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

UPDATE

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. After that I was put under pressure to change my mind and in the end I  decided to reinstruct Daniella Manson who 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 if 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 not to be present during legal argumentation so that they can see whether or not the judge is manipulating the law in one particular political direction.

Tony Greenstein

It was during the fiercest repression of  the Greek people that Zionism formed an alliance with their fascist oppressors

The Greek Junta (1967-1974), whose coming to power was backed by the United States and Henry Kissinger, set the scene for the coming to power of similar pro-American military juntas, like that of Pinochet in Chile. Israel at the time was ruled by an Israeli Labour government coalition, not Likud, not Religious Zionism not the right-wing of the Zionist movement. It included Mapam, the so-called left Zionist party which in 1969 formally joined what became the Israeli Labour Alignment.

As Eitay Mack shows in The suppressed history of Israel’s support for the brutal Greek juntathe Israeli government’s had extremely friendly relations with the Junta and this

 ‘relationship blossomed during the dark days of the military junta that ruled Greece from 1967 and 1974 — a period marked by the brutal repression, imprisonment, torture, and murder of opponents of the regime, and a period that was deliberately omitted from the celebratory narrative Israel promotes.’

Despite knowledge of the torture, murder and disappearance of its political opponents, the Israeli government had a closer relationship with the Junta than with previous civilian governments. The Israeli government was concerned with winning the support of the Junta for Israel in the United Nations and international forums.

From October 1968 onwards close military and economic ties developed between Israel and the Greek Junta. Israel’s only concern was with the fact that their budding relationship might receive undue publicity.

The head of the office of the Director General of Israel’s Foreign Ministry, Hanan Bar-On, asked the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs to “try as much as possible to be modest in publicizing the progress of our practical relations with Greece, be they in commerce or in other areas.”  When members of the Junta’s air force delegation later visited Israel for negotiations on the renovation and maintenance of aircrafts, they arrived in civilian clothes.

Mack reports that the Junta was becoming ever more oppressive inside its borders. On November 17, 1973, in response to a student strike, an attack was made by the military on the National Technical University of Athens with tanks, killing dozens of civilians. Although news of the atrocity was reported all over the world, including in Israeli newspapers, ‘the State of Israel did not waver in its support of the junta or take a step back in its economic relationship.’

Israel’s response was to double down on its support for the Junta and its military and economic trading relationships. As Mack notes:

The story of Israel’s support for the military junta in Greece offers insight into the nature and logic of Israel’s relations with dozens of dictatorships around the world during the 1960s and ’70s. Israel was not interested in the fate of the opposition and left-wing activists who were tortured and murdered by the security forces, nor did it seem to care that its diplomacy, military, and economy were directly aiding in the oppression of millions. This history suggests that the State of Israel was not merely a passive player, following only the will of the great powers; it was and remains a powerful and autonomous promoter of its own interests first and foremost, willing to compromise on values like democracy and human rights in order to gain international support in its own oppression of the Palestinian people.

Nowhere was this more evident in Israel’s relationship with the Argentinian Military Junta (1976-83) which tortured and ‘disappeared’ up to 3,000 Argentine Jews. Once again Israel’s own interest in supplying the Junta with weapons and military training trumped any concern for Argentine’s Jews.  So much so that in the case of Argentina Israel actually denied visas to Jews who were deemed subversive of the Junta.  See Jews targeted in Argentina's dirty war

The suppressed history of Israel’s support for the brutal Greek junta

Declassified files reveal the extent of Israel’s ties with the regime known for torturing and murdering thousands of its citizens in the 1960s-70s.

By Eitay Mack April 28, 2023

The leaders of the 1967 Greek coup d'état: Brigadier Stylianos Pattakos, Colonel Georgios Papadopoulos and Colonel Nikolaos Makarezos. (Unknown/CC BY-SA 4.0)

Greece is one of the few countries in Europe today that openly embraces the Israeli army, holding joint military exercises with Israel and acting as an enthusiastic partner for Israeli arms and surveillance companies. Against the background of Israel’s current constitutional and political crisis, Greece has also reportedly been trying to attract more Israeli hi-tech companies, many of which build military or dual-use products, by offering them extremely generous incentives. 

This close relationship has also had a major impact on Greek domestic politics. Last year, for example, it was revealed that an Israeli former intelligence general named Tal Dilian, who runs a spyware company from an office in Athens, was involved in a political and legal scandal over the spyware’s use against Greek politicians and journalists; both the head of intelligence and the adviser to the prime minister of Greece were forced to resign.

How did this unique relationship form? Publicly, Israel and Greece trace their strong ties back only to 1990, when full diplomatic relations were established and an Israeli embassy opened in Athens. On May 21, 2015, the 25th anniversary of that milestone, the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs published a celebratory statement explaining its narrative of Greek-Israeli diplomacy, according to which the period between 1952 and 1990 saw only low-level relations between the two countries.

In recent years, the statement continues,

“a strategic partnership has developed between the two countries … based on democratic values and common interests shared by the two countries, which face challenges in the Eastern Mediterranean region … The two countries, Greece and Israel, are modern and democratic scions of ancient nations … The bilateral cooperation between the two countries promotes common values, progress and stability in the region. Both countries strive to continue to promote peaceful and good neighborly relations with peoples and nations in the region.”

This account of the military relations between Israel and Greece is, however, untrue. Telegrams in the files of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the Israel State Archives, which were opened to the public between 2019-2020, show that the two countries’ special relationship was in fact born much earlier than 1990, and had nothing to do with the “democratic values” of either Greece or Israel. The relationship blossomed during the dark days of the military junta that ruled Greece from 1967 and 1974 — a period marked by the brutal repression, imprisonment, torture, and murder of opponents of the regime, and a period that was deliberately omitted from the celebratory narrative Israel promotes. 

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu meets with Greek Foreign Minister Nikos Dendias at the prime minister’s office in Jerusalem, January 31, 2023. (Marc Israel Sellem/POOL)

Before the junta came to power, Greece’s relations with Israel were cold: it preferred to build diplomatic and economic ties with Arab countries, and even voted against the 1947 UN Partition Plan. Then, under the pretext of dealing with the “communist threat,” a group of generals staged a military coup in Greece in April 1967. Immediately upon seizing power, the military junta began a campaign to eliminate its real and imagined opponents, an effort embraced or tacitly supported by most Western European countries and the United States. 

Although there is disagreement regarding the exact number of victims of the junta, several thousand activists, students, artists, writers, actors, journalists, and even World War II veterans were arrested, subjected to severe torture, and murdered. Some were held in detention and torture camps for many years, with little food and water and no medical treatment. The torture practices included whipping the feet with sticks and plastic tubes, inserting a tube into the detainee’s body and pouring water inside, banging the head against the wall or the floor, the torturers jumping on the detainee’s stomach, pulling out nails, causing burns and extinguishing cigarettes on the body, electrocution, and even sexual torture.

Although most of the files and documents of Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs remain classified, the telegrams in the archives that have been made available to the public reveal that Israel was well aware of these human rights violations and nevertheless continued its close military and political ties with the military junta and even considered it more friendly to Israel than the civilian regimes that preceded it. And yet, cognizant of diplomatic optics, Israel sought to hide the nature of its relations with Greece — a practice that continues to this day.  

Establishing the relationship

A telegram sent by the head of the Israeli mission in Athens, Yehoshua Nissim Shai, only two months after the coup, demonstrates Israel’s awareness of the political repression in Greece at the time. In June 1967, Shai complained that it was not possible to carry out Israeli PR activities in Greece because the locals were afraid to engage in any political matters:

“It is … absolutely forbidden for an individual to engage in political matters in the severe military regime that prevails in this country … It is enough for a person to express any political opinion without the approval of the authorities for him to find himself arrested the next day.”

Despite Shai’s awareness of these political crimes and apparent personal discomfort with them, a series of communications and meetings that took place in the immediate aftermath of the junta’s coup are indicative of the quickly warming relations between the two countries. 

A military tank seen on the street during the coup that brought the Greek junta to power, 21 April 1967. (CC BY 2.0)

Less than one month after sending the telegram, Shai reported in another telegram on his meeting with the junta’s foreign minister and his effort to motivate the junta to take a more sympathetic and understanding stance toward Israel. The foreign minister responded that the junta, and even he personally, had a very positive attitude toward Israel and “is happy about the glorious victory of the IDF” in the 1967 war, which had ended just a few weeks earlier. According to the minister, because of the junta’s diplomatic interests in the Arab world, he could not take a public pro-Israel line as he wanted, but he promised to do everything possible to soften the position of the Greek representative at the UN toward Israel. 

In another telegram describing a subsequent meeting with General Nikolaos Makarezos, one of the leaders of the coup, Shai reported:

“The conversation revolved around his visit to Israel at the beginning of this year. The minister mentioned his contacts with Mossad personnel and spoke highly of Israel’s achievements.”

On Sept. 17, the relationship developed further. The deputy speaker of the Knesset at the time, Yitzhak Navon, visited Greece and met with Constantine Kollias, the prime minister appointed by the military junta. According to the summary of the meeting, Navon tried to convince Kollias to vote with Israel in international forums such as the United Nations. Kollias expressed appreciation and admiration for the State of Israel, saying that he saw Greece and Israel as fighting “against the common enemy — communism” and added that “your hopes [are] our hopes.” Kollias later explained that he was upset with “attacks … in the press by Jews on the Greek government and police.” 

Instead of calling out Kollias’s complaint for being tinged with the antisemitic trope that Jews control the media, Navon tacitly validated his concern and said,

“The government of Israel has no control over the press in the world, not even in Israel itself. But it is possible to ‘soften’ this attitude in certain cases. Greece’s support for Israel may bring it sympathy in the free world.”

A market for modern and cheap weapons

A year later, the nascent diplomatic ties between Greece and Israel crossed over into military cooperation. In October 1968, Yaakov Ben-Sher, Israel’s commercial attaché in Greece, wrote that he met with Makarezos to discuss a visit by a delegation of Greek military officers to Israeli Military Industries, the state-owned weapons manufacturer, at Israel’s invitation. It was agreed that the delegation would not arrive in uniform and that the visit would not be publicized. The next month, Ben-Sher wrote that among the goals of the visit were “establishing a maintenance plant for aircraft in Greece, Israel Aerospace Industries, [and] the presentation of weapons and military equipment produced in Israel.”

Workers at an IMI factory manufacturing gun barrels in 1955. (GPO)

The junta’s air force delegation visited Israel between Nov. 25 and Dec. 3, 1968. A report prepared by the Greek delegation after the trip outlined their activities in Israel: the group visited Israeli Military Industries’ factory; was interested in Uzi submachine guns, lighting bombs, and smoke grenades; and discussed the possibility of Israel maintaining the junta’s air force aircrafts, and even Israeli assistance in the establishment of an arms manufacturing industry in Greece. 

The Greek military delegation wrote that

“due to the constant development of the Greek army and due to the reduction of the U.S. military aid program, Greece is dependent on the international arms markets, since the supply of the necessary equipment and weapons would not be immediately resolved by establishing a national arms industry. From this perspective, Israel is a market for modern and cheap weapons and is a site for extensive commercial exchanges and close economic cooperation for the benefit of both sides.”

On Jan. 30, 1969, Ben-Sher reported that he met again with the junta’s minister of coordination, Makarezos, and talked with him about the purchase of Gabriel missiles, land army communication equipment from Tadiran (an Israeli company), and even Israeli assistance in building a nuclear reactor in Greece. According to a telegram from June 5, 1969, sent by the Israeli mission in Athens, the chairman of the Greek Atomic Energy Commission visited Israel during the previous month, but it is not clear from Israeli Foreign Ministry documents disclosed to the public if and how Israel aided Greece’s nuclear development.

‘The rulers of today will also be the rulers of tomorrow’

As diplomatic relations between the State of Israel and the junta tightened, so did their economic ties. On Feb. 8, 1969, a new commercial agreement was signed, revealing the inextricable link between each country’s military and economy. In a telling symbol of the increasingly close ties, Yaakov Cruz, the former deputy head of the Mossad, was appointed to the position of head of the Israeli mission in Athens in early 1968. 

During May 1969, preparations began for a visit to Greece by an Israeli economic delegation, including representatives of the arms manufacturers. For reasons of political sensitivity, Israel decided to downgrade the level of participants in, and the visibility of, the delegation. In response, Cruz sent a telegram to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in which he tried to reverse the decision to downgrade. “Our relations with the current government have improved a lot compared to our relations with its predecessors,” wrote Cruz. 

Protest against the junta by Greek political exiles in Germany, April 30, 1967. (Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-F0503-0204-005/CC-BY-SA 3.0)

“Many of the Greek exiles were our most prominent opponents when they were in power, led by Andreas Papandreou,” he continued. “All Western countries, without exception, make great efforts, and often without limits, to succeed in as many economic transactions as possible with Greece, including the supply of military equipment.” Cruz concluded his telegram by writing that, in his opinion, Israel should not be ashamed of its relations with the junta, since it was equally clear to all Western countries, and in particular to the USA, that the “the rulers of today will also be the rulers of tomorrow.” 

On May 16, 1969, Cruz reported on a meeting he and the CEO of Israel Aerospace Industries, Al Schwimmer, held with the head of the military junta in order to “present the possibilities and proposals of Israel Aerospace Industries.” Cruz wrote that he reviewed with the head of the junta the progress that had taken place since his last visit: “Three agreements have been signed between us, two military delegations have already visited, and a third will leave next week to Israel. A goodwill delegation to promote economic ties is about to come to Greece at the beginning of June, and the visit of the CEO of Israel Aerospace Industries is also part of the effort to develop these ties.” The head of the junta thanked Cruz for the explanations he received and emphasized the need for cooperation between the two countries.

Keeping it a secret

At the beginning of June 1969, another Israeli economic delegation visited Greece. In several telegrams around that time, Cruz wrote that the members of the Israeli delegation received important proposals such as “establishing a maintenance plant for aircrafts, overhauling aircrafts’ engines and selling weapons”; that the delegation met with the Greek military’s chief of staff, the junta’s officers, and other senior officials; and that the Israeli company Tadiran had signed a deal with the regime worth $2 million. 

In a telegram sent by economic attaché Ben-Sher on Oct. 30 of the same year, he wrote that

“the Greek army ordered communication equipment from Tadiran in the amount of $2,316,500. The order was finally approved by the Israeli prime minister and the minister of defense. The contract will be signed within a week to 10 days. The contract is to be executed in 1970.” 

The close relations with a military junta that had become infamous for its human rights violations raised some concerns, however. “In my conversations with various people, they expressed their regret at the publicizing of the strengthening of our ties with Greece during this particular period,” the deputy head of the Israeli delegation in Brussels wrote to the director of the European division at the foreign ministry in 1969. “Last night, two friends told me that they understand the need for realpolitik in the special situation that Israel is in, and especially in what concerns our economic relations, but they wondered if it is not possible to prevent, or at least to moderate, the publicizing of this matter.” 

Demonstration against the Greek military junta in front of the White House, April 21, 1974. (Reading/Simpson/CC BY-NC 2.0)

In a telegram sent by the head of the office of the director general of the Foreign Ministry, Hanan Bar-On, to the leadership of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs a short time later, he asked to “try as much as possible to be modest in publicizing the progress of our practical relations with Greece, be they in commerce or in other areas.” In accordance with this request, the members of the junta’s air force delegation, who visited Israel for negotiations on the renovation and maintenance of aircrafts, arrived in civilian clothes.

According to a report prepared by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1972, Israel sold parachutes worth approximately $250,000 to the Greek military, and they conducted negotiations regarding the sale of searchlights to the Air Force and the Armored Corps. But the junta wanted more. “The Greek army is interested in buying other military equipment in Israel, but we do not have political approval for this,” Dr. Yitzhak Azouri, an Israeli diplomat stationed in Greece, wrote in 1972, “for example, rockets.”

The following year, Israel went so far as to assist Greece in one of the most sensitive areas of Israeli international relations. On Jan. 17, 1973, Azouri reported that an agreement was signed with the junta to transport crude oil from the Persian Gulf through the Eilat-Ashkelon oil pipeline, and from there on to Piraeus, Greece. “A transport of about 250,000 tons (in the amount of about $1.5 million) has already been carried out,” Azouri reported. “It was agreed in principle to transport around 1.5 million tons, that is, in the amount of about $9 million.” 

Azouri was reprimanded for his reports on a sensitive issue like oil. “In your review of Israel-Greece economic relations, you mentioned the matter of the oil pipeline, which is considered a top secret issue,” he was told in a telegram sent by the economic department of the Foreign Ministry on April 6 of that year. “Please inform the recipients about the secret classification of the telegram.”

Undeterred by escalating brutality

As its relations with Israel grew increasingly warm, Greece was becoming ever more oppressive inside its borders. On Nov. 17, 1973, in response to a student strike, junta forces raided the premises of the National Technical University of Athens with tanks, killing dozens of civilians. Although news of the atrocity was reported all over the world, including in Israeli newspapers, the State of Israel did not waver in its support of the junta or take a step back in its economic relationship. 

Thousands march outside the Athens Polytechnic against the military junta, November 1973. (Unknown/CC BY-SA 4.0)

On March 12, 1974, Azouri reported that “according to the estimate, the payments of Greece for transporting crude oil from the Persian Gulf through the oil pipeline will amount to about $8 million.” According to the same report, two Greek military delegations visited Israel in 1973, with the junta’s air force signing an arms deal with Israel Aerospace Industries for hundreds of weapons and other military technology, including 466 units of Uzi submachine guns, worth well over $1 million, with other deals in the works worth millions more.

Azouri also noted that after a visit to Israel by the Greek Air Force delegation, the Greeks decided to purchase bombs from Israel, subject to budgetary approval. Israel won a tender worth approximately $750,000 for the supply of 81 mm mortars, submitted proposals for the supply of hand grenades and the establishment of a factory for the production of hand grenades in Greece, and Tadiran signed an agreement for the supply of communications equipment worth $300,000. 

Azouri did not raise the possibility of canceling or freezing these deals in light of the massacre in Athens and other human rights violations. It seems, in fact, that Israel doubled down on its military relations with Greece: Azouri, alongside another Israeli diplomat named Yael Vered, negotiated a deal in which the junta’s air force decided to purchase bombs and aircraft armament accessories worth $4–5 million dollars. It was also agreed that within a month bomb models would be transferred to the junta for testing in their planes, pending budgetary approval.

At the time these deals were being negotiated, the junta was involved in the violent destabilization of Cyprus and supported the Greek nationalists who wanted the island to be annexed to Greece –– in opposition to the wishes of the elected government in Cyprus and the Turkish minority on the island. According to documents from the Israeli Foreign Ministry, Israel was aware that the junta was transferring military equipment to the forces it had stationed illegally on Cypriot soil. For example, in discussing one of the recent arms deals between Greece and Israel, Azouri said: “The problem is more political, as some of the mortars are intended for the Greek army in Cyprus.” 

His solution to the bad optics was to propose handing over the mortars without marking, and he added that the Foreign Ministry “has no objection to the Greek army in Cyprus receiving the mortars, and over time this can be brought to the attention of [Cypriot President and Archbishop] Makarios III, who has an interest in the Greek army’s activities on the island.”  

President Makarios of Cyprus in Bonn during a state visit to West Germany, May 22, 1962. (Bundesarchiv, B 145 Bild-F012969-0006/Patzek, Renate/CC-BY-SA 3.0)

Learning the wrong lessons

It was the junta’s intervention in Cyprus — supporting a military coup that took place on July 15, 1974 — that ultimately led to its downfall. The leaders of the coup deposed Makarios, and announced their intention to annex the island to Greece. Five days later, Turkey invaded the island in the name of protecting its Turkish minority and occupied the northeast. Two hundred thousand Greek Cypriots living in this area were deported or fled from the Turks, leading the island to be divided along ethnic lines, which has lasted to this day. 

Israel was well aware of the junta’s involvement in what was happening. According to a situation assessment prepared by the Israeli ambassador in Nicosia on July 18, three days after the military coup on the island:

“There is no dispute that the coup was carried out by the Greek officers of the Cypriot National Guard, in accordance with instructions from Athens. The assessment is that the ruling sect in Athens acted out of a lack of understanding of international affairs and from a provincial perspective.”

On July 22, a week after the coup, the exiled president of Cyprus, Makarios, asked Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin for assistance in preserving the island’s independence. Instead of providing aid, however, the Rabin government simply decided to send Makarios a nonchalant greeting from the former Israeli ambassador to the island, Rachamim Timur, in which he hoped for his well-being, wishing him health and all the best. Rage at the military junta’s intervention in Cyprus led to its collapse, and Greece began the process of becoming a democracy once again. 

Yael Vered, the Israeli diplomat, prepared a summary of the lessons to be learned from the recent Cyprus crisis. “Israeli conclusions: a. A minority of 18 percent can win full political rights if it has military and political support fighting on its behalf; b. 200,000 people can become refugees without the world being shocked; c. The nullity of the guarantees of ‘world powers’ has been proven … d. The impotence of the UN in finding an actual solution to crises has been proven once again (if indeed this even needs to be proven).” In another telegram, Vered wrote that “the Cyprus affair has so far demonstrated the impotence of the UN and its inability to solve complex problems such as the Cyprus problem (or, in the past, Vietnam, the Israeli-Arab conflict, Kashmir, etc).”

Apparently, Israel did not learn to be wary of future cooperation with other oppressive military regimes, did not learn that using excessive force can cause a regime’s downfall, and did not learn that upholding violent military rule is perhaps not worth the devastation it inflicted on innumerable citizens. Israel did, however, learn that refugees can be easily deported and that the UN is powerless — though Israel likely knew this already.

The State's Attempt to Prevent the Accused Explaining Why They Have Taken Direct Action Demonstrates the Ethical & Moral Hole at the Heart of Britain’s Judiciary

UPDATE

The Jury has just sent a note to the judge indicating they are deadlocked. It is not known what the numbers are. The Judge has indicated that he will give a majority verdict direction tomorrow, where a 10-2 majority is required. It is likely that the verdicts will be tomorrow (Tuesday)

Where is my daddy asks a child in Gaza after her father is killed

Finally, after 8 weeks, the jury in our trial was sent out at the end of Wednesday to reach a verdict on the 5 defendants. The charge against us is Section 3 of the Criminal Damage Act 1971 which states that:

A person who has anything in his custody or under his control intending without lawful excuse to use it or cause or permit another to use it—

(a)              to destroy or damage any property belonging to some other person;

is guilty. You might be forgiven for thinking that a defence of preventing the commission of war crimes under the International Criminal Court Act 2001 would be well founded. Sections 51 and 52 of this Act state that:

51        Genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes

(1)          It is an offence against the law of England and Wales for a person to commit genocide, a crime against humanity or a war crime.

(2)     This section applies to acts committed—

(a)in England or Wales, or

(b)outside the United Kingdom by a United Kingdom national, a United Kingdom resident or a person subject to UK service jurisdiction.

52      Conduct ancillary to genocide, etc. committed outside jurisdiction

(1)     It is an offence against the law of England and Wales for a person to engage in conduct ancillary to an act to which this section applies.

(2)     This section applies to an act that if committed in England or Wales would constitute—

          (a)an offence under section 51 (genocide, crime against humanity or war crime), or

          (b)an offence under this section,

but which, being committed (or intended to be committed) outside England and Wales, does not constitute such an offence.

(3)     The reference in subsection (1) to conduct ancillary to such an act is to conduct that would constitute an ancillary offence in relation to that act if the act were committed in England or Wales.

(4)     This section applies where the conduct in question consists of or includes an act committed—

          (a)        in England or Wales, or

(b)               outside the United Kingdom by a United Kingdom national, a United Kingdom resident or a person subject to UK service jurisdiction.

In other words it is an offence, not only to commit genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes in the UK but it is an offence to be an ancillary to such crimes. Further that committing or being ancillary to such crimes outside the UK is to be taken as being committed in the UK by a UK national or resident.

Boris Johnson lying about parties in Downing Street

The Rule of Law

Britain is, in theory governed by the Rule of Law but it is clear that this is, in reality a legal fiction which acts to disguise who it is that holds power.

In recent years this concept has become more threadbare and honoured in the breach. It was particularly marked under Boris Johnson, who as Prime Minister openly flouted and disregarded the very COVID lockdown laws that he had laid such emphasis on. He is alleged to have attended at least 10 parties but the Metropolitan Police, who had initially refused to investigate any breach by Johnson of the COVID regulations, only investigated half of them and only sent Johnson a questionnaire related to one of them.

The pathetic excuse of the Met was that it did not normally investigate breaches of coronavirus regulations “long after they are said to have taken place”. The Met presumably only investigates crime before the are committed! Which is probably why they arrested protesters against the Coronation before they even got to the demonstrations! It was only after the Public Law Project threatened to judicially review the Met’s refusal to investigate Johnson that they reversed their decision.

Nor was this the only instance of the Met turning a blind eye to Johnson and his cronies breaking the law. Johnson, when Mayor of London, secured for his mistress, Jennifer Arcuri, a £100,000 grant from the Greater London Authority for her business, Hacker’s House, which was based in California not London, whilst failing to declare an interest. Unsurprisingly the Met has not investigated this fraud on public funds and Whitehall’s internal audit agency conducted a whitewash inquiry.

The massive fraud, estimated at £16 billion, in COVID grants to cronies and friends of the Government is well documented. The government's use of a "VIP lane" to award contracts for personal protective equipment (PPE) to cronies and friends was ruled unlawful by the High Court. Yet despite this there have been no consequences for the fraudsters.

Health Secretary Matt Hancock secured a £30 million deal to supply test tubes for COVID tests for his friend and local pub landlord Alex Bourne’s company Hinpack Limited. The company had no experience of supplying medical equipment but who cares? Certainly not the Metropolitan or other police forces.

Tory peer, Lady Michelle Mone and her husband, Douglas Barrowman, were beneficiaries of the fraudulent VIP lane. Mone, Barrowman and their company, PPE Medpro and three other intermediary companies made in excess of £100m in profits from government contracts worth £203m. Little or nothing appears to have been done to prosecute Mone and Barrowman. Her company PPE Medpro stated that its principal business activity was international trading in coffee, consumables, edible nuts and fruits. In other words nothing to do with the supply of PPE. Suffice to say what they did supply proved useless.

It seems that powerful politicians and those in government effectively have immunity from criminal prosecution whereas those who threaten Israeli arms company with ‘criminal damage’ feel the full force of the law. Are these decisions political?  According to judges like Ian Burnett and Michael Chambers the answer is no but to most people the answer is obvious. There is one law for the rich and one for the poor.

In the United Kingdom, the rule of law, has been closely associated with Tory constitutionalist A.V. Dicey and his book Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution. According to Dicey, along with the concept of Parliamentary Sovereignty, the rule of law is one of the twin pillars of the British Constitution.

There were 3 aspects of the rule of law that Dicey highlighted. The first was that no man is punishable or can be lawfully be made to suffer or be deprived of their goods unless they have violated the law. There is also an absolute supremacy or predominance of regular law over arbitrary power and the state cannot act in an arbitrary manner which is unlawful.

Again all of these have been honoured in the breach by the current government with the connivance of both the Police and the Judiciary.

The second aspect of Dicey’s concept of the rule of law was equality before the law. Noone is above the law. Theoretically whatever an individual’s rank s/he is subject to the ordinary law of the land. In theory if someone breaches the same law, they would be treated in the same way. State officials were not to be given any special privileges or protections from the law. “Be you ever so high, the law is above you.”

The third aspect denotes that the principles of the constitution are the result of the ordinary law of the land. Dicey stated that Britain had a court-based constitution (in effect, a common law constitution), in the sense that decisions made by the judges directly resulted in the principles of the constitution concerning the rights of private persons. Yet all of these fine principles have never been observed.

In theory the selling of honours is a criminal offence under the Honours (Prevention of Abuses) Act 1925. The only problem is that no one has ever been prosecuted under it because those who have breached it have been Prime Ministers and powerful officials. We had the Cash for Honours scandal under Tony Blair, when those who loaned large sums to New Labour were given seats in the House of Lords. Blair was interviewed by the Met but not under caution.

There has been a similar cash for honours scandal under Boris Johnson but again the Met has done nothing because attacking direct action activists rather than ruling class crooks is their priority.

Dicey’s concept of the Rule of Law was updated by Thomas Bingham, a former Lord Chief Justice and Senior Law Lord, who was described as “the most significant judicial figure … in the history of the Anglo-Saxon legal systems.".

Bingham formulated Eight Principles of the Rules of Law. The third rule being that ‘The laws of the land should apply equally to all, save to the extent that objective differences justify differentiation.’ As the above clearly demonstrates, defrauding the public exchequer of billions of pounds is ignored when it concerns friends and cronies of government cabinet ministers whereas someone who shoplifts to feed their kids in the local Tesco faces going to gaol and a lecture by judges such as Michael Chambers.

The eighth rule of Bingham was that ‘The rule of law requires compliance by the state with its obligations in international law as in national law. Given the absence of any such compliance or enforcement by the British state, human rights and political activists have filled the gap. But to British judges such as Lord Hoffman, a former law lord, this has been called by ‘taking the law into one’s own hands’. Hoffman raised the spectre of ‘anarchy’ on the streets. But when the law is selectively applied what else can people do but apply it themselves?

For reasons of political and legal expediency, the current Lord Chief Justice Ian Burnett and legal apparatchiks like our very own Judge Chambers have sought to ensure that this obligation by the British State is rendered null and void. In the process they have erased the phrase ‘without lawful excuse’ from the Criminal Damage Act 1971.

You might therefore believe, if the rule of law meant anything that the Police would have investigated Elbit concerning the use of their drones in respect of war crimes in Gaza, Kashmir and Burma among other places. Instead they have turned a blind eye.

Elbit provides Israel with 85% of its drones and 80% of its munitions including White Phosphorous which Israel has used against UN schools.

However you would be failing to account for the ingenuity of the British ‘Justice’ System and in particular the evil genius of Ian Burnett. Burnett presided over the trial of Julian Assange whose ‘crime’ was disclosing US war crimes in Iraq. He revealed how US pilots had deliberately murdered innocent civilians, including two Reuters journalists, mowing them down with machine gun fire from a helicopter.

You have to hand it to Burnett. It takes a certain genius whereby those who reveal the secrets of war crimes are imprisoned at the behest of the war criminals. The Nuremberg Trials of 1946 in respect of the Nazi war criminals have been turned on their head. If Nazi Germany had won the war then the Nazi equivalents of Burnett would have prosecuted those who revealed the secrets of Auschwitz. After all, under Nazi law, Auschwitz and the extermination camps were also state secrets.

This is the irony of the decision of the Court of Appeal in the Colston case which was referred to it. The British Establishment – from Cruella Braverman to Keir ‘liar’ Starmer - was outraged that those who toppled the statue of a mass murderer and slave trader, Edward Colston, from his plinth and which was thrown into Bristol harbor were acquitted.

Julian Assange has been living in Belmarsh, Britain’s equivalent of Guantanamo, whilst the war criminals he exposed are free to commit further crimes. Such is British and US justice.

In the past week a new case came on for trial at Wolverhampton. Four more people were charged with criminal damage at Elbit’s Shenstone factory. Judge Chambers, the Tory judge presiding over our trial, has stated that he intends to try this case. He is determined to ensure that the trial doesn’t go on for another 8 weeks and has already said he will guillotine cross-examination.

Chambers did his best to put pressure on all 4 defendants to plead guilty making it clear that they had no defences, since he had already ruled out ‘lawful excuse’ in our trial. He told the defendants that as the offences they are charged with crossed the ‘custody threshold’ their interests would be best served by getting credit for pleading guilty!

Nonetheless all four resisted this pressure and pleaded not guilty to the annoyance of Chambers and the trial is set down for February 2024. Our task in the meantime is to ensure that there is a strong and determined campaign which will thwart the efforts of the police and judiciary to outlaw effective protests and keep juries in the dark.

At the same time as the jury in our case was deliberating, Israel was bombing Gaza again. In order to take out three leaders of Islamic Jihad Israel murdered 10 civilians, including 4 children. This is a war crime but British judges are like the 3 wise monkeys– they neither hear, see or say anything about this because it is ‘political’ and we are mere criminals.

Exactly the same was said about all mass movements for democracy in the past, whether it was the Chartists, the Suffragettes or before them Oliver Cromwell and the Roundheads who defied the existing constitution and its judges to assert the supremacy of parliament. As the Prosecutor told the jury in the trial of Emmeline Pankhurst in 1912:

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

Ian Burnett and Michael Chambers are nothing if not unoriginal.

As Craig Murray, the former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan, writes in his current blog Protest Is a Moral Duty. Just as the Police are doing their best to prevent any and all rights of protest – from the Coronation to Palestine – so the Judges are doing their best to criminalise and lock away demonstrators. Article 6 of the European Convention of Human Rights guaranteeing a fair trial has gone out of the window.

Of course when this happens in Hong Kong then the BBC and the Tory press wax lyrical about freedom of speech and democracy but when it happens in Britain these same hypocrites fall silent.

3 Protesters Who Informed Juries of Their Rights are Accused of Perverting the of justice

Trudy Warner, who held a placard telling jurors that they had an absolute right to acquit a Defendant according to their conscience, has been reported to the Attorney General for possible prosecution for perverting the course of justice. Perverting the Course of Justice now means informing juries of their rights.

Ironically, on the very walls of the Old Bailey, there is a plaque celebrating the case of Edward Bushell, when a Judge imprisoned a jury for 2 days and nights without food, water or chamber pot for refusing to find the Defendants William Penn and William Mead guilty according to the law. The hypocrisy of British Judges knows no bounds.

The British Establishment and their judicial wing realise that the weak link in the persecution of climate, Palestine and other direct action activists is the Jury, the only independent element in the British constitution.

That is why, despite the fact that juries have an absolute right to disregard the directions and advice of judges, they have decided that the mere act of informing jurors of their right to decide cases according to their conscience is ‘perverting the course of justice’ whereas in reality it is those who seek to keep jurors in the dark as to their rights who are guilty of this offence. But then, as the old saying goes, who judges the judges, unelected and unaccountable as they are. What they object to is what they call ‘perverse verdicts’.

The constitutional and legal position was outlinedby Patrick Devlin, one of the most famous law lords who stated that ‘perverse acquittals’:

gives protection against laws which the ordinary man regards as harsh and oppressive . . . an insurance that the criminal law will conform to the ordinary man's ideas of what is fair and just. If it does not, the jury will not be a party to its enforcement."

It has been more recently restated by Baroness Heather Hallett, a member of the Court of Appeal from 2005-2019, who in the 2017 Blackstone Lecture on the Role of the Jury 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 law or 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! And if you try to inform them you will be arrested and charged with perverting the course of justice.

Defences of proportionality under the Human Rights Act, Justification and Necessity, as well as acting to prevent war crimes, have all been ruled out by the Court of Appeal in its efforts to defend the arms industry and Elbit in particular.

We had the absurdity in our trial of the Prosecutor and Judge Chambers (who worked together in unison) arguing that it was necessary to prove that a particular engine had powered a particular drone which had killed a specific individual for the defence of necessity to be made out.

It’s like suggesting that in order to find IG Farben guilty of crimes against humanity for producing Zyklon B that murdered millions of people in Nazi Germany’s extermination camps, one had to find the particular pellet that killed a particular person. When it comes to excusing war crimes our judges will go to any lengths to distort and twist the law. All in the interests of justice of course!

Tony Greenstein

Now Protest Is a Moral Duty

Craig Murray

The torrential rain was shed from the policeman’s flat hat via its curved plastic peak, forming a curtain of water that flowed down in front of him, obscuring his face.

His name was Martin. A female colleague stood in solidarity beside him. Two other female policemen were filming with a large video camera from three metres away. Thirty yards down the road were large groups of burly policemen in fluorescent jackets, and beyond them the Tactical Support Group sat behind the dark windows of their mesh covered minibuses, fingering their shields and batons.

Facing Martin were the protestors. There were six of us, average age about 70. We were all absolutely sodden through, but still clutched umbrellas and tried to find angles from which to reduce the wind driven assault of cold water. As the rain was extremely noisy, and probably we don’t hear quite as well as we used to, we kept shuffling towards Martin and leaning forward to try to catch his words, before they were blown away or drowned.

Martin was reading the riot act. Or, to be precise, he was reading an order made under the Public Order Act 1986. With no sense that he understood the absurdity of his words, he intoned:

“I reasonably believe that this assembly has been organised with criminal intent. I reasonably believe that this assembly may result in violence to persons and to property. I reasonably believe that this assembly may cause disruption to the life of the community”.

Some of my top teeth are no longer natural and I get dizzy after climbing a flight of stairs or getting out the bath. I was cold and wet and longing for a nice hot cup of tea. I felt perhaps proud, but rather puzzled, to be taken for a serious criminal danger to the city of Leicester.

Behind Martin stood the paramilitary security guards of the Israeli weapons factory. They did not look really nice. I wondered if Martin was facing in the right direction.

I sneaked this photo of one of them from the taxi as I was leaving. Not entirely what you expect to find down a wooded lane outside Leicester.

Overhead a red police drone buzzed. What it could see, that the scores of police eyes on us could not see, remains a mystery. It was possibly on the lookout for subversive messages on the top of umbrellas.

I found the police operator round the corner who, to be fair, was probably sheltering from the downpour under a tree rather than deliberately hiding behind the hedge.

The factory makes, among other things, components for the kind of drones that kill women and children in Gaza on a regular basis.

This is one of the 'terrorists' Liane Mdoukh  killed by an Israeli missile in Gaza - no Western state has condemned these killings but if it were Russia....

I would like you to meet Liane. One of the Palestinian children killed this week in Gaza by weaponry of the Elbit weapons company we were picketing. Whether her death involved any components made in this precise Leicester Elbit factory I do not know. It is probable.

Look into Liane’s eyes, then tell me you do not wish you had been with me, standing in the rain.

When Martin had finished speaking I replied, rather to his, and everybody else’s, surprise. He had started moving away but returned to listen.

I said that I was not an organiser of the protest, just a supporter. But the Order he had read out did not apply. We were just six people – that is not enough people to constitute an “assembly” under Part 2 of the 1986 Public Order Act.

I then went to the police camera team and said the same thing to them. As they were filming for evidence purposes to show the Order had been made, I asked them to maintain the tape for evidence that the police had been told we were not an assembly in terms of the act.

They were really not very happy about this. You could see the cogs whirring as they wondered whether they could arrest me. I presume all these police had arrived after an operational briefing that they were dealing with violent Middle Eastern terrorists, and they were having a brief bout of cognitive dissonance.

There are of course people who resolve cognitive dissonance by an immediate resort to violence, and rather a higher proportion of such people than you might expect, find their way into the police force, so I then wandered off with some friendly remarks about the weather.

I reported yesterday on the incredibly heavy handed policing of this protest. The Chief Constable of Leicestershire, Robert Nixon, has instructed the protest must be “stamped out”, according to one police officer I spoke with.

About sixty protestors have been arrested, and some 50 released on bail on condition they leave the county of Leicestershire completely.

Some have even been arrested hundreds of miles away, for the new crime of planning to attend a demonstration.

Earlier that day I had witnessed the police harass a mother in hijab. Two male officers, not accompanied by a female officer, arriving to quiz her on why three children present at the protest were not at school.

Truancy is not in general a police matter, and if an intervention was deemed necessary it should have been carried out by a qualified local authority officer. The cultural insensitivity on display was remarkable, and it underlined the fact that every single police officer I saw over two days was white.

This picture, from a few days earlier at the same protest, illustrates it well. Leicester is a very multi-cultural city, but these are the county police.

Each time I arrived at the protest, I went walking around to count the number of police and see what they were doing. Generally I chatted with whoever was in charge, and made plain I thought they were far more heavy handed than was compatible with the right to protest.

I received a message from Palestine Action to the effect that friendly chats with the police are not really how they roll. I respect their position and its cause, but my own view is that if you treat the police officers personally as the enemy, it makes it hard to complain when they do the same to you.

On this final visit I noted, in addition to the ordinary and tactical support group minibuses; the drone squad, at least four marked police cars, the same number of unmarked cars with uniformed officers inside, and five cars parked up with occupants in civilian clothes sitting there for hours ostensibly doing nothing at all.

I called an Uber to leave. I then said my farewells, and my phone beeped saying the Uber had arrived, indicating the pick up point. I walked to the car and opened the back door – and there behind the dark windows were some burly policemen in plain clothes and a directional microphone.

The bearded driver was furious. He yelled at me “Why did you open that door?”

I replied “Well, if you will go around in disguise, people will mistake you for an Uber”.

The car doors were pulled shut again in anger and the car drove off. Three different groups of policemen approached, all yelling out “Why did you open that door?” “What were you doing with that car?”

Laughing, I replied “I am sorry, I thought it was my Uber”. Fortunately that very second my Uber pulled up next to me. I got in and left, giggling away.

The action at Elbit is continuous. I shall definitely be back at some stage. Please do get yourselves there. I regard it as a moral duty. We were just a few gentle souls in the rain, but I am proud to have been there.

 Mann combines Opposition to ‘anti-Semitism’ with Virulent Racism against Gypsies, Black and Muslim People

Loudmouth Mann confronts Ken Livingstone

I have covered John Mann before when he lied about and harassed a 90 year old Jewish Dr Glatt.

In July 2019 John Mann was appointed by Theresa May as her advisor on ‘anti-Semitism’. In September Mann was made ‘anti-Semitism Czar’ and elevated to the Lords by Boris Johnson.

When Theresa May appointed John Mann to lead the fight against ‘anti-Semitism’ it was a case of one racist appointing another racist

As ‘Anti-Semitism Czar’ Mann saw it as his duty to try and close down media outlets which didn’t conform to his racist Apartheid agenda. Mann is not a man to appreciate irony because if he did he would have known that before the advent of Hitler, Czar Nicholas II was the world’s most infamous anti-Semite who presided over the deaths of thousands of Jews.

Having failed to close down The Canary and Skawkbox, Mann then set his sights on indoctrinating school children. Citing a report from the Henry Jackson Society, a byword in Islamaphobia, he said that he said that

"It is not enough to teach about the Holocaust," quoting the report and urged ministers to guarantee funding for schools to teach about contemporary anti-Jewish hatred (i.e. anti-Zionism).

You can get a flavour of the HJS's views on racism from its Associate Director (2011-2018) Douglas Murray, author of The Strange Death of Europe’. The theme of the book is summed up in its title:

Europe is dying — being murdered, in fact — by hordes of Muslim immigrants, aided in their task by craven liberal politicians The Far Right Is Obsessed With a Book About Muslims Destroying Europe

Murray gave an intellectual veneer to the White Replacement Theory which found its voice at the neo-Nazi Charlottesville rally in the United States when anti-fascist Heather Heyer was murdered as the marchers chanted‘The Jews Shall Not Replace Us’.

Douglas Murray

The Guardian reported that

Douglas Murray, complained last year that London had “become a foreign country” because white Britons were a minority in 23 of 33 London boroughs.” Murray has also been pictured with Robert Spencer, the far-right US anti-Islam campaigner banned last year from Britain by the Home Office.

In 2012 the HJS's director William Shawcross said “Europe and Islam is one of the greatest, most terrifying problems of our future”.

The White Replacement Theory leads inexorably to the idea that the White races are under threat because the Jews have encouraged and helped stimulate Black and Muslim immigration whilst keeping their own Jewish state racially pure.

Mann is fond of quoting from the HJS because the anti-Semitism he is concerned about isn’t about hatred or hostility to Jews but about criticism of Israel - the ‘new anti-Semitism’.

Mann is best described by the findings of the Employment Tribunal in Fraser –v- University College Union. The case was brought by a Ronnie Fraser against his own trade union, UCU. He alleged anti-Semitism. UCU’s offence was supporting a Boycott of Israel. Their judgment (para. 148) stated:

Mr Mann … told us that the leaders of the Respondents were at fault for the way in which they conducted debates but did not enlighten us as to what they were doing wrong or what they should be doing differently. He did not claim ever to have witnessed any Congress or other UCU meeting. And when it came to antisemitism in the context of debate about the Middle East, he announced, “It’s clear to me where the line is …” but unfortunately eschewed the opportunity to locate it for us. Both parliamentarians clearly enjoyed making speeches. Neither seemed at ease with the idea of being required to answer a question not to his liking.

As his parting shot on leaving the Commons Mann launched an attack on Jeremy Corbyn for having given the ‘green light’ to anti-Semites.

He (Corbyn) has not just hijacked my political party – he has hijacked its soul and its ethics. I will never forgive him for that.

When John Mann talks about ‘ethics’ it is like a mafia chief giving a lecture on crime prevention or Harold Shipman lecturing on care for the elderly.

If Mann was seriously concerned about anti-Semitism then one would assume that in his 18 year parliamentary career that he was equally vociferous about all forms of racism. In fact no other form of racism disturbed him. But that may be because there were no freebies or parliamentary jaunts to be had.

Mann was one of the few Labour supporters of Brexit in Parliament. Brexit, which was motivated by fear and hostility to migrants and dreams of Empire past, was at one with Mann’s toxic views.

Throughout his time in parliament, Mann was distinguished for his pro-war record. He voted in support of the Iraq war in March 2003.

Not once did Mann speak out against New Labour’s Islamaphobia and demonisation of refugees. When racist Labour MP Phil Woolas was ejected from the Commons for lying about his opponent at the 2010 General Election, he had no greater supporter than Mann.

The Guardian described Mann as Woolas’s best friend, best man and political ally since the first day at Manchester University”. When Harriet Harman suspended Woolas from the Labour Party after his ejection from Parliament, she faced“a backbench revolt”

Among those to have spoken out in support of Woolas was John Mann, a close friend of his… (he) has been backing Woolas via telephone calls with a journalist at the Guardian).

When Harman cast Woolas adrift Mann said that ‘A period of silence from Harriet Harman would now be very welcome.’ Clearly Mann did not understand the irony of him telling anyone to be quiet.

Mann was quoted as saying that Woolas’s ejection had

profound implications for British democracy... Woolas is the first case of an MP being disbarred by the courts for malpractice since 1911.

Woolas did not just lie when he alleged that his Lib Dem opponent supported violent Muslim Jihadists, he deliberately sought a white working class vote by portraying all Muslims as terrorists and violent jihadists. A decision wastaken by his campaign team:

to 'make the white folk angry' by depicting an alleged campaign by those who they described generically as Asians to 'take Phil out' and then present Mr Watkins as in league with them.

When it came to the 2014 Immigration Act, which led directly to the Windrush Scandal, Mann abstained. Being an Opposition member it was the equivalent of supporting the government. It was the ‘anti-Semitic’ Corbyn who was one of only 6 Labour MPs who voted against the Act.

In 2007 Mann produced ‘the Bassetlaw Anti Social Behaviour Handbook. It described Gypsies and Travellers as “anti-social elements” in terms similar to the Nazi depiction of Gypsies.

This handbook is designed to help you deal with problems you may face in your street or in your community. There are lots of different types of anti-social behaviour…

Amongst these problems were Travellers. Mann’s advice was

The police have powers to remove any gypsies or travellers, and have powers to direct people to leave the land…

In 2016 Mann was interviewed by Police in connection with his pamphlet.  Gypsies are protected by the Equality Act 2010. 

Ben Bennett, a 13 year old Traveller, who made a complaint to the Police, described how Mann’s pamphlet made him:

‘very upset’. I can’t understand why John Mann MP would choose to talk solely about my community in such a derogatory manner.’

Mann claims he is motivated by the 6 million Jews who died in the holocaust but he has nothing to say about how up to one million Gypsies were exterminated in the Porajmos. The Nazis considered criminal, asocial elements just like Mann.

It is no surprise that Boris Johnson, who was notorious for his racist and anti-Semitic comments, made Mann his ‘anti-Semitism Czar’, elevating him to the Lords.

Mann made his intentions known from the start. He was going to concentrate on the Left press. Someone who was genuinely concerned with racism would have focused on the Daily Mail or Sun. Mann’s targets were the alternative media - The Canary and Skwawkbox.

In an article Corbynite sites feature far-right tropesby ‘liar’ Lee Harpin, whose inaccuracies cost the Jewish Chronicle a small fortune, Skwawkbox and The Canary were accused of a “heavily negative coverage of Jewish issues” to anti-Semitic audiences.

What were these ‘Jewish issues.’ Harpin did not say but we can guess - Palestine and Israel. The same Israeli state which has been condemned as an Apartheid state by the world’s main human rights groups such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.

Mann has consistently engaged in the guilt-by-associationtactics favoured by Joseph McCarthy. If you want a lesson in how to corrupt the English language, take the paragraph below which equates The Canary and Skwawkbox with neo-Nazis on the basis of an alleged opposition to capitalism. Fascists have never opposed capitalism. The Nazis called themselves ‘national socialists’ yet the first thing they did when they gained power was to put trade unionists and communists in concentration camps.

“despite the huge differences in the beliefs that are most foundational to their ideologies, articles published on all three sites share an opposition to capitalism, globalisation, and liberalism, adopt similar positions on many questions of foreign policy, and fulminate against a supposed adversary whose Jewishness is extensively highlighted (even if in different ways).

John Mann - Supports all forms of racism except 'antisemitism'

TR News, the official website of far-right activist… Tommy Robinson, has intentionally attempted to take the side of Jews and Israel, 

Robinson, like most anti-Semites, openly supports Zionism. Mann’s polemics ironically owe their origin to Nazi propaganda techniques which sought to portray opposites as being equal. For example they equated capitalism and communism, which they held were controlled by Jews. John Mann is a walking conspiracy theory:

TR News has resorted to defending those Muslims who were seen to embrace pro-Western right-wing ideology, the two left-wing websites sought to declare allegiance with the minority of Jews who supported their own viewpoint.

In other words fascist Muslims and Hindus, such as supporters of India’s BJP government are no different from anti-Zionist Jews who oppose all forms of racism. This is the kind of intellectual sleight of hand that Mann has made into a fine art.

The ‘research’ for Mann’s Report was carried out by Daniel Allington, a King’s College lecturer. Allington selected 20 articles on each site that featured the words ‘Jew’ or ‘Zionist’ for analysis. It clearly did not occur to Mann that what fascists mean by ‘Zionist’ differs from what socialists mean. The report is based on the assumption that ‘Jew’ = ‘Zionist’.

Allington is the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism’s go to academic. His ‘research’ is starts off with the conclusions and then looks for evidence. In other words he reverse engineers his research!

Together with Zionist ‘academic’ David Hirsh, Allington devised a Generalised Anti-Semitism Barometer for the CAA which found that anti-Semitism was more prevalent on the Left than the Right. The Zionist and Tory press lapped it up.

If true this was a staggering finding. Why then had all previous surveys found that anti-Semitism was the property of the Right? What the CAA didn’t advertise was that they had added 6 questions to the original 6 questions (which were themselves debatable).

That the CAA is a dishonest McCarthyist organisation is one thing. That Allington and Hirsh should allow their support for Zionism to fix the results of ostensibly neutral academic research raises questions as to their academic integrity. The questions they devised to ‘prove’ that the left is more anti-Semitic than the Right were:

1.    “I am comfortable spending time with people who openly support Israel.”

2.    “Israel has a right to exist as a homeland for the Jewish people.”

3.    “Israel is right to defend itself against those who want to destroy it.”

4.    “Israel and its supporters are a bad influence on our democracy.”

5.    “Israel can get away with anything because its supporters control the media.”

6.    “Israel treats the Palestinians like the Nazis treated the Jews.”

None of these statements are anti-Semitic. According to the OED anti-Semitism is ‘hostility to or prejudice against Jews.’

The dishonesty of Allington’s ‘research’ is staggering. I wouldn’t be comfortable spending time with supporters of Franco. Does that make me anti-Spanish? Israel’s right to exist as a homeland for Jews assumes that Jews aren’t at home where they live. Israel having the right to defend itself assumes that it is under attack. Obviously Israel’s supporters are anti-democratic, as the IHRA misdefinition of anti-Semitism proves. Supporters of Israel do control the media but who says Rupert Murdoch is Jewish? It’s only anti-Semitic if you assume that supporters of Israel and Jews are the same.

The most popular ‘anti-Semitic’ statement was comparisons between Israel’s treatment of Palestinians and Nazi treatment of Jews. But this is a political statement. Were holocaust survivors Ze’ev Sternhell and Yehuda Elkana anti-Semitic for writing ‘In Israel, Growing Fascism and a Racism Akin to Early Nazism’? and The Need to Forget? Is it anti-Semitic to point out that Nazi mobs chanted ‘death to the Jews’ and Israeli mobs chant ‘death to the Arabs’.

One example of Skawkbox’s ‘racism’ was

“making throwaway references to ‘a former Chief Rabbi with a history of supporting racism’ could contribute to the creation of an impression of Jewishness as inherently suspect.”

So accusing Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks of being a racist is anti-Semitic because he was Jewish! Is accusing someone Jewish of fraud, even if they’re guilty, also anti-Semitic because it might imply that all Jews are frauds. This is the infantile level of analysis  of John Mann.

When Sacks died, I wrote that he was ‘An establishment bigot’. Sacks, who compared Corbyn with Enoch Powell endorsed the Strange Death of Europe.

Dishonesty permeates the Report. Because Jewish conspiracy theories permeate the far-Right, the support of Skwawkbox and The Canary for the undercover Al Jazeera programme The Lobby about the influence and activity of the Zionist lobby was anti-Semitic!

But the latter was true. What these allegations have in common is a deliberate confusion of ‘Jew’ and ‘Zionist’.  And who does this? The same anti-Semites and fascists that Mann purports to oppose.

Liar Lee’s article concludes with a quote from Allington:

 “Government and civil society must encourage use of high quality, reputable sources of information at the expense of low-quality fringe sources,” it said. “We need not be helpless in the face of hatred.”

What Mann and Allington are advocating is state censorship. The reference to ‘high quality reputable sources of information’ is police state stuff. Who decides what’s ‘high quality’? Turkey’s Erdogan would agree with this. Is it the Mail and Sun? Britain’s racist tabloids escapes unscathed. Mann’s concerns are not Jews and anti-Semitism but Zionism and Israel.

The only good thing about Mann’s Report is that it reflects his own intellectual deficit. It was so poorly argued in its deviously dishonest analogies that only a rogue like Boris Johnson could fall for it.

Before becoming a Czar, Mann was Chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group Against Antisemitism. The Committee played an important part in the lead up to Labour’s anti-Semitism smears. The APPGAA was stuffed with members of the Friends of Israel groups such as Luciana Berger, Ruth Smeeth, Wes Streeting and Bob Blackman. None of them had ever criticised Israeli racism. Bob Blackman was a racist in  his own right. See Tory MP accused of Islamophobia after posting anti-Muslim article on Facebook

The Committee, chaired by Labour MP Dennis McShane, gaoled for his part in the expenses scandal, produced a Report into Anti-Semitism in September 2006. Its ludicrous observations included:

The Israeli government itself may, at times, have mistakenly perceived criticism of its policies and actions to be motivated by antisemitism, but we received no evidence of the accusation of antisemitism being misused by mainstream British Jewish community organisations and leaders.

Ten years later the President of the Board of Deputies, Jonathan Arkush, attacked Corbyn as an anti-Semite and stated that a Jewish group, Jewdas were ‘the source of virulent anti-Semitism’

The Report stated that ‘anti-Zionist discourse can be polluted with antisemitic themes’ but ignored the far more widespread incidence of Zionist anti-Semites. E.g. Richard Spencer, the neo-Nazi founder of the alt-Right and organiser of the demonstration in Charlottesville, declared himself a White Zionist. As Ha’aretz noted:

‘In a series of tweets, Spencer writes of his admiration for the law, which confers the right to national self-determination in Israel to the Jewish people alone, and says Jews are 'showing a path forward for Europeans'

Israel provides a model for White supremacists. The Jewish Nation State Law excluded Arab Israelis from any claim to the land they live in. It was a blueprint for Jewish supremacy. Yet Mann and the APPGAA never once mentioned that the incidence of Palestinian supporters using anti-Semitic rhetoric is far outweighed by Zionist anti-Semites like Spencer and Steve Bannon who combined anti-Semitism with Zionism (see his description of Jewish children, whom he didn’t want his children to go to school with, as ‘whiny brats.’).

There was no understanding that criticism of Israel was motivated by opposition to Israeli racism. In December 2018 the Knesset rejected by 71-38 a Bill which affirmed a citizens' right to equality and it refused even to debate a bill ‘calling for Israel to treat its Arab and Jewish citizens equally.’

Speaker Yuli Yoel Edelstein denounced the bill saying that:

“This is a preposterous bill that any intelligent individual can see must be blocked immediately. A bill that aims to gnaw at the foundations of the state must not be allowed in the Knesset,”

John Mann was one of the main Labour witchunters. In April 2016 Mann staged a confrontation with Ken Livingstone for saying that Adolf Hitler “was supporting Zionism before he went mad and ended up killing six million Jews”calling him a ‘Nazi apologist’ for saying that the Nazis had supported Zionism.

The only problem was that the Nazis did support the Zionists, who were 2% of the German Jewish community. In Zionism During the Holocaust I quote Alfred Rosenberg, the Nazi Party’s main theoretician, who wrote in 1919 that

Zionism must be vigorously supported in order to encourage a significant number of German Jews to leave for Palestine or other destinations.

Mann called for my expulsion, calling my membership of the Labour Party ‘hugely inappropriate’. Presumably only racists like himself were entitled to be members.

In January 2018 Mann wrote an article attacking Jackie Walker, suggesting that her claim of a witch hunt was a conspiracy theory. He accused Jackie, a Jewish woman, of promoting anti-Semitic tropes. Jackie responded by saying that it was obvious that she was targeted for being a Corbyn supporter and that she had been fighting fascists and anti-Semites on the streets for years and was never accused of promoting anti-Semitic tropes before Corbyn became leader.

Other examples of Mann’s false and dishonest allegations of anti-Semitism were when, in 2012, Mann’s wife was sent a dead bird by a disgruntled local (Roger Dyas-Elliott). Mann later reported this as an incident of anti-Semitism and attributed it to Momentum activists. But Momentum wasn’t set up until 2015 (3yrs after the incident) and was established by Jewish members of the Labour Party!

In August 2018 Mann called for special privileges for Jewish Labour MPs, calling for them to be “automatically reselected at elections”.

In October 2018 the BBC reported that Mann had registered more trips than any other MP, with eight overseas visits on the Register of Interests. Mann claimed the trips were "part of the job". Most were related to his role as UK chair of the Inter-Parliamentary Committee Against Antisemitism. Opposing ‘anti-Semitism’ has been very profitable for John Mann.

Tony Greenstein

The London Labour Bureaucrat Who Threatened Stephen With Expulsion Didn’t Even Have the Courage to Give His Name

Stephen Kapos speaking at the Socialist Labour Network Holocaust Memorial Day meeting on 27 January 2023

On Friday January 27 the Socialist Labour Network organised a meeting for Holocaust Memorial Day under the title Reclaiming the Memory of All Those Who Died In The Nazi Holocaust.

Unlike the official HMD commemorations, we remembered not just the Jews who died but the Disabled and the Roma Gypsies. We reject the Zionist exploitation of the holocaust to justify the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians.

When the Starmeroids got to hear of it, probably from the Skwawkbox article, an anonymous pen pusher from London Labour wrote threatening Stephen with expulsion.

The cowardice of this party hack, who wasn’t even brave enough to put their name to the letter, thought nothing of threatening a holocaust survivor with expulsion. This is what Starmer’s pledge to ‘tear out the poison’ of anti-Semitism in the Labour Party has amounted to.

Starmer, the self-declared‘Zionist without qualification’, who has said not a word about the Judeo-Nazis who are part of Israel’s government, has ended up threatening to expel a holocaust survivor from Labour. This shows what an utter hypocrite the man is.

Walter Wolfgang reenters the Labour Conference in 2005 having been expelled the day before

At least when the Blairites had holocaust survivor, Walter Wolfgang, removed from the Labour Party conference in 2005 they had the good grace to apologise and readmit him to the Labour Party conference.

Socialist Labour Network Holocaust Memorial Day Meeting – Stephen Kapos is the third speaker

Starmer, Evans and the fake victims of Labour ‘anti-Semitism’ – the Lady Smeeths, Hodges and Ellmans – have all the manners of a skunk on heat without the charm.

Not only is Starmer a liar, who made 10 Pledges to get elected leader which he immediately junked, but he is a corrupt liar who hid the sources of his campaign funding, from rich Zionists, hedge fund owners and other parasites until the result was in.

Starmer and Evans are McCarthyites who have outlawed free speech in the Labour Party. Even Blair didn’t proscribe organisations he disagreed with but Starmer, a personality free zone, has nothing to offer except lies, more lies and Tory lite policies.  

Stephen made the obvious point that has eluded these witchhunters, that speaking on the platform of another organisation, in this case the SLN, does not mean you are a member or supporter of that organisation. This technique of guilt-by-association was first patented by Joe McCarthy.

Starmer’s Labour Party is politically (and financially) bankrupt. Our task is to create a new socialist and working class party.

Below is the letter from a London Labour Party hack and below that is Stephen’s reply.

Email from the Witchunters of the London Labour Party

Dear Stephen, 

It has been brought to the attention of the Labour Party that you have been advertised as a speaker for an event entitled ‘Zionism During the Holocaust - Reclaiming the Memory of All Those Who Died’,  hosted by Socialist Labour Network on Friday 27^th January 2023. 

In line with Labour Party rules, Socialist Labour Network is a group which the NEC of the party has determined is incompatible with Labour Party values. Any support for the organisation would likely be deemed in breach of Party rules and may lead to expulsion. 

Yours sincerely,

London Labour 

Stephen Kapos’s Reply to Labour’s Witchhunters

To:      London General

       Labour Party

                                                                                              26th January 2023

Dear London General, 

Thank you for your emailed letter of the 24^th of January giving me advance warning that I am likely to be expelled from the Party if I were to speak from the panel as a Holocaust survivor at the SLN (Socialist Labour Network) Webinar on the 27^th January — on Holocaust Memorial Day.

The Holocaust is the most important single example of genocide, which at its worst descended into an industrial process of mass murder of millions.

As a child survivor and one of the fewer and fewer still living direct witnesses to the Holocaust I feel a compelling duty to bear witness and speak out about it at any platform that would invite me and to any audience ready to listen.

I am an activist for Palestinian human rights and an active member of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign in its Camden Branch. The defence of Palestinians living under a brutal occupation is very important to me, particularly as a Holocaust survivor. Palestinians live under a system of apartheid as recognised by Amnesty International and other major human-rights organisations. Those are my political beliefs which I claim are protected characteristics under the Equalities Act 2010.

I am not a member of SLN nor have I been following its activities, but via the book to be discussed on the 27^th I have a general understanding of SLN’s views on present-day Zionism (as a political movement ) and on some of the actions of the Zionist movement during the Holocaust and WWII.  I am in sympathy with some of those views on the grounds of my political beliefs mentioned above. I have personal experience of the Kastner project in Hungary which was driven by Zionist ideology.

Rudolf Kasztner - leader of Hungarian Zionism and Nazi Collaborator

My father was a victim of Kastner’s scheme and ended up stranded in the Belsen and Theresienstadt concentration camps. I was myself briefly interned in a Kastner-run detention camp in Budapest.

You make mention of Labour Party values.

I learnt about Labour values during my party activism in the period when Frank Dobson was our MP and I worked in a warm and friendly atmosphere prominently on various election campaigns.

Those values were very different to that of the present leadership whose values permit intimidation, banning of discussion of some of the most vital political topics, disregard for the Party’s own rules, and for natural justice, the drastic reduction of inner party democracy, extreme factionalism, lack of support for striking workers.

I do not share these values.

Please accept my immediate resignation from the Labour Party effective from tomorrow, i.e. from the 27^th of January 2023. Your attempt to effectively bar me from speaking about the Holocaust on Holocaust Memorial Day was the last straw for me.

In the short term the Tories are self-destructing which may well bring the Labour Party into government soon.

In the long term this period of the Party’s history will be remembered with shame: this was when MacCarthyism was revived and imported into the Labour Party — and into the political life of the UK itself.

Yours sincerely,

Stephen Kapos

Copies to :        Sir Keir Starmer MP,

                         The Secretary, Holborn & St. Pancras CLP.

                           (pls forward)

 Johnson’s Cowardice When Confronted With Starmer’s McCarthyism Speaks Volumes About the Socialist Campaign Group and the Labour Left

It was nothing if not predicable. A member of the Socialist Campaign Group collapsed like a pack of cards when threatened by Starmer’s bullies. Instead of standing her ground and defying Starmer to do his worst, instead of defending what she had said, she chose to preserve her parliamentary career above principle.

What a contrast with holocaust survivor Stefan Kapos, who when he was told last week by a Labour apparatchik not to speak at a Holocaust Memorial Day meeting organised by the Socialist Labour Network, or he could be expelled, immediately resigned. The SCG prefer instead to capitulate.

If John McDonnell, Zara Sultana and the rest of the opportunists in the SCG had any principles, still less strategy, they would have immediately backed up Kim Johnson and gone on the offensive, defending that she had said, calling out Starmer’s racism and challenging him to do racist worst. Instead they remained silent.

When, during Israel attacked Gaza in 2009 Gerald Kaufman, a Jewish MP who was not even on the left, compared Israel to Nazi Germany, no one even thought that he should be disciplined. Even Tony Blair, a renowned Zionist, didn’t entertain the idea of removing the Whip. That shows just how far down the road we have come with Starmer.

When Kaufman died in 2017 the Jewish Chronicle told its readers that he was ‘reviled’. Marcus Dysch wrote:

He compared Israeli soldiers serving during the Gaza conflict of 2009 to the Nazis who forced his ancestors to flee Poland.

His “here we are, the Jews again” comment when Labour MP Louise Ellman rose to speak in the chamber in 2011 was not just crass, but specifically targeted, knowingly full well the hurt that would – and did – follow.

It is not as if there isn’t proof a plenty that Israel is an apartheid state. It is also clear to all except wilful racists like Starmer, that Israel’s government is stuffed with extreme racists and fascists.

All the major human rights organisations, from B’Tselem’s Reportto  Human Rights Watch’s A Threshold Crossedto Amnesty International’s Israel’s apartheid against Palestinians, that Israel is guilty of the crime of Apartheid.

Starmer embracing Louise Ellman, the MP for Liverpool Riverside and Tel Aviv South, who defended the Israeli army's abuse of Palestinian children

If we could turn the clock back 90 years then Starmer would have had no difficulty explaining why Hitler had come to power. He is a man without principle dedicated to defending imperialism come what may.

When a delegate at Labour’s conference last September pointed out that the Zelensky regime had banned trade unions and incorporated neo-Nazis into his regime Starmer had him immediately suspended.

Kim Johnson prostrating herself at the feet of Starmer & the Israel lobby

The truth of what Kim Johnson said, before she recanted like a victim of Stalin’s purges, is self evident. Israel has de facto annexed the West Bank but denies any rights to its Palestinian inhabitants unlike the Jewish settlers who have the full protection of Israeli civil law.

Israeli maps treat the West Bank as part of Greater Israel. The Green Line has long disappeared. In the West Bank two different sets of laws apply to two different peoples – Jews and Palestinian. That is the quintessential definition of apartheid.

But within Israel Apartheid also exists. There are over 60 laws which explicitly discriminate against Israeli Palestinians.

The 2003 Citizenship Law prevents Israeli Palestinians from marrying Arab spouses living outside Israel. The Admissions Committee Law 2013 enables hundreds of Jewish communities to bar Israeli Arabs from living amongst them.

The Jewish Nation State Law reserves national self-determination only for ‘the Jewish people.’ 93% of Israeli land is reserved solely for the use of Jews via the Jewish National Fund.

Arabs are confined within their towns and villages which are unable to expand, unlike Jewish towns because they are deliberately surrounded by Jewish communities.

In the Galilee, East Jerusalem and the Negev/Naqab there is a deliberate policy of Judaisation. If you want an equivalent then you only need to recall Nazi Germany’s policies of ‘deJewification’.

Israel isn’t a fascist but a settler colonial state but that doesn’t make it better. Arguably it makes it worse. America wasn’t a fascist state but its settlers exterminated millions of the indigenous native Indians.

The Israeli government is, however, stuffed with people who proudly declare that they are fascists. Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s new Finance Minister who is in charge of the Civil i.e. Military Administration in the West Bank said that ‘My voters don’t care if I’m a homophobe or fascist’. Miri Regev, Israel’s new Minister of Transport said ‘I’m happy to be a fascist’.

Smotrich is on record as opposing having Arab women share maternity wards with Jewish women but to Starmer this too is ok.

Even the European Union of Jewish Students has warned against ‘Fascist’ Ben Gvir, the new Police Minister. Calling Israeli Ministers and the Israeli state ‘fascist’ is commonplace but for Keir Starmer, any criticism of the United States’s racist Rottweiler is forbidden.  

The Independent reported that:

Sir Keir’s spokesman denounced the use of both the terms “apartheid” and “fascist”, saying many will have taken offence at the latter in particular. He told reporters: “As a first step we would obviously want her to withdraw the remarks that she used for sure.”

Johnson’s crime was giving ‘offence’.  No doubt many Germans would have taken offence at criticism of Hitler’s regime and racist Whites like Starmer would have taken offence at criticism of South Africa but so what? If telling the truth gives offence then so be it.

If anything the description of people like Bezalel Smotrich and Ben Gvir as fascists is too kind. The proper description of them is Jewish or Judeo-Nazis. The Times of Israel reported, on election night Gvir

interrupted his own victory speech… to pay tribute to the radical settler Rabbi Dov Lior and to his former political partner Bentzi Gopstein, the head of the racist and homophobic Lehava organization.

Rabbi Dov Lior is Chairman of the Jewish Rabbinical Council of the West Bank and Chief Rabbi of Kiryat Arba and Hebron. He is also an unreconstructed racist, even by Israeli standards.

In 1994, he supported the murder by an American settler, Baruch Goldstein, of 29 Palestinian worshippers at the Ibrahimi Mosque. Lior then issued a religious edict, saying,

There is no such thing as enemy civilians in war time. The law of our Torah is to have mercy on our soldiers and to save them....A thousand non-Jewish lives are not worth a Jew's fingernail.

Lior praised Goldstein, calling him a “great saint and rabbi … may his memory be blessed”. Ben Gvir, until recently, had a poster on his wall of Baruch Goldstein.

Not to be outdone, Rabbi Yaacov Perrin, officiating at Goldstein’s funeral, told mourners that even 1 million Arabs “are not worth a Jewish fingernail.” Angry voices in the congregation shouted, “We are all Goldsteins!” and “Arabs out of Israel!”

Several months after the massacre, Lior told disciples in Kiryat Araba near the occupied West Bank city of Hebron

Jewish blood was redder than non-Jewish blood … and that a Jewish life is preferred by the Lord than a non-Jewish life.

In 2009 Rabbis Yitzhak Shapira and Yosef Elitzur wrote Torat HaMelech, a religious guide to killing non-Jews legally. Among their insights was the ruling that the ‘Prohibition 'Thou Shalt Not Murder' applies only 'to a Jew who kills a Jew.' Non-Jews are "uncompassionate by nature" and attacks on them "curb their evil inclination," while babies and children of Israel's enemies may be killed since "it is clear that they will grow to harm us."It was immediately endorsed by Dov Lior.

Another hero of Gvir is Benzi Gopstein of the fascist Lehava whose slogan is ‘assimilation is a holocaust’. Like its Nazi forebears it openly campaigns against miscegenation, sexual or personal relations between Jew and Arab.

Lehava thugs openly attack Arabs who they suspect of liaisons with Jewish women and in one attack 105 Palestinians were wounded and 22 hospitalised in a pogrom in Jerusalem.

Lehava activists were also responsible for arson at one of the few mixed Jewish-Arab schools, the Hand in Hand in Jerusalem. One of those who set fire to the school received 3 years in prison. If he had been a Palestinian the sentence would have been 3 or 4 times that.

As someone equally hostile to Christians Gopstein has advocated burning churches too. These are the friends of Israel’s new Police Minister, Itamar Ben Gvir who is now in charge of directing Israel’s police. Yet Labour’s racist leader, Keir Starmer, objects to calling the Israeli government ‘fascist’ or apartheid. But then Starmer or was quoted as saying ‘I support Zionism without qualification.’

There is nothing that Israel could do that would disturb Starmer and Biden. All that matters is its strategic role in the Middle East. Labour has a racist as leader yet the SCG, instead of following in the footsteps of previous generations of socialists like Mervyn Stockwood and Lord Soper keeps quiet in the hope of keeping their parliamentary seats.

There really is nothing more contemptible than the likes of Kim Johnson or Richard Burgon apologising for even the slightest criticism of Zionism or Israel.

Tony Greenstein

Freedland Calls on the Palestinians to Support Those Who Expelled Them and Stole Their Land in an Internal Jewish War over the Supreme Court

If there is any journalist, and I use the word advisedly, who can claim the credit for the media’s ‘anti-Semitism’ smear campaign against Jeremy Corbyn then that person is Jonathan Freedland. It was this that prompted me to ask, just before Britain’s General Election in 2019 Is Jonathan Freedland the most dishonest journalist in Britain?

One month before the 2019 election Freedland wrote ‘Many Jews want Boris Johnson out. But how can we vote for Jeremy Corbyn? If Freedland had been genuinely concerned about anti-Semitism, as opposed to anti-Zionism, then he would have had no difficulty answering his own question.

 Freedland thought nothing of allying with Daniel Finkelstein, the racist Associate Editor of The Times and on the Board of the Islamaphobic Gatestone Institute about a book which barely mentions Jews

Leaving aside Johnson’s racist comments about ‘Watermelon smiles’, ‘piccaninnies’ and ‘letterboxes’. Johnson’s anti-Semitic comments in his novel ’72 Virgins’ should have sufficed. Johnson wrote:

Maybe there was some kind of fiddling of the figures by the oligarchs who ran the TV stations (and who were mainly, as some lost no time in pointing out, of Jewish origin)

There was‘the Jewish cabal who run the American media complex’. Even the Jewish Chronicle mentioned how 72 Virgins had

‘described a Jewish character as an unethical businessman with a large nose, who exploits immigrant workers and black women’.

But here’s the strange thing. Not a word about Johnson’s anti-Semitism crossed Freedland’s lips. In all his tiresome tirades Freedland never once quoted an anti-Semitic phrase that Corbyn had used yet Johnson served them up on a plate.

Freedland’s main theme was about how Jewish identity was bound up with Israel and if you attack an identity then that is anti-Semitic.  What if there had been a few thousand South Africa exiles in this country. Would it have been racist to oppose apartheid?  How about German exiles pre-1939?  Would opposition to Nazism have been anti-German? That was the heart of Freedland’s bogus argument for Corbyn’s ‘anti-Semitism’. A completely specious argument.

As the former Jewish Speaker of the House of Commons, John Bercow, said when questioned about Corbyn: ‘I've never detected so much as a whiff of anti-Semitism’.

Professor Geoffrey Alderman, a die-hard Zionist and the historian of the British Jewish community, in ‘Is Jeremy Corbyn really anti-Semitic?’ wrote:

The fact of the matter is that Corbyn has an impressive record of supporting Jewish communal initiatives…. In 2010 he put his name to an Early Day Motion (tabled by Diane Abbott) calling on the UK government to facilitate the settlement of Yemeni Jews in Britain. Indeed I could fill this entire article with a list of philo-Semitic EDMs that Corbyn has signed since he was first elected… in 1983.

Alderman was a columnist for the Jewish Chronicle for 14 years before Editor Stephen Pollard banned him for dissent! Not a word of this made its way into the Guardian under Freedland.

These are just a sample of Freedland's articles during the Corbyn years - he didn't write even one article about the racism Muslims and Black People Experience - Just About a Privileged Section of White People

During the Corbyn years I wrote a number of blogs such as Why Freedland Felt the Need to Lie to The Guardian's Readers and why the Guardian Refused to Allow Any Reply to Freedland in its Comment Pages. See here, here, here and hereculminating in an attack on Ken Loach and a refusal of a right of reply.

Freedland produced an endless series of articles about Labour ‘anti-Semitism’. He celebrated Starmer’s sacking of Rebecca Long-Bailey because ‘at last, Labour is serious about antisemitism’.

The Guardian refused to cover Al Jazeera’s series The Labour Files about the dirty tricks campaign against Corbyn, which included spying, bugging and monitoring Labour activists, the racism of Labour’s staff and even their hacking of a journalist’s computer.

Even the saint-like Corbyn referred to the ‘'utterly disgusting subliminal nastiness'of Freedland. Corbyn’s comment, in a fly-on-the wall documentary ‘Corbynism: the post-mortem’ so unnerved Freedland that he devoted a whole Jewish Chronicle column to it!

Despite pretending not to notice Freedland admitted that

In truth, though, it left me quite shaken. It’s unnerving to see yourself torn into by a frontline politician — the man who would be prime minister — with such venom.

Like most bullies Freedland was happy to accuse people of ‘anti-Semitism’ but when his victim bit back he cried into his column. It is unfortunate that Corbyn didn’t do this a bit more often.

Freedland thought nothing of targeting Muslims with bogus accusations of 'antisemitism' in his desperation to prove that Jews were under attack in the Labour Party

It is instructive that when Freedland recently wrote a book about a Jewish holocaust hero, Rudolf Vrba, who escaped from Auschwitz he chose an anti-Zionist Jew! As Hilary and Steven Rose observed, Vrba ‘found some of the same Zionist leaders in positions of power (in Israel) who had helped betray the Jews of Budapest’.

I haven’t yet read Freedland’s book but I strongly suspect that he has glossed over or omitted Vrba’s opposition to Zionism. But let us recall what Vrba wrote in the Daily Herald (February 1961):

I am a Jew. In spite of that – indeed because of that I accuse certain Jewish leaders of one of the most ghastly deeds of the war. This small group of quislings knew what was happening to their brethren in Hitler's gas chambers and bought their own lives with the price of silence. Among them was Dr Kasztner. … I was able to give Hungarian Zionist leaders three weeks’ notice that Eichmann planned to send a million of their Jews to his gas chambers… Kasztner went to Eichmann and told him, ‘I know of your plans; spare some Jews of my choice and I shall keep quiet.’

Having Described the Palestinian Struggle as ‘anti-Semitic’ Freedland now asks them to rescue Israel’s ‘Jewish Democracy’!

One of the features of ethno-nationalist states is that the police state apparatus that is created to suppress the indigenous population is sooner or later turned against dissidents amongst the herrenvolk. Once you have got used to murdering the Untermenschen you soon find that you are also surrounded by Jewish traitors and fifth columnists. 

The Nazis not only murdered millions of Jews they also murdered at least three-quarters of a million Germans. Israel is no exception to this because an ethno-nationalist state breeds a fascist mentality and the goal of racial purity is the chimera which drives it along. That is what is happening in Israel today.

The Racism that Freedland Can't See - Only 'Anti-Semitism' Concerns Him

Freedland Appeals for Palestinian Support!

It was with astonishment and amusement, that I read Freedland’s latest screed Netanyahu is an existential threat to Israel. He can be resisted – but only with Palestinian support. As Netanyahu and his Coalition proceed to neuter Israel’s Supreme Court, Freedland has woken up to the 20% of Israel’s population who are Palestinian. Realising that the ‘Jewish Democracy’ that liberal Zionists have venerated is disappearing, even for Israeli Jews, Freedland now looks around for allies. Having demonised support for the Palestinians as anti-Semitic, Freedland now appeals to the victims of ‘Jewish democracy’ to come to its rescue.

Israel's Palestinian Citizens See the Furore Over the Supreme Court as an Internal Zionist Dispute

As Smotrich told Arab members of the Knesset ‘you are here by mistake – because Ben-Gurion didn't finish the job and throw you out in 1948,". So much for the ‘Arab lie’ of the Nakba. The Judeo-Nazis that Netanyahu has allied with don’t deny the Nakba.  They complain that it was not far-reaching enough!

Israel’s Supreme Court is a Colonial Court

The proposals to neuter Israel’s Supreme Court should be opposed as the alternative is the Nazi rule by decree. Even the façade of the Supreme Court is better than no legal process at all. However when Freedland claimed that

the supreme court has regularly protected the rights of minorities – including the 20% of Israeli citizens who are Palestinian Arab

this is what is known as a dirty fat lie. On the contrary Israel’s Supreme Court has presided over the theft of Palestinian land, both within Israel itself and the Occupied Territories.

By Supporting a 'Jewish' State This is What Freedland Supports - the Quest for Jewish Racial Purity

It has failed, even once, to rule against the more than 65 laws which discriminate against Israeli Palestinians. In the West Bank it has ignored international law. The Supreme Court has presided over the theft of Palestinian land in the West Bank using a variety of legal tricks. In July 2022 it ruled that the Mitzpeh Kramim settlement could stay because the land was stolen in ‘good faith’.

The Supreme Court created the legal architecture of Israeli Apartheid. It has consistently upheld claims by right-wing settlers in Jerusalem seeking to evict Palestinians because Jews once owned the land when Jordan captured East Jerusalem in 1948. Yet it has never once ruled that Palestinians who owned property in West Jerusalem before 1948 were entitled to its return.

The Supreme Court has ruled that demolition of the homes of relatives of ‘Arab terrorists’ is fine, because it deters terrorism but has ruled against demolishing Jewish terrorists homes. Former Supreme Court Justice Menachem Mazzuz retired early, at least in part, because he was overruled in his belief that demolitions were ‘illegal and immoral’ and a form of collective punishment.

In July 2021 the Supreme Court held, by 10-1, that the overtly racist Jewish Nation State Law was constitutional even though it explicitly discriminated against Israel’s Palestinian citizens. In the process they affirmed that that Arab citizenship was all but worthless.

The Supreme Court Only Approves House Demolitions in the case of Arab 'terrorists' - it never approves doing so with Jewish terrorists

The one Supreme Court justice who ruled against the law was its only Arab member, George Karra. Not one Jewish judge was prepared to leave their racism and Zionism at home. This is the Supreme Court that thousands of Israeli Jews are taking to the streets for. See Israeli courts legitimized the state’s worst policies. We must still protect them

Today it is the Supreme Court which is leading the drive to evict the Palestinian villagers of Khan al Ahmar on the West Bank having already ruled that the 1000 Palestinian inhabitants of Masafer Yatta should be evicted to make way for an army firing range.

Freedland knows all of this yet he lies about the role of Israel’s Supreme Court in protecting Palestinians. The Supreme Court is and always has been a Colonial Court of Zionism.

The objections of Religious Zionism and Likud to the Supreme Court have nothing to do with its record over the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. It is about an entirely different matter. Internal Jewish/Zionist disputes.

The Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that Reform and Liberal Judaism conversions must be recognised for the purposes of who is a Jew. It has taken the view that the definition of ‘Who is a Jew’ must be broad whereas the Orthodox Religious parties in Netanyahu’s coalition, want to narrow the definition of a Jew, excluding those who qualify under the ‘grandfather’ clause in the Law of Return.

This is an internal Zionist debate irrelevant to the Palestinians. Who cares who qualifies as Zionism’s Ubermenschen. Indeed it serves our interests that the definition of who is a Jew is as narrow as possible because then Jewry in the diaspora will wake up to the narrow, racist and nationalist state that Israel is. We have no irons in the fire.

As Ha’aretz wrote in an editorial, the Supreme Court is ‘the Occupation's Rubber Stamp’. Chief Justice Esther Hayut stated that

‘there is no need to make a ruling…on the question of the applicability of Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty to the Palestinian population in the area.’

The Supreme Court is perfectly happy with a situation where Israeli civil law applies to Jewish settlers and military law applies to Palestinians. See When the Exceptional is Regular: The Supreme Court on Israel’s Landgrabs by Hagai El-Ad of B’Tselem.

Jonathan Freedland knows all of this. One thing he isn’t is stupid.  Malevolent yes, dishonest yes, but stupid no. He also knows that a Jewish Democratic state is an oxymoron. The state is either Jewish, in which case Jews are entitled to preferential treatment or it is Democratic. As it stands Israel is Jewish for Arabs and Democratic for Jews.

What Freedland wants is for Israel’s Arab citizens, who possess a citizenship which relegates them to the status of tolerated guests, to rescue the democracy in ‘Jewish democracy’ even though they themselves will not benefit from it.

Although I knew it wouldn’t be printed, I sent the Guardian a letter.  However Freedland does not do criticism. Today the letters column of the Guardian has also been Freedlandised.

The Supreme Court as Israel’s Iron Dome & Flak Jacket

But if the Supreme Court doesn’t protect Palestinians what it does do is to protect Israel’s army of occupation. In the Jerusalem Postformer MK Rachel Azaria described the High Court, as

‘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,"

Likewise Alan Dershowitz, explained how:

“It will make it much more difficult for people like me who try to defend Israel in the international court of public opinion to defend them effectively, It would be a tragedy to see the Supreme Court weakened.”

Aharon Barak, the former Chief Justice, made the same the argument.

The High Court has acted as a kind of legal “Iron Dome,”. Without a credible independent court, deemed as ensuring Israel’s democratic functioning, including in its treatment of the Palestinians, “our chief of staff and government ministers will immediately be arrested when they travel overseas…  The leaders of the country will be put on trial in the International Criminal Court in The Hague.”

In January 2019 Supreme Court President Esther Hayut argued that

one of the important side effects of judicial review is its contribution to Israel’s international legitimization.” Its intervention helps “bolster Israel’s claim of ‘complementarity’ when it deals with criminal proceedings in foreign courts, whether international or those of other countries.”

In other words, contrary to Freedland’s lies, the Supreme Court protects Israel’s war criminals not the Palestinians. Neutering the Supreme Court strips away the illusions in Israeli democracy.

Tony Greenstein

A Short Email to Freedland

Dear Jonathan,

Having spent the Corbyn years equating support for the Palestinians with anti-Semitism you are now calling on them to rescue Israel from the consequences of Zionism and settler colonialism.

And as we both know the 'antisemitism' you wrote interminably about was nothing of the kind. Otherwise you might have spent a little time on Boris Johnson and Rees Mogg's undoubted antisemitism.

It is difficult to know whether it's just malevolence or just stupidity that drives you.  Perhaps it's both.

It is no coincidence that the only Jewish hero of the holocaust that you could find was an anti-Zionist.  I've yet to read your book so I will reserve judgement on whether or not you had anything to say on this aspect of Vrba.

Oh and speaking of the holocaust I have brought out a book Zionism During the Holocaust about the true record of the Kasztners and Ben Gurions.

Either way I somehow doubt that many Palestinians will be queuing up to support a Supreme Court which, contrary to the little lie in your article, has consistently negated Arab rights in and without Israel.

tony greenstein

The SHA’s ‘crime’? Opposing Streeting & Starmer’s support for the Privatisation of the NHS

The Socialist Health Association, formerly known as the Socialist Medical Association, has been affiliated to the Labour Party since 1931. The SHA was formed to campaign for a National Health Service. Not surprisingly they are strongly opposed to the plans of Starmer and Streeting to turn the NHS into a British version of American Medicare & Medicaid, dominated as it is by insurance companies and private companies who make rich pickings at the expense of patients.

We know that Starmer, Streeting and the other cuckoos in Labour’s nest are ‘business friendly’, but the NHS must be off limits to the hedge fund owners, venture capitalists, US health care companies and other capitalist vultures.

It is some measure of how right-wing Starmer and his supporters are that they would even think of disaffiliating an organisation which was one of the original campaigners for a national health service, free at the point of delivery. The SHA has been affiliated to the Labour Party for nearly 92 years.

People may remember that when Starmer was elected leader of the Labour Party he pledged that

Public services should be in public hands, not making profits for shareholders. Support common ownership of rail, mail, energy and water; end outsourcing in our NHS, local government and justice system.

Starmer meant none of this. He lied, lied and lied again in order to get elected and once Leader he junked every single one of his promises.

On 11^th January 2023 the SHA issued a strong statement in response to a statement by West Streeting, Shadow Health Secretary, supporting greater involvement by private companies in the NHS. ‘SHA response to use of private health companies’. Its subtitle was blunt and to the point: ‘Statement on Wes Streeting’s NHS proposals and acceptance of donations from John Armitage and MPM Connect.

Gurinder Singh Josan

The response by Starmer’s supporters in the form of Gurinder Singh Josan CBE has been to allege irregularities in the recent SHA elections of its Officers and Executive.

In a tweet of 29 January 2023 Josan alleged

·        constitutional breaches

·        attempts to manipulate result

·        breaches of GDPR

All the things that Starmer and his cronies have turned into a fine art. For supporters of Starmer to allege breaches of the GDPR and the SHA’s constitution after all the attempts by them to rig elections and their loss of members’ data demonstrates that satire has lost all meaning for them. As for attempts to manipulate the result, we only need recall their attempts to fiddle the result of the trigger ballots of Ian Byrne MP and Apsama Begum MP.

In a statement issued by the pro-privatisation candidates, including Jewish Labour Movement clone Neil Nerva, they withdrew from the elections and called on the Returning Officer and the SHA Officers to resign and then called on the Labour Party

‘to give consideration to the undemocratic nature of one of its affiliated Socialist Societies and to take appropriate action to review the affiliation’.

They also called on the SHA Officers to self-refer themselves to the Information Commissioner’s Office!

The right-wingers complained that the National Secretary of the SHA, Harry Stratton, had lobbied SHA  members in support of the socialist slate of candidates, having done precisely that themselves!

Knowing full well that they would lose, the Privatisation Slate then withdrew from the elections.  Unfortunately they left it too late.

The four successful socialists who were elected as Vice Chair (the Chair, Secretary and Treasurer being elected unopposed) gained an average of 707 votes. The unsuccessful privatisation candidates gained an average of 122.5 votes! In other words the socialist candidates secure 5.77 votes for every vote that the right-wing candidates obtained!

Clearly the vast majority of SHA members prefer to keep the NHS public and not turn it into an auction for the highest bidder.

The three victorious officers, Chair Mark Ladbrooke, Secretary Harry Stratton and Treasurer Esther Giles issued a joint statement celebrating their victory. It read,

“SHA members recognise that accelerating moves to integrate private providers into the health service will drain funding from the NHS and turn it into a mere brand for a mess of private corporations- all extracting shareholder returns and cutting services in order to do so.

“Big corporations have captured top NHS bodies with the intention of funnelling NHS resources into their pockets. They train few- if any- staff and maintain a parasitic role in the sector. Members of Labour’s front bench are deeply mistaken if they believe these businesses will resolve the catastrophic problems caused by decades of neoliberal austerity and service cuts.”

Two years ago Gurinder Singh, who is close to Tom Watson and the far-right Labour MP John Spellar, was subject to complaints of bullying a blind fellow Muslim UNITE member alongside Spellar. Singh is also close to local Sandwell Tories.

Unsurprisingly the reaction of property dealer Gurinder Singh (owner of Josan Estates Ltd.) and his friends is to try and disaffiliate the SHA and then set up a new organisation from which socialists will be barred.

All of this takes place in the context of the refusal of Starmer and Streeting to support the nurses and ambulance workers in their fight to decent pay and conditions and their attacks on the health unions over their proposals for reform.

What You Can Do

On Labour’s National Executive Committee there are 11 trade union representatives. They are:

Div. I – Trade Unions: Mark Ferguson (Unison)
Div. I – Trade Unions: Nicola Jukes (TSSA)
Div. I – Trade Unions: Isabelle Gutierrez (Musicians’ Union)
Div. I – Trade Unions: Michael Wheeler (USDAW)
Div. I – Trade Unions: Wendy Nichols (Unison)
Div. I – Trade Unions: Andy Kerr (CWU)
Div. I – Trade Unions: Gavin Sibthorpe (GMB)
Div. I – Trade Unions: Jayne Taylor (UNITE)
Div. I – Trade Unions: Kathy Abu-Bakir (GMB)
Div. I – Trade Unions: Ian Murray (FBU)
Div. I – Trade Unions: Mick Whelan (ASLEF)
Div. I – Trade Unions: Joanne McGuinness (USDAW)
Div. I – Trade Unions: Tony Woodhouse (UNITE)

Most of them have supported Starmer’s purge of the left and socialists in the Labour Party. Union members must demand that they oppose any attempt to disaffiliate the SHA. For any trade union member to support the attempts of Gurinder Singh, Starmer and Johanna Baxter to disaffiliate the SHA would be the equivalent of supporting the privatisation of the NHS.

My own union UNITE has two representatives. I shall be moving at my branch that they are instructed to oppose any attempt by Starmer and Streeting to disaffiliate the SHA and thus further the privatisation agenda of the Right. I urge you to do the same.

If there is any Socialist Society that should be disaffiliated it is the apartheid supporting, racist Jewish Labour Movement.

Tony Greenstein

Reeves Combines Zionism, Racism, Admiration for a Hitler Loving Anti-Semite & Hostility to the Disabled & Claimants - a Bigot for All Seasons

Sturmer pays tribute to Jeremy Corbyn

Trying to find the most despicable politician in Britain today is no easy matter. The competition is strong. The Tories have no end of good candidates – Ugly Patel, Cruella Braverman, Boris and Mogg – but they are Tories. You would expect no better of those who are ‘lower than vermin’ (A Bevan).

The competition is equally strong amongst Labour MPs. Keir Starmer himself is a strong contender, not least because when it comes to honesty and respect for the truth he makes Boris Johnson seem a paragon of virtue. Jess Phillips would also be a strong contender if anyone took her seriously. But the winner by a mile has to be Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves.

Reeves has all the required qualities of bigotry, prejudice, upper class disdain and sheer dishonesty. A former Bank of England economist she is so far to the right that she’s in danger of falling off the planet.

Reeves first came to people’s attention as an unreconstructed stone-age right-winger when, in an interview with the Guardian she declared that

“We are not the party of people on benefits. We don’t want to be seen, and we’re not, the party to represent those who are out of work,” she said. “Labour are a party of working people, formed for and by working people.”

18 months previously, as Ed Miliband’s  shadow work and pensions secretary, she had promised that

‘We would be tougher [than the Conservatives]. If they don't take it [the offer of a job] they will forfeit their benefit.’

In other words starvation would be used to make the jobless take the any job, however low the pay. Thus continuing the Tory policy of using unemployment to lower the price of labour. She also promised that Labour would be tougher than the Tories when it comes to slashing the benefits bill.

Yet if anyone is likely to replace the charisma-free zone that is Keith Starmer then it is Reeves, who doesn’t have a socialist bone in her body. Unlike Starmer she didn’t serve in Corbyn’s shadow cabinet and never felt obliged to say anything in his defence unlike the two-faced Starmer.

A number of leading Zionists like Jewish Chronicle Editor Jake Wallis Simonshave criticised Starmer because of this. Starmer’s replacement may prove attractive to the Labour Right. See Can Jews like me trust Keir Starmer’s Labour party?

The hypocrisy and dishonesty surrounding Labour’s fake ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign is nowhere better evidenced in Reeves admiration for the Hitler admiring Lady Nancy Astor, the second woman to be elected to Parliament on 28 November 1919.

The Countess Markievicz

Reeves claim that Astor was the first woman elected to Parliament conveniently omitted the revolutionary socialist Sinn Fein MP the Countess Markievicz who was elected 11 months earlier, though she did not take her seat.

Labour Party members have been expelled for far less than praise for a Hitler devotee, yet Starmer deliberately ignored Reeves gushing praise of Astor. The same was true of the Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland who uttered not a word of criticism of Reeves, confining his criticism to Corbyn.

Corbyn was slated by the Board of Deputies for having ignored John Hobson’s anti-Semitism in his introduction to Imperialism yet Hobson’s anti-Semitism pales in comparison to that of Astor.

The Anti-Semitism of Lady Astor that Reeves & Starmer Have Endorsed by Omission

In 1936 Lady Astor and others of her class, wrote to Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin that they “‘wholeheartedly’ endorsed the Führer‘s act” in marching into the Rhineland. The Cliveden set, named after Astor’s country residence, was a term first used by the Reynolds News on 28 November 1937. In 1938 they entertained Nazi apologist Charles Lindbergh. The group were highly sympathetic to fascism. A David Low cartoon published in the Evening Standard, showed Astor and Times Editor Geoffrey Dawson and others, holding high the slogan "Any Sort of Peace at Any Sort of Price".

Astor and fellow parasites

did I not after all believe there must be something of the Jews themselves which had brought them persecution throughout all the ages? Was it not therefore, in the final analysis, their responsibility?

Astor accused the Foreign Office of being manipulated by Catholics, who she also hated.

Astor became convinced that she was a victim of “Jewish Communistic propaganda”. In the House of Commons on 28 February 1938, Harold Nicolson heard Alan Graham, Tory Party MP for Wirral, say to Astor: "I do not think you behaved very well." She replied: "Only a Jew like you would dare to be rude to me."The News Chroniclecommented that Astor's "emotions about the Jews" had overcome "her sense of fitness". She introduced Chaim Weizmann at a party as "the only decent Jew I have ever met." Which says as much about Weizmann, the President of the World Zionist Organisation and Israel’s first President as it does about Astor.

Claude Cockburn linked the Astors to appeasement on the basis that they were keen to use Hitler as a bulwark against Bolshevism. Astor had connections with influential people such as Philip Kerr who was active as an emissary to Hitler.

Astor complained that the Observer, which belonged to her husband's family, was "full of homosexuals and Jews" and worked to bar Jews and Catholics from the newspaper's senior positions.

Astor wrote letters to US Ambassador Joseph Kennedy in which she suggested the Nazis were a solution to "the world problems" of Jewry and Communism. She told Kennedy Hitler would have to do more than "give a rough time" to "the killers of Christ" for her to want Britain and America to launch

"Armageddon to save them. The wheel of history swings round as the Lord would have it. Who are we to stand in the way of the future?"

She was referred to as "the Honourable Member from Berlin" during a 1939 Commons debate. Her opposition to the war earned her the title of "Hitler's woman in Britain".

It is inconceivable that Reeves was unaware of Nancy Astor’s virulent anti-Semitism yet even when it was pointed out to her, she refused to retract her praise of Astor. Starmer adamantly refused to do anything.

Let it not be said that Reeves only has a blind spot when it comes to anti-Semitism and love of Hitler. Reeves is equally bigoted against the unemployed and disabled saying that Labour does not want to represent people out of work.

Reeves, like many anti-Semites, adores the Israeli state and Zionism. After Kim Johnson had been threatened with the loss of the whip for describing Israel as a fascist and apartheid state, Reeves said that Johnson’s treatment was ‘a sign of just how serious Keir Starmer is at booting both antisemitism and “anti-Zionism” out of Labour.’

In an article‘I’m proud to be a Labour Friend of Israel’, Reeves said she believed that political criticism of Israel was motivated by antisemitism. A completely evidence-free accusation as she herself proves. She also made it clear that the presence of fascists and neo-Nazis in Israel’s government would ‘not stop a future Labour government forging a strong relationship with the Jewish state’.

Since Reeves equates hostility to Israeli Apartheid with anti-Semitism it is worthwhile seeing if there is any basis to what Kim Johnson said.

 Mass murderer Baruch Goldstein - hero to Israel's Police Minister Itamar Ben Gvir

The Israeli Government’s Fascists & Neo-Nazis

The spiritual guide of Israel’s Police Minister, convicted racist Itamar Ben-Gvir, is Rabbi Dov Lior, the Chief Rabbi of Kiryat Arba. Dov Lior once said that “a thousand non-Jewish lives are not worth a Jew’s fingernail”.

Rabbi Yaacov Perrin, when presiding at Baruch Goldstein’s funeral, a man who on 25 February 1994 entered the Ibrahimi mosque in Hebron opening fire and killing 29 worshippers, told mourners that even 1 million Arabs “are not worth a Jewish fingernail.

Lior described Goldstein as "holier than all the martyrs of the Holocaust." and until recently had a picture of Goldstein on the wall of his front room. But to Starmer and Reeves it is forbidden to mention that Israel is governed by those advocating genocide of the Palestinians. People who hold security posts in Israel’s cabinet.

Dov Lior also endorsedTorat HaMelech, a guide to how to kill non-Jews according to Jewish religious law. It was written in 2009 by two rabbis, Yitzhak Shapira and Yosef Elitzur. The following are extracts from the book:

“If we kill a gentile who has violated one of the seven commandments [the Noahide laws], there is nothing wrong with the murder,”

Shapira wrote that even babies and children of Israel’s enemies may be killed, since “it is clear that they will grow to harm us. Which is almost word for word what Himmler said when justifying killing Jewish children.

‘Anywhere where the presence of a gentile poses a threat to Israel, it is permissible to kill him, even if it is a righteous gentile who is not responsible for the threatening situation.”

Other rabbis who endorsed the book included Rabbi Yaakov Yosef, son of former Sephardic Chief Rabbi Ovadia Yosef.

Gvir belonged to Rabbi Meir Kahane’s Kach. Its spokesman, Noam Federman, described Goldsteins mass murder of Palestinians as “one of greatness. It was a great act of sanctifying the Name (God).”

Zvika Fogel, a member of Gvir’s Religious Zionism, declared that

“if it is one Israeli mother crying, or a thousand Palestinian mothers crying, then a thousand Palestinian mothers will cry.”

Even Israelis have described Israel’s government as having fascist and neo-Nazi members. Daniel Blatman, a holocaust historian at the Hebrew University and Chief Historian at Poland’s Warsaw Ghetto Museum has just written an article for Ha’aretz ‘Israel’s Government Has neo-Nazi Ministers. It Really Does Recall Germany in 1933’. Ideologically Gvir, Smotrich and other members of Netanyahu’s coalition are close to the Nazis, yet Reeves told the Jewish News that she had been 'incredibly angry, frustrated and depressed'by someone telling the truth about Israeli apartheid and fascism.

It would be unfair to Reeves just to target her for her virulent Zionism. She is equally racist when it comes to asylum seekers. As the Tories began demonising refugees crossing the Channel and talking of an ‘invasion’ where was Reeves? Did she protest at the Tories racist rhetoric?  Not a bit of it.  She joined in calling on the Tories to “get a grip” of the immigration system and “ensure that people who have not got a right to be here are sent home.”

And no one is happier about the mass haemorrhaging of Labour Party members. The more members leave the better as far as Reeves is concerned. Because she is, after all, a true democrat Starmer style.

Starmer & Reeves Also Approve of Israel’s Military Junta in the West Bank – Reeves is ‘Angry’ at Any Criticism of Israeli Apartheid

It is scarcely necessary to comment on these two videos. Unprovoked violence against Issa Amro, a Palestinian activist and pacifist living in Hebron, who has been under constant attack by the Israeli military who a few months ago declared his home a ‘Closed Military Zone’.

As he was giving an interview to Lawrence Wright, an American journalist from the New Yorker, Issam was subject to an unprovoked attack.  Wright however displayed all the bias and prejudice one has come to expect from the capitalist media. His focus was on the ‘dehumanisation’ of Israel’s soldiers not the dehumanisation of the Palestinians and their treatment.

What you might ask is wrong with these presstitutes? Is support and sympathy for Israel hardwired into their brains?

But let us not forget that it is imperialist politicians like Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves who are responsible for Israel being able to get away literally with murder. Indeed the despicable Reeves is ‘angry’ that people should even call Israel out for what it is.

If Issam had attacked and kicked an Israeli soldier he would have been killed. As it is the soldier received 10 days in prison, not for the attack, but because he did it in the full glare of the media. Next time he will know to do it in the dark, out of the way of cameras.

The attacks on Palestinian medical teams in the second video are equally despicable but once again our politicians stay silent. One expects approval of atrocities and war crimes from the Tories but not from the Labour Party. But today Labour is more concerned about ‘anti-Semitism’ i.e. criticism of Israel’s actions than the Military Junta that rules in Palestine and the Apartheid society that they have created.

Israel’s neo-Nazi Police Minister Ben Gvir naturally approves of what happened to Issam.  Both Gvir and Defence/Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich approve of the expulsion of Israel’s Palestinian citizens. Why shouldn’t they? Gvir was a member of Kach, a Jewish Nazi group that called for the expulsion of all Arabs from Israel and which applauded the murder of 29 Palestinians in the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron by one of their members, Baruch Goldstein.

This is Israel’s government today but the protestors in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv are unconcerned about the Junta that rules the West Bank. Their only concern is with ‘Jewish Democracy’ and the threat to Israel’s Supreme Court.

Tony Greenstein

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 Systems Shenstone 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 quoted as 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 Dissent website 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 quoted in 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 described by 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 wrote in 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 promised to 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 Law of 2018 which officially made Israel an Apartheid State was approved by a vote of 10-1, the sole dissent coming from the sole Arab member of the court.

Eg the Central District Court reduced the 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 refused to 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 announced that 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 rejected another 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 wars between 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

Under threat of Contempt of Court & Imprisonment I have been forced to take down my blogs on the Elbit trial in Wolverhampton

Last Tuesday, after a 7 week trial, four of us were found guilty of intent to cause criminal damage at Elbit’s Shenstone factory on March 9 2021. The jury could not reach a decision in the case of Helen Caney and Judge Michael Chambers gave a strong steer to the Crown Prosecution Service that a retrial would not be in the public interest.

When considering bail, pending sentence, Chambers ordered all my blogs on the case to be taken down on pain of immediate arrest and imprisonment for contempt of court. Further that there should be no further comment on what had transpired in the case. As a result all the posts, on both this and my shadow blog site have been taken down. 

At the time when I took down posts on this blog I forgot to take those down on my shadow blog. Jonathan Turner, CEO of UK Lawyers for Israel immediately emailed Chambers seeking my incarceration. [See Craig Murray's Blog, Lawyers For Israel Oppose Conscience]

Regavim recently went to the Israeli High Court to get the eviction of Khan al-Ahmar sped up

UKLFI is a far-right Zionist organisation which in December 2019 invited a representative of Regavim, an Israeli NGO, whose main activity consists of urging the Israeli government and courts to demolish Palestinian villages and homes, to speak to a meeting they held.

Regavim was founded by current Israeli Finance Minister and the Gauleiter of the West Bank, Bezalel Smotrich, a self-described‘proud homophobe’, who declared that he wouldn’t want his wife giving birth in a ward where there were Arab women. Smotrich recently called for the ‘wiping out’ of the Palestinian town of Huwara and in the face of widespread criticism claimed it was a ‘slip of the tongue’.

UKLFI has made the targeting of Palestinian academics like Shahd Abusalama and Palestinian supporters and events one of its priorities in Britain. It is an organisation stuffed with far-right politicians as its patrons, most of whom also appear to be lawyers including a former Master of the Rolls, Lord Dyson.

Turner is a barrister at 3 Stone Buildings. He is however concerned about possible contempt. When my own barrister Danielle Manson sent me a copy of Turner’s email I immediately took down the offending blogs.

I have, at the suggestion of other counsel in this case, made a formal complaint about Turner behavior to the Bar Standards Board since Turner is not involved in the case and has no interest in it other than to try and cause mischief.

Jonathan Hoffman demonstrating alongside Paul Besser of Britain First

Paul Besser with Jayda Franzen, Deputy Leader Britain First (left) and Paul Golding, Leader of BF (right)

Hoffman denies that Besser has any connection with Britain First despite the   photographic evidence above

Jonathan Hoffman – Link Man Between Zionists and Fascist/Neo-Nazi Groups

Another Zionist who was excited by my conviction was Jonathan Hoffman, who send me an email. Hoffman is a former Zionist Federation Vice-Chair and these days the link man between Zionist and Fascist/Neo-Nazi groups. Hoffman wrote that:

‘Haven't been so deliriously sic!) happy since Corbyn got smashed on 12/12/19.’  

Hoffman is particularly close to Paul Besser, former Intelligence Officer for Britain First. He also demonstrated alongside the English Defence League at the picket of Ahava, an Israeli shop in Covent Garden.

Hoffman and Besser (back) Ambrosine Shitreet (Pegida) and Mad Mel Gharial - a Tommy Robinson groupie

Besser (left), Hoffman (right) and Tommy Robinson and Pegida supporter Sharon Klaff (centre)

Hoffman is someone who will defend any war crime indeed any crime that is committed by Israel or Israelis. This even extended to the gang rape of a British woman by 12 Israelis in Cyprus in 2019.

The Cypriot police charged the woman with making a false allegation and the Israeli rapists returned home to a heroes welcome. Eventually the charge against the woman was overturned after a public outcry.

Hoffman found it difficult to understand the attacks on him from 'the women's rights lobby'i.e. feminists, because he had defended Israeli rapists

Hoffman was unperturbed by the injustice to the woman. All he could see was that Israelis had been accused of rape and leapt to their defence. To be fair Hoffman has defended rape and abuse by the Israeli military for so long that he was unable to understand what all the fuss was about when a British woman was raped by the best that Israel could produce.

Hoffman & Kevin Caroll of the EDL on official Jewish EDL video

Hoffman is particularly irked by the proof I provided of his links with fascist and neo-Nazi groups

Hoffman has himself previously been convicted of harassing a group of women protesters. Quite ludicrously he compared his conviction to that of suffragettes who were convicted. 

The Rights of Juries to Acquit According to their Conscience

Although I can't comment on the proceedings of the trial itself, I am not required to abstain on commenting on Judge Chamber’s own remarks when ordering my blogs to be removed. It was reported in the Brighton & Hove News that:

Following the verdict, Greenstein, 69, was also ordered by the judge to take down several blog posts in which urged jurors to acquit him and his co-defendants as a matter of conscience – which the judge said constituted “serious contempt”.

His Honour Judge Michael Chambers said: “It has been brought to my attention Mr Greenstein has been running an open commentary as to what’s been happening in the trial on his blog.

“Had the jury not come back, I was going to consider whether his liberty should be maintained.

“Not only has he been running a log of what’s happened, including matters not in front of the jury, it’s also been inaccurate.

“He’s also been calling on jurors to return outcomes according to conscience. That’s a serious matter of contempt.

“It’s a serious contempt to invite jurors to return outcomes which are not in accordance with the facts, but in accordance with their conscience.

“He will remove all this material from the log and desist.

“He needs to understand that if he fails to do so he will be brought back here under a warrant and will be remanded in custody.”

He added: “I don’t spend all my time reading blogs, but there are some people who do.”

There are, suffice to say, serious errors in all of these remarks.

i.              At no time, in any of the blogs, was I urging the jurors in the present case to return a verdict according to their conscience. The place to do that was in the Court and that was impossible since such an appeal would have been ruled out of order and the jury sent out.

ii.       What I have done was to argue, stemming from Bushell’s case in 1670, that jurors have the right to return a verdict according to their convictions or conscience. There is no reason why I should not have referred to this case since it is established law.

iii.        On the walls of the Old Bailey is a plaque which states that:

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

Judge Chambers is therefore wrong to suggest that the call for jurors to return a verdict according to their conscience is ‘a serious matter of contempt’. It is nothing of the sort. Chief Justice Vaughan’s ruling in the Court of Common Pleas ‘which established the Right of Juries to give their Verdict according to their Convictions’ remains good law today. That is not my opinion.

iv.        As Marcel BerlinsandClare Dyerwrote‘Lord Devlin, one of the great law lords, regarded the jury's right to bring in a perverse acquittal as one of the glories of our jury system.’

"It gives protection against laws which the ordinary man regards as harsh and oppressive . . . an insurance that the criminal law will conform to the ordinary man's ideas of what is fair and just. If it does not, the jury will not be a party to its enforcement."

v.           It has been more recently restated by Heather Hallett, a member of the Court of Appeal from 2005-2019. In her 2017 Blackstone Lecture on the Role of the Jury 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 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 law or unjust application of the law. There is a check against arbitrary or oppressive conduct by the court. Here the 17th century rationale lives on despite Caverno’s claim. We see as Professor Zander has properly pointed out the jury can set aside ‘unjust laws, oppressive prosecutions and harsh sentences.’

If further proof was needed that a jury returning a verdict according to their conscience is good law, then Law Lord Lord Hoffmann confirmed this in R v Jones (Margaret) [2007] 1 AC 161 (89) when he stated:

My Lords, civil disobedience on conscientious grounds has a long and honourable history in this country. People who break the law to affirm their belief in the injustice of a law or government action are sometimes vindicated by history. The suffragettes are an example which comes immediately to mind. It is the mark of a civilised community that it can accommodate protests and demonstrations of this kind.

The second error made by Judge Chambers was to say that:

“It’s a serious contempt to invite jurors to return outcomes which are not in accordance with the facts, but in accordance with their conscience.

The error lies in counterposing ‘facts’ to ‘conscience’. Nothing I wrote suggested that jurors should not have regard to the facts. Quite the contrary. It is the Court of Appeal and Judges like Silas Reid of Inner London Crown Court, who has gaoled at least 3 Insulate Britain protesters for daring to mention the words Climate Change who object to jurors knowing all the facts.

The problem is not with jurors knowing the facts but that they are prevented from knowing all of the facts. It is the perverse ruling of the Court of Appeal and LCJ Ian Burnett in the Colston referral excluding the defence of lawful excuse, which is a statutory defence to criminal damage, that is the problem.

Jurors are being prevented from knowing why Defendants take the action they do, i.e. their motivation. As has been seen in the case of Silas Reid, mere mention by Defendants of their motives is met with a sentence of immediate prison for contempt of court which is an abuse of process since the decision to imprison is in the hands of the same judge. Jurors don’t sit on a contempt of court case. The judge is a judge in his own cause which is a breach of natural justice.

The real objection to jurors acquitting according to their conscience is not to them knowing the facts but to them knowing too many facts! The fear is that if jurors understand why activists commit criminal damage, i.e. in order to prevent far greater crimes such as war crimes, then they will acquit the defendants in what has become known as ‘perverse verdicts’ but which in reality are anything but perverse.

I have however taken down my blogs, not because I accept there was anything in them which merited the charge of contempt of court but because I didn’t want to deliberately court imprisonment.

The Rule of Law and How It is Selectively Applied

Britain is, in theory governed by the Rule of Law but in practice this is a legal fiction whose purpose is to act as a smokescreen hiding who it is that holds power.

In recent years this concept has become more threadbare and honoured in the breach under Boris Johnson who, as Prime Minister, openly flouted and disregarded the very COVID lockdown laws that he had insisted on others obeying.

Johnson attended at least 10 parties according to an ITN investigation but the Metropolitan Police, who had initially refused to investigate any breach by Johnson of the COVID regulations, onlyinvestigatedhalfofthem and only sent Johnson a Questionnaire related to one of them. Johnson was recorded as saying of one party that “this is the most unsocially distanced party in the UK”.

The Met’s excuse was that it did not investigate breaches of coronavirus regulations “long after they are said to have taken place”. The Met presumably only investigates crime before they are committed! Which is probably why they arrestedprotesters against the Coronation before they even got to the demonstrations! It was only after the Public Law Project threatened to judicially review the Met’s decision that they conducted a cursory investigation.

Nor was this the only instance of the Met turning a blind eye to Johnson and his cronies breaking the law. Johnson, when Mayor of London, securedforhismistress, Jennifer Arcuri, a £100,000 grant from the Greater London Authority for her business, Hacker’s House, which was based in California not London, whilst failing to declare an interest. Unsurprisingly the Met has not investigated this fraud and Whitehall’s internal audit agency conducted a whitewash inquiry.

The massivefraud, estimated at £16 billion, in COVID grants to cronies and friends of the Government is well documented. The government's use of a "VIP lane" to award contracts for PPE to cronies and friends was ruledunlawful by the High Court. Yet despite this there have been no consequences for the fraudsters.

Health Secretary Matt Hancock secured a £30 million deal to supply test tubes for COVID tests for his friend and local pub landlord Alex Bourne’s company Hinpack Limited. The company had no experience of supplying medical equipment but who cares? Certainly not the Met.

Tory peer, Lady Michelle Mone and her husband, Douglas Barrowman, were beneficiaries of the VIP lane. Mone and her company, PPE Medpro made in excess of £100m in profits from government contracts worth £203m. Little or nothing appears to have been done to prosecute Mone and Barrowman. PPE Medpro stated that its principal business activity was international trading in coffee, consumables, edible nuts and fruits. In other words nothing to do with the supply of PPE. What they did supply proved useless.

Powerful politicians and government ministers effectively have immunity from criminal prosecution whereas those who threaten Israeli arms company with ‘criminal damage’ feel the full force of the law. Are these decisions political?  According to the judges the answer is no but to most people the answer is obvious. There is one law for the rich and one for the poor.

The rule of law, has been closely associated with Tory constitutionalist A.V. Dicey and his book Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution.

There were 3 aspects of the rule of law that Dicey highlighted. The first was that no man is punishable or can be lawfully be made to suffer or be deprived of their goods unless they have violated the law and an absolute supremacy of regular law over arbitrary power.

The second was equality before the law. Theoretically whatever an individual’s rank s/he is subject to the ordinary law of the land. State officials were not to be given any special privileges or protections from the law. “Be you ever so high, the law is above you.”

The third aspect denotes that the principles of the constitution are the result of the ordinary law of the land. Dicey stated that Britain had a court-based common law constitution, in the sense that decisions made by the judges directly resulted in the principles of the constitution concerning the rights of private persons. Yet all of these fine principles have never been observed.

In theory the selling of honours is a criminal offence under the Honours (Prevention of Abuses) Act 1925. The only problem is that no one has ever been prosecuted under it because those who have breached it have been Prime Ministers and powerful officials. We had the Cash for Honours scandal under Tony Blair, when those who loaned large sums to New Labour were given seats in the House of Lords. Blair was interviewed by the Met but not under caution.

There has been a similar cashforhonoursscandal under Boris Johnson but again the Met has done nothing despite the fact that one in 10 Tory peers have donated£100,000 to the party. In total 21 Tory peers have donated almost £50 million yet the Police have done nothing and there hasn’t been so much as one prosecution.

Thomas Bingham, a former Lord Chief Justice and Senior Law Lord, who was described as “the most significant judicial figure … in the history of the Anglo-Saxon legal systems." formulated Eight Principles of the Rules of Law. The third rule stipulated that ‘The laws of the land should apply equally to all, save to the extent that objective differences justify differentiation.’ As the above demonstrates, defrauding the public exchequer of billions of pounds by friends and cronies of government ministers is fine whereas someone who shoplifts to feed their kids in the local Tesco faces going to gaol.

The eighth rule of Bingham was that ‘The rule of law requires compliance by the state with its obligations in international law as in national law.’ Given the absence of any such compliance or enforcement by the British state, human rights and political activists have filled the gap. But to British judges this has been called‘taking the law into one’s own hands’. But when the law is selectively applied what else can people do but apply it themselves?

For reasons of political expediency, Lord Chief Justice IanBurnett and the Court of Appeal have ensured that this obligation by the British State is rendered null and void by judicially erasing the phrase ‘without lawful excuse’ as a defence in cases under the Criminal Damage Act 1971.

If the rule of law meant anything then the Police would have investigated Elbit’s manufacture of drones which commit war crimes in Gaza, Kashmir and Myanamar. Instead they have turned a blind eye. Elbit provides Israel with 85% of its dronesand 80% of its munitions including WhitePhosphorous which Israel has used against UN schools.

However you would be failing to account for the ingenuity of the British ‘Justice’ System. Burnett presidedover the trial of Julian Assange whose ‘crime’ was disclosing US war crimes in Iraq. He revealed how US pilots had deliberatelymurdered innocent civilians, including two Reuters journalists, mowing them down with machine gun.

You have to hand it to Burnett. It takes a certain genius whereby those who reveal the secrets of war crimes are imprisoned at the behest of the war criminals. The NurembergTrials of 1946 in respect of the Nazi war criminals would have been turned on their head if Burnett and the Court of Appeal had had their way. If Nazi Germany had won the war then the Nazi equivalent of Burnett would have prosecuted those who revealed the secrets of Auschwitz. After all, under Nazi law, Auschwitz and the extermination camps were also statesecrets.

This is the irony of the decision of the Court of Appeal in the Colston case which was referred to it. The British Establishment – from Cruella Braverman to Keir ‘liar’ Starmer - was outraged that those who toppled the statue of a mass murderer and slave trader, Edward Colston, from his plinth and which was thrown into Bristol harbor were acquitted.

Julian Assange has been imprisoned in Belmarsh, Britain’s equivalent of Guantanamo, whilst the war criminals he exposed are free to commit further crimes.

At the same time as the jury in our case was deliberating, Israel was bombing Gaza. In order to take out three leaders of Islamic Jihad Israel murdered 10 civilians, including4children. This is a war crime but British judges are like the 3 wise monkeys– they neither hear, see or say anything about this because it is ‘political’ and we are mere criminals.

Exactly the same arguments employed today against those who engage in direct action was said in the past. From the Barons’ revolt against King John that led to Magna Carta, to Oliver Cromwell and the Roundheads, the Chartists and the Suffragettes. All of them defied the existing constitution and its judges. Judges are always the last defenders of the ancien regime.

In 1912 the Prosecutor told the jury in the trial of Emmeline Pankhurst:

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

As Craig Murray, the former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan, wrote Protest Is a Moral Duty. The Police are dtheir best to prevent any and all protests – from the Coronation to Palestine. Likewise the Judges are doing their best to criminalise and lock away demonstrators. Article 6 of the European Convention of HumanRights guaranteeing a fair trial has become a dead letter.

Of course when this happens in Hong Kong then the BBC and the Tory press wax lyrical about freedom of speech and democracy but when it happens in Britain these same hypocrites fall silent.

Tony Greenstein

YouTube Collude with Zionism's Genocidal Racism By Deleting Videos of Their Crimes Under Hate Speech Policies

Pogrom against Palestinians by Jewish Settlers Jerusalem Day 29 May

Last Thursday 18 May the annual ritual of thousands of settlers being herded and protected by the Israeli Police through Damascus Gate in East Jerusalem took place. They chanted a variety of racist slogans, such as the delightful ‘Death to the Arabs’ whilst attacking any Palestinian they could lay their hands on.

It was an Israeli Labor government that instituted Jerusalem Day in 1968 as an assertion of Jewish Supremacy over Arab Jerusalem.

Last year it was Security Minister Omar Bar Lev, a member of the Israeli Labor Party, who gave authorisation to the Flag March and the inevitable pogrom through East Jerusalem.

You will remember that the Israeli Labor Party was part of the so-called Government of Change with Benny Gantz, who outlawed 6 Palestinian Human Rights groups at the stroke of a pen, including the highly dangerous Defence for Children International – Palestine. Whatever else it was the Change Government represented no change for Palestinians.

This year the march was led by Israel’s Police Minister, the neo-Nazi Police Minister Itamar Ben Gvir of Otzma Yehudit, Jewish Power. In the West the very term ‘Jewish Power’ is considered an anti-Semitic phrase but not in Israel where it is a reality.

Even Moshe Yalon, the right-wing former Likud Defence Minister has characterised Ben Gvir as ‘Mein Kampf in reverse’ but the yellow press and the craven BBC cannot bring themselves to describe in simple words the record of Gvir, who had on his living room wall until recently the picture of Baruch Goldstein, the man who massacred 29 Palestinian worshippers in the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron in 1994. This is what Zionism has evolved into.

Bogi Yaalon, "Mein Kampf," reversed and Jewish Supremacy ideology infiltrated the government

Western Hypocrisy

Just imagine what the BBC and the British press would say if in Iran, which has the second largest Jewish community in the Middle East after Israel, some 25,000, thousands of  Muslims were to march through the Jewish parts of Tehran chanting ‘Death to the Jews’.

You would have every talking head in the media condemning this in no uncertain words and talking of a second holocaust yet when it comes to the equivalent behaviour by Israeli Jewish settlers and their government supporters, there is absolute silence – not just by the British media but the New York Times, Washington Post and the rest of the prostitute press in the West.

Indeed last year we had the spectacle of the BBC’s disgusting racist, their correspondent in Israel, Yolande Knell, reporting that the pogrom through East Jerusalem was a ‘festive’ event. ‘It feels like a party’ this creature twittered into a microphone.

there are just thousands upon thousands of young Israelis like this that I’ve seen around the city the mood of them is really jubilant, it’s festive, it feels like a party.

As I wrote at the time:

‘One wonders what Yolande would have made of the Nazi pogrom Kristallnacht in November 1938. Perhaps she would have been caught up in the enthusiasm of the Nazis’ Sturmabteilung (SA) as they burnt Jewish synagogues and smashed Jewish shop windows, declaring that

there are just thousands upon thousands of young Germans. The mood of them is really jubilant, it’s festive, it feels like a party.

BBC Reporter Yolande Knell reporting on the Zionist pogrom on Jerusalem Day May 2022

But it’s not just the BBC and the British press who ignore Israel’s pogromists. The social media companies do their bit to help keep people in ignorance.

At 1.02 in the morning of 13 May I received notice from Youtube that they were taking down the video below

However I was informed that ‘If you think we've made a mistake, you can appeal and we’ll take another look.’

Now I have had experience of this kind of thing before. Not so long they took down a similar video. On that occasion it was a group of Israeli right-wingers shouting at Jewish demonstrators against house demolitions in Sheikh Jarrar in Jerusalem that ‘Hitler was right’ and telling them that they should have died in Auschwitz.

Despite me telling them that far from advocating what was in the video I was exposing the Zionists as the racists and fascists that they were Youtube turned down my appeal. I could have saved my breath because Youtube aren’t interested in exposing Zionist and Israeli racism. Their sole interest was in preventing the exposure of racism –all under the rubric of ‘hate speech’! 

In reality Youtube’s ‘hate speech’ policy is a policy to protect hate speech.  This is Youtube's commitment to anti-racism. We should not be surprised since Google is developing artificial intelligence software for use by Israel’s military for the purposes of surveillance. So I had no illusions in their ‘appeal procedure’ which is in reality a rubber stamping procedure.

In my appeal I said:

Are you stupid?  Do you deliberately conflate EXPOSING racism with ADVOCATING racism?

The video 'Jerusalem Day Demonstration by Settlers-Shireen is a Whore' doesn't support pogroms against the Palestinians by Jewish settlers but OPPOSES their racism.

Are you really that stupid?  Can you not tell the difference between exposing racism and supporting it?  

Let us assume you are not that stupid, which is possible. Then there is only one conclusion to be drawn from your removing this video and that is that you want to protect the very racists that I am exposing. In which case it is YOU not me who is guilty of breaching your 'hate speech guidelines'

In which case the disgusting hate mongers and racists are the morons who removed this video who do not even have the honesty to admit to their racism

Suffice to say this appeal did not succeed, thus proving that the Youtube Moderators are indeed racist scum.

Below is an excellent article on Mondoweiss by Mariam Barghouti about the political implications of Jerusalem’s annual flag march.

The Flag March is part of the Zionist war on Jerusalem

The Flag March represents the Zionist ethnic cleansing of Palestine and the imposition of Israeli colonial dominance over Jerusalem. It is part of the Zionist forever war on Jerusalem.

ByMariam BarghoutiMay 22, 2023

On Thursday, May 18, Israeli settler groups held the annual “Flag March” in Jerusalem. The march, or the “dance of flags,” was first inaugurated in 1968, a year after Israeli forces occupied East Jerusalem and took over Palestinian, Syrian, and Egyptian lands in the West Bank, the Golan Heights, and the Sinai. Israeli officials such as the National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich joined this year’s march, both members of the new far-right Israeli coalition.

In what the Israeli state calls “Jerusalem Day,” the Flag March signals a settler emphasis on the “reunification of Jerusalem.” However, as Palestinians insistent on remaining in their homes, from Sheikh Jarrah, to the Old City, and to neighboring towns in East Jerusalem, the Flag March has become an attempt to drive out the last remaining Palestinians from Jerusalem.

In a statement, the spokesperson for the Palestinian presidential office, Nabil Abu Rudeineh, warned that the Flag March could lead to an “explosion,” with tensions already high amidst Israel’s increased violence in Jerusalem. In a statement to the press, the Palestinian prime minister, Mohammad Shtayyeh, condemned the march as an attempt to consolidate the Judaization and conquest of Jerusalem further, emphasizing that “the Palestinians will continue to confront the policies of the occupation, no matter how heavy the price.”

However, for Palestinians in Jerusalem, the Flag March is not only a political and military move meant to solidify Israel’s stranglehold over Jerusalem but is a day of guaranteed violence and settler abuse.

The backdrop

The ethnic cleansing of Jerusalem began in 1948 with the massacres committed in Deir Yassin, Ein Karem, Abu Ghosh, and other towns surrounding Jerusalem. The military annexation of East Jerusalem began in 1967, and the judicial solidification of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel took effect on July 30, 1980. That summer, the Jerusalem Law was added to the Israeli Basic Law (a set of Israeli laws adopted in lieu of a constitution). The law declared Jerusalem, including East Jerusalem, as the capital of Israel. This further allowed the Israeli government to expand its jurisdiction over Palestinian lives in the city. This also violated international law and the internationally recognized status of East Jerusalem as occupied Palestinian territory. It is what laid the foundation for sparking the First Intifada of 1987. In December 2000, less than a year after the eruption of the Second Intifada, the Israeli Knesset made another amendment to the Jerusalem Law affirming sole Israeli power and jurisdiction over the city.

“Since the reunification of Jerusalem in 1967,” the website of Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs reads,

 “the city has become a haven for coexistence and revitalized religious and cultural expression for all faiths. Freedom of worship at all holy sites is guaranteed for the faithful of all three monotheistic religions, the first time in modern history that this has been the case.”

For Palestinians, this so-called “coexistence” has meant surviving the draconian policies of Israeli authorities known for persecuting Palestinians, enforcing apartheid, and committing crimes against humanity. 

Recent Jerusalem escalations

The settler Flag March should be viewed within the context of an escalatory dynamic particular to Jerusalem, in which rightwing settler groups and the Israeli state have attempted to progressively shrink Palestinian rights to the city while expanding Israeli colonial encroachment into Palestinian spaces. This process of encirclement has not only included the takeover of homes in neighborhoods like Sheikh Jarrah or restrictions in areas like Silwan but has also extended to restricting religious and worshiping rights. This has led to chronic and repeated flare-ups in the Old City and local and regional tensions intensifying.

In the first three months of this year, more than a dozen settler attacks were recorded against churches in Jerusalem, while police violations against Muslim worshippers and the systemic targeting of youth in the Old City intensified compared to previous years

On April 15, Israeli forces denied Palestinian Christians from participating in Easter worship by banning them from entry into the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and beating them. “The occupation, through such policies, claims that Jerusalem is theirs,” Archbishop Atallah Hanna toldMondoweiss following the police attack on the Church of Holy Sepulchre during Easter.

Just ten days before that, Israeli forces invaded the third holiest site in Islam, the al-Aqsa Mosque compound in the heart of the Old City, attacking and assaulting peaceful worshippers while they prayed. Hundreds of worshippers were arrested during the month of Ramadan, as almost 47 worshippers from the West Bank were arrested and held in detention for days and exposed to mistreatment and abuse by Israeli police, according to eyewitnesses who spoke to Mondoweiss. Meanwhile, in the West Bank, settlers have carried out arson attacks against Palestinian towns and villages, described even by the Israeli military as pogroms.

The “reunification of Jerusalem” celebrated by the Flag March therefore represents the Zionist promise for the ethnic cleansing to which the Palestinians of Jerusalem have been subjected since 1967, what the Mondoweiss Palestine Bureau has called the “Zionist forever war on Jerusalem.” 

This war has taken on many forms and has passed through several iterations. In 2017, Israeli policymakers attempted to mute the call to prayer for Muslim worshippers in Jerusalem and to set up metal detectors outside the entrance to the Aqsa compound, which resulted in the Bab al-Asbat uprising; in 2020, Israeli police and authorities began targeting bread bakeries in Jerusalem, noting that Jerusalem’s ka’ak bread is an emblem of Palestinian presence and identification in Jerusalem; in May 2021, settlers invaded the Aqsa compound, and again in April 2022, resulting in the beating and arrests of hundreds in both years.

Every year since May 1968, Palestinians in Jerusalem have had to fight for their homes and the right to assembly and freedom of worship. For Palestinians, the Flag March means surviving the violence of the Israeli state and its settlers yearly and refusing to be ethnically cleansed.

Israeli Police prepare for the closure of Old City of Jerusalem for the Flag March near the Chain Gate entrance, May 18, 2023. (Photo: Alaa Dayeh/Mondoweiss)

Holding a city captive

“[The first time I remember the Flag March] was around ten years ago,” Israa Abu Ahmad, a 29-year-old mother of two, told Mondoweiss on the day of this year’s march on May 18. “My sister was young, maybe 12 or 13, and was filming during the Flag March,” Abu Ahmad continued. “The [Israeli armed forces] then began to beat her, beat her a lot. She was a child.”

Incidents of the kind suffered by Israa are the norm for Palestinians in the Old City during the annual march. While Israelis prepare for ease of movement through the alleyways of the Old City and the streets of larger Jerusalem, Palestinians are herded through metal pathways erected around the city to ensure every Palestinian step is controlled and directed. Like most Palestinian residents of the Old City and its surrounding areas, Israa had to remain home with her children, fearing the likely violence from settlers.

“It’s as though we keep the children in a prison.”

Israa Abu Ahmad

In anticipation of settler and police violence, medical personnel and journalists were present around the city throughout the day to respond to and document developments. At approximately 3:00 p.m., before the march began, Israeli border police began manhandling, assaulting, and impeding medical staff in the area, according to on-the-ground documentation by Mondoweiss. According to reporters on the ground, several journalists were also attacked throughout the day.

Israeli Police obstruct medical personnel from moving around the Old City, Damascus Gate entrance, May 18, 2023. (Photo: Alaa Dayeh/Mondoweiss)

For the majority of the day, Palestinians were forced to remain inside their homes. Even children were denied the space to play. “I have my children here inside. It’s so hard to keep children locked in the house for 24 hours,” Israa told Mondoweiss. “It’s as though we keep [the children] in a prison.”

“I can’t play outside today, because they will hit me,” Rafeef Abu Ahmad, Israa’s 6-year-old daughter, told Mondoweiss. 

At that moment, banging was heard outside the house. “Do you see how [settlers] are beating?” Rafeef said, referring to the Jewish-Israeli youth rampaging outside her home near the Aqba Khaldiyeh area of the Old City. 

Just moments earlier, the 6-year-old had witnessed a mob of at least 15 Jewish settlers gathered around a man in her neighborhood, kicking him in the abdomen and continuing to beat him in a circle in what can only be described as an attempted lynching. Three Israeli police officers were on the scene, refusing to arrest the Jewish youth that assaulted the man and instead allowing them to continue on their rampage through the city. 

“In a previous Flag March, my shoulder was broken and, at the time my son was asleep by the window near my aunt’s house,” Israa continued, narrating the different years and forms of violence she and her family witnessed. 

“Settlers started to come out with liquor bottles across the windows and I was afraid for my son, so I went to him and carried him,” she told Mondoweiss.“By carrying my son, the bones in my shoulder broke to pieces. I had to do surgery and get platinum implants.” Israa’s son was nearly two years old at the time.

The impact this has on Palestinian Jerusalemites is also economic. These restrictions, especially during the Flag March, have forced Palestinians to close their shops early to make way for the rampaging settlers. Israa is one of them. “We closed all our shops today. I sew, and I have work. Today I closed the shop because I’m afraid they’ll attack,” she told Mondoweiss.

The day before the march on Wednesday, May 17, the Israeli police sent text messages to Palestinian residents of the Old City and shop owners, signed by the captain of the Israeli public police in the Jerusalem area, Shadi Basis. 

“Tomorrow will be the Flag March for the reunification of Jerusalem, from Damascus Gate on Waad St. to the Wailing Wall. Please take out all your cars and vehicles until 3 p.m., and shop and grocery owners must close at 3:00 p.m. Please adhere in order to obstruct collision and harm,”

Fear to document

The impact of this constant assault on Palestinian existence goes beyond the economic. It becomes an instrument of silencing Palestinians and punishing those who resist.

“We are not as strong as them, so we’re afraid,” a shop-owner in the Old City, who requested to remain anonymous, told Mondoweiss.“If the police ask us for something and we don’t do it, we become targets,” he said. “We’re afraid to have our voices recorded because of the threat that [Israeli police] will carry out revenge acts in different ways.”

“We are living in terror inside the city.”

Um Abed, shop owner

The fear witnessed in individuals and families approached by Mondoweiss for recorded interviews highlights the ways in which Israel punishes exposure. At least a dozen shop owners and residents in the city explicitly informed Mondoweiss they were afraid of repercussions from the Police if they spoke out.

“We are living in terror inside the city,” Umm Abed, a resident of the Old City and small shop owner, explained to Mondoweiss on Thursday morning, as preparations for the march ensued. “But the residents of the city cannot take this on. The youth are being banned from Aqsa, and they are either arrested or denied entry.”

“All the years that have passed are a series of assaults,” Umm Abed continued. “People come and document but all we have to protect us is God.”

Umm Abed, a shop owner in the Old City of Jerusalem .(Photo: Alaa Dayeh/Mondoweiss)

“All these marches are provocations,” Nada Khader, 53, told Mondoweiss on Thursday morning as police moved to ensure the alleyways were empty of the visible presence of its Palestinian inhabitants. Khader has been living in the Old City ever since Israeli authorities demolished her home in Beit Hanina twice — the first time in December last year, and the second in January. A widow and a mother of seven, Khader continues to face slow expulsion from Jerusalem.

“They are provoking us Jerusalemites in order to create problems and for them to try and prove their presence to say that Jerusalem is theirs,” she said.

Alaa Dayeh contributed to this article.

Roger Water’s Berlin Concert demonstrates how Political Culture can be subversive

Pickle is the weekly newsletter of alternative Jewish cultural group Vashti, which was founded in 2019 by Rivka Brown of Novara Media which supported the 'anti-Semitism' witchhunt. The group claims that it stands in opposition to the existing leadership of British Jews but does it?

Vashti  is one of a number of groups which have come about as a result of the Israel right or wrong, leadership of Britain’s Jews. Anything that weakens the Zionist consensus should be welcomed. However in their attempts to bridge the divide between anti-Zionism and Zionism there is a danger of Vashti reinforcing the very forces that caused them to form in the first place.

Jewish cultural politics can degenerate into self-indulgence and an identity politics which celebrates being Jewish for its own sake. It is but a short road to Zionism

A Jewish cultural politics that is not aware of this can end up reflecting rather than challenging the Zionist grip on British Jews. Any alternative Jewish political culture has to have as its focal point the Palestinians.

Identity politics carries with it the danger of counterposing the identity of the oppressor against the oppressed, given the Zionist context of Jewish politics today. Zionist feminism is a good example.

How Identity Politics Turned the Victims of Sabra & Chatilla into the Antisemitic Oppressors of Zionist Feminists - A Reply to Erica Burman,

Ahed Tamimi Exposes the Refusal of Western Feminism to Come to Terms with Zionism and Imperialism,

White Women as Slave Owners and the Myth of Sisterhood – Stephanie E. Jones and Why Zionist Feminism is an Oxymoron.

The Board of Deputies, the BBC and Tory establishment led the false ‘anti-Semitism’ attack on the Labour Left. Yet both Rivka Brown and Novara Media supported the witchhunt of Chris Williamson, Jackie Walker and Ken Livingstone. For some reason I was excluded from their attacks. Perhaps that was because I was White unlike Jackie.

When Rivka Brown was invited to a meeting billed as “A celebration of Jewish Radicalism” which was co-sponsored by Jewish Voices for Labour, I immediately wrote to JVL, pointing out Rivka’s poisonous attack on Chris Williamson as a ‘Jew Baiter’. I asked them to take their name off. To their credit they did so. See Solidarity is the Bread and Butter of Socialism. In the end Brown withdrew entirely.

Pickle& the Rachel Mars Interview

In the current Pickle Emma Jude Harris interviews Rachel Mars, a performance artist, starring in The Forge at the Barbican. The Forge consists of Mars welding together a replica of the gate at Dachau concentration camp. The original was stolen in 2014. It bore the slogan arbeit macht frei (work makes you free). 

Dachau was the first Nazi concentration camp and it opened on 22 March 1933, not for Jews but for communists and trade unionists.

Performance art is about challenging the conventions of visual art and using one’s body as the medium to convey hidden meanings. The mind boggles at what Mars was hoping to communicate by recreating a sign that symbolised Nazi terror. It is clear from her interview that she was not challenging conventional norms. I can’t imagine anything more boring than watching someone welding a gate on stage.

The first question Harris asked was ‘What do you feel is your “inheritance” as a Jewish person?’ which in itself begs the question as to whether there is a common Jewish inheritance. Mars’ response that‘this came up in therapy this week – so the need to go to therapy is the first one.’ speaks to class not ethnicity. Do more Jews than non-Jews go to therapy or is it a particular type of person?

Rachel Mars

 ‘As a Jewish person, I have inherited many things … a love of language, and argument, and disagreement, and debate, a certain type of love for a certain sense of humour, the need for a particular kind of community, and also a helpful feeling of otherness in Britain. But also an unnamed grief or sadness… because of Holocaust inheritance. I've inherited a big hole where there should be a lot of other people and their histories….’

The apotheosis of otherness is diversity and the depoliticisation of racism. The result is Lammy, Sunak and Braverman and the celebration of betrayal and collaboration.

Does being ‘othered’ give you a ‘helpful feeling’? What is Jewish otherness? It sounds very much like the Zionist desire to keep Jews separate from non-Jews. Otherness was forced on Jews by anti-Semitism. The response was unity with non-Jews. And do you miss people you’ve never seen or known?

Jewish humour came about as a result of oppression. It was a way of mocking authority and turning the tables. In the words of Saul Bellow ‘Oppressed people tend to be witty.’ Today Jewish people are not oppressed. This reference to Jewish humour is nothing more than pastiche, the romanticisation of a past that has long disappeared.

The interview goes from the bizarre to the banal as Emma asks ‘So what is your least favourite Holocaust memorial? And why?’ to which Rachel responds‘Ooh. I've got quite a lot of favourite ones?’

Banal because there is no questioning of why the Jewish holocaust is memorialised when no other acts of genocide are treated in this way. Bizarre because it treats holocaust memorials as if she was a child choosing her favourite candies.

In 2013 the National Congress of American Indians petitioned for a National American Indian Holocaust Museum. It’s still waiting.

The Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian depends on donations from American Indians themselves for support and this is not a Museum dedicated to the American Indian Holocaust.

The American Indian Genocide Museum in Texas is a voluntary organisation dependent on public donations. It does not receive the hundreds of millions of dollars that have been spent on the US Holocaust Memorial Museum [USHMM] in Washington.

What about a US National Slavery Museum? In 2001 a non-profit organization was founded in Fredericksburg, Virginia, to raise funds and campaign to establish a national museum on slavery. In 2008 the project died due to its inability to raise sufficient funds to pay property taxes, let alone begin construction. It has been abandoned.

The Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama was established in 2018 at an estimated cost of $20 million raised from private donations and charitable foundations. It was established by the Equal Justice Initiative, a non-profit organisation. It costs $5 to enter.

Contrast this with the USHMM. In October 1980, Congress authorised the establishment of the USHMM in Washington. It received lavish funding from corporate America via tax deductible donations for its construction. It opened in April 1993. In the current year it will receive $65 million in Federal money. Entrance is free.

The USHMM commemorates just one holocaust. That of Jews. As a result of lobbying by Turkey, Israel, and American Jewish/Zionist organizations, there is no mention of the Armenian genocide in the museum. As I document in Zionism During the Holocaust, Elie Wiesel, who was instrumental in founding the USHMM, attempted to destroy an international conference on genocide in Tel Aviv in 1982 because it included sessions on the Armenian holocaust. Israel’s Foreign Ministry made strenuous efforts to sabotage the conference.

In December 2003, 67% of the USHMM’s budget was provided by federal funds. Its operating budget depends largely on US government funding. The Federal Government also donated 1.9 acres of land in the centre of Washington for its construction.

So I have a question for Rachel Mars and Vashti. Why does the US Government spend hundreds of millions of dollars maintaining a national holocaust museum for a genocide that took place in Europe yet it isn’t prepared to build or subsidise a national museum to remember slavery or the extermination of the Indians?

According to the National Congress of American Indians, the American Indian population was approximately 10 million in 1500 and barely 237,000 in 1900. Nearly 98% of Native Americans were wiped out through colonisation – be it by disease or extermination. Yet there is no federally funded museum to commemorate this.

It’s not just in America that the Jewish holocaust is commemorated. Virtually every European state has its memorials and museums. As I pointed out in my open letter (see below) to Vashti, a Holocaust Memorial Bill is currently being proposed by the very same government which describes the boat refugees as an ‘invasion’.

So while Rachel Mars picks and chooses which are her favourite memorials, as if she was a child choosing her favourite toy, the victims of other holocausts go unremembered. Emma Harris observers how

‘Germany did an amazing job of memorialising everything, and that it’s so incredible that they've had all these interventions’

to which Mars agrees. Not once does it occur to these two sages to ask why this is so and the relationship to the virtual outlawing of solidarity with the Palestinians. Could it be that the German state is memorialising the holocaust as a way of cementing its military relationship with Israel, the West’s strategic ally in the Middle East?

If these two empty heads, sated with their vapid identity politics, had any knowledge of the history of German imperialism they would know that genocide did not begin with the Jews but with the Herero and Namaqua people in South-West Africa between 1904 and 1907 where Darwinian theories of race supremacy were applied.

Eugenic experiments were conducted by Eugene Fischer, who became the leading racial hygienist under the Nazis and Director of the Kaiser Wilhem Institute of Anthropology. Fischer defined the Herero Africans as an “inferior race.”

Fischer came to Shark Island and other concentration camps to conduct medical experiments on the Herero prisoners, who were subjected to sterilisation and injections of smallpox, typhus and tuberculosis. 310 Herero and mixed-race children of Herero women and German men were made test subjects of “lesser racial quality.”

Fischer’s medical experiments were a testing ground for later medical experiments on Jews and others during the Holocaust. Fischer’s The Principles of Human Heredity of Race Hygiene,” was read by Hitler in Landsberg prison in 1924. Fischer became Chancellor of the University of Berlin, where he taught medicine to Nazi physicians including Josef Mengele. What happened in SW Africa and Shark Island became ‘a template for the Holocaust.’

German memorials to the Rhineland Bastards, and the victims of the Herero and Namaqua genocides are conspicuous by their absence. When Harris and Mars congratulate the German state on having ‘memorialised everything’ they fail to ask why not anyone else.

Mars referred to how ‘impactful’ the Jewish Museum in Berlin is yet failed to mention how the Israeli and German states forced the resignation of its previous Director, Peter Schaffer, in June 2019. Mars’ interview is an example of the triumph of form over substance.

Schafer had previously been criticised for inviting a Palestinian scholar to give a lecture at the museum. But it was a post to the museum’s Twitter account that cited an open letter signed by 240 Jewish and Israeli scholars which sparked the Zionist backlash.

The post concerned a parliamentary motion declaring the BDS movement antisemitic. The scholars said that “Parliament’s decision doesn’t assist the fight against anti-Semitism. On the contrary, it undermines it.” The museum used the hashtag #mustread in its retweet and added a quote from the letter.

The Jewish Museum in Berlin had, for a long time, been in the firing line for its independent political stance. It had come under attack in 2013 for having invited British Jewish scholar Brian Klug to give its annual Kristallnacht lecture and before that Judith Butler.

At the end of the interview Harris asks why Mars feels that her work is an ‘important intervention for you to be making right now’? Mars refers to a ‘picture of a small boat trying to make it to Dover…. We really need to make this about now – this is not going away.”

Yet there is no obvious connection between welding a replica gate and present day racism against refugees. On the contrary in praising the variety of different holocaust memorials, without ever asking why, she contributes to the legitimation of the very states that demonise refugees today. Mars refers to how

‘Britain is constantly trying to position itself as [the] only saviour for the Jewish community in the Holocaust. And if the Jewish community accepts that narrative, that is a major problem’

without any reference to what actually happened. It’s not only the ‘Jewish community’ i.e. its Zionist leaders but Mars and Harris themselves who fawn over the Holocaust Memorial Industry.

The USHMM obscures the role of the United States and the State Department under Breckinridge Long, in turning away Jewish refugees. As Albert Einstein wrote in a letter to Eleanor Roosevelt, the policy of erecting bureaucratic hurdles ‘makes it all but impossible to give refuge to the victims of fascist cruelty in Europe.’ A report to Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau on the ‘Acquiescence of This Government in the Murder of the Jews,’ concluded that ‘it takes months and months to grant the visa and then it usually applies to a corpse.’

You would look in vain in the interview for any mention of the policy of the State Department towards Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany. Likewise in Britain, the Holocaust memorial industry consciously avoids all mention of the role of the British government and Home Secretary Herbert Morrison in turning away Jewish refugees from Vichy France who were desperate to get out in the autumn of 1942 before the Nazis overran the territory.

Given the fake ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign in the Labour Party it is worth bearing in mind that in October 1942 Morrison received a delegation of eminent churchmen and public figures such as Eleanor Rathbone and Lord Astor, asking him for visas for 2,000 Jewish children and the elderly in Vichy France. Morrison refused.

On 31 December 1942 after the Allies had declared that Germany was exterminating Europe’s Jews Morrison made it clear that ‘he could not agree that the door should be opened to the entry of uncategorised Jews.’ Morrison believed that if the Jews were allowed to remain in Britain after the war ‘they might be an explosive element in the country, especially if the economic situation deteriorated.’

Morrison believed that most Jews were communists and feared that they would be prominent in any industrial unrest. Morrison was said to doubt that there was a holocaust. Morrison was also a supporter of Zionism so you won’t find any mention of this by the Zionists.

What Mars’ interview shows is that a Jewish cultural politics that concerns itself with form not substance, which reflects instead of questions, ends up supporting the Zionist holocaust narrative and whitewashing the role of the West. To fail to ask why there are memorials to the Jewish but not Gypsy or Disabled holocaust, still less the Native Americans or Slavery, is to collude in a narrative that uses the holocaust dead to oil the wheels of the West’s war machine.

Roger Waters in Berlin Shows How Political Culture Can Challenge Racism & Fascism

If you want to understand how Political Culture can be subversive then you only have to look at the concert Roger Waters has just held in Berlin. Judging by the reactions of the same Berlin police who banned Nakba Day demonstrations, Waters has scored a bullseye.

The German police are the linear descendants of the Nazi Security Police which united with the SS in September 1939, except now they claim to be anti-Nazi and opposed to anti-Semitism.

Roger Waters has challenged the Nazi-style behaviour of the German state for its suppression of solidarity with the Palestinians. The hypocrisy of the German Police who are alleging that comparisons between Israel and the Nazis are criminal ‘incitement’ is breathtaking.

Moshe Yalon calls Israeli Ministers Ben Gvir  & Smotrich ‘Mein Kampf in reverse’

Such comparisons are legion in Israel. Ex Likud Defence Minister Moshe Yalon calls out Ben Gvir and Smotrich as Jewish Nazis ‘Mein Kampf in reverse’. Today’s headline in Ha’aretz is Netanyahu’s Cabinet Ministers in Race to See Who Is Most Fascist.

Roger donned an imitation fascist garb to draw a comparison between the suppression of anti-Zionism in Germany today and its suppression by Nazi Germany. This may be painful for those who pretend that they are now opposed to anti-Semitism but it is nonetheless true. The Times of Israel reported that Waters had ‘sparked outrage”

by projecting Anne Frank’s name at recent concerts to draw comparisons between Israel and Nazi Germany. Such comparisons are considered antisemitic under the widely-used IHRA definition of antisemitism.

If comparing Israel to Nazi Germany is anti-Semitic according to the IHRA then that only demonstrates how flawed the definition is!

Anne Frank, although only a teenager, never expressed Zionist sentiments and she considered Zionists freaks and oddities, as did most of Europe’s Jews. Anne wrote in her Diary (11.4.44) that

‘My first wish after the war is that I may become Dutch! I love the Dutch, I love this country…’

Palestine was not on her horizons. Zionism has colonised her name. Waters enraged the Zionists even further by linking Anne Frank’s name to that of Shireen abu Akleh, who was assassinated by Israel.

Vashti’s Cowardly Cultural Politics

The bravery of Roger Waters and his demonstration of how political culture can challenge bourgeois ideology is in contrast to the insipid and anaemic cultural politics of Vashti, who prefer to venerate a rusted Nazi gate than challenge the way that the holocaust has been used to underpin and legitimise the Palestinian genocide.

Vashti doesn’t dare make such comparisons because of the ‘offence’ it might cause to the Zionist leadership in Britain.

The Board of Deputies complained that it was “very concerning” that Waters will be performing in the UK, calling his concerts “political rallies.” Perish the thought. A concert that is political! Clearly Board members didn’t attend the Free Mandela concerts a generation ago.

Joe Biden’s ‘anti-Semitism’ Ambassador Deborah Lipstadt, a junk holocaust historian, was quick out of the stalls in condemning Roger Water’s as was her European counterpart Katharina von Schnurbein.

Death to the Arabs Demonstration in Jerusalem

We should take our hats off to Roger Waters. The comparisons between Israel and Nazi Germany are many and varied, from according different rights to different ethnicities to marches chanting ‘death to the Arabs.’ If the Zionists don’t like the comparison it’s because it’s true.

Tony Greenstein

Open Letter to Vashti

Dear Eli Machover/Vashti,

It was with a growing incredulity that I read your interview with performance artist, Rachel Mars. The focus was on ‘Holocaust memorialisation and the ways our inherited trauma shapes the art we create’.

What stands out most is the inability of Rachel or the interviewer, Emma Jude Harris, to place holocaust memorialisation in a political context. Simple questions such as why the focus and emphasis is on the Jewish holocaust and why the holocaust in the Belgian Congo and the Slave Trade attract so little attention were not even asked.

Not once does Rachel or Emma ask how and why the ruling elites in our society have co-opted the holocaust to imperialism, still less how Zionism has constructed an apartheid society using the holocaust as its justification. Such simple questions yet Emma did not feel the need to ask them and Rachel felt no need to mention them.

Questions such as why the German political establishment has taken on a particular interpretation of the holocaust as a justification for their integration into the NATO alliance and how their support for Israel and Zionism has cemented that integration.

To seek answers to such questions one would have to consult books such as Edith Zertal’s Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood, or Yitzhak Laor’s The Myth of Liberal Zionismor my own newly released Zionism During the Holocaust– The Weaponisation of Memory in the Service of Nation and State.

Projected holocaust memorial in Victoria Gardens

Questions such as why a rabidly racist government in Britain, that demonises asylum seekers crossing the Channel as an ‘invasion’ is so keen on holocaust memorialisation that only three days ago it introduced a Holocaust Memorial Bill which will enable the erection of a holocaust memorial in Victoria Gardens next to Parliament despite strong local opposition.

Rachel mentions the abundance of holocaust memorials in Germany yet fails to mention the virtual outlawing of any manifestation of solidarity with the Palestinians in Berlin or other parts of Germany.

My young Israeli friend, Stav, is facing two weeks in a Berlin prison for taking part in Palestine solidarity action. She refuses to pay on principle the fine that was imposed by the German state for daring to express solidarity with the Palestinians and she also faces being gaoled in Britain for taking part in actions against Elbit. None of this was allowed to intrude on your arty-farty interview.

This is the real Jewish trauma that Rachel Mars ‘forgot’ to mention as opposed to the synthetic trauma that Israel and its diaspora Jewish offshoots have helped inflict on Jews as a way of generating support for the ‘Jewish’ state. Emma mentions ‘intergenerational trauma’ among Jews but Zionism has deliberately out to recreate and invent trauma as a means of solidifying support for its racist enterprise.

As I noted in Zionism During the Holocaustif the behaviour and attitude of non-Jews in Europe towards Jews had replicated that of Israeli Jews towards the Palestinians, then not 6 but 7 or even 8 million Jews would have died in the Holocaust.

This is the irony that escapes not only Emma and Rachel but Vashti too. The most pro-Zionist party today in Germany is Alternative for Germany which in the debate 3 years ago in the Bundestag wanted to make BDS illegal, is riddled with neo-Nazis and holocaust deniers.  

It was less than a month ago that two parliamentary representatives of AfD followed, in what has become a long tradition of neo-Nazis and the far-Right paying homage to the holocaust, when they paid a visit to Israel’s propaganda museum, Yad Vashem.

There is no mention of how, in attacking Jewish anti-Zionists, the German state today is repeating the actions of the Nazi state before 1939 against Jews who were not Zionists.

On 28 January 1935 Reinhard Heydrich issued a directive stating:

‘the activity of the Zionist-oriented youth organisations that are engaged in the occupational restructuring of the Jews … lies in the interest of the National Socialist state’s leadership…. (they are) not to be treated with that strictness that it is necessary to apply to the members of the so-called German-Jewish organisations (assimilationists).

In May 1935 Schwarze Korps, paper of the SS, wrote that:

the Zionists adhere to a strict racial position and by emigrating to Palestine they are helping to build their own Jewish state.... The assimilation-minded Jews deny their race and insist on their loyalty to Germany or claim to be Christians because they have been baptised in order to subvert National Socialist principles

None of this appears in your interview, even as background.  No mention of how it is the Palestinians who are now the real victims of the European Holocaust and how the 'intergenerational trauma' of Jews is relieved by supporting neo-Nazis in the Israeli government, as they cry 'death to the Arabs'.’ The interview with Mars referred to there being no state sponsored memorials to the victims of slavery or lynching in the USA, in comparison with a holocaust which didn't occur in America. Mars says:

There's a new-ish memorial to lynching [in Alabama]. And that was not state money. It was an individual pursuit, and it is incredible in terms of design and impact.

Mars and her interlocutor don’t ask why it is that a memorial to lynching is not sponsored by the state where it took place or indeed by the Federal Government. It’s simply taken as an act of god.

Not once do they ask why were hundreds of millions dollars spent on the US Holocaust Museum in Washington yet the American state does not see fit to memorialise the Holocaust of Native Indians and Africans that took place on its shores?

Nor did this interview venture to ask why it is that holocaust memorialisation conveniently omits Britain and America’s record in turning away Jewish refugees from the Nazi holocaust. There are some lessons from the holocaust that are best forgotten.

Mars witters on about the ‘sonic experience’ of the Jewish Museum in Berlin and how ‘impactful’ it is yet she fails to mention how the Israeli and German state took out the previous Director of the Museum, Peter Schaffer, in June 2019.

Schaffer’s ‘crime’ was having retweeted a report referring to a letter signed by 240 Israeli and Jewish scholars rejecting the parliamentary motion condemning BDS as anti-Semitic. The museum used the hashtag #mustread in its retweet and added a quote from the letter: “Parliament’s decision doesn’t assist the fight against anti-Semitism.”

The Jewish Museum in Berlin had, for a long time, been in the firing line of the Israeli and German states for its independent political stand on anti-Semitism. It had come under attack in 2013 for having invited British Jewish scholar Brian Klug to give its annual Kristallnacht lecture and before that Judith Butler.

The saccharine cultural politics that Vashti offers has not questioned how Israel and the Zionist movement, aided and abetted by the British and European states, has colonised diaspora Jewish institutions. Why is it that everything that Vashti touches has to be so superficial?

When I offered to write an article about the weaponisation of the memory of the Holocaust, the theme of my recent book, you didn't even acknowledge it. You must have taken fright at the very thought of debating the uses to which the Holocaust has been put.

As for 'intergenerational trauma' - I think there are other words for it like exploitation of past injustice in order to perpetrate present injustices.  But do tell me. Is this a psychological or a political ailment? Or just schmaltz dressed up as a pathology?

On a brighter note this will make for an excellent blog on how the Zionist narrative of the holocaust persists, even amongst those who claim not to be Zionist. Instead of creating a political culture which asks searching questions what you are doing is engaging in a cultural politics which simply reflects rather than questions existing culture and assumptions surrounding holocaust and how memory is manipulated to serve nation and state today.

I do not expect a reply to this letter since I doubt that you are capable of one. With that in mind I am blind copying it pending a blog.

Tony Greenstein

Whilst the GMB Claims to Support the Palestinians in practice it is a Supporter of Israeli Apartheid

Bert Schouwenburg

On January 26 the Walthamstow branch of the GMB unanimously passed a motion which stated that

the decision to work with the Jewish Labour Movement (JLM) runs contrary to GMB’s support for Palestine, has brought the union into disrepute

and that the JLM

is effectively the UK wing of the Israeli Labour Party, a racist organisation that governed Israel from 1948 to 1977 and was directly responsible for the massacre or the expulsion of three quarters of a million Palestinians

The motion noted that the ‘JLM conflates anti-Zionism with antisemitism’ and that by continuing to support the JLM the ‘GMB is leaving itself open to accusations that it is supporting the racist treatment of Palestinian people.’ It therefore called on Congress to ‘instruct(s) the General Secretary and the CEC to sever all ties with JLM forthwith.’

It is a perfectly reasonable motion. There is nothing in the slightest anti-Semitic about it. Proposer, Bert Schouwenburg, was an organiser for the GMB’s London Region before taking up the post of International Officer until he retired in 2018 after Tim Roache, the General Secretary, who was alleged to have raped and molested female members of the GMB, took over. Roache was forced to resign and was in turn succeeded by Gary Smith, who is both a Starmer supporter and a racist Zionist.

Smith is such an ardent supporter of the Israeli state that even the far-right Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, praised him. The CAA, an Israeli state proxy, was set up specifically to counter solidarity with the Palestinians with accusations of ‘anti-Semitism’. It is so far to the Zionist right that even Margaret Hodge, the parliamentary representative of the JLM, attacked the CAA as being more interested in attacking the Labour Party than opposing anti-Semitism.

As Skwawkbox noted Smith

was a key participant in the campaign against Scottish Labour leader Richard Leonard. He also led a campaign against Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon on the same issue.

The CAA’s Chairperson, Gideon Falter, is Vice Chair of the Jewish National Fund UK. The JNF funds the building of settlements in the Occupied West Bank. The JNF only allows Jews to rent or lease its property and it owns or control 93% of Israeli land. The JNF has consistently fought the idea that Jews and non-Jews should have equal access to its land. Faltiel is also a supporter of Hindutva, Hindu Supremacy as espoused by the Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi (who is also an ardent admirer of Zionism).

Gary Smith is praised by the CAA, whose Chair Gideon Falter is Vice-Chair of the JNF which refuses to lease land to Arab citizens of Israel

Hardeep Matharu wrote about how

In 2018, the Hindu Forum of Britain arranged a private meeting with Gideon Falter, CEO of the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism (CAA). The chair – none other than Conservative MP Bob Blackman, who has a history of hosting Islamophobes– declared that there was a need to “learn from the way the CAA had got the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism passed in the Labour Party” with regards to supposed anti-Hindu sentiment.

A year later, two weeks before the 2019 General Election, a spokesperson for the Hindu Council UK supported Rabbi Mirvis’ claim that the Labour Party is antisemitic and added that it is anti-Hindu too because a conference resolution had criticised Modi’s policies in Kashmir. 

Amrit Wilson described how Falter assured the meeting that he and his supporters

would do all they could to help eradicate the ‘duty’ on the government to make Caste an aspect of race in the Equality Act of 2010.

In other words the CAA supports discrimination against Untouchables or Dalits. This is where the campaign against ‘anti-Semitism’ has ended up.

The far-right misnamed Campaign Against Antisemitism loves Gary Smith because they recognise a fellow racist

The same CAA described some of Gary Smith’s notable achievements noting that

he has spoken out against Richard Leonard, the former Scottish Labour leader, for failing to support the International Definition of Antisemitism.

The International Definition (the IHRA) has one purpose. Conflating support for the Palestinians and anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism. The GMB has also adopted the IHRA. As Stephen Sedley, a Jewish former Court of Appeal judge observed the 500+ word IHRA ‘fails the first test of any definition: it is indefinite.’

The CAA recalled how, in March 2019, during the fake anti-Semitism campaign against the Labour left and Jeremy Corbyn, Smith

‘labelled the Labour Party’s handling of antisemitism “disgraceful” and revealed that he even thought about leaving the Party himself.

In a private email, Bert described how

‘for reasons I have never fully understood, there has long been a reluctance to fully embrace the Palestinian cause [in the GMB] despite numerous resolutions.’

On 28 April 2023 Schouwenburg received a letter from London Region Secretary Warren Kenny suspending his GMB membership because of the motion on the JLM. As Schouwenburg noted

I do not think that he [Warren] is capable of sufficient independent thought to have made the decision to suspend me himself though I can only speculate as to why it was considered necessary to shut me down

Speculating that ‘I needed to be made an example of pour encourager les autres.’ In other words anyone who decides that in order to support the Palestinians one needs to oppose Zionism, the Jewish Supremacist ideology that has led to the Palestinians dispossession, needs to be aware that they will be expelled.

In his barely literate letter, Kenny alleged that the motion ‘contained several factual inaccuracies. The motion also contains serious, potentially legally actionable, and antisemitic allegations.’

However there was nothing in Warren’s letter explaining what these inaccuracies were or why the motion was deemed anti-Semitic. Nor did Warren explain what was ‘potentially legally actionable.’

The reason why Warren’s assertions were unsupported was because they were false. Bert was immediately suspended from benefit, banned from holding any GMB office and banned from taking part in any GMB business and affairs.

The motion passed by the branch contained not a hint of anti-Semitism nor was it inaccurate. It read:

In an article on Schouwenburg’s suspension Skwawkbox noted that the GMB officially supports the ‘Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions’ movement, which the JLM opposes and in both 2011 and 2013 passed resolutions not to allow its members to travel to Israel on delegations organised by ‘Trade Union Friends of Israel’.

There is very little on the GMB website concerning Palestine and no mention at all of BDS. Under the heading GMB Policy on Palestinewe learn that the‘GMB is a long-standing supporter of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign and Western Sahara Campaign and supports the statement below.’

The statement mainly opposes the Abraham Accords and for some reason includes GMB policy on the Sahrawi people of Western Sahara. The policy condemns Israel’s ‘continuing to flout international law through its ongoing occupation and colonisation of Palestinian land’, the expansion of settlements and the denial of the Palestinian right to self-determination. The policy states that:

global civil society must redouble its efforts to stand in solidarity with the Palestinian and the Sahrawi people until freedom, justice and equality are realised.’

Yet when Schouwenburg proposed a motion putting some teeth into this policy he was suspended which suggests that the GMB’s policy on Palestine is merely declaratory. 

Were there any ‘mistakes’ in the Walhamstow motion and why was it anti-Semitic?

The motion from Walthamstow branch noted that ‘the JLM is effectively the UK wing of the Israeli Labour Party’ [ILP]. If you go to the JLM website it states explicitly that the ILP is its ‘sister party.’ The motion described the ILP as

‘a racist organisation that governed Israel from 1948 to 1977 and was directly responsible for the massacre or the expulsion of three quarters of a million Palestinians.’

This too is a fact? The motion could have said that it was the ILP which kept Palestinians who weren’t expelled in 1948 under military rule from 1948 till 1966 and that it confiscated most of their land too.

The motion stated that the JLM

conflates anti-Zionism with antisemitism and by dint of its support, GMB is leaving itself open to accusations that it is supporting the racist treatment of Palestinian people. 

This too is a fact. Anyone doubting this should read Asa Winstanley’s new book‘Weaponising Anti-Semitism – How the Israel Lobby Brought Down Jeremy Corbyn’.

The JLM were refounded in 2015 solely in order to spearhead the attack on Corbyn using anti-Semitism as its weapon. The JLM joined the CAA in making a complaint to the Equalities and Human Rights Commission about the Labour Party.

The unspoken assumption running through Kenny’s letter is that the JLM is the Jewish section of the Labour Party but this is not true. One of the JLM’s Values is

To promote the centrality of Israel in Jewish life and its development on the basis of freedom, social justice and equality for all its citizens.

Promoting the centrality of Israel among Jews is a Zionist not a Jewish principle. The JLM is a Zionist group which no Jewish person who is not a Zionist would join. The JLM is affiliated to the UK Zionist Federation and the World Zionist Organisation.

The hypocrisy of the JLM is proven in their assertion that they support equality for all Israel’s citizens but that they also support a Jewish state. An ethno-nationalist state based on the religion of only some of its citizens cannot, by definition, be a state where all its citizens are equal.

When Israeli actor Rotem Sala posted on Instagram:

When will anyone in this government tell the public that this is a country of all its citizens, and all people are born equal. “Arabs are also human beings. And also the Druze, and the gays, and the lesbians and… gasp… leftists.

the reaction of Prime Minister Netanyahu was swift. He stated that:

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

The ILP did not contradict him. That is why ‘Jewish Settlement’ is one of the ‘values’ outlined in the racist Jewish Nation State Law, a principle that the Israeli Labor Party adheres too.

Kenny also doesn’t explain why Schouwenburg has been suspended and not all those present at the branch meeting where the motion was passed unanimously. When a motion is passed it is the property of the meeting not one individual. Why was Schouwenburg singled out?

The GMB’s defence of a Zionist group which supports a state which has been condemned as committing the crime of apartheid suggests that under Gary Smith the GMB is supporting Israeli Apartheid.

That Israel is an apartheid state is not a matter of dispute. Every major human rights organisation – Israel’s B’tselem, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have condemned Israel as an apartheid state.

The only conclusion that can be draw from Bert Schouwenburg’s proposed expulsion is, in his own words, that the

‘GMB are trying to shut down any voices that dissent from their newly-found enthusiasm for Israel’s apartheid regime. Under Gary Smith, a union that once backed the call for Boycott, Disinvestment and Sanctions (BDS) is now supporting the most vicious, right-wing government in Israel’s history.

It is not Bert Schouwenburg who should be suspended pending investigation but Gary Smith and his poodle, Warren Kenny.

Smith was instrumental in having Black rapper Lowkey banned from the Tolpuddle Festival at the behest of various Zionist organisations. See my blog of January 1 2023 detailing how Gary Smith acted as a messenger boy for the Apartheid State’s lobby groups.

Gary Smith's love affair with Zelensky, a Jewish fascist who has no problem with a national holiday for a mass murderer of Jews during  WW2

Smith’s opposition to ‘anti-Semitism’ doesn’t prevent him from being an ardent supporter of Zelensky who has banned Ukraine’s leftwing parties and has also abolished the right to strike, using the war as a pretext. Zelensky is a fervent Zionist and supported Israel’s attacks on Gaza. His support for self-determination doesn’t include the Palestinians. Yet the GMB is fundraising to buy a vehicle for the Ukraine military and London Region has, I understand, handed them a donation of £5,000, as if the billions from Joe Biden and Boris Johnson/Sunak weren’t sufficient.

Stepan Bandera's Ukrainian Insurgent Army (OUP) played an integral part in the massacre of 33,000 Jews at Babi Yar in 1941. He is a national hero in Ukraine & the Zionists say nothing

Zelensky may be Jewish but he is also a Zionist and that explains why it is that he has formed alliances with Ukraine’s neo-Nazi militias. He has done and said nothing about the fact that Stepan Bandera is the only Nazi collaborator in the world to have a national holiday in his honour. Bandera’s Ukraine Insurgent Army murdered some 200,000 Jews as well as 100,000 Poles.

The GMB is affiliated to Palestine Solidarity Campaign. The silence of PSC in the face of Smith’s support for Israel and the Zionists, in blatant contradiction of his own union’s policy on Palestine, should have been called out. Instead PSC has remained silent as Smith and the JLM target Palestinian supporters like Bert Schouwenburg.

Members of PSC should be asking what is the purpose of a union’s affiliation if that union acts as an extension of the apartheid regime? I know that Barbara Plant, the GMB’s President is a genuine supporter of the Palestinians. PSC should be working with her to confront Smith and his Zionist sycophants like Warren Kenny.

Even past General Secretary Tim Roache, put his name to an advertisement in the Guardian in 2017 calling on the British government to apologise for the Balfour Declaration.

The British Brothers League was set up to campaign for anti-alienist legislation which Arthur Balfour, the Zionist hero, introduced in 1905. William Evans Gordon MP was a friend of Zionist Organisation President Chaim Weizmann and a supporter of the Zionist movement

Arthur Balfour was a dedicated anti-Semite who proposed the first immigration laws, the Aliens Act, against Jewish refugees in 1905. Weizmann, srael’s first President, described a conversation he had had with Balfour, who told him that he had met with Cosima Wagner, the anti-Semitic widow of Richard Wagner. Balfour explained that ‘he shared many of her anti-Semitic postulates.’ One suspects that Smith and Balfour would have got on quite well.

Tony Greenstein

How does Kath Viner & Jonathan Freedland Square #MeToo with paying off Cohen and Penalising the Victims?

#MeToo in the media Good Law Project

As the old saying goes, hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtueand The Guardian’s hypocrisy is indeed a vice.

If there was an award for the most rabidly racist, war-mongering, anti-Corbyn ‘journalist’ the name of Nick Cohen would come high if not top of the list. Despite his name he isn’t Jewish though he began to claim that too with an article ‘Hatred is turning me into a Jew’.

Seven years later, as the anti-Corbyn campaign was getting going, Cohen penned an article Why I’m becoming a Jew and why you should, too. Clearly his conversion was taking a long time!

 ‘My name is Nick Cohen, and I think I’m turning into a Jew. Despite being called “Cohen”, I’ve never been Jewish before.

An open invitation from Nick Cohen for every racist troll to convert to Judaism

When anti-Semitism was a genuine form of racism, Jews were identified with the left and trade unionism. Zionism has managed to transform Jews into an object of admiration for the racist right.

Back in the early years of New Labour Cohen was a decent journalist, writing a weekly column on the back page of the Observer. His politics were Tribunite. He consistently attacked New Labour’s policies towards refugees. He even opposed the Blair government’s introduction of Holocaust Memorial Day.

Then 9/11 happened and with it the War on Terror. Cohen jack-knifed to the right, becoming an Islamaphobe and a supporter of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Thus was born the anti-Corbyn fiend and sexual predator that Freedland and Viner did their best to protect.

My favourite Cohen article is Don’t tell me you weren’t warned about Corbyn which he wrote just before Theresa May called a general election in April 2017. This latter-day Nostradamus predicted that:

On current polling, Labour will get around a quarter of the vote. Imagine, though, how the Labour party will fare in an election campaign when its leaders are Corbyn, John McDonnell, Emily Thornberry and Diane Abbott… The Tories have gone easy on Corbyn and his comrades to date for the transparently obvious reason that they want to keep them in charge of Labour.

In an election, they would tear them to pieces. They will expose the far left’s record of excusing the imperialism of Vladimir Putin’s gangster state, the oppressors of women and murderers of gays in Iran, the IRA, and every variety of inquisitorial and homicidal Islamist movement… Will there be 150, 125, 100 Labour MPs by the end of the flaying? My advice is to think of a number then halve it.

Cohen’s final paragraph to those supporting Corbyn was:

In my respectful opinion, your only honourable response will be to stop being a fucking fool by changing your fucking mind.

It is such sentiments that make Cohen an object of admiration for Hadley Freeman, Tanya Gold and all the other journalistic detritus.

This blog was alone in predicting Corbyn's unexpected success in 2017

In the wake of the June 2017 election, when Labour – despite the sabotage of the right - gained 30 seats and the highest swing since 1945– I wrote a blog Jeremy Corbyn and the Humiliation of Nick Cohen. Almost alone amongst commentators I predicted the outcome. With the polls showing a lead of over 20% I wrote:

… it was Harold Wilson who said that a week is a long time in politics. Seven weeks is a political eternity. Theresa May has taken a gamble that her 21% lead will hold. It is a gamble that she may yet come to regret.

There is only one direction that her lead can go, and that is down. Once her lead falls, then a snowball effect can take over. What is essential is that Labour marks out the key areas on which it is going to base its appeal. The danger is that Corbyn is going to continue with his ‘strategy’ of appeasing the right and appealing to all good men and women....

Theresa May is a cautious conservative. She is literally the product of her background - a conservative vicar’s daughter. Reactionary, parochial and small-minded, she is a bigot for all seasons.

On 3 June I wrote General Election - Is Labour on the threshold of victory? After the result I wrote to Kath Viner, offering to replace Nick Cohen at half his salary. For reasons which remain difficult to understand to this day Viner ignored my generous offer!

Nick Cohen Leaves The Guardian for ‘Health Reasons’

In January 2023 Cohen left The Guardian. According to The Telegraph Guardian News and Media (GNM)

did not mention that Cohen left the newspaper with a settlement following complaints of sexual harassment that spanned a period of 17 years

The Guardian said that Cohen’s departure was for ‘health’ reasons whereas the real reason was that he had had been a sexual predator, preying on young female journalists, some with mental health problems, others on temporary contracts.

The Guardian’s deception was only successful because other newspapers colluded with them. [See Nick Cohen, Phillip Schofield and British media’s own #MeToo reckoning, The Week, 1.6.23].

Kath Viner got rid of its cartoonist of 40 years standing, Steve Bell, the only decent journalist left on the paper - Viner ruled that the appearance of Razan Al Najar - the 21 year old Palestinian medic killed by Netanyahu's snipers in Gaza, in Theresa May's fireplace was 'antisemitic'

My email to Guardian editor Kath Viner also goes unanswered

In a puff to gullible readers who are asked to fund Kath Viner’s half a million pound salary, The Guardiancommits itself to delivering

fearless, investigative journalism – giving a voice to the powerless and holding power to account.”

Novara Media on Nick Cohen cover up

Except, it seems, when the powerless happen to be young, female journalists in its newsroom.

The Guardian Investigates Cohen or Does It?

In January 2018 Lucy Siegle reported Cohen for groping her. Siegle started at The Guardian around 2001 as an editorial assistant. She described standing at a photocopier when Cohen appeared behind her, cupped her bottom with both hands, grunted and breathed heavily into her ear.

Siegle remembers returning to her desk, humiliated. She never considered reporting him. “I’m literally the least powerful person in the entire newsroom.”. For 14 years she avoided his desk and chaperoned interns “like a mother hen crossing a busy road.”

The #MeToo movement was sweeping through society on Feb. 1, 2018, when Siegle met with Guardian Managing Editor Jan Thompson. Siegle described what happened next.

The meeting began with me. I described why I was there, and went on to tell the senior executive about Nick Cohen’s assault on me. There was not much response at this point, just a blank stare which I felt to be slightly hostile. But when I mentioned that I was aware there had been another allegation, the senior executive became animated.

They set me straight (“That sort of Twitter allegation would not be investigated in that way ever…”) and pulled a face of disgust at the very idea of that allegation. The executive also denied any knowledge about any allegation.

The meeting continued and the exec pointed out a number of times that it would be difficult for me to proceed with my complaint anonymously and made it sound as if I will have to go head-to-head with “Nick”. He was called by his first name throughout, and there was lengthy speculation from the exec about what he might say and how he might be affected by such an allegation.

The main concern of Thompson was about the possibility that Siegle would write about what happened. Thompson’s main concern was the alleged abuse that Cohen faced for his political views, according to notes Siegle wrote afterward. She described the meeting as a “chaotic mess of defensiveness and attack.”

The exec then told me that Nick Cohen was frequently targeted for abuse because of his political standpoint. They sounded like they were defending a very precious asset, their star striker. I could not understand why this was remotely relevant, but my brain began to compute that this conversation was not welcome….

By the time the meeting finished, I felt like I had been in a laundry cycle, but also a bit like I’d been beaten up. As happens with these things, you pore over them afterwards to make sure that you haven’t been over-sensitive or misread.

Because of this hostile reaction, Siegle decided not to pursue the complaint within GNM.

You might think The Guardian’s response was strange given that in its Leader The Guardian view on #MeToo: what comes next? they wrote:

No woman should suffer socially, economically or professionally for challenging her abuser. But how much harder it is to speak out when the cost may be not only your career, but the ability to pay the rent or feed your children. And how much more likely you are to be targeted when predatory men know that...

Even now, women are paying a price for speaking out. Much discussion has skipped past the primary question – how women should be treated in the workplace – to fixate on how perpetrators should be treated, without pausing to acknowledge the penalties that victims have already paid.

The Guardian was keen to hear from victims of sexual harassment everywhere but the Guardian!

One week before Siegle’s complaint The Guardiansolicited tips about workplace sexual harassment. They said:

We take all allegations of workplace harassment extremely seriously and aim to support victims in all circumstances. We have processes which anyone can use to raise complaints so that they can be fully investigated.

Siegle wrote of how she was aware of several other women who had also been “discouraged” by The Guardian from taking forward their complaints.

New York Times Breaks the story that the British press, including Private Eye, Wouldn’t Touch

On 30 May the New York Times [NYT] ran British Reporter Had a Big #MeToo Scoop. Her Editor Killed Itabout what had happened at The Guardian and the Financial Times [FT]. It spoke of 7 women who had made allegations against Cohen but no paper would touch it because ‘Britain’s news media has a complicated relationship with outing its own.’

Lucy Siegle is one of multiple women to accuse the British columnist Nick Cohen of unwanted sexual advances and groping.Credit...Andrew Testa for The New York Times

The NYT revealed that FT journalist Madison Marriage secured a “potentially explosive scoop” on the real reason behind Cohen’s departure but her story was spiked by Editor RoulaKhalaf. Marriage had evidence that his departure followed years of unwanted sexual advances and groping of female journalists.

The FT’s explanation was that “Some reporting leads to published stories and some not.”

Jane Bradley interviewed more than 35 journalists at The Guardian and FT to examine sexual misconduct in Britain’s news media.

Marriage had already begun investigating Cohen but RoulaKhalaf halted the investigation, telling Marriage not to contact any new sources. Her team had already interviewed five of Cohen’s accusers.

Two women were willing to speak openly, and Marriage had supporting documentation on others. Khalaf said that Cohen did not have a big enough business profile to make him an “F.T. story”. Publicly, the FT had declared “no topic or scandal off limits.”

In February Khalaf said she would not run the investigation as a news article, several journalists recalled, and suggested that Marriage file it as an opinion piece. She did, but it still did not run.

The Financial Times editor Roula Khalaf during an appearance last year on the BBC. Credit...James Manning/PA Images, via Getty Images

A native of Lebanon, Khalaf is not a British media insider. Colleagues described her as a cautious editor, and some said the Cohen article had fallen victim to an institutional conflict between the newspaper’s investigative aspirations and its conservative, business roots.

The spiking of the FT article hit Siegle especially hard. ‘Now it seemed the whole industry was protecting itself.’ She described how the response to the story showed

“#MeToo is nothing but a convenient hashtag for the British media. The silence on its own industry is just really conspicuous.”

Cohen was seen as someone with influence, former colleagues said. Credit...Marco Secchi/Getty Images

Cohen however was unrepentant. He told the NYT that it wasn’t the women he abused who were the victims: He was the “only person whose life is turned over because of this”. 

A GNM spokesperson told The Telegraph that the organisation “instigated our own HR investigations” in 2018, but the group said the victim “did not wish to pursue the complaint”. Siegle asked

If Britain’s most stridently liberal newspaper fails to deal with claims of sexual harassment by one of its leading writers, what does it say about the supposed progress of the #MeToo movement

On October 6 2021 Siegle posted on Twitter describing her experience at The Guardian.

“I don’t normally read Nick Cohen’s column in the Observer. Ever since he ‘groped’ me at the photocopier (zero marks for originality) at work when I was an admin assistant in my early 20s I have avoided being anywhere near him. But I do think he is a total creep…. lurking in the shadows to lay your hands on an underling (or anyone) is not to my mind compatible with the position he presents.”

It was through going public that she heard from other victims of Cohen, as did the Good Law Project [GLP]. The experiences of Women 1-5, as the GLP refers to the complainants (Siegle is W2) featured in a thread posted by Jolyon Maugham. Many more have come forward since.

GNM turned down a request for an independent inquiry into its complaint processes and handling of the complaints. Siegle told how

Nick Cohen is now co-operating with GNM on an investigation and his column has been “paused”. He has previously denied allegations as “vile and untrue”. I am sure that if Jolyon, myself, and the other Ws had not pushed and posted threads it would still be business as usual in Guardian HQ.

On 4 August 2022 Siegle wrote, not in The Guardian but the New European that

It was during this time as an admin assistant that I was assaulted by Nick Cohen, a prominent and highly-regarded journalist and, until this week when his column was “paused” as he is investigated by the company, still a star columnist on The Observer, as well as other publications including The Spectator and Private Eye.

Cohen spent two decades as a columnist for The Observer. ‘Inside the newsroom, he was seen as influential, colleagues said, someone who could help your career.’