‘TERFS’ are the new anti-Semites

trans rights activists are indulging in a heresy hunt reminiscent of the fake ‘anti-Semitism’ attacks on anti-Zionists 

I have hesitated long and hard before dipping my toe into the debate over trans rights and gender identity. It is fraught with traps and hidden mines waiting to go off. This piece is intended as a contribution to the debate rather laying down  fixed ideological positions as I would take over something simple like for example Zionism!

Leah Levane made it clear, and Matt Wrack to a lesser extent, that they disagreed with the no platforming of Esther Giles

The debate is not helped by a confusion over terms such as sex and gender and what we mean by them. The debate, as it has developed, bears all the hallmarks of the poisoned offspring of identity politics. However the no platforming of Esther Giles, the suspended secretary of Bristol North West CLP from speaking at a meeting called by Stand Up For Labour Party Democracy should be condemned by all those concerned to see democracy restored in the Labour Party. [See the statementby Labour Against the Witchhunt, Labour Left Alliance and Labour in Exile Network below].

Not only was Esther deplatformed but Graham Bash of Labour Briefing and the LRC was vetoed as a speaker by the organisers of the meeting which was hosted by Don’t Leave Organise and the LRC. Given the LRC were providing the zoom facilities for the meeting then this is astounding.

On the pretext that there were 500 participants, which there weren’t, everything was transferred to streaming on Youtube, thus preventing any audience input. Just to make sure they turned the comments off so that the controversy would not find its way in through the backdoor. You can of course have both have a zoom meeting and stream it.

It seems that in its control freakery Momentum, whose Alan Gibbons chaired it, and the CLPD have little to learn from Starmer and Evans. Momentum Forward seems like a continuation of Lansman by other means.

Ben Selby

Clearly Alan Gibbons, who has just been unsuspended, and the other Momentum power brokers who engineered Esther’s no platforming, including Ben Selby, a supporter of the Zionist AWL, don’t understand irony. Otherwise it might have dawned on them that it’s not the best advert for a meeting opposing Starmer’s attack on free speech to yourself no platform someone because you disagree with them. And to then take all possible steps to ensure that no one in the audience could raise the matter suggests that some people are running scared.

I am not an absolutist when it comes to freedom of speech. I accept that there have to be some limits. As US Supreme Court Judge Wendell Holmes saidin the 1919 case of Schenk v United States, free speech does not include crying ‘fire’ in a crowded cinema (although the judges misapplied the concept to opposition to the draft). Likewise those who openly advocate harm to people on the basis of race/colour/sex/sexuality/gender reassignment are not exercising freedom of speech but using it to deny others that right.

That is why I have always supported no platform for fascists, using the old slogan of ‘No Pasaran.’ To extend no platform as a tactic to those you simply disagree with is wrong in principle. On that I agree with JVL.

Of course trans women have every right to define themselves as women. Indeed anyone has the right to define themselves in whatever way they want. However that does not mean that other people have to accept that definition. Personally I have no reason to doubt anyone who makes such a claim, whatever it may mean, but many women do challenge the assertion by trans women that they are women.

 I find these arguments about ‘rights’ similar to the Zionist claim that Jews (not the ‘wrong sort’) have the ‘right to define anti-Semitism’ which is conveniently structured so as to defend Israel not Jews. People are what they are and semantic arguments about how you define something, including gender, does not actually change anything.

The right to self define is also a meaningless right since rights historically have been won in the struggle for freedom against those seeking to deny them. Free speech for example. Today ‘rights’ are increasingly seen as a badge of identity not an expression of what we have won and fought for collectively and what we have yet to win.

Those who are critical of gender ideology and gender fluidity and who disagree that trans women are women are not fascists and no platforming them is an abuse of that tactic. Those targeted are usually feminists. A number of women who I know, mainly older women, are critical of the argument that trans women are women.

They should not be treated as fascists and to do so suggests that those seeking to ban them have little confidence in their own arguments. Nor are they simply being bigoted. Many women feel that trans women are intruding on areas that are women only.

I accept that a number of people suffer from body dysphoria, the feeling of being born to the wrong gender or a gender different from one they identify with. I am opposed to any discrimination against trans women or men. That should go without saying. But just because someone identifies as a woman, when they have a penis and are biologically a man, should they be accepted as a woman without question?

In many situations such as toilets it makes little difference who uses them. But is it really being suggested that men claiming to be women but with male genitalia should be sent to women’s prisons, given that there have been a number of cases such as that of Karen White and Michelle Winter where female prisoners have been attacked and raped? I also accept that putting transwomen in men’s prisons can also be dangerous for the trans woman, which is why 3^rd spaces are needed. The situation is not an easy one to resolve in the context of a repressive institution such as prison.

It is a fact that with few exceptions we are born either male or female. Gender is a social construct however and it can be changed. The fact that trans activists have displayed, on occasions, the aggression and violence associated with men, in their attacks against what they describe as ‘transphobes’ suggests that self-defining as a trans woman does not automatically mean that one is a woman or that one even identifies as a woman.

It is also noticeable that this problem doesn’t arise with women becoming trans men. Presumably men don’t feel a threat from women who change their gender identity. Why?

Since gender is neither fixed nor binary, I don’t understand the objection to separate transgender identities and spaces.

When someone has transition surgery it is clearly different. Noone would go through that if they didn’t identify with another sex. That’s not to say that surgery simply removes at a stroke years of male socialisation to say nothing of them retaining the male physique and strength. This clearly poses problems in terms of competitive sport.

Self identification however is different and there is no point in simply asserting, as if a catechism, that men claiming to be women are in fact women. This becomes especially problematic when looking at men claiming to be women who have raped or sexually assaulted women. I accept that this is rare, however that doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen or exist. Likewise the overtly misogynist social media posts by trans activists, some of which I am posting here suggests that there is at least a section of trans women who are openly misogynist.

The attack on those who are gender critical, TERFs, is similar to the fake ‘anti-Semitism’ allegations. Women I know who don’t accept gender ideology and trans activism don’t hate trans people but they do question the assumptions on which this activism is based.

It certainly doesn’t surprise me that the Alliance for Workers Liberty, which has provided the ‘left anti-Semitism’ ideology which the Labour Right has utilised to attack anti-Zionists should be involved in a similar attempt to silence feminists.

Ben Selby of the Alliance for Workers Liberty was heavily involved in the removal of Esther Giles from speaking at the SUFLPD meeting on the grounds of ‘fighting for the rights of all communities that make up our movement’. This comes from a pro-imperialist outfit that refused to call for the withdrawal of imperialist troops from Iraq and Afghanistan and which supports the Apartheid State of Israel.  Presumably Palestinians and Arabs aren’t included in these ‘communities’.

My own experience of these issues is limited to being attacked by a transwoman at the picket of Sodastream in Brighton some years ago. The particular individual, Chelsea was her name, carried a handbag but that was the limit to her feminine wiles.

There was the infamous attack on feminists in Hyde Park in September 2017 which resulted in a number of women suffering injuries after being attacked by trans activists. A Woman’s Place issued a statement after one of those activists was convicted of assault. It is difficult not to see this and similar acts of aggression as an example of misogyny and male violence rather than women on women violence.

There was also an extremely aggressive and violent picket of a meeting by A Woman’s Place in Brighton during the 2019 Labour Party conference. It’s not often I agree with Simon Fanshawe, a died in the wool Blairite, but he was right when he said that yelling scum at lesbians and feminists who have been fighting for women’s rights for decades is not solidarity or diversity but aggression.

I feel enormous sympathy with transwomen but I also understand the feelings of women who are branded ‘transphobes’ when they are nothing of the sort.

There is a very easy explanation for this conflict between feminists and trans women and that is the way that identity politics, diversity and the reduction of racism to ‘hate crimes’ have depoliticized the fight for sexual and social liberation. Diversity is all about co-opting people to accept oppression rather than changing society. Class has been replaced by identity and everyone has an identity.  Even the ruling class!

Tony Greenstein

* this article has been amended to make it clear that Save Our Socialists did not organise the Stand Up for Labour Party meeting.

Against no-platforming at ‘Stop the Labour Lockout’, an event billed to campaign for free speech!

Posted on February 7, 2021 by admin

Joint statement by Labour In Exile Network, Labour Left Alliance and Labour Against the Witchhunt

We are very concerned to hear that Esther Giles of the successful campaign Save Our Socialists and Labour in Exile Network, has been de-invited from the February 7 ‘Stop the Labour Lockout’ event. She was billed to speak next to Alan Gibbons and Gaya Sriskanthan of Momentum, Matt Wrack of the Fire Brigades Union, Leah Levane of Jewish Voice for Labour and Socialist Councillors and many more.

But the day before the event, she was contacted and it was explained to her that some speakers had threatened to withdraw from the rally if Esther was allowed to speak. The reason: three years ago, she supported a comrade who was pressurised to make a statement about trans women. Esther’s feeling was that – regardless of the issue of the debate – nobody should be bullied. We continue to campaign side by side with all those oppressed by this capitalist society, including (but not only) women and all our LGBT comrades. Esther’s letter to the organisers is available here.

We very much believe in free speech in our organisations and in wider society. The best way to fight prejudice, misperceptions and misunderstandings is through education and debate and not by no platforming comrades on the left. Over the last five years, the mere accusation of a Labour Party member being antisemitic has been enough to get them suspended, disciplined and vilified. It is therefore more than ironic that an event billed to fight for “free speech in the Labour Party” should decide to no-platform a speaker merely for standing by a comrade’s decision to exercise that right.

It is also highly debatable whether this event really presents a “major united left initiative”, as Jewish Voice for Labour puts it here. Neither the Labour in Exile Network, the Labour Left Alliance nor Labour Against the Witchhunt have been invited to participate in what is billed as an ongoing campaign. This is particularly troubling, as these three organisations have been among the most outspoken opponents of the purge of left-wingers and Corbyn supporters – in the case of LAW, this was the reason it was set up in the first place in 2017! All three organisations continue to fight against all unjust suspensions and expulsions that have occured in the last 5 years.

We call on the organisers and speakers of the event to:

• Renew the invite to Esther Giles;
• Oppose any new attempts to no-platform speakers; and
• Invite Labour Against the Witchhunt, Labour Left Alliance and Labour in Exile Network to participate in the rally and the “ongoing campaign”.

Transgender extremism, violence against feminist meeting at British Labour Party conference

by Nick Rogers

The debate around the meaning of sex and gender made an appearance at this year’s British Labour Party conference in Brighton. Women’s Place UK – an organisation that questions the demand that biological males who self-identify as woman should have access to women’s spaces, to all-women shortlists, and be able to stand for election as women’s officers in the labour movement – organised an unofficial fringe meeting for the Monday evening of the LP conference. Despite circulating details of the venue only an hour or so before the start time – a security precaution experience has taught them to adopt – those attending the meeting found themselves confronting a baying crowd.

I did not attend the meeting. However, a woman comrade from my Constituency LP who did provides a vivid account of what happened:

“On approaching Brighton on the train slightly late for the meeting I got a message that a younger woman and her teenage daughter were frightened to go through the mob outside the meeting. I wasn’t sure of how to find the meeting, but as soon as I left the rear entrance of the station, I heard the roar of men shouting from several streets away. I found the two women around the corner from the meeting. I encouraged them to walk with me and said that I’d ask the police there to help us through.

“As we approached, I saw a large crowd of mainly young white men, some with masks and hoods down, crowding the entrance of the venue and shouting abuse. I was just so angry at women including lesbians being threatened by a crowd of mainly young men that I put myself between the mob and the two younger women and marched them into the venue through a kind of side passage.

“In the building I met a leading feminist campaigner I know who had come out to look for the two women and hadn’t found them. She was shaking and soaking – a young man had just squirted liquid from a plastic bottle at her head and face. She realised by the time I saw her that it was water, but it could have been anything. Apparently, police saw the attack but did nothing. She has given them a photo of her assailant.

“Ironically, later on residents in the residential flats above the community rooms where the meeting took place, got fed up with the hours of noise and chucked water over the protestors. Predictably, it was later claimed by the protestors that the water was being thrown at them by meeting attendees, though we had no access to these upper storey flats.

“Inside the basement meeting hall, Onjali Rauf, a Muslim campaigner for trafficked women and award-winning children’s writer, had just begun calmly to speak, against a constant background of the windows being kicked, with the blinds shaking. Where the blinds didn’t totally cover the windows protestors were taking pictures of those of us in the hall. I saw several women from Haringey Labour in the meeting, some of whom had been shaken up by the experience of entering the venue; also Kevin Courtney, General Secretary of the National Education Union; and Simon Fanshawe, founder of Stonewall. They tweeted their disgust at the protest, and that they heard only respectful discussion and nothing in any way transphobic in the meeting. (The full transcripts of the talks are published on WPUK website so you can check for yourself.)

“The meeting was well-stewarded by the absolutely unflappable WPUK women and Brighton Resisters including some very long-standing Brighton lesbian campaigners. These women are absolutely the veterans of Gay and Lesbian Liberation, and feminist campaigns such as Greenham, Grunwicks, setting up Women’s Aid Refuges in squats in the 1970s and organising support for women in stopping National Front marches in Turnpike Lane and New Cross etc.

“We’re used to groups of young white men trying to shut us down and indeed physically attack us. However, for several of the younger women there, the experience was extremely upsetting and scary. Onjali had to leave early after speaking, in order to collect her car. She was accompanied by several stewards, so I hope she was not abused as she left. The rest of us left in groups, to be greeted by the choir of protestors singing ‘We’re better feminists than you’.

“The protest was organised by Brighton Queer AF – a group which has objected rightly to the commercialisation of Pride. I’m sure that if any of them had come into the meeting, they would have learnt a lot, and maybe found that they hold common views on lots of things with the feminists, lesbians and trans-people who are gender-critical and socialist. The involvement of anyone with either official roles in Labour or Momentum or The World Transformed in encouraging the mob is alarming and is hopefully being followed up.”

Later that evening, I met several women who were recovering from the experience of having “scum, scum, scum” screamed in their ears as they entered and left the meeting and of having endured the cacophony of banging and shouting from outside throughout the entire meeting. One of my women comrades had been spat at.

Although they were clearly shocked, I was impressed with my comrades’ determination. Some had been fairly non-committal when it came to gender self-ID and its implications for women. They had attended the meeting to find out more. From the level of intimidation they had just witnessed, they were now clear that the left and the labour movement has a problem with rationally debating the issues raised. What is more, they felt the actions of the demonstrators were an expression of blatant misogyny.

The following morning, I was personally drawn into the debate when a young member of my delegation, without consulting with the rest of us, went to the rostrum on a spurious point of order to condemn the WPUK meeting as a transphobic hate group and to denounce any delegates who had attended, calling “shame” down on them. The rest of the delegation urged me, as delegation lead, to set the record straight. Making a (possibly equally spurious) point of order, I responded from the rostrum to explain that the young man did not speak for our CLP. I went on to say that differences within our party and the broader movement could only be bridged if debate was conducted in a fraternal and comradely spirit and that everyone’s freedom of speech was protected. The previous night’s demonstrators had sought to silence debate. Their behaviour was semi-fascistic.

These two short contributions have subsequently trended in a minor way on social media and within strictly limited political circles, but widely enough to reach the eyes of one of the editors of Redline, who asked if I would contribute an article.

It was only at the end of 2017 that I became aware of the intolerant reaction of some transgender activists to anyone who challenges their newly-minted ideology, and particularly anyone who will not accept the mantra that “trans-women are women”. A well-regarded local activist, Helen Steel, was mobbed and barracked for a prolonged period at the Anarchist Bookfair when she tried to intercede to defend some women activists who were handing out leaflets. Until then, I had always taken at face value the progressive nature of the demands of transgender activists – admittedly, the debate around these issues was peripheral to the political discussions I was mostly involved in. I had previously not heard the term of abuse, TERF (trans-exclusionary radical feminist), which was yelled at Helen for an hour or two.

It was the 2017 incident at the Anarchist Bookfair that prompted a group of us in the local Labour Party to investigate. It was not long before we realised that something was far wrong, not only with the way the debate was being conducted, but also with the thinking, or ideology, that the most extreme transgender activists had developed. If a trans-woman is any biological male who “feels” like a woman (and that is what the advocates of self-ID tell us) and “trans-women are women” then being a woman (or alternatively a man) is simply a feeling in your head.

Now, those of us who were quickly becoming gender-critical instinctively applaud anyone who challenges gender norms of behaviour, including in what they wear and in how they interact with other people and wider society. It is our understanding that gender is a social construct. In many ways it is oppressive, particularly to women, although it also places unhealthy psychological expectations and constraints on what it is to be a man in our society. We should all be rebels against gender. In a sense, the objective of socialists should be to abolish gender.

We also are aware that some people are so uncomfortable with the gender that society imposes on them that they wish to live their lives in the opposite gender. Others are unhappy with the biological sex into which they are born and may pursue medical intervention. There is an important discussion to be had about what we need to do as a society to help transgender people lead “liveable lives”.

However, we believe that there is a material, biological basis to the oppression that women have both endured and fought against for thousands of years – as a Marxist, this is axiomatic to me.  The role of women in the reproduction of species – through nine months of pregnancy, then birth and taking the major role in caring for young people – is the economic foundation of all hierarchical, patriarchal societies. It is the biologically-imposed “work” that women do and from which men benefit.

According to Engels, the “world historic defeat of the female sex” represented by the spread of the neolithic revolution (the emergence of agriculture, animal husbandry, land ownership, social elites and so on) made of women the first exploited class.

Today, it remains the case that women’s role in reproduction, and differences in the biology of women and men, such as average size and strength, must be taken into account in the social arrangements we build, if we are to move towards true equality.  Yet the ideology of the transgender extremists refuses to acknowledge biological sex as the basis of the division of our species into men and women.

It is already having a heavy impact on the language used by public bodies. And, remember, this is before any change is made to Britain’s Gender Recognition Act. Increasingly, the word “woman”, and other words associated with women, such as “mother”, are being disappeared from public discourse in relation to those issues that have the most direct impact on women’s lives.  Public information publications and online sites are more and more often speaking of “pregnant people”, “menstruators”, “people with cervixes”, “chest feeders”, and other bizarre terms that eradicate actual women.  This is justified as being trans-inclusive – since trans-men can give birth, menstruate, suffer from cervical cancer and trans-women cannot.

Meanwhile, the ability of women to discuss the nature of their lives as a collective group, and to fight against unfair and unequal treatment is being taken away from them.

So how is it that references to women are being progressively erased from the language? And how is it that delegates at Labour Party conference can cheer news of an assault on a meeting of women activists?  It seems to me that two strands of political and social development have come together.

First, there is the long night of neoliberalism under which we have weathered successive attacks on socialist ideas and the very concept of people coming together on a collective basis to fight for their rights. This political environment has nurtured the kind of post-modernist nonsense that passes for cutting-edge thinking in many of the social science and humanities departments of our academic institutions. The glorification of self has replaced grand narratives.

It has encouraged a relativist, individualistic approach to thinking about social issues. Thus we see activists emerging from these institutions insisting that what goes on in people’s heads is more important than material reality.

These developments are obviously profoundly un-Marxist (and deliberately so). They are also entirely unscientific – science being concerned with probing beneath the veil of immediate experience in order to uncover more profound truths.

To a large extent, adopting a scientific approach involves abstracting from the noise of a huge quantity of data in order to build testable models that can usefully explain what is happening. In biology, one of the most basic of models is the division of sexually-reproducing species into male and female, based on their role in reproduction. Transgender ideology furiously rejects this model – at least as far as our species is concerned. It insists people’s subjective experience (or assertions about that experience) is primary and even goes as far as arguing that sex is as much a spectrum as gender (it being obvious that gender, as a lived experience, is infinitely variable and malleable).

Second, we should recognise that all social change produces a backlash and that, under the guise of protecting the rights of transgender people, the advances that women made over the course of the twentieth century are being endangered.

Conservative and deeply sexist ideas such as the “female brain” and “feminine essence” are making a come-back. How else to explain being a woman or a man as a “feeling”? And the howling rage of the transgender extremists against women who dare to say that, as a biological and social category, they exist, displays clear evidence of misogyny. If something looks and sounds like a campaign against women, perhaps, by design or otherwise, it is.

There is no inherent clash between the interests of transgender people and women. Both suffer the consequences of a sexist society that demands certain behaviours based on your perceived biological sex. Both transgender people and women would benefit from working together to challenge gender stereotypes. In fact, gender and the concepts of femininity and masculinity are their common enemy.

Keir Hardie, the founder of the British Labour Party, included votes for women in the 1888 platform of the first election he fought (as an independent). He remained a supporter of the women’s movement throughout his political life and worked closely with the most radical of the Pankhursts, Sylvia. What is truly “shameful” is that, despite this inheritance, 101 years after the campaign for women’s suffrage achieved its first breakthrough in Britain, women within the Labour Party are facing the fight of their lives to assert their right to organise, campaign and speak out.

What’s wrong with gender ideology

by Daphna Whitmore

 Update: On 25 February 2019, Internal Affairs Minister Tracey Martin announced that the Government would put on hold a Bill to allow sex self ID pending better consultation and investigation by the Crown Law Office into legal issues that had been raised. This article has had photos and screenshots added on 31 August that show just how misogynistic many trans activists are. The photos also show that most trans activists are not transgender, but are males with a deep hatred of women.

Science is under attack as universities, workplaces and governments are drawing up policies and laws to codify a fiction that makes creationism look sensible. We are supposed to believe that trans women are women, lesbians can have penises, and biological sex is a social construct. The idea that a man can literally be transformed into a woman, and a woman can be a man, has gained ground over the past decade.

Parliament is considering a law that would enable anyone to change their sex on their birth certificate by simply filling out a form. A similar bill, the Gender Recognition Act, is being promoted in the UK by the Conservative government.

This self ID process is supposed to ease the suffering of people with severe body dysphoria. This is a rare condition in which a person is tormented by the belief that he or she was born in the wrong body. However, the majority of trans women activists do not have body dysphoria and do not want any medical or surgical procedures. The majority are hanging on to their penises and are aggressively demanding rights that impact on women. People who have opposed self ID have faced a storm of abuse from trans activists. Nearly all of the abuse is aimed at women, particularly gender critical women who they call TERFS (Trans exclusionary radical feminists).  (See here for thousands of examples).

Trans activists at the Melbourne International Women’s Day demonstration 2019 use the slogan “TERF graves are gender neutral bathrooms!” as a play on “I’ll piss on your graves”

Self ID would mean a male could simply say he is a woman and demand to share women and girls’ changing rooms. Biological males are now competing in women’s sports and the women are expected to applaud their victories. Women are being told they must open women’s groups to include males who identify as women and to do so with graciousness or be called transphobes, bigots or worse. Lesbians are being told they should embrace these new penis-bearing-women. Women in prisons have been harmed and face danger as males claiming transgender status are moved to women’s prisons. In Canada and Australia beauticians who provide women-only services have been taken to court for refusing to wax the hairy scrotums of trans women.

It is important to differentiate between biological sex and gender as a key plank of the trans ideology involves conflating the two. Sex is biological, whereas gender describes social and cultural behaviours. Biological sex is observable at birth while gender is something that is socialised and happens over time. So babies with male genitalia have XY chromosomes, and those with female genitalia have XX chromosomes. Biological sex is determined by birth genitalia and this corresponds 99.6% of the time to chromosome sex. That level of scientific validity is extremely high. Contrast that with the trans ideology that ‘sex is assigned at birth’, as if it is some random act of a blind midwife. Unfortunately the Ministry of Health and other government departments have taken up the ‘sex is assigned at birth’ linguistic hooey.

This trans activist at Melbourne International Women’s Day demonstration 2019 with a special message of hate for women who think the sex industry exploits

Here are more images from trans activists at the Melbourne International Women’s Day demonstration 2019:

The trans ideologues claim sex is a spectrum because some people are intersex. This, they say, proves that there are all sorts of sexes or genders. Intersex conditions are rare; they are usually still female or male, and most often are infertile. Just as other developmental anomalies occur such as limb deformities involving extra digits, there are deformities in sex, but this does not mean that sex is a spectrum. Furthermore, intersex people have complained about being used by the trans activists as intersex are not transgender. Their objections have been completely ignored.

Sexual reproduction was a path evolution took 1.2 billion years ago and it has remained dimorphic in that it has two distinct gametes. Sexual reproduction – in plant and animal species – entails two sexes, not a spectrum of sexes. Small gametes are male (sperm in humans) and large gametes are female (ova in humans). Sexual reproduction is simply the fusion of the nuclei of male and female gametes. If sex was a spectrum there would be a number of intermediate gametes. There are no intermediates. The development of sex characteristics are complex, but the end of the process is male or female in over 99 percent of people. *

Self ID is a gift to predatory males. Fill out a form and you are a woman. Why should females be forced to share intimate spaces against their will with males? If females want to get changed or shower without males, or sleep in rooms without males, that will no longer be enforceable. Should it become law women-only spaces would be made free access for any male who declares himself a woman. Violent offenders could be transferred to women’s prisons. It would further encourage biological males competing in women’s sports. In healthcare where it is vital to know the biological sex of the patient there will be wrong diagnoses, wrong treatments, and likely deaths. If this sounds far fetched consider blood transfusions where male and female blood is treated separately. Blood donations from females are used for products such as immune globulin, instead of being transfused directly to patients because of potential for antibodies from pregnancies, (including miscarriages – which are sometimes unknown). These antibodies can cause severe reactions, an acute lung injury, and sometimes death. Transgender people who conceal their biological sex in the healthcare setting are endangering themselves and others.

Transgender people have the right to live free from discrimination but the trans activists are undermining this. By demanding women give up women-only spaces and sex-based protections the trans activists’ campaign is far from progressive. The mess we now face, with a law change pending, is not just the fault of trans activists. They have been enabled by a chorus of woke-folk who have been schooled in post-modernist subjectivism.

The UK parliament has had 100,000 submissions on the Gender Recognition bill, many as a result of a mobilisation campaign by progressive women’s organisations. Supporters of women’s rights in New Zealand should sit up and take note.

Speak Up For Women is a campaigning group set up to defend the rights of women and girls, in opposition to the Government’s proposal that a person’s sex should be a question of choice, or self-identification, on birth certificates.

For more on the consequences of self ID read Renee Gerlich’s article published on the Canadian website Feminist Current.

……………………

*The trans ideologues like to bring up XY females who give birth as proof that a spectrum exists. These females may appear to be XY on karyotyping done with blood or saliva samples, however more sensitive tests show they usually have a patchwork of XY and XO cells and tissues. Their Y chromosome doesn’t have a functioning SRY gene (which triggers male sex development), and XO functionally directs the reproductive development, leading to female sex and anatomy. Similarly, some males are born with XX and develop as males due to the translocation of a tiny section of the sex determining region of the Y chromosome.See also

There is a major split in the LGBTQ community between the letter L and the letter T

A transwoman who raped a female in an horrific attack has been jailed for 15 years – but could still end up in a women’s prison

Three times Israel soldiers using JCB bulldozers have destroyed water tanks, toys and homes using the pretext that it is a military firing range

Herschel Grynszpan - who assassinated German Embassy official vom Rath

From 1933 to 1941 the Nazi policy towards the Jews was not extermination but expulsion. Today that is the unwritten but official policy of the Israeli state towards the Palestinians. According to the IHRA misdefinition of anti-Semitism such a comparison is anti-Semitic, even though it is true. That is one of the unique accomplishments of Zionism and its McCarthyist supporters. Something can be anti-Semitic even though it is true.

It was the expulsion of Jewish refugees from Germany to Poland, leaving them stranded in no mans land, cold and hungry, that caused the 17 year old Herschel Grynszpan to assassinateErnst vom Rathat the German Embassy in Paris on 7^th November 1938. Herschel’s parents had been amongst those stranded Jews.

Israeli soldiers and workmen get to work destroying Palestinian homes

The death of vom Rath on 9^th November was used by Hitler and Goebbels to launch Kristallnacht, a massive Nazi directed SA pogrom against Germany’s Jews. Hundreds of synagogues were burnt to the ground, nearly a hundred Jews were murdered and over 30,000 were placed in concentration camps.

Israel’s eviction of the Palestinian village of Humsa al-Baqai’a in the Jordan Valley is part of the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians from Area C of the West Bank. It is no different in principle to the Nazis’ expulsion of Germany's Jews who were also not considered nationals of Germany. 

Indeed it is worse in many ways. Hitler never pretended that Nazi Germany was a democracy.  He reviled democracy whereas Israel claims that it’s the ‘only democracy in the  Middle East’.

British and European Union supplies of equipment destroyed

Full marks therefore to Jon Snow of Channel 4, the only news journalist who has any ethics for the recent coverage of the demolition of Humsa.

Israel's military last week took delight in their third destruction of Humsa. Not content with bulldozing the tents that the European Union had given to the Palestinians you can see on the videohow one soldier empties the water tanks of the Palestinians. What kind of bestial mentality is it that would pour the water of communities who are water thirsty onto the ground?

A few of the belongings that have been saved from destruction

Jon Snow’s interview with a representative of the Israeli embassy, Ohad Zemet, was an uncomfortable one.  The number of lies that Zemet told is illustrative.

The first lie is that Israel acts in accordance with international law. That is such an egregious lie.  The Fourth Geneva Convention specifically forbids moving settlers into occupied territory. The occupier is also forbidden to transfer that population out of the  territories. Israel’s Supreme Court has ruledthat the Geneva Convention does not apply to Israel’s occupation.

The second lie is that Israel possesses an ‘independent judiciary’ the envy of the world.  It doesn’t.  Israel’s judicial system is an integral part of the Zionist system of control. It has consistently enforced laws designed to segregate and subdue Israel's Palestinians. It has consistently turned a blind eye to for example the 1950 Absentee Property Law which has been used and is still being used to confiscate land from Israeli Palestinians. It has never been used to confiscate land from Jews. The Supreme Court has also acceptedthe explicitly racist Jewish Nation State Law.

A view of the wreckage

The third lie is that the Bedouin had broken Israeli law and were squatters. The fact that these villagers have lived on this land for longer than the existence of the Israeli state gives the lie to this claim. Israeli law simply acts to legalise what is naked theft.  That is what Zionism is - land theft and ethnic cleansing.

In any case in a democratic society, civilians elect a government to pass the laws which govern them. The Palestinians have no vote and no say in the Israeli military law that governs them.  To therefore talk of breaking Israeli law is like talking of breaking the laws of the Nazi occupation. These laws have no democratic validity.

The fourth lie is that the Palestinians have defied zoning law and planning permission. In Area C virtually no Palestinians are granted planning permission and Israel has repeatedly demolished COVID isolation tents of the Palestinians to add to their racist crime of refusingto vaccinate Palestinians living under occupation, contrary to Article 56 of the Fourth Geneva Convention.

The fifth lie is a more subtle racist lie.  The Palestinians are being moved for their own safety because they are living on a firing range!  Unfortunately Jon Snow didn’t pick up on this. It is a regular device of the Israeli military to declare closed military zones on Palestinian, never Jewish settler, land precisely in order to have a pretext to evict them.  Usually, once the Palestinians have been evicted, the firing range becomes safe for the settlers.

A variation of this use of military firing zones is when the Israeli authorities forbid access to the said land.  After a year the Cultivation of Waste Land law kicks in. Uncultivated land reverts to the state after one year. And that just happens to be the Israeli state, Israeli state land is ‘Jewish national’ land, access to which is barred to Palestinians.

The tents, water tanks and equipment that the Israel’s Nazi-like troops destroyed with with a JCB bulldozer, were paid for by Britain and the European Union. Although it’s good to see Britain’s Consul General in Jerusalem protesting this act of destruction it would carry more weight if Britain and the EU were to impose penalties on Israel such as the withdrawal of Israel’s special trading status.  Coupled with an arms embargo.

Until Britain and the EU impose penalties on Israel then all their words of protest are meaningless hot air. The Zionist state listens to nothing except force because ethnic cleansers do not have any morality that civilised human beings recognise.

Of course Keir Starmer, the ‘Zionist without qualification’ has kept his mouth shut.  He neither sees, hears nor speaks any criticism of Israel. That the ‘left’ in the Labour Party – from the Campaign Group to Momentum – is too cowardly to call for the removal of this reactionary stiff is testimony to their uselessness.

Tony Greenstein

 The Real Concern of Oxford Students is that Loach has Fought All His Life Against the Privilege and Wealth that these Parasites Represent

One of the most basic and fundamental principles of any free and democratic society is a commitment to freedom of speech. Nowhere should that principle be held in higher regard than in universities and institutions of higher education.

You might have thought that Oxford University, the cradle of our future ruling class, would at the very least have tried to instill into their rich and pampered undergraduates a basic understanding of the ideas of academic freedom and the free exchange of ideas.

I was recently sent an articlein Oxford Student by a friend who has spent a lifetime fighting fascism. Like me he was disgusted at the way these young toffs have cynically exploited the charge of ‘anti-Semitism’ as a device for attacking Ken Loach, a man who throughout his life has been known for his support for marginalised groups in society like the homeless and poor. 

Loach is also well known for his opposition to colonialism and imperialism – be it in Ireland, Palestine or Nicaragua. And it is this that has aroused the ire of Oxford’s finest scoundrels.

What would the reactionary fops of Oxford’s colleges know of Cathy Come Home the November 1966 BBC play which Loach directed about homelessness? A play which made homelessness into a national issue and which led on one month later to the founding of Shelter the housing charity. A British Film Industry poll in 2000 rated Cathy Come Home as the second best British television programme ever made.

Why should it matter to these brats?  What would Oxford’s students and members of its notorious Bullingdon Club know about homelessness? Mummy and daddy are hardly likely to let their precocious offspring suffer the indignities of sleeping on the streets.

The family wealth of many Oxford students originated from the British Empire and its attendant evils such as slavery. The colleges that they are educated in were nourished by the blood of the Middle Passage. That they should take umbrage at someone like Loach is perfectly understandable. That they should trade on the memory of Jews who died in the holocaust in order to given expression to their class snobbery and contempt for ordinary people is an indication of their depravity.

St. Peter's College, Oxford

What the McCarthyite chorus of Zionists and other right-wing detritus objected to was an evening event in which the Master of St. Peter’s College, Professor Judith Buchanan, interviewed Loach, an alumnus of the college, on his film career.

It must be a source of annoyance to the entitled of Oxford University that Loach stands for everything that they hold in contempt. The working class and poor, to say nothing of the oppressed in Britain’s former colonies such as Palestine and South Africa, mean nothing to them. However these same students are apparently extremely agitated by the evils ‘anti-Semitism’ even if it does mean supporting Israel, the only apartheid state in the world.

Even more upsetting must be the fact that Loach’s glittering achievements are something that these strident representatives of Britain’s future ruling class can only aspire to.

Loach is the most distinguished British film maker alive [see herefor a ranking of his 37 films] His film Kes(1969) was voted the seventh greatest British film of the 20th centuryin a poll by the British Film Institute. Two of his films, The Wind That Shakes the Barley(2006) and I, Daniel Blake (2016), received the Palme d'Orat the Cannes Film Festival, making him one of only nine filmmakers to win the award twice. I Daniel Blake highlighted the suffering and indignities faced by claimants who attempt to claim benefits. Repeatedly Loach’s work has sparked national debates on issues of poverty and deprivation.

But according to Samuel Benjamin, the President of the Jewish (for which read Zionist) Society of Oxford (because no Jewish socialist worth their salt would join these bigots), the event came at the “expense of the welfare of Jewish students in Oxford.”

I know that Benjamin is British but nonetheless he seems to have a remarkably poor grasp of the English language. How can a discussion between Loach and a senior Oxford academic have any impact on the welfare of Oxford’s Zionist snowflakes? Do they quake in their boots at the thought that Loach’s ideas may make them question everything they’ve been brought up with? Such as the preposterous notion that Apartheid Israel is the ‘only democracy in the Middle East.’

Are we to seriously believe that a filmed interview with an 84 year old film director has had a debilitating effect on the welfare of Jewish students?  How? Are Jewish students at Oxford University such timid and sensitive creatures that they wilt at the very thought of someone whose opinions they disagree with being interviewed on campus?

The President of the Board of Deputies of British Jews Marie van der Zyl describedwhat was happening as being “entirely unacceptable”.  That an Oxford college “would not conduct its due diligence and allow Ken Loach to address students” rendered her apoplectic. The sheer arrogance of Zyl’s statement is breathtaking. Since when do academic and cultural events need the approval of the narrow minds of the Board of Deputies, which throughout its history has opposedJewish mobilisations against racism and fascism?

During the war the record of the Board was shameful. It actually opposed and sabotagedefforts at rescuing Jewish refugees from Nazi occupied Europe. It backed to the hilt the ardently pro-Zionist Labour Home Secretary Herbert Morrison in his adamant refusal to admit Jewish refugees from Nazi occupied Europe. [see Excuses! Excuses!: The Failure to Amend Britain’s Immigration Policy, 1942–1943, Lesley Clare Urbach, European Judaism, Vol. 50, No. 2 2017].

In the wake of the Allied Declaration of 17 December 1942 that the Nazis had embarked on exterminating Europe’s Jews, Dr Rabbi Schonfeld, Chairman of the Chief Rabbi’s Rescue Committee, formed a parliamentary group to lobby in support of the admission of Jewish refugees. The President of the Board, Selig Brodetsky, did his best to undermine Schonfeld’s efforts. Schonfeld described the

‘persistent attempt on the part of Brodetsky and some of his colleagues to sabotage the entire move… he and his collaborators asked members of the House to desist from supporting the new effort. .. To do nothing themselves and to prevent others from doing so is strange statesmanship.’

The results were predictable: ‘More than one M.P. has expressed a feeling of becoming wearied of trying to help the victims in the face of such sectarian Jewish opposition.’ [Jewish Chronicle 29.1.43] This was despite public opinion running 80% in favour of admitting Jewish refugees.

Jim Allen

Perdition – the real reason for the campaign against Ken Loach

What really irks the Zionists is the fact that in 1987 Ken Loach directed a play, Perdition, by socialist playwright Jim Allen that was based on a libel trial in Israel.  Rudolf Kasztner, the leader of Zionism in Hungary, sued a Malchiel Greenwald, who accused him of collaboration with the Nazis. The trial, between 1954 and 1958 didn’t go according to plan. Kasztner was found, in the wordsof  Judge Benjamin Halevi, to have ‘sold his soul to Satan.’ When accused of testifying at Nuremburg in favour of Himmler’s emissary in Hungary, SS Col. Becher Kasztner lied and was caught out.

It is this, the revelation of Zionism’s sordid record of collaboration and worse during the holocaust, when it acted as a Jewish Quisling movement, that led to the Zionist vendetta against Loach. It was, according to the Telegraph Ken Loach’s Perdition problem: the ‘anti-Semitic’ play that keeps coming back to haunt him that motivated Oxford’s young McCarthyites.

Perdition was based on Perfidy, a book by a Zionist American playwright Ben Hecht. When Kasztner came to Israel allegations began to be circulated that he had collaborated with Adolf Eichmann in the deportation to Auschwitz of 437,000 Hungarian Jews. 

What made the Hungarian holocaust so tragic was that it occurred in the last year of the war when Germany was reeling from the Russian advance in the East and was about to face the landing at Normandy. The Hungarian Jewish community was the last major Jewish community left in Europe and without the agreement between Kasztner and the Nazis. But for the collaboration of the Hungarian Judenrat and Kasztner’s ‘Rescue Committee’ far fewer Hungarian Jews would have died.

Kasztner reached an agreement with Eichmann. In return for the safe exit from Hungary of a train containing 1,684 people, the Jewish leadership of Hungary, most of whom were Zionists, Kasztner would cooperate and even help pacify the Jews who were to be deported, assuring them that they were starting a new life.

The allegations against Kasztner were made by Hungarian survivors of Auschwitz, people who had been tricked into getting on the trains but who had survived. There is no doubt that Kasztner was a collaborator. A recent book by the arch Zionist Paul Bogdanor, Kasztner’s Crime even alleges that Kasztner was a Gestapo agent.

The trial, which the Zionists don’t even mention today and which they have done their best to forget, led to the fall of the government of Moshe Sharrett in 1955. Benjamin Halevi upheld 3 of the 4 accusations of collaboration made against Kasztner.  In 1958 Israel’s Supreme Court cleared him by 4-1. However they did this on legal and political grounds whilst upholding the findings of the lower court. By this time Kasztner had been assassinated.

It was later revealed that Kasztner had not only testified in favour of Kurt Becher, whose job it was to extort  money out of rich Jews but he also testified at Nuremburg in support of Herman Krumey who had been Eichmann’s second in command, in charge of the mechanics of deportation.

Massive pressure was exerted against the Royal Court Upstairs, which was going to show the play, to cancel it. Max Stafford-Clarke, the Artistic Director, succumbed to the pressure. Ken Loach and Stafford-Clarke were never on speaking terms again. 

The Zionists waged a massive campaign to have the play banned and they succeeded in keeping it off the stage by threatening venues that they would lose their patronage and funding if they put it on.  Unfortunately for the Zionist lobby, instead of a few thousand people seeing the play millions of people became aware of the issues.

As Zionist historian  David Cesarani later said it was an own goal.

Was it worth all the fuss?... Had the play gone on it would have been seen by around 2,000 people…. We need to master the art of exposing and debunking, instead of instantly branding antagonists as anti-Semites… JC 3.7.17.

It’s a lesson that the Israeli funded Union of Jewish Students haven’t yet learnt. Trying to no platform your opponents on behalf of the Israeli state is not the best way to win an argument. It makes people suspicious that you are trying to silence alternative voices.

Even the Jewish Chronicle, which has been at the forefront of the fake ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign against the Labour Party, has recognised that the campaign to ban Ken Loach has been counter-productive.  In a leading article No Silencing last week they stated:

We might find Mr Loach’s views repellent but so long as he or anyone else is within the law when invited to speak, we have no right to demand that they be silenced.... it is worrying that some communal leaders cannot see how counter-productive it is for them to call for those with whom they disagree to be silenced.

The Board of Deputies, with all the prejudices of the Jewish petit bourgeois, are nothing if not stupid. They don’t have any perception as to how their actions might appear to others.  For years they have been arguing that the IHRA misdefinition of ‘anti-Semitism’ is not about banning speakers or threatening freedom of speech and then all of a sudden the Zionists try to ban Britain’s most distinguished film maker, Ken Loach, on the grounds that he is a holocaust denier.

Even that byword for dishonesty, the self-serving boor John Mann, the newly appointed Anti-Semitism Czar (could there be a more appropriate title?!!) felt it necessary to pen an article The IHRA definition should not be used to ban free speech - and that includes Ken Loach. What Oxford’s Zionists are doing is proving that everything we said about the IHRA is true and that its main purpose is to stifle free speech. The Oxford Zionists and the Board have proved that the IHRA has got nothing to do with fighting anti-Semitism and everything to do with suppressing the supporters of the Palestinians.

The Dishonesty of Oxford’s Zionist Students

The Oxford Student in its coverage simply assumesthat Ken Loach is anti-Semitic because the Zionist students says he is. I don’t know if any of these students have ever studied law, but one of the first things I was taught was that the British justice system rested on a presumption of innocence. Innocent until proven guilty. Ken Loach is entitled to be considered innocent of the charge of anti-Semitism until his detractors prove otherwise.

But such ideas are alien to Zionists.  After all they support a society, Israel, where if you are a Palestinian you are assumed to be guilty. Dissidents are subject to administrative detention without trial on the say so of a bureaucrat or military official.

The Zionist Jewish Society at St Peters complained that being they were being asked to substantiate their allegations that Ken Loach was anti-Semitic. They complained that this “put the burden of proving Loach’s antisemitism onto Jewish Peterites.” Well yes it did! Or are they saying we should adopt the Israeli system that they love so much whereby you are guilty by virtue of being Arab?

These juvenile McCarthyites complained that St Peters had not taken ‘any concrete steps to minimise the hurt that his invitation would inevitably cause.” They explainedthat a

‘free and open academic community’ is mutually exclusive with the platforming of individuals whose bigoted views cause active harm to others on account of their protected characteristics.”

In other words the defenders of Apartheid Israel should get to decide who they could censor. 

I sent a letterto Oxford Student responding to their article.  Now you would have thought that if the editors of the student paper had any confidence in the views they were printing then they would welcome debate. Sadly no. Just as Oxford’s Zionist students hate the idea that they have to prove that Ken Loach is anti-Semitic so the Oxford Student prefers not to have to justify their slanted coverage. Born of a sense of entitlement, they consider the fact that they call someone anti-Semitic should be sufficient proof in itself.

Clearly the editors of Oxford Student are in training for jobs on the Tory tabloids or Telegraph (or these days the Guardian) because I never heard a word back. Clearly those who run the rag believe that journalism and propaganda are just two sides of the same coin. The articlequoted an unnamed Zionist that

“Ken Loach is a political artist with anti-Semitic viewpoints, and his association with holocaust denial is particularly harmful and inexcusable”.

Now what does he mean by association mean? A weasel word that reflects that old McCarthyite principle, Guilt by Association. This is what the paper of Oxford’s racist students stands for.

As Ed Murrow, the famous CBS broadcaster said at the height of McCarthyism in 1954:

We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We must remember always that accusation is not proof and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law. We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason…

But what is the truth about the allegations that Loach is anti-Semitic? Loach has made his views extremely clear. For anyone to suggest that he has even a scintilla of sympathy for holocaust deniers, most of whom wouldn’t even exist but for the way that Zionism has weaponised the holocaust, demonstrates the fundamental dishonesty that lies at the heart of Zionism and their dessicated supporters. On 5th October 2017, in a letterto the Guardian Loach made his position extremely clear. Responding to a typically dishonest article from MI5’s man at the Guardian, Jonathan Freedland, Loach wrote:

That is pretty clear. Yet this quotation didn’t appear once in the Oxford Student or the other student paper Cherwell. My suggestion is to write and let the Editor of Oxford Student know what you feel about his racist rag at editor@oxfordstudent.com.

This spurious controversy was sparked by an interview with Loach in respect of a fringe meeting at the 2017 Labour Party conference which the interviewer falsely alleged that there had been a discussion about the holocaust and whether it had happened.  This is a complete lie.  I was there.  I spoke.  No such remarks were made.  One of the speakers, an Israeli Jew Miko Peled said everything should be discussed including the holocaust ‘yes or no’.  That was it. A standard free speech defence.

In the interview Loach said that

“History is for all of us to discuss. All history is our common heritage to discuss and analyse. The founding of the State of Israel, for example, based on ethnic cleansing, is there for us to discuss… So don’t try to subvert that by false stories of antisemitism.”

The late Raul Hilberg, the greatest of the holocaust historians, said that we should listen even to holocaust deniers because they may point out flaws in our own thinking.  The Zionists didn’t like Hilberg too!  Perhaps he was also a holocaust denier?

Given Loach’s clear statements how then can St Peters JCR, the Oxford Student, the Board et al. still maintain that he has an ‘association with Holocaust denial’ whatever that means? And more to the point why do they do they lie as a matter of course? 

The reason is simple. In their efforts to defend Zionism and the Israeli state, the supporters of Zionism have no option but to lie. It is their only means of defending a state that gives vaccines to Jewish citizens whilst denying it to Palestinians.  In other words, far from opposing racism Oxford Student and the various Oxford JCR’s are active collaborators in supporting Israeli apartheid.

The IHRA

The President of the Zionist society issued a statement writingthat ‘Loach has made remarks that are antisemitic under the definition, which was recently adopted by the University of Oxford.” This is the crux of the matter. Ken Loach has offended against the IHRA.

The fact that the allegations against Ken Loach were false has not stopped other Oxford’s Junior Common Rooms (a legacy from public school) passing motions condemning St Peters for not banning Loach. When I was a student we were vigilant to ensure that the administration didn’t ban meetings with which they disagreed. These privileged prats are to the right of their college administrations.

Today’s Oxford students are reminiscent of their European counterparts pre-1939.  The phenomenon of right-wing nationalist students was common to both Germany and Poland.  In Poland there were ghetto benches for Jewish students.  Whilst not suggesting that these are about to make an appearance at Oxford the clear racism and contempt for freedom of speech of Oxford Students is ominous.

There were a number of articlesin Oxford’s other student newspaper Cherwell. Apparently Wadham College had a meeting on 9th February to decide whether or not to condemn St. Peters College and its master Professor Judith Buchanan for not no platforming Ken Loach. When I was a student we no platformed fascists not anti-fascists!

When I was once invited to speak to the University of Sussex AGM in support of no platform for fascists – who opposed it?  The Union of Jewish Students on the ground that since we called them racists we might ban them! So we have a situation where the Union of Jewish Students opposes no platform for genuine holocaust deniers but for supporters of the Palestinians they operate a policy of No Platform!

Loach’s major crime according to Cherwell is that he claimed that a rise in antisemitism in Europe following Israel’s operation in Gaza was “perfectly understandable because Israel feeds feelings of anti-Semitism“. Well it is understandable.  Israel carries out its massacres in the name of all Jews worldwide and some people believe them and then attack Jews. That is what the Zionist Community Security Trust said in its 2014 Incidents Report which foundthat:

The single biggest contributing factor to the record number of antisemitic incidents recorded in 2014 was antisemitic reactions in the UK to the conflict in Israel and Gaza

Speaking the truth is also apparently anti-Semitic! The attack on Loach has produced an immediate response from groups such as Artists for Palestine. In a short statement Artists stand with Ken Loach and against McCarthyism figures such as Brian Eno, Roger Waters and Caryl Churchill wrote that:

“We are deeply troubled to learn of a McCarthyite campaign demanding Oxford University cancel a public event with director Ken Loach discussing his distinguished career in film. The campaign to silence a world-renowned artist, which has been active behind the scenes and which became public at the last minute, is using the controversial IHRA definition of antisemitism to try to prevent a cultural event from taking place. If any further evidence were needed to demonstrate how a vaguely worded definition is being deployed to silence critics of Israeli policy towards Palestinians — then this is it. We have been warned by respected Palestinian academics, Israeli scholars, leading experts on antisemitism, dozens of progressive Jewish groups, and others that this definition is being used as a political weapon. We cannot fight racism, including antisemitism, by demonising and silencing supporters of Palestinian rights.”

The IHRA definition is not a definition of anti-Semitism. As Sir Stephen Sedley, a Jewish former Court of Appeal judge said, it is open ended. The IHRA is 500+ words. What kind of definition is that?  Oxford’s racist students should club together and buy a copy of the Oxford English Dictionary where anti-Semitism is definedin just 6 words:  ‘hostility to or prejudice against Jews.’

Sedley wrote, in Defining Anti-Semitism, that:

Shorn of philosophical and political refinements, anti-Semitism is hostility towards Jews as Jews. Where it manifests itself in discriminatory acts or inflammatory speech it is generally illegal, lying beyond the bounds of freedom of speech and of action. By contrast, criticism (and equally defence) of Israel or of Zionism is not only generally lawful: it is affirmatively protected by law. Endeavours to conflate the two by characterising everything other than anodyne criticism of Israel as anti-Semitic are not new. What is new is the adoption by the UK government (and the Labour Party) of a definition of anti-Semitism which endorses the conflation

The IHRAconsists of a meaningless 38 word definition that leaves more questions than answers.

“Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.”

The IHRA has more holes than a second hand dartboard. If anti-Semitism is a ‘certain perception’ of Jews then what is that perception?  If it ‘may be expressed as hatred towards Jews’ what else may it be expressed as?  Why the inclusion of non-Jews in a definition of anti-Semitism at all and why is there mention of Jewish   community institutions? 

Contrary to popular misconception, the 11 attached illustrations of ‘anti-Semitism’ are not part of the definition. 7 of them concern Israel. The most notorious is the 7^th illustration:

Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.

So if you accuse Israel of racism for only arresting and torturing Palestinian children then you are anti-Semitic! If you accuse Israel of racism for reserving 93% of its land for Jews, then it is you who is a racist! What this means is that Israel’s crimes are to be visited on the heads of all Jews, ie that all Jews are responsible for Israel’s crimes.

Ironically the final illustration says that ‘Holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel.’ is anti-Semitic. So according to the 11^th illustration the 7^thillustration is anti-Semitic! The IHRA is not only an attempt to paint Palestine solidarity as anti-Semitic but it is ridden with internal contradictions.

The IHRA definition has been around, in one guise or another, since 2005. The definition has been slated by academics and jurists such as Brian Klug, David Feldman, Antony Lerman, Hugh Tomlinson QC, Geoffrey Bindman QC, and Geoffrey Robertson QC. Even the original drafter of the IHRA, Kenneth S. Stern doesn’t have a good word to say for it. In the Guardian he wrotethat the IHRA:

' was never intended to be a campus hate speech code, but that’s what Donald Trump’s executive order accomplished this week. This order is an attack on academic freedom and free speech, and will harm not only pro-Palestinian advocates, but also Jewish students and faculty, and the academy itself.'

In his testimony to the US Congress Stern spoke of how

'The definition was not drafted, and was never intended, as a tool to target or chill speech on a college campus. In fact, at a conference in 2010 about the impact of the definition, I highlighted this misuse, and the damage it could do.’

Professor David Feldman, an arch Zionist, describedthe IHRA as ‘bewilderingly imprecise’. Geoffrey Robertson QC saidthat it was ‘not fit for purpose’. But when it comes to the cream of Oxford’s racist students, the IHRA fits the bill.

Perhaps the last word should be with Avi Shlaim, Emeritus Professor of International Affairs at St Anthony’s college, Oxford (where I have previously spoken!) and an exiled Israeli.  Shlaim statedthat Loach is “completely innocent” and that “the attack on him is an attack on freedom of expression which has no place in an academic institution”.

Oxford students in their disregard for academic freedom are worthy successors to the Nazi students who in May 1933 demonstrated their loyalty to the regime by burning books.  Oxford students have metaphorically tried to burn Ken Loach. They should recall what Heinrich Hein said. Those who burn books will end up burning people.

Oxford’s Real Racism

What is most striking about the concerns of Oxford students is their hypocrisy. If they were really motivated by opposition to racism then the statue of Cecil Rhodes, a white supremacist and imperialist, standing outside Oriel College, should surely be of more concern? Rhodes’ statue is a living symbol of White Supremacy.  It is a permanent reminder to Oxford’s Black students of their place in society. Rhodes was of the belief that:

"I contend that we are the first race in the world, and that the more of the world we inhabit the better it is for the human race. Just fancy those parts that are at present inhabited by the most despicable specimen of human being,

Apart from slaughtering thousands of Africans in Mashonaland as part of the colonisation of what became Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) Rhodes was responsible for the enactmentof the Glen Grey Act 1884.

Through the adoption of the Act, Rhodes managed to gradually persuade Parliament to abandon Britain’s priceless nineteenth-century ideal that in principle all persons, irrespective of colour, were equal before the law.

The act raised the property qualification for voting thus excluding most Africans from the franchise. However if you read the account of Rhodes life on the Oriel College website, then you read a quite different account:

Rhodes was a pragmatic politician. His treatment of educated or powerful Africans, whose support he needed, could be cordial, and he financed a newspaper for a largely black readership.’

There is no mention of apartheid in this apologia for White Supremacy. If Oxford students were seriously concerned about racism then they would campaign night and day to remove Rhodes’ statue. 

The reason they do nothing is that their concerns have nothing to do with opposition to racism, anti-Semitism included. By supporting the weaponisation of anti-Semitism via the IHRA what they are really doing is declaring their support for Zionism and a Jewish Supremacist state.  In this they are little different from the National Front and BNP who used to assert that anti-fascism was anti-White racism.

What the Oxford Student doesn’t mention is that the IHRA is supported by anti-Semitic governments such as in Poland and Hungary. Its biggest supporter was Donald Trump, who combined Zionism and anti-Semitismin equal measure.

The students of Oxford who rushed to ‘defend’ Oxford’s Zionist snowflakes were not doing so because they opposed anti-Semitism but because they believe that Zionist settlers in Palestine have an entitlement to displace the indigenous Palestinians. When they support the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism they are supporting a ‘Jewish’ State which openly declaresthat Israel is a state of the Jewish people, not a state of its own citizens.

Oxford students have however proved indifferent when it comes to anti-Semites and members of the far-Right appearing at the Oxford Union. When Tommy Robinson came to speakthe 250 demonstrators outside included very few students and I suspect no Zionist students.  After all Tommy Robinson is an avowed supporterof Zionism and the State of Israel!

There was one thing however that Oxford’s Zionists did get right, albeit unwittingly, when they said that:

Loach has been acclaimed for the political impact of his films, praising his films inevitably praises his politics.

And it is true. Ken Loach’s political impact has been enormous. And that is what the Zionists and Oxford’s reactionary students really despise.

Tony Greenstein

Below is the pathetic motion passed at the St Peters College JCR.  As you can see it is entirely based on the IHRA. It continually asserts that Ken Loach is anti-Semitic without once attempting to prove it, other than by reference to the IHRA. A circular argument if ever there was one.

The JCR notes that:

1. Ken Loach has a history of blatant antisemitism. Per the IHRA definition of antisemitism, Loach has repeatedly made comments which:

a. Allude to‘…the myth about a world Jewish conspiracy or of Jews controlling the media, economy, government or other societal institutions’

b. ‘Accus[e] the Jews as a people, or Israel as a state, of inventing or exaggerating the Holocaust.’

c. ‘…[claim] that the State of Israel is a racist endeavour’

d.‘[draw] comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis’

2. The leadership of St Peter’s College, when meeting Jewish students concerned about the impact of the platforming of someone with such abhorrent views:

a. Claimed to be unaware of Loach’s past comments, despite their being widely reported in the media and widely accessible online

b. Sought to downplay the prospect of Loach’s invitation being actively harmful to the college community, suggesting that the event featuring him would ‘set aside’ the controversy

c. Asked Jewish Peterites not to view College as a place hostile to  Jewish students since this would result in more discomfort

d. Pushed Jewish Peterites to explain why downplaying the Holocaust is ‘always’ unequivocally antisemitic

e. Put the burden of proving Loach’s antisemitism onto Jewish Peterites when this is a matter of record, not opinion

f. Suggested that St Peter’s did not have a problem with antisemitism on account of the previous Master being Jewish g. Refused to disinvite Loach lest a PR fallout occur

h. Refused to commit to taking any concrete steps to minimise the hurt that his invitation would inevitably cause.

3. The leadership of St Peter’s College issued a statement on social media on Monday afternoon which:

a. Failed to apologise for the entirely avoidable distress caused to Jewish students by its mishandling of this issue

b. Sought to excuse Loach’s antisemitism by pointing out that he had been invited to College many times before

c. Failed to outline any steps which could be taken to avoid similar situations occurring in the future

4. Scores of British Jewish organisations have condemned St Peter’s College for its invitation of Ken Loach, its failure to engage with Jewish students and its refusal to apologise, including but not limited to the Board of Deputies of British Jews, the Union of Jewish Students and Oxford University JSoc

5. St Peter’s College, unlike many other colleges, failed to mark Holocaust Remembrance Day this year.

This JCR believes that:

l. St Peter’s College failed in its duty of care to Jewish students in inviting a known apologist for antisemitism without prior student consultation.

2. The College’s failure to apologise for its insensitive and ignorant handling of Jewish students’ concerns caused even more harm to Jewish students who were left feeling antagonised and unwelcome

3. The Master’s and College’s statements to students and the public added fuel to the fire

4. It is impossible to separate Ken Loach’s filmmaking from his views, including his offensive history of antisemitic remarks

5. St Peter’s College has failed to live by its commitment to ‘stand against all forms of discrimination’

6. A ‘free and open academic community’ is mutually exclusive with the platforming of individuals whose bigoted views cause active harm to others on account of their protected characteristics.

This JCR:

1. Urges all students to boycott this event so as not to lend credence and authority to the views of a noted antisemite, and to prevent their further dissemination

2. Condemns in the strongest terms the College leadership’s decision to go ahead with this event, disregarding the concerns and welfare of Jewish students in favour of preventing a ‘PR disaster’

3. Deplores in the strongest terms the College’s and Master’s inconsiderate and insensitive response to such concerns, noting that such a response caused even greater suffering

4. Offers its most sincere apologies on behalf of the College to all Jewish students, whether Peterites or not, and to anyone whom the College leadership’s ineptitude has caused distress and pain

5. Pledges its active support to all Jewish students who have been let down by St Peter’s and by the University, and 6. Stands in solidarity with Jewish students at St Peter’s and in Oxford in the face of endemic antisemitism more broadly.

 It is no coincidence that as soon as Oxford and Bristol Universities Adopted the IHRA that the Zionists Came for Ken Loach and David Miller

Last Saturday the newly formed Labour Campaign for Free Speech held its inaugural conference.  Among the invited speakers was Professor David Miller of Bristol University.

David was one of a number of speakers including Chris Williamson, the former Labour MP, Norman Finkelstein and Ronnie Kasrils, the Jewish former ANC Minister.

Quite understandably the Israel/Zionist lobby in this country were perturbed by the event. Targeting free speech has become a key priority for them. It is, after all, the only means of defending Apartheid Israel. Their chosen instrument being the IHRA misdefinition of anti-Semitism.

The IHRA

Bristol University in adopting the IHRA recently has all but invited the attack on David Miller. The IHRA is a definition whose sole purpose has become closing down free speech on Palestine and Zionism. It has absolutely nothing to do with anti-Semitism as has been traditionally understood.  Indeed it is arguable that the definition itself is anti-Semitic because on the one hand its illustrations say that ‘Holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel’ is anti-Semitic and on the other hand it also speaks of Israel as ‘a Jewish collectivity’ and says that ‘Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination’ is anti-Semitic.

Clearly if Israel is a Jewish collectivity and the expression of Jews’ right to self-determination then it cannot possibly be anti-Semitic to hold them responsible for its actions. Would anyone say that it was racist to hold British people who supported the Iraq War responsible for the actions of the British army?

This is why some of the biggest supporters of the IHRA are anti-Semites. Donald Trump, who combined White Supremacism, anti-Semitism and ardent Zionism in equal measures, appliedthe IHRA through Executive Order. As Vanity Fair observed

Prior to being elected, Trump seemed to suggestto a room full of Jews that they buy off politicians; tweeted an image of Hillary Clinton’s face atop a pile of cash next to the Star of David and the phrase, “Most Corrupt Candidate Ever!”; and released an ad featuring the faces of powerful Jewish people with a voiceover about them being part of a “global power structure” that has “robbed our working class” and “stripped our country of its wealth.” After moving into the White House, and just a few short months following his assertion that he is the least anti-Semitic person to walk the earth, Trump refusedto condemn neo-Nazis and, just last August, accusedAmerican Jews of being “disloyal” to Israel by voting for Democrats.

This was before saying that Jews “don’t love Israel enough” after which he dived straight into a stereotype about how Jews loved money and power.  Trump is not alone. Viktor Orban, the Prime Minister of Hungary is also a supporter of the IHRA. The same Orban who wagedan anti-Semitic election campaign in 2017 against the ‘globalist’ George Soros and who considers Hungary’s pro-Nazi leader Admiral Horthy, who presided over the deportation of Hungary’s Jews to Auschwitz as an ‘exceptional statesman’.

The IHRA has been heavily criticised by a host of academics and jurists such as Geoffrey Robertson QC, the noted human rights barrister, who termed it‘unfit for purpose’.  Even its author, Kenneth Stern, statedin testimony to Congress that the way the IHRA was being used, through its use in Title VI cases could ‘only help to chill, if not suppress, their political speech’.

Stern singled out for attention a particularly ‘egregious’case in which the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism had called for the dismissal of another Bristol University lecturer, Rachel Gould (who is Jewish) for having writtenan article ‘beyond anti-Semitism’ in which she looked at the way the holocaust was being used by Israel’s supporters to defend its repressive occupation of the West Bank.

David Miller’s Real ‘Crimes’

What then were the heinous ‘crimes’ of David Miller that caused the combined weight of Britain’s Zionist groups to call for his dismissal? Perhaps David praised the Nazis or told us how the Protocols of the Elder of Zion were true?  Or maybe he used his 10 minute speech to expound on the finer points of the International Jewish Conspiracy Theory? Well accordingto the President of the Board, Marie van der Zyl, Miller’s speech “would not look out of place on the pages of Der Sturmer”, a Nazi tabloid.

According to the Jewish Chronicle‘Bristol University professor calls for 'end' of Zionism as ‘functioning ideology of the world'. The Jewish News reported that ‘Action urged over Bristol academic who called to ‘end Zionism as an ideology’. In other words his ‘crimes’ were political.

David Miller was also accused of attacking Jewish students because he criticised Bristol J-Soc which has been waging a campaign of harassment against him for two years and the Union of Jewish Students nationally. Did he advocate boycotting Jewish students on campus?  Or attacking them physically? Perhaps he advocated the measures that Poland took pre-1939 when Jewish students were confined to ‘ghetto benches’ i.e. separated from non-Jewish students?

If so then I would be the first to call for David’s dismissal. But what did he actually say?  According to the Jewish Chronicle his offence was to say that

“The ‘Jewish student groups’ […] are political lobby groups overseen by the Union of Jewish Students, which is constitutionally bound to promoting Israel.

“There is a real question of abuse here — of Jewish students on British campuses being used as political pawns by a violent, racist foreign regime engaged in ethnic cleansing.

“The UJS’ lobbying for Israel is a threat to the safety of Arab and Muslim students as well as of Jewish students and indeed of all critics of Israel.”

Like me you might be slightly puzzled at the combined Zionist attacks on David Miller. Try as I might I can’t find anything in the least anti-Semitic in what he said. David talks about UJS, which is funded by the Israeli state being a

‘threat to the safety of Arab and Muslim students as well as of Jewish students and indeed of all critics of Israel.”

It is a strange anti-Semite who is concerned about the safety of Jewish students! David Miller is absolutely correct. The Constitutionof UJS states under ‘Objects’ paragraph 2.1.1.

Creating meaningful Jewish campus experiences and inspiring Jewish students to make an enduring commitment to their Jewish identity, Israel, and the community.

UJS is affiliated to the World Zionist Organisation which is responsible for the apartheid structures of the Israeli state including its settlement expansion. Ha’aretz, a liberal Zionist newspaper, spoke of its land theft division writing that

It’s time to investigate, and then shut down, this quasi-governmental agency, which steals both state and private Palestinian lands to realize its sacred goal of settlement construction

This is the racist body responsible for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians yet the Union of Jewish Students are affiliated to it. 

The truth is that Jewish students who are anti-Zionists or non-Zionists wouldn’t go within a mile of the average J-Soc. Indeed they would not be eligible to join.

David Miller called for an end to Zionism.  So do many Jews. There is nothing anti-Semitic in this.  Zionism is a political movement and ideology. The first Zionists weren’t even Jewish but Christian anti-Semites such as Lord Shaftesbury and Arthur Balfour who saw in Zionism a means to be rid of their unwanted Jews. Shaftesbury opposedJewish Emancipation holding that if Jews wanted to stand for office they should do so in their own state.  Balfour introduced Britain’s first immigration law the Aliens Act in 1905 in order that Britain could turn away Jewish refugees from Czarist Russia.

Jews and Zionism

The overwhelming reaction of Jews to the early Zionist movement was one of unremitting hostility. It was only the actions of Hitler and the holocaust that caused a majority of Jews to become Zionist. 

As Isaac Deutscher, the biographer of Leon Trotsky, wrotein ‘The Non-Jewish Jew and Other Essays’

 ‘to the Jewish workers anti-Semitism seemed to triumph in Zionism, which recognised the legitimacy and the validity of the old cry ‘Jews get out!' The Zionists were agreeing to get out.’

Similarly the bourgeois anti-Zionist, Lucien Wolf, Secretary of the Conjoint Foreign Committee of the Board explained regarding the Zionist belief that Jews belonged in their own stated that:

I have spent most of my life in combating these very doctrines, when presented to me in the form of anti-Semitism, and I can only regard them as the more dangerous when they come to me in the guise of Zionism. They constitute a capitulation to our enemies.’

To most Jews pre-Hitler Zionism was a form of Jewish anti-Semitism.

Can there be any more blatant attack on free speech than the calls to dismiss David Miller? What would happen if there was a call to dismiss a reactionary academic who called for the end of Communism?  The Tories would explode in indignation. Gavin Williamson would pontificate about freedom of speech but when it comes to Zionism this advocate of ‘free speech’ remains curiously silent.

The only possible justification for the attacks on David Miller as anti-Semitic is that Zionism is the equivalent of being Jewish. In other words it is assumed that but for a handful of ‘Jewish self-haters’ and the ‘wrong sort’ of Jews, all Jews are Zionists.

The conflation of being Jewish and Zionist is an anti-Semitic canard or trope in the language of the Zionists. Those who argue that being Jewish and Zionist are one and the same are arguing that Jews are therefore responsible for the actions of Israel, a state whose ideology is Zionism. Ironically it is that which is anti-Semitic.

David Miller’s criticism of UJS is wholly warranted. UJS is a Zionist not a Jewish organisation or more precisely a Zionist Jewish organisation.  In the words of Liron Velleman, UJS’s Campaign Organiser

We are a proud Zionist organisation, supporting Jewish students to develop their own personal relationship with Israel and embolden them to feel comfortable discussing it on campus. 

What does Zionism mean in practice?  Well B’Tselem, the largest Israeli human rights organisation has recentlymade its position crystal clear.  Israel is a Jewish Supremacist Apartheid Society.

If you have any doubt about this then watch these 2 videos.  One from the Palestinian solidarity group Makan and another is what happened when an Israeli Arab citizens had a picnic on the West Bank.  Not only did a group of settlers tell them they were not allowed there, because they weren’t Jewish, but when the Israeli army was called, the soldiers enforced the wishes of the settlers. No one from the army has been punished for this and no one will be punished because racism against Palestinians and Arabs is part of Israel’s DNA.

This is Zionism and this is what UJS supports and this what the calls for the dismissal of David Miller are about. Let us be absolutely clear that those who are calling for the sacking of David Miller are calling for an end to academic freedom in Britain and for the policing of speech by academics and students.

The Community Security Trust and Islamaphobia

That Zionist groups such as the Community Security Trust, whose remit is allegedly the safety of the Jewish community, are calling for the dismissal of Miller demonstrates that all these Zionist organisations are singing from the same hymn sheet.

The CST protests that at David Miller’s claim that parts of the Zionist movement are Islamaphobic is anti-Semitic. Can there be any doubt that Israel is viciously anti-Muslim? There are a plethora of pro-Zionist organisations that are also Islamaphobic such as the Gatestone Instituteand the Henry Jackson Society. No better example of this phenomenon was there than Donald Trump himself.

Zionism and the Far-Right

Who can forget the flyingof an Israeli flag outside Capitol Hill on January 6^th alongside the Confederate flag and an assorted group of neo-Nazis and White Supremacists? Our own fascist groups such as the EDL flythe Israeli flag at demonstrations. Tommy Robinson and his Football Lads Alliance have worked closely with a group of far-Right Zionists led by Jonathan Hoffman, a former vice chair of the Zionist Federation without any criticism from the Board. That darling of the far-Right, Katie Hopkins, was a guestat an Israeli Embassy dinner and had her picture taken with the Ambassador Mark Regev.

The Shameful Response of Bristol University

What is disappointing is the utter failure of the Bristol University to defend Professor Miller. The University has saidthey “do not endorse the comments made by Professor David Miller about our Jewish students”. Where is the defence of academic freedom?

Their commentto the Jewish Chronicle that ‘We are speaking to JSoc, Bristol SU and UCU about how we can address students’ concerns swiftly, ensuring that we also protect the rights of our staff.’ is disgraceful. Nothing Miller said is in the least a threat to Jewish students and to imply otherwise is a betray of the legal duty of mutual trust and confidence which underlies every employment relationship.

Chris Williamson has written an excellent letter to Professor Hugh Brady, the Vice-Chancellor of Bristol University.  I can only suggest that you also write to Bradey at:

The University of Bristol,

Beacon House,

Queens Road

Bristol BS8 1QU

email him at vc-epa@bristol.ac.uk

Other people at  Bristol University to email are:

Prof Sarah Purdy     Pro VC (Student Experience)          pvc-studentexperience@bristol.ac.uk

Prof. Tansy Jessop   Pro VC (Education)                         pvc-education@bristol.ac.uk

Mr Jack Boyer          Chair, Board of Trustees                 governance@bristol.ac.uk

Dr Moira Hamlin      Vice-Chair, Board of Trustees         governance@bristol.ac.uk

Judith Squires          Provost                                             provost@bristol.ac.uk

Jane Bridgwater       Director of Legal Services               jane.bridgwater@bristol.ac.uk

Prof. Simon TormeyDean, Faculty of Social Sciences    wp19124@bristol.ac.uk

                                 and Law

Perhaps the most disgusting response of all comes from the scab ‘Labour’ MP Thangam Debonair @thangamMP who has condemned what she calls the ‘appalling behaviour’ of David Miller for exercising his right to freedom of speech. You have to wonder. Do these New Labour MPs have any principles? Does Thangam, Bristol Mayor  Marvin Rees and all the other Labour racists have no commitment to the most basic principles of a democratic society?  Wherein the principles of John Stuart Mill and Voltaire?

Let us be clear of one things.

We will not allow Bristol University to make Professor David Miller a sacrificial victim on the altar of Zionism.  If Thangam.

Please Sign and Share the Petition Supporting David Miller. There are already 2 Zionist petitions up calling for his dismissal.

David Miller is not the first Bristol University lecturer to have been targeted by the Zionists – the last time it was a Jewish Professor, Rachel Gould

Below is a letter that I have written to Bristol University’s Vice-Chancellor, Hugh Brady, with copies to other senior administrators.  Please consider writing yourself because you can be sure that if there is one thing that the Zionists are good at it is getting a letter campaign together.

Also if you are Jewish please sign this letterand everyone please sign this petition. At the moment the Zionists have more than twice as many signatories.

Professor Hugh Brady,

Vice-Chancellor,

The University of Bristol,

Beacon House,

Queens Road

Bristol BS8 1QU

Email to:          vc-epa@bristol.ac.uk 

Dear Professor Brady,

For the past 2 years Professor David Miller has been subjected to a relentless campaign of vilification by Zionist groups, both on and off campus. In the past week, following his speech at a conference of the Labour Campaign for Free Speech, these attacks have reached a crescendo.

The mob attack on David has been led by those well known anti-racist papers, the Daily Mail and the Jewish Chronicle.

A whole gaggle of Zionist groups have joined in the hue and cry including the Board of Deputies, whose Constitutionmandates it to ‘Take such appropriate action as lies within its power to advance Israel's security, welfare and standing.’

Another group in hot pursuit of David is the far-Right IslamaphobicCampaign Against Anti-Semitism.

Such is the Board of Deputies’s devotion to Israel that it even justifiedIsrael’s use of snipers against unarmed Palestinian demonstrators killing 300 people including 50 children as well as a number of medics.

What was David Miller’s ‘crime’? He called for an end to Zionism. As someone who is Jewish I join him in this call, as do many Jews. There is nothing anti-Semitic in such a call.

Zionism is a political not an ethnic or religious creed. Would it seriously be suggested that someone who calls for an end to socialism, fascism or capitalism be dismissed?

David also pointed out that Jewish student societies are in reality Zionist societies. The Union of Jewish Students, which is the umbrella organisation for all 67 J-Socs in Britain, receives funding from the Israeli Embassy, as Al Jazeera’s The Lobby revealed.

UJS is also affiliated to the World Zionist Organisation, which according to Ha'aretzhas a ‘land theft division’. The people whose land it steals are Palestinians.

One of UJS’s ‘core values’ is “engagement with Israel’,which they‘passionately and proudly’boast of. Among its Objectsis “inspiring students to making an enduring commitment” to Israel.’

No anti-Zionist or anti-racist Jewish student would go within a mile of UJS or their affiliated societies.

In the light of the vicious attacks on David Miller by both the media and pro-Israel groups, the least he is entitled to expect is that Bristol University’s will stand by him and defend free speech.

Yet what has been the response of Bristol’s Administration to date? Have you defended David Miller’s right to speak out on Zionism and Israel without intimidation?  No. Instead you have offered to meet David’s student protagonists to discuss the ‘upset’ to them.

Bristol is not located in Israel where people have to be careful what they say.  A state where Palestinian poet Dareen Tatour was gaoled for writing a poem calling for resistance. 

If, 40 years ago, a Bristol University lecturer had called for an end to Apartheid in South Africa and had condemned the attacks on anti-Apartheid activists by supporters of Apartheid on campus, would you have rushed to reassure the racists of your support? That is exactly what you have done to date.

On 12 January 2021 Israel’s most respected human rights organisation B’Tselem, declared that Israel was ‘A regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea’ The refusalof Israel to vaccinate 5 million Palestinians whilst inoculating Jewish settlers living in their midst should settle this debate.

As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated:

“Israel is not a state of all its citizens. According to the basic nationality law we passed, Israel is the nation state of the Jewish people – and only it.

Sir Stephen Sedley, a former Lord Justice of Appeal, who is himself Jewish, explainedthat s.43 of the 1986 Education Act places a duty on Bristol to ‘take such steps as are reasonably practicable to ensure that freedom of speech within the law is secured for members, students and employees.’ 

I was one of the organisers of the Free Speechconferenceat which David Miller spoke. Speaking alongside him was noted American intellectual Norman Finkelstein and Ronnie Kasrils, a Minister in Nelson Mandela’s government. Both of them are Jewish.

Trump exhibits his signing of an Executive Order enabling use of the IHRA in Title VI cases - anti-Semites have no objection to the IHRA since it's not about anti-Semitism

The reason why the Board of Deputies and the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism have felt emboldened to call for the sacking of academics is because you recently adopted the IHRA misdefinition of anti-Semitism. As Stephen Sedley observed, the IHRA isn’t even a definition, being open ended. Why wasn’t the OED definition of anti-Semitism: ‘hostility to or prejudice against Jews.’ sufficient? 

The IHRA contains 11 illustrations of ‘anti-Semitism’, 7 of which are about Israel. Israel is not a Jew and anti-Semitism is not anti-Zionism. Your decision to bow to Zionist pressure previously has led directly to the current attacks on David Miller.

Islamaphobia and Zionism

The organisations  which have been fronting the current attack on David Miller have particularly objected to his linking of Zionist organisations and Islamaphobia. Israel itself is vehemently anti- Muslim. Israel’s liberal Ha'aretz, wroteabout how:

‘The rising tide of Islamophobia across the world… provides a backdrop for the hatred of Arabs in present-day Israel. Earlier this month, Channel 8 broadcast the first episode of Ron Cahlili’s documentary series, “Hate,” about the growing loathing for Arabs in Israel. Cahlili shows how the call “Death to the Arabs” moved from the margins to become a ubiquitous ideology that has infiltrated the Israeli mainstream.

Not only have the organisations calling for Professor Miller to be sacked covered for Israel’s Islamaphobia (a pluralityof Israeli Jews support the physical expulsion of Israeli Palestinians) but one of the most prominent, the CAAhas a long record of inciting racial hatred of Muslims.

In April 2016 the CAA produced a Report British Muslims and Anti-Semitism. Its Introduction spoke of the

‘growing antisemitism amongst British Muslims. On every single count, British Muslims were more likely by far than the general British population to hold deeply antisemitic views. It is clear that many British Muslims reserve a special hatred for British Jews, rating Jews much less favourably than people of other religions or no religion... It has long been suspected that sections of the British Muslim population harboured hatred towards British Jews... the prejudice is horrifyingly widespread.’

On the cover of the Report was a picture of a Black person holding a ‘Hitler was right’ poster. Not content with portraying Muslims as genocidal anti-Semites the CAA also included a profile of a typical Muslim male accompanied by the caption ‘Sympathetic to terrorism, extremism and violence.’ If ‘Jew’ had been substituted for ‘Muslim’ then who could have doubted that this image was anti-Semitic ?

4 years ago another Bristol University academic, Rachel Gould, who was herself Jewish, was subject to a similar campaign to that against David Miller. Dr Gould’s offence had been to write an article ‘Beyond Anti-Semitism’ which described how the memory of the holocaust was being used to deflect criticism of Israel’s racist policies.

The CAA wroteto you demanding that Dr Gould ‘should be required… to publicly retract her article.’ If however she refused to do so then ‘she should be dismissed, and her dismissal should be made public so as to clearly signal the University of Bristol’s values.’ These are the people you are currently appeasing.

Kenneth Stern, an American academic who was the main author of the IHRA, declared in testimonyto the US Congress that the CAA’s behaviour was ‘egregious’ and that ‘the exercise itself was chilling and McCarthy-like.’ Instead of sending the CAA away with a flea in their ear Bristol University then conducted an inquiry into this bogus complaint putting Dr Gould under enormous stress. It is little wonder that she departed for Birmingham University soon after.

None of this stopped Sir Eric Pickles, a Cabinet member from describing Gould’s article as ‘one of the worst cases of Holocaust denial”.  A claim Bristol Live called‘ridiculous and inflammatory.’

The CAA has waged similar campaigns against a host of academics, most of them Jewish. Richard Falk, an American emeritus professor at Princeton University and UN Special Rapporteur for the Palestinian territories was also subject to the CAA’s attentions. The CAA boastedthat

‘following intervention by Campaign Against Antisemitism, the university (Middlesex) has now decided to cancel the event.’ This development comes hours after the University of East London took action to stop another event at which Falk was due to speak.’

Emeritus Professor Moshe Machover of King’s College was also a victim of the CAA’s McCarthyisn. Machover was falsely accused of having ‘accused Jewish students of being under the control of the Israeli embassy’. A similar accusation to that against David Miller.

The CAA’s letter to to Queen Mary College could have been written by Joe McCarthy. They wrote

‘to ascertain why Professor Machover was allowed to speak and lodge a complaint, and have additionally written to King’s College London and the London School of Economics to ascertain his employment status, and request that disciplinary proceedings be instigated.’

The chutzpah (impudence) of an external organisation demanding to know why a distinguished professor was allowed to speak at a university is illustrative of the contempt of Zionist organisations for free speech. You Professor Grady have only encouraged them.

On no occasion have the gaggle of Zionist organisations currently targeting David Miller dissociated themselves from the CAA’s tactics.

Marie van der Zyl, President of the Board of Deputies, in her letter to Bristol University saidof Professor Miller that his ‘rants would not look out of place on the pages of Der Sturmer’, a Nazi tabloid.’

Anyone with any acquaintance with Julius Streicher’s rabidly anti-Semitic pornographic paper would know what a malicious smear this is. Yet instead of terminating the correspondence Bristol University has encouraged this type of rancid complaint, statingthat:

“We have received a significant number of calls for Professor David Miller to be dismissed.

“UK law requires that we, like all employers, act in accordance with our internal procedures and the ACAS code of conduct.’

UK employment law does not oblige any employer, least of all a university, to entertain malicious complaints about their employees. This statement is disingenuous.

Mark Gardener of the CST, a Zionist organisation with links to Israel’s Mossad, which collects information on Jewish anti-Zionists (they sent me a file of over 300 pages as a result of a Subject Access Request) accusedProfessor Miller of a ‘vile slur’ for accusing Zionist organisations of Islamaphobia. Yet this isn’t the first time that the CST has been accusedof Islamaphobia.

Another of the organisations accused of Islamaphobia is the Jewish National Fund. The JNF, which owns and controls 93% of Israeli land, refuses to rent or lease this land to non-Jews. It operates solely for the benefit of the ‘Jewish people’. Gideon Levy of Ha'aretz describedhow Avraham Duvdevani  Chair of the JNF, prevented a Jew having to sell land to an Arab by getting the JNF to buy the land. Thus keeping it for the Jewish people. The CST considers this policy of ‘Jewish land’ perfectly acceptable.

The Board of Deputies which is leading the attack on Miller is riddled with Islamaphobia and anti-Arab racists. Roslyn Pine, a deputy for Finchley United Synagogue, sharedtweets describing Muslims as “the vilest of animals” calling Arabs “so evil”. Although she was suspended for 6 years by the Board she was later quietly readmitted.

The Jewish Chronicle describedhow Robert Festenstein appeared alongside Tommy Robinson ‘in a politically motivated video made for a right-wing media website.’ Festenstein was introduced by Robinson as ‘a legal adviser’. The Board didn’t even bother to call Festenstein, the Deputy for Prestwich synagogue, to account because it knew that once it set out on this road it would have few members left.

None of this should be of any surprise. The Constitution of the Board mandates it to‘Take such appropriate action as lies within its power to advance Israel's security, welfare and standing.’ Not once has it condemned Israeli war crimes such as the practice of imprisoning Palestinian children as young as 12 or demolishing Palestinian homes. Even Tory Minister James Cleverly condemned the demolition of Humsa Al-Baqai’a, a village which housed 73 people, including 41 children, who are now homeless.

Using the English Language Correctly

I am sure you will be aware, as a senior academic, of how important it is to use the English language correctly. When someone is accused of anti-Semitism then this is a term that should be used accurately and not used to defend the abuse of Palestinian human rights. Anti-Semitism is about hatred, hostility and discrimination against Jews as Jews not hatred or opposition to Zionism.

When Zionist students at Bristol University say they feel ‘unsafe’ because of a speech made by Professor Miller at a conference that none of them even attended, what they are doing is using the English language as a weapon of deceit. Perhaps these snowflakes should spend a few days on the West Bank where they might come to appreciate exactly what the word ‘unsafe’ really means.  Since the Administration of Bristol University is too timid to enlighten them perhaps I might give you an indication of what this word means:

·                unsafe is not knowing when your house is going to be bulldozed

·                unsafe is not knowing if your child will return from the shops because he/she may become a victim of an Israeli sniper

·                unsafe is not knowing if you are going to be arrested everyday for just being of a different ethnicity

·                unsafe is not knowing if you'll have any water today because the tank may get riddled with bullets

·                unsafe is when you have to pay a $20,000 fine for a bulldozer that has destroyed your village. This practice originated with the Nazis. Jews who were deported to Auschwitz had to pay the cost of the trains that took them to their deaths.

·         unsafe is when in order to get to your class at Bir Zeit university you have to negotiate army checkpoints at any of which you could be harassed and delayed.

·         unsafe is not knowing what has happened to your 12 year old child after he had been arrested in the early hours of the morning, blindfolded with painful plastic handcuffs put on him, deprived of food and water for hours and then subject to violence by armed soldiers.

·         Unsafe is not knowing whether your girl, who has been taken by the Israeli military will be one of those 40% of girls subject to sexual abuse.

An Israeli flag flies along with Confederate flags amid a sea of neo-Nazi proud boys. Most fascist groups today see Israel as a model Islamaphobic state

Members of Bristol J-Soc don’t know the meaning of the word ‘unsafe’ and neither it would appear do you. Below is the descriptionof one such arrest by Amnesty International (a group describedby Donald Trump as ‘anti-Semitic’).

At about 2am on 24 October, a dozen Israeli police, armed with machine guns, came to arrest Bakr Sa'id, a 15 year old boy, at his home in Kufar Kana. Four armed police officers went to where Bakr Sa'id was sleeping and arrested the boy. Bakr Sa'id was reportedly interrogated for several hours in the early morning by three interrogators in civilian clothes who shouted and threatened him. Later in the day he was brought to court, but his father was not allowed to speak to him. Another detainee in court said he saw a police officer slap Bakr Sa'id in the face.

A Report for UNICEF on the treatment of Palestinian Children in Israeli Military Detention describes a standard interrogation of children, who are not allowed access to lawyers or their parents.

The interrogation mixes intimidation, threats and physical violence, with the clear purpose of forcing the child to confess. Children are restrained during the interrogation, in some cases to the chair they are sitting on. This sometimes continues for extended periods of time, resulting in pain to their hands, back and legs. Children have been threatened with death, physical violence, solitary confinement and sexual assault, against themselves or a family member.

Of course such treatment would not be meted out to Jewish children. This is why Israel is an Apartheid police state for Palestinians.

Your students’ description of themselves as ‘unsafe’ should be treated with contempt. The only question is whether you have the honesty and integrity to call out these false accusations against Professor Miller for the lies that they are. Academic freedom is something that people have given their lives for in other countries. Do you have the courage to stand up to these orchestrated smears against a member of staff or are you going to appease these apologists for Israeli war crimes?

Yours sincerely,

Tony Greenstein

cc.                     

Prof Sarah Purdy,    Pro Vice Chancellor Student Experience, pvc-studentexperience@bristol.ac.uk        

Prof. Tansy Jessop, pvc-education@bristol.ac.uk, Pro Vice Chancellor Student Education

Mr Jack Boyer, Chair, Board of Trustees, governance@bristol.ac.uk

Dr Moira Hamlin, Vice-Chair, Board of Trustees, governance@bristol.ac.uk

Judith Squires, Provost,                                      provost@bristol.ac.uk

Jane Bridgwater, Director of Legal Services     jane.bridgwater@bristol.ac.uk

Prof. Simon Tormey, Dean, Faculty of Social Sciences and Law wp19124@bristol.ac.uk

 Momentum/Arise Zoom Rallies and Warm Words are No Substitute for Collective Organisation and a Joint Left Strategy

Register hereto join the conference 

https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZclcOmgrzotHNazrRgZlai8FBsp73Bf9Mrl

To Connect with the Facebook Group click here

The decision of Starmer’s Regional Mafia to bar the 3 women on the shortlist for Liverpool Mayor should be the final straw for socialists in the Labour Party. From now on it is or should be all out war. Of course no reason has been given for their decision but no reason needs to be given. Their clear offence is that they were socialists.

In Ann Rothery's case her crime was being a Black socialist.  To Labour's racist leader this is in itself a crime.  The only acceptable Black people to this Zionist 'without qualification'are the David Lammy's of this world.

Labour In Exile Network was formed in the wake of Jeremy Corbyn’s suspension and the ensuing suspension of officers of the Labour Party who had the temerity to allow their parties to discuss such mundane matters as whether Starmer was out of his reactionary mind to suspend his predecessor.

LIEN has receivedconsiderable publicity in its call for an explanation from Starmer as to why he employedan Israeli spy, Assaf Kaplan, as a member of his staff, with the remit to snoop on members. LIEN has threatened, given the wholesale suspensions and expulsions, to simply reprintits own Labour Party cards. We have also made it clear that we will only canvass for and support those opposed to the present witch-hunt and attack on Labour Party democracy.

If you remember Starmer campaigned, not as the right-wing nonentity that he is but as Continuity Corbyn. He was the unity candidate which was why he didn’t disclose the donation of £50,000 from Sir Trevor Chinn, who has given his largesse to both Labour Friends of Israel and the Conservative Friend of Israel.

I sometimes despair at what I call the Stupid Left – Momentum and their fellow travellers. I don’t have a crystal ball or any unique foresight.  On February 4^th, two months before Starmer’s coronation, I wrote Keir Starmer is the candidate that the Deep State & the British Establishment want you to vote for.

I wrote this on the basis of Starmer's illiberal record over the previous decade as Director of Public Prosecution. He prosecuted Julian Assange, was hostile to victims of rape where the man was acquitted, overseeing their prosecution for making it up, he covered for killer policemen. To say nothing of his being the only MP was was a member of the Trilateral Commission.

Starmer's record since becoming leader is even worse. On COVID-19 he has supported Johnson throughout.  He has even refused to call for the dismissal of Matt Hancock, the hapless Health Secretary, after the High Court found his behaviour in awarding contracts to his friends and cronies was unlawful. His support for the Spy Cops Bill should repel anyone but a Zionist or utter reactionary

Today even the most stupid member of Momentum realises that Starmer is a liar. A Tony Blair minus the charisma. Unfortunately Momentum and the LRC/CLPD have not come up with one single idea to fight back against the most vicious anti-left witchhunt in the Labour Party’s history. Hence their refusal to call for the removal of Starmer and Rayne, his useless deputy.

The idea behind the LIEN is simple. It is to form a non-geographical CLP along the lines of the non-geographical International CLP. We aim to keep expelled and suspended socialists together.

It is clear that Starmer’s project, gutting Labour of its socialists and ending its reliance on trade unions, is destined to end in failure.  In the wordsof the inestimable Rachel of Swindon, Starmer’s

Sir Keith finds his natural home

mind-boggling inability to lead a once-great party is ensuring a generation of Conservative rule. Let’s be honest here folks, Starmer is a fucking disaster for the Labour Party, and a credit to the Conservative Party.

The Corbyn Project attracted hundreds of thousands of people to the idea that a better world was possible.  They were betrayed by people like Jon Lansman and John McDonnell who thought they could trim their sails to the wind and bow to the ruling class ‘anti-Semitism’ attack that was launched against Corbyn and his supporters.

The time to organise is now overdue.  Although Momentum claims to have 20,000 members it is like the Titanic.  It is unable to turn round in time.  We can be more nimble.

One immediate test will be in Liverpool. Liverpool is the most class conscious city in Britain.  Not unsurprisingly that is where I spent most of my childhood (I don’t claim any causal link between the two!).  If Anna Rothery were to decide to stand, as people are urging, then it could indeed pose a mortal challenge to Starmer’s hold over the Labour Party.

Liverpool was the place where there were giant rallies for Corbyn. If the Campaign Group and Jeremy Corbyn were to declare their support for Anna Rothery then she could quite easily deliver a body blow to Starmer’s leadership.

If you are not doing anything on Saturday, or even if you are doing something, come to our conference.

Click here to register for the Conference

We will  be having a range of speakers including Graham Bash, Tosh MacDonald, Chris Knight, Leah Levane, Jackie Walker and Roger Silverman.

We will be discussing a Plan for Change. The agendais here

Looking forward to seeing everybody

Tony Greenstein

Israel is not just a Jewish Supremacist State but a White Supremacist State

First printed in MR Online

From time to time I carry guest articles and the article below is by Gavin Lewis, a freelance Black-British mixed-race writer and academic. His article is about how Israel not only oppresses Palestinian people but Black Jewish people too.

However we have to be careful. It is always easy, as people have done in the past, to slip into thinking that the oppression of Palestinians can be subsumed under the Black-White paradigm.  

Historically the Oriental/Misrahi Jews from the Arab countries and North Africa have been discriminated against. Horrendously so. At one time they formed a group called the Black Panthers after their American namesake and were involved in riots and demonstrations. They were famously called 'not nice people' by Golda Meir, the racist  Israeli Labor Prime Minister who once said of the Palestinians that 

“It was not as if there was a Palestinian people in Palestine and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist.” (Sunday Times, June 1969) 

[See When Israel’s Black Panthers found common cause with Palestinians, Jaclynn Ashly, Electronic Intifada, 7.3.19.]

The Oriental/Arab Jews became the poor white trash of Israel. They were oppressed by White Ashkenazi Jews but in turn they oppressed Israel's Palestinians.

Indeed the base of support for Menachem Begin, the first Likud Prime Minister came from these Jews.  They were more racist than their European counterparts. The same is true of today's Ethiopian Jews. They are without doubt subject to severe discrimination.  However they have no sympathy with the Palestinians.  Their goal is equality with the Western Jews.

Two years ago I wrote an article for Al Jazeera Online, Why Israel is a Jewish, not a white supremacist state in response to an article by Yoav Litvin which spoke of the ‘Zionist fallacy of Jewish Supremacy.’ Except that it is no fallacy. As the recent B’Tselem Report on ApartheidIsrael makes clear

The Israeli regime enacts in all the territory it controls (Israeli sovereign territory, East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip) an apartheid regime. One organizing principle lies at the base of a wide array of Israeli policies: advancing and perpetuating the supremacy of one group – Jews – over another – Palestinians.

Israel is, first and foremost, a state of Jewish Supremacy but that is not to ignore the oppression of its Arab and Black Jewish citizens or in the case of a group of Ugandan Black Jews, they are not even allowed to become citizens of Israel because they are Black.

Gavin also touches on the festering scandal of the theft of thousands of babies from mainly Yemenite parents. There have been 3 government commissions of inquiry.  All of them a whitewash. Babies were sold for $5000 a piece to Jews in the United States or given to Ashkenazi Israelis. 

Evidence given to the Knesset Special Committee on the Disappearance of Children from Yemen, the East and the Balkans by researcher Eli Lipstein is that they were subject to medical experiments and then buried.  

“Until a few weeks old, they [the Yemenite children] were treated as biological waste.” 

Blood samples of Yemenite Jews was tested to find out if they had 'Negro blood'. [Times of Israel, 16.6.17.]

These babies weren’t considered Jewish. 

This was in the early years of the Israeli state.  It was run, not by Likud but the ‘socialists’ of the Israeli Labor Party. In reality the Labour Zionists were wedded to the racist theories of social Darwinism and the survival of the fittest.  Arab Jews were only tolerated because Israel need a working class.  However there was a systematic campaign of de-Arabisation.

This is a very welcome article from Gavin Lewis.

Tony Greenstein

A racist endeavor: Zionist Israel’s Black Jewish victims of color

Gavin Lewis

In the face of postwar condemnation of Western conquest and apartheid domination of countries such as Rhodesia and South Africa, as well as a more recent global tide of Black Lives Matter consciousness, Israel has, via recent Western political media’s ideological reengineering, escaped scrutiny for its systemic racist colonial construction, even when its victims are Jewish people of color. Even when reports of its racism escape this ideological censorship, examples of racism in Israel are treated as isolated incidents, rather than systemic characteristics of the entire racist regime.

In 2015, African-American Jewish mother Idit Malka and her young son attempted to visit Israel as part of an extended family celebration. According to the Jewish news agency Mondoweiss, 

“Malka was not even able to make it out of Ben-Gurion Airport. She and her 10-year-old child were, upon arrival, promptly detained in a holding cell for close to 48 hours.”¹

Both Mondoweissand the Jerusalem Postreported that, before being deported, an Israeli woman official screamed at Malka that “Eretz Yisrael isn’t a country for cushim [a racist Hebrew slur for Black people]”²

In the period prior to her visit, Malka had come to believe that, as a Black Jew, she was also permitted to regard Israel as a homeland. What she believes now as a Black woman having experienced Israeli racism is open to speculation. However, had she actually succeeded in going on to spend protracted time in the country, and perhaps experienced its ongoing practices, it might have caused her to rigorously revise her opinion.

Israel has subjected Black Jews to forced contraceptive injections. In 2013, Haaretz and the Times of Israelput the figure of suppressed Black Jewish reproduction at 50 percent.³ That is, even according to Israel’s own media at the time, over 130,000 Black Jews have had, as a matter of institutional practice, their potential reproduction forcibly curbed by up to half.⁴ Invoking the horrors of Nazi practices and illuminating the reality of modern-day eugenics, even Forbes magazine described it as “forced (if temporary) sterilization.”⁵

In 2009, Israel’s Ynetnews revealed that there were Israeli neighborhoods operating whites-only housing polices—designed specifically to keep out Black Ethiopian Jews—citing the town of Ashkelon as an example.⁶ The irony of white Western settlers keeping Black Jews out of the town is that, prior to the Nakba, Ashkelon had a ten-thousand-strong Indigenous Arab population. In 2012, Israel’s Jerusalem Post was still citing whites-only housing practices. One resident in the city of Kiryat Malachi was cited by the news outlet as supporting the racist practice, proclaiming that “a good Ethiopian is an Ethiopian in a grave.”⁷

In 2017, the Daily Beast reported that Tel Aviv was racially segregating its kindergartens to keep Black and white toddlers apart.⁸ In 2018, Israel’s Haaretz further confirmed this segregation of children.⁹ Similarly, for years, Israel has rejected so-called Black blood donations as “unclean,” which on occasion has caused race riots.¹⁰ In 2013, the Times of Israel reported that this restriction was even imposed on the blood donations of the unusually prominent Ethiopian Jewish politician Pnina Tamanu Shata.¹¹

In 2016, the U.S. San Francisco Bay View National Black Newspaper reported that 

“over three hundred Black Jews have announced their intention to refuse any military order to report for reserve duty, accusing the Israeli government of state-sponsored racism against citizens of Ethiopian origin.”¹²

This widespread attitude was hardly surprising given the climate and consciousness around race in the country. For example, in 2015, numerous news agencies, including Ynetnews, the Times of Israel, and the Jerusalem Post, reported a police attack on an Ethiopian Jew doing his national service, who was even in his Israeli Defense Forces uniform at the time of the assault. Hundreds protested when it was announced that police would escape prosecution.¹³

One of the marketed excuses for Israel’s colonial conquest of Palestine is that the Jewish white Western invaders supposedly shared an identity with Indigenous Jews of the region. Yet, in terms of colonial racism, Jewish white settlers conquering Palestine clearly regarded themselves as an elevated, superior, separate Western ethnic group, because among their first victims were actually Indigenous Middle Eastern Jews. In 2017, it came to light that a large number of children who had been brought up by settler parents were actually Yemeni-Jewish. Blood tests demonstrated that they had been stolen from Yemeni parents who had been regarded as too culturally primitive to successfully rear their own children.

As the Jewish news organization Mondoweissrevealed:

Known as the Yemenite Children Affair, in the first decade after the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, there was a systematic kidnapping of newborn Yemenite children, carried out by Israeli hospitals and government institutions. Mothers, who often were in Israel for a short time and did not speak Hebrew, would enter hospitals or other state facilities to give birth. Once the child was born medical staff told the parents the child died.… The babies who went missing, parents claim, were given away to childless Ashkenazi families (Jews of European descent–the dominant ethnic group in Israel at the time).¹⁴

However, as Mondoweiss further pointed out, the complete extent of settler crimes against the Indigenous Yemeni Jews also included eugenics-like human experimentation: 

“a Knesset committee followed up by confirming earlier this month that Yemenite babies died during the 1950s after state medical institutions conducted experiments on them.”¹⁵

The BBC refused to publicize this major scandal, but the un-broadcast “The Yemenite Children Affair” story can still be found buried on its website. In it, its reports confirm that “there are healthy babies who died from an experimental treatment. It’s a crime, it was on purpose, and it led to their death.”¹⁶

The BBC’s hidden un-broadcast report also concedes, as part of Israel’s overall strategy, that 

“post-mortem examinations were carried out on children, who were then buried in mass graves in violation of Jewish tradition, the special Knesset committee on the disappearance of children heard. In some cases the children’s hearts were removed for US doctors, who were studying why there was almost no heart disease in Yemen.”¹⁷

Obviously, human experimentation, like the forced sterilization of Black Jews, is reminiscent of Nazi policies. Strategically, this inescapable comparison is something Israel forcibly tries—most often through the imposed International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition—to suppress via the false ideological characterization of this analysis as anti-Semitic; in effect, deliberately exempting Israel from scrutiny for Nazi-type offences. This, regardless of the fact, that those who actually fought the Nazis vowed to be ever-vigilant about scrutinizing the potential reoccurrence of such fascist practices, wherever they may arise.

There is little space in this article to deal with religious persecution in Israel. But it is worth reporting that during the 2012–13 soccer season, the Russian owner of Beitar Jerusalem football club signed two young Chechen Muslim strikers. Because of their religion, they were routinely described as “dirty Arabs,” which in itself says a lot about the status and treatment of Indigenous Arabs in apartheid Israel. Literally thousands of Israelis drove the athletes out of the club and country in a campaign of intimidation and occasional violence, depicted in the 2016 documentary Forever Pure.

Clearly, Israel is not, as it chooses to market itself, simply a Jewish nation, but a white-settler state that happens to be Jewish, well deserving of the prefix apartheid attached to its name by many, including the United Nations and other human rights observers such as Nobel Peace Prize-winners Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Jimmy Carter. The horrors listed here have all been perpetrated against Black and Indigenous Jewish people of color, including visitors to the country. However, in scale and number, these practices are outsized by the equivalently racist, lethal, tortuous, and entrenched racism against the Indigenous Palestinians. Sadly, if even “Other” Jews can be victims of Israel’s racist oppression, nothing spares Palestinians.

The global cover-up of Israel’s systemic racist oppression has had enormous ramifications for domestic Western democracy. In 2020, Keir Starmer, the new neoliberal leader of the UK Labour Party, sacked his shadow education spokeswomen Rebecca Long Bailey. Long Bailey’s crime was that, after the killing of George Floyd, she retweeted a British corporate media story referring to how Israel had trained U.S. police departments responsible for Black Lives Matter offenses. Astonishingly, Starmer spun this as an anti-Semitic Jewish conspiracy theory. Despite the numerous available mainstream sources citing these police training events, no corporate media news outlet, including the one that ran the original story, contradicted Starmer.

Incredibly, after images of George Floyd being fatally choked were published, Starmer’s first instinct was to use the African American’s death to propagandize for an apartheid country—where many non-tourist areas would likely have been dangerous for Floyd and his family, and entire towns in which the Floyd family would have struggled to so much as rent a decent room. Perhaps part of Starmer’s motivation was the $62,000 donation he received from a pro-Israel lobbyist, revealed by the Electronic Intifada this year. Significantly, during the leadership election, Starmer refused to come clean about his campaign funding.¹⁸ In 2016, the UK government and corporate media warned the LGBTQ+ community about potential dangers of visiting North Carolina. Indicative of the second-class racial status of Black Britons, neither Starmer nor other members of the elite professional political and media class have warned them of the potential worst-case scenarios of visiting non-tourist areas of Israel.

Similarly, in the United States, CNN fired African-American academic Dr. Marc Lamont Hill as a contributor after he publicly expressed support for Palestinians. Why should Lamont Hill, as a Black man, say positive things about white-settler colonialism, particularly a white-settler society responsible for the sort of practices listed here? Dr. Lamont Hill has U.S. citizenship, a U.S. passport, and the right to vote. Yet, apparently, he is “only” an African American. Even in the middle of the Black Lives Matter movement, the entire U.S. media establishment finds it appropriate to take the side of what is, fundamentally, merely a foreign country, over an African American’s free speech right to articulate an antiracist sensibility. Clearly, Israeli Zionism is a racist threat, the influence of which is not restricted to just its own invented borders.

Afterword: Israel and White-Settler Societies

The evils that accompany and result from white-settler conquest should have by now been dumped into the rubbish bin of history. Many on the political right, and even the political center, pretend that the ramifications of colonial holocausts and land theft are no longer with us. Despite this, structural inequalities remain the current lived experiences of many. If you were a Black family in a Western society in the twentieth-century postwar era, you would have found that much of the United States was out of bounds to you because of segregation. As recently as 1967, if you were a mixed-race family, around seventeen states—more than a third of the United States—was off-limits because of anti-miscegenation laws (for decades after, mixed-race relations were still rarely permitted to be represented in U.S. popular media). White Australian and white New Zealand immigration policies were designed specifically to keep out the British Black Commonwealth and other Black nationals. Similarly, Rhodesia and apartheid South Africa were no place for Black people, be they arriving immigrant visitors or Indigenous Africans.

Yet, in twenty-first-century, in the form of Israel, Black and Indigenous peoples of the world are expected to put up with variants of these traditional white-settler offenses. And, alarmingly, even parts of the left are threatened into exempting Zionism from the sort of critique and anticolonial resistance leveled against other white-settler societies.

Notes

1.     ↩ Ben Norton, “Israel Detains and Deports American Jews Because They Are Black,” Mondoweiss, July 15, 2015.

2.     ↩ Norton, “Israel Detains and Deports American Jews Because They Are Black”; David Brinn, “Two American Jews Held for Two Days at Ben-Gurion, Denied Entry to Israel,” Jerusalem Post, July 13, 2015.

3.     ↩ Talila Nesher, “Israel Admits Ethiopian Women Were Given Birth Control Shots,” Haaretz, January 26, 2013; Asher Zeiger, “Ethiopian Women Claim Israel Forced Them to Use Birth Control Before Letting Them Immigrate,” Times of Israel, December 9, 2012. See also Nick Chiles, “Israel Admits ‘Shameful’ Birth Control Drug Injected in Unaware Ethiopian Jews,” Atlanta Black Star, January 29, 2013; “Israel’s Black Immigrants Forced to Use Birth Control,” Our Weekly, February 19, 2015; Jacqui Deevoy, “Israel Admits Forcing Birth Control On Ethiopian Jews,” NewsPunch, February 16, 2015; Katie McDonough, “Israel Admits Ethiopian Jewish Immigrants Were Given Birth Control Shots,” Salon, January 29, 2013.

4.     ↩ Some sources make differing claims about the size of the demographic, however, in 2015, the BBC listed the demographic as 130,000 (Yossi Mekelberg, “The Plight of Ethiopian Jews in Israel,” BBC, May 24, 2015). By 2019, the Economistwas using a figure of 150,000—presumably the effect of the lifting the contraception policy (“The Killing of a Black Jew Sparks Protests in Israel,” Economist, July 11, 2019).

5.     ↩ Elise Knutsen, “Israel Forcibly Injected African Immigrants with Birth Control, Report Claims,” Forbes, January 28, 2013.

6.     ↩ Shmulik Hadad, “‘Ethiopian Tenants? Out of the Question,’” Ynetnews, February 13, 2009.

7.     ↩“Report: Kiryat Malachi Neighborhood Bans Ethiopians,” Jerusalem Post, January 3, 2012.

8.     ↩ Lisa Goldman, “Israel’s Most Liberal City Introduces Racially Segregated Kindergartens,” Daily Beast, July 11, 2017.

9.     ↩ Orly Vilnai, “I Refused to Believe Tel Aviv Has Segregated Preschools – Until I Visited One,” Haaretz, January 21, 2018.

10.                        ↩ Serge Schmemann, “Ethiopian in Israeli Riot Over Dumping of Donated Blood,” New York Times, January 29, 1996.

11.                        ↩ Stuart Winer, “Uproar as Ethiopia-Born MK Denied Chance to Give Blood,” Times of Israel, December 11, 2013.

12.                        ↩ David Sheen, “Hundreds of Black Jews Refuse Army Service, Charge Israel with Institutional Racism,” San Francisco Bay View National Black Newspaper, December 9, 2016.

13.                        ↩ Noam (Dabul) Dvir and Omri Efraim, “Clashes and Arrests at Ethiopian Anti-Racism Protest,” Ynetnews, June 22, 2015; Stuart Winer and Marissa Newman, “Cop Who Beat Ethiopian-Israeli Soldier Won’t Be Tried,” Times of Israel, June 14, 2015; Ben Hartman, “Video: Violence Breaks Out as Israeli-Ethiopians Continue Anti-Racism Protests in Tel Aviv,” Jerusalem Post, June 22, 2015.

14.                        ↩ Shiraz Grinbaum and Yotam Ronen, “Thousands in Jerusalem Protest Abduction of Yemenite Babies Following Disclosure Some Were Experimented on,” Mondoweiss, June 26, 2017.

15.                        ↩ Grinbaum and Ronen, “Thousands in Jerusalem Protest Abduction of Yemenite Babies Following Disclosure Some Were Experimented on.”

16.                        ↩ Yolande Knell, “Missing Babies: Israel’s Yemenite Children Affair,” BBC, June 20, 2017.

17.                        ↩ Knell, “Missing Babies.”

18.  ↩ Asa Winstanley, “Israel Lobby Slaughters Corbyn Again,” Electronic Intifada, October 30, 2020.

About Gavin Lewis

Gavin Lewis is a freelance Black-British mixed-race writer and academic. He has published in Australia, Britain, Canada, and the United States on film, media, politics, cultural theory, race, and representation. He has taught critical theory and film and cultural studies at a number of British universities.

 The BBC Rejected My Complaint of Bias – They Pointed to 4 Examples Where They Had Mentioned Israel's Refusal!

Please Sign the Petition to the BBC

The BBC’s pro-Israel/Zionist bias is well known. However its gushing commentary on Israel’s rollout of COVID vaccinations exceeds all its previous crimes of omission and commission.

Last Saturday I was listening to BBC News 24 when it became apparent that the BBC was broadcasting a lengthy segment on how wonderful Israel’s vaccination programme was.

Not once was there any mention of the fact that not only were Palestinians in the West Bank not being vaccinated but that they had stoppedvaccinating refugees and asylum seekers in South Tel Aviv in addition to the sparse vaccination of Israeli Palestinians, in particular the Bedouin who live in largely ‘unrecognised villages’ in the Negev.

Israel is now agreeing to vaccinate Palestinians who work in Israel or the West Bank settlements. But this is because of the need to protect Israeli Jews not because of any concern for the Palestinians.

Israel is now exportingtheir surplus vaccines as diplomatic rewards. This is seen as more important than fulfilling their obligations under the Fourth Geneva Convention. I therefore submitted a complaint ‘The disgusting racism of the BBC’.

I am currently listening 2.08 a.m. to a disgusting report on Israel's COVID-19 vaccination programme. Not once did your racist reporter comment on the refusal to vaccinate 5 million Palestinians whilst exporting vaccines as a bribe to countries who are diplomatically useful.

Your useless racists who masquerade as reporters couldn't even be bothered following up today's Ha'aretz report

Israeli Decision Makes COVID Vaccines Off Limits to Thousands of Foreign Residents

https://tinyurl.com/y6w2xjwp

Yes Israel is deliberately refusing to vaccinate refugees and asylum seekers. It barely bothers to vaccinate the Bedouin in the Negev.

It's like a report on Nazi Germany which fails to mention the situation of the Jews. But then come to think of it that is exactly what you did in the 1930's.

You are in clear breach of your statutory duty of balance. THe only balance the BBC knows is between one racist and another racist, one right-wing bastard and another right-wing bastard.

I have no confidence whatsoever in your complaints system so I am simply not going to pay the license fee anymore as I object to paying for racists to propagate their foul output.

Perhaps if Britain only innoculated Christians you'd find nothing wrong in that?

The BBC is a bunch of disgusting racists and establishment toadies 

The BBC Complaints Service is not there to investigate complaints but to justify BBC behaviour. They can be trusted to go the extra mile in order to exonerate their colleagues. It is only on the rarest of occasions that they will partially uphold a complaint and that is when the offence is so obvious that it is impossible to justify.

Unusually I got a  reply at 10.00 a.m. the following morning. Clearly my accusations of racism had stung them into responding: 

The programme I complained of on BBC News 24 was part of an hourly rolling broadcast. This was just one of numerous times I have heard the same story on the BBC of how Israel is leading the world.

I fired back a response the following morning. It reminded me of when British Police in the 1930s used to have exchange visits with German Police. The news organisations of the day, the BBC included, would cover such visits without mentioning uncomfortable facts such as German Police responsibility for implementing the Jewish policies. From 1936 the German police were incorporated with the SS into the RSHA under Reinhard Heydrich, Himmler’s deputy. Of course the BBC of the day would occasionally mention Hitler’s anti-Jewish policies but not in a way to disturb the ‘news story’ of the German police. I wrote:

This is not a one-off. The BBC has a pattern of one-sided support for Israel which has got worse over the past two decades. It is unlikely to change with the recent appointmentof former Goldman Sacks banker Richard Sharp to the post of Chairman of the BBC.

Not only has Sharp given £400,000 to the Tory Party but he is donating his £160,000 salary to his Sharp Foundation which has given £35,000 to the pro-Israel Quilliam think tank run by Maajid Nawaz (who has been associated with Israel supporterTommy Robinson).

That is why I have set up a petition on the BBC’s refusal to mention, that Israel’s vaccination programme has refused to distribute the vaccine to all inhabitants of what is now Greater Israel.

Because of the growing criticism of its coverage, the BBC commissioned the 2004 Balen Report which was never published despite court action by the Israel supporter, Steven Sugar.

In 2006 the BBC commissioned a panel headed by Sir Quentin Thomas which commissioned a statistical analysis which showed, ‘That a disparity (in favour of Israelis) existed in BBC coverage’. They also found that more coverage was given to Israeli fatalities than to Palestinian. Despite the report’s recommendations, the BBC did absolutely nothing to remedy the situation.

In 2011, Prof. Greg Philo and Mike Berry of Glasgow University Media Group stated in More Bad News from Israel:

“While the broadcast media give a clear account of the Israeli perspective on this conflict, many journalists and especially in the BBC still find great difficulty in doing the same for the Palestinians. This is in spite of the report originally commissioned by the BBC Governors, which made clear the weaknesses in the BBC’s approach to presenting the history of the conflict and the nature of the military occupation imposed by Israel on the Palestinians.”

Below are just a few examples of the consistent BBC Bias which I have taken from the On Richard Sharp, the BBC and Israel/Palestine Coverage from Bella Caledonia.

1.           The use of ‘terrorism’ has always been used to describe actions by Palestinians but the BBC have never applied that term to the murder of Palestinians by the IDF. Thus lending Israeli security forces an unwarranted legitimacy.

2.           The BBC has consistently failed to differentiate between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism resulting in the inference that criticism of Israel is ostensibly racist. The BBC has also invited proponents of Israel, whether they be Israelis or not, to appear on television with people who were less forceful or capable of presenting the opposite view. In addition to the fact that Israeli propagandists are often invited to appear alone.

3.           The failure to present ‘the other side of the debate’ particularly on the accusation of anti-Semitism in the Labour Party, was conspicuous. You might have thought that Jewish victims of the ‘anti-Semitism’ witchhunt would have been invited to appear but this simply didn’t happen.  Instead their persecutors appeared monotonously.

4.           To end reports by saying, ‘The Labour Party was invited to appear but refused.’ was not credible. There are many advocates, including Jews, who would be more than willing to take part and present the argument of how anti-Semitism was being exploited by right-wing members of the Labour Party and the Israel lobby. They were never invited.

The most obvious example of this was the BBC Panorama programme by John Ware, an out and out Islamaphobe with a track record of hostility to Jeremy Corbyn. The programme was entitled ‘Is Labour Anti-Semitic?’ but as the response to my own complaint admitted, the programme proceeded from the assumption that the Labour Party was anti-Semitic.

The Panorama programme featured Jews complaining of anti-Semitism. All of them were officers from the Jewish Labour Movement. No attempt was made to interview for example Jackie Walker or myself, Jews expelled from the Labour Party. That would have spoilt the narrative.  See my own reporton the programme.

5.           It’s not only what the BBC says but what it doesn’t say. Margaret Hodge MP made accusations against Jeremy Corbyn for being anti-Semitic but was never challenged by interviewers. In 1987, Islington Council tried to sell a historic Jewish cemetery to property developers and was opposed by Jeremy Corbyn who successfully campaigned against the sale –who was the council leader? Margaret Hodge. This story has been out there for some considerable time so why was she not questioned on this?

6.           In the Al Jazeera exposéof how the Israeli embassy planned to ‘take down’ Foreign Office minister, Sir Alan Duncan because of his Palestinian sympathies, Newsnight did not report on it. Had it been Iran it would have been a never-ending story.

7.           Perhaps the greatest public reproval the BBC has ever faced was their decision not to broadcast the DEC Gaza appeal in 2009 when every other broadcaster obliged. Robert Fisk, wrote,

“And this, remember, is the same institution [the BBC] which said that to broadcast an appeal for medicines for wounded Palestinians in Gaza might upset its “neutrality”. Legless Palestinian children clearly don’t count as much as the BBC’s pompous executives.”

8.           The recent (19th Jan) BBC Radio Scotland show, The Kaye Adams Programme discussed the issue of Israel’s vaccination distribution. She started by saying that the ‘political’ issue would not be raised. That issue was Israel’s decision to deny the Palestinians receiving the vaccine.

The BBC’s Jerusalem correspondent did raise the issue and Kaye again censored it by saying, that she did not want to ‘diminish’ the issue but did so by not allowing any discussion of it.

Had the British government denied an ethnic group the vaccine wouldn’t that have been important enough to discuss? You can’t isolate an issue when it has major health and wellbeing consequences for a section of the population. Kaye Adam’s decision to not allow the ‘politics’ to be discussed was in itself – political. This was clearly an editorial decision to censor any criticism of Israel.

Some of the worst offenders at the BBC were:

James Harding– Director of News & Current Affairs, BBC News (2013–2018) and past editor of the Times said at a Jewish Chronical event,

“I am pro-Israel. I believe in the state of Israel. I would have had a real problem if I had been coming to a paper with a history of being anti-Israel. And, of course, Rupert Murdoch is pro-Israel.

Danny Cohen– Controller of BBC 1, 3 and Director of BBC television (2007-2015) wrote a letterwhile still a BBC executive condemning the Boycott, Divestment and Sanction (BDS) movement which campaigns to end the Israeli occupation of Palestinian West Bank and Gaza.

James Purnell – BBC Director of Radio and BBC’s Director of Strategy (2013-2020) was the chairman of Labour Friends of Israel during his parliamentary career.

Raffi Berg– BBC online News Middle-East Editor (2013-) had written emails to his BBC staff asking them to be more lenient towards Israel in their reporting on Gaza.

Tony Greenstein

PLEASE SIGN THE PETITION TO THE BBC

Caroline Lucas Vilifies anti-Zionist Professor David Miller alongside Virulent Racists like Bob Blackman MP, Baronesses Deech and Cox?

My letter in Ha'aretz

Caroline, when you were elected to Parliament as the first Green MP in 2010 I had no hesitation in supporting you. The chance to have an alternative to another cloned New Labour MP was attractive.

This is the letter signed by over 100 MPs and Peers in which Caroline Lucas joined hands with virulent racists

However since then you have followed in the footsteps of Green Parties throughout Europe who, as in Ireland, have got into bed with both conservative parties, Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil. In Germany it was a Green Party coalition that took German troops into their first armed conflicts abroad post 45, in Kosova and Afghanistan.

It seems that there is an iron rule that however radical they are before getting elected, Green MPs become assimilated to the establishment. That is the problem with trying to green capitalism.

Caroline Lucas and her Establishment Friends

I am however amazed that you have added your name to a letter whose sole purpose is to secure the dismissal of Bristol University Professor David Miller, under the guise of protecting Jewish students.

This letter criticises academics supporting Miller for signing ‘a factually inaccurate letter’. This is ironic coming from those who falsely allege that David ‘has undermined the safety and security of Jewish students.’

What did David do?  Did he visit Jewish students in the middle of the night with a group of thugs? No he put forward well researched criticisms, not of Jewish students but Zionist student groups operating on campuses who whitewash the record of the Israeli state.

The Israeli state has just been described as a Jewish Supremacist  Apartheid State by Israeli human rights group, B’Tselem. Not surprisingly the Israeli state finds it difficult to defend things like refusing to supply Palestinians with COVID vaccines at one and the same time as vaccinating Jewish settlers. Is it any surprise that seeks it accuses its critics, including David Miller, of anti-Semitism?

Supposing that the Anti-Apartheid Movement had criticised pro-Apartheid South African student groups 30 years ago? Would you have signed a letter attacking the AAM as endangering the safety of South African students? If not why have you signed this letter?

The letter you signed falsely accuses David Miller of having ‘framed Jewish students.. as pawns or tools of a foreign government.’ No he didn’t. What David said was that Jewish students were being used as “political pawns by a violent, racist foreign regime engaged in ethnic cleansing.” There is a crucial difference between the two.

The Israeli government uses the Jewish Diaspora as pawns. That is a fact. In the United States the Israeli Foreign Ministry even distributed a questionnaire asking American Jews ‘to indicate where their allegiance would lie in the case of a crisis between the two countries.’

David’s statement that ‘Bristol’s JSoc like all JSocs, operates under the auspices of the Union of Jewish Students (UJS), an Israel lobby group’ and is part of ‘a campaign of censorship and manufactured hysteria’ that is‘directed by the State of Israel’ is true.

The Union of Jewish Students is nota Jewish student group but a Zionist group whose first loyalty is to the Israeli state. Support for Israel is enshrined in UJS’s constitution.  Its objectsinclude

‘inspiring Jewish students to make an enduring commitment to their Jewish identity, Israel, and the community.’

Jewish students who are not Zionists ineligible to join UJS and where they have done they come under attack from UJS. Independent Jewish Voices, which isn’t anti-Zionist, described what happened at SOAS:

Emma Clyne, a Swedish Jew, writes of her experience as chairperson of the Jewish Society at SOAS in 2006-07. She came under intense pressure from the Union of Jewish Students, the umbrella organisation which works with Jewish societies in universities.

Before she became the chair of the SOAS Jewish Society, she had found it was like an Israel Society…. She took over the chair on condition that there was to be a clear distinction between the Jewish Society and the Israel Society. This led to a furious reaction from the Union of Jewish Students, which told her: “That’s not what the Jewish Society does. You can’t separate Israeli politics from Jewish identity. It is all the same.”

The antagonism towards her reached a peak after she went to the launch of IJV in 2007 and found the speakers “honest articulate and inspirational.” When she invited some of the speakers to a meeting at SOAS to discuss “the impact of nationalism on Jewish identity” the pressure on her increased, and she was told that the Union of Jewish Students and the Israeli Embassy were very concerned about the meeting.

I describedwhat happened when Emma organised a meeting with speakers such as Sir Geoffrey Bindman QC:

According to... Emma Clyne, posters for a meeting the society put on were repeatedly torn down. Ms Clyne told a meeting of Independent Jewish Voices on May 15 that she had to put new ones up every day.

A clue as to the reason for its silence might lie in an article in the Jewish Chronicle of April 27 ("Students in censorship row over IJV debate").

As the then Chair of UJS, Mitch Simmons, made clear ‘"It is the view of the UJS that certain views are not acceptable under free speech." This is what you are supporting Caroline. A full frontal attack on the freedom of Jewish students who are not Zionists.

The UJS is the student wing of the Zionist movement. It is affiliated to the World Zionist Organisation which funds Jewish settlements in the West Bank. In the words of Ha'aretz, it has a ‘land theft division.’

UJS has been particularly prominent in the campaign to impose the 500+ word IHRA definition of anti-Semitism on universities. The IHRA’s sole purpose is to conflate anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism. As Sir Stephen Sedley, the Jewish former Court of Appeal judge wrote, the IHRA isn’t even a definition being indefinite.

The Jewish Chronicle described how UJS ‘reacted with fury’ at the decision of the Academic Board of UCL to overwhelmingly reject the use of the IHRA misdefinition of antisemitism.

A joint statement by the UCL JSoc and UJS said that “Jewish student voices will not be silenced, nor dictated to, by a small group of academics’ warning that “retraction of the definition will cause considerable distress to Jewish students and major reputational damage to UCL”.Note that word ‘distress’. A definition that was supportedby Donald Trump and adopted by the anti-Semitic Prime Minister of Hungary, Viktor Orban. The JC describedhow UJS

‘singled out “several members” of the Jewish Studies Department for being “key drivers” in the decision taken by the Academic Board, adding: “We take particular exception to the Head of Department’s use of the Department’s Newsletter to promote his views on this issue. One can only imagine the intimidating impact this could have on students and other members of the academic staff.” The head of the Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies and Professor of Rabbinic Judaism is Sacha Stern, who has repeatedly written of his opposition to IHRA.

Does this language about Jewish academics at UCL having an ‘intimidating impact’remind you of anything?. How on earth can rejecting a bogus definition of anti-Semitism beloved of anti-Semites intimidate Jewish students? I am surprised Caroline have been taken in by this Israeli hasbara (propaganda).

David Hirsh, the lecturer who is  quoted in the letter you signed told the JC: “In my whole life, I have never been in a more hostile and antisemitic space than my union.”

The same happened at City University where the student union decided to hold a referendum over the IHRA. [City University students union criticised over IHRA referendum]

According to UJS the student union 'failed to consult Jewish students until after the decision was made'. UJS feared that in a democratic debate it might lose the argument. It preferred emotional blackmail using words such as ‘distress’ to discussing issues because these are ‘intimidatory’. Apparently it makes them feel ‘unsafe’. Zionism and democracy go together like oil and water.

UJS complained that City University’s students union had remained “adamant about the referendum going ahead”. A spokesperson for City Students’ Union said it promotes “freedom of speech as an essential part of our democracy”. Given its support for the State of Israel you can well understand the concerns of UJS.

Caroline Lucas as was - on the picket line

What I find laughable in the letter which you signed is the statement ‘We, the undersigned, wish you to know that we stand against hatred’although the phrase ‘We know hate speech when we see it’ rings true.

Ian Paisley, one of the signatories and MP for the DUP, is fully aware of what hate speech is being a member of an anti-Catholic Protestant party. There is no better example of the symbiosis of Zionism and anti-Semitism than in Christian Zionism. The leader of the million strong Christians United for Israel John Hagee, described Hitler as a messenger from god sent to drive the Jews to Israel.

Another Christian Zionist bigot Lord Pickles is one of the signatories to this letter. Pickles has been reborn as an opponent of ‘anti-Semitism’. I know him however as an anti-Gypsy bigot responsible for the eviction of the Traveller camp at Dale Farm.

Pickles gained his reputation as a councillor in Bradford when he played the race card appealing to the racism of Bradford’s White population.

When in 1984 Ray Honeyford, headmaster in a local school, wrote an article in Salisbury Review, a magazine which acted as a bridge between the Tory Right and overtly fascist groups there were calls to suspend him. Pickles gave him unstinting support. Honeyford wrote:

The term ‘racism’, for instance, functions not as a word with which to create insight, but as a slogan designed to suppress constructive thought.... Cultural enrichment’ is the approved term for the West Indian’s right to create an ear splitting cacophony for most of the night to the detriment of his neighbour’s sanity, or for the Notting Hill Festival whose success or failure is judged by the level of street crime which accompanies it.’

However Pickles, who defended Tory MEPs sitting with fascists and anti-Semites in the ECR Group has been born again. As Mehdi Hassan wrotein the New Statesman

Perhaps most shameful of all are the Tories' new allies from Latvia, the For Fatherland and Freedom (LNNK) party, whose sole MEP, Robert Zile, sits in the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) group, and even attended the Conservative party conference in Manchester.

The Tories have been keen to defend this controversial party, which honours Latvia's Waffen SS veterans each year with an annual parade in the capital city, Riga, on 16 March.

What was Tory Party Chairman Eric Pickles response? He ‘condemned Labour and the Lib Dems for recycling "old Soviet smears" and "endorsing Soviet propaganda" against the Latvians.’

This is the company you are keeping Caroline Lucas. Support for Israel and Zionism makes anti-racists out of racists and anti-Semites out of anti-racists.

Although he isn’t a signatory, the Leader of the Commons Jacob Rees-Mogg, describedDavid Miller’s comments as ‘deeply wicked and the sort of thing decent people simply do not say.’ Mogg knows quite a lot about wickedness and what decent people do and say.

In April 2019 Mogg tweeted a speech and video by Alice Weidel, Leader of Germany’s AfD whose former leader Frauke Petry called for refugee boats to be fired upon. This led to the AfD’s expulsion from the ECR. AfD members march regularly alongside neo-Nazis. It is a party full of holocaust deniers and neo-Nazis but it is also pro-Israel. This has led to it being put under formal state surveillance. Even the Zionist Jewish Chronicle had an articleJacob Rees-Mogg faces fury over 'disgraceful' promotion of 'antisemitic' German party.

This is what the Mogg Tweeted

Mogg, spoke last year of the “Illuminati who are taking the powers to themselves” in reference to two Jewish MPs, Oliver Letwin and John Bercow. Michael Berkowitz, Professor of Modern Jewish History at UCL, described this as ‘an expressly antisemitic sentiment’, The Illuminati are at the centre of many anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.

Mogg and his anti-Semitic Illuminati

Naturally the Board of Deputies, which kept silent about Mogg’s comments, has led the campaign against David Miller. President Marie van der Zyl saidthat Miller’s comments “would not look out of place on the pages of Der Stürmer”, the Nazis’ propaganda newspaper.’ The IHRA defines comparisons between the Nazis and Israel as anti-Semitic but naturally the Board is exempt from this.

The Board of Deputies say that calling them part of the Israel lobby is ‘anti-Semitic’ yet, as Asa Winstanley observed the Board of Deputies repeatedly defends Israel, right or wrong. It attacked the decision of the International Criminal Court to investigate Israeli war crimes as evidence of its ‘moral bankruptcy’. ‘What’, he asked, ‘has the ICC got to do with the British Jewish community? Nothing.’

The Board also boasted of changinga BBC headline about an Israeli air strike on Gaza that killed a woman and her child. What one wonders has Gaza got to do with Britain’s Jews? The Board also defendedthe murder by Israel of snipers of Palestinian demonstrators in Gaza killing300 demonstrators and 50 children.

It is clear that the BOD is a part of the Israeli lobby and it is also clear Caroline that you have accepted this false narrative about such criticism making Jewish students unsafe. It is Palestinian parents, wondering if their children will be attacked by the Israeli military who feel unsafe. It is Palestinian children blindfolded, arrested and beaten in the middle of the night by Israel who feel unsafe. These Zionist snowflakes don’t know the meaning of the word ‘unsafe’.

The Racists who Signed the Letter with Caroline Lucas

Speaking of hatred, there is no better example than Baroness Ruth Deech. Deech accusedLabour politicians of ‘cravenly’ adopting ‘anti-Semitic tropes and anti-Israel demonization’’ in order to get Muslim votes, rather than standing up to Muslim prejudices.

Deech described ‘right-wing anti-Semitesand Holocaust deniers’as ‘buffoons of no importance’whereas left-wing ‘anti-Semites’ should be taken very seriously. In her view Nazi style anti-Semitism was of no importance compared to criticism of Israel.

Deech called Jews who were not Zionists ‘renegade Jews’. Itself anti-Semitic. She named these ‘renegades’ - Gerald Kaufman, Norman Finkelstein, Avi Shlaim, Noam Chomsky, Ilan Pappe. The Oxford English Dictionary definitionof ‘renegade’ is

·         Having treacherously changed allegiance: a renegade bodyguard

·         Having abandoned one’s religious beliefs: a renegade monk. Used in conjunction with ‘Jew’ its archaic meaning is equivalent to apostate.

Deech’s article is a good illustration of David Miller’s argument that Zionism is one of the main props of Islamaphobia. Deech explained that:

The U.K. census of 2011 revealed that Bradford’s population was 24.7% Muslim, and no doubt it’s higher by now. There are wards of Bradford, Blackburn and Burnley (the suspended councilors’ constituencies) where British Muslims reach 70% of the local population.

Deech quoted an article in the New Statesman about how ‘the virus of anti-Semitism has infected the British Muslim community”. What is rarely mentioned is the high degree of anti-Muslim and anti-Arab racism in the Jewish community. It is the secret that dare not speak its name but if you don’t measure it then it will remain invisible.

In fact 61 per cent of those questioned viewed Jewish people favourably, while an additional 14 per cent of British Muslims had a sort-of middling opinion of Jewish people. This was almost exactly the same as how Muslims viewed Catholics, Buddhists and Hindus and the irreligious. That might have something to do with the fact that Muslims in Britain are the victims of White racism unlike Jews.

As Free Speech on Israel notedthe Baroness’s wordswere identical to‘early 20th century social attitudes to – and government racial profiling of – British Jews’.

Bob Blackman - the Prince of Race Hatred

But the Crown Prince of hatred Caroline is fellow MP and signatory, Bob Blackman. Blackman was accusedof Islamophobia after posting an anti-Muslim article on Facebook which he subsequently apologised for. [Bob Blackmansays he 'sincerely regret[s] any upset caused']

Blackman, the MP for Harrow East, had shared a story with the headline: “Muslim Somali sex gang say raping white British children ‘part of their culture'.”

Miqdaad Versi of the Muslim Council of Britain, tweeted: “Deeply disappointing to see Tory MP Bob Blackman once again endorse Islamophobia." Blackman had previously retweeted an anti-Muslim post by Tommy Robinson.

Vice revealedthat Blackman had been a member of several far-right Islamophobic Facebook groups such as "Britain for the British", "For Britain Political Party" and "Pendragons Fight Back".

"Britain for the British" is administered by BNP supporter Steven Devlin. It features numerous comments which praise Hitler, and many more which wish violence upon London Mayor Sadiq Khan, accusing him of being an "Islamofascist" and "traitor", and hoping that he dies.

Blackman is a patron of the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, which was a Who’s Who of Britain’s most racist politicians.

Blackman is a supporter of the Hindu chauvinist Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi and the BJP. When the Conservative Friends of Kashmir began, Blackman urgedBoris Johnson not to recognise them.

When the BJP revoked Article 370 of India’s Constitution declaring martial law and occupying Kashmir with thousands of troops, Blackman wroteto Johnson describing the attack on Kashmir as an ‘excellent decision’. It would, he said allow the Kashmiri people ‘to enjoy the benefits of being part of India.’ Strangely enough the people of Kashmir weren’t very appreciative of being under occupation!

Blackman also hostedthe outright Hindu racist Tapan Ghosh in the House of Commons. Tapash has called for the UN to control the birth rate of Muslims, praised the genocide of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar and said that Muslims should be forced to leave their religion if they come to a western country.

But you can imagine my surprise when I came across the Delhi newspaper, the Milli Gazette. Gideon Falter of the CAA attended a meeting in 2018 at the Commons at Blackman’s invitation. It described him as a ‘rabidly pro-Hindutva Tory MP’.

Falter told the meeting that he would do all he could to help eradicate the ‘duty’ on the government to make Caste an aspect of race in the Equality Act 2010.[UK Government will repeal caste law]Untouchables in India are treated as less than human yet this vile MP, whom Caroline Lucas considers congenial company, sought to remove caste discrimination as a protected characteristic in the Equality Act. And you know what? Blackman and his friends in the CAA succeeded.

Blackman also opposes what he calls ‘Hinduphobia’. Anyone who challenges caste discrimination or supports Kashmiri self-determination is a ‘Hinduphobe’. They have taken a leaf out of the Zionists’ book. These Hindu chauvinists are hoping to weaponise Hinduphobia against opponents of Hindu racism in the same way as ‘anti-Semitism’ has been weaponised against opponents of the Israeli state and Zionism. See

The alliance between Israel, Zionism and Hindu Nationalism is based on a shared belief in ethnic cleansing and ethno-nationalism and UK: Corbyn, the Hindu far-right and Israel’s partisans

TheyWorkForYou described how Blackman almost always voted against laws to promote equality and human rights. It gives examples of how Caroline Lucas’s fellow signatory of Caroline Lucas voted.

·                On 18 Jul 2019:Blackman voted not to legalise abortion in any circumstances in Northern Ireland.

·                On 9 Jul 2019:Blackman voted not to permit same-sex marriage in Northern Ireland.

·                On 13 Jun 2018:Blackman voted against retaining the EU "Charter of Fundamental Rights" as part of UK law.

·                On 26 May 2016:Blackman voted in favour of repealing the Human Rights Act 1998 and against plans to save the steel industry.

·                On 30 Jan 2014:Blackman voted to only allow human rights grounds to be used to prevent a foreign criminal being deported in cases where there would be a breach of the right to life, or right not to be tortured; and to add a new exemption to deportation for cases where harm to the criminal's children outweighs the public interest in removal.

·                On 16 Apr 2013:Blackman voted to remove the duty on the Commission for Equality and Human Rights to support the development of a society where people's ability to achieve their potential is not limited by prejudice or discrimination and there is respect for human rights.

·                On 16 Apr 2013:Blackman voted against making it illegal to discriminate on the basis of caste

In an article Bob on caste as a protected characteristic of the Equality Act 2010 Blackman revealed how

‘MPs received a written ministerial statement making it clear that this protected characteristic is going to be removed from the Equality Act. Bob urged the Minister to bring forward, without delay, proposals to remove this unnecessary, ill-thought-out and divisive move in the Equality Act 2010.’

The reaction of the HARROW MONITORING GROUP was that Blackman plays the divisive ‘caste’ card!

The parliamentary debate led to a statutory requirement to include caste in the Equality Act as a separate aspect of race. In 2013 a clause against caste discrimination was inserted into the Equality Act 2010.

Referring to his 2015 Harrow East campaign, Sunny Hundal of the Hindustan Times ‏tweeted“Astonishing. Tory MP in London playing Hindu divide-and-rule caste politics with leaflets for Hindus. Nasty”. Commenting on Blackman’s campaign, London assembly member and 2017 parliamentary candidate for Harrow East Navin Shah said,

“The general election also saw the same old issues like Kashmiri Pundits and caste legislation dragged out for the Tory propaganda to find cheap favours amongst Indian / Hindu voters”.

See Blackman not supported!

But the Queen of anti-Islamic bigots is another signatory to the letter Caroline Lucas signed, Baroness Caroline Cox. In February 2009, Cox and UKIP peer Lord Pearson invited the leader of the Dutch Freedom PartyGeert Wilders, who supports banning the Islamic religion outright, to show the anti-Islam film Fitnaat the House of Lords. Wilders was banned from entering Britain.Cox accused the Government of appeasing militant Islam.

In 2010 Cox and Pearson successfully hosted Wilders and his film with 200 members of the English Defence Leaguemarching in support of the screening.  Cox said in a speech in Israel that “Islam is using the freedoms of democracy to destroy it”

Geert Wilders - Baroness Cox's Fascist Friend

Cox, a former Deputy Speaker of the House of Lords, is prominent in the Henry Jackson Society and is a directorof the far-Right Gatestone Institute which hostsher writings online. In 2007, she toldthe Jerusalem Summit, an anti-Palestinian network of which she has been co-president since 2005, that “Britain has been deeply infiltrated” by Islamist extremists, who have converted the country into “a base for training and teaching militant Islam”. She added that “Britain’s cultural and spiritual heritage are under threat.”

Cox also told the Jerusalem Post she was concerned about “the disturbing alliance between the Islamists and the Left in the UK,”

According to Craig Murray, Cox is “a prominent supporter of organisations which actively and openly promote the ethnic cleansing of all Palestinians from Gaza.’

So Caroline Lucas are you going to allow your name to stay on this letter alongside a whole group of racist, war mongering MPs, the detritus of New Labour such as Lords Austen and Mann?

You say you are a supporter of Palestinian human rights. The absence of those rights isn’t an act of god. The lack of any human rights comes from Zionism, a Jewish Supremacist ideology and movement which has for the past 70+ years built a society where non-Jews are the Untermenschen of Israel.

The letter signed by your fellow parliamentarians has nothing to do with defence of Jewish students. It has everything to do with demonising a decent radical lecturer and inflicting a body blow against academic freedom in this country. Your decision to sign the letter is shameful. Please remove your name at once.

Tony Greenstein

As Britain’s Police and the Tory Government Declare Open War on the Right to Protest, Labour’s Stuffed Dummy Starmer Stays Silent

If you’ve been wondering why this blog has fallen silent for the past two weeks then wonder no more. In the early morning of Tuesday 9^th March I was arrested together with 5 supporters of Palestine Action whilst driving a van to Elbit Systems Shenstone factory. We were intent on redecorating the premises of Elbit in the blood red colour of their victims. [See Activists from Palestine Action remanded in prison as police crackdown continues]

Oldbury Police Holding Centre

We were taken to Oldbury holding centre in Staffordshire and held for 27 hours before being brought before magistrates in Birmingham and Wolverhampton.  The company who built it, describes it as a 60-bed suite ‘complete with en-suite rooms’although there are other more accurate descriptions of a facility designed to separate those it holds from each other and the outside world. Oldbury is a purpose built exercise in sensory deprivation.

Once taken to Oldbury we were separated from each other and given no access to the outside though news of a demonstration outside was leaked to us. You have no newspapers, TV or any reading material. Our watches were taken from us. The food consisted of cheap packaged meals which must have cost at least 30p each.

It was not until Tuesday afternoon that I was taken out of the cells to be interviewed by a member of the West Midlands Police and a Metropolitan Policewoman. The Met woman asked questions about the structure of Palestine Action and she was clearly from Special Branch.

Clearly this is part of a co-ordinated attempt by the Police to crack down on any action directed at the operation of Israeli arms company Elbit.

At 2.30 a.m. I was charged with going equipped to commit criminal damage. I had not been allowed a phone call as is stipulated in the regulations and I asked why not.  I was told that this was because my wife, Fiona (from whom I was separated) had told them that she wanted nothing to do with me. At the time I believed it and was taken aback to put it mildly.

It was only in Winson Green, where I was remanded, that I was informed by prison staff that Fiona had been ringing worried about whether I had access to my drugs. It was then that I realised that I had been lied to as part of a campaign to demoralize me. I intend to take legal action for personal injury as a result of this demonstrable lie.

Remanded in Custody

We were all charged with conspiracy to cause criminal damage and going equipped to cause criminal damage. 4 of us were sent to Birmingham magistrates court and 2 to Wolverhampton magistrates. I was amongst the latter. Whereas those sent to Birmingham were immediately bailed, those of us sent to Wolverhampton were remanded in custody by the resident bigot of a magistrate. On Monday the 5^thDefendant was released and the following day I was also given conditional bail, a curfew and reporting weekly to the Brighton police.

I was remanded to Winson Green prison which was made famous in 1975 when the Birmingham 6 were met by a ‘reception committee’ of warders who beat them up. This followed similar beatings by the West Midlands Police. The prison however has changed from these dark days.

Although it was frustrating being remanded Winson Green was far more tolerable than being in a police cell. The food was much better and we had a TV in the cells and association with other inmates although we were locked in a cell for 23 hours a day because of COVID, which is rampant in the prison.

Being a recipient of a liver transplant I have to take immune-suppressive drugs each day. This was not possible at the police holding centre and thus in the early hours of Thursday morning, handcuffed and accompanied by 2 prison warders I spent 6 hours at Birmingham’s Queen Elizabeth A&E obtaining a week’s prescription, which had to be collected later that day by another warder.

I was pleasantly surprised that one of the questions asked at reception was whether I was a racist! I did not see any sign of racial abuse from warders in P wing nor any racist banter among inmates.

Another series of questions concerned whether I was an extremist!  I had much pleasure pointing out to the warder that all those who have fought for democratic rights in the past, such as the Suffragettes were called extremists in their time. It was an interesting conversation with a warder who was not unsympathetic to my line of reasoning.

Not only were there large numbers of Black and Muslim inmates but there was a considerable number of Black warders. It made a change from my previous experience of being on remand, nearly 50 years ago at Ashford Young Remand Centre (long since gone).  There you were stripped naked at reception and all the Black prisoners were physically assaulted by the White warders.  There were no Black warders.

Sarah Everard

Having access to a TV in our cells meant that I could catch up on the news and sure enough the main headlines concerned the murder and kidnap by a Metropolitan Policeman of Sarah Everard as she was walking home. PC Wayne Couzens had spent some 2½ years in the Met and clearly found his fellow officers and the Met’s institutional misogyny congenial. It would seem that fellow officers had covered up the fact that Couzens had exposed himself twice in a MacDonald’s two days before Sarah’s murder.

It was not surprising that officers from the Met should object so strongly to vigils in support of Sarah Everard that they attacked a peaceful vigil at Clapham Common using the COVID regulations as an excuse.

The BBC excused the Met’s behaviour explaining how the Police ‘were faced with a very difficult decision.’ There was, of course, nothing difficult about the decision. Every day the Police use their discretion not to enforce the law when it comes to matters such as illegal evictions of tenants, racial harassment or allowing the hunting. The Police are and always have been selective in which laws they enforce. That is why fox hunts still continue.

No doubt the Waffen SS faced ‘difficult decisions’ when faced with trainloads of Jews being sent to Auschwitz. Not having the necessary accommodation they were no doubt ‘forced’ to kill them!

The Metropolitan Police, like all police forces only more so, has always been a political police force. No one forced the Met to collaborate, illegally, with building employers in blacklisting militants on building sites. As even the BBC observed

‘A secret police document has revealed how the Metropolitan Police's Special Branch helped the illegal blacklisting of trade unionists - preventing them from getting jobs because of their political views.’

The Police set up the Special Demonstration Squad in 1968.

Peter Francis, who infiltrated anti-racist groups between 1993 and 1997 for the SDS, has shed unprecedented light on his former unit, illuminating, for instance, how undercover officers routinely formed sexual relationships with campaigners and stole the identities of dead children.

The SDS officers were a law unto themselves. Their targets were exclusively on the left and environmental and animal rights groups. Their targets did not include the far-Right which has repeatedly been involved in bomb plots and terrorism. The SDS is now subject of a judicial inquiry but that is not expected to go anywhere.

The attack on the women’s vigil at Clapham should be a lesson to all those who believe that all that is necessary is to introduce more women or Black people into the Police. The Met is headed by a woman Police Commissioner, Cressida Dick whose only difference from her male predecessors is the lack of a dick.

The Trial

Our trial and that of the others arrested is likely to take place next November, COVID permitting..

There are three solicitor firms involved – Kelly’s of Brighton, ITN in London and my own firm, Riley Hayes in Birmingham. There is going to have to be a co-ordinated defence strategy and a defence campaign against what are clearly political charges. Our arguments are based on the common law defence of Necessity and Duress.

In essence they are that you can commit a smaller crime to prevent a greater crime.  For example if you smash down a door to rescue someone from a fire then you are committing criminal damage.  Likewise if you spray red paint over the factory to highlight the blood that its products spill then that is a lesser evil.

Elbit’s Factories of Death

Elbit are quite upfront. They boast that their drones (Unmanned Aerial Systems) ‘are the backbone of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) UAS force.’ Their main selling point is the experience they have in testing their systems in the field. Gaza is where they perfect their technology.

Spyware

On 6 December 2017, Citizenlabpublished a detailed report that showed that Ethiopian dissidents and journalists in the US, UK, and other countries were targeted by sophisticated commercial spyware, sold and operated by Cyberbit, a wholly owned subsidiary of Elbit Systems. In a reply to an inquiry from Human Rights Watch on the topic, Cyberbit did not deny selling this kind of technology.

Supplying the World’s Most Repressive Regimes

One of Elbit’s primary customers is the Philippines, whose President, Rodrigo Duterte, is an open admirer of Hitler. This didn’t stop him being shown around Israel’s holocaust propaganda museum Yad Vashem which Israeli Professor Dan Blatman has described as a

‘a hard-working laundromat, striving to bleach out the sins of every anti-Semitic, fascist, racist or simply murderously thuggish leader or politician like Hungary’s Viktor Orban, the Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte and Italy’s Matteo Salvini.

The Diplomat describedhow Elbit won its first contract in the Philippines for the supply of upgraded armored personnel carriers in June 2014. In August 2020, the Philippine Air Force received full delivery of three Hermes 900 and one Hermes 450 unmanned aerial systems (UAS) as part of a contract worth approximately $175 million. Each system consists of three unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), a ground control system and support equipment.

In October 23, 2020 amid the COVID-19 pandemic, Elbit won further contracts to produce 18 Sabrah ASCOD Light Tanks and 10 Pandur II Tank Destroyers.

India

Goldie Osuri of Warwick University describedin ‘Kashmir and Palestine: archives of coloniality and solidarity’ how in 2018, as part of Adani Global’s alliance with the Israeli company, Elbit saw the inauguration of an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle or drone manufacturing facility in Hyderabad servicing the Indian and Israeli defence forces, which may be used in both Kashmir and in Palestine [Global Studies in Culture and Power Volume 27, 2020]

Exasperating militarization, repression, communalism and Islamophobia

One of Israel’s core propaganda messages is its willingness to help India in its war in its ‘war on Muslim terror’. It is based on the defense of one ethno-religious category against aspirations for justice and is reinforcing communal oppression and conflicts within Indian society. Much of the money spent on Israeli ‘security’ is directly used in repression in Kashmir and the northeastern regions – just as in the case of Israeli repression of the Palestinian people – without any prospect of advancing justice, which would be the only way to achieve an end to the necessity of repression.

Israel’s dealings with India have been embedded in corruption

The most surprising aspect is India’s fondness of Israeli UAVs even though they have a history of failures. After India first bought Heron UAVs in 2002, two Indian Air Force and two Indian Army UAVs crashed, killing one Air Force handler. The first crash of the UAV happened soon after induction in 2003. On September 14 2015, the Indian government approved the $400 million purchase of 10 armed Heron TP UAVs from IAI. With 22.5% of all UAV imports over the 1985-2014 period, India has topped the list of unmanned aerial systems importers. Other Israeli companies had similar experiences in India. The guns produced by Elbit System’s subsidiary Soltam broke repeatedly during tests and tests were simply repeated in order for Soltam to change the guns and win the deal.

4)     Global action to end military relations with Israeli apartheid

In 2011, the Palestinian BDS National Committee issued a call for a comprehensive military embargo on Israel. The call include an end to military aid and weapons exports to Israel, ending the transfer of weapons and military technology to Israel, and ending all forms of military aid and research cooperation. The call for a military embargo is now supported by political parties, NGOs, trade unions and campaign groups across the world.

Some of the key impacts of the campaign include:

·        Banks divest from Elbit Systems: More than a dozen banks have announced that they have divested from Elbit Systems over its role in Israel’s military violence, and the company has been blacklisted by many investment advice companies. UK bank Barclays divested after more than 1.7 million people signed a petition organised by Avaaz and campaigners have occupied and protested at bank branches across the UK.

·        Elbit loses deals: Elbit’s participation in a Brazilian drone development effort was terminated at the beginning of 2016. This followed a 2014 decision by the Rio Grande do Sul 24 regional government to end a large-scale research collaboration project with Elbit Systems. Elbit factories across the world have been repeatedly blockaded by campaigners. Elbit has lost out on deals in Denmark and France following public campaigns.

·        Countries reduce or cut military trade with Israel: South Africa has maintained inthe last decade a de facto freeze in military ties. The Norwegian government has an official policy of not exporting weapons to Israel. In 2010, Norway even refused to allow the testing of a submarine that a German company was manufacturing for Israel in its waters.

·     Arms fairs protests: Israeli participation in arms fairs has been contested across the globe – from the Netherlands, to France, to Brazil and the US.

·     Campaigns against police training: Especially in Brazil and the US, movements of black and marginalised communities have teamed up with Palestine solidarity activists to stop Israeli police training that reinforce and exasperate police brutality, racism and repression

See Stop Indo-Israeli military ties

Myanamar/Burma

The Jerusalem Post reported that Elbit and 2 other Israeli companies, Cellebrite and Gaia Automotive Industries, supplied drones that have been used in the Myanmar coup. Jerusalem was supposed to end all military exports to Myanmar, after allegations emerged that weaponry was being sold to the army.

The New York Times published a report which revealed that

“Israeli-made surveillance drones, European iPhone cracking devices and American software that can hack into computers and vacuum up their contents,” were used by the generals to carry out their coup despite various sanctions and international arms embargoes which prohibit such systems from being exported to the country.

“The military is now using those very tools to brutally crack down on peaceful protesters risking their lives to resist the military junta and restore democracy,”

The report found that Israeli arms manufacturer Elbit, which claims to have had “no dealings with Myanmar since 2015 or 2016” supplied spare parts to repair military grade Elbit drones in late 2019.

In 2018 Israel was supposed to have blockedall military exports to Burma after reports emerged that Israeli weaponry was being sold to the Burmese Army which had been accused of using them in genocidal actions towards the Muslim Rohingya ethnic minority.

The Independent reportedthat

‘Israelhas been accused of continuing to sell military equipment to the Burmesemilitary even as it faced accusations of war crimes against minority Rohingya Muslims.

The Israeli Foreign Ministry denied media reports that it had sold advanced weapons to Burma and rejected any "alleged involvement in the tragedy in the Rakhine region." But that was a lie. When Israel’s High Court was petitioned to prevent arms sales to Burma, the government sought and obtained a gag order on the Court’s own ruling! In other words it is a criminal offence to even publish the Court’s ruling! There are still some people who describe Israel as just another Western democracy.

More than 600,000 Rohingya Muslims fledBurma to Bangladesh since a military crackdown was launched in August 2017. The United Nations denounced it as a textbook example of ethnic cleansing.

Ha’aretz reportedthat “Welcome to the Myanmar Navy,” was the caption on the Myanmar Navy’s Facebook page, in honor of the arrival of an Israeli patrol boat to Myanmar’s shore. “The Super-Dvora MK III is moving forward at 45 knots on Myanmar waters,” the post continued.

Fighting Back Against Elbit’s War Crimes

Extinction Rebellion reported howUK-based Israeli arms factories smashed and blockaded on the anniversary of the Balfour Declaration.It quoted from a Press release from Palestine Action, UK, Dec 2020.

Israel’s UK-based arms company Elbit systems, woke up to two of their key factories smashed, sprayed and painted red by Palestine Action on the morning of the Balfour Declaration anniversary. Simultaneously, activists are blockading Elbit’s other subsidiary, UAV Engines in Shenstone, forcing three of their weapons factories to shut down.

These multifaceted ‘hits’ against Israel’s largest arms company have set a new precedent for sustained direct action, involving 100s of activists from up and down the UK. Palestine Action, a new and rapidly growing movement challenging the UK’s unwavering support for Israel’s apartheid regime, have set out to symbolically de-commemorate the 103-year anniversary of the fateful Balfour Declaration.

Palestine Action’s statement goes on to describe Elbit as a company which openly markets its weapons as “battle tested” on Palestinian civilians. They are supplying the world’s most notorious repressive regimes, including India’s current occupation of Kashmir.

Both the UK Maritime and Coastguard Agency, as well as the UK police, have been trialing Elbit’s drones to mass-surveil large stretches of our coastline, in line with Priti Patel’s militarisation of the English Channel.

The EU’s border agency Frontex has also contracted Elbit to surveil the Mediterranean, leaving the lives of migrants, refugees and asylum seekers, fleeing war torn countries, in mortal danger. The EU was recently accused of “watching” migrants drown rather than investing in ways to save them.

Elbit Systems has also played a key role in the development of Trump’s militarised US/Mexico border wall, while the very same technologies are also being used to securitise and control the native O’odham people on Arizona’s indigenous reserves.

The Legal Context

The legal context in which Palestine Action operates is that of Universal Jurisdiction. There is a very useful Briefing by Lawyers for Palestinian Human Rights of which I’ve copied the most relevant extracts below.

LPHR briefing on Universal Jurisdiction

5.           The precise definition of UJ, and the manner in which it is implemented, varies somewhat between different States. However, the fundamental purposive approach is that in the case of the gravest crimes under international law, accountability (in the form of individual criminal responsibility) should be provided for, regardless of the territory in which the offences were committed in or the nationality of the alleged offender. The UK gives effect to the principle of UJ through statutory law. Section 1(1) of the Geneva Conventions Act 1957 provides:

“Any person, whatever his nationality, who, whether in or outside the United Kingdom, commits, or aids, abets or procures the commission by any other person of a grave breach of any of the scheduled conventions, the first protocol or the third protocol shall be guilty of an offence”. (emphasis added)

6.     Similar wording in relation to the offence of torture is found in S134 of the Criminal Justice Act 1988 which provides that:

“A public official or person acting in an official capacity, whatever his nationality, commits the offence of torture if in the United Kingdom or elsewhere he intentionally inflicts severe pain or suffering on another in the performance or purported performance of his official duties”. (emphasis added)

8.    Under section 51 of the International Criminal Court Act 2001, it is an offence against the law of England and Wales for a person to commit genocide, a crime against humanity or a war crime. This section applies to acts committed in England and Wales, but also in some circumstances to those committed outside of the UK (if by a UK national, resident or a person subject to UK service jurisdiction). Notably the Geneva Conventions Act and the Criminal Justice Act do not have the same restriction, and operate so that the UK can exercise jurisdiction over an individual “whatever his nationality”.

9.    A general principle which underpins UJ is the presumption in favour of territoriality. The general position is that criminal offences are most likely to be effectively investigated and prosecuted in the territory where they have been allegedly committed.

Universal Jurisdiction at work in the UK

10.                       Whilst these types of cases are exceptional, there have been some occasions of UJ arrests and prosecutions in the UK. On 18 July 2005, an Afghan warlord named Faryadi Sarwar Zardad was found guilty of torture and hostage taking in what was thought to be the first successful conviction in the UK for a crime committed abroad. The trial followed an investigation which involved UK police officers visiting Afghanistan to identify and take accounts from victims. Witnesses gave evidence at the trial at the Old Bailey via video link from the UK embassy in Kabul. Upon conviction Mr Zardad was sentenced to a 20 year custodial sentence.

11.                       In January 2013, a Nepalese Colonel, Kumar Lama was arrested in East Sussex and charged with two counts of torture under section 134 of the Criminal Justice Act 1988 relating to incidents that had allegedly occurred in 2005. This arrest and prosecution did not ultimately lead to a conviction.

Palestine Action

There has been a pattern of harassment of Palestine Action and groups like Extinction Rebellion, which took part in the Oldham occupation. Palestine Action is a new grassroots network of anti-racist groups and individuals taking direct action to end UK complicity with Israel’s colonial and Apartheid regime. Despite the UK Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab’s attempts to shut the group down, its popularity is growing both in the UK and now, internationally. It has, to date, targeted Elbit over 40 times, and will routinely, systematically, continue to escalate its actions until the British Government and this evil arms company can no longer profit from the death of Palestinian civilians. The ultimate aim is to shut Elbit down and end all UK complicity with Israeli apartheid

As Huda Ammori from Palestine Action stated

“The oppression of the Palestinians and the Kashmiri people, of migrants and refugees, does not happen in isolation. It happens because of the colonial legacy of this country.

See Israel's largest arms manufacturer targeted in London by Palestine Action activists

Please Sign the Petition: No Israeli Killer Drones for the Europe

PSC is Taking the Coward’s Way Out and Trying to Undermine Palestine Action

Following the success of Palestine Action in raising the profile of the campaign against Elbit, you might imagine that Palestine Solidarity Campaign would lend its support.  Not a bit of it.  The Executive, led by Director Ben Jamal and its equally useless Chair, Kamal Hawash, have done their best to undermine support for PA, distributing a distilled version of legal advice from Bindman’s Solicitors. What they have refused to do is to distribute the legal advice itself.

The gist of the advice is that people or groups who contribute financially or otherwise to PA may themselves be liable. At a time when the Government is proposing a Police and Crime Bill and organisations are campaigning against these attack on basic civil liberties, PSC chooses to attack those campaigning against Elbit.

The group which controls PSC, the subterranean Socialist Action and associated splinters, are fearful of any independent initiatives taken outside their control.  That explains their backstabbing attacks on direct action. They have even lobbied Omar Barghouti and the BNC National Committee to try and get them to dissociate themselves from the activists.

The advice that they give below is basically rubbish.  The Police have never tried to charge people who fund groups who may go on to commit criminal offences. To raise this prospect is in itself an invitation to the state to extend its activities.  Just as with the fake ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign PSC hauls the white flag of surrender in advance. The following advice was distributed to all PSC groups. My advice is to ignore it and treat it with contempt.

Palestine Solidarity Campaign on Palestinian Action

Palestine Action

Kamel Hawwash and Ben Jamal outlined concerns about the activities of the group Palestine Action, following discussion at PSC's Executive Committee. A number of key partners, including the leadership of the Boycott National Committee (BNC) in Palestine, have discussed with PSC concerns about the activities of this group, and the risks to the wider movement. BNC have communicated these concerns directly to Palestine Action, and asked them to remove all references to BDS from their website, a request eventually complied with by Palestine Action.

PSC has sought legal advice about the potential liabilities arising from the commission of acts of criminal damage of high monetary levels (more than £5000) and how these may also apply to those offering support to these activities even if not undertaking the activities themselves. This advice included noting that Section 1 of the Criminal Damage Act 1971 states that it is an offence to intentionally or recklessly damage property that belongs to another person. A person convicted of criminal damage can be sentenced to a maximum of 3 months imprisonment and/or a fine of up to £2500 if the value of the damage caused is under £5000. If the value of the damage caused exceeds £5000 a person can be sentenced to a maximum of 10 years imprisonment and/or an unlimited fine.

These liabilities potentially extend to both individuals encouraging or assisting criminal acts (including, for example, providing financial support), and organisations, including PSC branches that offered encouragement or assistance.

These concerns are not raised because PSC, or the BDS Movement is opposed to any form of direct action. Instead, they are raised because of the strategic and legal risks associated with the type of action being conducted by the group. PSC sought the advice to ensure it was discharging its duty of care to members to ensure they were aware of possible legal consequences of their association or support for Palestine Action's activities.

Zionist Gatekeeper Tries to Prevent Me Speaking at Rally

When I heard news of a Brighton demonstration at The Level, the traditional meeting place for socialists and radicals, I assumed that maybe a couple of hundred would turn up.

Instead there were thousands there. There was a massive police presence but they decided not to make themselves look stupid, unlike their counterparts in the Metropolitan Police. It was organised by Black Lives Matter Brighton and other unnamed individuals.

After various handpicked speakers had finished I got up to speak. About half a minute in, after I had announced that I had just been released from prison for trying to redecorate Elbit, an Israeli arms factory near Birmingham, the mike was cut off. A mysterious woman in red, a Zionist who was apparently one of the organisers, muttered that I was an ‘anti-Semite’.

Clearly one of Keir Starmer’s lapdogs had been let off the leash and the innocents of BLM had ignored the racist cuckoo in their nest. The organisers tried to explain to me that it wasn’t an open mike, which was untrue, and then the crowd started barracking them and demanding that I should continue.

Faced with appearing like the authoritarians they were demonstrating against, the organisers turned the mike back on!  And for 3 minutes I explained why it was that racism in Britain was not separate from the racist of the British Empire and Israel. The United States unsinkable aircraft carrier in the Middle East was at the heart of Islamaphobia internationally which is why people like Tommy Robinson declare that they are Zionists.

I finished with a quotationfrom Nelson Mandela that 

‘we know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.”

The Zionists have not hesitated to attack BLM for its support for the Palestinians. It would seem that some in the Brighton group have therefore tried to appease these Jewish supremacists and their New Labour hangers on rather than confront the fact that Zionism is just another variant of White supremacism.  It's not for nothing that racists and neo-Nazis like Tommy Robinson declare that they are Zionists. I guess I forced this contradiction into the open!

After I had spoken many people came up, including Palestinians, to say that they appreciated that I had spoken out as a Jewish anti-Zionist. One old trade unionist told me about the battles he had as an engineer with the Police 50 years ago at the Battle of Saltley Gate when thousands of miners and engineers forced the Police to close a large coke depot. This was the key even in the victory of the miners in 1972. 

We marched about 2 miles from The Level to the Hove Lawns on the seafront.  It was an exhilarating march and the chants made clear that Sussex Police, with their failures over the Jay Abatanmurder 20 years ago and the taseringof a Black man on the Pier a year ago. The reception from ordinary people was uniformly supportive.

Afterwards and having spoken to other organisers I approached the woman in question and asked why she had called me an anti-Semite.  Apparently ‘other people’ had told her I was.  I asked for her name but she scurried away refusing to divulge her identity.

I have penned a letter to the organisers asking certain pertinent questions. The main point I have made in them is that you cannot divorce the racism stemming from Britain’s imperialist past from racism today and the establishment of Israel was very much part of the legacy of Empire.

Keir Starmer - a 'Zionist without qualification'

Below are a series of photos of the demonstration. It is clear that as the British State seeks to attack hard won democratic rights that we have a battle on our hands.  We have to get rid of the illusion that the Police are our friend. The State may appear benign but when, as seems certain, we enter a new period of austerity, the Police will be the Boris Johnson's boot boys.

The Labour Party is led, as Oliver Eagleton's excellent article demonstrates, by a 'long time servant of the British Security State'who declared that “I support Zionism without qualification.”

Tony Greenstein

Saturday, March 20, 2021

Letter to the Organisers of Brighton March Against the Police Bill and Black Lives Matter

Hi,

I’m sorry I didn’t get your name but you are I assume one of the organisers of today’s march against the Police Bill. 

First can I say what a wonderful gathering and march it was. I expected a couple of hundred, not a few thousand to attend and I pay tribute to the organisers. It shows the depth of opposition to this new attempt to deprive us of basic democratic rights.

I am sorry that there was an attempt to stop me speaking at today’s rally and it is that which I am writing to you about in an attempt to explain who I am, why I wanted to speak and why I found the purported reason for trying to prevent me speaking, ‘anti-Semitism’, so disconcerting given that Black Lives Matter has been accused of precisely the same.

I stepped forward to speak because I was only released on Tuesday from Winson Green Prison in Birmingham where I’d been remanded. I was one of a group of 6 Palestine Action activists who were driving to the Shenstone factory owned by  Elbit when the police stopped us. Elbit is an Israeli arms company which specializes in building the drones which are used to kill civilians in Gaza, Yemen, the Middle East generally and Kashmir.

The Police are now targeting Palestine Action for repression in a big way and that was why I wished to speak. I am also Vice President of Brighton & Hove Trades Union Council. 

My first political activities were against the Apartheid regime in South Africa. When I was 16 I took part in demonstrations against the visiting South African Springbok rugby tour.

In Brighton I was a co-founder of the Brighton & Hove Anti-fascist Committee and Secretary of the local Anti-Nazi League in the early 80s when the National Front was active. 

It is because I am Jewish that I could not oppose Apartheid in South Africa and then turn a blind eye to Apartheid in Israel. Israel was South Africa’s closest ally, militarily and economically during the Apartheid years.

In 1976 South Africa’s Premier John Vorster was a guest of the Israeli state. As Henrik Verwoerd, the architect of Apartheid said:

The Jews took Israel from the Arabs after the Arabs had lived there for a thousand years. In this I agree with them. Israel like South Africa is an apartheid state.

There is an excellent 2 part article in the Guardian on Israel’s links with South Africa here and here. Israel is a state of Jewish Supremacy and Apartheid.  Even B’Tselem, the main Israeli human rights organisation has, after 30 years, come to this conclusion in a statement issued earlier this year.

The accusation of ‘anti-Semitism’ made against supporters of the Palestinians and anti-Zionists is not new or surprising. How do you defend distributing vaccines to Jews but not Palestinians or other racist practices? You accuse your opponents of ‘anti-Semitism’.

In the same way defenders of South African Apartheid accused us of being ‘anti-White’ as did the National Front/BNP who used to organise under the slogan ‘rights for Whites’. 

When I stepped forward to speak a woman in red referred to me as an ‘anti-Semite’. I was expelled from the Labour Party as part of the fake ‘anti-Semitism’ allegations against Jeremy Corbyn. The British press – from the Guardian to the Mail – supported these accusations, as did Boris Johnson and the Tory Party.

Friends such as Jackie Walker, a Black-Jewish woman was also expelled as part of this weaponisation of anti-Semitism. So too was Marc Wadworth, a long standing Black anti-racist activist. It was Marc who, more than any other single person, put the Stephen Lawrence campaign on the map when he introduced Nelson Mandela to Stephen’s parents.

The same Zionists who attack us as ‘anti-Semites’ are happy to hold hands with people like Donald Trump. But then it was Winston Churchill who divided Jews into good and bad when he wrote Zionism v Bolshevism. The point I made today is that racism in Britain cannot be separated from the history of the British Empire. We justified our conquests on the basis that those we colonised were uncivilized savages. In Kipling’s words it was the ‘white man’s burden.’  Zionism, the movement for a Jewish state and Jewish supremacy, was in alliance with the British Empire.

Those who orchestrated the false ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign against the left in the Labour Party, such as the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism are also attacking BLM as anti-Semitic. In the United States one of the main Zionist organisations, the Anti-Defamation League, has boasted of using Israeli Police to train 150,000 US cops as Amnesty has confirmed.

I am writing to you for two reasons. Firstly I find it disconcerting that someone involved in the organisation of today’s march echoes the accusations of the supporters of Israel that I am anti-Semitic. I would like confirmation that that is not the position of the organisers.

Secondly there is a large and active Palestine solidarity campaign group in Brighton and it would be good for there to be greater communication and work between the groups.  After all our enemy is the same.

In solidarity 

Tony Greenstein

As the Union of Jewish Students and the British Establishment Witchhunts anti-Zionist Academics PSC flies the White Flag of Surrender

Whatever you are doing, please join this demonstration in Bristol next Wednesday

If I Were the Treasurer of the Board of Deputies I would put the Director of PSC, Ben Jamal, on the payroll. And if I were a Zionist with an ounce of gratitude then I would get on my hands and knees and thank god for PSC. Never in my wildest dreams is it possible to imagine a more cowardly, timorous and treacherous leadership than that which presently runs PSC.

If the Zionist Federation, as part of a break-out session for young volunteers, set as an exercise in creative thinking, the task of imagining their ideal political opponent, then no one, even in their wildest dreams could imagine an organisation so accommodating and deferential as PSC. An organisation which takes every Zionist attack at face value, never doubting their sincerity whilst consistently undermining its own activists and supporters.

Britain’s Palestine Solidarity Campaign is as close as you can get to a pro-Palestinian organisation adopting a Zionist perspective. I feel a sense of shame since I was one of 15 people responsible for founding PSC back in 1982. Never in my wildest imagination could I imagine an organisation that attacks its own supporters, undermines independent initiatives such as that of Palestine Action, whilst dancing to the Zionist mood music.

Politically PSC clings in practice to the Apartheid ‘solution’ of 2 states. But even its past support for the Oslo Accords pales in comparison with PSC’s record in the past 5 years. Ever since the election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the Labour Party the Zionists have waged an ‘anti-Semitism’ offensive. In April 2016 I wrotean Open Letter to Ben Soffa, PSC Secretary urging them to take the campaign seriously. I wrote:

 I know that PSC is renowned for its caution and timidity but there must be some limits to this…. The ceaseless political attack by the Zionists on support for the Palestinians in the LP cannot simply be ignored.  They will not go away because their campaign is linked with the determination of the Right in the LP to remove Corbyn.  ‘Anti-Semitism’ is their weapon of choice.

The reply, 9 days later, oozed with complacency. Soffa wrote:

I make no apology for the fact that we do not engage in every debate some would wish to involve us in.

PSC would, in other words, get on with its routine work and it wouldn’t allow the Zionists to distract it.  Soffa was clear:

We must not fall into the trap of allowing our opponents to set our agenda

The problem was that the Zionists did set the agenda whereas PSC had no agenda. Instead of responding to the attacks PSC gave them an open goal. What PSC proved was that you cannot claim to support the Palestinians if you are not prepared to oppose Zionism, the movement and ideology that drove them from their land

Among the 'academics' signing a letter hostile to David Miller is Jonathan Hoffman, the link person between the Zionist Right and openly fascist organisations

In 1993 I resigned from PSC because of its support for the Oslo Accords. Oslo turned out, as I predicted(see my article in Labour Briefing October 1993). As everyone bar PSC will agree today, the Oslo Accords were the biggest disaster to hit the Palestinians since the Nakba. Voluntarily the PLO agreed to become Israel’s security subcontractor in return for endless humiliation..

The Palestinians are not, as PSC believe, a human rights issue. At its heart the Palestinian Question is a political question. Of course Israel commits numerous human rights issues but there is a reason for this – Zionism, the desire for Jewish racial purity.

What Shami Chakrabarti advised in her Report, PSC has been putting into practice. Chakrabarti wrote:

surely it is better to use the modern universal language of human rights, be it of dispossession, discrimination, segregation, occupation or persecution and to leave Hitler, the Nazisand the Holocaust out of it?

The problem with this argument is that although we may leave the Nazi and Zionism out of it the Zionists won’t. Similarly even if we ignore the question of ‘anti-Semitism’, as Ben Soffa suggested, it was clear that the Zionists wouldn’t be taking a vow of abstinence.

Supporting the Palestinians whilst having no critique or understanding of Zionism is like opposing human rights abuses in South Africa 30 years ago whilst having nothing to say about Apartheid.

On 22^nd February I wrote an email to Ben Jamal, PSC Director and Ben Soffa:

Professor David Miller of Bristol University is subject to a concerted attempt by a host of Zionist organisations to have him dismissed.

I hope that PSC is not going to repeat the errors of the past and simply turn a blind eye to what is going on. The reasons that the Board of Deputies, CAA et al are behaving in this way is to do with changing the discourse from the rights of Palestinians to those of Jewish students.

I hope therefore that PSC will write to the Vice-Chancellor of Bristol University, in addition to issuing a press statement. It would also be helpful if a petition I have launched in defence of David Miller could be publicised on PSC's social media as a matter of some urgency.

Ben Jamal replied telling me that

PSC has had discussions with a range of key partners in past 2 days. We have put out a statement today which addresses the broad context of the attempts to delegitimise activism and puts the attack on David Miller in that context. It also reflects the conversations we have had with partners. You can find it here

A strange thing happened - I got into a conversation with AJ Solomon, Vice Chair of Bristol Jewish Society. We got talking about Zionism and the attack on David Miller. Solomon told me that it was antisemitic to blame Jews for Israel's actions. I agreed but asked by then does Israel continue to call itself a Jewish state, thus perpetuating that idea. Losing the argument Solomon 'unsent' his 5 or so messages!

Whilst most of the long-winded statement was unexceptional, it failed in one key respect. To offer unconditional or indeed any support to David. The Board of Deputies and the Zionists were alleging that by focusing his criticism on the Union of Jewish Students [UJS], an Israeli funded student group which marginalizes and ostracises non-Zionist Jewish students, David Miller was making Bristol University an ‘unsafe’ environment for Jewish students.

UJS, which is leading the attack on Miller, is an Israeli funded Zionist student group. Its constitutioncommits it to ‘inspiring Jewish students to make an enduring commitment’to Israel.

In Vetting in practicefor Comment is Free I described what happened when Emma Clyne, the non-Zionist Chair of SOAS Jewish Society organised a meeting with speakers such as Sir Geoffrey Bindman QC:

posters for a meeting the society put on were repeatedly torn down. Ms Clyne told a meeting of Independent Jewish Voices on May 15 that she had to put new ones up every day.

A clue as to the reason for its silence might lie in an article in the Jewish Chronicle of April 27 ("Students in censorship row over IJV debate").

The Chair of UJS, Mitch Simmons, made clear‘"It is the view of the UJS that certain views are not acceptable under free speech."

PSC’s statement acknowledges the attack on pro-Palestinian and anti-Zionist academics first began in the United States. This attack uses the ‘vulnerability’ of Jewish students (but never anti-Zionist Jewish students) in order to portray supporters of Israeli Apartheid as its victims, is just a form of identity politics which has long been used against American academics such as Joseph Massad and Norman Finkelstein.

In short PSC and Ben Jamal as its representative had bought into the Zionist narrative that a political response to the Zionist UJS would endanger the lives of Jewish students.

PSC’s statementaccepted that the Board of Deputies, Community Security Trust and other Zionist organisations were ‘mirroring tactics already used in the US targeting students and academics on campus’ but what was their response?  Did they extend the hand of solidarity to David who was under attack? Not a bit of it. Instead PSC issued a statement mirroring the Zionists’ criticisms.

When addressing such issues, it is crucial to apply depth, context, and clarity, and to avoid narratives that oversimplify the interlinks between groups which oppose actions in support of Palestinian rights, and Israeli state actors. Doing so obscures our understanding of the way political actors’ function. At worst, it can risk drawing on anti-Semitic tropes about Jewish power.

Whilst some have criticised Professor Miller for lacking such depth and clarity in the way he has couched his remarks,...’

It doesn’t take a genius to read between the lines. This was a none too veiled attack on Professor Miller for failing to ‘apply depth, context, and clarity’ and for ‘oversimplify(ing) the interlinks between groups which oppose actions in support of Palestinian rights, and Israeli state actors.’ This statement is like crossing a picket line. It is scabbing. PSC has no expertise on the question of links between Zionist groups.  Professor Miller is an international expert.

But more importantly. Instead of allowing the Zionists to frame the issue, PSC should have launched a full-scale defence of David Miller’s right to conduct his research without let or hindrance. People are free to criticise David Miller’s work what they should not be free to do is to call for his dismissal.

When PSC organised a tour for the Israeli Palestinian cleric Sheikh Raed Salah, in 2011, he was detainedshortly after arriving in Britain. The Home Office used material that the Zionist Community Security Trust had given them, including a doctored poem, in which the words ‘we Jews’ had been inserted, as well as other ‘evidence’ in its attempt to deport Saleh. However the Upper Immigration Tribunal rejected the Home Office’s case and Professor Miller’s expert evidence played a key role in showing that the CST had submitted false evidence.

Unlike PSC’s apparatchiks, the Zionists have long memories. Ever since then the Israel lobby– from the Board of Deputies to the UJS – have waged a war to discredit David Miller. UJS in particular, which is affiliated to the World Zionist Organisation, which has a ‘land theft division’ (Palestinian land of course!) has done its best to get David Miller dismissed.

The 100+ MPs includes a number of overt racists including Bob Blackman MP and Baroness Cox - Caroline Lucas is happy to be seen in such company

The campaign to dismiss David Miller has been one which has been waged by the political Establishment, Tory to Green. Out and out racists like Baroness Cox, Bob Blackman and Ian Paisley signed a letterfrom over a 100 MPs demanding Miller’s dismissal. [See Meet Caroline Lucas’s Racist Friends]. In the Lords yesterday there were a series of questions, all demanding Miller’s dismissal, from Labour’s Lord Bassam to the racist Tory Lord Pickles.

Electronic Intifada, the world’s premier Palestinian news site had no qualms about supporting David Miller. As soon as the Zionist attack began they printed an articleby David and three days later followed it up with an articleby Asa Winstanley ‘Israel lobby demands firing of professor who opposes Zionism’. On 3 March they printed an articledescribing how the Israeli state is co-ordinating the attack on Miller via online trolls. On 6 October EI describedhow support for David Miller was growing with a petition signed by 315 academics. One name missing from the petition was Professor Kamel Hawwash of Birmingham University, PSC’s utterly useless Chairperson.

Middle East Monitor has carried 4 articles (here, here, hereand here) supporting Miller. Al Jazeera ran an article, A war is being waged against academic freedom in Britain, by Malia Bouattia, the former NUS President.

But from PSC not a dickie bird. Total silence. It was only 6 weeks ago that UJS and other racist students were attempting to prevent Ken Loach from giving a lecture at his old college, St. Peters in Oxford. Then too the personal safety of the young Zionist snowflakes was threatened by an 84 year old film producer.

If anyone has any doubts as to what is afoot, Professor Ray Bush of Leeds University is also under attack by Zionism’s McCarthyists. In all these cases PSC has said nothing. As the Zionists sharpen their knives, PSC and Director Ben Jamal prefer to avert their eyes.

The original calculation of PSC that the attack on Jeremy Corbyn was going to be confined to the Labour Party was, as I predicted mistaken. What began in the Labour Party has spread to every party with Caroline Lucas leading the Zionist charge inside the Green Party.

It is difficult to get understand the mentality of the clique that runs PSC. Allegations of ‘anti-Semitism’ have chilled debate within and without the Labour Party. Mere mention of Palestine is now grounds for expulsion from Starmer’s Labour. A climate of fear has grown up.

If PSC had used its trade union affiliates to oppose the IHRA then the Zionists could have been stopped in the Labour Party. But trade unions affiliate to PSC on the basis of support for the apartheid 2 states solution and on a human rights, not a political, basis. Because anti-Zionism is not part of PSC’s political perspective it has never opposed on principle a Jewish supremacist state.

The Jewish Chronicles Lies Are Remiscent of Goebbel's Der Angriff

The Jewish Chronicle has led the charge against Miller. Articles such as Bristol does not want its Jewish students to be safe and accusing Bristol University of an “absolute failure of their duty of care” have adorned its pages. Yet PSC, like the 3 wise monkeys, sees, says and hears nothing. It opposes the abuse of Palestinian human rights but it hasn’t a clue as to why those rights are abused.

We are seeing a massive national movement against government attacks on free speech and the right to protest. PSC is completely absent from this campaign. This is despite the fact that the first groups likely to be a casualty of state repression are pro-Palestinian groups. Instead of joining forces with women and Black Lives Matter PSC Executive, under the influence of Socialist Actiondoes absolutely nothing  in its splendid isolation from reality.

A demonstrationhas been called in Bristol for March 31 against the victimisation of David Miller, who has been forbidden to speak out in his own defence whilst he is attacked by the State and the Zionists. It has been called by the Labour Campaign for Free Speech. It will be a minor miracle if PSC deigns to publicise it.

The whole Zionist spectrum, including Israel’s Ha’aretz, is supporting the attack on David Miller with articlesby Professor David Feldman and Nicole Lampert. I have previously bloggedabout Feldman, ‘The Academic as an Establishment Whore.

With its latest act of political cowardice the question is whether PSC is fast becoming an obstacle to effective Palestine solidarity. Its refusal to support David Miller comes hot on the heels of its attack on Palestine Action for its actions against the Israeli Arms factories of Elbit. PSC prefers demonstrations that achieve nothing as opposed to direct action that provides a focus for a mass campaign.

Tony Greenstein

The Israeli elections have now resulted in the election of at least 2 Jewish Nazis to the Knesset  this is the end result of Zionism

I am giving a series of talks on Zionism as part of the Labour Left Alliance education programme. An introduction to Zionism, Zionism and anti-Semitism, labour or socialist Zionism, Zionism during the holocaust and Zionism and what it means in respect of today’s Israel.

These talks were supposed to start 2 weeks ago but unfortunately Her Majesty insisted that I stay in her accommodation in Birmingham, which to be frank wasn’t up to that much!! All I’d done was try and redecorate one of Elbit’s many factories of death in Britain.

At least the election of Jewish Nazis will demonstrate just where Israel is heading

Why Zionism you may ask.  Well Zionism is the ideology and movement that led to today’s Israel.  If you are one of the useless bureaucrats that runs Palestine Solidarity Campaign then Zionism, the ideology of Jewish Supremacy that led to the State of Israel and today’s Apartheid State is irrelevant. 

Itamar Gvir - former member of Jewish Nazi party Kach - he has on his wall a picture of Baruch Goldstein who massacred 29 Palestinian worshippers in the Ibrahimi mosque in Hebron

For  these people why Israel does what it does is irrelevant. All that matters is that the Palestinians are a suitable human rights cause and provide the opportunity for jobs and a living.  Because to some Palestine solidarity is no more than a job.

However to socialists and anti-imperialists Zionism, the movement that created the State of Israel, is the key to understanding everything.  When everyone welcomed the Oslo Accords in 1993 as leading to a Palestinian state I stood out as the perpetual Jeremiah, the Old Testament Prophet who was always crying ‘woe, woe’. But if you look at my articlein October 1993 (misdated 1983!) in a debate with Julia Bard of the Jewish Socialist Group it’s not hard to work out who was right and who got it wrong.

Avi Maoz

Today the Israeli elections have electednot one but two Jewish Nazis as part of the Religious Zionism party. Itamar Gvir of Ozma Yehudit and Avi Maoz of the virulently anti-gay Noam party. Not only this but they will be part of Netanyahu’s governing coalition. Gvir is slated to become an Israeli Government Minister.

This is the end result of Zionism. Jewish Nazis as Israeli government ministers. But in one sense Meir Kahane, the founder of the Jewish Nazi Kach party was right.  Israel can be a democratic state or it can be a Jewish state.  It can’t be both.

If your not doing anything tomorrow night at 6 pm please tune in. The link is

https://tinyurl.com/5xnp2p5f or click on Facebook Events here

Tony Greenstein

 Unlike the IHRA Misdefinition of Anti-Semitism the JDA Makes a Clear Distinction Between Anti-Semitism and Anti-Zionism

The Jerusalem Declaration on Anti-Semitism, although flawed in parts and open to criticism, not least because of its unfortunate title, should be welcomed by all those concerned about seeing the fight against anti-Semitism being part of the fight against racism rather than being counterposed to it. 

The JDA should also be welcomed by those who are sick and tired of seeing ‘anti-Semitism’ weaponised on behalf of a ‘Jewish’ state that has just seen 2 Jewish Nazis elected to the Knesset, one of whom is likely to be made a government minister.

Unlike the IHRA which labelled opposition to Zionism and Israeli racism as anti-Semitism, the JDAmakes a clear distinction between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism. The JDA states that the following are not anti-Semitic:

Criticizing or opposing Zionism as a form of nationalism, or arguing for a variety of constitutional arrangements for Jews and Palestinians in the area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean. It is not antisemitic to support arrangements that accord full equality to all inhabitants “between the river and the sea,” whether in two states, a binational state, uni-tary democratic state, federal state, or in whatever form.13.Evidence-based criticism of Israel as a state.

The difference between the IHRA misdefinition of anti-Semitism and the JDA is the difference between night and day.

Of course the JDA should have been unnecessary. The idea that it is necessary to define anti-Semitism in order to oppose it would have been ludicrous but for the cynical attempt by racists and imperialists, anti-Semites included, to use the historic oppression of Jewish people in order to support not only the Israeli state but western imperialism and its wars in the Middle East.

It is no accident that some of the most virulent anti-Semites and White Supremacists, from Viktor Orban of Hungary, Mateusz Morawiecki of Poland and Donald Trump, have all supported the IHRA. Indeed no genuine anti-Semite could possibly take exception to the IHRA. What is there not to like about it if you are a racist?

Indeed one of the most vociferous campaigners in support of the IHRA, former Vice-Chair of the Zionist Federation Jonathan Hoffman, is a link person between the Zionist Right in Britain and fascist groups such as the EDL and Tommy Robinson's supporters. Hoffman is also one of the 'academics' who have signed the Zionist petition calling for the dismissal of Professor David Miller of Bristol University.

I remain of the same opinion as Justice Potter Stewart' in the 1964 case of Jacobellis v. Ohio that I don’t need a definition of anti-Semitism to recognise it when I see it. When my father and thousands of Jews like him took part in the Battle of Cable Street in order to prevent Moseley’s British Union of Fascists marching through the Jewish East End in October 1936, they did not need a definition of anti-Semitism in order to understand what they were fighting. However we are where we are and today the primary benefit of a genuine definition of anti-Semitism is that it can be used to replace the bogus and fraudulent IHRA definition.

Unlike the IHRAmisdefinition of anti-Semitism, the JDA is concerned with anti-Semitism not tarnishing the struggle of the Palestinians and opponents of Zionism as ‘anti-Semitic’.

What is truly frightening about the IHRAis how many people of sound mind, people who consider themselves intelligent and in the normal world are intelligent, have nevertheless subscribed to a definition of anti-Semitism that was intellectually bankrupt, the academic version of the 3 card trick. The IHRA is embarrassingly incoherent, dishonest and internally contradictory. Indeed the IHRA is itself, by its own definition anti-Semitic when it says on the one hand that Israel is the collective representation of all Jews and then says that it is anti-Semitic to associate all Jews with Israel’s crimes.

The slogan on a large demonstration in Tel Aviv in support of Israeli soldier Elor Azaria, who shot a unconscious Palestinian in Hebron in the head, murdering him. 'Kill them all' means kill all Palestinians.  According to the IHRA to describe this as Nazi-like is itself antisemitic!

The IHRA’s vagueness and obfuscation was itself demonstrably dishonest. It was deliberately opaque. Indeed a 500+ word statement cannot, by anyone’s imagination, be called a definition and, as Stephen Sedley wrote, the IHRA cannot be a definition because it is indefinite.

The 38 word IHRA definition, leaving out its 11 Israeli centred examples, is nothing if not slippery and vague. The IHRA was an exercise in intellectual dishonesty and it was eagerly grasped by racists such as the British representative to the IHRA, Lord Pickles, as a way of smearing and demonising anti-racists. Anyone who genuinely believed it was a definition of anti-Semitism can only be classed as intellectually bankrupt. And the IHRA rested on the assumption that the State of Israel was a normal, democratic state. As such the IHRA took sides in the battle between Jewish supremacy and Zionism on the one hand and anti-Zionism on the other.

The 38 word core definition of anti-Semitism at the beginning of the IHRA states that:

“Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.”

Although we are told that anti-Semitism is ‘a certain perception of Jews’ we are never told what that perception is. We are told that anti-Semitism ‘may be expressed as hatred toward Jews’without saying what else it might be expressed as. In raising the bar of anti-Semitism to the level of hatred the IHRA missed out all sorts of examples of anti-Semitism which are hurtful or discriminatory but which are not derived from hatred.

It is perfectly possible for someone to inflict violence on someone because they are Jewish, not because they hate them but because they despise them or fear them. According to the IHRA they are not anti-Semitic! Likewise someone who objects to their son or daughter marrying a Jew, not because they hate them but because they believe Jews are dishonest and untrustworthy, to say nothing of being mean and stingy, is not anti-Semitic according to the IHRA. The IHRA has but one function.  To protect the Israeli state and Zionism not Jews.

The first advantage of the JDAis that it formulates a clear and easily understood definition of anti-Semitism: ‘Antisemitism is discrimination, prejudice, hostility or violence against Jews as Jews (or Jewish institutions as Jewish).’ The latter 5 words could have been omitted but based as it is on the Oxford English Dictionary definition‘hostility to or prejudice against Jews’ it is infinitely preferable to the IHRA definition.

We now have a very clear and useful definition of anti-Semitism that clearly distinguishes between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. The JDA does not attempt to police political speech in the way that the IHRA did.  It does not for example suggest that if someone criticises Israel without at the same time criticising every other country that abuses human rights (‘double standards’) that they are anti-Semitic.

This slogan is daubed on the walls of Hebron's Shuhada Street by the Jewish settlers - the IHRA says it's 'anti-semitic' to mention this!

The JDA does not describe comparisons between the Israeli state and its policies and that of Nazi Germany as anti-Semitic. It is clear that there are many comparisons today between Israel and Nazi Germany as the walls of Shuhada Street in Hebron, which are daubed with settler slogans ‘Arabs to the gas chambers’ testify.

As Neve Gordon and Mark Levin point out, under the IHRA two of the greatest Jewish personalities of the 20^th century, both of them refugees from Nazi Germany, Albert Einstein and Hannah Arendt, have to be classified as anti-Semitic! In 1948 when Menachem Begin, the leader of Herut visited the United States they signed a letter with other Jewish personalities, to the New York Times claiming that Herut was:

“closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties.”

Another piece of graffiti on the walls of Hebron - this betrays the mentality of the religious Zionist settlers in Israel

In particular Guidelines 10-15 are welcome. They are a clear statement that support for BDS has nothing to do with anti-Semitism and everything to do with a non-violent protest against Israel. The statement that evidence based criticism of Israel cannot be anti-Semitic is to be welcomed. Similarly that support for a unitary state of Palestine (and by implication opposition to a Jewish state) is not anti-Semitic.

However there are many criticisms that can also be made of the JDA. Firstly it lacks any Palestinian perspective or input.  Given that the JDA came about as a result of the attempts of the IHRA to silence free speech on Palestine it should have been a given that Palestinians might have an input into the JDA. Unfortunately the drafting of the JDA was an all-Jewish affair despite the fact that it has a whole section B ‘Israel and Palestine: examples that, on the face of it, are antisemitic’.

Although it has been created in opposition to the IHRA the JDA focuses far too heavily on the Israeli narrative and concerns. Although, given the context, this is understandable, the authors fight shy of saying outright that the main threat from anti-Semitism comes from the far-Right and fascist groups, not from the Left. Perhaps this was too much for people like Professor Feldman of the Pears Institute for the Study of Anti-Semitism. He and Brian Klug, another member of the drafting committee see themselves as above divisions of left and right, occupying as they do the ivory towers of Birkbeck College and Oxford University!  However we need to say it loud and clear that the main threat to Jews today comes from people like Donald Trump and his White Supremacist neo-Nazi supporters.  Historically the left has always fought anti-Semitism and Nazi Germany the opposition to anti-Semitism and Nazism came almost exclusively from the left.

This is especially pertinent since the so-called Campaign Against Anti-Semitism  includes the statement that ‘In 2019, Campaign Against Antisemitism’s Antisemitism Barometer showed that antisemitism on the far-left of British politics had surpassed that of the far-right.’ This was based on fraudulent ‘research’ carried out by Dr Daniel Allington of King’s College and others.

The CAA’s 2019 Anti-Semitism Barometer introduced 6 absurd new questions about anti-Semitic attitudes which were based solely on one’s attitude to Israel and Zionism. This redefinition of what constitutes anti-Semitic statements had but one purpose – to brand opponents of Zionism and the Israeli state as anti-Semitic. From now on Israeli zealots could claim that the real enemy of Jews was not their neo-Nazi friends but those on the Left.

For example if you are not comfortable spending time with Zionists then that makes you an anti-Semite! I confess I didn’t find the company of supporters of Apartheid in South Africa  particularly congenial but I never considered that that made me a racist! Below are the 6 new ‘anti-Semitic’ statements that Allington, Hirsh and company devised:

1.      “Israel and its supporters are a bad influence on our democracy.

2.      “Israel can get away with anything because its supporters control the media.”

3.      “Israel treats the Palestinians like the Nazis treated theJews.

4.      I am comfortable spending time with people who openly support Israel.”

5.      “Israel makes a positive contribution to the world.”

6.      “Israel is right to defend itself against those who want to destroy it.

What are the problems with the JDA?

However the JDA is not unproblematic and should not be seen as the final word on what is and is not anti-Semitic. For example Guideline No. 5:

‘Denying or minimizing the Holocaust by claiming that the deliberate Nazi genocide of the Jews did not take place, or that there were no extermination camps or gas chambers, or that the number of victims was a fraction of the actual total, is antisemitic.’

is no longer true. When in 1974 the National Front pamphlet Did Six Million Really Die by Richard Verall came out then it was possible to say that holocaust denial was anti-Semitic in itself and inspired by neo-Nazis who wished to deny that which they desired to repeat.

However one of the achievements of Zionism and the State of Israel has been to harness the memory of the Jewish victims of the holocaust to the Zionist chariot. So much so that many people, especially in the underdeveloped world, think that if they deny the holocaust they will deny Israel’s legitimacy. They are of course wrong but their intention is not to repeat the holocaust like neo-Nazis but to undermine the Israeli state. That is stupidity not anti-Semitism.

More problematic are the examples under B ‘Israel and Palestine: examples that, on the face of it, are antisemitic’

Guideline No. 6, ‘Applying the symbols, images and negative stereotypes of classical antisemitism to the State of Israel’ is closely allied to the IHRA’s9^th illustration : ‘Using the symbols and images associated with classic antisemitism (e.g., claims of Jews killing Jesus or blood libel) to characterize Israel or Israelis.’

The logical fallacy here is to substitute ‘Israel or Israelis’ for Jews. Israel is not a Jew.

One of the traditional anti-Semitic stereotypes of Jews in medieval Europe was poisoning the wells of non-Jews. Another was the murder of non-Jewish children in order to bake Passover bread. These are undoubtedly anti-Semitic.

However these examples refer to Jews not Israel. It is a fact, confirmed by archival evidence, that Israel poisonedthe water supply of Acre in the 1948 war of expulsion. It is also a fact that Israeli settlers have regularly poisoned the water and wells of Palestinians in the West Bank. This is what settlers do to the indigenous population, regardless of whether they are Jewish or Christian. It cannot be right to characterise factual assertions, based on evidence, as anti-Semitic. Nor can it be right to associate traditional anti-Semitic stereotypes of Jews with a racist state which treats Palestinians as the Untermenschen.

Israel has tested poisoned gas and chemical weapons on Palestinians. It is not anti-Semitic to state this. It is a factthat Israel has harvested stolen body parts of Palestinians. The Chinese government usesthe body parts of those executed. Such an accusation is not racist.

Guideline No. 8 ‘Requiring people, because they are Jewish, publicly to condemn Israel or Zionism (for example, at a political meeting).’ is also not anti-Semitic. It is understandable, given that the Zionist movement makes the claim that they speak on behalf of all Jews (except us self-haters!) which reinforces peoples’ confusion between being Jewish and being a Zionist.

It cannot be anti-Semitic for non-Jewish people to fall for Zionist propaganda and further it is reasonable for a Palestinian to ask that Jewish people distance themselves from the Israeli/Zionist assertion that to be Jewish is to support the oppression of Palestinians. If there is any anti-Semitism it is on the part of the Zionists.

I also find Guideline 10 problematic:

‘Denying the right of Jews in the State of Israel to exist and flourish, collectively and individually, as Jews, in accordance with the principle of equality.’

I acknowledge the right of Israeli Jews to live in Palestine/Israel. However I do not acknowledge that they have any collective rights as settlers and oppressors. The settlers are not oppressed and therefore the rights we should recognise are individual rights. I would therefore strike out the words ‘collectively and individually’.

However, apart from Guideline No. 6 these are minor disagreements.  The JDA is an overwhelmingly positive contribution to detoxifying the debate over anti-Semitism and the dishonest attempts of Israel’s anti-Semitic supporters to conflate anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism. It should therefore be welcomed as a wholly positive contribution to demystifying the question of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism.

We should therefore feel free to use this definition and to propose that trade unions, universities and labour parties be encouraged to ditch the IHRA in favour of the JDA. We should be open and explicit.  The IHRA is a definition that anti-Semites support. The JDA is a definition for opponents of anti-Semitism.

We should ask hypocrites like Caroline Lucas MP, who professes to support the Palestinians, to put her money where her mouth is. If Lucas supports the Palestinians then we need to keep asking her why she is supporting a definition of anti-Semitism which defines the Palestinian struggle as anti-Semitic. 

We know that racists like John Mann, Keir Starmer and Eric Pickles will cling to the IHRA as their main purpose is to sanctify western support for Israel and legitimise imperialism’s operations in the region. However we should demand that members of the Socialist Campaign Group adopt and endorse the JDA.  Likewise Momentum should abandon the IHRA and adopt the JDA. If these groups refuse to break with the racist and imperialist consensus over Zionism then they should be ostracised as enemies of the Palestine liberation struggle and as racists.

Tony Greenstein

 Racism Came to Britain with the Empire -  Colonialism is the handmaiden of racial supremacy 

Click here to register

When a member of the SWP proposed that Brighton & Hove Trades Council sponsor a meeting on UN anti-racism day I was naturally in favour. UN anti-racism day was originally established in 1966 as a commemoration for the 60 Black Africans killed by the Apartheid police in South Africa in 1960. 

It was particularly appropriate because on January 12^th Israeli human rights organisation, B’Tselem had declaredthat Israel was an Apartheid state. What made this statement important is that B’Tselem is the quintessential liberal human rights organisation. Founded in 1989 as a liberal Zionist organisation this declaration represented a break from the view that Israel was a flawed Western-style democracy.  In B’Tselem’s own words:

The Israeli regime enacts in all the territory it controls (Israeli sovereign territory, East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip) an apartheid regime. One organizing principle lies at the base of a wide array of Israeli policies: advancing and perpetuating the supremacy of one group – Jews – over another – Palestinians.

The anti-racist and anti-fascist movement in this country had always opposed Apartheid in South Africa. How could SUTR not adopt the same attitude to Israeli Apartheid? What was different?

But to SUTR and the SWP it was different. A majority of Jews in this country support the Israeli state whereas South Africa had few expatriates to support it. Another difference is that whereas South Africa defended the Apartheid political system the Israeli state and its Zionist apologists have always denied that it was an apartheid state. Israel boasts for example that Israeli Arab citizens can vote. Many British socialists used to see Israel as a socialist oasis in the Middle East. Generations of Labour Party left-wingers had been ardent Zionists.

It was only with the war in Lebanon in 1982 that the scales began to fall from peoples’ eyes. Tony Benn and Eric Heffer resigned from Labour Friends of Israel. The 1982 Labour Party conference passed an emergency motion calling for a democratic secular state. But till then Israel had been virtually immune from criticism and what criticism there was came from the Labour Right, people like Christopher Mayhew and David Watkins

The events of the past 5 years, in particular the false anti-Semitism campaign which was devised to demonise and destroy Jeremy Corbyn have represented a political setback. Support for Zionism and opposition to the Palestinians have become the trademark of the Labour Right. Unfortunately some on the left too, like Jon Lansman and Owen Jones, have also ended up in the Zionist camp.

Many trade unions like UNISON and even UNITE tried to square support for the Palestinians and support for Israel and Zionism. The unions have supported the IHRA misdefinition of anti-Semitism uncritically. This campaign has also taken its toll on sections of the far-left, the SWP in particular.

Following the January meeting of Brighton & Hove trades council I attended two meetings of SUTR where I proposed that a meeting on UN Anti-Racism Day be devoted to Apartheid in Israel.

SUTR is, as most people know, a front for the SWP. It is owned, lock stock and barrel by them and is their main ‘front’ organisation today.  Despite this it often does good work and I have gone on their demonstrations and attended their meetings.

After I had made my proposal member after member of the SWP got up to propose that we do anything other than hold a meeting on Israeli Apartheid. Refugees were the favourite choice of topic yet no member of the SWP was honest enough to admit to why they were opposed to holding a meeting on Israeli Apartheid.

In response to this one of those in attendance, Aidan Pettit, sent an email to SUTR (which the SWP Secretary refused to distribute to other members) stating that

‘it's not logical to oppose the racism meted out to refugees when they're in the UK but not the racism that drives many of them here in the first place

At the following meeting I repeated my proposal. This time another SWP member, Jeremy, got up and explained that it was very ‘delicate’.

What Jeremy and other SWP members meant was that they didn’t want to offend or cut links with liberal Zionist like Rabbi Sarah (we have a gay rabbi in Brighton). The SWP calls itself a Marxist, indeed a revolutionary socialist organisation yet it wasn’t prepared to adopt a consistently anti-racist position for fear of offending a liberal racist.

A simple question arises. How can you fight racism if you are not prepared to confront racists and if necessary offend them? Rabbi Sarah may not want to face up to the implications of a ‘Jewish’ state for the Palestinian, a state that vaccinates half of the population (Jewish) and not the other half (Palestinian) but surely the point of a socialist organisation is that it doesn’t allow itself to be held back by the more reactionary, backward elements in society?

What happened in Brighton is not unique. In Scotland for 3 years the Confederation of Friends of Israel Scotland and Glasgow Friends of Israel, two far-Right Zionist organisations which have worked with fascists, have been allowed to take part in the annual SUTR march.

A wide variety of organisations such as Scotland Against Criminalising Communities condemned the SWP’s willingness to accede to the Zionist demands.

The reason for the SWP’s political cowardice was without doubt the ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign in the Labour Party and the involvement of trade union leaders who have gone along with the demands of the Zionists that they be protected from ‘anti-Semitism’. The SWP, which has never had a sophisticated understanding of how anti-Semitism has been weaponised ran a mile.

In London on Holocaust Memorial Day they actually withdrewan invitation to Glynn Secker of Jewish Voices for Labour to speak after the Board of Deputies sought and obtained from Tower Hamlets Council the cancellation of a meeting.

However Brighton & Hove Palestine Solidarity Campaign took the decision that we would not allow the SWP/SUTR’s cowardice to prevail.  We are therefore holding on April 5^tha meeting with a variety of different speakers.

Ronnie Kasrills is the Jewish former commander of the ANC’s military wing, Umkonto we Sizwe and a former government Minister under Nelson Mandela will be speaking as will Ramzy Baroud, a journalist, author and editor of the Palestine Chronicle.

Also speaking is well known Asian anti-racist and former Birmingham councillor, Salma Yaqoob. Salma has been the target of the Labour Right and former Labour MP Ian Austin in particular.

Rania Muhareb is another speaker. Rania is a legal researcher and advocacy officer with the Palestinian human rights organization Al-Haq. She is currently taking a PhD at the Irish Centre for Human Rights in Galway.

Rana Nazir, the Chair of the Kashmiri Womens Association, is also speaking. The situation in India under the Islamaphobic BJP Prime Minister Narendra Modi is fast becoming similar to that in Israel. Israel is India’s major arms supplier and Modi is a member of the RSSpolitical group that is the core of the BJP. Founded by supporters of the Nazis, the RSSaspires for India to become like Israel, an ethno-nationalist state.

Recently India has promoted legislation that for example excludes the immigration of Muslim refugees.It has also repealedArticle 370 of the constitution whereby Kashmir is granted autonomy. Instead India has recolonised Kashmir in a similar way to that of Israel on the West Bank.

It is particularly appropriate as the trial of Derek Chauvin, George Floyd’s murderer, gets underway, that Kweku Martin Peprah of Brighton Black Lives Matterhas agreed to speak.  BLM have organised a series of well attended marches in Brighton in protest against police racism.

And lastly I intend to say a few words on behalf of Brighton Palestine Solidarity Campaign. The meeting is sponsored by Brighton & Hove Trades Union Council and I hope that as many people as possible will be able to attend. (Register here)

One thing we should take away from the meeting is the idea that the fight against racism, be it in Kashmir, the United States, Britain or Israel is indivisible. Either you are opposed to racism or you are not. There are no special exceptions, no get out clauses which exempt people simply because they are Jewish or Hindu. Racism is a poisonous and pernicious evil, whose effect is to divide the oppressed. No socialist should, for one minute, turn a blind eye to racism simply because they see a sectarian advantage to doing so.

I hope to see you at the meeting.

Below is an Open Letter which I wrote to SUTR/SWP about what happened. It has been endorsed by Brighton & Hove PSC.

Tony Greenstein

Open Letter to Brighton & Hove Stand Up To Racism re UN Anti-Racism Day

Dear Nick,

I attended meetings of Brighton & Hove SUTR on January 20 and February 3^rd in order to discuss plans for the UN’s International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.

The Day was established after the Sharpeville massacre on March 21 1960 when South Africa Police opened fire killing 69 Black demonstrators against the apartheid “pass laws”.

On 12 January 2021 the Israeli human rights group, B’tselem, which was founded in 1989 as a liberal Zionist organisation, issued a statementTHIS IS APARTHEID – A regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan to the Mediterranean Sea.

The past 30 years have convinced Btselem that democracy and a Jewish state are incompatible. In a carefully worded statement Btselem stated that:

The Israeli regime enacts in all the territory it controls (Israeli sovereign territory, East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip) an apartheid regime. One organizing principle lies at the base of a wide array of Israeli policies: advancing and perpetuating the supremacy of one group – Jews – over another – Palestinians.

Btselem is not alone. The foremost liberal American Zionist Pete Beinart reached much the same conclusion in an articlein theNYT headed I No Longer Believe in a Jewish State.

When I proposed that SUTR hold a meeting on Israeli Apartheid to mark UN Anti-Racism Day it met with concerted opposition from members of the SWP. They suggested that refugee events be held instead. Such events can be held any day of the year. As Aidan Pettitt wrote in an email which you refused to distribute to other members:

‘it's not logical to oppose the racism meted out to refugees when they're in the UK but not the racism that drives many of them here in the first place

The real reason for the SWP’s opposition to making UN Anti-Racism Day into Israel Apartheid Day was made clear by Jeremy. The issue was, he said, ‘delicate’. I think we all know what he meant. SUTR is afraid of alienating liberal Zionists.

This is of a piece with Scottish SUTR’s decision to allow the far-Right Confederation of Friends of Israel to participate, with Israeli flags, on their demonstrations. As a Joint Statement from the Islamic Human Rights Commission and other organisations declared:

we are dismayed that Stand Up to Racism Scotland will be allowing organisations that actively support Israeli apartheid and racism to participate in its annual anti-racism march in Glasgow. We believe that their presence is incompatible with Stand Up to Racism’s intention of celebrating International Day Against Race Discrimination

In 2019 SUTR withdrew an invitation to a Jewish anti-Zionist, Glyn Secker, to speak at a meeting in Tower Hamlets on Holocaust Memorial Day, after a campaignby Zionist groups. There is a long history of SUTR refusing to oppose racism when perpetrated by Israel.

SUTR’s refusal to confront the issue of Zionism, Israeli Apartheid and its connections to British racism is because of a fear of being accused of ‘anti-Semitism’ Perhaps you will also refrain from opposition to the BJP’s anti-Muslim policies and its occupation of Kashmir for fear of being accused of ‘Hinduphobia’? SUTR is afraid that its Labour Party sponsors will abandon it if it takes a principled position.

SUTR appears incapable of recognising the connection between the Israeli state, Zionism and the far-Right today. Perhaps it has escaped your attention that on January 6^th at Capitol Hill, amongst the Confederate flags and shirts bearing sloganssuch as 6MWE (6 million wasn’t enough) and Camp Auschwitz were Israeli flags.

In this country the EDL, Britain First and other fascist groups have long displayed Israeli flags on demonstrations. Tommy Robinson has statedthat he is a Zionist. The neo-Nazi founder of the alt-Right, Richard Spencer, openly declares that he is a ‘White Zionist’.

The far-Right admire and love Israel precisely because it is the kind of ethno-nationalist state that they aspire to create. Fascists and racists support Israel for the same reasons as they supported Apartheid in South Africa.

The admiration of the far-Right for Israel is not all one-way. There has long been a link-up between right-wing Zionists and the supporters of Tommy Robinson. People like Katie Hopkins, a guestat the Israeli Embassy, combine anti-Semitism with Zionism. In return she has been supportedby many Zionists for her Islamaphobia.

We have racist regimes such as Orban’s Hungary, which combine support for Israel with anti-Semitism. The anti-racist movement in Britain never hesitated to oppose South African Apartheid but when it comes to Israeli Apartheid you look the other way. Why?

The reason is obvious. The Israeli state is supported by a majority of Jews in the West. If a quarter of a million White South African émigrés had lived in this country would you have said that the question of Apartheid in South Africa was a ‘delicate’ matter?

Millions of people have seen how Israel has vaccinated its Jewish population whilst denying the vaccine to 5 million Palestinians living under occupation. That is what racist regimes do and that is what the UN Day Against Racism is about.

It is for this reason that Brighton & Hove PSC have decided that it will go ahead and organise its own meeting on Israeli Apartheid. It is to be regretted that SUTR refuses to stand up to one of the main sources of racism and Islamaphobia in the world today for fear of upsetting the British Establishment and its Zionist outriders.

Click here to join

In Solidarity

Tony Greenstein

 The history of how and why the Zionist movement and the anti-Semites became partners and the best of friends

Register here

This is the 2^ndof 5 talks I am giving on Zionism as part of the Labour Left Alliance Education Programme. They take place every Friday at 6 pm until 23^rd April.

One of the ironies of the fake ‘anti-Semitism’ allegations in the Labour Party is that Zionism as a movement has never objected to anti-Semitism.  Quite the contrary the history of Zionism is the history of its collaboration and co-operation with anti-Semitism.

For example throughout the campaign against Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party no mention was made of the explicitly anti-Semitic comments about Jewish media owners fixing elections in Boris Johnson’s 2004 book, 72 Virgins.

Roberts Zile - fascist MEP for Latvia's LNNK - sat with Tory MEPs

Likewise there was radio silence on the alliancebetween Conservative MEPs and fascist and anti-Semitic MEPs in the European Parliament’s ECR Group. People like Roberts Zile of the Latvian LNNK, who marched every year alongside the veterans of the Latvian Waffen SS, sat side by side with the Conservatives, yet the Board of Deputies and the Jewish Labour Movement had nothing to say about this. See The Conservative Party anti-Semitism crisis nobody talks about

The collaboration of Zionists with anti-Semites is the skeleton in the Zionist cupboard. Although they never mention it now, between 1954 and 1958 Israel was gripped by the Kasztner libel trial brought by the Israeli Labor government against a Hungarian holocaust survivor, Malchiel Greenwald. Greenwald had accused a senior Mapai (Israeli Labor) official Rudolf Kasztner, the leader of Hungarian Zionism during the war, of collaboration with Adolf Eichmann and the Nazis in the Hungarian holocaust.

Jews not wanted in Hildesheim

The libel trial boomeranged when Benjamin Halevi of the Jerusalem District Court, foundin 1955 that there had been no libel. Kasztner had ‘sold his soul to the devil’. Kasztner was assassinatedsoon after by agents of Mossad, Israel’s secret police. None of this is mentioned by Zionists today. It has disappeared into a Zionist memory hole but in 1955 the 2^nd Israeli government of Moshe Sharrett collapsed as a result of Halevi’s verdict.

A fascist EDL meeting with a Zionist Rabbi addressing the crowd

Today’s rump of the Israeli Labour Party is led by Merav Michaeli, the grand daughter of Kasztner. Michaeli doesn’t lose an opportunity to defend and try to rehabilitate her quisling grandfather. And nor does Yad Vashem, the Zionist holocaust propaganda museum in Jerusalem.

However the history of Zionist collaboration with the Nazis will have to wait until my 4^th talk. In this talk I want to explore the history of Zionist collaboration with anti-Semitism.

It is something of an irony that anti-Zionists are accused by the Zionists of ‘anti-Semitism’ because historically that was the accusation that Jews directed at the Zionists.  The Zionists were, in the words of Romania’s Jews, the ‘Hitlerjuden’, Jewish collaborators and quislings. It was because Ken Livingstone referred to this collaboration that the Zionists created such a storm.

Theodor Herzl - founder of Political Zionism

Francis Nicosia, Professor of Holocaust Studies at Vermont University wrote that:

‘whereas today non-Jewish criticism of Zionism or the State of Israel are often dismissed as motivated by a deeper anti-Semitism, in Herzl’s day an opposite non-Jewish reaction, one of support for the Zionist idea, might have resulted in a similar reaction’ ^[1]

When Theodor Herzl, the founder of Political Zionism, summoned the First Zionist Congress in 1897 he chose as its venue the capital of Bavaria, Munich. Munich’s Jews rose up as one in protest. They accused the authorities of anti-Semitism for allowing it to take place. As a result the Zionist Congress was quickly relocated to Basel in Switzerland.

Herzl accurately predicted in his Diaries that ‘‘the anti-Semites will become our most dependable friends, the anti-Semitic countries our allies.’ ^[2]It is one of the Zionist fables that it is easy to blur the distinction between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism.

In fact the distinction between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism is the distinction between chalk and cheese. One is a form of racism and the other a form of anti-racism. If you think that racism and anti-racism are similar then you clearly need help.

Of course a few fascists still justify their hatred of Jews by pretending that they are supporting the Palestinians, even though they combine this with Islamaphobia. Yes anti-Semites use the word ‘Zionist’ when they mean Jew. But so do the Zionists! However today the vast majority of fascists and anti-Semites, from Tommy Robinson to Donald Trump combined anti-Semitism and Zionism.

The Zionists pretend that there is only a coincidence of interests between them and the anti-Semites. The anti-Semites wanted the Jews to leave and the Zionists too, for different reasons, also wanted them to leave. If this was true then it would be bad enough that the Zionists were seeking to put into practice the programme of the anti-Semites. But it isn’t true. There is also an ideological symmetry between anti-Semitism and Zionism.

Both share the assumption that the ‘real home’ of Jews is in Israel not where Jews actually live. Both accept that Jews are aliens in the countries they live in. Both share a racial conception of humanity. One of the most repeated criticisms of Zionism by socialists before the holocaust was that they were legitimizing everything the anti-Semites were saying about Jews being aliens. In the words of Isaac Deutscher, Trotsky’s biographer:

‘to the Jewish workers anti-Semitism seemed to triumph in Zionism, which recognised the legitimacy and the validity of the old cry ‘Jews get out!' The Zionists were agreeing to get out.’^[3]

Alfred Rosenberg, the Nazi Party’s main theoretician, who was hanged in 1946 at Nuremburg, wrote in 1919 that

‘Zionism must be vigorously supported in order to encourage a significant number of German Jews to leave for Palestine or other destinations.’[4]

Rosenberg‘intended to use Zionism as a legal justification for depriving German Jews of their civil rights’ and ‘eventually the Jewish presence in Germany.’[5]

Is it any wonder that the main Jewish German organisation, the Centralverein talked about German Zionism having inflicted ‘a stab in the back’ to the anti-fascist struggle against Hitler.^[6] Chaim Weizmann, who became Israel’s first President, wrote

‘that unless some radical measures are taken fairly soon, we Zionists may stand charged, when history come to be written, with criminal indifference in the face of the greatest trial to which Jewry has been subjected in modern times.’ [7]

Zionism began with an acceptance that Jews did not belong outside Palestine/Israel. They saw anti-Semitism as the normal, rationale response of non-Jews to the presence of the Jewish stranger.

In the words of left-Zionist novelist, A B Yehoshua, the Jewish diaspora is a

‘‘cancer connected to the main tissue of the Jewish people who use other peoples’ countries like hotels.’ [8]

Herzl believed that anti-Semitism was divinely ordained, sent to preserve the Jews:

‘Anti-Semitism, too, probably contains the Divine will to Good, because it forces us to close ranks, unites us through pressure, and through our unity will make us free.^[9]

Indeed anti-Semitism was beneficial!

‘(It) will not harm the Jews. I consider it to be a movement useful to the Jewish character. It represents the education of a group by the masses... Education is accomplished by hard knocks.’^[10]

Arthur Ruppin, after whom many streets in Israel are named was the second most important person in the history of the Yishuv (the Jewish community in Palestine before 1948). He became Director of the Palestine Office from 1908 onwards and he is known as the Father of Land Settlement. Ruppin was also a believer in the racial sciences and social Darwinism.  He had a hatred of Oriental Jewry and it was this that led to Yemenite Jews, imported into Palestine between 1912 and 1918 dying like flies. They were paid starvation wages and denied medical treatment. Nearly 50% died as a result of what Etan Bloom described in his Ph D thesis as ‘‘pathological stereotyping’.  [11]

Ruppin was of the belief that European Jews were not Semitic unlike the Arab Jews. They were of Aryan origin and had been corrupted by the Semitic element into becoming speculators and money lenders. That was why they had to come to Palestine. Ruppin won the Krupps prize in Germany for an essay putting social Darwinism into practice.

When a friend of Ruppin called him an anti-Semite he retorted ‘I have already established here [in his diary] that I despise the cancers of Judaism more than does the worst anti-Semite.’[12]Ruppin associated Judaism with capitalism and his writings reflected his belief in the identity between anti-Semitism and anti-capitalism.[13] Joachim Doron wrote that his diary contained entries that were symptomatic of self-hatred. At a theatre performance he complained about the ‘Jewish physiognomy of one of the actresses.’ He subscribed to the myth, much loved by the Nazis, that the Jews had an especially strong sex drive and this was the reason for circumcision.[14]

If you were to read many of the comments about diaspora Jewry by Zionists you would be forgiven for thinking that they were from virulent anti-Semites. Joachim Doron described how

Rather than take up arms against the enemies of the Jews, Zionism attacked the ‘enemy within’, the Diaspora Jew himself and subjected him to a hail of criticism…. Indeed a perusal of Zionist sources reveals criticism ‘so scathing that the generation that witnessed Auschwitz has difficulty comprehending them.’[15](my emphasis)

Literally Zionism was seen by Jews when it first came on the scene as a form of Jewish anti-Semitism.  Tomorrow I will go into more depth about this.

 Tony Greenstein