Campaign Against Anti-Semitism Libels Dina Mulholland, Labour PPC for Ceredigion and Mike Sivier of Vox Political

Campaign Against Anti-Semitism attacks Labour PPC Dinah Mulholland

Bogus charity, Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, which campaigns making false and libellous accusations of anti-Semitism, has now stepped up its campaign during the General Election. The latest victims are Dina Mulholland, Labour PPC for Ceredigion and Mike Sivier, who was suspended as Labour candidate in the elections for Powys county council.

Campaign Against AntiSemitism Lies About Mike Sivier - naturally Labour nationally suspended him at once when this far-Right charity came a calling

For details on Mike Sivier’s rebuttal of the CAA’s lies see No council seat for Vox Political writer – because of politically-motivated interference

In addition to the petitioncalling on the Charity Commission to deregister this Zionist libel machine that masquerades as a charity, [have you signed yet?] I submitted a complaint to the Charity Commission nearly 3 months ago. Despite promises to the contrary the Commission still have not dealt with it.

When it comes to complaints from the Right that Student Unions are supporting Israel Apartheid Week the Charity Commission jumped into action under their far-Right Chairman William Shawcross, a former board member of the Henry Jackson Society and a virulent Islamaphobe. But when it's a bogus Zionist 'charity' the Charity Commission does nothing.

According to the fake 'charity' CAA this post on an Israeli Internet Magazine +972 is also anti-Semitic

I have today submitted a further complaint about the CAA’s outrageous and illegal interference in the general election campaign. By defaming Dina Mulholland, the CAA have also committed a criminal offence under s.106 of the Representation of the Peoples Act. I urge you to bombard the Charity Commission with complaints.

The CAA is strongly suspected of being funded by a $50m Israeli government slush fund to combat BDS and it is using this to destabilise the Labour Party.

What was the basis of CAA's accusation that Dina Mulholland was anti-Semitic? She alleged, in an article, that the Israeli military had sprayed skunk, an evil smelling liquid that is regularly sprayed on peaceful demonstrators, into water tanks making them undrinkable. Apparently this was a resurrection of the ancient libel of Jewish well poisoning!

Demonstrators have testified that skunk is almost impossible to wash off. It clings to you for weeks. A BBC reporter testified that “Imagine the worst, most foul thing you have ever smelled. An overpowering mix of rotting meat, old socks that haven’t been washed for weeks – topped off with the pungent waft of an open sewer. . .Imagine being covered in the stuff as it is liberally sprayed from a water cannon. Then imagine not being able to get rid of the stench for at least three days, no matter how often you try to scrub yourself clean.”^[8]

A reporter for Reuters described its effect in the following words:

Imagine taking a chunk of rotting corpse from a stagnant sewer, placing it in a blender and spraying the filthy liquid in your face. Your gag reflex goes off the charts and you can't escape, because the nauseating stench persists for days.^[4]

What the CAA are saying is that allegations against Israeli soldiers or settlers are allegations against all Jews and therefore automatically anti-Semitic. By this absurd logic, any criticism of Israel’s military occupation is automatically anti-Semitic.

Of course this is nonsense. People don’t accuse Israel’s army or Israeli settlers of war crimes because they are Jewish but because they are war criminals and racists. Their religion is irrelevant.

It is the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism which is being anti-Semitic. They are equating the actions of the Israeli Army and Settlers with all Jews. They are therefore breaking the very ‘International Definition of Anti-Semitism’ that they rely on. The IHRA definition gives as an example of ‘Contemporary examples of antisemitism’

‘Holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel’

The original allegation of well poisoning related to the Black Death which peaked in Europe in the 14^thcentury. At that time, not knowing about bacteria, germs etc. people sought an explanation for the death of possibly half of Europe’s population in Jewish poisoning of wells.

Once the Zionist Campaign Against Antisemitism spread their libellous poison, the mass media followed up with more lies

It hasnothing whatever to do with the well documented examples of Israeli military and settler poisoning of the Palestinian wells on the West Bank.

No doubt Fred Pearce (see letter to CC below) was also anti-Semitic when he wrote in the Guardian of 1^st March 2006, Running on empty that Israeli settlers poisoned Palestinian wells.

According to the Campaign Against AntiSemitism Laurence Brass's allegations of the poisoning of a Palestinian village well is a medieval blood libel and anti-Semitic - of course it's also true!

Perhaps Laurence Brass, who resigned as Treasurer of the staunchly Zionist Board of Deputies of British Jews, in order to speak out against the abominations perpetrated against the Palestinians is also anti-Semitic? Mr Brass was quotedin the Jewish Chronicle of 20^th December 2012 as stating that on a visit to the West Bank:

‘the abiding memory of his visit would be “the sight of an old rusty car being dumped down the village well, thus preventing the locals from having fresh water.’

If accusing any Jew of ever having poisoned water supplies is anti-Semitic then Israeli historian and Ha'aretz journalist Tom Segev's passage above is grossly anti-Semitic

If allegations that Jews may poison water resources is automatically anti-Semitic then what does one make of the documented fact that a group of Holocaust survivors, led by Abba Kovner, plotted to poison the drinking water of German cities as revenge for the Holocaust? It is so well documented that even the malicious liars and perjurers of the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism would be hard put to it to deny it. It is documented by, amongst others, Israeli historian and Ha’aretz journalist Tom Segev in his book The Seventh Million, in a Chapter entitled ‘6 Million Germans’ (pp. 140-146). Perhaps Segev is also anti-Semitic?

What this shows is that the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism has no hesitation in making the most outrageous accusations of false anti-Semitism against people.

It is a disgrace that the Labour Party Compliance Unit, in its case against the Black-Jewish anti-racist activist Jackie Walker, quotes the racist liar Gideon Falter, Chair of the CAA against Jackie. If Jeremy Corbyn has any integrity he will put a stop to the practice of quoting racists against Black anti-racists and he will fire Iain McNicoll and the head of the Compliance Unit John Stolliday for having used the testimony of racists in their witch-hunt.

I have submitted a further complaint to the Charity Commission against the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism.

Sign the Petition calling on the Charity Commission to deregister the racist ‘charity’ Camaign Against Anti-Semitism. We now have over 2,800 signatures. Please share widely and let's get at least 10,000 signatures.

Also please submit your own complaint to the Charity Commission against this bogus ‘charity’.

Correspondence to the Charity Commission Concerning the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism

Jane Grenfell,

Senior Technical Case Manager, Regulatory Compliance

Charity Commission

8^th May 2017

Dear Ms Grenfell,

Thank you for your response to my query as to why the Charity Commission has delayed responding to my complaints of 11^thFebruar and subsequently against the bogus ‘charity’ Campaign Against Anti-Semitism Registration Number: 1163790.

You say that there has been a reorganisation within the Commission. However when Student Unions organised Israel Apartheid Weeks earlier this year, the Charity Commission was able to respond to complaints from the Israeli Embassy and Zionist groups within a very short period of time. When it is convenient, the Charity Commission can move very quickly.

The complaints against the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism are even more urgent given that we are now in the middle of a General Election. The Campaign Against Anti-Semitism is actively intervening to attack certain, mainly Labour, parliamentary candidates. This must stop immediately and you are under a legal duty to act without delay.

The CAA’s actions also breach Section 106 of the Representation of the People Act 1983 which specifies that it is a criminal offence to make or publish a false statement of fact about the personal character or conduct of an election candidate. For further information you might want to consult this briefingon the defamation of candidates standing for election although it would be remiss of you not to be aware of it.

I refer in particular to the case of Dinah Mulholland, Labour PPC for Ceredigion. See their Facebook page. On 3^rd May a post appeared on the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism’s website, Dinah Mulholland, Labour parliamentary and council candidate in Wales, invokes antisemitic libel about Jews poisoning wells. The myth that Jews poison wells dates back to the Black Death. If the CAA’s allegations were true this would be a serious offence of incitement to racial hatred and a hate crime.

It would also be incumbent on the Welsh Labour Party to replace Ms Mulholland as a Labour candidate. In fact this allegation was a complete and total lie. A wicked fabrication. the Labour Party has now investigated this allegation and has found it to be wanting.

A failure to act on your part, given that you are the regulatory body, will be seen as making you complicit in the CAA’s unlawful actions. It will also be an act of gross maladministration and a complaint will be made to the Parliamentary Ombudsman.

The allegation against Ms Mulholland concerns an article published on voicewales.com on 13th November 2016, which recounted her visit to the West Bank as a delegate for Unite the Union. According to the CAA Ms Mulholland alleged that:

‘the Israeli military has ‘weaponised’ water, spraying chemicalised ‘skunk’ water into the water tanks of Palestinian protesters, making it unsafe to use.”

On this flimsy and artificial basis the CAA concluded that what Ms Mulholland had written was equivalent to ‘the false accusation of poisoning wells (which) has been used to demonise Jews and inflame violence against Jews since as early as the Middle Ages and is regarded as one of the gravest age-old antisemitic canards.’

Ms Mullholland’s accusations did not refer to the Jews, that was the CAA’s interpretation. They related to the Israeli military occupation and Jewish settlers on the West Bank. They do not relate to Jews at all but to Israeli who happen to be Jews. This attempt to equate far-Right settlers with all Jews is itself anti-Semitic according to the very ‘International’ Definition of anti-Semitism that the CAA has recourse to.

If the CAA is correct that an allegation of poisoning water against anyone who happens to be Jewish is a resurrection of a medieval anti-Semitic libel, then the Israeli +972 Magazine is also guilty of the same offence. In its edition of November 15 2014 Haggai Matar wrote an article WATCH: Police spray putrid water on Palestinian homes, schools.

Perhaps Fred Pearce, writing for the Guardian of 1^st March 2006, Running on empty was also anti-Semitic when he wrote:

‘Oxfam's Geoff Graves took me to Madama, a Palestinian village near Nablus, where neighbouring Israeli settlers poisoned the village's only well and shot at aid workers who came to clean it. Most villagers now buy water from passing tankers, but not all can afford it. Ahmed Qot, a poor farmer, told me he spends three hours every day carrying pots on his donkey to get water from a nearby village for his nine children and five farm animals.

It is a fact that the rabidly racist Jewish settlers on the West Bank have poisoned Palestinian wells. There are dozens of such examples. This does NOT mean that this is therefore typical Jewish behaviour. It is the typical behaviour of settler colonists, whatever their religion. For the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism to suggest that the behaviour of West Bank settlers represents normal Jewish behaviour is itself an anti-Semitic calumny against Jews. The CAA is not only a rabidly Zionist organisation it is clearly anti-Semitic.

An allegation against a specific group of Jews that they have tried to or actually poisoned water supplies does not mean that it is necessarily untrue, still less a blood libel. At the end of the second world war, a group of Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, led by Abba Kovner, planned to poison the water supply of German cities by way of revenge for the Holocaust. This is extremely well documented but Kovner was arrested in time. This is covered in the chapter ‘6 Million Germans’ (pp, 140-146) in The Seventh Million (1993) by Israeli historian and Ha’aretz journalist Tom Segev. I don’t believe anyone has accused Tom Segev of anti-Semitism previously but no doubt he will now be subject to the attentions of the CAA.

I would therefore appreciate your confirmation that the investigation against the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism will be treated with the utmost seriousness, without any delay and that they will be told to avoid all further comment on General Election candidates.

Yours sincerely,

Tony Greenstein

Previous Correspondence

8^th May 2017 16:43

Dear Mr Greenstein

I am sorry that it did not prove possible to respond as Mr Young had indicated. Due to a re-organisation within the Commission I have been asked to carry forward your concerns and will be examining them in detail. It is not possible at this stage to give any timeframe for the conduct of this case. However, once I have completed my analysis I will let you know.

I appreciate that this will be frustrating for you, but I can confirm that I am looking in detail at the information you have provided.

Yours sincerely

Jane Grenfell
Senior Technical Case Manager, Regulatory Compliance.
W: https://www.gov.uk/charity-commission

------------------- Original Message -------------------

From: TONY GREENSTEIN
Received:
To: PCT - Liverpool (Queue)
Subject: Re: 20170322 - To Tony Greenstein – update - CAMPAIGN AGAINST ANTI-SEMITISM 1163790 CRM:0162547

To: Alex Young

The Charity Commission

8^th May 2017-05-08

Dear Mr Young,

You wrote to me on 22^ndMarch stating that you were still evaluating my complaint against the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism and that you were advised it would take a week before a decision was made.

It is now over 6 weeks since you wrote to me and I have heard nothing.

I suspect that this matter has gone up to your Chairman, the Islamaphobic William Shawcross, who is a hardline Zionist as well as a member of the far-Right Henry Jackson Society and that this is what has delayed your decision. In other words political interference.

Please confirm whether my suspicions are correct and if not when we are going to get a substantive response.

In the meanwhile this bogus ‘charity’ is continuing to defame anyone who they consider supportive of the Palestinians and opposed to Zionism, especially if they are for example Labour candidates.

This alone should have got you doing something quickly and it is a disgrace that you have sat on this for nearly 3 months.

I attach to this a petition which at the time this was downloaded had over 2,700 signatures. It is now over 2,800 signatures calling for the CAA to be deregistered as a charity. I also attach the comments from signatories.

Yours etc.

Tony Greenstein

On 22 March 2017 at 13:09, PCT - Liverpool (Queue)<OperationsLiverpool@charitycommission.gsi.gov.uk> wrote:

Dear Mr Greenstein,

Thank you for your emails of 12 and 13 February and 3 March, and 22 March.

PRIMARY COMPLAINT:

We are still evaluating your complaints against the charity, and particularly your request that its charitable status should be removed. We will examine the further items you supplied on 20 March. I am advised there is the prospect of decisions on these matters within a week from today, after which we will communicate to you our view on the issues you have raised. If we consider that there are issues we must take up with the charity (for clarification or by way of regulatory advice) we will advise you that this is our conclusion.

IDENTITY OF THE TRUSTEES:

We are considering this information request in parallel to your primary complaint, taking into account the Commission's various legal responsibilities to inform our decision. Again I am advised there is the prospect of a decision on this matter within a week from today, after which we will communicate to you our view.

Yours sincerely

Alex Young

W: https://www.gov.uk/charity-commission

Dinah Mulholland, Labour parliamentary and council candidate in Wales, invokes antisemitic libel about Jews poisoning wells

Dinah Mulholland, the Labour Party’s parliamentary candidate for Ceredigion constituency in Wales in the general election on 8th June, and for the Llangybi ward on Ceredigion County Council in the Welsh local elections on 4th May, has invoked a classic antisemitic libel about Jews poisoning wells.
An article published on voicewales.com on 13th November 2016 recounts her recent visit to the West Bank as a delegate for Unite the Union. The article states: “According to Dinah, the Israeli military has ‘weaponised’ water, spraying chemicalised ‘skunk’ water into the water tanks of Palestinian protesters, making it unsafe to use.”

The false accusation of poisoning wells has been used to demonise Jews and inflame violence against Jews since as early as the Middle Ages and is regarded as one of the gravest age-old antisemitic canards. Mulholland’s unsubstantiated allegation breaches the International Definition of Antisemitism which states that “Using the symbols and images associated with classic antisemitism (e.g. claims of Jews killing Jesus or blood libel) to characterise Israel or Israelis” is antisemitic.

WATCH: Police spray putrid water on Palestinian homes, schools

By Haggai Matar

Published November 15, 2014

Two new videos catch a police ‘skunk’ truck spraying East Jerusalem neighborhoods with foul-smelling liquid. The smell was so bad that 4,500 students had to stay home from school.

The “skunk” trucks drives slowly through the neighborhood. It is evening, and there is no evidence of clashes in the area. The truck proceeds slowly, sprays putrid-smelling water on a nearby building, continues on and shoots once again. When it’s all over, the truck has tainted schools, homes, streets – entire neighborhoods – with its unbearable stink. Just like that.

Two videos that were filmed this past week by Palestinian residents of Jerusalem and were given to +972 support claims by residents regarding the inappropriate use of the skunk by the police. In August, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) filed a complaint to the police regarding multiple cases of the arbitrary use of the skunk, especially at times when there are no protests or clashes. It seems that the police has not changed its ways.

The common understanding among residents and human rights organizations is that the police are collectively punishing Jerusalem’s Palestinian residents, in light of clashes between youth and police in these neighborhoods. But the punishment neither begins nor ends with skunk water; the police block entrances to these neighborhoods with concrete blocks, detains residents for long hours at checkpoints and hands out petty fines – all at the behest of the Jerusalem municipality.

Police use the ‘skunk’ water canon to disperse protesters in Kafr Kanna, a day after Israeli police fatally shot an Arab man in the village. (photo: Yotam Ronen/Activestills.org)

In the A-Tur neighborhood, the police shot skunk water at four large schools, forcing the parents of 4,500 students to leave their children at home due to the unbearable smell. “It was this past Friday, at around 5:30 p.m.,” says Khader Abu Sabitan, a member of the parents’ committee in the neighborhood. “I was on the road and saw them pass with their machine, and saw how they began shooting water at the school. I’m telling you – there was nothing there. It is Friday at 5:30 in the evening, and there was no one in the school or on the streets. Nothing. Everyone was home. They went to all four schools in the neighborhood, shot the water, and left.”

The skunk water targeted the A-Tur elementary school for boys, the elementary and high school for girls, a high school for boys and the “Basma” elementary school for disabled children. All four schools are located on the neighborhood’s main street.

“After we saw what they did, we told the parents not to send the children to school on Saturday, which is a school day for us. We thought that the municipality would be able to solve the problem by Sunday, since the children didn’t go to school on that day. It wasn’t a strike – we just could not enter the area because of the smell. We sent letters through the teachers on Saturday and Sunday, but no one came. So we brought back the children to school on Monday, and told them to go straight to class ad not linger outside. The smell even permeated the classrooms, but they closed the windows and made do somehow. They stayed inside during the lunch break and then went straight home. It has been a week, and it still smells. Less, but you can still smell it.”

For anyone who has not experienced it, words cannot express the smell of the skunk. The Israeli-developed truck is primarily used by the army in the occupied territories over the past several years, although now it is slowly making its way to Jerusalem and Israel. The strong stench smells like a mix of feces and animal carcass – gagging is almost inevitable.

The worst part is that there is almost no way to get rid of the smell. Showering doesn’t help, and protesters usually deal with it is by taking a dip in the sea. Objects that have been sprayed with skunk water often smell for much longer periods of time. After being hit with a few drops of skunk water, my camera smelled for nearly half a year.

It is difficult to fathom exactly why such large amounts of skunk water must be sprayed at classrooms and homes, as can be seen in the second video that was filmed in the Jabel Mukaber neighborhood of Jerusalem. Like in the video from A-Tur, there are no stone throwers or protesters. The police act casually, there are no rocks being thrown in the air, no sounds of explosions, no screaming or bullets that characterize confrontations in East Jerusalem. Just a skunk truck spraying homes.

“The perception of the residents and organizations is that the police uses the skunk routinely, regardless of whether they are dispersing protests, as one can plainly see in the video” Oshrat Maimon, an attorney with the Ir Amim NGO. “The problem is that we don’t even know what the police’s procedure is when it comes to using the skunk. Therefore, we don’t know if the problem is in the procedure itself, or in the lack of implementation. The truth is that we’re a bit helpless in this situation.”

Over the past several weeks, activists from East Jerusalem have met with members of human rights organizations in order to attempt to formulate a response to the actions of the police and municipality. They, however, found it difficult to arrive at a solution. “Our field coordinators say that people are afraid of the police and do not want to provide testimonies,” says Maimon. “Even people who were shot, such as someone was hit with a sponge-tipped bullet in the head or a woman who was shot and her uterus was torn – when our investigators speak with them, they are afraid that if they speak up the police will find its way to them and find a way to harm them.

In response to ACRI’s request, the police responded that the skunk is used according to regulations, but refused to say explain what the regulation says. ACRI has attempted to force the police to publish the regulations vis-a-vis the skunk. Meanwhile in East Jerusalem, the occupation becomes smellier than ever.

+972 asked for a response from Jerusalem Police. Their response will be published here.

This article was first published on +972′s Hebrew-language sister site, Local Call. Read it in Hebrew here.

Gideon Levy - Ha'aretz journalist under constant attack by the racists and Zionists

Gideon Levy is, with Amira Hass, the bravest and most articulate of Israeli journalists. Both have come under repeated threat from the racists who make up the majority of Israel’s population. Incitement to attack opponents of Zionism in Israel is considered normal by the Zionist establishment, Labour and Likud.

Levy has had to be accompanied by body guards at times because of the threats to his life.

Ha’aretz occupies a lonely place in Israel journalism. It is a liberal Zionist newspaper, hardly read by any Israelis (!) but with an international reputation for printing at least some of the truth about the ugly reality of Israel today.

Amira Hass - Ha'aretz's other non-Zionist journalist

It puts to shame apologists for Israel’s racists like Jeremy Newmark of the Jewish Labour Movement and the oafish deputy leader of the Labour Party Tom Watson. Indeed it puts to shame Jeremy Corbyn who has completely forgotten what he campaigned for for over 30 years.

Tony Greenstein

Levy Apologises for telling the truth and upsetting his readers

To all offended readers, I apologize for the one-sidedness. How could I not maintain a balance between the murderer and the murdered; the thief and his victim; and the occupier and the occupied?

Dear Orna and Moshe Gan-Zvi,

I was saddened to read in Tuesday’s Hebrew edition of Haaretz that you’ve decided to cancel your subscription. I don’t know you, but I will miss you as readers. As someone who is partly responsible for your decision, as your article indicated, allow me to apologize. To apologize for writing the truth all these years. I should have taken into account that this truth wasn’t palatable to you, and acted accordingly.

It was not pleasant for you to read the theory put forward by me and my fellow Haaretz correspondent Amira Hass about the occupation. You, who are active in Rotary Israel, who come from the business world, who are so proud of your children and the fact that they live in the West Bank. Your son was educated at the Eli premilitary academy, and your granddaughters proudly carry the last name Sheetrit. You, who are so pleased with yourselves and your values, with your children and your morals, don’t think you should be forced to read unpleasant truths. You simply don’t deserve it.

Israeli forces firing tear gas toward Palestinian protesters during clashes in the West Bank town of Bethlehem, April

17, 2017. AHMAD GHARABLI/AFP

Indeed, how could I have spent all these years publishing articles that even you, generously, admitted were touching, without ever, to my shame, checking how these Palestinian families ended up in their serious predicaments? Really, how did that happen? Of course it was their own fault, but I keep blaming the Israel Defense Forces – how could I? And how could Amira Hass be so one-sided and lacking in perspective that would explain how a people could prefer the elimination of another people over a democratic society? Really, how could you, Amira?

I assume, Moshe, that if they were to lock you in a cage for years, you would continue your Rotary membership and refuse to back a struggle against your incarceration. I assume, Orna, that if foreign soldiers were to burst into your home in the middle of the night and arrest your Moshe before your eyes, kick him, force him to his knees, blindfold him, handcuff him, and beat him in front of your children who study in Eli – and then snatch him from your home for months without trial – you would be looking for some “creative leadership” for your people.

I assume that you, who come from the business world, would lovingly accept those who confiscate your property and ban you from your own land. I’m sure it would never occur to you to struggle against those who have tortured you with such evil for so many years.

What can we do? The Palestinians are different from you, dear Orna and Moshe. They were not born in such lofty heights as you. They are human animals, bloodthirsty, born to kill. Not all of them are as ethical as you and your children from the Eli academy. Yes, there are people who fight for their freedom. There are people who are forced to do so violently. In fact, there are almost no nations who haven’t acted this way, including the chosen people you’re proud to belong to. Not only do you belong; you are the pillar of fire that leads the camp, you’re the best, the moral elite – you, the religious Zionists.

I apologize for the one-sidedness. How could I not maintain a balance between the murderer and the murdered; the thief and his victim; the occupier and the occupied? Forgive me for daring to turn off your joy and pride in the land flowing with milk and Mobileye, and cherry tomatoes, too. There are so many wonderful things in this country, and Haaretz – with its “moral deterioration,” as you call it – is ruining the party. How did I not see that you don’t like to read the truth, and didn’t take this into account when I’d return from the occupied territories every week to write about what I’d seen with my own eyes?

But now it’s too late. The call to boycott chocolate spread was too much even for you, so you’ve decided to boycott Haaretz. From now on, the only paper on your coffee table will be the weekly, right-wing Makor Rishon. They won’t write about how IDF soldiers sprayed five Palestinian car passengers with bullets three weeks ago, and I’m sure your Shabbats will be a lot more pleasant from now on.

One of the main Hasbarah (Israeli propaganda) talking points is how the Arabs, for which read Palestinians, teach their children to hate whereas the Israelis teach their children love and peace to all.

Above are 2 videos, which put this into context. One of the videos show Israel’s police teaching children how they ‘confirm the kill’ of a terrorist (who by definition is an Arab). Bearing in mind the recent conviction for manslaughter of Elor Azaria, [see Israeli Soldier and National Hero Elor Azaria Goes on Trial For Executing Palestinian Lying Prostrate] for shooting a wounded Palestinian in the head at point blank range, it is quite clear that Israel’s police and army follow a policy of murdering anyone who shows the slightest degree of resistance to Israel’s military and police repression.

The other video and the article below show how Israeli children in an Orthodox Jewish school are taught to hate Arabs. It needs no commentary.

Tony Greenstein

Why are Israeli children brainwashed to hate?

Jonathan Ofir on May 10, 2017

On a recent video, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu slammed both the new Hamas charter (which he ’threw in the bin’ at the end of the clip), as well as mainstream media for suggesting that the new document indicated ‘moderation’. He could also have read Fathi Nemer’s sober analysis here on Mondoweiss, which points out that the new document merely emphasizes politics that have been in a process of ‘moderation’ in the past decade anyway.

But for Netanyahu it was important to point out that Hamas is ‘rejectionist’, in that it doesn’t recognize Israel, whilst it does concede to a Palestinian state inside 1967 lines (2-state solution). Netanyahu calls this a rejection of “Israel’s right to exist”. As Amira Hass notesin her analysis, the matter of recognizing Israel (as well as refugee return) is considered by Hamas as “a formula of national consensus.”

It would be possible to delve into the many accusations levelled by Netanyahu, to support throwing the document in the bin. As for example, whether recognition of Palestine would at any point be an item for consideration by the Israeli government. Netanyahu’s Likud platform of 1999, never rescinded, states:

“The Government of Israel flatly rejects the establishment of a Palestinian Arab state west of the Jordan river”.

But Netanyahu’s rhetoric escalation up to the point where he throws the document in the bin goes like this:

“[Hamas] brainwashes kids inside suicide camps. So, where does this hate-filled document belong? [throwing it in the bin] Right there.”

His focus is thus around ‘brainwashing’ and ‘hate’. Thus it could be interesting to look at some examples of Israeli violent brainwashing of children:

Aviezer Weiss, who is a self-declared right-winger, former student of a religious school and former head of Givat Washington Academic College of Education, says of this curriculum:

“The program follows one very clear ideological direction: that we need to quickly build the Temple so the Jewish people will be ‘the best’ in the world. That’s brainwashing, not education”.

She asks who has met an ‘Arab’ boy in the past year. Many raise their hands. One of the visitors asks where. A boy says near the ‘Wall’ (‘Western Wall’). He is asked whether he talked with him, and the boy says no, that he just “pushed me”. The teacher hurries on: “And what happens when you see an Arab boy? What do you feel?” They answer “Anger”, “I want to kill him”. Teacher continues unabated: “And what happens when you meet a secular [Jewish] boy?” she asks. One boy answers “I pity him for not having been born Haredi (Orthodox Jewish)”. The teacher asks why, and another answers that it’s because “he doesn’t tread the right path”.The teacher asks what they see when they think of Jerusalem in 10 years’ time, and several answer. A little debate ensues between those who say all will be Haredim and those who say all will be Jews but not necessarily Haredim. One boy then answers that all will be Jewish, but there will also be some Arabs who will be slaves. The teacher picks it up – “because the Messiah will come! I get it!”. Another student opines, that “there will be a war, and all Arabs will die, and some of them will be slaves”.

The visitor who seems to be the main supervising authority, is very pleased, he says to the teacher “there it is, you got the whole story”. He thanks the students and wishes them continued success and continued study “here in the Yeshivas”.

But religious fundamentalist, fanatic and violent indoctrination is not the only brainwashing going on in Israel. There is also the purely military violence.

Two days ago, the Israeli police did a demonstrationin Ramat Hasharon for hundreds of 5th-graders, in how they ‘verify a kill’ of a suspected ‘terrorist’.

The mock-operation using blanks, featured policemen coming on motorcycles and riddling a terrorist with countless rounds, continuing to shoot at him long after he has fallen and is motionless – to ‘confirm the kill’.

This is a mock-theatre of an extra-judicial execution, with outrageously excessive violence. And we are not speaking about security forces ‘in the heat of battle’, as it were. They are performing a carefully tailored, and staged, operation. One must thus be in the conviction that they are demonstrating HOW IT IS DONE.

Some parents were upset with this demonstration of violence, whilst the police spokeswoman could not understand the issue: “The children clapped, they were happy”, she said.

Yet the upset Mayor of Ramat Hasharon Avi Gruber said something really worth noting. He told Haaretz that

“in light of the Elor Azaria incident, it can’t be that the Israel Police itself would show a situation in which a man is lying on the floor and is being shot this way.”

Bingo. Azaryawas no aberration – he just got caught on film. And now the Israeli police also spilled the beans, in front of cameras and hundreds of children.

It’s good we have Hamas, to always blame the violence upon.

See also Ha'aretz 11.5.17. Can You Show Kids How to Kill an Assailant? Israeli Mayor Says No, Police Say Yes

But for Netanyahu it was important to point out that Hamas is ‘rejectionist’, in that it doesn’t recognize Israel, whilst it does concede to a Palestinian state inside 1967 lines (2-state solution). Netanyahu calls this a rejection of “Israel’s right to exist”. As Amira Hass notes in her analysis, the matter of recognizing Israel (as well as refugee return) is considered by Hamas as “a formula of national consensus.”

“The Government of Israel flatly rejects the establishment of a Palestinian Arab state west of the Jordan river”.

But Netanyahu’s rhetoric escalation up to the point where he throws the document in the bin goes like this:

“[Hamas] brainwashes kids inside suicide camps. So, where does this hate-filled document belong? [throwing it in the bin] Right there.”

His focus is thus around ‘brainwashing’ and ‘hate’. Thus it could be interesting to look at some examples of Israeli violent brainwashing of children:

There is a particular religious educational program that is indoctrinating children to ‘long’ for a rebuilding of the ‘3rd temple’, instead of Al-Aqsa. It is called “Love of the Land and the Temple”. Aviezer Weiss, who is a self-declared right-winger, former student of a religious school and former head of Givat Washington Academic College of Education, says of this curriculum:

“The program follows one very clear ideological direction: that we need to quickly build the Temple so the Jewish people will be ‘the best’ in the world. That’s brainwashing, not education”.

The following video, taken from Israeli television (I could not find the prime source), shows children at an Israeli Jewish Orthodox religious school, visited by two men who have come to ‘test’ their general knowledge. It deserves special scrutiny. The female teacher asks them what they think when she says ‘Jerusalem’. They answer sacred, temple, etc. She asks who believes the (3rd) temple will be built in the coming years – everyone raises their hands. “And what is there now?”, she asks. “The mosque, Al-Aqsa” they answer. “And what will happen to the mosque?” she asks. “It will be broken, exploded, disappear” they answer. (The teacher makes no response and continues on, as tacit approval). She asks who has met an ‘Arab’ boy in the past year. Many raise their hands. One of the visitors asks where. A boy says near the ‘Wall’ (‘Western Wall’). He is asked whether he talked with him, and the boy says no, that he just “pushed me”. The teacher hurries on: “And what happens when you see an Arab boy? What do you feel?” They answer “Anger”, “I want to kill him”. Teacher continues unabated: “And what happens when you meet a secular [Jewish] boy?” she asks. One boy answers “I pity him for not having been born Haredi (Orthodox Jewish)”. The teacher asks why, and another answers that it’s because “he doesn’t tread the right path”. The teacher asks what they see when they think of Jerusalem in 10 years’ time, and several answer. A little debate ensues between those who say all will be Haredim and those who say all will be Jews but not necessarily Haredim. One boy then answers that all will be Jewish, but there will also be some Arabs who will be slaves. The teacher picks it up – “because the Messiah will come! I get it!”. Another student opines, that “there will be a war, and all Arabs will die, and some of them will be slaves”.

The visitor who seems to be the main supervising authority, is very pleased, he says to the teacher “there it is, you got the whole story”. He thanks the students and wishes them continued success and continued study “here in the Yeshivas”.

But religious fundamentalist, fanatic and violent indoctrination is not the only brainwashing going on in Israel. There is also the purely military violence.

Two days ago, the Israeli police did a demonstration in Ramat Hasharon for hundreds of 5th-graders, in how they ‘verify a kill’ of a suspected ‘terrorist’.

Some parents were upset with this demonstration of violence, whilst the police spokeswoman could not understand the issue: “The children clapped, they were happy”, she said.

Yet the upset Mayor of Ramat Hasharon Avi Gruber said something really worth noting. He told Haaretz that

“in light of the Elor Azaria incident, it can’t be that the Israel Police itself would show a situation in which a man is lying on the floor and is being shot this way.”

Bingo. Azarya was no aberration – he just got caught on film. And now the Israeli police also spilled the beans, in front of cameras and hundreds of children.

It’s good we have Hamas, to always blame the violence upon.

- See more at: http://mondoweiss.net/2017/05/israeli-children-brainwashed/?utm_source=Mondoweiss+List&utm_campaign=9bd58effe4-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_b86bace129-9bd58effe4-398519413&mc_cid=9bd58effe4&mc_eid=ce892c63fb#sthash.30FuOVpM.dpuf

A reply to Jamie Robert’s When is Holocaust Revisionism OK?

My attention has been drawn to a typically dishonest Zionist response to my article by one Jamie Roberts.

I recently posted an article The anti-Zionist Bund led the Jewish Resistance in Poland whilst the Zionist Movement abandoned the Jews. It described the heroic role of the anti-Zionist Jewish Bund in leading the Warsaw Ghetto Resistance against the Nazis. The fact that Zionists feel the need to blatantly lie, when the evidence is there for all to see, not least from Zionist historians themselves, demonstrates that the Zionist movement has a lot to hide.

The Bund were a mass Jewish party in Poland before the war. Half of the Jewish dead in the Holocaust, some 3 million people, came from Poland. As the fight against anti-Semitism in Poland grew, and anti-Semitism was rife in Poland in the pre-war years amongst the middle class and petit bourgeoisie, the Bund marginalised the Zionists.

In the last free municipal elections in 1938, in Warsaw of the 20 Jewish council seats, the Bund gained 17. The Zionists gained precisely one. In Lodz, Poland’s second city, the Bund gained 11 out of 17 seats. The Bund received 61% of the Jewish vote in Warsaw. This pattern was repeated throughout Poland and together with the Polish Socialist Party gained a majority in one-third of Poland’s towns and cities.

The Zionists who, in the 1920’s had had a mass base in Poland, withered away and split into Right and Left Poale Zion. Left Poale Zion formed the majority group and they were barely Zionists at all as they prioritised the fight against the fascists over and above the cause of Palestine. The most well-known figure in LPZ was Emmanuel Ringleblum, the Chronicler of the Warsaw Ghetto.

Why did the Jews of Poland abandon the Zionists? Isaac Deutscher in his Non-Jewish Jew and Other Essays (pp. 66/7) provides a clue:

‘It should be remembered that the great majority of East European Jews were, up to theoutbreakof the second world war, opposed to Zionism... Themost fanatical enemies of Zionism were precisely theworkers, those who spoke Yiddish... they were themost determined opponentsof the idea of an emigration from Eastern Europe to Palestine... in the idea of an exodus, from the countries in which they had their home and in which their ancestors had lived for centuries, the anti-Zionists saw an abdication of their rights, a surrender to anti-Semitism. To them anti-Semitism seemed to triumph in Zionism which recognised the legitimacy and the validity of the old cry ‘Jews get out’. The Zionists were agreeing to get out.’

In my article I quoted from the speech of Irena Klepfisz, the daughter of a Bundist who was killed in the Warsaw Jewish resistance. Irena was born in the Warsaw Ghetto. It was a moving speech in New York on the 74^thanniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto resistance.

Marek Edelman, Bundist and last Commander of the Jewish Resistance in Warsaw

In my article, I showed how the Zionist youth, to whom I paid tribute to for their heroism, were abandoned by the Zionist movement in Palestine. I wrote that the:

Zionist youth certainly fought in the Warsaw Ghetto Resistance but they did it, not as Zionists but despite their Zionism. Their political parties were opposed to resistance and most of the Jewish collaborators in the Jewish Council (Judenrat) were Zionists.

Clearly this was painful for Zionism’s youthful liar Jamie Roberts. Instead of refuting what I said he asked the stupid question ‘when is Holocaust Revisionism ok’. Of course the answer is that it is never ok, but what I wrote didn’t ‘revise’ history it painted an alternative to the nonsense parroted by the bourgeois media and the Zionists, which is that the only Jews who fought were the Zionists and that all Jews in Europe dreamed of nothing but going to Palestine.

Zivia Lubetkin - a Zionist member of the Jewish Resistance who escaped from the Warsaw Ghetto with Bundist Marek Edelman

Holocaust Revisionism is the series of lies peddled by neo-Nazis and their friends, the kind of people who today can often be found in bed with the Zionists, because both share a hatred of Muslims and Arabs, which pretends that the Holocaust never happened. It is ironic that Holocaust denying parties like the British National Party are, at one and the same time, avid supporters of Israel. The examples are legion of anti-Semites supporting Israel and Zionism from Poland’s Michal Kaminski to Donald Trump’s adviser Stephen Bannon.

Jamie Roberts is forced to reply to an article which I didn’t write because he finds it impossible to respond to the article I did write. The question I posed was a very simple one. Why did the Zionist movement abandon its own youth in the Warsaw Ghetto and why did it instruct them not to participate in the Resistance?

You needn’t hold your breath for an answer because it is highly doubtful that Jamie Roberts has a clue as to the answer. That is why the fool accuses me of having ‘ignored the fact that the leader of Żydowska Organizacja Bojowa (ZOB) was Mordechai Anielewicz, who was also leader of the Zionist-socialist youth organisation, Hashomer Hatzair.’

I ignored nothing. Quite the contrary. I specifically referred to the Zionist youth who, despite opposition from their parent Zionist parties, fought side by side with the Communists and the Bund. I pay tribute to them. Mordechai Anielewicz was chosen as the first Commander of ZOB because he was the only one who had military training. Although Roberts is clearly unfamiliar with anything but a Hollywood version of what happened in the Warsaw ghetto, it is quite clear that the Zionist youth fought, not because of Zionism but despite it.

Anielewicz however, expressed his regret over the “wasted time” undergoing Zionist educational work. [Gutman p.143. The Jews of Warsaw 1939-1943, The Harvester Press, Brighton, 1982) Yitzhak Zuckerman told the Council of Kibbutz Ha Meuchad in May 1947 that “had the fate of the Jews in 1942 lain in the hands only of the political parties (Zionist - TG), the revolt would never have taken place.”[Gutman, p. 441 fn. 23]

I also described how Anielewicz’s successor as Commander of ZOB, the Bundist Marek Edelman, was written out of the Zionist version of the Warsaw ghetto resistance because he was not a Zionist and because he had compared the Palestinian resistance to that of the Jewish Resistance in Warsaw. When he died a few years ago, although he received a state funeral in Poland, with the President attending and a 15 gun salute, there was not one person, not even the lowest clerk, from the Israeli Embassy. Zionism wrote Edelman out of the history records.

It is a measure of the desperation of Zionism’s poisonous little propagandists that they have to resort to lies and inventions because they know in their heart of hearts that when the Jews of Europe were fighting for their lives and dying, the Zionist movement outside Europe was more concerned with building their bastard racial state than in supporting those who were still alive.

Don’t take my word for it. Let me quote the eminently respectable Saul Friedlander’s Nazi Germany and the Jews 1933-1945. Friedlander is an American/Israeli Emeritus Professor History and a Zionist, but unlike Jamie Roberts he isn’t a hack and he also knows something about the Holocaust which is why he was extremely critical for example of David Ben Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister for his refusal to lend assistance to attempts to save the Jews of Europe unless it was tied to the Zionist movement’s priority of building for a Jewish state. This is what Friedlander had to say:

Whereas Bundist youth stayed in close contact with a senior leadership that remained in occupied Poland, the Zionist youth movements gradually lost touch with party headquarters in Palestine. The ideological fervor of this Zionist youth did not falter – it was possibly even heightened by the surrounding circumstance; the response from Palestine, however, soon dwindled to increasingly unrealistic and perfunctory advice and instructions and often it lapsed into silence. Such indifference created a growing rift and soon turned into a desperate sense of independence among the local youth leaders, the oldest of whom were in their early twenties at most.’

Perhaps Saul Friedlander is a Holocaust Revisionist too? Or maybe anyone telling the truth about the Zionist role during the Nazi era is a revisionist? Given that the Zionist movement during the war all but refused to acknowledge that there was a Holocaust taking place (& for this I suggest people read the 2 volume Post Ugandan Zionism by another Zionist, Shabtai Beit Zvi for details) it is the Zionist ideologues like Roberts who share most in common with holocaust deniers.

Roberts refers to the lies and half truths of Ken Livingstone. If this were the case then the Labour Right would have expelled him for those lies. Instead they chose not to contest what Livingstone said. The reason is clear – what he said about the Nazis supporting Zionism before the Final Solution is, unfortunately, only too true.

Tony Greenstein

Liberal-Democrats Demonstrate that they are neither Liberal nor Democratic

Tim Farron is probably the most lightweight leader that the Liberals/Lib Dems have ever had, despite pretty strong competition. He is also the most right-wing and again the competition is pretty stiff.

Over 4 years ago David Ward, the then MP for Bradford East had the whip withdrawn for 3 months for asking "Am I wrong or are am I right? At long last the Zionists are losing the battle - how long can the apartheid State of Israel last?" Lib Dems withdraw party whip from MP David Ward over Israel comments

people wanting Farron to be honest

Since Israel rules over 4.5 million Palestinians on the West Bank and operates two sets of laws and legal systems it is difficult to know how else to describe Israel other than an apartheid state. In Israel itself the Arab minority is largely segregated from the Jewish population, for example there is a Jewish and an Arab education sector. 48% of Jewish Israelis want, according to the most recent Pew Research Centre Poll Israel’s Religiously Divided Society to physically expel Israel’s Arabs from the country. Israel is a state which in January demolished a Bedouin village in the Negev, Umm Al-Hiran to make way for a Jewish town. Quite how else would one describe that other than as apartheid?

David Ward - former MP deselected by bigot

Ward’s other offence was to have said that he was:

‘“saddened that the Jews, who suffered unbelievable levels of persecution during the Holocaust, could within a few years of liberation from the death camps, be inflicting atrocities on Palestinians in the new State of Israel and continue to do so on a daily basis in the West Bank and Gaza.”

There is nothing anti-Semitic in this. Israel calls itself a Jewish state so it’s not surprising that many people therefore ascribe its actions to Jews per se. Of course David Ward should have said Zionist or Israeli Jews but there was nothing anti-Semitic in what he said. It is a fact that most people confuse the actions of Israel with Jews and ask why it is that Jews who were one the victims of anti-Semitism are now the perpetrators of racism. Their confusion is due to Zionist propaganda.

My letter defending David Ward when controversy broke - Guardian refused to publish similar letter this time around

However for Christian bigot and leader of the Lib Dems that was too much. When another racist bigot, Eric Pickles the Chairman of the Conservative Friends of Israel asked what is known as a planted question in the House of Commons about David Ward’s selection as a Lib-Dem candidate, Theresa May insinuated that David Ward was anti-Semitic.

Tim Farron immediately jumped when May barked and David Ward was peremptorily sacked as a candidate despite having been democratically elected by members of the Bradford East CLP. I am pleased to hear that he is now standing as an Independent and I wish him the best of luck. Tim Farron sacks Lib Dem candidate for 'offensive and antisemitic' remarks

This has nothing to do with anti-Semitism and everything to do with a patently false and distorted definition of anti-Semitism, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, which conflates anti-Zionism and opposition to the Israeli state with anti-Semitism and is therefore itself anti-Semitic.

Sue Perkins of Bakeoff calling out Farron's weasel words

For a good explanation of why the IHRA definition of is bogus see the article by Sir Stephen Sedley, a former Court of Appeal Judge, in this months London Review of Books. Stephen Sedley, former Judge at the Court of Appeal Criticises the IHRA Definition of anti-Semitism

For a good explanation of why Farron, despite attacking David Ward for fake anti-Semitism, is a bigot see Lib Dems' Tim Farron regrets abstaining in gay marriage vote. Still the Tory Telegraph came to his defence when Farron refused to answer a question on whether gay sex was a sin! Lib Dems' Tim Farron regrets abstaining in gay marriage vote

I therefore decided to write a letter to Tim Farron and Naomi Wimborne-Iddrissi has penned a good article below and on the Jews for Boycotting Israeli Goods site. The Orwellian defenestration of David Ward

One hypocrite calling out another hypocrite

Dear Mr Farron,

I write, as someone who is Jewish, to protest your recent decision to prevent David Ward from standing as a Lib Dem candidate for Bradford East.

I must confess that I don't and never have supported the Lib Dems as they have always appeared to me to be a party without any principle. Your coalition with the Conservatives when you presided over the reorganisation of the NHS, whose only purpose was to hasten its privatisation, is a case in point. Your breaking of the promise not to raise tuition fees is another as was your collaboration in the cutting of benefits.

David Ward is one of the few people in the Lib Dems who has stood up against the tide and given his support to the real victims in the Middle East, the Palestinians. When Israel rules, as it has done for 50 years, over millions of people and refuses to accord them the same rights as its own Jewish citizens, whilst claiming their land as part of the biblical 'Land of Israel', then that is apartheid. To stand up against that is not anti-Semitic, it is basic anti-racist solidarity.

David Ward asked '“Am I wrong or are am I right? At long last the Zionists are losing the battle – how long can the apartheid State of Israel last?” There is nothing in the least anti-Semitic in what David Ward said. Israel is an apartheid state, even for its own Arab citizens. Everyday legislation is passed which is targetted at Israel's minority Palestinian population, a population which is considered a fifth column by Israel's rulers. A population that is considered a demographic threat to the majority Jewish population, a majority of whom favour the physical expulsion of Israel's Arab citizens.

You said in your response to other people when attempting to defend your decision that 'I have been clear that I believe in a politics that is open, tolerant and united.' Leaving aside your Christian Evangelical views on abortion and gays, which are anything but open and tolerant, your removal of David Ward as a candidate proves that you are a nasty and vicious McCarthyite, an insubstantial pipsqueak unfit to lead any political party, even one as reduced in circumstances as the Lib Dems

Yours sincerely,

Tony Greenstein

The Orwellian defenestration of David Ward

The moral panic about antisemitism rumbles on, crushing pro-Palestinian voices such as that of Malia Bouattia, former President of the National Union of Students, and taking its first general election scalp with the dumping of prospective parliamentary candidate David Ward by Liberal Democrat leader Tim Farron. See below the full story originally published by Free Speech on Israel.

We would like to be able to share with you the refreshing viewpoint of Jewish Bath University politics student Joanna Phillips, but we have not yet managed to obtain her permission to republish her piece in full. Read it here on the Jewish News website.

Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi

The Orwellian defenestration of David Ward

It was inevitable that antisemitism smears would be deployed against supporters of Palestine at some point during #GE17. Even so it was a surprise to hear Tim Farron, Liberal Democrat party leader, cornered by pro-Israel lobbyist Eric Pickles in the House of Commons on Wednesday, appeasing the witch hunters by declaring that one of his own parliamentary candidates would be banned from standing.

The language used to denounce David Ward, former Lib Dem MP for Bradford East, as in so many of the cases we have seen in the Labour Party, the National Union of Students and elsewhere, takes us deep into Orwellian territory.

While Ward could probably sue the Jewish News for calling him “the Israel-hating, Jew-baiting former MP David Ward”, other media have been less hysterical but equally dishonest.

The Guardian’s coverage referred back to 2013 when it called Ward the “Liberal Democrat MP suspended by the party after questioning the continuing existence of the state of Israel”.

What had Ward actually written on his Twitter feed in July that year?

“Am I wrong or are am I right? At long last the Zionists are losing the battle – how long can the apartheid State of Israel last?”

It must be clear to all but the most partisan that Ward is talking here about the continuation of apartheid, not of Israel itself. It may be controversial to refer to Israel as an apartheid state, and it makes some people very cross, but it is decidedly not an expression of hatred of Jews.

Further yet, taking into account the legal opinion of Hugh Tomlinson QC on the definition of antisemitism adopted last December by Theresa May’s government, if Ward had in fact questioned the “continuing existence” of the state of Israel, that in itself could not be used to prove his antisemitism, since he has expressed no hostility to Jews as Jews.

This view has received a ringing endorsement in the pages of the London Review of Books from former Lord Justice of Appeal Sir Stephen Sedley (who happens to be Jewish). Sedley wrote that the inadequacies of the definition so ardently embraced by Pickles and May allow“perceptions of Jews which fall short of expressions of racial hostility to be stigmatised as anti-Semitic.”

Exactly so.

The Lib Dem’s Farron said at a rally in St Albans on Wednesday that he found comments David Ward has made in the past “deeply offensive, wrong and antisemitic.”

So what has Ward said, apart from talking about apartheid Israel, that Farron might think fits this description?

According to LBC, “Mr Ward also caused controversy in 2013 when he wrote on his blog accusing ‘the Jews’ of atrocities against Palestinians. He was condemned by politicians, Jewish groups and Shoah survivors when he equated Jewish suffering in the Holocaust with Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians.”

This is another example of Orwellian word games. What Ward actually said on his website – and credit is due to the Spectator for taking the trouble to quote him in full – was that he was “saddened that the Jews, who suffered unbelievable levels of persecution during the Holocaust, could within a few years of liberation from the death camps, be inflicting atrocities on Palestinians in the new State of Israel and continue to do so on a daily basis in the West Bank and Gaza.”

This is not “equating” Jewish suffering with Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, it is lamenting the fact that one has followed historically upon the other. It is not “accusing” the Jews of atrocities, it is regretting that those who have suffered injustice in the past are now inflicting it on others.

I have, in discussions about the Middle East where my Jewish heritage comes up, heard countless questions worded almost identically to David Ward’s statement. It is an almost constant refrain – “How is it possible that people who have suffered so much can cause so much suffering to others?”

I recognise these questions for what they are – expressions of sincere concern and bafflement at a seemingly inexplicable state of affairs. They are based on the understandable misapprehension that the Israeli state, which calls itself “the Jewish state”, represents all Jews. They usually lead to productive discussions about the history of Israel and Palestine, offering me the opportunity to explain that – despite the claims made by and on behalf of state of Israel – very many of us do not identify with Israel and resent the erroneous assumption that we all share its ideology.

Ward would have done better to avoid using the problematic pair of words “the” and “Jews”. As Oxford philosopher Brian Klug has explained, a negative stereotype of “the Jew” is at the heart of antisemitism, projecting an illusory malign and mysteriously powerful figure onto individual Jews and Jewish organisations.

Ward apologised as soon as he realised how his words might be misread. After being dumped by Farron, he offered a creditable account of himself on his Facebook page, indicating that he well understands what antisemitism truly is and realises that generalisations about all Jews are unacceptable.

But he is hardly alone in making unwarranted generalisations. They come most often from people claiming to speak for “the Jewish community” as if this was an undifferentiated mass with no individual opinions. Now that is antisemitic!

If people making comments like David Ward’s express any hostility to Jewish people or give any hint of harbouring hateful feelings against us, I have no hesitation in chastising them for their antisemitism. But there is nothing in Ward’s comments of themselves that even hints at hatred of Jews – and this, as Sir Stephen Sedley reminds us, is what antisemitism is.

I have written to Tim Farron asking him to explain why he has departed from Nick Clegg’s view in 2013 that what David Ward said then was neither racist or antisemitic.

Maybe part of the answer lies with the extreme Zionist Campaign Against Antisemitism, which claimed that it had “worked with outraged Liberal Democrats to raise the issue with Mr Farron when news of Mr Ward’s selection broke.”

The CAA continued gleefully:

“The knockout blow was delivered by Sir Eric Pickles and the Prime Minister during Prime Minister’s Questions. Sir Eric praised the Prime Minister for adopting the International Definition of Antisemitism on behalf of the government, and asked whether she felt that all parties should “not just pay lip service to it, but to actually do something about it”, before attacking Mr Ward’s views.”

Farron obligingly caved in.

I will await with interest the Lib Dem leader’s response to my personal letter, which concluded:

“We are on dangerous ground when we allow proponents of a partisan political (in this case pro-Israeli) stance to determine what may and may not be spoken about. Freedom of expression is seriously at risk here and you, as a Liberal Democrat, should be defending it, not conniving in its demise.”

Palestine Solidarity Meeting with Tom Suarez is Cancelled Twice by Portsmouth Council Because it is ‘Controversial’

The book they want to ban - now why might that be?

Extremismin the Defense of Liberty is no Vice!Moderation in the Pursuit of Justiceis no Virtue! [Barry Goldwater, US Republican Presidential candidate 1964]

A Guest Post by Jenny Flintoft of Portsmouth PSC

This is the real terrorism - that Prevent is designed to protect

Tom Suarez has, on the basis of research in the Government’s archive written a book documenting the terrorist beginnings of the Israeli state. I have yet to read and review the book but by all accounts it is an impeccably documented book.

We can always expect the Daily Mail, the paper that supported Hitler in the 1930's, to be around when it comes to suppressing free speech

What is also clear is that the research in this book, which is based on over 400 documents from the government’s own archives is unacceptable to the Zionist lobby in this country. The Board of Deputies of British Jews, an overtly Zionist body, which calls itself the representative body of Jews in this country has done its best to stop its author Tom Suarez speaking to meetings about his findings.

The Board of Deputies incidentally is elected by nobody. It is based on synagogue membership. It doesn’t represent Britain’s secular Jews, about half of all British Jews, the most cultured and educated section of British Jews but narrow minded businessmen and middle class Zionist bigots. Many of the synagogues elect their representatives on an all male electorate. Others are simply rotten boroughs where there is no election.

Orwell summed up the language of the Prevent Strategy many years ago

On the basis of the squeals of Britain’s Israel lobby, which doesn’t want the truth about Israel to be known, a campaign has been mounted to stop Tom Suarez speaking. One wonders what they have to fear?

What is worse is that this is being done under the cover of the government’s Prevent programme. Prevent was introduced on a mandatory basis under the government’s Counter Terrorism & Security Act 2015. Purportedly designed to prevent terrorism it operated on the theory that people become terrorists because they are ‘radicalised’. This absurd theory misses out small things like the fact that people became terrorists because the government in alliance with the United States went and bombed the hell out of Iraq and Afghanistan killing over 1 million people. Some people wrongly believed that the attack on these countries was because they were Muslim.

The Prevent strategy assumes that people become ‘radicalised’ on the basis of ‘extremist’ political views. What are ‘extremist’ views? Anything which doesn’t subscribe to ‘British values’. Presumably Marxism, subversion, going on strike even, can in certain circumstances be held to be anti-British. Under this all encompassing rubric, the government has forced universities to vet speakers for public meetings because their young audiences may be susceptible to being unduly influenced by ideas which are not normative and conservative. Anti-imperialist ideas, Palestine solidarity and anything else outside the mainstream can be considered ‘extremist’ and thus akin to terrorism. This is the climate we are dealing with. That is also why we need to fight back.

Suarez’s book attacks Israel as a terrorist state. It is therefore outside the political mainstream. It therefore gives a license to pathetic pipsqueaks like Portsmouth’s Prevent Officer Charlie Pericleous to go around trying to close political meetings they don’t like.

Of course this doesn’t excuse in any way the cowardly owners of venues – whether it is the Quaker’s Meeting House in Cambridge which cancelled a talk by Suarez or the Friendship Centre in Portsmouth. A similar meeting at the Friends Meeting House in Brighton which I spoke at with Jackie Walker was the subject of similar attempts to stop the meeting by the Board of Deputies. Fortunately in our case the Friends had a stiffer backbone than their counterparts in Cambridge. In Nottingham another meeting by Jackie and myself also had to be moved at the last minute.

We are facing a concerted attack by the Conservative government and the Israel/Zionist lobby in this country on Free Speech. It needs a robust campaign in response because this is a defence of the very essence of freedom and basic democratic liberties.

Britain’s Palestine Solidarity Campaign has kept its head down and done virtually nothing in response to this attack on the rights of Palestine supporters and anti-Zionists. At the moment PSC is incapable of punching its way out of a paper bag, still less mounting a political fightback against government and state attacks. It even half-welcomed the government’s new International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of anti-Semitism until I threw a fit.

Ben Jamal’s advice to Portsmouth PSC is extremely inadequate. What is needed are not apologies after the event by Council bureaucrats but a determined campaign to ensure that no Council anywhere or any University tries to ban speakers that the Establishment in this country doesn’t like. Universities are under a legal obligation to defend free speech. Councils have to be made to if necessary.

We should be tackling head on this whole nonsense of ‘extremism’. The suffragettes in their day were also considered ‘extremists’. All fighters for freedom, from Nelson Mandella to Emily Davidson were extremists. The biggest danger to freedom comes from ‘moderate’ war mongers like Tony Blair and Theresa May.

The Israel Apartheid Week in British universities came under severe attack in January. One University, the University of Central Lancashire cancelled it outright. Others such as Exeter and University College London put restrictions on it.

We need a nationwide campaign against the attacks on free speech. At the moment there is a Free Speech on Israel campaign but it is very weak. What we need is to organise a nation campaign in defence of our democratic rights involving not just Palestine supporters but civil liberties supporters and anti-racist campaigners.

Below is a description of events at Portsmouth by one of the organisers.

You might also like to send an email to Portsmouth Council's Prevent Officer Charlie Pericleous who can be contacted at: Charlie.pericleous@portsmouthcc.gov.uk and ask if he sees as his main duty closing down democratic meetings.

Tony Greenstein

How Prevent and the Zionists Attempted to Stop Tom Suarez Speaking in Portsmouth

One month ago we booked a venue in Portsmouth, the Friendship Centre, for the evening of Thursday 27 April for an event open to the public. On the Thursday morning we were told our booking had been cancelled 'because of the nature of the speaker', Tom Suarez. We quickly booked a new venue, the Buckland Community Centre, only to be told an hour or two later that that booking was cancelled too. The manager said she had received a call recommending cancellation, but would not say from whom or give the reason. She said that the City Council’s legal team had insisted on cancellation. Again she refused to give the alleged reason or legal basis for the cancellation. She did say to our Chair, Zuber Hatia, that the Council would not allow the meeting to take place in any Community Centre or Church Hall.

The meeting finally went ahead in a pub in Havant, 6 miles away, to a much smaller audience than would normally have been expected. Tom was naturally disappointed , but said several times that he was glad we hadn't cancelled.

The meeting was held to hear Tom Suarez speak about his recently published book, ‘The State of Terror, how terrorism created modern Israel', a book based largely on the evidence of 436 documents in Britain’s national archives. Allowing the meeting to go ahead in the normal way, with a wider audience, would have allowed more people to make up their own minds about what Tom Suarez had to say, question him about his sources and their interpretation and then read the book if they wanted to go deeper.

The Daily Mail got hold of the story & started pestering the MP for Portsmouth S, Flick Drummond. In Flick's own words:

'I was contacted by someone informing me that the Daily Mail was going to write a story about Mr Suarez visiting Portsmouth and what did I think. I did not respond to the Daily Mail at first but just let the police know as I know that there was a riot at the LSE and a fuss in Parliament and I didn't want a big fuss in Portsmouth.

The Daily Mail continued to ring my office and email me so I just told them I had told the police and hoped that was the end of it.

They have misrepresented me and I have no view on Mr Suarez speaking anywhere......

My role has been blown out of all proportion and I assume it is because it makes a better story in the press. I was not seeking to stop the meeting but was concerned about other organisations being stirred up to protest.'

Flick has personally apologised to me no less than five times. Obviously she would have been better not talking to a newspaper that most sensible people avoid like the plague. Perhaps, however, she was put up to it by Conservative Central Office, who saw an opportunity to create an anti-Corbyn scandal. 'Jeremy Corbyn charity hosts anti-Semitic speaker', trumpeted the Mail.

So who was the main villain of the piece? It appears to have been Charlie Pericleous, Portsmouth's smooth-talking, oh-so-charming Prevent Officer. The meeting was advertised a month in advance, so Pericleous had a whole month in which to take any action he deemed necessary. Instead he chose to alert the Friendship Centre on the very day of the meeting that 'special security measures were necessary in view of the nature of the speaker'. The manager was spooked by this & immediately cancelled.

I had a long & frustrating telephone conversation with him & after a lot of weaselling around he finally admitted that he had rung Ruba Begum at Friendship House on Thursday morning to ask if she had 'appropriate security arrangements in place'.

When I asked, 'Why did you do that?' he said, 'Because of the controversial nature of the speaker.'

'Many of our speakers are controversial. We are a campaign, on a controversial issue. Do you think we are Gardeners' Question Time? Why didn't you ring me first, I could have reassured you that there was no need for security, we have never had any incidents in all the years we've been running meetings?'

'I didn't have your contact details.'

'We're not a secret group, you could easily have obtained them.'

He could of course have easily obtained them from MS Begum, but he chose not to.

He agreed to meet us. Ben Jamal had given us some advice on the matter, as follows.

'I think your ask at the meeting should be that the council puts out a clear statement along the following lines: That they did not seek the cancellation of the meeting; that they did not regard Tom as someone who should not be allowed to speak; that there is no bar on his speaking in any venue in Portsmouth; that they are pleased to have met with PSC to have clarified issues – If there has been any suggestion about cancellation of future PSC meetings then you may need to also get them to address that – You may need to allow them to say by way of explanation that they had been liaising with the venues to ensure that there were no security issues - If you want to push it they might want to acknowledge that they should have contacted PSC directly and apologise for not doing so. I would give as a reason for needing a statement that this has generated a huge amount of publicity which is potentially damaging and that you have been informed by one of the venues that they understood that the meeting should be cancelled on council advice so there is a need to address the confusion that has emerged.'

When five of us (including Tom Suarez himself) met Charlie Pericleous a few days later, on May 9th, the meeting was extremely unsatisfactory. It was, as Tom Suarez descibed it, 'an exercise in obfuscation'.

He started off by saying he had received abusive letters from PSC. I said, 'I haven't corresponded with you, only spoken over the phone.''No, it wasn't you.''Who was it then? I haven't authorised anyone to write to you, & I haven't given anyone your email address, because I don't have it.''No, they were letters sent thro' the post'. [Who writes postal letters nowadays?] 'I've got them here,' [pulls out packet]. 'I'd like to see them. If people are writing abusive letters in the name of PSC, I'd like to see them, because I need to deal with it.' [Rummages in packet]. 'One woman was called Tracey.' Tracey who?''Oh, actually I don't seem to have any of them here after all.' !!!!

He point-blank refused to answer any questions we asked. 'I'm not going to do that. I'm here to explain how the system works.'He then proceeded to ramble on for a long time, going round & round in circles & endlessly repeating the same tired meaningless phrases. Instead of listening to our concerns, he started a long lecture about how wonderful Prevent was & how many lives he was saving. Needless to say he provided no evidence of this.

He refused to consider any of the 'asks' suggested by Ben Jamal. Charlie would not be specific about who had told him to intervene in PSDPSC’s bookings at Friendship House and the Buckland Community Centre. He said his intervention had been the outcome of internal staff processes, but who or what had prompted their interest in the meeting he would not say. The reason he gave for advising cancellation was lack of time to assess risks or make arrangements to deal with them: Friendship House had not been told who the speaker was or the subject of the talk.

True, PSDPSC had not got round to supplying the venue with the usual publicity leaflet, but when the manager had contacted us a few days before the event she made no mention of this, only wanting to know what seating layout we wanted. Over the last ten years we have arranged about 80 meetings in Portsmouth, most of them on Council property and on no previous occasion have the venues shown any interest in the identity of speakers or what they would talk about. Booking forms, if any, would typically just have a space for “Description of the booking”. Nor had the Council ever issued any general instructions about what information was needed for bookings or mentioned any need to provide it for riskassessment purposes. PSDPSC meetings have never given rise to any disturbance or posed any risk whatsoever of it occurring.

So when Charlie told us that this was the first public meeting that the City Council had got cancelled in the last ten years his excuse of insufficient time for risk assessment seemed as implausible as everything else he said.

Charlie himself did seem a tad embarrassed over the whole affair, giving no answer when we pointed out that he had scored an own goal as far as his Prevent programme goes, alienating the Muslim community even more. He also failed to answer when Tom asked if the Jewish Board of Deputies was in any way involved. He did tell us that Tom Suarez was not considered an extreme speaker and assured us that there would be no obstacles raised if we arranged a future event with Tom in Portsmouth. We shall see. He refused to agree to the Council issuing a public statement along the lines advised by Ben Jamal at PSC HQ, but promised that some statement by the Council would be forthcoming. As of yet (May 15th) there has been no sign of this statement.

Shortly after the cancelled meeting on Apr 27th, Council employee Ms Megan Barnard took it on herself to write to Tom Suarez's partner, Ms Nancy Elan:

Dear Nancy,

Thank you for your email....The council fully supports free speech, but council officers have to bear in mind the impact on the community of events where inflammatory statements could possibly be made. It's best if venues have time to prepare for such an impact and think about how to manage risks. As Friendship House had not been told the identity of the speaker, council officers advised them that the event might be controversial. They made their own decision to cancel.

A charity that runs a council-owned community centre was then approached to host the talk. Given the short notice there was not enough time to assess the possible impact and put any measures in place to deal with any risks, so council officers advised it would be best for them not to go ahead.

Mr Suarez is not banned from speaking at council venues, but if a booking is made, the venue would need enough time to think about the possible impact of a potentially controversial event and ensure it can go ahead safely.....

Kind regards,

Meg

Megan Barnard

Leader's Programme Manager
Executive Support Team

Community and Communication

Portsmouth City Council

I replied to Ms Barnard myself on May 6th, asking her who might be making 'inflammatory statements'. I pointed out that it looked from the letter as though she thought Suarez might do so, & that this was insulting & possibly libellous. I also asked her clarify what 'risks' there could possibly be. Her reply was to say that she had forwarded the email to her line Manager, Louise Wilders, Director of Community and Communication. Ms Wilders has so far failed to offer any clarification, sending one email which entirely failed to address the questions, & ignoring two further emails.

PSDPSC is not letting this lie. We are putting in a Freedom of Information request for all emails, notes, minutes, reports and correspondence related to the cancellation of the meeting.

Jenny Flintoft, 15/05/17

see also Pro-Israel Interference in Free Speech in the UK

White Zionism – Why The ‘Alt-Right’ Hates Jews But Loves Israel

It has become almost an apocryphal tale of America’s liberal Zionists and their PEP (Progressive Except for Palestine) attitudes. America’s Jews generally support liberal politics and the vast majority of them voted against Donald Trump. Why? Because racial intolerance and bigotry aren’t in their interest. They know enough to know that anti-Semitism and white supremacism have always gone hand in hand.

Netanyahu is so enthralled by Trump that he even adopts his language style

The problem though is that the majority of them, even today, support to a greater or lesser extent the State of Israel. The State of Israel is not a liberal haven but the bastion of a far-Right openly racist government headed by Benjamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu it was who tweeted to Donald Trump that Israel had already built a wall to keep out asylum seekers. He was referring to the wall across the border with Egypt to keep out African refugees. Netanyahu explained that non-Jewish refugees, especially Black Africans, explained that ‘"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,"Israel PM: illegal African immigrants threaten identity of Jewish state

So when Rabbi Rosenberg, who heads the Zionist organisation for students, Hillel at Texas A&M told Richard Spencer of the alt-Right that “My tradition teaches a message of radical inclusion and love,” Spencer responded by asking how radical this inclusion was. Maybe all of the Middle East could come to Tel Aviv he asked mischievously. The good Rabbi was more than aware that Israel is anything but inclusive. It hasn’t taken a single Syrian refugee. It refuses to give citizenship to any of the thousands of migrant labourers from Asia. It even prevents its own Palestinian citizens from marrying anyone in the West Bank. And of course in order to ensure that the Jewish race maintains its ‘identity’ and purity, there is no religious marriage either.

The good rabbi was literally stunned into silence - he had no answer. How could he support segregation and the racist Law of Return when it came to Israel but support liberal immigration policies and anti-racist in America. He simply had no answer to this dilemma and the writer of the article has no answer either.

It is not any wonder that Israel presents a model to most of the American far-Right, just as it is a model for most of the European far-Right? Of course there are dedicated neo-Nazis like Andrew Anglin of the Daily Stormer for whom any Jew is an enemy. But Anglin and fully blown neo-Nazism represents a minority current within the American alt-Right. For those like Spencer and Breitbart News, anti-Semitism and dislike of Jews co-exists quite happily with strong support for Israel. Israel is not only the ideal pure racial state but it is also the hammer of Muslims. The fact that it is Jewish is neither here nor there.

Below is another anguished article in the Jewish Forward magazine, which is finding it hard to come to terms with the fact that the alt-Right which has come into the political mainstream thanks to Trump, combines both love of Israel and a dislike and worse of ordinary Jews. It proves though once again that being an anti-Semite is no barrier to being a Zionist.

Milo Yiannopoulos

That is why people like Spencer and Milo Yiannopoulos former senior editor of Breitbart, who has openly said that Jews control the media and the banks, call themselves White Zionists. Israel provides the perfect model for white supremacists (who like Jewish supremacists call themselves nationalists). Hence why Spencer says that his ‘white “homeland,” he said, would be “very similar to how Jews conceive of Israel.”

That of course is why those who claim there is any correlation between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism are either outright liars or mainstream fools (or both).

Tony Greenstein

The ‘Alt-Right’ Hates the Jews. But It Also Loves Them — and Israel.

Sam KestenbaumJanuary 16, 2017Illustration by Kurt Hoffman

When Rabbi Matt Rosenberg went to a speech presented by one of the country’s leading white nationalists, he hoped to make a statement about the power of Judaism. During a question-and-answer session after the talk, Rosenberg, who heads Hillel at Texas A&M, asked Richard Spencer, the self-styled ambassador of the “alt-right,” whether the two could sit down and study together.

“My tradition teaches a message of radical inclusion and love,” Rosenberg said. “Will you sit town and learn Torah with me, and learn love?”

“Do you really want radical inclusion into the State of Israel?” Spencer asked, a smile spreading across his face. “And by that I mean radical inclusion. Maybe all of the Middle East could go move into Tel Aviv or Jerusalem. Would you really want that?”

Rosenberg fell silent. Spencer did not. He went on, saying the Jewish people have prevailed because they resist assimilation — and he respected that.

“Jews exist precisely because you did not assimilate,” he said. “I respect that about you. I want my people to have that same sense of themselves.” The two men were speaking about different Jewish paradigms: Jews as nation versus Jews as citizens of the world. One of them Spencer praised; the other he sneered at.

New Face: White nationalist and leading ‘alt-right’ figure Richard Spencer addresses a crowd at Texas A&M University in December.

To be sure, the “alt-right,” a contemporary label preferred by white separatists, traffics in xenophobia and nativism of all sorts, including anti-Semitism. Jews are hardly its only, or most prominent, target, but the specter of imagined Jewish control, in which Jews seek to undermine white civilization, is a constant boogeyman.

Yet messages like Spencer’s at Texas A&M reveal another layer of this latest brand of white nationalism. Spencer says his dream of building a “white ethno-state” is “very similar to how Jews conceive of Israel.” He even describes his vision as something like “white Zionism.”

Spencer’s complicated relationship with Jews is illustrative. In the sprawling and divided world of the “alt-right” there are multiple factions. All groups imagine whites as an embattled group, whose white power and control is under threat from non-whites. But they are divided on the next part: Are Jews an enemy to the white nation, a model to emulate, or some combination?

In a glossy promotional video for Spencer’s organization, the National Policy Institute, a pro-Israel march flashes across the screen as Spencer reads aloud, “At a time when every other people is asserting its own [identity]… are we ready to become who we are?”

‘Jesus Christ Was A Jewish Klansman.’

Spencer isn’t the first white separatist to hold seemingly contradictory views on the Jews. Earlier white supremacists like the Ku Klux Klan had a similar love-hate relationship; Spencer and his cohort are building on these foundations.

In a 1926 tract on “religious and patriotic ideals,” one KKK-affiliated minister praised Jews as “a wonderful people,” particularly the way in which they have maintained the “purity of their racial blood, refusing to intermarry with other races.”

White Terror: Hooded Ku Klux Klan members meet, circa 1920. One leader of the white supremacist group praised Jews for being ‘Klannish since the days of Abraham,’ even as Jews were denounced as ‘an evil influence.’

The minister, a Texan named W. C. Wright, called Jesus Christ a Klansman — because he “belonged to the oldest Klan in existence, the Jewish theocracy.”

In Wright’s imagination, Jesus promoted a type of Jewish supremacy — just as the KKK fought for white supremacy. “Jews have been Klannish since the days of Abraham,” Wright wrote.

When the Ku Klux Klan Loved the Jews Sam Kestenbaum

Even an Imperial Wizard of the KKK’s heyday had praise, of sorts, for Jews. Alabama-born Hiram Wesley Evans, who presided over the KKK in the 1920s, called Jews “healthy, morally alert, energetic, loyal and reverent.”

But there always has been — and still is — a flipside to this admiration of the Jews.

In 1923 address titled “The Menace of Modern Immigration,”Evans called Jews “alien and inassimilable,” a breed of people who demonstrated an “evil influence.”

“There [was] admiration but also a nervousness about what Jews mean for larger national culture,” Kelly J. Baker, author of “Gospel According to the Klan,” told the Forward. “They were saying: ‘We can admire that they have not assimilated, that they have stayed separate — and immediately follow it, ‘But I think they are primarily evil.’”

‘I Began Rethinking Everything.’

Years ago, before his David Duke affiliations, “Hail Trump” Nazi salutes and rise to fame amid the campaign of Donald Trump, Spencer attended elite private schools in Dallas. Some of his classmates and friends were Jewish.

“The Jews were the kids that told me Santa Claus wasn’t real. They were kind of nerdy and little different,” Spencer said. “I didn’t have any major problems with them.”

Spencer didn’t reflect too much on Jewishness or on race at all.

Kurt Hoffman

He was a dedicated student, and in 2005, Spencer entered a doctoral program at Duke University, studying European intellectual history.

But he dropped out, his website reads, “to pursue a life of thought-crime.”

He had flirted with far-right ideology, but in the next years he would make a more dramatic shift. “I knew there was something wrong with the world,” Spencer told the Forward. “I began rethinking everything.”

In 2010 he founded a website called AlternativeRight.com and around the same time took the helm at the NPI think-tank, which is “dedicated to the heritage, identity, and future of people of European descent in the United States.”

Among his influences he cites Jared Taylor, the white nationalist editor of the website American Renaissance, which describes itself as the “premier race-realist site” on the internet. An early mentor of Spencer’s, Paul Gottfried, the inventor of the term “alternative right,” is Jewish and is a graduate of Yeshiva University.

Taylor describes himself as a “white advocate,” but he has made clear that he has no problem working with Jews; one time, he even banned discussion of the so-called “Jewish question” from online forums associated with American Renaissance.

And Spencer has said he respects some Jewish nationalists, including the prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu.

“I would say, if I were to have a beer with Netanyahu I bet we would agree on everything. I think we would see eye to eye,” Spencer said. “If I had a beer with Jon Stewart, he would be horrified and I would be annoyed.”

Spencer’s “white ethno state” is his long-term goal. It’s just a dream, he says, and he’s not sure how to get there. But he evokes the success of the Zionist project. His white “homeland,” he said, would be “very similar to how Jews conceive of Israel.”

Theodor Herzl conceived of his Jewish state as a solution to the imperiled condition of Jews in the Diaspora. Herzl and his cohort feared that something catastrophic was on the horizon. The horrors of the Holocaust — millions of Jews murdered by the Nazis — were the heinous culmination of European anti-Semitism. The mass killing helped galvanize support for the Jewish national project in the Middle East.

‘Alt Right’ Model? Members of the pre-state Haganah defense movement gather at Kibbutz Brenner in British Mandate of Palestine in 1938.

Israel’s founding document, its Declaration of Independence, while declaring the country a Jewish state, also made a “striking embrace of all peoples and religions,”said Jonathan Sarna, professor of American Jewish history at Brandeis University.

“It would be difficult to square that with the notion of a white nation,” Sarna said. “That is the very opposite of what the white nationalists want.”

For “alt-right” members who see Zionism in a positive light of sorts, it may have little to do with the country of Israel itself.

“For a lot of people, Israel is a Rorschach test,” Sarna said. “What they see in Israel tells us more about them than it does about Israel.”

Spencer compares himself to pre-state Zionist thinkers, seeing his role as a dreamer — not necessarily as someone who would build his whites-only nation, but one who would lay conceptual groundwork for a state.

“A similar thing could be said of Jews. Jews were imagining Zionism there is a Jewish state in the Middle East,” Spencer said in a radio interview with the website Reveal. “You have to dream it before you build it.” he said, trying his hand at a very Herzlian-sounding mantra.

There “is often talk about ‘Zionism’ as being a horrible evil that intends to take over the world,” author Brett Stevens wrote in August on the website Alternative-right.blogpost.com, “forgetting that Zionism is an assertion of Nationalism — the idea that Jews need their own state, and all Jews belong there, where they can control their destiny and live according to their ways.”

‘There Are Two Alt-Rights.’

Still, Spencer’s admiration for Jews is mixed with repulsion — particularly the belief that Jews have played a negative and outsize role in the decline of white civilization. And this attitude can be found across the contemporary white nationalist camp, which is beset with internecine disputes.

He calls the so-called “Jewish question” (or “JQ,” in contemporary “alt-right” lingo) among the most “complicated and difficult” topics for white nationalists. The term “Jewish question” of course is best known for its use in Nazi Germany, where leaders gathered on the shores of Lake Wannsee outside Berlin to plan the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question in Europe.”

He sees some liberal Jews, like the Texan rabbi, as “duplicitous,” presenting their case in “gooey, universalistic” terms. “I think it is easy to understand black crime, illegal immigrants, that’s in your face,” Spencer said. “But the Jewish question is extremely complicated.”

Indeed, the question of just how the “alt-right” should relate to Jews is a frequent fault line among Spencer’s followers and fellow travelers.

In December, the divergent views of the “alt-right” on Jews came to a head after online personality Tim Treadstone (better known as “Baked Alaska”) was booted from an upcoming “alt-right” inauguration event called the Deploraball after a series of tweets he wrote about the media being“run in majority by Jewish people.”

“Alt-right” personality Mike Cernovich, the event’s organizer, was worried that Treadstone’s anti-Semitism would undermine the growing political influence of the “alt-right” after Trump’s win. “No Nazi salutes, no JQ bullshit,” Cernovich wrote privately to Treadstone, scolding him and removing him from the event bill shortly thereafter. Paul Joseph Watson, an editor of the conspiracist website Infowars, which is also associated with the “alt-right,” described the “two ‘alt-rights.’”

One likes to wear Trump hats, “create memes & have fun,” he wrote in a public Facebook post. “The other faction likes to fester in dark corners of subreddits and obsess about Jews, racial superiority and Adolf Hitler.”

‘At The End Of The Day, We Are Very Different.’

The most fiercely anti-Jew faction of the “alt-right” may be best personified in Andrew Anglin, who runs the neo-Nazi website the Daily Stormer.

In the ongoing battle for the trajectory of the “alt-right” movement, Anglin has offered his views bluntly: “The goal is to ethnically cleanse white nations of nonwhites and establish an authoritarian government. Many people also believe that the Jews should be exterminated.”

Troll King: Andrew Anglin, founder and editor of the neo-Nazi Daily Stormer website, has called for the ‘extermination’ of Jews.

And unlike Spencer, Anglin has no admiration for Israel or Zionism. He cheers terrorist attacks against Israelis, laments the special U.S.-Israel relationship and sees in that relationship an expression of ultimate Jewish power. Anglin’s website has billed itself as the “The World’s Most Visited ‘Alt-Right’ Website” and features stories on alleged Jewish world control and black-on-white crime. Anglin has mounted numerous online campaigns — dubbed “troll storms” — against Jewish public figures. (The attacks have provocative titles, like “Operation: Jew Wife” or “Operation: Filthy Jew Bitch.”)

Anglin’s most recent campaign calls for an armed march against local Jews in Whitefish, Montana, where Spencer lives part time. Montana is among the country’s whitest states and has a minuscule Jewish population; however, the Whitefish area is a Jewish hub of sorts, home to a community of more than 100 families and individuals.

Anglin’s anti-Jewish campaign is in response to local activism against white nationalism and Spencer in particular. But Anglin sees Spencer and his family as the true victims: the Jews, the persecutors.

“The Jewish relationship to the goyim in this country has for decades resembled a man lying on the ground and being kicked in the head. Well, the goyim are standing up,” Anglin — who said he no longer speaks with any Jew on the telephone — wrote in an email to the Forward.

Spencer and Anglin agree on a lot. Spencer imagines the Whitefish Jews as people who have “set up left-wing organizations on their behalf,” perpetually “alien” to the world they live in. Spencer said he appreciates Anglin’s support.

But Spencer has also called for the Whitefish fiasco to “come to an end.”

In his Forward interview, Spencer said he hoped to spend the next weeks around Washington, possibly working on a short documentary. He had no plans to be in Whitefish for the march, building his own movement.

While Anglin rants against Jewish control in rural Montana, Spencer wants to build his “white Zionism” in D.C.

Within the broad category of the “alt-right,” you have people who have “genocidal views and people who have views of admiration, both of which are based on stereotypes,” said Chip Berlet, an independent researcher of white supremacy.

“In the minds of some people, Jews are either exceptionally talented or in league with Satan,” Berlet said. “It’s a love-hate relationship.”

“Clearly there has been a Jewish role in white dispossession,” Spencer said in his Forward interview, echoing Anglin and others. “But the ‘alt-right’ can learn something from Jewish history.”

How, exactly? “We can build networks that are national and international,” Spencer said.

Then he added, “We can also be a bit duplicitous.”

Earlier this week Israel’s Knesset passed the first reading of the Jewish Nation-state bill. In so doing it made it clear, beyond any doubt, that Israel is now officially an apartheid state. Israel has, of course, always declared itself to be a Jewish state, despite having a 20% non-Jewish minority. But now this has become a Basic Law, which is the equivalent of a constitutional law in a country with no constitution.

At the same time the status of the Arab language, which up till now has been a second official language of Israel, although in practice very few signs are in both Hebrew and Arabic, has now been relegated to a language with a ‘special status’.

This is of course what happened in South Africa where Afrikaans was the official language.

Israel is a state without a nationality – something that is quite unique in any modern state. Instead nationalities are based on religion, a pre-French revolution concept, and being a Jewish state the Jewish ‘nationality’ was the first and most important.

A good example of how the Jewish state treats non-jews

This whole concept of a Jewish state is based on the racial myth that Israel is the 'historic homeland' of the Jewish people. It is nothing of the sort. It may be the religious centre of the Jewish religion but Zionism is about creating a Jewish nation/race. It is not a religious movement although it uses religion to define that nation/race. It is like suggesting that Palestine is the historic homeland of Christians because Jesus was born, crucified and resurrected there.

The home of Jews throughout the world is where they live. Pure and simple. Anything else is a racial myth and should be consigned to the same historical dustbin as ideas of a 1,000 year Reich.

But it is worse than that because Israel is a state not of its own citizens – Jewish and non-Jewish – but a state of the ‘Jewish people’ a mythical concept which is based on race not religion.

Read the following article by Jonathan Cook which is extremely good.

Tony Greenstein

Apartheid flags flies outside Knesset

Israel’s Jewish Nation-State bill ‘declaration of war’

11 May 2017

Israel’s Knesset has passed its first vote on a new bill defining Israel as ‘a national home of the Jewish people’

Al Jazeera – 11 May 2017

New legislation to cement the definition of Israel as a state belonging exclusively to Jews around the world is a “declaration of war” on Palestinian citizens of Israel, the minority’s leaders warned this week.

The bill, which defines Israel as the “national home of the Jewish people”, passed its first vote in the Israeli parliament on Wednesday, after it received unanimous backing from a government committee on Sunday.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to get the measure on to the statute books within 60 days.

Fraudster Netanyahu speaks on 4th May 2017 in favour of Israel Apartheid Bill

Among its provisions, the legislation – popularly known as the Jewish Nation-State Bill – revokes the status of Arabic as an official language, even though it is the mother tongue of one in five citizens. Israel’s population includes a large minority of 1.7 million Palestinians.

The legislation affirms that world Jewry has a “unique” right to national self-determination in Israel, and calls for the government to further strengthen ties to Jewish communities outside Israel.

It also increases the powers of so-called “admissions committees” that block Palestinian citizens from living in hundreds of communities that control most of Israel’s land.

Threat to peace talks

In addition, critics are concerned that the legislation is intended to stymie prospects of reviving peace talks with the Palestinian leadership in the occupied territories. US President Donald Trump is due in the region later this month in what is widely assumed to be an attempt to kick-start a long-stalled peace process.

Netanyahu, however, has already indicated that he will insist on a precondition that Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, recognise Israel as a Jewish state. The new bill effectively sets out the terms of the state Abbas is expected to recognise.

Netanyahu said this week that all Zionist parties in parliament would be expected to support the legislation. “The bill establishes the fact that the State of Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish people in our historic homeland,” he told supporters of his Likud party.

He added: “There is no contradiction at all between this bill and equal rights for all citizens of Israel.” However, leaders of Israel’s large Palestinian minority strenuously disagreed.

‘We won’t disappear’

Ayman Odeh, head of the Palestinian-dominated Joint List party in the Israeli parliament, warned that the legislation would ensure “the tyranny of the majority over the minority”.

Under the bill, Hebrew alone will be an official language, with Arabic accorded only “special status”. Palestinian citizens already complain that most public services and official documents are not provided in Arabic.

“The aim is to portray institutional racism in Israel as entirely normal, and make sure the apartheid reality here is irreversible,” Haneen Zoabi, a Palestinian member of the Israeli parliament, told Al Jazeera.

“It is part of the right’s magical thinking – they are in denial that there is an indigenous people here still living in their homeland. We are not about to disappear because of this law.”

Superior rights

In strictly legal terms, the Jewish Nation-State Bill offers limited changes. Since its founding in 1948, Israel has defined itself as a state of the Jewish people rather than of all the country’s citizens, including its Palestinian minority.

The Law of Return of 1950 allows only Jews to immigrate to Israel and receive citizenship. Adalah, a legal rights group, has documenteddozens of laws that explicitly discriminate against Palestinian citizens.

But the new legislation is significant for reasons beyond its immediate legal implications.

Not least, it gives Israel’s self-definition as the nation-state of the Jewish people something akin to constitutional standing, observed Ali Haider, a human rights lawyer and former co-director of Sikkuy, an organisation lobbying for equal citizenship rights.

The bill, if passed, will join a handful of Basic Laws intended to provide the foundation for any future constitution. Such laws take precedence over ordinary laws and are much harder to repeal.

“This is a very dangerous step because it makes explicit in a Basic Law that all Jews, even those who are not citizens, have superior rights in Israel to those citizens who are Palestinian,” he told Al Jazeera.

Intimidation of judges

An alternative draft of the new law that promised equal rights to all citizens was effectively blocked by the government in January when it came up for consideration.

Haider said the new version would provide the constitutional foundation to justify a tide of other laws intended to marginalise Palestinian citizens and erode their rights as citizens.

An Expulsion Law passed last year gives Israeli parliament the power to expel Palestinian MPs if they make political statements the Jewish majority disapprove of. Another bill before the parliament, the Muezzin Law, silences the Muslim call to prayer.

Such laws are almost certain to be challenged in Israel’s supreme court. “The judges will be much more reluctant to intervene if the Jewish Nation-State Bill is in force,” Haider said. “They will feel under pressure to ignore basic democratic principles and give priority to Israel’s Jewish character.”

He added that there would be little opposition from the Jewish public. A survey by the Israel Democracy Institute last December foundthat more than half of Israeli Jews wanted any citizen who rejected Israel’s definition as a Jewish state stripped of basic rights.

Preparations for annexation

Another key goal of the bill for the Netanyahu government is its likely impact on any moves to revive peace talks with the Palestinians. Abbas and Donald Trump met last week.

Netanyahu’s government no longer pays even lip service to the idea that it might agree to a Palestinian state. Most debates in the Israeli cabinet focus instead on intensifying settlement building and preparations for annexing areas of the West Bank.

Zoabi noted that since Netanyahu came to power in 2009, he has worked tirelessly to persuade Washington to accept a new precondition for talks: that the Palestinian leadership must first recognise Israel as a Jewish state.

Sacrificing refugees’ rights

The new bill would place Abbas in a tricky position, allowing him to enter talks with Israel only if he first agrees to sacrifice the rights both of Israel’s Palestinian citizens to equal citizenship and of millions of Palestinian refugees to return to their former homes.

“This law is aimed not only at Abbas but at Trump,” said Zoabi.“It gives him a map instructing him exactly what can be negotiated over and what the terms of a solution must look like.”

Avi Dichter, a member of Netanyahu’s party who drafted the bill, indicated the diplomatic use it would be put to.

He told the Israeli website Ynet: “The Palestinian aspiration to eliminate the Jewish people’s nation-state is no longer secret”. He added that Israel must make “demands of its enemies to recognize it as the nation-state of the Jewish people”.

Netanyahu echoed Dichter, saying this week that the bill was “the clearest answer to all those who are trying to deny the deep connection between the people of Israel and its land”.

Apartheid regime

It is probably not coincidental that the Nation-State Bill is being fast-tracked as far-right ministers in Netanyahu’s government have drafted separate legislation to apply Israeli laws in the West Bank.

This is a key component of efforts by settlers and their supporters in government to annex the West Bank by stealth.

Marzuq al-Halabi, a Palestinian journalist writing for the Israeli website 972, warned this week that on the back of the Nation-State Bill the government would seek to redraw Israel’s borders to include parts or all of the West Bank.

The resulting “apartheid regime” would then “create… ‘justified crimes’ against the Palestinian people, such as population transfer or removal,” he wrote.

A Haaretz editorial agreed that Netanyahu was laying the groundwork for annexing the West Bank without conferring rights on its Palestinian population.

The new law, it said, was intended as “the constitutional cornerstone for apartheid” in Israel and the occupied territories, allowing Israel to “maintain control over… a Palestinian majority living under its rule”.

Tom Suarez has produced an important book on the bloody and terrorist origins of the Israeli state. It is for this reason and no other that Zionist organisations in this country – primarily the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the so-called Campaign Against Anti-Semitism have been waging a campaign to prevent halls from staging his talks.

Disgracefully Portsmouth City Council via its Prevent Officer Charlie Pericleous used the bogus pretext of ‘anti—terrorism’ to stifle out free speech in Portsmouth. It is incumbent upon the Palestine solidarity and wider labour movement to ensure that Israel’s policy of censorship is not exported to Britain.

That means first and foremost that Palestine Solidarity Campaign and other groups should rise to the challenge by organising a speaking tour for Tom Suarez. They want to shut him up, we should say no to Zionist Political Terrorism. Free Speech is a principle that Zionism is not going to destroy in this country.

Tony Greenstein

It's shocking that someone should call Israel racist or fascist

Israel, Zionism and the smearing of critics

Jonathan Cook
15 May 2017

Tom Suarez has written an important history of early Zionism, State of Terror, finding in British archives a wealth of evidence damaging to the Zionist cause. The archives reveal a troubling story of a colonial settler movement prepared to ally itself with powerful anti-semites in European

governments to achieve its goal of creating a Jewish state in Palestine. That included at different times dealing with the Nazis and the Italian fascists.

It is also worth remembering that British officials who aided the Zionist movement were far from immune to anti-semitism either. The Balfour Declaration, 100 old years this year, was Britain’s promise to the Zionists to help them create a “national home” at the expense of the Palestinian people. But as Edwin Montagu, the only Jew in the British cabinet at that time, realised, it was also a very good way for Britain’s anti-semitic elites to rid themselves of a domestic Jewish population while also creating a colony-state in the Middle East dependent on Britain.

The notorious racist Jonathan Hoffman spearheads campaign to suppress free speeech

As Suarez’s books reveals in shocking detail, any means were seen as legitimate by the Zionists, including violence and terrorism against Palestinian civilians, the British, and even fellow Jews, in their efforts to drive out the native population. A lengthy extract from Suarez’s book, published by Mondoweiss, gives a disconcerting taste of what the Zionists were prepared to do to win themselves someone else’s homeland.

The single most deadly terror attack conducted by the Zionists in Palestine was not the blowing up of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in 1946, as is commonly remembered. It was “the Jewish Agency’s bombing of the immigrant ship Patria in 1940, killing an estimated 267 people, of whom more than 200 were Jews fleeing the Nazis.”

How shocking - the Daily Mail is affronted by the idea that Zionism is either fascist or racist - being a paragon of anti-racism itself

The Jewish Agency, the Zionists’ government-in-waiting in Palestine, wanted to foil British efforts to relocate to Mauritius these Jewish refugees fleeing Europe. For the Zionist leadership, it was worth killing Jews if it aided the cause of creating a Jewish state in Palestine. As Suarez concludes, the terror attack “was no aberration, but the driving principle of the Zionist project: Persecuted Jews served the political project, not the other way around.”

Similar uses of terror continued after Israel’s creation in 1948, part of false-flag operations to drive Jews out of Arab lands as a way to bolster the Jewish majority in the new state of Israel.

Suarez also reminds us that before the rise of Hitler the Zionist movement was far from popular, even among most European Jews: most Jews and Jewish leaders dismissed Zionism as the latest anti-Semitic cult. They had fought for equality, and resented being told that they should now make a new ghetto – and worse yet, to do so on other people’s land. They resented being cast as a separate race of people, as Zionism demanded.

The Daily Mail - the paper which supported Hitler - is concerned about allegations that the Zionists (who it calls Jews) exploited the Holocaust - it is a matter of record that they did!

Even after Hitler launched the Holocaust, most Jews fleeing Europe wanted to head to the new promised land of the United States, not a territory unknown to them in a region, the Middle East, most would have associated with deserts and backwardness. But US Zionists lobbied their own officials ferociously to get the doors closed to most of these Jews, forcing them to become Zionists in Palestine.

In 1944 US Zionist leaders sabotaged President Roosevelt’s provisional success in establishing a half million new homes for European DPs [displaced persons], most of these homes in the United States and Britain. When Roosevelt’s aide Morris Ernst visited the Zionist leaders in an attempt to save the program, he was, in his words, “thrown out of parlours and accused of treason” – “treason”, because he was Jewish, and the Zionists owned Jews.

This is archival history that has been intentionally forced down the memory hole – by Zionist organisations, by Israel and by British officials – for very good reason. It risks reminding us that Israel emerged out of an unholy alliance between, on the one hand, British anti-semites and colonial officials and, on the other, Jewish ethnic supremacists who had adopted for themselves the ugly ideology of Europe’s racial nationalists.

US intelligence officials in the Middle East, points out Suarez, understood the roots of Zionist ideology. In a report in 1943, they concluded that Zionism in Palestine was “a type of nationalism which in any other country would be stigmatised as retrograde Nazism”.

The tactics of the Zionist leadership haven’t much changed even now that their state, Israel, has been achieved. Today, they don’t need to blow up hotels to get their way. Instead, its more fanatical devotees use respectable kinds of terror to silence anyone, like Suarez, who wants to remind us of this hidden history and help us understand how the past can cast a very clear light on the present.

I advise you to read this post by him explaining how Zionist leaders in the UK, backed by media like the Daily Mail (a paper that has a long history of anti-semitism and that expressed sympathy for the Nazis back in the 1930s), have worked on a ruthless misinformation campaign to seek to discredit Suarez and prevent him from holding public events. The catalogue of cancelled speaking engagements he documents is truly exasperating.

Sadly, too few organisations emerge from this affair with honour. These confected smear campaigns still work because we let them. The Quakers, who have had a relatively good history of supporting pro-Palestinian activism, have let themselves down badly in twice bowing to such intimidation.

The goal of Zionist activists like Jonathan Hoffman and Zionist organisations like the Board of

Deputies of British Jews is not just to silence Suarez. They want to pillory him as a warning to anyone who might think to follow in his footsteps. Similar intimidation campaigns in the UK to stop criticism of Israel have been launched against Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and a raft of Labour activists who support Palestinian rights.

Will any academic, young or old, dare to unearth more of these of official documents telling the real story of Israel’s creation? Would any of them want to suffer the smears and the irreparable damage to their professional reputations after seeing what has happened to Suarez.

Similar campaigns against journalists (I have some personal experience of this!) ensure that they mostly keep their heads down too. They won’t be publicising or reviewing Suarez’s book.

When politicians, writers, thinkers, journalists and academics are all targeted if they dare to speak even a little truth about Israel or about Zionism, who is left with any prominence who can do so?

Jonathan Hoffman and smear artists like him know the answer very well. Which is why they are not about to stop using misinformation and falsehoods to blacken the name of anyone with integrity like Suarez who tries to offer some illumination.

Are You a Holocaust Believer? Neo-Nazi Facebook Group Masquerades as Anti-Zionist

Say No to Israel's neo-Nazi Admins

Some months ago I was a made a member of the Say No to Israel site. I don’t even know when. Nor have I ever commented on the site. My only interaction with SNTI was to post links to articles from my blog.

A week ago I noticed that an Alex McGowin had posted a link on the Say no to Israel FB page to ‘Holocaust Deprogramming Course’. Curious as to what this might entail, I clicked on the picture and sure enough it led to a fully fledged holocaust denial site with all the same old nonsense.

I therefore sent a message to the four Admins - Robert Farrar, Kyle Khalil Zanika, Abyssa Khaliland Karmen Yiu-Zanika– asking that this post be deleted. After this I thought nothing of it until a couple of days later, Kyle contacted me to say he was going to remove the post and when was it posted. By this time I couldn’t even remember the name of the FB group in question. When Kyle reminded me, I searched through all the groups of which I was a member and then a curious thing – I didn’t seem to be a member of any such group!

The original post I complained about - am I a holocaust believer!

It was therefore clear that I must have been removed by an Admin and when I put this to Kyle he said that the only admins were he and his daughter Karmen. The first lie which he told since there are 4 listed (see graphic). After pointing out that I had sent my message to all 4 admins he then said that a Robert Farrar had removed me because ‘he said you were posting things irrelevant to the cause.’ I’m not sure which cause he was referring to by this time.

My conversation with Kyle - admin for SNTI FB group

He then made a very curious remark. 'Are you a Holocaust believer?' It’s like asking someone if they believe the Earth is round! Most people, strangely enough do.

Kyle then informed me that the Holocaust is ‘very disputable’ on the basis that ‘some of my Jewish friends told me that it was the greatest lie in history.’ ‘Some of my best friends are Jewish’ is the standard response of anti-Semites but it still took me aback. Then he went on a ramble about the Holocaust having been 75 years ago when news was controlled by the Elite (whoever they are) and when ‘we had no way to check facts.’ I suspect even 75 years ago it was quite easy to check out facts. What became very clear is that Kyle had checked out nothing bar his own prejudices.

From the World Jewish Congress Yearbook

I asked Kyle why he had originally said he would remove the post if he found nothing wrong with it, but there was no answer to this or indeed most of my other comments. Apparently Kyle is ‘100% semite’ whatever that is, but the Holocaust is irrelevant. At this point I was beginning to think that maybe Kyle was suffering from cognitive dissonance as nothing he said was making much sense.

Those liking holocaust denial comments

After challenging him to name his friends in Chicago I was told that he couldn’t do this as I might be the Mossad, though it’s difficult to know why Israel’s MI6 should be interested in a certified nutter. But at least his ‘many friends’ had now declined to just one anonymous friend.

Kyle’s main reasons for believing the Holocaust didn’t happen was that there were only 5 million European Jews in 1939 so how can 6 million die? He had this on good authority from a 1939 New York Times article. Unsurprisingly he couldn't provide an exact date, meaning it will be impossible to check. In any case the Nazis were quite happy with a figure of 11 million in January 1942. though this was probably too high. It is difficult to believe that there was a population explosion amongst Europe’s Jews between 1939 and 1942 such that the Jewish population more than doubled.

The SNTI FB page has over 5,000 members so it is clear that many members are unaware of the fact that the site is controlled by neo-Nazis, anti-Semites or racist buffoons. Having undertaken a more in depth look at the site it is clear that there is a hard-core of fascists and neo-Nazis posting Holocaust denial and anti-Semitic stuff.

Communism = Judaism (if only!)

I would hope therefore that most of those who are members would not want to associate with this site. It was the Hitler regime and anti-Semitism in Europe which led to thousands of Jews in the 1930’s emigrating to Palestine. The numbers doubled from 209,000 Jews in Palestine in 1933 to over 400,000 in 1939. This provided the critical mass for the Jewish state-in-the-making. Without the Hitler regime in Germany, it is unlikely there would have been a Zionist State of Israel.

To therefore post nonsense about there having been no Holocaust in Nazi occupied Europe is worse than stupidity. It is to give aid and comfort to the very political force that was responsible for the establishment of the Israeli state in the first place, a state which ethnically cleansed its Arab population in order to create an artificial Jewish majority.

The Nazi apologetics of Robert Farrar, Kyle Khalil Zanika, Abyssa Khaliland Karmen Yiu-Zanika far from being a sign of opposition to Zionism are the very opposite.

There is nothing that the Zionist movement wants to see than Holocaust denial in the Palestine solidarity movement. Why? Because it ‘proves’ that their opponents are anti-Semitic and thus provide s a powerful justification for the Israeli state and Zionism. Without anti-Semitism there would never have been Zionism but Kyle and co. are too stupid to understand this very simple piece of logic.

Of course it is understandable why Kyle and his fellow fools are holocaust deniers. Zionism claims that the justification for and legitimacy of Israel is provided by the Holocaust. The Holocaust is, if you like, the historic recompense for the murder of 6 million Jews. Kyle and friends, like Ahmedinajad in Iran, believe that if you deny the Holocaust then you deny the legitimacy of Israel.

Another delightful post on the SNTI FB page

There is just one problem with this idiocy. The Holocaust took place independently of the use that Zionism makes of it today. It is a historical fact. The Holocaust happened. Its chief perpetrators, Eichmann, Himmler and Hoess the commandant of Auschwitz, all admitted that the Holocaust took place. Eichmann boasted of his role in a freely given interview with Dutch Nazi journalist Wilhelm Sassen in 1957 and Himmler was recorded in October 1943 explaining the reasons for the extermination of the Jews to senior SS officers in Posen, Poland.

Looking through the list of members of the Say No to Israel site, it didn’t surprise me that arch racist and holocaust denier Gilad Atzmon is a member.

Tony Greenstein

Once again Corbyn Backs Down as Zionist Lobby Continues to Attack him

The article below by Asa Winstanley makes it clear that the draft Labour manifesto was altered as a result of pressure from the Labour Friends of Israel, which is nothing more than a front for the Israeli Labour Party, and the Jewish Labour Movement, an extension of the Israeli Labour Party inside our Labour Party.

A statement that the expansion of settlements on the West Bank was ‘wrong and illegal’ was taken out at the last minute. Likewise a statement that ‘that Labour “cannot accept the continued humanitarian crisis in the Occupied Palestinian Territories” was also removed.

The humanitarian crisis in Gaza includes hunger, people dying for lack of medicines, water that is 90% unfit to be drunk and an inability to rebuild after Israel's last attack because Israel refuses to allow building materials in (in conjunction with the Egypian police state under Sisis with whom Israel works). Couple this with electricity for 3-4 hours a day, 80% unemployment, Israel regularly shooting and killing Gaza fishermen because Israel doesn't like Palestinians in Gaza having independent access to food resources, and you have a humanitarian catastrophe. Corbyn's gutlessness in not facing that snake Tom Watson down and insisting that Israel is at fault is despicable.

The equation of Israel's continuous military violence with Palestinian attempts to fight back is an example of how far Corbyn has capitulated to Watson and co

The idea that 'rockets' from Gaza, which are little more than car exhausts and which haven't in any case been fired now for some 2 years, equates to the FI-5 fighter planes of Israel and the one ton bombs they drop on civilian areas is to equate the violence of the Yugoslav resistance with that of the Nazis.

The reason why the initial policy statements were dropped? These statements were unbalanced. Presumably a condemnation of Apartheid in South Africa would also have been ‘unbalanced’ as far as the White Supremacists were concerned. How can you be neutral between an occupier and the occupied? The idea of 'equivalence' between an occupier and an occupied people, who are subject to the full force of military repression is obscene.

Showing the typical Zionist ingratitude, Jeremy Newmark of the racist Jewish Labour Movement makes it clear that he doesn't and won't support Corbyn as Prime Minister - fortunately Newmark is in an unwinnable

Israel maintains a military and settler colonial occupation of the West Bank. 3 million Palestinians have no civil or political rights. They are governed by an entirely different set of laws and regulations to Jewish settlers, Military Law as opposed to Israel’s civil law, is usually known as Apartheid. When one takes into account that Israel’s Palestinians are also treated as a guest population, segregated and the subject of violence and discrimination, in Israel on sufferance, then the removal of even the reference to the continued humanitarian crisis, especially in Gaza is a disgrace.

Corbyn spent 30+ years in the Palestine solidarity movement. His capitulation to the Zionist lobby is sad. The same lobby which, in the case of the Jewish Labour Movement voted 92-4% to support Owen Smith last summer. The Chair of the JLM Jeremy Newmark has made it clear that in the event of him being elected, fortunately very unlikely, he would not support Jeremy Corbyn alongside a number of right-wingers such as Hove’s Peter Kyle and John Woodcock.

The Zionists would have Labour be even handed between a military occupation and the rights of those who live under occupation

The Israeli state isn't the cuddly and warm Jewish state that its propagandists over here put over. Israel is the state that forged the closest alliance with Apartheid South Africa. It is the state that supplied, armed and trained the Guatemalan military who murdered up to 200,000 Mayan Indians. In other words Israel is a pariah state led by war criminals.

Unfortunately there is no Palestine solidarity group inside the Labour Party to counter the Israeli Embassy’s groups – Labour Friends of Israel and Jewish Labour Movement.

Tony Greenstein

Israel lobby claims “win” over Labour manifesto changes

Status message

Your comment has been queued for review by site administrators and will be published after approval.

Asa Winstanley Lobby Watch 17 May 2017

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn launching the party’s 2017 manifesto. (Labour Party)

A section about Palestine in the UK Labour Party’s new manifesto was significantly altered after intervention from the Israel lobby.

The main opposition party published a list of pledges this week ahead of a general election on 8 June.

A draft of the manifesto was leaked to the press last week.

Reference in the draft to “expansion of Israeli settlements on the Palestinian West Bank” being “wrong and illegal” was removed from the final document.

A second line stating that Labour “cannot accept the continued humanitarian crisis in the Occupied Palestinian Territories” was also removed.

According to London newspaper The Times, the changes were made after Jeremy Newmark, chair of pro-Israel group the Jewish Labour Movement, complained about the draft being an “unbalanced, partisan” text.

The final document demanded both “an end to the [Israeli] blockade” of Gaza, its “occupation and settlements” and an “end to [Palestinian] rocket and terror attacks.” By doing so, it created a false equation between the violence of Israel, a highly militarized state, and the resistance tactics used by some Palestinian groups in response to Israeli oppression.

Palestinian state

But Labour’s commitment to recognizing a Palestinian state was also made more explicit in the final version.

The draft had only said a Labour government would “support Palestinian recognition at the UN.” The final version commits the party to “immediately recognize the state of Palestine” if it wins the election.

Labour Friends of Israel, a pressure group within the party, has described the changes as a “difficult win,” according to The Jewish Chronicle.

Jeremy Newmark did not reply to request for comment.

Newmark is a long-standing leader in the UK’s Israel lobby, and has a history of working closely with the Israeli government against the Palestine solidarity movement.

He is standing as Labour’s candidate for a north London seat in Parliament.

The final version of the manifesto’s section on Palestine seems to have been essentially reverted to the pledges Labour made before the 2015 general election. The two wordings are almost identical, apart from the references to Palestinian “terror attacks” and the “state of Palestine.”

The manifesto now says that “there can be no military solution to this conflict and all sides must avoid taking action that would make peace harder to achieve.”

Radical?

The 2017 Labour manifesto has been hailed as radical and is proving to be popular with voters.

Although Labour is still trailing the ruling Conservative Party in opinion polls, its ratings have been surging after unvealing a series of policy proposals.

Supposedly “radical” Labour policies such as building 100,000 social-rent homes a year and slightly increasing tax for those with an annual salary exceeding £80,000 ($104,000) were once polical consensus, carried out by Labour and Conservative governments alike.

It is only because politics in the UK swung so far right under Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives in the 1980s, and later under Tony Blair’s New Labour, that current leader Jeremy Corbyn’s modest social democratic program can be portrayed by a hostile media as a dangerous and “radical” document which would take the UK “back to the 1970s.”

But when it comes to Palestine, the manifesto seems to reflect long-failed conventional “wisdom.”

And it proposes no sanction that would hold Israel to account for its human rights violations against Palestinians. Even the draft version contained no such proposal.

When it comes to foreign policy, Corbyn’s “radicalism” remains very much constrained by the Labour Party’s right-wing, pro-Israel remnants.

MK Bezalel Smotrich at the Knesset, December 2016. Emil Salman

Bezalel Smotrich is, even in Zionist or Israeli terms, a bigot, but in Israel being an anti-Arab bigot is no great matter. The fact that he is also a Jewish Nazi is of no relevance. In July last year, the Knesset passed legislation, The Expulsion Law [see After Stormy Debate, Knesset Approves Law Allowing Ouster of Lawmakers] which allowed for the expulsion of members who are guilty of incitement to racism. However although the legislation does not say so, it is clearly understood that the law only applies to Arabs. That is also understandable – Israel is after all a Jewish state.

Smotrich's beast parade

As the article below explains, Bezalel Smotrich, a member of the Habayit HaYehudi (Jewish Home) party, which is a member of the governing coalition, has a long record. From organising a ‘beast parade’ of donkeys and other animals, as a parody of Jerusalem’s Gay Pride demonstration to supporting the present practice in Israeli hospitals that Jewish women have the right to a maternity ward that doesn’t contain Arabs.’ 'Israeli maternity wards segregate Jewish, Arab mothers'

Of course you have to understand that his wife ‘“is truly no racist, but after giving birth she wants to rest rather than have a hafla” — a mass feast often accompanied by music and dancing — “like the Arabs have after their births.” He went on to say that “It’s natural that my wife wouldn’t want to lie down [in a bed] next to a woman who just gave birth to a baby who might want to murder her baby twenty years from now.” adding that “Arabs are my enemies and that’s why I don’t enjoy being next to them.”

Smotrich at the illegal Amona outpost

Smotrich’s non-racist wife (because Zionists have a different definition of racism from most normal human beings) ‘Revital, later told Channel 10 that she had “kicked an Arab obstetrician out of the [delivery] room. I want Jewish hands to touch my baby, and I wasn’t comfortable lying in the same room with an Arab woman.” Lawmaker backs segregated Jewish, Arab maternity wards

Fortunately Bezalel’s remarks are not according to Israel’s anti-racism laws racist because all discrimination on the grounds of religion is automatically not racist! Except when it comes to Arabs.

However Smotrich has outdone himself with his latest remarks calling for the lessons of Joshua (the wiping out of the inhabitants of Jericho, yea even including their children) to be applied to the Palestinians of the West Bank. However, as in the case of his aforementioned remarks, there is nothing illegal about them, even though he is advocating what the Nazis did to the Jews because they too are based on religion.

Of course there are some people in Britain, not least the Labour Party, who believe that any

comparisons between Israel, Zionism and the Nazis is anti-Semitic. Indeed the new International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definitionof anti-Semitism defines comparisons between Israel and the Nazis as anti-Semitic.

The Zionists beginning with Herzl have been hostile to Armenian attempts to remember their holocaust

Shami Chakrabarti, in her Reporton Racism and Anti-Semitism demonstrated that she didn’t have a clue as to why people compare Israel’s actions with the Nazis. Clue: Israel bases its legitimacy on the Holocaust and accuses its opponents variously of anti-Semitism, being Nazis, Kapos, traitors etc. despite the fact that Israel, as an ethno-religious state bars an uncanny similarity to Nazi Germany prior to 1941.

In day -to-day political debate, it is always incendiary to compare the actions of Jewish people or ins titutions anywhere in the world to those of Hitler or the Nazis or to the perpetration of the Holocaust. Indeed such remarks can only be intended to be incendiary rather than persuasive.

According to Chakrabarti’s idiotic recommendation as to what constitutes anti-Semitism and the IHRAA definition of anti-Semitism, Israel’s Ha’aretz newspaper and Professor Blatman who wrote the article are guilty of ‘anti-Semitism’.

Of course in the real world most people will understand that advocating the genocide of an ethnic group or people is, almost by definition, Nazi like and those who tolerate such racism, which is what the Israeli government and the Labour Zionist opposition are equally guilty of is complicity in Nazi-like behaviour

Those who, like the Jewish Labour Movement and Israel’s emissary in the Labour Party, Jeremy Newmark, cry ‘anti-Semitism’ whenever Israel is criticised, are guilty of complicity in the Nazi like behaviour of the Bezalel Smotrichs of this world.

Tony Greenstein

The Israeli Lawmaker Heralding Genocide Against Palestinians

Deputy Speaker Bezalel Smotrich's admiration for the biblical genocidaire Joshua bin Nun leads him to adopt values that resemble those of the German SS

Daniel Blatman May 23, 2017 9:28 AM

Tomer Persico quoted remarks that MK Bezalel Smotrich (Habayit Hayehudi) made recently at a conference of religious Zionists, where he presented his plan to offer the Palestinians three options: leave the territories, continue to live there with second-class status, or continue resisting, in which case “the Israel Defense Forces will know what to do.” These are chilling words that are liable to lead Israel into committing the horrific crime of genocide.

It’s hard to believe that an elected representative of a party in the governing coalition could raise the option of genocide if the Palestinians don’t accept the terms he’s willing to offer them: either emigration, or life under an apartheid regime based on principles of Jewish law, which would be even worse than the one that existed in South Africa. Smotrich, a deputy speaker of the Knesset, is the most senior government figure to date to say unabashedly that the option of genocide is on the table if the Palestinians don’t agree to our terms – and it’s clear they won’t agree.

Smotrich relies on the biblical Book of Joshua as his model. Researchers of genocide in the ancient world have already determined that the Book of Joshua is an important document for examining the characteristics of genocide in the ancient world. Some of its components differed from the genocides of the 20th century, but the Book of Joshua describes actions that were explicitly defined as genocide in the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. The convention defines anyone who commits such acts as someone who committed crimes against humanity and must therefore be put on trial.

This is how the Book of Joshua describes the conquest of the city of Ai (Joshua 8:24-29): “And it came to pass, when Israel had made an end of slaying all the inhabitants of Ai in the field, even in the wilderness wherein they pursued them, and they were all fallen by the edge of the sword, until they were consumed, that all Israel returned unto Ai, and smote it with the edge of the sword. ... So Joshua burnt Ai, and made it a heap forever, even a desolation, unto this day. And the king of Ai he hanged on a tree until the eventide; and at the going down of the sun Joshua commanded, and they took his carcass down from the tree, and cast it at the entrance of the gate of the city, and raised thereon a great heap of stones, unto this day.”

The 1995 massacre in Srebrenica, an atrocity slightly less terrible than the biblical one, was defined as genocide by the United Nations. Article 2 of the genocide convention states that “genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” These acts include “killing members of the group”; “causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group”; “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part”; and “imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.”

Had the conquest of Ai taken place today, Joshua bin Nun would have been brought to court in handcuffs and tried on charges of genocide. And that’s Smotrich’s model.

Article 3 of the convention states that punishable actions related to genocide include genocide, conspiracy to commit genocide, “direct and public incitement to commit genocide” and “complicity in genocide.” It would be interesting to hear what an expert in international law would say about Smotrich’s remarks.

Smotrich’s admiration for the biblical genocidaire Joshua bin Nun leads him to adopt values that resemble those of the German SS. Naturally, he didn’t take the trouble to make such comparisons, since someone who supports genocide doesn’t try to understand the worldview of the genocidaires who preceded him.

From God's mouth to Himmler's ears

Smotrich's hero, Heinrich Himmler with Reynhardt Heydrich

This is how God explains to Joshua why Israel was defeated in one of its battles against the enemy (Joshua 7:11-12): “Israel hath sinned; yea, they have even transgressed My covenant which I commanded them; yea, they have even taken of the devoted thing; and have also stolen, and dissembled also, and they have even put it among their own stuff. Therefore the children of Israel cannot stand before their enemies, they turn their backs before their enemies, because they are become accursed; I will not be with you any more, except ye destroy the accursed from among you.”

Or in other words, conquest and annihilation must be carried out according to precise instructions from God. When Israel violates these instructions by seizing property and looting without permission, they are punished.

The similarity between the biblical text and what Heinrich Himmler said to senior SS officers in Poznan in October 1943 is chilling. Here is what Himmler said: “I am referring here to the evacuation of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish people. ... The wealth they possessed we took from them. I gave a strict order ... that this wealth will of course be turned over to the Reich in its entirety. We have taken none of it for ourselves. Individuals who have erred will be punished in accordance with the order given by me at the start, threatening that anyone who takes as much as a single Mark of this money is a dead man.”

In every genocide, the supreme authority insists on order and discipline from those responsible for carrying it out, in accordance with criteria which he sets. Members of the SS were convinced they were men of integrity, with clean hands, who didn’t loot their victims’ property. Does Smotrich believe the ethics of the Book of Joshua could serve as an example for how the Palestinians should be treated today?

Smotrich has a reputation as a racist and a homophobe. Now it turns out that he also potentially supports mass murder. In any enlightened society, one can find people like this in dubious pubs, in Munich or Mississippi, that are frequented by skinheads tattooed with swastikas. But in Israel, the person saying this is a representative of the state.

One obviously can’t expect Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to do anything about this. But the real danger to Israel comes from the hundreds of Knesset members and public figures from other parties – including Likud, Yesh Atid and even Zionist Union – who understand quite well where Smotrich and his colleagues in the Habayit Hayehudi party are dragging the state, but are afraid to stand up, form a united front with the Israeli left and tell the public the truth: Smotrichism, like Hitlerism, Stalinism and Maoism before them, is an ideology that leads to the perpetration of genocide.

If those who understand this don’t rise up and eliminate this danger now, this will be the tragic end of the Palestinian people. But it will also be the end of the vision of a sovereign Jewish existence in Israel.

Prof. Blatman is a historian of the Holocaust and genocide at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Yet in Israel ‘Apartheid’ is a term regularly used even by Zionists

Below is an article by Richard Kuper of Free Speech on Israel/JfJP on how the term ‘Apartheid’ is regularly used in Israel to describe the relations between Israeli Palestinians and Jews. Yet in Britain propaganda groups, like the Jewish Labour Movement regularly accuse those who describe Israel as an apartheid state of ‘anti-Semitism’.

Tony Greenstein

Apartheid references in Israel

RICHARD KUPER 2 May 2017
The attempt to outlaw the use of the term "apartheid" in relation to Israel and its occupation has to be recognised as carrying dangers of effectively stifling debate on an issue of great importance

Two students from occupied East Jerusalem passing daily through Qalandia checkpoint to reach Birzeit University, 2014. Credit: Rich Wiles.

We are faced with an increasing onslaught on criticism of Israel with attempts being made to drawn the lines ever more narrowly. There are accusations that any singling out of Israel is antisemitic: so, for example, calling for boycott, divestment and sanctions in Israel’s case but not in others is prima facie evidence of antisemitism, as is using the word apartheid to characterise any aspect of Israeli society.

What I would like to address here is the use of the concept of ‘apartheid’ to compare South African and Israeli society, and the dangerous suppression involved in outlawing its use. Critics say the analogy is plain wrong and therefore its use can only be malign: an attempt to delegitimate, demonise and apply double standards (to use Sharansky’s 3-D test of criticism of Israel – see the discussion Is criticism of Israel antisemitic?) about what it is that goes beyond what is acceptable. Ultimately, for many of these critics, the use of the term “apartheid” is antisemitic.

Those who argue for applying the term to Israel generally acknowledge the differences in the South African case but argue that a wider definition of apartheid, enshrined in the International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid, UN General Assembly Resolution 3068, 30 Nov 1973, covers the Israeli case as well. Ben White’s book Israeli Apartheid: A beginner’s Guide (Pluto 2009) provides a good presentation of the argument.

The deeply ingrained racism of Israel's government ministers

There have been a host of articles of the “I grew up in South Africa, so believe me when I say: Israel is not an apartheid state” type. Equally, other important South African voices have been prominent in drawing analogies between living under the two regimes. In particular, it is experience at the checkpoints that has led South Africans to say that it is “worse than apartheid”. For in South Africa, while non-whites had to carry passes, there was generally freedom of movement in the sense that you could go anywhere unless and until you were called on to produce your pass. Control in general was by post hoc police raid, in a general search for “illegal” migrants in urban areas where they were not supposed to be. Control over movement within Palestine and between Palestine and Israel is far more rigorous and rigidly totalitarian on a daily basis than it ever was under South African apartheid.

But the attempt to exclude the use of the term is quite widespread and Israel Apartheid Week arouses intense opposition. Let Baroness Deech and Riverside Labour MP Louise Ellman, Honorary President of the JLM (Jewish Labour Movement, stand for all critics. In March 2017 Deech tweeted:

Miri Regev is now 'Culture' Minister in Israel's government

“#israelapartheidweek A week of antisemitic hate, no foundation; shame on universities that host it”; the previous year Ellman declared herself “deeply disturbed by the news that Oxford University Labour Club has decided to support Israeli Apartheid Week…” and regarded comparisons between Israel and apartheid-era South Africa as “a grotesque smear”.

I do not want to argue the case for or against the applicability or the usefulness of the concept in relation to our understanding of Israeli society here. (The argument can be made well or badly and I would recommend the writings of Israeli academic Ran Greenstein who lives and works in South Africa for a comprehensive overview. See, for example, his two concise articles in +972 arguing a) that it is a form of apartheid; but b) different in important respects from historical apartheid in South Africa. )

Here I am more concerned about recognising that the attempt to outlaw its use carries real dangers of effectively stifling debate on an important issue – and possibly devaluing the term “antisemitism” in the process.

Reaffirming the right to criticise Israel robustly has become increasingly urgent in the light of the British government having ‘adopted’ the International Holocaust Remembrance Association definition of antisemitism in December 2016. This includes illustrative examples of what might “taking into account the overall context” be antisemitic, with no fewer than 7 or the 11 examples relating in some way to criticisms of Israel, for example “claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor”, or “applying double standards [to Israel] by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other  democratic nation”. Some of the dangers are spelt out in an opinion by Hugh Tomlinson QC (see “Legal opinion blasts holes in pro-Israel definition of anti-Semitism”) and by former Justice
Stephen Sedley in “Defining Anti-Semitism”

There is a concerted campaign to close down certain discussions and the use of terms like apartheid is increasingly likely to lead to campaigns of intimidation against universities, churches and others for daring to host discussion on these topics.

The Israel debate

What critics fail to register is how widespread the use of the term “apartheid” has become within Israel itself, either as a description of the dire realities of today, or as a warning of where the occupation can and must lead. Much of this appears in the pages of the liberal daily newspaper Ha’aretz, where criticism of the Israeli regime is most openly expressed, but the use of the term is also found in other, sometimes surprising, places.

Here, for instance, is a very recent Ha’aretz editorial “Fear at the top in Israel”, 30 Mar 2017, in which the standfirst reads:

Netanyahu and several of his ministers seem afraid above all of their image in the mirror - of leaders of a state calling itself a democracy and practicing apartheid.

And here is the proprietor of Ha’aretz, the redoubtable and much respected Amos Schocken arguing that “Only international pressure will end Israeli apartheid “, 22 Jan 2016:

the most basic democratic values of equality before the law for all people under Israel control, and equal rights to vote and be elected, do not exist… The nearly 50 years of Israeli apartheid… The growing delegitimization of Israel is this country’s own handiwork. Should Israel decide to end apartheid, it will return to being legitimate in every respect.

Or again, senior editor Bradley Burston, who “made aliyah” (immigrated) from Los Angeles to Israel in 1976, declared in “It’s Time to Admit It. Israeli Policy Is What It Is: Apartheid”, 17 Aug 2015): “I used to be one of those people who took issue with the label of apartheid as applied to Israel. Not anymore.”

Back in 2011, former Israeli ambassador to South Africa 1992-94, Alon Liel, in saying that “Israel needs 'outside interference’” was arguing that “Legislation about to be voted on in the Knesset is strikingly similar to that from Apartheid South Africa.”

In March 2017, comedian Assaf Harel in his TV programme, "Good Night With Asaf Harel" [broadcast on Israeli TV Channel 10] castigated Israelis for ignoring the occupation and claimed that Israel is an apartheid state. Ha’aretz’s report was headlined “In Last Monologue, Israeli Comedy Show Host Implores Israelis to Wake Up and Smell the Apartheid [italics added]”, 3 Mar 2017.

Israel's President Reuven Rivlin has recently also got into the act with his strong opposition to the so-called “Regularization Law”, which enables Israel to expropriate private Palestinian land where settlements have been built. This law, he affirmed in a meeting in February 2017, only two days after it had been passed, could “cause Israel to look like an apartheid state”, 12 Feb 2017.

Professor Oren Yiftachel who has written extensively about Israeli society as an ethnocracy, has now sharpened his critique. In “Call Apartheid in Israel by Its Name”, 11 Feb 2016, he wrote:

Citizenship here is reminiscent of South Africa's in the past: Jews are ‘white’ citizens, Arabs in Israel have ‘colored’ (in other words, partial) citizenship; and Palestinians in the territories have ‘black’ citizenship, without political rights.

Yossi Sarid environment minister under Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, wrote a decade ago, 25 April 2008:

[T]he white Afrikaners, too, had reasons for their segregation policy; they, too, felt threatened – a great evil was at their door, and they were frightened, out to defend themselves. Unfortunately, however, all good reasons for apartheid are bad reasons; apartheid always has a reason, and it never has a justification. And what acts like apartheid, is run like apartheid and harasses like apartheid, is not a duck—it is apartheid.

Former Israeli Attorney-General (1993–1996) Michael Ben-Yair, was already on record as saying in 2002: “In effect, we established an apartheid regime in the occupied territories immediately following their capture. That oppressive regime exists to this day.” 3 March 2002. He reaffirmed this opinion in an appeal to the EU to endorse the creation of a Palestinian state and said that “Israel has imposed an “apartheid regime” on Palestinians in the West Bank” and that “the settlement movement is a political act by a state against another people and as such is the most evil and immoral act since the end of World War II.” 23 Nov. 2014.

Shulamit Aloni, Minister of Education under Yitzhak Rabin, wrote an article in Yediot Ahronoth, English translation, 10 Jan 2007, called “Indeed there is Apartheid in Israel”:

[She elaborated] Jewish self-righteousness is taken for granted among ourselves to such an extent that we fail to see what’s right in front of our eyes. It’s simply inconceivable that the ultimate victims, the Jews, can carry out evil deeds. Nevertheless, the state of Israel practises its own, quite violent, form of Apartheid with the native Palestinian population. The US Jewish Establishment’s onslaught on former President Jimmy Carter is based on him daring to tell the truth which is known to all: through its army, the government of Israel practises a brutal form of Apartheid in the territory it occupies.

Respected NGO B’tselem, The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, has long used the concept of apartheid in its various reports.

Back in its definitive Land Grab study in 2002 of Israeli settlement practices, it concluded:

Israel has created in the Occupied Territories a regime of separation based on discrimination, applying two separate systems of law in the same area and basing the rights of individuals on their nationality. This regime is the only one of its kind in the world, and is reminiscent of distasteful regimes from the past, such as the Apartheid regime in South Africa.

Subsequent reports have only accumulated evidence that strengthens that conclusion.

Danny Rubinstein, a columnist for Ha’aretz likened Israel to apartheid South Africa during a United Nations conference at the European Parliament in Brussels on 30 August 2007. A UN report records his saying that “Israel today was an apartheid State with four different Palestinian groups: those in Gaza, East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Israeli Palestinians, each of which had a different status.”

Here is yet another Ha’aretz editorial in October 2014, following the ruling by Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon barring Palestinian workers from using Israeli public transport. Under the heading “Welcome aboard Israel’s apartheid bus” 27 October 2014, he wrote:

The minister’s decision reeks of apartheid, typical of the Israeli occupation regime in the territories. One of the most blatant symbols of the regime of racial separation in South Africa was the separate bus lines for whites and blacks. Now, Ya’alon has implemented the same policy in the occupied territories. In so doing, he justifies the claims of those who brand Israel internationally as an apartheid state.

In yet another example, Professor Daniel Blatman of the Hebrew University, writing in “Heading Toward an Israeli Apartheid State”, 4 Apr 2011, drew the connection between what was happening in the occupied territories and what was happening in green-line Israel:

Israeli racism, whose natural 'hothouse' is the colonialist project in the territories, has long since spilled over into Israeli society and has been legitimized in the series of laws recently passed in the Knesset.

[And further] I believe… the aim of this legislation is the gradual establishment of an apartheid state in Israel, and the future separation on a racial basis of Jews and non-Jews.

To round out this brief survey of an ongoing historic debate, I would like to cite two former Prime Ministers of Israel, both issuing dire warnings as to where Israel was headed should it not end the occupation of the Palestinian territories.

First Yitzhak Rabin’s warning of the dangers of apartheid reported in the Times of Israel, 25 Sep 2015, warning of the danger of apartheid:

“In a previously unpublicized recording of a 1976 interview, Israel’s fifth prime minister Yitzhak Rabin can be heard calling the still-nascent West Bank settlement movement “comparable to a cancer,” and warning that Israel risked becoming an “apartheid” state if it annexed and absorbed the West Bank’s Arab population.”

And finally, David Ben-Gurion himself. The renowned Israeli journalist Hirsh Goodman, who had left South Africa for Israel because of the former’s antisemitism and racism, after marching victoriously through the Sinai as a paratrooper in the Six-Day War, recalls in his memoirs Let Me Create a Paradise, hearing David Ben-Gurion on the radio warning that Israel must rid itself of its Arab territories lest it “become an Apartheid state”…

Trump and May Support Saudi Arabia’s Bombing of Civilians in Yemen and then Complain about Terrorism

When it comes to hypocrisy no-one can outdo the British press. Virtually the whole of the British press, with the exception of the Daily Mirror, supported Britain’s invasion of Iraq. An invasion that killed up to 1 million civilians.

Today the US and Britain support, with all the modern weaponry that Saudi money can buy, the murderous war of destruction in Yemen. One in 3 Saudi air raids hits civilian sites. Over 10,000 civilians have been murdered in circumstances no less tragic than what happened in Manchester. Theresa May and Donald Trump, no less than Obama and Cameron before them, literally have blood on their hands, together of course with the Sun which then has the gall to talk about terrorism and ‘our way of life’. One in three Saudi air raids on Yemen hit civilian sites, data shows

Saudi Attack on Yemeni School

There were no terrorist groups in Iraq before the invasion. There were no weapons of mass destruction either. The only thing Iraq possessed was an abundance of oil and it was this that the United States was determined to lay its hands on.

The terrible aftermath of Manchester is a consequence of Blair, Cameron and May's war policy

After the invasion in 2003 Al-Qaeda in Iraq grew in leaps and bounds. A few years later they changed their name to ISIS. Thus began the growth of this monstrous death cult. ISIS was a product of the bloody war that the United States and Blair’s New Labour imposed on Iraq. Nor was it accidental. When the Americans ran into heavy armed resistance in Iraq they did what all imperial powers do, they played the divide and rule card. The US and Britain deliberately sowed the seeds of division between Sunni and Shi’ite Muslims in order to shore up their own positions.

The Scum Always Had a Problem with the Truth

Donald Trump today is still doing this. He went a few days ago to Saudi Arabia to condemn the Iranian terror axis in the Middle East! ISIS, Al Qaeda and the other Jihadi groups in Syria and Iraq are 100% Salafist Sunni groups. Hezbollah, the main Shi’ite guerrilla group in the Lebanon, which is allied with Iran, has never exploded bombs in Western cities. Nor has Hamas, which is Sunni. Both condemned Al Qaeda for its Charlie Hebdo murder yet they are called 'terrorists' because they fight or have fought the terrorist regime in Tel Aviv.

The SCUM has the gall to accuse Corbyn and McDonnell of having blood on their hands

The western press deliberately conflates organisations which fight a guerrilla war against Israel with organisations that butcher and murder anyone who doesn’t subscribe to their definition of the Islamic faith.

Was it any wonder that the Scum supported Tony Bliar? That's what the Labour Right wants again

In reality ISIS are not motivated by Islam. It is a flag of convenience. Much fun was made of ISIS recruits in this country who bought Islam for Dummies before setting out on their Jihad. Those who murdered and maimed in Brussels and France, almost without exception, were petty criminals who drank and led anything but a pious Islamic way of life. Being a Muslim was a way of dignifying their alienation.

Lest we forget - the Sun attacked the one party leader, the late Charlie Kennedy, who opposed the Iraq War - under Nick Clegg the Lib-Dems became the pro-war party

Not content with what it had done in Iraq, Cameron and Clegg also decided to intervene in the Libyan civil war. Despite Britain’s previously close relations with the Ghadaffi regime, we decided to repay old scores and support the Islamic opposition to his regime. The consequences were predictable. Once again Al-Qaeda, ISIS and various Jihadist groups thrived. Ghadaffi had warned of just such an outcome but we decided on another ‘humanitarian’ bombing campaign.

Germans reading the Nazi equivalent of The Sun - Der Sturmer was also a semi-pornographic paper

The Sun Has the Blood of Manchester and 1 million dead Iraqis on Its Hands

On Tuesday the Sun came out with a headline accusing Jeremy Corbyn of having blood on his hands. The irony is that it is the Sun which is covered in the blood of the innocents.

As the headlines displayed here should remind people, the Sun was the chief cheerleader for the illegal war in Iraq. In Nazi Germany the editor of the Nazi newspaper, Der Sturmer, which did most to support Hitler’s wars of aggression and the attacks on the Jews, one Julius Streicher, was hanged at Nuremburg in 1946 for crimes against humanity. Instead of being feted by Prime Ministers, Rupert Murdoch should also be treated as a war criminal.

The Sun’s reference was not to Manchester but Corbyn’s previous support of Sinn Fein and the Republican movement. It is to be hoped that Corbyn does not duck the challenge. Jeremy Corbyn did indeed support the fight of the Catholic people of Northern Ireland for justice and a United Ireland.

The Sun of course never acknowledges its own mistakes - it assumes that its readers are idiots (probably true!) and have no memory

People forget that up to the imposition of Direct Rule in 1972, Northern Ireland had been a Protestant supremacist police state (much like Israel and South Africa). If you were a Catholic you couldn’t get a job in the civil service or decent housing. Discrimination was institutionalised in a state which the former Prime Minister, Lord Brookeborough described as a Protestant state, which it was. Northern Ireland was created in 1921 after the all-Ireland elections in 1918 had produced a Sinn Fein majority. This was unacceptable to the Tories allies amongst the Unionists who threatened to use force to reverse the results of the election. Thus began Ireland’s war of independence.

When in 1969 the Catholics launched a civil rights movement they were viciously attacked by the B-Specials and Protestant supremacists at the Battle of Burntollet. It was the ‘spark that lit the prairie fire’ i.e. the Troubles. The Catholic ghetto of the Bogside in Derry was attacked in a two day battle by the RUC and B-Specials (a paramilitary police force). A civil rights march in Derry was attackedby the RUC. This was the beginning of ‘The Troubles’. To those who want a greater understanding than that provided by the Sun then The Troubles in Derry article provides a starter. It was only when Britain accepted that the North of Ireland could no longer be a Protestant supremacist state that a peace accord was possible.

Lest we forget - the Sun invited people to cut out their dartboard filled with anti-war targets

The IRA fought a war with the British. Undoubtedly they, like the British Army, killed many innocent civilians. That is always the consequence of war. Britain and the US call it 'collateral damage'. However the IRA killed far fewer civilians than the British army in Iraq, Afghanistan or elsewhere.

21 years ago the IRA exploded a massive 1500 Kg bomb in Manchester city centre. It devastated the heart of Manchester yet not one person was killed. The reason? They gave a 90 minute warning. On occasions elsewhere, not least Birmingham, when warnings went astray or weren’t heeded, people did get killed, however the IRA never deliberately murdered civilians. Protestant paramilitary groups like the UDA and UVF, which the British Army and its secretive Forces Research Unitinfiltrated with agents, deliberately targeted Catholic civilians.

That is one of the major differences between the IRA bombing campaign and that of ISIS and the US military. The latter two don't give warnings when they bomb people.

It was also the case that the IRA and Sinn Fein had and continue to have massive support in the Catholic ghettos of Northern Ireland. The fact that the majority group amongst Catholics in Northern Ireland is Sinn Fein not the SDLP is proof of that. ISIS by contrast has to terrorise the inhabitants of the areas it controls.

In the article below, Patrick Coburn exposes the hypocrisy of the British political establishment and Theresa May. Saudi Arabia's Wahabist regime and Qatar have sponsored, armed and funded ISIS, Al-Qaeda and a host of Jihadist groups in Syria and Libya. The regime in Saudi Arabia, under King Ibn Saud, was armed and funded by the British in the wake of the first world war. We have continued, with the United States, to support them ever since, for the simple reason that this most austere and barbaric version of Islam is ideal to keep the population of Saudi Arabia cowed. What better way of legitimising repression and coercion than religion? For us to condemn the head choppers of ISIS when we support the head choppers of Saudi Arabia is the kind of hypocrisy for British imperialism was long renowned.

Tony Greenstein

Manchester attack: It is pious and inaccurate to say Salman Abedi's actions had 'nothing to do with Islam'

Patrick Cockburn Thursday 25 May 2017

In the wake of the massacre in Manchester, people rightly warn against blaming the entire Muslim community in Britain and the world. Certainly one of the aims of those who carry out such atrocities is to provoke the communal punishment of all Muslims, thereby alienating a portion of them who will then become open to recruitment by Isis and al-Qaeda clones.

This approach of not blaming Muslims in general but targeting “radicalisation” or simply “evil” may appear sensible and moderate, but in practice it makes the motivation of the killers in Manchester or the Bataclan theatre in Paris in 2015 appear vaguer and less identifiable than it really is. Such generalities have the unfortunate effect of preventing people pointing an accusing finger at the variant of Islam which certainly is responsible for preparing the soil for the beliefs and actions likely to have inspired the suicide bomber Salman Abedi.

The ultimate inspiration for such people is Wahhabism, the puritanical, fanatical and regressive type of Islam dominant in Saudi Arabia, whose ideology is close to that of al-Qaeda and Isis. This is an exclusive creed, intolerant of all who disagree with it such as secular liberals, members of other Muslim communities such as the Shia or women resisting their chattel-like status.

A further sign of the Salafi-jihadi impact is the choice of targets: the attacks on the Bataclan theatre in Paris in 2015, a gay night club in Florida in 2016 and the Manchester Arena this week have one thing in common. They were all frequented by young people enjoying entertainment and a lifestyle which made them an Isis or al-Qaeda target. But these are also events where the mixing of men and women or the very presence of gay people is denounced by puritan Wahhabis and Salafi jihadis alike. They both live in a cultural environment in which the demonisation of such people and activities is the norm, though their response may differ.

The culpability of Western governments for terrorist attacks on their own citizens is glaring but is seldom even referred to. Leaders want to have a political and commercial alliance with Saudi Arabia and the Gulf oil states. They have never held them to account for supporting a repressive and sectarian ideology which is likely to have inspired Salman Abedi. Details of his motivation may be lacking, but the target of his attack and the method of his death is classic al-Qaeda and Isis in its mode of operating.

The reason these two demonic organisations were able to survive and expand despite the billions – perhaps trillions – of dollars spent on “the war on terror” after 9/11 is that those responsible for stopping them deliberately missed the target and have gone on doing so. After 9/11, President Bush portrayed Iraq not Saudi Arabia as the enemy; in a re-run of history President Trump is ludicrously accusing Iran of being the source of most terrorism in the Middle East. This is the real 9/11 conspiracy, beloved of crackpots worldwide, but there is nothing secret about the deliberate blindness of British and American governments to the source of the beliefs that has inspired the massacres of which Manchester is only the latest – and certainly not the last – horrible example.

The attack on Manchester Arena – and those on the Bataclan and the Pulse nightclub before it – can trace their roots to the Wahhabism of Saudi Arabia. The UK and US governments just won’t admit it.

Derk Walters, a Dutch journalist working for NRC Handelsblad Facebook who is set to be expelled from Israel for critical coverage of the racist state

Derk Walters is being expelled by Israel for his hostile and critical reportage of Israel. The pretext is visa problems. It is a logical culmination of a series of repressive laws such as those attacking human rights NGOs, refusing admission to Israel to supporters of BDS coupled with the refusal by Netanyahu to see the German Foreign Minister after he had agreed to see human rights organisations Btselem and Breaking the Silence.

This followed a tweet from Walters that Israeli Arabs can’t talk about boycotting Israel. Ron Paz of the Government’s Press Office asked if the tweet could be construed as supporting BDS, commenting ‘I hope not’which can be taken as a threat of deportation, since support for BDS in Israel is almost akin to a criminal offence. Israel, just like South Africa, doesn’t take kindly to being boycotted though they are more than happy to impose a forcible boycott on Gaza.

Derk Walters works for the Netherland’s fourth largest newspaper, but that is no obstacle when it comes to Zionist attacks on freedom of the press. This follows previous threats to the BBC if they didn’t behave, however the BBC quickly backtracked and changed its headlines.

Tony Greenstein

Israel Expelling Dutch Journalist Critical of the Occupation, Cites Visa Problems

The Government Press Office says Derk Walters knowingly worked without an updated visa, but internal correspondence tells a different story

Ha’aretz, Ravit Hecht May 04, 2017

Visa problems are Israel's pretext for getting rid of a critical journalist - Israeli democracy doesn't extend to hostile foreign press coverage as the BBC learnt 10 years ago

Israel is refusing to renew the visa of a Dutch journalist who has lambasted Israeli policy toward the Palestinians in the West Bank, though the Government Press Office says he knowingly worked without a visa extension or permit.

Derk Walters has criticized Israeli policy in the Netherlands’ fourth biggest newspaper, NRC Handelsblad, though the GPO, which operates out of the Prime Minister’s Office, denies that this the reason for his expulsion.

Last year, Walters criticized Israeli actions in Hebron in the West Bank and tweeted about boycotts as political action against Israel.

Walters has been reporting from Israel since 2014. In January 2016 he ran an article describing constant friction between the Palestinians and settlers in Hebron early in the wave of stabbing and car-ramming attacks against Israelis.

He wrote that because of collaboration between the Israeli army and settlers, the Palestinians did not believe that the Israeli army was actually acting against assailants. Instead, it was planting knives near the bodies of the dead.

On January 13, 2016, a day after a Walters article on Hebron ran, he received an email in English from Ron Paz, the GPO’s foreign press chief.

“I do not challenge you about the hostile and biased description of the reality in Hebron,” Paz wrote to Walters in the email obtained by Haaretz. “I don’t challenge you for not even mentioning that Hebron is the most radical religious Islamist city in the West Bank and that dozens of suicide attackers came from there in the past 3 months, triggering tighter security measures.”

Paz added that a Walters headline saying that 175,000 Palestinians in Hebron were captives of 600 Jewish settlers was anti-Semitic.

Paz particularly criticized what he called Walters’ “severe accusations” against the Israeli army, “including seemingly-quoting the IDF/security forces policy and actions, without asking for a comment from the IDF.” As Paz put it, this was “just unimaginable.”

NRC’s editor-in-chief, Peter Vandermeersch, responded to Paz, criticizing the Israeli’s email to Walters. Four days later, Walters came to the GPO in Jerusalem to pick up a press card. He says he not only did not receive one, he was assailed by complaints, especially about the Hebron article and his paper’s coverage of Israel in general. He says he only received a press card after the Dutch ambassador intervened.

Nitzan Chen, the head of the Government Press Office, 2016.Yitzhak Harari / Knesset

On March 8, 2016, the GPO again contacted Walters, this time about a tweet. Walters quoted a Palestinian blogger who tweeted that “Boycott is legitimate political expression. It’s not less so just because used against Israel.”

Walters then added his own interpretation: Israeli Arabs cannot talk about boycotting Israel because they could be persecuted for it. Paz wrote to Walters asking if the tweet could be construed as supporting BDS. ‘I hope not,’ Paz wrote in an email.

Paz also wrote that retweeting an article from the left-wing website +972 Magazine raised “several questions, if I may point them out in the frame of our open and frank dialogue.” Paz wrote to Walters that “we do not think it is legitimate for journalists to take a stance in this highly controversial issue.” He wrote that such a tweet “gives the feeling of supporting the ideas in the articles.”

Paz also asked, “If you merely quoted an opinion (although highly controversial) which is not your own, would you consider quoting/tweeting an intelligent well-put article which explains why singling out Israel for political boycott is the new form of anti-Semitism?” He added: “Palestinian Israelis’ is a problematic phrase in many people’s opinion.”

At the end of 2016, when the GPO rejected Walters’ request to renew his visa and press card, it cited as grounds that NRC is not a recognized media organization under the GPO’s standards because its editor-in-chief is a board member and thus it suffers conflicts of interest between its commercial and editorial sides. The GPO later withdrew that argument after the Dutch Embassy intervened.

GPO head Nitzan Chen suggested that Walters receive a visa and press card for three months, during which the newspaper could get organized as the GPO required. The paper took that to mean that the GPO wanted Walters to be expelled.

Walters says that based on his previous experience with the GPO, he decided not to answer that particular email; instead, he told his paper it should talk with the GPO, or the Dutch government should use diplomatic means as in the past.

In February this year, Walters received another email from Chen, saying that since he had not answered the email from December 2016, he had been working illegally without a permit since December 20. The GPO also demanded proof that he lived in Tel Aviv, as written in his visa application.

Paz accidentally attached to Chen’s letter internal correspondence in which Paz wrote about his proposed answer to Walters. This included references to making the other side sweat and leaving all options on the table including a U-turn, and letting the Foreign Ministry get involved.

The internal correspondence accidentally sent to Walters.

"They'll sweat here". The internal correspondence accidentally sent to Walters (Hebrew)

Paz said the need for Walters to prove his Tel Aviv residence was based on his knowledge that Walters had actually moved to East Jerusalem – he posted it on Facebook.

NRC says the correspondence between Paz and Chen increases suspicions that Walters and the paper are being harassed. The temporary permits given to Walters expire in July and, he says, the GPO told him that his permits would not be renewed.

In a letter published this week in Dutch, Vandermeersch, the NRC editor, wrote that there was no way to interpret this decision other than as an attempt to prevent the publication of articles critical of Israel. Vandermeersch wrote that strangely, the April 4 letter from the GPO did not mention the tenor of Walters’ reporting. The nature of his articles was never a factor in the Israelis’ decisions, which contradicts Israeli accusations that Walters was engaging in improper activism.

Vandermeersch also quoted from a GPO statement saying the office believed that Walters’ reports were professional and adhered to journalistic ethics. As a result, the way Israel was expelling its writer was a stain on a country that depicts itself as a nation of laws.

Meanwhile, NRC has quoted Dutch Foreign Minister Bert Koenders as saying he regrets that Walters’ work permit has not been renewed. Journalists should write what they want under the rules of freedom of expression that apply in Israel too, Koenders said.

GPO: Walters broke the law

Chen, for his part, told Haaretz that Walters “wrote things connected with agitation and incitement but I don’t even want to go into those alleys. Mr. Walters broke the Israeli law in that, despite all our requests, he worked without a working permit. The offenses were committed intentionally, not by mistake. For example, he made a statement that I don’t want to say was perjury, but it was highly problematic – that he lives in Tel Aviv, while actually he was in East Jerusalem.”

As Chen put it, “We sent four or five reminders to renew his visa but he scorned the GPO at every level. Ron Paz called him and said, let’s arrange this, take a temporary visa. He wouldn’t hear of it. We don’t look into issues of content. That isn’t our arena. We look into whether he’s a journalist, not an activist or mercenary, for example, and whether the publication behind him meets the rules.”

NRC Handelsblad by Anonymous 2tNhW1B9 on Scribd

Viewletter:

Letter sent from Government Press Office to NRC Handelsblad

On Paz’s claim that he had contacted Walters at least twice over the reporter’s comments in the paper and on Twitter, Chen said the office indeed considers the ethics and credibility of journalists, universal journalistic ethics, but the GPO never made a connection between Walters’ writing and work permits.

“We are an administrative authority that just inspects. We don’t care if he waxes critical. There are examples of Al Jazeera writers in English and CBS being much more radical or influential,” Chen said.

“We never bundled the content aspect with the permits. Let them check if we ever denied a visa or press card to a journalist who wrote against Israel. Not only did we not impose gags, we give five-star service compared with any other media outfit, including to Al Jazeera and Al-Arabiya.”

In an English-language statement, the GPO added: “Unfortunately, both articles published by the Dutch paper NRC Handelsblad are tendentious, distorted and based on half-truths: the GPO has never conditioned its recommendation for work visas and press cards [on] the content published by one journalist or another. Nevertheless, when the GPO recognizes a substantial deviation from the facts and from universal journalist ethics, we request a clarification accordingly. This was the case of the article in question published by Mr. Derk Walters in Hebron in the beginning of 2016.

“The article’s headline, in which the reason for not extending the journalist’s visa beyond 3 months due to ‘activism,’ is an absolute lie, and the GPO has documents proving it. The article also claims that NRC requested the GPO’s response and did not get it − that is another lie. The GPO sent its response to the newspaper, and they did not bother publishing it.

“Mr. Derk Walters has violated Israeli law by working without a permit for months. According to NRC’s position, he did so with intent and not as negligence. Following information the GPO received regarding the NRC failing to comply with the rules, the GPO turned to the journalist and offered a 3 month renewal for his permit pending clarification. However, Mr. Walters and the paper chose to ignore the offer and immediately turned to diplomatic channels, during which time the journalist continued to work in Israel without a permit.

“Nevertheless, and beyond the letter of the law, after the GPO was satisfied with the NRC complying with the rules, the journalist was issued a 3 month work permit, and it was explained to the paper that it won’t be renewed due to the law violation above – to allow the paper time to send a replacing journalist which will receive permits by law.

“The GPO strongly rejects any suggestion that the material published in NRC had anything to do with the above. Hundreds of foreign journalists operate in Israel, some of which are critical to the state of Israel and its policies, yet the only one who decided to operate against the rules and regulations is NRC journalist Derk Walter[s]. Our decision is a direct consequence.”

The GPO concluded: “The State of Israel in general and the Government Press Office in particular champion freedom of speech and freedom of the press. The GPO does everything in its power to accommodate the media in Israel in all respects.”

In December, the GPO told Australian journalist Antony Loewenstein that his GPO card was “under review” after he challenged MK Yair Lapid at a press conference and a media watchdog blog charged that he was not a journalist, but “a prominent anti-Israel activist” and “a public supporter of the Boycott, Sanctions and Divestment (BDS) movement,” quoting public statements he made.

Ultimately, however, Loewenstein was permitted to keep his credentials and his visa until it expired in March. Given his plans to leave the country and return to Australia in May, the GPO agreed to allow him to remain in the country as a tourist until his departure, following lobbying on his behalf by the Foreign Press Association and others.

Allison Kaplan Sommer contributed to this report

Don’t support the IHRA Definition of anti-Semitism that Conflates anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism

On Wednesday the European Parliament is going to debate a motion, ‘Combating anti-Semitism’that includes support for the bogus International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of anti-Semitism.

Caroline Lucas MP supports a definition of anti-Semitism which brands BDS as 'anti-Semitic' thus proving that when they get near power, the Green Party jettisons its radicalism

I have sent a number of MEPs a letter asking that they oppose Clause C2 of the motion supporting the IHRA. You can see my letter here. I am pleased to say that the Green group in the European parliament will be opposing the definition. There is no doubt that the far-Right, Le Pen and co. will be only too happy to support the IHRA. After all anti-Semitism and Zionism have always gone hand in hand and the IHRA definition has nothing to do with anti-Semitism and everything to do with supporting Israel.

Victor Orban, the racist Prime Minister of Hungary, who has villified and demonised asylum seekers at the same time as seeking to rehabilitate the anti-Semitic rulers of Hungary in the pre-war period, has no problems supporting the IHRA definition precisely because it has nothing whatsoever to do with opposing anti-Semitism.

On the picket line in Brighton but breaking the BDS picket line

I am therefore even more surprised to find that Britain’s only Green MP, Caroline Lucas, the MP for Brighton Pavilion, who has previously claimed to support the Palestinian cause, has signed up to support this bogus definition of anti-Semitism which the far-Right Zionist Campaign Against Anti-Semitism has campaigned for. Already the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism has been used to stop Israel Apartheid Week at one university, has meant restrictions at Exeter University and UCL and has led to repeated attempts by Zionist organisations in this country to prevent speakers such as Jackie Walker and Tom Suarez speaking.

The IHRA definition of anti-Semitism is a menace to freedom of speech and liberty. In the wake of the Manchester bombing there are increasing attempts to curtail our liberty in the name of fighting terrorism. I realise that being a Green means that you have no guiding compass politically. Capitalism for most people in the Green Party is something that can be tamed and reformed. It is this lack of basic political principles that can lead to someone like Lucas giving support to the Zionist attempt to clamp down on support for the Palestinians.

Jonathan Bartley - co leader of the Green Party - joined the rest of the panel in supporting the expulsion of Ken Livingstone for telling the truth about Nazi-Zionist relations - a particularly pathetic performance

Another example of Green cowardice was the performance of Lucas's co-leader Jonathan Bartley on Question Time earlier this year. As the rest of the Establishment hacks lined up to call for Ken Livingstone's expulsion from the Labour Party for daring to tell the truth, Bartley demonstrated what a political pygmy he is when he joined the mob.

I hope that others in the Green Party will give Ms Lucas a hard time. Like most Greens who get elected into positions of power, she has already become part of the British establishment. In Germany Die Grunen when it formed a coalition with the SPD with Joshka Fischer as Foreign Minister, became the first German government to send troops into battle in a foreign country, Afghanistan. Without any class politics the Greens are destined to drift politically as Caroline Lucas demonstrates.

Below is an Open Letter to Ms Lucas taking her to task over her support for this fake definition of anti-Semitism.

Tony Greenstein

Professor Daniel Blatman, a Holocaust researcher at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, is according to the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism, an anti-Semite

Caroline Lucas,

House of Commons

London SW1 1AA

Sunday 28^th May 2017

Dear Caroline,

As you will be aware, following the Home Affairs Select Committee Report Antisemitism in the UK, Theresa May adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of anti-Semitism. This Report was widely considered as politically motivated, lacking any evidential base and a hatchet job on Jeremy Corbyn by Chuku Ummuna of the Labour Right and the Tory members of the Committee. The Committee had no terms of reference and it criticised a number of people from whom it had refused to take evidence.

This Wednesday the European Parliament will be debating a Motion on Combatting Antisemitism which also recommends adoption of the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism. I am pleased to hear that the Green group in the European Parliament has decided to vote against it.

I am therefore extremely surprised to hear from friends in the Green Party that you support this bogus and racist definition of anti-Semitism. Racist because it proceeds from the basis that Zionism and Israel represents all Jewish people.

The IHRA definition of anti-Semitism is another name for the Working Definition of Anti-Semitism which the Fundamental Rights Agency removed from its web site in 2013 because it conflated support for the Palestinians with anti-Semitism. It has now been given a new lease of life. It deserves to be put back to sleep again, this time for good.

No one doubts the evils of anti-Semitism although the concentration on this form of racism to the exclusion of, for example, racism against Romanis or Islamaphobia, raises suspicions that the government’s real motive is to use peoples’ opposition to anti-Semitism to underpin its foreign policy alliances in the Middle East.

The IHRA, is an intergovernmental organisation consisting of 31 countries. It includes a number of countries which tolerate anti-Semitism, such as Poland under its far-Right Law and Justice government. Hungary’s government under Victor Orban, whose racist attitude to refugees needs no elaborating, is set on rehabilitating Admiral Horthy who presided over the deportation of some 430,000 Jews to Auschwitz between March 19^th and July 9^th 1944. [The Reinterment and Political Rehabilitation of Miklós Horthy, Randolph Braham]. Orban though has had no difficulty signing up to the IHRA because like many anti-Semites he is ardently pro-Zionist. That in itself should give you pause for thought.

The IHRA definition has nothing to do with opposing anti-Semitism. Its sole purpose is to conflate opposition to Zionism and the Apartheid State of Israel with anti-Semitism. Seven of its eleven examples of anti-Semitism mention the State of Israel. By identifying Jews with the actions of Israel, the IHRA is likely to increase not diminish anti-Semitism.

Brian Klug, when giving a talkWhat Do We Mean When We Say ‘Antisemitsm’? Echoes of shattering glass’ at the November 2014 International Conference at the Berlin Jewish Museum “Antisemitism in Europe Today: the Phenomena, the Conflicts” produced a definition of anti-Semitism in 21 words: ‘antisemitism is a form of hostility to Jews as Jews, where Jews are perceived as something other than what they are.’ The IHRA definition needs 409 words, because its purpose is not to define anti-Semitism but to conflate anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism.

The IHRA definition of anti-Semitism includes ‘Holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel’. Ironically that is the main purpose of the definition.

According to the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism, this article in Israel's Ha'aretz paper is 'anti-Semitic'

The IHRA definition states: ‘Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis’ is anti-Semitic. Presumably Professor Daniel Blatman, a Holocaust researcher and head of the Institute for Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem is also anti-Semitic for comparing the Nuremburg laws with the raft of racist laws targeting Israeli Arabs in Ha’aretz. Heading Toward an Israeli Apartheid State. Indeed Professor Blatman is doubly anti-Semitic because he also transgresses another IHRA example of ‘anti-Semitism’: ‘claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavour.’

Anyone who is seriously concerned about anti-Semitism and indeed any form of racism, should be determined to separate off Jewish people from the actions of Israel. To associate Jews with the actions and policies of Israeli state, is to invite anti-Semitism.

If calling out Israel as a racist endeavour is anti-Semitic, as the IHRA definition states, then we should be honest and admit that telling the truth can be anti-Semitic.

In a 2012 opinion survey 59 percent of Israeli Jews wanted preference for Jews over Arabs in admission to government jobs and 49 percent want the state to treat Jewish citizens better than Arabs. 42 percent don't want to live in the same building with Arabs and 42 percent don't want their children in the same class with Arab children. ‘Only’ a third wants a law barring Israeli Arabs from voting for the Knesset and 69 percent would oppose giving 2.5 million Palestinians the right to vote if Israel annexes the West Bank. In last year’s Pew Research Centres survey Israel’s Religiously Divided Society, a plurality of Israeli Jews, 48% supported the physical expulsion of Israel’s Arab citizens.

The prevalence of racism amongst Israeli Jews reflects the racist nature of the Israeli state. There is nothing anti-Semitic in stating that openly.

The IHRA definition of ‘anti-Semitism’ is designed to keep the truth about Israel and Zionism under wraps. It has already been used in Britain to close down Israel Apartheid Week at the University of Central Lancashire and to prevent activities at other universities. The IHRA definition of anti-Semitism is already having a chilling effect on free speech.

I would hope that you reconsider your support for this bogus definition of anti-Semitism. .

Yours sincerely,

Tony Greenstein

Ella Rose, the JLM's new Director was none too happy at her former employment being revealed

If you annoy me you are a fucking anti-Semite!

The Jewish Labour Movements fragrant Ella Rose giving vent to her feelings about anti-Zionists

I have taken this amusing but very true piece by Jonathan Rosenhead, a Professor at the LSE, from the newsletter of Bricup - British Universities Palestine. It echoes the piece I did when the Al Jazeera revelations first broke - why wasn't the story of state and Israeli interference in the Labour Party and the false anti-Semitism allegations revealed by the British press. The answer of course is that our 'free press' was up to its ears in manufacturing stories about 'anti-Semitism'

Tony Greenstein

Al Jazeera's 'The Lobby' and the British Media

Jonathan Rosenhead

Iain 'Crooked' McNicol, Labour's General Secretary, has just exonerated the fragrant Rose despite her threats of violence

we couldn't put it better ourselves - the winning is all that counts with Ella Rose

Many readers of the Newsletter will already be aware of the ground-breaking Al-Jazeera English series The Lobby, broadcast on 4 consecutive nights from January 11th. Some will not – and in this they will be in the good company of the vast majority of the UK’s population. It got a front-page splash in the Daily Mail (of all places), but this was not followed up by the sort of in depth coverage elsewhere that its explosive contents deserved.

However that silence is not the one this article’s title refers to. This silence is analogous in its essentials to that of the dog in the Sherlock Holmes story The Silver Blaze. The crux of the plot is the disappearance one night of a famous race horse, and the violent death of his trainer. The dog slept in the stables where this happened. The celebrated dialogue runs like this:

Joan Ryan MP, LFI Chair inquiring about the money she had applied for

Labour Friends of Israel Chair Joan Ryan MP receiving the good news that she had won over £1m for her slush fund. Her only other claim to fame is claiming more expenses than any other MP in 2005 and 2006

Gregory (Scotland Yard detective): "Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?"

Holmes: "To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time."

Gregory: "The dog did nothing in the night-time."

Holmes: "That was the curious incident.”

The dog that signally failed to bark, not for one night, or over the last month, but for year after year is the entire British mainstream media – print, radio, television. What is the story that they missed and why did they miss it?

Labour Friends of Israel's Parliamentary Officer and Fabian Michael Rubin letting us know that he works closely with the Israeli Embassy

The set up

The Lobby is still viewable at and if you haven’t seen it you should. It makes gripping viewing.

The programmes depend on ‘Robin’, whose face we never see. He created a cover story as an aspiring Labour party activist with strong Israeli sympathies, and for 6 months managed to penetrate the shadowy world where Israeli embassy officials set up sham organisations to support Israel, mingle with very willing activists (both Labour and Conservative) and make funds available to them. And all the while Robin wears a concealed camera.

We have known about ‘The Israel Lobby’ in the US, and its most notable unit AIPAC, for years. Mearsheimer and Walt wrote a celebrated book with that title. The Lobby however is about the UK’s own Israel Lobby. To UK activists its existence has been known, in principle, for years. There has been circumstantial evidence galore - the inside track which Israel so evidently makes use of, the lavish funding of pro-Israel organisations, the sabotage of pro-Palestinian events. So we ‘knew’. But now we really know.

Joan Ryan MP has tropes on her brain and precious little else

It is worth pointing up here the reason why the activity revealed in The Lobby is taking place at all - the growing world-wide success of the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. This is now seen by Israel as the principal strategic threat to its continuing domination over the Palestinian people. The frenetic and multi-headed activity of Israel’s friends, supporters and proxies revealed in these programmes is, paradoxically, a measure of BDS’s success. Israel can no longer afford to rely just on discreet words in sympathetic ears; it is mobilising on many levels. In the process, they run a greater risk of their slips showing.

For supporters of academic boycott, such as BRICUP, and of BDS as a whole, the revelations of The Lobby are both an education, and a motivator.

It is tempting, I'll agree

The plot

There is so much material in these programmes that I can only be selective. But I’ll give a fairly detailed rundown of what is in the first programme, and then get more selective.

In Episode 1 we see Robin swanning around in the milieu of Labour Friends of Israel, the Israel Britain Alliance (a Zionist Federation Project), BICOM, Sussex Friends of Israel, Jewish Labour Movement. He is under the wing of Shai Masot of the Israeli Embassy, an unimpressive but gregarious character, anxious to be popular. He is quite deeply embedded – claiming for example to know all 200 London-based members of the Young Fabians. And in fact he did organise a trip to Israel for the Young Fabians in 2015. As Masot says in conversation: “Delegation to Israel – always a good start”.

The subtlety of fragrant Rose's analysis leaves us speechless

The revelations come thick and fast. We meet a couple of NUS Vice-Presidents plotting against their President Malia Bouattia, who supports Palestine. (The Chair of Labour Students is in on the plot.) One of them, not I think Jewish, had been taken on an expenses-paid Union of Jewish Students trip to Israel. The Israeli Embassy actually funds UJS itself! A University College London pro-Israel student activist has set up the Pinsker Centre which channels funds from AIPAC to appropriate causes.

We eavesdrop on the summer barbecue of the Jewish Labour Movement (JLM). We meet Ella Rose, who has been President of UJS, and has just been appointed Director of JLM. As she herself says, her CV didn’t have the most Labour Party experience among the candidates. But hey, what does that matter if you are applying from a staff position within the Israeli Embassy? (Later, unknowingly on camera, Rose boasts that with her martial arts training – from Israel – she could easily ‘take’ anti-racist campaigner Jackie Walker.)

Joan Ryan can't contain her glee at learning that she's won the Zionist jackpot

And then Masot invites Robin to chair the Young Labour Friends of Israel. It doesn’t exist – Robin’s job is to set it up. He is invited to apply for a job at the Embassy, first by Masot and then by its Head of Civil Affairs, who says his job would be to research the UK’s BDS movement.

What we get is a picture of a heady swirling mix of right-wing politics, ambition, wads of Israeli and US money, fake and shadow organisations, and over-weening self-confidence. Stirring the mix is an Israeli diplomat who isn’t even a diplomat.

Later episodes

We are really spoilt for choice. Episode 2 shows the famous JLM training session (on antisemitism!) at the Labour Party conference in Liverpool. This was the session at which Jackie Walker was set up, and secretly filmed so that an edited version of her interventions could present her in a bad light. It worked – she was ousted as vice-Chair of Momentum and suspended from Labour Party membership.

Shai Masot is on the scene at the conference, sometimes in convoy with Regev, or sitting hugger-mugger with him and the Chair of JLM Jeremy Newmark at a private meeting with pro-Israel supporters. (Regev says that people on the 3 left are very opposed to Israel “and probably antisemitic”.)

We share the delight of Joan Ryan MP, Chair of Labour Friends of Israel, when Masot tells her he has more than £1 million from Israel needed to fund trips to Israel by influential Labour MPs. We share her fury when a conference delegate persistently asks her how a 2-state solution can work – persistently because her interlocuter is dissatisfied with the non-answers she is getting. Ryan then persuades herself that the questioner has indulged in an antisemitic trope (about Jews working for banks – which we can see is Ryan’s own subconscious interpolation of material that wasn’t said). Ryan makes a complaint; the delegate is suspended from party membership.

Of course it isn’t only happening in and around the Labour Party. Masot seems to be best buddies with Maria Strizzolo, the young chief of staff to MP Robert Halfon, a Minister in the Government, and deputy chair of the Conservative Party at the time the recording happened. Simultaneously she is also a Westminster-based civil servant. Their highly indiscreet conversation is recorded as ever by Robin’s attentive camera. They talk about setting up a ‘City Friends of Israel’ for young finance professionals, with AIPAC’s assistance.

The crunch point, politically, is when she and Masot discuss the possibility of ‘taking down’ some non-compliant Tory MPs. As Strizzolo says “If you look hard enough, I’m sure there is something that they are trying to hide”. The one name that they put in the frame for this treatment is Sir Alan Duncan – certainly well known for showing more sympathy for the Palestinian predicament than most of his colleagues. But he was, and is, Deputy Foreign Minister! This small indiscretion has lost Maria Strizzolo both her jobs, and got Masot sent back to Israel in disgrace. The Foreign Affairs Select Committee is now investigating “How UK policy is influenced by other states and interested parties”.

Strategic Affairs

So that’s all right then? Well, not really. This is the tip of a rather large iceberg. Craig Murray has ferreted out of a reluctant Foreign Office the fact that Masot was supposed to be a member of the embassy’s ‘technical and administrative staff’, a grade well below the diplomatic salt. But as we see in the series, Masot is Ambassador Regev’s chosen travelling companion to the Labour Party conference – not really a technical and administrative duty. Evidently this is not all above board.

In fact Murray has examined the register of Israeli Embassy employees, and believes he has discovered what he calls ‘a large nest of Israeli spies’. It is, he says, “simply impossible” that the FCO would normally grant seventeen technical and administrative visas to support sixteen diplomats, when six of those sixteen are already support staff. So it seems that we have quite a bunch of supernumerary staff at the Embassy, up to something, and connived at by the UK government.

There is certainly some circumstantial evidence for this reading in Masot’s own biography, in so far as it is known. Until quite recently he was a major in the IDF. London was his first ‘diplomatic’ assignment, it was temporary, and he was not a regular member of the diplomatic service. The very credible suggestion has been made that his placement in London was the responsibility not of Israel’s Foreign Ministry but of its Ministry of Strategic Affairs. The MSA was set up in 2010 to counter Israel’s perceived ‘strategic threats’, principally the international BDS campaign. In the last year or two it has been on a spending spree for new ‘talent’, quite affordable from its $50 million budget. The new employees are “mostly former officers from Israel’s intelligence community”. All this fits Masot’s profile rather well. And then there is the fact that when the Minister of Strategic Affairs Gilad Erdan visited London last September, Masot was among the Israeli officials he met.

No wonder, then, that Israel removed Masot from the UK at something approaching the speed of light, and that the FCO in an unseemly rush pronounced the matter satisfactorily closed. We must hope that the Foreign Affairs Select Committee will not so easily be deflected from its task.

The second scandal

In fact the fiasco of Masot’s incompetent machinations is only one, and perhaps the lesser, of two scandals. The other scandal is how this can have been going on, evidently for years, yet no British news organisation with the resources to do so thought it worth investigating. Why do we have to rely on Al-Jazeera to cleanse our stable? It is that overwhelming silence that shouts complicity.

There is one honourable exception to this charge sheet. In 2009 the respected right-wing journalist Peter Oborne made a television programme Inside Britain's Israel Lobby for the Dispatches series. He concentrated then on the Conservative Friends 4 of Israel (barely touched on in The Lobby), which the programme makers describe as "beyond doubt the most well- connected and probably the best funded of all Westminster lobbying groups". (The full text is available on line.)

Oborne is interviewed for comment on the Al-Jazeera programme, and is almost incandescent with indignation about the revelations of Israeli interference with UK political processes. But some of that rage should surely be diverted and redirected at our own media. In the USA the operations of big oil and the gun lobby in distorting the political agenda are well known and visible. This relative transparency doesn’t just happen – it needs an alert, vigilant media with the courage and freedom of its convictions.

The British media is a watch dog that hasn’t barked. It is as appropriate to ask why that is so, and perhaps more useful, than to fulminate about the iniquity of Israel’s ruthless pursuit of what it perceives to be its interests. Are the watchdog’s teeth rotten beyond repair? Is it muzzled? What are the mechanisms that have maintained this complaisant silence in the presence of a blatant affront to open democracy?

Postscript

We left Conan Doyle’s dog in the stables waiting for Sherlock to sort out the mystery of its silence. But nowadays the government has adopted a problematic ‘definition’ of antisemitism, and the Anti-Antisemitic Tropes patrols are out in force. So I won’t draw any possible analogy. You’ll just have to read the story yourself.

The Lies of Far-Right Zionist Solicitor Robert Festenstein in his letter to QEII Centre

Part of the Zionist campaign on social media to censor anything to do with Palestine

It was predictable that Palestine Expo 2017, a celebration of Palestinian culture, art, food, music and politics would, sooner or later, come to the attention of the Zionist movement in this country. Robert Festenstein of the ‘Jewish Human Rights Watch’ [JHRW] sent a threatening and intimidatory letter to the managers of the Queen Elizabeth II Centre on the South Bank of the Thames alleging that the Conference and the groups behind it are terrorist supporters and that their sole purpose is ‘Jew-hate’.

Support for the Palestinians and opposition to Zionism is, according to the Zionist/Israel lobby in this country, automatically ‘anti-Semitic’ and also supporting ‘terrorism’. Thus we seen how the anti-terror climate in this country is being used to try and clamp down on free speech.

I have written Festenstein a letter [see bottom of page] by way of response as his letter is a clear abuse of his position as a solicitor and a thinly veiled attempt to use his position as a solicitor in order to try an intimidate the Queen Elizabeth II Centreinto calling off a perfectly lawful festival.

RHF letter to the QEII Centre where Palestine Expo 2017 is being held

There is a duty on solicitors under the second principle of the Law Society’s Code of Conduct to act with integrity. There is also a subsidiary principle to ‘behave in a way that maintains the trust the public places in you’. It is clearly the case that Festenstein has done neither. I would encourage people to submit a complaint in writing to the Law Society concerning Festenstein’s deceptive and dishonest conduct.

Festenstein and JHRW’s use of the ‘anti-Semitism’ scare is of course par for the course. Anything to do with the Palestinians is, by definition, ‘anti-Semitic’. In Israel the army and police force use force and violence to close down anything they disagree with e.g. last weekend’s attackon Jewish protesters in Jerusalem who were trying to prevent the normal march of Israeli settler youth through the Arab quarter, replete with their chants of ‘death to the Arabs’. One Jewish woman had her arm broken.

Welcome to RHF Solicitors - not only are they politically bankrupt but their legal expertise is in bankruptcy - even JHRW according to its accounts is bankrupt!

It seems that Festenstein has form on these matters. He threatened Cambridge University if it allowed Israel Apartheid Week to go ahead. It even demanded the names of individual students. It also mounted a failed judicial review challenge to 3 local councils for passing pro-Israel motions.

Festenstein also wrote threatening legal action to Celtic Football Club and UEFA after fans had greeted an Israeli football club Hapoel Beer Sheva with a mass of Palestinian flags. JHRW on that occasion substituted Nazi flags for Palestinian ones, presumably that was what they wished for.

JHRW is an interesting organisation, or rather it isn’t an organisation. It consists of 2 limited companies (presumably so that in the case of failed legal actions or libels, its directors won’t be legally liable).

The Directors of Jewish Rights Watch Ltd. - all of whom reside at Festenstein's solicitors' office!

The first company, Jewish Rights Watch has four directors. It was founded on 17^thDecember 2014 and its first director, Osker Heiman, was appointed and resigned on the same day. Clearly a man in a hurry. Jonathan Neumann, who is listed by Powerbase, the Public Interest Investigations site as its spokesperson was appointed the same day as Heiman resigned. Emmanuel Manny' Weiss, Robert Henry Festensteinand Joseph Rosenfield were appointed as directors subsequently.

Soldiers get ready to attack Jewish protesters in Jerusalem at the weekend when trying to stop settler march through Arab quarter - thousands of settler youth ramage through the area chanting 'death to the Arabs' - in Europe they used to chant 'death to the Jews' - such is the 'Jewish' state

The second company Jewish Human Rights Watch Education Ltd. has just one director, Robert Henry Festenstein! It was formed less than a week ago, 24.5.17.

JHRW does not seem to be that healthy financially - then again most transactions are probably off the books in the form of Israeli government slush-fund grants

So when Festenstein wrote to QEII on behalf of his ‘clients’ he was lying through his teeth. He was his own client. Despite accusing the organisers of Palestine Expo of not informing QEII of who they were, it is in fact Festenstein who was dishonest in not explaining his connection with his ‘client’.

Judging by its accounts Jewish Rights Watch owes over £13,000. JHRWE has £100 in share capital, all owned by Festenstein.

Recently formed, this company has but one director - the same Festenstein - it must be difficult representing himself

It is therefore disappointing that the management of the QEII Centre gave these racists the time of day. On JHRW’s web site there is a copy of a letter that the QEII Centre has apparently sent, saying that are carrying out ‘due diligence’ into the organisers of Expo 2017. Instead of putting the organisers under stress and strain they would perhaps better employ their resources into doing a little basic research into the bona fides of bent solicitor Festenstein and his so-called Jewish Human Rights Watch.

QEII response to JHRW - let us hope they don't take fright at the scare words 'anti-Semitism'

Because the one thing that JHRW is not concerned about is human rights – whether Jewish or Palestinian.

Below is an article about what has happened on Middle East Monitor

Tony Greenstein

An online hate campaign is trying to get a Palestinian cultural festival cancelled

Leaflets for the Palestine Expo 2017 event [Palestine Expo/Facebook]

@yvonneridley

May 26, 2017 at 12:12 pm

An unprecedented hate campaign has been unleashed on the social networks aimed at wrecking a ground-breaking two day event to celebrate Palestinian life and culture. Palestine Expo 2017 is billed as the biggest ever social, cultural and entertainment event of its kind in Europe; however, there are those calling for the festival to be stopped before it even starts.

Trading on unfounded fears and using the Westminster and Manchester terrorist attacks as ammunition, some groups and Twitter campaigns have described the expo in London on 8 and 9 July as a “festival of hate”. Others have been more targeted and made potentially defamatory statements, accusing the organisers of having terrorist links in a desperate bid to stop the event — for which thousands of tickets have already been sold — from going ahead.

Israel doesn't need to ban dissent - it just breaks its arm - Jewish protester being dragged off in Jerusalem when trying to stop annual pogrom against Arabs in Jerusalem

Now lawyers on all sides are examining the accusations and allegations about the event in July, which is designed to celebrate Palestinian culture, art, food and history. Robert Festenstein of RHF Solicitors in Manchester represents Jewish Human Rights Watch; he has sent a letter to the prestigious Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre in Westminster urging it not to host the event. The letter makes several damaging allegations against the event’s co-sponsors – Friends of Al-Aqsa and Palestine Solidarity Campaign – both of whom are taking legal advice and vehemently deny the accusations made against them.

Festenstein’s letter has found its way onto social networks and has been distributed widely. “Our client [JHRW],” it claims, “is aware that the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, who are also advertising the event, has clear links to the terrorist group Hamas.”

The letter further informs the venue that Friends of Al-Aqsa had its bank account with the Co-operative Bank closed. It claims that both pro-Palestine organisations “support Jew hate” and have “no right of audience anywhere in the UK, especially not near the scene of the recent Westminster terrorism attack.”

A campaign on social media calling for the ban of the Palestinian Expo 2017 [Twitter]

Despite several email requests for a comment, RHF Solicitors have not responded other than to ask, “Can you please confirm how you obtained our Mr Festenstein’s e-mail address? We look forward to your response, following which we will consider your request further.” Subsequent requests have failed to elicit a comment, even after revealing that his email address was obtained via the Law Society website.

“Palestine Expo,” explained PSC Director Ben Jamal, “will be a celebration of the rich Palestinian culture, with traditional dancing, food, artisan goods, art exhibits, and children’s entertainment alongside talks on the current political situation.” He described the allegations as “false and disturbing” before adding, “We are sure that reasonable people have no issue with any national group celebrating their heritage.”

RHF Solicitors letter to QEII

Friends of Al-Aqsa was established in 1997. It describes itself as an NGO concerned with defending the human rights of Palestinians and protecting the Noble Sanctuary of Al-Aqsa in Jerusalem. A spokesman declined to comment due to pending “legal issues”.

Several of the apparently leading opponents of Palestine Expo who appear to have led the Twitter campaigns against the event have been contacted for a comment. At the time of writing, they have failed to respond to any of the allegations that they have made.

JHRW makes it clear that it has nothing to do with human rights, except in so far as it tries to destroy the human rights of supporters of the Palestinians. BDS is its main objective

Nonetheless, it is hard to see how the damaging allegations of promoting “Jew Hate” and “Terrorism” could be substantiated when looking at the widely publicised programme at “PalExpo”. This includes exhibitions by internationally acclaimed photojournalist Hamed Abu Rahma and award-winning photographer Rich Wiles.

Among the 70 stalls at the event will be examples of fashion, health, beauty, arts, entertainment and food focussing on Palestine and its people. Lively panel discussions, workshops and talks will be on offer while spoken-word performers, musicians and artists will demonstrate how to use creativity and the arts in campaigns and activism.

Speakers and performers will include the popular Leanne Mohammed and Muslim Belal, Aamer Rehman and music by the children’s group Fatafeat. Dave Randall, described as a “faithless guitarist and producer” will discuss his book ‘Sound System: The Political Power of Music’.

The much-admired Jews for Boycotting Israeli Goods along with Free Speech on Israel will be discussing anti-Semitism. Visitors will be invited to take part in discussions and workshops on Muslim and Jewish experiences in Europe from an academic perspective. More details will follow soon.

Palestinian cuisine will also be a major focus with the opportunity to “master the art of Palestinian cooking” at a live, purpose-built kitchen in the food court. The author of ‘Palestine on a Plate’, Joudie Kalla, will make an appearance.

A campaign on social media calling for the ban of the Palestinian Expo 2017 [Twitter] Click to enlarge

Billed as the “perfect space to unleash your inner child” it’s hard to see how the two day event could be viewed as a festival of hate or a terrorist threat.

Israel and its supporters seize every opportunity to divert attention from its own human rights abuses and contempt for international law. “If the Manchester attacker was Palestinian and the victims Israeli,” moaned Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu this week, “the terrorist’s family would receive a stipend from Mahmoud Abbas.” It is possible that he used the Manchester atrocity rather cynically as a stick to beat the Palestinian Authority leader because, on Tuesday morning in Ramallah, US President Donald Trump heaped praise on Abbas for being ready to resume peace negotiations with Israel, which Netanyahu is trying to stall.

Other Israeli ministers posted tweets very similar to Netanyahu’s suggesting that they were part of a coordinated government campaign to exploit the Manchester tragedy. Certainly, a similar coordinated effort to have the Palestine Expo stopped before it even starts can be evidenced by doing a quick search on the social networks, although there is no suggestion this is being organised or instigated by JHRW or its lawyers.

Nevertheless, it is difficult not to conclude that the pro-Israel lobby swings into action to trash the reputations of Palestinians and those who support their struggle for their legal and human rights every time that something positive about Palestine emerges which will expose the Zionist narrative for what it is. Indeed, Robert Festenstein and his chums have a bit of a track record on this already. Some of their activities were exposed by my colleague Ben Whiteon these pages in March last year.

What’s more, Festenstein also tried to get the chair of Interpal, Ibrahim Hewitt, banned from speaking at a fund-raising event organised by the British charity in Manchester in September 2014. In a very aggressive email to a local councillor, he alleged that “it is the likes of Mr Hewitt and his accomplices who are responsible for the deaths, rapes and destruction in the Middle East…”

Interestingly, in his mini-campaign to get Hewitt banned from Manchester the lawyer said nothing about a talk that he was due to give just a few days after the Interpal event, in the same venue, for a British advocacy organisation. Mr Festenstein’s “concern”, it would appear, wasn’t so much about stopping “peddlers of hatred”as he claimed, but more of an attempt to damage an event at which funds would be raised by a British charity to help Palestinians in desperate need.

A campaign on social media calling to put a stop to the Palestinian Expo 2017 [Twitter]

The management of the QEII Conference Centre also failed to respond to MEMO enquiries on Thursday, although it is understood that it has carried out extensive due diligence checks regarding the allegations contained in the JHRW lawyer’s letter, and is content to allow Palestine Expo 2017 to proceed.

Having trawled extensively through the social networks and the programme lined up at the expo, a reasonable person has to conclude that there is indeed a hate fest in progress, but it’s certainly not organised by Palestinians or their growing network of supporters from various faith communities and among those of no faith. Far from promoting hate, Palestine Expo 2017 promises a celebration of culture, arts, crafts, food and music promoting the country and its people in a positive light. Who wouldn’t support that? Only those with no grasp of great British values such as democracy, justice and mutual respect and tolerance of others, that’s who.

My letter to Festenstein

How Political Opportunists and Racist Misfits Use the Criminal Law to Deflect Criticism

Since she is a Councillor in Brighton I'm not sure how she can vote for Peter Kyle in Hove - but he is a fellow Progress racist and an Israel right or wronger

I was served with this last week

Last week I was at home with my wife and son when who came knocking at the door but 2 members of Brighton Plod with nothing better to do of an evening. What I wondered had I done? Robbed the local offy, held up a bank or annoyed some Zionists? It would seem that the latter was my ‘crime’.

Last year, Progress Councillor Caroline ‘Poison’ Penn, who is a notoriously foul mouthed and abusive person, even by the standards of the Labour Right, took to Twitter to announce that she had joined, like a few fellow Progress members like Cllrs. Emma Daniels and Warren Morgan, the Brighton branch of the Israeli Labour Party (otherwise known as the Jewish Labour Movement).

Since Poison Penn had taken to announcing that she was a racist to the whole world, I thought I would respond. I wondered if she thought if would be worth announcing that she had joined the National Front or British National Party too.

Penn accuses me of being an anti-Semite and then threatens to call in the Police when I respond!

In May she decided to send out a Tweet (which she has since deleted) calling me an anti-Semite. Now I am used to Zionists calling me anti-Semitic. It is the standard accusation to make against anyone who is anti-Zionist or supports the Palestinians. Nonetheless it is abusive (and to use today’s PC language, ‘harassment’) especially when directed by someone like Poison Penn, who is a Goy, against someone who is Jewish.

So I responded to PP with a series of tweets pointing out that I am a long standing anti-fascist activist whereas she has been a racist for most of her short and miserable career. I also pointed out that a notorious right-winger, who resigned from the Labour Party because it was too left-wing Harris ‘Fascist’ Fitch, is her flat mate and moreover he has expressed to a number of people the fact that he is a supporter of the BNP.

Poison Penn denies she is a racist but supports Israel despite its ethnic cleansing and oppression of the Palestinians

Probably because a number of people began retweeting what I had sent out, Ms Penn bleated that I was harassing her!! Presumably responding to these people is harassment!

This isn’t the first time that a similar accusation has been made. Indeed responding to political criticism with charges of ‘harassment’ is now the done thing.

Apparently telling the truth is harrassment

The first such complaint was made to Northumbria Police by one Gary Spedding for posts such as Gary Spedding - The Zionist Cuckoo in the Palestine Solidarity Nest– The Walter Mitty of Palestine Politics. The next complaint of harassment, I’m not sure if it was on the grounds of race or not, was Cecille Wright for having posted Professor Cecile Wright –the Black Face of Lansman’s Coup - Paying lip-service to anti-racism for the advancement of a political career .

Since Poison Penn accuses me of anti-Semitism I pointed out how I had helped organise the ousting of people like the fellow in the middle - never seen Penn and Progress on anti-fascist demonstrations - they are not concerned about the anti-Semitism of neo-Nazis just supporters of the Palestinians

What you might ask is the common denominator? Trenchant political criticism of pseuds, careerists, opportunists and racists. Instead of these people responding in kind, they call in the Police and file charges of ‘harassment’. So the Police hand you a Police Information Notice which states that nothing in it implies you are guilty but nonetheless you have been warned.

Nonetheless it is serious as it can be the first stage in a charge of harassment, he definition of which is causing ‘alarm or distress’. This whole procedure is undemocratic. It is an attack on free speech. It’s no different in principle to the persecution radical pamphleteers like John Wilkes or Thomas Paine faced. It is the use of the criminal law to prevent political criticism and dissent. Because Poison Penn and company cannot respond politically they resort to the Police.

After she announced she had joined the Jewish Labour Movement, which supports Israel right or wrong, I pointed out that in Israel asylum seekers are demonised as 'cancer' by government ministers whilst the opposition Labour Party says nothing

Most people will think of harassment as being a man ringing up, stalking or worse an ex-girlfriend or wife. It could be an ex-girl friend harassing a man too. Or breaking into someone’s flat and threatening them, as happenedto Lily Allen or the vile abusethat Lily Allen suffered after the still-birth of her baby. There are many such examples of harassment and stalking. What isn’t harassment is political criticism made against people who, by their actions, court publicity but then complain when those actions are subject to scrutiny.

I criticised Gary Spedding because he claimed to be a Palestine solidarity supporter but spent most of the time feeding his own ego whilst attacking other, genuine solidarity activists.

Apparently it is 'harassment' to respond to an accusation of 'anti-Semitism'

Cecile Wright I criticised because she professed to be a Black anti-racist yet she stabbed Jackie Walker in the back when she supported the (very) white Jon Lansman in voting to remove Jackie as Vice-Chair of Momentum. I also pointed out that she had also been censored by the Momentum Black Caucus! This was deemed worthy of a complaint to the Police and I was also sent an email from Emma Rees, of the Momentum National Office implying I’d broken some social media code or other. Apparently criticising someone who is Black is itself an act of racism!

Since the racist Penn loves Israel so I pointed out that the Deputy Defence Minister believes Jews have higher souls than non-Jews and the opposition Labour Party says nothing

Caroline Penn is in a different category. She is a right-wing member of the Labour Party who shares a flat with someone who supports the BNP and EDL. She is know to be obnoxious and, like many racists, a supporter of Zionism and the State of Israel. When I called her out about this she ran to the Police. Well she can continue running because I intend to keep criticising her. She is a local politician and if she can’t take the heat then she should, in Harry Truman’s immortal phrase ‘get out of the kitchen’.

I look forward to charges of ‘harassment’ being filed and I intend to defend them vigorously!

Tony Greenstein

In Israel the 'Culture' Minister calls African Migrants a Cancer

European Parliament sees Anti-Semites, Fascists and Islamaphobes unite to Condemn ‘Anti-Semitism’

Green MEPs reject IHRA and Caroline Lucas MP withdraws her support for the IHRA

According to the IHRA Definition, this article in Israel's Ha'aretz paper is anti-Semitic

Today (Thursday) a debate took place in the European Parliament over whether to support the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of anti-Semitism [IHRA]. An amendment to delete support for the IHRA was lost by 479-101.

The winning majority consisted of Conservatives, far-Right nationalists and anti-Semites, social democrats and UKIP voting to support the Zionist definition of ‘anti-Semitism’.

Victor Orban's racist and antisemitic Fidesz party also supported the IHRA

As Naomi Wimborne-Iddrissi reportswe saw UKIP’s Gerard Batten, infamous for calling Islam a “death cult”, MEPs from Italy’s Northern League, who can’t even stand Italians south of Rome, together with racist Hungarian MEPs from Victor Orban’s Fidesz party, open anti-Semites from Poland’s Law and Justice Party ally with Zionists and corporate social democrats like Spain’s Lopez Aguilar and Péter Niedermüller from Hungary. All were apparently opposed to ‘anti-Semitism’. Perhaps they will form an ‘anti-Semites against anti-Semitism’ group in the Parliament!

Caroline Lucas email to me saying that she no longer supports the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism

The IHRA definition of anti-Semitism used to be known as the EUMC Working Definition of Anti-Semitism. It was removedfrom the web site of the European Union’s Fundamental Rights Agency in 2013. In 2016 it was, like the Undead in Dracula movies, brought back to life.

The IHRA has been used to close down and prevent meetings up and down the country. Israel Apartheid Week at the University of Central Lancashire was banned. At other universities like Exeter and UCL restrictions were placed on events. In all cases ‘anti-Semitism’ was the excuse.

Geert Wilder's fascist Freedom Party was also in favour of the IHRA definition of antisemitism

During the debate Péter Niedermüller praised the IHRA clause for making clear that “you cannot question the very being of the Israeli state.” which is, of course, exactly what the IHRA is about. Even former UKIP MEP, Steven Woolfe, who described himself as of Black and Jewish heritage and as a supporter of the state of Israel, nonetheless said adopting the IHRA clause would mean preventing freedom of speech and creating fear of speaking out. “This definition is so broad and wide that if we adopt it we would have to jail Mahatma Gandhi for things he said about Palestine,” Woolfe said.

Europe's flag is at half mast but not because of the passing of this bogus definition of anti-Semitism

Anti-Semitism of course is a form of racism against Jews as individuals. It is not hatred or criticism of a state. You cannot be racist towards a state. States are not human beings they are the constructs of human beings.

The racists of UKIP are all in favour of fighting 'anti-Semitism' because they know it is a stick to beat Muslims with

I reporteda few days ago on the attempts by far-right Zionist solicitor Robert Festenstein to use the IHRA definition to close down European’s largest Palestinian festival of art and culture, Expo 2017. Indeed anything or anyone who supports the Palestinians is now defined as anti-Semitic under this bogus definition.

Unfortunately Jeremy Corbyn, having abandoned the Palestinians in an attempt to appease the Zionist lobby in this country, has also adopted a definition of anti-Semitism which, 18 months ago, would have branded him an anti-Semite. It is shameful that Corbyn has jettisoned so many of the principles he once stood for – be it on Palestine or Ireland or indeed the monarchy.

Gerard Batten of UKIP spoke in favour of IHRA - Islam is a 'death cult'

Only a few weeks ago Hugh Tomlinson QC gave a formal legal opinionregarding the IHRA definition in which he made it clear that the IHRA definition was being used in an unlawful way to restrict freedom of speech under Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights. Sir Stephen Sedley, the former Court of Appeal judge, who is himself Jewish, has made searing criticisms of the IHRA in the May issue of London Review of Books. Sedley’s first paragraph begins:

Shorn of philosophical and political refinements, anti-Semitism is hostility towards Jews as Jews. Where it manifests itself in discriminatory acts or inflammatory speech it is generally illegal, lying beyond the bounds of freedom of speech and of action. By contrast, criticism (and equally defence) of Israel or of Zionism is not only generally lawful: it is affirmatively protected by law. Endeavours to conflate the two by characterising everything other than anodyne criticism of Israel as anti-Semitic are not new. What is new is the adoption by the UK government (and the Labour Party) of a definition of anti-Semitism which endorses the conflation.

In just one paragraph Stephen Sedley demolishes this bogus attempt to restrict freedom of speech. It is therefore to be welcomed that the lecturers’ union, the University Colleges Union has voted, at its annual conference last week to reject the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism.

Spanish Blairite Lopez Aguilar was one of the movers of the bogus IHRA definition of antisemitism

I also wrote an Open Letter to Caroline Lucas asking her to support the position of her fellow Green members of the European Parliament who have rejected the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism as a threat to freedom of speech and because it conflates anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism. I am pleased to say that Caroline has given a very strong indication that she has now changed her mind and understands the threat that the IHRA poses to freedom of speech. The IHRA was supported by right-wing Tories like Eric Pickles, the former Tory Cabinet Minister and Chair of the Conservative Friends of Israel. Pickles it was who defended the Tories alliance with openly anti-Semitic parties like Poland’s Law and Justice Party and Robert Zile’s Latvia’s LNNK in the ECR (European Conservative Reform) group in the European Parliament.

Marine Le Pen, French fascist leader is all in favour of fighting 'antisemitism'

In an article The Nazi whitewash Efraim Zuroffof the Simon Wiesenthall Centre, wrote that

‘I can't believe Eric Pickles supports Latvia's 'For Fatherland and Freedom' party, which wants to rewrite a murderous history... The sight of SS veterans marching down the main avenue of the capital city of a member of Nato and the European Union is hardly a sight to bring joy to the heart of a British political leader. Yet just a few days ago, Conservative chairman Eric Pickles saw fit in an interview on Radio 4 to rush to the defence of the Latvian "For Fatherland and Freedom" party which is among the staunchest supporters of precisely such an event that takes place annually in Riga every 16 March.’

This is the same Eric Pickles who, when it comes to defending Israel, is a vociferous opponent of ‘anti-Semitism’!

Below is a press statement from Bricup (British Committee for the Universities of Palestine) and Free Speech on Israel

Free Speech on Israel, a Jewish-led organisation which defends the right to criticise Israel, and the British Committee for the Universities of Palestine, which campaigns for academic and cultural boycott of Israel, today welcomed the vote by the University and College Union (UCU) to reject the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism.

Motion 57, submitted by UCU branches at the University of Leeds, Goldsmiths, and the University of Brighton, along with two strengthening amendments from Queen’s University Belfast and London Retired Members Branch, was carried overwhelmingly in the closing minutes of UCU's annual Congress in Brighton. Only one delegate spoke against the motion.

UCU had previously, in 2011, rejected the Working Definition of Antisemitism" of the EU Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC). The IHRA definition strongly resembles the EUMC version.

Both these definitions are considered highly problematic because they seek to conflate criticism of Israel with genuine anti-Jewish racism: examples cited in them make explicit reference to Israel. The UK Government has adopted the IHRA definition, and in February this year Universities Minister Jo Johnson wrote to Universities UK insisting that university activities must respect the definition. In particular, he alleged that ‘anti-Semitic incidents ... might take place under the banner of Israel (sic) Apartheid’ events. Some universities have banned or curtailed campus events during Israeli Apartheid week or subsequently, and campaigners for Palestinian human rights consider that the definition is being used to censor legitimate political activity and debate which criticises the Israeli occupation and human rights abuses. In moving the motion, Mark Abel of Brighton UCU noted that an event organised by Friends of Palestine had been cancelled by the University of Central Lancashire, who cited the IHRA definition as making the event ‘unlawful’. Reacting to this wave of censorship the new, Jewish-led organisation Free Speech on Israel, along with Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC), Independent Jewish Voices, and Jews for Justice for Palestinians, obtained a legal Opinion from the eminent human rights lawyer Hugh Tomlinson QC.

The Opinion is devastating: it characterises the IHRA definition as confusing, not legally binding, and putting public bodies that use it at risk of ‘unlawfully restricting legitimate expressions of political opinion’. A public body that bans a meeting under the IHRA definition without any evidence of genuine antisemitism could be breaching the European Convention on Human Rights which guarantees freedom of expression (Article 10), and freedom of assembly (Article 11).

In concluding his speech, Mark Abel said: ‘This is a dangerous conflation of anti-Zionism and anti-semitism. ... It is a definition intended to silence those who wish to puncture the Israeli state’s propaganda that it is a normal liberal democratic state’

Mike Cushman, a UCU member and co-founder of FSOI, said: ‘Free speech on Israel welcomes UCU’s recognition that fighting antisemitism is a separate struggle from defending the rights of Palestinians, and that both these struggles are important. Putting these in opposition to each other assists both antisemites and war criminals.’

Les Levidow, a UCU member speaking for BRICUP, said: ‘Congratulations to UCU for defending free speech on Israel/Palestine by rejecting the government-IHRA agenda to weaponise antisemitism, conflated with anti-Zionism.’

UCU Congress also passed a motion in support of Professor Kamel Hawwash, a UCU member at the University of Birmingham, who was prevented from entering Israel on 7th April on a trip with his wife and young son to visit relatives in occupied East Jerusalem. It seems likely that Prof. Hawwash was banned under the new Israeli boycott law, which prevents activists accused of supporting BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) from entering Israel. Prof. Hawwash was until recently the vice-chair of PSC. The General Secretary of UCU will now be writing to the Israeli Embassy and the FCO to urge that the ban on Prof. Hawwash and all non- violent human rights campaigners be lifted.

Below is the full text of Motion 57 as carried, incorporating amendments:

57 Composite: International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism University of Leeds, Goldsmiths, University of London, University of Brighton, Grand Parade

Congress notes:

1. UCU's exemplary anti-racist work, e.g. Holocaust Memorial Day materials;

2. policy (2011) dissociating UCU from the ‘EUMC working definition’ of antisemitism;

3. the close similarity between the IHRA and EUMC definitions, including their conflation of antisemitism with criticism of Israel;

4. That government has formally adopted the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism;

5. That this definition conflates anti-Semitism with criticism of the state of Israel and has been used to intimidate academics who are engaged in activities that are critical of the policies of the Israeli government but that are not anti-Semitic;

6. Government-inspired attempts to ban Palestine solidarity events, naming Israeli Apartheid Week.

7. The legal opinion from Hugh Tomlinson QC, obtained by PSC and other groups, characterising the IHRA definition as confusing, not legally binding, and putting public bodies that use it at risk of 'unlawfully restricting legitimate expressions of political opinion'.

Congress re-affirms:

a. UCU's condemnation of all forms of racial or religious hatred or discrimination;

b. UCU’s commitment to free speech and academic freedom;

c. the importance of open campus debate on Israel/Palestine;

Congress resolves that UCU dissociates itself from the IHRA definition and will make no use of it (e.g. in educating members or dealing with internal complaints).

Congress instructs:

i. NEC to contact all members in a dedicated communication urging report to NEC of all repressive uses of the IHRA definition;

ii Conduct research about the implications of the use of the IHRA definition;

iii. General Secretary to write to VCs/principals urging staff protection from malicious accusations, and freedom of political criticism;

iv. President to issue, and circulate to members, a detailed press statement on UCU’s criticism of the IHRA definition;

v. Lobby government to seek a review of its endorsement of the IHRA definition and to replace it with one that will both protect free speech and combat anti-Semitism.

Recalling the experience of Fraser vs UCU, we call upon the NEC to take a position against any university management that reacts to spurious accusations of anti-semitism by banning speakers who are opposed to the policies of the State of Israel but who have not in any way expressed racism against Jewish people.

Bogus Zionist ‘Charity’ Attacks Labour Candidates as ‘Anti-Semitic’

Campaign Against Anti-Semitism Libels Dina Mulholland, Labour PPC for Ceredigion and Mike Sivier of Vox Political

WATCH: Police spray putrid water on Palestinian homes, schools

By Haggai Matar

Gideon Levy’s Heartfelt Apology to Haaretz Readers

Levy Apologises for telling the truth and upsetting his readers

Teaching Jewish Children to Kill and Hate in the Jewish State

Why are Israeli children brainwashed to hate?

Lying in the cause of Zionism - Defending Zionism’s Abandonment of the Jews during the Holocaust

A reply to Jamie Robert’s When is Holocaust Revisionism OK?

Tim Farron – Christian Bigot Sacks former MP David Ward for Calling Israel an Apartheid State - The Truth is Anti-Semitic

Liberal-Democrats Demonstrate that they are neither Liberal nor Democratic

Free Speech Under Attack - How the Government’s Prevent Programme was used to Cancel Meeting on Israel in Portsmouth

Extremismin the Defense of Liberty is no Vice!Moderation in the Pursuit of Justiceis no Virtue! [Barry Goldwater, US Republican Presidential candidate 1964]

The Dilemma of America’s Liberal Jewish Zionists

White Zionism – Why The ‘Alt-Right’ Hates Jews But Loves Israel

Israel has officially declared itself an apartheid state

Israel’s Jewish Nation-State bill ‘declaration of war’

The Zionist Attack on Tom Suarez - Its Time to Defend Free Speech on Palestine and Israel

When 'Say No to Israel’ means ‘Say Yes to Holocaust Denial’

Are You a Holocaust Believer? Neo-Nazi Facebook Group Masquerades as Anti-Zionist

Labour Changes Manifesto as a result of Zionist Pressure – No Condemnation of Israeli Settlements or Violence

Because he is Jewish, Israel’s Nazi –like Deputy Speaker, Bezalel Smotrich, will not be removed from the Knesset

Is describing Israel as an Apartheid State anti-Semitic?

Yet in Israel ‘Apartheid’ is a term regularly used even by Zionists

The MANCHESTER Bombing is the Price We Have Paid for Iraq and Libya

Trump and May Support Saudi Arabia’s Bombing of Civilians in Yemen and then Complain about Terrorism

The Sun Has the Blood of Manchester and 1 million dead Iraqis on Its Hands

Israel, ‘The Only Democracy in the Middle East’ Set to Expel Derk Walters for ‘hostile and biased description’ of Hebron

Open Letter to Britain’s Only Green MP – Caroline Lucas

Don’t support the IHRA Definition of anti-Semitism that Conflates anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism

Lest We Forget - The Dog That Failed Even to Whimper

Al Jazeera's 'The Lobby' and the British Media

Zionist 'Jewish Human Rights Watch' are Attempting to Destroy Expo 2017 the Biggest Palestinian Cultural Event ever in Europe

The Lies of Far-Right Zionist Solicitor Robert Festenstein in his letter to QEII Centre

Racist Labour Councillor, Caroline ‘Poison’ Penn, Complains of ‘Harassment’ on @Cllorcaroline @thepennydrops

How Political Opportunists and Racist Misfits Use the Criminal Law to Deflect Criticism

Bogus Definition of Anti-Semitism Suffers Its First Defeat at the University Colleges Union Conference

European Parliament sees Anti-Semites, Fascists and Islamaphobes unite to Condemn ‘Anti-Semitism’