Why did the Legal System Fail So Badly – The Culpability of the Government and especially the Lib Dems

Sean Hudson’ account of the role of the National Federation of Sub Postmasters

The wrongful conviction between 1999 and 2015 of over 900 subpostmasters for theft and false accounting is rightly described as the worst case of miscarriage of justice in Britain. Except perhaps for the Irish cases such as the Birmingham 6 in the 70s and 80s.

Thanks to ITV’s Mr Bates vs The Post Office, which was broadcast in January this year, most people are aware of the conspiracy to frame the subpostmasters by the Board of the Post Office, Paula Vennells in particular, and Fujitsu, which was responsible for the Horizon computer system that so disastrously failed.

In fact the only people who seem unaware of what happened appear to be the Metropolitan Police who, as the BBC noted, have so far not only not charged anyone with any offence, but have interviewed just two people under caution. If they were climate protesters the Met would have been all over them.

The Lies of Paula Vennells

Potential offences should include conspiracy to pervert the cause of justice, obtaining monies by deception and perjury. It is of course understandable that the Met hasn’t yet got round to doing anything since they are more concerned with monitoring the speech of those protesting against genocide in Gaza and inspecting book covers to see whether or not they offend Zionists.

The first public airing of the scandal was in August 2015, Panorama’s Trouble at Post Office. This was followed up in 2020 by Panorama’s Scandal at the Post Office.

Like many people I was only dimly aware of what was happening, yet there were those in the legal profession and in the CPS who must have been aware, not least Britain’s liar-in-chief Sir Keir Starmer, who like in the case of Jimmy Saville, denied knowing anything.

There were about 983 prosecutions, 700 by the Post Office and the remainder by the CPS and associated bodies. Ed Davey, the leader of the Lib Dems, was Minister for the Post Office in 2012. In a letter to Alan Bates in 2010 Davey said that

The integrity of the Post Office Horizon system is an operational and contractual matter for POL [Post Office Ltd], whilst I do appreciate your concerns. I do not believe a meeting would serve any useful purpose.

The Lib Dems played a pivotal role in the scandalous privatisation of Royal Mail, from which the Post Office was hived off. Business Secretary Vince Cable undersold Royal Mail giving away billions of pounds to the City that had been paid for by the taxpayer.

Jo Swinson, a future leader of the Lib Dems was also a Post Office Minister and she was handed a briefing note about a ‘trickle’ of subpostmasters alleging miscarriages of justice and problems with Horizon. She not only chose to do nothing she has also refused to be interviewed over her role.

Swinson took over from Norman Lamb who succeeded Ed Davey, as Postal Affairs Minister. Swinson, a viciously anti-Corbyn MP, provided one of the highlights of the last election when she was defeated by the SNP. She backed up the position of the Post Office with a statement to the House of Commons that there was “absolutely no evidence of any systemic issues with the computer system”.

Like the other Lib Dem Ministers Swinson has subsequently said that she had been misled. But if she was misled by the Post Office that was because she was a willing victim. She chose to believe a large corporation against the little people it had been grinding down.

The National Federation of Subpostmasters

Another of the guilty parties was the National Federation of SubPostmasters to which all postmasters belong unless they take a decision to opt out. The NFSP was supposed to be the equivalent of the postmasters’ trade union but in reality it was a company union.

As Post Office trial observed it was a department of the Post Office. In return for a grant of over £2m a year it agreed not to do anything that displeased the Post Office. Far from supporting its members who were being prosecuted as part of the Horizon scandal it supported the Post Office right up to the bitter end. It signed a contract with the Post Office which meant that in the event of a conflict between the Post Office and its members it supported the former. Clauses included promises ‘not to engage in the following’:

5.3.1    undertaking any public activity which may prevent POL from implementing any of its initiatives, policies or strategies;

5.3.2    undertaking or inducing a third party to undertake media or political campaigns against POL;

5.3.3    organising or inducing a third party to organise public demonstrations, protests or petitions against POL;

5.3.4    organising or inducing a third party to organise boycotts of POL's business;...

5.3.6    other activities or behaviour the effect of which may be materially detrimental to POL....

5.7 The NFSP shall (and shall use best endeavours to ensure that all Personnel of the NFSP shall):

5.7.1    not act dishonestly or negligently at any time and/or not act directly or indirectly to the detriment of any Annual Plan and/or any Approved Project; and ...

5.8 The NFSP shall support POL and Post Office Operators in the rollout of the Network Transformation programme ... and shall work closely with POL to ensure that the objectives and requirements of the Network Transformation programme are effectively and positively communicated to current and future Post Office Operators.

Throughout the scandal the NFSP told members who came to it that they were the only ones having problems with the Horizon computer software and that they should plead guilty. It was, uniquely, in a position to know that this was a lie.

Until 2014 they were registered as a trade union until an employment tribunal ruled that its members were not employees. Its income was derived almost exclusively from the Post Office. With this agreement the NFSP could not do anything that might upset the Post Office. This lapdog was severely criticised by Mr Justice Cox when a class action was brought against the Post Office in 2019.

In paragraph 36 of his judgement Cox observed that the agreement between the Post Office and the NFSP was only made public

after a lengthy period of pressure by someone using the Freedom of Information Act. There seems to be a culture of secrecy and excessive confidentiality generally within the Post Office, but particularly focused on Horizon.

In his judgment of 15 March 2019 in the case of Alan Bates and others –v- Post Office Ltd. Cox J was scathing about the Post Office’s claim that its case was strengthened by the fact that the NFSP supported it. In paragraph 596 he found that:

The NFSP is not an organisation independent of the Post Office, in the sense that the word “independent” is usually understood in the English language. It is not only dependent upon the Post Office for its funding, but that funding is subject to stringent and detailed conditions that enable the Post Office to restrict the activities of the NFSP. The Post Office effectively controls the NFSP. The agreement also enables the Post Office to seek repayment of funds already paid to the NFSP. The NFSP is a company limited by guarantee and there was no evidence that it had any other source of funding. It is not likely to be able to repay any funds “clawed back” by the Post Office and therefore its very existence depends upon it not giving the Post Office grounds to challenge its activities. There is also evidence before the court that the NFSP has, in the past, put its own interests and the funding of its future above the interests of its members, in the e mail to which I have referred. In those circumstances, the fact that the NFSP does not support the Claimants in this litigation is entirely to be expected.

Sean Hudson of the Post Office Workers branch of the CWU, gave a fascinating account of the SFSP to a meeting of the Labour Left Alliance. For brevity I have excised the questioners and just left Sean’s answers to the questions that were asked.

If you download the NFSP’s accounts then however hard you look you will see no detail as to who is funding the NFSP.

There is a section on the Horizon scandal on the NFSP website which does its best to play down its scandalous role during the Horizon scandal when it worked closely with the Post Office management.

Michael Rudkin and the Subpostmaster’s Scandal

Indeed the NFSP penalised its own representative, Michael Rudkin, who stumbled on the fact that Fujitsu employees could access the individual accounts of postmasters. Computer Weekly reported that:

Former subpostmaster Michael Rudkin is certain he was singled out by the Post Office for asking difficult questions about remote access to Horizon. In August 2008, when he was chairman of the negotiating committee of the Federation of Subpostmasters, Rudkin visited a Fujitsu technology centre as part of a working group looking at how to improve bureau de change processes. During his visit, a Fujitsu employee demonstrated how he could make changes to subpostmaster branch accounts remotely, without the subpostmasters knowing.

Rudkin’s experience was confirmed in 2015 by former Fujitsu engineer Richard Roll. After contacting Alan Bates, the former subpostmaster who led the fight for justice for subpostmasters, Roll blew the whistle on remote access.

The NFSP ‘explanation’ is that:

Under its current leadership, the NFSP has appraised its own role in the Horizon scandal. It is a source of considerable regret to the current CEO and Board that the former leadership of the NFSP did not take more assertive action over the Horizon dispute. The NFSP could and should have done more to support subpostmasters affected by the scandal. 

They claim that:

contrary to much of the public discourse on the issue, the NFSP challenged PO on numerous occasions about the reliability of the Horizon system. PO’s response was always that the system was reliable, and that user-error was the primary cause of the problems.  

What they don’t say is that they told their members they were the only individuals affected by the scandal. The fact that even now they won’t admit their wrongdoing should put any postmaster on notice that if anything goes wrong in the future they’ll be on their own.

Post Office Trial in NFSP crawls out from under its rock described the NFSP as

crawling towards the moral high ground like some sort of rotting, zombified Uriah Heep, wringing its hands and bleating that it has been wronged.

I emailed the NFSP two days ago to say that I was going to publish a blog on what had happened and did they have any response. They have not replied.

A good summary of the case is Justice Lost in the Post by Private Eye which can be downloaded here. The Communication Workers Union has a branch for subpostmasters and anyone who wants protection would be well advised to join them and leave the NFSP.

The Legal System and its Failings

If the class action by 555 subpostmasters in 2017 that ended in victory in the High Court in 2019 represented a defeat for the Post Office and Fujitsu it was won at a very high price. At least 4 subpostmasters such as Martin Griffiths committed suicide and 33 others died, many driven to their deaths and there is a strong suspicion that others took their own life too or like Fiona McGowan were driven into depression and died soon after.

Others like Noel Thomas, who went to prison for a crime he did not commit, have suffered permanent psychological damage. Or Seema Misra who was gaoled whilst she was pregnant whilst her husband, Davindra, was attacked and abused by racist thugs on three occasions.

The question that hasn’t even been asked is how, over a period of 16 years, almost a thousand innocent people could be prosecuted for crimes that they did not commit, most of whom were convicted.

In January 2003 the NFSP had 6723 members. Even if we accept that over the 16 years of this scandal there were about 10,000 this still represents about 10% of all subpostmasters were prosecuted for fraud.

It beggars belief that no one in the legal world picked up on this high proportion of criminals that the world of subpostmasters were attracting. Given the type of person that became subpostmasters, respectable middle class this was an amazing statistic.

The responsibility for the Post Office in government during the Tory-Lib Dem coalition lay with the Lib-Dem Ministers; Vince Cable, Ed Davie, Norman Lamb and Jo Swinson. Did they have no subpostmasters as constituents who were being prosecuted.

Cable, Davey and Swinson, all of whom became leaders of the Lib Dems, demonstrated a total unconcern with the plight of the subpostmasters. They were content to accept the assurances of their civil servants and the Post Office. It was individual Conservative MPs such as James Arbuthnot and Andrew Brigden who took up the cases.

Was the Director of Public Prosecutions, Keir Starmer, whose CPS undertook around 200 prosecutions unaware of what was happening? Starmer of course accepts no responsibility for anything but it’s difficult to believe that he wasn’t aware of what was happening. If he didn’t know it was because he didn’t want to know. Or more likely, like the Lib Dems, he didn’t want to challenge corporate power.

And what about the judges? Almost to a man, and they are nearly all men, preferred to allow the Post Office claims of false accounting and theft to go unchallenged. Virtually none of them asked where the money that had allegedly been stolen had gone. None of them queried the ‘evidence’ that the Horizon computer system was reliable.

Prior to the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 there was a long-standing common law principle that "mechanical instruments" should be assumed to be working properly - for example, that clocks can be relied on. Section 69 of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 changed this requiring anyone introducing computer-generated evidence to show the system was operating correctly. However in 1999 section 69 of PACE was repealed by the Youth Justice and Criminal Evidence Act 1999 that the Blair government introduced and the law reverted back to the common law principle.

It is a sign of the servility and their unquestioning acceptance of prosecution evidence that Crown Court judges refused to interpret these common law principles and demand proof that Horizon was fit for purpose. It should have been clear that there is a world of difference between a mechanical device like a clock or even a speedometer and a complex computer system like Horizon.

It is a well-known fact that these giant IT projects have always had an abundance of bugs and problems. Indeed Horizon itself was rejected by the DWP because of this.

In the case of Seema Misra the Judge N.A. Stewart refused defence requests for disclosure. See transcript Day 6. There was no justification for this apart from the judge's belief that the jury would be capable of making up their mind from the technical evidence as to whether the defendant was guilty or not. An absurd decision.  

Karl Flinders in Computer Weekly quoted Stephen Mason, editor of the practitioner text for judges and lawyers, Electronic Evidence.as expressing surprise at the refusal of judges to order proper disclosure in cases involving technical evidence.

 “For some reason that I cannot understand, judges often refuse defence requests for relevant evidence. This happened in the case of Seema Misra. If the judges in Seema Misra’s case had ordered appropriate disclosure by the Post Office, the members of the jury might have reached a different conclusion about her guilt.”

Judge Stewart, despite the fact that Seema Misra was pregnant, despite the fact that she had suffered miscarriages, despite the fact that she had a clean record, sentenced her to 15 months imprisonment.  This was a vicious and vindictive sentence. The fact that she had chosen to plead not guilty, i.e. assert her innocence, contributed to the length of the sentence.

You can read the transcript of the sentencing hearing when Stewart completely disregarded Seema’s mitigation. If justice is to be served then Stewart should be kicked off the bench in order that he doesn’t preside over any further miscarriages of justice but of course that won’t happen. Indeed all the judges who handed out prison sentences should be given their marching orders.

Many defendants pleaded guilty to charges of false accounting in order that they did not face a more serious charge of theft, in the belief that they wouldn’t be sentenced to prison.

It should be a principle of law that no one pleads guilty to one offence for fear of being charged with another more serious one. This is blackmail yet our judicial system encourages it by offering a discount on sentence for those who plead guilty. It is legal intimidation and corruption.

The problem defendants face is that they lack recourse to expert witness evidence when confronted, as with the Post Office, with a corporation that has deep pockets. Without being able to go into Fujitsu’s offices in Bracknell with a search warrant and examine whether or not Post Office accounts could be accessed and changed remotely there was little that any defendant could do to challenge the prosecution evidence.

In short the system was stacked against them from the start and the last thing that judges are wont to do is to challenge the system. Their job is to uphold it.

What is clear is that there was a conspiracy extending from the Post Office to Fujitsu. Horizon was one of their few profitable software ventures and they wanted to keep it that way. Despite this there is no indication that the Police have even begun investigating the Fujitsu end of the scandal because the police are more concerned with defending corporations than investigating corporate malpractice.

We know from the refusal of the Police to even investigate the multiple breaches of COVID regulations by Boris Johnson, until threatened with a judicial review, that the Police see their job as protecting not challenging the Establishment. If they were seriously concerned with law breaking they would have investigated Boris Johnson obtaining by deception a grant of a £100,000 for his mistress Jennifer Arcuri when he was Mayor of London, despite the fact she was based in California not London.

Today as Rishi Sunak continues to aid and abet war crimes in Gaza by supplying the Israeli army with weaponry, a flagrant breach of the International Criminal Court Act 2000, the Police simply sit on their hands. However they are more than eager to prosecute and persecute activists for supporting Hamas against Israel’s genocidal army.

One other aspect of the scandal that needs remedying is the ability of the Post Office to mount its own prosecutions and to interview people under caution. This is an outrageous power for a private company, even one owned by the government and this power should be removed, not only from the Post Office but rail companies too.

Even getting into court to sue the Post Office was a struggle. It took more than 500 people to provide the basis of a class action. There was a time when such an action could have been mounted on legal aid but civil legal aid has been all but abolished. This makes the law a plaything of the rich with judges, the most socially exclusive profession in Britain, at its pinnacle.

Even when the Subpostmasters won their case the compensation they obtained was derisory. Of the £58 million they achieved in a settlement no less than £48m went to the legal profession. The 550 claimants had to divide the remaining £10m between them, about £20,000 each.

The Post Office, a government owned corporation had limitless money to spend, courtesy of the tax payer, and it deliberately sought to inflate the costs knowing that the claimants had limited means.

There is now a public inquiry, which has been put on a statutory footing. It is to be hoped that among its recommendations is ensuring that in the future, should such a case arise that there will be equality of arms between the victims and their persecutors.

Finally why is Paula Vennels a free woman? She was at the apex of the conspiracy. She knew about the defects in the Horizon system and she knew, despite the denials, that Fujitsu had remote access to individual subpostmasters’ accounts. She was shamed into returning her CBE (awarded in 2019 when knowledge of her role in the affair was known) because the government did not see fit to strip a fellow crook of her honours.

Vennels is still an ordained priest in the Church of England. Why?  Presumably because Archbishop Justin Welby was strongly pushing for her to become the next Bishop of London. After all what’s a little miscarriage of justice when you support Genocide in Gaza. Welby was quick to recognise a kindred spirit when he saw one.

Why has no one been prosecuted at Fujitsu? The old adage of one law for the rich and one law for the poor was never more true than in the case of the subpostmaster’s scandal.

The answer to some of these questions was provided by Sam Fowles in an article which told how Fujitsu

donated  money to both Labour and the Conservatives, paying around £26,000 every year to host “lounges” at each party’s conference. Simon Blagden, Fujitsu UK’s chair until 2019, is a long-term Conservative donor. He has been part of the exclusive “Leader’s Group”, where “members are invited to join [the party leader] and other senior figures… at dinners”.

This is the real reason why these people escape unscathed. They are part of a corrupt Establishment.

Tony Greenstein

Graham is a War Monger – Not Once Has She Shown Her Face or Spoken on the National Palestine Solidarity Demonstrations

Why is Unite's Sharon Graham silent on Gaza genocide? Not the Andrew Marr Show

When Sharon Graham was elected as General Secretary of Unite in August 2021 most socialist groups welcomed her election and breathed a sigh of relief that Gerard Coyne, a corrupt right-winger and the darling of The Sun, had come bottom.

They did this despite Graham describing herself as ‘non-political’. All that mattered was that she supported strikes. That Graham had nothing to say about capitalism, imperialism, racism or anything that affected Unite members outside the workplace was overlooked. It is as if Unite members never used the NHS or opposed climate change.

Typical was Socialist Worker whose headline was Boost for left as Sharon Graham wins Unite general secretary election. Both the SWP and the Socialist Party supported her candidacy. The SP was a particularly enthusiastic supporter.

Graham has supported striking members but she has been lousy on just about everything else. At the TUC Conference in 2022 Unite supported a GMB motion calling for increased military expenditure.

There are also concerns about her nepotism, indifference to racism, cronyism and her authoritarianism. Her husband Jack Clarke was promoted to a senior position in Graham’s team after she became general secretary without following the union’s normal procedures

Racists posts are acceptable as long as you are a friend of Graham's and you take them down quickly!

Graham has refused to respond to allegations that she tried to have evidence destroyed regarding her husband, Jack Clarke’s bullying. Clarke was on a final warning at the time. The evidence of racism against a close associate Tony Seaman was binned as “the posting was take down quickly’.  

Brendan Ogle was Unite’s senior officer in the Ireland Region who went off sick with cancer. When he returned he found that he had been demoted. He was told that there was no place for him under Graham. When he asked why, Gail Cartmail, Graham’s bag carrier, stated that “Sharon operates on the basis of loyalty.” Ogle had supported Graham’s election opponent, Howard Beckett.

Brendan Ogle, Unite Ireland's most senior officer victimised by Graham

There is at the moment a hearing taking place before the Workplace Relations Commission, the equivalent of an employment tribunal in Ireland.  Ogle is alleging disability discrimination. John Douglas, former General Secretary of Mandate had this to say about Ogle:

Brendan had one of the highest profiles of any trade union official in the country as leader of Right2Water; [he was] the leader of very many other campaigns, so to see Brendan being humiliated in the way he was after the way he came back from cancer to do the job he did on behalf of the working class ... it was shoddy.

The case is extremely high profile in the Irish press who are making the most of Graham’s reluctance to appear as a witness.

The first inkling that Graham was a Zionist and anti-Palestinian came on 8 June when South-East Regional Secretary Sarah Carpenter, who has now been appointed as Graham’s Chief of Staff, informed the Chair of my branch, Unite SE 6246, that she had asked for screenings of the film Jeremy Corbyn – The Big Lieto be cancelled ‘whilst I seek further guidance. I have not had any instructions to cancel.’

Al Shifa Hospital in Gaza City - 'mission accomplished'according to Israel's Defence Minister Yoav Gallant

I wrote to Carpenter, as Branch Secretary, to ask why, if she had not had any instructions to cancel the film, she needed to seek guidance.

That suggests that you were advised to cancel the booking. Perhaps you would enlighten us as to who gave you this advice? Otherwise your need to seek guidance makes no sense.

On 13 June Carpenter wrote back:

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

Every one of Carpenter’s excuses was a lie. The reference to ‘internal Labour Party matters’ suggested that she was trying to please Keir Starmer. Our branch unanimously passed a motion saying that

The film is about the orchestrated attack on Jeremy Corbyn and the socialist leadership of the Labour Party from 2015-19.  We do not believe that the following issues are irrelevant to Unite members.

·           increased privatisation of the NHS, which Starmer supports

·           public ownership of water, rail and the utilities

·           Zionism and Apartheid Israel

·           the racist treatment of refugees

·           worker’s struggles which Keir Starmer opposes and

·           Tory legislation restricting the right of protest and civil liberties

Although Carpenter would not reveal who had given her the advice Skwawkbox revealed that it was Graham.

The far-right anti-Palestinian Campaign Against Antisemitism boasts of working with Graham to ban a film about the 'antisemitism' smears that brought Corbyn down

I then discovered that the Campaign Against Antisemitismwere claiming credit for Unite having banned The Big Lie. The CAA is widely believed to be an Israeli Government proxy whose purpose is to co-ordinate the ‘anti-Semitism’ attacks on Palestinian supporters.

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....

following contact from Campaign Against Antisemitism in which we pointed out that the scheduling of the event appeared to be contradictory to the reports that the film has been banned in all of Unite’s buildings, it was cancelled....

Campaign Against Antisemitism commends Unite for its swift and decisive action to cancel the screening as soon as we brought it to its attention.

I wrote to Gail Cartmail, on August 30 2023 about this:

Your decision to take advice from the racist CAA... as to whether Jeremy Corbyn - The Big Lie is antisemitic is an outrage.

... You know very well that ‘antisemitism’ is the standard line of defence when Israel is accused of war crimes.... It shows that your vain boasts about Unite’s support for the Palestinians is just virtue signalling. You can’t hold hands with the masters of Israeli apartheid and pretend you support the Palestinians.

Your ban on Corbyn The Big Lie shows that both of you are just old-fashioned imperialist supporters masquerading as anti-racists.

Why have your officials lied and lied about the banning of ‘Jeremy Corbyn – The Big Lie’? Who has given you the right to decide what Unite members can or cannot see?

Clearly I had stung Cartmail because within 2 hours she replied:

Your disagreeable attack is based on a falsehood. No one in Unite took advice from the Campaign Against Antisemitism, on ‘Jeremy Corbyn – The Big Lie’, nor indeed any other matter. I suggest you don’t believe everything you read on social media or elsewhere.

Unite as a union is outstanding in both our commitment to anti-racism and solidarity with the Palestinian cause, actions speak louder than words.

I suggest you fact-check before launching another ill-informed and blatantly untrue broadside.

I then asked Cartmail if Graham had written to the CAA asking them to retract their false allegations against her. I received no reply.

Soon after Palestinian Resistance groups broke out of Gaza Ghetto on October 7. On October 16 Unite put out a statement which

unreservedly condemns and expresses its revulsion at the recent appalling acts of violence by Hamas against innocent civilians in Israel. We further deplore the subsequent suffering and loss of life being endured by civilians in Gaza arising from the actions of the Israeli government.

Another Hamas Base? Israel destroys the PGFTU Palestinian Trade Union  Building in Gaza City which housed a kindergarten and bakery

There was no mention of the carpet bombing of Gaza’s civilian population or its mass murder of civilians. By this time 2,750 Palestinians had died and 9,700 were wounded. Israel’s Minister of Defence Yoav Gallant had made clear what Israel’s genocidal intent was when he said, on October 9 that

I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.

Israeli spokesman Daniel Hagari made it clear that “right now we’re focused on what causes maximum damage”. Numerous Israeli government ministers made genocidal statements. President Herzog said on October 14 that ‘There are no innocent civilians in Gaza".

A bit more complicated. Unite exec voted down a TUC motion because they felt it did not go far enough. They want Unite to adopt a motion endorsing BDS as per union policy. They weren't given an option to vote on that during the meeting.

Another meeting this week I believe. https://t.co/0rgdebKovT

— Taj Ali (@Taj_Ali1) October 30, 2023

Meanwhile Sharon Graham and the Unite Executive continued to do nothing. They refused, in line with the position of Keir Starmer, to call for an immediate ceasefire.

On 17 October Herzog Peter Kavanagh, the Regional Secretary of London and Eastern Region Unite, wrote a letter to Graham asking why there had been no Unite banner or speaker at the previous Palestine demonstration in London on October 7 and why Unite had done nothing to advertise the demonstration on its web site.

Kavanagh asked that this be rectified immediately and that Graham should write to all branches urging that members attend the demonstration. No reply was ever received.

On 26 October an Emergency Executive Meeting on Palestine broke up in disarray having voted 24-14 against making any statement on Israel’s genocide.

After a ‘fraught meeting’  supporters of Graham issued a false briefing claiming that Graham was all for an unconditional ceasefire call but was stymied by ‘factional’ exec members. As was noted:

Graham’s reputation has been further badly damaged – after a series of controversies and undenied allegations about her conduct in the union – by her public silence on Israel’s genocide in Gaza and her attempts to block a Palestinian solidarity event.

On 27 October Cartmail sent me another email stating that

The General Secretary has been actively promoting that the union should put out a statement calling for a ceasefire.... She is also clear that the Unite position must be that we do not stoke division through anti-semitism and anti-Muslim racism.

Why should British Jews be the pretext for not condemning genocide? Was Graham saying that Jews support genocide? This is the Suella Braverman/Sunak/Starmer line.

On November 1 I sent an Open Letter signed by 135 members of Unite to Graham demanding that the Union call for an immediate ceasefire and take part in and publicise the national demonstrations.

On November 3 Graham finally issued a statement calling for a ceasefire although it was pitifully weak, failing to mention still less condemn Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

Mick Lynch of the RMT, one of a host of trade union leaders speaking at the national Palestinian demonstrations - only Sharon Graham is absent

On December 19 166 Unite members sent another letter to Graham pointing out that in the statement of Novemer 3

There was no mention of genocide or ethnic cleansing. There was no mention of the war crimes perpetrated by Israel - the bombing of hospitals, the targeting and murder of journalists, academics and doctors to say nothing of the bombing of residential areas or the murder of children, which now stands at over 8,000.

There was no mention of the fact that Israel has imposed a food, water and fuel blockade on the Gaza strip resulting in starvation according to the United Nations. Collective punishment of a civilian population is a egregious breach of international law yet the statement treats the Palestinians and the Israeli state as equally responsible.

It is not Hamas which possesses an airforce but Israel. It is the Israeli state which is carrying out the carpet bombing of Gaza with the intent of forcing Palestinians out altogether.

The statement treats the genocidal attack on the people of Gaza as equivalent to the break-out from the world’s largest open air prison on October 7. Israel has occupied the Gaza Strip for 56 years imposing a suffocating siege on it since 2007.

We quoted a report from Vatican News of 16 December as just one example of Israel’s war crimes:

‘Israelis have opened fire on Gaza’s Christians. Following heavy bombardment overnight of the area around Holy Family Latin parish in Gaza City, dozens are reported dead… and reports continue to arrive that shooting by Israeli snipers continues during these hours. A statement released by the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem confirmed that an Israeli sniper murdered two Christian women inside the Holy Family Parish where the majority of Christian families have taken refuge since the start of the war.’

An even more horrifying massacre took place on 17 December. Al Jazeera reported that Israeli bulldozers have crushed Palestinians who were taking shelter in tents outside Kamal Adwan Hospital.

Dozens of Palestinians are reported to have been buried alive. These are Nazi-style massacres and yet you have said nothing and done nothing since issuing your statement. You were happy to wave the Ukrainian flag but you haven’t waved the Palestinian flag or expressed any sympathy with the thousands of murdered Palestinian civilians, not least children

Graham was happy to support dockers refusing to unload fuel from Russia but not happy to support Palestinians under attack. Why? Because Graham is an unashamed supporter of US imperialism and Ukraine is a NATO proxy war.

For 4 months after the statement of November 3 Sharon Graham did absolutely nothing to campaign against Israel’s genocide. There was no national Unite presence on the London demonstrations, no publicity for them, no transport.

This was why we organised a demonstration outside Unite HQ on March 11 to coincide with an Executive Committee meeting. About 50 Unite members attended from 3 regions.

At the meeting itself, which lasted all week, there were 2 motions on Palestine. Graham and her supporters ensured that the motions on Palestine were not discussed with the aid of the Chair Andy Green.

Graham herself justified not discussing what is happening in Gaza because ‘Palestine is not a service we offer members.’ This one phrase sums up everything about Graham’s chauvinism.

Sharon Graham is firmly wedded to capitalism. She simply wants workers to have a larger share of the imperialist cake.

On March 7 Israel bombed the headquarters of the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions in Gaza City. The Federation’s five-story building had attached to it a kindergarten that served 380 children, as well as a large automatic bakery.

In a statement, Basheer Al-Sisi from the PGFTU’s Secretariat spoke of how they had “lost thousands of members, union offices, facilities, and other institutions” as a result of Israel’s “wholesale slaughter and forced dislocation—ethnic cleansing”.

In a letter of 26 March to PGFTU's General Secretary Shaher Saeed, Sharon Graham expressed her solidarity and boasted of Unite's record including donating £50,000 to Medicin Sans Frontiere. For a moment I actually thought that her letter was sincere, albeit over 2 weeks after the event.

In Sharon Graham’s Hypocrisy Over Gaza Beggars Belief I wrote:

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.

In her letter to PGFTU, Graham boasted that Unite had donated a paltry £50,000 to Medicins sans Frontieres/Doctors Without Borders. It is reported that Graham and Unite’s legal bill for defending itself against Brendan Ogle is over £1m (1.35m Euros) and that is before Graham starts her defence against a libel action by Ogle. I wrote:

Let us hope that Sharon Graham’s letter to the PGFTU is a sign that she has at last recognised 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 empty words.

Sharon Graham's letter attacking Palestine solidarity & anti-war activists & supporting NATO & AUKUS

Little did I know the depths of cynicism which Graham is capable of. The PGFTU HQ was bombed on March 7. Graham’s letter was sent on March 25. Between November 3 and then she had done absolutely nothing. This letter was all that she had done and she had written it solely in order to say she had done something.

The very next day after it was written Graham penned another letter, ‘Important message from the General Secretary and the Chair of the Union’. It was addressed to Unite Officers, Organisers and Staff. It showed signs of being hurriedly written as it is undated. It was written

to alert and inform you about a number of extremely troubling actions being undertaken by a tiny minority of individuals, inside and outside of our Union.

Some of these individuals are linked to the past leadership and a small number are linked to groups who want us to make decisions detrimental to our membership and their jobs.

It was written in the language of McCarthyism and its purpose was to witchunt the left and Palestine solidarity activists. But it was aimed more widely at climate and anti-war activists whose are deemed a threat to jobs. In other words what happens in wider society, with growing militarisation and reduced spending on the NHS is irrelevant. We must tie our fortunes to the military-industrial complex.

I mentioned at the beginning that some socialist groups have been supporters of Sharon Graham. If those groups don’t speak out now, they deserve to be condemned for working with the Right.

Graham’s letter is 4 pages long. I will focus on the section to do with Palestine which demonstrates both the national chauvinism of her politics as well as her dishonesty. It claims that our efforts to get Unite to campaign over the issue of Palestine have been nothing more than the weaponisation of attacks on her. She pretends that she has been at the forefront of solidarity with the Palestinians.

Graham falsely claimed that

Unite, was the first major union to publicly and unambiguously call for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza.... We were very clear. We have watched on with horror the bombardment and destruction of Gaza, and the unbearable terror, suffering and death of its innocent civilians. We have been unequivocal that the deliberate killing of civilians, hostage-taking and collective punishment are war crimes and should be identified as such.

This is simply a lie. UNISON called for an immediate ceasefire on October 26. UNISON also condemned Israel for its attacks on civilians unlike the even handed Unite statement a week later.

UNISON has made repeated calls for a ceasefire since October 26 whereas Sharon Graham has sat on her bottom and done nothing. In her vitriolic statement the only thing she was able to mention was the letter she sent to the PGFTU the day before!

Graham spent the rest of her letter suggesting that those who oppose the production of arms intended for Israel are targeting the workers in those factories. Instead of trying to persuade workers in arms factories to take action themselves she is pitting workers against Palestine solidarity and anti-war activists.

Graham was deliberately instilling fear in workers that unless they are prepared to arm NATO’s dictatorships their jobs will be lost. Rather than supporting the diversification of production and turning arms factories into producing useful equipment like solar panels and wind turbines Graham adopted the mentality of the most backward and reactionary section of workers who a few generations before believed that opposition to the British Empire spelt doom for British workers. Graham suggested that

there is no contradiction for a trade union to hold a position of solidarity with Palestinian workers, while at the same time refusing to support campaigns that target our members' workplaces without their support.

In other words we are in solidarity with Palestinian workers but also in solidarity with those whose weapons blow them up! Graham took aim at those who

build networks inside trade unions to undermine the defence industry or demand the disbandment of NATO and AUKUS.

The USA today is deliberately seeking war with China. Graham makes clear her support for the US’s anti-China AUKUS pact. The expenditure of billions of pounds on arms means less for welfare. And if there is a nuclear war, how will that benefit Unite workers?

ISRAELI KNESSET MEMBER: Israeli Knesset member Almog Cohen said that he received “excellent news” following the assassination of 3 of the sons of the head of Hamas' Political Bureau, Ismail Haniyeh, and three of his grandchildren.
FOLLOW OUR LIVE BLOG: https://t.co/zltt11MY3Bpic.twitter.com/OScP3HrIFX

— The Palestine Chronicle (@PalestineChron) April 10, 2024

The NHS is suffering because military expenditure continues to rise. Health and social care, local government, transport all suffer because the capital intensive arms industry sucks up billions.

It is time for those on the left who placed their faith in Graham to realise they have backed the wrong horse. Graham is a narrow minded British nationalist, an imperialist, racist war monger and a Zionist who has nothing to offer the working class.

Industrial strikes do not by themselves challenge capitalism unless they are generalised and politicised. It is quite possible to combine industrial militancy with racist, imperialist attitudes. The White South African working class was militant as was the Protestant working class of Northern Ireland. Israel’s Jewish working class was militant whilst fighting to reserve the highest paid jobs for Israeli Jews.

It is unfortunate that much of the left in Britain is unable to understand that racism and imperialism mean the working class allying with its bosses. Both Marx and Lenin understood these things unlike the SWP, SP and Counterfire.

In Marx’s day the burning question was British colonialism in Ireland. Marx wrote:

Every industrial and commercial centre in England now possesses a working class divided into two hostile camps, English proletarians and Irish proletarians. 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.

If you want a good example of the stupidity of the British left then you could do worse than read the Socialist Party’s Unite and the movement against the war on Gaza which transforms the criticism of Sharon Graham over Gaza into a dispute between the United Left and the ‘industrially militant ‘transformation’ agenda’ of Graham. 

This is total rubbish. Having organised the picket of Unite HQ I am not interested in artificial factional differences. My concern is about Unite’s support for Palestine solidarity. It is clear that Graham, with her support for NATO is no friend of Palestine.

I recommend an excellent article on the World Socialist Web Site Unite’s General Secretary Sharon Graham denounces industrial and political action against Israel’s Gaza genocide

Tony Greenstein 

  STOP PRESS

Unite general secretary Sharon Graham and her management team have been accused of contempt for Unite staff’s collective agreement on grievances – and of a string of other abuses, including the use of legal action to silence and intimidate workers and avoid transparency, banning workers from their workplace under an implied threat of dismissal – and putting people into ‘special measures’ to control the the union’s internal democracy..

Among the other innovative employment practices there is the threat that anyone submitting a grievance complaint against Graham will be considered to be in breach of the duty of trust and confidence between worker and committee and where it is absent the employer is entitled to dismiss the employee.

It seems that not only is Graham a reactionary in every other field but as an employer too she is an absolute dictator.

It will be interesting to see whether her supporters in the SWP, SP and Counterfire will now break from her at last or whether they are determined to go down with her!      

 

Above staff complaint to Unite's Executive

 It’s time for the SWP, Socialist Party& Counterfire to break with Graham’s Social Imperialism & Stop Apologising for Her

ON RESISTANCE STREET (2023) Trailer

On Monday I learnt that Sharon Graham had bannedOn Resistance Street an anti-fascist and anti-racist  film that looks at the role music has played in the fight against fascism and racism.

The reasons for the ban were explained by Graham’s sycophantic bag carrier, Sarah Carpenter, who, as Regional Secretary for the South-East, banned another film, Jeremy Corbyn – The Big Lie. Carpenter quoted an Executive Committee resolution of September 2023 that:

‘Unite should not use its premises or resources to show or promote any external films or other content that does not relate to our industrial agenda to support the pay, terms and conditions of our members and/or support existing Unite policies.

Leave aside the ‘explanation’ of Carpenter, a bureaucrat without an original idea in her head, or the tunnel vision of Sharon Graham whose ‘industrial agenda’ poses no threat to British capitalism. Graham is either so politically illiterate that she does not understand that historically racism and fascism have been used to divide and weaken, if not destroy the trade union and socialist movement. Or else she does not care.

Carpenter’s suggestion that anti-racism and anti-fascism is not part of ‘existing Unite policies’ testifies to her stupidity. Even more worrying, Carpenter also wrote that:

In this context the Union should be especially careful to avoid appearing to endorse any material which causes unnecessary offence to members.’

Is she really saying that Unite should not offend racists and fascists? This is very similar to the ‘reason’ that Gail Cartmail gave for the banning of Jeremy Corbyn – The Big Lie when she said that:

The General Secretary... is also clear that the Unite position must be that we do not stoke division through anti-semitism and anti-Muslim racism

On Resistance Street was shot on location in England, Belfast and New York.  It carries an original soundtrack of 20 songs.

The film revisits the ‘Rock Against Racism’ movement of the late 70s, noting its influence on future waves of radical artists and political activists.  It also shines a light – for the very first time in a film – on a 1950s organisation, ‘The Stars Campaign For Inter-Racial Friendship’ which was founded by a group of famous British jazz musicians and entertainers in the wake of the 1958 Notting Hill riots. It provided venues in West London for black and white youth to socialise together.  The film also highlights the crucial role played by punk rock in uniting young people in 1970s’ sectarian Belfast.

On Resistance Street tracks contemporary drifts to the right in the West, the weaponization of Black grammatical history, right wing musical cultural appropriation and the role of anti-racist social media groups today.  It looks at grime music and the historic role played by Black musicians in British music.

This decision is nothing less than shocking. For a trade union to ban an anti-fascist and anti-racist film is a sign of how the Sharon Graham leadership has degenerated politically.

I therefore moved a resolution at my own branch last night ‘noting with dismay’ all the lies of Graham and her flunkeys. For the first time that I can remember I was criticised for my moderation! Another member promptly moved an amendment that said the branch had no confidence in Graham. Just 2 out of 11 members abstained, the rest voted in favour.

Graham is the most right-wing boss of Unite and its predecessor unions since Arthur Deakin in the 50s. Graham stood on a platform that rejected Len McCluskey’s support for the Corbyn Project. She passed herself off as apolitical but in reality she is firmly on the right. Her objection to anti-racist education is matched by her support for Zionism and the Israeli state.

It is no accident that Graham has done nothing to support Palestinians in Gaza besides writing a solitary letter to the PGFTU, nearly 3 weeks after its headquarters in Gaza were bombed. The very next day she made it clear that she favoured continuing to send arms to Israel to continue the bombing, the more the merrier since to her all that matters is British jobs.

Yet despite her appalling record when it comes to international solidarity, anti-racism and anti-imperialism, the ‘revolutionary’ sects of the British left, have supported her through thick and thin. Both the SWP and the Socialist Party supported Graham in the election for General Secretary and Counterfire welcomed her victory.

Richard Allday's rant on WhatsApp in defence of Graham

Richard Allday, a Counterfire supporter and member of Unite’s Executive only last Friday chose to attack me on the Unite 4 Palestine WhatsApp group for my ‘obsession with Sharon Graham’ and my ‘unsubstantiated abuse.’ i.e. criticism of Graham.

To support strikes whilst rejecting their political implications, as Graham does, is to reject class politics. It is to treat the state as neutral and capitalism as a fair and equitable system rather than one based on exploitation. This is called economism.

Unfortunately the ruling class is not so stupid as Graham. It knows that even if Unite wins a few individual strikes, they still have all the cards. The rich and powerful can easily adjust the rules of the game through their tame puppets in parliament. They have the Police to reign in workers who get unruly and of course, if the worst comes to the worst, they can make going on strike itself harder and harder.

The Establishment is more than capable of winning back through legislation that which they lose industrially. Being ‘apolitical’ means accepting privatisation of public services and austerity in order to fund increased expenditure on the military. Graham supports increasing ‘defence’ expenditure even though it means cutting the NHS, education and social services where Unite also has members.

Concentrating solely on strikes means abandoning the fight against racism, global warming, war and imperialism. It is to define class oppression as solely economic without seeing that capitalism doesn’t just oppress people in the workplace but during their lives outside the workplace. There is little advantage in gaining higher wages if the Welfare State is under attack, the NHS is in decline, schools are privatised as academies and housing becomes harder to get.

Graham is fighting for a larger share of the imperialist pie not its abolition. Graham is an avid supporter of NATO’s proxy war in Ukraine and supported dockers refusing to handle Russian oil. There is some solidarity action that Graham does support, the problem is that it doesn’t involve genocide against the Palestinians.

When it came to Ukraine Graham didn’t mince her words:

“There is overwhelming support being expressed throughout Unite to support the people of Ukraine. It is not only the struggle for democracy that concerns us but also the struggle for people’s rights to work and build their future in peace.”

Yet when it comes to Gaza, getting Graham to condemn anything Israel does is like drawing teeth. In her letter condemning the bombing of the PGFTU headquarters in Gaza City Graham fails even to mention the word ‘Israel’. It is as if the bombing of the Trade union HQ happened by itself. Likewise Graham did not once let the word ‘genocide’ slip from her lips.

These things have not gone unnoticed by the Zionists. Writing in the anti-Palestinian Jewish News‘Liar’ Lee Harpin described how,

In a further put down on far-left foreign policy dogma Graham also wrote “Similarly, we cannot be expected to affiliate to organisations that actively work against our members and their jobs.

“Examples include groups that look to build networks inside trade unions to undermine the defence industry or demand the disbandment of NATO and AUKUS.”

Under Graham’s leadership Unite has also taken great strides in attempting to combat antisemitism within the movement. Despite early claims that the left-wing leader would seek to move the union away from Labour and disaffiliate, Unite now appears to be opting to become a “critical friend” of the Starmer led Labour Party.

Unfortunately Britain’s far-left sects are unable to see beyond their own noses. They are so pleased that a union leader supports strikes that they are unable to understand that you can support strikes and still be a racist, warmongering reactionary like Sharon Graham.

In an effusive pro-Graham article in Dissent Olly Haynes observed that Unite refused to support the Enough is Enough coalition with the RMT and CWU because

two of the coalition’s five demands—building affordable housing and imposing heavier taxes on the rich—could only be enacted directly through state power. ...

The first indication that Sharon Graham was a Zionist cuckoo in the trade union nest was when Jeremy Corbyn – The Big Lie was banned.

On 23 July 2023 the far-right Campaign Against Antisemitismclaimed credit for the ban on Corbyn The Big Lie. They wrote:

Following correspondence with Campaign Against Antisemitism, the Unite union has cancelled the screening of a propaganda film about the antisemitic former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn....

However, following contact from Campaign Against Antisemitism in which we pointed out that the scheduling of the event appeared to be contradictory to the reports that the film has been banned in all of Unite’s buildings, it was cancelled....

Campaign Against Antisemitism commends Unite for its swift and decisive action to cancel the screening as soon as we brought it to its attention.

Graham’s apolitical election stance was a cover for very right-wing politics. To her capitalism and imperialism are perfectly normal and therefore not political. Is it any surprise that she refused to condemn Israel’s actions in Gaza as genocide? But if Britain’s far-left organisations displayed their typically blinkered approach, engaging in a bout of wishful thinking, then the Zionist organisations were not fooled. Indeed it is highly likely that Graham signalled to them that Len McCluskey’s support for the Palestinians would be jettisoned.

Euan Philips (David Gordstein) of Labour Against Antisemitism, welcomed the election of Graham as General Secretary.

The SWP, SP and Countefire simply refused to accept that the Skwawkbox’s allegations of Graham’s nepotism, turning a blind eye to racism and despotism amounted to anything. Despite Skawkbox being vilified at no time has Graham disputed their allegations.

At her first Executive Committee meeting as General Secretary (September 2021) Graham ‘Pledged to make our Union the most democratic and transparent it has ever been.’ Actions however speak louder than words as her banning of films demonstrates.

Graham promised to ‘Take the lead or provide practical support to other groups tackling wider societal issues such as; climate change, the housing crisis and racism.’ Under Len McCluskey Unite’s Community branches were established. It is no secret that Graham is hostile to them as she sees them as naturally political.

Graham pledged ‘there will be no blank cheques’ for the Labour Party. The cutting of affiliation fees by McLuskey, has been reversed without protest. Graham also promised to

·               Introduce a Member Hotline in my Office.

·               Make sure that my expenses are accessible to members online.

·               Introduce ‘General Secretary Live’ online Q&A

Below is a time line of Graham’s record as General Secretary:

i.              On the 8 June Sarah Carpenter bannedCorbyn – The Big Lie from beingshown at Unite’s premises in Portsmouth on Graham’s ‘advice’.

ii.            From 7 October to 3 November, Graham delayed calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza.

iii.         In her statement of 26 June to staff and officers Graham claimed that Unite ‘was the first major union to publicly and unambiguously call for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza.’ This was a lie. UNISON called for an immediate ceasefire on October 26 and it also condemned Israel for its attacks on civilians unlike the even handed Unite statement a week later.

iv.         Graham has not only refused to attend the national Palestinian demonstrations but she has refused to allow Unite’s national banner to be present.

v.            Graham tried to pressurise Unite official Simon Dubbins to calling off a Unite Palestinian event at Labour Party conference. She has now suspended him.

vi.         Graham also tried to persuade Pete Kavanagh, Regional Secretary for London & Eastern Region, from speaking at the Palestinian demonstration in London on January 13.

vii.       Graham’s Chief of Staff, Sarah Carpenter, appointed without any reference to the Executive, threatened Kavanagh with loss of a pension bonus if he continued to support the Palestinians.

viii.    Graham said nothing about genocide in Gaza until March 25,over two weeks after, when she wrote a letter of ‘solidarity’ to the Palestinian trade union PGFTU after the bombing of their HQ in Gaza City.

ix.         One day later, March 26, Graham issued a letter condemning attempts to stop the manufacture of arms for Israel. Graham attacked ‘groups that look to build networks inside trade unions to undermine the defence industry or demand the disbandment of NATO and AUKUS’.

In her letter Graham said ‘there is no contradiction for a trade union to hold a position of solidarity with Palestinian workers’ whilst making arms intended to murder those same workers. She held that ‘it is a core principle of Unite that as a trade union the 'first claim' on our priorities’ is to support the right of Unite members to produce arms to kill other workers.

Clearly the words ‘international solidarity’ are alien to Graham. It is shameful that the left sects have failed to call her so far. There are indications, judging by a letter critical of Graham in Socialist Worker that the SWP is revising its attitude. Let us hope that Counterfire and the Socialist Party do likewise.

Graham could have told Unite workers that she would support them refusing to handle arms destined for Israel’s murder machine in Gaza in the same way as happened with Rolls Royce workers in East Kilbride in 1973 when they refused to service engines destined for Pinochet’s airforce.

According to Graham’s logic the right of workers at IG Farben to produce Zyklon B for the gas chambers trumped the rights of Jews not to be murdered.

x.           On 11 April the Officers National Committee submitted a collective grievance concerning the flouting of grievance procedures and the victimisation of workers who challenged Graham’s repressive regime. They wrote:

The length of time that grievances and investigations are taking to reach a conclusion is not acceptable in a modern workplace... employees are waiting months after submitting a grievance due to a refusal of some to participate in the process, being banned from your workplace when not even suspended, and an application of “special measures

Using legal privilege to justify enforcing a refusal to allow an employee to present their grievance is disgraceful and anti-trade union... part of our role is to challenge power in the workplace where that power is used to suppress workers seeking transparency, expressing their genuinely held views or seeking protection from abuse.

Threats of legal action for raising a grievance... is... a denial of natural justice.... In seeking to declare a grievance invalid the employer has cited the issues of trust and confidence.... Loss of trust and confidence is a legitimate reason for dismissal by an employer so to reference it is to further intimidate the worker.’

The time has come for the left to stop making excuses for Graham. Richard Allday told me that ‘she has not spoken out on the current atrocity in Palestine’ but he failed to ask why this is. The time has come for the left groups to put clear red water between them and Graham.

Tony Greenstein

When Germany Attacks Jewish anti-Zionists It is Following in the Footsteps of the Gestapo

Zoom link below:

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German Police Smash Up Palestine Congress

On the eve of the First World War Sir Edward Grey, British Foreign Secretary uttered the immortal phrase that summed up what was to come, when he said

‘The lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.’

I think if Judge Silas Reid is going to start imprisoning jurors for coming up with verdicts for the wrong reasons, he should also deny them food & water whilst they’re in gaol, to really lean into that ‘17th century judicial tyrant’ energy https://t.co/tSZZDbSa4Ipic.twitter.com/Y0mdBpPX1F

— Paul Powlesland (@paulpowlesland) March 1, 2024

We could well say the same today. Patrick Devlin, a former Law Lord, wrote in his book Trial by Jury (1956) that the jury system was ‘the lamp that shows that freedom lives”. That too is under threat from judges like Silas Reid who threatened a jury at the Old Bailey with prosecution if they allowed their consciences to interfere with the verdict. Reid’s action were an echo of the famous case of Bushell’s in 1670, when a jury was imprisoned for 2 days and nights without ‘meat, drink, fire or tobacco’, because they refused to return a guilty verdict.

But it is not only in Britain that the lamp of liberty is in danger of being extinguished. In Germany, a state which 80 years ago was exterminating millions of people it classed as subhuman, 2,500 Police forcibly closed a Palestine Congress in Berlin, banning from the country the former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis.

Yanis Varoufakis Describes How He Was Prevented from Speaking at a Palestine Congress in Berlin by Germany’s Police

Germany’s Support for Israel Mirrors Nazi Germany’s Support for Zionism

Today the German state purports to be pro-Jewish but when it comes to Jewish anti-Zionists, the German State is following exactly the same path as the Nazis took 89 years ago. The Nazis too distinguished between Zionists, (good Jews) and anti-Zionists (bad Jews).

On 28 January 1935 Reinhard Heydrich, whom Gerard Reitlinger described as the ‘real engineer of the final solution’ issued a directive:

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

This can be found in Lucy Dawidowicz’s War Against the Jews (p.118).

The result was that the activities of Zionist groups were supervised with ‘more benevolence’ than comparable activities by non-Zionist Jewish groups. The Gestapo and the SD (SS Security Service) ‘place(d) no restrictions on Zionist organisations.’ [Herbert Strauss, pp. 352-3., Jewish Emigration from Germany: Nazi Policies and Jewish Responses]

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

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

On 26 September 1935 in Das Schwarze Korps Heydrich wrote that the German government

Is in agreement with the great spiritual movement within Jewry itself, Zionism, whose position is based on the recognition of the unity of Jewry throughout the world, and the rejection of all ideas of mixing in.[Francis Nicosia’s Zionism and Anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany].

Heydrich was the Deputy to Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS and the second most powerful man in Germany to Hitler himself.

Ian Lustick, an Israeli political scientist, described in The Holocaust in Israeli Political Culture, (p.150) how, in the Eichmann Trial

Extraordinary precautions’ were taken to prevent the name of Hans Globke, the closest advisor to Konrad Adenaeur, the German Chancellor, from being made public.

In 1936 Globke, a senior official at the Interior Ministry, wrote a legal commentary on the Nuremberg Laws which became standard in Nazi Germany’s courts. It stipulated that sexual relations between Aryans and non-Aryans was a crime even if they took place outside Germany. In 1938 he introduced a regulation requiring Jews to take the first names, Israel and Sarah.

In 1941 Globke took part in drawing up an ordinance that stripped Jews in the conquered nations of their citizenship and allowed their possessions to be confiscated. A legal precondition for the Holocaust. ‘Hitler’s former henchman, was true architect of modern Germany’, The Times, 4.3.21.

Globke also played a key role in the development of Israel’s nuclear weapons. Protecting Israeli-German military and financial relations was paramount.[Lustick, fn. 27 p.150] Israel was determined to avoid a little matter like the role of ex-Nazi officials in the new German state coming between Israel and Germany. [ Lars Petersson, Hitler’s Deserters, pp. 123-9]

Berlin police just canceled the entire Palestine Congress. I was the only speaker that successfully finished a speech.

Salman Abu Sitta was cut off after 1 minute. Our livestream ended and electricity cut off.

This is Germany. pic.twitter.com/07NUCpownv

— Hebh Jamal (@hebh_jamal) April 12, 2024

It is this that explains the strategic and military alliance between Germany and Israel and why Germany is prepared to openly support Israel’s genocide in Gaza, to the extent of joining it at the International Court of Justice. ‘Anti-Semitism’ is merely the pretext for attacking democratic rights in Germany itself.

After all Germany took part in 2 genocides in the last century, so what is a third genocide between friends? Indeed there was a direct link between the first genocide, the extermination of the Herero and Nama people in South-West Africa (Namibia) and the Holocaust.

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 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.

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.

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.

An organisation named “Commission Number 3” was created by the Nazis to deal with the so-called problem of the “Rhineland Bastards”. This was organised under Eugen Fischer. It was decided that the African-German children would be sterilised under the 1933 Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring.

The programme began in 1937, when local officials were asked to report on all “Rhineland Bastards” under their jurisdiction.

All together, some 400 children of mixed parentage were arrested and sterilised. The Nazis went to great lengths to conceal their sterilisation and abortion programme. See The Holocaust’s forgotten black victims – the‘Rhineland Bastards’

Liberal Jews in Germany referred to the Zionists as ‘volkish’ or racial Jews. In Romania the Zionists were referred to by other Jews as ‘Hitler Juden (Jews)’. So when the modern day German State favours Zionist Jews they understand their ideological affinity

Why Does the German State Favour the Zionists?

The German State never deNazified after the war. In many cases the same civil servants, the same judges and police chiefs continued to play the same role that they had played in Nazi Germany.

Hostility after the war to Germany was very great, given the millions who had died at its hand. With the division of Europe into East and West, it was crucial to NATO and the Western Alliance that West Germany be integrated into the West’s military alliances. At the time there was a vigorous campaign against German  re-armament.

It was through Israel that Germany was rehabilitated and the price it paid was billions in reparations, which were meant for the holocaust survivors but were paid to the Israeli state. Israel stole the reparations together with the Jewish Claims Conference. To this day Israel keeps over a third living in poverty, choosing between heating and eating.

Reparations and Restitution

Yad Vashem, the Israeli state Holocaust museum boasted that West Germany’s government ‘realized that paying reparations would help accelerate West Germany's acceptance by the Western powers.’

Through reparations and direct transfers of weapons Israel paved the way for the integration of West Germany into NATO. But there was a political price. Israel was not to make an issue of the presence of Nazis in Konrad Adenaeur’s government.

Germany and Britain’s Attack on Democratic Rights

On December 20^th I was arrested under s.12 Terrorism Act 2000 for having posted, a month before, a tweet supporting Hamas, a proscribed organisation. Although Hamas’s military wing, the Al Quassem Brigades had been proscribed in 2001 its political wing had not been proscribed until 2021.

No justification has ever been given for why this further step had been taken although the Zionist organisations had long been lobbying for it. The government’s explanation was that:

Hamas IDQ was proscribed by the UK in March 2001. At the time 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.

No indication was given as to what this assessment was or what had changed since 2021. In fact there is no evidence whatsoever that Hamas is a single organisation any more than the IRA was a single organisation between 1969 and its ceasefire.

A Palestine solidarity demonstration in the Potsdamer Platz area, Berlin, October 15, 2023. The police suppressed the demonstration shortly after authorizing it.

See Germany cancels pro-Palestine event, bars entry to Gaza war witness

If Sinn Fein, the IRA’s political wing had been proscribed along with the IRA then there would have been no Good Friday peace agreement. The ban on Hamas makes it clear that the British government, despite pretending to oppose Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory, in practice does the precise opposite.  As the current genocide demonstrates, the real terrorists have always been the Israeli army and government.

Hilary Clinton Admits to Creating Al Qaeda

Hamas has never operated outside Palestine. It was elected, in free and fair elections, by the Palestinian people in 2006. Comparisons with ISIS are nonsense and merely police state rhetoric. If anyone is responsible for ISIS and Al Qaeda it is the United States. There was no ISIS before the invasion of Iraq and there was no Al Qaeda before the West began funding Islamic fundamentalist groups in Afghanistan in order to overthrow the secular pro-Soviet government there.

During the 1980s the Israeli government was instrumental in creating Hamas, for similar reasons. It wanted a Palestinian counterweight to secular Palestinian nationalism.

Brig. Gen. Yitzhak Segev, who was the Israeli military governor in Gaza in the early 1980s, told a New York Times reporter that he had helped finance the Palestinian Islamist movement as a “counterweight” to the secularists and leftists of the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Fatah party, led by Yasser Arafat (who referred to Hamas as “a creature of Israel.”)

“The Israeli government gave me a budget,” the retired brigadier general confessed, “and the military government gives to the mosques.”

“Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel’s creation,” Avner Cohen, a former Israeli religious affairs official who worked in Gaza for more than two decades, told the Wall Street Journal in 2009. In the mid-80s, Cohen wrote an official report to his superiors warning them not to play divide-and-rule in the Occupied Territories, by backing Palestinian Islamists against Palestinian secularists. See Blowback: How Israel Went From Helping Create Hamas to Bombing It

Today Hamas is enemy no. 1. ‘Terrorism’ is a term of abuse that one hurls at one’s opponents. It has no intrinsic meaning. As Lord Carrington, Margaret Thatcher’s Foreign Secretary admitted‘one man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist.’ In other words ‘terrorist’ is a label to stick on your opponents.

The Nazis too labelled their opponents ‘terrorists’ or ‘bandits’. To them the Maquis, the French Resistance, was a terrorist group as were the Partisans and all those who fought against them but the British had no problem at the time allying with them.

That is why Britain’s anti-terrorist legislation is based on a lie. Hamas is no more of a terrorist than any number of groups that the US and Britain has funded when it founded convenient.

Hamas has never operated outside Palestine. Unlike ISIS it did not send operatives to blow people up in Europe such as at the Bataclan massacre in Paris in 2015 which both it and Islamic Jihad condemned.

Prevent & The Use of Anti-Terrorism To Silence Dissent – The Thinking of the Thought Police

The British state has been very adept at exploiting terrorism in order to politically attack their opponents and in particular Muslims. It has laid the basis of Islamaphobia. Prevent was first introduced by the Blair government in 2006 to counter terrorism.

Since the passage of the Counter-Terrorism and Security Act July 2015 there has been what is known as the Prevent Duty. Schools, Universities and a wide range of public sector bodies have a legal responsibility to “have due regard to the need to prevent people from being drawn into terrorism”.

It is based on the bonkers idea, which the Police have adopted wholesale, that non-violent ‘extremism’ is the conveyor belt to terrorism. It is bonkers because there is no proof of this theory and because the causes of terrorism are self evident. Little things like America and Britain’s illegal invasion of Iraq that MPs voted for and Blair lied for with the story of Weapons of Mass Destruction.

Terrorism has causes and they are down to the fact that Western imperialism insists on invading, bombing and destabilising countries in the Global South in order that they can extract their wealth.

In Libya a country under the unified government of Muammar Ghadaffi was bombed by NATO countries and the result was a failed state which included ISIS and a refugee crisis.

The same happened in Syria where the CIA, Saudi Arabia and Qatar funded and supplied weapons to a host of Jihadi groups in their efforts to overthrow the Assad regime. Not surprisingly this gave ISIS a headstart and as in Afghanistan, the West’s Frankenstein turned against them. This is what creates terrorism not radicalisation.

Prevent operates on the basis that people are ‘radicalised’ by ‘extreme’ views and then are susceptible to recruitment by terrorists. No proof has ever been found to back up this nonsense. If anything Prevent is likely to create the very problem it’s designed to overcome.

It is no accident that the vast majority of people targeted by Prevent are Muslims and that support for Palestine is one of the indicators that someone is susceptible to being drawn to terrorism.

When I was remanded in Birmingham prison for a week in 2021, after having been arrested going on a Palestine Action outing, I was asked at the prison reception whether I was an ‘extremist’.  I asked her if she knew what an ‘extremist’ was and she confessed she didn’t.

I then explained that all those who fight for their freedom and democratic rights are called extremists and I gave as an example the Suffragettes who were called ‘extremists’ and ‘terrorists’. Today they have plaques in the House of Commons and statues commemorating them but in their time they were vilified by people like Churchill.

Next thing I know, the Jewish Chronicle said I was comparing myself to the Suffragettes.  Some people just don’t get it.

Last Thursday I went to court challenging the Police seizure of my computer and electronic equipment. Although most of it has no value to the Police they insist on hanging on to it.

I brought an action under s.1 of the Police Property Act 1897. The matter was adjourned to a later date. For the hearing the Police officer in charge of my case, Chris Beckford from the Anti-Terrorist Police prepared a witness statement. It was very interesting and gives a good insight into the mentality of Britain’s Thought Police.

In his statement Beckford stated on page 2, paragraph 7 that:

Itisimportanttotheinvestigation that we fully understand Mr Greenstein’s mind set and ideology. This not only comes from public sources, ie his blog and socialmedia,butfromhisinternetsearchhistoryandcommunicationwithothers.How,andindeedif,hetalksaboutHamas with others away from the public domain provides highly relevant insight into MrGreenstein. (my emphasis)

This isn’t ‘anti-terrorism’ it is the thought police. An insight into someone’s mindset and how they think. Not once in the course of two interviews lasting about 2.5 hours was I asked about any bombs I had made or planted.

The only questions related to articles on my blog or a speech I made at Holocaust Memorial Day on January 27. Counter-terrorism has become the policing of peoples’ minds and what they can say. And there are still fools, knaves and liars like Starmer and Sunak who pretend that this has something to do with peoples’ safety when it is about restricting what we are and are not allowed to say.

In the final paragraph of his witness statement Beckford wrote that:

The return of the property to Mr Greenstein at this stage would be prejudicial and compromising to the investigation as to whether he supports a proscribed terrorist organisation, and whether there is a wider risk to the public that they will be subjected to this support.

So what is this risk to the public? That they will be blown up by my words and thoughts? Chris Beckford is anxious to ensure that no one will be subjected’ to my views on Hamas and the Palestinians. Some might call this censorship but I would be loathe to do so.

This is not just a paper exercise. I was reported to the Police by Zionists and one racist in particular by the name of Heidi Bachram. The Zionist movement in this country is busy trying to extinguish our freedom of speech having done much the same in Israel.

The corrupt rogues and thieves who govern us go scot free. Billions of pounds went to the crooked cronies of the Tories via a VIP channel for procurement. Yet the Police are not interested in investigating corruption, perjury or miscarriages of justice. To date just 2 people have been investigated over the Post Office conspiracy to jail and convict nearly a thousand innocent sub-postmasters. The Met Police are not interested in crimes by the rich and powerful.

Clamping down on free speech in this country or playing the part of the Gestapo by Germany’s police is what freedom under capitalism means in the 21^st century as world war comes ever closer and climate catastrophe signals the end of the human race.

So I guess I am an ‘extremist’ because i want to abolish capitalism before it abolishes us.

Tony Greenstein

 The Campaign Against Antisemitism only gets away with their Lies because Press & Politicians Render Invisible the Thousands of Jews Who Take Part in the anti-Genocide Demonstrations

Sky News Extended Video Showed the Duplicity & Dishonesty of Falter

Gideon Falter’s attempt to play the ‘victim of anti-Semitism’ card ignominiously collapsed this week as he was shown to be a charlatan and a liar. Sky News video of his confrontation with the Police, unlike the carefully edited one the CAA released, shows that his claim of wanting to cross the road was a lie and that he was trying to walk into the march, with bodyguards, and provoke a confrontation.

Falter even dressed as a religious Jew for the occasion, complete with a yarmulke. If you look at Gideon Falter in his interviews it is noticeable that he is not wearing a head covering. See also Did an Israel Lobbyist Confect an Antisemitism Story About a Palestine Demo?

Falter was going out of his way to say ‘I am Jewish’ not for religious reasons but as a way of pretending that hostility to him was on account of his being Jewish rather than a supporter of genocide.

Even John Mann Criticised Gideon Falter

I forgot that I actually did take a short video of the Gideon Falter incident on the Palestine march last weekend. He had clearly come over from a small pro Israeli protest to try to antagonise people with his video guy to capture it. pic.twitter.com/VBQ5HHAFZo

— John Lubbock (@jwsal) April 21, 2024

As the Guardian noted, in footage of the incident, Falter appeared to be accompanied by a security guard as he was confronted by police officers. When asked by an officer what his intentions were and how many people were in his group he said: “I’m just waiting for a couple of people and then we are planning to carry on our way.”

When asked to confirm that footage showed Falter accompanied by a security guard, the CAA said it couldn’t comment. In fact it seems that he was accompanied by a whole bevy of Israeli security.

The claims that the Palestine demonstrations in London were anti-Semitic or that Jews were afraid to go near them falls down on one simple fact. Thousands of Jewish people have taken part in them. No one has been attacked. We have always been welcomed on the march.

Ben Jamal of PSC and Falter Discuss The Failed Scam

Holocaust Survivor Message to US Campus Protesters:

This survivor of the Holocaust is against Genocide in Gaza & conflating Jewishness with Zionism, which does nothing but increase antisemitism.

Your protests are so persistent, large and global that eventually the Western… pic.twitter.com/IDCH0NTO6m

— Double Down News (@DoubleDownNews) April 24, 2024

As the Guardian reported‘

a group representing Holocaust survivors, who attended the same pro-Palestinian demonstration as Falter, disputed his claim that the march was a no-go zone for Jews.

The group, which included Stephen Kapos, a Holocaust survivor from Budapest, and four other child survivors, said in an email:

“Throughout [Falter’s] interactions with the police, we were standing only a few yards away from him, yet we experienced nothing but warmth and solidarity from the pro-Palestine demonstrators and not a hint of antisemitism.

“Our group was ‘openly Jewish’ in that we all wore placards saying that, as descendants of Holocaust survivors, we oppose the ongoing genocide in Gaza.

“Every major pro-Palestine demonstration in London has included a large Jewish bloc which has received nothing but support and warmth from their fellow demonstrators.”

The Guardian only printed excerpts from the press release. The original is below:

It has been widely reported that Gideon Falter, chief executive of the Campaign Against Antisemitism, was threatened with arrest when he approached a pro-Palestine demonstration on 13 April in the Aldwych area of London.

Mr. Falter is reported to have said that his interactions with police officers “show that the Met believes that being openly Jewish will antagonise the anti-Israel marchers and that Jews need protection, which the police cannot guarantee. Instead of addressing that threat of antisemitic violence, the Met's policy instead seems to be that law-abiding Jewish Londoners should not be in the parts of London where these marches are taking place. In other words, that they are no-go zones for Jews."

We are writing to disagree strongly with these claims. This is because throughout his interactions with the police we were standing only a few yards away from him, yet we experienced nothing but warmth and solidarity from the pro-Palestine demonstrators and not a hint of antisemitism.

Our group was “openly Jewish” in that we all wore placards saying that, as descendants of Holocaust survivors, we oppose the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Indeed, one of us, Stephen Kapos, is a child survivor of the Holocaust who wasinterviewed by Sky News and the BBC's Leigh Milner at the time.

Every major pro-Palestine demonstration in London has included a large Jewish bloc which has received nothing but support and warmth from their fellow demonstrators. Claims that these protests are no-go zones for Jews are completely untrue.

Haim Bresheeth (son of two survivors of Auschwitz),

Mark Etkind (son of a survivor of the Lodz ghetto and Buchenwald)

Stephen Kapos (survivor of the Holocaust in Budapest)

Peter Kapos (son of a Holocaust survivor)

Yosefa Loshitzky (daughter of survivors of the Holocaust in Poland)

For the past two years, Stephen Kapos has spoken at both of our Holocaust Memorial Day commemorations.

It is no surprise that when Ben Jamal mentioned the presence of thousands of Jews on the march, including the Jewish bloc, Falter refused to continue the interview. Zionists like him can’t face the fact that many Jews do not support genocide and the murder of children by the Nazi-style mass assassination factories of Israel.

Falter ducks debate with Ben Jamal as he is thrown by references to anti-Zionist/anti-racist Jews

The Guardian noted that

Met insiders were apparently dubious that Falter had been out merely for a stroll and just happened across the march. Falter has said he had been walking in the capital after attending synagogue and was not there to counter-protest.

Falter was filmed on the north and south sides of Aldwych in different encounters with officers. In one video on the north side, he said he wanted to “carry on my way” and was asked how many people were with him. He said he was waiting for a couple of friends.

In another, on the south side, he said he wanted to walk on the north side. An officer says he had already been seen “walking against the march”

Gideon Falter, CEO of Campaign against antisemitism is seen in discussion with the police during the Pro Palestine March on Saturday. He brought his own security detail. pic.twitter.com/U6HlA89yOD

— Tom Bowles (@tomsdinner) April 19, 2024

Falter’s purpose was to provoke an incident and then spin it as anti-Semitic. When a Policeman said that he was ‘openly Jewish’ what he meant was that he openly supported Israel. Unfortunately the Police have imbibed, as I said in a previous blog, the idea that the marches pose a threat to Jews. The officer’s remarks were therefore logical given what they have been told rather than anti-Semitic.

If Falter had been a Muslim and tried to walk into a Zionist march the Police wouldn’t have spent 13 minutes arguing with him and simply pushed him back when he tried to push past. He’d have been arrested.

How long do you have to wait for a march to arrive, with a film crew and bodyguard, before you can no longer claim to have ‘stumbled’ across it?

Asking for a Falter. pic.twitter.com/JoCLrblMYa

— Dr Louise Raw (@LouiseRawAuthor) April 22, 2024

On a previous demonstration the Police interposed themselves between the Jewish bloc and the rest of the march because they believed them to be in danger! This is the product of the media equation of being Jewish and supporting Israel. They cannot handle the fact that thousands of Jews today are anti-Zionist and opposed to the existence of a racist, apartheid ‘Jewish’ state.

The Campaign Against Antisemitism

The CAA was founded in the summer of 2014 during Operation Protective Edge when 2,200 Palestinians died, including 550 children.

The CAA was founded at the instigation of Israel’s dirty tricks Ministry of Strategic Affairs. Its mission was to portray opposition to Israel’s attacks on Gaza as motivated by anti-Semitism.

Falter, who chairs  the CAA, is a board member of the Jewish National Fund UK. The JNF has a long history of supporting ethnic cleansing in Palestine. An openly racist organisation, it controls 93% of Israeli land which is off limits to Israel’s  Palestinian population.

In its entry on the Charity Commission website JNF-UK stated that:

THE OBJECTS ARE THE RELIEF OF POVERTY, AND THE FURTHERANCE OF ANY OTHER PURPOSES WHICH ARE CHARITABLE ACCORDING TO ENGLISH LAW, WITHIN THE STATE OF ISRAEL AS CONSTITUTED FROM TIME TO TIME, ESPECIALLY SUCH CHARITABLE PURPOSES AS BENEFIT PERSONS OF JEWISH RELIGION, RACE OR ORIGIN

The CAA only became a charity because the Charity Commission at the time was headed by Islamaphobic bigot William Shawcross. In 2012, as Director of the Henry Jackson Society, Shawcross said:

Europe and Islam is one of the greatest, most terrifying problems of our future. I think all European countries have vastly, very quickly growing Islamic populations

That is why the many complaints which had been made against the CAA for being a political organisation have been rejected. Its aim between 2015-19 was to remove Corbyn as Labour Leader.

Falter has become ever more hysterical at the support that the Palestinians in Gaza have received from people. Falter even called for the ‘home secretary to trigger draconian powers and even send in the army to “uphold the values that our country stands for”.

Falter forgot that he wasn’t in Israel where bringing in the army is quite normal to prevent Palestinians demonstrating! The total number of people who have taken part in the London marches, is probably in the region of 2-3 million. What irks Falter and the CAA is that millions of people are repelled by Israel’s continued genocidal attacks on defenceless Palestinians. War crimes are not popular.

Opinion polls have consistently shown that over 70% of British people support an immediate ceasefire and oppose Britain selling arms to Israel.

The only support that Israel has received is from the British Establishment. Nowhere was this more evident than in Sunak’s panicked reaction to George Galloway’s victory in the Rochdale by-election when he dashed out of Downing Street to froth about mobs roaming the streets and Jewish children afraid to walk the streets.

If we had a genuine media in this country as opposed to a prostitute press, then the obvious question to ask would be why Sunak and Braverman have expended so much effort in demonising refugees coming to Britain and devising the ludicrously expensive Rwanda scheme whilst at the same time bleating on about ‘anti-Semitism’.

The CAA has specialised in targeting anyone who opposes Zionism and the Israeli state, in particular Jewish people. Since 2014 the CAA had produced an ‘anti-Semitism barometer’ telling us how anti-Semitism is increasing in Britain. Despite everything they found that anti-Semitism was more common on the right than the left. As their 2017 Anti-Semitism Barometerconcluded:

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

Daniel Allington - King's College's Fake Academic

It therefore decided to invent a new measure of anti-Semitism which was signed off by academic-for-hire Daniel Allington of King’s College, London who was willing to prostitute himself and King’s by producing bogus ‘research’ that would fit the CAA’s predetermined conclusions that anti-Semitism was a left-wing problem.

What the CAA needed was to invent a set of questions that would 'prove' that it is the Left who are the real anti-Semites. Step forward Allington who was more than willing to use his academic credentials to ‘prove’ that the far-Right was really benevolent to Jews.

From 2015 to 2018 the CAA used Yougov to ask a series of statements that were allegedly anti-Semitic in order to show that the level of anti-Semitism was high in Britain. They were:

1.  “British Jewish people chase money more than other British people.”

2.  “Having a connection to Israel makes Jewish people less loyal to Britain than other British people.”

3.  “Jewish people consider themselves to be better than other British people.”

4.  “Compared to other groups, Jewish people have too much power in the media.”

5.  “Jewish people talk about the Holocaust just to further their political agenda.” or in 2015 “Jews talk about the Holocaust too much in order to get sympathy.”

6.  “Jewish people can be trusted just as much as other British people in business.” or in 2015 “In business, Jews are not as honest as most people.”

7.  “I am just as open to having Jewish friends as I am to having friends from other sections of British society” or in 2015 “I would be unhappy if a family member married a Jew.”

It is arguable that a majority of these statements are not anti-Semitic since there is a factual basis to them. But even if some people believe such generalisations about Jews, it doesn’t mean they are hostile to Jews, which is the classic way of understanding anti-Semitism.

Commentingon these questions Anshel Pfeffer wrote in Ha'aretz that:

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

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

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

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

‘If the majority of British Jews and the authors of the CAA report actually believe that, then it’s hard to take anything they say about contemporary anti-Semitism in their home country seriously.’

He went on to say that

‘To compare today’s Britain, for all its faults, with the Jews’ situation in 1930s exhibits a disconnect from reality which borders on hysteria.’

In 2018 the CAA employed Allington to fix their Antisemitism Barometer. In 2018 it still concluded that anti-Semitism was more prevalent on the right than left. The problem was what to do about this? Allington added 6 new questions with the sole intention of skewing the results. Allington embarked on what can only be called an act of academic fraud. His ‘research’ valueless. He decided what his conclusions were first and fitted the ‘evidence’ around them.

The 2019 Antisemitism Barometer was the first to show that ‘anti-Semitic views were most widespread on the far-left.' 

What had changed in one year? Had people on the left and right suddenly changed their opinions? Was there really a shift in peoples’ attitudes to Jews? Of course not. All that happened was that under the guidance of two dishonest academics - Allington and David Hirsh -  the CAA had added a new set of 6 questions, all of which were to do with Israel not anti-Semitism. They were:

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

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

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

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

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

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

The fraudulent nature of these questions is immediately obvious. They have nothing at all to do with Jews but with a racist state that calls itself ‘Jewish’. The CAA conceded that Question 5 had nothing to do with anti-Semitism but they added it anyway

‘Although… not antisemitic in itself, analysis showed that it was in fact a very good predictor of a respondent’s responses to other statements and therefore a good indicator of anti-Zionist antisemitic attitudes in general.’

Question number 4 is particularly egregious. I didn’t find myself comfortable spending time with supporters of Apartheid in South Africa or indeed racists generally. Did this make me a racist? I would be equally unhappy spending time with defenders of General Pinochet in Chile. Does that make me anti-Chilean? Perhaps not liking spending time with Nazis means you are an anti-German racist.

You can see where equating Israel with a Jew leads. Question 6 says that if you don’t accept Israel’s ‘right to defend itself against those who want to destroy it’ you are anti-Semitic. This assumes that Israel is the victim whereas today it is clear that Israel is a genocidal state.

On the basis of Allington's 'research' the CAA concluded that:

‘Among the very left-wing, 42% believe that Israel’s supporters are damaging British democracy, and 60% believe that Israel treats the Palestinians like the Nazis treated the Jews, which directly evokes one of the examples of antisemitism in the International Definition of Antisemitism.’

By Quoting Israel’s First Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion Jackie Walker Became a Holocaust Denier!

Deceit and dishonesty are programmed into the CAA’s DNA and Falter is their Dr Strangelove. The CAA will therefore print the most outrageous lies if that serves its purposes. Anything and everything in the hands of the CAA can be distorted into becoming anti-Semitic.

A vivid example of this was on 7 February 2017 when the CAA put up a post"Jackie Walker posts text asking whether Hitler can really be blamed for the Holocaust". The opening sentence of their post said that it ‘leaves open the possibility that he was justified.’

Linger over those last few weasel words, ‘leaves open the possibility’ hint, hint, nudge, nudge.  She didn’t actually say it but we all know that she meant to say!

Jackie Walker was the Black-Jewish activist who was expelled from the Labour Party after having been targeted repeatedly by the racist Jewish Labour Movement.

Jackie Walker was the ideal target. She was Black. Even worse, she claimed to be Jewish when every Zionist knows that is impossible.

You may think that the CAA would have difficulty with the following quote. However that is to underestimate the skills of the CAA.

Any normal person would ask how on earth anyone could conclude from the above that Hitler was not responsible for the Holocaust.

Unfortunately for the CAA the quote was from Nahum Goldmann’s The Jewish Paradox – A Personal Memoir1978 p.99. Goldmann was a former President of the World Jewish Congress and World Zionist Organisation! Goldmann was quoting directly from David Ben-Gurion, the first Prime Minister of Israel.

Like most Zionists the CAA knows nothing about the history of Zionism except that which they are spoonfed. The quote is included in the Wikipedia entry on David Ben-Gurion. See my blog at the time

Of course the CAA deleted the post when they realised their mistake but not before it had been widely distributed and commented upon by people like Jack Mendel, a Jewish News  ‘journalist’. Dishonesty pervades everything the CAA touches. It is a Midas touch in reverse.

When you live in a permanent haze of Zionist propaganda and lies, nothing seems real. It is a wilderness of mirrors. The CAA are no more interested in eradicating genuine anti-Semitism than Rishi Sunak is in redistributing wealth. The CAA have no case for remaining a charity.  They provide absolutely no public benefit and nor are their purposes charitable.

Dishonesty and plain old-fashioned lying are their main attributes. That they are treated as a serious organisation by the mainstream media is testament to the inability of organisations like the BBC to investigate who they are dealing with. Britain’s rabid tabloid press is more than happy to take these imposters at their word.

How the CAA Manipulates Statistics

As a Zionist organisation the CAA believes that the ‘real home’ of Jews is in Israel, not Britain. This is what Netanyahu told French Jews after the murder of 4 Jews in 2015. The CAA therefore conducted an unscientific poll of British Jews in order ‘prove’ that most Jews were thinking about leaving Britain for Israel.  It found that:

58% of Jews believed that they had no future in Europe.

More than half of British Jews feel that antisemitism now echoes the 1930s

1 in 4 British Jews has considered leaving the country in the past two years because of rising antisemitism.

45% of Jews questioned feel their family is threatened by Islamist extremism.

77% of Jews questioned have witnessed antisemitism disguised as a political comment about Israel.

84% of Jews consider boycotts of businesses selling Israeli products to be intimidation &

82% say that media bias against Israel fuels persecution of Jews in Britain.

These were loaded questions. Contrast this witha rigorously controlled, academic surveyof the British Jewish community by the Department of Sociology at City University (November 2015). This found that nearly a quarter, 24%, of British Jews supported sanctions to bring about a peace settlement. There was a ‘sizeable minority’ supporting sanctions (34%-41%) among the young, the highly qualified academically and those who are not affiliated to a synagogue). The survey even found that whilst 59% identify as a Zionist nearly a third, 31%, didn’t see themselves as Zionists.

Even the Jewish Chroniclepoured cold water on the CAA’s ‘findings’ with its own Survation poll. Some 88% of British Jews stated that they had no intention of emigrating. Jewish Chronicle 14.1.15.

The CAA poll was junk but it served its purpose, which was to whip up fears of anti-Semitism among Jews. Zionist organisations see their goal as ‘helping’Jewish people to emigrate to Israel.

The CAA’s Islamaphobia

Under the title Profile of British Muslim Antisemitism the CAA published a highly racist and offensive cartoon of a typical Muslim male. It has since deleted it. Islamaphobia is an integral part of Zionism. One of the campaign’s stated objectives is to “promote racial harmony.” In practice, its activities are designed to achieve the exact opposite. The CAA consistently targets Muslims.

“Littered with flaws”

The CAA published a report in 2016 on “British Muslim anti-Semitism.” (also deleted). It included a ‘profile’ of the kind of person that the campaign was targeting. The profile was highly racist. According to the CAA, the typical Muslim anti-Semite was likely to be a first-generation immigrant and living in public housing.

If someone had posted a similar portrayal of Jews, the CAA would have been the first to claim “anti-Semitism.” The report alleged that “many British Muslims reserve a special hatred for British Jews.”

“On every single count, British Muslims were more likely by far than the general British population to hold deeply anti-Semitic views,” it added.

The conclusions were based on a poll conducted for Channel 4. Yet even the Community Security Trust, a staunchly pro-Israel group, raised doubts about the conclusions which the CAA drew.

In a blog post for the CST, Dave Rich wrote:

“This latest poll showed something else that is interesting, and is not specific to Muslims: that people who believe anti-Semitic things about Jews rarely think of themselves as anti-Semitic.”

“What is perhaps curious, though, is that this is not reflected in a more basic question that was asked in the same poll about how favorable or unfavorable Muslims feel towards Jewish people as a religious group,”

Asked what their feelings were towards Jews: on a sliding scale from 0-100 – where 0 is the least favourable, British Muslims scored 57.1. This hardly suggests rampant anti-Semitism.

The CAA specialises in distorting statistics. In its annual “anti-Semitism barometer” report for 2015, it claimed that an opinion poll showed that “almost half (45 percent) of British adults believe at least one of the anti-Semitic statements shown to them to be true.”

The questions were carefully chosen to elicit the required answers. One statement was that “Jews’ loyalty to Israel makes them less loyal to Britain than other British people.” Is it surprising that one in five people believe this given that Jewish anti-Zionists are regularly accused of being “traitors”?

Clearly many Zionists believe that their first loyalty is to Israel. In 2013 Israel’s ministries for foreign affairs and immigrant absorption distributed a questionnaire to American Jews asking where their loyalties would lie in the event of a crisis between the two countries.

In January 2015 the Institute for Jewish Policy Research in London found that the CAA’s “barometer” report was “littered with flaws” and the group’s work “may even be rather irresponsible.”

The IJPR criticized the way that the CAA had used data collected by YouGov to make the “rather sensationalist claim that almost half of all British adults harbor some sort of anti-Semitic view.” YouGov had been commissioned to undertake the poll by the CAA.

According to the IJPR,

a far more accurate and honest read” of the data would “highlight the fact that between 75 percent and 90 percent of people in Britain either do not hold anti-Semitic views or have no particular view of Jews either way, and only about 4 percent to 5 percent of people can be characterized as clearly anti-Semitic.

In 2009 Foreign Office diplomat Rowan Laxton was accused by Falter of having shouted out, whilst exercising by himself in a gym, ‘fucking Israelis, fucking Jews’ after having seen on a TV screen footage of an elderly Palestinian man killed by Israel in Gaza.

Laxton, who is High Commissioner to the Republic of Cameroon, was prosecuted under s.5 of the Public Order Act for using ‘threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour, or disorderly behaviour …’ in a public place. The Police were not inclined to prosecute at first but Falter leaked it to the Daily Mail and put the Police under pressure. Laxton was convicted by Westminster Magistrates Court and was then suspended by the Foreign Office.

Laxton appealed to Southwark Crown Court who acquitted him of using the phrase ‘fucking Jews’. In other words Gideon Falter was a liar who had tried to ruin someone’s career for expressing their emotions about an Israeli attack on Gaza which killed 1400 civilians.  The death of Palestinians is not something which disturbs Falter in the slightest. As Professor Geoffrey Pullum noted in The diplomat, the bishop, the bomber, and the fruit bat the Daily Mail which reported the initial conviction did not report Laxton’s successful appeal.

Tony Greenstein

 Life at War - Part 1: Learning to live with a constant fear of death

I first met Tarneem at a Boycott Israel Network Weekend School about 2 years ago. She was a student at an old established university in England and active in Palestine solidarity work.

A few weeks she contacted me from Gaza where she had returned to a very different life. Gaza was at war and she wanted me to help in raising funds for her sick mother who needed to get to Egypt if there was any chance of her living.

In England she was a student of English and I asked her to write the article below so that people can understand the life that she, her family and thousands like her are living as Israel tries to pursue its ethnic cleansing and genocidal project.

This is her story. It is a story of a living hell that the war criminals who rule in the West – Genocide Joe Biden, David Cameron, Anthony Blinken and Rishi Sunak – are fuelling with supplies of more weapons to kill more civilians.

We learn today that Netanyahu is afraid that the International Criminal Court will issue a warrant for him and the other Judeo-Nazi War Leaders in Israel.

Biden we hear is doing his level best to put pressure on the Court’s Prosecutor Karim A. A. Khan KC not to issue any because Israel doesn’t recognise the ICC. Strangely enough Biden welcomed the ICC issuing warrants against Vladimir Putin even though Russia also doesn’t recognise the court.

The hypocrisy is breathtaking and demonstrates the collapse of any pretence that international law has any meaning. Karim himself was happy to issue warrants against Putin at a moment’s notice but has done his best to delay having to take any action against Netanyahu despite the fact that children have been deliberately targeted by Israel in this war. 500 children have died in two years of war in Ukraine, 30 times that number in 6 months in Gaza. The hypocrisy of our leaders is there for all to see but their only apparent concern is for Israel’s hostages, never Palestinian hostages.

The photographs below were taken by Tarneem and depict her environment.

Enough of my observations, let Tarneem tell her story.

Tony Greenstein

Bombing has become a regular part of my life.

I was raised in Gaza. This is the place of my childhood and youth. Every corner of this city has some emotional value for me and is associated with countless memories. I returned to Gaza from the United Kingdom after earning my master’s at Durham university, in early March to see my family, and help my people. With the beginning of this war, I am trapped in this living hell. Bombing and air raids had now become a part of my daily life. I would like to say that I am used to the constant sound of bombing and the feeling of the walls shaking, but I am not. For over six months, my family and hundreds of thousands of Gazan families live in constant fear of death. Our days consists of trying to stay alive and trying to find a way out. There are explosions and aircraft flying overhead every day. The bombings are everywhere and are getting closer than ever and sound bombs are the worst. We can think of nothing else, and we can feel nothing else. The days of the week stopped to have any meaning, I can’t tell whether it is Friday or Saturday, it is all just one long nightmare. My sister tries to keep count of the days, but for me it is all a blur.

One night, we all woke up terrified “I can't take this anymore. I can't even sleep anymore without jumping at every little noise." I told my family. My brother, Ali, replied "I feel like I'm constantly on edge. It's destroying my well-being." The bombardments were very close to the house. They usually increase in intensity once the sun goes down: it's psychological warfare, at night everything is more terrifying for us. 

How could I describe my home becoming a place of fear and terror? How could I take more hours and long nights of relentless bombings, explosions, and tank shelling? I was worried for my sister – she was so stressed because of the bombings that I thought her heart would stop. Her fitness watch showed 180 heartbeats per minute, and I was so worried to see her like this.I told her it would be stupid if she were to die from fear in the midst of all this! “Look! Who’s talking?”, my sister said. Then my siblings followed up with a conversation about how I turn off all our flashlights and remove batteries every time I hear a bombing.

Sister: "Did you hear that? I think it's another bombing raid."

Brother: "Yeah, I heard it. But seriously, does Tarneem really think turning off the lights will make us invisible to the war planes?"

Sister: "Apparently so! She acts like we're playing hide and seek with bombers."

Brother: "I swear, if we turned off the lights every time we heard a bomb, we'd be sitting in the dark all night.Let's just hope Tarneem doesn't ask us to start whispering next."

Sister: "Oh, don't give her any ideas!"

We laughed, knowing deep inside that this is a mental trauma that might last forever but anything to lighten the mood in this chaos was welcomed. There is no time to deal with our PTSD, it’s never post for us, always chronic.

Not knowing how long it will last makes this nightmare even worse. I will ask for some help later as it is impossible to do it now and, to be honest, I do not have time for it at the moment. I, now, spend my time caring for my mother, she is going through a lot more, but we support each other as much as we can. My beloved mother, 66 years old, needs urgent medical treatment. She requires two CT scans yearly for her upper thigh to monitor her condition, but she hasn't been able to receive any since October 2023. Unfortunately, even if the war in Gaza were to end, the necessary medical facilities and procedures would still be lacking. To make matters worse, there is no PET scan available in Gaza either. Her condition has been worsening, and she has been experiencing excruciating pain in her leg. We have managed to obtain some painkillers and vitamins, but the lack of nutritious food and essential medicines in Gaza is putting her health at serious risk. I am extremely worried about her, and I need to get her out of here.

Another day filled with the relentless sounds of bombing and airstrikes. I lay still in bed, my niece Mary sleeping beside me. With my seasonal allergy, I couldn't help but sneeze. Little did I know, this sneeze would evoke a heart-wrenching reaction from Mary.

Instantly, Mary's hands shot to her ears, her eyes tightly shut in a futile attempt to block out the cacophony of noise. Panic surged within me as I feared I had disturbed her sleep, but her mother's calm voice reassured me otherwise. "Mary thinks your sneeze was bombing,"she explained softly, her gaze filled with a mixture of sadness and resignation. "She does that every time there is bombing while she is sleeping."

The trauma inflicted by the constant barrage of explosions weighed heavily on us all, even seeping into our sleep. And for Mary, so young and innocent, the horrors of war were incomprehensible, yet painfully palpable in her instinctive reaction to the slightest disturbance.

As I lay here in the darkness, listening to the distant rumble of explosions, I can only hope and pray for a future where peace reigns and the sounds of war are nothing but a distant memory.Nevertheless, I find relief writing about my experience. The greatest source of support in these times is the messages of love and hope that I receive from people who know me and knows the reality about Gaza. Just realising that there are people who reject all the atrocities happening in Gaza makes me hopeful that things will get better one day. There is nothing more terrifying than seeing your loved ones suffering and your hometown being destroyed.

Facing the chaos of trying to come terms with a new life

Every morning in Gaza begins with uncertainty. Our so basic and so earthly human desires are our suffering and today is no different. With each passing moment, I am reminded of the harsh reality of life in a war-torn city. My mind races with the endless list of tasks that should be completed each day. One pressing dilemma is always water. Our tanks on the roof are empty, and the thought of another day without a drop of water weighs heavily on my mind. Water is needed for cooking, drinking, for a quick sponge bath and some essential laundry, which feels like some great extravagant luxury. A normal visit to the toilet must be planned, pre-planned, and precisely thought out so that one does not spend more water – it’s a constant balance between normal human urge, maintaining one’s sanity, and losing it all in a jiffy.

We need water in our tanks, but to pump it up, we need a water engine. And that engine needs fuel, which is scarce and expensive. Perhaps we can run the engine on electricity, I think to myself. But alas, electricity has been a luxury since the war began. Luckily, we have solar panels, a rare blessing in these troubled times. However, on cloudy days like today, there's not enough sunlight to power the engine. In the end, we are left with no choice but to rely on the one precious cylinder of cooking gas we have. It's a meager supply, one that we waited in line for hours to get. But in this unforgiving world, every drop of water is worth its weight in gold. This means that we’ll cook using firewood today, because we need to save the resources we have. Every day is a day of choosing your new priority. Is it water? Is it charging batteries and phones? Is it food and cooking?

As I write this, I can't help but wonder what tomorrow will bring. Will it be another day of impossible choices, another day of fighting to survive? So many close friends have been killed, will it be my turn tomorrow? Only time will tell.

Before the war I used to buy bread, now I make it. Before the war, I used to come back from work to home, and then I would relax on my bed and talk to my mum about my day, now it is not just boredom – it's anxiety, tension all the time. Before the war I used to have a group call with my international friends, now I struggle to search for a good signal daily to update them about my situation. Before the war I used to have a hot shower and sleep to release the fatigue of the day, now there is a lack of gas, lack of water, a symphony of relentless bombing and drones hovering over my head all night long.  

Every day is Gaza is a battle against food shortages, sanitation crisis, and blackouts, andon top of all this is the ever-present fear of death. It’s been half a year since this nightmare began, and the situation gets worse every day. People in Gaza die each day because of shelling, bombing and due to the lack of all basic needs – food, water, healthcare. Innocent civilians struggle through unbearable conditions and hardships every day, every hour, and every minute. Yet, amidst the chaos, there remains a glimmer of hope. And so, we press on, facing each new day with courage and determination, uncertain of what the future may hold.

Writer’s note:

You can donate to my mother’s evacuation fundraising campaign through this link:

https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-ali-get-medical-help-for-his-mum-outside-gaza

 At a time of Genocide & Ethnic Cleansing in Gaza the CPB is Holding a Seminar ‘Understanding Anti-Semitism’s ‘Contested’ Relationship to Anti-Zionism'

[This article also appears in this week's Weekly Worker as Distracting from genocide]

‘Anti-Semitism’ has been the weapon that Zionism has deployed to defend genocide in Gaza. It is not out of choice but necessity. Any manifestation of support for the Palestinians is deemed anti-Semitic for one simple reason. It is impossible to defend mass executions, starvation of a population, destruction of hospitals and mass murder of children unless you attack your critics. It is as if protesters against Apartheid in South Africa had been motivated by hatred of White people.

Student Sit-in at Columbia University

Reactionaries like Sunak, have labelled Palestinians and their supporters as anti-Semitic hate marchers. Braverman described the slogan ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine must be free’as ‘an anti-Semitic chant’ whilst calling for the marches to be banned.

Despite all their talk of wars for democracy what the warmongers really mean is a war on democracy. If there’s one thing that the Bravermans, Priti Patels, Sunaks and Starmers fear is that we exercise our rights to get rid of them and capitalism with it.

John Pilger: The War on Democracy": Out on DVD

Nowhere is this more in evidence than in the unprecedented wave of solidarity in universities in the United States where campus after campus has risen up in revolt and established encampments. The American State is demonstrating that underneath the sugar coating of democracy lies a highly repressive military-police apparatus.

Despite all the rhetoric about a free society, the United States is proving that the constitutional guarantees of freedom of speech and freedom from government tyranny are as nothing when compared to a police baton and arbitrary imprisonment.

Violence at UCLA as Zionist thugs attack students and Police Violence at Columbia University

According to House Speaker Mike Johnson, Republicans would “hold these universities accountable for their failure to protect Jewish students on campus.” Instead of attacking the student demonstrators as a threat to US imperialism’s interests, Johnson and Biden articulate their concerns in terms of the ‘safety’ of Jewish students. The safety of Palestinian students is of no concern. 

Shocking footage shows several officers at Washington University St. Louis beating a professor, slamming him, and dragging his limp body.
SIUE history professor Steve Tamari is reportedly hospitalized with broken ribs and a broken hand.
One doctor told him he's lucky to be alive. pic.twitter.com/QSafPxVMD3

— Prem Thakker (@prem_thakker) April 30, 2024

The vicious attack on Emory University Professor Caroline Fohlin by Police is unlikely to attract their attention. Likewise the attack on History Professor Steve Tamari at Washington University, which left him with broken ribs and hand, shows us the real face of US capitalism when its interests are challenged. One doctor told him he's lucky to be alive.

Police Violence at Emory University as they arrest a woman professor

The concerns of Braverman and Johnson, about anti-Semitism contrasts with their racism towards Black people, Muslims and refugees. ‘Anti-Semitism’ is all the rage with the Establishment which is why anyone pretending to be a socialist would question their motives.

Not so the Communist Party of Britain. It is holding a seminar ‘UNDERSTANDING & COMBATTING ANTISEMITISM’. You might have thought it would devote at least one session to exploring the weaponisation of anti-Semitism by the right and the far-right.

How is it that Suella Braverman, whose ‘dream’ consisted of the expulsion of refugees to Rwanda, was so concerned about ‘anti-Semitism’?

How is it that Donald Trump of the Muslim Ban is nonetheless perturbed about‘anti-Semitism’? To say nothing of Steve Bannon who whilst not wanting his daughters to go to school with Jewish children,was also very concerned about anti-Semitism?

Pro-Israel THUGS Attack Student Protesters - While Cops Rampage In New York

Tommy Robinson too is equally opposed to ‘anti-Semitism’? Indeed how is it that the founder of the alt-Right, neo-Nazi Richard Spencer, can describe himself as a White Zionist?

I’m afraid to disappoint you. There is no session on the weaponisation of anti-Semitism at the CPB Seminar. There is one however on what is called ‘the contested relationship between anti-Zionism and antisemitism’. Contested by who you may ask? Certainly not supporters of the Palestinians or anti-Zionists? We are quite clear. There is no relationship.

If you are an anti-Zionist you are an anti-racist and you will be equally opposed to anti-Jewish racism. But if you are an anti-Semite then the chances are that you are also a Zionist. As Zionist novelist A B Yehoshua once said in a lecture to the Union of Jewish Students

‘Anti-Zionism is not the product of the non-Jews. On the contrary, the Gentiles have always encouraged Zionism, hoping that it would help to rid them of the Jews in their midst. Even today, in a perverse way, a real anti-Semite must be a Zionist.’

If you didn’t know better you would be forgiven for thinking that the CPB seminar had been organised by the Jewish Labour Movement or a pro-genocide Zionist group. Yet it has been organised by Professor Mary Davis, the CPB’s resident Zionist and Labour historian.

The question people need to ask is why it is that in the middle of a live genocide that is justified by false allegations of anti-Semitism, the CPB is running a seminar whose sole aim and purpose is to bolster the Zionist narrative about anti-Semitism?

It’s been a long time since the British Communist Party was anti-Zionist. Following Stalin’s about turn in November 1947, when the Soviet Union supported the establishment of a medieval ethno-religious Jewish state in Palestine, communist parties have steadfastly refused to oppose Zionism as a settler-colonial movement.

The Russian workers movement at the beginning of the 20^th century saw Zionism as a counter-revolutionary movement. The founder of Poale Zion, Ber Borochov, was expelled from the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1901 when he founded a Zionist Socialist Workers Union in Yekaterinoslav.

Anti-Semitism was one of the main weapons of the Czarist autocracy in its fight against the working class and its organisations yet Theodor Herzl, the founder of Political Zionism, was happy to parley with it.

After the Kishinev pogrom of 1903, which was publicised worldwide, Herzl’s response was to warn the leaders of Europe that if the Zionist project failed, ‘hundreds of thousands of our adherents would at one swoop change over to the revolutionary parties.’

In August 1903, barely four months after Kishinev, Herzl visited Russia, meeting with the Czarist Interior Minister Count Vyacheslav von Plehve who bore direct responsibility for the pogroms. Herzl was concerned that the Russian Zionist Federation should retain its legal status. As he began explaining the merits of Zionism Plehve interrupted him: ‘You don’t have to justify the movement to me. Vous prêchez à un converti.’ [You are preaching to a convert].

Herzl asked Plehve: ‘Help me to reach land sooner and the revolt will end. And so will the defection to the Socialists.’ Herzl wrote to the Kaiser describing how:

our movement… has everywhere to fight an embittered battle with the revolutionary parties which rightly sense an adversary in it. We are in need of encouragement even though it has to be a carefully kept secret.

Herzl promised the Czarist rulers that the revolutionaries would stop their struggle in return for a charter for Palestine in 15 years. The Bund, the General Jewish Workers Union of Russia, was outraged.

Being a supporter of Empire the Labour Party was even more ardently pro-Zionist than the Conservative Party. In August 1917, its War Aims Memorandum supported a ‘return’ of the Jewish people to Palestine, there to establish a free state.

All manner of reactionaries and social democrats supported Zionism, from Churchill and Balfour to Arthur Henderson and Ramsay MacDonald. In those days there was no pretence that opposing Zionism was anti-Semitic because that was the position of most Jews.

After visiting Palestine in 1922, Ramsay MacDonald wrote of how

‘The rich plutocratic Jew ... is the person whose views upon life make one anti-Semitic. He has no country, no kindred. Whether as a sweater or a financier, he is an exploiter of everything he can squeeze. He is behind every evil that Governments do and his political authority, always exercised in the dark, is greater than that of Parliamentary majorities... He detests Zionism because it revives the idealism of his race.’

This was printed in a pamphlet, produced by Poale Zion, the forerunner of today’s Jewish Labour Movement!

Zionism has always been a reactionary, racist movement. Today an exterminationist mood has swept the Israeli state. Yet still the CPB clings to Stalin’s nostrums that Jewish people need a state. Alone on the left the CPB still adheres to the apartheid solution of two states. It’s time the CPB started to wake up to the movement around them.

Open Letter to Rob Griffiths, the General Secretary, The Communist Party of Britain at Office@communist-party.org.uk

Dear Rob Griffiths,

Today we are witnessing a genocide in real time in Gaza. It has been accompanied by clear statements of intent from Israel’s leaders. Defence Minister Yoav Gallant outlined what was in store:

We are imposing a complete siege on Gaza. There will be no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. Everything will be closed. We are fighting against human animals and we are acting accordingly.

Your party shrinks from making comparisons between Zionism and the Nazis but the similarities are striking - from car bumper stickers saying‘finish them off’ to stickers saying ‘exterminate Gaza’.

On October 4 1943 Heinrich Himmler, used exactly this phrase in a lecture to senior SS officers in Posnan when justifying the holocaust. The Nazis, he explained, were

the only people in the world’ to have taken a ‘decent attitude’ toward animals and who would be equally decent towards ‘human animals.

Gallant was not the only senior Israeli politician or military leader to make genocidal statements. South Africa’s application to the International Court of Justice documented numerous such statements. 

“no half-assed job: Rafah, Dir El Balah, Nusseirat - total annihilation. erase the memory of Amalek from under the sky. There is no place for this pure evil, has no cure, cannot exist.” — If Smotrich’s words aren't genocidal language, don't know what is.
pic.twitter.com/FSHDcw5sz7

— Hanno Hauenstein (@hahauenstein) April 30, 2024

Only last Monday Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s far-right Finance Minister and the Head of the ‘Civil Administration’ in the West Bank uttered these words:

"There are no half measures. [The Gazan cities of] Rafah, Deir al-Balah, Nuseirat – total annihilation. 'You will blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven'– there's no place under heaven."

How is this call for annihilation any different from Hitler’s call for the annihilation of the Jewish people in his ‘prophecy’ speech of January 30 1939? What kind of political cowardice is there in your party that refuses to see the comparisons with the leaders of the Third Reich yet is happy to go along with the ‘anti-Semitism’ smears of Biden and the Republican Right?

The current death toll is, when one includes those under the rubble, approaching 50,000, including perhaps 20,000 children. How has the Zionist movement justified this?

They have both spread false atrocity propaganda about October 7 on the one hand and they have resorted to accusing their critics of anti-Semitism on the other. Sad to say the CPB and its resident Zionist Mary Davis, have joined in with this.

The final death toll for October 7 is accepted as 1,139. Just two babies were killed, both accidentally. Neither was burned or beheaded. Yet we had lurid headlines of 40 beheaded babies. According to that well known paper of record, the Daily Mail,

Hamas terrorists massacred at least 40 babies and young children before beheading some of them and gunning down their families in a small kibbutz in Israel, horrified Israeli soldiers have claimed.

I24 News quoted IDF Major General Itai Veruv as saying:

It’s not a war, it’s not a battlefield. You see the babies, the mother, the father, in their bedrooms, in their protection rooms, and how the terrorists killed them, It’s a massacre.

When these allegations were discredited Israel’s narrative changed to false allegations of mass rape. Naturally that faithful servant of imperialist propaganda, the New York Times joined in with Screams without Words. However that has been completely discredited by a variety of different sources. Even the BBC has abandoned plans to run with the story.

The second line of defence has been our old friend ‘anti-Semitism’. In Britain we saw Gideon Falter’s attempt to portray himself as the victim of anti-Semitism backfire, after a policeman misspoke. Falter had attempted to provoke a confrontation with Palestine demonstrators.

In the United States thousands of students have taken to sit-ins and protests against the genocide. ‘Anti-Semitism’ has been wheeled out by the right as an excuse to attack peaceful demonstrations. Biden condemned‘blatant’ anti-Semitism at Columbia. Even war criminals become sensitive when it comes to ‘anti-Semitism’ these days.

Premiere of Jeremy Corbyn The Big Lie at which Ben Chacko, the Morning Star's Editor was Guest Speaker

The Weaponisation of Anti-Semitism

On 23 February 2023 Jeremy Corbyn - The Big Lie premiered at Conway Hall with the guest speaker being Ben Chacko, Editor of the Morning Star. The film, which Starmer and the TUC did their best to prevent being shown, showed how false allegations of anti-Semitism had been weaponised in order to remove Corbyn as Labour leader.

I am astounded therefore that the CPB, whose paper the Morning Star opposed the ‘anti-Semitism’ witchhunt, should be organising a seminar on ‘anti-Semitism’ which takes as its main sources those who led the ‘anti-Semitism’ witchhunt in Labour. The seminar has been organised by the CPB’s resident Zionist, Mary Davies.

Last September I wrote ‘Elephant in the Room’ criticising Davies’s article in Communist Review ‘‘The contested relationship between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism’.

As readers of Zionism During the Holocaust will know, the only relationship that exists is between Zionism and Anti-Semitism. Both share the belief that the ‘real home’ of Jews is Israel, as Netanyahu told French Jews in 2015.

Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville organised by Richard Spencer in August 2017

When the Zionist movement began at the end of the 19^th century most Jews saw it as a form of Jewish anti-Semitism. Today neo-Nazis like Richard Spencer, organiser of the Unite the Right Charlottesville march call themselves ‘White Zionists’? Tommy Robinson and others of his ilk declare their support for Zionism.

Davis would have to be stupid not to notice the support of the far-Right for Zionism. Since she’s a professor I assume she’s not stupid. There is no relationship, contested or otherwise between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism.

Of course there has been a determined campaign by the Zionists to conflate anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. This is based on the idea that Israel was ‘conceived as a Jewish collectivity’ (IHRA).

Counter-protest to Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville which Trump described as containing 'very fine people'

Davis’ course on understanding & combating antisemitism makes no attempt to either understand or combat anti-Semitism. Its real purpose is to perpetuate the myth that opposition to Zionism and the Israeli state derives from it being ‘Jewish’ rather than its actions.

In July 2019 she wrote an article for the Morning Star in which she asked whether allegations of anti-Semitism in the Labour Party were

a fiction manufactured by a conspiratorial alliance between the Israeli government and anti-socialist forces seeking to discredit Jeremy Corbyn?

There were clearly conspiracies as Asa Winstanley documented with the refounding of the Jewish Labour Movement in 2015.

There is no need for conspiracies given that the mass media shares the same Zionist, pro-imperialist agenda. Anti-socialist forces are always pro-imperialist and pro-Zionist. There is an unwritten consensus.

It is a strange argument coming from someone who is allegedly a communist. Is the anti-communism of the press also a conspiracy?

The real question is whether the allegations of anti-Semitism in the Labour Party were true. I was the first Jewish person to be expelled in February 2018, followed by Jackie Walker, Marc Wadsworth, Ken Livingstone and Chris Williamson. Were any of us guilty of anti-Semitism? All of us were caught up in the false ‘anti-Semitism’ smear campaign yet the charges against us did not allege anti-Semitism.

Davis avoids any concrete examples to back up her argument. She prefers innuendo. Her clinching argument that there was a problem with anti-Semitism in the Labour Party is that

the leadership of the Labour Party itself has acknowledged that there is an anti-semitic element within its ranks.’

What kind of argument is this? The fact that Corbyn was bullied into accepting the false ‘anti-Semitism’ narrative is proof of nothing.

Corbyn and Jennie Formby began expelling people at a rate that Iain McNicol, the former General Secretary could only dream of. They believed that by expelling Palestinian supporters they could impress their enemies. All they ‘proved’ was that there was an anti-Semitism problem, something Davis is happy to exploit.

Davies argues that there is an ‘anti-Semitic current’ in the Labour Party because after 2,000 years anti-Semitism ‘has penetrated deeply into mainstream thinking.’

What Davis demonstrates is the poverty of her analysis of anti-Semitism historically. I realise that the CPB has an aversion to Trotskyism or even dissident Marxism, given its Stalinist antecedents, but the books that Davis doesn’t mention are Abram Leon’s The Jewish Question – A Marxist Interpretation and Maxime Rodinson’s Cult, Ghetto and State, that put anti-Semitism in a historically materialist contest.Leon wrote that

Zionism transposes modern anti-Semitism to all of history and saves itself the trouble of studying the various forms of anti-Semitism and their evolution.

To Davis anti-Semitism is one seamless fabric. It is a Zionist idea that anti-Semitism has never gone away, that it is an unchanging virus that affects all non-Jews. This is both unMarxist and ahistorical. Anti-Semitism has changed as society has changed and as the Jews have changed. Racial anti-Semitism represented a sharp break from religious or feudal anti-Semitism. Far from being widespread, anti-Semitism today is a marginal form of prejudice.

This seminar that Davis organised is a reactionary junket whose only purpose will be to reinforce the Zionist smear that anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism are one and the same.

If CPB members wish to understand the reasons why British imperialism gave its backing to Zionism they should read Winston Churchill’s ‘ZIONISM versus BOLSHEVISM (8.2.20). It combines Churchill’s support for Empire with support for Zionism and anti-Semitism. He told readers that:

In violent contrast to international communism, it (Zionism) presents to the Jew a national idea of a commanding character.... In the Soviet institutions the predominance of Jews is even more astonishing. And the prominent, if not indeed the principal, part in the system of terrorism applied by the Extraordinary Commissions for Combating Counter-Revolution has been taken by Jews, and in some notable cases by Jewesses. The same evil prominence was obtained by Jews in the brief period of terror during which Bela Kun ruled in Hungary.’

Communist Jews were bad. Zionist Jews were good. Davis’s attempts to marry Zionism and Communism is a sisyphean task. As David Ben-Gurion, the first Prime Minister of Israel observed in December 1935, Zionism was a ‘bulwark against assimilation and communism’

The Zionist Community Security Trust - Davis's go to Zionist group on anti-Semitism - funded by the Home Office, founded by Mossad

Davis’s Reactionary Course Reading Materials

You only get an indication of just how reactionary is the furrow that Davis ploughs when you peruse her reading list. Included is a pamphlet ‘campus anti-Semitism’ from the Community Security Trust, funded by the Home Office and set up by Israel’s Mossad (MI6). The CST led the campaign to have Professor David Miller sacked from Bristol University. An employment tribunal later upheld his complaints of Unfair Dismissal and Discrimination.

You can get a flavour of the CST’s commitment to anti-racism from its choice of guest at its 2023 Annual Dinner - Suelle Braverman!

At a time when thousands of American students are protesting their Universities’ complicity in genocide in Gaza, what does Davis do? She backs those who assert that support for Palestine is a threat to the safety of Jewish students.

‘Antisemitism on campus surges as agitators take over’ shouts Fox News. Davis never once asks why it is that opposition to ‘anti-Semitism’ is so popular with those who are racist to the core on everything else.

Tony Lerman's 'Antisemitism Redefined' in Jewish Voice for Peace's 'On Antisemitism'

Davis’s next recommended text is their 2021 Anti-Semitic Incidents Reports. Tony Lerman, founding director of the IJA and Institute of Jewish Policy Research, was principal editor of the annual Antisemitism World Report. Lerman described how he had been

pressurised by the London Mossad representative dealing with antisemitism into ‘either ceasing publication or merging our report with one that the then-new Project for the Study of Antisemitism at Tel Aviv University... and part-financed by the Mossad, was beginning to produce. I vigorously resisted the pressure,... I tried to persuade the Israelis to allow us to operate without interference, but was given short shrift by the Mossad representative at the Israeli embassy in London and by the Israel ambassador [Moshe Raviv] himself. [‘Anti-Semitism Redefined’,  On Anti-Semitism’ JVP, Haymarket Books, 2017]

Lerman lost the battle and what resulted is the CST. Why should Israel’s MI6 be interested in anti-Semitism statistics unless they are being manipulated to further the interests of the Israeli state?

I have no idea who is going to present the topic Anti-Semitism and the Labour Party Under Corbyn, but the title itself has framed the discussion. Davis has clearly embraced those who made false accusations of anti-Semitism. 

Stalinist Anti-Semitism

The whole seminar is dishonestly selective. The role of communists in the fight against antisemitism during the 1930s and 40s is a mixed one. In Germany the Communist Party (KPD) described the Social Democrats as ‘social fascists’ thus destroying any possibility of a united working class front against the Nazis. Often they accepted the Strasserite equation of Jew and Capitalist.

In 1923 KPD leader Ruth Fischer gave a speech to Nazi students in which she said:

Those who call for a struggle against Jewish capital are already, gentlemen, class strugglers, even if they don’t know it. You are against Jewish capital and want to fight the speculators. Very good. Throw down the Jewish capitalists, hang them from the lamp-post, stamp on them. But, gentlemen, what about the big capitalists, the Stinnes and Klöckner?

Donald Niewyk describesthe KPD appeal to the SA and SS in 1933: ‘you have shot enough workers. When will you hang the first Jew?’ Between 1930 and 1933 there were no Jewish KPD deputies elected.

During the Holocaust the Soviet Union adamantly refused to recognise that the Nazis were targeting Jews for extermination.

Stalinism engaged in rewriting history when it argued that the Jews suffered no more than other groups at the hands of the Nazis. It enabled the USSR to gloss over the collaboration of Russians with the Nazis. As Samuel Moyn writes of Soviet-Jewish writer Vasily Grossman’s account of Treblinka,

the disproportionate victimhood of Jews was not ideologically useful from the perspective of Moscow…. From the perspective of official anti-fascism, ‘humanity’ had suffered, not one group within it more than the rest… the Soviets could not accept that the victims had been predominantly Jewish.’ Though Grossman’s essay had already been circulated elsewhere… the plates of the Black Book were destroyed.’ [Chil Rajchman, Treblinka – A Survivor’s Memory, p. 8, London, 2011]

In 1952 there was the Slansky trial, when 14 Czech communists were accused of being Zionist agents. 11 of them were Jewish. 11 were executed. In 1963 Slansky was pardoned.

Or the Doctors Plot when mostly Jewish doctors were accused of conspiring to murder Soviet leaders. Fortunately Stalin died before their trial, after which they were released.

Or the ‘anti-Zionist’ campaign in 1967 in Poland after the 6 Day War. It was led by Gomulka who conflated Jew and Zionist and blamed Jews for the era of Stalinist repression.

The failure by Davis and the CPB to examine honestly the history of their own anti-Semitic tradition marks out Davis’ course as a worthless propaganda exercise and an attempt to rewrite history.

The Holocaust

Under the Holocaust there is a review of Jonathan Freedland’s dishonest book about Rudolf Vrba, one of only 5 Jewish prisoners to escape from Auschwitz, on April 10 1944. Freedland’s book is the object of uncritical praise by Davis.

Vrba and fellow escapee, Alfred Wetzler, produced the Vrba-Wetzler Report which revealed for the first time the existence of Auschwitz as a death camp. Prior to that Auschwitz was believed to be a labour camp. The Report was given to the leader of Hungarian Zionism, Rudolf Kasztner, at the end of April and was immediately suppressed by Hungary’s Zionist leaders.

Suffice to say Freedland, as an arch Zionist glosses over much of this, including the Kasztner trial which convulsed Israel for 4 years (1954-58). It led to the collapse of the second Israeli government under Moshe Sharrett.

If Davis knew anything about the background to the affair she would know that Vrba’s book I Cannot Forgive is a far more reliable guide to what really happened than Freedland’s cheap thriller. Vrba’s book describes in far more detail their escape from Auschwitz but one suspects that she has not read any source books on the Holocaust.

The other text on the Holocaust is none other than an article by Davis herself on Holocaust Memorial Day. In her concluding remarks she quotes Blackface Badiel that we must ‘strenuously rebut the notion that in the fight against racism “Jews don’t count.” Quite.

The session on Islamist Anti-Semitism takes the prize. Zionism is the mainstay of Islamaphobia. Davis links to Rakib Ehsan’s article The establishment has not been robust enough against Muslim anti-Semitism in a paper that is an expert on the topic – the Jewish Chronicle, the anti-Palestinian rag which the ruling class loves so much that they run it at a permanent deficit. It has only 6,000 paid subscriptions!! We are told that

The existence of ‘parallel societies’ in Britain carries significant social risks which must be treated with the utmost seriousness by the UK government.

It is not often that Muslims write for the Jewish Chronicle. So who is Dr Ehsan? Well he is a research fellow at the far-right Henry Jackson Society, one of whose founders and Directors is William Shawcross, who in 2012 said“Europe and Islam is one of the greatest, most terrifying problems of our future”.

Another key figure in the HJS is Associate DirectorDouglas Murray. According to Nafeez Ahmed

Behind the facade of concern about terrorism is a network of extremist neoconservative ideologues, hell-bent on promoting discrimination and violence against Muslims and political activists who criticise Israeli and Western government policies.

Murray is the author of The Strange Death of Europe which espouses the White Replacement Theory. According to a review:

Chapter after chapter circles around the same repetitive themes: migrants raping and murdering and terrorising; paeans to Christianity; long polemics about how Europe is too “exhausted by history” and colonial guilt to face another battle, and is thus letting itself be rolled over by invaders fiercely confident in their own beliefs.

Murray is also a fan of Enoch Powell. The HJS seems perfectly appropriate in the circumstances for Mary Davis’ seminar on anti-Semitism!

Another prominent figure in the HJS is Baroness Cox, former Deputy Speaker of the House of Lords. In 2007, she told the Jerusalem Summit – an anti-Palestinian network - that “Britain has been deeply infiltrated” by Islamist extremists, who have converted the country into “a base for training and teaching militant Islam”.

The crème de la crème lies in Davis’ Selected Reading for the course. I will only pick out one suggestion and that is The Definition of Anti-Semitism by Kenneth L. Marcus.

In October 2017, Donald Trump nominated Marcus to be Assistant Secretary of Education for Civil Rights. Marcus was endorsed by a variety of Zionist groups including B'nai B'rith and The American Jewish Committee, and opposed by groups including The U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights and Jewish Voice for Peace. Naturally Davis thought he was kosher.

In September 2018, Marcus reopened a seven-year-old case against Rutgers University, previously closed by the Obama administration. The Zionist Organization of America welcomed its reopening.

In May 2020, nine civil rights groups filed a complaint against Marcus. Ian Lustick, writing in The Forward, deplored both Marcus's appointment, and his use of his office, arguing that:

"Marcus came to his position not to protect and expand learning opportunities in American educational institutions, but to threaten and narrow them, especially when it comes to open debate about Israel and the Palestinians. And his use of accusations of anti-Semitism in order to silence debate about Israel is being done with the sanction of the President of the United States."

The ZOA is on the far -right. When Trump was elected President it invited his anti-Semitic strategic director, Stephen Bannon to be its guest of honour at its Gala Dinner. Even the staunchly Zionist Anti-Defamation League took fright. In the end a large picket by the Jewish If Not Now group kept Bannon away. However in November 2018 Bannon was reinvited and this time he attended.

Sebastian Gorka - Hungarian neo-Nazi in Trump's Administration

Bannon was the Editor of Breitbart, the magazine of the alt-Right whose founder, Richard Spencer organised the Charlottesville march whose slogan was ‘the Jews shall not replace us.’Also in attendance was Sebastian Gorka, a Hungarian émigré and supporter of the neo-Nazi Vitezi Rend.

Marcus’s views on anti-Semitism would seem to be perfectly in tune with Mary Davis’ seminar on anti-Semitism. After all who better to learn from than genuine anti-Semites?

Communist Party Policy on Anti-Semitism

Davis’ seminar would not be complete without a restatement of party policy.

Davis boasts of the support the CP gave to the establishment of a Israel as a Jewish state. In November 1947 the Soviet Union under Stalin did a volte-face and supported Zionism. This calamitous decision, which its satellites obeyed, led to the establishment of the ethnic cleansing State of Israel.

Stalin’s cynical about turn had nothing to do with recompense for the holocaust survivors and everything to do with his wish to see an end to British imperialism in the Middle East. After the Zionist terror gangs had fought the British to a standstill Stalin embraced them in the fond hope that Israel would not fall into the American orbit.

By this one decision Stalin helped destroy the strong Communist Parties of the Middle East in Egypt, Syria, Iran and Iraq. However Davis is oblivious to all of this.

The CP demonstrates why it is a dinosaur incapable of adapting to changed circumstances. The party boasts its support for a 2 state solution when it is obvious to all that Zionism is not going to concede even a mini Bantustan. 2 states has been the smokescreen behind which the West Bank has been colonised.

Two states is an apartheid solution to what I termed‘Hitler’sbastard offspring.’ The CPB like its Israeli counterpart, has never been an anti-Zionist party. It has never accepted that Zionism is a settler colonial movement incapable of making peace with the indigenous population. So when Israel is seeking to complete its ethnic cleansing project in Gaza through genocidal means, you shamefully decide to focus on ‘anti-Semitism’ instead.

Tony Greenstein

Even Nazi Germany Spared the Jewish Hospital in Berlin Which was Liberated in May 1945 with 800 Patients Still Alive

This is What Happened at Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza

It is instructive to compare Israel’s systematic destruction of Gaza’s hospitals and health system with Nazi Germany. When Soviet troops liberated Berlin and entered the Jewish hospital on April 24 they were amazed to find that 800 patients, mainly Jews, were still alive.

In Budapest, between January 12 and 15, just before the Soviet Union liberated the city, The fascist Arrow Cross/Nyilas killing squads murdered around 240 patients at the Jewish hospitals in Maros and Városmajor Streets. Eugene Levai described this as ‘one of the blackest deeds of the Nyilas terrorism.’ [The Black Book of Martyrdom of Hungarian Jewry]

American Values – John Stewart

Israel’s massacres at Al Shifa and Al Nasser hospitals exceeds even the foul deeds of the Hungarian Nazis. Biden, Sunak and Cameron have nonetheless continued to supply Israel with the means with which to carry out further massacres. We are ruled by war criminals.

The perpetrators of the Budapest massacres were quickly rounded up and from February 3 1945 onwards were hanged by the Peoples’ Courts. Unfortunately Biden, Sunak and Cameron, to say nothing of that worthy successor to the Nazis, Olaf Scholz, are unlikely to face a similar fate.

Gaza and Hatikvah

Israel’s systematic destruction of Gaza’s hospitals began with the attack on Al-Ahli hospital on October 17 when 500 people were killed. Israel blamed it on a misfired rocket from Islamic Jihad, which Biden of course rushed to corroborate.

The West were happy to accept Israel’s denial of responsibility despite the fact that the evidence pointed to Israel being responsible. Israel supplied a digitally manipulated version of an alleged conversation between two Hamas operatives admitting responsibility, but the ‘conversation’ was clearly a fake. The overwhelming evidence was that it was an Israeli missile that had struck the hospital.

Berlin's Jewish Hospital

CNN's @clarissaward reports from inside Gaza with a first-hand look at the humanitarian catastrophe and the dire living conditions for hundreds of thousands of civilians trapped inside: pic.twitter.com/Am2i5YM7ZH

— CNN This Morning (@CNNThisMorning) December 14, 2023

Channel 4 Investigation into Who Bombed Al Ahli Hospital

Next came the attack on Gaza’s main hospital Al Shifa. The pretext this time was that it contained Hamas’s Command and Control Centre. Even BBC Verify refused to accept the ludicrous ‘evidence’ that Israel provided included a bag of weapons that Israel claimed was stored by an MRI scanning machine. The contents of the bag kept changing throughout the day.

The IDF released a video of a ‘Hamas laptop’ they found with a standardised IDF numbered charger and a Hebrew keyboard. They soon deleted the video from Twitter and uploaded it again with a blurred screen!

The real reasons for Israel’s attack on Gaza’s hospitals are not hard to fathom. If the purpose of Israel’s attack on Gaza is ethnic cleansing then it is necessary to destroy Palestinian civil society. The health care system therefore has to go.

Dr Walter Lustig - Director of the Jewish Hospital

The same is true for the bombing of mosques and churches. Christians and Muslims happily lived side by side under Hamas rule but Israel bombed both religions’ institutions. The world’s third oldest church, the Greek Orthodox St. Porphyrius was bombed as have nearly all Gaza’s historical sites. But perhaps that too was a Hamas command post! Or maybe the Catholic Church of the Holy Family where Israeli snipers killed worshippers, meriting a rare Vatican condemnation, was also a Hamas command post?

Phosphorus used in Gaza, British-Palestinian doctor says

Likewise the bombing of the trade union centre of the PGFTU in Gaza City which housed a bakery and kindergarten. It is obvious what Israel’s real game plan is and that explains Israel’s systematic destruction of Gaza’s universities and all aspects of civil society.

Israeli Ministers have been open about their intentions. Likud Minister Avi Dichter openly talked about a second Nakba. Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich last week called for the ‘total annihilation’ of Gaza without so much as a word of protest or condemnation by Netanyahu.

Death of Al Jazeera cameraman Samer Abu Dakka

But then there was no reaction from Genocide Joe Biden or his lapdogs Sunak and Cameron either. If Hamas had called for the wiping out of Israel then that would be front page news in the yellow press.

There are endless calls from Israeli Ministers for the mass murder of Palestinians, not just Hamas, including from Prime Minister Netanyahu with his invocation of Amalek. Israel’s Labor President Herzog did the same when he held that all of Gaza’s residents were legitimate targets. As the Guardian’s Chris McGreal noted, the language used by Israel is reminiscent of the genocide in Rwanda.

"Exterminating the roaches."

"You won't believe the video we got! You can hear the crunch of their bones."

These posts from the IDF are full of hatred, dehumanization, and genocidal glee.

The people of Gaza are in unfathomable danger. We can't fail, we MUST get a ceasefire. https://t.co/V4l8GWVsCfpic.twitter.com/DOTwJ8WupW

— IfNotNow🔥🕎 (@IfNotNowOrg) December 12, 2023

The West’s leaders are happy to justify any barbarity because to them the main enemy is Hamas whereas to most civilised people it is the Israeli state and its genocidiers who are the real criminals.

Western media outlets however either fail to report what Israeli Ministers say or treat each quote in isolation. Just as they refuse to see the context of Israel’s attacks as part of a strategy of ethnic cleansing.

The Destruction of Al Shifa Hospital

Before the International Court of Justice found a plausible case for genocide the US’s National Security Council spokesman John Kirby termed South Africa’s case as ‘meritless’. When the ICJ ruled all the Western countries immediately froze their aid to UNWRA whose job it was to prevent starvation in Gaza.

As Craig Murray, Britain’s former Ambassador said, the decision by Western states to stop funding to UNRWA, the UN agency charged with feeding the population of Gaza, was not taken in a single day. It was a pre-planned response to the ICJ. It was their way of showing their contempt for international law being applied to western imperialism. The International Criminal Court was established to judge tinpot African dictators not the West’s war criminals.

Israeli forces severely assault a Palestinian Journalist LIVE on CNN.

"SHOOT ME" the journalist screams.

They go on to punch, strangle, weapon butt, throw him to the floor, kick him in the face, and eventually hospitalise him. pic.twitter.com/TxGrsyzGDY

— Rami Jarrah (@RamiJarrah) December 15, 2023

Israel of course supplied no evidence about UNWRA’s involvement in October 7 but what did that matter? The United States, Britain, Germany and the rest wanted to show their displeasure with the idea that they should be held to account. They were signalling their support for Israel’s policy of deliberately creating famine in Gaza.

So when Israel proceeded to attack other hospitals – Al Nasser, the Indonesian hospital etc., it didn’t even bother to offer any excuses because they knew that the Western leaders would cover for them and that the western media would say nothing and wouldn’t even bother to report it, still less place it in context.

North American Medical Doctors Statement

The bombing of ambulances, the murder of doctors, the invasion of hospitals were all ignored because at the end of the day the Western media reflects and amplifies the message of the West’s war criminal leaders that Israel’s goal is the elimination of Hamas rather than the elimination of the Palestinians.

What would have been condemned in an instant in Ukraine did not cause any reaction in CNN, the BBC or the Guardian. They chose not to join the dots because to do so would bring into question the imperialist narrative that Israel is engaged in ‘self-defence’.

White Phosphorous Used by Israel

Thus it was that when Britain’s pathetic Prime Minister Rishi Sunak rushed out of Downing Street to condemn the electors of Rochdale for electing George Galloway, warning of mobs on the street and Jewish children afraid to put their school uniforms on, he harkened back to the breakout from Gaza on October 7 when 1139 Israelis were killed, a third of them soldiers and over half the rest by Israel itself. Sunak ‘forgot’ to mention the 20,000 Palestinians, including 10,000 children who Israel had already murdered. To him they had never existed.

Popular Israeli Car Bumper Sticker

That Sunak, Starmer and Biden make no mention of the thousands of Palestinian victims, the deliberate targeting of people’s homes, ambulances etc. is no accident. Only Israeli lives matter. It took the murder of 7 aid workers of the World Food Kitchen before Western leaders found their tongues and condemned Israeli war crimes.

Please by Doctors in Gaza

But even then they failed to draw any conclusions viz. that Israel’s targeting of aid workers was an essential part of a strategy of creating famine as an ‘incentive’ to the Palestinians to leave Gaza.

Biden was perfectly happy for Israel to investigate itself and blame a couple of junior officers who, when the dust dies down, will be reinstated into the Israeli military. It is as if it were usual, when someone commits murder for them to be tasked with the investigation! Perhaps if we extend this to burglary and rape and have the burglars and rapists investigate themselves we can dispense with the police entirely!

When Russia targeted a hospital in Mariupul that the neo-Nazi Azov battalion had occupied, having evicted the staff and patients beforehand, the Western press was united in condemnation. ‘Three dead as maternity hospital hit by Russian air strike’reported the BBC, yet the same BBC has consistently failed to report the death of thousands of Palestinians from Israeli air strikes. Racism? Perish the thought.

The words of a Palestinian child in Gaza to his dead, 4-year-old younger brother

"My dear brother, I didn't get enough of you. Where can I get another brother like you?"#CeasefireNOWpic.twitter.com/C0fX1W09lD

— Trita Parsi (@tparsi) December 3, 2023

When Israel, in the case of Al Shifa hospital, cut off the power and left babies to die as their incubators failed, the press said next to nothing. Israel forced the doctors and medical personnel out and the babies bodies were then eaten by wild animals.

Israel’s actions are clearly illegal yet, as we have seen, international law has effectively been scrapped. The ICJ was too timorous to call what Israel was doing a genocide or indeed to order western states not to supply arms.

Article 18 of the Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War is quite clear:

Civilian hospitals organized to give care to the wounded and sick, the infirm and maternity cases, may in no circumstances be the object of attack, but shall at all times be respected and protected by the Parties to the conflict.

Below I document the destruction of Gaza’s health system and also accounts from various doctors and health personnel of the situation on the ground.

HEALTH WORKERS FOR GAZA, ITALY

(updated to april the 2nd, 2024)

Ø   9 hospitals only partially functioning

Ø   25 hospitals out of service, 2 functioning at minimum level

Ø   24% of primary care facilities functioning

Ø    500,000 cases of acute respiratory infections

Ø    290,000 cases of diarrhea

Ø   17 operational medical emergency teams

Ø   8 out of 24 UNRWA medical centers functioning

Ø   Source: OCHA OPT, Data updated as of 03.29.2024

Ø   311 healthcare workers arrested

Ø   484 healthcare workers* killed of which:

Ø   153 doctors*, dentists*, medical students

Ø   124 nurses* and midwives

Ø   181 paramedics*, pharmacists*, physiotherapists*, opticians* and administrative staff

Source: HEALTH WORKERS WATCH, Data updated as of 11.03.2024

This Egyptian song is so powerful that Israel has apparently threatened to kill the singer.
Telk Qadeya' is the Egyptian rock group Cairokee 's latest single, 'with a twist' as they put it. It was issued on 30 November 2023, nearly two months after the start of the genocidal war… pic.twitter.com/n2mAxyZcjj

— Ahmed Nihan (@ahmed_nihan) April 20, 2024

As Surgeons, We Have Never Seen Cruelty Like Israel’s Genocide in Gaza

We urge anyone who reads this to publicly oppose sending weapons to Israel as long as this onslaught continues.

Feroze SidhwaMark Perlmutter

Apr 11, 2024 Common Dreams

On March 25 the two of us, an orthopedic surgeon and a trauma surgeon, traveled to the Gaza Strip to work at Gaza European Hospital in Khan Younis. Our limited sleep was constantly interrupted by explosions that shook the hospital’s walls and popped our ears, even well after the United Nations Security Council declared a cease-fire must be implemented. When warplanes screamed overhead, everyone braced for a particularly loud and powerful explosion. The timing of these attacks always coincided with “iftar,” when families in this overwhelmingly Muslim county broke the daily fast of Ramadan and were most vulnerable.

We as Americans must acknowledge that we are responsible for this crime against humanity, now in its seventh month and unfolding in full view of the entire world.

We walked through the wards and immediately found evidence of horrifying violence deliberately directed at civilians and even children. A three-year-old boy shot in the head, a 12-year-old girl shot through the chest, an ICU nurse shot through the abdomen, all by some of the best-trained marksmen in the world. Every square inch of the hospital’s floor is taken up with makeshift tents where displaced families live, desperate to find some semblance of safety. They are the lucky several hundred who get to live indoors, unlike the tens of thousands sheltering outside on the hospital’s grounds.

As we got to work we were shocked by the violence inflicted on people. Incredibly powerful explosives ripped apart rock, floors, and walls and threw them through human bodies, penetrating skin with waves of dirt and debris. With the environment literally embedded in our patients’ bodies we have found infection control to be impossible. No amount of medical care could ever compensate for the damage being inflicted here.

As humanitarian trauma surgeons we have both seen incredible suffering. Collectively, we were present at Ground Zero on 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, the Boston Marathon bombing, and the 2010 earthquake in Haiti on the first day of these disasters. We have worked in the deprivation of southern Zimbabwe and the horrors of the war in Ukraine. Together we have worked on more than 40 surgical missions in developing countries on three continents in our combined 57 years of volunteering. This long experience taught us that there was no greater pain as a humanitarian surgeon than being unable to provide needed care to a patient.

But that was before coming to Gaza. Now we know the pain of being unable to treat a child who will slowly die, but also alone, because she is the only surviving member of an entire extended family. We have not had the heart to tell these children how their families died: burned until they resembled blistered hotdogs more than human beings, shredded to pieces such that they can only be buried in mass graves, or simply entombed in their former apartment buildings to die slowly of asphyxia and sepsis.

The United States has heavily funded and overwhelmingly armed what is called “the occupation” of Palestine, but the term is misleading. Israel’s first president, Chaim Weizmann, declared that the existence of the Palestinians was simply “a matter of no consequence.” Thirty years later, Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan told the Israeli cabinet that the Palestinians “would continue to live like dogs…and we will see where this process leads.”

Now we know: This is where it leads. It leads to Gaza European Hospital, and to two surgeons realizing that the blood on the floor of the trauma bay and the operating room is dripping from our own hands. We Americans provide the crucial funding, weapons, and diplomatic support for a genocidal assault on a helpless population.

NORWEGIAN TV EXPOSE ISRAELI SPOKESMAN DAVID MENDER

Source: @MohFitXpic.twitter.com/Qb5qUlLWeV

— Sulaiman Ahmed (@ShaykhSulaiman) April 29, 2024

‘Come out, you animals’: how the massacre at al-Shifa Hospital happened

During the massacre at al-Shifa Hospital, the Israeli army shot patients in their beds and doctors who refused to abandon the sick, separated people into groups with differently-colored bracelets, and executed hundreds of civil government employees.

By Tareq S. HajjajApril 11, 202424

Human heads eaten by crows, unidentified and decomposing body parts, and hundreds of corpses piled up and buried in mass graves are all that remained of the victims of the massacre at al-Shifa Hospital. The grim scene was something out of a dystopian movie, the product of the two-week siege of Gaza’s largest hospital that ended in its total destruction.

Following the completion of al-Shifa’s decimation, the Israeli army announced that it had been one of the most successful operations since the start of the war, claiming that it had arrested hundreds of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad members in the medical compound. But the question that no one seemed to ask is how such a massive number of so-called “operatives” from Hamas and PIJ had gathered at al-Shifa with the full knowledge that the place had already been combed by the army once before and that Gaza City had been occupied by the army ever since.

It is with heavy hearts that we share the devastating news of the loss of our dedicated Al Jazeera cameraman Samer Abu Dakka during the recent coverage in Gaza in an Israeli airstrike. His unwavering commitment to truth and storytelling has left an indelible mark on our team.… pic.twitter.com/hdLlhG7IUg

— Mohamed Moawad (@moawady) December 15, 2023

The case of al-Shifa: Investigating the assault on Gaza’s largest hospital

Washington Post

JERUSALEM — Weeks before Israel sent troops into al-Shifa Hospital, its spokesman began building a public case.

The claims were remarkably specific — that five hospital buildings were directly involved in Hamas activities; that the buildings sat atop underground tunnels that were used by militants to direct rocket attacks and command fighters; and that the tunnels could be accessed from inside hospital wards. The assertions were backed by “concrete evidence,” Israel Defense Forces spokesman Daniel Hagari said as he laid out the case in an Oct. 27 briefing.

After storming the complex on Nov. 15, the IDF released a series of photographs and videos that it said proved its central point.

“Terrorists came here to command their operations,” Hagari said in a video published Nov. 22, guiding viewers through an underground tunnel, illuminating dark and empty rooms beneath al-Shifa.

But the evidence presented by the Israeli government falls short of showing that Hamas had been using the hospital as a command and control center, according to a Washington Post analysis of open-source visuals, satellite imagery and all of the publicly released IDF materials. That raises critical questions, legal and humanitarian experts say, about whether the civilian harm caused by Israel’s military operations against the hospital — encircling, besieging and ultimately raiding the facility and the tunnel beneath it — were proportionate to the assessed threat.

The Post’s analysis shows:

• The rooms connected to the tunnel network discovered by IDF troops showed no immediate evidence of military use by Hamas.
• None of the five hospital buildings identified by Hagari appeared to be connected to the tunnel network.
• There is no evidence that the tunnels could be accessed from inside hospital wards.

Watch this brand new video from Mondoweiss: https://fb.watch/rdAWIU4A5W/

Articles

Israel Is Wiping Out Gaza’s Journalists: A Tribute

Renowned Gaza surgeon killed in Israeli detention

More shocking than we could ever have thought possible”: the Gaza war

War on Gaza: Prominent Palestinian doctor tortured and killed in Israeli detention

‘Most Unethical Army in the World’ – Palestine Chronicle Assesses the Damage at Gaza’s Al-Shifa Hospital

War on Gaza: Hundreds of bodies unearthed in Khan Younis hospital mass graves

Gaza detainees 'urinated on, made to act like animals' by Israeli forces, Unrwa says

‘Not a normal war’: doctors say children have been targeted by Israeli snipers in Gaza

UN Rights Chief Demands International Probe of Mass Graves Near Gaza Hospitals

Bruises and broken ribs – Palestinian deaths in Israeli prisons

UN rights chief 'horrified' by mass grave reports at Gaza hospitals

Detention and alleged ill-treatment of detainees from Gaza during Israel-Hamas War - UNWRA

UN Food Chief Says Northern Gaza Suffering 'Full-Blown Famine'

'Deeply Sick': IDF Murder Porn Channel Compared to Horrors of Abu Ghraib

Aksentijevic's Filmat the P21, May 17 examines the Role of Zionism during the Holocaust as well as my journey from Zionist Youth to Prominent anti-Zionist

It was about 6 months ago that I was approached by Helena Aksentijevic as to whether I would agree to her making a half hour film about my role in the Palestine solidarity and anti-Zionist movement.

Confrontation with the Police on Demonstration Against Israel's Invasion of Lebanon in 20026 in Brighton

Helena had already made a number of similar films about people in Palestine solidarity and in opposition to Zionism such as Moshe Machover, Sabby Sagall, Ghada Karmi, Naomi Wimborne Idrissi, Bernard Regan and Stephen Kapos.

I was more than happy to cooperate as it a way of explaining why I have been active on the issue of Palestine and Zionism for over 50 years and how I became an anti-Zionist.

Tickets will cost £5 to defray the costs to P21 Theatre who have kindly allowed us to use the venue. There will be light refreshments and I am also happy to reduce the price of a signed copy of my book from £12 to £10.

In younger days

The evening will start off with the film and then I will have a discussion with Luca Salice, who is a translator and visiting lecturer at the University of Westminster, as well as co-chair of Camden PSC, before opening up to the audience for a Q&A.

Below are some of the more recent talks and interviews I have given on the subject of my book or related  topics.

Repression of Palestinian solidarity in the global North: A conversation with anti-Zionist Jews – South Africa Jews for a Free Palestine 

How Israel Weaponises the Holocaust – Rania Khalek

Zionism During The Holocaust Part 1: Pre-War Years

A Discussion with about 300 Twitter Users, 5 May 2024

Tony Greenstein interviewed on the Patrick Henningsen Show - 27 April 2024 – TNT Radio

How Zionists collaborated with the Nazis, in conversation with Tony Greenstein | EI Podcast

extract from Lucy Dawidowicz's War Against the Jews

 US rapper Macklemore releases track in memory of Hind Rajab and in support of the brave, principled students at Columbia University

Rapper Macklemore has brought out Hind’s Hall, a reference to the Columbia University building that students renamed after the 6 year old girl murdered by Israel. YouTube instantly censored it by warning people that they might be offended by the truth.

US National Security spokesman John Kirby has said there is no evidence of “deliberate” Israeli war crimes in Gaza. To paraphrase Paul Simon’s The Boxer the man sees what he wants to see and disregards the rest.

The evidence in this case is so clear that anyone who denies what happened is no different to a holocaust denier. Kirby, Genocide Joe and Slimy Sunak are genocide deniers.

As Israel pursues its genocidal and ethnic cleansing agenda in Rafah the United States is show to be morally naked before the world. All it can do is repeat ‘anti-Semitism’ as if it were an incantation. You'd have to be brain dead to fail to understand that ‘anti-Semitism’ has been weaponised against those with a conscience.

That there are all too many Jewish people who are prepared to provide the moral alibi for Israel’s genocidal crimes in Palestine is to their eternal discredit. They more than anyone else have legitimised anti-Semitism by their willingness to act as cover for the barbaric crimes of Israel’s war mongers.

The other sick cliché that these war criminals repeat is that ‘Israel has the right to self defence’. Presumably the butchered 20,000 children of Gaza were a mortal threat to Israel’s safety and security.

Bezalel Smotrich calls for the wiping out of Gaza’s towns

Only a week ago Israel’s Finance Minister and West Bank Gauleiter, Bezalel Smotrich, called for Gaza to be wiped out. There were no hysterical newspaper headlines, no condemnations from world leaders still less from within Israel. Nor did Board of Deputies or UK Lawyers for Israel have anything to say.

All the pious professions of outrage about Russia's invasion of Ukraine can now be seen for the hypocritical cant they are.

By 5 March nearly 600 children had been killed in two years of war in Ukraine. In Gaza, counting those under the rubble, at least 20,000 children have been killed in just 7 months. Yet the US continues to give Israel unwavering diplomatic support, financial and military, as the corrupt and repressive Arab regimes look on, providing Israel with backdoor support through a landline from Abu Dhabi and the Emirates via Jordan to Israel.

The death of Hind Rajab was particularly heinous. The article below by the Washington Post is comprehensive. It exposes Israel’s lies and deceit over the murder of Hind and the paramedics sent to rescue her.

Both the BBC and Washington Post reports make it clear that what occurred was a clear and premeditated war crime by the Israeli military. Although the BBC won’t be devoting any air time to this as it is still covering the break-out of October 7. Nevertheless the report on its website is devastating as Hind phones the Palestinian Red Crescent, who dispatch two paramedics.

The fact that Israeli tanks fired on a civilian car is evidence in itself that John Kirby is a liar.  But when the paramedics approached, having been given clearance by the Israeli army, the tank opened fire killing both Hind and the paramedics. John Kirby however is unable to see anything that contradicts his genocidal denialism.

Slimy Sunak when he exited Downing Street to condemn George Galloway’s by-election victory mentioned the Israeli casualties, one third of them military, on October 7^th. Somehow this racist creep ‘forgot’ to mention the thousands of civilian casualties since then.

For 3½ long hours on Jan. 29, the cellphone in 6-year-old Hind Rajab’s hands was the closest thing she had to a lifeline. Alone in the back seat of a car outside a Gaza City gas station, she was drifting in and out of consciousness, surrounded by bodies, as she told emergency dispatchers that Israeli tanks were rumbling closer.

From the operations room of the Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS), roughly 50 miles away in the city of Ramallah, the team on duty had done their best to save the child. Paramedics were on their way, the dispatchers kept telling her: Hold on.

Bob Dylan’s Masters of  War could have been written with Biden and Sunak in mind

The paramedics were driving to their deaths.

Twelve days later, when a Palestinian civil defense crew finally reached the area, they found Hind’s body in a car riddled with bullets, according to her uncle, Samir Hamada, who also arrived at the scene early that morning. The ambulance lay charredroughly 50 meters (about 164 feet) away from the car, its destruction consistent with the use of a round fired by Israeli tanks, according to six munitions experts.

In a statement, the Israel Defense Forces said it had conducted a preliminary investigation and that its forces were “not present near the vehicle or within the firing range” of the Hamada family car. Nor, the IDF said, had it been required to provide the ambulance permission to enter the area. The State Department said it has raised the case repeatedly with the Israelis.

“The Israelis told us there had, in fact, been IDF units in the area, but the IDF had no knowledge of or involvement in the type of strike described,”

spokesman Matthew Miller said.

A Washington Post investigation found that Israeli armored vehicles were present in the area that afternoon. The Post additionally found that the gunfire audible as Hind and her cousin Layan begged for help and the extensive damage caused to the ambulance were consistent with Israeli weapons. The analysis is based on satellite imagery, contemporaneous dispatcher recordings, photos and videos of the aftermath, interviews with 13 dispatchers, family members and rescue workers, and more than a dozen military, satellite, munitions and audio experts who reviewed the evidence, as well as the IDF’s own statements.

Murder of Hind Raja and 2 ambulance workers

After this story published, Miller said:

“The death of Hind Rajab is an unspeakable tragedy — something that never should have occurred and never should occur. … So what we are going to do is take the information that is contained in that Washington Post story, we’re going to go back to the government of Israel and ask them for further information. We would still welcome a full investigation into this matter, and how it occurred in the first place.”

PRCS as well as representatives from Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor and the Civil Defense who visited the scene on Feb. 10 provided visuals to The Post, which it verified by independently confirming the location using satellite imagery, open-source maps and eyewitness interviews. (Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor)

The Post’s review also found that the ambulance was discovered along a route provided by COGAT, an arm of the Israeli Defense Ministry that generally coordinates safe passage for medical vehicles with the IDF. COGAT initially referred specific questions about the ambulance to the IDF. In mid-March, Elad Goren, head of Coordination and Liaison Administration at COGAT, told The Post that the agency “coordinated everything … including the ambulance that wanted to go and find Hind,” but said he was “not aware” of the specifics. COGAT did not respond to repeated requests to clarify.

The IDF denied that any coordination had taken place, repeating its assertion that its forces were not in the area. It did not comment on two detailed timelines of the incident, or on the expert findings, provided by The Post.

It was not possible to reach Hamas’s military wing for comment on the incident.

Humanitarian officials have warned that a system of coordination with Israel’s military, designed to protect their aid deliveries and lifesaving ambulance maneuvers, is broken. Israeli strikes on a World Central Kitchen convoy that killed seven aid workers in Gaza on April 1 and stirred global outrage came after failed deconfliction efforts.

More than 33,000 Palestinians have been killed during Israeli military operations in Gaza, according to local health authorities. Amid a war of unyielding horror, Hind’s case touched a nerve around the world, in large part because her recorded cries for help offered a glimpse into the terrors faced by civilians.

9:32 a.m.

Generations of the Hamada family had lived on al-Wahda Street in the northern part of Gaza City for decades. Everything changed on Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas militants stormed border communities in southern Israel, killing about 1,200 people, including civilians in their homes and young people at a concert, and taking at least 240 hostages back to Gaza. The assault drew a punishing response from Israel, which insists its campaign is necessary to destroy Hamas’s military capabilities.

More than 75 percent of Gaza’s population of 2.2 million has been displaced by the fighting, many residents multiple times, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). The Hamada family fled their houses; some went south, while others sheltered closer to home, in the nearby Tel al-Hawa neighborhood in western Gaza City.

But late on Jan. 28, Israeli forces returned to western Gaza City in numbers. Posts on social media show heavy gunfire and airstrikes in that part of the city just after midnight local time. At 9:32 a.m., the IDF issued a call in Arabic on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, asking residents in the west of Gaza City — including the Tel al-Hawa area — to evacuate immediately.

Hind’s uncle, Bashar, and his wife packed her into the car along with her four cousins, Bashar’s brother Samir said. They planned to drive north, out of the evacuation zone and back toward the family home in northern Gaza City.

Karen Glaser, its Features Editor, began with an Attack on her Boyfriend for ‘anti-Semitism’ & then Doubled Down with a Stream of ‘Anti-Semitism’ Trivia

The ‘JC’ claims to be the world’s oldest Jewish newspaper but today it’s not possible to call it a newspaper in any meaningful sense. It is a propaganda sheet serving Zionist and Israeli interests. Alan Rusbridger, former Editor of the Guardian asked, Who really funds the Jewish Chronicle? It is a question yet to be answered.

What we do know is that in April 2020 the paper was rescued from liquidation by a consortium that was headed by Sir Robbie Gibb, who is a government-appointed BBC director. In his declaration of interest Gibb states that he has a 100% holding of Jewish Chronicle Media.

The problem is that Gibb doesn’t have that money. He is a front-man for person or persons unknown who gifted £3.5 million to the JC. Other members of this consortium included the ex-Labour MP John Woodcock (Lord Walney) who was suspended by Labour for sexually harassing an 18 year old assistant. Others included Zionist operative Jonathan Sacerdoti and John Ware who produced the anti-Corbyn Is Labour Anti-Semiticprogramme which has been assailed ever since it was broadcast in July 2019 for its dishonesty and downright lies.

Others included chief Islamaphobe and former Charity Commission chairman William Shawcross, who as a director of the Henry Jackson Society, expressed the view that:

 “Europe and Islam is one of the greatest, most terrifying problems of our future. I think all European countries have vastly, very quickly growing Islamic populations.”

 Others included Jonathan Kandel, Robert Swerling of EMK Capital and Tom Boltman, head of strategic initiatives at Kovrr. Why you might ask should anyone invest in a sinking ship? Rats usually leave sinking ships, they don’t join them. What is it about the JC that enables the normal laws of capitalism  to be suspended?

It’s not even as if the Jewish Chronicle has a large circulation. Once upon a time the paper had a circulation of over 50,000.  As late as 2008 it had a paid readership of 32,875. Under the editorships of Stephen Pollard and now Jake Wallis-Simpson it has collapsed to 12,192, of which 5,990 are given away free!

Alan Rusbridger alluded to the reason namely that the JC’s purpose is to ensure that people are ‘swayed by its coverage and arguments, especially in relation to Israel.’  Rusbridger asked what if anonymous foreign backers were to pump money into The Telegraph.

There would, rightly, be a parliamentary hue and cry about their background and motives.

One person who Rusbridger named as a possible backer was ‘right-wing American billionaire, Paul E Singer.’ who has been described as “a longtime supporter of hawkish pro-Israel causes” and is a major funder of the conservative thinktank Foundation for Defense of Democracies, whose positions“have closely tracked those of the Likud party and its leader, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu”.

These are not the kind of stories that make it into the Jewish Chronicle - their Jewish readership has to be kept ignorant and uninformed

That is presumably why Karen Glaser, who was previously at the anti-Corbyn New Statesman jumped ship to the JC where she was promoted to chief propagandist and editor of the JC2 supplement.

While she was at the NS I alighted on what I called‘the most trivial, trite and superficial article that the New Statesman has ever run’. (see below) It was about how she disposed of her Corbyn supporting boyfriend for ‘anti-Semitism’. As I wrote, it should have been called‘How Karen Glaser’s ex-boyfriend had a very very narrow escape!’

No doubt she was head hunted by the JC, impressed at how she had managed to invent out of nothing yet another fake ‘anti-Semitism’ story. Clearly they have been richly rewarded.

In her present job she has written articles such as Why are the Jews overlooking their natural allies? No it’s not the Left and those who fought genuine anti-Semitism in the 1930s and under Nazi occupation in Europe. She was referring to Muslims asking why it is that ‘we neglect more friendly communities’. Muslims are unfriendly.  Why? Because they support the Palestinians.

Other delightful articles from the pen of Ms Glaser include the heavy weight intellectual thesis ‘What fuels antisemitism? A lot is sheer envy’. Ah yes. All that anti-Semitism was just ‘sheer envy’. All those learned scholars who spent years analysing the subject were barking up the wrong tree. The highly cerebral Glaser has discovered the secret of anti-Semitism at last.

And then there is the sad, tear-jerking story of how ‘I’ve been rejected by a Gen Z friend thanks to TikTok and my editor’. Glaser describes how on November 9 she got a text from W saying she was sorry, but our relationship was over. She was “watching an interview your Jake Wallis Simons is giving” on television and,

“truly I don’t know how this is the side you’re on. I am so disappointed and upset and so many other emotions, but I can’t be friends with anyone who defends Israel.”

My first instinct was to congratulate Glaser on her choice of friends. If only she could emulate them.  But no, it was all self-pity. Glaser wrote:

Ever since October 7, W has been posting endless streams of extreme antisemitic propaganda on her social media platforms. Only she doesn’t realise they are antisemitic because the vicious lies she is spreading are about Israel. She believes there is a bright, clear line between hating the Jews and hating the Jews’ nation state.

It seems that W possesses something that Glaser doesn’t, viz. a modicum of intelligence. To most people there is no connection between hating Jews and hating the actions of a racist, apartheid, genocide loving state. But no, Glaser explains that ‘it’s a popular view among the privileged and educated, two things that W is not.’

Yet even Glaser concedes that ‘W is exceptionally bright so I recommended she read my editor’s book.’ This is a reference to the most turgid book of the year, Jake Wallis-Simpson’s  Israelphobia a book that the Right in this country just loves.

It is no surprise that Spiked the neo-liberal journal of the former Revolutionary Communist Party and its reviewer Daniel Ben Ami loves it. Funded by the far-right oil billionaire Koch brothers of New York it could hardly do any other. 40 years ago I knew Ben-Ami when he was an anti-Zionist before his he and the RCP decided to join the capitalists they had purportedly opposed!

Then there is The Spectator, a right-wing weekly that used to have some integrity. Tanya Gold, of whom I once wrote that she‘is to Journalism what Harold Shipman was to Care of the Elderly’ asked in her ‘review’Is Israelophobia the latest form of anti-Semitism? What she should really be asking is whether there is such a thing as ‘Israelophobia’.

But these cloned ‘journalists’ monsters, who call are really just scribes for the ruling class, are incapable of original thought or asking the simplest of questions. For them it isn’t the existence of apartheid, occupation and discrimination that is the problem, it is their critics.

It is like someone in the 1930s suggesting that opposition to Nazism stemmed, not from what they did but anti-German sentiments. In fact that was the position of the Anglo-German Fellowship, which was made up of Tory MPs, Peers and corporate affiliates like Price Waterhouse, Unilever, Dunlop, Thomas Cook and the Midland Bank (HSBC) and Lazard Brothers.

All the same arguments about critics of Hitler’s Germany apply to Israel but there is almost no one on the Right, with the possible exception of Peter Hitchens and Peter Osborne, who retain any intellectual integrity and are able to point out the obvious.

The Spectator used to be the house journal of people like Sir Ian Gilmour, its editor from 1954-9 and one of the most cerebral Foreign Office Ministers, who with his brother David penned a searing critique of a revisionist Zionist history of Palestine by Joan Peters.

People like Tanya Gold and Karen Glaser are incapable of admitting that thousands of Jews support the Palestinians for the very same reason that they oppose anti-Semitism. Instead they prefer to sing from a stale ruling class narrative that conflates hostility to Zionism with hostility to Jews as Jews. As Goebbels once remarked, if you repeat a lie long enough then people will believe it.

Until 1945 most Jews in Britain were not Zionists. When Zionism first appeared in Britain at the end of the 19^th century it was opposed by all wings of the Jewish community from the Chief Rabbi and the Board of Deputies to the Jewish Chronicle. Most Jews saw it as a form of Jewish anti-Semitism.

In the 1900 General Election Jewish refugees from Russia were demonised in the same way as the Boat People are today. The Tories, who today pretend they are concerned about anti-Semitism, were then opposed to ‘Alien immigration’ i.e. Jewish refugees. In the East End the Tories stood virulently anti-Semitic candidates, one of whom David Hope-Kydd referred to Jewish immigrants as ‘the very scum of the unhealthiest of the Continental nations.’

Notwithstanding this the English Zionist Federation supported them. In 1905 Arthur Balfour of the Balfour Declaration introduced, as Prime Minister, the Aliens Act directed against Jewish immigrants.  In 1917 when Lloyd George’s Cabinet approved the Balfour Declaration the only member to vote against it was its only Jewish member, Sir Edwin Montagu, who accused his fellow cabinet members of anti-Semitism.

Below I reprint an earlier blog on Karen Glaser when she took a swipe against a guy who had the misfortune to end up in bed with her!

Tony Greenstein

Is this the most trivial, trite and superficial article that the New Statesman has ever run?

Or How Karen Glaser’s ex-boyfriend had a very very narrow escape! 

 On her blog we learn that Karen Glaser is ‘an experienced journalist’ whose ‘journalism has been syndicated internationally.’ This perhaps tells us more about the standards of journalism today than the quality of Ms Glaser’s output.  Karen tells us that she writes on relationships and Jewish matters and that she has been a columnist for the Jewish Chronicle, which is not encouraging given the decline in the latter’s circulation and its role as a Zionist megaphone. She boasts that the guests on her Guardian podcasts have included David Aaronovitch and Melanie Phillips, which hardly gives us much confidence in her claim to be a left-wing British Jew. But perhaps she means a ‘left-wing’ Zionist which is an entirely different thing. In short Karen is just the kind of tame establishment journalist that The Staggers loves to indulge.

The New Statesman, which used to consider itself on the left, has been second only to the Guardian in its venomous attacks on Jeremy Corbyn and its indulgence of his Zionist critics (for example the abysmal article by the Jewish Labour Movement’s Mike Katz and Adam Langleben on why they supported the IHRA). My attention was drawn to what must count as just the most trivial article I have yet read of the anti-Corbyn genre. Ms Glaser’s Why I kicked my boyfriend out at 2am over anti-Semitism in the Labour party. It is the Zionist equivalent of Freddie Starr Ate My Hamster and bears about the same relationship to the truth.

The New Statesman's Bizarre anti-Corbyn Story

Apparently this tragic lonely heart had been in a relationship with ‘Sean’ for some 9 months before discovering his ‘anti-Semitism’. He is you understand a Corbynite and these people are nothing if not clever and devious.  Presumably he hid his anti-Semitism under the bed sheets for all of the 9 months until Karen had her epiphany.  Or perhaps he pretended he was a Tory? We have Karen’s assurance that Tories are never anti-Semitic so it’s no wonder that Karen was fooled by this dastardly swine.

Apparently Sean ‘gestured in exaggerated fashion’ to her many possessions. “Well, your life looks OK to me,” which is proof that she had been sharing her most intimate secrets with Himmler’s bastard offspring. How dare the upstart suggest that Karen’s life is a bed of roses when anyone can see that it consists of tears and strife, toil and trouble to say nothing of public self-humiliation. She had clearly been in bed with an anti-Semite if not a fully fledge Nazi. It is one of life's wonders that Karen is not suffering from PTSD.

When told that she seemed to be comfortably off Karen, sharp as a button, responded instantly that “Lots of Jews had nice apartments in 1930s Berlin,” and we all know what happened to Germany’s Jews. What an insensitive soul she had shacked up with not to realise that Corbyn’s Gestapo was about to nationalise her flat whilst putting her in ‘protective detention’ along with all those other Jewish capitalists.

Karen you understand was doing her best not to appear to be the ‘hyperbolic Jew of anti-Semitic ridicule.’ Rest assured Karen, only an anti-Semite could possibly suggest that you were exaggerating your pain, being hyperbolic or behaving like a typical JAP (Jewish American Princess).  After all, everyone knows that Momentum’s uniform includes regulation jackboots for the day when Fuhrer Corbyn takes control. 

Karen Glaser - A Journalist Whose Talents Lie in Fiction Writing

Karen tells us, in one of those romantic moments that we all treasure, that ‘I really liked’ Sean.  After this public drubbing you wonder what exactly it was that she liked about him, apart from having the patience of a saint or two. You get the feeling that it might have been preferable to have had a relationship with a tarantula rather than take the risk of being Karen’s consort.

And when Sean told Karen ‘that Labour’s anti-Semitism had been massively overstated, that it was essentially a tawdry attempt to smear Corbyn’ you could have heard a pin drop. Its akin to taking communion and drinking the blood of Christ naked or even worse, eating a ham sandwich in an Orthodox synagogue (which the Jewish anarchists used to do!).

However Karen, a woman with a permanently shimmering halo,‘took a deep breath and answered him properly.’ as one should of course though one suspects that she must have considered reaching for the rolling pin.  Our Jewish heroine ‘explained to my lover that this is no laughing matter’.

Here we have an existentialist clash of love and life. When the jackboots are on the doorstep, the last thing you want is for your lover to question your fears of an imminent demise.  Karen was, in essence, a budding Jamal Khashoggi.

Karen patiently explained ‘that there is a consensus across Anglo-Jewry that there is a serious problem of anti-Semitism in Labour’.  And where there is a consensus there is eternal life and truth. Clearly this ingrate, who one assumes isn’t even Jewish, was incapable of demonstrating even the slightest empathy with Karen’t horrible predicament.

At this point I feel duty bound to point out that Israel was founded in order to stop the Karens, Beckys and Sarahs of this world bedding down with shegetzes. For those who are unacquainted with these things let me explain that the shegetz like its female counterpart, the shiksa, is derived from the Yiddish word sheketz, which roughly translated means an abomination, an unclean thing, a detested thing.  Rabbi Jack Abramowitz described it as "simply indefensible", "inherently condescending, racist and misogynistic". Nonetheless non-Jewish boyfriends are inherently risky.

This is the real racism not fake anti-Semitism

However I digress. Karen is nothing if not broadminded and despite being a Zionist had no objection to having a shegetz for a partner. One can only hope that she has learnt her lesson and that in future she keeps it in the tribe. If she were in Israel she would be known as a trollope and worse. Miscegenation is taken seriously in the Holy Land because it isn’t so much a question of religion but racial purity whereas in the diaspora these things are only too common.  50%+ of American Jews 'marry out'.

Karen whose patience is one of the most loveable things about her, tried to explain to this non-Jewish parvenu that ‘if Tory politicians had done half the things to any other ethnic group that Corbyn has done to the Jews, leftists would be baying for blood.’

Now I know that the anti-Semites who read this blog will probably scoff and chuckle at this but Karen has a point. In fact a number of points. After all it is well known that when it comes to ‘other ethnic groups’ the Tories are a model of British tolerance and good manners. Indeed the party of the grisly May has never, as far as I am aware, ever advocated discrimination against anyone on the grounds of religion, race or sexual orientation. Enoch Powell is but a distant memory.

Yes I know that the Tory party are in alliance with a range of anti-Semitic parties (at least 3 – Swedish Democrats, Poland’s Law &; Justice and Latvia’s Fatherland and Freedom Parties) – in the European Conservative and Reform group in the European parliament.  Of course Tory MEPs voted to defend the anti-Semitic Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban in a vote of censure recently. But quite rightly Karen would have dismissed this as totally irrelevant.  She’s not talking old-fashioned anti-Semitism i.e. hatred of Jews she is talking Israel and hatred of Zionism.

Perhaps someone can supply the name of Jewish people killed by the Police in custody?

The Windrush scandal was merely a figment of someone’s imagination.  ‘Hostile environment’ policy? That’s just another name for global warming.  Stop and search? That’s just the Police being helpful to Black kids who’ve lost their way in life. Black deaths in custody?  Well everyone has got to die somewhere.  Clearly Karen has got a point.  If other ethnic groups had suffered  a fraction of what Jews have had to put with under Corbyn, that pound shop British Goebbels, then us leftists would have risen up.  It could well have turned into another Peterloo such would have been our anger.

And when Sean asked, ‘as Corbynistas always do’ what Corbyn had actually done, then Karen went through her ‘grim list’.  And for the doubting Thomases here let me assure you that the list is indeed Grimm as in Grimm’s Fairy Tales. 

All of these men according to Karen Glaser have 'hook noses'

Having been provoked, beyond endurance, by her non-Jewish lover, Karen let forth: There was his absurd claim that Hamas and Hezbollah ‘are dedicated to peace and justice’ when we all know that it was Hezbollah which invaded Israel in 1982 and again in 2006.  Indeed this terror group occupied a large swathe of land in Northern Israel for years with a puppet Zionist in charge.

As for Hamas, we all know what they are capable of.  They even send forth hundreds and thousands of demonstrators to the fence with Israel with strict instructions to get themselves killed, forcing the poor Israeli boys to do just that.  Because as we know ‘Hamas’s charter calls for the destruction of the Jews’ (it doesn’t!) and it would seem the destruction of the Palestinians too.

Then there is Corbyn’s defence of the blood libeller Raed Salah (again not true but what’s a lie between lovers?) to say nothing of his membership of Facebook groups ‘where deeply anti-Semitic posts are the norm’ (also not true) and ‘his siding with those behind the now infamous Nazi-style mural showing hook-nosed anti-Semitic caricatures, getting rich on the backs of the world’s poor.’ The latter refers to a mural of 6 bankers, 4 of whom were non-Jewish, none of whom had a hook nose. Why let a few facts come between lovers?

Of course there will be some cynics reading this who will be credulous at this point but I ask you to restrain your laughter.  This is a serious and difficult matter for Karen who ‘tried to explain to the man with whom I’d just shared my bed just how painful this all was.’ Anyone with an ounce of sensitivity will by now realise the difficulty poor Karen was in.  The conflict between her love and lust for Sean and her horror at his clear anti-Semitism posed a dilemma that no woman should have to undergo.

Karen however was nothing if not patient with her errant Sean.  She explained that in the past decade some 40,000 Jews had emigrated from France to Israel.  Of course, like all Zionist statistics this is somewhat misleading. After the murder of 4 Jews in the Hypercacher supermarket in 2015 Israel did its best to stimulate the emigration of Jews.  Netanyahu came over to Paris to tell the Jews there that their ‘real home’ was Israel but not only did they not come in the expected numbers but of those who did come ‘many of them are also returning to France in greater numbers’ according to Andy Semotiuk. Zionism’s answer to anti-Semitism has never been to fight it but to do what the anti-Semites want, which is to leave and set up their own racial state. According to Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics, in 2014 there were 6,547 Jewish emigrants from France and in 2015, despite the Charlie Hebdo and Hypercacher murders the number rose only to 6,628. In 2016, the number dropped to 4,239 and in 2017 there were only 3,157. In the first five months of 2018 there were just 759 emigrants. In short there are lies, damned lies and Karen’s statistics. Why the Expected Wave of French Immigration to Israel Never Materialized

Karen, whose patience with her shegetz, was almost superhuman, explained to the anti-Semitic misfit that ‘mocking Jews when they call out anti-Semitism, is analogous to white people telling black people they are imagining their experiences of racism.’ Well put. Read from the crib sheet with perfection. The only problem is that Jews in Britain are White not Black.  Not only White but the most privileged section of the White community in terms of socio-economic status. It was noticeable that in all her examples of ‘anti-Semitism’ none of them actually related to anything that has actually disadvantaged British Jews.  They all related to Israel. Strange that.

Even worse poor Sean then blurted out that ‘Jews have money, don’t they?’ whilst hastening to reassure Karen that he wasn’t talking about her.

By this time, you will understand that Karen Glaser had just about had enough of Sean and quite understandably she exploded. Anti-Semitism in her boudoir was really too much. Since Jews don’t have saints, one almost wonders whether Pope Francis might help out and canonise the Blessed Karen Glaser.  I realise that you have to be dead before the process of beatification begins but I’m sure that Karen, halo intact, could be made an exception. She patiently told the miscreant that:

‘the point is that anti-Semitism is never about Jews and the actual lives they lead, and one of the central tropes of anti-Semitism is the pernicious association between Jews and money. It never, ever goes away. For many on the left this means that the Jews can never be oppressed or exploited but are, in fact, the source of others’ oppression and exploitation. That’s why Corbyn couldn’t see anything wrong with that vile mural. It matched his world view.

You will understand I am sure the magnitude of young Sean’s offence. Indeed I am surprised that Karen didn’t pick up her phone, dial 999 and report him for a hate crime.  I should imagine that 6 months in the clink might be the best cure (since being deprived of Karen’s nocturnal favours probably won’t be punishment enough).

Before m’lud pronounces sentence it is probably fair to quote a couple of Jewish experts who can be witness to Sean’s anti-Semitic crimes.

The first is William Rubinstein, a past President of the Jewish Historical Society. In his book The Right, Left and the Jews, (Croom Helm, 1982) Rubinstein writes that

the rise of Western Jewry to unparalleled affluence and high status has led to the near disappearance of a Jewish proletariat of any size : indeed the Jews may become the first ethnic group in history without a working class of any size.... it has made Marxism, and other radical doctrines, irrelevant to the socio-economic bases of Western Jewry, and increasingly unattractive to most Jews.

While there have been many wealthy and powerful Jewish individuals and dynasties throughout modern history, only since the 1950s has Western Jewry as a whole risen into the upper-middle class. And the Jewish proletariat transformed itself into a near-universal Jewish bourgeoisie.’ p. 51

Perhaps we should quickly pass on since it’s obvious that this Rubinstein fellow is also anti-Semitic. How about the much more reasonable Geoffrey Alderman, who is a right-wing columnist for the Jewish Chronicle?  In his book ‘The Jewish Community in British Politics, Clarendon Press 1983, Alderman writes (p. 137)

the tendency for British Jews to be found in the higher social classes is very evident. In 1961 over 40 per cent of Anglo-Jewry was located in the upper two social classes, whereas these categories accounted for less than 20 per cent of the general population. The electoral consequences of this trend become clear when it is remembered that , at the time of the 1964 general election which Labour won, three -quarters of the top two social classes supported the conservative party.

Hmm. Maybe not. So it seems that not only is Sean right about Jews being more prosperous than the average Gentile but we have also stumbled on the real reason why so few Jews vote Labour today. Nothing to do with that left-wing Adolf Corbyn.  It would seem that it’s no longer in their interest to do so, as just about anyone who has lived in a Jewish community will tell you. They are insufferably bourgeois.  It was not for nothing that in Thatcher’s constituency of Finchley Jews constituted one of her main support bases.

The ever patient Karen, who truth be told wanted to hang on to Sean if at all possible, then got on to the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism. I know what some of you malcontents are going to say. That people like Geoffrey Robertson QC have slagged it off as being not fit for purpose but as Karen explained the IHRA

‘was written in response to this hatred, a definition to help European police forces and prosecutors better understand it. That’s why the Labour Party’s refusal to adopt it in full for so long caused huge hurt and pain.’

And nothing defines our Karen so much as pain.  Her article oozes the stuff. The fact that the IHRA mentions Israel more than Jews is completely irrelevant. Its sole concern is anti-Semitism. After all it’s a Working Definition on Anti-Semitism and has been for the past 14 years. What further proof do you need of its relevance than the fact that all those Tories support it? There is barely an anti-Semite in the world, Orban, Trump, Netanyahu, who doesn’t support it.

Up piped our irrepressible Sean ‘“Britain has hate speech and anti-discrimination laws.  Why do Jews need additional protection?” A good question you might think but I beg you to understand that this last, flippant comment was what we in the trade call the straw that broke the camel’s back (if comparing a Jew to a camel isn’t anti-Semitic).

The legendary Robert Fisk of The Independent

You will now understand why Sean’s insolent and brazen refusal to emphathise with his erstwhile lover led to the breakdown of a beautiful relationship. One can only imagine the pained expression on Karen as she barked ‘I think it’s time for you to leave’.

As St. Karen of Golders Green explained to The Stagger’s readership

‘Corbynistas’ standard response to Jews is that they know their claims of anti-Semitism are false and that they make them to smear the Labour leader. Of course this doesn’t explain why this woman threw her (now ex) lover out of her freshly painted flat at 2.30 am.’

Never a truer word spoken in jest.  Karen is right. Sean’s impudence doesn’t explain why ‘this woman’ behaved as she did.  I can only presume it was a product of the fact that for all her wittering about ‘anti-Semitism’ she could not explain how it was that anti-Semitism had only risen since Jeremy Corbyn had become leader of the Labour Party and why Tory links with genuine anti-Semites never seemed to get a look in.  Or indeed why, if Labour was indeed anti-Semitic  it was the papers of the Right, like the Daily Mail, the paper that supported Hitler in the 1930’s and which opposed the immigration of Jewish refugees from Nazism, who were hottest on Corbyn’s ‘anti-Semitism’.

One of a rare breed - Robert Fisk - The Independent's Legenday Middle East correspondent

 There is only one moral one can draw from this story and it is an old one.  Hell has no fury like a woman scorned. Karen Glaser deserves to be scorned and treated with complete disdain and contempt for the dishonesty of this account, from beginning to end. If it did indeed occur then we can rest assured that it is a parody of the breakdown in her relationship with ‘Sean’.  I suspect, like the odyssey of the Children of Israel in the Sinai desert it is a comfortable myth which hides more than it reveals about Karen’s personal life.

It would of course be interesting to hear Sean’s account of this fairy tale but for the New Statesman to do that would be to break a habit of a lifetime.  It would mean conceding a right of reply to someone who had been abused and traduced. Even if his name has been changed there is no doubt that there will be people who know of Karen’s ex-partner and will think worse of him as a result.

However that is as nothing when one considers that Sean should count himself extremely fortunate to be free of this hectoring, bullying, self centred and superficial woman. That she is probably typical of British journalists and the staff on the New Statesman is indeed a cause for reflection if not concern. Pundits and commentators today are little more than prostitutes doing their proprietor’s bidding. Their opinions are for sale and any journalist with an independent streak is unlikely to gain and retain employment on most newspapers.

Patrick Cockburn - part of a journalistic dynasty 

I can think of just two, possibly three, journalists who retain any credibility or independence today.  Patrick Cockburn, the legendary Robert Fisk and John Pilger. The first two are employed by The Independent and Pilger has no regular paper.  Instead we have a succession of mediocrities flitting between The Guardian, New Statesman and BBC, none of whom challenges the neo-liberal view of the world that sees capitalism as a good thing and inevitable and which is incapable of marrying up things like poverty, global warming and climate change with the social and economic system that produces these phenomenon.

Perhaps I have wasted too much time on Karen Glaser, who is really just an insipid and insignificant reflection of other peoples’ thoughts. Someone who retails hasbara  as her own original thought and whose view of the world is coloured by her own perception of her ‘oppression’.  At the end of the day Karen Glaser’s article says as much about the editors at the New Statesman as it does about her.

Below is a letter I rushed off to the New Statesman. It will not of course be published. (it wasn’t!)

Tony Greenstein

 International Law is Dying and the Mask of Western Democracy is Disappearing With It

Brilliant complication of scenes of violence by the New York Police set to The Hanging Treee

It is a truism that the first casualty of war is the truth. In the case of Israel’s attack on Gaza even the word ‘war’ is a lie. Unless the devastation of hospitals and the murder of doctors and patients counts as a war.

In 1984, Orwell's dystopian novel,doublethink was the ability to hold two diametrically opposed ideas and believe in them both simultaneously. The three slogans of the party — "War Is Peace; Freedom Is Slavery; Ignorance Is Strength"— are examples.

Today we see this playing out in Israel’s war on the Palestinians. Genocide is called Israel’s ‘right to defend itself’ and ‘terrorism’ is the Palestinians’ resistance. If anyone is the terrorist it is the Israeli state whose military has destroyed every university, nearly every hospital and virtually all civil society infrastructure such as churches, mosques and schools.

US Police Attack Student Demonstrators 

Orwell lived before the advent of social media but what he wrote is as true now as when he wrote it nearly three-quarters of a century ago.

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... 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.... Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.

We can replace pacification with the war against terror but the meaning is the same. We live in a world of lies, where truth is deemed subversive. Yet Orwell was wrong was in believing that people would simply accept the situation and adjust their thinking accordingly. Opinion polls in Britain and America have uniformly shown that the 70% of people wants an immediate ceasefire and a majority of young people and legal scholars see Israel’s actions as genocide.

The National Guard's Murder of 4 Students at Ohio University in 1970

Even members of Biden’s own administration have protested. On May 15 Lily Greenberg, a Jewish-American political appointee, resigned. On May 13 Major Harrison Mann resigned from the Defence Intelligence Agency, accusing Biden of ‘advancing a policy that enables the mass starvation of children’.

Mann cited an “unexpected outpouring of support” from colleagues testifying to the unprecedented dissent in the intelligence agency.

Fmr Minister Ayelet Shaked:"After we turn Khan Younis too into a soccer field […] we need to take advantage of the destruction [to tell] the countries that each of them should take a quota, it can be 20000 or 50000 […] We need 2 million to leave. That's the solution for Gaza."> https://t.co/1vQRo6ZHd1pic.twitter.com/UMFPhVKwSo

— Israel, translated (@israeltrnsltd) November 22, 2023

Lily Greenberg Call went from being a college student involved in Israeli government hasbara to publicly resigning from a US goverment job in protest of the Gaza genocide.

Israel's mass murder has irreparably damaged its image in the minds of young Jewish-Americans. pic.twitter.com/953dm9LkmW

— Dan Cohen (@dancohen3000) May 15, 2024

National Security Council member John Kirby had said he didn’t believe Israel was deliberately committing war crimes.  Presumably they were accidental! Kirby denied that there had been any breach of international law. Call wrote:

My whole life has been spent in Jewish community in the US and Israel. I have spent time in Israel/Palestine..., I am terrified by rising antisemitism around the world. And yet I am certain that the answer to this is not to collectively punish millions of innocent Palestinians through displacement, famine and ethnic cleansing....

As of writing this. Israel has killed 35,000 people in Gaza, including 15,000 children. The Israeli military has bombed medical infrastructure, besieged a hospital, left mass graves behind, destroyed every university in Gaza, targeted journalists and aid workers and committed many, many inexcusable atrocities. These are all violations of international law, none of which would be possible without American weapons, and none of which have been condemned by President Biden.

The President has the power to call for a lasting ceasefire, to stop sending weapons to Israel, and to condition aid. The United States has used nearly no leverage throughout the last eight months to hold Israel accountable; quite the opposite. we have enabled and legitimized Israel’s actions with vetoes of UN resolutions designed to hold Israel accountable. President Biden has the blood of innocent people on his hands....

Any system that requires the subjugation of one group over another is not only unjust. but unsafe. Jewish safety cannot – and will not – come at the expense of Palestinian freedom. Making Jews the face of the American war machine makes us less safe.

United States support of Israel is based on a series of lies.

WH spokesman John Kirby: "We don't have any indications that there's deliberate efforts to commit war crimes by the Israeli Defense Forces."

Came in response to question about Chile & Mexico asking the International Criminal Court to investigate crimes against civilians in Gaza. pic.twitter.com/ztx2lL5oRL

— Prem Thakker (@prem_thakker) January 19, 2024

The Lies About October 7

The first lie was the comparison of October 7 with the Holocaust. Zionism, having opposed the rescue of Jewish refugees from the holocaust, lost no time in exploiting it for propaganda purposes.  Even to the extent of Netanyahu suggesting that it was the Palestinians who gave Hitler the idea of killing the Jews.

Yocheved Lifshitz Press Conference

The Nazis and their allies murdered Jews because they were Jews. The Palestinian Resistance killed Israelis, not because they were Jewish but because they were their oppressors. It is as if people fought the Nazis because they were Germans.

The next lie was the allegation of mass, systematic rape. Certainly there were atrocities and some Israeli women may have been raped. What is absolutely certain is that Hamas did not organise a rape orgy.

The New York Times ran an ‘exclusive’ Screams Without Words. The story has been comprehensively discredited in the Electronic Intifada, The Intercept and the Grayzone among others. It employed as their main researcher an Israeli Anat Schwartz. On her social media feed, Schwartz liked a tweet saying that Israel needed to “turn the strip into a slaughterhouse.”

“Violate any norm, on the way to victory,” read the post. “Those in front of us are human animals.”

None of the women captives who were released made such claims. They claimed they had been treated like Queens and humanely.

Release of Hostages

When Yocheved Lifshitz was released by Hamas, she gave a press conference at the Hadassah hospital where she spoke of the humane treatment she had received from Hamas. Immediately there were recriminations as to how this press conference had been allowed. The hospital employee who arranged the press conference was dismissed yet no one in the press even considers this at all newsworthy.

Ex-Prisoners Recall Time In Israeli Detention

Contrast this with the treatment of Palestinian prisoners. They speak of beatings, food deprivation, being held incommunicado and suffering petty restrictions.

Compare the letter of Danyal and Emilia that was freely given to Hamas by an Israeli captive. Israeli Channel 13reported, that the released Israeli hostages said they did not experience mistreatment or torture. The food was scarce, which was not surprising since Israel has imposed a total water and food blockade on Gaza.

Hin & Ajam Were 2 Prisoners of Hamas

Tel Aviv kept the released Israeli hostages away from the media and allowed only relatives and friends to meet them. The hostages were forced into media silence as Israel tightened its control on interviews.

Columbia Protests

A report from Israel’s Channel 12 noted that Israeli authorities had arranged a special media process for the hostages’ post-release, in order to ensure that they remain in control of the narrative.

Alon Ben David: "Hamas treated the Israeli hostages well"

Political analyst Yaniv Peleg, said in an article for Israel Hayom that broadcasting the footage live was detrimental to Israel. How is broadcasting the truth ‘detrimental to Israel’? Peleg even complained of the professionalism of Hamas footage!

Police violence at Columbia University

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.

This was before Israel’s propaganda machine got going but it doesn’t suggest that Hamas were baby killers.

Joe Biden though swore that he had personally seen photographs of beheaded babies, which the White House later had to ‘walk back’.

Antony Blinken, his Secretary of State also testified before a Senate Committee to gruesome acts of murder and torture which simply didn’t happen.  Our rulers think nothing of lying to justify genocide.

Never before has genocide been so openly supported by amoral politicians for whom the truth is an alien being. Equally culpable is a media which has focussed on Israel’s pretext, the attack on October 7,as if an occupied people should not resist. One wonders if they would have had the same advice for France under Nazi occupation in 1940?

Abby Martin Describes What Conditions Are Like on the West Bank

For the BBC and Sky history began on October 7. For reasons unknown Hamas attacked peaceful Israelis living near the Gaza fence. With the exception of Al Jazeera, none of the media have put October 7 in the context of a half-century occupation and the Nakba.

Which is why has now banned Al Jazeera. Israel has already forbidden journalists to enter Gaza and it has killed at least 109 journalists. As the Bureau of Investigative Journalism wrote, The killing of journalists in Gaza is an unprecedented attack on the truth.

There has not been a squeak out of Biden or Sunak. Yet they would  have screamed if Russia had murdered journalists in Ukraine. One could only imagine the headlines of the gutter press.

השב"כ הודיע על צוות ניל"י לחיסול משתתפי הטבח.

את הצלמים שלקחו חלק בצילום הטבח יש לצרף לרשימה.

— Danny Danon 🇮🇱 דני דנון (@dannydanon) November 9, 2023

There has even been a campaign in Israel to encourage the killing of journalists. Danny Danon, a Likud MK, called for the“elimination” of photo-journalists “who participated in covering the massacre.” Reporters Without Borders condemned

calls by Israeli politicians in the past 24 hours for journalists in Gaza to be killed. Prompted by unsubstantiated conjecture about the journalists’ integrity,... . Targeting journalists is a war crime.

In an interview on Israel’s Kan Radios’ “This Morning Show” on 16 October hosted by Aryeh Golan, Yasmin Porat, an Israeli survivor from Kibbutz Be’eri said Israeli forces killed their own civilians

The first person to challenge Israel’s narrative about Hamas atrocities was Yasmine Porat in an interview with Israeli radio. Porat told of how she and her partner had been treated humanely by Hamas and how the inhabitants of Kibbutz Be’eri, where she had fled to after the attack on the rave, died because Israel’s military opened fire with tank shells on the houses where their inhabitants were being held captive.

The damage caused by Israeli tanks at Kibbutz Be'eri

Yasmine Porat Interview – Israeli Radio – 23 November 23

An article in the Times of Israel tells how:

An IDF officer has recounted a tough decision he made on October 7 to order a tank to fire two light shells toward a house in Kibbutz Be’eri in which Hamas terrorists had been holding 14 Israelis hostages during the Palestinian terror group’s onslaught — fire that killed at least one Israeli.

Today, the IDF responds to Hiram’s acknowledgment by praising the IDF commander

A cursory look at the damage to Kibbutz Be’eri makes it clear that the militants, who were only carrying light weapons, could not possibly have caused it. The mainstream media has refused to mention Israel’s Hannibal Directive.

The Grayzone quotes Haaretz as saying that the army was only able to restore control over Be’eri after “shelling” the homes of Israelis.

The price was terrible: at least 112 Be’eri residents were killed. Others were kidnapped. Yesterday, 11 days after the massacre, the bodies of a mother and her son were discovered in one of the destroyed houses. It is believed that more bodies are still lying in the rubble.

The cars burn out as a result of Apache missile strikes

Those Israelis who were burnt alive were the victim of Israel’s Apache  helicopters which, by the admission of the pilots, fired randomly on cars escaping from the rave and into Gaza.

Apache helicopter pilots told Israeli media that they scrambled to the battlefield without any intelligence, unable to differentiate between Hamas fighters and Israeli noncombatants, and yet determined to “empty the belly” of their war machines. “I find myself in a dilemma as to what to shoot at, because there are so many of them,” one Apache pilot commented.

Israel could of course have negotiated the release of the Palestinian prisoners but they preferred the death of their own citizens to the release of Palestinians.

Lies About Anti-Semitism

Lies about ‘anti-Semitism’ have been the most persistent. Yet a moments reflection shows that these allegations are made in bad faith.

Suella Braverman, who has the distinction of being the most racist Home Secretary to fill that post, accused the anti-genocide Palestinian demonstrations of ‘hate’ and ‘anti-Semitism’.

Was this anti-Semitism the Oxford English Dictionary definition, hostility to or prejudice against Jews? Braverman’s concerns were about the government being ‘in the grip of a 'pro-Palestine'sentiment’. This was 'not a time for walking away' from Israel.’

This was about Israel not Jews. But Israel is not a Jew. It is a state based on Jewish racial supremacy. As Primo Levi was reported as saying, Palestinians are Israel’s Jews.

This is the same Suella Braverman who ‘dreamed’ of sending refugees to Rwanda. A century ago she would have dreamt of doing the same to Jewish immigrants. At the beginning of the 20^th century Tories demonised Jewish refugees. Arthur Balfour introduced the Aliens Act of 1905 directed at Jewish refugees from Czarist Russia.

Sussex University Students Encampment

James Lowther MP, the Cruella Braverman of his day, spoke in a House of Commons debate about Jewish  refugees on 11.2.1883 about

These destitute aliens... are being sent over here in large numbers to compete not only with honest labour in the market, but with the charitable funds of this country,. ... the condition in which these emigrants for the most part live is filthy and revolting in the extreme. ... Their dwellings arc of the most foul and loathsome character; they are huddled together in numbers and under conditions which happily do not prevail in these days among the home-born population of this country; and the general hygienic conditions under which they live are such as to render their presence a source of permanent danger to the health of this country. ... when we find that persons are living within a few minutes' drive of this House under revolting conditions of human existence which can be scarcely imagined, can it be denied that the presence of these people constitute a source of permanent danger with regard, not only to the initiation, but to the propagation of disease?

Suella Braverman has existed for over a century in one form or another. But whereas Jews were once the target of these racists they are now their tame pets, an alibi for their imperialist ventures.

The Constitution of the Union of Jewish Students includes an 'enduring commitment' to Apartheid Israel. UJS represents Zionist i.e. racist Jewish students only

"Jewish students are angry, they are tired, and they are hurt by the continuous torrent of antisemitic hatred on campus since October 7th."

"Let us be clear, we will not stand for this hatred. It is time that universities take their duty of care to Jewish students seriously."pic.twitter.com/To37Opeglx

— Union of Jewish Students (@UJS_UK) May 2, 2024

The Lie of Violence

When student encampments began in Britain, Sunak called on universities ‘to protect Jewish students.’ He immediately summoned university vice chancellors to Downing Street because he was concerned about their safety! It was reported that

Some senior staff accused Rishi Sunak of “scaremongering” by summoning vice-chancellors to Downing Street last Thursday to urge them to “take personal responsibility” for protecting Jewish students.

The ‘protection of Jewish students’ is a theme of the war mongers. Biden too, who is happy to supply Israel with 2000 bombs to drop on Palestinian civilians is also concerned about

antisemitic posters and “slogans calling for the annihilation of Israel” on college campuses. “Jewish students [have been] blocked, harassed, attacked while walking to class,”

The ‘friendship’ song shown on Israel’s main public broadcast Kan shows sweet little school children singing a song about annihilating Palestinians

The  ‘anti-Semitism’ they talk about is that of the IHRA which was drawn up to conflate anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. As Stephen Sedley, the Jewish former Court of Appeal Judge observed it ‘fails the first test of any definition: it is indefinite.’

The  IHRA has 11 illustrations, 7 of which are about Israel not Jews. One of its illustrations states that ‘Holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel’ is anti-Semitic.’ So when Sunak and Biden raise the issue of Jewish safety because students, many of whom are Jewish, are protesting about Israel’s genocide, then even by their own definition it is they who are anti-Semitic.

Breaking: Students in #Greece participate in the worldwide encampment demonstrations for #Palestine#FreePalestinepic.twitter.com/yHDGvcQUMT

— Chris Avramidis (@chris_avramidis) May 13, 2024

What Sunak, Biden and the Tory press are doing is associating Jews with Israeli actions, genocide included. Why?  Because it provides them with a moral cover for their actions.

If anyone is endangering Jews in this country it is not those who support the Palestinians but Sunak and Braverman. Every word they utter is a lie, born of the dishonesty and malice of their politics.

Sunak called for police action against the encampments. Like Braverman, Sunak has done his best to have Palestinian demonstrations in London banned.

The encampment at University of Amsterdam had the riot police called on it in its first 12 hours. UvA called the police on its own students, who then razed unarmed student protestors with a bulldozer. Over a 100 protestors are now arrested.
power to the students. in our lifetime pic.twitter.com/lLkG8Veu7e

— Mariya (@mariyankhan) May 7, 2024

Violence Against American Students & in Europe

Despite the allegations of violence against America’s student encampments the violence has been one way. It is the encampments which have been violently attacked.

At UCLA, pro-Israel protesters attacked pro-Palestine students with fireworks and tear-gas.  Men wielding clubs assaulted the students.  The violent thugs were outsiders who came to campus prepared for their violent attack. Campus police abandoned the site. None of attackers have been arrested. 

STATEMENT [12 MAY 2024]: Hostile Men Attack Oxford Palestine Encampment.

We will not be deterred. pic.twitter.com/viryppi7oF

— Oxford Action for Palestine (@OxAct4Pal) May 12, 2024

The following day the governor sent in the police. They too assaulted the camp and arrested 200 protesters.  The campus thereafter became an armed camp patrolled and controlled by police.

The violence of the American state was effectively co-ordinated with the far-right Zionist vigilantes. Beneath the thin layer of democry there is a deeply repressive and militarised police state in the USA.

Exeter Liberated Zone pic.twitter.com/KhG90owXL4

— Laleh Khalili 🇵🇸 (@LalehKhalili) May 14, 2024

The USA has never outgrown its settler colonial origins. Because of its role as the world’s major imperialist country it has developed a police force that is highly militarised with a National Guard that is a quasi army. As Richard Silverstein wrote:

An unsavory alliance of US university administrators, law enforcement, MAGA Republicans, pro-Israel billionaires and the Israel Lobby has collaborated to destroy the US national student movement protesting Israel’s Gaza War.

Encampments and protests have spread to 120 campuses nationwide. Over 2,300 students have been arrested. Hundreds have been suspended and even expelled for their activism.

Israel Lobby groups like the ADL and Aipac echo the same charges.  Jonathan Greenblatt of ADL smeared Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace “campus proxies for Hezbollah.” 

The Columbia administration declared that students arrested after seizing the campus building will be expelled. 

Locals in Oxford call out supporters of the pro-Palestine university encampment, fed up with terrorist-sympathisers disrupting their city.

People have had enough. pic.twitter.com/zm7OndvV4a

— Turning Point UK 🇬🇧 (@TPointUK) May 13, 2024

At Columbia University Baroness Minouche Shafik called on New York’s Police to clear the encampments, not once but twice. According to The Intercept students who were arrested were denied water and food for 16 hours, according to two faculty members at Columbia University’s Barnard College .

Last night, around 8:50pm, the Oxford encampment was attacked by six men who arrived in a taxi.

They ripped down banners, screamed at students and made threats.

Protesters did not engage and de-escalators moved local community members away from the attackers.

1/ pic.twitter.com/fE1pETE3nS

— Madeleine Jane (@_MadeleineJane) May 12, 2024

Other students reported that they were beaten by New York City Police Department officers after their arrests and taken to the hospital for injuries before being returned to central booking. Shafik was part of the liberal elite and former Director of the LSE.

BREAKING: Our students at King's College London started their #encampment demanding @KingsCollegeLon to condemn Israel's war crimes in Palestine, boycott complicit Israeli academic institutions, pledge to help rebuild #Gaza's education sector & safeguard freedom of speech 🧵 1/7 pic.twitter.com/orCoTNenM0

— Prof. Hanna Kienzler 🧡 🇵🇸 (@HannaKienzler) May 13, 2024

The Arts and Science Faculty at Columbia passed a no confidence motion in Shafik. None of which stopped Biden’s lies to the nation.

Biden’s Lies

Biden continually invoked “anti-Semitism,” endorsing the false claims that hatred of Zionism and Israel is hatred of Jews. 

We love to see it. New encampment at Kings College. Zionism is over I am telling you #StudentProtests#kingscollegeencampmentpic.twitter.com/RijiCEjuIc

— Rachida Benamar🐝 (@ramapublishing) May 13, 2024

Protesters have deliberately maintained a non-violent stance, even in the face of police and counter-demonstrator assaults.  They have not prevented anyone from accessing campus. In fact it was the administration who cancelled classes because pro-Israel students felt “unsafe.”  The only outside agitators engaged in violence are the police who violently attacked students.

The attack at the @OxAct4Pal encampment yesterday was disgusting. Here are the two of the 6 culprits - https://t.co/4kyAT4a4Ee

Avi Libbert - CEO of Capri Fashion.

Marcus Olsberg of Duke Capital Limited.

The mob threatened to kill Jewish students and they got away with it!! https://t.co/bXZjV5zLFMpic.twitter.com/AySv7hjW9n

— Darshan Sanghrajka (@chiefchimpanzee) May 12, 2024

One bright side is that students and administrators at Portland State University, University of Minnesota, and Brown University achieved a compromise that offered a path to discuss divestment, along with providing full scholarships to Palestinian students whose universities have been destroyed by Israel.  Evergreen State College and Ireland’s Trinity College agreed to divest. 

I spent most of today at the @SOAS Liberated Zone for Gaza helping create a ramp to the encampment on behalf of DPAC (@Dis_PPL_Protest).

This is the only green space on campus, & student have been asking the uni to make it accessible for 3 yrs. We made it happen in 3.5 days.🇵🇸♿️ pic.twitter.com/IGmgsNd1uB

— Anna Landre ♿️ (@annalandre) May 13, 2024

07 May 2024 SOAS University, London, at student encampment set up day before part of wave of student protest camps globally

Haya said "Whether you vote Labour or Conservative, they're both the same, & nothing's going to change"#GazaGenocide#StudentsforGaza#RafahUnderAttackpic.twitter.com/txtKjnPQiE

— SEP London (@Sep_london) May 8, 2024

America’s student activists are paying a price in terms of  academic suspension, expulsion, damage to career prospects, and injury at the hands of the police. As Frederick Douglass wrote:

“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.

The Lie of American Democracy

Israel LOSING PR War? Antony Blinken BLAMES TikTok: Watch

What the current events demonstrate is that the United States, which is always happy to support ‘wars for democracy’ lacks any semblance of democracy itself. Its elections are bought, its Supreme Court is the property of the Republican Right and it is governed by two parties – Democrats and Republicans – who share the same war agenda.

Queen Mary University encampment for Gaza is go! Get down if you can and show your support ✊🏽 #FreePalestine🇵🇸 pic.twitter.com/lOA9oIPCQk

— Shabbir Lakha (@ShabbirLakha) May 13, 2024

Only recently Congress has voted to force Tik Tok to effectively shut down or sell itself off. The reason given was national security – it is a Chinese company. The real reason is that it doesn’t censor pro-Palestinian content like Mark Fuckerberg’s Facebook.

This was illustrated in a conversation between Senator Mitt Romney and Antony Blinken last week, during which both acknowledged some facts that generally go unstated by such creatures.

After bemoaning Israel’s lack of success at PR, Romney said that “Some wonder why there was such overwhelming support for us to shut down potentially TikTok or other entities of that nature”.  Romney went on to say, as Aaron Mate noted:

 “If you look at the postings on TikTok and the number of mentions of Palestinians relative to other social media sites—it’s overwhelmingly so among TikTok broadcasts.”

Blinken responded, saying that at the beginning of his career in Washington everyone got their information from TV and newspapers like the NYT, who can be relied upon not to tell the truth. 

“Now, of course, we are on an intravenous feed of information with new impulses, inputs every millisecond. And of course, the way this has played out on social media has dominated the narrative. And you have a social media ecosystem environment in which context, history, facts get lost, and the emotion, the impact of images dominates.... I think it also has a very, very, very challenging effect on the narrative.”

Zionism’s Perpetual Victimhood

Even when it is committing genocide Israel is the victim. So too with its supporters. A cartoon by Jewish American political cartoonist Eli Valley illustrates this phenomenon. At Leeds University pro-Israel activists abused and attacked pro-Palestinian protesters only to be portrayed as victims of anti-Semitism.

Not only have Leeds staff and students faced racist harassment and abuse without repercussions for the perpetrators, peaceful protests have been depicted as violent, their solidarity slogans labelled “hate speech” and accusations of antisemitism “weaponised to attack those who are critical of the Israeli government.”

A letter from Jewish academics is open for signature by Jewish students and staff in Leeds and also the wider UK Jewish community.

The same has happened in the United States. In See I Am a Jewish Student at Columbia. Don’t Believe What You’re Being Told About ‘Campus Antisemitism’ at Columbia University Jewish student writes

The White House, Congressional Republicans, and cable news talking heads would have you believe that the Columbia University campus has devolved into a hotbed of antisemitic violence – but the reality on the ground is very different.

Smears from the press and pro-Israel influencers, who have levied charges of antisemitism and violence against Jewish students, are a dangerous distraction from real threats to our safety.

The most pressing threats to our safety as Jewish students do not come from tents on campus. Instead, they come from the Columbia administration inviting police onto campus, certain faculty members, and third-party organizations that dox undergraduates. Frankly, I regret the fact that writing to confirm the safety of Jewish Ivy League students feels justified in the first place. I have not seen many pundits hand-wringing over the safety of my Palestinian colleagues mourning the deaths of family members, or the destruction of Gaza’s cherished universities. 

Murder of 4 Students at Ohio University 1970

One of the most notorious of those urging violence against Columbia students is Shai Davidi, an Israeli-American Assistant Professor who has urged the National Guard be brought in. The National Guard is infamous for killing 4 students at Ohio University at a Vietnam solidarity demonstration.

Emory's Caroline Fohlin is knocked down by the police while shouting: “I’m a professor!!” Hear the disbelief in her voice. She never expected to be treated like this by her own university for protesting Israel's slaughter.

But remember, democracy is on the ballot in Nov... pic.twitter.com/rDiWDlCH9e

— Trita Parsi (@tparsi) April 26, 2024

It is worth watching this CNN video from the moment Emory Econ Professor @CarolineFohlin came across the violent arrest of a protester on campus and asked the police, with shock, "What are you doing?" That's all that prompted an officer to hurl her to the ground and handcuff her. https://t.co/QKNRqOoIiSpic.twitter.com/3wzSIOcD6U

— Robert Mackey (@RobertMackey) April 26, 2024

There has also been police violence in the United States directed at faculty too. Professor Caroline Fohlin went out to remonstrate with police about their violence and she became the recipient of the same. In order to sustain violence abroad it is necessary for the United States to erode what remains of its own democracy. And that is being played out on US campuses even whilst the elites condemn the ‘violence’ of those who are the target of violence.

Thugs attack Oxford Encampment

There have also been attacks by far-right Zionists at the Oxford, UCL and SOAS encampments but fortunately the level of violence is nowhere near the violence in the US.

Is this genocidal language from a zionist/pro israeli towards UCL students at their Gaza encampment?

One of them this guy @aaronibs said whilst outside the encampment:
"We bring them in like cockroaches, and then we destroy the cockroaches"

Late on Saturday night a group of… pic.twitter.com/AdkWWqy3uc

— Mohammad 🇵🇸 (@mohammadfff_) May 12, 2024

At 2 a.m. on Saturday, while pro-Palestinian students were asleep, more than a dozen cowardly Zionists attempted to attack the liberated zone for Gaza at SOAS.

“We are going to being them in: we bring them in like COCKROACHES and then we destroy the cockroaches”

Zionist thug Aaron Ibrahim attacked SOAS encampment

was one of the more articulate comments from Aaron Ibrahim who has been identified as one of the Zionists who participated in the attack on the SOAS Liberated Zone. Ibrahim serves as the Head of National Sales at One2One Digital. People might want to contact One2One to ask whether they want to face a Boycott.

Another is Adam Tiano who has served in the Israeli Defence Force. He was scheduled to deliver a speech at the Boys Club House in London- a charity dedicated to assisting Jewish boys. One can only hope they reconsider. He works for AST Removals, who might also wish to consider whether they want to employ racist thugs.

Freed Palestinians Say They Were Tortured, Beaten and Starved in Israeli Prisons

“To the generals who have accompanied me in recent weeks, it seems we will part ways tomorrow, but I thank you from the bottom of my heart for your extraordinary humanity shown towards my daughter, Emilia.

You were like parents to… pic.twitter.com/yasR6uPkGQ

— Censored Men (@CensoredMen) November 27, 2023

The Use of Torture is Legal and Israel’s Official Policy

 Whereas Hamas have treated their hostages well, the treatment by Israel of Palestinian prisoners is diabolical. 18 Palestinians have died in captivity including Dr Adnan al-Bursh who died as a result of torture in Sde Teiman, Israel’s desert concentration camp.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rnU3mMMqNm0

BBC investigation: Israeli troops accused of beating and humiliating Gaza hospital staff | BBC News

There have been dozens of testimonies about the use of torture in Sdei Teman, including by 3 Israeli whistleblowers. CNN has done a major investigation into Sde Teiman. The BBC has also conducted an investigation into the assault on Al Nasser hospital and the torture of doctors and medics. David Cameron professed concern in the Lords but his concern did not extend to cutting off Israel’s arms supplies.

One wonders what Cameron would have said if it had been suggested that Hamas should investigate Israel’s allegations of atrocities on October 7? The reason for the double standards is because Israel is ‘our’ friend nowithstanding that the third largest group in Israel’s Knesset, Otzma Yehudit is a neo-Nazi Jewish Supremacist party.

Israel’s right to occupy and invade Gaza is treated as normal despite having no legal right to do so. Hamas attack on Israel on October 7 is treated as abnormal.

One question that should be asked is whether Hamas had any choice, in its efforts to free Palestinian prisoners, other than to mount the attack on October 7. What Israel does is normative.

Palestinian prisoners in Israel are treated as if they were guilty. No mention is made that thousands of them have had no trial, that they received Administrative Detention, internment without trial.

Palestinian prisoners are convicted in military courts where the conviction rate is 99.74%.  Palestinians are tried in military courts whereas Jewish settlers are tried in civil courts.

Sussex University Student Encampment

Jewish Supremacism and Racist Attacks are de facto legal in Israel today

Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who calls himself a ‘fascist homophobe’ has recently called for the ‘total annihilation’ of Gaza. This is the kind of language Hitler and Himmler used but where is the outrage from western leaders.

There are no half measures. [The Gazan cities of] Rafah, Deir al-Balah, Nuseirat – total annihilation. ‘You will blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven.

It is Otzma Yehudit, a Jewish Nazi organisation which is driving Israel’s genocide yet Biden and Sunak turn a blind eye to this. This is why Sunak, Cameron and Biden are war criminals.

Genocidal anti-Semitism is the accusation made of Hamas yet genocidal anti-Palestinian racism is the issue.  When Israeli mobs march chanting'death to the Arabs' this goes unreported in the Western media. The Minister of Police and Security, Itamar Ben Gvir, a follower of the Rabbi Meir Kahane, used to be one of them.

When Taboon Wine Bar in Jerusalem was attacked on January 26 by a mob of Israeli settlers in the Christian Quarter shouting “Death to Arabs … Death to Christians.” he went to the police station that night where he was told by a policeman “Don’t bother me too much.”

Nor does the MSM ask why Palestinians guilty of killing an Israeli serve 30 or 40 years in prison whereas it is highly exceptional for a settler or soldier to be gaoled for killing a Palestinian?