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Ella Rose - from Union of Jewish Students Chair to Israeli Embassy operative and Director of the Jewish Labour Movement

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Not so much a rose as a James Bond parody 



Asa Winstanley's deeply 'anti-Semitic' scoop provoked Ella Rose's wrath
Whatever else you can say about Ella Rose, she is certainly not a rose by any other name.  Indeed, to use her own, somewhat limited language, she is indeed pathetic.  Taking a series of screen prints of her cameo performance, emphasised the fact that she is almost a cardboard cut-out caricature of a living, breathing human being.  She is an excellent demonstration of the impact of Zionism on someone’s emotional intelligence.  It’s almost as if she takes pride in demonstrating her own limited intellect, with its restricted emotions and use of a sub-James Bond rhetoric. 
The clip begins when Ella was caught in tears by Al Jazeera’s undercover reporter crying and feeling sorry for herself: ‘its been a tough week’ because Electronic Intifada had blown her cover, as an ex-employee of the Israeli Embassy.  Now why, you might ask, should she cry over the exposure of this fact?  Clearly she and her employers wanted it to be kept a secret  because the last thing the Jewish Labour Movement wanted is for their close relationship with the Israeli Embassy to be held up to the light.  The JLM portrays itself as a genuinely independent Jewish section of the Labour Party whereas her appointment makes clear the nature of the relationship between the Embassy and the JLM.  Hence her tears.
Ella in her own way is an excellent representative of the Zionist mindset - might is right and strength and size is all
What the video also shows though is that not only has her appointment to the JLM deprived some village of their idiot but the entirely bogus nature of the ‘anti-Semitism’ accusation.  In reaction to the exposure of her role as a former (?) Israeli Embassy operative she let’ out a series of expletive driven accusations of anti-Semitism – ‘fuck you, fuck you, fucking anti-Semites the lot of them.’  Whereas in the past, anti-Semitism consisted of libels and untruths about Jews, conspiracies and wholesale fabrications such as the medieval blood libel, with the advent of Zionist ‘anti-Semitism’ the truth not only can be but often is anti-Semitic.  Telling the truth about Israel is a particularly heinous form of anti-Semitism.
Ella Rose has a subtle, almost Shakesperian turn of phrase
Even the most stupid and malevolent Zionist would have difficulty in explaining why telling the truth about someone’s former employment counts as anti-Semitism.  But when anti-Semitism means anything you want it to mean, then someone saying something that displeases you, including disclosing a secret that you would prefer to have remained hidden, is certainly an example of anti-Semitism.
Donald Trump is not the only one who believes that winning is everything
What this demonstrates, in all its clarity, is the Zionist cynicism and utter contempt for the suffering of Jews in the past.  To compare the disclosure of the identity of one’s last employment with for example the pogrom in Kishinev in 1903 is just sick.  At Kishinev women had their breasts torn off, their stomachs ripped open.  Jewish children had their heads broken with sticks, yet Ella Rose and not just her, dares to compare this with their own trivial concerns. 
During the Iron Guard’s attempted coup in January 1941 the atrocities against the Jews defies comprehension:
according to the JLM, the 'victim' should define their own oppression.  Clearly Ella has suffered an anti-Semitic trauma on a par with European Jewry in the 1930's 
Particularly gruesome was the murder of dozens of Jewish civilians in the Bucharest slaughterhouse. The perpetrators hung the Jews from meat hooks, then mutilated and killed them in a vicious parody of kosher slaughtering practices.[26][27] The American ambassador to Romania Franklin Mott Gunther who toured the meat-packing plant where the Jews were slaughtered with the placards reading "Kosher meat" on them reported back to Washington: "Sixty Jewish corpses were discovered on the hooks used for carcasses. They were all skinned....and the quantity of blood about was evidence that they had been skinned alive".[25] Gunther wrote he was especially shocked that one of the Jewish victims hanging on the meat hooks was a 5-year-old girl.[25] 

The range and depth of her language and emotional intelligence is quite remarkable.  Clearly she will be an asset to the JLM and its perjurer Chairperson Jeremy Newmark
Yet this immature and emotionally insecure, foul-mouthed girl,  dares to compare her experience of  being outed with the horrors of Jews in Romania and elsewhere in times gone by.  Of course it is not just Ella Rose who is guilty of this.  She is simply a rather inadequate specimen of a Zionist activist.  The whole Zionist movement engages in this wholesale parody and trivialisation of the experiences of Jews in the dark days of yesterday.
Our Ella demonstrating just what an intellectual catch she was for the JLM
Attention has focussed quite rightly on her threats to ‘take out’ Jackie Walker, whose dignified response stands in comparison to that of Ms Rose.  Despite all the vicious and undeserved accusations of ‘anti-Semitism’ that have been hurled at Jackie by these cheap political opportunists, for whom ‘anti-Semitism’ is merely a convenient weapon to defend their bastard state, she never once loses her composure.  Ella Rose, with her ‘die-in-a-hole’ comments to what she thought was one of her associates reveals not only her own lack of substance but that of the organisation she works for.
Jeremy Newmark, the JLM’s Chairperson is captured elsewhere boasting about what a catch Ella is.  Now unless there’s something we don’t know, then we can safely say that the JLM probably does deserve our Ella.  Every slight she experiences is explained away as ‘anti-Semitism’.  No doubt if she gets herself a boy friend, he had better be careful not to jilt her for fear that he’ll end up being accused of anti-Semitism.  Being Jewish certainly won’t help him as he’ll probably be accused of ‘self-hatred’ too.

The ability of Zionists to imagine that they, not the Palestinians, are the victims is infinite.  She expresses the Massada martyr complex admirably
It would be easy to laugh it off but what Ella demonstrates above all is the utter contempt she and her fellow Zionists have for what Jews experienced in the past.  This provides another, quite striking lesson.
Naturally - if a boyfriend jilts her it will be proof of his anti-Semitism
The whole basis of the Zionist claim to Palestine is the fact that Hebrew tribes wandered over the land 2,000+ years ago.  Of course this is patently ludicrous and if a present day Israeli caught site of one of the ancient Hebrews they would probably be immediately dispatched as a ‘terrorist’.  But what Ella demonstrates is that today’s Zionists don’t even have anything in common with the Jews who lived in Eastern Europe 80 years ago.  Instead they are but pale imitations of a Hollywood culture that can only express itself in the limited, macho style language that Ella feels so at home with.


Tony Greenstein




















Palestine and Anti-Semitism in Nottingham with Jackie Walker and Tony Greenstein

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The Evil Zionist Sheriff fails to stop meeting going ahead

Jackie Walker (L), Yousuf Farooq and Tony Greenstein (R)

On Saturday, despite the best attempts of the Zionists, in the form of Jonathan Hoffman, the ousted co-Chair of the Zionist Federation, a meeting with Jackie Walker and Tony Greenstein went ahead without incident.  Hoffman, who has previous form organising Zionist demonstrations with fascists like the English Defence League, had rung up the Mechanics Institute to threaten them with unnamed consequences if they went ahead with the meeting.  The Police, by all accounts, added to the pressure on the MI, when they advised that they couldn’t guarantee that there wouldn’t be public order incidents.

The meeting was therefore transferred to the International Community Centre in Mansfield Road and over 40 people attended a lively 2 hours of talks and questions.  I spoke first about the ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign of the Zionists in the Labour Party and the fact that Zionism, despite accusing its opponents of anti-Semitism shares a lot in common with the anti-Semites.  Both Zionists and anti-Semites believe that the place of Jews is in Israel, not in the diaspora.  I gave a number of historical examples of such collaboration and quoted Israeli novelist A B Yehoshua who, in a talk to the Union of Jewish students helped demolish a few of the misconceptions of these young Zionists when he said that ‘Even today, in a perverse way, a real anti-Semite must also be a Zionist.’  (Jewish Chronicle 22.1.82.)

Jackie then spoke  on her own experiences of being falsely accused of anti-Semitism focussing in particular on the threats of the Jewish Labour Movement’s new Director, Ella Rose (see) who harassment threatened to use her skills in Krav Maga to physically attack and destroy her.
There followed a lively hour of questions and contributions from the floor.  The meeting was a great success but it shows how, once again, the Zionists are determined to try and destroy free speech in this country by denying opponents of Israel’s barbaric and murderous policies a platform.  At the same time they  complain that they own speakers are given a rough ride.

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Perspective on Ferguson from Hedy Epstein - a Survivor of Nazi Germany

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I compiled this in 2014 at the height of the Fergusson riots.  Hedy Epstein has now died but she was an example to all, as she took part in the protests against racism in Fergusson


Hedy Epstein on Ferguson, Fleeing Nazi Germany and Palestinian-African-American Solidarity

November 30th, 2014
Interview with Hedy Epstein who lives in the St. Louis area a few days after the Ferguson grand jury let off the policeman in the killing of Michael Brown.  Epstein herself was arrested in August at a protest in St. Louis.  
Hedy Epstein on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla
We also talk about her background, fleeing Nazi Germany as part of the Kindertransport, her job for the Allies after the war, her awakening to what Israel was doing to Palestinians in 1982, her trips to the West Bank and retaliation against her.  

POSTSCRIPT:  After finishing up we realized we needed to talk about a person who was murdered in Gaza, Vittorio Arrigoni.  Be sure to listen AFTER the end.  Interviewer Stanley Heller

The Huffington Post  | By Alana Horowitz
Posted: 08/18/2014 8:45 pm EDT 

Hedy Epstein, a 90-year-old Holocaust survivor, was arrested on Monday during unrest over the death of Michael Brown,KMOV reports.
Hedy Epstein as a childhood survivor of the Nazis and part of the Kinder transport
Epstein, who aided Allied forces in the Nuremberg trials, was placed under arrest in downtown St. Louis, Missouri, "for failing to disperse" during a protest of Gov. Jay Nixon's decision to call the National Guard into Ferguson. Eight others were also arrested.
"I've been doing this since I was a teenager. I didn't think I would have to do it when I was 90," Epstein told The Nation during her arrest. "We need to stand up today so that people won't have to do this when they're 90."
Epstein is currently an activist and a vocal supporter of the Free Gaza Movement.
Tensions rose in Ferguson on Monday night after Nixon announced that the National Guard had been called in to help run the command center while police handled the protests.

Several people were arrested as protests ramped up, including Scott Olson, a photographer working for Getty Images.

President Obama addressed reporters on Monday and condemned the arrest of journalists covering Ferguson in the days since Michael Brown was shot and killed. He said he would be monitoring the National Guard presence to make sure it is "used in a limited and appropriate way."

"There is no excuse for excessive force by police," Obama said.

Terrorising Palestinian Children - This is what Zionism means in practice

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This is what the Jewish Labour Movement, Luke AkehurstJeremy Newmarksupport when they cry ‘anti-Semitism’

Israeli security forces taking a child into custody during a protest in Kafr Qaddum, December 2016. Nedal Eshtayah/Anadolu Agency
Below is an article by Jonathan Cook, an ex-Guardian journalist based in Nazareth whom the Guardian dismissed as part of their move rightwards.   Below that is an article by Gideon Levy, one of Ha’aretz two excellent journalists (the other being Amira Hass).  It describes a ‘combat mission’ by the Israeli Defence Forces that involves waking and terrorising Palestinian children in the early morning as a raid is conducted on Kfar Qaddum, a Palestinian village.

Kfar Qaddum has protested against the confiscation of their lands by the neighbouring Jewish settlement of Kedumim.  The army is there, like any colonial army, to protect the settlers and it represses violently any opposition to their open theft of Palestinian land.

You might have heard that the Zionists of the Jewish Labour Movement, Labour Friends of Israel and the Board of Deputies support 2 states.  However this is meaningless because there isn’t even one example of them opposing the military repression that Palestinians suffer from.  2 States is a slogan, about something that will never come to pass, as a means of avoiding taking any position on the daily suffering of the native Palestinian population.

What should also be called out is that the Jewish Labour Movement has been encouraged in its attack on Labour Party members as ‘anti-Semites’ by Jon Lansman, who is currently engaging in a coup in Momentum.  Equally disappointing is the fact that Jeremy Corbyn has been intimidated into silence by the Israeli state driven accusations of anti-Semitism.

Tony Greenstein

16 January 2017

Israeli security forces taking a child into custody during a protest in Kafr Qaddum, December 2016. Nedal Eshtayah/Anadolu Agency

Forget the empty posturing of world leaders in Paris yesterday. This phototells us what the Israel-Palestine “conflict” is really about.

Imagine for a second that the little boy – how old is he, eight, nine? – is your son, trying to adjust his keffiyeh because it keeps falling over his eyes and he can’t see anything. Image your small son surrounded by masked Israeli “soldiers”, or what looks more like a Jewish militia than an army. Imagine that the boy is likely soon to be bundled into the back of a military van and taken for interrogation without his parents or a lawyer present, or even knowing where he is. That he could end up beaten and tortured, as human rights groups have regularly documented.

Maybe you can’t imagine any of that because you, a responsible parent living in Europe or the United States, would never let your child out to throw stones.

Then you need to know more about the story behind this picture.

This photo was taken in Kfar Qaddum last month. The boy and his friends aren’t there to bait Israeli soldiers or indulge a bout of anti-semitism. Jews from the violent – and illegal – settlement of Kedumim have taken over their farm lands. Kedumim’s expansion has been further used to justify the army closing the access road in and out of Qaddum. The village is being choked off at the throat. In short, these villagers are being ethnically cleansed.

Parents living in such circumstances do not have the privilege of concealing from their children what is happening. Everyone in the village knows their community and its way of life are being extinguished. Israel is determined that they will leave so that the Jewish settlers next door can grab their land. Israel expects these villagers to join the rest of the aid-dependent Palestinian population in one of the ghettoised towns and cities in the bantustans of the West Bank.

Even little boys understand the stakes. And unlike your child, this one knows that, if he doesn’t resist, he will lose everything he holds dear.

What Israeli Soldiers Never Tell Their Mothers


There is virtually no combat service in the IDF that doesn’t entail soldiers carrying out despicable missions like the one described below.

Gideon Levy Jan 16, 2017 10:45 AM 
  
They gathered in the narrow street, on a cold and dark night. They were tense. The howl of a distant jackal broke the silence. For some, this was their first operational mission. They’d always dreamed of it, and they’d been in training for a long time. The adrenaline was flowing, just the way they liked it. That’s what they enlisted for.

Before they set out, they texted their parents to tell them not to worry. When the dawn broke and they returned safely to their base, they’d text again. Their mothers won’t ask what they did, and they won’t tell them. That’s how it always is. Their parents are proud of them: they’re combat soldiers.

As they formed up before leaving, their commanders checked their gear and ammunition, and gave them their final orders. The intelligence officer told them of the two wanted men; they must be found, at any price. Then the force went out into the night. Thirty soldiers. They went up the hill on foot.

They reached their target sometime after midnight. The village was deep in sleep, the orange security lights of the settlement across the way winking in the distance. And the order was given: Attack!

They leaped at the back door of the house and shook it until it was almost torn from its hinges. A dim light emanated from the second floor and a man came down in pajamas, still half asleep, to open the metal gate. Not one of them asked himself what he was doing there. Maybe that will happen when they grow up a little more. 

The first four entered with their machine guns at the ready. Black masks covered their faces; only their eyes peeped out. They pushed the shocked Palestinian backward. He tried to explain to them that the children were sleeping and he didn’t want them to wake up to the sight of a masked soldier above their bed.

The soldiers wanted Tariq. And also Maliq. They ordered the Palestinian to take them to them. The two wanted men slept in a room that was all blue, including the sheets. The soldiers woke them with shouts. The wanted men woke up in a panic.

The soldiers ordered them to get up. Then they grabbed their arms, pushed them into two separate rooms and locked them in. Other soldiers broke into the house, whose inhabitants had all woken up in the meantime. Six-year-old Mahmoud began to cry: “Daddy, Daddy!”

The soldiers warned the two wanted men not to dare participate in any more demonstrations. “Next time, we’ll shoot you or arrest you,” they told Maliq. He remained locked up for about 40 minutes, until the force left. On their way out, the soldiers threw stun grenades into the yards of the homes they passed – the icing on the cake.

All of this happened about 10 days ago in Kafr Qaddum. All of it happens every night throughout the West Bank.

The two wanted men were aged 11 and 13. Tariq’s voice hasn’t broken yet, and Maliq has a bashful smile. Since that night, they will sleep only in their parents’ bed. Mahmoud has started wetting the bed. The large force of soldiers came in the dead of night just to intimidate them, and perhaps also to maintain their edge.

The Israel Defense Forces Spokesperson’s Unit wasn’t ashamed to say, “Soldiers spoke with youths who had taken part in the regular demonstrations in Qaddum.” That’s what IDF soldiers do: hold intimidating nighttime talks with children. That’s what they enlisted for. That’s what they’re proud of.

Kafr Qaddum, it’s worth noting, is a place that merits respect. It has been fighting for about five years now, with courage and determination, for the reopening of its access road – which was blocked because of the settlement of Kedumim. The settlement had grown right up to the edge of the road, leading to its closure.

Last Friday, Amos Harel reported in Haaretz about a steep decline in the number of young men from well-off families willing to serve in combat units. The Border Police is now the most sought-after unit, and its gates are mobbed by the weaker sections of society, whom Israel cynically incites against the Palestinians, so that all of them want to be Sgt. Elor Azaria.

Perhaps it’s good that the well-off are abandoning service in the territories. Or perhaps it’s bad, because they’re leaving it to others. Today, there is virtually no combat service in the IDF that doesn’t entail carrying out despicable missions like the operation in Kafr Qaddum.

This Friday, or the following one, Tariq and Maliq will resume demonstrating on the road, and perhaps they’ll also throw stones. They won’t forget the terrors of that night so quickly; those terrors will form their consciousness.

And the soldiers? They’ll continue to be heroes, in their own eyes and those of their people. 

PALESTINIAN LIVES MATTER - But not to France, Germany and the Netherlands

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Giant Palestinian Flag Beamed onto Embassies of Countries which only remember Israeli Jewish deaths

In the last year in Brighton the local ‘eyesore’ otherwise known as the ‘i-360’ has had Palestinian symbols projected on it.  The i-360 is the world’s highest thin tower, however that is measured, and mainly tourists pay an absurd amount of money to travel up and down inside a viewing pod.  
A couple of weeks ago a giant Palestine flag was laid out on the beach and before that in the iconic Regency Square to be photographed and videod from the pod as it travelled up and down the i-360. 
Inminds decided on the 14th January to do much the same, in this case beaming on 3 London embassies to protesting their countries' hypocrisy over in condemning the killing of the Israeli soldiers whilst saying nothing about the routine death of unarmed Palestinian civilians.  

It should be borne in mind that the Israeli soldiers who died last week in Jerusalem, however horrific their deaths, were in uniform and were also armed. They were very much part of an occupying army and although western journalists might not get the point, Israeli soldiers in Jerusalem and the West Bank and Gaza are seen in much the same light as Nazi soldiers were in Occupied France between 1940 and 1944 and in the same way as British soldiers were in Northern Ireland after 1969.  In other words the local population, despite attempts to criminalise resistance, have a right recognised in international law to resist them by force of arms. The Nazis described the French Resistance and all other resistance movements as bandits'.  Britain too criminalised the IRA before eventually reaching the Good Friday Agreement with it.  Israel today tries to pretend that those resisting it are criminals rather than entitled to resist.  Israel of course pretends there is no occupation since they have a god given right to occupy all of Palestine and they even have the Bible to prove they hold the land deeds! 
Total silence reigns from the Western media when it comes to what are just the routine deaths of Palestinian civilians at the hands of Israel’s occupying forces.  By way of contrast there was massive publicity last week when a Palestinian in Jerusalem killed 4 armed soldiers and injured another of others in an attack with a heavy lorry before the driver was shot dead.

Israel’s propaganda was aimed at drawing a comparison between the attacks in Nice and Berlin and Jerusalem.  For example the BBC prominently reported the Jerusalem lorry attack including Netanyahu’s claim that it was carried out by ISIS.   The BBC report did state that the prime minister gave no evidence to support the claim’ however it then went on to report ‘An emergency meeting of the Israeli security cabinet approved administrative detention for IS sympathisers and authorised the destruction of the driver's home.’  In other words it helped confirm that which it had accepted was unsupported by any evidence.
 
We now know for certain that the Palestinian who carried out the attack had no connection with ISIS.  In other words this was a completely bogus propaganda claim by Israel’s far-right racist Prime Minister.

The BBC also gave details of those killed including their name, age and rank.  Can you remember the last time the BBC devoted such attention to Palestinian victims of Israel’s murdering occupation army? 

The Daily Mail went one step further.  In a headline Horrifying moment a truck driver mows down soldiers in Jerusalem - and REVERSES over them - killing four and injuring 15 before being shot dead at the wheel, as Israeli PM blames attack on ISIS  the Mail’s report went on to say that ‘Netanyahu said the attacker has been identified and 'according to all the signs he was a supporter of the Islamic State.' He says there 'definitely could be a connection' between Sunday's attack, which killed four Israeli soldiers, and recent attacks in France and Germany.’
Brighton beach as seen from the i-360
In fact there is no evidence that the Nice attacker had any connection with ISIS, unlike the attacker in Berlin.  Nor has any evidence whatsoever been provided of an IS connection with the Jerusalem killer.  What appears to have motivated him was the treatment that all Palestinians receive at the hands of the Israeli occupation.  A minor matter of no concern to western journalists. 

The SUN (or SCUM to give it its proper title) went one further.  It had no hesitation:

Note how the BBC report that the Israeli cabinet ‘authorised the destruction of the driver's home.’  without any comment at all.  We would have to go back to Britain’s occupation of Palestine to find this Nazi-like collective punishment which targets a person's family, regardless of whether or not they had any knowledge of what was to happen.  The family in question will therefore be made homeless and I understand they have had their permanent residency status in Jerusalem itself revoked, so the children will be made homeless and stateless.  Literally the Biblical punishment of visiting the sins of the father on the succeeding generations is alive and well in Israel.

By way of contrast let us look at the case of Hadeel al-Hashlamoun, which was particularly horrific, in Hebron 2015.  Hadeel was an 18 year old student.  Completely defenceless.  Hebron is where particularly vicious Nazi-like settlers have set up home having evicted the Palestinian residents and they throw down rubbish, faeces etc. onto the Palestinians whose homes are below them in Shuhada Street, formerly the main commercial street in Hebron but which has now been sealed off and Palestinians are forbidden to even walk there.  In their spare time these Judeo-Nazis paint slogans like 'gas the Arabs' on the front of the sealed off shops and Arab homes walls.  In this and their constant physical attacks on the Palestinian population, the settlers are befriended and supported by the Israeli occupation forces.

Israeli army personnel barked orders at Hadeel in a language she didn’t understand.  She was clearly frightened and paralysed before she was gunned down.  No one has ever been charged, still less convicted of her murder.

Her murder has been covered in a number of media outlets.  The Guardiancovered it, as did Ha’aretz, although its headline was demonstrably untrue Palestinian Woman Shot Dead After Trying to Stab Soldier in Hebron.  In the body of the story it reported that Photos published in Palestinian outlets show the Palestinian woman kneeling and a soldier aiming his rifle at her. The IDF claims that the woman had yet to pull out the knife at this point.’In other words, on the basis of a metal detector she was shot for failing to obey orders she didn’t understand even though she had not yet pulled out the knife, if it ever existed.  Suffice to say the army cleared itself.  Although to be fair, the excellent Amira Hass did a follow-up in Ha’aretz The Execution of Hadeel al-Hashlamoun.  
A search of the BBC site finds no mention of the death of Hadeel al-Hashlamoun - unlike the death of all Israeli Jews killed by Palestinians - yet another example of BBC bias
A number of other outlets carried the story, including Israeli papers, either sympathetically or not.  But the BBC?  Not a word, no mention of her murder.  Because of course she was a Palestinian and Palestinian deaths are not newsworthy with the BBC.  I did a search of their site under the girl’s name and turned up NOTHING.  Bias is not only what might be said but also what is not said.

Below is Indmind’s Report of its own action:

 On Saturday 14th January 2017 Inminds human rights group undertook guerilla projections on the walls of three European embassies - that of France, Germany and the Netherlands, to protest the double standards cities in these countries have shown in ignoring Israel's routine killing of Palestinian civilians, often children, whilst showing solidarity with 4 recently killed Israeli occupation soldiers.

On 8th January 2017, a Palestinian living in occupied East Jerusalem rammed his truck into a group of armed Israeli occupation soldiers killing 4 of them before being shot dead himself. Rather than accept this as a legally sanctioned act of resistance against foreign occupation, several European cities shamefully showed solidarity with the occupation army.  On 10th January Mayor Anne Hidalgo projected an image of the Israeli flag on Paris City Hall in solidarity. This followed the projection of the Israeli flag on the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin in Germany and the flying of the Israeli flag at half mast on Rotterdam City Hall in the Netherlands.

Inminds chair Abbas Ali said "Its shameful that these same cities have never shown any sympathy when Palestinian civilians, very often children, are murdered by the Israeli occupation forces. In summer 2014 Israel target bombed 118 schools in Gaza including 65 UN schools slaughtering 521 Palestinian children, and leaving another 1000 children permanently disabled, and 1500 children were made orphans. Where was the solidarity from these cities when this crime was perpetrated? We didn't we see any Palestinian flags being projected on Europe's monuments in solidarity with the victims of Israeli butchery. And this isn't some thing that just happened in 2014 - Israel has been killing one Palestinian child every 60 hours for the past 17 years - where is the outrage for this infanticide? Shame on these cities for the double standards they  show. We are here, outside their embassies - outside the Embassies of France, Germany, and the Netherlands, to tell them that Palestinian lives are not worth less then Israeli lives, that Palestinian lives matter."
#PalestinianLivesMatter

Video:  

The Demolition of Um al Hiran in Israel’s Negev is why Israel is a racist, settler colonial state

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2 Palestinian Israelis killed as Bedouin village is destroyed to make way for a Jewish town

No new Palestinian towns have been built since Israel's creation [Menahem Kahana/AFP]
There are those who naively believe that the illusory ‘two states’ will provide a solution to the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis.  That all that is required for peace is the achievement of  a Palestinian state.  Even were such a state possible, which it isn’t, then it would not address the racism that Israel’s 1.5 million Palestinians experience.

Even within Israel Israeli Palestinians are considered a ‘demographic threat.’  In blunt language, there are too many of them.  Israel is a Jewish state, not like the UK is a Christian state, where religion is a constitutional anachronism with no political meaning.  In Israel being Jewish means possessing privilege.  You get to live in better accommodation, you get paid more, you don’t suffer racial discrimination.  Um al Hiran was a village established in 1956 when the Bedouin were evicted from the south of the Negev.  They were placed here against their will.  Now today they have been violently evicted again by the bulldozers of the Jewish National Fund and the militarised police.   Two Palestinians have been murdered.  According to Al Jazeera, the driver of the car was met by a hail of bullets from the Israeli Police.
The lying statement of the Police said that:
"A vehicle driven by a terrorist from the Islamic Movement intended to strike a number of officers and carry out an attack," Micky Rosenfeld, police spokesperson, said in a statement.
However, Raed Abu al-Qiyan, an Um Al Hiran activist, denied that the driver of the car was seeking to harm police.
The man was a member of his Bedouin clan by the name of Yacoub Abu al-Qiyan.  Raed  told AFP news agency:  "The Israeli narrative is a lie. He was a revered school teacher.
"He was in his car and they shot at him from everywhere."  Al Jazeera’s report told how Israeli authorities regularly carry out demolitions of Bedouin homes they deem to have been built illegally.  However for Arabs in Israel, building permits are nearly impossible to obtain whereas Jewish Israelis are given preferential treatment.
Israel plans to demolish the whole of  Um Al Hiran and replace it with a Jewish village by the name of Hiran.

Um Al Hiran is just one of about 40 "unrecognised" Bedouin villages in Negev scheduled for demolition despite being home to tens of thousands of residents.
A Bedouin woman reacts during a protest against home demolitions on January 18, 2017 in the Bedouin village of Umm al-Hiran. MENAHEM KAHANA/AFP
Because of their "unrecognised" status, many of them are denied access to electricity, water and other municipal services.

Earlier in January, Palestinian citizens of Israel announced a nationwide strike after Israeli authorities demolished 11 Palestinian homes in the city of Qalansawe in central Israel.

These homes were also demolished on the pretext that they were built without a permit.

This is the naked racism of the ‘Jewish’ state.  During this demonstration the mild mannered head of the Joint Arab-Jewish list in the Knesset was treated no differently from anyone else.  He was hit twice by rubber bullets.

Those who support a ‘Jewish’ racist state in Israel, whether it is Jeremy Corbyn or the Jewish Labour Movement have a lot to answer for.  Israel is Jewish in the same way as South Africa was White or Nazi Germany was Aryan.  It is a badge of racial identification.

Tony Greenstein

18 January 2017


Here is another image (copyright: Keren Manor) that conveys the situation of Palestinians – these ones Palestinian citizens of Israel – more completely than any words. The man on the ground is Ayman Odeh, a member of the Israeli parliament, the head of the Joint List, the third largest party in the parliament, and the highest-ranking Palestinian politician in Israel.

Israeli police have just shot him with rubber-tipped bullets, not once but twice – including to the face. Odeh is one of the least confrontational politicians among Israel’s large Palestinian minority, a fifth of the population. His message is consistently one of peace and amity between all Israeli citizens, whether Jews or Palestinians. That does not seem to have protected him from the shoot-first, ask-questions-later approach of Israel’s security services towards Palestinians.

This image should be as shocking as seeing a bloodied Bernie Sanders or Jeremy Corbyn crawling in the dirt, watched impassively by US or UK police.
Um Al Hiran is home to several Palestinian Bedouin families [Menahem Kahana/AFP]
Context is important too. Odeh had joined the 1,000 inhabitants of Umm al-Hiran – all Palestinian citizens of Israel – early this morning in a demonstration to stop demolition crews destroying the 150 homes of their village in the Negev. Israel allowed these families to move to the area of Umm al-Hiran in the 1950s after it had driven them from their original, and much more substantial, lands during the Nakba. The pretext then for expelling them was that Israel needed their ancestral lands for an exclusively Jewish kibbutz.

That all occurred during a military government that ruled over Israel’s Palestinians for nearly two decades. More than 60 years later, exactly the same thing is happening again, but this time in front of the cameras. Umm al-Hiran is being destroyed so that an exclusively Jewish community, with the same name of Hiran, can be built over these families’ homes. Israel never issued Umm al-Hiran with a master plan, so now it can be declared illegal and its inhabitants called “squatters” and “trespassers”. The families are being ethnically cleansed a second time – not during hostilities or in a time of war, but by their own state in a time of peace.

They are far from alone. Thousands of other families, and their villages, face the same fate.
The truth is nothing has changed from the 1950s. Israel still behaves as if it is ruling militarily over its Palestinian citizens. It is still a Jewish state, one that privileges the rights of Jewish citizens over Palestinian “citizens”. It still treats all non-Jews as a threat, as an enemy.

Israel is not a normal kind of state. It is an ethnocracy, and one driven by an ideological variation of the ethnic nationalisms that tore apart Europe a century ago.

Odeh is a leader who campaigns for peace and equality between Jewish and Palestinian citizens. 

Today, he got his answer. His face is bruised, bloodied and bowed, crawling through the dirt. This is the language of a Jewish state.


The prime minister won't go quietly. Bulldozers are the ultimate refuge of the criminal suspect.

Odeh Bisharat Jan 18, 2017 8:37 PM


A Bedouin woman reacts during a protest against home demolitions on January 18, 2017 in the Bedouin village of Umm al-Hiran. MENAHEM KAHANA/AFP

In the eyes of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu all Arab citizens are terrorists, or, put euphemistically — they’re all a “demographic problem.” That’s been his theory forever, even when he was finance minister, and in light of the latest campaign by former senior security officials to keep Israel “Jewish and secure,” this legacy is not solely his.

Here are a few words about the demographic threat that “our forces” took care of on Wednesday in Umm al-Hiran. His name is Yakub Abu al-Kiyan, and he is a math teacher in Hura’s high school. His wife is Dr. Amal Abu Sa’ad, his brother Jabar is an Education Ministry inspector, and another brother Hamad is the principal of a school in Hura.

Koby, an activist in the Negev Coexistence Forum, reported on today’s encounter with this “threat.” He said that from the start police were aiming loaded weapons at people.

“I heard a few shots, and then I saw a white van start to move away from the policemen, not towards them,” he said. “After he started to move, he [the driver] was surely scared and tried to get away, the barrage of fire from the policemen started. They surrounded the truck, fired from all directions, some from in front and some from behind; at that point the driver was apparently wounded, lost control, continued down the hill, and that’s when the policemen were hurt. As far as I could tell, the driver was wounded and wasn’t in control of the vehicle.”

So this is the equal treatment referred to by Netanyahu, who conducts expulsions broadcast live, which will be remembered as the shame of the Jewish people for generations. This time it is impossible to declare, as in days of yore, that the Arabs are “rising up to destroy us,” or fled of their own free will.

Today all the authorities of the state of the Jewish people, from the government to the Supreme Court, are partners in a chilling action: Arabs out, Jews in. In dark times in history, the slogan was different, but the idea was the same: “Juden, raus” — Jews, out. I apologize for the free association working overtime on this insane day.

During the early years of the state, the Abu Al-Kiyan tribe was expelled from its lands in Hirbet Zubala, which they had cultivated for generations. After a period of wandering they were ordered in the 1950s by the military government to move to the Wadi Yatir area, where they established the village of Atir Umm al-Hiran. For the 60 years since, they’ve been fighting for recognition of their village, whose lands they occupied by government order.

But there is no shame. The government, with the backing of the Supreme Court, decided to expel the 1,000 residents, destroy the homes that were built with sweat and tears, and move the residents to a different village, which itself is overcrowded. Replacing them will be members of the chosen people.

The poet Mahmoud Darwish once wrote under similar circumstances, “Hooray for the conqueror of the village … Hooray for the tyrant who subdues the girl with eyes lined in blue.”

A few days ago Agriculture Minister Uri Ariel released his five-year plan as tidings for the Bedouin of the Negev. Attorney Sana Ibn-Bari managed to expose the plan’s intent to uproot unrecognized villages, so we now understand the plan’s true purpose. This is what the state is toward the Arabs; a state of bulldozers.

Writing in Haaretz last Friday, Yossi Verter predicted that Netanyahu wouldn’t go quietly. He will leave scorched earth behind, and the Arabs will be the first to feel his anger over the suspicions concerning his lust for power and love of luxury.


Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel. Bulldozers are the ultimate refuge of the criminal suspect. It’s important for those Jews who refuse to be part of this spectacle to make their voices heard.https://ssl.gstatic.com/ui/v1/icons/mail/images/cleardot.gif

The Construction of a Jewish Town over Umm al Hiran Begins - Guarded by Dozens of Police

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Israeli Democracy at its Finest
Israeli diggers begin work guarded by hundreds of soldiers

This is Zionism - The Demolition of Umm al-Hiran

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Umm al-Hiran on the morning before the bulldozers moved in for a spot of ethnic cleansing

Racism and Zionism are like Siamese Twins

Shami Chakrabarti, who was enlisted by Jeremy Corbyn to write a report on racism and anti-Semitism spouted a load of nonsense about Zionism, the racist ideology and movement that gave birth to the State of Israel.

She talked of some people personally redefining their Zionism in ways that appear to grant less support to the State of Israel and more solidarity to fellow Jewish people the world over.’

It’s like saying that some people redefined their fascism to be less racist.  She then went on to say that ‘My advice to critics of the Israeli State and/or Government is to use the term "Zionist" advisedly, carefully and never euphemistically or as part of personal abuse.’  This was in response to the attempt of the Zionists and the Jewish Labour Movement to outlaw the use of the term ‘Zionist’ as being a term of abuse.  My response is simply that Zionism is abusive so of course it will be perceived by some as being perjorative.
Joint Arab-Jewish demonstration in Tel-Aviv
But what has happened this week at the Bedouin village of Umm al-Hiran is a classic example of Zionism in action.  As Moshe Dayan once said:

‘During the last 100 years our people have been in a process of building up the country and the nation, of expansion, of getting additional Jews and additional settlements in order to expand the borders here. Let no Jew say that the process has ended. Let no Jew say that we are near the end of the road
Women weep outside the demolished home of Yaqub Musa Abu al-Qian, who was shot dead by police. The Israeli authorities claim that Qian deliberately ran over a police officer with his car, killing him, while eyewitnesses say that police opened fire on the car before it sped up — a version that appears to be supported by police aerial footage of the  incident. Umm el-Hiran, January 18, 2017. (Faiz Abu Rmeleh/Activestills)
Umm al-Hiran, with the JNF bulldozers, was a classic example of Zionism, which has always meant the dispossession of the indigenous Arab to make way for the Jewish settler.  Those, like the Jewish Labour Movement who pretend that Zionism is some kind of national liberation movement are no different from those who held that Nazism was the genuine national expression of the German people.
Umm el-Hiran before and after Israeli bulldozers carried out demolitions, January 18, 2017. (Keren Manor/Activestills)
There isn’t a single occasion when there has been a conflict between the testimony of the Israeli Police and their victims that the former have been proven, when video evidence has emerged, to be telling the truth.  It was no different in Umm al-Hiran yesterday.
lying police tweet
Add caption
The Police alleged that the attack on the leader of the Arab opposition in the Knesset, Ayman Odeh, was a stray stone that was thrown.  It is obvious to anyone that his injuries weren’t caused  by a solitary stone.  What is also evident is that if he had been the leader of a Jewish/Zionist party then he would not have been injured.
Police began violently dispersing those present, using shock grenades, pepper spray and sponge-tipped bullets. Among those injured by the latter was Joint List head Ayman Odeh, who was allegedly struck in the head and back. Police assert that Odeh was struck with a stone thrown by protesters, but eyewitnesses dispute this claim. Umm el-Hiran, January 18, 2017. (Keren Manor/Activestills)
Aymen Odeh lying on the floor
But on the basis of Police lies Aymen is already being attacked as a terrorist supporter in the Knesset.  Already one of the Joint List MKs, Basel Ghattas of Balad is set to be expelled from the Knesset after the passage 3 months ago of an Expulsion Bill.  Although of course its text was neutral it was obvious that its intended target were the Arab MKs.  Disgracefully the Israeli Labour Party is supporting or not opposing it.  Whereas the vilest of Jewish racists in the Knesset like Bezalel Smotrich of Jewish Home remain untouched.
police guard car
Yesterday a Palestinian was shot dead in his car.  By good fortune the car then went out of control and killed one of his murderers, an Israeli policeman.  Immediately the Police echoed by Netanyahu and also the President Reuben Rivlin, took up the theme that the Arab was a member of ISIS.  Not a shred of evidence was produced or will be produced.  This is another racist meme which basically says that opposition to the demolition of an Arab village to make way for a Jewish town is the work of ‘terrorists’.  If you oppose the demolition of your home and demonstrate against it then you will be classified as a ‘terrorist.’

What is also disgraceful is the silence of British politicians who are quick to condemn the death of Israeli military.  Last week the killing of 4 Israeli soldiers in Jerusalem by a lorry was condemned in the Western media and by western politicians but the demolition of an Arab village and the attack on the leader of the Arab opposition merits no comment.

Below is a quite detailed video of the murder of the Palestinian which leaves no doubt that the Israeli Police were lying.  There is also a story about a radio host who expressed sympathy with the dead Bedouin driver being sacked.  Being sympathetic to an Arab in Israel today is a risky business.
Hundreds of Israeli police officers arrived in Umm el-Hiran at around 5.30am, running towards the mosque where residents and activists had gathered, ahead of planned demolitions in the unrecognized village. Shortly after a few rounds of live fire were heard, followed by a burst of shots and shouts that people had been killed. (Keren Manor/Activestills)

Although all evidence points to wounds from sponge-tipped bullets, police claim Joint List head Ayman Odeh was hit by stones thrown by Bedouin protesters in Umm el-Hiran. If the police are proven wrong, it means they shot the leader of the third-largest party in Israel in the face without any justification. 

UPDATE: This post was updated with a photo of Ayman Odeh’s back showing his injury to be consistent with that of a wound from a sponge-tipped bullet, and that he is filing a complaint with the Department of Internal Police Investigations.
MK Ayman Odeh holding the sponge bullet he says was shot at him by Israeli forces in Umm el-Hiran. (Photo: Joint List)
Where Aymen Odeh had been shot - that was clearly no stone
The debate continues to rage over the killing of an Israeli police officer and a Bedouin man in Umm el-Hiran on Wednesday, when Israeli forces turned up to begin demolishing the Bedouin village in order for it to be replaced with a Jewish town. Police and much of the media have the incident down as a car-ramming attack, while residents and eyewitnesses say that police opened fire at the car before it sped up and hit officers — a version that appears to be supported by police aerial footage. But another contested event, involving the injuring of Joint List head and Knesset member Ayman Odeh, flew largely under the radar.
Related stories
By Activestills | January 18, 2017
By Orly Noy | November 22, 2016
By Edo Konrad | January 18, 2017
By +972 Blog | August 7, 2016
Police claim that Odeh was hit by rocks thrown by the Bedouin residents he was with, and police spokesperson Micky Rosenfeld insisted to +972 that Odeh’s injuries were caused by stones. Yet Odeh and the people who were beside him all say he was shot by black sponge-tipped bullets. A report in the Ma’ariv newspaper on Thursday morning cited police as saying that Odeh’s injuries could not have been caused by these projectiles as they aren’t in possession of such weapons. But police use of black-sponged tipped bullets against Palestinian youth is widely documented— particularly in East Jerusalem, where they have resulted in at least one death. On the other hand, the injuries Odeh suffered were relatively minor, which is unusual for this kind of bullet, but it also depends on the exact distance and angle it was shot from, which is unclear.

MK Ayman Odeh with blood dripping down his face from what he claims is a sponge-tipped bullet wound and police claim is a stone. (Photo: Joint List)

There were no firsthand reports of any rocks being thrown when Odeh was allegedly attacked by police, and none of the injuries at the scene were reported as having been caused by stones. You can hear bullets being fired in the video shot by Activestills that was broadcast all over the Israeli media. There are photos of Odeh holding the bullet that he says hit him and plenty more of the bullets lying around at the scene. All the people I spoke with who were there deny that any stones were thrown at the time that Odeh was apparently shot. The only mention of stones at all in Israeli media reports are from the police account about Odeh specifically.

“There were no rocks. None. Zero. The police are liars,” Odeh told +972, adding that the police first sprayed his face with pepper spray and after that fired at him, hitting his head and his back. “Who sprayed me? Was that the protesters too?” Odeh said. “The security forces are hostile towards Arabs, that is what they are programmed to do. They are liars.”

The Soroka Medical Center report of his treatment does not determine what caused the injury and only states that the patient, Odeh, claims it was caused by bullets. This is standard, as hospital policies are to not get involved in the cause of injury. According to a few doctors I consulted there is no way, medically-speaking, for the physicians who treated Odeh to definitively differentiate between a wound from a stone and a wound from a bullet. The only way to start to uncover the cause of injury is to do a forensics exam. So for now, it’s the police’s word against that of Odeh and at least half a dozen witnesses.

UPDATE, Thursday, 8:30PM: Ayman Odeh underwent a forensic exam today, as part of a complaint he is filing with the Department of Internal Police Investigations, accusing the police of aggravated assault and unlawful use of weapon. The findings of the exam are still not out, however Odeh provided +972 with this photo of the wound on his back, whose round shape and bruising is consistent with wounds from sponge-tipped bullets. The complaint is being filed by attorneys with Adalah and the Public Committee Against Torture.

Joint List MK Ayman Odeh’s back, showing round bruising that is consistent with an injury caused by a sponge-tipped bullet. (Joint List)

I don’t find the police version credible, to say the least, but I cannot disprove it at this time. However, the recent allegations by police, government and media of an “arson intifada” by Arab citizens following the fires in Haifa, despite there being no evidence or a single charge made, are a good reflection of their disingenuous conduct.

Either way, this is an incident of critical importance. If, as suspected, Odeh was in fact shot in the face and back by police, it means the head of Israel’s third-largest party was shot by his own police force for absolutely no reason. One of the videos from the scene shows Odeh talking with police and explaining that he is a Knesset member and is of course not armed.

When is the last time (if ever) that a Knesset member was shot by security forces? In 2006, rightwing Knesset members Effie Eitam and Aryeh Eldad were wounded by border police officers during the evacuation of Amona. But having a gun pointed at you is substantially different, and while Odeh is fighting for the rights of Palestinian citizens of Israel, Eitam and Eldad were fighting for the rights of illegal settlers in occupied territory.

The police shoot Palestinian youth in East Jerusalem with the same potentially-lethal black sponge-tipped bullets — and in the West Bank with rubber bullets — on a regular basis with impunity, but what could possibly be their excuse for shooting a public servant who posed no threat? They have to stick to the stone story, otherwise they’d have a lot more explaining to do.
With the driver, the police can at least claim there was the threat of a ramming attack. But with Odeh I don’t believe they have any excuse. Which is why the Israeli authorities and media are pushing hard the line that Odeh and other members of the Joint List are inciting the Arab public. They are victimizing and vilifying him.

Odeh told +972 that negotiations between the Bedouin residents of Umm el-Hiran and authorities to settle their relocation had reached a breakthrough Tuesday night and they were close to reaching an agreement, when things suddenly changed at midnight, and a decision was clearly made by someone in the government to scrap the agreement and instead go in full force to demolish the village. According to Odeh, “It was possible to prevent the spilling of blood…Prime Minister Netanyahu is responsible for the blood spilled.”

MKs Dov Henin and Issawi Freij: "The deeper the corruption investigation of Netanyahu – the wider his inflammatory incitement the Arab citizens of Israel”

Knesset Member Dov Khenin of Hadash charged Prime Minister Netanyahu with deliberately inciting against the country’s Arab citizens and setting the police to brutal raids – with the deliberate intention of distracting attention from the ongoing police investigation into charges of corruption against the PM. “The deeper the police investigation of Netanyahu, the wider the flames of his incitement”.

Khenin was speaking at a protest rally held on King George Street in Tel Aviv, in the aftermath of  widespread police violence, bloodshed and demolition of homes at the Bedouin village of Um al-Hiran in the Negev. Khenin noted that there was a visible direct relation between the intensification of the PM’s investigation on charges of corruption and the intensification of home demolitions and police violence against Arab residents in such places as Qalansawa and Umm al-Hiran.

MK Issawi Freij of Meretz spoke in a similar vein and said, 
"Today there was a completely unwarranted police offensive against the residents of Umm al-Hiran. Two people paid with their lives, a civilian and a police officer. Two people paid with their lives, two families became bereaved, two sets of children were orphaned. Two people were killed needlessly, with no justification and no reason for their deaths. It happened only and solely because the Prime Minister wants to distract attention from the steady supply of expensive cigars and champagne which he allegedly got from an American billionaire. The Prime Minister wants to mark out an enemy on whom his voters can vent their anger. This enemy which the PM has targeted and marked out is me -  an Arab citizen of the State of Israel and a Member of Israel’s Parliament, along with all my Arab fellow citizens, a full twenty percent of Israel’s citizen body. We are to be the scapegoats! I declare it loud and clear: we who stand here and at other protests around the country, Jews and Arabs united in voicing our protest, will not let Netanyahu succeed in this filthy design!”
The hundreds of demonstrators, who listened to the speeches on King George Street in downtown Tel Aviv, responded by chanting:"Netanyahu is dangerous – both corrupt and a racist!" and “Jews and Arabs refuse to be enemies!”

Other demonstrations took place at Jaffa’s Clock Square, in front of the Prime Minister’s residence  in Jerusalem, in Haifa, at intersections near Acre, Shfaram, Umm al-Fahm and Klaonsooh – as well as by Jewish and Arab students at the universities of Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Haifa and Beersheba.  

"The direct responsibility for today’s  dangerous escalation and bloodshed at the village of Um al-Hiran in the Negev rests upon those who took the decision to destroy a Bedouin village which had existed for decades, completely raze and wipe it off the face of the earth, to expel the residents and establish a Jewish ‘community’  in its place. In recent days, government officials arrived at the village, bluntly threatened its residents, and demanded that they move immediately to the town of Hura where there is no residence available to them. Those who initiated and implemented such brutal measures  against Bedouin villagers (who happen to be citizens of Israel) are directly responsible for the terrible events that took place today in the village" say the organizers of the demonstrations, peace and civil rights groups  such as the Negev Coexistence and Civil Equality Forum, Coaltion of Women for Peace and the Recognition Forum (i.e., recognition  of the so-called “unrecognized villages” of which Um al-Hiran is one.

Protesters call for a comprehensive and impartial investigation of the circumstances which led to the death of a of Umm al-Hiran resident Yacoub Musa Abu Alkian and police officer Erez Levy. They call upon the communications  media not to repeat uncritical the highly tendentious and inflammatory accounts disseminated by police and government speakers - which are contrary to the eyewitness testimonies of Jews and Arabs present on the scene.
The terrible bloodshed was the culmination of a day of violence which  began in the morning when massive demolition crews arrived at the village, accompanied by large forces of the Yoav unit of the police (created specifically for such anti-Bedouin actions). They had specifically declared intention of  expelling  the residents and demolishing  their homes, in order to make place for construction of the purely Jewish “community” of Hiran. The police used live ammunition and well as rubber bullets and  tear gas. Villagers - men, women and children – were injured in the police shooting, as were many of the Jewish and Arab supporters who came to offer solidarity with them.


Biased and tendentious media reports, couched in inciting and inflammatory tones – refusing  to recognize that   the residents were protesting the destruction of their village and homes, and labeling them as “terrorists " - are a direct continuation of the police violence on the ground.

Fake claims blown apart

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Al Jazeera’s The lobby exposes the establishment’s ‘anti-Semitism’ claims for what they are, writes Tony Greenstein


This article also appears in this week's issue of Weekly Worker


The Jewish Labour Movement at the 80th anniversary of the anti-fascist Battle of Cable Street - in 1936 the Zionist movement opposed confronting the fascists
Corbyn betraying everything he once stood for
This past week Al Jazeera broadcast a series of four half an hour programmes about the Israel Lobby in Britain.[1] They involved an undercover mole ‘Robin Harrow’ who became a trusted confidante of the leadership of the Israel lobby in Britain, in particular Shai Masot, the Senior Political Counsellor at the Israeli Embassy, Michael Rubin, former Chair of Labour Students and now Parliamentary officer for Labour Friends of Israel,Jeremy Newmark of the Jewish Labour Movement and Joan Ryan MP of Labour Friends of Israel as well as the ghoul of the Labour Right, Luke Akehurst.
Shai Masot in expansive mood
The background to this is the BDS campaign which began on 9 July 2005 when over 170 Palestinian NGOs called for Boycott and Disinvestment from and Sanctions against Israel.[2]  According to Gilad Erdan, the Public Security Minister who oversees the MSA “Great Britain is the world center of the anti-Israel BDS campaign[3] 
In June 2013 Benjamin Netanyahu gave Israel’s Ministry for Strategic Affairs[MSA] responsibility for fighting BDS.[4]  Israel’s active management of British Zionist groups began with Israel’s co-ordination of anti-BDS activities internationally. 
The Jewish Labour Movement's Director Ella Rose demonstrating the peaceful ways of Zionism
Paranoia
Israel’s political classes have been consumed by paranoia over BDS for the past few years.  This has resulted in thinly veiled threats to the lives of BDS activists.  Erdan is on record as saying that ‘“Soon any activist who uses their influence to delegitimize the only Jewish state in the world will know they will pay a price for it,”
Amnesty International spoke of “an escalation of acts of intimidation by the government and attacks and threats by settlers and other non-state actors (which) have created an increasingly dangerous environment” for human rights defenders in Israel and the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.[5]  At the ‘Stop the Boycott’ Conference held in Jerusalem on March 28th 2016, Intelligence Minister Yisrael Katz called for “sikul ezrachi memukad” against the “BDS leadership.”  This is the phrase  that Israel’s military use for extra-judicial executions.
BDS kicked off in Britain in 2005 with the Academic Boycott which was endorsed by the Association of University Teachers.  Despite condemnation by Tony Blair and New Labour it was ratified by the new University Colleges Union.  In 2007 both Unite and UNISON, Britain’s two largest trade unions adopted policy in support of BDS.  Yet the simple facts are that economically, the effect of BDS has been on the margins.  Veolia has pulled out of Israel, G4S is on the brink of doing so, Sodastream has been hard hit and a few Scandinavian investment banks have stopped investing in Israel.  There have been other successes, often at a local level, but overall they have been relatively marginal.  However what BDS has done is to focus the anger of groups such as students at the continuation of the world’s only active settler colonial and apartheid state.  The effect of BDS has been primarily politicalnot economic and yet the Israeli government has been paralysed by fear.  Is this justified?
Yes and no.  On the economic level the Boycott has made no impact on Israel’s military sales or the vast majority of its trading activities.   But Israel doesn’t exist because of its economic contribution to the Western world, important though it has become.  Israel’s role has been primarily strategic, a combination of the political and military.  Israel is particularly vulnerable to political pressure because its establishment was dependant on western political support in a way that South Africa never was as a result of a UN resolution.  Even despite recent gas finds it is dependent on raw materials in a way that South Africa never was. 
The JLM's Jeremy Newmark with war criminal Mark Regev
Israeli leaders have felt more keenly than most the effect of the end to Apartheid.  This was a serious blow to the Zionists’confidence.  In the words of Hendrik Verwoerd, South Africa Prime Minister and the Architect of Apartheid,  "Israel, like South Africa, is an apartheid state."[6]    With the loss of South Africa Israel was on its own.  One of the characteristics of settler colonialism is its siege mentality and paranoia.  This is because they are states which are never at ease with themselves.  They are artificial nations whose existence is predicated upon the dispossession or oppression of the indigenous population.  This is one reason why they can never be normal nation states, at least until they achieve a ‘final solution’ to the native problem.
The demands of the BDS campaign do not explicitly call for the end to a Jewish state but, taken together, they can have no other interpretation.[7]  The call for an end to the occupation of all Arab lands is ambiguous and can be understood as meaning an end to the post-1967 occupation.   However the demand for the full equality of Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel cannot be squared with the existence of Israel as a Jewish state.  Although Zionist parties pay lip-service to a Jewish and Democratic state, in practice they know that full equality is unattainable.  Support for the Right of Return of the refugees ethnically cleansed in 1947-8 and subsequently is wholly incompatible with the maintenance of a Jewish majority state without it being an openly apartheid state.
It is the political almost psychological susceptibility of Israel as a Jewish state, that lies behind the hostility of the whole Zionist spectrum to BDS.  Labour Zionism is equally as hostile to BDS as the far-Right Jewish Home.  Only at the fringes of the Zionist movement, where liberal Zionism meets non-Zionism, is there support for Boycotting Settler Goods only.
Zionist paranoia in respect of BDS is not wholly irrational.  BDS does indeed go to the heart of Zionism and what it means to be a Jewish state.  Although Israel’s reaction appears to be a massive and irrational over-reaction it is explained by the particular political insecurity of settler colonial states.  The overthrow of South Africa Apartheid began with the Sporting Boycott in 1970.  I cut my political teeth in the demonstrations against the visiting Springbok Rugby teams which were led by Peter Hain.  The attack on South Africa’s love of Sport was a prelude to the Economic and Political Boycott.  That is what Israel’s fear is.  Hence the use of the term ‘delegitimisation’.  Israel rightly fears that the whole concept of a Jewish state, which is fundamentally racist to the core, will be lost to those who still have some attachment to the ideals of the French Revolution and Emancipation. 
It is this paranoia, at the base of which lies a deep racial and existential fear, which explains some of the comical mistakes and overreach of the Zionist campaign in Britain as demonstrated by the escapades of agent Shai Masot.
Role of Embassy
At the beginning of November, I spoke to the biannual gathering of the Boycott Israel Network at Coalbrookdale Youth Hostel on the Zionists’ concocted anti-Semitism campaign which the Zionists have been waging ever since Jeremy Corbyn stood for leader of the Labour Party.  Someone asked me: ‘What was the role of the Israeli Embassy and Ambassador Regev in all this?’ -  I replied thus:
I don’t think Mark Regev began it but certainly he’s involved in it. If you look at it from this perspective, when Corbyn was elected or seemed likely to be elected to the Labour leadership, I imagine panic set in, not just in the Israeli embassy but the US embassy. Britain is the closest ally of the United States in Europe, the special relationship; the idea that someone who is anti-Nato, anti-Trident and so on, with his record, I would be amazed if the CIA and the Intelligence Agencies weren’t doing something. I mean that’s what they’re paid to do all over the world; why not in Britain? It would be bonkers if they didn’t; they would be failing in their duties, so, yes, of course they have been behind this campaign.[8]
Anyone who knows anything of the CIA’s destabilisation of governments in Central and South America or in Europe with Operation Gladio[9]should know that US intelligence organisations have no respect for democratically elected governments.[10]
Excellent though the work of ‘Robin’ has been as an undercover reporter in the Jewish Labour Movement and with Zionist groups such as Labour Friends of Israel no one should be under any illusion that what has been revealed is but a snapshot of what has happened.  We have no evidence of communications between the Israeli and American embassies on the matter but it is highly unlikely that the Americans haven’t been involved at some level.  We know little of the depth of co‑operation between the Israeli Embassy and the Jewish Labour Movement other than that they worked with Shai Masot.   But with these caveats the programmes were an excellent eye opener for those who are born innocent.
Credit should be given to ‘Robin’ for ingratiating himself with key Zionist activists and personnel.  It took a lot of skill but it also depended on their own arrogance.  Passing oneself off as a racist is not easy!  But it is also testimony to the Zionists main weakness – a lack of personnel.  Attracting youthful activists to a cause as desperate as that of Israel, to actively supporting a murderous regime steeped in ethnic cleansing is not an easy task.
What the programmes demonstrate is that Zionist politics in this country are now effectively the British side of the operations of the Israeli state, behind which stands the American state.  Although there have always been such connections, it is of recent origin that Israel was in the driving seat. 
The fourth programme is most amusing in this respect.  A story appears in Ha’aretz in which ‘Ministries Feud Over Anti-BDS War’  - basically an accusation by the Foreign Ministry that MOSA was in potential breach of British law.  Instead of co-operating and working with existing British Zionist groups it was going further and setting such groups up and effectively interfering in Britain’s own political process.  Shai Masot asks for a quiet meeting with Robin in which he clarifies his own role.  He explains away his previous introduction of ‘Robin’ as Chair of Young LFI, which doesn’t even exist, by saying he was drunk!  Now he emphasises he cannot be seen to be in control of anything:  ‘I am irrelevant’. ‘If I give you an idea it’s off the record, it’s not something you can use.’  Clearly Masot has been given a strict warning that he is operating at the edge of legality and endangering the whole mission in London.  He is worried. Whilst he is always available for advice or resources he cannot be quoted or be seen to be in charge!  Masot becomes incoherent and almost pleads for ‘Robin’s’ understanding.  ‘That’s politics’ he ends up saying.  It’s not an easy role change when you find difficult defining your role.   It was a portent of things to come.
Sir Alan Duncan - Shai Masot's Target
The first programme began with a front page headlines in the Mail on Sunday.  It revealed that Shai Masot in a conversation with Robin and Maria Strizzolo, a civil servant and adviser to Robert Halfon MP, Minister of State for Education, had expressed a desire to ‘take down’ Sir Alan Duncan, Britain’s Deputy Foreign Secretary and a known Arabist.  When the news broke, Israel’s Ambassador Mark Regev quickly distanced himself from what he described as a ‘junior employee’ who wasn’t even a diplomat.  Masot was thrown under the political bus.
What was even more interesting was the reaction of Boris Johnson.  Despite being called an ‘idiot’ who had becomeminister of foreign affairs without any responsibilities’ such that ‘If something real happened it won't be his fault... it will be Alan Duncan’  he accepted the apology and made it clear that there was going to be no investigation.  The only person who resigned was Ms Strizzolo, a Conservative Party activist and ardent Zionist who responded helpfully to Masot’s desire to bring down Duncan,  "A little scandal maybe?"  Given Duncan was the first out gay Tory MP, it is not difficult to imagine what she had in mind.[11]
Craig Murry, the ex-British Ambassador to Uzbekistan, who was sacked by Jack Straw for  raising that country’s abysmal human rights record and its use of torture[12]raised some interesting questions re Shai Masot.[13]
1) On what basis was Masot in the UK?
2) Since he was not on the Diplomatic List but was plainly a senior officer what precise visa and residence status did he hold?
3) How many more officers does the Israeli Embassy have with that same visa and residence status?
4) Has the FCO connived with the Israeli Embassy to allow other Israeli intelligence operatives residence in the country other than those officially credited?
5) Did MI5, MI6 or any other of the security services have any input into Mr Masot’s acceptance and visa/residency status?
Unsurprisingly Murray hasn’t received any response to his inquiries from the Foreign Office or Theresa May.  There is little doubt that what was a programme by a foreign state aimed at destabilising a British political party had the blessing and was carried out with the  active connivance of the government.  The fact that a government which is normally so keen to prevent immigration had granted someone who was not a diplomat British residence suggests collusion with the Israeli government’s anti-BDS strategy at the highest level.
The British Media
It was not difficult to work out that the hand of the Israeli state and MI5/CIA were behind the ‘anti-Semitism affair’.  Why should there be a sudden upsurge of ‘anti-Semitism’ when Corbyn was elected.  The fact that such allegations were being levelled at Corbyn himself, when he first stood, should have been a strong indication as to their provenance.[14]  The fact that people like Jon Lansman gave credence to this campaign should raise questions about his own bona fides.
Although the British press did not entirely ignore the story, most of them downplayed it and soon forgot what was, in essence, an espionage programme run on British soil.  Imagine if the Russians had been running secret agents who were infiltrating political parties.  It is a sad commentary on the state of the British press – from the quality end to the yellow press – that it was a TV station based in Qatar which broke a story that was begging to be told.  The verbosity and carelessness of Shai Masot suggested from the start that he was unlikely to be a member of Mossad, Israel’s equivalent of MI6.  He was the political equivalent of the keystone cops.  It would surely not have been difficult for the Guardian or Independent to have run a few students in the Jewish Labour Movement but the will was not there.  Jonathan Freedland had already laid down the Guardian’s editorial take on the anti-Semitism affair.
Subversion in the Student Movement
Students are one of the key area of activities for the BDS and  Palestine solidarity movement.  In the last year the student movement has been rocked by two things in particular.  The first was the false allegation of anti-Semitism at Oxford University Labour Club in January 2016.
As Asa Winstanley has shown, the allegations of anti-Semitism were wholly false and contrived.[15]  The person who made them at Oxford, Alex Chalmers, left the Labour Party a few weeks later and supported the Lib-Dems.  On his Linked-in profile, before it was deleted, was information that he had worked for Israel’s main propaganda group in this country, BICOM.  The Labour Club’s ‘anti-Semitism’ had consisted of support for Israel Apartheid Week.  As the the Zionist Baroness Royall later commented on a blog on her own investigation on the JLM site:  ‘‘I know that you will share my disappointment and frustration that the main headline coming out of my inquiry is that there is no institutional Antisemitism in Oxford University Labour Club.’   What kind of political charlatan expresses disappointment that she could find no trace of ‘institutional anti-Semitism’ (whatever that is) at the organisation she was investigating?
The other major event was the election of the first Black woman President of the National Union of Students, Malia Bouattia, an open supporter of BDS and anti-imperialism.  She was subject to vicious attacks by the bourgeois media, led by the Union of Jewish Students.  In June 2015 the National Union of Students (NUS) voted for BDS.
UJS received money from the Israeli embassy and attempted to influence the outcome of the NUS presidency election and oust Bouattia following her victory.  UJS instigated a disaffiliation campaign from NUS which sank like a damp squib.  Oxford University students, despite Alex Chalmers supporting the disaffiliation bid, voted by a margin of 1,000 students to affiliate to the national union.  Lincoln University which disaffiliated has since reversed that decision.  Only Hull and Newcastle Universities disaffiliated.
One key activist in all of this was Michael Rubin, who claimed to work “with the ambassador and embassy quite a lot”.  He told Robin that Bouattia was “really bad” and “awful”.  “We were campaigning for the person running against her because we didn’t want her to win,” said Rubin, who was at the time Chairman of Labour Students. 
During the election campaign, Richard Brooks, NUS vice president, held “secret” meetings with Russell Langer, UJS campaign director, and Rubin.  “We’d have our secret little purpose meeting where we’d plan how to get moderate people with good politics and any number of things elected to certain places,” Robin explored with Brooks, the possibility of ousting Bouattia.  He told ‘Robin’ “You can speak to me because I’m helping organise them.”  The investigation also revealed that the UJS sent Brooks on a paid trip to Israel, which he failed to declare.  As a result the Left and Black students in NUS are seeking his removal as a scab agent in the student movement.
Adam Schapira, who ran an unsuccessful bid for the UJS presidency revealed, as we always suspected, that “The Israeli embassy in the UK gives money to UJS.”  Schapira confirmed that the American pro-Israel lobby, AIPAC, is also channelling money to British campuses through the Pinsker Centre.[16]  What the programme confirms is that Britain is at the epicentre of Zionist and US destabilisation efforts.
There were some highly amusing moments.  Ella Rose is the Director of the Jewish Labour Movement, the main organisation in the Labour Party spearheading the anti-Semitism campaign.  Previously she had worked at the Israeli Embassy and before that as Chair of UJS.  She had sought to keep her work at the Israeli Embassy a secret as the JLM didn’t want its close relationship with the Israeli Embassy revealed.  Asa Winstanley at Electronic Intifada broke the story of who her former employer was.[17]
Ella was not happy when the story broke and she happened to bump into ‘Robin’ at that time.  She is filmed crying fuck you, fuck you, fucking anti-Semites the lot of them.’  She was in tears over the fact that the truth of her employment had been revealed and she accused Winstanley of being a ‘fucking anti-Semite’.  It would seem that anybody who displeases this spoilt brat is to be defined as an ‘anti-Semite’.  All the traditional measures of anti-Semitism – a belief in Jewish inferiority, stereotypes, the International Jewish Conspiracy, the Medieval Blood Libel are irrelevant.  The only thing that is relevant is whether or not you support the Apartheid State of Israel.  If you do, then you it is immaterial if you hate Jews as Jews.
Readers can, however, rest assured that Ella recovered soon enough to tell Robin that she had seen Jackie Walker the previous Saturday and ‘You know what?  I could take her, she’s like 5’ 2” and tiny’.[18]  Apparently she has trained in the Israeli martial arts Krav Maga.  The Jewish Chronicle’s Marcus Dysche interpretation is that this was nothing more than Al Jazeera having ‘embarked on an exercise that is nothing more than straightforward Jew-baiting dressed up as an investigation.’  In other words classic anti-Semitism even though the woman that Ella Rose has threatened to ‘take out’ is herself Jewish! [19]
The most interesting part of the programme was when we saw, at Labour Party Conference, exactly how a fake anti-Semitism incident is manufactured.  Jean Fitzpatrick, a delegate to the Conference comes up to the Labour Friends of Israel stall.  She is impressed by their commitment to Two States and wants to know more.  What do you actually do to achieve that she asks the Chair of LFI, Joan Ryan MP. 
Ryan is ideally placed to be the LFI’s Chair. As MP for Enfield North she has demonstrated not only a love for Israel but a love for parliamentary expenses too.  Her much doctored Wikipedia entry states that In October 2007, the Evening Standard reported that Joan Ryan claimed £173,691 in expenses for the 2006/2007 tax year, the highest for any MP. She was the second highest claimant in the 2005/2006 tax year.’  In February 2010 Ryan was asked to repay £5,121 mortgage interest. [20]

There is a further section entitledAccusations of editing Wikipedia from within Parliament’.  It would appear that Ryan is not exactly happy that her appetite for expenses has been given undue publicity.  In 2012, The Independent reported that "[a]t least 10 attempts have been made from computers in Parliament to remove information about [Ryan's] expenses claims and a further 20 efforts were subsequently made to delete the information.  During the 2015 general election, The Telegraph reported that ‘The entire section about expenses on Joan Ryan’s page was deleted. Ms Ryan spent thousands on repairs and decorations at her Enfield home before ‘flipping’ it to another property.’ [21]

Jean Fitzpatrick was a persistent questioner and wanted to know exactly what LFI were doing to oppose the settlements which are an obstacle to a two-state solution.  The answer of course is nothing.  LFI and the Zionist movement in Britain, whilst ostensibly supporting a 2 States solution in the abstract does nothing whatsoever to bring such a scenario about.  There has never been a single occasion when they have opposed Israel’s Occupation, its land theft or crop destruction, its theft of water or any of the other acts that make Israel’s occupation a vicious and bloody one.  Two states is a cover for one, Apartheid Greater Israel with the Palestinian kept under permanent military rule.
Jean at some stage mentioned that LFI seemed to be made up of the privileged and powerful, which it is and immediately they pounced.  This was an ‘anti-Semitic trope’ about rich Jews, bankers and the City of London.  In fact she had mentioned none of this but a complaint was made by Ryan and Jean was suspended.  After having been investigated Jean was reinstated but it was and is a telling lesson in how false and fake anti-Semitic incidents are manufactured out of nothing.
Jeremy Corbyn who up till his election was a strong, the strongest supporter of the Palestinians has been worn down by the Zionists’ ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign.  Instead of calling out the Zionist JLM for weaponising anti-Semitism in the fight to defend Israel, he repeatedly stressed he was opposed to anti-Semitism without understanding or realising that the ‘anti-Semitism’ his opponents were accusing people of had nothing to do with hatred of Jews and everything to do with hatred of the actions of Israel.  Hence why his denials did nothing to appease his critics. 
At Labour’s 2016 conference Corbyn abased himself, giving a grovelling speech to LFI, to whom he had never spoken before.  Newmarks’s smug and arrogant comments after Corbyn had spoken said everything about the contempt in which the Zionists hold him:  ‘I can kind of live with that for the time being.  It will get us through another year.’  Hardly a ringing endorsement but confirmation that they have subdued Corbyn.
Luke Akehurst, former National Executive member who works for We Believe in Israel, another Israeli Embassy front group, was full of praise for Corbyn’s speech condemning ‘anti-Semitism’ to a group of racists:
“It’s a shame he didn’t make this speech this time last year. His underlying beliefs won’t have shifted... but given where he came from it was a carefully drafted speech that had appropriate wording in terms of the way it addressed core issues in the Middle East and the way it addressed antisemitism. My initial sense was there was not much one could find to criticise in what was said.”[22]
What an utterly damning indictment of Corbyn that this creature of Labour’s far-Right could find nothing to criticise in it?  One thing the Al Jazeera programme did prove was that the LFI itself is nothing more than a creature of the Israeli Embassy.  There was  Shai Masot going around appointing the Chair of Young LFI until a Ha’aretz article stopped him in his track and then there was the affair of the slush fund.  Ryan asks what happened to the names she put in for an all-expenses paid trip to Israel and Masot told her that he had just got the money, more than £1m.  It doesn’t take a genius to work out that it costs nothing like that sum to take MPs on a freebie.  In other words the $50m that Israel has allocated to anti-BDS work is a slush fund which is being used to pay for the running of LFI, including no doubt generous ‘expenses’ for people like Ryan.  In short LFI is nothing more than an arms length organisation run by the Embassy.  It is to be hoped that Corbyn now cuts his links with this reactionary state run organisation and never again speaks at its functions.
The investigation by Al Jazeera has been extremely damaging to the Zionist movement in Britain.  We now have conclusive evidence of how Israeli state agents, with the connivance of the British state, have been interfering in both the Labour Party and the student movement, how MPs like Joan Ryan and others, are in their pay. 
Above all the programmes demonstrate that the fake anti-Semitism campaign of the past year is just that.  An artificial concoction dreamt up in Jerusalem, the Israeli and probably the  American Embassy.  It is long overdue that socialists in the Labour Party dispensed with any feelings of guilt over this use of identity politics to shield and protect the privileged and powerful, the racist and reactionary.  The fact that Zionism uses ‘anti-Semitism’ in order to defend its demolition of Palestinian homes, torture and internment is a sign of its contempt for those Jews who did suffer from anti-Semitism.  During the pogrom in Romania by the Iron Guard in January 1941 the bodies of Jews were hung from butchers hooks and their victims were skinned alive.  To equate support for the Palestinians or the discomfiture of a spoilt brat from North London with the horrors that Jews have historically experienced demonstrates the utter contempt for actual Jewish suffering the Zionists have.  This should not be a surprise.  When Holocaust survivors first went to Israel after 1945 they were termed derisively ‘sapon; (soap) after the myth that the Nazis used fat from those killed in Auschwitz to manufacture soap.  It was not until the 1960’s when the Holocaust was used as the main instrument of Israel’s propaganda war, that openly expressed contempt for Holocaust survivors vanished, at least from the surface of Israeli society.
Tony Greenstein



Notes

1. www.aljazeera.com/investigations/thelobby.
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boycott,_Divestment_and_Sanctions.
3. www.jpost.com/Israel-News/Politics-And-Diplomacy/Israels-public-security-minister-heads-to-London-on-BDS-fighting-mission-466842.
4. New York Times February 1 2014: http://powerbase.info/index.php/Ministry_of_Strategic_Affairs_(Israel).
5. https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/amnesty-condemns-israels-threats-against-bds-activists.
6. www.ynet.co.il/articles/0,7340,L-4784262,00.html.
7. AJ Clarno The empire’s new walls Michigan 2009, pp66-67.
8. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boycott,_Divestment_and_Sanctions.
9. http://azvsas.blogspot.co.uk/2016/12/the-boy-who-cried-wolf-syndrome-labour.html.
10. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Gladio.
11. Anyone who harbours any doubts on this score should read Inside the company - CIA diary by Phil Agee, a former CIA case officer in South America.
12. www.politicshome.com/news/uk/political-parties/conservative-party/news/82173/tory-aide-quits-over-israeli-embassy-worker.
13. www.theguardian.com/politics/2004/jul/15/foreignpolicy.uk.
14. www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2017/01/britains-undesirable-immigrant-shai-masot-given-visa/comment-page-2/#comment-649779.
15. Not only the Daily Mail and the Zionist Jewish Chronicle, but Jonathan Freedland and The Guardian. See, for example, ‘Labour and the left have an anti-Semitism problem’ (www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/mar/18/labour-antisemitism-jews-jeremy-corbyn).
16. ‘How Israel lobby manufactured UK Labour Party’s anti-Semitism crisis’: https://electronicintifada.net/content/how-israel-lobby-manufactured-uk-labour-partys-anti-semitism-crisis/16481.
17. www.cherwell.org/2017/01/11/nus-vice-president-filmed-plotting-to-oust-malia-bouattia; and http://mancunion.com/2017/01/11/nus-vice-president-caught-film-planning-oust-president.
18. https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/asa-winstanley/new-jewish-labour-movement-director-was-israeli-embassy-officer.
19. See http://azvsas.blogspot.co.uk/2017/01/ella-rose-from-union-of-jewish-students.html.
20. www.thejc.com/comment/comment/al-jazeera-harassment-of-british-jews-1.430547.
21. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_Ryan.
22. www.telegraph.co.uk/news/general-election-2015/11574217/Expenses-and-sex-scandal-deleted-from-MPs-Wikipedia-pages-by-computers-inside-Parliament.html.
23. http://jewishnews.timesofisrael.com/corbyn-at-lfi-peres-was-enormous-giant-of-israeli-politics.

Open Letter to Jeremy Corbyn - Don't Play with an Apartheid Organisation - Labour Friends of Israel

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Cut your links with Labour Friends of Settlements, Apartheid & Ethnic Cleansing


Jeremy Corbyn at the LFI fringe meeting - they wouldn't have dreamt have inviting him b4 being elected
The Jewish Labour Movement and LFI play up their false anti-Semitism narrative for all its worth
I am posting this to ask that if you are a member of the Labour Party or Momentum supporter please sign this letter stating which Constituency and Labour Party you are in.  With the recent Al Jazeera revelations, there can be no doubt that both LFI and the Jewish Labour Movement are emanations of the Israeli state inside the Labour Party.

Please send your details to me either via the comments or to azvsas@gmail.com

tony greenstein
Jeremy Corbyn MP
Leader of the Labour Party
House of Commons
London SW1 1AA

Dear Jeremy,
We write as Jewish and non-Jewish members/ supporters of the Labour Party.
We welcome the fact that you have called for a Government  inquiry into the revelations in the recent four-part series of programmes by Al Jazeera TV.  However the programmes also raise very serious questions for the Labour Party, not least its relationship to Labour Friends of Israel and the Jewish Labour Movement.  We understand Free Speech on Israel has already called for a Labour Party Inquiry into the implications for the Labour Party.  We endorse that call.
The Jewish Labour Movement does its best to talk up the idea that the Labour Party is swamped with anti-Semitism
In the second programme (7m 50s), Joan Ryan MP, the LFI Chairperson asks Shai Masot, the Israeli Embassy’s Political Officer, who was caught trying to ‘take down’ Government Ministers:

‘What happened with the names that we put into the Embassy Shai?  To which Masot replies ‘Just now we’ve got the money.  It’s more than £1m, it’s a lot of money..it’s not physical, it’s an approval’ to which Ryan jocularly responds ‘ I didn’t think you had it in your bag!’.
Michael Rubin, Parliamentary Officer of LFI and the Fabians explaining how close are LFI and the Israeli Embassy's ties
The LFI’s Parliamentary Officer, Michael Rubin, who was filmed boasting that he was trying to take-down the democratically elected President of the National Union of Students, Malia Bouattia, claimed to work “with the ambassador and embassy quite a lot”.

Joan Ryan in the third Al Jazeera programme was seen to concoct a wholly false allegation of anti-Semitism against a Labour Party conference delegate, Jean Fitzpatrick, who had come to ask Ms Ryan what LFI’s support for a 2 State Solution meant in practice and what they were doing to achieve it.  Getting no answer, Jean said that LFI had a lot of money, which is clearly true, a lot of prestige and that a friend of hers had got a good job at Oxford University on the basis of having worked for LFI. 
Joan Ryan asks what has happened to her request for cash for LFI's slush fund.  Joan just loves easy money.  In 2005-6 she claimed the second highest amount of parliamentary expenses.  In 2006-7, garnering over £173K, our Joan won the competition for the highest expenses of any MP.  Now she has collared over £1m.  When the MPs expenses scandal broke, she had to pay £6K back.
Shai Masot, the 'junior' Embassy official announces Joan Ryan's bid for slush fund money has been successful - 'more than £1m has been obtained'

A happy Joan Ryan is informed that the money for LFI's slush fund is not yet here
A delighted Joan Ryan MP jokes about a corrupt payment of £1m
None of this was remotely anti-Semitic yet Joan Ryan had no hesitation in transforming this into getting a ‘big job in banking and the City’ and an ‘anti-Semitic attack’.  On the basis of this Jean was suspended from the Labour Party.  Because the conversation was recorded, the charge was dropped but this is how false charges of ‘anti-Semitism’ have recently been concocted.

The reason for making false accusations of anti-Semitism, such as that against Ms Fitzpatrick, is to deter criticism of Zionism and the Israeli state.  Those who make these false claims of anti-Semitism are deliberately jeopardising Labour’s chances of electoral victory. 

Although the LFI purports to support a 2 State Solution it is clear, as Jean Fitzpatrick demonstrated, that this is a smokescreen for its uncritical support for Israel’s military occupation and settlement of the West Bank and Gaza.  At no time has LFI ever condemned or criticised the Occupation or the Settlements.  LFI supports the 2SS  knowing that it will never happen but also knowing that it will make them appear as reasonable and even-handed rather than a sycophantic and uncritical supporter of Israeli expansion and racism.

Prior to your election as Leader of the Labour Party you had never addressed a meeting of the LFI.  At the 2016 Conference you addressed the LFI fringe meeting for the second time.  It is clear from the Al Jazeera revelations that LFI operates as an emanation of the Israeli state within the Labour Party.  We saw this clearly when Shai Masot introduced Al Jazeera’s undercover reporter, ‘Robbin Harrow’ to people as the Chair of Young LFI, a non-existent organisation.

If you continue to speak at LFI meetings you will be taken to be endorsing a group which favours continued settlement expansion and which opposes their dismantlement.  You will also be interpreted as  lending support tothose who wage war on Palestinians living inside Israel.  Only last week a Bedouin village in the Negev, Umm al-Hiran, which had been there for 60 years, its inhabitants having been displaced from their original village further south,  was demolished by bulldozers from the Jewish National Fund.  One resident was killed by police gunfire. 

Despite Palestinians occupying only 2% of the Negev, the Israeli government and the Jewish National Fund sought, as part of the programme of Judaisation, to demolish an Arab village in order to make way for the Jewish town of Hiran.  This is comparable to, if not worse than,the demolition in the 1970’s of Black ‘squatter’ camps in Soweto.

Neither LFI nor the JLM, which are always eager to accuse supporters of the Palestinians and opponents of Zionism of ‘anti-Semitism’ have anything to say about apartheid in Israel, both within the 1948 borders and within the Occupied Territories.  Ha’aretz newspaper recently warned, in an editorial ,that with the proposed annexation of Ma’aleh Adumim, that’Israel will cease to exist as a Jewish and democratic state, and officially become an apartheid one’.

Ha’aretz also referred, in the same editorial, to the Israeli Labour Party ‘opposition’, of which the Jewish Labour Movement is the British wing.  Ha’aretz said that ‘It is pointless mentioning the opposition at this stage, since the dead cannot speak’.


We would urge you to cease giving any support to eitherthe Labour Friends of Israel or the Jewish Labour Movementand not to speak at any further fringe meetings of theirs.  Both the late Tony Benn and Eric Heffer resigned from LFI in 1982 as a result of its support for the invasion of Lebanon.  Over the past quarter of a century they have not changed.

Yours sincerely,

The  Tropes of Joan  Ryan MP
Jean Fitzpatrick states an obvious truth - LFI is very rich and has lots of prestige


Joan Ryan nearly passed out at the thought that LFI was anything other than a poverty stricken, much put upon Jewish organisation stricken by anti-Semitism
Jean makes a statement that working for LFI is good for your career - what is anti-Semitic about that?


Now it is impossible to know whether it is true or anecdotal but why getting a good job at Oxford University as a result of working for LFI, which is quite possible i.e. factually true, is anti-Semitic is bewildering

Joan is genuinely shocked.  LFI is almost broke, barely a million quid in the kitty

Despite not being Jewish, our Joan Ryan is an expert in anti-Semitic 'tropes' and dopes – saying that you can get a good job by working with LFI is the new definition of anti-Semitism 

Zionists love this word 'trope' it has a beauty all of its own.  The Mirriam-Webster dictionary defines it as:
1.   a common or overused theme or device - and this certainly applies to Ryan 
2.   a phrase or verse added as an embellishment or interpolation to the sung parts of the Mass in the Middle Ages- well it's certainly an embellishment!

Joan is convinced that we have an anti-Semitic trope here, therefore it is necessary to insert a few crucial words like banking - Joan never mentioned banking but if the trope is to be anti-Semitic we have to have banking 

Although we have an anti-Semitic trope here, without a doubt, unfortunately Jean didn't mention 'the City' - fortunately Joan is happy to insert a few crucial words here and there

Tropes to the left of us and tropes to the right - and if you were to accuse Joan Ryan of using anti-Semitism as a shield to cover her backside then that too would be anti-Semitic - and the fact that she's not Jewish has no relevance 
Jean never said anything about banks but we're sure that's what she meant - after all the woman was clearly anti-Semitic - she supported the Palestinians - what are a few words here and there? 





Palestine Solidarity Conference 2017 – The Carthorse Continues on its Leisurely Pace

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Conference Strongly Critical of Lethargy Over Anti-Semitism Campaign but Executive Survives with Union Block Vote
The Conference had around 300 delegates
I've often thought that Lowes cartoon description of the TUC as a lumbering carthorse was also a good description of PSC Executive.  Its inability to react in a crisis, to map out a strategy or indeed do anything other than sloganise perfectly exemplifies Lowes slow-witted animal.

For example PSC Exec. continues to describe the Zionists' anti-Semitism campaign as being directed at the Right to Protest.  It is not, or this is not its main purpose, which is to attack politically the Palestine solidarity and anti-Zionist movement by making certain criticisms of Israel, as a Jewish state, beyond accepted bourgeois discourse.  E.g. the decision of the Home Affairs Select Committee [HASC] to recommend the criminalisation of certain discourse i.e. abusive or accusatory uses of the word 'Zionism' seem a case in point.  The equating of anti-Zionism i.e. opposition to Israel as a Jewish state with a 'hate crime' is not an attack on the right to protest so much as an attack on freedom of speech.  PSC though seems incapable of reacting politically to political attacks on the movement.
Jenny Tonge, who was forced to resign the Lib-Dem whip in the Lords, addressed the conference
The HASC's recommendation was that 'For the purposes of criminal or disciplinary investigations, use of the words ‘Zionist’ or ‘Zio’ in an accusatory or abusive context should be considered inflammatory and potentially antisemitic.' This has nothing to do with the 'right to protest' but is a direct political attack on those would critique Zionism.  The political blinkers and caution of PSC Executive dictate that everything has to be filtered through its own political myopia.
Lowes' carthorse seems to be the model for Palestine Solidarity Campaign's Executive
PSC Conference is notoriously reluctant to censure the Executive for two main reasons – firstly the Executive can rely on ‘block votes’ from trade union affiliates who possess 3 votes in addition to a personal vote.  Secondly because activists, especially from northern branches, find it difficult and expensive to get to a London conference starting 10 am in the morning.  Most delegates therefore come from London and the South-East.   For many delegates, attending PSC Conference is their main activity of the year.

Nonetheless the Executive came under heavy criticism for having done virtually nothing during the year to stand up to the false anti-Semitism campaign mounted by the Israeli Embassy and its surrogates in this country, Labour Friends of Israel and Jewish Labour Movement.  The Zionist organisations have been invigorated by a large chunk of the $50m dollars allocated to them by the Ministry of Strategic Affairs. 
16 year old Leanne Mohammad addresses the Conference
As the third in the series of 4 programmes by Al Jazeera showed, Labour Friends of Israel received over £1m for freebies and trips by Labour MPs to Israel.  It does not cost £1m to send a group of Labour MPs over to Israel and it must be assumed that Joan Ryan MP has other plans afoot.

PSC Executive in the form of Ben Soffa, the National Secretary, admitted to having done nothing all year.  The first time they reacted was when they managed to get a question and answer sheet together on why supporting Palestine was not anti-Semitic.  That was in May 2016, a cool 5 months after the fake anti-Semitism campaign had begun with Oxford University Labour Club.  In fact it had started much earlier when Corbyn himself was accused of associating with holocaust deniers.  Yet despite the pathetic nature of PSC Executive’s response, the crucial motion on this was defeated by 89-112 votes.
Haneen Zoabi, Palestinian-Israeli member of Balad in Israel's Knesset - the subject of considerable villification including assaults by fellow Jewish Knesset members
The vote on abandoning support for a 2 States Solution in Palestine was lost by about 2-1 and the call for a more thorough going Review of PSC’s multiple failures during the year by a similar margin.  Although we lost the vote it was clear we won the debate.  No one could answer the simple question, how can we support a 2 State solution which 2/3 Palestinians have lost faith in?  How can we support a 'solution' that every Zionist organisation in this country purports to support?  The political incoherence of PSC is staggering.  It is addicted to settlements to the exclusion of everything else.

The same old stale argument that it is up to the Palestinians to decide what solution they want was trotted out.  In fact the motion didn't call for a 1 State solution but it did call for the explicit abandonment of a 2 State Solution.  Today only the Quisling Palestine Authority, which is a sub-contractor to the Israeli state, supports 2 states.  The reason why we should be quite clear is that people ask us what we would like to see.  If PSC Executive have their way we will answer that we don't know or have no answer or tell people to ask the nearest Palestinian they can find.

I stood for election and received a surprisingly high 130 votes but was not elected.   No doubt to the relief of the current Executive who wish to continue a life of indolence and inactivity for another year.  However there were a couple of people elected who did seem good, in particular Jenny from Halifax Friends of Palestine.  However PSC this year has demonstrated all its political and organisational failures in its inability to make any impression at all on the Zionist offensive.

PSC is in the hands of what might be called the political remnants of the old International Marxist Group - in particular Socialist Action, a group which operates beneath the political radar and another group Communist League, which again publishes nothing.  I have no problem with people belonging to either organisation but when their political perspectives affect the direction of PSC and lead to the organisation become hopelessly ineffective then it is a matter of concern.

PSC has some excellent branches, one of which - Brighton and Hove - I belong to.  But the national organisation is less than the sum of its parts.  The Executive is out of touch and for the most part inactive.  The new Director Ben Jamal does show signs of trying to get the organisation to overthrow its old political habits and I wish him success but I am pessimistic that he will manage to achieve this.

When Al Jazeera brought out a series of programmes ‘The Lobby’ on the dirty tricks of the Zionist groups, PSC even managed to fluff its response to that.  PSC put up a petition calling for an inquiry on its web site.  I told Ben to put it on either change.org or the Parliament web site as that way it could have an impact.  A real campaign could have been mounted to get 100,000 votes and the possibility of a debate.  In fact a petition to that effect has been put on Parliament’s web site by others.
Conference card demonstration against the destruction of Umm al-Hiran village in Naqab
By way of compensation there were two good guest speakers this year.  One Haneen Zoabi, a member of Israel’s Knesset, is probably the most vilified and loathed member of the 13 strong Joint List that was elected last year.  The Zionist parties, including of course the Israeli Labour Party has done its best to prevent her standing at all and it was only a Supreme Court decision that enabled her to stand.

Haneen described the level of racism in Israeli society.  The Expulsion Bill which went through the Knesset late last year enables the Jewish majority to expel an Arab member and in fact they are in the process of doing just that.   Balad member Basel Ghattasis at the moment under threat of expulsion for having apparently smuggled in phones to Palestinians serving long sentences in Israeli gaols.  When one of those he is alleged to have given a phone to is serving 37 years for having killed an Israeli soldier and Elor Azaria, the Kahanist soldier who executed a comatose and wounded Palestinian is not expected to serve any gaol time when he is sentenced in the near future for manslaughter (not murder as he should have been charged), you understand the ingrained nature of Israeli racism and apartheid.

The other speaker was Leanne Mohammad.  Leanne is a 16 year old Palestinian school girl who won the regional contest of the Jack Petchie speaking context for her wonderful speech ‘Birds not Bombs’ with reference to Gaza.  When news of her victory emerged, vicious Zionist trolls did what they normally do.  They racially abused her calling her ‘little Miss ISIS’.  Disgracefully and as often happens in this situation, the Jack Petchie Foundation backed down and removed her from the contest and initially her performance from the  Web.  I reported on this earlierbut Leanne was on fine form when she spoke to the Conference and I have no doubt she will make a fine orator and addition to the Palestine solidarity movement in the future.
Me together with Haneen Zoabi!
We live in times when not only the right-wing and Zionists are on the offensive but the Left in the Labour Party as represented by Jeremy Corbyn is on the retreat when it comes to Palestine.  Corbyn has disgracefully spokenat two successive Labour Friends of Israel meetings at Labour Party conference and bought wholesale into the new IHRA definition of anti-Semitism which conflates anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism.

It is therefore welcome that Corbyn, who used to be a regular fixture at PSC Conferences, at least sent greetings to Conference delegates but it doesn’t make up for his backsliding all year and his retreat in the face of the Zionist attacks.  He has supported the Jewish Labour Movement rule change to the Labour Party’s constitution which would equate criticism of Zionism with anti-Semitism.  The only conclusion that can be drawn from this is either Corbyn’s long support for the Palestinians was skin deep or that he doesn’t have the backbone or the political strength to withstand the Zionist attacks.  In fact if he had stood up to their blackmail they would have backed off.  As it is Corbyn made a rod for his own back by repeatedly condemning anti-Semitism but not realising that the ‘anti-Semitism’ that the Zionists talked of was criticism of Israel not hatred of Jews.
Corbyn's use of Chakrabarti to kick the whole affair into the long grass rebounded badly on him and Chakrabarti’s Report, which was a mixed bag, was bad on Zionism, telling people that Labour had a ‘rich tradition’ of support for Zionism and that people should be careful of even using the term.  If Chakrabarti had known anything about Zionism then she would know it is in common usage amongst Zionists, for example the JLM’s director, Ella Rose was captured by Al Jazeera saying ‘I’m, a Zionist shoot me’.  Likewise the part  of Chakrabarti’s Report that said ‘Zio’ was racist was a product of her ignorance, made even worse by Corbyn’s remark that it was a ‘racial epithet’.  ‘Zio’ is short for Zionist which is a political not a racial epithet.

This has been a year when the International Law Conference at Southampton University was prevented from going ahead, when Norwich and Nottingham PSC’s had to move meetings because the original venues had been cancelled as a result of Zionist pressure, when any church holding an event involving Palestine can expect Zionist pressure, when even PSC’s own blog with the New Statesman on the web was taken down as a result of Zionist pressure.  Yet PSC Executive is incapable of mounting any campaign on these, reducing the anti-Semitism offensive to ‘the right to protest’ which it isn’t and believes the odd legal action is an adequate substitute for an effective campaign.
Leanne Mohammad
Unfortunately the Free Speech on Israel group, which was set up to oppose the Zionist offensive, has been paralysed by its own inability to draw up an effective strategy aimed at tackling the JLM and Labour Friends of Israel.  It was almost completely absent at the Conference making no intervention.  Instead despite my having parted company with it, I was left to tackle the issue it was set up to campaign on whilst just one FSOI member, Glyn Secker, spoke and then only to say that FSOI didn't need any help from PSC!

Tony Greenstein 

Brighton and Hove Momentum Overwhelmingly Rejects Lansman’s Coup

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B&H Momentum Votes to Oppose the Witch-hunt and for Labour to Break all links with Labour Friends of Israel

After Jon Lansman’s coup against democracy a couple of weeks ago [Lansman’s Kitchen Coup Against Momentum’s Membership] members of Brighton and Hove Momentum had the chance to give their views on what had happened. 

Momentum's self-appointed dictator
It wasn’t so long ago that Momentum’s Steering Committee cancelled the November meeting of the National Committee, the very body that had elected tit.  At the December NC Lansman’s faction, despite appointing a host of ‘delegates’ from non-existent organisations, narrowly lost the vote on OMOV – one member one vote. 
A packed Friends Meeting House

If one is to believe him and in the light of subsequent events it’s very difficult to do so, the involvement of all 21,000 Momentum members in  decision making and voting on policy was a matter of principle for Jon Lansman.  When Lansman lost the vote at the NC then there was a veritable propaganda barrage in the Guardian and on-line.  It was all the fault of those Trots in the Alliance 4 Workers Liberty.  All 100 of them were, according to Owen Jones, hijacking Momentum’s democracy.  It was a war of the generations with Jon Lansman, who is not exactly a spring chicken, defending the rights of the teens and tweenies in Momentum’s ranks. 

Before Xmas Lansman and the anonymous ‘Team Momentum’ had gone to the trouble of surveying the views of the membership.  Did people want everyone to vote or would they allow those nasty sectarian Trots to be allowed to destroy Momentum through hijacking a delegate system in which only they could vote?  (it wasn’t quite worded like this but you get the message).  Unsurprisingly most people voted against sin and for god, mother and apple pie.  

Being an untrustworthy soul and smelling a rat I wrote a post Jon Lansman’s Xmas Punch Could Sucker Corbyn and then felt guilty afterwards for not trusting Jon Lansman’s better nature.  After all he (or the ubiquitous Team Momentum) had wished everyone Happy Xmas and New Year and I was deliberately misinterpreting the most noble and selfless of motives as if Lansman was a latter-day version of Dickens' Mr Gradgrind with a touch of Mr Micawber.  

Labour Friends of Israel Chair Joan Ryan MP asking about funding for an MPs trip and to Israel

It must therefore have come as quite a surprise to people when Father Xmas Lansman presented as his gift to Momentum members a hefty Constitution, which not a soul had been allowed to see beforehand.  No doubt it was because he didn’t want to spoil the surprise.  He wanted us to savour that look of delight when small children open their present for the first time. 

However when he gave the Steering Committee the first look at his Xmas present it was certainly a surprise, albeit not not an altogether welcome one.  The Committee (which was not allowed to meet  – it was all done online) was presented with a take it or leave it Constitution which not a soul had seen beforehand.  By 6-4 the Steering Committee voted to abolish not only itself but the body which had elected it, the NC and for good measure the Conference Arrangements Committee too.  

Surprisingly for someone who had indicated that he considered the rights of the membership to vote a principle worthy of going to the stake for, there was no OMOV vote.  Instead there was a highly centralised Constitution in which there will be a 28 member National Co-ordinating Group.  Only 12 of the places will be taken by the members with councillors, MPs, Police commissioners even, taking up the rest, alongside 6 trade unionists.  

The NCG will only meet 4 times a year and in practice will have even less control over Lansman and ‘Team Momentum’ than the existing Steering Committee does today.  Unsurprisingly, tonight’s Brighton and Hove members meeting passed a resolution (see below) rejecting these proposals. 

Brighton and Hove Momentum’s Steering Committee had unanimously agreed upon a resolution to put to the meeting.  I proposed the resolution and after discussion it was passed by 33-4 votes with 3 abstentions.  I quoted the famous Bertolt Brecht poem "Die Lösung" (The Solution) concerning the East German workers' uprising of 1953.  It was most appropriate to the situation we are in:

Bertolt Brecht

After the uprising of the 17th of June
The Secretary of the 
Writers' Union
Had leaflets distributed in the 
Stalinallee
Stating that the people
Had forfeited the confidence of the government
And could win it back only
By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?
 

After this we discussed three motions – on Anti-Semitism and the Witch-hunt, the NHS and Gender Quotes.  The latter motion, which proposed abolishing them, was heavily defeated.  I abstained on this primarily because although I agree with the sentiments I wasn’t enamoured of the arguments made or how they were presented.  The motion on the NHS passed overwhelmingly.  The only debate was on the anti-Semitism witch-hunt.  As a suspended member of the Labour Party and a Jewish anti-Zionist who had been suspended for ‘anti-Semitism’ I moved the motion.  Many people had already seen the programmes by Al Jazeera  about the destabilisation of the Labour Party by Israeli agents with a million pounds being given to Labour Friends of Israel in order that MPs could visit Israel for a propaganda tour and no doubt other nefarious purposes.
As Colonial Secretary, Churchill had a better grasp on the meaning of Zionism than the Alliance 4 Workers Liberty
Mark Sandell, the previously elected Chairperson of Brighton and Hove Labour Party, a member of the Alliance for Workers Liberty, a pro-Zionist and pro-imperialist group, got up to oppose the motion.  He supported the expulsion of Ken Livingstone for saying that Hitler supported Zionism.  Even if Livingstone was wrong, he wasn’t anti-Semitic.  Among Black people in London Livingstone is almost revered for his opposition throughout his period as Mayor and Leader of the GLC before that for his opposition to racism.

In fact he was basically correct – it is a fact that the Nazi government did support the Zionist movement vs the non-Zionist majority of the German Jewish community.  A cursory reading of say Francis Nicosia's Zionism and Anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany or Lucy Dawidowcz's War Against the Jews, both Zionist historians, would confirm that fact.

Joan Ryan MP is delighted that she has got a lot of dosh - attacks on this Israeli state subsidised body are 'anti-semitic' according to the AWL
At one point Mark asserted that supporters of the motion were talking about a ‘Jewish conspiracy’ – seemingly unable to understand that opposition to an Apartheid state has nothing to do with anti-Semitism.  Becky Massey, a member of the Steering Committee and a member of the previously disbanded Executive as well as the newly elected Chair of her ward stood up to make a really excellent speech rebutting the Zionist nonsense of the AWL.  She made it clear that we oppose things like the demolition of an Arab village in order to make way for a Jewish town for the same reason we opposed similar things in Apartheid South Africa.  The AWL, which  refused to call for the withdrawal of British troops from Iraq and supported Partition in Ireland, has a history of support for western imperialism.  
Joan Ryan is so happy at having got £1m for her slush fund that she cracks a joke
The meeting voted 28-6 with 10 abstentions to support the motion.  We were then faced with the choice of which motion to send to the forthcoming Momentum national policy making conference and a vote was taken after two short speeches.  The meeting voted by 28-18 with some abstentions to send the motion on Anti-Semitism and the Witch-hunt to conference and thus support all those who are suspended because of bogus allegations of anti-Semitism.  The motion also called for links to Labour Friends of Israel to be broken.

The meeting then broke up into 3 constituency meetings so that people could ensure that there were enough people willing to stand for places on the Executives of the three constituency Labour Parties.  After Labour’s NEC under Ann Black suspended Brighton and Hove Labour Party on July 4th last year, because the Right had lost the elections, a decision was subsequently taken to break the district party, comprising all 3 Brighton and Hove constituencies, into its component parts.

I counted at one stage 57 people in what was a good natured and lively meeting.  We also voted to send 8 delegates to Momentum’s conference, 4 men and 4 women.

Resolution on Current Situation

1.       We condemn the attempt by Jon Lansman and the majority of the Steering Committee to abolish the National Committee and the Conference Arrangements Committee, which was elected at the December NC meeting. 

2.       It is not possible for the Steering Committee, which was elected by the NC, to abolish the very body which elected it.  

3.       We do not recognise the newly-announced ‘Constitution’ imposed by way of an email.  It has no validity. We note that the Steering Committee, let alone the National Committee, was not even given an opportunity to discuss this proposed Constitution. 

4.       We particularly condemn the fact that those who refuse to accept an imposed, undemocratic Constitution, will be deemed to have resigned from Momentum.

5.       6.       We wish to give full support to the elected National and Conference Arrangement Committees.  We urge that a national delegate conference open to all Momentum groups and oppressed groups be convened as a matter of urgency and ask that in the meantime a bank account etc. be opened by the NC in order that the necessary financial arrangements can be made.

7.       We call on other Momentum groups and oppressed groups to boycott the proposed conference that Jon Lansman and the Steering Committee majority are organising.  It will be undemocratic and will not discuss policy, the new 'constitution' or motions.  Likewise we urge members to boycott elections to the new National Co-ordinating Group.  The NCG has no political, moral or legal validity.

8.       We urge that Jon Lansman and the Steering Committee majority to place all Momentum data in the hands of the Steering Committee and warn them that any ‘change in use’ of that data will be illegal under the Data Protection Act 1998.

9.       We hope that the Steering Committee rethinks its decisions as to the agreed Conference as it has clearly led to widespread anger and confusion amongst Momentum activists, including calls for a split.
Anti-Semitism and the Witch-hunt – Motion for Momentum Conference
Conference believes:
i.               That there has been a systematic and concerted attempt to destabilise the Labour Party with false allegations of anti-Semitism. 

ii.             That the sudden upsurge in anti-Semitism in the Labour Party when Corbyn became leader was a fiction created and sustained by a well organised campaign by both the Israel lobby and pro-Israel supporters within the Labour Party. 

iii.           The Labour Party has been the target of black propaganda or psyops by the Israeli embassy.  Corbyn was himself initially targeted as an anti-Semite by the Daily Mail and Guardian. 

iv.           We note the recent Al Jazeera programmes ‘The Lobby’ which revealed the involvement of the Israeli Embassy and its Senior Political Officer, Shai Masot, in destabilising the Labour Party.  We note Masot’s close links with Labour Friends of Israel, including his attempts to create a new Young LFI.  We also note the links between the Jewish Labour Movement and the Israeli Embassy. 

We propose:

1.             That those suspended as a result of the bogus allegations of anti-Semitism, in particular Jackie Walker, Ken Livingstone and Tony Greenstein, are reinstated immediately.  That no one should remain suspended unless there is clear and convincing prima facie evidence of racism and they should be notified of such evidence immediately in line with the recommendations of the Chakrabarti Report, which to date has been ignored.  Further that the new Momentum Committee takes up the witch hunt as an immediate priority.

2.             That an inquiry is set up into the background of both the wave of suspensions last summer and the false anti-Semitism campaign in the Labour Party with particular regard to the allegations against Oxford University Labour Club, the incidents at the Chakrabarti press conference and the participation of two Labour members in the flawed Home Affairs Select Committee report which attacked Corbyn, Chakrabarti and others.

3.             That it is unacceptable that an affiliated socialist society should be the British wing of an overseas party, the Israeli Labour Party.  We note that the JLM is an affiliate of the World Zionist Organisation, an openly racist organisation.  We demand that the JLM be disaffiliated and that a genuine Jewish section of the Labour Party, which is not Zionist, to which all Jewish members can belong, is established.


4.              That the Labour Party cuts its ties with Labour Friends of Israel, which operates as an extension of the Israeli Embassy inside the Labour Party.  It is unacceptable that an Israeli state lobby should operate inside the Labour Party.  The Al Jazeera revelations clearly show that Friends of Israel groups are an extension of the Israeli Embassy.

Tam Dalyell RIP – A Remarkable MP

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When Tam got thrown out of the House by corrupt Speaker, Michael Martin for insisting on a debate on Iraq

A Brave Internationalist and anti-imperialist

It is with genuine sadness that I learnt tonight of the death of Tam Dalyell.  He was one of the most extraordinary Labour MPs, an Old Etonian.


For much of his time in the House of Commons he was on the Right of the Party.  A technocratic MP who was always avidly pro-nuclear.  Tam truly merited the adjective eccentric.  He was anything but predictable.

Tam left the House of Commons  as a member of the left-wing Campaign Group of MPs.  First elected in a by-election in 1962 for the constituency of West Lothian, he retired in 2005 as MP for Linlithgow and Father of the House, which he had once been ordered to leave by the corrupt and useless speaker, Michael Martin, who was sunk by the expenses scandal which he tried to cover up.
I met  Tam once, when  I was chairing a meeting which I organised at Brighton Polytechnic on the Falklands/Malvinas War.  He was impressive as a speaker and because of his fierce opposition to imperialist war.  He opposed the Suez War, which led him to join the Labour Party.  He accused  Thatcher of being a war criminal for her sinking of the Argentinian ship, the General Belgrano, which was attacked outside the British imposed exclusion zone sailing away from it.  He was fiercely opposed to the Iraq war and had no hesitation in calling Tony Blair a war criminal. 
Tam was also opposed to Scottish devolution and coined what became known as the West Lothian Question, viz. why should Scottish MPs vote on English business when English MPs would no longer be able to vote on Scottish affairs.  Nonetheless he was on a losing wicket and devolution was introduced by New Labour following their victory in 1997.

When Tam got stuck into an issue he didn't let go.  An example was his conviction that it wasn't the Libyans who had planted a bomb on the Pan-am jet that came down over Lockerbie.  He fought against the conviction of Al-Megrahi who he rightly believed had been framed for the sake of Britain saving face.
Touring the marshes in Iraq

When you look around the Labour benches today, not least amongst those on the Left you realise that there is no one of the calibre of Tam.


Tony Greenstein 

Persona Non Grata & Banishment – The Price of Jon Lansman’s Displeasure

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The Motto?  Telling the Truth to Power Doesn’t Always Pay!

Be gone Spot and never grace my Inbox again!  

Jon always liked to cultivate an image of power - little did I realise it would go to his head
They say the personal is political, but that isn’t always true.  Sometimes the personal is, well, just personal and that is how it felt when Jon Lansman sent me, out of the blue, a curt email ending a long and sometimes traumatic personal relationship.  From nowhere I got the following:


On 26 January 2017 at 11:13, Jon Lansman <jonlansman@me.com> wrote:
Please delete me from your records and do not send me any further emails

Jon Lansman
Mob: 07710 541410
jonlansman@me.com
This kind of best sums up my own emotions at the way this has all ended
There was no acknowledgment even of my name.  It is as if I had become just another anonymous email address.  Not even a Best wishes, your sincerely or even yours truly.  Just a name and a mobile number and email address.  Clearly Jon doesn’t do empathy or sympathy for that matter.
What I wondered caused me to become persona non grata in the Lansman Inbox?  All I had done was to send a short email last night, giving Jon the good news from Brighton.  With an image of Tony Benn with his famous 5 questions. Clearly he had taken the words of Tony Benn about accountability and getting rid of the powerful too much to heart.  I thought Jon might see the funny side of the image.  Obviously not.  Clearly the vote against his coup d'etat in his own, Southwark Momentum group, had not gone down well and now the news from Brighton and Hove on top of Liverpool et al was proving too much.
was it a mistake to send this to Jon I ask myself?  did I underestimate his sensitivity?
The Devil According to Lansman and Newmark
On 26 Jan 2017, at 06:08, Tony Greenstein <tonygreenstein111@gmail.com> wrote:

B&H Momentum Votes to Oppose the Witch-hunt and for Labour to Break all links with Labour Friends of Israel

http://azvsas.blogspot.com/2017/01/brighton-and-hove-momentum.html
So, with considerable trepidation, I penned the final email ever to pass between us.  Unlike Jon’s email to me I thought the least I could do was to preserve a few of the formalities, such as addressing an old friend by their first name:
In happy days a young Lansman with Tony Benn
Dear Jon,
I apologise for having displeased Momentum's absolute ruler.  I am fully aware that if this act of lèse-majesté had occurred in previous times I might well have lost my head.  However at the risk of incurring further royal wrath perhaps I might be allowed to ask a few questions?
i.  Given your enthusiasm for One Member One Vote, MxV and on-line voting, I am curious as to why it was that you didn't put your proposed Momentum Constitution out to an on-line vote?  How can something which was a principle before Christmas become dispensable in the New Year?
ii.  How is a democratic Momentum compatible with you and your personally selected cronies owning Momentum and its companies? 
iii.  Perhaps you could explain to me the constitutional logic behind a body, the Steering Committee, which is elected by another body, the National Committee, abolishing the latter body as well as itself?
iv.  Do you not agree that your relationship with Jeremy Newmark of the Jewish Labour Movement and your support for their false anti-Semitism allegations, which have now been discredited in the recent Al Jazeera programmes, has played a major part in the destabililsation of Jeremy Corbyn?  The JLM has been used as a Trojan horse in the fight against Corbyn and Momentum.  Not only did the JLM vote 92-4% in favour of Owen Smith over the summer, but in Brighton & Hove we find that 5 right-wing delegates are being sent from the JLM to each CLP General Committee to negate their defeat in ward elections. 
v.  Perhaps you can explain how you think socialist politics and hostility to a policy making Momentum conference are compatible?
vi.  Do you have any understanding of why, up and down the country, Momentum groups are voting heavily against your coup?  I understand that even your own, Southwark group rejected your proposls by 17-10? 
Even David Cameron resigned when his proposals were rejected in a referendum?  Has the idea ever occurred to you?
As a parting gift I thought I would send you a reminder of the questions that a mutual friend of our once asked those in positions of power.
In solidarity
Tony Greenstein
In more reflective times before Momentum started becoming a profitable business
I can only hope that my parting missive causes Jon to rethink the error of his ways and the curt way he has cut me out of his life. 


However I have to face up to the bitter truth that things will never again be the same between us.

Open Letter to Jeremy Corbyn MP, Leader of the Labour Party

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It is time to break Labour's links with Labour Friends of Israel

I have just sent the following letter, from 104 members of the Labour Party/Momentum to Jeremy Corbyn MP.  In the light of the four Al Jazeera programmes on the penetration and destabilisation of the Labour Party (including the National Union of Students) by the Israeli Embassy, with the use of large sums of money, we call on the Labour Party to make a clean break with the Labour Friends of Israel.

LFI are not a normal group of party members seeking to win people to their point of view but an extension of the Israeli state and its Embassy in London.  It uses any manner of dirty tricks and black propaganda against its opponents in order to whitewash the Apartheid State of Israel.  It is as unacceptable for the LFI to use the £1+ million to subvert the democratic processes of the Labour Party as it would have been for the Apartheid government of South Africa to have done so 20 years ago.
Joan Ryan MP, Chair of LFI, wants to know where the loot is
Shai Masot, the Israeli Embassy agent has over £1m to disperse for dirty tricks, propaganda and of course MP visits to the land of Apartheid
The slush fund has been approved but is not yet in the bag as it were

Joan Ryan MP, Chair of Labour Friends of Israel makes a joke, delighted at having bagged over £1m in slush funds
Michael Rubin, LFI's parliamentary officer boasting of his work with the Israeli Embassy
Tony Greenstein


Jeremy Corbyn MP
Leader of the Labour Party
House of Commons
London SW1 1AA

Dear Jeremy,

We write as Jewish and non-Jewish members/ supporters of the Labour Party and Momentum.
We welcome the fact that you have called for a Government  inquiry into the revelations in the recent series of programmes by Al Jazeera TV.  However the programmes also raise very serious questions for the Labour Party, not least its relationship to Labour Friends of Israel and the Jewish Labour Movement.  We understand Free Speech on Israel has already called for a Labour Party Inquiry into the implications for the Labour Party.  We endorse that call.

In the second programme Joan Ryan MP, LFI Chairperson asks Shai Masot, the Israeli Embassy’s Political Officer, who was caught trying to ‘take down’ Government Ministers:

‘What happened with the names that we put into the Embassy Shai?  To which Masot replies ‘Just now we’ve got the money.  It’s more than £1m, it’s a lot of money..it’s not physical, it’s an approval’ to which Ryan jocularly responds ‘ I didn’t think you had it in your bag!’.
The LFI’s Parliamentary Officer, Michael Rubin was filmed boasting that he was trying to take-down the democratically elected President of the National Union of Students, Malia Bouattia.   Rubin claimed to work “with the ambassador and embassy quite a lot”.

Joan Ryan in the third Al Jazeera programme was seen to concoct a wholly false allegation of anti-Semitism against a Labour Party conference delegate, Jean Fitzpatrick, who had come to ask Ms Ryan what LFI’s support for a 2 State Solution meant in practice and what they were doing to achieve it.  Getting no answer, Jean said that LFI had a lot of money, which is clearly true, a lot of prestige and that a friend of hers had got a good job at Oxford University on the basis of having worked for LFI. 

None of this was remotely anti-Semitic yet Joan Ryan had no hesitation in transforming this into getting a ‘big job in banking and the City’ and an ‘anti-Semitic attack’.  On the basis of this Jean was suspended from the Labour Party.  Subsequently the charge was dropped but this is an example of how false charges of ‘anti-Semitism’ have been concocted.

The reason for making false accusations of anti-Semitism, such as that against Ms Fitzpatrick, is to deter criticism of Zionism and the Israeli state.  Those who make these false claims of anti-Semitism are deliberately jeopardising Labour’s chances of electoral victory. 

Although LFI purports to support a 2 State Solution it is clear, as Jean Fitzpatrick demonstrated, that this is a smokescreen for its uncritical support for Israel’s military occupation and settlement of the West Bank and Gaza.  At no time has LFI ever condemned or criticised the Occupation or the Settlements.  LFI supports the 2SS  knowing that it will never happen but also knowing that it will make them appear as reasonable and even-handed rather than an uncritical supporter of Israeli expansion and racism.

Prior to your election as Leader of the Labour Party you had never addressed a meeting of the LFI.  At the 2016 Conference you addressed the LFI fringe meeting for the second time.  It is clear from the Al Jazeera revelations that LFI operates as an emanation of the Israeli state within the Labour Party.  We saw this clearly when Shai Masot introduced Al Jazeera’s reporter, Robin Harrow to people as the Chair of Young LFI, a non-existent organisation.

If you continue to speak at LFI meetings you will be taken to be endorsing a group which favours continued settlement expansion and which opposes their dismantlement.  You will also be interpreted as  lending support tothose who wage war on Palestinians living inside Israel.  Only last week a Bedouin village in the Negev, Umm al-Hiran, which had been there for 60 years, was demolished by bulldozers from the Jewish National Fund.  One resident was killed by police gunfire. 

Despite Palestinians occupying only 2% of the Negev, the Israeli government and the Jewish National Fund sought, as part of the programme of Judaisation, to demolish an Arab village in order to make way for the Jewish town of Hiran.  This is comparable to, if not worse than,the demolition in the 1970’s of Black ‘squatter’ camps in Soweto.

Neither LFI nor the JLM, which are always eager to accuse supporters of the Palestinians and opponents of Zionism of ‘anti-Semitism’ have anything to say about apartheid in Israel.  Ha’aretz newspaper recently warned, in an editorial ,that with the proposed annexation of Ma’aleh Adumim, ‘Israel will cease to exist as a Jewish and democratic state, and officially become an apartheid one’.

Ha’aretz also referred, in the same editorial, to the Israeli Labour Party ‘opposition’, of which the Jewish Labour Movement is the British wing:  ‘It is pointless mentioning the opposition at this stage, since the dead cannot speak’.

We would urge you to cease giving any support to the Labour Friends of Israel and not to speak at any future fringe meetings of theirs.  Both Tony Benn and Eric Heffer resigned from LFI in 1982 as a result of its support for the invasion of Lebanon.  Over the past quarter of a century they have not changed.

Yours sincerely,

Jane Airs                                    Riverside CLP Liverpool
John Airs                                    Riverside CLP Liverpool
Peter Angell                                Castle Point CLP      
Ben Armstrong                           Brighton Momentum/Hove CLP
Clare N. Ayton-Edwards            Kenilworth & Southam (Warwickshire) CLP     
Georgina Baidoun                      Milton Keynes CLP 
Hilary Barker                              Penrith CLP             
Abdul Basīr                                Brighton Pavilion CLP   
Peter Bloomer                             Selly Oak CLP         
Tarin Brokenshire                       Cambridge CLP       
Andrea Burford                          Leicester East CLP   
Jackie Cairns                              Preston Labour Party      
Neil Cameron                             Sheffield Central CLP    
Valerie Gene Cane                     Brighton & Hove Momentum    
Marilù Cavaliere                         CLP: Luton South    
Ches Chesney                             Berwick-upon-Tweed CLP         
Brian Chinnery                           Enfield Southgate    
Mollie Collins                             Momentum and CLP South Dorset         
Andy Coombes                          Stroud CLP              
Graham Coupe                           South Norwood CLP
Patrick Darnes                            Congleton CLP        
Deborah Darnes                         Congleton CLP        
John Davies                                Riverside CLP          
Theresa Dunningham                 Central Suffolk & North Ipswich CLP   
Sally Rebecca Eason                  East Surrey CLP       
Simon Milner-Edwards               Withington CLP       
Pete Firmin                                 Hampstead & Kilburn CLP        
Jenifer Flintoft                            Meon Valley CLP/Portsmouth Momentum
Philip Foxe                                 Enfield South gate CLP  
Christopher Fraser                      Rushcliffe CLP        
Craig Fraser                                Cheltenham CLP      
Suzanne Gannon                        Vice Chair Membership, Colne Valley CLP       
Daphne Gilbert                           Hexham CLP/Momentum          
Lynda Gilbert                             Milton Keynes North CLP          
Tony Goss                                  Torbay CLP             
Val Graham                                Chesterfield CLP     
Judy Granville                            Hove CLP                
Tony Greenstein                         Brighton Kemptown CLP
Jenny Hardacre                          South Cambridgeshire CLP
Dr. James Hall                            South Cambridgeshire Constituency Labour Party
Martin Hall                                 Wythenshawe and Sale East CLP           
Abe Hayeem                              Harrow East CLP     
Rosamine Hayeem                     Harrow East CLP     
Professor Dave Hill                    Brighton and Hove Momentum
Simon Hinds                               Islington North         
Doug Holton                               Hackney North and Stoke Newington CLP        
Carole Hope                               Tewkesbury CLP     
Anna Hubbard                            Southport CLP       
Saying that LFI have lot of money is an anti-Semitic 'trope' - even though it's true!
   
This used to be called 'verballing' when the Police made up a confession
Jean Fitzpatrick, the LP delegate accused of anti-Semitism never even mentioned the City of London but in the hands of these racist frauds she didn't stand a chance
If you oppose Zionism and Israeli racism, it is a 'trope' - their favourite word
Inventing an anti-Semitism allegation - they call them 'tropes' probably because they think the victims are dopes
Steve Jansky                               North West Cambridgeshire CLP/Momentum    

Helen Jenner                              Otley and Yeadon CLP/Chair Leeds UNISON
Peter Jenner                                Otley and Yeadon CLP  
Helena Kearns                            Northern Ireland Labour Party
Chris Knight                               Streatham Momentum Group,
Kay Lawrence                            Torfaen CLP            
Marie Lynam                               Hamsptead and Kilburn CLP    
Doug Macari                               Canterbury CLP and Momentum           
Professor Moshe Machover        Hampstead and Kilburn CLP
Dr Alan Maddison                      Houghton and Sunderland South CLP
Miriam Margolyes OBE              Lambeth Constituency Party & Vauxhall CLP   
Helen Marks                               Riverside CLP          
Becky Massey                            Hove CLP
John Metson                               Durham City CLP    
Steve Mckenzie                          Bexhill and Battle CLP   
Tricia Neda McLaughlin             Gillingham and Rainham CLP    
Ellen McNay                              Sunderland Central CLP 
Anne Mitchell                             Hove CLP                
Brian Mogford                            Gower CLP              
Brendan Morgan                         N. Ireland CLP         
Wendy Morgan                           Aberconwy CLP      
Elizabeth Morley                        Ceredigion CLP/Momentum       
Suresh Nesaratnam                   Milton Keynes         
James O’Sullivan                        East Worthing and Shoreham CLP         
Gill Page                                     Richmond (Yorkshire) CLP
Pam Page                                    Brighton Kemptown CLP
Frankie Patterson                        Gosport CLP            
Allan Pearson                             South Ribble CLP     a
Nicola Pratt                                 Coventry South CLP
Claire Pyper                                South Birmingham Momentum  
Daniel Read                                Portsmouth CLP       
Janine E Reed                             Islwyn CLP              
Joan Rudderham                        Coventry North West CLP         
Professor Richard Seaford          Exeter CLP              
David Selzer                               City of Chester CLP 
Mehrnaz Shahabi                        Bristol West CLP     
Paul Stygal                                 Rochford & Southend East CLP
Jean Sullivan                              Warrington South CLP   
Anne Tanner                              Cardiff West CLP    
Max Tasker                                Clwyd West CLP     
Andrew Thompson                     Birmingham Ladywood CLP/Momentum/LRC  
Julian Townsend                        Camberwell and Peckham CLP  
Gareth Walker                            Tottenham CLP         tr
Jackie Walker                             Thanet CLP
Clive Walder                              Birmingham Northfield Momentum       
Adam Waterhouse                      Southampton and Romsey CLP 
Daniel Waterman                        International Member Labour Party       
David Watson                             Walthamstow CLP   
Ian Watson                                 Edinburgh Pentlands CLP         
Sarah Wilkinson                          Ludlow CLP           
Eric Willoughby                         Editor, Palestine Media Digest    
Sara Wood                                  Hampstead and Kilburn CLP     
Ken Willingale                            Southend West CLP  h
Charley Young                           Ceredigion CLP       
Sue Young.                                 Ceredigion CLP        

Israeli Labour Party Supports Netanyahu's Attempt to Expel an Arab MK, Basel Ghattas

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Basel Ghattas is the latest Arab member of the Knesset to come under attack from the Jewish majority 
It is one of the boasts of Israel that it is the ‘only democracy in the Middle East’.  Arabs can vote goes the narrative, therefore we are a democracy.


Of course the idea that a democracy is defined by the ability to put one’s cross on a ballot box once every 3-4 years is a pretty weak argument.  By this logic Hitler's government was democratic.  A state that tortures its citizens, especially if they are part of the minority population, that has a pervasive censorship, which consistently discriminates against one section of its citizens, that embeds racism within the very definition of the state as a State of the Jews, that doesn't even 'recognise' the right of non-Jews to live on their land is only democratic in the most formal of senses. 
Aryhe Deri - leader of Shas, jailed for corruption is now Interior Minister
However even the ability to choose their representatives is becoming irksome to the Zionists.  Balad, a radical nationalist party that wants to see Israel as a state of all its citizens rather than a State of the Jewish People has been under severe attack recently with its premises raided, its activists arrested on bogus charges of money laundering and its representatives under continuing harassment.  [Balad condemns unprecedented Israeli arrests of senior officials]
Israel is a state where corruption is epidemic amongst the Zionist political class.  Prime Minister Netanyahu has received hundreds of thousands of shekels of cigars and champagne from business associates and has been recorded offering favours for favourable coverage from the Yediot Aharanot newspaper.  The Interior Minister, Aryeh Deri of the Shas Party served nearly three years in prison for corruption when last in office.  Netanyahu's predecessor Ehud Olmert is still in prison for corruption yet there has never been a time when the Likud party offices have been raided by the Police.  Likewise, when Labour was in power, corruption was rife.  Ehud Barak managed to become wealthy overnight when Prime Minister.
Balad MKs have been under consistent attack.  Haneen Zoabi, a secular Arab woman who has been on a speaking tour of Britain, has been the subject of unheard of villification by Zionist MKs including physical attacks inside the Knesset building.  She was herself suspended for 6 months for making the unremarkable observation that 3 settler teenagers killed in the West Bank weren't the victims of terrorism.
Racism against the Palestinians is no offence - Bezalel Smotrich MK
On no occasion has any Jewish MK, e.g. its most notorious racist Bezalel Smotrich been expelled or suspended from the Knesset despite for example arguing that Jewish women should be able to give birth in hospital in segregated wards (in fact such wards exist in practice anyway!).  Racism against Palestinians is not a crime.  After all this is a state where it is legitimate to steal and confiscate the land of the indigenous population without any penalty.
In July 2016, Israel passed a bill allowing 90 members of the Knesset to expel another member.  We were told that this Bill would rarely if ever be used.  It was attacked as a naked attempt to expel Palestinian Israeli members of the Knesset who wouldn’t accept working within the Zionist consensus.  Like all racist legislation it doesn't explicitly mention that only Arab MKs will be subject to its provisions.  In theory Smotrich or Uri Ariel or even Netanyahu could be a victim of the Expulsion Bill, but as with so many things in the 'Jewish' state, in practice only Arabs are the victim.
Thousands of Palestinians gathered after the Friday noon prayer in Um al-Hiran to bury Yacoub Abu al-Qiyan, but the police refused to hand over his body to his family [Jonathan Cook/Al Jazeera]
Sure enough Basel Ghattas, a member of Balad, has been stripped of his immunity and now there are proposals to expel him from the Knesset.  The allegations against him, which he denies and of which he hasn’t even been convicted, was passing mobile phones to Palestinian prisoners locked up for up to 37 years for killing an Israeli soldier.   Even were he 'guilty' so what?  He however denies he passed anything more than printed materials.
One should note that Zionist killer Elor Azaria, who deliberately shot and murdered an Arab lying severely on the ground, although he has been convicted of manslaughter is unlikely to serve any time in gaol.  Instead he has become an Israeli national hero, with the Prime Minister ringing up his parents to reassure them and members of the Israeli cabinet, such as Miri Regev and Naftali Bennett calling for him to be pardoned.
The killing of Palestinians in Israel by the Police or Army is only a crime in theory.  Last weeYacoub Abu al-Qiyan was murdered in Umm al-Hiran, a village demolished in the Negev in order to make way for a Jewish town, by the Police who opened fire on his car.  There was justice of sorts as he then lost control of the car, which went out of control and killed one of his killers.  For this he was branded, without any evidence whatsoever, by the racist public order Minister, Gilad Erdan, a member of ISIS and until a court order, the Police refused even to hand over the body.
We shouldn’t be surprised at the hypocrisy of Israel which fetes its killers but damns Palestinian killers of Israeli soldiers.  The Israeli Labour Party (Zionist Union plus a few independents) which opposed the original Expulsion Bill is now giving its MKs a green light to support Netanyahu’s attempt to expel Basel Ghattas.
See the article in Ha’aretz below.
Tony Greenstein 

By allowing its lawmakers to raise their hands in favor of the law and bring about Basel Ghattas’ ouster, the faction has brought upon itself a shame that will never be forgotten.

Haaretz Editorial Jan 18, 2017 

Zionist Union leaders Tzipi Livni and Isaac Herzog at the Knesset, January 16, 2017. Olivier Fitoussi

 One of the most shameful laws the Knesset has ever enacted is now about to be implemented: For the first time in Israel’s history, there’s a real possibility that a sitting Knesset member will be ousted by a vote of his fellow legislators.

Seventy MKs have already signed on in support of expelling their colleague Basel Ghattas (Joint List) after he was charged with smuggling cell phones to imprisoned terrorists. If Ghattas is ousted, the decision will have been made possible by the votes of members of the Zionist Union faction, which decided on Monday to allow its MKs to vote in favor of his expulsion if they so choose.

The ouster law, which was enacted last summer, states that the Knesset can expel an MK for incitement to racism or support for armed struggle against Israel. Thus, based on the wording of the law itself, it shouldn’t apply to Ghattas: He hasn’t yet been convicted, and it’s doubtful that the charges against him meet the criteria set in the law.

It’s no surprise that the right-wing parties support Ghattas’ expulsion. They enacted the law precisely for this purpose: to eject Arab legislators from the Knesset. Nor should the Yesh Atid party’s support for his ouster surprise anyone: Party chairman Yair Lapid has been paving his political ascent with base incitement against Arabs for a long time now, since this is well known as the most effective weapon for gathering votes in Israel.

When it comes to incitement, Lapid doesn’t fall one whit short of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the greatest of anti-Arab inciters. And Lapid’s party colleagues have long since lost both their shame and their independence; they blindly, automatically obey their leader’s cynical decisions. Some of them know quite well how dangerous the ouster law is, and how contemptible it is to expel a Knesset member who hasn’t yet been convicted in court, but they have fallen silent out of fear of their leader.

Now, Zionist Union is following in Yesh Atid’s footsteps. And even from Zionist Union, such wretched behavior was hard to foresee. Not even chairman Isaac Herzog’s denunciation of the law after it passed as “an ugly stain on the face of this government of hate” deterred him from announcing Monday that he approves of the stain, in the form of Ghattas’ ouster. And a few other MKs from his faction hastened to announce that they, too, would vote for the expulsion.

This ugly stain is now defacing Zionist Union in its entirety. By allowing its MKs to raise their hands in favor of the law and bring about Ghattas’ ouster – which requires the support of 90 of the Knesset’s 120 MKs – the faction has brought upon itself a shame that will never be forgotten. This isn’t the first time the faction has been dragged after the radical right and the populist center; it isn’t the first time it has betrayed its trust as the largest opposition party; and it isn’t the first time we’ve been given proof that Zionist Union under Herzog’s leadership has completely lost its way.

Brighton & Hove’s Monster Demonstration Against Trump

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Praise from one racist Israel's Prime Minister to Donald Trump -  it's what I've already done Netanyahu tweeted

Only Israel and Netanyahu Welcome the Mexican Wall and the Ban on Muslims


Completely blocked - the intersection of Bartholomew Square, where Brighton town hall is situated, with Prince Albert Street and The Laines, with Cafe Rouge on the corner
On the steps of Brighton Town Hall - Momentum and Brighton & Hove PSC - no Zionists or Jewish Labour Movement were to be seen - probably because opposition to anti-Muslim racism is anti-Semitic!
I have seen some large demonstrations in my time in Brighton.  Over 5,000  demonstrated in April 2003 at the start of the Iraq War.  Some 4,000 school students demonstrated in 2010 against the massive increase in tuition fees but this was the largest demonstration I can remember in 40 years.  People came from everywhere.  Bartholomew Square in which the town hall was situated was packed solid.  It was impossible to get anywhere near the demonstration as Prince Albert Street was impassable.  So too were the Laines approaches. 

What was so impressive was not only the youthful nature of the demonstrators but the fact that this represented a cross-section of Brighton and Hove.  Parents with their children, old people and of course veteran protestors like me!  The chanting focussed on the racist bigotry of Trump’s measures against Muslims.  ‘Refugees are welcome’ was the cry.  Even a few of our New Labour councillors, such as Emma Daniels, a strong supporter of Israel’s racist anti-Muslim politics, showed her face before scuttling away.  It was also good to see Brighton and Hove’s Green Mayor Pete West.
Photograph taken from Prince Albert Street which was impassable

The hypocrisy of Trump’s measures, which conveniently excluded Saudi Arabia, the country from which the 9/11 bombers had come, made it clear what the purpose of the immigration ban was – to demonise Muslims and Arabs.  It was an attempt to use the race card to divide American society.  What is gratifying, at a time when New Labour politicians are allowing Brexit to divide people in Britain, is the strength and size of the opposition to Trump in America.

We are living in new times.  The election of Trump, who received fewer votes even than the detested Hilary Clinton, has little legitimacy in the eyes of a majority of American voters.  Most American Presidents enjoy a honeymoon when elected.  Trump has started out with negative ratings.
The election of Trump is not only unpopular with the American people but also with the majority of the American capitalist class and its political establishment.  It’s not simply his policies.  There is a lot of truth in the argument that what Trump does aloud Obama did behind closed doors. That Obama too banned Iraqis from visiting America for 6 months.  That Obama also presided over mass deportations of Mexicans.  But Trump makes a virtue out of his racist reaction.  He deliberately plays footsey with the American far-Right who are in ectasy.  He deliberately stirs up racial divisions in order to prop up US corporations.  He uses race in order to satisfy his lumpen working class support.
What is appalling in their eyes is that Trump is stripping the United States of its moral legitimacy as the leader of the democratic world.  To socialists and lefties this has always been a dubious and hypocritical proposition.  Chile, Iraq, El Salvador – the list of countries that the United States has despoiled is endless.  Its support for Israel is well known.

But today people identify the United States with a loud-mouthed bigot, who wears his racism on his sleeve, who is on record of boasting about sexual attacks on women, who has called all Mexicans rapists and who has appointed open racists and anti-Semites like Steve Bannon of Breitbart as his Strategic Advisor.  Tonight his immigration ban has been countermanded by the Acting Attorney General, an almost unprecedented action.
Brighton's Bartholomew Square

I predict that  Trump may serve one of the shortest terms of any American President.  It is almost certain that evidence is going to be provided of his many misdemeanours and crimes – from rape and sexual assault to fraud in the way his charity operated to tax evasion.  New York State already has an investigation into Trump’s charity underway.  I think it is odds on that Trump is going to be impeached.  At the end of the day it will only be America’s far-Right Zionists, White Supremacists and Fundamentalist Christians who will be his supporters.  Although Republicans have lined up in his support for the moment that is unlikely to last.

The fact that  Theresa May went to pay homage to Trump in America without saying a word about his anti-Muslim rhetoric and  racist tirades against Mexicans says everything you need to know about this tawdry woman who goes begging, from one tyrant to another, seeking a way out from her ‘hard Brexit’.  May is demonstrating, despite her fine words on succeeding to Cameron, that she is willing to support anything and anyone who provides her with an economic escape route from her difficulties on Europe and Brexit.  It was toe curlingly embarrassing to see her hand in hand with a man who boasts about grabbing women by the ‘pussy’.  It is or should be a good example to those who believe that having a woman in power is a good thing in itself.
Brighton's Bartholomew Square
There was, not surprisingly, just one voice in the world that welcomed  Trump’s anti-Muslim directives.  That was the State of Israel which has pioneered racial profiling.  Israel has, as Netanyahu boasted, constructed its own wall on the Egyptian border to keep out African refugees.  Israel has refused to accept any Syrian refugees and has called those refugees who did manage to gain entry before the Egyptian wall ‘infiltrators’ (a comparison with Palestinian refugees from 1948 who sought to return to their lands).

Israel has followed a policy of ‘encouraging’ the 60,000 African refugees who did obtain entry in the early years of this decade, to leave.  Methods include indefinite imprisonment in the Holot detention centre in the Negev Desert.  A number of those who were forced out of Israel ended up dead at the hands of ISIS in Libya.  Israel refuses to recognise that Eritrea, where most refugees come from, is a country with a horrific human rights record.  
Ha’aretz described how'On Saturday, the Israeli prime minister applauded Trump’s decision to set up a wall with Mexico, with the disputable claim, phrased in Trump-style syntax, “I built a wall along Israel's southern border. It stopped all illegal immigration. Great success. Great idea.” Netanyahu’s arguments in opposing the entry of refugees were explicitly racist.  It wasn’t about terrorism or lowering wages but identity – admitting non-Jewish refugees would dilute the Jewish majority:

"If we don't stop their entry, the problem that currently stands at 60,000 could grow to 600,000, and that threatens our existence as a Jewish and democratic state," Binyamin Netanyahu said at Sunday's cabinet meeting. "This phenomenon is very grave and threatens the social fabric of society, our national security and our national identity." Israel PM: illegal African immigrants threaten identity of Jewish state]
In an interviewwith the BICOM journal Fathom, Isaac Herzog, Leader of the Israeli Labour Party  put it more elegantly than Netanyahu but he sang from the same hymn sheet:

‘It’s complicated because one doesn’t want to create a precedent which could affect the equilibrium of the nation. There are millions out there who may want to come to Israel.’

In 2012 in an Op Ed ‘The next national target: Eritrea in the Jerusalem Post Herzog urged that Eritrean refugees, who form 2/3 of Israel’s refugees be sent back.  He repeated this on the eve of the 2015 elections. 

Theresa May has also invited Trump to visit Britain later this year.  A petition opposing the visit has already garnered 1.5m signatures.  It is a sign of the opposition that there will be on the streets when or if Trump shows his face.

Netanyahu’s anti-Jewish support for Trump’s anti-Muslim decree

Banning Syrian refugees and Muslim immigrants will help anti-American propaganda more than U.S. national security.

By Chemi Shalev | Jan. 29, 2017 

U.S President Donald Trump is a hero now for Muslim-haters who, in some countries, might even be the majority. He is being lauded by the hard-right in America, extolled as a man’s man in Vladimir Putin’s Russia, glorified as a god among racist parties in Europe and enjoys wall-to-wall support from his groupies in Israel, who are now being led, unabashedly, by Benjamin Netanyahu.

On Saturday, the Israeli prime minister applauded Trump’s decision to set up a wall with Mexico, with the disputable claim, phrased in Trump-style syntax, “I built a wall along Israel's southern border. It stopped all illegal immigration. Great success. Great idea.” Netanyahu’s intervention on a topic that is in sharp political dispute in the U.S. is questionable enough, but the timing of his decision to identify so strongly with Trump, just after the president issued his executive order on Syrian refugees and Muslim immigrants - a move viewed widely as a declaration of hate against Muslims - is a reckless gamble. For no discernible rhyme, reason or political imperative, Netanyahu has placed himself - and Israel, by extension - solidly behind a morally dubious move and a leader who could soon become the world’s most hated.

Trump’s spokespersons claim that the move is aimed at countering threats to U.S. national security, but that’s an obvious ruse. The U.S. already conducts the world’s most stringent screening for refugees. To this day, not one Syrian refugee or immigrant from any of the seven blacklisted countries has engaged in terrorist activities - while those who did attack America, including the terrorists who carried out the September 11 attacks, came from countries that were not included in Trump’s list, either because they’re too vital to U.S. interests or too lucrative for Trump’s business empire.

On the other hand, the damage that Trump’s move may cause, directly or indirectly, in the short term or in the long, is undeniable. The reports of refugees stuck on their way to the U.S. or in American airports, along with the shocking announcement by the Department of Homeland Security that green-card holders who are abroad will be barred from rejoining their families or their jobs, place a disturbing human face on the bureaucratic jargon of Friday's executive order. Much of Muslim public opinion is likely to be outraged by Trump’s actions - and they will be aided and abetted by hostile governments and jihadist groups eager to stoke the flames of hate. Friendly regimes, in places such as Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, will be under pressure to distance themselves from Washington. Preachers of radical Islam will be able to use the photo of Trump signing the order as proof of their age-old claim that America and the West are on a crusade against Islam. ISIS, which has been on the defensive for the past year and, according to some experts, on the verge of collapse, has been handed a propaganda victory and a new slogan for attracting new recruits.

Trump’s decision is bound to increase polarization between left and right, between liberals and some, but not all, conservatives. What supporters of the move will portray as a defensive imperative, its opponents will view as institutional discrimination and an assault on values. “Tears are running down the cheeks of the Statue of Liberty,” Senator Chuck Schumer said. The famous line of American-Jewish poet Emma Lazarus' The New Colossus “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” which is engraved in stone at the footsteps of Lady Liberty, will now need an asterisk that clarifies “  *Unless they happen to be Muslim.”

Trump’s decision is also bound to increase tensions in the American Jewish community, between the right wing that has adopted and compounded their Israeli counterparts’ anti-Muslim narrative and the more centrist and moderate elements - including most of the Jewish establishment - that remains loyal to the community’s traditional liberal values. Most Jews still view themselves as a vulnerable minority, just like Muslims. Most are deeply committed to the values of immigration and sanctuary. Most still carry the traumatized memories of their parents and grandparents of an America that locked its gates for Jewish refugees fleeing the Nazis. Netanyahu’s imprudent encouragement of Trump, along with the overzealous welcome that Trump has received from the Israeli government, further expand the growing divide between the Jewish State and the world’s biggest Jewish diaspora.


One wonders of course about the silence of the GOP chickens, who were quick to blast Trump’s offer to ban Muslims when his prospects to become the party’s presidential candidate looked slim but who are now laying low out of fear and expediency. First and foremost of these is House Speaker Paul Ryan who was rightfully enshrined for a few hours on Saturday on the Wikipedia page for spineless invertebrates. Photos of Likud lawmakers who have been similarly struck dumb when asked about Netanyahu’s corruption charges and other shady shenanigans also deserve a place of honor in the same gallery of cowards. They and their patrons, Trump and Netanyahu, are the proverbial birds of a feather that mock us together.





Sign the Petition - Call on Corbyn to sever all ties with Labour Friends of Apartheid Israel

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Please sign the petition calling for the Labour Party and Jeremy Corbyn to sever all links with the Labour Friends of Israel, which supports Israeli apartheid and its colonial occupation of Palestinian lands


Joan Ryan MP, Chair of LFI is worried that the cash she applied for has not been forthcoming.  Joan likes 'expenses' she was the winner in 2005 out of all MPs, when she claimed the most.  Next year, 2006 she was only runner up!

Joan Ryan is informed that £1m+ slush fund has been made available in order to defame and harass opponents
Israeli agent Shai  Masot says he hasn't actually got the cash yet
Joan Ryan MP, Chair of LFI is so delighted at the £1m+ slush fund she has been given that she makes a joke
  
Those tropes get everywhere

Professor Cecile Wright –the Black Face of Lansman’s Coup

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Paying lip-service to anti-racism for the advancement of a political career 

One of the less known figures in Lansman’s coup d'état is Professor Cecile Wright, one of two Black members elected to Momentum’s Steering Committee.  At least she was a member before Jon Lansman unilaterally dissolved it and all other elected Momentum bodies.
What you might ask caused Ms Wright to receive a vote of no-confidence on 21 January by 7 votes to 4 with 1 abstention from fellow members of the Momentum Black Caucus (MBC)?  Well the resolution was quite clear in this respect:
"Momentum Black Caucus has no confidence in Co-Chair Cecile Wright because of her failure to consult the Steering Committee or its Officers before being appointed a director of Momentum (Services) Ltd on 10 January 2017 over a possible conflict of interest.

We note Cecile Wright also failed to inform the SC or its Officers of changes brought in by Momentum's Steering Committee, on which she represents MBC, in Momentum's new constitution, which has eliminated MBC's representative role within the organisation and by 1 July will have removed key MBC Officers from their posts."
Cecile Wright was happy to step into the shoes of someone who had been subject to a political lynching
Ms Wright said in a statement for the meeting of MBC regarding her support for Lansman’s coup that:
The reading of the document assured me of the embodiment of black representation at all levels of the structure, in addition to the provision for MBC (see 12.2.) within the structures.  Thus the new structure offers the scope to build and develop sustained activism within our communities.
Cecile Wright has given no support to her Co-Chair of Momentum Black Committee - Marc Wadsworth - who was fitted up on an 'anti-Semitism' charge by US asset Ruth Smeeth MP
Or as Neil Young once wrote, ‘words, word, between the lines of age.’  It is no coincidence that Cecile Wright is a Professor of Sociology, an academic discipline notorious for its flowery verbiage and imprecision of meaning.  In sociology students compete as to who can waste the maximum number of words saying nothing at all.  Prof. Wright is clearly an accomplished practitioner of this art.
One of many racist tweets that Jackie Walker received - this did not stop Cecile Wright from taking up Jackie Walker's position as Vice Chair of Momentum from Jon Lansman
If we turn to s.12.2 of the new Constitution we find that it says nothing at all about ‘the embodiment’ (whatever that means) of black representation in the new structures.  Nor does it mention MBC.  Lansman’s Constitution reads:
12.2   The NCG shall encourage and support the development of liberation networks for women, BAME, disabled and LGBT+ people, and of Youth and Student networks in which members who self-identify as being within these categories are able to self-organise.
On October 2nd Jackie Walker, the Black-Jewish anti-racist activist was removed as Vice-Chair of Momentum, by Jon Lansman with the support of Christine Shawcroft, the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty and Sam Tarry among others.  In her statement Wright quite correctly said of the removal of Jackie Walker that: ‘the removal of Jacqueline, essentially represented the contemporary public ‘lynching’ of a black woman and that the Steering Committee was in effect throwing a black woman to ‘the lions’ because she has a voice and dares to use it.’
Strong stuff.  But did she mean any of it? 
On 17th September, two weeks before the Momentum Committee that ‘publicly lynched’ Jackie, I posted a blog The Jewish Labour Movement and its Political Lynching of Jackie Walker’.  I did this because of the level of attacks on Jackie before the contested events at Labour Party conference.  There is no dispute that Jackie was the subject of a political lynching at the instigation of the apartheid supporting racists of the JLM and LFI.  People who, as the recent Al Jazeera programmes proved, have been destabilising and infiltrating the Labour Party, manufacturing false anti-Semitism allegations, on behalf of the Israeli state.  In order to do this they proclaim that their ‘Jewish identity’ is bound up with the Israeli state, thus demonstrating that Zionism is the other side of the coin of anti-Semitism.  Because to associate British Jews with the actions of Israel is in itself anti-Semitic.
You would therefore imagine that Cecile would want to have nothing to do with Jon Lansman after he had moved the ‘public lynching’ of her fellow BAME member of Momentum’s Steering Committee, wouldn’t you?  After all there can’t have been many Black people in the United States who joined hands with the KKK after a lynching.
However you would be wrong.  After voting against Jackie Walker’s lynching, Cecile accepted nomination as Vice-Chair instead of Jackie Walker.  Far from supporting Jackie and mobilising people against this naked act of treachery and racism, the good professor accepted what in effect was a political bribe to keep silent.
Ms Wright continued along the same path of naked opportunism by supporting Lansman’s imposed Constitution which destroys any vestige of democracy in Momentum.  Self-organised and liberation strands will not have separate representation within Momentum’s National Coordinating Group (NCG) unlike Police Commissioners, MPs and other public officials.  This is in marked contrast to the current position within the National Committee.
Jon Lansman, who has admitted to “working closely” with Jeremy Newmark of the Jewish Labour Movement,  Newmark is someone who is effectively a representative of the Israeli Embassy inside the Labour Party.  Nonetheless Lansman has taken a shine to the good Professor.  Cecile Wright has been made a co-director of Momentum (Campaign) Services Ltd alongside Christine Shawcroft.  Her reasons for not informing fellow members of MBC were that ‘I was required to observe the strictest confidence for legal reasons.’  This of course is utter twaddle.  There is no possible legal reason for not informing people.  The Register of Company Directors is a public document freely available on the Internet.  Cecile Wright’s reasons for not informing MBC could only have been political  - i.e. she didn’t want them to know the extent of her collaboration with the right-wing of Momentum and Lansman in particular.
By joining Lansman’s coup, Prof. Cecile Wright has ensured that what she calls the ‘Black Agenda’ in other words the agenda of a group of Black careerists such as herself will be advanced on the backs of other Black members of the Labour Party.  There is no other interpretation.
Cecile Wright has quite a chequered history.  She was at one time on the University College Union’s Executive but is no longer on the Executive having fallen out with most of those she worked with in the union.  She set up the Labour Black Network with ex-Hackney Labour councillor Patrick Vernon, a fellow wannabe MP who is the party's race advisor. But they too fell out and their network for black careerists became moribund. 
Wright then leapt onto the Momentum Black ConneXions bandwagon founded by former Lambeth Labour councillor Kingsley Abrams, who was banned from Labour Party membership and Marlene Ellis. Clearly not a team player, Wright first fell out with Ellis, before dramatically suffering a vote of no confidence at the hands of her MBC comrades. Wright has been an extremely divisive figure in MBC, treating it, Lansman-style, as her personal fiefdom.
Wright only escaped moves to get her to resign as MBC co-chair because the organisation has been rendered defunct within Momentum by Lansman's Constitution. So, like Wright's short-lived Black Labour Network, MBC has become pretty much moribund.  You can go to Cecile Wright’s own blog for further details.
Tony Greenstein 


The Myth of Increased Anti-Semitic Attacks & the Creation of a False Media Narrative

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The Manufacturing of Consent Over False   Anti-Semitism

I want to thank Dr Alan Maddison for help in compiling this article.

Tony Greenstein

Alongside the false narrative of anti-Semitism in the Labour Party has gone the creation of false and distorted statistics.  No body is better at doing this than the secretive Zionist charity, the Community Security Trust.

It is extremely unusual for a charity to be allowed to keep the details of its trustees secret by the Charity Commission but it has managed this.  It is an extremely rich charity having reserves of over £12.3 million pounds at the end of the 2015 financial year.  I estimate that it seeks funding from half the Jewish charities in Britain.  In addition in 2015 it obtained Home Office and Community Department grants of over £6m.

It is supported by the wealthiest and most reactionary Zionist capitalists in Britain and in particular Gerald Ronson, who was jailed for a year in the Guiness fraud trial.  He is/was owner of the largest private company in Britain, Heron Ltd and is a far-Right Zionist.

The CST has historically seen its role as safeguarding the Jewish community from Jewish anti-Zionists and it has been used to eject hecklers from Zionist meetings and protect e.g. Israel's fascist foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman when he came to London.  It is known to have close links to Israeli intelligence and the Israeli Embassy, and its public spokesman Mark Gardener used to appear regularly on the media to defend Israel from 'anti-Semites' on the Left.  

His role has been superseded to some extent by its Deputy Director Dave Rich who late last year brought out a book entitled The Left's Jewish Problem Jeremy Corbyn, Israel and Anti-Semitism

You can get some idea of the ideology motivating the CST from the self-promoting blurb accompanying the book.  Dave Rich writes:

'There is a sickness at the heart of left-wing British politics, and though predominantly below the surface, it is silently spreading, becoming ever more malignant.'

This rubbish was written just a few months before Donald Trump gained the Presidency of the United States.  Rich was not of course to know that but what we have seen since his election is a rapturous reception by Netanyahu, the Israel government and the Israeli people.  Despite the support of open anti-Semites like Richard Spencer, the appointment of the CEO of the alt-Right Breitbart magazine Steve Bannon and what Spencer has called Trump's 'deJudaification of the Holocaust' the Zionist Organisation of America invited Bannon to be a guest speaker at its gala dinner.

Once again we see that Zionism has absolutely no problems with real anti-Semitism.  The only 'anti-Semitism' the Zionist lobby hates is that which condemns the racism and apartheid of the Israeli state.

UPDATE

2016 Anti-SemiticIncidents Report

The Community Security Trust, a Zionist group, has just issued their latest Anti-Semitic Incidents Report for 2016.  Apparently there were 1309 incidents of anti-Semitism, recorded over the last year compared to 924 incidents in 2015, an increase of 41% over the last year (the Guardian and the Report itself state that there were 960 anti-Semitic incidents recorded by the CST last year but the CST’s 2015 Incidents Report states that there were 924).
Protecting the Jewish community or protecting Israel and the Zionist movement?

No explanation is given for why the number of anti-Semitic incidents for last year grew from 924 in last year's report to 960 in this year's report.

In their half yearly report for January to June 2016 CST recorded 557 anti-Semitic incidents, so if the above figures are correct, then there was a 35%  increase in the second half of the year from 557 to 752 incidents.  However many of these figures need to be taken with a pinch of salt.

CST reported Incidents in London were 813, up 65% on last year (494).  This is however very strange because anti-Semitic reports to the London Met this year were only 513, an increase of 11.5% on last year (460).  Why is there such a difference - 65% vs 11.5%?

For 2015 the CST tally of anti-Semitic incidents in London ( 494) was similar to the London met’s 460.  For 2016 the CST result of  813 is 58.5% higher than the London met result (513).

One explanation is that this can only reflect an increase in more trivial incidents not transmitted to the police by the CST and one has to question their impartiality given CST's links to Israel and its Embassy. 

Interestingly under violent incidents the 2016 CST Report states that there were 107 violent antisemitic assaults in 2016, an increase of 29% over the 87 violent incidents recorded in 2015 and the highest number since 2010, when CST recorded 115 violent antisemitic assaults.

It is difficult to know what constitutes violence but it is noteworthy that none of the violent incidents recorded in 2016 were classified as Extreme Violence, i.e. incidents involving grievous bodily harm (GBH) or a threat to life as compared to four such incidents in 2015 and one in 2014.

287 (22%) of the incidents were social media related, cf. to 185 the previous year, an increase of 55%. 

The vast majority of anti-Semitic incidents, 1,006, involved what is termed ‘abusive behaviour’ which is a catch all category that includes social media content.  This is an increase of 40% over 717 last year and constitutes 77% of the overall total.  I would suggest that this category in particular is highly subjective and open to both misinterpretation and political manipulation.  

Of this 1006, 402 of these incidents were purely verbal abuse and given their Zionist bias, one has to question whether eg. support for the Palestinians directed at people who are Jewish counts as anti-Semitism in CST's eyes.   In 2015 there were 458 incidents of verbal anti-Semitic abuse.  In other words there was a decrease of 12.2% in verbal anti-Semitic abuse this year compared to last year.  This strongly suggests that this particular category should be treated with a great deal of scepticism because last year verbal anti-Semitic abuse constituted 49.5% of the category of abusive behaviour.  This year however the percentage had fallen to 40%.  Again there is no explanation of what this means.  What is none verbal abusive behaviour?  What does the other 60% constitute?

Presumably this is social media interaction.  When discussing the ethnic background of abusers the CST admits that ‘it is not always possible to obtain a physical description of the offender. Where there is no face-to-face contact, it would be a mistake to assume to know the ethnicity or religion of an incident offender on the basis of the abusive language they use.’ 

There was an increase in damage to property with 81 incidents this year cf to 65 incidents in 2015, an increase of 25%. 

What is particularly suspicious is that among the perceived causes of the rise in anti-Semitic incidents are ‘high profile allegations of antisemitism in the Labour Party.’  Given that the CST has made a false and misleading statement  to the Labour Party concerning Jackie Walker where they say that it is ‘disappointed and disturbed’ in respect of an ‘untrue slur; that ‘Jews played a leading role in the slave trade’ one can only conclude that there is a high degree of political manipulation buried in these figures.


Although Zionists argue that there is a ‘new’ anti-Semitism – i.e. hatred of Israel and Zionism, in practice they do their best to try and tie anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism together.  Some of them are honest, like Micky Davis, one of the biggest Jewish capitalists in Britain who gave evidence to the Home Affairs Select Committee on Anti-Semitism [HASC].   They reportedthus: 

Sir Mick Davis, Chairman of the JLC, told us that criticising Zionism is the same as antisemitism, because: Zionism is so totally identified with how the Jew thinks of himself, and is so associated with the right of the Jewish people to have their own country and to have self-determination within that country, that if you attack Zionism, you attack the very fundamentals of how the Jews believe in themselves.

However this was too blunt an approach.  The Committee therefore tried to inflate the incidence of anti-Semitism and conflate this with the upsurge in protests against Israel’s repression of the Palestinians.

In the Introduction under Key Facts the Committee report that the ‘The first half of 2016 saw an 11% rise in antisemitic incidents reported to Community Security Trust (CST), compared with the same period during the previous year.’

If true this is of course shocking but what is the reality?  In the CST’s Incidents Report for the first half of 2016 it is indeed reported that there was an increase from 500 to 557 anti-Semitic incidents.

However 133 of these ‘incidents’ involved social media, which could of course be just one individual racist tweeting something anti-Semitic.  Hardly a major incident.  These 133 incidents were themselves an increase on the 89 incidents recorded in the same period in 2015.  In other words, of the 57 extra number of anti-Semitic incidents, no less than 44 were on social media.  But there is more.  The CST tells us that:

The 557 recorded antisemitic incidents included 41 violent antisemitic assaults, a 13 per cent fall from the first half of 2015. None of these violent incidents were classified by CST as ‘Extreme Violence’, which would mean they involved potential grievous bodily harm (GBH) or threat to life.

In other words there was a fall of 13% in violent anti-Semitic incidents in the first half of 2016, none of which were classified as being of ‘extreme violence’.  Looking at the January-June CST Anti-Semitic Incidents Report for 2015, one finds that there were 2 incidents of extreme violence.  So there was another, welcome drop in anti-Semitic incidents for 2016 but the HASC, through statistical manipulation, managed to dress this up as an increase.  The question is why they would do that.

The HASC Report was the subject of a scathing critique by David Plank, a former Special Advisor to the Social Services Select Committee.  He describe it as:

‘a partisan party political polemic which should not have been agreed and made public by a House of Commons select committee. It fails to meet the basic standards required of select committees as to their inquiries and reports. This is particularly distressing on so important and contentious a matter as antisemitism in our country....

C.     The Report purports to be the result of an inquiry into “Antisemitism in the United Kingdom”. It is no such thing. The Inquiry has no terms of reference: as a result, it is ill-defined from the outset. Its evidence base is partial and excludes a swathe of evidence sources that would have been essential to such an inquiry. It is unbalanced in the coverage it gives to political discourse as against other aspects of antisemitism in the United Kingdom – and grossly imbalanced within the topic of political discourse in the entirely disproportionate attention it gives to the Labour Party and personally to its Leader.

You can read the full critique here

David Plank has put his finger on at least part of the problem.  In order to sustain the false anti-Semitism allegations that have become part of the accepted narrative in the Labour Party it was essential that the HASC produce a report showing that anti-Semitism is on the increase.  In criticising Jeremy Corbyn for the alleged increase in anti-Semitism in the Labour Party, in actual fact there has been no independent evidence of such anti-Semitism and the Chakrabarti Report didn’t manage to find any either, it is clear that this Report was motivated primarily by an animus towards Corbyn.

This manufacturing of an atmosphere of hysteria and false panic over anti-Semitism is tied to an attempt to redefine what a racist incident is, by deliberately misinterpreting the conclusions of the MacPherson Report into the Police’s racist inquiry and handling of the murder of Stephen Lawrence.  Remember that Stephen Lawrence was the victim of a racist murder.  We now have the appalling vista of Zionists and imperialists using the findings of an Inquiry into racism to justify their attacks on anti-racists who criticise Israel, the world’s only official apartheid state.

Hate Crimes and Racist Incidents – How the Establishment Uses the Language of Racism to Protect Racism

The CPS’s Racist and religious crime – CPS prosecution policy explains ‘What we mean by racist or religious crime’ by reference to the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry Report which was published in February 1999.  According to the CPS, the Lawrence Inquiry defined a racist incident as:

“˜... any incident which is perceived to be racist by the victim or any other person."
The CPS state that ‘We accept this definition.’ And it goes on to say that ‘We define a religious incident as:

"Any incident which is believed to be motivated because of a person's religion or perceived religion, by the victim or any other person".

At first sight this seems bonkers.  How can a racist crime, or indeed any crime, be decided on the basis of the victim’s perception alone?  Racism, like sexism or any form of discrimination, is not a subjectivity existing independently of the actual evidence.

What the CPS and the State, encouraged of course by Britain’s Zionist lobby is trying to do is to distort and decontextualise the findings of the Lawrence Inquiry.  The Lawrence definition of a racist incident was directed at forcing the Police to record the perceptions of the victim if s/he though they had been the victims of a racist attack.  It didn’t therefore mean to say that the attack was, automatically to be treated as proven or fact.  It applied to the Police’s own attitude to a possible racist attack in view of their blind disregard of the circumstances of Stephen Lawrence’s murder.
Is it seriously suggested that all allegations of rape are to be treated as fact?  If so why bother with a trial.  It is a trite fact that supporters of the Israeli state and Zionism consider that anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism are one and the same thing.  According to this logic, anyone who opposes Zionism is automatically an anti-Semite.  And because, according to the spurious logic of the CPS, it is for the ‘victim’ of racism to define a racist incident, an expression of opposition to Israel or hostility to Zionism can be counted as anti-Semitic if someone who is Jewish says they are racially offended!
Historically anti-Semitism was treated as hostility or violence to Jews as Jews.  Today it is treated as a form of hostility to Israel and its founding ideology, Zionism. 

According to the CPS’s ‘logic’ any Jewish Zionist who feels that an expression of hostility to Zionism or Israel is ‘anti-Semitic’ is entitled to declare that s/he is a victim of a racist incident.  Of course a Jewish anti-Zionist is likely to disagree, so it is not so much as the victim’s ‘perception’ so much as the politics of the ‘victim’ that counts.  Indeed one can go further.  A Zionist who is not Jewish may feel that they have been the subject of an ‘anti-Semitic’ incident and this too is to be treated at face value.

Shami Chakrabarti was faced with this dilemma, when Zionists in the Labour Party started alleging that the MacPherson Inquiry gave them carte blanche to define any expression of hostility to Israel as ‘anti-Semitic’.  In her Report she found that:


Submissions to my Inquiry reveal a level of concern and confusion (in some quarters) about the "Macpherson" definition of a racist incident. This is of course a reference to the famous Report of 1999 into the Metropolitan Police after its appalling mishandling of Stephen Lawrence's murder. The principle that an incident should be recorded as "racist" when perceived that way by a victim may indeed have some useful application outside the policing context, and even here in the world of Labour Party discipline. However the purpose of the approach is to ensure that investigators handle a complaint with particular sensitivity towards the victim. It is to suggest the seriousness with which a complaint must be handled, but in no way to determine its outcome. If I complain to the police that I have been the victim of a racist attack on the street, I should expect my complaint to be so recorded. However investigation and due process must of course then follow and it is perfectly possible that an investigator, prosecutor or magistrate will subsequently find either that no attack took place at all, or that its motivation was something other than racism. In the present context, my complaint that I have been subject to racist or other personal abuse by a fellow Party Member should be so recorded, taken seriously and handled sensitively. However it will be for the investigation and any subsequent process to determine whether my complaint was ultimately well-founded.

In other words the CPS’s definition of a racist incident as being dependent on the perception of the ‘victim’ is seriously misleading, not least as a statement of law.  An incident should, in the first instance, be recorded as racist if the victim declares that they believe it to be so, but that is only the starting point.  An allegation of racism has to be investigated and subject, if there is sufficient evidence, to a trial.  An allegation or ‘perception’ of racism is the beginning not the end of the matter.

Hate Crimes & the Depoliticisation of Race


We also have in recent years the growth of what is referred to as ‘hate crimes’.  Under this heading just about anything can be classified as hate.  Strikers who call those who go to work ‘scabs’ can no doubt be found guilty of this ‘crime’.  If we demonstrate against the bigotry and racism of UKIP and Nigel Farage then that could be a hate crime.  Indeed hating Donald Trump might also be a hate crime!  Therefore when we demonstrate our hatred of what Israel and its supporters do, then that too is a hate crime.

In other words racism, class rule, imperialism – all have been depoliticised.  Everything is subsumed under the rubric of ‘hate’ – I hate capitalism so maybe I should be charged with a hate crime.  Of course Zionists, who are adept at playing the victim, use this to the full extent but we should be aware that what is happening is a redefinition of racism such that racists can also be classified as victims.  Hence why arch-racists and bigots like Sir Eric Pickles, the former Tory cabinet member, who has no problem working with anti-Semites in the European Parliament, is nonetheless very concerned about ‘anti-Semitism’ when it comes to Israel.

This redefinition of anti-Semitism has gone hand in hand with the manipulation of statistics.

Is there an Upsurge in Anti-Semitism in Britain?

According to the Office of National Statistics there were 449,844 offences of violence against the person where injury was sustained.  There were another 624,972 violent incidents where there was no injury.  Compare this to the 4 violent anti-Semitic incidents against Jewish people in 2015 and none in the first half of 2016.

In other words using the pro-rata risk per 100 000 of each victim population
4/263 000 Jews gives 1.5 risk. 
Disabled assaults with violence were 409/ 11 million giving 3.7 risk.
BUT the pro rata risk for non-hate crimes is  431 000/ 58 million ( E&W) = 743.
Of course there may have been Jews amongst the latter, we don’t know as they aren’t broken down into religion or ethnicity but regardless the number of violent anti-Semitic attacks is tiny.  Certainly it doesn’t merit a Parliamentary Select Committee Report unless there is a hidden agenda.


In terms of what were termed ‘hate crime’s then the following figures provide some context for anti-Semitic hate crimes.

 

49,419 (79%) were race hate crimes;
7,194 (12%) were sexual orientation hate crimes;
4,400 (7%) were religious hate crimes;
3,629 (6%) were disability hate crimes; and
858 (1%) were transgender hate crimes.

 

Even assuming that the CST figures of 557 for the first half of 2016 are correct, making approximately 1,100 for the whole of 2016 if the second half of the year mirrors the second half, that mean that just over 2% of hate crimes were anti-Semitic.  Bearing in mind that 24% of these incidents were on social media.  Anyone can post a thousand hateful tweets and create a complete statistical absurdity.  In terms of actual person to person anti-Semitic incidents it would appear that there are about 800 incidents.  But even then, given that the CST is an overtly Zionist organisation, there is good reason for believing that what it sees as anti-Semitic is in fact a reaction to Israel’s crimes and that any anti-Israeli comment is likely to be classified as anti-Semitic.

 

In terms of the seriousness of such offences, even anecdotal evidence suggests that anti-Muslim racial incidents are of a far more serious nature than comments about Mohammad or social media tweets.  They involve firebombings of Mosques, the murder of individual Muslims and attacks on Muslim premises, not least by the far-Right. 


Below are statistical tables taken from the Office of National Statistics.

                                Reference sources for the Table below.


 Source : Overall Crime to March 2016


Note 15% growth in violence with injury over 2014/15, it fell for CST in 2015 and again first 6 months of 2016. Suggest CST exaggerates their total AS incidents to encourage support.

or
https//www.gov.uk/hate-crime-1516hosb1116-appendix-tables-4.ods
The Sexual Orientation and Transgender figures are combined to give LGBT data.


CST data source is used for incidents for the incidents against Jews in the table.

I as unable to get separate data for Violence with Injury against Muslims as Tell Mama only recorded this for Islamophobic incidents (about 1/3 total) reported directly to them, and not the ones sent to them by the Police. I have written to them for this but no answer. I am told that TellMama are under the influence of CST who are giving  them “advice”!  Dave Rich of CST is involved in TellMama.

Below is an interesting article

Britain's real hate crime scandal

Believe what you see on the streets, not the media hype

6 August 2016

Britain is in the grip of an epidemic, apparently. An epidemic of hate. Barely a day passes without some policeman or journalist telling us about the wave of criminal bigotry that is sweeping through the country. It’s been bad for years, they say, but has become worse since the EU referendum. Police forces tell us that hate crime has ‘soared’ in recent weeks; there’s been an ‘explosion of blatant hate’, according to some newspapers. Twenty-first-century Britain, it seems, is a pretty rancid, rage-fuelled place.

If you feel this doesn’t tally with your experience of life in Blighty in 2016, you aren’t alone. There is a great disparity between the handwringing over hate crime and what Britain is actually like. The open racism even I can remember in the 1980s has all but vanished. Racist chants at football matches are a distant memory. Hard-right, foreigner-bashing parties may be thriving on the Continent, but they are dying over here. The likes of the BNP and EDL have withered due to lack of interest. This is a British triumph.

It’s not vainglorious to say that Britain is the most tolerant country in Europe, perhaps the world. In France, for instance, a national news-making hate incident is the attempted burning down of a mosque, which happened last month in Toulouse. In Britain, it is somebody shouting something nasty on a bus.

It’s almost impossible to argue reasonably that Britain is a bigoted country where ethnic minorities are somehow kept down. On the contrary, they are now more likely than whites to hold top jobs (doctors, lawyers, chief executives). More than a million Londoners voted for Sadiq Khan in May, giving him the largest direct mandate enjoyed by any individual in British history — not bad for the capital of a nation in which, according to Lady Warsi, it has become ‘socially acceptable’ to despise Muslims.

Yes, the statistics are scary, and nobody should downplay the hurt caused to those who are attacked and abused. The number of hate crimes recorded by the cops has grown year by year. Six years ago, there were 42,255; in 2014-15, there were 52,528.

But these figures need to be taken with a fistful of salt. There is something wrong with the way we report and measure hate crimes in this country. The numbers do not necessarily speak to any objective spread of hate in modern Britain. On the contrary, what the BBC calls an ‘epidemic’ is a product of the authorities redefining racism and prejudice to such an extent that almost any unpleasant encounter between people of different backgrounds can now be recorded as ‘hatred’.
Consider the Brexit aftermath. The police say that 3,192 reports of hate incidents were received in the last two weeks of June, and 3,001 in the first two weeks of July. Apparently that constitutes a rise of 48 per cent and 20 per cent respectively on last year’s levels of incidents. But can we engage in some scepticism here? Many of these incidents (the police can’t at the moment say how many) were reported through True Vision, a police-funded website that allows anyone anywhere to report something they either experienced or witnessed, anonymously if they like. No evidence is needed. Everything is instantly logged as a hate incident. This inevitably presents a warped view of reality.
Already, two infamous post–Brexit ‘incidents’ have been debunked. It was widely claimed, for instance, that an attack on a tapas bar in Lewisham, south London, was a hate crime; actually, police say it was a burglary. A photo of four boneheads in Newcastle holding a banner saying ‘Stop Immigration, Start Repatriation’ was widely shared as evidence of xenophobia. But Geordies have pointed out that those idiots have been holding up that banner every weekend for ages, long before Brexit.

Beyond the post-Brexit hysteria, it’s incredible how subjective the idea of ‘hate crime’ has become. The police and the Crown Prosecution Service first agreed a common definition of hate crime ten years ago and started measuring national hate-crime levels in 2008. A hate crime, the police say, is ‘any criminal offence which is perceived, by the victim or any other person, to be motivated by a hostility or prejudice towards someone based on a personal characteristic’. They monitored ‘five strands’: crimes driven by prejudice based on race, religion/faith, sexual orientation, disability, and gender identity.

The police’s ‘Hate Crime Operational Guidance’ now stresses that the victim’s perception is the deciding factor in whether something is measured as a hate crime. No evidence is required. ‘Evidence of… hostility is not required for an incident or crime to be recorded as a hate crime or hate incident,’ the guidance says. ‘[The] perception of the victim, or any other person, is the defining factor… the victim does not have to justify or provide evidence of their belief, and police officers or staff should not directly challenge this perception.’ So you don’t need actual evidence to prove hate crime, just a feeling. The police are discouraged from asking for evidence. This is reflected in the policies of individual constabularies. So the ‘Hate Crime Procedure’ of the Surrey Police says ‘apparent lack of motivation as the cause of an incident is not relevant as it is the perception of the victim or any other person that counts’. No clear hateful motivation? Doesn’t matter. Record it as a hate crime anyway. Indeed, even when nothing hateful was said to the victim of a crime, still the police must record the incident as a hate crime if the victim perceives it to be so. The police guidance gives the example of a gay man being ‘sworn at and threatened’ by an assailant who said absolutely ‘nothing… about his sexual orientation’. If this gay man ‘perceives that he was targeted [because] he is openly gay’ then the police must ‘record this as a hate crime based on sexual orientation’. Think about this. If any gay man is shouted at in the street, by anyone, about anything, with no mention of sexuality, that can be recorded as an anti-gay hate crime. There’s no need for any proof whatsoever that anything anti-gay in sentiment was said or even intimated.

The unhinged subjectivity of the hate-crime definition becomes even clearer on the issue of what is called ‘secondary victimisation’. This is when a victim of an alleged hate crime feels that the police are not being sensitive enough and thus compound the ‘hate’ he or she has experienced. The police guidance says ‘secondary victimisation is based on victim perception, rather than what actually happens. It is immaterial whether it is reasonable or not for the victim to feel that way’. Again, this sanctification of perception over ‘what actually happens’ has trickled down into hate-crime policies of local constabularies. So the ‘Hate Crime Policy and Procedure’ of Greater Manchester Police says that if a hate-crime victim feels indifference from the police, this ‘victimises them a second time’ and ‘whether or not it is reasonable for them to perceive it that way is immaterial’. Truth, then, is ‘immaterial’.

In a world obsessed with evidence-based public policy, it is odd that a new crime category which explicitly eschews evidence in favour of emotion is subjected to such little scrutiny. And it gets worse: the prosecution of a hate crime doesn’t actually have to prove that hatred was the motivation. The CPS states: ‘The prosecution does not… need to prove hatred as the motivating factor behind an offence.’ The CPS says any crime that involves ‘ill-will, ill-feeling, spite, contempt, prejudice, unfriendliness, antagonism, resentment, or dislike’ on the basis of a ‘personal characteristic’ could be a hate crime. So unfriendliness can now be criminal. Next time you read about a hate-crime epidemic, bear that in mind.

Burglaries and robberies are often recorded as hate crimes. According to the Home Office, of all the hate incidents in the Crime Survey for England and Wales, 8 per cent are burglaries. And 1 per cent is bicycle theft. A racially motivated bike theft? You might think stealing is just about stealing, but if the victim thinks his stuff was nicked because he’s foreign, gay or trans, then it is recorded as hate crime.

The ‘Hate Crime Operational Guidance’ demands ‘increasing the reporting and recording of hate crime’. It specifies that success should not be measured by a reduction in hate-crime levels, perhaps because this will give people the impression that community life in Britain is getting better, and we can’t have that. ‘Targets that see success as reducing hate crime are not appropriate,’ it says, as this won’t ‘motivate managers’ to ‘promote positive recording’ or ‘increase the opportunity for victims to report’. So ‘success’ has one meaning only: creating evidence to suggest the problem is getting worse. The police are incentivised to find hatred, because their goal isn’t to tackle crime so much as to create a public impression of mass hatred.

Why are our authorities so willing to push this deceptive agenda? Why is our country determined to see itself as bigoted? It’s because creating a panic about hate crime gives officials and others a sense of purpose and history. But the squalid search for, and exaggeration of, hatred is dangerous and, to use a word so popular on social media, divisive. It is a slur on the white working classes to claim that what they think and say — on immigration, Europe, life in general — is racist. Such a perception convinces minorities that they should live in fear. It spreads anxiety and silences discussion. It rips Britain apart.

According to one leftie online magazine, Britain now evokes ‘nightmares of 1930s Germany’. But this doesn’t square with the reality of our country today, and you shouldn’t believe it. The hate-crime epidemic is a self-sustaining myth — a libel against the nation.
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