Is BASSA anti-semitic ?
I've just had the dubious pleasure of listening to the Victoria Derbyshire prog from earlier on today and wondered whether it was a precondition of BASSA that members were rabid anti-semites. I recall in August last year, some unspeakable lout who claimed to be cabin crew chose to turn up at Kempton with a star of David sewn to his shirt with the word BASSA written across it, a flagrant attempt to draw parallels between the cabin crew dispute and the suffering of millions of jews in Nazi occupied Europe in the period 1938-45. A more distasteful comment is hard to find, at least I thought so until I heard another cabin crew member on the recording of today's show liken the situation with cabin crew to Kristallnacht. For those who are unaware of what this means to Jewish people.let me explain.
Kristallnacht, also to referred to as the Night of Broken Glass, and also Reichskristallnacht, Pogromnacht, and Novemberpogrome, was a pogrom or series of attacks against Jews throughout Nazi Germany and parts of Austria on November 9–10, 1938.
Jewish homes were ransacked, as were shops, towns and villages, as SA stormtroopers and civilians destroyed buildings with sledgehammers, leaving the streets covered in pieces of smashed windows—the origin of the name "Night of Broken Glass." Ninety-one Jews were killed, and 30,000 Jewish men—a quarter of all Jewish men in Germany—were taken to concentration camps, where they were tortured for months, with over 1,000 of them dying. Around 1,668 synagogues were ransacked, and 267 set on fire. In Vienna alone 95 synagogues or houses of prayer were destroyed.
It was one of the first events where the true intent of the Nazis was revealed, in the mass extermination of the Jews and any other groups that did not conform to the Aryan ideal. The nearest equivalent I can think of in recent times was the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia by the Serbs. To intimate that the atmosphere in a company was the same as that which the Jews in 1938 found is grossly insulting to the memory of the millions who died.
If cabin crew are targetting Easter (or more accurately Passover) does this mean we are in for further parallels being drawn with BA management taking the role of Pharoah and the BASSA executive and there cronies assuming the role of the Jewish people in Egypt. Will we see the BASSA branch secretary carrying the Torah. Will the reps be saying Kaddish for the souls of the departed (i.e. sacked) members ? What new insults are BASSA going to fling at those of the Jewish faith ?