Muslim Voters Support Bernie Sanders in Michigan – Mass Media Can’t Work Out How to Explain This

March 11, 2016, 3:26 pm

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A strange thing happened this week in the United States. Against all the odds, polls were predicting that Hilary Clinton would win Michigan in the US’s rust belt by over 20%, Sanders gained a narrow victory by 1.5%.

How to explain this? Well one explanation is that Michigan’s Black voters split down the middle. The other explanation is that working-class whites don’t buy Clinton’s support from Wall Street.

But the major surprise is that large numbers of Arab voters did what the US media has always told its readers was impossible. The media narrative is that Arabs are anti-Semitic, hate Jews etc. That after all is what motivates the Palestinians. It’s nothing to do with land confiscation, killing of civilians, expulsion of refugees etc. It’s all to do with that ingrained hatred of Jews. Anti-Semitism explains all.

But you see Muslims aren’t quite as stupid as the American media would have their readers believe. Their main concern is anti-Muslim racism (or Islamaphobia as it’s called). Bernie Sanders, unlike Hilary Clinton, addressed this issue and opposed it. Clinton has remained silent. Sanders record on Israel is not good but it’s better than the other candidates and he has at least criticised the brutality of Israel’s military, unlike all other candidates.

That is why, contrary to the normal ruling class narrative of anti-Semitic Arabs, 60% of Arabs in Dearborn are estimated to have voted for the Jewish candidate. Strange that!

Tony Greenstein

Sanders’s outreach to Arab Americans on Islamophobia helped deliver Michigan surprise

Adam Horowitz and Philip Weiss on March 9, 2016

One of the great storylines from last night’s surprise victory for Bernie Sanders in Michigan is that he won the Arab-American vote– and the mainstream media are stunned that Arab Americans would vote for a Jew. Sanders won heavily-Arab-American Dearborn, by 7100 votes to Hillary Clinton’s 4700 votes. That’s a 59 to 39 percent Sanders stronghold inside Wayne County, which was a Clinton stronghold. Wrote law professor Khaled Beydoun:

The Detroit Free Press’s Niraj Warikoo reports that Sanders’s victory was fueled by young Arab and Muslim voters, and that he put out an Arabic ad at a time when Hillary Clinton wasn’t working that community.

On Monday afternoon, Sanders spoke to a packed theater that included many Arab-American Muslims, including several women wearing hijab, the Islamic headscarf, who sat behind him as he addressed the crowd. He was introduced by Detroit native U.S. Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn., the first Muslim elected to Congress. Sanders met before the speech with the publisher of the Arab-American News, which endorsed him last week.

The narrative of Arab-American Muslims in Dearborn supporting a Jewish candidate was one that struck many on social media as a symbol of unity at a time of division on the campaign trail.

Here’s that ad:

It quotes Sanders, thrillingly:

And if we stand for anything we have got to stand together and end all forms of racism, and I will lead that effort as president of the United States.

The Arab American News endorsed Sanders last week and cited his vigorous denunciation of Islamophobia.

Sanders stands for racial justice and has unequivocally condemned Islamophobia.

Beydoun made a similar point on Twitter:

And notice the Arab newspaper’s brisk and refreshing acknowledgment of Sanders’s Jewishness and of America’s unfair policy on Israel’s human rights abuses. It’s impossible to imagine this language in a non-Arab publication.

On foreign policy, Sanders has shown the most even-handed approachto the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Although his views on this issue do not rise to the aspirations of Arab Americans who would like to see Washington take a clear stance against Israel’s human rights abuses and occupation of Palestinian land, Sanders’ call for ending the blockade on Gaza is a step in the right direction. His condemnation of Israeli attacks that kill Palestinian civilians is unprecedented by any major presidential candidate.

Sanders is a Jewish American. This newspaper and the community at large do not have a bias against anyone’s ethnic or religious affiliation. Ideas are what matters.

Bear in mind, Sanders won the state by little more than 18,000 votes out of more than 1 million cast. Much of that margin was surely Arab-American.

Jeremy Scahill noted the obvious foreign policy angle:

Much of the commentary on the Sanders victory in the Arab-American community has noted the media’s surprise at it. IBTimes:

Political commentators and media outlets were quick to pounce on a “fascinating” statistic from Bernie Sanders’ victory in the Michigan primary on Tuesday night: Democrats in Dearborn, a city whose population is 40 percent Arab, voted overwhelmingly for Sanders over rival Hillary Clinton (59 percent to 39 percent). The subtext of pointing out this particular statistic is clear. How, the media wondered, could a predominantly Muslim group support a Jewish candidate?

An Arab American supporting Bernie Sanders

Many noticed NY radio host Brian Lehrer’s tweet from last night, because it assumed Arab Americans would not vote for a Jewish candidate (Lehrer is Jewish and almost never touches real criticism of Israel).

Ali Abunimahtweeted (and he’s been widely retweeted):

Ayesha Siddiqui said,

New York Times reporter Liam Stack, formerly in Cairo, said:

Teachable moment, for the mainstream media.

P.S. Donald Trump won Dearborn on the Republican side, 39 to 29 to 17 (Trump/John Kasich/Ted Cruz). But his vote total, 3153, is less than half of Sanders’s 7126 and less than Hillry Clinton’s 4730.

It’s a good assumption Trump’s Islamophobia didn’t resonate with Arab Americans.

↧

BBC Bias at its Best - the Sunday Politics Show

March 13, 2016, 3:12 pm

≫ Next: Gerry Downing, Anti-Semitism and the Socialism of Fools

≪ Previous: Muslim Voters Support Bernie Sanders in Michigan – Mass Media Can’t Work Out How to Explain This

Andrew Neil lobs a few softball questions at John Mann MP on ‘anti-Semitism’

Some of you may have watched the Sunday Politics show on BBC1 today. It lived up to the BBC’s honorable tradition of bias when it comes to anything to do with Zionism and Israel. The title of the particular section, whether or not Jeremy Corbyn has an anti-Semitism problem in the Labour Party, was a giveaway in itself.

John Mann - a right-wing Zionist MP who uses 'anti-Semitism' to defend Israeli apartheid

It was hosted by Andrew Neil, a right-wing Tory who was a former editor of Rupert Murdoch’s Sunday Times. After a very short interview with a Corbyn spokesman, who denied that Corbyn was anti-Semitic (a frequent Zionist allegation) and a repeat of a clip of an interview by Neil with the political lunatic Gerry Downing of the Socialist Fight organisation, we then were subjected to a long diatribe, which was passed of as an interview, with John Mann MP. Mann is the Chair of the so-called Parliamentary Committee on anti-Semitism Committee. He is also a noted opponent of Corbyn and on the right of the Parliamentary Labour Party.

The programme is on the BBC’s Iplayer and can be accessed here.

John Mann paints himself as the hero of an anti-Jewish campaign - problem is Mann is not even Jewish!

Mann was allowed to state, without interruption, that unnamed Jewish students were fearful of ‘anti-Semitism’ on campus. Reference was made to Labour Clubs at the LSE and Oxford University without any detail of what the supposed anti-Semitism was. Given the artificial furore which has been stirred up around Oxford University Labour Club whereby support for Israel Apartheid Week is somehow conflated with anti-Semitism, it is quite easy to understand that once again we are dealing with spurious allegations of anti-Semitism against anti-Zionists and supporters of the Palestinians.

Phil Woolas - a racist former MP removed by an electoral court for lying and dishonesty was a good friend of John Mann

Woolas's racist leaflet

It is the same old trick, to allege that opponents of Zionist racism are somehow motivated by anti-Jewish racism because the Israeli state defines itself as a Jewish ethnic state.

I have complained to the BBC, though without any illusions that an organisation that protected Jimmy Saville for 20+ years has a credible complaints system.

John Mann has form when it comes to false allegations of anti-Semitism. He used to allege that the University College Union was anti-Semitic because it launched the academic boycott of Israel. When he gave evidence to an Employment Tribunal, the Judgment of the Tribunal savaged this superficial and trite ego. (see below)

It would be useful if people were to watch the programme and then make their own complaint.

Tony Greenstein

Right-wing Tory and BBC Presenter

BBC Complaint

Andrew Neil’s Sunday Politics Programme asked whether Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party has a problem with anti-Semitism. It then proceeded to assume that the question it was asking was indeed true.

References were made to Oxford University and LSE Labour Clubs. Apart from a very short interview with one Corbyn supporter and an interview with Gerry Downing, a person who represents nobody but himself, there was no alternative viewpoint to the long interview with John Mann.

At no point did Neil challenge what Mann said, he merely asked him to clarify and expand on his points, viz. that there was a problem of anti-Semitism in the Labour Party. John Mann is not a neutral party. He defines anti-Semitism as opposition to Zionism and support for the Palestinians. He has a long record for deliberately confusing anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism.

Mann was discredited as a witness at the Fraser v University College Union employment tribunal in 2012 [Case No: 2203290/2011]. The Tribunal found [para 84] that ‘Mr Mann made no bones about his view that the union was operating in an anti-Semitic way …. He did not explain what the anti-Semitic behaviour was supposed to have consisted of besides referring to the boycott debate and characterising any boycott of Israel or Israeli institutions as itself anti-Semitic…’ [para 148] ‘when it came to anti-Semitism in the context of debate about the Middle East, he announced, “It’s clear to me where the line is …” but unfortunately eschewed the opportunity to locate it for us. Both parliamentarians clearly enjoyed making speeches. Neither seemed at ease with the idea of being required to answer a question not to his liking.’

Andrew Neil failed to ask any questions not to Mann’s liking or indeed any probing questions at all. Another example of BBC bias.’

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Gerry Downing, Anti-Semitism and the Socialism of Fools

March 13, 2016, 8:31 pm

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Confusing the Jewish Question and Zionism

It was August Bebel, the leader of the German Social Democratic Party who described anti-Semitism as the ‘socialism of fools’. Gerry Downing is nothing if not a fool. A complete muddlehead leading a tiny Trotskyist group Socialist Fight.

The BBC made hay with Gerry Downing's idiocy

Downing entered into the headlines last week when he was cited by David Cameron in Question Time in the House of Commons. I believe Socialist Fight is one of the splinters resulting from the implosion of the Workers Revolutionary Party of Vanessa Redgrave fame.

Abram Leon - author of The Jewish Question - a Marxist Interpretation - which Downing willfully misunderstands

It is an organisation that is causing much amusement to the Right. However his defence or ‘understanding’ of Al Quada’s 9/11 attacks and the actions of ISIS are anything but amusing. Downing’s playing with anti-Semitism is also no joke. His actions have been used to discredit the wider left.

Gerry Downing floundering with Andrew Neil

Downing, who has probably been somewhat taken aback at all the publicity his tiny sect has garnered, has mounted his own defence against the attacks from the capitalist media, Guido Fawkes, Cameron et al. [Statement by Gerry Downing in reply to the Guido Fawkes / Cameron attack on the Labour Party and on me personally]

Downing is fond of quoting Baruch Spinoza who said that “I have striven not to laugh at human actions, not to weep at them, nor to hate them, buttounderstand them.”

There is, of course, nothing at all wrong in understanding the actions of Al Qaeda or ISIS. The problem is that Downing’s understanding is both simplistic and wrong. Therein lies the problem.

Gerry Downing & John MacDonald in better days at a strike meeting

Gerry Downings main point, which is that the horrific massacres and oppression in the Middle East and elsewhere are the result of imperialism’s intervention and presence, is correct. It is not controversial that the US war in Iraq killed approximately 1 million people. Nor is it a secret that US and British imperialism supports oppressive regimes like Saudi Arabia, Egypt etc. Where he goes wrong is in seeing om either Al Qaeda or ISIS any form of anti-imperialist force.

As Hilary Clinton freely admitted, Al Qaeda is a creation of the very US imperialism that Downing opposes. That in itself should give him pause for thought. The US deliberately created a fundamentalist Islamic military/political presence in Afghanistan and Pakistan in order to destroy the Soviet presence and the liberal bourgeois regime of the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) under Babrak Karmal which had emerged in Afghanistan.

A weak bourgeois regime had emerged in Afghanistan, overthrowing the previous king. The USSR stepped in to support this regime and the US and Britain did their best to put reactionary cut-throats in place, alongside their allies in the ISI intelligence service in Pakistan and the Saudi regime.

The Taliban and Al Qaeda were the fruit of US imperialism and like Frankenstein’s monster they turned on their benefactor. But there was and is nothing anti-imperialist about them. Their politics represent the worst form of medieval savagery. There is nothing progressive about them – whether it is women’s education, sharia law punishments, workers’ self organisation, the destruction of cultural symbols such as the Buddhist statues of Bamiyan or the Greek-Roman architecture at Palmyra.

Like the Khmer Rouge these groups are neither fish nor fowl. They defy political description. Fascist is a easy shorthand but it isn’t really appropriate because fascism is a product of a modern industrial society where a movement based on a petit bourgeois rabble and lumpen elements are welded into a nationalist force capable of destroying working-class and progressive forces.

The Taliban, Al Qaeda and ISIS are modern movements, using modern technology, which are certainly a reaction to imperialism but a reaction of the most politically backward type. It is akin in some ways to the feudal socialism of anti-Semitic movements like the Christian Social Party of Adolf Stocker.

ISIS for example are known to be controlled militarily by ex-Baathist officers who have adopted Islam as a convenient justification and legitimation for their barbarous rule. How any socialist can support or ‘understand’, not as a means of analysis but as a form of apology, an organisation which enslaves young Yazidi women, whilst slaughtering all the men and older women, defies belief. A group which openly uses rape as a weapon of war. This genocidal group may indeed be a reaction to the US’s imperialist slaughter in Iraq, it may have come into conflict with the US and its sectarian Iraqi regime (although being supported by the Turkish regime), but what type of reaction is it? Do we support any opposition, however reactionary, to US capitalism? Would that include the KKK?

The actions of both ISIS and Al Qaeda have, if anything, been detrimental to liberation struggles in the Western Sahara, coming into conflict with Polisario as it attempts to confessionalise their struggles. Likewise they have been a dire threat to the Tuareg people and the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad(MNLA) in Mali, which have come into conflict with Al Qaeda in the Maghreb and local Islamist groups. Indeed they have been responsible for poisoning the struggle of the Syrian people against Assad.

It is no accident that Israel is known to support al-Qaeda's al-Nusra in Syria and it is widely suspected of supporting ISIS and is known to be the largest purchaser of ISIS's oil wells. Opposing Zionism is not on the agenda of ISIS or Al-Qaeda.

But it isn’t just Socialist Fight and Gerry Downing’s attitude to ISIS and Al Qaeda. It is their barking attitude to what they term ‘the Jewish Question’. In his Why Marxists must address the JewishQuestion concretely todayDowning cites the classic Marxist tract ‘The Jewish Question – A Marxist Interpretation’ by Abram Leon, the leader of the Fourth International in Belgium, who died in Auschwitz, . Downing states that:

‘The Jewish bourgeois were exceptionally well-suited for capitalist success because the social role of Jews as commodity-traders, and later money-traders and lenders: a ‘people-class’ in the phrase of Abram Leon, the great Belgian-Jewish Marxist theorist of the Jewish question, in medieval Europe prior to the emergence of capitalism, gave them the cultural advantage of a much older tradition in commodity economy than the ‘native’ ruling classes.”

Much of the above is arguable. Did Jewish bankers have any more formidable advantages than those of Lombardy or Venice? Were the Jewish bourgeoisie any more advantaged than the merchants of the City of London or the French Huguenots? I doubt it. What is certain is that a separate Jewish bourgeoisie, whose most famous representative was the Jewish financier and philanthropist Sir Moses Montefiore, disappeared in the 19th century. As Leon noted:

‘The economic process from which the modern nations issued laid the foundations for integration of the Jewish bourgeoisie into the bourgeois nation.' (p.116, Jewish Question - A Marxist Interpretation)

Downing’s remark that ‘Zionism is the cutting edge of bourgeois reaction today’ is unexceptional. There is no doubt that Zionist organisations such as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) or Christians United for Israel are the most hawkish groups in terms of foreign policy. In this they are allied with the neo-conservatives who dominated the Bush cabinet and who are fretting at Trump gaining the Republican nomination.

Likewise Downing’s statement that ‘The role Zionists have played in the attempted witch-hunt against Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour leadership campaign is glaringly obvious.’ cannot be doubted. But this was a Zionist witchhunt not a Jewish one. The Daily Mail initiated it and MPs like John Mann perpetrated it. Mann is not Jewish, but he is a devoted Zionist.

Quite what the long gone Jewish Question (which was as much a problem with anti-Semitism) has to do with the role of Zionism is somewhat of a mystery. Downing points out that 80% of Tory MP’s supported the Conservative Friends of Israel in the last parliament and that ‘leading figures in Labour like Ed Miliband and Ed Balls are involved with Labour Friends of Israel. All this is true but most Tory MPs are not Jewish. Likewise most LFI sponsors. Ed Miliband, who is Jewish was far less sympathetic to Zionism than Ed Balls, who is not Jewish.

It is when Downing asserts that Zionism’s ‘supporters are highly conscious ethnocentric activists with a material base in terms of capitalist property, within the ruling classes of several imperialist countries, as well as Israel. This caste has acquired major moral and political influence among much wider layers of the imperialist bourgeoisie. If this were not true, Zionists could not have the influence they do in the current situation.’ that Downing abandons Marxism and adopts anti-Semitism.

Zionism’s supporters are President Hollande of France and his Prime Minister Manuel Valls who are waging war on France's BDS movement. They are David Cameron and John Hagee. The supporters of Zionism and the racist Israeli state include both Jewish and non-Jewish politicians and capitalists. It has nothing whatsoever to do with a transnational Jewish bourgeoisie. This reeks of the Jewish Conspiracy Theory. There is absolutely no evidence that the non-Jewish bourgeoisie of Britain, the United State or France is engaged in a battle with the Jewish bourgeoisie. This is fantasy land stuff.

The problem is that the ruling elites in all the aforementioned countries support the Israeli state and attack anti-Zionists and the supporters of the Palestinians as ‘anti-Semites’. That is why, in his interview on the BBC with Andrew Neil, Gerry Downing was, to put it mildly, left spluttering and inarticulate, since he knew deep down that what he was arguing made no sense from a Marxist or communist perspective.

That is the price of allowing Ian Donovan, who was excluded from the Communist faction of Left Unity and an open supporter of Gilad Atzmon into his organisation. There is no Marxist or materialist analysis which explains the support for Zionism of Western bourgeois politicians and their acolytes in terms of a Jewish ethnic presence or lobby. This is indeed the socialism of fools and idiots.

It is ironic that in the United States, the unexpected victory of the only Jewish candidate, Bernie Sanders, in the Michigan primary, was partly due to the overwhelming support for Sanders in the city of Dearborn, where 40% of the inhabitants are Muslim and Arab Americans. [Muslim Voters Support Bernie Sanders in Michigan – Mass Media Can’t Work Out How to Explain This]

It should give even Gerry Downing pause for thought!

Tony Greenstein

See Socialist Fight'sGerry Downing on the Labour Party

↧

Manufacturing anti-Semitism out of its opposite

March 15, 2016, 5:48 pm

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In Zionist Newspeak Caryl Churchill’s 7 Jewish Children is anti-Semitic

an anti-Semitic poster

Doublespeak is the use of a euphemism to disguise or obscure the truth of something. For example the term ‘collateral damage’ is used to minimise the deliberate murder of civilians, when bombing civilian areas, by describing them as 'collateral' or incidental to the war itself. The term ‘peace keeping’ is another favourite for the waging of war. The renaming of the Ministry of War as the Ministry of Defence is yet another example of the phenomenon of using language to invert the meaning of something. It is close allied to Orwell’s concept of double think, the ability to hold two mutually exclusive ideas at the same time inside one’s head.

Caryl Churchill - author of 7 Jewish Children

In the past few months the Zionist movement and its tabloid mouthpieces, not least the BBC have waged a campaign to persuade people that opposition to racism in Israel is in fact the same thing as anti-Jewish racism (anti-Semitism). Who would know, because it is never reported in the mass media, that over half Israel's population wish to expel Israel's Palestinian citizens (never mind the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza).

Over the summer there were attempts to smear Jeremy Corbyn as an anti-Semite, when it became clear that he was likely to become leader of the Labour Party. This campaign was led by the right-wing former editor of the Daily Express and current editor of the Jewish Chronicle, Stephen Pollard. Ironically it was not so long ago that Pollard was defending the anti-Semitic Polish MEP Michal Kaminski and the even more virulently anti-Semitic Latvian MEP Robert Zile on the grounds that whatever their views about Jews they were both devoted supporters of Israel. [See Pollard's article in The Guardian, 9.10.09. Poland's Kaminski is not an antisemite: he's a friend to Jews, and also ‘The Hypocrisy of Jeremy Corbyn’s Accusers - Stephen Pollard Jewish Chronicle Editor & Apologist for Europe’s anti-Semitic politicians’ Michal Kaminski the Polish Zionist & anti-Semite that Jewish Chronicle Editor Stephen Pollard Just Loves]

Photo of an injured child - comparing this to Jewish suffering is 'anti-Semitic'

In recent weeks there has been a vigorous and determined campaign by sections of the media and right-wing Labour MPs such as John Mann and Louise Ellman to portray supporters of the Palestinians and opponents of Zionism as anti-Semitic. This has reached ludicrous heights with the attempt to portray the Palestine society at York University as ‘anti-Semitic’ for daring to show the play 7 Jewish Children by Caryl Churchil. The play, which is on the Guardian website is a sensitive and quite brilliant attempt to relate, through adults discussing what to tell and what not to tell 7 Jewish children, at different periods of time. The concern of the adults is both to inform and not to frighten and the phrases ‘tell her’ and ‘don’t tell her’ are repeated throughout the play. The last line in the play is ‘don’t frighten her’. The time periods change from hiding a Jewish child in an unnamed ghetto under Nazi occupation, to the murder of her relatives by the Nazis, to the immigration to the State of Israel by a Jewish family in post-holocaust Europe to their coming to terms with Arabs in Israel and an increasingly hardline, racist attitude to the Arabs who live there.

Criticising Israeli bombing and the murder of children is 'anti-Semitic'

‘Tell her this wasn’t their home’ is how they explain the expulsion of the Arabs from Israel. The death of Rachel Corrie explained by ‘Don’t tell her not to look at the bulldozer, Don’t tell her it was knocking the house down’. The attacks on Gaza are dealt with by through not informing her ‘Don’t tell her about the family of dead girls’ and then immediately contradicting itself ‘Tell her we killed the babies by mistake’ ‘Tell her about the family of dead girls, tell her their names why not,’ and then the final Zionist rationale ‘Tell her there’s dead babies, did she see babies? tell her she’s got nothing to be ashamed of. Tell her they did it to themselves. Tell her they want their children killed to make people sorry for them.’

Comparing this to Jewish suffering is 'anti-semitic'

That is indeed what the Zionists say as some form of rationalisation for their crimes. They are ‘forced’ to kill Palestinian children. It has disturbing echoes of similar Nazi justifications. They too were ‘forced’ to kill Jewish children. It was Golda Meir who once said that

‘We can forgive the Arabs for killing our children. We cannot forgive them for forcing us to kill their children. We will only have peace with the Arabs when they love their children more than they hate us.” (although Harvey Rachlin in Ha’aretz has searched in vain for any evidence that she actually said it!).

Caryl Churchill’s play was written at the time of Operation Cast Lead when over 1,400 Palestinians were killed in Gaza by Israel’s war criminals, hundreds of whom were children.

Howard Jacobson - sees anti-Semitism everywhere

Although the more simple Zionists like Howard Jacobson assert that it is ‘pure Jew hatred’ it is strange that they are unable to produce even one quote from the play that would back up their assertions. The only conclusion that can be drawn is that the associations between the Jewish experience of suffering in the second world war and the Palestinians experience of suffering is too close for comfort.

Below is the typically stupid and bombastic article which one has come to expect in the Jewish Chronicle and beneath it is a response from 6 Jewish and Israeli supporters of the play at York University. I have also included the dialogue in the play itself so you can judge whether it is anti-Semitic or not.

Pro-Palestinian students perform ‘antisemitic’ play as part of Israel Apartheid Week

EXCLUSIVE

By Jewish Chronicle Reporter,
February 25, 2016

A pro-Palestinian student group co-run by the son of Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, has performed a play widely described as antisemitic as part of Israel Apartheid Week.

York University’s student Palestinian Solidarity Society staged two productions of “Seven Jewish Children – A Play for Palestine” on Thursday afternoon.

Tommy Corbyn, who is studying electrical engineering at York, is the society’s events manager.

The play, written by Caryl Churchill as a response to an Israeli attack on Gaza, was first performed in 2009. In seven short scenes, totalling only 10 minutes, it examines modern Jewish history.

The JC’s theatre critic described the work as antisemitic, highlighting a moment when one Jewish character appears to be glorifying in Palestinian suffering.

Author Howard Jacobson described it as “Jew-hating, pure and simple”.

The play at York was a joint production by the Palestinian Solidarity Society and another group, the Antigone Collective.

Israel supporters issued flyers opposing the production, asking if York University “supports antisemitic culture”.

In a statement, the university Jewish Society condemned the staging.

The society added that in rejecting opposition to the event, York students’ union had showed a lack of concern about antisemitism on campus.

The staging was one of a series of events mounted by students across the country as part of the annual anti-Israel campaign at universities. Other activities included stunts such as the construction of mock Israeli military checkpoints and talks by anti-Israel propagandists backing an academic boycott of the country.

Jewish students have responded by mounting an initiative under the title “Building Bridges” designed to promote dialogue about Israel’s positive role in the world.

Responding to the JC article , the Jewish members of the York Palestine Solidarity Society have released this statement

To whom it may concern,

We are Jews and Israelis who work and study in York. Some of us were in the audience for the recent performance of Caryl Churchill’s ten minute play Seven Jewish Children at the University of York; others were involved in its production and acted in it. All of us are committed to seeing a just peace in Israel and Palestine.

Some of us have only attended Palestinian Solidarity Society events, others are ordinary members and committee members of this university society. It is clear to us that the society is committed to fighting racism and prejudice in all its guises, in particular intolerance of Palestinians in Israel, as well as Palestinian prejudice against Jews. One audience member, Dr. Lisa Peschel, a lecturer in York’s theatre department who conducts research on Jewish ghetto theatre, said, “This play does not claim to be a balanced and objective look at the entire range of Israeli political opinions, but it accurately represents certain voices in Israeli politics while acknowledging Jewish suffering as well. It addresses a humanitarian crisis that urgently needs to be discussed.”

As Israelis and Jews, some of us have personal experiences of being labelled antisemitic because we have expressed criticism of the abusive and intolerant attitudes of many Israelis, or of Israeli policies, towards the Palestinian people. Our support of an occupied, oppressed people is often mistakenly perceived, particularly by those Jews who identify as Zionist, as anti-Semitic sentiment.

To equate criticism of Zionism with anti-Semitism is not only dishonest, it also has an adverse effect for those Jews who do suffer actual intolerant, anti-Semitic abuse which should be taken seriously. Moreover, this misplaced accusation calls into question our own Jewishness, which we find an offensive gesture.

Finally, we would like to make it clear that Tommy Corbyn, son of the leader of the Labour Party, had nothing to do with organising, producing or even promoting the play.

Sincerely,

Maddie Boden
Eran Cohen
Edmund Dable-Heath
Hagar Geula
Juliana Morrison
Adrian Tellwright

7 Jewish Children

Tell her it’s a game

Tell her it’s serious

But don’t frighten her

Don’t tell her they’ll kill her

Tell her it’s important to be quiet

Tell her she’ll have cake if she’s good

Tell her to curl up as if she’s in bed

But not to sing.

Tell her not to come out

Tell her not to come out even if she hears shouting

Don’t frighten her

Tell her not to come out even if she hears nothing for a long time

Tell her we’ll come and find her

Tell her we’ll be here all the time.

Tell her something about the men

Tell her they’re bad in the game

Tell her it’s a story

Tell her they’ll go away

Tell her she can make them go away if she keeps still

By magic

But not to sing.

Tell her this is a photograph of her grandmother, her uncles and me

Tell her her uncles died

Don’t tell her they were killed

Tell her they were killed

Don’t frighten her.

Tell her her grandmother was clever

Don’t tell her what they did

Tell her she was brave

Tell her she taught me how to make cakes

Don’t tell her what they did

Tell her something

Tell her more when she’s older.

Tell her there were people who hated Jews

Don’t tell her

Tell her it’s over now

Tell her there are still people who hate Jews

Tell her there are people who love Jews

Don’t tell her to think Jews or not Jews

Tell her more when she’s older

Tell her how many when she’s older

Tell her it was before she was born and she’s not in danger

Don’t tell her there’s any question of danger.

Tell her we love her

Tell her dead or alive her family all love her

Tell her her grandmother would be proud of her.

Don’t tell her we’re going for ever

Tell her she can write to her friends, tell her her friends can maybe

come and visit

Tell her it’s sunny there

Tell her we’re going home

Tell her it’s the land God gave us

Don’t tell her religion

Tell her her great great great great lots of greats grandad lived there

Don’t tell her he was driven out

Tell her, of course tell her, tell her everyone was driven out and

the country is waiting for us to come home

Don’t tell her she doesn’t belong here

Tell her of course she likes it here but she’ll like it there even more.

Tell her it’s an adventure

Tell her no one will tease her

Tell her she’ll have new friends

Tell her she can take her toys

Don’t tell her she can take all her toys

Tell her she’s a special girl

Tell her about Jerusalem.

Don’t tell her who they are

Tell her something

Tell her they’re Bedouin, they travel about

Tell her about camels in the desert and dates

Tell her they live in tents

Tell her this wasn’t their home

Don’t tell her home, not home, tell her they’re going away

Don’t tell her they don’t like her

Tell her to be careful.

Don’t tell her who used to live in this house

No but don’t tell her her great great grandfather used to live in this house

No but don’t tell her Arabs used to sleep in her bedroom.

Tell her not to be rude to them

Tell her not to be frightened

Don’t tell her she can’t play with the children

Don’t tell her she can have them in the house.

Tell her they have plenty of friends and family

Tell her for miles and miles all round they have lands of their own

Tell her again this is our promised land.

Don’t tell her they said it was a land without people

Don’t tell her I wouldn’t have come if I’d known.

Tell her maybe we can share.

Don’t tell her that.

Tell her we won

Tell her her brother’s a hero

Tell her how big their armies are

Tell her we turned them back

Tell her we’re fighters

Tell her we’ve got new land.

Don’t tell her

Don’t tell her the trouble about the swimming pool

Tell her it’s our water, we have the right

Tell her it’s not the water for their fields

Don’t tell her anything about water.

Don’t tell her about the bulldozer

Don’t tell her not to look at the bulldozer

Don’t tell her it was knocking the house down

Tell her it’s a building site

Don’t tell her anything about bulldozers.

Don’t tell her about the queues at the checkpoint

Tell her we’ll be there in no time

Don’t tell her anything she doesn’t ask

Don’t tell her the boy was shot

Don’t tell her anything.

Tell her we’re making new farms in the desert

Don’t tell her about the olive trees

Tell her we’re building new towns in the wilderness.

Don’t tell her they throw stones

Tell her they’re not much good against tanks

Don’t tell her that.

Don’t tell her they set off bombs in cafés

Tell her, tell her they set off bombs in cafés

Tell her to be careful

Don’t frighten her.

Tell her we need the wall to keep us safe

Tell her they want to drive us into the sea

Tell her they don’t

Tell her they want to drive us into the sea.

Tell her we kill far more of them

Don’t tell her that

Tell her that

Tell her we’re stronger

Tell her we’re entitled

Tell her they don’t understand anything except violence

Tell her we want peace

Tell her we’re going swimming.

Tell her she can’t watch the news

Tell her she can watch cartoons

Tell her she can stay up late and watch Friends.

Tell her they’re attacking with rockets

Don’t frighten her

Tell her only a few of us have been killed

Tell her the army has come to our defence

Don’t tell her her cousin refused to serve in the army.

Don’t tell her how many of them have been killed

Tell her the Hamas fighters have been killed

Tell her they’re terrorists

Tell her they’re filth

Don’t

Don’t tell her about the family of dead girls

Tell her you can’t believe what you see on television

Tell her we killed the babies by mistake

Don’t tell her anything about the army

Tell her, tell her about the army, tell her to be proud of the army.

Tell her about the family of dead girls, tell her their names why not,

tell her the whole world knows why shouldn’t she know?

Tell her there’s dead babies, did she see babies?

tell her she’s got nothing to be ashamed of.

Tell her they did it to themselves.

Tell her they want their children killed to make people sorry for them,

tell her I’m not sorry for them, tell her not to be sorry for them,

tell her we’re the ones to be sorry for,

tell her they can’t talk suffering to us.

Tell her we’re the iron fist now, tell her it’s the fog of war,

tell her we won’t stop killing them till we’re safe,

tell her I laughed when I saw the dead policemen,

tell her they’re animals living in rubble now,

tell her I wouldn’t care if we wiped them out,

the world would hate us is the only thing,

tell her I don’t care if the world hates us,

tell her we’re better haters, tell her we’re chosen people,

tell her I look at one of their children covered in blood and what do I feel?

tell her all I feel is happy it’s not her.

Don’t tell her that.

Tell her we love her.

Don’t frighten her.

Seven Jewish Children is Caryl Churchill’s

response to the situation in Gaza in January

2009, when the play was written.

Seven Jewish Children first published in Great Britain in 2009 by

Nick Hern Books Limited, 14 Larden Road, London, W3 7ST,

in association with the Royal Court Theatre, London

Caryl Churchill has asserted her moral right to be identified as the author of this work

Typeset by Nick Hern Books, London

ISBN 978 1 84842 047 2

Performing Rights

Seven Jewish Children was first performed at the Royal Court

Theatre, London, on 6 February 2009.

↧

Brighton’s Pride of Place in Israeli Embassy’s War-plan

March 16, 2016, 11:30 am

≫ Next: Europe - Why Brexit Plays into the Hands of Racists & Reactionaries

≪ Previous: Manufacturing anti-Semitism out of its opposite

Israeli Embassy targets ‘Enemy Territory’ in Britain on giant Map

Brighton's Sodastream - a shop that existed without any customers!

Sodastream attempted to catch on to Brighton's green reputation - but people weren't so easily fooled! They even called their shop 'Ecostream'!

Even Scarlett Johansson couldn't prettify Apartheid

In a report Grim days mapped out for the arrival of Israeli mouthpiece Regev in the Middle East Monitor we learn of a giant map in the Israeli Embassy, a kind of war-plan, in which ‘enemy territory’ is staked out. Pride of place goes to Scotland but Brighton gets an honourable mention in dispatches. The article states that:

The mass pickets outside Sodastream convinced it that Brighton wasn't such a good place to do apartheid business

John Lewis stopped selling Sodastream stuff as a result of the campaign

Another hotspot on the embassy map is Brighton, where pro-Palestine activists are well-known supporters of BDS. Back in 2012, the then settlement-based company SodaStream failed in its attempt to open and run a flagship store – EcoStream – in the seaside town to sell home carbonated drinks machines and accessories. This was targeted immediately by activists from Brighton and Hove Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) who staged noisy protests every Saturday outside the shop, running a gauntlet of Sussex area pro-Israel activists to do so. EcoStream soon closed and its demise was followed by an announcement from one of Britain’s biggest retail stores, the John Lewis Partnership, that it would remove SodaStream products from its shelves.

One of the Zionists not so luvvable Christian fundamentalists

↧

Europe - Why Brexit Plays into the Hands of Racists & Reactionaries

March 17, 2016, 5:52 pm

≫ Next: Owen Jones’ Obsession with ‘anti-Semitism’

≪ Previous: Brighton’s Pride of Place in Israeli Embassy’s War-plan

Below is the latest Comment piece I have written for my local paper, the |Brighton Argus. It is difficult for the Left in Britain to decide between an increasingly racist and reactionary Europe. Its forcing of austerity on Greece or its racist deal with Turkey to fast track its admission to the EU whilst sending back refugees to a place that isn't even safe for Turkey's own citizens.

However the alternative is even more unpalatable and we have an assorted variety of right-wing Tory MPs, UKIP, fascist groups and assorted right-wing loonies (with a smattering of Stalinists and right-wing Labour MPs) in the leave Europe camp.

It's an unpalatable choice but on balance staying in to work with other groups within Europe rather than retreating to a little England position is my own choice in the referendum on whether to leave the European Union or not.

↧

Owen Jones’ Obsession with ‘anti-Semitism’

March 17, 2016, 9:00 pm

≫ Next: The False Use of anti-Semitism - Gary Spedding, the SNP’s Advisor on Palestine Sings the Zionist Song

≪ Previous: Europe - Why Brexit Plays into the Hands of Racists & Reactionaries

The Lacuna in Jones’ head

One despairs of Owen Jones. The brain of the Guardian’s resident life-style leftist seems to turn to jelly whenever he approaches the issue of anti-Semitism. Instead of anything in the way of an insight, still less meaningful analysis, all we get is a series of platitudes linked together by Jones’ urge to demonstrate how concerned and right-on he is. [Antisemitism is a poison – the left must take leadership against it, Guardian 15^th March] It is as if Jones is so guilt-tripped by the legacy of anti-Semitism that he cannot think straight.

Owen Jones - the Guardian's Vacuous 'left' Columnist

Without anything in the way of substantiating, Jones asserts that 'this centuries-old sickness infects progressive circles'. This reminds me of what Abram Leon, the leader of the Fourth International in Belgium, who died in Auschwitz, wrote in his classic book 'The Jewish Question - A Marxist Interpretation' p.247: ‘Zionism transposes modern anti-Semitism to all of history and saves itself the trouble of studying the various forms of anti-Semitism and their evolution.’ Anti-Semitism wasn’t a ‘sickness’ it was a political, economic and social phenomenon that changed in different eras. Jews in Europe weren’t only persecuted at particular periods they were also oppressors of the peasantry for long periods.

The Zionist Community Security Trust, aided by the Home Office, tried to get Raed Salah deported for 'anti-Semitism'. The case collapsed when the evidence was shown to be forged. He has since been sentenced to 11 months imprisonment in Israel on trumped up charges whilst genuine Israeli racists get off scot free

When right-wing Labour MPs, led by John Mann, and assorted Zionists orchestrate a campaign about ‘anti-Semitism’ in order to destabilise the Corbyn leadership, Jones abandons what few critical faculties he possesses to write yet another slushy mushy article for the Guardian.

Opposing Jewish settlers is anti-Semitic

In his latest article Jones complains that when people read his article they will say ‘ah, but what about Israel’. He complains that it’s not possible to raise the issue of anti-Semitism without people talking about Israel. Indeed it is ‘victim-blaming (people are apparently being compelled to hate Jewish people by the actions of a foreign state)’ whereas it is the exact opposite. Palestinians are accused of hating Jewish people by daring to protest at their treatment.

It doesn’t seem to occur to Jones that the reason Israel and ‘anti-Semitism’ are conflated is because this is a deliberate strategy of Israel’s supporters, who regularly and repeatedly accuse anti-Zionists of being anti-Semitic. [See for example Anti-Zionism Always Equals Anti-SemitismJonathan S. Tobin, Commentary, 18.8.14.

According to the Zionists this is automatically anti-Semitic

Indeed any support for the Palestinians is deemed anti-Semitic. According to Jeremy Corbyn’s new junior foreign office minister, Fabian Hamilton, [Jewish News, January 13, 2016,New shadow minister:Boycotting Israel and not vile dictatorships is anti-Semitic Hamilton ‘said boycotting the Jewish state without taking action against other countries is “simply anti-Semitic”.

Alex Chalmers - Oxford University Labour Club's Chairperson & Upper Class Twit who resigned when the Labour Club voted to support Israel Apartheid Week

As Brian Klug, one of the founders of Independent Jewish Voices and an Oxford don who has written extensively on anti-Semitism noted, ‘[W]hen anti-Semitism is everywhere, it is nowhere. And when every anti-Zionist is an anti-Semite, we no longer know how to recognize the real thing—the concept of anti-Semitism loses its significance’ Brian Klug,The Myth of theNew Anti-Semitism. The Nation, February 2, 2004

Protesting about Israel's murder of Palestinian children in Gaza is 'anti-Semitic' according to Junk Academic David Hirsh

Given the controversies over the now-defunct European Monitoring Committee Definition of anti-Semitism, you might have thought Jones would address some of the issues that were raised. This was a definition drawn up by the Zionist movement, whose main purpose was to provide some legitimacy to accusations that anti-Zionism equals anti-Semitism. It held that comparisons between Zionism and Israel’s behaviour with Nazi Germany were anti-Semitic and that someone who opposes the existence of the racist, apartheid State of Israel is anti-Semitic.

It is anti-Semitic to protest about the murder of Palestinian children

What does Jones have to say about the EUMC or ‘new anti-Semitism’ which includes ‘singling out Israel for criticism’? Nothing. To be fair he probably isn’t even aware of these debates.

I doubt if there is a single Palestine solidarity activist alive who hasn’t, at one time or the other, been accused of ‘anti-Semitism’. When York University Palestine Society is accused of anti-Semitism because it showed Caryl Churchill’s 7 Jewish Children, then it should be obvious, even to an intellectual lightweight like Jones, that the issue of anti-Semitism cannot be separated from anti-Zionism and support for the Palestinians. [see Pro-Palestinian students perform 'antisemitic' playas part of Israel Apartheid Week, Jewish Chronicle 25.2.16.]

7 Jewish Children is a short but quite moving and stimulating play, which is on the Guardian’s own web site. It makes the connection between hiding a Jewish child in an unnamed Jewish ghetto under Nazi occupation and the death of her relatives and the bombardment of Gaza in 2008-9 during Operation Cast Lead. According to the idiot Zionist novelist Howard Jacobson it is nothing more than “Jew-hating pure and simple” Let's see the 'criticism' of Israel for what it really is, Independent 18.2.09.

Oxford University Labour Club was recently accused of anti-Semitism when it voted to back the Israel Apartheid Week. [It’s time we acknowledged that Oxford’s student left is institutionally antisemitic] Guardian Comment is Free, 18.2.16. The only example of anti-Semitism was the fact that people sometimes used the term ‘Zio’ for Zionist.

As the former Director of the Institute of Jewish Policy Research, Antony Lerman observed, the almost automatic accusation of ‘anti-Semitism’ drains the term of all meaning. [Vetting in Practice, Guardian Comment is Free, 31.5.07. Tony Greenstein] Like the boy who cried wolf, the repeated false accusations of anti-Semitism render people immune to the real thing. That is the real problem, but it isn't one Jones is capable or able to address.

If Jones wants to find a real example of anti-Semitism it’s not the hapless Vicki Kirby, whose expressions owe more to clumsiness and stupidity, coupled with an inability to discern the difference between Zionism and being Jewish, than overt anti-Semitism. A far more convincing target would be Aviv Bushinsky, a former aide to Benjamin Netanyahu, who recently described the American Ambassador to Israel, Daniel Shapiro, as a ‘little Jew boy’ [‘Former Netanyahu aide lambasts US ambassador in heated spat’].

Jones only alludes to it, but the last 8 months have been dominated by allegations of anti-Semitism surrounding Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party. Leading the charge against Corbyn has been the editor of the Jewish Chronicle, Stephen Pollard, who ironically has a record of defending anti-Semites who are pro-Israel. [Poland's Kaminski is not an antisemite: he's a friend to Jews, Guardian, 9.10.09.] Michal Kaminski is the reptile who opposed a national Polish apology for the burning alive of up to 900 Polish Jews by fellow Poles in the village of Jedwabne in his constituency. He suggested that it was the few Polish Jews who weren’t exterminated by Hitler who owed the country an apology! None of this prevented the Israeli state from feting this fascist and anti-Semitic MEP.

Contrary to Jones assertion, all the evidence is that anti-Semitism is not on the increase. Even the avowedly Zionist Community Security Trust’s ‘Anti-Semitic Incidents Report 2015’ recorded 924 anti-Semitic incidents in 2015, a fall of 22% from the 2014 level. As the CST’s report admits, the two highest annual totals for anti-Semitic incidents occurred in 2009 and 2014 when there were ‘significant trigger events in the form of conflicts in Israel and Gaza’.

Jews in Britain are living in a golden era of tolerance. The same is not true in relation to racism against Muslims. Arson and physical attacks, including murder, are at an incomparably higher level for Muslims than Jews, leaving aside the question as to how the CST define an anti-Semitic incident. Anti-Semitism is not a form of state hatred. Synagogues don’t have fascist goons demonstrating outside them unlike the East London Mosque on Whitechapel Road which has faced three demonstrations by Britain First in the past month.

The elephant in the room is the relationship of Zionism itself to anti-Semitism. Zionism was founded on the belief that Jews did not belong in the Diaspora. Negation of and contempt for the Diaspora was a fundamental part of Zionism’s founding ideology.

It is the Zionist movement that has often found kindred spirits among anti-Semites. The founder of Political Zionism, Theodor Herzl explained that ‘the anti-Semites will be our most dependable friends, the anti-Semitic countries, our allies’. [Diaries, p.84] Herzl himself had friendly relations with anti-Semites including the leader of the anti-Dreyfussards, Eduard Drumont.

In his Diaries, Herzl relates how on a visit to the cousin of the German Kaiser, the Grand Duke of Baden, the latter explained how he supported Zionism as a means of weaning Jewish workers away from revolutionary politics but he was worried that if he openly supported the Zionist movement he might be accused of anti-Semitism.

Anyone acquainted with the writings of early Zionists know that they were full of anti-Semitic caricatures. Israel’s first Justice Minister Pinhas Rosenbluth described Palestine as ‘an institute for the fumigation of Jewish vermin’. [Joachim Doron, p.169, Classic Zionism and modern anti-Semitism: parallels and influences’ (1883-1914), Studies in Zionism 8, Autumn 1983]. An expression that would not have been out of place from the editor of the Nazi Der Sturmer, Julius Streicher. Zionism began from an attitude of contempt for the Jewish Diaspora which was little different from mainstream European anti-Semitism.

Today in Europe some of the most racist and far-right parties are, at one and the same time, supporters of Israel. They combine Islamaphobia, anti-Semitism and support for Israel. This includes both the British National Party and the English Defence League. As Ruth Smeed, spokesperson for the Board of Deputies admitted: ‘‘The BNP website is now one of the most Zionist on the web – it goes further than any of the mainstream parties in its support of Israel’. [BNP seeks to bury antisemitism and gain Jewish votes in Islamophobic campaign, The Guardian, April 10th 2008 .

As A B Yehoshua, one of Israel’s foremost novelists, explained in a lecture to the Union of Jewish Students

‘‘Anti-Zionism is not the product of the non-Jews. On the contrary, the Gentiles have always encouraged Zionism, hoping that it would help to rid them of the Jews in their midst. Even today, in a perverse way, a real anti-Semite must be a Zionist.’ Jewish Chronicle 22.1.82.

But despite his attempt to get into the good books of Britain's Zionist lobby, Jones is savaged in this week's Jewish Chronicle (17.3.16). David Hirsh, the junk Zionist academic from Goldsmiths College, argues in Jew hate and today’s Left

'We remember the shoddiness, one-sidedness and the ferocity of Jones’ own condemnation of Israel at the time of the Gaza conflict; we remember his failure to speak out against the campaign to boycott Israel. ... Jones needs to take to heart that there is a relationship between hostility to Israel and antisemitism. Hostility to Israel is partly caused by antisemitism and is also itself a cause of further antisemitism.'

Whether he tries to avoid it or not, the fact is that the Zionist definition of anti-Semitism rests on support for Israel and opposition to Palestine solidarity. This is not the first vacuous article Jones has written on anti-Semitism. Nor I suspect will it be the last.

Tony Greenstein

↧

The False Use of anti-Semitism - Gary Spedding, the SNP’s Advisor on Palestine Sings the Zionist Song

March 18, 2016, 6:04 pm

≫ Next: ANTI-SEMITISM - Jonathan Freedland & The Zionist Campaign to Defame Corbyn and the Labour Left

≪ Previous: Owen Jones’ Obsession with ‘anti-Semitism’

This post was originally posted in November 2015 but has since disappeared!

‘In fact the CST has been incredibly helpful to me in my work.’

Egotist extraordinaire

In a recent Facebook comment, the SNP’s principal drafter of Early Day Motions on Palestine spoke of ‘‘the very real anti-semitism that keeps happening in some sections of Palestine Solidarity.” No examples have ever been given. In fact the Palestine Solidarity movement has been very careful to weed out anti-Semites from the movement.

The ego attacks Ali Abunimah

Indeed this blog was set up to combat the anti-Semitism of Gilad Atzmon, Paul Eisen and Mary Rizzo 8 years ago. That is the meaning of its url – azvsas – anti-Zionism vs anti-Semitism. In 2012 we worked with others in the executive of Palestine Solidarity Campaign, including its Secretary Ben Soffa, to eradicate the present of the holocaust deniers and anti-Semites. This included the expulsion of an open holocaust denier from Brighton, Frances Clarke-Lowes. We worked with Palestinian comrades who understood the dangers of anti-Semitism to the Palestine solidarity movement and shortly after Ali Abunimah, Omar Barghouti and Professors Joseph Massad and Naseer Aruri, plus many others issued a statement GrantingNo Quarter: A Call for the Disavowal of the Racism and Antisemitism of Gilad Atzmon

Spedding prides himself on passing news to Electronic Intifada!

‘Anti-Semitism’ is the theme tune of the Zionist movement though. It is an allegation made against every single Palestine solidarity activist. What is the effect? Tony Lerman, the founder of the Institute of Jewish Policy Research, before being witch hunted out of it by Zionist capitalists like Lord Kalms for being a dissident, put it like this:

‘‘The anti-Zionism equals anti-Semitism argument drains the word anti-Semitism of any useful meaning. For it means that to be an anti-Semite, it is sufficient to hold any view ranging from criticism of the policies of the current Israeli government to denial that Israel has a right to exist as a state, without having to subscribe to any of those things which historians have traditionally regarded as making up an anti-Semitic world view: hatred of Jews per se, belief in a worldwide Jewish conspiracy, belief that Jews generated communism and control capitalism, belief that Jews are racially inferior and so on. Moreover, while theoretically allowing that criticism of Israeli government policies is legitimate, in practice it virtually proscribes any such thing.’

If indeed anti-Semitism was prevalent in the Palestine solidarity movement, Spedding would provide us with specific examples. Instead he makes vague allegations in exactly the same manner as Zionist propagandists. It demonstrates not only a general sloppiness, politically and factually, but a political style borne more of personal and political opportunism than any commitment to the cause of Palestine.

It also suggests that Spedding is not even concerned about anti-Semitism and that he has other fish to fry. As I wrote in the Seamy Side of Solidarity

‘Like the boy who cried wolf, the charge of "anti-semitism" has been made so often against critics of Zionism and the Israeli state that people now have difficulty recognising the genuine article.’

In other words, if you are seriously concerned about anti-Semitism, then you should be very careful not to make false allegations of anti-Semitism because it merely immunizes people to the real thing.

When I campaigned to expose the undoubted anti-Semitism of Gilad Atzmon the most frequent comment I got from people is that allegations of anti-Semitism were one more example of a Zionist accusations. People were sick and tired of being accused of ‘anti-Semitism’ so much so that they no longer recognised the real thing. That is why false accusations of anti-Semitism are so dangerous and why incidentally Zionists actually don’t care at all about anti-Semitism. Their concern is the Israeli state and for that they are quite prepared to risk the safety of Diaspora Jewish communities.

My attention was also drawn to a series of Twitter comments by Spedding regarding the Zionist Community Security Trust. They tried to fit up the leader of Israel’s Northern Islamic Leagues, Raed Salah, by providing false information to the Home Office on alleged anti-Semitic comments that Raed Salah had made in Israel. In fact the evidence they supplied consisted of a doctored poem, printed in the Jerusalem Post which had words added to it to make it appear anti-Semitic. Words such as ‘You Jews’. Although the first stage Immigration Tribunal upheld the deportation order of Theresa May, the Upper Tribunal quashed May’s order and Raed Salah was freed. CST which had boasted of supplying the original information kept quiet about Justice Ockleton’s devastating judgment.

In a tweet to Timothy Horgan, Gary Spedding wrote that

I've never had any issues with the CST. In fact the CST has been incredibly helpful to me in my work.

In response to an attempt of the CST to foist the discredited European Union Monitoring Committee Definition of anti-Semitism on Amnesty International, a definition which the Europe Union’s Fundamental Rights Agency has now scrapped from its website, Gary Spedding wrote that ‘The Parliamentary group does excellent work on anti-semitism. If you'd like, just ask’

The Parliamentary Committee on anti-Semitism was led by John Mann MP and the corrupt Dennis MacShane MP. It was a wholly Zionist outfit and MacShane and Mann got their comeuppance at the Fraser v University College Union Employment Tribunal, where an attempt was made to suggest that the Boycott of Israeli Universities was ‘anti-Semitic’ and discriminatory. The Tribunal ruled against the Zionists holding that:

‘We did not derive assistance from the two Members of Parliament who appeared before us. Both gave glib evidence, appearing supremely confident of the rightness of their positions. For Dr MacShane, it seemed that all answers lay in the MacPherson Report (the effect of which he appeared to misunderstand). Mr Mann could manage without even that assistance…. And when it came to anti-Semitism in the context of debate about the Middle East, he announced, “It’s clear to me where the line is …” but unfortunately eschewed the opportunity to locate it for us. Both parliamentarians clearly enjoyed making speeches. Neither seemed at ease with the idea of being required to answer a question not to his liking.’

These two characters were responsible for the ‘excellent work’ of the Parliamentary sub-committee on anti-Semitism!

And as for the CST, Spedding could declare about this vehemently Zionist and anti-socialist group that ‘I've never had any issues with the CST. In fact the CST has been incredibly helpful to me in my work.’

With friends like these….

Below are the relevant e-mails (hat tip Timothy Horgan) and the continuous correspondence that
Gary Spedding foisted on me.

Gary Spedding @GarySpedding Apr 21
@TimothyHorgan1 @AG_ThorpeApps I've never had any issues with the CST. In fact the CST has been incredibly helpful to me in my work.

Timothy Horgan @TimothyHorgan1 Apr 21

@GarySpedding Parliamentary Group on anti-semitism endorses dodgy Zionist EUMC definition - Thorpe-Apps motions tried to foist this on AI
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Gary Spedding @GarySpedding Apr 21
@TimothyHorgan1 The Parliamentary group does excellent work on anti-semitism. If you'd like, just ask @AG_ThorpeApps directly his view?
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Timothy Horgan @TimothyHorgan1 Apr 21

@GarySpedding @AG_ThorpeApps It lacks credibility after MacShane. Also relies too much on questionable CST.
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Gary Spedding @GarySpedding Apr 21
@TimothyHorgan1 @AG_ThorpeApps I've never had any issues with the CST. In fact the CST has been incredibly helpful to me in my work.

GS=Gary Spedding TG=Tony Greenstein

(GS) This is starting to look a bit like one of those childish games where two kids continually pass the same insult back and forth until one of them gives up.

(TG) I thought you promised not to write anymore?

(GS) For someone as advanced in years as you

(TG) Ageism as well as opportunism and unionism. You do get around!

(GS) My activism is a matter of public record. I don't need to defend such in an email exchange with you.

(TG) So why are you then?

(GS) I'm not trying to prove anything to you. The people that matter - my Palestinian and Israeli colleagues - all know my record and that I work hard each and every day fighting for justice, accountability and peacebuilding.

(TG) Yes I’m sure that most people in the world, bar myself, know of your wonderful record. Do you know the meaning of narcissism?

(GS) You've never come across me because you're part of a fringe that no longer plays any serious role in Palestine solidarity in the UK or elsewhere. As I said, the people who really matter all know who I am and the work I do.

Indeed. The very definition of ‘people who really matter’ is that they know about you.

(GS) It doesn't bother me in the slightest that you do not.

(TG) It would appear that it does though!

(GS) it is not an SNP motion.

(TG) No it’s just signed by 28 SNP members out of 33. Strange that.

(GS) It is not my fault that you choose to remain blind to the anti-semitism that blights our movement.

(TG) I see. Anti-Semitism is now a ‘blight’ on the Palestine solidarity movement. Details? Anti-Semitism is marginal. Mainly because groups like Jews for boycotting Israeli goods and Palestine Solidarity Campaign dealt firmly and effectively with anti-Semitism when it reared its head. Perhaps when we were exorcising Gilad Atzmon, Paul Eisen and his acolytes you were in short trousers telling your granny to suck eggs. See http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2007/feb/19/greenstein

(GS) The Palestinians certainly aren't ignoring the errors of internationals that damage the just cause of Palestine by spreading conspiracy theories and promoting anti-semitic tropes.

(TG) I see. An attack on internationals now? You certainly seem to be playing a few Zionist tunes. Which internationals might they be? ISM?

(GS) You haven't exposed anything. All you did was make a fool out of yourself and prove beyond any doubt that you couldn't care less about the issue of anti-semitism. That you couldn't care less about the concerns of Palestine solidarity advocates such as myself.

(TG) True, I’m not that much concerned about you. That’s the problem with narcissism – you can never understand why others don’t think of you in the same ways you do. I care about the people I work with, people I know are genuine and often anonymous Palestine solidarity activists, not self-seeking publicists with nothing to say.

(GS) That you don't respect the voices of Palestinians who are concerned about anti-semitism damaging the movement.

(TG) Not true. I have the greatest respect for Ali Abunimah and those who signed the statement calling on the movement to grant no quarter to Gilad Atzmon, who you seem unaware of. I also admire Ali for his previous statement regarding Israel Shamir. I also have great respect for the Electronic Intifada which Ali edits. https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/palestinian-writers-activists-disavow-racism-anti-semitism-gilad-atzmon

http://www.nigelparry.com/issues/shamir/originalletter.html

(GS) That you don't give a damn about the core principles of Palestine solidarity being anti-racist (including against anti-semitism).

(TG) I suggest you read the last sentence of my article Seamy Side of Solidarity http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2007/feb/19/greenstein It is quite clear: ‘You cannot oppose racism against the Palestinians and turn a blind eye to anti-semitism.’

(GS) It really doesn't matter how many times you repeat the lie; but the motion has nothing to do with Gerald Kaufman - except perhaps to demonstrate that anti-semitic rhetoric such as what he used in the meeting at Parliament is not part of any legitimate Palestine solidarity that we in the Palestine solidarity movement recognise.

I'm proud to have raised the issue of Gerald Kaufman's remarks directly with my colleagues in the Labour Party. This issue needed to be dealt with and now it has been. But the problem of anti-semitism within some of the Palestine solidarity movement still persists and must be challenged at every level.

(TG) So it does have something to do with Gerald Kaufman. I did a search of the Jewish Chronicle’s archives. There were over 50 mentions of ‘Arab money’. Racist? Indeed I found over 30 instances of ‘Jewish money’ before losing patience. So it’s a storm in a teacup, grist to the mill for those whose characterisation of Palestinians far exceeds anything Sir Gerald said.

(GS) Given your words to me I get the feeling that you are deeply upset that nobody in the mainstream Palestine Solidarity movement listens to you any more - I'm not confusing myself with the movement, it is you that seems to think being a founding member gives you some kind of ultimate authority. You aren't.

(TG) You shouldn’t attribute your own fears and feelings to others. Clearly you listened to me as I’ve been deluged with your verbal diarrhoea ever since.

(GS) My position on Northern Ireland is nothing to do with this discussion. I support the principle of consent and believe that it is for the people of Northern Ireland to determine their future either as remaining part of the United Kingdom OR becoming part of a United Ireland in the future. It is their choice on the matter and nobody elses. Only once people have worked on building peace and reconciliation to a point where those people are comfortable enough with each other that they refuse to resort to violence.

(TG) On the contrary there are very close comparisons with Ireland. As the first Military Governor of Jerusalem under the British Mandate said, the Zionist settlement was a ‘little loyal Ulster in a sea of hostile pan Arabism.’ The principle of ‘consent’ means a Unionist veto on a United Ireland. In other words a continuation of British gerrymandering. The decision on Partition is a decision for all Irish people, not just those who see their legacy as lying in the Plantation of Ireland.

(GS) Again, it is the people that matter who have confidence in me and the work I carry forward in order to push for social justice and human rights.

(TG) Me, me, narcicisstic me.

I'm not going to sit here and list all the work I have done in solidarity with Palestine.

(TG) That’s a relief

(GS) Suffice to say though that it certainly exceeds drafting a few Early Day Motions for submission to Parliament. As for BDS - I take my direction from the Palestinians at the core of the BDS movement. Not from an individual like yourself.

(TG) Good. I notice you don’t have much to say about it though. No doubt ‘anti-Semitism’ is a more important topic.

(GS) Again this is clearly about playing the 'better activist' game

(TG) No I just question the motives about someone who claims to be a Palestine solidarity supporter and who witters on about anti-Semitism knowing nothing about it.

(GS) I'm not on any 'Zionist bandwagon' - all serious Palestine solidarity activists laugh each and every time nobodies such as yourself accuse us of being Zionists.

(TG) I wish I could claim to know what ‘all serious Palestine solidarity activists’ laugh or cry about. But who is the ‘us’? The royal we?

(GS) Lastly, I would advise you to heed the disclaimer that is quite clear in my signature. You do not have permission to publish, disseminate, distribute or copy this email or any attachements found herein.

(TG) Ok then I’ll just have to publish it without your permission!

(GS) Further contact will be considered harassment.

(TG) If you’re so concerned about harassment then you don’t need to reply

(GS) Also stop emailing MPs about this EDM. We are all laughing at you.

(TG) Your concern about MPs is touching. I suspect it wasn’t laughter that led you to contact me.

11^th November 20.30

Tony,

This is starting to look a bit like one of those childish games where two kids continually pass the same insult back and forth until one of them gives up.

For someone as advanced in years as you I should have thought playground antics were very much a thing of the past. My activism is a matter of public record. I don't need to defend such in an email exchange with you. I'm not trying to prove anything to you. The people that matter - my Palestinian and Israeli colleagues - all know my record and that I work hard each and every day fighting for justice, accountability and peacebuilding.

You've never come across me because you're part of a fringe that no longer plays any serious role in Palestine solidarity in the UK or elsewhere. As I said, the people who really matter all know who I am and the work I do. It doesn't bother me in the slightest that you do not.

To respond directly about the EDM - it is not an SNP motion. It is a Palestine Solidarity motion that makes clear that anti-semitism has no place in our movement. That criticism of Israel is entirely legitimate. Criticism of Zionism is entirely legitimate. It is not my fault that you choose to remain blind to the anti-semitism that blights our movement. The Palestinians certainly aren't ignoring the errors of internationals that damage the just cause of Palestine by spreading conspiracy theories and promoting anti-semitic tropes. You haven't exposed anything. All you did was make a fool out of yourself and prove beyond any doubt that you couldn't care less about the issue of anti-semitism. That you couldn't care less about the concerns of Palestine solidarity advocates such as myself. That you don't respect the voices of Palestinians who are concerned about anti-semitism damaging the movement. That you don't give a damn about the core principles of Palestine solidarity being anti-racist (including against anti-semitism). By claiming that this is 'Zionist sectarianism' you are simply confirming that people such as yourself are willing to dismiss instances of anti-semitism - and thus be complicit in it. The motion does not attack Jeremy Corbyn over Gerald Kaufman's grotesque statements. The motion was drafted MONTHS ago. I speak to Jeremy Corbyn when I'm in Parliament. I send him my briefings every week. I'm non-party political and work with all those who will promote Palestinian human rights, peacebuilding, conflict transformation and most importantly justice.

It really doesn't matter how many times you repeat the lie; but the motion has nothing to do with Gerald Kaufman - except perhaps to demonstrate that anti-semitic rhetoric such as what he used in the meeting at Parliament is not part of any legitimate Palestine solidarity that we in the Palestine solidarity movement recognise.

Given your words to me I get the feeling that you are deeply upset that nobody in the mainstream Palestine Solidarity movement listens to you any more - I'm not confusing myself with the movement, it is you that seems to think being a founding member gives you some kind of ultimate authority. You aren't.

My position on Northern Ireland is nothing to do with this discussion. I support the principle of consent and believe that it is for the people of Northern Ireland to determine their future either as remaining part of the United Kingdom OR becoming part of a United Ireland in the future. It is their choice on the matter and nobody elses. Only once people have worked on building peace and reconciliation to a point where those people are comfortable enough with each other that they refuse to resort to violence.

I'm also not a refugee. Nor am I an 'advisor to the SNP' - I'm an independent cross-party volunteer in the UK, Irish and European parliaments on the Israel-Palestine conflict. Whether you think I'm qualified or not is again of no real consequence. Again, it is the people that matter who have confidence in me and the work I carry forward in order to push for social justice and human rights.

I'm not going to sit here and list all the work I have done in solidarity with Palestine. Suffice to say though that it certainly exceeds drafting a few Early Day Motions for submission to Parliament. As for BDS - I take my direction from the Palestinians at the core of the BDS movement. Not from an individual like yourself.

Again this is clearly about playing the 'better activist' game - the whole thing about your activism surpassing my own? You seem desperate to be validated.

As for your claim that I 'use MPs' or that this in some way is for the 'strengthen' my own career... I study Biology. My future is in the field of nature and the natural world. I don't have a career in the field of Israel-Palestine. There is absolutely no benefit or incentive for me in doing the work that I do except knowing that it furthers the causes of justice, equality and human rights.

I'm not on any 'Zionist bandwagon' - all serious Palestine solidarity activists laugh each and every time nobodies such as yourself accuse us of being Zionists.

Lastly, I would advise you to heed the disclaimer that is quite clear in my signature. You do not have permission to publish, disseminate, distribute or copy this email or any attachements found herein.

Further contact will be considered harassment. Also stop emailing MPs about this EDM. We are all laughing at you.

Mr. Gary Spedding
gspedding01@qub.ac.uk

Mobile: +44 7476 369469
Follow me on Twitter

From: Tony Greenstein <tonygreenstein111@gmail.com>
Sent: 11 November 2015 18:53
To: Gary Spedding
Subject: Re: Anti-semitism and Palestine Solidarity (Early Day Motion 652)

Gary,

You said:

(GS) Now we get to the real issue I think. This is yet another case of activist egotism on your part.

(TG) There's certainly no activism on your part, just egotism.

(GS) I've seen it many times before.

Not all of us have your experience of course

(GS) The reality is I don't need a high opinion of myself.

That's just as well. But why do you keep mentioning it then?

(GS) Other people hold these high opinions about me and the work I do.

Strange. I've never come across one such person. You might think, as one of the original founders of national Palestine Solidarity Campaign, a member of Brighton PSC and a co-founder of Jews Against Zionism and Jews for Boycotting Israeli Goods I might, having spoken at dozens of meetings over the years and having met with hundreds of fellow activists, that I would have heard of you. Strange to say I've not once come across you or heard mention of you.

(GS) It's one of the reasons why I don't feel threatened by you in the slightest.

I realise you have difficulty in both reading and comprehending at the same time, but I have no desire or wish to threaten you nor have I. Of course just because you're obviously paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you - just count me out!

(GS) I know enough about your so-called work from these exchanges and also from what you have done over the past week.

You mean calling out an SNP Early Day Motion drafted by you which talked about the 'anti-Semitism' of the Palestine solidarity movement. Yup. I did expose this nasty little bit of Zionist sectarianism, which tried to attack Jeremy Corbyn over the Gerald Kaufmann affair. Indeed you boast of the part you played in it on your FaceBook page.

(GS) Your dismissive attitude reveals that you aren't interested in strengthening Palestine Solidarity in the UK or elsewhere.

You confuse yourself with the movement. Is a refugee from the Unionist Alliance Party in Northern Ireland and an unpaid adviser to the SNP is in a position to judge these things? My record on Palestine solidarity and BDS (something you don't mention) in Britain stands on its own merits. It's just that I don't like to see people use the struggle of the Palestinians to strengthen their own careers.

Having taken part in the disruption of supermarkets, the Jerusalem Quartet, the Israeli Philharmonic Orchestra, the closure of Ahava and Sodastream and been prosecuted and threatened with prosecution for these activities, despite being seriously ill, I think my record of activism surpasses that of yourself, which consists primarily of drafting Early Day Motions for SNP MPs.

I'm surprise that SNP MPs, despite most of them being relatively new, would allow someone like you to use them in this way.

(GS) If you were, then I think you'd not be so nonchalant about the very serious reality of anti-semitism.

As someone who is Jewish, I am in a better position to decide whether anti-Semitism is a 'serious reality' or not. Only the Zionists have an interest in talking up 'anti-Semitism' as part of their campaign to deflect attention away from the Palestinians. It's the old case of 'kill Palestinians, shout 'anti-Semitism'. It doesn't work any longer despite opportunists like you trying to hop on the Zionist bandwagon.

(GS) Your opinion of me matters very little. My performance is judged on how threatened the Israel advocacy groups feel by the work I do and I can tell you that they're terrified. Absolutely terrified.

Yes the sound of them quaking in their shoes is deafening. Scotland has produced some fine comedians - Billy Connolly and Frankie Boyle to name but two. Have you ever thought of changing your profession?

Have you ever heard of the term 'narcissism'?

(GS) It is by no means the only measure.

Anyway, I have nothing further to say to you

That's a relief

(GS) except that you should stop dismissing anti-semitism and start being part of the movement that is making real change for Palestinian rights.

Have you always told your granny how to suck eggs?

PS: Please do assume that everytime you put your foot in it and write such rubbish, that I will reserve the right to put it out on my blog and in public.

Tony Greenstein

On 11 November 2015 at 09:34, Gary Spedding <gspedding01@qub.ac.uk> wrote:

Tony,

Now we get to the real issue I think. This is yet another case of activist egotism on your part. I've seen it many times before.

The reality is I don't need a high opinion of myself. Other people hold these high opinions about me and the work I do. It's one of the reasons why I don't feel threatened by you in the slightest.

I know enough about your so-called work from these exchanges and also from what you have done over the past week. Your dismissive attitude reveals that you aren't interested in strengthening Palestine Solidarity in the UK or elsewhere. If you were, then I think you'd not be so nonchalant about the very serious reality of anti-semitism.

Your opinion of me matters very little. My performance is judged on how threatened the Israel advocacy groups feel by the work I do and I can tell you that they're terrified. Absolutely terrified.

It is by no means the only measure.

Anyway, I have nothing further to say to you except that you should stop dismissing anti-semitism and start being part of the movement that is making real change for Palestinian rights.

Mr. Gary Spedding
gspedding01@qub.ac.uk

Mobile: +44 7476 369469
Follow me on Twitter

On 11 Nov 2015, at 05:33, Tony Greenstein <tonygreenstein111@gmail.com> wrote:

Gary

you have a high opinion of yourself which isn't matched by your actions.

You should not ascribe motives to others which properly belong to you and you alone

You know nothing of my work for Palestine solidarity over the years. Absolutely nothing. You are just a jumped up student opportunist who has travelled round the houses by all accounts.

I have no wish to damage you. You are doing a good job on your own account.

There was nothing to indicate your correspondence was private nor did you state that it was so. If you had done then I would have treated it so. Otherwise everything is in the public domain - whether it is you or Atzmon (who made similar complaints).

Your arrogance is demonstrated by your belief that one's attitude to you is the measure by which one's contribution to Palestine solidarity should be judged. It isn't. Your work is damaging not helpful.

tony greenstein

On 11 November 2015 at 03:41, Gary Spedding <gspedding01@qub.ac.uk> wrote:

Tony,

You did not have my permission to publish correspondence between myself and yourself.

This really needs to stop now. I'm tired of your condescending attitude. I have real work to be getting on with that actually does something for Palestinian rights and justice rather than the petty squabbles that you clearly feed on.

You need to understand that nothing you say damages me. Not one thing. All you have done is damage yourself with your attacks against me.

The breach of my privacy through the publication of private correspondence is not a political dispute. It is a legal one. And I have already sent the relevant letters and documentation to a solicitor who will decide what to do from this point.

Everything you have written is based on your own twisted interpretation of things and the attempt to smear me through defamation of character.

All this experience you claim to have counts for nothing where I'm concerned. It means nothing. It is nothing.

You aren't in this to promote Palestine solidarity. It's evident from your postings (and your interactions with me) that you are in this to serve your own agenda and your own interests. It's deeply insulting to the Palestinian people when so-called 'activists' like yourself come out the woodwork.

I'll continue working at the high standard and level I am so that one day Palestine will be free. I'll continue collaborating with Palestinian and Israeli human rights activists from a wide range of NGOs. I'll also continue fighting anti-Semitism in all its manifestations and building trust with the UK's various Jewish communities.

As I have already said; nothing you have written, nothing you are doing and nothing you have said is going to damage me. Israel advocacy organisations have tried exactly the same thing as you are doing now. It's almost as if you are an Israel advocate yourself. You use the same tactics as they do; lies, false assumptions and misrepresentations.

You have also embarrassed yourself in front of a wide range of individuals and groups. As I said; this really needs to stop now.

Mr. Gary Spedding

On 11 Nov 2015, at 03:24, Tony Greenstein <tonygreenstein111@gmail.com> wrote:

Gary,

Having practised in employment tribunals for over a decade and having been a legal advisor for the same time, your solicitor holds out no terrors. I also have experience of the libel courts having helped bring a successful action against The People some years ago as well as successful actions against David Aaronovitch and the Trades Union Congress.

Publishing conversations, private or otherwise, is not defamatory.

You say you do not wish to hear from me further. Fine. I was only responding to your email, just as I only responded to your use of FB's chat facility.

I don't generally advise trying to settle political differences in the law courts but be aware you will find libel a costly game and remember that not only is the truth an absolute defence but fair comment is also a defence following the Reynolds case. I only suggest this so that you don't waste your money.

My political points remain. Assuming you genuinely mean what you say, and I have no way of knowing this, then you need to reconsider your position.

tony greenstein

↧

ANTI-SEMITISM - Jonathan Freedland & The Zionist Campaign to Defame Corbyn and the Labour Left

March 18, 2016, 8:59 pm

≫ Next: BDS - a Jewish Civil War on American campuses

≪ Previous: The False Use of anti-Semitism - Gary Spedding, the SNP’s Advisor on Palestine Sings the Zionist Song

Garry Speding Gives a Helping Hand to the Zionist Campaign Against the Palestinians

A Moving Play by Caryl Churchill on the links between Gaza and the Jewish Ghettos of Europe is 'anti-Semitic'

The past few weeks have witnessed a resurgence of the Zionist campaign that began during the Labour leadership campaign in the summer, when attacks on Jeremy Corbyn as ‘anti-Semitic’ reached their height. According to the Zionists Corbyn not only supped with the devil, Paul Eisen of Deir Yassin Remembered but he attended a Palestine fundraising concert in 2013 which had been put on by DYR. See Stephen Pollard Jewish Chronicle Editor & Apologist for Europe's anti-Semitic politicians - The Hypocrisy of Jeremy Corbyn’s Accusers

The Guardian's & the Jewish Chronicle's Zionist journalist without a porfolio - Jonathan Freedland - never misses an opportunity to dumb down

There was then a hiatus whilst the attack diverted to the Father of the House of Commons Gerald Kaufmann. Kaufmann had spoken about ‘Jewish Money’ in relation to the Tory Party. The fact that many other Jews also speak in similar tones was ignored. GeoffreyAlderman and Gerald Kaufman –Jewish Chronicle Columnist’s Exercise in Hypocrisy

Alex Chalmers - the Upper Class fool who alleged anti-Semitism whilst providing no examples

When normal service resumed we had the affair of Oxford University Labour Club when its upper class twit of a Chair, Alex Chalmers resigned because he held that the club had a problem with Jews. Antisemitic? Or just against the Israeli government’s oppressive actions?

Gerry Downing whose foolish utterances gave Zionists comfort this week

What Chalmers really meant was that the Labour club, like many others, had decided to support Israel Apartheid week, i.e. it was giving support to the Palestinians who are and have been living under a military occupation for nearly 50 years. Some of Oxford’s privileged Jewish students i.e. those who support the racist state and wouldn’t know what oppression was if it hit them objected. Most people would say ‘tough’.

Paul Eisen - Jewish Holocaust Denier banned from Palestine solidarity movement- used to smear Jeremy Corbyn

And then there was the affair of York University’s Palestine Society which was accused of ‘anti-Semitism’ for putting on the play 7 Jewish Children, which is incidentally on the Guardian’s own web site. A thought provoking and stimulating play, only 10 minutes long, it draws a linkage between the Jewish child in the ghetto at risk of being murdered and the Palestinian in Gaza who is also in danger of being murdered. None of which stopped the Jewish Chronicle running with a story Pro-Palestinian students perform 'antisemitic' play as part of Israel Apartheid Week,]

This merited an open letter from 6 Israeli and Jewish students from York University’s Palestine society protesting that the putting on of the play 7 Jewish Children was not anti-Semitic. Seven Jewish Children’ staged at Univ. of York despitesmear that students were promoting ‘anti-Semitic culture’

Caryl Churchill - author of 7 Jewish Children

Of course Jewish students supporting the play was not news. Maybe that’s also a form of anti-Semitism. Making certain Jewish people invisible. But as they don’t support the Israeli state they don’t count of course being ‘race traitors’ and ‘self haters’.

It is a theme that the famous socialist and Jewish folk singer

Gary Spedding - the self-styled Palestinian activist & narcissist who no one has heard of playing the Zionist game

Leon Rosselson takes up with his latest song ‘The Ballad of Rivka & Mohammed’ which explores exactly the same theme, ending up with Rivka, the Jewish girl in the ghetto and Mohammed, the Palestinian boy in Gaza: "then each took the hand of the other and then they were seen no more"

Stephen Pollard - the Jewish Chronicle's Editor from the Gutter - Freedland's partner-in crime.

There has also been the trivial matter of one Vicky Kirby which Freedland and others have blown up out of all proportion. She is or was a member of the Labour Party. Someone who believes that Jews have big noses and believes that Hitler is the god of the Zionists, needs help rather than expulsion. The fact that she believes that Jews and Israel are synonymous might have a lot to do with some of the people that Jonathan Freedland keeps company with.

Indeed Freedland himself argues in his latest article in the Guardian Labour and the left have an antisemitism problem that ‘A recent survey found that 93% of British Jews said Israel formed some part of their identity’ thus suggesting that it’s not possible to criticise Israel or the existence of Israel as a racist Zionist state without it being anti-Semitic. It’s a case of Freedland having his cake and eating it.

Freedland’s article is the usual superficial stuff one has come to expect. He is like the drunk who leans on a lamp post, not for illumination but support. He skims the surface of every issue he touches, raising suspicions and caveats without ever managing to tackled a single issue meaningfully. Never, not once, does he attempt to tackle the question what is anti-Semitism. He makes triviality into an art form. Freedland is almost a living example of the decline of the Guardian as a newspaper.

Questions such as whether the allegations of anti-Semitism that have been made are genuine or whether they got up by people with an entirely different agenda elude Freedland. He informs us that the Oxford University Labour Club Chair resigned after saying the club was riddled with racism. But what was this racism? The only example he gives is where apparently one member of the Labour club ‘organised a group to shout “filthy Zionist” at a Jewish student whenever they saw her.’ When clicking the link this allegation is sourced to one Aaron Simons, in another Guardian Comment piece ‘It’s time we acknowledged that Oxford’s student left is institutionally antisemitic’ . Yes the Guardian has had a deliberate Mail-style strategy for some time to inflate Zionist allegations of ‘anti-Semitism’. Simons states that ‘It has been alleged that another OULC member organised a group of students to harass a Jewish student and to shout “filthy Zionist” whenever they saw her.’

We have no indication of who made the allegation, what the name of the student is who organised this shouting or indeed the alleged victim. Bearing in mind that Jewish students who support the Palestinians are regularly abused with the terms ‘traitor’ ‘self-hater’ it is pretty small beer, even assuming there is any truth in it.

But having spread the smear Freedland moves on leaving people none the wiser.

There was another Labour expulsion this week, of Gerry Downing. The obvious point to make is that the expulsion is a disgrace. Downing was expelled by post, with no notice, not told what the charges were, not invited to present a defence and told he had no right of appeal against the decision. A Kafkaesque affair. Freedland omits to mention all of that.

I don’t personally agree with Downing on the position he takes but I have no doubt, having met Downing, that he is not personally anti-Semitic. The problem is he is politically confused, a confusion caused by the Zionist insistent that support for Israel is bound up with being Jewish.

Indeed just this week I penned an article for the Weekly Worker criticising Downing’s political position, Confusing the question - Zionism, Jewish identity and the ‘socialism of fools’http://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1098/confusing-the-question/and blogged on him too Gerry Downing, Anti-Semitism and the Socialism of Fools - Confusing the Jewish Question and Zionism http://azvsas.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/gerry-downing-anti-semitism-and.html

Downing is wrong to think that there is a ‘Jewish Question’ or that it has any bearing on the issue of Israel. His belief that there is a separate Jewish component of western ruling classes is absurd and can lead in an anti-Semitic direction, but who is it who raises the question of Jews every time Israel is mentioned but Jonathan Freedland’s good friends in the Zionist movement? Does not Israel call itself the Jewish state? Does Israel not appropriate historic Jewish religious symbols like the Star of David as its own nationalist emblems?

Freedland reluctantly accepts that opposition to Israel ‘isnot always antisemitic’ The problem is that having conceded the point he goes on to make the opposite case viz. that anti-Semitism is equivalent to anti-Zionism.

Freedland tells us that when Jews pray they face east towards Jerusalem and that they have done so for 2,000 years. Yes the holy land held a certain religious symbolism for Jews but it had no political significance. When the Zionist movement first arose the fiercest opposition to it came from the Orthodox Jews. They held it was forcing the hand of god who had exiled the wicked Jews. In fact they’d voluntarily left for pastures anew. The fact is that Jews never sought to go to Palestine until the colonial era came along, anti-Semitism increased and Christians urged them to settle in the area of Palestine and build a state which would protect the Suez Canal. And even then most Jews desired to go anywhere but Palestine (between the mid 19^th century and 1914 of the 2½ million Jews who fled Czarist Russia some 2% went to Palestine).

Like a dog returning to its vomit, Freedland returns to his hobby horse – Jeremy Corbyn and anti-Semitism. Apparently Corbyn attended a fundraising concert for DYR in 2013 after Paul Eisen had been outed as a holocaust denier. As I explained to Freedland, who queried this in an email to me. Corbyn was never aware of the bona fides of Paul Eisen, didn’t meet with him, simply paid for a ticket, knew nothing about DYR and further it’s not at all certain that Eisen had anything to do with the concert in question anyway. In other words the kind of McCarthyist guilt by association technique that one has come to expect of Mr Freedland and his accomplices.

Freedland’s other point is even more dishonest. Corbyn ‘praised Islamist leader Sheikh Raed Salah’. He may well have, but so what. Contrary to Freedland’s assertions the British court was in no position whether or not to find that Raed Salah had ‘deployed the blood libel’. It heard no witnesses to this event. The passing comment of the court that in its opinion Saleh had referred to the Jewish blood libel was obiter dicta, irrelevant to the real finding that Raed Salah’s detention was illegal and he was freed as a consequence. The Court, the Upper Immigration Tribunal also found that the evidence of Saleh having written an anti-Semitic poem was in fact faked by the Jerusalem Post and the Zionist Community Security Trust.

Freedland is being thoroughly dishonest in his assertion. The Jerusalem Magistrates Court found Salah not guilty of racial intent precisely because it accepted that he hadn’t used as a rhetorical device the Jewish blood libel. On the contrary he said his reference to blood libel was to the Spanish Inquisition and its murder of children. The decision was reversed on appeal in a nakedly political attack on Salah who has been one of the main leaders of Israeli Palestinians and a thorn in the government’s side. The Israeli judiciary are not neutral where Palestinians are concerned. They are part of the apartheid state. The attack on Saleh in Israel is a racist attack on a Palestinian leader who has defended the Temple Mount against Jewish fundamentalists who would destroy the Golden Dome and Mosque of Omar.

In short there is no substance at all to Freedland’s arguments. The whole issue of ‘anti-Semitism’ in the Labour Party is a wholly contrived and got-up affair. It is the creation of journalists like Freedland and his counterparts on the Daily Mail. It has no basis in reality. The real agenda is defence of the Israeli state.

There was a similar and equally inaccurate article in Ha’aretz, the normally liberal Israeli paper. It is error ridden but I copy it below for reference. What is most interesting about it is that a Mr Gary Spedding, who I have tangled with before, passes himself off as ‘a veteran pro-Palestinian activist, who said he has been ridiculed and subjected to anti-Semitic abuse’.

See: Open Letter to SNP Members of Parliament – Don’t Be Fooledby False Accusations of anti-Semitism

SNP MPs Don’t Take Kindly to Criticism over Palestine & 'anti-Semitism'

The False Use of anti-Semitism - Gary Spedding, the SNP’sAdvisor on Palestine Sings the Zionist Song

Spedding isn’t Jewish. He is a Northern Ireland Protestant Unionist. So how he can be a victim of anti-Semitism is puzzling, although there is a certain logic to his claim. Under the ‘new anti-Semitism’ that has grown up in the USA opposition to war mongering, the arms trade, support for human rights etc. is considered anti-Semitic as it is inimical to Jewish interests! The assumption being that being Jewish means supporting Israel and as Israel is a nasty, militarised, racist state being opposed to any of the aforementioned means being anti-Semitic!

Spedding is a fully blown narcissist who is unknown to anyone in the Palestine solidarity movement. His only ability seems to be to blow his own trumpet and he is in good company there – with the anti-Semitic Jazzman Gilad Atzmon.

Tony Greenstein

The anti-Semitic Clouds Gathering Over U.K.'s Labour Party

A mounting number of recent incidents and accusations of anti-Semitism has party members and Jewish leaders wondering if Labour is still welcoming of Jews.

Daniella Peled Mar 17, 2016 1:41 PM

Britain's opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn listens to speakers at the annual Labour Party Conference in Brighton, U.K., September 28, 2015.Reuters

· U.K. Labour party suspends activist for saying Jews have 'big noses'

· Oxford firestorm highlights heated British debate over anti-Semitism and Zionism

· Corbyn declines to say 'Israel' at U.K. Labour meet – and keeps people guessing

A series of anti-Semitism scandals has hit the U.K.’s Labour movement in what some Jewish activists say may be a turning point for the party.

Recent controversies include the re-election of a Vicki Kirby to vice-chair of her local Labour party branch. Kirby was suspended in 2014 after a series of tweets, including one in which she suggested Hitler might be “the Zionist God.” Another tweet asked: "What do you know about Jews? They've got big noses and support [London soccer team] Tottenham Spurs lol." She has since been suspended again, and an inquiry is pending.

Only the previous week, party activist Gerry Downing, whose Socialist Fight website has published articles on “the Jewish Question” and who himself has been accused of questioning the Holocaust, was thrown out of the Labour party for the second time.

And in mid-February, Alex Chalmers, co-chair of the Oxford University Labour Club (OULC) resigned after the body decided to support Israel Apartheid Week, claiming that many OULC members “have some kind of problem with Jews." The scandal deepened after the Oxford Jewish Society released further allegations of harassment against Jewish students.

These incidents reflect an on-going internal struggle between a more radical left wing of the Labour Party and a more moderate sector of the party, and the conversation has spilled beyond the Jewish community, grabbing national headlines in the country's major papers.

This clash has been encapsulated by differing views on Israel and the Palestinians, not least due to party leader Jeremy Corbyn’s decades-long record as a pro-Palestinian campaigner. He has famously described representatives of Hezbollah and Hamas as his friends.

For Tal Ofer, an Israeli immigrant who ran as a Labour candidate in local elections in 2014, the trend is worrisome. “I feel sickened as a British Jew, as these are not the values of my party, the value of inclusivity and social justice,” he said.

Ofer added that he had raised his concerns with numerous senior party figures, including deputy leader Tom Watson.

“There are elements of the hard left inside the party now whose anti-Semitic views are clear," Ofer said. "As long as the party doesn't act against those anti-Semites, they feel that they have legitimacy to carry on with these views.”

Labour lawmaker John Mann, chair of the all-party group on anti-Semitism, claimed the situation had deteriorated with the influx of hard-left newcomers to the party following Corbyn’s election last year.

Others say that it is simply symptomatic of a trend infecting British politics.

Author and journalist Nick Cohen argued in his 2007 book "What's Left?" that blind anti-imperialism was transforming the left-wing into a profoundly illiberal movement. Nothing about the current anti-Semitism scandal was surprising, he told Haaretz.

“Now it’s mainstream – the far-left have taken over. People like me were screaming about this years ago and were always told that it was just about fringe groups," he said.

“It’s not just Corbyn or a clique in the Labour party,” he continued. “The same attitudes are all across the left, any charity, any university, any vaguely middle-class and left-wing institution.”

The core concepts of this ideology, he said, are: A belief that the West was the main or the sole source of global conflict, that the only reason for trouble in the Middle East was Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians, and that radical Islam should be excused rather than confronted. There was also “a rather racist cultural relativism, especially around women’s rights” and a conspiracy of Jewish control of American and European foreign policy.

In this context, Cohen said, anti-Semitism was being excused or dismissed if it appeared in a wider context of outspoken criticism of Israel.

Jeremy Newmark, the national chair of the Jewish Labour Movement, said he saw a distinct trend towards the “denial of anti-Semitism,” particularly among pockets of the grassroots membership.

“The party’s disciplinary system is often not robust enough to deal with this,” he lamented. “At a structural level in the party the rhetoric of zero tolerance has to be followed and matched with processes.”

Even those with strong pro-Palestinian credentials are not immune. “Some among the left have the misguided belief that anyone raising concerns of anti-Semitism are part of a Zionist ploy or pro-Israel conspiracy to discredit and defame,” said Gary Spedding, a veteran pro-Palestinian activist, who said he has been ridiculed and subjected to anti-Semitic abuse when he identified anti-Semitism within the movement.

Others argue that pro-Israel activists willingly blur criticism of Israel or Zionism itself with anti-Semitism for their own political ends.

The Jewish Socialists’ Group told Haaretz in a statement that they were “proud” to count Jeremy Corbyn as a longstanding and reliable ally and had “every confidence” that he would continue to deal effectively with any instances of anti-Semitism.

The group said Corbyn, when running for office, had faced a "vicious smear campaign based on lies, distortions and innuendo, which tried to brand him as an anti-Semite or friend of anti-Semites." The group charged the "right wing media,""cynical opponents" within Labour, and some "right wing Jews, who oppose Jeremy Corbyn’s longstanding support for Palestinian rights,” with orchestrating the campaign.

Still, communal leaders agree that Corbyn has done little since his election to squash controversies and try to build bridges with the Jewish community. For example, the party’s initial investigation into the Oxford affair has yet to be published, and Labour MPs have expressed concern that it will be subsumed into a wider enquiry about student affairs.

Corbyn did issue a statement this week after shadow cabinet minister Luciana Berger was inundated with offensive tweets after announcing that she would be attending an anti-Semitism conference in Berlin. Corbyn called the abuse "unacceptable," and said “It has no place in our society.”

Critics, however, complain that the leader won’t touch Israel-related anti-Semitism “with a barge pole,” as one parliamentary aide put it. “He fulfills his obligations by making short condemnations without any attention to nuance.”

As a result, the aide continued, many Jewish Labour activists “are actively cutting up membership cards.”

Newmark disputed this, saying he did not predict a mass exit of Jewish support from Labour. Rather, “people have redoubled their efforts to fight this within the party,” he said.

“If I don't fight for my party's future, who will do it?" said Ofer. "These are really difficult times to be a Jewish member… many people ask me to quit the party, but then how can I influence it from outside?"

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BDS - a Jewish Civil War on American campuses

March 19, 2016, 2:06 pm

≫ Next: Turkey's Genocide in Cizre - Up to 150 Civilians Trapped and Burnt Alive in Basement

≪ Previous: ANTI-SEMITISM - Jonathan Freedland & The Zionist Campaign to Defame Corbyn and the Labour Left

The truth is as Peter Beinart, a liberal Zionist admits, the BDS campaign on American campuses is driven by Jewish students sickened by what is done in their name

Ever since Jeremy Corbyn was seen as in with a chance of winning the leadership of the Labour Party there has been a concerted attempt by the neo-liberal wing of the Labour Party, together with the Guardian, Daily Mail and the Zionist movement to paint Jeremy Corbyn either as an anti-Semite or soft on anti-Semitism.

The EDL attack Birmingham PSC's stall - Israeli flag in one hand and giving a Hitler salute with the other! The real anti-Semites have always been supportive of Zionism

In today's Guardian there is the usual dishonest, cliched and frankly boring article by Jonathan Freedland on 'anti-Semitism' on the left of the Labour Party and amongst Corbyn's supporters. What is lacks in originality it makes up for in its virulence. See

As part of what is a systematic campaign the Jewish Chronicle this week devotes pages 1-3 on 'anti-Semitism' in the Labour Party and has a guest contribution by the junk academic from Goldsmith's College David Hirsh. Its is nothing if not original, titled Jew hate and today’s Left. I won't copy it but the link's here if you want to bore yourself with Hirsh's tedium.

However I have just picked up on an unusually excellent article in Israel's Ha'aretz by a liberal Zionist Peter Beinart, who makes a habit of saying what his fellow Zionists prefer not to hear. I've copied it below because of Ha'aretz's pay wall but it bears close scrutiny because it admits what the Zionist's claque of propagandists dare not admit, which is that the BDS campaign in the United States isn't being driven by 'anti-Semites'. It isn't even being driven by Palestinian or Arabs. It's motor is Jewish students who have fallen out of love with a racist and murderous 'Jewish' state.

The traditional anti-Semitic imagery which the Jewish Chronicle tries to associate with Boycotting Israel

Contrary to anti-Semites like Gilad Atzmon, for whom being Jewish is to be a Zionist, see his 'NOT IN MY NAME’ – An analysis of Jewish righteousness it is Jewish students who are the motor of the BDS campaign in the USA and to a lesser extent in Britain too.

When the Fight Over BDS is a Jewish Civil War

It’s not anti-Semitism that makes pro-Israel Jewish students at Vassar feel uncomfortable, it’s anti-Zionism, sometimes championed by fellow Jews.

Peter Beinart Mar 08, 2016 1:54 PM

Marchers cheer as they pass along a barricade separating them from anti-BDS movement protestors during the Celebrate Israel Parade in New York, June 1, 2014. Credit AP

Vassar, according to one conservative website, is among the ten most anti-Semitic colleges in America. Last month, an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal declared that, “Anti-Israel sentiment mixed with age-old anti-Semitism has reached a fever pitch” there. So it was with some anxiety that I travelled last week to the 155-year old former women’s college at the invitation of the local chapter of J Street U.

I went looking for anti-Semitism. What I found was more interesting.

I asked roughly a dozen Jewish students whether they thought anti-Semitism was prevalent on campus. They all said no, but admitted that they sometimes feel uncomfortable. When I asked what made them uncomfortable, they cited the intensely anti-Zionist climate. (At Vassar, J Street represents the right edge of the Israel debate).

Last December, for instance, the Vassar Student Council delayed approving a J Street U request for funds to attend the HaaretzQ conference in New York because some anti-Israel activists argued that even the left-leaning Haaretz, being a Zionist newspaper, supports a racist ideology. This February, a Rutgers Professor named Jasbir Puar gave a speech on campus in which she repeated absurd and incendiary claims that in late 2015 Israel had kept the bodies of dead Palestinians so they could be “mined for organs for scientific research.”

For establishment Jewish organizations, this kind of anti-Zionism is prima facie evidence of bigotry. As former Anti-Defamation League head Abe Foxman declared in 2014, “Anti-Zionism 99 percent of the time is a euphemism for anti-Semitism.”

But the J Street U students I interviewed disagreed. Many admitted that they found the anti-Zionist atmosphere on campus disquieting, which wasn’t surprising given that many either had Israeli parents, had attended Jewish day school or had participated in Zionist youth movements. But they were reluctant to equate Vassar’s anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism. One big reason: Many of the loudest anti-Zionists at Vassar are other Jews.

At Vassar, the movement to boycott Israel is not led by Palestinian or even Arab or Muslim students. It is led by a group of left-wing activists, several of whom are Jewish. One of the most prominent BDS student activists sits on the board of Vassar’s Jewish Student Union.

This isn’t unique to Vassar. Yousef Munayyer, executive director of the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, told me that in recent years he has seen striking growth in the number of Jewish students involved in the BDS movement.

According to its media coordinator, Naomi Dann, Jewish Voice for Peace, which supports BDS, has established 14 new campus chapters in the last two years. Jews don’t dominate the BDS movement on America’s campuses but they have become an indispensable part of it. Which helps explain why the Jewish students I talked to at Vassar described the campus struggle over Zionism less as an anti-Semitic assault than an intra-Jewish civil war.

The intra-Jewish debate over Israel at Vassar looks very different than the debate among older American Jews. Older American Jews are divided too, sometimes bitterly. But what divides them is the propriety of publicly criticizing Israel, not Zionism itself. Older American Jews largely take Zionism for granted, as did their parents, because they believe the lesson of the Holocaust is that the world needs a Jewish state of refuge in case parts of the Diaspora ever become unsafe again.

American Jewish millennials, however, have never seen any large-scale migration by Jews fleeing anti-Semitic persecution. Even the Soviet and Ethiopian exoduses of the 1980s occurred before they were born. They have grown up taking for granted that the vast majority of Diaspora Jews live in liberal democracies where they enjoy equality under the law. And they themselves have generally experienced little anti-Semitism. So when they grow alienated from Israel’s policies, they are more willing to challenge the very notion of a state created along religious and ethnic lines. A 2007 study by the Bronfman philanthropies found that American Jews under the age of 35 were 27 points less likely than American Jews over the age of 65 to declare themselves “comfortable with the idea of a Jewish State.”

To be sure, there are still plenty of young American Jews who agree with AIPAC, especially in the Orthodox community. But since Orthodox Jews tend to cluster in a few campuses, that leaves plenty of secular, liberal arts colleges like Vassar where the intra-Jewish debate isn’t about the legitimacy of criticizing Israel. It’s about the legitimacy of a Jewish state.

To the degree that establishment Jewish leaders acknowledge this rising Jewish anti-Zionism, they chalk it up to self-hatred. But when you talk to Jewish students in the BDS movement, as I have at campuses across the country, you quickly discover that being Jewish is precious to them. What they consider precious, however, is their conception of Jewish ethical ideals, ideals that they conflate with their left-wing politics. What they generally lack is the tribal allegiance that might make them compromise those ideals in the name of Jewish solidarity. The liberal Zionists at a place like Vassar are torn between Jewishness as universal morality and Jewishness as communal loyalty. The anti-Zionists see the latter as something to disdain.

The millions of dollars currently being spent to fight BDS will prove useless against these kids. They will prove useless because the Israeli government and the American Jewish establishment see anti-Zionism as merely a political challenge. But what the rising generation of Jewish anti-Zionists really pose is an intellectual challenge, an intellectual challenge that American Jews haven’t faced since the days when Jewish intellectuals like Hannah Arendt, Judah Magnes and Henrietta Szold championed a bi-national state.

There are answers to this challenge. They can be found in books like Chaim Gans' A Just Zionism and Alexander Yakobson and Amnon Rubinstein’s Israel and the Family of Nations. But formulating the answers requires taking anti-Zionist arguments seriously. And that’s difficult for an American Jewish establishment that, while financially and politically strong, is intellectually weak.

The American Jewish establishment does not want to rebut anti-Zionist arguments. It would rather call them anti-Semitic and thus shut the entire discussion down. But, as I saw at Vassar, the debate is coming, not only within the United States at large, but within American Jewry. It’s going to make a lot of people uncomfortable. Yet the longer American Jewish leaders evade it, the more likely they’ll ultimately lose.

Peter Beinart

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Turkey's Genocide in Cizre - Up to 150 Civilians Trapped and Burnt Alive in Basement

March 20, 2016, 3:02 pm

≫ Next: The Lies that Led to War

≪ Previous: BDS - a Jewish Civil War on American campuses

The European Union to Return Refugees to Erdogan's Bloody Regime

These films from RT speak for themselves about the West's NATO ally in the Near East, Erdogan's Turkish Police State. The can be seen directly at

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The Lies that Led to War

March 20, 2016, 3:52 pm

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What a surprise. They lied!!!

Colin Powell at the UN demonstrating why Iraq had WMD

The CIA Just Declassified the Document That Supposedly Justified the Iraq Invasion

ByJason Leopold

March 19, 2015 | 5:10 pm

Thirteen years ago, the intelligence community concluded in a 93-page classified document used to justify the invasion of Iraq that it lacked "specific information"on "many key aspects" of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs.

But that's not what top Bush administration officials said during their campaign to sell the war to the American public. Those officials, citing the same classified document, asserted with no uncertainty that Iraq was actively pursuing nuclear weapons, concealing a vast chemical and biological weapons arsenal, and posing an immediate and grave threat to US national security.

Congress eventually concluded that the Bush administration had "overstated" its dire warnings about the Iraqi threat, and that the administration's claims about Iraq's WMD program were "not supported by the underlying intelligence reporting."But that underlying intelligence reporting — contained in the so-called National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) that was used to justify the invasion — has remained shrouded in mystery until now.

The CIA released a copy of the NIE in 2004 in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, but redacted virtually all of it, citing a threat to national security. Then last year, John Greenewald, who operates The Black Vault, a clearing house for declassified government documents, asked the CIA to take another look at the October 2002 NIE to determine whether any additional portions of it could be declassified.

The agency responded to Greenawald this past January and provided him with a new version of the NIE, which he shared exclusively with VICE News, that restores the majority of the prewar Iraq intelligence that has eluded historians, journalists, and war critics for more than a decade. (Some previously redacted portions of the NIE had previously been disclosed in congressional reports.)

'The fact that the NIE concluded that there was no operational tie between Saddam and al Qaeda did not offset this alarming assessment.'

For the first time, the public can now read the hastily drafted CIA document [pdf below] that led Congress to pass a joint resolution authorizing the use of military force in Iraq, a costly war launched March 20, 2003 that was predicated on "disarming" Iraq of its (non-existent) WMD, overthrowing Saddam Hussein, and "freeing" the Iraqi people.

A report issued by the government funded think-tank RAND Corporation last December titled "Blinders, Blunders and Wars"said the NIE "contained several qualifiers that were dropped…. As the draft NIE went up the intelligence chain of command, the conclusions were treated increasingly definitively."

An example of that: According to the newly declassified NIE, the intelligence community concluded that Iraq "probably has renovated a [vaccine] production plant"to manufacture biological weapons "but we are unable to determine whether [biological weapons] agent research has resumed." The NIE also said Hussein did not have "sufficient material"to manufacture any nuclear weapons and "the information we have on Iraqi nuclear personnel does not appear consistent with a coherent effort to reconstitute a nuclear weapons program."

But in an October 7, 2002 speech in Cincinnati, Ohio, then-President George W. Bush simply said Iraq, "possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons" and "the evidence indicates that Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program."

One of the most significant parts of the NIE revealed for the first time is the section pertaining to Iraq's alleged links to al Qaeda. In September 2002, then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld claimed the US had "bulletproof" evidence linking Hussein's regime to the terrorist group.

"We do have solid evidence of the presence in Iraq of al Qaeda members, including some that have been in Baghdad,"Rumsfeld said. "We have what we consider to be very reliable reporting of senior-level contacts going back a decade, and of possible chemical- and biological-agent training."

But the NIE said its information about a working relationship between al Qaeda and Iraq was based on "sources of varying reliability"— like Iraqi defectors — and it was not at all clear that Hussein had even been aware of a relationship, if in fact there were one.

"As with much of the information on the overall relationship, details on training and support are second-hand,"the NIE said. "The presence of al-Qa'ida militants in Iraq poses many questions. We do not know to what extent Baghdad may be actively complicit in this use of its territory for safehaven and transit."

The declassified NIE provides details about the sources of some of the suspect intelligence concerning allegations Iraq trained al Qaeda operatives on chemical and biological weapons deployment — sources like War on Terror detainees who were rendered to secret CIA black site prisons, and others who were turned over to foreign intelligence services and tortured. Congress's later investigation into prewar Iraq intelligence concluded that the intelligence community based its claims about Iraq's chemical and biological training provided to al Qaeda on a single source.

"Detainee Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi — who had significant responsibility for training — has told us that Iraq provided unspecified chemical or biological weapons training for two al-Qai'ida members beginning in December 2000,"the NIE says. "He has claimed, however, that Iraq never sent any chemical, biological, or nuclear substances — or any trainers — to al-Qa'ida in Afghanistan."

Al-Libi was the emir of the Khaldan training camp in Afghanistan, which the Taliban closed prior to 9/11 because al-Libi refused to turn over control to Osama bin Laden.

Last December, the Senate Intelligence Committee released a declassified summary of its so-called Torture Report on the CIA's "enhanced interrogation" program. A footnote stated that al-Libi, a Libyan national, "reported while in [redacted] custody that Iraq was supporting al-Qa'ida and providing assistance with chemical and biological weapons."

"Some of this information was cited by Secretary [of State Colin] Powell in his speech to the United Nations, and was used as a justification for the 2003 invasion of Iraq,"the Senate torture report said.

"Ibn Shaykh al-Libi recanted the claim after he was rendered to CIA custody on February [redacted] 2003, claiming that he had been tortured by the [redacted], and only told them what he assessed they wanted to hear."

Al-Libi reportedly committed suicide in a Libyan prison in 2009, about a month after human rights investigators met with him.

The NIE goes on to say that "none of the [redacted] al-Qa'ida members captured during [the Afghanistan war] report having been trained in Iraq or by Iraqi trainers elsewhere, but given al-Qa'ida's interest over the years in training and expertise from outside sources, we cannot discount reports of such training entirely."

All told, this is the most damning language in the NIE about Hussein's links to al Qaeda: While the Iraqi president "has not endorsed al-Qa'ida's overall agenda and has been suspicious of Islamist movements in general, apparently he has not been averse to some contacts with the organization."

The NIE suggests that the CIA had sources within the media to substantiate details about meetings between al Qaeda and top Iraqi government officials held during the 1990s and 2002 — but some were not very reliable. "Several dozen additional direct or indirect meetings are attested to by less reliable clandestine and press sources over the same period,"the NIE says.

The RAND report noted, "The fact that the NIE concluded that there was no operational tie between Saddam and al Qaeda did not offset this alarming assessment."

The NIE also restores another previously unknown piece of "intelligence": a suggestion that Iraq was possibly behind the letters laced with anthrax sent to news organizations and senators Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy a week after the 9/11 attacks. The attacks killed five people and sickened 17 others.

"We have no intelligence information linking Iraq to the fall 2001 attacks in the United States, but Iraq has the capability to produce spores of Bacillus anthracis — the causative agent of anthrax — similar to the dry spores used in the letters,"the NIE said. "The spores found in the Daschle and Leahy letters are highly purified, probably requiring a high level of skill and expertise in working with bacterial spores. Iraqi scientists could have such expertise,"although samples of a biological agent Iraq was known to have used as an anthrax simulant "were not as pure as the anthrax spores in the letters."

Paul Pillar, a former veteran CIA analyst for the Middle East who was in charge of coordinating the intelligence community's assessments on Iraq, told VICE news that "the NIE's bio weapons claims"was based on unreliable sources such as Ahmad Chalabi, the former head of the Iraqi National Congress, an opposition group supported by the US.

"There was an insufficient critical skepticism about some of the source material,"he now says about the unredacted NIE. "I think there should have been agnosticism expressed in the main judgments. It would have been a better paper if it were more carefully drafted in that sort of direction."

But Pillar, now a visiting professor at Georgetown University, added that the Bush administration had already made the decision to go to war in Iraq, so the NIE "didn't influence [their] decision." Pillar added that he was told by congressional aides that only a half-dozen senators and a few House members read past the NIE's five-page summary.

David Kay, a former Iraq weapons inspector who also headed the Iraq Survey Group, told Frontlinethat the intelligence community did a "poor job" on the NIE, "probably the worst of the modern NIE's, partly explained by the pressure, but more importantly explained by the lack of information they had. And it was trying to drive towards a policy conclusion where the information just simply didn't support it."

The most controversial part of the NIE, which has been picked apart hundreds of times over the past decade and has been thoroughly debunked, pertained to a section about Iraq's attempts to acquire aluminum tubes. The Bush administration claimed that this was evidence that Iraq was pursuing a nuclear weapon.

National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice stated at the time on CNN that the tubes "are only really suited for nuclear weapons programs, centrifuge programs,"and that "we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."

The version of the NIE released in 2004 redacted the aluminum tubes section in its entirety. But the newly declassified assessment unredacts a majority of it and shows that the intelligence community was unsure why "Saddam is personally interested in the procurement of aluminum tubes." The US Department of Energy concluded that the dimensions of the aluminum tubes were "consistent with applications to rocket motors" and "this is the more likely end use."The State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research also disagreed with the intelligence community's assertions that Iraq had reconstituted its nuclear weapons program.

The CIA's 25-page unclassified summaryof the NIE released in 2002 did not contain the State or Energy Departments' dissent.

"Apart from being influenced by policymakers' desires, there were several other reasons that the NIE was flawed,"the RAND study concluded. "Evidence on mobile biological labs, uranium ore purchases from Niger, and unmanned-aerial-vehicle delivery systems for WMDs all proved to be false. It was produced in a hurry. Human intelligence was scarce and unreliable. While many pieces of evidence were questionable, the magnitude of the questionable evidence had the effect of making the NIE more convincing and ominous. The basic case that Saddam had WMDs seemed more plausible to analysts than the alternative case that he had destroyed them. And analysts knew that Saddam had a history of deception, so evidence against Saddam's possession of WMDs was often seen as deception."

According to the latest figures compiled by Iraq Body Count, to date more than 200,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed, although other sources say the casualties are twice as high. More than 4,000 US soldiers have been killed in Iraq, and tens of thousands more have been injured and maimed. The war has cost US taxpayers more than $800 billion.

In an interview with VICE founder Shane Smith, Obama said the rise of the Islamic State was a direct result of the disastrous invasion.

"ISIL is a direct outgrowth of al Qaeda in Iraq that grew out of our invasion,"Obama said. "Which is an example of unintended consequences. Which is why we should generally aim before we shoot."

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Tony Greenstein suspended from Labour Party

March 21, 2016, 7:25 pm

≫ Next: Another Israeli extra-judicial execution B'Tselem - The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories

≪ Previous: The Lies that Led to War

Labour Party machine gets its revenge on Corbyn’s activists as expulsions mount

Well it had to happen. I've just been informed by letter by the Labour Party that I have been suspended from the Party. Why? On the basis of comments I have apparently made. What comments? Who knows since they haven't sought to tell me. Kafkaesque or what?

Jeremy Corbyn has been elected as leader of the Labour Party and John MacDonald is Shadow Chancellor, however the bureaucracy, the civil service of the Labour Party has been left unchanged. Those functionaries who acted with such enthusiasm under Tony Blair have not been sacked or moved. The Constitutional Unit, which would be better known as the Inquisition Unit continues its McCarthyist work.

It is essential that the purgers and expellers in the Labour Party, the Tories within, are themselves subject to purging. They see getting rid of socialists as more important than fighting the Tories. These are Blair’s children and we need to put them out of their misery.

I have no idea what the comments I am alleged to have made which caused the LP McCarthyists such upset. Perhaps I mentioned socialism too often. Or in the current atmosphere of attempting to paint the Left as anti-Semitic perhaps they thought that expelling someone who has fought fascism all his life would be an example to all.

Regardless I shall fight to the end against the agents of capital within the Labour Party.
I attach the letter I was sent and my response.

The place to write to complain is the John Stolliday, Head of Constitutional Unit at Legal_queries@labour.org.uk

Tony Greenstein

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Another Israeli extra-judicial execution B'Tselem - The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories

March 24, 2016, 7:13 pm

≫ Next: Israeli Medical Association backs refusing to treat Palestinian 'terrorists'

≪ Previous: Tony Greenstein suspended from Labour Party

Apparently the soldier who executed a Palestinian lying injured on the ground has been arrested. We can be sure that this animal will, once the publicity has died away, be quietly released after at best a nominal punishment. Israeli killers in uniform never serve time, still less a sentence of years in prison, unlike Palestinian resistance fighters who serve decades on the basis of confessions extracted by torture.

In an opinion poll, 53% of Israelis supported extra-judicial killings, so this is not seen as anything out of the ordinary.

This is what Israeli ‘democracy’ is all about and what Western politicians like the execrable Clinton praise so dearly.

Tony Greenstein

Video: Soldier executes Palestinian lying injured on ground after the latter stabbed a soldier in Hebron

24 Mar 2016

Video: ‘Emad abu-Shamsiyah

This morning, according to media reports, Palestinians Ramzi al-Qasrawi and ‘Abd al-Fatah a-Sharif were shot after stabbing a soldier in Tel Rumeida, Hebron. The soldier sustained medium-level injuries. While al-Qasrawi died on the spot, a-Sharif was injured and fell to the ground. In video footage captured by Hebron resident ‘Emad abu-Shamsiyah, who sent it to B’Tselem, he is seen lying on the road injured, with none of the soldiers or medics present giving him first aid or paying him any attention at all. At a certain point, a soldier is seen aiming his weapon at a-Sharif and shooting him in the head from close range, killing him. Although this occurs in the plain view of other soldiers and officers, they do not seem to take any notice.

The wave of violence that began in October 2015 is shocking and Israeli security forces must use all the force necessary, depending on the circumstances, to protect the public. The law is clear: shooting to kill is only permitted when the person is endangering the lives of others. Once the danger is over, he or she must not be harmed.

Extrajudicial street killings are the direct consequence of inflammatory remarks made by Israeli ministers and officials, augmented by the general public atmosphere of dehumanization. Some top officials have commented, here and there, on the importance of abiding by the law and refraining from use of excessive force. This includes a recent public statement made by the chief of staff and comments included in a formal letterby the minister of defense to B’Tselem in response to a query. However, the law enforcement authorities are by and large turning a blind eye to repeated grave suspicions of extrajudicial killing by the security forces, and these backed in the field by commanders. The message to the Israeli public is undeniable: attempting to injure a civilian or a soldier is a death sentence.

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Israeli Medical Association backs refusing to treat Palestinian 'terrorists'

March 24, 2016, 9:01 pm

≫ Next: Anti-Semitism - Weapon of choice

≪ Previous: Another Israeli extra-judicial execution B'Tselem - The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories

Israel’s new triage guidelines – purely for international consumption

In my previous post on the extra-judicial execution of a wounded Palestinian it was noticeable that 2 Israeli ambulances did nothing to tend to someone who was clearly severely injured on the ground. Their only concern was a superficially wounded soldier.

Palestinian Red Crescent

It is clear that the new guidelines from the Israeli Medical Association, whilst formally adhering to the triage rules, whereby you tend to the most severely wounded first, is not in practice being adhered to.

Israeli doctors are complicit in the shoot to kill policies of Israel’s military. The new guidelines are purely for international consumption.

Tony Greenstein

Israeli medics are leaving wounded Palestinians to bleed to death

Israeli soldiers invade hospital demanding records

Dan Cohen March 23, 2016

Last December, an Israeli medic announced on his Twitter account that he would not treat injured Palestinians he deemed “terrorists.”

“As a ZAKA volunteer for close to twenty years. I am announcing publicly, I will not offer aid to a terrorist/murderer that hurt innocents, whatever his condition may be. Before I treat the victims,” he wrote.

Soon after, he claimed to have carried out his promise. On the scene at Jerusalem’s Jaffa Gate where a Palestinian man who attacked an Israeli was shot, beaten with a metal rod and kicked by civilians, the medic boasted on Twitter that he did not treat the dying Palestinian man.

“For all of those asking, when I arrived today to the scene of the terror attack at Jaffa Gate in Jerusalem. I treated those wounded by stabbing and no! I did not go to give aid to the terrorist may his name be erased! despite the fact that his condition was mortal,” he wrote.

This is not an aberration, rather, it is an instance of increasing turmoil in the Israeli medical community over the concept of triage, the internationally recognized protocol for medical treatment based on severity and likely benefit from immediate treatment.

Changing Israeli Protocol on Triage

In 2008, the website of the Israeli Medical Association listed a Talmudic dictum in its section on ethics.

“In cases where human caused violence results in casualties for the perpetrators of such violence (the enemy), the obligations towards these parties should be clearly defined. Here, the principle to be implemented is “the poor of your city come first,” it read.

When Hadas Ziv, Physicians for Human Rights Israel’s ethics committee coordinator, found this in October 2015, the committee wrote a complaint to IMA’s ethics committee that “statements from medical teams on the ground indicate that they do not prioritize the injured according to their medical condition,” and requested that the licenses of the offending medical staff be revoked. The IMA does not have the authority to revoke medical licenses themselves, but as a professional organization it is able to make recommendations to the Ministry of Health. After PHRI’s letter, the IMA did remove the directive from its website.

In response to the removal of the instruction breaching triage, the aforementioned ZAKA medic and a handful of others made online announcements that they would continue to discriminate in defiance of the IMA.

Rather than expelling the medic who refused to treat a dying Palestinian, ZAKA, the medical organization he works for, confirmed that this breach of triage is the protocol they are training.

“Usually already in the initial stage the attacker is identified, and our policy is to give precedence to the attacked with medical treatment,” ZAKA wrote on Twitter.

A Twitter pollstarted after the medic’s announcement indicates public support for attacking triage, with 88% of the 59 polled in support.

On October 18, Ziv filed a complaint over changes to the triage protocol with the Ministry of Health, but more than five months later, she has not received a response and the MOH has been silent on the issue.

A Pattern of Denying Medical Aid to Palestinians

In November 2015, the NGO Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor released a report documenting five separate incidents of denial of medical aid to Palestinians by Magen David Adom, which is officially recognized by the International Committee of the Red Cross, accusing it of violating the Geneva Conventions. “Such discrimination in providing medical treatment, even when a crime has been attempted, is prohibited and illegal under the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination.”

A video taken after a stabbing attack in the occupied West Bank last Thursday shows Israeli medics treating an injured Israeli soldier while two Palestinians lie on the ground, severely injured. Both Palestinians, Ali Jamal Muhammad Taqatqa, 19, and Ali Abd al-Rahman al-Kar Thawabta, 20, died of their wounds.

In video footage of the killing of 18-year-old Hadeel al-Hashlamoun in Hebron, an Israeli settler named Ofer – who local activists claim has no medical training and operates a fake ambulance – can be seen discouraging Israeli medics from treating her. Other videos show Israeli medical personnel standing idly as she bleeds to death, meanwhile medics from the Palestine Red Crescent Society were refused access to treat her. Amnesty International calledher death an “extrajudicial execution.”

In another incident, 21-year old Yasmin al-Zarou was gunned down by Israeli soldiers, who then interrogated her as she bled on the ground. Israeli medics stood over her and even pushed her outstretched hands away as she asked for help.

Widespread Support

Last October, Deputy Minister of the Interior Yaron Mazuz publicly backed the change to triage. “The first priority should be give in to the residents of Israel, mostly to those who were injured from the attacks. Is it unacceptable that we would treat terrorists before residents of the state,” he said on Israel’s Channel Two.

But for Ziv, the MOH’s silence is unusual and deeply troubling.

“Even worse than the right-wing populist politicians who are just looking for headlines – fine, they understand nothing in medical ethics,” Ziv told me in a telephone call. “What worries me is that the Minister of Health [Ya’aldoesn’t see it as its role to say something very clear cut, and I wonder why is that so.”

Attacks on triage are also gaining support in Shaare Zedek, one of Israel’s top hospitals. Speaking at at a conference on the ethics of terror attacks, Dr. Ofer Merin, Executive Director of the Trauma Unit & Deputy Director of Medicine at Shaare Zedek hospital in Jerusalem, told the audience that adoption of this practice was inevitable – however in euphemistic terms.

“When we reach the ‘day of judgement’ in which we won’t be able to treat everyone, I think – and I say this with complete caution – that if it is impossible to treat everyone, I think there is no avoiding the moral statement that we need to give the innocents different rights than the person who harmed them intentionally,” he said.

Writing in the UK medical journal The Lancet, Merin subtly proposed the idea of abandoning triage in April 2015. “The moral issue of concurrently treating a terrorist and his victim is even more complex. Is it actually realistic to expect the staff to disregard the fact that the terrorist intended to kill the innocent person lying wounded in the same trauma unit?”

Ultimately, he concluded that “Punishment is not the role of the medical staff; rather, their duty and obligation is to preserve life and restore health. Judgment should be the exclusive provenance of the legal system and physicians should practice their art without discrimination and with a clear conscience.”

But the recent violence appears to have created the pretext for Merin to warn that the hospital would soon have no choice but to embrace racist medical practices.

Top state-funded rabbis have also endorsed this practice, abandoning the euphemistic terminology of a moral dilemma, and have even encouraged Israeli police and soldiers to execute wounded Palestinians deemed “terrorists” on the spot.

Rabbi Chaim Kanievsky, a top haredi authority, instructed paramedics from United Hatzalah to “not treat injured terrorists,” and that “If the terrorist was in a life threatening condition, they should leave him or her to die.”

“It is forbidden to leave a murderer alive,” Chief Rabbi of Safed Shmuel Eliyahu toldthe Galei Yisrael radio station.

In another instance, Eliyahu said, “Only in a case where you really have no other choice…keep him alive, interrogate him and then send him to hell as soon as possible.”

Rabbi Ben-Tzion Mutzafi, another top haredi rabbi, ordered his students to bludgeon wounded Palestinians to death. “It is commanded to take hold of his head and hit it against the ground until there is no longer any life in it,” he said.

Rabbis Eliyahu and Mutzafieven called for soldiers and police who let Palestinians live to be prosecuted.

“The political situation in Israel is horrific,” Ziv lamented. “The atmosphere, environment and political leadership all influenced other systems in our [Israeli] society. Education has changed, courts have changed – the medical system is not immune to that.”

↧

Anti-Semitism - Weapon of choice

March 27, 2016, 6:31 pm

≫ Next: Otto Skorzeny - The SS Colonel responsible for the death of thousands of Italian and Hungarian Jews was an Israeli agent

≪ Previous: Israeli Medical Association backs refusing to treat Palestinian 'terrorists'

The English Defence League attacks a Palestine solidarity stall - Israeli flag in one hand, Hitler salutes with the other - anti-Semitic support 4 Zionism is a topic glossed over by Freedland & mass media

False accusations are being carefully aimed at Jeremy Corbyn and the left

Weekly Worker 24.3.16.

Jonathan Freedland - Senior Guardian & Jewish Chronicle journalist - confuses anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism

You might be forgiven for thinking, such has been the plethora of articles about ‘anti-Semitism’ recently, that the Labour Party had been taken over by the provisional wing of the National Front. But, of course, the recent obsession with ‘anti-Semitism’ has nothing whatsoever to do with the Oswald Moseley/British Union of Fascists variety.

Owen Jones - erstwhile hero of the working class and fairweather friend of the Palestinians - hawking his conscience around anyone who will listen

It is what is termed the ‘new anti-Semitism’. This does not include any of the old features, such as hatred of Jews as Jews, stereotyping, hideously distorted cartoons, violence and theories about world Jewish conspiracies. Good gracious no. That would mean that groups such as the Zionists’ friends in the English Defence League, alongside whom Jonathan Hoffman, vice-chair of the Zionist Federation, happily demonstrated against the boycott of the Ahava shop in Covent Garden, would have to be ostracised. The EDL has a habit of attacking Palestine solidarity events - flying the Israeli flag in one hand, whilst giving the Hitler salute with the other.

Alex Chalmers - Upper Class twit, Zionist hack and Chair of Oxford University Labour Club - sees no evil where Israel is concerned

‘New anti-Semitism’ means that Israel is the “Jew amongst the nations”.¹It is picked on, not because it is the world’s most racist state, but allegedly because it is a Jewish state. Opposition to the Israeli state and Zionism therefore qualifies as anti-Semitism. However, a traditional anti-Semite, such as Poland’s Michał Kamiński MEP, who demanded that the Jews of Poland apologise for the fact that 900 of their fellows had been burned alive by fellow Poles in 1941, can qualify - according to the editor of the Jewish Chronicle, Stephen Pollard - for the title of “friend to Jews”.²

Caryl Churchill - author of brilliant 7 Jewish Children

The recent hysteria over ‘anti-Semitism’ began last summer when the British establishment and the Labour right, via its ‘liberal’ mouthpiece, The Guardian, woke up to the fact that rank outsider Jeremy Corbyn was about to win the leadership of the Labour Party. Their initial reaction was to try and get the whole election called off because of ‘infiltrators’, but that was too obvious. Even Hatty Harman worked out that this would have led to an insurrection by Labour members.

At the same time the Daily Mail and the Jewish Chronicle tried to suggest that Corbyn had kept company with a Jewish holocaust-denier, Paul Eisen, British director of Deir Yassin remembered. There is, of course, a rich irony in the Daily Mail’s concern with anti-Semitism. Not only did the Mail vigorously campaign in the 1930s against the admission of Jewish refugees from Germany, but its owner, Viscount Rothermere, wrote that the Jews had “started a clamorous campaign of denunciation against what they call ‘Nazi atrocities’, which, as anyone who visits Germany quickly discovers for himself, consists merely of a few isolated acts of violence”.³

Gerald Downing of Socialist Fight - playing with the 'socialism of fools'

The allegations against Corbyn were preposterous. He had attended a Palestinian fundraising concert in 2013. However, Eisen played no part in organising that concert. It was St John’s Wood Church which organised the event through another organisation called Deir Yassin Day.

Jonathan Hoffman co-vice chair of the Zionist Federation (& Harvey Garfield) demonstrate with Roberta Moore of the neo-Nazi Jewish Defence League with the fascist holocaust deniers of the EDL behind them (in paramilitary uniforms)

The campaign against Corbyn and his supporters went quiet for a few months. There was a brief interlude when the father of the House of Commons, Gerald Kaufmann, a Jewish MP and previously strong supporter of Zionism, referred to “Jewish money”. It’s not a phrase that I would have used, but it is commonly used by Jewish people. One of Kaufmann’s main accusers was the far-right Jewish Chronicle journalist, Geoffrey Alderman, who called for the excommunication of Kaufmann despite using the same phrase himself, twice within the same paragraph!⁴

However, it was different when it came to David Whelan, the owner of Wigan Athletic football club, who told of how “there is nothing like a Jew who sees money slipping through his fingers” and when challenged by The Guardianresponded, “I think they are very shrewd people ... I think Jewish people do chase money more than everybody else.”⁵ Complaints about this for Alderman amounted to “a sad and miserable tale of political correctness taken to new depths of absurdity”. In his view “there is nothing remotely anti-Semitic in what Whelan is alleged by The Guardian to have said about Jews”.⁶

As the Tories find themselves in political difficulty over George Osborne’s budget and the resignation of Iain Duncan Smith, Labour is beginning to seem a credible government in waiting. But thankfully for the establishment, the Zionist movement had already taken on the role of an outrider for the political establishment. Together with The Guardian, it has decided to revert to that tried and trusted weapon, ‘anti-Semitism’.

Labour’s ‘problem’

Jonathan Freedland, a senior Guardian journalist, set the tone with an article which used the idiocy of one Labour Party member, Vicky Kirby, and the stupidity of Gerry Downing⁷ to tar the left in the party as anti-Semitic.⁸

Kirby apparently believes that Jews have big noses and that Hitler is a Zionist god, which suggests she needs help rather than expulsion. Downing’s stupidity is less excusable.⁹ The French Revolution resolved the Jewish question, the place of Jews in European society, over 200 years ago. In the words of Stanislas Marie Adélaïde, the count of Clermont-Tonnerre, “We must refuse everything to the Jews as a nation and accord everything to Jews as individuals.”¹⁰ Only the Zionists and the anti-Semites rejected the emancipation of the Jews.

What Freedland lacks in substance he makes up for with innuendo. Not once does he attempt to define the anti-Semitism he talks about. Is it new or old anti-Semitism or a mixture thereof?

Zionists like to use the discredited European Union Monitoring Committee definition of anti-Semitism, which included “vilification of Israel” and comparisons between Nazi Germany and Israel. The only problem is that even the European Union’s Fundamental Rights Agency has junked it - which led Shimon Samuels of the Simon Wiesenthal Center to claim: “Those who fight anti-Semitism have lost an important weapon.” A weapon not against anti-Semites of course, but against anti-Zionists.¹¹

Clearly Kirby and Downing are two idiosyncratic individuals. Even Freedland did not think it wise to base his suggestion of widespread anti-Semitism in the Labour Party on these two. It is on the case of Oxford University Labour Club that his case rests.¹²

In his own words, its chair, Alex Chalmers, decided to resign “in the light of OULC’s decision ... to endorse Israel Apartheid Week”.¹³ But Chalmers’ assertion that “the student left in Oxford … have some kind of problem with Jews” was clearly based on their anti-Zionism, not their anti-Semitism.

Chalmers is a political lightweight. His Zionist politics are crystal-clear. He speaks about Hamas’s violence, yet he ignores the far greater violence of the Israeli state and the settlers. He claimed on his blog that he was offended by use of the term ‘Zio’ - shorthand for ‘Zionist’ - because apparently the Ku Klux Klan use it. Possibly they do, but so do many people and it has no anti-Semitic connotations. Should we stop speaking English because the KKK do? This is absurd. Chalmers also complained that a former Labour club officer commented that “most accusations of anti-Semitism are just the Zionists crying wolf”. In asserting that anti-Semitism was the reason for his resignation, Chalmers has proved the very point that he disputes.

Chalmers lost the vote over the Labour club’s support for Israel Apartheid Week and decided to throw his toys out of the pram. Yet it is indisputable that Israel presides over a system of overt racial segregation in the West Bank, where four million Palestinians have lived under military law for nearly 50 years, without any civil or political rights, whilst Jewish settlers enjoy all the benefits of Israel’s civil law. Even the highways are reserved for Jews only. How can anyone seriously suggest that this is not apartheid?

Behind the ‘green line’ (Israel’s borders till 1967) a subtler form of apartheid exists. There are no ‘Arabs only’ signs, but housing, employment, education are segregated. Only five private high schools in Israel are mixed. Half of Israel’s Arab villages are ‘unrecognised’ - meaning that they have no electricity, sewerage or services and they are liable to be demolished at a moment’s notice. In the Negev, Jerusalem and Galilee there is an ongoing government programme of Judaisation, just as in Nazi Germany prior to 1941 there was a process of deJewification. Zionist policy is a mirror reflection of European anti-Semitism.

In the recent Pew Opinion Survey a majority (48%) of Israeli Jews want Israeli Palestinians expelled from the country. 79% believe Jews are entitled to preferential treatment.¹⁴ In which western state would a majority of the citizens support the expulsion of 20% of the population?

The only example of anti-Semitism at Oxford that Freedland gives is where apparently one member of the Labour club “organised a group to shout ‘filthy Zionist’ at a Jewish student whenever they saw her”. This allegation is sourced to Aaron Simons.¹⁵ We have no indication of who made the allegation, the name of the student who organised this shouting or indeed the alleged victim. Bearing in mind that Jewish students who support the Palestinians are regularly abused with the terms, ‘traitor’ and ‘self-hater’, and told they should have died with their families in the gas chambers, it is pretty small beer, even assuming there is any truth in it.¹⁶

Identity

Freedland’s other argument is that in a recent survey 93% of British Jews said Israel formed some part of their identity. Even were this true, then the obvious retort would be ... so what? Is it racist to criticise and attack a state that people identify with? The journalists of Charlie Hebdo attacked what some Muslims identified with. Were they racists or defenders of free speech? Supposing Muslims or Africans were to argue that female genital mutilation was part of their identity, would we be racist to oppose FMG and challenge that identity?

I have a brother living in Israel but that does not affect my anti-Zionism. Many British people had relatives in Rhodesia and South Africa under apartheid. Were they victims of racism when we opposed the system they identified with? Freedland is unable to explore the implications of his statement because he knows that it does not stand up to scrutiny.

Racism is about denying the existence of a human being because of fixed or unalterable characteristics. It is about dehumanisation. It involves stereotypes, discrimination, hate and violence. It is not about challenging group identity. If it is part of free speech not to accept reactionary Islamic practices or ideology, then the same applies to Jews. Freedland reluctantly accepts that opposition to Israel “is not always anti-Semitic”, implying that it normally is. Having conceded the point, however, he goes on to make the opposite case: vizthat anti-Semitism is equivalent to anti-Zionism.

Freedland tells us that when Jews pray they face east towards Jerusalem and that they have done so for 2,000 years. Certainly the holy land had a religious symbolism for Jews, but it had no political significance. When the Zionist movement first arose, the fiercest opposition to it came from the Orthodox Jews. Jews never sought to go to Palestine until the era of late-colonialism. The migration to Palestine was provoked not by religion, but by anti-Semitism in eastern Europe. It was evangelical Christians such as Lords Palmerstone and Shaftesbury who urged Jews to settle in Palestine (and build a state which would protect the Suez Canal). Even then most Jews desired to go anywhere but Palestine (between the mid-19th century and 1914, of the 2.5 million Jews who fled tsarist Russia only 2% went to Palestine).

Freedland’s other point is simply dishonest. He says that Corbyn “praised Islamist leader Sheikh Raed Salah”. He may well have, but so what? Contrary to Freedland’s assertions, a British court was in no position to determine whether or not Raed Salah had “deployed the blood libel”. It heard no witnesses to this event. The passing comment of the court that in its opinion Salah had referred to the Jewish blood libel was obiter dictum: ie, wholly irrelevant to the court’s actual finding that Raed Salah’s detention by Theresa May was illegal. May’s deportation order was overturned and Salah was freed as a consequence. The Upper Immigration Tribunal also found that the allegation that Salah had written an anti-Semitic poem was based on faked evidence supplied by the Jerusalem Post and the Zionist Community Security Trust. Freedland does not mention this, however.

He also fails to mention that the Jerusalem magistrates court found Salah had not referred to the Jewish blood libel in a speech. Salah said his reference was to the Spanish Inquisition and its murder of children. The decision was reversed on appeal by the Jerusalem District Court, colonial court, in a nakedly political attack on Salah, who has been one of the main leaders of Israeli Palestinians and a thorn in the government’s side. During the Israeli raid on the ship, the Marvi Marmara, when Israel murdered nine Turkish citizens, there was an attempt by Israel’s forces to assassinate Raed Salah, but they shot a Turkish man by mistake. I clearly remember the announcement of Salah’s death by Israel.¹⁷

In short there is no substance to Freedland’s arguments. The issue of ‘anti-Semitism’ in the Labour Party is wholly contrived. It is the creation of journalists and Zionist activists. It has no basis in reality. The real agenda is defence of the Israeli state.

Mental disease?

The Guardian has gone overboard in the campaign to brand Labour under Corbyn as anti-Semitic. It recently printed an article by that champion of the Iraq war, Nick Cohen, on how it is the duty of every freedom-lover to convert to being Jewish as a protest against anti-Semitism.¹⁸Unfortunately, in its eagerness to attack the left, The Guardian failed to pick up on a similar article by Cohen in the Jewish Chronicle a mere seven years previously!¹⁹ (Another person with an urge to regurgitate a previous offering is Owen Jones.²⁰ His latest piece bears a distinct resemblance to an article he wrote last summer.²¹)

Leon Pinsker, one of the earliest Zionists, the founder of the Lovers of Zion, wrote in 1882:

“Judaephobia is then a mental disease and, as a mental disease it is hereditary; and, having been inherited for 2,000 years, it is incurable.”²²

This summarised Zionism’s attitude to anti-Semitism. If anti-Semitism was incurable it was ‘futile’ to fight it. This belief that anti-Semitism was an incurable disease was fundamental to Zionism’s acceptance of anti-Semitism. It was a natural consequence of living in ‘other people’s lands’. Far better to establish a settler-colonial state of Israel.

In fact anti-Semitism had material roots in the societies in which it occurred. Far from suffering a continuous anti-Semitism for 2,000 years, Jews were both oppressors and oppressed. They were the allies of the ruling classes under feudalism and the exploiters of the peasantry. In the words of Abram Leon, the Jews were a people class.²³ It was the transition to a decaying capitalism in eastern Europe which unleashed racial, as opposed to religious, anti-Semitism. The Jews found themselves “wedged between the anvil of decaying feudalism and the hammer of rotting capitalism”.²⁴

Jones has the advantage over Nick Cohen of possessing a modicum of intelligence. Unfortunately it is wasted. The only example he finds of anti-Semitism is Vicky Kirby. Jones, a gadfly of the left, complains that whenever he raises the question of anti-Semitism people cry, “Ah, but what about Israel?” It doesn’t seem to have occurred to him that the reason why Israel and anti-Semitism have become intertwined is because it is a deliberate strategy of the Zionist movement to label supporters of the Palestinians and opponents of Zionism as anti-Semitic.

If Jones has any doubts on the matter then he could, for example, refer to Abe Foxman, director of the US Anti-Defamation League: “To me, it’s very simple: anti-Zionism 99% of the time is a euphemism for anti-Semitism.”²⁵ In such a situation and where communal bodies such as the Board of Deputies proclaim that British Jews support the latest attack by Israel on Gaza, it is inevitable that people will react to allegations of anti-Semitism, even if genuine, by raising the question of Israel.

Owen Jones is a fair-weather friend of the Palestinian struggle and the fight against Zionism. He tries, like a good opportunist social democrat, to befriend both the oppressor and the oppressed.²⁶

Also jumping on the bandwagon is Blair’s ‘Lord Cashpoint’ - otherwise known as Lord Levy. He has taken to both The Guardian and the Jewish Chronicleto warn that he could quit Labour over anti-Semitism! If the noble lord carries out his promise, it will be one of the few gains from this contrived affair of ‘anti-Semitism’.²⁷

Chipping into this one-sided debate is Aaron Simons, a former chair of Oxford University’s Jewish Society (for which read Zionist society). Borrowing from the 1999 Macpherson report, Simons claims that Oxford’s student left is “institutionally anti-Semitic”. There cannot be a more absurd formulation. Anti-Semitism is not a form of state racism in British society. Jews in this society are white, not black. Anti-Semitism is, at most, a marginal form of prejudice. It is not synagogues, but mosques, which are repeatedly the subject of arson attacks. Just as defenders of Israel and its genocidal attacks on Palestinians have resorted to the tag, ‘Jewish lives matter’, in imitation of ‘Black lives matter’, so Zionist students in Britain, having played no part in anti-racist struggles, seek to capitalise on the struggle of black people.²⁸

Thought-provoking

There was also the affair of York University’s Palestine Society, which was accused of ‘anti-Semitism’ for putting on the play Seven Jewish children (an added ingredient was that Jeremy’s son, Tom Corbyn, is a member of York’s Palestine Society). Freedland did not publicise this example of ‘anti-Semitism’ - perhaps because The Guardian has promoted Seven Jewish childrenon its own website. This is a quite beautiful and thought-provoking play by Caryl Churchill, comparing a child hiding in a Jewish ghetto in Nazi-occupied Europe to a Palestinian child killed in Gaza.²⁹

Of course, the fact that some Jewish students supported the play was not news - maybe theirs is a form of ‘anti-Semitism’ that Jonathan Freedland and co have not examined. This is an example of making Jewish people who are anti-Zionists invisible - as Jewish anti-Zionists do not support the Israeli state, they do not count, of course, being ‘race traitors’ and ‘self-haters’. The Jewish Chronicle, however, ran with a story calling the play “anti-Semitic”³⁰- which provoked an open letter from six Israeli and Jewish students from York University’s Palestine society denying this.³¹

The theme of Seven Jewish children is one taken up by the socialist and Jewish folk singer, Leon Rosselson, in his recent song, ‘The ballad of Rivka and Mohammed’, which ends up with Rivka, the Jewish girl in the ghetto, and Mohammed, the Palestinian boy in Gaza: “then each took the hand of the other and then they were seen no more”.³²

Not surprisingly members of the Blairite right, such as Michael Dugher MP, who was recently sacked from the shadow cabinet, Rachel Reeves MP and, of course, rent-a-mouth John Mann MP have all jumped on the bandwagon. Mann is quoted as saying that “urgent action” must be taken, as “the problem has got worse since new members joined following Mr Corbyn’s election” and the Labour leader will face “an almighty row” if he does nothing. Of course, there is something very simple that Corbyn could do - and that is to tell Mann and co to put up or shut up. In other words, come up with some evidence that there is a problem of anti-Semitism in the party.

We should bear in mind that this is not the first time that Mann has made allegations he cannot back up. John Mann was a witness in the Fraser v University College Union employment tribunal case, where it was alleged that the boycott of Israeli universities was anti-Semitic. The tribunal dismissed the claim and described Mann’s evidence thus:

We did not derive assistance from the two members of parliament who appeared before us. Both gave glib evidence, appearing supremely confident of the rightness of their positions ... Mr Mann ... told us that the leaders of the respondents were at fault for the way in which they conducted debates, but did not enlighten us as to what they were doing wrong or what they should be doing differently ... And, when it came to anti- Semitism in the context of debate about the Middle East, he announced, “It’s clear to me where the line is ...”, but unfortunately eschewed the opportunity to locate it for us. Both parliamentarians clearly enjoyed making speeches. Neither seemed at ease with the idea of being required to answer a question not to his liking.

When put to the test, Zionist claims of ‘anti-Semitism’ are invariably found wanting, because Zionism has no interest in combating genuine examples of anti-Semitism. That is not, and never has been, its concern.

Suspended - Latest victim

In the course of writing this article I received a letter from the Labour Party. I was informed that, on the basis of comments I was alleged to have made, I was being suspended forthwith from membership. No indication was given as to the nature of the comments I was alleged to have made. I can only assume that they related to anti-Semitism or Zionism. Perhaps my case too will be used as an illustration of the growth of ‘anti-Semitism’ in Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party!

I shall, of course, be fighting this new witch-hunt and I hope that Corbyn and McDonnell will begin to take charge of the Blairite civil service they have inherited in the party.

Notes

1 . Jewish Chronicle July 16 2015: www.thejc.com/news/world-news/139820/israel-now-jew-among-nations-says-abe-foxman.

2 . ‘Poland’s Kaminski is not an anti-Semite: he’s a friend to Jews’:

3 . The Daily News September 4 1933 under the title, ‘Nazi youth in control’.

4 . Jewish Chronicle August 14 2015:

5 . www.theguardian.com/football/2014/nov/20/wigan-dave-whelan-accused-antisemitism-jewish-people.

6 . See http://azvsas.blogspot.co.uk/2015/12/geoffrey-alderman-and-gerald-kaufman.html.

7 . See T Greenstein, ‘Confusing the question’ Weekly Worker March 17 2016.

8 . ‘Labour and the left have an anti-Semitism problem’:

9 . See T Greenstein, ‘Confusing the question’ Weekly Worker March 17 2016.

10 . Speech in the French Constituent Assembly, December 21 1789:

11 . ‘EU drops its “working definition” of anti-Semitism’ The Times of IsraelDecember 5 2013:

12 . ‘Labour and the left have an anti-Semitism problem’:

13 . www.facebook.com/alex.chalmers.16?fref=ts.

14 . Pew Research Centre, ‘Israel’s religiously divided society’:

15 . A Simons, ‘It’s time we acknowledged that Oxford’s student left is institutionally anti-Semitic’:

16 . See ‘A Zionist and a holocaust denier hold hands together’:

17 . https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/uk-prison-palestinian-leader-sheikh-raed-salah-says-he-will-fight-deportation.

18 . N Cohen, ‘Why I’m becoming a Jew and why you should, too’ The GuardianMarch 19 2016:

19 . ‘Hatred is turning me into a Jew’ Jewish Chronicle February 12 2009: http://www.thejc.com/comment/comment/hatred-turning-me-a-jew.

20 . ‘Anti-Semitism is a poison - the left must take leadership against it’:

21 . ‘Anti-Semitism has no place on the left. It is time to confront it’:

22 . L Pinsker Autoemanzipation, ein Mahnrufan seine Stammesgenossen, von einem russischen Juden Berlin 1882, p5.

23 . A Leon The Jewish question: a Marxist interpretation London 1974.

24 . Ibid p226.

25 . ‘Foxman one on one: anti-Semitism, BDS and Mel Gibson’:

26 . For a more in depth analysis see ‘Owen Jones’s obsession with “anti-Semitism”’:

27 . ‘Lord Levy warns he could quit Labour over anti-Semitism’ The GuardianMarch 20 2016; and ‘I will leave Labour unless it stands up to anti-Semitism, says Lord Levy’ Jewish Chronicle February 21 2016.

28 . www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/feb/18/oxford-student-left-antisemitic-university-antisemitism-jewish-progressive-politics.

29 . www.theguardian.com/stage/2009/feb/26/caryl-churchill-seven-jewish-children-play-gaza.

30 . www.thejc.com/news/campus-news/153875/pro-palestinian-students-perform-antisemitic-play-part-israel-apartheid-week.

31 . ‘Seven Jewish children staged at University of York despite smear thatstudents were promoting “anti-Semitic” culture’:

32 . See http://azvsas.blogspot.co.uk/2016/02/then-each-took-hand-of-other-and-then.html.

↧

Otto Skorzeny - The SS Colonel responsible for the death of thousands of Italian and Hungarian Jews was an Israeli agent

March 27, 2016, 8:15 pm

≫ Next: Murder in Pakistan & Western Hypocrisy ‘Let us be careful what we sow, because we will harvest’ Hilary Clinton

≪ Previous: Anti-Semitism - Weapon of choice

The Nazi Who Became a Mossad Hitman

His Hero: Skorzeny meets with Hitler in 1943 after leading the daring rescue of the German leader’s friend and ally, Benito Mussolini.

Author Dan Raviv and Yossi Melman

Otto Skorzeny was a swashbuckling Nazi agent who rescued Mussolini and captured Horthy’s son and rolled him up in a carpet. The short-lived Salo Republic that Mussolini presided over from September 1943 onwards deported around 8,000 Italian Jews. By capturing his son, Skorzeny forced Horthy to abdicate in favour of Szalasi, leader of the Iron Cross, whose murderous rampages and pogroms in Budapest from October 1944 to January 1945 when Soviet troops liberated Budapest, led to the death of approximately 50,000 Jews.

Skorzeny was therefore suitably qualified to be an Israeli agent.

Tony Greenstein

Yitzhak Shamir - Israeli Prime Minister and Stern Gang leader who approved of alliance with Nazis

On September 11, 1962, a German scientist vanished. The basic facts were simple: Heinz Krug had been at his office, and he never came home.

Isar Harel - Mossad Chief who approved of hiring Skorzeny

The only other salient detail known to police in Munich was that Krug commuted to Cairo frequently. He was one of dozens of Nazi rocket experts who had been hired by Egypt to develop advanced weapons for that country.

Miklos Horthy - Hungarian dictator whose son Skorzeny kidnapped

HaBoker, a now defunct Israeli newspaper, surprisingly claimed to have the explanation: The Egyptians kidnapped Krug to prevent him from doing business with Israel.

Mussolini who Skorzeni rescued

But that somewhat clumsy leak was an attempt by Israel to divert investigators from digging too deeply into the case — not that they ever would have found the 49-year-old scientist.

We can now report — based on interviews with former Mossad officers and with Israelis who have access to the Mossad’s archived secrets from half a century ago — that Krug was murdered as part of an Israeli espionage plot to intimidate the German scientists working for Egypt.

Otto Skorzeny - Nazi agent hired by Israel

Moreover, the most astounding revelation is the Mossad agent who fired the fatal gunshots: Otto Skorzeny, one of the Israeli spy agency’s most valuable assets, was a former lieutenant colonel in Nazi Germany’s Waffen-SS and one of Adolf Hitler’s personal favorites among the party’s commando leaders. The Führer, in fact, awarded Skorzeny the army’s most prestigious medal, the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross, for leading the rescue operation that plucked his friend Benito Mussolini out from the hands of his captors.

Skorzeny

But that was then. By 1962, according to our sources — who spoke only on the promise that they not be identified — Skorzeny had a different employer. The story of how that came to be is one of the most important untold tales in the archives of the Mossad, the agency whose full name, translated from Hebrew, is “The Institute for Intelligence and Special Missions.”

Key to understanding the story is that the Mossad had made stopping German scientists then working on Egypt’s rocket program one of its top priorities. For several months before his death, in fact, Krug, along with other Germans who were working in Egypt’s rocket-building industry, had received threatening messages. When in Germany, they got phone calls in the middle of the night, telling them to quit the Egyptian program. When in Egypt, some were sent letter bombs — and several people were injured by the explosions.

Krug, as it happens, was near the top of the Mossad’s target list.

During the war that ended 17 years earlier, Krug was part of a team of superstars at Peenemünde, the military test range on the coast of the Baltic Sea, where top German scientists toiled in the service of Hitler and the Third Reich. The team, led by Wernher von Braun, was proud to have engineered the rockets for the Blitz that nearly defeated England. Its wider ambitions included missiles that could fly a lot farther, with greater accuracy and more destructive power.

According to Mossad research, a decade after the war ended, von Braun invited Krug and other former colleagues to join him in America. Von Braun, his war record practically expunged, was leading a missile development program for the United States. He even became one of the fathers of the NASA space exploration program. Krug opted for another, seemingly more lucrative option: joining other scientists from the Peenemünde group — led by the German professor Wolfgang Pilz, whom he greatly admired — in Egypt. They would set up a secret strategic missile program for that Arab country.

In the Israelis’ view, Krug had to know that Israel, the country where so many Holocaust survivors had found refuge, was the intended target of his new masters’ military capabilities. A committed Nazi would see this as an opportunity to continue the ghastly mission of exterminating the Jewish people.

The threatening notes and phone calls, however, were driving Krug crazy. He and his colleagues knew that the threats were from Israelis. It was obvious. In 1960, Israeli agents had kidnapped Adolf Eichmann, one of the chief administrators of the Holocaust, in far-off Argentina. The Israelis astonishingly smuggled the Nazi to Jerusalem, where he was put on trial. Eichmann was hanged on May 31, 1962.

It was reasonable for Krug to feel that a Mossad noose might be tightening around his neck, too. That was why he summoned help: a Nazi hero who was considered the best of the best in Hitler’s heyday.

One of the Mossad’s top priorities was stopping German scientists from working on Egypt’s rocket program.

On the day he vanished, according to our new information from reliable sources, Krug left his office to meet Skorzeny, the man he felt would be his savior.

Skorzeny, then 54 years old, was quite simply a legend. A dashing, innovative military man who grew up in Austria — famous for a long scar on the left side of his face, the result of his overly exuberant swordplay while fencing as a youth— he rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel in Nazi Germany’s Waffen-SS. Thanks to Skorzeny’s exploits as a guerrilla commander, Hitler recognized that he had a man who would go above and beyond, and stop at nothing, to complete a mission.

The colonel’s feats during the war inspired Germans and the grudging respect of Germany’s enemies. American and British military intelligence labeled Skorzeny “the most dangerous man in Europe.”

Krug contacted Skorzeny in the hope that the great hero — then living in Spain — could create a strategy to keep the scientists safe.

The two men were in Krug’s white Mercedes, driving north out of Munich, and Skorzeny said that as a first step he had arranged for three bodyguards. He said they were in a car directly behind and would accompany them to a safe place in a forest for a chat. Krug was murdered, then and there, without so much as a formal indictment or death sentence. The man who pulled the trigger was none other than the famous Nazi war hero. Israel’s espionage agency had managed to turn Otto Skorzeny into a secret agent for the Jewish state.

After Krug was shot, the three Israelis poured acid on his body, waited awhile and then buried what was left in a hole they had dug beforehand. They covered the makeshift grave with lime, so that search dogs — and wild animals — would never pick up the scent of human remains.

Wiki Commons Yitzhak Shamir

The troika that coordinated this extrajudicial execution was led by a future prime minister of Israel, Yitzhak Shamir, who was then head of the Mossad’s special operations unit. One of the others was Zvi “Peter” Malkin, who had tackled Eichmann in Argentina and in later life would enter the art world as a New York-based painter. Supervising from a distance was Yosef “Joe” Raanan, who was the secret agency’s senior officer in Germany. All three had lost large numbers of family members among the 6 million Jews murdered by the cruel, continent-wide genocide that Eichmann had managed.

Israel’s motivation in working with a man such as Skorzeny was clear: to get as close as possible to Nazis who were helping Egypt plot a new Holocaust.

The Mossad’s playbook for protecting Israel and the Jewish people has no preordained rules or limits. The agency’s spies have evaded the legal systems in a host of countries for the purpose of liquidating Israel’s enemies: Palestinian terrorists, Iranian scientists, and even a Canadian arms inventor named Gerald Bull, who worked for Saddam Hussein until bullets ended his career in Brussels in 1990.

Mossad agents in Lillehammer, Norway, even killed a Moroccan waiter in the mistaken belief that he was the mastermind behind the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre of 11 Israeli athletes by the terrorist group known as Black September. Ahmed Bouchikhi was shot down in 1973 as he left a movie theatre with his pregnant wife. The Israeli government later paid compensation to her without officially admitting wrongdoing. The botched mission delayed further Mossad assassinations, but it did not end them.

To get to unexpected places on these improbable missions, the Mossad has sometimes found itself working with unsavory partners. When short-term alliances could help, the Israelis were willing to dance with the proverbial devil, if that is what seemed necessary.

But why did Skorzeny work with the Mossad?

He was born in Vienna in June 1908, to a middle-class family proud of its military service for the Austro-Hungarian Empire. From an early age he seemed fearless, bold and talented at weaving false, complex tales that deceived people in myriad ways. These were essential requirements for a commando officer at war, and certainly valuable qualities for the Mossad.

He joined Austria’s branch of the Nazi Party in 1931, when he was 23, served in its armed militia, the SA, and enthusiastically worshipped Hitler. The führer was elected chancellor of Germany in 1933 and then seized Austria in 1938. When Hitler invaded Poland in 1939 and World War II broke out, Skorzeny left his construction firm and volunteered — not for the regular army, the Wehrmacht, but for the Leibstandarte SS Panzer division that served as Hitler’s personal bodyguard force.

Getty Otto Skorzeny

Skorzeny, in a memoir written after the war was over, told of his years of SS service as though they were almost bloodless travels in occupied Poland, Holland and France. His activities could not have been as innocuous as his book made them seem. He took part in battles in Russia and Poland, and certainly the Israelis believed it was very likely that he was involved in exterminating Jews. The Waffen-SS, after all, was not the regular army; it was the military arm of the Nazi Party and its genocidal plan.

His most famous and was in September 1943: leading commandos who flew engineless gliders to reach an Italian mountaintop resort to rescue Hitler’s friend and ally, the recently ousted Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini and spirit him away under harrowing conditions.

This was the escapade that earned Skorzeny his promotion to lieutenant colonel — and operational control of Hitler’s SS Special Forces. Hitler also rewarded him with several hours of face-to-face conversation, along with the coveted Knight’s Cross. But it was far from his only coup.

In September 1944, when Hungary’s dictator, Admiral Miklos Horthy, a Nazi ally, was on the verge of suing for peace with Russia as Axis fortunes plunged, Skorzeny led a contingent of Special Forces into Budapest to kidnap Horthy and replace his government with the more hard-line Fascist Arrow Cross regime. That regime, in turn, went on to kill or to deport to concentration camps tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews who had managed to survive the war up to that point.

Also in 1944, Skorzeny handpicked 150 soldiers, including some who spoke fair to excellent English in a bold plan to fend off the Allies after they landed in Normandy on D-Day in June. With the Allies advancing through France, Skorzeny dressed his men in captured U.S. uniforms, and procured captured American tanks for them to use in attacking and confusing Allied troops from behind their own lines.

The bold deception — including the act of stealing U.S. soldiers’ property — plunged Skorzeny into two years of interrogation, imprisonment and trial after the war ended. Eventually, Allied military judges acquitted him in 1947. Once again, the world’s newspapers headlined him as Europe’s most dangerous man. He enjoyed the fame, and published his memoirs in various editions and many languages, including the 1957 book “Skorzeny’s Special Missions: The Autobiography of Hitler’s Commando Ace,” published by Greenhill Books. He spun some tall-tale hyperbole in the books, and definitely downplayed his contacts with the most bloodthirsty Nazi leaders. When telling of his many conversations with Hitler, he described the dictator as a caring and attentive military strategist.

There was much that Skorzeny did not reveal, including how he escaped from the American military authorities who held him for a third year after his acquittal. Prosecutors were considering more charges against him in the Nuremberg tribunals, but during one transfer he was able to escape — reputedly with the help of former SS soldiers wearing American military police uniforms.

Skorzeny’s escape was also rumored to have been assisted by the CIA’s predecessor agency, the Office of Special Services, for which he did some work after the war. It is certainly notable that he was allowed to settle in Spain — a paradise for Nazi war veterans, with protection from the pro-Western Fascist, Generalissimo Francisco Franco. In the years that followed he did some advisory work for President Juan Peron in Argentina and for Egypt’s government. It was during this period that Skorzeny became friendly with the Egyptian officers who were running the missile program and employing German experts.

In Israel, a Mossad planning team started to work on where it could be best to find and kill Skorzeny. But the head of the agency, Isser Harel, had a bolder plan: Instead of killing him, snare him.

Mossad officials had known for some time that to target the German scientists, they needed an inside man in the target group. In effect, the Mossad needed a Nazi.

The Israelis would never find a Nazi they could trust, but they saw a Nazi they could count on: someone thorough and determined, with a record of success in executing innovative plans, and skilled at keeping secrets. The seemingly bizarre decision to recruit Skorzeny came with some personal pain, because the task was entrusted to Raanan, who was also born in Vienna and had barely escaped the Holocaust. As an Austrian Jew, his name was originally Kurt Weisman. After the Nazis took over in 1938, he was sent — at age 16 — to British-ruled Palestine. His mother and younger brother stayed in Europe and perished.

Like many Jews in Palestine, Kurt Weisman joined the British military looking for a chance to strike back at Germany. He served in the Royal Air Force. After the creation of Israel in 1948, he followed the trend of taking on a Hebrew name, and as Joe Raanan he was among the first pilots in the new nation’s tiny air force. The young man rapidly became an airbase commander and later the air force’s intelligence chief.

Raanan’s unique résumé, including some work he did for the RAF in psychological warfare, attracted the attention of Harel, who signed him up for the Mossad in 1957. A few years later, Raanan was sent to Germany to direct the secret agency’s operations there — with a special focus on the German scientists in Egypt. Thus it was Raanan who had to devise and command an operation to establish contact with Skorzeny, the famous Nazi commando.

The Israeli spy found it difficult to get over his reluctance, but when ordered, he assembled a team that traveled to Spain for “pre-action intelligence.” Its members observed Skorzeny, his home, his workplace and his daily routines. The team included a German woman in her late 20s who was not a trained, full-time Mossad agent but a “helper.” Known by the Hebrew label “saayanit” (or “saayan” if a male), this team member was like an extra in a grandly theatrical movie, playing whatever role might be required. A saayanit would often pose as the girlfriend of an undercover Mossad combatant.

Internal Mossad reports later gave her name as Anke and described her as pretty, vivacious and truly flirtatious. That would be perfect for the job at hand — a couples game.

One evening in the early months of 1962, the affluent and ruggedly handsome — though scarred — Skorzeny was in a luxurious bar in Madrid with his significantly younger wife, Ilse von Finckenstein. Her own Nazi credentials were impeccable; she was the niece of Hjalmar Schacht, Hitler’s talented finance minister.

They had a few cocktails and were relaxing, when the bartender introduced them to a German-speaking couple he had been serving. The woman was pretty and in her late 20s, and her escort was a well-dressed man of around 40. They were German tourists, they said, but they also told a distressing story: that they had just survived a harrowing street robbery.

They spoke perfect German, of course, the man with a bit of an Austrian accent, like Skorzeny’s. They gave their false names, but in reality they were, respectively, a Mossad agent whose name must still be kept secret and his “helper,” Anke.

There were more drinks, then somewhat flamboyant flirting, and soon Skorzeny’s wife invited the young couple, who had lost everything — money, passports and luggage — to stay the night at their sumptuous villa. There was just something irresistible about the newcomers. A sense of sexual intimacy between the two couples was in the air. After the four entered the house, however, at a crucial moment when the playful flirting reached the point where it seemed time to pair off, Skorzeny — the charming host — pulled a gun on the young couple and declared: “I know who you are, and I know why you’re here. You are Mossad, and you’ve come to kill me.”

The young couple did not even flinch. The man said: “You are half-right. We are from Mossad, but if we had come to kill you, you would have been dead weeks ago.”

“Or maybe,” Skorzeny said, “I would rather just kill you.”

Anke spoke up. “If you kill us, the ones who come next won’t bother to have a drink with you, You won’t even see their faces before they blow out your brains. Our offer to you is just for you to help us.”

After a long minute that felt like an hour, Skorzeny did not lower his gun, but he asked: “What kind of help? You need something done?” The Mossad officer — who even now is not being named by colleagues — told Skorzeny that Israel needed information and would pay him handsomely.

Hitler’s favorite commando paused for a few moments to think, and then surprised the Israeli by saying: “Money doesn’t interest me. I have enough.”

The Mossad man was further surprised to hear Skorzeny name something that he did want: “I need for Wiesenthal to remove my name from his list.” Simon Wiesenthal, the famous Vienna-based Nazi-hunter, had Skorzeny listed as a war criminal, but now the accused was insisting he had not committed any crimes.

The Israeli did not believe any senior Nazi officer’s claim of innocence, but recruiting an agent for an espionage mission calls for well-timed lies and deception. “Okay,” he said, “that will be done. We’ll take care of that.”

Skorzeny finally lowered his weapon, and the two men shook hands. The Mossad man concealed his disgust.

“I knew that the whole story about you being robbed was bogus,” Skorzeny said, with the boastful smile of a fellow intelligence professional. “Just a cover story.”

The next step to draw him in was to bring him to Israel. His Mossad handler, Raanan, secretly arranged a flight to Tel Aviv, where Skorzeny was introduced to Harel. The Nazi was questioned and also received more specific instructions and guidelines. During this visit, Skorzeny was taken to Yad Vashem, the museum in Jerusalem dedicated to the memory of the 6 million Jewish victims of the Holocaust. The Nazi was silent and seemed respectful. There was a strange moment there when a war survivor pointed to Skorzeny and singled him out by name as “a war criminal.”

Raanan, as skilled an actor as any spy must be, smiled at the Jewish man and softly said: “No, you’re mistaken. He’s a relative of mine and himself is a Holocaust survivor.”

Naturally, many in Israeli intelligence wondered if the famous soldier for Germany had genuinely — and so easily — been recruited. Did he really care so much about his image that he demanded to be removed from a list of war criminals? Skorzeny indicated that being on the list meant he was a target for assassination. By cooperating with the Mossad, he was buying life insurance.

The new agent seemed to prove his full reliability. As requested by the Israelis, he flew to Egypt and compiled a detailed list of German scientists and their addresses.

Skorzeny also provided the names of many front companies in Europe that were procuring and shipping components for Egypt’s military projects. These included Heinz Krug’s company, Intra, in Munich.

Raanan continued to be the project manager of the whole operation aimed against the German scientists. But he assigned the task of staying in contact with Skorzeny to two of his most effective operatives: Rafi Eitan and Avraham Ahituv.

Eitan was one of the most amazing characters in Israeli intelligence. He earned the nickname “Mr. Kidnap” for his role in abducting Eichmann and other men wanted by Israeli security agencies. Eitan also helped Israel acquire materials for its secret nuclear program. He would go on to earn infamy in the 1980s by running Jonathan Pollard as an American Jewish spy in the United States government.

Surprisingly flamboyant after a life in the shadows, in 2006, at age 79, Eitan became a Member of Parliament as head of a political party representing senior citizens.

“Yes, I met and ran Skorzeny,” Eitan confirmed to us recently. Like other Mossad veterans, he refused to go on the record with more details.

Ahituv, who was born in Germany in 1930, was similarly involved in a wide array of Israeli clandestine operations all around the globe. From 1974 to 1980 he was head of the domestic security service, Shin Bet, which also guarded many secrets and

‘Money doesn’t interest me. I have enough,’ the Nazi told the Mossad agents.

often conducted joint projects with the Mossad.

The Mossad agents did try to persuade Wiesenthal to remove Skorzeny from his list of war criminals, but the Nazi hunter refused. The Mossad, with typical chutzpah, instead forged a letter — supposedly to Skorzeny from Wiesenthal— declaring that his name had been cleared.

Skorzeny continued to surprise the Israelis with his level of cooperation. During a trip to Egypt, he even mailed exploding packages; one Israeli-made bomb killed five Egyptians in the military rocket site Factory 333, where German scientists worked.

The campaign of intimidation was largely successful, with most of the Germans leaving Egypt. Israel stopped the violence and threats, however, when one team was arrested in Switzerland while putting verbal pressure on a scientist’s family. A Mossad man and an Austrian scientist who was working for Israel were put on trial. Luckily, the Swiss judge sympathized with Israel’s fear of Egypt’s rocket program. The two men were convicted of making threats, but they were immediately set free.

Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, however, concluded that all of this being out in public was disastrous to Israel’s image — and specifically could upset a deal he had arranged with West Germany to sell weapons to Israel.

Harel submitted a letter of resignation, and to his shock, Ben-Gurion accepted it. The new Mossad director, commander of military intelligence Gen. Meir Amit, moved the agency away from chasing or intimidating Nazis.

Amit did activate Skorzeny at least once more, however. The spymaster wanted to explore the possibility of secret peace negotiations, so he asked Israel’s on-the-payroll Nazi to arrange a meeting with a senior Egyptian official. Nothing ever came of it.

Skorzeny never explained his precise reasons for helping Israel. His autobiography does not contain the word “Israel,” or even “Jew.” It is true that he sought and got the life insurance. The Mossad did not assassinate him.

He also had a very strong streak of adventurism, and the notion of doing secret work with fascinating spies — even if they were Jewish — must have been a magnet for the man whose innovative escapades had earned him the Iron Cross medal from Hitler. Skorzeny was the kind of man who would feel most youthful and alive through killing and fear.

It is possible that regret and atonement also played a role. The Mossad’s psychological analysts doubted it, but Skorzeny may have genuinely felt sorry for his actions during World War II.

He may have been motivated by a combination of all these factors, and perhaps even others. But Otto Skorzeny took this secret to his grave. He died of cancer, at age 67, in Madrid in July 1975.

He had two funerals, one in a chapel in Spain’s capital and the other to bury his cremated remains in the Skorzeny family plot in Vienna. Both services were attended by dozens of German military veterans and wives, who did not hesitate to give the one-armed Nazi salute and sing some of Hitler’s favorite songs. Fourteen of Skorzeny’s medals, many featuring a boldly black swastika, were prominently paraded in the funeral processions.

There was one man at the service in Madrid who was known to no one in the crowd, but out of habit he still made sure to hide his face as much as he could. That was Joe Raanan, who by then had become a successful businessman in Israel.

The Mossad did not send Raanan to Skorzeny’s funeral; he decided to attend on his own, and at his own expense. This was a personal tribute from one Austrian-born warrior to another, and from an old spy handler to the best, but most loathsome, agent he ever ran.

Dan Raviv, a CBS News correspondent based in Washington, and Israeli journalist Yossi Melman are co-authors of five books about Israel’s espionage and security agencies, including “Spies Against Armageddon: Inside Israel’s Secret Wars” (Levant Books, 2014). Contact them at feedback@forward.com

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Murder in Pakistan & Western Hypocrisy ‘Let us be careful what we sow, because we will harvest’ Hilary Clinton

March 28, 2016, 8:51 pm

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Taliban bomb in Pakistan – ‘sowing the seed and reaping the whirlwind’

There is no justification, political or religious, for the terrible bombing in Pakistan which has claimed over 70 lives, including 29 children. But the crocodile tears shed by western leaders should be seen for exactly that.

Deadly bomb in Lahore targets Christians

If the death of 29 children are terrible, which they are, then the death of over 500 Palestinian children at the hands of the terrorist State of Israel are equally terrible, yet when it comes to Israel’s attack on the poverty stricken people of Gaza western leaders invoke ‘Israel’s right to self-defence’.

A girl who was injured in a suicide bomb blast is rushed

Girl injured in today's bomb attack by Taliban

Nearly all the 70 or so Israelis killed in Operation Mass Murder (Protective Edge) were soldiers, contrast that with 2,200 Palestinian civilians. The hypocrisy of the West and its support for ‘Israel’s right to exist’ as a murderous and terrorist entity is unabated.

We only have to recall the chant of the mobs in Israeli streets at the time of Operation Mass Murder ‘Marching Israelis In Tel Aviv Chant 'There's No School In Gaza, There Are No More Kids Left'Huffington Post 29.7.14.

Timothy Dalton as James Bond in Living Daylights - when the Mujahadeen were our noble friends

As it says in the King James bible, Hoseah 8:7 ‘For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind’ so it is with the murderous attack by the Pakistani Taliban on the Christian community of Lahore.

Pakistan Taliban - created by the ISI

If we were to allocate responsibility there would be a number of actors. ‘Born again’ President George W Bush, who waged war on Afghanistan. Presidents Carter and Reagan who were happy to sponsor the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan, supply them with stinger anti-aircraft missiles and other weaponry and of course the Pakistani military.

General Zia ul Haq was put in power in Pakistan in 1978 by the military and the United States, overthrowing the government of Zulfikar Bhutto and the Pakistani Peoples Party. He promptly introduced what he termed ‘sharia law’ hanging and torturing thousands. The previous civilian President, Bhutto was hanged in 1979 on a trumped up murder charge.

Taliban - armed by the West

It was fitting when Zia ul Haq, who had lived by the sword died by the sword. He was mysteriously killed by a bomb in his plane. It was equally fitting that his supporters, represented by the American Ambassador to Pakistan, Arnold Lewis Raphel. as well as various military criminals were also killed in the same plane.

This was the beginning of the introduction of Islamicisation in Pakistan. It coincided with the war in Afghanistan and Zia ul-Haq was instrumental in supporting and arming the Afghan Mujahadeen who later morphed into the Taliban.

The powerful Pakistan intelligence agency the ISI (Inter Service Intelligence agency) was the conduit that funnelled millions of dollars and arms and equipment to the Taliban, the Mujahadeen and what later became Al Qaeda. The ISI has never stopped supporting the Taliban in Afghanistan, as Wikileaks demonstrated. [see Wikileaks: Pakistan accused of helping Taliban in Afghanistan attacks - Pakistan has armed, trainedand coordinated Taliban and al-Qaeda attacks in Afghanistan, according to the military reports. Daily Telegraph 26.7.10.

The 1980’s was a time when the Mujahadeen were talked of as ‘freedom fighters’ in the West. I can remember when I wrote an article for the Student Union newspaper at Brighton Polytechnic, where I was Vice-President. I attacked the backwards Mujahadeen and the then popular campaign (popular in the bourgeois press) against what was a liberal Afghanistan government by the barbarian savages that the West considered ‘freedom fighters’. I received a lot of criticism for an article which was indeed prescient.

Many of you won’t remember a James Bond film, ‘Living Daylights’. Bond films are really a cultural reflection of the latest fashion in cold war and imperialist politics. James Bond is there to sort out all sorts of terrorists and threats to the West. In Living Daylights he was the Lawrence of Arabia figure, helping the noble savages of the Mujahadeen in their mission to reclaim Afghanistan from the terrible Soviets. The Taliban were the heroes.

Of course the policy of sponsoring Islamist groups is now in tatters as the USA and the West suffered blowback. The facts are hardly in dispute. Even Hilary Clinton, that most despicable of Democrat candidates, admits that the US were responsible for creating Al Qaeda. [see Hamid Gul’s Pakistan legacy: Taliban blowback]. Gen. Ehsan-ul-Haq, another retired ISI chief, said publicly in late 2013 that instead of Pakistan enjoying strategic depth in Afghanistan, it was the Taliban who enjoyed strategic depth in Pakistan.

See Pakistan bombing: Suspects, arms seized after attack on Christians kills 72

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MUST WATCH VIDEO Irish Dail Member Richard Boyd Barrett Savages Israeli Ambassador

March 29, 2016, 7:12 pm

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≪ Previous: Murder in Pakistan & Western Hypocrisy ‘Let us be careful what we sow, because we will harvest’ Hilary Clinton

Why Israel Should Not Be Treated as a Normal State

A wonderful attack on the Israeli Ambassador to Ireland by Richard Boyd Barrett TD for People Before Profit. The Ambassador is left speechless

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To Them That Hath Shall Be Given

March 30, 2016, 1:03 pm

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The Politics of Envy

I am sure all those who read this blog will join with me in condemning the politics of envy. Those miserable souls who would deny a man a good bottle of vintage wine or port in order that some ne'er do well might have a meal once or day or, god forbid, be able to heat his hous. Oh for the days of the workhouse!!

Matthew 13:12

For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath.

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Andrew Neil lobs a few softball questions at John Mann MP on ‘anti-Semitism’

Confusing the Jewish Question and Zionism

That is indeed what the Zionists say as some form of rationalisation for their crimes. They are ‘forced’ to kill Palestinian children. It has disturbing echoes of similar Nazi justifications. They too were ‘forced’ to kill Jewish children. It was Golda Meir who once said that

7 Jewish Children

Israeli Embassy targets ‘Enemy Territory’ in Britain on giant Map

When normal service resumed we had the affair of Oxford University Labour Club when its upper class twit of a Chair, Alex Chalmers resigned because he held that the club had a problem with Jews. Antisemitic? Or just against the Israeli government’s oppressive actions?

Of course Jewish students supporting the play was not news. Maybe that’s also a form of anti-Semitism. Making certain Jewish people invisible. But as they don’t support the Israeli state they don’t count of course being ‘race traitors’ and ‘self haters’.

It is a theme that the famous socialist and Jewish folk singer

Leon Rosselson takes up with his latest song ‘The Ballad of Rivka & Mohammed’ which explores exactly the same theme, ending up with Rivka, the Jewish girl in the ghetto and Mohammed, the Palestinian boy in Gaza: "then each took the hand of the other and then they were seen no more"

But having spread the smear Freedland moves on leaving people none the wiser.

I don’t personally agree with Downing on the position he takes but I have no doubt, having met Downing, that he is not personally anti-Semitic. The problem is he is politically confused, a confusion caused by the Zionist insistent that support for Israel is bound up with being Jewish.

Freedland reluctantly accepts that opposition to Israel ‘isnot always antisemitic’ The problem is that having conceded the point he goes on to make the opposite case viz. that anti-Semitism is equivalent to anti-Zionism.

See: Open Letter to SNP Members of Parliament – Don’t Be Fooledby False Accusations of anti-Semitism

Spedding is a fully blown narcissist who is unknown to anyone in the Palestine solidarity movement. His only ability seems to be to blow his own trumpet and he is in good company there – with the anti-Semitic Jazzman Gilad Atzmon.

Tony Greenstein

Israel’s new triage guidelines – purely for international consumption

In my previous post on the extra-judicial execution of a wounded Palestinian it was noticeable that 2 Israeli ambulances did nothing to tend to someone who was clearly severely injured on the ground. Their only concern was a superficially wounded soldier.

False accusations are being carefully aimed at Jeremy Corbyn and the left

Weekly Worker 24.3.16.

Why Israel Should Not Be Treated as a Normal State

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