Nigel Farage, the 'hail fellow well met' bloke at home with South Coast prejudices about how they should scrap benefits

Historically Britain hasn’t had an equivalent of far-right European parties such as the Front Nationale or Italy’s Northern Leagues.  One of the things that made it easier for the Left to operate and to defend the gains made after the  2nd world war, was the strength of the working class coupled with a post-war consensus that full-employment and the NHS were articles of faith, not to be touched.  Pensions and welfare benefits were part of the civilising of capitalism.

No more.  Thursday’s local election results produced a situation where, if it had been a General Election, Labour would have gained 29% under Millionaire Milliband, the Tories 25%, UKIP  23% and the Lib-Dems, who have acted as the government’s faithful nodding poodle, a mere 14%.  The figures, compiled for the BBC by Professor John Curtice, suggest that on the basis of Thursday's voting, Labour might have won 29 per cent in a general election, the Conservatives 25 per cent, Ukip 23 per cent, the Liberal Democrats 14 per cent, and "others" 9 per cent

Contrary to some of the cheaper jibes coming from Cameron and Clarke, UKIP isn’t a fundamentally racist as opposed to a chauvinist party.  It hates’ ‘Johny Foreigner’ no matter who s/e might be.  Although there will no doubt be found plenty of ckoset fascists and ex-fascists in the party, it isn’t like the  BNP  or National Front, derived from the bowels of British fascism but the country villages of  the home countries.

Ed Milliband - not an ounce of socialist politics or personality.  Political programme identical to that of the Tories.  His main claim to fame is that 'blue Labour' is just another establishment party

Laughing all the way to the voting bank - does anyone remember the rise of Robert Kilroy Silk, ex-Labour MP, BBC broadcaster and ex-UKIP MEP?

Although many people believe that UKIP is just an anti-Europe party, beneath its rhetoric lies a belief that has never gone away.  In the words of US Secretary under Truman, Dean Acheson, 'Britain has lost an empire but not yet found a role.'  It was an attempt to solve that quandary that led to the  so-called 'special relationship'.  In other words UKIP envisage an independent Britain carving out its own foreign policy.  They should take a good look at Sir Anthony Eden and Suez and where that led.

The  primary blame for the  ascendancy is the socialist left, who have continued to insist that they are the main enemy rather than those who run capitalism.  They fea ture on the bankers as if Chief Executives and Directors, with their massive 20%+ annual salary increases aren’t also a symptom of capitalism.

I was listening to one woman in the South-Shields by-election, where the Tories were knowced intto 3rd place by UKIP.  ‘I’m voting UKIP’ she said.  ‘I’m fed up with  cuts and closures’.

The problem is that Farage, both himself and his party, are to the right of the Conservative Party.  If that woman seriously believes a coutnry toff, whose trade-mark is a pin-striped suit, is going to come and reverse the iniquities of capitalism when she and others need to seriously think again.

But who can blame such people, the atomised working class of the North, when the manifestos of all 3 main parties, the Green Party being  pretty irrelevant, is almost identical.  All 3 agree the welfare state should be shrunk.  All believe in the privatisation of public services (mainly the Post Office is left) and NHS – indeed New Labour under its previous war-criminal Prime Ministers  Blair and Brown, pioneered such ‘reform’.  All believe in cutting benefits to the unemployed and disabled.  All believe in the holy grail of housing left to the market without any meaningful addition to the public housing stock.  New Labour had 13 years to take Rail back into public ownership.  Instead it squandered the money on Bush’s war in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Below is an article I wrote late last year for Weekly Worker, in which I laid out the rod that the Left had made for its own back.  That was before the SWP had imploded in a rape controversy concerning the ‘rights and privileges’ of members of the SWP Central Committee.

There’s No Success Like Failure

The Never Ending Retreat of the Far Left

Alex Callinicos SWP Chief defended party hacks against accusations  of rape

It is somewhat ironic that the different socialist groups, having predicted the capitalist crisis for years, are now too weak to take advantage of  it.  We have the greatest financial crisis for over a century, if not ever.  Banks that would be bankrupt in an instant but for government bailouts of financial lame ducks, real unemployment at over 3.5 million, a wholesale reversal of the post-war settlement as embodied in the welfare state, to say nothing of an environmental catastrophe around the corner.  All this coupled with three major political parties between whom you would be hardpressed to slip a piece of paper.  It is difficult to imagine a more favourable climate for Marxist and socialist groups, yet the truth is that at no time in the post-war era has the left been so weak.

Nearly a decade ago the SWP successfully destroyed  the Socialist Alliance when their attention span, never great at the best of times, became distracted by the allure of Respect and George Galloway.  Today the electoral embodiment of the far-Left is the misnamed Trade Union & Socialist Coalition, which manages to achieves fewer votes each time it stands for election.  But despite their abject failure to sink roots, Marxist groups and self-declared parties run a mile rather than confront their own failures.  There is no debate about the reasons for the Left’s failure in Britain or how such a failure can be reversed.  The only option left to members is to leave, disenchanted or burnt-out or both.  Both the principal groups on the left – the SWP and Socialist Party – take it as a personal affront when it is suggested that perhaps their strategy needs revising.  Suggest to them that perhaps a balance sheet could be drawn on the successes and failures of the far left and they will look at you blankly as if you were an economist from outer space.

Whereas the secret state and MI5 have long ago transferred their attentions to anarchist and environmental groups, the sects and groups of Britain’s far-left see failure as success and survival as an achievement of its own.  Recruiting in ones or twos is more important than effecting an overall change in the balance of class forces.  The most important battles of all are with each other.  The SWP in particular is an unstable, stalinoid group whose modus operandi is that of a revolving door.  The secret is to ensure that recruits-in are more than recruits-out and any statistical sleight of land is employed to ensure that the first is greater than the second.  What none of the larger groups on the Left will do however, and this includes the Communist Party of Britain, is to draw up any kind of honest assessment of where they have gone wrong as well as what they’ve got right. 

Perhaps I can declare my own interest.  I joined the International Socialists (later SWP) when I was still at school aged 16, having just led a school strike.  Within 3 years I was expelled for breaking the rules of ‘democratic (i.e. bureaucratic) centralism’ when I voted publicly against IS’s attempt to wind up the Anti-Internment League.  I considered the interests of the anti-imperialist struggle and the fight of the nationalist minority in the North of Ireland as more important than the sectarian interests of the IS leadership.  After the branch had twice hesitated to do the deed, Roger Rosewall – IS’s Industrial Organiser at the time – was brought up to Liverpool to effect my expulsion, which he did.  Amongst those abstaining was John Bloxham, pillar of Socialist Organiser/Alliance for Workers Liberty.  Rosewell himself later became Shirley Porter’s bag carrier, an employee of Aims of Industry, leader writer for the Daily Mail and a member of the Industrial Committee of the Social Democratic Party!  Clearly he had been a state asset but to this day I never received an apology from the SWP for the role that Rosewell played and the membership received no explanation either.  After all he too has long disappeared down an Orwelllian memory hole.

Although he later recanted and changed his views in Days of the Locust, at the time it was National Secretary Jim Higgins who effected my expulsion.  I mention this not because my case was in any way exceptional but because it is precisely such behaviour that has alienated thousands of potential revolutionaries over the years.  Although IS(SWP) has a formal system of appeal against expulsions, I doubt if any of the hundreds of expelled SWP members has ever successfully appealed.  By way of comparison, the bourgeois courts are a model of democracy!  Indeed most employers have disciplinary appeal structures in which people are successful.  Yet socialist, Marxist even, groups treat democratic rights and debate as a luxury .

That there are objective reasons for the weakness of the socialist left cannot be doubted.  Prime amongst them is the restructuring of the working class itself as symbolised in the defeat of the Miners’ strike in 1984-5.  Long gone are the big trade union battalions – the miners, dockers, shipyard workers and car workers, to name but a few.  Of course the working class hasn’t disappeared as such, people still need to sell their labour, but it has been fragmented, atomised and depoliticised.  There has been a catastrophic decline in union membership, the abolition of the closed shop and a massive decrease in union militancy.  One of the few blue-collar unions remaining, the RMT, despite moving to the left, is weak and fragmented as a result of rail privatisation.

What is the point of an organised Left that goes through the motions whilst accepting defeat?  If we are really the creatures of forces beyond our control then the only conclusion is that we may as well go home or confine ourselves to the letters page of the Guardian or academic discussion groups.
Internationally capitalism is not only undergoing a massive economic crisis, the worst of which is probably to come, but it has also become more savage and war-like.  Where once the US only tiptoed around the Middle East, preferring to rely on its surrogates, today the region bristles with warships, drones,  missiles and marines.  We are in a state of permanent war yet the Left, apart from the million + march in 2003, has had virtually no impact.  Whereas the international left played a major part in the withdrawal from Vietnam, it has had little impact on the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan.  That has been the prerogative of the armed resistance in Iraq and Afghanistan.

One question that left groups have never faced up to is whether it is indeed possible to replace capitalism given the weakness of our own side.  The emphasis by Marx and socialist theoreticians on the organised working class as an agent for change in society was predicated upon the fact that industrial capitalism had thrown together, in factories, large numbers of workers, whose consciousness would, as a result of the battles they were forced to undergo, generalise from the economic to political.  It wasn’t that the working class was any more oppressed or exploited, in the commonly understood sense of the word, than the peasantry and villeins of the feudal era, but that unlike their predecessors they had the possibility and ability to do something about it and further, that capitalism laid the basis for a society where humanity was free of want.

In Britain, as Lenin recognised, the working class’s conservatism was a direct product of the fact that it dined off the crumbs of British imperialism.  In fact they did better than that.  The Attlee government in 1945 came into office with a crisis whose dimensions were not dissimilar to those of today, although the nature of the crisis was very different, since although Europe had virtually been bankrupted by war, the USA was barely affected economically and further had surplus capital aplenty.  The UK was bankrupt and only a £3 billion loan from the United States kept it afloat.  Yet the Labour government not only nationalised the mines and rail and utilities but it created the NHS and introduced a National Assistance Act that guaranteed everyone a minimum standard of living.  How was it able to do so?  Because the Labour government super-exploited its African and Asian colonies (whilst being forced to concede independence to India, Sri Lanka and Burma).  The rubber plantations of Malaya and the cocoa crops of Ghana, in addition to the forced loans that constituted the sterling area, financed Labour’s reforms.  Today the City of London continues that tradition in a different guise.

The Queen is alleged to have asked a group of economists why they didn’t predict the economic crisis.  Perhaps the same question should be asked of the socialist gurus who preside over the different groups and their pet economists?  Marxism is supposed to be scientific socialism, yet it operates in code with an understanding of dialectics being reserved for the high priests of the order.  The fact is that socialist groups have no greater understanding of the crisis of world capitalism than any bourgeois economist.  I make no claims to an understanding of the dismal science that is economics but it seems to me that we have witnessed the transferrance of production to the third world and Asia whilst Western societies have lived off credit as consumers, having defined the rules of the game via the Dollar and Euro.  If this is true then it raises questions about whether revolutionary change is even possible in the West any longer, even as a theoretical possibility.

The Left Groups

 I stood at the last local elections in Brighton for the Trade Union and Socialist Coalition alongside a supporters of the Socialist Party and Socialist Resistance.  Imagine my surprise when I discovered, mid-campaign, that the SP had produced an extra leaflet, which I had been unaware of, naming only their candidate.  In essence two campaigns were being fought – the electoral campaign and a recruitment campaign for the SP.  As long as TUSC continues as a Heath-Robinson contraption, a coalition of convenience between sections of the RMT bureaucracy and Bob Crowe and the SP, with the SWP, although formally a part, in practice having little to do with it except as a flag of convenience, it has no future.  How can you have a credible electoral group unless it is a party with individual membership? 

The argument that the SP puts forward is that one person one vote was responsible for the Labour Party moving to the right.  In fact it was a symptom of the Left’s lack of a base, even at the height of the Benn campaign for Deputy Leadership.  But to imagine you can create a viable group which refuses to have members, which won’t allow a vote at its national conference in order not to offend trade union leaders who wish to exercise control whilst their own membership remains uninvolved, is an absurdity. 

It is of course welcome that the RMT is involved in supporting TUSC.  However to try and exercise control, not via a block vote even but through a complete absence of democracy, where all decisions are taken by a small handpicked group, is self-defeating.  Political currents will of course exist within such a party but loyalty has to be to the party not the current.  Why?  Because the priority is building for socialism and no political sect or current is capable of doing this.

We have the situation whereby the different sects believe that the only route to socialism lies in their retaining control of what are effectively front groups.  The SP believes a party can only be created by the trade unions, i.e. by the left trade union bureaucracies.  Since that is not going to happen without extreme pressure to break from the Labour Party from below, it effectively means that there will be no other party other than themselves.  A mass party based primarily on individual membership would of course exert its own attractions on the membership of trade unions, but that isn’t a road that even the furthest left of union executives is prepared to contemplate.  The SP’s position is a reflection of their own economism, which is based on an adaptation to the existing economic and trade union consciousness.  For example one of the unions that they put forward as an example to follow is the Prison Officers Association – barely a trade union and one whose membership has never shown the slightest degree of sympathy or support for political prisoners.  The SP’s economism helps explain why it is not involved in international solidarity work or indeed virtually any other campaign outside those with direct economic demands.

I must confess that the SWP’s trajectory is even more difficult to fathom.  It is a long time since they had a ‘turn to industry’ and their politics are eclectic.  Although they are more likely to be involved in international, environmental and anti-war campaigns, at the end of the day they are in complete agreement with the SP that the main purpose of political activity is to recruit to their own sect.
It never ceases to amaze me that groups led, as in the SWP’s case, by distinguished professors aren’t able to see that building one’s own group at the expense of the class is a recipe for never achieving socialism.  Is it any wonder that the British left is by far and away the weakest in western Europe?
Long gone are the days when IS organised a 6 week strike in a Manchester engineering company because of the victimisation of a shop steward (John Deason).  The decline of engineering has seen to that.  But the lack of any base in the working class (the SWP in particular) has meant that their politics have lacked any firm grounding or principle.  The anti-war struggle developed into a love-in with Islamic mullahs and small businessmen.  Respect was founded, not on any class basis, but out of the most opportunistic electoralist reasons.  And likewise, when they woke up to the fact that SWP members were unlikely to benefit from an Islamic vote (unless they were Muslims) they broke for the most opportunistic reasons from Respect.

The Socialist Party has been more immune to this and it does have a base within some unions, in particular PCS.  However it is noticeable that this is at the expense of raising any political demands.  The savage attacks on DWP members are a direct consequence of New Labour’s abolition of the divide between the Employment and Benefits service.  Yet the two are quite different and many people receive benefits whilst at work (less common now that universal benefits are being scrapped) and many looking for work won’t receive income-based benefits at all.  This was symbolised by the creation of Job Centre Plus offices yet PCS  failed to oppose what was a naked ideological attack by New Labour on the very concept of benefits (which is why the successor to Family Credit was termed a Tax Credit – literally the same people swapped department from the DWP to  HMRC).

The failure of the SP to even raise political demands to do with the structure of employment which affected their own members reflected a wider problem.  They didn’t question the political right of management to manage and the government to dictate how the department was organised.  And if they failed to oppose Job Centre Plus they also failed to oppose the use of sanctions against benefit claimants or the use of privatised companies to provide ‘training’ and now the Work Programme.  Yet the logical culmination of the use of Atos, Maximus, A4E and all the other crooked companies that the Tories and New Labour have employed, has been savage cuts to jobs with the prospect that the entire DWP labour force will be contracted out.

In short a failure of politics has led to a failure in the economic battle too.  Yet the major political groups on the Left have their own peculiar definition of sectarianism which goes something like:  ‘if you criticise us then you are being sectarian’.  In other words people are expected to work alongside them, put up with party building at the expense of joint work but if you raise your doubts as to what they are doing then you are the sectarian!

The strength of the Communist Party of Britain lies in its control of the Morning Star, despite its failure to learn any lessons of the collapse of the Soviet Union.   I understand they sent a delegation to ‘socialist’ China recently.  I can only assume they weren’t put up in the same hotel as the IMF!  The CPB operates at the fringes of the TUC and trade union bureaucracy and because it is vastly weakened compared with the halycon days of Harry Pollitt, it or some of its members have been forced into co-operation with their hated rivals in the ‘Trotskyist’ groups.  I refer to Andrew Murray in particular, but also Robert Griffiths.

The Alliance for Workers Liberty is barely worth mentioning.  Led by its own guru, Sean Matgamna, it distinguished itself during the Iraq War by refusing to oppose the occupation and it has adopted much the same attitude to Afghanistan.  Only US troops can guarantee the ability to organise of the Iraqi working class!  What began as support for federalism in Ireland and then support for Zionism in the guise of 2 States for 2 Peoples has become naked support for US imperialism.

What is left of the old International Marxist Group are two groups and a couple of splinters.  Socialist Action operates in a semi-submerged state, its politics combining neo-stalinism and a third worldist approach to national liberation movements.  Alone among the groups it has no paper, albeit issuing a political bulletin fairly regularly by e-mail.  It is active in various solidarity groups, notably Palestine and Venezuela Solidarity Campaigns.  Having tied its fortunes to Ken Livingstone via his Chief of Staff, the late Redmond O’Neill, it has seen its fortunes decline alongside him.

The other group is Socialist Resistance.  On an individual basis I have a high regard for many of its members  but as a group it leaves a lot to be desired.  Marginalised in TUSC it is led by Alan Thornett, who first earned his spurs in the WRP.  Although more principled than most groups it has barely a hundred members.

The reality of the far left today is that the various groups and sects are little more than propaganda groups.  Their intervention in either class or related social struggles is next to zero.  One of the more remarkable features today is that it is the anarchists and direct action activists and groups who are more vibrant.  UK Uncut, Occupy – these are the targets of police repression.  In Brighton we have a vibrant anarchist social centre, the Cowley Club.  When the EDL came to town it wasn’t the SP or the SWP (UAF) who took the lead but the anarchists together with old unattached far-left socialists.  The result was a mass campaign which led to Sussex Police being unable to force a path through Brighton for the fascists.  After just 1/3 of the way along their route they were diverted down the backstreets.  It was as magnificent a victory as anything we saw in the 1970s and 1980’s when the SWP was committed to direct action against the fascists and physical opposition to their marches and activities.  The anarchists had learnt the lessons of the Trotskyists and Red Action of 30 years ago.  In the lead up to the march I was one of those who spoke to a packed meeting of students at Sussex University.  During the demonstration against the EDL one young woman at the meeting came up to me and asked pointedly whether their achievements matched those I had talked about a few days previously.  These are young people for whom the current grouplets of the far left hold no attraction

One group I haven’t mentioned is the Communist Party of Great Britain!   The CPGB is committed to building a Marxist Party.  However this is a purely theoretical position since it abandoned pretty quickly the Campaign for a Marxist Party!  It was part of the Socialist Alliance and even joined, half-heartedly, Respect.  Despite this it proudly proclaims that there are no half-way houses.  Either a Marxist Party nor nothing at all.  The problem is that a Marxist party consisting of all the sects would resemble nothing so much as rats in a bag.  It wouldn’t be the capitalists I had to fear but my own comrades!  The one thing the CPGB has going for it is the most open paper on the Left.  The SP’s ‘The Socialist’ is as dull as ditchwater.  Socialist Worker has never recovered since Paul Foot and is as predictable as ever.  Neither publication boasts an open letters page because debate is frowned upon.  It is ironic that one of the  smallest groups on the left boasts a paper with perhaps the largest readership.  It is an asset that they would be foolish to dispense with.

The one silver cloud in an otherwise bleak sky was the Scottish Socialist Party.  Of course circumstances were more favourable, with PR elections to the Assembly and the recent experience of a successful fight against the Poll Tax.  But nonetheless it pointed the way and that was why the RMT, which was expelled by Labour for supporting it has ended up supporting TUSC ironically. The SP which opposed the direction that Scottish Militant Labour took was nonetheless forced to follow in their footsteps.

That the SSP ultimately collapsed in the wake of Tommy Sheridan’s disastrous libel and perjury trials should not blind us to its successes.  Whether you call it a Labour Party Mark 2 or a half-way house, the fact is that half way is better than not even setting out on the journey.  To broaden the base of socialist ideas and support can never be a bad idea.

What of the Labour Party to which the CPGB is increasingly drawn?  Having been active at the time of the Benn deputy leadership campaign I have no doubt whatever that the position of the SP is essentially correct.  Whether you call it a bourgeois workers party or an openly pro-capitalist party along the lines of the Democrats, the fact is that socialists no longer have any purchase on it.
There was a time when the Labour Party proclaimed its belief in the reform of capitalism.  As Alan Bullock wrote in his biography of Labour’s post-war Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin, the ghost of  the 1930’s stalked the Labour cabinet.  And by that he meant mass unemployment.  Does anyone seriously believe that of today’s party?  When Aneurin Bevan, John Freeman and  Harold Wilson resigned from the Labour Cabinet in 1951, over the introduction of prescription charges, to form the Keep Left (later Tribune) group, their support lay in the constituencies.  Their opponents were in the trade unions – people like Arthur Deakin of the TGWU and Lord Carron of the AUEW.  When New Labour gained office and Gordon Brown refused to reestablish the link between pensions and earnings, it was the union block vote that passed the successful motion.  The CLPs voted by nearly 2-1 against.  When the individual membership of a party swings in such a dramatic fashion from left to right – a swing that is as much in evidence today as it was 15 years ago – then it is time to draw conclusions, one of which is that the Labour Party can only be the graveyard of socialism.

Tony Greenstein

Frances O'Grady - the first woman head of the TUC - learnt her  traditions of backstabbing from Brendan Barber well

Or would it take an attack on Dave Prentis’s expense  account to bring howls and threats of direct action?

What the banner should say is 'Prentis hands off our pensions'

On Thursday this week the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act was given Royal Assent.  Let us take a step back.

In 1971, at the height of the ‘wild-cat’ unofficial strike movement, the Ted Heath government conceded the right not to be unfairly dismissed.  Through the influence of Europe a raft of anti-discrimination law, TUPE and the Working Time Regulations.  The Human Rights Act 1998 also has had an effect on interpretation.

One wonders how many of the  dunderheads who voted UKIP realise that they are further to the right than the Tories.

Apart from extending the qualifying period for unfair dismissal from 1 to 2 years, making all claimants see ACAS first, it pulls a neat stroke.  Unfair dismissal compensation will be a maximum of one year’s salary, around £78,000 per year.  However you will only be able to obtain a maximum of one years salary.

They are not going to abolish most rights, they are going to make it impossible to afford to go to a tribunal by paying £1,200 to have a case set down.  This is equally applicable to Whistleblowing.  So in the wake of Stafford NHS scandal, Savile et. al the  government is going to make it harder to blow the whistle.  If you are a victim of racism you will have to pay £1,200 if you want to seek redress against the racist.  If you are a woman, then an ‘ordinary’ case of sexual harassment won’t get off the starting blocks.  Only rich women, gay people and Black people will be able to afford to to to Employment Tribunal.

Prentis of UNISON in a fighting mode - as he always is till conference has ended

Employment law will increasingly become the prerogative of bankers and the highest-paid workers.  Laws against racial harassment will be meaningless if they cannot be enforced.  And the TUC's 'think thank' will continue churning out pamphlets that no-one reads.

And what has the now ‘feminised’ TUC under Frances O’Grady done to campaign against this?  Absolutely bugger all.  At a stroke a historic gain, won by workers who stood for no nonsense from bullying employers, has been wiped out, with the support of Ed ‘millionaire’ Miliband and his ‘blue dog’ Labourites.

John Hendy QC - legal mouthpiece for the IER

On 12th November I wrote to the IER and Director, Carolyn Jones.  After initially receiving no reply I wrote again.  The IER is effectively a front organisation for the Communist Party of Britain (Morning Star).

Carolyn Jones - Director of the stalinist IER

Jones’s response was that ‘As a charity IER is not as such a campaigning organisation.’  This is a lie.  The IER has campaigned for a Trade Union Freedom Bill which is hardly likely to be passed by the present government when it is busy stripping away workers’ rights, led by that good ‘liberal’ Vince Cable. Defence of existing rights are likely to be more successful in such a situation. 

Even the Employment Law Association has done more to campaign against the fees and their implications than the TUC and the trade union leadership. It seems that the TUC and its offshoots have become so addicted to defeat that they are unable to imagine a situation where they might, in part, be successful.

It seems that the TUC and its offshoots have become so addicted to defeat that they are unable to imagine a situation where they might, in part, be successful

Public Concern at Work, is also non-political, but unlike the IER is an effective campaigning charity.  It has nonetheless secured major amendments to the Public Interest Disclosure Act 1998, including a statutory reversal of Fecitt v NHS Manchester [2012] ICR 372 which determined that vicarious liability did not attach to an employer for their employees’ actions.  Likewise they secured the abolition of the good faith test as a condition of a disclosure being protected.

The Tories said the unions were holding the country 'to ransom'.  The bankers are however a major 'industry'.  It's this that Ted Heath and the TUC sought to put an end to

It would have been relatively easy if, in the wake of the Savile, Stafford NHS and other scandals, IER and the TUC had campaigned against fees on the grounds that someone exposing wrongdoing, in addition to all the other risks, would now have to pay for the privilege.  Instead they said nothing and sat on their hands.

Employment rights legislation was not handed on a plate to workers.  It was a culmination of the inability of union leaders to control their own members.  Hundreds of thousands of workers each year use the tribunal system, including trade unionists.  The effect of these proposals will undoubtedly mean that unions become even more selective in funding cases involving their own members, turning down otherwise meritorious cases.

A traditional 'wild-cat' strike that obtained workers' rights

Oh and just in case you thought you might get a fee waiver if you've been sacked. Sorry.  That's also been tightened up.  If you have a house worth more than £100,000 then that will count towards your fees.

Tony Greenstein

Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act 2013

The final text of the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act 2013 has been published, coming in at a mere 292 pages.  Sections 7-24, and Schedule 2, are the ones which are relevant to employment practitioners.
Notes for editors
1. The Bill was introduced to the House of Commons on 23 May 2012, and completed its passage on 24 April 2013.
2. The provisions which come into force on Royal Assent include:

• A power to include review and sunset provisions in secondary legislation, which streamlines implementation of the government policy on such provisions first published in March 2011.
• A prohibition on Acas disclosing specified information except in certain defined circumstances such as criminal investigation.
• All the order-making powers (that is power to make provisions by means of secondary legislation) come into force, which means that they are available to be exercised.
• 3. Further provisions will come into force on 25 June namely:
• Certain provisions on employment (Part 2) as follows:
• Ensuring that the 2 year qualification period for employment will not apply where the main reason for dismissal is the employee’s political opinions or affiliation.
• Simplifying the procedures and costs of deciding tribunal cases
• New provisions on whistleblowing
• Certain other repeals:
• Abolition of the Agricultural Wages Board for England and Wales, (although the current Agricultural Wage Order will remain in place until 1st October 2013, and similarly applications to Agricultural Dwelling House Advisory Committees will be permitted until that date)

4. Most other provisions are planned to come into effect in October 2013 or April 2014. A detailed implementation timetable will be published on the BIS website shortly.

Tony Greenstein

As Anti-semitism in the Palestine Solidarity Movement has all but vanished the purpose of this blog has become redundant

Over the past 3 months, posts have become rare on this site.  Other commitments have compounded this problem.

When the Blog started in January 2008 Gilad Atzmon, supported by the Zionists, was running wild over the solidarity movement entrapping not a few people who believed that what Israel was doing was a consequence of something inherently

Today, except at the fringes, Atzmon is a discredited figure.  In 2012, a holocaust denier Frances Clarke-Lowes was expelled from PSC to the fury of the Zionists and Harry’s Place. As I argued then, Atzmon was a deliberately divisive character whose main objective was to cause disharmony inside Palestine Solidarity.  He failed.


Jewish rather than the Zionist settler-colonial movement.  It is like saying that White Supremacy in South Africa had something to do with the genetic make-up of the coloniser

As BDS goes from strength to strength – with Stephen Hawking, the latest prominent figure to join the campaign, Atzmon rails in his seclusion, making occasional outbursts attacking BDS as being 'Jewish'.

In May 2013 the situation has changed.  Indymedia woke up, the original cause of allegations of anti-Semitism and eventually learnt the lesson.   The movement has taken off.  My greatest      privilege was speaking at UNISON’s 2007 and 2008 AGMs where a total boycott was passed by over 80%. of conference.

speaking at PSC Conference

Sadly I don’t have the time or energy to continue, though people can send me inidividual articles (& graphics) to put up which I will.  From time to time I hope to post the odd article on my specialism Nazi relations with Zionism during the war rather than covering all stories which others do much better.

I hope you understand.

Lotta Continua
Tony Greenstein

From Al-Araqib to Susiya (English)

70 Years Ago the Representative of Polish Jewry Committed Suicide in Protest at the world' indifference to the Holocaust as the Zionist Leaders Made the Creation of Israel the Priority

Shmuel Zyglebojm

Today the holocaust is on the lips of every reactionary buffoon.  European far-ight politicians pay homage to Yad Vashem by day and then join the Waffen SS ‘veterans’ by night.  But at the time the world Zionist leaders kept quiet.  No Madison Square demonstrations or pickets or Hollywood glitz.  Then all eyes were on building the Aryan (Zionist) state.


Shmuel Zygielbojm was one of 2 elected Jewish leaders in the Polish government-in-exile.  The other one, a Zionist, Ignacy Schwarzbart, who proved worse than useless and like his comrades said nothing publicly about the holocaust.  Quiet whispers in the Establishment’s ears about that which they already knew.

In the last Jewish Council seats in 1938 the Bund (anti-Zionist) obtained 17/20 seats.  The Zionists precisely one.  A pattern repeated all over Poland.  As the holocaust approached Zionism proved its uselessness in its belief that anti-Semitism couldn't be fought.  It was as a final gesture that this hero to Jewish people took his life as the Zionists sought  to keep silent and silence ot hers.
Tony Greenstein

Seventy years ago, as the Warsaw Ghetto was crushed, Szmul Zygielbojm suicide in London was not a futile gesture.

Posted: 17 May 2013 05:30 PM PDT
Cross-post from

Seventy years ago, the Warsaw Ghetto uprising was crushed. In London, Szmul Zygielbojm took his own life in protest. He was a Polish Jew, a socialist and the representative of the Bund (the Jewish workers’ party) in the Polish government in exile.

He left behind a letter in which he explained his action:

 “The latest news that has reached us from Poland makes it clear beyond any doubt that the Germans are now murdering the last remnants of the Jews in Poland with unbridled cruelty. Behind the walls of the ghetto the last act of this tragedy is now being played out.

The responsibility for the crime of the murder of the whole Jewish nationality in Poland rests first of all on those who are carrying it out, but indirectly it falls also upon the whole of humanity, on the peoples of the Allied nations and on their governments, who up to this day have not taken any real steps to halt this crime. By looking on passively upon this murder of defenceless millions – tortured children, women and men – they have become partners to the responsibility.

… I cannot continue to live and to be silent while the remnants of Polish Jewry, whose representative I am, are being murdered. My comrades in the Warsaw ghetto fell with arms in their hands in the last heroic battle. I was not permitted to fall like them, together with them, but I belong with them, in their mass grave.

By my death, I wish to make the strongest possible protest against the passivity with which the world is looking on and permitting the extermination of the Jewish people. I know how little life is worth today, but since I was unable to do anything during my life, perhaps by my death I shall help to break down the indifference of those who have the possibility even now, at the last moment, to save the handful of Polish Jews who are still alive from certain annihilation.

… My life belongs to the Jewish people of Poland, and therefore I hand it over to them now. I yearn that the remnant that has remained of the millions of Polish Jews may live to see liberation together with the Polish masses, and that it shall be permitted to breathe freely in Poland and in a world of freedom and socialistic justice, in compensation for the inhuman suffering and torture inflicted on them. And I believe that such a Poland will arise and such a world will come about…”
Shmuel Zygielbojm

{ 2 comments}

George Jochnowitz May 11, 2011 at 10:51 pm

Laurel Leff, in her book BURIED BY THE TIMES, reports that the the full text of Zygielbojm’s letter appeared in a news story in the Times–on page seven.
Bob Cartwright May 12, 2011 at 12:15 am

Jan Karski had recently brought specific news of the holocaust to Britain and later America. He had met with the leader of the Bund in Warsaw, Leon Feiner. Feiner told Karski “Tell the Jewish leaders, that … they must find the strength and courage to make sacrifices no other statesmen have ever had to make, sacrifices as painful as the fate of my dying people, and as unique.”

Newspaper accounts based on Karski’s reports were published by The New York Times on November 25 and November 26 and The Times of London on December 7.

In December, Karski described the conditions in the ghetto to Zygielbojm. Zygielbojm asked whether Karski had any messages from the Jews in the ghetto. As Karski later wrote, he passed along Feiner’s message:

This is what they want from their leaders in the free countries of the world, this is what they told me to say: “Let them go to all the important English and American offices and agencies. Tell them not to leave until they obtain guarantees that a way has been decided upon to save the Jews. Let them accept no food or drink, let them die a slow death while the world is looking on. Let them die. This may shake the conscience of the world.”

Two weeks later, Zygielbojm spoke again on BBC Radio concerning the fate of the Jews of Poland. “It will actually be a shame to go on living,” he said, “if steps are not taken to halt the greatest crime in human history.”

On April 19, 1943, the Allied governments of the United Kingdom and the United States met in Bermuda, ostensibly to discuss the situation of the Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe. By coincidence, that same day the Nazis attempted to liquidate the remaining Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto and were met with unexpected resistance.

By the beginning of May, the futility of the Bermuda Conference had become apparent. Days later, Zygielbojm received word of the suppression of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and the final liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto. Zygielbojm then killed himself as a protest against the indifference and inaction of the Allied governments in the face of the Holocaust.

Michael Kaminski MEP of Poland's Law & Justice Party - opposed any  apology by Poland for Jedwabne, when anti-Semitic Poles burnt alive some 600 Polish Jews.  Rudolph Vrba, the famous escapee from Auschwitz, whose  Protocols were covered up by the Zionists, called Israel a 'State of Judenrats) - quisling Jewish Councils

In his “suicide letter,” addressed to Polish president Władysław Raczkiewicz and prime minister Władysław Sikorski, Zygielbojm stated that while the Nazis were responsible for the murder of the Polish Jews, the Allies also were culpable:

The responsibility for the crime of the murder of the whole Jewish nationality in Poland rests first of all on those who are carrying it out, but indirectly it falls also upon the whole of humanity, on the peoples of the Allied nations and on their governments, who up to this day have not taken any real steps to halt this crime. By looking on passively upon this murder of defenseless millions tortured children, women and men they have become partners to the responsibility.

I am obliged to state that although the Polish Government contributed largely to the arousing of public opinion in the world, it still did not do enough. It did not do anything that was not routine, that might have been appropriate to the dimensions of the tragedy taking place in Poland….

I cannot continue to live and to be silent while the remnants of Polish Jewry, whose representative I am, are being murdered. My comrades in the Warsaw ghetto fell with arms in their hands in the last heroic battle. I was not permitted to fall like them, together with them, but I belong with them, to their mass grave.

By my death, I wish to give expression to my most profound protest against the inaction in which the world watches and permits the destruction of the Jewish people.

Zygielbojm’s suicide was a deeply reasoned and socially responsible act. But according to the values prevailing in our own society, it should be dismissed or even condemned as a “futile gesture”, a “pointless sacrifice” – and therefore something pathological, neurotic, “self-indulgent”. All my political life I have heard this said about any sacrifice made for a just cause. It was said in the 80s about the miners who tried and failed to save their communities, and about the councillors who stood up for local democracy against rate capping and got surcharged and chucked out of politics for their pains. It’s being said now about Palestinian hunger strikers. It has been the stock-in-trade of Third Way, post-social democratic politics, where to sacrifice one’s political career or “viability” by standing up against power and prejudice is viewed as a self-evidently self-defeating folly. Surely it is this ideology of self-serving “pragmatism” that ought to be dubbed “self-indulgent”? What’s truly pathological and neurotic is the “common sense” of egocentric individualism, the obsession with personal success and status, the desperation to conform to an inhuman, destructive social order.

Mike Marqusee (with amendments to letter)
May 2013

Turning the other cheek?

This video was made yesterday by Tommy Donnellan. Tommy had only a camera in his hands and was deliberately targeted by the IDF, this is evident from the pictures,  and hit 4 times by steel bullets.  The bullets are euphemistically called "rubber bullets"  are in fact steel bullets with a paper thin coat of rubber.  

The damage to Tommys leg is clear from the video.  The very very brave soldiers, covered head to toe with bullet proof underclothing were firing these bullets at the stone throwing children.

Please circulate widely to demonstrate to people how democratic rights are implemented in the occupied territories.

On 13th May I wrote that I would not be continuing to blog for health reasons but the temptation sometimes to comment on current events is too great!  I explained that the blog was originally set up to combat the influence of Gilad Atzmon and in that it had succeeded, much to the annoyance of the Zionists and Harry’s Place. 

It would appear that Sara AB on HP was none too happy with my comments, even though I was banned from posting comments at the site after the victory at PSC AGM in expelling an out and out holocaust denier.    It would appear that Atzmon is still doing concerts and that a certain Roseanne Barr is putting him on at the Levantine Cultural Centre.

The idea that we have or wanted to stop Atzmon playing at concerts is laughable. Ms Barr cites Atzmon’s saying that an anti-Semite these days is someone the Jews hate, not someone who hates the Jews.  Amusing though it is, it certainly isn’t Atzmon’s creation.  Shlomo Sand, the Israeli professor who challenges the myths that Zionism uses to legitimate itself cited the very same ‘joke’.  Fact is that the victims of Israel’s terror machine repeat what they are told by their attackers, that they come as Jews to ‘defend’ themselves  cannot be blamed for their description of their attackers.  It is also the case that hating Jews is not considered 'anti-Semitic' whereas anti-Zionism belongs in the realm of the beast.  There is nothing anti-Semitic in the saying, regardless of more immediate Palestinian concerns.

Of course there are a few nutcases such as Ms Barr, Germany’s Gabi Weber and others who refuse to even look at the evidence of Atzmon’s views.  They are in love with Atzmon and are too stupid to even know it!

Sometimes I look on with despair at the international situation, how the  ‘terrorism’ weapon had been abused regularly and negated.  In particular the Ombudsmen system of oversight of government departments and areas of responsibility is  a weak and pathetic excuse for not having genuine control of an organisation by its workers.

Whistleblowing
Whistleblowing is all in the news these days, not least with the attempts of the USA to lay their hands on Edward Snowden for 'espionage'.  The powerful rarely like their secrets exposed.  One of the results of Derbyshire Unemployed Centre vs Mrs Street and the appeal I conducted at the Employment Appeal Tribunal, Lucas v CDHA, is that in whistlebowing cases, the good faith requirement is scrapped and it goes towards damages.  No longer should good faith be required as a condition of ensuring that a protected disclosure becomes a qualified disclosure.

 Egyptian Military Coup
Those who sow the seed shall reap the rewards as America backs the generals.  It is a tragedy that there are those millions who danced to see Mubarak go should welcome the coup d’etat of the Egyptian army.  The modern day founder of the army and ouster of the  pro-British King Farouk, Gamel Abdel Nasser, was a self-declared secularist with massive support after the blockade of the Suez Canal by Britain and France.

But an army that once held its head up high, has become an arena in which different generals and interest groups conduct an obscene and corrupt auction.  The army believes that it can ride the crest of a wave and resume business as normal.  Although eventually it abandoned Mubarak, it was involved early on in the attempted suppression  of the first ‘revolution’.  It is a military which instructed that anyone associated with anti-government movement should not receive an anaesthetic.

Those who cheer it now may die in the not so distant future at the hands of the same army,  as the Generals reveal their real, corrupt reasons for taking power.  President Morsi was a ‘moderate’ Islamist who believed that America would save him.  He was leader of the weak and corrupt Muslim Brotherhood which has maintained the siege of Gaza.  He was nonetheless elected unlike the generals.

People may cheer the Egyptian armed forces now.   But they will learn that in strengthening the army they are weakening their own cause.

Tony Greenstein

A stunning interview with a boy who explains what a theocracy is and crucifies (!)  the Islamists.

Watch.

Tony Greenstein

Apparently the Nazis were anti-nationalist, left wing univeralists!

Apparently David Hirsh, vehement figurehead of Engage and fierce opponent of all boycotts of Israel, is a leftist!  Well for 'socialist Zionists' he might be but by most other peoples' definition he is a conservative imperialist.

Hirsh pontificating about things he knows nothing about

I first saw this article on Jewssansfrontiers  and I posted the comment beneath.  Although I haven’t posted for some time, I couldn’t resist the temptation to deal with the pretend academic Hirsh, who went down with Yale’s Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Antisemitism, which was deemed by the authorities to be more concerned with political advocacy than scholarship.   Even as ardent a Zionist as Prof. Deborah Lipstadt, of Daving Irving v Penguin fame, wrote in an article ‘How To Study Anti-Semitism’  that:

‘The university defended itself against charges of having succumbed to Muslim pressure by listing the Jewish studies courses taught at the school and stressing its extensive library holdings in the field. (Yale, admittedly, does have an excellent Jewish studies program, and its libraries have one of the best collections in Jewish studies world-wide.) …

There is, however, another side to this story. Apparently, there were people on the Yale campus who were associated with YIISA and who were eager to have it succeed. These friends of YIISA counseled the institute’s leadership that some of its efforts had migrated to the world of advocacy from that of scholarship. They warned YIISA that it was providing fodder to the critics’ claim that it was not a truly academic endeavor.

The anti-nationalist socialist surrounded by Israeli flags!

I have twice participated in YIISA’s activities. I gave a paper at one of its weekly seminar sessions on Holocaust denial and attended its conference last August. While serious scholars who work in this field gave the vast majority of the papers  - They were passionate and well argued. But they were not scholarly in nature.

Two lessons can be drawn from this imbroglio. First, there is a real need for serious academic institutions to facilitate and encourage the highest-level research on anti-Semitism….

Second, this struggle also demonstrates the necessity of differentiating between those who do advocacy and those who do scholarship. Both are critical — but entirely different — endeavors.

The horrors that Ford found so appealing

 But I digress.  In his talk Hirsh  argued that:

'The Nazis are usually thought of as right wing.  But in some ways, they were also similar to the left.  They were radical, they wanted profound change.  They didn’t like nationalism, they had a global programme for changing the whole world.  They were hostile to British and American imperialism and democracy.  They put their big political ambitions before the ‘pursuit of happiness’.  Hitler claimed to be the universalist and he said it was the Jews who wrecked society for everybody by following only their own selfish interests.

But by and large, the left opposed Hitler and his antisemitism….
When Israel was first established, it was supported by most people on the left.  They liked the socialist experiment of the kibbutzim and the Labour Party which ran Israel in its first decades.  They admired Israel as an anti-imperialist movement which defeated the British.  They supported Israel as the underdogs, the survivors of the Holocaust.

The Nazis were univeralists, who ‘were not so much right-wing as radical had a global programme for changing the whole world.  They were hostile to British and American imperialism and democracy’ Whilst conceding that ‘’by and large, the left opposed Hitler and his antisemitism.’

Some of this is just pig ignorant and shows how Hirsh is a master of the superficial and unacquaintted with the history of the Nazi Party.   Calling anti-Zionists 'anti-Semites' is the limit of his knowledge of racism.  As an example of Hitler's opposition to the British Empire one could quote from Mein Kampf:

Germany should not try to take advantage of turbulence in the British Empire, and link its destiny with racially inferior oppressed peoples.  An alliance with Russia against England and France was no substitute for an alliance with England.  An alliance with England and Italy would give Germany the initiative in Europe (Mein Kampf pp. 601-7)….

Inmates of Auschwitz

It is remarkable how, up to two decades later, Hitler’s views had changed very little since the publication of Mein Kampf.  He was to retain this opinion of Britain until he realised that it would not grant him the free hand in Eastern Europe which he craved, and even then, he repeatedly stressed his ambition to come to terms with Britain.  During the Second World War, the last pre-war British ambassador to Berlin, Sir Neville Henderson, wrote that Hitler “combined … admiration for the British race with envy of their achievements and hatred of their opposition to Germany’s excessive aspirations” [Failure of a Mission, Sir Neville Henderson, p.266]

Hitler repeatedly remarked to Albert Speer that the English were “our brothers.  Why fight our brothers?” [Albert Speer: His Battle with the Truth, Gitta Sereny, p.218]

The idea that the Nazis were universalist is laughable.  Hitler consistently talked of the German Volk (people) and saw everything from that absurd perspective.  Jews and the mentally handicapped were not of course part of his racial comradeship.  He was not so much a supporter of German nationalism, as per the Equality, Fraternity and Liberty of the French revolution, as a nationalist.  These sentiments were codified in the 1935 Nuremburg laws.  In this he was one with the Zionists who also derided the 'assimilationists' and the idea that you could be a German Jew as opposed to a Jew residing in Germany, witness the obsession with a Jewish demographic majority in Israel.  There were no ideas or principles that the Nazis had that could be applied world-wide and nor did they make any such claim.  Unless of course world conquest is a form of universalism!

Ford too was a socialist

As for being ‘left-wing’.  Only particularly stupid conservatives makes this claim.  He was funded by the Iron and Coal barons such as Thyssen and Emil Kordof and the other leaders of German heavy industry in particular.  He was  put in power by the German military, led by President Hindenberg.  One of his first acts was the abolition of the unions and its replacement by the German Labour Front led by Robert Ley.  Its purpose was not to organise workers and strikes (which were made illegal) as to spy on workers and ensure they did not form new unions.  A strange form of socialism. The fact that people like Henry Ford supported Hitler, until a Jewish and trade union boycott forced him to distance himself from the Nazis, should tell Hirsh something.  Then again he probably didn't know of the use Ford made of his newspapers such as The Dearborn Independent from 1921-27. 
The American Jewish Historical Society described the ideas in the paper as "anti-immigrant, anti-labor, anti-liquor, and anti-Semitic.  In Henry Ford, Adolph Hitler's Inspiration For Treatment Of Jews - How Henry Ford Helped To Create Auschwitz that Hitler talked of how "I regard Henry Ford as my inspiration" - Adolph Hitler, 1931.   Hitler even had a picture of Ford on his wall.  Perhaps Hirsh considers Ford too as left-wing?

On 30 July 1938, Ford celebrated his 75th birthday by receiving the Grand Cross of the German Eagle, the most important honor that Germany might offer a non-citizen.   He received the award -- a golden Maltese cross embraced by four swastikas -- in his office, joined by the German consuls from Cleveland and Detroit. 

A longtime admirer of Ford's, Adolf Hitler sent a personal note of gratitude to be delivered at the ceremony. Signed on July 7, the parchment scroll warmly thanked Ford for his "humanitarian ideals" and his devotion, along with the German Chancellor, to "the cause of peace." No doubt Ford too was a universalist!

Hitler was also an imperialist, not something normally associated with socialism.  The 'socialist' part of his ‘national socialism’ was a sop to the plebeian element in the Nazi Party, around the SA stormtroopers, who believed that the Jews were the embodiment of capitalism and once they were got rid of then they would take control of industry, the ‘second revolution’.  The Night of the Long Knives settled that particular dream when Ernst Rohm and the unofficial leader of the Nazis ‘left-wing’ Gregor Strasser and hundreds more were murdered at the behest of the Army and the capitalists in June 1934.  Hitler believed in elites, not just racial, but within the Aryan nation, with capitalists and the leaders of industry and finance being at the top of the racial ladder. 

Left wing?  Not unless your definition of socialism includes Israel and the Kibbutz.  But then Hirsh does see the Kibbutzim as socialist rather than as stockade and watch tower settlements, the outposts of the future Israeli state.  A socialism that excluded the Arabs from membership, in other words ones of racial exclusivity is Hirsh's idea of socialism!

David Hirsh was the leader of the Engage group of Zionists who in 2005 decided to oppose the Boycott of Israeli universities.  Engage was later found to be partly funded by the Board of Deputies of British Jews, who are anything but leftists – fake or otherwise.  No doubt the Israeli state contributed to the financing of Engage.

Hirsh is someone who gives lectures about subjects he knows nothing about.  He is a junk academic dealing in cliches and trivia.  Anyone acquainted with Mein Kampf would know of Hitler's oft-expressed comments that he was an admirer of the British Empire and explained how one must never align oneself with those whose countries were under colonial domination.  It was simply that he wanted to replicate it in Eastern Europe.  For example he gave no support to the General Strike and Arab rebellion in Palestine from 1936-9. 

The rest of Hirsch's points such as universalism have been dealt with above and of course Hirsh compared the left and the Nazis whilst denying that the Nazis were right wing.  That I suppose is why on May 2nd he abolished all unions and sent socialists and trade unionists to Dachau.  That is why the Nazi party was given massive support by the capitalists, especially the Iron and Steel barons of the Ruhr.  And oh yes, the old Prussian army generals who put him in power did so because Hitler was such an ardent socialist!!

What Hirsh does is betray his own ignorance of the development and politics of the Nazi party and also the function that anti-Semitism played within it.

That is not to say that Hitler wasn't contemptuous of the conservative parties (DNVP, DVP, Centre Party).  They were gentle folk who would never win over the workers, whom they despised.  They were unable to work amongst the masses and they even purported to believe in democraacy.  In that he was right.  The Nazis organised their plebeian followers and the lumpen proletariat whereas the Conservatives confined their work to the middle classes and rich.  What the industrialists and army feared came to pass.  In exchange for attacking the left, outlawing the KPD (Communists), abolishing the unions they made a deal with the devil.  They surrendered political power to the Nazis and Thyssen ended up in a concentration camp and the army leaders of the attempted putsch were hanged with piano wire.  It was an experience the bourgeoisie are not keen to repeat.

One can only suggest that Hirsh go back to school!

Tony Greenstein

The Arab Spring Dies in Egypt

burned Rabaah al-Adawiya mosque

When Obama was first elected as President I took a lot of flack from those with illusions in the potential of a Black President for my article ‘Obama – the Black Face of US imperialism’  I was even accused of racism.  White liberals often feel guilty at the use of the term 'Uncle Tom' which I used even though, as Joe pointed out, radical Black leaders like Malcolm X regularly assailed Black politicians and time servers as Uncle Toms.  The Socialist Workers Party, ever the opportunist, was fulsome in its coverage of Obama’s election.  Millions the world over breathed a sigh of relief that the era of George Bush jnr. was over and America’s first Black President had been elected.

Military show of force in Cairo

However since those early days and his much heralded speech in Egypt promising a new dawn   (courtesy of Egypt’s dictator Mubarak) Obama has shown himself to be as bad as Bush.  Drone wars and ‘smart power’ have become the hallmark of his Presidency.

Child holds up gas cannisters fired at demonstrators

Even US Presidents usually pay lip-service to democracy.  Obama, who is usually so verbose, has literally been struck dumb.  He can’t oppose the Egyptian military murderers yet he cannot openly support the machine-gunning of unarmed demonstrators.  What we see is a naked exposure of the hypocrisy of Western foreign policy.  Of course it would be difficult to say ‘we are bombing Pakistan and Afghanistan in order to provide a conduit for oil’ but as Clausewitz said, war is a continuation of politics by other means.

Yet even the most cynical observer of politics (the BBC excepted of course!) can see that the Western leaders have been exposed as hypocritical war mongers.  Apparently Obama has difficulty in deciding whether the removal of a democratically elected civilian President is a coup or not!  Black is white and peace means war, as Orwellian doublethink becomes the order of the day. 

injured member of MB carried by riot police

What is happening in Egypt is a demonstration of the fatal weakness of the Arab spring.  Unlike the 1848 revolutions in Europe that were unsuccessful at the time but which nonetheless achieved their objectives with time, the events in Egypt spell the death knell for the Arab spring.

Police storm al-Fath mosque

When demonstrators in Tunisia forced Ben Ali, its long-time dictator out of office in January 2011, it provided hope that Arab politics, frozen for so long with long-serving dictators such as Mubarak and Assad, would now herald in real change.  When Mubarak was forced out of office, its momentum seemed unstoppable, spreading even to Bahrain in the Gulf.  But whereas Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu publicly mourned the departure of Mubarak, western leaders were more astute.  For them the question arose as to how there could be change in the faces of its dictators whilst maintaining Western interests.  It was a dilemma that was solved, firstly in Libya, then Syria and now Egypt.  In the first two, the growth of mass movements who were calling for change, had to be pre-empted. 
What this meant was the militarisation of the struggle.  Instead of mass popular movements that might go on to challenge the existing economic order and in particular imperialist domination of Arab oil, the West decided to arm one or more factions of the opposition.  Instead of a mass movement to oust Assad and Ghadaffi, we saw a military conflict aided by Western air power.

Egypt proves, if proof were needed, that in the Arab and Gulf States, reformism has no possibility of succeeding.  The structure of politics and western interests mean that the struggle is all or nothing.  There can be no Egyptian Kerensky or Attlee.

Women mourns death of her daughter

Unfortunately it is a lesson that the Arab masses have to relearn.  The need for an all-Arab socialist movement, which is capable of planning and channeling the protests, is self-evident.  Western powers will simply pick off individual countries, turning them into sectarian cesspools and seeking to redivide the political entities that western imperialism itself first created (an obvious example is northern Iraq and the Kurdish semi-state there).

No one doubts that the government of Mohammed Morsi in Egypt was truly awful.  Morsi saw himself as the next pharaoh and devised a constitution that gave the President absolute power.  Sharia law and the encroachment of Islamic law, which is nothing but a façade for the legitimation of repression and the entrenchment of economic power in the hands of sections of the petit-bourgeois its clerical offshoot was something that Morsi and the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood proposed and intended. 

MB volunteer sleeps amongst shrouds

There is no doubt that Morsi wished to see an  ‘Islamic’ dictatorship in Egypt.  However Egypt is a largely secular society and the Muslim Brotherhood was and is a conservative political force that sought to co-opt imperialism in its plans.  Right to the end Morsi had illusions that Obama would prevent the military stepping in!

However those millions of Egyptians who hated Morsi, were wrong to support a military take-over in Egypt.  It is staggering that such a large section of society seems to have learnt nothing from the days of Mubarak.  The Egyptian army and police are the deadly enemies of any popular or democratic movement.  They who supported Mubarak and it is noteworthy that the charge against Morsi is that he and his followers used violence against their gaolers when they made their escape from prison.

General Sisi even compares himself to President Gamal Abdel Nasser, the leader of the Free Officers who ousted the pro-British King Farouk.  Those taken in by this comparison know nothing of their own history.  Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal in 1956 and was faced with a triple invasion by Israel, Britain and France.  All of this was plotted in Sevres near Paris.  Israel did the bidding of the two powers, though Ben-Gurion was openly skeptical about whether he would be betrayed, and attacked on cue and Britain and France imposed themselves as ‘peacekeepers’ bombing Port Said in the process!  The British Prime Minister Anthony Eden, who presided over the Suez disaster, will go down as the worst prime minister of the last century (except for Gordon Brown).

The United States under Eisenhower used the Suez invasion to oust the British from the Middle East.  When Britain and France began bombing the US took  both countries to the UN and only by use of   their veto did the Security Council not censor them.  But Eisenhower engineered a run on the pound, in the days when there was still a sterling area and both imperialist powers were forced to withdraw from Egypt.  When David ben-Gurion chafed at the idea of a withdrawal of Zionist forces, Eisenhower memorably said that it was not for those who are guilty of aggrandizement to set conditions on their own withdraw, something we should remember today.

Nasser was the most popular political leader Egypt ever had, even when defeated by Israel in 1967, because he stood up to imperialism.  When he resigned in 1967 popular demands led to his reinstatement.  Sisi on the other hand has only stood up to the Egyptian masses – the Muslim Brotherhood today but workers, socialists and women tomorrow.  Those who supported the military coup will not be able to complain when the military turns against them.

The massacre of Morsi’s supporters, maybe 2,000 have been killed, bodes ill for the future.  Army and police guns may be turned on Islamists today but they will target workers and socialists in the future.  Of course there are some in the Egyptian middle classes who supported Sisi’s actions, who also supported Mubarak.  But Sisi and SCAF (Supreme Council of the Armed Forces) still pretend that they are continuing the Arab spring whilst making it clear that violence against the armed forces is a deadly crime (though massacring unarmed demonstrators is quite acceptable).

The hypocrisy of western leaders should be obvious to anyone who is not blind.  Rhetoric about a ‘war for democracy’ is limited by their own greed and interests.  However the Arab masses have their own interests.

Imperialism seeks to divide people on confessional lines.  It is essential that any popular movement in Arabia has emblazoned on its banner opposition to confessionalism.  It is also crucial that the existing state forces are disarmed.  The mistake in Egypt was to limit the struggle to Mubarak.  But even then those seeking revolution and the overthrow of Zionism in the Middle East face an enormous problem.  The bastion of counter-revolution in the region resides in Saudi Arabia.  From the time of Nasser to today the Saudi ruling class has been active in opposing any popular movements and were unhappy at the removal of Mubarak.  Today, thanks to people like Edward Snowden, this fundamentalist government is exposed as having strong links with Israel, supporting and encouraging the bombing of Iran, just as it supported the Phalange in Lebanon's civil war.  It is now a major supporter of the military in Egypt and is funding them.  The Wahabi rulers of Saudi Arabia are, when not governing, to be found in the nightclubs and brothels of the West.  A poor man who steals a loaf of bread can have his hand and legs amputated whilst the real thieves in society are its rulers.

Western policy in the Arab East, from the earliest times, have been to separate the people from the oil.  This was one reason why whole western armies were transplanted to Saudi Arabia to fight the first Gulf War, as a result of Saddam Hussein’s annexation of Kuwait.  Overcoming this obstacle is crucial to the success of any revolution in the region.  Part of the same problem is the sectarian nature of much of Arab politics.

In Iraq, the US overcame the armed resistance through encouraging and perpetrating civilian massacres and car bombings.  It is one of the ironies of the ‘war against terror’ that whilst nominally fighting Al Queda, in Libya, Iraq and now Syria, they have used them to foster sectarian violence.  It demonstrates that the increased use of western forces in the region is legitimised by a bogus excuse.  Whilst Arab fought and killed Arab in Iraq, the US forces took stock and increased their own power.  In Faluja, the centre of the resistance, the US carried out a massacre as they sealed the city off.  Torture centres and prisons, of which Abu Ghraib was not the worst, were set up.

In the Gulf, the local population is not and will not become revolutionary.  Of course in places such as Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, the Shiite masses have that possibility, if they resist the temptations of sectarianism.  In Bahrain Saudi troops were sent at one point to the aid of King Hamad.  But the centre of any mass movement has to be the thousands of migrant workers in the Gulf.  Of course there are real problems with this strategy, not least that it is easy to deport workers from the Philippines or Thailand.

As the Egyptian Armed Forces prepare for further massacres, the burning need is for imperialism to be placed at the centre of the struggle.

Tony Greenstein

There is a simple test as to whether or not military action is justified.  Does that old war criminal Tony Blair support it?  Only last week Blair was supporting the military rulers in Egypt who have massacred up to 2,000 people and for whom torture is the normal method of investigation.  Clearly the death of a few hundred civilians in Damascus isn't going to cause him to lose sleep.

One of the most obnoxious and stupid of the Christian demonstrators Jill Young.  Not unsurprisingly she is hiding her face.  Her message about other countries being more repressive than Israel is reminiscent of apologists for Apartheid in South Africa.

The public queues up to sign the petition opposing Sodastream and Israel's occupation of the West Bank

Exceptionally the Police escort one particularly abusive Zionist across the street

Zionist Doublethink - a Zionist carries leaflets entitled peace whilst advocating war.  Hitler as also a 'peacemaker' who was attacked by Poland!

Despite repeated threats Mike  on the right continues to come down from London to give support to the Palestinians

The shop is empty as usual, but it pays for a security guard nonetheless.  In the foreground another member of the public shows her support.

Sodastream playing dumb  (or dumber than usual) doesn't know where it's products come from.

If [Zionism] succeeds, it will do a great spiritual and material work for the Jews, but not for them alone. For as I read its meaning it is, among other things, a serious endeavour to mitigate the age-long miseries created for western civilisation by the presence in its midst of a Body which it too long regarded as alien and even hostile, but which it was equally unable to expel or absorb. Surely, for this if for no other reason, it should receive our support. [From co-existence to conquest, International Law and the Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict 1891-1949 by Victor Kattan]

British Brothers League - opposed the entry of Jewish refugees but they were ardently in favour of Zionists

British PM David Lloyd George, an ardent Christian Evangelist, standing shoulder to shoulder with his hero

John Hagee during his speech describing Hitler as god's messenger demonstrates what a hunter does

"Theodor Herzl is the father of Zionism. He was a Jew who at the turn of the 19th century said, this land is our land, God wants us to live there. So he went to the Jews of Europe and said 'I want you to come and join me in the land of Israel.' So few went that Herzl went into depression. Those who came founded Israel; those who did not went through the hell of the holocaust.

"Then god sent a hunter. A hunter is someone with a gun and he forces you. Hitler was a hunter. And the Bible says -- Jeremiah writing -- 'They shall hunt them from every mountain and from every hill and from the holes of the rocks,' meaning there's no place to hide. And that might be offensive to some people but don't let your heart be offended. I didn't write it, Jeremiah wrote it. It was the truth and it is the truth. How did it happen? Because God allowed it to happen. Why did it happen? Because God said my top priority for the Jewish people is to get them to come back to the land of Israel." see video clip of the speech.

John Hagee addressing the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee, the main pro-Zionist organisation in the United States, explaining why Hitler was much misunderstood

The Anti-Defamation League - opposed to 'anti-Semitism' when its anti-Zionism but supporting Christian anti-Semitism of John Hagee

Glenn Beck, who believes the Jews killed Christ, after addressing the Knesset.  Seen here talking to Baruch Mazel a settler and  supporter of Kach, the Zionist Nazi  organisation

‘“…who describes as “accurate” the anti-Semitic tract “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion”; likening Reform rabbis to “radicalized Islam”; calling Holocaust survivor George Soros a “puppet master,” a bloodsucker and a Nazi collaborator; touting the work of a Nazi sympathizer who referred to Eisenhower as “Ike the Kike”; and claiming the Jews killed Jesus.'

Knesset members give a rapturous reception to a prominent anti-Semite

Yet none of this prevented Beck being invited to give an address to Israel’s parliament, the Knesset.

Hitler greets Bishop Muller, head of the Reich Church and Abbot Schachleitner

As Ever Truth is the first Casualty of War

Incompetent rebels mishandled Saudi supplied chemical weapons

Unlike in Iraq, where the inspectors were investigating a genuine question as to whether the Iraqi regime possessed weapons of mass destruction, the role of the UN investigators in Syria is largely a form of political camouflage for war.

If  the photographs are to be believed, then over  1,000 civilians in Ghouta suburb of Damascus, died a horrific and agonising death from the use of Sarin and nerve agents.  Investigators will be stating the obvious but providing a political camouflage for the war mongers.  Incidentally the USA has apparently increased the number of victims by a factor of 5 according to the Gulf Report.

US military officers have repeatedly said that the case against Assad is not a ‘slam dunk’, ie. not certain.  What they haven’t done is explain why this is the case.

It is, equally well known that the West and  Israel in particular do not have any principled objections to the use of chemical weapons. http://www.azvsas.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/the-lies-our-leaders-tell-in-order-to.html   Both Israel and the USA used White Phosphorous against civilians in Gaza and Fallujah and as I showed in the article above, in the case of the war in Iraq the US not only knew about Saddam Hussein’s use of chemical weapons against Iranian troops but provided satellite intelligence in order to ensure their most effective use.  So even if it were true that the Assad regime had used chemical weapons, that is the pretext not the reason for any bombing of the Assad regime.

However it is not at all certain that the Syrian regime did bomb civilians in Damascus.  For a start they had no motive to do so, quite the contrary, since they were winning the war against the Free Syrian Army and the Salafists.

Which Syrian Chemical Attack Account Is More Credible?

By Jim Naureckas
September 02, 2013 "Information Clearing House - "FAIR" -  Let's compare a couple of accounts of the mass deaths apparently caused by chemical weapons in the Damascus suburb of Ghouta on August 21. One account comes from the U.S. government (8/30/13), introduced by Secretary of State John Kerry. The other was published by a Minnesota-based news site called Mint Press News (8/29/13).

The government account expresses "high confidence that the Syrian government carried out a chemical weapons attack" on August 21. The Mint report bore the headline "Syrians in Ghouta Claim Saudi-Supplied Rebels Behind Chemical Attack." Which of these two versions should we find more credible?

The U.S. government, of course, has a track record that will incline informed observers to approach its claims with skepticism–particularly when it's making charges about the proscribed weapons of official enemies. Kerry said in his address that "our intelligence community" has been "more than mindful of the Iraq experience"–as should be anyone listening to Kerry's presentation, because the Iraq experience informs us that secretaries of State can express great confidence about matters that they are completely wrong about, and that U.S. intelligence assessments can be based on distortion of evidence and deliberate suppression of contradictory facts.

Comparing Kerry's presentation on Syria and its accompanying document to Colin Powell's speech to the UN on Iraq, though, one is struck by how little specific evidence was included in the case for the Syrian government's use of chemical weapons. It gives the strong impression of being pieced together from drone surveillance and NSA intercepts, supplemented by Twitter messages and YouTube videos, rather than from on-the-ground reporting or human intelligence. Much of what is offered tries to establish that the victims in Ghouta had been exposed to chemical weapons–a question that indeed had been in some doubt, but had already largely been settled by a report by Doctors Without Borders that reported that thousands of people in the Damascus area had been treated for "neurotoxic symptoms."

On the critical question of who might be responsible for such a chemical attack, Kerry's presentation was much more vague and circumstantial. A key point in the government's white paper is "the detection of rocket launches from regime-controlled territory early in the morning, approximately 90 minutes before the first report of a chemical attack appeared in social media." It's unclear why this is supposed to be persuasive. Do rockets take 90 minutes to reach their targets? Does nerve gas escape from rockets 90 minutes after impact, or, once released, take 90 minutes to cause symptoms?

In a conflict as conscious of the importance of communication as the Syrian Civil War, do citizen journalists wait an hour and a half before reporting an enormous development–the point at which, as Kerry put it, "all hell broke loose in the social media"? Unless there's some reason to expect this kind of a delay, it's very unclear why we should think there's any connection at all between the allegedly observed rocket launches and the later reports of mass poisoning.

When the evidence isn't circumstantial, it's strikingly vague: "We intercepted communications involving a senior official intimately familiar with the offensive who confirmed that chemical weapons were used by the regime on August 21 and was concerned with the UN inspectors obtaining evidence," the report asserts. Taken at face value, it's one of the most damning claims in the government's report–a veritable confession. But how was the identity of this official established? And what exactly did they say that "confirmed" chemical weapons use? Recall that Powell played tapes of Iraqi officials supposedly talking about concealing evidence of banned weapons from inspectors–which turned out to show nothing of the kind. But Powell at least played tapes of the intercepted communication, even as he spun and misrepresented their contents–allowing for the possibility of an independent interpretation of these messages. Perhaps "mindful of the Iraq experience," Kerry allows for no such interpretation.

Another key claim is asserted without substantiation: "Syrian chemical weapons personnel were operating in the Damascus suburb of 'Adra from Sunday, August 18 until early in the morning on Wednesday, August 21, near an area that the regime uses to mix chemical weapons, including sarin." How were these personnel identified, and what were the signs of their operations? How was this place identified as an area used to mix sarin? Here again the information provided was far less detailed than what Powell gave to the UN: Powell's presentation included satellite photographs of sites where proscribed weapons were being made, with an explanation of what they revealed to "experts with years and years of experience": "The two arrows indicate the presence of sure signs that the bunkers are storing chemical munitions," he said, pointing to an annotated photograph of bunkers that turned out to be storing no such thing. Powell's presentation graphically demonstrated that US intelligence analysts are fallible, which is part of why presenting bare assertions without any of the raw materials used to derive those conclusions should not be very convincing.

Kerry did offer an explanation for why the report was so cursory: "In order to protect sources and methods, some of what we know will only be released to members of Congress, the representatives of the American people. That means that some things we do know, we can't talk about publicly." It is not clear, however, why intelligence methods that produced visual and audible evidence that could be shared with the public 10 years ago cannot be similarly utilized today. It does point to why the $52 billion the United States spends on surveillance annually, according to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden (Washington Post, 8/29/13), provides relatively little information that's of value to American democracy: The collection of information is considered so much more valuable than the information collected that it rarely if ever can be used to inform a public debate. Instead, as we discuss the dreadful question of whether to launch a military attack on another country, we are offered an undemocratic "trust us" from the most secretive parts of our government–an offer that history warns us to be extremely wary of.

Unlike the U.S. government, Mint does not have much of a track record, having been founded only about a year and a half ago (CJR, 3/28/12). The founder of the for-profit startup is Mnar Muhawesh, a 24-year-old Palestinian-American woman who believes, reasonably enough, that "our media has absolutely failed our country" (MinnPost, 1/18/12).  One of its two reporters on its Syrian chemical weapons piece, Dale Gavlak, is a longtime Associated Press Mideast stringer who has also done work for NPR and the BBC. AP was one of the few US corporate media outlets to question official assertions about Iraqi WMDs, contrasting Powell's assertions with what could be discerned from on-the-ground reporting (Extra!, 3-4/06).

Mint takes a similar approach to the Syrian story, with a reporter in Ghouta–not Gavlak but Yahya Ababneh, a Jordanian freelancer and journalism grad student–who "spoke directly with the rebels, their family members, victims of the chemical weapons attacks and local residents." The article reports that "many believe that certain rebels received chemical weapons via the Saudi intelligence chief, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, and were responsible for carrying out" the chemical attack. The recipients of the chemical weapons are said to be Jabhat al-Nusra, an Al-Qaeda-linked rebel faction that was caught possessing sarin nerve gas in Turkey, according to Turkish press reports (OE Watch, 7/13).

Mint quotes Abu Abdel-Moneim, described as the father of a rebel killed in the chemical weapons attacks, as saying that his son had described carrying unconventional weapons provided by Saudi Arabia to underground storage tunnels–a "tubelike structure" and a "huge gas bottle." A rebel leader identified as J describes the release of toxic weaponry as accidental, saying, "Some of the fighters handled the weapons improperly and set off the explosions." Another rebel referred to as K complains, "When Saudi Prince Bandar gives such weapons to people, he must give them to those who know how to handle and use them."

Of course, independent media accounts are not necessarily more credible than official reports–or vice versa. As with the government white paper, there are gaps in the Mint account; while Abdel-Moneim cites his late son's account of carrying chemical weapons, the rebels quoted do not indicate how they came to know what they say they know about the origin of the weapons. But unlike the government, Mint is honest about the limits of its knowledge: "Some information in this article could not be independently verified," the story admits. "Mint Press News will continue to provide further information and updates."

This humility about the difficulty of reporting on a covert, invisible attack in the midst of a chaotic civil war actually adds to the credibility of the Mint account. It's those who are most certain about matters of which they clearly lack firsthand knowledge who should make us most skeptical.

Jim Naureckas is editor of EXTRA! Magazine at FAIR

Whether or not the above article is correct is for others to decide, but it sounds extremely credible.  What is not credible are the fake crocodile tears from Obama, Blair, Kerry and co. about chemical weapons when depleted uranium is used on shells as a matter of course.  Those who support nuclear weapons and yet allegedly oppose the use of chemical weapons are born again liars and hypocrites.






Tony Greenstein

The Lies the West Tells regarding Chemical Weapons

Evidence given by Kerry of murder by chemical.  In fact these were civilian victims of US bombing in Iraq!

I make no apologies for returning to the question of the justification given for the attack or explosion in the Ghouta suburbs, Damascus.

Victim of rebel use of  chemical weapons in Damascus

I have already covered in the previous post the strong suggestion by Dale Gavlak of the Michigan Mint Pressthat the explosion was an accident caused by hamfisted rebels.  Below is an article suggestion that far from not having the capability to deliver chemical weapons, the rebels have already been supplied, by the United States via Saudi Arabia, with just such weapons.

Just as the horrors of the Vietnam War were justified on the basis of a non-existent incident in the Gulf of Tonkin, and just as Blair & Bush lied about WMD, we are now seeing Kerry, Hollande and Cameron also lie about what is really motivating these humanitarians.  Geo-political strategy aimed at the control of the Middle East and the elimination of any independent regimes.

Child  Victim

What should the reaction of socialists and anti-imperialists be?  In my opinion when the Syrian regime under Assad, however brutal and reactionary it is, is under attack by imperialism then it should receive critical support.  Likewise the non-fascist element of the rebels, ie. not the Nusi Al Queda group which would engage in a bloodbath of Shi'ites, Alawaites and Christians, should be supported on condition there is a clear break with the fascists.

One thing is above all ironical.  In no European state or even the USA is there a majority for bombing Syria.  Only Israel supports such an action!   That shows just how skin deep democracy really is in the heart of the beast.

Tony Greenstein

Russia Releases Key Findings on Chemical Attack Near Aleppo Indicating Similarity With Rebel-made Weapons

Horrific injuries caused by US/Saudi chemical weapons in Iraq

 

Western Leaders are Lying When They Claim to be Certain that Assad Used Chemical Weapons

Medics in Khan al-Assal, Aleppo, treat an injured man

I recommend the Washingtons Blog for much of this information .  There is a wealth of links to reputable sources in an article Yes, the Syrian Rebels DO Have Access to Chemical Weapons
Even the only reputable Israeli Daily Newspaper Ha'aretz has carried an article 'Jihadists, not Assad, apparently behind reported chemical attack in Syria' By Anshel Pfeffer, its Defence Correspondent, on 24.3.13.
He asked 'Was the first use of chemical weapons in the Syrian civil war carried out by rebel forces fighting against the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad?'

The mysterious explosion last Tuesday near the city of Aleppo, which killed 26 people and wounded dozens, was swiftly labeled by Western intelligence agencies as a chemical incident perpetrated by forces loyal to Assad.

U.S. President Barack Obama was even asked during a press conference in Israel whether the incident would change his administration's non-intervention policy on Syria. But as more information passes, a different picture is beginning to emerge. The explosion claimed the lives of Syrian Armed Forces soldiers who are apparently loyal to Assad, and the Syrian government was quick to demand an international investigation of the incident.
These two facts would indicate that Assad's forces were not behind the attack.      

In addition, from what has been released of the physical and medical evidence, it seems that some of the injuries were caused by chlorine. While chlorine gas has been used in the past as a weapon, mainly in the First World War, the chemical arsenals of nations developing these weapons have for decades focused mainly on mustard gas and various types of nerve agents, which, had they been used last week, would have caused different symptoms that were not observed.

It appears that the target of the attack was a checkpoint manned by Syrian Armed Forces, which reinforces the theory that rebel forces, probably jihadists known to be operating around Aleppo, were behind it. A report by Britain's Channel Four, based on Syrian military sources, claims that the weapon used in the attack may have been a missile carrying a warhead filled with chlorine mixed into a saline solution. The Syrian source also said that a factory that manufactures chlorine is located nearby.

If these claims are true, it would seem to prove that the jihadists have the technical expertise necessary to insert chlorine gas into a warhead and seal it so that the gas does not leak during launch but only upon impact with the target. Another possibility is that it was a conventional missile that hit a chlorine storage tank, causing leaking gases that resulted in casualties.

Not all intelligence experts share the deep concern over a possible use of chemical weapons by Assad's forces. The large stockpiles of chemical substances held by the Syrian regime are closely guarded by the Air Force Intelligence, a branch extremely close to the Assad family, and, despite losing control of wide swathes of Syrian territory, the regime is making extreme efforts to safeguard these assets. Even though the regime has the capability to launch a chemical attack using artillery shells, warplanes and missiles, they normally store chemical substances separately and it is expected that Western intelligence agencies would identify any attempt by the regime to prepare a large quantity of chemical warheads. In one case, a number of months ago, such a mixing operation was noted and the United States issued stern warnings to the Assad regime to desist.      

According to a number of reports, American and perhaps also British special forces are willing to enter Syria to secure the chemical weapons stockpiles from bases in Jordan and Turkey should there be any sign that they are about to be captured or used by terror organizations. The Sunni-dominated Free Syrian Army, which has among its ranks senior officers who defected from forces loyal to Assad, has also prepared a plan to take over the chemical bases in the case of the regime's sudden collapse.

Of course this blows a gaping hole in the certainty of trigger-happy western leaders.  Because they know what the Saudis have supplied the Al Nusri Front, the main rebel group and Al Queda front, with.  They also know that this includes both chemical weapons and a means of delivery.

There is only one conclusion.  Obama wants to bomb Syria and intervene in the conflict there in order to send a message to Iran and Hizbollah.  Israel of course is fully behind him.

Tony Greenstein

 

High-Level U.S. Intelligence Officers: Syrian Government Didn’t Launch Chemical Weapons

Posted on September 7, 2013 by WashingtonsBlog
 

Goering - Hitler's Deputy, who was sentenced to death at Nuremburg (but committed suicide before he could be executed) explains the policy that Obama is following

 

Peace demonstrators outside the White House

 Below is yet more evidence that Obama and Kerry are lying through their teeth.  Congressmen who have seen the classified ‘evidence’ report that it is unconvincing and proves nothing.  The US has planned for years to attack Syria and the civil war has now provided an ideal opportunity to reshape the Middle East, alongside their Turkish, Saudi and Israeli allies.


It is noticeable that in all of Obama's western 'democratic' allies such as France and Canada, the populations are overwhelmingly against the war attack, which Obama is now planning to be far greater than a few cruise missiles.  Even in the USA the population is opposed to the attack, which poses problems regarding the vote in Congress.  Only in Britain has Cameron bowed to public opinion , when he was unexpectedly defeated in the House of Commons

Our leaders are weak, despite their bravado, and we should bombard our elected representatives and make every effort to build another million strong march against any war.



Tony Greenstein

Obama’s friends, the Syrian Jihadists behead a Catholic priest

Warning - This Video is Gruesome and You should not Watch It If  You Are Likely to be Traumatised

Numerous Intelligence Officials Question Administration’s Claims

A report from the Russian Arabic-language channel RT Arabic shows captured rebel arsenals apparently with chemical agents manufactured in Saudi Arabia and gas masks, supporting Russian claims that the rebels are the culprits in the gas attack

Colin Powell Presenting the United Nations with 'proof'' that Iraq possessed  Weapons of Mass Destruction - he later apologised for what he did

Preface:   Without doubt, intelligence is being manipulated to justify war against Syria.  Here, here,   here, here  and here.

Without doubt, the Syrian rebels had access to chemical weapons … and have apparently used them in the recent past.  Associated Press reported  last week:

An intercept of Syrian military officials discussing the strike was among low-level staff, with no direct evidence tying the attack back to an Assad insider or even a senior Syrian commander, the officials said.

So while Secretary of State John Kerry said Monday that links between the attack and the Assad government are “undeniable,” U.S. intelligence officials are not so certain that the suspected chemical attack was carried out on Assad’s orders, or even completely sure it was carried out by government forces, the officials said.

    ***

Obamas 'democratic friends' the Syrian rebels behead a man

The Knife Used by Obama and the Saudi's friends to Execute Innocent People

Another possibility that officials would hope to rule out: that stocks had fallen out of the government’s control and were deployed by rebels in a callous and calculated attempt to draw the West into the war.

Reuters notes   today:

With the United States threatening to attack Syria, U.S. and allied intelligence services are still trying to work out who ordered the poison gas attack on rebel-held neighborhoods near Damascus.

No direct link to President Bashar al-Assad or his inner circle has been publicly demonstrated, and some U.S. sources say intelligence experts are not sure whether the Syrian leader knew of the attack before it was launched or was only informed about it afterward.

Indeed, numerous intelligence officers say that the rebels likely carried out the August 21st attack.

For example, the Daily Caller reports:

The Obama administration has selectively used intelligence to justify military strikes on Syria, former military officers with access to the original intelligence reports say, in a manner that goes far beyond what critics charged the Bush administration of doing in the run-up to the 2003 Iraq war.

According to these officers, who served in top positions in the United States, Britain, France, Israel, and Jordan, a Syrian military communication intercepted by Israel’s famed Unit 8200 electronic intelligence outfit has been doctored so that it leads a reader to just the opposite conclusion reached by the original report.

    ***

The doctored report was picked up on Israel’s Channel 2 TV  on Aug. 24, then by Focus magazine in Germany, the Times of Israel and eventually by The Cable.

According to the doctored report, the chemical attack was carried out by the 155th Brigade of the 4th Armored Division of the Syrian Army, an elite unit commanded by Maher al-Assad, the president’s brother.

However, the original communication intercepted by Unit 8200 between a major in command of the rocket troops assigned to the 155th Brigade of the 4th Armored Division, and the general staff, shows just the opposite.

The general staff officer asked the major if he was responsible for the chemical weapons attack. From the tone of the conversation, it was clear that “the Syrian general staff were out of their minds with panic that an unauthorized strike had been launched by the 155th Brigade in express defiance of their instructions,” the former officers say.

According to the transcript of the original Unit 8200 report, the major “hotly denied firing any of his missiles” and invited the general staff to come and verify that all his weapons were present.

The report contains a note at the end that the major was interrogated by Syrian intelligence for three days, then returned to command of his unit. “All of his weapons were accounted for,” the report stated.

    ***

An Egyptian intelligence report describes a meeting in Turkey between military intelligence officials from Turkey and Qatar and Syrian rebels. One of the participants states, “there will be a game changing event on August 21st” that will “bring the U.S. into a bombing campaign” against the Syrian regime.

The chemical weapons strike on Moudhamiya, an area under rebel control, took place on August 21. “Egyptian military intelligence insists it was a combined Turkish/Qatar/rebel  false flag operation,” said a source familiar with the report.

[A "false flag" is a ploy for starting war which has been used by governments around the world for thousands of years.]

Agents provacateurs are as old as warfare itself. What better than a false flag attack, staged by al Qaeda and its al Nusra front allies in Syria, to drag the United States into a war?

And 12 very high-level former intelligence officials wrote the following memorandum to Obama today:

We regret to inform you that some of our former co-workers are telling us, categorically, that contrary to the claims of your administration, the most reliable intelligence shows that Bashar al-Assad was NOT responsible for the chemical incident that killed and injured Syrian civilians on August 21, and that British intelligence officials also know this. In writing this brief report, we choose to assume that you have not been fully informed because your advisers decided to afford you the opportunity for what is commonly known as “plausible denial.”

    ***

There is a growing body of evidence from numerous sources in the Middle East — mostly affiliated with the Syrian opposition and its supporters — providing a strong circumstantial case that the August 21 chemical incident was a pre-planned provocation by the Syrian opposition and its Saudi and Turkish supporters. The aim is reported to have been to create the kind of incident that would bring the United States into the war.

According to some reports, canisters containing chemical agent were brought into a suburb of Damascus, where they were then opened. Some people in the immediate vicinity died; others were injured.

We are unaware of any reliable evidence that a Syrian military rocket capable of carrying a chemical agent was fired into the area. In fact, we are aware of no reliable physical evidence to support the claim that this was a result of a strike by a Syrian military unit with expertise in chemical weapons.

In addition, we have learned that on August 13-14, 2013, Western-sponsored opposition forces in Turkey started advance preparations for a major, irregular military surge. Initial meetings between senior opposition military commanders and Qatari, Turkish and U.S. intelligence officials took place at the converted Turkish military garrison in Antakya, Hatay Province, now used as the command center and headquarters of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) and their foreign sponsors.

Senior opposition commanders who came from Istanbul pre-briefed the regional commanders on an imminent escalation in the fighting due to “a war-changing development,” which, in turn, would lead to a U.S.-led bombing of Syria.

At operations coordinating meetings at Antakya, attended by senior Turkish, Qatari and U.S. intelligence officials as well as senior commanders of the Syrian opposition, the Syrians were told that the bombing would start in a few days. Opposition leaders were ordered to prepare their forces quickly to exploit the U.S. bombing, march into Damascus, and remove the Bashar al-Assad government

The Qatari and Turkish intelligence officials assured the Syrian regional commanders that they would be provided with plenty of weapons for the coming offensive. And they were. A weapons distribution operation unprecedented in scope began in all opposition camps on August 21-23. The weapons were distributed from storehouses controlled by Qatari and Turkish intelligence under the tight supervision of U.S. intelligence officers.

Posted in Politics / World News

12 U.S. Intelligence Officials Tell Obama It Wasn’t Assad

Posted on September 7, 2013 by WashingtonsBlog   

Cross-Posted from WarIsACrime.org; originally posted at Consortiumnews.com

By Ray McGovern, a 27-year CIA veteran, who chaired National Intelligence Estimates and personally delivered intelligence briefings to Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, their Vice Presidents, Secretaries of State, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and many other senior government officials

Editor Note: Despite the Obama administration’s supposedly “high confidence” regarding Syrian government guilt over the Aug. 21 chemical attack near Damascus, a dozen former U.S. military and intelligence officials are telling President Obama that they are picking up information that undercuts the Official Story.

MEMORANDUM FOR: The President
FROM: Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)
SUBJECT: Is Syria a Trap?Precedence: IMMEDIATE

We regret to inform you that some of our former co-workers are telling us, categorically, that contrary to the claims of your administration, the most reliable intelligence shows that Bashar al-Assad was NOT responsible for the chemical incident that killed and injured Syrian civilians on August 21, and that British intelligence officials also know this. In writing this brief report, we choose to assume that you have not been fully informed because your advisers decided to afford you the opportunity for what is commonly known as “plausible denial.”

We have been down this road before – with President George W. Bush, to whom we addressed our first VIPS memorandum immediately after Colin Powell’s Feb. 5, 2003 U.N. speech, in which he peddled fraudulent “intelligence” to support attacking Iraq. Then, also, we chose to give President Bush the benefit of the doubt, thinking he was being misled – or, at the least, very poorly advised.

Secretary of State John Kerry departs for a Sept. 6 trip to Europe where he plans to meet with officials to discuss the Syrian crisis and other issues.

The fraudulent nature of Powell’s speech was a no-brainer. And so, that very afternoon we strongly urged your predecessor to “widen the discussion beyond …  the circle of those advisers clearly bent on a war for which we see no compelling reason and from which we believe the unintended consequences are likely to be catastrophic.” We offer you the same advice today.

Our sources confirm that a chemical incident of some sort did cause fatalities and injuries on August 21 in a suburb of Damascus. They insist, however, that the incident was not the result of an attack by the Syrian Army using military-grade chemical weapons from its arsenal. That is the most salient fact, according to CIA officers working on the Syria issue. They tell us that CIA Director John Brennan is perpetrating a pre-Iraq-War-type fraud on members of Congress, the media, the public – and perhaps even you.

We have observed John Brennan closely over recent years and, sadly, we find what our former colleagues are now telling us easy to believe. Sadder still, this goes in spades for those of us who have worked with him personally; we give him zero credence. And that goes, as well, for his titular boss, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who has admitted he gave “clearly erroneous” sworn testimony to Congress denying NSA eavesdropping on Americans.

Intelligence Summary or Political Ploy?

That Secretary of State John Kerry would invoke Clapper’s name this week in Congressional testimony, in an apparent attempt to enhance the credibility of the four-page “Government Assessment” strikes us as odd. The more so, since it was, for some unexplained reason, not Clapper but the White House that released the “assessment.”

This is not a fine point. We know how these things are done. Although the “Government Assessment” is being sold to the media as an “intelligence summary,” it is a political, not an intelligence document. The drafters, massagers, and fixers avoided presenting essential detail. Moreover, they conceded upfront that, though they pinned “high confidence” on the assessment, it still fell “short of confirmation.”

Déjà Fraud: This brings a flashback to the famous Downing Street Minutes of July 23, 2002, on Iraq, The minutes record the Richard Dearlove, then head of British intelligence, reporting to Prime Minister Tony Blair and other senior officials that President Bush had decided to remove Saddam Hussein through military action that would be “justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD.” Dearlove had gotten the word from then-CIA Director George Tenet whom he visited at CIA headquarters on July 20.

The discussion that followed centered on the ephemeral nature of the evidence, prompting Dearlove to explain: “But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.” We are concerned that this is precisely what has happened with the “intelligence” on Syria.

The Intelligence

There is a growing body of evidence from numerous sources in the Middle East — mostly affiliated with the Syrian opposition and its supporters — providing a strong circumstantial case that the August 21 chemical incident was a pre-planned provocation by the Syrian opposition and its Saudi and Turkish supporters. The aim is reported to have been to create the kind of incident that would bring the United States into the war.

According to some reports, canisters containing chemical agent were brought into a suburb of Damascus, where they were then opened. Some people in the immediate vicinity died; others were injured.

We are unaware of any reliable evidence that a Syrian military rocket capable of carrying a chemical agent was fired into the area. In fact, we are aware of no reliable physical evidence to support the claim that this was a result of a strike by a Syrian military unit with expertise in chemical weapons.

In addition, we have learned that on August 13-14, 2013, Western-sponsored opposition forces in Turkey started advance preparations for a major, irregular military surge. Initial meetings between senior opposition military commanders and Qatari, Turkish and U.S. intelligence officials took place at the converted Turkish military garrison in Antakya, Hatay Province, now used as the command center and headquarters of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) and their foreign sponsors.

Senior opposition commanders who came from Istanbul pre-briefed the regional commanders on an imminent escalation in the fighting due to “a war-changing development,” which, in turn, would lead to a U.S.-led bombing of Syria.

At operations coordinating meetings at Antakya, attended by senior Turkish, Qatari and U.S. intelligence officials as well as senior commanders of the Syrian opposition, the Syrians were told that the bombing would start in a few days. Opposition leaders were ordered to prepare their forces quickly to exploit the U.S. bombing, march into Damascus, and remove the Bashar al-Assad government

The Qatari and Turkish intelligence officials assured the Syrian regional commanders that they would be provided with plenty of weapons for the coming offensive. And they were. A weapons distribution operation unprecedented in scope began in all opposition camps on August 21-23. The weapons were distributed from storehouses controlled by Qatari and Turkish intelligence under the tight supervision of U.S. intelligence officers.

Cui bono?

That the various groups trying to overthrow Syrian President Bashar al-Assad have ample incentive to get the U.S. more deeply involved in support of that effort is clear. Until now, it has not been quite as clear that the Netanyahu government in Israel has equally powerful incentive to get Washington more deeply engaged in yet another war in the area. But with outspoken urging coming from Israel and those Americans who lobby for Israeli interests, this priority Israeli objective is becoming crystal clear.

Reporter Judi Rudoren, writing from Jerusalem in an important article in Friday’s New York Times addresses Israeli motivation in an uncommonly candid way. Her article, titled “Israel Backs Limited Strike Against Syria,” notes that the Israelis have argued, quietly, that the best outcome for Syria’s two-and-a-half-year-old civil war, at least for the moment, is no outcome. Rudoren continues:

“For Jerusalem, the status quo, horrific as it may be from a humanitarian perspective, seems preferable to either a victory by Mr. Assad’s government and his Iranian backers or a strengthening of rebel groups, increasingly dominated by Sunni jihadis.

“‘This is a playoff situation in which you need both teams to lose, but at least you don’t want one to win — we’ll settle for a tie,’ said Alon Pinkas, a former Israeli consul general in New York. ‘Let them both bleed, hemorrhage to death: that’s the strategic thinking here. As long as this lingers, there’s no real threat from Syria.’”

We think this is the way Israel’s current leaders look at the situation in Syria, and that deeper U.S. involvement – albeit, initially, by “limited” military strikes – is likely to ensure that there is no early resolution of the conflict in Syria. The longer Sunni and Shia are at each other’s throats in Syria and in the wider region, the safer Israel calculates that it is.

That Syria’s main ally is Iran, with whom it has a mutual defense treaty, also plays a role in Israeli calculations. Iran’s leaders are not likely to be able to have much military impact in Syria, and Israel can highlight that as an embarrassment for Tehran.

Iran’s Role

Iran can readily be blamed by association and charged with all manner of provocation, real and imagined. Some have seen Israel’s hand in the provenance of the most damaging charges against Assad regarding chemical weapons and our experience suggests to us that such is supremely possible.

Possible also is a false-flag attack by an interested party resulting in the sinking or damaging, say, of one of the five U.S. destroyers now on patrol just west of Syria. Our mainstream media could be counted on to milk that for all it’s worth, and you would find yourself under still more pressure to widen U.S. military involvement in Syria – and perhaps beyond, against Iran.

Iran has joined those who blame the Syrian rebels for the August 21 chemical incident, and has been quick to warn the U.S. not to get more deeply involved. According to the Iranian English-channel Press TV, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javid Zarif has claimed: “The Syria crisis is a trap set by Zionist pressure groups for [the United States].”

Actually, he may be not far off the mark. But we think your advisers may be chary of entertaining this notion. Thus, we see as our continuing responsibility to try to get word to you so as to ensure that you and other decision makers are given the full picture.

Inevitable Retaliation

We hope your advisers have warned you that retaliation for attacks on Syrian are not a matter of IF, but rather WHERE and WHEN. Retaliation is inevitable. For example, terrorist strikes on U.S. embassies and other installations are likely to make what happened to the U.S. “Mission” in Benghazi on Sept. 11, 2012, look like a minor dust-up by comparison. One of us addressed this key consideration directly a week ago in an article titled “Possible Consequences of a U.S. Military Attack on Syria – Remembering the U.S. Marine Barracks Destruction in Beirut, 1983.”

For the Steering Group, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity

Thomas Drake, Senior Executive, NSA (former)
Philip Giraldi, CIA, Operations Officer (ret.)
Matthew Hoh, former Capt., USMC, Iraq & Foreign Service Officer, Afghanistan
Larry Johnson, CIA & State Department (ret.)
W. Patrick Lang, Senior Executive and Defense Intelligence Officer, DIA (ret.)
David MacMichael, National Intelligence Council (ret.)
Ray McGovern, former US Army infantry/intelligence officer & CIA analyst (ret.)
Elizabeth Murray, Deputy National Intelligence Officer for Middle East (ret.)
Todd Pierce, US Army Judge Advocate General (ret.)
Sam Provance, former Sgt., US Army, Iraq
Coleen Rowley, Division Council & Special Agent, FBI (ret.)
Ann Wright, Col., US Army (ret); Foreign Service Officer (ret.)

The Dissection of Obama's American Exceptionalism 

This is a must watch interview with Chris Hedges, for Middle East Correspondent and Bureau Chief for the New York Times and Rania Masri, an environmental and human rights activist and Professor in Lebanon.

Story teller masquerading as historian

One of hundreds of Jewish members of the French resistance Denise Gamzon of the E.I.F. (Jewish Scouts of France)

Edouard Drumont - leading French anti-Semite and anti-Dreyfusard - friend of Herzl

Simon Schama - Story teller masquerading as historian

Tonight we saw as good an example as one is likely to get of the BBC's institutionalised Zionist bias.

Simon Schama's History of the Jews was a travesty of history.  Faction not factual.

By his own admission Schama is a Zionist, one of whose central tenets is that anti-Semitism cannot be fought.  Schama thus made the facts of the Dreyfus Affair fit into a preconceived mould and botched them all.

Theodor Herzl - founder of Political Zionism and an opponent of combating anti-Semisim

Schama dwelt at some length on Herzl’s apparent reaction to the conviction and exile of Captain Alfred Dreyfus without even mentioning his exoneration still less the massive campaign in his support led by Emile Zola and his famous article J’Accuse.

Schama did mention the leader of the anti-Dreyfusards, Edouard Drumont but ‘forgot’ to mention that Herzl befriended him and went out of his way to seek a favourable review of his pamphlet 'The Jewish State' (Der Judenstaat) in the anti-Semitic newspaper 'La Libre Parole' which Drumont duly praised. 

Captain Alfred Dreyfuss whose exoneration Schama 'forgot' to mention.

Nor is there the slightest evidence that Herzl was even interested in the Dreyfus Affair nor did he ever write about it. Bernard Lazarre, author of Anti-semitism, its History and Causes, resigned from the first Zionist Actions committee, because of Herzl's attitude to Dreyfus.

Schama did not attempt to place the Dreyfus Affair in the context of French politics and the attempt by the clerical-military caste to reverse the French Revolution and its Emancipation of the Jews.   As Clermont-Tonnerre said in the Constituent Assembly in 1789'To the Jews as individuals everything, as a nation nothing.'

The fact that over 75% of French Jews survived the Nazi occupation was the legacy of the Dreyfus Affair. 

I wonder whether we will see a history of Palestine written by a Palestinian historian  such as Walid Khalidi?   Or would that be a breach of  BBC neutrality?

BBC 'neutrality' prevents any mention of the expulsion of the Palestinians

Mishor Adumum hwere Sodastream is based

Police have difficulty policing the demonsrations despite their obvious pro-Zionist bias

The campaign against Sodastream in Brighton has stirred up both a national and international campaign against this company.  Based in West Bank near Maaleh Adumim it employs Palestinian slave labour Slave labour because unions are not allowed and the company is based on the very land its workers used to live on.

 

A prettified ad for Sodastream

In Brighton the demonstration started from the Clocktower in the Centre of Brighton at 12.30 and we marched via a shop in Ship Street, then Robert Dyas and Argos to Sodastream itself where the Zionists had based themselves.  Despite attempts by the Police demonstrators swarmed across Western Road and I found myself in the midst of a group of Zionists who tried to surreptitiously attack me (‘Peace being their slogan’)!

One of many national pickets of Sodastream

As usual the no. of Zionist supporter were outnumbered by anti-racists

On of those who wanted a share of the action was EDL supporter Simon Cobbs who is their leader.  It seems that these days having an association with anti-Semites is a positive advantage if you’re a Zionist.  Cobbs who is free with his threats and use of violence pushed me – big mistake as I retaliated and he fell back when realising that bullies needed to be stood up to.





The other main group among them were a group of fundamental Christians whose support for Israel is based on the ‘return of the Jews’ to Palestine in order that the second coming of Christ can be hastened via the fires and battles of Armageddon.  Most Jews of course, who reject Jesus, will perish and the Elect, in what they call Rapture, will ascend to heaven.  Mad?  Yes but these are the creatures who butchered over 100,000 ‘heathen’ Mayan Indians in Guatemala and who have encouraged every war of the United States.
  

The Zionists had nothing to say and spent their time trying to drown us out.  After all it is difficult to defend land theft. They reserved their venom for anti-Zionist Jews whom they termed ‘traitors’ – I’ve never understood this as I’ve never owed Zionism any loyalty but of course this was the charge made by Hitler against anti-fascist Germans.  And then one or two whispered Kapos at us, oblivious of the notorious collaboration of the Zionist movement with the Nazi movement both before and after 1933.  After all they and the Zionists agreed on one thing – the Jews didn’t belong in Germany. 

Boycott is a weapon of the oppressed.  Apart from Capt. Boycott its first use in Britain was the Boycott of Slave Grown Sugar in the Caribbean (the Church of England owned the Codrington plantation in Barbados).  In South Africa the Boycott was crucial in the demise of Apartheid.  Again Israel opposed it as White South Africa was its best friend and it supplied nuclear technology and other weaponry to it..  The Christian Fundamentalists were equally opposed.  After all it was in the Bible Belt of the USA that segregation was based and where the Ku Klux Klan was strongest.  And in 1933 there was a massive boycott of Nazi Germany by Jews and the international labour movement.  It was held that it was likely to cause the overthrow of Hitler, such was its effect.
 

Jews for Boycotting Israeli Goods attended the picket

Brighton Clocktower where we met

Goering summoned the leadership of the German Jewish community in March 27 1933 to get them to have the boycott called off.  They claimed it was impossible but the Zionists, who had secured an invitation to the meeting after much effort, spoke out.  They would destroy the Boycott?  The condition being that a Transfer Agreement was signed between German and Jewish Palestine.  It was called Ha'avara (see Edwin Black’s book on Ha’avara for the details).  In order to build up Palestine the Zionist leadership deliberately sacrificed the Jews of Europe because people naturally said that if the Jews were trading with Hitler why shouldn’t they?  It was difficult to point out that the Zionists represented only themselves (& to be fair many Zionists opposed Ha'avara, especially the right-wing Revisionists).
 
By 1939 60% of the investment in Jewish Palestine was from Nazi Germany!  They even spied on the German communist party for them.  In other words the real Jewish traitors and ‘kapos’ were the Zionists.  Which is why in Poland, which was the heart of European Jewry, in 1938 they rejected the Zionist parties overwhelmingly.  In Warsaw out of 20 Jewish seats, 17 went to the anti-Zionist Bund.

Christian Fundie climbs lamppost - Palestinian flag annoys racists

I am posting a video that the Zionists took so bear that in mind.  But we distributed 800 leaflets and obtained even more signatories for a petition to close down Ecostream.  Once again the Police displayed their bias when we were removed across the street but the Zionists ensured that once again Sodastream (neighbouring shops had no customers!).