REVIEW - Paul Kelemen, The British Left and Zionism – History of a Divorce

April 29, 2019, 7:26 pm

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Slaying the Myth that Socialists ever supported Zionism

It is not often that a book appears which can be classed as indispensable to an understanding of Zionism, the racist and colonialist ideology of the movement that established the Israeli state. This book describes the relationship of Zionism to the Left and the Labour Movement in Britain.

There are many books which have been written about the history of Zionism , most of them tedious and repetitive, whose conclusions were formed before even a word was written. Books under this heading include Tel Aviv Professor of Political Science David Vital’s The Origins of Zionism and Zionism: The formative Years. There are some books on Zionism by Zionists which are well worth reading for example Walter Lacquer’s History of Zionism and Noah Lucas’s The Modern History of Israel.

Anyone wanting a comprehensive Marxist analysis of Zionism could not do better than Nathan Weinstock’s Zionism: A False Messiah. This is despite Weinstock himself undergoing a personal and political crisis which ended up in him becoming a Zionist![1]

Dorset Street in the Jewish East End at the beginning of the 20th century

For an understanding of the origins of the Zionist labour movement Ze’ev Sternhell’s The Founding Myths of Zionism is groundbreaking.Sternhell, a childhood survivor of the Nazis in Poland tells the story of the endemic political and financial corruption of the Histadrut and its lack of democracy, holding conventions every six or seven years. As Golda Meir noted, Histadrut was not so much a trade union as a ‘great colonising agency.’[2]The ‘socialism’ of the Israeli Labour Party, Mapai, which was expressed in the collective Jewish only settlements, Kibbutz, was harnessed to its colonising goal of establishing a Jewish only society.

If you want a history of Zionism and Israel from both a cultural and political perspective, employing the tools of comparative history, then Gabriel Piterberg’s The Returns of Zionism cannot be bettered.

Joseph Gorny’s The British Labour Movement and Zionism 1917-1948 is a history of the relationship of the British labour movement to Zionism but from a Zionist perspective. Gorni never once questioned the fundamentals of Zionism.Gorny isalso a Tel Aviv University Professor of Modern Jewish History. In Israel there are two forms of history at university.  General history and Jewish history! Jewish history is about researching and developing the myths that sustain the Israeli state. It is about the Zionist narrative of Israel and is thus engaged in rewriting history from a Zionist perspective. Gorny’s is essentially a functional and descriptive history.

Sir Oswald Moseley looking none too happy at the Battle of Cable Street

Kelemen’s book is written from an avowedly anti-Zionist perspective and because of this it provides an essential and unique insight into the twists and turns of the Communist  Party as it had to adapt its understanding of Zionism and the colonisation of Palestine to the needs of the Soviet Union’s foreign policy.

In these days when ‘anti-Semitism’ is the principal weapon of the Right in the Labour Party this book is indispensable to an understanding of how the British labour movement came to adopt and support Zionism from August 1917 onwards. Support for Zionism was an essential component of Labour’s support for the British Empire and today’s opposition to ‘anti-Semitism’ is nothing more than a rationale for Labour support for British foreign policy in the Middle East .

Old Montague Street in the East End

Kelemen begins by noting that the character of the Israeli state was determined by the circumstances of its birth, the expulsion of the Palestinians. Its formation as an ethno-nationalist state ‘carried a strand of the ideological legacy that the state’s existence was meant to refute.’ In other words the Israeli state was the bastard offspring of European fascism not least Hitler’s Germany.

Hannah Arendt observed in 1961, when reporting on the Eichmann trial for the New Yorker, that there was

something breathtaking in the naiveté with which the prosecution denounced the infamous Nuremburg laws of 1935, which had prohibited intermarriage and sexual intercourse between Jews and non-Jews. The better informed among the correspondents were well aware of the ‘irony’ but they did not mention it in their reports. This was not the time to tell the Jews what was wrong with the laws and institutions of their own country.[3]

 Although they could marry abroad, their children would be considered bastards, effectively Mischlinge to use the Nazi term for those of mixed race.

Lord Passfield (Sydney Webb)

In view of the fabricated ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign battering the Labour Party today and the allegations that Labour has been ‘overrun’ by anti-Semitism, it is worth noting the comments of Sydney Webb, one of the founders of the Fabians and Colonial Secretary in the MacDonald government between 1929 and 1931:

French, German, Russian socialism is Jew-ridden. We, thank heaven, are free.’ And why? ‘There’s no money in it.’  (20)

It is worth noting, in view of the reports that Jeremy Corbyn and ‘anti-Semitism’ has been responsible for putting Jews off voting for the Labour Party,[4]that demographic and socio-economic trends led, as early as the 1959 General Election to Jews in Finchley supporting the Tories by a ratio of 3-1. In the 1964 General Election Jewish voters still preferred the Tories by 2:1. As Kelemen noted ‘The Jewish Community’s embourgeoisiement would also alter its interaction with Zionist politics.’Those who therefore suggest that all was fine with the Jewish community and that the only thing preventing it from supporting the Labour Party, as it had done in the past, was the advent of Jeremy Corbyn are being dishonest.

The Zionists and the Jewish bourgeoisie didn't want Jewish workers opposing Moseley's fascists

The Jewish community today is not the Jewish community of the 1930’s. The East End Jewish working class has gone. It simply does not exist today. As Jews have move to the suburbs so they have moved up the socio-economic ladder and their politics have also changed, for the worse. Support for Zionism is part of that political shift to the Right.

‘While Anglo-Jewry’s Jewishness was redefined by Zionism, its Englishness was reshaped to mirror the social conservatism of English suburbia.’ (71)

The Police try to batter a way for the fascists but without success

Jewish working class residents of Hackney in the late 1970’s were found to hold similar racist views of their Black neighbours as non-Jewish white inner city residents. Jewish racism, not least Islamaphobia, is the elephant in the room. Amidst all the nonsense about ‘anti-Semitism’ what is omitted is the growing Islamaphobia and racism amongst a section of the Jewish population. (74) This reflects the finding of Geoffrey Alderman, an academic and Jewish Chronicle columnist that nearly 2% of the Jewish community in 1979 were voting for the National Front.[5]The Jewish Chronicle of 3^rd March 1978 cited the head of a Jewish primary school headteacher in

North-West London that Jewish parents didn’t wish to send their children to the same schools as Black children. (77)

Anti-fascists in the East End built barricades to stop the fascists

In his chapter on British communists and Palestine Kelemen began by noting that the Mile End constituency in the East End, which was heavily Jewish, elected England’s only Communist MP Phil Piratin in 1945. This was a consequence of the leading role that the Communist  Party had played in the anti-fascist struggle and a reflection of the role that the Soviet Union had played in defeating Nazi Germany. In 1936 over a hundred thousand Jewish and non-Jewish workers had prevented the British Union of Fascists, led by Sir Oswald Moseley, from marching through the Jewish East End.

The Jewish bourgeoisie, the Zionists included, vehemently opposed any anti-fascist mobilisation and told the Jews of the East End to stay indoors.

As Zionism, in the wake of the Holocaust, began to gain a base among the Jewish working class of the East End, the Communist Party had great difficulty in coming to terms with Zionism, which it saw as just another form of nationalism. Their problems were compounded by their Stalinist politics and the geo-political considerations of the Soviet Union which did a 180 degree turn in 1947 by supporting the creation of the Israeli state.  The CP were afflicted by what Kelemen terms ‘Yishuvism’ (the Yishuv was the Jewish community in Palestine).

The CP saw the Jewish working class in Palestine as being like any other. ‘The Communist movement’s Marxism furnished no insight into the specificity of settler colonialism.’ They failed to see that the Jewish working class was privileged in comparison with the Arab workers and that it was their institutions that were spearheading the exclusion and dispossession of the Arabs. Rennap, a leader of the CP’s National Jewish Committee went so far as to describe the Jewish working class in Palestine as oppressed. The CP depicted the Yishuv ‘in crude instrumentalist terms as a tool of British imperialism.’ (93)

Zionism in Britain made very little impact among Jewish workers or trade unionists. A correspondent in the Young Zionist in the 1930s complained about how the Jewish working class have no interest in Zionism and join the Communist Party instead.  It was not until the war years that Poale Zion increased its membership from less than 500 to 1500. In 1946 Jews made up 10% of the CP’s membership. (98)

Kelemen described how in 1948 the CP supported Israel in its war against the Arab states. (101) The reason for this U-turn lay in Stalin’s crude analysis which saw Britain as the main obstacle to Soviet interests in the Middle East. The Arabs were seen as British pawns and the future Israeli state as being in revolt against imperialism rather than just British imperialism. It was a gross miscalculation which undermined the position of the Communist Parties in the Arab East. The CP’s position helped consolidate support for Zionism in the left-wing of the Jewish community.

In his chapter on Social Democracy and Israel Kelemen noted the attitude of the Labour Party towards the British Empire. Far from supporting the movements for colonial independence Labour leaders rationalised imperialism into ‘good’ and ‘bad.’

The Labour Party’s handbook for speakers stated that

‘Imperialism is dead but the Empire has been given a new life. Socialist planning is developing it not for personal profit but the Common-Weal. (118)

The Labour Party bought into the arguments of the Zionists, despite their campaigns for a Boycott of Arab Labour an Produce, that the resulting economic prosperity would assuage the Arabs and lead to them forgetting their nationalist desires.

Labour’s support for Zionism was at one with its overall support for Empire. Whereas the Tories did not bother to hide their belief that the Empire was a source of wealth, Labour’s imperialists dressed up Britain’s role in the language of trusteeship and benevolence. On 20^th August 1948 Tribune’s editorial was headed ‘Let’s stay in Africa.’ The reason being that ‘Africa offers huge material resources which can be exploited for the benefit of Britain and the world.’  (122)

In practice what happened was that Africa and Malaya were super exploited by the Attlee government in order to pay for reforms such as the NHS. Thus was the British working class tied into support for imperialism. It was the Left as much as the Right of the Labour Party which subscribed to the ideas of Whig historian Thomas Babington Macaulay that colonisation was for the benefit of the colonised. This belief in a ‘constructive’ imperialism was the basis of Labour’s support for Zionism. Between 1917, when the Labour Party first declared its support for a ‘Jewish home’ in the War Aims Memorandum and 1949 the Party conference declared its support for Zionism on 11 occasions.

During Israel’s war of independence, when ¾ million Palestinians were expelled, the Labour press was full of articles such as that in the New Statesman by David Kimche, a Labour Zionist who described Jewish farmers watching with ‘tears in their eyes’ as the Arabs left Haifa and Jaffa. What Kimche didn’t mention was that they were leaving because the Zionist militias had bombarded them with mortars. (126)

Labour’s leaders failed to mention that the Histadrut, which was Israel’s second largest employer, didn’t even admit Arabs as members until 1959. Kelemen quotes Ian Lustick that of the thousands of Histadrut owned factories and firms not one was situated in an Arab village.

In the 1960’s the few MPs sympathetic to the Palestinians were on the Right of the Party – Christopher Mayhew, George Brown, David Watkins. This contrasts with the position today when the Right of the Labour Party is solidly behind Zionism in all its racist glory.

Kelemen shows how the Left of the Party was up in arms about Nasser’s nationalisation of the Suez Canal in 1956. Prominent among them was Aneurin Bevan.

Kelemen skilfully shows how the growth of anti-Zionism on the Left post-1968 owed nothing to Soviet propaganda as is alleged by Zionist propagandists and their echo chamber in the Alliance for Workers Liberty. It was a consequence of Vietnam and support for third world national liberation movements.

Isaac Deutscher, who had abandoned his earlier anti-Zionism had by 1967 become revolted by the open displays of nationalism and chauvinism in the wake of Israel’s victories. He described Israel as the Prussia of the Middle East.

One of the great myths of Labour Zionism was that regardless of its colonisation it was internally socialist. It operated the collective kibbutzim and owned a major chunk of the Israeli economy. It was a new generation of historians such as Baruch Kimmerling, Zachary Lockman and Zeev Sternhell who demolished this theory. Labour Zionism’s colonisation took a collective form even as it gave birth to capitalism.  Collective colonisation was simply the most efficient form of colonising Palestine.

The New Left, unlike the Communist Party, were not hindered by the foreign policy requirements of the Soviet Union and their crude understanding of Zionism which shaded into anti-Semitism. Anti-Zionism was never a part of Soviet opposition to Israel.

Kelemen described the first Palestine solidarity march held in Britain in London in 1969 organised by Tariq Ali’s Black Dwarf when 500 were expected and 2000 turned up. In November 1969 there was held a first Palestine Solidarity Conference of 300 people although the organisation seems to have then disappeared. (159/160)

This was a time of considerable ferment with the emergence of an Israeli anti-Zionist organisation Matzpen and the idea emerged of a democratic unitary secular state in the whole of Palestine. The Communist  Party was constrained by its previous support for the Israeli state. In 1972 Ghada Karmi, a Palestinian doctor in London formed Palestine Action.

Kelemen mentions the travails of the Guardian which employed the first pro-Arab Middle East correspondent Michael Adams. Adams was the only western correspondent who was not dazzled by the messianic hysteria that accompanied Israel’s conquest of the West Bank. I vividly remember BBC correspondent Michel Elkins[6]barely containing his joy as Israel won the 1967 war. Guardian Editor Alistair Hetherington censored a report of Adams on Israel’s destruction of 3 Palestinian villages– Beit Nuba, Yalu and Imwas – which today form part of Canada Park, from which their inhabitants were expelled.[7]  (161)

A pivotal change in Labour’s pro-Israel attitude took place in the wake of the 1973 Yom Kippur war when Ted Heath froze British arms sales to Israel. Harold Wilson put down a motion opposing Heath and calling for the supply of arms to Israel. After a backbench rebellion, Labour MPs were given a free vote and 15 voted with the government and 70 abstained. David Watkins saw this as the end of 50 years of Zionist domination of Labour policy. Unfortunately he was a tad too optimistic! (163)

Until 1982 and the Lebanese War, the Labour left was overwhelmingly pro-Israel. Tony Benn and Eric Heffer left Labour Friends of Israel though Ian Mikardo never renounced his Zionism. Kelemen states that LFI were launched in the wake of the Suez War with the support of 40 Labour MPs and that it was created by Poale Zion which nearly died out before it was resuscitatedin 2015 in order to campaign against Jeremy Corbyn. It now calls itself the Jewish Labour Movement. Kelemen claims that at that time Poale Zion was a Jewish only organisation whereas today at least two thirds of the JLM are not Jewish.

When Tony Blair took over the leadership of the Labour Party LFI came back into favour. Blair declared that it was ‘one of the most important organisations in the Labour Movement’ and the following November Gordon Brown declared that LFI had more support among MPs than it had ever had in the 40 years since its formation. (179)

In his concluding chapter on ‘A New Anti-Semitism?’ Kelemen notes that the 2006 Report of Dennis MacShane’s All Party Inquiry into Anti-Semitism had recommended that the ‘the Jewish community itself that is best qualified to determine what does and does not constitute anti-Semitism.’ As Kelemen comments, this represented a ‘considerable slippage’ from the MacPherson Report which stated that initial reports were only prima facie evidence and not conclusive as to whether a racist incident had occurred.  It was also an anti-Semitic formulation since there is no single Jewish viewpoint on what constitutes anti-Semitism.

What the Zionists mean by ‘Jewish community’ is a politically organised group of people defining anti-Semitism in terms of opposition to Israel. It is an obvious recipe for a politically inspired, IHRA definition which conflates Zionism and anti-Semitism. (187) Kelemen is correct that the political context for the ‘new anti-Semitism’ is the decline of traditional anti-Semitism and the rise of Islamaphobia. (193)

Israel, the alleged object of the new anti-Semitism, in 2009 launched a campaign to dissuade Jews abroad from marrying non-Jews. To most people that would constitute racism but in Zionism’s eyes it is merely the preservation of the Jewish race. 

Tony Greenstein

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[1]       Meet the Trotskyist anti-Zionist who saw the errors of his ways, Jewish Chronicle 4.12.14., https://www.thejc.com/news/uk-news/meet-the-trotskyist-anti-zionist-who-saw-the-errors-of-his-ways-1.62661, Labour’s first Jewish leader is losing the Jewish vote

[2]       Tony Greenstein, Histadrut: Israel’s racist ‘trade union’ Electronic Intifada, 9 March 2009, https://electronicintifada.net/content/histadrut-israels-racist-trade-union/8121

[3]       Eichmann in Jerusalem – The Banality of Evil, pp. 7,8.

[4]       Why Just 13 Percent of British Jews Say They Will Vote For Labour in the General Election, The Tablet, 30.5.17 https://www.tabletmag.com/scroll/236063/why-just-13-percent-of-british-jews-say-they-will-vote-for-labour-in-the-general-electionsee also Labour’s first Jewish leader is losing the Jewish vote, The Telegraph 30.10.14.

[5]       The Jewish Community in British Politics (1982) pp. 159, 163-167

[6]       https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Elkins

[7]       https://mondoweiss.net/2017/06/picnicking-israelis-palestinian/

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How to Create Anti-Semitism in 2 easy steps

April 30, 2019, 8:31 pm

≫ Next: Rabbis tell their students that “Hitler was correct in every word he said… he was just on the wrong side.”

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First you say that Zionism is the same as being Jewish, then, when people criticise Israel you cry ‘anti-Semitism’

What is remarkable about the false anti-Semitism campaign waged by Labour’s racistDeputy Leader Tom Watson and child abuse supporter Margaret Hodge is how often they get away with it. 

[There was a time when Jewish Chronicle then Daily Express Editor Stephen Pollard wrote about Hodge that ‘It’s difficult to imagine a more blatant, shameful and utterly contemptible piece of two-faced hypocrisy than the behaviour of Margaret Hodge‘. It was true then and it’s true now!

Jeremy Corbyn became Labour leader because of a desire to see fundamental change. However the people who supported him were political novices who were unprepared for the backlash that followed.

It was not easy for the Right to attack Corbyn who won as the anti-Austerity candidate. Arguing, as did the Dark Prince Peter Mandelson that he was “intensely relaxed about people becoming filthy rich” whilst people were using food banks or sleeping on the streets did not convince many people. Liz Kendal tried it in 2015 and flopped with 4.5%.

‘Anti-Semitism’ was a much more useful weapon, almost custom made. It had an aura of moral righteousness about it. Fighting ‘anti-Semitism’ could make even the worst reactionary feel good. It is, as I once wrote in an essay for Return No. 5, ‘The False Anti-Semitism of the Right’.

Fighting for lower taxes for the rich is far less morally uplifting than opposing racism against those who suffered from attempted extermination. Even if it means getting into bed with racists!

The Daily Mail, which during the 1930’s supported Hitler abroad and Sir Oswald Moseley’s British Union of Fascists at home in addition to campaigning against the admission of Jewish refugees from the Nazis, began the fake anti-Semitism campaign with a story allegingJeremy Corbyn had worked with a holocaust denier Paul Eisen.

There is a good tradition for this kind of thing.  When British imperialism conquered India it did it so in the name of fighting Suttee, a Hindu custom of burning widows on the pyre of their husbands. It didn’t mention bleeding India dry of its wealth and resources or blasting peoplefrom the barrels of cannons.

That is why it is disappointing that Richard Burgon MP, one of the better members of Corbyn’s Shadow Cabinet should first denyand then distance himself from his perfectly reasonable view that Zionism is a threat to peace.

Zionism basedits whole project on the  slogan that Palestine was a ‘land without a people for a people without a land’. The slogan had first been coined by a Christian Restorationist, Alexander Keith.

The main accusation against Burgon should have been that it was a statement of the obvious. Saying Zionism is a threat to peace is like saying that dogs bark or fish swim. Why should be want to deny it?

The JLM demonstrate that their concern is Zionism not anti-Semitism

It is irrelevant whether or not Burgon remembered saying that Zionism is a threat to peace. Obviously he must have believed it and why not? Israel has, since it was founded, based its whole existence on creating enemies. First it was Gamel Abdul Nasser of Egypt, then the PLO, then Hezbollah and now Iran. The Israeli state could not justify its existence without an enemy. 

Recently the enemyhas become the 40,000 Black refugees within its borders whose only crime is to be Black and not Jewish. The term used by Netanyahu is ‘infiltrators’which the Israeli Labour Party’s Avi Gabbay repeated. Infiltratorsconjures up another enemy of Israel, the Palestinian refugees who ‘infiltrated’ back into Palestine after their expulsion in 1948. Hundreds if not thousands of them were murdered by the Israeli army in the 1950’s. Calling refugees ‘infiltrators’ is an attempt to equate them with ‘terrorists’.

The lies of Jonathan Freedland - the famous mural had no 'hooked-nose' Jewish bankers in it and 4 of the bankers were non-Jewish

But it’s not only within the Middle East that Israel has been a threat to peace. It has consistently supported the most repressive and genocidal regimes abroad. It actively aided the genocide in Guatemala where up to 200,000 Mayan Indians were slaughtered. It supported the death squad regime in El Salvador. Shipped weapons to the Nicaraguan Contras when the US Congress cut them off.  It supported Pinochet in Chile (Israel’s Supreme Court recently refusedto allow the files to be opened on ‘national security’ grounds).  It armedthe neo-Nazi Junta of Argentina between 1976-1983 when it murdered up to 3,000 Jews and of course more recently it armed the Burmese regime as it committed genocide. Israel was also of course the main arms supplier to the Apartheid regime in South Africa, including nuclear weapons.

Tom Watson defended 'poor Phil'who campaigned on this racist leaflet from Phil Woolas in 2010 - the High Court removed Woolas from the Commons for lies in a campaign that aimed to 'make white folk angry'

Colin Shindler describedin the Jewish Chronicle how

Despite a US arms embargo, Israel trained personnel and provided equipment which could be used against Pinochet’s opponents. In 1989 Eitan Kalinsky and his wife were sent as Israeli emissaries to teach at the Jewish school in Santiago. They attended the now public protests against Pinochet’s regime and were amazed to note that the riot-control vehicles had been manufactured by Beit Alfa, a left-wing Hashomer Hatzair kibbutz.

Kibbutz Artzi was the kibbutz federation of the so-called Marxist Zionist Mapam party!

So the question is why Burgon didn’t proudly admit that he called Israel a threat to world peace and defy his accusers to do their worst? After all Israel is an openly apartheid state which for half a century has maintained a military dictatorship in the Occupied Territories.

The reason is Zionist Political Terrorism. The fake anti-Semitism campaign run by the Israeli Embassy, as Al Jazeera documented, has successfully intimidated otherwise decent politicians like Richard Burgon into denying their own private views.

The JLM have successfully demonised Ken Livingstone, Chris Williamson, Jackie Walker, Marc Wadsworth, Chris Williamson and others, myself. Included. Unfortunately, instead of Momentum standing up to them, Jon Lansman and Owen Jones have gave gone along with the McCarthyites.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hoyo140ITc4

When Burgon first stated Zionism was a threat to peace, Joan Ryan MP wrote an open letter on 16^th August 2016 to him. I replied with another Open Letter four days later! This was a dead issue deliberately resurrected by the JLM in order to continue with its campaign of intimidation and vilification.

If Burgon had had the guts to stand up to the JLM and Katz and call these petty racists out, as Moshe Machover for example did, then Katz would have been reduced to the insignificant straw man that he is.

The arguments used by Katz of the Jewish Labour Movement to attack Burgon are interesting and show the dishonesty of the Zionists.  Katz statedthat ‘the vast majority of British Jews identify as Zionists’ and that Burgon was therefore ‘insulting a core part of their identity.’

Leaving aside how you can ‘insult’ an identity as opposed to agreeing or disagreeing with it, his basic premise is untrue. In British Jews Attitudes to Israel conducted in 2015 just 59%, down from 71% five years previously, defined themselves as Zionists. 31% of British Jews said they were not Zionists. 59% is not ‘overwhelming’.

Howevereven if an overwhelming majority of British Jews supported Zionism what would that say?  That the majority of British Jews were racists?  Stupid? Ignorant?  Choose your adjective. However if Zionism is racist, as it clearly is, then the views of British Jews are irrelevant.  Truth is more important.

Racism is about dehumanisation. Racism defines people as inferior according to arbitrary attributes such as ‘race’, colour or religion. It is not about challenging a political identity.

Salman Rushdie

When 40 years ago Salman Rushie publishedSatanic Verses the vast majority of Muslims considered it an insult to their identity as Muslims. Copies of the book were publicly burned and a fatwa was put on the head of Salman Rushdie by Ayatollah Khomeini.  Many of us on the Left had no hesitation in supporting Rushdie’s right to publish his book unharmed. Were we racist because we were opposed to a core element of some Muslim’s identity?  Of course not.

If some Africans believe that FGM is part of their identity is it racist to oppose it?  Zionism is just as much of a threat to Palestinians and FGM is.  If some Jews identify as Zionists that paints them as incorrigible racists who identify with the historic oppressors of Jews.

The right to criticise religion is a fundamental part of any free society.  Likewise the right to call an ideology, Zionism, racist or a threat to peace is called freedom of speech. It is irrelevant whether Zionism is the core part of the identity of many Jews. So what? It is also the core identity of Evangelical Christians and opposition to Zionism is the core identity of many anti-Zionist Jews. 

Eric Pickles defended the Tory link-up with anti-Semitic and racist parties in the European parliament

The tragedy is that under the baleful influence of the Zionist Jon Lansman, fake leftist Owen Jones and others such as Shadow Foreign Minister Emily Thornberry, supported by cowardly trade union leaders such as Dave Prentis, the Labour Party has adopted the IHRA definition of ‘anti-Semitism’ which conflates criticism of Israel and Zionism with anti-Semitism.  That is why out and out racists like Tory Eric Pickles have signed up to a definition of anti-Semitism that provides an ideological underpinning for British foreign policy. 

What the present campaign of equating anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism is doing is to identify British Jews with Zionist atrocities. All the things that the Israeli state does is equated with British Jews. That is why supporting Zionism is the best way to support anti-Semitism.

The fake anti-Semitism allegations have been much in evidence in the local elections. In Brighton the only Black woman council candidate, Alex Braithwaite has been suspended from Brighton Labour Party.  It is too late for her name to be taken off the ballot paper and we hope that in two days time she will nonetheless be elected to the council.

Another Labour Party member, Amanda Bishop, foolishly believed that Alex’s removal was as a result of the actions of local Jews, since what was done was in the name of the Sussex Jewish Representative Council and she made a suggestion on Facebook, more in jest, that we should march to the local synagogue!  She too has been suspended although Amanda too has a long and good record as an anti-racist in the days of Apartheid. The fake anti-Semitism campaign is being used by racists to attack anti-racists.

The only effect of the fake anti-Semitism campaign is to INCREASE anti-Semitism.  And that too will be welcome to Zionism because without anti-Semitism there is no Zionism or emigration to Israel.

Tony Greenstein

Rabbis tell their students that “Hitler was correct in every word he said… he was just on the wrong side.”

May 2, 2019, 4:48 pm

≫ Next: Brighton and Hove Labour Party Emerges as the Largest Party in the Local Elections Despite the Best Efforts of the Zionists

≪ Previous: How to Create Anti-Semitism in 2 easy steps

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'The gentiles will want to be our slaves. Being a slave to a Jew is the best'

Just as Israel was getting ready to commemorate Holocaust Memorial Day, news broke of Rabbis Eliezer Kashtiel, head of the Bnei David pre-military academy in the settlement of Eli and Rabbi Giora Redler, telling their students it wasn’t Hitler who was in the wrong, it was the Jews he killed.

Redler can be heard describing Hitler as

‘the most correct person there ever was, and was correct in every word he said… he was just on the wrong side.”

In other words Hitler’s only fault was that he targeted the wrong people, Jews, instead of those who were members of the lower race (Arabs?).

“The real Holocaust was not when they murdered the Jews, that’s not it. All these excuses — that it was ideological or systematic — are nonsense,” he said. “Humanism, and the secular culture of ‘We believe in man,’ that’s the Holocaust.”

The rabbis are not alone.  It is a widespread belief amongst religious Zionists that the ‘real Holocaust’ is assimilation, inter-marriage even abortionbecause all of these involve a loss to the Jewish race.

Rabbi Shimon Elitov, a member of Israel’s Chief Rabbinate tolda conference in Budapest in 2014 that “Assimilation in the shocking numbers that we see is worse that the physical Holocaust that we saw,” (my emphasis) RabbiYisrael Eichler, a Knesset member for the Haredi United Torah Judaism tolda Knesset Committee that assimilation was the ‘silent Holocaust’.

If you believe that what is most important is the preservation of the Jewish nation/race then there is a racist logic that the physical extermination of Jews should be seen as the equivalent of those Jews who have been ‘lost’ to assimilation.

Rabbis Kashtiel and Redler were giving a lecture to recruits to the Israeli army. The videosof their lectures featured on Israel’s Channel 13 last Monday. They can be heard calling for the enslavement of the “stupid and violent” non-Jews due to their genetic inferiority.

Again the Bnei David rabbis were not unusual in advocating that non-Jews should be slaves to Jews. The late Sephardi Chief Rabbi Ovadia Yosef also urgedthat non-Jews become the slaves of Jews and that non-Jews should be bannedfrom living in Israel.

Rabbi Kashtiel told his young audience that

“The gentiles will want to be our slaves. Being a slave to a Jew is the best. They’re glad to be slaves, they want to be slaves, instead of just walking the streets and being stupid and violent and harming each other, once they’re slaves, their lives can begin to take shape.”

“All around us, we are surrounded by peoples with genetic problems. Ask a simple Arab [because all Arabs are simple - TG]‘where do you want to be?’ He wants to be under the occupation. Why? Because they have genetic problems, they don’t know how to run a country, they don’t know how to do anything. Look at them,”

“Yes, we’re racists.’ He said.

‘We believe in racism… There are races in the world and peoples have genetic traits, and that requires us to try to help them. The Jews are a more successful race.”

What is important to understand is that these people are not marginal cranks.  They hold power in Israeli society. United Torah Judaism is part of Israel’s ruling coalition. The idea that assimilation, Jews marrying non-Jews, is the equivalent of the Holocaust is common to secular Jews too because racial supremacy is the knot that binds secular and religious Jewry.

The leader of the ‘centrist’ Yesh Atidand one of the leaders of Israel’s Blue & White party, Yair Lapid reactedto the wedding of Israeli Arab broadcaster Lucy Aharish to Jewish actor Tzachi Halevy by saying that intermarriage was problematic because “we haven’t recovered from the Holocaust yet.”

Students at the Bnei David pre-army academy learn in the study hall. (Screen capture/YouTube)

This isn’t the first time that Bnei David has been in the headlines. In July 2016 Bnei David Rabbi Yigal Levinstein, was recorded calling LGBT people “deviant.”  Less than eight months later, Levinstein told IDF recruits that military service drives female soldiers “crazy” and strips them of their Jewishness. In February of this year, another Bnei David rabbi, Yosef Kelner, lectured students on women being “weak-minded” and possessing a reduced capacity for spirituality.

The Jerusalem Post explainedwhy, despite former Defence Minister Avigdor Lieberman threatening to cut their funding, Bnei David has been the darling of the Israeli military. It all began in the late 1980s when the then-head of IDF Central Command Amram Mitzna and Rabbi Levenstein conceived of a program that would encourage more religious-Zionist young men to become IDF officers.

In 1988, together with Rabbi Sadan, Levenstein created the very first religious pre-military academy. Today there are dozens of such pre-military academies throughout Israel. In 2016, Sadan received the Israel Prize, its highest award, for the project.

As the Jerusalem Post explained ‘It would not be an exaggeration to say that the religious pre-military academies revolutionized the religious-Zionist approach to military service.’ Quite simply there are now hundreds of religious-Zionist zealots in the IDF, all of them influenced by the racist, sexist and homophobic teachings they have received and for whom the Palestinians are no more than subhuman.

As the religious manual Torat HaMelech, a guide to killing non-Jews legally explained, the Arabs are the historic biblical enemy Amalekand in war it is one’s duty to wipe out every Arab, children included.

After the footage was broadcast Kashtiel and Redler claimed their comments were taken out of context! Rabbi Kashtiel stated that

“yes, we are racist. We believe in racism, there are races in the world and genetic qualities of nations. This requires us to think how to help them.”

Rabbi Radler explained that the Holocaust was a divine punishment designed to make the Jewish people leave the diaspora and that the true Holocaust, according to him, “is secular culture in which we believe in man, that is the Holocaust.” 

In other words the Holocaust was punishment for Jews who refused to leave the diaspora. Which was what Christian fundamentalist Pastor John Hagee, President of Christians United for Israel said when he described Hitler as a ‘hunter’ sent by god to chase the Jews to Israel.

Rabbi Radler went on to say that “Hitler was the rightest person there was” and that Nazi ideology was true as there is a

“masculine side which fights and is focused on honor and the brotherhood of men and a feminine world which is soft and moral and claims one should submit the other cheek.”

It will be claimed that what the two rabbis said was an aberration. That they are a couple of bad apples. The reality is different.  Rather than being the odd one’s out, Radler and Kashtiel are normative.

Repeatedlyreligious rabbis, especially the Military Rabbinate, have urged that Arabs be treated with extreme cruelty and that the civilian population is a legitimate target. Chief Military Rabbi Avichai Rontzki was responsible for religious propaganda being given to soldiers during Operation Cast Lead in 2008-9 arguing that soldiers should consider all Palestinians, as legitimate targets. The attack on Gaza was portrayed as a religious wars against the Jews’ ancient enemy, the Philistines. One of their favourite phrases was ‘being kind to the cruel [the Arabs] is to be cruel to the kind. [Jews]’

The sexism on display at Bnei David is anything but exceptional. Another Military Chief Rabbi Colonel Eyal Krim supported the idea of rape in warrulingthat“Even though fraternizing with a gentile woman is a very serious matter’it was permitted during wartime.

Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu

Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu, son of a former Sephardi Chief Rabbi and justified in a 2002 article the use of rape in war. David Sheen, an Israeli journalist described how Eliyahu justifiedgenocide in Gaza arguing that 100,000 or even a million civilians should be killed.

Eliyahu was also the Safed Chief rabbi who bannedJews from renting rooms or flats to Arabs.  A position dozens of Israeli rabbis supported.

Mordechai Kedar, a Professor at the religious university of Bar-Ilan urgedthe use of rape in war since the fear of having one’s sister or mother raped would deter Arab ‘terrorists’.

Nor is their racism at all exceptional. After all the Deputy Defence Minister Rabbi Eli Dahan, in charge of the West Bank’s Civil Administration, describedPalestinians as ‘animals’ sub-humans.

“To me, they are like animals, they aren’t human.” Dahan explained that ‘A Jew always has a much higher soul than a gentile, even if he is a homosexual,” If these are views of the Deputy Defence Minister why is it any surprise that ordinary rabbis admire Hitler?

This virulent racism is not confined to just a handful of rabbis. A plurality of Israeli Jews also supportsthe physical expulsion of Israel’s Palestinian population.

Israel is a Jewish settler state in which Arabs are now officially 3^rd class citizens.  It is a state that does its best to encourage Jewish immigration whilst refusing to readmit Palestinian refugees. It is a country that needs to have a perpetual enemy and is a state of racial supremacy where relationships between Jews and Arabs are officially disapproved.

Israel in short is a state of racial supremacy and it should be no wonder that some Rabbis are coming to the conclusion that Hitler was much misunderstood and that his basic message was correct even if his target, the Jews, was misplaced.

There is no fundamental difference between the ideology of racial supremacy in Nazi Germany, of separation between Jew and non-Jew under the 1935 Nuremburg Laws, and the situation in Israel today.

It is that which explains the background to the Hitler supporting words of the two Israeli rabbis.

See Richard Silverstein’s Senior Rabbis at Israeli Military Prep School Say “Hitler was Right”

Brighton and Hove Labour Party Emerges as the Largest Party in the Local Elections Despite the Best Efforts of the Zionists

May 3, 2019, 6:54 pm

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Tweeting Your Opposition to Israeli Apartheid Can Get You Suspended as the racist Jewish Labour Movement makes clear their opposition to a Corbyn led Labour Party

The election results were Labour 20 (23), Tories 14 (20) and Green 19 (11) Independent 1 (0) with the 2015 election results in brackets.  

In fact Labour held 20 seats prior to the elections because there had been 2 defections to the TIG group, including former leader Warren Morgan and one councillor, Ann Meadows, crossed the floor and joined the Tories.

Meadows, a councillor for 20 years stood again for the Tories and obtained just 627 votes, 47 votes ahead of the next Tory and 23 votes below the third placed Green!  The Labour candidates all gained over 1,500 votes which demonstrated that after 20 years as a councillor she hadn’t secure a personal following, thus proving the wisdom of deselecting her.

In Wish Ward, Momentum supporter and the only Black woman standing, Alex Braithwaite was suspended. Her offence was to call into question the fake anti-Semitism campaign supported by the Tory press.  According to The Argus her offence was that

‘She retweeted an article by Vox Political entitled ‘A general election is in the offing – time for another anti-Semitism smear against Jeremy Corbyn’

According to that well known anti-racist paper, the Daily Mail Alex ‘shared messages supporting Ken Livingstone and claiming the Rothschild family controlled the European Central Bank.’

The Nazis struck a coin, with the Zionist Star of David on one side and the Swastika on the other after the Head of the Jewish Desk in the Gestapo , Baron von Mildenstein, came back from a 6 months visit to Zionist settlements in Palestine. The Zionists were delighted at the time but now referring to Zionist relations with the Nazis is 'antisemitic'

Even worse ‘she posted a cartoon which suggested the BBC was controlled by the ‘terrorist state’ of Israel.’

Supporting Ken Livingstone is now part of the definition of anti-Semitism! Suffice to say sharing a tweet five years ago about the Rothschilds hardly counts as anti-Semitism either.

The Sussex Jewish Representative Council (which is fronted by Fiona Sharpe of Sussex Friends of Israel) sent this tweet:

 “We are very concerned by a tweet from Labour candidate, Alex Braithwaite.

“Once again she has questioned and belittled the allegations of anti-Semitism within the Labour Party.

“More than this, she again suggests that it is concocted to ‘smear’ Jeremy Corbyn.”

So questioning the fake anti-Semitism smear campaign is itself proof of ‘anti-Semitism’. Just as challenging the claims of witchcraft in Salem could earn you a place on the gallows.

Every week the Jewish Chronicle runs a new story accusing Corbyn of ‘anti-Semitism’. This week there is a bonus. The next has been extended to John Prescott, Labour’s former Deputy Prime Minister for suggesting that the fake anti-Semitism campaign is about Israel!

John Hobson's classic book on Imperialism

And as if to prove Alex and John Prescott are correct the Jewish Chronicle Editor and former Daily Express editor, Stephen Pollard, wrote an editorial Hobson’s Voice, which openly called Jeremy Corbyn an anti-Semite. Pollard wrote

Week after week, more evidence emerges cementing the inescapable conclusion that Jeremy Corbyn is an antisemite. So, once again, we pose this question to mainstream, decent Labour MPs: How can you, in all conscience, work towards making a racist politician Prime Minister?

Those who campaign to put today’s Labour into power are, inescapably, working to put an antisemite into Ten Downing Street.

Outrageous McCarthyism against someone who, unlike Pollard, has spent his whole life fighting racism, anti-Semitism included.

The subject of Pollard’s ire is the foreword that Jeremy Corbyn wrote in 2011 to John Hobson’s 1902 book, Imperialism: A Study. The book Imperialism some 8 years ago.  Hobson like so many people a century or more ago believed that Jews were the centre of world finance.  Many Zionists like Theodor Herzl also wroteabout the ‘terrible power of our purse’.  However malevolent racists and defamers like the Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland forget about Zionism’s anti-Semitic pedigree, included its allianceswith anti-Semites like Viktor Orban and Steve Bannon today.

As Guerilla Wire points out in a 1995 pamphlet for the Fabians (page 11), Tony Blair described Hobson as “probably the most famous Liberal convert to what was then literally ‘new Labour’.”– strangely no mention of ‘anti-Semitism’ there.  Likewise in his 2005 Chatham House speech on liberty and the role of the state, Gordon Brown cited Hobson with approval – also nothing was said about ‘anti-Semitism’.

Indeed despite the fulminations of the Guardian’s racist and Zionist columnist Jonathan Freedland, the cover of the 2011 edition to which Jeremy Corbyn wrote the foreword, carries a Guardian review which said ‘Hobson’s Imperialism belongs to the small group of books in the years from 1900 to the outbreak of war that have definitely changed the contours of social thought.’

Again no mention of ‘anti-Semitism’ and in 2015 the Guardian’s former political editor Michael White wrote:

“At his Nottingham rally someone thrust into my hand a copy of JA Hobson’s influential classic, Imperialism (1902) whose 2011 edition contains Jeremy’s own perfectly decent introductory essay. Its analysis will impress many”. 

Strangely enough Michael White made no mention of ‘anti-Semitism’. 

If anything proves that the ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign against Corbyn and people like Alex Braithwaite is fake then the attacks on Corbyn over his review of a classic text on Imperialism by John Hobson proves it definitively.

It’s not surprising Corbyn didn’t mention the 10 or so anti-Semitic lines in a book of 400 pages because they were wholly irrelevant. As Guerilla Wire says:

‘Phil Miller quoted Glyn Secker, secretary of Jewish Voice for Labour:

“Daniel Finkelstein, in his scurrilous piece for the Times (April 30th), ingeniously cobbles together quotes from two different books by Hobson . . . (he) does in one passage make a reference to the Jewish element in international finance and to the Rothschilds as did many others at that time. But he also referred to JP Morgan and Cecil Rhodes — neither of them Jewish — as examples of financiers backing imperialism”.

In other words the racist duo, Finkelstein and Freedland, deliberately manufactured a story out of nothing with the sole intention of  maligning Corbyn.

The Editor of the Jewish Chronicle, Stephen Pollard, has form.  When the Tories formed an alliance with anti-Semitic parties in the European Parliament in 2009 they were attacked by the then Foreign Secretary David Miliband. Who defended the Tories?  Stephen Pollard, who wrote that Michal Kaminski, the Polish Law & Justice Party MEP was “one of the greatest friends to the Jews in a town where anti-Semitism and a visceral loathing of Israel are rife.’ And it is true.  Besides being an anti-Semite, Kaminski was, like Trump and Bannon and many others, a strong Zionist.  Because Pollard defines anti-Semitism in terms of Israel not Jews. Whereas to most people anti-Semitism is hatred of Jews to Pollard anti-Semitism is criticism of Israel.

Once upon a time Jonathan Freedland called out genuine racists and anti-Semites including Jewish Chronicle Editor Stephen Pollard

Ironically on this occasion Freedland waxed lyrical about Kaminski and his fascist origins. He wrote in an opinion piece:

there was a time when no self-respecting British politician would have gone anywhere near such people. Kaminski began his career in the National Rebirth of Poland movement, inspired by a 1930s fascist ideology that dreamed of a racially pure nation. Even today, the PiS slogan is "Poland for Poles"… In 2001 he upbraided the president for daring to apologise for a 1941 pogrom in the town of Jedwabne which left hundreds of Jews dead. Kaminski said there was nothing to apologise for – at least not until Jews apologised for what he alleged was the role Jewish partisans and Jewish communists had played alongside the Red Army in Poland.

Today Freedland sings a different tune alongside Pollard. However that is no reason why the Labour Party should sing the same song.

Alex Braithwaite’s offence was being an anti-Zionist not an anti-Semite. Hove must be one of the most anti-Semitic places in Britain! Although the Tories retained Wish Ward the other Labour candidate gained 1,107 votes whereas Alex gained 1,275, 168 or 15% more votes! Despite the false claims of Fiona Sharpethat Jewish voters in the ward would be concerned, voters made it very clear what they thought of these false allegations.

The sooner that the Labour Party begins to stand up to this bogus campaign from the Jewish Labour Movement and Zionist pressure groups, the sooner the anti-Semitism issue will be put to bed. The JLM have made it clear that they will not support a Labour Government led by Jeremy Corbyn.  This racist group should be disaffiliated immediately.

Right-wing Labour candidate defeated in Hanover - member of Apartheid supporting Jewish Labour Movement (although she's not Jewish)

The results for Labour in Brighton were mixed. In Hollingdean and Stanmer Ward, Labour lost one of its seats to the Greens. Phil Clarke, former General Secretary of the Trades Council was defeated by 56 votes. In Preston Park Ward, Labour lost its two councilors as the Green Party won all 3 seats. An excellent local activist Denise Frend was defeated but the consolation prize was the defeat of JLM member, the racist Julie Cattell who belongs with Chuka Ummuna’s TIG. Likewise in Hanover and Elm Grove, although Danielle Spencer, a Momentum supporter was defeated another JLM supporter Emma Daniels was defeated, a clear victory for anti-racism.

Daniel Yates, Blairite leader of Labour Group, member of racist JLM who banned the public from the election count for the first time ever

In Queens Park a strong challenge by the Greens meant that Labour lost one of the 3 seats and Momentum supporter Colin Piper.  A number of good socialists were elected in wards such as in Moulsecoombwhere Kate Knight was elected and East Brighton where Nikki Brennan was elected. Overall the balance in the Labour Group is estimated as tilting towards the left. Currently the leader Daniel Yates is a Blairite and member of the JLM. It is to be hoped that he is replaced by a socialist.

I also found it strange that for the first time ever, under Yate's undemocratic administration, local people were refused access to the election announcements unless they had pre-existing passes. I await an explanation.

There can be no doubt that the campaign waged by the Right of the Labour Party in Brighton & Hove aimed at destroying the chances of success in the local elections. In this they were unsuccessful. Prominent amongst these were Luke Stanger, a racist who believes that Travellers are a ‘nasty blight’.  But although Stanger has been suspended the kid glove treatment he has been afforded makes it clear that ‘anti-Semitism’ is a privileged form of racism in the Labour Party today.

Tony Greenstein

The Gaza Ghetto Uprising

May 6, 2019, 1:45 am

≫ Next: At last Corbyn fights back against the anti-Semitism smears – now its time to junk the Witchhunter’s Charter, the IHRA

≪ Previous: Brighton and Hove Labour Party Emerges as the Largest Party in the Local Elections Despite the Best Efforts of the Zionists

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If Ha'aretz's Gideon Levy were in the Labour Party he would be expelled for comparing Israel’s actions to those of the Nazis!

This is an excellent article.  There is nothing I can add that can improve it.  One can only wonder at the bravery of Gideon Levy who writes from the belly of the beast.

In describing Gaza as a ghetto and making a comparison with the Warsaw Ghetto he is doing no more than the last Commander of the Warsaw Ghetto Resistance Marek Edelman, who became a non-person in Israel and for Zionism thereafter.

As Ha’aretz wrote on 9^th August 2002 in an article Letter to 'Palestinian Partisans' Raises International Storm

Dr. Marek Edelman, the last of the uprising leaders still living, wrote an "open letter" to Palestinians this week, asking them to stop the bloodshed and enter into peace negotiations. But the letter has prompted a dispute among the remaining survivors of the uprising and their families, since in his letter Edelman does not mention the word "terrorism."

Moreover, the letter is filled with hints of comparisons between the Palestinians' fight and that of the ghetto residents. He addresses "the commanders of the Palestinians armed organizations and the partisan organizations, and the soldiers of the armed Palestinian organizations."

There is a reporton Al Jazeera that a ceasefire has come into operation. 

People have asked why Palestinians in Gaza continue to fire rockets despite the enormous disparity in strength between them and the Zionists – the answer is quite simple.  They have nothing to lose such is the desperate conditions they live in. Gaza is the largest such prison camp in the world.  It is a concentration camp.

The Gaza Ghetto Uprising

Gideon Levy

May 05, 2019 2:14 AM

The cruelty and temerity of the people in Gaza once more reached new heights Saturday: dozens of rockets on Israel before the week of its Independence Day, just after its Holocaust Remembrance Day, and worst of all, two weeks before its Eurovision. How dare you Gaza, how dare you.

Israel still hasn’t recovered from the Holocaust, is preening itself for its Independence Day, the musicians are starting to arrive at Ben-Gurion Airport, and you’re firing Qassam rockets. How will we be able to celebrate? News reports give the impression that Israel is under siege; Gaza is threatening to destroy it. Twitter has already suggested “Eva’s Story on the Gaza Border” – a play on the social media campaign about the Holocaust.

Pundits explain that it’s all because of Hamas’ greed. Ramadan is beginning and “they’re under crazy pressure for cash.” Or, “It’s all because of the weak security policy that has gotten the terror groups used to Israel; we only strike buildings.”

And so they shoot, those villains. Hamas wants money, Israel’s too soft on them, they are terror, we are peace; they were born to kill. On Friday the army killed four protesters by the Gaza border fence, but who’s counting. In Israel a teenage boy tripped while running for a shelter. “When a lack of policy and continuity yields to blackmail,” a voice of wisdom mumbled, and nobody could figure out what he was proposing. Benny Gantz, the alternative. This is what we have an opposition for.

Everything is completely disconnected from context and reality, intentionally and willfully. Half a week after Holocaust Remembrance Day,  the knowledge that 2 million people have been locked up more than 12 years behind barbed wire in a giant cage doesn’t remind Israel of anything and doesn’t arouse anything. Half a week before Independence Day, the struggle for freedom and independence of another people is perceived as murderous terror for no reason.

Even the desperate attempt to prevent the brink of starvation is perceived as greed; the effort to somehow impart the appearance of a holiday in the holiest month of the year is depicted as extortion. That’s how low the brainwashing goes and no one protests. Everyone accepts it with a shrug.  Anyone who doubts how hollow and destructive the inculcation of the Holocaust is in Israel should look at the responses in Israel to this Gaza Ghetto Uprising. Anyone who ignores the reality in Gaza or tries to deny its disaster has learned nothing.

Gaza is a ghetto and what’s happening in the south is a ghetto uprising. There's no other way to describe it. You can make claims against Hamas but you can’t make any claims against Gaza. It’s fighting for its freedom and no struggle is more just than its struggle, and Hamas is its leader.

The countdown to Hamas’ death has already begun: Only seven more months until the UN report, until Gaza is unfit for human habitation. But Israel yawns and its spokespeople only know how to tout “deterrence,” that monster we’ve created to justify every killing, closure and bout of destruction, as we lie ourselves to death that there’s something to deter 2 million unemployed, desperate, humiliated people, some of whom are hungry or dying for lack of medical care, and all of whom are locked up.

No one in Israel can imagine life in Gaza over the past 12 years. There are people who see to it that we don’t know, including Israel’s ban on the entry of Israeli journalists, which has stoked no protest at all. “Eva’s Story” should be filmed in Gaza way before it's filmed in the Gaza border area.

A country that is established on the memory of the ghettos, which only a few days ago sanctified that memory, hides its face from the much larger ghetto that it built with its own hands and doesn’t want to see, one hour from the center of that country. A country that was established in a bloody struggle will not recognize the justness of the struggle of another people and wonders whether that people even exists. A society that considers itself exemplary, which was established on the world's indifference to its suffering, shows monstrous heartlessness to the suffering it is causing.

“What were they before?” a woman asked me Friday in a lecture I gave in Tel Aviv. And what were we? What have we become?

At last Corbyn fights back against the anti-Semitism smears – now its time to junk the Witchhunter’s Charter, the IHRA

May 7, 2019, 12:42 am

≫ Next: The Fight Goes On - Why I Reject the Threats of the Campaign Against Antisemitism's Lawyers

≪ Previous: The Gaza Ghetto Uprising

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Corbyn’s Accuser Times ‘journalist’ Lord Finkelstein was a Board Member of the Racist Gatestone Institute - this is Jonathan Freedland's accomplice

Smeared by a racist

The latest episode in the fake anti-Semitism smear campaign began on April 30^th when Times Associate Editor and Tory peer Danny Finkelstein wrote Corbyn’s praise for deeply antisemitic book. The book in question was J.A. Hobson’s classic Imperialism – A Study.

Corbyn’s sin was one of omission. He had failed to comment on some 10 anti-Semitic lines in a book of 400 pages. Anti-Semitism was unfortunately not unknown a century ago.

What is good though is that for the first time instead of apologising and promising to do better and then being kicked in the teeth, Corbyn has stood up to his racist abusers. Prime amongst these being Jonathan Freedland and the Board of Deputies, a Zionist organisation which justified the cold blooded murder of Palestinian demonstrators in Gaza last year.

In his letter of 2^nd May to Marie van der Zyl, President of the BOD Corbyn spoke of the ‘mischievous representation to the foreword to my book’ and the ‘false accusation that I endorsed the anti-Semitic content of this 1902 book.’

Jonathan Freedland never misses an opportunity to attack Corbyn on behalf of his Zionist friends - in this instance this establishment journalist poses as a radical

Because Corbyn has stood up to these bullies we can expect these liars to slink away because bullies are also cowards.  But it is worth noting that if one of us had accused our detractors of making false accusations, then according to the Compliance Unit that would itself have been proof we were ‘anti-Semitic’

Just tweeting that the Israel lobby is responsible for the fake anti-Semitism campaign is in itself enough to warrant somebody being suspended.

This tweet is part of the evidence for a member of the Labour Party being suspended - merely referring to an article making an allegation that the Israeli lobby is behind the antisemitism smears, which is itself based on an undercover Al Jazeera programme, The Lobby, is sufficient in itself to prove antisemitism

However Corbyn must go further. If ‘mischievous’ allegations are made about him then the same is true for many of us and who is making these allegations if not Israel’s lobbyists?

Hobson's book with a warm endorsement from The Guardian

On the front cover of Hobson’s book was a blurb from a Guardian Review: it said the book had ‘changed the course of social history.’ The Guardian seems to have gone overboard on this book. A Guardian Review described it in glowing terms:

‘Hobson's Imperialism belongs to the small group of books in the years from 1900 to the outbreak of war that have definitely changed the contours of social thought.'

Michael White, their former Political Editor, describedhow:

‘someone thrust into my hand a copy of JA Hobson’s influential classic, Imperialism (1902) whose 2011 edition contains Jeremy’s own perfectly decent introductory essay. Its analysis will impress many. Others will shake their heads.

However to the Guardian’s peripatetic former Comment Editor Finkelstein’s article was like a red rag to a bull. Freedland has penned innumerable anti-Corbyn articles and he immediately penned another which appeared the next day - Jeremy Corbyn is either blind to antisemitism – or he just doesn’t care.

So pleased was Freedland with Finkelstein’s ‘scoop’ that he tweeted‘credit to @Dannythefink for exposing this deeply depressing episode, one to add to an already long list.’

And here you have a good example of how Establishment journalists feed off each other’s prejudices. Finkelstein is a Tory peer, Freedland is a ‘liberal’ journalist but when it comes to Zionism and Israel, sorry ‘anti-Semitism’, you couldn’t put a piece of paper between them. They operate within a consensus that has a very small gap between them. What they share is more important than what divides them.

Freedland wrote that

In today’s Times, [it was the previous day’s] the columnist Daniel Finkelstein has dug out a 2011 reissue of JA Hobson’s 1902 work, Imperialism: A Study. The foreword was written by Jeremy Corbyn in 2011.’

According to Freedland this mural contains Jewish bankers with 'hooked noses'- if so I can't find them!

So blatant is Freedland’s dishonesty that I penned an Open Letter to Jonathan Freedland. I was particularly taken with the idea that Finkelstein just happened to come across Corbyn’s 8 year old Review, that he dug it up much like you might dig up a few weeds. No doubt Luciana Berger also just happened to ‘dig up’a mural dating back to 2012 last year!

One can only await with bated breath what will be on offer next year.  Judging by present trends it will be at least a decade old by then!

Andrei Brevik, the Norwegian fascist who killed over 70 young socialists, is quite clear that anti-Zionist and anti-racist Jews are the enemy of both him and the Zionists

We can assume that the ‘digging up’ was done by others, whether they are at the Israeli Embassy or MI5 is irrelevant. But given that Freedland at least pretends to be a democrat, I wrote that

[if what was happening to Corbyn] happened to any other politician then we would have no one in public life and you know it. You are an integral part of a concerted attempt by powerful forces in the British State to discredit a radical politician. Of course the Right would like to attack Corbyn for his economic proposals or his opposition to austerity but that wouldn’t play well. Hence the ‘anti-Semitism’ card which you use.

Freedland quickly passed over Hobson having been a political correspondent for the Manchester Guardian! It’s quite a tradition that Freedland has to live down. Ted, the son of C.P. Scott, the Guardian’s most revered editor, even married Hobson’s daughter, Mabel!

Corbyn’s crime was that he hadn’t mentioned that Hobson was anti-Semitic. It is as if a mention of T S Elliot’s anti-Semitism is compulsory before you can discuss his poetry. And not only Elliot, but Virginia Woolf, Jack London, Dickens, Shakespeare and Orwell too. Although anti-Semitism has all but disappeared today, other than as a stick to beat the Left, it had an inglorious tradition amongst the British ruling class. People like Freedland and Finkelstein.

What is also true is that people like Hobson tended to abandon such views when the reality of the society they lived in changed. Even T S Eliot seems to have become a reformed character.

On the 7^th June 2003 Zionist solicitor Anthony Julius wrotethat

‘Eliot was not a typical anti-semite. He was instead an extraordinary anti-semite. He did not reflect the anti-semitism of his times, he contributed to it, even enlarged it.’

Six months before Professor Ronald Schuchard of Emory University ‘in a ground-breaking essay’ in the January 2003 issue of "Modernism/ Modernity", refutedthe charge of Eliot's anti-Semitism, backing his claims with a cache of new documents.

As Paul Kelemen showed in The British Left and Zionism – History of a Divorce (MUP 2012) anti-Semitism was far more deeply entrenched in the right-wing leadership of the Labour Party in years gone by. Sydney Webb, founder of the Fabians and later Colonial Secretary Lord Passfield, wrote that ‘French, German, Russian socialism is Jew-ridden. We, thank heaven, are free.’ And why? ‘There’s no money in it.’ 

During the war years Attlee, Morrison and Bevin supported Churchill and Eden in their implacable hostility to the entry of Jewish refugees. They even worried when they learnt that Jews might be extruded by Germany’s allies rather than exterminated. But Freedland and Finkelstein have no complaints because the Zionist movement, led by President of the Board of Deputies Selig Brodetsky was also opposed to the entry of Jewish refugees. Their argument being that Jewish refugees should go to Palestine if they were to go anywhere.

It was left to Professor Donald Sassoon, in a letter to the Guardian, to explain that Hobson’s book has been taught for years in universities without anyone feeling the need to highlight the 10 anti-Semitic lines.

Sassoon also makes the point that ‘Far less marginal are Hobson’s comments about the “lower races” (ie black Africans) and what to do with them’ but anti-Black concern is of no interest to Freedland or Finkelstein. Only anti-Semitism concerns them.

Freedland also failed to mention that Gordon Brown also failed to mention Hobson’s anti-Semitism when wrotethat

‘in Britain, this idea of liberty as empowerment is not a new idea, J A Hobson asked, "is a man free who has not equal opportunity with his fellows of such access to all material and moral means of personal development and work as shall contribute to his own welfare and that of his society?"

Tony Blair also describedHobson as “probably the most famous Liberal convert to what was then literally ‘new Labour’.” in a pamphlet for the Fabians.

Daniel Finkelstein – Board Member of White Supremacist Gatestone Institute

According to Powerbase Finkelstein was a founder member of the board of Gatestone

Finkelstein is or wasa member of the Board of Governors, as of October 2015 of the Gatestone Institute.  What is the Gatestone Institute?  Well according to Wikipedia

the Gatestone Institute is a right-wing anti-Muslim  think tank with a focus on Islam and the Middle East. The organization has attracted attention for publishing false articles and being a source of viral falsehoods.

Gatestone was founded in 2012 by Nina Rosenwald, who serves as its president. Former U.S. Ambassador to the United NationsJohn R. Bolton, now national security advisor, was its chairman from 2013 to March 2018. Its current chairman is Amir Taheri. Its authors include Nonie Darwish, Alan Dershowitz, Raymond Ibrahim, Denis MacEoin, Daniel Pipes, Raheel Raza, Khaled Abu Toameh, and Geert Wilders.

Finkelstein is recorded in the House of Lords Register as having spoken and been paid at a number of its events. The engagements are listed below. It is clear that he is a regular speaker for the GI.

Speaking engagement, 27 October 2016, Gatestone Institute

Speaking engagement, 20 November 2015, Gatestone Institute

Speaking Engagement, 14 October 2014, Gatestone Institute

Speaking engagement, 10 March 2014, Gatestone Institute

Daniel Finkelstein is a member of what is, according to the article White supremacists at the heart of Whitehalla racist organisation with strong international links and ties with other anti-Muslim Groups.

One key figure is neo-con Douglas Murray, Associate Director of the cold-war Henry Jackson Society. According to Nafeez Ahmed  ‘

Behind the facade of concern about terrorism is a network of extremist neoconservative ideologues, hell-bent on promoting discrimination and violence against Muslims and political activists who criticise Israeli and Western government policies

Another prominent figure in the HJS is Baroness Cox, a former Deputy Speaker of the House of Lords. She is a virulent Islamaphobe and all round bigot. According to Ahmed in 2007, she toldthe Jerusalem Summit – an anti-Palestinian network of which she has been co-president since 2005, that “Britain has been deeply infiltrated” by Islamist extremists, who have converted the country into “a base for training and teaching militant Islam”.

“They are using our institutions to recruit young people, and preventing any critical analysis of Islam,” she added. “Britain’s cultural and spiritual heritage are under threat.”

Later that year, Cox told the Jerusalem Post she was concerned about “the disturbing alliance between the Islamists and the Left in the UK,” On the presidium of the Jerusalem Summit alongside Cox was another well-known anti-Muslim hate-monger Daniel Pipes.

According to former British ambassador Craig Murray, Cox is “a prominent supporter of organisations which actively and openly promote the ethnic cleansing of all Palestinians from Gaza.’

According to James Bloodworthin  Labour should cut its ties with the illiberal Henry Jackson Society Murray wrote that the problem was skin colour not religion or colour:

"We long ago reached the point where the only thing white Britons can do is to remain silent about the change in their country. Ignored for a generation, they are expected to get on, silently but happily, with abolishing themselves, accepting the knocks and respecting the loss of their country. 'Get over it. It's nothing new. You're terrible. You're nothing'."

Bloodworth wrote that in 2013 11 Labour MPs were members of the HJS. He wrote to all 11 with his concerns about the HJS but none replied. Gisela Stuart is no longer an MP. Solomon Hughes in the Morning Star this March wrote describing how right-wing MP and friend of Tom Watson, John Spellar, is a member and how both Yvette Cooper and Shadow Defence Minister Nia Griffiths had co-operated with HSJ over a conference they held in Oxford. Margaret Beckett was also a member as I understand was Chris Bryant.

In 2009 Murray described Robert Spencer, the leader of a group calling itself "Stop the Islamization of America (SIOA)", as a "very brilliant scholar and writer". He is so brilliant that along with Pamela Geller he got himself banned from entering Britain. He is responsible for Jihad Watch which is allied to David Horowitz’s Freedom Centre and Frontpagemag.com which as I write is busily peddling Israel’s line that it is under attack from Hamas.  Nothing about Israeli military strikes and bombing are allowed to come between it and the truth.

Bloodworth described how Marko Attila Hoare, a former senior member of the Henry Jackson Society was driven out of the organisation in 2012 because of his opposition to Murray's anti-Muslim and anti-immigration views.

"It rapidly became clear that Murray had not tamed his politics, and that actually they were becoming the politics of the whole organisation,"

In an otherwise appalling apologia for Finkelstein on the Barrister’s Blog, Matthew describes how, in a 2006 speech to the Pim Fortuyn Memorial Conference Murray demanded that “conditions for Muslims in Europe must be made harder across the board.”:

“All immigration into Europe from Muslim countries must stop. In the case of a further genocide such as that in the Balkans, sanctuary would be given on a strictly temporary basis. This should also be enacted retrospectively. Those who are currently in Europe having fled tyrannies should be persuaded back to the countries which they fled from once the tyrannies that were the cause of their flight have been removed. And of course it should go without saying that Muslims in Europe who for any reason take part in, plot, assist or condone violence against the West (not just the country they happen to have found sanctuary in, but any country in the West or Western troops) must be forcibly deported back to their place of origin.”

Abbi Wilkinson, who has come in for criticism from Finkelstein's elite barrister friends, nails the simple truth about Finkelstein - an upper class racist

Abbi Wilkinson’s article Danny Finkelstein And The Bigotsrefers to Murray’s statement that ‘There are certain things in Britain about which it is impossible to speak frankly. The birth rate of the Muslim population is a prime subject”. In either of those cases, had he used “Jews” and “Jewish”, he’d have been denounced for anti-Semitism.

Finkelstein however disagreed. As far as he was concerned, Douglas Murray was both ‘stimulating and worthwhile and often right.’ Nor did he agree with the ‘characterisation of Gatestone’which he found both ‘stimulating and worthwhile and often right’ indeed ‘Gatestone acts as an excellent platform…”.

Finkelstein’s admiration for Murray in 2015 should be seen in the light of the decision of the Tory Party leadership to cut its links with Murray. Paul Goodman, a former MP and editor of Conservative Home wrote on October 17 2011 Why the Conservative frontbench broke off relations with Douglas Murray – and what happened afterwards.

In 2006 Murray made a speech in the Dutch Parliament"What are we to do about Islam?" His answers were what most normal people would describe as racist. To Finkelstein they were ‘stimulating’ and ‘worthwhile’. Murray declared:

"Conditions for Muslims in Europe must be made harder across the board: Europe must look like a less attractive proposition... all immigration into Europe from Muslim countries must stop"

Muslims who

"take part in, plot, assist or condone[my italic] violence against the west must be forcibly deported to their place of origin".

So someone whose parents or even grandparents came from Bangladesh, who supports Palestinian resistance against Israel, which Murray sees as ‘part of the West’ should be deported ‘back’ to a country they have never seen. Or someone who supports resistance to French troops in Africa should be deported. One wonders what part of this Finkelstein finds stimulating?

Goodman therefore went  to see Murray to ask him to disown his remarks.  He refused and therefore relations with the Tory Party were broken off.  Later Murray claimed to have recanted ‘years earlier’ but this was clearly untrue.

Murray is listed as a Distinguished Senior Fellow of the GI whose Board he sat on until late October 2014. John Bolton, now Trump’s National Security Advisor, chaired the GI from 2013 to 2018. Gatestone’s board also included Baroness Cox. The GI proudly lists all of Murray’s writings. They make interesting reading.

Finkelstein claims not to support Wilder's views but he defends Murray whose views are similar and he was part of the Gatestone Institute which did share Wilder's views

Wilders in court in The Netherlands on charges of racial discrimination

Geert Wilders - Gatestone's favourite fascist

In his article on Gatestone’s site The Guilty Verdict Dutch Politicians Wanted So Much Murray rails at a Dutch court for having convicted Geert Wilders of inciting discrimination and fostering hatred of Moroccans. Apparently all poor Geert did was to ask a crowd of his supporters whether they wanted more or fewer Moroccans and they responded ‘fewer’. In fact the transcript is damning. EuroNews describeshow Ronald van Vliet a parliamentary member of his far-right Freedom Party resigned in protest against the speech.

During the meeting Wilders encouraged supporters to chant racist slogans against Moroccans before he addressed them:

“So I ask you what do you want in this city more or less Moroccans?”

The crowd chants, “less. less.”

Wilders continues: “We will fix it.”

The crowd laughs.

Finkelstein changes his story & lies through his teeth

Ahmed described how Finkelstein was ‘promoting far-right politics, and in the name of freedom itself.’

When his membership of GI’s Board was raised Finkelstein lied, lied and lied again. When three years ago, Nafeez Ahmed asserted “you are on the board of [Gatestone]”, he replied

“I naturally don't (and didn't) say that I didn't know who it was or what it publishes or who it hosts. Of course I do.Being on the Board doesn't mean I agree with every article or every speaker, nor does it imply that I don’t”

He went on

I don't accept your characterisation of Gatestone. I find Douglas Murray stimulating and worthwhile and often right, without always agreeing. I think Gatestone acts as an excellent platform …(my emphasis)

Yet on 1^st August 2018 Finkelstein tweeted

‘I do not serve on the board and have never had any role of any kind running Gatestone or supervising it in any way. They listed me on the board, until I told them to stop. I have spoken to them as have many distinguished guests.’

Realising that that might not sound all that convincing Finkelstein clarified 7 minutes later in response to a query from kadhim:

‘To clarify, are you saying that you never served on the board and that they listed you as such (for two years) in error?

To which Finkelstein replied

‘Essentially. I realise that sounds like a weasel word so let me unpack it. They listed me on a board and I didn’t actually know at first. The board never met or was asked to meet or had any role and rather lazily, once I do know, just left it.’

As clear as mud. Four minutes later

‘More recently, I thought, mmm, being listed on a board is different to making a speech or two and I don’t want to be responsible for everything they do with no actual control so I’d better not continue lazily ignoring this. So I asked to be taken off. That, I’m afraid is the

And knowing he was being caught in a trap of his own making tweeted ‘‘unheroic truth’

But 8 hours later, realising that nothing he said had made sense Finkelstein tweeted

Yes I’m sorry I was on it and I apologise for the error. Worst of all it gives the legitimate impression that I support ideas that I think are completely wrong and rightly thought offensive

But was it an error? For at least two years Finkelstein sat on the board of an openly racist and Islamophobic organisation, spoke at their meetings, defended people like Douglas Murray who the Tory front bench had dissociated themselves from and then expects us to believe that this worldly wise man, who goes around on the lecture circuit explaining the political climate to people was unaware of who he was mixing with?  And worse can then call anti-Semitic a man who has fought racism his whole life.  As Private Eye used to say ‘pass the sick bucket Alice’.

The reality is that Finkelstein sat on the Board of an organisation which consciously promoted the writings of Geert Wilders, an open fascist whose racism is such that even members of his own misnamed Freedom Party have resigned.

Gatestone Institute defend Geert Wilder's racist views

The  Gatestone’s response to this was an article Who is in More Trouble: Wilders or The Netherlands?

According to the Center for American Progressin Washington DC, Nina Rosenwald and the foundations controlled by her and her family are part of “a small, tightly networked group of misinformation experts” that “peddle hate and fear of Muslims and Islam.”This is the organisation Finkelstein has such close connections with and who Jonathan Freedland, in his battle against ‘anti-Semitism’ considers a trusted ally.

The GI has repeatedly endorsed the myth of “Muslim no-go-zones” in Europe that caused David Cameron to describe a Fox News pundit echoing the same views as an “idiot.”

Freedland's email to me as the antisemitism smear campaign began

There is also a good article in the Morning Star The Times launches yet another desperate smear against Corbyn

I have one more question to Freedland, Finkelstein and all the other obsessives who are willing to chase down anti-Semitic opinions expressed over a century ago.  You describe yourselves as Zionists.  When are you going to distance yourself from the anti-Semitic opinions of Zionism’s founders. Unlike Hobson’s views they are still relevant today because Israel is in a de facto alliance with white supremacists the world over, from Trump to Orban.

Freedland doesn't care what company he keeps when attacking Corbyn

Theodor Herzl, founder of the Zionist movement, railing against 'the terrible power of our purse'

I am referring for example to Theodor Herzl, the founder of Political Zionism, who wrote about the Jews in the pamphlet which started off the movement, The Jewish State:

When we sink, we become a revolutionary proletariat, the subordinate officers of all revolutionary parties; and at the same time, when we rise, there rises also our terrible power of the purse.

Or Jacob Klatzkin, join editor of the Zionist paper die Welt, who wrote that the Jews were

 ‘a people disfigured in both body and soul – in a word, of a horror… some sort of outlandish creature… in any case, not a pure national type... some sort of oddity among the peoples going by the name of Jew.

Or how about Israel’s first Justice Minister, Pinhas Rosenbluth who described Palestine as ‘an institute for the fumigation of Jewish vermin’

There are many more such quotes I can dig up if necessary. Zionism began with a rejection of the Jewish diaspora. It's called 'negation of the diaspora.' Zionism literally hated the Jewish presence outside Palestine. Many Zionists considered themselves proud anti-Semites.  For example Arthur Ruppin, one of the most important Zionist figures in the last century, after whom streets and boulevards are named in Israel and the Father of Land Settlement:

We can rely on Aaronovitch, a former communist who went to the neo-liberal right, to defend Finkelstein

When a friend of Ruppin called him an anti-Semite he retorted ‘I have already established here [in his diary] that I despise the cancers of Judaism more than does the worst anti-Semite.’ Ruppin associated Judaism with capitalism and his writings reflected his belief in the identity between anti-Semitism and anti-capitalism. [Joachim Doron, Classic Zionism, parallels and influences’ (1883-1914), Studies in Zionism 8, Autumn 1983]

Compared to Ruppin and Herzl, John Hobson was a very mild anti-Semite.  Perhaps we could see some explanations from Jonathan Freedland as to why he has said nothing about the origins of Zionism up till now?

Tony Greenstein

The Fight Goes On - Why I Reject the Threats of the Campaign Against Antisemitism's Lawyers

May 7, 2019, 5:56 pm

≫ Next: A day in the life of Palestinians in the Jordan Valley

≪ Previous: At last Corbyn fights back against the anti-Semitism smears – now its time to junk the Witchhunter’s Charter, the IHRA

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Please Help Me Ensure That I Have the Means to Continue The Fight Against the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism

The Jewish Chronicle's Report of the Hearing

This is the latest update in my libel action against the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism 

As you may recall, the CAA called me a ‘notorious anti-Semite’on 5 different occasions but when it came to the Preliminary Issues Hearing on Meaning on February 14^th, they argued that their libels weren’t based on fact but opinion! In other words they can’t back up their allegations factually and have to rely on the defence that theirs are ‘honest opinions’ (s.3 of the Defamation Act 2013).

The First Libellous Article by the CAA

At the hearing on 14^th February Justice Nicklin, who was in the same chambers as the counsel for the CAA, Adam Speker, ruled that calling someone an ‘anti-Semite’ is a matter of opinion. We sought leave to appeal to the Court of Appeal but on 25^th March Lady Justice Aplin refused to grant us leave. Her decision can be seen here. 

We therefore submitted, as per the Order of Nicklin J, amended Particulars of Claim on 3^rd April.  The Defendant, the CAA have until 10^th May to submit a Defence.

My Response to the CAA's Threatening Letter

However on 24^thApril, RPC Solicitors, who are acting for CAA sent me a threatening letter.  warning of a massive costs bill. (see  below for letter)

If I don’t withdraw the action they will seek summary judgment and costs of over £60,000.  After having taken legal advice I am happy to continue the fight because there is an important principle at stake, namely that Zionist organisations cannot go around accusing people of ‘anti-Semitism’ and then if called to account plead ‘sorry guv, it was only an opinion. Of course it’s not based on  facts.’

The Jewish Chronicle has been particularly concerned about my libel action

I therefore sent the CAA a letterrejecting their threats.   

The fact that CAA are allowed to run an ‘honest opinion’ defence is outrageous but that is what the good Judge Nicklin allowed.

Nonetheless we will be arguing that their Opinion is not honest, that there is no reasonable basis to it and the factual matrix on which they have based their opinion, which effectively says that I am a holocaust denier, is a lie.  I am therefore willing to risk a judgement for costs, which will be well in excess of £60,000 and take a chance.

I am therefore asking you to contribute whatever you can afford to my Libel Appeal Fund in order that I can continue to pursue this case against what is, without doubt, the nastiest of all Zionist organisations in Britain.  A veritable libel machine. You can make a donation by one of four different methods:

The fifth libellous article

1.           either clicking hereto GoFundMe.

2.           making a payment via Paypal to tonygreenstein111@gmail.com (it should be a personal payment not a payment for services to avoid any deductions)

3.           Or you can make a BACS transfer direct to:BUWC, 40-47-87 04094107 or

4.           Send a cheque to me, made out to BUWC at PO Box 173, Brighton BN51 9BE

The last two methods avoid any deductions (approx 5%).

Thank you

Tony Greenstein

The CAA's threatening letter

A day in the life of Palestinians in the Jordan Valley

May 7, 2019, 8:31 pm

≫ Next: Labour Party Witchhunt – the Zionists are unhappy that Moshe Machover was the one that got away

≪ Previous: The Fight Goes On - Why I Reject the Threats of the Campaign Against Antisemitism's Lawyers

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In photos: the dark reality in the occupied Jordan Valley

The Jordan valley is part of the Jordan rift valley. Through it flows the Jordan river which demarcates the boundary between Israel and Jordan. Nearly all of it lies in Area C under  the Oslo Accords and is thus in complete control of Israeli forces.  It is the centre of Israel’s agribusiness and the Israeli military go to extraordinary lengths to prevent Palestinians erecting any form of building or development.  Palestinians form the cheap labour on the settlement farms.

From the very start of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank Israeli politicians such as Israeli Labour’s Yigal Allon made it clear that the Jordan Valley would never be relinquished.

These pictures by Antony Lowenstein give a glimpse of the harassment that Palestinians face at the hands of the military and the settlers.

This first appeared on Mondoweiss

Tony Greenstein

In photos: the dark reality in the occupied Jordan Valley

Antony Loewenstein spends a day in the Jordan Valley reporting on the nightmarish situation for many Palestinian shepherds as they attempt to graze their land.

The Israeli occupation of Palestine is largely reported in the Western media, if it all, through the lens of the West Bank and Gaza. These areas contain millions of Palestinians whose lives are controlled by the Israeli army and hundreds of thousands of Jewish settlers. The Jordan Valley, situated in the West Bank, is given less attention within that press coverage. It’s almost invisible in the Israeli media (with a 2011 poll finding that most Israelis didn’t even know the Jewish state was occupying the area). There are nearly 65,000 Palestinians living there along with 11,000 Israeli settlers.

I’ve recently spent time in the Jordan Valley reporting on the nightmarish situation for many Palestinian shepherds and residents in the face of constant Israeli army attacks, arrests and abuse. Extreme settlers, working with the military, are literally trying to push Palestinians off their land.

The following photo essay documents one day in the life of Palestinians in the Jordan Valley.

Traveling from Jerusalem to the Jordan Valley is a short drive past countless Palestinian villages, Israeli checkpoints and illegal Israeli settlements. (Photo: Antony Loewenstein)

Israeli activist Guy Hirschfeld works every day in the Jordan Valley to defend Palestinian shepherds against the Israeli army and settlers. (Photo: Antony Loewenstein)

Palestinian shepherd Ahmed arrives with his sheep and is soon surrounded by the Israeli army and told to leave because it is a closed military zone. (Photo: Antony Loewenstein)

An Israeli army jeep crisscrosses the Jordan Valley, on daily patrol in the area. (Photo: Antony Loewenstein)

The calm before the storm in the beauty, stillness and roughness of the Jordan Valley. (Photo: Antony Loewenstein)

Near the end of the day, Palestinian shepherd Mohammed is detained and put in restraints by the Israeli army after refusing to stop grazing his sheep. His keffiyeh was pulled over his eyes, and he was put in the back of an Israeli army jeep and taken to a nearby base where an image of Batman is painted on the outside wall. Mohammed was later released soon after he was detained, following Israeli commanders seeing Hirschfeld’s Facebook live-stream of the arrest. (Photo: Antony Loewenstein)

Israeli activist Guy Hirschfeld argues with Israeli soldiers. He explains that they’re doing the work of the settlers by kicking Palestinian shepherds off their land. (Photo: Antony Loewenstein)

Hirschfeld tells an Israeli soldier that she has no right to block Palestinian freedom of movement in the area, but the military says otherwise. (Photo: Antony Loewenstein)

Palestinian shepherd Ahmed is told by Israeli soldiers that he must leave the area. (Photo: Anthony Loewenstein)

Hirschfeld constantly films and photographs his actions in the Jordan Valley, posting them on Facebook, to document the daily abuses committed by the Israeli army and settlers. (Photo: Antony Loewenstein)

Hirschfeld shows an Israeli soldier photos and videos he’s shot throughout the day, documenting the actions of the army in the Jordan Valley. (Antony Loewenstein)

An Israeli soldier guards the Palestinian shepherd, Mohammed in the moments before he is taken to a nearby army base. (Photo: Antony Loewenstein)

Antony Loewenstein is a Jerusalem-based, independent, investigative journalist who has written for the New York Times, Guardian and many others, author of “My Israel Question” and “Disaster Capitalism: Making A Killing Out Of Catastrophe,”amongst others, writer of the documentary “Disaster Capitalism” and will be releasing a book on the global “war on drugs” in 2019. He’s been reporting on Israel/Palestine since 2003.

Other posts by Antony Loewenstein.

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Labour Party Witchhunt – the Zionists are unhappy that Moshe Machover was the one that got away

May 9, 2019, 10:25 pm

≫ Next: 15,000 March in Memory of Nakba (‘Catastrophe’) Day in Central London

≪ Previous: A day in the life of Palestinians in the Jordan Valley

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The Zionist Movement is happy to use the Holocaust to justify its crimes but doesn't want people to understand what its relationship with the Nazis was

On 19^th March the Jewish Chronicle led with what it termed an ‘Exclusive’. Jeremy Corbyn had intervened over the expulsion of Israeli dissident Professor Moshe Machover whom it described as a “'Nazis supported Zionism’ activist.’ 

The Jewish Chronicle and the Zionist Jewish Labour Movement objected to the fact that the ‘Tel Aviv-born academic quoted architect of Final Solution in article distributed at Labour conference.’ You will note that they did not assert that Machover was wrong. What they objected to was that he was telling the truth! According to Zionism’s junk academic David Hirsh, Moshe was guilty of “monstering of Jews and of Israel” although Israel wasn’t even in existence when Heydrich, the engineer of the Final Solution, was speaking favourably of Zionism.

The Gestapo were more than willing to concentrate Jews in just one place

All this was in the context of the fake anti-Semitism smear campaign. It is difficult to imagine  a better way to legitimise anti-Semitism than to equate telling the truth with anti-Semitism. However since Zionists aren’t interested in combating anti-Semitism then that is an irrelevant consideration for them.

Moshe Machover

Almost alone amongst the suspensions and expulsions in the past three years there is one that rankles with the JLM and the Israel lobby more than any other and that is the case of Moshe Machover, Emeritus Professor at King’s College, London University.

Moshe was auto expelled, i.e. without a hearing, by Sam Matthews at the beginning of October 2017 and by the end of the month he had been reinstated. Up and down the country CLPs, trade union branches and other groups passed resolutions opposing the expulsion.

Ostensibly Moshe was expelled because it was alleged he was a member of the Communist  Party of Great Britain. This was an assertion made without a shred of evidence. The real reason was because Moshe had penned an article Anti-Zionism does not equal Anti-Semitism.

A novel on a romance between an Israeli Jew and Arab was banned from the English high school syllabus because inter-racial marriages are considered a social taboo in Israel

To most people it was incomprehensible that the one of the founders of Matzpen, the Socialist Organisation in Israel and a distinguished academic in Britain, had been expelled at all. The idea that expelling Jewish people helps Labour combat anti-Semitism is one of the more bizarre features of the fake anti-Semitism witchhunt and should be perverse even to the dimmest Zionist mind.

Herzl's Jewish State pamphlet - he welcomes the fact that the antisemites will be 'keenly interested in helping us'

Moshe’s real offence was having written the above article but instead of prosecuting him over this they tried a bureaucratic approach.  A false allegation that he was a member of the CPGB.  Since then there has been no further attempts to expel Moshe.

From Herzl's pamphlet The Jewish State

That was why the Jewish Chronicle has decided to test the waters afresh after the adoption of the IHRA misdefinition of anti-Semitism. The IHRA is designed to smear as anti-Semitic anyone who makes any fundamental criticism of Israel and Zionism. In particular the Zionists believe that Moshe has infringed one of the IHRA’s illustrations of ‘anti-Semitism’ namely ‘Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis’.

Presumably their article Jeremy Corbyn intervened over expulsion of 'Nazis supported Zionism' activist Moshé Machover was meant as some kind of shock-horror. As if Blair and Kinnock had never interfered in the disciplinary process!

Zionist historian David Cesarani saying the same thing in his book as Ken Livingstone - that the Nazis supported Zionism pre 1939

Moshe’s ‘crime’ was drawing attention to the Zionist record during the period of the Nazis. That is quite understandable. The JLM do not want people to know that during the Nazi period the Zionists took a conscious decision NOT to fight fascism but to collaborate with it and use it to their advantage. That was why Ken Livingstone was hounded out of the party. 

So in the interests of telling the truth, I thought it might be helpful to illuminate a few facts that the JLM would prefer were kept hidden.

Zionist Exploitation of the Holocaust

As we know, from their repetitious accusations of ‘anti-Semitism’ Zionism never fails to use the Holocaust as a propaganda weapon. The examples are legion. For example when Matan Vilnai, Israel’s Deputy Defence Minister threatened the Palestinians of Gaza with a Holocaust or when Israeli Foreign Minister, Abba Eban described the Green Line separating the West Bank from Israel as ‘Auschwitz borders.’

From the Jewish State - the phrase 'the terrible power of our purse'  is clearly antisemitic - this page demonstrates how Herzl rejoiced in the support of antisemites

Israel has only just commemorated Yom Ha Shoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day. However Zionism doesn’t remember the Holocaust in order to learn and impart the lessons that most people would draw from such a terrible event, namely that we should renew our opposition to racism. That genocide must never be repeated.

On the contrary the lesson that Zionism draws from the Holocaust is that the ‘Jewish People’ itself a racial mystification, in the form of a ‘Jewish’ State should be militarily strong. Which means the continued subjugation of the Palestinians.

Rohinga children - the Burmese army uses Israeli weaponry

So we have the obscenity of Israel arming and equipping the Burmese regime whilst it slaughters the Rohinga people. A carbon copy of what happened in the 1970’s when Israeli support played a crucial part in the genocide of up to 200,000 Mayan Indians in Guatemala.

The other lesson that Zionism imparts is that anti-Semitism is inherent in non-Jewish society and cannot be eradicated and that Jews will only be safe in their racial paradise. For example the article Israel marks Holocaust Remembrance Day amid fears of resurgent anti-Semitism, after going through a list of anti-Semitic incidents in the past year, it quotes researchers at Tel Aviv University as concluding that ‘Many Jews in the Diaspora feel increasingly insecure and are questioning their place in society.’ This is, what they like to call, Zionist wishful thinking.

From Herzl's Diaries - he tried to enlist the support of British imperialist Cecil Rhodes - nowadays the Zionists pretend that they are a movement of national liberation

There is no mention of the fact that the shooting of Jews in the United States just happened to occur as a result of the Presidency of Donald Trump, a White Supremacist who also just happens to be the best friend Israel has ever had in the White House.

The Holocaust is deliberately used to foster Israeli nationalism and the hatred of non-Jews. For Zionism there are no universal or moral lessons from the Holocaust. The slogan ‘never again’only applies to Jews.

That is why it is necessary to examine what exactly was the role that Zionism played with the accession to power of the Nazis in 1933.

Zionist Relations with the Nazi from 1933 Onwards

This was the Zionist attitude to anti-Semitism throughout its history, including today

Firstly there was nothing unique about the Zionist attitude to the Nazis.  From the very start Zionism had acted according to Theodor Herzl’s maxim at the time of the Dreyfus Affair. In his Diaries Herzl, the founder of Political Zionism had written:

In Paris... I achieved a freer attitude towards anti-Semitism, which I now began to understand historically and to pardon. Above all, I recognise the emptiness and futility of trying to 'combat' anti-Semitism.  [Diaries of Theodore Herzl, Gollancz, London 1958 p.6, May 1895].

Herzl’s attitude, that anti-Semitism must be exploited to Zionism’s advantage and that without anti-Semitism there would be no Zionism held true in the era of the Nazis. As Herzl noted,

‘the governments of all countries scourged by Anti-Semitism will be keenly interested in assisting us to obtain the sovereignty we want.’ [Theodor Herzl, The Jewish State, p.28 H Pordes, London 1972]

When Hitler came to power in Germany it was clear to most Jews throughout the world that the Nazis were no ordinary anti-Semitic regime. Throughout Eastern Europe, from Poland to Romania and the Baltic states, anti-Semitism was rife. Ghetto benches in Polish universities had been introduced in 1935 and anti-Semitic laws had been introduced in Hungary and other countries.

The Nazis however represented something entirely different from the feudal and religious anti-Semitism of the Eastern Europe. The Nazis were unconcerned with the myth that the Jews killed Christ. They were anti-communists who believed that the Jews were the germ carriers of Bolshevism, engaged in a world-wide conspiracy to undermine every nation bar their own. The Jews were a devil people. The Nazis had contempt for the unsystematised anti-Semitism that ended up in pogroms, a few deaths, but a continuation of the ‘Jewish problem’.  They were scientific racists.

The Nazis began with a concerted legislative attack to drive the Jews out of society beginning on April 7^th 1933 with the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service which resulted in the dismissal of Jews (apart from veterans of the first world war and their offspring) from the civil service. It proceeded via the 1935 Nuremburg Laws, which removed citizenship from the Jews and made them subjects. The Zionists welcomed the Nuremburg laws as clarifying the situation of Jews in Germany.

For the Nazis it didn’t matter whether or not someone who was Jewish converted to Christianity. Once a Jew always a Jew. Being Jewish was a racial not a religious category, unlike the situation in the anti-Semitic countries of Eastern Europe. Thus there appeared the Christian Jew, Jews who had converted to Christianity. In Nazi eyes they remained Jewish. The Protestant Reich Church in particular went along with this and barred them from their precincts.

Jews the world over knew that the advent of Hitler in a country that was the citadel of European civilisation, Goethe, Schiller and Beethoven, was entirely different from the plethora of anti-Semitic regimes in Eastern Europe. The result was that when Hitler took power there was an instant reaction from world Jewry. The Daily Express described it as ‘Judea Declares War on Germany’ but of course it was the other way around (though fascists have subsequently used this headline to justify Hitler’s war on the Jews).

World Jewry were united in seeing the advent of Hitler as a menace and threat to the existence of German Jewry. An international Jewish boycott of Nazi Germany grew up almost instantaneously supported by the labour movement and many non-Jews. The history of the Boycott is best described in Edwin Black’s book, The Transfer Agreement.

There was no section of Jewry who welcomed or saw any good in the advent of the Nazis bar one. Most Jews feared for the German Jewish community. The Zionist leaders however only saw good coming from the rise of Hitler to power. Their only concern was whether or not the Nazis would benefit the Jewish state-in-the-making. They were determined to exploit the rise of Hitler to their own advantage.

Francis Nicosia, Professor of Holocaust Studies at Vermont University, cites Berl Katznelson, second only to David Ben Gurion, as describing the rise of the Nazis as ‘an opportunity to build and flourish like none we have ever had or ever will have.’ [Zionism and Anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany, p.91, CUP 2008] Tom Segev, the Israeli journalist and historian, ascribes the same comments to a report from Moshe Beilinson, a Mapai activist, to Katznelson..

Ben Gurion, the leader of Palestinian Zionism and the first Israeli Prime Minister expressed the hope that the Nazi victory would become a ‘fertile force for Zionism.’ [Tom Segev, The Seventh Million, p.18, 1993 Hill and Wang]

Of course it can be argued that very few people in 1933 could foresee the Holocaust but most Jews feared the worst in respect of the Nazis’ intentions.  Both Ben Gurion and Jabotinsky foresaw the extermination of the Jews. [Segev, p.18]

In New York 55,000 packed inside Madison Square Gardens with another 35,000 outside.  To prevent this rally on March 27th Goering had summoned the leaders of the German Jewish community to get them to try and get it called off - only the Zionists agreed to do so

Every section of Jewish society bar the Jewish bourgeoisie and the Zionist movement supported the campaign to boycott Nazi Germany.

In August 1933 the Zionist movement reached agreement with the Nazis for a trading agreement, Ha'avara. It involved the use of the assets of German Jews who emigrated to purchase German goods which were exported to Palestine. The same Jews were allowed to take £1,000 in foreign currency with them in order to enter Palestine as capitalists, without the need for an immigration certificate. When these goods were sold in Palestine, the migrants whose money it was received a fraction of the value of their money.

This benefited the Zionists enormously since it enabled whole industries like brewery and printing to develop. Ha’avara accounted for 60% of total capital investment in Jewish Palestine. [David Rosenthall, Chaim Arlosoroff65 Years After his Assassination, Jewish Frontier, May-June 1998, p. 28]. Literally Hitler built the Zionist economy in Palestine.

What was the reason for Nazi Germany agreeing to this deal which on the face of it involved a unilateral transfer of German wealth to the Zionist economy in Palestine? Initially at least they gained no foreign currency though it did keep German factories working.

According to Yf’aat Weiss’s ‘The Transfer Agreement and the Boycott Movement: A Jewish Dilemma on the Eve of the Holocaust’

 ‘One of the German authorities’ principal goals in negotiating with the Zionist movement was to fragment the Jewish boycott of German goods...  Correspondence between Heinrich Wolff, the German consul in Palestine, and the German Foreign Ministry shows that shattering the boycott was a key motive for the German authorities in concluding the Transfer Agreement.’  

Whilst most Jews were boycotting the Nazi economy the Zionists were doing their best to expand their trade with them. Ha'avara acted as the spearhead of a concerted attempt to increase the market for German goods throughout the Middle East.

It was condemned vociferously by Jews the world over. Baruch Vladeck, the editor of the Yiddish daily Forward and Chairman of the Jewish Labor Committee in the United States described how

‘The whole organized labor movement and the progressive world are waging a fight against Hitler through the boycott. The Transfer Agreement scabs on that fight.’

Vladeck contended that

‘The main purpose of the Transfer is not to rescue the Jews from Germany but to strengthen various institutions in Palestine.’

Vladeck termed Palestine ‘the official scab agent against the boycott in the Near-East’ because ‘without the worldwide effort to topple the Third Reich, Hitler would have never agreed to the Transfer Agreement.’ [Lenni Brenner, pp. 92-93, 51 Documents: Zionist Collaboration with the Nazis’, Barricade Books, 1972].

There is no doubt, as Edwin Black argued, that the aim of Ha'avara was not to rescue German Jews but to rescue their wealth.  Some 20,000 Jews were able to emigrate from Germany under Ha'avara but these were among the richest Jews who would have had least difficulty in emigrating anyway. What Ha'avara did was to take the pressure off the Nazis. Zionism prioritised its own needs above the needs of Jews.

Whereas most Jews did all they could to try and help destroy the Nazi government in its infancy, the Zionist movement took a different position altogether.  So keen was it to collaborate and work with the Nazis that it couldn’t even condemn the Nazi government and its anti-Semitism at its 1933 Congress in Prague.

Even Elie Wiesel, the arch Zionist, who was a survivor of Auschwitz, admitted that the

‘Jewish leaders of Palestine never made the rescue of European Jews into an overwhelming national priority. We know that Zionist leader Itzhak Gruenbaum... considered creating new settlements more urgent than saving Jews from being sent to Treblinka and Birkenau.’ 

Wiesel cited approvingly Tom Segev’s conclusion that ‘Only a few survivors owed their lives to the efforts of the Zionist movement’ [The Land That Broke Its Promise : THE SEVENTH MILLION: The Israelis and the Holocaust].

Prior to 1939 the Zionist leaders lobbied the Gestapo not to allow emigration to any other destination bar Palestine, so much for the nonsense that Ha'avara was about saving Jews. As Saul Friedland wrote, ‘the Palestine leadership refused to extend any help to emigrants whose destination was not Eretz Israel.’ [Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1933-1945, p.57, Orion Books, 2009]

Ben Gurion’s official biographer, Shabtai Teveth quotes Ben Gurion as saying that where there was ‘a conflict of interest between saving individual Jews and the good of the Zionist enterprise, we shall say that the enterprise comes first.’ For Ben Gurion ‘there were no “personal” cases, no individual Jews for him’ there was only ‘the Jewish people.’ [Teveth, The Burning Ground 1886-1948, pp. 855, 857, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1987].

This was demonstrated in what was termed ‘cruel Zionism’. When the Western powers held a conference in Evian in France to discuss the Jewish refugee question in Europe, the Zionists hoped that it would fail.  They repeatedly expressed their fears that discussion of the refugees would take the spotlight off the building up of the ‘Jewish’ state in Palestine. The Western leaders were also opposed to letting the Jews of Germany into their countries. The only positive outcome from Evian was the offer from Gen. Trujillo of San Domingo to accept 100,000 Jewish refugees. Brazil’s representative, Helio Lobo, indicated that Brazil could accept 40,000 emigrants a year, though nothing like this number were admitted. [S Beit Zvi, Post-Ugandan Zionism on Trial, A Study of the Factors That Caused the Mistakes Made by the Zionist Movement During the Holocaust, 1991, p. 170, Zahala, Tel Aviv].

The Jewish Agency headed by Berl Locker, was unremitting in its hostility to the offer of the Dominican Republic and did their best to destroy it.

Ben Gurion wrote a memo to the Jewish Agency Executive in 1938 explaining that

‘if the Jews are faced with a choice between the refugee problem and rescuing Jews from concentration camps on the one hand, and aid for the national museum in Palestine on the other, the Jewish sense of pity will prevail and our people's entire strength will be directed at aid for the refugees in the various countries. Zionism will vanish from the agenda and indeed not only world public opinion in England and America but also from Jewish public opinion. We are risking Zionism's very existence if we allow the refugee problem to be separated from the Palestine problem.’ [Memo of 17.12.38 to Zionist Executive, Arie Bober, The Other Israel, p.171

After the Nazi pogrom of Kristalnacht, when nearly all German synagogues were set on fire, hundreds of Jews murdered and property destroyed, the British agreed to admit 10,000 Jewish children (though not their parents). The Zionists were furious that they were not going to Palestine and Ben Gurion expressed his anger in a speech to Mapai’s Central Committee on 9^thDecember 1938, he said:

‘If I knew that it would be possible to save all the children in Germany by bringing them over to England, and only half of them by transporting them to Eretz Yisrael, then I would opt for the second alternative. For we must weigh not only the life of these children, but also the history of the People of Israel.’ [Yoav Gelber, ‘Zionist policy and the fate of European Jewry 1939-42, Yad Vashem Studies,, Vol. 12.;, p.199, Segev, p.28].   

The Jewish Agency in Jerusalem set up a Rescue Committee that rescued no one. Its leader Yitzhak Gruenbaum of the ‘left’ Zionist Mapam made his views clear at a meeting of the Zionist Actions Committee in mid-January 1943, when he argued that money from the Foundation Fund should not be used for rescue:

‘No, and I say it again – no! This tendency to consider Zionisactivities secondary must be resisted….’

The struggle for redemption of the land did not

‘readily fit with activities for the benefit of the Diaspora, and this is our tragedy.’ But if a choice had to be made between the two, then ‘Zionism comes first.’ The Blue & Yellow Stars of David The Zionist Leadership and the Holocaust, 1939-1945, Harvard University Press, 1990, Cambridge Massachussets, p.76.

Even Shabtai Teveth, Ben Gurion’s official biographer, had to conclude that

‘If there was a line in Ben-Gurion’s mind between the beneficial disaster and an all-destroying catastrophe, it must have been a very fine one.’ [Teveth, p. 851]

Rudolf Kasztner

Most people will not even have heard of the Kasztner Trial in Israel between 1954 and 1958. It led to the fall of the Moshe Sharrett government in 1955. It stemmed from the accusation that the former leader of Hungarian Zionism Rudolf Kasztner had collaborated in the deportation to Auschwitz of nearly half a million Jews in return for a train out of Hungary for the Jewish and Zionist elite.

A libel action was brought on Kasztner’s behalf by the Israeli state and Attorney General Chaim Cohen appeared on his behalf. At the trial a number of survivors of the Hungarian Holocaust took the stand to testify against Kasztner. He and his acolytes in the Zionist movement had gone to the brickyards where the Jews were assembled prior to deportation to reassure them that they were being ‘resettled’ in the fictional Kenyermeze or Waldsee. Those that survived came back with vengeance in their hearts. A trial was held in Cluj, the capital of Transylvania, then in  Hungary, where a death sentence was passed by the Jewish Holocaust survivors against Kasztner.

Benjamin Halevi, President of the Jerusalem District Court, found that

‘Eichmann did not want a second Warsaw. For this reason, the Nazis exerted themselves to mislead and bribe the Jewish leaders….

The Nazi patronage of Kasztner, and their agreement to let him save six hundred prominent Jews, were part of the plan to exterminate the Jews. Kasztner was given a chance to add a few more to that number. The bait attracted him. The opportunity of rescuing prominent people appealed to him greatly. He considered the rescue of the most important Jews as a great personal success and a success for Zionism.’

Halevy found that Kasztner had lied when he denied giving testimony at Nuremburg after the war in favour of a leading Nazi, Himmler’s personal emissary in Hungary, Col. Kurt Becher. What the court didn’t know was that Kasztner had given testimony in favour of 7 Nazis including Wisliceny, the butcher of Greek and Slovakian Jewry and Herman Krumey, the man who implemented on a day to day basis the extermination of Hungarian Jewry. Kasztner did all these things as an official emissary of the Jewish Agency, not as an individual.

Halevi concluded with an ancient proverb: ‘timeo Danaos et dona ferentes’ (I fear the Greeks even when they bring presents).

‘By accepting this present Kasztner had sold his soul to the devil.’ Kasztner, as the leader of the JA Rescue Committee, ‘didn’t want to destroy by his left hand what he built with his right…’ [Perfidy, pp. 179-80, Julian Messner, New York 1962.

For those interested in this episode Perfidywritten by Ben Hecht, a supporter of Revisionist Zionism, is still the best book. The Zionists have claimed for years that Kasztner was the great rescuer of 1,648 Jews on his train despite his having covered up the Auschwitz Protocols of the Jewish escapees from Auschwitz Rudolph Vrba and Alfred Wetzler but last year even Paul Bogdanor, a far-Right Zionist, who had set out to exonerate Kasztner concluded that he was a Nazi agent in his book Kasztner’s Crimes.

Ken Livingstone was forced out of the Labour Party for saying that Hitler i.e. the Nazis supported Zionism. However this is an incontrovertible fact. The Nazis consciously supported the Zionists against their anti-Zionist opponents in German Jewry.

From the beginning of the Nazi regime, Zionism

‘became a central component of Nazi Jewish policy as the Nazi state sought to reverse Jewish emancipation and assimilation in Germany and to end Jewish life in the Reich…’[Nicosia, p. 105].

A ‘generally ‘pro-Zionist’ stance had emerged as a result of the Ha’avara strategy in Nazi Jewish policy.’ [Nicosia ZANG, p. 89]

On 28^th January 1935 Reinhardt Heydrich, issued a directive stating:

‘the activity of the Zionist-oriented youth organizations that are engaged in the occupational restructuring of the Jews for agriculture and manual trades prior to their emigration to Palestine lies in the interest of the National Socialist state’s leadership.’ These organisations therefore ‘are not to be treated with that strictness that it is necessary to apply to the members of the so-called German-Jewish organizations (assimilationists)’. Lucy Dawidowicz,; The War Against the Jews 1933-45, Penguin, London 1987.

In May 1935 Schwarze Korps, paper of the SS, wrote in a similar vein that

‘the Zionists adhere to a strict racial position and by emigrating to Palestine they are helping to build their own Jewish state.... The assimilation-minded Jews deny their race and insist on their loyalty to Germany or claim to be Christians because they have been baptised in order to subvert National Socialist principles.’ Randolph Braham, The Politics of Genocide – The Holocaust in Hungary, Vol. 1. Columbia University Press, 1981 p. 484, fn. 94., 5 May 1935, L. Dawidowicz, p.118,

In 1936, the Palestine Post reported the demand that:

‘… the German Zionist Federation be given recognition by the Government as the only instrument for the exclusive control of German Jewish life was made by the Executive of that body in a proclamation today. All German Jewish organizations, it was declared, should be dominated by the Zionist spirit.’

Zionism sought to build a Jewish state in order to perpetuate what it called the ‘Jewish people’. It was a movement based on a racial fantasy. At critical times, not only during the Nazi era, the Zionist movement has prioritised either building its own movement or the Israeli state above the interests of Jews.  It did this during the Hitler era, it did it during the period of the neo-Nazi Junta in Argentina between 1976 and 1983. It did this in the civil war in Russia when the leader of the Revisionist Zionism Vladimir Jabotinsky allied with the leader of the White Russians Petlyura, despite his forces having massacred thousands of Jews.

Despite its accusation of ‘anti-Semitism’, the Zionist movement has never opposed anti-Semitism.  Of course many individual Zionists fought anti-Semitism including in the Warsaw Ghetto. Just as many Zionists supported the Boycott of Nazi Germany but Zionism is an elitist movement.  During the Nazi era the Zionist movement set their face against any campaign against the Nazis.

Below are extracts from the letter sent by the Zionist Federation of Germany to Hitler.

Extracts - Memo from the German Zionist Federation to Adolf Hitler (21^stJune 1933)

The full text can be found in Lucy Dawidowicz’s Holocaust Reader, pp. 150-155

May we therefore be permitted to present our views, which, in our opinion, make possible a solution in keeping with the principles of the new German State of National Awakening and which at the same time might signify for Jews a new ordering of the conditions of their existence ... Zionism has no illusions about the difficulty of the Jewish condition, which consists above all in an abnormal occupational pattern and in the fault of an intellectual and moral posture not rooted in one’s own tradition ...

... an answer to the Jewish question truly satisfying to the national state can be brought about only with the collaboration of the Jewish movement that aims at a social, cultural, and moral renewal of Jewry ...

Zionism believes a rebirth of national life, such as is occurring in German life through adhesion to Christian and national values, must also take place in the Jewish national group. For the Jew, too, origin, religion, community of fate and group consciousness must be of decisive significance in the shaping of his life ...

On the foundation of the new state, which has established the principle of race, we wish so to fit our community into the total structure so that for us too, in the sphere assigned to us, fruitful activity for the Fatherland is possible ... Our acknowledgement of Jewish nationality provides for a clear and sincere relationship to the German people and its national and racial realities. Precisely because we do not wish to falsify these fundamentals, because we, too, are against mixed marriage and are for maintaining the purity of the Jewish group ...

... fidelity to their own kind and their own culture gives Jews the inner strength that prevents insult to the respect for the national sentiments and the imponderables of German nationality; and rootedness in one’s own spirituality protects the Jew from becoming the rootless critic of the national foundations of German essence. The national distancing which the state desires would thus be brought about easily as the result of an organic development.

Thus, a self-conscious Jewry here described, in whose name we speak, can find a place in the structure of the German state, because it is inwardly unembarrassed, free from the resentment which assimilated Jews must feel at the determination that they belong to Jewry, to the Jewish race and past. We believe in the possibility of an honest relationship of loyalty between a group-conscious Jewry and the German state ...

For its practical aims, Zionism hopes to be able to win the collaboration even of a government fundamentally hostile to Jews, because in dealing with the Jewish question no sentimentalities are involved but a real problem whose solution interests all peoples, and at the present moment especially the German people.

The realisation of Zionism could only be hurt by resentment of Jews abroad against the German development. Boycott propaganda – such as is currently being carried on against Germany in many ways – is in essence un-Zionist, because Zionism wants not to do battle but to convince and to build ... Our observations, presented herewith, rest on the conviction that, in solving the Jewish problem according to its own lights, the German Government will have full understanding for a candid and clear Jewish posture that harmonizes with the interests of the state

15,000 March in Memory of Nakba (‘Catastrophe’) Day in Central London

May 11, 2019, 4:13 pm

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Short but sweet – Palestinian heroine Ahed Tamimi addresses the crowds

Ahed Tamimi speaking at the end

Well the weather could have been better but our spirits were high.  An estimated 15,000 people marched through central London, from the BBC Voice of Israel offices at Portland Place, off Oxford Street to Whitehall.

During Operation Cast Lead in 2008-9, the Sri Lankan Government murdered an estimated 20,000 Tamils

Apart from a tiny handful of Zionists corralled in behind 2 rows of police, who were invisible to all unless you went searching for them, there was no Zionist opposition. Missing from the 10-15 oddballs, neo-Nazis and assorted fascists was Jonathan Hoffman.  Presumably he doesn’t want to get himself arrested again and face the next couple of months on remand at Her Majesty’s undoubted pleasure.

I also bumped into Paul Besser, the Zionist former ‘intelligence officer’ for the neo-Nazi Britain First who is an ardent Zionist. However he didn’t seem to want to be trapped behind two rows of police and made himself scarce.

There were a large number of banners from the Labour Party, some from Momentum, Trade Unions (including a drum band from PSC) and various left groups. A number of Jewish groups took part including Jewish Voice for Labour, Jews for Justice and Neturei Karta members who, given it was the Sabbath, must have walked a considerable distance to join the demonstration since public transport is forbidden for Orthodox Jews on Saturday.

The highlight was Ahed Tamimi, the young school girl who was imprisoned for 8 months for slapping a soldier who had invaded her family’s grounds having nearly killed her cousin. If Ahed had been an Israeli Jew and had instead just killed a Palestinian lying unconscious on the ground, she would have been feted in Israeli society, had the Prime Minister lobbying for her, had supermarket bags with her picture on and would then have served just 9 months in prison like Elor Azaria, a Kahanist member of the Israeli army.  Azaria was only prosecuted because he had the misfortune to have been caught on camera.  Normally Israeli soldiers get away with literally murder.

Other speakers included a windbag who otherwise calls himself the Palestinian Ambassador, and Richard Burgon MP, who began speaking as I left.

The Zionist Times of Israel places its  emphasis on Corbyn's backing for the demonstration and the demand for a 'free' Palestine - which is undoubtedly 'antisemitic'

Police guarding the Zionist Zoo

Brighton & Hove PSC sent a large contingent to the demonstration but we left behind token forces in Brighton to staff our regular weekly stall at the clocktower.

It was good to meet up with others from around the country and to hear what was happening.

Below are some of the pictures which I took.

Tony Greenstein

One of the animals carrying an anti-semitic poster which says that Jews are not part of the many

What would his mother say, smoking a cigarette?

Jewish neo-Nazi Gemma Sheridan on the right, ginger hair, member of Jewish Defence League

'Mad' Mel Gharia on the left looking none too happy - and who can blame her given the company she is keeping

A pathetic turnout by the Zionists as Hoffman keeps away

15,000 March in Memory of Nakba (‘Catastrophe’) Day in Central London

May 11, 2019, 5:29 pm

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Short but sweet – Palestinian heroine Ahed Tamimi addresses the crowds

Ahed Tamimi speaking at the end

Well the weather could have been better but our spirits were high.  An estimated 15,000 people marched through central London, from the BBC Voice of Israel offices at Portland Place, off Oxford Street to Whitehall.

During Operation Cast Lead in 2008-9, the Sri Lankan Government murdered an estimated 20,000 Tamils

Apart from a tiny handful of Zionists corralled in behind 2 rows of police, who were invisible to all unless you went searching for them, there was no Zionist opposition. Missing from the 10-15 oddballs, neo-Nazis and assorted fascists was Jonathan Hoffman.  Presumably he doesn’t want to get himself arrested again and face the next couple of months on remand at Her Majesty’s undoubted pleasure.

I also bumped into Paul Besser, the Zionist former ‘intelligence officer’ for the neo-Nazi Britain First who is an ardent Zionist. However he didn’t seem to want to be trapped behind two rows of police and made himself scarce.

There were a large number of banners from the Labour Party, some from Momentum, Trade Unions (including a drum band from PSC) and various left groups. A number of Jewish groups took part including Jewish Voice for Labour, Jews for Justice and Neturei Karta members who, given it was the Sabbath, must have walked a considerable distance to join the demonstration since public transport is forbidden for Orthodox Jews on Saturday.

The highlight was Ahed Tamimi, the young school girl who was imprisoned for 8 months for slapping a soldier who had invaded her family’s grounds having nearly killed her cousin. If Ahed had been an Israeli Jew and had instead just killed a Palestinian lying unconscious on the ground, she would have been feted in Israeli society, had the Prime Minister lobbying for her, had supermarket bags with her picture on and would then have served just 9 months in prison like Elor Azaria, a Kahanist member of the Israeli army.  Azaria was only prosecuted because he had the misfortune to have been caught on camera.  Normally Israeli soldiers get away with literally murder.

Other speakers included a windbag who otherwise calls himself the Palestinian Ambassador, and Richard Burgon MP, who began speaking as I left.

The Zionist Times of Israel places its  emphasis on Corbyn's backing for the demonstration and the demand for a 'free' Palestine - which is undoubtedly 'antisemitic'

Police guarding the Zionist Zoo

Brighton & Hove PSC sent a large contingent to the demonstration but we left behind token forces in Brighton to staff our regular weekly stall at the clocktower.

It was good to meet up with others from around the country and to hear what was happening.

Below are some of the pictures which I took.

Tony Greenstein

One of the animals carrying an anti-semitic poster which says that Jews are not part of the many

What would his mother say, smoking a cigarette?

Jewish neo-Nazi Gemma Sheridan on the right, ginger hair, member of Jewish Defence League

'Mad' Mel Gharia on the left looking none too happy - and who can blame her given the company she is keeping

A pathetic turnout by the Zionists as Hoffman keeps away

The Need to Forget - Why We Should Abolish Holocaust Remembrance Day

May 12, 2019, 10:07 pm

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The Holocaust Memorial Industry is reinforcing the very forces that gave rise to the Holocaust

What is remarkable is that the farther away we get from the Holocaust the greater is the desire to ‘remember’ it. You might think that in the years immediately following the end of the war that American Jewry would be obsessed by nothing else.  Not a bit of it.

The only group in American society who regularly warned people to ‘Remember the 6 million murdered’ were the Communist  Party. [Peter Novick, p.94, The Holocaust in American Life, 2000]In the era of McCarthyism Communists were the last people that the Jewish establishment wanted to be seen with. Novick writes that

 ‘on one point there was striking unanimity among the principal Jewish agencies: the danger that promoting a widespread consciousness of the Holocaust would inevitably promote the image of the Jew as victim.’

On 3 separate occasions –1946, 1947 and 1948 the major Jewish organisations - including the American Jewish Committee, the Anti-Defamation League, American Jewish Congress, Jewish Labor Committee and Jewish War Veterans, vetoed the idea of a Holocaust memorial in New York. (Novick, p.123)

Nathan Glazer, the American neoconservative, in American Judaism in 1957, observed that the Holocaust ‘had had remarkably slight effects on the inner life of American Jewry.’ (Novick, 105)

Auschwitz death camp survivor Jacek Nadolny, 77, tattooed with camp number 192685, holds up a wartime photo of his family, as he poses for a portrait in Warsaw. January 7, 2015\ REUTERS

It was even worse in Israel. Novick describes how Israel Gutman, a historian at Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum and a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto resistance, told how Jews in Palestine listened to survivor’s stories with ‘a forced patience’ that was soon exhausted. 

‘American Jews, or Jews in the Yishuv would have been incredulous at the idea... that survivors’ memories were a ‘precious legacy’ to be preserved.’ (Novick, p.83)

In a 220 page Israeli history textbook published in 1948, just one page was devoted to the Holocaust compared to 10 pages on the Napoleonic wars. [Edith Zertal, p.94, Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood, 2011] The survivors were considered an embarrassment and Israelis described them as sapon (soap, based on the myth that the murdered were turned into soap). [Tom Segev The Seventh Million, p.183].   Hanzi Brand wrote of how, when she settled on Kibbutz Gvata Haim, the other members ‘talked about their war to avoid hearing about hers. They were ashamed of the Holocaust.’ [Segev, p.471]

Picture - Auschwitz II-Birkenau in a thick evening fog, during the 73rd anniversary of the liberation of the concentration and extermination camp. Oswiecim, Poland. January 27, 2018\ KACPER PEMPEL/ REUTERS

Novick describes how, in Israel there was the theme of the ‘survival of the worst’. Ben Gurion describes the Holocaust survivors as

‘people who would not have survived if they had not been what they were – hard, evil and selfish people, and what they underwent there served to destroy what good qualities they had left.’ (Novick, p.69)

So what is it that has changed such that we now have an abundance of Holocaust memorials and artefacts? Even the bogus International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of anti-Semitism implies that it has a connection with the murdered Jews. Both Norman Finkelstein and Novick suggests that the Holocaust Industry sprung up onlyafterthe victory over the Arab countries in the war of 1967. (The Holocaust Industry, p.26; Verso 2003, Novick p.148).

Israel HaYom cartoon: concentration camp barbed wire morphs into an IAF F-16 (Shlomo Cohen)

Over 30 years ago Israel exploded, in Daniel Blatman’s words, when Prof. Yehuda Elkana published “The Need to Forget” Elkana, a child survivor of Auschwitz, argued that the time had come to forget the Holocaust. It should no longer be commemorated on a national basis.  Worship of the Holocaust served nationalist and racist purposes.

Hungary's antisemitic Prime Minister Viktor Orban and Israel's racist prime minister Netanyahu

Elkana became President of the Central European University in 1999, a university set up by George Soros. It is ironic that at the end of last year the University announced that it would close and relocate to Vienna when Hungary’s anti-Semitic Prime Minister Viktor Orban, refused to allow it to remain in Hungary. The campaign against Soros was supported, indeed initatedby the Israeli government and Benjamin Netanyahu who, like Orban, saw Soros as an enemy.

Even the title of this essay is likely to be subject to criticism since any mention of the Holocaust must be accompanied by solemnity, awe and reverential distance. As befits any religion and the Holocaust has become a secular religion, its basic tenets cannot be questioned. The Holocaust is an experience that must be mediated via Holocaust scribes, academics and organisations such as the Holocaust Educational Trust and Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust museum.

View of section of the Auschwitz Nazi concentration camp on Feb. 6, 1961 in Oswiecim, Poland

Above all the Holocaust cannot be understood. According to Elie Wiesel, the Auschwitz survivor and arch Zionist, ‘Auschwitz cannot be explained nor can it be visualized... The Holocaust transcends history...’ (Novick, p.211). 

If the Holocaust cannot be explained and doesn’t belong to history then it carries no universal lessons. Its only explanation lies in the very existence of the Jews, in other words eternal and unchanging anti-Semitism. That is why for Israel the Holocaust has become a foundational myth whose only purpose is colonial.

In a macabre re-enactment, only 59 years too late, Israeli fighter jets overflew Auschwitz in 2003 to rub home the message that if only Israel had been in existence at the time there would have been no Holocaust. The National Museum of Auschwitz-Birkenau deploredthis crass display. Ehud Barak, former Chief of Staff and later Prime Minister of Israel statedthat ‘we have arrived 50 years too late.’

Israeli soldiers at the Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremony at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, May 4, 2016.Olivier Fitoussi

Zionism salves its conscience about its record during the Holocaust by fantasising about what might have been if Zionism had achieved its state earlier. What it doesn’t ask is how and why the Zionist movement impeded rescue. The dead of Auschwitz have been summoned in a macabre parade in the cause of Israel’s military might.

The use to which Holocaust remembrance is cynically put is evidenced by the Israeli state’s close connections to the far-Right Polish government which, when not actively encouraging anti-Semitism engages in its own sophisticated form of Holocaust denial. This is the meaning of the Polish government’s Holocaust law which Netanyahu’s sordid agreement legitimised. Israel’s sanctification of the Holocaust is intended to manipulate the past in order to shape the present and distort the future. 

Poland's Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki visits the Ulma Family Museum of Poles Who Saved Jews during WWII in Markowa, Poland. February 2, 2018AGENCJA GAZETA/ REUTERS

There are many lessons that can be learnt from the Holocaust. One is to be vigilant against the rise of racism and fascism. Another is to understand that if Germany, containing the most cultured society in Europe could turn to racial fascism and genocide then so can any people.  All peoples, given the right set of circumstances, can become murderers and accomplices to genocide. Jews are no exception.

March of the Living

Every year thousands of Israeli school children visit Auschwitz and take part in the March of the Living just before Israel’s Yom HaShoah. The programme statesthat:

The International March of the Living is an annual educational program, bringing individuals from around the world to Poland and Israel to study the history of the Holocaust and to examine the roots of prejudice, intolerance and hatred.

A woman, wrapped in an Israeli flag, stands in front of barbed wire at Auschwitz-Birkenau as people take part in the annual 'March of the Living,' in Oswiecim, April 19, 2012. AFP

Wrapped in Israeli flags, which to Palestinians is what the swastika was to the Palestinians, these Israeli marchers represent Zionist military might and ethnic cleansing.  It is in this way that Israel has subverted and corrupted the meaning of the Holocaust.

It is no wonder that all the evidence concerning Israel’s youth is that they are becoming even more racist and right-wing than their parents’ generation.

In Why are Israeli kids so Right wing?,Naomi Zeveloff quotes a 2016 survey in which 40% of Jewish teenagers (15-18) and 44% of Jewish young people (21-24) said they “think that Arab citizens of Israel should be prohibited from being elected to the Knesset”.

Gideon Levy wrote that

I have yet to hear a single teenager come back from Auschwitz and say that we mustn’t abuse others the way we were abused. There has yet to be a school whose pupils came back from Birkenau straight to the Gaza border, saw the barbed-wire fence and said, Never again. The message is always the opposite. Gaza is permitted because of Auschwitz.

Aerial view showing the layout of the largest concentration camp and death camp run by Nazi Germany during World War II at Auschwitz near the Polish town of Oswiecim, Poland, Aug. 25, 1944AP

Despite visiting Auschwitz ‘on patriotic brainwashing trips’ Israeli schoolchildren know nothing of what led up to the Final Solution. ‘At most they can tell you it was because of anti-Semitism, an explanation that suits the victim identity nurtured from childhood.’

Far from combating racism Holocaust Remembrance increases and reinforces the existing high level of racism in Israeli society. It provides Zionism’s racism with a moral legitimacy.

As Richard Silverstein noted in his article Yom HaShoah and Its False Premises Israel’s veneration and sacralisation of the Holocaust is in inverse proportion to its treatment of Israel’s living Holocaust survivors. Despite taking billions of dollars from the German government as reparations, Israel has kept them in abject poverty.

Brazil's far-Right President Bolsonaro is welcomed by Yad Vashem

The elevation of the Jewish Holocaust above all other acts of genocide not only suggests that it is unique but that it has nothing to tell us beyond the fact that it occurred. If the purpose of remembering and commemorating acts of genocide is to prevent their reoccurrence and to act as a warning against their repetition, why single out one act of genocide? The genocide of the Gypsies and the Disabled are all but omitted from Holocaust museums such as Yad Vashem and the Washington US Holocaust Museum. The genocide of Africans in the slave trade or Armenians forms no part of Holocaust Memorial Day.

Indeed from the days of Herzl onwards there has been a determined refusal by Zionism to acknowledge the Armenian massacres and genocide. Lucy Dawidowicz, a prominent Zionist historian went so far as to say that unlike the Nazis, the Turks had a ‘rational’ reason for massacring Armenians. Elie Wiesel, Alan Dershowitz and Arthur Hertzberg, all prominent Zionists, withdrew from an international  conference on genocide in Tel Aviv when the sponsors refused to remove sessions on the Armenians. (Novick pp. 192-193, Finkelstein pp. 69-70)  The Zionist lobby in the United States has repeatedly opposed any commemoration of the Armenian holocaust.

Yehuda Bauer, Professor of Holocaust Studies at the Hebrew University Jerusalem, in a debate with Dr Sybil Milton, the Senior Resident Historian at the US Holocaust Memorial Council argued that

‘the tragedy of the Gypsies’ whilst being ‘ no less poignant, and no less horrible’ was nonetheless not part of the Holocaust. Whilst ‘it happened at the same time as the Holocaust, and there are of course many similarities. Yet it appears to me that the Holocaust is very much a unique case. If someone prefers to call it Judeocide, that is his her privilege. It is exactly the same thing: it is the mass murder of the Jews at the hands of the Nazis.’

For Zionism the Holocaust is a Jewish only affair. Sybil Milton, who was herself Jewish, responded succinctly:

‘(The) Nazi genocide, popularly known as the Holocaust, can be defined as the mass murder of human beings because they belonged to a biologically defined group. Heredity determined the selection of the victims. The Nazi regime applied a consistent and inclusive policy of extermination- based on heredity- only against three groups of human beings: the handicapped, Jews, and Gypsies.’

This correspondence ‘Gypsies and the Holocaust’ can be found in The History Teacher, Vol. 25, No. 4. (Aug., 1992), pp. 513-521.

We are now living in an era where Israeli Rabbis in an elite pre-military training school can telltheir students that Hitler was right, even if he chose the wrong victims. For all their commemoration of the Holocaust, even the most basic and elementary anti-racist and anti-fascist sentiments are missing in Israel. It is, after all, a state where the term ‘leftist’ is a form of abuse and where Donald Trump is more popular than any other country. Commemoration of the Holocaust serves a wholly nationalist and militarist agenda.

Zionism has appropriated the Holocaust and subverted it. When I was involved in the Anti-Nazi League, a mass anti-fascist movement which defeated the National Front in the late 1970’s our posters proclaimed ‘Never Again’. This also became the slogan and title of a book by Rabbi Meir Kahane of the Judeo-Nazi Kach movement.

The French military accompany the genocidal Interamhawe militia in Rwanda

This focus by political elites on the Holocaust has had no effect on the occurrence of genocide. In the late 1970’s, as a direct consequence of America’s secret war in Cambodia, there occurred the genocide of  nearly 2 million Cambodians. In 1994 there was another genocide, in Rwanda, when up to 1 million Tsutsis and moderate Hutus were murdered by the Hutu Interahamweas French troops stood by and even protected the murderers. This is the same France that has all but made BDS illegal in the name of ‘anti-Semitism’.

Bill Clinton, who waxed lyrical about the Nazi Holocaust when opening the US Holocaust Museum in 1993 refused to intervene the following year in Rwanda. The US Administration was specifically warned about a ‘"final solution to eliminate all Tutsis" but decided against intervention.

Yad Vashem

What makes Israel’s use of the Holocaust particularly obscene is the role of Yad Vashem. It openly welcomes through its doors people like Viktor Orban, who last July faced an unprecedented picketby Holocaust survivors and others when he visited Yad Vashem. Orban, fresh from his campaign against Soros, praised as an ‘exceptional statesman’ Admiral Horthy, under whom nearly half a million Jews were deported to Auschwitz.

Hitler admirer and Philippine President Duterte pays homage at Yad Vashem

Followinghim last September was Rodrigo Duterte, the Philippine President who compared himself to Hitler. Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro paid a visit in April to Yad Vashem. He described the Nazis as ‘leftists whilst ‘forgiving’them for the Holocaust. South Africa’s Prime Minister, John Vorster, who was interned during the war for his support for the Nazis visitedYad Vashem in 1976. This prompted Professor Israel Shahak, a child survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto and Belsen to speakof Yad Vashem’s behaviour as ‘‘vile and ‘truly beneath contempt.’

Daniel Blatman, a Holocaust researcher at the Hebrew University describedYad Vashem as a

‘hard-working laundromat, striving to bleach out the sins of every anti-Semitic, fascist, racist or simply murderously thuggish leader or politician like Hungary’s Viktor Orban, the Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte and Italy’s Matteo Salvini.’

Matti Friedman in the New York Times describedthe reaction of staff at Yad Vashem to the long list of far-Right visitors. One staff member told him that

‘“There is distress here, and even anger, because many of us see a collision between what we believe are the lessons of the Holocaust and what we see as our job, and between the way Yad Vashem is being abused for political purposes.”

A member of a white supremacy group gives the fascist salute during a gathering in West Allis, Wisconsin, September 3, 2011REUTERS/Darren Hauck

Of course this should be taken with a pinch of salt given its record.

Friedman described an incident last June when Austrian chancellor, Sebastian Kurz, was told that the names of Austria’s lost Jewish communities, which were on a wall he was passing, had recently seen anti-Jewish incidents involving members of the Austrian Freedom Party, a party whose first two leaders were former S.S. officers. Mr. Kurz’s government is in coalition with the Freedom Party.

Kurz’s guide, Deborah Hartmann, mentioned to the chancellor that some of his allies were people who “need to be informed what the Holocaust was.” The Austrian embassy ‘made a rare official complaint’ and Yad Vashem issued an apology.

Blatman notedthe absence of Yad Vashem from the 5^th Global Conference on Genocide in Jerusalem in 2016. Why? It has nothing to say on anything bar the Jewish genocide. Blatman wrote of how  

None of the hundreds of scientific events organized by Yad Vashem has been dedicated to the Holocaust and genocide.... You have to look hard to find any reference to the destruction of other populations in the Holocaust, and its chief aim seems to be to silence criticism. Similar museums in Paris and Washington hold regular activities on these topics

Whilst Yad Vashem studies what happened to the Jews in Polish or Ukrainian cities ‘they rarely address Nazi atrocities against other ethnic groups’. They study the minute detail of what happened to the Jews without ever seeing the wider picture. Yad Vashem ‘helps keep the Holocaust in a narrow Jewish ghetto that serves the xenophobic manipulations Israel makes of it.’

That is why Yad Vashem has never given birth to a comprehensive book on the Holocaust such as Gerald Reitlinger’s The Final Solution or Raul Hilberg’s Destruction of the European Jews. Holocaust research in Israel has done nothing to combat racism.

That was the conclusionof Professor Elkana. If what Elkana wrote was true 31 years ago it is even more true now. For Zionism and the Israeli state, the Holocaust functions not as a warning against the dangers of racism but as means of silencing their critics. The Holocaust is Israel’s get out of jail free card. Elkana wrote:

‘Lately I have become more and more convinced that the deepest political and social factor that motivates much of Israeli society in its relations with the Palestinians is not personal frustration, but rather a profound existential "Angst" fed by a particular interpretation of the lessons of the Holocaust and the readiness to believe that the whole world is against us, and that we are the eternal victim. In this ancient belief, shared by so many today, I see the tragic and paradoxical victory of Hitler. Two nations, metaphorically speaking, emerged from the ashes of Auschwitz: a minority who assert,"this must never happen again," and a frightened and haunted majority who assert, "this must never happen to us again."

Elkan cited Thomas Jefferson as having written that democracy and worship of the past are incompatible. Elkana’s conclusion was that ‘For our part, we must learn to forget!... They must uproot the domination of that historical "remember!" over our lives.’

Gideon Levy wrotesimilarly

‘We have to forget as quickly as possible and make others forget to the degree possible. The time has come to get past the past. We needn’t erase it, but put it in its place; it’s over.’

The Holocaust cannot be forgotten. The question is how it is remembered, by whom and for what purpose. Zionism’s abuse of Holocaust memory has to be challenged. Under capitalism all memory serves a purpose. Holocaust remembrance is no different. Levy wrote that

The legacy of the Holocaust has caused Israel fateful damage; it solidified nationalism and validated militarism instead of shaping humanism, justice, morality and compliance with international law, which in Israel 2019 are considered treason or weakness.

Levy argues that what drives racism and hatred of Arabs is ‘self-victimization. After the Holocaust we are permitted to do anything, and of course, only with force.’

The Holocaust needs to be reclaimed by the Left and Anti-Fascism.  For too long the Zionist movement has got away with harnessing the Holocaust to the chariot of racism and ethnic cleansing.

Tony Greenstein

Jonathan Hoffman MEP? – Bang Goes such a Promising Political Career!

May 14, 2019, 8:00 pm

≫ Next: Jewish Chronicle Columnist Geoffrey Alderman Nails the Lie that Corbyn is an anti-Semite

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The Renew Party’s Racist Star Crashes to Earth in an Entirely Predictable Explosion

The full versions of the above videos can be seen here and here

You can take a horse to the water but you can’t make it drink.  You can take Yonatan Scoffman to a Party but you can’t expect him to remain house trained.

You will be forgiven if you haven’t heard of the Renew Party. They are yet another ‘centrist’ party, anti-Brexit, full of middle class professionals and budding careerists. The type of people who can be characterised as the muddled middle or as we used to say of the SDP, the fuddled fiddle!

They describe their politics as economically dry or freemarket and socially liberal.  In other words another variant of the free market Blairite/Clintonite economics that have left the poor poorer, the NHS half privatised, demonised claimants and refugees whilst their international solidarity begins and ends in Europe. 

Perhaps not quite the kind of renewal that most people want!

Renew is a party of unashamed capitalism in political crisis.

These people abound with business degrees and marketing skills. They are the kind of people who if they can’t find a fence to sit on will go out and build one.  They stand for a system in crisis and harken back to a gold age. In the absence of anything to say they proclaim that they are ‘new’ or in the case of these people ‘renew’.

Annabel Mullin

Richard Breen - property developer who funds Renew

Their leader is Annabel Mullin, a member of the identikit middle class and their main funder is Richard Breen, a property developer.

It is no surprise that Jonathan Hoffman felt in his element. He took to Renewmuch like a leech to its host. Just as support for Israel and Zionism was a precondition of support for and membership of New Labour, so this is the case with Renew.

One thing that marks out political ‘centrism’ is unquestioning support for British foreign policy, which means the ‘special relationship’ with the US, NATO and imperialism.  And that means unquestioning support for Israel’s role in the Middle East as the United States’s gendarme.

Hoffman appears in a training video

Renew advertise themselves as a ‘new party with a new vision for fixing the problems of 21st century Britain.’  Sometimes one wishes that these people also possessed a political memory because there was another New Party. It was formed in 1931 by one Oswald Moseley.  By the following year it had metamorphosed into the British Union of Fascists.

It is therefore no surprise that they have formed up with Chuka Ummuna’s TIG group and apparently the Greens and Lib Dems too to field a joint Renew-TIG candidate at the forthcoming Peterborough by-election.

Hoffman with Kevin Caroll of the EDL

In the background are members of the EDL in army fatigues - picket of the Ahava shop - Hoffman originally called this photo shopped until the photographer (David Hoffman) threatened libel

Here we see Hoffman with Besser of Britain First (top left) Amanda Shitrit and Sharon Klaff (far-right Islamaphobes). Hoffman's normal excuse is to blame being seen with fascists on the camera!

Hoffman with Britain First's Paul Besser - in front Amanda Shitrit, Pegida alongside 'Mad' Mel Gharia  both of whom are Tommy Robinson supporters

Hoffman being ejected by the police yet again

Hoffman with 2 members of the Jewish Defence League, Roberta Moor and Robert de Jonge. The JDL is a Jewish-Nazi group outlawed as a terrorist group in the USA

Hoffman with far-Right Tory activist Thor Halland (left) and looking glum with the Police (yet again)

Hoffman with a variety of fascists including Hitler supporter Neil Horan top left

It is on one level not surprising that Hoffman, a man who is at home with an ecumenical list of fascists, from Britain First to the EDL, fits in so easily with Renew. Parties such as these consist of wannabee members of the political establishment. Not only are they mainly White but racism and assumptions of Britain’s imperial role courses through their veins. Anti-racism consists of tokenism and a few Black faces. It stops at anything questioning the state.

Renew’s big brother, Change UK, is led by Chuka Ummuna.  Although Black by birth he is as politically White as his fellow TIG MP, Angela Smith. She of the 'funny tinge.’ Chuka is very exercised by ‘anti-Semitism’ but has nothing to say about the Windrush scandal or the ‘hostile environment’ policy that led up to it. Unsurprisingly  since he supported it.

Googling would have saved Renew a lot of heart ache

However in the age of the Internet, it was rather remiss of Renew to admit Hoffman to its candidate list without having done basic due diligence.  Like Googling his name for example!  A quick search turns up such gems as his recent arrest on charges of harassment and assault.  You’d even learn that Hoffman was shot by his grandmother!  However I suspect this was unfortunately a different Jonathan Hoffman though on second’s though it could be true!

I have been passed a fascinating Facebook conversation involving a James Mendelsohn, who is some kind of liberal Zionist and his exchanges with both Renew and Hoffman. Clearly Mendelssohn is a dying breed.

In essence the conversation revolved around a disgusting cartoon that Hoffman was distributing, allegedly of Jackie Walker from a fake parody Twitter account. The cartoon was virulently racist, emphasising thick lips, dreadlocks and green slime emanating from her head.  It contains just about everything you could possibly want from a racist cartoon about Black people.

Candidate Hoffman explains all

If a similar cartoon of a Jewish person, with a long and crooked nose, grasping hands and fingers, an evil eye etc. had been drawn one suspects that Hoffman would have had no difficulty recognising its anti-Semitism.

As Mendelsohn made clear, a cartoon exaggerates peoples’ features, this was simply a racist caricature. There was nothing amusing in it nor was it in any way a likeness of Jackie's features.

Hoffman defended it on the ground that well, Jackie has dreadlocks and she is Black. He argued that as the person who drew the cartoon has no racist intent (how could he possibly know leaving aside whether he is the best judge in such matters) the cartoon itself can’t be racist.

The logic is baffling. An act of discrimination in law isn’t negated because the discriminator didn’t intend to discriminate.  It stands or falls on its own merits.  If you pay someone less because they are Black or older then you are presumed to have intended to discriminate.  It is inherent in the act.

It used to be the case that a person was presumed to intend the consequences of his own action in capital murder cases. Today this is interpreted as assuming that if you engage in certain actions then you must be taken to foresee the consequences and hence possess the essential mens rea (guilty intent). 

What the person intended when she drew the racist cartoon is irrelevant to the question of whether the cartoon is or is not racist. That is an objective fact. What she intended is subjective.

Letter to Annabel Mullin about Hoffman

When Mendelsohn brought Hoffman's cartoon to the attention of Renew Annabel Mullin responded by saying ‘We do not believe it has passed the threshold for racism.’ Presumably Mullin was referring to the cartoon itself and not just Hoffman’s distribution of it.  Regardless the explanation did not give a clue as to why an obviously racist cartoon, was not deemed to pass the threshold for racism.  The only conclusions to be drawn is that Renew’s threshold is very high or Ms Mullin’s toleration for it is high.

Mendelsohn therefore concluded that ‘@RenewParty has failed badly in failing to take meaningful action against Mr Hoffman for his defence of the image.’And that ‘@RenewParty certainly won't be getting my vote, any time soon.’

Where I part company with James Mendelsohn is in his final conclusions that Hoffman is ‘a long-time pro-Israel and anti-antisemitism campaigner’ and that in his opinion ‘his defence of the above image makes him unfit to be involved in any such campaign.’ 

On the contrary someone like Hoffman is extremely well qualified to defend the world’s only Apartheid state! There is nothing incompatible in Hoffman being a virulent anti-Black racist and being a Zionist.  They go hand in hand.

Many of the comments of Mendelsohn and his friends, in their attacks on Jackie Walker and their unfounded assertions that she is racist, are themselves racist. Hoffman, with his crude golliwog style cartoons is being honest whereas his liberal Zionist critics are being disingenuous.

If you support the State of Israel in all its racist glory then it is inevitable that you will end up as a thorough going racist.  That however is something that Mendelsohn and his fellows are going to have to work out for themselves. Asking themselves questions such as why is it that Zionism is politically supported by the far-Right and people like Tommy Robinson and Richard Spencer?

However it seems, after denying that Hoffman had crossed their invisible threshold for racism, that he has nonetheless been quietly excluded from the Renewcandidates list. 

I also have a confession to make.  Finding out that Scoffman is such a dedicated opponent of Brexit has been the only thing that caused honest soul searching on my part about my stance on Brexit!

Tony Greenstein

 

Jewish Chronicle Columnist Geoffrey Alderman Nails the Lie that Corbyn is an anti-Semite

May 15, 2019, 11:10 pm

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The Goebbels/Pollard Technique of Repeating a Falsehood Does Not Make it True

Every week without fail there is another story in the Jewish Chronicle campaign to ‘prove’ that Jeremy Corbyn’s is anti-Semitic. Its editor, Stephen Pollard, is a former editor of the Daily Express and a member of the cold war Henry Jackson Society, a virulently Islamaphobic organisation whose Associate Directoris the racist Douglas Murray.

Geoffrey Alderman is a right-wing eccentric and Zionist. He has been a columnist at the Jewish Chronicle since 2002. He is also an academic at the private University of Buckingham. He was rightly condemned when he wrotethat ‘Few events... have caused me greater pleasure in recent weeks than news of the death of the Italian so-called "peace activist" Vittorio Arrigoni.’ Vittorio’ was a member of the International Solidarity Movement who was murdered in Gaza.

Geoffrey Alderman

He was once a member of the Board of Deputies but left to the sound of booing and hissing and was called a ‘communal gadfly’ a title that he has somewhat taken to heart since he has compiled an anthologyof his writings based on this description.

Alderman’s primary claim to fame is as a Jewish historian. His book The Jewish Community in British Politics was the subject of a concerted effort by the Board of Deputies to persuade him to excise certain parts concerning racism in the Jewish community and in particular that nearly 2% of Hackney Jews had voted for the neo-Nazi National Front.

Above the Zionist Attack on the Labour Party

When the Anti-Nazi League, a mass anti-fascist group, was created in 1977 to meet the challenge of a growing National Front, which had attracted over 100,000 votes in the GLC elections and large votes in local elections in cities such as Leicester and Bradford, the Board of Deputies attacked it, with what Maurice Ludmer, editor of Searchlight Anti-fascist Magazine described as

‘"all the fervour of Kamikaze pilots... It was as though they were watching a time capsule rerun of the 1930's, in the form of a flickering old movie, with a grim determination to repeat every mistake of that era.’ [Searchlight 41, November 1978]

Another non-story in the Jewish Chronicle - its enemies always 'rant' - the poor dear above had to be 'consoled' after having been told by John Prescott a few home truths

Alderman was one of the few prominent British Jews who criticised the Board of Deputies for attacking the ANL rather than the fascists.

Another non-story in the Jewish Chronicle - they hate the idea that Corbyn meets Jews aren't part of the Zionist clique

What is remarkable about the current wave of anti-Semitism hysteria is the almost complete unanimity of the Zionists about Labour’s non-existent ‘anti-Semitism’ and in particular Jeremy Corbyn’s ‘anti-Semitism’.

The lynch mob has been led by Stephen Pollard. Writing in 2019 in the Daily Mail he stated that ‘It took me a long time before I felt it appropriate to describe Jeremy Corbyn as an anti-Semite.’ This is such a blatant lie that it is a wonder that Pollard's nose hasn’t already grown to twice its size!

Even before Corbyn was elected as Labour leader the Jewish Chronicle was accusing him of consorting with holocaust deniers, such as Paul Eisen. 

All the major Jewish news papers sing the same song - is it any wonder that many Jews respond that 'antisemitism' is a worry though individually they never experience it?

Last July, in their United We Stand editorials, the 3 major Zionist papers in Britain accused Corbyn of posing an ‘existential threat to Jewish life in this country’.  Who else but an anti-Semite could do this?

The Foreign Editor of the Jewish News, Stephen Oryszczuk heavily criticised the joint editorial in an interview with Canary saying that

‘The question is whether there is an intention to taint him. Some are certainly out to get him, but without revealing sources, all I can say is that it’s sometimes questionable where these things come from.’ Oryszczuk described what happened as a ‘character assassination.’

One of the emails sent out weekly by Pollard

Oryszczuk was immediately put on ‘sick leave’ and has I understand been forced out.

Alderman has never been one to pull his punches. In the Spectator he has written a devastating critique of the idea that Corbyn is anti-Semitic.

Freedland and Finkelstein join hands to demonise Corbyn

Alderman first takes issue with Danny Finkelstein, The Times Associate Editor and Tory Peer, who was a Board Member of the Gatestone Institute. The GI promotes Tommy Robinson, Geert Wilders and a whole host of racists, fascists and Islamaphobes. The Gatestone Institute, which is funded by American billionaire Nina Rosenwald, the “sugar mama of anti-Muslim hate”, describedRobinson as ‘a British free-speech activist and Islam critic.’ I hate to think what they might have called Hitler. A Jew critic?

Finkelstein criticisedCorbyn for not having condemned the anti-Semitism of John Hobson when Corbyn reviewed his book, ‘Imperialism: A Study’ 8 years ago. Alderman is absolutely right when he writes that ‘There was absolutely no need for Corbyn to have drawn attention to them in his foreward.’ It was as he points out 10 lines in a 400 page book.

Pollard has been waging a non-stop war against Corbyn for over 3 years

Alderman demolishes the Chair of Labour Friends of Israel, Joan Ryan MP’s fatuous assertion that

‘‘Over the past three years… the Labour party under Jeremy Corbyn has become infected with the scourge of anti-Jewish racism. This problem simply did not exist in the party before his election as leader.’  

Alderman points out that ‘leading socialist activists – for instance Sidney and Beatrice Webb’ were ‘unashamed exponents’ of anti-Semitism.  Sydney Webb describedthe European continental parties as ‘Jew ridden’ but fortunately this wasn’t true in the British Labour Party because ‘there’s no money in it.’ Alderman was clear:

‘The fact of the matter is that Corbyn has an impressive record of supporting Jewish communal initiatives’

and then proceeds to reel off a whole long list of examples of where Corbyn has supported local Jewish initiatives such as saving the cemetery of the West London synagogue from the developers. Writing that

‘I could fill this entire article with a list of philo-Semitic EDMs that Corbyn has signed since he was first elected as Labour MP for Islington North in 1983.’

Alderman ‘deliberately omitted from this discussion any consideration of Corbyn’s attitude to Zionism and whether anti-Zionism is inherently anti-Semitic.’ and he concludes that ‘the grounds for labelling him an anti-Semite simply do not exist.’

Which is a pretty damning indictment of the fallacious and dishonest campaign mounted by people like Pollard, who is the Joseph Goebbels of the British Jewish community.  Pollard has turned the JC into a Zionist propaganda rag and its circulation has dropped like a stone to less than 20,000, many of them given away.  Which is why the JC is facing severe financial problems.

Pollard made his reasons for mounting the fake anti-Semitism campaign against Corbyn crystal clear last year.  In an article Labour's new guidelines show it is institutionally antisemitic Pollard attacked the attempt to remove or neutralise some of the examples of the IHRA. The problem was that

‘instead of adopting the definition as agreed by all these bodies, Labour has excised the parts which relate to Israel and how criticism of Israel can be antisemitic.’

As we always said the ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign was about Israel not anti-Semitism. This has always been Pollard and the Board of Deputies’s only concern. If Corbyn had been genuinely anti-Semitic but pro-Zionist then Pollard would have raised no objection to Corbyn.

In just the same way, the execrable Margaret Hodge has become a hero to the Jewish Chronicle. This is the same Hodge of whom Pollard wrotein the Daily Express that ‘it’s difficult to imagine a more blatant, shameful and utterly contemptible piece of two-faced hypocrisy than the behaviour of Margaret Hodge. ” Except that he wasn’t describing her attack on Jeremy Corbyn as a ‘fucking anti-Semite.’

Of course Pollard’s description of Hodge could not be bettered when it comes to his own behaviour and his selective attitude to anti-Semitism.

When in 2009 the Tories left the European Peoples Party in the European Parliament they formed the European Conservative Reform Group. However the parties that were included in this group included the anti-Semitic Polish Law and Justice Partyand Latvia’s For Fatherland and Freedom/LNNK. This met with a lot of criticism.

Jonathan Freedland, who was then more vocal about genuine anti-Semitism wrotethat ‘there was a time when no self-respecting British politician would have gone anywhere near such people’. He described how Michal Kaminski, the Chairman of the ECR,

began his career in the National Rebirth of Poland movement, inspired by a 1930s fascist ideology that dreamed of a racially pure nation. Even today, the PiS slogan is "Poland for Poles", understood to be a door slammed in the face of non-Catholics. In 2001 he upbraided the president for daring to apologise for a 1941 pogrom in the town of Jedwabne which left hundreds of Jews dead. Kaminski said there was nothing to apologise for – at least not until Jews apologised for what he alleged was the role Jewish partisans and Jewish communists had played alongside the Red Army in Poland.’

Freedland also pointed out that members of the Latvian LNNK party

 ‘have played a leading part in the annual parade honouring veterans of the Latvian Legion of the Waffen-SS. Lest we forget, the SS were the crack troops of Nazi genocide; the Latvian Legion included conscripts, but at least a third were volunteers, among them men with the blood of tens of thousands of Jews on their hands. It is in honour of those killers that Cameron's new buddies march through the streets of Riga.’

When it comes to a genuine anti-Semite Pollard is all over him like a rash

Pollard you might think would have lambasted the Tories, such is his concern about anti-Semitism. Not a bit of it. The same man who damns Corbyn wrote a responsedefending Kaminski. Kaminski was

‘one of the greatest friends to the Jews in a town where antisemitism and a visceral loathing of Israel are rife.’

Because Kaminski was a strong supporter of Israel he had to be supported.  And this is the dilemma of Zionism. Most anti-Semites love Israel. The neo-Nazi founder of America’s alt Right, Richard Spencer, even describes himself as a White Zionist and Tommy Robinson described himself as a proud Zionist. So did Norway’s mass killer Anders Breivik. There is nothing incompatible about loving Zionism and Israel and hating Jews. Most of today’s far-Right do. Indeed if you are a genuine anti-Semite then you will also be a sincere anti-Semite.

The only ‘anti-Semites’ that Pollard and co. are opposed to are anti-Zionists.  However there are still some, a diminishing number, of Zionists, who see through their own lies.  One of them is Geoffrey Alderman.

Tony Greenstein

Is Jeremy Corbyn really anti-Semitic?

Geoffrey Alderman

Jeremy Corbyn

8 May 2019

Is Jeremy Corbyn an anti-Semite? I began researching the answer to this question well before Danny Finkelstein’s recent revelation in the Times that eight years ago Corbyn had written a glowing foreward to a new edition of Imperialism: A Study, written by the radical economist John Atkinson Hobson, first published in 1902.

Context is paramount. That’s why I feel obliged to censure Finkelstein’s exposé. We all know what Hobson thought of Jews and capitalism. But to conclude – as Finkelstein does – that in writing the foreward Corbyn had praised a ‘deeply anti-Semitic book’ is to give a totally false impression of what this influential study is actually about. In a text running to almost 400 pages there are merely a dozen or so lines which we would call anti-Semitic. There was absolutely no need for Corbyn to have drawn attention to them in his foreward.

It’s quite true that the Labour Party that Corbyn leads has been dogged in recent years with incidents in which a significant number of its members, after being publicly pilloried as anti-Semites, have been expelled from the party. Worse than that, earlier this year a group of MPs resigned from the party, citing rampant anti-Semitism and a failure to deal with it as one of the reasons for their departure.

The group included the Jewish MP Luciana Berger, and also the non-Jewish MP Joan Ryan, formerly chair of Labour Friends of Israel. In her resignation speech, Ryan suggested that the ‘huge shame’ of anti-Semitism did not exist until Corbyn became party leader. Criticising Corbyn for ‘presiding over a culture of anti-Semitism and hatred of Israel,’ Ryan insisted that ‘Over the past three years… the Labour party under Jeremy Corbyn has become infected with the scourge of anti-Jewish racism. This problem simply did not exist in the party before his election as leader.’

Really? After all, hasn’t anti-Jewish racism existed in the party since its creation, over a century ago? In the late 19^th century, wasn’t the trade-union movement (out of ‘the bowels’ of which the party emerged, as Ernie Bevin once graphically observed) positively riddled with such prejudice? Weren’t leading socialist activists – for instance Sidney and Beatrice Webb – unashamed exponents of it? To point to these irrefutable facts is neither to excuse such racism nor to imply that it wasn’t present in other political parties. Indeed it was and still is.

But my present concern is with Jeremy Corbyn, by which I mean Corbyn the person. For whilst it’s one thing to accuse him of being ‘soft’ on anti-Semitism, tolerating it and even befriending some of its exponents, it’s quite another to level the charge against him personally. What truth – if any – could there possibly be in such an accusation?

The fact of the matter is that Corbyn has an impressive record of supporting Jewish communal initiatives. For instance he was recently supportive of Jewish efforts to facilitate the speedy issue of death certificates by the north London coroner. In 2015 he took part in a ceremony in his Islington constituency to commemorate the founding of the North London Synagogue. In 2010 he put his name to an Early Day Motion (tabled by Diane Abbott) calling on the UK government to facilitate the settlement of Yemeni Jews in Britain. Indeed I could fill this entire article with a list of philo-Semitic EDMs that Corbyn has signed since he was first elected as Labour MP for Islington North in 1983.

In 1987 the West London Synagogue approached Islington Council with a startling proposal: to sell its original cemetery to property developers, destroying the gravestones and digging-up and reburying the bodies lying under them. This cemetery (dating from 1843) was not merely of great historic and architectural interest – in the view of orthodox Jews, the deliberate destruction of a cemetery is sacrilegious. So when Islington Council granted the planning application, a Jewish-led and ultimately successful campaign was launched to have the decision reversed. I was part of that campaign. So was Jeremy Corbyn. Meanwhile, the then-leader of Islington Council (1982-92), whose decision to permit the destruction of the cemetery was eventually overturned, was none other than Margaret Hodge (though it is unclear whether she personally was in favour of the proposal).

I have deliberately omitted from this discussion any consideration of Corbyn’s attitude to Zionism and whether anti-Zionism is inherently anti-Semitic. All I will say here – as a proud Zionist – is that in my view context is, again, paramount.

I will agree that from time to time, as backbench MP and party leader, Corbyn has acted unwisely. But the grounds for labelling him an anti-Semite simply do not exist.

Geoffrey Alderman is Professor of Politics, University of Buckingham.

Eurovision 2019 - "Madonna's a Total Prostitute - She'll Do Anything for Money"

May 17, 2019, 5:12 pm

≫ Next: EXCLUSIVE - MICHAEL ENGLISH, CLOSE ASSOCIATE OF JONATHAN HOFFMAN VISITED BY MANCHESTER COUNTER-TERRORISM POLICE .

≪ Previous: Jewish Chronicle Columnist Geoffrey Alderman Nails the Lie that Corbyn is an anti-Semite

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Primal Scream’s Bobby Gillespie: 

“the whole thing is set up to normalise the State of Israel & its disgraceful treatment of the Palestinian people."

For some reason, which BBC2 Executives will no doubt rue, BBC Newsnight decided to interview Primal Scream’s Bobby Gillespie tonight and to ask him about Madonna’s decision to perform during the Eurovision Song Contest in Tel Aviv this weekend.

Speaking to Newsnight ahead of the release of a new greatest hits album, the rock band's lead singer called Madonna a “total prostitute” adding, “I’ve nothing against prostitutes.... Primal Scream would never perform in Israel".

“It’s set up to normalise the State of Israel and its disgraceful treatment of the Palestinian people. By going to perform in Israel I think what you do is you normalise that,"

Earlier this week, Madonna said: “I’ll never stop playing music to suit someone’s political agenda nor will I stop speaking out against violations of human rights wherever in the world they may be.”   So if the political agenda is Israel’s violation of human rights then Madonna would prefer to take the money than not play!

Gillespie’s answers are precisely the way to deal with the Zionist trope about the ‘right to exist’ of the Israeli state. When I was asked that question on BBC Big Questions some years ago I responded by saying that no state has the right to exist. A state is not a person and only a fascist equates a state with the people living in it.

Even better was when Bobby Gillespie was told by Kirsty Wark that he would be seen as ‘anti-Semitic’.  His response?  ‘All my heroes are Jews – Karl Marx, Bob Dylan and the Marx Brothers.’  Which left Kirsty Wark speechless. I haven’t shown the pathetic declaration of Madonna at the beginning of the week talking about this ‘ancient conflict’. The conflict goes back to 1917 and the Balfour Declaration. Which isn’t all that ancient!

Tony Greenstein

Kirsty Wark:       ‘Eurovision song contest in Tel Aviv. Madonna’s going to play.’

Bobby Gillespie‘Well Madonna will do anything for money. She is a total prostitute. I’ve nothing against prostitutes. It’s set up to normalise the State of Israel and its disgraceful treatment of the Palestinian people. By going to perform in Israel what you do is normalise that. So Primal Scream would never perform in Israel. I think Madonna is just desperate for publicity and desperate for the money because she’ll be getting... they pay very very well.

Kirsty Wark:  This gets into difficult territory because you believe in the State of Israel’s right to exist? Because this is what the big argument is.

Bobby Gillespie:I believe in the rights of the Palestinian people.

Kirsty Wark:And the rights of the Israelis?

Bobby Gillespie:Stolen land

Kirsty Wark:  I have to just ask this one question which is, if you don’t believe in the right of the State of Israel to exist you understand why you are then seen as anti-Semitic?

Bobby Gillespie:I’m not anti-Semitic at all.  All my heroes are Jews. Karl Marx, Bob Dylan, Marx Brothers                                   

---

EXCLUSIVE - MICHAEL ENGLISH, CLOSE ASSOCIATE OF JONATHAN HOFFMAN VISITED BY MANCHESTER COUNTER-TERRORISM POLICE .

May 19, 2019, 11:28 pm

≫ Next: This is why Zionism is racist – Settler gets 5 years for burning alive 3 Palestinians including a baby

≪ Previous: Eurovision 2019 - "Madonna's a Total Prostitute - She'll Do Anything for Money"

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More Adventures with Tommy Robinson's Zionist friends

It has been brought to my attention that Michael English, a small time crook and ardent Zionist, member of the neo-nazi Jewish Defence League, has been visited by the counter-terrorism police.

Michael helpfully put a video of the visit by the Police up on Facebook before it was hurriedly taken down.  But not quickly enough, Ambrosine Shitrit’s advice notwithstanding.

 Michael English has already come to the attention of this blog on more than one occasion. For example

Who are Tommy Robinson’s Zionist Supporters? 

EXCLUSIVE: David Collier – the ‘Independent Researcher’ who accused Corbyn of anti-Semitism keeps company with White Supremacists, Neo-Nazis and Islamophobes

EXCLUSIVE – We Name the Gang of Zionists Whose Purpose is to Disrupt Palestinian Events in London

EXCLUSIVE - The Lies of David Collier (Gnasher Jew) and his Dodgy Dossiers

Focus on Fascism - More News from Tommy Robinson’s Zionist Supporters & Reactions to My Revelations

Michael English with Jonathan Hoffman, former Vice-Chair of the Zionist Federation at a recent anti-Palestine demo.

The Police came to the point pretty quickly and asked English

“.……… I NEED TO ASK YOU EXPLICITLY - FOR THAT ACTIVISM AND FOR ISRAEL AND ZIONISM – WOULD YOU HARM ANOTHER PERSON?”

Manchester Counter-terrorism Police to Michael English on  9^th May 2019.

Michael English, known to the Police as a clearly vulnerable young man has just been visited and interviewed in his Salford, Manchester council flat by a member of the Manchester Counter-Terrorism Police and an officer from the Prevent Counter-terrorism team.

Shortly after the interview began Michael interrupted the interview in order to film it.  Afterwards  he put the taped interview on the closed extremist group site JDF- JEWISH DEFENCE FORCES. Jonathan Hoffman, Paul Besser – former “intelligence “ officer of Britain First and Mark Haringman  are all members of this group. David Collier was also a member also but he deserted the group recently after being named by me on here.

The video caused great concern and panic amongst the far-Right Zionist group around Hoffman and frantic efforts were made to contact Michael to have it taken down. Ambrosine Shitrit, who is involved in running the Judeo Nazi Campaign4Truth,(it is unfortunate that Shitters 2 person campaign isn’t subject to the Trades Description Acts) and EYE ON ANTISEMITISM blogs with Sharon KlaffShe became increasingly frantic as the evening wore on. Michael was eventually contacted and removed the video. But it was too late – we have the video here.

Michael at earlier anti-Palestine demo with Sheridan wearing  terrorist JDL shirts. Hoffman at same event next to Roberta Moore, boss of the Jewish Division EDL. Moore also wearing a JDL shirt. JDL is a proscribed terror group in the US AND Israel.

Michael was firmly but  diplomatically and politely told by the Counter-terrorism police officer that -

 “ It was a safeguarding visit to check to see if you are moving towards violent extremism…… the reason we have come to see you today is that concerns have been raised by professionals who state that you may have anti-Palestine sentiments and there were concerns that you might embrace a violent ideology towards attacking Palestinians

“.……… I NEED TO ASK YOU EXPLICITLY - FOR THAT ACTIVISM AND FOR ISRAEL AND ZIONISM – WOULD YOU HARM ANOTHER PERSON?”

At recent anti-Palestine demo. Michael on left with l-r Ambrosine Shitrit, Paul Besser ex “intelligence officer” Britain First, Jonathan Hoffman ex Vice-chair Zionist Federation and Melanie Gharial.

No doubt the Police and security services are fully aware of the plans being made by the group associated with Hoffman  to disrupt the peaceful pro-Palestine Al Quds Day march in London next month. Perhaps these “safeguarding” visits are connected to this. No doubt the Security Services are bearing in mind that Darren Osborne, the right-wing terrorist had planned to attack the parade before going on to carry out a murderous attack on Finsbury Park mosque.

Michael has been seen frequently with Hoffman at anti-Palestine events. Here they both are again with Gemma Sheridan.

Michael  with Thor Halland, another Hoffman associate who can be volatile at anti-Palestine demos.

Michael with Mark Haringman who has already come to the attention of the Met Police.

Michael endearingly  seems to fantasize a lot and for a while naively modelled himself on Alfie Solomons, the Jewish gangster in Peaky Blinders.  No stranger to Strangeways Prison in Manchester it is hoped that this clearly vulnerable young man will learn from the visit of the Counter-terrorism Police and Safeguarding officer.

His family are clearly very worried about him.  Would it be too much to hope that the extremist Zionist misfits who seem to have been exploiting a vulnerable young person will now leave him alone and at peace.

It would also help if the tax-payer funded CST, the Zionist Federation and the Board of Deputies were more proactive in co-operating with the Police when they organise anti-Palestine counter-demos.  For example, in recent years Joseph Cohen of the self-styled Israel Advocacy Movement and Simon Cobbs of Sussex Friends of Israel have been named as co- organisers of the counter-demo for the Al Quds march along with the ZF and BOD.  Yet Cobbs and Cohen join the likes of Hoffman, Besser and Collier in trying to prevent the march taking place. Both then boast loudly  about this  afterwards. 

Anon

This is why Zionism is racist – Settler gets 5 years for burning alive 3 Palestinians including a baby

May 20, 2019, 9:34 pm

≫ Next: On what basis does the American state label incidents as 'domestic terrorism'

≪ Previous: EXCLUSIVE - MICHAEL ENGLISH, CLOSE ASSOCIATE OF JONATHAN HOFFMAN VISITED BY MANCHESTER COUNTER-TERRORISM POLICE .

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The Israeli ‘Justice’ system demonstrates once again why it is institutionally racist as Lod’s District Court endorses plea bargain

In July 2015 18 month Ali Dawabshe and his parents, Saad and Reham were murdered in their beds when settlers threw petrol bombs inside their house. Only 4 year old Ahmad survived, albeit with 60% burns to his body.

Weeks later Israel’s ‘hilltop youth’ ‘celebrated’their deaths in a wedding where they were pictured stabbing at pictures of Ali Dawabsheh. 

Palestinian policeman investigates arson at Dawabshe's home

A 19 year old Israeli was convicted at Lod District Court last week, not of murder  but arson.  In fact, because the murderer has already served 3 years on remand he will go free.  The prosecution agreed to a plea deal which allowed the crime to be reduced from murder to arson. Israel’s colonial court had to agree to the plea deal, which of course they did.

Nasr Dawabsheh, a spokesperson for the family, saidthat "This deal is unfair and encourages the settler gangs to commit more crimes," The Court  threw out several of the accused’s confessions because of torture. If he had been a Palestinian then there is no doubt that his confession would be accepted.  Israel’s military courts in the West Bank have a 99.7% conviction rate because confessions are accepted without question.

The 3 murdered Dawabshe family members

This comes on top of the decision of the Israeli authorities to refuseany ‘anti-terrorist’ compensation to the surviving child, Ahmad.  Only Jewish settlers, being citizens, receive such monies and as Ahmad is not Jewish and therefore not a citizen he is not entitled to any compensation for the appalling burns and torment that he suffered. Yoav Mordechai, the IDF coordinator of activities in the West Bank did however denyreports that Israel’s Health Ministry had served the family with a NIS 2 million bill for treatment. Mordechai apparently said that Israel would foot the bill.

Of course if this Israeli teenage killer had been an Arab all would have been different.  When Ahmad Manasra was convictedof attempted murder, he was held on remand until he was 14 years of age in order that he could receive a prison sentence. He was initially sentenced to 12 years, reduced to 9.5 years imprisonment. The two Israelis stabbed did not die and it was his cousin who had inflicted the wounds.

Ali Saad Dawabsheh

There is a surprisingly good article on the Times of Israel blog, Kill at Will. The Duma Dilemma by Esor Ben-Sorek, a retired professor of Hebrew and Biblical literature who describes himself as a follower of Trumpeldor, Jabotinsky and Begin – all symbols and leaders of Revisionist Zionism. the article is reprinted below.

The graffiti daubed on the walls of the Dawabsheh home

Kill at Will. The Duma Dilemma

On what basis does the American state label incidents as 'domestic terrorism'

May 20, 2019, 11:04 pm

≫ Next: The Prostitute of the Press - the Jewish Chronicle and Glynn Secker

≪ Previous: This is why Zionism is racist – Settler gets 5 years for burning alive 3 Palestinians including a baby

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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Questions Whether Domestic Terrorism Depends on the Identity of the Perpetrator

The Prostitute of the Press - the Jewish Chronicle and Glynn Secker

May 22, 2019, 12:33 pm

≫ Next: More Fake Anti-Semitism Propaganda from the Jewish Goebbels

≪ Previous: On what basis does the American state label incidents as 'domestic terrorism'

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In order to prove ‘anti-Semitism’, there are no limits to the JC's willingness to make things up

Glyn Secker addresses Palestine demonstration on May 11th

For 3 years the Jewish Chronicle has pursued, under its far-Right editor Stephen Pollard, a single minded campaign to ‘prove’ that Labour is an anti-Semitic party led by an anti-Semite, Jeremy Corbyn.

In the days when Jonathan Freedland was concerned with genuine anti-Semites

According to Pollard the anti-Semitic Kaminski was the 'best friend' of the Jews

The irony of these false accusations is that Pollard has consistently defended anti-Semites as long as they support the Israeli State. People such as former Law & Justice MEPs for Poland and Latvia, Michal Kaminski and Roberts Zile. See Why are anti-Semitic regimes so attractive to Israel and the Zionist movement? 

Besser with Paul Goldman of Britain First

Jonathan Arkush, President of the Board of Deputies, addresses a Zionist meeting with Roberta Moore and Robert de Jonge of the Jewish Nazi Jewish Defence League (in tee shirts bottom left)

Pollard was one of the foundersof the Islamaphobic Henry Jackson Society, whose Associate Director is the racist Douglas Murray.

According to the JC ‘Secker referred to “Jews in the gutter with these rats.” As the transcript from Jamie Stern-Weiner’s site makes clear, the Jews Secker was referring to were the leaders of the Zionist Federation. He obviously wasn't speaking about Jews in general.

Paul Besser of Britain First - an active Zionist

Jonathan Hoffman, on the Zionist Federation Council and former Vice Chair of the ZF alonside Besser of Britain First and Gemma Sheridan of the JDL

Last week was a bumper week in the Jewish Chronicle’s Goebbel’s style campaign against Labour. The front page was devoted to Secker’s speech to the Palestinian demonstration in London on May 11^th, which continued on page 6. The article was by liar-in-chief and Political Editor Lee Harpin, who puts the Daily Mail to shame.

Britain First Banners side by side with the Zionist Federation

If this is the worst example of anti-Semitism that the Jewish Chronicle can find then Jews clearly have nothing to worry about.  But of course it's got nothing to do with anti-Semitism. It's Palestine that is the main concern of Pollard and the Jewish Chronicle.

Paul Charney, Chair of the Zionist Federation, having a friendly chat with a member of the EDL

Zionist Federation Chair Paul Charney addresses meeting with Jewish Defence League members Roberta Moore and Robert de Jonge (bottom left)

On page 5 Harpin had another fake ‘Labour anti-Semitism’ story, ‘Corbyn to hate probe councillor –‘Congratulations’ and beneath it a story on hitherto unknown ‘Labour veterans resign citing anti-Semitism’and yet another article on the same page ‘Ex-staffers wait to submit ‘huge email cache’ on hate’ which quotes a Private Eye story (by Ratbiter Nick Cohen) on the ‘inquiry’ by the State’s Equality and Human Rights Commission into Labour’s ‘anti-Semitism’. 

All in a week's work - the JC goes for Corbyn's advisers

David Collier (back turned) with Paul Besser (in blue) at demonstration

The EHRC is a completely useless body which has nothing to say on state racism, such as Theresa May’s ‘hostile environment’ policy, the Windrush Scandal, the detention of asylum seekers and migrants, hostility to Gypsies etc. Bogus Labour 'antisemitism' is more to its taste.

What the story didn’t say was that Labour staffers had destroyed these emails before leaving employment with Labour but had preserved their own copies for submission to the EHRC. A complete breach of the Data Protection Law, GDPR regulations as well as their own contracts of employment but none of this featured in the JC’s story.

Protesters against 'anti-Semitism' outside Palestine Expo included Paul Besser (blue hat) of Britain First, Hitler supporter Neil Horan (in green) and Jonathan Hoffman of the Zionist Federation with Ambrosine Shitrit

Neil Horan, an open Hitler supporter, present at previous Zionist demonstration at the Royal Albert Hall

Across pages 6 and 7 was a continuation of the page 1 story ‘AskingSecker to train Labour on anti-Semitism ‘beggars belief’ and underneath is the story about former Labour parliamentary candidate for South Thanet Rebecca Gordon-Nesbitt who was also accused of ‘anti-Semitism’ for having tweeted comments dismissing the fake anti-Semitism smears.  The NCC in this case dismissed the charges against her and so the JC's neutral heading was ‘Former PCC let off the hook’.  In other words she was guilty but got away with it.

Liar Lee Harpin hears what he wants to hear

On pages 8 and 9, just for a change there was a double page spread, on Labour anti-Semitism. It included a large anti-Semitic drawing from the Soviet Union titled ‘To understand Labour Jew-hate, go back to 1967 USSR.’  The main targets this time were Corbyn’s advisors Seamus Milne and Andrew Murray. Interestingly the article, by Izabella Tabarovsky has a disclaimer at the end saying that although she is a ‘scholar’at the Kennan Institute at the Wilson Centre, ‘the views expressed are her own and do not reflect the views of the Wilson Centre or the Kennan Institute.’ Perhaps being scholarly institutions they wished to put a distance between themselves and Ms Tabarovsky’s frothing at the mouth pot pourri of conspiracy theories dressed up as an academic article.

And then on page 10 there is a feature on the ‘remarkable life’ of venomous right-wing rat and war monger, former Labour MP Ian Austin.

Jonathan Hoffman of the Zionist Federation in conversation with Kevin Caroll of the EDL

You would think that there was no news of any substance to report in this week’s Jewish Chronicle apart from the fact that Philip Green is down to his last billion pounds!

Jewish Voice for Labour put out their own statementon this crude attempt to fit up Glyn Secker for another suspension and you can watch his speech here and decide for yourself whether or not it is anti-Semitic. 

Any reasonable person, which excludes the far-Right liars of a propaganda sheet that was once considered a paper of record of the Jewish Establishment, would conclude that nothing Glyn said was remotely anti-Semitic. At worst overheated rhetoric but anti-Semitic? This kind of defamation and hysterical finger pointing is reminiscent of the propaganda of totalitarian regimes and police states.

Jonathan Hoffman of the Zionist Federation with Paul Besser of Britain First and Pegida supporters Klaff and Shitrit

Even Owen Jones, who has spent the last two years cuddling up to the Israeli State’s representative inside the Labour Party, the Jewish Labour Movement, distanced himself from this crude attack on JVL.

The Jewish News reportedthat ‘Guardian columnist and author Owen Jones has defended a leading member of Jewish Voice for Labour against allegations of antisemitism.’ Jones stated:

‘Although I refute the idea he’s an antisemite, for example, I strongly oppose calling the JLM ‘a fifth column’ – who I regard as comrades and have been proud to speak at their events, and more broadly his language was inflammatory in a way that I can’t accept.”  

Jones’ defence was, to say the least, extremely weak, though it’s better than his support for the expulsion of Jackie Walker and Ken Livingstone. Perhaps Jones is beginning to wake up to the fact that the more he and others go along with the ‘anti-Semitism smears’ the longer they will continue.

Owen Jones has displeased the JLM by failing to follow the line that Glyn Secker is antisemitic

However any defence is anathema to the JLM which expects total obedience to its dictats. Peter Mason, their national secretary, stated that the JLM was

“Pretty embarrassed to have given [Owen Jones] a platform, given how he’s turned, to be honest. You can’t in one breath defend 99 year affiliated @JewishLabour from an accusation of being a fifth column, whilst also defending the beer hall speech accuser. We’re not your fig leaf.”

Zionist organisations don’t tolerate dissent. Jones is being threatened with the loss of the JLM’s ‘platform’. My advice would be to take this opportunity to cut your links with this apartheid group with open arms!

The Jewish News also reported, accurately for once, that Secker told the PSC demonstration that Labour MPs friendly with Israel are a “fifth column”. Which is a statement of fact.  Labour MPs like Margaret Hodge and Ruth Smeeth who are members of the Israeli Embassy front-group LFI are no different from Tory MPs like John Carlisle who acted as apologists for the White South Africa regime under Apartheid. They should be booted out as MPs.

Yair Netanyahu, Benjamin's son gives his best wishes to the anti-semitic candidates in the European elections - Orban, Nigel Farage and Matteo Salvini

The Jewish News also reported that Glyn had ‘claimed the Zionist Federation is “embracing” the neo-Nazi English Defence League’, adding: “What on earth are Jews doing in the gutter with these rats?” Again this is correct.  At no point did Secker say, or imply, that most Jews were in the gutter, contrary to the Jewish Chronicle’s lies. However he did ask why the Zionist Federation and leaders of the Board of Deputies had openly embraced fascists and members of far-Right Zionist groups.

On the substance of Secker’s allegations there can be no doubt.  The leadership of the Zionist Federation, including the CEO and Chair of the Zionist Federation, Aryeh Miller and Paul Charney, who are Herut UK supporters, openly work with the Judeo-Nazi group the Jewish Defence League and their activists Roberta Moore, Robert de Jonge and Gemma Sheridan. Also on the Zionist Federation Council is Jonathan Hoffman, who openly demonstrates and works with members of the EDL, BNP and Britain First’s Paul Besser.

Two years ago a group of Zionist Federation supporters and members picketed Palestinian Expo Festival in London. Not only Hoffman and Besser were present, along with Pegida and Tommy Robinson supporters Sharon Klaff and Ambrosine Shitrit but also a de-frocked Catholic priest Neil Horan who is an open Hitler supporter. And what was their demonstration about?  Anti-Semitism of course!!

According to his Wikipedia entry, Horan declared that

‘he would carry posters declaring "Adolf Hitler was a good leader who was following the word of Christ", give the Hitler salute and light a candle for Hitler at the Gestapo headquarters.”

It would seem that in the fight against ‘anti-Semitism’ Zionist leaders are prepared to ally with anyone, Hitler supporters included. What we await is a clear and unequivocal denunciation of the far-Right Zionists in Britain who work with open fascists, including Tommy Robinson. Given that these fascist rats last year attacked the Al Quds demonstration in conjunction with supporters of Tommy Robinson, it will be interesting to see if the Board of Deputies and Zionist Federation mount another demonstration in alliance with the Zionist far-Right. The silence of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, who themselves tolerate JDL members at their meetings, speaks volumes about their commitment to fighting racism, anti-Semitism included.

Tony Greenstein

Transcript – Jamie Stern-Weiner’s site

And what about the murder at Poway synagogue in California? Anger and horror. But listen to the Rabbi, Steve Engel: ‘Republicans are equating verbal criticism of Israel with physical attacks on Jews to label Democrats antisemitic, unleashing the extreme right to win key votes in marginal states which determine the presidency’.

Well, we have our own Republicans here, a fifth column inside the Labour Party, 119 Labour Friends of Israel MPs led by Hodge and Watson and the Jewish Labour Movement. And it’s not about antisemitism here either.

The Labour Party Secretary Formby has established that serious cases in the party amount to just one hundredth of one percent.

And Jewish leaders here also turn a blind eye to the extreme right, even when their own Zionist Federation embraces the English Defence League, a neo-fascist group banned by Facebook. What on earth are Jews doing in the gutter with these rats?

When will they condemn the Israeli government [inaudible-doing deals?] with Hungarian, Polish and Brazilian fascists?

When will they condemn the IDF slaughter of the unarmed at Gaza? When will they join the anti-fascist movement against Yaxley-Lennon aka Robinson?

Here’s a warning to the Jewish leadership: While you foment your campaign of allegations of antisemitism against Corbyn and the left to silence Israel’s critics, while you cry wolf month after month, year after year in the Labour Party, and remain blind to the explosion of the far right and Islamophobia, you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem! And also, you serve to protect the poison that will destroy both our freedom and yours. Well, sisters and brothers, whose side are we on?

More Fake Anti-Semitism Propaganda from the Jewish Goebbels

May 23, 2019, 12:13 pm

≫ Next: Rejoice at the end of a Despicable Woman but Brexit Still Remains

≪ Previous: The Prostitute of the Press - the Jewish Chronicle and Glynn Secker

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The Jewish Chronicle conducts an Opinion Poll to test the effectiveness of its propaganda against Jeremy Corbyn!

Every week I get an Editor’s Letter from the Jewish Chronicle and this week is no exception. Usually there is only one story affecting the British Jewish community and that is the ‘anti-Semitism’ of Jeremy Corbyn or the Labour Party.

This week was no different except for the fact that there was nothing to report. There were no long erased murals, no exchanges with Jonathan Hoffman, Richard Millett orother Jewish fascists who lacked a sense of British irony, no ancient book reviews, not even a Holocaust survivor who detected a similarity between Israel today and Nazi Germany yesterday.

But Stephen Pollard, the Jewish editor, is an enterprising fellow.  That’s why he was the founder of the Henry Jackson Society and a former editor of Richard Desmond’s Daily Express. Long forgotten is his eviscerating front page on Margaret Hodge who is now a friend in the fight against ‘anti-Semitism’. Those with long memories will remember that Desmond was Britain’s biggest pornographer with titles like Asian Babes.  But Desmond too was a Zionist as well as an EDL supporter.

Pollard as readers of my blog will know is only interested in ‘anti-Semitism’ of the Left, i.e. anti-Zionism.  He has nothing to say about anti-Semites on the Right as long as they are pro-Israel.  People like White Zionist Richard Spencer are of no concern to him. Indeed Pollard has a history of defending pro-Israel anti-Semites such as Poland’s Michal Kaminski .

Letter from the JC Editor

I digress however.  This week was a very lean news week.  No reports of Labour anti-Semitism could be detected.  Gnasher Jew was having a week off. No Black people to pillory or bully.

So Pollard decided to commission an opinion poll into Labour ‘Anti-Semitism’ to test how effective the non-stop propaganda of the past 3 years has been and surprise surprise they foundthat ‘80% of the public are aware of Labour’ anti-Semitism crisis’ and 59% don’t believe he will do anything about it this non-existent crisis.

However if this bogus and contrived poll had been objective then the second question, after asking people had they heard of Labour’s ‘anti-Semitism crisis’ would have been to ask them what exactly this crisis was about.  What was it that the press, not just the Jewish Chronicle had gone on about. What did this 'antisemitism' consist of?  Unfortunately Pollard's bogus You Gov poll asked none of these searching questions.  

Were Jews walking around in fear of their lives? Was violence against Jews as Jews increasing? Or was it that support for BDS and Palestinian rights were increasing?

I suspect that the number of people who could have described this ‘anti-Semitism’ would have been in single figures and most of those would have been mentioning Israel. Indeed I suspect that 95% of British Jews would have been mystified and muttered something about Israel.

So what the poll was asking was how many people had heard of and been taken in by the non-stop propaganda blitz about ‘Labour anti-Semitism’ the sole purpose of which is to remove Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the Labour Party

This is the kind of bigotry that Desmond excelled in

In other words it was a poll about how effective at propaganda are the British press, the Jewish Chronicle and the BBC.

And this is how the media operates.  It campaigns around a lie and then asks how many people have heard of this lie.  George Orwell once wrote a book about this kind of propaganda.  He called it 1984 and the process he was describing was doublethink, the ability to hold contradictory opinions in one’s head at the same time or fragmented consciousness in Marxist terms.  Because most people and communities who are the victims of racism also know that one of the fiercest campaigners against racism is Jeremy Corbyn.

Mr Pollard is rather good at doublethink. What he’s not good at is straight forward honest journalism.  But then that is a problem that is not confined to the Jewish Chronicle. It affects most of the media from the Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland to the Daily Mail and Telegraph.