On 12 January 2026 at Kingston Crown Court, Free Speech on Palestine Will Be on Trial
Jail UK Starmer & The Real Criminals! Rally At UK Consulate in San Francisco To Demand Hands Off Tony Greenstein
Platform Films Interview & Feature
Tony Greenstein’s first
speech
At the Old Bailey on January 31 I
appeared before Dame Parmjit Kaur "Bobbie"
Cheema-Grubb, the first ever Asian High Court Judge. In the case before
me she granted bail to a young man accused of sharing ISIS propaganda despite
the Prosecution’s objection, albeit with very strict bail conditions. I guess
she must count as some kind of liberal given that the Court of Appeal today
under Lady Justice Sue Carr is an extremely
reactionary court.
Today’s Court of Appeal is perhaps
the most reactionary since Lord Denning retired in 1982. Denning
said of the
Birmingham 6 and Guildford 4, all of whom were innocent and cleared, that
We shouldn’t have all these campaigns to get them
released if they’d been hanged. They’d have been forgotten and the whole
community would have been satisfied.... It is better that some innocent men
remain in jail than that the integrity of the English judicial system be
impugned.
Tony Greenstein's 2nd speech at his Old Bailey hearing on 31 January 2025
My barrister made the case for having
the trial at the Old Bailey, because, having joint custody of an autistic son,
I had good reasons for being in reach of Brighton easily. Lady Grubb however decided
that judicial convenience should come before my needs.
I arrived at the court at 9 am to
meet my legal team only to find they were not there. I went out again to what
became a large demonstration outside. After going in again at 10.00 I came out
around 11.30 to find that the demonstration had grown and I made a second,
shorter speech explaining what had happened.
Chanting at on 31 January 2025 at the demonstration outside the Old Bailey
There is a case management hearing on
June 6 and a timetable for the serving of evidence, a defence and similar
matters.
However none of this should obscure
the politics behind the trial and the determination, first of the previous
government and now this one to criminalise anyone sympathising with the
Palestinian resistance.
I am charged with inviting support
for a proscribed organisation, Hamas. It is an easily provable lie. I support
the Palestinian resistance to Israel’s genocide and obviously that includes
Hamas.
In 1982, UN General Assembly Resolution37/43 affirmed the legitimacy of the
struggle for independence and liberation from foreign domination and foreign
occupation by all available means, including armed struggle. This resolution
openly recognized the right to use force against foreign illegal occupation.
Chris Williamson on Tony Greenstein's prosecution
Article 1(4) of the Additional Protocol 1 to the Geneva Conventions
(1977) classifies conflicts in which peoples are fighting against alien occupation
and racist regimes as armed conflicts. Individuals engaging in such “fighting,”
if captured, should be afforded the status of prisoners of war, meaning their
fighting is legitimate.
For further
elucidation see Do Palestinians have the right to resist, and what are the limits? by Ihsan Adel of Law for Palestine. But you don’t need to go to the law
books to know that the right to resist an occupation of one’s territory is an
inalienable right of any oppressed people. That Israel has been declared to be
in an illegal occupation of Gaza by the International Court of Justice is sufficient
in itself.
All nations
have the right to resist occupation. Would anyone deny that the French, Poles
and Czechs had the right to resist Nazi occupation during the war? The Nazis also
termed their opponents ‘terrorists’. Even Starmer and his fool of a Foreign
Secretary Lammy might understand that.
Why then
is there any equivocation over the rights of the Palestinians to resist a
military occupation. How is it that the Palestinians are terrorists whilst the
Ukrainians are freedom fighters? There is but one explanation and that is imperialism
and its racist twin. Racism is part of the DNA of the British state but that is
no reason to accept it.
The
description of Hamas as a ‘terrorist’ organisation is also racist. It demonises
Palestinians in a way that isn’t applied to Europeans. It assumes that they
have lesser rights than the French because they aren’t White. Israel has no
right whatsoever to be occupying an inch of Palestinian land, including I would
add 1948 Palestine.
Israel was
following the United States example. It birthed ISIS from al-Qaeda in Iraq as a means of dividing the Iraqi Resistance on
ethnic lines.The US also helped create Al
Qaeda and the Taliban in order to fight the pro-Soviet regime in Afghanistan in
the late 1980’s.
The West’s 'war on terror'
was built on a series of deceptions to persuade us that our leaders were
crushing Islamist extremism. In truth, they were nourishing it’.
In the case of Hamas the
justification for proscribing their political wing was not only paper thin but
it is an incitement to genocide. Hamas is a political party as well as a
guerrilla organisation. It has some 20,000 members who work in government,
hospitals, schools etc. If its civilian members are classed as ‘terrorists’
then that is effectively justifying Israel’s bombing of those schools and
hospitals. This is why Starmer, Biden and Scholtz are complicit in Israel’s
genocide. They have laid the political basis for it.
The rationale, if one can call it that, for
proscribing Hamas in 2019 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. [note that there
is no explanation as to what this assessment consisted of – apart from
increasing pressure from Zionist organisations to do so].
Hamas
commits and participates in terrorism. Hamas has used indiscriminate rocket or
mortar attacks, and raids against Israeli targets. During the May 2021
conflict, over 4,000 rockets were fired indiscriminately into Israel.
Civilians, including 2 Israeli children, were killed as a result. [by this calculation the thousands of
deadly Israeli missiles which have killed thousands of Palestinian children
must make Israel a terrorist state a thousand times over].
Palestinian
militant groups, including Hamas, frequently use incendiary balloons to launch
attacks from Gaza into southern Israel. There was a spate of incendiary balloon
attacks from Gaza during June and July 2021, causing fires in communities in
southern Israel that resulted in serious damage to property. [so ‘serious
damage to property’ is more important than a starvation siege on Gaza for
18 years, the deliberate shooting of unarmed civilians in the Great Return
march etc? This ‘justification’ reeks of racist hypocrisy].
Hamas also prepares for
acts of terrorism. One incident of preparatory activity is that Hamas recently
launched summer camps in Gaza which focus on training groups, including minors,
to fight. This is evidence of Hamas being responsible for running terrorist
training camps in the region. In a press statement, Hamas described the aim of
these camps as to “ignite the embers of Jihad in the liberation generation,
cultivate Islamic values and prepare the expected victory army to liberate
Palestine”. [Israel also has military training
camps for its youth and don’t its fundamentalist messianic settlers cultivate
genocidal values?
Rabbi Dov Lior, the spiritual
mentor of Kahanist Police Minister Ben Gvir proclaimed that
‘There is no such thing as enemy civilians in war time.
The law of our Torah is to have mercy on our soldiers and to save them... A
thousand non-Jewish lives are not worth a Jew's fingernail."?
Does this not
qualify to classify Israel as a terrorist state?]
Racism and
corruption lie behind Tory/Labour support for Israel’sgenocide. Hypocrisy runs like a red streak
through the prosecution of Sarah Wilkinson, Natalie Strecker, Richard Medhurst
and myself. It is based on a series of lies and half truths.
The irony is that if there is any
group which I support in Gaza it is the leftist Popular Front for the
Liberation of Palestine not the Islamist Hamas. There is no reason why, as a
Jewish atheist I should support an Islamic group. There are no articles on my
blog which support Hamas politically, quite the contrary. But the CPS are
bringing the prosecution in order to silence me and others not because we are ‘terrorist’
supporters. See for example:
My case
will be heard before a judge and jury. We will see whether, as is often the
case, the judge will act as a second prosecutor and rule out our defences. This
has been par for the course with Palestine Action and climate activists’
trials.
I have no
doubt that the state will do its best to secure a guilty verdict by fair means
or foul. I understand that the decision to prosecute in this case went up to
the Attorney General’s office. The Attorney General Richard Hermer is a
Zionist. His deputy, Sarah Sackman MP is Vice-Chair of the Jewish
Labour Movement which spearheaded the ‘anti-Semitism’ smear campaign
in the Labour Party under Corbyn. This is the corruption of government and our
legal system.
There is a German word for what is being proposed – Judenreinor today
Arabrein
There is nothing new in Donald Trump and
Netanyahu’s plans for the ‘evacuation’ of the Palestinians from Gaza. The
Nazis’ devoted much time and energy to a similar ‘problem’.
From 1939 onwards hundreds of
thousands of Jews, Poles and Gypsies, were
preventing the Warthegau, that
part of Poland which was conquered and incorporated into Greater Germany, being
settled with German colonists. Most of them were expelled to the Generalgouvernment,
that part of Poland into which they intended to pour all the racial ‘mush’
(Himmler).
Volksdeutsche of Łódź greeting German cavalry
in 1939
The Nazis managed, with difficulty,
to resettle half a million Volksdeutschein their place just as
Israel hopes to settle Jews in Gaza.
Hans Frank
Many were the conflicts within the
Nazi bureaucracy between the Gauleiter Arthur Greiser
and the Governor-General of the Generalgouvernment, Hans Frank. For those who are interested in
Nazi resettlement policies you can read Christopher Browning’s article on Nazi
resettlement policies.
Arthur Greiser
It was only when the Nazi plans for
the resettlement of the Jews to the East were thwarted that they turned to
extermination. So it is with Gaza, except that the Zionists reversed the
process, first they began the extermination process and only then turned to expulsion.
Palestinian journalists demonstrate outside the Palestinian Authority against the banning of media
Yet despite this that pathetic poodle
of US imperialism, Keir Starmer and his contemptible fool of a Foreign
Secretary, David Lammy, could not bring themselves to criticise Trump. As the
Guardian’s Peter Walker put it, ‘Prime minister and colleagues use political
code to push back at proposal without directly criticising US president.’
Even
Ed Davey of the Lib Dems criticised the loathsome Trump whilst pushing for the
resurrection of that old lame duck, the two-state solution. Starmer has built
his career on slavish loyalty to the American Empire and Trump is not going to
stop him.
Starmer
told ushow he was ‘moved’ by the image of Emily
Damari, the Israeli hostage who was reunited with her family. The images of
Palestinian hostages, who had been starved, beaten and tortured, did not make
any impression on this apology for a human being. However it is doubtful that anything
could move Starmer apart from a subsidy from one of his millionaire friends
towards his wardrobe.
When
Israel was established as a ‘Jewish’ State it fabricated a
narrative that the Palestinian refugees had run away, on orders from the Arab
regimes, despite pleas from the Zionists to stay. This was comprehensively
debunked, first by Erskine Childers
and Rashid Khalidi
and then Israeli historians Benny Morris and Ilan Pappe.
Benny Morris explained that‘Defense Ministry officials
apparently hope their actions will raise doubts about the conclusions and
credibility of various scholars.’ This enabled people
like Israel’s vile Ambassador, Tzipi Hotoveli, to proclaim that
stories of the Nakba were an ‘Arab lie’.
Only 3% Of Jewish Israelis Think Trump's Ethnic Cleansing Plan For Gaza Is Immoral
Today
there is no pretence. Israelis in their overwhelming majority want the
Palestinians of Gaza (and the West Bank) either expelled orexterminated. Some 82% of Israeli Jews support Trump’s
plan and just 3% consider the proposals immoral. The rest think it impractical.
This is what memory of the Holocaust has become in Zionist hands.
It
is worth bearing in mind that Israelis are far more racist towards the
Palestinians than Germans were to Jews. Anti-Semitism in Germany was never
respectable. The Nazis had to work hard to persuade Germans and they never
succeeded. Anti-Semitism was confined to the core of the Nazi party itself.
Between 1930 and 1933 Hitler downplayed anti-Semitism to the point of
non-existence.
Of
course people will find this difficult to accept given the way the media portrays
the reasons why Hitler came to power. However all serious historians agree. For
example Ian Kershaw wrote in Popular
Opinion and Dissent in the Third Reich
that the more than five million extra votes that the Nazis obtained in the 1930
elections‘were in no sense anti-Semites’. David
Cesaranisuggested in The Final Solution thatHitler’s attacks on Jews ‘diminished to vanishing point’. Even Zionist historian Yehuda Bauer
accepted this.
In
1939 Hitler began to fulfil his desire to create ‘living space’ lebensraum for the German people by
conquering first Poland, then Western Europe and finally Russia. That is precisely
what Israel is doing. Achieving its Arab-free living space.
For
15 months they carpet bombed Gaza under the pretence that they were seeking to
destroy Hamas when it was obvious to anyone, bar Jews for Genocide and that
inveterate liar Starmer, that Hamas was the one thing they hadn’t destroyed.
Hospitals,
schools, clinics, universities, journalists, residential homes and agricultural
land – all were subject to the an intensity of bombing that made the
destruction of Nuremberg, Dresden and Hamburg seem like a picnic.
All
the while Butcher Biden supplied the 2,000 lb bombs that enabled the
devastation. Now Trump comes along and says that of course Palestinians can’t
live in the rubble whilst still continuing to supply the 2000 lb bombs. The
hypocrisy and mendacity of our rulers knows no bounds.
We
have a weak and shaky ceasefire, which hasn’t stopped Israel killing
Palestinians in Gaza although the bombing has (temporarily) stopped. There
isn’t an agreement that Israel has made that hasn’t been broken and they are
still killing people in Lebanon. Netanyahu and much of his coalition would like
to restart the slaughter because to the Zionists not enough Palestinians have
yet died.
Yet
whatever Israel does, as far as Starmer, Trump and our own Jews for Genocide in
the form of the Board of Deputies, are concerned it is acting in self-defence. It
is an interesting legal concept as to whether an occupying power has the right
of self-defence. Perhaps Russia has such a right in Ukraine! Maybe we should
consult our favourite ‘human rights lawyer’ Sir Kid Starver.
I
fear that Israel will find a pretext to restart the war against Gaza. What
Trump has done is to provide Israel with a pretext to break the ceasefire, as
Netanyahu has promised, after the first phase, in which case we will see a
continuation of the genocide. This is a very real danger. Of course it will be
difficult politically to restart the slaughter but that will depend on the
American administration. One thing is for certain. The Arab regimes could stop
it in a day if they stopped the oil.And
the Arab masses could stop it if they overthrew those regimes.
Israeli military operation in Jenin: Palestinian homes attacked with simultaneous blasts
Instead
Israel’s war on the Palestinians has spread to the West Bank. For the past 5
years I have raised funds for the Al Tafawk Children’s Centre
in Jenin refugee camp. Three times the Israeli military has deliberately
wrecked the interior of the Centre.
Today
I have no idea if Al Tafawk is even standing because much of Jenin’s refugee
camp has been blown up and
numerous people, including children have been killed. Yet still Western leaders
have the audacity to about Israel’s ‘self-defence’. If only Goebbels had had
such good propagandists as the BBC provide he could have achieved far more
without the opprobrium.
Israeli Soldiers Celebrate Destruction in Jenin
Israel’s
attack on Jenin we should not forget was preceded by 25 days of violence
by the Quisling Palestine Authority. Yet even now organisations like Britain’s
Palestine Solidarity Campaign are afraid of calling these Quislings by their
name. First Israel banned Al Jazeera and then the PA banned it.
Trump’s
plan though is unlikely to be carried out. The last thing the Egyptian and
Jordanian states want is hundreds of thousands of Palestinians determined to
seek their revenge. Despite their role as collaborators, neither regime has a
death wish.
If
the Zionists cannot achieve an empty Gaza by ethnic cleansing then mass murder
and genocide is the alternative and the only thing standing in the way are
Hamas and the Palestinian resistance.
This
of course is where Britain’s political police come in. They will do their
utmost to arrest and persecute anyone who supports resistance to Israel’s genocide.
All in the name of ‘the fight against
terrorism’. This is the state of British ‘democracy’ today and we can rely
on Britain’s compliant judiciary to do their best to help.
There
has been one of those absurd ‘debates’ about whether Israel is committing genocide.
As if not using the word changes the reality. I suggest people read Yuval
Abraham’s article in +972 Magazine, Bomb the area, gas the
tunnels: Israel’s unbridled war on Gaza’s underground as to what
Israel’s tactics were. Abraham writes that:
The Israeli army intensively bombarded residential areas in Gaza when
it lacked intelligence on the exact location of Hamas commanders hiding
underground, and intentionally weaponized toxic byproducts of bombs to
suffocate militants in their tunnels…
The investigation, based on conversations with 15 Israeli Military
Intelligence and Shin Bet officers who have been
involved in tunnel-targeting operations since October 7, exposes how this
strategy aimed to compensate for the army’s inability to pinpoint targets in
Hamas’ subterranean tunnel network. When targeting senior commanders in the
group, the Israeli military authorized the killing of “triple-digit numbers” of
Palestinian civilians as “collateral damage,” and maintained close real-time
coordination with U.S. officials regarding the expected casualty figures.
So there we have it. Israel was prepared to
kill hundreds of Palestinian civilians on the off chance that they might kill a
member of Hamas.And then creatures like
Lammy & Starmer dare to call Hamas ‘terrorist’.
In
the process three Israeli hostages — Nik Beizer, Ron Sherman, and Elia Toledano
— were killed by asphyxiation as a result of a Nov. 10, 2023, bombing that
targeted Ahmed Ghandour, a Hamas brigade commander in northern Gaza. Even if
the bombs didn’t kill them then the carbon monoxide they produced did.
Israel
soldiers were not willing to fight in the tunnels but thought that carpet
bombing would do the trick. Fortunately it didn’t and at the end of the war
Hamas and the Resistance was killing more of Israel’s war criminal military
than it was at the beginning.
Imagine
if Hamas exploded a bomb in the middle of Tel Aviv because they believed a
senior officer of the Israeli army was passing by?Or Russia bombed a market place because it
believed a Ukrainian general was doing his shopping there. The pages of the
tabloids would be filled with blood curdling rhetoric.
Israel’s
figures of Hamas fighters killed were always phony. Every male civilian they
killed was a Hamas ‘terrorist’ but at the end of the day the Zionists ended up
fooling themselves, which was why, when the ceasefire came into effect,
Israelis were stunned to see hundreds of Hamas fighters in their distinctive
olive green uniforms handing over the healthy and well-fed Israeli captives,
unlike the emaciated and tortured bodies of the Palestinian captives that
Israel had seized.
Israel’s
2,000 lb bombs were supplied by the United States despite knowing how they
would be used but ‘bloody’ Blinken stymied any declaration that human rights
violations were being carried out. Why?
Because
under the Leahy law if the
US State Department declared that Israel was committing war crimes then the U.S. Government would have been barred
from using funds to assist in those crimes. Instead investigations into Israel’s
war crimes never progressed beyond an initial stage.
"אז יאמרו בגויים הגדיל ה'לעשות עם אלה, הגדיל ה'לעשות עמנו היינו שמחים"
Netanyahu
and his far-right partner Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s Finance Minister, ‘proud homophobe’ and fascist are
itching to get back into the bombing on the grounds that if you haven’t
succeeded yet try, try and try again. But what is clear is that Hamas and the
Palestinian Resistance has not been defeated and is unlikely to be
defeated.
At
the moment Israel’s genocidal lust and desire for more living space is now
translating into war on the people of the West Bank.
Even
Trump cannot simply declare that he wants Palestinians to leave Gaza because he
wants the gas fields in the sea off Gaza. Instead he dresses it up as
concern for the Palestinians. He wrote that the Palestinians in Gaza would have
"far safer and more beautiful
communities, with new and modern homes, in the region."
There
is nothing new in this duplicity. As Abdaljawad Omarwrote:
the same language has been used before.
In 1830, President Andrew Jackson justified the Indian Removal Act as a necessary
measure for the “happiness” of Native Americans, ethnically cleansing them
under the guise of protecting their way of life....
The logic remains unchanged —
displacement framed as pragmatism, ethnic cleansing cloaked in the language of
order and progress, and for Trump: Palestinians as an obstacle to a beautiful
beachfront where everyone could live, including “some
Palestinians.”
This could be so magnificent. But more
importantly than that is the people that have been absolutely destroyed that
live there now can live in peace in a much better situation because they are
living in hell. And those people will now be able to live in peace. We’ll make
sure that it’s done world class.
It
is noticeable that German leaders have said next to nothing. But why should
Germany’s leaders say anything? The worse it gets for Palestinians the more
they can come to terms with their own holocausts. After all, if even the Jews perpetrate
a holocaust then it can’t be that bad.
Today
Gaza is unliveable in because Israel deliberately made it so. For the
Palestinians to be removed would be to reward the war criminals. That Trump can
suggest it and the media can actually debate it seriously demonstrates how low
moral standards have sunk in the western world.
One
wonders what Western leaders would say if Putin had carpet bombed Ukraine and
then said he was removing the population to save them further trauma and he
expected Britain, Germany and France to take them in and foot the bill! All in
order that they could have ‘beautiful’ lives free from Russian bombs! Yet this
is what Trump is saying and our leaders cannot even spell out the implications
for fear of offending his fragile ego.
We
are entering a period of great uncertainty. The Palestine solidarity movement
has a responsibility to step up its protests and begin to make life
uncomfortable for those in power. Instead of allowing the Metropolitan Police
to disrupt our protests we should be disrupting the rhythms of London. The
first thing we should be doing is to hold the demonstration which was initially
planned for the BBC – with or without the agreement of Britain’s political
police.
I
witnessed firsthand the PA’s brutality against journalists in Gaza. Its possible return does not bode well for us.
Published On 1 Feb 2025
A group of
Palestinian journalists protest in front of the Palestinian Legislative Council
headquarters against the decision of the Palestinian Authority to close
Bethlehem-based private TV channel, Al-Roah, in Gaza City on October 17 1999
[File: Mohammad Saber/AFP]
On December 28, 21-year-old journalism student Shatha Al-Sabbagh was
assassinated near her home in Jenin. Her family accused snipers from the
Palestinian Authority (PA) deployed in the camp of shooting her in the head.
Al-Sabbagh had been active on social media, documenting the suffering of Jenin
residents during the raids by Israel and the PA.
Just a few days after Al-Sabbagh’s assassination, the authorities in
Ramallah banned Al Jazeera
from reporting from the occupied West Bank. Three weeks later, PA forces
arrested Al Jazeera correspondent Mohamad Atrash.
These developments come as the Israeli occupation has killed more than
200 media workers in Gaza and arrested dozens across the occupied Palestinian
territories. It has also banned Al Jazeera and refused to allow foreign
journalists to enter Gaza. The fact that the PA’s actions mirror Israel’s
reveals a shared agenda to suppress independent journalism and control public
opinion.
To Palestinian journalists, that is hardly news. The PA has never been
our protector. It has always been a complicit partner in our brutalisation.
That is true in the West Bank and it was true in Gaza when the PA was in power
there. I witnessed it myself.
Growing up in Gaza, I watched how my people were oppressed by Israeli
forces and by the PA. In 1994, the Israeli occupation formally handed over the
Strip to the PA to administer under the provisions of the Oslo Accords. The PA
remained in power until 2007. During these 13 years, we saw more collaboration
with the Israeli occupation than any meaningful attempt at liberation. For
journalists, the PA’s presence was not just oppressive, it was
life-threatening, as its forces actively stifled voices to maintain its fragile
grip on power.
As a journalism student in Gaza, I experienced this suppression
firsthand. I walked the streets, witnessing PA security officers looting shops,
their arrogance apparent in the brazen act of theft. One day, when I attempted
to document this, a Palestinian officer violently grabbed me, ripped my camera
from my hands, and smashed it to the ground. This wasn’t just an assault, it
was an attack on my right to bear witness. The officer’s aggression only ceased
when a group of women intervened, forcing him to retreat in a rare moment of
restraint.
I knew the risks of being a journalist in Gaza and like other media
workers, I learned to navigate them. But the fear I felt near the PA forces’
ambush points was unlike anything else. That was because there was never logic
to their aggressive actions and no way to anticipate when they might turn on
you.
Walking near the PA forces felt like stepping into a minefield. One
moment, there was the illusion of safety, and the next, you faced the brutality
of those who were supposedly there to protect you. This uncertainty and tension
made their presence more terrifying than being on a battlefield.
Years later, I would cover the training sessions of Qassam Brigades under
the constant hum of Israeli drones and the ever-looming threat of air strikes.
It was dangerous but predictable – much more so than the actions of the PA.
Under the PA, we learned to speak in code. Journalists self-censored out
of fear of retribution. The PA was often referred to as “cousins of Israeli
occupation” – a grim acknowledgement of its complicity.
As the PA was fighting to stay in power in Gaza after losing the 2006
elections to Hamas, its brutality escalated. In May 2007, gunmen in
presidential guard uniforms killed journalist Suleiman Abdul-Rahim al-Ashi and
media worker Mohammad Matar Abdo. It was an execution meant to send a clear
message to those who witnessed it.
When Hamas took over, its government also imposed restrictions on press
freedoms, but its censorship was inconsistent. Once, while documenting the new
policewomen’s division, I was ordered to show my photos to a Hamas officer so
he could censor any image he deemed immodest. I often managed to bypass these
restrictions by swapping my memory cards preemptively.
The officers weren’t fond of anyone overriding their orders, but instead
of outright punishment, they resorted to petty power plays—investigations,
revoked access, or unnecessary provocations. Unlike the PA, Hamas did not
operate within a system of coordination with Israeli forces to suppress
journalism, but the restrictions journalists faced still created an environment
of uncertainty and self-censorship. Any violation on their part, however, was
met with swift international condemnation—something the PA rarely faced,
despite its far more systematic repression.
After losing control of Gaza, the PA shifted its focus to the West Bank,
intensifying its campaign of media suppression. Detentions, violent crackdowns,
and the silencing of critical voices became commonplace. Their collaboration
with Israel was not passive; it was active. From surveillance to campaigns of
violence, they play a crucial role in maintaining the status quo, stifling any
dissent that challenges their power and the occupation.
In 2016, the PA’s collusion became even more apparent when they
coordinated with Israeli authorities in the arrest of prominent journalist and
press freedom advocate Omar Nazzal, who had criticised Ramallah for how it
handled the suspected murder of Palestinian citizen Omar al-Naif at its embassy
in Bulgaria.
In 2017, the PA launched a campaign of intimidation, arresting five
journalists from different outlets.
In 2019, the Palestinian Authority blocked the website of Quds News
Network, a youth-led media outlet that has gained immense popularity. This was
part of a wider ban imposed
by the Ramallah Magistrate’s Court that blocked access to 24 other news
websites and social media pages.
In 2021, after the violent death of activist Nizar Banat in the PA’s
custody sparked protests, its forces sought to crack down on
journalists and media outlets covering them.
In this context, the prospect of the PA returning to Gaza following the
ceasefire agreement raises serious concerns for journalists who have already
endured the horrors of genocide. For those who survived, this could mean a new
chapter of repression that reflects the PA’s history of censorship, arrests and
stifling of press freedoms.
Despite the grave threats that Palestinian journalists face from Israel
and from those who pretend to represent the Palestinian people, they persevere.
Their work transcends borders, reflecting a shared struggle against tyranny.
Their resilience speaks not only to the Palestinian cause but to the broader
fight for liberation, justice and dignity.
Eman Mohammed is an award-winning Palestinian-American photojournalist
and Senior TED fellow currently based in Washington, DC.
Does anyone remember Starmer’s 10 Pledges on
which he was elected in April 202 as Labour Party leader?Let me remind you.
Pledge No. 4 promised to ‘Promote Peace &
Human Rights’. He promised “no more illegal wars” which has already been
broken by British participation in Israel’s
genocide. We have heard nothing about his promise of a Prevention of
Military Intervention Act and as for his promise to “put human rights at the heart of foreign policy” well that is a
sick joke.
And as for
Starmer’s promise to ‘review all arms
sales and make us a force for international peace and justice’ the least
said the better. Just 8% of all arms contracts to Israel have been frozen.
Last week
the home of journalist Richard Medhurst was raided and 19 pages of his
electronic devices and equipment were seized by the Austrian police almost
certainly in co-ordination with the British anti-terror police. This follows on
from the arrest and detention for 3 days of Ali Abunimah of the Electronic Intifada
in Switzerland. It is clear that the repression of activists and journalists in
Britain is being duplicated across Europe.
The Process is the Punishmment
On 4 December four UN Special
Rapporteurs - independent human rights experts
who advise the United Nations on human rights issues – wrote to the British
government demanding an explanation for its persecution of journalists and
political activists under the Terrorism Acts. They stated that those persecuted
‘appear to have no credible connection to
“terrorist” or “hostile” activity.’ They demanded an explanation for the government’s
abuse of the Terrorism Act
to raid, harass, intimidate and criminalise journalists and political activists
who expose and resist Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
The
government had 60 days to respond but it has not bothered to do so, hence why the
letter has been
made public. In it, the Rapporteurs state that those the government is
targeting ‘appear to have no credible
connection to “terrorist” or “hostile” activity’.
The Two Zionist Law Officers Behind the Prosecution and Persecution of Journalists - in Israel they shoot or ban journalists - now they are trying out the same in the UK
You might
think that the whole purpose of anti-terrorism legislation is to prevent
terrorism. Apparently not so.Terrorist
acts seem to be the excuse to clamp down on liberties that otherwise the government
would be too afraid to touch. The exercise of free speech and the ability to
speak one’s mind seem to particularly distress government minister. ‘Human
rights’ lawyer Starmer and his Zionist Attorney General Hermer and Sarah Sackman, Vice-President
of the genocide supporting Jewish Labour Movement
have other ideas. Supporting the Palestinian resistance against Israel’s
genocide in Gaza, which obviously includes Hamas, is a form of terrorism.
I am
charged with ‘inviting support for Hamas’.I’m not quite sure what that means since
nothing I or others say or do is going to have the slightest effect on Hamas’s
ability to pursue a guerrilla war against Israel’s murderous army.
I haven’t
invited anyone to join Hamas, indeed I don’t even know whether someone in
Britain is eligible to join. I certainly don’t know how to apply and I’ve never
had the slightest interest in joining myself. Quite why a Jewish atheist should
want to join an Islamist organisation is a mystery that only those whose
expertise is in twisting words and meanings out all recognition could answer.
An Israeli War Criminal Alon Misrahi Who Later Committed Suicide
If there
was ever a just war then the fight against Israel’s army is just that.As Israel bombs and destroys every single
hospital, school and university in Gaza, the Palestinian resistance wages a courageous
fight against a murderous army that takes thousands of civilians prisoners in
order to incarcerate themin Israel’s
torture camps.
The fight
of the Palestinian resistance is as just as the fight of the French and Czech
resistance against the Nazis. As the old saying goes ‘one man’s freedom fighter
is another man’s terrorist’.
The
official casualty rate in Gaza is now 62,000 but that is almost certainly a
vast underestimate. In December 2024 TheLancet projected
a death toll of 186,000. The total today could be 300,000, over 10% of Gaza’s
population.
The UN
rapporteurs made their views clear as to what the clear purpose of the
persecution of activists and journalists was.
the potential
misapplication of counter-terrorism laws against journalists and activists who
were critical of the policies and practices of certain governments, which may
unjustifiably interfere with the rights to freedom of expression and opinion
and participation in public life, lead to self-censorship and have a serious
chilling effect on the media, civil society and legitimate political and public
discourse.
Craig
Murray Addresses the UN in Geneva on Western government attacks on civil liberty
Section 12 of the Terrorism Act 2000 has been used to charge
journalists and activists, including Richard Barnard and Richard Medhurst, for
allegedly expressing support for a “proscribed organisation” in the course of
activism and media reporting…
…we raise concern about an allegedpattern
of over use, or other misuse, of counter-terrorism legislation to target
legitimate freedom of expression and opinion, including public interest media
reporting, and related freedoms of peaceful assembly and association, and political dissent or activism.
The UN Rapporteurs
singled out the notorious section 12(1A) of the Terrorism Act 2000, which
criminalizes expressing an opinion or belief that is supportive of a proscribed
organisation and being reckless as to whether it encouraged support for that
organisation. This is what I was originally arrested. The Rapporteurs wrote:
The term “support” is
undefined in the Act and in our view is vague and overbroad and may
unjustifiably criminalize legitimate expression.
We note that there is no
requirement that the expression of support relate to the commission of violent
terrorist acts by the organization. As such, the offence may unjustifiably
criminalize the expression of opinion or belief that is not rationally, proximately
or causally related to actual terrorist violence or harms. The offence further
does not require any likelihood that the support will assist the organization
in any way. It goes well beyond the accepted restrictions on freedom of
expression under
international law
concerning the prohibition of incitement to violence or hate speech…
As the UK Joint Parliamentary
Committee on Human Rights observed
‘the meaning of
expressing support for a proscribed organization is ambiguous and could capture
speech that is neither necessary nor proportionate to criminalize, including
legitimate debates about the de-proscription of an organization and
disagreement with a government’s decision to proscribe.’
However the Court of Appeal has put
the most restrictive and oppressive interpretation on the legislation.
TheCourt of Appeal further
indicated that it could include “encouragement, emotional help, mental comfort
and the act of writing or speaking in favour of something”. The Court reasoned that “[the]
organisation as a body, and the individual members or adherents of it, will
derive encouragement from the fact that they have the support of others, even
if it may not in every instance be active or tangible support”.
In other
words the charges against activists have nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism
but everything to do with opposition to Britain’s support for Israel’s war
crimes. There is an International Criminal Court
Act 2001, s.51 of which makes it
an offence against the
law of England and Wales for a person to commit genocide, a crime against
humanity or a war crime.
The section ‘applies to acts
committed—
(a)in England or Wales, or
(b)outside
the United Kingdom by a United Kingdom national, a United Kingdom resident or a
person subject to UK service jurisdiction.
Section 52
makes it ‘an offence against the law of
England and Wales for a person to engage in conduct ancillary to an act to
which this section applies.’ Sub-section 2 makes it clear that not only
does this apply to behaviour in England Wales but that it also applies to
conduct ‘which, being committed (or intended to be committed) outside England
and Wales, does not constitute such an offence.’
The UN Rapporteurs
note that
some proscribed
organizations are de facto authorities performing a diversity of civilian functions,
including governance, humanitarian and
medical activities, and
provision of social services, public utilities and education. Expressing
support for any of these ordinary civilian activities by the organization could
constitute expressing support for it, no matter how remote such expression is from
support for any violent terrorist acts by the group’.
When the British
government under Priti Patel proscribed, not only the military but the
political wing of Hamas, they were effectively saying that a doctor who was a
member of Hamas’s political wing was also a terrorist. This proscription is an invitation to genocide and is thus
unlawful, not only under domestic legislation but the Geneva Convention on
Genocide. As Genocide is the ultimate crime, the proscription simply falls by
the way. Except that Britain’s Police, being institutionally racist, believe
that the lives of Palestinians counts for nothing.
Tony Greenstein at the Old Bailey
The UN Rapporteurs also wrote of
their concern that
the absence of legal
certainty may have a chilling effect on the media, public debate, activism, and
the activities of civil society, in a context where there is a heightened
public interest in discussion of the conflict in the Middle East, including the
conduct of the parties and the underlying conditions conducive to violence in
the region. We are further concerned that a person could be prosecuted for
isolated remarks or sentences that mischaracterize the overall position of the
individual, or despite the individual’s intentions or continued and express disavowal
of terrorist violence, given the subjectivity and contested meanings of certain
expressions in relation to sensitive or controversial political conflicts…
The
recommendation of the UN Rapporteurs is that the government should
repeal section 12(1A), or otherwise to amend
it to protect freedom of expression, and to develop prosecutorial guidelines
for its appropriate use to avoid the unnecessary or disproportionate incrimination
of political dissent.
We are concerned that police powers at UK
border areas and ports under
schedule 7 may be unjustifiably used against
journalists and activists who are critical of Western foreign policy. ... We
are concerned that such powers carry a risk of intimidating, deterring, and
disrupting the ability of journalists to report on topics of public importance
without self-censorship…
Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000, and schedule 3 of the Counter-Terrorism
and Border Security Act 2019, have been used to examine and obtain data from
journalists and activists, including Johanna Ross (Ganyukova), John Laughland, Kit Klarenberg, Craig Murray and Richard Medhurst in circumstances
where they appear to have no credible connection to “terrorist” or “hostile”
activity.
This of
course is exactly what has happened.Academics such as Professor Ilan Pappe have been stopped as have a
series of radical and dissident journalists. All with the blessing of a Prime
Minister who still lays claim to being a human rights lawyer. The Rapporteurs
write that they are particular concerned at
the growing number of instances
where schedule 7 may have been inappropriately directed towards journalists and
activists, and to consider addressing this through amendments to the legislation,
guidance for relevant officials, and training of border security officers. We further
encourage your Excellency’s Government to address the judiciary’s concerns regarding
the retention of electronic data
Not surprisingly Starmer has not only ignored it but decided to prosecute
both myself and Natalie Strecker under
the anti-terror legislation despite neither of us posing any threat of
terrorism. Journalist Richard Medhurst has been charged under the Terrorism Act
for doing his job and refusing to hand over passwords that would allow the
state to rifle through contacts, sources and confidential communications.
The UN letter also details some of their criticisms concerning the
badly-written Terrorism Act 2000, which is (deliberately) so broad that it can
be abused in the way that the Starmer regime is now doing:
We are concernedat the vagueness and overbreadth of the offencein section 12(1A) of the Terrorism Act
2000, which criminalizes
expressing an opinion or belief that is supportive of a proscribed organisation
and being reckless as to whether it encouraged support for that organisation.
We reiterate
the many concerns about this offence identified by the UK Joint Parliamentary
Committee on Human Rights in its report on the bill that
introduced the offence.
The UN Rapporteurs
note that
The suggestion
by the Court of Appeal that any support will somehow encourage the organization
is nebulous and tenuous,
andover-extends liability to
capture speech that may have a very remote and speculative relationship to
terrorist violence.
We note
further that view of the United Nations Human Rights Committee that the
predicate definition of terrorism in section 1 of the Terrorism Act 2000 is
itself over-broad and “unduly restrictive of political expression”, and has been criticized also by the two Independent
Reviewers of Terrorism Legislation and the UK Supreme Court in R v. Gul
(2013)
Further, the section 12(1A) offence does not require the person to intend to
encourage others to support the organization. The lower mental
element of “recklessness” is sufficient, namely where the person had some
subjective foresight that their conduct will result in the proscribed outcome
and nonetheless engages in it in circumstances where a reasonable person would
not.
The UK Joint Parliamentary Committee on Human Rights has warned that a mental
element of recklessness when applied to acts of speech alone is dangerous; and
that this is aggravated by the lack of clarity as to what
speech constitutes an expression of support.
The principle of legality under article 15(1) of the ICCPR requires that criminal
laws are sufficiently precise so that it is clear what conduct constitutes an
offence and the legal consequences of committing an offence.
This principle seeks to prevent ill-defined and/or overly broad laws which are
open to arbitrary application and abuse, including to target civil society on
political or other unjustified grounds (A/70/371, para. 46(b)). We are
concerned that section 12(1A) does not meet this standard because of its
vagueness and overbreadth.
The Human
Rights Committee has stipulated that these restrictions must be “the least intrusive instrument” among
those which might achieve the desired result and must be “proportionate to the interest to be protected” (general
comment No. 27, para. 14). In this respect we emphasize that the section 12(1A) offence
is unnecessary since there is already an offence of “encouragement of
terrorism” under section 1 of the Terrorism Act 2006, which is a more calibrated and
proportionate offence targeting encouragement of terrorist crimes.
The UN Rapporteurs also criticize Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000,
pointing out its similar unfitness and scope for abuse and miscarriages of
justice. They say that
We are further concerned that the extensive powers authorised under section 2 do not
require any degree of suspicion that a person falls within the meaning of
“terrorist” at section 40(1)(b).
The extreme
breadth of such power enables unnecessary, disproportionate, arbitrary or
discriminatory interference with an individual’s rights, including freedom from
arbitrary detention, freedom of movement under article 12(1) of the ICCPR, and
the rights to leave and
enter
one’s own country under article 12(2) and (4) of the ICCPR.
There is no material on which to form a rational judgement as to whether the use
of the powers
are
necessary or proportionate in the individual case. Even a “hunch” or the
“professional intuition” of the officer concerned could be the basis
on which the powers will be exercised.
The arbitrary
potential of the power is compounded by the low threshold of determining
whether a person merely “appears” to fall within section 40(1)(b).
The safeguards
around the power, such as restrictions on the location, duration, type of
questioning and search, and the supervision of the Independent Reviewer of terrorism
legislation, are insufficient to prevent the misuse of the power and the
potential harm caused to the rights of the individuals
examined.
We are further concerned that the retention of electronic data under
section 11A(3)(a) “for so long as is necessary for the purpose of determining
whether a person falls within section 40(1)(b)” is disproportionate, particularly if it were
used to justify retention indefinitely so as to provide a bank of data for
future use in connection with subsequent investigations or the
collection or receipt of additional information.
We consider that the retention of data for a long period should require
an objectively established ground for the suspicion and be strictly necessary
and proportionate to that law enforcement objective. In this
regard, we
refer your Excellency’s government to article 17 of the ICCPR which requires
that “[n]o one shall be subjected to arbitrary or unlawful interference with
[their] privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to unlawful attacks on
[their] honour and reputation”.
We note
that several journalists detained under schedule 7 have had their electronic
devices confiscated for a significant period of time and have
not been updated on the use, retention or destruction of their data, or advised
in relation to their personal data protection rights.
The term “hostile act” is defined at section 1(6) as an
act which: “(a) threatens national security; (b) threatens the economic
well-being of the United Kingdom in a way relevant to the interests of national
security; or (c) is an act of serious crime”.
What is ‘threatening the economic well-being of the UK’?It could be argued that a general strike or
even a strike in important areas of the economy such as docks constitute such a
threat.
We raise similar concerns regarding the vague and
over-broad definition of “hostile activity”, which includes the sweeping terms
“national security” and “economic well-being”. The ambiguity within these concepts reposes an
extraordinary discretion in the police when exercising the relevant powers,increasing the risk of unnecessary, disproportionate
or otherwise arbitrary interferences in the rights to liberty and privacy, and
having a chilling effect on freedoms of thought, conscience, opinion and
expression, including in relation to journalists and activists.
The letter is signed by:
·Ben Saul, Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protectiSpecial Rapporteur
on the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms while
countering terrorism
·Irene Khan, Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the
right to freedom of opinion and expression
·Gina Romero, Special Rapporteur on the rights to freedom of peaceful
assembly and of association
·Ana Brian Nougrères, Special Rapporteur on the right to privacy
The letter effectively accuses the Starmer regime of the deliberate abuse
of anti-terrorism legislation to criminalise free speech on Palestine to
protect Israel, because of Starmer’s absolute commitment to Zionism and the
‘right’ of Israel to murder whoever it wants..
Those Who Argue That Israel Controls American Foreign Policy Are Letting
US Imperialism Off the Hook
I understand why, for many people, it
seems as if Israel controls US foreign policy. After all Israeli politicians, Netanyahu
included, boast of how much power they exert and in all probability they
believe it.
I must confess that I was surprised by
the video of Lowkey whose
title was ‘Donald Trump is a Puppet of Israel’. In the video Lowkey explained which billionaires and Israeli/Zionist
individuals and organisations had financed Trump’s successful election
campaign.
xxxx
This is political idiocy. Trump isn't a puppet of Israel, nor was Biden @doubledownnews - it is such a fucking stupid thing to say
Israel is the attack dog of US imperialism. Israel does what the US can only dream of. Why the fuck do you think Biden said that if Israel didn't… https://t.co/LW5uomYv10
— Tony Greenstein tonygreenstein.com (@TonyGreenstein) February 5, 2025
The heading on the video from Double
Down News was ‘Donald
Trump is a Puppet of Israel’. Although Lowkey didn’t actually say
these words in the video, I assume that he was nonetheless happy with the
title..
It was on this basis that I posted a comment making it
clear that this was ‘political idiocy’
and that it was a ‘fucking stupid thing to say’. I went on to say:
Israel
is the attack dog of US imperialism. Israel does what the US can only dream of.
Why the fuck do you think Biden said that if Israel didn't exist it would have
to be invented. Christians evangelists wanted an Israel when Jews didn't. Read
up on your fucking history and use your brain
the US controls Israel or
rather supports her because an unsinkable aircraft carrier is in its interests
- that's why the most rabid anti-Semites love Israel
For this I was duly reprimanded by
Asa Winstanley of Electronic Intifada who said there
was ‘no need to abuse @Lowkey0nlineover
a political disagreement. He’s a good man and doesn’t deserve to be sworn at
like that.’
I don’t accept I swore at or abused Lowkey but
I didn’t pull any punches either. I agree that Lowkey is a good man and an
excellent researcher. However it is one thing to do the research and it is an
entirely another thing as to what conclusions you draw from that research.
I have no doubt that rich Jewish Zionists like
Miriam Adelson funded Trump’s
campaign. So did the Hitler saluting
neo-Nazi Elon Musk, who is not Jewish.
Elon
Musk’s ‘awkward gesture’according to the Zionist
ADL
But it is an entirely different matter to
conclude from this that Trump is Israel’s puppet. Or that United States foreign
policy is controlled by Israel. Because if Israel, a relatively small state
that is entirely dependent on US weapons and finance, does control the US, a
much bigger and more powerful state, then the question arises as to how this is
possible. A moment’s thought should tell us that this is highly unlikely. Why
would the Pentagon, American multi-nationals and billionaire class allowthe Israeli state or indeed any state to
control their foreign policy?
Of course there are conspiracy cookies, of whom there are quite a number
who, like Glenn Beck, the former Fox News presenter, will come out and say it’s
a Jewish conspiracy as predicted in the Protocols of the Learned Elders of
Zion. But for more normal and rational people this is an absurd formulation.
American Jews are 5 or 6 million. 40% of young Jews believe Israel is
an apartheid state and young Jews are in the forefront of the anti-genocide
protests.
Of course the Jewish capitalists, who with
the exception of George Soros are all Zionists, are pro-Israel.But is US support for Israel a result of rich
Jews conspiring together? That is the only plausible explanation for how Israel
‘controls’ US foreign policy.
Butcher Biden, whilst always telling us of
his red lines, funded and equipped Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Without US
support Israel would not have been able to destroy Gaza. The question is why
the US did this. The answer is not hard to find.
The Middle East is an incredibly important
part of the world. It is the gateway to Asia with the Suez Canal and it is a
region rich in oil and gas. Both British and US foreign policy is geared to
suppressing the Arab populations through compliant comprador regimes. Arab
nationalism with its threat to Western control of the oil is a dire threat to
the West’s prosperity and Israel has been pivotal in defeating it.
Israel is the United States’s attack dog,
used to frighten and police the region. Although the US uses Saudi Arabia in
particular to do this in the Gulf,the Saudi regime is not based on popular
support and is thus unstable. Israel is a western settler colonial state whose
population is every bit as right-wing and racist as its politicians.
But if Israel is the West’s attack dog then
it is important that it retains its bite. If you kick your attack dog too often
it becomes afraid to do anything. Far better that Israel murders a few hundred
thousands in Gaza than that it’s afraid to slaughter Arabs when the US expects it to.
With the settlers of the West Bank now
gaining critical mass in Israeli politics we are seeing a shift from the old
secular racism of Israel toMessianic
racist politicians who believe they are fulfilling god’s mandate.
Of course the old Israeli Labor Party politicians
weren’t really secular. There was no civil marriage in Israel as that would have
enabled Arabs, Christians, Muslims and Jews to inter-marry and in a Jewish state
based on racial purity that is not kosher.
Israel prefers to keep its version of the Nazi
Nuremberg laws which prevents Jews and Arabs inter-marrying. It was the ILP government
which conquered the West Bank because it too signed up to the idea that the
biblical territories of Zionist mythology must be conquered.
Noam Chomsky - Why Does the U.S. Support Israel?
As Noam Chomsky explains in the video, Christian Zionism predated
Jewish Zionism by hundreds of years. This was the theology of Christian imperialism.The first imperialist to dream of a Jewish state
was Napoleon and he was followed by a variety of British
politicians, Lords Palmerston and Shaftesbury in particular.
Why were the British so keen on Zionism that
they agreed to sponsor the Zionist project via the Balfour Declaration?
The answer is simple. They saw a British run client settler state as being in
their interests although things did not turn out as they expected because after
1945 the British and the Zionist militias fought a war against each
other. But at no stage did the British arm the Arabs. This was a repeat of the
American War of Independence. Even though the British were losing to the American
colonists, they never entertained the idea of arming the Black slaves.
When Israel defeated the combined Arab
armies in 1967 they also defeated the Arab nationalism of Gamal Abdel-Nasser.
Arab nationalism died with Nasser.
US President Joe Biden: “If there were not an Israel, we’d have to invent one.”
Alexander Haig was right when he described Israel as
an unsinkable aircraft carrier.Biden
was right when he said that if Israel
didn’t exist it would have to be invented. A ready made friendly settler state
in the region that supported and was dependent on the US fitted in with
imperialism’s plans.
The Conversation gets it about right when
it describes how:
Regardless of
which political party or coalition is in power in Israel, and regardless of
where public opinion in the U.S. is
moving, the U.S. government’s “commitment
to Israel’s security is ironclad,” as Vice-President Kamala Harris put it.
The U.S. sees
Israel as a critical “strategic ally” in the Middle East….
Why would the
U.S. need to invent an Israel? Biden has always seen Israel as an investment which produces the best
returns for U.S. interests.
In 1986, when he
was a member of the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, he opposed the sale of weapons to
Saudi Arabia because they were not able to become “agents of .U.S interests in the Persian Gulf region.”
He stressed that
his opposition to the weapons sale was not about whether the Saudis were good
guys or bad guys, but about the ability of the Saudis to help advance and
secure U.S. interests.
He emphasized
that the “naked self-interest of the U.S.”
should always guide their Middle East policy, and that his support for Israel
is situated within that self-interest. As he bluntly explained: “Were there not an Israel, the United States
of America would have to invent an Israel to protect her interest in the
region.”
Biden’s frank
comments make clear that the U.S.-Israel “bond” is not about defending
democracy. Rather, it has always been, and still is, about American imperial
interests in the region.
That is why although the US has cajoled and
tried to persuade Israel to come to some form of two-state bantust-type
settlement with Israel, they never contemplated forcing Israel to disgorge its
territory.
That is why, although Israel is the most
powerful actor in the region, American and British politicians have always gone
along with the fiction of Israel’s ‘right to defend itself’ which really means Israel’s
right to attack whoever it wants.
Of course in the United States there is a
competition as to who can give Israel the most support, because it is taken for
granted that Israel is an adjunct to American power in the region. It may
indeed seem at times as if Israel controls the United States but all I can say
to those who believe this is that appearances can often be deceptive.
It pays US politicians to pretend that Israel
has them by the throat but when on occasion there really is a clash of
interests then it is always the United States that wins. When Reagan wanted to sell
AWACS surveillance aircraft to Saudi Arabia, Israel objected.
Reagan bluntly declared that ‘It is not the business of
other nations to make American foreign policy.’he won
the battle. Similarly when Bush demanded that $10
billion loan guarantees not be used to fund settlements on the West Bank and Prime
Minister Shamir objected,
Bush stood his
ground, insisting on delaying the entire loan guarantee for 120 days. ….
Shamir thought
that with the help of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC,
he could force
Bush’s hand by mobilizing Congress to approve the aid immediately in
defiance of the president.
Unmoved, Bush
vowed to veto legislation that authorized the aid before the 120-day delay had
expired. He took his case to the media, speaking at length about his stance in
a press
conference on Sept. 12, 1991. He famously portrayed himself as an
underdog against the might of AIPAC and other pro-Israel groups, which had recently
organized a massive lobbying day on Capitol Hill.
“I heard today
there was something like 1,000 lobbyists on the Hill working on the other side
of the question. We’ve got one lonely little guy down here doing it,” he said,
eliciting laughs from the White House press corps.
Shortly
thereafter, Bush prevailed
in his game of chicken with Shamir and AIPAC.
Congress backed
down. And when the U.S. finally guaranteed the loans in the spring of 1992, it
did so using a new formula designed to offset Israel’s spending on settlements.
It guaranteed $200
million less for each billion Israel asked for to account for
Israel’s projected settlement spending.
Historically the Republican Party has not
depended on Jewish or Zionist financial support. That has always been in the
Democrat’s pocket although today it is different. But regardless of who
supported which party there was never any doubt that when it came to Israel
there was total bipartisanship.
In short it is not Israeli control of US
foreign policy that is the problem. It is US imperialism and its Israeli watchdog
that are our real enemies.
Not only do those who attribute US support
for Israel to the Zionist lobbies not understand where power lies but they let
US imperialism off the hook. If only the lobby wasn’t so powerful these people
claim then US imperialism would be more benign.
Or you do like David Miller seems to be
doing and that is chasing individual Zionists in positions of power on the
basis that once they are removed from office then Britain will adopt a pro-Palestinian
foreign policy.
Such a strategy is a recipe for derailing
the Palestine solidarity movement by failing to see where power really lies.
In Israel Selling Palestinian Books is ‘Act of Terrorism’ – But If You
Sell Books that Explain How to Legally Kill Non-Jews then that’s Fine
Sky News Report - Why
have two bookstore owners in Jerusalem been detained?
I was shocked when I heard that Mahmoud
Muna had been arrested. Mahmoud was a student at Sussex University and was well
known to members of Brighton & Hove Palestine Solidarity Campaign. Mahmoud
and supporters of the Palestinians worked together for some years to enlighten
people about what the Palestinians endure. After graduating from Sussex Mahmoud
went back to Jerusalem to his bookstore. However none of us realised that
selling books or certain books would become a crime in occupied Jerusalem.
For a long time Israeli propagandists
got away with the lie that Israel was the ‘only
democracy in the Middle East’ and to be honest Israel was very good at
hiding the fact, as Ahmed Tibi MK put it, Israel was
Democratic towards Jews and Jewish towards Arabs.
Mahmoud and Ahmed Muna in court in Jerusalem on Monday. Photograph: Mahmoud Illean/AP
Israeli raid on Palestinian
bookshop sparks outrage
Since 2018, Apartheid has
been entrenched in statute in the Jewish Nation State Law which states in clause
1(c) that:
The realization of the right to national self-determination
in the State of Israel is exclusive to the Jewish People.
The
existence of a Jewish state in a land whose indigenous people were Palestinians
could not mean anything other than an apartheid state. It is this that explains
the extreme racism of the Israeli police which resulted in them raiding a Palestinian
bookshop, which has been established in Jerusalem for 40 years, in order to seize a children’s colouring book amongst others with
the slogan ‘from the river to the sea’ on its front cover.
I am reminded of what took place in Nazi
Germany where the authorities organised book burning ceremonies. I am also reminded
of Heinrich Heine’s prediction that “Wherever
they burn books, in the end will also burn human beings.” Except that in Israel they first burn people alive
in Gaza and then they turn their attention to books.
Jerusalem Magistrate's Court Judge
Chavi Toker approved the warrant for the raid on the bookshop despite the fact
that the Police never sought permission from the prosecution, which is required
by law to
open an investigation into suspected incitement.
Hence at the bail hearing they
changed their suspicions to "undermining
the public's safety" The most damning evidence they produced was a
colouring book for children "From the River to
the Sea,"
Although another Magistrate's Court
judge, Gad Ehrenberg, rejected the police's request to keep Mahmoud and Ahmed
Muna in gaol for 8 days he decided to keep them in jail for another day so
police could continue their investigation. This despite the illegality of the
whole operation.
Jerusalem District Court Judge Eli
Abravanel reprimanded the police for not obtaining permission to open an
incitement investigation, but still allowed the decision to keep the two men in
gaol for 2 days. After all they are Palestinians, so what is there to complain
of?
Protesters outside court in Jerusalem on Monday. Photograph: Quique Kierszenbaum/The Guardian
Ha’aretz, which the Police also took exception to, commented in an editorial:
Due to the police's aggressive and undemocratic
behavior and the judges' cowardice or naïveté, Mahmoud and Ahmed Muna spent two
nights in jail. This is even more absurd given the fact, which emerged
following their release on Tuesday, that the police never even bothered
questioning them again, despite keeping them in jail.
The bookshop however isn’t
an anonymous back street shop.
There is no diplomat, journalist or scholar of
Jerusalem who isn't familiar with the store and its intellectual treasures.
Evidence of this is the fact that the bail hearing at the Jerusalem
Magistrate's Court was attended by diplomats from nine countries, plus the
European Union.
Mahmoud Muna inside a branch of the Educational Bookshop chain in July 2024. Photograph: Sally Hayden/SOPA Images/Shutterstock
Ha’aretz’s editorial
observed that
The raid and the arrests show how deeply the rot has
propagated within the police and the legal system. Attorney General Gali
Baharav-Miara must tell the police that their behavior was illegal, and that if
they want to open an incitement investigation, they can find thousands of calls
for mass murder, obliterating the Gaza Strip, starvation and many other
incitements for war crimes on social media, in interviews with politicians and in rabbis'
sermons.
Which entirely misses the point of
course. Incitement to violence and death against Palestinians is not a crime in
Israel but any manifestation of Palestinian identity, culture or history is a
crime. That is why Israel today is a fully-fledge police state as far as Palestinians
are concerned, even for those who are Israeli citizens.
However
Mahmoud and Ahmed aren’t entirely blameless. If they had stocked a wider range
of books perhaps they wouldn’t have offended Israel’s racist police.
For example they could have stocked
that well-known book Torat HeMelech authored
by Rabbis Yitzhak Shapira and Yosef Elizur. Shapira was head of the Od Yosef
Chai Yeshiva in the settlement of Yitzhar. The Jerusalem Post explained that the
students at Od Yosef Chai saw Israeli army ethics as ‘problematic’ because they
were ‘based on "western" or "Christian" morality that
equates Jewish lives with those of non-Jews’. The whole basis of Torat HaMelech
is that Jewish lives and non-Jewish lives are not the same.
Nathan Thrall at the protest on Monday. Photograph: Quique Kierszenbaum/The Guardian
Indeed Torat Hamelech was a mine of
useful information if you want to wipe out non-Jews without incurring the
displeasure of the legal authorities. Replete with quotations from the holy
books and Talmud it explained how
The prohibition 'Thou Shalt Not Murder' applies only
“to a Jew who kills a Jew,”... Non-Jews
are “uncompassionate by nature” and
attacks on them “curb their evil
inclination,” while babies and children of Israel's enemies may be killed
since “it is clear that they will grow to
harm us.”
You may
scoff but books like this are invaluable if you want to commit a genocide in
Gaza. Unfortunately the International Criminal Court, run as it is by non-Jews didn’t
see it that way although, to be fair Keir Starmer, Joe Biden and now Donald
Trump have given it their seal of approval.
CCTV shows Israeli police raiding Jerusalem bookshop – video report
No doubt if
Mahmoud and Ahmed had stocked books like Torat
HaMelech they would not have suffered the ignominy of having their bookshop
raided and spending two days in custody.
Despite
many calls for the prosecution of the authors of Torat HaMelech
Attorney-General Yehuda Weinstein said that the
investigation was being closed because there is not enough evidence that the
book was published with the intention to incite racism.
works pertaining to rulings on religious law or
publications of religious sources should not be dealt with in criminal
proceedings in order to preserve freedom of religion.
One wonders how a Muslim cleric would
have fared if he had written a book detailing how Muslim religious law
permitted the killing of Jews. Well actually we know because Raed Saleh, the
leader of the Northern Islamic League received a sentence of 11 months in 2015
for a sermon 8 years previously. Saleh was convicted of incitement
to violence and racism.
Saleh
had, in response to an attack on Al Aqsa by the police said:
“May the streets of
Jerusalem be purified with the blood of the innocent, who shed it in order to
separate from their souls the soldiers of the Israel occupation, also in the
blessed al-Aqsa Mosque,”.
Clearly that was far worse than calling for
non-Jewish children and infants to be killed in order that they might ‘curb their evil inclinations’
In Israel the
only people who get convicted and gaoled for incitement to racism are Palestinians.
When thousands of Jewish settlers march to the chant of ‘Death to the Arabs’ the Police do all they can to protect them.
And if you call Israel an Apartheid state?Why you must be anti-Semitic!
A
Reply to Susan Caplan, a Zionist Who Wrote That the Demonstrations ‘Must Not Be Allowed to Continue’
There was a time when the Police professed to be politically neutral.
However that has gone out of the window as the Commissioner of the Metropolitan
Police, Sir Mark Rowley, openly boasted of how he
is cracking down on Palestinian demonstrations in London.
Rowley’s reasons are really quite touching for someone who is in charge
of an organisation which has been found to be institutionally racist by numerous inquiries, including by the
historic MacPherson Inquiry into the
murder of Black teenager, Stephen Lawrence.
Although
the Inquiry didn’t get to the bottom of the Police’s links with his killers,
subsequent further information emerged from Victoria and Naomi Smith, who were
related to the Norris family, whose son David Norris was eventually gaoled for
Stephen’s murder. Clifford Norris, the father of David Norris, used a network of corrupt
Metropolitan police officers to protect himself and his close
relations from justice.
To this day there has been no investigation into these claims of police
corruption. But rest assured. Although the murder of a Black teenager didn’t impact
on the Met until the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry reached its damning verdict, the
Met are however very sensitive to the impact of demonstrations against Genocide
in Gaza on Zionist Jews. So much so that they go out of their way to get them
to make complaints.
The Met’s assumption that all Jews are supportive of Genocide in
Palestine and Israeli Apartheid is itself anti-Semitic. And why not? In the
1930s from my own research Brighton Police entertained visiting delegations of
the German Police, even when, after 1936, Heinrich Himmler was put in charge of both
the German Police and the SS.
Of course attacks on free speech and the right of assembly aren’t
confined to Britain. In Switzerland two weeks ago the Executive Director of
Electronic Intifada, Ali Abunimah was kidnapped off the
street and held incommunicado for three days before being expelled from the
country. Ali had been invited to address a meeting on Palestine.
Last Tuesday police and
politicians in Germany tried to cancel a meeting in
Berlin featuring Francesca Albanese, the U.N. special rapporteur on the
occupied Palestinian Territories. Organisers were forced to move the event to a
smaller venue.
The
organizers, DiEM25, said in a statement on its
website:
“In a
deeply concerning escalation, the organisers of ‘Reclaiming the Discourse:
Palestine, Justice, and Truth’ – an event featuring UN Rapporteur for
the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Francesca Albanese –
are facing ruthless attacks on their fundamental rights to freedom of speech,
assembly, and expression.
The venue, Kühlhaus Berlin, faced immense pressure from German
politicians and the Berlin police to cancel the event. This is not only a disgrace
but a direct assault on the rule of law and the core principles of democracy.
It also represents an attack on businesses coerced into submission through
mafia-like tactics, where intimidation has reached alarming extremes. …
LIVE
FROM BERLIN: Palestine, Justice and the Power of Truth with Francesca Albanese
and more
In the 1930s when anti-Semitism was a real issue, the Metropolitan
Police sided with the fascists and at the Battle of Cable Street
did its best to force thousands of fascists on the Jewish East End. However
working class solidarity and a demonstration of 200,000 forced them back.
Today the Police purport to be concerned about anti-Semitism when it
comes to protest against Genocide and War Crimes in Gaza. Of course they could
try implementing the International Criminal Court
Act 2001which makes being ancillary to or participating in war
crimes, even when abroad, an offence.
However British complicity in war crimes doesn’t disturb the Met but evidence-free
allegations that Jews are afraid to walk the streets because of Palestine
solidarity demonstrations, does concern them.In other words the Met has adopted the Zionist narrative that to support
the Palestinians is in itself anti-Semitic.
We had the absurd spectacle of the Jewish Bloc on a Palestine
Demonstration in London in December 2023 being separated off
from the rest of the demonstrators because the Police found it difficult to
accept that Jews could support the Palestinians.
Where does this racist nonsense come from?Perhaps Mark Rowley could answer and explain
the nature of the briefings that are given to his officers. This is a legacy of
colonial divide and rule. As part of this false narrative anti-Zionist Jews
suddenly become invisible.
Suddenly the only genuine Jews are racist Jews like Susan Caplan. Ms Caplan,
did respond to the invitation of the Met to complain about the demonstrations.
We know this because the Met, in complete disregard of the Data Protection
Laws, distributed her email to all and sundry! Caplan’s response is
interesting, not because it contains any gems of wisdom but because of the
insight it provides into the Zionist mind.
There was a time when Israel claimed to be ‘the only democracy in the Middle East’ however Genocide, Mass
Murder and Ethnic Cleansing in the West Bank combined with incidents like the raid and arrest of two bookshop owners in
East Jerusalem have put paid to that myth.
In her email Caplan complained ‘as
a Jewish person’ that ‘it is
unacceptable to allow this protest to continue with it’s (sic) inciteful behaviour.’ We are not told
who is being incited and against whom but we can guess.Inciting against Israel’s racist and genocidal
Ambassador Tzipi Hotoveli is clearly unacceptable to the said Caplan.
Not only this but the protests ‘have
become uncontrollable’ and ‘cause
more divide (sic) rather than peace
and unity.’ There is nothing in the way of evidence to back these
assertions but I suspect that evidence is the last thing the Met are looking for.
As for peace and unity one wonders whether Caplan really expects the
demonstrators to hand out white doves to the supporters of Genocide and unite
with them.
And then we come to Caplan’s real concern. ‘Calling for the end of Israel, the end of Zionism is unacceptable [Caplan
loves this word] hate speech and must not
be allowed.’
As I wrote in my letter to her, Zionism is a political ideology which is
based on hateful racism and calling for it to go is no different from calling
for Apartheid South Africa or the Nazi state to disappear.
Caplan’s final flourish was to allege that political demands for an end
to Zionism constitute ‘hate speech’ – and of course we are all against hate
speech, an all-embracing term which includes those who hate capitalism, racism
and oppression.
Ironically, the victims were Israeli tourists. And right after being shot, they took to social media chanting 'Death to Arabs.' You can't make this up.
This is the result of anti-Palestinian hate & indoctrination that sadly runs deep in Israel and pro-Israel communities in U.S. pic.twitter.com/y13D6aM96Y
Forbidding demonstrations against racism is what the Israeli state does
all the time. What Caplan and those who put her up to this really want is for
Britain to adopt the norms of the Israeli state which allows demonstrations calling for ‘Death to the Arabs’but which bans anything which opposes
Genocide or Israeli state racism.
I finished my letter by referring to an incident in Miami
Beach, Florida when a Jewish Zionist shot
up a vehicle containing two Israelis, who he mistook for Palestinians!
This is not the first time that Israelis have attacked other Israelis in the mistaken belief
that they were really Palestinians.
The New Yellow Star?
It is rather unfortunate that some Israelis, especially Arab Jews, look
like other non-Jewish Arabs. Perhaps Israel should make it compulsory for Palestinians
to have a distinguishing mark on their clothes in order that assailants don’t keep
mistaking Jews for Arabs. The Nazis used the Yellow Star. Perhaps Israel could use
the Watermelon?
The injuries to the two Israelis were minor and didn’t affect their racism.
The father took to Facebook to complain of their ‘anti-Semitic’ experience and
true to his Zionist sympathies finished with the slogan ‘Death to the Arabs.’You
really could not make it up.
Tony Greenstein
18 February 2025
Dear Ms Caplan,
Thank you for your email to
the Police complaining about the weekly demonstration at Swiss Cottage against
Israel’s Ambassador, Tzipi Hotoveli. Despite doing their best to engineer
complaints (or ‘victim statements’) the Police nonetheless had the good manners
to send your response to other interested parties.
I hope you won't take
offence if a Jewish anti-Zionist replies to you. Your email is a good example
of the Zionist mindset and is indicative of everything that is wrong with
Zionism, Zionists and supporters of Israeli Apartheid.
You say that 'calling
for the end to Israel, the end to Zionism is unacceptablehate speech and
must not be allowed to continue'. Thus speaks the authentic voice of the
Israeli Police State.
Zionism is a political
ideology, like fascism. It is perfectly appropriate to call for an end to it.
Its origins lie in Christian Zionism. Its aim was to form, in Theodor Herzl’s words, a state which would ‘form a portion of the rampart of Europe
against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism.’
Zionism when it first began
was welcomed by anti-Semites, as a means of being rid of the Jews in their
midst, and was seen by most Jews as a form of Jewish anti-Semitism. That was
why the Balfour Declaration was proposed by Arthur Balfour, a Christian Zionist
and anti-Semite who, when Prime Minister, introduced the 1905 Aliens Act
designed to keep Jewish refugees out of Britain. It is noteworthy that the only
person to oppose the Declaration in the Lloyd George War Cabinet was its only
Jewish member, Sir Edwin Montagu.
Calling for an end to the
Israeli state is no more a form of hate speech than calling for the end to the
Nazi State or the Apartheid State of South Africa. It is only fascists and
racists who cannot distinguish between a state and the people who live in that
state. I call for the end to the Israeli state because it is a state of Jewish
Supremacy and Apartheid.
Why is it unacceptable for
people to express views in public that you disagree with? This isn't
Israel where Palestinian speech is repressed and anti-racist protests are met
with police batons and bans. Have you not heard of the raid on the Educational
Bookshop
in Jerusalem this past week when the owners were arrested and books were
carried away in plastic bags? I seem to remember there was another European
state in the 1930s which also didn’t like books of the wrong kind.
But perhaps you have forgotten
where you are living? Freedom of Speech and the Right of Assembly are basic
democratic rights which haven't yet been extinguished in Britain. I realise that
you and your fellow Zionists are doing your best to achieve this, with the
complicity of the Metropolitan Police, Starmer and Yvette Cooper but we are
there to resist you.
The present genocide in
Gaza is something that should be protested against, in particular by Jewish
people. You should hang your head in shame that after the genocide of Jews by
Hitler that you support the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.
You probably know nothing
about the genesis of the Holocaust so let me remind you that on October 4 1943
at Posen (Posnan) in Poland, Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS justified the extermination of Jews
to a group of senior SS Generals thus:
We Germans, who are the only people
in the world who have a decent attitude to animals, will also adopt a decent attitude to these
human animals...’
On 9 October 2023 Yoav
Gallant spoke in similar terms when he said:
“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,” [Times of Israel, 9.10.25]
I don't wish upset you with
too many uncomfortable facts Susan, but on 6 October 1943, also at Posen,
Himmler explained why Jewish children also had to be killed:
‘I did not assume to have the right to exterminate the
men… and have the avengers personified in the
children to become adults for our children and grandchildren.’ [Raul Hilberg,
The Destruction of the European
Jews, fn. 3, p.294]
Compare this to what Rabbi
Eliyahu Mali, head of the pre-military Kiryat Moshe Yeshivah, said on 7 March 2024:
“Today’s terrorists are the children of the
prior [military] operation that left them alive. The women are essentially the ones who are producing the terrorists,” he
said, adding that when someone
comes to kill you, you should be quick to kill them. “It’s not only the
14- or 16-year-old boy, the 20- or
30-year-old man who takes up a weapon against you but also the future generation. There’s really no
difference,”
So you can see how similar is
the ideology behind the Zionist genocide in Gaza and the Nazi genocide of Jews.
Is this inciteful as you
alleged? No it is educational. The only question really is whether you
wish to be educated or would you rather wallow in your ignorance? The Israeli state is Hitler's
bastard offspring which is why genuine anti-Semites like Trump love Israel.
Richard Spencer, the
neo-Nazi who organised the Charlottesville march where those taking part chanted “Jews
will not replace us’even described himself as a White
Zionist. Who could possibly disagree with him?
But let me finish this on a
lighter note. Yesterday in Miami Beach, Florida a Jewish Zionist mistook two
Israelis for Palestinians and opened fire on them. The ‘victims’, who survived
unscathed immediately posted on Facebook describing their attack as
anti-Semitic and finishing their post with ‘Death
to the Arabs.’
‘Death to the Arabs’ is the slogan that is chanted by the Israeli
right. In Germany and Polandbefore the
war Death to the Jews was the slogan
of the anti-Semites. Perhaps now you understand why there is a demonstration
against Tzipi Hotoveli, who is on record as saying there is no Palestinian
history and who called for the murder of 600,000 Palestinians in
Gaza.
As Zionism moves
towards its Final Solution, Trump, Starmer and Germany’s Genocidal
leaders Remain Fulsome in Their Support of Israel’s ‘Right To Defend Itself’
Zionism’s Endgame: a ‘Final
Solution’ for the Palestinians, w/ Tony Greenstein
We are living in a world where our
rulers don’t even pretend to be on the side of the angels. Their amorality is a
badge of pride.
As far as Trump is concerned all that
matters in Ukraine is American access to Ukraine’s rare minerals. Likewise in
Gaza, never mind the people, what is important is the potential value of Mediterranean
real estate.The fact that 2 million
people live there is irrelevant.
Fact Check on Genocidal Song on Israel’s Kan Public
Broadcaster
You might think that after 4
genocides to their credit that the German state would be reluctant to support a
fifth genocide. Not a bit of it. German politicians have embraced Israel’s
genocide in Gaza because it makes them feel better about their own genocides. What
could be better than a ‘Jewish’ state perpetrating the genocide.
Israel's Oldest & Most Popular Podcast - 2 Nice Jewish Boys Discuss
Erasing Gaza
Zionism and its bastard state, has played
the role of helping the German State come to terms with the Nazi holocaust. Now
that a far-right party, the AfD, a
large portion of whose membership consists of neo-Nazis, has come second in the
elections, the German state is moving towards a relativisation of the Holocaust.
It is no surprise that Israel’s Diaspora Minister is a fan of Hitler saluting
Elon Musk.
The Netherland's Fascist Leader Geert Wilders and Israel's Labor President Isaac Herzog Get On Famously
After all. If Israel can perpetrate a
holocaust in Gaza why should Germany be forever burdened with a guilt complex over
its holocaust?It is difficult to argue
with such logic.
Israel’s Friendship Song of
Annihilation – as sung by Israeli school children
For those who doubt that Germany has
participated in 5 genocides then here they are: the Maji Maji
genocide in East Africa/Tanganyika, the Nama/Herero genocide,
the Turkish genocide
of Armenia (Germany was in alliance with Turkey inWW1), the Jewish/Nazi holocaust and now the
Israeli holocaust in Gaza.
I say this by way of introduction.
Netanyahu has done all he could to get back to the genocide in Gaza and has
broken the ceasefire repeatedly. Less aid has gone in than was agreed, Israeli
soldiers have repeatedly killed civilians and as I write the release of the
last batch of Palestinian hostages has been delayed on another pretext.
Tony Greenstein at the Glasgow Anti-Racist/Palestine Solidarity
Demonstration March 2024
There isn’t an agreement that Israel
has been party to that hasn’t been broken.Israel was supposed to be out of Lebanon but it is now saying that it
will maintain 5 permanent bases,
naturally in support of its ‘right to self defence’. It has also made it clear
that it is staying in Southern Syria following the fall of Assad.
I sometimes think how unlucky Nazi
Germany was with its propaganda chief. Goebbels really wasn’t up to it. If
Hitler had the benefit of the Daily Mail and
BBC then every conquest he made could
have been presented as an act of self-defence.
Israel’s goal today remains the same.
The removal of the Palestinians from Gaza. In my interview with Rania I was
sceptical of their ability to pull it off but as time goes on I am increasingly
fearful that they may get away with a large-scale ‘transfer’ given the supine
nature of the Arab leaders and the willingness of the Americans to support it.
European leaders’ opposition isn’t
worth a bucket of warm spit. We can see Netanyahu prepare the ground with his ludicrous lies that the two Bibas children were killed by Hamas.We should treat this story on a par with the allegations that Hamas had chopped off the heads of 40 babies which what
the media ran with.It was a lie then
and it is a lie now.
But who should leap out to amplify
the false stories that Netanyahu, an inveterate and well known liar
peddled?Why our own snake-like Foreign
Secretary, David Lammy and of course the viperous Sturmer
himself.
Hostage kisses Hamas
Those who repeat Israel’s lies about
child-killers are deliberately paving the way for a continued genocide and ethnic
cleansing in Gaza. Instead of directing their fire at the torture, starvation,
rapind to death and the appalling condition of the Palestinian hostages and
noting the welcome and friendly relations of many of the Israeli prisoners with
their Palestinian captors, Starmer and the BBC focus on yet more Zionist
atrocity propaganda.
All the evidence is, as Yocheved Lifshitz said, that Hamas treated
Israel's captives humanely
The vile killing of the Bibas children by Hamas terrorists is sick and abhorrent, as is the failure to return the body of their mother Shiri to the grieving family. Her body must be returned. The hostages must be released. This nightmare must end. https://t.co/dScjVpbySh
There is little doubt that Netanyahu
and his fellow war-criminals are itching to restart the genocide. It is
incumbent upon the anti-war movement in this country to step up the protests.
Starmer and Lammy have not issued on word of protest at Israel’s mistreatment
of the Palestinian prisoners, their humiliating release and abuse. The token
demonstrations wandering through London have to step up. Our first rallying
point should be the BBC and the Metropolitan Police with their ‘anti-Semitism’
scam should be told to go to hell. We will meet at the BBC because they are the
originators of the lies that facilitate genocide.
Interviews with Katie Halper and Rania Khalek
In January and February I was
interviewed on a wide range of topics by Katie Halper and Rania Khalek. These
included my arrest on October 4 for calling Israel ‘Hitler’s Bastard Offspring’.
The filth didn’t like the comparison. They even thought it was anti-Semitic
though the thick plod were unable to explain why in my interview.
As I explained to Katie, anti-Zionist
Jews are invisible so perhaps that is why. But if they weren’t so stupid they
would understand that Zionism is of Christian not Jewish origin.Jews always opposed Zionism until the
holocaust apart from a few freaks and reactionaries.
Of course today the Zionists exploit
the holocaust for all its worth with Gilad Erdan, Israel’s representative to
the UN donning a Yellow Star.
His comparison with the Jewish dead of the holocaust was sickening. If he had had
any integrity he would have worn a swastika.Zionism has always exploited the Jews who died in the holocaust whom Zionism
turned its back on.
According to
Chaim Weizmann, Israel’s first President, the Jews who died in the holocaust were:
dust on the wheels of history and they
may have to be blown away. We don’t want them pouring into Palestine. We don’t
want Tel Aviv to become another low-grade ghetto.
Erdan ‘forgot’ to mention that during
the Hitler era the Zionists were the Nazis favourite Jews. Explaining why
Zionists were the good Jews, unlike the ‘assimilationist’ Jews who kept on
insisting that they were Jewish Germans, Reinhardt Heydrich, head of the SS,
said:
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).
I also explained my own conversion to
anti-Zionism having been brought up in a Zionist family. I was brought up on
the lie that the Palestinian refugees voluntarily left their homes and villages
rather than being expelled at the point of a gun.
I also explained how, when Zionism
first arose, the only people who welcomed it were anti-Semites and that this is
true today too.I specifically mentioned
the President of America’s million strong Christians
United 4 Israel, John Hagee, who gave a sermon explaining why Hitler
was god’s emissary sent to drive the Jews to Palestine.
Orthodox Jews in particular opposed
Zionism. Agudat Yisrael was founded as a specifically anti-Zionist
organisation. This gives the lie to the claims of
Britain’s racist Chief Rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis that Zionism and Judaism have been
intertwined for 3,000 years.
I also went into the content of my
book in some depth explaining that for the Zionists building a ‘Jewish’ state
was the first priority in the holocaust and that Ben-Gurion is notorious for saying that if
there was a choice to be made between rescuing and saving Jews and building
their bastard state, the latter comes first.
When Britain offered to take 10,000
Jewish children in the wake of Kristallnacht the Zionists were outraged that
they weren’t going to Palestine. In a speech to Mapai’s (Israeli Labor Party)
Central Committee Ben-Gurion said:
If I knew that it
would be possible to save all the children in Germany by bringing them over to
England, and only half of them by transporting them to Eretz Yisrael, then I
would opt for the second alternative. For we must weigh not only the life of
these children, but also the history of the People of Israel.
I also described the Kasztner Affair and the
resulting trial in Israel from 1954-8 when the leader of Hungarian Zionism, a
senior official and candidate in Mapai (the Israeli Labor Party) for the next
elections, Rudolf Kasztner, sued for libel when he was accused of being a Nazi
collaborator. He lost when it transpired that he had spent his time post-war at
Nuremberg testifying in favour of Nazi war criminals.
Kasztner had concluded a deal with
Eichmann that if the Nazis agreed to a train out of Hungary for the select few
(Zionists, bourgeois and a few rabbis) he would not inform Hungarian Jews of
the Auschwitz Protocols which two escapees from Auschwitz had written detailing
where they would go if they boarded a deportation train. Up till then no one
knew that Auschwitz was an extermination camp. Kasztner went so far as to
misinform those who were deported that they were travelling to a fictious
resettlement camp, Kenyermeze.
With Rania I gave an outline of the
development of Zionist historiography of the holocaust and how it had been
distorted to accord with Zionist myths of Jewish resistance. Zionism has rewritten
the letters and memoirs of the Zionist resistance fighters in the Warsaw ghetto
eliminating their criticisms of the Zionist movement.This was in order that their writings should accord
with the Zionist narrative that they led the resistance and were heroes rather
than sordid collaborators.
The Zionist historians had also
erased entirely the role of Jewish anti-Zionists, in particular the Jewish
anti-Zionist Bund and its leader, the last Commander of the Resistance, Marek
Edelman.
With Rania I first discussed Trump’s
ethnic cleansing plans. I was sceptical that they would succeed but I am less
so now as all the indications are that Israel is looking for an excuse to
resume the genocide.
We discussed the reaction of Israeli
Jews to the plan. 80% support it and
just 3% think its amoral. Which means that 97% of Israelis are not only amoral
bastards but genocidaires too.The other
17% either can’t make their mind up about it or think it’s not practical.
I imagine some Nazis also thought the
extermination of Jews, Poles, Gays, Roma etc. was not practical. This is the morality
of Israelis and that’s why I find it hard to explain why in a democratic,
secular stateIsraeli Jews would have
the right to national rights as Jews. It is difficult explaining why Palestinians
should be forced to live side by side with genocidal would be murderers.
There is an overwhelming case for American
Jews with 2 passports, especially the settlers on the West Bank, to be deported
back to Brooklyn.
I also explained that Hitler didn’t
start out with a plan to genocide the Jews. His plan, like the Zionists was
ethnic cleansing.It was only when that
failed that genocide became his only option if he wanted to be rid of the Jews.
The same ‘dilemma’ faces the Zionists.If it can’t be expulsion it must be holocaust.
I went into how the very history of
the holocaust had been rewritten by the Zionists to emphasise Jewish
resistance, despite it being very low apart from the Warsaw Ghetto and a few
others such as at Bialystock which went off at half cock, Lachwa and Minsk.
We discussed the situation of Arab
Jews in Israel and how Israel deliberately set out to destabilise their
position in 1948. In Iraq it is well documented
that they planted bombs in synagogues and other places Jews frequented in order
to stimulate flight. Avi Shlaim, an Emeritus Professor at Oxford University in
his book Three Worlds has
recently come up with further proof of Zionist involvement in the bombings.
When the Zionist underground threw a
grenade into the courtyard of the Masudo Shemtov synagogue in Baghdad, killing
2 people, they stimulated a mass emigration of the oldest Jewish community in
the world.Out of 135,000 Jews only
10,000 remained after 1951.
I also told how when they arrived in
Israel Iraq’s Jews were treated like animals and were sprayed with DDT. Three Worlds also explains how a rich
cultured community were turned into poor labourers in Israel, forced to sleep
in tents and how they were deArabised.
I described how Holocaust Worship today leads to the creation
of holocaust museums (but not for Black slaves or the Native Indians) such as
the United StatesHolocaust Museum where
history has been rewritten.When I went
there Pastor Niemoller’s saying ‘First
they came for ...’ was hanging above the entrance except it had been changed.
The first category was ‘First they came
for the communists’ but that wouldn’t do in cold war America so it was
omitted.
I also showed how two-thirds of the members of the Judenrate,
the Nazi Councils that the Nazis established to help implement the Final
Solution, were Zionist. It was the Judenrate and not the Nazis who rounded up
Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto. Rania observed that the Palestinian Authority was
the Palestinian equivalent of the Judenrate!
I quoted Hannah Arendt who said in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem that
Wherever Jews lived, there were recognized Jewish leaders, and this
leadership, almost without exception, cooperated in one way or another, for one
reason or another, with the Nazis. The whole truth was that if the Jewish
people had really been unorganized and leaderless, there would have been chaos
and plenty of misery but the total number of victims would hardly have been
between four and a half and six million people.[1]
I told how the Warsaw ghetto resistance’s first task was to
execute Jewish collaborators. They couldn’t have organised a rebellion with the
collaborators operating. This is equally true of the Palestinian revolution. It
too has to execute its collaborators.
Katie discussed my book, Zionism During the Holocaust in some
depth in particular how the Zionist movement has weaponised Jewish suffering
and anti-Semitism whilst refusing to draw any universal lessons from the Holocaust.
I also spoke about my arrest under the Terrorism Acts and the attacks on the
Palestine solidarity movement in Britain and Europe.
I won’t even attempt to summarise the
topics we discussed but I enjoyed both interviews which were penetrating and
thoughtful. At a time when Israel is committing genocide in Gaza as a
consequence of colonial expansion and in the cause of racial purity, it is
incumbent on Jewish anti-Zionists to speak out against the horrors that are
taking place in our name.
Another point of comparison between Israel
and Nazi Germany is Israel’s policy of starvation of Gaza’s civilian population.
This is taken straight out of the Nazi playbook. 20% of the Warsaw ghetto, some
80,000 people, died from starvation. An even higher percentage died in Lodz,
the second biggest ghetto in Poland. Hans Frank, the Nazi governor of Poland,
spoke of Death By Hunger as does Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s Finance Minister,
who is of the opinion that starving 2 million people to
death would be ‘moral’ if only the West would allow him to get away with it!
The mass executions that Israel has
carried out and the mass graves, to say nothing of the torture camps, resemble
nothing so much as the Nazi policies towards the civilian population of the
countries they occupied. In some ways they are worse.
The major difference between Nazi
Germany and Israel is that anti-Semitism in Germany itself was mainly confined
to a hardcore of the Nazi party, the ‘old fighters’ whereas in Israel genocidal
racism is supported by the overwhelming majority of the Jewish population.
This is perhaps best summed up in the
hilarious story of a Zionist who went in search
of Palestinians to kill in Miami Beach, Florida and ended up shooting two
Israelis who he thought looked like Palestinians! The Israelis, assuming it was
an anti-Semitic attack by Palestinians, signed off with ‘death to the Arabs’ on Facebook.
According to the bogus IHRA
‘definition’ of anti-Semitism, it is anti-Semitic to compare Israel to Nazi
Germany (but is it anti-German to compare Nazi Germany to Israel?!). Yet
Israelis go out of their way to draw such parallels themselves. A Nazi
mentality has descended on the Jewish population of Israel.
An article in Ha’aretz
'When You Leave Israel and Enter Gaza, You Are God': described how many
soldiers in Gaza reported moral injuries: "I felt like, like, like a Nazi
... it looked exactly like we were actually the Nazis and they were the
Jews."
The Jewish Chronicle Has a New Editor, Daniel Schwammenthal, and it Seems
They’ve Realised That a Propaganda Rag Cannot Be a Newspaper
Edward Isaacs was Chair of Bristol’s
Jewish (in fact Israel) Society when the campaign began in earnest against a
sociology professor, David Miller. McCarthyism came easily to this spoilt rich
Zionist brat.
Solomon got into a debate with me
which he badly lost, resulting in him deleting his comments.Isaacs merely threatened to sue me with
Daddy’s money if I called him a liar again. So that’s what I did.I called him a liar but no libel writ arrived
so I guess it is an established fact now that Edward Isaacs, Chair of UJS from 2023-4 is a liar.
Naturally I put up a blog which
remained up until yesterday. Now there is simply a page that says that the blog does not
exist though it still appears on a Google search.
This is what Google objected to - the truth
Fortunately, some years ago, I
decided that the risks of Google taking down a blog that has existed for some
16+ years were too great and I therefore invested in a website and a domain
which is based in the United States. All my posts on Blogspot have been copied
onto it including all legacy posts, just in case.
This is all that remains of my deleted blog!! Except on my shadow blog
Although it costs me an arm and a
leg, hence my occasional appeals to readers, it is worth it not to let the
Zionists destroy what is also a history of the Palestine solidarity movement in
this country. You can however access it here.
This is Blogspot's Explanation for Deleting a 31/2 year old post
Twice in the last year Google has
taken down posts. This never used to happen and so I am thinking of leaving
blogspot altogether and simply posting to my own site.
I therefore invite people to go to
the post Edward Isaacs is a Liar on my site to see what has been
irking Isaac’s for the past 3+ years. He was clearly hoping to join LAW in
order tospy on people there but I
always check people who apply to join in case they are Zionists.
Isn’t it strange how these young
amoral Zionists, who are so ready to call people ‘anti-Semites’ become so
touchy when they are accused of not telling the truth?
Is the Jewish Chronicle Changing Under Its New Editor Daniel
Schwammenthal?
It was
inevitable after the public relations fiasco in which the Jewish Chronicle was found to have been printing as ‘Exclusives’
lying disinformation from Netanyahu’s office via a pimp who called himself a journalist,
I refer toElon Perry, that its
obnoxious, racist Editor Jake Wallis Simons had to go. Although he took nearly
6 months to get the message.
Perry had
claimed to have taken part in the Entebbe raid a mere 48 years ago, as well as
having been a professor at Tel Aviv University for 15 years. Clearly he was a
Walter Mitty character but then that fitted in well at the JC. The JC was was happy
to have him write complete fabrications because printing lies is what it
specialised in.
The fable
that did him was about how Hamas leader, Yayha Sinwar was trying to escape to
Iran with the hostages and that was why Israel needed to stay in the
Philadelphia corridor in order to prevent such occurrences. There was no truth
in this story and as we know, Sinwar died a martyr’s death throwing, with his
last gasp of breath, a stick at the drone which located him. ‘Sinwar’s stick’
has since become famous as a symbol of Palestinian bravery and resistance.
However
this time it was the Israeli end which did for editor Jake Wallis-Simons, whose
other speciality was as a soft-porn novelist. Netanyahu’s disinformationhad been part of a war against the army top
brass and his political enemies. Hence why they were quick to rubbish the
story.As the Guardian commented
Despite being provided with a series of questions,
Wallis Simons and the JC have so far declined to describe how Perry – an
individual with no discernible journalistic track record, let alone as an
investigative reporter – came to be writing for the paper or what due diligence
had been exercised over an increasingly fantastic series of claims.
I mention
all of this because Agnes Kory, a child survivor of the Nazi holocaust, sent me
a copy of a letter she had sent to the Jewish Chronicle supporting the picket
of Tzipi Hotoveli, the Israeli Ambassador, in Swiss Cottage where she lives.
I wished
her good luck but I doubted very much that they would print it. Imagine my
surprise when the Jewish Chronicle did just
that! Under Pollard or Simons the chances are that Agnes’s letter
would have ended up in the electronic equivalent of the waste paper basket.
At the same
time I was contacted by a JC reporter,
Jane Prinsley about a story they were doing about the demonstrations at Swiss
Cottage. You may not think this is unusual but for the JC it is an innovation. Jane actually contacted me before writing
the story!
It is of
course good journalistic practice to contact people you intend to write about
but it is not something that the JC have
done since Pollard became Editor in 2008.
Imagine my
surprise when I read Prinsley’s article. Even
though it didn’t include all my points, it did accurately quote from the 3 out
of 6 that they did use. I can’t imagine that Marcus Dysch or ‘Liar’ Lee even considering
contacting their victims.
As I said
in a letter to the JC (which I don’t
expect to be published!) when ‘Liar’ Lee Harpin used to write articles
involving me it was a pleasant past-time to see how many mistakes I could
identify in each article. This is perhaps why the paper experienced
so many adverse judgements of IPSOS, the so-called independent body that
investigates complaints against newspapers and why it suffered so many
libel defeats too.
As Jonathan Cook wrote‘the
Jewish Chronicle’s libel payouts were a small price to pay for smearing
Corbyn and the left.’
The JC literally did not care if its
stories were true or not.The main
objective was to damage Corbyn and the Left, which is why an unknown consortium
was prepared to finance the paper despite knowing that it could only make
losses as readers abandoned it. The BBC’s Director Robbie Gibb
man fronted the take-over of the JC
by anonymous billionaires.
My satirical letter to the Jewish Chronicle
The scandal involving Perry resulted in the JC's four principal columnists, headed
by Jonathan Freedland and David Aaronovitch, resigning. The rats were
abandoning ship.
Despite his attempts to cling on, Jake Wallis
Simon’s days were numbered.Whether this
results in any substantive change in the JC
is to be doubted. To date the JC has
operated on the basis that 99.99% of British Jews are fully fledged Zionists. Jewish
anti-Zionism has disappeared from its pages. The reality of what is happening
to the Palestinians never even makes it into their pages thus reinforcing the
belief that Palestinians (‘Arabs’) don’t like Israel because they are born anti-Semitic
rather than that they might object to living in an apartheid state that steals
their land.
The Only Reason
for Banning the Film is McCarthyite guilt-by-association – Since October 7 the
BBC has run non-stop Israeli Atrocity Propaganda
xxxx
I first became aware of the controversy
surrounding Gaza: How to Survive a War
Zone, the only attempt by the BBC during 16 months of Israel’s genocidal
attacks on Gaza to portray the suffering of civilians, when I read a letterfrom 45 Zionists gaslighting in the media journal Deadline. I posted a short comment.
The letter contained a variety of errors. David Collier
is not an 'investigative journalist' but a far-right Zionist propagandist who
mixes with fascists like Jonathan Hoffman, Paul Besser of Britain First and
Tommy Robinson supporter Sharon Klaff.
Jonathan Sacerdoti is a professional Zionist
propagandist, who formerly worked for the Israeli front group CAA. I asked if Sarah Deech was related to Baroness
Deech, a patron for UK Lawyers for Israel? She is. The apple
doesn’t fall far from the tree. When these apologists for the
murder of children ask
What
role did Abdullah Al-Yazouri’s parents play in the supervision of the filming
of the child and the BBC’s duty of care obligations in filming with under-18s?
Who was the child’s chaperone.
Abdullah says he’s been targeted & the BBC hasn’t reached out. As a former @BBCNews journalist I can tell you that child safeguarding is a key part of our training. To see none of it applied here is shocking & speaks to the dehumanisation of Palestinian children over months. https://t.co/Sokm13Q1v4
How the BBC caved to Israeli pressure. Censored! Gaza how to survive a war zone
a more pertinent question would be ‘what steps did the Israeli government take
to ensure that it didn't slaughter thousands of children?’ But that would have been too much for these hypocrites. I asked in another post whether
‘any of the 45 genocide supporters protested at
Israel's bombing of the tent encampment outside Al Aqsa hospital last October
when 19 year old Sha'aban al-Dalou was literally burnt alive. Or was Hamas also
based in the tents as well as every hospital, school, river and university?
I thought it might be useful to write to the organ grinder, BBC
Director-General Timothy Davie rather than his monkeys.
Dear Timothy
Davie,
I won’t call you Tim
because familiarity breeds contempt and I already have more than enough
contempt for you.
You withdrew the film Gaza: How To Survive A War Zone’because
Abdullah Al-Yazouri, a 13 year old boy, had a father who had served as Gaza’s
Deputy Agriculture Minister, a perfectly normal government job unrelated to
‘terrorism’.
One wonders whether you would have pulled
an interview with an Israeli child because his parent(s) had served in the IDF,
a terrorist army that doesn’t think twice about shooting unarmed
pregnant Palestinian women or firing missiles at hospitals?
What
relevance did Abdullah’s family have to his testimony? Is he not allowed to
testify in his own right. As Nicola Grove wrote:
weaponising family
associations to discredit a child’s testimony is both unethical and dangerous.
The BBC’s duty of care to Abdullah, and all minors in conflict zones, must
prioritise their safety, privacy, and dignity. Publishing unverified claims
about his family risks exposing him to harassment or harm, in direct violation
of the BBC’s International Safeguarding Policy.
Was
Surviving October 7th: We Will Dance Again which the BBC ran, subject to the same level
of scrutiny as this film? Why is it that the victims and not the perpetrators
of genocide are subject to this level of scrutiny? This is colonial racism at
its worst.
It
is noticeable that the 45 Zionists who wrote to you had nothing to say about its content yet that was clearly what they
objected to. The participation of Abdullah was their pretext for objecting to
the film.
Your Background
Since
Abdullah’s background is deemed relevant perhaps we should look into your background.
You had all the qualifications necessary for the job of Director-General when
you were appointed to the job in September
2020. None of them had anything to do with
the journalism though. You more than made up for this in terms of your connections
with the British Establishment.
Politically
you stood twice as a councillor for the Tory Party in the Hammersmith
and Fulham Council elections in 1993 and 1994, losing both times. You were also deputy
chair of Hammersmith and FulhamConservative Association. The Tory Party is fiercely
pro-Zionist. 80% of its MPs
are members of Conservative Friends of Israel. It is clear where your
sympathies lie.
Your
media experience was enhanced when you joined Procter
& Gamble
as a trainee in 1991 and then in 1993 you joined PepsiCo, becoming vice-president of
marketing and finance.
Clearly
this stood you in good stead when you joined the BBC in 2005. In September 2020
you became the BBC’s Director-General. You immediately set
out new guidelines for BBC staff, stating that they should avoid expressing their personal
views on current issues of political controversy (which you called 'virtue
signalling').
The
only exceptions that were made were for people like John Ware, of Panorama’s Docufiction ‘Is Labour Anti-Semitic’ and a member of the consortium that took over the bankrupt anti-Palestinian Jewish Chronicle. Being a Zionist has
always been an exception to the rules.
Is Labour Anti-Semitic has since been comprehensively discredited.
None of its ‘Jewish victims’ were revealed as close friends and officers of the
Jewish Labour Movement. Labour Witchhunter Ben
Westerman, who alleged he was asked about his Jewish origins was shown to be a liar as a tape-recording produced
by his 2 Jewish victims revealed.
In
2023 Gary Lineker was suspendedfrom presenting Match of the Day because he had tweeted that Suella Braverman’s
anti-refugee policy and its rhetoric had a distinct Third Reich flavour about
it. Once again you demonstrated your loyalty to the party of which you were an
officer.
Gary’s fellow presenters
Ian Wright and Alan Shearer though pulled out of the show
in solidarity with him. Other BBC sport presenters including
Jermaine Jenas and Alex Scott refused to appear on air in protest over
Lineker's suspension. Solidarity is not a word that Tories like you would ever
understand.
There is no huge influx. We take far fewer refugees than other major European countries. This is just an immeasurably cruel policy directed at the most vulnerable people in language that is not dissimilar to that used by Germany in the 30s, and I’m out of order?
For you life is about attacking the downtrodden or stabbing
people in the back. That is why, when the Zionists attacked Gaza: How To Survive A War Zone’you caved in willingly.
The BBC has always been hostile to the victims
of colonialism. When there was a Boycott of Sporting links with South Africa
the BBC defied it. John Arlott refused to be your commentator on the 1970
cricket tour because, in his words,
a successful tour would offer comfort and confirmation to a completely evil
regime
Genocide
and the BBC’s Consistent Bias on Palestine
The
BBC frowns on using the term ‘Genocide’ even though the International Court of
Justice has said it is plausible. You’re happy though to quote the term when
it’s Ukraine.
When it comes to Gaza, where it was estimated in July
2024 that 186,000 Palestinians had died the BBC refuses to use the term. Today
the figure may be nearing ½ million. What is plain to millions the BBC refuses
to see even though Israeli leaders boast of their genocidal intent. For example:
Nissim Vaturi, Deputy Speaker of the Knesset called
for Israel to “wipe Gaza off the face of
the earth,” adding: “Gaza must be
burned. There are no innocents there’. Minister of Finance, Smotrich, complained that
though it would be moral to starve 2 million Palestinians to death the world
won’t allow it. Today Israel is blocking all aid to Gaza.
You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible. And
we do remember.
Israel's 'Friendship Song'
An exterminationist mood has taken hold in Israel, illustrated in
a group of sweet Israeli school children singing the 'Friendship Song' broadcast on Israel's Kan public broadcasting station, about 'annihilating everyone' in Gaza. There is the oldest and most
popular podcast in Israel, 2 Nice Jewish Boys discussing erasing Gaza
with one press of a button or the ubiquitous car stickers calling to 'finish them’. The
BBC never reports the racism that is part of the DNA of a ‘Jewish’ state. There
is a complete avoidance, in terms of analysis, of the violent anti-Arab racism in
Israel that long predated October 7 such as the annual 'Death to the Arabs' pogrom
in Jerusalem each May.
The
BBC has become a genocide denier despite Lord Sumption becoming the fifth
former Supreme Court judge to statethat Israel is likely committing genocide in Gaza. As always the BBC prefers
the Zionist narrative to that of its victims.
In Srebenica
in 1994 8,000 Muslim boys and men were murdered. The BBC wrote how
even now, after the recovery of
thousands of victims and war-crimes trials for a number of those responsible,
some still deny that the genocide took place.
What
explanation can there be for this difference in attitude other than that in Srebenica the West opposed
the genocidaires whereas in Gaza they support them?
The film was narrated by 13 year old Adbullah who
combined a command over English with a relaxed and witty manner. He was an
immediate hit. The film was not complimentary to Hamas but the real objection
to it was that it revealed, for the first time, what life was like for ordinary
civilians in Gaza under Israel’s murderous attacks.
When a letter arrived from
45 Zionists you faced a choice. You could either defend the child victims of
war and allow them to tell their story or support the racists. For you it was
no contest.
You
preferred the former because Jews are the moral alibi that West uses to justify
its complicity in Israel’s war crimes. A letter from 700 Jews was ignored because anti-racist Jews are
invisible to the BBC. There was also a letter from 500 media personalities. Of course the Zionist ones were the ones that counted!
The letter
from the racist Jews and Zionists asked:
Was
it known to the BBC that the narrator and principal contributor of the
documentary, Abdullah Al-Yazouri, is the son
of a senior leader of the proscribed terrorist group, Hamas?
It contained 2 lies. Hamas is not a
terrorist but a resistance group. Secondly there is no evidence that Abdullah’s
father is even in Hamas let alone that he is a ‘senior leader’. But even if he is
so what? Was your father Timothy a
monster like his son? They then ask?
If
the BBC was aware that Abdullah Al-Yazouri was the son of a terrorist leader,
why was this not disclosed to audiences during the programme?
If
the BBC was not aware that Abdullah Al-Yazouri is the son of a terrorist
leader, what diligence checks were undertaken and why did they fail?
Your Zionist friends asked ‘what
training was given ... on the BBC International Safeguarding Policy’.Of what relevance was this ?
As if not aware of the contradictions these vile racists asked whether Abdullah’s parents ‘sign(ed) a release form
authorising his participation in the documentary?’ Presumably his Hamas
parents were fit to sign a release form!
These feral trollops also asked about ‘the welfare of the children involved to the International Safeguarding
Point of Contact?’ They support killing kids whilst being concerned for
their welfare?
The lead signatory was Danny Cohen, former Controller of the BBC. It says
everything about the BBC that this hideous creature could be your controller.
His amorality outdoes even yours.
The BBC, it seems, made sure viewers got a live-stream today of Israel's defence against genocide in Gaza but deprived viewers yesterday of South Africa's detailed case for accusing Israel of genocide.
The pulling of ‘Gaza: How To
Survive A War Zone’ is but one of the examples of how, when the BBC is
given a choice, it supports the genocidaires. When South Africa presented its
case at the ICJ that Israel was committing genocide the BBC refused to show the
presentation of South Africa’s case live. But it did broadcast Israel’s defence
of the indefensible live.
AlthoughDavid Jordan, the Director of
Editorial Policy and Standards accepted that the BBC made a mistake when he told MPs on Westminster's
Media Committee that the news team may have “done it differently” if they were covering the ICJ case again, you
repeatedly declined to say whether (you)… thought it had been fair for
the corporation to broadcast the Israeli defence in full while South Africa’s
counter-arguments were only shown in part.
This
in itself shows Timothy that you are a Zionist partisan.
At one point during the discussion [about Palestinian
prisoners] the correspondent in Jerusalem mistakenly referred to them as
‘hostages’. We apologise for the error.
Perhaps
you might explain why you have offered an apology? Israel is illegally occupying the Palestinian
territories and one-third of the 10,000 captives it is holding have not even
had a trial in a military court. Hundreds of them are children. Why they are
not hostages?
Israel’s military courts have a conviction rate
of 99.74%. Even Stalin’s Russia had a higher acquittal rate. They are ‘trials’
where evidence against the accused is not disclosed to the accused. Viewers
would assume that ‘prisoners’ refers to people convicted by due process not a
military kangaroo court which doesn’t even translate its proceedings to the
defendant.
You also said that the decision to censor the film
had “nothing to do with one side or the
other” in the Israel-Gaza conflict adding that the corporation did not “bow
to lobbies”. You are not even a good liar. Who else did you bow to if not 45 doxxing Zionists?
Abdullah says he’s been targeted & the BBC hasn’t reached out. As a former @BBCNews journalist I can tell you that child safeguarding is a key part of our training. To see none of it applied here is shocking & speaks to the dehumanisation of Palestinian children over months. https://t.co/Sokm13Q1v4
When
Abdullah says that you are
responsible for his life then that is equally true of the 45 monsters who
started the ball rolling. If Israel targets Abdullah, as it targeted Rifat
al-Areer and so many others you will be responsible for his murder as surely as if you
held the gun.
Why did the BBC censor this documentary on Gaza? with Asa Winstanley
Former BBC
Journalists Who Accuse You of bias
Former
BBCjournalist Karishma Patel has called
the BBC out for refusing
to reach “reasonable, evidence-based
conclusions” over Israel’sgenocide
in Gaza. She suggested that you have become “a vehicle in informational warfare”. That’s why she resigned
in 2024.
The BBC‘s decision
to pull the film, Patel said, was “a
distraction from a much bigger problem my old employer has with impartiality”.
Patel joined over a
thousand UK-based media professionals in condemning
the BBC’s decision which they described as “racist” and “dehumanising”. Patel added:
Impartiality has failed if its key method is to constantly balance
“both sides” of a story as equally true. A news outlet that refuses to come to
conclusions becomes a vehicle in informational warfare
She also asserted
that:
We have passed the point at which Israel’s war crimes and crimes
against humanity are debatable. There’s more than enough evidence – from Palestinians
on the ground, aid organisations; legal bodies – to come to coverage-shaping
conclusions around what Israel has done.
Comparing
the situation to the BBC‘s
2018 decision to finally issue editorial guidance that “Climate change IS happening”, she asked:
When will the BBC conclude that Israel IS violating international law,
and shape its coverage around that truth?
There’s no ‘balance’ between genocidal war criminals and their victims
By hiding or omitting key context and
toeing the line linguistically,
the BBC
has consistently failed to inform the public properly about Israel’s crimes in
Gaza and the British government’s support for them.
It
is noticeable that there was no ‘due diligence’ done of the BBC’s Zionist film We Will Dance Again. Were there any illegal settlers, soldiers or children in it? Your hypocrisy
stands out Timothy.
The Opinion of the new President of the ICJ, Judge Issawa on Israeli Apartheid
a media environment where the victims of genocide,
ethnic cleansing and apartheid are subjected constantly to the most intense
scrutiny, while their tormentors and those who support them are all too often
allowed a free pass is a distorted and frankly racist one.
When
BBC journalists depart from you or speak anonymously they have little good to
say of your Middle East coverage. I
refer to Drop Site News’The BBC's Civil War Over Gaza and the Cradle’sBBC staffers reveal editor's 'entire job' to whitewash
Israeli war crimes. One former
BBC journalist said of the infamous Raffi Berg, BBC News’ Zionist Gatekeeper: "This guy's entire job is to water down
everything that's too critical of Israel"
"How
much power he has is wild," said another journalist.
Another
journalist spoke of a broader BBC culture of "systematic Israeli propaganda."
Yet another journalist spoke of
an extreme fear at the BBC, that if you ever wanted to
do anything about Israel or Palestine, editors would say: 'If you want to pitch something, you have to go through Raffi and get
his signoff’
One particularly appalling example of Berg’s handiwork
on behalf of Israel was the story of how Muhammed Bhar, a
24-year-old Palestinian man with Down’s syndrome and autism was left to die
after being bitten by an Israeli army dog.
Muhammed lived in Gaza with his family. On July 3, the Israeli military raided Bhar’s home. The family begged for
mercy for their disabled son, but the unit’s dog savaged him. He begged the dog
to stop, using the only language he could access in that moment: “Khalas ya
habibi” (“that’s enough, my dear”). The soldiers then put the injured man in a
separate room, locked the door, and forced the family to leave at gunpoint. A
week later, the family returned home to find Bhar’s decomposing body.
Bhar’s story was originally documented by Middle East Eye on
July 12, with the headline: “Gaza: Palestinian with Down syndrome ‘left to die’
by Israeli soldiers after combat dog attack.”The Independentheadline was “Gaza
man with Down’s syndrome mauled by Israeli attack dog and left to die, family
says.” The BBC headline was: “The lonely death of Gaza man with Down’s
syndrome.”
The headline failed to reflect the terrible circumstances of Bhar’s death and omitted who did what to whom.
In the original version of the story, it took 500 words to learn that an
Israeli army dog had attacked Bhar, and a further 339 to discover how he had
died.
Berg was the one to hit 'publish' on the story and it was he who decided
that the headline should remove any Israeli responsibility for the murder.The article about Bhar sparked an outpouring of fury
both internally at the BBC and on social media. In a post liked by 14,000
users,Husam Zomlot, Palestine’s ambassador to the UK, tweeted
“I don’t think there could be a worst murder in
human history, still @BBCWorld headlines this as ‘death of a
Gaza man’ to abdicate Israel of responsibility. Abhorrent!”
Palestinian-American
writer Tariq Kenney-Shawa mocked the absurdity of the framing. “A ‘lonely death,’ as if he died after a long
battle with cancer or was perhaps swept away by the sea or lost under the
rubble of an earthquake,” he tweeted.
Eventually, the BBC decided to rewrite the story. It changed the headline
to “Gaza man with Down’s syndrome
attacked by IDF dog and left to die, mother tells BBC.” It also inserted
two new paragraphs informing readers that the Israeli military had admitted
that a Palestinian man with Down’s syndrome who was
attacked by an army dog in Gaza was left on his own by soldiers, after his
family had been ordered to leave
and that he was “found
dead by his family a week later.” Even with the new phrasing, the story
implied that the dog had attacked Bhar of its own volition, not that it was
under the control of IDF personnel.
Raffi Berg is a faithful servant of the Israeli state,
an open Zionist and a fan of Netanyahu. He praised Israel’s murderous Mossad in his book Red Sea Spies. Perhaps Timothy you can point
me to a Palestinian supporter in an equally powerful position in the BBC?
When
Amnesty International accusedIsrael of committing genocide in Gaza, what headline did Berg chose? "Israel rejects 'fabricated' claims of genocide." He also failed
to post the story for 12 hours.
Journalists interviewed by Drop Site also
noted that Amnesty’s report was not covered on the BBC's flagship news
programs—BBC 's News At 1, News At Six, or News At Ten or BBC Two's Newsnight.
The
BBC runs with Israel’s atrocity propaganda over October 7 and the lie that
Hamas killed 1200 Israelis without mentioning that 400 of them were military
and that Israel almost certainly killed a majority, of its own citizens. The Hannibal Doctrine states that it’s
better to kill your own soldiers than allow them to be captured and exchanged
for hostages, on the BBC website.
Your
Australian counterpart has no such difficulty. What’s your problem? I searched on the BBC website and
there is no mention of the Hannibal Directive
bar onereference to a 2015 report.
The Hannibal Doctrine has been regularly
discussed by Israeli media. It is as if Raffi Berg is getting a second salary
from Netanyahu. Perhaps he is.
As
Jonathan Cook, a former Guardian journalist wrote,
the HD is now being applied to Israel’s hostages in Gaza. It is clear that
Netanyahu prefers to kill them through Israeli bombing than stop the war. Here
is some of the evidence that the BBC won’t publish or broadcast.
In November
2023, Israeli police confirmed
that IDF helicopters had killed large numbers of Israelis at the Nova music
festival. Israeli tank drivers were filmed discussing
the orders they had been given to fire at Israeli homes with their owners
inside them.
Eye-witnesses described
how tanks had fired into kibbutz homes containing Israeli families with
children, killing many – including a
young girl Israel then used as a ‘poster child’ for claims that the
victims were brutally killed by Palestinians.
A reserve colonel flying helicopters told Ha’aretz that Israeli deaths on the day
were the result of a ‘mass Hannibal’. Mark Regev inadvertently
admitted the same when he revealed that around 200 burned ‘Israeli’
bodies were in fact Palestinians burned beyond initial recognition at the same
time as the Israeli casualties.
Soon
afterward Israel’s military gave away the truth when it toldYediot Ahronoth that the reason
it was refusing to have a formal investigation into the ‘friendly fire’
killings was because the number killed were ‘immense
and complex’:
Its
widespread use on 7 October – on average every twenty
minutes or so from the early morning hours until late into the evening – has been clear for around 15 months, freely discussed by
Israeli media, including by Israel’s military, but UK and US politicians and the
BBC continues to ignore it because it does not fit the Establishment’s narrative which is to excuse Israel’s genocide.
Yoav Gallant admits the use of '#Hannibaldirective' "I think tactically in some places it was, in other places it was not, and that is a problem," Former Israeli Defense Minister told Channel 12. 💢The Hannibal Directive allows the killing of Israeli soldiers and the shelling of… pic.twitter.com/4zaFyw6dcC
On February 7, former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant confirmed earlier
reports regarding the use of the Hannibal Doctrine but unlike the Times of Israelthe BBC refuses to cover it. Gallant
was asked by Israel’s
Channel 12 whether the order was given to implement the policy on that day and
he said:
“I
think tactically in some places it was, in other places it was not, and that is
a problem,”
As
early as December 2023, former Israeli Labor party leader Shelly Yachimovich
called for an investigation into the Israeli army’s implementation of the
‘Hannibal Directive’ in towns surrounding the Gaza Strip on October 7. Al
Jazeera Arabic website reported.
“There is a violent
campaign to prevent any investigation/talk about the event from hell in which
Brigadier General Hiram ordered a tank to fire and storm the house in Bari,
knowingly killing 12 hostages, including children. Hannibal would be rolling
over in his grave,” Yachimovich posted on X.
“The
reasoning? Hiram is a “hero of Israel.” The heroes of Israel protect the
children of Israel, they don’t kill them. Who am I to judge? Who is he to
kill?” she added.
In
January 2024, the Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronoth reported that the Israeli military implemented the Hannibal Directive, killing its own
soldiers and civilians in order to prevent Hamas from taking them as captives.
An
Al Jazeera investigation in March last year also found “evidence that this
protocol was used on Israeli civilians” on October 7.
In
July 2024, Haaretzrevealed that the Israeli army ordered the activation of the Hannibal Directive on
October 7. An investigation confirmed that the Israeli army issued orders to ensure no vehicle was allowed
to return to Gaza during the attack, despite the risk to the residents of the
Gaza envelope.
This
was not the first order given by the division with the intent of foiling
kidnapping even at the expense of the lives of the kidnapped, a procedure known
in the army as the ‘Hannibal procedure’
Israel’s
use of the HD is highly relevant to both what happened on October 7 and Israel’s’s
subsequent genocide yet the BBC refuses to mention it in the interests of
maintaining the narrative fiction that Israel’s is acting in self defence. This
makes you Timothy an accessory to genocide.
I realise Timothy that you are facing an unscrupulous Culture
Minister Lisa Nandy who has swiveled from a defender of Palestinian
children’s rights to a supporter of genociding
them. However a person in your position should have the backbone to confront
her with her dishonesty instead of compounding it. Just remind her of when she
said that ‘When
you threaten children’s rights anywhere, you threaten children’s rights
everywhere.’
In sum, for the last quarter of a century the
BBC has maintained a consistent and persistent bias against the Palestinians,
what has been called a 'bias against understanding.' The Balen Report which the BBC commissioned
under pressure from pro-Israeli groups who alleged a bias against Israel and
which it then kept secret at the cost of hundreds of thousands of pounds (our
money lest you forget), found that there had been no bias, quite the contrary.
In an article in Electronic Intifada former BBC correspondent Tim
Llewellyn quoted from
the summary about the campaign of the Zionist lobby to create the perception of
BBC bias against Israel:
”I am
conscious that this report has been compiled under a weight of criticism from
pro-Israelis and is, in some ways, shaped by it: not because their criticisms
are necessarily any more accurate than those from pro-Palestinians, but
because they
[pro-Israelis] are responsible for the climate of perception which surrounds
the BBC’s coverage.” [my italics].
An article two
months after October 7 by Greg Philo and Mike Berry of Glasgow University's
Media Unit concluded that:
In our earlier
studies... we also found that, in the absence of
context and history, BBC journalists would report the Palestinian “side” in
terms of the suffering caused by the fighting. But the Palestinian perspective
in terms of the reasons for the conflict was absent. The Israeli rationale, on
the other hand, was often foregrounded in news reports.
When we tested
the possible effects of this on audience members – by asking why participants
in our audience groups thought the two sides were fighting and how the conflict
could be resolved – we found these patterns in reporting appeared to lead some
to conclude that it was “very sad” for the Palestinians but that the Israelis
were “retaliating” and the situation could be resolved if the attacks on Israel
stopped.
Another key
finding from these studies was that Israeli casualties were given
proportionally more coverage than Palestinian ones, and the language used to
describe Israeli deaths was markedly different. Words such as “atrocity”,
“murder”, “lynch-mob” and “barbarically killed” were used by journalists to
describe the deaths of Israeli soldiers, but not those of Palestinians.
....
We found that
“murder”, “murderous”, “mass murder”, “brutal murder” and “merciless murder”
were used a total of 52 times by journalists to refer to Israelis’ deaths but
never in relation to Palestinian deaths. The same pattern could been seen in
relation to “massacre”, “brutal massacre” and “horrific massacre” (35 times for
Israeli deaths, not once for Palestinian deaths); “atrocity”, “horrific
atrocity” and “appalling atrocity” (22 times for Israeli deaths, once for
Palestinian deaths); and “slaughter” (five times for Israeli deaths, not once
for Palestinian deaths).
But the issue
goes beyond these differences. The Palestinian perspective is effectively
absent from the coverage, in how they understand the reasons for the conflict
and the nature of the occupation under which they are living.
One senior BBC correspondent commented to us in 2002 that what was missing was the
view that the Palestinians saw themselves as engaged in a decades-long struggle
of national liberation “in which a population is trying to throw off an
occupying force”.... (it) has nothing like the status given to the Israeli
perspective which stresses that Israel is subject to terrorist attacks
motivated by Islamic extremism and antisemitism.
On
a WhatsApp group, seeing a video of you giving evidence to a Parliamentary Committee,
you were compared to an ‘oleaginous toad’.
I had to correct them. Toads have done nothing that is at all comparable to
your vile behavior in allowing the BBC to become the voice of Israel’s Gaza
Genocide.
should be Renamed ‘Go Fraud Me’ – BOYCOTT This RACIST $ Billion Corporation
Since 2019 the Brighton Trust has funded the Al Tafawk
Children’s Centre in Jenin, a city at the heart of Israel’s attempt to
ethnically cleanse the West Bank. In April 2020 I launched a Crowdfunder on Go
Fund Me.
In
the 5 years since the Crowdfunder has been running we have raised over £65,000,
of which GFM have taken about £2,000.
During that time the Children’s Centre has been repeatedly attacked by
the Israeli army because we know that Hamas loves to hide in children’s
centres, hospitals and even reservoirs!
This massive destruction of Jenin Refugee Camp and the Al Tafawk Centre
is all the work of Israel's finest
The
first major attack on Al Tafawk was in July 2021 when they destroyed much of
the interior.I wrote about it in an article, Why did
Israel raid and wreck a children’s centre in Jenin?Again in November 2023 they wrecked much of the interior and for good
measure smashed large gaping holes in the exterior of the centre. See my articlePalestinian children in the West Bank are
also under attack.
Since November 2023 there
have been constant attacks on the Centre and on the families and children who
use the Centre. Jenin has become a city under siege.
Over a year ago Israel began
its series of prolonged raids destroying the Western Union offices. We then had great difficulty sending money,
twice relying on couriers, which was why our donations were reduced from £20K
in 2023 to £14.5K in 2024. We simply could not send the money.
However with the aid of our donors and also the The British Shalom-Salaam
Trust we were able to keep the Centre afloat despite the toll it was
taking on the head teacher, Mona’s health. We also began to utilise the Palestine
Bank.
Combined Destruction of Camp and Centre
from Inside
The
latest attacks on Jenin have not only destroyed much of Jenin Refugee Centre
but the Centre itself. When it was finally possible for people to investigate
it became clear that the Israeli army had all but destroyed the fabric of the
building.
It
is testament to the hypocrisy of the West, which never fails to condemn Hamas
if it so much as fires a peashooter at Israel, that there has been utter
silence about the wanton violence of the Israeli army in attacking and
destroying a children’s centre as well as most of the refugee camp itself. Violence
against unarmed civilians is perfectly acceptable to genocide supporters such
as Slimy Starmer, Lamentable Lammy and the arch-hypocrite herself, Lisa Nandy
who once proclaimed on a PSC
platform that ‘When
you threaten children’s rights anywhere, you threaten children’s rights
everywhere’.
This Vile Cow, who is now Culture Secretary, decided to haul the BBC over the coals
for having made the film Gaza: How to
Survive a Warzone. So much for the rights of children.
For nearly 5 years our Crowdfunder ran without a
hitch. People contributed towards it and we passed on the money to the
Centre. Then, out of the blue, we got an
email from GFM asking us a series of questions and informing us that they had
temporarily placed your fundraiser under review as
we gather more information on your plan to help those abroad... transfers from your
fundraiser are paused, your fundraiser remains visible to the public and can
continue to receive new donations’.
In other words although people could donate to the
Crowdfunder we would not receive those donations. The email began with that
sugary hypocrisy that US Corporations are well known for. The ability to smile
and lie at the same time.
Thank you
for your efforts to help those affected by the conflict in the Middle East. Due
to recent developments within the region, we’re carefully reviewing fundraisers
related to this conflict. This is an important step to help ensure fundraisers
are in compliance with all applicable laws and strictly enforced policies from
our payment partners and our Terms of Service.
They referred to the ‘conflict in the Middle East’ as though it was a war between two
equally matched opponents rather than an occupation and asymmetric warfare.
They asked us a series of questions but it became increasingly clear that they
were not interested in our answers. They had their own agenda which was to
terminate us.
Sure
enough the next day there arrived a fresh set of questions. What struck me was
that they ignored my initial response. It was clear that both sets of questions
had been written in advance. One of the questions asked us to
confirm the full name of the person(s) who manages
or controls the organization. If any individuals have a 25% stake or greater in
the organization, please also provide their full legal name.
Having already provided the name
of this person it was clear that whatever I wrote the Crowdfunder had a limited
shelf-life. One of the questions sought an
Understanding of the
organization's beneficial ownership structure. Please
confirm the full name of the person(s) who manages or controls the
organization. If any individuals have a 25% stake or greater in the
organization, please also provide their full legal name.
It was as if we were dealing with a
piece of real estate in the Mid-West rather than a voluntary organisation, so I
fired off an angry and derisory letter.
Fortunately I had long feared that
this was coming so I immediately got to work and set up a newCrowdfunder with Chuffed and used our continued access
to the GFM Crowdfunder to warn all previous donors of what was happening and
asking them not to send anything to GFM but to donate to the new Crowdfunder.
I also asked all previous donors to
send me their email as GFM doesn’t supply those who run a Crowdfunder with the
emails of donors (unlike Chuffed).
The response was almost instant and it was clear that the new Crowdfunder had
taken off. Other donors contributed
funds directly to the Brighton Trust. However if I had been taken in by GFM’s
lies and dissimulation then we would have had a disaster on our hands.
I copy below all the correspondence
so you can see for yourself. GFM has a facility where you can thank all the
donors repeatedly so I took advantage of that as well as posting numerous
updates which automatically went to existing donors.
Meanwhile Mona and the children had
been forced out of Jenin Refugee Camp. They are now taking refuge on a college
campus but we are in touch with them and regularly sending them money to
survive as most people now have no work owing to Israel having effectively destroyed
the camp.
As Israel proceeds apace
with its project of ethnic cleansing it’s important that people in the West
assume responsibility for the maintenance of a population without work and in
particular its children. By contributing to the fundraiser you will also get
regular updates about what is happening to the Al Tafawk Centre and its
children.
GFM is a billion dollar corporation
that feeds off the misery of the American people. It makes its money in large
part through crowdfunders which aim to raise money to fund medical operations
that in this country are still free on the NHS.
Of course if Starmer and Streeting
and all the other muppets in ‘Labour’ have their way then we will also be ‘enjoying’
the benefits of an American style health service where the insurance company decides
whether you live or die and whether it will choose to honour the payments you
have made to it by paying for treatment.
This is the ‘freedom of choice’ that
neo-liberalism grants to people without means. It was quite a shock to the US Corporations
when Brian Thompson, CEO of the largest health company, was assassinated by
someone aggrieved at how he or his relatives had been treated by one of the
largest companies in the world. Social media was full of ‘gloating’ at
those who had suffered because of the death of this obnoxious man in charge of
this toxic corporation.
Tens of thousands of people have expressed support on
social media for the killing of UnitedHealthcare’s CEO, or sympathized with it,
in what at least one researcher is calling a worrying sign of radicalization
among segments of the U.S. population.
GFM is a parasite that lives off this ocean of misery which they
are doing their best to spread to Palestine.
Please support our fundraiser and
ensure that the Al Tafawk Children’s Centre is not allowed to die.
Tony Greenstein
Compliance Team (GoFundMe) Fri
28 Feb, 11:29
Dear Go Fund Me,
In your email informing
me that you are taking down a Crowdfunder aimed at supporting the Al Tafawk Children’s
Centre in Jenin, Palestine you ended by saying ‘Thank you for your
understanding.’
Yes
I understand you in the same way that I ‘understand’ the motives of those who carried
out the Nazi holocaust or the Genocide in Rwanda. Please believe me when I say
that I have utter contempt for you and your parasitic business that feeds off
the poorest in society. But perhaps I should explain, as dumb imperialist Yanks
aren’t the brightest of creatures.
I have been running a
Crowdfunder with you for 5 years, in which time I have raised over £60,000 for the
Al Tafawk Centre which the Israeli army has now wrecked, for at least the third
time, as part of the United States and Israel’s contribution to civilisation.
The Israeli army, which
the United States fucking funds and equips, has destroyed or damaged a children’s
centre for no other reason that the Zionists hate Palestinian children. In the
words of one Israeli soldier, as he was ripping up a children’s book, ‘these children will only grow up to be terrorists.They don’t need to learn to read’.
You can read about the
previous occasions that Israel has destroyed the Centre here and here.
When you first emailed me
on 5 January asking questions and thanking us ‘for your efforts to help those affected by the conflict in the Middle
East.’I smelt a rat. A big Yankee
rat. You wrote ‘Due to recent
developments within the region, we’re carefully reviewing fundraisers related
to this conflict.’ In other words you were seeking to undermine support for
the Palestinians as they face ethnic cleansing and genocide.
Fortunately I could smell
you a 100 miles away. You reference to a ‘conflict’
was a give away. No doubt the Nazi holocaust was also a ‘conflict’ although
only imperialist arseholes would so describe it.
Despite answering your
questions I took immediate steps to set up another Crowdfunder in order that
you weren’t able to help Trump in his endeavours.
When you then sent a
second questionnaire a day later, having not bothered to read our first answers.
It asked who was the beneficial owner of the Al Tafawk Centre. I realise that
American Scum like you lack any imagination but Jenin is not some left behind
mid-Western town. By then I knew that your intentions were malign.
It is therefore no
surprise that on 28 February you wrote informing me that you were closing the
Crowdfunder down. By that time I was no longer using it anyway but thanks for
letting me know of your ill intentions.
What surprised me though
is how bad a liar you are Toni. Don’t they give you any training?Still with a madman like Trump as yourPresident who needs training? We also have a
bad liar in the form of Sir Kid Starver so you would think they’d get on well
together.
You told me that after 5
years you only just discovered we were violating your T&Cs.Apparently we fall under Term 8.6 because our
‘activities’– feeding hungry
children and maintaining a children’s centre as US bombs fall around it, is
prohibited because the area is subject to US sanctions.
In fact the West Bank is
not subject to US sanctions, unlike so many countries in the world today.But if it was. So fucking what?It is against US law it seems.
This is the country that respects no law, which has passed ‘The Invasion of Hague Act’ such is your contempt for
International Law.
Underneath your charitable
veneer there is a billion dollar corporation. Which
doesn’t stop you begging for a tip from individual donors as if you were a
charity.Go Fraud Me might be a better name.
But if you think Palestinians
suffering from US funded genocide should be sanctioned then it is clear that scum
like you should be boycotted. I have found an excellent Crowdfunder, not in the
fucking USA, which is immune to racist trash like you. In the USA you make your
money from people raising money to obtain medical treatment. That is the sick
society that the USA is today. Its no surprise that it’s led by a megalomaniac rapist
by the name of Trump.
I shall be contacting the
Boycott National Committee to have you added to the list of those to Boycott.
Tony Greenstein
Important Message From GoFundMe [Ticket #15658156]
Compliance
Team (GoFundMe)
Fri
28 Feb, 11:29
Dear
Tony,
We're sending you this message to tell you that, after further review, your
GoFundMe account was removed because it violates our Terms of Service, which
you can view here. Specifically, the content of your fundraiser falls under our
“Prohibited Fundraisers and Related User Content" section, Term 8.6;
“activities with, in, or involving countries, regions, governments, persons, or
entities that are subject to U.S. and other economic sanctions under applicable
law, unless such activities are expressly authorized by the appropriate
governmental authority and by our payment service providers;”
Our Terms of Service, along with strictly enforced policies from the payments
industry, prohibit GoFundMe from allowing you to continue raising money on our
platform.
The Time has Come to Make Our Demonstrations Effective not Symbolic –
We Should Mobilise at Bibi’s
Broadcasting Corporation and tell the Met that We Won’t Allow Jews to
be used as the Moral Alibi for Genocide
Brighton Railway Sit in and Demonstration Against Genocide in Gaza
In Brighton yesterday evening hundreds of us occupied
Brighton Railway Station and greeted commuters with our message – STOP THE BOMBING, STOP THE GENOCIDE IN GAZA.
I spoke as did others before we took to the streets for an impromptu
demonstration.
Starmer's double standards on war crimes
Our numbers swelled by the end to over 500 as we marched
down Queens Road before turning into Western Road and then streaming through
the Churchill Square shopping centre. School kids and shoppers who were there
greeted us rapturously. The only angry red-faced person was a Zionist Jeweller
closing his shop!
And then it was back to the Clocktower for a final rally.
Further events and a march are planned in Brighton.
UK police officer: You can protest for Israel, not
Palestine
The time has come to take the law into our own
hands. When our government continues to supply weapons to Israel and the Police
refuse to enforce the International
Criminal Court Act 2001 then
we have to do it for them. The Police don’t even bother to disguise their support
for Israel as the idiot Met Inspector in this video made clear.
Trump gave the
green-light to Israel to renew the genocide. However this time
around Netanyahu may find murdering Palestinian women and children more
difficult than before. The outrage of the world needs to descend on the Jewish
Nazis in Tel Aviv.
Francesca Albanese on the West’s Genocide Denial
The Arab masses need to force their Quisling regimes – from
Egypt to Jordan to Saudi Arabia to Iraq – to call a halt to the genocide by
calling a halt to the West’s oil.
Starmer refuses to describe genocide in Gaza as
genocide
Palestinian children are being slaughtered in Gaza in order
that Netanyahu can preserve his government coalition with openly neo-Nazi
Itamar Ben Gvir, the former Police Minister, rejoining
the coalition as Police-Security Minister.
It is incumbent on the Palestine solidarity movement to rise
to the challenge. Symbolic protests are not enough when war crimes are being
perpetrated by our leaders.. If laws need to be broken to prevent genocide then
that is justified whatever our judges and rulers may think. That was the lesson
of Nuremberg. The law against Genocide and the Genocide Convention
is the Supreme Law of our times. All other laws are secondary.
This time the world must make it clear to Netanyahu and his
Western enablers – Trump, Starmer, Lammy et al. that there is a price to pay
for supporting genocide. The timidity of PSC and Stop the War Coalition
nationally must end.
We must rally at the BBC, which is acting as the British arm
of the Voice of
Israel. It carried Netanyahu’s lies about how Hamas had broken the
ceasefire when everyone knows that it was Netanyahu himself who broke the
ceasefire and refused
to move into Phase 2 of the ceasefire for fear of bringing down his coalition.
Instead of allowing Hamas equal time the BBC then switched
to another Zionist, this time from Chatham
House, the British Establishments International Affairs think tank.
We should say out aloud that it isn’t Hamas but Netanyahu
and his western enablers who are the terrorists. Those who deliberately murder
children and their families are the ISIS terrorists of our time. It is no
accident that the ISIS-Al Qaeda HTS, which is formally proscribed by Britain,
has been given a free pass by the British and European governments with
favourable interviews with Blair’s eminent grise Alistair Campbell and Rory
Stewart.
Amazing interview - a real privilege to be back in Syria - stunning turn of events and the most incredible story with so much unknown for the future https://t.co/GfUmlt4o3m
Not only that but Establishment figures like former head of MI6, Sir John
Sawers, have openly praised HTS calling them‘a
liberation movement, not of a terrorist organisation.’
Sawyers said:
"It would be rather
ridiculous, actually, if we're unable to engage with the new leadership in
Syria because of a proscription dating back 12 years."
— Tony Greenstein tonygreenstein.com (@TonyGreenstein) March 19, 2025
This is a clear breach of s.12 of the Terrorism Act 2000
under which I and others like Sarah Wilkinson and Richard Medhurst are being
prosecuted. The situation today in Britain is that if you speak out in support
of a proscribed organisation slaughtering Christians and Alawites and others in
Syria that is fine. But if you support the Palestinian resistance against
genocide, including the elected Hamas government in Gaza, then you are
prosecuted.
In my view Netanyahu’s attack on Gaza is a sign of political
weakness not strength. We have it in our power to force an end to the Genocide
and an end to the arms shipments which enable the genocide. Of course the German
government, which is Israel’s second major arms supplier, will be reluctant to
cut off the arms supply since Genocide in Gaza makes the German state feel more
comfortable about all the other genocides, including the Holocaust, that they
have perpetrated.
Today there can be no excuse for timidity. The Zionists may
seem to be strong however they have lost all moral legitimacy. As I said
yesterday when speaking, although it may not appear to be the case, Zionism is
approaching its end game. The narrative of Jews fighting for a homeland in
Israel no longer washes. Israel is seen as Western imperialism’s attack dog.
Its main supporters are the very anti-Semites that Zionism claimed it needed a
state to get away from.
In recent days the far-Right Chief Rabbi of Britain, Ephraim
Mirvis, has been embarrassed
into withdrawing from a conference on anti-Semitism organised by
Israel’s fascist Diaspora Minister Amichai Chikli. Chikli, being a good
Zionist, decided that given he is holding a conference on anti-Semitism who
better to invite than anti-Semites!
Chikli has previously faced
criticism for his efforts to strengthen Israel’s ties with Europe’s far-right
parties, which had been boycotted due to their associations with antisemitism
and Nazism.
The conference guest list includes a who’s who of European
fascist and far-right parties. In
attendance will be Jordan Bardella, president of the French National Rally
party founded by antisemite and Holocaust denier Jean-Marie Le Pen; Marion
Marechal, a far-right French member of the European Parliament and Le Pen’s
granddaughter; Hermann Tertsch, a far-right Spanish member of the European
Parliament; Charlie Weimers of the far-right Sweden Democrats party; and Kinga
Gál, of Hungary’s Fidesz party.
In the fight against ‘anti-Semitism’ (for which read
anti-Zionism) the Israeli government and Zionist movement decided to invite
genuine anti-Semites. None of us should be surprised. When Hitler came to
power, the only political movement to welcome the rise of the Nazis was the
Zionist movement.
People forget that 90 years ago people like Berl Katznelson,
a founder of Mapai (Israeli Labor Party) and editor of their paper Davar and deput to David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s
first Prime Minister’s, spoke of the rise of Hitler as ‘an opportunity to build and flourish like none we have ever had or
ever will have.
Others like the national Zionist poet Hayim Nahman Bialik
argued that ‘Hitlerism has perhaps saved
German Jewry, which was being assimilated into annihilation.’
Starmer on Srebenica's inhuman genocide
Zionism today wants us to forget their friendly
relations with the Nazis. Anti-Semitism has always had a fatal
attraction for the Zionist movement, which most Jews saw as a form of Jewish
anti-Semitism.
Starmer on cutting off food
Meanwhile Starmer has gone out of his way to support the
Genocide. When Lammy said Israel had broken international human rights law by
its blockade of Gaza for 15 days, Starmer’s
spokesman contradicted him by saying that Israel ‘was at risk’ of breaking the law but in
any case the government cannot form an opinion as that is the job of the
courts.
This is what Starmer Supports – A Child is injured
then all are killed
Liar Starmer never had any problem calling out Russia’s
breaking of law and accusing it of war crimes in Ukraine. But when it comes to
the Palestinians Starmer has reiterated his former view that preventing the
entry of food, fuel, medicines etc. is perfectly alright. Starmer is beyond
despicable. A corrupt Zionist who was top of the list when it cames to freebies.
Even his wife’s knickers were donated! Starmer has unflinchingly backed up
Trump on Israel.
The
Palestine solidarity movement in Britain must redouble its efforts to stop
Starmer, Lammy and all the other war criminals.
The BBC Response to My
Complaint of Bias & Genocide Denial was that it was ‘Abusive in Nature’& ‘Goes against our values’
Under Fire: Israel's War On Medics
A week
ago I made a Complaint to the BBC about their decision to withdraw Gaza – How To Survive a Warzonefrom BBC iPlayer.
I also made some observations about their Zionist gatekeeper Raffi Berg and
their ex-soap powder cum Pepsi salesman Tim Davie.
A few days ago I was sent an M.Phil dissertation on the BBC’s
record during the first 6 years of the Nazi period. It doesn’t make pretty
reading. Who would have thought that the BBC, which today appeases the Zionists
on the grounds of ‘anti-Semitism’, was so sympathetic to the concerns of the
Hitler regime?
When anti-Semitism was a genuine problem rather than a pretext
for defending genocide, the BBC bent over backwards to placate the Nazi regime.
It ignored their anti-Semitism. Indeed it justified it, branding Germany’s Jews
a political threat rather than a religious group, which was what the Nazis were
saying.
So when the BBC and the British Establishment parade their
‘anti-Semitism’ credentials today just bear in mind that when anti-Semitism was
alive and kicking the BBC had no problem with it.
According to the BBC my complaint went against their ‘values’ and was abusive. Not only that
but the ‘tone and language’ was ‘offensive’. Who would have guessed what
snowflakes the BBC are.
This is
my response.
BBC Complaints - Case
number CAS-8047026-N0S3Z9
Dear BBC,
It seems
that you have lost your judgement in the wake of the PR disaster that is Gaza – How To Survive a Warzone. Accusations of enabling genocide
have touched a raw nerve. I only hope that you can see and smell the blood of the
thousands of Palestinian children who your propaganda has helped to kill.
In your
response (14 March) to my complaint about your persistent pro-Zionist bias you informed
me that it was ‘abusive in nature’ and
that ‘the tone and language used is
offensive’ and that‘the underlying
message goes against our values’.
Perhaps you
can explain for your viewers what your values are? Do they include balancing
Israeli lies with their actions such as bombing tent encampments and the
burning alive of Palestinian children?
Do your
values include support for the torturing to death of doctors such as Dr Adnan al Bursh?
A good example
of your bias is the headline‘Palestinian doctor
dies in Israeli prison’. What did he died of? COVID? Over eating?
How is it
that a healthy man of 50 when he was arrested died soon after? Why has his body
not been returned to his family? Has the BBC asked any of these questions? Or
is the death in custody of Palestinian prisoners taken for granted by the BBC?
We are told that ‘No details were
given on the cause of death, and the prison service said the incident was being
investigated.’ The same prison service that had previously denied it even Dr
Al-Bursh. Have you followed up on this so-called ‘investigation’?
The BBC refers
to ‘Gaza's Hamas-run health ministry’
as if to pour doubt on their claim that 496 health workers have been killed by
Israel. Do you preface Israeli claims with ‘the Likud-run government’. Hamas
happens to have been elected to govern Gaza.
Sky News however did investigate and they reported that:
"In mid-April 2024, Dr Adnan Al-Bursh arrived
at Section 23 in Ofer Prison. The prison guards brought Dr Adnan Al-Bursh into
the section in a deplorable state. He had clearly been assaulted with injuries
around his body. He was naked in the lower part of his body.
"The prison guards threw him in the middle of
the yard and left him there. Dr Adnan Al-Bursh was unable to stand up. One of
the prisoners helped him and accompanied him to one of the rooms.
He died soon
after. The death of Dr Bursh was a prima
facie case of murder yet the BBC displayed no interest in the circumstances
or causes of the death of a famous orthopaedic surgeon. Instead it quoted the
meaningless warblings of a Biden Administration spokesperson.
Did
Netanyahu’s fan and ex-CIA man at BBC News, Raffi Berg, deem that the story did
not fit with your image of Israel as ‘the
only democracy in the Middle East?’
Sky
News - The Murder of 5 year old Hind al Rajab and the Paramedics Sent to Rescue
Her
Let us take
another example of BBC Censorship by omission, the murder of 5 year old Hind al
Rajab, the little girl who was blown up by an Israeli tank along with the
ambulance crew that was sent to rescue her. Again Sky News covered her death in detail and again Raffi Berg decided to ignore it.
Informing the Public with Stickers
The reality
is that BBC News coverage is dictated by a Zionist zealot, Raffi Berg and you
call this ‘balance’. It is not surprising that you decided that my complaint ‘will not be circulated to our colleagues for
consideration or further reply.’ What point is there in disturbing their
consciences when it is clear that they have none?
It seems that
you took offence at my language. Who would have guessed that the BBC’s genocide
supporters have hurt feelings? I suspect that Eichmann and Hitler too felt hard
done by. However the death of thousands of Palestinian children does not seem
to move you.
Since
October 7 the Government has supported Genocide in Gaza whilst denying it was
taking place. Naturally the BBC has fallen in line. Instead of admitting you
are a state propaganda organisation you pretend that you are independent and your
coverage ‘balanced’.
I plead
guilty to being insensitive to your feelings. Faced with Israel’s starvation of
Gaza, its bombing of hospitals (because they are all Hamas), its torture camps
and rapes, it is not a difficult decision given your heroic efforts at news
management.
In nearly
all cases of genocide, the killers claim they are acting in self-defence. Ratko
Mladic, the Bosnian Serb commander based his case against genocide on the claim that
his forces were acting in self-defence. Mladic was convicted of genocide and war crimes by the
International Criminal Tribunal. Similarly with the Armenian genocide. The
Turkish Foreign Affairs Ministry claimed that
Ottoman policy of removing the Armenians from
militarily sensitive zones to the inner parts of the country must be seen as a
justified measure of self-defense not genocidal action
The BBC not
unnaturally has adopted the Zionist narrative.
You ignored a
petition from 700+ Jewish anti-racists and a thousand media commentators such as Gary Lineker. Who are they compared to the voice
of 45 Racist Jews?
Jews who are
anti-racist and anti-Zionist are invisible to the BBC because in your eyes we
aren’t Jewish. To be Jewish in the eyes of the Establishment you have to be a
supporter of Zionism. I do not recall a single BBC programme on Jewish
anti-Zionism or which has acknowledged that one-third of British Jews refuse to define themselves as
Zionists.
Jews in
Britain are the moral alibi for the crimes of imperialism. It is far better to
pretend to be defending a ‘Jewish’ state than admitting it’s about oil,
resources and strategic interests. At least Trump is honest when he declares that
he wants to plunder other countries.
Unlike you
most British people are not desiccated pen pushers. You reach for your ‘guidelines’
much like a drunk leans on a lamppost, for support rather than illumination.
Even the BBC’s own journalists protest
at the censorship
There are of
course genuine journalists at the BBC who are outraged at your coverage. Owen
Jones quotes from numerous journalists at the BBC
but I suspect that those handling complaints are selected for their slow-witted
viciousness to say nothing of their stupidity.
Censorship applies
not only to what you publish but also what you don’t publish. In the case of
Ukraine the BBC doesn’t face such dilemmas. It carries only Zelensky’s version
of events.
Israel is
different because it is a western settler-colonial occupation. Indigenous
people are, by definition, sub-human terrorists. When the BBC reports from
Palestine it takes care not to use the word Occupied and prefers euphemisms such
as Disputed Territories.
Israel’s
defence of its land theft is akin to a burglar claiming title to the goods he’s
just stolen, though on a much grander scale.
Former BBCjournalist Karishma Patel has called the BBC out for refusing to reach “reasonable,
evidence-based conclusions” over Israel’sgenocide in Gaza. She suggested that
you have become “a vehicle in informational warfare”. That’s why she resigned in 2024.
Impartiality has failed if
its key method is to constantly balance “both sides” of a story as equally
true. A news outlet that refuses to come to conclusions becomes a vehicle in
informational warfare
We have passed the point at
which Israel’s war crimes and crimes against humanity are debatable. There’s
more than enough evidence – from Palestinians on the ground, aid organisations;
legal bodies – to come to coverage-shaping conclusions around what Israel has
done.
In the case
of Ukraine there is no balance. The BBC reached its conclusions that Russia was
in the wrong on day one of the invasion but in the case of Israel you prefer to
wait for eternity as you pretend that it is about Hamas rather than ethnic
cleansing.
Russia’s
version of events, that the promises made to Gorbachev in 1991 about NATO
expansion were broken are never put even though they are documented in the US’s own National Security
Archives.
Imagine if
Russia had destroyed or bombed every Ukrainian hospital in order to eradicate
terrorists. Would that explanation be treated with respect by the BBC? BBC
balance is a dishonest attempt to treat right and wrong, good and evil,
genocide and peace as equals.
As
Archbishop Desmond Tutu said, “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.”
Martin Luther King made the same point when he said that “The hottest place in Hell is reserved for those who remain neutral in times of great moral
conflict.”
There is no
such thing as neutrality. You either support genocide or you oppose it. The
fact that the BBC refuses even to mention the word is proof enough as to where
you stand.
I realise
that the scribe who wrote to me may take offence if called a liar so I’ll
suggest that you are being economical with the truth. The BBC coverage of Gaza is
an extension of the Foreign Office’s policy objectives.
That
brilliant film on Gaza’s children, with Abdullah being a natural presenter, was
scrapped because the foul Danny Cohen, Baroness Deech’s trollope of a daughter,
Sarah, Oberman and all the other political dwarfs were considered more
important than the thousands of people, Jews included, who bombarded you with
complaints.
How the BBC
Appeased Hitler and either Ignored or Justified Nazi Anti-Semitism
I’ve just read a fascinating M. Phil Dissertation by Guy Raz of Cambridge University.
It’s titled ‘The
BBC and Appeasement: Broadcast Coverage of Nazi Persecution of the Jews,
1933-1938’. In his Introduction
Raz writes:
‘Between 1933 and 1938, Nazi Germany engaged
in the systematic persecution of its Jewish community with acts of increasing
intensity. One would, therefore, expect the BBC to have reported extensively on
these developments considering its association with hard-nosed journalism and
critical news broadcasting. That this was not the case is in part explicable
through the extent to which Broadcasting House, in direct and independent
compliance with the diplomatic aims of the Foreign Office, was party to and a partner
in the application of the policy of appeasement. There was a major discrepancy
between the BBC's knowledge of what was happening in Nazi Germany and the
Corporation's effort to disseminate that knowledge to any great extent. 'Negative'
news about Nazi Germany was carefully controlled by the BBC during this period
in order to ensure that 'sensitive' information was not widely distributed for
public consumption.’
This could
have been written, word for word, about your coverage of Israel today. When anti-Semitism was a matter of life and death, when
Jews were being beaten, impoverished and put in Nazi concentration camps the
BBC did not want to know.
John Pilger doesn't hold back: "The BBC is and has long been the most refined propaganda service in the world."pic.twitter.com/6mViFKnG4Z
— Rachael Swindon #WeAreCollective (@Rachael_Swindon) December 9, 2017
But
when ‘anti-Semitism’ is a propaganda tool weaponised to justify apartheid and
genocide the BBC is suddenly opposed to it. You have even installed an Israeli
spy, Raffi Berg, as a Zionist gatekeeper in charge of the news. As John Pilger said, the BBC is the world’s
most sophisticated propaganda machine.
There were 3 major anti-Semitic mileposts between 1933 and 1939
in Germany. The first was the Boycott of Jewish Shops on 1 April 1933. The second was the
passage in September 1935 of the Nuremberg Laws which stripped German Jews of
citizenship (something the Zionists welcomed) and the third was Kristallnacht, the Nazi pogrom of 10-11 November 1938 when most
synagaogues were burnt to the ground, over 100 Jews killed and 30,000 thrown
into concentration camps. How did the BBC cover this? Guy Raz writes:
the April boycott was discussed in two
non-news bulletins but the tone of the discussion preferred to minimize the
extent of the boycott. The Nuremberg decrees were mentioned in one, brief news bulletin
lasting no more than twenty seconds and devoted primarily to the Memel dispute.
Kristallnacht was also mentioned in a
news bulletin, without commentary and with few details.
The
Nuremberg Laws were described by Gerard Reitlinger as ‘‘the
most murderous legislative instrument known to European history’ yet the
BBC gave them 20 seconds in a news bulletin. Kristallnacht, the pogrom that signalled
Nazi intentions towards the Jews was mentioned without comment.
When
anti-Semitism was a reality the BBC stood with the racists and anti-Semites? Why?
Because the BBC was born in the womb of the British Establishment and shares
their values. Raz tells
us that
News deemed 'negative', defined as such by
the Foreign Office ... was to be avoided after 1936. What is astonishing,
however, was just how little information about anti-Jewish persecution was
dispensed for broadcast before this time - three years after the introduction
of anti-Semitism as official policy in Germany. Even fewer reports about
anti-Jewish persecution would be broadcast after 1936.
When
Hitler was preparing the ground for the expulsion and eventual extermination of
Europe’s Jews, the BBC was silent. But today when ‘anti-Semitism’ is a mere prejudice
the BBC is all over it like a rash.
No
doubt the BBC’s famous ‘balance’ was in operation then too. It balanced between
the British government and Hitler. Jews were out of the equation altogether
just like the Palestinians are today.
‘the Corporation
saw anti-Jewish persecution as secondary to other forms of Nazi repression,
most notably, anti-Church persecution’.
Christians
were not discriminated against as Christians.
‘When information about anti-Jewish repression
reached the airwaves, the tone of the broadcast almost always implied that
Jews, along with Marxists and Social Democrats, constituted a political opposition.’
The
idea that religion is a political ideology or movement is not new. Geert
Wilders, the fascist leader of Netherland’s Party for Freedom (PVV) says exactly the same about Islam today:
Islam is an ideology aiming for world
domination rather than a religion. It demands that the state be regulated
according to Islamic law.
If
Wilders weren’t so ignorant, he would know that the same is true of all
religions. The Israeli Right, which controls Israel’s government, also wants to see Israeli civil law
replaced by Halacha, Jewish law.
Some
of the worst genocidal states during the Holocaust were the Christian ethno
states, Romania, Slovakia and Croatia. Every religion has those who believe
that their religion is supreme. Guy Raz said:
what is surprising was the extent to which
the Corporation 'spiritually surrendered' to Nazi conceptions of race by adopting
some of the language of German racialism.
This is
no surprise. Racism is as English as buttered toast and the BBC is nothing if
not a reflection of ruling class Englishness.
Broadcasts also often implied that Jews were
partially responsible for the increase in anti-Semitic persecution.
This was
particularly evident during the Holocaust. Hungary was the last country in
Europe with a large Jewish population when the Nazis invaded on 19 March 1944. Robert Philpot wrote about how the
BBC had consistently avoided the topic of its Jews in its wartime broadcasts to
Hungary, failing to warn that a Nazi invasion would mean deportations and
death.
Prof. Carlile
Macartney was a wartime adviser to the BBC and the Foreign Office. He proposed that
the BBC needed to take into account the anti-Semitism of the Hungarian populace
andavoid mentioning Jews altogether.
His advice was a reaction to ‘continuing concerns that the Hungarian Service was, in
fact, too associated with Jews.’ A December 1939 internal BBC memo, spoke of the
criticism the corporation had received that the service’s announcers had “Jewish-sounding voices” and that its six
Hungarian staff were “purely or
preponderantly Jewish.”
A further memo 18 months later spoke of how “One of the main criticisms of our broadcasts has been on the ground of
Jewish accents.” It was necessary to bring in “a nucleus of Aryan voices.”
Jean Seaton, in her article‘The
BBC and the Holocaust’ states that
'The BBC displayed both before and during the
war, views and decisions that were quite simply anti-Semitic.'
On the eve of the Anschluss, the annexation of Austria, its
founder and General Manager Lord Reith
assured the German foreign minister that the
'BBC was not anti-Nazi' after von Ribbentrop suggested otherwise.
Today the
BBC has exchanged its respect for Nazism for adulation of Zionism. Raz observed
that the BBC went out of its way to portray Hitler in a positive light. For
example the destruction of Jewish and ‘degenerate’ art found fulsome support in
the BBC.
When his policies seemed to defy rationality,
like the destruction of 'degenerate artwork', reports often came to his
defense. ‘At least he [Hitler] honours
art to the extent of believing that its misuse can encompass the cultural
destruction of a people; and equally that... it can be the greatest agent in
national regeneration,'said one art review.
The BBC’s most
disgraceful decision was over who should represent them at the 1936 Berlin
Olympics. Harold Abrahams, a gold medalist in the 1924 Olympics, ‘was also the Corporation's most popular and
widely respected sports commentator.’’
There
was just one problem. Abrahams was Jewish and for 3 months ‘executives
debated on the prudence of sending Abrahams to Berlin as the BBC's representative..’the
Director of Broadcasting wrote to the Director of Programming that
You will remember that at a
Programme Board meeting in the late autumn we discussed the advisability of
using Mr. Harold Abrahams as our commentator at the Olympic Games. It was then felt that while we
were not prejudiced against him for racial reasons, it might be advisable to
postpone a final decision as to his employmentbyusuntil nearerthetime,when weshouldbeabletoseethestateof
feelinginGermany...
The Controller of Public
Relationswrote:
Abrahams is a Jew. He is our
best commentator on athletics. The question arises as to whether or not we
should do this [label Abrahams as a commentator]. We all regard the German
action against the Jews as quite irrational and intolerable and on that score
we ought not to hesitate, but should we, as between one broadcaster and
another, put aside all views of this kind and take the line that however
irrational we regard another country's attitude to be it would be discourteous
to send a Jew commentator to a country where Jews are taboo?
Just
savour that for a moment – it would be discourteous to send a Jewish
commentator to a country where Jews are taboo. Can anything better sum up the
BBC’s historic attitude to racism?
From
Nazi Germany and the Holocaust in the 40s to Genocide in the 2020s the BBC has
never let principle stand in the way of what is in the best interests of the
British ruling class.
The
committee's decided against sending Abrahams ('it would be definitely impolitic for us to send Abrahams as our
official commentator') illustrates the cowardly nature of the BBC. It is in this light
that the decision to pull the film on Gaza
should be seen. It has nothing to do with ‘terrorism’ or ‘anti-Semitism’.
It is simply a continuation of the BBC’s loyalty to British Foreign Policy.
This
and this alone explains the abysmal, biased coverage of Genocide in Gaza. Indeed
the BBC refuses to even use the word ‘Genocide’ thus taking the position of the
very genocide deniers that it decried in Srebenica where 8,000 not half a million have died.
Israel developed its own atrocity propaganda
surrounding October 7 which mirrored British atrocity propaganda in WW1 when
German troops were accused of bayoneting Belgian babies. The BBC has carried it
without once questioning it.
Defense minister confirms
army orders to kill Israelis on 7 October
On October 7 Israel put into
operation the Hannibal Directive which decrees that it's better to kill a captured Israeli rather than allow them to be exchanged later for Palestinian hostages. The Zionist love of killing Palestinians outweighed their concern for their own citizens. which decrees that it’s better to kill a captured Israeli than allow them
to be exchanged later for Palestinian hostages. The Zionist love of killing
Palestinians outweighed their concern for their own citizens.
On 7 July 2024 Ha'aretz reported that the IDF used the Hannibal Directive to prevent Hamas taking Israeli soldiers captive. It later turned out that the Directive was also used to prevent the capture of civilians. There were many such similar stories in the Israeli press.
Hannibal
Doctrinewhich decrees that it’s better to kill a captured Israeli than allow them
to be exchanged later for Palestinian hostages. The Zionist love of killing
Palestinians outweighed their concern for their own citizens.
Hannibal
Doctrinewhich decrees that it’s better to kill a captured Israeli than allow them
to be exchanged later for Palestinian hostages. The Zionist love of killing
Palestinians outweighed their concern for their own citizens.
On 7 July
2024 Ha’aretz reported that the IDF used the Hannibal Directive to prevent Hamas
taking Israeli soldiers captive. It later turns out that the Directive was also
used to prevent the capture of civilians. There were many such similar stories
in the Israeli press.
On 7 July
2024 Ha’aretz reported that the IDF used the Hannibal Directive to prevent Hamas
taking Israeli soldiers captive. It later turns out that the Directive was also
used to prevent the capture of civilians. There were many such similar stories
in the Israeli press.
The Australian Broadcasting
Corporation ran a story‘Israeli forces accused of killing their own citizens under the 'Hannibal
Directive'but
not the BBC. There isn’t one mention of the Hannibal Directive on the BBC’s
website. The BBC is STILL propagating Israeli lies that Hamas operatives
slaughtered Israelis on October 7 when the truth is that the majority of
Israeli civilians were killed by the IDF.
Take another
story, which is connected with the BBC pulling Gaza – How To Survive a Warzone. The killingof Palestinian children. There is every reason to believe that the
high number of Palestinian children killed is a consequence of their being deliberately targeted.
Rabbi
Eliyahu Mali, who runs the Bnei Moshe Yeshivah in Jaffa has, like other rabbis,
openly advocated for the murder of Palestinian children because they
represent the future generation of Palestinian fighters. It is an argument that
Himmler made about Jewish
children:
“For I did not consider myself
justified in exterminating the men—in other words, killing them or having them
killed—and then allowing their children to grow up to wreak vengeance on our
children and grandchildren.
When complaints were made to the
Israeli Police, who are happy to raid Palestinian bookshops on a whim, they recommended
that Mali not be prosecuted. Has the BBC covered this story or related it to
what is happening in Gaza? Of course not.
The BBC was happy to carry the allegations of
Netanyahu that the Bibas children were killed by Hamas with their bare hands rather
than that they were killed by Israeli bombing. The BBC gives full unchallenged coverage
to any Israeli lie.
There is no evidence to support
Israel’s allegations and there is no medical evidence either. Hamas was not given
the chance of rebutting Netanyahu’s lies.
When it comes to documented proof of
Israel’s murder of Palestinian children the BBC goes silent and withdraws the
only film that allowed Palestinian children to express themselves. When
Zionists make demands the BBC rushes to demonstrate their fealty to the
genocidaires.
The UN has just released a Report that Israel’s systemic attacks on women’s
healthcare in Gaza amount to “genocidal acts”, and that the Israeli military
have used sexual violence as a weapon of war to “dominate and destroy the Palestinian people”.
Has the BBC
reported on this or investigated? Well it did lead with Israel’s denials on BBC
Radio 4 News. When a Russian atrocity is announced does the BBC lead with
Russia’s denials? To call the BBC genocide enablers would be an understatement.
The BBC’s silence and refusal to
accurately report
the multiple accounts of Israeli torture of Palestinian health care workers and
their murder makes it complicit in that murder. Because if the BBC and other
western media were calling out these war crimes Israel would not feel that it
had impunity to do whatever it wants.
The BBC has repeatedly carried Israel’s atrocity
propaganda about Hamas rapes on October 7, despite there being no forensic
evidence and despite Israeli prosecutor Moran Gazsayingthat she has no cases or victims.
In an interview with Ynet, Moran
said that the prosecutors are not filing a case on sexual assault or rape by
Hamas militants as her department has failed to find any evidence despite
having over fourteen months to investigate the claims.
"In the end, we don’t have
any complainants. What was presented in the media compared to what will
eventually come together will be entirely different…" Moran said.
However the
BBC has been reluctant to publicise the well documented examples of Israeli soldiers raping
Palestinian women. Rape of indigenous people is a well established colonial
tradition.
An Israeli soldier who raped a Palestinian prisoner alongside other soldiers appeared on Israeli channel 14 to defend his unit that committed the rape. The incident sparked outrage as it was filmed on CCTV cameras and spread to the media.
The verified Israeli rape of
Palestinian men, with the perpetrators appearing on Israel’s Channel 14
boasting of their deeds, hasn’t merited coverage on BBC News or any
investigative programme. Raffi Berg instead commissioned ‘We will dance again’since
the focus must always be on the settlers never the colonised.
The deliberate starving of Palestinian
prisoners began under Israel’s neo-Nazi Minister of Police, the Kahanist Ben
Gvir who openly proclaimed the policy. The
BBC has never provided any context to Israel’s policy of torturing Palestinian
prisoners.
Whereas Israeli hostages kiss their
captors Palestinian hostages show no affection for their guards. One Zionist
suggested to me that Israeli hostages were suffering from Stockholm Syndrome. I
asked why it was that Palestinian prisoners don’t suffer from this malady!
I refer particularly to the torture of the Director of Gaza’s Kamal Adwan
Hospital, Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, who told a legal representative of “the torture and abuse” he was subjected
to since being detained by Israeli occupation forces 47 days ago.
The BBC
refrained from publicising what has happened to Dr Safiya. One wonders what its
response would be if it had been Hamas that had been torturing an Israeli
doctor?
"A pure soldier showcases the quality football that was made with hard work after prolonged fighting in the Whores' Strip."
This is the caption written for an image shared on a prominent Israeli settlers' Telegram channel. The image shows an Israeli soldier stepping on the… pic.twitter.com/m9bVKLAvLe
The
destruction of this and other hospitals was a war crime. To capture and torture
doctors is a practice that even the Nazis refrained from. The only Jewish
communal building that survived untouched in Berlin till 1945 was
the Jewish Hospital. Israel has outdone the Nazis as no hospital in Gaza has
escaped unscathed.
The BBC refuses to use the term ‘genocide’ despite
the overwhelming evidence. For example Israeli ministers like Nissim Vaturi,
the Deputy Speaker of the Knesset, have called for all adult men in Gaza to be
killed. That sounds a bit like genocide but if you don’t report it then you
don’t have to decide.
There is also the small matter of the mass graves which are
being uncovered in Gaza but I wouldn’t want to disturb your conscience any
further. You have a lot weighing it down as it is.
I wouldn’t expect the BBC to cover the case of an
Israeli soldierplaying footballwith the skull of a Palestinian man. After all this is simply good old
colonial fun and games.
I might expect the BBC to carry prominently the
story of Israel’s denial of food and fuel aid to Gaza and how babies havefrozento death. However the silence of the BBC on this as on so much else is
deafening. There are only some voices that the BBC can hear. See
In 2017 Manchester
University Forced Her to Change the Title of a Talk ‘You're doing to the Palestinians what the Nazis did to me’ after Israel’s
Ambassador Mark Regev Lobbied Them
Manchester
University thought it a good idea to frame the Palestinian experience of
apartheid and genocide as a religious one
Born in
Budapest, Marika Sherwood (8 November 1937 – 16 February 2025) was the
daughter of Hungarian-Jewish parents, Laszlo (Laci) Fenyő and Magda. Laci
survived Hungary’s Jewish Labour Service, but many relatives died in the
Holocaust. Magda secured false Christian identity papers for her and Marika,
and they survived the Nazi occupation, reuniting with Laci after the war.
Marika
survived the Budapest Ghetto that was established under the fascist Arrow Cross
government that the Nazis installed in October 1944. Marika, who remembered
having to wear a Yellow Star and witnessing many atrocities, later spoke of the
impact of these wartime experiences in shaping her very public support of the Palestinian cause.
Marika
Sherwood emigrated with her family to Australia in 1948 and then to Britain in
1965. As a teacher in London she witnessed the discrimination that Black
students experienced and the absence of Black history from the curriculum.
Marika was shockedby the racism many of her pupils experienced.
It was this that led to her becoming interested in learning about their
Caribbean heritage.
This led to Marika
becoming a pioneer in the field of Black and Caribbean history and the co-founder
of the Black & Asian Studies Association with Hakim Adi, Britain’s first
Black Professor of History.
Her writings
include After Abolition: Britain and the
Slave Trade Since 1807, Origins of
Pan-Africanism: Henry Sylvester Williams and Africa and the African Diaspora.
Marika published
13 books about slavery, colonialism and the history of African and Caribbean
people Britain in a long and distinguished career as a teacher, writer, and
social campaigner. She was at the forefront of attempts to diversify
the curriculum across schools and higher education.
With her
BASA colleagues, Marika designed and wrote a GCSE module and textbook on migration to Britain (2016).
In 1990 Marika was appointed a research fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth
Studies and began organising history seminars there. Marika’s
extensive publications are listed on the ICWS Research website.
Many Struggles: West Indian Workers
and Service Personnel in Britain (1939-45), published in
1985 was one of the first publications to highlight “the racism meted out to Black people by the British state” during
the second world war, and to demonstrate that those from the Caribbean were an
integral part of the war effort. Over the next 40 years she would produce more
than 20 books and almost 100 articles.
Her books covered a vast variety of topics. In After Abolition: Britain and the Slave Trade Since 1807, she reminded
people, during the bicentennial commemoration of the Abolition Act, that
Britain’s involvement in human trafficking continued long after 1807.
In much of her work she provided in-depth histories centred on key
figures and organisations in Britain, including Kwame Nkrumah:
The Years Abroad 1935-1947; Claudia
Jones: A Life in Exile; Origins of
Pan-Africanism: Henry Sylvester Williams, Africa and the African Diaspora; Malcolm X: Visits Abroad and Kwame Nkrumah and the Dawn of the Cold War:
The West African National Secretariat 1945-48.
In October
2022 Marika was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of History at the University of
Chichester. When receiving the award she said:
I am honoured to accept this award and am
extremely grateful to Professor Adi. I hope that I can inspire more students to
research areas that universities have not been not looking at – the working
classes, colonialisation, and the history of black people in the UK, which
largely remains unexplored.
I am delighted to present Marika with an honorary
doctorate for her contributions to history. We first met in 1987 when I was a
PhD student and she came to a seminar at which I was speaking. We have been
friends and colleagues since, working and writing together as well as jointly
launching BASA. This award is greatly deserved and long overdue.
Manchester
University Censored Marika Sherwood’s Talk
In March 2017 Marika was invited by students at Manchester University to
give a talk, as part of Israel Apartheid
Week. Marika chose the title, “A Holocaust survivor’s
story and the Balfour declaration: You’re doing to the Palestinians what the
Nazis did to me.” In the light of Gaza it is prescient.
The Zionist
lobby and Israeli politicians don’t like to be reminded that their chants of Death to the Arabs, their apartheid
policies and talk of extermination mirror what the Nazis did to the Jews. For
them the Holocaust is sui generis.
The Jewish News reported that
Manchester University had
censored the title of a talk in March by
Holocaust survivor Marika Sherwood, ....
The subhead of the title was dropped and the
university said it would record the speech after a visit to the university by
Mark Regev, the Israeli ambassador, and his civil affairs attaché, Michael
Freeman.
Following his
visit, Freeman sent an email to Manchester University’s head of student
experience, Tim Westlake, which thanked him for discussing the “difficult issues that we face”.
Freeman also said in the
email that the title of Sherwood’s talk violates the International Holocaust
Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism,
and criticised another speaker as anti-Semitic.
Both of these events will to [sic] cause Jewish
students to feel uncomfortable on campus and that they are being targeted and
harassed for their identity as a people and connection to the Jewish state of
Israel. I would be grateful if you could look into these events and take the
appropriate action,” Freeman wrote to Westlake.
This idea
that anti-Zionist critiques of Israel, because it challenges some Jewish students
identification with Israel, is a formof
harassment is profoundly undemocratic and a recipe for the abolition of free
speech. Would British universities have prevented anti-Nazi meetings on
campuses in the 30s for fear that German students would feel
uncomfortable?Would they have banned anti-Apartheid meetings in the 70s and 80s because White students from South
Africa would object?
The email also
said:
We welcome debate and discussion and see it
as an essential part of a healthy democracy and open society. In the case of
these two particular events, we feel that this is not legitimate criticism but
has rather crossed the line into hate speech.
What we had is racists deciding what is and is not
legitimate and Manchester University going along with them in this.
The Guardian
got access to the email after the Information Commissioner’s Office told the University to disclose “all correspondence between the University of
Manchester and the Israeli lobby” between February 1 and March 3.
I was just speaking of my experience of what
the Nazis were doing to me as a Jewish child. I had to move away from where I
was living, because Jews couldn’t live there. I couldn’t go to school. I would
have died were it not for the Christians who baptised us and shared papers with
us to save us
Sherwood told The
Guardian. “I can’t say I’m a Palestinian,
but my experiences as a child are not dissimilar to what Palestinian children
are experiencing now.”
A spokesman for the Israeli embassy was quoted in Ha’aretzas saying:
Comparing Israel to the Nazi regime could
reasonably be considered anti-Semitic, given the context, according to the
[International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance's] working definition of
antisemitism, which is accepted by the British government, the Labour Party,
the NUS [National Union of Students] and most British universities.
In other words the IHRA misdefinition of anti-Semitism directly led to
the censorship of Marika’s talk.
Manchester University said a free
speech code applied to all campus events involving outside speakers and ‘controversial
topics’ and that the university also consulted “relevant laws, including the Equality
Act 2010,” in setting the guidelines for the event.
This is just verbal flatulence. The Equality Act has nothing to say
about freedom of speech nor Jewish identity come to that.
On January 13 I was part of a delegation which met Manchester
University’s Vice Chancellor Duncan Iveson and its Vice-President for Social
Responsibility, Prof. NalinThakkar. Representatives also came from UK Jewish Academic Network, Jewish Voice for Labour (JVL) Greater
Manchester, Jewish Action for Palestine Manchester, Na’amod NorthWest and
Manchester Jewish Students’ Kehillah. I represented Jewish Network for
Palestine.
The delegation arose out of a ‘debate’ held as part of theWhitworth debate series on
October 31 2024. The title of this debate was “Is
antizionism antisemitism?”.
In an Open Letter to
Iveson the 6 Jewish organisations wrote on 27 November that:
Not only is this question absurd to any
serious historian of zionism, but the presentation of the debate framed as one
to be argued on a religious basis - that is, as a dispute between Muslims and
Jews - could do nothing other than result in an event of intellectual vacuity,
while – as some wrote to the organisers asking them to change this framing -
needlessly inflaming intercommunal tensions and exacerbating both islamophobia
and antisemitism. This is indeed what happened on October 31st,
just as many had warned the organisers.
The letter went on to say that:
it seems extraordinary to us that an event
billed as relevant to the current horror in Gaza, which a large number of the
world’s most respected institutions are now referring to as a genocide, should
have included no academic specialist in either Palestinian or Jewish history.
Indeed we can only sympathise with the enraged despair of the brave young
Palestinian woman who shouted out during the debate to ask why, while her
people were being massacred by zionists, there was not even a Palestinian voice
on the stage. She was forcibly dragged out of the hall by burly university
security men, but her quintessential question still reverberates unanswerably
around the world. The root cause of the century old conflict is the struggle
for self-determination of the Palestinian people in the face of a settler
colonial enterprise in which the UK has played a significant role. Attempts to
portray this instead as a religious war are ahistorical, inflammatory and
deeply divisive.
This resulted in our meeting. However it was clear that nothing that we
had said about alternative Jewish voices to Zionism and support for Israel was
being taken seriously. Manchester University, like most academic institutions,
is too much a part of the British state to ever break free of the imperialist
paradigm.
That is most evident in its support for the IHRA misdefinition of
anti-Semitism which is not about anti-Semitism but the conflation of
anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. Stephen Sedley, a Jewish former Court of Appeal
Judge wrote that the
IHRA
fails the first test of any definition: it is
indefinite. ‘A certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred’
invites a string of questions. Is anti-Semitism solely a matter of perception?
What about discriminatory practices and policies? What about perceptions of
Jews that are expressed otherwise than as hatred?
There are many similar critiques of the IHRA including legal opinions
from Hugh Tomlinson KC
who warned that it had
a potential chilling effect on public bodies
which, in the absence of definitional clarity, may seek to sanction or prohibit
any conduct which has been labelled by third parties as antisemitic without
applying any clear criterion of assessment.
Which is
exactly what happened at Manchester University. Human rights lawyer Geoffrey
Robertson KC wrote that:
There is one
aspect which I find remarkable, ... Despite its imprecision, it [the IHRA] does
pivot upon manifestations of “hatred towards Jews.” As I point out in paragraph
2 above, “hatred” is a very strong word. It is the emotion that can be deduced
in those who daub abhorrent slogans on tombstones and Synagogues, but it falls
short of capturing those who express only hostility or prejudice, or who
practice discrimination... This consideration, above all others, convinces me
that the definition is not fit for purpose, or any purpose that relies upon it
to identify anti-Semitism accurately.
There are also Zionists such as Professor Geoffrey Alderman who are
highly critical of what he called‘a flawed and faulty definition of antisemitism’. David Feldman, Director of Birkbeck's Institute for the Study of Anti-Semitism asked
So does the IHRA definition that Britain has
adopted provide the answer [to the problem of anti-Semitism]? I am sceptical.
Here is the definition’s key passage: “Antisemitism is a certain perception of
Jews, which may be expressed as hatred towards Jews.” This is bewilderingly
imprecise.
The text also carries dangers. It trails a
list of 11 examples. Seven deal with criticism of Israel. Some of the points
are sensible, some are not. Crucially, there is a danger that the overall
effect will place the onus on Israel’s critics to demonstrate they are not
antisemitic. The home affairs committee advised that the definition required
qualification “to ensure that freedom of speech is maintained in the context of
discourse on Israel and Palestine”. It was ignored.
Kenneth Stern
And what of Kenneth
Stern, the American academic who was the principal drafter of the IHRA. In an articleI drafted the definition of antisemitism. Rightwing Jews are weaponizing
it Stern wrote that:
Fifteen years ago, as the American Jewish
Committee’s antisemitism expert, I was the lead drafter of what was then called
the “working definition of antisemitism”. It was created primarily so that
European data collectors could know what to include and exclude. That way
antisemitism could be monitored better over time and across borders.
It was never intended to be a campus hate
speech code, but that’s what Donald Trump’s executive order accomplished this
week. This order is an attack on academic freedom and free speech, and will
harm not only pro-Palestinian advocates, but also Jewish students and faculty,
and the academy itself.
Yet that is what the IHRA has become.A hate speech code.
On 29 January 2025,
Trump issued an Executive
Order (the Antisemitism EO) entitled “Additional Measures to Combat
Anti-Semitism.” This built on an order that Trump signed during his first term—EO
13899—that required federal agencies to consider the IHRA definition
of antisemitism and its accompanying examples when enforcing Title VI of the
Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Title VI).
Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964
prohibits discrimination based on race, color, or national origin in programs
and activities receiving federal financial assistance
Trump’s EO
states that it is intended to address the “barrage
of discrimination” that Jewish students have faced “in our schools and on our campuses” since October 7, 2023, such as
“denial
of access to campus common areas and facilities, including libraries and
classrooms; and intimidation, harassment, and physical threats and assault.”
Theobvious question to ask is why Trump, a racist
extraordinaire, who spoke of
neo-Nazis at Charlottesville as ‘some
very fine people’ and who has targeted migrants of colour as rapists and
criminals, whilst offering asylum to
White Afrikaaners is concerned with ‘anti-Semitism’? It is proof positive that the ‘anti-Semitism’ he is
concerned with is nothing more than anti-Palestinian racism.
Leaving
aside the litany of lies about Jewish students being denied access to campus
facilities etc. when it is common knowledge that it is pro-Palestinian
protesters who have been harassed, beaten and attacked, what does this say
about the IHRA that an open racist and bigot endorses it?
We only have
to turn to Ken Stern’s testimony to Congress of November 7, 2017.Referring to the use of the IHRA in Britain
Stern wrote:
The
EUMC’s “working definition” was recently adopted in the United Kingdom and
applied to campus. An “Israel Apartheid Week” event was cancelled as violating
the definition. A Holocaust survivor [Marika Sherwood] was required to change
the title of a campus talk, and the university mandated it be recorded, after
an Israeli diplomat complained that the title violated the definition.
Perhaps
most egregious, an off-campus group [Campaign
Against Anti-Semitism’s] citing the definition called on a university to
conduct an inquiry of a professor (who received her PhD from Columbia) for
antisemitism, based on an article she had written years before. The university
then conducted the inquiry. And while it ultimately found no basis to
discipline the professor, the exercise itself was chilling and McCarthy-like.’
I mention this because Professor Nalin Thakkar sent an email to the 6 Jewish representatives
that he met in January defending Manchester University’s continued use of the
IHRA. Thakkar wrote:
In line
with the majority (100) of UK higher education institutions (along with UK
national government, devolved governments in Wales and Scotland, many local
authorities including GMCA, College of Policing), and UK government policy ... the
University adopted the IHRA working definition of antisemitism in June 2020.
The
University adopted the definition as guidance, which I have attached, and has
due regard to the definition when interpreting and understanding antisemitism
if and when raised in the University context….
our
approach to the IHRA definition does not affect the application of equality law
and the rights it affords to members of our community, or our commitment
to provide an environment free from harassment and discrimination.
It
also does not affect our legal obligations and the legal rights of our staff
and students in relation to freedom of speech and expression, including to
discuss and question difficult and sensitive topics, views and opinions,
provided that is done responsibly, with respect for others, and within the law.
Thakkar seems to be saying that because most universities
had caved in, under threat of defunding by former Education Secretary and
toilet salesman, Gavin Williamson, Manchester University should do likewise.
This is institutional cowardice.
I have responded with a letter (copied
below) on behalf of Jewish Network for
Palestine. It is plain as a
pikestaff that ‘anti-Semitism’ is being weaponised to defend Israel and its
imperialist backers. No one seriously thinks that a racist like Trump is losing
sleep over the ‘suffering’ of Jewish students.
The real
question is why Manchester University is not willing to ditch a ‘definition of
anti-Semitism’ that is deeply racist by defining Palestinian’s experience of
racism as a form of anti-Semitism and thus making them invisible. In the IHRA’s
eyes to call Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians racist is to be anti-Semitic.
Yet there are a thousand reasons why Israel is racist. It is time that Manchester University
and other academic institutions stopped
dissembling.
That the IHRA
was used to prevent a holocaust survivor Marika Sherwood from explaining why
her treatment by the Nazis was similar to that of Palestinians by the Israelis
is reason enough to get rid of it.
Targeting Jews and Jewish
anti-Zionists is explained by Miller’s Failure to Understand Why
Imperialism Supports Zionism and Genocide
in Gaza – As Such It is Anti-Semitic
The Virulent neo-Nazi Stew Peters Show & His $6 Million Reward for
Proving the Holocaust Happened
I didn’t want
to have to write this blog. There are far more important topics such as Genocide
in Gaza. HoweverMiller’s recent social media postings are
becoming ever more bizarre and crossing the line into anti-Semitism. Miller has
abandoned anti-Zionism.
His behaviour is not only strange it is also stupid. If 'antisemitism'
is the ritual accusation of the Zionists why try to prove them correct by
attacking Jews as Jews? It seems that Miller believes that it is Western Jews
who are responsible for the hideous monstrosity that is the Israeli state. This
is the Zionist narrative.
Jews in the West are the moral alibi for imperialism. Does anyone
seriously think that Trump is seriously concerned
about Jews or anti-Semitism? His ‘concern’ over the
‘plight’ of Jewish students is grotesque in the extreme given his own racism
and hostility to Black
Lives Matter and anti-racism, with his portrayal of
migrants as rapists and criminals.
Trump has given overt support to the neo-Nazis of Charlottesville, describing them
as ‘very fine people’ and to the
Proud Boys and other White Supremacist militias. Miller understands none of
this.
When Biden said that if
Israel didn't exist it would have had to be created he was expressing the views
of mainstream imperialist thought in the US. According to Reagan’s
Secretary of State, Alexander Haig, Israel was the US’s unsinkable aircraft carrier
and cheap at the price in an area of immense strategic and economic interest.
Jews in the words of
Barnaby Raine are merely the West's colonial pets.
I was reluctant to break from Miller because of what had happened at
Bristol University where he was fired in a McCarthyist witchhunt. I was elated
at his victory in the Employment Tribunal and I hope he wins at the EAT. Initially
I pushed back against the criticism of him by JVL and Na'amod, I cannot do so now because David has made
it clear that he is going down an anti-Semitic pathway.
In holding Jews responsible for Israel’s holocaust in Gaza, Miller lets
imperialism off the hook. The genocide could be halted tomorrow if Trump, or
Biden had stopped the flow of arms. It could have been halted if the Arab
states had stopped the flow of oil. The fact that that miserable humanoid Starmer,
has uttered not one word of criticism speaks volumes.
Those who are
interested in ending this genocide must begin by targeting those responsible
near them: the entire Zionist movement globally must live in fear of
accountability until it is dismantled and its ideology eradicated. And let's be
clear, there are Zionists everywhere. In every town and city. Find out where
they are.
Zionism is the worst catastrophe that has befallen the Jewish people
next to the Holocaust itself. It is an abomination. It has destroyed Judaism’s
moral and ethical traditions.
Isaiah’s injunction to
‘learn
to do good; seek justice, correct oppression; bring justice to the fatherless,
plead the widow’s cause’
has been replaced by Israel’s
determination to turn Gaza into a land of orphans. We have a new acronym WCNSF
(Wounded child, no surviving family).
The injunction in Exodus ‘not (to) oppress a stranger... having yourselves been strangers in the
land of Egypt” has
been replaced by Death to the Arabs.
I am all in favour of destroying Zionism politically and
organisationally but targeting individual Zionists is not the way to do it.
Miller is arguing that we start ferreting out individual Zionists. How
will that stop the genocide? Israel isn’t even concerned about killing its own
hostages. Why should it be concerned about Miller’s fans tracking down
individual Zionists? He says ‘there are Zionists everywhere. In every town and city. Find out
where they are.’ And then what?
Leaving aside his paranoia, are individual Zionists in Britain,
many of whom are Jewish, really responsible for what Israel does?Is that how imperialism operates?
But if like Miller you dismiss imperialism as an interconnected
system of war and political domination motivated by economic exploitation,
then it is far easier to focus on individual Zionists. In so doing you let off
the hook US imperialism and the complicity of Arab regimes such as Saudi
Arabia’s MBS.
Because Miller fails to understand why Western capitalism supports
Israel, he believes that it is all due to ‘infiltration’ of government bodies.
Since about two-thirds of Jews are Zionists this will inevitably be portrayed
as Jew hunting. Is that what Palestine solidarity is about?
Miller’s call for targeting individual Zionists lays him open to Police
attacks. Of course the hysterical reaction
of the Zionists is hypocritical. For years now Zionist organisations like the
misnamed Campaign Against Anti-Semitismand UK Lawyers for Israelhave gaslighted and doxxed
anti-Zionists and Palestinians like Miller himself and Shahd Abusalama.
Of course if the Police were to act as the Board of Deputies enforcers
then of course we would defend Miller despite his stupidity.
I am currently being prosecuted for support for the Palestinian
Resistance. I was targeted by Heidi Bachram,
who follows in a long tradition of Zionist informers who in countries under
Nazi occupation betrayed Jews to the Gestapo.
Heidi Bachram would have been in her element feeding the Stasi or the Gestapo with 'useful information' on their enemies
Scottish PSC has tried to arrange a debate between Miller and myself without
success. Miller has shied away from debating his ideas. David knows that what
he is saying is indefensible.
The idea that the West supports Israel because Zionists have crept into powerful
positions barely merits a response. Are the Christian Zionists in Trump’s
cabinet all infiltrators?Is Marco
Rubio, US Secretary of State a Zionist infiltrator?
Does the German state support Israel and attack Palestine solidarity demonstrations
because of Jews? Why does the AfD, which
is riddled with neo-Nazis and holocaust deniers, love Israel so
much?
Far-right and neo-Nazi groups are happy to support Zionism and Israel, not
because they love Jews but because they hate Muslims and love imperialism. In
appearing on anti-Semitic and White Supremacist platforms like Stew Peters he is
mixing in some very unsavoury company. Miller seems to have no sense of
self-awareness.
2.They are
over-represented in Europe, North America and Latin America in positions of
cultural, economic and political power.
3.They are therefore, in a
position to discriminate against actually marginalised groups.
In reaction to criticism of this tweet I defended it although I had
grave misgivings, in particular about the third point.
Miller was correct to say that Jews are not discriminated against or
experiencing racism. There is no state anti-Semitism in Britain. Anti-Semitism
is a marginal prejudice not a form of racism with all its power dynamics. I was
saying this long before Miller, as was Norman Finkelstein and others. I could
even go along with his observations on Jewish 'overrepresentation' in
positions of power, because statistically and sociologically it is true.
However where I parted company was Miller's third point that this
enabled Jews to discriminate against those who were oppressed. If Jews in
powerful positions discriminate against others they do it as part of the group
or organisations they are part of, not as Jews. In private communication with
Miller I made my position clear
I know it's bleak but there is an inescapable fact that, through my work, I have long been trying to explain: the war in the Levant has no borders, because Zionism has no borders.
So when you, in Britain or France or Germany, are having mosques shut down and Muslim homes are… https://t.co/n5EWFfXOWi
In this long rambling tweet Miller
declared that ‘the State of Israel is at war with you’. That when activists
or Muslims are arrested by 'counter-terror' police, “that is being done directly on behalf of the State of Israel”
Miller is arguing that Islamaphobia in the West is a product of Zionism
and Israel. “the soldiers of Zion have
penetrated the security establishment of your state to make its policy.”
How they managed to achieve this is not explained. To call this conspiratorial
is an understatement.
At a stroke Miller erases the racism that results from colonialism
and imperialism. Trump’s Muslim ban was a
consequence of the Israeli state not racism in America.What of the racism against Hispanics in the
United States? Did Trump labelling all
Mexicans as rapists arise from the soldiers of Zion? Are the deportations to Latin America all Israel’s
fault?Apparently so.
This is easy to explain. The global Left is occupied and infiltrated by Zionist fanatics who cloak themselves in socialist and 'pro-Palestinian' garb, which has caused deep confusion among gullible white leftists in particular.
It is not difficult to see how this kind of conspiratorial
fantasy degenerates into anti-Semitism. When I was young British fascists
condemned Israel. Not because of what it did to Palestinians but because in
their eyes it was a ‘Jewish’ state. The Palestine solidarity movement wanted
nothing to do with them but Miller with his appearance on the Stew Peters Show
and other tweets seems to be embracing them.
Racism in the West is not the product of support for Israel and
its soldiers of Zion. It is home
grown.Of course today Islamaphobia in
the West is goes hand in hand with support for Israel, which is seen as an
anti-Islamic state. But that is a very different thing. Miller says
‘Take Geert Wilders, in the Netherlands, ... Wilders can be
said to be a creation of the State of Israel and its foreign
intelligence assets.’
This is completely unsupported by anything in the way of
evidence. Geert Wilders is the product of racism in The Netherlands. He is a
home-grown fascist. His support for Zionism and Israel flows from that. In his
own words
If
Jerusalem falls into the hands of the Muslims, Athens and Rome will be next.
Miller
therefore exonerates the British and other states of racism by saying that
their racism is not the product of their own class societies but solely that of
Israel.
Miller talks about ‘the global struggle against Jewish supremacism’. In this phrase Miller
conflates all Jewish people with the Israeli state like the Zionists. That
Israel is a Jewish Supremacist state is a fact which Israel’s human rights
group Bt’selem testifies to.
Again it is difficult not to take this as a call to oppose Jews everywhere and to
brand them all as Jewish Supremacists.
Even accepting that two-thirds of diaspora Jews support Israel
and Zionism, for a whole number of historical reasons, I doubt if any but a
fraction are open Jewish supremacists. Most Jews see Israel, wrongly, as some
form of refuge against anti-Semitism. Of course a minority are overt racists
and Jewish supremacists but even they are not arguing for Jewish supremacism within the societies they live in.
Despite his academic status Miller’s language is sloppy, vague
and open to misinterpretation. It is not helped by the fact that instead of
putting his ideas down on paper he tweets out his latest undigested ideas and
thoughts.
Miller confirms that he is no anti-imperialist or socialist when
he says that the British and US states don’t do what they do because of
imperialism and their need to subjugate, exploit and conquer, but because of
infiltration. He even says that
there's no such thing
as 'foreign' policy. The British state has made a colossal miscalculation by
participating so directly in this genocide,... The British people will have to
repair this trajectory by taking British political and public institutions out
of the grip of Zionist fanatics. This is the only way to preserve the balance
of British society in the long-term. It is essential that Britain is de-Zionised,
In other words he is arguing that the support of the British state for Israel
is on account of a handful of Zionist fanatics.
Without them the state would be quite a benign institution. It wouldn’t be
imperialist or racist, cut disability benefits or privatise the NHS. Instead
A de-Zionised Britain
could be an example to other post-imperial states in how to confront centuries
of imperial violence and chart a course away from the suicidal client
relationship with the US.
This is utter garbage and has nothing to do with a principled
opposition to imperialism, let alone Zionism. It ignores the economic
imperative behind imperialism. Anyone who thinks Miller is on the left is wrong.
I responded to this here and JVL
republished it as Looking down the wrong end
of the telescope.
In another conspiratorial tweet
we are told that the ‘global left is
occupied and infiltrated by Zionist fanatics.’ For someone who is a
Professor Miller is remarkably imprecise in his language. Who is this global
left? One of the problems with the left is that it isn’t united but in Miller’s
fevered imagination it is homogenous!
The left is
divided into Marxists, Stalinists, Trotskyists, Social Democrats and the
unaligned. There is little agreement between them. But in Miller’s fantasies we
are all infiltrated.
Miller
doesn’t realise that attitudes on the Left towards Israel have changed. In the
wake of the Nazi holocaust most people on the left saw the establishment of the
Israeli state as some form of recompense. They were wrong not to see that an
ethno-nationalist Jewish state could not help but become an echo of everything
they had escaped from. I summed this up when I said that ‘Israel was Hitler’s bastard offspring’.
The Labour
left around Tribune saw Zionism and Israel as progressive. The Labour Party saw
settler colonialism as a positive thing and the natives were invisible. This
was why people like Hyndman of the Social Democratic Federation supported the Boers in the Second Boer War.
Much of the Trotskyist
movement adopted a position of neutrality during the Nakba seeing the 1948 war
as one between British imperialism and its Arab allies and Israel. The
Communist Party, after Stalin’s about turn in 1947 supported UN resolution 181
partitioning Palestine and with it the creation of the Israeli state.
However
times have changed and the key point was the invasion of Lebanon in 1982 when
both Tony Benn and Eric Heffer resigned from
Labour Friends of Israel. The scales fell from their eyes. In 1948 most people
knew nothing of the Nakba. What they saw were those who had survived Hitler’s genocide
struggling again to survive. They were wrong. As we now know Zionism had much
in common with the Nazis ideologically and had collaborated with them, as my
book Zionism During the Holocaust
explains. Israel’s fledgling army had been trained by the British and easily
saw off the ramshackle Arab armies with the exception of Transjordan’s Arab
Legion commanded by Glubb Pasha.
With the
rise in support for anti-imperialist struggles, the revolution in Cuba and opposition
to the Vietnam War and Apartheid in South Africa, the left moved into the
Palestiniancamp internationally. Israel
was seen as an arm of US imperialism.
In the
Labour Party it was the right-wing which had historically been pro-Arab and
pro-Palestinian.People like Christopher Mayhew, David Watkins and
Andrew Faulds. After 1982 the Right began
to realign and Tony Blair made support for Zionism virtually a condition of New
Labour.
So Miller is
wrong on this point. The global left is less occupied by Zionists than it ever
has been. He says that ‘'Pro-Palestinian' is a meaningless term’.Perhaps to David but not to Palestinians.
Miller says that ‘A basic
tenet of anti-imperialism is to begin with suspicion when confronted by
possible agents of Empire.’ Really?A basic tenet of anti-imperialism is support for the oppressed against
the oppressor. We are told that:
leftists around the
world are constantly deferring to Jewish 'allies' for analysis on Zionism... Not only do these
leftists refuse to protect their movements from entryism, they actively
solicit, privilege and even worship Jewish opinion about Jewish supremacist
crimes.
It is impossible to interpret this as anything other than
anti-Semitic and a symptom of Miller’s hostility to the left. Jews supporting
the Palestinians should be treated with suspicion. Miller fails to acknowledge
that Jews might have good reason to oppose Zionism in the same way as Jewish communists
and the Bund opposed Zionism in their time.
Jews are part of the Palestine solidarity movement. Of course Jews,
including Israeli Jews, might have a special understanding of Zionism having
gone through a process of deprogramming but that isn’t because they are Jewish.
It is a recognition that anti-Zionist Jews have a special expertise.
We only have to think of people like Moshe Machover, Ilan Pappe,
Avi Shlaim, Haim Bresheeth – even myself! It was the Israeli group Matzpen
which was first began
calling Israel a settler colonial state.
Jewish activists have been to the fore in occupying
Congress. Whilst Jewish Voice for Peace have been organising thousands
of its supporters David Miller has been waging war against Jewish
‘infiltrators’ on Twitter.
This kind of attack, which can only turn the solidarity movement
against itself is divisive and destructive. Miller is effectively doing the
Zionists’ work.
American Jews are divided as never before, especially young Jews.
Jewish students have been an integral part of the campus protests in the United
States and Britain. Jonathan Ben-Menachem was one of many Jewish students who joined the protests at
Columbia and other universities across the US calling for their
institutions to cut ties with companies linked to Israel. In an interview he
described his
amazement
as the media and political figures have attempted to characterise the protests
as antisemitic and dangerous, despite Jewish student organisations playing a
central role in them.’
There has been this discourse that Columbia
is this hotbed of antisemitism,... It’s crazy how bad faith that discourse has
become.
Sarah, also a Jewish student at Columbia, was arrested for taking part
in the encampment. She was held by the NYPD for eight hours, with her hands in
zip ties. She was suspended the next day, but snuck back onto campus a few days
later to take part in a Passover Seder celebration with fellow protesters.
“It was definitely
one of the more joyful experiences I’ve had at Columbia,” she told The
Independent. “So many of us got arrested or suspended, it was really nice
to see so many Jewish faces at the Seder.”
Sarah had been
appalled by attempts to smear the Columbia protests as antisemitic, saying that
the term had been
weaponized
in a really deceitful way by political opportunists who insist on conflating
anti-Zionism and antisemitism.
There’s
never any substantive response to people like me who are anti-Zionist Jews,”
Sarah noted. “There’s a long tradition of Jewish anti-Zionism.
Nara Milanich,
professor of history at Barnard College, asked:
Are Jews on campus, or anyone else, safer
because hundreds of police in riot gear with firearms were invited to come onto
campus and haul our students off in zip ties? I don’t feel safer,” she
said.
According to
Miller all of those quoted above are
Jewish infiltrators whom
non-Jewish Palestine solidarity protesters are deferring to. Whereas to the press
and politicians like Starmer and Braverman anti-Zionist Jews are invisible.
Important thread. Don’t agree with everything in it. But the ideas need discussion.
There is an actual academic literature on this.
Are Jews so (relatively) privileged because of ‘intelligence’ or ‘culture’?
What really
made me sit up and take note of Miller’s direction of travel was his retweeting of an
article by Richard Lynn, editor of Mankind Quarterly‘On the high intelligence and cognitive
achievements of Jews in Britain’.
Mankind
Quarterly isn’t some obscure academic journal. It was was
established in 1960 with funding from White segregationists opposed
to civil rights in America. It has been described as a ‘white supremacist
journal’ and ‘a pseudo-scholarly outlet
for promoting racial inequality.’
When I first
saw the tweet I immediately saw that it smacked of the racial sciences:
Are Jews so
(relatively) privileged because of ‘intelligence’ or ‘culture’? Or are there
other explanations? And what are the consequences in terms of the power and
influence of Zionism and the production of genocide in Palestine and
Islamophobia in the West?
Miller saw a
connection between ‘Jewish intelligence’ and Zionism. I explained in my response that Zionism was the idea of
British imperialism and its Christian Zionist advocates not Jews.
A lead article in The
Times of 17 August 1840, called for a plan 'to plant the Jewish people in the land of their fathers' claiming that
it was under 'serious political
consideration' and commending the efforts of Lord Shaftesbury. When
Palmerston approached the Board of Deputies in August 1840 to inquire about co-operation
in Jewish settlement projects, he got a very lukewarm response. The only ones
who didn’t want to ‘return’ were the Jews themselves! In a resolution passed on
7 November 1842 the Board of Deputies resolved that it
'is precluded from originating any measure for carrying out the
benevolent views of Colonel Churchill respecting the Jews of Syria’.
On 'Yuval Abraham' (a name as preposterous as the idea of a Jewish colony in Palestine) and the Oscars:
It's tiring to even have to say this but there are no 'Israeli' anti-Zionists. They are occupiers living on stolen land, and some engage in egregious publicity stunts to even…
In his
latest tweet Miller
simply digs himself further into a hole. We are told that ‘there are no 'Israeli' anti-Zionists’. Presumably my comrades Ronnie
Barkan and Stav, who are currently facing trial for participating in a Palestine
Action outing and who are already on suspended sentences don’t exist?Both of them are Israeli.
Miller also doubts that there are ‘more than a handful of Jewish anti-Zionists anywhere, particularly if
we assess anti-Zionism on a *material* basis.’ What is this material
basis?Apparently we must first become
martyrs! I wonder if this applies to non-Jews and if not why not?
Apparently I was one of the few Jewish anti-Zionists he conceded
did exist but I suspect that after this article I will also be relegated!
Miller is not only going down an anti-Semitic rabbit hole but a
Zionist one too. Zionists claim that all Jews, bar a handful of ‘self-haters’
are Zionists. Anti-Semites too are happy to see Jews as Zionists with anti-Zionist
Jews rendered invisible.
It is extremely sad and regrettable that Miller is unable to see that Zionism was the
adopted policy of British and then US imperialism well before Jews. Jews provided
the imperialists with legitimacy. Winkling out Zionists is not a strategy.
NYU Cancelled a Talk by Dr Joanne Liu
of Doctors Without Borders Because
They Feared She Would Mention the US Sponsored Genocide in Gaza
The
cancellation of a talk on 19 March by Dr Joanne Liu, a past-President of Médecins Sans Frontières(Doctors
Without Borders) and a Professor at Montreal’s McGill University, on ‘challenges
in humanitarian crises’ demonstrates the crisis of democracy in the United
States.
It also
demonstrates the cowardice and self-censorship of America's Corporate Universities
and their Administrations. Instead of fighting for the principles of academic
freedom that they avow in theory, they have simply surrendered.
NYU has an endowment of $6.7
billion. Columbia’s endowment is
$14.8. They have been described as hedge funds with a university attached. It’s
not that NYU doesn’t lack lofty policies. Quite the contrary.
It states under The Case for Academic
Freedomthat
Academic freedom is essential to the free
search for truth and its free expression. Freedom in research is fundamental to
the advancement of truth. Freedom in teaching is fundamental for the protection
of the rights of the faculty member in teaching and of the student in learning.
Academic freedom imposes distinct obligations on the faculty member such as
those mentioned hereinafter.
But like the
neighbouring Columbia University, NYU is running scared. Médecins Sans Frontières is hardly a radical organisation but its work combating the effects of the American sponsored Genocide in Gaza and Israel’s ethnic cleansing in the
West Bank, was more than enough for NYU to get cold feet.
The fact that only the Guardianand
Montreal’s CTV Newshas even covered the story (though that may be changing) speaks volumes. It is noticeable that the New York Times has ignored it. After
having whitewashed Israel’s Genocide in Gaza it is in no position to stand up
to Trump.
Once again Zionism and ‘anti-Semitism’ is the pretext for censorship. They
dress up American foreign policy interests as concern for those poor Zionist Jews
on campus who are suffering from a non-existent anti-Semitism. Of course the
welfare of anti-Zionist Jewish students is of no concern.
The night before her presentation, Liu got a call from the vice chair of
the education department who raised concerns.
A couple of the slides in her presentation touched on Gaza’s Genocide as
well as the CIA cut-out, USAID. NYU was concerned that mentioning cuts in USAID
might be perceived as “anti governmental”
and we wouldn’t want that would we?What
was that about academic freedom being ‘essential
for the free search for truth and its free expression’?
Racial Cleansing or Rassenhygiene was the term the Nazis used in respect of Jews, Roma and other non-Aryans
Liu said she was told the slides about Gaza “could be perceived as antisemitic”. Well these days just about
anything could be perceived as ‘anti-Semitic’. I imagine that a boil on the
backside could be! And opposing genocide is certainly ‘anti-Semitic’ in the
eyes of those who use Jews to justify the Empire’s more grotesque activities.
Liu, who by then was already in New York when she got the phone call, offered
to make edits to the slides in question but three hours later, the university phoned
back and said they were cancelling anyway.
Langone Health, NYU’s Medical Centre told CTV News
that “Guest speakers at our institution
are given clear guidelines at the outset.... we cannot host speakers who don’t
comply.” Controlled Speech is not Free Speech. But they reassured CTV that ‘we did fully compensate this guest for her
travel and time.”Well that’s
alright then but did they consult the Trump White House before paying money
over to this terrorist sympathiser in the guise of a doctor?
Liu said that she “was stunned,”
but why?Democracy in the United States,
which has always been a sickly child is now on its death bed. Universities are
demonstrating that under capitalism money talks loudest of all or, in Dylan’s immortal phrase money doesn’t talk it swears.
NYU campus
Bruce Robbins, a
Jewish Columbia professor, slams the university’s response to Trump's
Demands
Liu wrote about her ordeal in an op-ed in Le Devoir
referencing the abject cowardice of Columbia University Administration which rushed to meet
Trump’s demands with expulsions of students, the revoking of degrees and placing
its Middle Eastern,
South Asian and African Studies department under martial law.Columbia’s interim president, Dr. Katrina A.
Armstrong, also stepped down.
Mentioning the fact that Israel specialises in bombing hospitals, universities
and schools, not forgetting churches and mosques, is terribly anti-Semitic because,
as we know, most Jews support burning children alive in their tent
encampments.Today Jews are the excuse
for any atrocity.
Hans Luther - Nazi Ambassador to the USA who was welcomed on campus by university administrations
The irony, as I said in my Open Letter to Linda Mills is that her partner-in-crime,
Columbia University, fired Jerome Klein, a member of the fine arts
faculty in September 1934, for signing a letter protesting Columbia’s
invitation to Hans Luther, Nazi Germany’s Ambassador to the US.
Luther also visited the
University of Minnesota in 1935, as well as St. Paul and Minneapolis. He was
hosted by the German Department for a tea. Students attempting to ask him
questions were restrained by Dean Anne Blitz.
His visit touched off a campus-wide discussion on boycotting the 1936
Berlin Olympics. Dean Edward Nicholson would not allow students to distribute
literature about the boycott.
The predecessors of the same creatures, who today fall over themselves
to protect the Israeli state’s genocide, in the name of 'anti-Semitism' of course, were 90 years ago protecting
Nazi Germany. It is the same in this country. The BBC, which accommodates the fake anti-Semitism narrative whenever it can, barely mentioned anti-Semitismbetween 1933 and 1939 .
In other words, when anti-Semitism was a genuine form of racism, the ruling class and its university apparatchiks weren't interested. Nowhere is this more evident than
with Trump. Trump has fallen
over himself to oppose anti-Semitism on campus, despite having pro-Nazi figures like Sebastian Gorka in his Administration. But what's strange is that an out and out racist
like Trump is so concerned with anti-Semitism when no other form of racism or oppression
bothers him?
In 1936 Robert
Burke, a Columbia student, was expelled for participating in a mock book
burning and anti-Nazi picket on campus. Stephen Norwood wrote in ‘The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower’
about how
“American
universities maintained amicable relations with the Third Reich, sending their
students to study at Nazified universities while welcoming Nazi exchange
students to their own campuses.’
So as I wrote to Linda
Mills:
your
behaviour today in supporting the extermination of the Palestinians of Gaza,
because that is what it amounts to, is really no different to the reaction of
American universities to the Nazi regime, except that the extermination is
being carried out by Jews (or rather Zionist Jews) rather than them being done
to them.
A glimpse of the farewell for the eight PRCS medics killed by Israeli forces while performing their humanitarian duties in Rafah: Mustafa Khafaja, Ezzedine Sha’at, Saleh Moammar, Rifaat Radwan, Mohammad Behloul, Ashraf Abu Labda, Mohammad Al-Hila, and Raed Al-Sharif. 🙏 Mercy… pic.twitter.com/6wFcfjjybC
The latest atrocity in Gaza is Israel’s execution of Red Crescent and first
responders last week. The Red Cross said it was "appalled" by the deaths of the medical teams.
While
carrying out their work, along with first responders from the Civil Defense in
Gaza and a staff member of the United Nations, their bodies were identified
today and have been recovered for dignified burial.
The Red Cross added,
International
humanitarian law is clear: medical personnel, ambulances, humanitarian relief
personnel, and civil defense organizations must be respected and protected.
Attacking them or obstructing their passage is strictly prohibited. All
feasible steps must be taken to ensure their safety.
We are told that we must
‘learn the lessons of the Holocaust’by Zionist organisations such as the misnamed
Holocaust Education Trust
who accuse opponents of Gaza’s holocaust of ‘anti-Semitism’.
I guess one lesson is that if you are going
to put anyone in a gas chamber just check first that they aren’t Jewish.
Because for Zionism only Jewish Lives Matter (unless they are anti-Zionist
Jews!).
As Columbia University’s Jewish Professor Bruce Robbins said of the allegations of anti-Semitism,
they are ‘completely lame
and unconvincing.’
A McGill University professor told CTV News last week that he cancelled three visits to
the U.S. due to the current political climate and what he believes
is the “breakdown of the rule of law”
south of the border. He said other colleagues are also avoiding visits to the United States. Trump wants Canada to become the 51st
state in order that he can impose the same police state north of the border.
Liu said that she hopes this “assault on academia.” doesn’t creep up north and that universities
remain a place where different points of view and facts are not silenced.
Meanwhile American academics who retain their integrity are looking for a future outside of the United
States given the cowardice and capitulation of their own administrations. 3 Yale professors are fleeing, amongst whom is Tim Snyder, the author ofThe Bloodlands and Jason Stanley, a
scholar on fascism, whose grandmother fled Hitler.
Linda Mills - NYU President - the Pathetic Face of America's Corporate Universities
I have also sent an Open Letter to Linda Mills, the President of NYU. Below is a list of NYU email
addresses for senior management who you might want to contact.
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