The Story of One Woman’s Fight for a Better Society

Holocaust to Resistance: My Journey – A Review Essay
Suzanne Berliner Weiss
Roseway Publishers, 2019

Interview with Suzanne Weiss Wednesday 1 March 2023

I first met Suzanne Weiss through organising the Socialist Labour Network’s Holocaust Memorial Day meeting on 27 January 2023. Suzanne had, prior to this, sent me a copy of her book, Holocaust to Resistance: My Journey. Below is a review article I have written.

Tony Greenstein

From Holocaust to Resistance - Suzanne Weiss

Suzanne Weiss has written one of the most moving books I’ve read. Suzanne is a living, walking symbol of the slogan Never Again for Anyone. The Nazi Holocaust– which devoured millions of lives, Jews, Gypsies, the Disabled, to say nothing of trade unionists, communists and socialists – did not spring out of nowhere.

The Holocaust wasn’t, as western propaganda pretends, an act of madness, ‘a pseudo-messianic ideology.^[1]which saw the Jews as being the incarnation of the Devil.^[2] Nazism was a product of imperialism, the belief that the West had a divine right to plunder, pillage, rape and murder those it colonised.

As Edwin Black wrote:

The Nazis' extermination programme was carried out in the name of eugenics …. In France, Belgium, Sweden, England and elsewhere in Europe, cliques of eugenicists did their best to introduce eugenic principles into national life; they could always point to recent precedents established in the United States….

From the turn of the century, German eugenicists formed academic and personal relationships with the American eugenics establishment, in particular with Charles Davenport, the pioneering founder of the Eugenics Record Office on Long Island, New York, which was backed by the Harriman railway fortune. A number of other charitable American bodies generously funded German race biology with hundreds of thousands of dollars, even after the depression had taken hold.

Black described how Hitler proudly told his comrades how closely he followed American eugenic legislation:

Now that we know the laws of heredity’ he told a fellow Nazi, ‘it is possible to a large extent to prevent unhealthy and severely handicapped beings from coming into the world. I have studied with interest the laws of several American states concerning prevention of reproduction by people whose progeny would, in all probability, be of no value or be injurious to the racial stock

Alt Samia Central United Church, 2017

The Nazis were, above all, imperialists. Nazi economic and foreign policy was based on lebensraum, the conquest of ‘empty spaces’ in Eastern Europe. On 5 November 1937, Hitler addressed the German High Command emphasising that he intended to wage wars of plunder in Eastern Europe. The record of the conference was known as the ‘Hossbach Protocol’. The Incorporated Territories, which Germany later conquered in Poland, were to be cleared of Jews, Poles and Gypsies.

SLN  Holocaust Memorial Day Meeting, Suzanne Weiss 27 01 23

Suzanne Weiss was born of Jewish refugee parents in France in 1941. In 1943 the Jewish resistance dispersed thousands of Jewish children into the countryside, including Suzanne. She was looked after for the next two years by a French farm family in Auvergne province. Then, in 1945, her dying father, accompanied by a friend who purported to be her mother, came to the village and took her back to the Jewish community. For the next four years Suzanne was shunted from one orphanage to another before being adopted by a Jewish couple in America.

Troubled Teen 1954

Suzanne had a difficult childhood growing up in the United States with two domineering adoptive parents, Frances and Louis Weiss. Louis insisted that the only role of a woman was to procreate. Although they were on the anti-McCarthyite left and supported the struggle of America’s Black population for liberation, Suzanne’s adoptive parents were aghast when Suzanne invited home a young Black man. They wanted him to come in the back door lest the neighbours see! An injunction that Suzanne ignored.

Yet when Suzanne asked Viola, a Black woman who cleaned the apartment, and cared for her, whether it was true that Africans cooked and ate white people, Suzanne was reproached for asking a Black person such a question. ‘Where did you get such an idea’ her mother asked her as if she had invented it. In fact, the young Suzanne was questioning the prevailing racist bias of American society.  

Growing Up in New York

Reading this difficult personal story, which intertwines with her growing political awareness, I was shocked that her new parents could be so insensitive to a young orphan who had lost a mother in Auschwitz and a father to the fight against the Nazis. Frances even told her that she hadn’t been their first choice to adopt. ‘I wanted Nicole’ referring to a friend in the orphanage. They were bull-headed and determined that Suzanne would grow up in their own image. The first part of the book is about Suzanne’s determination to map out her own life.

Pensive and conflicted, 1958

After one heated argument  in which Suzanne ran to her room and slammed the door, Louis took that door off its hinges! Many similar incidents followed. Frances was ‘emotionally remote’ Suzanne recalls. Her new parents ‘didn’t understand that they had adopted a child with a tumultuous background whose personality had already been formed.’ They provided material necessities but not for her emotional needs.

A subtext running throughout the book is Suzanne’s search for information on who her birth parents were and what had happened to them. Her adoptive parents had various documents and photographs yet did not share them.

Suzanne tells a miraculous story of how a school friend introduced her to Nora, who turned out, amazingly, to be Suzanne’s birth mother’s sister. Nora’s spouse, Jake, turned out to be a notorious Jewish collaborator with the Nazis in their Polish home town of Piotrkow Trybunalski. From Nora Suzanne learnt that her mother had been an activist in the Bund, a Jewish anti-Zionist party that commanded majority support amongst Polish Jews.

When Suzanne revealed her discovery of Nora to her adoptive parents, they gracefully accepted it. But after a party in celebration of this addition to the family, her adoptive father launched into a tirade dictating Suzanne’s future: ‘the female role is to find a mate and to multiply.’ Angered, Suzanne fled from her home and sought refuge with a girlfriend. Suzanne’s adoptive parents reacted by having Suzanne arrested and incarcerated in a detention facility – as it happened, a Catholic girl’s residence for delinquents. As she was remanded into custody, Suzanne observed that Louis ‘had  learned nothing from the McCarthy Witchhunt’.When the residence staff asked whether she was really Jewish, Suzanne replied coldly, ‘Hitler made me Jewish’. Today one might equally reply that Zionism has also made us Jewish.

After her release, Suzanne’s problems did not ease. When she was given a recording by Gertrude Stein, the American lesbian poet and novelist, Suzanne’s paranoid adoptive father hired a private detective to follow her.

Suzanne and her adoptive mother moved to Los Angeles in an attempt to cut off the friendship with her New York friends. Suzanne paid for her own post office box in order that she could communicate with her friends safe from the prying eyes of her adoptive parents.

At a French orphanage

The American Socialist Workers Party

The second part of the book takes up Suzanne’s work in the American Socialist Workers Party (SWP), and her role in establishing its print shop. This was the time of the Cuban Revolution, the continuing struggle for Black rights, Women’s rights, and the campaign against the Vietnam War.

In 1960, the Holocaust was a hot topic because of the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem. When a friend asked Suzanne if she was a Zionist she responded

No, I’m Jewish. I didn’t see how Israel as a Jewish country could be the answer to the hatred of the Jews. Besides wouldn’t it be a convenient place to get rid of us all at once.

Suzanne concluded that ‘Never again’ was not only a Jewish slogan about Nazism but also applied to the whole of humanity.

In August 1959 as Suzanne left for a new life in San Francisco her adoptive mother lamented that they had had only had nine years together. Upon reflection Suzanne noted that

I rebelled against the insincerity, dishonesty and hypocrisy of these ‘progressives’. They who railed against McCarthyism, used his tactics.

In June 1960 Suzanne married and left with her husband for a honeymoon in revolutionary Cuba.

On their return, Suzanne joined in building the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, –  dangerous work since exiled-Cubans were armed and threatening. Suzanne recalls how at one Fair Play for Cuba meeting a group of Cubans attacked the meeting. Fortunately, the stewards were prepared for them and fought back, ejecting them out into the street.. An exile fired a gun (at an undercover cop!). However, there followed harassment and surveillance by the FBI against the supporters of the Cuban revolution.

This whole period was one of struggle for Black liberation, the assassination of Kennedy and then Malcolm X, and the growth of the anti-Vietnam war movement.

When Suzanne succeeded in obtaining a small sum by way of holocaust reparations she was determined to give it away to those struggling to end apartheid in South Africa and the SWP. Her adoptive parents insisted that she should keep it herself, and rather than praising her selflessness, cut her out of their will (although in her old age her adoptive mother relented). Suzanne observed that it was ‘a hard blow to a fragile relationship.’

With Suzanne's birth mother, Fajka Berliner

Another application for reparations brought not payment but a cache of new documents about Suzanne’s parents and what had happened to them. She learnt that her birth mother had arranged for her rescue by the Jewish resistance.

From civil rights campaigns to Vietnam anti-war campaigns, Suzanne was immersed in solidarity action. At a time when many Communists and socialists were calling merely for negotiations to end the Vietnam War, Suzanne was explicit in the demand for American troops out. She refused to accept the legitimacy of the American presence.

Throughout her narrative Suzanne skilfully interweaves the personal with the political. She describes the sexism of her male comrades. When Suzanne narrowly escaped being raped in New York, her comrades joked about how women really enjoyed being raped.

The pervading sexism in both the SWP and American  society as a whole, is a constant theme. It was a sexism that not only put women down but also had the effect of inhibiting their participation in the movement. Although the SWP was transformed by the women’s liberation movement, Suzanne’s  own immersion in the print shop, cut her off from the living movement. It is a problem that afflicts all Marxist groups and reproduces itself as sectarian isolation.

When the SWP decided that its members should become factory workers, Suzanne took on a number of manual jobs in factories and the oil industry. The jobs were dirty and at times dangerous. She sought to prove that women had equal rights to those of men.

Her description of the American working class, which in private industry was barely unionised, shows how the effects of both racism and sexism weakened the class. Her friends and companions were Black women. In one workplace in the South the clerks objected to her eating her lunch with Black workers. ‘You’re a Yankee and we’re segregationists’ they proudly boasted, along with references to Hitler as a ‘great man’. They preferred a segregated workplace even though these divisions played into the hands of the bosses. This backwardness of workers is rarely addressed by the left, other than as an example of ‘false consciousness’.

In 1979 Suzanne got a job with an oil company and encountered the hatred of the white workers for Black workers: ‘my idealised concept of union solidarity was shattered by reality.’ In 1981 the air traffic controllers union PATCO struck for increased pay and better working conditions. President Reagan fired them, over 11,000 strikers. ‘The total lack of a union response sealed Reagan’s victory,’ Suzanne commented.

Yet the party leaders continued to stress, like a hammer knocking on our brain: ‘The workers are moving to centre stage of the class struggle.’ How’s that? Get off cloud nine and face reality I thought’.

And here we see how the far-left, addicted to its template of working- class revolution never understands why there is no revolution. Instead, the different groups retreat into the theory of inevitability and ignore difficult theoretical questions such as whether or not the western working class is indeed the gravedigger of capitalism or whether it has been compromised by racism and imperialism.

In 1982, Suzanne stood as a socialist candidate for Congress, winning positive nominal support of fellow workers – but no co-workers actually came to her rally. ‘The party remained an alien milieu for my workmates. Our socialist message was not in harmony with their lives and concerns.’

It was this divorce from reality that led Suzanne to lose her enthusiasm for the party.

Perhaps the most gratifying episode in the book is Suzanne’s initiative in finding a new partner. Having settled on John Riddell she asked him to dinner! Like all fairy tales it ended up in a happy marriage with someone Suzanne could trust and cherish.

Suzanne played a significant role in the SWP for 33 years, during which time she was entrusted with organizing the care of James P. Cannon, a founder and prominent leader of the SWP.

In the years after Cannon’s death, Suzanne records, the SWP increased its sectarian and undemocratic path excluding all criticism. What had been a promising socialist group became a sect under the control of a leadership which brooked no dissent.

It was a leadership which refused to allow reality into its political vision. Suzanne had been working alongside the American proletariat, and had won their respect, but it was clear that they would not get involved in the SWP. The party’s experiment of sending their cadre into factories was not working.

Although she does not mention it, this experiment was not unique. Very similar things happened with the PATCO Reagan British SWP and Trotskyist groups like the International Marxist Group (IMG) who also sent their middle-class cadre into factories in the hope that they would provide the spark that would light the fires of working-class revolution.

What neither the SWP, the IMG or other tiny groups of the Marxist left understood was that the working class in the West was not automatically a revolutionary class. They had been corrupted by the crumbs from the imperialist table, hence why nationalism and racism were so endemic amongst workers in the West. They had supped with the devil but without a long spoon!

The final part of the book recounts Suzanne’s return to France with her partner, John. She had sworn never to return to the land where she had experienced the terror of Nazism but, after a time John, persuaded her. This is perhaps the most optimistic part of the book where Suzanne learnt of the fight of the French resistance and how, in the area where she had been hidden, Auvergne, 5,000 Jewish children had been hidden. This was as many as the total saved during the war by the illegal immigration (Aliya Beit) to Palestine, the only form of rescue acceptable to Zionism.

In France, Suzanne met up with Michel Berman, who had first looked after her when her father retrieved her from Auvergne. She learned of the activities of the UJRE (Union of Jews for Resistance and Mutual Aid) which had protected her from the Nazi killers.

Suzanne visited her father’s grave and found it marked with a cross. ‘No justice even in death’. She also found the Nazi record of her own mother’s journey to Auschwitz and learnt of the complicity of the French Vichy police in the arrest of Jews. Although the Vichy regime shielded Jews born in France, it offered up the refugee Jews to the Nazis.

This is the answer to Zionism’s belief that Jews can only be safe living in their own state and replicating the racism that they had experienced. It was not Zionism that saved Suzanne or the thousands of Jewish children in France, Belgium and other countries but the solidarity of ordinary workers and peasants and their resistance to Nazism. At the same time the Zionists staffed the Judenrat (Jewish Councils) which, almost without fail, collaborated with the Nazis over and above their duty.

As Suzanne cut her last links with the SWP, she judged that its politics ‘had become more and more contrived and brought no understanding, no clarification, no lessons learned.’ She moved with John to Toronto to begin a new life. Obtaining a degree at university, she became a care counsellor for the elderly:

Suzanne wondered ‘whether elderly Holocaust survivors differed from survivors of other traumas, tragedies or genocides such as Palestinian families’. She pondered how Palestinian survivors of the Naqba were subjected to daily terror, the destruction of their families and the loss of their homes, possessions and homeland.

By the year 2001 the entire older generation in Suzanne’s family had died:. ‘I look back with regret on the older generation with all its passionate courage and hurtful short-sightedness.’

There is a chapter on Nora’s husband Jake’s collaboration with the Nazis, which is an issue I have wrestled with in my book Zionism During the Holocaust. Suzanne quotes Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi who distinguished between collaboration under coercion from voluntary collaboration. I had independently reached the same conclusions. It is something that Lenni Brenner in his 51 Documents – Nazi-Zionist Collaboration fails to make. As Suzanne observed: ‘Responsibility for the personal tragedy of his (Jake’s) wartime role lies with the Nazis, who made thuggery and betrayal the road to survival.’

The point about Zionist collaboration with the Nazis was that it was voluntary. No one forced the Zionists to offer a trade agreement Ha'avara to the Nazis. No one forced the German Zionist Federation to write a letter to Hitler on 21 June 1933 pledging co-operation. No one forced Rudolf Kasztner to testify at Nuremberg on behalf of the Jewish Agency in support of Hermann Krumey, the butcher of the children of Lidice and Hungarian, Austrian and Polish Jewry. This was the crime of Zionism. Its collaboration was voluntary.

In sum, Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia Solidarity, and indigenous sovereignty were all causes Suzanne embraced in recent decades. In the process, she says, ‘I broke from long held prejudices against left-wing activists who were not Marxists.’ Climate change pointed to new directions. Yet Suzanne regretted the absence of a socialist party which could have integrated all these struggles if only it had not been consumed by sectarian dogmas.

On receiving a request in 2005 to sign a letter protesting at the visit of Israeli war criminal Ariel Sharon, Suzanne signed it with the words ‘holocaust survivor’. She had come out. As she observed:

Hitler’s Holocaust is unique in history. Nothing is similar to it. Still, many Israeli techniques – the expulsions, the ghetto isolation, the pervasive checkpoints – have a disquieting resemblance to Nazi methods.

Perhaps here we disagree. Every genocide is unique but was the Holocaust any different from the extermination of Native Americans by Andrew Jackson or the Armenian genocide, at which German army officers were present who would later carry out the extermination of Jews? Was not the extermination of Africans at Namibia’s Shark island concentration camp the precursor of the Holocaust? Its commandant Dr Eugene Fischer later training Nazi doctors such as Joseph Mengele.

To those who say comparisons between Israel and Nazi Germany are anti-Semitic my reply is that we should compare more not less. In so far as Israel uses the Nazi holocaust as its justification we are under a duty to point out the similarities.

I was pleased to discover that Suzanne was involved in campaigns against Israeli companies Ahava and Sodastream since I too was heavily involved in these campaigns in Britain. As Suzanne says ‘my allegiance to the Palestinian freedom struggle contributes to my affirmation of my Jewishness.’

In the chapters on her visits to Auvergne, Suzanne remarks on how, on at least five occasions, German soldiers had deliberately ignored the presence of Jewish children. The community of Chambon was overflowing with children, a quarter of whom were Jewish, as well as German soldiers. This is an important corrective to the idea that all Germans were anti-Semites. Hitler came to power not because of anti-Semitism but despite it.

The German army was, to be sure, guilty of many atrocities not least its collaboration with the Einsastzgruppen. But it also protested in Poland at the attacks by the Nazi SS on Jews.

In the penultimate chapter Suzanne describes her interviews in Paris with Le Figaro. ‘Whilst thanking the people who courageously hid the Jews and other refugees ‘in plain sight’, I also drew the parallel with the fate of refugees today.’ It is this which Zionism refuses to do since it too pursues the chimera of racial purity.

Suzanne summed up her defence of Palestinian freedom:

My whole being has been intertwined in this irrepressible striving for social justice. My mother and father were Jewish socialists, looking for solutions to hatred and injustice. They were opposed to the Zionist settlement of Palestine. I stand with them and oppose the colonialism that has displaced and oppressed the indigenous Palestinians.

It is not surprising that Suzanne has left behind her, at the age of 82, the sectarianism of far-left groups but continues to embrace the struggle of the Palestinians while also persisting in her commitment to the goal of socialism. If the first part of her life saw the end of Apartheid in South Africa it is to be hoped that we will also soon see the end of Apartheid in Palestine.

This is a book that I cannot recommend highly enough.

 But later they fire tear gas at Palestinians trying to defend themselves – this is worse than Apartheid in South Africa

Israeli settler in the West Bank village of Burin, on Friday.Credit: Yesh Din

This film is taken by human rights group Yesh Din and was printed today in Ha’aretz in an article below. It demonstrates beyond doubt that the Israeli military have one purpose and one purpose alone in the West Bank – to defend the settlers and to further the colonisation of the land.

That is why armed resistance by the Palestinians is perfectly justifiable and why the settlers are also legitimate military targets. The Quisling Palestinian Authority should be dismantled. It serves no purpose other than to act as the enforcer of the Israeli Occupation Authorities.

Tony Greenstein

Israeli Soldiers Seen Standing by as Settlers Throw Rocks at Palestinian Houses in West Bank Town

In a video documenting the incident, the rioters are seen vandalizing trees and throwing stones, as soldiers stand by without trying to stop or detain them. According to Israeli NGO Yesh Din which published the video, three Palestinian houses were damaged

Hagar Shezaf        Mar 4, 2023 8:11 am IST 

Israeli settlers were documented throwing stones at Palestinian houses in the West Bank village of Burin on Friday, as IDF soldiers were present and stood by.

In a video published by Israeli human rights organization Yesh Din, the rioters, some of them masked, are seen throwing stones and destroying trees belonging to Palestinians – while Israeli soldiers stand by without trying to stop or detain them.

According to Yesh Din, three houses in the village were damaged by the stones. Soldiers were later seen firing tear gas into the area, and several local residents were injured by inhaling the gas, according to the organization.

The army says it is investigating why the soldiers did not act immediately, adding that after a military force that arrived in the village responded with crowd-control measures, order was restored.

The village of Burin is located near the settlement of Yitzhar and the Giv'at Ronen outpost, as well as the Palestinian town of Hawara. According to evidence, during the settlers' rampage in Hawara earlier this week, riots also took place in Burin, resulting in damages to several houses in the village.

Security establishment officials estimated that approximately 400 settlers took part in the riots in Hawara, which broke out after the murder of brothers Hillel and Yigal Yaniv by a Palestinian assailant. During the riots, a Palestinian man was shot dead and dozens were injured. The attackers caused extensive damage to property, set cars and buildings on fire and slaughtered sheep.

Central Command chief Maj. Gen. Yehuda Fuchs called the incident "a pogrom carried out by lawbreakers" and admitted that the army was not properly prepared to prevent it. "This is a disgraceful event by lawbreakers who acted not in accordance with the values on which I was raised, not in accordance with the values of the State of Israel and also not in accordance with the values of Judaism," Fuchs said.

On Friday morning, the army prevented hundreds of left-wing activists who came to Hawara to express support for residents from entering the town, and threw stun grenades at them. The IDF declared the area a "closed military zone" and prevented the buses with which the Israelis arrived from moving forward. The activists then walked towards the town while demonstrating, and at least four were detained when they tried to cross the army blockade. One of the activists said he was beaten by soldiers. A soldier was also seen confronting former Knesset speaker and Jewish Agency chairman Avrum Burg, knocking him to the ground.

‘I couldn’t see if my brother’s murderer was a soldier or settler’

 The Real Question is Why Does Stand Up to RacismRefuse To Stand Up To Racism?

On Wednesday Brighton and Hove Trades Council voted by 9-4 not to support the Stand Up to Racismmarch in London on March 18. This was because Scottish SUTR, since 2017, have allowed Glasgow Friends of Israel (GFI) and the Confederation of Friends of Israel – Scotland (COFIS) to take part in the march.

In 2018 Zionist groups were allowed to participate, complete with police protection. As a result the Muslim Association of Britain alongsidethe Muslim Council of Scotland refused to take part.

The SWP ‘invited’ the Convenor of Scottish SUTR Tallis Ahmed to the meeting. Ahmed proceeded to lie and dissemble claiming that Care 4 Calais sponsored their march, denying that Muslim groups had boycotted it. She even pretended that SUTR is democratic claiming that they had AGMs at which officers were elected. A cursory glance at their website reveals no such democratic inclinations.

What the SWP were unable to do was defend the presence of Zionist groups on their march. The reason being that it is indefensible and thus they were caught on the horns of a dilemma. How can you have an anti-racist march with racist flags and groups taking part?

When I pointed out that a number of Black groups and individuals had signed a letterurging speakers not to take part in SUTR’s founding conference, Ahmed claimed that Black Lives Matter was only a name! Almost the same as Keir Starmer calling them a ‘moment’. The fact is that Southall Black Sisters and East End Sisters Uncut also signed the letter.

Glasgow Friends of Israel make racist rape jokes about the Murder by an Israeli Sniper of 21 year old Palestinian Medic, Razan al Najar

15 local trade unionists signed an open letter calling on the Trades Council not to back SUTR’s march in London. (see below)

Only last week there was a pogrom in the Palestinian town of Huwara. One person was killed, 98 were injured, attempts were made to burn Palestinians alive in their homes and throughout all of this the Israeli army helped the settlers, dancingwith them afterwards in the streets whilst using stun grenades to violently attack 400 Israeli Jews who came to express solidarity with the victims.

These are the friends of SUTR and the SWP

Bezalel Smotrich, the head of the Civil Administration in the West Bank, calledfor the ‘wiping out’ of the town of Huwara, recalling the worst pogroms against the Jews of Europe.

It beggars belief that the Socialist Workers Party, who controlSUTR, should allow racists and Jewish Supremacists on an anti-racist march.

GFI Attack Jewish anti-Occupation group Na'amod

Every major human rights organisation, from Amnesty International to Human Rights Watch and Israel’s B’Tselem, have concluded that Israel is an Apartheid State. B’Tselem describedIsrael as

‘A regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea’.

Apartheid is a system of racial supremacy and its supporters have no place in any organisation which calls itself anti-racist.

Veterans of the anti-Apartheid struggle in South Africa have described Israel’s repression as worse than Apartheid in South Africa. Archbishop Desmond Tutu observedthat

‘What's being done to the Palestinians at checkpoints, for us, it's the kind of thing we experienced in South Africa.’

After a visit in July 2008 to the West Bank former Deputy Minister of Health Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge MP explained:

“What I see here is worse than what we experienced – the absolute control of people’s lives, the lack of freedom of movement, the army presence everywhere, the total separation and the extensive destruction we saw….racist ideology is also reinforced by religion, which was not the case in South Africa.”

Yet SUTR, who claim to oppose racism, welcomes onto its annual march against racism in Glasgow, two openly racist Zionist groups.

In 2019 GFI Chair, Sammy Stein was filmedharassing a Scottish PSC [SPSC] stall in the company of Max Dunbar, a former Treasurer of the BNP in Scotland with close links to open holocaust deniers.

Edward Sutherland, Christian Zionist, Anti-Semite and Member of Glasgow Friends of Israel

In May 2022 GFI member Edward Sutherland, a Christian Zionist. was reprimandedby the General Teaching Council for posting ‘vile’ anti-Semitic messages on Facebook using an alias, Stevie Harrison.

Ironically Sutherland’s defence was that ‘the messages were not antisemitic due to there being a “distinction” between Zionism, a political position, and Judaism, a religion.’ Zionists usually spend their time telling us that there is no difference! One of Sutherland’s posts read ‘Looks like a certain Zio’s big nose is out of joint.’

Palestinian home in Huwara burnt out by pogromists - their supporters march with SUTR

The GFI Facebook Group is a racist sewer. Posts include:

·               The description of Israel’s murder of 3 Palestinians as ‘euthanasia’

·               The murder of 50 Muslims by a neo-Nazi in Australia which attracted comments such as

‘it’s payback time for the attacks that Muslims have perpetrated across the globe’ ‘what goes around comes around so what’s the problem’ and ‘the whole attack was staged’

·               Advocating that a Palestinian activist ‘should be strangled with her own head scarf.’

Matthew Berlow, a member of GFI and a solicitor was fined£500 for staging a fake graffiti attack on his home and then trying to blame SPSC for it. This did not stop him taking part in SUTR’s march. See

Berlow fined by Law Society

Scottish lawyer admits framing Palestinian group with fake vandalism attack

GFI Attack anti-racist musician Roger Waters

GFI’s Facebook page includes attacks on Jewish peace group Brighton and Hove Trades Council Muslim Association of Britain alongsidethe Muslim Council of Scotland, Tallis Ahmed Starmer Huwara, Smotrich, Amnesty International to Human Rights WatchDesmond Tutu Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge Sammy SteinMax Dunbar, Edward Sutherland, a Christian Zionist. was reprimandedby the General Teaching Council Matthew Berlow, Na'amod, calls Roger Waters one of ‘the worlds’ best known anti-Semites’, calls for refusing entry to Britain of an anti-Zionist rabbi, denies that Jewish settlements are illegal under international law, attacks Humza Yousef, a Muslim candidate for First Minister in Scotland for meeting with Hamas being part of the Scottish Islamic Foundation and has a comment with 3 likes denying that the Palestinians even exist:

‘Every time one uses the word Palestinian, one is perpetuating a MYTH"

I wrote on behalf of the Trades Council to Scottish SUTR asking for

clarification as to what is the position this year. Will GFI and COFIS be welcomed onto the march or will you make it clear to them that they are not welcome and will be excluded if they attempt to join.

GFI Support Banning an anti-Zionist Rabbi from Britain

The reply was disingenuous. They claimed that neither Zionist group had been welcomed, which is a lie. In 2019 a motion not to allow them to participate was defeated in the SUTR organisers group. My anonymous correspondent also claimed that

SUTR is a domestic campaign to mobilise against racism and the far-right in Britain.

The Tory attack on refugees is being jointly undertaken with the French government. Racism in Britain originates in Britain’s colonial past. The SWP claims to be Marxists yet Marx called on workers of the world to unite.

I was informed that ‘The demonstration is  for everybody who agrees with these core demands’. It beggars belief that GFI agree with welcoming refugees. In Israel non-Jewish refugees are automatically refused asylum.

In 2012 Prime Minister Netanyahu statedthat ‘"illegal infiltrators [i.e. refugees] flooding the country"were threatening the security and identity of the Jewish state.’ Has GFI ever condemned this? If not why would they support asylum seekers coming to this country?

I also asked:

If SUTR considers itself a ‘domestic campaign’ mobilising against racism why does it not mobilise against the increasing anti-Palestinian racism that Palestinian students, academics and supporters are facing from Zionist groups that manifests in abuse, vilification, silencing and in some cases loss of livelihood? 

The Zionist movement is prominent in attacking Black, Muslim and Palestinian students and academics. They targeted Shaima Dallalai, the Muslim President of NUS who was sacked and Shahd Abusalama, a lecturer who was first suspended and then forced out of her job.

Close relations have developed between the Zionists and the far-Right resulting in Tommy Robinson attendingthe Board of Deputies rally at the Israeli Embassy, in support of the attack on Gaza, in May 2021.

UN Anti-Racism day was institutedin 1966 in order to remember the 69 Africans gunned down by the South Africa police at Sharpevillein March 1960. To allow pro-apartheid groups to take part in the SUTR march is to spit on the grave of those who were murdered.

As Margaret Pacetta and John Hilley wrotein the Morning Star of 13 March 2018

‘You cannot stand up to racism while lying down to Israeli apartheid.’

The Annual Pogrom Through Jerusalem each May - GFI/COFIS have never condemned Zionist Racism

To Palestinians the Israeli flag is the equivalent of the swastika for Jews. It is the flag of those who march through East Jerusalem each year chanting‘Death to the Arabs.’ It is the flag of house demolitions.

It’s like expecting Black people to march alongside the Confederate flag. The SWP are incapable of integrating anti-imperialist and anti-racist politics. It is the politics of opportunism and left sectarianism.

Why? Because the SWP sees their primary task as building their party. Everything else is secondary. SUTR has won the support of trade union leaders by playing down their politics. Frightened of the false charge of ‘anti-Semitism’ if they banned Zionist groups, they have also conceded to the Zionists’ false ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign.

SUTR is an SWP front. It is their main recruiting tool and they are willing to sacrifice the Palestinian struggle in order to win the support of those to their right. Trade union leaders are happy to subcontract anti-racism onto SUTR. That’s why SUTR doesn’t criticise trade union leaders who remain silent about the Labour Party’s anti-refugee policies. Yvette Cooper criticised Cruella Braverman’s refugee proposals because they won’t work, not on principle. Rachel Reeves has gone further and criticisedthe Tories for not deporting more.

SUTR seems to believe that since the majority of British Jews are Zionists they should turn a blind eye to Zionism. They forget that Zionism was founded on the belief that anti-Semitism could not be fought as it was inherent in all non-Jews.

Racism was how imperialism justified colonising other peoples’ countries. Palestine was a British colony between 1917 and 1948. By allowing Zionist groups to march with them, SUTR has become complicit in British racism.

Lineker’s comparison with the Nazis is highly relevant – in the 1930s the Tories demonised Jewish refugees in the same way as they demonise refugees today

The Solidarity of Ian Wright and Alan Shearer is in marked contrast to Labour Scabs  Cooper & Thornberry Who Attacked Lineker not the Tories

Hats off to Gary Lineker! He has done more to fight racism against asylum seekers in one tweet than Stand Up to Racism has done in its entire existence!

We should also congratulate Ian Wright, Alan Shearer, Alex Scott, Micah Richards and Jermaine Jenas for their solidarity with Lineker. Would that Starmer or Thornberry had the same honesty and integrity.

Thornberry – Israel is a beacon of light and democracy

The behaviour of Thornberry, for whom Israel is a a ‘beacon of light’ is despicable. Rather than calling out the racism of Cruella she parroted the Zionist line that the Holocaust is unique and must never be compared. Likewise the pathetic Yvette Cooper who skwawked that the 1930s must never be mentioned.

On the contrary we should compare and compare again what is happening today to what happened in the 30s when British immigration policy was responsible for thousands of Jewish refugees dying who could otherwise have been saved. It was the Cruella Bravermans of the 30s who protested that Britain was ‘full up’. It was the Tory newspapers – in particular the Express and Daily Mail who led the charge. On 20^th August 1938 the Mail quoted approvingly an Old Street magistrate that

 "The way stateless Jews from Germany are pouring in from every port of this country is becoming an outrage:  the number of aliens entering the country through back door - a problem to which the Daily Mail has repeatedly pointed"

The sanctimonious hypocrisy of the BBC is staggering. They suspended Gary Lineker for comparing the Nazis’ demonisation of Jews with the Tory scapegoating of refugees yet they back to the hilt Islamaphobe John Ware and arch Tories such as Fiona Bruce, Tory Laura Kuensberg, Andrew Marr, Andrew Neil etc.

It’s no surprise that the BBC rushed to defend Cruella since it’s headed by corrupt Tory donor Richard Sharp and Tory Director General Tim Davy.

The Daily Mail in the 1930s on Hitler

We are told that the BBC became embroiled in a row over impartiality after Lineker compared the language used to launch the government’s asylum policy with 1930s Germany. Yet the BBC has never hesitated to give a platform to Nigel Farage on Question Time or framing the asylum debate solely in terms of it being a ‘problem’.

When have you ever heard the BBC highlight the fact that refugees come to this country because we went to their countries?  When has the BBC drawn the connection between western wars in Syria, Libya and Iraq and the refugees who come to these shores? Always, without exception, the BBC treats the topic of refugees as a burden. Refugees are completely dehumanised.

Piers Morgan on Lineker

When it comes to racism the BBC is first to highlight the issue of free speech yet when it comes to anti-racism free speech disappears out of the window. When Cruella protested at being criticised and the Tory tabloids went on the attack the BBC jumped to attention.

The row was sparked by Lineker’s response on Twitter to a Home Office video in which home secretary Cruella unveiled plans to stop people crossing the Channel on small boats.

Thornberry's Racist Rant

Accordingto Thornberry Lineker “went too far” by comparing the Government’s policy to Nazi Germany. She said ‘there was a special place in hell for the Nazis’. Complete rubbish. The Nazis didn’t come from outer space. They came to power because western leaders saw in Hitler the saviour of Germany from communism. Hitler took inspiration for his eugenicist policies of sterilisation and euthanasia from similar policies in American states.

Once again Starmer and his front bench have sold the pass. Instead of defending refugees their criticisms were over whether the Tory policies would work. People like Rachel Reeves criticisedthe Tories because they weren’t deporting enough refugees.

Thornberry, the Assistant Attorney General, insistedthat while the broadcaster feels strongly about the issue, his “Germany in the 30s” comment overstepped the mark.

“I think some of the language that Gary Lineker has used in the last 24 hours has been really very unfortunate, and I wouldn’t have used some of the [comments],”

Then there was another racist, Shadow Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper who told LBCthat “we shouldn’t make comparisons with the 1930s”. Yet in 2017, when Trevor Kavanagh wrote a Sun columnthat said Britain must deal with “the Muslim problem”, Cooper tweeted:

When reports of islamophobia and antisemitism are rising, how can The Sun think it is okay to print a column on ‘The Muslim Problem’ with echoes of the 30s?

See Cooper attacked Lineker for comparison with 30s – but made comparison with 30s

And then Starmer Labour did a a U-Turn. Why? Because they suddenly realised that Lineker’s principled stance was popular. Not everyone is as cowardly and bigoted as the Labour front bench.

Nicola Sturgeon was quotedon Twitter as saying

"As a strong supporter of public service broadcasting, I want to be able to defend the BBC. But the decision to take Gary Lineker off air is indefensible. It is undermining free speech in the face of political pressure - & it does always seem to be right-wing pressure it caves to."

Piers Morgan, not a natural progressive, opinedthat:

"It’s now a sackable offence in Britain to express an opinion. What a pathetic state of affairs."

Former Arsenal player Ian Wright said

"Everybody knows what Match of the Day means to me, but I’ve told the BBC I won’t be doing it tomorrow. Solidarity."

Match of the Day pundit and former Newcastle United player Alan Shearer said:

"I have informed the BBC that I won’t be appearing on MOTD tomorrow night."

All pathetic Labour Party's Home Affairs spokesperson Yvette Cooper could say was

"The focus on this is being used by the government, both to find someone to blame and also to distract from their own serious failures."

Jeremy Corbyn on the other hand made his views crystal clear:

"Well done Gary Lineker for standing up for refugees. Well done Ian Wright for showing the meaning of solidarity."

Head of Broadcasting Union BECTU Philippa Childs spoke out too:

"This is a deeply concerning decision from the BBC. It will give the appearance that they have bowed to political pressure from ministers to take someone off air for disagreeing with the policies of the current government."

Match of the Day pundit and former Manchester City player Micah Richards said

I was not due to be working on MOTD tomorrow, but if I was, I would find myself taking the same decision that Ian Wright and Alan Shearer have.

Match of the Day pundit and ex-Spurs player Jermaine Jenas said

"I wasn't down to be doing Match of the Day tomorrow, but if I was I would have said no and stood with my fellow pundits and Gary Lineker."

The BBC’s Own Goal

As a result of the Tory domination of the BBC’s management Gary Lineker was suspended, however Tim Davy and Richard Sharp have clearly scored an own goal! What they didn’t and couldn’t have expected was the solidarity from Lineker’s fellow broadcasters.

As a result Match of the Day will have no commentators and it would seem likely that because of the actions of the Professional Footballer’s Association the BBC will be having no post-match interviews either!

What started as a knee-jerk reaction to the Tory government’s police state attacks on anyone who dissents from their narrative has turned into a horrendous problem for them as their flagship programme is literally all at sea.

The bravery of Lineker and the solidarity of fellow commentators compares to the scabby behaviour of Starmer (who has remained silent), Cooper and Thornberry. Meanwhile of course the useless Campaign Group, led by John McDonnell and Diane Abbot says nothing whatsoever so intimidated have they become.

See Skwawkbox’s Labour u-turns and attacks Tories for attacking Lineker – after spending a day attacking him too

I have also sent in a complaint to the BBC.

Tony Greenstein

My Complaint to the BBC

It is staggering that the BBC has removed Gary Lineker from BBC's Match of the Day for breaching impartiality guidelines.  It demonstrates just how much the BBC is in the pockets of the Tory Government.

Did you sack Andrew Marr in 2003 for praising Tony Blair  being right over the invasion of Iraq?

Did you sack Tory Laura Kuensberg for repeated bias against Jeremy Corbyn including staging shadow cabinet resignations on air?

Did you sack Andrew Neil for his bias over the fake Labour 'antisemitism' allegations?

Did you sack John Ware for his Islamaphobia. To quote Middle Eastern Eye:

'Ware's 2005 programme "A Question of Leadership" attracted over 600 complaints in just its first week after broadcast, most though not all of them, from Muslims protesting about its unusually hostile and one-sided nature.

One senior ex-Panorama journalist, described the programme as "the most disgusting Panorama that I have ever seen. The presenter was acting like a prosecuting attorney, not a journalist." The Guardian's Madeleine Bunting called the documentary "McCarthyite".

Ware's presenting of 'Is Labour Antisemitic' was one series of lies after another, all of which are unravelling.

The BBC is nothing more than the voice of the British Establishment. Riddled with Tories and other corrupt elements. You are anti-working class and always happy to give a voice to racists but you can't stand having a principled anti-racist presenter like Gary Lineker.  You are an utter disgrace.

Your complaints department is nothing more than a shock absorber. You are nothing more than the mouthpiece of the Tory Party and every passing racist.

You even silenced Richard Attenborough in case global warming 'sceptics' were put out.

It is time you were allowed to die off.  You are worse than Sky and your competitors.

I want to know how it is that you can remove Gary Lineker and yet you did nothing about Jeremy Clarkson when he calledfor strikers to be shot?

When the BBC's Tim Davie says ‘We are absolutely driven by a passion for impartiality” it’s like Hitler saying he was driven by a passion for Jews

Tim Davie Interview

We should celebrate a rare victory over the BBC who have been forced to client climb down, reinstate and apologise to Gary Lineker. If Lineker had spoken out in support of Cruella Braverman’s abolition of the right to claim asylum and attacked refugees does anyone seriously think that Lineker would have been suspended?

That is why, when Tim Davie, talks about his ‘passion for impartiality’he is a liar. Was Fiona Bruce suspended for defending Stanley Johnson’s ‘one-off’ breaking of his wife’s nose? Was Jeremy Clarkson suspended when he saidthat strikers should be shot, ‘in front of their families’ no less?

The list of BBC pundits and presenters who make right-wing comments without any action being taken against them is legendary. But when Lineker spoke out in support of refugees and had the audacity to compare the vitriol directed against them with the attacks on refugees in the 30s, both from the Mail and Express all hell broke loose. The Tory tabloids barked and Tim Davie jumped to attention.

However Lineker stood his ground, unlike the shameless cowards on Labour’s front bench who rushed to criticise Lineker’s remarks.  Yvette Cooper and Lady Nugee (Emily Thornberry) like good Zionists condemnedthe comparison with the 30s. Yet in the 30s the same attacks were made on Jewish refugees to this country that the Tories make now. The Daily Mail wroteon 20^th August 1938 that:

 “The way stateless Jews from Germany are pouring in from every port of this country is becoming an outrage:  the number of aliens entering the country through back door – a problem to which the Daily Mail has repeatedly pointed”

Let no one pretend that Britain has a good record on refugees. It is bloody awful and the record of the Labour Party is equally appalling.

The BBC was born in the womb of the British state. For decades, until the 1990s. MI5 vetted its staff to ensure that those deemed ‘subversive’ were excluded from employment.

In 1926 the BBC’s founder Lord Reith excludedthe Archbishop of Canterbury from broadcasting to the nation because he favoured a settlement with the miners during the General Strike whereas the government sought to starve them back to work. The Catholic Archbishop of Westminster was allowed to broadcast because he condemned the strike as a sin against god.

Throughout its history the BBC has distinguished itself by hostility to the working class and trade unions. Whenever there is a strike they focus, not on the workers’ grievances but on the  impact of the strike on the public. They emphasise the inconvenience to the public not the struggle to get by of the workers. They tell us the cost of meeting the workers’ demands but never the cost of tax avoidance by the wealthy.

When was the last time the BBC questioned, still less informed us, of the catastrophic effect of NHS privatisation? When did they connect the PPE shortages at the start of the pandemic with the outsourcing of contracts and the ‘just in time’ mentality of the companies involved.

When was the last time the BBC questioned the incompatibility of the profit motive and the mission of the NHS to care for people regardless of cost?  The BBC has the values of capitalism and the market embedded in everything they say and do.

Not once do they ask, as with the Post Office or the Railways why workers are expected to take pay cuts in real terms when hundreds of millions of pounds go to shareholders. When they tell us how much it costs to meet workers’ demands have they ever gone on to ask why that cost could have more than been met by reducing dividend?

Jonathan Pie

The most infamous case of BBC bias was during the 1984-5 Miners’ strike when they focused, not on police violence but that of the miners.  At Orgreave Coke Depot where there was mass picketing, the BBC reversedthe sequence of Police attacks on the miners and the miners retaliating by throwing stones. The Police attacks were portrayed as a response to the Miners’ actions. Eventually the BBC owned upbut by then it was too late.

The coverage of the gross corruption in the allocation of COVID contracts, with the Tories having a VIP lane, whereby cronies and friends of Tory MPs and Ministers gained preferential access, has been virtually nil. What is inconvenient to the government is inconvenient to the BBC.

On Israel and Palestine the BBC is a byword for bias. Israeli attacks on Palestinians are always a reaction to Palestinian violence never the cause of such violence. Watching the BBC you would never know that Palestinians in the West Bank have experienced the rule of a military junta for over half a century. They speak of the Police keeping order whilst not mentioning that this is a colonial police force that is hostile to the Palestinians whilst protective of Jewish settlers.

When demonstrators in Jerusalem were chanting ‘death to the Arabs’ the Police attackedthe Palestinians who protested.  Imagine that there were Palestinian crowds shouting ‘death to the Jews’. It would feature on every BBC news programme. But when Israelis chant‘Death to the Arabs’ it provokes no comment.

Last year a riot of settlers on Jerusalem Day, a veritable pogrom, in East Jerusalem, was portrayed by BBC correspondent Yolande Knell in this 44 second video clip,as follows.

‘‘the mood of them is jubilant, festive.  It feels like a party.... they’re celebrating their presence at this spot.’

This video of last year’s march shows a variety of racist slogans such as ‘Mohammed is Dead’‘A Good Arab is a Dead Arab’’The Arab is a son of a bitch. and of course ‘Death to the Arabs.’

BBC reporters know that Jerusalem Day is a demonstration of Jewish Supremacism whose purpose is to make it clear that the Palestinian presence in Jerusalem is unwanted. Hence the reference in the above video to a second Nakba (ethnic cleansing of Palestinians). Notice the reaction of the Police.

The excuse made for Knell’s piece to camera, in response to my complaint, was that it ‘should be considered within the wider context of the article’ was pathetic. A visual piece to camera is clearly going to have more impact than a written article on the BBC web site.

Andrew Neil, who was a high profile political correspondent for the BBC and also chairman of the tory Spectator hasn’t hesitated to air his opinions on Brexit, Corbyn etc. without any come back.

Is it any wonder that the BBC behaves in this way when its Chairman, Richard Sharp, donated £400,000 to the Tory party while helping Boris Johnson, to secure loan of £800,000? We should treat the BBC for what it is – an Establishment Broadcasting Corporation.

Fiona Bruce defends Boris's dad breaking his wife’s nose – just a ‘one-off’

When Martine Croxall said she was ‘gleeful’ at the news that Boris Johnson had dropped out the Tory leadership race and would not return to Number 10 she was taken off the air.

Not only had Croxall said “Well, this is all very exciting, isn’t it? Am I allowed to be this gleeful? Well, I am!” but later she could be heard giggling and said: “Sorry! I shouldn’t probably. I’m probably breaking some sort of terrible due impartiality rule by giggling.”

Former culture secretary Nadine Dorries said it was an example of “deep seated bias” within the BBC. Croxall was not only taken off air following the comments but the BBC launched an “urgent” investigation, saying in a statement:

“It is imperative that we maintain the highest editorial standards. We have processes in place to uphold our standards, and these processes have been activated.”

Why has there been no action against the anti-Corbyn presenters Laura Kuenssberg and Fiona Bruce?

Throughout the Corbyn era the BBC led with attacks on ‘Labour anti-Semitism’. Andrew Neil devotedthe whole of his Sunday politics in 2016 to attackingLabour ‘anti-Semitism’.

The tone of the programme was set by the voice over which asked:

‘Does Jeremy Corbyn support 4 causes like the Palestinians or Stop the War mean he’s not tough enough when there are allegations of anti-Semitism in Labour.’

There was no explanation why supporting the Palestinians or opposition to war should mean hostility to Jews, unless it is being suggested that Jews are war-like. Itself an anti-Semitic assumption.

There was a 45 second rant from Wes Streeting on Labour ‘anti-Semitism’ followed by a 25 second response from James Schneider, a Momentum supporter defending Corbyn but not saying much else.

John Mann, the Zionist MP and Chair of the so-called Parliamentary Anti-Semitism Committee, who believes that boycotts of Israel are inherently anti-Semitic, was given an uninterrupted 6 minutes and 4 seconds. In other words those arguing that the LP was saturated with anti-Semitism had a mere 16 times as much time as the person who defended Corbyn. At no point did Andrew Neil question Mann’s assumptions of Labour ‘anti-Semitism’. It was taken for granted.

Mann wasn’t asked, at any stage, for any evidence to support his arguments. Neil asked 6 questions, none of them probing.

The first was ‘is there a problem with anti-Semitism in the Labour Party.’ An interviewer with any sense of balance of fairness would have asked ‘Why do you say there is an anti-Semitism problem…‘ or ‘what is the evidence for your assertion that…’

Mann engaged in empty rhetoric but provided not a scrap of evidence for his assertions. 

The second question was no better. It assumed there was a problem of anti-Semitism. ‘Why has it come back’ and his third question simply asked ‘why in the Labour Party. Again no challenge to the central thesis.

Neil’s fourth question referred to Corbyn’s ‘friends in Hamas and Hezbollah’ which is a repetition of the media lies.  Corbyn chaired a meeting at which he referred to the speakers as ‘friends’ in a general and polite sense.  That was all.  They weren’t his personal friends. In any event neither organisation is anti-Semitic.

Neil then suggested that Corbyn shared platforms with people hostile to Israel and whether that is anti-Semitic. The assumption being that hostility to the Zionist state is anti-Semitic.

His fifth question was no different. Are you doing enough about this. Again the assumption that there was Labour ‘anti-Semitism’.

But it was Neil’s 6^th question which was most ironical. Andrew Neil demonstrated that the only problem with anti-Semitism lies with people like himself.  He asked about the ‘Jewish vote’ as if there is a block Jewish vote to begin with.

Another irony is that when Andrew Neil was Editor of the Sunday Times who did he hireto verifythe Goebbels Diaries? Holocaust denier David Irving!

And when Boris Johnson was Editor of The Spectator he hiredTaki, the owner of Takis magazine for whom David Duke of the KKK wrote. Taki supported the openly Nazi Golden Dawn Party in Greece. And who was Chairman of the Board of Press Holdings Media Group which owns The Spectator? Andrew Neil! The hypocrisy is endless.

Taki himself was deeply anti-Semitic. As his biography records:

Taki was able to run columns on ‘bongo bongo land’, West Indians ‘multiplying like flies’ and one on the world Jewish conspiracy, in which he described himself as a ‘soi-disant anti-Semite’.

So where are the left-wing reporters and news journalists at the BBC?  We have Tory Laura Kuensberg and Nick Robinson, ex-Presidentof the Oxford University Conservative Association.

Former communications officer for Theresa May, Robbie Gibb, is on the BBC board. Tim Davie, the current BBC director general, previously stood as a councillor for the Tory Party in Hammersmith and was deputy chair of Hammersmith & Fulham Conservative party.

The question Davie has repeatedly failed to answer was why was Lineker silenced for a tweet criticising the current government when it had no issues with Lineker’s political views when he opened the BBC coverage of the Qatar World Cup with a monologue detailing human rights issues in the Arab country? Impartiality, it would seem, is only relevant when criticising policies of the Conservative party.

Under the heading of ‘impartiality’ the BBC has neglected to cover the scandal of our sewage-filled waterways. Corporate vandalism is never a good story.

The BBC’s coverage of Ukraine has been lamentable. When the Nord Stream pipelines were blown up the BBC highlightedUS and Ukrainian accusationsthat the Russians had blown up their own pipelines. A child of 6 could have told them this was unlikely given that the Russians owned it. But if your ‘impartiality’ guidelines dictate you support NATO’s narrative then the absurd becomes true.

The BBC has failed to so much as mention the revelationsof Seymour Hersh, the legendary Pulitzer prize winning reporter, that it was the United States that carried out the bombing of the Nordstream pipeline.

And then there is Jeremy Corbyn. Who can forget the lying dishonest production by John Ware, Is Labour Anti-Semitic?

In Liverpool Riverside Jewish member Helen Marks was under investigation. Her investigator was Ben Westerman who alleged that Rica Bird had asked him ‘where are you from? Are you from Israel?

What Rica had said was ‘‘so I’m just curious about what branch are you in?’ and when Westerman said it wasn’t relevant Rica accepted it. There is a world of difference between asking what Labour Party Branch someone is in and asking if someone Jewish is from Israel.

The interview was recordedso it is clear that Westerman was lying. As the Labour Files rightly said, the Jews interviewed in the Panorama programme were drawn entirely from the officers of the anti-Corbyn Jewish Labour Movement. Not one Jewish anti- Zionist was interviewed. Another example of BBC impartiality!

Rica Bird

Lord Sugar of The Apprentice has a history of political outbursts including interviews calling on people to vote Conservative to tweeting a mocked-up image of Corbyn sitting next to Adolf Hitler. But ‘passionate’ Tim Davie was unmoved by such bias.

Given Tim Davie is so ‘passionate’ about impartiality there is a long list of issues that he could tackle. The first could be the sycophanticcoverage of the deathsof the Queen and Prince Philip. Endless interviews with the queues to see her coffin. Given around a quarter of the British people are Republican why is there no balance on the  Royal Parasites?

We could ask why Nigel Farage has made so many appearances on Question Time. As the Scottish National reportedin May 2019:

IN a completely unsurprising turn of events, the BBChas come under fire over its lack of impartiality. 

Last night's episode of Question Time marked Nigel Farage's 33rd appearance on the show.

The third-largest Westminster party was of course not represented on the broadcaster's flagship political show.

It is clear that the BBC has always had a racist agenda. Why else put Farage on Question Time so much? UKIP and the Brexit Party never son a single parliamentary seat. This is the clue to the action taken against Gary Lineker. The BBC is a thoroughly racist institution that thinks a few token Black presenters will overcome its racist agenda.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=5_JC371jxPI&embeds_euri=https%3A%2F%2Fblogspot.com%2F&feature=emb_logo

Not forgetting Andrew Marr who, when Blair launched an unprovoked war of aggression against Iraq outdid himself.

Mr Blair is well aware that all his critics out there in the party and beyond aren’t going to thank him, because they are only human, for being right when they’ve been wrong...

it would be entirely ungracious even for his critics not to acknowledge that tonight he stands as a larger man and a stronger Prime Minister as a result.

We all know how that turned out! Researchers at John Hopkins University and the Lancet, estimated that more than a million people died as a result of the war. The BBC naturally ignored these findings.

It was no surprise that Marr’s book launch for Head of State, was held in Downing Street with David Cameron as the host.

Liz Thomson, breachedthe bonhomie and etiquette when she asked Marr if having Cameron host the book launch ‘mightn’t compromise his position as impartial political interviewer for the BBC’.

Marr’s wife, Guardian columnist Jackie Ashley went ballistic telling Thomson that ‘you’ve ruined my evening’ before she ‘resumed the harangue, calling [Thomson] ‘despicable’ and ‘a B-I-T-C-H’.

The BBC has reported the Ukrainian resistance but during the Iraq invasion there were no favourable reports of the Iraqi resistance or the American atrocities that Wikileaks revealed. Nothing on the thousands of deaths in Falluja. To this day the BBC has ignored the kidnapping of Julian Assange, who did the job that the BBC failed to do. Investigate American war crimes.

So when Tim Davie says he is ‘passionate’ about BBC impartiality my only response is ‘pass the sick bucket Alice.’

Tony Greenstein

 Gary Lineker’s Crime was Comparing the Tories Refugee Policies to the Nazis – We Must Compare, Compare and Compare Again

On Wednesday March 15 at 7.30 pm I will be holding the Brighton Book Launch for Zionism During the Holocaust. This will be the first physical meeting around my book that I’ve held in Britain.

OnThursday March 16^th at 5 pm British time there will be a Zoom meeting where I will be speaking with others at a PSC South Africa. Please do register.

You are invited to a Zoom webinar.
When: Mar 16, 2023 07:00 PM Johannesburg
Topic: Zionism During the Holocaust
Register in advance for this webinar:
https://tinyurl.com/3sf9dyxc

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the webinar.
https://www.facebook.com/palestinesouthafrica

South Africa PSC was formed as part of an initiative for the (World Conference Against Racism) in 2000 as a secular initiative to promote the Palestinian cause in South Africa and to lead an international anti-apartheid movement against Apartheid Israel. The aims of PSC-SA include the establishment of a secular democratic state in Palestine.

When Gary Lineker spoke out against Cruella Braverman’s attack on refugees, what angered his opponents was the comparison between Cruella’s policies and those of Nazi Germany. For the ruling class and Zionists the Nazis represent a holocaust divorced from history. The holocaust began in June 1941 and Lineker referred to the 30s yet these ignoramuses tied everything into Auschwitz.

From 1933 to June 1941 the policy of Hitler was not extermination but expulsion of the Jews. The ruling class and the Mail forgets that large sections of the ruling class supported Hitler’s anti-Semitism .

In Nazi Youth in Control [Daily News 4.9.33] Lord Rothermere, the owner of the Daily Mail wrote that

‘Of all the historic changes in our time, the transformation of Germany under Hitler has been the swiftest, most complete…’

'There has been a sudden expansion of their national spirit like that which took place in England under Queen Elizabeth. Youth has taken command. On a visit, which I am paying to Northern Germany I find-, the signs of the new Hitler spirit as manifest in the most out of-the-way villages as in the largest cities.'

Like most bourgeois apologists for Hitler Rothermere considered the reports about Nazi brutality were irrelevant.

‘They have started a clamorous campaign of denunciation against what they call 'Nazi atrocities,' which, as anyone who visits Germany quickly discovers for him self, consists merely of a few isolated acts of violence.’

It was merely

‘The administration of a few doses of castor oil to Communist adversaries.’

For Rothermere the concentration camps of Sachsenhausen and Dachau did not exist. Support for Hitler extended deep into the Tory Party but today anyone who points this out or the comparison between   the demonisation of refugees and Hitler’s demonisation of the other, including Jews, is beyond the pale.

Lady Nugent (Emily Thornberry)

Emily Thornberry attackedLineker saying that

Some of the language Gary Lineker has used in the last 24 hours has been really very unfortunate… I just think there is a special place in hell and for the Holocaust and I don’t think you should be making comparisons… I think he went too far but what the BBC does about it is frankly not my business…. It’ll be up to them if they want to do anything about it.

Yvette Cooper also preferred to attack Lineker than the Tories.

Asked whether she supported what Lineker had said Cooper stated:

‘No I don’t. No I don’t. That was wrong. I think he was wrong to say that.’

Asked to elaborate Cooper said

‘I just don’t think you should make comparisons with the 1930s… I just don’t think you should make those sorts of comparisons.’

Asked if he should be sacked Cooper responded that it was ‘a matter for the BBC.’

Contrary to Cooper and Lady Nugent aka Emily Thornberry we should compare, compare and compare again. When Israel uses the holocaust to justify ethnic cleansing and pogroms we should point out that the Nazis also started with ethnic cleansing and pogroms before moving on to extermination.

Hitler’s sterilisation and murder of the Disabled were modelled on similar laws in the United States, Sweden and elsewhere.

Of course Zionists hate comparisons with the Nazis but they are more than happy to make such comparisons themselves.

Former Israeli Foreign Secretary, Abba Eban when arguing against withdrawal from the Occupied Territories, referred to the 48 armistice lines as ‘the Auschwitz borders.’ Norman Podhoretz of the American Jewish Committee paper Commentary, accused Jewish critics of the Lebanese War of granting Hitler a ‘posthumous victory’Deputy Defence Minister Matan Vilnai threatened to give ‘Gaza a taste of the 'shoah’. Menachem Begin portrayed ‘Arafat in Beirut as Hitler in his bunker in Berlin’ as a reason for bombing Beirut.

In Israel every enemy is a reincarnation of the Nazis. In the lead up to the Six Day War:

the newspapers continually identified Nasser with Hitler. The proposals to defuse the crisis by any means other than war were compared with the Munich agreement. [Tom Segev, The Seventh Million, pp. 390-391].

The Nazi period is a seminal event in world history. It is the ultimate in capitalist barbarism. It is not surprising that it is the benchmark by which subsequent events are judged.

Zionist concerns about a high Arab birth rate in Israel mirrorthe Nazis’ racial obsessions. Ideologically Zionism and Nazism drink from the same poisoned well.

Relationships between Jews and Arabs are seen as a threat to the racial purity of the Jewish nation/race. More than half of the Jewish population in Israel believesintermarriage to be national treason.

In Israel like Nazi Germany opposition to miscegenation is strong. The Nuremberg Laws outlawed ‘inter-racial’ sex. In Israel opposition to such relations is a strong social taboo. 75% of Israeli Jews oppose intermarriage. A particularly egregious case involved an Arab who was gaoled for 18 months for rape. The Jewish woman believed that ‘Daniel’ was a Jewish man and thus she had been raped by deception. In Nazi Germany a common theme was that Jewish men concealed their Jewish identity in order to seduce Aryan women.

Israelis often see themselves in the role of Nazis. Before the massacre in Jenin, an Israeli officer said that:

it is justified and in fact essential to learn from every possible source…. the commander’s obligation is to … analyse and internalise the lessons of earlier battles – even, however shocking it may sound, even how the German Army fought in the Warsaw Ghetto.

When 41 Israeli Arabs were mowed down with machine guns at Kafr Kassem in 1956 one of the killers, Shalom Ofer, proudly proclaimed that ‘We acted like Germans, automatically, we didn’t think.’

There is a wider identification with the Nazis in Israeli society. ‘We are no longer Jews today,’ one Israeli wrote. ‘Today we are Nazis.’ He was trying to organise vigilante groups to attack Israeli Palestinians in mixed cities during Israel’s 2021 attack on Gaza.

The comparison of ‘assimilation’, marrying out or having relationships with non-Jews, to the Holocaust is a common Zionist theme. Avraham Greenbaum of Bar-Ilan University, expressed ‘concern that Jewry’s losses through assimilation were greater than the losses sustained in the Holocaust.’For Zionism the Holocaust was not a human tragedy but a loss to the Jewish race.

Assimilation is frequently described as a ‘quiet’‘silent’ or ‘bloodless’ holocaust. Norman Lamm, President of the Yeshiva University, wrote that with a diminishing Jewish birth rate and intermarriage exceeding 40 %, ‘Who says that the holocaust is over?’ Chief Rabbi, Immanuel Jakobovitz believed that abortion in Israel was comparable to the Holocaust. Lehava’s slogan is ‘Intermarriage is a holocaust.’

Marriage between a Jew and non-Jew in Nazi Germany after 1935 was forbidden. The same is true in Israel where a Jew and non-Jew cannot marry. Hannah Arendt observed that:

Israeli citizens, religious and non-religious seem agreed upon the desirability of having a law which prohibits intermarriage… there certainly was something breathtaking in the naiveté with which the prosecution denounced the infamous Nuremberg Laws of 1935, which had prohibited intermarriage and sexual intercourse between Jews and Germans. [Eichmann in Jerusalem, p.7].

Far from comparisons between Israel and Nazi Germany being anti-Semitic, the exact opposite is the case. Such comparisons constitute a powerful warning against the direction in which Israel is heading. The only question is whether they are true.

Comparing a country to Nazi Germany doesn’t mean that they are the same but that they have certain features in common.

Today there are demonstrations in Israel where the main slogan is ‘Death to the Arabs’. How is it anti-Semitic to compare this to similar demonstrations in Europe in the 1930s?

When Culture Minister Miri Regev described African refugees as ‘a cancer in the body of the nation’this was a Nazi-like statement. Deputy Defence Minister Rabbi Eli Ben-Dahan explainedthat ‘[Palestinians] are beasts, they are not human.’ He also explained the racial hierarchy of souls: ‘A Jew always has a much higher soul than a gentile, even if he is a homosexual.’

Professor Amos Funkenstein, former head of the Faculty of History at Tel Aviv University, explained why comparisons with the Nazis are valid. Referring to the refusal of soldiers to serve in the Occupied Territories, Funkenstein compared them to soldiers in the German army who refused to serve in concentration or extermination camps. Funkenstein explained:

As a historian I know that every comparison is limited. On the other hand, without comparisons, no historiography is possible. Understanding a historical event is a kind of translation into the language of our time. If we would leave every phenomenon in its peculiarity, we could not make this translation. Every translation is an interpretation and every interpretation is also a comparison.

Idith Zertal described how:

‘The transference of the holocaust situation on to the Middle East reality… not only created a false sense of the imminent danger of mass destruction. It also immensely distorted the image of the holocaust, dwarfed the magnitude of the atrocities committed by the Nazis, trivializing the unique agony of the victims and the survivors, and utterly demonizing the Arabs and their leaders. [Zertal, Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood, p. 100].

 Listen to the recording of the South Africa PSC and Brighton Book Launches for Zionism During the Holocaust

PSC South Africa Book Launch

I was privileged to be invited to speak to a meeting of PSC South Africa on 16 March 2023. The meeting was held to launch my book 'Zionism During the Holocaust - the Weaponisation of Memory in the Service of State & Nation'in South Africa.

My book tells the story of how the Zionist movement not only was indifferent about the rescue of Jews from the claws of Hitler's fascist murderers but they OPPOSED the rescue of Jews from Europe if their destination was not Palestine. Indeed the German Zionist Federation and the emissary of the Palestinian Jewish Agency, Feivel Polkes, even went to the lengths of pressurising the Gestapo not to allow emigrants from Germany to go anywhere but Palestine.

Brighton Book Launch

I have a section in my book (pp. 300-1) ‘The Zionists Lobby the Nazis to Only Allow Emigration to Palestine’ in which I describe how Polkes, a Haganah intelligence agent, came to Berlin for talks with the SD, the SS Security Service, (Sicherheitsdienst ) and the Gestapo between 26 February and 2 March 1937.  Polkes offered to become an informant for the Gestapo, sharing Haganah intelligence information, in return for which the Gestapo would pressure the German Jewish communal organisation, the RVt (Reich Representation of German Jews), the umbrella organisation of German Jewry, to require emigrating Jews to settle exclusively in Palestine.

The Daily Mail - consistently racist and bigoted

I sourced this from Professor Francis Nicosia’s article Zionism in National Socialist Jewish Policy, and his books Zionism & Anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany and The Third Reich and the Palestine Question. This information was obtained from German files captured after the war. The Haganah file on Polkes is closed because it is too embarrassing.

According to the cruel logic of Zionism, what was the point of building a Jewish state in Palestine if Jews could find sanctuary in other countries? According to the Zionist 'logic' it was the Jews themselves who were responsible for anti-Semitism, because they were strangers who had outstayed their welcome in other peoples' countries.

In his pamphlet The Jewish State, Herzl wrote that Jews:

…naturally move to those places where we are not persecuted and there our presence produces persecution…. The unfortunate Jews are now carrying Anti-Semitism into England; they have already introduced it into America.

Rescuing Jews in other countries would simply reproduce the antisemitism that had driven them there. My book tells the story of Zionist relations with the Nazis, their agreements and collaboration. It is not a pretty story. Even today although the Zionists and the Israeli state exploit the Holocaust for propaganda purposes, they are totally unconcerned about the remaining holocaust survivors themselves. Over one-third of Israeli holocaust survivors live in poverty, forced to choose between eating and heating.

Israel’s Treatment of its Holocaust Survivors

Israel spends the second highest amount per capita in the world on arms with which to kill Palestinians and hundreds of millions of dollars on settlements built on stolen Palestinian land yet it cannot afford to give the remaining holocaust survivors a decent standard of living. Even worse the Israeli state and the Israeli banks STOLE the reparations that Germany paid in compensation to the survivors.

The Jewish Claims Conference [JCC] was set up in 1951 as the legal successor to Jews who had a claim against Germany and Austria. The JCC was generous, at least with itself. In 2004 the salary and pensions contributions it was paying to its Executive Vice-President Gideon Taylor, was $437,811 (£240,000).

Mass Jewish Demonstration In Support of the Boycott

The JCC has been embroiled in controversies over fraud. Former President Rabbi Israel Singer was forced to resign in 2007 amid allegations that he had used his position to embezzle funds. In May 2013 31 people were convicted of fraud worth more than $57 million. A whistleblower who was victimised alleged that this was the tip of the iceberg.

However Zionism, which turned a blind eye to the Holocaust whilst it was happening has never hesitated to wield it as a weapon against the Palestinians.

In the early 1950s Israel claimed reparations from Germany on behalf of the holocaust survivors. Despite being claimed on the basis of individual need Israel’s first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion was determined that ‘the major portion of the compensation will be claimed by the Jewish people as a collective body [i.e. the Israeli state] not as individuals.’ In 2007 it was accepted by Knesset Speaker Dalia Itzik that Israel should apologise for having stolen these funds from the Holocaust survivors.

Adolf Eichmann

If Switzerland was reluctant to part with the assets of murdered Jews then the same was true of Israeli banks, which hoped that the survivors might die first. It was only under pressure that Bank Leumi agreed to pay NIS 20m to the survivors. In 2004, a parliamentary inquiry found that Leumi owed NIS 300m ($71.65m) to Holocaust survivors and their families.

Israeli medical committees have done their best to reduce the entitlement of holocaust survivors to benefits ‘alter(ing) their disability evaluations in a manipulative way.’ This is how the ‘Jewish’ state treats the holocaust survivors and yet none of the official Holocaust memorial bodies, such as the Holocaust Education Trust, says a word about these scandals. To them the Holocaust is about the Israeli state not the individuals who died or survived.

Tony Greenstein

The decision of the SWP to Welcome Far-Right Zionists onto its ‘anti-racist’ march in Glasgow demonstrates that fighting ‘anti-Semitism’ is more important than opposing Israeli Apartheid & Fascism

Whenever there is a Palestine solidarity march you can be sure that there will be an SWP stall with posters and placards. The impression given is that the SWP is in the forefront of Palestine solidarity.

The reality is somewhat different. The way the SWP works in practice marks it out as an organisation that combines verbal support for the Palestinians with the most shameful appeasement of Zionism and its British supporters.

Zionists on the march with the SWP's blessing

This contradiction has come to a head again this year on the SWP/ Stand Up to Racism march on March 18 in Glasgow. Since 2017 the SWP has welcomed Glasgow Friends of Israel [GFI] and the Confederation of Friends of Israel–Scotland [COFIS] on its marches.

It has done it again this year but we are now fighting back against the SWP’s shameless capitulation to Zionism’s far-right supporters. Dundee Trades Council’s refusal to support the SWP’s march was joined this year by Brighton and Hove Trades Council. At Lewisham Trades Council a similar motion of non-support was narrowly defeated. It is to be hoped that next year more trade union bodies and Trades Councils will join in saying no to the SWP/SUTR’s collaboration with far-Right Zionists.

Glasgow Friends of Israel Contingent 2023

It is no surprise that the ‘right’ of these Zionist groups to march was vociferously supported by that friend of anti-racism, the Scottish Daily Express! The SWP’s real reason for allowing Zionists to march each year is a fear of being accused of ‘anti-Semitism’, in other words a surrender to the campaign that brought down Corbyn.

In other words GFI will be marching against anti-Zionism i.e. the Palestinians, courtesy of the SWP

On 16 February Scottish SUTR wrote to me to say that ‘SUTR has no policy on the Middle East’.  However most anti-racist groups do oppose apartheid, today in Israel yesterday in South Africa. Even the SWP used to oppose apartheid.

If an anti-racist Zionist actually exists then no one objects to them marching. Hopefully they will come to recognise their own political confusion. The objection is to organised supporters of Israeli Jewish Apartheid marching with flags and placards. To Palestinians the Israeli flag is the equivalent of the Confederate flag for Black people.

The Lies that Justify Ethnic Cleansing from COFIS

As Mick Napier of Scottish PSC said:

"SUTR pretend to be neutral on the issue of of Israeli ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people. Bad enough to try to be neutral but in fact they are very partisan. Their absurd claim that "we cannot build a united anti-racist movement if the politics of the Middle East are imported into the movement" is belied by their insisting on the right of Friends of Israel to march with them, ie precisely to import the Politics of the Middle East onto their demonstrations, thereby making them no-go areas for Palestinians".

When I was a teenager I was a member of the International Socialist group, which pre-dated the SWP. I remember that they took a fierce anti-Zionist position. The first anti-Zionist pamphlet I read was The Class Nature of Israeli Societyby Moshe Machover and others.

The SWP is proud of the fact that they have the support of the right-wing TUC and trade union bureaucracy. The same people who are calling off the biggest wave of strikes we have seen.  It doesn’t seem to have occurred to them that this ‘support’ is a way that they can parade their anti-racist credentials without them doing anything.

If the TUC were serious about fighting racism then they would have condemned the statement of Rachel Reeves criticising the Tories for not having deported enough refugees.

It is more than ironic that on an allegedly anti-racist march you have organisations marching whose sole purpose in being there is to support racism.

The main leader of GFI, Sammy Stein, was caught fraternisingwith Max Dunbar, the ex-BNP Treasurer in Glasgow. Stein was pictured on the latest march with an SWP banner! GFI’s main support is from anti-Semitic Christian Fundamentalists.

Stevie Harrison is Sutherland and together with Matthew Berlow (below) they faked an antisemitic attack which was intended to be blamed on Scottish PSC

Although GFI later dissociated themselves from Dunbar, the statement confirming this was from Edward Sutherland,who was reprimanded by the General Teaching Council for sharing an anti-Semitic post online.

In his most recent post on GFI’s Facebook pageSammy Stein of GFI demonstrates how far to the right he is, even of the Zionist movement, when he cast doubt on the Deir Yassin massacre in April 1948 which he calls ‘disputed’. Zionist militias Irgun and Lehi carried out a savage massacre in the village. Over 100 women, children and elderly died.  Even Ben Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister condemnedit but Sammy Stein, being the fascist scumbag that he is, disputes it. 

As I pointed out, holocaust deniers dispute the holocaust so shall we doubt that too? Stein also repeats the mythg of Palestinian refugees having voluntarily left whereas this was a lie designed to cover up the ethnic cleansing that occurred in 1947-8. That the SWP chose to align themselves with the likes of Sammy Stein demonstrates that they have learnt nothing from the rape scandal that nearly destroyed them in 2012/3. They have also learnt nothing from their associationwith the anti-Semitic Gilad Atzmonfrom 2005-2011.

The problem in Scotland is part of a wider problem with the politics of the SWP on Zionism, racism and imperialism. Instead of treating racism as flowing from imperialism and Britain’s role in the world the SWP treats racism and imperialism as separate entities.

On the one hand the SWP will proclaim that Zionism is racist and Israel is an apartheid state, but when it comes to anti-racist work, the issue of Palestine disappears as the SWP allies with these very same racists! The fact that Israel and Zionism is to the fore of Islamaphobia is simply ignored.

On the GFI Facebook page a supporter wrote, after the murder of 50 Muslims in New Zealand that:

‘it’s payback for the attacks that muslims have perpetrated across the globe. perhaps this will curb their appetite for bloodshed.’

It is difficult to think of a more vile racist comment yet the SWP was unconcerned. Imagine that someone had celebrated the murder of 11 Jews at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018 because of the Palestinians murdered by the ‘Jewish’ state. The air would be thick with cries of anti-Semitism, prime amongst them the SWP.

Also on the GFI FB group was a post which talked about Israel ‘euthanasing’3 Palestinians. This is language which one would normally expect from neo-Nazis. The SWP supports refugees coming to Britain but it refuses to ask why they come and to integrate this understanding into broader anti-racist struggles.

The SWP confines itself to broad statements of support for Palestine solidarity but rarely discusses the causes of their dispossession and the role of Zionism except once a year at Marxism when anti-Zionism is brought out on display.

At the 2021 Palestine Solidarity Campaign conference, the Executive proposed a new constitution eliminating anti-Zionism. The two SWP members present, Tom Hickey and Rob Ferguson, spoke in support of the Executive’s proposals and against those who wanted PSC to remain an anti-Zionist organisation.

The arguments of Hickey and Ferguson were that we should concentrate on activismand not get distracted by minor issues like Zionism. Except that Zionism, as an ideology and movement, was responsible for the situation in Israel today. How can you support the Palestinians and have nothing to say about Zionism? This, more than anything else, reveals the bankruptcy of SWP politics.

The question of Zionism was a central feature of debates inside the Labour Party. Yet to the SWP what matters is activity for its own sake despite the fact that Israel, unlike South Africa, depends on maintaining political support in the West. Anti-Zionism is not a theoretical luxury but a necessity. We constantly have to win the argument on campuses and in trade unions.

The reluctance of the SWP to argue for anti-Zionist politics is a product of their opportunistic politics. Tony Cliff, their founder did understand Zionism being born in Mandate Palestine but SWP theoreticians today – John Rose and Rob Ferguson – do not have that background.

The SWP and Zionist Relations with the Nazis

In ‘Don’t fall into your opponents’ traps’, John Rose criticised Ken Livingstone:

… the anti-Zionist, pro-Palestinian case must be argued effectively and sensitively. Traps must be avoided which favour our opponents. On Thursday Ken Livingstone created then walked into precisely such a trap. The argument about Zionist collaboration with the Nazis has been around for a long time. It is rightly ignored by solidarity activists with Palestine….

It’s true that when Hitler came to power some Zionist leaders stupidly thought that they could do a deal with him that would enable some German Jews to go to Palestine. But Ken should have known that this disgraceful manoeuvre bitterly divided the Zionist movement.

Rose went on to say that ‘there was no coherent, united Zionist leadership in the 1930’s. It was deeply split.’ This is simply untrue, indeed it is a lie. As I show in Zionism During the Holocaustit is also ahistorical nonsense. There was almost complete agreement about the need to create a Jewish State and ‘transfer’ the Palestinians out of it in the 30s and 40s. The differences amongst the Zionist leadership between Weizmann and Ben Gurion were about which imperialist partner they preferred – Britain or the United States. Even the differences between Labour and Revisionist Zionism were tactical.

Nor was there anything ‘stupid’ about negotiating with Nazis from the Zionists’ point of view. The one thing that Ha'avara, the Nazi-Zionist trade agreement of August 1933 was not about was saving German Jews. What it sought to do was to rescue their wealth.

Ben Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister, was the most important pre-state Zionist figure. A cursory reading of the final chapter, Disaster Means Strength, of his biography by Shabtai Teveth makes it abundantly clear that the Zionist leadership welcomed the rise of the Nazis and Hitler. The very title of the chapter gives us a clue.

On the eve of Hitler becoming Chancellor, in January 1933, Ben-Gurion explained his thinking to the Central Committee of Mapai (Israeli Labour Party) when he warned that

‘Zionism… is not primarily engaged in saving individuals’ and that if there was ‘a conflict of interest between saving individual Jews and the good of the Zionist enterprise, we shall say the enterprise comes first.’

In November 1935, after the passage of the Nuremberg Laws he said:

To the disaster of German Jewry we must offer a Zionist response, namely, we must convert the disaster into a source for the upbuilding of Palestine.

On 15 October 1942, by which time the Zionist leadership was aware of the holocaust, Ben Gurion remarked to the Zionist Executive:

Disaster is strength if channelled to a productive course. The whole trick of Zionism is that it knows how to channel our disaster, not into despondency or degradation, as is the case in the Diaspora, but into a source of creativity and exploitation.

Berl Katznelson, a founder of Mapai and editor of Davar, saw the rise of Hitler as ‘an opportunity to build and flourish like none we have ever had or ever will have.’Ben-Gurion predicted that ‘The Nazis’ victory would become “a fertile force for Zionism.”’

It is to the critical Zionist historian Noah Lucas, not John Rose, that we must turn if we want to understand Zionism’s approach:

‘As the European holocaust erupted, Ben-Gurion saw it as a decisive opportunity for Zionism... In conditions of peace,… Zionism could not move the masses of world Jewry. The forces unleashed by Hitler in all their horror must be harnessed to the advantage of Zionism. ... By the end of 1942… the struggle for a Jewish state became the primary concern of the movement.’  [A Modern History of Israel, pp. 187/8].

Rose was also wrong when he said that ‘this disgraceful manoeuvre bitterly divided the Zionist movement’ The Labour Zionists were united in support of Ha'avara. The General Zionists and Religious Zionists of Mizrahi supported them. Only the Revisionists under Jabotinsky opposed Ha'avara and they were isolated.

Ordinary Zionists bitterly opposed Ha'avara and didn’t understand what was happening but the Zionist movement was not a democratic movement and their voices counted for nothing.

On June 21 1933 the German Zionist Federation voluntarily wrote to Hitler expressing their opposition to the Boycott and their agreement with Nazi fundamentals. They wrote:

On the foundation of the new state, which has established the principle of race... fruitful activity for the fatherland is possible…. Precisely because we don’t wish to falsify these fundamentals, because we too are against mixed marriages and are for maintaining the purity of the Jewish group… The realisation of Zionism could only be hurt by resentment of Jews abroad against the German development. Boycott propaganda… is in essence fundamentally unZionist, because Zionism wants not to do battle but to convince and to build.’[Lucy Dawidowicz, A Holocaust Reader, pp. 150-153].

The Zionist leaders were not stupid. If anyone can claim credit for the founding of the ‘Jewish State’ it is Hitler. Between 1933 and 1939, as a result of the advent of Hitler, the Jewish population of Palestine more than doubled from around 215,000 to 449,000, giving the settlers a critical mass. 60% of capital investment in Palestine between 1933 and 1939 came from Nazi Germany.

John Rose was overcome by meeting the last Commander of the Warsaw Ghetto Resistance, Marek Edelman in 1989. The anti-Zionist Bund, of which Edelman was a member and members of left-Zionist groups such as Hashomer Hatzair and Dror, fought together. But the Zionists fought, not because of their Zionism but despite it.

Mordechai Anielewicz, the first Commander, expressed his regret over the ‘wasted time’ undergoing Zionist educational work. I quote in my book the speech of one of these Zionist fighters, Hayka Klinger, to the Histadrut Executive in March 1944. She described the Judenrate, the Jewish Councils who collaborated with the Nazis thus:

after they began assisting the Nazis to collect gold and furniture from Jewish homes, they had no choice but to go on to help them prepare lists of Jews for labor camps... And precisely because those who stood at the head of most of the communities were Zionists, the psychological effects on most of the Jewish masses vis-à-vis the Zionist idea was devastating, and the hatred towards Zionism grew day by day...

Klinger told the Histadrut Executive that ‘we received an order not to organize any more defence.’ To the Zionist leadership the ghetto fighters were more valuable in Palestine. Klinger observed that

Without a people, a people’s avant-garde is of no value. If rescue it is, then the entire people must be rescued. If it is to be annihilation, then the avante-garde too shall be annihilated.

After the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, a Zionist emissary arrived in Bedzin in July 1943 to persuade Frumka Plotnicka to leave. She replied that ‘I have a responsibility for my brethren... I have lived with them and I will die with them.’ The Zionist youth in Europe, such as Zivia Lubetkin and Plotnicka, refused on principle to leave. One can only admire the bravery and commitment of these young Zionist fighters who, given the choice between the fight against the Nazis in the Diaspora and the Arabs in Palestine, committed what in Zionist eyes, was a mortal sin. They chose the Diaspora.

One of the Zionist emissaries, Yudke Hellman, described how in October and December 1939 he witnessed the return of Plotnicka and Lubetkin to German-occupied Poland and how he had tried and failed to persuade them to leave for Palestine. Frumka stood up and announced that her decision to return to Warsaw was final.

Never was the ethical and moral distinction between the Jewish diaspora and Palestine’s Zionist leaders clearer. Rose failed to perceive that Zionism was established on the basis that anti-Semitism could not be fought and that its principal task lay in the establishment of a Jewish state. He was dazzled by Zionists involvement in the Warsaw ghetto resistance.

It was the Revisionists who put up the strongest resistance in the Warsaw ghetto because they were armed by their fascist friends. They had an abundance of arms unlike the left-wing Jewish Fighting Organisation (ZOB). So yes, Zionists fought. It was not because they were Zionists but because they were organised in groups. The Zionist parties in Warsaw however were opposed to resistance.

Individual Zionists are not the same as the movement. At times of despair the Jewish masses supported the Zionists and when the fight against anti-Semitism grew, they abandoned Zionism. In the last free elections in 1938 in Warsaw out of 20 Jewish Council seats the Zionists obtained precisely one compared to 17 for the Bund.

As anti-Semitism grew in Poland Poale Zion split into a right and left in 1919. Left Poale Zion had effectively abandoned Zionism. But these contradictions entirely escape the SWP and its theoreticians.

The Israeli state was extremely hostile to Edelman, who had written an open letter to the Palestinians asking them to enter into peace negotiations. The letter caused outrage because Edelman did not mention the word ‘terrorism.’ Israeli leaders were incensed by its title: ‘Letter to Palestinian partisans’.

When Edelman died on 9 October 2009 he was honoured with a state funeral and a fifteen-gun salute. Not even the lowliest clerk at the Israeli Embassy attended. No official representative of any international Jewish organisation attended either.

Edelman received Poland's highest honour but he died unrecognised and forgotten in Israel. The President of Poland spoke at his funeral and two thousand people attended the grave-side ceremony.

John Rose has been the SWP’s main theoretician on Zionism since Cliff. He has never understood the internal dynamics and logic of Zionism. Imperialism has used the tragedy of the Holocaust to legitimise its barbarism and to paint anyone opposed to Zionism as ‘anti-Semitic’. Unfortunately Rose and the SWP instead of standing up to this have bowed to it and the winds of chauvinism. In an article critiquing Norman Finkelstein, Rose wrote that:

Even in its most reactionary form, Zionism before the second world war was one of the voices of oppressed Jews facing the growth of violent anti Semitism as a mass movement everywhere.

This statement represents an abandonment of any class politics. Zionism was the voice of the reactionary Jewish petit-bourgeoisie who, given half the chance, would betray working class Jews as Marcel Liebman demonstrated so vividly when describing his experiences as a child seeking refuge in Nazi-occupied Belgium. He described one leader of the Belgian Judenrat, the Association of Jews of Belgium telling a poor Polish Jewish woman:

Well, well! If you ended up in Eastern Europe what would be wrong with that? You are all from Poland anyway! You’d just be going back where you came from!

Another wealthy Zionist member of the AJB, ‘S.V.’ wrote in his diary on 12 December 1942, after the Germans had released a Jew who was married to a non-Jewish woman:

I find it extraordinary that someone should be recompensed for having been unfaithful to his religion.

Two-thirds of the Judenrat, which were hated by poor and working class Jews, were Zionists but Rose saw them as the voice of the oppressed, writing that ‘Zionism was perfectly capable of inspiring resistance to the Nazis’.

Rose went on to say that ‘Zionism later mis-used its genuinely heroic anti-Nazi resistance fighters for cynical ideological ends in Palestine.’ How surprising! The Zionists also misused the Holocaust to justify ethnic cleansing. Why? Because historically they were indifferent to it. To many Zionists those who died in the Holocaust brought it upon themselves. Idith Zertal observed that:

There hasn’t been a war involving Israel ‘that has not been perceived, defined, and conceptualized in terms of the Holocaust.’ Israel has mobilised the Holocaust ‘in the service of Israeli politics.’

This is more than cynicism. It is the mobilisation of the Holocaust in the service of imperialism and Israel’s war against the Palestinians.

Rose referred to Hitler’s view of the Jews as a ‘satanic race’.

Hitler didn’t just think that Jews were a distinct race. He also thought that they were a Satanic race, and ultimately, that they were a Satanic race that had to be exterminated.

Rose echoes Zionist holocaust historians such as Yehuda Bauer who attributed anti-Semitism to ‘a political elite that had come to power with pseudo-messianic concepts of saving humanity from the Jews.’

What Bauer was saying was that Nazi anti-Semitism lay outside of history. It was inexplicable. That is also what Rose is saying. That the Holocaust lies outside class politics. This is simply anti-Marxist.

Did the elimination of up to 3 million Polish intelligentsia occur because the Poles were Satanic? Or the Russians or Disabled? The attempt to exterminate the Jews was not unique. Why did Hitler want them gone? Because the Jews were seen as the biological parents of their main enemy, Bolshevism. Hence the term Judeo-Bolshevism.

Rose wrote about the

truly sinister cat and mouse game the Nazis were playing when they appeared to be supporting the Zionist project in Palestine even if did mean some German Jews, by moving to Palestine with Hitler’s agreement, escaped the death camps.

Rose did not understand the Ha'avara agreement (or the Nazis’ Jewish policies) which led to just 20,000 wealthy German Jews moving to Palestine. They had to have £1,000 (today about £85,000). These Jews would have found refuge in other countries.

If anything Ha'avara undermined the position of other Jews wanting to emigrate. Between 1933 and 1939 the Nazis’ policy was expulsion not extermination. There were no death camps to escape from. The first death camp, Chelmno was established in December 1941.

The problem with the SWP is it shouts slogans about Zionism but has never taken the time nor trouble to understand it.

GMB 3 Pickets Acquitted in Brighton Magistrates Court

What is the Meaning of the Massive Opposition in Israel to Netanyahu’s Judicial Reform Plans?

John Ware Accuses Me of Being Disagreeable!

Those of you with long memories may recall that in the early hours of Tuesday 9 March I was arrested with 5 supporters of Palestine Action whilst driving a van to Elbit SystemsShenstone factory.

The trial, in Wolverhampton Crown Court, is due to start on Monday before Judge Chambers. I shall, of course, be pleading not guilty to the charge of intending to destroy or damage property, contrary to section 3 of the Criminal Damage Act 1971. My intent was not  to cause criminal damage but to prevent war crimes being committed.

Elbit's Hermes Drone

British justice places a premium, as it has always done, on the protection of property over people, even when that property’s sole reason for existence is to kill and maim the innocent.

The trial is scheduled to last between 2 and 3 weeks and I shall try to keep people informed as to its progress from time to time though my blog will not be appearing as regularly as before.

Picket of Brighton Magistrates Court

GMB 3 Pickets Acquitted of Obstructing the Highway

Yesterday the case against the “GMB three”, who were accused of wilful obstruction of the highway collapsed. Three GMB officers were arrested in May last year during an industrial dispute with waste management company Biffa in Wealden, East Sussex. They were found not guilty at Brighton Law Courts after the Crown put forward no evidence. Gary Palmer, one of those involved, was quotedas saying:

Picket of Brighton Magistrates Court

“This was always a political case about the rights of people during a cost-of-living crisis to win enough money to look after their families.

“Our members were taking part in lawful industrial action to win a decent pay rise.

“This was an attempt by the company and the police to restrict the right to protest,”

The 3 were arrested under the 1980 Highways Act on suspicion of “obstructing the highway” in the course of asking strike-breakers not to cross their picket line. Among the scabs was “a manager driving a vehicle who GMB and the strikers believe does not have the correct paperwork to drive the vehicle he was in.” But the Police weren’t concerned with such trifles as health and safety.

Picket of Brighton Magistrates Court

“This is a serious health and safety risk for GMB members on the picket line he was crossing and the general public. The licence violation was reported to the police.”

A statement by Sussex Police read,

“Pickets or assemblies in trade disputes are not immune from criminal law and police have powers at their disposal to respond to any issues or breaches of the peace, including any offences of blocking the highway.

The Highways Act was introduced by the Thatcher government in 1980—one of its first major pieces of legislation aimed at suppressing the right to strike. It has been routinely used against pickets and protests. Under “Obstruction of highways and streets”, section 137 of the Act reads,

“Penalty for wilful obstruction (1) If a person, without lawful authority or excuse, in any way wilfully obstructs the free passage along a highway he is guilty of an offence and liable to a fine not exceeding £50.

“(2) A constable may arrest without warrant any person whom he sees committing an offence against this section.”

The Informed Dissentwebsite notes,

“‘Obstruction’ includes anything that prevents passing and re-passing along the highway. To be committing this offence, you don’t have to be blocking the whole width of the highway. This is because the offence is obstructing the highway itself (and not other users of the highway). The prosecution, therefore, do not have to prove that anyone was actually obstructed, but instead that you obstructed the highway itself.”

The police attack on the refuse workers’ pickets came after the police consulted with senior Tory Party politicians. In a statement following the police operation Wealden District Council said,

“following intervention by the Police today to enforce lawful access to and from the depot, which had until now been blocked by the picket line, Biffa have been able to operate two rubbish collection rounds in the southern half of the District today.”

Simon Hester, chair of Hastings and District trades union council, told Socialist Worker,

“A number of GMB full-time workers and I were blocking vans from leaving the depot. We knew Friday would be a stand-off because the council had recalled all the vans to the Amberstone depot on Thursday.

“Vehicles were in line waiting to leave the depot, and I was in front of the trucks. They sent officers to deal with pickets. When the chief inspector arrived, he said we would be arrested for blocking a highway. 

“He also made it clear that we needed to stop blocking vans because public pressure on the council to clear the streets of rubbish was starting to mount.”  See UK: Police attack refuse workers’ picket in Wealden, England, arresting union officials

Being attacked for being disagreeable by John Ware is like being accused of sexual harassment by a rapist

Readers of this blog will be shocked to hear that Islamaphobe-in-chief John Ware, has accused me of being ‘one of the most disagreeable individuals I’ve ever set eyes on.’ Leaving aside the minor point that he has never set eyes on me, you will understand why I have to consult m’learned friends about this attack on my good character and reputation.

Coming from the man who was quotedin the Guardian as having ‘a track record for displaying unfairness and twisting the truth’ this is a case of pots and kettles.

Ware's 2005 programme "A Question of Leadership" was describedby a senior ex-Panorama journalist as "the most disgusting Panorama that I have ever seen. The presenter was acting like a prosecuting attorney, not a journalist." The Guardian's Madeleine Bunting called the documentary "McCarthyite".

Ware is also on record, in the Jewish Chronicle (where else?) as saying that Islamaphobia is rational and the fault of Muslims themselves.

‘Yet there are several differences between antisemitism and (authentic) Islamophobia. The former is entirely irrational, the latter reactive.

It is surely Muslim radicals who have brought it [Islamaphobia] on their fellow Muslims — by their promotion of Islam as a political ideology, and by invoking Islamophobia to close down criticism of this ideology, pouring fat on the fire of those predisposed to blind bigotry in the first place.

Islamophobia — however it is defined — will abate when terrorism carried out in God’s name ceases.

All you have to do is substitute ‘Jew’ for ‘Muslim’ and John Ware would be the first to protest. Given the extent of Israeli terrorism the possibilities are endless. Clearly anti-Semitism is rational.

It is no surprise that Panorama has employed Ware so frequently, all in the name of that famous ‘balance’ between the right and far-right.

What is the Meaning of Israel’s Jewish Protests?

It is important to understand the nature of the massive Israeli demonstrations against the judicial reforms that Netanyahu is proposing. As Gideon Levy wrotein Ha’aretz:

To most Israelis, real democracy is tantamount to “the destruction of Israel.” They’re right. True democracy will bring an end to the Jewish supremacism they call Zionism, and an end to the state they call Jewish and democratic. Therefore the threat of democracy is the existential threat, against which all Jewish Israelis unite: Should democracy be instituted for all the state’s residents, it will bring an end to the pretend democracy.

Therefore, the leaders of the protest make sure to steer clear of any true contact with democracy, lest the entire thing collapse like a house of cards. It is not due to racism or hatred of Arabs that they don’t want Palestinian flags or protesters – they are good people, after all – but only due to the understanding that raising the question of apartheid will render their struggle ludicrous.

That is why most Israeli Palestinians have avoided the demonstrations which are about Jewish democracy only. Both Netanyahu and his opponents agree on the place of Israeli Arabs and they also agree with the repression that Palestinians face.

One of the most vociferous opponents of the ‘judical coup’ is former Defence Minister and Chief of Staff, Benny Gantz, who promisedto bomb Gaza ‘back to the stone ages’. It was Gantz who outlawed 6 Palestinian Human Rights organisations and it was under Gantz that Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh was assassinated.

In the eyes of these Jewish demonstrators the Supreme Court represents all that is good about Israel. As the Jerusalem Post reported:

Around a hundred activists from the civil society movement Darkenu argued that the High Court of Justice protected IDF soldiers from international lawfare campaigns.

The High Court is the flak jacket of IDF soldiers, it is protection for our sons and daughters that serve in the army, from attempts to petition against IDF soldiers at the International Criminal Court in The Hague," warned Darkenu CEO and former Kulanu MK Rachel Azaria. "The Override clause and Levin's moves to weaken the justice system would hurt IDF soldiers, and hurting our soldiers is a red line.

The military fears that the war crimes that the Israeli army perpetrates would be open to the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court at the Hague if the judicial reforms go through.

The demonstrations in Israel reach into the innermost parts of the secret state. Thousands of reserve soldiers, some from the elite forces, have said they would refuse to serve.

Ex-Generals, heads of Shin Bet and a raft of Judges have condemned the override clause that would enable 61 votes in the Knesset to overturn any decision of the Supreme Court. Coupled with proposals that would allow the government to choose who sits on the court this has provoked panic at the heart of the Israeli establishment.

Israeli Palestinians however have been conspicuous by their absence from the protests. Why? Because the Supreme Court has an unparalleled record of approving legal discrimination against Arabs. Not one piece of anti-Arab legislation has been disallowed.

Even the Jewish Nation State Lawof 2018 which officially made Israel an Apartheid State was approvedby a vote of 10-1, the sole dissent coming from the sole Arab member of the court.

Eg the Central District Court reducedthe time spent on Administrative Detention for two settler suspects in the Huwara pogrom from 4 to less than 2 months and from 4 to 3 months. Administrative Detention is almost never used against Jews. It is a form of internment without trial and Palestinians are routinely given 6 months detention renewable every 6 months. In the case of these settlers they were given less than 6 months in the first place. The Supreme Court has an unparalleled record for  approving Administrative Detention for Arabs.

Little wonder that the settlers’ legal representatives from Honenu said that ‘it was precedent-setting for the court to significantly shorten an administrative detention order’ They are right. Court reduces detention without charges for 2 held over assault on Huwara

Khalil Awawdeh - Hunger Striker - Imprisoned Without Trial - Supreme Court Refused to Release Him

Yet in the case of Khalil Awawdeh, who had been on hunger strike for 170 days and was at death’s door the Supreme Court refusedto intervene. As a matter of course they refused to challenge the assertions of Israel’s Shin Bet secret police. As Diana Buttu, a Palestinian lawyer and former negotiator said

“The Supreme Court rubber stamps everything that the Israeli security services put forward. It is only in very rare circumstances that we actually see that they are pushing back against what the security services are saying.”

As +972 Magazine recounted:

On Wednesday afternoon, Palestinian administrative detainee Khalil Awawdeh announcedthat he was ending his hunger strike, which had lasted over 170 days, after the Shin Bet agreed not to renew his detention beyond October 2. Until then, he will remain at Shamir Medical Center in central Israel, where he is currently hospitalized, in order to recover….

In recent days, photos of an emaciated Awawdeh on the brink of death flooded social media, energizing the global campaign to release the prisoner. If the Shin Bet’s policy of extending the detention and agreeing to release the hunger-striking detainee as his life hangs in the balance were not grotesque enough, it is worth remembering that only on Tuesday, Israel’s Supreme Court rejectedanother urgent petition for Awawdeh’s release.

So on Tuesday the Supreme Court were satisfied by Shin Bet’s evidence that Awawdeh was a dangerous terrorist and the day after Shin Bet itself agreed to end the Administrative Detention making a fool of the Supreme Court. This speaks volumes about the racism of the Court.

But if the Supreme Court is racist towards Palestinians it is liberal towards Jews and that is what has earned it the ire of the Jewish Supremacist Religious Zionism and the Orthodox Jewish parties. It has repeatedly recognised non-Orthodox conversions for the purpose of being a Jew entitled to the law of return.

It has always made clear that its version of ‘who is a Jew’ is an all encompassing one, rejecting the narrow racial purity definitions of the Israeli right. It does indeed have a liberal attitude to gay Israelis and others. But when it gets an Arab in its sight it is as racist as Ben Gvir.

So what is likely to happen? In the short-term we should not be surprised if the judicial reform plans do not go ahead, at least unreformed.

Israeli Defence Minister

‘Yova Gallant has reportedly threatened to resign his post recently over concerns for the brewing crisis in the military and fears that it could be beset by mass desertions and refusals to serve’.

The Jerusalem Post asked ‘Could senior Likud MKs force compromise on judicial reform? – analysis’. It reported that possible defectors include MKs Danny Danon, Yuli Edelstein as well as MK David Bitan and Avi Dichter, a former head of Shin Bet. The Coalition’s majority of 64-56 could easily disappear as it would only take four Likud MKs to vote against or abstain to prevent the passage of the legislation.

If this were to happen then it is almost certain that the ruling coalition would break up and Religious Zionism would defect, thus causing fresh elections. So in the short term the judicial reforms could be nixed.

ButiIn the longer term the beneficiary is likely to be Religious Zionism which already has 14 seats. Israeli Jewish society is undergoing profound changes. Until 1977 the Israeli Labor Party, which has just 4 seats in the Knesset today, formed the government in partnership with the National Religious Party.

The effect of the 1967 war and the conquest of the West Bank was to cause the NRP, which no longer exists today, to move to the right as the settler movement began, with ILP encouragement, colonising the West Bank. What was a handful of settlers in 1967 is 700,000 today.

Today Israeli politics are driven by the Jewish settlers with their messianic dreams of a Third Temple, the Return of the Messiah and eternal salvation. ‘Left’ Zionism is dead. How did this happen?  I would argue that it was inherent in Zionism itself.

Labor Zionism created the Israeli state. Most of their leaders were atheists who based their claim to Palestine on the god they denied! In order to provide their movement with legitimacy, at a time when most Orthodox Jews saw Zionism as a secular heresy, they formed a faustian pact with the minority of Orthodox Jews led by Rabbi Abraham Kook who supported Zionism. Why? Because without their backing there could be no definition of a Jew that would be accepted by religious Jews. The NRP were given control over personal affairs – birth, death and marriage. They defined who was a Jew (although the definition was different for the purposes of the Law of Return).

As Jewish nationalism and religious Zionism became intertwined, both feeding off each other, so Israel has moved further and further to the settler right. Today much of the army has been taken over. Recently we saw the active  complicity of the army in the Huwara pogrom.

The settler lobby will continue to grow, politically and numerically, until it exerts a stranglehold over Israeli politics. It knows what it wants unlike secular Israeli Jews. Although the racism of secular Jews is not fundamentally different from that of religious Zionists they do not want Israel to become a halachic state, a state ruled by Jewish law.

There is a very real prospect of Israel having the attributes of a theocratic state based on the principles of racial purity and with an open dictatorship and apartheid. The rabbis, corrupt as they are, will then rely on their own interpretation of the bible to rule. Already segregated classes in universities are accepted. The present coalition is proposing to prevent chametz, forbidden food at Passover, entering hospitals.

The old warsbetween the two Jewish states of Judah and Israel is more than likely to be repeated. What has held Israeli Jewish society together over the past 75 years has been a common antagonism towards the Palestinians. Today religious Zionists see no need to compromise with their secular opponents. That is what we are seeing played out today.

So although it is more than possible that the judicial reforms will be watered down in the long-terms they and more will be introduced.

Tony Greenstein

 I have taken down the previous trial update after seeking legal advice.  However there is thisreport on Skwawkbox that is a fair reflection of the previous report

It is believed that I will go into the witness box on Tuesday but this is not certain.  Because of Easter t here will only be 3 days of the trial this week.

ALL WELCOME TO ATTEND AT WOLVERHAMPTON CROWN COURT

Tony Greenstein

Jonathan Freedland’s Inability to UnderstandIsrael’s Present Crisis is Symptomatic of Liberal Zionism’s Refusal to Accept that a Jewish Democratic State is an Oxymoron

Whatever the situation and whatever the crisis, Jonathan Freedland can be relied on not to understand it. So it is with his latest essay on [Netanyahu is leading a coup against his own country. But the threat is not only to Israel, Guardian 31 March 2023]

No one quite beats Freedland, the Guardian's Zionist gatekeeper, when it comes to the ability to write at length and say nothing

Freedland is the man who waged a war against Jeremy Corbyn’s ‘anti-Semitism’ whilst failing even to mention Boris Johnson’s own, genuine anti-Semitism. Jonathan Freedland’s journalism is representative of the collapse in the Guardian’s own journalistic standards. Its representation on the D-Notice Committee, its publishing of fake stories on Julian Assange and the sheer trivialisation of every issue that he touches. Freedland truly has a Midas touch in reverse. In a very real sense the Guardian has been ‘freedlandised’.

West Bank settler at a new outpost

True to form Freedland neither understands Israel’s present crisis nor where it comes from. The very real threat to Jewish democracy, because there is no democracy for Palestinians, including Israeli Palestinians, does not come out of thin air but from the poison injected by the settlement project in the West Bank. Freedland barely mentions the fact that the West Bank settlement project has now gained critical mass with over 700,000 settlers and a corresponding political influence, especially when allied to that of the Orthodox religious parties, Shas and United Torah Judaism and Likud.

The conquest of the West Bank and Gaza resulted in Religious Zionism, which till 1977 had formed coalition governments with the Israeli Labor Party, transforming into support for political messianism whose ultimate goal could only be the ethnic cleansing of Palestine and its coronation in a Third Temple.

But who was it who sponsored the original settlement of the West Bank, including the ultra-nationalists of Hebron, if not Israeli Labor? It was the stalwarts of the Israeli Labor ‘left’, Yigal Allon, Yisrael Galili and Yitzhak Tabenkin, who helped found the Greater Israel movement because they saw, quite correctly, that the settlement project in the Occupied Territories was but an extension of the internal colonisation of pre-67 Israel itself.

The Jewish Nazi Who is Israel's Police Minister

It wasn’t Itamar Ben Gvir or Bezalel Smotrich who first Who up the Judaisation (in Nazi Germany this was called Aryanisation) of the Galilee, Negev and then East Jerusalem. This was all the work of the Israeli labor movement.

Jerusalem - Ongoing Ethnic Cleansing and House Demolitions

In a very real sense the demonstrations that we have seen in Israel are the rage of Caliban at seeing his own face in the mirror. There is nothing that Smotrich and Ben Gvir advocate, including the wiping out of Harara, that the Israeli Labor movement did not pioneer in the Nakba.

Freedland has no problem in justifying the Nakba and demonising anyone, which was Corbyn’s ‘crime’, for advocating for the right of return of the Palestinian refugees.

The Mothers of the Plaza

No-one is more devoted to a ‘Jewish’ state than Freedland. What Freedland cannot or will not understand is that Israel is not a refuge from anti-Semitism. Quite the contrary. Zionism has always thrived on anti-Semitism as Argentinian Jews found to their cost during the years of its neo-Nazi Junta (1976-1983 ) when Israel collaborated with the Junta and refused to say anything about its torture and murder of up to 3,000 Jews. Israel had a profitable strategic, political and military relationship with that junta.

Nor does Freedland understand why the sticking plaster of the Good Friday agreement in Northern Ireland worked, up to a point, in securing a frozen peace whereas the Oslo Accords were an abysmal failure. Ulster Unionism no longer had the political strength to fight for a Protestant State for a Protestant People (James Craig) whereas Zionism had lost none of its appetite for colonisation and a Jewish Supremacist State. All it needed was time to consolidate. Yet even in Northern Ireland the question of  Partition looms large as we have seen over Brexit and the Northern Ireland Protocol.

Smotrich - Head of West Bank Military Administration - called for the 'wiping out' of the Palestinian town of Huwara

The only solution in Israel is a state of all its citizens as opposed to a Jewish state. However the abolition of Israeli Apartheid is the one solution that Freedland will not countenance because he is a Jewish chauvinist. As the Israeli government prepares legislation that will ban Israel’s Arab parties, thus ensuring that the only governments Israel will know in the future are those of the far-Right, Freedland fails to perceive that a ‘Jewish’ state, like all ethno-nationalist states, can only go in one direction.  If you want a state of racial purity then who better to carry it out than those who will complete the project and not stop halfway?

Lapid & Biden

All Zionist parties are committed, in Yair Lapid’s phrase to ‘maximum Jews, maximum land and minimum Palestinians.’ Who better to carry it out than those who believe in there being no Palestinians rather than ‘minimum’ Palestinians (other than slaves and hewers of wood and drawers of water?

The irony of Freedland is that when faced with finding a genuine Jewish hero during the Holocaust to eulogise he was forced to choose an anti-Zionist, Rudolf Vrba, since the Zionism movement had distinguished itself by its collaboration with the Nazis!

Tony Greenstein

Today the Defence Case Opens With My Cross-Examination

This is a very quick update, sorry for the lateness of the message but I have been preoccupied tonight with an updated Defence Statement and other documents including a conference with my barrister.

At or about 11.30 a.m. the Defence case will open with my giving evidence and then being cross-examined by the Prosecution. For those that can make it, the trial is being held at Wolverhampton Crown Court, which is about 5 minutes from the train station.

It would be good to have as many people as possible attending, both the public gallery and the lobby/picket outside.

Tony Greenstein

We should not forget that Democratic Rights were Won in the Teeth of Opposition by a Reactionary Judiciary

Contempt For Justice

Today in Britain we have an unpopular Government and an almost equally unpopular Opposition, both of which agree on the need to curtail democratic rights and direct action. As environmental disaster beckons, we have a government intent on ramping up carbon emissions by approving of new oil fields in the North Sea.

Their answer to direct action protests is not to change course but to attack the right to protest. The judiciary, which likes to think of itself as independent, has joined forces with the Executive.

As groups like Extinction Rebellion, Climate Action and Just Stop Oil take direct action in response to the climate crisis, the government, in hock as it is to the oil industry, has resorted to repression.

First there was the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts (PCSC) Act and today a Public Order Act which puts greater power in the hands of the same police forces which are riddled with corruption, rapists and racists (in no particular order).

This legislation was preceded by the Overseas Operations Bill which made it much harder to prosecute British personnel for serious crimes – including torture – overseas as well as the Covert Human Intelligence Sources (Criminal Conduct) Bill (Spycops Bill) which was even more abhorrent. It granted a host of state agencies the power to commit grave crimes with legal immunity. This is a giant leap forward to a police state yet British judges have remained silent.

There was a time, in the 1990s and 2000s when a succession of liberal judges presided over the Supreme Court and as Lord Chief Justice such as Thomas Bingham, described as ‘the greatest jurist of our time’, Lord Taylor who presided over the  Hillsborough Disaster Inquiry and uncovered Police malfeasance, Lord Steyn, Baroness Haleand Stephen Sedley. It is perhaps no accident that Taylor, Sedley and Steyn were Jewish.

Today we have seen a return to a reactionary judiciary under Lord Reed, President of the Supreme Court and the execrable Lord  Burnett who presided over the Assange hearing.

If   Burnett had any integrity he would have recused himself from the Assange case since he is a close friend of former Minister Alan Duncan, who described Assange as a “miserable little worm”.

Assange is a litmus test for the judiciary. He has been imprisoned for four years, without charge because of an extradition request from the United States. His only offence being to reveal multiple war crimes.

This is not my paranoia. Last year The Economist published Britain’s Supreme Court takes a conservative turn. Prospect Magazine carried The government wanted to rein in the Supreme Court. Now it may not need to. After the backlash from the right-wing press and the Mail with its ‘Enemies of the People’ headline, when the Supreme Court rejected Johnson’s prorogation of Parliament, the Judiciary have unilaterally surrendered to the government.

The Supreme Court’s shameful decision on Shamima Begum, which was contrary to international law on statelessness was one indication of the new ‘security minded’   court.  In another decision, where two mothers challenged the government’s decision to restrict tax credits and universal credit to two children, Reed went out of his way to attack those bringing the action.

Nicholas Reed Langen lamented the “trend towards deference.” This is the political backcloth to the attack of government and judges on the right to protest. This increasing judicial reaction occurred as juries have been returning what the Right see as authorities are ‘perverse verdicts’ of  ‘not guilty’ against direct action protesters.

The Establishment was outraged by a Bristol jury which acquitted those who dumped the statue of Edward Colston, a mass murderer and slave trader, into Bristol harbour. The government sought ‘clarification’ from the Court of Appeal as to whether defendants could cite human rights in their defence in a case of criminal damage.

One wonders whether the judges would have approved of a statue of Hitler being erected in Golder’s Green yet the Court of Appeal found that human rights defences should only be considered by courts in protest-related cases if the damage is ‘minor’ and ‘low-value’. It thus put a threshold on when people can enact their human rights.

The affront to Black British citizens never crossed the minds of these miserable judicial wretches who knew the price of everything and the value of nothing. The courts have always prioritised the needs of property over people. It was another reactionary judge Lord Denning who ruled in LB Southwark v Williams that

“necessity would open a door which no man could shut…If hunger were once allowed to be an excuse for stealing the plea would be an excuse for all sorts of wrong doing. The courts must take a firm stand.”

The ruling by the Court of Appeal found expression in the decision of Judge Silas Reid in climate change cases to gaol for contempt defendants who mentioned why they took direct action. This has meant that people are unable to put forward any defence and is clearly contrary to Article 6 of the European Convention of Human Rights:

In the determination of his civil rights and obligations or of
any criminal charge against him, everyone is entitled to a fair
and public hearing within a reasonable time by an independent
and impartial tribunal established by law.

It is also contrary to Article 50 of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, the right not to be tried or punished twice in criminal proceedings for the same offence.

It is or should be obvious to all except the most narrow minded judge that if you can’t say why you are innocent the trial must be unfair. None of this is surprising since the history of British justice is a history of conflict between protest and a reactionary judiciary.

In Fascist Judges Craig Murray described how in Irmtrud Wojak’s biography of Fritz Bauer, a concentration camp survivor who became the most important prosecutor of the Nazis in Germany, Bauer detailed how the Nazis didn’t have to find their own judges. Most of the German legal establishment had simply adapted themselves to applying Nazi laws.

It was one of the scandals of the post-war Federal Republic of Germany that judges who had served the Nazis so well continued in post. Does anyone seriously believe that if a fascist regime arose in Britain that the judges would defend our rights? Craig wrote how

The current legal establishment will adapt themselves to the legal framework of whatever sort is ordained by the rulers. Anybody expecting judges to defend liberties is likely to be sorely disappointed. They will happily remove the ability of juries to defend liberty too.

Judge Silas Reid – a model fascist judge

Silas Reid would have no difficulty in becoming a model Nazi judge, dispatching a British Sophie Scholl to the guillotine or gallows.

Sent to prison by Silas Reid for trying to "tell the whole truth"

David Nixon

In October 2021, David Nixon took part in an Insulate Britain roadblock whose aim was to arouse the public and media to the need to insulate homes, to tackle fuel poverty and reduce carbon emissions.

Six previous trials of people involved in similar actions had ended in two acquittals, two guilty verdicts, and two deferred (in one of these the Judge asked the prosecution whether it was in the public interest to continue).

Protesters are being tried for the ‘archaic’common law offence of causing a public nuisance. Silas Reid told the defendants at Inner London Crown Court that while they might genuinely believe that they had been performing a public good and not a public nuisance jurors should not take their motivations into account.

Appearing at Inner London Crown Court with three others, Nixon was warned by Silas not to mention climate or fuel poverty during the trial. In response to an accusation that 8,500 people had had their bus journeys disrupted Nixon told the jury that coincidentally 8,500 people had died that same year as a result of fuel poverty.

Silas Reid cleared the court and demanded Nixon apologise. As Reid directed the jury to leave the court, Nixon continued:

That’s before moving on to climate change. Posters around the court building are saying that we are on a highway to climate hell with our foot on the accelerator.

“You’ve not been able to hear these truths because this court has not allowed me to say them. Our safety is at risk, our society is at risk.

“I have only one apology: that Insulate Britain did not get our demand met.”

When he refused to apologise on the grounds that his duty was to ‘tell the whole truth’ he was sentenced to an eight-week prison sentence for contempt of court. Reid has been accused of “stripping away” protesters’ legal defences following the sentencing of Nixon because he defied Reid’s instruction not to cite the climate crisis as motivation for his participation in the same Bishopsgate roadblock in 2021.

After the jury returned, Reid told them to disregard Nixon’s statements. Reid told jurors:

This is not a trial about climate change, fuel poverty, etc. Matters relating to that are not relevant to your deliberations, no matter how much Mr Nixon wants them to be.

While the jury went out to consider their verdict, Nixon admitted contempt and declined two offers from Reid to apologise, telling Silas Reid: “I wish I could but I don’t think it would be genuine.”

The jury returned to court and found the four protesters guilty. Nixon was standing trial alongside Kai Bartlett, Alyson Lee and Christian Murray-Leslie. Reid said he would sentence them at a later hearing.

On four occasions, defendants have defied Silas’s instruction in their closing speeches to the jury. Those trials were immediately halted, juries sent out, and the defendant removed to a cell for ‘contempt of court’. In three cases, Judge Reid has then gone on to sentence the defendant to several weeks in prison. Perhaps because of the concerns expressed, he decided to take no further action in the last case. Barrister Paul Powlesland said:

"Judge Reid jailing David for speaking the truth to a jury in his defence is an outrageous threat to some of our oldest and most precious liberties…. If you are on a jury trying a peaceful climate protester, the judge may be preventing them from mentioning the climate crisis in their defence. Remember that you have an absolute right to acquit them on your conscience.

"Such an acquittal cannot be appealed and you will never be asked to explain or justify it…. Citizens pushing back on judges is what has kept the right to jury trial alive over the centuries."

Several leading lawyers protested outside the court during one of the contempt of court hearings. In an interview Powlesland reminded us about the 17^th century Bushel’s case, where a judge locked up the jury without food and water for two days to try and force a guilty verdict, but which ended up setting a legal precedent – the right for a jury to acquit on their conscience. The case is celebrated by a plaque inside the Old Bailey (where it is visible to court users, including jurors).

Former Barrister Tim Crosland, who himself has been disbarred for telling the truth, said:

"The British courts have lost the plot. Infuriated by the habit of juries acquitting climate protestors, a new policy has been adopted in which the judge bans climate protestors from referring to climate change during their trial, and when the defendant honours their oath to tell the whole truth and explains to the jury why they did what they did, the judge holds them in contempt of court for defying their gagging order."

Amy Pritchard & Giovanna Lewis

Giovanna Lewis, 65, from Dorset; Amy Pritchard, 37, from London; and Paul Sheeky, 46, from Warrington, were accused of blocking a major junction in central London on 25 October 2021 at around 8am. All three denied the charges.

The jury heard that 25 arrests had been made that morning as protesters lay in the road while others glued themselves to the ground, bringing rush hour traffic on Upper Thames Street and Bishopsgate to a standstill that lasted hours.

In his opening address Reid warned that the defendants had hoped being able to talk about climate and ecological crises as motivation for their actions would “touch people’s hearts” and bring morality to proceedings. Reid said:

“It seems to me that the desires of the defendants to speak about the motivations of their actions is that they believe that the jury will look at the case in a moral way rather than in a legal way. That would be wholly wrong.”

This is an amazing statement that confirms that judges like Silas Reid live in an ethical free zone devoid of all morality. See ‘For history to judge, not the jury’: judge rules climate crisis ‘irrelevant’

This latest crackdown followed a ruling by the Attorney General after the Home Secretary’s appeal against the acquittal of the Colston Four (who toppled the Bristol statue). The Attorney General’s ruling, along with the earlier Ziegler ruling, restrict the defences available to someone accused of protest-related charges such as criminal damage or public nuisance, ruling out any balancing exercise relating to human rights or any defence of ‘necessity’ (attempting to prevent a greater evil).

Although there is some leeway for judges to decide how much a jury can hear from defendants, protest trials often begin with legal arguments where the prosecution ask the judge to rule out all such  defences at the start of the trial, while defence lawyers argue the jury should hear them. The judge can also direct the jury at the end of the trial to ignore elements that are deemed irrelevant in law.

Real Mediareported the five-week trial of Burning Pink activists during which evidence of the extent of the climate crisis was heard. All but two out of 20 charges against 12 people ended in acquittal.

A group calling themselves Fair Justice Project have been posting notices in the streets near the Old Bailey displaying legal information about the right for jurors to acquit on their conscience.

The right to acquit on conscience (but the jury mustn’t know)

On the morning of 27^th March, retired social worker, Trudi Warner, used similar wording on a banner and stood for half an hour on the pavement of the road leading to the juror’s entrance at the court.

When she returned to court later that week, she was ambushed by police and arrested for contempt of court. Held in a cell for the rest of the day, she appeared before the British version of Roland Freisler, President of the Nazi People’s Court, at 5pm and told she must appear at the Old Bailey on 4th April for contempt proceedings (“contempt in the face of the court attempting to influence the jury”).

After hearing from her solicitor, Mr Justice Cavanagh gave his decision that:

 “It is not the case in any trial that jurors can acquit by their conscience if by that it is meant they can disregard evidence and directions given by the judge and decide on their own beliefs whether a defendant is guilty of a criminal offence. To do so would be a breach of their jury oath and cause injustices.”  

Cavanagh’s ruling is a clear attempt to roll back the rights of a jury and is indicative of the period we are living in. A jury can acquit for any reason whatsoever. They are not accountable for their decision to anyone. It is clearly stated on the plaque that adorns the Old Bailey, celebrating the decision in Bushell’s that

Chief Justice Vaughan delivered the opinion of the Court which established “The Right of Juries” to give their Verdict according to their Opinions.

Either Cavanagh is an ignorant bigot or he is determined to overturn a celebrated decision of over 500 years standing in the  Judges’ attempt to bow the knee to the present Tory Government. (see below)

Cavanagh ruled that the case should be referred to the Attorney General. In the meantime, appeals have been lodged in relation to several of Reid’s Insulate Britain trials and several trials scheduled for after Easter have been deferred until those appeals are decided.

A woman who attended in support, was arrested at the Old Bailey for allegedly “attempting to pervert the course of justice” in connection with putting up a poster near Inner London Court. If anything it is Cavanagh and Silas Reid who are guilty of attempting to pervert the course of justice.

Bushel’s case sets a so-far inalienable right in law. So the question is, where can it be legal to display a banner celebrating this case, and more importantly, where and why could it NOT be legal to display this tenet of British law?

Hidden forces pushing change in our democracy and rights, exposes some of the power and money behind the recent crackdown on protest rights. See also Climate protester confronts judge over ‘amoral’ order on what jury could hear

Four Insulate Britain protesters appeared at Inner London Crown Court before Judge Silas Reid ahead of their sentencing next week.

Insulate Britain campaigners (left to right) Stephen Pritchard, Roman Paluch-Machnik, Ruth Cook and Oliver Rock, outside Inner London Crown Court ahead of their sentencing for road blockages protests (Jordan Pettitt/PA) / PA Wire

Another road-blocking protester who could face jail confronted Silas Reid over the decision to ban him from mentioning his climate-related motivations to a jury. Stephen Pritchard used his speech ahead of his sentencing to condemn the order made by Silas Reid:

I think that your rulings were amoral; I believe also they were irrational given the situation that we’re in

The Buddhist and former parish councillor appeared at Inner London Crown Court alongside former probation officer Ruth Cook, 71, gardener Roman Paluch-Machnik, 29, and carpenter Oliver Rock, 42.

All four were convicted by a jury of causing a nuisance to the public by obstructing the highway after they stopped traffic at Junction 3 of the M4 on October 1 2021. Insulate Britain said they are the first protesters to be convicted of causing a public nuisance – a common law offence which carries a maximum penalty of life imprisonment.

Silas Reid had ruled that they should not mention their climate motivations during their trial, but asked them to “concentrate as much as possible on motivation” in their speeches ahead of sentencing. He told them:

“Blocking the road in the way you did, if it was done for no reason, is a serious matter and would result in a prison sentence.”

Addressing Reid, Pritchard said:

“People’s lives are being lost. The only possible way I could imagine stopping peaceful civil resistance in this context is for you to tell me that this country has stopped pumping greenhouse gases into the air.

“I’m well aware of what prison is like, having been to prison. It’s not a very nice place. But I feel like I’m already a prisoner of my conscience.”

Cook said she had spent decades “upholding the law” but resorted to disruptive protests so she could “look her grandchildren in the eye”.

Speaking about Silas Reid’s imposition of limits to their defence, the grandmother from Frome gestured to the jury bench and said:

I’m really aware of those empty seats. I am going to say things now that I wish they would have been able to hear, so that they weren’t discussing traffic data and listening to boring statistics about traffic, but knew why we did what we did.

Cook, who is also a Quaker, said her work delivering aid in Africa on behalf of Oxfam and the Refugee Council and seeing climate refugees on the continent

“changed me fundamentally. I saw the impact that the climate emergency was having on their lives

The defendants also mentioned the impact the campaign had had on their friend Xavier Gonzalez-Trimmer, who killed himself after spending time in prison over an Insulate Britain protest. Pritchard said:

“He was a brave, gentle and caring human being who could see the future we were facing and was desperate to do something about it, and now he’s dead.”

Paluch-Machnik used his speech to highlight the impact of climate change, adding: “This isnt a belief system of mine, this is a measurable process.” The four will return to the same court for sentencing by Silas Reid.

The Rights of A Jury and Bushel’s Case 1670

Prior to Bushell’s Case, for nearly four centuries, jurors had been subject to coercion, fines and imprisonment if they disregarded the wishes of the judge. The jury was not independent as it is today, but more a ventriloquism act, “the judge with thirteen voices” any time the judge wished to determine the verdict. The grandfather authority for the coercion probably was a case in 19 Edward III (1346), which suggested that jurors "might be dragged about in carts at the tail of the [Circuit] Justices from assize-town to assize-town until they could make up their minds". [The Four Jurors in Bushell's Case, Wilmer G. Mason, American Bar Association Journal, JUNE 1965]

In August 1670, William Penn, who went on to found Pennsylvania, and William Mead were charged with “unlawfully and tumultuously” assembling to preach and speak during a Quaker worship session on London’s Gracechurch Street. The jury found them not guilty. The outraged judges, the Mayor and Recorder of London, refused to accept the decision and told the jurors to keep deliberating. The jury was sent back with the warning that

“you shall not be dismissed until we have a decision that the court will accept; and you shall be imprisoned up, without meat, drink, fire, or smoke…. With God’s aid, we’ll get a decision, or you’ll starve to death.”

The jury returned two days later, finding both defendants not guilty. For contempt of court, the judge fined them. One of the jurors, Edward Bushel, refused to pay the fine required for his release. Instead, he petitioned the Court of Common Pleas for a writ of habeas corpus, contesting the legality of his detention. He was released two months later after the court approved the writ.

The case of Bushel resulted in a landmark ruling on the role of jurors. Lord Chief Justice Vaughan declared the fines and imprisonment imposed unconstitutional and held that a jury could not be punished for its decision, effectively ending judges’ ability to control verdicts based on political whim and establishing the jury’s independent power. Bushel’s Case established the concept of jury nullification, in which a jury overturns an unconstitutional statute by declaring a defendant not guilty, regardless of whether the jury believes the prisoner is guilty precisely by the wording of the law.

Lady Justice Hallett Blackstone Lecture  on Trial by Jury.

In May 2017, LJ Hallett gave an interesting lecture on the role of the jury. For Lord Camden it was ‘the foundation of our free constitution’. For Lord Eldon the ‘greatest blessing which the British Constitution had secured to the subject’. For Lord Devlin, ‘the lamp that shows that freedom lives.’ For Lord Judge, ‘a safeguard against oppression and dictatorship’.  Blackstone refers to it as “the sacred bulwark of our liberties.” Thomas Erskine said that

 ‘Criminal justice in the hands of the people is the basis of freedom. While that remains there can be no tyranny, because the people will not execute tyrannical law against themselves. Whenever it is lost, liberty must fall along with it. . .’

Similarly, in the early nineteenth century, people were still being hanged for sheep, horse and cattle stealing and for robberies to the value of 40 shillings - raised in 1827 to £5. Juries deliberately undervalued goods stolen to avoid sending offenders to the gallows.

Heather Hallett stressed in her lecture that a jury may refuse to convict in spite of the law and the evidence because it concludes that the law is an unjust law. The jury passes its verdict on the law. Secondly, it ensures that the prosecution and the judge are on trial. Hallett went on to quote Professor Michael Zander that the jury can set aside ‘unjust laws, oppressive prosecutions and harsh sentences.’ 

Hallett gave the example of the case of Dr Leonard Arthur a highly respected consultant paediatrician who, as he saw it, put the interests of his patients and their parents first. John Pearson was born with Down’s syndrome and abnormalities of his lung, heart and brain. Dr Arthur wrote in the case notes, "Parents do not wish the baby to survive. Nursing care only."

Despite what to the lawyer may have appeared a confession to the charge of attempted murder, the jury acquitted him. Their verdict has been construed as a refusal to convict a doctor of murder for 'allowing a severely handicapped baby to die'even if the law was against him.

The case in 1985 of Clive Ponting, a civil servant, was another example. In the judge’s view he had broken the Official Secrets Act by passing on secret information to a politician but the jury refused to convict, upholding his claim that disclosure was in the public interest.

To again quote Hallett, the jury

is a check against the authority of government and Parliament, which ensures that they take heed of the judgment the public passes on what they do. It is the means by which individuals can ‘feel that the law is theirs’, that the law reflects and continues to be consistent with the ‘attitudes and mores’ of society generally.

Lord Sumption: civil disobedience has begun

The views of Lord Sumption, a member of the Supreme Court between 2012 and 2018 on civil disobedience are also interesting.

Sometimes the most public spirited thing that you can do with despotic laws like these [COVID laws] is to ignore them. I think that if the government persists long enough with locking people down, depending on the severity of the lockdown, civil disobedience is likely to be the result. … whatever Mr Hancock says. People are doing that to some extent already.

Sumption went on to say that :

“I feel sad that we have the kind of laws which public-spirited people may need to break. I have always taken a line on this, which is probably different from that of most of my former colleagues. I do not believe that there is a moral obligation to obey the law… You have to have a high degree of respect, both for the object that the law is trying to achieve, and for the way that it’s been achieved. Some laws invite breach. I think this is one of them.”

I point these divergent views out, even amongst the judiciary because there is now a clear attempt to suggest that the powers of the jury are confined within the limits that a trial judge sets. There are many instances when, in order to achieve social change or achieve the abolition of a bad law, it was necessary to break the law.

Rosa Parks sitting in the bus

Rosa Parks by breaking the law on segregation helped change the law when she refused to give up her seat for a white man.

Hallett’s observations are the answer to those who say that a jury must blindly follow the law, or the Judges’ interpretation of the law. There are times when an oppressive law deserves to be broken. The Poll Tax was an obvious one. Let us not forget that hiding Anne Frank was against the law whereas deporting her was legal.

In June-July 1945, the London Conference preceded the Nuremberg trials of the major New Zealand war criminals. The Conference created effectively a new law, Crimes Against Humanity. Under the Agreement for the Prosecution and Punishment of the Major War Criminals of the European Axis, and Charter of the International Military Tribunal. London, 8 August 1945

‘Individuals would be responsible for the perpetration of war crimes irrespective of ‘whether or not in violation of the domestic law of the country where perpetrated.’

This was the answer to the defence of Goering, Streicher & co. that they were only obeying orders.

The suffragette’s breaking of the law in order to reform the law was another. They were told, by the prosecuting barrister in the BBC’s reconstruction of a trial that:

Suffrage is not the issue, it is the criminal behaviour of the suffragettes and their incitement to partake in militant activity at which 54 windows were broken

‘This is not a political trial it is a criminal trial’ – so sing Judge and Prosecution in harmony

I promised in my last blog to provide an update on the trial at Wolverhampton Crown Court in which I’m charged, together with 5 others, with having in my possession ‘articles withintent to destroy or damage’ property belonging to Elbit.

I was informed by my barrister, Danielle Manson from Garden Court Chambers that the reason why I am the lead defendant is because of my blog of two years ago!  A rare honour indeed. No doubt I shall be cross-examined on every word and past participle.

There is one theme that Judge Chambers and Prosecutor Deborah Gould are agreed on and that is that this trial has nothing to do with politics.  It’s only about criminal conduct and criminal damage in particular.

If Chambers and Gould are to be believed, then 6 people, most of whom did not even know each other beforehand, conspired to engage in a spot of vandalism on the morning of March 9^th for no other reason than that they felt in a destructive mood. Quite why we didn’t focus on breaking a few windows nearer home or vandalizing a phone box is one of life’s mysteries.

Six members of the German Jewish Resistance Group in Nazi Germany Who in May 1942 set fire to Goebbel's Soviet Paradise Exhibition in Berlin's Lustgarten. They had broken the law and were beheaded. According to Judge and  Prosecutor in the trial, adherence to the law is a supreme value

There is therefore a deliberate attempt to exclude or play down the real reasons for what happened, i.e. the role of Elbit in manufacturing drones such as Hermes 450 which has been responsible for the death of thousands of Palestinian civilians, to say nothing of its supply of drones to the Indian army for use in Kashmir and its supply of weaponry to the genocidal junta in Burma.

Herbert Baum - executed leader of the German Jewish anti-Nazi Baum Group - died under torture

Jo Wadsworth, the Blairite co-editor of the Brighton & Hove News published an article on the case today. No doubt she and the Editor of the Jewish Chronicle are salivating at the prospect of me being convicted!

Today the jury was whittled down from 18 to 12. It was thus only on the afternoon of the fourth day of trial that the Prosecution opened its case with lurid tales of conspiracies and plots. Factually she was all at sea despite copious amounts of information supplied by mobile phone companies on our whereabouts on the night of March 8/morning of March 9.

Thus I was supposed to have left Brighton at 5.30 when I picked up the van and arrived by 9.30. In fact I didn’t leave Brighton until about 7.30 and didn’t arrive until after midnight. Just a small point but it shows the sloppiness of the Prosecution despite the massive powers of search they have under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000.

Demonstration March 29th outside Shenstone's factory in Walsall

Thus tomorrow (Friday) the trial begins proper as the Prosecution opens its case. However as Judge Chambers has other business, sentencing a rapist and murderer in the afternoon, there will only be a short session from 10.00-12.00. 

Thus ends the first week. The second week will consist of only 3 days because of Easter and the third week will be four days because of Easter Monday so this trial is likely to continue into the third week of April.

However this also gives people time to mobilize around the issues in the case, which is the right to take action against those who deliberately flout international human rights law in search of profit. Britain is signed up to the UN and European Human Rights Conventions but they are observed in the breach and a blind eye is turned to arms exports by Britain.

In June 2019 the Court of Appeal held that the government’s export of arms to Saudia Arabia to be unlawful. Foreign Secretary Liz Truss blithely ignored the ruling and proceeded regardless. It was all a ‘mistake’ she said.  Not a defence I suspect we will be able to use.

Tony Greenstein 

This blog has been legally vetted and there are a number of things I have been forced to omit for legal reasons which will become clear later

The latest instalment of the Shenstone 5 Palestine Action Trial as the State is Determined to Criminalise Protest Actions

This is now the third week of the trial of the Shenstone 5. The Prosecution finished its case last Wednesday and the Defence case began on Tuesday April 11 when my Cross Examination began.

Despite Judge Chambers doing his best to rule out all my attempts to explain the reason behind the action at Elbit as ‘political’ I managed to convey to the jury the reasons behind our actions – the war crimes carried out by Elbit.

During the first week I had fallen ill with gastro-enteritis but despite my barrister applying for me to go home and lie down, Judge Michael Chambers refused the application without giving any reason. I was not needed in the trial as it was then being taken up with legal arguments and my barrister, Danielle Mason from Garden Court Chambers argued that she did not need me to instruct her.

At that point I simply walked out and called Chambers bluff. In the end no warrant for my arrest was issued despite threats to do so.

This Tuesday Danielle began my Evidence in Chief and then Deborah Gould, the humourless Prosecution barrister began cross-examination.

It did not go well for Gould as she tied herself down in knots trying to prove that Palestine Action was one vast conspiracy aimed at targeting the benevolent Elbit Systems whose drones she alleged had purely civil and commercial purposes.

As Skawkbox details Gould was eventually reduced to pleading that I could have written to the local MP, in ignorance of parliamentary procedure that you can only write to your local MP, that I could have petitioned Elbit to be nicer, that I could have submitted a Subject Access Request under the GDPR, ignorant of the fact that this would only apply to information they held on me (highly unlikely) or submit a Freedom of Information request which you can only do to a public body not a private company.

She even asked if I had asked Elbit what they were producing that week and who their customers were!  Presumably Elbit, which goes to extraordinary lengths to hide the names of customers like the regime in Myanamar, would have willingly handed over the information!  In fact kosher pigs are more likely to fly first.

I testified that one of the defendants, Helen Caney, was discernibly distressed and anxious and that I had offered to take her back in the minibus to her home in Reading. When she declined the offer I agreed to take her to the nearest railway station. Gould then asked me if I had consulted the rail timetables, (!) had I informed the Police who had arrested her along with us about her condition and implied that I had not fulfilled my duty of care even though it is the Police who have that responsibility not me. Especially since I was under arrest.

Helen, along with one other protestor who had decided not to take part in the action, sat with me at the front of the van. The three protestors who were intent on occupying the roof of Elbit were dressed in red boiler suits. Those at the front were not.

That should have been enough but Gould is convinced that that was just a ploy and that all 6 of us were determined to take part in the action. Gould is determined to wrongfully convict all 5 of us despite the fact that I too had no intention of entering the factory because

a)      the minibus was due back at the rental hire company at 5 pm the following day

b) because aged 67, having had a liver transplant I was incapable of scaling 8 foot metal fences.

At one point I was asked if I had mentioned Helen’s mental state and distress to my barrister, at which point my barrister rose to her feet to object as it was a clear and obvious breach of client-lawyer privilege. Quite amazingly Judge Chambers overruled the objection without giving any reason. Presumably this was on the basis that Chambers has a rule whereby he consistently overrules all defence lawyers’ objections whilst upholding all objections made by Prosecution counsel! His usual style is to cut them off in mid-sentence without even bothering to hear them out.

Yesterday we had the Affair of the Blue Badge. Gould thought she had found the smoking gun when she asserted in cross-examination that my badge had been found in the back of the van.  Clearly I had intended to go into the factory.

Clive Ponting's Prosecution in 1985 is famous because the Judge directed he be convicted and the Jury refused

I pushed back on this and said it was impossible since I hadn’t been in the back, where bags containing sledge hammers and a crowbar were stored in sealed bags. But Gould was insistent that that was where they had been found citing a police witness statement. The only problem was that when the Chambers examined what the policewoman had actually said in cross-examination she said she couldn’t remember where she had found it! It was only when she was referred to the statement she made at the time that she had listed all the items found as being located in the back of the van.

However Helen Caney then gesticulated to the court from the dock that she had found a police photograph of the van and sure enough my blue badge was there, on the dashboard. However Gould was not to be thwarted. She asserted that it was too big, even though it was on the dashboard and was blue.

As I finished my cross-examination I walked out to a standing ovation from the public gallery which resulted in a warning from Judge Chambers that he would clear the gallery in future.

However overnight she had asked the police to look into the matter further and sure enough they came back with a wrapper that said it found in the front. No apology was forthcoming from Gould however.

Towards the end of today’s session Gould, who had been badgering away at the second defendant, Ibrahim Samadi, trying to prove that we had been engaged in an operation of military efficiency then questioned him on a phone call I had apparently made to my wife, with my mobile phone, whilst in police custody at 4.30 a.m on the 9^th March.

The only problem with this was that I didn’t have my mobile on me in police custody and furthermore the Police had prevented me making any calls in custody, in breach of the custody rules. At which point I shouted out that it was a lie and my barrister got to her feet to object. If Gould was going to question anyone on a phone call I had allegedly made then the person to question was me but she had declined to do so yesterday for reasons best known to her. It resulted in a blazing row between Gould and my counsel after Chambers had ended the day’s session!

The obvious thing for Gould to do tomorrow would for me to be called back to the witness box to give evidence to that effect but I suspect Gould will try to wriggle out of that as it would not serve her purposes of obtaining a wrongful conviction by any means necessary.

As I have previously documented British judges, who have always been the most loyal and subservient members of the Establishment, are determined to help the Tories in their attacks on defendant’s right to a free and fair trial.

Before the pivotal case of Bushell’s Case in 1670 juries had been little more than creatures of the judges. They were termed the Judges 13 voices. In 1670 a jury had refused to convict William Penn, the founder of Pennsylvania and a prominent Quaker and William Mead, of preaching to an ‘unlawful and tumultuous’ assembly.

The jury was then locked up for 2 days without food, water or a chamber pot. The jury was then fined but Edward Bushell refused to pay the fine and was imprisoned for contempt. He then petitioned for habeus corpus and the Court of Common Pleas under Chief Justice Vaughan established that juries could not be punished for their verdicts.

Thus began the independence of the jury and it is this that Judge Silas Reid and other judges like Michael Chambers are now challenging. As the Tories introduce measures to even prevent people attending a demonstration, the Judges are rushing to fall into line.

There are a number of Palestine Action trials coming up. I urge people to attend wherever possible and to go to the Palestine Action site for further details of the nearest trial to you.

Elbit 9

Date           Apr 17 - May 5, 2023 9:00 am - 5:00 pm

Venue        Bristol Crown Court

Location   9 Small St, BS1 1DB Bristol

Tamworth 2

Date           Apr 17 - 21, 2023, 9:00 am - 5:00 pm

Venue         Stafford Crown Court

Location             The Combined Court Centre, Victoria Square, ST16 2QQ Stafford

UTACS 7

Date         Apr 18 - 26, 2023

Time          9:30 am - 5:00 pm

Venue:       Nottingham Magistrates Court

Location: Carrington Street, NG2 1EE Nottingham

The New Arab

Elbit Systems vs Tony Greenstein: A shining example of the UK's crackdown on Palestine activism

SKWAWKBOX 02/04/2023

Judge denies ill Greenstein permission to leave box during ‘non-political’ Elbit trial

Skwawkbox 12 April 2023

Exclusive: Greenstein testifies at trial of Shenstone Palestine Action protesters

Skwawkbox 12 April 2023

 ‘Key plank’ of prosecution case falls in Greenstein trial – and further farce ensues

Labour is Dead as a Party Representing The Working Class and Oppressed

I had a personal and political reason for knowing that Starmer was lying when he stood as a Corbyn continuity candidate for the Labour leadership. That he should have jettisoned his 10 Pledges so quickly was no surprise whatsoever. That he should have called himself a Zionist ‘without qualification’ was also no surprise. Racism and Starmer go together like Laurel and Hardy.

On February 18^th, hours after I had been expelled, Starmer welcomed my expulsion with one word – ‘good’. A man of few words and even fewer ideas.

Keeping Starmer in his Shadow Cabinet, despite his personal responsibility for what has happened to Julian Assange, his proposal to gaol those guilty of over claiming benefits for 10 years (not tax dodgers of course) and his refusal to prosecute police murderers such as the killer of Ian Tomlinson, should have given him ample warning of Starmer’s Brutus like treachery.

Below is an article which I largely agree with, from Adam Johannes, a Welsh socialist. It is clear that despite the Tories self-imploding over the summer with Liz Truss’s 44 day leadership, the shortest in history, Starmer has failed to capitalise on it.

Thornberry attacks the Crown Prosecution Service under Starmer for its failure to prosecute Jimmy Savile

Sunak has now stabilised the Tory government and Starmer has nothing to say, hence his childish ad accusing him of not wanting to gaol child abusers when it was he who refused to prosecute Jimmy Savile. Starmer himself has never denied his part in the decision not to prosecute Savile.

Starmer represents the British state in all its ugliness and hypocrisy. He is, as I wrote, two months before he was elected leader, ‘the candidate that the Deep State & the British Establishment want you to vote for.’

For me the key was Starmer’s pivotal role in the persecution of Julian Assange, whose only crime was the revelation of American war crimes in the illegal Iraq War. Starmer also ensured that thousands of CPS files were destroyed.

Corbyn made many mistakes during his leadership but the key one was appeasing those who were out to destroy him. Instead of calling out Israel’s supporters in the Jewish Labour Movement he tried to work with them.

Corbyn failed to understand the nature of the attack on him and took these attacks as if they had been made in good faith. In particular he accepted the ‘anti-Semitism’ narrative.

As Asa Winstanley made clear, The Jewish Labour Movement had been refounded precisely in order to destroy Corbyn. Yet, as the Labour Leaked Report revealed (p. 306)

Jeremy Corbyn himself and members of his staff team requested to GLU that particular antisemitism cases be dealt with. In 2017 LOTO staff chased for action on high-profile antisemitism cases Ken Livingstone, Tony Greenstein, Jackie Walker and Marc Wadsworth, stressing that these cases were of great concern to Jewish stakeholders and that resolving them was essential to “rebuilding trust between the Labour Party and the Jewish community”.

Well we were all expelled or forced out of the Labour Party yet was trust rebuilt? Yet instead of realising his mistake Corbyn went on trying to appease the Zionists. Chris Williamson, his most faithful supporter in Parliament was thrown to the wolves. Jennie Formby boasted about how many socialists she had expelled compared to Iain McNicol.

The crowning mistake was at the Labour Party Conference in 2018 when Corbyn opposedreselection. I spoke with Chris Williamson at the Labour Against the Witchhunt fringe meeting and I said to him after the meeting that by taking this decision, and persuading Len McLuskey of UNITE to oppose it, Corbyn had driven the final nail into the coffin of the Corbyn Project.

Tony Benn and Jon Lansman

In one sense Corbyn and Tony Benn before him represented the fatal weakness of the Labour Left. In Benn’s famous phrase an airplane needs two wings to fly. This is of course true but when it has two pilots determined to fly in different directions that is a disaster.

The Labour left had little or no imagination and could never imagine life without the pro-war, pro-capitalist Labour Right. In practice what this meant was that the Labour Left abandoned all hope of socialism and put its faith in minor reforms to capitalism. The history of the Labour Left is a history of retreat, ideological confusion and betrayal.

This has now reached its logical end point with a Socialist Campaign Group that has, to all intent and purposes, abandoned any criticism of Starmer or his policy of faithfully following every twist and turn of US foreign policy.

John McDonnell and the SCG support the United States’s proxy war in Ukraine. Just as McDonnell, perhaps the most pathetic of the leaders of the Labour left there has ever been, praising Starmer’s do nothing, see nothing, say nothing refusal to criticise Boris Johnson over the COVID pandemic.

However Corbyn can make amends. To paraphrase Shakespeare, nothing would become Corbyn so much as his leaving of the Labour Party to stand as a socialist independent. The question is whether he will take that step and lead the fight against Starmer and for a new socialist formation.

I agree with Adam Johannes.  Because Starmer has refused to oppose the Tories on economic affairs, civil liberties, racism or indeed anything substantive, the Labour Party today is by no means guaranteed to win the next election.

Dido Harding - only qualification was marriage to a Tory MP

The refusal of Starmer and Streeting to support striking workers, including the nurses and junior doctors is particularly shameful. ‘There is no money’ they repeat in Tory fashion. But there was £37 billion for a failed COVID test and trace system run by Dido Harding. of which there  is no trace other than to say it went to Tory cronies.

There were billions of pounds for a VIP channel for COVID contracts that even the High Court declared unlawful. It is capitalism that prefers to reward ruling class crooks rather than pay ordinary workers that is the problem and the problem with the Labour Left is that they have never opposed a market economy or capitalism.

Tony Greenstein

The Weakness of Starmer Labour and the tasks ahead

Adam Johannes

The latest opinion polls suggest that the days of a 20 point lead by Labour over the Tories are over and we could be heading for a hung parliament in the next election, which could even mean the prospect of another five years of Tory rule.

On the central faultline in British politics the cost-of-living crisis and the economy the Labour Party are not offering a sharp, clear alternative way of resolving the crisis by ending it, or any easily understood solutions to the ills that plague everyday life today: wages, benefits and pensions that don't match rising living costs, the housing crisis, crumbling public services etc.

Labour's plunge in the polls comes as we reach the end of round 1 of the national strike wave which offered the possibility of a national alternative narrative to the establishment on the economic crisis, but has dipped with the drive of the trade union bureaucracy for sectionalism and to settle for pay rises well below inflation, effectively a pay cut, and refusal to link individual disputes into a national programme to end the cost of living crisis.

A stronger, more political, movement of workers in the rank and file will be needed that can push for a winning strategy in the workplaces and articulate an alternative set of national policies to end the crisis, tied in with supporting campaigns against racism, climate breakdown and imperialist war etc.

The permanent dithering of Jeremy Corbyn over whether he will stand as an independent (let alone help build a left wing alternative to Labour) is also problematic, as such such an election campaign even though in one constituency would offer a possibility to give a national profile for an alternative set of national policies and exert pressure on Starmer's Labour from the left.

One of the weaknesses of the Corbyn Project was the beginnings of a sweeping economic programme separated from fighting social movements and militant trade unionism at the base of society, it was as though it could all be done from above. One of the side-effects of the collapse of Corbynism is the beginnings of a revival of social movements and militant trade unionism that often don't link the day-to-day battles with 'high politics' and a sweeping economic programme that challenges the system.

Meanwhile yesterday's canvassers for nationalisation of the commanding heights of the economy now say that all we can do is burrow away at a very local level in our renters unions and workplaces in the hope that in some far flung future we will reach the cumulative strength to articulate a national alternative, politics doesn't progress by gradualness though, but by 'Leaps! Leaps! Leaps!'

The Enough is Enough campaign has also been a setback for the left. The unions involved CWU, RMT, UCU, as well as Tribune and Acorn, and Zarah Sultana should be held to account, you don't play sectarian games during a major economic crisis. Last summer as the cost-of-living crisis began to fight hundreds of thousands signed up to this sham organisation wanting to join a national mass organisation to fight back. It's main achievement has been to derail building a national movement around the cost-of-living crisis and a national community organisation to support the national strike wave, by pretending to fill the space and thereby stopping anything actually being built to occupy the space.

The coming election will probably be the ugliest on record fought out on so-called 'culture war' issues in a bidding war between Tories and Labour over who can be most in the gutter in cynically using the lives of minorities, migrants and marginalised groups, and the poor, for political gain, and Labour deploying right wing tropes around being tough on crime, rather than its causes.

This is a potentially combustible mix. With no strong national left wing voice, as bitterness rips though society over rising living costs coming on top of years of austerity and neoliberalism, all kinds of dark forces may be waiting in the wings.

The left must stand with the oppressed and the scapegoated, but simply remaining in that defensive space means essentially getting bogged down on a terrain decided by the right and where the right is strongest.

What is desperately needed is HOPE a sense of a national movement in political life on the offensive with a progressive economic programme that can unify our people and cut across various cultural divides in society.

Not only repairing years of damage to the fabric of society done by forty years of Thatcherism and individualism, but offering something collective for the common good that goes beyond the welfare state consensus of 1945-1975.

Why did the Community Security Trust, which claims it is ‘working towards the elimination of racism and anti-Semitism’invite Suella Braverman to its 2023 Annual Dinner?

Cruella and the Refugee ‘Invasion’

There is no doubt that Diane Abbot’s letter to the Observer could have been better worded. Pigmentation or colour isn’t the cause of racism though in Britain, because of our colonial heritage, being Black and being victims of racism are synonymous. By racism I mean institutionalised and state racism not prejudice. But nothing in her letter was in any way racist or anti-Semitic.

It is those who are calling for Diane’s expulsion, such as the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism and the Jewish Chronicle who are the most virulent racists. They give unqualified support to the world’s only apartheid state, Israel.

It was only last week that the Jewish Chronicle Leader stated that ‘There is no ‘context’ to the murder of the Dees’ referring to the killing of three British settlers in the West Bank. They alleged that the settlers were killed because they were Jewish rather than because they were settlers.

The context they denied was the murder of 95 Palestinians, including 17 children, by Israel in the first quarter of this year. To say nothing of the reign of terror by settlers against Palestinians which culminated in a pogrom at Huwara and a call to ‘wipe out’ the town by Israeli Finance and Settlement Minister Bezalel Smotrich. This is because to the Jewish Chronicle and the CAA Palestinian Lives Don’t Matter.

Even the Times of Israel carried the headline‘Settler extremists are sowing terror, Huwara riot was a ‘pogrom,’ top general says’.

Diane Abbot was wrong to say that Gypsy Roma or Travellers don’t experience state racism. They clearly do and the current Public Order Act, which gives Police further powers to harass Gypsy Roma is proof of that. It is also clear that in the past the Irish have been victims of British state racism, as have Jews in the more distant past.

Starmer and CST gaolbird Gerald Ronson

However there is nothing anti-Semitic about saying that today Jews are a privileged section of White British society and that they are not victims of racism, as opposed to prejudice. The real reason for Diane Abbot’s suspension lies in the determination of Starmer to remove the last vestiges of the Labour Left in Parliament whilst emphasising his support for the ‘anti-Semitism’ weapon which the British state wields against supporters of the Palestinians.

British Movement activists 

If Starmer were genuinely concerned about racism then Neil Coyle, a right-wing Labour MP who was suspended from Parliament for 5 days for abusing a British Chinese journalist, Henry Dyer and also abusing a parliamentary assistant to another MP, would not have had the whip restored. Nor would Trevor Philips, the racist broadcaster who believes Muslims are a nation within a nation, been reinstated to the Labour Party. Diane Abbot on the other hand has been the subject of more racist abuse than any other MP.

The organisation which is responsible for combating ‘Anti-Semitism’ is the Community Security Trust, which is  a project of Israel’s Mossad (MI6 ).

Cruella's Concern About 'Antisemitism' Stands in Contrast to Her Racist Attacks on Refugees and Indifference To the Windrush Scandal

Asa Winstanley of Electronic Intifada revealed the CST had denounced Jewish critics of Israel in secret reports to the government in 2011.’ Winstanley described how ‘evidence suggested that the CST works behind the scenes with an assertively pro-Israel agenda not stated in its charitable remit.’ The article also raised ‘serious questions over the CST’s links to the government of Israel and, allegedly, to its intelligence services.’ When asked to comment on these allegations the CST preferred to remain silent.

In particular, in a report sent to the Home Office, the CST denounced several “anti-Zionist British Jewish individuals and groups” as “extreme groups,” claiming they were “unrepresentative of the vast majority of British Jews.”

The report was primarily an attempt to help the government deport Palestinian political activist Raed Salah expressed concern that certain Jews had “voiced support for Salah,” recommending that the “extent of their credibility to speak on these issues should be considered.”

David Hearst of the Guardian wrote about how

just 17 minutes after receiving a report on the activist, prepared by Michael Whine of the Community Security Trust… Faye Johnson, private secretary to the home secretary, emailed about a parliamentary event Salah was due to attend.

"Is there anything that we can do to prevent him from attending (eg could we exclude him on the grounds of unacceptable behaviour?)"

Whine's report said Salah's record of provocative statements carried a risk that his presence in the UK could have "a radicalising impact" on his audiences.

Raed Salah - Palestinian Israeli activist attacked and imprisoned by Israel on false charges of racism - it is only Israeli Arabs who are ever charged with racism

UK Border Agency officials were dubious about the CST’s evidence and they were proved right. Andy Smith of the Special Cases Directorate said the action would not only prolong Salah's stay in the UK but raise his profile. In the end the warning of Smith and others proved correct and Saleh ended up receiving compensation for false imprisonment  and overturning his deportation order. The CST ‘evidence’ consisted of doctored quotes and fabrications.

The crux of the false evidence that the CST supplied against Salah was that he wrote an anti-Semitic poem containing the line: “You Jews are criminal bombers of mosques”. As Asa Winstanley wrote

This “poem” was fabricated in the context of a long-standing Israeli campaign of attacks, detentions and disinformation against Salah. This particular forgery looks to have been originally carried out by an editorial writer at the Jerusalem Post. But this highly problematic, hostile 2009 article was cited by the UK Border Agency (UKBA) as the primary factual basis for both the exclusion and deportation orders. 

Unsurprisingly Saleh won his appeal. The real question is why an organisation whose remit is opposing anti-Semitism in Britain should feel the need to echo Israel’s racist attacks on a Palestinian Israeli citizen. The reason is the close links between the CST and Mossad, which has trained the Community Security Trust’s staff and volunteers.

In its attacks on Raed Salah, who should the CST quote in paragraph 28-30 of its submission to the First Tier Immigration Tribunal?  A racist Israeli professor who makes the British National Party seem mild by comparison.

‘When the Muslim population gets to a critical mass you have problems. That is a general rule, so if it applies everywhere it applies in Australia." and ‘Australia should cap Muslim immigration or risk being swamped by Indonesians.’

‘Muslim immigrants had a reputation for manipulating the values of Western countries, taking advantage of their hospitality and tolerance.’ ‘"French people say they are strangers in their own country. This is a point of no return.’

The First Tier Tribunal criticised the CST for having

'failed to distinguish between anti-Semitism and criticism of the actions of the Israeli State and therefore gives an unbalanced perspective… '

The CST declares that its mission is to

Promote good relations between British Jews and the rest of British society by working towards the elimination of racism, and antisemitism in particular.

However its decision to invite Home Secretary Suella Braverman, who takes pride in her racist vitriol against migrants and refugees, describing them as an ‘invasion’, as the guest speaker at its 2023 Annual Dinner, gives the lie to its claim to have anything to do with opposing racism. When it talks of 'antisemitism' what it really means is opposition to Zionism and Apartheid.

The CST claims that it is a continuation of the Jewish 43 and 62 Groups which physically confronted and fought a resurgent neo-Nazi and fascist movement after the war and in the 1960s. However the evidence suggests otherwise.

Paul Besser, who regularly demonstrates with former Zionist Federation Vice-Chair Jonathan Hoffman

The CST has never physically opposed fascist or neo-Nazi groups in Britain. In June 2010 it stood by whilst a Zionist demonstration outside the Israeli Embassy was joined by members of the English Defence League. It has never raised any objection to the participation in Zionist demonstrations of Zionist activists  like Jonathan Hoffman, who have worked openly with members of fascist/neo-Nazi groups like Paul Besser of Britain First.

Arrest of Morris Beckman of 43 Group

The CST is a Zionist group which works with the Police whereas the 43 and 62 groups were regularly attacked by the police. In his pamphlet on the 62 Group Steve Silver described how

It was not the two organised attempts by the police to break the spirit of the 62 Group in 1963 and again in 1969 that caused the Group’s decline. In 1963 the police used brutal violence and fit-ups; in 1969 it was a directive issued by a Deputy Commissioner to all Borough Commanders instructing them to arrest on sight a list of around 15 people. (The Fighting Sixties, p.15)

The CST doesn’t simply work hand in glove with the Board of Deputies, it came out of them and other Jewish Establishment groups. Dave Rich, the CST’s Head of Policy explained that

The Association of Jewish Ex-Servicemen, the Board of Deputies of British Jews, JACOB and others all did their bit until the disparate strands of Jewish communal defence eventually evolved into today’s CST.

Two nazi teenagers salute National Socialist Movement leaders, Colin Jordan and John Tyndall, in Trafalgar Square July 1962.

In the 1930s the Board refused to even publicly oppose fascism, stating that ‘We cannot declare ourselves against Fascism, per se’. DanielSonabend described in his book We Fight Fascists [pp. 7-8] how ‘there was deep resentment among the East End Jewish community towards the Board’ because of its inaction when it came to fighting the fascists.

Contrast this with its eagerness to defend the Israeli state. The height of its hypocrisy was when the BOD organisedits first demonstration against ‘anti-Semitism’ in March 2018, against Jeremy Corbyn. When it came to overtly fascist and anti-Semitic groups the Board has always preferred to do nothing.

Morris Beckman, the founder of the 43 Group, described how ‘Outraged (Jewish) ex-servicemen engaged in furious dialogue’ with the BOD’s Jewish Defence Committee about the renewed activity of Sir Oswald Moseley’s fascists after the war only to be told that ‘it was no time to make waves’. [The 43 Group, pp.15-16, 1993, Centerprise Publications].

Silver described how

The activities of the 62 Group resurrected the old defence debate about the best way to fight antisemitism, with the Board of Deputies’ Jewish Defence Committee publicly frowning on the gung-ho activities of the Jewish anti-fascists. (p.12)

Braverman Explaining That Past Massacres of Refugees in Rwanda Won’t Deter Her From Sending More to the Country

Far from being an anti-racist body the CST is funded by a Tory government whose racist vitriol against refugees as a means of dividing its opponents is second to none. Braverman took the opportunity of the CST’s annual dinner to announcea ‘task force to tackle antisemitism’.

Home Office funding for the CST will also rise by £1m to £15m to provide guards for Jewish synagogues and schools. Given the lack of any threat to either, compared to the situation in the 1950s and 60s, one can only conclude that this money is intended to create fear of a threat that isn’t actually there.

Contrast this with the non-stop attacks on mosques and other Islamic groups in Britain. According to Al Jazeera,

About 42 percent of surveyed mosques or Islamic bodies in the UK have come under attack in the last three years, a new report says.’  So why you might ask is there such concern over a non-existent threat to synagogues compared to the very real threat to mosques which don’t receive government funding for  the purposes of security.

Braverman told the CST’s Annual Dinner that

“Antisemitism is one of the great evils in the world. It is vital that all people, but especially political leaders, challenge antisemitism whenever and wherever they encounter it.’

Why should a Home Secretary who described the migration of refugees across the Channel as an ‘invasion’ and who boasts that her ‘dream’ is to deport refugees to Rwanda, be so concerned about anti-Semitism? The answer is that she’s not concerned about genuine anti-Semitism but is about opposition to Zionism and the Israeli state which is characterised as anti-Semitism.

Hence why Braverman pledged to

“reaffirm the government’s support for the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, and encourage its further adoption.

 Since the IHRA is used solely to target support for the Palestinians and opposition to Israeli Apartheid, whilst being useless in the fight against neo-Nazism, we can see how and why Braverman are so keen to conflate anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism.

For Cruella and the CST Fighting 'Antisemitism' and Supporting Racism Against Asylum Seekers Go Hand in Hand

This scaremongering about anti-Semitism and creating an atmosphere of fear amongst British Jews is merely another demonstration of the cynical hypocrisy of the present government.  Not forgetting of course that Starmer was also a guest at the CST dinner. In total the CST has received £122 million from the Home Office since 2015. 

When was the last time you heard Braverman talking about Islamaphobia? She and her ilk in the Conservative Party deny that such a thing even exists yet she had no compunction in criticising the Police for treating anti-Semitism as ‘racism lite’. Apparently

Abusive behaviour towards Jews tended to be “accepted” and “normalised”, she said. By contrast, such bullying would have “triggered a very firm response from law enforcement” if it was directed at other minorities.

Police must understand that Jews do count, says Braverman

On 8 December 2021 the Islamic Human Rights Commission wrote a letter to the Charity Commission calling for an investigation into the Community Security Trust because

it is clear that the CST’s raison d’etre is actually to protect the state of Israel from criticism and censure.

This is evidenced from the fact that the organisation frequently attacks and challenges those who organise or take part in campaigning for the rights of the Palestinians, invariably using the tactics of character assassination, false accusations, Islamophobia and racism.

Gerald Ronson, Chair of the CST addresses the dinner guests - in May 1990 he was gaoled for a year for theft, conspiracy and false accounting

Tony Lerman, the founder of the Institute of Jewish Policy Research, who was witchhunted out of the job of Director, documented in his article Antisemitism Redefined [Haymarket Book, Jewish Voice for Peace, 2017], how in the 1990’s the Israeli state moved to take over the monitoring of statistics on anti-Semitism:

I had close personal experience of the role the Mossad played in establishing Israeli hegemony over the monitoring and combating of antisemitism. While I was director of the Institute of Jewish Affairs (IJA) and its successor, the 'Institute for Jewish Policy Research’ I founded and was principal editor of the annual Antisemitism World Report, the first objective, independent , country-by-country survey of anti semitism worldwide. The London Mossad representative dealing with antisemitism made it clear to me that they were very unhappy about our independent operation and then tried to pressure us into either ceasing publication or merging our report with one that the then new Project for the Study of Antisemitism at Tel Aviv University, headed by Professor Dina Porat and part-financed by the Mossad, was beginning to produce. [On Anti-Semitism,p.12].

What you might ask is Mossad, Israel’s equivalent of MI6 or the CIA, doing being in charge of monitoring statistics about anti-Semitism? What relationship does an intelligence service have to questions of racism unless it is engaged in Black Ops?

Colin Jordan at the BNP rally in May 1960 in Trafalgar Square

The only logical explanation for why Mossad, wanted to take over something that clearly has nothing to do with them is because the inexorable ‘rise of anti-Semitism’ has become a Zionist theme whose counterpart is that only the ‘Jewish State’ is safe for Jews. 

‘Anti-Semitism’ has become the Zionists’ principal weapon in the fight against anti-Zionism, BDS and support for the Palestinians. Indeed the logic of the current ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign is that Jews should do what the anti-Semites want – which is to leave the countries they live in.

It is this that explains the appearance from nowhere of groups like the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism. The CAA arose in the middle of Operation Protective Edge, Israel’s genocidal attack on the Gaza Strip.

The CST has been given the responsibility of compiling statistics of anti-Semitism in Britain. They have been careful not to overplay their hand. That is why they reject many complaints of anti-Semitism. This has ironically meant rejecting in practice the IHRA definition because this would make it too obvious that they are engaging in statistical fraud. This is despite their support for the IHRA politically.

They have done this because they know that once their statistics match the IHRA definition, i.e. that any manifestation of anti-Zionism equals anti-Semitism, their statistics would lose all credibility.

Nonetheless the CST has massaged the figures, highlighting social media anti-Semitism (which could be infinite since a single individual can post thousands of ‘anti-Semitic incidents) as well as providing an elastic and fuzzy definition of what constitutes anti-Semitism.

The CST’s figures show an inexorable statistical increase, year on year, in anti-Semitic incidents, thus feeding into the myth of increasing anti-Semitism. They depend on self-reporting and thus the perception of the ‘victim’. There is no way of judging whether the reports are true or false since the vast majority never result in prosecution or conviction. There has also been a continual and marked divergence between their statistics and those of the Police.

For further reading see

Attempts by Mossad front groups to have police target Jewish and other activists

Labour hands more power to Israel’s lobby

EI exclusive: UK charity with Mossad links secretly denounced anti-Zionist Jews to government

Manipulating Antisemitism Statistics - the CST and CAA

The Community Security Trust - Policeman of the Jewish Community

Proof that the Community Security Trust's statistics of 'anti-Semitism' are subject to Political Manipulation

CST Gets Too Big for its Boots as Jewish Critics Multiply

Zionist Community Security Trust in Dilemma over Islamaphobic Conference

The Community Security Trust cites the racist Hebrew University Professor Raphael Israeli to denounce the ‘anti-Semitism’ of Sheikh Raed Salah.

Community Security Trust Supplies False Information to Deport Sheikh Raed Salah

Israeli Professor Moshe Machover is the target of a Renewed Attempt at Expulsion by the Zionist Community Security Trust

CST Thugs Violently Eject 2 Jewish People from Zionist ‘Environmental‘Meeting

How the Zionist Community Security Trust and Theresa May Colluded at the Behest of Racists to Deport Raed Salah & Prevent Free Speech

British Judges Keep Juries in the Dark About Their Power to Decide Cases According to their Conscience and the Reasons for Direct Action

Judge Chambers, the ‘non-political’ reactionary voice of the Wolverhampton Judiciary, was at his finest this week. At one point he reprimanded Owen Greenhill, a barrister for one of the Defendants, for referring to Elbit’s UAV Drone Factory as a Death Factory. 

Prosecuting counsel, Deborah Gould, was most upset at this description. Silly man this Greenhill.  Doesn’t he know that Elbit’s Shenstone factory makes candy and cuddly toys for kids before their drones bombard children in Gaza, Kashmir and Burma? 

All the Common Law defences of Necessity, Justification, Human Rights and Proportionality were also ruled out. The idea that you can prevent a bigger crime, for example someone who breaks down a door to rescue someone inside a burning building, by committing a smaller crime, is not allowed. The artificial and dishonest device that British judges have employed to sustain this pretence is interesting.

The problem for the judges is that you can’t identify which engine that Shenstone manufactures goes into which drone. And then you have the problem of identifying which drone is killing which child. You see our judges want to be absolutely certain they can pinpoint the right drone and as this is not possible to ascertain, the defence cannot be employed.

The connection between the Shenstone factory and the dead child in Gaza/Kashmir/Myanamar is too ‘remote’. That is why Debbie Gould, the West Midland’s Prosecutor asked me on the witness stand why I hadn’t petitioned and written to Elbit asking them what they were producing that day on March 9 2021 when we were arrested. As if it mattered which day they manufactured their lethal output.

The irony is that a month ago 21 people were convicted at Wolverhampton Crown Court of child abuse. Yet at the same time the Crown was defending Elbit, a serial child abuse offender guilty of murdering hundreds of children.

Given that Elbit do their best to conceal the identity of many of their unsavoury customers, is it likely that they are going to hand over their production schedules and the destination of their wares to protestors?  We only know they supply the Myanamar military, which even the British government has imposed an embargo on, because they showed off their nice new gun boats to all and sundry. Is it likely that they are going to come clean to demonstrators?  Gould thinks so!

Sarah Everard - Murdered by the Metropolitan Police

March 9 was also, coincidentally, the date that PC Wayne Couzens was charged in relation to the murder of Sarah Everard. The attitude of the Police to violence against women, of which Couzens was only a symptom (he was repeatedly protected when accused of exposing himself and was even nicknamed by colleagues as ‘the rapist) is reflected in the eagerness of the Police to protect these factories of death.

Employing the ‘logic’ of Gould and the Court of Appeal one might assume that if protestors had occupied the German firm of IG Farben, which produced Zyklon B, the gas used to poison 3 million Jews and Gypsies in Auschwitz and other extermination camps, they would have been told by the British Judiciary that it was not enough that Zyklon B was used to murder hundreds of thousands of people, they must be able to identify which consignment of the gas had killed which Jews.

Tory Lord Chief Justice, Ian Burnett, friend of Alan Duncan who described Julian Assange as a 'miserable worm'-  Burnett didn't see fit to recuse himself

When it comes to hair splitting and legal gymnastics no one can outdo British judges. Soon to be retired Lord Chief Justice Ian Burnett is a skilled practitioner when it comes to excusing mass murder. It was he who ordered the deportation of Julian Assange for the ‘crime’ of exposing US war crimes.

British judges have unparalleled experience in turning a blind eye to the crimes of the British Empire. ‘Remoteness’ is one of these devices. If the murder of Black and Brown people was to be excused or ignored then that was because they were too ‘remote’ from the cause of action.

The Colston Statue

After the Establishment’s rage at the acquittal by a Bristol jury of those who toppled the Colston statue, Cruella Braverman referred the decision to the Attorney General and then to the Court of Appeal. Not surprisingly the Appeal Court ruled that where there is a ‘violent’ protest then Articles 9-11 of the European Convention (freedom of conscience, opinion and assembly) are not engaged.

You have to admire the brass neck of Burnett and these apologists for murder in whigs. Any normal person, such as the Bristol jury, would have no problem in seeing that the real violence was done by those like Colston who were engaged in the slave trade. Yet to Tory supporter Burnett the only violence done was to a murderer’s statue. That Black people in Bristol were forced to look at a statue to a slave trader day in day out was of no account. After all Black people are not well heeled White people living in the suburbs.

This is because ‘violence’ is narrowly defined by the state to mean violence against property not people and because property is and always had been the main concern of the law. As Lord Denning explained in Southwark LBC v Williams in 1971

"... if hunger were once allowed to be an excuse for stealing, it would open a door through which all kinds of lawlessness and disorder would pass... if homelessness were once admitted as a defence to trespass, no one's house could be safe. Necessity would open a door which no man could shut."

Thus the relatively liberal decision of the Supreme Court in Zieglerwhich protected peaceful obstruction by asking whether the disruption caused was proportional to the defendant’s rights under Articles 10 and 11 of the ECHR, has been gutted by Burnett and his Tory fellows.

Let us imagine if someone were to place a statue of Hitler in Golders Green, where there are large numbers of Jews. According to Burnett toppling  or destroying the statue would be a criminal offence. Cruella Braverman only a few weeks ago attended the Community Security Trust’s Annual Dinner where she said there was

‘a culture in the police of treating antisemitism as “racism lite” was to blame for the failure to convict thugs who bully Jews.’

If a statue of Hitler went up in Golders Green the person responsible would be prosecuted under the Public Order Act and probably incitement to commit racial hatred because Jews are the pampered pets and the alibi for British foreign policy.

But when it comes to Black people, statues such as that of Colston and Rhodes are protected in the name of ‘history’ as if Hitler too isn’t a historical figure. The only conclusion one can draw from the Court of Appeal’s decision is that racism against Black people is acceptable.

It is through decisions like this that people can understand the racist nature of the British judicial system and the British judiciary.

Anti-Semitism is prioritised as a ‘hate crime’ precisely because it is no longer a form of state racism. If anti-Semitism were to be become respectable, as it was in the 30s, then a statue of Hitler in a Jewish area would also be acceptable.

Palestine Action Trial, Wolverhampton

The fifth week of the Palestine Action trial in Wolverhampton has now ended. Judge Chambers excelled himself during legal arguments the Friday before last when he misquotedLord Hoffman, formerly of the Supreme Court, to the effect that ‘taking the law into one’s own hands’ can only lead to anarchy. This was included in directions issued to the jury. Hoffman had stated that

A tight control of the use of force is necessary to prevent society from sliding into anarchy,…

 Ordinary citizens who apprehend breaches of the law, whether affecting themselves, third parties or the community as a whole, are normally expected to call in the police and not to take the law into their own hands.

What this demonstrates is the political and historical illiteracy of the judiciary and their fear of the mob. What was Magna Carta but a rebellion of the Barons? How was Parliamentary Supremacy secured other than by Cromwell’s sacking of the Long Parliament in 1648? Trade Unionism was only established by the refusal to obey the Unlawful Oaths Act of 1797 which prevented the forming of genuine trade unions. The result of such defiance being the transportation to Australia of the Tolpuddle Martyrs.

What was Chartism and the People’s Charter of May 1838 but a direct action movement aimed at obtaining universal manhood suffrage. And we know that the Suffragettes regularly took the law into their own hands as a means of fighting for the right of women to vote.

The Chief Prosecutor of Emmeline Pankhurst in 1912 could almost have been Deborah Gould in drag. In a BBC reconstruction the Prosecutor told the jury that:

Suffrage is not the issue, it is the criminal behaviour of the suffragettes and their incitement to partake in militant activity at which 54 windows were broken

Today the suffragettes have statues in Parliament Square and plaques in the House of Commons yet at the time they were called vandals, terrorists and depicted as not really women. And the last great movement of direct action was the Poll Tax when millions of Britain’s defied the law that Thatcher had passed and refused to pay the tax until it was repealed.

In fact all democratic rights owe their origin to the fact that people were prepared to take the law into their own hands. Far from ushering in anarchy they led to the limited democratic rights which today are being rolled back.

It was in recognition of this fact and the refusal of juries to convict in cases where the law was either unjust or being used in an oppressive way that Baroness Heather Hallett, a member of the Court of Appeal from 2005-2019 gave the 2017 Blackstone Lecture on the Role of the Jury in which she said:

A jury may refuse to convict in spite of the law and the evidence because it concludes that the law is an unjust law. The jury passes its verdict on the law. Secondly, it ensures that the prosecution and the judge are on trial.

These trials [Ponting and Leonard Arthur] all took place in the full glare of publicity. Here we see a specific application of the principle of open justice: the public can attend court and scrutinise what is going on. They can see the jury make its protest as to what they see as an unjust lawor unjust application of the law. There is a check against arbitrary or oppressive conduct by the court…. We see as Professor [Michael] Zander has properly pointed out the jury can set aside ‘unjust laws, oppressive prosecutions and harsh sentences.’

This is on the official site of the British Judiciary but nonetheless it is forbidden to mention these issues to a jury.

We have recently had the arrest of retired social worker, Trudy Warner, for holding a placard at the jury entrance to the Inner London Crown Court on which was written ‘Jurors: You have an absolute right to acquit a defendant according to your conscience.’ Warner was referring to the ancient case of Bushell’s, which established the right of a jury to defy a judge. The judgment in Bushell’s is even on a plaque at the Old Bailey. It reads:

‘Near this site WILLIAM PENN and WILLIAM MEAD were tried in 1670 for preaching to an unlawful assembly in Grace Church Street This Tablet Commemorates The courage and endurance of the Jury Thos Vere Edward Bushell and 10 others who refused to give a verdict against them although locked up without food for two nights and were fined for their final Verdict of Not Guilty The case of these Jurymen was reviewed on a Writ of Habeus Corpus and Chief Justice Vaughan delivered the opinion of the Court which established the Right of Juries to give their Verdict according to their Convictions

Bushell’s jury was imprisoned for 2 days and night without food or water for refusing to convict William Penn and William Mead of unlawful assembly. It led to the independence of the jury and their freedom from coercion from the Judge Chambers of their day.

According to Judge Chambers, by breaking the law and sitting in a seat meant for a White person, Rosa Parks was ushering in anarchy

According to Hoffman and Chambers, the breaking of the law by Rosa Parks, who refused to give up her seat on a bus to a White man, was not justified because it could have set America on the road to anarchy. Similarly the refusal by Black people to obey the pass laws in South Africa was not justified. In condemning direct action our judges merely demonstrate that they are historically illiterate, reactionary buffoons.

In fact, far from leading to anarchy, it is when people take the law into their own hands that they can rid themselves of unjust, racist and sexist laws which perpetuate the privileges of the tiny minority which rule this country and from where British judges originate. British judges are the most socially exclusive of professions, with 65% attending public school and 75% graduating from Oxbridge colleges.

No democratic freedoms have ever been won except by people taking the law into their own hands in the face of determined opposition by the Judiciary. Judges have always been the last bastion of reaction.

On May 9 our trial resumes with Judge Chambers summing up of the case, which will I am sure mention none of these things as he emphasises that his take on the law is the authorised version.

According to Judge Chambers, Sophie Scholl - executed by the Nazis for being part of the White Rose group - was 'ushering in anarchy'by defying the law

A Case of Judges Being Part of the Prosecution

I was initially accused by Deborah Gould of lying because, when responding to a police question as to where I was driving the minibus, I said that I was going for a drive! When I challenged Gould and argued that I was indeed going for a drive she backed down and agreed that my response was misleading rather than an untruth.

Judge Chambers was having none of it. Despite both myself, I was representing myself at the time, and the Prosecution agreeing that I wasn’t lying, Chambers insisted on issuing a Lucas Direction on lies, which although mitigating its seriousness nonetheless maintained that I had lied. When you have a judge who is more prosecution minded than the Prosecutor then the idea that this is a fair trial, under Article 6 of the European Convention of Human Rights becomes an absurdity.

In the Clive Ponting case, cited by Hallett, despite being instructed by Judge Sir Anthony McGowan to convict Ponting, the jury acquitted him. Ponting had revealed that Thatcher was lying to Parliament when she said that the General Belgrano had been sailing towards the Falklands Islands when it was torpedoed whereas the opposite was the case. McGowan told the jury that the public interest defence in the case did not apply because ‘The public interest is what the government says it is’.

Judge Silas Reid has abolished the right of defendants to defend themselves gaoling 3 Insulate Britain protesters for explaining why they took direct action

Last week I sacked my barrister and decided to take the address to the jury. Unfortunately after that I was put under pressure to change my mind and in the end I reinstructed Daniella Manson. Daniella mounted a factual rather than a political defence.

Amy Pritchard and Giovanna Lewis were jailed for 7 weeks for contempt of court after they defied an order not to refer to climate change as their motivation for blocking traffic in the City of London.

As the British state cracks down on Palestine Action and various environmental action groups – Just Stop Oil, Climate Action, Insulate Britain etc. are going to have to come together to rebut the attack on direct action by the state and its judicial mouthpieces. The role of defence lawyers will inevitably be less important as virtually all the common law defences have been withdrawn.

Our task will be to inform juries of their rights because of one thing we can be certain, Britain’s judges will keep them in the dark.

Keeping Juries in the Dark

The key to securing compliant juries who are willing to convict at the suggestion of judges lies in keeping them in ignorance. Until the present trial I was unaware of how this was managed or rather manipulated.

A lot of time in trials, certainly in our trial, is taken up with arguments about the law. Whenever this happens the jury is sent out so it is totally oblivious to the real arguments in a trial. When I was initially denied the right to sit in the well of the court, when I decided to sack   my barrister, I made my application to the judge to reverse his position. He immediately sent out the jury but I continued with my application in their presence.

Immediately the jury had gone Chambers threatened that I pulled the same ‘stunt’ again I would be confined to the cells. This is how jury trials are being manipulated. I can see no reason whatsoever for juries to be present during legal argumentation so that they can see whether or not the judge is manipulating the law in one particular direction.

Tony Greenstein

 Lightfoot was a Modern Day Troubadour Who Held Up a Mirror to the World Around Him

36.                        The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald

There was no one, bar Dylan, who had such a prodigious output and consistently high quality of songs as Lightfoot for such a concentrated period of time. Between 1966 and 1982 Lightfoot recorded 14 albums of the highest quality, yet in the 40 years since he recorded only 6 albums, the quality of which paled in comparison with his earlier output.

It is in those first 16 years that Lightfoot established his reputation with songs such as If I Could Read Your Mind and the Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.

First COVID took John Prine and now ill health and old age have taken the life of Gordon Lightfoot 84, one of the greatest singer songwriters there has ever been.

There were many minor talents who wrote and sang songs in the 60s and 70s,  the heyday of popular music – Donovan, Don McLean, Cat Stevens, Al Stewart – but there were very few who could put out album after album with such a consistently high quality as Gordon Lightfoot, Canada’s national folk singer.

There are of course others like Paul Simon, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young and Kris Kristofferson but no one so accurately reflected the society around them and Canada in particular as did Lightfoot. Lightfoot’s most famous song was also his first hit in Britain If You Could Read My Mind, a wistful song reflecting on the breakdown of his marriage to Brita Ingegerd Olaisson. The lines

I don't know where we went wrong
But the feeling's gone
And I just can't get it back

Put into words the experience of a relationship that went wrong for reasons which many of us find difficult to explain or even understand. Yet the song also contained a barbed dig at his wife:

And if you read between the lines
You'll know that I'm just trying to understand
The feelings that you lack

His daughter reputedly got Lightfoot to change the last line to ‘The feelings that we lack’ but by then the song had been issued.

The obituaries will concentrate on his most famous songs such as the catchy pop hit Sundown, which topped the US charts and the Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgeraldabout an iron-ore ship carrying 29,000 tons and more, which sank on November 10 1975 in Lake Superior after encountering a fierce storm. It went down with all 29 hands. Lightfoot changed the wording to reflect the fact that it wasn’t error by the crew but the overwhelming of the ship by nature that had led to the catastrophe.

Dylan said that his fellow singer died “without ever having made a bad song”, and every time he listened to one of them, he “wished it would last forever”. I disagree. Every singer-song writer has made a bad song and Gordon Lightfoot was no exception.  But what was remarkable about him was how many good songs he wrote.

Dylan also said that “I can’t think of any Gordon Lightfoot song I don’t like. Every time I hear a song of his, it’s like I wish it would last forever.” Opinion widely varies on his top 10 songs so I have taken the Americana  top 10 Lightfoot songs and compared it to Billboard’s 10 Best Songs before choosing my own top 10!

Americana                      Billboard                      Tony Greenstein

Top 10                             Top 10                          Top 10

1        Oh So Sweet                               Sundown                         A Long Way Back Home

2   If You Could Read My Mind  The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald  10 Degrees & Getting  Colder

3        Beautiful                                If You Could Read My Mind    If You Could Read My                Mind

4        Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald  The Circle is Small         Christian Island

5        Ode to Big Blue           Carefree Highway       It’s Worth Believing

6        10 Degrees & Getting  Colder    Anything for Love                 Sit Down Young Stranger

7        Old Dan’s Records          Rainy Day People                   The Way I Feel

8        Minstrel of the Dawn                 Ribbon of Darkness                Early Morning Rain

9        Summer Side of Life             Talking in Your Sleep             That Same Old Obsession

10      Early Morning Rain          Dream Street Rose        Did She Mention My Name/Walls Wreck of the Edmund  Fitzgerald

As you can see there is very little agreement! It is a luck dip as to which song one prefers. Eight of the songs I have chosen don’t figure in either Billboard or Americana’s choices and that is because there is such a wide range to choose from.

I have therefore chosen a wider 40 songs below that are my favourites. You will notice that my last song Triangle is from the last great Lightfoot album, Shadows in 1982. I am afraid that like Dylan and Paul Simon, Gordon Lightfoot lost the genius of his younger years as he grew old. However that does not detract from the high quality of his earlier songs. The decision of Americana to name Oh So Sweet from the 2020 album Solo as Lightfoot’s No. 1 is absurd. It is an attempt to pretend that Lightfoot’s output hadn’t deteriorated in quality when it clearly had. The song wouldn’t make the top 100, let alone number 1.

I hope you enjoy my choice. I would welcome your comments on my selection!

Tony Greenstein

List of  Gordon Lightfoot Songs and Links

1.      Early Morning Rain

2.     For Lovin' Me

3.     I’m Not Saying

4.      Steel Rail Blues

5.     Ribbon of Darkness

6.     The Way I Feel

7.     Walls

8.     Home from the Forest

9.      Canadian Railroad Trilogy

10.                        Did She Mention My Name?

11.                        Long Way Back Home

12.                        Poor Little Allison

13.                        Sit Down Young Stranger

14.                        If You Could Read My Mind

15.                        The Pony Man

16.                        10 Degrees and Getting Colder

17.                        Go My Way

18.                        Summer Side of Life

19.                        Cotton Jenny

20.                        Talking in Your Sleep

21.                        Don Quixote

22.                        Christian Island

23.                        Alberta Bound

24.                        Ordinary Man

25.                        On Susan's Floor

26.                        Farewell to Annabel

27.                        That Same Old Obsession

28.                        Old Dan's Records

29.  It’s Worth Believing

30.  High and Dry

31.                        The Watchman's Gone

32.  Sundown

33.                        Bells of the Evening

34.                        Rainbow Trout

35.                        Race Among the Ruins

37.                        Summertime Dream

38.                        Dream Street Rose

39.  The Circle is Small

40.                        Triangle

Police Arrest Protesters for Exercising their Democratic Right to Protest Against Monarchy

Democracy British Style

It was less than two months ago that the Metropolitan Police were described as ‘institutionally racist, misogynistic and homophobic’. Baroness Louise Casey said that the Black community were ‘over-policed and under-protected.’

Murdered by the Met

It was little more than two years ago that Sarah Everard was murdered by a Police officer, Wayne Couzens, who had been systematically protected by fellow officers when reports of  him exposing himself were made. The last incident was six days before he went on to kidnap and murder Sarah, when Police were given his car registration number and his bank card details by a fast food restaurant.

If Couzens had been arrested at the time Sarah Everard would still be alive. As it is Couzens was given the nickname‘the rapist’ – a ‘joke’ that fellow officers in the Nuclear Constabulary found highly amusing.

Casey Response to Met Reaction to Report

Couzens was not of course the only incident. 18 months ago two police officers, Deniz Jaffer and Jamie Lewis, were gaoled for sharing  pictures of two dead Black women, nicknamed ‘dead birds’ in two WhatsApp groups, one of which had 41 fellow officers as participants.

Anti-monarchy arrests during UK coronation

Met Commissioner Cressida Dick resigned after a series of scandals. An independent police watchdog revealed shocking evidence Feb. 1 that officers in Charing Cross station had engaged in conduct involving misogyny, homophobia, bullying and sexual harassment between 2016 and 2018.

The report claimed that officers had engaged in sexual activity while on duty, joked about hitting and raping women, and mocked the deaths of black babies and the Holocaust. In published Whatsapp messages, one male officer told to a female officer: “I would happily rape you…if I was single I would happily chloroform you.” Two of the officers investigated were promoted, while nine were left to serve in the Met.

Cressida Dick’s replacement, Sir Mark Rowley shows no inclination to improve matters, having rejected Louise Casey’s finding of institutionalised racism. The National Black Police Association offered to meet him to highlight areas of concern and collaborate on how to change the systemic racism within the force, but was snubbed. 

The Inquiry chaired by Nuala O’Loan, the former police ombudsman in Northern Ireland into the murder of Daniel Morgan, a private eye, found that the Police investigation was riddled with corruption.

The report accused Dick of 'placing hurdles' in their path by refusing to give them access to a vital police database. The HOLMES system which is used by UK police forces to investigate complicated crimes such as serial murders and high-value frauds.

Access to the database was 'essential' because many of the documents were only available in online form, and her refusal caused 'very significant delays', the report stated.

'The Metropolitan Police's lack of candour manifested itself in the hurdles placed in the path of the Panel, such as (then Assistant Commissioner) Cressida Dick's initial refusal to recognise the necessity for the Panel to have access to the HOLMES system,'

Who then was better placed to be given additional powers under the new Public Order Act than the Metropolitan Police? Indeed such was Cruella Braverman’s trust in the Met Police’s ability to abuse whatever powers they were handed that the implementation of the Act was fast tracked just one day after receiving royal assent. Normally it takes months to implement legislation and sometimes parts of that legislation are never implemented.

The POA means that anyone who blocks roads, airports and railways could be jailed for up to 12 months — while anyone who glues themself down could face up to six months behind bars or an unlimited fine.

Police will also be able to stop and search protesters for items such as padlocks, superglue and digging tools if they suspect they are intending to be used at a protest. People caught with these items, with the intention of using them to cause disruption, will also face criminal charges.

In short the POA is an ideal piece of legislation  to hasten the arrival of a Police state. It is the type of legislation which the press would fall over themselves to criticise if Putin or China were to introduce it.

Only one thing will render this Act null and void and that will be a refusal to comply with its provisions by direct action protesters. This is a government that detests any form of direct action whilst being immersed  in serious corruption and law breaking – all of which have gone without investigation by the Met.

According to Transparency International 2021 was the year corruption took centre stage

From the British Government’s COVID-19 response to ministers’ and MPs’ conflicts of interest; from the businesses caught up in bribery scandals to the devastating effect of corruption in defence forces around the world which triggered or aggravated conflicts or led to the total collapse of government.

Its effect was of course felt on the public

Whether that was UK hospitals unable to access high quality or reasonably priced personal protective equipment (PPE) for their staff and patients, planning decisions seemingly based on who you know rather than the public interest, or millions fleeing their homes and countries when the safest place to be should have been at home.

It is therefore no surprise that the Metropolitan Police should pull out all the stops to prevent protests at the Coronation.  It is a case of one undemocratic institution, the Met, giving its full support to another undemocratic institution, the Monarchy.

However the Met Police commanders are nothing if not stupid. They have enabled millions of people to see for themselves the hostility to the democratic right to protest of the Police. The publicity garnered by the protesters because of the decision by the Police to arrest its organisers was invaluable. Even the ever loyal BBC was forced to carry news reports of the heavy handed response of the Met. In that sense and in that sense only, we should be grateful to Mark Rowley.

However we have to ask why the government gave a bunch of racists, rapists, misogynists and corrupt bigots even more powers than they already had given their penchant to abuse their existing powers. There was no popular mandate for the new Public Order Act and it says everything about Starmer’s Labour Party that it failed to make any protest about the new powers still less pledge to repeal it.

Tony Greenstein