Labour’s Thought Police claims another victim - Black Jewish activist Jackie Walker

May 5, 2016, 6:07 pm

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Labour’s McCarthyist purge is led by the British representatives of the Zionist & racist Israeli Labour Party

Black Jewish Momentum activist suspended after being targeted by racists & Zionists

Jackie Walker is Vice Chair of both Momentum and Thanet Labour Party. She is Black and of Jewish descent. She has just been suspended as part of Labour’s racist witch hunt. As a Black and Jewish anti-racist she was perhaps an inevitable target. Most of the victims so far have been Muslims or Black people, with a couple of Jewish anti-racists thrown in for good measure. She has been suspended at the instigation of the Israel Advocacy Movement.

It is essential that Momentum now finds its voice and opposes this witch hunt and the suspension of Jackie Walker or else the Right will walk all over it. It looks as if the Right's campaign over 'anti-semitism' has already been responsible for a poor showing by Labour in the Council elections.

Either Jon Lansman as Chair of Momentum gives a lead in this and breaks off his cosy chats with those in Labour Friends of Israel/JLM who are spearheading the witch hunt or he should be removed as soon as possible.

It is also essential that Jeremy Corbyn now remembers his roots, his work in the past for the Palestinians and begins to grow a backbone once again

This is an organisation that proclaims that its mission is to 'successfully repel the libellous accusations Israel's detractors frequently hurl.'

The Israeli Labour Party that the Labour Zionists are in a World Union with were close friends of the White Supremacist Apartheid state in South Africa

Under Palestinian refugees it takes issue with the Israeli Zionist historian Benny Morris. Morris in the 1980's, through the use of recently opened Hagannah archives, proved without a doubt that the Palestinian refugees were expelled. Morris does not condemn Israel for doing so, on the contrary he believes they should have expelled all the refugees and not 90% of them.

John Vorster, South Africa's Apartheid Prime Minister was a member of the Broederbond and interned for supporting the Nazis in the war

The IAM summarises Morris' argument as follows:

'The refugee problem was caused by attacks by Jewish forces on Arab villages and towns and by the inhabitants’ fear of such attacks, compounded by expulsions, atrocities, and rumors of atrocities — and by the crucial Israeli Cabinet decision in June 1948 to bar a refugee return.'

This is born out my the archives, witnesses who participated in these events and by e.g. Menachem Begin, former Likud Prime Minister, who boasts that the massacre at Deir Yassin village near Jerusalem, provoked the flight of the Arabs.

According to the Israeli Advocacy Movement

As many of the Arabs were recent migrants or the children/grandchildren of recent migrants, they simply returned to the neighbouring countries they’d originally came from when they fled.

Many Arab villages were systematically depopulated by the Arab Liberation Army (an army of volunteer soldiers from Arab countries sponsored by the Arab League) and local gangs loyal to the Arab Higher Committee (the de facto Palestinian government headed by the Grand Mufti). The empty villages were then transformed into military positions for anti-Jewish attacks.

These are the Zionist equivalent of holocaust deniers. But these racists and revisionists are the ones who are driving the witch hunt. What we need is an investigation into racism in the Compliance Unit of the Labour Party and the suspension of its head, John Stolliday pending such an investigation.

Jacqueline’s real crime is that she is also an anti-Zionist. This is intolerable to Stolliday and Iain McNicol, Labour’s General Secretary.

Jackie Walker's comments on Jewish involvement in the slave trade - certain subjects are verboten

Jackie's partner, Graham Bash, who is a life long Jewish activist in the Labour Party, has issued an open letter to those who have suspended Jackie Walker:

Anti-Semitism and the Labour Party

As a Jew (all my life) and Labour Party member (48 years) I am outraged at the way allegations of anti-Semitism have been used to silence legitimate criticism of Israel and undermine Jeremy Corbyn as my party’s leader.

I know what anti-Semitism is. I was brought up to learn how the Jewish East End fought with the dockers against Mosley’s fascists at Cable Street. I was told at school how it was a pity that Hitler didn’t finish off the job of murdering all Jews. And very quickly I learned what it was like to be made to feel an outsider. It was hardly surprising that I started going on anti- fascist demos in my late teens and very soon afterwards joined the Labour Party, which I remain a member of to this day.

I know what anti-Semitism is. Apart from socialist, anti-racist politics, my other love is football. How many times as a West Ham fan have I had to endure my own team’s fans singing “I never felt more like gassing the Jews”? Or being attacked by my team’s own fans for daring to put up a ‘West Ham fans United Against Racism’ banner at Upton Park.

I know what anti-Semitism is - I have a sensitive ear for anti-Semitic comments - and, without doubt, the place I have encountered it least is within the Labour Party. In 48 years, I have encountered anti-Semitism once, perhaps twice, compared to countless episodes outside.

Of course I have encountered deep antipathy to Israel, and its murderous actions to deny justice for Palestinians, but that is what I would expect from a democratic anti-racist party – and these are views shared by me and many other peace loving socialist Jews.

Throughout most of my years in the party, I have worked closely with Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell. They have always been the first to fight injustice and inequality and from them there has never been a hint of anti-Semitism.

What is happening in the party today is an attempt to cynically use rare examples, and usually false allegations, of anti-Semitism as part of a McCarthyite witchhunt against supporters of Jeremy. As if to prove the point, the latest victim is my own partner and anti-racist campaigner, Jackie Walker, of mixed heritage (Afro- Caribbean and Jewish), outrageously suspended from the Labour Party, simply for telling the truth that her Jewish ancestors were involved in financing the Slave Trade, that the African holocaust was even worse than the Jewish holocaust, and that anti-Semitism is not a major problem in Corbyn’s Labour Party.

I am proud of the heritage and family traditions that helped my development on the road to being an anti-racist, international socialist. This current witchhunt will not deflect me, and countless thousands like me, from the struggle for justice worldwide and for a socialist Labour government led by Jeremy Corbyn.

Graham Bash

The Israeli Labour Party, when it was in power, established the closest of relations with the Apartheid Government in South Africa. It partnered a joint arms and steel company in South Africa, Iskandoor (an offshoot of Histadrut’s Koor Industries conglomerate – Histadrut being both Israel’s trade union federation and the 2^nd largest employer at the time). Israeli Labour shared nuclear technology with South Africa in return for financing its own nuclear weapons projects.

Israeli Labour is a party that was responsible for the expulsion of ¾ million Palestinians, the massacre of thousands of them and a refusal to readmit any refugees for fear of endangering the Jewish demographic majority in Israel. It is because of this fear that Arabs might outnumber Jews that it sponsored the Koenig Plan of Judaisation in the Galilee and similar programmes in the Negve. If you want a comparison try the DeJewification programs of the Nazis and you’ll get the flavour. Same mentality even if expulsion rather than extermination was the method.

Israeli Labour is a party that kept Israel’s Palestinians under military rule for 18 years, confiscated their land, refused to recognise ½ their villages and detained political radicals without trial indefinitely. An Israeli Labour Party whose leader talks about it not being an ‘Arab loving’ party.

I only met Jackie Walker last month when she came to chair the Brighton and Hove Momentum meeting. Ironically the subject of my suspension came up when the meeting voted, with only 1 against, to oppose the suspension. Jackie spoke briefly of the fact that there seemed to be more and more suspensions locally, never dreaming that she might fall victim.

What was Jackie’s offence? She wrote ‘many Jews (my ancestors too) were the chief financiers of the sugar and slave trade which is of course why there were so many early synagogues in the Carribean.’

This is a statement of fact that can be demonstrated in many an academic journal. When taking an MA in imperial history at London University I studied the slave trade and came across Jewish involvement quite often. It is a fact. Jews weren’t the only people involved in the trade, nor did they play a predominant role but nor were they absent. It is quite proper to point out that Jews have not only been oppressed in history but have also been persecutors. Just as today, Jews are primarily oppressors in their role as Zionists whereas anti-Semitism is at a historic low.

What we are seeing today is that the Zionist movement is using the marginal existence of anti-Semitism, it is more a prejudice than a form of state racism, and redefining it in order to fool the more gullible and guilt tripped left, like Owen Jones, Jon Lansman and now John McDonnell and Jeremy Corbyn.

Of course fascists and anti-Semitic site the fact of Jewish involvement to say that it was the Jews who were responsible for the slave trade. But since when do we take our cue from fascists and anti-Semites? Are we to restrict what we say in case they misuse it? They will anyway. Christians too played their full part. There is for example the notorious example of the Church of England Codrington plantation in Barbados. The CoE resisted the abolition of slavery till the end. The Quakers too were heavily involved in both slavery and ironically opposition to slavery. I’m not aware of any major Jewish participation in the anti-slavery movement though I have no doubt that given that Manchester was one of the main centres of the British anti-slavery movement that there would have been many individual Jews involved, since Manchester had the second largest Jewish community in Britain after London. One anti-slavery activist who was well known was a Rabbi G. Gottheil.

Below is an article from the Jewish Journal on Jewish involvement in slavery in The Netherlands. The Jewish Journal according to its website is the largest Jewish weekly newspaper in the United States outside of New York City.’

There is also an excellent review of the Nation of Islam’s The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews: Volume One by Winthrop D Jordan September 1995 Jordan points out that the main Jewish involvement was in the Brazil and Suriname trade and it was mainly Dutch Jews who had been expelled from Spain and Portugal who were involved. Jewish involvement in the British and French slave trade was thought to be minimal though there were considerable numbers in the southern American states.

The Nation of Islam has a reputation for anti-Semitism being a Black separatist group. In reality it apes and mimicks white anti-Semitism as an oppressed group and it is also a reaction to Jewish racism. It has been particularly attacked by racist Zionist groups like the Anti-Defamation League which lauded Ronald Reagan and awarded him its Torch of Liberty award and the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, which in 1988, awarded Reagan, supporter of the Argentinian Junta and the Nicaraguan Contras, with the “Humanitarian of the Year” award despite his speech at Bitburg cemetery in Germany where he said that the SS were “victims of the Nazis just as surely as the victims in the concentration camps.” The ADL has a reputation for hypocrisy (it has also supported John Hagee President of Christians United 4 Israel when he described Hitler as god’s hunter sent to drive Jews to Israel).

The suspension of Jackie Walker for daring to raise the topic of Jewish involvement in the slave trade, as if its anti-Semitic to even discuss these matters, is outrageous. We now have a list of forbidden topics laid down by our McCarthyist masters.

We should demand the closing down of the Compliance Unit and the dismissal of both Stolliday and McNicol.

Tony Greenstein

How culpable were Dutch Jews in the slave trade?

Cnaan Liphshiz and Iris Tzur, JTA

Posted on Dec. 26, 2013 at 1:33 pm

Amsterdam musicians dressing up as Black Pete, the slave of the Dutch Santa Claus, Sinterklaas. (Cnaan Liphshiz/JTA)

On a busy street near the Dutch Parliament, three white musicians in blackface regale passersby with holiday tunes about the Dutch Santa Claus, Sinterklaas, and his slave, Black Pete.

Many native Dutchmen view dressing up as Black Pete in December as a venerable tradition, but others consider it a racist affront to victims of slavery. With Holland marking the 150th anniversary of abolition this year, the controversy over Black Pete has reached new heights. Hundreds demonstrated against the custom in Amsterdam last month, and more than 2 million signed a petition supporting it.

Through it all, Dutch Jews — some of whom celebrate their own version of the Black Pete custom, called “Hanukklaas” — have largely remained silent.

But that changed in October, when Lody van de Kamp, an unconventional Orthodox rabbi, wrote a scathing critique about it on Republiek Allochtonie, a Dutch news-and-opinion website. “The portrayal of ‘Peter the slave’ dates back to a period when we as citizens did not meet the social criteria that bind us today,” Van de Kamp wrote.

Speaking out against Black Pete is part of what van de Kamp calls his social mission, an effort that extends to reminding Dutch Jews of their ancestors’ deep involvement in the slave trade. In April, he is set to publish a book about Dutch Jewish complicity in the slave trade, an effort he hopes will sensitize Jews to slavery in general and to the Black Pete issue in particular.

“I wrote the book and I got involved in the Black Pete debate because of what I learned from my Dutch predecessors on what it means to be a rabbi — namely, to speak about social issues, not only give instructions on how to cook on Shabbat,” van de Kamp told JTA.

“Money was earned by Jewish communities in South America, partly through slavery, and went to Holland, where Jewish bankers handled it,” he said. “Non-Jews were also complicit, but so were we. I feel partly complicit.”

Though he holds no official position in the Dutch Jewish community, van de Kamp, 65, is among the best-known Orthodox rabbis in the Netherlands, a status earned through his several books on Dutch Jewry and frequent media appearances.

His forthcoming book, a historical novel entitled “The Jewish Slave,” follows an 18th-century Jewish merchant and his black slave as they investigate Dutch-owned plantations north of Brazil in the hope of persuading Jews to divest from the slave trade. In researching the book, van de Kamp discovered data that shocked him.

In one area of what used to be Dutch Guyana, 40 Jewish-owned plantations were home to a total population of at least 5,000 slaves, he says. Known as the Jodensavanne, or Jewish Savannah, the area had a Jewish community of several hundred before its destruction in a slave uprising in 1832.

Nearly all of them immigrated to Holland, bringing their accumulated wealth with them.

Some of that wealth was on display last year in the cellar of Amsterdam’s Portuguese Synagogue, part of an exhibition celebrating the riches of the synagogue’s immigrant founders. Van de Kamp says the exhibition sparked his interest in the Dutch Jewish role in slavery, which was robust.

On the Caribbean island of Curacao, Dutch Jews may have accounted for the resale of at least 15,000 slaves landed by Dutch transatlantic traders, according to Seymour Drescher, a historian at the University of Pittsburgh. At one point, Jews controlled about 17 percent of the Caribbean trade in Dutch colonies, Drescher said.

Jews were so influential in those colonies that slave auctions scheduled to take place on Jewish holidays often were postponed, according to Marc Lee Raphael, a professor of Judaic studies at the College of William & Mary.

In the United States, the Jewish role in the slave trade has been a matter of scholarly debate for nearly two decades, prompted in part by efforts to refute the Nation of Islam’s claim that Jews dominated the Atlantic slave trade. But in Holland, the issue of Jewish complicity is rarely discussed.

“This is because we in the Netherlands only profited from slavery but have not seen it in our own eyes,” van de Kamp said. “The American experience is different.”

The slavery issue is not van de Kamp’s first foray into controversial territory. In Jewish circles, he has a reputation as a contrarian with a penchant for voicing anti-establishment views.

That image was reinforced last year when he spoke out against a compromise the Dutch Jewish community had reached with the government over kosher slaughter. Designed to avert a total ban, the compromise placed some restrictions on kosher slaughter that Holland’s chief rabbis said did not violate Jewish law. Van de Kamp denounced the deal as an unacceptable infringement on religious freedom.

More recently, he angered Dutch activists by suggesting that vilifying Dutch Muslims helped generate anti-Semitism. He also advocated dialogue with professed Muslim anti-Semites at a time when Jewish groups were calling for their prosecution.

But his reputation as a maverick rabbi in a consensus–oriented community has also endeared van de Kamp to some supporters.

“He is in a league of his own,” says Bart Wallet, an Amsterdam University historian and expert on Jewish history. “From the sideline, he is free to criticize and does not have to conform to anything.”

↧

In Memory of the great anti-war priest Daniel Berrigan

May 6, 2016, 9:12 pm

≫ Next: Planning Laws – Another Example of Israeli Apartheid

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Most priests and religious leaders are like our own Chief Rabbi Mirvis. Pious nationalists who tie the interest of the State to that of religion. In Nazi Germany the Protestant Reich Church had as its slogan ‘with the cross in our hearts and the swastika on our breasts’. Chief Rabbi Mirvis [see Ken Livingstone and the hard Left arespreading the insidious virus of anti-Semitism] believes that Judaism and Zionism are inseparable. Strangely, when Zionism first came on the scene, there was no more ardent opposition to this secular heresy than the Orthodox Jews. Chief Rabbi Herman Adler in Britain was firmly opposed. As politics have changed so the religion has changed and all the old religious arguments against it have now been junked.

Which goes to show that religion is merely a reflection of current politics. Religious leaders like Mirvis just provide a sanctimonious legitimation to Zionist racism by invoking god. Of course every nation that ever went to war did so with god on its side.

Daniel Berrigan was one of those few exceptions. A conscientious Roman Catholic priest who went to prison for opposing the Vietnam War and burning draft papers. In Nazi Germany the only Catholic priest who openly opposed Hitler’s anti-Semitism was Pastor Lichtenberg, whom the then Pope Pius XII did nothing to help. Among Jewish rabbis today there is a similar paucity of figures who stand out against the racism and chauvinism of Zionism. This is especially true of Orthodox Rabbis (the Neturei Karta sect excepted) who prostitute their religion to the chariots of Israeli chauvinism.

Tony Greenstein

Her absurd generals, her military junk’ — Daniel Berrigan’s prophetic speech on Israel in ’73

Rev. Daniel Berrigan in the 70s

I believe this is called a drive-by shooting. The New York Times devotes a whole page or so to an obituary of the great Daniel Berrigan, the Catholic priest who died yesterday in NY at 94. But this is paragraph 39:

After visiting the Middle East, he bluntly accused Israel of “militarism” and the “domestic repressions” of Palestinians. His remarks angered many American Jews. “Let us call this by its right name,” wrote Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg, himself a contentious figure among religious scholars: “old-fashioned theological anti-Semitism.”

The Boston Globe, too.

Father Berrigan’s involvement with politics did not end with his release from prison. He drew widespread criticism for a 1973 speech denouncing Israel.

Sadly the Times did not quote from the speech in any fair measure. Here is the NYT’s coverage of Berrigan’s speech to the Association of Arab University Graduates in Washington 1973. The Times article came out two months after the speech, when Jewish organizations had made it controversial, and sought to have Berrigan stripped of honors for the remarks; after they were printed in a publication of the Clergy and Laity Concerned group.

The speech was an antiwar statement that denounced Israel as a military settler state in the same moral basket as the United States, which was pursuing an imperial adventure in Vietnam.

Quotes in that New York Times PDF include Berrigan’s view that Israel was, like the United States and South Africa, “seeking a biblical justification for crimes against humanity.”

The world had known criminal Christian communities, he said, but “we had never known a criminal Jewish community.” In the wake of the Holocaust, the “Jews arose like warriors, armed to the teeth… Israel entered the imperial adventure.”

A similar racist ideology to Nazism was creating “the myth of the barbarian Arab.”

It was a tragedy, Berrigan said, that in place of Jewish prophetic vision, Israel should launch an Orwellian nightmare of double talk, racism, fifth-rate sociological jargon, aimed at proving its racial superiority to the people it has crushed. …

Israel has not abolished poverty and misery; rather she manufactures human waste, the byproducts of her entrepreneurs. the military-industrial complex. Israel has not freed the captives, she has expanded the prison system, perfected her espionage, exported on the world market that expensive blood-ridden commodity, the savage triumph of the technologized West, violence and the tools of violence.

Her absurd generals, her military junk are paraded on national holidays before the narcotized public. The model is not the kingdom of peace, it is an Orwellian transplant, taken bodily from Big Brother’s bloody heart.

Berrigan said that were he a Jew in Israel, he would be living as he did in the U.S., in resistance to the state and being hunted by the police or in prison.

Berrigan also signaled the corruption of the Jewish establishment in order to lobby the U.S. government in the Vietnam era: “major American Jewish leaders were capable of ignoring Asia’s holocaust in favor of economic and military aid to Israel.”

Here is the JTA’s coverage at the time:

The 52-year-old Jesuit priest who served 27 months in Danbury Federal Penitentiary for burning draft records in Catonsville, Md. in 1968, attacked Israel as an “imperialist nation” and a “settler” state” which is “the creation of an elite of millionaires, generals and entrepreneurs.”..

Among the charges Berrigan made against Israel before the Arab graduates was that “she had turned the law of nature into a mockery, creating ghettos, disenfranchised peoples, exiles, hopeless minorities, cheap labor forces has expanded the prison system, perfected her espionage, exported on the world market that expensive blood ridden commodity, the savage triumph of the technological West–violence and the tools of violence.” In an interview published today in the NY Post, Berrigan was quoted as reaffirming his condemnation of Israel and saying he “was very depressed by the silence of my own church about Israel.” He denied, however, that he was anti-Semitic. “I’m as anti-Semitic as I am anti-Catholic,' the Jesuit priest was quoted as saying.

That article quotes Jewish leaders calling for Berrigan’s reeducation. [shades of Naz Shah MP’s ‘re-education’]

In his book, Middle East Illusions, Noam Chomsky takes Berrigan’s side and describes Hertzberg’s characterization of Berrigan’s speech as “fabrication,” including Hertzberg’s claim that Berrigan sought the end of Israel. Berrigan called on Arab leaders to show “de facto respect for Israel, a de facto state,” and said that American Jews had expressed an “acute and legitimate concern for Israel.” Chomsky points out that Hertzberg regards Arab concerns about Palestinian refugees as “moral hysterics,” and Chomsky savages Hertzberg’s claim that Israel’s acceptance of Jewish refugees from the Soviet Union and Arab countries was an example of the “Jewish passion for the poor and forgotten.” In fact, Chomsky says, it was evidence of the Zionists’ need to build a Jewish state on an ethnocentric basis.

It’s a pity that the New York Times doesn’t explain that Berrigan’s critique of Israel was equally harsh to his criticism of the United States at the time; and more important, that it was prophetic

↧

Planning Laws – Another Example of Israeli Apartheid

May 7, 2016, 3:17 pm

≫ Next: Labour’s Election Results Give Corbyn only a Temporary Reprieve

≪ Previous: In Memory of the great anti-war priest Daniel Berrigan

Officially of course there is no discrimination between Arabs and Israeli Jews when it comes to planning laws. Except that in practice Jewish towns receive planning permission when they need to expand and Arab towns don’t. In fact there has not been one example of a new Arab town in Israel since its foundation in 1948. In that time the Israeli Palestinian population has increased 10 fold to 1.5 million.

Two of the Arab bidders in Afula

It is particularly important for Zionism and the Judaification of Israel that Arabs are not allowed to move into Jewish towns, hence the decision by an Israeli Jews to prevent Arabs building their own homes in a ‘Jewish’ town. Yes most towns and villages in Israel are segregated too.

In Israel half the Arab villages are ‘unrecognised’ which means they receive no normal facilities such as electricity, running water, sewerage etc. and in addition are liable to instant demolition.

See Israel's housing policy for Arabs isdesigned to fail

The following article is from the liberal American Jewish publication Forward. A group of Arab bidders have been refused permission to build homes by a Nazareth court on technical grounds. The fact that Israeli Jews attacked the original decision of the Mayor to grant permission, saying he was a ‘terrorist’ and a ‘traitor’ gives you a flavour of the nature of the objections.

Israeli Judge Says No to Arabs Building in Jewish Town — Cites Bidding Woes

Naomi ZeveloffApril 26, 2016Naomi Zeveloff

Dozens of Arab families who were planning to build homes in the Jewish city of Afula have lost their leases to the land after an Israeli judge said that they illegally coordinated their bids.

The rubble of three houses of the Assaf family hours after they were demolished by the Israeli authorities, on April 15, 2015. Dahmash, located between Lod and Ramle, is the only unrecognized village in central Israel. Oren Ziv / Activestills.org

Last November, hundreds of Jewish residents of Afula protested the prospect of Arab neighbors after Arab families won tenders to build 47 houses in the northern Israeli city. Demonstrators demanded Afula mayor Yitzhak Meron revoke the tenders, calling him a “traitor” and a “terrorist.” Likewise the comment of the Jewish bidders legal representative, Itai Cohen, who celebrated the decision of the Nazareth Court by saying that ‘“This is a day of celebration for Afula, and particularly for those who were concerned about the the fate of the city’s Jewish makeup.”

A group of Jewish families who bid and lost tenders for the land first complained to the Israel Land Authority, contending that the Arab bidders had been in coordination with one another. The ILA rejected the complaint saying that it was natural for bidders with personal connections to exchange information, said Haaretz.

The Jewish families then took their petition to a Nazareth court.

On Sunday April 24, a Nazareth judge ruled in favor of the Jewish families. He said that the Arab families had organized their bids so they weren’t competing against each other and coordinated prices in a manner that “upset the market’s natural balance,”according to Israel’s Ma’ariv newspaper.

Their coordination “seriously harmed the principle of equality, a principle that is at the foundation of tender law,” the judge said.

Israeli police stand guard as the home of Hana al-Nakib and her four children is demolished in the city of Lod, February 10, 2015. Palestinian citizens of Israel can rarely obtain building permits due to discriminatory criterion. (Oren Ziv/Activestills.org)

Itai Cohen, a representative of the Jewish families told Maariv: “This is a day of celebration for Afula, and particularly for those who were concerned about the the fate of the city’s Jewish makeup.”

According to Abdullah Zoabi, a lawyer representing four Arab families, the judge did not rule that the Arab families were disqualified from trying to bid on the land again. Abdullah said he was waiting to learn whether the state would intervene and limit the bidding to Afula’s Jewish residents.

Arab lawmakers are calling foul on the Nazareth court, saying the decision was driven by racism. Knesset Member Basel Ghattas told Maariv that the court’s decision reflected the “spirit of racism that has been sweeping the country. These state institutions have always used planning and construction laws to deprive Arabs of their lands and rights, and the Nazareth District Court’s decision gave a seal of approval to a petition that was lodged exclusively out of racist motives.”

The Nazareth judge invalidated the entire group of tenders, saying that the entire bidding process was “defective” and there was no way to exempt those who did not coordinate. Zoabi’s four clients were found not to have coordinated, but they lost their right to build anyway. He said he that the four families will appeal the decision to the Israeli High Court.

Iman Sharary told the Forward she was extremely disappointed to learn that the Nazareth judge disqualified her family building in Afula. She wanted to lease the land in Afula for her sons and their families, since land is at a premium in Yafia, the village where they grew up. She believes that the judge’s decision was racially motivated.

“It’s so unjust,”she said. “If this is not racism, so what is?”

She said that she and her husband, Riad Sharary, did not coordinate their bid and that she had no idea who the other Arab bidders were. Now, she is looking for a new place for her sons to settle down.

“I’ll find other places. It’s not Afula or nothing,” she said. “There are other places that are much less aggressive and much less humiliating and much less threatening.”

Naomi Zeveloff is the Forward’s Middle East correspondent. Contact her at zeveloff@forward.com or on Twitter @NaomiZeveloff

Israel's Virulent Housing Bias Runs Deep — and It's Not Only Aimed at Arabs

Naomi Zeveloff December 29, 2015

AFULA, Isrsael - From her backyard deck in Yafia, an Arab village west of Nazareth, Iman Sharary, 53, pointed to a plot of land in the distance where her sons will build their homes.

She would have preferred her children stay in Yafia, but with land at a premium in the village, she and her husband sought and won the tender to build in a less expensive area. Afula Illit is a tree-lined suburb about 10 miles south of Yafia. It’s also predominantly Jewish.

Now, the Sharary family is at the center of a local controversy with national proportions. One of dozens of Arab families from northern Israel that won tenders to build 49 homes in Afula Illit, the Shararys and their fellow Arab bidders face the fury of many of their potential Jewish neighbors.

Days after the tender process results were made public, a group of about 200 Afula residents staged a protest, calling on Mayor Yitzhak Meron to revoke the tenders. Demonstrators denounced him as a “traitor” and a “terrorist,” according to press reports. “He wants to build a mosque,” one sign at the protest read.

The Afula episode is only the latest real estate controversy with a racial tinge in Israel. According to the Walla news site, Jewish residents of Ofakim, a city west of Beersheba, won tenders to build in the city but canceled the transaction once they learned that 14 Bedouin residents were planning on settling in the same area.

Naomi Zeveloff: Not in My City: Adeil Eluz, a gas station manager in Afula, is protesting against the prospect of Arabs moving in nearby.

And in November, the Bemuna construction company posted a video advertisement of an Ashkenazi family whose Hanukkah celebration was interrupted by Mizrahi neighbors — Jews of Arab origin — depicted as raucously ignorant of their Ashkenazi holiday traditions. The video, which the company later deleted, was an advertisement for a new housing development in Kiryat Gat that presumably would be free of Mizrahim. “Do you dream of owning your own home?” the voiceover said. “Want neighbors after your own heart?”

Now, Israel’s attorney general has demanded the Israel Land Authority to look into the charge of racial discrimination at Bemuna in the sale of the apartments.

These incidents and others in recent years speak to the deep segregation in Israel. With a few exceptions, like Haifa and Jaffa, Israel is a country split along ethnic and religious lines, with different school systems and population centers for each group. Officially speaking, “there is no legal basis in creating the segregation” when it comes to housing inside the Green Line, said Talya Steiner, a researcher at the Israel Democracy Institute. “It just kind of evolved.”

But the High Court has sanctioned such segregation in recent years by allowing Bemuna, the company with the anti-Mizrachi advertisement, to build housing explicitly marketed to Orthodox, so-called “national religious” Jews, who are predominantly Ashkenazi, in an Arab section of Jaffa.

There are other ways that the state maintains segregation and even helps to deepen inequality between sectors. One has to do with the ultra-Orthodox. Because Haredim, as they are known in Hebrew, have larger families and educate their children in sex-segregated schools, the Housing Ministry acknowledges and supports their need for separate neighborhoods to maintain their lifestyle. Yet the Housing Ministry ran up against “not in my backyard” attitudes from several municipalities when it tried to plan Haredi neighborhoods in cities with secular and national religious majorities. Now there is a major housing shortage for ultra-Orthodox Israelis.

Another form of state-sanctioned segregation is seen in small communities in Israel, such as kibbutzim or moshavim. These communities may screen new members based on standards such as “unsuitability to the community’s social life” or its “social-cultural fabric,” or to “unique characteristics of the community as defined in its bylaws,” according to a law upheld by the high court in 2014. Critics say this is actually code language to weed out Arabs, homosexuals or anyone outside the community norm.

Beyond the issue of segregation, Israel’s Arab villages and cities suffer from a lack of planning, which exacerbates the housing shortage in these areas. In 2000, after 13 Arab citizens were killed in demonstrations at the start of the second intifada, a state commission found that inequality between the Jewish and Arab sectors in the realms of planning and building was a central cause of the unrest. The commission recommended new plans for Arab localities. But according to a 2012 report by Bimkom, a planning rights organization, planning in Arab cities still lags far behind that in Jewish areas, leading to “housing crises and lack of public buildings for services.”

Poor city planning in Arab areas is at least part of the reason that some Arabs are moving out of their home communities and into Jewish towns. As Sharary said of her family’s purchase in Afula, “Arabs need it very much.”

“The story of Afula is a symptom of a much greater issue,” Steiner said. “There is a socioeconomic development pushing young Arab couples to leave Arab cities and find quality of life in adjacent neighborhoods.”

Many of the Arab buyers in Afula — such as the Shararys, who are a family of accountants — come from sturdier economic backgrounds than the Jews who are now protesting their presence in the city.

“There is a counterintuitive socioeconomic aspect here,” said Rachelle Alterman, a planning expert at Israel’s Technion. “We are talking about an upwardly mobile, upper-middle income, or certainly a higher-educated Arab population in Afula, which is lower-middle income Jewish. There is this reverse disparity.”

Afula’s Jewish protesters are expressing their opposition to these new neighbors loud and clear. One anonymous activist posted a photo of Meron wrapped in a keffiyeh, the Palestinian national scarf, on Facebook. Right-wing activists mocked up similar images of Yitzhak Rabin before his murder, and also, more recently, of President Reuven Rivlin for his outreach to Arab citizens. According to a report on the Israeli website Mynet, the police are investigating the picture’s provenance.

One of the protesters, David Suissa, is chief of staff to Construction and Housing Minister Yoav Galant of the center-right Kulanu party. Issawi Frej, an Israeli-Arab member of the Knesset, called for his firing.

“The Housing Ministry should campaign against racism in housing and not promote it,” he said.

The mayor’s spokesman, Moty Priel, said that the municipality is “unable to and should not intervene” in the tender process. Because the land in question is state owned, any citizen — regardless of race, religion or gender — may participate in the auction, which is held by the ILA.

An ILA spokesman told the Forward that the tender was conducted “according to the rules.”

That hasn’t placated the protesters. Adeil Eluz, manager of a gas station in Afula, said that the tender should have first been open to locals in Afula and then to people who have served in the army — a move that would exclude most Arab Israelis, who are not drafted into the army.

Naomi Zeveloff: Working the Legal Front: Attorney Ilan Vaknin, who represents 10 Jewish families who lost an auction for tenders to build homes in Afula, says he and his clients ‘want to keep the Jewish character’ of the city. He is calling for an investigation into where the Arab families who won the bids got their money.

“It’s not against the Arab people,” he said. “It’s against the priority of the mayor and his councilors to give land to outside people instead of local people.”

Ilan Vaknin, an attorney representing 10 Jewish families who lost the auction, as well as other Afula residents, is less guarded in his assessment.

“We want to keep the Jewish character of the city,” he said. “And if we take in 50 [Arabs] in this little place, this will change the place from one side to the other.” Afula’s total population is 41,000 residents.

Vaknin said he suspects that some of the Arab buyers coordinated their bids, which would run afoul of the ILA process.

“Maybe an Islamist organization brought money to buy the Jewish land,” he said. “We want the police to check it.” The mayor’s office said it would look into the allegations.

Sharary believes that the protesters are driven by fear. The uproar hasn’t prompted her family to reconsider their bid. “It’s a good opportunity to make Afula another mixed town,” she said.

Contact Naomi Zeveloff at zeveloff@forward.com or on Twitter, @NaomiZeveloff

↧

Labour’s Election Results Give Corbyn only a Temporary Reprieve

May 8, 2016, 4:31 pm

≫ Next: Israeli Policy is to wait for the remaining Holocaust survivors to die

≪ Previous: Planning Laws – Another Example of Israeli Apartheid

John Mann, Progress & the Zionists did their best to Destroy Labour’s Election Performance

Those who welcomed the victory of Jeremy Corbyn in
The Israeli Labour Party welcomed ex-Nazi and Apartheid Premier John Vorster to Israel on a state visit. Under ILP governments South Africa was Israel's closest ally and collaborator

Interned during WW2 for supporting the Nazis, South African Apartheid Premier Vorster pays tribute to the dead at Israel's holocaust propaganda museum, Yad Vashem
the Labour leadership campaign and want to see him become Prime Minister in 2020 have to fact up to the truth. Corbyn is drinking in the last chance saloon. The vultures are circling and it is a matter not of if but when they strike.

Owen Jones - the future Nick Cohen

Owen Jones has shown that he is another 'left-winger' moving rightwards

Labour hung on in the local elections last week, in Corbyn’s words, despite not because of Labour’s election campaign. The only reason that Labour only lost about 25 local council seats was because of the Tories own near political collapse. Part of the desperation of the false 'anti-Semitism' campaign was motivated, not just by the local elections but the referendum campaign. It is conceivable that the Tory Party could go into meltdown and even split on the issue. In such circumstances Labour could be expected to almost walk into power. It is this scenario above all others that haunts those who are behind the current campaign. We should not underestimate the sense of determination of Corbyn's foes.

Jon Lansman in his youthful left-wing days as Tony Benn's aide

Labour did terribly in Scotland, it stood still in Wales and improved its percentage of the vote slightly in England. Overall it gained 31% of the vote which is nowhere near well enough to win a General Election. Of course the results in Scotland were a legacy of Blairism and what is called Red Toryism.

John McDonnell - launching Momentum

With the Tories in disarray politically, Labour should have done far better. The Tories were forced into a series of U-turns on cuts to disability benefits, tax credits, and school academies. IDS resigned, the Cabinet are split over Europe and the doctors’ strikes have rocked the government and forced Hunt back into negotiations. Why then was Labour unable to capitalise on all this?

Far-right Labour MP John Mann - he considers himself Jewish

There is one primary reason. The Right of the Party, in the person of John Mann and Wes Streeting, did their utmost to ensure that the Labour Party did as badly as possible. This was a case of deliberate sabotage. John Mann’s farcical confrontation with Ken Livingstone at the doors of Parliament was staged managed specially for the cameras. The only thing we learnt from this is that Mann has apparently read Mein Kampf!

Jon Lansman - Momentum's Chair - has conceded that Right's accusation of anti-Semitism has validity - has refused to campaign against witch hunt

Instead of immediately withdrawing the whip from Mann, it was Ken Livingstone who was suspended for some undiplomatic but essentially correct remarks. [see What Ken Livingstone didn’t say about Hitler]

Livingstone - outspoken and not willing to play by the Right's rules

This was at the instigation of the British branch of the Israeli Labour Party, the Jewish Labour Movement and Labour Friends of Israel, in conjunction with the Jewish Chronicle and the Israeli Embassy, whose Ambassador Mark Regev, was Netanyahu's spokesman as well as a polished PR spokesman for Israeli war crimes. Regev has been busy this week speaking to the press on Labour's crisis.

Ken Livingstone - former London Mayor - targeted by the Right

Indeed Isaac ‘We Aren’t Arab Lovers’ Herzog, leader of the Israeli Labour Party, threatenedin a supreme act of irony to break links with the Labour Party for racism! Unfortunately there is little chance of him keeping his word!

Max Blumenthall shows [How Opponents of UK Labour Leader Corbyn Advanced a Political Coup with Antisemitism Smears] how what we are seeing is a live version of Chris Mullin’s A Very British Coup where Harry Perkins was the Jeremy Corbyn character. The difference is that Perkins was a former steel worker with nerves of steel whereas Jeremy Corbyn seems to have a spine made of rubber. Corbyn has been pushed from pillar to post by the Right with barely a squeak.

In Who is Driving the ‘anti-Semitism Witch Hunt in the Labour Party? and Britain’s Cointelpro – How the Israeli Embassy and Guido Fawkesdestabilised the Labour PartyI showed how the campaign over ‘anti-Semitism’ has nothing to do with anti-Semitism and everything to do with destabilising Corbyn and Labour’s election campaign. It is a witch hunt in which every past utterance by those targeted is held up to the light and distorted to demonstrate ‘anti-Semitism’.

Arthur Miller's Crucible Comes to the Labour Party
What we are seeing is not the rise of anti-Semitism but an Informers Charter in which people are afraid to speak their mind for feaer that they will cross an invisible boundary. In practice it isn't racism but anti-racist discourse which is being scrutinised. All the worst practices of McCarthyism have come to the Labour Party and Corbyn and MicDonnell have presided over it, seemingly oblivious of what is happening around them. No one will dare debate any controversial issue, least of all Palestine, Zionism or anti-Semitism for fear of falling foul of the modern day equivalent of the Salem Witch hunt.

Support Palestinian resistance? That’s ‘terrorism’ and you will be denounced as readily as America's Communists and Pete Seeger (and many who weren’t communists) were to the FBI. Under John Stolliday’s Compliance Unit denunciation will result in automatic suspension in Labour's version of Arthur Miller's Crucible! Instead of the House of UnAmerican Activities committee we have the National Constitutional Committee.
.
Asa Winstanley in Electronic Intifada, How Israel lobby manufactured UK Labour Party’santi-Semitism crisis showed how virtually all the ‘anti-Semitic’ incidents that have led to suspensions from the Labour Party have been invented or embroidered.

Corbyn is steadily ceding ground politically to the Right. Indeed at times he shows signs of political incoherence. John McDonnell has already had to go through the embarrassment of agreeing to Osborne's fiscal limits last autumn and then reversing himself.

It was embarrassing to watch Corbyn at Prime Minister’s Question Time last Wednesday being taunted by Cameron over his description of Hamas and Hezbollah as ‘friends’. Instead of rebutting the suggestion that Hamas and Hezbollah were genocidal anti-Semites and terrorists he simply wilted, repeating his condemnation of 'anti-semitism'. He could have responded that Hamas has indeed condemned the holocaust [Hamas condemns the Holocaust Guardian 12.5.08., Bassem Naeem]. He could have thrown back Cameron's accusation pointing out that it was Cameron who was aiding terrorism – state terrorism - by the vile Saudi Arabian regime, with arms supplies that have killed thousands of Yemeni people. He could even have pointed to Cameron's anti-Semitic friends, like Kaminski and Zile in the European Conservative and Reform group that Tory MEPs are members of.

It was toe curlingly embarrassing as Corbyn seemed to forget entirely all those many speeches about Israeli confiscation of land, ill-treatment of Palestinian prisoners, the apartheid laws etc. It is as if everything he said on Palestine for the laslt 30 years was just meaningless waffle. He could have pointed out that Hezbollah wouldn't have existed but for Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon that killed over 20,000 people and injured over 80,000.

Corbyn might, with people like Seamus Milne briefing him, point out that it was Israel that helped create Hamas as a counterweight to secular Palestinian nationalism. [Why Israel virtually created Hamas, How Israel helped create Hamas Washington Post 30.7.14., and How Israel Helped to Spawn HamasWall Street Journal 24.1.09.

It shouldn’t be beyond Corbyn’s intellect to work out that the suspensions of up to 50 people on anti-Semitism charges, including myself and Jackie Walker, has been got up by the Right and the Israel Lobby as part of their campaign against him. [Labour suspends Jewish activist over “African holocaust] yet instead all he has done is to ritually condemn 'anti-Semitism' when h is opponents have a very different definition of anti-Semitism from him.

Given Corbyn’s experiences of being accused of consorting with holocaust deniers over the summer [EXCLUSIVE:Jeremy Corbyn's 'long-standing links' with notorious Holocaust denier and his'anti-Semitic' organisation revealed Daily Mail 7.8.15.] it wouldn’t take a genius to work out that this sudden explosion of ‘anti-Semitism’ had more to do with political calculation and destabilisation than a sudden outburst of anti-Semitism in the Labour Party.

Anti-Semitism isn’t a word game played by Labour's thought police, it is hatred, discrimination and violence against Jews, married to overarching conspiracy theories. It isn’t calling Israel a racist state or Zionism a racist ideology. There isn’t one single or solitary example of anyone Jewish being abused in this way. Anti-semitism isn’t calling racist Zionists ‘Zio’ on twitter where everything is shortened to fit in 140 characters. It isn’t discussing Jewish involvement historically in the slave trade. Nor is it Naz Shah, a Muslim woman, horrified at the murder of over 2000 Palestinians in Operation Protective Edge, including 551 children, dreaming of how all this might Labour is in danger of breeding a generation of Matthew Hopkins.
Perhaps Norman Finkelstein, the American Jewish anti-Zionist Professor who best summed up the hypocrisy and cynicism of Labour's witch hunters:

Finkelstein was asked about Shah posting an image that has been presented as an endorsement of a ‘chilling “transportation” policy’. The absurd John Mann MP has compared her to Eichmann. [Open Democracy, [The American Jewish scholar behind Labour’s ‘antisemitism’ scandal breaks his silence. Finkelstein's response that it was 'obscene'.

'It’s doubtful these Holocaust-mongers have a clue what the deportations were, or of the horrors that attended them. I remember my late mother describing her deportation. She was in the Warsaw Ghetto. The survivors of the Ghetto Uprising, about 30,000 Jews, were deported to Maijdanek concentration camp. They were herded into railroad cars. My mother was sitting in the railroad car next to a woman who had her child. And the woman – I know it will shock you – the woman suffocated her infant child to death in front of my mother. She suffocated her child, rather than take her to where they were going. That’s what it meant to be deported. To compare that to someone posting a light-hearted, innocuous cartoon making a little joke about how Israel is in thrall to the U.S., or vice versa…it’s sick. What are they doing? Don’t they have any respect for the dead? All these desiccated Labour apparatchiks, dragging the Nazi holocaust through the mud for the sake of their petty jostling for power and position. Have they no shame?
'desiccated Labour apparatchiks'is an fitting description of Labour's Blairite General Secretary, Iain McNicol and his hatchetman, John Stolliday. Yet it is symptomatic of his leadership that Corbyn has failed, as Jon Lansman told me, to reign in and control the Labour Party civil service.

What can be done?
There is only one thing that will instil the fear of god into Labour’s Right. That is deselection. It is rumoured that Corbyn didn’t want to suspend Livingstone but was forced into it by threat of shadow cabinet resignations. If true then he should have called their bluff and made it clear that they would face the consequences. It is still possible for Corbyn to confront the Right. It is still possible for Momentum to stop sitting on the sidelines doing nothing. But for that to happen Jon Lansman must be removed and a democratic structure put in place.

Instead of John McDonnell saying that of course we don’t want reselections, Momentum should declare war on the hard Right. Those who voted to bomb Syria should be top of the list with John Mann suspended for bringing the party into disrepute.

At the moment the Right are winning the battle for delegates to the annual party conference. The Left has not organised. Neither the LRC or Momentum. Momentum has seen its Vice-Chair Jacqueline Walker suspended over the same ‘anti-Semitism’ charges that I have been suspended for. Apparently a Black-Jewish member of the Party is not allowed to discuss the Black holocaust of the Slave Trade, still less Jewish involvement in it even though the latter is a fact [see Labour’s Thought Police claims another victim] What we are seeing is the political equivalent of book burning.

Ken Livingstone’s comments about Hitler's support for Zionism were tactically inept but they weren’t anti-Semitic and they were pretty near the truth too. He didn't say that Hitler was a Zionist nor that the Nazis supported the Zionist project. What he meant was that the Nazis supported the Zionist solution to Germany's Jewish population which was that they should be sent to Palestine primarily.

It is a fact that the Zionists collaborated with the Nazis. It wasn’t that the Nazis worked with the Zionists to expel as many Jews as possible. If that was the case then clearly the Zionists could not be criticised for their actions.

Those on the left who attack Livingstone and even support his expulsion are not merely betraying Ken but they are ultimately betraying Jeremy Corbyn. Ken Livingstone has given fulsome support to Corbyn since his election. The Right would dearly love to see his expulsion and anyone on the Left who goes along with that, and it would appear that Jon Lansman and Owen Jones are willing to do so, is the political equivalent of Judas Iscariot. The only difference is that it hasn't been necessary to bribe them with 30 pieces of silver since they are willing to offer their services completely free of charge.

Particular mention should be made of the dilemmas of the Alliance for Workers Liberty. The AWL are in a dilemma. Their main person in Momentum, Jill Mountford has been expelled. They themselves are a victim of the Rights slow witch hunt, a witch hunt that Jeremy Corbyn has done nothing to prevent or put a stop to. AWL cannot therefore be seen to be supporting the witch hunt.

On the other hand they have been guilty for nearly 30 years of conflating anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism, so they are faced with a dilemma when Labour's Zionist witch hunters do the same thing. In the case of Ken Livingstone they are unable to let their opposition to a witchhunt get the better of
an ingrained hostility to Livingstone. Hostility to Livingstone and George Galloway is almost their raison d'etre.

In a textbook exercise in mendacity and Stalinist distortion, Sean Matgamna writes Livingstone, Labour and Anti-Semitism that 'If the enemies of the Labour Party and of the left have found a soft target, it is a legitimate target.' This is nothing less than crossing class lines. Livingstone is the target of the Right, not merely the Zionist Right. To let your own vicious sectarianism come before unity on the Left is a disgrace. It is the equivalent of scabbing on a strike.

Matgamna, who is a self-declared Zionist continues that 'A big part of the pseudo-left believe or assert that “Zionists” (that is, for practical purposes, most Jews) are historically tainted by Nazism.'

Having bound his organisation hand and foot to imperialist politics, it is necessary to reflect and ape the distortions of the bourgeois press. Socialists and anti-imperialists make a sharp distinction between Jews and Zionists unlike the Zionists and their echo chambers. Nor does anyone I know suggest that Jews are 'tainted by Nazism.' It is true that Zionism today is indeed tainted by Nazism, whether it is the Lehava poster that declared that Hitler had got the wrong nation - it should have been the Palestinians or the welcome given to the leader Strache of Austria's formerly neo-Nazi Freedom Party.

Matgamna continued to suggest that anti-Zionists argued that “the Zionists” “collaborated” with the Nazis in making the Holocaust and share responsibility for it.' Again a perfect example of the worst example of bourgeois distortion, worthy of the Daily Mail and Sun newspapers. No one I know has ever suggest that the Zionist movement collaborated in making the Holocaust with the Nazis and that they share responsibility for it. Certainly the Zionists collaborated with the Nazis and certainly the number of Jews who died as a result of this collaboration was greater than it would have been. This really is indisputable. Its like suggesting that Marshall Petain collaborated with the Nazis in the invasion and occupation of France. Of course once the Nazis had occupied France he collaborated with the Nazis but no one suggested he collaborated in helping the Nazis invade.

Matgamna goes to the outer reaches of lunacy in suggesting we argue that “the Zionists” manipulated even the Nazis during World War 2 and especially share responsibility for the Nazi murder of one million Hungarian Jews in 1944-5.' There is a very serious argument that collaboration in Hungary increased the number of those Jews who died. Instead of 430,000 dying it could have been far far less if for example the Zionist leadership under Rudolf Kasztner hadn't suppressed the Auschwitz Protocols, a detailed account of the workings of Auschwitz by two escapees Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler. As even Yad Vashem historian, Professor Yisrael Gutman conceded, Kasztner received a copy of the Protocols on 29 April 1944 but that he had already made a decision, with other Jewish leaders, ‘not to disseminate the report in order not to harm the negotiations with the Nazis. [Ruth Linn, Escaping Auschwitz - A Culture of Forgetting, p.72, London 2004.]

The suppression of the Protocols, in order to preserve an agreement with Eichmann regarding a train out of Hungary carrying 1684 of the Zionist and Jewish elite, is a matter of fact. The Jerusalem District Court, in 1955, found that Kasztner, in testifying for a leading Nazi Kurt Becher after the war at Nuremburg, had indeed collaborated with the Nazis. In fact Kasztner, on behalf of the Jewish Agency and the World Jewish Congress, testified on behalf of 7 leading Nazis including Dieter Wisliceny, the butcher of Slovakian and Salonikan Jewry and Herman Krumey, Eichmann's second in command in Hungary, who organised the deportation of its Jews.

AWL Zionist guru Sean Matgamna - attacking Livingstone is more important than opposing witch hunt

I should therefore be grateful that AWL has called for the lifting of my suspension! In 'Lift Tony Greenstein's Suspension' they write that:

'Tony Greenstein is himself Jewish. He has been an often strident critic of anti-semitism, including on the left. [not true - I don't agree with the concept of 'left' anti-Semitism - TG] He also adheres to an extreme version of that strand of far-left politics on Israel/Palestine which exceptionalises Israel as a uniquely evil state and Jewish nationalism as a uniquely reactionary nationalism. He has long been hostile to Workers Liberty on issues to do with Israel. [the last sentence is true!] His comments, if they are indeed the subject of the allegation were rhetorically wild. They were not in and of themselves anti-semitic, but that is not to defend them: Greenstein will be well aware of the way in which anti-semites, including left anti-semites, often hyperbolically and cynically compare Israel to Nazi Germany, in a deliberate attempt to instrumentalise the collective trauma of the memory of the Holocaust against Jews. His comments feed into that discourse. Nevertheless, that does not justify his suspension, the manner of which is an affront to any basic notion of justice. Those accused of a misdemeanour have, at the very least, a right be informed by their accuser what it is!'

As Toad said of his defence lawyer in Kenneth Graham's classic Wind in the Willows 'it's not much of a defence'!

The Right has not intention of allowing Corbyn to lead Labour into the General election. The only question is when they strike. That is why they have to be defeated. Appeasement is a recipe for disaster. The local elections results have given him a temporary reprieve. But it is temporary and Sadique Khan has begun the attacks. [Sadiq Khan, the new Mayor of London, going onto the attack. Sadiq Khan attacks Jeremy Corbyn hours after winning London Mayor election, The Telegraph 8.5.16.]

The question is whether Corbyn uses the time to mobilise his forces or whether he is going to continue to be a willing hostage of the Right. The only possibility of Corbyn remaining leader is if those Labour Party members who joined in the wake of Corbyn’s victory are mobilised. At the moment the new members are not attending meetings or engaging in what are frankly the boring routine meetings that the Labour Party has. Labour’s rhythms are electoral not political. It centres around activities such as canvassing, even though most canvassing is a waste of time. People don’t decide whether to vote and who to vote for on the basis of doorstep chats but because they are convinced that the Party is going in the right direction and has the right answer to their problems.

There is no possibility of Labour being in a position to convince anyone it is a serious, credible anti-austerity party unless it removes from the Labour Party the influence of the Prince of Darkness Peter Mandelson and his cohorts. If anyone should be expelled it should be the old war criminal himself, Tony Blair.

Good party activists are being accused of ‘anti-Semitism’ and suspended by those who supported the Iraq war and who are indelibly associated with Islamaphobia. It is the representatives of the racist regime in Tel Aviv who are calling the shots. By the logic of the Zionists and the Labour Right, people like Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Ronnie Kassrils, the Jewish ANC former Police Minister, are also anti-Semites. Indeed most of the African National Congress are anti-Semitic for supporting BDS against Israel.

Desmond Tutu and Kassrils have condemned Israel's system of identity cards and checkpoints in the West Bank as being worse than anything that was experienced in the days of Apartheid. [South Africa's Israel boycott, Ronnie Kasrils, Guardian Comment 29.9.10., Desmond Tutu: U.S. Christians Must Recognize Israel as Apartheid State, Ha'aretz, Jun 17, 2014.

South African anti-apartheid activists know what Israel is really like because they were confronted with Apartheid security forces who had been armed and equipped and in many cases trained by the Zionist regime in Israel.

It is time to fight back but the breathing space afforded by the elections will not last long and it is unlikely to come round again.

Tony Greenstein

↧

Israeli Policy is to wait for the remaining Holocaust survivors to die

May 9, 2016, 7:47 pm

≫ Next: Israel is jettisoning even the trappings of democracy

≪ Previous: Labour’s Election Results Give Corbyn only a Temporary Reprieve

Elderly holocaust survivors amongst poorest in Israel

Israel can afford billions of dollars for nuclear weapons and arms. Missiles to bomb Gaza are never in short supply. The holocaust is a convenient weapon to be employed as a justification for Israel’s barbaric policies towards the Palestinians . Money for settlements is no problem but when it comes to looking after the remaining survivors of the holocaust, then Israel is as stingy and parsimonious as it is possible to be. Despite the fact that the money for the holocaust survivors comes from money paid in reparations by the German Government.

Below we read of the fight between the Finance Ministry and the World Zionist Organisation. It has lasted for 11 months, by which time many of those eligible have already died die off. This suits both parties. The WZO which funds a settlement program in the West Bank and which was the recipient, with the Israeli government, of reparations, cannot find the money. The same WZO which, in the guise of the Jewish Agency, was indifferent to the holocaust.

Israel is one of the most unequal societies in the western world. There is a fabulously rich oligarchy and a large class of the impoverished. 47.4% Arab families are living in poverty, 3.5 times as many as Jewish families. [See In poverty report, Arab sector sees improvement, while haredi sector gets poorer Jerusalem Post 16.12.14].

Eliezer and Chana Tzinman. Photo by Tomer Appelbau

Israeli Holocaust Survivors in Need to Receive One-time Passover Benefit

Some 11,000 survivors have not received benefits for 10 months due to a legal dispute between the funding companies.

By Lee Yaron, Haaretz
April 06, 2016

Eleven thousand Holocaust survivors who have not received benefits for the past 10 months will receive a one-time payment this month.

Arranged by MK Moshe Gafni (United Torah Judaism,) the payment will relieve the distress of survivors caught up in a legal dispute, which neither the World Zionist Organization (WZO) nor the Finance Ministry seems able or willing to resolve.

“I can now afford fewer medications for me and my wife, even though this harms our health,” 88-year-old Holocaust survivor Eliezer Tzinman told Haaretz. “I’ve stopped eating fruit and buy less food. We eat only bread since that’s all I can afford. If there is really cheap fruit on Fridays we get some. We don’t turn use heat since we can’t afford the electricity.”

Tzinman, who came to Israel from Ukraine, lives with his wife on 5,000 shekels ($1,670) a month. Since June, when his benefits stopped, they’ve had to make do with 4,000 shekels a month.

“The benefit was the mainstay of our income,” he said. “I can’t use public transportation due to my health and now I can’t get to my doctor since I can’t afford a taxi. We only want our benefits back.”

The dispute is between the Company for Location and Restitution of Holocaust Victims’ Assets and a holding company called Otsar Hityashvuth Hayehudim, which is partly owned by the WZO. The former company provides 2,700 shekels to needy survivors every three months. However, it ran into solvency problems in June and the only funds currently available are the holding company’s Bank Leumi shares.

Though both entities have committed themselves to reaching a legal settlement promptly, funds have not been transferred to the survivors. Not even several Knesset committee sessions on the issue have succeeded in breaking the deadlock. Only through Gafni’s intervention was a one-time payment arranged before Passover.

The Treasury was going to guarantee a loan for the company for restitution to enable it to continue paying the benefits, but nothing has come of it as yet.

Another option was that funds be transferred from the Jewish National Fund until the dispute is settled. Its director agreed to do so after an appeal by MK Meirav Michaeli (Zionist Camp) but the WZO has yet to give its approval.

Gafni has appealed to the attorney general to assist in finding a solution to the problem. “The WZO should allow the JNF to transfer these funds or come to an arrangement with the company for restitution,” he told Haaretz.

“We can’t continue with this foot-dragging. Every day there are fewer survivors. This is the weakest segment of society and the hardest hit among survivors, who have enough problems already.”

Tens of thousands of Israeli Holocaust survivors are living in abject poverty

As the world marks Holocaust Memorial Day, a generation whose childhood was taken by the Nazis is spending its final years struggling with hunger, cold and homelessness

The Telegraph 27.1.16.

Asia Komisarov's father was killed by the Nazis in Russia. She and her mother survived and she moved to Israel as part of a wave of Russian immigration in the 1990s. She lived in a crumbling flat in Jaffa but was forced out when her landlords wanted to raise prices Photo: Association for Immediate Help for Holocaust Survivors

By Raf Sanchez, Ramat Gan

7:00AM GMT 27 Jan 2016

Isaac walks a shuffling path through the valley of rotting newspapers and piled-up rubbish bags that swamp his small kitchen.

Despite the January cold he wear sandals as he picks his way through the squalor to the toilet.

Awaiting him there is a bath with no hot water and a small sink that is black with rot and mold.

The crumbling flat in Ramat Gan, near Tel Aviv, has no oven and the 79-year-old subsists mainly off crisps, raw vegetables and powdered soup made with an electric kettle.

It is a sad and stark situation for an old man whose earliest memories are hiding from the Nazis in cellar beneath a Ukrainianpigsty, cramped in with ten other frightened Jews as they waited for rsecue or for death.

The squalor of a flat belonging to Isaac, a Holocaust survivor whose childhood was spent hiding in a cellar beneath a pigsty in Ukraine

Isaac, who asked that his surname not be published, is one of thousands of IsraeliHolocaust survivors living out their final days out in poverty.

As the world marks International Holocaust Remembrance Day on Wednesday, we will see haunting black-and-white images of children caught up in Hitler’s industrialised slaughter.

Many of those children are now in their late eighties, struggling with ill health and trying to survive on meagre pensions and small compensation payments still made to survivors of the Holocaust.

A survey in 2015 found that of the roughly 189,000 Holocaust survivors living in Israel, about 45,000 are in poverty. In the two other major population centers for survivors - New York City and the countries of the former Soviet Union - the rates of destitution are even worse.

“These people suffered so much at the beginning of their lives, they shouldn’t have to go through any more suffering at the end of their lives,” said Tamara More, chief executive of the Association for Immediate Help for Holocaust Survivors.

The all-volunteer network supports Isaac and around 3,000 others across Israel, focusing mainly on those in poverty. “Every day about 35 survivors die and we have so little time to try to make up for the injustice they have gone through,” Ms More said.

The average age of an Israeli Holocaust survivor is 87 and by 2025 almost all of the remaining survivors will probably have passed away. A 112-year-old Israeli survivor of Auschwitz is now thought to be the world’s oldest man.

Isaac, like many Holocaust survivors, is dedicated to his cats

Israel’s government knows time is running out and in 2014 it passed major legislation to ensure survivors get a minimum monthly payment of 2,200 shekels (£386). The bill also increased healthcare benefits and ended a discrepancy in the support given to those who came to Israel immediately after the war and those arrived later. Yair Lapid, the former finance minister who championed the bill, called it “an amendment to an historical injustice”.

The programme has helped many survivors but others are still trapped in poverty. Many of worst cases are among those who immigrated to Israel in the 1990s from the former Soviet Union but were unable to carry their Soviet pensions with them.

“The reason they're impoverished is because the security blanket is too small,” said Colette Avital, chair of the Centre Organization of Holocaust Survivors. “If you worked all your life but don’t have a pension then whatever allocation you get from being a victim of the Nazis is not enough.”

Asia Komisarov was just in just that situation. Mrs Komisarov was born in 1939 in Leningrad, now St Petersburg, and her father was killed by the Nazis during the brutal 872-day siege of the city.

She came to Israel in the 1990s as part of a wave of Russian Jewish immigration but was already well into her fifties and struggled to find regular work. She rented a dilapidated bolthole flat in Jaffa was forced out when her landlords decided to renovate and take advantage of the city’s gentrification and rising rent prices.

Mrs Komisarov was saved from homelessness by the Association for Immediate Help for Holocaust Survivors and moved into their care home until she died of pancreatic cancer last year.

The aging Holocaust survivor population has the problems confronting elderly people everywhere.
Many Israeli apartment buildings have no lifts, meaning the survivors face a choice between isolation in their flats or dozens of stairs. Loneliness is rampant, especially among those whose families did not survive the war.

But Tamara More, the volunteer network chief, has noticed something specific in her years working with survivors: an unusual affection to the stray cats that prowl the streets of Israeli cities.

“I think they may feel the cats lives are a little like their own. The cats are hungry, they’re on the streets and the survivors want to protect them,” she said.

Many survivors seek assurances from volunteers that their pets will be looked after when they pass away. As a result the Association’s building is patrolled by cats, including one that belonged to Asia Komisarov, and Ms More is trying to set up a home to look after the animals when the survivors are no longer there.

One of the reasons Isaac won’t move from his crumbling flat into a care home is a black cat called Mitzi. Although he has barely enough food for himself, he buys milk and yoghurt to lay out for her and other strays.

“I don’t know what’s in my future. I just know the cats are depending on me,” he said quietly. “Cats are good creatures. If you pet them and show them love they appreciate it.”

Association for Immediate Help for Holocaust Survivors:facebook.com/aihhs

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Israel is jettisoning even the trappings of democracy

May 10, 2016, 9:39 pm

≫ Next: It is Time for Unity in the Campaign Against the Witchhunt

≪ Previous: Israeli Policy is to wait for the remaining Holocaust survivors to die

Apologists for the Israeli state always refer to the fact that Arabs have the vote in Israel, as if putting your cross on the ballot paper once every 4 years rectifies all the racist injustices of the previous years. In fact nearly 50% of Israeli Palestinians don’t even vote because it is considered a waste of time. But those who do vote overwhelmingly for Arab parties (& the Communist Hadash) not under one electoral roof – the Joint List.

The reason the Arab parties and Hadash joined together for the first time ever was because the electoral threshhold was raised from 2% to 3 .25% in order to exclude Arab parties from the Knesset altogether. That was the brainwave of the fascist former Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman. That forced all the non-Zionist parties to come together.

Now the Knesset has decided to support a Bill that will allow the Jewish majority to expel or suspend Arab MKs. In an ethnocracy, where different communities vote for either Jewish or Arab parties, then this means quite simply that the Jewish parties are deciding which Arab representatives will be allowed.

Democratic? In Israeli terms yes, by most peoples’ standards no.

Excluding Arabs from Israel’s ‘democracy’

An article by Marzouq El-Halabi in +972 follows the one from Times of Israel

MKs Basel Ghattas, Haneen Zoabi and Jamal Zakalka, from the Joint Arab List’s Balad faction, visited the families of Palestinians killed while trying to stab Israeli soldiers. The MKs were trying to negotiate the returns of their corpses to the families. For this the Knesset ethics committee decided they should be suspended. Photo by Noam Moskowitz.

Controversial MK suspension bill passes first Knesset reading

Proposal would allow lawmakers to ban colleagues for inciting racism, supporting terror; critics say move limits democracy

By Raoul Wootliff, Times of Israel

March 28, 2016

The Knesset voted on Monday night [March 28] to advance a controversial law enabling MKs to suspend their colleagues, approving the first reading of the bill by 59 to 52 votes.

The proposal would allow 90 MKs to vote to suspend lawmakers if they “negate the existence of the State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state,” incite racism, or express support for a terror group or state in its war against Israel.

The coalition managed to secure the win despite two Likud members refusing to support the measure, after the opposition Yisrael Beitenu party abstained from the vote.

The measure must still pass two more Knesset readings.

The vote was preceded by a flurry of speeches by MKs calling to support or oppose the measure, as well as discussions by some MKs about a soldier charged with murder over the shooting death of a wounded Palestinian assailant in Hebron last week.

Speaking before the vote, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the bill would help in Israel’s fight against terror.

“I expect all those who say they are in favour of the bill to vote in support and to not give an advantage or profit to those who support terror,” he told the weekly Likud meeting, anticipating rebellion by a number of coalition MKs.

Likud MKs David Amsalem and Avraham Neguise followed through on threats not to vote with the government until it renews the immigration of remaining Falashmura Jews from Ethiopia.

Earlier on Monday, Avigdor Liberman, head of hawkish Yisrael Beytenu, said he would not support the measure unless he gets tit-for-tat backing from the coalition for a bill to block the Supreme Court from involvement in activities of the Central Elections Committee.

Backed by Netanyahu, the bill was proposed after three Arab MKs made a condolence visit to the families of Palestinians killed while attacking Israelis, and the three observed a moment of silence, which some said was tantamount to showing support for terror.

In a legal opinion published hours before a Monday night vote on the bill, Eyal Yinon, the chief legal adviser for Israel’s parliament, said that while he does not deem it necessary, it is “preferable” the proposal receive a majority and could face legal challenges if it doesn’t.

"If MKs suspected of committing crimes, they should go to the Attorney General, not misuse parliament." President Rivlin

The controversial measure has been vociferously opposed by some, including President Reuven Rivlin, who warned that the power to punish lawmakers should not be in the hands of fellow Knesset members.

Earlier this month Rivlin said the bill reflected “a problematic understanding of parliamentary democracy,” and that the correct address for MKs who had committed or were suspected of committing crimes was the attorney general, not fellow lawmakers.

Writing on Twitter during the vote, opposition leader Isaac Herzog railed against the proposal, saying it would do nothing to prevent terror attacks.

“I call on the prime minister and his coalition: Stop!” he wrote. “This is an unnecessary and twisted law that is not needed in order to fight terror.”

In February, a stormy meeting of the Knesset’s Constitution Law and Justice Committee voted to send the MK suspension bill for a first reading in the Knesset — prompting the head of the Joint (Arab) List MK Ayman Odeh to announce that he and members of his party were considering resigning from the Knesset if the three lawmakers who made the condolence visit were expelled.

The three lawmakers were suspended on February 8 by the Knesset Ethics Committee — Hanin Zoabi and Basel Ghattas for four months, and Jamal Zahalka for two.

Odeh also said a bill such as the one under discussion could strengthen a nascent debate in Arab Israeli intellectual circles about creating a separate Arab parliament in Israel, which would act as a counterweight to a Knesset that only represented the country’s Jews.

Ahead of the vote, former Shin Bet head and current Likud MK Avi Dichter said Odeh would be called to account for his support of Palestinian terrorists assassinated by Israeli forces.

Odeh later took the podium and accused Dichter of “cheap and lowly incitement” to get headlines.

Times of Israel staff contributed to this report.

On our way out of the apartheid closet

By advancing legislation to exclude the Arab minority from the Knesset, Israel is showing the world that its political system is really only intended for one group.

By Marzouq El-Halabi, +972
April 08, 2016

The so-called “suspension bill,” which passed its first reading in the Knesset several weeks ago, constitutes another step by the Israeli Right to exclude Arab representatives from Israeli politics. The bill, which gives the Knesset the authority to temporarily or permanently suspend elected members, stems not from a worry over the fate of Israel’s democracy, but is part of the Right’s slow effort to maliciously and intentionally harm it. The ultimate goal of the bill goes unspoken, although it is clear to all: to remove the Arab electorate from the political game in order to ensure the Right’s reign in the near future.

That strategy began even before the right-wing parties marked Arabs in Israel as the targets of a well-orchestrated delegitimization campaign. There is not a single leader on the Right who has not tried his hand, whether through incitement, anti-democratic bills — some of which passed — or targeting specific Arab MKs in the Knesset. A racist public discourse that besmirches the Arab minority as a “suspicious group” that is always “at fault.” My presumption is that this incitement is organized, even if it comes from different political parties.

From cooperation to exclusion

After the Right failed, at least temporarily, to exclude the Arabs by raising the election threshold, it attempted to put pressure on the Arab minority and its representatives. Unfortunately, many media outlets cooperated with the Right’s mission, even so far as strengthening the attacks against the Arab minority and its representatives. When the atmosphere grew tense due to violent attacks by individual Palestinians, the Right struck again, this time by outlawing the Northern Branch of the Islamic Movement. The Islamic Movement may have been the target, but the goal was to create an atmosphere in which the entire Arab public is removed from the political sphere. Now it seems that the Right has marked the representatives of the nationalist Balad party, and any other Arab representative that does not dance to the tune of Bennett or Netanyahu.

A Palestinian citizen of Israel votes in the 2015 elections, March 17, 2015 Ramle, Israel. Photo by Oren Ziv/Activestills.org

The process is clear. The point is to drive a wedge between the Arab minority as a significant electorate power and the opposing right-wing camp. Let us remember that it was the Arab members of Knesset who provided a political safety net for Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in the 90s. This kind of scenario could repeat itself, which is exactly what the Right is trying to prevent by removing the Arab minority from the political game.

The establishment’s attitude since the founding of the state has been to include the Arab minority in the political game, and to encourage Arab citizens to participate in elections. Those who held this view believed that the participation of the Palestinians who remained in their homeland would give the nascent state a seal of approval, and would only strengthen its legitimacy in the eyes of the world. The legal attitude was much the same: aside from the “Al-Ard ruling” in the 1960s, Israel’s Supreme Court has tended to allow Arab parties who had been disqualified by the Central Elections Committee from participating in elections. The Right, which has failed at disqualifying Arab parties and leaders, is attempting to pass legislation that would allow it to do so.

And if they succeed? What then?

This move is not surprising since those behind it are right-wing ideologues who prefer the nation and religion over the state. What is surprising is the political camp that positions itself as an alternative to right-wing rule, the one which praises itself for protecting democracy. Instead of fighting for democracy and proper representative for Arabs, this camp turns a cold shoulder to them. This camp seems to enjoy taking part in the delegitimization of the Arab minority in Israel (see MK Avi Dichter’s speech targeting Joint List Chairman Ayman Odeh*). This kind of discourse leaves little room for doubt that even the “enlightened” camp, which “fights for democracy” does not intend to include Arabs in its democracy.

Let’s imagine that Arabs are finally excluded from the Knesset, and that the number of Arab citizens who vote starts to dwindle — whether due to more anti-democratic legislation or as a response to the Right’s policies. That is precisely when the world will start to suspect that the regime in Israel is an apartheid regime that has come out of the closet. If the political game between the river and the sea becomes designated for one nation alone, the result will be that the Right in Israel will have succeeded in turning Israel into an apartheid state. There is no other name for this kind of rule. The problem is that we are already at the peak of this process.

Marzouq El-Halabi is an attorney, journalist, and author. He writes a regular column in the London-based Al-Hayat daily newspaper.

* The link provided in the text [here] was actually to the March 1st Haaretz report of an attack by Odeh on former Shin Bet chief Avi Dichter. A few weeks later ‘Former Shin Bet chief MK Avi Dichter (Likud) accused the Joint (Arab) List leader MK Ayman Odeh on Monday of doing nothing to stop terror against Israelis.’ Times of Israel, March 29, 2016

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It is Time for Unity in the Campaign Against the Witchhunt

May 11, 2016, 6:09 pm

≫ Next: Anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism

≪ Previous: Israel is jettisoning even the trappings of democracy

Momentum has to support all those suspended not just its Vice Chair Jacqueline Walker

David Watson - one of those suspended with Sadique Khan

Ken Livingstone - betrayed by Momentum's Jon Lansman

I was suspended on March 18^th from the Labour Party. Until the suspension of Ken Livingstone I was the most prominent victim of the Right’s feeding frenzy. Tony Greenstein suspended fromLabour Party - Labour Party machine gets its revenge on Corbyn’s activists as expulsions mount

David White - suspended Secretary of Croydon Central LP

Since then there have been numerous people, it is estimated about 50, who have been fingered for ‘anti-Semitism’. The one common denominator in all the suspensions has been the lack of any evidence of anti-Semitism. Ken Livingstone was suspended, not for anti-Semitism but for making political comments about the collaboration between the Zionist movement and Nazism which are a matter of recorded history. Ken was a member of the National Executive Committee and his suspension has made it impossible for him to continue in that role.

Aysegul Gurbuz has been suspended from the Labour Party pending an investigation Credit: Twitter

It is therefore particularly disgraceful that his replacement, one Rhea Lewis, is a former member of the Jewish Leadership Council (an organisation of big Jewish capitalists led by Micky Davies, former owner of mining company Xtrata) and the Zionist Youth Council. As such, the nomination as part of the left slate of Ms Lewis, especially in the current climate of attacks on anti-Zionists and supporters of the Palestinians, is totally unacceptable. Voting for Lewis is as good as voting for the Right.

Progress rat & Croydon witch hunter Steve Reed OBE

As I wrote less than week ago, the current witch hunt shows all the signs of state involvement designed to deliberately destabilise the new left wing leadership of the Labour Party. Britain’sCointelpro – How the Israeli Embassy and Guido Fawkes destabilised the LabourParty - Ken Livingstone Must Be Reinstated & Corbyn Must Fight Back

Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell, instead of fighting back and rebutting what is so obviously a co-ordinated and orchestrated campaign by their political enemies, have given these allegations of ‘anti-Semitism’ credence. Instead of parroting that they are against anti-Semitism, as if there is anyone who isn’t against sin, they could have pointed out that the anti-Semitism that supporters of Israel talk about isn’t anti-Semitism but anti-Zionism – opposition to the racist and Apartheid nature of the Israeli state.

Corbyn could also have pointed to the links that the Tories have in the European Parliament with an assortment of fascist and anti-Semitic parties including the Polish Law & Justice Party, which won the last Polish Elections and Robert Ziles LNNK in Latvia. Some idea of the nature of the Polish Party can be gleaned by the following report from Forward, the liberal US Jewish paper of December 17 2015. Entitled Poland Turns Hard to Right — and Jews Wind Up in Crosshairsit describes how the Wroclaw branch of the Party held an anti-immigration demonstration and they decided to burn an effigy of a Hasidic Jew for their entertainment.

Jewish Chronicle editor Stephen Pollard defends anti-Semitic Kaminski because he is pro-Zionist

It is somewhat ironic that the Jewish Chronicle’s editor Stephen Pollard is a fan of all those anti-Semites that the Tories work with in the European Parliament. Pollard, who has played a prominent part in the Labour witch hunt, has gone out on a limb to defend the anti-Semitic former MEP of the Law & Justice Party, Michal Kaminski who called on Polish Jews to apologise for hundreds of their number having been burnt alive in his constituency village of Jedwabne. As long as you support the State of Israel then any amount of anti-Semitism is acceptable. SeeJedwabne – The Polish Village Where Up to 900 Jews Were Burnt Alive by Fellow Poles Pollard – Upset by Corbyn’s ‘anti-Semitism’ but a devotee of theanti-Semitic Michael Kaminski

Far right editor of Jewish Chronicle Stephen Pollard is member of Henry Jackson Society - supports anti-Semites as long as they support Israel

It was extremely unfortunate, to put it mildly, that the Chair of Momentum, Jon Lansman, was seen to put the knife into Livingstone’s back commenting that ‘A period of silence from Ken Livingstone is overdue, especially on antisemitism racism & Zionism. It’s time he left politics altogether’(28.4.16.) The comments that caused the Right such offence were:

"Let’s remember when Hitler won his election in 1932, his policy then was that Jews should be moved to Israel. He was supporting Zionism – this before he went mad and ended up killing six million Jews.’

Livingstone was wrong to refer to Israel when it was Palestine and he was wrong to imply that the holocaust was a product of Hitler’s madness. It was the logical consequence of the anti-Jewish policies of the Nazis - depriving Germany’s Jews of employment, political and civil rights, including citizenship, stripping them of their belongings and then deportation to Poland and Latvia. But he was essentially correct.

Momentum's Jon Lansman - got his fingers burnt supporting witch hunt of Livingstone

Jon Lansman found out to his cost a week ago that humouring the witch hunters only increased their appetite. His own Vice Chair at Momentum, Jacqueline Walker, was also suspended for anti-Semitism. The specific offence was discussing the Jews and slavery. Being a Black and Jewish person, one might have thought she was eminently suitable to discuss this topic. Clearly the witchfinder generals at LP HQ thought differently.

I wrote about Jacqueline Walker's case, a Black-Jewish victim of the witch hunt, on 6^thMay Labour’s Thought Police claims another victim - Black Jewish activist Jackie Walker What is so reprehensible about the present witch hunt is that any debate around the topic of Zionism or Jews is now being policed by those who will report any comments not deemed 100% kosher to the thought police at Labour Part headquarters. Labour is a political party, it should encourage discussion and debate instead of pouncing on people who stray from the road.

It is especially disgusting that this policing is being carried out by the devotees of a racist state which is the only apartheid state in the world. A state which has censorship and gagging orders, which detains prisoners without trial, which uses torture freely, which locks up Palestinian children as young as 12 (not Jewish children) and uses torture on them [see Jerusalem Post 20.6.13. UN: Israel tortures detained Palestinian children] where racism is rampant. A plurality of Israeli Jews support the forcible expulsion of Israeli Palestinians. [see Israel’s Religiously Divided Society Arguably the level of racism in Israel is higher than it ever was in Nazi Germany itself, because the anti-Semitism of the Nazi Party wasn’t particularly popular outside its own ranks.

Of course if the topic of Zionist Nazi collaboration is an expulsion offence, there is no logical reason why discussing Jewish involvement in the Slave Trade should be allowed. Indeed it would be helpful if Labour General Secretary Ian McNicol could draw up a list of banned topics, much like the old Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (Inquisition) used to do. Perhaps socialism and Marx could also be added to the list.

For the first time in the anti-Semitism frenzy, the Chairperson of Momentum, Jon Lansman, spoke out against the witch hunt, in an article on Left Futures Afrenzied witch-hunt is not the way to combat antisemitism or any form of racism

Unfortunately it has taken nearly 3 months for Momentum and Lansman to come out clearly against a suspension of an activist, but even then they have focused on Jacqueline Walker as an individual. There is no mention of other individuals who have been suspended. Lansman, Momentum and the LRC are playing the witch hunter’s game by playing divide and rule.

Important though her case is, Jacqueline Walker is no more important than that of all the other people who have been suspended. What is necessary is to oppose the witchhunt as a whole not to single out particular people as ‘undeserving’ of being suspended, thereby implying that everyone else is deserving.

The witch hunt seems to be concentrating on Muslim councillors in particular, which would fit in well with the Islamaphobia of the Blairite bureaucracy. At least 5 Muslim Labour councillors have been suspended. See Labour suspends three councillors over alleged antisemitic remarks Khadim Hussain, former Lord Mayor of Bradford, has been suspended for sharing a Facebook post that said: “Your school education system only tells you about Anne Frank and the six million Zionists that were killed by Hitler.”, Nottingham councillor Ilyas Aziz, ex-Blackburn mayor Salim Mulla and Burnley councillor Shah Hussain

There is nothing anti-Semitic in this. Of course he should not have said ‘6 million Zionists’ but given that the Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mervis has just had an article in the Daily Torygraph whose sole purpose is to conflate being Jewish with being a Zionist is it any wonder that even former Lord Mayors get confused?

Mervis wrote in Ken Livingstone and the hard Left are spreading the insidious virus of anti-Semitismthat ‘One can no more separate it [Zionism] from Judaism than separate the City of London from Great Britain.’ And then they complain that people call Jews Zionists! You couldn’t make it up. The deception and dishonesty of the Zionist movement and its allies in the press and on the Labour Right.

We should also note the description of anti-Semitism as a virus. This use of a biological metaphor is exactly what the Nazis did. They described Jews and the untermenschen as viruses and vermin. Racism and anti-Semitism is not a virus, it is the product of the political and economic conditions we live in. It changes as society changes. Viruses are generally hard and sometimes impossible, like Aids, to cure. Racism can be cured or defeated. It is only racists who describe racism in these terms.

Suffice to say the Torygraph refused a right of reply to a letter signed by more than 80 Jews (it has been reprinted in today’s Guardian Anti-Zionism does not equate to antisemitism

What Lansman and indeed both Momentum and the Labour Representative Committee have done by not opposing the witch hunt from the start is to embolden Blair’s LP bureaucracy to strike at the heart of the organisation that they and Labour’s Deputy Leader Tom Watson detest.

When Lansman went off on his own holding talks with the Jewish Labour Movement, the British branch of the racist Israeli Labour Party and the Labour Friends of Israel and then came back with the brilliant idea that we should not mention Zionism, the movement that created the State of Israel and which has led to the expulsion and dispossession of the Palestinians, that is where he began to go wrong. If you don’t understand Zionism you don’t understand why the Israeli state is an apartheid state. Why the Left must stop talking about ‘Zionism’

Thus last week David Watson was suspended. The far-right Jewish Chronicle boasted in an article Labour suspends Walthamstow activist for antisemitic Facebook posts that

‘A Labour activist has been suspended from the party after the JC brought his antisemitic posts on social media to light.’

David Watson, the fundraising co-ordinator for the Walthamstow Labour Party, has been suspended pending an investigation, a spokesperson confirmed.

He shared articles on Facebook alleging that Daesh has used weapons made in Israel, comparing Mossad with the Nazis and accusing Israel of genocide against the Palestinians….

Mr Watson also wrote in a Facebook status: “If I were a Palestinian, like most people ... I'd probably want to be a guerilla fighter and liberate my people from a brutal and oppressive occupation.”

Another post saw Mr Watson call Zionism “a racist ideology.”

To most normal people this would be evidence of expressing a perfectly valid political opinion, but to the right-wing rabble around the Jewish Chronicle or Progress it is enough for today's equivalent of the Spanish Inquisition.

Today comes another suspension, this time the Secretary of Croydon Central CLP: Labour suspends Croydon Central secretary over Hitler tweet

David White’s crime (and no doubt mine) was to have tweeted in support of Ken Livingstone’s comments. The article explains how:

‘White and Livingstone are long-time colleagues, having both served together on the Greater London Council in the 1980s.

“Specifically I commented that Ken was largely factually accurate in referring to an agreement in the 1930s between the German Nazi Party and some Zionists to provide for some Jews to go to what is now Israel (the so-called Haavara agreement),” White explained in somewhat more than 140 characters.

“Immediately I sent the tweet I realised that it was unwise, whatever the historical facts, to conflate Zionism with Hitler.”

White says that he quickly deleted his ill-considered comment. But a reporter on a local newspaper had screen-grabbed the tweet and used it as the basis for an article which included the dread words “Ken Livingstone’s Hitler comments were ‘largely accurate’,” in its headline.

Thus the Labour Party’s Inquisition marches on, with Labour’s Torquemada busy at work. It must be a disappointment to Progress that the rack has been abolished in Labour Party disciplinary procedures.

Tony Greenstein

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Anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism

May 11, 2016, 7:03 pm

≫ Next: APARTHEID ADVENTURES - Fighting BDS

≪ Previous: It is Time for Unity in the Campaign Against the Witchhunt

Guardian Letter from 88 Jews Rejects Chief Rabbi's Claim That Zionism is Integral to Judaism

The Guardian today carried a letter from the Free Speech on Israel group containing the signatures of 88 Jews. The letter was originally sent to The Telegraph in response to a letter by the Chief Rabbi Ken Livingstone and the hard Left are spreading the insidious virus of anti-Semitism which asserted that claims that Zionism is a:

‘political; that it is expansionist, colonialist and imperialist’ movement are ‘a fiction.’ According to Mirvis, Zionism is apparently ‘a belief in the right to Jewish self-determination in a land that has been at the centre of the Jewish world for more than 3,000 years. One can no more separate it from Judaism than separate the City of London from Great Britain.’

I guess that when your whole life is based on a fictional character called god, writing fiction comes easy. Jewish life in the past 3,000 years is not one seamless tapestry. Even at the time of the Roman occupation of Palestine in 63 BC the majority of Palestine’s Hebrews had emigrated to the Hellenised cities of the Mediterranean. If there was a centre of Jewish life it was in Vilna not Jerusalem. Palestine was the last place that Jews wanted to go. Of the 2.5 million+ Jews who emigrated from the Russian Pale of Settlement from the mid 19^th century until 1914, about 98% went to the United States and Britain. Palestine was the last place Jews wanted to go.

The Daily Torygraph faithful to its traditions of free and open debate refused to take a reply, hence why we wrote to the Guardian referring to its coverage of Mirvis’s absurd letter. It would be interesting to see how Mirvis explains the opposition of Chief Rabbi Hermann Adler to Zionism. Writing in the English Review in 1878 responded to the question ‘what was ‘the political bearing of Judaism?’ Adler replied that ‘Judaism has no political bearing whatever.’

‘Ever since the conquest of Palestine by the Romans we have ceased to be a body politic. We are citizens of the country in which we dwell. We are simply Englishmen or Frenchmen or Germans, as the case may be, certainly holding particular theological tenets and practising special religious ordinances; but we stand in the same relation to our countrymen as any other religious sect, having the same stake in the national welfare and the same claim on the privileges and duties of the citizens.’ [Leonard Stein, The Balfour Declaration, 1961, London]

↧

APARTHEID ADVENTURES - Fighting BDS

May 12, 2016, 6:30 am

≫ Next: It is Time for Unity in the Campaign Against the Witchhunt

≪ Previous: Anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism

Another in that excellent cartoon series Apartheid Adventures

Enjoy!

↧

It is Time for Unity in the Campaign Against the Witchhunt

May 12, 2016, 4:37 pm

≫ Next: The Zionist leaders considered creating new settlements more urgent than saving Jews from being sent to Treblinka and Birkenau

≪ Previous: APARTHEID ADVENTURES - Fighting BDS

Momentum has to support all those suspended not just its Vice Chair Jacqueline Walker

I was suspended on March 18^th from the Labour Party. Until the suspension of Ken Livingstone I was the most prominent victim of the Right’s feeding frenzy. [see Tony Greenstein suspended from Labour Party - Labour Party machine gets its revenge on Corbyn’s activists as expulsions mount How Israel lobby manufactured UK Labour Party’s anti-Semitism crisis Labour is one step away from book-burning]

Cllr. Aysegul-Gurbuz - suspended

David Watson, suspended for saying Zionism is racist, with Sadique Khan, Mayor of London

It is therefore particularly disgraceful that his replacement, one Rhea Lewis, is a former member of the Jewish Leadership Council (an organisation of big Jewish capitalists led by Micky Davies, former owner of mining company Xtrata) and the Zionist Youth Council. The nomination as part of the left slate of Ms Lewis, especially in the current climate of attacks on anti-Zionists and supporters of the Palestinians, is totally unacceptable. Voting for Lewis is as good as voting for the Right.

Ken Livingstone - suspended for telling the truth

As I wrote less than week ago, the current witch hunt shows all the signs of state involvement designed to deliberately destabilise the new left wing leadership of the Labour Party. Britain’s Cointelpro – How the Israeli Embassy and Guido Fawkes destabilised the LabourParty - Ken Livingstone Must Be Reinstated & Corbyn Must Fight Back

Jon Lansman - Chair of Momentum - gave left cover to the witch hunt

Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell, instead of fighting back and rebutting what is so obviously a co-ordinated and orchestrated campaign by their political enemies, have given these allegations of ‘anti-Semitism’ credence. They have parroted that they are against anti-Semitism, as if there is anyone who isn’t against sin. What they don't seem to have realised is that the anti-Semitism that supporters of Israel talk about isn’t anti-Semitism but anti-Zionism – opposition to the racist and Apartheid nature of the Israeli state.

David Watson - suspended for saying that Zionism is racist

Corbyn could also have pointed to the links that the Tories have in the European Parliament with an assortment of fascist and anti-Semitic parties, including the Polish Law & Justice Party, which won the last Polish Elections and Robert Ziles LNNK in Latvia. Some idea of the nature of the Polish Party can be gleaned by the following report from Forward, the liberal US Jewish paper of December 17 2015. Entitled Poland Turns Hard to Right — and Jews Wind Up in Crosshairs it describes how the Wroclaw branch of the Party held an anti-immigration demonstration and they decided to burn an effigy of a Hasidic Jew for their entertainment.

Tory Boy Steve Reed MP of Progress - behind Watson's suspension

It is somewhat ironic that the Jewish Chronicle’s editor Stephen Pollard is a fan of all those anti-Semites that the Tories work with in the European Parliament. Pollard, who has played a prominent part in the Labour witch hunt, has gone out on a limb to defend the anti-Semitic former MEP of the Law & Justice Party, Michal Kaminski who called on Polish Jews to apologise for hundreds of their number having been burnt alive in his constituency village of Jedwabne in 1941. As long as you support the State of Israel then any amount of anti-Semitism is acceptable. See Jedwabne – The Polish Village Where Up to 900 Jews Were Burnt Alive by Fellow Poles Pollard – Upset by Corbyn’s ‘anti-Semitism’ but a devotee of theanti-Semitic Michael Kaminski

Stephen Pollard, ex-editor of Express and now editor of Jewish Chronicle - happy to defend anti-Semites as long as they are pro-Israekl

It was extremely unfortunate, to put it mildly, that the Chair of Momentum, Jon Lansman, was seen to put the knife into Livingstone’s back commenting that ‘A period of silence from Ken Livingstone is overdue, especially on antisemitism racism & Zionism. It’s time he left politics altogether’ (28.4.16.) The comments that caused the Right such offence were:

Pollard defending notorious Polish fascist and anti-Semite Michal Kaminski MEP

Livingstone was wrong to refer to Israel when it was Palestine and he was wrong to imply that the Holocaust was a product of Hitler’s madness. It was the logical consequence of the anti-Jewish policies of the Nazis - depriving Germany’s Jews of employment, political and civil rights, including citizenship, stripping them of their belongings and then deportation to Poland and Latvia. But he was essentially correct.

I wrote about Jacqueline Walker's case, a Black-Jewish victim of the witch hunt, on 6^thMay Labour’s Thought Police claims another victim - Black Jewish activist Jackie Walker What is so reprehensible about the present witch hunt is that any debate around the topic of Zionism or Jews is now being policed by those who will report any comments not deemed 100% kosher to the thought police at Labour Party headquarters. Labour is a political party, it should encourage discussion and debate instead of pouncing on people who stray from the road.

It is especially disgusting that this policing is being carried out by the devotees of a racist state which is the only apartheid state in the world.

Israel is a state which has censorship and gagging orders, which detains prisoners without trial, which uses torture freely, which locks up Palestinian children as young as 12 (not Jewish children) and tortures on them [see Jerusalem Post 20.6.13. UN: Israel tortures detained Palestinian children] where racism is rampant.

A plurality of Israeli Jews support the forcible expulsion of Israeli Palestinians. [see Israel’s Religiously Divided Society Arguably the level of racism in Israel is higher than it ever was in Nazi Germany itself, because the anti-Semitism of the Nazi Party wasn’t particularly popular outside its own ranks.

For the first time in the anti-Semitism frenzy, the Chairperson of Momentum, Jon Lansman, spoke out against the witch hunt, in an article on Left Futures A frenzied witch-hunt is not the way to combat antisemitism or any form of racism However they are to blame for not speaking out before now. The suspension of Jacqueline Walker is a direct result of the encouragement that Lansman and the LRC gave to the witch hunt. By keeping silent until now they encouraged the witch hunters.

It has taken nearly 3 months for Momentum and Lansman to come out clearly against the suspension of an activist, but even then they have focused on Jacqueline Walker as an individual. There is no mention of other individuals who have been suspended. Lansman, Momentum and the LRC are playing the witch hunter’s game by playing divide and rule.

The witch hunt seems to be concentrating on Muslim councillors in particular, which would fit in well with the Islamaphobia of the Blairite bureaucracy. At least 5 Muslim Labour councillors have been suspended. See Labour suspends three councillors over alleged antisemitic remarks Khadim Hussain, former Lord Mayor of Bradford, has been suspended for sharing a Facebook post that said: “Your school education system only tells you about Anne Frank and the six million Zionists that were killed by Hitler.”, Nottingham councillor Ilyas Aziz, ex-Blackburn mayor Salim Mulla and Burnley councillor Shah Hussain.

There is nothing anti-Semitic in this. Of course he should not have said ‘6 million Zionists’ but given that the Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mervis has just had an article in the Daily Torygraph whose sole purpose is to conflate being Jewish with being a Zionist is it any wonder that even former Lord Mayors get confused?

Mervis wrote in Ken Livingstone and the hard Left are spreading the insidious virus of anti-Semitism that ‘One can no more separate it [Zionism] from Judaism than separate the City of London from Great Britain.’ And then they complain that people call Jews Zionists! You couldn’t make it up. The deception and dishonesty of the Zionist movement and its allies in the press and on the Labour Right.

We should also note the description of anti-Semitism as a virus. This use of a biological metaphor is exactly what the Nazis did. They described Jews and the untermenschen as viruses and vermin. Racism and anti-Semitism is not a virus, it is the product of the political and economic conditions we live in. Racism changes its contours as society changes. Viruses like Aids are sometimes impossible, to cure. Racism can be cured or defeated. Zionism however was founded in the belief that racism amongst non-Jews was inherent, biologically inherited and impossible to cure. It is an anti-socialist position but Zionism itself was always anti-socialist. It is only racists who describe racism thus.

Suffice to say the Torygraph refused a right of reply to a letter signed by more than 80 Jews (it has been reprinted in Wednesday's Guardian Anti-Zionism does not equate to antisemitism

When Lansman went off on his own holding talks with Labour Friends of Israel and the Jewish Labour Movement, the British branch of the racist Israeli Labour Party, he then came back with the brilliant idea that we should not mention Zionism, the movement that created the State of Israel and which has led to the expulsion and dispossession of the Palestinians. That is where he began to go wrong. If you don’t understand Zionism you don’t understand why the Israeli state is an apartheid state. Why the Left must stop talking about ‘Zionism’

Last week David Watson, the Secretary of Croydon Central CLP was suspended. Labour suspends Croydon Central secretary over Hitler tweet David White’s crime (and no doubt mine) was to have tweeted in support of Ken Livingstone’s comments. The article explains how:

‘White and Livingstone are long-time colleagues, having both served together on the Greater London Council in the 1980s.

“Immediately I sent the tweet I realised that it was unwise, whatever the historical facts, to conflate Zionism with Hitler.”

White says that he quickly deleted his ill-considered comment. But a reporter on a local newspaper had screen-grabbed the tweet and used it as the basis for an article which included the dread words “Ken Livingstone’s Hitler comments were ‘largely accurate’,” in its headline.

The far-right Jewish Chronicle boasted in an article Labour suspends Walthamstow activist for antisemitic Facebook posts that

‘A Labour activist has been suspended from the party after the JC brought his antisemitic posts on social media to light.’

David Watson, the fundraising co-ordinator for the Walthamstow Labour Party, has been suspended pending an investigation, a spokesperson confirmed.

He shared articles on Facebook alleging that Daesh has used weapons made in Israel, comparing Mossad with the Nazis and accusing Israel of genocide against the Palestinians….

Another post saw Mr Watson call Zionism “a racist ideology.”

Thus the Labour Party’s Inquisition marches on, with Labour’s Torquemada busy at work. It must be a disappointment to Progress that the rack has been abolished in Labour Party disciplinary procedures.

Tony Greenstein

↧

The Zionist leaders considered creating new settlements more urgent than saving Jews from being sent to Treblinka and Birkenau

May 12, 2016, 6:54 pm

≫ Next: Irony of Ironies – Jewish Labour Movement Publishes Anti-Semitic Post

≪ Previous: It is Time for Unity in the Campaign Against the Witchhunt

Instead of supporting and strengthening the Boycott of Nazi Germany, the Yishuv (Jewish Palestine) was sabotaging it

Tom Segev whose book Elie Wiesel reviewed

Before you decide to report this post to Labour’s compliance unit, in order that they have more evidence to use for my expulsion hearing, please be aware that this is taken from an old and excellent review below by Eli Wiesel.

The conclusion one Israeli nationalist drew about the holocaust - centre is the mixed school, the Hand in Hand, in Jerusalem, after members of the state-funded Lehava had set fire to it and daubed its walls with slogans

Let me explain that I have little time for Wiesel, a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. He is a self-serving Zionist propagandist. The conclusions he drew from the holocaust was that Jews must be strong regardless of how much they persecute others. He has given wholehearted backing to Israel’s attacks on the Gaza Strip.

How the Jewish Chronicle saw Ha'avara, the Zionist-Nazi trade agreement at the time

Nonetheless Wiesel, is a survivor of Auschwitz. He was deported from Hungary, the last major Jewish community to be deported. He was a victim of Rudolf Kasztner, the leader of Hungarian Zionism, who made a pact with Adolf Eichmann. In return for a train taking 1684 of the Zionist and Jewish elite to safety out of Hungary, he would ensure that the remainder of Hungary’s Jews were pacified and misled as to where they were being deported. They were led to believe they were being ‘resettled’ in Kenyermeze, a place that didn’t exist. Hungary’s Jews, but for the collaboration of Kasztner, the Zionist ‘rescue committee’ and the Judenrat (Jewish Council) would not have lost nearly ½ million people.

Jewish Chronicle Article attacking Zionists' trade agreement Ha'avara which broke the Jewish boycott of Nazi Germany

Elie Wiesel confirmed that ‘We were taken just 2 weeks before D-Day, and we did not know that Auschwitz existed… everyone knew except the victims.’ Nicholls, W. Christian Anti-Semitism: A History of Hate, London: Jason Aronson Inc., 1993 353.. Wiesel asked ‘Why didn’t we know? To this day I try to understand what happened. If ever there was a tragedy that could have been prevented, it was that one.’ [“The ‘Myth’ and Reality of Rescue from the Holocaust’, p.10. citing Wiesel’s introduction to Braham and Bel Vago, The Holocaust in Hungary 40 Years Later (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), p. xiv].

Wiesel’s review of the critical but excellent Israeli historian, Tom Segev’s book The 7^th Million deserves reprinting now that Ken Livingstone is in hot water for having told the truth about Nazi support for the Zionist movement.

Tony Greenstein

Reviewed Tom Segev's book below

The Land That Broke Its Promise : The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust, By Tom Segev (Hill & Wang)

May 23, 1993

This review was translated from the French by Marion Wiesel

Had Israel existed in 1939, would the Holocaust have been averted? Did Israel need Auschwitz to be born or reborn? These questions have surfaced over and over again. They are heavy with implications. I, myself, choose to view these two events in Jewish History as mysteries linked not as cause and effect but by chronology.

Rudolf Kasztner - Hungarian Zionist leader who exchanged the Hungarian Jewish community for 1684 of the elite Zionists and Jews in Hungary

Tom Segev, an influential columnist for the Israeli daily "Haaretz," is to be congratulated for the way he is treating the issue. Daring to challenge traditional beliefs, "The Seventh Million" is richly documented and written with great passion. Still, it is certain to cause pain, especially to those who love Israel and harbor a romantic and idealized image of its destiny.

What follows is not meant to mitigate the guilt of the killers and their collaborators; nothing can ever diminish that. Still, on a different level, not all others are beyond reproach.

Israel, for some of us, is much more than a geographical or political notion; it is the very heart and conscience of our people. Even inside the "Kingdom of Night," there were inmates who dreamed of Jerusalem, who were convinced that in Tel Aviv and Haifa, Givat-Brenner and Hulda, our brothers and sisters were crying for us and with us. Our faith in Jewish solidarity was total. Had anyone dared to suggest that during the darkest hours of our history, the leaders and inhabitants of Palestine were not overwhelmed by compassion for their deported fellow Jews, we would have dismissed him as a traitor.

http://articles.latimes.com/images/pixel.gif

Jewish Chronicle Report of Supreme Court decision in Kasztner Trial 31.1.58.

Of course, Segev is not the first to have revealed the shortcomings of the "Yishuv"--as the Jewish community in Palestine was then called--and its leaders. Playwright and novelist Ben Hecht wrote a violently polemical work, "Perfidy," dealing with the Kastner trial in the early 1960s. Through it, he attacked the Zionist establishment's timorous policy during the war and went so far as to accuse its major players of collaborating with the Germans.

There is no comparison between Ben Hecht's inflammatory pamphlet and Segev's study. The latter is sober and balanced, and therefore, all the more disturbing. Segev tells of his torment as he gradually discovers the extent to which the Jewish victims in Europe were let down by their co-religionists in Palestine.

Let us examine the strange episode of the haavar or "transfer."

In the mid-1930s, after Hitler's rise to power, while American Jewry fought to organize an economic boycott of Nazi Germany, the leaders of the Palestinian Yishuv entered into active, though unofficial, negotiations with Berlin regarding the transfer of German Jews and their wealth--some 30 million pound sterling--to the Holy Land.

The Zionists compare assimilation (Jews marrying non-Jews) to the annihilation of Jewry by Hitler

Surely, Jewish Palestine--at the time the two words were not contradictory--needed money to finance its development, but this brazen pragmatism went against the political philosophy of a majority of world Jewry. There developed a growing perception that instead of supporting and strengthening the boycott, Palestine was, in fact, sabotaging it.

A comparison of a Jewish child under the Nazis and a Palestinian child under Israel

There were justifications. Yes, the country was poor and needed financial input and yes, this course of action provided a chance to save German Jews who might otherwise have decided to "wait and see" and let the last possible opportunity of salvation go by.

But Segev goes on to show, supported by devastating evidence, that later, even as Germany carried out its Final Solution--liquidating one ghetto after another, one community after another--the Jewish leaders of Palestine never made the rescue of European Jews into an overwhelming national priority. We know that Zionist leader Itzhak Gruenbaum, a future Minister of the Interior in David ben Gurion's first cabinet, considered creating new settlements more urgent than saving Jews from being sent to Treblinka and Birkenau.

Read Segev's heartbreaking conclusion:

"There had been about nine million Jews in Europe on the eve of the war; about six million were killed, leaving three million alive. Most of them were saved by Germany's defeat in the war. Some were spared thanks to the help they received from various governments and organizations such as the Joint Distribution Committee and from thousands of good-hearted people in almost every country--the "righteous Gentiles." There were dramatic rescue operations such as the flight across the Pyrenees from France to Spain and the convoys of Jews that sailed from Denmark to Sweden. Only a few survivors owed their lives to the efforts of the Zionist movement."

What follows is equally depressing. It concerns the reception accorded to survivors as they arrived, first in Palestine, then in Israel. They were received warmly, but, most often, with little sensitivity. They were urged over and over again, to forget what they had experienced. People would tell them: "The past is the past . . .,""Let bygones be bygones . . . ." But the survivors needed to tell their stories, if only to fulfill their obligations toward the dead.

They needed to bear witness and no one wanted to listen. Except if the stories glorified Jewish heroes and partisans. The proud citizens of Eretz Israeldid not want to hear about the suffering, the oppression, the agony, the humiliation of hundreds of thousands, of millions of their own people. It was only after the trial of Gestapo head Adolf Eichmann that the teaching of the shoah, a term as inadequate as the term "Holocaust," began to be taken seriously in Israel.

Of all that Segev reports in this singular book--the unsuccessful plans for revenge, German reparations, the complex relations with Bonn--the chapter about the Israelis' attitude toward survivors is the most painful.

While it is not my role to corroborate his claims, I can relate my own experience when I arrived in Israel in June 1949 on my first visit there. I had been sent by a Parisian weekly to write a series of articles on the metamorphoses death camp survivors were undergoing in their new homeland. The survivors' comments fill me with sadness, as they did then. They spoke of the arrogance of old-timers who asked why they had not immigrated to Israel earlier. And why they had gone "like sheep to slaughter." And why, why, and why . . .

I shall stop here. Read Segev's book and you will understand why.

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Irony of Ironies – Jewish Labour Movement Publishes Anti-Semitic Post

May 13, 2016, 8:26 am

≫ Next: Uri Ariel MK of Far Right Jewish Home Condemns Treatment of Palestinians at Check Points

≪ Previous: The Zionist leaders considered creating new settlements more urgent than saving Jews from being sent to Treblinka and Birkenau

British Branch of Israeli Labour Party Forced to Censor its own anti-Semitism!

Jeremy Newmark’s Jewish Labour Movement has become very agitated of late. It's because of all the publicity that Jews who are not Zionist have been getting. What's even worse is that people have started to cotton on to the fact that the Zionists have been using anti-Semitism as a weapon against their political opponents rather than out of any concern for genuine Jewish anti-racism.

Now you see it

Now you don't

It is very disconcerting, indeed upsetting, for the Zionist led campaign about ‘anti-Semitism’ in the Labour Party to have 88 Jews write to the Guardian saying that the whole affair is got up and bogus. See Labour, antisemitism and where Jeremy Corbyn goes from hereand Anti-Zionism does not equate to antisemitism

An early example of Zionist anti-Semitism from Herzl's Jewish State. It talks about 'honest' anti-Semites and how the anti-Semites will be of such a great help to Zionism

We have always said that there is no anti-Semitism in the Labour Party. But it appears we were wrong, True to form the Zionist JLM publishes an anti-Semitic post which states that ‘It appears that some of those signatories only identify as Jews for purposes of taking such contrary positions.”

See JLM realises that calling non-Zionist Jews imposters & ‘contrary’ is unacceptable

Young Zionists censor themselves! and

Jewish Labour Movement publishes bitter attack on Jewish critics of Israel

One of the letters that the JLM took such exception to

Now if anything is anti-Semitic then it is someone who denies that Jewish people are Jewish. Yet this is exactly what JLM have done. Of course at the time of Hitler, no such distinction was made but our Zios seem to think that they are the arbiters of who is and is not Jewish. You can only be Jewish if you are a racist and a supporter of the Israeli state. How much more anti-Semitic can you be than that?

↧

Uri Ariel MK of Far Right Jewish Home Condemns Treatment of Palestinians at Check Points

May 13, 2016, 6:41 pm

≫ Next: Ian McNicol Restages Franz Kafka’s The Trial (minus the literary drama)

≪ Previous: Irony of Ironies – Jewish Labour Movement Publishes Anti-Semitic Post

Hard-right minister says treatment of Palestinians shameful

It comes to a pretty pass when even Uri Ariel, of the Habayit HeYehudi (Jewish Home) Party condemns the treatment of Palestinians at Israeli checkpoints. In all checkpoints in this Apartheid state there are two doors – one for Palestinians who wait for hours and another for Jewish settlers and Europeans.

Such is the nature of Israeli Apartheid and Zionism.

Tony Greenstein

Waiting to cross the Hawara checkpoint near Nablus, 2008.

Hard-right minister: Conditions at West Bank checkpoints ‘disgraceful’

Uri Ariel says Israel must improve Palestinian economy, build Gaza port: ‘We are responsible for the region’

By Times of Israel staff
April 15, 2016

The conditions suffered by Palestinians at Israeli checkpoints in the West Bank are “shameful and a disgrace to the State of Israel and to the security establishment,” Agriculture Minister Uri Ariel said on Friday.

Ariel [L], best known for his fiery right-wing rhetoric and his insistence on Jewish rights to the Temple Mount, told Tel Aviv Radio on Friday morning that Israel must take steps to improve the economic well-being of the Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, including the long-disputed construction of a Gaza port.

Palestinians ‘stand there in terrible conditions: in the heat, in the rains. Why can’t we fix this?’

He said Palestinians should not be forced to pass checkpoints inside the West Bank and that conditions at checkpoints to Israel must be improved.

“Go and see how they stand and wait to enter Israel at the checkpoints. It’s shameful and a disgrace to the State of Israel and to the security establishment. People stand there in terrible conditions: in the summer heat, in the winter rains.” He added that workers often arrived before dawn and waited for hours without shade or water. “Why can’t we fix this?” he said.

Ariel said Gazans deserved a port for the import and export of goods and said this could be achieved with “one hundred percent security.” He called on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to stop “considering” it and simply carry it out. “We’ve been considering for 47 years. They have no international ports. Why shouldn’t they have a port?”

He added that Israel should provide water and cooking gas to Palestinian towns, saying “We are responsible for the region.”

Ariel is a former settler leader who represents the Orthodox-nationalist Jewish Home party. He has repeatedly stated his wish to reinstate Jewish prayers at the Temple Mount. He visited the contested compound on several occasions including a visit this past September that was followed by days of Palestinian rioting, as tensions over the status of the site escalated.

↧

Ian McNicol Restages Franz Kafka’s The Trial (minus the literary drama)

May 14, 2016, 1:59 pm

≫ Next: A small victory – I have been told the basis of my suspension!

≪ Previous: Uri Ariel MK of Far Right Jewish Home Condemns Treatment of Palestinians at Check Points

I am invited to a Labour Party Investigation into Allegations against me, I am not allowed to know the nature of these allegations

Alice in Wonderland in her trial - Labour Party practice is modeled on her trial

I was suspended from the Labour Party on the 18^th March. Despite repeated requests, the Labour Party’s General Secretary Iain McNicol has refused to release any details of the allegations made against me. I apparently made certain comments to which persons unknown took objection, but I am not allowed to know either the comments nor the persons who were so aggrieved.

Little could Franz Kafka have known that the Labour Party would model its witch hunts on his book

McNicol’s reticence in letting me know the reasons why I was suspended, did not extend to that well known Labour newspaper, The Telegraph. On April 2nd it led with a story on my suspension Corbyn told to‘exorcise’ anti-Semitism in his partyand The Times followed suit the same day Labour welcomes back blogger who compared Israel to Nazis

I have now been summoned by Harry Gregson, Labour’s acting Regional Organiser, to an investigation hearing. Gregson has not provided me with any details of the allegations against me, despite my having requested this of him. Any questions that he might put to me could only be asked as a form of ambush. Such a method of inquiry, if an employer tried it on, would result in a finding of automatic unfair dismissal. No court of law would allow cross-examination on the basis of refusing access to evidence.

Alice dismisses her judges as a pack of cards

Of course I would have little difficulty swatting away questions from a minor apparatchik such as Gregson but that would be entirely besides the point. There is a principle involved. Anyone who is accused of an offence, however trivial or grievous, is entitled to know the nature and detail of those allegations. Only in a police state are you not given the details of what you are accused of. It is a damning indictment of the Labour Party that they are incapable of adhering even to the most basic rules of fairness.

For the Labour Party to tolerate such a situation sheds much light on the nature of the accusations I am facing and the people who have made these allegations. Because of course in Israel when Palestinians are administratively detained without trial for periods of 6 months at a time, they too have no right to see the evidence against them. This is the system that Blair brought in for terrorism trials, with its system of special advocates, whereby the accused was not informed of much of the prosecution case. It would seem that Blair's rules of justice have now seeped into the Labour Party.

Perhaps attacking Apartheid Israel and Zionism is a form of political terrorism? Most people would think that a state that discriminates in every area of its life against the indigenous population and locks people up without trial is the terrorist.

Exactly my position!

Fortunately the Labour Party isn’t able to detain or torture me and since the Blairites who put McNicol and co. in office are not in power themselves, they can’t extraordinarily render me to a country that will carry out third party torture on their behalf.

I have therefore written to Gregson saying that the dates and times of the proposed meeting are not in any event possible but that I have no intention of meeting up with him until I am provided with the requisite details. In any event I have put in a Subject Access Request under the Data Protection Act 1998 and if Gregson isn’t forthcoming any investigation meeting will have to wait until the information I have requested is delivered to me.

I can’t imagine what Alice in Wonderland in her trial would have made of it. She would probably have dismissed Gregson and McNicol as just a pack of cards! Or as Humpty Dumpty said, 'When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less. The question is which is to be master — that's all.'

Tony Greenstein

13^thMay 2016

Dear Mr Gregson,

Thank you for your email which I received today.

I am unable to attend for an interview on the day suggested, May 21^stor on any weekend because I have shared responsibility for my autistic son, Daniel. I am only therefore able to make meetings on a weekday.

Further I do not normally travel outside Brighton both for reasons relating to the care of Daniel and the need to be on hand in case of an emergency. I also do not usually travel long distances for reasons to do with my own health. I would therefore expect you, as the acting regional organiser, to attend such a meeting in the Brighton & Hove constituency.

Thank you for the NEC Advice Note. I was already in possession of it. As you are aware, since I have both written and spoken to you, I wish to be informed of the details of the allegations which have been made against me and the complainant(s). This is a basic precondition of any open, fair and transparent investigation.

Having practised in both Employment Tribunals and the Employment Appeal Tribunal I can assure you that someone who was subject to an investigation on the basis of unseen and undisclosed allegations would be considered to be automatically unfairly dismissed. Even the worst employer wouldn’t fail to inform someone of the charges or allegations made against them. I can see no conceivable reason as to why you are continuing to refuse to disclose the allegations against me and I note that the NEC Advice note states that:

‘Unless the complaint or allegations being investigated are about intimidation by the respondent, the respondent should be notified of the investigation and the nature of the complaints or allegations at an early stage.

I have this week submitted to the Labour Party General Secretary Iain McNicol a Subject Access Request under the Data Protection Act 1998 for the above information. I would therefore suggest that instead of waiting the statutory 40 days before handing the said information over to me, that you voluntarily disclose it now. You also made a promise to the Chair of Brighton and Hove Labour Party, Lloyd Russell-Moyle, so he informed me, to provide me with the relevant information.

In the event that you continue to refuse to send me the requested information, then I shall wait until you are forced by law into disclosing it. I am not prepared to be interviewed ‘blind’ and subject to questioning about matters I cannot prepare for in advance. Any fair and unbiased investigation would, as a matter of course, disclose all such information because otherwise it is interview by ambush. Any such investigation would be bound to be seen as unreasonable.

The NEC advice states that I can suggest names of witnesses who you will interview. Again it is not possible to suggest names of possible witnesses when I am unaware of the nature of the allegations to which there might be witnesses.

Given that the Compliance Unit has already leaked details of the complaints against me to The Telegraph which, together with The Times, printed a story on 2^ndApril 2016, there cannot be any possible reason other than an ingrained unfairness for your failure to comply with my request. I would therefore ask you once again to supply me with the details of the allegations which have apparently been made against me together with the name(s) of the complainants.

You will also be aware that both The Times and The Telegraph retracted any suggestions that I was anti-Semitic, which I understand to have been the tenor of the allegations which have been made. They also printed letters from me to that effect. I have made it clear to Mr McNicol that I will not hesitate to issue claim for defamation should The Labour Party make any finding that I am anti-Semitic.

I look forward to receiving a positive response to my request for information and an agreement as to time and place when an investigatory hearing might take place.

Yours sincerely,

Tony Greenstein

Harry Gregson inviting Tony Greenstein to an 'investigation' meeting

↧

A small victory – I have been told the basis of my suspension!

May 17, 2016, 9:46 pm

≫ Next: Israeli General Compares Israel with the Nazis

≪ Previous: Ian McNicol Restages Franz Kafka’s The Trial (minus the literary drama)

Labour Party is prepared to spend nearly £30K a year on a new Compliance Administrator

We can gauge New Labour’s attitude to civil liberties and the rights of the accused by the fact that it has taken two whole months before Labour’s Acting Organiser in the South of England, Harry Gregson, let me know what the basis of the charges against me are.

Labour's hapless General Secretary Iain McNicol - appointed by Miliband and sidelined thereafter

Of course 3 terse lines hardly comply with the duty of disclosure.

When the Police charged me with assaulting a violent Zionist in the course of the Sodastream protests I received full statements, documentation, film etc. They eventually dropped charges. That was also my experience when charged with the heinous offence of making an unauthorised collection on behalf of PSC (a collecting tin on a stall!). In that case I was acquitted but again there was reams of paper. Labour's Inquisition is sparse indeed.

When it comes to the instant suspensions from the Labour Party there is a point blank refusal to disclose anything, other than the practice that Blair and Alistair Campbell developed to perfection, i.e. leaking to friends in the press, in this case The Telegraph and Times.

Out go my crimes of referring to ‘Zio idiots’ and ‘Zionist scum’ as well as comparisons between the Nuremberg Laws and Israel’s marriage laws. Preferably wiser counsels concluded that expelling me for quoting the greatest Jewish political philosopher of the last century, Hannah Arendt, was maybe not such a good idea.

Extracts from the press and their retractions

The 3 offences that I am so far charged with are:

1. Describing the IRA attack on Thatcher as ‘obviously legitimate’. Well the IRA were at war with the British and attempting to assassinate Thatcher, the effective commander of the British forces was obviously legitimate in the eyes of the IRA. Let us remember that the British Army was working via its Forces Research Unit with Loyalist Death Squads who targeted completely innocent Catholics as well as people like the solicitor Demond Finucane and Sinn Fein politicians like Gerry Adams. That was legitimate. Given that Thatcher personally sent 750 men to their deaths on the General Belgrano, despite it steaming away from the Falklands and then her support for General Pinochet, who was responsible for the torture and murder of thousands of Chilean socialists, communists and democrats I wouldn’t have shed many tears at her demise.

2. The second charge that Zionism is a form of Jewish anti-Semitism is a fact. That is how Jews rightly saw it.

3. The comment ‘'spot on re the Zionist collaboration with the Nazis.'Gives me problems as I don’t know to who I said this. Was it in respect of Livingstone or before. But yes the Zionist movement did indeed collaborate with the Nazis.

So although this is a step forward it is clearly not enough.

An ideal job but this fixed term contract thing seems very anti-worker to me

However given my experience at their hands I am tempted to apply for the job of Compliance Administrator. Clearly given the number of new suspensions the Compliance Unit is overworked and there is a need for more hands on the deck of what is, by all accounts, an extremely inefficient department. I am sure my candidacy will be welcomed by all! Clearly the Labour Party is in no need of extra funds if it has money to waste on jobs like this.

Harry Gregson celebrating Mrs Windsor's 90 years on state benefits - clearly no republican he!

After 2 months I've been given a glimpse of the pretext 4 my suspension

On 16 May 2016 at 09:24, Harry Gregson <harry_gregson@labour.org.uk> wrote:

Dear Mr Greenstein,

Thank you for your letter. You were suspended from the Labour Party as it was alleged you breached Labour Party membership rules by acting in a way that was grossly detrimental to the Party. This specifically related to the comments below that you were alleged to have made:

- 'The attack on Thatcher by the IRA was obviously legitimate. She was a military target'

- 'Zionism is a Jewish version of anti-Semitism'

- 'spot on re the Zionist collaboration with the Nazis.'

These comments were the trigger for your suspension and will form part of the interview. However you will also have the opportunity to respond to any other evidence that I have discovered throughout the investigation so far.

Please can you let me know if you are now prepared to meet for an interview? I can come to Brighton if necessary.

Best wishes

Harry

Harry Gregson

Acting Regional Director, Labour South East

07872 417312

On 13 May 2016 at 16:51, Harry Gregson <harry_gregson@labour.org.uk> wrote:

Dear Mr Greenstein,

I am writing to inform you that I will be carrying out the investigation on behalf of the Labour Party into the circumstances that resulted in your suspension from the Party.

I will be conducting interviews with witnesses and I will also need a time when you are available for an interview. You are entitled to bring along a 'silent friend', as am I, they must be a Party member and they cannot intervene in the interview in any way. Please provide me with the name of your ‘silent friend’ prior to the interview so I can ensure they meet these requirements. I also attach the NEC advice note on carrying out such an investigationfor your information.

At the interview you can also request I interview anyone else you deem important to this investigation.

I am proposing holding this interview on Saturday 21^st May in Ergon House, Horseferry Road, SW1P 2AL.

Please can you let me know if you can make this date and if so what time works for you and I will try and accommodate it.

Best wishes,

Harry Gregson

Acting Regional Director, Labour South East

Sent by email from the Labour Party, promoted by Iain McNicol on behalf of The Labour Party, both at Southside, 105 Victoria Street, London, SW1E 6QT Website: www.labour.org.uk to join or renew call 0345 092 2299.

16^thMay 2016

Dear Mr Gregson,

At last, after nearly two months of being suspended, I have finally been given a glimmer of the reasons as to why I have been suspended.

I would now like to receive the full allegations, i.e. date, time and surrounding discussions, so that I can see when these quotations were allegedly said and what the context of these remarks were. In other words the full body of evidence surrounding what are bare quotations.

I will receive this anyway via the Subject Access Request that I have submitted so it would make sense on your part to send me the full information now rather than waiting the statutory 40 days. I cannot think of any reason whatsoever to continue to withhold such information from me. If this were a court of law they would grant full disclosure without a second's thought unless you are claiming national security considerations for so doing.

I also note that the allegations of comparing Israel’s law on marriage to those of the Nuremberg Laws, as reported in the Telegraph and The Times appear to have been dropped. I would be curious to know why.

You say that these remarks were the trigger for my suspension and that I will have the opportunity to respond to any further evidence that you have discovered. Again I wish to be informed as to what evidence you believe you have uncovered in advance of my interview with you and again the surrounding context.

Assuming that you agree to a full disclosure of the information I have requested I will of course be happy to meet with you at a mutually agreed time and place.

Yours sincerely,

Tony Greenstein

↧

Israeli General Compares Israel with the Nazis

May 18, 2016, 8:33 am

≫ Next: Zionist Royalle Finds What She Wanted to Find

≪ Previous: A small victory – I have been told the basis of my suspension!

Obersturmbannführer Golan’s Anti-Semitic Crime

As you will know, comparing Israel and Zionism with the Nazis is anti-Semitic. Ken Livingstone went even further in suggesting an identity of interest between the Nazis and Zionists. Clearly such wickedness must be punished. Only Zionists are allowed to compare their opponents with Nazis and use the Holocaust to attack their opponents. Everyone else must remain silent at all times because the poor dears will suffer terribly. The now discredited Working Definition on Anti-Semitism of the European Union Monitoring Committee defined anti-Semitism as including a comparison of Israel with the Nazis.

You can therefore imagine how shocked I was that at Israel’s Holocaust Memorial Day, the Deputy Army Commander General Yair Golan told his audience that what happened in Europe bears a resemblance to what is taking place in Israel today. Naturally this provoked outrage, not least from the same Netanyahu who excused Hitler for the Holocaust because the Palestinian Mufti of Jerusalem pushed him into it. See Top IDF officer Yair Golan compares modern Israel to 1930s Germany inbombshell speech

In this article B. Michael has a look at a few reasons why Golan was correct to make the comparison he did. Michael uses the term ‘unchosen’ throughout, in an ironic reference to the concept of the ‘chosen people’ as it applies in Israel today.

Tony Greenstein

Gen. Yair Golan

Why would that general compare Israel to 1930s Germany? Hmm...

What was going through that anti-Semite general’s head when he compared the Chosen People to 1930s Europe? A few pointers.

By B. Michael

Haaretz - May 15, 2016

With all the festivals and days of sadness behind us, we can now return to the nagging question: What on earth was going through that anti-Semite general’s head when he dared hint that we, the Chosen People, commit abominable acts like those perpetrated by the gentiles?

Really, what's he talking about?

OK, let’s start with the small details known to everyone. Maybe he was talking about:

1. The rising number of calls proclaiming, “Death to the unchosen people!”

2. The demands not to employ the “unchosen” ones, buy from them or rent or sell apartments to them, and drive them from the Holy Land (all sanctified by the Rabbinate and other kosher rabbis, naturally).

3. The growing thuggishness that labels every “unchosen” person a legitimate target for insults, abuse, assaults, vilification and, if possible, manslaughter.

4. A soccer team that swears its ranks will include only those of pure blood and religion, and whose fans’ most popular chant is “Death to the unchosen ones.”

5. A society that produces pogrom-like actions and lynch mobs, church and mosque arsonists, and plenty of thugs and scoundrels.

6. Elected officials encouraging extrajudicial killings on our streets.

7. A lawmaker (and his wife) openly demanding racial segregation between the pure and impure in maternity wards.

In short, no big deal - just routine matters that no longer excite folk. Consequently, we have no choice but to expand the list and include some other items that may have escaped the collective memory...

8. Spiritual leaders who publish books that determine when it’s acceptable to kill gentiles and their children. These religious leaders still tend their flocks.

9. A movement that defends the purity of the people and its blood, and persecutes lecherous “unchosen” ones who dare consort with daughters of the Chosen Ones in order to defile them. On his Facebook page, the head of this holy movement calls for the mass murder of the “unchosen ones,” knowing no harm will befall him.

10. Tens, if not hundreds or thousands, of businesses boasting of their employees’ purity.

11. The chief Sephardi peddler of religion who declared, “Goyim were created solely to serve the Chosen People.” His noble predecessors determined that only Slavic nations were created in order to serve the then-master race. Our religious pastor surpasses them: he deemed all nations our servants.

12. The education and culture ministers, who work tirelessly to synchronize education, culture, the media and arts, so everyone speaks in unison about one people, one state, one Torah and one viewpoint.

13. The brilliant legal sophistry that prohibits the “unchosen” ones from purchasing state lands. Only the Chosen People may do so.

14. The hundreds of communities that meticulously ensure the purity of their chosen population. The “unchosen” may not enter their gates lest they cause contamination by their very presence. All of this is legal.

15. The Absentee Property Law, which regulates the assets of “absentees” even when the “absentees” are clearly present and living a stone’s throw away. Only the laws of Chosen People have clauses relating to “absent-present” persons whose presence doesn’t detract from their status as “absentees.”

16. The fact that the assets of the “chosen ones” remain theirs forever, even after thousands of years of abandonment that exceed any statute of limitations. In contrast, the assets of the “unchosen” – even when they’re still holding them – will be confiscated, stolen, expropriated and transferred to the Chosen People. Just as our magnanimous Lord in heaven decreed.

17. A society that controls millions of “inferior” people who lack civil and human rights, downtrodden by a mechanism called the “Civil Administration” and headed by a general.

18. A state that locks up a million and a half people in a gigantic enclosure, unsure whether to call it “Pale of Settlement” or the “Gaza Ghetto.”

19. A regime that imposes a grotesque legal system upon millions, which doesn’t require evidence and shows no truth, justice or compassion. However, the system does have a “court” – a contemptible theater whose main purpose is to give a “legal” and “authorized” appearance to a military dictatorship.

20. A justice minister who goes out of her way to crush the legal system, liberating the rulers at last from oppressive legal constraints.

21. A government that rules an occupied people, and sometimes its own subjects, according to emergency regulations that give it limitless authority “for security reasons.” (Damn, I wish I could remember where I’ve heard of this trick being used before.)

22. A state – unique among all the world’s democracies – in which there’s no legal way for a “chosen” person to marry an “unchosen” one.

23. A government that wholeheartedly believes in the Chosen People’s right to continue expanding eastward. This space extends from Mesopotamia to Nuweiba.

24. A state that insists it’s the “only democracy” in the Middle East, whereas it’s actually the only “military theocracy” in the entire world.

25. A state that proves pop psychology is occasionally accurate in its diagnosis: an abused child can indeed become an abusive adult.

And that’s pretty much it.

Is it because of these piffling details that Obersturmbannführer Golan remembered what he did? Odd. Very odd. There’s no comparison, clearly.

↧

Zionist Royalle Finds What She Wanted to Find

May 18, 2016, 8:38 pm

≫ Next: Labour’s ‘anti-Semitism’ witch-hunt lets the cat out of the Bag

≪ Previous: Israeli General Compares Israel with the Nazis

Baroness Royall Inquiry into‘Anti-Semitism’ Gives Carte-Blanche to Labour’s Witch-hunters

Baroness Royal - a Zionist chosen who had reached her conclusions before she even set foot in Oxford

The ‘findings’ from Baroness Royall’s ‘investigation’ into anti-Semitism at Oxford University Labour Club were written before she even entered the hallowed portals of Oxford. It is fitting that they weren’t accompanied by anything as grand as evidence. Indeed that was the whole purpose of the report. It is evidence free.

As Asa Winstanley demonstrated in his article How Israel lobby manufactured UK Labour Party’s anti-Semitism crisisthe whole issue of ‘anti-Semitism’ was contrived and manufactured from the start by those whose main target is Corbyn. The means to bring him down is ‘anti-Semitism’. They have already tried to associate him with ‘terrorists’ and holocaust deniers. Now those who are running this campaign – the media, the Israel lobby and Progress – are alleging, on the basis of years old tweets, that there is an endemic problem of ‘anti-Semitism’ in the Labour Party.

It wasn't anti-Semitism but Israel Apartheid week that was the problem

Alex Chalmers was a Zionist activist had been an intern at BICOM - the British Israel propaganda group

It began in March when the co-Chair of Oxford University Labour Club Alex Chalmers resigned claiming that his fellow students had a problem with Jews. As Chalmers made it clear on his Facebook page, the reason for resigning was that the Labour Club had voted to support the Israel Apartheid week. In other words it opposed the systematic and institutionalised racism that exists in Israel. Far from being the innocent abroad, Chalmers had been, according to his Linked-in profile, an intern at BICOM, the British-Israel propaganda outfit.

When the Israeli Labour Government held power Apartheid South Africa was its closest ally

If Oxford University were situated in Tel Aviv then its Jewish students would have the opportunity to choose whether or not they wished to share accommodation with Arab students or not. Imagine if the same happened in reverse at Oxford and non-Jewish students were given the option not to share with Jewish students. There would, rightly, be uproar at what would be anti-Semitism. Arab and Jewish students live in separate housing at the Technion

Royall herself, a former Kinnock adviser, went on a Labour Friends of Israel trip in 2007 Fresh Row Over Labour Anti-Semitism Inquiry As Unite Official Raises Links To Labour Friends Of Israel

The Jewish Labour Movement is an appendance of Israel's Apartheid Labour Party

Of one thing there was no doubt, Janet Royall was determined to find anti-Semitism. The only problem is that even she couldn’t conjure ‘institutional anti-Semitism’ out of thin air. The mere fact that she could even entertain the idea that Jews in Britain might suffer from institutional anti-Semitism demonstrates what planet she is living on. As William Rubinstein, the former President of the Jewish Historical Society, wrote: ‘the rise of Western Jewry to unparalleled affluence and high status’ which ‘has led to the near-disappearance of a Jewish proletariat of any size; indeed, the Jews may become the first ethnic group in history without a working-class of any size.’ W.D. Rubinstein, ‘The Left, the Right and the Jews’, p.51, Croom Helm, London 1982

In short British Jews are privileged and prosperous. The days are long gone since they lived in the East End, worked in the tailoring trade and voted Labour as naturally as the sun going down at night. The idea that Jewish students at Oxford University Labour Club suffer from ‘institutional racism’ or that Jews in Britain suffer from it is risible. Jews are one group who do not suffer from police violence, disproportionate stop and search, immigration controls and deportation.

As soon as her Report was released, Royall blogged on the site of the racist Jewish Labour Movement

In another indication of where Royall was coming from, no sooner had she reported than she blogged on the web site of the Jewish Labour Movement. [Blog: Baroness Royall on her report: "There is too often a culture of intolerance where Jews are concerned and there are clear incidents ofantisemitism"]

The Jewish Labour Movement is the British wing of the Israeli Labour Party - a party which since 1930 has been devoted to Zionist Apartheid - see this quotation from one of its earliest pioneers, David HaCohen

The Jewish Labour Movement is affiliated to the World Zionist Organisation via the World Labour Zionist Movement, which in essence is what remains of the Israeli Labour Party. The WZO actively funds settlement and colonisation in the West Bank. The Israeli Labour Party was the initiator of the first settlements in the West Bank as well as having presided over the Nakba, when ¾ million Palestinians were expelled and thousands massacred. The Israeli Labour Party supports some form of bantustan and segregation. It doesn’t support a 2 state solution. The possibility of a 2 state solution is in any case non-existent yet JLM pretend that they are supporters of this fantasy solution.

The fact that Royall saw fit to blog on a pro-Israel site is indicative of the fact that she was hopelessly compromised from the beginning. From the outset she assumed that which she was supposed to be proving, or not as the case may be..

As a Jews

Royall remarked on the JLM blog that ‘Many students reported that should a Jewish student preface a remark “as a Jew …” they are likely to face ridicule’. This is indeed a disgraceful thing to happen if it’s true. It’s a problem I’ve faced quite a number of times, but as an anti-Zionism Jew. Let’s take onetake one such example of this form of racism.

David Aaronovitch's 'As a Jews' column - anti-Semitic?

In an article entitled ‘Have I got Jews for you!’(I trust you appreciate the pun) in the Jewish Chronicle of 5^thMay 2016, David Aaronovitch waxed lyrical about Jews who spoke up as Jews against the practices of Israel:

‘my online world was invaded by the Asajews…. The "these people" were the Asajews. I heard quite a few of them on Any Answers last week. "As a Jew myself, I want to tell you that…" And there followed something that would say that the contributor believed that Labour had no antisemitism problem and that the real problem was those who kept on going on about antisemitism when what they were truly objecting to was any criticism of the state of Israel…. The Asajews used in this way are just a stage army and their deployment, frankly borders on the disgraceful.’

Of course there will be no remonstrance about Aaronovitch’s article because it is deployed in support of Israel and against its opponents.

As the Press Release from the group Free Speech on Israel says what we have here is a modern version of Orwell’s Thought Police. Royall advocates ‘training’ to eliminate anti-Semitism. And who should provide it? But the defenders of Israel’s Apartheid society. The Jewish Labour Movement.

Royall talks in her recommendations about ‘a safe space in order to discuss and debate without discrimination’ What she really means is for a protected space for supporters of Israel to peddle their racist nonsense. Those who justify and support the bombing and siege of Gaza should be able to do so with impunity.

Royall also recommends that ‘The Labour Party should consider whether adopting the Macpherson Principle that an antisemitic incident that may require investigation is any incident that is perceived to be antisemitic by the victim or any other person is appropriate.’ In other words if someone who defines their identity with reference to Israel then anti-Zionism is automatically perceived as anti-Semitic. This is what Jonathan Freedland was arguing for when he contended wrongly that ‘A recent survey found that 93% of British Jews said Israel formed some part of their identity.’ Labour and the left have an antisemitism problem In other words it is a backdoor way of saying that anti-Zionism is equal to anti-Semitism.

MacPherson didn’t say, nor does the law say, that a racial incident is defined by someone who claims to be a victim. Whether something is a racial incident or crime is determined by the objective evidence. Otherwise everyone could claim to be a victim. What MacPherson was saying was that because the Police had historically dismissed allegations of racist crimes they must treat an allegation as being a racial incident before it could be investigated. This was specifically to be applied to the police. It had no wider implication.

One of the most insidious of Royall’s recommmendations is that ‘There should be no statute of limitation on antisemitic behaviour. any incident of antisemitism, even when not in Party membership, may be considered by Labour’s disciplinary procedures in respect of current members.’

In other words this is an open invitation to trawl through past tweets and FB posts to nail anyone you don’t like. It is a witch hunter’s charter. It is also a charter for the perpetuation of the present crisis as an until Corbyn is removed. Racism isn’t a few words exchanged five years ago, racism is a system of oppression. It is a power structure. It is discrimination at work, it is police harassment, violence and spying, it is a constant barrage of Daily Mail and Sun headlines making Muslims a scapegoat. The kind of headlines that Jews had to put with once. It is not dead tweets. Nor is it a challenge to an identity of the oppressor, which is what Zionism is.

Perhaps the most dangerous of all the proposals and it is the thin end of the wedge in many ways for the Right in Parliament who seek to preserve their monopoly, Royall recommended that ‘That new procedures for the selection of local government and national candidates must include more rigorous vetting procedures. It is noted that volunteers manage many selections and the procedures must be appropriate for the task in hand.’ In other words the party bureaucracy and those who know what they are doing will determine who is selected. Out will go left-wing trouble makers and in will come clones of John Mann and Wes Streeting.

This ‘Report’ should be rejected in totality. Unfortunately Jeremy Corbyn having appeased the Right for the last 8 months is likely to go along with anything until the knife is slipped between his shoulder blades.

See also: Press Release: Reaction of Jewish led group toBaroness Royall Report recommendations

Baroness Royall Inquiry

Oxford University Labour Club

Executive Summary and Recommendations

Executive Summary

I was asked by the National Executive Committee of the Labour Party to examine the allegations of antisemitism that arose surrounding Oxford University Labour Club (OULC) after the resignation of a former co-Chair.

This was followed by a number of allegations of incidents of antisemitism against members of the Labour Party, including against one Member of Parliament and a member of the National Executive Committee.

I was also made aware that there was at least one case of serious false allegations of antisemitism which was reported to the police.

The context of the wider allegations means that I had to consider the matters of Oxford University Labour Club in that broader landscape. My recommendations will have a positive impact, not only on OULC, but on Labour clubs and the Labour Party more generally.

I do not believe that that there is institutional antisemitism within OULC. Difficulties however, face OULC which must be addressed to ensure a safe space for all Labour students to debate and campaign around the great ideas of our movement.

It is not possible to simply make recommendations about the OULC without considering how our Party itself responds to these events. I am therefore, today making recommendations about how Labour tackles antisemitism to minimise the chance of any repetition of incidents such as those described at OULC. I am making eleven recommendations for immediate and sustained action. In addition, I am advising the second, wider inquiry led by Shami Chakrabarti of a further seven issues which she may wish to consider.

Many of my recommendations may be implemented such that they have a positive impact in other areas where Labour will want to demonstrate in a practical and sustained way that our Party “promotes a just society, which judges its strength by the condition of the weak as much as the strong, provides security against fear, and justice at work; which nurtures families, promotes equality of opportunity, and delivers people from the tyranny of poverty, prejudice and the abuse of power”.

Recommendations

· OULC should consider procedures that allow for greater continuity of leadership than is provided by electing new leadership each term

· The Executive of the OULC, and other Labour Clubs, should examine the culture of their Club and take action to ensure that all those who wish to participate in meetings feel that there is a safe space in order to discuss and debate without discrimination. -

· Training should be organised by Labour Students together with the .Jewish Labour Movement for officers of all Labour Clubs in dealing with antisemitism.

· The Executive of the OULC, and all Labour Clubs, should have a clear line of reporting for incidents of antisemitism and other forms of racism, discrimination and harassment. (his should include the ability of individual students to report incidents directly to the Executive Director of Governance of the Labour Party

· Where documented evidence of incidents which are alleged to show antisemitic behaviour has been presented in respect of members of OULC who are members of the Labour Party, I will be recommending to the General Secretary that these allegations are investigated in line with normal procedures.

· There should be no requirement for the Labour Party to determine its own investigation into antisemitic behaviour on the outcome of any criminal investigation or other third party inquiry.

· The Labour Party and the NEC should provide the leadership and training in equalities issues including antisemitism and ensure that post-holders throughout the Party have access to materials and guidance which will help them identify and deal appropriately with any incidents.

· That the national complaints procedure is properly resourced so that it may deal effectively with complaints of antisemitism.

· There should be no statute of limitation on antisemitic behaviour. any incident of antisemitism, even when not in Party membership, may be considered by Labour’s disciplinary procedures in respect of current members.

· That there is a standing report to each meeting of the NEC Equalities Committee, and the NEC Disputes Panel, of any complaints and the action taken.

· It is not recommended that where a person is excluded from membership for antisemitism this should automatically be a life ban. I recognise that people may change their views and that where that is demonstrable a person may be allowed to seek NEC approval for any future application to join the Labour Party.

Other issues submitted to the Chakrabarti Inquiry for consideration

· The Labour Party should consider whether adopting the Macpherson Principle that an antisemitic incident that may require investigation is any incident that is perceived to be antisemitic by the victim or any other person is appropriate.

· The Review should consider whether it would be useful for the Labour Party to adopt a definition of antisemitic discourse

· Labour should consider adopting rule changes that will allow swifter action to deal with antisemitism. This could include empowering the NEC, through an appointed, authoritative and independent panel, to exclude members where there is credible evidence of antisemitism with a right of appeal to the National Constitutional Committee (NCC). The panel must be able to both speak with authority on these issues and seek advice from experts in the field where necessary. No doubt such a procedure could be considered for wider use.

· That the membership procedures be adjusted such that, should evidence of antisemitic behaviour be discovered within the first year of membership, it should be treated as though it were discovered during the eight-week probationary period.

· That new procedures for the selection of local government and national candidates must include more rigorous vetting procedures. It is noted that volunteers manage many selections and the procedures must be appropriate for the task in hand.

· Consultations should take place with the Leader and Deputy Leader of the Party in respect principles of how we conduct on-line debate in a way which is both welcoming and productive. No form of antisemitism or racism is acceptable, including being used as a factional political tool.

Baroness Royall Inquiry

Young Labour Conference Recommendations

↧

Labour’s ‘anti-Semitism’ witch-hunt lets the cat out of the Bag

May 20, 2016, 10:01 am

≫ Next: Searchlight 'anti-fascist magazine joins forces with Labour’s ‘anti-Semitism’ witchhunt

≪ Previous: Zionist Royalle Finds What She Wanted to Find

Calling for the Deselection of an MP is now a Disciplinary Offence

Obtaining the reasons for my suspension from the Labour Party has been like drawing teeth .

Although they have been happy to leak information to the Tory press, Labour’s witch hunters have been less keen to inform me what it is I have been accused of, as you can see from the correspondence below.

Islam - Religion of Bigotry one of the pamphlets on Paul Bogdanor site

Labour’s disciplinary procedures bear a remarkable similarity to Alice in Wonderland and Franz Kafka’s Trials. [See Ian McNicol Restages Franz Kafka’s TheTrial ]

Now however the witch-hunters’ hand has been revealed. Gregson has now openly asked me if I have called for the deselection of Peter Kyle, the New Labour MP for Hove who supports the involvement of private companies in the NHS and who supported the bombing of Iraq. Of course the answer is yes but is it a crime in the Labour Party now to support deselection?

The first I knew what I had been accused of was when these articles appeared in The Times & Telegraph April 2nd

Harry Gregson, Labour’s acting SE England organiser is a run of the mill apparatchik. His level of political consciousness can best be discerned by the fact that he celebrated the 90^th birthday of a woman who has been on state benefits for 90 years whilst telling the rest of us to tighten our belts! The monarchy is, as Shelley observed, the string that ties the robbers’ bundle.

Gregson sources Paul Bogdanor a regular contributor to the frontpage.com site - an example of the virulent Islamaphobia on this site is a pamphlet by Pamela Geller

Gregson’s idea of an investigation is to google my name and see what comes up. It would appear that no sewer is polluted enough for him to immerse himself in it in the hope that he might find a few nuggets amongst the detreitus.

Gregson sources one of his quotes regarding an anti-Semite called Gilad Atzmon, who I have heavily criticised on this blog and elsewhere, to a Paul Bogdanor. Bogdanor writes for the Frontpage.com site which features Jihadi Watch and features the above pamphlet from one of the most extreme anti-Muslim racists, Pamela Geller. Geller is basically a fascist but that does not stop Gregson sourcing from such people. This is how she is described on her Wiki page:

She is a supporter of the English Defence League (EDL) saying: "I share the EDL's goals ... We need to encourage rational, reasonable groups that oppose the Islamisation of the west."^[29] In June 2013, Geller was scheduled to speak at an EDL rally,^[7] but was barred from entering Britain by a Home Office ruling that describes her as having established "anti-Muslim hate groups".^[13]

Some of the comments date back years, part of long-forgotten debates. They have been hauled out, stripped from their context and selected in order to provide a pretext for my expulsion. The chances of Gregson or the other apparatchiks even understanding the context of an ongoing discussion with Gilad Atzmon, the holocaust denying jazzman are about zero.

If Gregson, Stolliday and McNicol had a shred of honesty, then they would say ‘we disagree with your opinions, you are a socialist and an anti-Zionist and we are therefore expelling you.’ But these people are fundamentally dishonest and instead resort to trying to find the residue of long forgotten conversations, fragments and comments in order to make a case.

The original allegations related to anti-Semitism and Ireland. Now that they have been deemed insufficient, Gregson has been scurrying around in Islamaphobic sites trying to find something else to go on.

As Norman Finkelstein remarked in The American Jewish scholar behind Labour’s ‘antisemitism’ scandal breaks his silence

It’s doubtful these Holocaust-mongers have a clue what the deportations were, or of the horrors that attended them. I remember my late mother describing her deportation. She was in the Warsaw Ghetto. The survivors of the Ghetto Uprising, about 30,000 Jews, were deported to Maijdanek concentration camp. They were herded into railroad cars. My mother was sitting in the railroad car next to a woman who had her child. And the woman – I know it will shock you – the woman suffocated her infant child to death in front of my mother. She suffocated her child, rather than take her to where they were going. That’s what it meant to be deported. To compare that to someone posting a light-hearted, innocuous cartoon making a little joke about how Israel is in thrall to the U.S., or vice versa…it’s sick. What are they doing? Don’t they have any respect for the dead? All these desiccated Labour apparatchiks, dragging the Nazi holocaust through the mud for the sake of their petty jostling for power and position. Have they no shame?

My offences were the following comments:

1. 'The attack on Thatcher by the IRA was obviously legitimate. She was a military target'

Gregson goes to the far-Right Zionist and warmonger's site Harry's Place to dig up a quote from the right-wing Times columnist, Oliver Kamm.

What I said was that in the context of a war between the IRA and the British Government then clearly the Commander in Chief of the British Army, Margaret Thatcher was clearly a legitimate target in the eyes of the IRA.

Despite the froth of the mass media and the Tories, my memory of these times was that ordinary working-class people said that it was a pity they didn’t get her. This was during the Miners’ strike and that was the gist of the comments that miners I worked with in Brighton uttered.

Given the fact that Thatcher was the main supporter of General Pinochet of Chile in his fight against extradition to Spain, a man who had thousands of workers, socialists and democrats tortured to death, and that she personally ordered the sinking of the Belgrano with the loss of around 750 men, when it was sailing outside of and away from the Argentinian exclusion zone, I wouldn’t have lost any sleep if she had died.

Jihad Watch - virulently racist section of site that Bogdanor posts on

More publications on Bogdanor's Frontpage.com site

2. 'spot on re the Zionist collaboration with the Nazis.'

This is a good example of a comment wrenched out of all context. It has been sourced from someone called Paul Bogdanor, son of the more sober Oxford constitutionalist Vernon Bogdanor. Bogdanor is belongs to the fascist and Islamophobic wing of the Zionist movement. Besides writing virulently anti-communist nonsense he believes that in the second world war Hitler and Stalin were no different. He posts on Frontpage.com which has a section ‘Jihad Watch’ a fanatically anti-Muslim page.

More Islamaphobic rubbish

The surrounding comments make it clear that I was arguing with Gilad Atzmon, an anti-Semitic jazz player, trying to persuade him to abandon his move towards a holocaust denial position. This was in the context of a meeting of his, at the SWP’s Bookmarx bookshop which Jews Against Zionism picketed. The fuller correspondence is:

Dare I say it, some of your remarks re the holocaust were spot on re the Zionist collaboration with the Nazis. And that is the point anti-Zionists should make rather than flirting with holocaust denial, or in Shamir's case being a full blooded exponent.

It is therefore dishonest to post the piece below suggesting that I am ‘now experiencing a radical change of heart.’ The radical change of heart, if anyone’s was your own in disagreeing with Shamir’s views on Auschwitz, especially after having praised Paul Eisen’s holocaust denial tract, Holocaust Wars, as a ‘great text’. If someone who, like you, has flirted with holocaust denial, has retracted, then it would be wrong to pretend otherwise. That is called honesty. However just to clarify, for the avoidance of any further confusion on your part, if you disagree with Israel Shamir re the existence of Auschwitz as an extermination centre then your idea is spot on. If you agree with Paul Eisen about the Nazi holocaust or go wittering on about Jewish power then your ideas are their usual turgid nonsense.

I trust that even you now understand.

Tony Greenstein

>>Peace may as well prevail

3. 'Zionism is a Jewish version of anti-Semitism'

Gregson is under the impression that Zionism was a movement opposed to anti-Semitism. This is an understandable belief given that Zionists shout ‘anti-Semitism’ at the drop of a hat. What Gregson doesn’t appreciate is that Zionist screams of ‘anti-Semitism’ have nothing to do with anti-Semitism and everything to do with support for Israel. Which is why the incident that started the latest bout of media attacks on ‘anti-Semitism’ at Oxford University Labour Club was triggered by that club’s support for Oxford Israel Apartheid Week. OULC have been bludgeoned now into accept the Zionist discourse about anti-Semitism, as Naz Shah has, but a lie is still a lie.

Academic article describing Zionist anti-Semitism - according to Gregson agreeing with it is 'anti-Semitic'

Hopefully the article Classic zionism and modern anti-semitism: Parallels and influences (1883-1914) by Jacques Doron from the Journal of Israeli History, no. 8, 1.9.83. will help in Harry's education.

In the article, which is from a Zionist academic journal, Doron observes, in respect of Zionist anti-Semitism, that ‘It cannot be denied that the Jewish self-criticism so widespread among the German Zionist intelligentsia often seemed dangerously similar to the plaints of the German anti-Semites.’p.171.

Zionism was founded upon what was called the ‘negation of the Diaspora’, literally a hatred of Jewish existence outside Palestine. Zionism was a blut and bloden political movement that believed that the Jewish Question could only be resolved when Jewish feet were planted on the soil of Palestine. Jews had a mystical blood and racial attachment to each other via the land of Palestine. Their existence outside Palestine was unnatural, abnormal. They therefore went as far as to accept what the anti-Semites said about the faults of the Jews. When Arthur Ruppin, Father of Jewish Land Settlement (and also the Father of Jewish Sociology) in Palestine, who was also a member of the Zionist Executive was accused of being an anti-Semite, he didn’t take offence. Quite the contrary:

‘When Ruppin's friend called him "an anti-Semite," he was not at all put off by the epithet and retorted spontaneously: "I have already established here [in his diary] that I despise the cancers of Judaism more than does the worst anti-Semite."(p. 186 entry Ruppin's Diaries 4.8.93.)

Arthur Ruppin, member of Zionist Executive and Father of Jewish Land Settlement

Ruppin’s view of the famous Dreyfuss trial, where France’s aristocratic and military caste sought to pin the label of treason on a Jewish officer, as a means of rolling back the gains of Emancipation for French Jewry as a whole, was that:

Ruppin was proud to be called an anti-Semite

‘In Paris a captain by the name of Dreyfuss has been arrested on charges of spying: he is a Jew. In Berlin a major usury trial is taking place. Naturally the accused are Jews, and so it goes on. I fear that up till now I have had too good an opinion of my people and perhaps the anti-Semites are right in their charges after all!… Even the gravest punishment is not too harsh for this Dreyfus, since not he alone but all the rest of us must suffer for his guilt.’ (p. 187)

An example of Jewish anti-Semitism - Pinhas Rosenbluth describes Jews outside Palestine as 'vermin'

Doron speaks of Ruppin’s ‘revulsion toward the Jewish character and its physical embodiment.’p. 191. Ruppin however was not alone. You are spoilt for choice when it comes to anti-Semitic statements by Zionists. Perhaps the most anti-Semitic of all comments was that by Pinhas Felix Rosenbliith (who was destined to become Israel’s first Minister of Justice . He described Palestine "an institute for the fumigation of Jewish vermin." As Doron notes, ‘a perusal of the Zionist sources reveals a wealth of charges against the Diaspora Jew, some of which are so scathing that the generation that witnessed Auschwitz has difficulty comprehending them.’

Isaac Deutscher, the biographer of Trotsky, summed up the attitude of most Jewish workers to Zionism when he wrote:

It should be remembered that the great majority of East European Jews were, up to the outbreak of the second World War_} opposed to Zionism... the most fanatical enemies of Zionism were precisely the workers, those who spoke Yiddish... they were the most determined opponents of the idea of an emigration from East Europe to Palestine... in the idea of an evacuation, of an exodus from the countries in which they, had their homes and in which their ancestors had lived for centuries_, the anti-Zionists saw an abdication of their rights, a surrender to anti-Semitism. To them anti-Semitism seemed to triumph in Zionism, which recognised the legitimacy and the validity of the old cry ‘Jews get out!' The Zionists were agreeing to get out. [Isaac Deutscher, 'The Non Jewish Jew '& Other Essays-The Russian Revolution and the Jewish Question' pp.66/7]

4. Gregson demonstrates the idiocy and stupidity of this witch-hunt when he says ‘On top of the above that were raised in the original complaint, I would also like to ask you about the following allegations:

'That you wrote: Israeli Policy is to waitfor the remaining Holocaust survivors to die’

Why you might ask, should this be the subject of a disciplinary investigation? It is a fact that Israel has squandered the reparations money from Germany meant for the holocaust survivors for holocaust education, monuments etc. Large scale fraud has been perpetrated by the Jewish Claims Conference, the major organisation involved in claiming the money. It is an open secret that the Israeli government is as parsimonious as it can be.

No doubt this article from Ha'aretz is also 'anti-Semitic'

Hagai Amit writes in Ha’aretz 15.9.13 Israeli Restitution Agency Sitting on NIS 1B as Poor Survivors Struggle to Make Ends Meet that

‘It was hard not to be moved by the plea for financial support made to the Knesset Labor, Welfare and Health Committee in April by Dora Roth on behalf of her fellow Holocaust survivors. “What have you done with the money? What? The sight on television of Holocaust survivors who don’t have heat in the winter, who don’t have money for food is to your shame. Permit us to die in dignity.”

Gregson believes its 'anti-Semitic' to tell the truth about how Israel treats the Holocaust survivors who have subsidised the Israeli state

Or perhaps Gregson didn’t get to read another article in Israel’s Ha’aretz newspaper Israel Is Waiting for Its Holocaust Survivors to Die Perhaps Gregson would like to summon the ‘anti-Semitic’ writer of the above article for an investigation too! I should point out that the person who wrote the above article, Amos Rubin, is a childhood survivor of the holocaust but I doubt that will stop humourless and dessicated Labour bureaucrats and the Zionist Jewish Labour Movement who are happy to use the holocaust to try and undermine support for Palestine in the Labour Party.

5. Another charge is that ‘you described another Labour MP as 'Tory Boy'. Mydescription of Steve Reed in It is Time for Unity in the Campaign Against theWitchhunt - Momentum has to support all those suspended not just its Vice Chair Jacqueline Walker was motivatedafter reading the Report in Inside CroydonLabour suspends Croydon Central secretary over Hitler tweet. Steve Reed is even wearing a blue rosette!

‘Last week, Lambeth South MP Steve Reed OBE, a deputy chair of Progress, the Blairite party-within-a-party, seemed to suggest that something was underway when he referred to “internal disciplinary matters” in a tweet regarding White’s situation. This was long before the Croydon party official had received any notification that he was subject to such a procedure. This is not the first time that Progress has conducted a witch-hunt against socialists in Croydon.’

6. - That you acted in an un-comradely manner to Labour members and referred to the investigation set up by Baroness Royal as 'racist'

My tweet describing former Hove MP Ivor Caplin as a war criminal

Yes I probably did refer to the report of Baroness Royall as ‘racist’. Possibly the reason is that it is part of a racist agenda which conflates Jews and Zionists as equivalent. It is a report designed to label as ‘anti-Semitic’ Oxford University Labour Club’s support for Israel Apartheid Week and to rehabilitate the Zionist Jewish Labour Movement. However the url refers to another tweetdescribing the former Hove MP Ivor Caplin, a former Defence Minister at the time of the Iraq War as a war criminal!

An example of racist & Islamaphobic pictures on the Twitter page of Zionist that I called out

7. That you use 'Zio' /'Zio idiots'/'Zionist scum' as a insults repeatedly on

twitter yes I confess I do use the label with Islamaphobes! Is there a problem with that?

There are 3 more allegations:

8. That you evoked the Final Solution in a letter to the Labour Party.

9. That you referred to the Brighton Labour Party as acting in a racist way.

10. That you advocated the de-selection of Labour MP Peter Kyle on twitter.

None of these are sourced, but it’s nice to know that calling for the removal of Peter Kyle is now an offence meriting disciplinary action!

Below is my correspondence with Gregson:

I responded fairly instantly

On 19 May 2016 at 00:33, Tony Greenstein <tonygreenstein111@gmail.com> wrote:

Dear Mr Gregson,

I see you have used a fascist and Islamaphobic site FrontPage.com, viz. that belonging to Paul Bogdanor to source one of your quotes.

I have just taken a screenshot from their 'Jihad Watch' section which advertises books such as Robert Spencers''Islam - Religion of Bigots' (attached)

Clearly in your search for dirt you haven't hesitated to dredge the sewers.

I suspect that if you go on the neo-Nazi Redwatch-South Coast site you will find even more useful nuggets of information…

I wasn't aware that it was an offence to call for the reselection of a Labour MP or Peter Kyle. But perhaps you would enlighten me?

You ask for a date next week. I am free next Friday 27th May. I will leave you to source the room and set the time and place.

Please be aware that I will be recording the interview in order that there can be no dispute as to what has taken place.

Yours sincerely,

Tony Greenstein

In practice, the Israeli government is waiting for the Holocaust survivors to die off within 20 years so that it will no longer have to pay their benefits.

Israel Is Waiting for Its Holocaust Survivors to Die

http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/israel-is-waiting-for-its-holocaust-survivors-to-die.premium-1.501630

There are three different days committed to remembering the Holocaust, but during the rest of the year, the Israeli government only thinks of Holocaust survivors as a financial burden.

Amos Rubin Feb 06, 2013

The Chief Rabbinate of Palestine in 1946 declared the tenth day of the Hebrew month of Tevet a "general day of Kaddish" for dead Jews whose gravesites are unknown. The date was traditionally a fast day observed by Jews to commemorate the beginning of Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar II's siege of Jerusalem. Its modern significance was added not long after the end of World War II, when the horrible scale of the destruction of Europe's Jews – 6 million people, constituting one third of the continent's pre-war Jewish population – became clear. Today, only the members of Israel's national religious Jewish community preserve the tradition. The ultra-Orthodox, as usual, boycott commemorations on the day because of "the Zionists."

On March 3, 1951, Israel's Knesset set aside the 27th day of the Hebrew month of Nisan, when the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising broke out (April 19, 1943 in the Gregorian calendar), as Israel's Holocaust Remembrance Day. On the eve of the day, all places of entertainment in Israel are closed by law and mourning and commemoration services are held at Israel's national cemetery on Mount Herzl and the museums at Kibbutz Lohamei Hageta'ot (the Ghetto Fighters' Kibbutz), Kibbutz Yad Mordechai, Kibbutz Tel Yitzhak and Nir Galim.

On the other hand, the United Nations declared the day the Red Army liberated the Auschwitz concentration camp (January 27, 1945) International Holocaust Remembrance Day. On this day every year, UN member countries across the globe come together to mourn the tragedy that led to the death of 6 million Jews, 3 million Romani and 1 million genetically "defective" Germans.

That totals three days a year, but what about the other 362 days? The number of concentration camp survivors, anti-Nazi partisans and Jews who hid in forests and Christians' homes now living in Israel is 233,700, according to the Myers-JDC-Brookdale Institute. Of these individuals, dozens die every day. Apparently, the heartrending stories of 80-to-90-year-olds struggling for the basic means of survival that appear in the media every year do not bother the officials entrusted with their welfare in the Finance Ministry. That these survivors must choose between buying their medicines or food or that they don't have a source of heating in the winter doesn't seem to stop the State of Israel from denying them substantive assistance by relying on a variety of bureaucratic clauses. Israel even pettily denies Holocaust survivors the few benefits they are entitled to, when medical committees alter their disability evaluations in a manipulative way. Thus, a committee determines a Holocaust survivor has a 69 percent level of disability, not 70 percent, so the state can save NIS 500 on the recipient's benefits payment. In practice, the Israeli government is waiting for the Holocaust survivors to die off within 20 years so that it will no longer have to pay their benefits.

In 1953, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion and West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer signed a reparations agreement, entrusting the State of Israel to handle payments to Holocaust survivors. Looking back, you could argue that Ben-Gurion was right to transfer survivors' reparations payments toward strengthening the young State of Israel. Yet it was only decades later that this injustice done to Holocaust survivors – including my parents, Auschwitz survivors Eliyahu and Rachel Rubin – was corrected. Only then did they start receiving reparations payments from the treasury.

Several Israeli banks hold the property of Jews murdered in the Holocaust but create obstacles to prevent their heirs from receiving their due. Several years ago, Haaretz published an estimate that deposits made in Israeli banks in the decades before 1945 are not worth what they should be today. Israeli banks shamelessly benefit from the funds of the dead, those without heirs and even those with them. With respect to the German and Swiss banks that took Holocaust victims money, there is the biblical quote, "Have you murdered and also inherited?" In Israel it is just, "Have you inherited?" It is saddening to see how the Jews who determine government priorities in our country, which was founded on the ruins of the Holocaust and thanks to the tremendous Zionist endeavor, are in practice waiting for Holocaust survivors to die.

The writer was hidden by the Righteous Gentiles Margit and József Strausz in 1944 in Munkács, Hungary (today Mukacheve, Ukraine).

Re: Investigation

Harry Gregson

May 19^th 2016

Dear Mr Greenstein,

I have organised the interview for 11am Friday 27th May in the Clermont Room at the Brighthelm Centre, North Rd, Brighton BN1 1YD .

Please can you confirm that you will be attending.

Harry Gregson

Acting Regional Director, Labour South East

07872 417312

From: Tony Greenstein <tonygreenstein111@gmail.com>
Sent: 19 May 2016 00:33
To: Harry Gregson
Subject: Re: Investigation

Dear Mr Gregson,

I see you have used a fascist and Islamaphobic site FrontPage.com, viz. that belonging to Paul Bogdanor to source one of your quotes.

I have just taken a screenshot from their 'Jihad Watch' section which advertises books such as Robert Spencers''Islam - Religion of Bigots' (attached)

Clearly in your search for dirt you haven't hesitated to dredge the sewers.

I suspect that if you go on the neo-Nazi Redwatch-South Coast site you will find even more useful nuggets of information

You refer to allegations that I referred to a Labour MP as 'Tory Boy' and you give the url as http://azvsas.blogspot.co.uk/

that is not the url but the main page of my blog. Please provide me with the actual url.

- That you use 'Zio' /'Zio idiots'/'Zionist scum' as a insults repeatedly on twitter https://twitter.com/TonyGreenstein/status/731937984765960196

You also say:

- That you evoked the Final Solution in a letter to the Labour Party.

- That you referred to the Brighton Labour Party as acting in a racist way.

- That you advocated the de-selection of Labour MP Peter Kyle on twitter.

you haven't sourced any of the above three. Please do:

I wasn't aware that it was an offence to call for the reselection of a Labour MP or Peter Kyle. But perhaps you would enlighten me?

You ask for a date next week. I am free next Friday 27th May. I will leave you to source the room and set the time and place.

Please be aware that I will be recording the interview in order that there can be no dispute as to what has taken place.

Yours sincerely,

Tony Greenstein

On 18 May 2016 at 17:24, HarryGregson <harry_gregson@labour.org.uk> wrote:

Dear Mr Greenstein,

I did not receive the reply you said you sent.

You requested the context in which those comments were allegedly made. The sources for them are as follows:

'The attack on Thatcher by the IRA was obviously legitimate. She was a military target'

http://hurryupharry.org/2010/04/01/oliver-kamm-tony-greenstein-the-ira-and-musicians/

'spot on re the Zionist collaboration with the Nazis.'
http://www.paulbogdanor.com/antisemitism/greenstein/nazi.html

'Zionism is a Jewish version of anti-Semitism'

http://mondoweiss.net/2015/07/california-authorities-criticism/#comment-780016

On top of the above that were raised in the original complaint, I would also like to ask you about the following allegations::

That you wrote: Israeli Policy is to wait for the remaining Holocaust survivors to die

http://azvsas.blogspot.co.uk/2016/05/israeli-policy-is-to-wait-for-remaining.html

- That you described another Labour MP as 'Tory Boy' http://azvsas.blogspot.co.uk/

- That you acted in an un-comradely manner to Labour members and referred to the investigation set up by Baroness Royal as 'racist'

https://twitter.com/TonyGreenstein/status/732274033459384320

- That you use 'Zio' /'Zio idiots'/'Zionist scum' as a insults repeatedly on twitter https://twitter.com/TonyGreenstein/status/731937984765960196

- That you evoked the Final Solution in a letter to the Labour Party.

- That you referred to the Brighton Labour Party as acting in a racist way.

- That you advocated the de-selection of Labour MP Peter Kyle on twitter.

Please tell me by Friday when and where (city) you can meet in the next week as I would like to conclude this investigation as soon as possible. I will then source a venue.

Harry Gregson

Acting Regional Director, Labour South East

07872 417312

From: Tony Greenstein <tonygreenstein111@gmail.com>
Sent: 18 May 2016 15:29:28
To: Harry Gregson
Subject: Re: Investigation

Dear Mr Gregson,

I sent you the following reply. Yes I am happy to see you at a mutually agreed date but please supply everything that you possess by way of allegations. I have in any event applied via a subject access request for the full information so there is no reason for you to hang on to it since you will have to disclose everything.

Full disclosure is normal practice in both the civil and criminal courts, employment tribunals etc. so I am finding it increasingly difficult to know why you are incapable of following what is accepted practice in all courts. It is in your interests to make full disclosure since otherwise any decision that is made will be open to legal challenge.

Whilst happy that you have informed me as to the 3 central quotes at the centre of my case I need to obviously know what was the surrounding conversation. I assume that you have this.

Assuming you agree to further disclosure then please supply with some dates.

Please acknowledge this reply as the previous email clearly got lost in the ethernet.

Regards

Tony Greenstein

Dear Mr Gregson,

At last, after nearly two months of being suspended, I have finally been given a glimmer of the reasons as to why I have been suspended.

I would of course like to receive chapter and verse, i.e. date, time and surrounding discussions, as to when these quotations were allegedly said, so that I can see what the context of these remarks were. In other words the full body of evidence surrounding what are bare quotations.

I will receive this anyway via the Subject Access Request that I have submitted so it would make sense on your part to send me the full information. I cannot think of any reason whatsoever to withhold such information from me. If this were a court of law they would grant full disclosure without a second's though unless you are claiming national security considerations!

On the basis that I receive fully disclosure of the information I have requested I will be

On 16 May 2016 at 09:24, HarryGregson <harry_gregson@labour.org.uk> wrote:

Dear Mr Greenstein,

- 'The attack on Thatcher by the IRA was obviously legitimate. She was a military target'

- 'Zionism is a Jewish version of anti-Semitism'

- 'spot on re the Zionist collaboration with the Nazis.'

Please can you let me know if you are now prepared to meet for an interview? I can come to Brighton if necessary.

Best wishes

Harry

Harry Gregson

Acting Regional Director, Labour South East

07872 417312

From: Tony Greenstein <tonygreenstein111@gmail.com>
Sent: 14 May 2016 03:52:50
To: Harry Gregson
Subject: Re: Investigation

please see attached letter

On 13 May 2016 at 16:51, HarryGregson <harry_gregson@labour.org.uk> wrote:

Dear Mr Greenstein,

I am writing to inform you that I will be carrying out the investigation on behalf of the Labour Party into the circumstances that resulted in your suspension from the Party.
I will be conducting interviews with witnesses and I will also need a time when you are available for an interview. You are entitled to bring along a 'silent friend', as am I, they must be a Party member and they cannot intervene in the interview in any way. Please provide me with the name of your ‘silent friend’ prior to the interview so I can ensure they meet these requirements. I also attach the NEC advice note on carrying out such an investigationfor your information.

At the interview you can also request I interview anyone else you deem important to this investigation.

Best wishes,

Harry Gregson

Acting Regional Director, Labour South East

On 18 May 2016 at 09:33, HarryGregson <harry_gregson@labour.org.uk> wrote:

Dear Mr Greenstein,

I have not heard back from you about a time and date for the rearranged interview. This is somewhat surprising given your desire for this matter to be resolved asap.

Please can you let me know when you are available for an interview by 5pm on Friday 20th May or else I will have to progress the investigation without your input.

Best wishes

Harry

Harry Gregson

Acting Regional Director, Labour South East

07872 417312

↧

Searchlight 'anti-fascist magazine joins forces with Labour’s ‘anti-Semitism’ witchhunt

May 20, 2016, 5:21 pm

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Searchlight Magazine – the Racist ‘Anti-fascist’ Magazine

Searchlight Magazine, under Gerry Gable, has a long history of attacking the Palestine solidarity movement and the Palestinians. It also has a record of never attacking or criticising Israeli Apartheid.

Searchlight's racism quickly alienated Black organisations in Britain

Searchlight's libellous editorial

In its current edition, quite bizarrely, out of the blue in an editorial, it describes me both as an anti-fascist, a Palestine solidarity activist and a ‘Jew hater’. Clearly the statement is actionable.

What has prompted its editor, Gerry Gable, to this outburst he doesn’t say. I can only presume it is the accumulation of various resentments built up over the years. It is probably a result of criticisms I have made over the years about Searchlight’s Zionist politics, its destabilisation of the anti-fascist movement and its spying on anti-fascists and anarchists on behalf of the secret state see e.g. The Death Agony of Searchlight Anti-Fascist Magazine - How Gerry Gable endedup defending racism in the name of anti-fascism Gable has certainly proved sensitive in correspondence to the comparisons I drew between him and his illustrious predecessor, Maurice Ludmer.

Gable and friend

When Apartheid existed in South Africa, Searchlight didn’t hesitate to criticise the actions of the Apartheid Government, although it never mentioned the close diplomatic, economic and military relations between the two governments.

Gables memorandum to his bosses boasting of intelligence contacts and how he spied on the Left and Anarchists

When it comes to Israel Gable, whose magazine only comes out every 3 months now, since the cash cow that Hope not Hate and Nick Lowles represented have departed, sees no evil, hears no evil and says no evil. The injunction by hundreds of Israeli rabbis that Jews should not rent apartments to Arabs is not mentioned. [Dozens of Top Israeli Rabbis Sign Ruling to Forbid Rental of Homes to Arabs, ] Neither the demolition of hundreds of Palestinian homes, Jewish roads in the West Bank, the official Apartheid in the West Bank (2 separate legal systems for settlers and Palestinians) or the segregated schools are worthy of mention. No mention either of the Judaisation programmes within Israel, which bear a market similarity to the deJewification program of the Nazi party.

Gable and his wife Sonia

In a profile of Gable he explained that he left the Communist Party in 1961 "because the party had begun to adopt an anti-Israeli line." (Jewish Chronicle 23.10.87). This is in contrast to the previous editor of Searchlight, Maurice Ludmer, who was President of Birmingham Trades Council and a stalwart of the trade union movement. Ludmer left the CP in 1968, because of its lack of commitment to anti-fascism and anti-racism.

Searchlight fantasy about an international fascist axis - drawn from Israeli paranoia

Despite this, Searchlight has a fondness for Stalinist politics. How else can one explain the racist justification of Stalin's expulsion of the Tatar people because a minority of them collaborated?

During the Labour Government of 1974-80, the security establishment persuaded Home Secretary, Merlyn Rees into deporting journalist Mark Hosenball and ex-CIA agent Phil Agee. Duncan Campbell of the New Statesman, was investigating GCHQ (then a secret installation) with Hosenball and the result was the ABC trial (Aubrey, Berry and Campbell) under the Official Secrets Act. In November 1978 this trial collapsed with token sentences being handed out. During the trial and the campaign that preceded it, the security services had done their best to poison the media via corrupt and tame journalists. One such was Gerry Gable, a researcher with London Weekend Television.

In May 1977, Gable wrote one of a number of reports to his superiors at London Weekend Television regarding Phil Kelly, who became editor of Tribune and an Islington Labour councillor, was then active in the ABC Defence campaign.

Maurice Ludmer - first editor of Searchlight - an anti-imperialist unlike his successor

"He was also seen frequently... at the offices of the Vietnam Sollidarity Campaign. It was suggested that in either late '67 or early '68 he travelled to Cuba and was trained as was 'Carlos... in Guerilla warfare and Espionage by the KGB." In 1969, "Kelly went to Jordan, not, as he told people, to see the refugee amps... but to a proper Fatah training camp. Members of the Baader Meinhoff group also attended these camps." On a demo in London "he was seen to kick a policeman... Reports from left watchers state that he has been to Cuba, America, East Germany, Jordan, Sofia in Bulgaria...

“The arrest of Campbell, Berry and Aubrey has caused a civil rights row, but according to my top level security service sources, they inform me in the strictest confidence.. Kelly is suspected of being the KGB man who reaps the goodies...I have now given the names I have acquired to be checked out by British/French security services especially the French and German connections and the south American stuff is being checked by Geoffrey Stewart-Smith's Institute. He has strong CIA links (and links with WACL - a fascist group - TG). I may try somebody in the Israeli Foreign Office that I know for somechecks on Kelly..."

Searchlight Conference with Zionist pressure group, the Islamaphobic Campaign Against Anti-Semitim

According to the New Statesman (15.2.80): "The wording of Mr Gable's memo suggests clearly that he was engaged in a 2-way transaction with his security sources... The nature of the official material received and recorded by him suggests that much of it was coloured by phone-tap info and informer reports." As Time Out remarked, the memo caused those who Gable mentioned, like Hosenball, who had previously considered Gable as a friend, to feel betrayed" (22.2.80) It is something that people in anti-fascist politics have also experienced. There is reason to believe that Campbell was also being monitored by Gable.

Nine years later and Gable was up to his old tricks, this time for Channel 4's 20/20 Vision. Gable befriended, and took advantage of, a lonely low-level civil servant in the DTI, Brian Gentleman. One day he found himself accused, live on TV, of being a Czech agent. However the Police refused to prosecute. Gentleman was considered a Walter Mitty character whom Gable had entrapped. The Broadcasting Complaints Commission delivered a stern rebuke.

But it is in his effect on the anti-fascist movement that Gable and Searchlight has been most destructive, precisely because it is here that their reputations have been established. Anti Fascist Action was formed in February 1985. Almost immediately via Searchlight/Guardian journalist David Rose a controversy was sparked over an anarchist group, Class War.

CW were never popular on the Left, their paper was particularly crude. They attracted a young, punk periphery with a low political awareness. They were the perfect foil for Gable and his security service chums. Allegations were made that their leadership were NF'ers, that racism was endemic in CW, that they were police agent-provocateurs on demonstrations and that the NF & CW jointly planned the Stop the City demonstrations as an anti-Jewish pogrom. CW were immediately suspended. When a Commission of Enquiry reported, CW were exonerated but the damage to AFA had been done. The 1976 AGM nearly broke up in turmoil. AFA’s Report stated that "Despite the leading role of Searchlight magazine in the affair, and despite many approaches to the magazine for evidence, the sum total of material from Searchlight to the enquiry was nil. We are bemused by Searchlight's role in this affair." In the course of the inquiry Gable had admitted to monitoring anarchists. For whom he didn't say.

Gables Memorandum to his bosses at London Weekend Television

From: Gerry Gable

Date: 2 May 1977

About: Agencies

To: Julian/Mike Braham/Barry Cox (Please keep these reports secure)

Phil Kelly was a member of the Young Liberals who in the sixties joined what was known as 'the Red Guard'. Young Liberals like Peter Hain and Peter Hellyer went against the traditional Liberal line and started campaigning along lines more akin to the Radical left. They stood out against the Vietnam War/Apartheid and for the Palestinians against the Israelis. At home they were for direct action on housing and other evils in our society.

In the first place, as I understand it, Kelly was an odd fish in the rather middle class Young Lib circles, he had a strictly working class background. He was up to his neck in various campaigns in 1967. The Biafra aid set up was one of them. He was also seen frequently during that year at the offices of the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign. It was suggested that in either late '67 or early '68 he travelled to Cuba and was trained as was 'Carlos' during the same period. Certainly Cuba held a Tri-Continental conference at that time involving many third world and Latin American states where Cuba was active in spreading their own brand of revolution. It is suggested that parallel to the conference, an extensive course of training in Guerilla warfare and Espionage took place. If the latter is true, then certainly Cuba's own Secret Service would have been aided by the KGB on the espionage side of the courses. In the early part of 1969 Kelly was seen at the Soviet Trade Mission in London.

I think that around this time he worked on the Hornsey Journal or another paper in that area, then he moved to work in the new radical press -- being a familiar face at Black Dwarf/Seven Days and later Time Out. Hellyer and some other Young Liberals got very involved with the Palestinians around this time and in the summer of 1969 Kelly went to Jordan, not, as he told people, to see the refugee camps, schools and medical aid groups, but to a proper Fatah training camp. Members of the Baader Meinhof group also attended these camps and learnt their bombing and killing skills in them. Kelly was taught firearms/explosives and went out on some treks to the Israeli border with Fatah patrols.

Around this time, after returning to London, Kelly acted as a cheer leader on several Arab demonstrations in London and during fighting in one of them he was seen to kick a policeman.

But although he seemed firmly in the left camp, a number of odd things about his attitude towards a person he knew to be hostile to the left are rather strange, on several occasions he could have blown the cover of a man who had infiltrated the Palestinians and some left groups. This man ran into him time and time again, including once at a function organised by the Cuban embassy in London. Kelly was seen on Irish Rights marches the night the Ulster office was attacked, medical aid for Vietnam, Portugese meetings and even a demo over Anguilla.

Wherever he worked on left journals he always seem to get into a position [section illegible, but probably 'had access to the'] names and address of subscribers. Reports from left watchers state that he has been to Cuba, America, East Germany, Jordan and Sofia in Bulgaria for a Peace Conference. In the early seventies he went to work in West Germany and was away for around two years, I understand that he worked as a sports reporter (he was there at the time of the Munich massacre). He also had a German girl friend whose name is either Gerde Jager, or Jaegar, the daughter of a rich lawyer. She is said to be close to SWAPO operations in Western Europe and tied up with something named 'Informist'?

Back in Britain Kelly worked at Time Out and was instrumental in introducing Mark Hosenball to stories that are part or even all of the reason for his deportation order. Around Time Out a group of Americans, Kelly, Duncan Campbell (the technology freak), plus Crispin Aubrey and John Berry (not just a former Army signals clerk, but a former member of British Military Intelligence) began to operate.

More than a year ago Kelly started to work for Interpress Services, a press agency of which he appears to be the sole employee in this country.

Even some of the left watchers here thought that this agency was set up at the time of a Third World Conference held in Colombo in Sri Lanka a couple of years ago and that in some way it is connected with the Yugoslav State Press Agency. However our checks reveal that it was set up in Italy in 1968 as a press co-operative and the directors are South Americans an Italians, one of the original people before Kelly at this end was John Rettie -- a man I still have to check out but was in some KGB scandal in Moscow some years ago.

The last return made by the co-op shows an annual turn-over of a quarter of a million pounds sterling, although it precedes Kelly's joining them (at least officially) salaries are shown as only two thousand per annum.

Hosenball, who to my knowledge was always keen to meet any new contacts, told me that he had refused to meet Kelly's contacts in Germany but would say no more. He was also prepared to tell me that the co-op was, as he understood it, set up by some Chilean Christian Democrats who in more recent times dropped out to be replaced by the Iraquis, although no signs of this appear on the company house records. Hosenball is frightened to tell me more about Kelly and it is almost certain that Kelly could blackmail Hosenball to keep silent. Since the Agee/Hosenball expulsion notices were issued, Kelly is often being seen more and more running round organising things. When Hosenball made it clear that he did not wish to be used as political cannon fodder, Kelly wrote an attack on him that appeared in the 'Leveller', a radical magazine.

This is not all that Kelly has done for the 'Leveller', he has also produced material on West Germany for them about the trials of the Terrorist groups.

The arrest of Campbell/Berry and Aubrey has caused a civil rights row, but according to my top level security service sources, they inform me in the strictest confidence that for about four years Campbell, Berry and Kelly and others have been systematically gathering top level security material. Campbell, who claims to have only an interest in technological matters in as far as the state is involved, had done four years detailed research into the whole structure of the other side of not only our Intelligence services but those of other NATO countries. He has also gone to people who work on top security contracts and started off by asking them about open commercial work their companies do and then gradually asked them for information on top secret work, including that on under-water detection hardware, which he clearly knows is beyond the pale.

Politically it appears that the group have no one political guiding light or line, but Kelly is suspected of being the KGB man who reaps the goodies gathered by people who are possibly as disapproving of the KGB as they are of the CIA. [Two words illegible but probably 'Other teams'] like this have been operating in France and Sweden. (Agee has been in contact with the Swedish set up.) The security services feel that once the real nature of this case begins to emerge they expect people like Jonathan Aitken will fade away fast. The security service accepts that a number of decent people have been signed up to support these people on civil rights grounds and they also unofficially accept all the short-comings of the act that they have been held under, but they say they are sure this has gone well beyond the bounds of Press Investigation.

Hosenball, although supposedly having his differences with Kelly, was party to a strange chat between Kelly and Steve Weisman at Granada's Christmas party. They were going through a list of contacts and what Hosenball's reaction would be be if he were asked about them. I could not catch the names but when one name came up all three of them seemed very keen to keep it out of the hearing.

Hosenball got extremely angry with Malcolm Southam of World In Action when asked about a man named Karl Von Metre, thought to be an American living in Paris, and would not talk about him Hosenball's Paris trips are a mystery.

He told me two years ago that the reasons for his Paris visits were to go through files taken from a Portugese office of an extreme right wing group that used a press agency as a cover. At the time of the army take over in Portugal they had been seized and taken to Paris. However, my own investigation showed that the files were not in Paris at all had had never been taken out of Portugal, so why lie? His contact in Paris is Frederick Laurent, a young man who works for the left wing paper 'Liberation' and who lives in very grand style in a huge Paris apartment.

When Hosenball and Kelly had hold of the Crozier material they were very keen not to check out right wing connections but to trace phone numbers they felt belonged to Secret Service establishments etc. Hosenball also went to Spain, I think to track down one of the people mentioned in the Robert Moss letters, but despite all this research most of what they got was not appearing in print anyway. Kelly was not happy about Searchlight using the documents and I think Hosenball, who had done work for Searchlight on various occasions, felt embarassed by his attitude.

Kelly's current girl friend is Dorothy Jones who works for the People's Press Service or News Service, a sort of Agitprop outfit. Kelly moved into a house in Hemmingford Road, Islington, some time last winter. He shares it with Richard Fletcher who is on the London Co-op Education Committee, (strong links with East Germany) this is at 104 Hemmingford Road, N7.

I went to the house one dark winter night just after they had moved in. I was with Mark Hosenball and the reason for our visit was to get some more photocopies of the Moss letters.

When we arrived, a man who I thought must Fletcher came to the door. The building is a shop, basement and upper part, it was in a bad state of disrepair and the man was plastering or something like that. He said to Mark 'there is a caucus meeting, Phil's up top'. Mark told me to hang on and ran upstairs to the top floor. Being a nosey bugger I followed and in the top floor front room were about seven or eight men, no women, all seated on cushions on the floor with no centre light.

They were a mixed age group. I didn't recognise any of them and they did not seem to know me. Kelly looked at me staring in over Hosenball's shoulder and leapt up and pushed us out of the room. He said to Mark in a low voice 'Why did you bring him here?' and Mark waffled on about not being able to contact him in advance and I needed the letters that very night as Searchlight was going to press on the next day. Kelly took us to the basement and produced the papers and then ushered us out as quickly as possible.

I have now given the names I have acquired to be checked out by British/French security services, especially the French and German connections and the South American stuff is being checked by Geoffrey Stewart-Smith's institute. He has strong CIA links. I may try somebody in the Israeli Foreign Office that I know for some checks on Kelly. It is now a time of waiting for feed-back and also further checks here.

I have attached a number of documents including a transcript of Kelly's interview with World in Action. It goes without saying that I would like this kept strictly secret.

GERRY GABLE

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When Jeremy Corbyn Supported a Democratic, Secular State & Breaking Links with Poale Zion (JLM)

May 21, 2016, 3:26 pm

≫ Next: More Apartheid Adventures

≪ Previous: Searchlight 'anti-fascist magazine joins forces with Labour’s ‘anti-Semitism’ witchhunt

On Palestine Corbyn has become a Trappist Monk

Of course everyone is entitled to change their mind. Sometimes people even change the parties they belong to but I’m not aware of a time when Jeremy Corbyn changed his mind about support a 2 state solution in Palestine or the breaking of links with Labour Zionism.

The primary purpose of a 2 state solution was and is to justify a never ending peace process (in Israel its known as the ‘piss process’). As long as the Peace Process can be said to be continuing so long will there be a justification for the present Apartheid situation on the West Bank and the pretence that Gaza isn’t occupied.

Corbyn has changed his tune since becoming leader

Netanyahu made it clear during the General Election in Israel that he did not believe in a 2 State Solution. His Ministers have made it even clear. Tsipi Hotoveli, the Deputy Foreign Minister (there is no Foreign Minister as Netanyahu has also taken that position) has made the position of the Israeli Government crystal clear:

Tzipi Hotoveli - the religious nutcase who is Israel's Deputy Foreign Minister

‘This land is ours. All of it is ours. We expect as a matter of principle of the international community to recognise Israel’s right to build homes for Jews in their homeland, everywhere.”

Zionism from its foundation has asserted Jewish sovereignty over all of the biblical Land of Israel (Eretz Yisrael), which extends up to the Litani, east to the Euphrates and south to the Nile. There is no recognition of shared sovereignty. As Moshe Dayan explained to a group of university graduates:

Moshe Dayan

During the last 100 years our people are in the process of building up this country and this nation, of expansion, of getting more Jews and more settlements to expand the borders. Let no Jew say that this is the end of the process. Let no Jew say that we are near the end of the road. Ma’ariv, 7.7.1968.

The ‘peace process’ has only one function. To maintain the pretence that a 2 state solution is possible and therefore to provide justification for the denial of any political or civil rights for over 4 million Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. It is a pretence that western leaders are happy to play along with.

When you're surrounded by New Labour sharks it's best not to feed them

But for socialists and Corbyn in particular to play along with this is despicable. Corbyn was arrested at South Africa house once protesting Apartheid in South Africa yet he is willing to go along with Apartheid in Israel. Because that is what the 2 State solution amounts to.

The Labour Movement Conference which Corbyn chaired in 1984

Of course the Jewish Labour Movement and assorted hypocrites will pretend they support a 2 State solution, knowing full well it won’t come about. However they oppose any pressure upon the Israeli state, such as sanctions or BDS, to bring it about. Sanctions on Iran, a siege of Gaza (which is the most coercive form of sanctions) is fine, but sanctions against Israel – let the heavens fall in first.

Report of LMCP Conference which Corbyn chaired - the Zionists tried to hoax the speakers that the conference had been cancelled

In the Spring of 1984 the Labour Movement Campaign for Palestine held a conference at County Hall, London when the GLC was still in existence. The Conference was sponsored by AUEW-TASS, the engineering section of the Engineering Union, 11 MPs and Palestine Solidarity Campaign as well as the London office of the PLO. Among the speakers were Peter Tatchell and Richard Balfe MEP (he's now Lord Balfe of the Conservative Party!).

One of its main demands was for the breaking of links between Poale Zion, the British branch of the Israeli Labour Party and the Labour Party. Poale Zion has now changed its name to Jewish Labour Movement but it is the same creature. Now Corbyn is happy to preside over an absurd situation where JLM is going to be ‘training’ people to recognise ‘anti-Semitism’ – which in their view is opposition to the Israeli state and Zionism (a word they don't like to use because Zionist, I mean the word, is 'abusive'.

Jeremy Corbyn was the Chair of the Conference and a very good and enthusiastic chair he was. He was fully in support of the principle aims of the conference so I am interested to know why he has changed his mind about what, if the Trades Description Act applied to politics, would be called the Labour Friends of Apartheid Israel.

Jeremy Corbyn was one of the LMCP's original sponsors - the LMCP's platform included support for a democratic, secular state not a Jewish Apartheid state

It’s not terribly difficult to discern the strategy of Corbyn’s advisers. Keep you head down when it comes to anything to do with Palestine. Above all don’t say anything about how the current campaign about ‘anti-Semitism’ is really about criticism of Israel. If you concentrate on the bread and butter issues of austerity then other things will disappear into the distance. This is a particularly stupid strategy because the Zionists, aided by their chorus in the Mail, Guardian etc. will not let the issue of Palestine and Zionism die. They will continue to root out ‘anti-Semitism’ in the party even if it does mean ludicrously examining every tweet for the past decade in the hope that some minor misdemeanour might be discovered. In my own case it has taken ludicrous lengths.

The idea is to focus on economics and ignore the political and questions of the State. Pretend that the capitalist state is neutral as opposed to an instrument to be used by one class against another. Leave the question of monarchy and control of the army to another time. That is why there was such a fuss made about Corbyn singing the national anthem. Deference to the Crown and the institutions of the State is important for Labour’s servile worshippers at the altar of the capitalist state. The monarchy provides the icing over the division of the cake between rich and poor. However rich or poor you are you can identify with Mrs Windsor.

Even the mild-mannered PLO representative in Britain, Manuel Hassassnian lambasted Corbyn’s silence over Palestine. Palestinian ambassador says leaders won’t stand up to Israel for fear of being labelled anti-semitic. Corbyn used to attend every AGM I can remember of Palestine Solidarity Campaign. He was vocal on the oppression of the Palestinians. Now he has taken a vow of silence as if he were a Trappist monk when it comes to Palestine.

As Hassassnian said: ‘“Jeremy Corbyn (who) was an ardent, staunch supporter of the Palestinians and now we hardly see any statements coming from him in support of Palestine.’

Naturally ‘when the Star contacted the Labour Party for comment on Mr Hassassian’s statements’ it ‘did not receive any responses.’

Blairite clone Fabian Hamilton accuses BDS supporters of 'anti-Semitism'

Corbyn’s silence led to the ludicrous appointment of arch-Zionist Fabian Hamilton to a junior shadow foreign office minister who in the Jewish News has accused supporters of BDS of being ‘anti-Semitic’. According to this useless New Labour clone, opposing the military and police state that is the life of Palestinians on the West Bank is ‘anti-Semitic’ and yet Corbyn appointed him despite knowing of his views.

Corbyn has also gone along with the 'anti-Semitism' smears made against anyone those who are deemed a political threat by Labour's Blairite civil service. He has been attacked repeatedly by the Jewish Chronicle's editor Stephen Pollard yet not once has he pointed out that Pollard acted as an apologist and worse for anti-Semitic politicians Robert Zile and Michal Kaminski, Latvian and Polish MEPs, whose anti-Semitism was only exceeded by their support for Zionism.

If Corbyn is so willing to bow down to the Zionist lobby today, he will bow down to the financial lobbies tomorrow.

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