Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: un figlio di superstiti della Shoah

... sara' forse il prossimo Primo Ministro inglese?
http://www.momentmag.com/Exclusive/2009/2009-12/200912-David_Miliband.html
David Miliband
Does the British foreign secretary, the child of Holocaust survivors and 
New Labour wonk, have the “icicle in the heart” it takes to become prime 
minister?
By Michael Goldfarb
David Miliband is known for his low-key, wonkish public-speaking style. 
But at this fall’s Labour Party Conference, the British foreign 
secretary was angry—and didn’t hide it. “It makes me sick,” he told 
those gathered, referring to the Conservative Party’s membership in a 
European Parliament coalition that boasts known anti-Semites.
In June, ahead of Britain’s general election next year, the 
Conservatives joined the European Conservatives and Reformists Group, 
chaired by Michal Kaminski of Poland’s Law and Justice Party, who has 
insisted that Poles should not apologize to Jews for atrocities 
committed during the Holocaust until Jews apologize to Poles for 
atrocities committed by Jewish soldiers in the Soviet Army. Another 
member, Roberts Zile of Latvia’s Fatherland and Freedom Party, partakes 
in an annual ceremony commemorating a Latvian SS unit.
Miliband made the Conservatives’ unsavory partners a main talking point 
of his address. He decried Kaminski’s “anti-Semitic, neo-Nazi past” and 
accused Conservatives of giving up their values for short-term political 
advantage. “No one in the Tory party batted an eyelid. What do they say? 
All you need for evil to triumph is for good men to remain silent.”
The outburst was uncharacteristic. Miliband is the child of Holocaust 
survivors—and at least 80 members of his family perished—but he is also 
a man who until recently has said almost nothing publicly about his 
Jewish heritage.
As the point man for British diplomacy, the youthful-looking 44-year-old 
has managed to find a balance between a British vision of foreign policy 
and that of the United States and steer a straight course through furors 
set off by the United Nations’ Goldstone Report, Britain’s University 
and College Union’s efforts to boycott Israeli academics and the 
Scottish government’s release of the only man convicted in the Lockerbie 
bombing. And as his speech at the Labour Party conference showed, he 
can, when he wants to, throw a punch. Acknowledged as a bright light of 
the next generation of Labour leaders, Miliband is frequently spoken of 
as a future prime minister.
The story of how David Miliband ascended to these heights is a tale of 
historical forces that shaped Jewish life in Europe. Like many Jews, his 
paternal grandfather, Samuel, a leather worker, left Poland after World 
War I, eventually settling in Brussels. But on May 10, 1940, the Nazis 
overran Belgium. Samuel and his 16-year-old son Adolphe walked for two 
days to the port of Ostend, where they boarded the last boat for 
Britain. Left behind were Samuel’s wife and daughter, who fled to a 
village in the countryside, successfully hiding from the Gestapo.
The son was David Miliband’s father, who soon changed his name to Ralph. 
He briefly attended the London School of Economics (LSE), then served 
for the rest of World War II in the Royal Navy, patrolling the 
Mediterranean and translating intercepted German communications.
Meanwhile, Miliband’s mother, Marion Kozak, and her family were trapped 
in Nazi-occupied Czestochowa in southern Poland. Marion and her mother 
found shelter in the home of a local Polish family who took great risks 
to ensure their survival. At war’s end, Marion also made her way to 
Britain, where she met Ralph Miliband, who by then had resumed his 
studies in politics at the LSE and had become a committed Marxist. It 
was the 1960s and Marion shared his passion for left-wing politics. They 
married and, rather late in life, started a family. David was their 
first-born, followed by his brother Ed.
Ralph became one of the most prominent left-wing intellectuals in 
Britain and a leading figure of the “New Left,” a movement sparked by 
the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary and given impetus by the Vietnam 
War. Britain was the epicenter of global cultural changes that marked 
the ’60s and Labour was in power. Although it was in theory a socialist 
party, Ralph viewed Labour as completely cut off from the working masses 
who founded it and argued that it had become a servant of the existing 
power structure.
Ralph Miliband’s world view was shaped by big ideas but also by his 
painful family history. Israel’s swift victory in the Six-Day War of 
1967 created fissures within the New Left that still have not healed. 
Harsh critics, including many of the movement’s Jewish intellectuals, 
accused Israel of waging a war of colonial aggression against the 
Palestinians. In contrast, Ralph Miliband supported Israel’s actions.
As the son of a professor, David’s growing years were peripatetic. At 
first, the family lived in Primrose Hill, a leafy area just north of 
London’s Regent’s Park, famous today as home to movie stars and models, 
but then a colony of left-leaning professors and writers. They moved 
when Ralph left LSE to teach in the northern English city of Leeds and 
later at Boston’s Brandeis University, returning to Britain for David’s 
high school years. As a result, the future foreign secretary became a 
fan of both the British soccer team Arsenal and of a certain American 
baseball team. As Miliband once put it, “If you lived in Boston, you, of 
course, support the Boston Red Sox.”
David’s  childhood was steeped in values of equality and justice and his 
father’s frustration with Britain’s political system. As a young man, 
his commitment to those values led to a break with his father’s world 
view and toward an embrace of Labour Party politics. After a first class 
degree from Oxford in politics, philosophy and economics followed by a 
master’s at MIT in Boston, Miliband gained notice as a policy analyst at 
the Institute for Public Policy Research, a think-tank with close ties 
to Labour. It was the early 1990s and the party had just lost its fourth 
election in a row to the Conservatives. Every speck of policy and 
ideology was up for re-examination.
In 1994, Miliband co-edited a volume of essays called Paying for 
Inequality: The Economic Cost of Social Injustice. With enough charts 
and statistics to beat the most ardent free-marketer into submission, 
the book took on the economic orthodoxy of the Thatcher-Reagan era. “Our 
purpose,” wrote Miliband, “is to show that the economic justification 
for current levels of inequality is spurious.” The book was notable for 
what it was not: It was not a shrieking, rhetorical screed against the 
widening gap between rich and poor in Conservative Britain but rather a 
measured and sober analysis of the economic cost of that gap to British 
society. Miliband called for the redistribution of wealth not because he 
wanted a revolution, but because it would tap the economic potential of 
those who had been excluded and reduce costs in the long run.
The book, published before Miliband turned 30, had a major impact on the 
new team that headed the Labour Party. He became particularly close to 
Tony Blair, the newly elected party leader. Blair was not a Marxist; he 
was barely a Socialist; Ralph Miliband reportedly despised the young 
Labour Party leader, considering him a closet Tory. But his son and the 
soon-to-be prime minister saw the world differently. They believed that 
Labour had to embrace a new kind of progressive politics to meet 
Britain’s current needs. In the post-industrial society, the working 
“masses” were property owners. To be elected, Labour had to speak a new 
language. Borrowing from Ralph Miliband’s idea of a “New Left,” the 
party rebranded itself “New Labour.”
David Miliband is credited with writing much of the 1997 Labour Party 
election manifesto—its party platform. There wasn’t much naked socialism 
in it. But there was a lot of emphasis on something his father, who 
passed away in 1994, would have approved of: education. Labour won the 
election in an historic landslide. Miliband followed Blair into 10 
Downing Street as head of poli cy. Blair’s chief of communications, 
Alastair Campbell, gave him the nickname “Brains.”
Miliband was thought of as a brilliant policy wonk but not a politician. 
“David is very austere,” says one political figure who has known him for 
a long time. “He is shy and values his privacy.” Despite an affinity for 
blogging, his personal life is virtually unknown beyond a few basic 
facts. His wife, Louise Shackleton, a violinist with the London Symphony 
Orchestra, is a dual American-British citizen whom he met on a flight to 
Rome. The couple adopted two young sons, Isaac and Jacob, from the 
United States. His ability to keep his private life private is an 
amazing feat in a country with a rapacious tabloid press.
But in 2001, much to the surprise of many who knew him, Miliband threw 
himself into electoral politics. He stood for Parliament for the safe 
Labour seat of South Shields, a gritty northern constituency. It was the 
kind of place where voters favored the socialism his father endorsed. 
Once elected to Parliament, his rise to the cabinet seemed pre-ordained. 
In 2006, Blair appointed him secretary for environment, food and rural 
affairs. The following year, the new prime minister, Gordon Brown, named 
him foreign secretary.
Becoming foreign secretary wasn’t what Miliband had in mind. Chris 
Brown, professor of international relations at LSE, says David Miliband 
hoped that Prime Minister Brown would put him in charge of a big-budget 
domestic department, like the Home Office, which oversees immigration 
policy, counter-terrorism and science.
But after a smooth rise to the upper echelons of the Labour Party, 
Miliband had slammed into the wall that has prevented Labour from 
fulfilling the promise of its 1997 manifesto: the rivalry between Tony 
Blair and Gordon Brown. The men were elected to Parliament the same year 
and plotted against each other to become prime minister. Blair won out 
because it was clear to everyone that he was a great campaigner. Brown’s 
intellectual skills are formidable but he is not at all personable. He 
broods, he holds grudges, and he does it all in public. In Brown’s mind, 
Miliband was a Blair loyalist and a potential rival. But he was too 
important to ignore, and so he was “relegated” to the Foreign Office to 
enjoy the prestige and not get in the way.
Whatever his initial feelings about the appointment, Miliband has thrown 
himself into a job that is no longer as glamorous as it once was. In the 
heyday of the British Empire, the foreign secretary’s position ranked 
only slightly behind the prime minister’s in importance. But because the 
center of world power shifted to Washington after World War II, 
Britain’s foreign policy ambitions today are more modest.
Since Labour came to power in 1997, British and American foreign policy 
has run along the same track on the big issues: Kosovo, Afghanistan, 
Iraq and aid for Africa. On issues such as the unpopular war in Iraq, 
being seen as the United States’ lapdog is not a good place when it 
comes to public opinion. “That is what brought Tony Blair down. He was 
seen as too slavish to American policy,” says Todd Endelman, a 
University of Michigan professor who specializes in Anglo-Jewish 
history. Miliband has faced criticism for his closeness to Blair, and as 
foreign secretary has spent considerable energy extricating British 
foreign policy from the compromises and possible illegalities associated 
with the war on terror. He has managed to get British citizens out of 
Guantanamo, yet at the same time has fought what looks like a losing 
battle against keeping secret the interrogation methods (torture) used 
on some of those citizens. His public avowals that this would compromise 
American intelligence and might lead to the U.S. withholding top 
intelligence from Britain seem mealy-mouthed to the more vocal critics 
of the “special relationship” between the two nations.
Climate change is one area where the British have been able to clearly 
differentiate themselves from the United States. Throughout the Bush 
Administration, the U.S. was not a player, and the Obama Administration, 
while more interested, is just getting its toes wet. The United Kingdom 
has made climate change a major foreign policy priority in recent years, 
led, among others, by Miliband’s brother Ed, who is secretary of state 
for energy and climate change. Last November, Ed Miliband helped usher 
in the Climate Change Act, which commits the United Kingdom to reducing 
carbon emission by 80 percent from a 1990 baseline by the year 2050. 
David Miliband has called for all governments, including Barack Obama’s, 
to make similar commitments, arguing, “This is too important an issue 
for conventional negotiation where everybody plays their cards close to 
their chest until the last minute.”
Oliver Kamm, an editorial writer for The Times of London and an Oxford 
contemporary of the foreign secretary, notes that Miliband has 
approached dealing with Russia and Iran differently than did Blair: 
“He’s been less prone to give [Russian Prime Minister Vladimir] Putin 
the benefit of any doubt. And he’s been strong on holding the Iranian 
leadership to account for their nuclear duplicity.”
Miliband has made it a priority to reach out to Arab and Muslim 
communities both outside and inside the U.K. In May, he declared that 
the West needs to “understand the Muslim world better. We need to hold 
fast to our values and support those who seek to apply them, or we will 
be guilty of hypocrisy.” “Miliband and his team within the foreign 
ministry were the first to realize that the term ‘the global war on 
terror’ ought to be shelved,” says Steve Clemons, senior fellow at the 
New America Foundation.
Miliband’s message of tolerance is important not only to an 
international audience but a domestic one. Britain is home to 2.4 
million Muslims, a population that is growing 10 times faster than its 
others. Regarded as one of the most tolerant countries in Europe, 
Britain struggles with questions of integration, particularly the social 
exclusion of its Muslims, as well as the psychological aftermath of the 
July 2005 suicide bombings on London’s public transport system carried 
out by young Britons of Pakistani descent, which left 52 people dead and 
over 700 injured.
Britain has been a leading partner in attempts to lure Syria away from 
Iraq and into serious peace discussions with Israel, and Miliband has 
become a point person for these discussions. Shortly after Barack 
Obama’s election, Miliband visited Damascus, the first official visit by 
a member of the British government in nearly a decade. His meetings with 
his Syrian counterpart helped smooth the way for recent discussions 
between President Obama’s special Middle East envoy, George Mitchell, 
and Syrian president Bashar Assad.
On the subject of Israel itself, Britain has shown a greater willingness 
than the United States to criticize the Israelis over settlements and 
what some call the disproportionate responses to provocations from Gaza 
and southern Lebanon. (Jewish Labour MP Gerald Kaufman is among the most 
vocal.) Like his predecessors, both Labour and Conservative, Miliband 
has been unequivocal: “Settlements are illegal under international law,” 
he told Parliament last summer. “They are a major blockage to peace in 
the Middle East on the basis of a two-state solution.”
That Miliband is Jewish is almost never mentioned in professional 
assessments. Unlike the large and organized Jewish community in the 
U.S., the U.K.’s Jewish community is smaller—around 267,000—and quieter, 
too. According to one of its leaders, who prefers to speak anonymously, 
the community has “genuine ambivalence about one of their own being 
close to power,” despite the fact that Jews have a long history in 
British politics. While in the U.S., Democrats can count on wide support 
from the Jewish population, British Jews are more divided between the 
Conservative and Labour parties, according to Todd Endelman.
David Miliband grew up in a home without a close connection to London’s 
Jewish community, which is traditionally more religiously observant than 
its American counterpart. According to one close observer, “The 
Milibands were not active members of the community and this was 
resented. They were not acknowledged as really being Jewish.”
Miliband, who is an atheist, has become more open about discussing his 
ethnic roots than in the past. This June, he undertook a private visit 
to Warsaw’s Jewish cemetery, where he spent time on his own looking for 
the graves of his family. In a candid article for London’s Jewish 
Chronicle, Miliband conceded that this visit had been too long in 
coming. “There must have been a deep ambivalence at the heart of this 
delay. Poland is my roots,” he wrote. “But Poland is the scene of 
terrible tragedy—mass murder on an unimaginable scale.” And he learned 
more about his family’s past when his brother traveled to Moscow for 
talks on climate change. While there, during a radio interview, an 
elderly caller announced on the air, “I am Sofia Davidovna Miliband. I 
am your relative; I am the only one left.” It was no hoax. The woman was 
indeed his 87-year-old cousin. The pair had a private meeting during 
which Ed learned that he and David had previously unknown distant 
cousins living in Britain.
Many members of the Jewish community have come to appreciate David 
Miliband’s growing public acceptance of his heritage. Some especially 
like that he hosts a Hanukkah celebration at his official residence, 
something that no foreign secretary had ever done. “He has learned the 
power of small symbols to the Jewish community,” added the community 
leader approvingly.
With a general election expected next May, Labourites and the 
Conservatives have already commenced campaign hostilities. The Labour 
Party is considered to be in the position where the Conservatives were 
in 1994: ripe for defeat. They are currently 16 to 18 points behind the 
Conservatives in every opinion poll.
The Conservatives are led by David Cameron, a contemporary of Miliband’s 
at Oxford, and just as fresh-faced as the foreign secretary. He has 
studied the New Labour playbook and repositioned his party squarely in 
the middle ground of British politics—except on one issue: Europe. 
Britain’s Conservatives have long been skeptical about the country’s 
membership in the European Union, which some view as nothing more than a 
stealth program for creating a United States of Europe, headquartered in 
Brussels and run by France and Germany. During tough economic times, 
like now, there is popular resentment, for example, of the 600,000 Poles 
who have migrated to Britain for work since 2004. Nevertheless, the 
Conservatives’ invitation of Kaminski and Zile to their 2009 conference 
has allowed Labour to stir controversy and puncture the carefully 
crafted new image of the Conservatives as the “nice” party.
Even the spotlight on the Conservatives’ strange bedfellows may not be 
enough to pull Labour out of its doldrums, which means that Miliband 
could be out of government after the elections. What he will do then is 
a matter of wide speculation among London’s chattering classes. If he 
makes a bid to lead the party he could end up being prime minister by 
the middle of the next decade.
Observers are divided about whether David Miliband really wants the top 
job—and if he’s got what it takes to land it. In July, he wrote an op-ed 
piece that was widely seen as critical of Brown’s leadership and many 
assumed that he would challenge Gordon Brown for the Labour leadership.
But it didn’t happen. Oliver Kamm regrets his college friend’s lack of 
audacity. “His opportunity to be Labour leader has, for all effective 
purposes, passed, because he didn’t go for the kill when he might have 
done and ought to have done, against a leader who will produce electoral 
catastrophe for the party.”
Michael White, veteran political columnist of The Guardian, also doesn’t 
think it will happen. “David Miliband is a smart guy and a decent guy, 
very thoughtful, too, for a politician,” he says. “Can he become Labour 
leader and even prime minister? Not on the evidence I’ve seen so far. 
He’s neither ambitious nor ruthless enough, no icicle in the heart.” But 
other political commentators are not so sure. Ned Temko of The Observer 
newspaper says, “My impression is he wants the leadership.”
If Labour loses, there’s talk of him becoming Europe’s first foreign 
minister, and indeed, Miliband would like to see Britain take a greater 
role in European Union leadership. “He has been successful in 
demarcating his own political agenda, and even should the Brown 
government crash and burn, David Miliband will emerge unscathed,” says 
Jonathan Laurence, a professor of political science at Boston College 
and a senior fellow at Brookings Institution’s Center on the U.S. and 
Europe. “He has a bright future.”

 ... sara' forse il prossimo Primo Ministro inglese?
Sarà il prossimo Primo Ministro inglese _laburista_.
Nel frattempo, potrebbe sempre fare l'alto rappresentante per la Common 
Foreign and Security Policy dell'EU.
-- 
Baci,
Mony

 Sarà il prossimo Primo Ministro inglese _laburista_.
mi piaci quando sei ottimista.
In ogni modo, Channel $ ci ha informati che, se invece vincessero i 
Tory, andra' al governo qualcuno foraggiato da Israele. No, cioe' da un 
finlandese. No, anzi sudafricano. Ah, no, inglese. Cazzo, come si 
nascondono bene i sionisti.

 nascondono bene i sionisti.
Mi raccomando virgole e virgolette.
-- 
Baci,
Mony

 più di un giro...
mi pare che negli ultimi 30 anni di giri corti ce ne siano stati
pochini.

amaryllide ha scritto:

Ma negli ultimi trent'anni le differenze tra Labourism e Toryism non 
sono mai state così poche come adesso: Cameron farà la sua parte, i suoi 
getteranno gli elettori nella costernazione e Miliband vincerà al giro 
successivo con un Labour depilato del Blairism nel suo più deleterio 
senso, e quindi votabile.
-- 
Baci,
Mony

 successivo con un Labour depilato del Blairism
e quindi di Miliband.

 e quindi di Miliband.
No, Miliband propugna il Milibandism.
-- 
Baci,
Mony

 No, Miliband propugna il Milibandism.
in quale labour sta emergendo? In quello blairista. Non ci sono cazzi.
Nei cicli precedenti il futuro leader non contava niente nel partito
prima del passaggio all'opposizione.

 prima del passaggio all'opposizione.
Non sempre. Per esempio, Margaret Hilda Roberts ebbe a crearsi un bel 
nome, sia nel partito che nella politica in genere, quando ricopr� la 
carica di ministro dell'istruzione con Heath. Brrr...
-- 
Baci,
Mony

 
http://www.momentmag.com/Exclusive/2009/2009-12/200912-David_Miliband.
..
Non scrivi la cosa pimportante, quella che mi fa fare sfegatatamente
il tifo per lui: potrebbe essere il primo PM dichiaratamente ateo
nella storia inglese...

eugenio ha scritto:

un ebreo ateo alla guida di un Paese scismatico. Un sogno massonico!


allora faccio il tifo per lui come PESC.