Glastonbury’s Cancellation of The Big Lie Is A Surrender to Corporate Interests, Racism & Apartheid – It is also an Attack on Free Speech

The hypocrisy of the British Establishment and its servile echo chambers in the Labour movement knows no bounds.

On 11 May the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Actbecame law. On 1 June a Free Speech Tsar (a strange title since the Tsar didn’t believe in free speech!) Arif Ahmed, a philosophy professor at the University of Cambridge, was appointed.

Arif Mohamed is a political chameleon. The misnamed Campaign Against Anti-Semitism had railed against Ahmed as he had denounced the IHRA definition of ‘anti-Semitism’. As Liar Lee Harpin of the Jewish News reported on 16 January 2023:

In a blog written in February 2021, Ahmed wrote: “I am strongly against Gavin Williamson’s requirement that universities adopt the IHRA definition of antisemitism.”

“This ‘definition’ is nothing of the kind; adopting it obstructs perfectly legitimate defence of Palestinian rights.

“As such it chills free speech on a matter of the first importance. I hope the Secretary of State reconsiders the need for it; but these new free speech duties ought to rule it out in any case.

However this was unacceptable to the government. Mohamed may possess all the correct freedom of speech credentials when it comes to Muslims and trans-rights protesters but he clearly didn’t understand that when it comes to Zionism there is no such thing as ‘free speech’?

A campaign then got going from the usual sources to ‘change the mind’ of the good professor and sure enough after the Zionists and the government had exerted enough pressure, Arif reversed his previous commitment to free speech on Palestine.

On 1 June 2023 Jewish News reported that

After his appointment by Sunak was confirmed by The Times, Ahmed appeared to partially tone down his criticism of IHRA in an op-ed written for the newspaper. He said:

 “The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition is an important tool for understanding how antisemitism manifests itself in the 21st century. Adopting it sends a strong signal to students and staff facing antisemitism. ”

The CAA, an Zionist propaganda organisation which masquerades as a charity, crowed about its success in pushing back against Arif’s naïve belief that free speech covered the Palestinians.

The Labour Files – The Spying Game I Al Jazeera Investigations

There has been a determined attempt by the Zionist Lobby, the BBC and the media to suppress any debate or discussion about the ‘anti-Semitism’ smears that led to the destabilisation of Corbyn. Al Jazeera’s four part investigation The Labour Files, which documented what had happened was almost completely ignored by the mass media. The Guardian has even deleted comments underneath articles which mention it. So much for Comment is Free!

The Labour Files – The Spying Game told the story of how the Labour Party used hacked data from a journalist to investigate members who were critical of the party. With the knowledge of the party’s leadership, hacked emails were used as evidence to expel Labour councillors and activists in Croydon.

Jeremy Corbyn – The Big Lie

The Big Lie is made by award-winning radical film-maker Platform Films. It is produced by Chris Reeves and Norman Thomas and it is narrated by Alexei Sayle. It explores the political deceit of those who undermined the Corbyn movement and uncovers the critical role played by Starmer and his cronies.

It is no surprise that Jeremy Corbyn – The Big Lie, has resulted in a concerted campaign by Starmer, the Zionist lobby and Intelligence assets like Paul Mason to prevent it being shown.

The protestations by Zionist organisations that the film peddles 'conspiracy theories ' by blaming Jewish organisations (actually it never mentions the term 'Jewish organisations') is both laughable and hypocritical. The Board of Deputies, which sent the above letter to Glastonbury and Mike Eavis, led the smear campaigns against the Left and Corbyn. They call themselves a Jewish, rather than a Zionist, organisation even though their constitution commits them to support Israel, right or wrong. Marie van der Zyl, the author of the above letter, was particularly prominent in the campaign.

The BOD which denies involvement in a smear campaign against Corbyn confirms what the film says by smearing it as  'antisemitic'

The campaign against The Big Lie included the Campaign Against Anti-Semitismwriting to Vodafone, the corporate sponsors of Glastonbury, in order to get them to put pressure on the Eavises who organise the festival. That was then followed up by Paul Mason, who has previously devoted his time to ‘exposing’ and witchhunting ‘far left rogue academics.’

Mason wrote a witch-hunting article in Labour List, the housepaper of Starmer’s Labour Party, attacking the film as a series of  ‘Corbyn conspiracy theories.’ Mason wrote that

‘the film presents a full-blown conspiracy theory about Corbyn’s opponents, conflating Zionists, Jews and Israel as part of a force that “orchestrated” his overthrow.

Mason hasn’t even seen the film. It isn’t those who produced this film who conflate  Zionists, Jews and Israel but Mason’s Zionist friends. As if to prove the point Mason goes on to argue that the film

‘appears to match at least two examples of anti-Semitism in the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition, and should raise legal and ethical questions for any venue considering screening it.

The whole point of the IHRA ‘definition’ of anti-Semitism was to conflate criticism of Israel and Zionism with anti-Semitism whereas anti-Zionists are careful to make a clear separation between Jews and Zionism. That is why we are attacked as ‘self haters’. The implication being that being a supporter of Zionism and Israeli Apartheid is integral to being Jewish. But in the minds of spooks and MI5 assets like Mason, words mean what you want them to mean.

Paul Mason’s clinching argument is that

The film claims to tell the story of what caused the Corbyn project to fail, employing a familiar cast of characters: Chris Williamson, Jackie Walker, Tony Greenstein, Graham Bash and Ken Loach, all of whom have been expelled from or suspended by Labour, together with David Miller, the former Bristol University academic sacked after complaints from Jewish students.

Since when is expulsion from the Labour Party proof of anything other than McCarthyism? Three of the 5 people named above as being expelled are Jewish! Starmer’s conflation of Zionism with being Jewish is what genuine anti-Semites also believe. That has led to Jews being five times more likely to be expelled from the Labour Party today than non-Jews. This is Starmer’s ‘war against anti-Semitism’.

And if you are a member of the non-Zionist Jewish Voices for Labour then you are 35 times more likely to be expelled. So if anyone is anti-Semitic it is Paul Mason and his NATO/MI5 allies. As a result of Mason, the CAA and all the other forces exposed in Jeremy Corbyn – The Big Lie, Glastonbury cancelled the screening of the film.

If anyone is a conspiracy theorist it's Paul Mason whose spider web above is 1 long conspiracy

Paul Mason was exposed by the Grayzone as having been

engaged in a malicious secret campaign that aims to enlist the British state and “friendly” intelligence cut-outs to undermine, censor and even criminalize antiwar dissenters.

In one leaked email, Mason thundered for the “relentless deplatforming” of The Grayzone and the creation of “a kind of permanent rebuttal operation” to discredit it.

In another, the celebrity journalist declared that “the far left rogue academics is who I’m after,” then rants that he is motivated by fear of an emergent “left anti imperialist identity” which “will be attractive because liberalism doesn’t know how to counter it.” See Paul Mason’s covert intelligence-linked plot to destroy The Grayzone exposed

The Editor of Labour List, Tom Belger, not content with Mason’s article, ran another asking Why did Glastonbury only pull controversial Corbyn film after backlash? A more appropriately title article might have been ‘Why did Glastonbury surrender to an Apartheid lobby and a disinformation article by a discredited spook like Paul Mason?

The Orwellian Statement from Glastonbury justifying their Capitulation to the Apartheid Lobby by Claiming It's in the Name of Equality!

The real reasons why pressure was put on Glastonbury to cancel Oh Jeremy Corbyn – The Big Lie is simple. It is an attempt to hide the truth and prevent people learning about the forces which made false ‘anti-Semitism’ claims against Corbyn and his supporters. For all the froth from Tories about ‘free speech’ what they really mean is that they want free speech for Braverman, racists and homophobes. When it comes to anti-Zionism and support for the Palestinians they support any amount of cancel culture. Tom Tugendhat tweeted

It’s not often I find myself agreeing with Paul Mason.

@Glastonburyshouldn’t allow itself to be exploited by antisemitism-deniers seeking to peddle their vile conspiracy theories. I hope they change their mind and decide against screening this film.

Tugendhat has no problems being in the same government as Cruella Braverman who talked about an ‘invasion’ of asylum seekers. A government which has a history of racism including anti-Semitism, not least former Prime Minister Boris Johnson whose novel 72 Virgins was replete with genuine anti-Semitic tropes about Jews conspiring to fix elections through their control of the media.

The decision to try and prevent people seeing what happened during the Corbyn years has provoked a massive backlash. Norman Thomas stated that the cancellation was a product of "vicious outside pressure" and went on to explain that:

 “An outside pressure group has declared war on our film. They wrote to the festival's sponsors... and whipped up huge storm of complaints about the film claiming, without any foundation whatsoever, that the film is antisemitic."

"The claim that the film is antisemitic is a total smear. The festival organisers even had a lawyer examine the film who pronounced it totally devoid of antisemitism."

 “Journalists, who know very well what's going on, have to stand up and call this out for what it is: rank censorship.

"The problem is, if they do, they fear being accused of antisemitism.

"But if enough of us stand together the accusation won't stick and this madness will end."

In a statement on behalf of Platform Films, Norman Thomas wrote

“WE WILL SCREEN BANNED CORBYN FILM IN EVERY TOWN IN THE COUNTRY,” VOWS PRODUCER

GLASTONBURY AXING OF FILM IS CAUSING A BOOM IN SCREENINGS!

A controversial film about Jeremy Corbyn banned by Glastonbury is going to be screened in every town in the country, claims its producer.

 “Glastonbury was forced to drop the film after pressure was put on its sponsors. But we have no sponsors. This banning is going to rebound in a big way!”

“We will make no charge for screening the film. People have to just tell us where and when they’re going to screen it.”

 “It’s been claimed — undoubtedly by people who haven’t seen it — that the film is ‘antisemitic’ — but Glastonbury festival had a lawyer examine it who pronounced it totally free of antisemitism. On top of that, most of the principal commentators in the film are actually Jewish, so, by banning this film, the festival is actually banning Jews.”

 “It’s been claimed the film is full of conspiracy theories. This is absolute nonsense. The film is a straightforward documentary which tells the story of how Jeremy Corbyn became leader of the Labour Labour Party and explores the forces that brought him down. It’s a piece of political history that powerful people want to bury — but we won’t let that happen.”

People are attempting to suppress it for one big reason — it tells the truth.”

Narrated by Alexei Sayle, the documentary explores claims Jeremy Corbyn was a victim of a concerted smear campaign, that Keir Starmer played a deceptive “spy cop” role in Corbyn’s shadow cabinet and that Starmer is waging a witch-hunt in the party.

The Glastonbury festival had been advertising the screening on their website for almost a month, but the pressure groups launched their attack on it with just a few days to go before the festival started, in order to do maximum damage.

 “The people behind this attack are skilled in what they do. They don’t want people to know the truth and they don’t want films like this to be seen. And they know how to put the boot in.”

The screening of the film in the festival was due to be followed by a live discussion with film-maker Ken Loach, who also appears in the film.

 “The same people who have got our film banned are also viciously attacking Ken. The next thing is, they’ll be trying to get his films banned, too. This is just mad McCarthyite stuff.”

In the meantime, though, according to Mr Thomas, the banning of the film seems to have backfired in a big way. He said:  “Since news of the ban has got out, we have been inundated by people wanting to organise screenings of the film in towns across the country. And we will do all we can to help them. Between us we will get the truth out there.”

To see a trailer of the film, go to  https://youtu.be/9TACIA7oSIk.

For details of other screenings of the film go to https://www.facebook.com/platformfilmsuk/ or email norm6344@gmail.com

Sharon Graham and Unite Ban Corbyn: The Big Lie is Part of Her Bromance with Keir Starmer

On 8 June the Chair of Unite SE/6246 Branch Damian McCarthy wrote to Regional Secretary Sarah Carpenter asking why screenings of the film at Unite’s Portsmouth Office had been cancelled “on the orders of Regional Secretary Sarah Carpenter.”.

Carpenter emailed back the same day to say that:

I have asked for the screenings to be cancelled whilst I seek further guidance.  I have not had any instructions to cancel.

At this point I wrote, as Secretary of the Branch to Carpenter to ask:

You say that you have not had any instructions to cancel. Yet you also say that you need to seek ‘further guidance’. That suggests that you were advised to cancel the booking. Perhaps you would enlighten us as to who gave you this advice? Otherwise your need to seek guidance makes no sense.

On 13^th June Carpenter wrote back:

The issues covered in the film are pertinent to internal Labour Party matters and that is not the focus of our union.  Unite’s members are working on issues linked to our local communities and to industrial issues, and union resources are prioritised in these areas.  Resources include use, maintenance and security of Unite buildings.

 There are a number of screenings in local independent venues, which are open to interested members.

This means that we will not be showing the film in the Portsmouth office, and I will alert the relevant branch of this.

This was nonsense. What are these ‘internal Labour Party matters’? The resolution that was passed unanimously by our branch last night rejected the idea that:

‘the issues in the film are internal to the Labour Party and not relevant to Unite members. The film is about the orchestrated attack on Jeremy Corbyn and the socialist leadership of the Labour Party from 2015-19.

We do not believe that the following issues are irrelevant to Unite members:

*        increased privatisation of the NHS, which Keir Starmer supports

*        public ownership of water, rail and the utilities which Starmer opposes

*        Zionism and Apartheid Israel which Starmer supports

*        the racist treatment of refugees which Starmer supports

*        worker’s struggles which Keir Starmer opposes

*        Tory legislation restricting the right of protest and our civil liberties which Starmer supports

Carpenter would not reveal who had given her  the ‘advice’ but as Skwawkbox revealedit was Sharon Graham, the General Secretary of Unite who is increasingly as running a despotic and nepotistic regime. There have been a series of revelations of what has been going on and the decision to openly join Starmer and the Labour and TUC Right in banning the film should cause the scales to fall from the eyes of those who had illusions in Graham.

Although Graham has talked of supporting strikes at the same time she has done nothing to campaign against the new anti-trade union laws. Nor has she at any stage called for general f strike action against this government. Sharon Graham’s support for strike action has to be seen in the context of her lack of socialist politics.

What is the point of claiming you support workers’ struggles if you fail to challenge the legal framework which is making successful strikes next to impossible? Why has Graham refused to join other unions in opposing the anti-trade union laws?

I know some people have said that Skwawkbox has been running a vendetta against Graham but by her actions over the Big Lie film it is clear that they are not without foundation. To ban a film aimed at educating members as to the vicious ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign by Labour’s neo-liberal wing suggests that Graham is part of them. As Skawkbox says of the banning of the film:

The move, which comes hot on the heels of the Glastonbury festival’s cowardly decision to cave in to pro-Israel groups that do not want the smears of the pro-Israel right inside and outside the Labour party exposed, appears to be a further confirmation of longstanding reports from insiders that Unite general secretary, for all her protestations about Starmer’s behaviour, has made an accommodation with his regime.

Another senior figure in the movement told Skwawkbox that:

‘Starmer’s thought police are now running my union. It’s a disgrace.’

Sharon Graham’s tenure as general secretary has been marred by allegations… that she attempted to have evidence destroyed in bullying and misogyny complaints about her husband, whom she now employs in her office despite a final warning from the union for his behaviour and by the union’s appalling treatment of Irish union legend Brendan Ogle, who is now taking legal action over Unite’s ‘disgusting’ abuse and bullying following his return from cancer treatment…. the union’s conduct toward him led to protests during Graham’s recent Dublin visit, outrage among Irish politicians and threats from a whole sector to disaffiliate entirely.

In addition, after her supporters failed in their bid to take control of the Unite executive despite ‘dark money’ spending on advertising, ineglible and racist members being allowed to stand and the alleged use of paid organisers in and following the exec election campaign, her faction has resorted to Starmerite tactics to try to discredit the executive members’ election of a new left-wing union chair and both vice-chairs, as well as the vital Finance and General Purpose Committee.

The Labour Right and the British State are by their very nature secretive, dishonest and manipulative. They engage in conspiracies all the time. It is not anti-Semitic to tell the truth. Conspiracy theories are about the ‘hidden hand’ of a few individuals who manipulate events. The film makes no such argument.

However to deny that there are conspiracies and that Corbyn was the victim of a large number of them is to deny facts that Al Jazeera and others have uncovered. That is the real reason why Paul Mason is  jumping up and down together with his neo-liberal friends.

It is interesting to read thereviewof Diane Datson in North East Bylines. Unlike its detractors, Diane actually watched the film.

I was interested to see how the film would tell the tale of the shocking behaviour within the right wing sector of the Labour Party machine so I went along to see Oh Jeremy Corbyn – the biggest lie on Thursday 9 February at Conway Hall, London. It was difficult to get a seat, the hall was jam-packed.

In short, the film tells of the alleged corruption within Labour Party backed up by written evidence and by ex-members who have suffered at the hands of Keir Starmer and his purges. It makes clear that the establishment was petrified of Jeremy Corbyn, of his popularity amongst the people, of his stance on Palestine and his promotion of peace and negotiation instead of considering war as a first option.

It tells how the establishment relied upon right-wing Labour staffers and MPs to do the dirty work and bring Corbyn down and ensure a Conservative victory in 2017. We learn how, when Corbyn secured the biggest vote share ever for Labour in 2017, they upped the ante and weaponised antisemitism and the remain campaign against him. It also reveals that there were those who worked hard with Labour MPs and paid money to bring Corbyn down.

Starmer is portrayed as corrupt, craven and “leading a lawless party” who will stop at nothing to purge the left – accusing and suspending many left-wing members as antisemites. The film suggests that anti-Semitism was the smear that stuck and so therefore was utilised to bring about the downfall of the Corbyn project.

A shocking film

The film is sinister and, for those that don’t know anything about the events, very shocking. It will make many very angry as we were robbed, in the most undemocratic way, of a prime minister who would listen to the people and work on the side of humanity. It will infuriate the public, as it is clear that no one likes duplicity. It will also make many people very sad.

The real message conveyed in this film is that the Labour Party is no alternative to the Conservatives – it serves the ruling class and is led by someone every bit as devious as Boris Johnson, if not more so.

However, I for one felt uplifted, as the film ended optimistically. Many of the interviewees think that all is not lost – those millions of people who were inspired and given hope by the Corbyn project haven’t gone away – they are to be found supporting the picket lines, protesting and fighting for many causes such as public ownership of the NHS and the right to strike and the establishment is STILL petrified.

This film should be shown far and wide. It is well evidenced and the interviews with ex members, and in some cases their despair, adds a very human element. Many people are working hard to get it shown – it will be seen time and time again in the future as it depicts such a scandalous almost unbelievable era in the story of the Labour Party. The good people of this nation deserve to know the truth.

Show solidaritywith the 4 Elbit activists who have been convicted of trying to prevent war crimes

Registration

https://tinyurl.com/dthrcy6t

Letter to Judge Reid from signholders

This meeting has been called because 4 Palestine Action protesters, including myself, were convicted on May 16 of ‘intent to cause criminal damage’ to the Shenstone factory of Israeli arms company Elbit which manufactures engines which power the drones that murder and maim Palestinian civilians, including children.

We were arrested on March 9 2021 whilst driving to the factory. Two months later Israel attacked Gaza and murdered over 250 people, including 50 children.

The eagerness to prosecute for breaches of the law doesn't extend to Boris Johnson or powerful politicians involved in the COVID frauds

Of course Elbit Systems Ltd. could have been prosecuted under the International Criminal Courts Act 2001 of being ancillary to the commission of war crimes. Section 52 of the Act holds that acts committed outside the UK will be treated as committed here by persons resident in this country.

Carol Vorderman on corruption in this government

Matt Hancock too hasn't had his collar felt by the Police - strange that

However the Police, Judges and Tory/Labour politicians are more concerned with the damage to Elbit’s factories from paint than the damage done to human beings. That is the ‘logic’ of capitalism.

Today our fundamental rights are under attack. People are being sent to prison just for using the terms “climate change” and “fuel poverty” in court and arrested for literally upholding the law concerning the right of juries to make decisions on their conscience.

In 1670, Bushel’s Case established the right of a jury to reach a verdict ‘according to their convictions.’ This allowed the acquittal of the protesters that toppled the statue of the slave trader, Edward Colston. Since then the Court of Appeal has withdrawn ‘lawful excuse’ from damage to property.

Palestine Action activists have been prevented from explaining their motives when on trial. Climate activists have also been prevented from discussing their motives in court. This undermining of the jury system is a huge attack on all of our rights.

Amy Pritchard & Giovanna Lewis who were both sentenced to imprisonment for daring to mention climate change

You can show solidarity with Tony Greenstein and the 3 other Elbit activists on Monday June 26 outside Wolverhampton court (10am)

[the date is still not finalised because probation reports haven’t yet been obtained on most of the defendants]

Come along to our Zoom meeting on Saturday June 24 at 6pm

to discuss the issues and how we can fight back. Register here: 

https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_K4VLOrwARMueMGRUMnPjkg

Speakers include:

·         Huda Ammori from Palestine Action, which protests against factories supplying arms to Israel

• Kush Naker of Just Stop Oil
• Tim Crosland, Director of PlanB, which links mobilisation and litigation to hold power to account for the climate catastrophe
• Tony Greenstein, who is facing a custodial sentence and has been prevented from speaking out about his motives in court
• Deepa Driver on the fight for justice for Julian Assange

·         Cathy, Sally, Ollie arrested (28 April 23)

·         https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1CZteBxvaU

The Tolpuddle Martyrs also defied the law in order to form a union - unfortunately the TUC leaders don't have a fraction of their courage today despite holding a Tolpuddle Festival each year

QUOTESFROM PROMINENT JUDGES, LAWYERS, AND SCHOLARS

Lord Patrick Devlin, a former Law Lord and legal scholar, said:

‘The first object of any tyrant in Whitehall would be to make Parliament utterly subservient to his will: and the next to overthrow or diminish trial by jury, for no tyrant could afford to leave a subject’s freedom in the hands of twelve of his countrymen. Trial by jury is more than one wheel of the constitution: it is the lamp that shows that freedom lives.’

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."

The BBC, Media and Politicians are always concerned about attacks on the right to protest in Hong Kong but never in Britain

Lord Justice Auld, a former Court of Appeal Judge said in 2001:

‘[Jury nullification] has been an accepted feature of our jury system for a long time and is seen as a useful long-stop against oppression by the State and as an agent, on occasion, of law reform.’

Melinda Janki, Guyana-based lawyer, and winner of the Commonwealth Rule of Law prize, 2023 said:

‘For decades ExxonMobil suppressed evidence that burning fossil fuels would destroy the global climate system. Today we in the Global South are living with the impacts. People are dying. Animals are dying. It is unconscionable and contrary to the rule of law for any judge to seek to suppress evidence of the destructive impacts of fossil fuels.’

Revd Dr Sue Parfitt, a priest and retired psychotherapist, said:

‘It’s a serious matter indeed if a jury feels unable to make decisions according to their conscience, just as it confounds the basis for the law in this land when defendants are prevented from telling the whole truth in court. Both rights must be defended.’

John Adams, lawyer, a leader of the American Revolution and later 2nd President of the USA, 1771, said:

‘It is not only [the juror’s] right, but his duty … to find the verdict according to his own best understanding, judgment, and conscience, though in direct opposition to the direction of the court.’

Oliver Wendell Holmes, US Supreme Court Justice, said in 1920:

‘the jury has the power to bring in a verdict in the teeth of both law and facts.’

E.P. Thompson, writer and historian, said in 1980:

‘The English common law rests upon a bargain between the Law and the People. The jury box is where people come into the court; the judge watches them and the jury watches back. A jury is the place where the bargain is struck. The jury attends in judgment, not only upon the accused, but also upon the justice and humanity of the law….’

Michael Randle, addressing the jury in his own defence said:

‘The judge, Judge McCowan, in his summing up to the jury virtually directed them to find Clive Ponting guilty. He told the jury that the interests of the State were synonymous with the policies of the State and these were determined by the government of the day. Ponting's motives, he said were irrelevant. The jury should forget about any concept of moral duty. But the jury did not forget the concept of moral duty or were unwilling to accept the judge's contention that the interests of the state were synonymous with the policies of the government. They brought in a verdict of Not Guilty. The lamp of freedom shone more brightly that day, and a dangerous shift towards arbitrary power was avoided. I appeal to you today to keep that lamp burnished and shining and to allow considerations of humanity and common sense to guide your judgement. I invite you to agree with us that what we did was right and to find us Not Guilty.’

Matt Hutchings KC, a leading Barrister from London, said:

‘Our country is in crisis. The root cause is a clash between a government and media bosses who are acting at the behest of the fossil fuel industry, and our citizens, ordinary people who are calling for a rapid and just transition away from fossil fuels to green and clean energy. When people are charged with offences which they committed because of their sincere beliefs about the climate crisis, the jury should be allowed to hear evidence about these beliefs. It is not right that juries are prevented by judicial directions from hearing the truth about why the defendants are in the dock. The eminent judge Sir Patrick Devlin wrote in his book 'Trial by Jury' that juries were "an insurance that the criminal law will conform to the ordinary man's idea of what is fair and just". At a time when our democratic values and institutions are under attack, it is vital that we defend one of our sacred democratic principles: the independence of juries.’

Rabbi Jeffrey Newman from North London said: 

‘Intention is an ancient concept, fundamental in Jewish & British law, for example in distinguishing between murder and manslaughter. It seems to me, therefore, that we cannot disregard motivation when we come to look at actions and consequences in other contexts. As a Jew, and a rabbi - that is, a Jewish teacher - I have had to think very carefully about issues of obedience to the law and where and when a state may enact laws that a citizen, after careful and honest consideration, decides cannot and should not be obeyed. At such times, courageous protest by posters, placards or leaflet distribution have been prohibited by repressive regimes. Judges have sometimes focussed the attention of juries too narrowly thereby causing much harm. At this time, we must consider with all due wisdom the needs of our planet and all its species and of future generations as we assess the proportionality of protest.’

Paul Stephens, 58, a former Police Officer, said:

‘I joined the police in 1983 to protect the good people from the bad. Simplistic I know but I was 19. The legal system in the UK is doing the exact opposite. They are protecting polluters, allowing increased harm and obscene profits; whilst prosecuting people trying to save life in a way that is so unjust; gagging them from sharing their motivation with the jury. Extinction changes everything and the legal system must wake up and become a force for good.’

Heather Hallett, a member of the Court of Appeal from 2005-2019 and currently chairing the Public Inquiry into the COVID pandemic. In her 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 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.’

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.

Trudi Warner (3 March 23)

Save Our Juries

A new group Save our Juries has been set up, the purpose of which is to protect and defend the right to a fair trial through the power of collective action, as judges undermine it by concealing from juries their proper role

Save Our Juries will defend and protect the right to a fair trial and shine a spotlight on the repression that is taking place by: 

1.    Literally upholding the law on signs which explain a jury’s right to acquit a defendant as a matter of conscience

2.    The power of silence and blank signs as a symbol of state repression. 

More than 20 people have already been referred to the Attorney General for upholding the law on our signs. The more the state reacts against us the more it exposes to the public its violence and authoritarianism. If you want to take collective action against the Government’s programme of repression at this critical moment.

Just as the fossil fuel companies and others have for decades hidden the truth of the climate and ecological crises from the public to maintain their profits, the British judiciary now perpetuates the suppression of evidence through the courts, including by:

1.     Banning those engaged in campaigns of political defiance from explaining their motivations and beliefs to the jury

2.     Telling the jury that motives, even if articulated, are irrelevant and must be ignored

3.     Sending people to prison just for using the terms “climate change” and “fuel poverty” in court

4.     Banning references to a jury’s right to acquit a defendant as a matter of conscience

5.     Arresting and referring for prosecution those who remind jurors of their right to make decisions on their conscience.

6.     Directing the jury that defences such as necessity, proportionality or reasonable excuse are not available.

7.     Limiting the time to present a defence to 15 minutes.

Jury trials are being turned into show trials, with the jury being used just to rubber-stamp the politicised directions of the judge.

Save Our Juries will campaign to protect & defend the right to trial by jury by nonviolent collective action.

The principle that juries can acquit a defendant on their conscience (“jury nullification”) has a long history. It was first established in 1670 when the Recorder of London tried to compel a jury to convict two Quaker preachers, William Penn and William Mead, for holding an unlawful assembly. Chief Justice Vaughan, of the Court of Common Pleas ruled that juries have the right to “give their verdict according to their convictions”. That ruling is celebrated with a marble plaque in the Old Bailey.

Because of that principle, the penalty of hanging for stealing sheep was abolished in this country because juries refused to convict people of that offence. After the passing of the Fugitive Slaves Act 1850, many US juries declined to convict those who had helped the enslaved to gain their freedom. In 1985, a British jury acquitted Clive Ponting for breach of the Official Secrets Act after he leaked a document which exposed the Government’s lies over the sinking of the Argentine ship, General Belgrano, with the loss of 368 lives, despite the judge’s direction that he had no defence in law.

The Jury is the “Achilles heel” in the Government’s programme of repression against those expressing defiance against its authoritarian policies. It only takes 3 out of 12 jurors to prevent a guilty verdict. If ordinary people are empowered to act on their conscience, as is their right, and presented with the relevant context, many will refuse to convict their fellow citizens who have been taking a stand against the corruption of the fossil fuel industry or those who are supplying arms with which to commit war crimes.

If juries routinely decline to convict, that’s not embarrasses the Government, it haemorrhages one of their primary sources of power, repression through the criminal courts. That’s why such extreme measures have been taken to bypass juries in conscience cases.

When Trudi Warner, a retired social worker held up a placard communicating the jury’s right to make decisions of conscience, she was arrested and sent to the Old Bailey. When 24 of us replicated her action in May outside Inner London Crown Court, Judge Reid referred us to the Attorney General for contempt of court. Those taking part included Quakers, health professionals, a priest, legal professionals and a retired police officer.

The Attorney General, the Government’s most senior legal adviser, now faces a dilemma. See The Times. She can either decline to prosecute, undermining the authority of the judges. Or she can prosecute us, in which case there will be more of us and the assault on trial by jury will be brought to national and international attention.

Likely and unlikely allies

Save Our Juries is a natural point of intersection for diverse campaigns and movements, including anti-racism, peace and climate movements. Juries have acquitted those who toppled the statue of the slave-trader, Edward Colston, those attempting to block violent deportations, and those resisting climate breakdown and fuel poverty. Likewise a judge had recently ruled that those blocking the sale of drones to Israel which would be used to target Palestinians, could not explain their motivations to the jury and could not inform the jury of their right to acquit as a matter of conscience.

Save Our Juries reaches across political divides. When someone’s liberty is at stake, the right to a fair hearing and the right to trial by jury are fundamental even to a ‘conservative’ sense of British justice. Judge Reid’s actions have already been gathering support from some unlikely sources, see for example “Protesters must be allowed to explain motives in court”, The Times:

 “Whether you sympathise with Insulate Britain or regard them as woke tofu-munchers, surely any defendant in a criminal trial is entitled to defend themselves when their liberty is at stake? … Banning all reference to motive also compromises the jury. Shouldn’t jurors be able to consider whether these protestors were acting out of conscience?”

Save Our Juries campaigns to prevent the suppression of evidence and the subversion of democracy (hence its support for the self-determination of peoples and the decolonisation of land, education and ecosystems). Initially, Save Our Juries will support the following collective actions:

1.           Upholding the law on signs

Upholding the law on a sign outside court for an hour (e.g. between 9 and 10am) is a simple, accessible and powerful action. It presents the State with a deep dilemma. It must either:

i)  criminalise people for literally upholding the law, exposing to public view its repressive nature; or

ii)  permit jurors to be empowered by being informed of their right to acquit a defendant as a matter of conscience, risking a critical mass of jury acquittals.

A letter can be handed in to the presiding Judge, openly communicating the rationale for the action (such as the letter handed to Judge Reid by the 24 signholders in May).

2.           The power of silence (and blank signs) as a symbol of oppression

Blank signs may be held outside courts where defendants are being prevented from explaining their motives and advancing a defence (blank signs being the international symbol of state repression).

Campaign launch: at Gail Bradbrook’s trial at Isleworth CC (Monday 17th July), and on Friday 21st July) at Isleworth, ILCC, Hove, and other Crown Courts

If you’re interested in joining a sign-holding action in July (or at some later date), please email us at saveourjuries@protonmail.com

Unity not uniformity

There is a central working group of 5-6 people who have been working on the development of the campaign, action designs and the essential administration and care that allows people to take action.

Given the diversity of the movement, different groups engaging in the campaign will know best how to communicate with their communities. Quakers involved in the campaign, for example, have emphasised the role of Quakers in establishing the original precedent on the principle of jury nullification in 1670:

Tony Greenstein

“Quakers stand up for vital legal precedent established in 1670 Quaker trial”.

Contact

To join or support the campaign, please contact saveourjuries@protonmail.com.

Useful references

A.      PATTERN OF JURY ACQUITTALS

“We took direct action against the UK’s racist policies, and a jury acquitted us. Resistance can succeed” (Guardian, 16 June 23)

“Extinction Rebellion co-founder cleared of further charge in paint-throwing case” (Independent, 21 February, 2023)

“Insulate Britain activists cleared in court after M4 protest” (Bristol Post, 16 January 23)

“The government is undermining the idea of trial by jury after Colston Four verdict” (Independent, 20 April 22)

“Juries keep letting Extinction Rebellion off the hook — here’s why” (Evening Standard, 8 April 22)

“UK activists keep being acquitted by juries. What does that mean for protest?” Open Democracy, 22 January 22

“Grant Shapps slams Bristol jury for clearing Colston Four” (Daily Mail, 6 January 22)

“Jurors see the bigger picture: activists who were cleared in court”, (Guardian, 6 January 22)

“Jury acquits Extinction Rebellion protesters despite ‘no defence in law’” (Guardian, 23 April 21)

“Extinction Rebellion founder cleared of vandalism in landmark case after arguing climate change justification” (Independent, 10 May 2019)

B.       TRUTH-TELLING AND SOLIDARITY ACTIONS TO DATE

 “Climate activists risk contempt charges over placards outside court” (The Times, 2 June 23)

“Judge refers doctors, priest and Olympic Gold medalist to Attorney General over

alleged contempt of court” (Press release, 2 June 23)

“Judges join lawyers in the bear pit” (Law Society Gazette, 23 May 23)

“17 May 2023: Judge Silas “Silencing” Reid defeated by show of solidarity for retiredsocial worker arrested for holding up a sign” (Press release, 17 May 23)

“Climate activists call crown court judge ‘unprincipled bully’ during protest” (Independent, 15 May 23)

“Protesters must be allowed to explain motives in court” (The Times, 13 March 23)

“Insulate Britain activist jailed for eight weeks for contempt of court” (Guardian, 7 February 23)

“Activists jailed for seven weeks for defying ban on mentioning climate crisis” (Open Democracy, 3 March 23)

“Climate activist who allegedly held sign directed at jurors may be charged” (Guardian, 4 April 23)

C.       ACTION AND MEDIA RESOURCES

Video and stills from signholders and others

Still pics

D.         OTHER RELEVANT MATERIALS

 “‘Not only a right, but a duty’: A history of perverse verdicts” (Justice Gap)

“Jury Nullification: The Short History of a Little Understood Power” (Midlands Historical Review)

School syllabus (Penn and Mead)

History GCSE: The Conventicle Act of 1664 and the Independence of the Jury (BBC)

The Auld Review, September 2001, Juries, paras. 99ff

“Lawyers For Israel Oppose Conscience”, Craig Murray, 20 May 23

Fully Informed Jury Association (US)

Jury Nullification (Wikipedia)

Labour’s Confected ‘Anti-Semitism’ Crisis Allowed Anti-Semites To Become Anti-racists & Anti-racists to become ‘anti-Semites’

One of the ironies of Labour’s manufactured ‘anti-Semitism’ crisis was how those who had never thought about racism before suddenly became anti-racists. ‘Anti-Semitism’ can sometimes work miracles.

No one was more concerned about ‘anti-Semitism’ than Gordon Brown. He called for the expulsion of all ‘anti-Semites’. This was the same Brown who used the slogan of the National Front and BNP, British Jobs for British Workers, in an attempt to whip up fears about foreign workers.

Tom Watson was also concerned about ‘anti-Semitism’. Watson was worried that Labour would ‘disappear into a vortex of eternal shame and embarrassment” over ‘anti-Semitism’. In 2004 the same Tom Watson was Campaign Manager for Labour in a byelection in Birmingham Hodge Hill when a leaflet “Labour is on your side; the Lib Dems are on the side of failed asylum-seekers” was distributed

When former Immigration Minister Phil Woolas was removed as an MP in 2010 by the High Court, after waging an election campaign based on ‘making white folk angry’ Watson’ told Labour Uncut that he had ‘lost sleep’ over the fate of ‘poor Phil.’

The Tories also find supporting racism and opposing ‘anti-Semitism’ easy to reconcile. When he was leader of Bradford Council, Eric Pickles, a former Chair of Conservative Friends of Israel, supported a racist and fascist headmaster Ray Honeyford. When he was Community Secretary Pickles provided funding to Basildon Council in order that it could evict the Travellers at Dale Farm.

Labour’s Support for Zionism

Historically the Labour right has distinguished itself by combining anti-Semitism with support for Zionism. The two went hand in hand.

In August 1917, Labour adopted the War Aims Memorandum, two and a half months before the Government’s Balfour Declaration, which proposed that Palestine be freed from Ottoman rule

‘in order that this country may form a ‘free state’ under international guarantee to which such of the Jewish people as desire to do so may return …’

In 1920 Poale Zion [PZ] affiliated to the Labour Party as a Socialist Society. This gave it the right to propose motions at Labour Party conferences and have delegates to its bodies. Labour’s leaders thoroughly approved of what they saw as a ‘progressive’ colonialism.

Ramsay MacDonald, the first Labour Prime Minister, visited Palestine in 1921 and he was favourably impressed by the Zionist settlers. In 1922 PZ published his report of the visit A Socialist in Palestine. Like most Christian Zionists MacDonald saw Palestine through a biblical lens describing Ludd (Lydda) as ‘a city of the Philistines and the place where Peter cured a man of the palsy.’

MacDonald attributed Palestinian opposition to Zionism to their ‘leaders who wish for strife and to engage in riots and pogroms.’ In his eyes, they would have welcomed the Zionist settlers but for their leaders! The same myths are repeated today where Palestinian resistance is attributed to the ‘incitement’ of a few.

MacDonald wrote that ‘the Zionist movement has appealed with great force to Jewish Socialists…’ despite the fact that it was the socialist and revolutionary movements, where Jews were prominent, which bitterly opposed Zionism. MacDonald blamed this opposition on two groups. One was ‘the Scribes and Pharisees’ who have ‘the blindness and the stiff-neckedness of the proud tribe of Judah at its worst.’ The other were represented by:

‘The rich plutocratic Jew ( who) is the true economic materialist. He is the person whose views upon life make one anti-Semitic. He has no country, no kindred. Whether as a sweater or a financier, he is an exploiter of everything he can squeeze. He is behind every evil that Governments do and his political authority, always exercised in the dark, is greater than that of Parliamentary majorities... He detests Zionism because it revives the idealism of his race.’ {A Socialist in Palestine, p. 6.  Poalei Zion Publication, 1922, London]

Yet PZ, which now calls itself the Jewish Labour Movement, were happy to print MacDonald’s anti-Semitic tract. Why? Because then as now their main concern was not anti-Semitism but Zionism.

The idea that Jewish capitalists were ‘behind every evil that Governments do’ and that his political authority, ‘always exercised in the dark, is greater than that of Parliamentary majorities’ is a classic anti-Semitic conspiracy theory.

Sidney Webb, the founder of the Fabians and the pro-imperialist New Statesman, became Colonial Secretary in 1929 in MacDonald’s second government. He explained that

‘French, German, Russian socialism is Jew-ridden. We, thank heaven, are free.’ Why? ‘There’s no money in it.’ [Paul Kelemen, The British Left & Zionism – History of a Divorce, p. 20].

John Newsinger writes of Ernest Bevin, Foreign Secretary in the Attlee government, that his ‘use of anti-Semitic abuse was not unique among the labour leadership.’ [The Labour Party, anti-Semitism and Zionism, International Socialism, Issue: 153]

In their biography of Harold Laski, Chairman of the Labour Party (1945-6) and a prominent opponent of Attlee, Isaac Kramnick and Barry Sheerman refer to him having to put up with not just “the bullying anti-Semitism of Ernest Bevin”, but also

“the more cultivated sarcasm of the economics don Hugh Dalton, who…persistently referred to his fellow socialist Laski as the ‘under-sized Semite’ while also ridiculing his far-left ‘yideology’”.

Dalton was an extreme Zionist who referred to Africans as “niggers” and Arabs as “wogs”. Nor was Clement Attlee free of anti-Semitism. In March 1951, when he was considering a number of appointments to the government, he rejected Ian Mikardo and Austen Albu because they were Jews: “they both belonged to the chosen people, and he didn’t think he wanted any more of them”. (Newsinger).

In 1935 Herbert Morrison, grandfather of Peter Mandelson and on the right of the Labour Party, visited Palestine. Josef Gorni wrote that this visit made a stronger impression on him than any other visit abroad. Morrison wrote about his experiences that he knew. [The British Labour Movement and Zionism, 1917-1948, p.125]

“I know the London Jew very well. But the Palestinian Jews were to me different; so different that a large proportion of them were not obviously Jews at all”.

Morrison was right. The Jews he knew were on the left. Palestinian Jews were colonists and in alliance with British imperialism.

In Morrison’s view these new Jews were ‘free of the inferiority complex of their brethren abroad, despite being a national minority in Palestine.’ If he had not been an imperialist Morrison would have seen this lack of an ‘inferiority complex’ for what it was – the typical racial arrogance of settler colonials.

Morrison was Home Secretary in the war-time coalition government which only permitted a few thousand Jewish refugees to enter Britain. And this was “despite rather than because of government policy”.:

While every effort was made to deny entry to Jewish refugees, in the spring of 1940 the government was ready to receive as many as 300,000 refugees, who never materialised, from Holland and Belgium. 42

On 23 September in a Home Office memorandum Morrison outlined his policy as

 “not to admit during the war additional refugees…unless in some quite rare and exceptional cases it can be shown that the admission of the refugees will be directly advantageous to our war effort”

Everything possible was done once the war was started to prevent Jewish refugees from Europe entering Britain. The admission in November 1940 of 450 Jewish refugees from Luxembourg to Tanganyika was prevented by Herbert Morrison.

Morrison opposed the admission of more than a token number of Jewish refugees. Fearing he would be inundated with appeals he advised the Cabinet to reject such requests on the pretext that it would cause an increase in anti-Semitism. When Attlee proposed, in January 1943, a draft parliamentary statement which said that ‘any such refugees as may arrive in the United Kingdom will be admitted.’ Morrison advised him to remove this promise because

‘it gave the impression that if Jewish refugees are placed on some worthless boat and sent to a British port that is a way of disposing of them.’ [Leslie Urbach, Excuses! Excuses! The Failure to Amend Britain’s Immigration Policy 1942-1943, p. 52].

Nancy Astor at the Election Count

In October 1942 Morrison received a delegation of eminent 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. Apparently anti-Semitism ‘was just under the pavement.’ A month later the Nazis overran Vichy France and these Jews were deported to Auschwitz. Morrison was said to doubt that there was a holocaust. [Lesley Urbach,  pp. 52-3]

On 31 December 1942 Morrison explained that ‘he could not agree that the door should be opened to the entry of uncategorised Jews.’ Morrison believed these Jews ‘might be an explosive element in the country, especially if the economic situation deteriorated.’ Morrison’s real fear was of communist Jews. He combined both deep anti-Semitism and ardent Zionism. The Board of Deputies had no objections to Morrison’s anti-Semitism. [Wasserstein, p. 115-16, 131].

US Ambassador to Britain, John Winant, sent a message to the State Department describing how the FO

‘are concerned with the difficulties of disposing of any considerable number of Jews should they be rescued from enemy-occupied territory...’

Morrison told a Christian-Jewish deputation that despite public opinion being supportive of the refugees ‘there was also a body of opinion which was potentially anti-Semitic’ and that it was important not to ignore this feeling. Morrison was therefore giving an anti-Semitic minority a veto on the admission of Jewish refugees even if that led to their death. Fear of ‘anti-Semitism’ was the excuse for his and the government’s own anti-Semitism.

Despite UN High Commissioner Sir Herbert Emerson declaring that it would be a mockery if the Allied Declaration on the Holocaust was not followed by action, Morrison refused to agree to admit more than 1,000 to 2,000 refugees. [Wasserstein p.183]

Newsinger cites Tony Kushner that the government would not

allow any official discussion or attacks on anti-Semitism…. Not only was the Labour Party wholeheartedly involved in the Churchill government’s policy towards Jewish refugees and the question of rescue, but it continued aspects of this policy once it came to power in 1945.

The Attlee government refused to let Holocaust survivors into Britain whilst at the same time bringing over 200,000 Eastern European workers to remedy a shortage of labour. This included a Ukrainian Waffen SS Division which, as a Home Office minute noted, had been made “with the Prime Minister’s approval”. But the Zionists too opposed holocaust survivors entering Britain.

However we should not think that just because Labour’s Right led the manufactured anti-Semitism campaign, that it has left its anti-Semitism behind. Take e.g. Siobhain McDonagh MP, who admittedly is perhaps the stupidest person to have ever sat on the green benches. McDonagh explained to the Today progamme (4.3.19) that:

It’s very much part of their politics, of hard left politics, to be against capitalists and to see Jewish people as the financiers of capital. Ergo you are anti-Jewish people.

‘In other words to be anti-capitalist you have to be antisemitic,’ John Humphrys interrupted. ‘Yes,’ Mcdonagh said. ‘Not everybody but there’s a certain strand of it.’

In other words if you are anti-capitalist you are anti-Semitic! The unspoken assumption being that all Jews are capitalists. But if McDonagh’s anti-Semitism could, at least partly, be explained by her stupidity, no such excuse can be made for Alec Russell, writing in the New Statesman about the

‘deep-seated theoretical underpinnings of left critiques of capitalism that have antisemitism as their logical consequence’.

One can only wonder why it was that in Nazi occupied Europe it was the Communist left who protected Jews and the right which collaborated with the Nazis to kill them, even when fighting the Nazis for nationalist reasons, as in Ukraine.

But what of Steve Reed who asked of former Daily Express owner Richard Desmond, “Is billionaire former porn-baron Desmond the puppet master for the entire Tory cabinet?” Reed, who apologised, is Justice Minister in Starmer’s shadow cabinet.

Reed though was a strong supporter of the false allegations of ‘anti-Semitism’ and a strong Zionist supporter. In September 2020 he told a group of councillors that he promised to ‘continue to tackle antisemitism within its [Labour] ranks.’

Starmer was quick to reassure Reed that no action would be taken because his campaign against ‘anti-Semitism’ was only about support for the Palestinians and anti-Zionism, not genuine anti-Semitism.

If Reed’s comments could be considered mere slips of a racist tongue, then there can be no excuse for Rachel ‘Bank of England’ Reeves.

Reeves first came to people’s attention 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. Labour are a party of working people, formed for and by working people.

If anyone is likely to replace the charisma-free zone that is Starmer it is Reeves. She didn’t serve in Corbyn’s shadow cabinet and never felt obliged to say anything in his defence unlike the two-faced Starmer.

Reeves admiration for Hitler lover Lady Nancy Astor, the second woman to be elected to Parliament, is second to none. This is understandable, since Reeves feels a far closer affinity to a fascist than a socialist.

Labour Party members have been expelled for far less 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.

Whereas Corbyn was slated by the Board of Deputies for having ignored Hobson’s anti-Semitism, in his Introduction to Imperialism, Reeves gushing admiration for Hitler went unremarked.

Just as with Boris Johnsons comments in his novel 72 Virgins, about hooknosed Arabs and Jewish media barons fixing elections, so it was with Reeve’s praised for Astor. The Zionists fell silent. As Novara Media, Lansman, Jones and McDonnell failed to comprehend, the ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign was never about anti-Semitism.

Nancy Astor was a fully fledged Hitler admirer. In 1936 Astor and others wrote to Stanley Baldwin that they “‘wholeheartedly’ endorsed the Führer‘s act” in marching into the Rhineland.

In 1938 the Cliveden set, named after Astor’s house, . entertained Nazi apologist Charles Lindbergh. The group were very sympathetic to fascism. A David Low cartoon in the Evening Standard, showed Astor and Times Editor Geoffrey Dawson holding high the slogan "Any Sort of Peace at Any Sort of Price".

At a Jewish charity dinner in November 1934, she asked James McDonald, the League of Nations’ High Commissioner for Refugees:

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 was convinced that she was a victim of “Jewish Communistic propaganda”. In the House of Commons (28.2.38) 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 once introduced Chaim Weizmann, President of the World Zionist Organisation as "the only decent Jew I have ever met." Which says more about Weizmann than it does about Astor.

Astor complained that the Observer, which was owned by her 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 a war.

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 Astor’s anti-Semitism yet she refused to retract her praise of Astor. Starmer adamantly refused to do anything.

Like many anti-Semites, Reeves adores Zionism and the Israeli state. After Kim Johnson had been threatened with 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’.

There are fools on the left – from Lansman and John McDonnell to Owen Jones and Novara Media who believe that the ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign against the left was about anti-Semitism. None of these knaves have repented of their idiocy because an alliance with the right is their main objective, even if Palestinians pay the price.

But never let it be thought that if anti-Semitism were to raise its ugly head that the Labour Right would be in the least concerned. Like the Zionists themselves, ‘anti-Semitism’ for them is opposition to Zionism and Apartheid. It is not about hatred or hostility to Jews as Jews. Not now nor has that ever been the case.

Tony Greenstein

 Is there anyone sane left on the planet who seriously believes that US/NATO support for Ukraine is motivated by a concern for self-determination?

If there is anyone who believes that NATO, i.e. US support for Ukraine and its supply of advanced weaponry to the Zelensky regime, is on account of its support for that country’s self-determination, then I can only suggest that they consult a psychiatrist.

How can the United States, which launched a war of aggression against Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003 and which supports Israel’s war crimes against the Palestinians, be seriously concerned with the principle of self-determination?

To those who have any doubts about what is happening and the threat it poses to the survival of humanity, I recommend that you watch the video below of a speech by Max Blumenthall of the Grayzone, which was targeted by Paul Mason on behalf of British Intelligence.  I’m not sure how Max managed to address them but the video is well worth watching.

Below the video I have included a transcript of the speech. Please watch and share.

To those who don’t understand the background to what is happening in Ukraine or the possible consequences of provoking a nuclear war, I recommend the two following videos of talks and interviews with John Mearsheimer, Professor of Political Science at Chicago University and a member of the realist school of thought.

Tony Greenstein

Max Blumenthal addresses UN Security Council on Ukraine aid

Thank you to Wyatt Reed, Alex Rubinstein and Anya Parampil for helping me prepare this presentation. Wyatt has first hand experience with the subject as a journalist whose hotel in Donetsk was targeted with a US-made howitzer by the Ukrainian military in October 2022. He was 100 meters away when the strike hit, and was nearly killed.

My friend, the civil rights activist Randy Credico, is also here with me today. He was in Donetsk more recently, and was able to witness regular HIMARS attacks by the Ukrainian military on civilian targets.

I’m here not only as a journalist with over 20 years of experience covering politics and conflict on several continents, but as an American dragooned by my own government into funding a proxy war that has become a threat to regional and international stability at the expense of the welfare of my fellow countrymen and women.

The West's neo-Nazi friends in Ukraine who are also fighting for freedom!

This June 28, as emergency crews worked to clean up yet another toxic train derailment in the United States, this time on the Montana River, that further exposed our nation’s chronically underfunded infrastructure and its threats to our health, the Pentagon announced plans to send an additional $500 million worth of military aid to Ukraine.

The development came as Ukraine’s army enters the third week of a vaunted counter-offensive that CNN describes as “not meeting expectations,” and which even Volodymyr Zelensky says is “going slower than desired.”

As Ukraine’s military failed to breach Russia’s primary defense line, CNN reported that by June 12, Kiev quote “lost” 16 US-made armored vehicles sent to the country.

So what did the Pentagon do? It simply passed that bill down to average US taxpayers like myself, charging us another $325 million to replace Ukraine’s squandered military stock. There was zero effort to consult the US public’s position on the matter; and the vast majority of Americans likely did not even know the exchange took place.

The US policy I just described — which sees Washington prioritize unrestrained funding for a proxy war with a nuclear power in a foreign land while our own domestic infrastructure falls apart before our eyes — exposes a disturbing dynamic at the heart of the Ukraine conflict: an international Ponzi scheme that enables Western elites to seize hard earned wealth out of the hands of average US citizens and funnel itI into the coffers of a foreign government that even the Western-sponsored Transparency International ranks as one of the most corrupt in Europe.

The US government has yet to conduct an official audit of its funding for Ukraine. The American public has no idea where their tax dollars have gone.

That is why this week, The Grayzone published an independent audit of US tax dollar allocation to Ukraine throughout fiscal years 2022 and 2023. Our investigation was led by Heather Kaiser, a former military intelligence officer and veteran of US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

We found a $4.48 million payment from the US Social Security Admin to the Kiev government.

We found $4.5 billion worth of payments from the United States Agency for International Development to pay off Ukraine’s sovereign debt, much of which is owned by the global investment firm BlackRock.

That alone amounts to $30 taken from every single US citizen at a time when 4 in 10 Americans are unable to afford a $400 emergency.

We found tax dollars earmarked for Ukraine padding the budgets of a television station in Toronto, a pro-NATO think tank in Poland, and, believe it or not, rural farmers in Kenya.

We found tens of millions to private equity firms, including one in the Republic of Georgia, as well as a million dollar payment to a single private entrepreneur in Kiev.

Our audit also revealed the Pentagon’s $4.5 million contract with a company called “Atlantic Diving Supply” to provide Ukraine with unspecified explosives equipment. This is a notoriously corrupt company that Thom Tillis, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, previously lambasted for its “history of fraud.”

Yet once again, Congress has failed to ensure these shady payments and massive arms deals are properly tracked.

In fact, much of the military and humanitarian aid shipped to Ukraine has simply vanished. Last year, CBS News quoted the director of a pro-Zelensky non-profit in Ukraine who reported that only around 30% of aid was reaching the front lines in Ukraine.

The embezzlement of funds and supplies is at least as troubling as the potential consequences of the illicit transfer and sales of military-grade weapons. Last June, the head of Interpol warned that the massive transfers of arms into Ukraine means “we can expect an influx of weapons in Europe and beyond,” and that “criminals are even now, as we speak, focusing on them.”

This May, a group of anti-Kremlin Russian neo-Nazis outfitted with gear supplied by the Ukrainian government, was hailed by Western politicians for carrying out terrorist attacks in Russian territory using American-made Humvees. Although the group, the so-called “Russian Volunteer Corps,” is led by a man who calls himself the “White King” and includes numerous open admirers of Adolf Hitler, the Western weaponization of this militia against Russian forces has not prompted any outcry from Congress.

And while the Biden administration has promised that it’s keeping tabs on the weapons sent, a State Department cable leaked last December conceded that “kinetic activity and active combat between Ukrainian and Russian forces create an environment in which standard verification measures are sometimes impracticable or impossible.”

The Biden administration not only knows that it can not track the weapons it is shipping to Ukraine, it knows it is escalating a proxy war against the world’s largest nuclear power, and is daring it to respond in kind.

We know they know this because back in 2014, President Barack Obama rejected demands to send lethal offensive weaponry to Kiev because, as the Wall Street Journal put it, he had a “long-standing concern that arming Ukraine would provoke Moscow into a further escalation that could drag Washington into a proxy war.”

When Donald Trump entered office in 2017, he attempted to hold the line on Obama’s policy, but was soon branded a Russian puppet by the Washington press corps and Democratic Party for refusing to send Raytheon’s Javelin missiles to the Ukrainian military. Trump’s reluctance to send the Javelins became part of the basis for his impeachment. He unsurprisingly relented.

As the US-made offensive weaponry began to reach the front lines of the Donbas, the collective West exploited the Minsk Accords to “give Ukraine time” to arm up, as former German Chancellor Angela Merkel put it.

In January 2022, the US announced a $200 million arms package to Ukraine. By the 18th of February, observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe reported a doubling in ceasefire violations, with OSCE maps showing the overwhelming majority of targeted sites on the side of the pro-Russian separatist population in Donetsk and Lugansk. Five days later, Russia invaded Ukraine.

And since then, the US and its allies have been scurrying up the escalation ladder at every opportunity.

“Things we couldn’t give in January because it was escalatory were given in February,” a former State Department official complained after meeting with Ukrainian counterparts. “And things we couldn’t give in February we can in April. That has been the distinct pattern, starting with, for crying out loud, Stingers,” they said, referring to shoulder mounted missiles.

President Joe Biden himself said in March 2022, “The idea that we’re gonna send in offensive equipment and have planes and tanks… don’t kid yourself, no matter what you all say, that’s called World War III.”

Just over a year later, Biden changed his tune, backing a plan to provide F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine, and after pressuring Germany to send in the tanks he once feared would provoke World War III.

It would only take two months from receiving HIMARs systems from the US for the Ukrainian military to begin targeting critical infrastructure, using them to strike the Antonovsky Bridge over the Dnipro river, and again, two months later in a test strike on the Kakhovka Dam “to see if the Dnieper’s water could be raised enough to stymie Russian crossings,” as the Washington Post reported.

Three weeks ago, the Kakhovka Dam was destroyed, triggering a major environmental catastrophe that caused mass flooding and contamination of the local water supply. Ukraine, of course, blames Russia for the attack, but has produced no evidence.

Around this time, Ukraine also baselessly accused Russia of planning a provocation at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant. This triggered a resolution by Senators Lindsey Graham and Richard Blumenthal (no relation to me) calling for NATO to intervene directly in Ukraine and attack Russia if such an incident occurred.

The move by Blumenthal and Graham thus established a de facto red line for initiating US military action, much like the one set down in Syria which, as a former US diplomat commented to journalist Charles Glass, “was an open invitation to a false flag.”

Will we see another Douma deception, but this time in Zaporizhzhia?

Why are we doing this? Why are we tempting nuclear annihilation by flooding Ukraine with advanced weapons and sabotaging negotiations at every turn?

We have been told by people like Sen. Dick Durbin that Ukraine is “literally in a battle for freedom and democracy themselves,” and we must therefore supply it with weapons “for as long as it takes,” as President Biden said. Anyone who opposes military aid to Ukraine opposes the defense of democracy, according to this logic.

So where is the democracy in Volodymyr Zelensky’s decision to ban opposition parties, criminalize the media outlets of his legitimate political opponents, to jail his top political rival, round up his top deputies, raid Orthodox Churches and arrest clergymen?

Where is the democracy in the Ukrainian government’s imprisonment of Gonzalo Lira, a US citizen, for questioning the official narrative of their war effort?

And where is the democracy in Zelensky’s recent decision to suspend elections in 2024 on the grounds that martial law has been declared? Well, it seems that Ukraine’s democracy is harder to find these days than its military’s suddenly inconspicuous commander-in-chief, Valeriy Zaluzhny.

Senator Graham has offered a much more grim – and on-the-mark – rationale for supplying Ukraine with billions in weapons. As the senator boasted during a recent visit with Zelensky in Kiev, “The Russians are dying…it’s the best money we’ve ever spent.”

Graham, we should remember, has also said that we, the US, must fight this war to the last Ukrainian. While official casualty numbers are strictly classified, we must worry that Ukraine is well on its way to fulfilling the senator’s ghoulish fantasies.

As a Ukrainian soldier complained this month to Vice News, we don’t know what Zelensky’s “plans are, but it looks like extermination of its own population — like of the combat-ready and working-age population. That’s it.”

Indeed, military cemeteries in Ukraine are expanding almost as rapidly as the Northern Virginia McMansions and beachfront estates of executives from Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and assorted Beltway contractors benefitting from the second highest level of military spending since World War Two.

These are the real winners of the Ukraine proxy war. Not average Ukrainians or Americans. Or Russians or even Western Europeans.

The winners are people like Secretary of State Tony Blinken, who spent his time between the Obama and Biden administrations launching a consulting firm called WestExec advisors which secured lucrative government contracts for intelligence firms and the arms industry. Blinken’s former partners at WestExec advisors include Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines, CIA deputy director David Cohen, former White House press secretary Jen Psaki, and almost a dozen current and former members of Biden’s national security team.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, for his part, is a former and possibly future board member of Raytheon, and ex-partner of the Pine Island Capital investment firm that collaborates with WestExec and which Blinken has advised.

Meanwhile, the current US ambassador to the UN, Linda Thomas Greenfield, is listed as a senior counsel at the Albright Stonebridge Group, a self-described “commercial diplomacy firm” that also finesses contracts for the intelligence sector and arms industry. This firm was founded by the late Madeleine Albright, who infamously declared that the deaths of half-a-million Iraqi children under the US sanctions regime was “worth it.”

So while middle-aged Ukrainian men are ripped off streets by military police and sent to the front lines, the financially and politically connected architects of this proxy war are planning to walk through the revolving door to reap unimaginable profits once their time in the Biden administration is over.

For them, a negotiated settlement to this territorial dispute means an end to the cash cow of close to $150 billion in US aid to Ukraine.

When the United States, a permanent member of this council, has fallen under the control of a government which seeks to perpetuate a proxy war for “as long as it takes,” which considers diplomacy synonymous with unilateral coercive measures to “turn the ruble to rubble,” as Biden has pledged to do; whose leadership subverts negotiations in order to pursue profit while refusing to properly inform its own citizens what they are paying for, and which pushes the sons and brothers of its supposed Ukrainian partners out onto a killing field in order to bludgeon a geopolitical rival; when both Zelensky and members of the US Congress are calling for preemptive strikes on Russia which contravene the spirit of Article 51 of the UN charter, this council must take action to enforce that charter.

Articles 33 – 38 of Chapter VI of that Charter are clear that the security council must use its authority to guarantee a pacific settlement of dispute, particularly when it threatens international security. That should not only apply to Russia and Ukraine. This council has an obligation to strictly monitor and restrain the US and the illegal military formation known as NATO.

John Mearsheimer: The West is playing Russian roulette

“Why is Ukraine the West’s fault”

Despite Libelling Ken Loach over Perdition – the Zionists Do Not Want to Discuss their Record During the Holocaust or their Relations with the Nazis because it is 'anti-Semitic'

Channel 4 Debate on Perdition

Given my recent conviction in a trial of Palestine Action activists and the possibility of being imprisoned I wish to sell my remaining copies of Zionism During the Holocaust as quickly as possible! I am therefore offering them for sale at cost price. Prices from the bookshops and Amazon are 50% higher! For those interested please contact me at tonygreenstein104@gmail.com

Secondly it is remarkable that the only criticism of my book from the Zionists has come from ex-Jewish Chronicle hack Jenni Frazer, now writing for Jewish News.

In a piece, written over a year before my book came out and just after the Zionists had successfully pressurised Crowdfunder to take down my crowdfunder, Frazer compared me to Netanyahu:

One is an egregious and avid Jewish antisemite, the Brighton-based Tony Greenstein. And the other is the former Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.

Without reading a word of the book Frazer confidently writes that ‘the book does honestly just sound dreadful. …’ I guess it must be dreadful for Zionist propagandists (which is what ‘journalists’ for the Zionist press are) to read the truth for once. Frazer described how:

A martyred Greenstein blames “the Zionist bookburners” for the demise of his Crowdfunder appeal, asking: “What is the difference between Joseph Goebbels and the Zionist lobby? Answer: Goebbels burnt books after they were printed. The Zionists try to burn the books before they are printed”. Gosh, how witty…. ‘

[thanks Jenny that is almost a compliment! - TG]

Anyone who is the least bit tempted [to support the Crowdfunding Appeal] ought perhaps to know that disgraced former MP Chris Williamson, who was suspended from Labour over allegations of antisemitism (and then resigned from the party before he was expelled) is an admirer of Greenstein’s and has urged people to donate.

I ought perhaps to add… that in criticising Netanyahu I do not question his true and lasting love of Israel. I just question his methodology. What he and Greenstein have in common, I am afraid, is an overweening sense of self and rightness. Neither is attractive.

Clearly Jenny thought that associating the ‘disgraced (in whose eyes?) MP Chris Williamson’ with my book would prove detrimental.

I mention all this because the book has been selling extremely well. The reviews have all been favourable and it is given a score of 4.8 out of 5 on Amazon.

40 years ago when Lenni Brenner brought out the first book on Zionist-Nazi Collaboration, Zionism During the Dictators, the Zionist propaganda machine got to work and there was actually a debate in the pages of the Jewish Chronicle. Today the only debates in the JC are between right-wing and even further right Zionists.

4 years later Ken Loach produced Perdition, a play by Jim Allen. Perdition was based on a libel trial in Israel brought by Rudolf Kasztner, the former leader of Hungarian Zionism, against a holocaust survivor who accused him of collaboration. Kasztner had reached a deal with Eichmann for a train out of Hungary for the Zionist elite. In return he and his followers collaborated with the Nazis in the deportation of nearly half a million Hungarian Jews.

The Kasztner Train

Kasztner failed in his action and Israel’s government fell as a result. It is a trial that the Zionist movement doesn’t like to talk about today because the facts of the case are so clear. Even many Zionists now accept that Kasztner was a collaborator but that hasn’t stopped the attacks against Ken Loach.

Why then have the Zionists, who normally don’t hesitate to attack anything that upsets them, like the film ‘Oh Jeremy Corbyn – The Big Lie’ kept so quiet?

The obvious, indeed the only, reason is simply that the Zionists got badly burned first time around by Brenner’s book and then Perdition. The evidence, not only of collaboration with the Nazis but active efforts by the Zionists to prevent Jewish refugees being rescued, is so great that this is a debate that they simply don’t want to get into.

The Perdition affair led to a heated debate on Channel 4 which pitted Brenner, Alan and Marion Woolfson against 3 Zionist propagandists. By common acclaim the Zionists lost and lost badly.

The usual Zionist response to allegations of collaboration with the Nazis is, as their faithful pet Owen Jones repeats, that such accusations are equivalent to saying that the Jews murdered themselves (see No, Jews did not collaborate in their own genocide).

This is as absurd as saying that to speak of Quisling is to suggest that all Norwegians collaborated in their own occupation. Quisling represented a tiny minority of Norway's population and likewise the Zionists were a tiny minority of the German Jewish population. Everywhere in the Jewish world the Zionists were in a minority.

No one is suggesting that the Jews collaborated with the Nazis but that the Zionist leadership did. Once again people like Owen Jones conflate Zionist with being Jewish and then go on to blame us for their own anti-Semitism!  The fact that only 2% of German Jews were Zionists in 1933 escape these apologists for Apartheid.

But the record is very clear. As Ben Gurion told the Executive of Mapai (forerunner of the Israeli Labor Party) on 9 December 1938:

If I knew that it would be possible to save all the children in Germany by bringing them over to England, and only half of them by transporting them to Eretz Yisrael, then I would opt for the second alternative. For we must weigh not only the life of these children, but also the history of the People of Israel.[1]

Jewish synagogue set alight during the Kristallnacht pogrom

This was in the context of the Kristallnacht pogrom of November 9-10 1938 which shocked the world. The British Government agreed to let 10,000 German Jewish children into Britain and the Zionists bitterly opposed it.

According to Zionist ‘logic’ if refugees from Nazi Germany could be saved by going to any country other than Palestine then they would simply recreate anti-Semitism there. In his founding pamphlet, The Jewish State Theodor Herzl had written that the Jews:

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

If countries other than Palestine could save the Jews then what was the point of having a Jewish state?  It is hard to argue with this logic.

Victor Orban, anti-Semitic Hungarian Prime Minister tours Yad Vashem, Israel's  Holocaust Propaganda Museum like so many other anti-Semites and neo-Nazis before him

My book makes a number of points about the Zionist record before, during and after the holocaust.

i.              Until the Holocaust, which was seen as the defeat of the Jewish diaspora, Zionism was in a minority in every Jewish community.

ii.           From its inception the Zionist movement agreed with the anti-Semites that Jews did not belong in the countries of their birth. They also understood that without anti-Semitism there wouldn’t be enough Jewish immigrants to make a future Jewish state viable.

iii.        That anti-Semites, not least the Nazis, frequently quoted  from Zionist writings to ‘prove’ that the Jews were an alien element.

iv.        That the Zionists uniquely amongst German Jews were pleased at the accession to power of the Nazis.

v.           That the Zionist leadership in Palestine and internationally saw only opportunities for their movement to grow with the Nazis taking power in Germany.

The International Jewish Boycott Campaign That the Zionists Fiercely Opposed

vi.        Whereas the vast majority of Jews sought the overthrow of the Nazis through a Boycott campaign, the Zionists sought to establish relations with the Nazis to their mutual benefit.

vii.     That throughout the war the Zionists opposed any scheme to rescue Jewish refugees from Nazi occupied Europe whose destination was not Palestine.

viii.  That after the establishment of the State of Israel nothing changed. From the neo-Nazi Junta in Argentina to the Azov Battalion in Ukraine, Israel has been happy to supply weapons and training to anti-Semitic regimes and forces.

ix.        That Zionism begins from the assumption that Jews are aliens in every country bar Israel and its goal is the ‘ingathering of the exiles’.  The term ‘exile’ in itself means that Jews living outside Israel are aliens.

When I published my book I took a decision to leave out one chapter on Cruel Zionism. I have decided to make it available to people here. It describes the efforts of the State of Israel  to destabilise the position of Jews  in the Arab lands after 1948.  Israel needed a Jewish working class and the European Ashkenazis preferred the Oriental or Arab Jews of the Middle East to be that working class. Also they sought new immigrants in order to make the state demographically viable and they therefore set about ensuring that the position of Jews in the Arab world was made untenable.

I copy below links to all the reviews, podcasts and interviews I’ve done in connection with the book. There are a number of Amazon  reviews, all positive! I’ve also included one reader’s comment too.

Tony Greenstein

Reviews and Talks About the Book

CPGB meeting 12.12.2022

Amazon reviews

Zionism and the holocaust – Future of the Left Events

Electronic Intifada Podcast

Over the Edge Bookfair Galway

Interview Tony Gosling, Bristol Community Radio

Official Book Launch Jewish Network 4 Palestine

Review Palestine Chronicle

ReviewWeekly Worker 

ReviewJewish Voices for Labour 

Book Review Middle East Monitor 

Israel and Argentina During the Military Junta

Why lefties need a big book about anti-Semitism – Kay Green

Penniless Press – reviewed by Alan Dent

Mondoweiss Podcast - 

Phil Weiss speaks to Tony Greenstein.

Review in Electronic Intifada by Asa Winstanley

How the Zionist movement has used the Holocaust to Sanitise Their Racist Project by Weaponising the Memory of the Murdered 6 Million

Brighton Book Launch

How Zionism helped the Nazis perpetrate the Holocaust

Asa Winstanley Review in Electronic Intifada

Al Hiwar TV - Tony Greenstein speaks about his book Zionism During the Holocaust

The Struggle - Rescue of Jews was NOT the Zionist Priority During the Holocaust

 Readers Comments

I just wanted to say how glad I am that you have written your book on Zionism during the holocaust - and glad too that I have read it.  Every page.  Including most of the index and bibliography thank you very much, and not forgetting the fantastic photos, especially of Vrba and Edelman.

I am ashamed to admit how much of the history was unknown to me (not all of it!), and there was not room in your book to address all of my ignorance, but you have set down the markers, laid out the case to answer (cases) and I do thank you for erring on the side of brevity and concision.

(One final point - trivial I know, against what you have accomplished - but thank you also for putting the footnote numbers in bold!  I have not seen that done before.  It is very helpful!  I hope it catches on.)

Kind regards

John C

This Law Has One Purpose – To Protect Israeli War Crimes – This is why Starmer & Labour’s Cowardly MPs Support It

When justifying the Government’s Anti-Boycott Bill, Michael Gove stated that BDS leads to “appalling antisemitic rhetoric and abuse.” Not one iota of evidence was tendered in support of this lie nor could there be. It simply doesn’t exist.

Gove is not unfamiliar with racist rhetoric and abuse. He authored Celsius 77 which argued that terrorist incidents were not the product of the West’s invasion of countries like Iraq but ‘“a conveyor belt” linking religious conservatism and terrorism’. Using bogus statistics Gove argued that ‘a sizeable minority of Britain's 1.8 million Muslims hold rejectionist Islamist views’.

Peter Oborne

In the words of Peter Oborne, former Chief Political Commentator of The Telegraph, Gove ‘is best known as the unsung commander-in-chief of the Islamophobes inside the Conservative Party’. Gove was one of the founders of the racist Henry Jackson Society whose Director William Shawcross stated in 2012 that “Europe and Islam is one of the greatest, most terrifying problems of our future”.

The HJS’s Associate Director Douglas Murray was the author of The Strange Death of Europe whose theme was 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’.

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

This is who the Board of Deputies of British Jews, in its support of the Anti-Boycott Bill, is allying with. Intellectual fascists like Murray. See SOAS Policy Briefing on the new Anti-Boycott Bill

A Brief History of Boycotts

Contrary to the assertions of Gove and the Zionists,  BDS has always been the weapon of the weak and powerless, from the Boycott of Slave Grown Sugar in the Carribean, to the Boycott of Capt. Boycott in Ireland to the Boycott, Sanctions and Disinvestment campaign against South Africa, which Israel defied.

The Zionists point to the ‘boycott’ by the Nazis of Jewish shops on April 1 1933. However this wasn’t a peaceful boycott so much as a siege of the shops by SA thugs. The closest comparison is with Israel’s siege of Gaza, except unlike the Nazis it has been going on for 17 years.

Gove & Starmer’s Claim That They Oppose BDS Because of ‘Anti-Semitism’ Is A Lie

On 19 June I sent a letter to the Guardian opposing the Anti-Boycott Bill. I didn’t expect it to be published. Although the Guardian used to publish letters from me, since 2019 the letters column has been Freedlandised (after Jonathan Freedland).

In my letter I pointed out that when Thatcher opposed sanctions against the Apartheid regime in South Africa she did not pretend that she was doing it in order to fight racism! She and her husband, who had considerable investments in South Africa, were perfectly content with White Supremacy.

Instead of Gove and admitting that he is happy with the colonisation of the Palestinian territories and Jewish Supremacy he prayed in aid ‘anti-Semitism’ using British Jews as convenient fall guys. Government lying did not disappear with Boris Johnson.

I argued that Councils who support a boycott of Israel are not engaging in their own foreign policy. They are simply expressing solidarity with an oppressed people. Those who say that there is something anti-Semitic about this are really saying that British Jews support the occupation and terrorisation of Palestinian civilians. If anyone is anti-Semitic it is Michael Gove.

I also sent a letter to the Jewish Chronicle! Not because I expected it to be published but because it’s useful, once in a while, that this Zionist rag is confronted with the truth! Whereas the JC has given wholehearted support to the Bill its counterpart, Jewish News has opposed the Bill, along with some Zionist youth organisations. Even some Tory MPs have expressed reservations about Gove’s Bill. Not Labour’s Tory leader, Keir Starmer.

The Jewish Boycott of Hitler

What Gove and the Board of Deputies ignore is the Jewish Boycott of  Hitler 90 years ago. This would have been illegal if the anti-Boycott Bill had been law. This is the irony of Gove’s claim that his motive is in fighting against anti-Semitism.

The anti-Nazi Jewish Boycott is a boycott that the Zionists never mention. But for the fierce opposition of the Zionist Organisation, which concluded a trade agreement, Ha'avara, with the Nazi state, Hitler could have been overthrown by the winter of 1933.

On 30 January 1933 Hitler was appointed Chancellor by President Hindenberg at the behest of Germany’s conservatives. At that time Hitler was supported by Churchill, Lloyd George and the British Establishment who saw Hitler as a bulwark against German Communism.

‘Those who have met Herr Hitler face to face in public business or on social terms have found a highly competent, cool, well-informed functionary with an agreeable manner, a disarming smile, and few have been unaffected by a subtle personal magnetism.’ Churchill 1937

On 5 March 1933, in the last, unfree elections, the NSDAP secured a working majority together with the Deutsche National Volks Party.

The reaction of Jewry world wide was swift. They launched a Boycott of Nazi Germany. The reaction of the Zionists was to do their best to undermine the Boycott. They wanted to take advantage of the rise of the Nazis not oppose them. Why? Because their priority was establishing a ‘Jewish’ State.

On 21 June 33, the German Zionist Federation sent a memo to Hitler.

‘Boycott propaganda… is in essence fundamentally unZionist, because Zionism wants not to do battle but to convince and to build.’ [Lucy Dawidowicz, A Holocaust Reader, pp. 150-153].

But in Jewish working class areas of the East End the Boycott 

‘spread like a bush fire. After businesses closed on Friday 24 March thousands of Jews marched from the East End to the German Embassy.’ [David Cesarani, Final Solution, pp. 41-2].

On 3 April 70,000 Greek Jews gathered in a mass protest and in Panama 15 leading Jewish firms cancelled all German orders. On 4 April there were Jewish protests in Bombay. In Polish Upper Silesia anti-German boycott violence was so extensive that the German Foreign Ministry threatened to complain to the League of Nations. In Britain the police in London and Manchester threatened to prosecute storeowners displaying boycott posters.

In the first few days of April thousands of orders for German goods in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem were cancelled. In response the ‘socialist’ Zionists of Mapai launched a campaign against the boycott. On Kol Yisrael, on 18 May they broadcast that ‘Screaming slogans calling for a boycott… are a crime’. Referring to a recent arson attack on the German consulate they said, ‘We have no quarrel with the representatives of the German government in Palestine.’ [Black p.144] It was amongst the Kibbutzniks that opposition to Boycott was greatest. [Arendt, Zionism Reconsidered, The Jew as Pariah, p. 139]

By mid-April England had supplanted Germany as the largest exporter to Denmark and Norway. Sales to Finland were drastically down. German exports were 10% down in April. German industrialists submitted a memo to the Government ‘drawing attention to the heavy withdrawal of orders for German goods’ Bosch had lost the whole of its South American market. [Hilberg, p. 35]

Trade statistics showed that the export surplus of the first quarter showed a decrease from £28.4m in 1932 to £11.8m in 1933, a drop of over 50%. [‘The Anti-German Boycott Works’, Jewish Chronicle, 19.5.33]. In June the export surplus was down by 68% compared to May.

Massive Jewish Veterans Parade Supporting a Boycott in New York

For the entire first half of 1933 exports were down 51% even though the anti-Nazi boycott had not really begun until late March.’[Black, p.223] Exports to France decreased by 25%. Egypt had an almost complete Boycott. Exports were down 22% to the USA.

The German diamond industry, which employed 5,000 workers, faced total collapse. [Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews]

Goering stipulated that those who disseminated atrocity propaganda faced the death penalty. Nonetheless he soon drew the conclusion that the only way to stop the atrocity propaganda was to stop the atrocities. The Boycott forced the Third Reich to restrain anti-Jewish violence.

‘Germany simply could not afford further export reductions’ and without exports ‘there would be economic death.’ [Black, p.24]

In Britain mass demonstrations started in Manchester and swept through Newcastle, Leeds, Birmingham and Glasgow. The protests culminated in an overflow rally on 16 May at London’s Queen Hall.

When news spread that goods labelled ‘Made in Germany’ were found in the warehouse of Isaac Angel in Stepney, 1,000 protestors surrounded the store and mounted police had to be called in. Even the Archbishop of Liverpool urged Catholics to join the Boycott!

Reich leaders realized that boycott agitation was accelerating, especially in Great Britain. Placards proclaiming BOYCOTT GERMAN GOODS spread infectiously throughout London, and were now in the windows of the most exclusive West End shops.

By June 1933 the specter of collapse was hovering over the Third Reich. The Reichsbank had only RM 280m in gold and foreign-exchange reserves, less than half that of 1932.

On 20 July in London a ‘monster’ Boycott demonstration took place. Over 50,000 people took part. Both the TUC and the Labour Party supported it. The TUC instructed its affiliates to support the Boycott.Three of the speakers were from the Board of Deputies, although not representing it, because ‘that body has taken no part in the demonstration and indeed has used strenuous efforts to prevent it.’ [Monster Jewish Protest Demonstration’, Jewish Chronicle  21.7.33]

A letter from Max Morris, a future President of the National Union of Teachers, attacked the BOD's ‘mockery of democracy’ writing that

‘at no point in our history has there been evidenced such widespread discontent at our so-called leadership’ over their opposition to the Boycott. [Max Morris, ‘Our Leaders:  A Mockery of Democracy,’ JC 28.7.33].

When it comes to fighting genuine anti-Semitism the BOD has always opposed doing anything. It’s only when the fight is against anti-Zionism that the Board is concerned about ‘anti-Semitism’.

At a meeting of the World Alliance for Combating Anti-Semitism on 28 March 1933 Mendel Wood said that the Boycott was:

the only weapon that they had and it had already proved a great success. Until recently Goering would not deign to reply but the boycott had elicited from him a denial of atrocities. It had made the Nazis call a halt to physical violence. Their duty was to strengthen the boycott by any means.

A resolution was moved declaring that ‘the Board of Deputies doesn’t represent Anglo-Jewry.’ 2000 East End Jews and non-Jews held a mass meeting organised by the Anti-War Council at the Mile End Baths. Even the Union of Young Israel Societies supported the boycott. [Intensifying the Boycott – The Deputies Failure’, JC, 31.3.33.] But the BOD voted 110-27 against a Boycott.

This was a reprieve for the Third Reich, a letup in the anti-German offensive… (it) could not have come at a more decisive moment.[Black]

The Investor’s Review of 5 August 1933 reported that ‘authoritative opinion is that Hitlerism will come to a sanguinary end before the New Year.’[Hitler hard up’, JC 11.8.33]Cesarani, a Zionist historian, suggested that those who doubted the viability of the regime ‘were not engaged in wishful thinking’ and that it was beset by enemies coupled with a chronic balance of payments deficit. [Final Solution, pp. 81-2]

Robert Ley, leader of the Nazi Labour Front, warned that Germany was a ‘besieged fortress’ on the verge of collapse. Goebbels pleaded:

‘Was it to the interests of other nations to bring Europe to chaos by a world boycott of Germany just because the Jewish minority wished it?’ [Tribute to Jewry’s Boycott Defence War.’  JC 8.9.33].

The Zionist movement found itself in a profound conflict between transfer and boycott and between the needs of the Zionist movement and the Jewish people. Unsurprisingly the former came first.

Despite being uncoordinated the Boycott was having a dramatic effect on the German economy. People instinctively avoided purchasing German goods and American dockers were refusing to handle German goods.

The Yishuv’s [Jewish Palestine] leaders opposed the Boycott because

Zionist priorities... awarded precedence to the realization of Zionist goals and the building of Palestine over the struggle to preserve Jewish civil rights in the Diaspora.

Dov Hoz, a leading Labor Zionist, observed, ‘In these negotiations, we are reaping the fruit of the boycott we oppose.’[Weiss, The Transfer Agreement and the Boycott Movement, p. 24]. But for the Boycott there would have been no Ha'avara .

On 7 August 1933 agreement was reached... ‘Ha’avara was a Zionist idea and initiative, not a Nazi one.’the Nazi party and the Zionist Organization shared a common stake in the recovery of Germany. If the Hitler economy fell, both sides would be ruined. [Weiss, The Transfer Agreement and the Boycott Movement,  p. 253]

Ha’avara may have saved Hitler from being overthrown. In return for Ha'avara the ‘Zionists would halt the worldwide Jewish-led anti-Nazi Boycott that threatened to topple the Hitler regime in its first year.’ [Weiss, The Transfer Agreement and the Boycott Movement,  p.xix]

The leaders of Germany realized that the anti-Hitler boycott was threatening to kill the Third Reich in its infancy, either through utter bankruptcy or by promoting an imminent invasion of Germany…The destruction of Hitler’s tenuous regime… loomed as the crisis of the hour in Berlin … [Black pp. 110, 130]

As Moshe Shertok, Israel’s second Prime Minister proclaimed:

‘It is Zionism’s fate to be cruel toward the Diaspora at times [...] when this is necessary in order to build the country.’ [Weitz pp. 25-7]

The Jewish Chronicle, a Zionist paper, attacked Ha’avara:

We say that that is aiding and comforting one of the most savage oppressions, even in Jewish history…. It breaks the united Jewish boycott front, a front let it not be forgotten, with which non-Jewish sympathisers were also aligned. [The Unclean Thing,’ JC, 27.12.35]

Michael Gove - A Racist and a Liar

Ha’avara accounted for 60% of total capital investment in Jewish Palestine. [Jewish Frontier, May-June 1998] Whole industries in Palestine, such as Printing and Brewing were founded as a result.

After the Nazi Party took office, eleven of the world’s leading musicians, led by Arturo Toscanini and Fritz Reiner, announced a boycott of German cultural events. In Paris filmgoers cheered a band of Jewish youth who disrupted a German film. In Latvia the German embassy ‘sought court restraint for Jewish student groups urging a boycott of German films.’

The staunchest supporters of the agreement in the Yishuv did not see the saving of lives as an independent goal at that time, rather they sought to extract German Jewish property for the benefit of the Yishuv. [Eshkoli-Wagman, p. 31, Yishuv Zionism, Modern Judaism, V. 19:1, February 1999]. 

Both Tom Segev and Moshe Zimmerman, stressed ‘the cynical abandonment of German Jewry out of Palestinocentric Zionist considerations’. [Eshkoli-Wagman, p. 31, Yishuv Zionism, Modern Judaism, V. 19:1, February 1999]. The Zionist activists spoke of ‘saving the wealth’ and ‘rescuing the capital from Nazi Germany.’

So when the Zionists oppose BDS today they are being consistent with what they did in 1933 when they opposed boycotting Nazi Germany. The only boycotts that they do agree with is a boycott of Palestinians.

Tony Greenstein

The MP for Brighton Kemptown, Who Supported Palestine When It Suited Him, Abstained on the Anti-Boycott Bill - As Did Dianne Abbot and Richard Burgon

I have amended this article to take out my criticism of Zara Sultana, who had a legitimate reason for being absent

Corbyn, McDonnell and Crispin Blunt Speeches Opposing the Tory’s Anti-Boycott Bill

Whenever I think of Lloyd Russell-Moyle I think of his exact opposite, Divina Levrini. One is an opportunist for whom everything is a tactical game designed to advance his career. The other is or rather was a 30 year old Swedish mother who, despite a serious illness, went on the 2018 Gaza Freedom Flotilla in order to fight for justice and freedom for others regardless of the cost to herself. Divina was beaten up and denied her medication by the savages who run Israeli detention facilities. Divina died 9 months after returning from detention in Israel.

Divina Levrini holding the Gaza Freedom Flotilla banner at Brighton's Old Steine

Moyle and Divina could not be more different. One sacrificed her life for the freedom of the Palestinians, the other used the Palestinians to help his career, making fine speeches full of sound and fury but literally signifying nothing.

When in 2018 the Gaza Freedom Flotilla came to Brighton and Hove Russell-Moyle was happy to come to the party in their honour at the Verdict, a Brighton jazz club and be pictured alongside these heroes who put their lives on the line, literally. But when it came to standing up for the Palestinians in parliament this week, despite making a short intervention in the debate, Moyle was conspicuous by his absence.

The national conference of Woodcraft Folk, which Moyle chaired, which voted overwhelmingly for Boycott - at that time he had no problems with BDS

This is especially the case since Moyle chaired the national conference of the Woodcraft Folk which voted in July 2010 to support a full boycott of Israel. Moyle knows the arguments, he knows that Israel is an Apartheid State yet when push comes to shove he bottled out and abstained.

No greater cowardice can there be than someone who is happy to stand in the limelight  but afraid to stand up and be counted when it matters.

The late Divina Levrini

See Divina Levrini – A Star that will forever burn brightly in our memories

People may think that I’m being hard on Russell-Moyle. After all he is little or no different from all the other cowards and traitors who sneer and bray from Labour’s backbenches. Moyle was a member of the ‘Socialist’ Campaign Group who make fiery speeches once a year at Labour Party Conference, posturing and preening themselves and spend the rest of the time cowering in the shadows. In a way I am being harsh on Moyle because he is no different from the rest of the parliamentary traitors.

LRM grabs the mace

For all I know Moyle may still consider himself a socialist but thinks that it is best to bide his time. The problem with this is that by continually making concessions to the right one becomes part of them. The will to do good will have atrophied through lack of use.

Moyle is fond of making firebrand speeches, even if he finds it hard to live up to them. There was his speech at the election count, where he accused Tories of killing people. That didn’t last long.

fiery speech at count

Then there was the speech at the 2021 Labour Party conference where he said that Starmer is “not a politician for the Labour Party”. Well that lasted all of 5 minutes.

Lloyd Russell-Moyle - Starmer was "not a politician for the Labour Party".

Then there was his promise to put his arms around all those who had been unfairly purged, which is about 99.99%. That too didn’t last longer than the first hostile headline. Moyle said:

“I want to apologise from all of us but me in particular. Because if we have made you feel like you are alone, if we have not reached our arm around you enough in these tough times when you are being purged or set up with false allegations, I not only apologise, I will endeavour to do better because we have to support each other.”

The spiritual mentor of Israel's Police & Security Minister, Itamar Ben Gvir is on record as saying that one Jewish fingernail is worth a thousand non-Jewish lives

I have to confess that I never asked Moyle to put his arms round me but I would have appreciated it if he hadn’t written to Iain McNicol urging that my expulsion be sped up! Especially since at that time he was Chair of Brighton and Hove Labour Party which had just passed policy deploring my suspension.

A few more photos from the time when Moyle found it useful to be seen to support the Palestinians

According to the local Argus, Sussex Friends of Israel’s Fiona Sharpe, a racist who doubles as Labour Against Anti-Semitism said:

“Keir Starmer has taken some positive steps to remove anti-Semitism from the party, and we urge him to take immediate action and remove the whip.”

No sooner had he spoken than Moyle was backtracking. On Twitter he began the retreat:

 “there are anti-Semites that have rightly been expelled from party” but there was also people “who have been threatened with expulsion or investigation for no reason."

"No arm should be put around people legitimately removed from Labour", he added in another tweet, "but those wrongly threatened for supporting trans rights or supporting Labour MPs has created a chilling effect which has made activist feel vulnerable and not respected. It’s to those we should show solidarity."

Guido Fawkes, the Tory libel site, ran with the headline“Moyle for the chop”.  Guido suggested that

“if Starmer is serious about detaching Labour from the hard-left, his outriders think Russell-Moyle’s now ripe for the picking”.

LAAS posted on Twitter to say that a letter had been sent to Starmer to “urge him to remove the whip” from Moyle.

Lloyd promises to ‘put his arms round’ all the victims of false anti-Semitism accusations.

Moyle's promise to hug and put his arms round the hundreds of victims of false antisemitism accusations lasted as long as his speech. As soon as the Zionist backlash began LRM retreated and he has been doing so ever since. In 2017 he was attacked for supporting Melanie Melvin, Brighton Labour Party’s Women’s Officer after she came under attack. Again he retreated. Moyle’s record ever since the ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign began is one of retreating under pressure.

This is the Israel that Moyle says is not an Apartheid State

Lloyd Russell-Moyle Supported the Tory Anti-Boycott  Bill

But none of this can justify the fact that last Monday 3 July, when the second reading of the Tory Anti-Boycott Bill was held, Moyle abstained. This is truly unforgiveable. If this Bill had been in force in 1933 it would have made the Jewish anti-Nazi Boycott illegal. It would have made the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign against South African Apartheid illegal. It would also have made the Boycott of Slave Grown Sugar in the Caribbean illegal.

Now just imagine if the White Slave Owners had protested that Boycotting their sugar was discrimination against them on the grounds of colour! This lity is what the Zionists are saying. That we are discriminating against them, not because they murder Palestinian children, not because they demolish their homes and confiscate their land. Perish the thought. It’s because they are Jewish!

This is what the anti-BDS campaign is about and Moyle has joined hands with the most reactionary racists, Zionists and imperialists. Because when an Opposition abstains on a government measure it is tantamount to supporting it. Keir Starmer we know is a Zionist ‘without qualification’.Starmer is a proud and unashamed racist and this is who Moyle has joined hands with.

Israel's new government is stuffed with people proud to be fascists and homophobes

The best that can be said of the vote last Monday is that at least 10 Labour MPs defied Starmer to vote against this racist measure. They were Apsama Begum, Dawn Butler, Barry Gardiner (surprisingly since he is down as a Labour Friends of Israel sponsor), Ian Lavery, Andy McDonald, John McDonnell, Ian Mearns, Grahame Morris, Mick Whitley and Beth Winter. This is in addition to Jeremy Corbyn and Claudia Webbe who have had the Whip removed.

Moyle also provided a testimonial to anti-Roma, harasser of women and anti-Palestinian hate activist Luke Stanger

But where were Dianne Abbot, Clive Lewis, Nadia Whithome (the AWL MP), Richard Burgon, Ian Byrne, Dan Carden, Kim Johnson who only recently called Israel a fascist and apartheid state, Rebecca Long Bailey, Kate Osamor, Bell Ribeiro-Addy, Sam Tarry and Jon Trickett?

Despite having been a Corbyn supporter when it benefited his career, Moyle refused to sign a petition calling for the whip to be restored to Jeremy Corbyn

On paper the SCG has 35 members, but in practice it is in a state of political collapse. To put things into perspective 10 members of the Liberal Democrats, Zionists to a man and woman, also voted against this Bill on civil liberties grounds. Even 2 Tories did. The refusal of Moyle, Burgon and co. to join them is nothing less than shameful.

Tony Greenstein

Sharon Graham May Have No Pride But We Call on Unite Delegates To Let Starmer Know What Members Think of This ‘Real’ Conservative

Sharon Graham’s election in August 2021 was greeted with relief by most of the left, especially as the scab candidate of the Scum, Gerard Coyne, came third.

Unfortunately Sharon Graham has proved a big disappointment. It was revealed last December that Jack Clarke, Graham’s husband had been appointedHead of Bargaining and Dispute Support in Graham’s office without the approval of the National Executive Committee.

Sharon Graham has refused to deny this story let alone intervene with West Midland's region where 3 members made this decision to support a scab

This clearly smacked of nepotism, yet the response of Unite’s press office to Skwawkbox was to refuse to deny the report.

It was then revealed that complaints of bullying and threats of violence against other staff members by Clarke had been covered up

Unite has declined to deny reports that Unite’ general secretary’s Sharon Graham tried, before she became the union’s general secretary, to have evidence against her husband destroyed – or to answer questions as to whether the evidence was in fact destroyed after she took up the General Secretary position.

It was then revealed that Brendan Ogle of Unite Ireland region, had been victimised after he returned to work after treatment for cancer, because he didn’t support Graham in the election for General Secretary. The Irish Examiner reported that:

Brendan Ogle, who is the effective head of the Unite union in Ireland, claims he was urged to take a more junior role in the organisation that would necessitate a 100 mile daily commute. Following discussions with Unite, he continues to work in Dublin with the same title and pay he held prior to his illness.

…  he is being excluded from his organisational role in Right To Water, the group he set up through the union to campaign for a referendum on the public ownership of the water infrastructure….

 “He was told that was coming from head office in London. The only thing that has changed while he was out sick was the leadership in London where a new general secretary was elected,”….

Mr Ogle has been a leading figure in the trade union movement for over 20 years since he was general secretary of the Irish Locomotive Drivers Association, where he organised a rail strike in 2000. He was also the head of the ESB group of unions prior to joining Unite.

Why is Unite inviting a 'real Conservative' to its conference?

The invitation to Starmer, who has refused to support workers in struggle – be they nurses, train drivers, teachers or post workers, is an insult to Unite members. Starmer is a neo-liberal who has torn up the 10 Pledges that he made at the time of his election. as Labour leader. As Jenny Chapman admitted he said what was need to get elected rather than what he believed in.

Pledge No. 5 that ‘Public services should be in public hands’ and to ‘end outsourcing in our NHS, local government and justice system.’ This has been discarded. Instead West Streeting has announced that private sector involvement in the NHS will increase.

The film Jeremy Corbyn – The Big Lie has been banned from Unite premises at the behest of Starmer and his supporters. On 5^th July Sarah Carpenter, Regional Secretary of Unite SE wrote informing me that:

After careful consideration by senior union officials, the decision taken [to ban the film Corbyn the Big Lie] was grounded in our focus to prioritise resources to fight for members pay, terms and conditions and issues facing our local communities.

It was of course a lie. The decision had nothing to do with prioritising resources. Carpenter went on to inform me that under Rule 17.3 of the rule book our branch was forbidden from making a £250 donation to Platform  Films, who produced the film, despite them having made films for trade unions for years, including theT&G Story, a history of the T&GWU, which was the precursor of Unite.

Tony Benn wrote that:

“By making these brilliant films over the years, Platform has filled a gap that is so obvious in the media – that it doesn’t cover labour and progressive causes properly.”

And Bob Crowe likewise said that:

“RMT is proud to be associated with a film company that unashamedly knows which side it is on, and is carrying the tradition of gutsy, agitprop, socialist film-making to a new generation in the 21st century.”

But for the right-wing bureaucrats who have taken over Unite, none of this counts. As Sharon Graham cosies up to Keir Starmer the Corbyn era is wiped from memory and workers rights are abandoned.

Only this week Keith Ewing and John Hendy QC wrote an article for Tribune ‘Is Labour Backsliding on Workers’ Rights?’ They wrote:

Labour has quietly dropped key policies to guarantee basic rights and protections at work and strengthen trade unions – a U-turn that would harm millions of the country's most exploited workers.

Starmer is a neo-liberal, a racist and a ‘Zionist without qualification’. But for the right-wing Graham, none of this is stopping her wooing Starmer despite his anti-trade union policies, his warmongering, racism and chauvinism and his hostility to basic civil liberties and the right to protest.

The invitation to Starmer is the final straw. Many on the left like the SWP and the Socialist Party made the mistake of backing Graham in the General Secretary elections. Her support for industrial action blinded them to her right-wing stance on everything else. e.g. Unite’s support for increased military expenditure at the TUC Conference.

The latest scandal is Graham’s refusal to deny the claim of Gerard Coyne that Unite backs him as the candidate for the parliamentary seat of West Bromwich East. Members who have written to Unite have not received any denial.

This is why we must demonstrate outside Unite’s conference tomorrow. We refuse to allow the union to be taken over by Starmer’s lackeys and a self-serving and nepotistic leadership.

Tony Greenstein

Israel’s Army Killed 4 Children and Wrecked the Al Tafawk Children’s Centre in Jenin – All in ‘Self Defence’

Al Jazeera Film on Israel’s Propaganda War

In May 2021, as the world’s eyes were on Israel’s attack on Gaza, Israeli soldiers wrecked the Al Tafawk Children’s Centre in Jenin. They even took the time and trouble to tear up the children’s reading books. This is the hate that Zionism engenders.

Last week Israel’s military went even further. They not only wrecked the interior, they damaged the exterior walls of the Centre, punching large holes in them, demolishing the balcony. This is understandable. To Zionism Palestinian children are what Jewish children were to the Nazis. The embodiment of a satanic people.

On October 4 1943, in Posen (Poznan), Himmler explained why it was necessary to kill not just Jewish adults but their children too:

Thus I did not feel I had the right to exterminate – let’s say then, kill them or have them killed – the men while I allowed their avengers, in the form of their children, to grow up and avenge them upon our sons and grandsons.

Al Tafawk Video

The Al Tafawk Centre, which we have helped fund for the past four years, will not be allowed to die and I am therefore asking people to contribute what they can afford to the Go Fund Me Crowdfunder.

The British Shalom/Salaam Trust has also launched an 

URGENT APPEAL on behalf of the AL TAFAWK CHILDREN'S CENTRE

The BBC – Allergic to the Truth

Despite killing 4 children in Jenin, making some 35 Palestinian children in the West Bank this year, the BBC apologised because Anjana Gadgil told the truth for once and said that‘Israel is Happy to Kill Palestinian Children’ when questioning former Prime Minister, Naftali Bennett. Bennet is on record as saying that 'I've Killed Lots Of Arabs In My Life And There's No Problem With That'.

Palestinians in Jenin confront Palestinian Authority after deadly Israeli raid

Bennett’s claim that the children that Israel kills are ‘terrorists’ is a lie but in the eyes of the Zionists, Palestinians by definition are terrorists.

Jenin – Middle East International

I have therefore submitted a complaint to the BBC about their apology to the Zionist lobby for Gadgil’s remarks and asked them to withdraw it and also apologise for Gadgil having accepted that the term ‘terrorist’ applies to Palestinian children anyway. (see below)

‘Her smile never left her face’

By Basel AdraJuly 5, 2023

In a previous military raid in Jenin, the army killed seven Palestinians, including 15-year-old Sadeel Naghniyeh, who according to witnesses was shot in the head while standing at the entrance to her home. Her death began reverberating after images of her fellow classmates carrying her body for burial went viral.

Sadeel was shot on June 19, and died of her wounds two days later. Her father Ghassan described the scene to +972:

“The alarms started going off in the camps, we heard screaming, and people began running to their homes. This is a scene that repeats itself in every invasion of the camp. Israeli snipers went up to the roofs of the houses and buildings and began shooting. The clashes were not close to our house, we only heard them. My daughter was speaking to her cousins through the window, and told me that she wanted to go to her uncle’s house. I told myself that it is better that she go and not talk through the window, since doing so is more dangerous because of the snipers.”

The reality of Israel’s treatment of Palestinian children, which the BBC deliberately ignores was highlighted by the new Save the ChildrenReport which showed that:

·                During arrest, 42% of children were injured, including gunshot wounds and broken bones, and 65% of children were arrested during the night, mostly between midnight and dawn. Half of all arrests took place in the children’s home.

·                The majority of children experienced appalling levels of physical and emotional abuse, including being beaten (86%), being threatened with harm (70%), and hit with sticks or guns (60%).

·                Some children reported violence and abuse of a sexual nature, including being hit or touched on the genitals and 69% reported being strip searched.

·                60% of children experienced solitary confinement with the length of time varying from one 1 day to as long as 48 days.  

·                Children were denied access to basic services, 70% said they suffered from hunger and 68% said they didn’t receive any healthcare.   

·                58% of children were denied visits or communication with their family while detained.

·                The majority of children detained are boys – a trend reflected by the survey, with boys representing 97% of the respondents.

The Anti-Boycott Bill

As 1000 Israeli soldiers were launching a blitzkrieg on Jenin Refugee Camp, together with drones and helicopters, British MPs gave a second reading to the anti-Boycott Bill which is designed to protect the right of Israel to commit war crimes and to make solidarity action with the Palestinians illegal.

In Israel’s British apologists are enabling this violence former Guardian correspondent David Hearst wrote that:

‘Every word that Keir Starmer or Lisa Nandy utter in support of the 'Jewish homeland' sends a very clear message to Israel that it can carry on doing what it wants.’

Israel has openly fascist and neo-Nazi Ministers in power such as Police and Security Minister, Itamar ben Gvir, who used to hang a portrait of Baruch Goldstein on his living room wall. Goldstein opened fire in February 1994 in the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron massacring 29 Palestinian worshippers. Ben Gvir, who used to chant ‘death to the Arabs’, has recently told his supporters to change the chant to ‘Death to the terrorists’.

The BBC’s craven apology speaks volumes about the organisation. But let us have a look at the child ‘terrorists’ that Israel has murdered.

On June 2 a two-year-old Palestinian boy Mohammed al-Tamimi died after being shot in the head near Nabi Saleh by Israeli soldiers while riding in a car with his father. The army later said that the death was ‘unintentional’ and that the soldier would be reprimanded.

Four children murdered on Gaza beach playing hide and seek

In 2014 during Operation Protective Edge Israel murdered 551 Palestinian children. No doubt they too were terrorists, like the 4 children playing hide and seek on Gaza’s beach. Israel later described their death as a ‘tragic accident’.

In 2018 during the Great Return March from Gaza, Israeli snipers opened fire killing 50 children and some 266 unarmed demonstrators. The snipers injured 30,000 others. The bullets they used were deliberately designed to cause maximum damage to the human body.

Israel’s attack on Jenin needs to be seen in the context of the remarks by Ben-Gvir, an ex-supporter of Rabbi Meir Kahane, who called for the murder of hundreds, if not thousands of Palestinians.

Jenin is laying the basis for a second Nakba. Thousands of Palestinians were forced out of their home and forced to wander the streets of the refugee camp, without food or water, as Israeli troops occupied their homes.

Mustafa Sheta described how the invasion began with a devastating attack on The Freedom Theatre, where a group of families had sought refuge. Even the most dishonest Israeli Embassy liar would be hard pushed to explain why this symbol of Palestinian culture was attacked, the road outside being destroyed.

The attack on Jenin refugee camp decimated its infrastructure and obliterated the main roads in the camp.

Hospitals in Jenin treated dozens who were wounded during the military operation but residents said that ambulances, in many cases, were unable to reach and evacuate those hurt.

The Jenin municipality said that the water supply had been cut off throughout the refugee camp because infrastructure had suffered damage in the fighting.

The city’s power grid also suffered significant damage due to operations by the Israel Defense Forces’ engineering corps. Residents said that both electricity and internet service was disrupted. Sami Bakr, who lives in the refugee camp, said:

Israeli Military Bulldozer

“I heard bulldozers, and suddenly we saw them destroying the roads leading to the refugee camp to prevent people from leaving or entering it,” he said. “There are still forces there, and the residents are very afraid. The vast majority aren’t opening their windows.”

Bakr said that residents had been under siege since the morning, without electricity or internet. “There are wounded people who still haven’t been evacuated from the camp because the medical crews can’t enter.”

Urabi Hamad, a Jenin resident who lives near the camp, said that in his neighbourhood “we can’t leave or enter” adding:

 “There are still many forces in the area. The media are also still under siege, and the medical teams can’t move. The fear is horrible. We hear shooting and explosions all the time, and we’re afraid it will escalate and expand. There’s a lot of destruction everywhere.”

THE FREEDOM THEATRE in Jenin Refugee Camp, leads an emergency online meeting, on the invasion and what you can do

Doing Israel’s Dirty Work – The Palestinian Authority

It would also appear that another purpose of the attack on Jenin was to do the dirty work for the Palestinian Authority Israel’s military subcontractor. The PA hasn’t been able to operate in Jenin refugee camp for months.

Last Sunday the Israeli Security Cabinet decided that they would ‘act to prevent the collapse of the Palestinian Authority’ although this was opposed by Police Minister Ben Gvir with Smotrich abstaining. Smotrich, who is the effective Governor of the West Bank stated that ‘There will be no economic relief for the Palestinians.” 

The Jenin operation didn’t end. Phase Two has already begun.

After a PA delegation to the funeral of Jenin’s 12 martyrs was kicked out of the camp by mourners incensed at PA inaction, a ministerial committee was formed by presidential order to lead the reconstruction effort. Another Fatah delegation composed of members of its central committee returned on Saturday, July 8, to meet with members of the Jenin Brigade. The day after that, yet another delegation made up of PA ministers also arrived and made the rounds. The PA presence started to be normalized. See

According to PAJU, MahmoudAbbas the so-called Palestinian President visited Jenin on Wednesday to a hostile reception. In advance of his coming 1,000 PA security force members were deployed to Jenin. Rami, a Jenin resident was quoted as saying:

“We don’t need any help from the Palestinian Authority … you have been meeting [with the enemy] under the table,,, The Palestinian Authority is our occupier, not Israel.”

It also reported that ahead of Abbas’s visit

‘PA troops were spotted removing the flags of Gaza-based resistance groups Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), both of which enjoy great support across the West Bank.’

The same Israeli Judges Who Are the Bulwark of Israeli Jewish Democracy Enable the Military Dictatorship in the West Bank

The military subjugation of the Palestinians in the West Bank is backed to the hilt by Israel’s Zionist judges. The Supreme Court has consistently supported the demolition of the houses of families of Palestinian ‘terrorists’ whilst at the same time refusing to countenance the destruction of the homes of Jewish terrorists.

The ‘reason’ for this racist discrimination was explained in a 2015 ruling by Noam Sohlberg in the High Court. Sohlberg justified this openly racist discrimination by claiming that home demolition serves as a deterrent, and that the Jewish public was already “deterred and not incited.” Sohlberg acknowledged the existence of Jewish terrorism, but asserted,

“The difference exceeds the similarity in many aspects, and particularly… regarding mass attitudes: firm, wall-to-wall condemnation in the Jewish community, which is not the case on the opposite side.”

Largest Military Operation in Jenin as Israel Strikes Palestine Hard | Vantage with Palki Sharma

Sohlberg is a settler from Alon Shvut. A Sohlberg doctrine that is relevant to current events is his support for the lenient treatment of Jewish terrorism. As Yoana Gonenexplained

From the outset, this was a shameful justification based upon a racist gut feeling rather than facts….  Appalling pogroms and acts of terror committed by hundreds of bloodthirsty settlers have become routine. Houses are torched with their occupants inside; masked Jews hurl rocks at cars and fire guns at Palestinian localities; thuggish gangs go after Arabs on both sides of the Green Line; and rather than “firm, wall-to-wall condemnation,” these acts receive the helpful turning of a blind eye or outright enthusiastic support on the right.

A few days ago Ben-Gvir told lawbreakers at the illegal outposts, “Run to the hilltops, we have your back.” In fact there is a ‘wall-to-wall’ refusal in the right-wing parties to avoid issuing any condemnation, including Prime Minister Netanyahu. Meanwhile, among the Jewish public, a sickening song of praise to the pogrom in Hawara has become a hit and can be heard at protests in support of the judicial overhaul.

Instead of combating the settler violence coalition members launched a grammatical battle over the definition of “terror” and lashed out at officials who called it that. National Missions Minister Orit Strock, whose son was convicted of abusing a Palestinian minor, said it was a “disgrace” to label the Jewish pogroms ‘terror’, and Finance Minister Smotrich described it as “morally unacceptable and genuinely dangerous.”

These events reveal the fraud in Sohlberg’s words, which purport to be an objective legal argument, but in fact stem from Jewish Supremacist notions that inspire Strock and Smotrich. Like these ministers, Sohelberg considers terror to be something that only Arabs engage in and as something that Jews are genetically incapable of.

See The Settler Judge Who Advocates Lenient Treatment for Jewish Terror

Tony Greenstein

Zionist War Criminal Goldberg’sDescriptionof My Book as ‘Perhaps the Worst book I’ve Ever Read’ is Why You Should Read It!!

Marc Goldberg, proudly describes how he became a settler ‘in time to find himself fighting the Al Aqsa Intifada as an IDF Paratrooper’. Heis a curious choice to review a book on Zionism and the Holocaust. Goldberg is Head of Investigations at the CST, a Mossad Project.

Britain's  racist Home Secretary Cruella Braverman is a Welcome Guest at the CST's Annual Dinner

Some idea of the nature of the CST’s purported anti-racism can be gauged by the fact that Home Secretary Cruella Braverman, was guest of honour at their most recent annual dinner.

The ‘review’ was commisioned byFathom, the Internet Journal of BICOM, Israel’s main propaganda organisation in Britain,

I recently observed that the Zionists had avoided discussing my book whereas the Jewish Chronicle had devoted a whole page to an attack, by the Queen of Trivia Tanya Gold, on Asa Winstanley’s Weaponising Anti-Semitism.

I surmised that the reason for this was that the Zionists didn’t want to get into a debate on their record during the Holocaust. Judging by Goldberg’s ‘review’ I wasn’t far wrong.

As is to be expected, Goldberg barely touches on the content of my book. He prefers see it as one more anti-Semitic tome. Originality is not something which defenders of Zionism and Jewish supremacy are renowned for. Goldberg also writes for the Times of Israel and The Jewish Chronicle.

Fathom’s founding Editor Alan Johnson claimed it would be a ‘scholarly journal’ but amongst its ‘scholarly’ contributors are David Collier, the far right Zionist who refers to Palestinians in the third person and Luke Akehurst, the Labour witchhunter. Neither are renowned for their academic prowess.

Collier’s sole article was an attack on the BBC and Jeremy Bowen for having given ‘a masterclass in anti-Israel propaganda.’ The myth that the BBC is ‘anti-Israel’ is a favourite Zionist theme, completely at variance with the facts.

David Collier, far-Right Zionist with Tommy Robinson supporter Dr Brian, is welcome at Fathom

Fathom includes amongst its Advisor Editors Trevor Chinn, the multi-millionaire funder of Starmer and a variety of Zionist organisations as well as ex-Israeli Chief of Staff Brigadier General Michael Herzog and a former Director of Mossad, Efraim Halevy.

Fathom welcomes the Israeli military and security establishment as associate editors

Fathom says it welcomes articles on the ‘new’ antisemitism or antisemitic anti-Zionism’.  Its prejudices are self-evident. You will not find anything in Fathom that questions Zionism or why Israel has ended up with Judeo-Nazi Ministers like Ben-Gvir and Smotrich. Despite its pretensions Fathom is very much a propaganda journal.

Goldberg was part of the witchhunting against Black President of NUS

Despite its academic pretensions, Fathom is overladen with taken-for-granted Zionist clichés and assumptions. Goldberg’s review is consistent with this. This is not inevitable in a Zionist journal. The Journal of Israeli History really does carry scholarly articles and I cite it more than once in my book. But Fathom? It is afraid to pierce beneath the surface of Zionist propaganda for fear of what it may find.

Another military man on Fathom's Editorial Board

In its Introduction we are told that

‘Fathom’s highest quality editorship and insistence on careful fact-checking is fast propelling the journal into becoming essential reading for every person involved in policy and politics in the region and on the international scene.’

If the editors of Fathom believe this then they are suffering from a disconnect from reality that borders on a psychosis. There is no better example of falsifications than Goldberg who writes:

The author was only recently held by a British Court to be a ‘notorious antisemite’. In my opinion this book is antisemitic rubbish.

If you redefine anti-Semitism to mean anti-Zionism then I’m an anti-Semite. But Goldberg’s statement was a lie. Despite my pointing this out in their comments it’s still there. Is this fact checking?

Britain's  racist Home Secretary bunged the CST another £1 million this year

In 2017 I sued the Campaign Against Antisemitism for libel. Instead of defending their comment that I was a ‘notorious anti-Semite’ as factually true under s.2 Defamation Act 2013 they asserted that what they said was an honest opinion under s.3 even if it were untrue.

The Court agreed with the CAA that accusations of anti-Semitism are opinion and not fact. I therefore had to prove that the opinion of the CAA was dishonest, i.e. malicious, which is a high bar legally. At no stage did the Court offer an opinion of its own.

Nonetheless I have reason to be grateful to Goldberg. His description of my book as ‘perhaps the worst… I’ve ever read.’ is more valuable than all the academic recommendations on the back cover! 

Sir Trevor Chinn - Financier to a Host of Racist Individuals

Goldberg Avoids All The Difficult Questions

From February 1940 reports came into the Jewish Agency [JA] about how the Jewish population of Poland were being ‘mercilessly and cruelly annihilated’ yet no Palestinian Zionist body even discussed these reports. Why? Dina Porat, the Chief Historian at Yad Vashem admits that ‘these questions are hard to answer’ because ‘Ben-Gurion’s concentration on post-war goals shifted attention away from the present plight of Europe’s Jews.’

Dr Noah Lucas, a critical Zionist historian who I quote in my book

A serious historian, even a Zionist historian, would at least attempt to tackle such questions. Throughout my book I quote critical Zionist historians such as David Cesarani and Noah Lucas and it is a sign of the lack of commitment to scholarly inquiry that Fathom chose a propagandist rather than a historian to review my book.

Perhaps there is a Zionist equivalent to Godwin’s law? How long can a Zionist last out before attacking an opponent as anti-Semitic? Perhaps we should call it Goldberg’s Law. The beauty of attacking your opponents as anti-Semitic is that it saves you having to engage with their arguments.

The reason that Zionists resort to accusations of ‘anti-Semitism’ so readily is that it’s impossible to defend Israel’s actions. How do you defend evicting Palestinians from their homes to make way for messianic settlers? How do you defend demolishing the homes of Palestinian but not Jewish terrorists? How do you defend the right of hundreds of Jewish communities in Israel to legally bar Arabs?

Goldberg accuses me of ignoring ‘the work that the Zionist movement … did to fight Hitler’ and ignoring ‘the challenges faced by the Zionist movement….’ He complains that my book

doesn’t consist of a full review of the work undertaken by the Zionist movement against the Nazis, offers little to nothing in the way of context.

Peter Bergson, dissident Zionist whose Emergency Committee campaigned to save Jewish refugees - the American Zionist leaders sought his deportation

The problem is that not only did the Zionist movement do virtually nothing but they obstructed the work of others. I paid tribute to the dissident Zionists led by Hillel Cook (Peter Bergson), who were responsible for the formation of the War Refugee Board. I also paid tribute to the Zionist fighters in the ghettoes who disobeyed the instructions from Palestine to cease fighting the Nazis.

Medal struck to commemorate when the head of the Gestapo's Jewish Section, Baron von Mildenstein, sampled the hospitality of the kibbutzim 

When the vast majority of Jews supported boycotting Nazi Germany, the Zionists opposed it before they negotiated a trading agreement, Ha'avara, with Hitler. How could they fight Hitler when they were straining to increase their trade with the Nazis?

The Conference Centre Where the Evian Conference Was Held

I described in detail the Zionist hostility to the face-saving Evian Conference, called by Roosevelt to discuss the plight of Jewish refugees, in July 1938. Citing Boaz Evron’s Jewish State or Israeli Nation, I quoted Menachem Ussishkin at a meeting of the Jewish Agency Executive [JAE] of 26 June 1938:

Mr Greenbaum is right in stating that there is a danger that the Jewish people also will take Eretz-Yisrael off its agenda, and this should be viewed by us as a terrible danger. .. All other emigration countries do not interest him… The greatest danger is that attempts will be made to find other territories for Jewish emigration. (my emphasis).

Chaim Weizmann - first President of the Israeli state

I quoted from a letter of 13 February 1938 to Stephen Wise, the US Zionist leader, from George Landauer. It was a letter written at the behest of Chaim Weizmann, the Zionist Organisation President.

Even if the Conference will not place countries other than Palestine in the front for Jewish immigration, there will certainly be public appeals which will tend to overshadow the importance of Palestine.... it may bind Jewish organizations to collect large sums of money for assisting Jewish refugees, and these collections are likely to interfere with our own campaigns

The consensus of the meeting was to ‘belittle the Conference as far as possible and to cause it to decide nothing….’

Despite hoping that the Evian Conference would come to nothing, the leaders of the Zionist movement afterwards cynically criticised it for its failures.

Goldberg has nothing to say about this or the opposition by the Zionists to rescue where it was not to Palestine. Goldberg says he finds ‘both ludicrous and false’ my suggestion that the Zionists obstructed rescue. However he saves us the opportunity to learn why.

Goldberg’s ‘review’ consists of a series of assertions, none of which he substantiates. He says ‘many of his quotes serve to obscure the meaning of the sources they’ve been taken from’ but there are no examples.

Goldberg alleges that ‘Greenstein has managed to omit every substantive act of resistance Zionists took against the Nazis’. His main example being Aliya Bet, the illegal immigration of Zionist pioneers, often with Gestapo connivance, into Palestine.

In fact I do mention it when I cited Dina Porat as saying that through this ‘we gave meaning to life, we raised the prestige of the Zionist movement.’ I commented that ‘The arrogance of this statement is breathtaking. In other words saving Jews to anywhere but Palestine was meaningless.’

6,000 people were estimated to have been rescued. Zionist prestige was for Porat the most important thing. The other example Goldberg gives of Zionist resistance to the Nazis is when 33 Haganah agents were parachuted into Europe in March 1944. Goldberg argued that:

this episode serves as an interesting insight into Zionism during the Holocaust. It shows that the Jewish Agency Executive succeeded in convincing the British to drop Jews from Palestine behind enemy lines to carry out operations that might help Jews.

32 agents at the fag end of the war were unlikely to bolster the existing, highly developed resistance in Nazi occupied Europe. I quoted Zionist historian Yechiam Weitz that

Their primary goal was in effect to influence the survivors to choose Palestine as their ultimate destination. This point is corroborated by testimonies from that period.’

Goldberg thinks my claim that the Kindertransport, in which 9,354 child refugees were brought to England ‘despite Zionist hostility’ ‘an odd thing to say’. Similarly my assertion that ‘the Zionist leaders instead demanded that the children be brought to Palestine, which the Colonial Office rejected.’ Goldberg claims that Chaim Weizmann had been one of the founders of the Central British Fund for German Jewry, which organised the Kindertransport and that both Weizmann and Lionel de Rothschilds ‘personally lobbied Chamberlain to allow the children to come to Britain.’

There were in fact 6 people on that particular delegation. Weizmann was one of 10 original founders of the CBF but he played little part in it. Those responsible for its founding were the anti-Zionist leadership of British Jews, Neville Laski and Leonard Montefiore in particular.

Goldberg accuses me of failing to mention Weizmann’s presence at the founding of the CBF. The CBF consisted of the traditional bourgeois leadership of British Jewry, which was anti-Zionist. Simon Marks and Weizmann had only been invited to join it in order to buy off Zionist hostility to their rescue activities.

The Zionists resented the fact that appeals for Jewish refugees were likely to displace their own appeals. The Zionists only agreed to cooperate because it was agreed that the first destination of refugees would be Palestine. Amy Gottlieb wrote:

‘there can be little doubt that this was the assurance that Simon Marks, Chaim Weizmann and other Zionists had demanded in return for their co-operation.’ (Men of Vision, p.29)

The anti-Zionist leaders had bought off Zionist opposition by agreeing to their demands. The idea that Weizmann lobbied Chamberlain for Jewish refugees to come to Britain beggars belief. I quoted Malcolm MacDonald, the Colonial Secretary, recalling:

I remember at the time that Weizmann’s attitude shocked me.  He insisted on the children going to Palestine. As far as he was concerned it was Palestine or nowhere. 

When MacDonald refused to guarantee that the children would go on to Palestine Weizmann told him that: ‘We shall fight you - and when I say fight I mean fight.’

Ben Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister was even more explicit:

If I knew that it would be possible to save all the children in Germany by bringing them over to England, and only half of them by transporting them to Eretz Yisrael, then I would opt for the second alternative. For we must weigh not only the life of these children, but also the history of the People of Israel.

Goldberg complains that in my account of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, I was more interested in attacking Zionism. That I sought to

‘undermine the significance of the Zionism to the fighters yet,… during the uprising in the ghetto ‘for two days both the Polish and Star of David flags flew, visible to thousands of Poles’ … Who raised that flag if the fighters were waning in their Zionist politics?

Goldberg failed to understand that I wasn’t suggesting that the Zionist ghetto fighters weren’t Zionists, rather that Zionism had nothing to do with their decision to resist. The Revisionist Zionists, who had staffed the Jewish police who carried out the roundups, also fought a separate struggle against the Nazis and it was they who flew the Star of David.

Subjectively the Zionist fighters in the Ghetto remained Zionists, but objectively their decision to fight owed nothing to Zionism and everything to do with the fact that they were organised and understood that the Nazis intended to murder them.

Dina Porat described how ‘there was panic in Palestine’ after the Warsaw Ghetto Revolt. Melech Neustadt of the JAE urged the Zionist youth movement leaders in Palestine to instruct their members in Poland to leave ‘and thereby stop the armed uprisings’. Why? Because they ‘would ultimately deprive the Yishuv of the cream of Europe’s potential pioneering force.’

When a Zionist emissary arrived in Bedzin in July 1943 to persuade Frumka Plotnicka to leave, she replied ‘I have a responsibility for my brethren... I have lived with them and I will die with them.’ Zionist youth such as Zivia Lubetkin, refused on principle to leave. (160/161). Zionism saw the main fight as being against the Arabs, not the Nazis. Goldberg has nothing to say on this.

Goldberg questions my assertion that Jacobo Timerman, the Editor of La Opinion, ‘came under attack from the Zionist movement’.  It’s true that I cited an article in the Jewish Chronicle‘Timerman Stirs Jewish Discord’ (14.8.81) by Jose Smilg, its correspondent in Buenos Aires, who alleged that it was Timerman’s fight for human rights which was ‘inspiring a rash of anti-Semitic articles in the Argentine press.’’

But I also gave a number of other examples such as

i.           Ma’ariv, the Israeli newspaper, withdrew from an agreement to publish Timerman’s book Prisoner Without A Name, Cell Without a Number.

ii.          I described how in the United States ‘Timerman was attacked by right-wing Zionists who believed he ‘asked for what he got’.

iii.        I described how when Timerman received the Golden Pen of Freedom Award the venue was shifted from the Knesset to the Hebrew University in order not to offend Argentine’s anti-Semitic regime.

iv.        I also described how, when Timmerman published ‘The Longest War’ opposing the Lebanon War, Israel’s Deputy Foreign Minister, Yehuda Ben-Meir, described his book as ‘a collection of calumnies and lies arising from his own self-hatred.’

v.         When Timerman died, on 11 November 1999 he received glowing obituaries internationally but Israeli papers ‘provided only terse reports.’

Argentina’s anti-Semitic regime, between 1976 and 1983 murdered up to 3,000 Jews without so much as a Zionist whisper.

Goldberg described my book as ‘almost unreadable’. I accept that it must have been traumatic to have to read nearly 500 pages in which all those myths one had been brought up with were consigned to the fire. Such an experience can cause cognitive dissonance.

Goldberg could not understand why I wrote that it was only the Nazis who bore responsibility for the organisation of the Holocaust, yet I also said that the Zionists bore a moral responsibility for having obstructed the rescue of many thousands of Jews. Goldberg sees a contradiction where there is none.

Goldberg is sure that I have contradicted myself when I write that everywhere in Europe Zionism was a distinct minority among Jews yet I assert that

The Judenrate were composed of the traditional leadership, over two thirds of whom (67.1 per cent) consisted of Zionist supporters of all factions.

Goldberg asks ‘how both these things can be true’ suggesting that I am ‘determined to prevent the facts from standing in the way’ of my beliefs? Or it could be that the Goldberg assumes that the Jewish leadership politically reflected those they presided over?

Zionist resistance fighter Chajka Klinger condemned the collaboration of the Judenrat with the Nazis

If Goldberg hadn’t found my book so difficult to read he would have seen that I cited a Zionist resistance fighter Hayke Klinger who, in a speech in Palestine in March 1944 said: (148)

And precisely because those who stood at the head of most of the communities were Zionists, the psychological effects on most of the Jewish masses vis-à-vis the Zionist idea was devastating, and the hatred towards Zionism grew day by day...

Most disturbing of all was that I included others in the Holocaust:

‘what was not part of the Holocaust? We are left in the dark as to where, for Greenstein, the Holocaust begins and ends.’

I referred to the murder of the Disabled, 3m Russian POWs and 1m Gypsies whereas Zionism considers the Holocaust a Jewish-only affair. According to Gerhard Riegner ‘Drawing universal lessons from the Holocaust meant the ‘plunder of [Jewish] moral capital.’ All other groups come under Genocide, not Holocaust.

Collier, a contributor to Fathom, with Jonathan Hoffman - linkman between far-right Zionists and fascist groups

Goldberg criticises my reliance on the statistics of Edwin Black, author of The Transfer Agreement, the definitive book on the subject of Ha’avara. Goldberg cites a critical article by Richard Levy in Commentary (September 1984) in which he says of Black that his ‘weakness as a historian emerges in his treatment of the politics of the anti-Nazi boycott movement.’ It is pertinent to note the comment of David Wyman, Emeritues Professor of History at Massachusetts University in a letter to Holocaust & Genocide Studies[Vol. 11, p.277]:

‘It is entirely to the point to note that Levy is a retired nuclear engineer who has no formal training as a historian.’

It is sometimes difficult to understand Goldberg’s reasoning. For example he criticises me for citing Black in respect of the popularity of the Nazi boycott in Latvia whilst not mentioning that the Nazis had reached an agreement with the Latvian government to prevent the boycott. Goldberg suffers from ‘excessive love of authority syndrome’. He assumes that the Nazis’ successful pressure on the Latvian government to outlaw the Boycott was popular. Why?

Goldberg’s Failure to Understand the importance of the Boycott or Ha’avara

When Hitler was ‘elected’ Chancellor on March 5 1933 Jews spontaneously reacted by boycotting Nazi Germany. Only the Zionist movement and the Jewish bourgeoisie opposed the Boycott. The Zionists because they wanted to take advantage of the Nazi regime to build their ‘Jewish’ state. I quoted Auschwitz survivor Elie Wiesel:

‘Surely, Jewish Palestine... needed money to finance its development, but this brazen pragmatism went against the political philosophy of a majority of world Jewry. There developed a growing perception that instead of supporting and strengthening the boycott, Palestine was, in fact, sabotaging it.

Wiesel was a fervent Zionist but even he felt obliged to speak out. The Zionist movement was not interested in saving Jews. Its sole concern was its settler-colonial project in Palestine.

I have also ‘overblown the importance of this footnote of Holocaust history’. Even worse I am implying that world Jewry was capable of organising the overthrow of the Nazi government, which Goldberg says is akin to Nazi propaganda, i.e. anti-Semitic!

Of course by themselves Jews was not able to overthrow the Nazi regime but the whole point of the Boycott campaign was to persuade non-Jews to join them. Large sections of the labour movement supported it because they understood that the principal enemy of the Nazis were German trade unions and working class organisations.

I wrote that ‘The Nazis were ‘astonished’, given the record of Polish anti-Semitism, that the advent of the Nazis had given birth to a widely supported Boycott movement.’ (p.111) Despite the Zionist slander that most Arabs were Nazi supporters, Egypt had an almost complete Boycott. To the Zionists working with non-Jews to oppose anti-Semitism was and is anathema.

Jewish hero, Auschwitz escapee and anti-Zionist Rudolf Vrba bitterly criticised Zionist collaboration with the Nazis

Goldberg seeks to play down the economic importance of Ha’avara. His suggestion that Ha’avara trade accounted for only 1/1000 of German exports to Palestine is nonsense. Palestine remained a relatively small market for Germany but for the Jewish economy it was very significant. The reason that Hitler authorised the continuation of Ha’avara in 1937 was not for economic but political reasons. Ha’avara ensured that the defeat of the Boycott. The Zionist movement played the part, as Jewish Labour Leader Boris Vladeck termed it of ‘the official scab agent against the boycott in the Near-East’. The Zionists were happy to scab on the Boycott.

Goldberg wondered ‘why the fears of German Jewry aren’t addressed by Greenstein.’ In fact I did address these so-called fears, which suggests that Goldberg hasn’t properly read my book.

Publicly German Jews opposed the Boycott. If they had supported it they would have been killed. It was these denials that Goldberg relies on. I quote (108-9) from a message to Stephen Wise which said ‘Do not believe the denials, nor the Jewish denials.’ Moshe Beilinson, for the Labor Zionist movement, admitted that all Germany’s Jews, including the Zionists, supported the boycott. What I wrote was:

The Boycott forced the Third Reich to vigilantly restrain anti-Jewish violence. Goering was desperate. ‘Germany simply could not afford further export reductions’ and without exports ‘there would be economic death.’

The Jewish Chronicle, (‘The Unclean Thing,’ 27.12.35.) a supporter of Zionism, nonetheless thundered:

We object to the transfer of their assets in the form of the products of German factories and German employment. We say that that is aiding and comforting one of the most savage oppressions, even in Jewish history…. It breaks the united Jewish boycott front, a front let it not be forgotten, with which non-Jewish sympathisers were also aligned.

Argentina – A post-war example of Zionist collaboration

In 1994 a bomb exploded in the Jewish Community Centre in Buenos Aires. Almost immediately Israel and the United States blamed Iran and Hezbollah. Yet as Bill Brencick, chief of the political section in the US embassy from 1994 to 1997, acknowledged in a 2007 interview, suggestions of Iranian responsibility were based solely on a ‘wall of assumptions’ and that there was ‘no hard evidence’.

In 2014 a former police spy, Jose Alberto Perez, who had infiltrated the Jewish community in Buenos Aires on behalf of the Federal Police, revealed to two investigative journalists, Miriam Lewin and Horacio Lutzk, that he had been ordered to turn over blueprints to the community’s building to his police case officer “Laura”.  ‘Laura’ had ordered him to find out the involvement of the Jewish community in the ‘Andinia’ conspiracy theory which held that Marx, Einstein and Freud were at the centre of a Jewish conspiracy against Argentina.

The Military Intelligence Agency SIDE oversaw the investigation of the bombing. The SIDE Unit handling the investigation was riddled with the same anti-Semitic officers from the Cabildo group, who had tortured and murdered Jews during the rule of the Junta.

The anti-Semitic right in the Argentinian state was happy to go along with Israel and the United States but Perez was under no doubt that the bombing was carried out by dissident elements in the police and security establishment.

Goldberg denies my claim that Argentinian prosecutor Alberto Nisman committed suicide. ‘He was actually murdered.’ Goldberg prefers the version of events offered by the anti-Semitic Argentine state and Israel but there is considerable doubt as to whether  Nisman was murdered. An article in the Buenos Aires Times (17.1.00) refers to a 6 part documentary The Prosecutor, the President and the Spy which examines

the prosecutor's still unsolved death only days after he accused Fernández de Kirchner of colluding with Iran to allow the alleged authors of the bombing to go free.

The article refers to Pablo Duggan, author of the book Who Killed Nisman?, who states: 

"Nisman committed suicide. It's all proven in the file. This case should have been closed three years ago." 

The article tells how the series ‘which highlights the role played in the AMIA investigation by the intelligence services and the CIA – has caused a storm of reaction on Twitter.’ Its conclusion? The documentary tips the scales towards suicide.

The Argentinian state is riddled with anti-Semites, not the fake variety that Goldberg spends his time attacking. He is more than happy for Iran and Hezbollah to get the blame for the bombing. But given the confession of the police spy Perez and the record of the Argentinian state, it is highly likely that the perpetrators were home grown. Israel and its apologists like Goldberg want to exonerate genuine anti-Semites because they aren’t the real enemy.

Goldberg takes exception to my quote regarding the SS Intelligence Service that ‘Any attempt to foster anti-Jewish sentiment is strictly prohibited. Provoking the Arabs against Jewish immigrants only serves to harm the Reich.” Goldberg cites a 5 man Nazi commando group who were parachuted into Palestine with weapons and explosives in 1944. Their purpose was to instigate riots between Arabs and Jews.’

The only problem is that the quote from the SS was in a report dated January 1937. Of course 7 years later, when the Nazis were desperate, the idea of promoting Jewish-Arab riots was both appealing and elusive. In 1937 the Nazis were interested in Jewish emigration to Palestine. The last thing they wanted to encourage was Arab opposition. Hitler was opposed on principle to allying with indigenous peoples against their colonial masters. Not being a historian Goldberg telescopes 7 years into one.

Goldberg compares my observation that many Germans dismissed rumours of the murder of Jews as “atrocity propaganda” or refused to believe that such things could happen, with my statement:

‘What was unforgivable was that the Zionist leadership in Jerusalem refused to believe the evidence, even when it came from Jewish witnesses.’

Goldberg entirely misses the point. Ordinary Germans didn’t have any evidence of the systematic extermination of the Jews whereas the Zionists did have this evidence. Their offices in Geneva and Istanbul were in possession of reports of the killings very early on. ‘Exchange Jews’ who had been swapped with German prisoners returned to Palestine three times with detailed stories of what was happening yet the Zionists refused to believe them. They had other priorities.

I am also very critical of the British and US leaders who were also in possession of information about Auschwitz and chose to do nothing.

Goldberg doesn’t like the comparison between the Zionist movement, the Catholic Church and the USSR. The former had two billion adherents and the latter was a ‘large, powerful country.’ But the Catholic Church was also under attack. Hundreds, if not thousands, of its priests had been murdered in Poland. Yet despite this many of the Apostolic Nuncios had done all in their power to prevent the extermination of the Jews. In a number of countries the Church had sheltered Jews despite the risks. The Soviet Union had rescued up to 1.5 million Jews. No one expected the Zionist movement to match this but nor did one expect them to sabotage rescue attempts either.

Goldberg argues that I miss ‘the fact that Zionists were Jews who were caught up in and victims of the Holocaust the same as all other Jews.’ He deliberately conflates individual Zionists living under Nazi occupation with the Zionist leadership in the West and Palestine.

I pointed out in the final paragraph of p.61

To the Zionist leaders the Holocaust was a distraction. If saving Jews had been a priority, they would have established a central co-coordinating body to pull together all the various reports in order that they could identify where the destruction was taking place and where rescue was possible. The tiny Al-Domi group in Palestine suggested this but they were ignored.

Goldberg takes exception to what he calls my ‘Quote Mangling’ an example of which is where I write

‘In October 1941 David Ben-Gurion saw the catastrophe that was unfolding ‘as a source of strength and momentum’ which would accelerate the realisation of Zionism.’

Goldberg complains that ‘The quote isn’t from Ben-Gurion himself but from Shabtai Teveth’s biography of Ben-Gurion.’  That’s right. Which is why the footnote refers to Teveth’s book! But it is a devastating quotation coming as it did from Ben Gurion’s official biographer who went on to say that

If there was a line in Ben-Gurion’s mind between the beneficial disaster and an all-destroying catastrophe, it must have been a very fine one.’

Goldberg objected to my pointing out that the far-right Alternative for Germany, which is riddled with neo-Nazis ‘loves the Jewish state’and wants to make BDS illegal, Goldberg finds one individual member of the AfD who went to an anti-Zionist conference in Tehran to disprove this!

Goldberg suggests that Nick Griffin of the BNP is a supporter of the Palestinians. Yet when Israel attacked Lebanon in 2006. Lee Barnes, their legal advisor wrote on the BNP site that:

As a Nationalist I can say that I support Israel 100 % in their dispute with Hezbollah. In fact, I hope they wipe Hezbollah off the Lebanese map and bomb them until they leave large greasy craters in the cities where their Islamic extremist cantons of terror once stood. The 21st Century is the Islamic Century. Unless we start to resist the threat of Islamic extremism then within 100 years the West will have become Eurabia.

Ruth Smeed of the Board of Deputies was quoted as saying that

the British National Party website is now one of the most Zionist on the web – it goes further than any of the mainstream parties in its support of Israel.’

Who was the BNP leader at that time?  Nick Griffin. And who was welcomed like a hero at the last pro-Israel demonstration outside the Israeli embassy in May 2001?  Tommy Robinson!

The vast majority of the far right combines both anti-Semitism and support for Israel and Zionism. Richard Spencer, the neo-Nazi founder of the alt-Right protested that he was a White Zionist.

Goldberg recommends that readers read Eichmann’s Jews by Doron Rabinovici. I cite Rabinovici’s book as ‘one long apologia for the Kultusgemeinde, the Vienna Judenrat’. Rabinovici wrote that:

It was not because the Jewish councils betrayed the Jewish community but because they attempted to act in their interests that the Jewish functionaries were condemned to see things from the perspective of the authorities. They had to think like Nazis in the interests of the Jews.

So ferreting out the hiding places of Jews avoiding deportation was in the interests of the Jews! The President of Israel’s Supreme Court,Yitzhak Olshan was dismissive of this argument:

no matter how the Judenrat acted, they served the Nazis… Even those who served the interests of the Jewish communities assisted the Nazis.

Goldberg sympathises with the Judenrat and those who collaborated with the Nazis. Like the Zionist historians, he understands the ‘dilemmas’ of the Judenrat who did the work of the Nazis and dismisses those, including the Zionist fighters in the ghettos, who had nothing but loathing for the Judenrat, as did most holocaust survivors. Goldberg is nothing if not an establishment Zionist.

Goldberg take exception to Ken Loach’s calling my book ‘essential reading’ and his claim that my ‘detailed reference to original sources cannot be ignored.’ Goldberg concludes: ‘Perhaps it cannot be ignored, but it should be.’ This is Fathom’s idea of a review.

Goldberg writes of the ‘wave of outrage’ that greeted Loach’s play Perdition a quarter of a century ago. The outrage was the Zionist lobby trying to prevent a play being shown in the Royal Court Theatre that they didn’t like. Perdition was about Hungary in 1944 when a pact between the leader of Hungarian Zionism, Rudolf Kasztner, with Eichmann resulted in a train for the Zionist elite out of Hungary and complicity in the deportation of a half a million Jews to Auschwitz.

Robert Wistrich of Tel Aviv University, an ardent Zionist wrote that it was ‘unwise’ to attack the play as anti-Semitic, adding that ‘the entire Jewish leadership of that generation – including the Zionists – failed the test of the times.’ Wistrich conceded that ‘the major priority of the Zionist movement at the time was indeed building Palestine’. He accepted that ‘a reasonable case’ could be made that Zionists did not fight anti-Semitism before 1939

with the appropriate vigour’ and further ‘that some Zionists wanted to develop a ‘special relationship’with the Nazis…. To deny these points… is not only stupid but unnecessary.

Goldberg’s ‘review’ perpetuates this stupidity. His ‘review’ isn’t particularly sophisticated because the Zionist defence of their record during the holocaust comes up against the facts. All they can do is shout ‘anti-Semitism’ hoping it will drown them out.

For those who wish to see for themselves whether my book qualifies for the title of ‘worst book ever’ you can email me at tonygreenstein104@gmail.com to inquire about buying a copy!!

Tony Greenstein

 The Banning of Corbyn - The Big Lie & Asa Winstanley’s ‘Weaponising Anti-Semitism’ because they ‘caused deep hurt among Jews in Britain” Renders Unite's Policy on Palestine Meaningless

Defy @UniteSharon, Kid Starver & their Zionist Friends - See The Big Lie on Sunday 30 July - Register Here

https://www.tickettailor.com/checkout/view-event/id/2848027/chk/9145/?modal_widget=true&widget=true

It is the unanimous view of groups such as Amnesty International,  Human Rights Watch and B’Tselem that Israel is an Apartheid state. According to B’Tselem there is

A regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: This is apartheid 

In the West Bank there are two legal systems – one for Jews and one for Palestinians. This is the quintessential definition of Apartheid. Israel is a settler colonial regime where soldiers accompany and protect settlers as they stage pogroms against the Palestinians.

Israel is also a settler colonial state even within 1948 Israel. Israeli Arabs are considered a fifth column. That is why the Israeli state, a ‘Jewish’ state, has tried to Judaise areas like the Galilee and Negev.

The Koenig Memorandum of April 1976 by Yisrael Koenig, a senior member of the Israeli Labor Party, proposed to:

Expand and deepen Jewish settlement in areas where the contiguity of the Arab population is prominent, and where they number considerably more than the Jewish population; examine the possibility of diluting existing Arab population concentrations.

Imagine someone proposing to dilute the Black population of London or Whiten Birmingham. That is the politics of the National Front or BNP. Racial engineering was at the heart of Nazi lebensraum. See Christopher Browning’s ‘Nazi Resettlement Policy’. Koenig spoke about the duty of ‘those dealing with the Arab sector… to familiarize themselves with the Arab mentality.’

For those who don’t get it I suggest they try the phrase ‘Jewish mentality’. Today open Jewish supremacists such as Police Minister Ben Gvir reign supreme in Israel. Even Moshe Yalon, former right-wing Likud Defence Minister terms Gvir ‘Mein Kampf in Reverse.’ How else does one defend all this? By crying ‘anti-Semitism’.

At the root of the cry of ‘anti-Semitism’ is the belief that the opposition of Palestinians to Zionism and a Jewish State has nothing to do with the confiscation of land or demolition of homes but is solely on account of Israel’s racists being Jewish racists.

Gail Cartmail & Sharon Graham - Appeasing Starmer and Supporters of Apartheid Whilst Attacking Unite Supporters of the Palestinians

Accusing those on the left of ‘anti-Semitism’ was how the Labour right and the Zionist lobby destroyed the Corbyn left between 2015 and 2019. That is what Asa Winstanley’s book is about and that is why the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, an Israeli state organisation operating in Britain, has done its best to prevent the book being read or Jeremy Corbyn – The Big Lie being shown.

For the past few weeks Unite officials have peddled a series of lies to justify preventing The Big Lie being shown at Unite’s Portsmouth offices. Sarah Carpenter, SE Regional Secretary, told us it was about ‘resources’ and not meddling in internal Labour politics.

Finally the truth has emerged. It has taken a lot of prodding and probing before the lies of Unite’s officials crumbled.

It all began on 8 June when the Chair of Unite SE 6246 branch, Damian McCarthy, wrote to Carpenter asking if it was true that she had cancelled a showing of The Big Lie and if so why. Carpenter’s reply was disingenuous:

Hi Damian

I have asked for the screenings to be cancelled whilst I seek further guidance.  I have not had any instructions to cancel.  I hope to get back in touch with the Portsmouth Community branch as soon as possible to clarify the position.

Best wishes

Sarah Carpenter

Regional Secretary, South East Region

On the one hand Carpenter hadn’t had any instructions to cancel the screening yet she needed to seek ‘further guidance’ about the instructions she hadn’t received! It is of course difficult to lie effectively as Kid Starver demonstrates daily!

On 13 June Carpenter wrote back to McCarthy with a whole new set of lies. Now the screening had been cancelled because

The issues covered in the film are pertinent to internal Labour Party matters and that is not the focus of our union. Unite’s members are working on issues linked to our local communities and to industrial issues, and union resources are prioritised in these areas. Resources include use, maintenance and security of Unite buildings.

Although Unite can give Starver’s Labour Party the very blank cheque that Graham denied she was giving, some £2m a year, it couldn’t afford the cost of security for a union building to show a film. The pathetic lies of Graham’s officials need not detain us.

There was a time when trade unions did their best to educate and politicise their members. Today they do their best to keep them in ignorance as they cosy up to Labour’s neo-liberals.

On 5 July Carpenter sent me a letter. In this she double downed on the original lies:

Dear Tony

To address the questions that you ask I can be clear that Unite has not been contacted by any group in regards to the decision made. After careful consideration by senior union officials, the decision taken was grounded in our focus to prioritise resources to fight for members pay, terms and conditions and issues facing our local communities.

I will draw your attention however to Rule 17.3 within the Unite rule book, of which all branches should be aware…

 ‘… that no general purposes funds shall be used for political objects’.  

Therefore, the wish of the branch… regarding making a donation to Platform Films in this instance can be described as political and therefore the branch cannot, under rule, make a donation.  

Unfortunately these lies hadn’t been squared with the CAA. The CAA boasted about their success in persuading Sharon Graham into cancelling the film and Winstanley’s Bristol book launch. There were no references to ‘Unite resources’ or ‘security’. The CAA wrote

Following correspondence with Campaign Against Antisemitism, the Unite union has cancelled the screening of a propaganda film about the antisemitic former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn that was due to be shown alongside a book signing and talk from Asa Winstanley.

In other words the CAA has once again weaponised anti-Semitism in exactly the ways that Winstanley’s book exposes.

The first demand Unite members should make is to see all of the correspondence between the CAA and Graham.

Graham couldn’t even be bothered to lie to members herself. This nepotistic General Secretary left that to Gail Cartmail, Unite’s Assistant General Secretary. Cartmail claimed that “Asa Winstanley’s publication has already caused deep hurt among Jews in Britain.”

Jo Glasman ‘we slaughtered Corbyn’

Why should British Jews be ‘hurt’ by a film that exposes how the Israel lobby destabilised Corbyn and then boasted of it? That seems anti-Semitic!

It’s not Britain’s Jews but Israel’s apologists who were ‘hurt’ by the revelations in the film and book. There isn’t a shred of evidence that British Jews were concerned about the film or book. Censorship is for Zionist zealots and cowardly General Secretaries and their servile courtiers.

But even if British Jews were offended, so what? When Muslims attacked Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses the Guardian proclaimed If we don’t defend free speech, we live in tyranny. But when anti-Zionists attack Apartheid ‘preventing hurt’ to racists is what counts.

According to Electronic Intifada Cartmail stated that she was responding at the request of Sharon Graham. Ken Loach noted that

Asa Winstanley’s book has been widely praised, including by noted Jewish commentators, for its rigorous and authoritative research.

By banning the author from discussing it in this way, Unite has shown the title to be accurate – anti-Semitism has indeed been weaponized. This is a critical political issue. Buy this important book and judge for yourself.

This was the CAA's 'tribute' to the longstanding Jewish MP Gerald Kaufman - his crime? Supporting the Palestinians

The book launch was scheduled for Monday 24 July at Tony Benn House, Unite’s regional office in Bristol. Benn would turn in his grave if he knew what Unite’s dessicated bureaucrats had done.

A local union official told organisers that the event would be cancelled after “discussion with senior colleagues.” Asked to explain why he would only say the decision “relates to advice and opinion on controversy around the film” and that “the leadership of Unite” did not want to “be drawn into contentious political debate.”

Skwawkbox editor Steve Walker told Electronic Intifada that

Who are the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism?

The Campaign Against Anti-Semitism was formed in August 2014 to undermine solidarity with the Palestinians during Israel’s Operation Protective Edge when 2,200 Palestinians, including 551 children died. The CAA’s sole purpose was to weaponise anti-Semitism.

The CAA said nothing about the welcome for this neo-Nazi at a demonstration supporting Israel

The CAA has said nothing about the growing alliance between Zionist activists such as Jonathan Hoffman, the former Zionist Federation Vice-Chair, and the far-Right. When Tommy Robinson turned up to a pro-Israeli demonstration outside the Israeli Embassy in May 2021 he was given a hero’s welcome. The CAA said nothing.

When Jacob Rees-Mogg attacked two fellow Jewish Tories, Sir Oliver Letwin and John Bercow, as “Illuminati who are taking the powers to themselves.” the CAA said nothing. As Michael Berkowitz, Professor of Modern Jewish History at UCL wrote:

The CAA waged a war against Jeremy Corbyn on behalf of the Israeli state - all with the Charity Commission's blessing

‘With his nod to “Illuminati” – pointed at Letwin and Bercow – Rees-Mogg is knowingly trafficking in the portrayal of Jews as underhanded and sinister. … while studiously avoiding the word “Jew”, he has exhumed, embellished, and rebroadcast one of the most poisonous antisemitic canards in all of history.

Even Jonathan Freedland, the Guardian's resident Zionist, condemned Mogg for his attack on George Soros, saying that ‘Jacob “Illuminati” Rees-Mogg has form in this area.’ .

The paper of Israel's settlers just love Germany's neo-Nazi Alternative for Germany party

You might expect the CAA to vigorously condemn Mogg, who also retweeted the comments of Alice Wiedel, leader of the neo-Nazi German Party AfD but all you will find is a neutral article Jacob Rees Mogg defends sharing German far-right leader’s speech on Twitter which reports what he said without any of their normal vitriol.

The CAA attacked social activist hero Jo Solo and Hate Not Hope Got Their  Fingers Burnt in the Backlash

Why does the CAA not criticise Mogg’s comments? Because Mogg is as ardently pro-Israel as the AfD. When it comes to anti-Semites the CAA goes easy on them as long as they are pro-Israel.

The CAA played down criticism of the AfD, the most pro-Zionist party in Germany,saying that the ‘AfD has a long history of problematic language and policies’. The Nazi Party also had 'problematic language and policies'. If the CAA had been around in 1933 then they would have said nothing. After all the Nazi Party was also pro-Zionist.

The Liars of the CAA Alleged Prof. Moshe Machover, an Israeli anti-Zionist Supported Hamas - Machover is a Marxist, Hamas are religious conservatives - but Sharon Graham was taken in by the CAA

I have no doubt that the CAA is funded, directly or indirectly, by the Israeli state, via people like Gerald Ronson. When I applied for disclosure on their sources of funding in my libel action against them the CAA resisted to the bitter end.

To date there are no less than 1056 CAA postsattacking Corbyn. One of their officers, There are none on Tommy Robinson. The CAA was one of two Zionist groups, the other being the Jewish Labour Movement, which made a complaint to the institutionally racist EHRC about anti-Semitism in the Labour Party.

In order to maintain the pretence that it opposes the far-right too, the CAA devotes a tiny fraction of its resources to tackling fringe fascists such as the mentally ill Holocaust denier Alison Chabloz.

The CAA is an Islamophobic Campaign

The CAA’s 2016 Report British Muslims and antiSemitism is a vile racist tract. It has a picture of a Muslim man on the front cover holding a ‘Hitler was right’ poster. The implication is clear. Muslims are Nazi supporters.

The Report also included a full colour profile of a Muslim man which if it had been of a typical Jew would have been met with loud cries of ‘anti-Semitism’. The CAA report read:

… the gradual buildup of understanding and friendship between Britain’s Jews and Muslims has been utterly eclipsed by growing antisemitism amongst British Muslims. (my emphasis)

On every single count, British Muslims were more likely by far than the general British population to hold deeply antisemitic views…. many British Muslims reserve a special hatred for British Jews … British Muslims largely do not recognise antisemitism as a major problem.

It has long been suspected that sections of the British Muslim population harboured hatred towards British Jews…. the prejudice is horrifyingly widespread.

What the CAA doesn’t mention is that Islamaphobia/anti-Arab racism among Zionist Jews far outstrips Muslim prejudices against Jews.

The CAA has been at the forefront of attacking academic freedom. Because Bristol University lecturer Rachel Gould wrote Defining Anti-Semitism in 2011 describing how the holocaust intimidates people into self-censoring their views on Israel the CAA targeted her.

Palestinian PhD student and union vice-president at Exeter University, Malaka Shweik, was targeted by the CAA. She was eventually cleared and even the Daily Mail & Express apologised for carrying the malicious smears of Sharon Graham's favourite Zionist group, the CAA

This McCarthyist organisation demanded that Rachel publicly retract her article and write explaining why she had retracted her essay. If she declined to do so then she be dismissed “and her dismissal should be made public so as to clearly signal the University of Bristol’s values”.

Shahd Abusalama, a Palestinian PhD student and lecturer was targeted by the CAA at Sheffield Hallam University and forced out

The CAA forgets that Britain is not Israel (yet)! Academic freedom is not a term that the CAA is familiar with. It has used the IHRA Definition of Anti-Semitism as a weapon against anti-Zionists and Palestinian supporters. Even the IHRA’s principal drafter, American academic Kenneth Stern said , in testimony to the US Congress, that the CAA’s attack on Gould was ‘chilling and McCarthy-like’.

The Problem that the CAA faced was that it was the Right that was anti-Semitic – King’s College’s Daniel Allington Solved That Problem Through Academic Fraud

The CAA was set up with a single goal - to label Israel’s anti-Zionist opponents as ‘anti-Semitic’. It faced a serious problem though. Its target, anti-Zionists and Palestinian supporters, many of whom are Jewish, are almost exclusively on the Left, whereas genuine anti-Semites are almost exclusively on the Right.

Since 2014 the CAA has produced an ‘anti-Semitism barometer’. Despite their best efforts they found that anti-Semitism was more common on the right than the left.As their 2017 Anti-Semitism Barometer concluded:

 ‘Supporters of left-wing political parties and ‘remainers’ are less likely to be antisemitic than those on the right or supporters of the ‘leave’ camp’.

What the CAA needed was an academic who was willing to prostitute himself by producing bogus ‘research’ that would enable the CAA to claim that anti-Semitism was primarily a problem of the Left.

The CAA needed to invent a set of questions that would 'prove' that it is the Left who are the anti-Semites not the Right.

Step forward Daniel Allington who was prepared to use his academic credentials in what is no less than an academic fraud. With the help of Allington, the CAA drew up 6 statements in its 2019 Antisemitism Barometer, allof which related to Israel: They were:

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

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

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

4.        “I am comfortable spending time with People who openly support Israel.”

5.       “Israel makes a positive contribution to the world.”

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

I have to confess I would have been uncomfortable spending time with supporters of Apartheid South Africa or Nazi Germany. By this definition that makes me a racist!

By constructing these fraudulent questions, which bear no relationship to anti-Semitism as defined in the Oxford English Dictionary and as understood by 99.99% of people – ‘hostility to or prejudice against Jews as Jews’ the CAA was able to end its articles with the strap line:

Campaign Against Antisemitism’s Antisemitism Barometer 2019 showed that antisemitism on the far-left of British politics has surpassed that of the far-right.

The fact that Sharon Graham has banned a film about the campaign to destabilise Jeremy Corbyn at the behest of an organisation whose Chair, Gideon Falter, is Vice-Chair of the Jewish National Fund, an organisation which refuses to rent or lease the 93% of land in Israel that it owns or controls, is a disgrace. It makes Unite party to Israeli Apartheid. Graham might not care if she covers for racist Zionists but union members should care.

The CAA took this post down very quickly when it alleged Jackie Walker was a holocaust denier - unknown to them the quote they objected to came from Israel's first Prime Minister - David Ben Gurion!

The CAA has seen as one of its tasks engendering fear of anti-Semitism amongst British Jews. Anshel Pfeffer, commenting on the CAA’s 2015 Anti-Semitism Barometerwrote in Ha'aretz that:

take for example the statement that “Jews think they are better than other people.” Of course it’s not the thing that one should normally be caught saying in public - but is it anti-Semitic? For a start, many Jews do subscribe to the Jewish notion of “the chosen people,” and for that matter it’s not only Jews; members of many if not most nations, religions and ethnicities believe they are better than the others. That’s natural and normal national pride. Even if this view runs counter to liberal orthodoxy, believing that Jews think of themselves that way can certainly be a fair and honest assessment.

The same can be said of another of the survey’s statements: “Jews talk about the Holocaust too much in order to get sympathy.” That’s a rather nasty accusation but the fact is too many Jews, both political leaders in public appearances and ordinary Jews on social media, are often too quick to bring up the Holocaust in order to make a point. The sad truth is that many Jews have cheapened the memory of the Holocaust by using it in an inappropriate fashion. Holding that opinion doesn’t necessarily make you an anti-Semite.

Pfeffer accused the CAA of an ‘eagerness to see the anti-Semitism in Britain, which inarguably exists, as much more widespread than it really is’. There are no prizes for guessing why this might be so.

About the ‘finding’ that 56% of British Jews agree that “the recent rise in anti-Semitism in Britain has some echoes of the 1930s.” Pfeffer wrote that

If the majority of British Jews and the authors of the CAA report actually believe that, then it’s hard to take anything they say about contemporary anti-Semitism in their home country seriously…. To compare today’s Britain, for all its faults, with the Jews’ situation in 1930s exhibits a disconnect from reality which borders on hysteria.

That Graham, Cartmail, Carpenter and other officials took the complaints of the CAA serious without doing any due diligence is a disgrace. Not once did they ask themselves why the CAA wanted to silence a film that Ken Loach and many others have praised.

This was what the 'antisemitism' campaign was really about - demonising mainly Jewish anti-Zionists and anyone supporting the Palestinians

The Big Lie is a film in which many Jewish socialists explain why they have been expelled as a result of false allegations of anti-Semitism from the Labour Party. People like Graham Bash, Jackie Walker, Leah Levane, Naomi Wimborne Idrissi and myself. In getting into bed with the CAA Sharon Graham has torn up Unite’s policy in support of the Palestinians. See

UK union cancels “Weaponising Anti-Semitism” book launch

Exclusive: Graham’s Unite bans Corbyn film from all its buildings

UK union cancels “Weaponising Anti-Semitism” book launch

Unite hid that it had cancelled film and book event to please so-called Campaign Against Antisemitism

Exclusive: Unite leaders know ‘can’t trust a word Starmer says’ – yet gave him platform to deceive anyway

The Campaign Against Antisemitism is a campaign against Palestinians

 A Brave and Tortured Soul Who Spoke Out Against the Catholic Church’s Child Abuse Years Before It Became Fashionable

Ripping Up John Paul II Photo

When I heard of the death of Sinéad O'Connor at the all too young age of 56 I felt an indescribable sadness. It was a shock, although maybe it shouldn't have been given what she went through. There was no one who was as brave and courageous as Sinéad. When she ripped up a photograph of Pope John Paul II who, like all his predecessors had presided over a church which was a byword for the abuse of children and women, she suffered horrific abuse. When I first heard of her passing I thought of all those who deserve to die, like Kid Starver, yet live on to cause yet more torment. The world is a cruel place.

Rebel Song

Sinéad is famous for her cover of Prince’s Nothing Compares to You. It is indeed a powerful song but my all-time favourite is Rebel Song in which her love affair with a violent Englishman is the metaphor for England’s murderous colonisation of Ireland. It is one of three songs that I want to be played at my own funeral when it comes.

Famine 

Sinéad was nothing if not an Irish republican. Her song Famine accurately describes the so-called Irish Famine. It was of course no more a famine than what happened in Bengal and other places under  British rule. It was more a case of genocide. Food was being exported at the same time as Irish peasants were starving. This was Britain’s civilising legacy to the world and Ireland was foremost amongst those the British considered uncivilised.

Nothing Compares to You 

Sinéad received a standing ovation as she dedicated the Classic Irish Album award she received for I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got, to 

each and every member of Ireland’s refugee community”. “You’re very welcome in Ireland. I love you very much and I wish you happiness.”

Sinéad was nothing if not passionate in her principles.

I am a seed

Sister Sinead is a tribute to Sinéad O'Connor by her friend, Kris Kristofferson. Kristofferson comforted Sinéad on stage in 1992 when she was booed by the crowd during a Bob Dylan 30th Anniversary concert a fortnight after tearing up the Pope’s picture on Saturday Night Live. Sinéad regularly shaved her hair as a statement against the superficialities of the record industry, which Kristofferson alludes to in the lyric, "that bald-headed brave little girl."

Kris Kristofferson - Sister Sinead (2009) 

It should be said that Kristofferson himself is a brilliant country musician. Notable among his songs include Me and Bobby McGee, Help Me Make It Through The Night and my favourite Sunday Morning Coming Down.

Sunday Morning Coming Down

Of her ripping up of John Paul’s photograph she said “I’m not sorry I did it. It was brilliant,”“But it was very traumatising,” adding “It was open season on treating me like a crazy bitch.”

foggy dew 

The year before that high-profile protest, she boycotted the Grammy Awards, the music industry’s answer to the Oscars, saying she did not want “to be part of a world that measures artistic ability by material success.”

She refused the playing of US national anthem before her concerts, drawing further public attacks.

Sinéad’s life was one of tragedy and abuse. Abused by her mother she lived to see her son Shane 17 die 18 months before her. She blamed the Irish health service and said “May God forgive the Irish State for I never will”.

Pogues singer Shane MacGowan tweeted:

“Sinead you have always been there for me and for so many people, you have been a comfort & a soul who is not afraid to feel the pain of the suffering.

“You have always tried to heal & help. I pray that you can be comforted & find strength, healing & peace in your own sorrow & loss.

Sinéad O'Connor receives the Classic Irish Album award for I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got at the RTÉ Choice Music Prize at Vicar Street on March 9th. Photograph: Kieran Frost/Redferns

Let us hope that Sinéad has at last found peace.  Below are a few obituaries and tributes

Tony Greenstein

Sinéad O’Connor obituary - Guardian

Sinéad O’Connor, acclaimed Dublin singer, dies aged 56 -  Irish Times

Sinead O’Connor dead: Irish singer of ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’ dies aged 56

Acclaimed and outspoken Irish singer Sinead O’Connor dies at 56

Controversy never drowned out the astonishing songcraft of Sinéad O’Connor

The Public Order Act 2023 which Starmer Supported is Intended to Criminalise All Effective Protest

As people may know I together with 3 other Defendants am awaiting sentence after having been convicted of ‘intent to cause criminal damage without lawful excuse’ to the Shenstone Elbit factory of Israeli arms factory, Elbit.

The Judge ruled out all lawful excuses holding that there were no lawful excuses, thus leading inevitably to our convictions.

All five Defendants, including one whom the jury was deadlocked on, have issued the following statement:

Mike Lynch White (centre), cofounder of Scientist Rebellion was sentenced to 27 months in prison at Chester Crown Court 

I seem to recall a saying that Justice Delayed is Justice Denied. This was first coined by Sir Edward Coke, the greatest jurist of the Elizabethan and Jacobin periods, who was variously Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas and King’s Bench as well as Attorney General.

In the Case of Proclamations and Dr. Bonham's Case, Coke declared the King to be subject to the law, and the laws of Parliament to be void if in violation of "common right and reason". Cases which foreshadowed Bushel’s Case of 1670 where a jury decided not to enforce a tyrannical statute.

A week ago, Saturday 22 July, was Prisoners’ Day of Action. There are currently 7 supporters of Palestine Action in prison for taking action to disrupt the production of Israeli weapons on British soil.

Four of them are detained after dismantling American weapons factory, Teledyne Labtech in Wales. Teledyne are the largest listed exporters of weapons from Britain to the Apartheid State of Israel. Two others are in prison for occupying APPH, a Canadian weapons factory, and supplier of parts for Israeli Elbit drones and fighter jets.

Over 100 more face trials for taking direct action against a range of weapons companies, mainly Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest weapons firm. Elbit supply the majority of Israel’s military drone fleet, land equipment and munitions. Their weapons are used against the Palestinian people, and then marketed as “battle-tested” and sold on to other oppressive regimes across the world. Using the captive population of Gaza as a laboratory is a crime against humanity. All strikes against that industry are not only legitimate but essential.

The British State’s complicity with the colonisation of Palestine goes back all the way to the Balfour Declaration when, in the words of Arthur Koestler ‘“One nation solemnly promised to a second nation the country of a third.”  

Palestine Action  to date have shut down two Israeli weapons factories and cost Elbit hundreds of million pounds in lost contracts. By imprisoning activists, the British state is demonstrating that it prioritises protecting the military supply chain of a foreign apartheid state over the freedom of its own citizens.

In addition to handing down prison sentences, the State has imprisoned activists without trial and on occasions the Crown Prosecution Service have reintroduced previously dropped charges, after Elbit asked for a review. In reaction to both growing public support for direct action and the number of ‘perverse acquittals’ by juries, especially the Colston acquittals the Court of Appeal ruled, on reference from the Attorney General, that ‘lawful excuse’ defences such as Necessity (preventing a greater crime) and Human Rights defences of proportionality did not apply to cases of criminal damage.

For further information see Palestine Action Prisoners Day of Action on Saturday 22nd July

Almost 80 public figures, including members of the European Parliament, screenwriters, lecturers, musicians, writers and journalists, have signed an open letter calling on the UK to release detained Palestine Action protesters who "sacrificed their liberty to challenge colonial violence".

The protesters were arrested while obstructing the entrances to several sites belonging to Israel's largest weapons manufacturer, Elbit Systems, in the UK. Elbit, the letter says, manufactures "an array of weaponry, including drones equipped with payloads", and "profit from the captive population of Palestine — they have turned civilians into a human laboratory where experimental weaponry can be tested, improved on, and then marketed as "field-proven" and branded as "battle-tested" surveillance technology and components for tanks and fighter jets."

The signatories, who include Palestinian writer and activist Mohammed El-Kurd and musicians Roger Waters and Lowkey, added:

We demand the charges are dropped against those already incarcerated and at risk of prison over their work to disrupt the criminal production of Israeli weapons on British soil.

We stand with those who have sacrificed their liberty to challenge colonial violence and we call on others to do the same until they, and the Palestinian people, are free.

Palestine Action demo outside Newcastle Crown Court

Steps taken by Palestine Action, the letter continued,

have resulted in the closing down of two of Elbit's sites, and the loss of millions of pounds through the severance of MoD contracts. Palestine Action has inspired local communities across the country to rise up against these immoral factories which profit from the business of war and destruction.

In spite of this, the UK government

has decided to prioritise its interests in protecting the military supply chain of a foreign apartheid state by incarcerating its own people.

The heroes who have taken courageous action to expose and dismantle Britain's role in the colonisation of Palestine should be celebrated and rewarded, not imprisoned. We therefore call for the release of all Palestine Action political prisoners, and for the charges to be dropped.

Signatories to the letter also include British-Palestinian filmmaker Farah Nabulsi, lawyer and winner of the Palestine Book Award 2019 Academic Award, Professor Noura Erakat, and 2020 Creative Award Winner Susan Abulhawa, in addition to CAGE Director Moazzam Begg, MEPs Mick Wallace and Clare Daly and academic David Miller, who was fired from Bristol University following a campaign by the Israel lobby over his criticism of the Zionist state.

Here is the full statement calling for the release of Palestine Action prisoners

Solidarity from Greece

Solidarity from Greece for the actionists imprisoned in British jails for disrupting Israel’s military supply chain #FreeTheActionistspic.twitter.com/edQiE8zcof

— Palestine Action (@Pal_action) July 25, 2023

Banner Drop Manchester

Liverpool Protest

Huge support in Liverpool for the fight to free Palestine Action prisoners and all Palestinians #FreeTheActionistspic.twitter.com/CSVHmC8fiI

— Palestine Action (@Pal_action) July 22, 2023

Leicester Keysight Technologies

BREAKING: Palestine Action shatter a key supplier to Leicester’s Israeli weapons factory, on the 82nd day of the siege #ShutElbitDownpic.twitter.com/vwlLPfm70y

— Palestine Action (@Pal_action) July 22, 2023

Can the struggle for ‘Jewish’ Democracy be extended to the Palestinians?

For over 30 weeks, ever since the election of Netanyahu’s far-right coalition last November, Israel has been wracked by massive demonstrations over the judicial reforms.

But this has been a strange protest. Organisers have tried to exclude anti-occupation groups because they would ‘alienate’ those who agree with the subjugation of the Palestinians. Palestinian flags have been few and far between and those holding them have often been attacked.

The demonstrations take place only a few miles away from the rule of a Military Junta, under the West Bank Gauleiter Bezalel Smotrich, who called for the ‘wiping out’  of the Palestinian town of Huwara, yet almost nothing seeps back into these demonstrations.

Opposition leaders Benny Gantz and Yair Lapid rushed to support the Israeli military in its recent attack on Jenin. When it comes to bombing Gaza and murdering Palestinians there is unanimity amongst the political opposition and most of the demonstrators.

The demonstrations have seen a sea of Blue and White Israeli flags which to Palestinians are akin to what the Swastika was to European Jews.

How do we reconcile these contradictions?  Democracy for Jews but not Arabs?

Come and listen to the speakers today at 7 pm.

How Israel and Zionism Destroyed the World’s Oldest Jewish Community in Iraq

One World, London, 2023

Witness - The Last Jew of Babylon - 15 Jul 07 - Part 1

Avi Shlaim is Emeritus Professor of International Relations at St Anthony’s College, Oxford. He is also an Iraqi Jew who emigrated at the age of five to Israel before coming to England. It is a tale of 3 worlds – life in Iraq as an Arab Jew, in Israel as an alienated de-Arabised Jew and in England as a refugee from the Jewish ‘homeland.’ It is also, on a personal level, the story of how Zionism destroyed a Jewish community which was over 2,500 years old, in order to provide a working class for the ‘Jewish’ state to replace the Palestinian refugees.

Baruch Nadel, a journalist on Israel’s largest selling newspaper Yediot Aharanot, summed up the situation when he wrote that:

‘Zionism, not having saved the Jews of Europe found itself after the Second World War without a useful objective. To give a moral justification to the existence of their country, the Zionists looked for a way to “save” other Jews, regardless of their wishes. The only Jews with whom this would be possible were the Jews of the Arab world’. (Marion Woolfson, p. 198)

The Jewish Chronicle's idea of a review is a full-frontal attack with all the usual distortions!

The book is an intensely personal story that is symbolic of a far wider tragedy, the impact of Zionism on Iraq’s Jewish community.

Zionism was a movement that dedicated itself to one overriding goal since its founding at the end of the 19^th century, the creation and perpetuation of a Jewish nation/race via the creation of a Jewish state. Shlaim describes how

We in the Jewish community had much more in common linguistically and culturally with our Iraq compatriots than with our European co-religionists. We did not feel any affinity with the Zionist movement and we experienced no inner impulse to abandon our homeland to go and live in Israel.

Witness - The Last Jew of Babylon - 15 Jul 07 - Part 2

Shlaim writes of how

Relations that were shaped over hundreds of years were erased in a few hours…. A history of more than 2,000 years is liquidated in less than 2,000 hours…. The interaction of two forces – Zionism and Arab nationalism – forced us to leave our homeland and transformed our lives beyond recognition.

This tragedy was personified in the figure of Shlaim’s father, Yusuf.  A rich and prosperous merchant in Baghdad, on first name terms with the ruling elite, his Jewish identity was ethnic cultural not Zionist nationalist. In Israel Yusuf was reduced to poverty, jobless and living off his wife, Saida’s earnings as a telephonist in the town hall.

Avi Shlaim

Shlaim recalls when, in 1963, his Uncle Isaac, who was living in London, travelled to Israel. Isaac was ‘utterly shocked by the deterioration in the fortunes of the whole family’.

His mother, who had owned a luxury villa by the Tigris River in Baghdad, now lived in a tiny one-room bungalow in Ramat Gan. He remembered his uncles Jacob, Sha’ul and Joseph as prosperous merchants and men of considerable social stature in Baghdad. Now he saw for himself how drastically they had gone down in the world.

Zionism was not a ‘home-grown product but a foreign ideology propagated by emissaries from Palestine.’ Shlaim describes his mother’s ‘emphatic’ reaction when he asked her whether they had had any Zionist friends in Iraq: ‘No! Zionism is an Ashkenazi thing. It had nothing to do with us.’

When the Zionist Committee was given permission to function by the British, the local Jewish leaders met with the High Commissioner to express their opposition. ‘The Zionists were unable to enlist the support of any influential Jewish leaders.’

The largest, richest Jewish community in the Arab world, over 125,000, fled Iraq in the space of less than one year as five bombs (Naim Giladi in Ben Gurion’s Scandals says there were six) exploded in places frequented by Jews. It was the bombs which triggered the stampede.

The Great Synagogue of Baghdad

On 21 July 1950, three months after the first bomb, the Shlaim family, except for his father who came over later, moved to Israel. The reason according to Saida, was that life had become too dangerous for Jews in Iraq and the bombs compounded this sense of insecurity.

Shlaim describes Iraq’s Jews during the Ottoman era as the ‘most integrated into local society, the most Arabised in culture and the most prosperous.’ He describes his own childhood as ‘privileged and pampered.’ Among his parents’ friends was Jamal Baban, Minister of Justice and the wife of the Prime Minister, Tawfiq al-Suweidi.

By 1880 there were 55 synagogues in Baghdad. During the British occupation they controlled 75% of its imports. In 1935 the Baghdad Chamber of Commerce consisted of 9 Jews, 4 Muslims and 2 Britons.

By the end of 1951 all but 6,000 Jews had left in Operation Nehemiah and Ezra. When they arrived in Israel they were sprayed with DDT like animals as they got off the plane. Ben Gurion referred to them as ‘savage hordes’ and Foreign Minister Abba Eban remarked that

The goal must be to instil in them a Western spirit and not let them drag us into an unnatural Orient.

In October 1960 Ben Gurion declared that Jews in Muslim countries had ‘lived in a society that was backward, corrupt, uneducated and lacking in independence and self respect.’ He warned that ‘there is the danger that the coming generation may transform Israel into a Levantine state.’ This contemptuous racism towards Arab Jews later translated into victory for Menachem Begin’s Likud in 1977 and the eclipse of what had been Mapai (the Israeli Labor Party).

Iraq’s Jews were pauperised overnight. Bankers, lawyers and other professionals were reduced to begging for casual work. Saida described how, with the passage of time, Baghdad looked more and more like a ‘lost Eden.’

Iraqi Jewish refugees in a Ma'abara (transit camp), April 1951

Living at first in tents, they were dispersed mainly to development towns and collective settlements on the borders of Israel, there to guard against ‘infiltrators’ – Palestinian refugees trying to return. They had no say in where they went. It was the defence establishment which decided on the location of the collective settlements and development towns. Shlaim describes how

Books were kept with the names of those who left without permission and the lists were sent to labour exchanges to deny the escapees employment and housing. The police were asked to set up checkpoints and not to allow them to pass. Such draconian measures belied Israel’s claim to be a free and egalitarian society.

The Zionist movement saw a Jewish state in Palestine as a colonial outpost in the Middle East. In the words of the founder of Political Zionism, Theodor Herzl,

 ‘We should there form a portion of a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism.’

Zionism was founded on a contempt for the Jewish diaspora that rivalled that of the anti-Semites. Zionism began by accepting that Jews did not belong in the countries where they lived. It agreed with the anti-Semites that ‘exile’ had produced asocial characteristics in the Jews which in turn had led to anti-Semitism.

Zionism literally despised the Jewish Diaspora which it held responsible for all the ills Jews had suffered from, including the Holocaust. According to Jacob Klatzkin, the Jews were

a people disfigured in both body and soul – in a word, of a horror… some sort of outlandish creature… in any case, not a pure national type... some sort of oddity among the peoples going by the name of Jew

Such was the vehemence of these denunciation that Joachim Doron was moved to describe how:

rather than take up arms against the enemies of the Jews, Zionism attacked the ‘enemy within’, the Diaspora Jew  himself and subjected him to a hail of criticism…. Indeed a perusal of Zionist sources reveals criticism so scathing that the generation that witnessed Auschwitz has difficulty comprehending them. [Journal of Israeli History 8, Classic Zionism].

King Faisal I with Sir Sassoon Eskell, the Jewish first Minister of Finance, on an official tour of duty in Baghdad

The Ashkenazi leaders of Israel were determined that the Arab Jews must forget their roots and culture. They were to be shamed and made to forget where they had come from. Shlaim described how, if he was to identify one key factor that shaped his relationship to Israeli society, it would be an inferiority complex.

Shlaim describes how mortified he was as a child one day when his father approached him in a playground with other children and began talking to him in Arabic, forcing him to respond. Shlaim wrote that:

An impressionable young boy I picked up and internalised the beliefs and biases of my new environment. I wanted to turn my back on my Arab heritage… Speaking Arabic did not sit well with the new identity I was adopting.

His sister Dalia refused to speak Arabic, even at home, ‘because she regarded it as the language of the despised Diaspora.’

The first lesson in the moulding of the Arab Jews was for them to discard Arabic. Hebrew was the language with which they would become acculturated and assimilated to Israel’s western-style culture. In the 1920s and 1930s a similar battle had been waged against Yiddish – another diaspora language. In the 1940s Ramat Gan became a battle ground in the country’s language war. A Yiddish language press was blown up by Hebrew language fanatics.

Shlaim describes how the sense of alienation he felt as a child translated into poor performance at school where he was shy and withdrawn, refusing to participate in and keeping silent.

I internalised the inferior status that I thought society had assigned to me and I behaved accordingly…. I felt out of place on account of being a Sephardi, an Oriental, a Jew from the East, a Mizrahi.

Shlaim describes one incident in his class where the teacher ordered him to remove his necklace and ring. Wearing jewellery, especially by men, did not accord with Zionism’s austere ideology. ‘It was a deeply humiliating experience… This was my equivalent of being sprayed with DDT.’ Yet despite this he passed his national exam.

Shlaim and many other Arab/Misrahi Jews faced the condescending racism of their Ashkenazi peers. Education Minister, Israeli Labor’s Zalman Aran, believed that poor performance in school reflected low native intelligence rather than external socio-economic factors. In 1959 Mizrahi children constituted 50% of their age group but only 18.8% of those attending academic secondary schools.

The curriculum was also Zionised.  History was

more related to the project of nation building than to the disinterested pursuit of the truth…. The rich cultural heritage of the Arab-Jews was not just ignored, it was erased.

Jewish history was the history of Jewish suffering, what Salo Baron called the ‘lachrymose conception of Jewish history.’

At Israeli universities there is a department of history and a department of Jewish history devoted to rewriting history according to nationalist imperatives. At this time the Holocaust did not figure prominently and this situation pertained until the Eichmann trial.

Once the Holocaust became part of Israel’s war of propaganda then holocaust history too began to be rewritten to accord with the Zionist narrative. The heroism of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

was appropriated by Israeli propagandists to portray other Diaspora Jews as passive and weak in contrast to Israel’s ‘new-Jews.

As I show in Zionism During the Holocaust, the Zionist fighters in Warsaw fought despite the instructions of their own youth movements in Palestine to escape and come to Palestine. The real fight they were told was against the Arabs not the Nazis.

Yemenite immigrants gather for a photo at Rosh Ha’ayin

The 1950s was the era of Israeli Labor governments. During this time thousands of babies were stolen from Yemenite women to be given to Western Jews whilst the mothers were told that their babies had died.

Shlaim argues that anti-Semitism and anti-British feelings became intertwined as Iraq’s Jews were seen by Arab nationalists, as British agents.

On April 1 1941an anti-British coup by four senior army officers, the Golden Square, caused the royal family and regent Abdul Illah to flee to Transjordan. Rashid Ali al-Gaylani an ardent nationalist was appointed as Prime Minister and it was immediately decided to send an artillery force to lay siege to the RAF base in Habbaniya. Not until the end of May did the British regained control.

Immediately after, on June 1, as British soldiers waited at the gates of Baghdad, a pogrom broke out against Iraq’s Jews. Up to 189 were killed, hundreds injured and 10 women were raped. Shlaim suggests that keeping the troops outside Baghdad was ‘a fatal miscalculation’ but was it a miscalculation or something more sinister?

British historian Tony Rocca, in an investigation for the Sunday Times, found that Sir Kinahan Cornwallis, Britain’s ambassador, denied the Army’s requests to put down the anti-Jewish mobs and ‘while the Farhud raged, Cornwallis went back to his residence and played a game of bridge.” Marion Woolfson in Prophets in Babylon asked whether Cornwallis deliberately used the Jews of Baghdad as a foil for anti-British sentiment. Recounting ‘Farhud’ that ended 2,400 years of Iraqi Jewry

Shlaim describes how his mother, Saida, learnt that the British had deliberately not sent their troops into Baghdad and that

the secret motive of the British was to turn the Jews into scapegoats for the national humiliation that they themselves had inflicted on the Iraq army and the Iraqi people.

Yemenite Jews in camps

To the Zionists the Farhud is proof of the enmity of Iraq’s Arabs for their Jewish brethren. Yet it is a fact that hundreds of Jews were saved by their Moslem neighbours before troops were sent in by the Regent to clear the mobs. Shlaim quotes the case of one Muslim woman who stood in front of her neighbour’s gate with her Colonel husband’s loaded rifle, threatening to shoot anyone who came near them.

Compared to the horrendous massacres that were taking place in Europe at around the same time, when thousands of Jews were being killed in pogroms, what happened in Iraq was minor and one-off by comparison. Today Zionism has forgiven what happened in Europe since its main enemy is in the Middle East not Europe, with the neocon fiction about a ‘Judeo-Christian’ heritage.

To the Zionists this was proof that Arab society was anti-Semitic. According to the Zionist narrative‘It was a turning point in the history of the Jews in Iraq.’ Yet if that is so, why did Iraq’s Jews take such ‘persuading’ to leave in 1950-1? Shlaim is clearly correct when he says that anti-Semitism was on the increase but that nonetheless ‘it was more of a foreign import than a home-grown product.’ 

Many Iraqis looked to the Nazis in the 30s and 40s because the Nazis were the enemy of their enemy, not because they supported Hitler’s doctrines of racial supremacy. Arabs too were Untermenschen. It was Britain not Germany that was occupying their country.

However anti-fascism was also strong among Iraqis. As Orit Bashkin observed, ‘during the years 1941-1952, most of the influential Iraqi intellectuals were identified with Socialist and Communist goals.’ It was the Left, that was ‘the most resolute opponent of Nazism and Fascism.’ [Iraqi Shadows, Iraqi Lights, Arab Responses to Fascism and Nazism, Ed. Israel Gershoni, 2014]

Shlaim says that it was ‘as supporters of the British that the Jews of Baghdad were murdered and looted.’ This is undoubtedly true but I have my doubts whether it was ‘an innocent celebration of a Jewish festival (which) became the spark for a barbaric pogrom.’ Shlaim says that the Jews were dressed up in their finery during the festival of Shavuot and that they were mistaken for celebrating the return of the British and royal family. Other reports suggest that a Jewish delegation had gone to the airport to welcome the Regent back.

Far from there being a pattern of attacks against Iraqi Jews, as the Zionists argue, there had been no such attack for centuries. The Iraqi Jewish leaders saw the Farhud as ‘an aberration’

In the wake of the Nakba and because a steady number of Jews were leaving Iraq illegally, the Iraqi parliament on 9 March 1950 passed a Denaturalisation Law which allowed Iraqi Jews to relinquish their citizenship and emigrate. At first very few Jews registered and even those who did were hedging their bets. On the first day after the law passed, just 3 people registered. But then the first bomb went off outside the American Cultural Centre and Library on March 19. Yet by April 7 just 126 Jews had registered. Then on April 8 a grenade was thrown at the Dar al-Bayda, a Jewish owned coffee shop. Four Jews were injured and the next day 3,400 Jews turned up to register.

It was widely suspected that the Israeli government had come to an agreement with Nuri e-Said that in exchange for Iraq’s Jews being allowed to emigrate, Iraq could keep their assets. An advocate of such an agreement was Mordechai ben Porat, the leader of the Iraqi Zionists and later a member of the Knesset.

By the end of 1950 90,000 Jews had registered to leave. On 14 January 1951 a hand grenade was thrown into the courtyard of the Masuda Shemtov synagogue. Three Jews were killed and 25 were injured. By the beginning of March 1951 105,400 Jews had registered to leave. But then Prime Minister Nuri e-Said introduced a law by which all Jewish assets were frozen and then confiscated and shops were closed and sealed by the police.

A couple more bombs were thrown at Jewish owned enterprises and by the end of 1951 over 120,000 Jews had registered to leave.

Chapter 7 Baghdad Bombshell, takes up the story that the Zionist movement in Iraq, decided to ‘encourage’ those Jews who were unwilling to emigrate to Israel of their own accord by exploding bombs in places Jews frequented.  This was first broken by Haolem Hazeh andIsrael’s Black Panthers and then taken up by authors David Hirst, Marion Woolfson, Abbas Shiblak and Naim Giladi,

The Zionists have denied any role in the setting off of bombs in Baghdad but they have not explained why they were hiding caches of weapons that could have equipped an infantry company. As Israeli historian and journalist Tom Segev wrote:

It is significant the rumor arose at all, and that it was persistently repeated, even by Iraqi Jews. Obviously the idea was not unthinkable.’ [Tom Segev, The First Israelis']

When Iraq hanged Yusuf Basri and Shalom Salih Shalom for having taken part in the bombing campaign, Israel mounted a campaign of support for them among Iraqi Jews. As a classified document to Foreign Minister Moshe Sharrett admitted, Iraqi immigrants in the transit camps greeted the hangings with the attitude ‘That is God’s revenge on the movement that brought us to such depths.’

It is indisputable that the bombs played a major part in the emigration of the Jewish community. The question is whether or not the Zionist underground played any part. Shlaim’s research suggests that 3 of the bombs were the work of the Zionists in the person of Yusuf Basri, who was arrested on 10 June 1951. Traces of TNT were found in his car. Basri’s controller was an Israeli intelligence agent, Max Binnet. In all 12 arms caches were uncovered.

Shlaim uncovered in the course of his research vital new evidence of Zionist involvement in the bombing campaign in the form of a new witness Yaacov Karkoukli, who served several prison sentences in Iraq for his involvement in Zionist activities.

Karkoukli was a fanatical Zionist who agreed with the bombing campaign and supplied new and important information as to who was responsible. Shlaim concludes that the bomb at the Dar al-Beyda on 8 April 1950 was carried out by the right-wing Iraqi nationalist party Istiqlal and the others by the Zionists or, in the case of the Masuda Shemtov bombing, at their instigation by bribing an Iraqi policeman, Salem al-Quraishi to have it carried out by one Salih al-Haidari’.

Shlaim asked Karkoukli whether that meant that Zionist activists had deliberately set off the bombs to which he replied in the affirmative. Karkoukli also confirmed that the Israeli government had given tacit consent to the confiscation of the property of Iraq’s Jews, mentioning that Israel intended to use this to offset claims by Palestinian refugees.

Shlaim also uncovered an Iraqi Police Report into the bombing obtaining one page of a 258 page document. Shlaim writes that

this report constitutes undeniable proof of Zionist involvement  in the terrorist attacks that helped terminate the two and a half millennia of Jewish presence in Babylon.

The report pointed to the involvement of Zionist agents in the bombing, coupled with the fact that Zionist activist Yusef Basri led the Iraqi police from one arms cache to another.

The Zionist movement in Iraq had both opportunity, means and motive to carry out the bombing campaign. We know from the Lavon Affair shortly after, in which Israeli agents had been caught planting bombs in Egypt, that Israel had no compunction about committing terrorist acts in neighbouring countries. They did this despite the fact that it would inevitably rebound on Egypt’s large Jewish community and cause hostility and suspicion against them.

Zionism rewrote the history of Arab Jews so that the ‘Jewish’ state became the climax of their dreams, rescuing them from centuries of pogroms and discrimination. Accordingly the Arab Jews eagerly came to Israel in order to achieve their liberation.

This narrative is a post-facto self-serving justification. The Jews of the Arab world had lived in relative peace and harmony with their fellows. The Arab East had been a place of refuge for Jews fleeing from the Spanish Inquisition. Maimonedes, the greatest of Jewish philosophers, had sought refuge in Egypt as Saladdin’s personal physician. Jewish-Moslem relations in Spain had been harmonious in comparison with the Christian attacks on them.

To listen to Zionist and neocon propagandists you would be forgiven for thinking that the Holocaust  had occurred in Arabia not Europe. That is why at the 2015 World Zionist Congress Netanyahu blamed the Mufti of Jerusalem for inspiring Hitler to perpetrate the Holocaust.

The story of how it was the Muslims who fought with the Jews against the Crusaders at the Battles of Hatin and Haifa and how Saladdin’s capture of Jerusalem enabled the Jews who had been expelled to return has been erased from Zionism’s historical memory. Even Zionist historian Bernard Lewis had to admit that ‘There is nothing in Islamic history to parallel the Spanish expulsion and Inquisition, the Russian pogroms, or the Nazi Holocaust.’

It has suited the needs of the Israeli state to rewrite the history of Arab relations with the Jews as one of enmity and persecution. However it wasn’t enmity between Jew and Arab that explains the Israeli-Arab conflict but the imposition by British colonialism of Zionism on the Middle East and Palestine. It is this that explains the deterioration of relations between Arab Jews and their non-Jewish neighbours.

Above all it was the expulsion of the Palestinians in 1948 and the defeat of the Arab armies that caused the deterioration in relations between Jew and Arab in the Arab countries. As a Jewish State Israel purported to represent Jews the world over, including those living in the Arab countries. Jews in many of these countries were singled out as a client intermediary group, creating suspicion and hostility..

Zionism made it impossible for Jewish communities to survive in the Arab world. Not only did Israel expel ¾ million Palestinians in 1948 but they did it in the name of all Jews. Not surprisingly many Iraqis questioned the loyalty of Iraq’s Jews. When UN Resolution 181 was passed in November 1947 the General Council of Iraq’s Jews sent the UN a telegram opposing the creation of a Jewish state.

Shlaim describes how a ‘powerful popular wave of hostility towards both Israel and the Jews living in their midst swept through the Arab world’ after the defeat and expulsion of the Palestinians. Britain’s unpopular ruler, Nuri e-Said, ‘actively whipped up popular hysteria and suspicion against the Jews.’  Zionism was outlawed and this marked the start of the official persecution of the Jews. Shlaim describes how his mother ‘singled out the birth of Israel as the decisive point in the crisis of Iraqi Jews.’

If Israel and the UK were at war imagine how Jews here would be treated. One only has to look at how the United States treated its Japanese citizens during WW2 after the attack on Pearl Harbour to understand that the hostility between Israel and the Arab countries was bound to impact adversely on the Jews of those countries.

The final part of the book concerns the decision of his mother to send her son to England to continue his education. On 7 September 1961 Shlaim set sail from Haifa to Marseilles and he was accepted as a pupil at the Jewish Free School in London.

It was now that Shlaim began to blossom academically. He describes how ‘considerable glamour and kudos’ attached at that time to being an Israeli yet because he was an ‘Israeli of the wrong kind’ he was left in something of a quandary as his different identities collided.

Shlaim described how Jewish history that was taught at JFS focussed on persecution and martyrdom whereas Israeli history emphasised heroism and redemption: ‘the history we were taught at school was scarcely distinguishable from Zionist propaganda.’  One suspects that the same curriculum is still being followed today.

Shlaim concludes from the experiences of his family that

there was another category of victims of the Zionist project: the Jews of the Arab lands…. Unlike Europe Iraq did not have a ‘Jewish problem’…. Zionism changed all that. By endowing Judaism with a territorial dimension… it accentuated the difference between Jews and Muslims in Arab spaces… Zionism not only turned the Palestinians into refugees; it turned the Jews of the East into strangers in their own land. In 1947-49 it was not only the land of Palestine that was partitioned but also the past.

Shlaim who is now a supporter of a one democratic state solution notes how this would also renew the relevance of the Arab Jew. In his concluding remarks Shlaim notes how ‘apartheid in the twenty-first century is simply not sustainable.’

If I have one criticism of this book it is that we need a Dramatis Personae of all the friends and family who make an appearance. At times I found it difficult to follow the many different stories.

Tony Greenstein

 Support St Mungo’s Workers  Don’t Allow This Corporate Charity to Break the Strike With Agency Scabs

Strike Rally on August 10^th

Last Thursday I attended a mass rally in support of the St Mungo’s strikers outside their plush headquarters in East London, located near luxury yachts and St Katharine Docks. There were hundreds of supporters there and a fierce determination to ensure that the trustees and management, who almost all come from the corporate and financial sector, are not allowed to break a strike of low paid workers.

Meanwhile in Bristol our comrades are keeping up the pressure on Rocasa to stop 🛑 supplying agency staff to 🪧 break. ⛔️🔥🌤️🔥 pic.twitter.com/tHnN1NhZWm

— St Mungo's Unite (@SMUnite) July 27, 2023

Emma Haddad, their Chief Executive Officer, was on £189K according to their last accounts. St Mungo’s has refused to divulge her current salary so we can be certain that she is now receiving over £200K a year, that is 10 times more than St Mungo’s low paid workers.

Haddad has absolutely no experience of the third sector, still less homelessness. She has come from the Home Office where, by all accounts, she had an appalling record.

Whilst the strike has been on St Mungo’s have appointed a Transformation Director, Sean Palmer, also from the Home Office. There seems to be a revolving door between the Home Office and St Mungo’s.

The job was advertised as starting at £130,000 but it is understood that Palmer  negotiated closer to £160,000. It is the usual story. More money for the rich whilst telling its workers they have no money left for them.

😀😃All smiles at Rochester Row this morning. 😃😃 pic.twitter.com/yEqdOCIMnj

— St Mungo's Unite (@SMUnite) July 27, 2023

Rally at St Mungo's HQ

Palmer was previously involved in the Napier barracks scandal whereby asylum seekers were unlawfully detained and when at the Ministry of Justice he was involved in the shutting down of 100 courts thus creating a massive backlog in people having their cases heard.

Haddad, their CEO, and Palmer oversaw deathly and inhumane accommodation at the Home Office for refugees.  How one wonders are they appropriate for running homelessness accommodation?

Unite lead officer Onay Kasab speaking at the St Mungos strike rally 

As for the trustees, they are almost all are from corporate accounts and finance backgrounds with barely any homelessness experience between them.

True to form these corporate scoundrels first attempted to break the strike using agency staff. When the High Court outlawed that particular practice they decided to hurriedly appointing appoint temps to permanent posts, at great expense, to try and break the strike. What is clear is that this is not about  money but the viciously anti-union and anti-worker mentality of those who occupy corporate boardrooms.

Rally at  St Mungo's HQ

St Mungo’s strikers have been on strike since the end of May. They are currently on week 11. Their demand is for a 10% pay rise for all.

None of this has stopped St Mungo's PR boasting that ‘we’re all united in our values and our aim of ending homelessness.’  So who are what they call their  Team Members?

Rally at St Mungo's HQ

Who Are St Mungo’s Executive Directors?

Emma Haddad, the Chief Executive Officer comes directly from the Home Office where she was responsible for housing for asylum seekers and refugees and before that she worked for the DWP and before that ‘working with EU partners on the migration and asylum agenda.’ Implementing racist migration and asylum policies is her forte

David Fisher - The only Executive Director with any experience in the housing field

David Fisher, the Executive Director of Services, previously worked in three London based charities; Single Homeless Project; Housing Services Agency and Broadway.

Jonathan Manuel, the Executive Director of Finance, has spent most of his career to date at FTSE 100 drinks company Diageo. Clearly he is well qualified to work for St Mungo’s.

Who are the Trustees?

Well Joanna Killian, who is – Chair of Trustees, is Chief Executive of Surrey County Council. Before that she was a Partner and Head of Local Government and Devolution at crooked accountants KPMG LLP, who seem a favoured company with St Mungo’s.

Then there is Rolande Anderson, who is following a senior career in the civil service. Rolande is Vice Chair at London Metropolitan University and an Associate of the College of Policing. Handy experience if you are dealing with vagrants as the Police term the homeless.

There is Alexandra Beidas, who as a commercial lawyer and Global Head of Employment and Incentives at Linklaters, a big city solicitors, has a wealth of experience walking past the homeless each day.

Not forgetting Rob Bradshaw who is currently Client Director at Gate One, a digital and business transformation consultancy. He has previously worked as a management consultant for PwC and KPMG (again).

And another housing and homelessness expert is Dan Corry, who seems to have gone missing since the beginning of the strike. Dan is also Chief Executive of New Philanthropy Capital, having held a variety of posts in public policy and economics including as Senior Adviser to the Prime Minister on the Economy from 2007 to 2010.