ICJ:
Blinne Ní Ghrálaigh's powerful closing statement in South Africa case against
Israel
Today
is the day that the International Court of Justice makes its decision. I hesitate
to speculate as to what the decision might be. Will they issue an interim injunction
to Israel to desist from its genocidal activities or will it end up with a
fudge or compromise instructing Israel to protect the civilian population and
take more care. In which case Israel will proclaim that they are already doing
that.
I
hesitate to make a prediction but nonetheless I will. The Court has come under
an immense amount of political pressure.The United States has already said
that the case that South Africa has brought to be ‘“meritless, counterproductive, and completely without any basis in
fact whatsoever.”. The UK under Sunak has played its traditional role, which
is one of being America’s faithful lapdog and Keir Starmer has played his
normal role of follow my leader.
Happy to report that this video garnered more than 100,000 views within the first couple of hours on IG.
Over the last 111 days, since October 7, Isræl has consistently denied targeting civilians. Well, in this video, I am going to show you that in the history of its… pic.twitter.com/076QZ2QcYp
There is no doubt that if the decision were made
on purely legal grounds then South Africa would win hands down. That is the opinion
of international law experts. However this is not a court that bases its
decisions on legality. It is a political court and its judges are political
appointees.
Therefore,
although I would love the court to come to a clear-cut decision instructing Israel
to stop its genocidal attacks my fear is that the court will fudge the decision
and engage in meaningless soundbites. It will criticize Israel without having
the courage to issue an injunction instructing it to stop the genocide that is
taking place.
Children About
To Be Shot
I
sincerely hope that I am wrong but I fear otherwise. Israel has already made it
crystal clear that it will defy an injunction to stop committing genocide. That
means a decision instructing it to desist from further military activities it
will go to the Security Council for enforcement.
The
United States will then veto the resolution and under the Uniting for Peace resolution
377 (V) it will then go to the General Assembly. It is anyone’s guess what
could happen then but theoretically the General Assembly could suspend Israel’s
membership of the United Nations. If Israel was suspended it is likely that the
United States would walk out and the British poodle could follow them.
This
scenario must be playing on the minds of the ICJ which is why I don’t believe
that they will deliver the verdict that most people want. No one doubts that
legally South Africa has clearly met the test of showing intent on Israel’s
part to commit genocide. Indeed it is already doing just that and its
spokespersons, from the President and Prime Minister down have made their
genocidal intentions clear to all.
No
one doubts that Irish lawyer Blinne Ni Ghralaigh made a devastating closing
speech. If it was simply about the case that South Africa made then it would
win hands down but my fear is that this court will allow political
considerations to intervene.
Murder of Man With White Flag
If however the ICJ does do
as I predict then that will be seen as the death of international human rights
law. If the highest court in the world cannot implement the law when there is
such an egregious example of genocide taking place under its very eyes, then
international law is meaningless.
The other question I have
posed is how October 7th will come to be seen in years to come.
Again I hesitate to make predictions but I am convinced that we are seeing the beginning
of the end of Zionism.
Zionism was always an
unnatural political creature and Israel even more so. Israel, even its Jewish part,
has never been able to decide what its identity was. Was it Jewish first or Israeli
first? This is a question on which Israeli Jews themselves are split.
October 7 has also made ‘normalisation’
between the treacherous and corrupt Arab regimes and Israel that much harder
though one cannot put it past creatures such as Saudi Arabia’s MBS to plough on
nonetheless.
However the rise of the
Houthis and Hezbollah coupled with the fierce resistance of Hamas and the other
militias in Gaza has destroyed the myth of invincibility that the Israeli state
likes to cloak itself with. Israel may be a nuclear power but despite the
wishes of certain far right Israeli ministers it is unlikely to want to create
a radioactive desert in the Middle East.
It is just possible that Israel
pre-1967 could have turned into a normal bourgeois state, albeit one with
repressive and authoritarian tendencies. After 1967 and the conquering of the
territories with the growth of what Yeshayahu Leibowitz called the Judeo-Nazis this became impossible.
Today we see the far right
settler parties driving Israel’s political agenda and we saw, pre-October 7 the
massive demonstrations in Israel over the judicial reforms. What October 7 postponed
will not go away. We are seeing the symptoms of those divisions in the growing
political crisis in Israel over the hostages as it becomes clear that Netanyahu,
Smotrich and Ben Gvir wish to pursue their war aims regardless of its effect on
the hostages.
Given the choice between
killing Palestinians and saving the hostages Netanyahu and co. unhesitatingly choose
the former.
The relatives of the
hostages though are becoming more and more desperate as they know that the
longer the war goes on, the more of them will die. These divisions roughly
correspond with the divisions over the judicial reforms.
The current government has effectively
declared war on the Palestinians, not only in Gaza but the West Bank. The Palestinian
Authority is barely able to survive as the Israeli government ignores this
Vichy style administration that the Oslo Accords gave birth to. It is doubtful
that this bastard child of Oslo will long survive.
Ever since July the war on
Jenin in particular, but also Nablus and Tulkarem has gone on. I am told that
there hasn’t been one peaceful night in Jenin since July. I know because I
fundraise for the Al Tafawk Children’s Centre there.
There is now a war between
the settlers, armed by Ben Gvir and the Palestinians. A war whose purpose is
ethnic cleansing.
I once asked myself if there
is anything that Israel could do which the United States would sanction it for.
The answer that I have drawn is no. Whatever protestations made by Biden and
Blinken they continue to arm Israel.
The key question that is
posed today is how to get rid of the ‘Jewish’ settler-colonial state, a state
of Jewish supremacy and Apartheid. War with Lebanon seems increasingly likely
and if that happens the conflagration is likely to spread to Iraq and Iran. The
whole region is slipping inexorably into war.
The Houthis have shown the
way but others in the region are not far behind. The Abraham Accords have been
show to be built on sand.
The reality is that if the
repressive and rotten Arab regimes had taken a leaf out of the Houthis book and
embargoed the oil, as they did in 1973, then the United States would have
stopped the genocide in its tracks.
Above all the question of Zionism
and its demise is integrally liked with the death of the Arab regimes, especially
Egypt and Saudi Arabia.
ICJ interim ruling on
genocide case against Israel - Live
It is a comforting myth, not least to the German State,
the heir to the Nazi murderers, to believe that the State of Israel was gifted
to the Jews in compensation for the Holocaust.
Like all such myths it carries within it the danger that
it will imbue those who claim to inherit the memory of those who died, with the
power to repeat what happened before. And thus it has come to pass that Israel has
been found to have perpetrated genocide in Gaza in thename of the Jewish Holocaust.
It is a myth that Israel was created because of the Holocaust.
If that were true why is there no Roma or Gypsy state? Why have the Gypsies and
Roma not been offered compensation equivalent to Germany’s reparations to Israel?
The Gypsies continue to be hounded and persecuted in Europe.
In fact the colonisation of Palestine by Zionist settlers
began in 1882 not 1945. The Holocaust was, as far as the Zionist leaders were
concerned fortuitous in that it enormously strengthened their project. As Noah
Lucas, a critical Zionist historian wrote in The Modern History of Israel:
‘As the European holocaust erupted,
Ben-Gurion saw it as a decisive opportunity for Zionism... In conditions of
peace,… Zionism could not move the masses of world Jewry. The forces unleashed
by Hitler in all their horror must be harnessed to the advantage of Zionism.
... By the end of 1942… the struggle for a Jewish state became the primary
concern of the movement.’
Even now Germany refuses to compensate Namibia for
the massacre of more than 70,000 Herero and
Nama people between 1904 and 1908, which was the 20th Century's
first genocide.
Namibia: The Price of
Genocide | People and Power
It
is no surprise that Namibia’s anger boiled over
when Germany offered to join Israel’s case at the ICJ. It was in Namibia, then
a German colony, that Germany’s extermination program for the Herero and Nama
people became the
template for the Holocaust.
Eugen
Fischer was the Nazi doctor who helped
pioneer eugenics in the Third Reich. As director of the Kaiser Wilhelm
Institute for Anthropology (1927-42) Fischer provided the ‘scientific’ rationale
for the Nazi’s war of extermination.
On Shark Island in SW
Africa Fischer ran medical breeding experiments on the camp’s inmates. Racist
ideas developed in the colony were brought back to German institutions along
with the Africans’ skulls. In 1939, Fischer declared
When a people
wants … to preserve its own nature, it must reject alien racial elements,… The
Jew is such an alien and, therefore, when he wants to insinuate himself, he
must be warded off.
Fischer
conducted
medical experiments on children born from the rape of African women. His
research inspired Adolf Hitler and in the 1930s, Fischer taught his racist
theories to Nazi doctors. One of his students, Joseph Mengele, was
responsible for the medical experiments in the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp.
It
is therefore appropriate that the German state, which never de-Nazified, has
offered its support to Israel at the ICJ.
In
March 1988 Professor Yehuda Elkana, a child survivor of Auschwitz, wrote an article
in Ha’aretz, The Need to Forget. Elkana,
who later became Rector of the Central European University in Budapest,
before Netanyahu’s friend, Viktor Orban, the anti-Semitic Prime Minister of Hungary,
closed it down wrote of:
a profound existential "Angst" fed by a particular interpretation
of the lessons of the Holocaust and the readiness to believe that the whole world
is against us, and that we are the eternal victim. In this ancient belief,
shared by so many today, I see the tragic and paradoxical victory of Hitler.
Two nations, metaphorically speaking, emerged from the ashes of Auschwitz: a
minority who assert, "this must never happen again," and a frightened
and haunted majority who assert, "this must never happen to us again."
Elkana described how Israel sent children on
repeated visits to Israel’s holocaust propaganda centre, Yad Vashem asking:
What did we want those tender youths to do with the experience? We
declaimed, insensitively and harshly, and without explanation: "Remember!""Zechor!" To what purpose? What is the child supposed to do with
these memories? Many of the pictures of those horrors are apt to be interpreted
as a call to hate.
Israel also sends thousands of schoolchildren to Poland every year to
visit Auschwitz. As Ha’aretz columnist
Gideon Levy observed,
Remembering
the Holocaust is now for nationalists only. There’s no universal conclusion or
moral lesson.
I have yet to hear a single teenager come back from Auschwitz and say
that we mustn’t abuse others the way we were abused. There has yet to be a
school whose pupils came back from Birkenau straight to the Gaza
border, saw the barbed-wire fence and said, Never again. The message is always
the opposite. Gaza is permitted because of Auschwitz.
Elkana told how Thomas Jefferson wrote that democracy and worship of the
past are incompatible.
Democracy fosters the present and the future. Too much of
"Zechor!" (Remember) and an addiction. to the past undermine the
foundations of democracy.
Elkana’s conclusion caused uproar in Israel:
we must learn to forget! Today I see no more important political and educational
task for the leaders of this nation than to take their stand on the side of
life, to dedicate themselves to creating our future, and not to be preoccupied
from morning to night, with symbols, ceremonies, and lessons of the Holocaust.
They must uproot the domination of that historical "remember!" over
our lives.
If we are going to commemorate the Holocaust every Holocaust
Memorial Day then we have to ask ‘to what purpose?’ If the Holocaust is going to
be used, as Israel uses it, to justify its genocide in Gaza and maybe the West
Bank too, then Elkana is right. It is best forgotten.
We have seen Israeli politicians proclaim
that the breakout from Gaza on October 7 was the greatest massacre of Jews since
the Holocaust. Not only is this factually wrong but it is morally and
politically wrong too.
Israel sees October 7 through the prism of the Holocaust
because it wants to avoid discussing the real reasons of what happened that day.
I leave to one side the question of what actually happened, as opposed to the
myth of organized rapes, beheaded
babies and all the rest.
It is no wonder that when Antonio Gutterez, the UN
General Secretary, said that October 7 did not happen in a vacuum Israel’s leaders
went
berserk, calling for his resignation. Israeli leaders want people to
believe that the events of October 7 happened, not because of Israel’s occupation
of the Gaza Strip for 57 years and its siege of 17 years but because Palestinians
are consumed by hatred of Jews. In other words our old friend, ‘eternal anti-Semitism.’
We are supposed, according to the Zionists, to
ignore the ongoing genocide in Gaza, the murder of 30,000+ people including
15,000 children, the murder of 120 journalists, hundreds of doctors and health
workers, the destruction of hospitals and homes and instead focus solely on the
700 Israeli civilians, the majority of whom appear to have been murdered by Israel
as a result of its Hannibal
Doctrine.
The decision of the ICJ, despite the fact that it
didn’t order a ceasefire, is welcome. Those who, even now, ignore the death
ofPalestinians and instead can only remember
October 7 should be treated as the racists and genociders that they are.
On a personal note, I have myself put an end to a 40
year friendship with someone who wrote in a local
right-wing rag that ‘nothing the
Israeli state has done provides justification for the atrocities of that day.’
The whole article concentrated on attacking Hamas comparing it to ISIS as Netanyahu
did.
As the video below from two Israeli hostages show,
Hamas’s treatment of its captives is incomparably better than Israel’s
treatment of Palestinian prisoners, especially given Israel’s carpet bombing of
Gaza.
Hin & Ajam Were 2 Prisoners of Hamas
The
article railed against an anti-Semitic doctor in Durban without mentioning that
the South Africa Jewish community wholeheartedly supported Apartheid. South
Africa and Israel became close
military partners. Those Jews, like Ronnie Kasrils and Joe Slovo, who joined
the ANC and opposed Apartheid were ostracized by this right-wing Zionist Jewish
community.
Tonight
the Socialist Labour
Network and Jewish
Network for Palestine are holding a meeting on Holocaust Memorial Day. Our
message is that Never Again applies to everyone, including the Palestinians
currently fighting to live in Gaza.
We
should also remember the record of the Zionist movement during the Holocaust when
they not merely prioritized the building of a ‘Jewish’ State over the rescue of
Jews from the Holocaust but they actively opposed all rescue attempts where the
destination wasn’t Palestine.
Historian
Christopher Sykes wrote of the 1938 Evian Conference that Roosevelt called to
find a solution to the Jewish refugee problem and the Zionist attitude to it,
that:
From the start they regarded the whole enterprise with hostile indifference...
If the 31 nations had done their duty and shown hospitality to those in dire
need then the pressure on the National Home and the heightened enthusiasm of
Jews with Palestine would both have been relaxed. This was the last thing that the Zionist leaders wished for…. Even
in the more terrible days ahead they made no secret of the fact, even when
talking to Gentiles, that they did not want Jewish settlements outside
Palestine to be successful... The Zionists wanted to do something more for Jews
than merely help them to escape danger…. that such was the basic Zionist idea
is not a matter of opinion but a fact abundantly provable by evidence... [my
emphasis - Crossroads to Israel]
Nor
should we forget the response of David Ben-Gurion to the Kindertransport, a
scheme whereby the British agreed, after Kristallnacht in November
1938, to admit 10,000 unaccompanied Jewish children to England. He was furious
that they weren’t going to Palestine and in a speech to the Israeli Labor Party’s
[Mapai] Central Committee on 9 December 1938, he explained his reasoning:
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.
Likewise
Chaim Weizmann, the first President of Israel and then President of the Zionist
Organisation told Malcolm MacDonald, the Colonial Secretary that ‘‘We shall fight you - and when I say fight
I mean fight.’
We
have to reclaim the Nazi Holocaust for everyone, not just for Jews people or
the Israeli state.
The Israeli State,
instead of being Recompense for the Extermination of Europe’s Jews, is the Embodiment
of the Nazi Policies of Lebensraum and Racial Resettlement
Above is the recording of our hugely
successful Holocaust Memorial Day meeting last night. 333 people attended from
25 countries and every continent including 218 from the UK, 38 from South
Africa, 27 from the United States and 12 from Germany.
Instead of this being a typical Zionist Holocaust
Memorial Day meeting, using the memory of the Holocaust to reinforce the racist,
genocidal Israeli state, there were a series of speakers who spoke of the liberation
of humanity from the imperialist order which led to the Holocaust.
The meeting was chaired by Esther Giles from the Socialist Labour Network. Speakers included the foremost Israeli historian
of the Nakba, Ilan Pappe; Ronnie Kasrils,the former leader of the ANC’s military wing, Umkonte we Sizwe and
former Police Minister under Mandela.
Ghada Kharmi, a Palestinian doctor who
was expelled with her family from Jerusalem in 1948 and a prolific author and academic, the latest book being One State, Suzanne Weiss, who as a
child was hidden by the Jewish resistance from the Nazis in Auvergne, France;
Stephen Kapos, who was hidden by the Holy Cross church group from the Nazis and
the fascist Iron Cross in Budapest and Tony Greenstein from the SLN and Jewish Network for Palestine, the first Jewish member
of the Labour Party to be expelled and author of Zionism During the Holocaust.
We intend to repeat this meeting next
year. Never Again must the Zionists be allowed to lay claim to the memory of
the Jewish dead of the Holocaust. They represent the perpetrators not the
victims of the Holocaust.
When Yoav Gallant, Israel’s Defence
Minister, called Palestinians ‘Human
Animals’ he was repeating
word for word Himmler’s October 1943 Speeches in Poznan, Poland calling Jews ‘Human Animals’.
It is important that we do not allow the
Zionists to colonise HMD and thus trash the memory of the Jews and others who
died at the hands of the fascist barbarians. There is no one and nothing that
is closer to these fascists than the regime in Tel Aviv whose closest friends today
are those very same fascists – from our own Tommy Robinson to people like Geert
Wilders, Germany’s Afd and Norway’s Anders
Breivik, to say nothing of Trump and Bannon.
The
United States and its British Poodle Cut Food Aid to those Already Starving
Channel 4
Interview with Chris Gunnis, former spokesperson for UNRWA
It was no surprise that the war criminals
who govern us – Biden, Sunak, Scholtz and the rest immediately cut of all aid
to UNWRA, the UN agency responsible for feeding the Palestinian refugees. Israel
has long desired
to eliminate UNWRA altogether. It is as Philippe Lazzarini, the head of the UNWRAsaid, collective punishment.
But even if the allegations are true,
even if some UNWRAstaff did participate in October 7, so what? Resistance
against an occupier is allowed under international law and is the right of any
occupied people.
Most people will understand what the
real motive is behind this decision. The leaders of western imperialism don’t
even bother to hide their anger at the decision of the International Court of
Justice at the Hague, weak as it was, that the case that the United States said
was ‘meritless’was upheld by the ICJ who considered genocide ‘plausible’.
The decision to attack UNWRA is clearly
in retaliation for against the decision to go to the ICJ. Such is the nature of
the ‘rules based order’. See below two articles from Mondoweiss. Naturally Israel’s
response
was to accuse the ICJ of anti-Semitism!The go to explanation for all criticism of Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
Never before has it been so obvious that
Western support has nothing to do with Jews or anti-Semitism and everything to
do with Western interests.
However in their desire to support the
West’s attack dog in the Middle East the west’s war mongers are risking setting
the whole of the region on fire.
If the Arab regimes, the Houthis apart,
weren’t so cowardly and subservient to the West, the genocide in Gaza could have
been stopped in its tracks long ago. An oil embargo, as in 1973, would have
forced the United States to reign in their racist Rottweiler.
On the very day that the ICJ ordered for Israel to ensure the
unimpeded entry of humanitarian aid into Gaza, Washington saw fit to cut
off all funding to UNRWA, the United Nations agency for Palestinian
refugees.
The decision came after Israel claimed that 12 UNRWA workers
had been involved in the October 7 attack. UNRWA has said that it has terminated
the contracts of these workers as it commissions an independent
investigation into the allegations — but the United Kingdom, Australia,
Italy, and Canada have followed
the U.S.’s lead and pulled their funding of the organization.
In an election year during which he is trying to convince the
American public that he is the only alternative to the return of Donald Trump
to the White House, U.S. President Joe Biden is following his predecessor’s
lead, as Trump had partially suspended funding to UNRWA in 2018.
“We call on
the countries that announced the cessation of their support for UNRWA to
immediately reverse their decision, which entails great political and
humanitarian relief risks, as at this particular time and in light of the
continuing aggression against the Palestinian people, we need the maximum
support for this international organization and not stopping support and
assistance to it,”
Palestine Liberation Organization Secretary-General Hussein
al-Sheikh wrote on
X.
Hamas, meanwhile, called on the United Nations “not to yield
to the threats and blackmails.”
“We stress the
importance of the role of these agencies in providing relief to our people and
documenting the crimes of the occupation, which exceed the most horrific crimes
known to humanity in our modern era,”
JEREMY CORBYN: Britain joining other countries in suspending funding for #UNRWA amounts to collective punishment.
Even as the U.S. appears steadfast in siding with Israel,
Biden is facing
legal trouble at home over his administration’s failure to stop the ongoing
genocide in Gaza.
Palestinians testified
on Friday in front of a federal court, in a case brought forth by the
Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) against Biden, Secretary of State Antony
Blinken, and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, arguing that the three
high-ranking officials are liable under U.S. law for complicity in Israel’s
violations of the Genocide Convention.
The State Department has paused funding for
UNRWA after the Israeli government accused 12 employees of being involved in
the October 7 attack.
The State Department paused
additional funding for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine
Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) after the Israeli government accused 12 UNRWA
workers of being involved in the October 7 Hamas attack.
A press statement from State Department spokesperson Matthew
Miller said the Biden administration was “extremely
troubled by the allegations.” Secretary of State Antony Blinken has spoken
with United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres “to emphasize the necessity of a thorough and swift investigation of
this matter.”
UNRWA has already terminated the staffers and opened an
investigation into the allegations. “The
Israeli authorities have provided UNRWA with information about the alleged
involvement of several UNRWA employees in the horrific attacks on Israel on
October 7,”said
UNRWA Commissioner General Philippe Lazzarini.
“To protect
the agency’s ability to deliver humanitarian assistance, I have taken the
decision to immediately terminate the contracts of these staff members and
launch an investigation in order to establish the truth without delay.”
UNRWA COMMISSIONER-GENERAL:
The suspension of the agency's funding is shocking and threatens humanitarian work in the region, especially in Gaza.
I call on countries that suspended funding to reconsider their decisions.
Many have noted that UNRWA provides life-saving aid to more
than 2 million Palestinians in Gaza.
“Based on
unproven allegations alone, the U.S. has cut off funding to UNRWA, one of few
groups which provides crucial on the ground aid to Palestinians,”said the
antiwar group CODEPINK. “Yet, as Israel
commits war crime after war crime, the U.S. continues sending weapons.”
“The US is
collectively punishing Palestinians, who rely on UNRWA to survive, based on
Israeli allegations against 0.0004% of UNRWA’s staff. Outrageous,”said the
Institute for Middle East Understanding (IMEU).
The Biden administration’s announcement comes on the same day
that the UN’s top court ordered
Israel to prevent genocidal acts Gaza and a U.S. court began hearing a lawsuit
accusing Israel of genocide.
NEW: The State Department has put a temporary hold on funding for UNRWA, the main UN agency in Gaza, following allegations that 12 UNRWA employees were involved in Hamas's Oct. 7 attacks in Israel pic.twitter.com/HXtr7AzISa
NEW: The State Department has put a temporary hold on funding for UNRWA, the main UN agency in Gaza, following allegations that 12 UNRWA employees were involved in Hamas's Oct. 7 attacks in Israel pic.twitter.com/HXtr7AzISa
Commentators questioned the State Department’s timing across
social media.
“So, the US
State Dept drops a rather significant statement on (unsubstantiated) allegations
against UNRWA workers and pulling funding on the day of the ICJ ruling which
finds sufficient evidence for plausible genocidal acts—- and decides there’s no
need for a press briefing,”
wrote AJ+’s
Sana Saeed. “Honestly, this would be
masterful manufacturing of the news if it wasn’t so transparent.”
“The US chose
to stop funds to UNRWA only an hour after the ICJ decision,” tweetedUSCPR Organizing
& Advocacy Director Iman Abid. “Israel kills over 33,000
Palestinians and the US still continues to negotiate an increase in funding to
Israel. I don’t know what more you need to know about this administration.”
Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant praised the move on
Twitter. “Major changes need to take
place so that international efforts, funds and humanitarian initiatives don’t
fuel Hamas terrorism and the murder of Israelis,” he wrote. “Terrorism under the guise of humanitarian
work is a disgrace to the UN and the principles it claims to represent.”
In December, UNRWA announced
that Israel’s onslaught against Gaza had killed 142 employees of the
organization.
In
1982, just before Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, Operation Peace
for Galilee, a group of about 15 of us decided, at
a meeting held at the University of London Union, to form Palestine Solidarity
Campaign.
PSC
then was anti-Zionist calling for a democratic, secular state in Palestine. This
was a very different period from today. There was a radical Labour
administration at the Greater London Council under Ken Livingstone which gave us
support.There was the Miners’ Strike in
1984-5. PSC fitted into all of this activism.
The
decay in PSC began with the Oslo
Accords, the single greatest political defeat for the Palestinians since
the Nakba. It led to the legitimisation of Zionism as the United Nations
overturned Resolution
3379
of 10 November 1975, which stated that Zionism was a form of racism.
Caroline Lucas, Brighton's Green MP, signed a statement with Tory racists calling for David Miller to be Sacked
As
a result of Oslo, on 16 November 1991 the UN passed Resolution
46/86 overturning Resolution 3379. In exchange for minor
concessions the PLO agreed to recognise the Israeli state.
In
1993 PSC voted at an Emergency AGM to endorse the Oslo Accords believing that
Israel was going to agree to a Palestinian state. As I predicted
at the time, the Oslo Accords, with the Palestinian Authority as Israel’s
military subcontractor, substituted the faces of Israeli police
for Palestinian ones.
I
resigned from PSC and it wasn’t until 2005 that I rejoined at the invitation of
PSC’s then General Secretary, Betty Hunter.
On
6 April 2022 I resigned
again when PSC removed opposition to Zionism from a new Constitution.In August 2022 I posted
an email exchange I had had with Ben Jamal, PSC’s Director concerning the
reasons for my resignation.
I
did not take this step lightly but I felt that to remain a member of an organisation
which was politically bankrupt and which consistently tried to appease the
British Establishment and the Zionists was pointless.
Imagine
the Anti-Apartheid Movement confining itself to opposing human rights abuses by
the South African state whilst taking no position on Apartheid itself. By
refusing to oppose Zionism, PSC refuses to oppose the ideology of the Israeli
state that lies at the heart of its Jewish supremacist policies and ethnic cleansing.
PSC’s Disastrous Failure to
Oppose the ‘Anti-Semitism’ Attacks on Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Left
PSC’s
most egregious error was to ignore the Zionist attacks on Corbyn and the newly
resurgent Labour Left. Corbyn had been PSC’s main parliamentary supporter. The
failure to stand up to those crying ‘anti-Semitism’ was a fatal error that led
to a serious defeat for the whole Palestine solidarity movement. It stemmed
from PSC’s desire to present itself to Britain’s pro-Zionist Establishment as a
safe and trustworthy pair of hands.
In
March 2016 I was singled out by the Jewish Labour Movementand suspended
by the Labour Party. I wrote
to PSC Secretary Ben Sofa on 11 April 2016 asking why PSC had been silent over
the ‘anti-Semitism’ attaacks. Ben responded
on 20 April in what was a master class in complacency. He wrote that
‘I make no apology for the fact that we do not engage in every debate
some would wish to involve us in.’
First
I was suspended, then Jackie Walker, Ken Livingstone and Marc Wadsworth. More
were to follow as Corbyn buckled. Throughout this time PSC did absolutely
nothing. As far as they were concerned what was happening in the Labour Party
was a foreign country yet, as we have seen, the Zionists’ ‘anti-Semitism’
campaign spread into virtually every area of society.
PSC
seemed oblivious to how false allegations of anti-Semitism were being used to
undermine solidarity with the Palestinians. They preferred engaging in routine activities
to taking on the Zionist enemy.
When
the Zionists, who at first pretended that their opposition to ‘anti-Semitism’
had nothing to do with Palestine, proposed that Labour adopt the IHRA
definition of anti-Semitism, which conflated anti-Zionism and
anti-Semitism, PSC continued to do nothing. Seven of the IHRA’s 11 ‘examples’
of anti-Semitism were to do with Israel not Jews. PSC refused to even support a
picket of Labour’s National Executive in September 2019 which approved the
IHRA.
As
Stephen Sedley, a Jewish former Court of Appeal Judge wrote in Defining
Anti-Semitism, the IHRA ‘fails the first test of any definition: it is indefinite.’
PSC
confined themselves to writing letters to local authorities urging them not to
adopt the IHRA. PSC made a written submission to the Chakrabarti Inquiry and it
helped commission an Opinion
on the IHRA from Hugh Tomlinson QC and that was it.
PSC’s Alliance
with the Trade Union Bureaucracy
PSC’s
main achievement had been in the trade union movement. Most trade unions were affiliated
to it. PSC could have used these affiliations to fight back against the
adoption of the IHRA by increasing numbers of civil society groups at the
behest of the Jewish
Labour Movement and the Israeli Embassy funded Labour Friends of Israel.
The trade unions controlled the Labour Party. PSC could have supported Corbyn
against his Zionist detractors but they chose not to.
When
PSC held a trade union conference in October 2019 I distributed leaflets opposing
the IHRA at the conference.Prior to this I had written,
as had Brighton and Hove PSC, to Ben Sofa and Ben Jamal, PSC’s Director, asking
that the IHRA be placed on the agenda of the conference. What was Jamal’s
response? To throw me out of the conference for not having permission to
distribute the leaflets! Suffice to say the IHRA was not on the agenda.
At
a time when the IHRA was being used to attack
activists and academics, PSC sat on the sidelines. Over 150 local authorities
had adopted the IHRA. Big
Ride for Palestine was banned by Tower Hamlets council.
One
particularly outrageous case was where the misnamed Campaign Against Antisemitismattempted
to get Rebecca Gould, an academic at Bristol University sacked, because of an article‘Beyond Anti-Semitism’ which she had
written on how the Holocaust and ‘the
spectre of anti-Semitism’ is used to suppress discussion of Palestinian
oppression. Even Kenneth Stern, the person who drafted the IHRA, condemned
this attack as ‘McCarthy like’ and ‘chilling’.
Also
at Bristol University Professor David Miller was dismissed as a result of a Zionist
witchhunt. PSC refused to support
David because his research was into the Zionist lobby. Instead they put out an anodyne
statement which implicitly criticised him:
When addressing such issues, it is crucial to apply
depth, context, and clarity, and to avoid narratives that oversimplify the
interlinks between groups which oppose actions in support of Palestinian
rights, and Israeli state actors. Doing so obscures our understanding of the
way political actors’ function. At worst, it can risk drawing on anti-Semitic
tropes about Jewish power.
Whilst some have criticised Professor
Miller for lacking such depth and clarity in the way he has couched his
remarks, those leading the call for Professor Miller to be sacked are
straightforwardly asserting that to define Zionism as a movement and political
ideology that is racist is inherently anti-Semitic.
After
Miller’s dismissal PSC put out another statement
which instead of condemning his dismissal called it ‘deeply concerning and sets a dangerous precedent’. It also failed
to call for his reinstatement.
Today
David Miller has been vindicated after an Employment Tribunal ruled
that he had been unfairly dismissed and that anti-Zionism was a protected
belief under the Equality
Act 2000.
I have written asking Caroline Lucas to Apologise for Her Previous Support for David Miller's Dismissal
Internationally
the Zionist campaign to target anti-Zionists via the IHRA was proceeding apace.
The Bundestag in May 2019 condemned
BDS as ‘anti-Semitic’.
Why
then did PSC confine its activities to making paper submissions and writing letters?
The reason was PSC didn’t want to offend the trade union leaders who had given the
IHRA their support and they didn’t want to jeopardise their affiliations by
going to rank and file trade union members.
One of the most despicable of Starmer's supporters Lisa Nandy, a vociferous supporter of Israel's genocide in Gaza that PSC put on its platforms
Two States or a Unitary State? A
Failure to Explain What PSC Wants to Achieve
PSC
accepted that Israel was an Apartheid State but it refused to draw the obvious
conclusions, namely that if Israel was an apartheid, state, then it had to go.
It was afraid of saying that a Jewish state was an inherently racist state.
This
was not a difficult thing to do. In January 2021 B’tselem, had not only declared
that Israel was an apartheid state but that there was a regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean
Sea. Jewish Supremacy
was not a phrase PSC used.
This was followed up in April 2021 by Human
Rights Watch which declared‘A
Threshold Crossed - Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and
Persecution.’A year later Amnesty International produced
a Report, ‘Israel’s apartheid against
Palestinians’.
Declaring
for a unitary, democratic secular state was not difficult, except that PSC,
under the control of a tiny ex-Trotskyist group Socialist Action, alongside
various remnants of what had been the International Marxist Group, were
unwilling to do so.
In
2009 I pointed
to
the role in PSC of the secretive Socialist Actiongroup which with Jon Lansman had colluded in
the ‘anti-Semitism’ witch-hunt in the Labour Party which the Jewish Chronicle
then cited.
Btselem,
which started life as a liberal Zionist group, declared that
‘More than 14
million people, roughly half of them Jews and the other half Palestinians, live
between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea under a single rule.’
When Jenny Tonge Came Under Criticism From the Right-Wing Press PSC Abandoned Her
There
is already a single state in Palestine but one in which half the population
have no civil or political rights. PSC Executive’s pretext for refusing to
declare in favour of a unitary state was that it was up to the Palestinians to
decide this question but Palestinians are in no position to make any decision
but it is clear that given the choice Palestinians want to live in the whole of
historic Palestine.
An
article
for the Washington institute for Near
Eastern Policy explained that
the two-state solution (this) is no longer a popular
position among Palestinians. Less than 40 percent of the Palestinian public—in
the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem—supports it over one-state
alternatives. Support for a two-state solution has declined steadily since
2018.
Further, most Palestinians believe that
a two-state solution is unlikely to emerge from the conflict. Instead, a
majority of them say they prefer to reclaim all of historic Palestine,
including the pre-1967 Israel. A one-state solution with Arabs and Jews holding
equal rights comes in second. Similarly, recent polling from PCPSR
finds support among Palestinians and Israeli Jews for a two-state solutionhas
dropped to 43 percent and 42 percent, respectively.
But
even if Palestinians did support a two-state solution then that would only be
because a state in the whole of Palestine was deemed impossible to achieve. PSC
is not addressing Palestinians but British people. When people ask what we
would like to see we should be clear – one state with equal rights for Jews and
Arabs.
One
state was the demand of the anti-Apartheid movement in South Africa. Only far-right
White racists wanted a White state. The two-state solution in Palestine, which
the West supports, is an apartheid neo-colonial solution. It leaves a racist
Jewish state intact.
The
real reason why PSC won’t support a one state solution is the trade unions. All
Britain’s unions support 2 States. This allows them to support both the
Palestinians and the Zionists. Not for the first time trade union leaders have
faced both ways. On the one hand supporting Israel and on the other supporting its
victims.
We
saw this during the height of the false anti-Semitism campaign. Dave Prentis,
the General Secretary of UNISON, pledged his support for the Palestinians and
on the other hand wrote
in the New Statesman ‘Why Labour must
adopt the full IHRA definition of anti-Semitism.’
Why
could Prentis and other union leaders do this?Because historically the unions have been supporters of British imperialism.
Instead of confronting unions with the choice of supporting an apartheid state
or a democratic state, two states allows them to face both ways at the same
time. They can support Israel (dressed up as opposition to ‘anti-Semitism’) and
also support the Palestinians. It enables people like Prentis to work openly
with the JLM.
Palestine Solidarity Campaign is
a Human Rights NGO not a Political, Campaigning Organisation
Because
PSC supports a two-state solution i.e. a ‘Jewish’ state and a Palestinian
state, it sees its role as primarily one of opposing human rights abuses and in
the current context Israel’s genocide. It allows the field to be clear for the
Zionists and their ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign.
Since
October 7 there have been a number of very large demonstrations in support of
the Palestinians in Gaza. PSC has been one of 6
organisations - CND, Stop the War Coalition, Friends
of Al Aqsa, the Palestinian Forum and the Muslim Association of Britain
organising the demonstrations. By itself PSC is incapable, given its past record,
of mobilising more than 5,000 people. In reality the demonstrations built
themselves as people spontaneously joined them, appalled as they were by the
continuing genocide in Gaza.
PSC’s Strategy
of ‘Mainstreaming’
Emily
Thornberry at Labour Friends of Israel dinner
The
strategy of PSC is to mainstream the issue of Palestine. What this means is
attempting to get the British state to adopt a pro-Palestinian position by
winning over the Establishment. It is doomed to failure, as we have seen over
Gaza, because it fails to take account of the fact that the British state is an
imperialist state. The British Establishment is committed to its financial,
economic and political interests world wide. Palestinians come very far down
their list of priorities.
Anti-imperialism
plays no part in PSC’s politics. That is why PSC has put on its platform vile Zionists
like Emily Thornberry who declared
at an LFI dinner that 'Israel is a Beacon
of Freedom and Democracy'before
going on to say
that supporters of the Palestinians (who she called ‘anti-Semites’) should be ‘drummed out of the party.’
I support the Palestinians that is enough and I support Hamas against the Israeli army https://t.co/ICv99vWQAW
Palestine Solidarity Campaign as
a Wannabee Establishment Group
PSC
and its Director Ben Jamal reacted with horror when Palestine Action, which was set up
about 4 years ago, began a campaign of direct action against Elbit’s arms
factories and those who were trading with it. They immediately attacked it, got
the Boycott National Committee to do
the same and issued bogus legal advice about the dangers of PSC branches
supporting Palestine Action.
However
the popularity of PA amongst PSC activists led PSC’s Executive to have to accept
support for PA at the 2022 conference. However PSC have done zilch to implement
that policy.
When
Mick Napier and I were arrested under the Terrorism Act 2000
before Xmas Electronic Intifada contacted
them. What was their reaction?‘No one is available to comment’. The British
State is using ‘terrorism’ against Palestine solidarity activists and PSC has
nothing to say about this attack on our freedom to speak out on Palestine.
PSC took
fright when the 7 October breakout from Gaza concentration camp happened. They demanded
that Manchester PSC take down a post from its website supporting the breakout. Harry
Cole, political editor of The Sun, called the Manchester post “appalling” and suggested it was a matter
for the police.
Despite
the branch complying with PSC’s demands, PSC decided to suspend the officers of
Manchester PSC anyway. As a result Manchester PSC has formally cut ties with
PSC nationally and is now an independent group. See UK Palestine Solidarity Campaign
punishes Manchester branch
Despite
its role as Israel’s military subcontractor, arresting Palestinians and handing
them over to Israel, PSC has refused to utter a word of criticism of this
Quisling Authority. A third of the PA’s budget goes on security, the highest in
the world. Its security forces operate on behalf of the Israeli military. The
PA are used to suppress demonstrations and opposition by Palestinians to Israel’s
occupation. Mahmoud Abbas, its notional ‘President’ considers cooperation
between the Israeli state and the PA as ‘sacred.
The
security services of the PA are a bunch of thugs who in August 2021 murdered Palestinian activist Nizar Banat. My
resolution to PSC AGM condemning his murder was opposed by PSC Executive and the
sheep present voted it down.
The
invasion of Gaza by Israel and the resulting genocide have created a mass
movement in support of the Palestinians.That movement will not always be around although Israel’s image will
have been irreparably damaged. It is important that the opportunity should be
taken now, when most groups that have sprung up – from Parents for Palestine to
School students groups – have no connection with PSC to take steps to form a
genuine, anti-imperialist solidarity movement and not a glorified NGO. We have
no time to lose.
This
blog is a follow up to Anita Patel’s Women’s
Place UK : Whitewashing Zionism. When you’ve been friends with someone for
40 years it comes as a shock to realise that they have become an ageing reactionary,
an Islamaphobe in particular. All in the name of second wave feminism.
I
don’t often write blogs about those I know personally and I’m doing it now
because, as the old saying used to go, the personal is political or at least it
can be.
Jean
was elected
to Brighton Borough Council for the Labour Party in 1987. Her husband, Andy
Winter was elected in the following year. At that time she was a socialist. I
can remember her speaking vehemently in opposition to the Gulf War in 1991 and
Tony Benn praising the speech. I accompanied her on a fact finding trip to
Northern Ireland. She was a strong supporter of the Republican movement.
Although
not actively involved in the Palestine solidarity movement she was always
opposed to Zionism and the oppression of the Palestinians.
When
six Labour Councillors were suspended at the beginning of the 90’s for refusing
to implement the Poll tax she and Andy were amongst them. 30 years though is a
long time in politics.
Israeli teens tik tok video mocks the lack of drinking water in Gaza - Jean Calder & Andy Winter have no problem with these neo-Nazi videos
Over
the years Jean’s feminism, increasingly framed by the belief that Islam was
uniquely misogynist, seemed to drive her to the right and like Fay
Weldon and other feminists Jean became increasingly Islamaphobic. I can
remember her support for the banning by
France of face covering by Muslim women. When I pointed out that this was an
invitation to racist and sexual attacks by men on women she seemed unperturbed.
We
also had disagreements on transgender people. Although I accept that you can’t
just say that a transwoman is a woman biologically, clearly people can identify
gender wise with the opposite sex. Jean had difficulties accepting that there
were many people who genuinely felt that they had been born in the wrong body
and that transgender people were a vulnerable minority who were being targeted
by the Right and far-Right.
Jean
is not alone in this. There are many feminists who see transgender women as
their enemy. This was brought home to me at the picket
of the drag queen Aida H Dee at Brighton & Hove libraries in 2022 when
feminists joined fascists in trying to prevent parents taking their children to
listen to story telling.
When
Jeremy Corbyn was elected as Labour leader in 2015 I expected Jean to welcome it.
Not a bit of it. She had some grudge against Corbyn over child
abuse in Islington children’s homes although this was the responsibility of
the Council leader Margaret Hodge, who engaged in a cover
up. She was then rewarded by being made Children’s Minister by Tony Blair.
There
were other things that disturbed me such as a hostility to refugees because Jean
saw them as single men. I pointed out that when Jews came to Britain from
Czarist Russia in the 19th and 20th centuries the men
usually came first and when settled brought their families over.
It
all came to a head when we were having coffee in the Pavilion Gardens with
friends when Jean started joking about Suella Braverman, who lost her job as
Home Secretary trying to prevent the demonstrations against genocide in Gaza. All
in the name of anti-Semitism of course.
I
turned round and said that as far as I was concerned Braverman was a ‘racist bitch’. True it was sexist but
if you find racism amusing then you can hardly protest against sexism. That was
the last time we talked or met.
I
then discovered that Jean had been busy writing articles for Brighton & Hove News, an anti-Palestinian
and racist Internet rag as well as on her own blog.
Apparently
Jews have a most sensitive antennae when it comes to racism and anti-Semitism
is the most dangerous of all forms of racism. A virus no less. Freedland coined
this reactionary metaphor when he fronted the fake anti-Semitism narrative
against the left when Corbyn was elected labour leader.
It
is reactionary because it divorces racism from society. Instead of poverty, housing
shortages, pervasive driving racism we have instead a virus that persists
regardless of the political and social climate. And if anti-Semitism is a virus
then presumably its target is also pathological. Eternal anti-Semitism was the
handmaiden of the Eternal
Jew, (Der ewige Jude)
which
the Nazis produced.
As
Leon Pinsker, one of the earliest Zionists wrote:
‘Judeophobia
is a mental disease. As a mental disease it is hereditary, and as a disease
transmitted for two thousand years it is incurable.
This
was the basis for the Zionist belief that anti-Semitism could not be fought. If
anti-Semitism was incurable or a virus, then there was no point fighting it. Zionism
accepted anti-Semitism as the norm, the constant in the relationship between non-Jews
and Jews and this laid the basis for the Zionist solution which was to escape
from anti-Semitism not fight it.
The
vast majority of Jews in Czarist Russia disagreed and fought anti-Semitism which
was why so many became revolutionaries. Zionism appealed to the most
reactionary Jews and it is with them that Jean Calder has found a political
home.
Anti-Semitism
today has changed. Now it is the false anti-racism of the Right, having been redefined,
not as hostility to Jews but as hostility to Zionism. It is not surprising that
this ‘anti-Semitism’ is the only form of racism that Jean’s hero Suella
Braverman was concerned
about. The woman who said it was her dream
to see asylum seekers deported to Rwanda was apparently concerned about
‘anti-Semitism’ when it came to marches against Israel’s genocide.
Braverman
was treading a well worn path. Even Donald Trump, when not accusing Jews of
being disloyal
to ‘their country’ (Israel not America!) was concerned
about anti-Semitism. Even Steve Bannon, when not fretting
about his daughter going to school with Jews, was opposed
to anti-Semitism.
In
her article
Jean was moved to tears that a small group of Zionists had set up a memorial to
remember the Jewish victims of October 7. Not once did she ask why it was that there
were no candles or words of sympathy for the thousands of children that Israel
has murdered in its genocidal attack on Gaza.
If
Calder had retained any of her previous critical faculties she might have
questioned the sincerity of these mourners. After all if they were really
concerned about Israel’s captives in Gaza then they would have joined us in
calling for a ceasefire.
‘The family of Tal Haimi, who is being held hostage by Hamas,
fear that he could be injured or killed by Israeli airstrikes’.
The Zionists that Calder embraced are
the most vociferous supporters of the Israeli war on Gaza. Whenever BHPSC has demonstrated
in favour of a ceasefire they have opposed us.
Many,
including the families of those hostages still held by Hamas, direct their
anger toward Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who dismissed the
terms of a ceasefire and hostage deal put forward by Hamas in forthright terms.
Israel admits to killing its own citizens on October 7
"Mass Hannibal"— We
killed Israelis on 7 October, says Israeli air force colonel
These
Zionists no doubt included Jewish
Chronicle columnist Heidi Bachram who described
events in solidarity with the people of Gaza as ‘chilling and threatening’ and the chant ‘From the river to the sea Palestine will be free’ as ‘genocidal’. Bachram boasted
of having reported me to the police for a speech outside Hove town hall.Free speech and Zionists don’t go together.
Calder said that she
lit a candle
and listened as a man said Kaddish for the dead. ... I realised that not since
I was a child had I prayed for the Jewish people. I didn’t think I still needed
to. I grew up among racists in Apartheid South Africa.
And
therein lies the irony. Although Calder left Apartheid, Apartheid has not left
her. She says that
Individual
Jewish people are not responsible for the actions of the Israeli government,
yet they are being condemned as if they are.
Perhaps
the reason that a few people wrongly blame Jews for what Israel does is because
her Zionist friends insist that Israel is a Jewish state. Every time Zionists defend
the actions of Israel in the name of British Jews that cannot help but
reinforce the notion that Jews are responsible for what is happening in Gaza.
Washington Post plans hit piece over
EI's accurate reporting about 7 October, with Ali Abunimah
Hamas
Calder
said that
We
also need to question why there have been so few public statements of
solidarity in response to the Hamas attack. Faced with the horror of
Palestinian casualties in Gaza, many non-Jewish progressives have focused on
that, preferring to forget the events of 7th October.
Calder’s
article on 22 December was over two months after October 7, when over
20,000 Palestinian civilians had already been murdered. Why I wondered was
she more concerned about less than 1200 Israeli dead, a third of them soldiers,
than over 20 times that number of Palestinian civilians? People living under
occupation are entitled to resist their oppressors.
An Israeli soldier publishes an advertisement for his barber shop from Gaza next to executed Palestinian civilians in Gaza, attaching it to a viral Israeli music comparing Palestinians to animals and "Amalek."pic.twitter.com/GYiwxB4tsZ
The final
tally of Israeli dead shows that 695 Israeli civilians, including 36
children, as well as 373 security forces and 71 foreigners died, giving a total
of 1,139. This figure is dwarfed by the numbers killed by Israel, 27,000+ in
Gaza today plus at least 10,000 under the rubble. Yet Calder has nothing to say
about dead Palestinians. 37 Israeli children compared to over 11,000
Palestinian children died. Even the Nazis only shot 100 hostages in reprisal
for 1 dead soldier. Calder writes that:
The cruelty of
the Hamas atrocities was live-streamed and publicised by mocking perpetrators.
Even for me, a non-Jew, the assaults brought back terrible images of
anti-semitic atrocities of the 1930s and 1940s, many filmed by nazi bureaucrats.
How Israeli army ordered troops
to fire on Israelis on 7 October, with Asa Winstanley
This is untrue. The Nazis killed Jews because they
were Jews. Hamas killed Israelis, not because they were Jews but because they
were their oppressors having occupied Gaza for over half a century. In fact
Israeli Palestinians and Thai workers also died on October 7 so Calder’s
assertion is simply a lie.
The Lying Israeli Narrative of October 7 that Calder
& Winter Have Accepted
There is
no doubt that some Israeli civilians were killed by Hamas and other groups,
including freelancers. Any murder of civilians is to be condemned but the
breakout from Gaza, the international law right of resistance should not be
condemned.
Just as
we would support the slave revolts in Haiti in 1791 despite the fact that every
single French person was killed, so too with October 7. But it is now becoming
increasingly clear that most Israeli civilians were killed by the Israeli
military.
What we’re now learning about 7
October, with Ali Abunimah
According
to Israel’s own statistics of the 1,139 people killed by Palestinian militants,
one third – 373 – were soldiers. These were clearly legitimate targets. The
question is who killed the 695 Israeli civilians and 71 foreigners?
At 6:42 am, a
mere 12 minutes after Operation Al-Aqsa Flood was launched, the Southern
District Commander of the Israeli Police, Amir Cohen, gave an order
code-named “Philistine Horseman,” sending police officers and Border Police who
were on alert to the sites of various battles.
Tank fires on Israeli civilian
home in Kibbutz Be'eri, 7 October 2023
This
included members of the Yamam,
and Tequila
commando units that have no police duties but conduct military and
counter-terrorism operations, including
undercover assassinations in the Gaza Strip and occupied-West Bank.
According to a senior Israeli officer
speaking
with the New York Times, the first formal reinforcements to southern
Israel came from commandos that arrived by helicopter.
Israeli teen ”burned completely”
by Israeli tank fire at kibbutz
Sagi
Abitbol, a policeman working as a security guard at the festival, was among the
first to confront Hamas fighters near Nova, and witnessed the early
arrival of these helicopters.
Israel admits to "immense"
amount of "friendly fire" on 7 October, with Asa Winstanley
There is a
very detailed article
in Electronic Intifada of 20 January which suggests that some of the civilians
were actually plain clothes members of Shin Bet, 10 of whom were killed.
Winstanley tells how the military
“instructed all its fighting units to perform
the Hannibal
Directive in practice, although it did so without stating that name
explicitly,”
Kibbutz Be'eri homes that Israeli tanks fired shells at killing all inside, Israelis included
The Hannibal
Directive states that in the event of Israelis being taken captive, both
they and their captors should be killed. The revelations came in a new investigative
article by Ronen Bergman and Yoav Zitun, two journalists with extensive
sources inside Israel’s military and intelligence establishment.
They also
revealed that “some 70 vehicles” driven by Palestinian fighters returning to
Gaza were blown up by Israeli helicopter gunships, drones or tanks.
Hamas explicitly instructed its operatives not
to kill women, children and the elderly. You can hear this at approximately
3:04. Confirmation of this comes from the Times of Israel
of 9 October which quoted the mother of two children.
At 8:20 a.m., terrorists entered Dvir’s home, he lunged at them
with an axe, tried to protect my two kids who were with him, and was murdered
in front of their eyes,” she posted. “His
partner Stav also tried to protect them, but was murdered as well. The
terrorist calmed down my Daria and Lavi, covered them in a blanket, took
lipstick and wrote on the wall: ‘The al-Qassam [Brigades] people don’t murder
children.
All Britain's Prostitute Press ran with the '40 Babies Lie' - Not one has retracted the story or apologise - the myth therefore continues
Yet the Israeli government has painted a narrative that says
Hamas deliberately killed children. At first there was the story of the 40
beheaded babies. Almost all the British media published this fake story and
variations on it. It was all a lie.
Jo Biden even said that he had personally seen the pictures
until it was walked
back by his own spokespersons. Yet what was Calder’s response over 2.5
months into Israel’s genocide:
Since 7th
October I have expected some form of public statement of solidarity from
churches and faith leaders, an expression of grief or horror at what happened
that day.
Solidarity
with whom? Those perpetrating a genocide? Yes there certainly should have been
a public statement from Calder’s Church of Englandbut Justin Welby has refused to condemn
Israel’s genocide. Coming from a man who has previously
covered for child abuser John Smyth
who was described by Welby in 2017 as "charming" and
"delightful."
that is not altogether surprising.
Calder’s
entire focus is on October 7. Like the good ‘Christian’ that she is, she
dismisses support for those being starved to death or murdered as ‘worthy and necessary.’ but a
distraction.
Calder
pays lip service to Palestinian suffering, including 75 years of occupation,
dispossession and forcible exile of Palestinian refugees. According to her ‘nothing the Israeli state has done provides
justification for the atrocities of that day.’
A
17 yearsiege of Gaza, where nothing
could enter or leave without Israel’s permission, where Israeli leaders used
the phrase ‘mowing
the lawn’ to describe their periodic attacks on Gaza – Operation
Cast Lead in 2008/9 when 1400 Palestinians including 300 children were
killed, Operation
Pillar of Defence in 2012 when 174 civilians died and Operation
Protective Edge in 2014 when 2,200 civilians including 551 children died.
In
the past 15 years, until the latest conflict 6407 Palestinians and 308 Israelis
have
died. Calder might think the attack on October 7 wasn’t justified but most
people would say that the continuing murder of Palestinians, is justification
in itself.
During
the Great
Return protests beginning in March 30 2018 some 234 Palestinians were
killed by Israeli snipers and more than 33,000 were wounded. Orly Noy wrote about Razan
al-Najar, the 21 year old medic who became a symbol of Israeli atrocities when
she was gunned down by a sniper:
Razan
a-Najjar died about two-and-a-half years ago, but I can still clearly
see her in my mind’s eye. The 21-year-old paramedic was shot and killed by
Israeli soldiers during one of the Great Return March protests in Gaza on June 1, 2018.
Witnesses say she was shot as she made her way toward the fence that separates
Israel and the Gaza Strip to tend to the wounded, donning a white medical coat.
In
the Sharpeville
Massacre in South Africa, which reverberated around the world after police
opened fire on unarmed demonstrators, 69 people were killed and 180 injured.
Yet Calder believes that the thousands of Palestinians murdered by Israel up
till October 7 provided no justification. Why this disparity? Because
‘anti-Semitism’ and the Holocaust justifies every barbarity. Over 30,000 have
been murdered but still Calder believes that we should focus on October 7.
I
know this because I have WhatsApped her but she has not responded. Andy Winter,
also a South African exile, was no better. He wrote an article‘The terrible cycle of violence upon
violence... continues in Israel and Gaza’. The cliché ‘cycle of
violence’ is designed to obliterate the causes of that violence which is the
Zionist nature of the Israeli State. As B’tselem found in its Report
there is ‘A regime of Jewish supremacy
from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea’. Winter condemns
The
appalling terrorist attacks on men, women and children in southern Israel a
week last Saturday, followed by the unfolding humanitarian crisis and the
killing of men, women and children in northern Gaza almost defy words
Although
condemning what he calls ‘terrorists’ Winter calls thegenocide an ‘unfolding humanitarian crisis’. Presumably this has been caused by
an Act of God or some other natural disaster, Having failed to call out
genocide and ethnic cleansing for what it is he lays into the BBC, the Voice of
Israel:
But there are
words. Terrorism is just one, a word that the BBC shamefully refuses to use
when describing the attacks and murders on October 7.
We have
two White South Africans failing to recognise what is obvious to Black S
Africans and Palestinians. That not only is Israel an apartheid state but it is
far worse than S Africa ever was. The Apartheid regime there did not murder Black
South Africans by the thousand. It did not bomb the shanty towns from the air. It
did not have the exterminationist mentality of Israel.
As Andrew
Feinstein, the former Jewish ANC MP said‘Israeli Apartheid is far more brutal
than anything we saw in South Africa’. Navi Pillay, a former UN human
rights chief said
the same as did Israel’s most famous poet Yitzhak Laor who remarked
that ‘the system preserving this
apartheid is more ruthless as it is equipped with the lie of being 'temporary.'
So too did
Nelson Mandela’s grandson Mandla Mandela.
Israel’s
apartheid is even worse than South Africa’s. We never had F-16s bomb our
Bantustans killing hundreds of children. Remember that.
The reasons for
this lie in the different political economies of the two states. S Africa needed
Black people in order to exploit their labour. Israel as a Jewish state aimed
to be as Jewish as was possible, hence its policy was not exploitation but
ethnic cleansing.
Israeli children sing song of
annihilation on Israel's national broadcaster Kan
Israel’s
Exterminationist Mentality
Despite
its many problems today South Africa demonstrates that the legacy of the
struggle against apartheid lives on. It was South Africa not any of the
miserable Arab regimes which took Israel to the International Court of Justice.
‘Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy
to that of the Nazis’ is anti-Semitic.’
The rationale
being that a Jewish state can’t behave like the Nazi state and that it is
offensive to accuse Jews of behaving like Nazis. It is testimony to the
intellectual poverty of both the political class and academia that this
illustration has attracted so little attention and has been given a free pass.
Nazism
was neither original nor ideologically coherent. Racial hygiene, rassenhygiene
formed the basis of its racial politics and was based on social Darwinism.
Survival of the fittest between species was applied to racial differences
within humanity.
Eugenics,
as Hitler readily acknowledged came from the United States where laws providing
for compulsory sterilisation were passed in over 30 states.
What
happened in Germany could, given the right set of circumstances, happen in any
state. To suggest Jews are immune from this is to suggest that racism is
biologically inherited and that some people are immune from this by virtue of
their racial inheritance. This in itself is racist.
Extermination
and genocide has been only too prevalent in the 20th century
beginning with the Herero/Nama people in Namibia to the Armenian genocide, the
extermination in Cambodia, Rwanda and now genocide in Gaza. Anyone who believes
that Israeli Jews are exempt from the social, economic and political laws
governing every other society is by definition a racist.
The
warnings have been flashing in Israel for a long time. Opinion polls have long
shown that a majority
of Israeli Jews favour the deportation of Israel’s Arab citizens. Mobs, led by
Israel’s current Police Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, march through Jerusalem each
year chanting‘Death to the Arabs’. Mobs in Germany
and Poland used to chant ‘Death to the
Jews’.
In
January 2018 Ze’ev Sternhell, a child survivor of the Nazi ghetto of Przemyślin Poland wrote an article
for Ha’aretz In Israel, Growing Fascism
and a Racism Akin to Early Nazism.Maybe
the racists who compiled the IHRA would call the late Sternhell an anti-Semite too?
The Nazi and Genocidal Statements
of Israel’s Zionist Leaders
The South African Application
to the ICJ gives the lie to those who claim it is ‘anti-Semitic’ to say that
Israeli leaders cannot be compared to the Nazis.
On 9 October Defence Minister Yoav
Gallant described
the Palestinians as ‘human animals’. On
October 4 1943 Himmler, the Head of the SS in a speech to senior SS officers justifying
the Holocaust called the
Jews ‘human animals.’
On 16 October 2023, Netanyahu described
the attack on Gaza as a “a struggle
between the children of light and the children of darkness, between humanity
and the law of the jungle.’
On 28 October 2023 Netanyahu invoked
the Biblical story of the Amalek:
“you
must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible. And we do
remember”
The ancient Israelites wiped out every
man, woman, child and suckling infant. Its Hitlerite nature is crystal clear. On
10 November 2023, Ben-Gvir, Israel’s Police Minister stated that:
“when
we say that Hamas should be destroyed, it also means those who celebrate, those
who support, and those who hand out candy — they’re all terrorists, and they
should also be destroyed.”
On 1 November 2023, Amichai Eliyahu,
Israel’s Heritage Minister posted
on Facebook:
“The
north of the Gaza Strip, more beautiful than ever. Everything is blown up and
flattened, simply a pleasure for the eyes.’
Haaretz: Israeli Army directly involved in publicising its brutal treatment of Palestinians. No other army in the world publicises its atrocities. The aim is to terrorise Palestinians certain of the West"s complicity, unafraid of US&EU public opinionhttps://t.co/RH3JRefeoK
Nissim Vaturi, the Deputy Speaker of the Knesset ‘tweeted’
on 7 October 2023 that:
“[n]ow
we all have one common goal — erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the
earth. Those who are unable will be replaced.’
Giora Eiland, a Reservist Major General, former Head of the National Security Council,
and adviser to the Defence Ministerwrote:
Israel
should not allow any economic assistance. The people should be told that they
have two choices; to stay and to starve, or to leave. If Egypt and other
countries prefer that these people will perish in Gaza, this is their choice.
“These animals can no longer live.”
Ezra Yachin, a 95-year-old Israeli army reservist, is seen inciting “every Jew with a weapon” to kill Palestinians and “erase the memory of them” pic.twitter.com/LUQs0XoR5U
On 11 October 2023, 95-year old Israeli
army reservist Ezra Yachin — a veteran of the Deir Yassin massacre in 1948 —was
called up for reserve duty to “boost morale” amongst Israeli troops ahead of
the ground invasion.His message
was broadcast on social media inciting other soldiers to genocide while being
driven around in an Israeli army vehicle:
“Be
triumphant and finish them off and don’t leave anyone behind. Erase the
memory of them. Erase them, their families, mothers and children. These animals
can no longer live . . . Every Jew with a weapon should go out and kill
them. If you have an Arab neighbour, don't wait, go to his home and shoot him .
. . We want to invade, not like before, we want to enter and destroy what’s
in front of us, and destroy houses, then destroy the one after it. With all
of our forces, complete destruction, enter and destroy. As you can see,
we will witness things we’ve never dreamed of. Let them drop bombs on them and
erase them.
When I said
that Israel was ‘Hitler’s bastard
offspring’, much to the Jewish Chronicle’s chagrin, I was not exaggerating.
🚨 Urgent: The Palestine Red Crescent ambulance was discovered bombed the Tal al-Hawa area of #Gaza City, resulting in the killing of crew members Yusuf Zeino and Ahmed Al-Madhoun, who had been missing since a rescue mission for the child Hind Rajab 12 days ago.#NotATarget❌… pic.twitter.com/dCgfeevTd8
Because Zionism draws no universal
lessons from the Holocaust Israelis now see themselves in the position of the
Nazis. Only pathetic white liberals like Calder and Winter, cannot or will not
see it. Israel has absorbed the lessons of the holocaust but not the ones
anti-racists might wish.
Professor Yehuda
Elkana, a child survivor of Auschwitz, wrote
in an article for Ha’aretz in March 1988:
a profound existential “Angst” fed by a particular interpretation of the lessons of the
holocaust … that we are the eternal victim. In this ancient belief… I see the
tragic and paradoxical victory of Hitler. Two nations, metaphorically
speaking, emerged from the ashes of Auschwitz: a
minority who assert, “this must never
happen again,” and a frightened and
haunted majority who assert, “this
must never happen to us again.”[‘The Need to
Forget,’Ha’aretz, 2.3.88]
When
Hitler came to power his programme was not to exterminate the Jews but to expel
them. It was only when he couldn’t expel them that the Nazis turned to
extermination. So it is with Israel today.
Adam Keller, an Israeli peace activist wrote describing how ‘the word ‘extermination’ with
all its resonance of Auschwitz has entered the language of Israeli politics.’
Keller described how the streets of Tel Aviv were flooded with red stickers
reading
"Exterminate Gaza!".
Not "Destroy!", not "Flatten!"– but clearly and explicitly
"Exterminate Gaza!". "Le-Ha-Sh-Mid!" -
"Exterminate!" Every Jewish Israeli knows from a young age exactly
what this word means. ….
Roy Sharon, a radio and TV commentator on the
main Israeli broadcasting corporation, spoke very explicitly of his desire to
see “a million dead bodies in Gaza”.
Israel’s Ambassador
in London Tzipi Hotoveli described all Palestinians as Nazis and compared
what Israel was doing to the British bombing of Dresden and Hamburg where
600,000 were killed. She wanted to murder a similar number of Palestinians.
Yet these white liberal
racists can only mouth ‘anti-Semitism’ as if they can only hold one idea at a
time in their heads. British Jews are not victims of racism. They are
privileged and White. Racism operates at the level of the state. Anti-Semitism
in Britain is a prejudice, it has no power behind it.
Israeli Teens Get Their Kicks from Palestinian suffering
I would go further. British Jews
are probably the most racist section of the White population. Islamaphobia and
anti-Arab racism is extremely high amongst them.
It may be uncomfortable for
someone who is Jewish to be confronted with anti-Semitic stereotypes but we
should remember that one of the reasons that there has been an increase in
anti-Semitism is precisely because it is a ‘Jewish’ state that is committing
these atrocities. That is why Jewish people have a duty to proclaim that what
is happening is ‘not in our name’ as the Jewish Bloc chanted on the
demonstrations in London.
When white liberals like
Winter and Calder equate anti-Semitism in Britain with the genocidal racism of
the Israeli state they are effectively condoning this genocide. British Jews do
not suffer economic discrimination, state violence, deportations, attacks on the
streets or police stop and search.
The
inability of white liberals to recognise Zionism for what it is, a genocidal
ideology and movement, and their recourse to ‘anti-Semitism’ as a justification
for their position demonstrates that when you scratch a liberal you get the
same old racism.
Calder’s
feminism has racism embedded in it. I can only recommend that Calder and other
White feminists, steeped as they are in the sisterhood of imperialism, read
Nesrine Malik’s excellent article
on the war against women in Gaza. Malik quotes the charity Care on the conditions women in Gaza face:
“There is no
doctor, midwife or nurse to support women during labour. There is no pain
medication, anaesthesia or hygiene material when women give birth.” Babies are
born on the ground in the wilderness, umbilical cords cut with whatever sharp
object there is to hand, and tins filled with hot water keep the newborn warm.
C-sections, painful in the aftermath even when drugs are plentiful, are being
performed without
any anaesthesia at all, by
surgeons who do not have any water to wash their hands, let alone sterilise
them, and no antibiotics for any resulting infections. In some cases, according
to Washington Post reporting, C-sections were
performed on women postmortem.
Neither Calder nor
Winter allowed the word ‘genocide’ to pollute their articles. Not once did
Calder refer to women in Gaza. Her concern was with sentimental mush on a Hove
lawn.
Fahya Falash in Palestine Chronicle: ‘Transported in Cages’ – Shocking Details of
How Israel Treats Female Gaza Prisoners quotes Palestinian lawyer Hassan
al-Abadi as saying that he was particularly disturbed by the way Israeli forces
transported the female detainees from Gaza to the prisons.According to Abadi, they were placed in
trucks carrying cages similar to those used for animal transport.
“This detail particularly hurt me: these women have been transported in
animal trucks. They have been tied, blindfolded and stripped of their head
covering, as a way to humiliate them,” al-Abadi said.
Since
Calder is so fond of reminiscing about the Holocaust she might care to remember
that when Jews were deported to Auschwitz they too were transported in animal trucks.
Abadi also
said that when the female detainees arrived at the prison, their clothes were
stained with blood. Most of them were also bleeding from their hands, as the
plastic chains had been tightly tied around their wrists for days.
Murdoch's Times has not retracted its 40 Babies Beheaded Story - instead it continues with fake news - only one baby died on October 7, killed by Israel!
Upon
their arrival, they were distributed into three rooms, each containing six iron
beds. Most of them were reportedly forced to sleep on the floor without pillows
or mattresses.
“The prisoners
told me that the food is also very bad and that the Israeli guards deliberately
leave it on their cells’ doors for hours, until it turns cold. The water has a
rusty taste as well,”
According to
al-Abadi, these women not only suffer due to the extremely cruel conditions of
their detention but because they are constantly concerned about their
families. They do not know the fate of their children as Israel relentlessly
bombards Gaza.
They are not
allowed to hear the news or follow what is happening in any way. They are
isolated from the outside world and don’t know anything
But there
are other forms of violation carried out by Israeli authorities. Al-Abadi told how
the prison administration prevents these women from bringing along sanitary
pads
Therefore
during their period they are forced to wash their clothes daily and wear them
when they are still wet, as the prison administration does not provide them
with additional clothes. They only have what they were wearing when arrested.
Rimal Neighborhood, Gaza city |
Israeli soldier Yosee Gamzoo publish a picture showing him torturing a Palestinian civilian in West Gaza city.
Israel doesn’t
consider men and women detained in the Gaza Strip to be prisoners of war under
the so-called “unlawful combatants” law. Therefore, it prevents them from
having contact with lawyers and human rights institutions.
“The female
detainees from Gaza are even forbidden from talking to the rest of the
prisoners and they have to communicate in secret.”
Winter and Calder, comfortable
as they are with their hackneyed clichés about canaries might cast a glance at
Yuval Abraham’s article in Israel’s +972 Magazine ‘Inside
Israel’s torture camp for Gaza detainees’ before setting pen to paper.
They
uploaded thousands of videos and still images of the killing of terrorists and
destruction in the Strip, and encouraged the channel's followers to share the
content so that "everyone can see
we're screwing them."
An
October 11 post read: "Burning their
mother… You won't believe the video we got! You can hear their bones crunch.
We'll post it right away, get ready." Photos of Palestinian men
captured by the IDF in the Strip and the bodies of terrorists were captioned: "Exterminating the roaches…
exterminating the Hamas rats… Share this beauty." A video of a soldier
allegedly dipping machine gun bullets in pork fat is captioned: "What a man!!!!! Greases bullets with
lard. You won't get your virgins." Another caption was: "Garbage juice!!!! Another dead
terrorist!! You have to watch it with the sound, you'll die laughing."
On October 14, alongside the caption "Exclusive video of a good night, don't forget to share and repost"
was a video of an Israeli vehicle repeatedly driving over the body of a Palestinian.
"Very good, Gershon!!! Run him over
run him over!!!! Screw the bastards! Flatten them,"the accompanying
text read.
Hamas published yesterday an 18-minute long pre-recorded press conference in English about their side of the story.
This has received zero media attention anywhere in the western press.
So in the interest of full transparency, here is the entire press conference. pic.twitter.com/Cd5SyYjImJ
Jordanian Medial Syndicate member Dr Bilal Azzam who visited Gaza, says Palestinian doctors were tortured and abused by israeli troops pic.twitter.com/2qyPi3d805
This is an official production of the Israeli army. The abuses described,
which appeal to the sadistic appetite of the average Israeli, are not the work
of lone rangers or odd balls.They
represent the official mindset of the army which sought deniability but was
forced to admit to its ownership of the contents when it was shown that the
information could only have come from official sources.
This demonstrates that the abuses, the tortures, the humiliations are
official Israeli policy.
It is easy to virtue signal about ‘anti-Semitism’. Starmer and Sunak do
it all the time. Israel is gearing up to perpetrate its biggest ever massacre
in Rafah where Israel’s plans to transfer over a million Palestinians into
Egypt. Yet all this pair of mediocrities do is harp on about how terrible October
7 was.
There was a time when Andy Winter and Jean Calder were dissonant anti-establishment
voices. Those times have long gone. Today they write for local right-wing rags
reflecting the views of the British Establishment in all its murderous glory as
it extinguishes ancient liberties and freedom of speech.
Anti-Semitism is the false anti-racism of the Right and those who hark
back to a past genocide do so in order to justify another genocide. A false
memory of the past is used to shape the present and manipulate the future.
As to the question in the title of this essay the answer is simple. You can’t
be friends with people who are proud to be racists. We no longer have anything
in common.
Whatever
else you can say about George Galloway he is not without controversy. Politically
he has a long record of forming alliances and then falling out with his
partners – whether it is the SWP
in Respect or the Stalinist Communists Party of Great Britain - Marxist
Leninist in his Workers Party.
I say ‘his’
because the Workers Party revolves around George. It is very much his baby and
it is highly unlikely that the membership would overrule him on any major issue
or indeed have the means to do so.
🚨Twitter deleted the post, so reposting to expose Israeli army crimes!
Last video of kids martyrs of Husouna family massacre They fled from Gaza to Rafah in search of safety, escaping shelling Israeli army killed them inside their tent along with all family members last night ! pic.twitter.com/hlW7qWqFJx
This is what war criminals Keir Starmer & Peter Kyle Support
George is
politically eclectic. He is a brilliant speaker, an old-fashioned orator in an
age when the leader of the Labour Party freezes like a rabbit
caught in a car’s headlights whenever anyone gets to challenge him as Audrey
White did when Starmer ventured into Liverpool.
George is not
someone that socialists find easy to support. He is anti-abortion for a start and
dismissive of issues of sexual orientation and sexual oppression -all of which heputs into a basket called ‘wokery’. There is
a distinct impression that he panders to some very basic prejudices such as
homophobia and transphobia in the belief th at if you ignore these issues then
you will get basic workers’ unity.
Likewise George’s
attitude to race which is most evidenced in his failure to oppose the Tories
scapegoating of asylum seekers. George disgracefully
attacked the SNP for having supported demonstrators in Glasgow who
freed two refugees who were seized by the Home Office’s Border Unit.
He was also
vehemently pro-Brexit and was quite prepared to support a racist like Nigel
Farage. Indeed he tried to
become a candidate in the European elections for the Brexit Party.
He even formed
an alliance in Scotland with Tories and that he even shared a platform with David
Clews, a member of the Patriotic Alternative.
George has
been a consistent anti-imperialist and was expelled from the Labour Party as an
MP for opposing the Iraq War. When summoned to Congress to address allegations
regarding oil sanctions he turned in a fine and memorable
performance.
On the
issue of Palestine George also has a good record. There was a time when he supported
the two-state solution. I know because I debated the issue with him at my old
college St Mary’s in Strawberry Hill, Twickenham. But as he later admitted I
was right and he was wrong on this.
So I
understand why it is that many people refuse to support Galloway because of his
de facto alliance with racists and
reactionaries.
Letter in the Scottish National from anti-racist campaigner Mark Brown
However the
by-election in Rochdale is not about Galloway but what he stands for on the one
key issue in Britain and indeed the world.US and British imperialism’s support for the genocide in Gaza. All other
issues pale by comparison. The lives of thousands of Palestinians hang in the
balance at this moment and Galloway’s disgraceful opportunism over refugees,
Brexit and Farage are minor by comparison.
Galloway
and only Galloway is able to win this election. If Galloway wins the election
it won’t be his previous positions that are highlighted in Britain against the
racist imperialists Sunak and Starmer but his position on an immediate
ceasefire in Gaza.
This is the
key dividing line in British politics. It is the most crucial issue that we
face today. It would be utter sectarianism for anyone on the left to ignore
this. We cannot choose who our representatives are sometimes. Galloway’s
victory will be a victory for the Palestinians. What he thinks about Brexit or
refugees is frankly irrelevant at this time.
A defeat
for Starmer’s candidate, Azhar Ali is now certain now that the Labour Party has
withdrawn its
support for him, allegedly over his ‘anti-Semitic’ comments about Israel having
been forewarned of the October attacks but in reality because of the
realisation that he was going to lose.
We need Galloway’s
victory to make it crystal clear to that apology for a human being, the robotic
Keir Starmer that support for genocide is unacceptable.
GENOCIDE IN
GAZA IS THE ONLY ISSUE IN THE ROCHDALE BY-ELECTION
As Israel Murders Patients in Nasser Hospital – They Don’t Even Pretend
It’s a Hamas Base – 500 People in Brighton Demonstrate Their Disgust At Our War
Criminal Rulers
I used to ask myself if there was anything that the Nazi-Zionist
Government in Jerusalem could do that would invoke Western sanctions. Gaza and
Rafah prove that there is nothing its Racist Rottweiler can do that would cause
the United States to penalise Israel.
Human rights are for Russia, China, Cuba and Iran.
They are irrelevant when it’s Israel. International law has been shown to be a
paper tiger as the International Court’s ruling on plausible genocide has not only been ignored but the subject to
retaliation.
Indeed Israel is now making
threats to the life of South Africa’s Foreign Minister, Naledi Pandor, and
her family. Israel is the quintessential definition of a terrorist state.
Rami Igra, previously head of the Captive & Missing Division in the Mossad, says there are no uninvolved civilians in Gaza over the age of four, the "humane" Kan reporter Ayala Hasson agrees but clarifies that the 0-4 year old children are innocent and deserve humanitarian aid. pic.twitter.com/y1NtMoJtpW
On the bogus excuse that 12 members of UNWRA took
part in the October 7 breakout, as if what members of staff do in their spare
time is of any relevance, Biden, Sunak and the rest of the blood-soaked western
leaders decided to stop funding UNWRA thus contributing to Israel’s Death by
Hunger strategy.
As I pointed out in my speech to the sit-in, it was
the Nazi Governor of Poland, Hans Frank, who openly boasted of their tactic of
starving the Jewish ghettos. 83,000 died in the Warsaw Ghetto alone.
Support for genocide is causing Labour Party leader
Keir Starmer a headache as more
local councillors resign, this time in Kirklees. ‘Anti-Semitism’ has proven
a handy pretext to disown its candidate
in Rochdale to avoid a humiliating defeat in the by election.
Powerful words by 102 years old philosopher Edgar Morin, one of France's most revered intellectual figures, as well as a Jewish WW2 resistant who fought as a lieutenant in De Gaulle's France combattante.pic.twitter.com/0xmKJX0Uu4 Here are his words on Gaza: "I am both astonished…
Canadian Parliament Demonstration Against the Supply of Arms for
Genocide
Weshall see
next Wednesday when the SNP put down a motion calling for an immediate
ceasefire whether the death of around 15,000 is enough for Mogadon Man or
whether he, Rachel Reeves, Peter Kyle and the other monsters on Labour’s front
bench prefer to see yet more kids killed.
Irish MP Speak Out
Against Genocide in Gaza
The sit-in was the biggest of the 3 that have been
held so far in Brighton. I was pleased to address the demonstrators after a Palestinian
woman, Tanuksha. There were a number of other speakers and the chanting made it
clear to thehundreds of passengers what
the feeling in Brighton & Hove was.
There was one obnoxious passenger but the Police
quickly removed him and another obnoxious woman on a bicycle.
You might think that at a time of genocide in Gaza Panorama
might devote a programme to exposing Israeli lies about October 7 or how ethnic
cleansing, not defeating Hamas, is the main reason for Israel’s Nazi-style blitzkrieg.
Not a bit of it.
Today Panorama will give a helping hand to Israel’s killers
by ‘exposing’ how British Muslims support Hamas. All with the aid of its
favourite Islamaphobe John Ware.
In July 2019, shortly before the General Election Panorama broadcast
Is Labour Anti-Semitic? It
didn’t need the question mark since it had already made up its mind. It was a
hatchet job on the Corbyn left and who better to front it than Ware?
Ella Rose was nominated for an Oscar for her starring role as John Ware's fake victim of antisemitism
The program attracted over 2,000 complaints yet Ofcom refused to
investigate it. The British Establishment was determined to run with the
‘labour anti-Semitism’ narrative and it brooked no opposition.
If ever there was a reporter unfit to present a documentary on alleged
racism in the Labour Party then it is Ware.
The programme failed to explain that the Jews interviewed all happened
to be members/officers of the Zionist Jewish Labour Movement. It didn’t even
give their names. Not one anti-Zionist Jew or member of Jewish Voice for Labour was
interviewed.
On Monday Panorama will broadcast Hamas’s Secret
Financial Empires by John Ware and producer Leo Telling. It attacks
British Palestinians for funding Hamas. It relies on Israeli intelligence sources
and is will be about as reliable as the Israeli allegations that Gaza’s
hospitals were Hamas military bases.
Claims of rape by some mainstream media are false, spurious and evil. They feeds into the genocidal narrative adopted by Zionists to justify the crimes committed by the terrorist apartheid state.
Asa Winstanley of Electronic Intifada documents
how:
As “evidence” of such
“support” for “terror,” the producer cited four posts to X (formerly Twitter)
by Altikriti, where he called into question some of Israel’s most high-profile
atrocity propaganda about the Palestinian military assault on 7 October.
While the producer conceded that “there is currently no evidence (at least,
of which we are aware) that 40 babies had been beheaded,” he claimed to
have “gathered evidence” of other
crimes.
Allegations of rape made by Israel are false. It’s a lie. Just like the 40 beheaded babies was a lie. Just like every other allegation made Israel turns out to be a lie, including the mass slaughter of Israeli citizens on the 7th of October. That too was a lie. #Gaza#Genocide
Just one baby, Mila Cohen (10 months) was killed,
by a stray bullet, 36 children in total. Compare that to the 15,000+
Palestinian children who’ve been murdered including 4 babies who were left
to die by the Israeli military in Al Shifa when the ventilators were turned
off.Their bodies were left for wild
animals to devour. See
CNN’s Infants
found dead and decomposing in evacuated hospital ICU in Gaza. Here’s what we
know.
In 2002, Chris Hedges wrote about Israelis in Gaza for Harper's: "Children have been shot in other conflicts I have covered, but I have never before watched soldiers entice children like mice into a trap and murder them for sport."
Of course every child is one too many but whereas Hamas went out
of their way not to kill children there is evidence
that Israeli is deliberately rounding up children like mice and then executing
them.
It seems that the hatchet job that Panorama is intending will be
as factually inaccurate as all Ware’s previous programmes. Winstanley describes
how
Putting the program’s
allegations to Altikriti, the producer described one of the campaigner’s tweets
as a response to “a post by UK women.”
Yet the tweet
Telling cites was actually a response to a pro-Israel lobby group, We Believe in
Israel, which was spreading the Israeli propaganda about rape. The group is
actually run by a man, Luke Akehurst, and
the post in question does not quote women.
Is this like the 40 beheaded babies story? Where’s your evidence that anyone has committed rape or targeted women specifically? From what we’ve seen and heard from released hostages (all women, incidentally) is that they we treated with extreme respect and never harmed. https://t.co/9KTrcl5GwW
The
programme is going to broadcast how prominent British Palestinians like Anas
Altikriti are supporting Hamas. Proof of this is their doubting of Israeli
atrocity propaganda such as the story about 40 beheaded babies.
The ‘evidence’ for Ware’s accusations in the program is Israel’s
Secret Police Shin Bet who are
notorious for routinely using torture and abusing Palestinian children.
During Is Labour
Anti-SemiticWare described the
interview by Labour Party staff member Ben Westerman of a Jewish member Helen Marks. It was witnessed by another Jewish member Rica Bird. A tape recording
proved that Westerman lied
when he alleged that Rica had asked if he was from Israel. She had asked what
branch of the Labour Party he was from.
After having denied that Westerman lied for so long Ware finally
admitted, in the Zionist journal Fathom
(where else?) that ‘it cannot be ruled out that
Westerman’s recollection has erred’ and that he ‘misremembered’.
This
came after the BBC finally
admitted that the interview with Izzy Lenga, a JLM officer, had
been cut so as to suggest holocaust denial was a feature of Labour Party debate
rather than her alleged experiences at University. However the admission was
tucked away in Corrections & Clarifications rather than being broadcast.
The
programme had two ‘expert witnesses’ Dave Rich from the Zionist Community Security Trust and the second witness was Professor Alan
Johnson. Johnson is not Jewish
and he has no special knowledge of anti-Semitism. He is Editor
of Fathom, the journal of BICOM, the main Israeli propaganda
organisation in Britain. He is a Zionist. Why was this information concealed?
The only conclusion is that Ware deliberately set out to mislead
viewers. By not providing Johnson’s political and professional background Ware paraded
Johnson as a neutral expert when he was nothing of the sort?
It
is a testament to how dishonest Is Labour
Anti-Semitic was that over 4 years later John Ware is still forced to defend
it.
Arzu Merali’s documented how Ware's
2005 "A
Question of Leadership" attracted over 600 complaints in just its
first week protesting about its hostile and one-sided nature.
The Muslim Council of Britain described
the programme thus:
John Ware’s team have made a
deeply unfair programme using deliberately garbled quotes in an attempt to
malign the Muslim Council of Britain and with the barely concealed goal of
drawing British Muslims away from being inspired in their political beliefs and
actions by the faith of Islam. It is unfortunate that just when Britain’s 1.6
million Muslims are beginning to make progress in terms of their political
participation in the mainstream, there are those who are purposefully trying to
sabotage that process,’said Sir Iqbal Sacranie, Secretary-General of the Muslim
Council of Britain.
It seems that
to qualify as so-called ‘moderates’ Muslims are required to remain silent about
Israeli crimes in Palestine, otherwise they are automatically labelled as
‘extremists’.
And that is the gist of it. Ware’s agenda is to defend the
Israeli state at all costs. Arzu described Ware as ‘someone
who has made a career out of exceptionalising Muslims.’
One senior ex-Panorama journalist
described the programme as
the most disgusting Panorama that I have
ever seen. The presenter was acting like a prosecuting attorney, not a
journalist.
The Guardian's Madeleine Bunting called the
documentary, which dubbed all Muslims as ‘extremist’, as an example of the ‘McCarthyite
absurd’. Bunting described Ware’s journalistic
method as being one of ‘Branding moderates as extremists’ and gave as an
example his targeting of Sir Iqbal Sacranie of the MCB. She described his
behaviour as McCarthyite.
Ware doesn’t so much investigate as pillory and scapegoat,
substituting his own prejudices for reporting. Ken Livingstone’s description of
Hitler having supported Zionism was termed a ‘cranky’ version of history. Since
when is it a presenter’s job to pass judgement on a particular view of history?
One wonders what John Ware would call the memo that the German
Zionist Federation sent
on 21st June 1933, to Hitler?
‘On the foundation of the
new state, which has established the principle of race... fruitful activity for
the fatherland is possible. Our acknowledgement of Jewish nationality provides
for a clear and sincere relationship to the German people and its national and
racial realities....’
‘The efforts of the
Gestapo are oriented to promoting Zionism as much as possible and lending
support to its efforts to promote emigration.’
Maybe Cesarani was also a ‘crank’? Or perhaps the crank is Ware?
Ware is a relic of the days of Empire when we ‘civilised the natives’. He wrote
of his
horror... that some migrants to this
country had brought with them a lot more than just their possessions.
They didn’t understand democracy and dissent. One can only
wonder at where they may have got it from! Britain’s former colonies were not a
model of democracy.
Racism oozes out of everything Ware writes. He described Islam
as an ‘ideology’ which is what Tommy Robinson and the far-Right says.
Since the Chief Rabbi stated
that Judaism and Zionism are intertwined
does not the same apply to Judaism?
In an article for a right-wing magazine Standpoint (27.6.17) Enough
is enough of terror — but also of our self-doubtWare wrote of Western civilisation being ‘based on
Christianity, which enshrines individualism and freedom.’
One can only wonder what Torquemada’s victims would have made of
that. Perhaps Martin Luther’s fulmination that ‘the Jews are our misfortune’ is Ware’s idea of civilisation?
This was emblazoned
on the masthead of the Nazi paper Der Sturmer.
In the article for Standpoint Ware wrote that the Tory Party’s
‘family quarrel over Europe... risks letting in a Labour leader
whose entire political career has been stimulated by disdain for the West,
appeasement of extremism, and who would barely understand what fighting for the
revival of British values is really all about.’
These bigoted remarks should have rendered Ware as unfit to
comment on a greyhound race let alone the Labour Party. Yet the BBC was and is
more than happy to employ him.
Ware is of the opinion that the alternative to British values ‘is
a diffuse mush with nothing particularly special to defend at all.’ Islamaphobia
is just ‘powerful ammunition’ for discrediting Prevent. But it is in the
final paragraph that we understand Ware’s motivation when he lambasted the Tory
party for
‘risk(ing) letting in a Labour leader whose entire political
career has been stimulated by disdain for the West, appeasement of extremism,
and who would barely understand what fighting for the revival of British values
is really all about.’
This is the man who the BBC believed was the most suitable
person to present a programme on ‘Labour anti-Semitism’. The MCB got it right
when they described Ware as ‘an agenda-driven pro-Israeli polemicist.’
‘any suggestion that ethnic cleansing was a principle war aim by
the Jews in 1948 ... is highly contested. The Jews had accepted the UN
partition plan. The Arabs had not.... The Arabs’ war aim was the destruction of
the Jews’ emergent state fuelled by a religious Jihad. Survival was the Jews’
war aim.’
Ware knows nothing about
the Nakba. He referred to Arab war plans but the Arab armies only invaded in
May 1948 as a consequence of the expulsion by then of over 300,000 Palestinian
refugees. The ethnic cleansing was well under way.
Josef Weitz, Director of the Jewish National Fund’s Colonisation
Department wrote
in his diary in 1940, reprinted on 29.9.67 in the
Israeli Labour Party daily Davar:
"Between ourselves it must be clear that there is no room
for both peoples together in this country...We shall not achieve our goal of
being an independent people with the Arabs in this small country. The only
solution is a Palestine, at least Western Palestine [west of the Jordan river]
without Arabs...And there is no other way than to transfer the Arabs from here
to the neighbouring countries, to transfer all of them; not one village, not
one tribe, should be left...Only after this transfer will the country be able
to absorb the millions of our own brethren. There is no other way out."
Commenting
on what he had written in his diary 27 years later Weitz wrote
that:
when the UN passed a
resolution to partition Palestine into two states, the War of Independence
broke out to our great good fortune; and in this war a twofold miracle
happened: a territorial victory and the flight of the Arabs. In the Six Days’
War one great miracle happened: a tremendous territorial victory; but most of
the inhabitants of the liberated territories remained ‘stuck’ to their places
which may destroy the very foundation of our state.”
Ware cannot help but be aware of the Zionist penchant for ethnic
cleansing. It doesn’t take a genius to work out that if you want to establish a
‘Jewish’ state in a land where two-thirds of the population are Palestinian
then you have to expel them.
John Ware
compliments me when he says that ‘Greenstein must be one of the most
disagreeable individuals I’ve ever set eyes on’
Ware never makes any distinction between Zionists, Israelis and
Jews. He is clearly unaware of the Post-Zionist Israeli Historians such as
Benny Morris or Ilan Pape otherwise he would not have written such junk.
In the same article
Ware makes his own views crystal clear.
So deeply into Labour’s Left has anti-Zionism morphed into
antisemitism (sic) — itself a Corbyn legacy — that Jewish Labour members are
avoiding meetings.
When Ware embarked on Is
Labour Anti-Semitic? his mind had long been made up. Even New Labour’s
David Blunkett had savaged
Panorama’s The Asylum
Game and Ware, for
playing
into the hands of a "Powellite anti-immigration agenda" ...
He
particularly singled out for criticism the BBC1 Panorama special, the Asylum
Game, and its writer and presenter, John Ware, for producing a "poorly
researched and overspun documentary" which repeated unchallenged the
claims of "the rightwing anti-immigration pressure group, Migration
Watch".
In another article
for the Jewish Chronicle in November 2016 Why the I-word has closed
down debate on extremismWare defended the notorious Islamaphobe Douglas Murray,
Associate Director of the Henry Jackson
Society and on the board of the far-Right Gatestone Institute.
Gaby Hinsliffe in a Review of Murray’s The Strange Death of Europedescribed
how
The rightwing journalist and
commentator cites Enoch Powell and wants to protect white Christian Europe from
‘outsiders.’ [33]
Islamophobia — however it is defined — will abate when terrorism
carried out in God’s name ceases.
Ware quoted favourably Murray’s assertion that the term “Islamophobia”
was ‘a meaningless idea – a crock.” Ware explained the difference
between anti-Semitism and what he termed ‘(authentic) Islamophobia’.
‘The former is entirely irrational,
the latter reactive.’
Which is exactly how anti-Semitism used to be defended. Ware
blamed Muslim radicals
who have brought it on their fellow Muslims — by their promotion
of Islam as a political ideology.
What is surprising is that if the BBC and Panorama were
seriously interested in exploring racism in British political parties, and the
same is equally true for the EHRC,
then there is plenty of scope for a programme about the Tory Party. More than
half of Conservative Party members questioned for a
poll believed Islam is a threat to British life.
In 1987 Ware
tried to discredit former army intelligence officer Colin Wallaceon Panorama. Paul
Foot, who was a brilliant investigative journalist dismissed Ware as a shoddy reporter.
As the article A
long history of lies against the leftexplained
In 1987 Ware reported for a
Panorama documentary that tried to discredit former army intelligence officer Colin Wallace.
Wallace had exposed a “dirty
tricks” campaign against Labour prime minister Howard Wilson.
Ware claimed
Wallace was a fantasist. But as investigative journalist Paul
Foot wrote, Ware’s own report was riddled with obvious errors.
Wallace’s letter
in The Spectator showed how Ware was
cavalier in his approach to facts and an establishment journalist:
John
Ware, the former Sun reporter who now works for the BBC, no doubt owes much of
his skill and flair as a writer to his days with his old newspaper.
Ware
was defending the British army against allegations of illegal activity. As in Palestine Ware went
out of his way to defend the colonial authorities. Ware is the go to
‘journalist’ whenever colonial malpractice needs defending. It’s no surprise
that the BBC, the old Voice of the British Empire, should solicit his services
much as someone solicits a prostitute.
As Robin
Ramsay of The Lobster explained
Colin Wallace, who was framed for the murder of a man in Arundel (and later
cleared) was subject to a concerted attempt at discrediting him. But for Paul
Foot’s investigation this would have stuck.
In 2015 Ware produced a documentary
Jeremy
Corbyn: Labour’s Earthquakeon
Corbyn’s first leadership campaign. It featured claims from right wing Labour figures that a
Corbyn victory would lead to left wing “thuggery
and intimidation”.
The
Independent described
how Panorama lied
when they told Corbyn’s team that their film was about the Labour
leadership campaign as a whole, including all four candidates.
‘A
source in Mr Corbyn’s campaign accused the BBC of conducting "a complete
hatchet job" on Mr Corbyn.’
Ware produced
a number of films attacking Muslims and Palestinians. One suggested that Palestinian
charity Interpal funded terrorism. Others have targeted the Muslim Council of
Britain and Muslim Engagement and Development (Mend).
Interpal successfully suedthe Daily Mail in 2019
and was awarded £120,000 for alleging it funded terrorism. Ware also attacked Mend accusing it of antisemitism due to its
members’ criticisms of Israel.
“A notorious pro-Israeli Islamophobe”, “desperate to discredit Muslims” with “a track record for displaying unfairness and
twisting the truth”. Panorama's leading reporter, John Ware, is not quite
public enemy number one for many British Muslims - that is an accolade no doubt
held by Bush or Blair - but postings such as these on the Muslim Public Affairs
Committee website show he comes a close second.
It says everything about the
impartiality of the BBC, with its much vaunted ‘balance’, that it has continued
to employ John Ware, a bigot for all seasons, whenever it has wanted to attack
either the left or Muslims. We can therefore expect no better of Ware’s expose
tomorrow of British Muslims and Hamas. Ware is a known liar and that is why the
BBC employs him.
Ware not only writes for the anti-Palestinian Jewish Chronicle he
owns
part of it. In 2020 when the JC was going bankrupt Ware was part of a
consortium which put in a bid to save it.
When two members of the consortium, William Shawcross and Rabbi
Jonathan Hughes were contacted by the Jewish
Newsthey said that they didn’t know who was funding the bid. Clearly Ware
has a lot invested, personally and politically in supporting both Zionism and Islamaphobia.
As such he is about the worst person imaginable to be producing documentaries
on Muslims for the BBC. It is like asking Nick Griffin of the British
National Party to produce a documentary on British Jews.
The JC, according
to ABC, the media industry’s auditor, had a paid sale of only 6,371 for
May/June 2023. If it was any other paper the JC would have been allowed to go
to the wall but it is considered too valuable a propaganda organ by the Zionists
to be allowed to die a natural death.
To say that there is a conflict of interest between Ware as
owner of the JC and Ware as BBC journalist is to put it mildly. Tomorrow night
we can look forward to more of the same. I suggest that people get on the
phones and start making complaints to the BBC now. To make a complaint go
here and to phone in a complaint ring 0843 254 8737
On
Saturday in Brighton 300 people held a demonstration at The Level and then
marked 2 miles to an out of the way arms factory owned by L3 Harris on Brighton’s
Moulsecoomb Estate.
Previously the factory was called EDO-MBM. It
too supplied weaponry to Israel. It was the subject of a major campaign ten
years ago and also a famous
trial in which all the protesters, who had caused over £¼
million damage were acquitted.
The
trial was presided over by an extremely sympathetic Judge Bathhurst Norman,
whose summing up, as the Guardian reported, quoted favourably
the testimony by Caroline Lucas, the Green MP for
Brighton Pavilion, that "all
democratic paths had been exhausted" before the activists embarked on
their action.
Bathhurst
Norman, who was born in Haifa during the British Mandate, was later reprimanded
by the judicial authorities, after a Zionist complaint, for the sympathy he had
shown with the defendants.
The
Jewish Chronicle was certainly not
amused. It reported
that
That case became notorious following the comments of
Judge George Bathurst-Norman. He was formally reprimanded by the Office for
Judicial Complaints after telling the Hove Crown Court jury: “You may well think that hell on earth would
not be an understatement of what the Gazans suffered at that time [during
Operation Cast Lead].”
Telling
the truth has always been frowned upon by the judicial authorities.
L3Harris
is the 12th largest weapons manufacturer in the world. It makes bomb release
mechanisms for F-35 fighter jets being used by Israel to kill Palestinians.
L3Harris
is a major US weapons developer, which has facilities in the Massachusetts
cities and towns of Northampton, Ayer, and Wilmington. L3 Harris supports
Israel's ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their homeland, US militarism
and imperialism, and the US government's regime of tracking, detentions, and
deportations of Black and Brown migrants.
As reported by AFSC
Investigate, L3Harris is a top
supplier of component parts for Lockheed Martin F-35 warplanes, which Lockheed Martin
sells to Israel, manufacturing a total of 1,600 components for each of Lockheed
Martin's F-35s. Israel used its
fleet F35 warplanes during its May 2021 bombing campaign against Palestinians
living in Gaza.
L3Harris
also produces
components for Boeing's Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAM) guided bombs, or
"smart bombs," which enable increased precision in striking targets.
These JDAM-guided bombs have been directly linked to the killing of at least 44
Palestinian civilians in Israel's bombing
of al-Wahda street in May 2021. L3 Harris has also previously supplied Israel
with "SafeView body scanner machines," which Israel used at the Qalandia,
Bethlehem, and Sha’ar Efraim (Irtach) military checkpoints in the West Bank,
and the Erez checkpoint in the Gaza Strip.
Together
with its so-called "separation wall," Israel's military checkpoints function
to immiserate Palestinians who refuse to leave their land to make space for
Zionist settlement expansion. Israel's checkpoints also function to fragment
Palestinian society, physically separating Palestinians from one another and preventing
Palestinians from moving freely across their land to travel to work, to tend
their farmland during the day, and to visit loved ones.
L3Harris manufactured the
management systems for the Israeli Navy’s fleet of Sa’ar 5 and Sa’ar 6
warships. Israel uses these warships to enforce its naval blockade on the Gaza
strip, which denies the
nearly 2 million Palestinians living in Gaza access to basic resources necessary
to maintain water, sewage, electric, medical and other civilian infrastructure,
significant amounts of which Israel destroys each time it bombs Gaza and which
Palestinians cannot rebuild due to this blockade.
Israel
then delays or denies Palestinians access to exit permits necessary to leave Gaza,
preventing
Palestinians from receiving life-saving medical care, which Palestinians
cannot provide for themselves as the result of Israel's naval blockade which
prevents resources from coming into Gaza along with Israel's bombing campaigns
which destroy what infrastructure Palestinians attempt to construct in Gaza.
Accordingly,
L3Harris bears responsibility not only for equipping the warplanes Israel has
used to kill and injure thousands of Palestinians during its bombing campaigns
against Gaza, but also for equipping the warships Israel uses to enforce its
naval blockade of Gaza, which causes the mass preventable illness, death, and
suffering amongst the people of Gaza.
L3Harris
has derived
$36.15 billion to date through US Department of Defense (DoD) contracts
for the provision of products and services to the US Army, US Navy, US Air
Force, and other branches of the US military. Recent L3Harris business dealings
with the US DoD include this $750
million contract to equip the US Marines with "multi-channel
handheld and vehicular radio systems," as well as this this
$947.3 million contract to support the US Air force's "aircraft
electronic warfare system initiative."
Support
for US tracking, detentions, and deportations of migrants
As reported by AFSC
Investigate, L3Harris equips the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and
US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) (a sub-agency within DHS) with
advanced surveillance technologies, which DHS and ICE use to enforce the US
government's brutal regime of tracking, detentions, and deportations of Black
and Brown migrants.
Over the
past decade, L3 Harris has provided DHS and ICE with tens of millions of dollars worth of cell-site
simulators, known as "Stingrays," and subsequently provided DHS and ICE
with an upgraded version of The Stingray known as "The Crossbow."
Stingrays
and Crossbows mimic cell phone towers to make cell phones connect to them, allowing DHS and
ICE to pinpoint the location of mobile devices or to identify phone numbers in
their certain area, and thereby enabling DHS and ICE to more effectively track
the movements of the migrants they target. In 2019, the US Department of
Homeland Security (DHS) awarded L3
Harris a 5-year contract worth a potential $3 billion for "tactical
communication networks," by extending the contract DHS had previously established
with L3 Harris in 2013.
At 19.55 on February 16, on the eve of the last Palestine
Demonstration, the Metropolitan Police issued a tweet
changing the time of the demonstration, putting it back by 1½ hours.
The timing was deliberately planned in order to
cause maximum disruption to those with pre-booked coaches and transport.
The
pretext for this was in order to “accommodate an event at a synagogue along the route.” thus lending
credence to allegations that marches against Israel’s genocide were
anti-Jewish. The tweet reinforced this with the suggestion that “the impact on nearby congregations will be
reduced.”
There was no hint as to what this ‘impact’ might
have been but it doesn’t take much imagination to understand that what the
Police were doing was to reinforce the message from supporters of Israel’s genocide
that the demonstration was anti-Semitic.
Below is a statement from 150 Jews calling this
intervention by the Police as an act of malice designed to reinforce the
message of Zionist groups and their lapdogs, Sunak and Starmer, that
demonstrations against genocide are ‘hate
marches.
It’s correct that we’ve made it a condition that the march can’t move off until 1.30pm to accommodate an event at a synagogue along the route.
We’ve also required organisers to move the form up point south on Park Lane (marked by the green dot below) and we’ve blocked the… pic.twitter.com/jRnPkxw5fZ
We have entered the land of Orwell’s double-speak where language that ‘deliberately obscures, disguises, distorts,
or reverses the meaning of words’ is employed by our rulers, the political
class and their media echo chambers to try and destroy what remains of our
democratic right to protest.
Opposition to mass murder, ethnic cleansing and sexual
violence is bizarrely called ‘hate’ and
support for the starvation of children and the deliberate murder of those queuing
for food is a sign of the love that these people feel!
George Orwell wrote about this phenomenon of how the
ruling class uses language in an essay Politics
and the English Language which is prescient. Orwell wrote:
In our time,
political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. Things
like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and
deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended,
but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which
do not square with the professed aims of political parties.
Thus political
language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy
vagueness. Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants
driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on
fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification.
Millions of
peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no
more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification
of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in
the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is
called elimination of unreliable elements.
Such
phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental
pictures of them. Consider for instance some comfortable English professor
defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, ‘I believe in killing off your opponents when
you can get good results by doing so’. Probably, therefore, he will say
something like this:
Orwell was writing at the time of the British Empire.
He was describing its ‘civilising methods’. Today we don’t need to conjure up
mental pictures of Israel’s atrocities in Gaza. They are on the Internet and our
TV screens. That is what makes the Tory/Labour attacks on those who support the
Palestinians and oppose Israel’s massacre of civilians all the more despicables.
Rishi Sunak, Keir Starmer, Lisa Nandy and all the
other war criminals who govern us cannot say they didn’t know. It is impossible
for them not to know. They can therefore reasonably be described as blood drenched
monsters. Cool, calculated political sadists for whom children starving and
being murdered is less important than defeating a resistance movement, Hamas.
As we saw last night with the magnificent victory of
George Galloway in Rochdale, despite the opposition of sectarian groups like
the Socialist
Workers Party, there is no constituency in Britain, besides MPs and Peers, TV
and tabloid journalists, who can be mobilised in support of genocide.
Support for an immediate ceasefire commands the support of
71% of British people compared to 12% who wanted the blood letting to go on. This
is despite the unanimity of the press and broadcasting media, the FT excepted, in favour of letting Israel’s genocidal rampage
continue.
Even in the wake of October 7 and the mass
propaganda about Hamas ‘atrocities’ most of which have now been debunked,
an opinion poll on 19th October showed that 76% of British people supported an immediate
ceasefire compared to 8% who didn’t.
It is the rich and powerful, those who have access
to the airwaves who are the people who shout loudest for a continuation of the
genocide and ethnic cleansing. As Galloway proved
last night, Sunak, Braverman and Starmer’s support for a continuation of the bloodletting
commands next to no support.
Only the Daily Mail could call for restrictions on the right to protest in the name of democracy - Vladimir Putin should pay attention to how the British Establishment justifies repression
So we have the pathetic Sunak slinking
out of Downing Street to make an evidence free accusation that it was ‘intimidation’
that had led to the defeat of all the bourgeois parties.
Sunak complained that Galloway supported Hamas and
Hezbollah. Neither of these organisations have murdered 30,000 innocent people
and injured another 70,000. Neither of these organisations have deliberately
starved children to death and left
babies to die in incubators. It is an indictment of the murderous twisted
values of Sunak and his puppet Starmer that they believe that Hamas is the
incarnation of evil whilst Israel is the symbol of all that is sweet and
saintly in this world.
These are the values of capitalism and imperialism.
No amount of blood shed is enough for these human vampires. Yet if their racist
Rottweiler in the Middle East suffers an attack from those it has occupied for
57 years then this is the incarnation of evil.
It is this perversion of human values that leads these
creatures to call demonstrations against genocide ‘hate marches.’ And it now
appears that the Police, who are an instrument of class rule, there to protect
property not people, who are using the pretext of ‘anti-Semitism’ to hem in the
marches and provoke confrontations.
A number of people, myself included, have been arrested
on the preposterous allegation that supporting the Palestinian right to resist
is somehow support for ‘terrorism’. The proscribing of Hamas’s political wing
in November 2021 by Sajid David was a nakedly political act. It had not an iota
of justification.
If you go to the government
website and see how the government
justified its proscription of Hamas’s political wing (its military wing was
proscribed in 2001) there is nothing saying why it was felt necessary to proscribe
the political wing.
Throughout the Troubles in Northern Ireland from
1968 to the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, whilst the IRA was proscribed Sinn
Fein remained legal despite calls from the Tory right to proscribe it. If Sinn
Fein had been proscribed then support for the IRA would never have been
channelled in a political direction and the peace agreement would never have
been signed. That is what that shallow political lightweight Sajid David was
doing when, with a stroke of the pen, he proscribed Hamas political wing.
The government said that at the time when Hamas’s
military wing was proscribed in March 2001
it was HM government’s assessment
that there was a sufficient distinction between the so called political and
military wings of Hamas, such that they should be treated as different
organisations, and that only the military wing was concerned in terrorism. The
government now assess that the approach of distinguishing between the various
parts of Hamas is artificial. Hamas is a complex but single terrorist
organisation.
Yet there is nothing to say why the government made this
assessment. Absolutely nothing to
justify proscribing the political wing. All it says is that:
Hamas commits
and participates in terrorism. Hamas has used indiscriminate rocket or mortar
attacks, and raids against Israeli targets. During the May 2021 conflict, over
4,000 rockets were fired indiscriminately into Israel. Civilians, including 2
Israeli children, were killed as a result. Palestinian militant groups,
including Hamas, frequently use incendiary balloons to launch attacks from Gaza
into southern Israel. There was a spate of incendiary balloon attacks from Gaza
during June and July 2021, causing fires in communities in southern Israel that
resulted in serious damage to property.
Even assuming that the above attacks were
‘terrorist’ as opposed to resistance activities, why were they attributed to
Hamas’s 20,000 strong political wing? Hamas was the elected leadership of
Palestinians in both the West Bank and Gaza under the last free elections in
2005.
If Hamas is to be classified as ‘terrorist’ because
it killed 2 Israeli children then what should we call Israel which has murdered
15,000+ children in Gaza? The racist hypocrisy of this provision is nauseating.
Any normal person would classify Hamas as a
resistance group. That does not mean you have to support it. It is an Islamic
group. I’m an atheist. They are conservative socially and politically whereas
I’m a socialist. But terrorist? This is the label that was applied to all
colonial resistance to British imperialism.
‘Terrorist’ was also the label that the Nazis
applied to the French and Polish Resistance. The Tory government and their
Labour echo chambers are no different in their approach to Hamas than the Nazis
occupiers in Europe were to the Maquis.
There had, before the Police’s decision to impose
restrictions on the last Palestine march, been at least 9 previous such
demonstrations without any discernible impact other than on the hysterical
Braverman, the late and unlamented Home Secretary, who literally lost the
plot when she accused the Police of a pro-Palestinian
bias. No-one who is Jewish has been attacked or molested in any way prior to or
subsequent to the marches.
Braverman wasn’t the only person who lost the plot.
The misnamed Campaign Against
Antisemitism, which was set up at the behest of Israel’s dirty tricks
Minister of Strategic Affairs last time there was Israeli a major attack on
Gaza, in the summer of 2014, called
for the military to be called in!
The CAA even had the galls to say they were doing it
in order to “uphold the values that our country
stands for”.That is the contempt that Zionists have for democratic
rights. But the CAA probably thought that they were still in Israel.
Since Braverman’s resignation the Police have been
slowly caving in to the raucous and racist Tory and Zionist lobby with Police officers
seeing their role as monitoring the slogans and speech of demonstrators. As if
the average thick plod is capable of understanding political nuance.
The most
ludicrous arrests were of four members of an obscure Stalinist group who
had been selling a book on Nazi-Zionist collaboration with the Star of David
intertwined with the Swastika. What business is it of the Police to decide that
an artistic front cover of a book infringes the law? Since when were the police the arbiters of
what is acceptable? This takes us back
to the early 60s when the publishers of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Penguin Books,
were prosecuted
for gross indecency.
I just hope that those arrested follow through with
their threats to sue the Met for false arrest and malicious imprisonment.
In recent years the Met have increasingly taken upon
themselves the roles of deciding what is and is not acceptable politically. We
all remember the pre-emptive
arrests of protesters at the Coronation of Charles III.
The mere fact that the Police took it upon themselves
to decide that supporting Republicanism was an arrestable offence points to a
deeper malaise in the police. Their ingrained right-wing bias.
As the Undercover
Policing Inquiry into police malpractices, including rape by deception, revealed
the Met’s Special Demonstration Squad, which infiltrated political groups
concentrated solely on left-wing
groups despite the fact that it is the far-right that has indulged in
terrorism, bomb making and in the case of Darren Copeland the bombing
of the Admiral Duncan pub in Soho, which killed 3 people a quarter of a century
ago.
The pathetic excuse given for their political
prejudice was that the police were too
frightened to infiltrate fascist groups. Which, if true, just goes to show how
nice we are and how we are the opposite of Braverman’s rhetoric!
Of course the Police response to accusations of bias
is that they are only ensuring observance of the law without fear or favour.
If that is the case then it is strange that another
law seems to have gone by default. I
refer to the International
Criminal Court Act 2001, which makes it an offence to commit war crimes, be
it in this country or abroad. It also makes someone who is ancillary
to, i.e. helps someone commit a war crime equally guilty of the offence, wherever
it is committed.
Given that Sunak, with the support of his faithful
lapdog Starmer, has been supplying the Israelis with weapons with which to
commit war crimes isn’t it about time that Sunak and Starmer shared a cell
together?
With a bit of luck this would do wonders for penal
reform as they might get to experience that which they wish to inflict on
others. It would, I am sure, be an extremely popular measure since everyone
knows that politicians are the biggest crooks.
Speaking of which isn’t it about time that the
Police started prosecuting Tory Ministers who set up the VIP
channel for their friends and cronies who took advantage of the COVID
crisis to trouser billions
of pounds? It would make a change from prosecuting shop lifters for petty
theft.
As the letter below shows, the Police are fully
aware that hundreds of Jews have taken part in the marches, many of them as
part of a Jewish bloc.
I know that the habits of colonial divide and rule tactics
die hard because at an earlier march the Police suddenly interposed themselves between the Jewish bloc and the rest of
the march, because they believed that Jews were in danger from non-Jewish demonstrators.
This is not mere stupidity but a consequence of the
false propaganda that the right churns out. The idea that there is anything
anti-Semitic about pro-Palestinian marches is levelled by supporters of Israeli
genocide in the absence of anything with which to defend what I called
Hitler’s bastard offspring.
Because the Met operate within a racist and right-wing
milieu, they have convinced themselves that the marches are inherently
anti-Semitic. They seriously believed that demonstrators would attacks Jews who
support the Palestinians, whereas in fact Jews opposed to genocide have been
welcomed on the marches. This is part of the racist mindset of a police force
that is notorious for the racists, bigots and Islamaphobes who make up its
ranks.
The reaction of Rishi Sunak to Galloway’s election
victory last Friday morning was a sight to behold. He slithered out of 10
Downing Street to spew his venom at an audience that was no longer listening,bar the media circus that is little more than an echo chamber.
Sunak is an empty suit, a bundle of clichés, spewing
racism and threats of state violence under the pretext that he is combating ‘extremist disruption and criminality’. What
he meant of course was the mass demonstrations against the genocide in Gaza
that he is encouraging and which 76%
of the population support.
It is one of the hallmarks of the political dishonesty of our politicians that opposition to genocide is violence and support for genocide is making peace.
Sunak is the least impressive Prime Minister since
the last one,Liz Truss, whose reign was
less than the lifespan of a lettuce.
Sunak’s speech
Sunak demonstrated the moral and political turpitude of an
elite that has systematically transferred the wealth of the UK from the poorest
to the richest. Sunak himself is the richest
man in parliament and he is married to the tax-dodging daughter of a billionaire.
Every action of the government is designed to
impoverish the vast majority of people. The NHS is in chaos and underfunded,
schools are being privatised, welfare benefits have been systematically cut,
Brexit has reduced the volume of trade and yet according to Sunak and Braverman
the greatest threat to Britain comes from refugees. Racism and divide and
ruleare the order of the day.
Yet it is over Gaza that their moral depravity
shines out. In his speech Sunak mentioned October 7, when Palestinian fighters killed
1,139 Israelis, a third of whom were military and police and half the
remainder were killed by Israel under the Hannibal
Doctrine, which stipulates that in the event of an Israeli being captured
it is better to kill both captor and captive than allow the latter to be exchanged
for Palestinian prisoners at a later date. A fact carefully
hidden by a compliant media.
Galloway Interview with Sky TV
When genocide stalks Gaza, when Israel perpetrates
the flour
massacre, Sunak says nothing. One Israeli Jewish life is worth more than
100 Palestinian lives. Which is exactly the ratio of hostages killed that the Nazis
exacted when one of them were killed.
Israel is armed to the teeth by Sunak and the US government
and soldiers opening fire on starving people waiting for food does not disturb Sunak,
Starmer or our political elite in the slightest. Of course if Russia had
committed such an atrocity it would have filled the airwaves. Instead Sunak
condemned a non-existent violence on the streets of Britain as a pretext for removing
yet more of our rights to protest.
Aaron Bushnell’s Brave Sacrifice to Stop Biden’s
Genocide
Rochdale is a constituency which has been held by all
3 major parties and was for much of the 19th century a stronghold of
radicalism and the supporters of free trade and opponents of the Corn Laws,
notably Richard Cobden.
So it is not altogether a surprise that the voters of Rochdale have elected in
George Galloway another radical.
There was one issue above all other that dominated
the election and that was Gaza. As Galloway said in his victory speech, ‘Keir Starmer this is for Gaza.’
Sunak
leads an openly racist party. 58% of whose members say
that Islam poses a threat to this country. 43% of members don’t
want a Muslim Prime Minister, a survey by YouGov
found. Substitute Judaism/Jewish for Islam/Muslim and you get a flavour of the
state of the Tory party.
The
same study found 45% believe there are “areas
in Britain in which non-Muslims are not able to enter” and 67% believe
there are areas “that operate under
Sharia law”. Conspiracy theories are rife in this racist party yet Sunak’s
only concern was the false claim that Jewish school students are fearful’ to wear their uniforms ‘lest it reveal their identity.’
Sunak’s concern for British Jews, almost all whom are White, economically prosperous and not
subject to state repression or discrimination is touching but what he is doing
is using Jews as a moral alibi for his support for Israel as a ‘Jewish’ State. When you
are enabling genocide it helps to point to distract people’s attention by
pointing to a non-existent problem.
It is beyond
alarming that last night the Rochdale by-election returned a candidate who
dismisses the horror of what happened on October 7th, who endorses
Hezbollah and is endorsed by Nick Griffin, the racist leader of the BNP... you
cannot use that to call for the eradication of a state or any kind of hatred or
anti-Semitism.... It is the public’s expectation that they [the Police] will
not only manage these protests but police them.
We have had 30,000 killed and 70,000 injured in Gaza
and rising but this is not enough for Sunak who had nothing to say
about Palestinian deaths and injuries.
Calling for the dismantlement of the Apartheid State
of Israel is anti-Semitic. Was the destruction of the Nazi and South African
states also racist?
Galloway at
University Debate Destroys Zionist Claims That He is Anti-Semitic
Sunak’s
real agenda was left to last. Unable to ban the mass demonstrations outright like
Braverman wanted, he called for wholly peaceful mass protests not only to be
managed by the police but to be ‘policed’ by them. Which is code for coercion, violence
and harassment of marchers by arresting them for chanting things and holding
placards he doesn’t like.
Police
repression is Sunak’s response to the political crisis and the mass movement
that has arisen since October 7. No doubt the Met, a byword for corruption,
racism and misogyny will step up their harassment of protestors and if violence
breaks out it will of course be the fault of those who were harassed.
The
irony of Sunak talking about racism is breathtaking. He has been forced to
suspend the former Vice-Chair of the Tory Party Lee Anderson whom he appointed
in the first place because he was a racist. Yet two-thirds
of Tory members support him and Sunak himself refuses to call his attack on
Sadiq Khan for being in the grip of Islamists Islamaphobic.
Not
surprisingly Starmer echoes every word Sunak says. There was a time when the
Labour Party was an Opposition party but today we have a choice of identikit
politicians whose only interest is in scapegoating minorities.
Starmer
has pursued a consistently racist and Islamaphobic policy in the Labour Party,
all in the name of opposing ‘anti-Semitism’. Both party leaders are committed
to Zionism and support genocide in Israel.
Galloway condemned the SNP for supporting the protesters
The
victory of George Galloway should be welcomed by all those on the left who want
change. Of course Galloway is not the perfect socialist. His views on refugees
leave a lot to be desired as does his attitude to social oppressions and abortion.
But where he is right is in stressing the importance of class as opposed to
identity politics.
Most
people on the left realised that Genocide in Gaza was the main issue in Rochdale
and supported Galloway. The SWP did not.
Nine
days before the election the headline
in Socialist Worker was ‘Galloway is not the answer for Rochdale - We need a better expression of Palestinian
liberation than George Galloway’s party.
Presumably
the SWP’s decision to march with Glasgow Friends of Israel on March 16 to mark
UN anti-racism day is what they mean by a better expression of Palestinian liberation!
Supporters of Israel’s genocide will be taking part in an ‘anti-racist’ march.
10 days later the SWP
headline was ‘The Rochdale
by-election was a referendum on Rishi Sunak’s and Keir Starmer’s support for Israel’s
genocide.’ which rather begs the question why, in that case the SWP did not
support him!
The claims of Starmer that Labour would have won if
they had not suspended their
candidate Azhar Ali is more Starmer’s lies. Nothing that Ali said was
anti-Semitic. Given the warning Israel had over October 7 it is quite
reasonable to believe that it might have let it happen. It certainly is not
anti-Semitic to propound such a theory.
Thetruth as
everyone knows is that Ali was suspended because Starmer knew he was going to
lose and he decided that it was preferable to sack him than lose to Galloway.
Never has it been so obvious that whatever else
Britain, America, Germany and the West is they are not democracies. Majorities
in every European country see Israel’s attack on Gaza as unjustified. Even in Germany
44% oppose
Israel’s attack to 35% who support
it.
Even in the US 68% support
a ceasefire and 43% oppose sending Israel weapons compared to 31% supporting
it. Yet the governments of nearly all the countries chose to ignore public
opinion. And when, as in the UK, the public is resolutely opposed to the government’s
policy the government attacks the marches as ‘hate marches’ and seeks to restrict
them.
Even the Economist is not impressed with Sunak's attack on the right to protest
Rochdale indicates that we face a profound
political crisis with both government and opposition in lockstep. You could not
put a piece of paper between Sunak and Starmer which is one reason why in
Rochdale the two main parties got just 20% between them. No wonder Sunak was so
furious.
The question for the left is whether they can get
their act together to pose a unified challenge in the next election when the
main task will not be defeating Sunak so much as ensuring the defeat of
Starmer.
We should be under no illusions that Starmer is the
main enemy. He stands for the continuation of the Tory attacks on the working
class and poor. There isn’t even one promise that he hasn’t broken. Not one of
his 10
pledges that secured his election as leader that he hasn’t torn up.
The call by Andrew Feinstein for a unified left,
the Collective, is welcome. What would be even more welcome would be if Jeremy
Corbyn, together with those MPs who Starmer has removed the whip from, were to
seize this opportunity to give a lead rather than cowering in the shadows. Corbyn
hasn’t even declared whether he will restand for parliament. One can only
wonder what is keeping him.
On
Monday at 12.00 p.m Unite members will lobby Unite’s Executive Committee in solidarity
with those experiencing genocide in Gaza and for an end to the obstruction of
General Secretary Sharon Graham.
Unite
has perhaps the best policy of any trade
union on Palestine. Yet you would have to go to the United Left website to find
it. It is nowhere to be seen on Unite’s own website.
‘unreservedly condemned and expressed its
revulsion at the recent appalling acts
of violence by Hamas against innocent civilians in Israel’
But
it could only ‘deplore the subsequent
suffering and loss of life being endured by civilians in Gaza.’
The
difference in tone between ‘revulsion’
at the loss of Israeli compared to ‘deploring’
the loss of Palestinian lives was no accident. Clearly Palestinian lives don’t
matter.
Large numbers of injured people are brought into Shifa Hospital in Gaza City after an Israeli attack on the courtyard of al-Ahli Arab Hospital. [Abdelhakim Abu Riash/Al Jazeera]
This
despite 2,750 Palestinians having
been killed by October 16, the day when Israel
bombed Al Ahli hospital killing a further 500 Palestinians.
Since
then Israel has bombed every single hospital and health facility in Gaza,
murdering patients and doctors alike.
On
November 3rd after considerable pressure from activists including an
online petitionUnite issued
a second statement which this time called for an immediate ceasefire.The statement was however pitiably weak
calling on ‘all parties to respect
international law’ as if the Palestinians experiencing genocide were
equally culpable as the murderers. Nowhere did the statement mention genocide.
Nor
did the statement mention the fact that Israel had imposed a Nazi style food,
water and fuel blockade on the Gaza strip resulting in starvation according to the
United Nations.
You
have done nothing to publicise all the previous national demonstrations.Are
you going to ignore the one on January 13 too? There has been no national Unite
presence on the marches to date.
In
fact it subsequently turned out that Graham had actually prevented the national
Unite banner being taken on demonstrations. The letter demanded that Graham
publicise all future demonstration, that you provide the resources
necessary for Unite members to attend, that Unite nationally is present on the
march together with its banner and that Unite has a speaker at the rally.
Jim Kelly, Chair of London & Eastern
Region Unite Speaking to a Palestine Trade union Rally
Not
only were none of these things done but according to Jim Kelly,
Chair of London and Eastern Region, Graham’s representatives had ‘advised’
Peter Kavanagh, the Regional Secretary, not to speak at a Palestine solidarity demonstration.
Kelly described how activists on Palestine had had to work in ‘an environment of silence and obstruction’ by
union officials, in particular Graham.
Kelly
described how Graham had attempted to suppress attempts to mobilise solidarity
in support of the Palestinians. He
described an ‘expectation that employees
will not speak alongside other General Secretaries’ at demonstrations.
Unite has
had no national presence at the London demonstrations calling for an End to
Genocide and solidarity with the Palestinians in Gaza. Nor has Unite done anything
to publicise thee demonstrations.
Kelly
highlighted the activity of Unite branches despite
Graham’s attempts to stop solidarity. He mentioned St Mungo’s and
Doctors in Unite in particular.Kelly
highlighted Graham’s‘excellent’ speech
at the trade union rally in Cheltenham against the government’s anti-union laws
but pointed out that fighting racism and international solidarity were equally important for socialists.
Israeli Minister of Heritage Amichai Eliyahu:
“North Gaza is more beautiful than ever. Blowing up and flattening everything is amazing. Once we are finished, we will hand over the lands of Gaza to the fighting soldiers and settlers who lived in Gush Katif."pic.twitter.com/lTlOEwnIce
Since
October 7 over 30,000 Palestinians have been murdered in Gaza including at
least 13,000 children. Over 70,000 have been injured.Hospitals, ambulances, homes have been bombed
in an attempt to ethnically cleanse Gaza. Israeli Ministers such as Minister of Heritage Amichai Eliyahu have openly
called for the annihilation of Palestinians suggesting
dropping a nuclear bomb on Gaza as well as wiping
out the month of Ramadan.
Netanyahu declaring invasion: "You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible"
1 Samuel 15:3
"Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass"pic.twitter.com/5QF9PkGhjJ
There
is a database
of 500 genocidal statements by Israeli leaders including Prime Minister Netanyahu
who called
on soldiers to ‘remember Amalek’
the mythical biblical tribe whose extermination god ordered.
Finance
Minister Bezalel Smotrich, the Gauleiter of the West Bank, has described
2 million Palestinians in the West Bank as Nazis. This is a recipe for extermination.
This was after calling for the Palestinian town of Huwara to be ‘wiped
out’.
The
description of poor, homeless and starving Palestinians as ‘Nazis’ by those in
full combat gear armed to the teeth shows not only a complete disconnect from
reality but a fascist mentality.
Sharon
Graham and the National Executive have openly ignored Unite policy in support
of the Palestinians which states that
‘The time
has now come to stop the Israeli ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people and
for Unite to take a lead in taking bolder steps like those that were taken
against the South African apartheid regime.’
Unite should
have been trying to persuade Unite workers not to handle arms shipments to
Israel. When it came to Ukraine Graham gave
her full support to dockers refusing to unload Russian oil. The Guardian
quoted Graham as saying that Essar, the owner of the Stanlow oil refinery
may believe
that it is justifiable to transport Russian oil under a flag of convenience but
Unite does not. Unite urges the transport secretary, Grant Shapps, to close
this loophole immediately.
This
comes on top of Graham’s banning of the film ‘Jeremy Corbyn – The Big Lie’ which showed how anti-Semitism had
been weaponised in the Labour Party against Jeremy Corbyn.
Former South-East
Regional Secretary Sarah Carpenter, who banned Jeremy Corbyn – The Big Lie from Unite premises in Portsmouth with a
series of lies, has just been appointed Graham’s new Chief of Staff.
Carpenter
got off to a flying start when she threatened Peter
Cavanagh, the union’s London regional secretary, with the loss of a
discretionary pension bonus if he did not pull back from his support for
Palestinians in Gaza.
We demand that the National Executive instructs Graham to actively work for
an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, that she be present with the national banner on
future demonstrations, that she should speak at them and above all that she
should stop obstructing the work of others.
At a time when Israel is massacring Palestinians waiting for the
delivery of food and executing prisoners and torturing captives it is
outrageous that our General Secretary, by her silence and obstruction, is
effectively giving support to the genocidal war mongers in Tel Aviv.
Unite and its predecessor union have a proud record of giving support to
the struggle against Apartheid in South Africa. We expect it to do the same
against Apartheid in Israel.
The Shameful Support of the Left Sects for Sharon Graham's Refusal to Support the Palestinians
All the 'revolutionary' left sects - from the SWP to the Socialist Party - even Counterfire - are making excuses for Sharon Graham, complaining it's not her but the United Left on the Executive that is blocking her. This is clearly and obviously not true. It is Graham and Graham alone who has taken the decision not to have a National Unite presence on the demonstrations.
I have to confess I was surprised by the reaction on a Unite Palestine Discussion group by the opposition of Counterfire's Richard Allday, a member of Unite's National Executive, to the lobby. I accused him of being a member of the SWP until he corrected me. Supporters of the SWP had also made it clear on the group that they didn't support the lobby.
Because of her limited support for strikes, on a wholly non-political basis, whilst at the same time supporting Starmer against the left, the left sects have given their unqualified support to Sharon Graham's racism, British nationalism and support for imperialism. Karl Marx, who supported the Fenians and the Irish struggle for liberation, would turn in his grave if he saw who it was who were claiming to act in his name today. As Marx once said:
'a nation that oppresses another nation cannot itself be free'
This
Blog is one of the longest anti-Zionist, Socialist and pro-Palestinian blogs in
existence. In that time I have published 3,384 blogs. The main Blog is on
Google’s Blogspot.
About
7 years ago I set up a shadow blog on www.tonygreenstein.com.
The reason for this were threats from Zionists that they were going to
put pressure on Google to take it down for ‘anti-Semitism’.
That
did not happenbut Google have removed a
number of blogs until I removed things that offended them. It is therefore
extremely useful to have a backup Blog in case Google were ever to remove the
blog in its entirety.
I
have now been informed by the Sussex
Community Internet Project who maintain my blog that my shadow blog needs
urgently rebuilding.The cost is £1,000
and I am therefore appealing to readers to contribute towards this cost.
Unlike
many blogs I do not derive any income from the blog. On the contrary
I have subsidised it however I am asking viewers to help shoulder
the cost.
The
blog has specialised in anti-Zionist analysis, in particular of the fascist wing
of theZionist lobby in Britain
focusing on people like Jonathan Hoffman and his band of fascists as well as
particularly poisonous sections of the Zionist Lobby such as the CampaignAgainst Antisemitism, the Community Security Trustand UK Lawyers for Israel.
I am particularly proud of my analysis of what was happening during the Corbyn era when I continually warned Corbyn that people like Ken Livingstone, Jackie Walker, Marc Wadsworth, Chris Williamson and myself were collateral damage and that he was the real target.
Unfortunately Corbyn did not listen until it was too late when he too was suspended and had the Whip withdrawn.
I have also been extremely critical of Palestine Solidarity Campaign, of which I was the co-founder. Its recent actions in suspending officers of Manchester PSC, resulting in the whole branch going independent and its ultimatum to Birmingham PSC that they were not to invite Palestinian hero Leila Khaled as a speaker confirm me in my belief that PSC nationally has learnt no lessons from its refusal to take seriously the 'anti-Semitism' attacks on the Palestine solidarity movement.
Today the government is threatening further attacks on the Palestine solidarity movement. In its dying days it is threatening all those who dare to exercise basic democratic rights. Sunak and his alter ego Starmer would be at home governing a fully fledged police state.
Mass marches of hundreds of thousands of people against genocide in Gaza are 'hate marches' whereas those supplying and supporting the genocide are bathed in love. This blog is part of the fightback against those who would abolish all remaining democratic rights. They intend to ban those they term as 'extremists' and they are blunt when they say that if you oppose capitalism you are an 'extremist'.
Those who are opposed to genocide are now 'extremists' whereas those who support murdering 30,000 Palestinians, mainly women and children, are 'moderates'. Michael Gove is intending to introduce further legislation to ban opponents of the racist Israeli state .
We learn that Sunak, smarting over the victory of George Galloway in Rochdale is threatening further attacks including the possible banning as 'extreme' of Palestine Action, a group that PSC has consistently failed to support. We are living in dark and dangerous times and despite my own recent arrest under the Terrorism Act 2000 I am determined not to cease publication of the blog.
Despite
shadow banning and the use of algorithms by Facebook and Twitter I have
maintained a hit rate of over 50,000. Last month there were over 65,000 hits
compared to more than 100,000 at its height.
These
attempts to suppress radical and Palestinian supporting sites have hit all such
sites such as The Canary, Skwawkbox, Electronic Intifada etc.
I
have partly avoided the efforts to restrict the circulation of my blog by
maintaining a large email list though Google Groups recently took down one such
group which is why I want to start using Mailchimp to bypass these attempts.
Again this will cost money.
As
you can see from the top 20 posts – which range from an amazing 165,000 for an
article on Churchill to over 105,000 on the attack on and imprisonment of Ahed
Tamimi – the blog has remained a thorn in the side of the Zionists and is often
quoted by the Zionist press (very rarely favourably!).
So
I am asking you for support to ensure that Google, Facebook and Twitter are not
able to affect its continuation. In the longer term I may well transfer to
substack whilst still maintaining a shadow blog.The shadow blog has about a third of the
hits of the blogspot but it is an essential guarantee that Google cannot take
my blog down.
As well
as maintaining a blog I have brought out a book on Zionism During the Holocaust about a period in history which the Zionists
prefer to rewrite if notforget. I also
contribute articles to a wide variety of publications as well as interviews,
talks etc. For example a forthcoming Al
Jazeera film on the founder of the Stern Gang, Avraham ‘Yair’ Stern, who
proposed a military pact with the Nazis, interviewed me.
I would
therefore appeal to you to help me continue this work. I would also like to
thank those who have made regular donations to help meet ongoing maintenance
costs which are about £750 per year.
If you
are able to make a donation please transfer any donations to:
Account:Brighton & Hove Unemployed Workers Centre (business account)
Account No:04094107
Sort Code:090150
Thank you,
Tony Greenstein
Blog, Financial Appeal, ZionismDuring the Holocaust,
Genocide in Gaza through the eyes
of Israeli soldiers
On 5 November 2023 Anita
Patel wrote a guest blog Women’s Place UK
: Whitewashing Zionism. Anita wrote, in reference to their statement of 28th
October “Israel & Palestine – Peace,
Equality, Freedom, Justice”, that it was:
an
evasive and impossible fudge, between advocates of apartheid, ethnic cleansing
and genocide on the one hand, and a people who are fighting for their survival
on the other.The statement frames the
attack on Gaza as a conflict between two equivalent hostile parties, failing to
distinguish the oppressor and the oppressed, and making the same demands of
both those parties, on the grounds that all the women involved share the same
experience of war.It is as though
Israeli women were not part of the oppressor and Palestinian women were not
part of the oppressed people.
BWC has provided a good example of how this statement
has been interpreted by radical and liberal/bourgeois feminists when they
banned Parents for Palestine from having a stall at their celebrations in Brighton
Dome.
UKLFI is
a far-right Zionist organisation. Listed among its Directors is Daniel
Berke, lawyer for Tommy Robinson. As the film below makes clear he is politically
close to Robinson. Berke was also the solicitor for Jonathan Hoffman, the link
person between British fascists and far-right Zionists.
Regavim was founded in 2006
by Bezalel Smotrich, the then leader of the far-right National Union party.
Smotrich calls himself a “proud homophobe” and is an open fascist. Today Smotrich is Israel’s
Finance Minister and the Gauleiter of the West Bank.
BWC not only refused to
talk to P4P about the allegations, they refused to disclose who had made the
allegations or what they were. Instead they just went ahead and cancelled P4P’s
stall.
This is the kind of ‘justice’
that Palestinians receive in the West Bank where you can be detained without trial
(Administrative Detention) without knowing who has made the allegations or what
those allegations are. So well done BWC. You are certainly good Zionists.
What BWC did was to cave
in to the supporters of genocide in Gaza taking their side. BWC has always been
a nest of right-wing radical and Zionist feminism and so it’s no surprise that
they were happy to cover for the supporters of Israel.
When I was Secretary of
the local Anti-Nazi League 40 years ago I wrote to them suggesting that we work
together in combating the National Front which was active in Brighton at that
time. Their response was that since fascists and anti-fascists were men they
were going to abstain!
In practice BWC has been
abstaining from the fight against racism and fascism ever since. Now they have
taken it a step further and openly declared their sympathies with those who are
perpetrating genocide in Gaza.
Palestinian women and girls
have reportedly been arbitrarily executed in Gaza, often together with family
members, including their children, according to information received. “We are
shocked by reports of the deliberate targeting and extrajudicial killing of
Palestinian women and children in places where they sought refuge, or while
fleeing. Some of them were reportedly holding white pieces of cloth when they
were killed by the Israeli army or affiliated forces,” the experts said.
The experts
expressed serious concern about the arbitrary detention of hundreds of
Palestinian women and girls, including human rights defenders, journalists and
humanitarian workers, in Gaza and the West Bank since 7 October. Many have
reportedly been subjected to inhuman and degrading treatment, denied
menstruation pads, food and medicine, and severely beaten. On at least one
occasion, Palestinian women detained in Gaza were allegedly kept in a cage in
the rain and cold, without food.
The Guardian reported
on 22 February that there was evidence
of at least two cases of rape of Palestinian women captives, alongside other
cases of sexual humiliation and threats of rape. Reem Alsalem, the UN special
rapporteur on violence against women and girls, said the true extent of sexual
violence could be significantly higher.
Palestinian children in the
Israel military detention system face physical and emotional abuse, with four
out of five (86%) of them being beaten, and 69% strip-searched, according to
new research by Save the Children. Nearly half (42%) are injured at the point
of arrest, including gunshot wounds and broken bones. Some report violence of a
sexual nature and some are transferred to court or between detention
centres in small cages, the child rights organisation said.
Palestinian
women and children are also being starved to death by Israel.Reports of sexual abuse and violence against
women by Israeli soldiers are rife, which is not surprising since the Chief
Military Rabbi of Israel, Eyal Karim has ruled
that rape is permitted in war.
The haunted face of a 10 year old who died of starvation
In answer to
a question on the religious website Kipa when asked if soldiers
were permitted to rape women during war. Karim replied that, as part of
maintaining fitness for the army and the soldiers' morale during fighting, it
is permitted to
"breach"
the walls of modesty and "satisfy the evil inclination by lying with
attractive Gentile women against their will, out of consideration for the
difficulties faced by the soldiers and for overall success."
It is no surprise that
the sisters of BWC have, given the choice, chosen to side with those who have
forced Palestinian women to have caesarean sections without anaesthetic, who
are deprived of basics hygiene such as sanitary towels, wipes and above
all, of food. To these racist harridans, Palestinian women are lesser human
beings compared to their White counterparts.
The fact that BWC lied when
it said in a statement that it had offered to speak to P4P when it hadn’t and
then accepted the allegations from the Zionists at face value demonstrates
beyond doubt where their sympathies lie.
The Zionist Apologists for Rape & Violence Against Women
Radical feminism has always given cover to imperialism,
be it in Ireland or Palestine so we shouldn’t be surprised. The darlings of
American feminists – Betty Friedan, Letty Pogrebin and Andrea
Dworkin– were all Zionists.
American feminism has until recently, and under the pressure of Black Lives
Matter and third world women, been a bastion of support for imperialist ventures.For example Susan Nossel. former head of Amnesty USA justified the Afghan
war with feminist arguments.
Feminism
as a western movement has, by its very nature, viewed society as primarily divided
into men and women. Race and class has been largely absent from Western
feminist narratives and it is no accident that the racist trollops of Brighton Women
Centre have come to dominate the women’s movement and feminism.
Western
feminists such as Betty Friedan fought hard against Palestinian demands for
liberation and in practice what wascalled second wavefeminism ended
up in the right-wing feminism of the ‘Blair
babes’ who voted overwhelmingly in Parliament for the Iraq War in 2003.
The
election of 100 Labour Women MPs in 1997 resulted in a
situation where 25% of women MPs (mostly old-style socialists like Alice Mahon)
voted against the war compared to 40% of male MPs. So much for the sexist idea
that women are more peaceful.
In
more recent years it has been female Zionist MPs such as Margaret Hodge, Louise Ellman,
Luciana Berger and Ruth Smeeth who led the ‘anti-Semitism’ fight against Jeremy
Corbyn and the left in the Labour Party.
This
is why on Saturday March 8th we held a silent picket of the IWT
celebrations at the Dome. Opposite us were a group of Zionist women chanting ‘Rape
is not Resistance’.Their message was
that the break-out from Gaza on October 7 had been an orgy of
rape.
Dabke
at Womens Day Celebrations
Allegations
of systematic rape have been the main narrative of the Israeli state in order to
demonise Hamas and justify its genocide in Gaza. BWC has gone along with this
false narrative. It has been comprehensively
debunked.
However
allegations of rape have always been the stock-in-trade of racists and imperialists against
indigenous people from Southern Africa ‘the black peril’ to the
lynch mobs of the Deep South. Indeed allegations of rape and sexual assault
were common to Nazi propaganda against German Jews. So it’s no surprise that Brighton
Womens Centre has adopted this narrative.
On
Saturday March 8th Palestine solidarity activists and other
anti-racists therefore held a silent demonstration outside the Dome. Opposite
us was a small band of Zionists chanting ‘rape
is not resistance’ thereby playing into this deeply racist trope.
Ironically
when a woman went up to them to say that she was a victim of rape and she found
their demonstration upsetting and disturbing a male Zionist told her that she
should be raped again.It was reported
to the Police but the man in question was protected by the Zionist women thus
demonstrating that their concern was not rape but support for Israel’s genocide
in Gaza.
The 2 men suspected of telling a woman she should be raped again
People
may wish to consider whether a demonstration should be held
outside BWC to highlight their complicity in support for
genocide but in the meantime you might wish to contact these racists feminists at admin@womenscentre.org.uk.
There
was an interesting discussion on Mumsnet
in the Feminism thread on BWC’s cancellation of P4P’s stall.
Brighton Women’s
Centre cancelled a stall celebrating Palestinian women for #IWD
Fortitudinal · 09/03/2024 12:06
What the fuck? Brighton Women’s Centre and the Dome
cancelled this stall at the last minute. How can they possibly justify this?
It’s heartbreaking.
Brighton Women’s Centre is a captured male-including
organisation now anyway. A long way from its fantastic beginnings as a truly
feminist space.
Cynical, corporate-controlled bullshit.
TodayIsNotMyDay
· 09/03/2024 14:38
White / Imperial feminism strikes again.
The ”we stand for ALL women” has always been bullshit,
but it has been a true mask off during this genocide.
WhereAreWeNow · 09/03/2024 17:41
What reason did they give? That seems really weird.
fakeprofile · 09/03/2024 17:42
What is going on in Brighton?? The blatant misogyny on
display in recent years has been shocking
Fortitudinal · 09/03/2024 18:26
I know. I don’t know if they gave any reasoning at
all. I suppose in a cowardly bid to avoid anything ‘controversial’ with regards
to Israel/Gaza?
It’s fucked up.
TodayIsNotMyDay
· Yesterday 12:59
It’s fucked up.
It truly is.
How can someone keep a straight face and claim to
support women if they don’t support all women?
The women and girls are going through the worst anyone
possibly could*.
I think this IWD has turned into Valentine’s Day #2,
it’s mostly just another day to buy stuff and some chant about being strong
woman, without any actual substance.
(*I do not mean
to make this into a competition who has it worst)
ssd · Yesterday 13:09
That is really not on.
And
that is right. What Brighton Women’s Centre has done is really not on.
For 5 months Sharon
Graham has Opposed All Solidarity with the Palestinians,
Following Starmer in Refusing to Campaign Against Israel's Ethnic
CleansingImage may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Jonathan
Fluxman of Unite Doctors Criticises the Rape Narrative that Israel is using to
justify genocide
Last Monday at midday about 50 Unite members from as far away
as Birmingham, held a lobby of Unite’s national executive which was due to meet
an hour later.
The
lobby was noisy and vociferous and hundreds of leaflets were distributed.
Drivers passing by made clear their opposition to genocide in Gaza by honking.
Amandla the cry of Black South Africans when they fought apartheid
There
was an open mike and a number of demonstrators spoke including Jonathan Fluxman
of Unite doctors. Jonathan, who is from South Africa, condemned the false rape
narrative that has been used to demonise both Hamas and the attack of October
7.
He
rightly drew our attention to the way rape has always been weaponised against indigenous
people as an excuse for murder e.g. in the Deep South and with the ‘Black
Peril’ in southern Africa.
It
is a sad commentary on Unite, which has a long history of international
solidarity stretching from the Spanish Civil War, which Jack Jones a former
General Secretary of the TGWU (the precursor of Unite) fought in to the support
the union gave to the ANC and the fight against Apartheid in South Africa that
we needed to picket a Union Executive Meeting in order that the Union extends
solidarity to the Palestinians who have been slaughtered and ethnically
cleansed by the Zionist butchers.
Sharon
Graham, the ‘non-political’ General Secretary of Unite, has chosen to side with
the Zionists and their anti-Semitism smears. As Gail Cartmail, her previous
spokesperson admitted, so-called ‘anti-Semitism’ has played a role in their
decision.
Graham
is a Zionist sympathiser. Even before October 7 she banned, at Starmer and the
Zionists’ behest, Jeremy Corbyn – The Big
Lie from being shown on Unite premises.
The far-right Campaign
Against Antisemitism, an Israeli governmentfront, whose sole mission is to equate
opposition to the Israeli state and its genocide with anti-Semitism, boasted
of having entered into correspondence with Unite despite the denials of Cartmail.
The
reason given for the banning was they didn’t wish to offend Unite’s Jewish
members, despite the fact that Jews were prominent in the film. Clearly Graham
equates Jews with Zionism and goes along with the false anti-Semitism
narrative.
If
the CAA is to be believed, and for once I do believe them, Unite under Graham
entered into correspondence with the CAA about banning the film. The CAA claimed
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.
Graham
was happy to speak with Ukraine flags fluttering around her but she hasn’t been
seen dead with a Palestinian flag. Unite has done absolutely nothing nationally
since Israel embarked on its genocidal campaign in Gaza.
It
is a disgrace that allegedly revolutionary groups like the SWP, Counterfire and
the Socialist Party have acted to protect Graham rather than calling her out.
Her attraction is that she supports militant action by workers in struggle,
which is fine, but strikes alone do not a world change. The question is whether
you challenge the imperialist consciousness of British workers who will never
overthrow the chains of capitalism whilst they have illusions in British imperialism.
Counterfire’s Richard
Allday, the ‘angry
trucker’, dismissed the leaflet for the lobby as
negative,
insulting, confrontational and counterproductive. I’ve said it before: if the
intention is to get the Union to carry out Conference decisions, then let’s
concentrate on that and not turn it into a slanging match which will harden the
divisions which are part of the problem.
Thus
ignoring completely Sharon Graham’s obstruction of all solidarity work
nationally.
These
‘revolutionary’ groups claim to be Marxist and it is therefore instructive to
read what Marx wrote
in April 1870 in a letter to Sigfrid Meyer and August Vogt
"The
ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers his
standard of life. In relation to the Irish worker, he regards himself as a
member of the ruling nation and consequently, he becomes a tool of the English
aristocrats and capitalists against Ireland, thus strengthening their
domination over himself.
He cherishes
religious, social, and national prejudices against the Irish worker. His
attitude towards him is much the same as that of the “poor whites” to the
Negroes in the former slave states of the U.S.A.. The Irishman pays him back
with interest in his own money. He sees in the English worker both the
accomplice and the stupid tool of the English rulers in Ireland.
This
antagonism is artificially kept alive and intensified by the press, the pulpit,
the comic papers, in short, by all the means at the disposal of the ruling
classes. This antagonism is the secret of the impotence of the English working
class, despite its organisation. It is the secret by which the capitalist class
maintains its power. And the latter is quite aware of this."
Our
present day Trotskyists fetishise strikes and ignore the fact that
the fight against capitalism is a political struggle not simply economic. The
failure to oppose Zionism and Israel isn’t a mistake it is fundamental to
opposing British imperialism and its foreign policy and thereby capitalism
itself. Sharon Graham is an open British nationalist. She supports NATO in
Ukraine and the United States’s watchdog in the Middle East, Israel.
Allday’s
post was in response to criticism of the complete inactivity of the national
leadership under Graham which has refused to have the national banner on the national
demonstration and which has failed to publicise them or indeed anything about
the genocide on Unite’s website.
Indeed
Graham has gone out her way to obstruct the actions of others ‘advising’ Jim
Kelly of the London & Eastern Regional Secretary not to speak at the
national demonstration on 13 January 24. She has suspended
a senior Unite employee, Simon Dubbins, who organised a Palestine meeting at
the Labour Party annual conference in Liverpool last October.
On
November 3rd after considerable pressure from activists including an
online petition Unite issued
a second statement which this time called for an immediate
ceasefire. The statement was however pitiably weak calling on ‘all parties to respect international law’
as if the Palestinians experiencing genocide were equally culpable as the
murderers. Nowhere did the statement mention genocide.
Jim Kelly, Chair of London & Eastern
Region Unite Speaking to a London Trade union Rally for Palestine
Unite
has done nothing to campaign for a ceasefire such as telling its sponsored MPs
that it wouldn’t continue to finance them if they didn’t support an immediate
ceasefire.
Nor
did the statement mention the fact that Israel had imposed a Nazi style food,
water and fuel blockade on the Gaza strip resulting in starvation according
to the United Nations.
On Monday
there were 2 motions to the Executive. Both were problematic.
Motion 1 from the Passenger
National Industrial Sector Committee talked about Israel’s genocide being in ‘retaliation
for the 7 October brutal atrocity carried out by Hamas.’ An uprising of an
oppressed people against 57 years of occupation was not a brutal atrocity. Israel’s
genocidal attack on Gaza was not a retaliation for October 7. 7 October was the
pretext for long standing Zionist plans for ethnic cleansing.
Motion
2 from the Unite LE Region also calls
October 7 a ‘retaliation for the 7 October brutal atrocity’. It also calls for a two-state solution.
Both motions call for a national Unite presence at the national
demonstrations. That there be a prominent national speaker from Unite to speak
at all future marches/demonstrations and that Unite’s
website and social media platforms advertise prominently all future PSC
mobilisations and that they call for Unite to urge members to join it.
The motion instructs Graham to write to all
branches nationally, urging members to join these marches and that resources
are in place to facilitate members wishing to travel to attend PSC
marches/demonstrations.
What the motions don’t do is talk about ethnic
cleansing, the Israeli state’s real aim in Gaza nor about the role of British
workers in facilitating the genocide by transferring arms to Israel. The key
demand, that workers refuse to handle weapons destined for Israel and better
still refuse to load or unload Israeli ships, is missing.
Tony Greenstein Speech at Glasgow Palestine March Against Genocide 16 March 2024
Ronnie Barkan, an Israeli Jew and supporter of Palestinian Action and myself were invited by Scottish
Palestine Solidarity Campaign to speak and address a demonstration in Glasgow City
Centre, on Saturday.
There were a number of
other speakers from Glasgow’s Muslim and Palestinian communities in addition to
the Chair of Scottish PSC, Mick Napier, who was the master of ceremonies. We
also had children leading the chanting and one reading out her poem. Children
also led the demonstration to symbolise the appalling death toll of children in
Israel’s monstrous attack.
The civilian who was run over and mutilated by Israeli tank bulldozers was already in custody, with visible marks of bruising and restraints on what remains of his body. pic.twitter.com/HzdKbZatdr
After the initial
speeches the march set off on a circular route back to its initial starting
point where there were more speeches.
It is very clear that
Glasgow, like so many other towns and cities in Britain, has been energised by
the genocide and slaughter in Gaza and the complicity of Britain’s political
leaders – Sunak and Starmer in that slaughter.
It is a sad reflection of
the state of Britain’s democracy that over 70% of people support an immediate ceasefire whereas Starmer and Sunak
support the war crimes of Israel and go along with the narrative that Israel’s
war is against Hamas rather than against the Palestinians of Gaza as Israel’s
leaders themselves admit.
Glasgow Palestine Solidarity March Saturday March 16th
Nearly 70% of Americans also support a ceasefire but this too has had no
effect on the President, Genocide Joe Biden or Congress. It shows how democracy in the West is a charade and that the people who rule us are those with the deepest pockets, like Sunak.
Glasgow Palestine Demonstration 16 March 2024
The elites that
govern us do so in their interests not ours. Our views don’t count when the
interests of the corporations are at stake. The United States however suddenly
remembered about international law when the Houthis started attacking Israeli ships
in the Red Sea. It seems trade is more important than the mere death of thousands of Palestinians.
So it is quite
understandable that Rishi Sunak, an empty politician devoid of a single
original thought, mediocre even by the standards of British politicians, when voters in Rochdale gave their verdict on Israel’s slaughter, came dashing
out of Downing Street, all scowl and rage, to berate us about the violent mobs
and hate stalking our streets.
Why Jewish children were,
he told us, afraid to wear their school uniforms such was the level of hate.
Anti-Semitism was just around the corner and even worse Jews couldn’t go into
the centre of London for fear of mobs of Palestinians and other anti-Semites.
Of course anti-Zionist Jews on the march are invisible because we don’t provide the moral
alibi that imperialism desires in its forever wars.
If the majority of British Jews and their communal organisations in this country had any self-awareness or understanding of their role as stool pigeons they might realise that Jews are being used and manipulated by crooks like Sunak and Starmer in order to justify further attacks on democratic rights such as freedom of speech and the right to protest.
There is no evidence that anti-Semitism
is increasing, if only because the IHRA misdefinition of anti-Semitism has conflated anti-zionism and anti-Semitism
making any statistics meaningless. I suspect that virtually all the alleged incidents of anti-Semitism relate to Gaza and the claims of the Board of Deputies that British Jews support genocide in Gaza.
Very few incidents are likely to occur because of traditional anti-Semitism i.e. irrational hate or hostility to Jews as Jews because of stereotypes that they are rich or engaged in conspiracies against non-Jews. The familiar neo-Nazi tropes of a bygone age.
If there is an
increase in anti-Semitism then whose fault is that if not those who go out of
their way to associate British Jews with Israel’s crimes? It is Sunak and Starmer
who bear the responsibility for any increase in anti-Semitism for associating British Jews with the genocide that is taking place.
Jews are the stool
pigeons, the pawns and pets thrown a bone by the British ruling class in exchange for their role in legitimising the crimes of British imperialism in the Middle East.
But if anyone was to
suggest that Jews bear a responsibility for Israel’s actions then that would be
called anti-Semitism under the IHRA
definition of anti-Semitism which gives as an example of anti-Semitism ‘Holding
Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel.’ This is usually called having your cake and eating it.
Faced with the
unpopularity of Britain’s support for Israel what does Rishi do, with the full
support of that waste of space Starmer? He promises to bring in new laws to
make protests and demonstrations a criminal offence.
And the
Islamaphobe-in-Chief of the Cabinet, Michael Gove, who engineered the infamous Trojan Horse Affair, promises to redefine
extremism so that anyone opposed to capitalism and war is, by definition an
extremist. Some people might say that supporting the bombing of hospitals and
torturing their doctors is a sign of extremism but who am I to question this
government fruitcake?
Stand Up to Racism & the SWP + the Police
Welcome & Protect Zionists on their 'antiracist' march
None of which excuses the
Socialist Workers Party in the guise of Stand Up to Racism for deciding, for a
seventh year in a row, that they would hold a March Against Racism in conjunction
with genocidal racists in Glasgow Friends of Israel and COFIS.
This year they decided to hold their march and demonstration on the
outskirts of Glasgow outside the BBC Scotland offices and what a
miserable affair it was.There were less than 300 of them with some 10 Zionists frothing at the
back.
At a time of genocide
Palestinians and their supporters had decided that unlike previous years it was
best to simply ignore them and their police minders.
Instead people flocked to
the SPSC demonstration in the city centre and the SUTR/SWP and the massed ranks of
Scotland trade union officials, all 300 of them, were left to enjoy the company of far-right Zionists. This is proof
of one thing – that SUTR is a paper campaign backed by trade union bureaucrats
and just about no one else.
Stand Up to Racism march 2019 with Zionists - notice the close co-ordination between Police & stewards
Jonathan
asks ‘Why is
the same western media obsessively reheating five-month-old allegations against
Hamas so reluctant to focus on Israel’s current, horrifying atrocities?’ and the
answer has to be that when it comes to the crimes of Western imperialism’s
watchdog in the Middle East anything goes.
If in future years SUTR/SWP don’t
learn the lesson of this year then it’s clear that they are best ignored. The
SWP should be left with its Zionist friends to oppose ‘racism’.
Tony Greenstein
The Zionist
Organisations that SUTR/SWP are Marching With - In Their Own Words
Glasgow Friends of Israel member Edward Sutherland, a Christian Zionist, in May 2022 was reprimanded
by the General Teaching Council for posting ‘vile’
anti-Semitic messages on Facebook using an alias, Stevie Harrison.
Sammy Stein (right), Chair of Glasgow Friends of Israel and Max Dunbar, ex-BNP and neo-Nazi holocaust denier have a friendly chat before harassing Scottish PSC stall
Razan al-Najar was a medic tending to the wounded when Israeli snipers murdered her. The disgusting suggestion by GFI that she deliberately got herself killed or that Hamas raped/bribed her shows the depths to which SUTR's friends will sink. Israeli snipers killed over 300 and injured thousands of peaceful demonstrators at the Great Return march in 2018 and GFI support that.
Hostages
tortured to death. Parents executed in front of their children. Doctors
beaten. Babies murdered. Sexual assault weaponised.
No, not
Hamas crimes. This is part of an ever-growing list of documented atrocities
committed by Israel in the five months since 7 October - quite separate
from the carpet bombing of 2.3 million Palestinians
in Gaza and a famine induced by Israel’s obstruction of
aid.
Last
week, an investigation by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz disclosed that some 27 Palestinians
seized off Gaza’s streets over the past five months are known to have died
during interrogations inside Israel.
Some were
denied medical treatment. But most are likely to have been tortured to death.
Three
months ago, a Haaretz editorial warned that Israeli jails “must not become
execution facilities for Palestinians”.
Israeli soldiers inside an evacuated compound of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) in Gaza City on 8 February, 2024 (AFP)
Israeli
TV channels have been excitedly taking viewers on tours of detention centres,
showing the appalling conditions Palestinians are kept in, as well as the psychological and physical abuse they are subjected to.
An
Israeli judge recently called the makeshift cages in which Palestinians are
held “unsuitable for humans”.
Remember,
a large proportion of the 4,000 or so Palestinians taken hostage by Israel
since 7 October - probably the vast majority - are civilians, like the men and
boys paraded through Gaza’s streets or held in a stadium stripped of clothing before being dragged
off to a dark cell in Israel.
According
to Israeli media, many dozens of Palestinian women - including pregnant women -
have been seized too, but in their case off camera.
Presumably,
Israel has wished to avoid undermining its careful messaging that only Hamas
weaponises violence against women.
But
according to United Nations legal experts, Palestinian women are suffering the
most degrading forms of abuse at the hands of the Israeli military.
Soldiers
are also believed to have taken photos of female detainees in degrading
circumstances and then uploaded them online
The experts observed that Palestinian women and girls in
detention were reportedly being subjected to “multiple forms of sexual assault,
such as being stripped naked and searched by male Israeli army officers.
"At
least two female Palestinian detainees were reportedly raped while others were
reportedly threatened with rape and sexual violence."
Soldiers
are also believed to have taken photos of female detainees in degrading
circumstances and then uploaded them online.
Palestinian
women and girls in Gaza are also reported by their families to have gone
missing after contact with the Israeli army.
“There
are disturbing reports of at least one female infant forcibly transferred by
the Israeli army into Israel, and of children being separated from their
parents, whose whereabouts remain unknown,” they said.
Beatings,
waterboarding
A
separate report by the UN last week revealed that 21 of its staff -
humanitarian aid workers - had been snatched by Israel. They were then tortured to extract confessions, most likely false, of
involvement in Hamas’ 7 October attack. Their torture included beatings,
waterboarding and threats to family members.
Those
confessions were cited by western allies as the grounds - in fact, the only
known grounds - for cutting off funding to the UN relief agency Unrwa, the last
lifeline for Gaza’s starving population. It was these claims, extracted through
torture, that helped Israel rationalise its imposing of a famine on Gaza.
Palestinian
men rounded up and stripped by Israeli forces in Gaza before being taken to an
undisclosed location (Screengrab/X)
Of the 1,000 detainees subsequently released, 29 were children,
one as young as six, and 80 women. Some were reported to have cancer and
chronic illnesses such as Alzheimer’s.
According
to the UN investigation, Palestinians reported severe punishment beatings,
being caged with attack dogs, and suffering sexual assault. Physical evidence -
such as broken ribs, dislocated shoulders, bite marks, and burns - was still
visible many weeks later.
Executions,
human shields
These
horrors, of course, are not just taking place in cells and interrogation rooms
inside Israel. Gaza is being subjected to astonishing levels of brutality and
sadism from Israeli troops - quite aside from the carpet bombing and enforced
starvation of civilians.
The
Israeli military has used Palestinians as human shields, including one man sent
into a hospital, his hands bound, to announce an Israeli order to evacuate the
premises. Israeli forces executed him on his return.
Those
trying to follow such evacuation orders, waving white flags, have been shot at.
Medical facilities
have been repeatedly invaded by the Israeli military in stark violation of
international law. Those who could not be evacuated, such as premature
babies, have been left to die unattended, even while Israeli soldiers were
occupying the building.
This
week, the BBC interviewed medical staff who reported being tortured, savagely
beaten and having attack dogs set on them inside the Nasser hospital in Khan
Younis after Israeli soldiers stormed it.
One, Dr
Ahmed Abu Sabha, had his hands broken. He told
the BBC: “They put me on a chair and it was like a gallows. I heard sounds
of ropes, so I thought I was going to be executed.”
The BBC
interviewed medical staff who reported being tortured, savagely beaten and
having attack dogs set on them inside the Nasser hospital in Khan Younis
At
another stage, he and other detainees were beaten in the back of a truck, while
only in their underwear. They were taken to a gravel pit, where they were made
to kneel blindfolded. They believed they were about to be executed.
During
his eight days as hostage, Sabha was never questioned.
Dozens
more medics are believed missing, presumed to still be in Israeli
detention.
Photographs
published by the BBC also show patients in the grounds of Nasser hospital in
beds with their hands bound tightly above their heads.
Those who
died were left to decompose by Israeli soldiers. A doctor there, Dr Hatim
Rabaa, told the BBC: “Patients were screaming, ‘Please remove them [the
corpses] from here'. I was telling them, 'It isn't in my hands'."
Other
examples of murderous cruelty are documented daily. Unarmed Palestinians,
including those waving white flags, have been shot dead by Israeli soldiers. Palestinian parents have been executed in cold blood in front of
their children. There have been repeated episodes of Israeli forces gunning down en
masse desperate Palestinians trying to reach aid, as happened yet again
this week. And even Israeli hostages trying to escape their captors have
been killed by the very Israeli soldiers they were trying to surrender
to.
These are
just some of the cases of Israeli sadism and barbarity that have surfaced
briefly in western media coverage, soon to be forgotten.
Wiping
Gaza off the map
The
stomach-turning double standards are impossible to ignore.
The
western establishment media has been chock full of the most lurid allegations
of savagery directed against Hamas, sometimes with little or no supporting
evidence. Claims that Hamas beheaded babies or put them in ovens - emblazoned
on front pages - were later found to be nonsense.
A
makeshift sign reading in Hebrew 'help, 3 hostages' using leftover food
reportedly shown by Israeli hostages before being shot dead by Israeli
soldiers, 17 December 2023 (AFP)
Accusations
against Hamas have been endlessly reheated to paint a picture of a supremely
dangerous and bestial militant group, in turn rationalising the carpet bombing
and starvation of Gaza’s population to “eradicate” it as a terrorist
organisation.
But
equally barbarous atrocities committed by Israel - not in the heat of battle,
but in cold blood - are treated as unfortunate, isolated incidents that cannot
be connected, that paint no picture, that reveal nothing of import about the
military that carried them out.
If Hamas’
crimes were so savage and sadistic they still need to be reported months after
they took place, why does the establishment media never feel the need to
express equal horror and indignation at the acts of cruelty and sadism being
inflicted by Israel on Gaza - not five months ago, but right now?
This is
part of a pattern of behaviour by the western media that leads to only one
possible deduction: Israel’s five-month-long attack on Gaza is not being
reported. Rather, it is being selectively narrated - and for the most obscene
of purposes.
War
on Gaza: Israel's food-queue slaughter cannot go unpunished
Through
consistent and glaring failures in their coverage, establishment media -
including supposedly liberal outlets, from the BBC and CNN to the Guardian and
New York Times - have smoothed the way for Israel to carry out mass slaughter
in Gaza, what the World Court has assessed as plausibly a genocide.
The role
of the media has not been to keep us, their audiences, informed about one of
the greatest crimes in living memory. It has been to buy time for US President
Joe Biden to keep arming his most useful of client states in the oil-rich
Middle East, and to do so without damaging his prospects for re-election in
November’s US presidential vote.
If
Russian President Vladimir Putin was a madman and a barbarous war criminal for invading
Ukraine, as every western media outlet agrees, what does that make Israeli
officials, when every one of them supports far worse atrocities in Gaza,
directed overwhelmingly at civilians?
And more
to the point, what does that make Biden and the US political class for
materially backing Israel to the hilt: sending bombs, vetoing demands for a
ceasefire at the United Nations, and freezing desperately needed aid?
Worrying
about the optics, the president expresses his discomfort, but he carries on helping Israel
regardless.
While
western politicians and commentators worry about some imaginary existential
threat those brief events of five months ago pose to the
nuclear-armed state of Israel, Israel is quite literally wiping Gaza off the
map day by day, quite undisturbed.
Hamas
‘started it’
There
have been two, largely implicit defences for this glaring imbalance in western
priorities. Neither stands up to even the most cursory scrutiny.
One is
the argument that Hamas “started it” - insinuated in the endless claim that, in
destroying Gaza, Israel has been “responding” or “retaliating” to the violence
of 7 October.
This is a
justification for killing tens of thousands of Palestinians and starving two
million more that should never have been let out of the playground. But worse,
it is patent nonsense. Hamas did not initiate anything on 7 October, except for
handing Israel a pretext to wreck Gaza.
Hamas
started nothing on 7 October. It was simply a new, and particularly gruesome
phase in what has been decades of Palestinian resistance to Israel’s
belligerent occupation of Gaza
The
enclave has been under a crushing siege for 17 years, in which its land, sea
and air were patrolled constantly by Israel. Its population was denied the
essentials of life. They had no freedom of movement apart from inside their
cage.
Long
before the current Israeli-induced famine, Israel’s trade restrictions had
ensured high levels of malnutrition among Gaza’s children. Most exhibited too the scars of deep psychological trauma from constant and massive attacks
by Israel on Gaza.
Biden
crows about building a “temporary pier” - weeks or months down the road - to bring aid into Gaza that
is desperately needed now. But there is a reason the enclave lacks a seaport
and airport. Israel bombed the only airport back in 2001, long before
Hamas took charge of Gaza. It has been attacking and killing fishermen trawling
just off Gaza's coast for years.
Israel
has refused to allow Gaza to connect to the world - and break free of Israeli
control - ever since.
Hamas
started nothing on 7 October. It was simply a new, and particularly gruesome
phase in what has been decades of Palestinian resistance to Israel’s
belligerent occupation of Gaza.
Bogus
narrative
The other
implicit defence of western establishments constantly stressing Hamas’
barbarism over Israel’s is that the nature of those atrocities is said to be
categorically different - in the apples and pears sense.
Hamas
supposedly demonstrated a degree of sadism in its killing spree on 7 October
inside Israel that marks it out from Israel’s far larger killing spree in
Gaza.
That has
been the basis for every media interview that requires guests to “condemn” Hamas before they are allowed to express
concern about the slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza. No one is asked to condemn
Israel.
In
Gaza, the hospital was our last place of sanctuary. Then Israel bombed it
It is the
basis too for permitting Israeli spokespeople to claim unchallenged that Israel
targets only Hamas, not civilians, even while some three-quarters of Gaza’s
dead are women and children.
On the
BBC’s evening news at the weekend, presenter Clive Myrie made precisely this
preposterous assertion as he intoned that since 7 October, “Israel launched a
relentless bombing campaign targeting members of Hamas.”
But the
latest revelations of the 27 reported deaths in Israeli torture centres and the
testimonies of beaten medics from Nasser Hospital confirm how bogus this entire
narrative framing by the western media is - one intended to mislead and
misinform audiences.
Israel
claims it is targeting Hamas, but its actions tell an entirely different story.
Famine will kill off the sick and vulnerable long before it does Hamas
fighters.
The truth
is, Israel is not primarily eradicating Hamas. It is eradicating Gaza. Its
crimes are at least as cruel and savage as anything Hamas did on 7 October -
and its atrocities have been carried out on a far larger scale and for far
longer.
Western
establishments and their media have been waging a giant campaign of
misdirection for the past five months, as they have against Palestinians over
previous years and decades. Western publics have been encouraged to look in the
wrong direction.
Until
that changes, the men, women and children of Gaza will continue to pay the
heaviest of prices at the hands of a vengeful, sadistic Israeli military.
Zionist Accusations that Palestinian Men are Sexual Predators
Mirrors Nazi Tropes about Jewish men – Western Feminists Are Complicit in how Racists
Weaponise Rape
Excerpt from an Interview on Ha’aretz podcast ‘The Week’9.11.23. - "Mass Hannibal"— We killed Israelis on 7 October, says Israeli air force colonel Nof Erez
Zionism,
when it arose was seen by most Jews as a form of Jewish
anti-Semitism. Zionist ideologues like Arthur Ruppin accepted the worst
stereotypes of the Nazis and
anti-Semites, such as Jews being sexual predators, adopting them as its own.
One
medieval myth about Jews was that they poisoned the wells of non-Jews.
Thousands of Jews died in the German Empire between 1348 and 1350 and across
Europe as a result.
Yet
it is an incontrovertible fact that Israeli settlers poison the water of the
Palestinians. David Hearst wrote
how
the settler
attacks come generally at night and where they cannot destroy water cisterns
they poison them by putting chicken carcasses in them.
In
1948 Zionist militias infected the waters of Acre and Gaza with dysentery
bacteria. According to Ofer Aderet this biological warfare was far
more widespread than first known.
Allegations
that Jews were disloyal to the countries they lived in and owed their
allegiance to a cabal of international Jewish ‘Elders’ was part and part of
anti-Semitic discourse.
Zionism
does its best to live up to this myth by actively encouraging dual
loyalty.One of their favourite accusations
against Jewish anti-Zionists is that they are ‘traitors’ – in other words they
have no loyalty to Israel as a ‘Jewish’ state.
When
Ilhan Omar accused US Zionists of allegiance to a foreign country, Israel, it
was as if the heavens had fallen in. Jonathan Chait wrote
that
Accusing
Jews of “allegiance to a foreign country” is a historically classic way of
delegitimizing their participation in the political system.
Even
though it was true it was a case of pure anti-Semitism! Michelle Goldberg in
the New York Times accused Omar of waging a series of
"microaggressions". As I wrote
at the time:
It is inherent
to Zionism that the first loyalty of any Jew is to Israel because their stay in
the diaspora is temporary. "The negation of the diaspora" is fundamental to
Zionist ideology. The accursed Galut (diaspora) needs to be wound up,
In 2013 Israel’s
Ministries of Foreign Affairs and Absorption sent a survey asking
American Jews "where their
allegiance would lie in the case of a crisis between the two countries."
Netanyahu realising the implications had the survey stopped in its tracks but
it would have been interesting to see the results.
Jonah Cohen writing in ‘The Lust
Libel’ argued
that
Antisemites have long depicted the Jews as a
perverse, predatory, and pornographic people; horny vampires of the
Orient. That ghoulish portrait — which, for short, can be called the ‘lust
libel’ — is one of the more enduring of the classical antisemitic stereotypes.
It is no
surprise that Zionist hasbara should adopt this anti-Semitic narrative and
project it onto the Palestinians. Rape has become the principal ingredient of
Zionist propaganda. October 7, instead of being a resistance operation, was organised
rape.
Israeli
women and many Western Feminists, such as those at Brighton Women’s Centre, are happy to go
along with this myth even though its sole purpose is to justify a genocide that
has killed over 14,000 children and over10,000 women in Gaza. White western
feminists are literally helping to kill Palestinian women and girls at the behest
of Jewish Supremacists, women included.
There are
good precedents for this in the history of colonialism. The ‘BlackPeril’
was the fear of White South African men that Black men had designs on ‘their’
women. In the Deep South the fear of Black sexual predators fuelled lynching. White
women went along with this, as is the case today with western feminists.
Foremost
on the minds of Southern Whites was a fear of inter- racial sex, miscegenation.
Whites espoused
the idea that black men were sexual predators and wanted integration in order
to be with white women. And Black women were secretly sluts.
This
helps explain Israeli soldiers fascination
with the underwear of the Palestinian women they have killed and often raped
(Israeli rape of Palestinians never seems to figure in the discourse of Israeli
women or Western feminism).
Only
today I received a report from a Palestinian woman of rapes near Al Shifa
hospital, which Israel has again invaded.
Zionism’s Rape Fraud and October
7
October
7 was a great shock to the Zionists. They repeated ad-nauseum that October 7 ‘was the worst atrocity committed against the
Jewish people in a single day since the Holocaust.’ Biden was happy
to repeat
this.
Except
that it wasn’t the worst atrocity against Jews since the Holocaust. That was
the murder
of at least 3,000 Jews, 12% of the total victims, by Israel’s friends, the
neo-Nazi Argentine Junta between 1976 and 1983.
When
Hamas and the militants broke out on October 7 they did not kill Israelis
because they were Jews but because they were occupiers. The Nazis and the
Argentine Junta killed Jews because they were Jews. That simple distinction
eludes Zionists.
Yasmin Porat Survivor Speaks:
Israeli forces shot their own civilians
October
7 was the nightmare that every settler colonial regime fears, that the natives
will rise up and take their revenge on their persecutors. It was the fear of
white slavers in the Caribbean, the Apartheid masters in South Africa and the
Zionists in Palestine.
Israel
used October 7 in order to construct a myth of a second holocaust. According to France
24 695 Israeli civilians, including 36 children, as well as 373 security
forces and 71 foreign workers died. A total of 1,139.
There
were undoubtedly atrocities committed, such as civilians or concert goers shot
at close range but that was not sufficient for the Zionists.At first their propaganda was crude but that
didn’t stop the western media from adopting it wholesale.
‘40 Beheaded babies’, ‘baked babies’ and even babies hung on
clothes lines were invented. The serious
press such as The Telegraph and Timesreported
these claims as fact.
Fact
Check on the Beheaded Babies
Today, I spoke again with Prime Minister Netanyahu regarding the latest developments in Israel and Gaza.
I continued to affirm that Israel has a right to go after Hamas, a group of terrorists responsible for the worst massacre of the Jewish people since the Holocaust.
A
fact check on Al
Jazeera showed how the claims were false. This included Genocide Joe’s claim that
he had seen them with his own eyes. All this nonsense had to be walked
back as Israel admitted it had no proof of these allegations.
As
Israeli state propaganda and its advocates got their act together, the claims
of atrocities settled on the allegation of mass rape. The attractions of such
claims are many.
Unlike
the beheaded babies, allegations of rape are difficult to disprove and easy to
make. The irony is that senior officers, including the Military Chief Rabbi,
Eyal Karim, actually justified
raping Palestinian women.
According
to Karim ‘wounded terrorists should
be killed, gay people are sick and women are sentimental.’He elaborated
that at a time of war it was permitted to satisfy
the evil
inclination by lying with attractive Gentile women against their will, out of
consideration for the difficulties faces by the soldiers and for overall
success could be considered as excusable in order to maintain morale among
soldiers and the army during fighting.”
Former
Col. Mordechai Kedar, who served in military intelligence for 25 years and a
lecturer at Bar Ilan University, declared
that.
'The only
thing that deters a suicide bomber is the knowledge that if he pulls the
trigger or blows himself up, his sister will be raped,'
Israel
has not alleged that some rapes were committed but that rape was a deliberate
strategy of Hamas on October 7, that it was organised and systematic. When a group of Zionist women picketed in
Brighton they chanted‘resistance is not rape’ – which is
of course true but no one is suggesting otherwise.
It
is clear that the main aim of Hamas on October 7 was the capture of hostages in
order to exchange them for Palestinian prisoners. Something which was entirely
justifiable.
No
one is suggesting that no one was raped on October 7. Rape and war go together
but what is clear is that if rape happened it was perpetrated by the those who
came in Hamas’s wake.
"Today he is a baby, tomorrow he is a fighter." - Rabbi Eliyahu Mali, head of the settlers' yeshiva school in occupied Jaffa, incited his students serving in the Israeli occupation forces to kill everyone in Gaza, including babies.
Of
the 1,139 Israelis including foreign workers who died
on October 7 approximately one-third were soldiers or police and up to half the
remainder were killed by Israel itself. Israel was determined that no hostages
would be taken who would then have to be exchanged for Palestinian prisoners. If
necessary they would kill them themselves. See Israel
killed Israelis, confirms new 7 October documentary
As
Al Jazeera’s investigation (below) revealed, many of the deaths of Israelis on
October 7 occurred because Israel had implemented from 12 pm that day the Hannibal
Directive that British papers, including the Guardian have been loathe to mention, despite the fact that it is
an accepted fact in Israel.
A
further investigation by Al Jazeera gives a time line of events on October 7
and provides further proof that many civilian casualties were caused by the
decision of Israel’s military that anything that moved between Gaza and Israel
that day was to be targeted, irrespective of whether their own hostages would
die.
Rape
has long been a favourite obsession of the far-right.From Nazi Germany to South Africa it has been
deployed against the indigenous population. In patriarchal societies rape is a
serious offence against a man’s property and if it is a Black man then it’s
race defilement too. False allegations of rape were made against Julian Assange
because the state knew that such allegations would deter otherwise progressive
people from supporting him. People like my own MP Lloyd Russell-Moyle.
Let
us see how the Israeli narrative of rape has been debunked.
Scandal grows around fraudulent
New York Times "mass rapes" investigation, with Ali Abunimah
On
28 December 2023, 82 days after October 7, ‘Screams
without words’ appeared in the New York Times. It was the result of an
investigation carried out by Pulitzer prize winner, Jeffrey Gettleman, as well
as two freelance staff Adam Sella and Anat Schwart. Schwartzhad no previous journalistic experience and had
been an Intelligence officer for the Israeli army. She demonstrated where her
sympathies lay when she ‘liked’
a tweet calling for Gaza to be turned into a slaughter house.
Schwartz
also liked
posts about the long since discredited ’40 beheaded babies’ story and a post
calling for Hamas to be labelled as equal to ISIS. Esha Krishnaswarmy revealed that
Adam Sella was Schwartz’s nephew! The stench of nepotism and corruption was
overwhelming. Sella too is not a journalist.
On
December 4 Gettleman, Schwartz and Sella, had written another
article for the NYT What We Know
About Sexual Violence During the Oct. 7 Attacks in Israel which did not
name a single victim. On December 8 the NYT published a correction saying that
the Israeli police were relying on witness testimony not autopsies or forensic evidence.
This
is the problem with Israel’s rape propaganda. There is no forensic evidence of
rape because all those killed were quickly buried. The alleged crime scenes
were not quarantined either.
For a week I embedded myself with Jewish Israeli nationalists who believe it’s a worthy cause and religious duty to block desperately needed humanitarian aid at the Gaza border. They enjoyed pastries with the military while confessing to war crimes and cheering for genocide.… pic.twitter.com/YVaXYdVqgt
There
isn’t one single victim who has come forward. All we have is ‘witnesses’ from
Zaka who are proven
liars and the Israeli military whose lies set off the 40 beheaded babies
story.
Zaka
is an ultra orthodox organisation which was founded by a multiple
rapist, Meshi Zahav. He committed suicide in June 2022 but not before his
colleagues in Zaka had tried to cover them up. Yet despite being discredited in
Israel, the NYT and US media continues to quote them as an impartial
organisation.
The
NYT ran a puff
piece about Zaka on 15 January ‘They
Thought They Knew Death, but That Didn’t Prepare Them for Oct. 7’. As the
Intercept noted in an article
of 27 February
The Times
report on Zaka reads like a glowing portrait of selfless volunteers on a “holy
mission” to honor the dead and give families closure in accordance with Jewish
law. The article could also be read as a whitewash of an organization mired in
sexual abuse and financial scandals for decades. The Times never notes that
Landau appears to be a serial fabulist, and other Zaka volunteers tell stories
that stretch credulity.
‘fail(ed) to
scrutinize Zaka stories. Many volunteers describe extreme crimes that would
leave extensive evidence yet aren’t corroborated by reporting.’
Although the
NYT has refused to comment on the criticisms of its article the Interceptreported
that they had
pulled a
high-profile episode of its podcast “The Daily” about sexual violence
perpetrated by Hamas on October 7 amid a furious internal debate about the
strength of the paper’s original reporting on the subject, Times newsroom
sources told The Intercept. The episode had been scheduled for January 9
Interesting interview with 10/7 survivor Raz Cohen, who gave the NYT the quote “screams without words,” for its headline: “‘Screams Without Words:’ How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence On Oct. 7.”
He just told Tapper the men he saw were not actually from Hamas, but rather Gazan… https://t.co/XTmn2X5mOp
The NYT is
also reported to have cut links with Schwartz. Even worse for the NYT a key
witness Raz Cohen contradicted
a claim in the article that Hamas had committed the rapes.
There
were stories such as naked women tied to trees at the Supernova Festival.
Zaka’s deputy commander, Greiniman, claimed foreign fighters had taken part in
the attack. Another Zaka spokesperson said he saw dozens of dead babies, and children
bound together and burned. Yet another volunteer claimed
they found a sexually mutilated woman’s corpse under rubble with her organs
removed.
Yet only
two babies died on October 7. Nor were any children found bound together or
burned.
Aaron
Mate revealed how former US diplomat, Stuart Seldowitz was on Zaka’s New York Advisory
Board.Seldowitz recently accepted
a plea deal for having racially abused a food vendor in New York with his
anti-Palestinian rants. His rants included saying that killing 4,000
Palestinian kids wasn’t enough.
But
whilst the western media are doing their best to support the fake allegations
of rape against Hamas they are ignoring what according to the UN is very
credible reports of rape, sexual abuse and torture against Israel in Gaza.
The
NYT article was important because it is considered a paper of record. It was
used by Zionists to ‘prove’ that October 7 had been a mass rape attack.
When
Professor Justin Stebbing of
Imperial College, London sent me an email on 21 January saying “thank you
for making me hate all jews, i agree with you they should all be gassed” he
followed it up with a caption of the NYT article.
On January 4, seven
days after the NYT article, Ha’aretz posted
an appeal by the police for victims or witnesses to contact them:
Israel's police investigators are having difficulties
finding living victims of or witnesses to sexual assault committed by Hamas on
October 7
Why would the Police
do this if the evidence is so overwhelming?
The Black Dress
BREAKING: GAL ABDUAH’S SISTER DENIES RAPE CLAIMS IN NYT ARTICLE AND SAYS NYT MANIPULATED THE FAMILY
They had no knowledge the article was going to be about rape and were under the impression it was going to be about Gal ABDUAH’S memory. pic.twitter.com/g6EGS7VXyt
The
main claims in NYT’s article revolve around Gail Abdush, the woman in the Black
Dress, who was allegedly raped at the music festival. Yet almost immediately
after the NYT article the Abdush family denied that she had been
raped and said they had been interviewed under false pretences.
Ynet asks the photographer of "the woman in the black dress" how @nytimes reached her. She explains the rationale of the Israeli journalists Adam Sella & Anat Schwartz:
The
person who took the video of Abdush’s body, Edan Wesley described how Sella and
Schwartz called her repeatedly and said how important the video was to Israeli
hasbara (propaganda).As Ali Abunimah pointedout, Schwartz and Sella
were telling so-called witnesses that their testimony was essential for the
purposes of Israeli State Propaganda. It is clear that Schwart and Sella’s mind
had long been made up.
The
NYT allegations over the woman in the black dress centred on a video by Eden
Wessely.Shiran Maluka, a friend of
Miral Alter, Gail Abdush’s sister, wrote:
Based on what
does Eden Wessely conclude that she was raped? Based on the video she took,
there is no evidence, it’s not true that half of her body was burned, only her
face, and there is nothing but a dress pulled up.
Wesley
herself is a dubious character of the Israeli far-right. In the early days of
the war, Wessely posted
fake news, debunked by the
Israeli media, about “Israeli
traitors who supported Hamas fighters during the attack on October 7th.”
Wessely also shared many posts by the fascist Im
Tirtzu, and posts by rapper, Hatzel,
a symbol of Israeli fascism. In another post, Wessely shared
a picture of Israeli human rights lawyer Lea Tsemel, calling her “the devil incarnate.”
In the end, it
appears that the New York Times manipulated a working-class Mizrahi
family in the service of Israeli hasbara in order to score a
journalistic achievement, which in reality is nothing more than a repetition of
fake news and government propaganda.
The
Intercept reported
that as well as the NYT, the
Washington Post, and Los
Angeles Times’s coverage of Israel’s war on Gaza showed a consistent bias
against Palestinians...
Major U.S.
newspapers disproportionately emphasized Israeli deaths in the conflict; used
emotive language to describe the killings of Israelis, but not Palestinians; ...
Pro-Palestinian activists have accused major publications of pro-Israel bias,
with the New York Times seeing protests at its headquarters in Manhattan for its
coverage of Gaza –– an accusation supported by our analysis.
The Intercept alleged that
The (Israeli)
Channel 12 podcast interview with Schwartz, which The Intercept translated from
Hebrew, opens a window into the reporting process on the controversial story
and suggests that The New York Times’s mission was to bolster a predetermined
narrative...
In the
podcast interview, Schwartz described
her efforts to get confirmation from Israeli hospitals, rape crisis centers
etc. In fact she was unable to get a single confirmation.
“She was told there had been no
complaints made of sexual assaults,” the Times
spokesperson acknowledged. Yet the NYTheadline
was‘‘Screams Without Words’: How Hamas
Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7”
The first
eye witness evidence came from an Israeli Air Force paramedic who claimed that
two teenage girls at Kibbutz Nahal Oz had been raped and murdered in their
bedroom. Problem was that no girls at the Kibbutz fitted the description. He
later changed the site of the attacks to Kibbutz Be’eri, but there too no one
matched the description of the victims.
Schwartz then
contacted Kibbutz Be’eri but that drew a blank so she then contacted Zaka and Yossi Landau told her that
When we go
into a house, we use our imagination. The bodies were telling us what happened,
that’s what happened.
Landau
features in the Times report, though
no mention is made of his well-documented
track record of disseminating sensational stories of atrocities that were later
proven false.
After
Zaka, Schwartz’s next port of call was Shari Mendes, who serves in a rabbinical
unit of the Israel Defense Forces. The Intercept reported that Mendes
had also
spoken about other violence on October 7, telling the Daily Mail in October, “A baby was cut out of a pregnant woman and beheaded and then the
mother was beheaded.” No pregnant woman died that day, according to the official Israeli list of those killed in the attacks, and
the independent research collective October 7 Fact Check said Mendes’s story was false.
Shari
Mendes was a serial liar yet to Schwartz she was a credible witness.
Schwartz quoted
on 14 November in her first story for the NYT, Israel’s police chief, Kobi
Shabtai that ‘This is the most extensive
investigation the State of Israel has ever known,” Yet when “Screams Without Words” appeared forensic
evidence of sexual violence was non-existent.
On the
Channel 12 podcast Schwartz said her next step was to go to a new holistic
therapy facility established to address the trauma of October 7 victims. It was
called Merhav Marpe, or Healing Space.
In
multiple visits to Merhav Marpe, Schwartz again said that she was told there
was no direct evidence of rapes or sexual violence. She expressed frustration
with the therapists and counsellors at the facility, saying they engaged in “a conspiracy of silence.” And so it went
on. The elusive evidence was simply not there so Schwartz began speculating
that it was because Israel was a conservativesociety or that survivor guilt played a part. At no time did she
question her own basic assumptions.
She
interviewed Raz Cohen, who claimed he had seen multiple rapes whilst denying
that the perpetrators at the Nova Festival were from Hamas.
The
independent site October
7 Fact Check, Mondoweiss, Ali Abunimah and Max Blumenthal of The Grayzone have flagged numerous
inconsistencies and contradictions in Cohen’s account. He had initially said“he chose not to look, but he could hear
them laughing constantly.”
Coupled
with Schwartz’s ‘investigation’ Israel was mounting an intensive public
campaign, accusing the international community and feminists of ignoring the
widespread, systemic sexual violence of Hamas’s October 7 attack.
The NYT Goes Into Witchhunt
Mode as Criticism Mounts
The NYT
management which has exposed many state secrets itself, notably the Pentagon Papers and
more recently the Wikileaks
revelations of Julian Assange didn’t take kindly to being the subject of
exposes, notably by The Intercept
which gave a blow-by-blow account of dissent within the NYT.
The NYT
took a leaf out of Richard Nixon’s
book and began a leak inquiry, more commonly known as a witch-hunt. Vanity
Fair revealed
how ‘at least two dozen staffers,
including Daily producers’ had been called into
meetings in an attempt to find out how internal details about the podcast’s
editorial process got out. The investigation was by Charlotte Behrendt,
the paper’s director of policy and internal investigations.
The article quoted
staffers as saying that this was the ‘first
such internal probe they can recall taking place.’ NYT’s management had
been rocked by revelations about the shelving of The Daily podcast. The Nation noted
sarcastically that
somewhere in
the fiery caverns of Hell, Richard Nixon is enjoying a brief respite from his
eternal torment as he learns how The New York Times is mimicking him
Where
once the NYT could be relied on to subject US Administrations to scrutiny,
today they act as little more than court stenographers to Biden and Israel’s
far-right government. Woodward
and Bernstein have been replaced by Blumenthall, Mate and Abunimah. Today
the mainstream press, led by the NYT, acts as a kind of fools’ chorus to the
senile Biden and Kissinger
protégé Blinken.
If the Times
wanted to serve its readers and the world, it would launch a transparent
investigation into this botched article, the biggest failure of journalism at
the newspaper since Judith Miller’s infamous and
discredited articles on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq in 2002 and
2003. Just as Miller regurgitated war propaganda on behalf of the George W.
Bush administration, the Times is now serving as a mouthpiece for
Benjamin Netanyahu’s war cabinet.
Heer
suggests that the main instigator of “Screams
Without Words” was the NYT’s Executive Editor Joe Kahn, a Zionist whose
father, Leo Kahn, was a longtime member of the board of CAMERA, a pro-Israel
media watchdog. But could Kahn have acted without the approval and perhaps
direction of the Sulzberger family, which owns the newspaper?
Heer
notes that Watergate proved that a scandal could topple a President and asks ‘what scandal is large enough to bring down
the executive editor—or perhaps even the owners—of The New York Times?’
Israel has Struggled to Control the Narrative in
Order to Justify Genocide in Gaza
At the
beginning of December I wrote
a blog on the Israeli hostages who had been released and how their testimonies
had conflicted with the Zionist demonisation of Hamas. Yocheved Lifshitz 85 spoke
of how well she had been treated.
Lifshitz
said the captives were treated well and received medical care, including
medication. The guards kept conditions clean, and hostages were given one meal
a day of cheese, cucumber and pita, she said, adding that her captors ate the
same.
A family
member of Ruth Munder, an elderly woman who was released, told the Jerusalem
Post that Munder did not experience any harm during her captivity. In
a section ‘How did Hamas Treat the Hostages’ the Jerusalem
Post reported that
Initially, there weren't
many people with them, but at some point, more individuals were added. They had
access to a radio and television, where they heard news from Israel. Ruth heard
on the radio that her son [Roi Munder] had been killed… The conditions were far
from ideal; 80-year-old men and women lied down on plastic benches similar to
those in a hospital, without mattresses.
"Fortunately, they did not endure any unpleasant
experiences during their captivity; they were treated in a humane manner," continued the family member.
"Contrary to our
fears, they did not encounter the horrifying stories we had imagined. They
described the initial moments of their kidnapping when the terrorists were
agitated and threatened to harm them, but once they were on motorcycles, they
did not harm them."
Lifshitz
told the press how she received daily visits from a doctor during her captivity.
Lifshitz’s daughter also said that her mother was cared for by a paramedic
during her captivity.
On
October 24, Lifshitz told the press that she was treated well
while in Hamas captivity after she was driven into the Gaza Strip. Her
statements caused an uproar in Israel, with some government and diplomatic
figures accusing the conference organizers of damaging the country's advocacy
efforts by portraying a positive image of Hamas.
Israeli authorities
were outraged at the fact that Ichilov Hospital in Tel Aviv had facilitated
Yocheved Lifshitz’s interview. Hospital employee Avi Shoshan was suspended and subsequently dismissed. Why
should Israel object to the hostages speaking freely unless they had something
to fabricate?
The organisers of the press conference had
allowed doubt to be cast upon government lies about Hamas and that was
unforgiveable. Ha’aretz reported how Lifshitz started the press conference
by recounting the details of the October 7 kidnapping: "Masses
mobbed our homes. They beat people, took some hostage." She
described it as "very painful.”
It was the statements that followed, however, that drew
controversy in Israel. She said that the kidnappers brought a doctor
that gave them medical treatment, that the hostages were treated well and the
kidnappers were friendly. "We lay on mattresses, they made sure
everything was sanitary," she said. "They made sure we
wouldn't get sick, and we had a doctor with us every two or three days.”
Ha’aretz reported the story as ‘The problem
is you, not Hamas' : Hostages' families lash out at Israeli government.’
"They were very friendly to us," Lifshitz said, "they treated us gently and
looked after us." Clearly this dedemonising of Hamas and the
portray of its members as human beings could not be allowed again.
Israel’s
Channel 12 reported
that Israel’s released hostages ‘are expected to receive close supervision,
and they will be instructed on what to tell the media and what not."
Blumenthall
on what hostages can say
The Israeli govt has imposed strict rules on freed Israelis, closely monitoring or muzzling them entirely
Having Refused to Take Part in the National Palestine Demonstrations Against Genocide
Graham Writes to the Palestinian Trade Unions after Israel Bombed Their
Offices Boasting About Her Support
For
once I was lost for words. Never was the saying that Hypocrisy is the Tribute
that Vice Pays to Virtue truer. It takes a special kind of gall to have done absolutely nothing in support of the Palestinians
as they are bombed and ethnically cleansed in Gaza, to have held hands with the
far-right Campaign
Against Antisemitismas she banned Jeremy
Corbyn – The Big Lie from Unite premises and then to write to the General
Secretary of the Palestinian General
Federation of Trade Unions boasting of Unite’s record.
On
March 7, as part of its ‘war against Hamas’ Israel bombed the
headquarters of the PGFTU in Gaza City. The Federation’s five-story
building had attached to it several other facilities providing services to the
Palestinians, including a kindergarten that served 380 children, as well as a
large automatic bakery.
The PGFTU Offices in Gaza After Israel Bombed Them
In a statement,
signed by Basheer Al-Sisi, a member of their General Secretariat, he spoke of
how the Federation has “lost thousands of
members, union offices, facilities, and other institutions” as a result of
the “wholesale slaughter and forced
dislocation—ethnic cleansing” committed against the Palestinian people in
the last six months.
— General Federation of Trade Unions (@GFTU1) March 12, 2024
Palestinian
workers from Gaza who were in Israel at the time of October 7 were rounded up,
imprisoned and tortured. A number of them died yet Graham kept her silence
throughout.
The PGFTU
is controlled by Fatah, not Hamas, but that did not stop Israel bombing its
offices. The ‘war against Hamas’ is a fiction meant only for stupid westerners
and the BBC/Sky.
It is of
course welcome that Graham has, at last, written expressing her solidarity with
the Palestinians in Gaza. But it is long overdue. It is also welcome that she
has, for the first time, condemned Israel’s
‘war crimes’ but we will never forget that this only came nearly 6 months after Israel’s
attack and with deaths and injuries over 100,000.
Graham
even boasted that Unite has donated £50,000 to Medicins Sans Frontiere, which isn’t even a Palestinian organisation
when Unite could have donated a much larger sum to Medical
Aid for Palestinians, which is permanently on the ground in Gaza, as a host
of Unite branches have done.
Demonstration Outside Unite Exec Meeting by Unite Members, March 11
£50,000
is chicken feed. It is reported
that Graham and Unite’s legal bill for defending itself in a labour court in
Dublin, against its former Regional Organiser Brendan Ogle is over £1m (1.35m
Euros) and that is before Graham starts defending herself against a libel
action by Ogle which no doubt Unite will pay for.
There
have been regular demonstrations in London against genocide in Gaza ever since
October 7. Not only has Sharon Graham refused to attend or speak but she has forbidden
Unite’s national banner being taken on the march.
Will
Sharon Graham be attending the Demonstration next Saturday 30 March. I won’t be
holding my breath. Graham even tried
to prevent Peter Kavanagh, Regional Organiser for the London & Eastern
Region speaking at the demonstration on January 13th and threatened him
with loss of a pension bonus if he did.
This is
in addition to suspending
Simon Dubbins, a Unite official who organised a meeting on Palestine at the Labour
Party Conference in defiance of her wishes.
Graham
also didn’t mention that Unite members had staged a demonstration/lobby
outside Unite headquarters on March 11th at the beginning of the
Executive Meeting in protest at Unite’s complete inactivity on Palestine.
Suffice
to say that Graham also failed to mention that she and her supporters had opposed
any discussion of Palestine at the meeting and in response to those who did
wish to discuss it told them that ‘Palestine
is not a service that Unite offers to its members.’
Perhaps
the height of Graham’s hypocrisy was her boast that ‘I am sure you are aware that Unite has a longstanding policy in
support for the Palestinian people.’ How would the PGFTU be aware when she
has refused to put the policy on Unite’s website. Is Shaher Saed, the General
Secretary of the PGFTU expected to be telepathic?
Tonight we
will be holding a meeting of Unite activists who do want Unite to start giving
real solidarity to the Palestinians – this includes
1.Unite being present
on all future national
demonstrations
2.Instructing dockers
and Unite workers to boycott all arm shipments to Israel and all trade with Israel
as and until its genocide and ethnic cleansing in Gaza stops.
3.To fund members
wanting to attend the demonstrations and to publicising the demonstrations on
the website and internally.
4.Unite policy on Palestine
to be displayed on Unite’s website
5.That Unite donate
£250,000 to Medical Aid for the Palestinians
6.That an Emergency
Executive Committee Meeting be called in order to discuss what Unite can now do
on Palestine.
7.That Unite let Keir
Starmer and the Labour Party know that until they reverse their position of
support for Israel’s genocide they won’t get another farthing from Unite.
Let us
hope that Sharon Graham’s letter to the PGFTU is a sign that she has at last
recognised that her previous stance of support for Israel’s genocide is
unacceptable and that the Union must revert to its traditional position of
support for the oppressed not the oppressor. I fear though that Graham’s letter
is about as far as she intends to go and that these are mere empty words.
In the article I argue that it is not Holocaust
trauma but the trauma of settler-colonials, for whom the rising up of the
indigenous Palestinians, is their nightmare scenario. I compare Israel’s
situation with that of the Caribbean slave owners and South Africa’s Whites.
In the Times
of Israel two Israeli holocaust academics, Avinoam
Patt and Liat Steir-Livny lazily claim
that
Just as the
Nazis aimed to annihilate the Jews, Hamas and affiliated terrorist
organizations share the same objective: the destruction of Jews.
White 'trauma' in Kenya led Britain to set up a series of concentration camps
It
is an evidence free assertion. What do they base this claim on? The 1988 Hamas Charter. It is true that the 1988
Hamas Charter referred to Jews and was anti-Semitic but the point is that it
never informed the practice and politics of Hamas and in 2017 was discarded in
favour of a ‘“Document
of General Principles and Policies’.
Of
course the think tanks of US imperialism have done their best to suggest that
the changes are cosmetic. As Mandy Rice-Davies of Profumo fame once said,
they would say that wouldn’t they. It is in the interests of Zionism to portray
Hamas as a genocidal, anti-Semitic organisation.
Matthew
Levitt and Maxine Rich of the neo-con Washington Institute for Near East Policy
argue
in ‘Hamas's
Moderate Rhetoric Belies Militant Activities’
The
international community should judge Hamas not by any moderation in the group's
rhetoric but by its actions on the ground. So long as the latter remain
militant and extreme, the relative moderation of the former means not much at
all.
What
concerned them was not that Hamas had abandoned its anti-Jewish rhetoric but
that they were still militantly opposed to Israel’s occupation, siege and
subjugation of the Palestinian people.
This
is typical of the dishonesty of western academics who conflate the Nazi’s extermination
of Jews with opposition to Israeli settler colonialism. The suggestion being that
Hamas and the Palestinians oppose Israel’s Jewish Supremacist regime not because
of what it does but because their oppressors happen to be Jewish!
Amira
Hass in Ha’aretz explained
the background to the original Charter and how it came to be adopted and the fact
that it had little influence on Hamas’s day to day practice or ideological
outlook.
The
new document contains none of the anti-Semitic articles and sentences that
characterized the charter. Supporters of the movement, especially in the West,
advised it long ago to change these provisions.
One
Hamas member told Haaretz that almost immediately after the charter was
published in 1988, people in the movement urged that these sections be changed.
The charter wasn’t written in a cooperative process, he explained, and it isn’t
“scientifically or legally” accurate.
He
said the Hamas members deported to Marj El Zhour in Lebanon in 1992-93 were the
first to seriously discuss the need for changes. But the changes were never
made because doing so required a lengthy, complex process of thought and
consultation during difficult periods of military escalation.
The
charter itself hasn’t been canceled. It’s a historic document that relates to a
particular moment in the organization’s history, and Hamas isn’t renouncing it;
nor is the new document called a “charter.” Cancelling the charter would repeat
the humiliation undergone by the PLO when it had to announce the repeal of
certain provisions of its 1968 charter because they contradicted the Oslo
Accords. But the Hamas charter is no longer the organization’s official
ideological platform.
‘Presumably
if Gaza’s occupiers had been Christians then the Palestinians would have
happily accepted their fate!’.
Levitt
and Rich typify the superficiality of the ‘academics’ that adorn American think
thanks and universities. To say nothing of Israel’s fake holocaust ‘scholars’ such
as Patt and Steir-Livny.
Nazi
anti-Semitism targeted Jews because they were Jews and extermination was a
culmination of a process that began with ethnic cleansing. When Hamas attacked Jews
it was understandable because Israel’s soldiers came to their homes to kill them
in the name of ‘the Jews’. That is why Palestinians refer to Yahud (Jew)
because that is how their oppressor appears to them.
However
Hamas matured in the 30 years between the 1988 Charter and the 2017 document.
They learnt to distinguish between Jews and Zionists. Nor was this simply a
matter of rhetoric or verbal accommodation.
No less
than the Times of Israel quoted
a statement of senior Hamas official Basem Naim that the group was “sorry to hear about the terror attack” in
2018 on the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh which claimed 11 lives. Naim explained
that
As Palestinians and
victims of the terror of Israeli occupation, we know the meaning of terror and
its horrific outcomes. This heinous attack, especially in a place of worship,
proves that terror has no religion or nationality.
Can one
imagine the Nazi party condemning an attack on Jews? The attack was perpetrated by Robert Bowers, a supporter of
Donald Trump, an ardent supporter of the Israeli state.
at the same
time as we unreservedly condemn the crimes perpetrated by the Nazis against the
Jews of Europe, we categorically reject the exploitation of the Holocaust by
the Zionists to justify their crimes and harness international acceptance of
the campaign of ethnic cleansing and subjection they have been waging against
us - to the point where in February the Israeli deputy defence minister Matan
Vilnai threatened the people of Gaza with a "holocaust".
The Nazi state
had journals and papers devoted to propagating anti-Semitism. It established
and funded ‘scientific’ institutes whose task was to ‘prove’ that Jews were subhuman.
Pivotal to the attempts to set Nazi ideology on a scientific basis was the Kaiser
Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics. The
Institute was founded with money from America’s Rockerfeller Foundation whose
money kept it going during the Great Depression.
Eugen Fischer - from genocide in Africa to the Holocaust
Eugen Fischer, who first began with medical experiments on the Herero and Nama
people at Shark Island concentration camp in SW Africa (Namibia), the first
genocide of the 20th century, went on to train SS doctors such as
Joseph Mengele, the Auschwitz doctor.
Hamas has never sought to establish ‘academic’
institutions whose purpose was to theorise anti-Semitism. Hamas make a sharp
distinction between Jews and Zionists. Many of the released captives testified
to their humane treatment at the hands of Hamas. These are very strange Nazis!
Those who equate Hamas with the Nazis or suggest
that their goal is the elimination of Jews are projecting their own genocidal thoughts
onto their victims. In is one more case of serial Zionist dishonesty.
I quote in my article
Hannah Starman, who as a child was baffled at Israel’s portrayal of the people
they were bombing in Beirut as Nazis. Hannah was only 7 but as she said:
when I looked among the
images of people in Beirut to find the Nazis, all I could see were people who
looked poor, quiet or scared.
Nothing like the tall and
erect Nazis, shouting out orders in their uniforms and shiny boots. I was confused.
And this confusion bred a lifelong interest in what was really going on in
Israel. How could a people that had suffered so much cause so much suffering?
Why were they telling the world that they were fighting the Nazis? And why did
the world believe them?
What a child could see with her own eyes, Biden,
Sunak, Starmer, Scholtz and the other war criminals are unable to see. Not because
they are blind but because they have deliberately created a narrative that
portrays the victims of genocide as ‘Nazis’.
What western leaders are unwittingly doing is
normalising the Nazis which is one reason why so many neo-Nazis today, like the
White Zionist Richard Spencer and Dutch
political leader Geert
Wilders, adore the Israeli state.
It is also the reason why Germany’s leaders have
fallen over themselves in the rush to endorse Israel’s genocide. It is ironic
that the ‘Jewish state’ is helping to rehabilitate the Nazis but when one looks
at the history of the period, alone amongst the Jews the Zionists saw only good
coming out of the Nazi rise to power.
As David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister remarked
‘The Nazis’ victory would become “a fertile force for Zionism.” ‘ [Tom Segev,
The Seventh Million, p. 18].
One
of the drawbacks of being a well known activist, or as the Zionists say ‘notorious’,
is that I am frequently contacted directly by Palestinians in Gaza, either via Facebook,
Paypal or even directly by email, asking for help.
Some
of the messages, indeed most of them, are heartbreaking but unfortunately I am
simply not able to respond positively in the vast majority of cases because I
don’t have the money.
That
is why I am appealing directly to you. I have set up a Crowdfunder here
and if you can afford toplease give
generously, however large or small your donation.
Please help me
buy medicine for my child. He burned his foot while burning wood to prepare
food. I did not have gas and he screams in pain
.Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Hello my
friend, how are you? I hope you donate to my children. They are crying and
suffering from extreme hunger. I have no food and no drinking water. The
situation here is getting worse
To my
dear-hearted friends, I am a woman. My house was bombed, which led to the death
of my husband. I have seven children. We live in a tent. Now I and my seven
children are at risk of death due to malnutrition and severe cold. I appeal to
you to donate in order to buy clothes, food, and blankets. Please donate in
order to survive.
My friends, I
appeal to you on this day to donate in order to save the life of my brother who
was injured due to the bombing. I appeal to you to donate in order to buy
treatment for him. Please donate and do not hesitate in order to save the life
of an orphan
My brothers, I
salute you. I am your brother, the orphan Ahmed and I do not
remember a day when I was happy in Gaza. My house was completely bombed, which
led to the martyrdom of my father. I appeal to you to donate to buy food for my
brothers to survive. Save the orphaned children of Gaza
A very, very
urgent appeal to those with compassionate hearts 🚨
My children have been without food for two days and have been drinking sewage
water. I appeal to you to donate now and as soon as possible. I want to buy
food. My children are crying from extreme hunger. Please donate and do not
ignore.
I am an orphan
child. I am 16 years old. I have six brothers who are orphans. My father died
and left me to provide for my brothers’ needs. I cannot provide for the needs,
and now the cold is severe and my brothers are crying from the severity of the
cold. They need heavy clothes to protect them from the cold. Please, save the
children of Gaza. Gaza has been under bombardment for 104 days and the
bombardment is still violent. Save the orphaned children
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