I don't want to be droning on too long about something that's past, but there are people who feel that Jenny Tonge has been unfairly treated, and I believe it's important to be precise about this issue. Here is what Janice Turner wrote in the Times (as quoted in the Guardian on Monday):
How has this attempt to identify terrorism's underlying cause been conflated with justifying or condoning it? It is like suggesting that all academics analysing the socioeconomic conditions in 1930s Germany that fostered the anti-semitism that led to the Holocaust must be Nazi sympathisers.If this is the parallel one chooses, I'd say, instead, that it's like suggesting that the following would be a morally dubious public statement for a liberal MP, in a contemporary democracy, to make:
I can understand... I think if I had had to live in that situation, and I say this advisedly, I might just have considered [here insert some expression for participating in Nazi crimes against the Jews] myself.Would Jenny Tonge have been widely condemned had she said she might just have considered torching a synagogue, beating up Jews, participating in a shooting squad in Eastern Poland, herding people to their deaths, and so forth? She surely would have. At the same time, it is probable that she spoke carelessly - her 'advisedly' notwithstanding - and that she really meant to say only that she sympathized with Palestinian sufferings and undestood the grievances resulting from them. But then Tonge had the opportunity to correct herself and she didn't take it. In these circumstances, it was right for Charles Kennedy to remove her from her position.