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Avi Gabbay, leader of Israel’s Labour Party cuts links with Jeremy Corbyn alleging ‘anti-Semitism’

April 14, 2018, 8:57 pm
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It is long overdue that Labour severed its links with Israel’s (Labour) party of ethnic cleansing



Last week the new leader of the Israeli Labour Party, Avi Gabbay issued a letter cutting his links with Jeremy Corbyn.  It is doubtful that this racist twerp had any links in the first place.  His actions were designed to aid those seeking to overthrow Corbyn. The last person Jeremy Corbyn needs to take lessons from, when it comes to racism, is Avi Gabbay of the Israeli Labour Party, a party that openly supports segregation and Apartheid.

Gabbay’s actions provide an ideal opportunity however to sever our links with the Israeli Labour Party.  For that we should be grateful to him.  It is a complete disgrace that Labour has maintained, for nearly a century, its links with a party of ethnic cleansing, segregation and apartheid.  A party that openly campaigned for employers to sack Arab workers, which barred Arabs from its kibbutzim, which destroyed produce that Jews bought from Arabs and which barred Arabs from its trade union Histadrut, which was the General Federation of Hebrew Labour, until 1959.
Former leader Isaac Herzog (left) and current leader Avi Gabbay (right)

The Labour Party in its War Aims Memorandum of August 1917 gave support to the creation of a Jewish settler state in the Middle East, alongside the Suez Canal.  It was seen as an essential guarantee of Britain’s strategic interests which lay in protecting the route to India, the jewel in the crown of the Empire.

Since 1920 Poale Zion (now renamed the Jewish Labour Movement) has been an affiliated socialist society of the Labour Party. PZ's affiliation should be seen in the context of Labour’s support at that time for the British Empire. Supporting Zionism and a Jewish settler state was a part of Labour’s support for the Empire.

Joan Ryan with a group of helpers


 In the words of Sir Ronald Storres, the British Military Governor of Jerusalem from 1920-25 the Zionist project would be ‘one that blessed him that gave as well as him that took by forming for England “a little loyal Jewish Ulster in a sea of hostile Arabism.’ [Orientations, Nicholson & Watson, London 1943, p.345] 

Whatever imperial justification there was in 1920 for the anachronism whereby the overseas wing of the Israeli Labour Party (then Ahdut Ha’avodah) was affiliated to the Labour Party with the status of an affiliated socialist society, there is no such justification now. 
Labour Friends of Israel's Joan Ryan doing her best not to support Jeremy Corbyn in the General Election
A Jewish Palestine was seen as a piece in the imperial jigsaw.  Today Israel is an essential component of Pax Americana in the Middle East.  It is supported to the tune of $4 billion a year by the United States.

If there is a case for a Jewish section of the Labour Party, then the Jewish Labour Movement which describes the Israeli Labour Party as its ‘sister party’is not it.  The JLM’s name is misleading. It is only open to Zionists  Jewish or non-Jewish. The JLM is affiliated to the World Zionist Organisation whose Jerusalem Programholds that Zionism means ‘the centrality of the State of Israel and Jerusalem, its capital, in the life of the [Jewish] nation’

Jews who are neither Zionists nor racists cannot join the JLM whereas non-Jewish racists are welcome.  The JLM is believed to be largely composed of non-Jewish members for whom ‘anti-Semitism’ is simply a weapon to attack the Left.
In the wake of Gabbay's letter to Jeremy Corbyn, Gabbay became impatient awaiting a reply and so sent a second letter
Rather than reprimanding Gabbay for seeking to interfere in the internal affairs of the British Labour Party and for appointing himself the representative of Jews in the Labour Party (when were the elections?) Joan Ryan, the Labour MP for Enfield Southgate (when is she going to be reselected?) and Chair of Labour Friends of Israel rushed out an Open Letter, on behalf of LFI, supporting Gabbay.  This is the same Joan Ryan who toldher constituents in the General Election that she understood why they liked Theresa May more than Corbyn! She wrote:

“The polls are all saying that the Conservative party will win a large majority, possibly with more MPs than they have ever had before. Realistically, no one thinks Theresa May will not be prime minister or that she will not have the majority she needs to negotiate Brexit.”

These are the 10 reasons why the Labour Party should cut its links with the Israeli Labour Party and its ‘sister’ party the Jewish Labour Movement

1.           As Ben White explained in The Independent the Israeli Labour Party’s ‘“glory days include the Nakba [the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948]”, as well as “conquering and settling the West Bank and East Jerusalem”. In 1947-48 the ILP organised the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.  ¾ million Palestinian refugees were expelled and thousands were massacred by the Labour Zionist terror group, Haganah and Palmach.

2.           The Israeli Labour Party was always a racist party of segregation and apartheid.  From the time of its formation in 1906 it fought for Jewish Labour, which meant campaigning against Jewish employers hiring Arab labour.  It was a nationalist never a socialist party.

3.           When it comes to repressing the Palestinians there is no difference between Labour and Netanyahu.  In his open letter to Corbyn Gabbay stated that he was cutting his links with him because ‘Corbyn had expressed “very public hatred of the policies of the government of the state of Israel, many of which regard the security of our citizens and actions of our soldiers – policies where the opposition and coalition in Israel are aligned”.  There isn’t a war in Israel that the ILP hasn’t supported or an attack on the Palestinians which they have not taken part in.  Gabbay and the ILP wholeheartedly support the current shooting of unarmed protestors in the Gaza prison camp by Israeli snipers.

4.           Previous leader Isaac Herzog declaredthat his nightmare was waking up to find that Israel had a Palestinian Prime Minister and 61 Palestinian Members of Israel’s Knesset (Parliament).  Herzog also emphasised that he wanted to dispel the false impression that the ILP were ‘Arab Lovers’.

5.    Gabbay has gone better.  He declared that he would not join a coalition with members of the Joint List, a grouping of parties made up predominantly of Palestinian citizens of Israel. An Israeli Palestinian party has never been part of a government in Israel. It is an unwritten Zionist convention that Arab parties do not take part in the government of a Jewish state.  “We will not share a government with the Joint List, period,” Gabbay said. “Let that be clear.”  Ayman Odeh, the leader of the Joint List, responded that “Someone who doesn’t view Arab citizens and their elected representatives as a legitimate group, doesn’t present a real alternative to the right.”  At the same time, Gabbay indicated he could team up with Yisrael Beiteinu, the far-right party led by Israel’s notoriously anti-Arabdefense minister Avigdor Lieberman.

     6.    Lieberman believesPalestinians like Odeh should eventually be stripped of their Israeli citizenship altogether.

7.           Gabbay followed upwith more belligerent comments declaring that “the Arabs have to be afraid of us” and that Israel need never evacuate any of its settlements built on occupied Palestinian land in violation of international law.  According to Gabbay ‘Settlements represent the ‘beautiful face of Zionism’.
Gabbay's Labour Party, which is supposed to be the part of everyone, opposes admitting asylum seekers for the same reason that it expelled 3/4m Palestinians - because a Jewish state means a Jewish majority state

8.           In May 2012, Herzog wrote an opinion piece, challengingarguments by human rights groups that Eritreans in Israel deserved protection as refugees.  When the current crisis over Netanyahu’s attempt to deport 40,000 Black African refugees for the crime of not being Jewish or White erupted, Gabbay rushed to support Netanyahu. 

9.           The Israeli Labour Party was in power in Israel from 1948-1977.  During that time its closest ally was Apartheid South Africa.  Labour’s trade union Histadrut established an arms factory in South Africa, Iskandoor.  Israel also jointly developed a nuclear bomb with South Africa.

10.      On 22ndNovember, Ha’aretz published an editorial Labor Party's Support of Deportation, Imprisonment of Asylum Seekers Cheapens the Israeli Opposition.  It described how the ‘Zionist Union gave their support to a disgraceful government bill for the deportation and imprisonment of asylum-seekers.’ (Zionist Union is the Israeli Labour Party plus a smaller party, Hatnuah). 

Gabbay, who previously served in Netanyahu’s cabinet has only just joined the Israeli Labour Party.  Previously he was Chairman of Bezzek, Israel’s telecommunications giant.  There is nothing in the slightest left-wing about this billionaire.  It is a measure of the ILP’s desperation that he has been elected the leader of a party which is, in the worlds of Uri Avnery‘a political corpse without a purpose’.

Explained: Why many on the Left are furious at new Labor leader Avi Gabbay

From vowing never to join forces with Arab political parties to saying there’s no reason to remove settlements, Labor’s new leader has alienated many on the Left in recent months. His latest move, supporting the deportation of asylum seekers, is different.

Head of the Zionist Union party Avi Gabbay with Opposition Leader Isaac Herzog. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)

Last July, Avi Gabbay was elected chairman of the Labor party on the promise to return the party to power. Since then, Gabbay has staked out positions considerably to the right of Labor’s traditional base, leaving many on the Left frustrated, even devastated. Labor gained ground in the 2015 elections because it cast itself as the anti-Netanyahu; now, Labor voters worry, Gabbay is turning into Netanyahu.

Gabbay was always an unconventional choice for Labor. A former head of the Israeli telecom giant Bezeq, Gabbay was among the founding members of Moshe Kakhlon’s center-right Kulanu party, and even served as minister in the current government, resigning in May of 2016 to protest the appointment of Avigdor Liberman as defense minister. While Gabbay’s rivals in Labor raised questions about his right-wing past, the party ultimately decided to give him a chance.

Religion and state? Okay

The first sign of trouble came shortly after Gabbay’s election, in August, when he appeared at an event about religion and state alongside Education Minister Naftali Bennett in the West Bank settlement of Efrat. Bennett, at the time, was facing criticism from secular Israelis who were angered by his changes to the Israeli public school curriculum, which they felt amounted to religious indoctrination. While Gabbay did criticize Bennett’s changes to the curriculum, he made a concerted effort to appeal to the religious right. “I have no problem if my son learns Talmud,” Gabbay said.

‘We have nothing in common with them’

In early October, at a speaking event in Beer Sheva, Gabbay announced that he would refuse to form a governing coalition that included the Joint List, the political heterogeneous union of Arab parties and the third largest party in the Knesset. “We have nothing in common with them,” he said. Gabbay’s stance on the Arab parties was in practice not significantly different from that of his predecessor, Isaac Herzog, but the absolute rejection of partnering with Arab parties ruffled feathers even within his own party.

Threatening to kick out Labor’s only Arab MK

Two weeks later, when Labor MK Zuheir Bahlul announced he would not attend the Knesset’s celebration of the 100th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, Gabby reportedly threatened that Bahlul “won’t sit in the next Knesset session,” adding that he was tired of “this kind of extremism.” Gabbay’s public threats against his party’s only Arab MK disturbed many in Labor and on the left. “From his response to Bahlul,” the Haaretzeditorial board wrote, “[Gabbay] has proven himself to be a nationalist like all the others—someone who does not want Arabs in the governing coalition, or in his party.”

Settlements are here to stay

Gabbay further frustrated members of his own party when he declared that no settlements would need to be evacuated in a future peace agreement. Tzipi Livni was quick to release a statement that Gabbay’s views did represent hers or those of the Zionist Union, the merger of the Labor party and Livni’s Hatnua. Despite the controversy, Gabbay’s comments, again, reflected more of a shift in style than in substance. Herzog, during his time as Labor chairman, also did not exactly take a pro-peace position, claiming that now was not the time to attempt a two-solution.

Gabbay’s strong statement in favor of keeping the settlements in place did not sit well with others on the left either. Meretz MK Ilan Gilon remarked at the time that Gabbay seemed “to have forgotten that he was chosen to lead the alternative to the Likud.”

Adopting Netanyahu’s disdain for the Left

If pandering to the religious right, threatening an Arab member of his party, and cozying up to the settler lobby wasn’t enough, Gabbay appeared to cross another line when in early November he echoed a famous Netanyahu comment that “the Left has forgotten what it means to be Jewish” — that the Labor party had chosen liberal values at the expense of Jewish values. Adopting a line associated with the beginning of Netanyahu’s tenure generated a firestorm.

The last, or latest, straw

Gabbay’s defenders have insisted that the rightward swing is all part of a strategy to return Labor to power—though it is a strategy that has been tried and failed before.

Yet Gabbay’s new direction for the party became more than just a change in rhetoric this week, when he ordered the party to support a bill that will allow the deportation and indefinite detention of asylum seekers living in Israel. Support for the bill does more than shift Labor’s location on the political map, it could have real consequences: the deportation of tens of thousands of people who have lived in Israel for years, putting many of their lives at risk.

Nine of the Zionist Union’s 23 MKs opposedGabbay’s decision. Sheli Yachimovitch, the former Labor chairwoman, said it “was morally impossible to support the bill.” Zuheir Bahlul remarked, “I cannot understand how the party can support an immoral, right-wing proposal to send the refugees to hell.”

See also Chaim Levenson, Ha'aretz 10.4.18., Israel's Labor Party Suspends Ties With Jeremy Corbyn for 'Enabling anti-Semitism' 


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A Weekend of Solidarity with the Palestinians in Brighton

April 15, 2018, 6:10 pm
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A message of endorsement for our campaign from the heart of Brighton Pier 

Our message to HSBC – stop financing sales of arms to Israel

Below are some photos of the range of activities that took place in British, a city on the South coast of England this weekend in support of the Palestinians. 

Our focus was on Israel’s wanton murder of unarmed demonstators in Gaza using the same feeble excuses of ‘self-defence’.  

It is to be noticed that according to a report in today’s Ha’aretzIsraeli Settlers Attack Soldiers Arriving to Evacuate West Bank Outpost Israeli  soldiers used tear gas and fired in the air to disperse a group of stone throwing violent settlers.  They didn’t fire directly at them.  Of course the reason why is that the settlers were Jewish.

Among our activities was marching from the Clocktower in British where we held the Gaza demonstration and where we have a stall each Saturday to HSBC which is financing arms sales to Israel.  We then went to the Palace Pier, which was crowded with tourists and hung a massive banner from the side of it!

Tony Greenstein















Stone throwing settlers on the West Bank were treated with kid gloves - being Jewish of course

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Syria - in war the first casualty is the truth

April 15, 2018, 7:51 pm
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The lies of Theresa May - Yemen, Iraq and Palestine


The bodies of dead Iranian solidiers - killed in an Iraqi gas attack - the chemical weapons in this case were supplied by the West
Robert Fisk


As always truth is the first casualty of war.  Theresa May’s statement that it is in Britain’s national interest to prevent the use of chemical weapons and that is why we took part in the bombing of Syria beggars belief. 

Was this the same national interest that led to the turning of a blind eye to Iraq’s use of chemical weapons in the war against Iran?  Or the use by Britain and America of depleted Uranium shells in the first Gulf War and in Iraq in 2003?  Or the use by Israel of White Phosphorous in the attack on Gaza in Operation Cast Lead in 2008-9?

Theresa May’s concern for the children of Douma is of course in sharp contrast to her silence over the children of Yemen, thousands of whom have died in the Saudi attacks on that country.  But given that May’s government is busy selling the Saudis the weapons to murder civilians in Yemen it is no surprise that she has kept silent on such matters.
Bodies of victims of alleged gas attack in Douma last week
 By what logic does the British government extend its sympathy to those killed in Syria whilst supplying the weaponry to kill far more children in Yemen?  The use of chemical weapons by any state or group is to be condemned without reservation, but so is the deliberate bombing of civilian targets. 

The use of chemical weapons by Assad, even if it proves to be true and that is by no means certain, is a pretext for the bombing.  The United States, Britain and France are unhappy at the victory of Russia and Assad in the Syrian civil war.  This bombing is a means of expressing their displeasure and signalling that they are not yet finished interfering in Syria.  Macron has stated that he has persuaded Trump not to withdraw US forces from Syria.  That is the real purpose of the bombing.

We shall see who are the treacherous creatures in Labour’s Parliamentary Labour Party prepared to back May over this.  The names of   these MPs should form a list of the highest priority of MPs for constituency activists to deselect.

Below is an excellent article by Robert Fisk in Thursday’s Independent.  A pity that the once-liberal Guardian isn’t capable of the same.

I have also included an article, also by Robert Fisk nearly 6 years ago on Syria and chemical weapons.  Not much has changed in that time except that Assad is now nearer to winning the civil war.

Tony Greenstein
Result of Saudi airstrike in Yemen where 60% of civilian casualties caused by Saudi bombing

 As Theresa May gears up for war in Syria, we should remember what hypocrites we are about chemical warfare in the Middle East

·         Robert Fisk 
·         @indyvoices 
·         Thursday 12 April 2018 09:15 BST

Oh, the hypocrisy of it. The ignoble aims. The distraction. The outrageous lies and excuses.

I’m not talking about America’s tweet-from-the-hip president and his desire to escape from the cops’ raid on his lawyer’s office – there’s a Russian connection, all right.

And I’m not talking about his latest sleaze. Life with Melania might not be great at the moment. More distracting to sit with the generals and ex-generals and talk tough about Russia and Syria.

I’m not talking about Theresa May, who wants to step out of the Brexit ditch with any distractions of her own: Salisbury attacks, Douma – even Trump. So Trump telephoned Macron, when the poor lady thought she’d won his hand. What is this nonsense?

Macron has now hitched his own wagon to the Saudis against Iranian “expansionism” – and no doubt arms sales to the Kingdom have something to do with it. But how sad that the desire of young French presidents to act like Napoleon (I can think of a few others) means that they devote themselves to joining in a war, rather than pleading against it.
Mad Dog Matthis - Trump's Defence Secretary
Now we have our spokespersons and ministers raging about the need to prevent the “normalisation” of chemical warfare, to prevent it becoming a part of ordinary warfare, a return to the terrible days of the First World War.

This does not mean any excuses for the Syrian government – though I suspect, having seen Russia’s Syrian involvement with my own eyes, that Putin might have been getting impatient about ending the war and wanted to eradicate those in the last tunnels of Douma rather than wait through more weeks of fighting. Remember the cruelty of Grozny.

But we all know the problems of proof when it comes to chemicals and gas. Like depleted uranium – which we used to use in our munitions – it doesn’t, like a shell fragment or a bomb casing, leave a tell-tale hunk of metal with an address on it. 
When all this started with the first gas attack in Damascus, the Russians identified it as gas munitions manufactured in the Soviet Union – but sent to Libya, not to Syria.
But it’s a different war that I’m remembering today. It’s the Iran-Iraq war between 1980 and 1988, when Saddam Hussein invaded Iran. When the Iranians re-crossed their own border and stormed into Iraq years later, Saddam used gas on thousands of Iranian soldiers – and civilians, for there were nurses and doctors at the war front.
Halabja today a Kurdish city where 5,000 were murdered by Saddam Hussein and the West
Funny how we forget this now. We don’t talk about it. We have forgotten all about it. Talk about the “normalisation” of chemical warfare – this was it!

Aleppo before the Syrian Civil War

But in our desire to concentrate minds on Syria, we’re not mentioning the Iran gassings – Iran being another one of our present-day enemies, of course – and this may be because of our lack of official memory.

More likely it’s because of what happened: the institutionalisation of chemical warfare, the use of chemicals by Saddam who was then an ally of the West and of all the Gulf Sunni states, our frontline Sunni hero. The thousands of Iranian soldiers who were to die were referred to on Iraqi radio after they crossed the frontier. The “Persian insects” had crossed the border, it announced. And that’s how they were treated.
Houthi fighter after a Saudi air strike
For the precursors for the Iraqi gas came largely from the United States – one from New Jersey –  and US military personnel later visited the battlefront without making any comments about the chemicals which were sold to the Iraqi regime, of course, for “agricultural” purposes. That’s how to deal with insects, is it not?
Yet not a soul today is mentioning this terrible war, which was fought with our total acquiescence. It’s almost an “exclusive” to mention the conflict at all, so religiously have we forgotten it. That was the real “normalisation”, and we allowed it to happen. Religious indeed, for it was the first great battle of the Sunni-Shia war of our time. But it was real.

Of the thousands of Iranians who were asphyxiated, a few survivors were even sent to British hospitals for treatment. I travelled with others on a military train through the desert to Tehran, the railway compartments packed with unsmiling young men who coughed mucus and blood into white bandages as they read miniature Korans.
They had blisters on their skin and, horrifically, more blisters on top of the first blisters. I wrote a series of articles about this obscenity for The Times, which I then worked for. The Foreign Office later told my editors that my articles were “not helpful”.

No such discretion today. No fear of being out to get Saddam then – because in those days, of course, the good guys were using the chemicals. Don’t we remember the Kurds of Halabja who were gassed by Saddam, with gas which the CIA told its officers to claim was used by the Iranians?

For this war crime, Saddam should have been tried. He was indeed a “gas-killing animal”. But he was hanged for a smaller massacre with conventional weapons – because, I have always suspected, we didn’t want him exposing his gas warfare partners in an open court.

So there we are. May holds a “war cabinet”, for heaven’s sakes, as if our losses were mounting on the Somme in 1916, or Dorniers were flying out of occupied France to blitz London in 1940.

What is this childish prime minister doing? Older, wiser Conservatives will have spotted the juvenile quality of this nonsense, and want a debate in Parliament. How could May follow an American president who the world knows is crackers, insane, chronically unstable, but whose childish messages – about missiles that are “nice and new and ‘smart’” – are even taken seriously by many of my colleagues in the US? We should perhaps be even more worried about what happens if he does turn away from the Iran nuclear deal.

This is a very bad moment in Middle East history – and, as usual, it is the Palestinians who will suffer, their own tragedy utterly forgotten amid this madness. So we are going to “war”, are we? And how do we get out of this war once we have started it? Any plans, anyone? What if there’s a gigantic screw-up, which wars do tend to usually produce? What happens then?

Well, I guess Russia comes to the rescue, just as it did for Obama when gas was used for the first time in the Syrian war.

Robert Fisk: Syrian war of lies and hypocrisy

·         Robert Fisk @indyvoices Saturday 28 July 2012
The West's real target here is not Assad's brutal regime but his ally, Iran, and its chemical weapons
Has there ever been a Middle Eastern war of such hypocrisy? A war of such cowardice and such mean morality, of such false rhetoric and such public humiliation? I'm not talking about the physical victims of the Syrian tragedy. I'm referring to the utter lies and mendacity of our masters and our own public opinion – eastern as well as western – in response to the slaughter, a vicious pantomime more worthy of Swiftian satire than Tolstoy or Shakespeare.
While Qatar and Saudi Arabia arm and fund the rebels of Syria to overthrow Bashar al-Assad's Alawite/Shia-Baathist dictatorship, Washington mutters not a word of criticism against them. President Barack Obama and his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, say they want a democracy in Syria. But Qatar is an autocracy and Saudi Arabia is among the most pernicious of caliphate-kingly-dictatorships in the Arab world. Rulers of both states inherit power from their families – just as Bashar has done – and Saudi Arabia is an ally of the Salafist-Wahabi rebels in Syria, just as it was the most fervent supporter of the medieval Taliban during Afghanistan's dark ages.
Indeed, 15 of the 19 hijacker-mass murderers of 11 September, 2001, came from Saudi Arabia – after which, of course, we bombed Afghanistan. The Saudis are repressing their own Shia minority just as they now wish to destroy the Alawite-Shia minority of Syria. And we believe Saudi Arabia wants to set up a democracy in Syria?
Then we have the Shia Hezbollah party/militia in Lebanon, right hand of Shia Iran and supporter of Bashar al-Assad's regime. For 30 years, Hezbollah has defended the oppressed Shias of southern Lebanon against Israeli aggression. They have presented themselves as the defenders of Palestinian rights in the West Bank and Gaza. But faced with the slow collapse of their ruthless ally in Syria, they have lost their tongue. Not a word have they uttered – nor their princely Sayed Hassan Nasrallah – about the rape and mass murder of Syrian civilians by Bashar's soldiers and "Shabiha" militia.
Then we have the heroes of America – La Clinton, the Defence Secretary Leon Panetta, and Obama himself. Clinton issues a "stern warning" to Assad. Panetta – the same man who repeated to the last US forces in Iraq that old lie about Saddam's connection to 9/11 – announces that things are "spiralling out of control" in Syria. They have been doing that for at least six months. Has he just realised? And then Obama told us last week that "given the regime's stockpile of chemical weapons, we will continue to make it clear to Assad … that the world is watching". Now, was it not a County Cork newspaper called the Skibbereen Eagle, fearful of Russia's designs on China, which declared that it was "keeping an eye … on the Tsar of Russia"? Now it is Obama's turn to emphasise how little clout he has in the mighty conflicts of the world. How Bashar must be shaking in his boots.
But what US administration would really want to see Bashar's atrocious archives of torture opened to our gaze? Why, only a few years ago, the Bush administration was sending Muslims to Damascus for Bashar's torturers to tear their fingernails out for information, imprisoned at the US government's request in the very hell-hole which Syrian rebels blew to bits last week. Western embassies dutifully supplied the prisoners' tormentors with questions for the victims. Bashar, you see, was our baby.
Then there's that neighbouring country which owes us so much gratitude: Iraq. Last week, it suffered in one day 29 bombing attacks in 19 cities, killing 111 civilian and wounding another 235. The same day, Syria's bloodbath consumed about the same number of innocents. But Iraq was "down the page" from Syria, buried "below the fold", as we journalists say; because, of course, we gave freedom to Iraq, Jeffersonian democracy, etc, etc, didn't we? So this slaughter to the east of Syria didn't have quite the same impact, did it? Nothing we did in 2003 led to Iraq's suffering today. Right?
And talking of journalism, who in BBC World News decided that even the preparations for the Olympics should take precedence all last week over Syrian outrages? British newspapers and the BBC in Britain will naturally lead with the Olympics as a local story. But in a lamentable decision, the BBC – broadcasting "world" news to the world – also decided that the passage of the Olympic flame was more important than dying Syrian children, even when it has its own courageous reporter sending his despatches directly from Aleppo.
Then, of course, there's us, our dear liberal selves who are so quick to fill the streets of London in protest at the Israeli slaughter of Palestinians. Rightly so, of course. When our political leaders are happy to condemn Arabs for their savagery but too timid to utter a word of the mildest criticism when the Israeli army commits crimes against humanity – or watches its allies do it in Lebanon – ordinary people have to remind the world that they are not as timid as the politicians. But when the scorecard of death in Syria reaches 15,000 or 19,000 – perhaps 14 times as many fatalities as in Israel's savage 2008-2009 onslaught on Gaza – scarcely a single protester, save for Syrian expatriates abroad, walks the streets to condemn these crimes against humanity. Israel's crimes have not been on this scale since 1948. Rightly or wrongly, the message that goes out is simple: we demand justice and the right to life for Arabs if they are butchered by the West and its Israeli allies; but not when they are being butchered by their fellow Arabs.
And all the while, we forget the "big" truth. That this is an attempt to crush the Syrian dictatorship not because of our love for Syrians or our hatred of our former friend Bashar al-Assad, or because of our outrage at Russia, whose place in the pantheon of hypocrites is clear when we watch its reaction to all the little Stalingrads across Syria. No, this is all about Iran and our desire to crush the Islamic Republic and its infernal nuclear plans – if they exist – and has nothing to do with human rights or the right to life or the death of Syrian babies. Quelle horreur!

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George Habash - Founder of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - a Hebrew Biography

April 16, 2018, 5:35 pm
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Gideon Levy Reviews Eli Galia's Biography of Habash which makes it clear that the Leftist Leader was right

George Habash speaking in Beirut, 1979. AP
 Although Zionist apologists and Israeli propaganda (hasbara) make hypocritical attacks on Hamas, Hezbollah and ‘Islamic extremism’ Zionism has always considered its main enemy to be secular and in particular left-wing Palestinian nationalism. 


This is as true today as it was in the period of the British Mandate when the Zionists always preferred to deal with HajAmin al Husseini, who later collaborated with Hitler, to his secular opponents in the Istiqlal(Independence) Party.  Indeed it was the Zionist and first British High Commissioner Sir, later Viscount,  Herbert Samuel who appointed Husseini to the post of Mufti despite him having come fourth out of four in the elections to the post.

Today Israel demonises Hamas as a Nazi genocidal, Jew hating group rather than the conservative Islamic group that it actually is. Israel glosses over the fact that it virtually created Hamas, the Gazan offshoot of the Egyptian Muslim Brothers singlehandedly.  I have covered this in a number of posts in How Israel Created Hamas and HAMAS - When Israel & Netanyahu Sang from a Different Songsheet. If you Google ‘Israel created Hamas’ you will find a wealth of evidence that in the late 1980’s, whilst Netanyahu was Prime Minister, Israel helped nurture Hamas as a means of undermining secular Palestinian nationalism.  See in particular the admission of the Military Governor of Gaza at the time, Itzhak Segev, that he helped fund Islamic groups to counter the PLO.  A particularly good article is How Israel Helped Spawn Hamas which was published by the Wall Street Journal (now behind its pay wall).

What happened with Hamas of course is nothing new.  The USA virtually created the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan in order to overthrown the then Soviet backed government.  Reactionary. Conservative Islamic parties or groups have always been seen by Israel and imperialism as a bulwark against socialist or left-wing parties.  The same was true in Iran where Ayatollah Khomeini had close links to the Americans who were most fearful of a socialist revolution.

Below is an excellent review in Ha’aretz by Gideon Levy of a new autobiography of the founder of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, George Habash.  The PFLP were a left-wing, Marxist group.  They still have support amongst the Palestinians, in Gaza in particular.  If only, as he says, Habash had triumphed over Arafat and the Oslo Accords had not been agreed with Israel then the situation could have been very different today for the Palestinians.


Gideon Levy
  Apr 13, 2018 6:16 PM

George Habash was Israel’s absolute enemy for decades, the embodiment of evil, the devil incarnate. Even the title “Dr.” before his name — he was a pediatrician — was considered blasphemous.

Habash was plane hijackings, Habash was terror and terror alone. In a country that doesn't recognize the existence of Palestinian political parties (have you ever heard of a Palestinian political party? — there are only terror groups) knowledge about the man who headed the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine was close to zero.

What’s there to know about him? A terrorist. Subhuman. Should be killed. Enemy. The fact that he was an ideologue and a revolutionary, that his life was shaped by the expulsion from Lod, changed nothing. He remains the plane hijacker from Damascus, the man from the Rejectionist Front who was no different from all the rest of the “terrorists” from Yasser Arafat to Wadie Haddad to Nayef Hawatmeh.
Now along comes Eli Galia's Hebrew-language book “George Habash: A Political Biography." It outlines the reality, far from the noise of propaganda, ignorance and brainwashing, for the Israeli reader who agrees to read a biography of the enemy.
Presumably only few will read it, but this work by Galia, a Middle East affairs expert, is very deserving of praise. It's a political biography, as noted in its subtitle, so it almost entirely lacks the personal, spiritual and psychological dimension; there's not even any gossip. So reading it requires a lot of stamina and specialized tastes. Still, it's fascinating.

Galia has written a nonjudgmental and certainly non-propagandistic biography. Taking into consideration the Israeli mind today, this isn't to be taken for granted.
Galia presents a wealth of information, with nearly a thousand footnotes, about the political path of Habash, a man who was considered dogmatic even though he underwent a number of ideological reversals in his life. If that's dogmatism, what's pragmatism? The dogmatic Habash went through more ideological changes than any Israeli who sticks to the Zionist narrative and doesn’t budge an inch — and who of course isn't considered dogmatic.

The exodus from Lod following an operation by the Palmach, 1948.Palmach Archive / Yitzhak Sadeh Estate
In the book, Habash is revealed as a person of many contradictions: a member of the Christian minority who was active in the midst of a large Muslim majority, a bourgeois who became a Marxist, a tough and inflexible leader who was once seen weeping in his room as he wrote an article about Israel's crimes against his people. He had to wander and flee for his life from place to place, sometimes more for fear of Arab regimes than of Israel.

He was imprisoned in Syria and fled Jordan, he devoted his life to a revolution that never happened. It's impossible not to admire a person who devoted his life to his ideas, just as you have to admire the scholar who has devoted so much research for so few readers who will take an interest in the dead Habash, in an Israel that has lost any interest in the occupation and the Palestinian struggle.

The book gives rise to the bleak conclusion that Habash was right. For most of his life he was a bitter enemy of compromises, and Arafat, the man of compromise, won the fascinating historical struggle between the two. They had a love-hate relationship, alternately admiring and scorning each other, and never completely breaking off their connection until Arafat won his Pyrrhic victory.

What good have all of Arafat’s compromises done for the Palestinian people? What came out of the recognition of Israel, of the settling for a Palestinian state on 22 percent of the territory, of the negotiations with Zionism and the United States? Nothing but the entrenchment of the Israeli occupation and the strengthening and massive development of the settlement project.

In retrospect, it makes sense to think that if that's how things were, maybe it would have been better to follow the uncompromising path taken by Habash, who for most of his life didn't agree to any negotiations with Israel, who believed that with Israel it was only possible to negotiate by force, who thought Israel would only change its positions if it paid a price, who dreamed of a single, democratic and secular state of equal rights and refused to discuss anything but that.

Unfortunately, Habash was right. It's hard to know what would have happened had the Palestinians followed his path, but it's impossible not to admit that the alternative has been a resounding failure.
Members of the Palestinian National Council in Algiers, 1987, including Yasser Arafat, left, and George Habash, second from right.  Mike Nelson-Nabil Ismail / AFP
The Palestinian Che Guevara

Habash, who was born in 1926, wrote about his childhood: “Our enemies are not the Jews but rather the British .... The Jews’ relations with the Palestinians were natural and sometimes even good” (p. 16). He went to study medicine at the American University in Beirut; his worried mother and father wrote him that he should stay there; a war was on.

But Habash returned to volunteer at a clinic in Lod; he returned and he saw. The sight of the Israeli soldiers who invaded the clinic in 1948 ignited in him the flame of violent resistance: “I was gripped by an urge to shoot them with a pistol and kill them, and in the situation of having no weapons I used mute words. I watched them from the sidelines and said to myself: This is our land, you dogs, this is our land and not your land. We will stay here to kill you. You will not win this battle” (p.22).
On July 14 he was expelled from his home with the rest of his family. He never returned to the city he loved. He never forgot the scenes of Lod in 1948, nor did he forget the idea of violent resistance. Can the Israeli reader understand how he felt?
Now based in Beirut, he took part in terror operations against Jewish and Western targets in Beirut, Amman and Damascus: “I personally lobbed grenades and I participated in assassination attempts. I had endless enthusiasm when I was doing that. At the time, I considered my life worthless relative to what was happening in Palestine.”

“The Palestinian Che Guevara”— both of them were doctors — made up his mind to wreak vengeance for the Nakba upon the West and the leaders of the Arab regimes that had abandoned his people, even before taking vengeance on the Jews. He even planned to assassinate King Abdullah of Jordan. He founded a new student organization in Beirut called the Commune, completed his specialization in pediatrics and wrote: “I took the diploma and said: Congratulations, Mother, your son is a doctor, so now let me do what I really want to do. And indeed, that's what happened” (p. 41).

Habash was once asked whether he was the Che Guevara of the Middle East and he replied that he would prefer to be the Mao Zedong of the Arab masses. He was the first to raise the banner of return and in the meantime he opened clinics for Palestinian refugees in Amman. For him, the road back to Lod passed through Amman, Beirut and Damascus. The idea of Pan-Arabism stayed with him for many years, until he despaired of that as well.

He also had to leave medicine: “I am a pediatrician, I have enjoyed this greatly. I believed that I had the best job in the world but I had to make the decision I have taken and I don't regret it .... A person cannot split his emotions in that way: to heal on the one hand and kill on the other. This is the time when he must say to himself: one or the other.”
Militants from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Jordan, 1969. Thomas R. Koeniges / Look Magazine Photograph Collection / Library of Congress
The only remaining weapon

This book isn't arrogant and it isn't Orientalist; it is respectful of the Palestinian national ideology and those who articulated and lived it, even if the author doesn't necessarily agree with that ideology or identify with it. This is something quite rare in the Israeli landscape when it comes to Arabs in general and Palestinians in particular. Nor does the author venerate what's not worthy of veneration, and he doesn't have any erroneous romantic or other illusions. Galia presents a bitter, tough, uncompromising, very much failed and sometimes exceedingly cruel struggle for freedom, self-respect and liberation.

And this is what is said in the founding document of the PFLP, which Habash established in December 1967 after having despaired of Palestinian unity: “The only weapon left to the masses in order to restore history and progress and truly defeat enemies and potential enemies in the long run is revolutionary violence .... The only language that the enemy understands is the language of revolutionary violence” (p.125).

But this path too met with failure. “The essential aim of hijacking airplanes,” wrote Habash, “was to bring the Palestinian question out of anonymity and expose it to Western public opinion, because at that time it was unknown in Europe and in the United States. We wanted to undertake actions that would make an impression on the senses of the entire world .... There was international ignorance regarding our suffering, in part due to the Zionist movement’s monopoly on the mass media in the West” (p. 151).

The PFLP plane hijackings in the early 1970s indeed achieved international recognition of the existence of the Palestinian problem, but so far this recognition hasn't led anywhere. The only practical outcome has been the security screenings at airports everywhere around the world — and thank you, George Habash. I read Galia's book on a number of flights, even though this isn't an airplane book, and I kept thinking that were it not for Habash my wanderings at airports would have been a lot shorter. In my heart I forgave him for that, for what other path was open to him and his defeated, humiliated and bleeding people?

Not much is left of his ideas. What has come of the scientific idealism and the politicization of the masses, the class struggle and the anti-imperialism, the Maoism and of course the transformation of the struggle against Israel into an armed struggle, which according to the plans was supposed to develop from guerrilla warfare into a national war of liberation? Fifty years after the founding of the PFLP and 10 years after the death of its founder, what remains?

Habash's successor, Abu Ali Mustafa, was assassinated by Israel in 2001; his successor’s successor, Ahmad Saadat, has been in an Israeli prison since 2006 and very little remains of the PFLP.

During all my decades covering the Israeli occupation, the most impressive figures I met belonged to the PFLP, but now not much remains except fragments of dreams. The PFLP is a negligible minority in intra-Palestinian politics, a movement that once thought to demand equal power with Fatah and its leader, Arafat. And the occupation? It's strong and thriving and its end looks further off than ever. If that isn’t failure, what is?

A mourning procession for George Habash, Nablus, January 2008. Nasser Ishtayeh / AP

To where is Israel galloping?

Yet Habash always knew how to draw lessons from failure after failure. How resonant today is his conclusion following the Naksa, the defeat in 1967 that broke his spirit, to the effect that “the enemy of the Palestinians is colonialism, capitalism and the global monopolies .... This is the enemy that gave rise to the Zionist movement, made a covenant with it, nurtured it, protected it and accompanied it until it brought about the establishment of the aggressive and fascistic State of Israel” (p. 179).

From the Palestinian perspective, not much has changed. It used to be that this was read in Israel as hostile and shallow propaganda. Today it could be read otherwise.
After the failure of 1967, Habash redefined the goal: the establishment of a democratic state in Palestine in which Arabs and Jews would live as citizens with equal rights. Today this idea, too, sounds a bit less strange and threatening than it did when Habash articulated it.

On the 40th anniversary of Israel's founding, Habash wrote that Israel was galloping toward the Greater Land of Israel and that the differences between the right and left in the country were becoming meaningless. How right he was about that, too. At the same time, he acknowledged Israel’s success and the failure of the Palestinian national movement. And he was right about that, too.

And one last correct prophecy, though a bitter one, that he made in 1981: “The combination of a loss of lives and economic damage has considerable influence on Israeli society, and when that happens there will be a political, social and ideological schism on the Israeli street and in the Zionist establishment between the moderate side that demands withdrawal from the occupied territories and the extremist side that continues to cling to Talmudic ideas and dreams. Given the hostility between these two sides, the Zionist entity will experience a real internal split” (p. 329).

This has yet to happen.

Imad Saba, a dear friend who was active in the PFLP and is in exile in Europe, urged me for years to try to meet with Habash and interview him for Haaretz. As far as is known, Habash never met with Israelis, except during the days of the Nakba.

Many years ago in Amman I interviewed Hawatmeh, Habash’s partner at the start and the leader of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which split off from the PFLP in 1969. At the time of the interview, Habash was also living in Amman and was old and sick. I kept postponing my approach — until he died. When reading the book, I felt very sorry that I had not met this man.

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Is This Mural Anti-Semitic? A Difficult Question

April 16, 2018, 6:08 pm
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It’s a good question that Private Eye has posed.  The beard is uncannily familiar with the beard that Orthodox Jews have and the nose seems deliberately designed to imitate what anti-Semites portray as 'Jewish noses'.  I just hope whoever drew up this front cover is expelled forthwith from the Labour Party!


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Guardian refuses to print letter from 650+ members challenging the lie that the Labour Party is an anti-Semitic party

April 16, 2018, 7:15 pm
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Why no self-respecting socialist or Labour supporter should buy the Guardian


I have long campaigned for people to shed their illusions in the Guardian and not buy it.  The Guardian for a long time was something like Israel’s Ha’aretz.  It contained a variety of different views and the only coverage of Israel/Palestine that differed in any way from the mainstream press.  It boasted correspondents like Michael Adams and David Hirst, both knowledgeable about the Palestinians and Zionism.


Today it’s Middle East coverage is pitiful.  It’s Comment is Free blog, which was supposed to be a space for free speech on issues, including Israel, has felt the heavy hand of Guardian censorship as its moderators take the scissors to any anti-Zionist critiques.  Comparison of Israel with Nazi Germany is a particular no go area, even though Israelis make the comparison every day.

The following story from Jewish Voice for Labour site is about how the Guardian has refused to print a letter from over 650 members of the Labour Party counteracting it constant barrage of lies that the Labour Party is overrun by anti-Semitism.
Jonathan Freedland - a member of the foreign policy elite and an ardent Zionist and columnist for the right-wing Jewish Chronicle has pioneered the censorship of anti-Zionist voices at The Guardian
Unfortunately the Guardian has been getting worse for some time ago. I have published a series of articles over the years detailing how the Guardian has moved further to the Right and how it has become more friendly to Israel and Zionism under its senior editor Jonathan Freedland

How The Guardian has sold its Soul
Guardian Cowardice as it abandons Antony Loewenstein to Israel’s Ministry of Information
Palestine Is Not an Environment Story - How Nafeez Ahmed's Article on Gaza's Gas was Censored
The Guardian and Jonathan Freedland's tedious Campaign against Corbyn
The disgusting ad that the Guardian carried in 2014 as the Israelis were committing massacres in Gaza
People may recall that in 2014 the Guardian printed an advert from Elie Wiesel during Operation Protective Edge, which killed 2,200 Palestinians in Gaza, including 551 children.  It's title was  'Jews rejected child sacrifice 3,500 years ago now it's Hamas' turn.' Electronic Intifada's Asa Winstanley best summed up this decision: “Liberal” Guardian to print pro-genocide ad
The Guardian's disingenuous attempt to defend its appalling decision
Even Rupert Murdoch's Times rejected the advert, but not the Guardian.  At a time when Palestinian children were being slaughtered by Israeli armaments, the Guardian printed this vicious racist propaganda.  All the letters it printed were hostile.  Today it would seem such letters would not even be printed.

Tony Greenstein


Guardian denies space to 650+ Labour Party members challenging hostile media coverage

The Guardian has refused to publish a letter submitted over a week ago challenging hostile media coverage of the Labour Party, even though it attracted more than 650 signatures from party members in barely 24 hours.


Those who signed, and hundreds more who sent in their names after the noon deadline on Friday April 6, are entitled to ask why the Guardian cannot feature the views of huge numbers of ordinary Party members while devoting so much space to attacking Jeremy Corbyn.

This is especially pertinent today, Monday April 16, as the Parliamentary Labour Party is due to meet this evening for the first time since March 26 and a parliamentary debate about antisemitism is scheduled to take place tomorrow, Tuesday April 17.

We hope that the latter debate will pay ample attention to the virulent antisemitism expressed by friends of the Tory party in this country and across Europe.

To give voice to the silenced Corbyn-supporting members of the Labour Party, we publish below the original letter as submitted to the Guardian.

For clarification, JVL recognises that there is evidence of racist attitudes, including antisemitism, among some party members. This is why we propose, in line with recommendations in the Chakrabarti Report, open debate and discussion combined with non-factional training to help members recognise and deal with prejudices which have no place in an anti-racist party.

We also recognise that we live in a racist society in which many prejudices persist, including towards Jews. This is true within the Labour Party as elsewhere, but we do NOT accept, as widely alleged, that party members are especially susceptible to holding antisemitic views, unconscious or otherwise.

Please share this post widely on social media and invite more Labour Party members to join in demonstrating support for Corbyn’s leadership.



ORIGINAL TEXT OF SOLIDARITY LETTER

We are Labour Party members who have watched with growing astonishment and anger as our Party has been traduced with claims of widespread antisemitism. We stand absolutely against any form of discrimination and if there are any in our Party who are guilty of racist attitudes or behaviour then they should be expelled. But such action should only be after due process including evidence and the right to appeal and not through the trial by media which we are currently seeing.

Most importantly we do not accept that the disputed actions of a tiny minority of people in any way represent our Party as a whole and its 570,000 members. Neither do we accept the absurd claim that racist attitudes are widespread but we are somehow unable to recognise them because they are unconscious.  We recognise racism because we have been fighting it for much of our lives and that fight was a key reason for joining our Party in the first place.

The current febrile atmosphere has been encouraged by a hostile right-wing media and by those who seek to damage the Party or its leadership for their own ends. We absolutely reject the gross calumny which is thus being perpetrated against the Party as a whole and the integrity of its members.
There is a great task ahead of us, to re-build and regenerate our society so that all may live with security and dignity.  The cruel legacy of successive governments has left people desperate for change. The Labour Party led by Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell can achieve that transformation. Let us make certain that nothing can distract us from this historic opportunity.
Signed by 650+ Labour party members

A few of the monotonous Guardian articles on the fake antisemitism campaign against the Labour Party

The right-wing and anti-migrant Daily Express sings from the same song sheet as the Guardian




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50 Years After Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood Speech’ Parliament Debates Fake ‘Anti-Semitism’ and Applauds Zionist MPs Luciana Berger and Ruth Smeeth

April 17, 2018, 8:56 pm
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At a time when Blacks have been told to prove their Right to Stay, Labour's Right uses ‘Anti-Semitism’ to Attack Corbyn & Defend Israel


What is most striking about politics today is that the entirely artificial and fake anti-Semitism narrative that is peddled by every national newspaper – from the anti-racist Sun to the oh so liberal Guardian – as well as every television pundit, is simply not believed by either the general public or Labour Party members themselves. Huff Post reported that ‘Just 19% said it was a serious issue while 77% believe it is used to undermine the leader or stop criticism of Israel, a YouGov study for The Times found.’  Labour Members Think Anti-Semitism Claims Are Being Exaggerated To Damage Jeremy Corbyn.  In other words by a 4-1 margin Labour Party members simply refuse to accept that anti-Semitism in the Labour Party is a problem.
There is no evidence that the wider public and ordinary people are any more concerned about ‘anti-Semitism’ either.  It is a text-book example of how a media frenzy combined with powerful interest groups can create a non-story and an accepted narrative.  It is reminiscent of the powers of Orwell’s Big Brother.
There are no great anti-racist movements being formed to fight this ‘anti-Semitism’ such as Rock Against Anti-Semitism perhaps in order to fight this apparent upsurge of ‘anti-Semitism’.  This fight is entirely confined to the Westminster bubble and people like Jonathan Arkush, Zionist President of the Board of Deputies who accusedthe non-Zionist Jewdas group of being a ‘source of virulent anti-Semitism’.  At least Arkush was honest.  The ‘anti-Semitism’ he is talking about is Jewish in origin.
There have been strenuous attempts, through the manipulation of false statistics by the CST to frighten members of the Jewish community but I doubt if very many Jews are quaking in their boots at the prospect of the rise of anti-Semitism either.  See More Fake News – The Myth of Increasing Anti-semitism

At a time when the very real and serious issue of British state racism has reared its head once again, Parliament debates the complete non-issue of ‘anti-Semitism’. The debate in Parliament yesterday was a tribute to the vanity and ego of Zionist MPs Ruth Smeeth, Luciana Berger and John Mann – all of them supporters of the Israeli state.
Ken Livingstone - the target of Labour's Zionists for fake anti-semitism
In June 1948 the Empire Windrush docked in Tilbury with 492 passengers from the Carribean. Under the British Nationality Act 1948 they were entitled to citizenship of the UK and Colonies. Up to the 1962 Commonwealth Immigration Act anyone from a former colony was entitled to enter Britain and claim citizenship. Minister of Health Enoch Powell even toured the West Indies urging people to come to work in Britain.  The 1971 Immigration Act called a halt to primary immigration but gave existing immigrants indefinite leave to remain. 

It was David Cameron’s promise in 2010 to cut the number of immigrants to under 100,000 and Theresa May’s attempt to implement it that caused the problems.  The Immigration Act 2014 created quite deliberately a climate of hostility and suspicion. People had to prove that they had a right to stay in this country. If you didn’t have a passport or some other evidence of citizenship then you could be considered an illegal immigrant. Of course this only applied to Black people.  It was a thoroughly racist Act that Labour said nothing about. Thus Albert Thompson, who has been here over 50 years was denied cancer treatment because he had no documents to prove his status. Theresa May refuses to intervene over man's £54,000 NHS cancer bill
John Mann - the rent a mouth MP with an overweening sense of ego with the detestable Chair of Labour Friends of Israel, Joan Ryan, another honorary Jew, behind him
The Home Office under May destroyedall the landing cards of those who came thus destroying the obvious way to prove someone’s claim to citizenship.  All this was reflected in the  notorious ‘go home’ vans of the Home Office under Britain’s most racist Home Secretary.  The 2014 Act made doctors, landlords, teachers into immigration officials.

Yet what was the House of Commons debating yesterday?  Anti-Semitism.  No Jew in this country is in danger of being deported or deprived of cancer treatment because of their immigration status. The Go Home vans were directed at Black not White Jews. Anti-Semitism is the false anti-racism of the Right.  It is a debate which was proposed by the government for nakedly political reasons, i.e. to attack Corbyn knowing full well that traitorous Labour MPs would join in.

The Zionist MP for Liverpool Wavertree, Lucian Berger in her speech about ‘anti-Semitism’ called for the expulsion of Ken Livingstone, who more than any other single individual pioneered anti-racism in local government.  What is his crime?  To mention the fact that during the 1930’s the Zionist movement collaborated and worked with the Nazis. This is a verifiable historical fact as Zionist historians, from David Cesarani to Lucy Dawidowicz and Hannah Arendt testified. 
Anti-Semitism is hatred of Jews.  Livingstone has never uttered an anti-Semitic phrase in his life.  Livingstone is hated for his support of Palestine not because of anti-Semitism.

Only a few weeks ago Luciana Berger, a former Director of Labour Friends of Israel and today Presidednt of the Jewish Labour Movement, revealed a six year Facebook post about an old mural, long erased.  Her only purpose was to attack Corbyn and help the Tories in the local elections. The sooner she is deselected the better.
This is the real racism - Home Office vans sent into Black areas of Britain with the message you're not wanted
Berger has a history of making false allegations of anti-Semitism from her student days.  She is a seasoned Zionist operative who makes herself out to be a martyr.

Equally as appalling was Ruth Smeeth MP who staged a tantrum at the Chakrabarti Press Conference when she falsely accused Black anti-racist Marc Wadsworth of anti-Semitism.  If you want to know about real racism, then you should have tuned into tonight’s programme on BBC1 about the death of Stephen Lawrence 25 years ago.  Stephen was an innocent Black teenager waiting for a bus who was cruelly murdered by White racists.  Marc Wadworth was interviewed about the police racism which allowed the murderers who killed this 18 year old Black teenager to go free. Marc is facing expulsion next week by a racist Labour Party which prefers US Intelligence Asset Ruth Smeeth over a Black anti-racist activist.

Ruth Smeeth, who got a standing ovation from the Tories and Labour’s Red Tories told the House of 10 messages she received.  I  publish them below.  Of  the 10 just one, the last, was explicitly anti-Semitic.  Of the other 9, possibly 2, numbers 5 and 9 are implicitly anti-Semitic.  No. 4 was sexist.  The others might be termed abusive but they are not anti-Semitic.  No doubt they have been chosen with care.  Telling Smeeth she is ‘cancer of humanity’ or that she  is a Zionist is not anti-Semitic.  They may be unpleasant but Smeeth, a defender of Israel’s shooting of unarmed Palestinian demonstrators and Israel’s abuse of Palestinian children is also unpleasant.
Albert Thompson - denied treatment for cancer of the prostate because of Britain's racist immigration laws
It’s about time we said it loud and clear.  There is no evidence that anti-Semitism is on the increase in this country.  No one has died from a social media post or tweet.  There are no Jewish Stephen Lawrences.  There are no Jewish Windrush members who are facing deportation.  This ‘anti-Semitism’ is an entirely bogus and fake exercise.

It isn’t just the Labour Right who go in for this nonsense.  Eleanor Penny, in the ever worthy but infinitely boring Red Pepper tells us that‘Many people are genuinely worried about the rising tide of antisemitism in this country – and rightly so’ and that ‘We need to confront the growing problem of antisemitism across the political spectrum.’ Jewdas, Corbyn and the policing of Jewishness

I realise that people on the left, from the breathless Penny to the SWP need to pay homage to the idea that anti-Semitism is on the increase but there are no signs of it.  Anti-Semitism is not a form of state racism.  The state spends millions of pounds protecting Jewish schools from a non-existent threat whilst patently failing to defend mosques from fascist attacks.

I feel like the boy who declared that the Emperor had no clothes. There is no doubt that Israel’s best friends in Eastern Europe – the governments of Poland and Hungary – are anti-Semitic. Poland’s Defence Minister Antoni Macierewicz assertedthat the Czarist forgery, which Hitler swore by, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion is true. Hungary’s newly elected far-Right Prime Minister Viktor Orban has promised to rehabilitateAdmiral Horthy, the pro-Nazi ruler who presided over the deportation of half a million Jews.  Orban however is best friends with Netanyahu, both of whom hate that archetypal Jewish financier who pulls the strings, one George Soros.  But the British press who are so opposed to ‘anti-Semitism’ have also attacked Soros, the ‘puppet master’, in anti-Semitic terms.

There is also no doubt that Trump and his entourage use anti-Semitic dog whistles when the occasion arises.  As Dana Milbank said in the Washington Post, Anti-Semitism is no longer an undertone of Trump’s campaign. It’s the melody.

However this kind of anti-Semitism, the kind that hates Jews, is not up for debate in Parliament.  What Luciana Berger, Ruth Smeeth and John Mann are most concerned about is the type of ‘anti-Semitism’ that involves hatred of Israel’s murderous system of Apartheid.

Tony Greenstein

Ruth Smeeths 10 ‘Anti-Semitic’ Message

1.             Hang yourself you vile treacherous Zionist Tory filth you are a cancer of humanity
2.             Ruth Smeeth is a Zionist she has no shame and she trades on the murder of Jews by Hitler who the Zionists betrayed
3.             Ruth Smeeth must surely be travelling first to Tel Aviv with all that slush after all she’s complicit in trying to bring Corbyn down
4.             First job for Jeremy Corbyn tomorrow expel the Zionist Bicom Smear Hag Bitch Ruth Smeeth from the Party
5.             This Ruth Smeeth is Britanaphobic we need to cleanse our nation of these types #JC4PM
6.             Deselect Ruth Smeeth asp Poke the Pig get all the Zionist child killer scum out of Labour
7.             You are a spy You are evil, satanic, leave #Labour #Corbyn
8.             Ruth, you are a Zionist plant, I’m ashamed you are in Labour, better suited to the murderous Knesset, #IsupportKen
9.             Your fellow traitor Tony Blair abolished hanging for treason.  Your kind need to leave before we bring it back #Smeethisfilth
10.         The gallows would be a fine and fitting  place for this dyke piece of Yid shit to swing from
 (those in bold are anti-Semitic or likely to be)
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Jackie Walker’s The Lynching is a perfect answer to the vile racism of the Jewish Labour Movement

April 18, 2018, 9:59 am
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How the Victim of Jeremy Newmark’s racist campaign came out on top


Jackie Walker was Vice Chair of Momentum when she was suspended from the Labour Party in May 2016.  During a private conversation with a friend she had stated that ‘many Jews, my ancestors too, were the chief financiers of the sugar and slave trade… so who are the victims and what does it mean .’  Jackie missed out one word ‘among’ as in ‘among the chief financiers of the sugar and slave trade.’  [see The lynching of Jackie Walker, Open Democracy, 12.10.16].  For that she was attacked as an anti-Semite.

The reason Jackie was targeted was not because of one word but because she was a Black-Jewish anti-Zionist.  In May 2016 there was massive support for Jackie in the Labour Party and Momentum.  Even Owen Jones supported her and within less than a month she was reinstated.
The Jewish Labour Movement withdrew its invitation to a meeting because McDonell has spoken on a platform with Jackie Walker
However the Jewish Labour Movement, the British branch of the racist Israeli Labour Party, a party that openly believes in segregation and Jewish supremacism, didn’t give up so easily. At the TUC Conference in Brighton in September Jackie spoke on a platform with John McDonnell.  When McDonnell was announced as a speaker at a JLM meeting at Labour Party conference, there were calls for him to be disinvited for speaking on the same platform as Jackie. The Jewish Chronicle quoted Jeremy Newmark, Chair of the JLM as saying that McDonnell ‘"must explain his defence of Walker which is inconsistent with his call for zero tolerance. This raises serious questions. Our members expect him to explain himself.’ 
The above tweets are just some of the vile abuse sent by Zionist 'victims' of antisemitism
On September 17th, over a week before the Labour Party conference, I wrote a blog The Jewish Labour Movement and its Political Lynching of Jackie Walker.  I had picked up on the increasing attacks on Jackie by the JLM and to me this seemed a classic case of a political lynching.  It was clear to me that the Zionists were pushing for a resuspension of Jackie. What was happening to Jackie would not have happened to a White person.  The JLM had deliberately targeted Jackie and made her into the classic scapegoat.  Its supporters indulged in the vilest racist abuse, something that crooked Labour General Secretary Iain McNicol was quite happy to turn a blind eye to.  No one has ever been disciplined for abuse of people on the Left.  Only right-wing MPs are victims.
According to the Jewish News of 14th June 2017, ‘the title [The Lynching] is a reference to an article by Marxist commentator Tony Greenstein, who wrote: “The attacks on Jackie Walker and others are political, a determined effort by the Israel lobby to make Britain’s Labour Party safe for Israel and Zionism.”  I am proud to have been the source of the title of this profound and moving play which describes the visceral racism employed in defence of the world’s only Apartheid state, Israel.
At the 2016 Labour Party Conference Jackie attended a ‘training session’ on anti-Semitism run by the Jewish Labour Movement.  She was recorded saying that she hadn’t found a definition of anti-Semitism that she could work with.  A pretty uncontroversial statement.  She also stated that it would be nice if Holocaust  Memorial Day could include all holocausts including those of Africans who had died in the slave trade or as slaves in the West Indies.  These remarks were secretly recorded by the Jewish Labour Movement and immediately there were loud calls to suspend Jackie for ‘anti-Semitism’.  This time there would be no support from Owen Jones or Jon Lansman.  On the contrary Lansman went out of his way to support Jeremy Newmark in his campaign of vindictive persecution.  
This wealthy property developer and founder of Momentum has followed a Zionist agenda in Momentum, always seeking to give legs to the false anti-semitism campaign
In The Independent of 30.9.16. Lansman leapt to the defence of the corrupt racist Jeremy Newmark, Chair of the Jewish Labour Movement.  Lansman threw Jackie, his deputy in Momentum to the wolves for the sake of his Zionist friends.
‘“I spoke to Jeremy Newmark of the Jewish Labour Movement this morning, he’s very upset and I can understand that – I work closely with Jeremy, I’ve been meeting with Jewish organisations to talk… I’ve been outspoken. I was very, very unhappy about… and I did comment on it, about it, what she had previously said.
Picket of Momentum Executive Committee which Stabbed Jackie Walker in the Back
On October 3rd 2016 Momentum’s Steering Committee met at the TSSA Headquarters near Euston and voted by 7-3 to remove Jackie as Vice Chair of Momentum.  The meeting was picketed by Free Speech on Israel.  Unsurprisingly Iain McNicol then followed up by suspending Jackie for a second time as a result of Lansman’s racist scabbing.
What makes Lansman’s actions particularly despicable is that the false anti-Semitism campaign which had netted Jackie Walker was a campaign whose primary purpose was to remove Corbyn as leader of the Labour Party.  Lansman was acting as a fifth column within Momentum.  The Alliance for Workers Liberty’s Jill Mountford and Mike Chessum, voted with Lansman to remove Jackie.  The AWL would soon be removed from Momentum’s Executive Committee too when Lansman decided to destroy the democracy of Momentum.
Go and watch this play it is very moving and describes the racism that Jackie has experienced in Britain not least in the Labour Party from careerists and opportunists such as Momentum’s property developer dictator Jon Lansman.
Tony Greenstein
Battered but triumphant
Riri Hylton The Electronic Intifada 4 April 2018


Jackie Walker (James Tye)
Two years after being purged from the Labour Party over spurious anti-Semitism allegations and a successful run of performances in the UK, Jackie Walker is touring Europe with her one-woman show.

The Lynching of Jackie Walker, an autobiographical piece, was borne out of a political crisis in Britain’s Labour Party. Following the election of Jeremy Corbyn, an outspoken critic of Israel, as party leader, accusations of anti-Semitism within the party’s left have been on the rise.
Former vice-chair of Momentum, the left-wing group formed to support Corbyn, Walker – who is of Jamaican and Jewish descent – was an early target.
“They wanted a lynching, a political lynching,” she states in the play’s trailer. “So I thought I would get my own court of public opinion and you’re going to be that for me tonight.”
Jeremy Newmark - the corrupt Chair of the Jewish Labour Movement who led the witchhunt of Jackie Walker
Walker was eventually cleared of charges of anti-Semitism only to be suspended again after she was secretly filmed challenging a controversial definition of anti-Semitism at a Labour Party training session. The head of the Board of Deputies of British Jews recently called for Walker’s expulsion from Labour.
The anti-racist activist draws a clear connection between a resurgence in the radical left and the accusations levied against her.
“You can see this in programs like Al Jazeera’s The Lobby. Suddenly the establishment began focusing on anti-Semitism – which does exist – to both beat and confine the left,” she tells me, referring to an undercover investigation exposing how pro-Israel groups influence British politics. “I think they’ve found it an effective tool.”
It is a tool that has since been used against many other Labour Party members, including Glyn Secker, secretary of Jewish Voice for Labour; Black anti-racist activist Marc Wadsworth and Israeli anti-Zionist Moshe Machover.
The Lynching is both allegorical in its treatment of political persecution and something of a clarion call for the masses. A non-linear narrative weaves together pluralities of voice, history and location, finally arriving at the present, an alarming mirror of the past.
Concerned for the most part in another period of social upheaval, Walker attempts to situate her particular “lynch” in a broader historical process. “This has all happened before, as my mother says [in the play]. This is a technique that the right use against the radical left whenever they need to button us down.”
Alarming mirror of the past
The play begins as Walker navigates the crowd towards an unadorned stage with a whiteboard, stool, table and coat stand. A photo of Walker’s mother, Dorothy Walker, is held in place on the board and on the coat stand hangs the brown trilby hat of Jack Cohen, Walker’s father.
Walker has a forceful yet disarming presence. She morphs from one character to another, employing a simple prop, turn or other sharp movement. The ghost of Dorothy speaks in a patois lilt and brings a fierce historical wit. She is both witness and public defender, traversing disparate geographical locations as she builds a case.
“Tonight you will hear about a witch-hunt, about fake news, alternative facts and an attempt to smash the biggest, most radical political movement we’ve ever seen,”she begins. It will become clear throughout the course of the performance that the play is as much about the vindication of a mother as it is her daughter.
The first act details the courtship of Dorothy – a Jamaican civil rights activist – and Jack – a Russian communist Jew – in 1940s Brooklyn. Their involvement, at first romantic, quickly matures. “It was music that brought us together, but it was in the politics where we found love,” states a nostalgic Jack.
Political activity – such as boarding buses as a mixed-race couple in the segregated South – attracts attention from the state and Dorothy is finally thrown out of the country, but not before a period of solitary confinement at a psychiatric hospital, where she is forced to give birth tied to a bed.
Such tragic stories are, however, punctuated by moments of laughter and Walker inhabits her mother with a true warmth, in a script littered with bitter anecdotes:
“Jamaica – a paradise. When white people get there for the first time, they say they discover it, they call it tabula rasa. That mean empty page. Perhaps they were blind because there were thousands of Indians living there,” she offers mockingly.
The Lynching is awash with historical reference. It traces the ghoulish picnics held at lynchings in the deep South and the founding of slave plantations in colonized Jamaica before crossing the Atlantic, where the Walker family is met with the “No dogs, no Irish no coloreds” signs of 1950s Britain.
Once in England, we encounter an 8-year-old Jackie who experiences a series of flashbacks, disrupting the narrative with short vignettes of troubling tales. Neo-Nazi attacks on the family home, racist slurs in the school playground and physical attacks color the stage, each scene interrupted by a lullaby.
Dorothy’s death marks another abrupt interruption in the play. An overwhelmed infant Jackie tells the story in short, simple sentences, shifting from past to present tense. “I went to sleep really quickly. But then, suddenly the light went on. And my mum can hardly breathe. I don’t remember how she got to the floor.”
Once at the hospital and following a post-mortem diagnosis, the child determines the real cause of death.“I remember what my mum told me and I think she died because she was poor and sick. Poor and sick and colored.”
From this emerges a present-day Walker, who begins detailing life in the years following her mother’s passing. It’s a sobering moment marked by its unvarnished, matter-of-fact delivery. Bleak irony is replaced by more somber observations: “I left care at 18, same way I came into Britain, with a suitcase and £25.”
An attack on change
After a brief sketch of her time in the Labour Party, grassroots activism and election to vice-chair of Momentum, we are brought to the present-day allegations.
A damning statement by the state prosecutor leads to the re-emergence of Dorothy Walker, who gives a detailed rebuttal of each charge. “Wake up!” she appeals, “we have seen this before. This is not an attack on Jackie Walker. This is an attack on change.”
Walker makes a compelling case in the mirroring of her and her mother’s struggle, and this bears fruit in the final act. “What I’m trying to do in the play is to get people to have a historical view of what is happening at the moment,” she explains.
“This new anti-Semitism, which equates criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism, is one of the major tools they’re using to try to fracture and break us.”
The Lynching possesses a sirenic, almost shamanic quality, alerting us to the dangers of collective amnesia, offering the role of witness as its salve. The final scene of Dorothy and her daughter attest to this.
Eight-year-old Jackie stands center stage and describes a dream where she is visited by her mother. The two sit at the top of a hill and the child describes her Christmas meal among other things.
The mother begins to float slowly away toward the clouds as she says goodbye, leaving behind a tearful daughter, who resolves to remember.
And it is in this quiet love of memory that The Lynching triumphs.
Riri Hylton is a freelance journalist/editor working in both print and broadcast journalism. They are based between London and Berlin.
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Winston Churchill – a Mass Murderer to whom history was very kind

April 18, 2018, 6:05 pm
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In Winston Churchill, Hollywood Rewards a Mass Murderer


As a child I lived in Merthyr Tydfil, South Wales for a year.  One of the things that has stuck with me since that time was the hostility amongst Welsh working class people to Churchill as a result of his sending the troops and police into the valleys to help the coal owners defeat the striking miners, some of whom were shot.

But Churchill’s reputation was made primarily in imperial affairs. It is indisputable that Churchill was primarily responsible for the slaughter at Gallipolli in 1915.  Prior to that there was his period as Home Secretary when he took personal control of the Sydney Street siege in January 2011.   Two Latvian revolutionaries were holed up there and they were besieged by police and troops.  When the building caught fire he ordered the fire brigade not to put the flames out and allowed those inside to burn to death.  As Colonial Secretary he presided over Partition in Ireland and over the beginning of the Mandate in Palestine.  In Palestine he introduced the murderous Black and Tans who had seen bloody service in Ireland.
Churchill saw very early the potential of Zionism as an antidote to Communism amongst Jews
Adam Jones, editor of the Journal of Genocide Research, calls Churchill "a genuine genocidaire", noting that he called Indians a "foul race" and said that the British air force chief should "send some of his surplus bombers to destroy them." [Jones, Adam (2016-12-16). "Chapter 2 State and Empire; War and Revolution". Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction. Routledge]

Whether it was sending in the army to protect the coal owners in Wales or presiding over the famine in Bengal in 1942, Churchill was a mass murderer.  Churchill’s whole career had been dedicated to the preservation of the Empire.  In January 1931 he resigned from the Conservative Shadow Cabinet over self-government for India.  Churchill was a died-in-the-wool supporter of the British Empire.
Churchill made his reputation in the second world war, primarily through his fighting speeches.  However his opposition to Hitler was not from an anti-fascist perspective.  He saw Hitler as a threat to British interests.  Initially he had welcomed Hitler as an anti-communist.  During the War Churchill was distinguished by his refusal to do anything to alleviate the position of the Jews including the bombing of Auschwitz and the railway lines leading up to it.  He was however a die hard Zionist and that is why Zionist supporters treat him kindly, despite his undoubted anti-Semitism. 
Striking up a familiar pose
During the war he advocated the mass bombing of German cities like Dresden and Nuremburg.  Thousands  died as a result yet the war itself was advanced.  These were undoubtedly war crimes.  When Greece was liberated he put the local Nazi collaborators back in power as his main goal was keeping the Greek Communists out of power.

His most famous tract Zionism and  Bolshevism was published in the Illustrated Sunday Herald on 8 February 1920.  Suffice to say that Churchill was not overfond of revolutionary Jews!  He wrote of the ‘International Jew’ as being responsible for all the ills his class suffered from, including the French Revolution!
Churchill enjoying himself at the Sydney Street siege
‘The adherents of this sinister confederacy are mostly men reared up among the unhappy populations of countries where Jews are persecuted on account of their race.... This movement among the Jews is not new. From the days of Spartacus-Weishaupt to those of Karl Marx, and down to Trotsky (Russia), Bela Kun (Hungary), Rosa Luxembourg (Germany), and Emma Goldman (United States), this world-wide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilisation and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality, has been steadily growing. ... It has been the mainspring of every subversive movement during the Nineteenth Century;...
There is no need to exaggerate the part played in the creation of Bolshevism and in the actual bringing about of the Russian Revolution by these international and for the most part atheistical Jews.. ...
Zionism offers the third sphere to the political conceptions of the Jewish race. In violent contrast to international communism, it presents to the Jew a national idea of a commanding character.’
Churchill like most of his class saw Zionism as an alternative to the attractions of revolution for Jews. Those who see that the origins of Zionism were progressive are very much mistaken. 
Churchill's Police confront the miners in South Wales
It was also during his period as Prime Minister that Britain engaged in the most horrific use of torture and concentration camps against the Mau Mau people in Kenya.  Victims included Hussein Onyango Obama, the grandfather of Barak Obama.  See Revealed: Britain's torture of Obama's grandfather and Sir Winston Churchill: Zionist hero

Tony Greenstein

In Winston Churchill, Hollywood Rewards a Mass Murderer

A statue of former British prime minister Winston Churchill is silhouetted in front of the Houses of Parliament in London in 2015., Luke MacGregor/Reuters
“History,” Winston Churchill said, “will be kind to me, for I intend to write it myself.” He needn’t have bothered. He was one of the great mass murderers of the 20th century, yet is the only one, unlike Hitler and Stalin, to have escaped historical odium in the West. He has been crowned with a Nobel Prize (for literature, no less), and now, an actor portraying him (Gary Oldman) has been awarded an Oscar.

As Hollywood confirms, Churchill’s reputation (as what Harold Evans has called“the British Lionheart on the ramparts of civilization”) rests almost entirely on his stirring rhetoric and his talent for a fine phrase during World War II. “We shall not flag nor fail. We shall go on to the end. … We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets. … We shall never surrender.” (The revisionist British historian John Charmley dismissed this as “sublime nonsense.”)

Words, in the end, are all that Churchill admirers can point to. His actions are another matter altogether.
Blenheim Palace where Churchill was born
During World War II, Churchill declared himself in favor of “terror bombing.” He wrote that he wanted “absolutely devastating, exterminating attacks by very heavy bombers.” Horrors such as the firebombing of Dresden were the result.

In the fight for Irish independence, Churchill, in his capacity as secretary of state for war and air, was one of the few British officials in favor of bombing Irish protesters, suggesting in 1920 that airplanes should use “machine-gun fire or bombs” to scatter them.

Dealing with unrest in Mesopotamia in 1921, as secretary of state for the colonies, Churchill acted as a war criminal: “I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against the uncivilised tribes; it would spread a lively terror.” He ordered large-scale bombing of Mesopotamia, with an entire village wiped out in 45 minutes.

In Afghanistan, Churchill declared that the Pashtuns “needed to recognise the superiority of [the British] race” and that “all who resist will be killed without quarter.” He wrote: “We proceeded systematically, village by village, and we destroyed the houses, filled up the wells, blew down the towers, cut down the great shady trees, burned the crops and broke the reservoirs in punitive devastation. … Every tribesman caught was speared or cut down at once.”
In Kenya, Churchill either directed or was complicit in policies involving the forced relocation of local people from the fertile highlands to make way for white colonial settlers and the forcing of more than 150,000 people into concentration camps. Rape, castration, lit cigarettes on tender spots, and electric shocks were all used by the British authorities to torture Kenyans under Churchill’s rule.
But the principal victims of Winston Churchill were the Indians — “a beastly people with a beastly religion,” as he charmingly called them. He wanted to use chemical weapons in India but was shot down by his cabinet colleagues, whom he criticized for their “squeamishness,” declaring that “the objections of the India Office to the use of gas against natives are unreasonable.”

Churchill’s beatification as an apostle of freedom seems all the more preposterous given his 1941 declaration that the Atlantic Charter’s principles would not apply to India and the colored colonies. He refused to see people of color as entitled to the same rights as himself. “Gandhi-ism and all it stands for,” he declared, “will, sooner or later, have to be grappled with and finally crushed.”
In such matters, Churchill was the most reactionary of Englishmen, with views so extreme they cannot be excused as being reflective of their times. Even his own secretary of state for India, Leopold Amery, confessed that he could see very little difference between Churchill’s attitude and Adolf Hitler’s.
As a dedicated racist  Churchill was a strong believer in racial purity and selective breeding - eugenics
Thanks to Churchill, some 4 million Bengalis starved to death in a 1943 famine. Churchill ordered the diversion of food from starving Indian civilians to well-supplied British soldiers and even to top up European stockpiles in Greece and elsewhere. When reminded of the suffering of his Indian victims, his response was that the famine was their own fault, he said, for “breeding like rabbits.”
Madhusree Mukerjee’s searing account of Churchill’s role in the Bengal famine, “Churchill’s Secret War,”documents that while Indians starved, prices for foodgrains were inflated by British purchases and India’s own surplus grains were exported, while Australian ships laden with wheat were not allowed to unload their cargo at Calcutta (where the bodies of those who had died of starvation littered the streets). Instead, Churchill ordered that grain be shipped to storage depots in the Mediterranean and the Balkans to increase the buffer stocks for a possible future invasion of Greece and Yugoslavia. European warehouses filled up as Bengalis died.

This week’s Oscar rewards yet another hagiography of this odious man. To the Iraqis whom Churchill advocated gassing, the Greek protesters on the streets of Athens who were mowed down on Churchill’s orders in 1944, sundry Pashtuns and Irish, as well as to Indians like myself, it will always be a mystery why a few bombastic speeches have been enough to wash the bloodstains off Churchill’s racist hands.

Many of us will remember Churchill as a war criminal and an enemy of decency and humanity, a blinkered imperialist untroubled by the oppression of non-white peoples. Ultimately, his great failure — his long darkest hour — was his constant effort to deny us freedom.

Shashi Tharoor is author of “Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India.” He chairs the Indian Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee.

Not his finest hour: The dark side of Winston Churchill

by Johann Hari
Winston Churchill is rightly remembered for leading Britain through her finest hour – but what if he also led the country through her most shameful hour? What if, in addition to rousing a nation to save the world from the Nazis, he fought for a raw white supremacism and a concentration camp network of his own? This question burns through Richard Toye's new history, Churchill's Empire, and is even seeping into the Oval Office.
George W Bush left a bust of Churchill near his desk in the White House, in an attempt to associate himself with the war leader's heroic stand against fascism. Barack Obama had it returned to Britain. It's not hard to guess why: his Kenyan grandfather, Hussein Onyango Obama, was imprisoned without trial for two years and was tortured on Churchill's watch, for resisting Churchill's empire.
Can these clashing Churchills be reconciled? Do we live, at the same time, in the world he helped to save, and the world he helped to trash? Toye, one of Britain's smartest young historians, has tried to pick through these questions dispassionately – and he should lead us, at last and at least, to a more mature conversation about our greatest national icon.
Churchill was born in 1874 into a Britain that was washing the map pink, at the cost of washing distant nations blood red. Victoria had just been crowned Empress of India, and the scramble for Africa was only a few years away. At Harrow School and then Sandhurst, he was told a simple story: the superior white man was conquering the primitive, dark-skinned natives, and bringing them the benefits of civilisation. As soon as he could, Churchill charged off to take his part in "a lot of jolly little wars against barbarous peoples". In the Swat valley, now part of Pakistan, he experienced, fleetingly, a crack of doubt. He realised that the local population was fighting back because of "the presence of British troops in lands the local people considered their own," just as Britain would if she were invaded. But Churchill soon suppressed this thought, deciding instead they were merely deranged jihadists whose violence was explained by a "strong aboriginal propensity to kill".
He gladly took part in raids that laid waste to whole valleys, destroying houses and burning crops. He then sped off to help reconquer the Sudan, where he bragged that he personally shot at least three "savages".
The young Churchill charged through imperial atrocities, defending each in turn. When concentration camps were built in South Africa, for white Boers, he said they produced "the minimum of suffering". The death toll was almost 28,000, and when at least 115,000 black Africans were likewise swept into British camps, where 14,000 died, he wrote only of his "irritation that Kaffirs should be allowed to fire on white men". Later, he boasted of his experiences there: "That was before war degenerated. It was great fun galloping about."
Then as an MP he demanded a rolling programme of more conquests, based on his belief that "the Aryan stock is bound to triumph".There seems to have been an odd cognitive dissonance in his view of the "natives". In some of his private correspondence, he appears to really believe they are helpless children who will "willingly, naturally, gratefully include themselves within the golden circle of an ancient crown".
But when they defied this script, Churchill demanded they be crushed with extreme force. As Colonial Secretary in the 1920s, he unleashed the notorious Black and Tan thugs on Ireland's Catholic civilians, and when the Kurds rebelled against British rule, he said: "I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes...[It] would spread a lively terror."
Of course, it's easy to dismiss any criticism of these actions as anachronistic. Didn't everybody think that way then? One of the most striking findings of Toye's research is that they really didn't: even at the time, Churchill was seen as at the most brutal and brutish end of the British imperialist spectrum. Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin was warned by Cabinet colleagues not to appoint him because his views were so antedeluvian. Even his startled doctor, Lord Moran, said of other races: "Winston thinks only of the colour of their skin."
Many of his colleagues thought Churchill was driven by a deep loathing of democracy for anyone other than the British and a tiny clique of supposedly superior races. This was clearest in his attitude to India. When Mahatma Gandhi launched his campaign of peaceful resistance, Churchill raged that he "ought to be lain bound hand and foot at the gates of Delhi, and then trampled on by an enormous elephant with the new Viceroy seated on its back." As the resistance swelled, he announced: "I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion." This hatred killed. To give just one, major, example, in 1943 a famine broke out in Bengal, caused – as the Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen has proved – by the imperial policies of the British. Up to 3 million people starved to death while British officials begged Churchill to direct food supplies to the region. He bluntly refused. He raged that it was their own fault for "breeding like rabbits". At other times, he said the plague was "merrily" culling the population.
Skeletal, half-dead people were streaming into the cities and dying on the streets, but Churchill – to the astonishment of his staff – had only jeers for them. This rather undermines the claims that Churchill's imperialism was motivated only by an altruistic desire to elevate the putatively lower races.
Hussein Onyango Obama is unusual among Churchill's victims only in one respect: his story has been rescued from the slipstream of history, because his grandson ended up as President of the US. Churchill believed that Kenya's fertile highlands should be the preserve of the white settlers, and approved the clearing out of the local "blackamoors". He saw the local Kikuyu as "brutish children". When they rebelled under Churchill's post-war premiership, some 150,000 of them were forced at gunpoint into detention camps – later dubbed "Britain's gulag" by Pulitzer-prize winning historian, Professor Caroline Elkins. She studied the detention camps for five years for her remarkable book Britain's Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya, explains the tactics adopted under Churchill to crush the local drive for independence. "Electric shock was widely used, as well as cigarettes and fire," she writes. "The screening teams whipped, shot, burned, and mutilated Mau Mau suspects." Hussein Onyango Obama never truly recovered from the torture he endured.
Many of the wounds Churchill inflicted have still not healed: you can find them on the front pages any day of the week. He is the man who invented Iraq, locking together three conflicting peoples behind arbitrary borders that have been bleeding ever since. He is the Colonial Secretary who offered the Over-Promised Land to both the Jews and the Arabs – although he seems to have privately felt racist contempt for both. He jeered at the Palestinians as "barbaric hoards who ate little but camel dung," while he was appalled that the Israelis "take it for granted that the local population will be cleared out to suit their convenience".
True, occasionally Churchill did become queasy about some of the most extreme acts of the Empire. He fretted at the slaughter of women and children, and cavilled at the Amritsar massacre of 1919. Toye tries to present these doubts as evidence of moderation – yet they almost never seem to have led Churchill to change his actions. If you are determined to rule people by force against their will, you can hardly be surprised when atrocities occur. Rule Britannia would inexorably produce a Cruel Britannia.
So how can the two be reconciled? Was Churchill's moral opposition to Nazism a charade, masking the fact he was merely trying to defend the British Empire from a rival?
The US civil rights leader Richard B. Moore, quoted by Toye, said it was "a rare and fortunate coincidence" that at that moment "the vital interests of the British Empire [coincided] with those of the great overwhelming majority of mankind". But this might be too soft in its praise. If Churchill had only been interested in saving the Empire, he could probably have cut a deal with Hitler. No: he had a deeper repugnance for Nazism than that. He may have been a thug, but he knew a greater thug when he saw one – and we may owe our freedom today to this wrinkle in history.
This, in turn, led to the great irony of Churchill's life. In resisting the Nazis, he produced some of the richest prose-poetry in defence of freedom and democracy ever written. It was a cheque he didn't want black or Asian people to cash – but they refused to accept that the Bank of Justice was empty. As the Ghanaian nationalist Kwame Nkrumah wrote: "All the fair, brave words spoken about freedom that had been broadcast to the four corners of the earth took seed and grew where they had not been intended." Churchill lived to see democrats across Britain's dominions and colonies – from nationalist leader Aung San in Burma to Jawarlal Nehru in India – use his own intoxicating words against him.
Ultimately, the words of the great and glorious Churchill who resisted dictatorship overwhelmed the works of the cruel and cramped Churchill who tried to impose it on the darker-skinned peoples of the world. The fact that we now live in a world where a free and independent India is a superpower eclipsing Britain, and a grandson of the "savages" is the most powerful man in the world, is a repudiation of Churchill at his ugliest – and a sweet, ironic victory for Churchill at his best.
See also Winston Churchill
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Marc Wadsworth Victim of a Racist Witch-hunt - Framed by the Jewish Labour Movement & Ruth Smeeth MP

April 20, 2018, 4:32 pm
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Say no to the victimisation of Black activists at the behest of the world’s only Apartheid State, Israel


Veteran anti-racist campaigner Marc Wadsworth is one of the many members of the Labour Party who have been unjustly suspended from the Labour Party. The National Kangaroo (Constitutional) Committee will decide next Wednesday if Marc should be expelled from the party. Judging by previous cases he can expect no justice.

Marc was first expelled and then readmitted only to be suspended after the launch of the Chakrabarti Report at a press conference 30th June 2016.  


When Marc questioned why Labour MP Ruth Smeeth seemed to be trading information with that well known Labour supporting paper, the Daily Telegraph, he was immediately accused of ‘anti-Semitism’ on the prompting of Kevin Schofield, an ex-Sun journalist.  Marc was making the point about how few Black faces there were at a Press Conference that was supposed to be about racism in the Labour Party.

Although Marc had never, at any time, referred to Ruth Smeeth as Jewish, because he didn’t know that she was Jewish, Smeeth immediately got up on her hind legs screeching ‘how dare you, how dare you’ as if she had been embarrassed by her Black servant in front of polite company.  Immediately the lies started.  Marc had mentioned the press, therefore it was a ‘trope’ about Jewish control of the media.  That is how these people work.


Ruth Smeeth, the Lying Zionist MP who faked Victimhood at the Chakrabarti Press Conference
Ruth Smeeth doing her best to damage Labour and oust Corbyn
This week Smeeth has been the ‘hero’ of the false ‘anti-Semitism’ debate in the House of Commons.  The Tories held the debate in order to give an opportunity to the Labour Right - Smeeth, John Mann and Luciana Berger – to attack their own leader Jeremy Corbyn.  It was a Tory-Labour Right love fest. Smeeth read out 10 messages of ‘abuse’ she had received. Only 1 was explicitly anti-Semitic and all of them revolved  around her support for the Israeli state. 

It is unfortunate and unacceptable that some people react to support for the self-styled ‘Jewish’ state by resorting to anti-Semitism but the blame rests firmly with those who imply that Israel is acting on behalf of all Jews.  

See 50 Years After Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood Speech’ Parliament Debates Fake ‘Anti-Semitism’ and Applauds Zionist MPs Luciana Berger and Ruth Smeeth
Luciana Berger, Zionist anti-Corbyn MP
Smeeth is a senior officer in the Jewish Labour Movement.  The JLM is the British wing of the Israeli Labour Party, a Jewish supremacist, segregationist party responsible for the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians.  It is a Zionist party which supports Benjamin Netanyahu’s attempt to deport 40,000 Black African refugees from Israel.

Smeeth is an ardent Zionist.  Her allegations of 'anti-semitism' against Marc Wadsworth are a smear whose real purpose is to undermine the Corbyn leadership of the Labour Party and to outlaw criticism of the world’s only apartheid state.  It has nothing whatsoever to do with anti-Semitism.
Stephen Lawrence
As viewers of BBC 1’s documentary on Stephen Lawrence will have seen this week, Marc was an integral part of the campaign to uncover the truth about who killed Stephen and to hold the Metropolitan Police to account.

Thanks to the long campaign, two of his killers, Gary Dobson and David Norris, were eventually gaoled. The MacPherson Inquiry which was held labelled the Metropolitan Police institutionally racist.  Despitehaving played no part whatsoever in this campaign the JLM attempted to hijack and pervert the conclusions of this Inquiry to suggest that Jewish Zionists, i.e. the supporters of settler colonialism, should be allowed to define themselves as victims of ‘anti-Semitism’ even though Jews in this country, unlike Black and Asian people, do not suffer from state or Police racism. In other words Jews who are Zionist and who object to criticism of Israel can then turn around and say they are a ‘victim’.
Gary Dobson (left) and David Norris - gaoled for life for the murder of Stephen Lawrence 
This is identity politics gone mad.  Imagine what use might have been made of this nonsense if White Afrikaaners had taken advantage of it. They could have proclaimed themselves the victim when people criticised Apartheid.  Indeed that is what the National Front and BNP tried to do with their 'Rights for Whites' campaigns.
Stephen Lawrence's Family
At the moment the false anti-Semitism campaign is in full cry.  It was started off by another professional Israel supporter, Luciana Berger MP who produced out of a hat a 6 year old Facebook post by Jeremy Corbyn concerning a mural in the East End that was alleged to be anti-Semitic.  Berger and Smeeth’s main concerns are for the Israeli state rather than their constituents.  Smeeth has been exposed by Wikileaks as a source for the US Embassy.
According to the logic of identity politics, since Jewish Zionists are now a protected minority so should White racists be 


This lobby is extremely important.  It is high time that we derailed this campaign of destabilisation aimed at Corbyn.  It is a tragedy that Momentum, 40,000 strong – is actually aiding and abetting the witchhunt with the active connivance of Jon Lansman.

Please come along to the Lobby and make your voice heard: Solidarity with Marc!

EXCLUSIVE - The Lies of Ruth Smeeth MP led to the suspension of Marc Wadsworth


Wes Streeting ‘shouts in Dianne Abbott’s face’ and arranges march against ‘Windrush child’

Centrist MP for Ilford North Wes Streeting's week has resulted in him being accused of having 'questions to answer' about a 'worrying pattern of behaviour'.
Streeting has clashed twice with Labour front-bencher Diane Abbott - and has sent an email inviting colleagues and others to join him next week in a show of strength against a black Labour activist and 'Windrush child'.

Diane Abbott
Labour's Shadow Home Secretary Diane Abbott has suffered the most vile abuse - receiving almost half of all abuse received by female MPs in the run-up to the General Election. She has spoken movingly of the terrible hate-messages she receives on a daily basis.

On Tuesday, she had just spoken in a parliamentary debate - about personal abuse she has received, the seriousness with which Labour treats the issue of antisemitism and the measures the party is taking to combat it. Ms Abbott also made a number of points that the Haredi Jewish community had asked her to raise - and for which the community praised her later.
As Home Secretary Amber Rudd began to respond, Streeting made an intervention - to side against his own party - and against Abbott's representations on behalf of the Jewish community in her constituency.
(left to right)  Wes Streeting, Diane Abbot, Marc Wadsworth
Mr Streeting wasn't finished. In a parliamentary corridor, Streeting is alleged to have literally shouted in Ms Abbott's face, standing toe to toe with her and screaming 'not my party!', in front of a number of onlookers.
Witnesses described Streeting's behaviour as so intimidating that he had to be physically steered away from the Labour front-bencher.
Marc Wadsworth, left, introducing Stephen Lawrence's family to Nelson Mandela

Marc Wadsworth is a veteran black Labour activist. He featured in the BBC's documentary about Stephen Lawrence, "Stephen, the murder that changed a nation" this week, when he was seen introducing Stephen's mother Doreen to the late South African president Nelson Mandela.
Wadsworth was suspended by the party last year after challenging Labour MP Ruth Smeeth at the launch of the Chakrabarti report, who then walked out of the meeting.
Ms Smeeth quoted Wadsworth as accusing her of a 'media conspiracy', a well-known antisemitic trope, but video evidence showed that Wadsworth had not said that.
His exact words were:
I saw that the Telegraph handed a copy of a press release to Ruth Smeeth MP so you can see who is working hand in hand. If you look around this room, how many African, Caribbean and Asian people are there? We need to get our house in order, don't we?
Wadsworth's complaint was about the lack of representation for BAME (black, Asian and minority ethnic) people - an issue he continues to fight for in spite of his suspension, as he was instrumental in the recent launch of the Grassroots Black Leftgroup.
Wadsworth was initially summarily expelled from the Labour Party but reinstated and suspended after his lawyers wrote to Labour’s compliance unit pointing out that it had acted unlawfully and not in accordance with the party’s rules.
Neither the expulsion letter nor the suspension notification mentioned allegations of antisemitism – that charge was added over six months later, in January 2017.
Since then, he has remained suspended – in spite of a public letter of support printed in the Guardian from twelve prominent supporters including black and Jewish activists - and Wadsworth has felt so severely attacked that he felt compelled to crowdfund to have full legal representation at his disciplinary hearing next week.
In the same week as his issues with Diane Abbott, Wes Streeting sent the following message to parliamentary colleagues:
Apologies for the impersonal message, but I wonder if I can enlist you to provide some practical moral support for our friend and colleague Ruth Smeeth next Wednesday morning (25th April)?
She is giving evidence against Mark Wadsworth - the guy who abused her at the antisemitism inquiry launch- and we expect there to be a protest outside against her.
To give Ruth some moral support and solidarity, I am assembling a group of Labour MPs and Peersin Westminster Hall at 940am. We will then walk with Ruth to Church House nearby. We won’t be allowed in with her, but I can’t tell you how much a strong turnout will mean to her - and how much better it would be if we outnumber the protesters.
So, if you can make it let me know by email or text.
Wednesday 25th April
940am
Westminster Hall
Thanks for your support,
Wes Streeting
Readers will judge for themselves whether the video above of Wadsworth's challenge to Ms Smeeth constitutes 'abuse'.
But while it is clear that noabuse of Ms Smeeth en route to the hearing can be condoned, Streeting's email also represents an attempt to counter demonstrations in support of a suspended black activist's attempt to clear his name of allegations he insists are unfounded.
Wadsworth told the SKWAWKBOX:
It's ironic that in this week of media attention on the Tories' abuse of the Windrush generation, I find Wes trying to organise a parliamentary protest against me, in spite of the evidence.
My dad came to this country from Jamaica at his own expense during World War Two to join the RAF to fight against the nazis. He went back in 1946 but then came back to the UK on the Windrush in 1948 - I'm a Windrush child.
Given his two or three tweets this week condemning the government's treatment of the Windrush generation, I'd have hoped Wes would be supporting a Windrush descendant who's fighting for the representation of black and Asian people in the Labour Party, but it seems that's not going to happen.
Taken together with his clashes with Diane Abbott this week, it represents a worrying pattern of behaviour and Wes has questions to answer.
The SKWAWKBOX contacted Mr Streeting for comment. At the time of publication, he had not responded.
↧

Dear Peter Kyle, What a Sickening Racist You Are

April 20, 2018, 8:06 pm
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Only Hove’s ‘Labour’ MP could attack the dead for having ‘provoked’ their killers

If Kyle is not reselected then, if Labour gains a majority, Kyle is likely to refuse to support a Labour government under Corbyn
Whatever else you can accuse Peter Kyle, Progress’s  Labour MP for Hove of, it isn’t a sense of humour failure.  Who else could blame the dead for having deliberately gone out of their way to get themselves killed whilst exonerating their killers of all blame? 
According to Kyle this 13 year old boy must have been a terrorist too
As most people will be aware, the situation in Gaza after 11 years of Israel’s siege is a humanitarian disaster. 95% of the water is unfit to drink, because Israel has stolen their water.  Food is in short supply since Israel took care to attack chicken farms and its navy regularly uses Gaza’s fishing boats as target practice.  Suffice to say exports of Gaza’s produce is forbidden and exit is made extremely difficult for medical patients, many of whom have died trying to leave Gaza.
Palestinian Return demonstrators
Suffice to say that the population being at the end of their tether resorted for the past 3 weeks to large ‘Return’ demonstrations near Israel’s security fence.  Their demand is quite simple – since Israel has made their living conditions unbearable and since they come from what is now Israel, having been expelled in 1947-8, they demand the right of return.  However according to Israel’s propagandists, of which Kyle is one, those demonstrating were forced to by Hamas, who like all groups Israel comes into conflict are demonised as genocidal Nazis.

Of course the idea of Palestinian refugees returning home to Palestine is unthinkable to Israel’s racist regime which only allows Jews to ‘return’ despite them never having lived there.
Peter Kyle in the House of Commons
As the ‘only democracy in the Middle East’ Israel could not tolerate peaceful demonstrations on its borders.  So it employed 100 army snipers to take pot shots at those who were demonstrating.  The result is at least 36 demonstrators shot dead and over a thousand wounded.

Unsurprisingly Peter Kyle’s constituents have contacted him to ask that their MP express their concern and fury over Israel’s war crimes.  Peter however had different ideas.  Not for nothing is Peter known as a walking  mouthpiece for whatever hasbara (propaganda) Israel has on offer.
Luke Akehurst - arms salesman and Israeli propagandist
After the shooting of the first batch of Gaza’s demonstrators on Good Friday Luke Akehurst, an employee of Stand by Israel and a stalwart of the Labour Right, went into overdrive.  He put out an‘Urgent Call to Action - email your MP to ask them to condemn Hamas for provoking violence on the Gaza border’.  He titled this OPERATION DEFEND ISRAEL.
Turning things on their head is not unknown in politics see the above Express headline
Lukey also has a well developed sense of humour.  Who else would call the shooting dead of 19 unarmed Palestinians ‘Operation Defend Israel’.  If only Luke  had been around in the second world war then he could have termed the Nazi invasion of Poland ‘Operation Defend Germany’or the establishment of concentration camps as ‘Operation Defend Jewry’.  Come to think of it the Daily Express did exactly this.  When Jews declared a boycott of Germany the Daily Express ran with a headline on 24th March 1933 ‘Judea Declares War on Germany’. 

Thus when his constituents contacted Kyle they were treated to a long lecture about the evils of Hamas, the group that runs Gaza whereas he signally fails to utter even a single word of criticism of Israel for having murdered what is now 36 unarmed protestors.  

Kyle it is only fair to say is only taking his lead from  Akehurst who wrote that ‘On Good Friday the terror group HAMAS ordered men, women and children to provoke a dispute with Israel.’  You see, it wasn’t Israel’s fault at all.  It was all Hamas’s fault for having  ‘provoked’a dispute with Israel.
Peter Kyle has adopted the above apologia for Israel's war crimes wholesale
One of the criticism that Zionists often make of their opponents is that we believe in conspiracy theories.  Could there be any bigger conspiracy theory than the idea that thousands of Palestinians were ordered to demonstrate and risk their lives because Hamas forced them to?  

Akehurst tells us how many ‘rioters’ were killed (Akehurst has no doubt that all those killed, including those shot in the back, were rioters).  Indeed they ‘were identified as Palestinian terrorists.’  And who did the identification?  Why of course their murderers.

I therefore decided to write to my dear friend Kyle 

Letter I sent to Peter Kyle 20.4.18.

Dear Peter Kyle,

In response to a constituent's concern regarding Israel's shooting dead of over 30 unarmed demonstrators  in Gaza over the past 3 weeks and the wounding of over one thousand more, you wrote a letter criticising Hamas but saying nothing about a state that shoots peaceful protestors.

Your sickening hypocrisy is best demonstrated by your sentence:

'We recognise the plight of the people of Gaza and the dire humanitarian situation they face.'

This is from someone who is on record as supporting the very siege of Gaza, now over 11 years old, that has led to this 'dire humanitarian situation'.

You 'condemn Hamas’ ongoing rearmament, tunnel construction and attempts to launch rocket and terrorist attacks.'  I can only presume you would have condemned the tunnel construction and the attempt to arm of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising? 
Since there have been no rocket attacks by Hamas in recent years, unlike the regular shootings, missile attacks and tank fire by Israel, you have to employ a form of weasel words as in 'attempts to...'

Perhaps you might inform us if you have an opinion on the regular shooting of Palestinian fishermen in Gaza's territorial waters, despite agreements to allow fishing up to 6 kilometers?

 You say that you 'deplore Hamas’ repeated violation of the human rights of the citizens of Gaza'presumably you don't consider the right to clean water, which is a direct consequences of Israeli action in depleting the water table and bombing water purification plants a violation of human rights?  Or the right to live with a roof over one's head, since Israel leveled thousands of homes in Operation Protective Edge? 

I also presume that you don't consider the shooting of unarmed demonstrators to be a breach of human rights either?

I would be interested to know what it is that prevents you ever condemning the actions of the aggressor.  Israel possesses an overwhelming military might.  It is a first world nuclear power, yet you condemn the puny and pathetic response of those living under Israel's daily occupation? 

Yes I know that there are no Israeli military forces in Gaza but when you control its borders, preventing access by sea, land and air in addition to controlling who goes in and out and the population register then you are in occupation.

Your concern for LGBT Palestinians is touching though I am not aware that Hamas is persecuting Palestinian gays in the same way that Israel's friends in Syria, al-Nusra, Jaish al Islam and other jihadist groups are doing. 

Or perhaps you believe that LGBT Palestinians don't drink water or eat food or want to work?  Your pinkwashing is nothing but a disgusting attempt to use the oppression of one group in order to justify Israel's racist and murderous policies which are directed at all Palestinians, gay and straight.

Perhaps you might be so kind as to inform me just what has caused a Labour politician to become such a despicable racist and an apologist for the only Apartheid state in the world.  On seconds thought don't bother.  I think I understand.

Tony Greenstein
This is the propaganda organisation that Luke Akehurst fronts
Dear XXX,
Thank you for your email.
I am absolutely horrified by this situation and fully support the calls by the UN Secretary General, and the EU’s Foreign Affairs representative for an independent international investigation.
The only solution is two states for two peoples and the only path to peace is through negotiation without preconditions. As Labour’s Shadow Foreign Secretary Emily Thornberry MP has said, we need “both sides – and the international community as a whole – to now come together as a matter of urgency, end the blockade and humanitarian crisis inside Gaza, end the illegal occupation of Palestinian lands, and end this senseless cycle of violence by working towards the two-state solution we all want to see, with a secure Israel living in peace alongside a secure and viable state of Palestine.”

As a Labour MP I am proud to have signed the Pledge for Gaza:
-           We recognise the plight of the people of Gaza and the dire humanitarian situation they face;
-           We condemn Hamas’ ongoing rearmament, tunnel construction and attempts to launch rocket and terrorist attacks in Israel and urge respect for the Oslo Accords which stipulate the demilitarisation of the Palestinian territories;
-           We deplore Hamas’ repeated violation of the human rights of the citizens of Gaza, in particular its treatment of women and LGBT Palestinians;
-           We call upon the international community to honour the reconstruction pledges made at the Cairo conference in 2014;
-           We urge the Israeli government to assist with the economic revitalisation of Gaza including supporting Labor MK Omer Bar-Lev’s plans for the construction of a seaport.
I will always do everything in my power to advocate for peace and to promote a negotiated two state solution for two peoples; with Israel safe, secure and recognised within its borders; living alongside a democratic, independent Palestinian state.
I hope this is helpful. Thank you once again for contacting me.
All the best,
Peter.
Peter Kyle MP 

↧

Labour’s Expulsion of Cyril Chilson, a Child of Holocaust Survivors, Says Everything You Need to Know About Labour's 'Antisemitism' Witchhunt

April 22, 2018, 7:22 am
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Emina Ibrahim, Vice Chair of Momentum,  A Collaborator in this Racist Outrage

Below is the case of Cyril Chilson, an academic at Oxford University and an ex-Israeli who served as a Captain in the Israeli army.  

Cyril's parents were both Holocaust survivors, including his mother who was a Auschwitz concentration camp.  His father only just escaped the Nazi invasion of Soviet-occupied Poland and went on to fight in the Soviet army.  As such Cyril was an ideal target for the vile racists behind the racist witch-hunt.  Perfect in fact.

Cyril was expelled for two years by Labour’s National Kangaroo Court on March 20th as part of the fight against 'anti-semitism' in the Labour Party.

Tony Greenstein
Cyril Chilson

Giving the Truth a Voice in Labour's Kangaroo Court

I had been suspended since August 2016. Was it a coincidence that the letter from the Party, informing me about my suspension (following an anonymous (!) ‘complaint’, came through my letter box only a short time after I posted on the Labour website a note in  support of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership?

Be that as it may, it seems that after this extended period of incubation the NEC and the NCC became all of a sudden quite anxious to get things done. Was the impending election of a new General Secretary the stimulus to this newly found efficiency? I was contacted in November 2017 and was given three weeks to respond and find legal representation. The NCC rejected my request to have Tony Greenstein as my legal representative, despite his legal qualifications. When Daniel Bennett, a Barrister from the Doughty Street Chambers volunteered to act on my behalf the NCC agreed at last to defer the hearing. Having been forced to accept that being represented by a lawyer would deprive me of the right to speak during the hearing, I decided to represent myself and give up Mr Bennett’s kind offer. with my wife as my ‘silent friend’. My wife joined me as a ‘silent friend’.
Maggi Cosins - the Right-wing GMB Chair of the National Kangaroo Court
We arrived at the hearing venue, the Jurys Inn Hotel in Oxford where the NCC panel met. The panel was chaired by one Maggie Cousins. Her lieutenants were Emina Ibrahim and Douglas Fairbairn. The ‘prosecutor’ (appearing here under the bureaucratic euphemism: ‘presenter’) was a certain Dan Hogan from the infamous Compliance Unit. A young trainee-apparatchik with a title to match: ‘Investigations Officer’. He was accompanied by Louise Withers-Green, an even younger ‘silent friend’.

 The session began with Mr Hogan’s presentation i.e. the charges against me. He homed in on an assortment of my tweets which were the sole material used as ‘evidence’ by the NEC industrious investigators.
A mass grave in Belzec, which was a pure extermination camp
Hogan pulled out of nowhere  the Chakrabarti Report. To the best of my knowledge this report may have been endorsed by the Party, but not implemented. I tried to question the use of the Chakrabarti Report ad hoc while the official status of this document remains unclear. At this point the Chair, Ms Cosins started to shout at me: “If you go on like this, you will have to leave the room.”  Hogan ‘apologised’ for not having added the said report to the bundle and dispatched Jane Shaw, Secretary to the NCC, to photocopy the pages thereof. The same thing happened with Hogan’s reliance on the IHRA definition which was called into question by me. I referred Hogan and the panel to the resolution of the last Party conference whereby the endorsement of the definition for Antisemitism which was laid down by  IHRA in 2016, was limited to the preamble, not to the examples which follow it. Once again, the Chair chided me: ‘Keep this for your own presentation’. When I tried to clarify that this was a procedural issue, given that this material did not appear in the bundle and the Party’s own rules make it clear that no further evidence can be accepted after the deadline of evidence submissions, I was once again facing a threat from the Chair: “Enough of this. I have been very tolerant up until now”.

Hogan’s presentation was chequered with personal insults and mendacious statements. He did not refrain from character assassination by association aimed even at  those who were already expelled from the Party during the present witch hunt:  “Mr Chilson”, announced Hogan in dramatic pathos, “wanted to be represented by Tony Greenstein. This was followed by Mr Chilson dismissing Mr Daniel Bennett, a Barrister who volunteered to act on his behalf. One wonders why”. Mr Hogan seems to have forgotten that innuendo and indeed innuendo based on lawyer-client relationship (which is meant to be confidential), is unacceptable. What one should have really wondered in this context, is how come Mr Hogan knew that I had ‘dismissed’ Mr Bennett? He wasn’t briefed by Mr Bennett, surely?
Dr Joseph Mengele, the SS Doctor known as the Angel of Death
This was followed by a failure of Hogan’s reasoning. “Mr Chilson refused to engage with the NEC investigation”. When I reminded him that I did answer the questionnaire which was sent to me and asked him how this can be squared with my attendance which on the face of it contradicts his postulate, he ignored my question and instead the Chair again reprimanded me: “Don’t talk over him!”despite the fact that I never did so. In fact, Ms Cosins herself kept interrupting me time and again.
One of the charges against me was hinged on one of my tweets about Zionism whereby I reminded my interlocutor that following the Boycott of German goods  which the Jewish leadership in the US had organised after the Nazis came to power in 1933, the Nazis had swallowed their racist pride for fear of the impact on Germany’s frail economy and agreed to negotiate with the Zionist Federation, forced to treat the Zionist representatives as their equals.  Hogan tried to liken this to an act of Holocaust denial dubbing it ‘historical revisionism’.When I mentioned that I was a son of Holocaust survivors and therefore could not be anti-Semitic let alone a Holocaust denier, Hogan said “I only refer to the evidence, I don’t know you”… I went on to ask him if he was a trained historian with an expertise on the history of the Zionist movement in Nazi Germany. He admitted he was ‘no expert’. At this stage the Chair intervened: “I know everything about the history of Nazi Germany and everything about Jewish history  and I want this to stop and I want it to stop now! We are not here for a history lesson!”
Children in the Lodz Ghetto, which was the second largest ghetto after Warsaw in Poland and which survived almost till the end of the war
Was the Chair of the Kangaroo Court becoming concerned as Dan Hogan was losing ground?
Another contention which demonstrates the falsehood of the charges and the way in which they were looked at by the panel revolved around my tweet about the pro-Israeli lobby in the UK and those who run it. I highlighted the pivotal role of two individuals connected with the arms trade, Hogan tried to portray this as an attempt to present the UK Jewish community as a collective whose loyalty to the UK is questionable. Hogan went on to refer to it as a ‘typical anti-Semitic trope’. Likewise, drawing on one of my tweets in which I argued that ‘Jewish solidarity is not a sentiment but an investment’ he tried to develop this theme and claim that by criticising certain British Jews I was employing an anti-Semitic stereotype whereby Jews around the globe are collectively responsible for the policies and acts of the State of Israel.  ‘The investment’ theme’, declared Hogan, ‘is a typical reference to Jewish greed and manipulative behaviour’. 

When I reminded Hogan that even a broken clock shows the correct time twice a day, he was struggling with the meaning of this metaphor. I had to explain to the puzzled ‘presenter’ that the existence of anti-Semitic tropes does not exclude the existence of Jewish individuals who sadly behave in a way reminiscent of those repulsive generalisations. If we were to refrain from criticising them because they happen to be Jewish, we betray the truth and by remaining silent we actually join the oppressors.  I also reiterated a claim which Hogan tried to dispute and found himself in a pickle due to his ignorance of Jewish contemporary history: the leadership of the Jewish communities in the western world (particularly in the US and the UK), adopted a policy of ‘right or wrong my country’ vis-à-vis the State of Israel especially since the coming to power of Likud in 1977. This is not a ‘trope’ or a ‘stereotype’ but a historical fact.

Emina Ibrahim - Vice Chair of Momentum goes along with all McNicol's expulsions
I referred Hogan to an article by the American Jewish columnist Jonathan Weissman on this specific issue, published only four days beforehand in the New York Times. Weissman criticises the American Jewish leadership for being ‘obsessive’about Israel. So much so, that the community leaders had neglected domestic Jewish-American issues such as the  rising home-grown anti-Semitism. They also refrained from criticising the rise of far right anti-Semitism in Europe as this did not suit the Israeli foreign policy.  As regards Anglo- Jewry, Hogan kept ignoring my references to a study  by a Jewish sociologist from London City University which corroborated my claim that the majority of Jews in Britain regard the State of Israel as an essential part of their self-identity. Among these, 71% accept (to a variable extent) Israel’s policies in the occupied territories even if they are unhappy about parts or all of them.  All of this was labelled as ‘typical anti-Semitic conspiracy theories’.

Hogan asked me or rather stated at some point: “so like most anti-Semites you think that all the Jewish community in the UK are in Israel’s pocket or collaborators of Hasbarah!” (the Israeli state-sponsored propaganda system). I said: No. No one could say such a thing about the late Sir Gerald Kauffman or the late Harold Pinter or the excellent members of Jewish Voice for Labour or Labour against the Witch Hunt, but these are, alas, the exception.  Let me remind you that certain dignitaries in the Jewish community called not to vote Labour in 2015 because ‘Ed Miliband’ as they put ‘is not one of us’.  Was it the bacon bap that he ate in public or rather his (fairly moderate) criticism of Israel that made Miliband fall afoul of them?
Cyril's father fought at Kursk, the largest tank battle in the second world war
When I was suspended I used (and I still do so) to tweet the headlines concerning the atrocities committed by Israel in the Palestinian territories. I added to those headlines the rhetorical question: ‘is reporting this anti-Semitic?’ Hogan tried to claim that by doing so I was mocking the very concept of anti-Semitism and thus “denying the Jewish people the language  to describe their persecution by a deliberate attempt of  hijacking the  definition of what anti-Semitism is”. Hogan failed to realise that he was actually conflating criticism of Israel with antisemitism contrary to his own admission that ‘criticising Israel is not anti-Semitic’ and therefore he himself was actually denying me any language to describe the unpleasant truth. Certain Israeli Jews have become persecutors and certain Jews abroad support them by trying to gag anyone who dares to tell this simple and horrible truth.
“Are you denying”, asked Dan Hogan, relishing his freshly-baked scholasticism, “that by sending those tweets you were distracting from actual anti-Semitic acts which deserve redress and indeed, by doing so you were denying Jewish people the language to describe the prejudice, discrimination and hatred they are subject to? And if you do deny it, what for should a reasonable person send these questions? Who was meant to answer them?”

Here I had to remind the already ecstatic Mr Hogan that rhetorical questions were not meant to be answered. The Chair interjected: “we all know what a rhetorical question means.”
“Apparently not” I replied.

“Well, answer then:  what was the purpose of all of this?“

“Telling the truth and opposing the gagging by false accusations of anti-Semitism” I replied.
Mr Hogan wanted to continue but the Chair signalled him to stop. She seems to have realised that even in a Kangaroo Court, silly questions must be asked measuredly.

Now presented itself an opportunity for the hitherto silent panellist namely Ms  Emina Ibrahim to share with me her own pearls of wisdom: “Well, perhaps this is an issue of cultural differences. Take me for example: I am of Turkish – Cypriot background. In my culture we often use rhetorical questions to express displeasure or exasperation or at time, over-excitement. Perhaps this was an unnoticed return to your personal culture of origin?’
The question is whether she is going to continue where her predecessor, Crooked McNicol left off 
Cyril was the victim of this vile racist, Iain McNicol
I was profoundly shocked and I hope that my speechlessness may have allowed Ms Ibrahim to consider her question as  a rhetorical one, and therefore, a question not meant  to be answered.
Mr Hogan’s ‘cross examination’ featured repeated insinuations such as: “Have you been aware of the inflammatory nature of your twits?”,“Can you understand that your tweets come across as offensive?” “How do you feel about causing pain to Jewish members of Labour?” “Do you think that comments such as yours would make Labour an attractive and safe place for Jewish voters?”

I stressed time and again that I never meant to hurt anyone. I likewise apologised for any feelings which may have been hurt but at the same time I expressed my belief that mature and constructive politics must not involve sentiments. Rather, it must be realistic, truthful and logical. I then told the panellists how I was abused by one of the most active pro-Israel accounts on Twitter whose handle is @GnasherJew. This hitherto  anonymous operator (whose identity seems to have been revealed by now) did not refrain from appealing to the Oxford College in which I teach, requesting the College to sack me while adding an abusive description  of myself.

My account of the abusive and slanderous behaviour of @GnasherJew was simply ignored.  The above are of course only snippets from what went on during my hearing.  I concluded my summations by saying: “I never imagined, when I proudly joined the Party, that I, son of Holocaust survivors, would have to defend myself against allegations of anti-Semitism against other Party members who have chosen to use a weaponizing of anti-Semitism to achieve their political targets . You may disagree with me but expelling me from the Party will be tantamount to spitting on the non-existent graves of the Holocaust victim, including those of my extended family.”

The Chair asked me after my concluding remarks: “Do you think your hearing was a fair one?”
“I think this question is unfair. I do have some misgivings about what went on here today, but I hope to be proven wrong”. I replied, trying hard to maintain a calm tone, hoping I was not showing my indignation and disgust at this ostensibly-innocent question.

There was a break of 30 minutes. When we returned to the room the Chair said: “The panel has decided that the charges against you have been proven. I want to remind you that we are able to expel you and would like to ask you whether there were any mitigating circumstances?”

So I was not proven wrong after all. This was indeed a kangaroo court that was apparently one track minded.

At this point, I decided that this farce had to be brought to an end. I grabbed my briefcase and said: “This was a colossal waste of time. Good bye!”

“Hang on! Don’t go! We haven’t reached a decision as yet!” Shouted the Chair in a last attempt to keep a façade of fairness. Me and my wife kept  walking and did not look back.

The letter with the expulsion for two years decision, arrived on the following Saturday. I found particularly repulsive the concluding paragraph:

“If you apply to re-join you will not be eligible to have your join date backdated to give you continuity with an earlier period of membership.”

BACKGROUND TO CYRIL CHILSON

Cyril Chilson was born in Petakh Tikva, near Tel Aviv, Israel, into a family of holocaust survivors.

His father Leon came from Drohobycz, a town situated south-west of Lwow, the regional capital of what used to be between the two world wars, the province of Galicia in Eastern Poland (now, part of Western Ukraine). Following the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact Cyril’s father transferred to a technical school which was run by Red Army personnel. When the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, Leon joined the retreating school personnel twenty-four hours before the invading troops reached his hometown. Leon was drafted andtrained by the Red Air Force as a combat pilot. He first saw action in air battles at the Finnish Front during the Soviet-Finnish Continuation War and later took part in the battles of Kursk and Stalingrad where his aircraft was shot down by a German anti-aircraft battery. Despite being wounded Leon managed to down a German fighter aircraft before parachuting himself out of his fire-engulfed plane. Nonetheless, he managed to make it to the nearest Soviet outpost with four (half-frozen) German soldiers he captured single-handedly en route. For this feat, he was decorated with the Soviet  Order of Glory (Russian: Орден Славы).

Lodzia, Cyril’s mother, was transferred in 1942 from her hometown Ozorkow in Central Poland, to the Lodz ghetto. Having survived there nearly two years, she was deportedin summer 1944 together with her mother and sister to Auschwitz. Upon arrival Dr Mengele, who was in charge examined the newly-arrived and with his index finger decided who will be killed instantly and who could still make themselves usefulto the Reich through hard labour. Lodzia and her mother Helena were granted the privilege to work for the Germans. However, Lodzia suddenly noticed that her sister was sent to the queue on  ‘the opposite side,’ i.e. to instant gassing in the crematoria. Lodzia dared to try and flatter  Dr Mengele  (speaking unasked to an SS officer, was deemed suicidal). Lodzia hoped to flatter Mengele by calling out towards him: ‘Herr Feldmarschall!.’ Instead of shooting her in the head (as everyone expected), Mengele asked Lodzia what he could do for her. Lodzia did again the unimaginable. She insisted (another taboo in the relations between Jews and Nazis) that an error had occurred. Her sister, she claimed,  was young and healthy and perfectly fit for work. Mengele asked Lodzia to point at her sister (the stunned inmates thought he wanted to murder both sisters to discourage any future impertinence). Lodzia did as she was  told and to the amazement of everyone present, Mengele ordered to remove Perla, Lodzia’s sister from the death queue and reunite her with her family among those destined momentarily for life.

Lodzia, Perla and their mother Helena survived the Holocaust. They were liberated by the Red Army in Terezienstadt, Czechoslovakia. After three years in a Displaced Persons camp near Munich, they emigrated to Israel. Lodzia trained as a nurse and met Leon who arrived in Israel from France. Leon returned to Poland after the war  only to find out that the Nazis murdered his entire family (parents and two younger siblings)  in the concentration camp of Belzec in south-eastern Poland. He moved to Paris where he studied engineering. With the outbreak of the Korean War in 1951 and despite not being a Zionist, Leon chose to come to Israel. He became a senior official at the Israel Electric Company but passed away following a cardiac arrest aged 48.

Cyril  was educated at the first Hebrew secondary school in the world, Ha-Gymnasiya Ha-Ivrit Herzliyah in Tel Aviv (founded: 1906) and after his military service which was spent almost entirely in the occupied West Bank (where he witnessed the instrumentality of the  IDF  in the daily oppression of the Palestinian population), Cyril served  in Lebanon during the first Lebanon War in 1982 where he witnessed the treachery of the then secretary of defence General Ariel Sharon, who was responsible for  the infamous  massacre of thousands of Palestinians at the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps on the outskirts of Beirut. As a reservist Cyril who is fluent in several  lanaguages, was transferred to the IDF spokesman unit and served there  as a liasion officer to foreign press. Cyril read Classics and History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem graduating with distinction. He worked as a journalist in the printed and electronic media. Cyril was news editor at the defunct Al Hamishmar Daily, the organ of the United Workers Party (MAPAM- also defunct) and served as news editor at Channel 1 of the Israeli TV. Alongside his socialist convictions he has been a staunch opponent of the Israeli occupation and supporter of justice for the Palestinian people. Cyril came to the UK as a post-graduate student and wrote a doctoral thesis at Brasenose College, Oxford about the 5th century Palestinian-born  church historian Sozomenus of Bethelia (near Gaza). Cyril teaches at Blackfriars Hall, Oxford. He is married to Dr Tali Chilson, a scholar of Jewish thought and Hebrew literature. They have two grown-up sons. He and his family have been naturalised as British Citizens. They live in Oxford.
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The 75th Anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising Passed Unnoticed – It is not on the Zionist Calendar

April 22, 2018, 9:20 pm
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Remembering the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising


Jews captured during the Warsaw ghetto being marched to a collecting point for deportation. (Credit: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of National Archives and Records Administration, College Park)
Last week was the 75th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.  You would have been forgiven for having missed it.  The anniversary of the founding of the Israeli state, which was also on 19th April this year, took precedence in the mass media and the Zionist press.  Given the choice between a tale of Jewish heroism against impossible odds, fighting fascism and racism or tales of heroic Israelis massacring Palestinian civilians and creating ¾ million Palestinian refugees, there was no choice.

Earlier in the year we had Holocaust Memorial Day, a saccharine event whose primary purpose is to depoliticise the Holocaust, the how and why it happened.  No uncomfortable comparisons between New Labour and Theresa May’s ‘climate of extreme hostility’ to immigrants and the failure to rescue Europe’s Jews.  No searing questions about how much of the Establishment and their rabid press supported Hitler up and until the invasion of Poland.  Even fewer questions about the role of the Zionist movement during the Holocaust.
Poland stands at attention for those slain (Photo: Reuters)

The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was however commemorated in Poland.  There were the government's own commemorations led by the President Andrzej Duda but hundreds attended independent commemorations, refusing to attend those organised by a government which, earlier in the year, passed legislation making it a criminal offence to accuse Poles of having collaborated with the Nazi occupation (which many did).
 Israeli leaders stayed away because they preferred to celebrate the Palestinian Naqba (catastrophe) to attending the commemoration of the Warsaw Ghetto uprisings.
German soldiers direct artillery against a pocket of resistance during the Warsaw ghetto uprising. Warsaw, Poland, April 19-May 16, 1943. — US Holocaust Memorial Museum
It is not hard to see why the Zionist movement and their court servants – the John Manns, Joan Ryans, Ruth Smeeths and Luciana Bergers, should have little to say about the Uprising.  For a start it was led by an anti-Zionist Jewish socialist party the Bund, [the wrong sort of Jews!] who had the loyalty of the overwhelming majority of Polish Jews.  Secondly fighting anti-Semitism has always been deprecated in Zionist circles (unless it is the type of ‘anti-Semitism’ that is anti-Zionism).  Zionism was established on the basis of not fighting anti-Semitism because anti-Semitism was inherent in the non-Jew, it was futile.  Antisemitism was deemed by the Zionist movement to be the product of Jewish ‘homelessness’.  In the words of the founder of Political Zionism, Theodor Herzl, who wrote this  at the time of the Dreyfuss Affair:
Theodor Herzl - founder of Political Zionism - tolerant of anti-semitism
Theodor Herzl
‘In Paris... I achieved a freer attitude towards anti-Semitism, which I now began to understand historically and to pardon. Above all, I recognise the emptiness and futility of trying to 'combat' anti-Semitism.' [Diaries, p.6]

Poles laying flowers on the monument to the fallen heroes

The Warsaw Ghetto was ignored and forgotten by the Zionist leaders in Palestine. Zionist leader Yitzhak (Antek) Zuckerman asked why no-one left Geneva, Istanbul or Sweden, ‘if only to serve as a ‘gesture, a sign, a hand extended as a token of sharing our fate’?’ Only the Bund and the AK sent emissaries into the ghetto. Other movements in Europe sent their emissaries from one ghetto to the next  [Dinah Porat, p. 228, The Blue and Yellow Stars of David]. To the Zionist movement in Palestine, the fate of the Warsaw Ghetto was irrelevant.  Their sole objective was achieving a Jewish state. The young Zionists who fought first had to rebel against their own Zionist parties. Zionism was irrelevant. Marek Edelman, the last Commander of the Uprising and a member of the Bund describes how:
‘We joined hands with all Jewish Zionist underground organizations. Our comrades lived and worked with the others just as members of a close family. A mutual aim united us. During this entire period of over half a year, there were no quarrels or struggles, which are common among adherents of different ideologies. All overworked themselves in organising the mutual defence of our dignity.’[Edelman, The Ghetto Fights, pp. 110-111. Citing Second report of the Jewish workers underground movement, 15.11.43].

Jews that were captured during the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, about to be searched for weapons before being moved to Treblinka. (Credit: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of National Archives and Records Administration, College Park)

Marek Edelman described how ‘the cornered partisans defended themselves bitterly and succeeded, by truly superhuman efforts, in repulsing the attacks’ as well as capturing two German machine guns and burning a tank. [Edelman, p.76].
The role of the Bund and Edelman in the Warsaw Ghetto Revolt has been airbrushed out of history by Zionist holocaust historians. The Revolt has become another Zionist foundational myth. [The last Bundist, Moshe Arens,] Today Zionism uses the Revolt for propaganda purposes, suggesting that the Resistance was solely composed of young Zionist fighters.
There was another reason for Zionist hostility to Edelman. Edelman had written an open letter to the Palestinians asking them to stop the bloodshed and enter into peace negotiations. The letter caused outrage in Israel because Edelman did not mention the word “terrorism.” Israeli leaders were particularly incensed by its title: ‘Letter to Palestinian partisans’.
Ha'aretz, 9.8.02.
Smoke from the Treblinka uprising, as seen from a railroad worker. (Credit: UtCon Collection/Alamy)
‘Mr Edelman … wrote in a spirit of solidarity from a fellow resistance fighter, as a former leader of a Jewish uprising not dissimilar in desperation to the Palestinian uprising in the occupied territories. He addressed his letter to “commanders of the Palestinian military, paramilitary and partisan operations – to all the soldiers of the Palestinian fighting organisations. This set up a howl of rage in the Zionist press, who reminded their readers that Mr Edelman, despite his heroism in the 1940s, is a former supporter of the anti-Zionist socialist Bund, and can therefore not be trusted.’ [Palestine's partisans, Paul Foot, Guardian, Wednesday August 21, 2002,]

What was particularly irksome was that Edelman had consciously compared the structures of the resistance movement in Warsaw to that of the Palestinians.’  [The Last Bundist].

When Edelman died, the President of Poland attended his funeral in Warsaw on 9th October 2009 and there was a fifteen-gun salute. Because of his support for the Palestinians, not even the lowliest clerk in the Israeli Embassy attended. [Zionism Boycotts the Funeral of Marek Edelman, 15.10.09.] Moshe Arens, the former Likud Foreign Minister, interviewed Edelman as part of his research into the history of the Revisionist National Military Army ZZW, which fought separately in Warsaw: ‘I knew his views on Israeli politics, and did not discuss the situation in the Middle East, but as we parted I said “You must make peace with the Arabs.” Edelman received Poland's highest honor, and the French Legion of Honor medal but ‘he died not having received the recognition from Israel that he so richly deserved.’  
see also
Hero of Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Marek Edelman, Dies at 86, Ha'aretz 4.10.09., 

‘Marek Edelman - Death of an anti-fascist hero of the Warsaw Jewish Resistance’

The Revisionist Zionists made up the leadership and ranks of the Jewish police and the leadership of ZOB had contempt for them. The ZZW obtained their arms via their Polish fascist friends. Stiff resistance to the Nazi invasion of the Ghetto came from the Revisionists, who were based at 7-9 Muranowska Square and the corner of Muranowska and Nalewki streets. For two days the Polish and Jewish Star of David flags flew, visible to thousands of Poles on the Aryan side.  [S Beit Zvi, p.353, Post-Ugandan Zionism on Trial, A Study of the Factors That Caused the Mistakes Made by the Zionist Movement During the Holocaust, 1991, Zahala, Tel Aviv]

Some five to six thousand Jews are estimated to have escaped from the ghetto to the ‘Aryan’ side of Warsaw and to have remained hidden till the end of 1943.  In Palestine there was panic that the revolts ‘would ultimately deprive the Yishuv of the cream of Europe’s potential pioneering force.’ Melech Neustadt wanted the youth movements in Palestine to instruct their comrades ‘to abandon their communities, save themselves, and thereby stop the armed uprisings.’ The Zionist youth in Europe, such as Antek Zuckerman and Zivia Lubetkin refused on principle to leave. Hayka Klinger, who arrived in Palestine in March 1944, told the Histadrut Executive that ‘we received an order not to organize any more defence.’ [i] The Zionist leadership sought to extricate the leaders of the ghetto fighters as they were more valuable in Palestine than in leading the resistance in the ghettos. Klinger told Histadrut that ‘Without a people, a people’s avant-garde is of no value. If rescue it is, then the entire people must be rescued. If it is to be annihilation, then the avante-garde too shall be annihilated.’ [Zertal, The Politics of Nationhood, p.33

The Zionist leaders saw the subsequent risings in other ghettos as ‘a kind of betrayal of the overriding principle of the homeland.’ [Zertal, p.44] Yet despite this Ben Gurion later claimed that the heroism of the ghetto fighters owed its inspiration to the Zionist fight in Palestine. The ghetto fighters were ‘retrospectively conscripted’ into the Zionist terror groups. ‘We fought here and they fought there’ according to Palmach commander Yitzhak Sadeh.[Zertal, pp. 25-26]. The resistance of the Jewish ghetto fighters became intertwined with the heroic myth of the Zionist fight for Palestine.  See The anti-Zionist Bund led the Jewish Resistance in Poland whilst the Zionist Movement abandoned the Jews

The article below contains a number of mistakes and is slanted towards a Zionist version of events.  Nonetheless it is an interesting description of the events of 75 years ago.  I also recommend you read Marek Edelman's account of the Ghetto Uprising, The Ghetto Fights.
Tony Greenstein
See also Poland marks 75th anniversary of uprising in Warsaw Ghetto
  Remembering the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising
By Marcus Barnett
On this day in 1943, a band of Jewish resistance fighters launched an armed insurrection against the Nazis. They were proud socialists and internationalists.
Jewish resistance fighters during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. WWII War Crimes Records

On the eve of Passover 1943 — the nineteenth of April — a group of several hundred poorly armed young Jews began the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, one of the first insurrections against Nazism.
For a small group of fighters, realizing — in the lyrical words of one militant — that “dying with arms is more beautiful than without,” an isolated group of Jewish militants resisted for twenty-nine days against a much larger foe, motivated by a desire to kill as many fascists as they could before they themselves were killed. The uprising, etched into the collective memory of postwar Jewry, remains emotive and emboldening.

That their heroism was a crucial part of the war is disputed by nobody today. But less known is the extent to which the uprising, far from being a spontaneous one of the masses, was the product of planning and preparation from a relatively small — incredibly young — group of Jewish radicals.

The Ghetto
Within a few weeks of the Nazi consolidation of Poland, Governor Hans Frank ordered four hundred thousand Warsaw Jews to enter a ghetto. By November 1940, around five hundred thousand Jews from across Poland had been sealed behind its walls, severed from the outside world and plunged into social isolation. Surrounded by a ten-foot-high barrier, the creation of the ghetto meant the relocation of approximately 30 percent of Warsaw’s population into 2.6 percent of the city, the designated area being no more than two and a half miles long and having previously housed fewer than 160,000 people.

In the ghetto, Jews were forced to live in chronic hunger and poverty. Many families inhabited single rooms, and the dire lack of food meant that roughly one hundred thousand people survived on no more than a single bowl of soup per day. The sanitation system collapsed, and disease became rampant. By March 1942 onwards, five thousand people died each month from disease and malnutrition.

The situation was dire — and yet, the initial response of the Jewish community leadership was one of inaction. Following the creation of the Judenrat (Jewish Council) — a collaborationist organization established with Nazi approval to allow easier implementation of anti-Jewish policies — some inhabitants fell into a false sense of security. An attitude permeated the ghetto, proffered through the lens of Jewish history, that Nazism was just another form of persecution that the Jewish people must suffer and outlast.

Others — such as the Hashomer Hatzair militant Shmuel Braslaw — began to recognize a jealous respect for the Germans among the ghetto’s residents. “Our young people learn to doff their caps when encountering Germans,” wrote Braslaw in an internal document, “smiling smiles of servitude and obedience . . . but deep in their hearts burns a dream: to be like [the Germans] — handsome, strong and self-confident. To be able to kick, beat and insult, unpunished. To despise others, as the Germans despise Jews today.”

Against this demoralization, circles of defiance could be found in the self-organization of the left-wing of the Jewish community. Communists, Socialist-Zionists of varying descriptions, and social democrats organized themselves into sections in the ghetto, aiming to transform the misery into meaningful political organization. All parties — the Bund, a social-democratic mass organization that had enjoyed huge pre-war popularity; the Marxist-Zionist youth group Hashomer Hatzair; the left-wing Zionist party Left Poale Zion; and the Communist Party dedicated themselves to this strategy, organizing cells that sought to revive collectivist attitudes among an emotionally crippled and disaffected Jewish youth.

In dark times, the cell structures of youth organizations provided a social and psychological anchor against hunger and depression. “The day I was able to re-establish contact with my group,” wrote the Young Communist militant

Dora Goldkorn, “was one of the happiest days in my hard, tragic ghetto life.” In the project to develop a resistance leadership among the youth, keeping spirits high was crucial; acts of friendship such as the sharing of food were as important as distributing anti-Nazi literature.
By 1942, the various youth organizations felt confident enough to consider the formation of an “Anti-Fascist Bloc.” On the insistence of the Communists, a manifesto was drafted that sought to unite the Jewish left in the Warsaw Ghetto, with the hope of generalizing this political unity across other ghettos.

Calling for a “national front” against the occupation, for the unity of all progressive forces on the basis of common demands and for armed antifascism, the manifesto echoed the pre-war Popular Fronts in its organizational methodology.

The Left Poale Zion enthusiastically joined, as did the Hashomer Hatzair — who re-emphasized their fidelity to the Soviet Union, despite the Kremlin’s opposition to Zionism. The Bund, however, were less reliable, due to their historic anticommunism and rejection of specifically Jewish armed action; a party that resolutely stated Poland was the home for Polish Jews, many Bundists refused avenues other than Polish-Jewish unity of action.

The paper of the Anti-Fascist Bloc, Der Ruf, reached publication twice. Its contents overwhelmingly focused on applauding Soviet resistance and urging the ghetto inhabitants to hold out for imminent liberation at the hands of the Red Army.

The bloc’s fighting squads contained militants belonging to all varieties of labor movement groups, but the lynchpin of the organization was Pinkus Kartin. A stalwart of communism in prewar Poland and a veteran of the International Brigades to Spain, Kartin was a leader both politically and militarily. To the historian Israel Gutman, who himself was active with Hashomer Hatzair in his youth, Kartin “undoubtedly impressed” the underground’s young and inexperienced cadre.

It was the arrest and murder of Kartin in June 1943 that signaled the end for the Anti-Fascist Bloc. His arrest triggered an intense repression against the prominent Young Communists, who saw their numbers decimated and were driven into hiding. It is for this reason that when the Jewish Fighting Organization (ZOB) was founded several months later, the Communists were absent at first — although their political line was upheld and applied by those such as Abraham Fiszelson, a Left Poale Zion leader who had been Kartin’s right-hand man and had befriended him in Spain.

During this period, figures from the right-wing of the Jewish community formed a rival group, the Jewish Military Union (ZZW). Led by the right-wing Zionist group Betar and funded by high society, the ZZW relied upon ex-army officers who could fight orthodox warfare with the Nazis using regular army discipline — unlike the ZOB, which considered itself the armed expression of the Jewish workers’ movement. Furthermore, the ZZW’s connections to Polish nationalists, the antisemitic Polish government-in-exile and the right-wing Revisionist-Zionist movement provoked suspicion among the ZOB leadership.

By contrast, in the eyes of Israel Gutman, the typical ZOB volunteers were “young men in their twenties, Zionists, Communists, socialists — idealists with no battle experience, no military training.” While the propaganda of the ZZW was staunchly nationalistic, the ZOB’s propaganda and literature encouraged antiracist internationalism, offered intellectual positions on the world situation, and debated the labor movement.

Despite the darkness of their times, members of the ZOB belonged to a political tradition that desired a better world, and sought to create it through their struggle.
 The Resistance
The ZOB set as its aim an anti-Nazi insurrection. However, it recognized that paramount to achieving this was the strengthening of the organization’s position in the wider community — it was decided that it had to involve the intimidation and execution of Jewish collaborators with the occupiers.
For ZOB militants, collaborators represented an auxiliary wing of fascism that was instrumental in facilitating the deportation of Polish Jewry. To demonstrate that this stance would not be accepted in the ghetto, ZOB militants chose to execute Jewish policeman Jacob Lejkin. For his “dedication” in deporting Jews to Auschwitz, Lejkin was shot, and his example triggered widespread panic in the collaborating establishment. This was followed by the execution of Alfred Nossig in February 1943. Józef Szeryński, the former head of the ghetto police, committed suicide to avoid his own fate.
These acts ensured ZOB’s centrality in the resistance movement, and also encouraged resistance from beyond their ranks. They aimed to prove that challenging collaboration was both possible and a moral duty — and within a short period of time had won many ghetto inhabitants to this position.
As the months progressed, the specter of death became ever-present. Between June and September 1942, three hundred thousand Jews had been deported or murdered, a destruction of the Polish Jewish community. In these desperate circumstances, people lost everyone and many young people began to dispense with anxieties about protecting their families and commit instead to militant political activity. Simply put, the more Jews were murdered in the ghettos, the less personal obligations were felt by survivors, and the more the feeling of responsibility for causing further anguish from Nazi reprisals receded.
Contempt was shown for the self-determined martyrdom of Adam Czerniakow, the Judenrat leader who committed suicide in July 1942. For young Jewish socialists such as the prominent Bundist Marek Edelman, Czerniakow had “made his death his own private business,” a symbol of privilege in contrast to Edelman and his working-class comrades awaiting their turn on the deportation lists. For them, he said, the overwhelming sentiment in these times was that political leadership necessitated that “one should die with a bang.”
The Uprising
In many senses, the hopes of the Left in calling for a common struggle against Nazi barbarity had outlived its constituency: the Jewish community was in the process of being exterminated. What now mattered was the initiative young leftists took upon themselves — and the majority favored an uprising.
On the morning of Monday, January 18, six months after the first mass deportations of Warsaw Jews (which reduced the number of ghetto inhabitants from four hundred thousand to approximately seventy to eighty thousand), ZOB militants emerged from the crowds of deportees to attack German soldiers, killing several. A series of attacks followed over four days, where militants infiltrated lines of slave laborers marching towards the Umschlagplatz [Deportation of Jews], stepped out of rank at a given signal, and assassinated their German guards. Though scores of ZOB fighters fell, the confusion created by the fighting allowed some to flee — and demonstrated to others that Nazi bodies could also fall in the ghetto.
By April 1943, there was a general awareness that the ghetto was to be entirely liquidated. A general armed revolt was scheduled to happen at the next Nazi provocation. On April 19, five thousand soldiers led by SS general Jürgen Stroop entered the ghetto to remove the final inhabitants; in response, approximately 220 ZOB volunteers began their attack, located in ersatz positions in cellars, apartments, and rooftops, each armed with a single pistol and several Molotov cocktails.
The revolt caused chaos, catching the Nazis off guard and killing many Wehrmacht and SS soldiers. In response, the humiliated German army, suffering losses at the hands of prisoners they thought long defeated, initiated a policy of systematically burning out the fighters. To paraphrase one ZOB militant, it was the flames — not the fascists — whom the fighters lost out to. Vicious hand-to-hand combat raged for days, and by late April coordinated warfare by the ZOB collapsed, the conflict now largely consisting of the Germans burning small groups of armed Jews out of bunker hideouts created to evade capture.
According to accounts, both the red flag and the blue-and-white flag of the Zionist movement were raised over ZOB-seized buildings. The youngest fighter killed had been a Bundist activist aged thirteen. Though clearly inexperienced as a fighting force, an anonymously authored Bund internal document that reached London in June 1943 stressed the “exemplary” political unity and “fraternity” between leftist groups in combat. The unswerving dedication to which the young fighters of the ZOB clung to their dreams of socialism was exemplified most movingly in a May Day rally held amid the ghetto’s ruins.
Participating in the rally, Marek Edelman reflected that
The entire world, we knew, was celebrating May Day on that day and everywhere forceful, meaningful words were being spoken. But never yet had the Internationale been sung in conditions so different, so tragic, in a place where an entire nation had been and was still perishing. The words and the song echoed from the charred ruins and were, at that particular time, an indication that socialist youth [were] still fighting in the ghetto, and that even in the face of death they were not abandoning their ideals.
Leading militants of the ZOB committed mass suicide on May 8, surrounded by the German army at their base on Mila 18. By mid-May, the ghetto had been razed, and the Great Synagogue of Warsaw personally blown up by General Stroop on May 16 to celebrate the end of Jewish resistance. A mere forty ZOB combatants had escaped onto the “Aryan” side of Warsaw, where scores more fell before war’s end in the subsequent city-wide uprising of 1944.
 The Lesson
In our times, war criminal George W. Bush can pay comfortable tribute to the fighters of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. So can fellow humanitarians David Cameron and Barack Obama, who both offered speeches dripping with moralism about the heroism of the revolt. Their platitudes are the product of the historical reduction of the event over time — something which is likely to increase as more witnesses to the Holocaust leave us, often with unrecorded testimony.
More dangerous still are active attempts to erase the politics that produced such heroic resistance. Just this week, the University of Vilnius in Lithuania announced that it would honor Jewish students murdered in the Holocaust — as long as they had not participated in left-wing political activity or anti-Nazi militancy.
Against this attack on history, the Left’s task is to defend the fighters of the ZOB from the condescension of official patronage or the dark possibilities of state demonization. We can only do this by restating what so many of these people were — young militants, committed to left-wing ideals, brimming with enthusiasm for a better world, pushed to oblivion alongside their community.
Jews by birth and communal affiliation, they also engaged in the struggle as internationalists, a determined part of a worldwide struggle against fascism and capitalism. As weakened as they were, their attitude — that to submit meant death, that resistance even in the face of impossible odds was a moral imperative — inspired imprisoned Spanish Republicans, French communist peasants, their fellow Poles watching from behind the ghetto walls, and their fellow Jews languishing in the concentration camps.
Their story is a reminder of the Holocaust’s brutality and hopelessness, but also a shining example of those who in the worst of circumstances — in the words of the partisan poet Hirsh Glik — could never say that they have reached the final road.
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Israel's Cold Blooded Murder of Unarmed Palestinian Demonstrators

April 23, 2018, 10:00 am
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This is what Ruth Smeeth, Luciana Berger and the Jewish Labour Movement Mean When They Talk About ‘Anti-Semitism’




If you want to know what the fake anti-Semitism campaign is about then this video should explain everything.  Last week we had the nauseating spectacle of a Tory sponsored debate on ‘anti-Semitism’ which gave the Labour Right – Luciana Berger, Ruth Smeeth and John Mann – the opportunity to attack Jeremy Corbyn for not doing enough about ‘anti-Semitism’.

See 50 Years After Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood Speech’ Parliament Debates Fake ‘Anti-Semitism’ and Applauds Zionist MPs Luciana Berger and Ruth Smeeth

The real racism in Britain is not apparently about the deportation and refusal of medical treatment of the children of the Windrush, the effective removal of citizenship from Britain’s Black citizens, it is a handful of abusive tweets sent to Labour MPs who have defended Israel right or wrong.

We know that this is all about Israel and not about anti-Semitism because the President of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, Jonathan Arkush has stated this as a fact.  When he  wrote  an open letter to Jeremy Corbyn recently he stated that:
‘“Again and again, Jeremy Corbyn has sided with antisemites rather than Jews. At best, this derives from the far left’s obsessive hatred of Zionism, Zionists and Israel. At worst, it suggests a conspiratorial worldview in which mainstream Jewish communities are believed to be a hostile entity, a class enemy,”

Arkush can't help himself mixing up anti-Zionist and anti-Semitism because for him they are the same.  That is why, when Corbyn went to a Passover seder with Jewdas, Arkush described  the latter group, a Jewish group, as a ‘source of virulent anti-Semitism’.  To Arkush and the Zionists, opposition to Israel’s murderous and racist behaviour is ‘anti-Semitic’ even when it comes from Jews. 

Arkush and the Board of Deputies had no problem in welcoming the election of Donald Trump and his anti-Semitic entourage of Bannon, Gorka et al. Anti-semitism from supporters of Israel is never a problem.

 This is despite the fact that, according to Dana Milbank in the Washington Post Anti-Semitism is no longer an undertone of Trump’s campaign. It’s the melody. See Trump Rolls Out Anti-Semitic Closing Ad for an analysis.

Corbyn should give Arkush, the Jewish Leadership Council and the Labour Right a clear message – yes he opposes anti-Semitism and yes he also opposes those who use anti-Semitism as a weapon with which to attack the Left leadership of the Labour Party and Corbyn himself.
  
We need your support this Wednesday!

According to a report in the Skwawkbox, Wes Streeting MP, who recently verbally attacked Diane Abbott, is organising anti-Corbyn MPs, peers and others people to protest outside the Labour Party disciplinary hearing against veteran black anti-racism campaigner Marc Wadsworth this Wednesday, April 25.

Streeting claims that his “march” from Westminster Hall to Church House (which will also be attended by Labour First's Luke Akehurst) is in “support of Ruth Smeeth MP”, who will give evidence against Marc, as "there will be a protest against her".

Campaigners, including, Labour Against the Witchhunt, Grassroots Black Left, Jewish Voice for Labour and members of the Windrush generation, are not organising a protest against Smeeth but a lobby in support of Marc.  We demand that the false charges against him are dropped and that he is fully reinstated to Labour Party membership. What we are protesting about is the attempted frame-up of Marc. Labour bosses are demanding his expulsion from the party.
Jonathan Arkush of the Board of Deputies and the leader of the Israeli Labour Party, Isaac Herzog - the 'sister party' of the JLM - welcomed Trump to power
Streeting calls Marc “the guy who abused her [Ruth Smeeth] at the [Shami Chakrabarti] antisemitism inquiry launch”.

In fact the Chakrabarti report was about anti-semitism and all forms of racism, including the anti-black racism and Islamophobia, which have been ignored. What abuse is Wes Streeting talking about? Marc Wadsworth actually said at the report launch, after being goaded by Daily Telegraph political report Kate McCann:

“I saw that the Telegraph handed a copy of a press release to Ruth Smeeth MP so you can see who is working hand in hand. If you look around this room, how many African, Caribbean and Asian people are there? We need to get our house in order, don’t we?”

Of course, anti-semitism exists in society, just like other forms of racism and prejudice and this is reflected in the Labour Party. But, just like Jackie Walker, Ken Livingstone, Tony Greenstein and many other Labour members suspended and expelled by the party in the last two years, Marc is no anti-semite and nothing he did or said was even vaguely anti-semitic.

In truth, the right-wing in the Labour Party want to claim another scalp in their campaign to smear Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters.

LAW will be showing their support to Marc and all those people unjustly suspended and expelled without due process. We demand the yet to be implemented Chakrabarti rules be applied to all cases, that have been referred to Labour’s draconian National Constitution Committee, including Marc’s.

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Israeli Professor and Holocaust Researcher Daniel Blatman compares Israel's Political and Military elite to their Nazi equivalents

April 23, 2018, 6:06 pm
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J'Accuse  - My Fiery Protest Is Simply the Cry of My Very Soul

J’Accuse was the title of the Open Letter by Émile Zola to the President of the French Republic, Félix Faure . It was written in support of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the French army.  


Dreyfus had been convicted in December 1894 of treason after having been framed by fellow officers. J'Accuse was published in L’Aurore on Jan. 13, 1898. The letter denounced the army for covering up the wrongful conviction of Dreyfus. It was instrumental in building the campaign to free Dreyfuss.  Zola was himself tried on Feb. 7, 1898, for defamation of a public authority, the Army, and was sentenced to one year’s imprisonment and a fine of 3,000 francs. As a result of all the attention Dreyfus underwent a new court-martial. Although still found guilty, he was pardoned by the President of the Republic. Not until 1906 was Dreyfus formally cleared of all wrongdoing. See


The following article is based on Emile Zola’s famous letter.  It is penned by Professor Daniel Blatman who is a Holocaust researcher and head of the Institute for Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.  For background information on Professor Blatman, who is a Fellow of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum see.


Daniel Blatman’s letter is an accusation directed against the political and military echelons of Israel, their blatant disregard of the basic norms of a democratic society, their contempt for the most basic human rights of the Palestinians.  He openly compares the generals of the Israeli military to their equivalents in the German and Japanese armies:  ‘Senior German and Japanese officers and commanders gave exactly the same reasons when they tried to explain the injustices in occupied Russia and the Philippines.’

Unlike the pathetic apologists for Israel’s war crimes in the West, who believe that any comparison with the Nazis is anti-Semitic, Professor Blatman has no such scruples.  Unlike the fools who agreed to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of anti-Semitism, Daniel Blatman know something about the atrocities of the Nazis as well as the atrocities and similarities of the mentality of Israel’s rulers with the Nazi state. See for example Professors Ofer Cassif & Daniel Blatman of the Hebrew University, Jerusalem Compare Israel to Nazi Germany
In Heading Toward an Israeli Apartheid State Blatman compared Germany’s Nuremburg Laws, South Africa’s Apartheid Laws and Israel’s ‘tsunami of racist laws’ passed in recent months.

Tony Greenstein
Professor Offer Cassif

Just like Emile Zola, people of conscience are protesting against the leaders who have sent Israel’s politics and culture down to levels worthy of a fascist beer hall
Daniel Blatman
  Apr 08, 2018 4:17 AM

The headline of this piece is taken from the open letter “J’accuse” by the novelist Emile Zola to France’s president on January 13, 1898. It’s about the injustice caused to Alfred Dreyfus, and about shattering France’s legacy of liberty, turning anti-Semitism into a force unifying the haters of equality. It’s about the lies and malice in the army and the corruption, distortion of truth, ignorance, violence and deceit. Zola protested all these things and accused those responsible. In Israel on the eve of our 70th Independence Day, we are also accusing.
Captain Alfred Dreyfus - Framed Jewish Officer

We are accusing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of selling his soul to the devil of incitement, fearmongering and racism. Circumstances gave him a chance to appear before the world as a leader who courageously says the right things: We will deal with the distress of tens of thousands of unfortunate human beings based on the values of justice and humanism.

Now, a few days before Holocaust Remembrance Day, when we remember the Jewish refugees who could find no safe haven to which to flee, we will put an end to this difficult humanitarian problem. My fellow citizens, a worthy leader would say, this is the way, it’s the right and proper way and there is no other. But Netanyahu, who is chiefly to blame for Israel’s current situation, chose to remain a pathetic and scared leader without moral backbone.
Emile Zola
We also accuse Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman, who defends an army that commits war crimes against civilians demonstrating against their poverty and distress while they are imprisoned between the sea to the west and fences, snipers’ rifles and tanks to the east. We accuse him of incitement against the country’s Arab citizens, corrupt politics and hooliganism, and of using the norms of a regime that no longer exists, which are poisoning the shaky Israeli democracy. We accuse him of encouraging incitement against elected officials – Jews and Arabs – who were legally elected to the Knesset and faithfully represent their constituencies.
We accuse the heads of the army and the security agencies of failing to protest against the political leadership and warn that after 50 years of occupation and oppression the Israel Defense Forces is losing the ability to distinguish between what is permissible and what is forbidden. The army’s spokespeople sometimes sound like the officers of armies whose leaders were accused of collaborating with the worst crimes of the 20th century. Senior German and Japanese officers and commanders gave exactly the same reasons when they tried to explain the injustices in occupied Russia and the Philippines.

There too, adhering to the mission, defending the homeland, strategic considerations, instructions from the high command and obeying orders served as excuses to justify firing at unarmed people, arrests in the dark of night and deadly collective punishment. And there too it began with 17 people murdered and ended with thousands.

We accuse Education Minister Naftali Bennett of brainwashing the next generation, of turning Israel into a country whose young people think democracy is a form of government that’s right only for Jews, preferably those who observe the appropriate religious ceremonies. He is guilty of emptying the school system of its universal messages and filling the minds of the country’s young people with inferior religious kitsch accompanied by messages with fascist content: the nation’s greatness and the value of sacrificing one’s life for it. He is guilty of nurturing martyrdom centering around the Holocaust and worshipping the rocks of Samaria, creating a philosophy composed of a sacred God, sacred soil and a sacred race.

We also accuse Culture Minister Miri Regev and Likud MKs David Amsalem, Miki Zohar, Nava Boker and their ilk – politicians whose vulgarity and hooliganism is second only to the depth of their ignorance. These are people who have turned the language of the marketplace into a language used in public discourse; people who proudly flaunt their ignorance (“I don’t read Chekhov”) as if they had won a prestigious prize for scientific research or a literary work; people who turn the elected official’s obligation to shun corruption into nothing more than a suggestion.

And despite the attempts to claim that this pathetic gang is the authentic representative of some (Mizrahi?) revolution, its members are guilty of the deterioration of Israel’s politics and culture into dark corners of the type that flourished in the beer halls where hatred, violence and racism reigned. Then it was the Jew, today it’s the liberal, the leftist, the Arab or any person who doesn’t agree with them.

We accuse Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked and Tourism Minister Yariv Levin, two people whose goal is to take apart the last defender of Israeli democracy – the Supreme Court. They’re two educated young people who are advancing bills (the nation-state bill, for example) and appointments in the judiciary based on a new Zionist ideology, National Zionism, that represents an antithesis both to the traditional Zionism of the 20th century and the post-Zionism of the century’s end. This Zionism is a branch of European neo-fascism, which contains elements of xenophobia and ultranationalism, subordinating democracy to other values and restricting individual rights and the freedom and independence of the law.

We accuse the preachers of hatred who bear the title “rabbi”: Eli Sadan, Dov Lior, Shmuel Eliyahu, Yigal Levinstein and many others, for turning Judaism into a religion that supports ethnic cleansing and genocide, xenophobia, the exclusion and hatred of women and the harming of gay people. The guilt of these men is great because they educate hundreds and thousands of young people, and their hate-filled preaching has many listeners who accept their words because they wear skullcaps and sport beards and are therefore thought to have special wisdom and knowledge.
They are the spiritual force behind the gangs of young people who harass the Palestinian and his olive grove in the territories, they are the ones who grant religious justification for the acts of violence and murder committed by the kippa-wearing thugs. They are the greenhouse that nurtures politicians such as MK Bezalel Smotrich, a racist, homophobe and preacher of genocide. Only in Israel (or in benighted countries in the previous century) could someone like him become deputy Knesset speaker.

History — or if it isn’t too late, the Israeli voter — will pass judgment on all of them, and others. Confronting them is a gradually shrinking group of dissidents who are stubbornly marching against the prevailing atmosphere. These are the civil society activists who by their protest are halting the expulsion of asylum seekers, the Holocaust survivors who are helping lead the protest against the deportation, the members of the New Israel Fund who continue to support whatever promotes the values of equality and democracy in Israel. These are the people who petition the High Court of Justice against the injustice perpetrated by the government, the activists of the Jewish-Arab partnership, and everyone who still believes it’s possible to stop the wheel before it crushes us all.

Emile Zola concluded his letter as follows: “As for the people I am accusing, I do not know them, I have never seen them, and I bear them neither ill will nor hatred. To me they are mere entities, agents of harm to society. The action I am taking is no more than a radical measure to hasten the explosion of truth and justice. I have but one passion: to enlighten those who have been kept in the dark, in the name of humanity which has suffered so much and is entitled to happiness. My fiery protest is simply the cry of my very soul.”      
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“Monarchy is only the string that ties the robber’s bundle” - Percy Bysshe Shelley as Another Royal Parasite is Born

April 23, 2018, 8:47 pm
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We demand the same treatment for the Royal Brat as for Claimants – no State Aid for three or more children

All day the BBC has been full of idiots telling us how happy they are that there is another royal parasite born to the manor.  What pathetic lives they lead if the hereditary rulers of this country giving birth to another royal brat gives them such pleasure. 

This blog demands that no state money be expended on the Cambridge’s new child.

When the detestable Ian Duncan Smith was Secretary of State for Social Security he introduced a rule that if you have 3 or more children you cannot receive benefits for them, thus throwing hundreds of thousands of children into poverty.

We demand that the same principle be introduced for the latest Royal Brat, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridgeshire’s 3rd child.  No money from the state for its upkeep.
One more royal mouth to feed

Abolish the Royal Family — There is no more logic to having a hereditary mathematician than a hereditary ruler

Below is an Article on the Socialist case Against Monarchy

Monarchy in the UK

This year marks Queen Elizabeth II's golden jubilee. During those 50 years the royal family has tried desperately to maintain its credibility amid scandal and seismic social changes. MANNY THAIN looks at how Britain's monarchy has developed and at its place in the modern world.
BRITAIN IS RULED, at least nominally, by a monarch - Queen Elizabeth II. The royal family is viewed as a purely symbolic state decoration by some, as being completely irrelevant by others, or as a mildly entertaining soap opera centred on a deeply dysfunctional family. It also plays a constitutional role which is generally hidden behind a carefully constructed faade of political neutrality. As the recent funeral of the Queen Mother showed, it is capable of arousing deep feelings of loyalty and support.
The monarchy was actually overthrown during the English revolution. On 4 January 1649, parliament passed a resolution which abolished the House of Lords, confiscated crown, church and royalist land, and set up a commission to try the king, Charles I, who was later executed. In 1660, however, the monarchy was restored with Charles II and has retained an important constitutional role ever since.
The monarchy epitomises conservative values and the status quo. It is a bastion against change. It is the living embodiment of a hierarchical society, reinforcing the notion that there is an established order: people should know their place and accept it.
The monarch dissolves parliament, appoints and dismisses prime ministers, assents to legislation, signs treaties, declares war and appoints judges. These powers are generally exercised by the prime minister under royal prerogative. Using this prerogative, a British prime minister can declare war without a debate in parliament. Margaret Thatcher banned trade unions at the Ministry of Defence 'spy centre' at GCHQ on that basis. Whole areas of secondary legislation are handled by the Privy Council - the members of which are appointed for life - and the 'orders in council', and never come before parliament. MPs swear an oath of allegiance to the Queen not to the people they represent. The monarch meets the prime minister once a week. Britain's peoples are not citizens but subjects.
Public image
THE IMAGE PRESENTED is that the monarchy follows age-old tradition. In reality, 'The Firm' (as its members refer to it) is a very modern construct, dating back to Queen Victoria who ruled from 1837-1901. The death of the Queen Mother on 30 March, aged 101, marked the end of the physical connection between the present House of Windsor (which is itself a fabricated brand name) and Victorian Britain and empire.
Under Hanoverian rule (1714-1836) royalty became increasingly discredited with American independence, the madness of George III and the depravity of George IV. In the face of a strengthening republican mood, Victoria and Albert set about making the institution popular. This was not a straightforward task and it provoked some familiar criticism: "George Bernard Shaw, writing anonymously in the Pall Mall Gazette, complained just before Victoria's half-century celebration: 'Were a gust of wind to blow off our sovereign's head-gear tomorrow, the Queen's bonnet would crowd Bulgaria out of the papers'. And when Victoria visited the East End, the celebration was marred by what Lord Salisbury called 'a horrid noise'. [The] booing was attributed to 'socialists and the worst Irish'." (The Observer, 10 February 2002)
The opening of parliament was reinvented by Edward VII (r1901-10). He introduced the theatrics of Black Rod knocking on doors and the practice of courtiers walking backwards. Queen Elizabeth II, for her part, curtailed last summer's state opening ceremony so she could enjoy a day at the races.
In the past, royalty claimed the divine right to rule. Although that idea had been undermined by the English revolution, it endured far longer than many might have thought possible. Even in 1964 a poll claimed that 30% of the public believed that the monarch was chosen by God! The mystery surrounding the monarchy has been an important component in its history. In 1923 the BBC considered broadcasting the marriage of Lady Elizabeth Angela Marguerite Bowes-Lyon (later, the Queen Mother) to the Duke of York (the future George VI). Courtiers refused on the grounds that the service might be heard 'by men in public houses' with their caps still on. That would never do.
George's elder brother, Edward VIII, was heir to the throne but abdicated in 1936 to marry Wallis Simpson, a divorcŽe. That undermined the example the head of the Church of England was expected to uphold. An Independent Labour Party MP moved a motion to replace the monarchy with a republic. It fell by 403 to 5. On 12 May 1937, George VI was crowned. The abdication was a major crisis for the royal family and, even now, official documents on the affair remain under lock and key at the Public Records Office.
Edward VIII was a fascist sympathiser, a friend of Adolf Hitler. That was common among the British ruling class whose biggest threat came from the socialist movement, with the example of the Russian revolution still fresh in the memory. Several of the current Prince Philip's sisters married German aristocrats who backed the Nazis. Philip was a minor Greek royal from a German line but was transformed under the tutelage of the influential Lord Louis Mountbatten, Queen Victoria's great-grandson. He renounced his Greek titles. Out went the Greek Orthodox religion. In came the Church of England. He learned to ride a horse.
Mother of invention
THE OUTBREAK OF the second world war saw George VI and his Consort get their hands dirty, very dirty. They were closely associated with the policy of appeasement with Hitler. The prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, was invited onto the balcony of Buckingham Palace to celebrate his capitulation, in what was described by the court historian, John Grigg, as "the most unconstitutional act by a British sovereign in the present century". (The Guardian, 1 April) In 1939 the foreign secretary's office telegraphed the British ambassador in Berlin to encourage the fascist regime "to check the unauthorised emigration of Jews". The relevant papers to these ignominious episodes also remain secret.
Once Britain was at war with Germany, the myth-making machine went into overdrive. The Queen Consort's visits to the bomb-devastated East End of London became the stuff of legend. Yet her initial visits - in high heels, jewels and expensive clothes - gave people the impression that the royal family was untouched by the war's tragedies. The propaganda took a while to work. Echoing Queen Victoria's experience, Elizabeth was pelted with rubbish and jeered by angry crowds. When Buckingham Palace was bombed in 1940, the Queen Consort, with more than a hint of relief, remarked that she could now look the East End in the face.
Throughout the war the standard flew at Buckingham Palace, denoting the presence of royalty. At night, however, George VI and Elizabeth would travel to the safety of Windsor Castle. The palace implied that they were living off similar rations to everyone else but, of course, they wanted for nothing. The Queen Consort played the long-suffering patriot. When it was suggested that the family should go to Canada, she famously said, "The children could not leave without me, I could not leave without the king, and the king will never leave".
George VI died on 6 February 1952, opening the way for Elizabeth II to take the throne. The title of 'Queen Mother' was created. More familial strife followed as the Queen refused to give consent to the late Princess Margaret marrying divorcŽ Group Captain Peter Townsend. Even then, the issue was mainly one of example rather than constitution. Margaret and any future offspring had very little chance of succeeding to the throne (the Queen already had two children). A Daily Mirror poll showed 95% of people in favour of the marriage. The monarchy showed itself to be hopelessly out of touch.
The end of deference
IN ATTEMPTING TO modernise the monarchy, the royal family opened up to the outside world, at least to a limited extent. "The royals have become a media commodity in a circulation and ratings-driven age". (Financial Times, 7 February) Its decadent, bankrupt and reactionary nature was exposed.
The watershed year was 1992, described in the Queen's inimitable way as her 'annus horribilis'. Few people had any idea what she was talking about. Her use of arcane language reinforced how far removed she is from the real world. Tabloid newspapers had a field day. But it had been a bad year. A fire at Windsor Castle provoked widespread anger when it was revealed that the property was not insured and that The Firm was about to present a repair bill for £40 million to Britain's taxpayers. There was a series of domestic faux pas: photos of a topless Duchess of York with businessman, John Bryan; Princess Anne divorcing and remarrying within six months; and the marriage between heir to the throne, Prince Charles, and Princess Diana was collapsing amid bitter mutual recriminations.
In search of rehabilitation, royals visited pubs and Glaswegian council houses. The royal yacht was decommissioned and the palace travel budget cut from £17.3 million in 1997 to £5.4 million in 2000. A fraction of the Queen's accounts was reluctantly declared and a very small amount of tax was paid, voluntarily.
Social attitudes had shifted significantly and the monarchy was struggling to keep up: "When she left her safari hotel after being told she was queen 50 years ago, journalists respectfully lined the road, but not one took a picture. In 1957 when the journalist John Grigg ventured to suggest her speaking style was a 'pain in the neck' he was assaulted in the street. Now deference is dead. Fergie is the Duchess of Pork, Edward is Prince Plonker and Andrew is pictured with topless models on holiday". (The Guardian, 2 February)
The media attention courted by the royals was undermining the institution's credibility. The low point was the death of the Princess of Wales in 1997 and the royal family's unfeeling reaction. Paradoxically, Princess Diana's death became the focus of anger against the monarchy. The question of its viability was posed starkly. Only the direct intervention of Tony Blair saved the day. His leading spin doctors were deployed to help rebuild the monarchy's crumbling reputation.
The Queen Mother's death exposed generational divisions in Britain. It was a non-event for the vast majority of young people, many of whom have rejected the corrupt establishment politics and institutions. More 18- to 24-year-olds voted in the Pop Idol television poll than in the general election and a Mori poll found that eight out of ten young people have no idea how parliament works. There is no common ground between the right-wing, all-white, privileged House of Windsor and a capital city which is now home to more than 300 language groups (Financial Times, 6 April). Of the 2,500 calls to the BBC on its coverage of the Queen Mother, those who wanted more or who were supportive were outnumbered ten to one.
On the other hand, the Queen Mother's televised 100th birthday celebration in London on 19 July 2000 was seen by seven million people in Britain - nearly half of all viewers that night. An estimated quarter of a million people filed passed her coffin in Westminster Hall and the funeral was watched by 300 million people worldwide. Simon Schama, a historian with the BBC, put forward the thoroughly reactionary view that the ceremony demonstrated the "entirely instinctive emotional bond" between crown and country. Schama is saying that the monarchy, and the class system it upholds, is the 'natural order'. But there is nothing instinctive about the relationship between the royal family and its subjects. It has been systematically cultivated and conditioned, the product of centuries of physical oppression and exploitation by the ruling class.
Plans for the Queen Mother's funeral were drawn up decades ago. Apparently, the original plan was for the biggest state funeral since Winston Churchill's to give the monarchy a shot in the arm. Princess Diana's death five years ago, and the incredible outpourings of emotion at the time, led to the plans being shelved. The monarchy feared organising a massive show with no one turning up. It would never live down being upstaged by the upstart Diana.
Nonetheless, in the ten days between the Queen Mother's death and her burial, a carefully orchestrated campaign was set in motion. For the first time ever, parliament was recalled to commemorate the death of a member of the royal family. It was not recalled during the miners' strike of 1984-85; or when 2,000 British troops were sent to Bosnia in 1992; when the RAF bombed Iraq in February 2001; or during the present crisis in the Middle East. This was despite calls from MPs to debate all these issues. The Scottish parliament and Welsh assembly were also convened. Clearly, a proportion of that audience was drawn by curiosity and tourists helped boost the crowds.
Dwindling support
SUPPORT FOR THE royal family is steadily declining, although it still commands respect from significant, though ageing, sections of the population. In 1990, 75% thought Britain would be worse off without a monarch. In 2000 it was 44%. And an ICM poll in April 2001 showed that 34% believed Britain would be better off without a monarchy. A Mori poll for the royal household found that only one in four people believed the family was hard-working. One in ten considered them good value for money.
Sympathy for the Queen Mother may feed into the Queen's golden jubilee celebrations, bolstering the lacklustre preparations to date and giving the impression of a new-found popularity. Any such effect is likely to be short-lived. The monarchy is an anachronism, totally out of step with life in the 21st century. The Queen Mother's death could, in fact, precipitate further crises as the Queen finds herself directly in the firing line, so to speak.
Anthony Holden, an author on constitutional and royal affairs, commented: "Not since the 1870s has there been such a whiff of republicanism in the air, and the passing of the Queen Mother will do nothing to dispel it. Quite the reverse. For half a century, since the early death of her husband, she has served as a cordon sanitaire around her increasingly dysfunctional family, disarming constitutional criticism as her adoring fans made the age-old mistake of confusing the institution of the monarchy with the transient mortals who happen to be its temporary custodians.
"This handy smokescreen used to be one of the Windsors' hidden strengths; now it may prove their fatal weakness. For most of the Queen Mother's lifetime, the constitutional arguments of abolitionists have all too easily been swatted aside as tasteless criticism of a harmless old lady and her dutiful daughter and grandson". (The Observer, 31 March)
The Queen's golden jubilee celebrations include tours to Jamaica, New Zealand and Australia, with a three-month tour of Britain. There will be classical and 'pop concerts' at Buckingham Palace, thanksgiving at St Paul's cathedral, a carnival in the Mall, beacons across the country and street parties. But The Firm is apprehensive about what these events might reveal about support for the monarchy.
As with the death of Princess Diana, Blair is doing all he can to prop up the royal edifice. His sycophantic speeches hide behind a mask of 'neutral, universal values' and evoke nationalism. Blair said that the Queen Mother "was part of the fabric of our nation and we were immensely proud of her. But respect for her went far beyond Britain. Throughout the Commonwealth and the world, she was greeted with instant affection and acclaim". (The Observer, 31 March) Blair's talk of 'the nation', in this context, is really code for the ruling class and capitalist system. In fact, the Queen Mother, the last Empress of India, was a bigoted reactionary, opposed to the break up of the British empire and an admirer of PW Botha, leader of South Africa's brutal apartheid regime. She implacably defended the interests of the rich against the working class but astutely never voiced her political opinions in public. Her only interview was conducted in 1923.
Royalists have every reason to be concerned. The constitutional crisis in prospect if Prince Charles marries Camilla Parker Bowles has set off alarm bells. The heir to the throne and head of the Church of England is a self-confessed adulterer living unmarried with another man's ex-wife. It might not sound such a big deal but this is what royal crises are made of. If the Queen and her advisers try to block the marriage, the House of Windsor could yet again demonstrate how out of step it is with the rest of society.
It is tempting, and relatively easy, to ridicule the pompous attitudes of the British monarchy. Its members betray a peculiar, other-worldly arrogance which suggests they really do believe that they are superior beings: "On one occasion when they [the Earl and Countess of Wessex] walked across St James's Park for lunch, they declared upon arrival that they had travelled by foot to 'give pleasure to the people'." (The Observer, 3 March)
Time for change
MANY PEOPLE WANT royalty scaled down: "Mori polls suggest that 70% of the British people prefer a monarchy to a republic although nearly the same proportion wants it modernised". (Financial Times, 7 February 2002) The 'continental model' is put forward, where the royal family would have a much reduced income and property, and a purely ceremonial role. This does not solve the problem. The House of Windsor is unique in the West for its constitutional role and vast wealth. One of its greatest assets to the capitalist system lies in its potential for rallying reaction. It is a weapon the ruling class keeps in reserve. But even the less extravagant royal families could become a focus for reaction to varying degrees.
With respect for establishment politicians and parties at an all-time low, and with massive social, economic and political upheaval on the horizon internationally, the capitalist ruling class will use any means at its disposal to maintain its power and privileges. Philip Stephens commented: "But at the start of her jubilee year, the Queen knows that the monarchy is weaker, measurably so, than it has been for a long time. The deference and the reverence have gone... the logical absurdity of choosing a head of state by accident of birth also becomes ever more apparent. But, for now at least, contempt for politicians outweighs the misgivings about the Windsors and the obvious flaws of a hereditary system". (Financial Times, 11 January)
The Windsors are a throwback to a far distant time and system. Many states making the transition from feudalism to capitalism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries drastically curtailed the privileges and power of their royalty. In Britain the monarchy reinvented itself and retained an unusually important position.
Reform of the British state is long overdue. The monarchy must be abolished, along with that other feudal bastion of privilege, the House of Lords. If, faced with an overwhelming tide of opposition to the monarchy and its trappings, the ruling class judged that this would help ensure the survival of capitalism, they could be reformed out of existence. The monarchy's potential for mobilising support for the system, however, makes it a useful weapon in future battles with a socialist movement and one it would prefer to retain in its arsenal.
Alternatively, the task of removing the monarchy will fall on the shoulders of the socialist revolution. Society would be able to look forward to a future based on human solidarity. The vast majority of working-class people would be involved in planning and running the economy. And there would be no room for this privileged and parasitical elite.
The cost of royalty
DETAILED FIGURES ARE unavailable, but the royal household cost Britain's taxpayers around £35 million in 2001, including £6.5 million for the Queen's expenses. The royal estate comprises 285 houses and apartments. The following information only provides the merest glimpse of the phenomenal wealth in the hands of The Firm. On top of the payments these spongers receive from the government - through us - they are all wealthy landowners raking in profits from agriculture (120,000 hectares), land and property rents, marine assets and all manner of scams. The crown estates made a profit of £147.7 million after tax in 2001.
Queen Elizabeth II has personal wealth estimated at £1.15 billion. The Duchy of Lancaster brings in millions more. Her stamp and medal collections are worth £102 million, her jewels £72 million. She has £7.1 million-worth of cars, and racehorses valued at £3.6 million. Her official residences of Buckingham Palace, Windsor Castle and Holyroodhouse are supplemented by private properties at Balmoral, Sandringham and Frogmore. Buckingham Palace has 600 staff, Windsor Castle 1,000 rooms.
Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, gets £379,000 from the civil list.
Charles, the Prince of Wales, has personal wealth estimated at £346 million. He resides at St James's Palace and Highgrove, although he will move into the Queen Mother's old London residence at Clarence House. Workers in Britain will pick up the bill for refurbishment, estimated at £5 million. Clarence House costs £500,000 a year in upkeep. Charles is also the Duke of Cornwall and his land there earned him £7 million in 2000. He paid £1.5 million in tax.
Andrew, the Duke of York, has personal wealth estimated at £3.5 million. He gets £249,000 from the civil list and a Royal Navy pension of £16,500. His residences are at Sunnyhill Park, the Royal Lodge at Windsor and Buckingham Palace.
Edward, the Earl of Wessex, has a personal fortune estimated at £9 million. He lives in a £10 million, 56-room mansion, Bagshot Park, set in 88 acres of woodland. When he and the countess moved in the Ministry of Defence funded £1.8 million repairs. Bagshot costs around £250,000 a year to run. Edward gets £249,000 from the civil list and was given £250,000 when the couple agreed to stop pursuing their business careers.
Anne, the Princess Royal, gets £228,000 from the civil list. Her residences are at Gatcombe Park and St James's Palace.
Prince and Princess Michael of Kent have no royal duties. They lived rent-free for the first 18 years they spent in Kensington Palace, where they have the use of nine reception rooms, seven bedrooms and the palace staff. They have just started paying for this accommodation - £67 a week!
The Queen Mother's personal fortune was estimated at £60 million. Her civil list allowance was £643,000. She put £14 million in a trust fund for her great-grandchildren and left a £4 million overdraft with Coutts bank. If she had to pay inheritance tax the overdraft would have been discounted. As it is, however, no tax is due - part of the agreement reached with John Major's government in 1992/93. The one property she had owned herself, the Castle of Mey, was handed over to a trust in 1996. Her paintings and jewels are estimated to be worth £16.5 million.


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Overlooked Ida B. Wells – One of the First Black Journalists

April 24, 2018, 6:55 pm
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I first intended to publish this article from the New York Times on international women’s day about a largely unknown Black journalist.  However it is as appropriate now as it was then.  I apologise if people find the graphic disturbing however it is important that people understand the nature of racism in the United States until recently.  When we contrast this with the false and fake ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign in the Labour Party then people should be rightly angry.

Tony Greenstein

She took on racism in the Deep South with powerful reporting on lynchings
By CAITLIN DICKERSON

Ida B. Wells, one of the nation’s most influential investigative reporters, in 1920. Chicago History Museum/Getty Images


It was not all that unusual when, in 1892, a mob dragged Thomas Moss out of a Memphis jail in his pyjamas and shot him to death over a feud that began with a game of marbles. But his lynching changed history because of its effect on one of the nation’s most influential journalists, who was also the godmother of his first child: Ida B. Wells.
“It is with no pleasure that I have dipped my hands in the corruption here exposed,” Wells wrote in 1892 in the introduction to “Southern Horrors,” one of her seminal works about lynching, “Somebody must show that the Afro-American race is more sinned against than sinning, and it seems to have fallen upon me to do so.”

Wells is considered by historians to have been the most famous black woman in the United States during her lifetime, even as she was dogged by prejudice, a disease infecting Americans from coast to coast.
She pioneered reporting techniques that remain central tenets of modern journalism. And as a former slave who stood less than five feet tall, she took on structural racism more than half a century before her strategies were repurposed, often without crediting her, during the 1960s civil rights movement.

Wells was already a 30-year-old newspaper editor living in Memphis when she began her anti-lynching campaign, the work for which she is most famous. After Moss was killed, she set out on a reporting mission, crisscrossing the South over several months as she conducted eyewitness interviews and dug up records on dozens of similar cases.
Her goal was to question a stereotype that was often used to justify lynchings — that black men were rapists. Instead, she found that in two-thirds of mob murders, rape was never an accusation. And she often found evidence of what had actually been a consensual interracial relationship.

She published her findings in a series of fiery editorials in the newspaper she co-owned and edited, The Memphis Free Speech and Headlight. The public, it turned out, was starved for her stories and devoured them voraciously. The Journalist, a mainstream trade publication that covered the media, named her “The Princess of the Press.”
Readers of her work were drawn in by her fine-tooth reporting methods and language that, even by today’s standards, was aberrantly bold.

Wells wrote about the victims of racist violence and organized economic boycotts long before the tactic was popularized.

“There has been no word equal to it in convincing power,” 

Frederick Douglass wrote to her in a letter that hatched their friendship. “I have spoken, but my word is feeble in comparison,” he added.

He was referring to writing like the kind that she published in The Free Speech in May 1892.

“Nobody in this section of the country believes the threadbare old lie that Negro men rape white women,” Wells wrote.

Instead, Wells saw lynching as a violent form of subjugation — “an excuse to get rid of Negroes who were acquiring wealth and property and thus keep the race terrorized and ‘the nigger down,’ ” she wrote in a journal.
Wells was born into slavery in Holly Springs, Miss., in 1862, less than a year before Emancipation. She grew up during Reconstruction, the period when black men, including her father, were able to vote, ushering black representatives into state legislatures across the South. One of eight siblings, she often tagged along to Bible school on her mother’s hip.

In 1878, her parents both died of yellow fever, along with one of her brothers; and at 16, she took on caring for the rest of her siblings. She supported them by working as a teacher after dropping out of high school and lying about her age. She finished her own education at night and on weekends.

Around the same time, the Civil Rights Act of 1875 was largely nullified by the Supreme Court, reversing many of the advancements of Reconstruction. The anti-black sentiment that grew around her was ultimately codified into Jim Crow.
“It felt like a dramatic whiplash,” said Troy Duster, Wells’s grandson, who is a sociology professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and New York University. “She cuts her teeth politically in this time of justice, justice, justice, and then injustice.”

Observing the changes around her, Wells decided to become a journalist during what was a golden era for black writers and editors. Her goal was to write about black people for black people, in a way that was accessible to those who, like her, were born the property of white owners and had much to defend.

Her articles were often reprinted abroad, as well as in the more than 200 black weeklies then in circulation in the United States.

Whenever possible, Wells named the victims of racist violence and told their stories. In her journals, she lamented that her subjects would have otherwise been forgotten by all “save the night wind, no memorial service to bemoan their sad and horrible fate.”

Wells also organized economic boycotts long before the tactic was popularized by other, mostly male, civil rights activists, who are often credited with its success.

In 1883, she was forced off a train car reserved for white women. She sued the railroad and lost on appeal before the Tennessee Supreme Court, after which she urged African-Americans to avoid the trains, and later, to leave the South entirely. She also travelled to Britain to rally her cause, encouraging the British to stop purchasing American cotton and angering many white Southern business owners.

Wells was as fierce in conversation as she was in her writing, which made it difficult for her to maintain close relationships, according to her family. She criticized people, including friends and allies, whom she saw as weak in their commitment to the causes she cared about.

“She didn’t suffer fools and she saw fools everywhere,” Duster, her grandson, said.

One exception was her husband and closest confidant, Ferdinand L. Barnett, a widower who was a lawyer and civil rights activist in Chicago. After they married in 1895, Barnett’s activism took a back seat to his wife’s career. Theirs was an atypically modern relationship: He cooked dinner for their children most nights, and he cared for them while she traveled to make speeches and organize.

Later in life, Wells fell from prominence as she was replaced by activists like Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois, who were more conservative in their tactics, and thus had more support from the white and black establishments. She helped to found prominent civil rights organizations including the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the National Association of Colored Women, only to be edged out of their leadership.

During the final years of her life, living in Chicago, Wells ran for the Illinois State Senate, but lost abysmally. Despite her ebbing influence, she continued to organize around causes such as mass incarceration, working for several years as a probation officer, until she died of kidney disease on March 25, 1931, at 68.

Wells was threatened physically and rhetorically constantly throughout her career; she was called a harlot and a courtesan for her frankness about interracial sex. After her anti-lynching editorials were published in The Free Speech, she was run out of the South — her newspaper ransacked and her life threatened. But her commitment to chronicling the experience of African-Americans in order to demonstrate their humanity remained unflinching.

“If this work can contribute in any way toward proving this, and at the same time arouse the conscience of the American people to demand for justice to every citizen, and punishment by law for the lawless, I shall feel I have done my race a service,” she wrote after fleeing Memphis, “Other considerations are minor.”

Correction March 9, 2018

An earlier version of this article referred imprecisely to voting rights during Reconstruction. Black men were able to vote. Women did not get the right to vote until 1920.

Caitlin Dickerson is a national immigration reporter. More than a century later, she still uses the reporting techniques that were pioneered by Ida B. Wells.
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The Crucifixion of Marc Wadsworth - Nailed by the Lies of Ruth Smeeth

April 25, 2018, 9:37 pm
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Black anti-racism activist is on Trial for Antiracism

Channel 4 News - Cyril Chilson and Tony Greenstein interviewed

A lively and well attended lobby
To George Osborne and the Tory press we were a 'mob'
If there was any justice in the Labour Party the person facing a two day disciplinary hearing would not be Marc Wadsworth but Ruth Smeeth.  The filmed evidence of her departure in ‘tears’ (can you see them?) from the Chakrabarti Report press conference demonstrates without a shadow of a doubt that there was nothing said that was at all anti-Semitic.  Marc called out Smeeth’s relations with The Telegraph and complained at the lack of Black voices at the press conference.

Yet Wes Streeting MP could claim today that ‘ I’m afraid it does say something about the culture that we’re up against that a Jewish MP going to give evidence against someone who has abused her is greeted by a protest outside’.   Streeting is a good example of the whole of the false anti-Semitism crewe.  He assumed that Marc is guilty as charged, yet the whole purpose of a hearing – even before the rigged jury of Maggi Cousins and the National Kangaroo Committee – is to inquire into whether the allegations are proven or not. 
Liar-in-chief Smeeth accompanied by Lord Dubbs

The fact that Smeeth is Jewish is irrelevant. The fact is that compared to Marc she is highly privileged.

Labour Against the Witchhunt held a lobby of the hearing at Church House, Westminster today  from 9.30 onwards.  About 20 MPs including the usual anti-Corbyn suspects – Streeting, Frank Field, Margaret Hodge, Jesse Philips and Peter Kyle escorted Smeeth to the venue.  There they were met with over 70 demonstrators.

It was no doubt something of a surprise to see that Marc had so many friends.  Streeting looked most unhappy.  What Streeting didn’t appreciate is that Marc is an anti-racist of longstanding. Marc was heavily involved in the Stephen Lawrence Defence Campaign and was interviewed as part of the BBC 3 part documentary shown last week on the Stephen Lawrence murder.  Smeeth on the other hand has had no involvement in anti-racist work being a former employee of BICOM, the main propaganda arm for Israel, the world’s only apartheid state, in Britain. 


Smeeth is a also former Israel lobby spin doctor who, after entering the UK’s parliament in 2015, continued to be funded by two leading figures from her former employer, BICOM – the Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre. 
The latest official register of financial interests for members of Parliament shows that Smeeth continues to be funded by the Israel lobby.
Last year, as Asa Winstanley observed, she registered an in-kind donation worth more than $7,000 from Trevor Chinn, a member of BICOM’s executive committee.



A 2009 diplomatic cable published by Wikileaks revealed that Smeeth was a source the US embassy considered it should “strictly protect.” [See Asa Winstanley, Labour Israel lobbyist deletes anti-Semitic “conspiracy” claims]


Speaking to The Daily Telegraph in 2011, Smeeth admitted to being at a meeting with the US embassy but said: “I have no recollection of saying what has been attributed to me. I would not consider myself to be a source for the US government.”


Smeeth gave evidence today at Marc’s hearing.  By all accounts she is not a very good liar.  She claimed that she was wearing a Star of David around her neck, though Marc would not have been able to see it, if it was there, because of his own poor sight.
David Collier - a worried Zionist and friend of fascists

Jeremy Corbyn’s office in a typical act of cowardice contacted Marc to ask that the demonstration outside the hearing be called off.  Presumably they wanted Marc to walk in alone whilst the Right mobilised.  Jeremy has known Marc for at least 20 years and knows full well that he is not an anti-Semite.  It is shameful how Jeremy has thrown Marc and others to the wolves in order to appease the Labour Right not realizing that the target of the anti-Semitism campaign is not Jackie, Marc or myself but Corbyn himself.
The original lies of Ruth Smeeth which she later deleted from her web site

This whole fake ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign has been manufactured over the past few weeks with one purpose in mind – to damage Labour’s chances in the local elections.  That was why Luciana Berger dug up a 6 year old Facebook comment by Corbyn concerning a long erased Mural.  Unfortunately some on the Left who should know better, like Jon Lansman and Richard Seymour, have falled for the Rights decoy tactics as these ex-leftists pronounce that there must be something in the bogus anti-Semitism claims.


We are faced with an incremental campaign to get rid of Corbyn. It was strange watching the Channel 4 footage above and seeing right-wing Tory, Jonathan Arkush, of the Board of Deputies proclaiming that Labour should not tolerate Ken Livingstone.  The same man who welcomed Trump and his anti-Semitic entourage without any murmur or protest.

Smeeth accompanied by right wing loudmouth Jess Phillips and millionairess Margaret Hodge
Our lobby lasted from 9.30-1.00.  It was lively and good humoured and just after 1,00 Marc came out to meet a media scrum.  Labour Against the Witchhunt is the only organisation to consistently oppose a witch hunt whose principla aim is to remove Corbyn’s leadership.


Tony Greenstein

See Asa Winstanley’s
Former Israel lobby spin doctor aims for seat in UK parliament
Labour Israel lobbyist deletes anti-Semitic “conspiracy” claims
Frank Field amongst other Labour right-wingers
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Jewish Voice for Labour Surrenders to Wes Streeting’s White Parliamentary Lynch Mob

April 26, 2018, 9:49 pm
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Abandoning Marc Wadsworth to the Zionist witch-hunt and the lies of Ruth Smeeth is both shameful and counter-productive

Wes Streeting and the all-White group of MPs accompanies Smeeth

When Jewish Voice for Labour was formed last summer I welcomed it whilst warning of the dangers of not having clear politics, strategy or direction. I opposed not only its two tiers of membership – Jewish and non-Jewish – but its refusal to squarely support the Palestinians’ fight for justice and the Right of Return of Palestinian refugees.

Although most JVL members are opposed to Zionism there is a belief that some things are best left unsaid.  The group is also unclear as to whether its main purpose is as some kind of Jewish cultural formation or whether it is primarily a political organisation.

Opposition to the anti-Semitism witch hunt or the affiliation and privileged status of the Jewish Labour Movement was not mentioned in its founding statement.  Nor does it say anything about about the racist nature of the Israeli state. I wrote a number of articles warning of the consequences of not being clear or honest such as Timidity is not a Strategy,and Jewish Voice for Labour & the Politics of Self-Indulgence - Nothing to say on Palestine or Zionism. 

For the past few weeks we have had a relaunch of the anti-Semitism campaign.  There is no doubt that this is intended both to damage the chances of Labour in the local elections and also to act as a prelude to the removal of Corbyn himself.
The Zionist demonstration was an anti-Labour hate fest with far-Right racist Zionists dominating - according to the mythology Labour is full of Jew haters.  A number of those present work with fascist groups yet these are never called out.  Jonathan Arkush himself has spoken to rallies of the openly fascist JDL
The campaign began with the affair of the mural and then an absurd ‘anti-racist’ demonstration on March 26thoutside Parliament by about 500 Zionists.  It is probably the first and last ‘anti-racist’ demonstration which the DUP and Norman Tebbit attend!  To its credit the JVL organised a counter-demonstration but as the attacks have mounted JVL have gone quiet.

This week another of the ‘anti-Semitism’ victims, Marc Wadsworth, was up before Maggi Cosins and the National Kangaroo Court.  To date both Cyril Chilson and me have been expelled.  The allegations by Ruth Smeeth MP that she was subject to anti-Semitic comments at the Chakrabarti press conference by Marc are a complete lie as can be seen in the video.  Nothing was said that was remotely anti-Semitic.
Chris Williamson MP is one of the few Labour MPs to stand up against the McCarthyism of the Zionist Jewish Labour Movement
Smeeth is used to lying as a profession. She was a paid worker for the Israeli propagandist organisation BICOM, before becoming an MP, see: Former Israel lobby spin doctor aims for seat in UK parliament
Last week Wes Streeting, a right-wing anti-Corbyn MP appealedto MPs to form a posse which would accompany Smeeth to the venue where she would give her perjured evidence.  Streeting statedthat Smeeth was

giving evidence against Mark Wadsworth – the guy who abused her at the antisemitism inquiry launch – and we expect there to be a protest outside against her. 
Marc, as anyone who watched the recent BBC programmes The Murder that Changed a Nation on the Stephen Lawrence murder, would know, played an integral role in the campaign.  Marc has been one of Britain’s best known Black anti-racists.  It is a scandal that he has been suspended for nearly 2 years because of allegations by a supporter of the world’s only Apartheid state, Israel. 

It is also scandalous that JVL took a decision not to support the lobby of Marc’s hearing. JVL didn’t want to be seen to oppose Streeting’s all-white group of right-wing MPs.  In essence they took fright. This is sheer political cowardice.  It is also the road to disaster.  JVL seem to believe that if they are good boys and girls then Jeremy will look kindly on them and rearrange the now postponed meeting he was going to have with Jewish groups.  This is an utter illusion.   Despite this a few individual JVL members came along, including Glynn Secker.

The purpose of the witch-hunt is not to expel Jackie, Marc or myself.  It is either to remove or neuter Corbyn.  Far from abstaining from support those of us fighting the witch hunt JVL should be in the forefront of the fight.  Whilst the Zionists are on the rampage JVL decided to do nothing.
Originally Free Speech on Israel, which consists of many of the same people as JVL, was set up because of the weaponisation of anti-Semitism.  It would appear that they have given up on free speech.  Likewise the Jewish Socialists Group, which worked alongside Black anti-racist activists like Marc, have kept quiet over the witchhunt and appear to have given up on socialism and Jewish Voice for Labour seem to have lost their voice altogether.

However Labour Against the Witch-hunt went ahead with the protest despite Corbyn’s office contacting Marc and asking him to call off the protest.  Quite rightly Marc refused.  The idea that keeping quiet and saying nothing will aid Jeremy Corbyn is absurd.  The purpose of the witch-hunt and the false accusations of anti-Semitism is to remove Corbyn.  Jackie, Marc and me are simply collateral damage. Saying nothing will strengthen not weaken the Right.
President JONATHAN ARKUSH, BOD - addressing rally Grosvenor SQ. July '16 where JDL openly wore KAHANE shirts. 
Far from abstaining from protests we should be redoubling our efforts to reselect creatures like Streeting, Smeeth, Berger and Ryan.  The Right will not give up and appeasing them is likely to destroy the Corbyn project and the prospect of him becoming Prime Minister.  It is time that people realise and understand that the goal of Streeting, John Mann and co. is to prevent Corbyn becoming Prime Minister. 

Last June’s General election was a set back for them which is why we have seen the false anti-Semitism campaign being stepped up.

When Streeting and his 20 white racists reached Church House, the venue where the Kangaroo Court was sitting, it was they who felt intimidated and Streeting could be seen bleating about how terrible it was that people had exercised their right to free speech.

It is excellent that Chris Williamson MP, despite the pressures on him, not least by people like Barry Gardiner, refused to be cowed and gave evidence in support of Marc Wadsworth.  Clive Lewis MP has also given Marc his support.  The decision of the JVL leaves friendly MPs in an even more exposed position.  We had 70 people on the demonstration as it was but with the support of JVL and FSOI we could have had even more.

We have a situation where the representatives of the Israeli state – Labour Friends of Israel and the JLM, the ‘sister party’ of the openly racist Israeli Labour Party, operate openly inside the Labour Party. 
The Israeli Labour Party, of which the JLM is the British representatives, is an anti-socialist racist party that supports the deportation of non-Jewish African refugees from Israel
In May 2012, the ILP’s previous leader Isaac Herzog wrote an opinion piece arguing that Eritreans in Israel didn’t deserve protection as refugees. Today it openly supports Netanyahu’s attempts to deport Israel’s 40,000 Black African refugees for the crime of being Black and not Jewish.

Last week the new leader of the Israeli Labour Party, Avi Gabbay issued a letter cutting his links with Jeremy Corbyn because of ‘anti-Semitism’. The ILP’s previous leader Herzog declared that his nightmare was waking up to find that Israel had a Palestinian Prime Minister and 61 Palestinian Members of Israel’s Knesset.  Herzog also spoke about the false impression that the ILP were ‘Arab Lovers’.

 Gabbay has gone one better.  He declared that he would not join a coalition with members of the Joint List, the representatives of Palestinian citizens of Israel. An Palestinian party has never been part of a government in Israel. It is an unwritten Zionist convention that Arab parties do not take part in the government of a Jewish state.  

In conjunction with Labour’s Right, supporters of Israel and the Zionist movement have waged an ongoing campaign of destabilisation. The pretext is ‘Anti-Semitism’. The hollowness of this campaign is shown by the demands of Jonathans Arkush and Goldstein of the Board of Deputies of British Jews and Jewish Leadership Council. 
The Zionists accuse Livingstone of 'antisemitism' for saying that Hitler supported Zionism - above is an extract from Zionist historian David Cesarani's book which says exactly the same!
Top of the ‘anti-Semites’ Arkush and Goldstein want expelled from Labour are Jackie Walker and Ken Livingstone.  In the Evening Standard they wrote that they wanted expelled the ‘serial offenders Ken Livingstone and Jackie Walker.’ 

Jackie Walker is a Black-Jewish socialist and long standing anti-racist.  Ken Livingstone pioneered anti-racism in local government.  It is clear beyond doubt that their ‘crimes’ aren’t anti-Semitism or hatred of Jews but support for the Palestinians and opposition to Zionism.  Not only is Jackie Walker and Ken Livingstone under attack but so is Chris Williamson MP. In the Jewish Newsof 19th March Arkush says regarding Chris speaking alongside Jackie that:
Sadly, this is the kind of behaviour we have come to expect from Chris Williamson. We called for him to be sacked last year from the shadow cabinet over outrageous comments labelling claims of antisemitism in Labour ‘a dirty lowdown trick’.

Ivor Caplin, Southern organiser for the Jewish Labour Movement, a Junior Defence Minister under Blair and a war criminal in his own right went even further:  ‘Mr Williamson has decided to take a leaf out of Ken Livingstone’s book... If he can’t stop, he needs to go.”

Arkush is a right-wing Tory, who welcomed Donald Trump to power despite the anti-Semitism of his campaign.  According to Dana Milbank in the Washington Post Anti-Semitism is no longer an undertone of Trump’s campaign. It’s the melody. See Trump Rolls Out Anti-Semitic Closing Ad for an analysis.  That however does not disturb Arkush because these anti-Semites are also pro-Israel.

Of course if you claim that the Zionist anti-Semitism claims are false or weaponised then that too is anti-Semitic!  However in the same breath they tell us that Zionism is a part of Jewish identity and to oppose the ‘Jewish’ state is anti-Semitic.  Or in the words of the Jewish Chronicle’s Editor Stephen Pollard Jeremy Corbyn made ‘the odd assertion that anti-Zionism is not antisemitic’.
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Jeremy Corbyn throws Marc Wadsworth overboard in a desperate attempt to save his leadership

April 27, 2018, 6:08 pm
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Sacrificing a Black anti-racist for criticising White Zionist MP Ruth Smeeth will INCREASE anti-Semitism & STRENGTHEN the anti-Corbyn Right


Watching the uncritical acceptance by Corbyn’s office of the expulsion of Marc Wadsworth is like watching someone slowly committing suicide oblivious to all offers of help.  The inability of Corbyn to confront the pro-Israel lobby, which is so desperate to find ‘anti-Semitism’ that it creates a wholly artificial furore over a 6 year old mural, is as bewildering as it is depressing.  It is as if the head of Corbyn’s office Seamus Milne had a death wish.


Labour Against the Witchhunt lobby of Marc Wadsworth's hearing
Smeeth's all-White lynch mob included Streeting and Jess Phillips - only the white hoods were missing
The decision by the National Kangaroo Committee to expel longstanding Black anti-racist activist Marc Wadsworth is shameful.  The role of Corbyn’s office, which tried to get Marc to call off Labour Against the Witchhunt’s demonstrationon Wednesday, as a Parliamentary Lynch Mob accompanied Smeeth to the hearing, was cowardly. It doesn’t seem to occur to Corbyn that those supporting Smeeth – Streeting, Mann, Jess Phillips, Joan Ryan, Luciana Berger – are the same creatures that have dedicated themselves to overthrowing him.

Marc has a long and proud record of fighting racism and fascism, from campaigning to secure the defeat of the British National Party’s first councillor in Britain, Derek Beacon in the Isle of Dogs, to getting Nelson Mandela to sponsor the Stephen Lawrence campaign.  This was at a time when the Labour Party under Blair completely ignored the Lawrence campaign.
Arkush speaks to a meeting that includes 2 members at the front with the tee-shirts of the JDL/Kach, a Jewish neo-Nazi group
What makes Marc’s expulsion even worse was that it was at the behest of the Zionist Board of Deputies under right-wing Tory Jonathan Arkush.  The same Arkush had no hesitation in welcomingthe ascent to power of Donald Trump and his anti-Semitic entourage.   According to  the Washington Post Anti-Semitism is no longer an undertone of Trump’s campaign. It’s the melody. See Trump Rolls Out Anti-Semitic Closing Ad for an analysis.  Arkush also spoketo a meeting that included the openly fascist Jewish Defence League.

Not once has Arkush criticised the Tories links with genuine anti-Semitic parties such as the Polish Law and Order Party and Latvia’s National Alliance in the European Parliament as part of the European Conservative Reform group. 
A longstanding Black anti-racist has been sacrificed to appease Arkush, Smeeth and the rest of the racist scum who make up Israel’s apartheid lobby in Britain.  What is equally appalling is that Momentum, under its property developer dictator Jon Lansman, has not only said nothing about the expulsion or witchhunt but it has backed the claims of false anti-Semitism calling it ‘unconscious’ anti-Semitism.  This at a time when Black people in Britain, the Windrush generation have been deported and denied benefits and medical treatment.  Genuine racism is not ‘unconscious’.  It is because anti-Semitism in the Labour Party is non-existent that Lansman and Momentum’s leadership have resorted to Freudian psycho-analysis. Let us be clear about one thing. 
Jackie Walker - the next target for Labour's racists
Marc’s expulsion has nothing to do with anti-Semitism anymore than my expulsion or the prospective expulsions of Ken Livingstone and Jackie Walker have anything to do with anti-Semitism.  This campaign is about Israel not Anti-Semitism.

Of course if you say that the false ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign is fake and false, then that is proof of your anti-Semitism!  It is much like when someone is defined as insane.  The more they protest they are normal the more psychiatrists are convinced of their malady.

Arkush and Goldstein complain, in all innocence that ‘we are accused of “smearing” Corbyn’.’  Perish the thought.  Using the language of the left they protest that ‘We are not merely being denied the most basic principle of anti-racist behaviour – solidarity – but are viciously accused of smears, of dirty tricks, of lies.’  Who would guess that on 30th March, after Israel began murdering unarmed protestors in Gaza, that these poor victims of racism had blamed the killings on the Palestinians?
Ken Livingstone - top of the target list for the Zionist Labour Movement
The proof that anti-Semitism is a marginal phenomenon in the Labour Party is the fact that those expelled have all been Jewish, Black or anti-racist activists.   It is a strange purge of ‘anti-Semitism’ when the real racists in the Labour Party, those councillors who have evicted Roma and Gypsies or who have demonised Muslims, are left alone.

Zionism has never had any objection to anti-Semitism.  From the very start of the Zionist movement anti-Semites and Zionists have been best of friends.  Livingstone’s main offence was to point to a truth attested to by Zionist historians.  The Nazis and the Zionists had a racial conception of humanity.  They divided society into race not class.  The collaboration of Zionism with the Nazis is a fact.  Not only did the Zionists conclude a trade agreement Ha'avara with the Nazis at the very time that the International Jewish Boycott of Nazi Germany was at its height but they also campaigned against the lowering of immigration barriers in the USA or opening any country to Jewish refugees bar Palestine itself.  As Ben Gurion told Mapai’s Central Committee on 9th December 1938, after Kristallnacht and after Britain agreed to the immigration of 10,000 Kindertransport Jewish children:

‘If I knew that it would be possible to save all the children in Germany by bringing them over to England, and only half of them by transporting them to Eretz Yisrael, then I would opt for the second alternative. For we must weigh not only the life of these children, but also the history of the People of Israel.’ [Gabriel Piterberg, Returns of Zionism, p.99.]

Sometimes it was difficult to tell who was a Zionist and who was an anti-Semite.  Zionists held that anti-Semitism was the fault of the Jews in the Diaspora for not having moved to Palestine.   The Jews were strangers in someone else’s land and as such they had developed unhealthy asocial characteristics.  By going to Palestine they would cleanse themselves. 
Israel’s first Justice Minister, Pinhas Rosenbluth described Palestine as ‘an institute for the fumigation of Jewish vermin’. [Joachim Doron, p.169, Classic Zionism and modern anti-Semitism: parallels and influences’(1883-1914), Studies in Zionism 8, Autumn 1983).  The number of anti-Semites who queued up to pay the Zionists a compliment were legion – from Edouard Drumont to Heinrich Class to Alfred Rosenberg, Minister for Ostland and the Nazi Party’s main theoretician, who wrote in 1919 that ‘Zionism must be vigorously supported in order to encourage a significant number of German Jews to leave for Palestine or other destinations.Francis Nicosia, The Third Reich and the Palestine Question, p.25.

A simple truth – Zionists always resort to false accusations of ‘anti-Semitism’ to defend Israel’s murderous behaviour

Corbyn needs to face up to a simple truth.  Apologists for Israel always resort to accusations of anti-Semitism to defend Israel’s murderous practices.  It is perfectly understandable.  How do you defend the beating and torture of children, the shooting of unarmed demonstrators, the demolition of schools and homes other than by impugning the motive of the accuser? 

When Natalie Portman, the Hollywood star who is a liberal Zionist, recently boycotted the Genesis Prize, Israel’s equivalent of the Nobel prize, because she refused to be in the same room as Benjamin Netanyahu, Likud Minister Yuval Steinitz accused her of ‘anti-Semitism’. Natalie Portman’s snub ‘borders on anti-Semitism,’ says minister.  The examples are legion. 
Stephen Pollard, editor of the Jewish Chronicle, one of the main proponents of the false anti-Semitism allegations stated, in a letter to readers only this week apropos of Corbyn’s apology in The Standard that ‘it contained the odd assertion that anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitic.’  In other words anything but the most anodyne criticism of Israeli Apartheid is anti-Semitic. 

This is not a trivial matter.  The Right in the Labour Party has abandoned a full-on confrontation with Corbyn.  Instead they have resorted to a perverted version of identity politics whereby the oppressor’s identity becomes equally as valid as that of the oppressed.  They are using the language of the left to attack the left.  Corbyn and his office seem incapable of grasping this simple truth. 

What though is one to make of the Momentum National Coordinating Group’s acceptance of Lansman’s position that anti-Semitism is a real problem in the Labour Party?  How is one to explain their utter political bankruptcy?

One thing is for sure.  The false anti-Semitism campaign was launched in order to sabotage Labour’s local election campaign.  It is sapping the strength of the Labour Party and detracting from the Tories problems over Windrush.  Everytime there is an expulsion there is a demand for another one.  As the Tories appeasement of Hitler in the 30’s demonstrated, the more you appease an aggressor the hungrier they become.  Nothing 
Corbyn can or will do will satisfy Labour’s imperialist right and its Zionist allies.

But it is worse than this.  If, by chance, Corbyn were to ever get in power, then he would be confronted with opposition by the bankers and major industrialists that would be ten times what the Arkush and Goldstein can offer.  Then he would be up against the civil service and the rest of the British Establishment.  If he cannot put down loud mouths like John Mann and Wes Streeting there is no way he is going to stand up to the multinationals and investment banks.

Corbyn needs to grow a backbone fast and remove the whip from Streeting, Mann, Ryan, Smeeth, Ian Austin, John Woodcock and Berger. And that should be for starters. Corbyn needs to confront Labour’s Right with wholesale removals of the Whip and deselections.  That is the only way he will see in a radical Labour government.  He has to go on the offensive instead of cringing and making useless apologies for a non-existent anti-Semitism.  Instead we are now seeing calls from Arkush and the Zionists for the removal of the Whip from Chris Williamson for sharing a platform with Jackie Walker.  McDonnell is even more useless when it comes to confronting Labour’s Bastards.

The reality is that having foresworn a campaign of reselecting the right-wing MPs, his enemies on the back benches – over half the PLP – are simply waiting for their chance to stab him in the back (or as in Jess Phillips case, the front).  The only real question is whether they will move before or after a General Election. It is almost certain that a group of maybe 50+ Labour MPs will simply refuse to support Corbyn as Prime Minister.  By failing to take out these MPs now, Corbyn has all but ensured that he will never ever be in a position to form a government. 

That is what the expulsion of Marc Wadsworth really means.  Corbyn’s cowardice today guarantees he will ultimately be seen, despite his undoubted talents, as a weak minded leader who was incapable of standing up to his own back benchers.

The role of Jon Lansman and Momentum is even more despicable.  Having created an organisation 40,000 strong they have ensured that politically it is completely useless.  In these debates Momentum carries absolutely no weight, a product of its lack of democracy.

Tony Greenstein

Sign the Open letter to Jeremy Corbyn and the left on the NEC



LAW statement on the expulsion of Marc Wadsworth

Labour Against the Witchhunt strongly condemns the outrageous decision to expel Marc Wadsworth after a two-day hearing in front of three right-wing members of Labour’s National Constitutional Committee.

Marc is the latest victim of the politically motivated witch-hunt against Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters. Marc Wadsworth, a lifelong campaigner against racism, has been smeared and his reputation tarnished, first by the vile and false allegations against him and now, to top it off, by this deeply unjust verdict. Following 22 months of trial-by-media, our comrade had very little chance of receiving a fair hearing – and he did not get one.

It was enough for Ruth Smeeth MP to state at the hearing that she “felt” Marc Wadsworth was being anti-Semitic at the launch of the Charkrabarti report in June 2016 in order for the NCC to uphold this particular charge. This sets a very dangerous precedent, where the need for any rational evidence is, it seems, redundant.

It is not Marc who has brought the party “into disrepute” – it is the “shameless smears” of the “Corbyn-hating” MPs (Len McCluskey in the New Statesman), who have worked tirelessly to undermine Jeremy Corbyn at every opportunity since his election as Labour leader in 2015.

Chris Williamson MP got it exactly right when he called this decision“perverse”. He has quite rightly criticised the “weaponisation of anti-Semitism for political ends”. We warmly welcome his courageous support for Marc at the hearing and the support of Clive Lewis MP, who supplied a witness statement and said: “I’ve known him for 20 years. He’s an anti-racist campaigner. I watched that video and I don’t think that warranted being expelled from Labour.”

This is in stark contrast to the cynical PR stunt orchestrated by Wes Streeting MP, who has made no secret of his severe dislike for Jeremy Corbyn and his policies. Ruth Smeeth did not need to be ‘protected’ on her way into Church House. LAW’s lobby outside the expulsion hearing was always planned as a protest in support of Marcand not in opposition to Smeeth. If Smeeth, who has been funded by the Israeli lobby even since becoming an MP,cannot deal with walking past a couple of dozen protestors, maybe she (or the members in her Constituency Labour Party) should reconsider if being an MP is the right profession for her.
We call on Jeremy Corbyn, general secretary Jennie Formby and the National Executive Committee to finally put an end to this ongoing witch-hunt against the left in the party. The right-wing will demand more and more scalps. But the history of appeasement in politics teaches us they will never be satisfied. Capitulation to their unscrupulous demands is not the answer. They can never have enough suspensions, enough expulsions, enough compromised principles, including Corbyn’s lifelong support for the rights of the Palestinians.

This campaign against ‘Anti-Semitism’ has become the new anti-communism. We are in a period of new McCarthyism in the Labour Party. It is to be greatly regretted that Jeremy Corbyn, who in the 1980s was the secretary of Labour Against the Witchhunt, seems to be going along with this witch-hunt.

The number of cases of anti-Semitism among Labour Party members upheld remains tiny. The overwhelming majority of allegations have been baseless and politically motivated – used to purge or muzzle members who support Corbyn and those who are critical of Israeli government policies and actions.

We are witnessing the development of a chilling culture of fear, self-censorship, of members afraid to openly ask questions and learn, particularly on social media. We have seen many good Corbyn-supporting comrades being thrown to the wolves of the Tory Party and their supporters in the mainstream media. They are publicly smeared as Holocaust deniers, anti-Semites, racists – and have no way of fighting back against such vile accusations. These smears have ruined lives. Labour’s broken disciplinary procedure, that is not fit for purpose. It has actually resulted in suicides.

We call for an end to the expulsions and suspensions of Labour Party members for their political views. All those summarily expelled or suspended from membership without due process, or as part of the anti-Corbyn witch-hunt, should be immediately reinstated – and that includes Marc Wadsworth, Jackie Walker, Ken Livingstone, Stan Keable, Tony Greenstein and Cyril Chilson.

We agree with the statement by Jewish Voice for Labour, according to which Marc’s “treatment has been a travesty of the transparent, fair and equitable procedures one would expect from a labour movement organisation. It is a further irony that his summary suspension followed by 22 months in limbo would not have been possible if the relevant recommendations of the Chakrabarti Report had been implemented.”
Labour Against the Witchhunt
BCM Box 8932, London WC1N 3XX
Tel: 07817 379 568
Email: info@labouragainstthewitchhunt.org
Web: www.labouragainstthewitchhunt.org
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Labouragainstthewitchhunt/
Twitter: W

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