Socialism in the United States – Is it making a Come Back?

June 24, 2019, 8:28 pm

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Focus on Milwaukee and Chicago – Can the United States put the Cold War and McCarthyism behind it?

Bernie Sander’s challenge for the Democratic Party’s nomination in 2016 was unique for a number of reasons, not least for the fact that he was the first mainstream Presidential contender to openly call himself a socialist. The fact that he nearly won the contest was remarkable, especially given that ‘Crooked’ Hilary and her friends openly cheated.

Whereas Europe has had a tradition of strong socialist and communist parties in the United States such parties have always been confronted with a virulent anti-communism. Attacks against labour unions and the right to organise have been particularly vicious in the USA.

Sacco and Vanzetti

Frank Little of the Industrial Workers of the World was lynchedin August 1917 by six thugs who pulled him out of his bed and Joe Hill was judicially murdered in Utah in 2015. Twelve years later two Italian born anarchists, Sacco and Vanzetti, were again judicially murderedon trumped up charges in Massachussetts.

Nonetheless the United States has had a rich socialist historyof class struggle such as in the car factories of Detroit in the 1930’s. In 1912 when Eugene Debbs stood for President he got nearly a million votes and 6% of the vote. In 1920 he stood again and got nearly a million votes but just 3.4%.

The first Red Scare was in the first World War when Debb’s Socialist Party opposed the draft. A speech in Canton Ohio on June 16 1918 at the end of the war when Debs declaredthat:

“The working class have never yet had a voice in declaring war. If war is right, let it be declared by the people – you, who have your lives to lose.”

led to a prosecution under the Sedition Act and Debs being sentenced to 10 years imprisonment, of which he served 32 months before being pardoned.

Debs campaigning for President in 1912

In the post-war period McCarthyism and anti-Communist hysteria led to a witch-hunt of supporters of all progressive and radical politics. This was depicted by Arthur Miller in The Crucible, which was ostensibly about the Salem Witchhunt. People like Pete Seeger and Charlie Chaplin were victims of the determination of the American Right to root out anyone who was seen as an opponent of US imperialism and its war machine.

It was only with the movement against the Vietnam War that radical and socialist organisations began to resurface and grow. Nonetheless the American political environment is very different from that in Britain or Europe. There is no equivalent to a mass social democratic or Labour Party. Instead there are two capitalist parties – Republican and Democrat.

The Democrats were originally the party of Dixieland, the KKK and White Supremacy. In the 1950’s and 1960’s it became the party of civil rights and an end to segregation and the Big Society. This caused a rupture in its southern base with the Democratic Governor of Alabama, George Wallace, running an independent campaign for US President in 1968 having coined the slogan 5 years earlier ‘segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever’. Wallace won 5 states in the Deep South.

Rashida Tlaib and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortes

In the Congressional elections last year, Bernie Sanders, the Independent Senator for Vermont was joinedin Congress by two members of the Democratic Socialists of America Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and the Palestinian-American Rashida Tlaib of Michigan. It has to be said that the DSA are a social democratic not a Marxist party. Class struggleis not to the fore in their politics.

Nonetheless this has provoked a backlash. In his State of the Union address, Donald Trump railedagainst the advance of socialism. when he warned that

“Here, in the United States, we are alarmed by new calls to adopt socialism in our country. ... Tonight, we renew our resolve that America will never be a socialist country”

Not only Congressional Republicans but Nancy Pelosi joined in the applause!

An article in The Hill by Paris Dennard, a CNN political commentator and former Bush official explained:

‘The Democratic Party continues to go further to the extreme left. Their latest clarion call is the idea of "Democratic Socialism." Socialism by any other name is still socialism, and trying to infiltrate it into our modern political process and system of government is dangerous.

There is no doubt that this new rise of socialism found in the base of the Democratic Party is a flawed economic ideology that must be challenged by all Americans who support free enterprise....

This is, of course, what the ‘anti-Semitism’ smear campaign and the launch of Chuka Ummuna’s now failed TIGwas all about. Making the Labour Party into a safe party of capitalism.

Below are two interesting articles on socialism in Milwaukee and the Democratic stronghold of Chicago, home to the infamous Mayor Daley.

Tony Greenstein

When Socialism Was Tried in America—and Was a Smashing Success

For much of the 20th century, Milwaukee was run by socialists—and Time magazine called it “one of the best-run cities in the U.S.”

April 6, 2019 John Nichols The Nation

Dan Hoan, Milwaukee’s mayor from 1916 to 1940. (Milwaukee Public Library / Historic Portrait Collection), (Milwaukee Public Library / Historic Portrait Collection)

“If I owned all the real estate in the world, I wouldn’t feel so powerful as I do on the streets of this socialist city,” declared former New York City councilman Baruch Vladeck when he arrived in Milwaukee in 1932 for the Socialist Party’s national convention in that city.

Norman Thomas, the famed civil-rights and economic-justice campaigner who became the party’s presidential nominee that year, celebrated the fact that he was chosen for that honor in a city governed by Socialists. The success of Milwaukee under then-Mayor Dan Hoan, Thomas said, was proof that the party’s social-democratic “dreams will someday come true.”

“Someday” was dramatically delayed by the results of the 1932 elections. The Socialist ticket did well, securing almost 900,000 votes nationwide and registering its highest percentage of the total vote in Wisconsin. The winner of that year’s race, Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt, took notice: He met with Thomas after the election and borrowed liberally from proposals that had long been championed by the Socialists—for a Social Security system, unemployment compensation, strengthened labor unions, and public-works programs. Roosevelt’s New Deal took the wind out of the Socialist Party’s sails in the national arena, but the party remained a force in Milwaukee for decades to come.

Now that Milwaukee has been selected as the host city for another national convention—that of the Democrats in 2020—Republicans have suddenly discovered its history. “No city in America has stronger ties to socialism than Milwaukee,” griped Wisconsin Republican Party director Mark Jefferson. “And with the rise of Bernie Sanders and the embrace of socialism by its newest leaders, the American left has come full circle. It’s only fitting the Democrats would come to Milwaukee.” Wisconsin Republican Senator Ron Johnson said the Milwaukee convention would provide a “firsthand look” at “the risk of Democrat socialistic tendencies.”

Apart from the fact that Wisconsin’s top Republicans don’t seem to like the state—or its history—very much, the GOP response is comic. Many Wisconsinites know that their state has a long, rich socialist tradition, and that Milwaukee’s association with it is one of the coolest things about the city. It even earned a mention in the movie Wayne’s World, when rocker Alice Cooper explains, “I think one of the most interesting aspects of Milwaukee is the fact that it’s the only major American city to have ever elected three Socialist mayors.”

The Democratic Party is not a socialist party, but the delegates to its 2020 convention might nominate a democratic socialist, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, for president. And when they convene in Wisconsin’s largest city next summer, they shouldn’t hesitate to take the Republicans up on their call to highlight lessons from Milwaukee’s Socialist past. Doing so will strengthen the hand of the party’s eventual nominee, whether it’s Sanders or another of the contenders, all of whom will surely be labeled “socialist” by Donald Trump and his troll army.

Instead of fearing mention of the S-word, Democrats can and should approach it as smart Republicans have the L-word—“libertarian.” Republicans frequently borrow from the libertarian lexicon and toolbox, and acknowledge as much, without abandoning their essential partisanship. Democrats ought to be similarly limber. It’s great that the party now has a strong democratic-socialist wing, which includes Sanders and members of Congress like New York’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Michigan’s Rashida Tlaib. But Democrats who do not identify as socialists can still follow the lead of FDR and the late senator Edward Kennedy, who worked closely with and celebrated the ideas and ideals of democratic socialist Michael Harrington, author of The Other America, a groundbreaking study on poverty. Another 2020 Democratic presidential contender—Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana—gets it right when he says that the old Republican strategy of attaching a “socialist” label to every progressive idea is just that: old. “Today, I think a word like that is the beginning of a debate, not the end of the debate,” explains the most millennial of the Democrats’ presidential prospects.

Buttigieg says that the S-word has “lost its ability to be used as a kill switch on debate,” arguing: “If someone my age or younger is weighing a policy idea, and somebody comes along and says, ‘You can’t do that—it’s socialist,’ I think our answer is going to be, ‘OK, is it a good idea or is it not?’”

Polling tells us that young voters are more comfortable with socialism than capitalism. Older voters may still be susceptible to Republican appeals rooted in Cold War hysteria, but the challenges posed by the existential crisis of climate change and the radical transformation of our economy in an age of AI-driven automation are going to make everyone far more open to radical responses. And many of the best of these—especially those that call for expanding the social-welfare state—will draw from historic and contemporary socialist thinking.

Democrats can get ahead of the curve and disarm Trump and the trolls by embracing the opportunity that Milwaukee offers to talk about socialism as it has existed and succeeded in the United States. For American socialists in the 20th century, Milwaukee was a political mecca, a city that tested and confirmed the validity of their ideas. Vladeck, then the manager of TheJewish Daily Forward (these days known simply as The Forward), called it an example of “the America of tomorrow.”

Socialists were proud to point to Milwaukee, which had a Socialist mayor for most of the period from 1910 to 1960, as a model of sound and equitable governance. And they were not alone: During Hoan’s 24-year tenure, Time magazine reported, “Milwaukee became one of the best-run cities in the U.S.”

Hoan also took on the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s, at a time when politicians in both the Democratic and Republican parties were compromising with the violent racists as they extended their reach from the South to northern cities. “The Ku Klux Klan will find Milwaukee a hotter place to exist in than Hades itself,” the mayor declared in 1921.

Hoan’s integrity, along with his managerial skills, would eventually earn him recognition as one of the 10 finest municipal leaders in American history. In The American Mayor, his groundbreaking 1999 assessment of municipal governance in cities across the country, Melvin Holli wrote:

“Although this self-identified socialist had difficulty pushing progressive legislation through a nonpartisan city council, he experimented with the municipal marketing of food, backed city-built housing, and was a fervent but unsuccessful champion of municipal ownership of the street railways and the electric utility. His pragmatic ‘gas and water socialism’ met with more success in improving public health and in providing public markets, city harbor improvements, and purging graft from Milwaukee politics.”

Emil Seidel and Frank Zeidler, the mayors who served before and after Hoan, were Socialists as well. And Milwaukee voters elected dozens of Socialists to the city council, county board, school board, state legislature, and Congress. Milwaukee’s Socialists were so fiscally and socially responsible that historians to this day hail them as exemplars of a uniquely American form of democratic socialism. Zeidler once explained to me,

“Socialism as we attempted to practice it here believes that people working together for the common good can produce a greater benefit both for society and for the individual than can a society in which everyone is shrewdly seeking their own self-interest.”

That worked well for Milwaukee in the 20th century—so much so that “socialism” ceased to be a scare word for the city’s residents. What frightens Republicans today is that “socialism” is ceasing to be a scare word in our contemporary national discourse.

John Nichols is The Nation’s national-affairs correspondent. He is the author of Horsemen of the Trumpocalypse: A Field Guide to the Most Dangerous People in America, from Nation Books, and co-author, with Robert W. McChesney, of People Get Ready: The Fight Against a Jobless Economy and a Citizenless Democracy.

America's Socialist Surge is Going Well in Chicago

Tuesday night’s elections saw the largest socialist electoral victory in modern American history

April 3, 2019 Micah Uetricht

The United States is experiencing a socialist surge right now. That surge came to Chicago last night, where democratic socialists won big in the second, final round of municipal elections.

Three Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) members won their city council races in runoff elections on Tuesday: Byron Sigcho-Lopez in the 25th ward, Jeanette Taylor in the 20th and Andre Vasquez in the 40th. The fourth candidate, Rossana Rodriguez-Sanchez, is locked in a race in the 33rd ward that is too close to call and will await the counting of mail-in ballots, but was up by 64 votes once all precincts’ votes were counted.

They will join two other socialists who handily won the first round of elections outright in February: Carlos Rosa, an incumbent in the 35th ward, and Daniel La Spata, who defeated an incumbent in the first ward.

Add them up and you’ve got at least five, maybe six democratic socialists who will be on the 50-member Chicago city council. Few major American cities have seen even a single socialist councilor in generations; the third-largest city in the US could soon have half a dozen. It’s the largest socialist electoral victory in modern American history.

The socialists won by strong, straightforward campaigning on working-class issues. Rosa, for example, made his race a referendum on affordable housing in a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood, painting big real estate developers as the enemy and demanding rent control in the city.

Taylor, a longtime neighborhood and education activist on the city’s South Side, demanded the forthcoming Barack Obama presidential library in her ward include a community benefits agreement to fight displacement of working-class residents. In 2015, she participated in a 34-day hunger strike to demand the reopening of Walter H Dyett high school; her website homepage reads: “Send a Dyett hunger strike to city hall.”

And Rodriguez campaigned on a history of activism for affordable housing and immigrant rights in a gentrifying, working-class immigrant neighborhood and against privatization of public services and expansion of police power in the city.

In other words, these democratic socialists ran as unabashed fighters against corporate greed and austerity and for the city’s working class.

Political observers and organizers should take these victories as a lesson: voters found that strong leftwing message appealing – and weren’t scared off by candidates who proudly called themselves “socialists”.

Socialism is spreading throughout the US, as seen in the popularity of the Vermont senator Bernie Sanders and New York representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and the huge bump in DSA membership, increasing more than seven times over to 60,000 in the past three years. But what sets Chicago apart from many other cities in America – and played a crucial role in last night’s socialist victories – is that the left wing of the city’s labor movement hasn’t been afraid to partner with democratic socialist candidates.

Since its 2012 strike, the Chicago Teachers Union has served as the anchor of the city’s labor left. The CTU, along with community groups and other progressive unions such as SEIU Healthcare Illinois and Indiana, formed a political organization called United Working Families (UWF) in 2015. Many union leaders, in Chicago and elsewhere, are skittish about backing openly socialist candidates.

UWF appears not to be, endorsing most of the DSA’s city council candidates (and in many cases expended significant resources on them). Another progressive electoral group, Reclaim Chicago, was the principal backer of two of the victorious DSA members, Vasquez and La Spata.

That coalition of left unions and community groups will be crucial in the years to come. Last night also saw the election of the Chicago’s first black woman mayor, as well as its first lesbian mayor, Lori Lightfoot, a former prosecutor and corporate lawyer.

Lightfoot claimed to be a progressive, but her record has been scrutinized by criminal justice activists and the CTU (which backed Lightfoot’s opponent, Cook county board president Toni Preckwinkle); she drew a large donation from a murky “dark money” group that uses vague pro-austerity rhetoric as well as support from Emanuel’s personal lawyer. The city’s labor movement and left will probably find themselves joining together to fight Lightfoot in office.

Chicago’s socialist victories last night weren’t a fluke. Throughout the country, people are tired of low wages, soaring housing costs, privatization of public goods, budget cuts and corporate giveaways of public money. They have tried austerity and found it miserable.

If Chicago’s elections are any indication, maybe they’re ready to try socialism.

Micah Uetricht is the managing editor of Jacobin magazine. He is the author of Strike for America: Chicago Teachers Against Austerity (Verso, 2014) and a member of the Chicago Democratic Socialists of America

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Israelis Demonstrate in Afula Against the Sale of a House to an Arab - Arabs barred from entering Afula's municipal park

June 25, 2019, 4:24 pm

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≪ Previous: Socialism in the United States – Is it making a Come Back?

What Afula Does Openly hundreds of Israeli Jewish Communities do covertly but legally

As Ofer Casif, the Jewish member of Hadash in the Knesset wrote on Twitter, "How would we define a mayor in Europe who would demonstrate against selling a house to a Jewish family?"

The answer is that we would call him a neo-Nazi although according to Labour’s racist Deputy Leader Tom Watson and its Shadow Foreign Secretary Emily Thornberry, we would be guilty of anti-Semitism! Because the IHRA definition of ‘anti-Semitism’, which the Labour Party has adopted, defines comparing Israelis to Nazis as anti-Semitism.

However for most people opposing the sale of a house to someone because of their ethnicity or, in the case of Afula, barring access to its park to people because they are Arabs, is the action of Jewish Nazis.

However we should not be too harsh on Afula. Unlike Israel’s outraged liberals who are weeping crocodile tears, Afula is not alone. Hundreds of Jewish communities in the Galilee and elsewhere bar access to non-Jews (and Black Jews), quite legally, under the Receptions Committees Law of 2011. This is reinforced by the Jewish Nation State Law 2018 which specifically endorses ‘Jewish settlement’.

The Jewish only city of Afula - its residents are fighting to keep its 'Jewish character'

These gated communities do not allow Arab Israelis to wander through them and have picnics in their parks.

Nor is it simply the Zionist right. The Israeli Labour Party and Meretz are both based on Israeli Kibbutzim which have always been Jewish only communities, as have the Moshavim. Jewish settlement and segregated housing was fundamental to the Labour Zionist policy of Jewish land, labour and produce.

But whereas in most middle class Israeli Jewish communities people are prevented from accessing the land by simply preventing the sale of land, via the Israeli Land Authority and the Jewish National Fund, in Afula, this is not possible. Afula is populated by Israel’s Oriental/Misrahi Jews. The Reception Committee Law doesn’t operate for communities above 700 people.

The Jewish city of Afula

Afula doesn’t simply consist of JNF and ILA land, some 93% of all Israeli land, but private land. Hence it is more difficult to prevent Arabs buying property as was the case in Upper Nazareth. This is why Israeli newspapers can tut tut knowing that no Israeli Arab village has been built since Israel’s formation unlike hundreds of Jewish communities.

What Afula is shining a light on is the Apartheid nature of the Israeli state. An apartheid state that the Labour Right defends and Corbyn is too timid to call out. However what the demonstrators in Afula are doing is putting the ‘Jewish’ in the ‘Jewish state’ into practice. They are the honest racists.

The Jewish National Fund owns or controls 93% of Israeli land

Suffice to say that the Mayor, Deputy Mayor and other council officials in Afula were demonstrating against the sale of a house to an Arab. If these people had been Arabs calling for people not to sell to Israeli Jews, they would have been arrested immediately, charged with incitement to racial hatred and face imprisonment.

Arab Israeli poet Dareen Tatour served 5 months in prison for simply writing a poem calling on her people to resist Zionism. Raed Saleh was framed for racial incitement because he mentioned the blood of children in the context of demonstrations in Jerusalem against the attacks on worshippers at the Mosques of Omar and Al-Aqsa.

But to most people the connections between what happened in pre-1939 Nazi Germany and Israel today will be unmistakeable. Arabs are not wanted today in Israel just as Jews were not wanted back then.

Tony Greenstein

Jews are forbidden from entering this town - sign in Nazi Germany

What Netanyahu Sowed, This Northern Israeli City Reaps

Haaretz Editorial

Jun 17, 2019 12:36 AM

Slogans regarding the need to “preserve the Jewish character” of a place were once again heard in Afula, during a demonstration on Saturday night held in front of a home that was sold to an Arab family.

These slogans cannot hide the racist division between “our people” and “the others,”between the superior and inferior, between the holy and the unclean, that accompanies a person here from womb to tomb. The way the city fathers embraced the demonstration is indicative of the deepening cooperation between government representatives and avowed promoters of racism like the Lehava organization, whose flag was seen at the protest alongside the Israeli flag.

A demonstration to preserve the 'Jewish character' of Afula

There were several dozen people at the demonstration, including Mayor Eli Elkabetz, Deputy Mayor Shlomo Malihi and members of the city council. The Facebook page Otzma Yehudit Afula – devoted to promoting Otzma Yehudit, the Kahanist faction that contended in the April general election as part of the Union of Right-Wing Parties – called on people to attend the protest.

“Our city is being sold,” the page said. “We must not lend a hand to this and we must not be silent. I ask everyone who can and to whom his country is important to come Saturday night.” In one of the responses, a party activist made the intention clear. “If you don’t wake up, Afula will fall like Upper Nazareth and your daughters will become slaves to the enemy.” As in other times in history, the dissemination of hate focuses on the “violation” of women by “the other.” Itai Cohen, one of the city council members who demonstrated, said the municipality would continue “to make sure the city preserves its Jewish character.”

In Afula’s case, preserving some imaginary purity has turned out to be worthwhile. Like many more veteran politicians than he, Elkabetz has learned to use racist dog whistles to benefit his political career. During the last local election campaign, Elkabetz promised to “preserve the Jewish character of Afula,” participated in demonstrations against selling local homes to Arabs, and on his Facebook page claimed that “the conquest of the city park,” i.e., visits to the park by Arabs from nearby communities, “must stop.”

After his victory, the municipal park was in fact opened several times solely to Afula residents. City council members, as they were sworn in, promised to “preserve the city’s Jewish character.” Last month Attorney General Avichai Mendelblit ruled that this addition to the swearing-in ceremony had no legal standing.

Afula is a racist mirror of broad sections of Israeli society, the legacy of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s recent years in office. The spirit of the nation-state law – the Netanyahu government’s crowning glory – wafts over the Afula demonstration and gives legitimacy to discriminatory, ugly behavior toward Arab citizens. Israel urgently needs local and national leadership that will facilitate ways for Jews and Arabs to live together.

Northern Israeli City Closes Park to Non-residents Over Summer Vacation

Mayor’s campaign ad states ‘Park built for Afula residents must remain theirs. … We must proudly wave Israeli flags in entire park and play music in Hebrew’

Noa Shpigel

Jun 25, 2019 2:09 AM

The northern city of Afula announced Monday it will close its main municipal park to nonresidents over the summer, except on Fridays. In recent years, Afula residents have complained of Arabs from the area using the park, and have protested against Arabs buying homes in the city.

The mayor of Afula, Avi Elkabetz, was responsible for building the park during his previous terms in office from 2005 through 2013. His election campaign last year featured a slogan calling for Afula to maintain its Jewish character. Before he was elected, he took part in protests against the sale of homes in the city to Arabs. After the election, members of the city council were sworn in with an oath that they would protect the Jewish character of the city.

As part of Elkabetz’s election campaign, he wrote the following on Facebook: “The occupation of the municipal park must end. It is not a political issue. It is not an election issue. It is simply a fundamental matter of principle. A park that was built for the residents of Afula needs to remain theirs … We must proudly wave Israeli flags through the entire park and play music in Hebrew,” he wrote.

A week and a half ago, Elkabetz again participated in a protest against the sale of a house in the city to an Arab family.

The city said the municipal park was built with public funds and Afula residents pay for its maintenance. The park will be open to the general public on Fridays for free and during the rest of the week it will serve as a community center in every way, similar to other places around the country that are open to local residents only.

Residents can enter the park for free by showing their ID card and children who don’t have an ID card can purchase a wristband to identify them for a one-time fee of 10 shekels ($2.80).

The park will be run by the city’s Shakim Afula community centers organization, which posted on its Facebook page on Monday: “Good news for Afula residents,” saying it will produce dozens of community and culture events over the summer vacation, including sporting events, shows, family get-togethers, workshops for children, a small zoo and more. It asked the public to wait patiently until it publishes its full program and details, “and not to believe rumors from unfounded reports.

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We welcome the reinstatement of Chris Williamson –but why are Dennis Skinner, Laura Pidcock and the Campaign Group of MPs Saying Nothing?

June 26, 2019, 5:52 pm

≫ Next: Jeremy Corbyn Must Defend Chris Williamson Instead of Appeasing Tom Watson

≪ Previous: Israelis Demonstrate in Afula Against the Sale of a House to an Arab - Arabs barred from entering Afula's municipal park

When Boris Johnson condemns Williamson' Reinstatement – What More Do You Need to Know about the Fake Anti-Semitism Campaign?

The paper that supported Hitler was also outraged

It is extremely welcome that Chris Williamson, one of the few socialist MPs, has had the whip restored. The outpouring of hate and bile from the Zionists and racists are wholly predictable and synthetic. However unless this is defended by the Left it may be short-lived.

Margaret Hodge, who as Leader of Islington Council covered up child abuse condemnedthe decision as ‘unbelievable’ and ‘turning a blind eye to Jew-hate’. This is the same Margaret Hodge whom the BNP sent a bunch of flowers to as a thank you for having endorsed their policy of only housing ‘local’ i.e. White families. As the Guardian reported in an article BNP backs Hodge in housing row

Just to remind ourselves of the position of the paper of British liberalism

The British National Party has supported Margaret Hodge in calling for British-born families to take priority over immigrants in the queue for council homes. They have seized on the Labour MP's comments as a vindication of its extremist policies. 'Labour MP Margaret Hodge deserves a word of compliment from the BNP for her efforts to raise the thorny issue of social housing for native Britons...

Like a lynch mob - Jess Phillips and company accompanied Ruth Smeeth

The Zionist campaign over 'antisemitism' has netted a lot of Black and Jewish activists

Ruth Smeeth, who was revealed to be a protected American asset by Wikileaks and a prima donna who falsely alleged anti-Semitism against Marc Wadsworth, was quotedas accusing Chris of having

‘intentionally undermined, marginalised and harassed the British Jewish community and Jewish Labour Party members, which has continually brought the Labour Party into disrepute.’

The bigger the lie the more it is to be believed. What Smeeth means is that Chris dared to criticise and call out the McCarthyist tactics of Zionist leaders and the Jewish Labour Movement’s false anti-Semitism narrative in particular.

Utterly predictable from the Zionist Chronicle

The Jewish Chronicle describedChris Williamson as a ‘Jew baiter’. Of course he is no such thing. The cynicism of Zionists like the Jewish Chronicle’s ‘Liar’ Lee Harpin who writes this nonsense is unbelievable. It trivialises anti-Semitism and makes it into a mere political bargaining chip, a cheap name to attack your political enemies with.

There were Jew baiters like Julius Streicher, the editor of the Nazi paper der Sturmer who was hanged at Nuremburg. Sir Oswald Moseley of the British Union of Fascists was another Jew baiter but Chris Williamson? I defy the Zionists to produce even one sentence of Chris’s that is anti-Semitic.

Board of Deputies Vice President Amanda Bowman said the lifting of the suspension was “an utter disgrace”. This is the same organisation which supportedIsrael’s use of snipers against unarmed demonstrators protesting against Israel’s siege of Gaza. The Board is an unrepresentative Zionist group masquerading as representative of Britain’s Jewish community.

According to the Jewish Chronicle’s Political Correspondent, ‘liar’ Lee Harpin one of Chris’s offences was that he ‘claimed Tony Greenstein – who was expelled for allegations involving antisemitism – had a right to hold his “anti-Zionist views”.’

Quite amazing really. Presumably this idiot thinks I don’t have the right to be an anti-Zionist. I think Liar Lee has forgotten that this is not Israel, where people are gaoled for their views, but Britain.

It is difficult to disagree with the Jewish Chronicle's now editor

And what was Chris’s original ‘crime’? To quote from the Tory supporting Politics Home: Chris Williamson told a Momentum meeting that:

"The party that has done more to stand up to racism is now being demonised as a racist, bigoted party.

“I have got to say I think our party's response has been partly responsible for that because in my opinion… we've backed off far too much, we have given too much ground, we've been too apologetic...

"We've done more to actually address the scourge of anti-semitism than any other political party. Any other political party. And yet we are being traduced."

See‘The Suspension of Chris Williamson MP is Shameful – This May Be the End of the Corbyn Project’

But the icing on the cake of this racist hypocrisy is the reaction of notorious racist and candidate to be leader of the Tory Party and Prime Minister, Boris Johnson who tweeted:

"Shameful that Labour have reinstated this key Corbyn ally back into their party after his appalling remarks. We must never allow these apologists for anti-Semitism anywhere near government."

This is the man who described Black people as ‘picanninies’ and having ‘water melon smiles’ and who comparedMuslim women to ‘letter boxes’ and bank robbers. Johnson whose whole campaign strategy has been guidedby the viciously racist former Trump advisor Steve Bannon.

The fact that Boris Johnson and the Daily Mail have gone to town over the reinstatement of Chris Williamson just shows what this is about – it has nothing to do with ‘anti-Semitism’ or ‘Jew baiting’ and everything to do with Israel and opposition to Zionism.

Jack London compared a scab and blackleg to a rattlesnake

When Chris Williamson was suspended, Owen Jones was to the fore in stabbing him in the back, all in the name of a ‘healing process with Britain’s Jewish community.’ Of course Owen Jones was, as is normally the case, providing a left gloss on the fact that it was the Labour Right and Tom Watson who had, with Tory support, called for his suspension.

Yet what is amazing is that not one MP from the Corbynites of the Socialist Campaign Group of MPs spoke out. All of them, without exception, kept quiet.

Unsurprisingly Tom Watson and the Daily Mail are in the same boat

Richard Burgon, Dianne Abbot, Dennis Skinner, Cat Smith, Laura Pidcock, Lloyd Russell-Moyle etc. said nothing. This cowardly silence can and will only help the Right. Remaining silent only strengthens the Right. The idea that this is about ‘anti-Semitism’ or Jews is for the birds.

This is about Israel, Zionism, support for shooting Gaza’s protestors, demolishing Palestinian villages whilst crying ‘anti-Semitism’ at anyone who critiques the State that does all of this.

The Jewish Labour Movement’s MPs, who are interchangeable with those of the Labour Friends of Israel, have been to the forefront in supporting the demolition of Palestinian homes, the arrest and physical abuse and torture of children and all the other abominations of Israel’s military occupation.

That is why we should welcome Chris’s reinstatement and call for Momentum and the Campaign Group of MPs to end their shameful silence.

I also sent this message to the 27 Campaign Group of Labour MPs

Dear Campaign Group MP

Today Chris Williamson unexpectedly but quite correctly had the Labour Whip restored to him.

The allegations of 'antisemitism' against him are and always were bogus. It should be sufficient in itself to note that the Board of Deputies and Labour Friends of Israel/JLM who make these charges defended and supported Israel's mowing down of unarmed demonstrators in Gaza. To say nothing of their support of the half century old military occupation of Palestine.

At a time when the Tory press, Boris Johnson, various Zionists and other assorted reactionaries are attacking Chris, is it too much to expect that you might raise your head above the parapet and publicly welcome him back?

Or is cowardice your only card?

Tony Greenstein

Members of the Campaign Group are:

Diane Abbott diane.abbott.office@parliament.uk

Richard Burgon richard@richardburgon.com

Dawn Butler dawn.butler.mp@parliament.uk

Ronnie Campbell ronnie.campbell.mp@parliament.uk

Dan Carden dan.carden.mp@parliament.uk

Emma Dent Code emma.dentcoad.mp@parliament.uk

Jeremy Corbyn jeremy.corbyn.mp@parliament.uk

Marsha de-Cova marsha.decordova.mp@parliament.uk

David Drew david.drew.mp@parliament.uk

Imran Hussain imran.hussain.mp@parliament.uk

Ian Lavery ian.lavery.mp@parliament.uk

Karen Lee karen.lee.mp@parliament.uk

Clive Lewis clive.lewis.mp@parliament.uk

Rebecca Long-Bailey rebecca.longbailey.mp@parliament.uk

John McDonnell mcdonnellj@parliament.uk

Ian Mearns ian.mearns.mp@parliament.uk

Grahame Morris grahame.morris.mp@parliament.uk

Laura Pidcock laura.pidcock.mp@parliament.uk

Kate Osamor kate.osamor.mp@parliament.uk

Danielle Rowley danielle.rowley.mp@parliament.uk

Lloyd Russell Moyle lloyd.russellmoyle.mp@parliament.uk

Dennis Skinner skinnerd@parliament.uk

Cat Smith cat.smith.mp@parliament.uk

Laura Smith laura.smith.mp@parliament.uk

Jon Trickett trickettj@parliament.uk

I also sent the following letter to the Jewish Chronicle in response to its vile article

Letters Editor,

The Jewish Chronicle
28 St. Albans Lane
London NW11 7QE

letters@thejc.com

Dear Sir:

The restoration of the Labour whip to Chris Williamson is to be welcomed by all those who oppose racism. Your headline ‘Outrage as Labour lifts suspension of 'Jew-baiter' MP Chris Williamson’ is itself outrageous.

Nothing Chris has said or done in any way merits the description ‘Jew baiter’. It is no surprise that neither you, Ruth Smeeth, the Board of Deputies or any other of his Zionist detractors are able to quote a single sentence or phrase that Chris has uttered which is in anyway anti-Semitic.

You are well aware that Chris Williamson signed a petition in support of Gilad Atzmon in ignorance of his anti-Semitism. As someone who led the campaign against Atzmon, long before the Zionist movement took it up, these allegations are simply opportunist. In any event I opposed Atzmon’s politics not his music and I support his right to play his music.

The allegation that Chris has harassed, baited, marginalised etc. the Jewish community is just poppycock. The real reason for the attacks on Chris Williamson is his anti-Zionist politics and his support for the Palestinians. Once again the Jewish Chronicle pretends that all Jews are Zionists and supporters of Israeli right or wrong, which according to the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism is anti-Semitic!

Lee Harpin claims that one of Chris Williamson’s offence is claiming that I have a right to hold anti-Zionist views. Is it the Jewish Chronicle’s position that I don’t have the right to be an anti-Zionist? I don’t believe even Israel makes holding anti-Zionist views a criminal offence! This is McCarthism gone mad.

Yours faithfully,

Tony Greenstein

↧

Jeremy Corbyn Must Defend Chris Williamson Instead of Appeasing Tom Watson

June 27, 2019, 10:09 pm

≫ Next: Once again Corbyn Has Betrayed his Friends & Appeased his Enemies - Today Corbyn’s very leadership is at stake

≪ Previous: We welcome the reinstatement of Chris Williamson –but why are Dennis Skinner, Laura Pidcock and the Campaign Group of MPs Saying Nothing?

It is time to remove Jon Lansman – he is a stalking horse for the Right

What is happening over the restoration of the whip to Chris Williamson is outrageous. He was duly tried by a panel of the National Executive. The Right are not happy with the decision and are therefore demanding that the verdict be annulled. It’s like the prosecution having a second bite of the cherry in a court case.

Naturally the Jewish Chronicle targets a Black member of the panel which heard Chris Williamson's case

118 MPs and peers have demanded that there should be no political interference in decisions regarding anti-Semitism, blithely unaware that that is exactly what they are doing. Once again Jeremy Corbyn, instead of defending Chris Williamson and stating loudly that he is not anti-Semitic, has pathetically restated that he is not an anti-Semite.

We should use the list of 118 (minus about 25 Lords) as a target list for deselection. These are people whose first loyalty is to the Israeli state and Britain’s pro-American foreign policy rather than to any conception of socialism.

The Independent's headline is no different to the Daily Mail's

For over 3 years the Zionist lobby and the Jewish Labour Movement (who are one and the same thing) have mounted campaigns against a whole series of targets. Each time Corbyn and Momentum, in the form of Jon Lansman have given way. Each time the Israeli Embassy lobby, which is what the JLM is, have simply increased their demands. Now even telling the truth about the Israel lobby is ‘anti-Semitic’ (thus equating Jews with Israel and Zionism).

Sobel is member of Labour Friends of Israel and should have been suspended after this tweet below

Why has there been no suspensions over a tweet welcoming the murder of Palestinians?

Even though an undercover Al Jazeera documentary The Lobby gave clear and unambiguous proof that the Israeli Embassy was deeply involved in penetrating the Labour Party and using dirty tricks.

If Corbyn had called out the weaponisation of anti-Semitism from the beginning then he would not have faced the past 4 years of hell. If he had said ‘yes, I condemn anti-Semitism but I also condemn the false allegation of anti-Semitism against supporters of the Palestinians and anti-Zionists’ he would not have lanced the boil. Instead the Zionists have been encouraged at every stage.

Corbyn e has apologised, appeased, wavered and conceded, looked hesitant and uncertain whilst displaying no appreciation or understanding of what was happening. It is obvious, as I stated 3 years ago in a series of speeches, that what was happening was an example of state destabilisation. It was clear to me even then that the ‘anti-Semitism’ allegations, which began with the Daily Mail were not spontaneous. They bore all the hallmarks of similar campaigns in other countries.

This is what the fake 'antisemitism' campaign is really about

We had an example of that when an unnamed General said at the beginning of Corbyn’s tenure that the army could not allow Corbyn to endanger the security of the realm. Then we had a ‘charity’ the Integrity Initiative being funded to run a dirty tricks campaign and then last month there was US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo statingthat the US would not allow Corbyn to come to power unhindered.

For too long the Left has assumed that the allegations of ‘anti-Semitism’ were made in good faith. Jewish people like myselfand Jackie Walker were expelled. Black anti-racists like Marc Wadsworth were expelled. Asa Winstanley, a journalist on Electronic Intifada has been suspended for writing a series of storieson the destabilisation campaign of the Jewish Labour Movement and the Israeli Embassy. Ken Livingstone was driven out.

Phil Woolas - the racist Labour MP that Tom Watson defended

Tom Watson defended 'poor Phil' and lost sleep about it

We have the absurdity of Tom Watson of all people leading the charge against Chris Williamson on the grounds that he is concerned to fight ‘anti-Semitism’. Watson is an out and out racist. He defendedPhil Woolas, a Labour MP who in the 2010 General Election ran a campaign which aimed to ‘make the White folk angry.’ The High Court removed him as an MP for electoral offences yet Tom Watson, instead of condemning this racist former Immigration Minister spoke of how he had lost sleep over ‘poor Phil.’

Or Margaret Hodge, who defendedand covered up for child abusers when leader of Islington Council and who was even sent a bunch of flowers by the BNP for espousing their policies of giving council houses to white people only, is leading the ‘anti-Semitism’ charge.

But what is worse is that our so-called friends, people like Jon Lansman, the unelected leader of Momentum, have attacked Chris Williamson. Lansman has worked with the JLM and defended them throughout. Despite the fact that the JLM are the self-proclaimed ‘sister party’ of the racist Israeli Labour Party.

If one good thing comes out of this Lansman has exposed himself. Anyone who defends him now is of the Right not Left. Likewise Owen Jones who has supportedthe suspension of Chris Williamson. Jones is and always has been a fair-weather friend of the Left. He too has befriendedthe JLM whilst pretending to be a supporter of the Palestinians.

Another media leftist Ash Sarkar has revealed her true colours in also joining in on the attack on Chris Williamson. What this whole episode has revealed is the weakness of the Left. Not one MP as far as I’m aware has come out in support of Chris Williamson. The so-called Campaign Group of MPs has remained silent. The cowardice is damning.

Can you imagine Tony Benn having remained silent whilst this witchhunt was going on or Eric Heffer? The reality is that the present left MPs have no class consciousness or really any different politics from the rest of the Blairite rabble in the PLP. Virtually none of them have any experience of trade unionism. Their socialism is academic at best. How else to explain the silence of Richard Burgon, Dianne Abbot, Cat Smith, Lloyd Russell Moyle, Ian Lavery and Laura Pidcott?

But whereas the MPs have show utter timidity it is the rank and file members of the Labour Party who have shown their support for Chris Williamson. Most members know that he has not made any anti-Semitic comments or remarks.

Tom Watson defended 'poor Phil' as well as supporting accusing the Lib Dems of being 'soft' on asylum seekers

The fact is that those leading the charge against Chris are the same MPs who refused to vote against the 2014 Immigration Act which introduced the ‘hostile environment’ policy which led to the Windrush deportations. The concern for ‘anti-Semitism’ against a privileged white community is in stark contrast to the actual racism against Black people.

What racism have Jewish people experienced? A few anti-Semitic social media posts at worst. No one has died from a tweet. Yet hundreds of people, some of whom have died, suffered from Theresa May’s ‘hostile environment’ policy. In 2014 how many Labour MPs broke the whip to vote against the Tories Immigration Act? Just 6– Corbyn, McDonnell, Abbot, Kelvin MacKenzie (also suspended).

This is the extent of the hypocrisy over the fake and false ‘anti-Semitism’ allegations.

Defending Chris Williamson is essential to defending the Corbyn leadership of the Labour Party. Unfortunately Corbyn himself is incapable of recognising the fact that throwing Chris overboard won’t make him stronger but weaker. Appeasing the Right doesn’t make them go away they just become emboldened.

That is why the defence of Chris Williamson is, despite Corbyn’s cowardice a defence of Corbyn!

Tony Greenstein

↧

Once again Corbyn Has Betrayed his Friends & Appeased his Enemies - Today Corbyn’s very leadership is at stake

June 29, 2019, 4:33 pm

≫ Next: Marina Hyde’s Attack on Chris Williamson is an Example of the Guardian’s Slow Witted Viciousness

≪ Previous: Jeremy Corbyn Must Defend Chris Williamson Instead of Appeasing Tom Watson

It should have been Tom Watson who was suspended not Chris Williamson

Defend Chris Williamson

Lobby Labour’s NEC

Tuesday 9^th July

105 Victoria St, Westminster,

London SW1E 6QT

(nearest tube Victoria)

It is difficult to work out the thinking behind the resuspension of Chris Williamson. We should be under no doubt that the decision of Jenny Formby was cleared by Corbyn. I am told that John McDonnell also played a part in this abject surrender.

Yvonne Davies objected to a BNP style march and was subject to bullying by Watson

This is not about ‘anti-Semitism’ or any form of racism. If it was then Tom Watson, a person who supported a racist St George’s Day March in Sandwell, in which BNP members were attending and then bullieda Labour councillor Yvonne Davies who suggested a more family friendly event, should put that nonsense to rest.

If they want to find examples of racism then John Mann's attack on gypsies and travellers is a good example

This is the same Tom Watson who supported‘our Phil’ Labour MP Phil Woolas who was removed for election offences by the High Court in 2011, (lying) after running a campaign based on ‘making the white folk angry.’

This is about Israel, the Zionist lobby and more generally support for American foreign policy in the Middle East. This is about the return to traditional bipartisanship in foreign policy and an end to any idea of mass nationalisation of the utilities and an end to austerity. It is a return to New Labourism that is threatened.

Watson supported racist Labour MP Phil Woolas telling people he had 'lost sleep' over 'poor Phil'

Jeremy Corbyn has handled the accusations of ‘anti-Semitism’ abysmally for the last 3 years. Instead of apologising he should have called out his accusers. Instead he apologised, betrayed his supporters, appeased a Zionist lobby which was out for only one thing, his head and last month when the Jewish Labour Movement began grandstanding and threatening to disaffiliate from the Labour Party he begged them to stay! They rewarded his pathetic pleas with a motion of no confidence.

No one should be under any doubt about this. Last September when the NEC passed an unamended IHRA definition of anti-Semitism, which conflated anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, it should have been clear to even the dumbest of creatures that it was Israel not Jews which was on the agenda.

Racist Labour MP Phil Woolas was defended by the racist MP below

The betrayal by Jon Lansman should make even the stupidest Momentum supporter sit up and take note. Momentum was set up to support Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership. Today it is hand in glove with Tom Watson and the JLM. Either Lansman is removed, which is impossible given the lack of democracy in Momentum, or an alternative left network needs to be set up in the Labour Party.

The concern of the media for Corbyn's health is touching

The JLM was refounded in 2015 with the specific project of removing Corbyn. The journalist who first uncovered this, Asa Winstanley has also been suspended from the Labour Party – for anti-Semitism of course! Telling the truth is also anti-Semitic!

The situation today is dangerous. Tom Watson has gained immeasurably from the resuspension of Chris Williamson. Corbyn has once again weakened himself by agreeing to this suspension. The absurdity of 118 MPs writing a letter deploring political interference in the anti-Semitism disciplinary process whilst themselves doing exactly that beggars belief.

The slow-witted viciousness of Marina Hyde of the Guardian

As should be clear even to the most slow-witted journalist, the anti-Semitism campaign has and never has had anything to do with anti-Semitism. From the very start the JLM had one purpose – to remove Corbyn. That is why whenever they achieved one target (removal of Ken Livingstone etc.) they moved on to another. And Jon Lansman has worked with them all the way.

It is no accident that all the papers today lead with stories on Jeremy Corbyn’s ‘unfitness’ to lead the Labour Party. The problem is that by his continual vacillation and his refusal or inability to call out Tom Watson he has confirmed those attacks.

What can we do?

Well Labour’s NEC is holding its next meeting on Tuesday 9^thJuly at which Chris Williamson will be discussed. It is at Southside near Victoria Station. Anyone who is serious in not wanting to see the Right take back control of the Labour Party should be there.

Tony Greenstein

↧

Marina Hyde’s Attack on Chris Williamson is an Example of the Guardian’s Slow Witted Viciousness

July 2, 2019, 4:26 pm

≫ Next: EXCLUSIVE – Focus on Zionism's Fascist Wing - Katie Hopkins Shows the Depth of Racism Amongst British Jewry

≪ Previous: Once again Corbyn Has Betrayed his Friends & Appeased his Enemies - Today Corbyn’s very leadership is at stake

The Guardian Reserves its Venom for an anti-racist MP but has nothing to say about a Labour MP to whom the BNP once sent a bunch of flowers

Just what is the purpose of a journalistic permafilla like Marina Hyde?

There was a time when people would argue as to who was the best journalist on the Guardian – Jonathan Steele, John Palmer or perhaps David Hirst. Even its right-wing journalists such as Hugo Young were serious intellectuals.

Today you have abusive lightweights such as Marina Hyde who not only lack the ability to write a coherent article but seem to think that their puerile and remarkably unfunny ‘jokes’ are an example of their talent

Even Boris Johnson of 'piccaninies' with 'water melon smiles' is concerned about 'antisemitism'

It’s not just Marina Hyde. There’s Suzanna Moore, Gaby Hinscliffe, the pretentious Rafael Behr’s and that’s just for starters. Even Jonathan Freedland’s trademark is a studied exercise in journalistic dishonesty and duplicity. Someday someone will write a on the decline of a once great British newspaper.

Marina Hyde’s latest effort is a piece of heavy laboured humour. ‘Of all the hills to die on why on earth has Labour chosen Chris Williamson.’ Of course Chris Williamson isn’t a hill and Marina Hyde is not a valley or even a plateau. If this military metaphor was intended to be humorous then like most of what passes for her journalism, it fell at the first hurdle.

Unfortunately Marina Hyde has no trace of Dr Jekyll about her

The real question is why, of all the MPs in the Labour Party or indeed Parliament, the female counterpart of Dr Jekyll’s Mr Hyde chose to attack one of the few consistently anti-racist MPs.

Hyde could have chosen Margaret Hodge, who once advocated a policy of only housing White families in Barking. So pleased were the BNP that she had adopted their policies that they sent her a bunch of flowers!

Margaret Hodge is the former leader of Islington Council who covered up child abuse at the Council’s children’s homes. When challenged she points to her relatives who died in the Holocaust, as if she is somehow unique amongst Jews in this respect.

Or she could have targeted Tom Watson, the barrel of lard who confessed to losing sleep over ‘poor Phil’the racist Labour MP who was removed by the High Court for various electoral offences such as lying about his Lib Dem opponents.

In a blatantly Islamaphobic campaign ‘poor Phil’ stated that his opponents supported Islamic terrorism. An email from his agent was uncovered which talked about ‘making the white folks angry’.

Watson himself is no slouch when it comes to dog whistle politics. Watson was campaign chair for Labour in the Birmingham Hodge Hill by-election in July 2004. The campaign drew criticism for its dirty tactics, particularly a Labour leaflet proclaiming "Labour is on your side – the Lib Dems are on the side of failed asylum seekers",

Travellers are listed, alongside Rubbish and Alcohol as a potential menace

Or then again Mr Hyde could have used her hobnail boots to good effect against John Mann who issuedthe Bassetlaw Anti-social Behaviour Handbook which described Gypsies and Travellers as examples of anti-social behaviour, alongside fireworks, alcohol, rubbish and neighbours from hell. A whole ethnic group was listed as an example of anti-social behaviour which is what the Nazis did with Gypsies.

After complaints Mann was interviewedby Police but the Guardian’s Mr Hyde ignored the very real racism of the Labour Right in favour of fake ‘anti-Semitism’. Far better to put the boot into Chris Williamson than into a genuine racist.

This journalistic trollope could have deployed her bile and venom against Louise Ellman who used two parliamentary debates on Palestinian children, on 6^thJanuary 2016 and 7^thFebruary 2018, to defend Israel’s treatment of children, Palestinian of course, not Jewish. Jewish children are subject to Israeli civil not military law.

Minor matters such as kidnapping children as young as 12 in the early hours of the morning, dragging them from their beds, blindfolding them, beating them, holding them in cold cells without access to clean water, toilets or food, refusing them access to their parents or lawyers, told to sign confessions in a language they don’t even understand. All of this passes unnoticed by the Guardian’s pet pirhana of a ‘journalist’.

The concern of the Right for 'antisemitism' is in strange contrast to their attitude to other forms of racism

Being a gormless slow witted thug masquerading as a ‘journalist’ Marina Hyde chose to emulate her namesake rather than Dr Jekyll. Instead of attacking a Zionist MP who defends the indefensible she chose instead to attack one of the few consistently anti-racist and anti-Zionist MPs.

Marina Hyde is herself a walking, talking metaphor for the Guardian. A bully in print, a savant without an ounce of wit using a pen dripping with bile. She prefers butchery to surgery and the result can be seen in an indigestible article full of animus and in humour.

Below is a letter which I sent to the Guardian. It was not, of course, published. Guardian Letters, which used to be one of the few areas of free speech left on the Guardian has succumbed to Freedland’s baleful influence.

Tony Greenstein

Letters Editor

Kings Place,

90 York Way

London N1 9GU

Dear Sir/Madam,

The cynicism and slow-witted viciousness of Marina Hyde’s attack on Chris Williamson is nothing more than would expect these days. In her normally snide asides Hyde asks ‘“HOW FAR WOULD YOU GO TO DEFEND CHRIS WILLIAMSON?” [Of all the hills to die on, why on earth has Labour chosen Chris Williamson? Guardian 28^th June]

Can I suggest that most Labour Party members, including its Jewish members, would go quite a long way? The fact that 118 Labour MP’s and peers chose to sign a letter demanding Williamson’s resuspension was all the more reason to resist the very political interference in the disciplinary process that they purported to deplore.

Contrary to the assumption in her remarkably unfunny column Chris Williamson is one of the few consistent supporters of the Palestinians and anti-racists in the Parliamentary Labour Party.

The letter was headed by Deputy Leader Tom Watson. The same Tom Watson who, in 2011 defended Phil Woolas who was removed as a Labour MP by the High Court for lying about his opponent, in the course of a campaign based around ‘making the white folk angry.’ Tom Watson is on record as having said that he had lost sleep thinking about ‘poor Phil’.

The idea that Tom Watson or any of the other signatories were motivated by anti-racism or opposition to anti-Semitism is risible. The real agenda was getting rid of Jeremy Corbyn and once again Corbyn has demonstrated his weakness when standing up to these bullies.

Yours etc.,

Tony Greenstein

↧

EXCLUSIVE – Focus on Zionism's Fascist Wing - Katie Hopkins Shows the Depth of Racism Amongst British Jewry

July 4, 2019, 7:36 pm

≫ Next: If You Can’t Defend Chris Williamson, You Can’t Defend Jeremy Corbyn

≪ Previous: Marina Hyde’s Attack on Chris Williamson is an Example of the Guardian’s Slow Witted Viciousness

The Sad Lives of Zionism's Tommy Robinson Supporters Exposed

No.1 in a series profiling in depth the small group of fascist Zionists and far-right thugs who conspire to harass and intimidate Palestinians and their supporter. We do not say that all Zionists are fascists but the one’s named below are. Our next report will be on the 'intellectual' fascist David Collier, who has tricked much of Britain's media into accepting his claims that he is an 'independent researcher' rather than a far-Right Zionist who denies there is any such thing as Palestinians.

The Two Flags of Apartheid - Israel and South Africa

Introduction

June was a busy month for the fascist wing of British Zionism, although to be fair the difference between the fascist and non-fascist wing as represented by the mainstream Board of Deputies and the Jewish Labour Movement is difficult to discern. When it comes to Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour Party and 'anti-Semitism' there is no difference. The fascists feed off the mainstream narrative.

No doubt more of these characters will be on display this weekend at the Pal Expo 2019 festival at Earl’s Court making a nuisance of themselves. No doubt Paul Besser of the Holocaust denial group Britain First and other supporters of Tommy Robinson and the EDL will be protesting about ‘anti-Semitism’. Perhaps we might even see the unfrocked Catholic priest Neil Horan, a Hitler lover, in his green mini skirt.

Katie Hopkins - Zionist Bigot Extraordinaire

The ritual denunications of a Jewish Katie Hopkins meeting by the Board of Deputies might be more convincing if they also denounced far worse racism in Israel

Word has come in of a large, almost wholly Jewish, meeting in the Jewish owned Pillar Hotel, Hendon this past Tuesday. There is a reportby Ben Welch in this week’s Jewish Chronicle. All our old friends were there - Amanda Shitrit and Sharon KKKlaff. As Ben noted:

‘Right-wing agitator Katie Hopkins’ words were not delivered to a crowded meeting of the BNP in Barking but to the sympathetic ears of a roomful of Jewish people in the heart of North West London.’

Someone remind me - who was it who compared Jews to vermin? [Clue their initials are AH] This is the type of creature who takes to Zionism these days

This is not surprising. As I argued recently in Electronic Intifada Let’s be honest about Britain’s obsession with “anti-Semitism the elephant in the room is the extent of racism and Islamaphobia in the British Jewish community.

Like all good fascists - KT Hopkins meeting had its accompanying goons and even guard dogs - pity they didn't have German Shepherd dogs, a favourite at Auschwitz

Britain’s Jews do not suffer from state racism, which is the main form of racism. They are White and privileged. There are no Jewish victims of the Windrush ‘hostile environment’. No Police Stop and Search for Jews to protest about. Racism is rampant in Britain’s Jewish community and Zionism has helped inculcate a toxic degree of Islamaphobia in British Jews against the ‘Arabs’ who are often conflated with Muslims. The essence of Zionism, racism towards the non-Jew and Palestinians in particular, manifests itself in racism against Black and Muslims as well as non-Jews.

That is why Katie Hopkins, despite her commentsabout refugees being nothing more than cockroaches and vermin, was a guest of honour at the Zionist Federation meeting last year sharing a photo-shot with Israeli Ambassador and war criminal, Mark Regev.

After all in Israel comparisons of Palestinians with cockroaches are nothing new. E.g. former Israeli Chief of Staff, Raful Eitan comparedArabs to ‘drugged cockroaches’ scurrying around in a bottle.

It is why Tommy Robinson has been fetedby Jews in Britain and defendedin The Times of Israel. Katie Hopkins was the star of the meeting this week and her noxious film about the Islamic ‘invasion’ of Europe, Homelands, was first shown last month in Jerusalem, hosted by the Deputy Mayor of Jerusalem who had taken the day off from further demolitions of Palestinian homes.

June started off with the annual Al Quds demonstration in London. For some reason this attracts the ire of an assortment of racists and fascists, including the Board of Deputies. Perhaps it is because those who organise it are sympathetic to Lebanon’s Hizbollah.

It is said that Himmler was also a good husband and father - the worst fascists often are

Britain’s token Muslim cabinet minister, Sajid David, in his bid to curry favour recently outlawed the civilian as well as the military wing of Hizbollah! Since the Hezbollah party doesn’t and never has operated in Britain this was a pointless gesture but it was meant to satisfy the Zionist lobby.

Of course it is understandable why the Zionists hate Hezbollah. Hezbollah, who are part of the Lebanese government were the main force driving out Israel from southern Lebanon in 2000. Historically Zionism has always claimed South Lebanon up to the Litani River as part of Eretz Yisrael, the biblical Land of Palestine.

In 2006 Israel decided to reinvade Lebanon because expansionism is in the Zionist DNA. Unfortunately after just one day Israel had lost 33 of its finest and they withdrew with their tails between their legs. Since then they have not dared to attack.

On the day of the demonstration the Zionists made a nuisance of themselves but were unable to prevent the march taking place.

The Fascists taking part in the Board of Deputies Demonstration at Al Quds included Tommy Robinson’s Bodyguard – Danny Thomo

Amongst the fascists taking part at Al Quds was Danny Thomas, Tommy Robinson’s bodyguard. At the end the fascists rejoined the Board of Deputies demonstration to applause from the bourgeois elements, thus demonstrating that there is little difference between one group of racists and another. Except that the open fascists lack good manners, breeding and etiquette.

The month was also marked by the conviction of two Zionist thugs Jonathan Hoffman and Damon Lenszner in the Hendon magistrates court. Unfortunately, as part of a plea deal, the charges of common assault and in Lenszner’s case assault by beating were dropped. Hoffman has been whining and lying ever since. According to legal expert Sharon KKKlaff they were charged‘on spurious grounds’.

We start with a focus on one of the most disreputable of the fascists, Sharon KKKlaff, an émigré from South Africa. When Apartheid ended she also left. She comes from a long fascist pedigree.

Who is Sharon KKKKlaff - A RACIST LIFE

A South African Supporter of Apartheid she finds a multi-racial society too difficult to adjust to

Klaff hero worshipping Katie Hopkins

Sharon Klaff nee Olsfanger, from Pretoria, Apartheid South Africa.

Q: 3 words that exemplify what it was like growing up there

A: Best life ever.

Her dad was a fascist and supporter of a group that Albert Einstein and Hannah Arendt compared to the Nazis - KKKlaff has lived up to her father's ideals

KKKKlaff is a vulgar South African and fascist loud-mouth who has brought Zionist extremism to the streets of London

At Al Quds Day 2019 in London many wondered who the screeching harridan with the South African accent was who spent the whole day harassing them. We report here.

The ageing racist who continuously insulted and tried to provoke peaceful marchers is SHARON KLAFF aka KKKlaff was also deliberately confrontational with the police throughout the day. She tried to intimidate the police who restrained her telling them she was going to complain to “an important friend of hers who was a Detective Chief Inspector”.

Like many Zionists, Klaff is stupid and does not understand English humour and IRONY. At one point trying to provoke and patronise a policeman she pointed at the very large flag of Palestine and screeching asked if he knew which flag it was - the policeman replied deadpan “Israel, I think”.

Klaff sordid family history

[Klaffs’ Grandfather was interned by the South African Government on suspicion of being a pro-German agent and a grave threat to national security during the war.].

Of course the future Apartheid Prime Minister John Vorster was also internedas a Nazi supporter.

Krazy KKKlaff with Ambrosine Shitrit, Paul Besser (ex-Britain First gofer) and extremist Zionist goon Jonathan Hoffman

Shitrit complaining that she had been misidentified as KKKlaff and screaming ‘libel’. Although Canary made a mistake the fact is that she is an Islamaphobe. Needless to say no lawyers were consulted.

Klaff’s father was the escort for Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the founder of Revisionist Zionism which Albert Einstein and Hannah Arendt describedin a letter to the New York Times of 4^th December 1948 as

‘a political party closely akin in its organisation, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties’

In other words Klaff was the daughter of a Jewish Hitlerite and she has followed faithfully in his footsteps. Jabotinsky reached an agreement in 1921 with Simon Petlyura, the anti-Semitic Ukrainian nationalist leader who fought against the Bolsheviks, in the course of which at least 100,000 Jews were murdered in horrific pogroms. Jabotinsky’s Zionism meant he allied with the devil, as he explained, even if that devil was a notorious and bloodthirsty anti-Semite. It became the subject of heated controversy in the 12^thZionist Congress in 1921 and led to the divorce with Chaim Weizmann, Israel’s first President and the founding first of the Revisionist Zionist Alliance in 1925 and then the breakaway New Zionist Organisation in 1935 (although Weizmann was very fond of Mussolini who he met 4 times).

Klaffs’ father “Bennie” Olsfanger: escorting Jewish terrorist Ze’ev Jabotinsky around Southern Africa. Jewish terrorist Jabotinsky in drivers’ seat, Olsfanger on right of picture.

Klaffs’ Grandfather

Klaffs’ grandfather was interned by the South African Government on suspicion of being a pro-German agent and a grave threat to national security during the war.

Klaffs’ husband.

Husband David Klaff served in the Apartheid South African Army and still brags about it now.

The Nazi Jews – Betari Youth Movement

“We dressed in black and khaki and the other Jewish youth movements called us Nazi Jews”.

Boasted Annette Rosenberg, a contemporary of Klaff.

Klaff idol Zionist terrorist Jabotinsky took the Hitler Jugend as his model for the Betar Youth.

Picture of Reisel Kaplan and Louis Rosenberg

Klaff and French Beitari thug Laurent Kachauda

Half a century on Klaff waddles through London with convict Laurent Kachauda, a French Zionist thug earlier sentenced to 6 months imprisonment for an unprovoked assault on an elderly French Jewish lady. Shop assistant Kachauda was sentenced along with 3 Zionist terrorist accomplices: It took 4 Zionist thugs to assault the lady sitting on her own in a cafe.

Klaff waiting to speak at poorly-attended Fascist rally after Anne-Maria Waters, founder Pegida UK with Tommy Robinson.

Ambrosine Shitrit

Shitrit in the audience listening to Anne Marie Waters

Shitrit looking away as Anne Marie-Waters speaks at a Pegida meeting

Here we have Ambrosine Shitrit letting us know her relief that a Muslim, Sajid David no less, will not be the Prime Minister.

Shitrit trying to save Michael English from himself after he posted a video of him being interviewed by the Police – too late unfortunately as I grabbed a screen grab

Here Klaff lets the mask slip once again. She proclaims herself to be a proud national socialist. The Board of Deputies asked her to delete the post. They thought it was embarrassing to be so open about one’s true allegiances.

The racism just spills out

Klaffs’ racist idols: Luke Nash-Jones, Robert Spencer, Carroll, Geller, Tommy Robinson. Spencer and Geller are banned from UK and EU Schengen area.

Betari extremist Zionist thugs idolised by Klaff today still ape the Hitler uniform - brownshirt and all.

Klaff is enthused by Tommy Robinson’s appearance on Panorama

CAN YOU SPARE A MINUTE TO HELP SHARON KLAFF FREE TOMMY ROBINSON?

Klaff suggests that the prosecution of Jonathan Hoffman and Damon Lenszner for attacking a Palestinian woman was ‘institutionalised anti-Semitism’ on the behalf of the Police

Klaff being restrained by Police

Krazy KKKlaff often becomes unruly and incoherent and has to be restrained by police. Is this because, unlike the Apartheid Police of her former homeland the Met refuse to take orders from her at public events when she insists on “speaking to a superior officer”whenever they do not follow her screeching orders to arrest the nearest Bleck, Mooslem or pro-Palestinian she has decided to pick a fight with.

It’s difficult to imagine what Cobbs has with which to blackmail KKKlaff since she seems shameless. Unless she has some Palestinian children hidden under her floorboards at home.

Apparently Cobbs has joined forces with ‘BDS’ (presumably PSC) which is news to us!!

Even Simple Simon Cobbs wants nothing to do with KKKlaff. Presumably

“..the out of work chap now top-hatted and cock-a-hoop new establishment with a red-faced Israeli suntan courtesy the community’s donations to charity”. Is our very own Simon Cobbs from Sussex Friends of Israel.

Apparently KKKlaff resents the fact that Cobbs, Collier and Cohen get free all-expenses paid jollies to Israel, taking credit for the hard work of Sharon and Shitrit whilst she is manhandled by the Met Police . It breaks one’s heart to see all these divisions amongst the fascist wing of the Zionists.

Best life ever! Klaff on her years in Apartheid South Africa “best life ever”.

Klaff having an “ironic” laugh at Sad Loner Richard Millett- Maid of Honor!?? Increasingly deranged posts from Klaff - here making fun of brave loner Dickie Millie? Maid Of Honor?- not our RICHARD MILLETT? I ask you? Pray tell, Sharon!!! Millett has announced a forlorn attempt to sue Jeremy Corbyn for ‘anti-Semitism’

KKKlaff is a member of the extremist Zionist Jewish Defence Forces, a secret closed group whose admin is Mordechai Kedar. Professor Colonel Kedar has argued that Palestinian women and girls should be raped by Occupation soldiers in a wartime situation to deter ‘terrorism’. The secret closed site also claims there never was a Palestine and there are no Palestinians.

Nobody wants to be associated or seen with KKKlaff (or Mark Haringman) except the most extreme Zionist misfits, losers and criminals.

Even North London Friends of Israel want nothing to do with Klaff and her boorish loudmouthed sidekick Mark “Handcuffs” Haringman who posts as Mick McMurphy complaining that he was arrested for not moving on.

Klaff with convicted criminals Kachauda & Michael “Mad Mick”English defying police.

Klaff to the JTA about western civilisation

I am informed that Klaff and her family have acquired substantial property interests in the UK. When harassing Palestine events she defies police requests to remain in designated counter-protest areas. Below are details of her property company, Bowerbeck Ltd.

Klaff is also associated with Neil Masterson, a nasty thug who served a prison sentence for assault on George Galloway.

Police mugshot of Masterson wearing his pink IDF t-shirt! Court reports said Masterson, a full-time carer, had been a heroin addict for 25 years.

Klaff with Australian Zionist extremist Avi Yemeni who has been refused entry to the US by Homeland Security. From her days in the “Nazi-Jews” of Betar in Apartheid South Africa to London with self-proclaimed Nazi-Jew Yemini Klaff loves neo-Nazis. Even Marie van der Zyl and Jonathan Arkush of the Board of Deputies, who are not unhappy to befriend fascists themselves, draw the line at Krazy KKKlaff and her criminal accomplices.

Avi Yemini is a strong supporter of Tommy Robinson

A Touching photo of Klaff and Shitrit dancing together in fascist harmony

KKKlaff addressing Pegida-front rally including MBGA fruit-cake racist Luke Nash-Jones (wearing flag) who was suspended even from UKIP for his extremist views. Loopy Luke, like Krazy KKKlaff spent his early years in Southern Africa – in his case Ian Smiths Rhodesia.

Shitrit speaking at Pegida rally - Krazy KKKlaff with racist Simon Harris of neo-Fascist EDL - European Defence League at Pegida Front rally.

Simon Harris is a great believer in the Aryan race. This is not however anti-Semitic as he is pro-Israel. I think you follow the logic. This is who KKKlaff and Shitrit mix with

This is a potted biography of Simon Harris who announces that a new edition of the Nazis’ favourite book The Protocols is available. For those interested in this book there is an excellent review by an A. Hitler in Mein Kampf where we are assured that it contains nothing but the truth about the Jews.

Shitrit gives a 'huge thank you' to 'Simon Harris blogger' an open holocaust denier - all in the name of fighting 'anti-semitism' - Still this is the position of Jewish Chronicle Editor Stephen Pollard, so it’s not unusual.

Simon Harris – Holocaust Denier and Zionist

Simon Harris is the founder and editor of European Freedom. Despite being a Holocaust denial publication Klaff and Shitrit have no hesitation in appearing with him on a demonstration. Klaff and Shitrit are an integral part of the group of Zionist fascists – from Besser to Hoffman and Collier. What is surprising is that the mainstream press still have not twigged to the fact that Collier is not an independent researcher as he claims but a far-Right Zionist who associates with neo-Nazis, fascists and other loony tunes.

Klaff and Shitrit with the Zionist flag alongside holocaust denier Simon Harris

Klaff, Shitrit and holocaust denier Simon Harris

Even the Board of Deputies and JLC have contempt for Klaff and her fascist associates – and given that they’re all right-wing Tories that is something – and their campaign against a Mosque in Golders Green, which has a substantial Muslim population. Their arguments were nakedly racist and even characters like Jonathan Arkush and Stephen Pollard, editor of the Jewish Chronicle, drew the line at such blatant Islamaphobia. Nothing however is too racist for KKKlaff.

BOD Chair Marie van der Zyl puts Klaff in her place

Klaff attacks BOD over mosque

Klaff and Shitrit set up HippodromeGG to oppose a Muslim Cultural Centre in Golders Green. The Jewish News refused to take their ads because they were ‘racist’. Klaff raised the question of noise in a residential street but thought it was OK to use a megaphone and start screeching loudly at night in a residential area in Islington, which did not go too well for her as some of the residents took exception and smacked her one.

Tommy Robinson cult supporter James Goddard, facing charges of assault on Anna Soubrey MP was with EDL and Klaff in trying to disrupt the Al Quds march. Goddard in centre pic holding EDL flag.

Above are Klaff and Shitrit keeping company with defrocked Roman Catholic priest Neil Horan (in green miniskirt), who is an open supporter of Hitler. He was last seen at the picket against ‘anti-Semitism’ at the Palestine Expo 2017. You couldn’t really make it up – demonstrating against anti-Semitism with neo-Nazis!!

Laurent Kachauda

Laurent Kachauda, an activist with French Beitar and a violent thug, came over to the Al Quds demonstration. It was not a happy experience for him. He had threatened to come over with a gun, which was not a wise boast.

He along with 4 fascists of the Jewish Defence League were convicted of violence against Olivia Zémor, a French Palestine solidarity activist.

Kachauda undergoing a search by the Met for the gun he boasted of bringing over - Laurent est allé à Londres pour «Le Weekend »

Comme beaucoup de touristes, notre Laurent a fait prendre sa photo avec les "bobbies" de Londres.

Mais notre cher Laurent était très triste et désolé, même s'il avait déjà été accueilli par les "bobbies" Londoniens à son arrivée au large de l'Eurostar à Saint-Pancras.

Kachauda was stopped and thoroughly searched by the Met outside Downing Street in Whithall. London. Apparently the Police weren’t happy with a potential terrorist casing the joint.Here is the film.

Kachauda parades with the flag of the Judeo-Nazi Jewish Defence League (banned as a terrorist group in the USA)

Honteusement, À son arrivée à la Gare du Nord pour son voyage à Londres, M.K(h)achauda a également été arrêté et interrogé par les Services de Sécurité Français.

(Mais s'il vous plaît, ne le dites à personne, car Laurent est mortifié et choqué par tout cela).

At Gare du Nord the French Security Services took time to wish Laurent « Bon Voyage » giving him a good going over.

Kachauda's sorry tale of woe in London - didn't even have a good night's sleep!

Nor was it a pleasant stay in London. He was detained for 8-hours at St. Pancras. It seems that the Police had been forewarned!!

Apart from repeated harassment from the Met he managed to stay in a most uncomfortable but expensive flea pit!! Actually it’s hard not to evince sympathy after this description but I’ll try!! The dump in question was the Rose Court near Marble Arch. Clearly more money than sense but no more than he deserved!! I don’t know whether they served breakfast still less whether it was kosher and sanctioned by the Beth Din but I doubt it somehow!!

Stupidement, Laurent semble choisir ses hôtels comme il choisit ses amis en Angleterre: très bas-classe, sordide et sale, très désagréable.

Laurent a choisi de rester dans un petit hôtel sordide très près de Marble Arch - ce que les Anglais appellent un "fleapit".

Laurent, Comment dit-on "fleapit" en Français ? »

Laurent, How do you say « Fleapit » in French ?

Comme l'année dernière, Laurent a participé à la manifestation anti-Palestine avec Jonathan Hoffman et son proche collaborateur,Michael English (Le Roi Sioniste), sans doute les deux leaders les plus importants du mouvement Sioniste en Angleterre.
[39]

'Like last year Laurent participated in the anti-Palestine demo along with Jonathan Hoffman and his close associate Mr.English Zionist King (!), arguably the two most important leaders of the Zionist Movement in England.'

Laurent est toujours profondément attristé et désolé. Malheureusement, Laurent ne sait plus à qui faire confiance en Angleterre. Quelqu'un l’a trahi – PERFIDE ALBION !

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMOy-dPtgMU&t=12s

Jonathan Hoffman

No feature on Zionists and fascists would be complete without a mention of poor Jonathan Hoffman, a man much reduced in circumstances. A man who once mixed with the high and mighty found his autism and inability to understand or empathise count against him. Today he is truly a figure of fun.

It has been a rum few months for Jonathan Hoffman otherwise known as Yonatan Scoffman. Convicted of harassing women at Hendon magistrates court, fined and reprimanded, he was the subject of an excellent parody by Stephen Oryszczuk who was the Jewish News Foreign Editor. His piece You can’t put lipstick on a pig summed up the frustration of many Zionists at the tactics of Hoffman – which is basically to shout and harangue and try and drown out people in the hope that if you can’t hear them you’ll never find out the truth.

In many ways this is all a very personal tragedy. Hoffman, was all set to become a candidate for the Renew Party in the European elections! Renew provided the Independent Group’s candidate in the Peterborough by-election. Tragically as we know, the TIG group didn’t take off and two of its MPs are now in the Lib-Dems and the others are at sixes and sevens. However poor Jonathan Scoffman once had high hopes of becoming Jonathan Scoffman MEP!!

Unfortunately after having posted a vile racist cartoon of Jackie Walker Hoffman was ejected from this budding and well meaning group of nonentities, so I’m afraid we will have to wait a few more years, assuming Brexit fails, to see Yonatan Scoffman MEP.

Hoffman in a Renew party training video - listening (for once) - he had high hopes of becoming an MEP but sadly it was not to be as he was removed from this tiny party's candidates list

The picket of the Puma shop which led to Hoffman's criminalisation

Hoffman is still unable to come to terms with now having a criminal record. He is still lying about having been acquitted of assault on a Palestinian woman, whereas the charges were dropped. Nor were they fictions nor was anyone lying. There was a full feature film which the judge looked at before passing sentence and refusing his solicitor’s suggestion that he receive a conditional discharge.

Hoffie’s tactics come over wonderfully in this film below at the successful picket of the Ahava shop in Monmouth Street, Covent Garden, which we eventually got closed down. You see him shouting repeatedly at Bruce Levy that he is the ‘Queen of Renegade Jews’!! ‘Renegade Jew’ is his favourite insult and roughly translates as anti-racist Jews.

Stephen Oryszczuk was forced to resign from the Jewish News after having gone public with his criticisms of the joint editorial by 3 Zionist newspapers last year calling Corbyn an anti-Semite.

“Let’s call him Yonatan Scoffman.

….. his arguments are bigoted and his actions embarrassing. He disrupts meetings, screams abuse, waves Israeli flags and gets dragged out by security”.

Scoffman was in court with fellow criminal and fascist Damon Lenszner and what do you know ? Out of all the thousands of solicitors in England and Wales Lenzman just coincidentally had representing him a Manchester solicitor by the name of Daniel Berke. Not only did Berke represent another Berk but he also represents Tommy Robinson. What a small world we live in !!

Although Hoffman was represented by John Dye, a barrister, he was instructed by Berke’s Manchester firm, 3D Solicitors. So both Zionist criminals were represented by the solicitor's firm that also represents Tommy Robinson. Coincidence? Yes about 1 in 20,000!

Below is a conversation between Manchester petty crook Michael English and an unnamed EDL supporter during the search of Kachauda

Previously I reported that Hoffman was a member of the JDF Facebook group. It seems that as a result of my storyhe too has resigned.

Other pictures of interest and miscellaneous stuff

Here is a picture of Roberta Moore’s non-Jewish boyfriend Robert de Jonge. Both he and Roberta Moore are members of the neo-Nazi Jewish Defence League. Robert seems to have found a dumber mutt than himself, bearing the logo Free Tommy.

Paul Besser

As regular readers will know, Besser is a member of Britain First and was its ‘intelligence officer’. I reported him in a storyabout the Confederation of Scottish Friends of Israel as being a member of a secretive Israeli Facebook Group, the Jewish Defence Force. As a result of my exposure he has now resigned.

Here is a touching picture of Paul Besser, the decidedly unintelligent 'Intelligence Officer' of Britain First with Shitrit.

Besser being told off by a Police Officer and standing to attention

A touching photo of Shitrit and Besser

Brian of London – Tommy Robinson’s Israel Organiser

I’ve featured Brian of London before. He is an avid supporter of Tommy Robinson and has close relations with far-Right Zionist David Collier.

Many of these fascists and neo-Nazis gather under the banner of the so-called Campaign for Truth, which Melanie Phillips graced with her presence.

Damon Lenszner in a spot of difficulty

[44]

Lenszner, who appeared with Hoffman in court, employed Tommy Robinson’s solicitor, Daniel Berke, to defend him.

Mad Mel Gharial

No report on Zionist fascists would be complete without something on Mad Mel, who has to crowdfund in order to afford to get to London for demonstrations. Reputed to have once been a page 3 girl, it would seem that her race hatred and bile has etched itself into her face judging by these photos. She is a female version of Dorian Gray.

Here she is with Danny Thomas, Tommy Robinson’s body guard.

↧

If You Can’t Defend Chris Williamson, You Can’t Defend Jeremy Corbyn

July 6, 2019, 4:54 pm

≫ Next: Nothing Better Demonstrates Why Allegations of Labour Anti-Semitism are Fake than the Labour Right's Hostility to Roma and Travellers

≪ Previous: EXCLUSIVE – Focus on Zionism's Fascist Wing - Katie Hopkins Shows the Depth of Racism Amongst British Jewry

Support the Mass Lobby of Labour’s Disputes Committee - Tuesday July 9^th Reinstate Chris Williamson Now

First they came for Tony Greenstein, then Jackie Walker, Marc Wadsworth and Ken Livingstone as well as near misses such as Naz Shah and Richard Burgon. The they is the Jewish Labour Movement, Israel’s Trojan Horse inside the Labour Party.

By their own description the JLM is the ‘sister party’ of the racist Israeli Labour Party. A party of segregation, which has pledgednot to uproot any settlements, hostileto non-Jewish asylum seekers and the author of the Nakba, the expulsion of the Palestinian refugees. The JLM is affiliated to the World Zionist Organisation which funds the very settlements which destroyed the two state solution that the JLM purports to support.

Jeremy Corbyn instead of standing up to Tom Watson’s demand to re-suspend Chris Williamson once again gave way. John McDonnell went one worse giving Chris the same advice he had given to Ken Livingstone which was to apologise ‘because Jews are a very forgiving people.’ Apart from the anti-Semitic stereotype in the above statement it demonstrates just how far McDonnell has moved away from anti-racism and anti-imperialism. In other words, those who supportedthe gunning down of unarmed demonstrators by Israeli snipers in Gaza over the past year should be appeased once again.

And what was Chris Williamson supposed to apologise for? The following statement:

"The party that has done more to stand up to racism is now being demonised as a racist, bigoted party.

I have got to say I think our party's response has been partly responsible for that because in my opinion… we've backed off far too much, we have given too much ground, we've been too apologetic...

We've done more to actually address the scourge of anti-semitism than any other political party. Any other political party. And yet we are being traduced.”

I defy anyone to explain how the above is anti-Semitic. It is complete fakery. McCarthyist nonsense. Chris Williamson was clearly saying that Labour has been too apologetic in the face of false allegations of anti-Semitism.

Jewish Chronicle story

Today’s Sunday Times has lurid tales of rifts between Corbyn, McDonnell and Diane Abbot. It is impossible to know whether this is true or not however there is no doubt that Corbyn’s tactics have been crazy and self defeating.

Corbyn chose to stand firm on the wrong issue – instead of rebutting the false allegations of anti-Semitism he caved into them and repeatedly apologised whereas he did himself untold political damage by refusing to accept a second referendum and making Labour a party of Remain.

Tom Watson bullied Yvonne Davies from standing for the Council for having opposed a BNP-style march

The fact is that Labour gained just 13% in the European elections, defeated even by the Lib-Dems. Corbyn’s idiotic strategy let the Lib Dems come back and have been responsible for historically low levels of support. The support at the 2017 General Election has been frittered away in a bout of little Englandism. Labour could have been the party of Remain and Reform of the EU and pulled the rug from under Tom Watson.

Brexit was the policy of the European Right. Leaving meant abandoning a form of capitalism that has at least incorporated minimum social standards such as the Working Time Directive in favour of a completely unregulated form of capitalism, red in tooth and claw, best epitomised by Donald Trump’s statement that anything, including the NHS, was on the table for a trade deal.

It was on the fake allegations of anti-Semitism that Corbyn should have stood firm against Watson and the rest of Labour’s right. Why no mention of their support for May’s ‘hostile environment policy’ that led to the Windrush scandal?

The racist leaflet of Phil Woolas that Tom Watson supported

It is inexplicable, given Tom Watson’s racist record that Corbyn has kept a sullen silence. In Tory lies, Lib Dem lies , Phil Woolas and a mystical shaman of truth Watson described the High Court’s decision to remove Phil Woolas as an MP as ‘one we will all regret’. Watson stated that:

Watson leapt to the defence of 'poor Phil' Woolas and his racist election campaign

‘I’ve lost sleep thinking about poor old Phil Woolas and his leaflets.’ He felt ‘like a piano has been dropped on my head. It is the most brutal truth of all – the realisation that you are on your own in politics.‘

Watson wasn’t the only one to defend an MP whose election agent mapped out an election strategy which was explained in an email: ‘“If we don’t get the white folk angry, he’s gone.” There was John Mann, another proponent of fake ‘anti-Semitism’.

Corbyn’ tactical stupidity dates back to the 1970’s under Tony Benn when the Labour Left effectively allied with Enoch Powell and the Tory Right to oppose membership of the then Common Market. It led to the isolation and defeat of the Labour Left then. Unfortunately Corbyn has been too stupid to learn any lessons from that defeat.

This nationalist nonsense was the product of Communist Party nationalism, who directed the economic strategy of the Labour Left and what in essence was the desire of the Soviet Union to keep Europe weak. It was also a useful way of the Labour Left avoiding any confrontation with the Wilson government over the social contract and the attack on working class conditions. Defeat in the referendum led to Benn being switched from Trade and Industry to Energy and a major defeat for the Left.

If the Right are able to pick off Chris Williamson then the Corbyn project is effectively at an end. We have to defend Chris Williamson and try and put some steel in the backbone of Labour’s NEC. If Watson and Labour’s racist right get away with the expulsion of Chris Williamson then Corbyn’s head will be next.

Momentum, led by the unelected Jon Lansman is no longer on the left. Lansman’s attacks on Chris Williamson and Jewish Voice for Labour demonstrates that he has thrown in his lot with the Right. Those who refuse to see it will live to rue the day.

In a poll by Labour List on whether Chris should be readmitted to the Party, over 10,000 members voted by 61% to 31% in his support. It is essential that next Tuesday there is as large a lobby of Labour’s NEC as possible to tell them that they represent only themselves if they refer Chris’s case to the National Kangaroo Committee.

Tony Greenstein

↧

Nothing Better Demonstrates Why Allegations of Labour Anti-Semitism are Fake than the Labour Right's Hostility to Roma and Travellers

July 7, 2019, 9:17 pm

≫ Next: Desperate Manoeuvres as Brighton & Hove’s Lansmanite Steering Committee Tries to Keep its Supporters at Bay

≪ Previous: If You Can’t Defend Chris Williamson, You Can’t Defend Jeremy Corbyn

The Romani Uprising in Auschwitz, 16 May 1944

16.5.2018 0:01

Below is an article written on the anniversary of the Romani Uprising in Auschwitz. The bourgeois media treats the Holocaust as a Jewish only affair because the Holocaust has been transformed into an ideological weapon. The Holocaust is employed in the service of Zionism and Britain’s relationship with Israel and the United States. The Gypsies unlike Jews are still in much the same ways as they were before the Hitler era and that is why, at best, they are a footnote in the Holocaust Memorial Day commemorations.

For example Matteo Salvini, the Italian Deputy Prime Minister, on coming into office proposed a census of Roma with the purpose of deporting those who were not Italians. Far-right Italy minister vows 'action' to expel thousands of Roma

The contents page of John Mann's Guide to Dealing with Anti-Social Behaviour - Travellers were given as an example with Neighbours from Hell

If those alleging that the Labour Party is ‘institutionally anti-Semitic’ were sincerely opposed to racism then you would expect they would throw their arms up in horror at attacks on Gypsies and Roma, who were killed in similar proportions to the Jews in the Holocaust.

Instead one of the leading protagonists John Mann issued a vile ‘Handbook on anti-social behaviour’ in Bassetlaw. Its Contents helpfully listed examples of anti-social behaviour and hazards to civilised life, such as alcohol, graffiti, rubbish and neighbours from hell were Travellers.

Up and down the country Labour Councils have persecuted Gypsies and Travellers. Nor is it just Labour Councils. The Tories have been even worse. Prime amongst them these racists was Lord Eric Pickles, Chairman of the Conservative Friends of Israel. When Pickles was Communities Secretary he provided half the £12m funding Basildon Council needed in order to evict hundreds of Travellers from Dale Farm in 2011. See Lord Eric Pickles – Why is this Racist Bigot Britain’s Special Envoy on Holocaust Issues?

An SS man handling a Roma woman with an iron bar

Indeed almost all of the proponents of fake Labour ‘anti-Semitism’ have records of attacks on asylum seekers and Islamaphobia. As I have repeatedly detailed Tom Watson has one of the worst records when it comes to racism.

Not only did he back racist Labour MP ‘poor Phil’ Woolas to the hilt when the the High Court removed him as an MP in 2011 for a campaign based around ‘making the white folk angry’ but he was the Campaigns Organiser for Liam Byrne in the 2004 by-election in Birmingham Hodge Hill. In The ghost of EnochNick Cohen described the gay bashing, racist campaign that Watson ran when ‘Labour reshuffled the pack and played the race card’ against the Lib Dems.’ One Labour leaflet carried the slogan: "Labour is on your side, the Lib Dems are on the side of failed asylum seekers."

Closing the doors on the deportation trains

Former City banker Byrne told the voters,

'The Lib Dems want to keep giving welfare benefits to failed asylum seekers. They voted for this in Parliament on 1 March 2004. They want your money -and mine - to go to failed asylum seekers.'

If this isn’t playing the race card it is difficult to know what is.

Of course the media isn’t interested in this or indeed in any other form of racism. Anti-asylum seeker stories are their bread and butter. Only ‘anti-Semitism’ concerns them. Why? Because it is tied to British foreign policy interests, the special relationship with the United States and support for Israel.

Roma having just disembarked from the trains to Auschwitz

Below is part of the hidden history of the Holocaust. The Gypsy revolt in Auschwitz in 1944 when the Nazis moved to terminate the gypsy camp that had been set up there to deceive the Red Cross.

It’s a history that the Holocaust Memorial Day ignores because it doesn’t fit in with the deployment of the Holocaust as a propaganda weapon. That is why there are no Gypsy or Traveller representatives on the Committee that organises the Holocaust Memorial Day commemorations.

Tony Greenstein

Auschwitz (PHOTO: Gabriela Hrabaňová)

On 16 May 1944, in the concentration camp at Auschwitz, something completely extraordinary occurred: Romani people imprisoned in the so-called "Gypsy Camp" there rebelled against the SS. This historical event is still almost unknown in the Czech Republic, but 16 May is becoming more and more popular worldwide as Romani Resistance Day.

What happened in Auschwitz on 16 May? News server Romea.cz publishes below in full translation a never-before published study by historian Michal Schuster that describes the Romani uprising there.

The "Gypsy Family Camp" in the Auschwitz-Birkenau Concentration Camp, 1944

The year 1944 can simply be called the closing phase of the so-called "Final Solution to the Gypsy question" in Nazi-occupied Europe, including on the territory of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. After transporting most Roma to the Auschwitz complex during 1943, smaller transports there took place during 1944. On 16 May 1944 the first attempt to annihilate all the members of the so-called "Gypsy Camp" at Auschwitz-Birkenau took place and was prevented by an uprising of the prisoners there. The most tragic event did finally take place and the camp and its inhabitants were entirely destroyed at the beginning of August 1944.

Labour Right-winger Lukey Stanger described Travellers as a 'nasty blight on communities'

First attempt to destroy the "Gypsy Camp" and the Romani prisoners' uprising

The commander of Auschwitz, Rudolf Höss, ordered at the beginning of 1944 the acceleration of the work already underway in one section of Birkenau, primarily the construction of ramps and the rails for the three-rail branch of the Oświęcim-Katowice railway line, which led to Crematorium I and Crematorium II. The commander of all the crematoria, SS Otto Moll, had to ensure, during the course of one week, repairs to all the crematoria, completion of the construction of the buildings, and the start of new construction, as well as the erection of several rooms where the prisoners were stripped near the repaired Bunker II and behind Crematorium V. The prisoners also dug two big pits for burning corpses.¹

Romani girl looking out from deportation train

All of the preparations were performed in order to receive a transport of Jews from Hungary. Those new prisoners who were labeled capable of work during the selection would need accommodation, so the highest SS command at the main camp decided on 15 May 1944 to kill everyone in the "Gypsy Family Camp". That would free up space in all of camp B-II-e for more of the Jews from Hungary. ²

The final action was to have been performed on the evening of 16 May, when the gong was rung announcing a ban on leaving the camp (the so-called Lagersperre) and it was closed. Trucks drove up and parked in front of the gate to the camp; 50 -60 members of a special SS commando unit jumped out of them and called on the prisoners to quickly leave the residential blocks. Inside the blocks, however, a tense silence prevailed and the prisoners refused to come out, barricading the doors and desperately preparing to defend themselves with rocks and work tools. The members of the SS commando unit were startled by this disobedience and their commander decided to postpone the action.³

SS Men at Auschwitz

Romani Holocaust survivor Hugo Höllenreiner (born 1933 in Munich), who was deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp with his family in 1943, later recalled those moments of resistance as follows: "There were about seven or eight men, definitely, who came to the gate. Dad shouted out - the whole building trembled when he shouted: 'We're not coming out! You come in here! We're waiting here! If you want something, you have to come inside!'"⁴

Luke Stanger deploying 'antisemitism' as a weapon against the only Black woman candidate in Brighton & Hove's council elections - to its shame the Labour Party suspended her and lost the election

The entire event was described in a report by Tadeusz Joachimowski (1908-1979)5[1], a former Polish political prisoner in the Auschwitz concentration camp who was assigned to be a "scribe" (a writer) in the "Gypsy Camp", as follows: "The last commander of the Gypsy Camp and the current rapportführer [reporting officer] was Bonigut.⁶He was probably from Yugoslavia. He disagreed with the approaches and tactics of the SS. He was a very good person.

On 15 May 1944 he came after me and said things looked bad for the Gypsy Camp. An order had been issued to destroy it and had reportedly already received confirmation from the political department through Dr Mengele. The Gypsy Camp was to be destroyed and its crew killed using gas. There were roughly 6 500 Gypsies in the camp at that time.

Bonigut entrusted me with informing those Gypsies whom I trusted about what was ahead. He asked me to warn them so they would not go like sheep to the slaughter. He also told me that the signal for the beginning of the action would be the Lagersperre and that the Gypsies should not leave their barracks. Bonigut himself warned several Gypsies of the action. I also (secretly) performed this task. The next day at around 7 PM I heard the gong announcing the Lagersperre. Automobiles drove up in front of the Gypsy Camp and 50 - 60 SS men armed with machine guns got out of them. They immediately surrounded the buildings where the Gypsies lived. Some SS members entered this residential area shouting 'Los, los'. There was total calm in the barracks. The Gypsies, armed with handcuffs, knives, shovels and stones, waited to see what would happen. They did not leave the barracks. The SS members were appalled and left themselves. After a brief consultation, they went to find the Blockführerstube [the commander of that block] in order to inform the commander of the action. After some time I heard a whistle. The SS men who were surrounding the barracks left their positions, got back in the automobiles, and drove away. The closure of the camp was lifted. On the next day (17 May 1944), Lagerführer Bonigut came to me and said the Gypsies were rescued, for now...".⁷

While there was no open clash between the Romani prisoners and the SS members, this event played a significant role. It decidedly was not the habit in the concentration camps for the prisoners to resist a planned, prepared action en masse right before it was to be undertaken. There is absolutely no doubt that the armed SS commando could have suppressed this act of resistance, but decided not to go into an open confrontation with the prisoners and preferred to achieve their aims in another way. This event is unequivocally an uprising and occupies a significant place in the tragic history of the Holocaust of the European Roma.

In the so-called "Gypsy Camp" at Birkenau there were approximately 6 500 prisoners, half of whom were subsequently put into quarantine in the main camp, some at the end of May and start of June, others at the start of August 1944.⁸ They included prisoners from Bohemia, Germany, and Poland.⁹

The destruction of the "Gypsy Camp" at Birkenau

About 10 000 women from Hungary then arrived at the "Gypsy Camp" and were accommodated in the odd-numbered blocks, while the Romani prisoners were put on the even-numbered side. They moved a second time into the rear half of the camp when men from Hungary arrived and were put in the front section of the camp. In July 1944, Himmler decided to destroy the rest of the "Gypsy Camp".¹⁰ On the morning of 1 August, those prisoners fit for work were supposed to report for transport elsewhere, and Antonín Absolon-Růžička (born 30 September 1930 in the Moravian village of Mistřín) took advantage of the opportunity.¹¹He later recalled: "One day in summer when I heard on the grounds¹²that a new transport was leaving and lining up at the gate, I ran out there, naked, fleeing the blocks and heading for the canteen. I met my sister Jana on the way. She asked where I was running to and I told her I wanted to leave with the transport. She started to persuade me not to leave, saying we two were the only ones left, that I should stay with her. All I know is that I told her I had to go. I didn't even say good-bye I was in such a hurry...".¹³

On the next day, 2 August 1944, the final transports to the concentration camps of Buchenwald and Ravensbrück were put together out of all the female and male prisoners fit for work from the "Gypsy Camp". There were 918 boys and men sent to Buchenwald, of whom 151 had Protectorate citizenship. At the Buchenwald concentration camp, thanks to these transports from Auschwitz, the number of Romani and Sinti prisoners almost doubled.¹⁴The Ravensbrück transports included 490 female prisoners. Unfortunately, it is no longer possible to determine their state or territorial citizenship.¹⁵ Nevertheless, women from the Protectorate were certainly among them.

Through these six work transports, these female and male prisoners left the camp at Birkenau for good, because at the time the so-called "Gypsy Family Camp" was about to be destroyed and the fate of its remaining prisoners had been decided.¹⁶

After their departure, only the elderly, mothers with children and the fathers who didn't want to leave their families, and orphans remained in the "Gypsy Camp". During the late night of 2 August and the early morning hours of 3 August the block was closed (Blocksperre) and the 2 897 children, elderly people, the infirm and women were taken in trucks to the courtyard of Crematorium V. There their unexpected resistance had to be broken, after which they were herded into the gas chambers.¹⁷

Those horrible moments were described by a member of the so-called Special Division (Sonderkommando), Filip Müller (born 1922 in the Slovak town of Sered'): "The room for removing clothing was stuffed full of people by midnight. The anxiety was growing minute by minute... desperate cries could be heard from all sides, accusations, lamentations, remorse. The voices called out in chorus: 'We are Germans of the Reich! We've done nothing wrong!' From elsewhere could be heard: 'We want to live! Why do you want to kill us?'... The liquidation proceeded as usual. Moll and his aides unlocked the safeties on their pistols and rifles and uncompromisingly called on those who had taken their clothes off to leave the room and go into the three spaces where they would be poisoned with gas. On that final trip many were weeping with desperation... Even from within the gas chambers, for a long time afterward, we heard intermittent calls and cries until the gas performed its work and the last voices were snuffed out."¹⁸

The bodies of the murdered, who included many prisoners from the Protectorate, were then burned in the pits near the Crematorium because it was not yet running.¹⁹

A recollection of the murder of those in the "Gypsy Camp" was also recorded by camp commander Rudolf Höss in his memoirs: "They did not know what awaited them until the final moment; they only realized it when they were brought into Crematorium No.V. It was not easy to lead them into the chamber. I didn't see it, but Schwarzhuber told me about it, that no liquidation action of the Jews had been as difficult as the liquidation of the Gypsies."²⁰

During this action, camp doctor Josef Mengele personally shot dead the male Romani twins on whom he had been performing experiments in order to subsequently use their bodies for autopsy. The female twins were transferred to the Hindenburg concentration camp. Irma Valdová-Krausová survived with her sisters because of that, and later recalled: "On that day Dr Mengele came to the camp at 18:30 in order to take the remaining twins away, including my two sisters Anna and Alžběta. Of my entire extended family, I was their only relative left, and they did not want to leave me, no matter the cost. During the confusion they put me in the car as well, which saved me from a certain death."²1

This mass murder was followed by the brutal killing of the female and male prisoners who, after being transported elsewhere, had been sent back to Auschwitz-Birkenau to die in the gas chambers because they were exhausted and unfit for work. For this purpose, 200 Roman boys were sent from the concentration camp at Buchenwald on 26 September 1944 and 800 Romani men were sent on 10 October 1944. On 11 October 1944 and then on 14 October 1944 a total of 217 Romani girls and women were sent back to Auschwitz from the work commando units at Ravensbrück concentration camp. Some underwent a second selection and were once again transported back to Ravensbrück, while the rest ended up, like all of the boys and men who were returned to Auschwitz, in the gas chambers.²²

International Romani Holocaust Day

The year 1944 and its place in Romani history remains alive, and what is important is that the tragic events of the Roma Holocaust are finally earning a firm place in European and world history. The year 2014 marked 70 years since the mass annihilation of the so-called "Gypsy Family Camp" at the Auschwitz concentration camp.

On 2 August 2014 the former camp at Birkenau was the scene of a commemorative gathering featuring representatives of European Romani organizations, representatives of the Polish Government, authorities and local municipalities, diplomats, survivors, witnesses and relatives of the prisoners. The day of 2 August has been designated International Romani Holocaust Day and is a significant state day in Poland.²³

Footnotes:

1. Kladivová, Vlasta: Konečná stanice Auschwitz-Birkenau. Olomouc 1994, pp. 77-78

2. Kladivová, V.: Konečná stanice Auschwitz-Birkenau. Olomouc 1994, p. 78.

3. Nečas, Ctibor: Holocaust českých Romů, 1999, s. 170; LEWY, Guenter: The Nazi Persecution of the Gypsies. Oxford University Press, 1999, p 320; Right to Remember – A Handbook for Education with Young People on the Roma Genocide. Council of Europe, 2014, p 81; BASTIAN, Till: Sinti und Roma im Dritten Reich: Geschichte einer Verfolgung. München: C.H.Beck Verlag, 2001, p 62.

4. For the testimony of H. Höllenreiner, see Haus der Bayerischen Geschichte, Signatur: zz-1460.03,http://www.hdbg.eu/zeitzeugen/video.php?id=563

5. Along with the other prisoners, he saved the prison's inventory books from the "Gypsy Camp"; see Die Sinti und Roma im Konzentrationslager Auschwitz-Birkenau / Memorial Book. The Gypsies at Auschwitz-Birkenau / Ksiega Pamieci. Cyganie w obozie koncentracyjnym Auschwitz-Birkenau, ed. State Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau in cooperation with the Documentation and Culture Center of German Sinti and Roma (Heidelberg), Volume 1, München/London/New York/Paris 1993, p. XXXI.

6. Georg Bonigut worked at the "Gypsy Camp" from 13 December 1943 as reporting officer (Rapportführer) for Auschwitz-Birkenau. At the end of May 1944 he was appointed commander of the camp (Schutzhaftlagerführer) in the "Gypsy Camp", where he remained until it was destroyed. He then became commander of the block and commander of reporting at the Auschwitz III-Charlottengrube concentration camp. See Gedenkbuch. Die Sinti und Roma im Konzentrationslager Auschwitz-Birkenau / Memorial Book. The Gypsies at Auschwitz-Birkenau / Ksiega Pamieci. Cyganie w obozie koncentracyjnym Auschwitz-Birkenau, ed. State Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau, in collaboration with the Documentation and Cultural Center of German Sinti and Roma (Heidelberg), volume 2, München/London/New York/Paris 1993, p 1647.

7. Nacistická genocida Sintů a Romů: katalog ke stálé výstavě ve Státním Muzeu v Osvětimi. Romano džaniben, 2009, p. 288-289.

8. Nečas: Holocaust českých Romů, 1999, p 170.

9. Kladivová, V.: Konečná stanice Auschwitz-Birkenau. Olomouc 1994, p 79.

10. Kladivová, V.: Konečná stanice Auschwitz-Birkenau. Olomouc 1994, p 80.

11. Kladivová, V.: Konečná stanice Auschwitz-Birkenau. Olomouc 1994, p 81.

12. The grounds of the military hospital (Häftlingskrankenbau).

13. Nemůžeme zapomenout = Našťi bisteras: nucená táborová koncentrace ve vyprávěních romských pamětníků, shromáždil a uspořádal Ctibor Nečas. 1. vydání. Olomouc:
Univerzita Palackého v Olomouci, 1994, p 64.

14. Nacistická genocida Sintů a Romů, katalog, 2009, p 300.

15. Nečas: Historický kalendář, 2008, p 64.

16. Kladivová, V.: Konečná stanice Auschwitz-Birkenau. Olomouc 1994, p 79; Nečas: Holocaust českých Romů, 1999, p 170.

17. Kladivová, V.: Konečná stanice Auschwitz-Birkenau. Olomouc 1994, p 82; Nečas: Historický kalendář, 2008, p 64.

18. Nacistická genocida Sintů a Romů: katalog ke stálé výstavě ve Státním Muzeu v Osvětimi. Romano džaniben, 2009, p 294.

19. Nečas: Holocaust českých Romů, 1999, p 171.

20. Wspomnienia Rudolfa Hössa, komendanta obozu oświęncimskego, Wydawnictwo prawnicze Warszava, 1956, p 116; Kladivová, V.: Konečná stanice Auschwitz-Birkenau. Olomouc 1994, p 88.

21. Kladivová, V.: Konečná stanice Auschwitz-Birkenau. Olomouc 1994, p 83.

22. Nečas: Holocaust českých Romů, 1999, p 171.

23. Schuster, Michal: Genocida Romů v českých zemích a její reflexe. In: Romano voďi 25.10.2012, ps.

Michal Schuster, Museum of Romani Culture, translated by Gwendolyn Albert

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Desperate Manoeuvres as Brighton & Hove’s Lansmanite Steering Committee Tries to Keep its Supporters at Bay

July 8, 2019, 4:42 pm

≫ Next: The Guardian Reaches a New Low: First It Prints a Letter from over a 100 Jewish Supporters of Chris Williamson Then It Deletes It!

≪ Previous: Nothing Better Demonstrates Why Allegations of Labour Anti-Semitism are Fake than the Labour Right's Hostility to Roma and Travellers

With the AGM 3 months overdue the Steering Committee of B&H Momentum is trying to do locally what Lansman has done nationally

Update

See Letter from over 100 Jews Supporting Chris Williamson - unfortunately Momentum now supports Tom Watson

Before the Labour Party AGM on July 9th 2016, BH Momentum organised a monster rally at the Brighthelm Centre - today's Lansmanite Steering Committee is running scared of its own supporters

With just one week to go I have received a copy of the AGM agenda for Brighton and Hove Momentum. It is clear that the Lansmanite majority on the Steering Committee [SC] is trying to retain its position through the use of bureaucratic and highly undemocratic procedures such as trying to ensure that the AGM doesn’t have control of its own proceedings.

Let us be clear. It is for the meeting itself to decide its own agenda. The Steering Committee can propose but it is for the meeting to dispose. For example previous practice is that people can be nominated for the SC from the floor. There is no explanation why that is no longer acceptable and to try and slip it through in this way is nothing other than a sleight of hand.

The suggestion that ‘candidates for positions on the steering committee will be expected to demonstrate some ability to carry out some of them in a responsible and reliable fashion’ is an interesting one. To whom are they expected to demonstrate these things? The current SC?

The only thing that any candidate needs to do is to obtain the support of the meeting. My suggestion is that we revert back to the practice at the founding meeting that the SC is elected as a block of 12 or 18 and then allocates responsibilities. The most obvious task is to once again ensure that BH Momentum is an active and democratic group.

An article I wrote in Brighton & Hove Independent at the time of the last coup attempt

The Agenda proposed is the height of unreality. It is as if the world outside doesn’t exist. We are in the midst of a major attempt ruling class attempt to remove the Corbyn leadership of the Labour Party. The SC doesn’t appear to have noticed. Tom Watson is on manoeuvres and unfortunately his partner-in-crime is none other than the unelected head of Momentum, Jon Lansman.

Tomorrow some of us are going up to a lobby of Labour’s Disputes Committee/NEC and taking the Momentum banner with us. Although the agenda makes no mention of the suspension of Chris Williamson at the behest of Tom Watson and Lansman, that is what will be on the agenda of the NEC. There is no mention of the witchhunting of a fine socialist MP by the right-wing of the PLP in conjunction with Momentum nationally.

On Wednesday we will have a hatchet job by Panorama about the fake anti-Semitism campaign. The programme will not, of course, examine the bogus nature of the allegations but it will focus on process alone and who lost what.

The only indication in the agenda that this is happening is a tangential mention of the fact that members expelled from Momentum, i.e. myself, will not be allowed in the AGM, even though the present Committee are aware that I was expelled by the same forces that are using the State, in the form of the Equality & Human Rights Commission [EHRC] to attack the Corbyn leadership.

I refer to the Jewish Labour Movement which is effectively the Israeli state inside the British Labour Party. Despite the fact that we last year criticised the democratic deficit in Momentum and hosted Chris Williamson the present SC is now intent on implementing the witchhunt locally. They have no mandate.

It is abundantly clear that there is a massive campaign nationally by the State to remove Corbyn. This is being undertaken in conjunction with the Right of the Labour Party. The SC is oblivious to all this. As far as they are concerned socialism is confined to the municipal boundaries of Brighton and Hove. We are in the midst of a political crisis in the Tory Party over Brexit and the imminent election of Boris Johnson has made Corbyn’s removal even more urgent.

The EHRC, which is not an anti-racist body, will almost certainly provide the fuel for a further attack on Corbyn. Yet there is nothing whatsoever on the agenda about this or other matters.

The proposed agenda is just that. A proposal from those who have failed to organise any public meetings of Momentum in the past year. Nothing on the witchhunt, nothing on Brexit, nothing on anything. It is as if the election of Brighton and Hove Council was the limit of their socialist ambitions.

Tony Greenstein (Steering Committee member 2016-2018)

Brighton and Hove Momentum AGM Agenda Tuesday July 16^th 7.30 Community Base

Brighton and Hove 'Many-festo' results

Many Momentum members were involved in Brighton & Hove Labour's 'Many-festo' consultation process. The findings and policy recommendations arising from that process can be found here, along with the published manifesto, as formulated by the outgoing Labour Group of councillors.

Brighton & Hove Momentum Member Survey

As Brighton & Hove Momentum looks forward and outward, we want to ensure that all members' voices are heard, not just the small number who attend and speak at Momentum meetings. Please take a few minutes to participate in our members' survey.

Brighton & Hove Momentum Annual General Meeting, 2019

As previously announced, this will take place at

7.30pm, Tuesday 16 July 2019

Community Base, 113 Queens Rd, Brighton BN1 3XG

Agenda

1. 7:30pm Steering committee statements, reports & announcements

2. 7:40pm Q&A with: Cllr Nancy Platts, Leader of Brighton & Hove City Council and Cllr Noah Tucker of Haringey Borough Council.

3. 8:30pm Elections for steering committee posts - please read carefully

The steering committee consists of the administrative officers (Secretary, Data Protection Administrator/joint secretary, Treasurer) plus a further six members.

The officer positions carry with them specific legal duties of trust and confidentiality.

The other six positions have during the current session been defined by functional role. Many of these roles were inevitably sidelined by the successful campaign to select and elect Corbyn-supporting councillors.

Labour Party Liaison - this role has to a large degree been shared among active members of the steering committee on an ad-hoc basis. Trade union liaison has not occurred in any formal sense

External Liaison (vacant) - this role was intended to involve forming connections with other Momentum groups. This was not done.

Social Media (vacant) - in practice this role was shared among different members of the steering committee.

Political Education - in practice this role was subsumed in the campaigns role

Campaigns coordinator x 2 (1 vacant) - this role was carried out to a significant degree and needs to be a key focus in the next year

While the committee as a whole will still need to carry out these functions, and candidates for positions on the steering committee will be expected to demonstrate some ability to carry out some of them in a responsible and reliable fashion, the needs of the organisation are for an expanded campaigning capacity, and for the other named functions to be shared between members of the committee or co-optees to it. The exact recommendations for these positions will be dependent on the outcome of the member survey.

Procedure for candidates and elections

Candidates for steering committee positions must be members of the Labour party. This helps to ensure that Momentum remains, and is seen to remain, a legitimate group within the Labour party.

Candidates must be nominated, with their knowledge and assent, by a Momentum member. Nominations must be sent from the email address to which this email has been sent, to team@brightonhovemomentum.org to arrive by 8pm, Monday 15 July.

Nominated candidates should submit a statement in support of their candidacy, of no more than 200 words, also to to team@brightonhovemomentum.org and also to arrive by 8pm, Monday 15 July. Statements in support of applications for officer posts should explain the candidate's capacity to carry out the administrative duties involved, and fitness for trusted office. Statements in support of applications for other positions on the steering committee should describe how the candidate can help reach out into the wider local community and become involved in local campaigns.

The steering committee will be subject to a gender representation requirement - at least four members must be female. In addition, ethnic minority members if applying in sufficient numbers will be expected to comprise at least 20% of the committee. Momentum's constitution also contains a commitment to youth representation, and it is vital that it connects with younger generations. Accordingly, and again subject to sufficient applications being received, the committee recommends that the committee consist of at least 50% members aged under 35.

4. General discussion

Please send any topics or proposals you would like to see discussed to team@brightonhovemomentum.org by 8pm, Monday 15 July. If you have already sent a proposal to this address, there is no need to re-send it.

Please note that like any other membership organisation, Brighton & Hove Momentum branch invites only members to the AGM.

If you have received this email, you are recorded as a member of Momentum. If you know of anyone who believes they are a member but has not received the email, please ask them to contact us at team@brightonhovemomentum.org to check their membership status. Supporters who join Momentum in good time for the AGM will be able to attend: no-one therefore need be excluded unless expelled from Momentum.

We hope to see you on the 16th.

Momentum Local
http://momentum.nationbuilder.com/

Momentum is funded entirely by membership fees and donations from thousands of supporters across the UK.

↧

The Guardian Reaches a New Low: First It Prints a Letter from over a 100 Jewish Supporters of Chris Williamson Then It Deletes It!

July 9, 2019, 11:49 pm

≫ Next: Large Lobby for Chris Williamson Outside Labour HQ as Tom Watson and Jon Lansman Sneak into by the Backdoor

≪ Previous: Desperate Manoeuvres as Brighton & Hove’s Lansmanite Steering Committee Tries to Keep its Supporters at Bay

The Zionists complained we weren’t prominent and that some of us had been expelled for 'anti-Semitism'! That was the whole point! Antisemitism has been weaponised

Given its appalling record of late, refusingto print a letter from over 200 Jewish women and another from over 400 people, both of which the Morning Star later printed, I was surprised that the Guardian had decided to printa letter from over 100 Jewish supporters of Chris Williamson.

The Morning Star published the letter that the Guardian refused to carry from 200 Jewish women

Of course we knew that the Zionists weren’t going to like the letter but we didn’t believe given the Guardian’s fabled commitment to free speech (comment is free but facts are sacred– CP Scott) that they would pull the letter after it had already gone out in the print edition.

Now you see it now you don't

It is surprising that the gutless Guardian didn't recall all the print edition

Until the advent of the Internet such a thing was physically impossible. I confess I once achieved this feat locally in the Brighton Argus when an article from a Palestinian sounding name appeared in the morning edition arguing that Palestinians’ home was in Jordan. Clearly the Zionists had sent it and the letter was removed from the evening edition. Today the Argus doesn’t have more than 1 edition.

Free Speech on Israel is not something that has ever concerned the Board of Deputies

The normal thing to do if the Zionists didn’t like the letter would have been to write a letter in response. Indeed before the fake anti-Semitism campaign that is exactly what the Board of Deputies used to do and on more than one occasion I have crossed swords with them.

But those were the good old days when the Guardian had a backbone and it didn’t have a committed Zionist Jonathan Freedland at the helm. It also had a decent Letters Editor Nigel Wilmott rather than a handpicked clone Rory Foster who has a spine made of rubber.

Yesterday the Board of Deputies of British Jews, whose very name is a lie since it does not represent either secular Jews or Haredi Ultra Orthodox Jews complained. At best the BOD represents 30% of British Jewry and the most conservative elements of that 30%.

Most of their complaints were fatuous and the Board should have been sent away with a flea in their ears or told to send a letter in by way of reply. But Rory Foster has no guts or backbone. The Board’s complaints were trivial in the extreme:

i. The first complaint is that we are not ‘prominent’. Unfortunately that is not true. Thanks to the Board and the Zionist press Jackie Walker and myself are very prominent!! Is anyone suggesting that Noam Chomsky and Norman Finkelstein don’t deserve that accolade? A truly pathetic example of the obsession with status and rank of these petty-bourgeois businessmen.

ii. ‘The Guardian was misleading and inaccurate in its description of the signatories, some have been suspended or expelled from the Labour Party.’ Yes, that was the whole point of the letter, that Chris Williamson is in danger of being unfairly expelled from the Labour Party because of false allegations of anti-Semitism. Noone is hiding this fact. It is however a lie to imply that either Jackie Walker or myself was expelled for anti-Semitism. If Jews are expelled for ‘anti-Semitism’ then that casts doubt on the whole shoddy process.

I was suspended in March 2016 for ‘comments I was alleged to have made.’ No indication was given as to the nature of those comments and I only learnt of them 2 weeks later when Sam Matthews leaked them to The Telegraph and Times. At my expulsion hearing (which I delayed when I obtained a High Court Injunction) Counsel for the Labour Party emphasised that it was not being alleged that I was anti-Semitic.

How the Zionist press sees it

I had called Louise Ellman MP a supporter of Israeli child abuse and ‘shamed’ her. I had called Owen Jones ‘a Janus faced whore who bears the impression of the last person who sat on him’ and called Chuka Ummuna an Uncle Tom (though I had apologised if the original Uncle Tom took offence!). When I gave testimony to Shami Chakrabarti she was shocked by what I told her.

iii. One of the signatories, Michael Morgan, who was not Jewish had apparently called for Zionist to be exterminated (I suspect this is an exaggeration). His inclusion was a mistake and could easily have been rectified by erasing his name.

When Israeli snipers began gunning down unarmed Palestinians the Board of Deputies leapt into action blamed Hamas's 'cynical use of its population'- not a word about the use of snipers against an unarmed population

But the Board of Deputies is not in a position to complain. It has overtly supportedthe murder of unarmed Palestinian demonstrators in Gaza by the Israeli army. Or are Palestinian lives worth less than those of Zionists? Isn’t that racist?

iv. Meredith Wood-Bevan put Hope not Hate after their name. He didn’t claim to represent HnH. This merely suggests that he was active in the group.

Similarly Peter Sheridan put Jewish Labour Movement after his name. All that means is that he is a member of this group. Embarrassing to be sure (for the JLM) but he didn’t claim to represent them. Indeed it shows that not everyone in the JLM is a racist.

The sheer hypocrisy of these supporters of open murder beggars belief and the Guardian is shameful in bowing down to these racists

The Board finish their letter by stating that ‘We wish to make two specific complaints:

First, the Guardian has a duty to conduct due-diligence on the signatories of letters it publishes, especially on one relating to such a serious issue as racism. In this case, the inclusion of racist signatories ought to have stopped the publication of the letter.’

But the problem is that the Board of Deputies define anyone who is anti-Zionist as anti-Semitic. Therefore anyone who opposes a Jewish state or Zionism is, by definition, anti-Semitic. Indeed most of the Jews who died in the Holocaust were, by their definition, anti-Semites.

This is the racism that the Board doesn't talk about in the Jerusalem Post

Of course the opposite is true. Anyone who defends an ethno-nationalist state in which Jews are privileged vs non Jews, is automatically a racist. For example Palestinian homes are demolished in order to make way for Jewish homes. Jewish homes are never demolished to make way for Arab homes. Jewish women when they go into labour can choose a maternity unit where there are no Arabs. The Board of Deputies defends Israel as a Jewish state. It is therefore racist. The BOD go on to say that:

‘Second, should it choose to publish such a letter, the Guardian has a duty to describe it accurately. To describe the signatories of this letter as “prominent members of the Jewish community” is inaccurate and misleading.’

This is just soo pathetic it is unbelievable. ‘Prominence’ like fame is entirely subjective. If the Board of Deputies signatories wish to argue they are more prominent than us fine but I suspect they will be laughed out of town.

The Guardian rejected a letter from over 400 signatories

Nowhere, not once in their pathetic letter does the Board of Deputies challenge the substance of our letter and our support for Chris Williamson. Instead by their actions the Board of Deputies have proved exactly what we said in the letter. This is a contrived campaign of demonization of anti-racists and the Guardian has again demonstrated its utter spinelessness.

The Board also Tweetedtheir objections as being:

i. The signatories are racist (not true)

ii. Hope not hate were ‘misrepresented’ (not true)

iii. The signatories were described as ‘prominent members of the Jewish community’. (pathetic)

Huff Post take on the affair getting us much more publicity

If you now go to the Guardian letter it says that the article has been removed. The full List of Signatories can be found here. The story has of course been picked up widely in the British media. For example by the Canaryand Huffington Post

Nor is this the first time that The Guardian has printed controversial letters. On 22 October 2015, in response to a letter supporting the Cultural Boycott of Israel some 149 signatories claiming to represent the ‘cultural world’ wroteopposing the Cultural Boycott. Besides JK Rowling (who I guess represents some type of culture) there those well known culture vultures Tory MPs Bob Blackman, Guto Bebb, Mike Freer and Michael Dugher (sorry he was apparently Labour!). They even told us they were setting up Culture for Coexistence‘an independent UK network representing a cross-section from the cultural world’. If you click on Culture for Coexistence now you get the message ‘Website expired’which suggests it was nothing more than a name of convenience for the purpose of getting a fraudulent letter into The Guardian. I can’t remember the BOD asking for ‘due diligence’ on that occasion.

If the Board of Deputies really do object to Jackie Walker, Leon Rosselson and myself being described as ‘prominent’ which was the Guardian’s sub-headline not ours, then let them write in and make this point about how really important the Board is! I seem to recall that in 1942/3 the then Board of Deputies President Selig Brodetsky sabotaged the efforts of Rabbi Dr Solomon Shonfeld, Chairman of the Chief Rabbi’s Rescue Committee because of the desire to protect the self-importance of the Board. Clearly these things matter to these people, even as in 1942, the lives of Jewish refugees from Nazism was at stake.

What is truly disgraceful is that The Guardian has just given in to this blatant exercise in censorship. Ironically the furore around the letter has gained it far more publicity than it would have garnered if they had bitten their lips. It has been, from the Zionist perspective, a wholly counter-productive exercise because it has shown, in all its kodachrome clarity, what a petty minded, self-important group of grey bureaucrats the Board of Deputies is.

For them to accuse others of racism when they justify gunning down hundreds of unarmed Palestinians does indeed merit the Yiddish description chutzpah.

The list of Jewish signatures can be found here.

Tony Greenstein

↧

Large Lobby for Chris Williamson Outside Labour HQ as Tom Watson and Jon Lansman Sneak into by the Backdoor

July 10, 2019, 6:02 pm

≫ Next: Despite the extremely light sentence Rejoice Rejoice as 2% Tommy Does Time for Trying to Derail the Trial of Child Abusers

≪ Previous: The Guardian Reaches a New Low: First It Prints a Letter from over a 100 Jewish Supporters of Chris Williamson Then It Deletes It!

As the BBC & the Establishment Step up the War Against Corbyn a 200 strong Lobby Calls for Reinstatement of Chris Williamson

Can you imagine the howls of outrage from the prostitute press and the BBC if it had been Margaret Hodge who was suspended and the NEC had then decided to reject a decision of an NEC panel to reinstate her and instead summon a new panel?

That was what happened yesterday was procedurally outrageous. The panel recommendation to reinstate Chris Williamson was overturned and a new panel appointed. It’s like a judge rejecting a jury verdict and promptly appointing a new jury. But of course the press and BBC don’t see it like that because Chris Williamson being a socialist is the enemy.

No doubt if the second panel decides to reinstate Chris we will have a third panel appointed. Because the ‘evidence’ of anti-Semitism is non-existent.

The process is an entire farce. We can assume that the new panel will do their duty and refer Chris Williamson to the National Kangaroo Committee in order that he can be expelled. Why? Because the State of Israel via the so-called Jewish Labour Movement (which in fact has a majority of non-Jews in its ranks) has decreed that the most prominent anti-racist in the Parliamentary Labour Party should be expelled.

This process is not taking place in a vacuum. It is part of the same process we saw tonight when BBC Panorama ran an hour long programme on ‘anti-Semitism’ in the Labour Party. Not once did the programme question the veracity of ‘anti-Semitism’ in the Labour Party despite three-quarters of members rejecting the nonsense of Labour anti-Semitism.

Not once did the BBC programme question why Jewish members of the party had been prominent in the expulsions. Of course if they had asked those questions it may have turned out that the answer was one which was too uncomfortable for them to handle.

Of course, as this blog has repeatedly pointed out, Jeremy Corbyn made a fatal mistake of accepting the fake anti-Semitism smears. This allowed his enemies to exploit this concession and go in for the kill.

The irony is that the witchhunt of Chris Williamson is being led by a man, Tom Watson, who has a long record of racism stretching back to the Birmingham Hodshrove by-election when he toldthe electorate that Labour was ‘on your side’ unlike the Lib Dems who ‘were on the side of asylum seekers’. This ghastly man wrotein Labour Uncut about how he had lost sleep thinking about ‘poor Phil’ – the racist Labour MP that the High Court removed from Parliament after he lied about his Lib Dem opponent claiming that he supported Islamic terrorists.

In other words the anti-Semitism witchhunt in the Labour Party is led by racists such as Tom Watson and the millionaire property developer Jon Lansman who literally owns Momentum.

It is clear that the Right will not stop braying until Chris Williamson is expelled. My advice to Chris is to come out fighting and ensure, first of all, that Jackie Walker’s film, The Witchhunt is now shown in Parliament.

Those of us on the Left have a clear task. To ensure that an independent left is built separate from Momentum. Momentum, because it lacks all democracy, cannot be reformed. Momentum was initially born out of the Jeremy Corbyn for leadership campaign. Today it is in the enemy camp. Next week in Brighton and Hove there will be a crucial meeting of the local Momentum group when there will be a contest between supporters of Lansman and his opponents.

As the supporters of the United States and British imperialism rely on their good friends Tom Watson and the Jewish Labour Movement to do their dirty work inside the Labour Party we have to break with people like Lansman who have openly allied themselves with the supporters and ‘friends’ of the only apartheid state in the world, Israel.

Tony Greenstein

↧

Despite the extremely light sentence Rejoice Rejoice as 2% Tommy Does Time for Trying to Derail the Trial of Child Abusers

July 11, 2019, 6:32 pm

≫ Next: The BBC’s War on Corbyn – Panorama would have made Pravda Proud

≪ Previous: Large Lobby for Chris Williamson Outside Labour HQ as Tom Watson and Jon Lansman Sneak into by the Backdoor

There is much weeping and wailing amongst the Zionists of Golders Green as Tommy Robinson is Sent Down

Tommy Robinson aka Stephen Yaxley Lennon will serve just 10 weeks in prison for trying to derail the trial of child sex abusers. Making political capital out of their trial and trying to demonise all Muslim men with the crimes of a few were more important than the fact that those found guilty could have walked free.

Tommy Robinson is not the only person who has made the equation between Muslim men and grooming of young girls and sex abuse. This is a widespread stereotype. These people seem to forget people like Jimmy Saville or the late Bishop of Lewes Peter Ball, who was befriended and protected by Prince Charles, to say nothing of the abuse of children in public and religious schools, by both Protestant and Catholic clergy.

Keeping company with Tommy Robinson to the last was Katie Hopkins, the ex-Sun and Daily Mail ‘journalist’. This is the same Katie Hopkins who spoketo a packed meeting of largely Jewish people in Hendon last week. As Ben Weich observed:

Right-wing agitator Katie Hopkins’ words were not delivered to a meeting of the BNP in Barking but to the sympathetic ears of a roomful of Jewish people in the heart of North West London. A packed meeting no less of mainly Jewish people in Hendon.

Although there was a large article on the Jewish Chronicle website, only a smaller version, minus pictures, was tucked away on the inside of the printed version. Clearly the threat from Jeremy Corbyn is greater.

However this article prompted mega businessman Sir Mick Davis, and Tory Party Treasurer to take to the columns of the Jewish Chronicle this week (Our fight against bigotry cannot be fought alongside bigots like Katie Hopkins).

Sir Mick however was being disingenuous. Katie Hopkins has been widely welcomed in the Jewish community. She even attendedthe Zionist Federation annual dinner and dance last year and was pictured with Israel’s war criminal Ambassador Mark Regev.

Anti-Muslim racism and bigotry are a direct consequence of Zionism. Israel is the most anti-Islamic state in the world. Repeated attacks against the rights of Muslim worshippers at the Mosque of the Golden Dome and Al Aqsa in Jerusalem including Israeli soldiers enteringthese holy places in their boots in order to attack worshippers. Imagine that this happened in a synagogue.

The equation of Muslim and terrorist, the treatment of Palestinians as sub human, the legislation passed against the call to worship, the so-called Muezzin Law, the decision to make the Northern Islamic League illegal in November 2015 whilst allowingthe openly fascist and violent Lehava to stay in business. All of this testifies to the anti-Islamic racism in Israel.

The far-Right organisation Lehava which campaigns against ‘assimilation’ was fundedby the Israeli state via its ‘charity’ Hemla. Ha’aretz quotes a source in the Social Services Ministry as saying that 'We have been cooperating with a racist group for a decade,'.

Lehava has been given the green light to continue their campaign of violence against Arabs in Jerusalem. Using the slogans‘"Arabs beware – our sisters are not up for grabs" and "Jewish girls for the Jewish people." Lehava attacks Arabs at random in order to ‘protect’ Jewish women. The Nazis had the same concerns for German women whom they ‘protected’ against Jewish men.

According to Lehava’s far-right attorney Itamar Ben-Gvir,

‘Lehava's activity is entirely lawful, as has been repeatedly confirmed by police. The Jerusalem District Court has recently said that campaigning against assimilation isn't racist."

So campaigning for racial purity, because that is what it is, is ‘entirely lawful’ in the Jewish state and then people ask why there is anti-Muslim racism.

This is despite the repeated arson attacks at mosques and churches carried out by Lehava and their supporters. Indeed Benji Gopstein, the leader of Lehava has openly justified this. Burning of Christian churches in Israel justified, far-Right Jewish leader says

Zionism’s poisonous anti-Muslim racism has seeped into much of the Jewish community in Britain. That is why Katie Hopkins can speak to a packed Jewish audience in Hendon and Golders Green whereas an anti-Zionist speaker would probably be lynched!

Sharon Klaff on the left as Katie Hopkins speaks

The fascist Zionists that I have covered – Ambrosine Shitrit, Sharon KKKlaff, Paul Besser of Britain First, Mark Haringman and Jonathan Hoffman – to name but a few – operate with impunity in Hendon and Jewish circles. Their visceral hatred of Muslims and Arabs finds an echo in the camp of religious Zionism and amongst the supporters of Herut and Likud like Mandy Rice Blumenthall and her partner solicitor Mark Lewis.

Tommy Robinson has distinguished himself by his open and overt support for Israel. Although Zionists try to turn a blind eye to it, the open support of Israel by neo-Nazis like Tommy Robinson is because Israel is to them the ideal ethno nationalist state. This adulation has been reciprocated by a whole layer of Zionists. Even The Times of Israel askedWhy are US ‘pro-Israel’ groups boosting a far-right, anti-Muslim UK extremist?

Borderlife, a book by Dorit Rabinyan, an Israeli author, portraying the relationship of a Jewish and Arab teenager was banned from the high school syllabus, because it might give young Israeli Jews ideas about having relationships across ethnic boundaries. What state other than a viciously racist state for whom miscegenation is the rule would ban such a book? In Britain only fringe far-Right groups campaign against White and Black people having relationships.

The reasons given by the Education Ministry for banning the book from the high school syllabus were in themselves a master class of euphemisms: the problem was that the book was

"full of layers of hidden narratives, with criticism of the liberal-left part of the Israeli political spectrum, [and] wrapped in a romantic story of an impossible love.’

Why one might ask was this an impossible love? Apparently

"The professional team came to the conclusion that young adolescent may have difficulty to go in depth into these layers."

In other words young people in love may not understand in a ‘Jewish’ state the racial imperative not to mix with Arabs and non-Jews. NBC quoted education official Dalia Fenig that "at this time of tensions in Israel choosing this book can fuel hatred."What kind of Orwellian mind describes inter-racial relationships as fuelling hatred? See Israel Bans Teaching of 'Borderlife' Novel With Jewish-Arab Love Story

Israel is the ideal ethno nationalist state which is why open neo-Nazis like Richard Spencer describe themselves as ‘White Zionists’. As Mick Davies said:

It is an uncomfortable but increasingly apparent truth that there are a small number of fringe groups and individuals within the Jewish community who could, by any definition, be described as far right.

It is an even more uncomfortable truth that the supporters of the far-Right in the Jewish community are no longer a fringe.

Tony Greenstein

↧

The BBC’s War on Corbyn – Panorama would have made Pravda Proud

July 15, 2019, 10:39 am

≫ Next: Being Honest About Jews, Jewish Identity and Zionism in an Age of Identity Politics

≪ Previous: Despite the extremely light sentence Rejoice Rejoice as 2% Tommy Does Time for Trying to Derail the Trial of Child Abusers

Is Labour Anti-Semitic? was the title – but the answer was never in doubt

Another side of Ella Rose that Panorama did not show - more a thorn than a rose!

The Grid - How Special Effects Turned John Ware's enemies into aliens

As John Pilger has long argued, the BBC is the most refined propaganda service in the world.[1] Its reputation for independence is what has helped make it so effective.

The BBC was born in the womb of the British state. In 1926 Lord Reith, its first Director-General, banned the Archbishop of Canterbury from broadcasting an appeal for compromise in the General Strike.[2] The ruling class were determined to defeat the unions and they didn’t want any voices preaching compromise.

Despite Islamaphobia being four times as prevalent as anti-Semitism and anti-Roma racism being over six times as prevalent, the BBC displays no interest for anything other than 'antisemitism'

At Orgreave during the Miners’ Strike the BBC deliberately reversed its footage of miners throwing stones and police baton charging so as to make it appear that the Police were responding to the miners rather than the miners responding to Police brutality.[3]

Edited highlights of the programme

For 20 years, despite commissioning it, the BBC refused to show The War Game on the horrors of nuclear war.[4] It ‘would undermine moral’ for people to see what would happen to them in a nuclear war.

The BBC used MI5 to vet members of staff. Until the Daily Telegraph ferreted it out under the Freedom of Information Act it simply lied and denied that it was happening.[5]

It should not be a surprise that the BBC has joined in enthusiastically in the campaign to remove the only genuinely left-wing leader the Labour Party has ever had. That is the context for Panorama’s ‘Is Labour Anti-Semitic’.The answer to their question of course was never in doubt. It really was a rhetorical question.

The Guardian has gone to town on this fake programme

However it needs to be said that Corbyn and much of the Labour left have brought the ‘anti-Semitism’ problem on themselves. It was obvious from the start that this was a state directed campaign of destabilisation that had nothing to do with anti-Semitism. You only had to look at the main protagonists – the Daily Mail and the Tory tabloids – anti-racists none. The Al Jazeera programme The Lobby.[6]Anyone with any understanding of similar political destabilisation in South America must have known what the ruling class is capable of.

It was also obvious that the attempt to pervert the conclusions of the MacPherson Inquiry by suggesting that ‘victims’ of anti-Semitism would be the judge and jury in deciding the ‘guilt’ of their attackers could not but help open the way for false claims. Corbyn and Seamus Milne both knew that supporters of Israel have a long history of equating anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism. Yet despite this Corbyn unilaterally accepted the IHRA ‘definition’ of anti-Semitism. Truly Corbyn made a rod for his own back. Corbyn and Milne opened the doors to the excrescence of the ruling class like John Ware.

One you concede your opponents arguments you are left arguing over the extent of the ‘problem’. Corbyn’s promise to do better is like a man running upstairs on a downward escalator. However hard you run you can never escape. This is a nightmare of Corbyn’s own making because it should have been obvious from the start that the only acceptable solution to the Zionists was Corbyn’s own resignation.

Panorama excelled itself last Wednesday with an unrelenting barrage of propaganda. Allegations were treated as fact however outlandish. There was no attempt to provide any background or context to those making the allegations nor was there any attempt by presenter John Ware to cross-examine those making the allegations.

It is no wonder that the BBC has sent a standard response to all the many complaints it has received refusing to answer any specific points. Indeed so awful and one-sided was it that only Tom Watson, Labour’s racist Deputy Leader could take any solace from it. You wouldn’t hang a cat on the ‘evidence’. The programme didn’t even bother to hide its intention to mislead and deceive viewers.

Racism

The BBC’s interest in ‘anti-Semitism’ is in contrast to its studied disinterest in other forms of racism. Windrush has barely featured in its schedules. There has been just one investigatory programme. There has been no attempt to discern what has happened and why, despite hundreds of Black British citizens having been deported, some left to die penniless in the West Indies.

There has been no witch-hunt of Theresa May, the Home Secretary who was responsible for the ‘hostile environment policy’ (which let us not forget New Labour under Alan Johnson inaugurated).[7]According to former head of the civil service, Sir Bob Kerslake, it was seen by some Tory Ministers as “almost reminiscent of Nazi Germany”.[8]

Can you imagine Panorama doing a programme on Tory attitudes to migrants and asking whether or not people thought that Theresa May was a racist? Has it even asked this question of Boris Johnson given his well known remarks about Black people being ‘piccaninnies’ and having ‘water melon smiles’.[9]That was the question Ware repeatedly asked– ‘is Jeremy Corbyn anti-Semitic’? The only form of racism the BBC and the Labour Right is interested in is ‘anti-Semitism’.

The Left bears a great deal of responsibility for this. In a racist society people will have racist ideas in their heads. To believe that you will eliminate racism by monitoring social media posts is crass. Racism isn’t about the ideas in peoples’ heads but what happens in practice. That is why those on the Labour Right who endorsed the hostile environment policy and thus Windrush are the same people who are concerned about anti-Semitism.

British Jews live in a golden age. No British Jews have been deported or subject to Police violence nor had their encampments evicted by hundreds of Police thugs as happened at Dale Farm and happens continually to Travellers. Anti-Semitism has become the false anti-racism of the Right. That is why the BBC has fallen over itself to accommodate itself to an ‘anti-racism’ whose purpose is to uphold racism in Israel.

Given that Islamaphobia is four times as prevalent as anti-Semitism and anti-Gypsy feelings are over 6 times as common, the BBC’s concentration on anti-Semitism raises obvious questions.

The real problem Labour faces is not the attacks of the BBC and the Right but the Treachery of the so-called Left

At no time did Panorama even ask the question in the programme title, i.e. whether or not there was an anti-Semitism phenomenon in the Labour Party. This was taken as given.

I was braced for the bias that you come to expect from the BBC but the relentless exclusion by John Ware of any sliver of evidence that the case for Labour anti-Semitism might have been over egged was astonishing.

Raed Salah

Just one example of Ware’s lies was when he described how

‘Corbyn campaigned toallow anotoriously anti-Semitic preacher Raed Salah into Britain who had called Jews the ‘germs of all time’ and blamed them for 9/11.’

This was a litany of lies. Salah was already here. Corbyn campaigned against his deportation. The allegations of anti-Semitism were shown in court proceedings to be untrue.

It was alleged that Salah had made a series of antisemitic statements in sermons and a poem. The real reason was that Theresa May ‘was determined to find a reason to exclude Salah, before the evidence against him had been verified.’ [10]This was despite being warned that the case against Salah was very weak.

All 4 charges were thrown out by the Vice-President of the Upper Immigration Tribunal, Mr Justice Ockleton who ruled that Theresa May ‘was misled as to the terms of the poem written by the appellant, a matter on which there is now no room for dispute.’

May’s officials had relied on a version of Salah’s poem published in the Jerusalem Post in 2009 which the Zionist Community Security Trust produced. The words ‘You Jews’ had been inserted into it to make it appear anti-Semitic.

‘The principal sourcefor the decision to ban him, according to witnesses who testified in court for the Home Office, was a report compiled by the CST.’

This is the same CST whose Deputy Director, Dave Rich, was one of two expert witnesses. Raed Salah wrote.[11]

‘The evidence she [May] relied on (which included a poem of mine which had been doctored to make it appear anti-Jewish) was not, he [Justice Ockleton] concluded, a fair portrayal of my views. In reality, I reject any and every form of racism, including antisemitism.’

Salah went on to write, prophetically that:

‘I have no doubt that, despite this, Israel's cheerleaders in Britain will continue to smear my character. This is the price every Palestinian leader and campaigner is forced to pay.’

John Ware is one of those cheerleaders. Ware got his information from Wikipedia!

Jewish Labour Movement [JLM]

The average viewer would assume that those making the allegations of anti-Semitism were ordinary members of the Labour Party with no connection with each other or grudge to bear bar the fact that they were Jewish. It would no doubt come as a surprise to people to learn that all those making complaints were not only members of the same Zionist group, the JLM which had been refounded in 2015 specifically to oust Corbyn but they were also officers of the JLM.[12]This is what is called a ‘put up job’. Those engaged in bank robberies and similar enterprises usually call it a frame up.

It is crystal clear that the BBC deliberately hid the fact that those who were interviewed were officers in the JLM, a pro-Israeli organisation which is affiliated to the World Zionist Organisation. The BBC therefore engaged in a carefully calculated act of deception. Equally the BBC made no approaches to any anti-Zionist Jews or Jewish Voice for Labour? [JVL]

Those making the allegations included the following: Stephane Savary and Joe Goldberg, Joint National Vice-Chairs; Izzy Lenga, International Officer; Alex Richardson, Membership Officer; Adam Langleben, Campaigns Officer; Ella Rose, Equalities Officer and former National Director, Rebecca Filer, Political Education Officer; Joshua Garfield, Local Government Officer as well as Rachel Megan Barker and Phil Rosenberg also of the JLM. To call it a conspiracy would be an understatement.[13]

Ella Rose of the JLM is in between former Chair Jeremy Newmark and the Israeli Ambassador

The JLM is quite open about its close connections with the Israeli Embassy.[14]

Opening the programme was Ella Rose quivering with emotion as she spoke of her horrendous, but completely vague and unsubstantiated allegations of anti-Semitism. The average viewer would not have dreamt that this fragrant innocent had featured in The Lobby where she was seen threatening violence against Jackie Walker and boasting that she could ‘take out’ Jackie using her martial arts skills. Nor was her work in the Israeli Embassy or her role as Director of the Jewish Labour Movement mentioned.

Quite remarkably none of those making allegations of anti-Semitism were even captioned. Viewers would have had no idea who many of them were still less their background. Their heartfelt testimonies had been rehearsed many times to perfection in the BBC’s studios in order to inject the right amount of pathos.

Allegations were made by Izzy Lenga that Holocaust denial was a staple of her Labour Party meetings. No detail was provided such as which CLP was this was taking place in. It is such an obvious lie. The idea that Labour meetings would debate whether the Holocaust had happened or declare that Hitler didn’t go far enough is pure fiction. In John Ware’s Panorama Zionists were given carte blanche to make up any allegation they saw fit without ever once being challenged.

Already the ‘evidence’ cited in the programme has begun to come apart at the seams. Ben Westerman, who was investigating complaints of anti-Semitism in Liverpool Riverside CLP, lied when he said that he had been asked during one of the six interviews he conducted if he came from Israel. He implied that this was antisemitic.

Unfortunately for Ben the interview in question was recorded. He was asked which branch of the Labour Party he was from not whether he was from Israel! Not that that would have been anti-Semitic.[15]

Jonathan Hoffman & Harry Saul Markham of Young Herut - two fascists the BBC showed at the Zionist 'anti-racist' demonstration

The programme began with footage of the Zionist ‘Enough is Enough’ demonstration outside the Houses of Parliament. The demonstration was called in the wake of the ‘mural affair’ which had remained dormant for 7 years before being pulled out a hat by Luciana Berger.[16] There was no mention of the JVL counter-demonstration or indeed the curious fact that Norman Tebbit of the ‘cricket test’ and Ian Paisley of the sectarian DUP were present. The BBC focussed on a group of Zionist Fascistssuch as Jonathan Hoffman and Harry Markham of the fascist Young Herut.[17]

They interviewed Kat Buckingham, the person who ‘investigated’Brighton and Hove Labour Party when it was suspended in July 2016. The Left had won all the positions on the Executive, by 2-1, at a 600 strong AGM of the party. The Right led by former leader Warren Morgan (now of the Funny Tinge Party) had made allegations of spitting as a pretext to have the vote annulled.

When video evidence emerged demonstrating that the allegations were bogus Kat Buckingham simply refused to look at it because it might breach data protection laws!

Alan Johnson

The second ‘expert witness’ was none other than Alan Johnson.[18]He is not Jewish and has no special expertise. He is though the Editor of Fathom,[19]the journal of BICOM– the main pro-Zionist propaganda organisation in Britain.[20]Curiously Ware didn’t see fit to mention this. Perhaps Johnson was the only academic Ware could find.

Sam Matthews

It was the sheer duplicity and dishonesty of the 8 staff members which attracted most attention. In particular Sam Matthews, Labour’s Witchfinder General. Matthews was a good actor but that is all. Those who have had dealings with him know that he was an inveterate leaker, malicious and extremely hostile to anyone on the Left. Anti-Zionist to him was the equivalent of anti-Semitism.

The Guardian has gone to town on this contrived and dishonest programme

In the Jewish Chronicle this week Matthews claimed that he was driven to the brink of suicide. I have no doubt that this is just another piece of acting designed to elicit sympathy. Tt was Sam Matthew’s treatment of Carl Sergeant, the Welsh Minister who was suspended and committed suicide, which has been mentioned as a contributory factor in what happened at the inquest.[21]Far from Matthews contemplating suicide it was his arrogant behaviour which drove people to the brink of self harm and worse.

Mike Creighton also figured prominently in the programme. He has been around for decades in the Labour Party though he has now retired. I have personal knowledge of just how incompetent he was through a legal action I brought against the Labour Party.

So useless was he that when I made a Subject Access Request in 2016 a bundle of documents arrived, albeit a few weeks late. However as no records were kept of his having sent off anything to me a further bundle was sent several months later! What was worse they were sent to an address I hadn’t lived in for two decades. The last time I lived there I was suspended as part of the poll tax rebellion! The excuse his lawyers gave for the confusion that resulted was Creighton’s incompetence. I believe them!

What the programme didn’t even hint at was that far from these conscientious staff members seeking to root out anti-Semitism, what actually took place was a witchhunt by Blairites at Labour’s HQ of members suspected of being Corbyn supporters. Thousands were suspended and barred from voting.

My own experiences are an example. In March 2016 I was informed by letter that I had been suspended ‘for remarks you are alleged to have made.’ No further detail was provided and despite repeated emails to the Compliance Unit no details were forthcoming.

On April 2^nd I found out that I had been suspended as part of the fake anti-Semitism witchhunt when the Telegraph and The Times printed stories detailing my crimes.[22]I had compared Israel’s marriage laws to the Nazi Nuremburg Laws and said that Israel was waiting for the Holocaust victims to die so that it could save money! If I was anti-Semitic then so was Hannah Arendt, a refugee from Nazi Germany. Likewise Ha’aretz which published Israel Is Waiting for Its Holocaust Survivors to Die was also anti-Semitic! [23]

John Ware - the Islamaphobe that the BBC chose to present their hatchet job on Labour 'antisemitism'

John Ware – using a racist to report on racism

If ever there was a reporter unfit to present a documentary on racism then it is John Ware. Ware is an Islamaphobe and an all round reactionary.

Arzu Merali’s documents how Ware's 2005 "A Question of Leadership" attracted over 600 complaints in just its first week after being broadcast protesting about its hostile and one-sided nature.[24]

One senior ex-Panorama journalist described the programme as "the most disgusting Panorama that I have ever seen. The presenter was acting like a prosecuting attorney, not a journalist." The Guardian's Madeleine Bunting called the documentary, which dubbed all Muslims as ‘extremist’, "McCarthyite".[25]

Ware doesn’t so much investigate as substitute his own prejudices for what is normally called reporting. Ken Livingstone’s description of Hitler having supported Zionism was termed a ‘cranky’ version of history. Since when is it a presenter’s job to pass judgement on a particular view of history.

One wonders what John Ware would call the memo that the German Zionist Federation sent unsolicited, on 21^st June 1933, to Hitler. It can be found in Lucy Dawidowicz’s Holocaust Reader:

‘On the foundation of the new state, which has established the principle of race... 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....’ Zionist historian, David Cesarani, wrote in The Final Solution (p.96);

‘The efforts of the Gestapo are oriented to promoting Zionism as much as possible and lending support to its efforts to promote emigration.’

Maybe Cesarani was also a ‘crank’. Or perhaps the crank is Ware? Ware is a relic of the days of Empire and the belief that we have to civilise the natives. He wrote of his

‘horror... that some migrants to this country had brought with them a lot more than just their possessions’. They didn’t understand democracy and dissent.[26]

One can only wonder at where they may have got it from! Britain’s former colonies were not a model of democracy.

Racism oozes out of everything Ware writes. He describes Islam as an ‘ideology’ which is the argument of Tommy Robinson and the far-Right. Since we are told by the Chief Rabbi that Judaism and Zionism are intertwineddoes not the same apply to Judaism?[27]

Ware writes of Western civilisation being ‘based on Christianity, which enshrines individualism and freedom.’ One can only wonder whether the victims of Torquemada would have agreed. Perhaps Martin Luther’s fulminationthat ‘the Jews are our misfortune’ is part of Ware’s civilisation? [28] Julius Streicher, emblazoned it on the masthead of the Nazi paper Der Sturmer.

Ware is of the opinion that the alternative to British values ‘is a diffuse mush with nothing particularly special to defend at all.’ Islamaphobia is just ‘powerful ammunition’ for discrediting Prevent. But it is in the final paragraph that we understand the Ware’s motivation when he lambasts the Tory party who

‘risk(s) letting in a Labour leader whose entire political career has been stimulated by disdain for the West, appeasement of extremism, and who would barely understand what fighting for the revival of British values is really all about.’

This is the man who the BBC believed was the most suitable person to present a programme on ‘Labour anti-Semitism’. The Muslim Council of Britain got it right when they described Ware as ‘an agenda-driven pro-Israeli polemicist.’ [29]

Writing in the Jewish Chronicle Ware demonstrated that not only is he an expert on Islam but he is also well briefed on Zionism. He opined that ‘any suggestion that ethnic cleansing was a principle war aim by the Jews in 1948 ... is highly contested. The Jews had accepted the UN partition plan. The Arabs had not.’ After all ‘The Arabs’ war aim was the destruction of the Jews’ emergent state fuelled by a religious Jihad. Survival was the Jews’ war aim.’[30]You will note that Ware is incapable of making any distinction between Zionists, Israelis and Jews. Ware is clearly unaware of the New Israeli Historians such as Benny Morris or Ilan Pape otherwise he would not have written such junk.

In the same article Ware makes his own views crystal clear.

So deeply into Labour’s Left has anti-Zionism morphed into antisemitism (sic) — itself a Corbyn legacy — that Jewish Labour members are avoiding meetings.

When Ware embarked on the Panorama programme his mind had long been made up. Even New Labour’s David Blunkett castigated Panorama’s The Asylum Game and Ware, for having ‘repeated unchallenged the claims of "the rightwing anti-immigration pressure group, Migration Watch". [31]

In another article for the Jewish Chronicle Ware defends the notorious Islamaphobe Douglas Murray, Associate Director of the Henry Jackson Society[32]and on the board of the far-Right Gatestone Institute. Gaby Hinsliffe in a Review of Murray’s The Strange Death of Europe described how ‘The rightwing journalist and commentator cites Enoch Powell and wants to protect white Christian Europe from ‘outsiders.’ [33]

Murray wrote that he considered the term “Islamophobia” to be ‘a meaningless idea – a crock.” He also explained the difference between anti-Semitism and what he termed ‘(authentic) Islamophobia’. ‘The former is entirely irrational, the latter reactive.’ Ware blames Muslim radicals ‘who have brought it on their fellow Muslims — by their promotion of Islam as a political ideology’.

What is surprising is that if the BBC and Panorama were seriously interested in racism in British political parties, and the same goes for the Equalities and Human Rights Council, then there is plenty of scope for a programme about the Tory Party. More than half of Conservative members questioned for a new poll believe Islam is a threat to British life.[34]

Socialist Worker give as an example of how, in 1987, Ware tried to discredit former army intelligence officer Colin Wallace on Panorama. Wallace had exposed a “dirty tricks” campaign against Labour prime minister Howard Wilson. He was part of a Black Propaganda, Psy Ops unit in Northern Ireland.[35]

‘Ware claimed Wallace was a fantasist. But as investigative journalist Paul Foot wrote, Ware’s own report was riddled with obvious errors.’ [36]

In 2015 Ware produced a precursor to the present Panorama on Corbyn’s first leadership campaign that claimed that ‘a Corbyn victory would lead to left wing “thuggery and intimidation”.

Ware produced a number of films attacking Muslims and Palestinians. One suggested that Palestinian charity Interpal funded terrorism. Others have targeted the Muslim Council of Britain and Muslim Engagement and Development (Mend). Interpal has recently successfully sued the Daily Mail and recovered £120,000 for alleging it funds terrorism.[37] Ware’s recent attacks on Mend accuse it of antisemitism due to its members’ criticisms of Israel.

As Robin Ramsay of The Lobster explained Colin Wallace, who was framed for the murder of a man in Arundel (and later cleared) was subject to a concerted attempt at discrediting him. He was portrayed as a fantasist. But for Paul Foot’s investigation this would have stuck.

Special Effects

One of the most curious aspects of Panorama was how anyone on Corbyn’s side, the enemy, appeared not as themselves, but with vertical lines or a grid effect superimposed on them. The effect was to make Corbyn and others appear as aliens, disembodied, not really human. This wasn’t done with members of the JLM or members of staff, just people like Ken Livingstone or Jackie Walker. This kind of cheap and tawdry special effects is symptomatic. The aim was clearly to introduce the subliminal message that they are the enemy.

John Ware and the Edited Email.

In my view, Corbyn should have interfered far more often with the work of the witchhunters. It is the right of Corbyn to interfere with the attempts of Labour’s Blairite staff to use ‘anti-Semitism’ as a means of suspending or expelling socialists.

However given that Corbyn denies having done any such thing, one can only marvel at how Panorama and Ware edited one such email to give a completely erroneous impression.[38] According to Ware an email from Seamus Milne to Labour staff read:

something’s going wrong, and we’re muddling up political disputes with racism… I think going forward we need to review where and how we’re drawing the line.

In fact Milne was respondingto a request from a former Labour staff member for a view on a complaint. Milne wrote, having identified the subject of the complaint, Glyn Secker, as a “Jewish activist, the son of Holocaust survivor”

if we’re more than very occasionally using disciplinary action against Jewish members for anti-Semitism, something’s going wrong and we’re muddling up political disputes with racism.

The sheer level of Ware’s dishonesty is staggering. The BBC is responding to the sheer volume of complaints with a standard response. It is important that people do not accept this and continue.

A lot has also been written by other people on Panorama:

With Panorama's hatchet job on Labour antisemitism, BBC has become pro-Tory media, Jonathan Cook Middle East Eye 11.7.19.

1. Last night, the BBC edited a Labour email and broadcast the hit job to millions, James Wright, The Canary, 11 July 2019

On the doctoring of a Labour email to show Seamus Milne and Labour in a bad light.

2. Jeremy Corbyn is Attacked Because He is Anti-Capitalist, not Anti-Semitic, Tommy Sheridan, Sputnik News, 12th July 2019

3. Same Executive Producer on three Channel 4 and BBC anti-Corbynite programmes revealed as former Labour activist, Tom Pride, tompride.wordpress.com, 12 Jul 2019

Someone has it in for Corbyn and is given free range to express his hatred on MSM.

4.Panorama: Dreck, Lies and Videotape, Ten Facts about the Panorama Programme followed by Three Lords A-Leaping and more…

“The most interesting thing about the program was that despite the resources that had clearly been poured into its production, not a single concrete example of the egregious and ubiquitous antisemitism it alleges was actually produced and examined.”

5. Sticky Fingers: JLM’s Panorama Playbook?, Jay Blackwood, Jewish Dissident, 12 July 2019

Jay Blackwood outlines the dubious role of JLM in the Panorama programme (dubious is an understatement…)

6. Former Labour Party investigator caught lying in BBC Panorama interview Johnny Beggs, Facebook 12 July 2019

Investigator Ben Westerman claimed he had been asked if he came from Israel and implied this was antisemitic. He hadn’t – he was asked what Labour party branch he came from…

7. BBC’s anti-Corbyn hatchet job fails to land blow

Plus:

Who is John Ware?See various articles in The Lobsterover the years from the nineties onwards.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hY7o2KkfI8U&feature=youtu.be

[2] The General Strike to Corbyn: 90 years of BBC establishment bias, https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/ourbeeb/general-strike-to-corbyn-90-years-of-bbc-establishment-bias/

[3] Orgreave campaigners call for BBC strike coverage apology, 18.6.14., https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-south-yorkshire-27893072

[4] The War Game, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_Game

[5] Revealed: how the BBC used MI5 to vet thousands of staff, Daily Telegraph, 2.7.06., https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1522875/Revealed-how-the-BBC-used-MI5-to-vet-thousands-of-staff.html

[6] https://www.aljazeera.com/investigations/thelobby/

[7] Why was the scheme behind May’s ‘Go Home’ vans called Operation Vaken?, Guardian 26.4.18., https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/apr/26/theresa-may-go-home-vans-operation-vaken-ukip

[8] May's immigration policy seen as 'almost reminiscent of Nazi Germany', Guardian 19.4.18., https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/apr/19/theresa-may-immigration-policy-seen-as-almost-reminiscent-of-nazi-germany

[9] Boris Johnson: Tory leadership frontrunner's history of racist comments, from Muslim 'letter boxes' to African 'piccaninnies'. The Independent, 24.5.19., https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/boris-johnson-racist-tory-leadership-muslims-letter-box-piccaninnies-conservative-party-a8929376.html

[10] Theresa May's haste to ban Raed Salah will be repented at leisure, Guardian 9.4.12. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/apr/09/theresa-may-raed-salah-ban

[11] Britain's duty to the Palestinian people, Guardian 19.4.12., https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/apr/19/britain-duty-to-palestinian-people

[12] Jewish Labour Movement was refounded to fight Corbyn, Electronic Intifada, 7.3.19., https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/asa-winstanley/jewish-labour-movement-was-refounded-fight-corbyn

[13] NEC Members, https://www.jewishlabour.uk/national_executive_committee

[14] Jewish Labour Movement worked with Israeli embassy spy, Electronic Intifada 12.4.18.

[15] Johny Begg’s Facebook page, https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10218672085488271&set=a.3496824614306&type=3&theater

[16] Corbyn in antisemitism row after backing artist behind 'offensive' mural, Guardian, 23.3.18., https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/mar/23/corbyn-criticised-after-backing-artist-behind-antisemitic-mural

[17] EXCLUSIVE – We Name the Gang of Zionists Whose Purpose is to Disrupt Palestinian Events in London, 9.12.17. http://azvsas.blogspot.com/2017/12/exclusive-we-name-gang-of-31-zionists.html

[18] Alan Johnson, Fathom, http://fathomjournal.org/author/alan-johnson/

[19] The Left and the Jews: Time for a Rethink, Fathom, http://fathomjournal.org/the-left-and-the-jews-time-for-a-rethink/

[20] http://www.bicom.org.uk/

[21] Carl Sargeant inquest: Second anonymous letter claim, BBC News, 10 July 2019, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-48935751

[22] Activist who derides critics as 'Zionist scum' admitted to Labour in latest anti-Semitism scandal to hit Party, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/04/01/activist-who-derides-critics-as-zio-scum-re-admitted-to-labour-i/1.4.16., Labour welcomes back blogger who compares Israelis to Nazis, Times 1.4.16.,

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/labour-welcomes-back-blogger-who-compares-israelis-to-nazis-r0r8b99zz

[23] Israel Is Waiting for Its Holocaust Survivors to Die , 6.2.13., https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-amos-rubin-waiting-for-shoah-survivors-to-die-1.5228490

[24] The banality and boredom of anti-Muslim witchhunts. Or beware John Ware, Arzu Merali, 29.3.18. https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/banality-and-boredom-anti-muslim-witchhunts-or-beware-john-ware,

[25] Throwing mud at Muslims, Guardian, 22.8.05., https://www.theguardian.com/Columnists/Column/0,,1553878,00.html

[26] Enough is enough of terror — but also of our self-doubt, Standpoint, 26.7.17.], https://standpointmag.co.uk/issues/july-august-2017/features-july-august-2017-john-ware-enough-is-enough-extremism-self-doubt/

[27] Ken Livingstone and the hard Left are spreading the insidious virus of anti-Semitism, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/05/03/ken-livingstone-and-the-hard-left-are-spreading-the-insidious-vi/, Ephraim Mirvis, Daily Telegraph 3.5.16.

[28] Martin Luther and antisemitism, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther_and_antisemitism

[29] John Ware’s Uncharitable Panorama in the Service of Israel2.8.06.

[30] Jeremy Corbyn’s gold standard code on antisemitism is far from black and white2.8.18.

[31] Blunkett savages BBC in asylum row, Guardian 24.7.03

[32] Why the I-word has closed down debate on extremismJewish Chronicle 26.7.13

[33] The Strange Death of Europe by Douglas Murray review – gentrified xenophobia, Guardian 6.5.17., https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/may/06/strange-death-europe-immigration-xenophobia

[34] Conservatives: Members see Islam as 'threat to British life', poll suggests

[35] Letters: The Real Colin Wallace Spectator 7.4.90., http://archive.spectator.co.uk/article/7th-april-1990/25/letters-the-real-colin-wallace

[36] Paul Foot 1937-2004, Socialist Worker, 24.7.04., https://socialistworker.co.uk/art/954/Paul+Foot+1937+2004

[37] Daily Mail owner pays £120,000 in damages to Interpal trustees, Civil Society, 14.6.19., https://www.civilsociety.co.uk/news/daily-mail-owner-pasy-120-000-in-damages-and-apologises-to-interpal-trustees.html

[38] Last night, the BBC edited a Labour email and broadcast the hit job to millions, Canary, 11.7.19., https://www.thecanary.co/trending/2019/07/11/last-night-the-bbc-edited-a-labour-email-and-broadcast-the-hit-job-to-millions/

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Being Honest About Jews, Jewish Identity and Zionism in an Age of Identity Politics

July 16, 2019, 5:39 pm

≫ Next: The Only Decent Journalist on the Guardian is their Cartoonist – Steve Bell

≪ Previous: The BBC’s War on Corbyn – Panorama would have made Pravda Proud

You cannot understand the obsession with 'anti-Semitism' today without understanding how Jewish identity has changed

The idea for this article, which was published in Electronic Intifada came from someone who wrote to me.
They asked which of the following applies to British Jews?
Black people experience
1     Deaths in custody
2     Worse health inequalities
3     Their children are disproportionately in pupil referral units
4     They are disproportionately under employed
5     They are not given same opportunity to access community asset development scheme when organisations given funding to ensure this happen
6     Why are they disproportionately over represented in prisons?
7     Why did the EU not investigate the EHRC on all these counts as they are a national body for the member state equality
8     A disproportionate number who are subject to stop and searched
9     Over medication in the treatment processes for mental health
10   Disproportionate homelessness

When posed like this it is clear that British Jews are not oppressed. Antisemitism is confined to noxious comments on social media, at worst. There are very few anti-Semitic attacks. It is precisely because Jews don't suffer from state racism that the racist media - from the Daily Telegraph to the Guardian - have no hesitation in plugging 'antisemitism.

The above questions have crystallised in the article below.

Tony Greenstein

Britain’s Labour Party lost support among Jewish voters before Jeremy Corbyn became its leader. (Ben Cawthra/Sipa USA/Newscom)

Tony Greenstein The Electronic Intifada 26 June 2019
Cries of “anti-Semitism” are the charges every supporter of the Palestinians has to face. I doubt that there is a single Palestine solidarity activist who hasn’t been accused of anti-Semitism.
The rationale for these accusations include the suggestion that we are operating “double standards” in singling out Israel for criticism. We are alleged to criticize Israel because it is a “Jewish” state. Israel is the “targeted collective Jew among the nations,” Irwin Cotler, a former government minister in Canada, has written.
Today, a different, more subtle argument is developing: Israel and Zionism are an integral part of Jewish identity. That is why opposition to Zionism and Israel is automatically anti-Semitic.

This argument was tested earlier this decade in an employment tribunal which assessed allegations that Britain’s University and College Union was anti-Semitic because it supports BDS – the Palestinian call for boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel. Ronnie Fraser, the pro-Israel campaigner who had taken legal action against the union, argued that Zionism was an integral part of Jewish identity.
That argument was rejected by the tribunal’s judges in 2013. The tribunal concluded that “a belief in the Zionist project or an attachment to Israel” was “not intrinsically a part of Jewishness.”
Another variant of this argument is to suggest that as Israel is the only Jewish state in the world, opposition to it must be anti-Semitic. Since there are Islamic and Christian states, opposition to Israel cannot be other than anti-Semitic. However this is to obscure the fact that Israel is unique because it is the only ethno-religious state in the world.
Inherently racist
Defining ethnicity and nationality in terms of religion means a state will be inherently racist.
Being Jewish in Israel is not a religious but a racial identity. Jews have privileges that are not accorded to non-Jews.
As a Jew in Israel, you have access to 93 percent of “national” land controlled or owned by the Jewish National Fund. Imagine that in Britain, which is nominally a Christian state, I was unable to rent a flat because it was Christian national land.
How would that not be anti-Semitic?
The Islamic states of the Middle East are certainly backward and regressive political formations. However they do not systematically grant Muslims special privileges.
On the contrary, the Islamic nature of the Iranian or Saudi states operates to legitimize the oppression and persecution of Muslims. Arguably Jews in Iran are better off than Muslims.
The French Revolution, which ushered in the emancipation of the Jews, also introduced the separation of religion from the state. This is why Zionism was based on a rejection of emancipation which it saw as leading to the “assimilation” of Jews to non-Jews.
When France’s Constituent Assembly convened in September 1789 to discuss the Jewish question, the civil liberties advocate Stanislas de Clermont-Tonnerre declared that “Jews should be denied everything as a nation, but granted everything as individuals.”
Anti-Semitism was widespread in the ethno-religious and nationalist Christian states of Eastern Europe in the 1930s and 1940s. These states proved receptive to the Nazis.
The savagery of the Holocaust in Romania was too much even for Hans Frank, a leading Nazi lawyer and Governor of the Generalgouvernment (Poland). He contendedthat some of the massacres committed in Romania were much worse than Nazi violence in Germany, where “we use the art of surgery, not of butchery.”
In Romania, the fascist Iron Guard was also knownas the Legion of the Archangel Michael. Christianity was an essential part of Hungary’s fascist Iron Cross. And Slovakia’s Hlinka Guard – which deported Jews to Auschwitz – was led by a Catholic priest, Jozef Tiso.
Moral panic
The British political establishment, including much of the leadership of the Labour Party, has been in the grip of a form of mass hysteria, a moral panic about anti-Semitism. The mere denial of the existence of anti-Semitism is proof that you are an anti-Semite.
The situation resembles that other example of mass hysteria, the Salem witch trials. The historian Elizabeth Reis writes about the dilemmas that faced the women in these trials:
During examinations, accused women were damned if they did and damned if they did not: if they confessed to witchcraft charges, their admissions would prove the cases against them; if they denied the charges, their very intractability, construed as the refusal to admit to sin more generally, might mark them as sinners and hence allies of the devil.
What is this “anti-Semitism” that is so all-pervasive? In many respects, it resembles the allegations of being sympathetic toward communism made in the West during the Cold War.
Among the theoreticians of this “new anti-communism” is Jonathan Freedland, a columnist with The Guardian. In 2016, he argued that “93 percent [of British Jews] who told a 2015 survey that Israel forms some part of their identity as Jews can take criticism of Israeli governments and of Israeli policy” but not anti-Zionism.
It should be noted that Freedland was concealing the full picture. The same survey asked British Jews whether they identified as Zionists – 59 percent said “yes” and 31 percent said “no.” The proportion identifying themselves as Zionist dropped by 13 percent since a previous survey was conducted in 2010.
Unsustainable
A similar claim was made earlier this year by Mike Katz, chair of the Jewish Labour Movement – a pro-Israel lobby group. Katz was referring to a comment by the Labour lawmaker Richard Burgon who describedZionism as “the enemy of peace.”
The comment had been made at a 2014 meeting but a video of Burgon’s speech was only published this April. When the video was circulated online, Katz stated that Zionism is “a core part of their [British Jews’] identity.”
In other words, criticism of Zionism, the ideology and the movement, as opposed to the government of Israel, is intrinsically anti-Semitic because you are attacking the identity of most Jews. This argument is unsustainable on a number of levels.
First, the identity of Jews has changed repeatedly.
Before World War II, most Jews were anti-Zionist. To say that anti-Zionism is a form of anti-Semitism is to say that Polish Jews, 90 percent of whom died in the Holocaust, were anti-Semitic on the basis that – in Warsaw and other major Polish cities – they voted overwhelmingly during 1938 elections for the anti-Zionist Jewish Bund.
Secondly, the reasons for the change in Jewish attitudes to Zionism is primarily a product of socio-economic changes which have driven them to the right.
And thirdly, the argument that it is racist to criticize or oppose a group’s identity is flawed and illogical. It has extremely reactionary implications.
When I was a child I used to visit relatives in London’s East End. We would go to eat in Bloom’s, the Jewish restaurant in Whitechapel. We would have to queue to get a place at lunchtime.
In 1996 Bloom’s closed, the reason being that the Jews had moved out of the East End to be replaced by Bengalis and other immigrant communities.
The Jews of the East End have migrated to the London suburb of Golders Green and elsewhere.
During the first half of the 20th century, Britain’s Jews were predominantly working class and prominent in the trade unions. When Phil Piratin, England’s only Communist member of parliament, won the constituency of Mile End in East London during the 1945 general election, it is estimatedthat half of his vote came from Jews.
Jews formed an identifiable part of Britain’s working class and its most politically conscious part. Jews led the anti-fascist movement. At one time there were more than 30 Jewish trade unions.
Moving rightwards
Today, there is no Jewish working class. Jews have climbed the socio-economic ladder and – in many cases – moved rightwards politically. When it is argued that “anti-Semitism” under current Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has led to the loss of Jewish support for the party, that is simply untrue.
According to a poll in April 2015, 69 percent of Jews were planning to vote Conservative in the following month’s general election and only 22 percent for Labour. That was despite the fact that Labour was then led by Ed Miliband, its first Jewish leader.
William Rubinstein, a historian, wrote in the 1980s about “the rise of Western Jewry to unparalleled affluence and high status.” That rise “has led to the near-disappearance of a Jewish proletariat of any size; indeed, the Jews may become the first ethnic group in history without a working class of any size.”
As the Jews changed, so too did anti-Semitism. State-sponsored anti-Semitism disappeared in Britain to be replaced by racism against Black and Asian people.
Rubinstein’s conclusion was that the change in Jews’ socio-economic position “has rendered obsolete (and rarely heard) the type of anti-Semitism which has its basis in fears of the swamping of the native population.” It has made “Marxism, and other radical doctrines, irrelevant to the socio-economic bases of Western Jewry, and increasingly unattractive to most Jews.”
Geoffrey Alderman, a Jewish Chronicle columnist and right-wing Zionist, wrote in a 1983 book [Jewish Community in British Politics] that by 1961, “over 40 percent of Anglo-Jewry was located in the upper two social classes, whereas these categories accounted for less than 20 percent of the general population.”
Alderman shows that British Jews frequently became much more conservative than the rest of the British population.
That is illustrated by the March 1978 by-election which took place in the Ilford North area of Greater London. Labour had previously held this seat by just 778 votes. By-elections are held in Britain when a parliamentary seat becomes vacant, usually due to a death or resignation.
During the 1978 by-election Keith Joseph, Margaret Thatcher’s svengali, came to the constituency to make a blatantly racist anti-immigration speech.
One might expect that Jewish voters of all people would react against this. Not a bit of it. The Conservatives gained the seat on a swing of 6.9 percent but among Jewish voters there was a swing of 11.2 percent.
As Jews move to the right, they become more sympathetic to Zionism, British foreign policy and US imperialism. That has nothing to do with anti-Semitism.
Blackmail
The argument that opposition to a group’s identity is racist is part of the poisonous legacy of identity politics which eliminates the distinction between oppressed and oppressor. That legacy would have one believe that even the powerful and privileged have an identity and their claims have equal validity to those they exploit.
In the absence of class and race, identity politics become a justification for the status quo.
Of course, it is true that racists will disguise an attack on a particular ethnic or racial group by attacking its religion.
When right-wing firebrand Robert Spencer attacks Islam as “warfare against unbelievers” or his colleague Pamela Geller writes that “the Quran is war propaganda,” then that is racism, not a critique of religion. But when someone defends Salman Rushdie because he published The Satanic Verses, that is a defense of reason against religious bigotry.
The same applies to Zionism. If someone attacks Israel because it is a Jewish state, then that is anti-Semitic. But nearly all criticism of Israel has nothing to do with anti-Semitism.
On the contrary, it is anti-Semites – from Hungary’s Viktor Orban to Steve Bannon in the US – who use support for Israel to disguise their anti-Semitism.
Opposition to a particular identity is not racist.
In Afghanistan many, if not most, people consider the burka an integral part of Islam. Is it seriously suggested that it is intrinsically racist and anti-Muslim to oppose the burka, even when such opposition comes from Muslim women?
In many countries in Africa female genital mutilation is part of the identity of those living there. Is opposition to FGM racist?
There are many religious practices that are reactionary, medieval and barbaric. Opposition to them is not racist.
The same is true with the Jewish community. Although there is no doubt that most Jews in Britain are more liberal than the Jewish leaders and the Board of Deputies, there is little doubt that the majority are supporters of Zionism. It is also arguable that a majority of Jews do not realise the extent of Israeli racism and how Zionism mandates a form of apartheid.
However it is a fact that a Jewish ethno-nationalist state in Israel cannot be other than a racist apartheid state. The argument that it is anti-Semitic to oppose an identity that is itself based on support for racism is untenable.
If indeed the majority of Jews do support a Zionism that mandates the demolition of Palestinian villages such as Umm al-Hiran in order to build Jewish towns in their place, then that is clearly a racist identity. If the majority of British Jews support a state where the chief rabbi of Safed issues an edict that non-Jews cannot rent property from Jews, then how is that not racist?
The idea that opposition to religious identity is, in itself, a form of racism is a form of blackmail.
Both apartheid in South Africa and slavery in the US were justified by particular interpretations of the Bible. Was opposition to the identity of white planters or West Indian slave owners racist?
Tony Greenstein is a founding member of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign and the author ofThe Fight Against Fascism in Brighton and the South Coast.

↧

The Only Decent Journalist on the Guardian is their Cartoonist – Steve Bell

July 18, 2019, 5:17 pm

≫ Next: Open Letter to Jon Lansman - the Proprietor and Owner of Momentum

≪ Previous: Being Honest About Jews, Jewish Identity and Zionism in an Age of Identity Politics

When you scratch a Liberal you find a Reactionary – The Guardian’s reaction to a Socialist leader of Labour was Predictable

Forget the Chakrbartys, the Gary Younge’s and George Monbiots, the only genuine anti-racist and anti-imperialist journalist with the Guardian these days is their brilliant cartoonist, Steve Bell.

Yesterday the Guardian, once again, censured a cartoon in which Israel's racist Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu featured. One wonders just what the problem of Kath Viner, the Guardian's cowardly editor is.

Netanyahu has literally allied himself with a party, Otzma Yehudit, which is a neo-Nazi party in order to slide into government once again. He is a man who complained that too many Arabs were voting and who contradicts an actress, Rotem Sala, 'explaining' to her that no Arabs are not equal citizens in Israel. Israel is a Jewish not a democratic state.

Yet the Guardian's cowardly editor and its equally cowardly journalists maintain their silence as the only socialist on the staff is censured by this bastion of free speech.

Email to Kath Viner and the Guardian's gutless staff by Steve Bell

The rest of them are washed up liberals. Not only did 60 of Labour’s finest racist peers launch an attack on Corbyn yesterday via the Guardian but the paper’s former Jewish Chronicle pundit and her colleagues, Jessica Elgot (who has blocked me on Twitter!) wrote a story based around the treachery of these unelected aristocrats.

He may be a racist but that doesn't stop John Reid protesting about 'antisemitism'

I couldn’t help but notice the name of John Reid. Ex-Stalinist he has a good claim to have been the most racist Home Secretary in living memory. It would certainly be a hard fought contest with David Blunkett, another signatory, who tried to stop the children of asylum seekers going to school because then they would become integrated in the local community and harder to remove.

As the Guardian wrotein its more liberal days, i.e. when the capitalist system wasn’t threatened with having a socialist as Prime Minister, ‘Controversial proposals to deny asylum seekers rights to educate their children in British schools are facing a legal challenge because they breach human rights legislation.’ Blunkett wanted separate schools for asylum seekers in detention centres because that would make deportation easier.

Nick Blake QC wrote that:

‘'Blunkett's obnoxious language of "swamping" is unnecessary, inappropriate and offensive. How can a separate educational regime for asylum seeking children be other than discrimination?'

Another New Labour racist who signed the letter from the peers was Beverley Hughes, a former Immigration Minister. An article ‘Tough new asylum laws 'too draconian'in the Telegraphof all places described how‘New rules to strip asylum seekers of benefits were condemned as "draconian and appalling" by refugee campaigners.’ New Labour’s Beverley Hughes was quoted as saying that

‘It is a reasonable expectation that desperate people fleeing for their lives will claim asylum as soon as they can. It is not acceptable for people to claim asylum after being in Britain for weeks or months working illegally, simply as a way of staying on at the taxpayers' expense."

Labour peers advert in the Guardian

Here you see their racist logic in action. Asylum seekers are condemned for working illegally, having had their benefits removed and yet they are also condemned for staying on at the tax payer’s expense. In all the furore over the fake anti-Semitism people forget just how deeply racist these people were. ‘Anti-Semitism’ has brought people like Norman Tebbit even out of the woodwork and that is the best proof there is that if Tebbit and Trump condemn it, then it’s not anti-Semitism.

When people like Reid, Blunkett or Hughes condemn anti-Semitism, we should treat it in the same way as when Donald Trump tells 4 Black Congresswomen to go back to the home they never came from and then adds, for good measure, a condemnation of their ‘anti-Semitism’.

Anti-Semitism today is being weaponised by the Right and it is only fools and knaves like Momentum’s racist fuhrer Jon Lansman who refuses to see it.

That is why I support moves to break away from Momentum since the urgent need today as the vultures of the Right hover is for a fightback against those who weaponise anti-Semitism. Following the AGM of Brighton and Hove Momentum last night members of the Labour Party have decided to form the Left Alliance in Brighton and Hove since Momentum is incapable of fighting the witchhunt.

Tom Watson lost sleep over 'poor Phil Woolas' Labour's racist MP

Our enemies include, according to the Guardian, Labour Party staff who votedby 124-4 in favour of a motion condemning the Labour press office’s response to the BBC programme.

These are the same people who quite happily expelled and suspended thousands of people suspected of voting for Jeremy Corbyn. When the left gained a majority on the National Executive Committee there should have been a wholesale clearout of existing New Labour staff, both locally and in the HQ. It is still not too late.

It is not for the Labour Party’s civil service to dictate the politics of the Labour Party and the GMB should be told in no uncertain terms that any staff attempting to dictate the party’s response to the BBC’s Panorama programme, which contained the false and distorted ‘whistleblowing’ of Sam Matthews and company will be dismissed.

Below is an excellent article on the hypocrisy of Labour’s racist peers and their record of racism, by Aaron Bastani

The Labour Right Would Prefer a Johnson Government to a Corbyn One. It’s Time to Replace Them

by Aaron Bastani

This was the week when the British establishment, from right to centre, effectively conceded they would prefer a Boris Johnson premiership to a Jeremy Corbyn one. This includes the Labour establishment, of course, the highlight being an advert in the Guardian taken out by 64 Labour Lords criticising the party’s leadership.

It must be a new low for the Guardian when, in a manner resembling that of the Evening Standard, its commercial arm is indistinguishable from its editorial line. Rather than irritation or anger, the advert left me with a sense of befuddlement: why did Labour Lords pay £18K for negative coverage in a paper so willing to perform the service for free? Unelected legislators paying for newspaper inches in a ‘progressive’ outlet to attack a socialist leader of the opposition – just when you thought you’d seen it all, something else comes along.

The political hue of the signatories was predictable. One was Margaret McDonagh, the party’s general secretary from 1998 to 2001. It was during her tenure that Labour accepted a donation of £100K from Richard Desmond, then proprietor of the Daily Express and Daily Star. Not long after that contribution, which was known of only by McDonagh and the person who banked the cheque, the former general secretary joined Desmond’s operation as general manager of Express newspapers. Such largesse by the media lothario – whose Daily Star would champion the English Defence League in 2011– would be significantly outdone, however, when he later donated more than £1m to Ukip.
Another signatory was John Reid, home secretary during the New Labour years and arguably the most authoritarian figure to hold an office tailor-made for such a disposition. While the advert claims the Corbyn leadership has failed “to defend our party’s anti-racist values”, it was Reid who once announced he would target “foreigners [who] come to this country illegitimately and steal our benefits”. He also once boasted he was “throwing out more asylum seekers – failed asylum seekers – than ever before.” As ‘anti-racist’ rhetoric goes, it’s certainly original.

Indeed Reid’s ‘woke’ credentials go so far that he even once took a holiday with Radovan Karadzic– the man responsible for Europe’s most recent mass genocide at Srebrenica. Perhaps unsurprisingly for someone who wanted special prisons for refugees run by G4S, he proceeded to join the company after leaving government. Like McDonagh, Reid’s trajectory is that of the classic Blairite: unscrupulous bureaucrat to unsavoury lobbyist.

Then there is Baroness Morgan of Huyton – Sally Morgan to you and I. Morgan was once a trusted advisor to Tony Blair himself. So much so that – along with her then boss – she allegedly blocked the attorney-general from explaining to cabinet the small matter of the legality of the Iraq war. After leaving Downing Street in 2005, she became a non-executive director at Southern Cross Healthcare, leaving a year before the company went bust in 2012. She proceeded to become a senior non-executive director at Carillion, the outsourcing company, which also went into liquidation in early 2018 and is subject to an ongoing investigation by the Financial Reporting Council.

In short, many of the Lords associated with the Guardian advert represent the very worst elements of the Blair era. They are cronies who enabled a racist agenda on immigration; bag-carriers who misled a nation into an illegal war. Their reward is plum peerages with no scrutiny and plenty of perks.
Only days before the advert was published, five members of Labour’s national executive committee, including deputy leader Tom Watson, submitted a motion calling for rule changes to be enacted within the party. This included the demand that racism, sexism, misogyny, homophobia and transphobia are dealt with by “automatic exclusion” from Labour where there is “irrefutable evidence”. In an opportunistic ploy, typically bereft of considering actual implementation, it’s unclear what “irrefutable evidence” is on Planet Watson. Would Watson himself, for instance, have faced such a measure after running a racist campaign in the 2004 Hodge Hill by-election? After all, one of the leaflets in that very campaign claimed the Lib Dems “want to keep giving welfare benefits to failed asylum seekers. They voted for this in parliament on 1 March 2004. They want your money, and mine, to go to failed asylum seekers.”

What wasn’t mentioned in this campaign was that the policy in question was Labour’s plan to take asylum seekers’ children away from them and forcibly place them in care. For defending such a brutal, racist policy – and deploying the most audible of dog whistles while doing so – what does Mr Watson think should be his comeuppance?

And what would Watson suggest for his various colleagues, both past and present? Take David Blunkett, who was home secretary from 2001 to 2004. He once claimed asylum seekers’ children were “swamping” British schools. And then there’s Jack Straw – should he have been automatically expelled for overseeing the introduction of discriminatory visa policies for Roma people of Slovakian and Czech heritage in 2001? Or perhaps he could offer input regarding Phil Woolas? Ahead of the 2010 general election, the former MP’s team spoke internally of needing to get “the white vote angry”. Such an impulse was the basis for a campaign so ridden with racially inflammatory lies that shortly after winning, two high court judges determined Woolas had acted unlawfully and called for a fresh election. His punishment in the intervening period? A promotion. Watson’s response, rather than to decry his colleague’s lack of a moral compass, was to declare that the judges’ decision was one “we will all regret” and that he had “lost sleep thinking about poor old Phil Woolas”.

Remarkably Woolas’s son, Josh Woolas, was one of the 200 “current and former Labour staff and supporters” who condemned Labour’s handling of last week’s Panorama documentary in a recent letter. Did he pen anything when his own father’s campaign explicitly aimed at getting the ‘white vote’ angry? I suspect you know the answer to that. Interestingly, he participated in his own smear campaign in 2016. Like father, like son.

But even more absurd than the Guardian advert and Watson’s motion is the fact we now know it was former general secretary Iain McNicol who made the former party staffers on Panorama sign their non-disclosure agreements. This means the ‘whistle-blowers’ appeared on the same programme, saying the same thing, as the man who had allegedly curtailed their ability to speak the truth. Of course John Ware, who produced the programme, didn’t deem that detail important enough to mention.

Confronted with an increasingly deranged Labour right and their allies in parts of the media, it’s important to grasp what all of this represents: a last ditch effort to stifle any chance of a Corbyn-led Labour government. This now has an added urgency given that a general election looks increasingly imminent. The default approach of the Labour leadership so far, not unwisely, has been to ride such provocations while getting on with the slow business of transforming the party. But the reality is without mandatory re-selection it’s difficult to see how the leadership can maintain a semblance of party cohesion, especially in government.

Every single Labour MP now needs to face a trigger ballot as soon as the opportunity arises. Why? Because there is absolutely no chance of a successful political programme aiming to deal with Britain’s biggest problems – from rising racism to falling wages – with many of these people as Labour MPs. The last ten days have proven that beyond all reasonable doubt.

Published 18th July 2019.

↧

Open Letter to Jon Lansman - the Proprietor and Owner of Momentum

July 19, 2019, 4:49 am

≫ Next: Complaint to the BBC regarding the Panorama programme of Wednesday 9th July 2019

≪ Previous: The Only Decent Journalist on the Guardian is their Cartoonist – Steve Bell

Is there anyone left on the Left that you haven't yet betrayed?

Dear Jon Lansman,

Sorry for not having written for some time but this is to let you know that I’ve cancelled my son’s subscription to Momentum which I took out to enable him to vote at the local Brighton and Hove Momentum AGM.

There doesn’t really seem to be much point in belonging to Momentum any longer does there? Momentum was established to defend the Jeremy Corbyn leadership of the Labour Party but ever since you got into bed with the Jewish Labour Movement, Margaret Hodge and those making false accusations of ‘anti-Semitism’ against socialists, anti-Zionists and anti-racists, Momentum has become, how shall I put it, somewhat irrelevant.

Given the almost daily attacks by Tom Watson on the Corbyn leadership one might have expected you to break your trappist silence. Indeed the question on many peoples’ lips is ‘what is Momentum for’?

I understand that this is the reason for the recent haemorrhage in Momentum membership. There was a time when you boasted every week about how many new members you had. Perhaps you might confirm whether or not it is true that membership has slipped from a peak of over 40,000 to under 30,000 now?

I notice that you have been very quiet about the 64 Peers, New Labour leftovers and corporate lobbyists who paid for a full page advert in the Guardian two days ago calling on Jeremy to resign.

Surely you don’t find it difficult to point out the racist record of former Home Secretary John Reid who protested that Jeremy had failed to ‘to defend our party’s anti-racist values’. This is the same John Reid who boasted about ‘throwing out"record numbers of asylum seekers’ and who hoped to make life "constrained and uncomfortable" for illegal immigrants. Yes the hostile environment policy didn’t start with Theresa May.

Indeed your silence in the face of Tom Watson’s attacks on Chris Williamson and Jenny Formby are equally puzzling, except for the fact that you have attacked the former and kept silent over the latter.

Watson is the person who defended Phil Woolas MP when two judges from the High Court removed him as an MP for lying about an opponent in the 2010 General Election. Woolas’s election campaign was based on‘making the white folk angry’.

Tom Watson, the great campaigner against ‘anti-Semitism’ ‘lost sleep over poor Phil’ but perhaps that is because he ran a similar campaign in the 2004 Birmingham Hodge Hill by-election putting out leaflets that said‘"Labour is on your side, the Lib Dems are on the side of failed asylum seekers."

Indeed despite Tom Watson’s professed concerns about ‘anti-Semitism’ there was more than a whiff of the stuff in his houndingof Leon Brittan over allegations of paedophillia. You will remember that Brittan was dying of cancer at the time. As Nick Cohen wrote: ‘When he hounded a dying man to his grave, Watson sank lower than the News of the Worldreporters he and Hacked Off once fought.’ As we saw with Jenny Formby, Tom Watson likes to attack those who are suffering from cancer.

If you still don’t feel confident in defending Jeremy Corbyn against allegations of ‘anti-Semitism’ can I suggest that you read Aaron Bastani’s excellent articleon the background to these hypocritical racists or indeed Skwawkbox.

Your silence over the continual attacks on Corbyn can only be explained by the fact that you have reached the conclusion that he too must go. After all you have stabbed virtually everyone else you once befriend – from Christine Shawcroft to Peter Willsman - in the back.

You first came to my attention as someone who was active in the campaigns to elect Tony Benn as Deputy Leader and later Leader of the Labour Party. I suspect that if Tony were alive today and saw how you were deliberately undermining and helping to destroy the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn, something which unfortunately Tony did not live long enough to see, then he would have no hesitation in denouncing you as just another in the long line of left-wingers who had betrayed those who put their trust in them.

Finally I have still not forgiven you for describingme as “probably the rudest person I know in politics. He says many offensive things, most of the time”. There is no excuse for qualifying your description of me with ‘probably.’ When it comes to calling out traitors, backsliders, opportunists and hypocrites I pride myself on not speaking in clichés or euphemisms . Suffice to say you qualify on all counts.

Yours truly,

Tony Greenstein

↧

Complaint to the BBC regarding the Panorama programme of Wednesday 9th July 2019

July 20, 2019, 3:51 pm

≫ Next: The Orwellian World of the Guardian/Observer - How Lies Become the Established Truth

≪ Previous: Open Letter to Jon Lansman - the Proprietor and Owner of Momentum

100+ Questions which demonstrate why Panorama’s ‘Is Labour Anti-Semitic’ was presented by a racist bigot whose aim was clear - to help the campaign to remove Corbyn

The Questions Can Also Be Found Here

I have submitted the following complaint to the BBC following its ‘Is Labour Anti-Semitic’Panorama programme on Wednesday July 10^th. The fact that Tom Watson, instead of giving support to Corbyn, immediately latched onto this programme’s false accusations, presented by the BBC’s Islamaphobe –in-chief John Ware, demonstrates why Watson is not fit to be a dog catcher let alone Deputy Leader of the Labour Party.

See also the Canary’s Read Labour’s full complaint to the BBC as tensions flare over Panorama’s antisemitism episode. The fact that the BBC is standing by this appalling programme tells you everything you need to know about BBC bias.

Jeremy Corbyn is lectured by racists on anti-racist values

This programme by itself explains why the BBC needs to be reformed from the top down. The anti-socialist, racist bias of this institution needs to be combated. The idea that the BBC is ‘independent’ needs to be jettisoned.

Since originally writing this we have had a full-page advert in the Guardianfrom 60 Labour lords calling on Corbyn to fall on his sword because of his toleration of ‘anti-Semitism’ These unelected lords are thinking of having a vote of no confidence in Corbyn. The real question is why do they think we have any confidence in them.

Among the signatories was one of the most racist bigots of New Labour (& there was stiff competition) former Home Secretary John Reid. Reid was quoted by the BBC in 2007 as railing against asylum seekers. He was called an Alf Garnett figure by the Lib Dems home affairs spokesman, Nick Clegg. Reid was quoted as saying that

‘A clampdown has been launched targeting "foreigners [who] come to this country illegitimately and steal our benefits. The plan is to stop illegal immigrants getting housing, healthcare or work.’

Reid said that the UK was now "throwing out" record numbers of asylum seekers and he hoped to make life "constrained and uncomfortable" for illegal immigrants.

This is the type of person who is now lecturing Jeremy Corbyn, a life-long anti-racist about ‘anti-Semitism’. It makes you want to puke. The hypocrisy of these people is breathtaking.

When Labour MP Phil Woolas was removed by the High Court in 2010 for waging a blatantly racist campaign against the Lib Dems ‘which sought to make the White folk angry’Tom Watson wrote that ‘I’ve lost sleep thinking about poor old Phil Woolas and his leaflets.’ This is the level of sincerity and integrity of those campaigning to paint Jeremy Corbyn as an anti-Semite.

When Margaret Hodge professes to be concerned about anti-Semitism we should ask her why she advocated a policy on reserving council houses for ‘locals’ i.e. whites in her Barking constituency such that the BNP congratulated her and sent her a bunch of flowers! The same Margaret Hodge who as Council leader in Islington covered up child abuse in council homes and defamed one of those victims. Demetrious Panton such that she had to pay him £30,000 in libel damages.

Our enemies are hypocrites to a man and woman and that is why we should not have any truck with Jon Lansman who has given aid and comfort to these creatures.

Below I have submitted over 100 questions concerning the Panorama programme.

Tony Greenstein

BBC Complaints
PO Box 1922
Darlington
DL3 0UR

Dear Sir or Madam,

I wish to make a complaint about the Panorama programme ‘Is Labour Anti-Semitic’ that was broadcast on Wednesday 9^th July. I am well aware of the standard, pro-forma response you have already sent to complainants. Please do not bother sending it to me. I have read it and it is wholly inadequate, trite and clichéd. I expect you to answer the specific points I am making and to stop trying to avoid the justifiable criticisms of you that I and others are making.

The BBC’s Complaints system is or should be about examining where things have gone wrong and how to put them right. Unfortunately your complaints system, which has no independent oversight, seems to have but one concern – the protection of the BBC from complaints and criticism, thus reinforcing its existing bias.

The BBC has always been an establishment body, born in the womb of the State. Its journalists and news staff are largely conservative, public school educated and wedded to a version of politics that upholds the existing political, social and economic system. From the General Strike to the Great Miners’ Strike the BBC has always sided with the rich against the poor, the powerful against the weak.

The Panorama programme Is Labour Anti-Semitic was the most biased, tendentious, dishonest and politically driven programme I have ever seen. What it lacked in evidence it made up for with assertion and unsupported allegations. Its disregard for the truth was clear from the outset. Although its title was framed as a question, it was clear that this was mere rhetoric. As John Prine put it, ‘a question ain’t really a question when you know the answer too!’

I will, unusually, begin with your ‘defence’ to what you clearly expected would be a deluge of complaints. The fact that you prepared in advance a standard response demonstrates the contempt the BBC has both for its viewers and the truth.

i. I do not accept that your refusal to respond to complainants individually is because of a desire to ‘use our licence fee resources as efficiently as possible’. The BBC’s waste of licence payers’ money is legendary. Money spent on accountability to those who pay the licence fee should be the last area for cutbacks. This is nothing more than a self-serving lie, a pretext to avoid scrutiny.

ii. Naturally you ‘completely reject any accusations of bias or dishonesty.’ One would not expect anything else. Donald Trump claims that he doesn’t have a ‘racist bone in his body.’ The evidence suggests otherwise.

iii. You claim that you ‘explored a topic of undoubted public interest, broadcasting powerful and disturbing testimonies from party members who’d suffered anti-Semitic abuse.’ No the members in question allegedthat they had suffered anti-Semitic abuse. They presented no proof whatsoever and they should be viewed with extreme scepticism.

iv. The party members whose views you ‘explored’ came from a single and narrow Zionist political group, the Jewish Labour Movement. You didn’t interview a single Jewish member of the Labour Party who wasn’t a Zionist or a supporter of the Israeli State.

v. It is true that you ‘heard from former Labour officials, some of whom defied non-disclosure agreements to speak out about their experiences inside the Party and its anti-Semitism crisis.’ The fact that these officials signed NDA’s does not however mean that they were telling the truth or that they didn’t have their own agenda. Your failure to treat their claims with any level of scepticism suggests that you share their agenda.

vi. You say you gave a ‘full right of reply to the Labour Party.’ I disagree. Given the tendentious and relentlessly one-sided nature of the broadcast it would have been impossible for any right of reply to have dealt with the programme’s in-built bias. Since you did not supply the Labour Party with a copy of the programme before it was broadcast it was impossible that they could have adequately responded.

vii. Your programme defamed ordinary members of the Labour Party, including its many Jewish members, who didn’t agree with those whom you carefully selected to give ‘evidence’.

John Ware - the BBC's Islamaphobe-in-chief

viii. You say that ‘John Ware is a highly experienced and respected investigative journalist.’ John Ware is a former Sun journalist, a racist and Islamaphobe who is on the record as saying [Why the I-word has closed down debate on extremism, Jewish Chronicle 26.7.13. that whereas anti-Semitism is ‘entirely irrational’ Islamaphobia, if it exists, is ‘reactive’. It is no wonder that Ware won the Islamic Human Rights Commission’s Islamaphobe of the Year award in 2005.

ix. No one, apart perhaps from ‘journalist’ Tommy Robinson, could have been less suitable to present this programme than John Ware. Ware made a hostile and biased Panorama programme, Jeremy Corbyn: Labour’s Earthquake in 2015 even before he became leader. The Independent reported that ‘Jeremy Corbyn's team send a complaint to the BBC over its 'hatchet job' Panorama programme’.

x. ‘The significance’ as you put it of the email from Seumas Milne is that you deliberately excised part of it in order to create a false and misleading impression. You omitted all reference to Jews who had been disciplined for ‘anti-Semitism’. If Ware had been interested in a serious investigation he might have asked why people like myself and Jackie Walker had been expelled. Instead of portraying Jackie as some kind of disembodied alien he would have interviewed both of us and Marc Wadsworth, who was disgracefully framed.

xi. Your claim to have relied on ‘a significant body of evidence, some of which could not be included in the broadcast programme for reasons of source protection’ is unverifiable. What is clear is that you have ignored a much greater body of evidence that the anti-Semitism crisis as you call it has been a confected and artificial crisis in which Jewish and Black anti-racists have been the prime target.

I am therefore submitting to you a series of questions which form part of the overall complaint.

Yours

Tony Greenstein

My 105 Questions re Panorama’s Is Labour anti-Semitic?

The programme opened with Ella Rose of the Jewish Labour Movement telling us that she had been the victim of such terrible anti-Semitism in the Labour Party that she couldn’t ask someone she cared about to attend Labour Party meetings. Someone apparently screamed in her face when she was giving out leaflets at Labour Party conference.

Ella Rose

1. Why did you not name or caption Ella Rose?

2. Were you aware of Ms Rose’s history as an Israeli Embassy staffer and Director of the Jewish Labour Movement [JLM]?

3. Why did you not mention that she was the former Director of the Jewish Labour Movement and a former worker at the Israeli Embassy?

4. Why did you not think that was relevant?

5. Were you aware that Ms Rose also featured in Al Jazeera’s undercover documentary The Lobby?

6. Were you aware that Ms Rose was filmedmaking threats of violenceagainst another Jewish member of the Labour Party, Jackie Walker?

7. How is Ms Rose’s portrayal in Panorama as a innocent victim of anti-Semitism compatible with her threats of violence against another Jewish person and her boasting that she could attack someone nearly three times her age because she is ‘tiny’?

8. Do you agree that in hindsight this throws doubt on Ms Rose’s claims that she is an innocent victim of anti-Semitism?

9. If you weren’t aware of Ms Rose’s background and her portrayal in The Lobby, making threats of physical violence, then what due diligence did you do?

10. Why was Ella Rose not questioned about her allegations of anti-Semitism and asked for specifics? For example who was the person who ‘screamed’ at her? Did she make a complaint at the time?

11. Did you ask what were the leaflets she was giving out? Perhaps they were justifying Israel’s brutal and murderous attacks on Palestinians and that someone understandably disagreed with her? This would have nothing to do with anti-Semitism but as you failed to ask the relevant questions we will never know.

12. Were you not interested in the details of her allegations and did you prefer all the allegations to be as general and unspecific as possible?

The Jewish Labour Movement

13. Seven Jewish Labour Party members appeared in the programme. All seven were not only members of the JLM but officers of this organisation. Were you aware of this fact?

14. If not why not?

15. If you were aware of their membership of the JLM, which seems likely, why did the programme deceive its viewers by omitting to mention this fact?

16. If you weren’t aware of their membership of the JLM how were these seven Jewish Labour Party members chosen? The fact that they knew each other and were part of the same group cannot simply be coincidence.

17. What direct contacts with the JLM did Panorama and John Ware have?

18. Was the programme planned jointly with the JLM?

19. Did you discuss its format with the JLM beforehand?

20. Why did you not seek to interview other Jewish Labour Party members who held different opinions to those of the JLM?

21. Why did you make no attempt to interview members of Jewish Voices for Labour for example? Large numbers of Jewish members of the Labour Party, being a left-wing anti-racist party, are not Zionists. Isn’t it strange that you didn’t manage to interview a single non-Zionist Jewish person?

22. Did you think that interviewing non-Zionist or anti-Zionist Jews might spoil your narrative?

23. Would it have been inconvenient if not embarrassing to have Jewish people on the programme who disagreed with John Ware’s strongly held belief that Jeremy Corbyn is anti-Semitic?

24. The title of the programme was ‘Is Labour Anti-Semitic?’. What attempt did you make to interview people who did not believe it was anti-Semitic?

25. Why did you not attempt to achieve any balance and have supporters of Jeremy Corbyn, including Jewish supporters, who would refute the false assertion that he was anti-Semitic?

26. Did Panorama find it difficult to make contact with any of the 29 Jewish rabbiswho last year signed a statement supporting Jeremy Corbyn? What attempts did you make to contact them?

27. Why did Panorama not interview the well-known Jewish Chronicle and Jewish Telegraph columnist Dr Geoffrey Alderman, who is himself a Zionist, of Buckingham University, who wrote an article in The Spectator recently,Is Jeremy Corbyn really anti-Semitic?, rebutting the absurd accusations that Jeremy Corbyn is an anti-Semite? Would this have been too embarrassing for the BBC and John Ware?

28. Did you make a conscious decision not to present at any evidence running counter to your narrative?

29. How do you reconcile this with the BBC’s duty to impartiality?

30. Do you intend to run another programme countering John Ware’s thesis that Corbyn is anti-Semitic?

Other forms of Racism

31. According to the Pew Global Attitudes Survey 2016negative opinions about Muslims and Roma in the UK are 28% and 45% respectively compared to 7% for anti-Semitism. Why is it that Panorama has not made programmes about these forms of racism and asked whether the Tory party is institutionally Islamaphobic or anti-Roma?

32. Is the reason for Panorama’s disinterest in these forms of racism due to the fact that Jeremy Corbyn cannot be accused of them?

33. Do you have a reason for preferring to concentrate on anti-Semitism rather than other forms of racism?

34. Is your reluctance to Panorama do a special on the background to the Windrush Scandal have anything to do with the assertion that opposition to the State of Israel and Zionism is anti-Semitic?

35. Why has Panorama not seen fit to do a documentary on the hostile environment policy of Theresa May?

36. In the programme John Ware asked Mike Creighton and others ‘do you believe Jeremy Corbyn is an anti-Semite’ despite there being not a shred of evidence, from anything he has ever said, to suggest that he is. Can you envisage a programme, for example on Windrush, in which you asked the same question about Theresa May?

37. Why in her valedictory interviewwith Theresa May why did Laura Kuenssberg not ask Theresa May about her hostility to immigrants with special reference to the hostile environment policy, Windrush and Grenfell Tower?

38. Given that the former head of the civil service, Sir Bob Kerslake, said that Theresa May’s attitude to migrants was seen by some other Tory Ministers as “almost reminiscent of Nazi Germany”why did Ms Kuenssberg not pursue this line of inquiry?

39. Does the BBC have a blind spot when it comes to racism in the Conservative party?

40. Is racism against Black people, Roma and Muslims more acceptable to Panorama than anti-Semitism? Is that the explanation for your disinterest in them?

Raed Salah

41. John Ware stated that ‘Corbyn campaigned toallow anotoriously anti-Semitic preacher Raed Salah into Britain who had called Jews the ‘germs of all time’ and blamed them for 9/11.’ These assertions are untrue and have been found to be untrue by a British court but Panorama’s audience would not have known this fact. Will you retract these lies and apologise to both Raed Salah and Jeremy Corbyn?

42. It is untrue that Jeremy Corbyn did not campaign to allow Raed Salah into the country because he had already entered Britain unhindered despite Theresa May having issued an order preventing his entry. Corbyn campaigned for Raed Salah to be released from custody in order that he could continue with his speaking tour. How did John Ware manage to get such a simple fact wrong?

43. The allegation that Raed Salah was anti-Semitic and had called Jews ‘germs’ or made other anti-Semitic comments were shown during the hearings before the First and Upper Immigration Tribunals to be untrue. These allegations were based on the doctoring of a poem by the Jerusalem Post. This was the reason that the Upper Immigration Tribunal overturned Theresa May’s deportation order.

These are matters of fact and were widely reported for exampleTheresa May's haste to ban Raed Salah will be repented at leisure, Guardian 9.4.12. All4 charges were thrown outby the Vice-President of the Upper Immigration Tribunal, Mr Justice Ockleton who ruledthat Theresa May‘was misled as to the terms of the poem written by the appellant, a matter on which there is now no room for dispute.’ Why was it that John Ware chose to ignore the ruling of a British court, which was upheld by the High Court?

44. Was John Ware of the facts surrounding Raed Salah’s entry to Britain and his attempted deportation? If so why did he not report them?

45. If John Ware was unaware of the above facts then doesn’t this cast a shadow of doubt over the whole Panorama programme?

46. Are you disputing the findings of the Upper Immigration Tribunal as upheld by the High Court with your egregious comments?

47. Will you withdraw your allegations and apologise for them?

48. Does John Ware not believe in doing basic research before making a programme containing serious accusations of anti-Semitism? Why did Ware make these bigoted and slanderous comments without researching what had actually happened?

49. Why did John Ware allege that Raed Salah was a ‘notorious anti-Semitic preacher’ when the Upper Immigration Tribunal found that the allegations of anti-Semitism against him were false?

50. Was this another case of a former Sun journalist plying his old trade and playing fast and loose with the facts?

51. Was John Ware aware that Raed Salah is the leader of a significant proportion of Israeli Palestinians who have suffered extreme discrimination in Israel including persistent attempts to hinder their ability to pray at the Al Aqsa and Golden Dome mosques.

52. Would you accept that John Ware’s demonization of Raed Salah is an example of the very racism that he purported to decry?

53. Was the affair of Raed Salah merely another convenient Islamaphobic stick with which Ware could beat Jeremy Corbyn?

54. The principal sourceaccording to The Guardian 9.4.12. ‘for the decision to ban him, according to witnesses who testified in court for the Home Office, was a report compiled by the CST.’

55. Given the unreliability of the Community Security Trust, an overtly Zionist organisation with close links to Israel’s Mossad (MI6) why did the programme use its Deputy Director, Dave Rich, as one of its two expert witnesses?

56. After being freed from detention, Raed Salah wrote an article Britain's duty to the Palestinian people in the Guardian 19.4.12. in which he wrote:

‘‘I have no doubt that, despite this, [his arrest and detention on the basis of false evidence] Israel's cheerleaders in Britain will continue to smear my character. This is the price every Palestinian leader and campaigner is forced to pay.’

Does the BBC accept that John Ware’s lies about Raed Salah constitute a good example of this smearing?

Izzy Lenga and the Jewish Labour Movement

57. Allegations were made by Izzy Lenga, the International Officer of the JLM, that Holocaust denial was discussed at her Labour Party meetings. No detail was provided of this wild allegation, for example which CLP was this was taking place in? This seems to be a blatant lie, a flight of fantasy.

The idea that Labour Party meetings would debate whether the Holocaust had happened or declare that Hitler didn’t go far enough is inconceivable. Did Ms Lenga make any complaint about what had happened? If not, why not?

58. Why was Ms Lenga not questioned as to any specific details to establish whether in fact this happened?

59. Were the seven JLM members encouraged to make whatever allegation first came into their heads, however unlikely or fantastic?

60. Why were none of the seven Jewish ‘victims’ questioned about what had allegedly happened?

61. What kind of programme is it that allows those it interviews to simply make allegations without any attempt to verify them or subject them to scrutiny?

62. It would appear that supporters of Israel were given carte blanche to invent any allegation that came into their heads without ever being challenged. Do you agree and if not why not?

Ben Westerman

63. Ben Westerman, an investigator into the Riverside CLP stated that during the course of an interview he was asked if he came from Israel. A recording of the interview makes it clear that this was a lie and that Westerman was asked which branch of the Labour Party he came from. Johny Begg’s Facebook page,

64. Do you accept that Westerman’s assertion was untrue?

65. If not why not?

66. What attempts did John Ware and the programme’s researchers make to verify these assertions and was any attempt to interview those in Riverside CLP who were subject to Westerman’s investigation?

The Zionists’ ‘Anti-racist’ Demonstration

67. The programme began with footage of the Zionist ‘Enough is Enough’ demonstration outside the Houses of Parliament in March 2018. Why was no mention made of the JVL counter-demonstration.

68. Was it not thought important that there were hundreds of Jews and others who were opposed to what was seen as a racist, Zionist demonstration?

69. Would the opposition of anti-Zionist and non-Zionist Jews to this demonstration have spoiled Ware’s narrative?

70. Why was no mention made of the fact that Norman Tebbit of the ‘cricket test’ fame and Ian Paisley of the sectarian DUP were present?

71. Does this not run counter to the claim that this demonstration was about anti-racism and anti-Semitism?

72. Can you think of another ‘anti-racist’ demonstration that either of these two gentlemen have ever attended?

73. The BBC focussed on a group of far-Right Zionistsin particular Jonathan Hoffman and Harry Markham of Young Herut. Were you aware of these people and their antecedents?

Kat Buckinham and Labour’s ‘Whistleblowers’

74. One of the ‘whistleblowers’ you interviewed was Kat Buckingham whose confessed to being frustrated at not being able to suspend people at will. This is the same Kat Buckingham who investigated Brighton and Hove Labour Party when it was suspended in 2016 over bogus charges of spitting at its AGM. Ms Buckingham refused to even watch CCTV evidence proving the spitting allegation to be false. Why did you not interview people who had been the sharp end of Ms Buckingham’s ‘investigations’?

75. Ms Buckingham and Sam Matthews denied they were Blairites out to exact revenge but it is common knowledge that their team suspended thousands of people on suspicion of being Corbyn supporters during the leadership elections in 2015 and 2016. Why did you not think that this was relevant?

76. Did the programme makers feel that mention of the ‘whistleblowers’ actual records of suspending and expelling people might undermine their stories of having only been concerned about anti-Semitism?

77. Were the ‘whistleblowers’ ever asked whether or not they had ever suspended or expelled Labour Party members for Islamaphobia or other forms of racism?

78. Were the ‘whistleblowers’ ever asked whether or not they had ever suspended or expelled Labour Party members for supporting Jeremy Corbyn?

79. Were the ‘whistleblowers’ ever asked why such a high proportion of those suspended/expelled for ‘anti-Semitism’ were Jewish and Black/Asian?

80. Were the staff ‘whistleblowers’ asked whether or not they had considered suspending John Mann MP, who harangued Ken Livingstone, for publishing a vehemently anti-Roma handbook on anti-social behaviour?

81. Why were the ‘whistleblowers’ not asked why they did not consider suspending Tom Watson, Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, for having supported racist Labour MP Phil Woolas? Woolas was removedas an MP by the High Court in 2010 for having lied about his Lib Dem opponent in the General Election. Woolas fought a racist campaign to ‘make the white folk angry’ and Watson gave him full support confessing that ‘I’ve lost sleep thinking about poor old Phil Woolas’.

82. Why were the Labour Party ‘whistleblowers’ not asked why Tom Watson, who ran a racist campaign during a 2004 by-election in Hodge Hill, where he claimed that ‘"Labour is on your side, the Lib Dems are on the side of failed asylum seekers." was not suspended?

83. Did Panorama not think of asking why there has never been any disciplinary action against racist White Labour politicians such as Tom Watson?

84. Could this be because ‘racism’ against White people is more interesting?

85. One of those prominent in the false allegations of anti-Semitism is John Mann MP. Mann brought out a Bassetlaw Guide to Anti-Social Behaviour The contents list Travellers alongside Rubbish, Alcohol, Grafitti and Fireworks as an example of anti-social nuisances. Were Labour’s ‘whistleblowers’ ever asked whether they had considered suspending John Mann? If not why not?

Alan Johnson of ‘BICOM’

86. The second ‘expert witness’ that the programme dredged up was Professor Alan Johnson. Johnson is not Jewish and he has no special knowledge of anti-Semitism. He is the Editor of Fathom, the journal of BICOM,the main Israeli propaganda organisation in Britain. He is a Zionist. Why was this information concealed?

87. Did John Ware deliberately set out to mislead viewers by not providing Johnson’s political and professional background?

88. If not how can Ware explain his parading of Johnson as a neutral expert when he was nothing of the sort?

Sam Matthews

89. Sam Matthews was allowed to explain his frustrations at not being able to expel at will anyone he deemed anti-Semitic. Why was Matthews not subject to cross-examination in:

i. Suspending thousands of pro-Corbyn members for the ‘crime’ of supporting the ‘wrong’ candidate in 2015 and 2016?

ii. the suspension of Glyn Secker, Secretary of Jewish Voices for Labour?

iii. the expulsion of Professor Moshe Machover in October 2017? This expulsion was retracted after a world wide campaign against the victimisation of this Israeli professor by renowned academics in Moshe’s field of mathematics.

iv. Would this have run counter to the programme’s narrative of Labour ‘anti-Semitism’?

90. Why was no mention made of Matthews partiality in expelling or suspending Jewish members of the Labour Party for ‘anti-Semitism’?

91. I was the first Jewish member of the Labour Party to be suspended in March 2016. I was given no explanation as to what it was that I had said that merited suspension. Two weeks later, April 2 2016 I learnt from leaks to the Telegraphand The Times that I had been suspended because of the fake ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign in the Labour Party. The details of my case and many other future cases were leaked by the Compliance Unit and Sam Matthews. Why was no mention made of the fact that Sam Matthews was a notorious leaker of confidential data despite this practice being condemned in the Chakrabarti Report?

John Ware

92. John Ware has a history of hostility to Muslims and attempting to paint them as terrorists and terrorist supporters. His programme A Question of Leadershipin 2005 attracted 600 complaints in its first week. Ware tried to link a Palestinian charity Interpalto Hamas, an allegation which had already led to a successful libel action against the Daily Mail and an apology and damages from the Board of Deputies of British Jews.

In Panorama or PropagandaFaisal Bodi documented Ware’s Islamaphobic journalism. Arzu Merali also documented the Islamaphobia of Ware in The banality and boredom of anti-Muslim witchhunts. Or beware John Warefor Middle East Eye, 29.3.18. Madeleine Bunting in The Guardian described in Throwing mud at MuslimsWare’s journalistic method as being one of ‘Branding moderates as extremists’ and gave as an example his targeting of Sir Iqbal Sacranie of the Muslim Council of Britain. She described his behaviour as McCarthyite. Do you agree and if not why not?

93. The MCB described Ware as an ‘‘an agenda-driven pro-Israeli polemicist.’ Do you agree, given his attempt to describe Interpal as a terrorist supporting charity and his failure to make any criticism of Israel’s racist behaviour towards the Palestinians?

94. Does not John Ware’s repeated writing in the racist Jewish Chronicle, edited by far-Right former Expresseditor Stephen Pollard not suggest that he has a hidden agenda?

95. John Ware’s latest article in the Jewish Chronicle is entitled 'If Labour wants a fight, bring it on,'says Panorama's John Ware. Leaving aside the Clint Eastwood rhetoric, is this the kind of neutrality that the BBC encourages in its journalists?

96. Perhaps you can explain why John Ware attacks even the most moderate Muslims as ‘extremists’ whilst defending racists and bigots such as Douglas Murray, author of ‘The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam’in an article in the Jewish Chronicle (26.7.13.) Why the I-word has closed down debate on extremism

97. During the course of a one-sided attack on Ken Livingstone when recounting his statement that ‘Hitler supported Zionism’ John Ware described his view of history as ‘cranky’. Perhaps you can explain what qualifications in history Ware has which enables him to pass this historical judgement? Is he a trained historian?

98. Since when is it the job of a presenter to pass a view on a particular historical period as fact?

99. David Cesarani, a Zionist historian, wrote in his book The Final Solution p.96 that ‘‘The efforts of the Gestapo are oriented to promoting Zionism as much as possible and lending support to its efforts to promote emigration.’ Do you agree that John Ware, the former Sun journalist, had no right, still less qualifications, to describe Ken Livingstone’s views as ‘cranky’. Some believe that this adjective best applies to Ware’s views of Muslims.

100. In an article for a right-wing magazine Standpoint (27.6.17) Enough is enough of terror — but also of our self-doubtWare wrote that ‘Western civilisation is itself based on Christianity, which enshrines individualism and freedom.’ This was in contrast to Islam which is an ‘ideology’.

In making this contrast Ware demonstrates that he is a narrow minded bigot as well as historically illiterate. It was ‘Christian’ Europe which was the site of the Holocaust not the Arab or Muslim world. Anti-Semitism was strongest in the most devout Christian states such as Poland, Rumania, Slovakia and Hungary. During the second world war Christian anti-Semitism allied with Nazi anti-Semitism throughout Europe.

Do you agree that in hindsight employing an arch bigot and Islamaphobe, as well as someone who is historically illiterate, to present a programme on ‘anti-Semitism’ was a mistake?

101. In the same article for Standpoint John Ware wrote that the Conservative Party’s

‘family quarrel over Europe... risks letting in a Labour leader whose entire political career has been stimulated by disdain for the West, appeasement of extremism, and who would barely understand what fighting for the revival of British values is really all about.’

These heavily prejudiced and ignorant remarks clearly mark out John Ware as unfit to comment on a greyhound race let alone the leader of the Labour Party. Do you therefore agree that John Ware was the worst possible choice of presenter for the recent Panorama programme?

102. Will you now rectify your mistake with a programme focussing on genuine racism in British society and Jeremy Corbyn’s role in having fought racism throughout his political life?

103. If not, why not?

104. What confidence can we have that John Ware will not be allowed to roam through the BBC studios in the future defaming all this imagined opponents?

105. It is difficult to imagine anyone less suitable than John Ware present a programme on anti-Semitism or any form of racism. If you continue to defend him, can you tell us if you have any plans to employ the Yorkshire Ripper to present a programme on the evils of violence against women?

The Grid

This grid effect was used to make those accused of 'antisemitism' appear sinister

106. I am curious why those whom you deemed anti-Semitic such as Corbyn, Jackie Walker, Livingstone and Thomas Gardiner appeared with a grid or vertical lines superimposed on their images? Why were these special effects employed and was it in order to create an impression of them being disembodied and not quite human?

I look forward to receiving your response and your explanation of how you intend to remedy your failings.

Kind regards,

Tony Greenstein

This is the BBC’s Standard Response to Complaints About Panorama’s – Is Labour Anti-Semitic?

Dear Mrs Halfpenny

Thanks for taking the time to get in touch regarding ‘Panorama – IsLabourAnti-Semitic?’ broadcast 10 July on BBC One. We note you have concerns about the programme.

To allow us to reply promptly to your concerns, and to ensure we use our licence fee resources as efficiently as possible, we’re sending this response to everyone. We’re sorry that for this reason we can’t reply personally to you on each point which has been made.

The BBC stands by its journalism and we completely reject any accusations of bias or dishonesty.

Panorama, broadcast 10 July, explored a topic of undoubted public interest, broadcasting powerful and disturbing testimonies from party members who’d suffered anti-Semitic abuse. We also heard from former Labour officials, some of whom defied non-disclosure agreements to speak out about their experiences inside the Party and its anti-Semitism crisis. This shows the serious questions facing the party and its leadership on this issue.

The programme adhered to the BBC’s editorial guidelines, including a full right of reply for the Labour Party.

John Ware is a highly experienced and respected investigative journalist, whose track record includes critically-acclaimed and award-winning reports.

We reject any claims Panorama took any of the evidence out of context.

The significance of the email from Seumas Milne is that it showed one of the most powerful figures in the LabourParty expressing concern about the handling of anti-Semitism complaints and suggesting the wider process should be reviewed. This goes contrary to the Labour Party’s claims that this process was independent of the Leader’s Office. The impact of this email on those dealing with the complaints process was made clear in the eyewitness testimony shown in the programme.

As is the nature of such investigations, the BBC has relied on a significant body of evidence, some of which could not be included in the broadcast programme for reasons of source protection and space.

Thanks again for getting in touch.

Kind Regards

BBC Complaints Team
www.bbc.co.uk/complaints

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The Orwellian World of the Guardian/Observer - How Lies Become the Established Truth

July 21, 2019, 9:24 am

≫ Next: Corbyn’s Latest Anti-Semitism Proposals Prove that He is a Victim of the Stockholm Syndrome

≪ Previous: Complaint to the BBC regarding the Panorama programme of Wednesday 9th July 2019

According to The Observer it is an Established Fact that John Ware’s Panorama Programme 'Is Labour Antisemitic' is ‘Damning’

One of the nastiest Blairites who presided over a racist immigration policy is nonetheless concerned about 'antisemitism'

According to today’s Observer, in a report over the justifiable expulsion of Lady Hilary Armstrong, for signing the Lord’s letter attacking Jeremy Corbyn for ‘anti-Semitism’, John Ware’s hatchet job of a Panorama Report is described as ‘damning’.

These propaganda techniques are taken from the book of Goebbels. Repeat a lie long enough, ignore any criticism to the contrary, and hey presto any lie becomes the established truth.

I have sent a letter to the Observer, but in the present climate its chances of being printed are about minus zero!

Presumably Mark Townsend didn’t consult my articleasking a mere 106 questions on this hatchet job. He could though have used his brain (these days unlikely for a paper that censorsSteve Bell for an ‘anti-Semitic trope’.

Below is the letter I sent to the Observer.

Tony Greenstein

John Ware has a long history of racist and Islamaphobic comments - he believes Islamaphobia is 'reactive' unlike 'irrational' antisemitism

Letters Editor

The Observer

Kings Place,

90 York Way

London N1 9GU

Dear Sir/Madam,

Your report on Hilary Armstrong’s expulsion from the Labour Party [Hilary Armstrong 'very sad' over vote to expel her from Labour party, July 21] is a good example of how a lie becomes an established fact through repetition.

You refer to ‘a damning report by the BBC’s Panorama programmeinto the party’s handling of allegations of antisemitism.’

There was nothing at all damning in this crude hatchet job by John Ware. Leaving aside Ware’s own damning record of Islamaphobia even the Observer cannot fail to have noticed that not one of the Labour Party ‘victims’ of anti-Semitism were captioned. All of them were close colleagues, officers of the Jewish Labour Movement, a small pro-Zionist group.

It is noteworthy surely that there were no interviews with the many Jewish members of the Labour Party who are not Zionist or who do not subscribe to the fable that the Labour Party is an anti-Semitic party.

The testimony of the so-called whistleblowers concealed more than it revealed. None of them were asked about the thousands of suspensions of Labour Party members whose only crime was that they were supporters of Jeremy Corbyn. In a parliamentary or local election that would be called for what it is, gerrymandering.

If this programme had been broadcast in any other country it would have been called out for what it is. A piece of propaganda.

Yours faithfully,

Tony Greenstein

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Corbyn’s Latest Anti-Semitism Proposals Prove that He is a Victim of the Stockholm Syndrome

July 22, 2019, 8:19 pm

≫ Next: House Demolitions in Sur Bahir - 4 British Peace Activists were ‘“stamped on, dragged by the hair, strangled with a scarf and pepper sprayed by Israeli border police.”

≪ Previous: The Orwellian World of the Guardian/Observer - How Lies Become the Established Truth

Labour’s Pathetic Analysis of ‘Zionism’ Throws the Palestinians Under the Bus

Labour's sanitised version of Israel as the cultural fulfilment of being Jewish doesn't seem to include the soldiers above expressing such delight at blowing up 100 homes and making 1,000 people homeless.

What is most depressing about Labour’s new Web Page on Anti-Semitism is not that it gets most things wrong, which it does, nor that it indulges in what Salo Baron called the ‘lachrymose version of Jewish history’, but its clumsy, childish anti-intellectualism.

By lachrymose I mean the tale of never ending woe, the Zionist fable that Jews were always persecuted, poor dears, non-stop for 2,000 years. They weren’t. For many of those years they ruled over others and occasionally suffered terribly for it but the Jewish experience in the Jewish diaspora was a mixed and rich one.

It is also true that Jewish communities prospered in particular in Islamic countries where the oldest Jewish communities were to be found, such as in Iraq, until Israel and Zionism destabilised those countries. That was why, in Iraq and Morocco Zionist agents planted bombs in Jewish places to simulate anti-Semitism.

In its childish simplicity coupled with a poverty of thought, Labour’s statement completely fails to place anti-Semitism in any form of context. It is a childish monologue of good people and bad people. It is the kind of history that would be rejected in a GCSE essay.

For example how does what it terms ‘anti-Semitism’ relate to other forms of racism? Racism isn’t just a jumble of stereotypes and conspiracy theories in the heads of fools. It is a system of ideas linked to power structures that result in deprivation, detriment and physical suffering.

It is a fact that Jews today form the most privileged section of the White population. There is no Jewish Windrush, there are disproportionately few Jewish prisoners, Jews don’t get stopped and searched by the Police nor do they suffer Police violence, nor are they economically, socially or politically discriminated against. There are very few racist attacks on Jews. Being Jewish is a plus not a minus in society. Jews make up 0.5% of the population but probably 3-4% of parliament.

William Rubinstein, a past President of the Jewish Historical Society in Britain, wrotein his book ‘The Right, Left and the Jews’ about “the rise of Western Jewry to unparalleled affluence and high status.” That rise

“has led to the near-disappearance of a Jewish proletariat of any size; indeed, the Jews may become the first ethnic group in history without a working class of any size.”

No one has ever died from a ‘trope’ or a tweet. Yes people have difficulty explaining why Israel appears to have so much support and power. It is unfortunate that most people aren’t Marxists and able to see that Israel is the West’s watchdog guarding over Western interests. Unfortunately the Zionist lobby, which consciously terms itself a Jewish lobby, gives the impression that Jews have more power than they have.

And why if anti-Semitism is such a problem were the New Labour retreads who signed the Lords letter, such as Lord John Reid and Lady Beverly Hughes, the very people who demonised Muslims and asylum seekers in the days of New Labour? Why is one form of racism unacceptable whilst other forms are taken to the heart?

Social democratic parties have never been known for being intellectual powerhouses. Parties that manage capitalism depend on making pragmatism appear as some kind of virtue but what is particularly depressing is that in its vapid attack on ‘anti-Semitism’ not once does Corbyn’s pathetic drivel attempt to explain how ‘anti-Semitism’ in Labour impacts on Jews materially or physically. Where is the analysis of racism in British society?

Tom Watson, the 'anti-racist' defended this leaflet and this candidate Phi Woolas

In response to the attack from Labour peers last week, Tom Watson’s weeks of subversion and the execrable Panorama programme last week Corbyn had two choices. He could come out fighting, pointing out that those who were attacking him had deplorable records of demonising refugees, Black people, Gypsies etc. or he could cave in. Corbyn chose the latter and effectively surrendered to his enemies.

PATTY HEARST - A victim of the Stockholm Syndrome

It is the political version of the Stockholm Syndrome.

Corbyn’s strategy, if you can call it that, is to run so fast from his detractors that they won’t catch up. It is to make himself the willing prisoner of those whose sole purpose in life is to remove him. Thus he informsthe Shadow Cabinet that ‘those who deny the existence of antisemitism in the party are “part of the problem”.

A typically fatuous and stupid declaration. If you deny being a witch that is proof that you are. In that other example of mass hysteria, the Salem witch trials, the historian Elizabeth Reis wroteabout the dilemmas that faced the women in these trials:

“During examinations, accused women were damned if they did and damned if they did not. If they confessed to witchcraft charges, their admissions would prove the cases against them; if they denied the charges, their very intractability, construed as the refusal to admit to sin more generally, might mark them as sinners and hence allies of the devil.”

The problem is that there is no problem other than that of false accusations. Let us take the accusations at face value. Let us suppose, for the sake of argument that ‘a small number of Labour members hold antisemitic views and a much larger number don’t recognise antisemitic stereotypes and conspiracy theories.’So what? What does it matter? People have all sorts of ideas in their heads. Is there any evidence that they give effect to them?

I suspect people harbour far greater prejudices about Muslims as terrorists and Gypsies as a social pest. This incidentally gives rise to far greater problems than a belief that the Rothschilds control Britain’s money supply.

At a time when according to a poll by Hope not Hate 54% of the Tory rank-and-file believe that Islam is “generally a threat to the British way of life”and some 60% think that "Islam is generally a threat to Western civilisation", whilst 54% of members of the Tory party are shown to have anti-Islamic views, the Labour Party concentrates on a handful of people who may have indulged in conspiracy theories about how Israel has so much power.

Incidentally the belief that Israel controlled ISIS has nothing to do with anti-Semitism. Apart from the fact that Israel and Jews are not one and the same there is no doubt that Israel had strong relationships with both Al Qaeda in Syria and ISIS including military relations.

Zionism, anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism

That this is not about anti-Semitism but Israel is demonstrated by the section headed ‘Zionism, Anti-Zionism and Anti-Semitism’.

We are told correctly that Zionism was a response to 19^th century anti-Semitism. What we are not told was that it was the most reactionary and backward Jews who became Zionists. The racial nationalists like Theodor Herzl and Max Nordau. In the wordsof Herzl, ‘“The anti-semites will become our most dependable friends, the anti-semitic countries our allies.”’ (Diaries p.84)

Fatuously we are told that ‘Zionism means maintaining that (Israeli) state.’ No it doesn’t. You don’t need an ideology to maintain a state. Most countries don’t have ideologies. Zionism is the ideology of racial nationalism, Jewish supremacy and apartheid. To gloss over that is unforgivable. Zionism dictates that 93% of land in Israel belongs to Jews only. Zionism dictates the demolition of 100 homes today and making 1,000 Palestinians homeless. Zionism dictates that you steal the land of Palestinian peasants and hand it to Jewish settlers. Zionism dictates that in a ‘Jewish’ state you don’t have Arab parties in government or equality on the street.

Quite unforgivably the statement makes no mention of the Palestinian Nakba, the expulsion of ¾ million Palestinians in 1948 and the massacre of thousands of them. That is how Israel became a Jewish state. Massacres and expulsions, the record of which, Israel is now trying to hideby reclassifying its archives.

The statement says that ‘Most British Jews feel connected to some extent to Israel and many have friends and family there.’ So what? This is fucking racism. This was the argument for White South Africa, that many British people had relations in Rhodesia and South Africa. It is the argument of kith and kin and its a disgrace that Corbyn has put his name to this racist bilge.

The statement says that ‘Jewish people have the same right to self-determination as any other people.’ Another stupid statement. Do Christian or Muslim people have the right to self-determination? Self-determination belongs to nations not religions. If the Jews are a nation then they are aliens in Britain, which was historically the argument of the anti-Semites.

As Lucien Wolf, the Secretary of the Conjoint Foreign Committee of the Board of Deputies, wrote:

I have spent most of my life in combating these very doctrines, when presented to me in the form of anti-Semitism, and I can only regard them as the more dangerous when they come to me in the guise of Zionism. They constitute a capitulation to our enemies.’

So Corbyn in his idiocy has put his pen to a passage which is anti-Semitic! This is Labour’s programme on anti-Semitism!

The statement however gets worse. ‘There are many forms of Zionism both in Israel and around the world and for many Jews, Zionism represents national liberation.’ No doubt Apartheid represented White liberation for many South Africans but that did not make it so. There actually aren’t many forms of Zionism today, unless you mean far-Right and further-Right. Left Zionism has all but disappeared. Zionists all agree on the necessity of a Jewish state where Palestinians exist on sufferance. All else is tactical.

Zionism always used to be seen as a form of colonisation before colonialism got a bad name. In his Diaries Herzl wrote a letter to Cecil Rhodes, the founder of Rhodesia and an archetypal British racist in which he said:

‘How then do I happen to turn to you since this is an out of the way matter for you? How indeed? Because it is something colonial.’

This can be found on page 1194 of Herzl’s diaries. Herzl for those who don’t know was the founder of political Zionism.

I realise that those who wrote this pitiful document know nothing of the history of Zionism, other than what they have been spoon fed by the Jewish Labour Movement. However that is no excuse for someone who spent 30 years in the Palestine solidarity movement.

The statement temporises and says that ‘Labour supports Palestinian statehood and a two-state solution to the conflict.’ Again this is as pitiful as it is wrong. Two states has gone (arguably it never arrived). No one supports it. No section of Zionist opinion in Israel. It is simply a formula for allowing the continuation of the building of more settlements and more apartheid.

The final paragraph tells us that ‘opposition to the Israeli government must never use antisemitic ideas’. No one disagrees with this but the Palestine solidarity movement in Britain never has used anti-Semitic ideas. This argument is one of the biggest lies of the Zionist movement.

On the contrary it is anti-Semites – from Tommy Robinson to Viktor Orban, from Donald Trump to Richard Spencer, from Steve Bannon to Michal Kaminski, who support Israel whilst harbouring anti-Semitic ideas. When Richard Spencer, the neo-Nazi founder of the alt-Right says he is a White Zionist I believe him. After all, if you are a racial supremacist what is there not to like in Israel?

Support for Zionism and Anti-Semitism is and always has been compatible because in the wordsof Zionist novelist, A B Yehoshua, ‘even today, in a perverse way, a real anti-Semite must be a Zionist.’ That was as true of Arthur J Balfour as it was of Mussolini.

Comparing Israel to the Nazis

Comparing Israel or what happens in it to the Nazis is going to be the subject of a much longer article by me. Suffice to say it is’t anti-Semitic. When Zeev Sternhell, a child survivor of a Nazi ghetto in Poland and a world renowned expert on fascism and former professor at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University comparespre-1939 Germany to Israel today, then I prefer to take his word for it rather than an idiot who does not recognise who his political enemies and friends are.

When Jews march to the chant of ‘death to the Arabs’ they are behaving no differently to Nazis or anti-Semites.

When Rabbis Kashtiel and Redler at the Eli pre-military Yeshivah told their students that ‘Hitler was right’ perhaps they too saw some similarities.

Zionism and Anti-Semitism

Labour’s pathetic tract on Zionism and anti-Semitism ends by telling us that ‘anti-Zionism is not in itself anti-Semitic’ which is a curious way of putting it. Anti-Zionism is a form of anti-racism. When it tells us that ‘Neither Zionism nor anti-Zionism is in itself racism.’ It gets it half wrong or half right. Zionism is intrinsically racist because it is based on the expulsion and dispossession of another people.

The anti-Semitism smear campaign, which clearly began with the British, Israeli and American states, has and will only ever have one goal. The removal of the hapless Corbyn. We support Corbyn despite his many idiocies. As the ruling class becomes more desperate that he should not be allowed to get anywhere near No. 10 Downing Street, this patched up nonsense is not going to carry any weight.

Just today at the Parliamentary Labour Party Yvette Cooper asked‘Why are so many anti-Semites drawn to support you?’. Of course the simple answer is that it is a lie. But once you concede the argument like Corbyn over Labour ‘anti-Semitism’ you get drawn in further and further into this right-wing swamp.

Tony Greenstein

↧