Quantcast
Channel: Tony Greenstein's Blog
Viewing all 2426 articles
Browse latest View live

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.”

$
0
0

This is what Zionism does Jeremy Corbyn and this is what a ‘Jewish’ state means – ethnic cleansing


 


 Last week the Labour Party issued a statementon ‘Zionism, anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism’ in which it explained that
Since the State of Israel was founded in 1948, following the horrors of the Holocaust, Zionism means maintaining that state.
This is what is usually called being economical with the truth, or in layman’s terms, lying. What the Labour Party statement omitted to say is what type of state it was that Zionism was‘maintaining’. Israel is of course a ‘Jewish’ state and being polite (or dishonest) the Labour Party and Corbyn chose to omit the small matter of a few thousand Palestinians massacred and ¾ million refugees displaced.
Zionism did not end in 1948. Today, in Jerusalem, Zionism is actively seeking to reduce the number of Palestinians living in the city and increase the number of Jews. The polite word for this is ethnic cleansing.
On Monday 900 Israeli Police and Soldiers invaded the Palestinian town of Sur Bahir on the outskirts of Jerusalem, using extreme violence to evict 30 solidarity activists. As the International Solidarity Movement reportstwo Palestinian families lost their homes in unprecedented mass demolitions in East Jerusalem. The evictions and demolitions were carried out in a ‘sadistic and brutal’ way.
During the invasion of the two occupied buildings Israeli border police shot Palestinians at close range with rubber-coated steel bullets and kicked them down flights of stairs. ISMers were stamped on, dragged across the floor by the hair, strangled with a scarf and pepper sprayed by Israeli border police.
But if you criticise this you will be called anti-Semitic by Labour Party racists such as Peter Kyle MP.
ISM activists, Bethany Rielly, 25, Beatrice-Lily Richardson, 27, Chris Lorigan, 30, and Gabriella Jones, 20, were carrying out a non-violent action by sitting in the house of Palestinian Ismail Obeide with 30 locals in the Wadi al-Hummus neighbourhood of Sur Baher, in an attempt to delay the demolition.
At around 3am 900 hundred Israeli soldiers were bussed to the area with trucks of demolition equipment to bulldoze three Palestinian apartment blocks, including an unfinished block which they spent 15 hours rigging with dynamite.
A Palestinian building demolished by Israeli forces in the village of Sur Baher [Abed al-Hashlamoun/EPA]


At around 5am they smashed down the door of Mr Obeide’s house. He was standing in the doorway holding his hands out in disbelief when dozens of soldiers invaded his home immediately pepper spraying him in the face.
The four British nationals were sitting in a small unventilated bathroom with the door closed when a soldier opened the door and threw in a tear gas canister. Chris Lorigan said:
“When the soldiers found us in the bathroom, they threw multiple tear gas canisters and shut the door. As we started to suffocate in the smallest room in the house, soldiers burst in and dragged us violently, pulling at every possible part, regardless of safety or policy.’
“I was dragged by my feet and lifted up, kicked in the stomach, then one soldier in particular stamped on my head four times, at full force, then standing on my head and pulling at my hair, he then stamped on my throat and others started punching my torso. It was a sadistic display of violence by the border police.”
Chris Lorigan, being attended in the hospital for a fractured rib (Photo:ISM
ISMer with severe tissue damage to right hand
Beatrice was also dragged out and her hands crushed so badly that she suffered severe tissue damage to her right hand which will be permanently misshapen unless she gets cosmetic surgery and a fractured knuckle on her left hand. She was bruised across her arms, hips and inner thighs.
Gaby was severely pepper sprayed in the face and hands and soldiers ripped her shirt revealing her bra, leaving large bruises on her right arm.
Bethany was dragged by her Keffiyeh around her neck out of the bathroom. Soldiers then pulled her out of the room by her hair. She said:
“A soldier dragged me by my keffiyeh across the floor strangling me until I screamed when he then crushed my neck under his knee. I couldn’t believe the pure aggression they were using against us. I was in such a state of shock the whole time that I couldn’t open my eyes. As they dragged me by my hair as I choked from being strangled and the tear gas I heard them laughing at me. We were unarmed civilians using peaceful means to try and delay them destroying Ismail and his family’s home that they worked so hard to build. Hundreds of soldiers were bussed in to do this. Is a house demolition a military operation anywhere else in the world? This is the reality of life for Palestinians living under Israeli occupation.”
ISMer with bruising on arm and ripped shirt where soldiers pulled it apart
Nine Israeli and international activists were in the house of Ghaleb Abu Hadwan, with his 4 daughters, son and grandfather. Edmond Sichrovsky, an Austrian activist of Jewish origin, who was in the house said:
 “Border police broke into the house and dragged out the Palestinians, knocking the grandfather to the floor in front of his crying and screaming grandchildren. Everyone with a cellphone was forcibly removed from the house. Once there was no one filming present, they attacked me and 4 other activists. I was repeatedly kicked and kneed, which left a bloody nose and multiple cuts, as well breaking my glasses from a knee in the face. Once outside, they slammed me against a car while shouting verbal insults at me and women activists, calling them whores (Sharmuta).”
Gabriella Jones arm injuries, one of the hospitalized activists (Photo: ISM)
According to Sichrovsky Israeli forces broke into the home and first dragged out the Palestinians,
“knocking the grandfather to the floor in front of his crying and screaming grandchildren ... everyone with a cellphone was then forcibly removed before soldiers began attacking him and four other activists.
“I was repeatedly kicked and kneed, which left a bloody nose and multiple cuts, as well breaking my glasses from a knee in the face. Once outside, they slammed me against a car while shouting verbal insults at me and women activists, calling them whores,” he said.
A US activist was kicked in the stomach and Spanish activist Ivan Rivera was hit in the head with the butt of a gun.
The latest demolitions of Palestinian homes near the Apartheid Wall on the outskirts of Jerusalemwere "shocking and heartbreaking" and should be probed as a war crime, Palestinian envoy Riyad Mansour said on Tuesday.
The Israeli military considers the homes, which are close to the Apartheid Wall that crisscrosses the occupied West Bank, a "security"risk.
Israel’s Supreme Court ruled in favour of the military in June, ending a seven-year legal battle, and set Monday as the deadline to knock down the homes.
Israel's UN Ambassador Danny Danon defendedthe action as being part of ‘the rule of law in Israel." Except of course that this ‘rule of law’ only applies to Palestinians. It is only Palestinians who are ethnically cleansed because Israel is a Jewish state.
Israel uses security as a pretext to force them out of the area as part of long-term efforts to expand settlements. All settlements on occupied Palestinian lands are illegal under international law.
At least 16 people, including 12 Palestinians and four British nationals, were hospitalized for injuries sustained during Israel’s massive demolition operation.
“He then stamped on my throat and others started punching my torso. It was a sadistic display of violence by the border police,” Lorigan said.
Beatrice-Lily Richardson’s arm injuries, one of the hospitalized activists (Photo:ISM)

Bethany Rielly’s neck injuries, one of the hospitalized activists (Photo: ISM)
According to testimonies from ISM activists stationed in other rooms of Obeidi’s house, Israeli soldiers continued their acts of aggression even after the Palestinians in the house held their hands up and agreed to leave voluntarily.
One unnamed American activist said that the soldiers were grabbing people’s fingers, “appearing as though they intended to break them.”
“Then we got to the stairs and they were kicking us down the stairs in the lower back and several of the Palestinian boys they kicked so hard that they tumbled down the stairs and this was when there was no resistance at all going on,”
ISM noted that it had activists from Spain, Britain, and Austria stationed in another house belonging to Ghaleb Abu Hadwan and his four daughters, son, and grandfather.
In its statement documenting the account of its activists, ISM said:
“Yesterday’s demolition of Wadi al-Hummus has made national news but due to the lack of media presence inside the family homes the extent of the violence and sadism perpetrated by IOF on Palestinian citizens and international activists has remained largely unreported.”
While sharing the personal stories of their activists, ISM noted the importance of recognizing the fact that it is “incomparable” to the daily treatment of Palestinians by the Israeli occupation
“17 people including Mr Obedi, his wife and their six children are now homeless as well as the family of Mr Hadwan,” ISM said.
“Evidence of the ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestine is more apparent than ever in efforts like the destruction of these three blocks in Wadi al-Hummus, and hundreds more demolition orders, by the Israeli government.”

Wadi Hummus: Another Israeli celebration of ethnic cleansing



Life And Debt: Stories From Inside America’s GoFundMe Health Care System

$
0
0

The Creeping Privatisation of the NHS – Brighton and Hove CCG is Forcing Patients to Buy Medicines Rather than Prescribe Them


  
You may remember that line from Joni Mitchell’s Big Yellow Taxi
You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.’
That applies like nothing else to the NHS.  People take for granted being able to turn up at a hospital if they have a problem or get ill.  We take it for granted being able to obtain a GP’s appointment.  We don’t know what it is like to face the agonising decision of whether we can afford to go to the doctor or afford to buy the medicines he has prescribed.  Yet that is the ‘logic’ of the free market.
With Donald Trump promising that in a US-British trade deal ‘everything is on the table’ including the NHS, then it is worth having a look at what the free market in health is like in the United States.
A comment piece I did for the Brighton and Hove Argus some years ago on Big Pharma
After all the ideology of the market is that everything has its price, everything is a commodity, health included. No one has any social responsibility or duties towards another. If you can afford it then the world is your oyster but if you can’t, then that’s tough. Everyone has the right to starve and sleep under the stars but it just happens that only the poor and homeless take advantage of these ‘freedoms’.
As RH Tawney put it‘freedom for the pike means death to the minnow.
In the United States ‘freedom’ includes the right to die without treatment and of course the right to buy virtually any treatment you want and to jump the queue whilst doing so.
Below is a shocking article on how thousands of Americans are having to resort to crowd funding to pay for health care. Billions of dollars have been raised to pay for what we take for granted. Whole communities rally round to raise the funds necessary to pay for someone’s cancer treatment because even when someone is insured, there are ancilliary costs that are not covered.
There is a reason why every newspaper hates Corbyn - and it isn't 'antisemitism'
However those who don’t have a community to rally round them, the homeless and forgotten, are left to die unaided. And the ‘Christian’ politicians who call themselves ‘pro-life’ as they prohibit abortions, because the death of the unborn so distresses them, are unmoved by the death and suffering of those who cannot afford medical care because they cannot afford it.
When I learnt that I had Hepatitis C 7 years ago, I was fortunate in more ways than one. I was unable to cope with what was the then standard treatment of being injected with a toxic drug called Interferon.  Although it was curing the disease it was killing the patient!
I was lucky because at that very moment new experimental non-interferon treatments were coming on stream. A drug called Harvoniwas being marketed by an American drug company called Gilead Sciences. I took this drug for 90 days. One pill a day after which I was cured. But without the NHS I couldn’t have afforded it because it cost about $1,000 a pill.  It cost $1 a pill to make.  An obscene level of profit.
I was lucky because I was one of the 500 sickest people with Hep C who were on a government funded programme to pay for this drug on the NHS.  I was the first person my consultant told me in Brighton and Hove.
The drug was developed primarily at Cardiff University but Gilead Sciences got the patent and they charged what they admitted ‘the market would bear’.
There is a brilliant cross-examination by Alexander Orcasio-Cortez, the socialist Congresswoman from New York who Trump particularly hates and who was recently toldto ‘go back home’ despite having been born in the USA.  In the same speech Trump accused the Congresswomen of ‘anti-Semitism’.

In the video we see the hapless Gilead representative face the accusations that they are charging $2,000 for Truvada, an HIV drug, in the US whilst it costs $8 in Australia. Big Pharma has no morals.
My complaint to the Brighton & Hove CCG

I mention all this because the Brighton and Hove Clinical Commissioning Group has decided on a policy that any drug that can be purchased over the counter is no longer going to be available on prescription.  It doesn’t matter what it costs, you will not be able to get it. It would appear that it does not depend on what your ailment is either. This is in order that the CCG can ‘save’ approximately £500,000, absolute chicken feed.
The cost of drugs in the US is one of the main ‘extras’ that insurance tends not to cover so it is an important principle that if your doctor believes that you should be prescribed a drug it’s not for the faceless bureaucrats of the CCG to determine whether or not you will be ‘allowed’ it.
I have made a formal complaintand I have threatened that if necessary I will seek to apply for a judicial review of the decision.  However this is not just peculiar to Brighton and Hove but is a national policy. The NHS may be safe with us, as the Tories claim, but one thing is for sure.  Given half the chance they would like to adopt the American system of super profits for private health care companies and an insurance lottery for the rest of us whereby the insurance company will decide whether or not you need the treatment you have been prescribed and how much they will fund.
One statistic has always caught my eye.  Cuba, which has a universal health care system, has a lower child mortality rate than its wealthy neighbour because the United States prefers to spend its money on weapons systems than on the most basic needs of its citizens. And it has a President whose job it is to get the poor to fight amongst themselves, ‘making America great’ in order that the rich can get away with it.
And that is also what the attacks on Corbyn and the ‘anti-Semitism’ moral panic is about. Protecting the wealthy here from those who would like to redistribute their ill-gotten gains.
Tony Greenstein

The human body is a frail thing, and illness is a pitiless adversary. Every day, an untold number of Americans are diagnosed with a devastating illness or suffer a sudden injury that threatens to upend their lives and tear apart their families.
This misfortune often comes at a staggeringly high financial cost that can be just as cruel.
While health insurance or government programs like Medicaid and Medicare can shield against huge medical bills, massive debt and even bankruptcy, only the truly wealthy can feel secure that sickness won’t lead to financial ruin.
This is why thousands of Americans have turned to crowdfunding website GoFundMe in the last decade to help cover medical bills and related costs. HuffPost is profiling some of those people, and what their stories reveal about the shortcomings of the American health care system.
These are not feel-good stories.
That’s often how the news media cover these fundraisers ― focusing on the generosity of individuals giving rather than the systemic failures that created the need. While it’s hard not to be inspired by successful campaigns and the fortitude of those suffering through terrifying ordeals, such stories portray a chilling reality that Americans ― even those with good jobs and health insurance, can be one bad day away from financial ruin.
A serious disease can put financial strain on people even in countries with universal health care systems and strong safety nets. But the United States, which has neither of those things, leaves its residents uniquely vulnerable. 
More than 50 million donors contributed more than $5 billion to GoFundMe campaigns between 2010 and 2017, according to GoFundMe, which is based in Redwood City, California, near San Francisco.
Two years ago, one-third of all the money raised went to campaigns listed in the Medical category. GoFundMe reports that more than 250,000 medical fundraisers are added a year and raise $650 million annually.
Although the fundraising numbers offer a sense of the need behind the many campaigns, they are imprecise, according to GoFundMe. Users can choose whatever category they like, so not all medical fundraisers are actually for medical bills and related costs, and some users seek help for those things in other categories on the website. Those figures also include money raised in other countries.
Successful fundraisers can generate $100,000 or more, as neighbors and strangers alike rally around families in need, and that money can go a long way to ensuring that treatments can continue, that housing and other daily costs can be covered and that families don’t lose everything while trying to keep loved ones alive and make them healthy.
ISABELLA CARAPELLA/HUFFPOST
Americans pay more for their health care than their counterparts in other developed countries. And even though more than 90% of Americans have some form of health coverage, according to a federal survey from 2017, it’s often inadequate. Some 45% of Americans are “underinsured,” according to a report published last year by The Commonwealth Fund, a New York-based think tank. And 27% of Americans told West Health and Gallup they had skipped medical care because of the cost in the past year in survey findings published this year.
High deductibles requiring thousands of dollars of out-of-pocket expenses before the insurance covers any bills, large copayments at the point of service and costly prescription medicines are among the reasons Americans pay so much. Add to that services or medicines insurance companies won’t cover at all, experimental treatments ineligible for coverage, medical providers that aren’t in insurance networks and other uncovered costs, and medical bills can rise into the millions of dollars. For the uninsured, there is no upper limit to how much they could owe.
According to data from the Federal Reserve Board, 40% of Americans don’t have enough savings to cover an emergency expense exceeding $400. In the past year, Americans borrowed $88 billion to cover medical bills, the West Health/Gallup survey found. Among Americans who declared bankruptcy from 2013 to 2016, 59% cited medical bills as a factor, according to a survey published in the American Journal of Public Health this year.
Illness often means lost income, as the patient and family members miss time at work during treatment. Transportation and lodging costs pile up for people who must travel long distances to receive care, including those in rural areas who live far from the nearest medical facilities and those who seek medical treatment from specialists who practice at prominent institutions like the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota or the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio. These so-called indirect expenses are a reason medical fundraising is the leading category on GoFundMe worldwide.
Browsing the Medical category on GoFundMe offers a brutal reminder that illness doesn’t discriminate. People from all walks of life and at virtually every level of income, both the insured and the uninsured, turn to their communities and to strangers on the internet to solve a financial problem that would be impossible to handle on their own.
No amount of charity is enough to compensate for America’s tattered and unforgiving health care system, as GoFundMe founder and CEO Rob Solomon articulated in an interview with Kaiser Health News published in January.
“The system is terrible. It needs to be rethought and retooled. Politicians are failing us. Health care companies are failing us. Those are realities. I don’t want to mince words here. We are facing a huge potential tragedy,” Solomon said. “We provide relief for a lot of people. But there are people who are not getting relief from us or from the institutions that are supposed to be there. We shouldn’t be the solution to a complex set of systemic problems.”

The Curious Case of Priti Patel - the Zionist Basket Case

$
0
0

Corruption, Dishonesty and Treason – Priti Seems Very Well Qualified to be Home Secretary – If Only She Were Jewish She Could be Israel's 'Justice' Minister


Corruption, Lying and Treason are the qualities that make up our new Home Secretary
Sacked under Theresa May, Priti Patel has made a comeback as Home Secretary in the new government. A self-declared supporter of the death penalty she is also a friend of Narendra Modi, the communalist  Prime Minister of India, who has the deaths of thousands of Muslims to his credit in the 2002 riots in Gujarat, where he was Chief Minister.
What with being paid£1,000 an hour by Viasat, a company which holds contracts with the British government we can add corruption and more to her credentials.  Clearly very qualified.  Enjoy this excellent video from George Monbiot.
Tony Greenstein

Peter Kyle’s Contempt for Democracy as he ‘persuades’ the Brighthelm Centre to Cancel Chris Williamson Meeting

$
0
0

The 'Labour' MP for Hove Uses Jews to further the Labour Right’s anti-Corbyn agenda whilst Lansman gives him encouragement

Israeli soldiers cheer as they murder another Palestinian - this is what Kyle and Labour Friends of Apartheid support

UPDATE
It would appear that the signatories accompanying the McCarthyist statement on 'antisemitism' have been taken down pending an 'investigation'. 

Possibly that has something to do with the number of anti-Semites and fascists who decided to endorse the statement including the late Adolf Hitler, Pinochet, Eichmann, John Vorster as well as one very alive Donald Trump!  What did they expect? Socialists to sign?




Israeli soldiers demonstrate their joy as Palestinian buildings are blown up and Palestinians are made homeless - this is the reality of present day Israel


Peter Kyle, the MP for Hove demonstrated his contempt for freedom of speech when he ‘persuaded’ the Christian Evangelist Brighthelm Centre to cancel a public meeting on August 8th at which Chris Williamson MP was speaking. His excusewas that
‘our city should not be a welcoming place for people who bait the Jewish community or sow seeds of division.’
Peter Kyle supports the use of private firms in the NHS - the main task of the Left in Hove is his deselection
So according to Kyle a meeting on socialist economics and a Labour government is ‘divisive’.  Such is Kyle’s contempt for democracy and freedom of speech.
Chris Williamson is someone who has been an active anti-fascist all of his life. Peter Kyle on the other hand is someone who has never spoken up about refugees or racism.  Only Israel and ‘anti-Semitism’ is his concern.
We intended to auction the original Steve Bell cartoon that was banned by the Guardian - on the grounds of 'antisemitism' of course
 The suggestion that Chris Williamson is a ‘Jew baiter’ is a despicable lie coming from someone who has supported New Labour’s racist agenda on refugees, Travellers and asylum seekers.
Kyle is also a member of Labour Friends of Israel which last year supported Israel’s shooting of unarmed demonstrators in cold blood. Kyle has refused to sign any Early Day Motion condemning Israel’s human rights abuses. That is the clue to why he sought to obtain the banning of Chris Williamson.  As a dedicated Zionist he is following a path blazed by the Israeli state itself.
My letter in the Argus
Banning meetings and persons, locking people up indefinitely without trial – this is what comes naturally to the Israeli state, just as it did to the South Africa apartheid state before it.  Israel rules over 5 million Palestinians who have neither political nor civil rights. If all those living under occupation were given a vote there would be no ‘Jewish’ state.
The meeting, organised by Brighton and Hove Labour Left Alliance for August 8thwill go on at another, undisclosed venue as planned.  We are determined to ensure that Kyle and his Zionist supporters aren’t allowed to get away with their attack on free speech in Brighton and Hove.
At the time of the Charlie Hebdo killings, free speech included the right to attack the Muslim religion but it would seem this doesn't extend to the Israeli state
The Brighthelm Centre will also be the subject of a full boycott. When they refused to allow Jackie Walker to speak two years ago Palestine Solidarity Campaign decided to hold its meetings elsewhere.  We will now call for a full boycott of the Brighthelm Centre beginning with my own trade union branch, Unite.
As the prospect of a General Election looms so the Labour Right have started mobilising around ‘anti-Semitism’. This is a somewhat easier topic than coming out in support of austerity and things like tuition fees for students, benefit cuts for claimants or attacks on asylum seekers.
Anti-Semitism is a much easier way of fooling people. However the test of their sincerity is what their take is on other forms of racism.  For these people to prioritise ‘anti-Semitism which is a marginal prejudice, when the very real racism of Windrush and Islamaphobia is ever present demonstrates the hypocrisy of these people.
It seems that Donald and Kyle agree about 'antisemitism' and why shouldn't they?
None of those who have signed their statement and there are about 30 Labour right-wingers from Brighton and Hove, have ever spoken out about other forms of racism.
Under the banner of Labour Members Together the remnants of Brighton and Hove Right have issued a dishonest statement. It is little wonder that Adolf Hitler, Augusto Pinochet and John Vorster have (posthumously) signed it along with Neville Chamberlain and (Lord) Steve Bassam.

Their statement on anti-Semitism is a farrago of lies and distortions. Point 2 seeks

the expulsion of anyone who is guilty of ‘sharing a platform with members suspended or expelled for anti-Semitism.

Classic McCarthyism. In essence they are calling for the old South Africa Apartheid practice of banning people. The fact that people who are suspended are presumed to be innocent until proven guilty is irrelevant to what we used to call ‘police state democrats’.  An accusation means to this bunch of New Labour leftovers means you are guilty.
The dishonesty of the statement is evinced by Point 10 which refers to
the Macpherson principles, which define racist incidents as those which are perceived as such by the victim or any other person.’
The MacPherson Report says no such thing and if they lie about this then you can assume they won’t be telling the truth about anything else. As Shami Chakrabarti explained in her Report.
the purpose of the approach [recording incidents as racial when perceived as such by the victim] is to ensure that investigators handle a complaint with particular sensitivity towards the victim. It is to suggest the seriousness with which a complaint must be handled, but in no way to determine its outcome.’
These dishonest or stupid right-wingers deliberately omit the latter part and suggest that an accusation is in itself proof of guilt.  Indeed they add ‘any other person’ for which read ‘any other Zionist or racist’!
Given that Jackie Walker, Marc Wadsworth and myself were expelled as part of the anti-Semitism witch-hunt, not for anti-Semitism but ‘bringing the party into disrepute’ etc. this demonstrates the hypocrisy, lack of any democratic principles and basic dishonesty of these people.
The reason why Kyle seeks to prevent Chris Williamson MP from speaking is that he knows he has no answer to the arguments of the Left. The Labour Right can only thrive through bans and prescriptions.
Tony Greenstein

Live Interview with Tony Greenstein tomorrow!

Tony Greenstein Interview with Scottish PSC

$
0
0
Mick Napier's interview with me today can be seen here on the Scottish PSC Facebook Group or below:


In the 55 minutes available I tried to cover the witchhunt of anti-racists and socialists in the Labour Party and also Zionism’s real relationship to anti-Semitism, which is one of acceptance of the rightfulness of antisemitism.

Tony Greenstein

CHRIS WILLIAMSON – NEC Panel Recommends His Expulsion

$
0
0

The only person who should be expelled is Tom Watson –
If Corbyn Doesn't Speak Out He Will Be Next on the List
I have learnt tonight that Chris Williamson, the Labour MP for Derby North, has been recommended by an NEC panel for expulsion. This outrageous recommendation is nothing but pure maliciousness and vindictiveness against one of the few genuine socialists amongst Labour MPs.
It is also fraudulent. The NEC appointed a previous panel which recommended his reinstatement. Because they got the wrong decision the NEC have appointed another panel!  It’s like being acquitted by a court and the powers that be deciding they didn’t like the decision and trying you over and over again until they obtain the ‘right’ decision.
The attacks on Chris, by the supporters of the Israeli Apartheid state, are based on yet another outrageous and dishonest distortion. Chris was accused of saying that Labour has been too apologetic about anti-Semitism. This is a lie.  He said Labour had been too apologetic about the false allegations of anti-Semitism made against it.  Only a complete moron or someone as politically dishonest as Tom Watson, cannot understand the difference.
What Chris actually said was:
 “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.”
Momentum’s unelected dictator Jon Lansman has already made it clear that he is at one with the Right in the Labour Party in demanding Chris’s expulsion.  However it is also the case, as a recent poll, by Labour List demonstrated that over 60% of Labour members support Chris.
In other words Lansman and his sycophantic hacks, and we have a few of them here in Brighton Momentum, are in a minority. Any reasonable person can see that nothing Chris said was anti-Semitic.
Tom Watson 'lost sleep thinking about poor old Phil Woolas'
However there are very good grounds for expelling Tom Watson.
Phil Woolas's racist leaflet that Tom Watson backed

i.                 RACISM
a.                         Backing racist Labour MP Phil Woolas who campaigned to ‘make the white folk angry’.  When the High Court removedhim for lying about an opponent Watson wrotehe had ‘lost sleep over poor Phil.’
b.                        Running a racist campaign in the Birmingham Hodge Hill by election in 2004. As Campaign Manager Watson oversaw the distribution of  leaflets which said “Labour is on your side; the Lib Dems are on the side of failed asylum-seekers.” In an interview with the New Statesman Watson said. “I wouldn’t write it again, I wanted to defeat the Lib Dems at all costs.” Which just goes to show that Watson has all the attributes of a syphilitic rattle snake.
2.    Bullying of women
a.     BullyingYvonne Davies, a local Councillor because she objected to a white racist march supported by the BNP in his constituency of Sandwell. Yvonne, who is now leader of Sandwell Council, organiseda photoshot of councillors to send to Jennie Formby as a get well card.  All councillors except the two working for Watson were in the photo!        
b.    BullyingJennie Formy over the fake anti-Semitism claims knowing full well she is undergoing chemotherapy.
3.    Anti-Semitism
Leon Brittan:         Tom Watson is on record as saying he wouldn’t rest until the last anti-Semite was expelled from the Labour Party.  In which case he should resign his membership!
Moments after the death of the former Jewish Conservative Home Secretary Leon Brittan from cancer, Watson wrotethat he was ‘“as close to evil as any human being could get” (which is a remarkably good description of Tom Watson).
Brittan had been accused by Watson’s friend Carl Beech, now serving 18 years for a variety of offences, of being a paedophile. There was no substance to this yet Watson singled out Brittan, a dying man, not any other of Beech’s targets.  The only possible reason for this was because he was Jewish. 
During his political career Brittan had been subject to considerable anti-Semitism in the Tory Party (but of course as this has nothing to do with Israel it was brushed under the carpet). Harold MacMillan quippedthat the Thatcher cabinet
“was more old Estonian than old Etonian” — a crack which sped through the bars of the Commons and in Tory clubland as a non-too-subtle way of putting Nigel Lawson, Leon Brittan or Michael Howard in their place.’
This is the tradition Tom Watson has followed in.
4.    Using the abuse of children to further Tom Watson’s Political Career
Tom Watson didn’t merely raise the issue of a possible VIP paedophile ring, he positively encouraged Carl Beech, who has himself been convicted of sexual abuse of children, to make wild and fantastic claims of abuse. Although I hold no brief for Harvey Proctor, who when he was an MP was a member of the far-Right Monday Club and a fellow-traveller of the National Front, the allegations made against him were clearly preposterous and without foundation. Watson abused parliamentary privilege to make these claims. In this sense Proctor is right to callWatson the ‘cheerleader-in-chief’ for Carl Beech.
That is not to say that there haven’t been powerful politicians and celebrities who have used their position to continue their abuse.  The obvious person was Jimmy Saville, who was given a knighthood by Margaret Thatcher.  Likewise Cyril Smith, the Liberal MP was protected by the leader of the Liberals, David Steel despite Steel knowing of the allegations. Peter Morrison, Thatcher’s PPS was another well known paedophile and implicatedin the North Wales child abuse scandal. See Paedophile politicians - the ones that got away
Clearly what the NEC should do is to firstly suspend Tom Watson, then form a panel to hear the charges against him and then recommend his expulsion.
In the meantime the case of Chris Williamson should be withdraw from the National Constitutional Committee as there is no case to answer
Tony Greenstein

Why is the Jewish Labour Movement, which refuses to support the election of a Labour government, affiliated to the Labour Party?

$
0
0

The Jewish Chronicle is Worried that Labour MPs might start Attacking the Tories rather than the Left – IJAN’s 10 Questions to the JLM Provokes Apoplexy




You would have thought that the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Organisation had organised a picnic outside their local synagogue with ham sandwiches on the menu (as Jewish anarchists used to do!) when they posed 10 simple questions to the Zionist ‘Jewish’ Labour Movement.

Suffice to say the Jewish Chronicle was not amused.  Their article condemning Jewish Voice for Labour as a ‘far-left fringe group whose members have repeatedly denied or downplayed antisemitism within the Labour party’  spluttered with indignation.


What worried the Jewish the most was that with the advent of a new Tory Prime Minister Boris Johnson and the prospect of an early General Election some Labour MPs were forgetting the interests of Israel and Zionism and concentrating on defeating the Tories. To the Zionists, including the JLM, that is unforgiveable!

The Jewish Labour Movement at its poorly attended conference on 7th April (under 200) passed a resolution stating that the Labour Party was ‘institutionally anti-Semitic’ and that Jeremy Corbyn is
unfit to be prime minister and a Labour government led by him would not be in the interest of British Jews.’
The JLM made it clear that they would
withhold endorsement, support or campaign time from any candidate who is not an ally in the fight against antisemitism in the Labour Party.’
In other words the JLM refuse to support the election of a Labour government under its current leadership. Which begs the question why are they are affiliated to the Labour Party or more pertinently why haven’t the JLM been disaffiliated?
The Israeli Labor Party Supports Netanyahu's attempts to deport Israel's Black African refugees
By their own admission the JLM is the ‘sister party’ of the almost extinct Israeli Labour Party which in 1948 and onwards ethnically cleansed the Palestinian population of Israel. The ILP for the first 30 years in Israel was the party of government. Today it is barely managing to get into the Knesset. Yet even now this racist party supportsthe expulsion of all non-Jewish Black African refugees from Israel.
The JLM put this into practice at the Peterborough by-election when they refused to support the successful Labour candidate Lisa Forbes. The Jewish Chronicle defendedthis because



‘Lisa Forbes, had been found to have endorsed a social media post claiming that Theresa May had a “Zionist slave master’s agenda” and approved another message stating that Isis had been created by the CIA and Mossad.’
In the eyes of the JLM's Chair Mike Katz, the opposition of anti-Zionist Jews is proof of 'antisemitism' in the Labour Party
What you might ask has this to do with anti-Semitism? Theresa May has faithfully supported all Israel’s war crimes. I’m not sure I’d describe it as a ‘Zionist slave master’s agenda’ but it’s not anti-Semitic. Likewise saying ISIS was created by the CIA and Mossad is not anti-Semitic either. The United States did help create ISIS and Israel has certainly had secret and friendly relations with ISIS. But even if this is wrong why is it anti-Semitic? Is Israel equal to Jews? If so that is anti-Semitic!
Rebecca Shiraz found the questions 'highly offensive' in other words difficult to answer!
The Jewish Chronicle also took exception to asking the JLM to defend its affiliation to the Zionist Federation and the Board of Deputies of British Jews, which supportedIsrael’s murder of unarmed protesters in Gaza. The JLM made no statement in opposition to the Board’s support for mass murder unlike hundredsof British Jews.
I can’t imagine why there should be a problem in asking any organisation which opposes basic human rights what they are doing in the Labour Party. Clearly Zionists think they should be exempt from the normal rules.
Suffice to say the Jewish Chronicle quoted Jon Lansman, ‘head of the far-left Momentum group’ as having attacked Jewish Voices for Labour: Lansman stated that
“neither the vast majority of individual members of JVL nor the organisation itself can really be said to be part of the Jewish community.... JVL behaves as if it speaks for Jewish socialists. It does not. And too many of its members self-define as 'Jews' only to attack other Jews."
The fact that Lansman attacks the only Jewish group in the Labour Party opposed to Zionism should be reason enough for socialists to keep clear enough.
The Jewish Chronicle quotes a number of Labour nonentities such as Georgia Gould, Leader of Camden Labour Group who declared herself to be a ‘proud member of Jewish Labour.’ Presumably if there had been a Labour Friends of Apartheid group 30 years ago she would have been a proud member of that too.
It is understandable that the present day Labour Friends of Israeli Apartheid should whine and protest at the questions that IJAN has asked but they won’t go away.
Socialists inside the Labour Party should ask why it is that the JLM, which is essentially an arm of the Israeli state inside the British Labour Party, continues to have all the privileges of an affiliated socialist society when they don’t even support the Labour Party?
The Israeli Labour Party under its previous far-Right leader Avi Gabbay officially cut relations with the Labour Party.  We should do likewise and send these gutter racists off with a clip on their proverbial ear. A party of segregation and ethnic cleansing has no place being part of the Labour Party because in essence the JLM is not a ‘sister party’ but the British wing of the Israeli Labour Party.
The fact that the JLM are also affiliated to the settlement funding World Zionist Organisation is another reason enough to disaffiliate these racists.

The initial signatories of the letter include Dr Swee Ang, an orthopaedic surgeon who has worked in Gaza repairing the damage to people caused by Israeli missiles and bombs, 3 Israeli Jewish professors - Haim Bresheeth, Moshe Machover and Avi Shlaim. It includes legendary Jewish folk singer Leon Rosselson and Jewish comedian Alexei Sayle as well as Electronic Intifada journalist Asa Winstanley and Ian MacDonald QC and Palestinian activist and doctor Ghada Karmi.

According to the Zionists however the 5 out of 9 Jewish signatories are the ‘wrong sort of Jews’ because they insist on standing up against Zionist apartheid and calling out the fake anti-Semitism campaign for what it is.
See below the excellent questions of the Jewish Labour Movement:
Tony Greenstein
Initial signatories
Dr. Swee Ang
Dr. Haim Bresheeth
Dr. Ghada Karmi
Emeritus professor Moshe Machover
Ian Macdonald QC
Leon Rosselson
Alexei Sayle
Avi Shlaim, FBA
Asa Winstanley
To JLM,
Your AGM on 7 April 2019 passed resolutions denouncing the leadership of the Labour Party and the Labour Party itself. This is extraordinary coming from an organisation affiliated to the Labour Party. We therefore have some questions to ask the JLM and your supporters.


The JLM passed resolutions that said:

the Labour Party is institutionally antisemitic;
the leadership of the Labour Party have demonstrated that they are antisemitic;
and Jeremy Corbyn is therefore unfit to be prime minister and a Labour government led by him would not be in the interest of British Jews.
…[we] withhold endorsement, support or campaign time from any candidate who is not an ally in the fight against antisemitism in the Labour Party…
Q
In the Peterborough by-election in May, you decided not to campaign for Labour parliamentary candidate Lisa Forbes, and after she won you called for her to have the whip suspended immediately. Does that mean that you were so opposed to her election that you did not care who was elected instead? Undermining the Labour candidate enhanced the chances of the Brexit party, led by an extreme right-winger who has connections with the antisemitic racist right in Europe.  Would you have preferred the Brexit candidate to be elected?
Q
Are you in favour of the Labour Party manifesto which Corbyn’s leadership has produced, against austerity, for re-nationalisation and an ethical foreign policy? 
Q
When there is a general election, what other party would the JLM encourage Jewish people to vote for, or would you propose that Jewish people abstain from voting? Would you tell people not to vote Labour, allowing the possibility of a racist, anti-immigrant, homophobic, pro-austerity, extremist right wing Tory prime minister?


There is an increasing threat of war against Iran by the US, backed by Israel and Saudi Arabia. A Corbyn government would ensure that Britain uses its power to deflate such a horrendous possibility and would not back such a war.
Q
Would you support the Corbyn-led anti-war Party or support this highly dangerous promotion of war?


The Al Jazeera documentary, The Lobby, revealed that the JLM was working with Israeli agent Shai Masot based at the Israeli embassy, who was plotting to “take down” Foreign Office minister Alan Duncan and discredit the then chair of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee Crispin Blunt for disagreeing with Israel’s policies towards Palestinians.
The then chair of the JLM, Jeremy Newmark, was filmed at the 2016 Labour Party conference in a meeting with Masot and Israel’s ambassador to the UK Mark Regev discussing how to undermine Party members’ support for Palestine.
When confronted, Ella Rose, then director of JLM, now Equalities Officer, defended the JLM’s relationship with Masot saying she knew him “very well” and that she had worked with him when she was a public affairs officer at the Israeli embassy.  She admitted that the JLM brought an Israeli delegation to the conference on behalf of the embassy.
Q
In the light of this we have to ask what is the relationship between leading members of the JLM and the Israeli embassy in London?
Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and shadow Foreign Secretary Emily Thornberry called for an investigation into the apparent Israeli interference exposed by Al Jazeera.
Q
Does the JLM support such an investigation?
The JLM website states:
In addition to the UK Labour Party, the Jewish Labour Movement is also affiliated to the Board of Deputies of British Jews, the Zionist Federation of the UK, and organise within the World Zionist Organisationalongside our sister party in Israel, Havodah - the Israeli Labor Party . . .
According to the UN, the World Zionist Organisation wasallocated $35 million by Israel to fund and organise Israeli settlements on Occupied Palestinian landin violation of international law. The Zionist Federation of the UKdemonstrated in support of the 2014 bombing of Gaza where over 2,000 Palestinian civilians were killed, including 500 children. The Board of Deputies of British Jews attempted to justify the widely condemned intentional killing of unarmed Palestinians by the Israeli military during the Great March of Return.  So far this has resulted in 277 killed, including 52 children, media, medical personnel and disabled people, and 28,000 wounded and deliberately disabled.
Q
We see no references to these tragedies on your website: how do you explain being affiliated to these organisations which defend illegal incursions into Palestinian land and life, and the organised murder and maiming of unarmed civilians?


Isaac Herzog, while leader of the JLM’s ‘sister party’ the Israeli Labor Party (ILP) stated his apartheid view to: “separate from as many Palestinians as possible, as quickly as possible . . . We want to . . . complete the barrier that separates us.” Last year he stated that intermarriage between Jews and non-Jews is a “plague”. Current ILP leader Gabbay has said: “the Arabs have to be afraid of usand “We will not share a government with the [Arab majority party] Joint List, period.”, and joined the racists in trying to legislate for 35,000 African asylum seekers to be either deported or indefinitely incarcerated.
Q
Have you challenged these views?


Your no-confidence resolution in Jeremy Corbyn also says:
Solidarity for those less fortunate than us or who suffered discrimination or injustice are both Jewish and Labour values.
Q
Yet the JLM seems to focus only on antisemitism in the Labour Party and has little to say about antisemitism by other political parties, even by the far right.  Other forms of racism, including Islamophobia, and discrimination and injustice, such as the hostile immigration environment are rarely mentioned. Can you say why this is so?


Your AGM also attacked other Labour organisations, including a Jewish organisation:
CLPD [Campaign for Labour Party Democracy], LRC [Labour Representation Committee] and JVL [Jewish Voice for Labour] are a malign influence in the Labour Party.
One of your ‘valuesis: To promote the centrality of Israel in Jewish life . . .
Q
You often refer to ‘the Jewish community’ as if Jewish people are of one mind and whose political views you represent; at the same time you attack a Jewish organisation.  How can you justify this?
Since you consider the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn institutionally antisemitic and therefore claim he is ‘unfit’ to govern, are we right to assume that you stay in the Labour Party to prevent it becoming the government?
2 July 2019



Short Video on Why BBC Panorama Programme by Racist John Ware Broke Every Guideline about Bias, Honesty and Balance

$
0
0

Why the BBC Should Fess Up and Broadcast a Balancing Panorama on the Black and Jewish people expelled by Labour's racist witchhunt 




 
It’s a pity that this excellent video from Jewish Voices for Labour has no sound but it still makes an impact with its simple message - why were all the 'victims' of 'antisemitism' officers of the pro-Israeli Jewish Labour Movement from one, small Zionist group, the Jewish Labour Movement?

Why were viewers not told that all the 7 'victims' officers of the same group? If 'antisemitism' is so widespread in the Labour Party surely it couldn't have been difficult to find other 'victims'?  Or could it? 

Is the real truth that 'victims' of antisemitism in the Labour Party are so hard to find that they have to go to the one group that has a vested interest in 'antisemitism' because the JLM is first and foremost a Zionist, i.e. a pro-Israeli group.

And why was such a sensitive topic presented by a racist, anti-Islamaphobic bigot John Ware? 

Even by the torturous standards of the BBC and its Establishment bias, Panorama set new low standards. See

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

and

100+ Questions which demonstrate why Panorama’s ‘Is Labour Anti-Semitic’ was racist


Open Letter to Lloyd Russell-Moyle, MP for Brighton Kemptown and Chair of the Campaign Group of MPs - Why the Silence Over Chris Williamson?

$
0
0

By Refusing to Support Chris Williamson and Oppose his Expulsion You are Complicit in the Campaign to Remove Corbyn

Dear Lloyd,
I am writing to you as co-Chair of the Campaign Group of Labour MPs as well as my own MP.
One of your constituents, David Rodgers was informed by Labour’s Disputes Committee in February that he ‘may have been involved in a breach of Labour Party rules.’


The ‘evidence’ consisted of a Facebook post stating that the BBC was conforming to a Zionist agenda whilst hundreds of unarmed demonstrators were being massacred in Gaza. David also mentioned that the lies of the British press concerning ‘anti-Semitism’ were orchestrated by Tel Aviv’s Ministry of Information.
Apparently this is anti-Semitic
As can be seen, the fake anti-Semitism witchhunt is concerned with criticism of Israel not Jews
To most people this would be classed as fair comment, even a statement of the obvious, but in the present atmosphere of intimidation, informing and denunciation he was effectively being accused of anti-Semitism.
David made no mention of Jews. His comments related solely to Israel and Zionism. Yet when any mention is made of Zionism, the ideology that justifies demolishing Palestinian homes to make way for Jewish settlers, Labour’s disciplinary blood hounds smell anti-Semitism, a reaction which is itself anti-Semitic. . What is happening in Labour today is a parody of Arthur Miller’s Crucibleyet people like you are afraid to speak out.
I know that you have been a vociferous supporter of the Palestinians and that is appreciated but what you don’t seem to comprehend is that Israel’s behaviour is not some aberration. Israel was founded by the Zionist movement as a Jewish supremacist state in just the same way that Northern Ireland was created as a Protestant supremacist state.
On 25th March David received a letter from the Compliance Unit giving him a formal warning, without any hearing, because he had posted content which was ‘prejudicial and grossly detrimental’ and incompatible with the Code of Conduct on Anti-Semitism. In the day of Joe McCarthy he might have been accused of being UnAmerican.
This ‘finding’ is Kafkaesque. The BBC is clearly following a Zionist agenda. The recent Panorama programme Is Labour Anti-Semitic fronted by the Islamaphobe John Ware is proof of that. The BBC’s pro-Israel bias can no more be doubted than its anti-working class bias. The reference to Israel’s Ministry of Information is factual.
Jon Lansman has betrayed a whole series of socialists in his determination to support Apartheid Israel
Because of the adoption of the IHRAmisdefinition of anti-Semitism, criticism of the Israeli state is now equated to criticism of Jews. The fact that this contradicts one of the IHRA’s illustrations of anti-Semitism, ‘Holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel’ seems to have eluded the heirs of Uncle Joe.
The reason that I am writing to you is that your assistant, Nathan Philips wrote to David stating that ‘this is a party matter, and as an MP's office we do not get involved in individual cases relating to party disciplinary issues.’
Nathan is wrong. This is not a disciplinary but a political issue. It is about the weaponisation of anti-Semitism to deflect criticism of the Israeli state and also undermine and destabilise Corbyn’s leadership.
The Right have chosen their attack carefully. ‘Anti-Semitism’ is a more palatable and plausible than opposition to nationalisation or austerity. Even Donald Trump has gotten in the act. When tellingBlack Congresswomen to ‘go back home’ he also attackedthem for ‘anti-Semitism’. ‘Anti-Semitism’ is the Right’s signature tune. Those who’ve never taken the slightest interest in opposing racism, from the Daily Mail to Tom Watson, have suddenly become concerned about ‘anti-Semitism’?
Given that you are also co-Chair of the Campaign Group your response is disappointing. What’s happening to David is happening to hundreds of people in the Labour Party.
In 1992 I was one of about 30 people suspended or expelled from the Labour Party.  Indeed the whole Brighton and Hove party was suspended not because of ‘anti-Semitism’ but because we opposed the Council’s attempt to implement the poll tax.
Under Tony Benn the Campaign Group did more than hold 1 meeting a year
At that time the Campaign Group, led by Tony Benn and Jeremy Corbyn, gave us their support. Corbyn was Secretary of Labour Against the Witchhunt. The NEC Report into Brighton Labour Party was leaked to us by Dennis Skinner. In short the Campaign Group used to do some campaigning.
Today it is difficult to know what if anything the Campaign Group does.
Solidarity with one’s comrades is the bread and butter of socialism. It was the basis on which the labour movement was founded. An injury to one is an injury to all.
We have seen a steady stream of people who have been demonised as a result of the fake ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign: Ken Livingstone, Pete Willsman, Christine Shawcroft, Marc Wadsworth.  Even Jewish opponents of Zionism such as Jackie Walker, Glynn Secker and myself have not been immunse.
Chris Williamson is merely the latest victim. Despite the best efforts of Peter Kyle he will be speaking in Brighton next week. Chris has been suspended at the instigation of Tom Watson and Margaret Hodge. His real crime is support for democracy in the Labour Party and opposition to the Witch-hunt.  What Chris actually said, when was that the Labour Party had backed off far too much’ in the face of the false allegations of anti-Semitism. He also stated that Labour had done more to combat ‘the scourge of anti-semitismthan any other political party.’ Yet this has been twisted to fit a right-wing Zionist agenda.
Laura Pidcock is co-Chair of the Campaign Group - she has given no support to Chris Williamson
The Campaign Group is complicit in this. During this whole period the Campaign Group of MPs, which you and Laura Pidcock chair has remained completely silent. 
According to Labour List’s survey61% of Labour members want Chris Williamson reinstated. So why the hell have you and the rest of the Campaign Group of MPs said nothing? Do you really think that Tom Watson, the man who lost sleep when the High Court removed racist Labour MP Phil Woolas from Parliament for running a campaign designed to ‘make the white folk angry’ is really concerned about anti-Semitism?
Has it never occurred to you that the real target of this fake anti-Semitism campaign is not Chris Williamson but Jeremy Corbyn? If the Campaign Group of MPs continues its silence then what purpose does the group serve?
How the 18th century Tom Watson's fought racism
Like the Salem witchhunt of the 18th century, denial of being a witch or anti-Semite is taken as proof of one’s guilt. Of course there may be a tiny handful of anti-Semites in the Labour Party, just as there may be a few paedophiles.  However does anyone seriously suggest Labour has a paedophile problem?
I can only imagine what Tony Benn would have said about this timidity. The time has come when you and others in the Campaign Group should throw off your fear and speak out.
In solidarity
Tony Greenstein

Tower Hamlets Council’s Decision to Refuse to Host the Big Ride for Palestine is both Cowardly & Shameful

$
0
0

The IHRA, the Pretext for this racism has nothing to do with opposing anti-Semitism and everything to do with Undermining Solidarity with Palestinians 

In what must count as one of the most shameful and racist decisions of a ‘Labour’ Council, Tower Hamlets refused last weekend to host the Big Ride for Palestine.
The reasons that Council officials gavewere that raising money to fund sporting equipment for Palestinian children had “political connotations” and that the closing rally of this year’s bike ride could not go ahead in the borough “without problems”.
One wonders whether raising money for Israeli Jewish children would also have had political connotations. The stench of hypocrisy is overbearing.
 Officials told organisers there was a risk speakers might express views which contradicted the council’s policies on community cohesion and equality. Fancy that.  You would never guess that we live in a democracy.
This is what free speech under a New Labour Council is about. I guess we should be grateful. If this were Israel we could be locked up without trial – it’s called administrative detention.
What kind of Orwellian world do we live in when supporting children in the world’s largest open prison, Gaza, might be thought to promote inequality? How could this possibly affect ‘community cohesion’ – unless they are saying Jewish residents would be upset by supporting Palestinian children?
The real reason for banning The Big Ride was that supporting the event might breach the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism because of references on the Big Ride’s website to apartheid and ethnic cleansing.
In other words calling Israel what it is – an apartheid state and referring to ethnic cleansing is considered to be ‘anti-Semitic’. What this really means is that telling the truth is now anti-Jewish! The IHRA is effectively saying that Jews are racist, because if you are anti-racist you are anti-Jewish. 
There is no doubt that Israel is a racist and apartheid state.  It is a state where the Chief Rabbi of Safed, a government employee, backed up by dozens of other rabbis, issued an edictforbidding Jews to rent homes to Arabs.
It is a state where hundreds of demonstrators come onto the streets in Afula to protestthe sale of a house to an Arab. It is a state where hundreds of Jewish communities are legally entitled, under the 2011 Admissions Committee Lawto bar Arabs from their communities.
It is a state where education is segregated and according to the 2006 Israeli Democracy Institute Survey, 62% of Israelis wanted the government to encourage local Arabs to leave the countryand 75% of Jewsdidn’t approve of sharing apartments with Arabs.
It is a state where not one single Arab village or town has been created since 1948, whereas hundreds of Jewish communities have been created.
As for ethnic cleansing it is the official policy of the Israeli government, of whatever political hue, to increase the number of Israeli Jews and reduce the size of the Arab population. That is why no Palestinian refugees are allowed to return whereas any Jew is allowed to ‘return’ regardless of whether they have been there before.
It is a state where the Ministry of Education can ban a book, Borderlife, about a relationship between Jewish and Arab teenagers because it gives the wrong message.
Education officials explained that
intimate relations between Jews and non Jews, and certainly the option of formalising them through marriage and having a family... is perceived by large segments of society as a threat to a separate identity
Accordingto Dalia Fenig a senior education official:

“Young people of adolescent age tend to romanticizing and don’t, in many cases, have the systemic vision that includes considerations involving maintaining the identity of the people and the significance of assimilation.”

In other words teenagers might not yet have had time to assimilate the racist ideology behind a ‘Jewish’ state which says that mixed relationships between Jew and Arab are forbidden.
As for ethnic cleansing where would one start?  The demolitionof 100 Palestinian homes in July in Sur Baher, Jerusalem might be a start.
Of course the IHRA doesn’t actually say that calling Israel an Apartheid state or a state that practices ethnic cleansing is anti-Semitic.  It doesn’t have to. It is vague enough so that officials will interpret it cautiously excluding anything controversial that might cause ‘problems’ later. That is how bureaucracies operate.
Seven of its eleven illustrations of ‘anti-Semitism’ relate to Israel. The preamble to the 11 illustrations states that:
Contemporary examples of antisemitism... could, taking into account the overall context, include...
But of course Council officials and politicians don’t do context. They apply the definition as if the examples are inflexible and straightforward. 
The IHRA definition has been subject to excoriating criticism by a host of academics and legal scholars such as Geoffrey Robertson QC, who described it as ‘not fit for purpose’. Hugh Tomlinson QC described the IHRA as ‘chilling’ free speech and the Jewish former Court of Appeal Judge Sir Stephen Sedleywas similarly critical. Even David Feldman, Director of the Zionist Pears Institute for the Study of Anti-Semitism describedthe IHRA as bewilderingly imprecise’. Even the person who drafted it, Kenneth Stern attackedthe misuse of the IHRA saying:
The definition was not drafted, and was never intended, as a tool to target or chill speech on a college campus.
No amount of reasoned argument or logic can withstand the unanimity of bourgeois support for Zionism. The IHRA is a necessary defence of British foreign policy support for Israel. 
Last week even Dr Geoffrey Alderman, a maverick right-wing Zionist academic and former Jewish Chronicle columnist, slatedthe IHRA definition. Like Geoffrey Robertson he described the IHRA as not fit for purpose. The IHRA’s 11 examples ‘embed numerous internal contradictions.’
Yet despite all of this criticism the IHRA continues on its way because it is important to dress up support for the West’s armed guard dog in the Middle East in rosy and comfortable colours.
The actions of Tower Hamlets Council are of course outrageous. Tower Hamlets is a heavily Bengali and Muslim area. The idea that supporting the Palestinians is anti-Semitic is not likely to gain much support in the area and it should be used to remove this politically corrupt and racist New Labour council which owes its existence to the undemocratic removal of the previous independent left administration of Lofthur Rahman, by a combination of the High Court and Tory right-winger Eric Pickles.
But above all it is incumbent on the trade unions, which were responsible for the Labour Party adopting the IHRA to now recognise that their existing policies on supporting BDS and the Palestinians are incompatible with support for the IHRA.
My own branch Unite SE/6246 has sent an open letter to Len McLuskey calling for UNITE to reverse its support for the IHRA. Activists in UNISON and other trade unions should be doing the same. Our message should be simple – support the Palestinians or support Israeli Apartheid and Zionism.
On October 12th Palestine Solidarity Campaign will be holding a trade union conference. They have so far ensured that the IHRA is kept off the agenda as the Socialist Action leadership of PSC is anxious not to come into conflict with the trade union leaders. It provides an ideal opportunity for us to raise the issue nonetheless.
Our message must be that the IHRA must go.  It has nothing to do with fighting anti-Semitism and everything to do with supporting racism and apartheid in Israel.
Tony Greenstein

See Palestine activists hit back after council refuses to host event over antisemitism

Chris Williamson MP Defies Zionist Intimidation and the Lies of Peter Kyle to Speak in Brighton

$
0
0

A Magnificent Victory for Free Speech – the Voice of Anti-racism and Anti-Fascism Will Not Be Silenced By Thuggery and Intimidation



When the newly formed Labour Left Alliance was recently formed little did we expect that our opponents on the Labour Right and in the Zionist lobby would move heaven and earth to prevent Chris Williamson MP speaking at our first public meeting.
Peter Kyle, right-wing nominally Labour MP for Hove
Brighton & Hove Momentum give their support to the meeting
Two weeks ago ‘Labour’ MP for Hove, Peter Kyle, pressurised the Brighthelm Church and Community Centre into cancellingour booking of their main hall. Liar Kyle stated that ‘“our city should not be a welcoming place for people who bait the Jewish community or sow seeds of division.’
The only person ‘baiting’ the Jewish community was Kyle himself. Instead of giving the real reasons for not wanting Chris Williamson to speak – the witchhunt, austerity, fake anti-Semitism – he used the Jewish community as a political battering ram.
Kyle has been unable to point to one single thing that Chris Williamson has said which is anti-Semitic. All that he has done is to call out the fake anti-Semitism campaign against mainly Black and Jewish members of the Labour Party.
Chris Williamson’s response, that “When Peter Kyle was still in nappies, I was an active member of the Anti-Nazi League, physically confronting foul racists and anti-Semites in the National Front.” said it all.
Email from Holiday Inn
The next venue to be targetedwas the Holiday Inn which had accepted our booking. The Zionists and their friends in the Labour Party engaged in crude and violent intimidation. Abusve phone calls were made calling the staff ‘cunts’ coupled with two men who came in to warn the receptionists that there would be ‘consequences’if the meeting went ahead forced the hotel into cancelling the booking.
Chris Williamson, Greg Hadfield & Tony Greenstein
They sent Greg Hadfield, who had booked the meeting an email which made it quite clear that the reason for cancellation was that
‘Over the past 24 hours, our hotel and employees have been subject to abuse and threats from members of the public on the phone, on email and on social media outlets.’
Disingenuous statement by national Quakers and response
Finally today the Zionists and Labour Right learnt that we had booked the Friends Meeting House as a backup. Although we have had excellent relations with the local Quakers unfortunately the Quakers nationally were pressurised by the Zionists and they stepped in and forced the cancellation of the meeting.
The tweet put out by the Quakers nationally was disgraceful. It implied that the reason for cancelling the booking was anti-Semitism, when no one has or could point out anything Chris Williamson has said that is even remotely anti-Semitic. It was a thoroughly disingenuous tweet.
In other words it was an act of cowardice by people who aren’t prepared to back up what they say with evidence.  Of course they didn’t accuse Chris of anti-Semitism they merely implied it.  Doubly dishonest.
At 1 pm on Thursday we learnt of the cancellation and I have to confess that I was beginning to think that we might have to accept defeat.  Full marks to Greg Hadfield who had the wits about him to hire an outside PA.  Coupled with the good weather it was decided that we would hold the meeting outdoor in Regency Square in the finest traditions of the labour movement.  Regency Square is a grand place and is, as its name implies, a place of some architectural interest.
At 6 pm we gathered at our pre-arranged meeting point by the Odeon cinema. It had been intended to redirect people to the Friends Meeting House.  Instead we redirected people to Regency Square. When people learnt of what had happened and the cancellation of yet another venue, they were outraged.  Quite rightly people felt angered that a lobby group for a foreign state, Israel, was preventing them attending a meeting to listen to a British MP. Out they poured as we sent never ending groups along to Regency Square, which was 5 minutes away.
Right-wing weirdo Lukey Stanger
At 6.30 an email was sent to our email list telling people where the new venue was. The Zionists meanwhile met outside Brighton Town Hall and we were told that they would be marching to the new venue. In fact the only person to turn up was Lukey Stanger who is         suspended from the Labour Party for harassmentof women and claiming that Travellers are a ‘nasty blight’ on society.
Although Zionist stragglers turned up they kept to the fringers and shied away from disrupting a crowd of between 150 and 200 people.  Given that the Friends Meeting House lecture theatre holds only about 100 people, we had inadvertently been given, free of charge, a larger space with which to accommodate people.
After the cancellation of the Holiday Inn room, which held 195 places, we were seriously worried that we could not fit everyone in to the Friends Meeting House. Regency Square however is large enough! It was also the scene of a meeting in July 2016 when Jeremy Corbyn spoke at the overflow to a meeting in the nearby Metropole Hotel.
Chris spoke for about half an hour, primarily on socialist economics and monetary theory whilst refuting all the allegations of anti-Semitism. As he pointed out, he had physically fought the National Front and similar anti-Semites when the Labour Right had argued that even fascist were entitled to freedom of speech,  Right-wing Labour has never opposed the fascists.  They only oppose anti-racists and anti-imperialists under the guise of anti-racism.
Asa Jansson, an academic from Sweden spoke next and she drew the parallels between the rise of fascism in her own country and what is happening today in Britain. It was a careful and thoughtful speech from someone who was in at the beginning of Brighton and Hove Momentum before it swung to the Right.
There were a number of speakers from the audience including myself. One of them, a woman, asked all people of Jewish origin to come and stand by the ‘Jew baiter’ Chris Williamson and about 8 people did so.  Presumably we are the ‘wrong sort of Jew’ i.e. we are not racists or Zionists.
When I spoke I made the point that those who accused us of racism are the very people who introduced the ‘hostile environment’ policy and Windrush, both of which began under New Labour. I also made the simple point that Peter Kyle’s differences with Chris Williamson and Jeremy Corbyn have nothing to do with anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism is simply a smokescreen.  Kyle’s objections are to do with his support for the involvement if private health care companies in the NHS, to his support for academies, PFI and all the other New Labour/Tory policies which led to 2 successive general election defeats in 2010 and 2015.
I also dealt with the argument that Labour has an ‘anti-Semitism’ problem by way of an analogy.  There are undoubtedly a few paedophiles in the Labour Party just as there are a few people with anti-Semitic ideas.  However no one suggests that the Labour Party therefore has a paedophile problem so why do they say it has an anti-Semitism problem? The answer is Jeremy Corbyn and his proposals, mild though they are, for a redistribution of wealth.
Over 150 people attended this wonderful outdoor meeting.  There was a determination amongst people that we would not be silenced or prevented from meeting.  That the littler Hitlers and petty dictators who had sought to prevent us meeting would and did fail. As I said in my speech, 40 years ago the National Front had tried to stop the Left in Brighton meeting.  They failed then and those who tried to stop us meeting, the Kyles and the Fiona Sharpes of Sussex Friends of Israel have failed now. Unfortunately the Quakers when it came to standing up to powerful lobbies simply folded. 
Tony Greenstein

It is time for Israel to put an end to their Blood Libel at Umm-al-Hiran

$
0
0

The Police murder of a Palestinian teacher must now be admitted



 

Residents look at the remains of homes demolished in the Bedouin village of Umm al-Hiran in southern Israel, January 25, 2017.Alex Levac

If anyone wants to know why Israel is not a normal western state then what happened in the Bedouin village of Umm al-Hiran should be an object lesson.
Umm al-Hiran is one of about 50 Arab villages in Israel which is ‘unrecognised’. What this means is that those who live in these villages have no legal right to do so.  They may be able to stay but then again they may not.
There is of course no such thing as an ‘unrecognised’ Jewish village. By definition Jews have the right to live where they want. After all their right is god given.
Being ‘unrecognised’ means that the village was not connected to the national water mains, electricity or power supply. Everything it had was built by the residents themselves. However the new Jewish town of Hiran will have all these facilities and more.
Israel’s Palestinians are there on sufferance.  The villagers of Umm al-Hiranwere moved by military order to Wadi Atir in 1956. They built stone houses, paved roads, built wells and farmed the surrounding land. Sheikh Farhoud Abu al Qi'an argued that before their arrival "It was a desert, with no roads, water, houses or services".
Aymen Odeh, leader of the Joint List, made up of the mainly Arab parties is deliberately shot at close range with a sponge bullet by the Israeli  Police
In 2001, the Israel Land Authority described its residents as a "special obstacle". In 2003 the Israeli state applied to the Magistrates’ Court in Beershebafor the demolition of the village ex parte, without informing the landowners. In 2004, the state filed lawsuits to evacuate the villagers on the basis that they were trespassers who were squatting illegally. The court ruled that the legal status of the residents was as "permanent residents", but at the same time concluded that because the land was held from the state free of charge, their residency could be revoked at any time. The Prime Minister's Office had also previously blocked a plan to recognise the neighbouring village of Atir, which shares land with Umm al-Hiran, requesting instead that the plan did not clash with the proposal to establish a Jewish town.
The proposal would relocate the Bedouins of Umm al-Hiran to the Bedouin township of Hura, one of seven Bedouin townships, all of which are at the bottom of the country's socio-economic index. These townships are specifically designated towns intended to "contain" expelled Bedouins. They are characterised by being overcrowded, lacking in adequate services and having the highest percentage of unemploymentand povertyin Israel.
Umm al-Hiran is in Israel’s Negev desert (not the Occupied West  Bank or Gaza) which, after over 60 years, was demolished in order to make way for the ‘Jewish’ town of Hiran.
Raba Abu al-Kiyan, the widow of Yakub, next to the rubble of their home in Umm al-Hiran. Alex Levac
The Negev is largely unoccupied.  Few Jews want to live there.  It would have been easy to  build a Jewish town next to Umm al Hiran but that would have defeated another racist master plan, the Prawer Plan.  It is an article of faith amongst Israel’s planners and demographers that the Negev must be Judified.  In other words Arabs must be confined to their own shanty towns at the disposal of Israeli industry.  

I have covered what happened at Umm al Hiran before, in a number of blogs

The Demolition of an Israeli Arab village is why Israel is an Apartheid State & why a racist state has no ‘right to exist’

The Demolition of Um al Hiran in Israel’s Negev is why Israel is a racist, settler colonial state , Better to be a dog than Bedouin in Israel - The Story of Umm al-Hiran and the Bedouin of the Negev (Naqab)

The Demolition of al-Hiran, A Bedouin Village in the Israel’s Negev Desert.

This is Zionism - The Demolition of Umm al-Hiran.

On January 18th 2017 a large force of Israeli police accompanied by bulldozers attacked the village. Not unnaturally the villagers resisted.

During the raid a Palestinian school teacher Yaqub Musa Abu alQi’an, began driving his car slowly away from his home.  His car was raked with gunfire and he lost control and the car rolled down the hill and killed a policeman.  Yaqub who was bleeding heavily was allowed to die.

What later happened was that the Israeli police and the security minister Gilad Erdan started inventing a fable that Yaqub was a member of ISIS.  They had no evidence of this.  They alleged he deliberately killed the policeman.

It has now been conclusively proven that the killing of the policeman was a consequence of the police having opened fire and not, as Erdan and others alleged a deliberate assassination.

What happened in Umm al Hiran, where the leader of the Palestinian Joint List in the Knesset, Aymen Odeh was shot with a sponge bullet by the Israeli police, has now been investigated by a Forensic Architecture team led by Eyal Weizman.

It has been conclusively proven that Yaqub did not deliberately kill the Israeli policeman despite repeated accusations that he was a ‘terrorist’.

The Ha’aretz editorial below demanded that the Israeli state now acknowledge what they have done and compensate the family.

Of course the greater injustice, the forcible removal of a Bedouin village to make way for an Orthodox Jewish town remains

Tony Greenstein

Jun 04, 2019 3:53 AM

File photo: Israeli policemen stand guard next to a vehicle that rammed into a group of policemen in the Bedouin village of Umm al-Hiran, Israel, January 18, 2017. AP


Israel must apologize formally to the family of Yakub Abu al-Kiyan and compensate it for his death. The state must also retract the blood libel it spread about the teacher from Umm al-Hiran. All this is required by the release of the final conclusions of an investigation into the January 2017 eviction of the village’s residents, during which Abu al-Kiyan and Erez Levi, an Israeli police officer, were killed.
An analysis of footage from police body cameras, the cameras of journalists and left-wing activists at the scene and from a police helicopter supports the conclusion reached by the Shin Bet security service and the Justice Ministry department that investigates alleged police misconduct: Contrary to the claims of then-Police Commissioner Roni Alsheich and Public Security Minister Gilad Erdan, Abu al-Kiyan did not intentionally hit Levi with his car, in a terror attack. The analysis also supports Hadash-Ta’al Chairman Ayman Odeh’s contention that he was hit by a sponge-tipped bullet at the scene after the incident.
The Israeli  police spokesman alleged that Yaqub was a murderer and terrorist, something that Erdan also claimed

 “Our analysis shows unequivocally that this wasn’t a terror attack or anything resembling one,” said Prof. Eyal Weizman, whose Forensic Architecture agency at Goldsmiths, University in London, investigated the incident. Weizman explained that Abu al-Kiyan hit Levi with his car because he lost control of it after being shot and wounded. As a result, Abu al-Kiyan bled to death, without any of the policemen lifting a finger to help him. This fact underscores the importance of the incident with Odeh, Weizman added, “since he and other activists were nearby and sought to reach [Abu al-Kiyan] to give him first aid, which could have saved his life.”
The Justice Ministry department at one point recommended that one of the policemen who opened fire be questioned as a criminal suspect in Abu al-Kiyan’s death, in light of evidence obtained from the Shin Bet. But that recommendation was rejected by State Prosecutor Shai Nitzan, who apparently caved in to pressure from the police commissioner after Alsheich doubled down on his baseless accusation that Abu al-Kiyan was a terrorist.
Weizman blamed the Justice Ministry department, saying that had its personnel “dealt with the evidence the way we dealt with it, they would have seen clearly that the police were responsible for the deaths of Abu al-Kiyan and Erez Levi, as well as for Odeh’s serious injuries.” Instead, he continued, “What we saw was an ongoing attempt to manipulate the evidence, including by not handing over evidence.”
Given the results of this investigation, Israel must officially clear Abu al-Kiyan of all guilt and apologize to his family for the false accusations hurled at him. It must also compensate the family for the fact that he was shot, wounded and bled to death without being offered medical care that might have saved his life as well as for the smearing of his reputation and his memory, which exacerbated the crime of his killing. Finally, it must investigate everyone involved, both those who fired and those who perpetrated the cover-up, and see to the prosecution of everyone responsible for the scandalous handling of this painful affair.

New Footage Sheds Light on Fraught, Fatal 2017 Episode in Bedouin Village

U.K. forensic organization releases video of incident in which a local resident and a police officer were killed and an Arab lawmaker wounded, during the evacuation of Umm al-Hiran
Jun 03, 2019 10:16 PM
Israel Police entering Umm al-Hiran in advance of the evacuation, on January 18, 2017.Keren Manor / Activestills 

The final chapter of an investigation into an incident in a Negev Bedouin village in 2017, in which two people were killed, was publicized Monday by British forensic experts. The two victims killed during the Israeli security forces' evacuation of Umm al-Hiran, in advance of its planned demolition, were a local teacher, Yakub Abu al-Kiyan, and police officer Erez Levy.
Compiled by the U.K.-based Forensic Architecture research organization, the report features images from body cameras worn by Israel Police officers at the scene on January 18, 2017, immediately after Abu al-Kiyan – who was shot while driving and then lost control of his vehicle – ran over Levy and killed him.
Original assessments by politicians and other officials were that this was a deliberate, car-ramming attack.
The new investigation, headed by Prof. Eyal Weizman of Goldsmiths, University of London, was also based on footage from the cameras of journalists (including documentary photography collective Activestills), local residents and left-wing activists who were present during the evacuation – and from a police helicopter. These materials, backed by digital analyses by Forensic Architecture, support the theory of the Justice Ministry's department for investigation of the police, as well as of the Shin Bet security service, that Abu al-Kiyan was not trying to run over Levy as a terrorist act.
Forensic Architecture
The images also confirm the version of events provided by Knesset member Ayman Odeh, then-chairman of the Joint List party, who was also in Umm al-Hiran that day and claims he was hit in the head then by a sponge-tipped bullet.
The newly released footage from policemen’s body cameras shows Abu al-Kiyan losing control of his vehicle after he was shot. The vehicle proceeds on its way at high speed and shots can be heard in the background. After a few seconds the vehicle stops and its horn starts honking. A policeman can be seen opening the door and removing Abu al-Kiyan.
The Forensic Architecture report rules out the possibility that Abu al-Kiyan was shot by a police officer at close range, calling it “unreasonable,” and reveals new information about developments near the scene, including the incident with Odeh. The police have denied that sponge-tipped bullets were fired at him and said demonstrators had been throwing rocks, one of which hit the MK.
The authors of the report say the police investigation department of the Justice Ministry failed to give Odeh’s lawyers three videos taken by the police at Umm al-Hiran, which could have shed light on the incident; the written transcript of testimonies by policemen lacked statements relating to the incident as well, they note. One video clip from the police was broadcast on Israel's Channel 10 television last year, but it was edited, omitting the seconds when Odeh was apparently injured.

The clash between security forces and Odeh and left-wing activists occurred seconds after Abu al-Kiyan was shot and Levy was run over, as the activists tried to approach the site.
The new investigatory materials (and others) were collected by Forensic Architecture in collaboration with the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel, which is providing legal representation to Odeh. After the case was closed against the policemen involved in the incident involving him, the MK's lawyers submitted an appeal in March. Now, with publication of the new information, it is likely that the investigation of Odeh’s injury will be reopened.
As to the circumstances surrounding Abu al-Kiyan's death, the Justice Ministry department had recommended that one of the policemen who fired his weapon be questioned under caution, based on information from the Shin Bet. However, the prosecution closed the case and never questioned anybody about firing the lethal shot.
Eyal Weizman, a professor of spatial and visual cultures at Goldsmiths, says Forensic Architecture's analysis categorically shows that Abu al-Kiyan was in no way motivated by terrorist intentions when he ran over Levy; he had lost control of his vehicle after being shot, whereupon he bled to death because the security forces did not attend to him.
“That is why the incident with Odeh is so important, as he and other activists were right there and tried to get to him [Abu al-Kiyan] to help him, which could have saved his life,” says Weizman, adding that he and his co-researchers found an abundance of photographic and other evidence of the evacuation of Umm al-Hiran on that fateful day.
It is unusual to get footage from so many angles regarding a single incident,” he says. “If the Justice Ministry's department had related to the evidence like we do, they would have clearly seen that the police were responsible for the deaths of Abu al-Kiyan and Erez Levy, and for Odeh’s serious injuries. What we see is a persistent effort to manipulate the evidence, including the failure to provide evidence. The policeman who shot live bullets at Abu-Kiyan and the one who shot at Odeh should be put on trial.”
Israel Police officers next to the vehicle driven by Yakub Abu al-Kiyan in Umm al-Hiran on January 18, 2017. Tsafrir Abayov / AP

For its part, after receiving the new information, the department for investigation of the police at the Justice Ministry commented that the plaintiffs had not made additional requests or reported anything missing from the testimony originally submitted in the case.
“In the appeal, the claim was raised for the first time that video footage was missing," according to the department's statement. "To the best of our knowledge, the material was transferred in full. If, however, material is missing, those making the appeal should submit it."
Forensics Architecture will be displaying some of the images from its investigation of the Umm al-Hiran incident at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, as part of its 2019 biennial, through September.
See also

·         Umm al-Hiran: A cautionary tale of an Israeli government emboldened by Trump


Please Support the Al Tawfawk Community Centre in Jenin - Donate Generously

$
0
0

This Centre Could Be Anywhere But It Isn’t – It Operates Under Military Occupation





Apart from being a political activist and blogger I’m also a trustee for a charity, The Brighton Trust.  The Brighton Trust was set up by members of Brighton and Hove Trades Union Council.
The aim of the trust is to donate money to unpopular causes, campaigns aimed at changing rather than just putting sticking plaster over the problems in our society. As a result of our contacts with members of the New Education Union (formerly NUT) in Brighton and Hove who had adopted a community centre in Jenin, we decided to do the same.
Jenin was the subject of a massacrein 2002 when Israel used military bulldozers to demolish homes with their inhabitants still inside them.
In the past year many schools have closed as a result of Donald Trump having cut of all US funding to UNWRA. The Al Tawfawk Centre is the only one left standing.
Our trust has agreed to donate £50 per month to the Centre. We will be sending the money this Wednesday before I go on vacation!
I would like to appeal to all those who read my blog to consider sending a donation, however small or large to the following account.  We will then forward it on together with our own donation.  It must reach us by Wednesday.
For more information about the Centre see their Facebook page
We will, of course pay the costs of a SWIFT transfer which is £25.
Please Donate to:
Account Name:          The Brighton Trust
Account Number:       91420311
Sort Code:                             09-01-28
Many thanks
Tony Greenstein

Open Letter to Caroline Lucas - Why Have You Remained Silent About The Attack on Freedom of Speech?

$
0
0

The Attempt to Ban Chris Williamson and the Rally in Regency Square was in Caroline Lucas Constituency Brighton Pavilion 




Dear Caroline,
Last Thursday a fellow Member of Parliament, Chris Williamson, spoke to over 150 people in Regency Square, which is in your constituency, on socialist economics. The meeting was originally scheduled to be at the Brighthelm Centre which is also in Brighton Pavilion. The meeting was cancelled after the intervention of the MP for Hove, Peter Kyle.
Email sent to Holiday Inn by Zionist opponents of Chris Smith
The meeting was then transferred to the Holiday Inn which received a barrage of abusive and threatening calls including a visit by two men threatening ‘consequences’.

Email confirming that threats of violence were made against the Brighton Quakers by Zionists

Friends Meeting House in Brighton


The meeting was then transferred to the Quaker Friends Meeting House, again in your constituency. Although they were fully aware of the controvery the meeting was cancelled at the last minute after a barrage of abusive phone calls and threats of violence.  The FMH is also in Brighton Pavilion.

In her more radical days Caroline Lucas, Britain's only Green MP stood on picket lines unlike Kyle, who refused to support her NHS Reinstatement Bill
Despite the best efforts of Kyle and the supporters of Israeli Apartheid, the meeting went ahead because enough people were determined enough to ensure that freedom of speech in Brighton and Hove will not be subject to a veto by the Israel lobby.
The Pathetic Marie van der Zyle, President of the BOD, came down from London and stayed in the Jury's Inn in order to protest Chris Williamson's meeting - no one even saw her!
The Board of Deputies Led the Campaign to Ban Chris Williamson - One Year Ago It Supported Israel Shooting Unarmed Protesters in Gaza
The reasons for Kyle’s attack on what is a basic democratic right, freedom of speech and assembly, both guaranteed under Articles 10 and 11 of the European Convention of Human Rights, was that Chris Williamson was a ‘Jew baiter’. This bogus and spurious allegation, which is made against all supporters of the Palestinians including Jewish supporters, has no foundation. There is nothing that Chris has said which merits this venomous accusation.
At the meeting in Regency Square the Chair of the meeting Greg Hadfield, told how he wrote to you asking for a message of support which could be read out at the meeting. It would appear that you decided not to respond.
This attack on freedom of speech is not a one-off. There have been repeated attempts to prevent supporters of the Palestinians, including Jewish people, from speaking by those acting on behalf of the world’s most racist state.
Steve Bell, the legendary Guardian cartoonist, had an innocuous cartoon depicting Tom Watson as the witch-finder general censored. Jackie Walker has been confronted by a concerted attempt to prevent her film The Witchhuntbeing shown, including bomb threats.
Chris has been subject to a McCarthyist campaign for having dared to challenge the Establishment Consensus that the Labour Party is overrun with anti-Semitism. As happened at Salem in the 18th century, denial of being a witch is taken as proof of one’s guilt. As you are probably aware, Arthur Miller’s Crucibleused Salem as a metaphor for McCarthyism in the United States.
When you were first elected I, like many socialists, was happy to vote for you rather than New Labour. You were then an explicit supporter of the Palestinians. Of late you have remained silent in the face of a wall to wall propaganda blitz, led by BBC’s Panorama, . It would seem that Brexit and your new allies such as Peter Kyle have had a deleterious effect.
Although you initially opposed the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism you succumbed to the onslaught and changed your position despite the Green Party conference rejecting the IHRA.
The IHRA has been slated by academics and legal scholars. Geoffrey Robertson described the IHRA as ‘not fit for purpose’. Even the person who drafted it, Kenneth Stern, in testimony to the US Congress, described it as ‘chilling’freedom of expression.
Only yesterday Tony Lerman, a distinguished Jewish academic and founder of the Institute for Jewish Policy Research wrote in the Independent an article I warned that adopting the IHRA would shut down Palestinian protest – I’ve been proved right based on the decision last week by Tower Hamlets council to refuse to allow the Big Ride for Palestine, which raises funds for children in Gaza, to meet in a local park because they feared it was ‘anti-Semitic’


Peter Kyle - right-wing Labour MP for Hove
More recently we have seen Greens and neo-Nazis voting together to condemn BDS in the Bundestag as ‘anti-Semitic’ and in Austria to ban Ronnie Kassrills,  the Jewish founder of the ANC’s military wing, Ukkhonto we Sizwe, from speaking on Viennese council premises.
I am therefore writing to ask you to condemn Pete Kyle’s attack on freedom of expression in your constituency and to reconsider your support for the IHRA.
It should not have been necessary for me to ask you to speak up for what are basic civil liberties such as freedom of expression.  However we are living in a period when the Daily Mail and the Sun can condemn ‘anti-Semitism’ at one and the same time as they employ Katie Hopkins as their columnist.
I look forward to hearing from you.
Kind regards
Tony Greenstein


Led by its Racist Mayor Biggs, Tower Hamlets Council chose to support an Apartheid State

$
0
0

How is it that a Council with 2/3 Black and Asian Councillors Voted for a Tory Resolution on 'racism'? This is institutionalised Uncle Tommery



On Saturday 27th July Big Ride for Palestine, which raises money for sports equipment for children in Gaza, was prevented from using a park for their rally in Tower Hamlets. This was because of a decision by Tower Hamlets Council to adopt the IHRAdefinition of anti-Semitism which conflates opposition to Zionism and the Israeli state with anti-Semitism.

The truth of why the Council had banned the rally came out a week later as a result of a Freedom of Information request by PSC.
Council officers found it easier to lie than tell the truth. The council toldThe Big Ride that the event’s “political connotations” meant that the rally could not go ahead in the borough “without problems”.
Council staff feared there was a “real risk” that the event might breach the IHRA definition of antisemitism because of references on the Big Ride’s website to apartheid and ethnic cleansing. 
When considering how to explain the decision, one council official said it would be wise to “avoid the anti Semitism aspect ref their website as this could open a can of worms and come back to bite us”. Indeed it did!
On September 19th 2018 the largely Labour Council, just 4 of whose councillors are not Labour, unanimously passed a motion adopting not only the 38 word IHRAdefinition of anti-Semitism but all its 11 examples of ‘anti-Semitism’, 7 of which reference the State of Israel. In other words the IHRA has nothing whatever to do with anti-Semitism.
On 14th November a petition was handed into the Council asking for the policy to be amended to include a provision that 
"It is not antisemitic, without additional evidence, to suggest that it displays anti-Jewish prejudice to criticise the Government of Israel; or to criticise Zionism as a political ideology; or to describe any policy or law or practices of the state of Israel as racist, including acts leading to Palestinian dispossession as part of the establishment of the state; or to define Israel as an apartheid state; or to advocate Boycott Divestment and Sanctions against Israel." (2) Support Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza by flying the flag of Palestine at the Town Hall in the week before and after the UN International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian people on November 29th.
This was unacceptable to Mayor John Biggs because the whole point of the IHRA is to defend Zionism not defeat anti-Semitism. This caveat would drive a coach and horses through the definition.  Biggs rejected this contemptuously statingthat:
 there can be no qualifications or caveats to a definition of racism, particularly where they specifically relate to a single group or country
And Biggs is right. There can be no caveats over a definition of racism.  But whatever else it is the IHRA is not a definition of racism.
Biggs is not only a racist he is an idiot.  Racism applies to individuals not countries. You can't be racist towards an abstract noun. The idea that we couldn’t have criticised Chile under Pinochet or Spain under Franco because we might be considered racist is a testament to the intellectual poverty of this former financial analyst from the City of London.
The IHRA consists of over 500 words whereas the Oxford English Dictionary definition of racism: ‘Hostility to or prejudice against Jews’ is only 6 words. As Antony Lerman wrotein the Independent this week:
I warned that adopting the IHRA would shut down Palestinian protest – I’ve been proved right, which describes what happened when Tower Hamlets implemented the decision.’
Tower Hamlet’s Council was led by a radical left Mayor Lofthur Rahman until 2015. Rahman was elected Mayor in 2010 and again in 2014. This proved too much for the corrupt local New Labour machine backed by Eric Pickles, who subsequently became Chair of Conservative Friends of Israel.
Soon after his reelection Rahman was accused of a series of electoral offences and removed by an election court presided over by Richard Mawrey.  It was what I called a ‘Democratic Coup in Tower Hamlets by an Unelected Judge’.  
In the Guardian Richard Seymour and Ashok Kumar wrote about how The smear campaign against Lutfur Rahman is an insult to democracy. 37,000 people voted for him yet an unelected Tory judge had removed him.
Giles Fraser in ‘The Lutfur Rahman verdict and the spectre of ‘undue spiritual influencewrote that among the reasons for removing Rahman from office, was that he had exerted “undue spiritual influence” on some sections of the electorate, specifically Muslim voters . 
Cartoon in Punch portraying the Irish as monkeys
The legislation under which this ‘crime’ had been committed was the 1883 Corrupt and Illegal Practices Act. The idea of “undue spiritual influence” was introduced to constrain the influence of the Roman Catholic clergy on what the English establishment at the time took to be the ignorant and impressionable minds of the Irish proletariat. Instead of impressionable Catholics it was now Muslims who were likely to be stirred by religious passions.  Mawry was explicit about this. “Time and again”, he said
it was stressed that the Catholic voters were men of simple faith, usually much less well educated than the clergy who were influencing them, and men whose natural instinct would be to obey the orders of their priests … This principle still holds good … [A] distinction must be made between a sophisticated, highly educated and politically literate community and a community which is traditional, respectful of authority and, possibly, not fully integrated with the other communities living in the same area … [I]t is the character of the person sought to be influenced that is key to whether influence has been applied....
[i]t would be wrong … to treat Tower Hamlets’ Muslim community by the standards of a secular and largely agnostic metropolitan elite”.
If this is not racist then words have lost all meaning. Muslims were not as sophisticated as a white ‘secular and largely agnostic metropolitan elite’.  Anti-Irish racism has been transformed into anti-Muslim racism.
John Biggs is only Mayor thanks to a racist Deputy High Court Judge and Tory Lord Eric Pickles. 
What is remarkable is that the resolution was passed unanimously by Tower Hamlet’s Council on the proposal of its two Tory members.  What kind of miserable and corrupt Uncle Toms does Tower Hamlets have , and two-thirds of its members are Black and Asian, that they pass a resolution on racism moved by its Tory members.  The same Tory Party that introduced the ‘hostile environment’ policy which led to the deportation of the Windrush generation.
I have written to every Councillor in Tower Hamlets asking them to explain themselves. The answers should be interesting! For anyone who wishes to email them their email addresses are below.
Tony Greenstein

SeeCritical Legal Thinking Why Muslims Can’t Trust the Legal System: The Lutfur Rahman Judgement and Institutional Racism

Open Letter to Tower Hamlet’s Councillors How do you sleep at night?

In Israel’s Ha’aretznewspaper, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the Nobel Peace Prize winner and veteran opponent of the struggle against Apartheid was quoted as saying that
"I have witnessed the systemic humiliation of Palestinian men, women and children by members of the Israeli security forces. Their humiliation is familiar to all black South Africans who were corralled and harassed and insulted and assaulted by the security forces of the apartheid government."
In the Jerusalem Post of November 28 2017 Mandla Mandela, the grandson of Nelson Mandela was quoted as saying that Israeli Apartheid was worse than in South Africa.
On 3rd April this year, Ronnie Kassrills, the Jewish founder of Umkhonto We Sizwe, the ANC’ military wing, wrote in the Guardianof how when he ‘fought South African apartheid’ he saw ‘the same brutal policies in Israel’
These veterans of the anti-Apartheid struggle in South Africa are likely to have a somewhat greater understanding of what apartheid and racism means than Tower Hamlet’s councillors.
Perhaps it was the existence of Jewish only roads or the separate entrances in the hundreds of checkpoints – one for Palestinians and another for Jewish settlers – that impressed them. Or maybe it was the military collaboration between Israel and Apartheid South Africa or the existence of hundreds of Jewish communities in Israel which under the Admissions Committee Law 2011 bar Arabs from living in them. Possibly they were referring to the religious edictof the Chief Rabbi of Safed, backed up by dozens of other rabbis, forbidding Israeli Jews from renting homes to Arabs.
What may have clinched it for Mandela, Tutu and Kassrills was Israel’s unique ‘democracy’ whereby 600,000 Israeli Jewish settlers have a vote whereas the 3.5 million Palestinians whose land they have stolen do not.
It’s difficult to know what it was that most impressed these fighters against Apartheid, a system that was no different in principle to Nazi Germany.
To describe the Israeli state as an apartheid state is a statement of fact. It has nothing to do with anti-Semitism unless you believe that most or all Jews are supporters of apartheid in which case it is you who is anti-Semitic.
Yet this was the pretext for Tower Hamlet’s refusal to host The Big Ride for Palestine and closing Altab Ali Park to them. What makes this racist act of Tower Hamlet’s Council all the more despicable is that you desecrated the name of the person after whom the park was named. Altab Ali was the victim of a racist murder just as surely were the 551 Palestinian children after Israel’s blitzkrieg in 2014. The Big Ride aimed at providing support for the children of Gaza yet you decreed that support should be given to the murderers rather than the victims.
It is unbelievable that in Tower Hamlets, where 38% of the population are Muslims according to the 2011 census, a resolution was unanimously passed in September 2018 supporting the IHRAdefinition of anti-Semitism.
The IHRA has been heavily criticised, not only by prominent lawyers and academics but even by the person who drafted it, Kenneth Stern. In your desperation to claim your allowances did you even bother to read up about the criticisms of this fake ‘anti-Semitism’ policy?
Antony Lerman, a former Director of the Institute of Jewish Policy Research stated that
‘Not only is there now overwhelming evidence that it’s not fit for purpose, but it also has the effect of making Jews more vulnerable to antisemitism, not less.’
Sir Geoffrey Bindman, a Jewish lawyer, described the 38 word IHRA definition as
‘poorly drafted, misleading, and in practice has led to the suppression of legitimate debate and freedom of expression.
Sir Stephen Sedley, a former Court of Appeal Judge, who is also Jewish saidthe IHRA ‘fails the first test of any definition: it is indefinite. He described it as
placing the historical, political, military and humanitarian uniqueness of Israel’s occupation and colonisation of Palestine beyond permissible criticism.’
The noted human rights barrister Hugh Tomlinson QC saidthe IHRA ‘lacks clarity and comprehensiveness’ and that it hasa potential chilling effect on public bodies’
Even the man who drafted it Kenneth Stern, in testimonyto Congress, said:
‘“The definition was not drafted, and was never intended, as a tool to target or chill speech on a college campus... It was never supposed to curtail speech on campus.”
Yet without a moment’s thought you passed the IHRA ‘definition’ the result of which was to ban a charity bike ride whose purpose was to raise funds for children in Gaza, who have been subject to a starvation blockade for the past 12 years.
What I find incomprehensible is that Tower Hamlet's Black and Asian councillors voted for a motion on racism proposed by Tower Hamlet’s Tory members. That is like putting the Moors Murderers in charge of a children’s home.
30% of Tower Hamlets originate in Bangladesh. Do I need to remind you that in pursuit of free market economics and under successive Tory (and Liberal) governments, over 40 million people died of famine in Bengal under the British Raj?
As that well-knownTory racist, Winston Churchill, remarked:
I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion. The famine was their own fault for breeding like rabbits."
If there is one thing that distinguishes the Conservative Party it is an unashamed defence of an Empire whose depredations were justified in the name of a higher civilisation. Above all else it was racism which oiled wheels of the British Empire.
It is unbelievable that over 30 Black and Asian members of Tower Hamlet’s Council could vote for a Tory motion on racism. If I hesitate in calling them Uncle Toms it is only because Harriet Beechwood Stowe’s Uncle Tom is a noble character.
Last November a petition was submitted to the Council asking for it to be made clear that the IHRA definition would not infringe on the right of the Palestinians to criticise Zionism and Israeli racism. Tower Hamlet’s white and racist New Labour mayor John Biggs contemptuously rejected this proposal. Biggs statedthat 
there can be no qualifications or caveats to a definition of racism, particularly where they specifically relate to a single group or country.’
Leaving aside the novel idea that you can be racist about a country, a definition which is 500+ words long is no definition. The Oxford English Dictionary definition of anti-Semitism: ‘Hostility to or prejudice against Jews’ is just 6 words.
It is clear after the banning of the Big Ride for Palestine that the adoption of the IHRA has had the effect of branding support for the Palestinians as anti-Semitic. I don’t know whether self-respect is a word that you understand but but if you do still possess any then you will ensure a speedy repeal of Tower Hamlet’s support for the IHRA.
Yours sincerely,
Tony Greenstein

We the undersigned petition the council to We ask the Mayor and the Council to: (1) Adopt the following caveat to the IHRA statement of 19 September. This safeguards our right to campaign for Palestine in Tower Hamlets.

Tower Hamlets Council, many councillors and our Mayor have welcomed many visitors from Jenin in Palestine since the formation of the Tower Hamlets Jenin Friendship Association in 2002.
We are concerned that on 19th September the Labour dominated council passed, unopposed, a Conservative motion to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism, along with its highly controversial examples.

As the far-right grows in Europe and in Britain, it is vital we stand against the poison of antisemitism and all forms of racism, wherever they emerge.

However, some of the examples contained within the definition adopted by the council may be used to prevent our community from expressing solidarity with the Palestinian people in their struggle for equality and human rights. Moves to suppress solidarity have been made by other London Councils.
This Petition ran from 02/10/2018 to 14/11/2018 and has now finished.

53 people signed this Petition.
Council response

Tower Hamlets Council voted unanimously to agree the IHRA definition, and alt 11 accompanying examples, on 19h September 2018.

While I appreciate that there are strong views on this issue over thirty countries, including the UK and twenty four El-J member countries, have adopted the IHRA's definition of anti-Semitism along with 130 councils across the UK, the Crown Prosecution Service and the judiciary.

The petition asks us to amend a decision we took in September, in effect to adopt a caveat to our adopted definition of anti-Semitism. In my view, there can be no qualifications or caveats to a definition of racism, particularly where they specifically relate to a single group or country.
I deeply worry about what message it would send to apply a caveat to a recognised definition of antiSemitism to reference the actions of Israel, as the petition seeks to do.

It is entirely right and proper to criticise the actions of Israel, and to show solidarity with the people of Palestine, but to do so as a qualification to a definition of anti-Semitism would be wrong in my view.

Mayor@towerhamlets.gov.uk, Faroque.Ahmed@towerhamlets.gov.uk, Shah.Ameen@towerhamlets.gov.uk, Victoria.Obaze@towerhamlets.gov.uk, cllr.rajib.ahmed@towerhamlets.gov.uk, kahar.chowdhury@towerhamlets.gov.uk, Bex.White@towerhamlets.gov.uk, sabina.akhtar@towerhamlets.gov.uk, Motin.Uz-Zaman@towerhamlets.gov.uk, Sufia.Alam@towerhamlets.gov.uk, amina.ali@towerhamlets.gov.uk, Cllr.Rachel.Blake@towerhamlets.gov.uk, Cllr.marc.francis@towerhamlets.gov.uk, Shah.Ameen@towerhamlets.gov.uk, Faroque.Ahmed@towerhamlets.gov.uk, Cllr.Asmak.Begum@towerhamlets.gov.uk, Val.Whitehead@towerhamlets.gov.uk, Kevin.Brady@towerhamlets.gov.uk, Tarik.Khan@towerhamlets.gov.uk, Gabriela.Salva-Macallan@towerhamlets.gov.uk, Mufeedah.Bustin@towerhamlets.gov.uk, Councillor Mufeedah Bustin, Shad.Chowdhury@towerhamlets.gov.uk, Leema.Qureshi@towerhamlets.gov.uk, Dipa.Das@towerhamlets.gov.uk, Cllr.Ayas.Miah@towerhamlets.gov.uk, Cllr.David.Edgar@towerhamlets.gov.uk, Asma.Islam@towerhamlets.gov.uk, Puru.Miah@towerhamlets.gov.uk, councillorpetergolds@gmail.com, Ehtasham.Haque@towerhamlets.gov.uk, cllr.candida.ronald@towerhamlets.gov.uk, Mohammed.Pappu@towerhamlets.gov.uk, Cllr.Danny.Hassell@towerhamlets.gov.uk, Cllr.helal.uddin@towerhamlets.gov.uk, Mohammed.Hossain@towerhamlets.gov.uk, Cllr.Sirajul.Islam@towerhamlets.gov.uk, Eve.McQuillan@towerhamlets.gov.uk, Cllr.Denise.Jones@towerhamlets.gov.uk, Abdal.Ullah@towerhamlets.gov.uk, harunmiahcllr@outlook.com, Cllr.rabina.khan@towerhamlets.gov.uk, Cllr.AbdulC.Mukit@towerhamlets.gov.uk, Cllr.john.pierce@towerhamlets.gov.uk, Kyrsten.Perry@towerhamlets.gov.uk, cllrandrewwood@gmail.com, zenith.rahman@towerhamlets.gov.uk, Dan.Tomlinson@towerhamlets.gov.uk,


What Kind of State Hides Away Documents Previously Open and Available to Researchers?

$
0
0
Israel is a State whose Intelligence Services are Engaged in Rewriting the History of the Nakba and the Ethnic Cleansing of the Palestinians






I was brought up as a Zionist and from an early age I learnt that, despite the wishes of the Israelis, the Arabs had insisted on leaving Palestine in order to let the Arab armies invade and drive the Jews out. In every Arab village there was a radio which conveyed orders from the Arab states to get out in order not to impede the invading Arab armies.
Looking at it today, it is a wonder how I and generations of Jews bought into these myths. They are, when seen in the cold light of day, absurd. No indigenous population voluntarily exiles itself. It makes no sense. Why would the Palestinians take orders from distant Arab rulers. But to us it made sense. After all ‘the Arabs’ were the enemy.
The history of what has happened has been told in many books and articles such as Ilan Pappe’s Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine and Benny Morris’s The Birth of the Palestinian Problem Revisited.  Over half the Palestinian refugees had already been expelled by May 15th 1948 when Israel declared its independence.
We were also told how the Zionists begged the Palestinians to stay and in particular how the Mayor of Haifa Shabtai Levy pleaded with the Palestinians to stay. Indeed Golda Meir wrote in her autobiography "My Life" that Ben-Gurion asked her to try and prevent the flight of Haifa’s Arabs.
“Ben-Gurion called me and said: 'I want you to immediately go to Haifa and see to it that the Arabs who remain in Haifa are treated appropriately. I also want you to try and persuade the Arabs who are already on the beach to return home. You have to get it into their heads that they have nothing to fear,' he said. And so, I went immediately. I sat on the beach there and begged them to return home I pleaded with them until I was exhausted but it didn’t work,”
It was also a lie. In fact on 2nd June 1948, barely a month after their expulsion, David Ben-Gurion sent a letter to Abba Khoushy, the secretary-general of the Haifa Workers' Council, and later the city’s mayor instructing him that ‘we don’t want a return of the enemy. And all institutions should act accordingly’After Capturing Haifa, Ben-Gurion GaveOrder to Stop Fleeing Arabs From Returning.
What we weren’t told was how the Palestinians in Haifa had been shelled and mortared by the Zionist terror militias and that the main militia, the Labour Zionist Haganah had used loudspeakers to warn of a terrible massacre if any Arabs stayed.  Such was the panic that many Palestinians drowned in the sea at Haifa Port when boarding the boats to take them to safety. [See Ilan Pappe’s The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine]


We were also told how the Zionists begged the Palestinians to stay and in particular how the Mayor of Haifa Shabtai Levy pleaded with the Palestinians to stay. But as Michael Bar-Zohar, the biographer of Ben Gurion, noted appeals to “the Arabs to stay” were political gestures for external audiences whereas "[i]n internal discussions", Ben-Gurion communicated that “it was better that the smallest possible number of Arabs remain within the area of the state. [Michael Bar-Zohar (1977): Ben-Gurion: A Political Biography. Hebrew, Tel Aviv, vol. 2, pp. 702–3]
It would have been impossible to form a majority Jewish  state if the Arabs had stayed.  In 1961 two researchers, quite independently of each other, Walid Khalidi and Erskine Childers, conducted research which involved transcribing the CIA and BBC reports and tapes of the Arab radio stations of the period.  [See Erskine Childers, The Other Exodus, The Spectator, 12.5.61.]
What Khalidi and Childers found was that these radio stations instructed the Arabs of Palestine to stay and indeed threatened them with dire consequences if they left.  There was no evidence of any instruction to leave, contrary to the Zionist mythology and yet a whole lie has been built on this myth, which was constructed in order that Israel could avoid implementing UN Resolution 194. [see The Palestinian Exodus in 1948, Institute for Palestine Studies].
In Israel the official lie, that the Arabs left of their own accord, persists. In 2011 the Knesset passed the Naqba Law which authorised the Finance Minister to reduce state funding or support for an institution if it holds an activity that rejects the existence of Israel as a “Jewish and democratic state” or commemorates “Israel’s Independence Day or the day on which the state was established as a day of mourning.” 
The Palestinians still left in Israel are supposed to rejoice on the day that their relatives were expelled or massacred. The State instructs them to commemorate and celebrate a lie on pain of suffering the consequences.
Interestingly by August last year the Finance Ministry had rejected all 98 appeals, 17 of which had been submitted by Israel’s fascist culture Minister Miri Regev, to reduce funding to institutions which had nonetheless held events commemorating Naqba day.  In practice it was difficult to implement a law designed to change history to fit in with national myths.

However a Committee set up as a result of  Regev’s whining decided to fine the Jaffa theatre a few thousand shekels for holding two events, one of which featured the poetry of Dareen Tatour, an Israeli Palestinian poet gaoledfor her poetry by Israel.
It is clear that the Israeli state is intent on preserving the myth of its creation, that the Arabs ran away. It seeks to do this both by the use of legislation fining any institution, including schools, which provide another version of history and through closing their archives, even when they have previously been open to historians and researchers. The truth is a malleable instrument of power.
However  the genie is out of the bottle. Once a document has been revealed and read no amount of retrospective censorship can put the genie back into the bottle.  The mere fact that Israel is trying, by the crudest censorship, to put a stop to these embarrassing revelations about its history, by resealing the archives, is proof that Israel has a great deal to hide, not least the circumstances of its own creation.
History is being rewritten by Israel’s security services with the sole purpose of distorting the past in order to shape the future.
Today the same dilemma faces Israel as it did in 1948. The majority of those now living within Greater Israel are Palestinian Arabs. The Jewish State can only remain Jewish by depriving the majority of Palestinians under their control of any civil or political rights. In other words Israel has chosen a combination of apartheid (previously dressed up as the 2 State Solution) and bantustanisation. The question is whether and when it resorts to its final solution, transfer or ethnic cleansing. As Jonathan Ofir writes in the article below:
Everything is being buried, by an arm of the Israeli government. If someone were doing this to Holocaust documents, there would be a cry to the heavens. … The Jewish State is actively trying to erase the Nakba and any critical discussion of it. Holocaust denial is illegal in Germany – but Nakba denial is not illegal in Israel, and it is thriving.

Reading through the following articles and in particular the interview with Yehiel Horev, Director Malmab, the Head of the Defence Ministry Department charged with restricting access to already open archives is chilling.  He makes no secret of his belief that historical documents are a plaything of a government intent on rewriting history. Horev explainedthat:
the objective is to undermine the credibility of studies about the history of the refugee problem. In Horev’s view, an allegation made by a researcher that's backed up by an original document is not the same as an allegation that cannot be proved or refuted.
Horev elaborated, quite shamelessly, that
When the state imposes confidentiality, the published work is weakened, because he doesn’t have the document
There are those who still profess that Israel is just another liberal western democracy.  This deception lies at the heart of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance misdefinition of democracy. What is happening with Israeli archives dealing with the origins of the State demonstrates that Israel’s democracy is just a facade, a sugar coating that covers a military state.  What other democracy would allows its intelligence services to roam the country intimidating academic archivists into permiting the censorship of embarrassing documents?
Tony Greenstein
International forces overseeing the evacuation of Iraq al-Manshiyya, near today's Kiryat Gat, in March, 1949. Collection of Benno Rothenberg/Israel State Archives

Jonathan Ofir on July 12, 2019 36 Comments


Benny Morris
Israeli historian Benny Morris is known for his uncovering of some of Israel’s darkest secrets from the Nakba. Only a week ago, he was mentioned in detail in Hagar Shezaf’s staggering investigative report in Haaretz titled “Burying the Nakba: How Israel Systematically Hides Evidence of 1948 Expulsion of Arabs”. The piece uncovered a secret yet systematic operation by an Israeli Defense Ministry department, causing critical Nakba archives to disappear from the public eye – archives that had already been cited since the late 1980’s by historians such as Morris.

Yesterday, a Hebrew-only piece appeared in Haaretz, by Morris, titled “The Director of Historical Revisionism in the Defense Ministry”. The title is a sarcastic pun on the name of the revealed department, the “Department for Security of the Defense Establishment” (acronym Malmab in Hebrew).
Morris congratulates Shezaf for her “excellent investigative report” and continues to tell in detail of the disappearance of archives he had quoted from concerning the massacre of Deir Yassin from 1948.
Morris’s exposure reveals a multi-layered conspiracy of cover-up, historical revisionism and censorship that cuts across many decades:
About two years ago, when I was preparing a collection of articles for my recent book in Hebrew (“From Deir Yassin to Camp David”), I asked the Defense Ministry and IDF Archive for permission to peruse anew documents which regarded the massacre which was committed by the Etzel [Irgun] and Lehi [Stern Gang] in the Arab town Deir Yassin, on the western approaches of Jerusalem, on February 9th 1948. On that day 100-120 of the village residents were killed, most of them children, women and elderly. These documents were open to researchers and the wide public at the beginning of the 21st century and I had quoted from them extensively in the English article “The Historiography of Deir Yassin” which I had published in 2005 in the Tel Aviv University’s “Journal of Israeli History”. I had now asked to peruse them again, but the directors of the archive refused my request. They had no explanation other than the statement: “now the documents are closed”.
Morris reveals that the documents he was seeking were not only from 1948 (reports from the Haganah Intelligence Service), but also from much later – 1971.
The 1971 documents relate to secret discussions between former Haganah/IDF officials and Foreign Ministry officials concerning what happened in Deir Yassin. And the reason for the discussions is a booklet that was published in 1969 by the Hasbara Department of the Foreign Ministry, under Abba Eban. Morris explains about the content:
In the booklet it was claimed that there was no massacre in Deir Yassin and that the story about the massacre is supposedly an Arab fiction, ‘part of a collection of fables’.
Morris also discloses that it was his father, the late Yaakov Morris, who was the author of the booklet. The release of the booklet caused uproar amongst veterans of the Labor movement who had been leaders in the Zionist militias and the Israeli military in 1948, and they complained about the booklet. In 1971, Shaul Avigdor, who had been a Haganah immigration official, sent a complaint to Gideon Rafael, Director General of the Foreign Ministry. Avigdor attached an opinion from Yehuda Slutzki, author of the official Haganah history book, who affirmed that there indeed was a massacre in Deir Yassin. Yitzhak Levy, who was head of the Intelligence Service in Jerusalem in 1948 and later became Deputy Director General of the Prime Minister Office, wrote to Menahem Begin (Irgun commander and later Prime Minister) also in 1971 – Begin had denied the massacre.
Levitzeh [Yitzhak Levy] wrote that he had investigated the story at the time, and found that Deir Yassin was a quiet town, which had not participated in the battles of 1948 and that indeed a massacre had been perpetrated there by the Irgun and Lehi. Also Israel Galili, from the heads of the Haganah in 1948 and at the time a senior minister in the Israeli government, complained directly to Eban. Eventually Eban replied that his office had shelved the discussed booklet.
Morris summarizes:
The relevant letters from 1971, which were open for perusal in 2003-2004, were closed to researchers and the wide public by order of the Malmab, and therefore in 2018 I was prohibited from seeing them. As well, most of the “incriminating” material from April 1948, which was written by the Intelligence Service officers and was open in 2003-2004, was closed by the Malmab (by the way, even earlier, since I began to work with 1948 matters from the early 1980’s, the Archive of the Defense Ministry and IDF has consistently refused to release for review photographs of the slain of Deir Yassin, which were apparently taken by the Intelligence Service people before they were buried).
Morris cites Yitzhak Levy, reporting about Deir Yassin in 1948:
The conquering of the town was done with great cruelty. Whole families, women, elderly and small children were killed… Some of the prisoners were taken to detention centers including women and children and cruelly murdered by their captors.
Levy had supplied his report the day after with a follow-up from testimonies of Lehi militants:
Lehi fighters raped a number of women and murdered them later.
Morris writes that these reports contain many more acts of the Irgun and Lehi in Deir Yassin, including looting etc.
Morris decries the “idiocy” of the Malmab in hiding these materials, since “the whole story was told and publicized since 1988 in many books in Hebrew and English, from my pen and from others”. But he resigns to the logic of it all:
Yet, as transpires from Shezaf’s article, the heads of Malmab in their actions hope or hoped that inaccessibility of the Israeli materials, which they had enforced, would cause doubt regarding the work, the conclusions and the very credibility of the researchers – including this writer – in whoever reads their books and articles.
What a cover-up, what a conspiracy (and that’s not just a theory). Everything is being buried, by an arm of the Israeli government. If someone were doing this to Holocaust documents, there would be a cry to the heavens. What a shame. The Jewish State is actively trying to erase the Nakba and any critical discussion of it. Holocaust denial is illegal in Germany – but Nakba denial is not illegal in Israel, and it is thriving.
H/t Ronit Lentin
Jonathan Ofir
Israeli musician, conductor and blogger / writer based in Denmark.

Burying the Nakba: How Israel Systematically Hides Evidence of 1948 Expulsion of Arabs

Since early last decade, Defense Ministry teams have scoured local archives and removed troves of historic documents to conceal proof of the Nakba

Jul 05, 2019

Four years ago, historian Tamar Novick was jolted by a document she found in the file of Yosef Waschitz, from the Arab Department of the left-wing Mapam Party, in the Yad Yaari archive at Givat Haviva. The document, which seemed to describe events that took place during the 1948 war, began:
Safsaf[former Palestinian village near Safed] – 52 men were caught, tied them to one another, dug a pit and shot them. 10 were still twitching. Women came, begged for mercy. Found bodies of 6 elderly men. There were 61 bodies. 3 cases of rape, one east of from Safed, girl of 14, 4 men shot and killed. From one they cut off his fingers with a knife to take the ring.”
The writer goes on to describe additional massacres, looting and abuse perpetrated by Israeli forces in Israel’s War of Independence. “There’s no name on the document and it’s not clear who’s behind it,” Dr. Novick tells Haaretz. “It also breaks off in the middle. I found it very disturbing. I knew that finding a document like this made me responsible for clarifying what happened.”
The Upper Galilee village of Safsaf was captured by the Israel Defense Forces in Operation Hiram toward the end of 1948. Moshav Safsufa was established on its ruins. Allegations were made over the years that the Seventh Brigade committed war crimes in the village. Those charges are supported by the document Novick found, which was not previously known to scholars. It could also constitute additional evidence that the Israeli top brass knew about what was going on in real time.
Novick decided to consult with other historians about the document. Benny Morris, whose books are basic texts in the study of the Nakba – the “calamity,” as the Palestinians refer to the mass emigration of Arabs from the country during the 1948 war – told her that he, too, had come across similar documentation in the past. He was referring to notes made by Mapam Central Committee member Aharon Cohen on the basis of a briefing given in November 1948 by Israel Galili, the former chief of staff of the Haganah militia, which became the IDF. Cohen’s notes in this instance, which Morris published, stated:
 “Safsaf 52 men tied with a rope. Dropped into a pit and shot. 10 were killed. Women pleaded for mercy. [There were] 3 cases of rape. Caught and released. A girl of 14 was raped. Another 4 were killed. Rings of knives.”
Morris’ footnote (in his seminal “The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949”) states that this document was also found in the Yad Yaari Archive. But when Novick returned to examine the document, she was surprised to discover that it was no longer there.
Palestine refugees initially displaced to Gaza board boats to Lebanon or Egypt, in 1949. Hrant Nakashian/1949 UN Archives
“At first I thought that maybe Morris hadn’t been accurate in his footnote, that perhaps he had made a mistake,” Novick recalls. “It took me time to consider the possibility that the document had simply disappeared.” When she asked those in charge where the document was, she was told that it had been placed behind lock and key at Yad Yaari – by order of the Ministry of Defense.

Since the start of the last decade, Defense Ministry teams have been scouring Israel’s archives and removing historic documents. But it’s not just papers relating to Israel’s nuclear project or to the country’s foreign relations that are being transferred to vaults: Hundreds of documents have been concealed as part of a systematic effort to hide evidence of the Nakba.
The phenomenon was first detected by the Akevot Institute for Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Research. According to a report drawn up by the institute, the operation is being spearheaded by Malmab, the Defense Ministry’s secretive security department (the name is a Hebrew acronym for “director of security of the defense establishment”), whose activities and budget are classified. The report asserts that Malmab removed historical documentation illegally and with no authority, and at least in some cases has sealed documents that had previously been cleared for publication by the military censor. Some of the documents that were placed in vaults had already been published.
An investigative report by Haaretz found that Malmab has concealed testimony from IDF generals about the killing of civilians and the demolition of villages, as well as documentation of the expulsion of Bedouin during the first decade of statehood. Conversations conducted by Haaretz with directors of public and private archives alike revealed that staff of the security department had treated the archives as their property, in some cases threatening the directors themselves.
[Yehiel Horev] explained that the objective is to undermine the credibility of studies about the history of the refugee problem. In Horev’s view, an allegation made by a researcher that's backed up by an original document is not the same as an allegation that cannot be proved or refuted.
Yehiel Horev, who headed Malmab for two decades, until 2007, acknowledged to Haaretz that he launched the project, which is still ongoing. He maintains that it makes sense to conceal the events of 1948, because uncovering them could generate unrest among the country’s Arab population. Asked what the point is of removing documents that have already been published, he explained that the objective is to undermine the credibility of studies about the history of the refugee problem. In Horev’s view, an allegation made by a researcher that's backed up by an original document is not the same as an allegation that cannot be proved or refuted.
The document Novick was looking for might have reinforced Morris’ work. During the investigation, Haaretz was in fact able to find the Aharon Cohen memo, which sums up a meeting of Mapam’s Political Committee on the subject of massacres and expulsions in 1948. Participants in the meeting called for cooperation with a commission of inquiry that would investigate the events. One case the committee discussed concerned “grave actions” carried out in the village of Al-Dawayima, east of Kiryat Gat. One participant mentioned the then-disbanded Lehi underground militia in this connection. Acts of looting were also reported: “Lod and Ramle, Be’er Sheva, there isn’t [an Arab] store that hasn’t been broken into. 9th Brigade says 7, 7th Brigade says 8.”
“The party,” the document states near the end, “is against expulsion if there is no military necessity for it. There are different approaches concerning the evaluation of necessity. And further clarification is best. What happened in Galilee – those are Nazi acts! Every one of our members must report what he knows.”
The Israeli version
One of the most fascinating documents about the origin of the Palestinian refugee problem was written by an officer in Shai, the precursor to the Shin Bet security service. It discusses why the country was emptied of so many of its Arab inhabitants, dwelling on the circumstances of each village. Compiled in late June 1948, it was titled “The Emigration of the Arabs of Palestine.”
This document was the basis for an article that Benny Morris published in 1986. After the article appeared, the document was removed from the archive and rendered inaccessible to researchers. Years later, the Malmab team reexamined the document, and ordered that it remain classified. They could not have known that a few years later researchers from Akevot would find a copy of the text and run it past the military censors – who authorized its publication unconditionally. Now, after years of concealment, the gist of the document is being revealed here.
Palestinian children awaiting distribution of milk by UNICEF at the Nazareth Franciscan Sisters’ convent, on January 1, 1950. AW / UN Photo

The 25-page document begins with an introduction that unabashedly approves of the evacuation of the Arab villages. According to the author, the month of April “excelled in an increase of emigration,” while May “was blessed with the evacuation of maximum places.” The report then addresses “the causes of the Arab emigration.”According to the Israeli narrative that was disseminated over the years, responsibility for the exodus from Israel rests with Arab politicians who encouraged the population to leave. However, according to the document, 70 percent of the Arabs left as a result of Jewish military operations.
The unnamed author of the text ranks the reasons for the Arabs’ departure in order of importance. The first reason: “Direct Jewish acts of hostility against Arab places of settlement.” The second reason was the impact of those actions on neighboring villages. Third in importance came “operations by the breakaways,” namely the Irgun and Lehi undergrounds. The fourth reason for the Arab exodus was orders issued by Arab institutions and “gangs” (as the document refers to all Arab fighting groups); fifth was “Jewish 'whispering operations' to induce the Arab inhabitants to flee”; and the sixth factor was “evacuation ultimatums.”

The author asserts that, “without a doubt, the hostile operations were the main cause of the movement of the population.” In addition, “Loudspeakers in the Arabic language proved their effectiveness on the occasions when they were utilized properly.” As for Irgun and Lehi operations, the report observes that “many in the villages of central Galilee started to flee following the abduction of the notables of Sheikh Muwannis [a village north of Tel Aviv]. The Arab learned that it is not enough to forge an agreement with the Haganah and that there are other Jews [i.e., the breakaway militias] to beware of.”
The author notes that ultimatums to leave were especially employed in central Galilee, less so in the Mount Gilboa region. “Naturally, the act of this ultimatum, like the effect of the 'friendly advice,' came after a certain preparing of the ground by means of hostile actions in the area.”
An appendix to the document describes the specific causes of the exodus from each of scores of Arab locales: Ein Zeitun – “our destruction of the village”; Qeitiya – “harassment, threat of action”; Almaniya – “our action, many killed”; Tira – “friendly Jewish advice”; Al’Amarir – “after robbery and murder carried out by the breakaways”; Sumsum – “our ultimatum”; Bir Salim – “attack on the orphanage”; and Zarnuga – “conquest and expulsion.”
Short fuse
In the early 2000s, the Yitzhak Rabin Center conducted a series of interviews with former public and military figures as part of a project to document their activity in the service of the state. The long arm of Malmab seized on these interviews, too. Haaretz, which obtained the original texts of several of the interviews, compared them to the versions that are now available to the public, after large swaths of them were declared classified.
These included, for example, sections of the testimony of Brig. Gen. (res.) Aryeh Shalev about the expulsion across the border of the residents of a village he called “Sabra.” Later in the interview, the following sentences were deleted: “There was a very serious problem in the valley. There were refugees who wanted to return to the valley, to the Triangle [a concentration of Arab towns and villages in eastern Israel]. We expelled them. I met with them to persuade them not to want that. I have papers about it.”
In another case, Malmab decided to conceal the following segment from an interview that historian Boaz Lev Tov conducted with Maj. Gen. (res.) Elad Peled:
Lev Tov: “We’re talking about a population – women and children?”
Peled: “All, all. Yes.”
Lev Tov: “Don’t you distinguish between them?”
Peled: “The problem is very simple. The war is between two populations. They come out of their home.”
Lev Tov: “If the home exists, they have somewhere to return to?”
Peled: “It’s not armies yet, it’s gangs. We’re also actually gangs. We come out of the house and return to the house. They come out of the house and return to the house. It’s either their house or our house.”
Lev Tov: “Qualms belong to the more recent generation?”
Peled: “Yes, today. When I sit in an armchair here and think about what happened, all kinds of thoughts come to mind.”
Lev Tov: “Wasn’t that the case then?”
Peled: “Look, let me tell you something even less nice and cruel, about the big raid in Sasa [Palestinian village in Upper Galilee]. The goal was actually to deter them, to tell them, ‘Dear friends, the Palmach [the Haganah “shock troops”] can reach every place, you are not immune.’ That was the heart of the Arab settlement. But what did we do? My platoon blew up 20 homes with everything that was there.”
Lev Tov: “While people were sleeping there?”
Peled: “I suppose so. What happened there, we came, we entered the village, planted a bomb next to every house, and afterward Homesh blew on a trumpet, because we didn’t have radios, and that was the signal [for our forces] to leave. We’re running in reverse, the sappers stay, they pull, it’s all primitive. They light the fuse or pull the detonator and all those houses are gone.”
IDF soldiers guarding Palestinians in Ramle, in 1948. Collection of Benno Rothenberg/The IDF and Defense Establishment Archives

Another passage that the Defense Ministry wanted to keep from the public came from Dr. Lev Tov’s conversation with Maj. Gen. Avraham Tamir:

Tamir: “I was under Chera [Maj. Gen. Tzvi Tzur, later IDF chief of staff], and I had excellent working relations with him. He gave me freedom of action – don’t ask – and I happened to be in charge of staff and operations work during two developments deriving from [Prime Minister David] Ben-Gurion’s policy. One development was when reports arrived about marches of refugees from Jordan toward the abandoned villages [in Israel]. And then Ben-Gurion lays down as policy that we have to demolish [the villages] so they won’t have anywhere to return to. That is, all the Arab villages, most of which were in [the area covered by] Central Command, most of them.”
Lev Tov: “The ones that were still standing?”
Tamir: “The ones that weren’t yet inhabited by Israelis. There were places where we had already settled Israelis, like Zakariyya and others. But most of them were still abandoned villages.”
Lev Tov: “That were standing?”
Tamir: “Standing. It was necessary for there to be no place for them to return to, so I mobilized all the engineering battalions of Central Command, and within 48 hours I knocked all those villages to the ground. Period. There’s no place to return to.
Lev Tov: “Without hesitation, I imagine.”
Tamir: “Without hesitation. That was the policy. I mobilized, I carried it out and I did it.
Crates in vaults
The vault of the Yad Yaari Research and Documentation Center is one floor below ground level. In the vault, which is actually a small, well-secured room, are stacks of crates containing classified documents. The archive houses the materials of the Hashomer Hatzair movement, the Kibbutz Ha’artzi kibbutz movement, Mapam, Meretz and other bodies, such as Peace Now.
The archive’s director is Dudu Amitai, who is also chairman of the Association of Israel Archivists. According to Amitai, Malmab personnel visited the archive regularly between 2009 and 2011. Staff of the archive relate that security department teams – two Defense Ministry retirees with no archival training – would show up two or three times a week. They searched for documents according to such keywords as “nuclear,” “security” and “censorship,” and also devoted considerable time to the War of Independence and the fate of the pre-1948 Arab villages.
In the end, they submitted a summary to us, saying that they had located a few dozen sensitive documents,” Amitai says. “We don’t usually take apart files, so dozens of files, in their entirety, found their way into our vault and were removed from the public catalog.” A file might contain more than 100 documents.
One of the files that was sealed deals with the military government that controlled the lives of Israel’s Arab citizens from 1948 until 1966. For years, the documents were stored in the same vault, inaccessible to scholars. Recently, in the wake of a request by Prof. Gadi Algazi, a historian from Tel Aviv University, Amitai examined the file himself and ruled that there was no reason not to unseal it, Malmab’s opinion notwithstanding.
According to Algazi, there could be several reasons for Malmab’s decision to keep the file classified. One of them has to do with a secret annex it contains to a report by a committee that examined the operation of the military government. The report deals almost entirely with land-ownership battles between the state and Arab citizens, and barely touches on security matters.
Another possibility is a 1958 report by the ministerial committee that oversaw the military government. In one of the report’s secret appendixes, Col. Mishael Shaham, a senior officer in the military government, explains that one reason for not dismantling the martial law apparatus is the need to restrict Arab citizens’ access to the labor market and to prevent the reestablishment of destroyed villages.
A third possible explanation for hiding the file concerns previously unpublished historical testimony about the expulsion of Bedouin. On the eve of Israel’s establishment, nearly 100,000 Bedouin lived in the Negev. Three years later, their number was down to 13,000. In the years during and after the independence war, a number of expulsion operations were carried out in the country’s south. In one case, United Nations observers reported that Israel had expelled 400 Bedouin from the Azazma tribe and cited testimonies of tents being burned. The letter that appears in the classified file describes a similar expulsion carried out as late as 1956, as related by geologist Avraham Parnes:
The evacuation of Iraq al-Manshiyya, near today's Kiryat Gat, in March, 1949. Collection of Benno Rothenberg/The IDF and Defense Establishment Archives
“A month ago we toured Ramon [crater]. The Bedouin in the Mohila area came to us with their flocks and their families and asked us to break bread with them. I replied that we had a great deal of work to do and didn’t have time. In our visit this week, we headed toward Mohila again. Instead of the Bedouin and their flocks, there was deathly silence. Scores of camel carcasses were scattered in the area. We learned that three days earlier the IDF had ‘screwed’ the Bedouin, and their flocks were destroyed – the camels by shooting, the sheep with grenades. One of the Bedouin, who started to complain, was killed, the rest fled.”
The testimony continued,
“Two weeks earlier, they’d been ordered to stay where they were for the time being, afterward they were ordered to leave, and to speed things up 500 head were slaughtered.... The expulsion was executed ‘efficiently.’” The letter goes on to quote what one of the soldiers said to Parnes, according to his testimony: “They won’t go unless we’ve screwed their flocks. A young girl of about 16 approached us. She had a beaded necklace of brass snakes. We tore the necklace and each of us took a bead for a souvenir.”
The letter was originally sent to MK Yaakov Uri, from Mapai (forerunner of Labor), who passed it on to Development Minister Mordechai Bentov (Mapam). “His letter shocked me,” Uri wrote Bentov. The latter circulated the letter among all the cabinet ministers, writing, “It is my opinion that the government cannot simply ignore the facts related in the letter.” Bentov added that, in light of the appalling contents of the letter, he asked security experts to check its credibility. They had confirmed that the contents “do in fact generally conform to the truth.”
Nuclear excuse
It was during the tenure of historian Tuvia Friling as Israel’s chief archivist, from 2001 to 2004, that Malmab carried out its first archival incursions. What began as an operation to prevent the leakage of nuclear secrets, he says, became, in time, a large-scale censorship project.
I resigned after three years, and that was one of the reasons,” Prof. Friling says. “The classification placed on the document about the Arabs’ emigration in 1948 is precisely an example of what I was apprehensive about. The storage and archival system is not an arm of the state’s public relations. If there’s something you don’t like – well, that’s life. A healthy society also learns from its mistakes.”
Why did Friling allow the Defense Ministry to have access the archives? The reason, he says, was the intention to give the public access to archival material via the internet. In discussions about the implications of digitizing the material, concern was expressed that references in the documents to a “certain topic” would be made public by mistake. The topic, of course, is Israel’s nuclear project. Friling insists that the only authorization Malmab received was to search for documents on that subject.
But Malmab’s activity is only one example of a broader problem, Friling notes:
“In 1998, the confidentiality of the [oldest documents in the] Shin Bet and Mossad archives expired. For years those two institutions disdained the chief archivist. When I took over, they requested that the confidentiality of all the material be extended [from 50] to 70 years, which is ridiculous – most of the material can be opened.”
In 2010, the confidentiality period was extended to 70 years; last February it was extended again, to 90 years, despite the opposition of the Supreme Council of Archives. “The state may impose confidentiality on some of its documentation,” Friling says. “The question is whether the issue of security doesn’t act as a kind of cover. In many cases, it’s already become a joke.”
In the view of Yad Yaari’s Dudu Amitai, the confidentiality imposed by the Defense Ministry must be challenged. In his period at the helm, he says, one of the documents placed in the vault was an order issued by an IDF general, during a truce in the War of Independence, for his troops to refrain from rape and looting. Amitai now intends to go over the documents that were deposited in the vault, especially 1948 documents, and open whatever is possible. “We’ll do it cautiously and responsibly, but recognizing that the State of Israel has to learn how to cope with the less pleasant aspects of its history.”
In contrast to Yad Yaari, where ministry personnel no longer visit, they are continuing to peruse documents at Yad Tabenkin, the research and documentation center of the United Kibbutz Movement. The director, Aharon Azati, reached an agreement with the Malmab teams under which documents will be transferred to the vault only if he is convinced that this is justified. But in Yad Tabenkin, too, Malmab has broadened its searches beyond the realm of nuclear project to encompass interviews conducted by archival staff with former members of the Palmach, and has even perused material about the history of the settlements in the occupied territories.
Malmab has, for example, shown interest in the Hebrew-language book “A Decade of Discretion: Settlement Policy in the Territories 1967-1977,” published by Yad Tabenkin in 1992, and written by Yehiel Admoni, director of the Jewish Agency’s Settlement Department during the decade he writes about. The book mentions a plan to settle Palestinian refugees in the Jordan Valley and to the uprooting of 1,540 Bedouin families from the Rafah area of the Gaza Strip in 1972, including an operation that included the sealing of wells by the IDF. Ironically, in the case of the Bedouin, Admoni quotes former Justice Minister Yaakov Shimshon Shapira as saying, “It is not necessary to stretch the security rationale too far. The whole Bedouin episode is not a glorious chapter of the State of Israel.
Palestinian refugees leaving their village, unknown location, 1948. UNRWA
According to Azati, “We are moving increasingly to a tightening of the ranks. Although this is an era of openness and transparency, there are apparently forces that are pulling in the opposite direction.”
Unauthorized secrecy
About a year ago, the legal adviser to the State Archives, attorney Naomi Aldouby, wrote an opinion titled “Files Closed Without Authorization in Public Archives.” According to her, the accessibility policy of public archives is the exclusive purview of the director of each institution.
Despite Aldouby’s opinion, however, in the vast majority of cases, archivists who encountered unreasonable decisions by Malmab did not raise objections – that is, until 2014, when Defense Ministry personnel arrived at the archive of the Harry S. Truman Research Institute at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. To the visitors’ surprise, their request to examine the archive – which contains collections of former minister and diplomat Abba Eban and Maj. Gen. (res.) Shlomo Gazit – was turned down by its then director, Menahem Blondheim.
According to Blondheim, “I told them that the documents in question were decades old, and that I could not imagine that there was any security problem that would warrant restricting their access to researchers. In response, they said, ‘And let’s say there is testimony here that wells were poisoned in the War of Independence?’ I replied, ‘Fine, those people should be brought to trial.’”
Blondheim’s refusal led to a meeting with a more senior ministry official, only this time the attitude he encountered was different and explicit threats were made. Finally the two sides reached an accommodation.
Benny Morris is not surprised at Malmab’s activity. “I knew about it,” he says
“Not officially, no one informed me, but I encountered it when I discovered that documents I had seen in the past are now sealed. There were documents from the IDF Archive that I used for an article about Deir Yassin, and which are now sealed. When I came to the archive, I was no longer allowed to see the original, so I pointed out in a footnote [in the article] that the State Archive had denied access to documents that I had published 15 years earlier.”
The Malmab case is only one example of the battle being waged for access to archives in Israel. According to the executive director of the Akevot Institute, Lior Yavne,
The IDF Archive, which is the largest archive in Israel, is sealed almost hermetically. About 1 percent of the material is open. The Shin Bet archive, which contains materials of immense importance [to scholars], is totally closed apart from a handful of documents.”
A report written by Yaacov Lozowick, the previous chief archivist at the State Archives, upon his retirement, refers to the defense establishment’s grip on the country’s archival materials. In it, he writes, “A democracy must not conceal information because it is liable to embarrass the state. In practice, the security establishment in Israel, and to a certain extent that of foreign relations as well, are interfering with the [public] discussion.”
Advocates of concealment put forward several arguments, Lozowick notes:
“The uncovering of the facts could provide our enemies with a battering ram against us and weaken the determination of our friends; it’s liable to stir up the Arab population; it could enfeeble the state’s arguments in courts of law; and what is revealed could be interpreted as Israeli war crimes.”
However, he says, “All these arguments must be rejected. This is an attempt to hide part of the historical truth in order to construct a more convenient version.”
What Malmab says
Yehiel Horev was the keeper of the security establishment’s secrets for more than two decades. He headed the Defense Ministry’s security department from 1986 until 2007 and naturally kept out of the limelight. To his credit, he now agreed to talk forthrightly to Haaretz about the archives project.
“I don’t remember when it began,” Horev says, “but I do know that I started it. If I’m not mistaken, it started when people wanted to publish documents from the archives. We had to set up teams to examine all outgoing material.”
From conversations with archive directors, it’s clear that a good deal of the documents on which confidentiality was imposed relate to the War of Independence. Is concealing the events of 1948 part of the purpose of Malmab?
Palestinian refugees in the Ramle area, 1948. Boris Carmi / The IDF and Defense Establishment Archives
“What does ‘part of the purpose’ mean? The subject is examined based on an approach of whether it could harm Israel’s foreign relations and the defense establishment. Those are the criteria. I think it’s still relevant. There has not been peace since 1948. I may be wrong, but to the best of my knowledge the Arab-Israeli conflict has not been resolved. So yes, it could be that problematic subjects remain.”
Asked in what way such documents might be problematic, Horev speaks of the possibility of agitation among the country’s Arab citizens. From his point of view, every document must be perused and every case decided on its merits.
If the events of 1948 weren’t known, we could argue about whether this approach is the right one. That is not the case. Many testimonies and studies have appeared about the history of the refugee problem. What’s the point of hiding things?
“The question is whether it can do harm or not. It’s a very sensitive matter. Not everything has been published about the refugee issue, and there are all kinds of narratives. Some say there was no flight at all, only expulsion. Others say there was flight. It’s not black-and-white. There’s a difference between flight and those who say they were forcibly expelled. It’s a different picture. I can’t say now if it merits total confidentiality, but it’s a subject that definitely has to be discussed before a decision is made about what to publish.”
For years, the Defense Ministry has imposed confidentiality on a detailed document that describes the reasons for the departure of those who became refugees. Benny Morris has already written about the document, so what’s the logic of keeping it hidden?
I don’t remember the document you’re referring to, but if he quoted from it and the document itself is not there [i.e., where Morris says it is], then his facts aren’t strong. If he says, ‘Yes, I have the document,’ I can’t argue with that. But if he says that it’s written there, that could be right and it could be wrong. If the document were already outside and were sealed in the archive, I would say that that’s folly. But if someone quoted from it – there’s a difference of day and night in terms of the validity of the evidence he cited.”
'When the state imposes confidentiality, the published work is weakened, because he doesn’t have the document'
In this case, we’re talking about the most quoted scholar when it comes to the Palestinian refugees.
“The fact that you say ‘scholar’ makes no impression on me. I know people in academia who spout nonsense about subjects that I know from A to Z. When the state imposes confidentiality, the published work is weakened, because he doesn’t have the document.”
But isn’t concealing documents based on footnotes in books an attempt to lock the barn door after the horses have bolted?
“I gave you an example that this needn’t be the case. If someone writes that the horse is black, if the horse isn’t outside the barn, you can’t prove that it’s really black.”
There are legal opinions stating that Malmab’s activity in the archives is illegal and unauthorized.
“If I know that an archive contains classified material, I am empowered to tell the police to go there and confiscate the material. I can also utilize the courts. I don’t need the archivist’s authorization. If there is classified material, I have the authority to act. Look, there’s policy. Documents aren’t sealed for no reason. And despite it all, I won’t say to you that everything that’s sealed is 100 percent justified [in being sealed].”
The Defense Ministry refused to respond to specific questions regarding the findings of this investigative report and made do with the following response:
“The director of security of the defense establishment operates by virtue of his responsibility to protect the state’s secrets and its security assets. The Malmab does not provide details about its mode of activity or its missions.”
Lee Rotbart assisted in providing visual research for this article.

Don’t wait for Israeli archives to prove what Palestinians already know



Illustrative photo of Palestinian refugees fleeing during the Nakba.


The village of Safsaf (“willow” in Arabic) appears on page 490 of the newest edition of Walid Khalidi’s All That Remains, a seminal book that catalogues 418 Palestinian communities that were destroyed and depopulated during the Nakba. A Palestinian eyewitness account describes the day when Zionist forces conquered the village and rounded up its residents in October 1948:

As we lined up, a few Jewish soldiers ordered four girls to accompany them to carry water for the soldiers. Instead, they took them to our empty houses and raped them. About seventy of our men were blindfolded and shot to death, one after the other, in front of us. The soldiers took their bodies and threw them on the cement covering of the village’s spring and dumped sand on them.

On Thursday, Haaretz published a widely-shared investigative piece by Hagar Shezaf on how Israeli authorities are systematically concealing archival materials relating to the 1948 war, even after they have been officially disclosed. It begins with an Israeli historian stumbling upon a document four years ago that was written in November 1948 by the Haganah’s former chief of staff. The note, which was first unearthed by New Historian Benny Morris in the 1980s, is also quoted in Khalidi’s book:
Safsaf – 52 men were caught, tied them to one another, dug a pit and shot them. 10 were still twitching. Women came, begged for mercy. Found bodies of 6 elderly men. There were 61 bodies. 3 cases of rape, one east of Safed, girl of 14, 4 men shot and killed. From one they cut off his fingers with a knife to take the ring.

It is strangely consoling to see official Israeli admission of the event. As Shezaf’s excellent article shows, and thanks to the vital work of Akevot– an Israeli organization that works to expand public access to documentation about the conflict held in government and private archives – along with other historians, archive research has made it irrefutably clear that Zionist forces consciously carried out brutal acts of violence against Palestinians to facilitate their expulsion.

Though this is hardly news, such archives remain valuable in providing what are essentially “confessions” by officials of the inhumane crimes they oversaw – crimes that are denied by Israel and its supporters to this day.

Yet, for many Palestinians, the bewildered reactions to these discoveries can be infuriating. They remind us of how thousands of Palestinian testimonies, and decades of Palestinian-led research, struggle to stir so much as a ripple in mainstream discourse about Israel’s history. A few Israeli documents, however, can swiftly rile up a storm.

The knowledge of this disparity has been a key reason for Israel’s obstinate archive policy: as one official blatantly told Shezaf, authorities deliberately continue to hide these documents in order to “undermine the credibility of studies about the history of the [Palestinian] refugee problem.” And many still fall for it.
Jewish workers demolish homes in Jaffa in 1948 after the majority of the city’s Palestinian residents were either expelled or fled, October 6, 1949. (Fritz Cohen/GPO)


This cruel double standard over who has “permission to narrate” the conflict has been raised before– and, it seems, it must be raised again and again.

The world should not have to constantly catch up to what Palestinians have always known about the Nakba. Many Palestinians reading about Safsaf in Haaretz would have reached for their copies of All That Remains or other collections, correctly assuming they would find the same facts recorded years before. Descendants of Safsaf’s survivors would likely know the harrowing story by heart, having heard it from their grandparents’ own lips. Like all settler-colonial states, Israel fears the ghosts of its dark and violent origins. Palestinians are those living ghosts. Listen to what they have to say.

More than 100 files from the 1800s are still classified in Israel’s archives

Israel recently published its catalogue of some 300,000 classified files, including thousands of documents from before the state was even founded. The very existence of the files had been kept a secret until recently.

By Asaf Shalev
The Israeli state archives in Jerusalem on September 03, 2012. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)


Israel’s State Archives unceremoniously published the contents of its catalog of classified archive documents this past summer, posting them online in 363 separate spreadsheets. Buried in the catalog of classified archives were more than 100 files dating back to the 1800s, and more than 2,000 files that predate the founding of the State of Israel but which the archive has yet to declassify.

The very existence of the 300,000 classified files—their names, dates, and origin within the state bureaucracy—had been kept a secret, until now. One-fifth of the files, deemed too sensitive still by the government, were excluded from the disclosure.

“There were many people who were concerned about the opening of this catalog,” State Archivist Yaacov Lozowick wrote in a statement accompanying the release.

The classified catalog, currently housed on the website of the State Archives, is hard to find, difficult to access, and almost impossible to search through or analyze. In order to understand what lies in the cryptic files, +972 Magazine enlisted various data-research tools and analyzed the hundreds of thousands of entries.

One of the things that stood out immediately was the age of some of files. The oldest item, a Foreign Ministry document titled “Parker Report,” dates back to 1821. That’s all we know about it. In total, the catalog of classified archival documents contains 125 items from the 19th century, and about 2,000 documents from before 1948, when Israel was founded. Because we cannot access the files themselves, it is impossible to say why documents that predate the state are still classified over 70, and in some cases, nearly 200 years later.

In contrast, in the United States the FBI and CIA routinely release old records, even ones that cast those agencies in a negative light. It is also telling that, unlike the U.S. government archives, which are run as an independent agency, Israel’s State Archives is a branch of the Prime Minister’s Office, whose current occupant has proven to be no champion of transparency.

Documents from virtually every Israeli ministry appear in the catalog: each of the 363 original spreadsheets represent a different agency, sub-department, state-run company, and in a few cases, former senior officials who bequeathed their personal collections to the State Archives. Conspicuously absent are the Defense Ministry (aside from one cache of records produced during Israel’s first, short-lived occupation of Gaza in 1956), the military, the Mossad, and the Shin Bet security service. These institutions manage their archives separately, lest any documents wrangle free.

Almost three quarters of the files come from only three government bodies: Israel Police (28.2 percent or 71,874 files), the Foreign Ministry (24.2 percent or 61,620 files), and the Prime Minister’s Office (21 percent or 53,587 files). Next up are the Energy Ministry, the State Comptroller’s Office, the Israel Prison Service, and the Justice Department.
Israeli Black Panthers, including Charlie Biton, protesting on Dizengoff Street in Tel Aviv, May 1, 1973. (Moshe Milner/GPO)
Some of file names alone are tantalizing. For instance, there was “Nine Years Out of 2,000” which turned out to be a secret book commission by the Mossad about the history of immigration from Morocco. Another is called “Shariah Court of Gaza,” 1913-1922. There is a set of Jordanian government documents apparently confiscated in 1967, when Israel occupied the West Bank, which had been under Jordanian administration.

Then, there are those still-classified archival files with labels like “anti-Israel organizations” and the “fight against anti-Semitism,” produced by Israel’s diplomatic missions around the world. There are files on Deir Yassin and Kfar Qasim, the two most notorious massacres carried out by Israeli forces. The catalog contains 13 files from the 1940s and 1950s about the assassination of Folke Bernadotte, a Swedish diplomat representing the UN Security Council who was killed by a Zionist militia in 1948. The sinking of Israel’s Dakar submarine, still a mystery, is the subject of another classified file.

But even many files without sensational appeal promise to contain valuable historical information. For example, there is the case of the Israeli Black Panthers, a 1970s group of radicals who demanded social justice for Mizrahi Jews. As part of my research for a book I am writing about the group, I knew there were police files on the Panthers from references found in a couple of academic articles and a Haaretz magazine feature. Eventually, I obtained the documents, but not from the State Archives (where I was told the Panthers files were unsealed by mistake and subsequently re-sealed).
These police intel reports, containing invaluable and rare documentation of the Panthers by various undercover agents and informants, came from two files, the only two state archives files on the Panthers that we knew existed. A search for the keyword “Panthers” in the classified database yielded the two file numbers, along with 21 other files — from various police precincts — containing the words “Black Panthers” in their titles. It would not have been possible to find them without searching in the combined database. Knowing that the files exist is far cry from holding them in your hands, of course, and the chance of obtaining those particular files is nil at the moment.

I recently filed a request for the remaining Panther files only to be told that the person authorized to review and release archival police records died in accident more than a year ago. A police spokesperson said in an email that a job opening for such a person would be posted “soon,” providing no timeline for the recruitment and hiring process.


An employee at the Israel State Archives looks at classified documents related to the Yemenite Children Affair, at the Israel State Archives offices in Jerusalem, December 22, 2016. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)


‘A country without a history’

Gadi Algazi, a historian from Tel Aviv University, built his academic reputation by extracting social and cultural histories from the clutches of archives dating back hundreds of years. These days, Algazi is better known by his students and friends for his preoccupation with the more immediate past. He recently conducted research into a long-forgotten protest movement and he gives occasional talks on what he’s found.In the early 1950s, according to Algazi, residents of a transit camp for immigrants near Kfar Saba mounted a veritable political struggle demanding better treatment from authorities. Iraqi-born communists living in the camps riled up and then organized the community for a series of demonstrations and other actions. The police got called in and the whole affair was kept out of the papers and out of the wider public’s eye.

After a recent talk about the affair at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, I caught a ride with Algazi back to Tel Aviv and in the car, he told me, “Israel is a country without a history.” What he meant was that we know very little about the machinations of power, money, and social status that congealed in the 1950s, the critical decade after the country’s founding. The policy decisions that shaped Israeli society and allocated resources and privileges remain an enigma to this day, he explained. The Kfar Saba story is a foray into a time when Israel intra-Jewish ethnic lines were drawn. The discovery of the event would not have taken as long as it did in a country with an appreciation for its past.

“For the vast majority of historical researchers, the documentation kept in archives is the central raw material,” said Miriam Eliav-Feldon, a veteran history professor and the chair of the Historical Society of Israel, speaking at an event confronting the crisis of access to public archives a few months later. “Without it, it’s almost impossible to find out what took place, what the intentions and motivations of the individuals were.”

The effort to “rescue archival access” was launched more than two years ago when the State Archives shuttered its reading room. That’s where patrons used to fill out request slips and were hand-delivered boxes of files. The State Archives decided that all of its materials would be digitized, however, and meanwhile, anyone who wants access has to search the online catalog and request the files be scanned and posted online. The plan may have been well intentioned, Eliav-Feldon said, but it has led to long and erratic wait times and a lack of transparency about what is being released. “It makes it impossible to get work done,”she added.

A short time into the digital revamp efforts, lawyers for the Prime Minister’s Office imposed a new policy that gummed up the research process even further. Now, each file that has not already been scanned and uploaded must first be vetted by the government body that generated it to begin with. Want to read decades-old correspondence from the public security minister? The archive has to get the ministry’s approval first. The same goes for police reports, health ministry minutes and any other stacks of papers collecting dust on a warehouse shelf at the State Archives. Aside from having no conceivable incentive to allow the publication of potentially embarrassing documents, government bodies do not typically keep archival professionals on staff.

The coalition of archival access seekers reflects in many ways the various public battles being waged over Israel’s past. There are the Nakba scholars. There are Argentinian and Chilean Jews working to flesh out the extent of Israel’s ties with Latin American military dictatorships. Then there’s the reinvigorated campaign to expose the abduction and disappearance of thousands of babies of Mizrahi families. Without access to official archives, much of that work simply cannot be done.

Blocking access to the documentary record, to the memory cells of our recent past,”Eliav-Feldon said at the Tel Aviv University event, “does grave harm to our knowledge and understanding of our existence.”

You can search the catalog of classified Israeli archives (in Hebrew) thanks to the Akevot Institute for Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Research. The nonprofit organization performed its own web scraping and programming of the classified catalog, making the files searchable on its website. You are also welcome to download the database by clicking here and play with the data yourself.

Asaf Shalev is a journalist based in California. He is completing a book about the Israeli Black Panthers with UC Press. Find him on Twitter: @asafshaloo. Omri Kahalon, a software engineer, contributed to this report.

Classified: Politicizing the Nakba in Israel's state archives

Listen to the following sound podcast
https://soundcloud.com/ottoman-history-podcast/the-politics-of-1948-in
Related stories
By Noam Hofstadter | January 26, 2018
By Haggai Matar | March 15, 2019
By Michael Schaeffer Omer-Man | February 15, 2016
By +972 Blog | December 19, 2015
By Natasha Roth | September 24, 2015
By Haggai Matar | April 13, 2016
By Haggai Matar | April 12, 2016
By Lisa Goldman | February 19, 2016

·         Testimonies from the censored Deir Yassin massacre: 'They piled bodies and burned them'

·         General's final confession links 1956 massacre to Israel's secret plan to expel Arabs

·         Palestinians uncover history of the Nakba, even as Israel cuts them off from their sources


Zionism and the Israel Lobby are the Biggest Threat Today to Freedom of Speech and Democratic Rights

$
0
0

Peter Kyle ‘Labour’ MP for Hove and the Board of Deputies were the instigators of the threats of violence and abuse employed against the Chris Williamson meeting



When Peter Kyle pressuredthe Brighthelm Church & Community Centre (which is now likely to be subject to a boycott) to cancel the meeting with Chris Williamson, he gave the green light to Sussex Friends of Israel and their friends to use threats of violence and make abusive phone calls to staff at the Holiday Inn and the Quaker Friends Meeting House.
Kyle has refused to condemn the methods that were employed to force these venues into cancelling bookings. Not only that, but as Greg Hadfield makes clear, he has lied and dissembled about these threats. In reality he is party to them.
Peter Kyle - right-wing Labour MP for Hove and in need of urgent deselection

For further information on the timeline of events and Kyle’s role see Greg Hadfield’s two excellent essays A first rough draft of history: Chris Williamson MP in Brighton and HoveandThe sequel: A second rough draft of history and Chris Williamson

Other racists such as former Council leader, Daniel Yates complainedthat, instead of accepting the fact that Zionist thugs could intimidate venues into cancelling our booking,  we had the temerity to hold a rally out in the open in Regency Square.
The pathetic Yates tweetedthat I’m disgusted. I hope @BrightonHoveCClook into the matter and the organisers actions.’ This is the level of the commitment of the Labour Right in Brighton & Hove to free speech..’
Yates was given short shrift on Twitter.
Are you a councillor for Labour or Israeli fascism?’
'And what are they going to look into? Man makes speech outside'? What the police should look into is the various threats against the venues’.
‘Absolutely outrageous, what is disgusting is your not asking the police to investigate the threats made to the venues. Instead you abuse the victim.
The best response was from Jo Seirer: 
You spot a victim of bullies, and can't resist giving them an extra kick. And you say you are disgusted. You spelled it wrong. You are disgust-ING.’
According to Yates we should have had the good grace to acknowledge that the supporters of the Israeli state had the right to intimidate venues into closing down a perfectly lawful meeting.
This is the pathetic reaction of Labour's former Council leader
We . should also have accepted the characterisation of Chris Williamson as a ‘Jew baiter’ and not dared to challenge their Goebbels style propaganda.
In all the attacks on Chris no one has produced anything that merits this description.
This is the level of dishonesty of our Zionist opponents, Kyle and Yates.
It is worth looking at what Chris actually said at the fateful Sheffield Momentum meeting because liars like Kyle and Yates continue to allege that what Chris said was anti-Semitic:
"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 point out what was anti-Semitic in the above statement.
When I first came to Brighton I quickly became involved in anti-fascist activity. The National Front was then very active doing what the Peter Kyle’s of today are doing, which was to try and close down meetings they disagreed with. In particular they attacked meetings of CHE (Campaign for Homosexual Equality). No doubt Kyle is unaware of this and much else.
What is despicable is that Kyle, whose only claim to fame is that he is gay, is adopting the methods of the National Front. His attack on Chris Williamson as a ‘Jew baiter’ is an example of the Nazi propaganda technique of the big lie.
What Kyle and co. are saying is that anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism are one and the same. This is the libel which equates Jews with everything that Israel and Zionism does.  It is itself anti-Semitic.
The term ‘Jew baiter’ seems  to be in fashion these days. Presumably Kyle and the Jewish Chronicle believe it has greater effect than the overused ‘anti-Semite’ the value of which has been devalued since it is used against all critics of Israel.
In fact ‘Jew baiter’ wasn’t used against run of the mill anti-Semites such as Oswald Moseley and the British Union of Fascists. It was reserved for ardent Jew haters like Arnold Leese of the Imperial Fascist League. But I suspect Kyle is as ignorant of the history of fascism as he is about the history of the gay rights movement.
By using Jews as a stick to beat his political opponents, the person who is guilty of ‘Jew baiting’ and anti-Semitism is Kyle himself.
What we are seeing today with Chris Williamson is an attempt to close down democratic debate by the supporters of the world’s only apartheid state. It is also an international phenomenon.
In America repeated attempts are being made to render BDS illegal.  In Germany the Bundestag witnessed the spectacle of neo-Nazis, Greens and Social Democrats voting together to condemn BDS as anti-Semitic! Indeed the neo-Nazi AfD, Alternative for Germany, complained that the other resolutions were not strong enough as they didn’t outlaw BDS!
Katie Hopkins - ardent Zionist, neo-Nazi who talked of 'final solution' for Muslims and supported the murder of 11 Jews in Pittsburgh - was guest of honour at the last Zionist Federation dinner
In the United States it is the most anti-Semitic elements, born again Christians and the alt-Right, neo-Nazi Richard Spencer and Steve Bannon who declare their love for Israel as an ethno-nationalist state.  Here in Britain anti-Semites such as Tommy Robinson and Katie Hopkins pledge their support for Israel. The same Katie Hopkins who declared that refugees were ‘cockroaches’. This didn’t stop her justifyingthe attack on the synagogue in Pittsburgh where 11 Jews were murdered because of their support for refugees. A justification that wasechoed by the Israeli far-Right and figures such as the popular rap artist The Shadow (Yoav Eliasi).
Every racist, from the White Supremacist in the White House to Kyle, Stanger and Yates opposes 'anti-Semitism'
Israel is a model for White Supremacists and Nationalists because, like Trump, they admire Israel’s determination to keep refugees out and its virulent Islamaphobia in order to protect their ‘Jewish identity’. They admire Israel’s wall with Egypt and the determination to keep Israel racially Jewish.
When Trump pressured Israel to refuse to admit Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, this White supremacist President, who describedthe neo-Nazis of Charlottesville as ‘fine people’, saidof Tlaib and Omar that ‘They hate Israel & all Jewish people’. Thisshould prove decisively that ‘anti-Semitism’ is a weapon of the racist right – be it Trump, Kyle or Yates.
Labour Right and Zionist oddball, Luke Stanger, currently suspended by the Labour Party for harassing women and racism - was on the fringes of the meeting in Regency Square
It was of course particularly enjoyable seeing the outrage and splenetic fury of the Zionists, Yates included. Their rally mustered all of a dozen miserable creatures a few of whom hung around the periphery of our demonstration, frustrated that we had defied them and exercised our democratic rights.
What the Labour Right and the Zionists don’t understand is why 150 people, at short notice, were determined to ensure that the rally took place. That people don’t like being told what they can and cannot listen to just because the defenders of the world’s most racist state tell them to.
Idiot President of the Board of Deputies, Marie van der Zyl, held her own one woman protest on the fringes of our meeting
The cream of the Zionist leadership in Britain – the President of the Board of Deputies President Marie van der Zyle and the Jewish Leadership Council -came down and spent the night in the Jury’s Inn Hotel! No doubt at the expense of the ‘Jewish community.’
Leah Levane and Jenny Manson of Jewish Voice for Labour have written an open letter to Ms Zyl. They describe what happened in Brighton  as representing ‘a critical threat to democracy’ and they describe the methods which have been used over the past year to intimidate venues including ‘telephoned bomb threats’ at the premiere of the Jackie Walker film Witchhunt at the 2018 Labour Party conference and
‘threats of hostile reviews for potential hotel hosts on TripAdvisor, mass heckling at meetings, and more. However to the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that there have been direct threats of actual physical harm made in person to venue workers.’
When Israel began using snipers to murder unarmed demonstrators the Board of Deputies rushed to support them
JVL describe what has happened as ‘reminiscent of the tactics used during the historical rise of far-right movements, who organised violence or the threat of violence on the streets.’ They ask the Board to ‘completely disassociate themselves from such actions.’
Labour Friends of Israel supported the murder of hundreds of unarmed Palestinians in Gaza this and last year by Israeli snipers
I suspect that the Board of Deputies which rushed to justify what happened last year when Israel started gunning down protestors at the Gaza fence, as did Labour Friends of Israel, are not going to condemn the fascist-like tactics of their supporters in Britain. Kosher pigs are likely to fly first.
But let us be under no illusions. The Board of Deputies only represents a minority, the most right-wing, racist section of Jews. They represent neither secular or Ultra-Orthodox Jew
Although the media has tried to cover it up, when 36 Orthodox rabbis signed a letter supporting Jeremy Corbyn and opposing the Board’s attacks on him only the alternative media such as Skwawkbox publicised it. Portraying unanimity in the Jewish community behind the Board of Deputies is in the interests of the establishment press.
The eagerness of the Board of Deputies to stop Chris Williamson is in marked contrast to their failure over the years to oppose anti-Semitism from genuine fascists.
The IHRA definition of anti-Semitism is being widely used to inhibit support of the Palestinians and what happened with the Chris Williamson meeting took place in the context of the widening of the definition of anti-Semitism to include criticism of Israel.  Only last week it was used by Tower Hamlet’s Council in order to bar the Big Ride for Palestine. It has been used to sack Stan Keable at Hammersmith and Fulham Council and it was used by Dudley Council to suspend Paul Johnson.
The IHRA‘definition of anti-Semitism’ has to go. Although the Green Party conference refused to accept the IHRA, rejecting the attempts of the leadership to force it through, locally all 11 Green Councillors in Brighton & Hove voted for it. One can only hope that with 8 extra councillors in addition to new Labour councillors that the present Council will reverse what is a charter for racist supporters of the Israeli state.
We should accept the advice of Kenneth Stern, who drafted the IHRA definition, who said that it chills free speech!
Last week, dissident Zionist academic Dr Geoffrey Alderman slated the IHRA definition in The Independent as being internally contradictory and not fit for purpose as he did in a submission to the EHRC investigation. His analysis is interesting because it concentrates on sections that other people have tended to ignore.
There is no academic or legal justification for the definition that is worth the paper it’s written on. The IHRA is a definition of anti-Semitism that anti-Semites are happy with.
What is needed is for the Palestine solidarity movement to build an alliance that encompasses supporters of civil liberties and human rights in order to defend our democratic rights.
Without any class politics Caroline Lucas has drifted to the Right with her all-women cabinet nonsense that included Tories and Liberal supporters of austerity
I have sent an Open Letter to Caroline Lucas, the MP for Brighton Pavilion where the meeting was held and where the venues which cancelled the meeting were based, asking why she has stayed silent over what happened in her own constituency. It seems that Caroline’s journey to the right continues apace.
Tony Greenstein

Open Letter to Len McLuskey, General Secretary of UNITE – The Time has Come to Junk the IHRA

$
0
0
 The IHRA’s Only Purpose is to Prop Up Apartheid Israel, Undermine solidarity with the Palestinians and Topple Corbyn

At the June meeting of Unite SE/6246 Branch members learnt of the suspension of one of our members from the Labour Party. She is an activist in Palestine Solidarity Campaign and her ‘crime’ was tweeting opposition to Israeli political interference and Zionism.
She has been suspended with a recommendation for expulsion without a hearing. All her tweets, without exception, related to Israel and the Israel lobby. Nothing in them is remotely anti-Semitic.
The branch therefore asked me to write an open letter to the General Secretary of UNITE, Len McLuskey, asking for the Executive Council to withdraw its support for the IHRA’s bogus definition of anti-Semitism. 
UNITE has clear policy in support of BDS and the Palestinians. The IHRA defines it as ‘anti-Semitic’. The IHRA says that ‘applying double standards’ to Israel ‘by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation’ is anti-Semitic. The problem is that Israel is not like any other democratic state.  It is a state of only its Jewish citizens. However the IHRA starts from the proposition that Israel is a liberal democracy
BDS is only applied to Israel therefore the IHRA classifies it as anti-Semitic. Applying this logic when South Africa was an apartheid state, BDS was also racist against White South Africans and when Jews (except for the Zionists) launched a boycott of Nazi Germany in 1933 that was racist against Germans! 
 Only recently the German Bundestag, following in the tradition of Nazi opposition to Boycotts, confirmedthat BDS is anti-Semitic. We had the spectacle of Greens, Social Democrats and neo-Nazis agreeing that support for the Palestinians is anti-Semitic!
What is amazing about the IHRA, which governments have so readily adopted, is that there is no support for the IHRA from any legal or academic scholars. Even the person who drafted it, Kenneth Stern in written testimonyto the US Congress criticised it for chilling free speech. It is a worthless definition whose only purpose is to allow supporters of the world’s only apartheid state to accuse anti-racists and anti-imperialists of ‘anti-Semitism’.
Take Stephen Sedley, a former Court of Appeal Judge who is himself Jewish. Sedley wrote, in an article for London Review of Books that the IHRA
Assume(s) that Israel, apart from being a Jewish state, is a country like any other and so open only to criticism resembling such criticism as can be made of other states, placing the historical, political, military and humanitarian uniqueness of Israel’s occupation and colonisation of Palestine beyond permissible criticism.
The IHRA is based on 2 fallacies:  first that Israel and Jews are identical, a position that is in itself anti-Semitic. And secondly that Israel is like ‘any other democratic nation.’ It isn’t.  No other state in the world demolishes the homes of one section of the population in order to replace them with the majority ethnic group, Jews.
Even Dr Geoffrey Alderman, a right-wing Zionist and Jewish academic and historian, a columnist for the Jewish Chronicle and Jewish Telegraph, has made a submission to the Equalities and Human Rights Council investigation into the Labour Party criticising the definition.
In an article This Labour Party row will not be settled by relying on a flawed and faulty definition of antisemitism Alderman draws attention to the 11 illustrations of anti-Semitism in the IHRA definition, focussing on 2 of them.
One example that says it is antisemitic to accuse Jewish citizens “of being more loyal to Israel, or to the alleged priorities of Jews worldwide, than to the interests of their own nations.” Alderman noted that
many Jews who hold dual citizenship and who, under certain circumstances, would act (and have indeed acted) in the interests of Israel rather than of Britain. It should not be deemed antisemitic to point this out.’
The other example he referred to is the one saying it is anti-Semitic to ‘“draw(ing) comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.”  He observes that people often compare countries, for example Burma, to the Nazis.  Why is it anti-Semitic to compare Israel’s actions to the Nazis given that Israeli politicians regularly accuse their enemies of behaving like Nazis?
The Oxford English Dictionary definition of anti-Semitism is 6 not 500+ words
Labour’s witchhunters rely on criticism of Israel not Jews
The ‘evidence’ against the UNITE comrade is an example of how the IHRA has been used, not to combat anti-Semitism, which is hostility to Jews as Jews but to defend the world’s most racist state. When Len McLuskey did a 180 degree about turn to support the IHRA he fooled himself into believing it would mean an end to the ‘anti-Semitism’ witchhunt.  It hasn’t. It has emboldened and strengthened it. The cowardice and pusillanimity of McLuskey and the trade union leadership has increased the crisis around Corbyn and the Labour Party. It is time to tell the Zionists to get lost and if they are concerned about anti-Semitism then maybe they will stop justifying what Israel does in the name of the Jews.
Labour's witchhunters are now openly equating criticism of Israel with antisemitism
The first piece of evidence against our Branch member was about her sharing an article by Electronic Intifada journalist, Asa Winstanley, on how the Israel lobby manufactured Labour’s anti-Semitism crisis. Asa has also been suspended in what is a blatant attack on the freedom of the press. Clearly Labour’s witchhunters think they are in Israel now. Asa has also been denied press credentials for Labour’s conference. It seems that Jenny Formby’s administration is now going one worse than the hated Iain McNicoll. As the IHRA’s author Kenneth Stern has admitted the IHRA‘chills’ free speech ,.
The fourth piece of ‘evidence’ referred to an articlein The Independent quoting the late Jewish Father of the House of Commons, Gerald Kaufman as saying that ‘Jewish money’had influenced the government. The term ‘Jewish money’ is widely used in the Jewish community and I found over 600 instances of its use on the Jewish Chronicle website! It is not anti-Semitic per se.
Ironically the suspended Labour Party member's tweet 'But shhh, mustn't criticise Israel or you'll be accused of antisemitism' has come truer rather quicker than she expected!
Asking people to share a petition calling for an inquiry into Israel’s influence on democracy in Britain was another piece of ‘evidence’. What has this to do with Jews or anti-Semitism. Israel is not a Jew.
Al Jazeera’s programme The Lobby covered in detail how an agent operating out of the Israeli Embassy, Shai Masot had indeed interfered in British politics. He discussedhow to bring down the Deputy Foreign Secretary, Sir Alan Duncan, who was hostile to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank.  Masot described himself as a political officer assigned to the Israeli Embassy.  How can it possibly be anti-Semitic to speak the truth?
The person also said it would be ‘interesting to see how the JLM and other Zionist orgs justify this appalling action’ referring to police brutality against Palestinian children.  Is it anti-Semitic to call out the abuse of Palestinian children by Israel?
Other things that the comrade said included telling Brighton’s then leader of the Labour Council, Dan Yates that ‘privileging anti-Semitism above other forms of racism is nothing to be proud of. Neither is supporting Israeli racism and apartheid.’ It is an extremely valid question as to why the Labour Party has been obsessed with non-existent ‘anti-Semitism’ when racism in society and the Windrush scandal has merited no attention at all.
Or perhaps her crime was referring to Israel’s most popular rap artist (who has a quarter of a million Facebook fans), The Shadow. The Shadow  blamed the dead at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue for their own murder. Their ‘crime’ beingn to support immigrants in the USA. Normally it is only fascists and anti-Semites who cheer on those who murder Jews but there is also a number of sick Zionists who believe that you need anti-Semitism in order to ‘encourage’ Jews to emigrate to the racial paradise of Israel. Referring to this fact is enough to be accused of ‘anti-Semitism’ by the morons of Southside.
Supporting an inquiry into the fake anti-Corbyn ‘charity’, the Campaign Against Anti-Semitismalso aroused the ire of Labour’s witchhunters as did mentioning Israel’s half-hearted probe into the fire bombing of a Palestinian family in the West Bank, which left both parents and an 18 month old baby dead and a four year old child with severe burn injuries.  The Southside scum who included this tweet clearly believe it is anti-Semitic to condemn Zionist child murderers.
The time has come for McLuskey and other union bureaucrats, like UNISON’s Dave Prentis to abandon the IHRA ‘definition’ of anti-Semitism.  Why is a ‘definition’ of anti-Semitism needed anyway if not to protect Israel? My dad did not need a 500 word definition of anti-Semitism in order to fight Oswald Moseley’s British Union of Fascists at Cable Street.  And when the BUF did attack Jews and try to march in Jewish areas, the Board of Deputies told them to stay at home. These are the very same reactionaries who cry ‘anti-Semitism’ today whenever Palestine is on the agenda.
Tony Greenstein

Len McCluskey,
General Secretary,
Unite The Union,
128 Theobald's Road,
LONDON, WC1X 8TN

Tuesday 23rd July 2019


Dear Brother McCluskey,
It’s Time to Scrap the IHRA Definition which conflates anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism
I am writing to you on behalf of Unite SE/6246 Branch. We believe that it is time to call a halt to this bogus and confected ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign. 
Last August, in an articlein Huffpost you stated that ‘It would be for the best if all eleven [IHRA examples] were now agreed, so the party can move on.’ The Party however did not move on. The whole purpose of this fake ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign was to remove Jeremy Corbyn as leader.
You acknowledged as much in the title of your articlewhere you stated that the ‘Jewish community leaders’ ‘have simply refused to take “yes” for an answer.’  You spoke of their ‘Intransigent hostility and an utter refusal to engage in dialogue’. Why then continue to appease them?
You are right. These Zionist leaders will always refuse to accept ‘yes’ for an answer as long as Jeremy Corbyn is Leader of the Labour Party. The primary interest of these people is the defence of the Israeli state, right or wrong. That is why last summer the Board of Deputies supportedIsrael’s massacre of over 200 unarmed demonstrators in Gaza.
The Board of Deputies is not concerned with ‘anti-Semitism’ From the Battle of Cable Street to the present day their attitude has been that Jews should avoid confrontations with fascists.
You stated in your article that ‘it would have been far better for the party to have adopted at least ten of the eleven IHRA examples’ but you were willing to give them the whole loaf. We disagree.  The IHRAhas only ever had one purpose, to conflate anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism. 7 out of the 11 examples of anti-Semitism are concerned with Israel not Jews.
Our union supports a policy of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions. Under the IHRA that is anti-Semitic since we don’t apply BDS to any other country.
Likewise the IHRA holds it is ‘anti-Semitic’ to claim that ‘the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.’ This is palpable nonsense. When Israeli actress Rotem Sala protestedthat ‘Israel is a state of all its citizens’ she was immediately reprimanded by Benjamin Netanyahu who declared ‘“First of all, Israel is not a country of all its citizens. According to the nation-state law that we passed, Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish nation’.
According to the IHRA telling the truth is anti-Semitic. The examples of racism are legion from protests in Afula against the sale of a house to an Arab to the edict, by the Chief Rabbi of Safed Shmuel Eliyahu, a paid public servant that forbids renting homes to Arabs.
It is claimed that Israel is a Jewish state. What this means in practice is that Jews receive preferential treatment. 93% of Israeli state landis barred to Arabs because it is Jewish national land. Britain is officially a Christian state but the rights and duties of Jews are no different from Christians.  If a Jewish person were told that they couldn’t rent a house because they weren’t Christian that would rightly be termed anti-Semitic yet it is ‘anti-Semitic’ to criticise the same thing in Israel.
The IHRA has been panned by academics and legal scholars. According to Geoffrey Robertson QC the IHRA definition is, ‘not fit for purpose’.  Sir Stephen Sedley, the Jewish former Court of Appeal Judge wrotethat the IHRA ‘fails the first test of any definition: it is indefinite.’Hugh Tomlinson QCdeclaredthat the IHRA had ‘a potential chilling effect’ on free speech.  Even the person who drafted it, Kenneth Stern, complained in written testimonyto the US House of Representatives that ‘The definition was not drafted, and was never intended, as a tool to target or chill speech’.
We understand why you agreed to endorse the IHRA last August. However appeasement only emboldens the aggressor. In recent months two members of Unite locally have been suspended for alleged ‘anti-Semitism’. Both are anti-racist activists and one is Black.
The time has come to declare that we are not going to allow this continuing attack on socialists and anti-racists, in the name of the fight against anti-Semitism. Widening the definition of anti-Semitism to include criticism of Israel benefits no one, least of all Jews.
Only last week Panorama broadcast a vicious, one-sided and blatantly dishonest attack on Jeremy Corbyn. No one from Jewish Voices for Labour was interviewed.
We therefore ask that Unite representatives on the NEC are instructed to withdraw their support for the IHRA.
Furthermore, at the 2017 Labour Party conference in Brighton you promised that Unite would affiliate nationally to JVL.  The time has come to honour that promise.
Yours sincerely,

Tony Greenstein
Policy on Israel/Palestine
Work with other NGOs and all other supportive bodies in the UK and around the world and develop a Unite campaigning and leverage strategy around Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) within the next 12 months, notably against complicit companies involved in the occupation, the apartheid wall and the illegal settlements, through workforce pressure, contracts and pension funds, and encourage members to call on supermarkets and retailers to stop using companies which export goods from illegal settlements

Mad Cows and Englishmen –The Telegraph goes Barking Mad over Beef and Communism

$
0
0

As Douglas Murray chokes on his racist bile, is the Torygraph's headline the most stupid ever? 

I rubbed my eyes when I saw the headline ‘University which banned beef now hosts 'Communist' summer school’. What could possibly be the connection between the decision to take beef off the menu at Goldsmiths University, as part of their contribution to fighting global warming and a debate between Professor Moshe Machover, the founder of Matzpen, the Israeli Socialist Organisation and myself?
What for that matter is the connection between British Beef and hosting the annual Communist University? I guess in the mind of the Daily Telegraph it’s only the loony left and rabid feminists who would ban the staple food of every red blooded Englishman. Hosting a Communist University must be proof that our way of life is under attack even though it is a commercial booking and nothing to do with the university itself. Small details such as these are irrelevant to the rabid right.


Phoebe Southworthfour-year long trial
Letter to the Telegraph in response to their idiotic article
The latest move has prompted accusations that Goldsmith is no longer a "safe space" for Jewish students and that it is "officially becoming a Communist university".
So let us digest this.  Two Jewish people debating the finer points of whether Israeli Jews constitute a nation means that ‘Goldsmith is no longer a "safe space" for Jewish students’.  Is she really saying that hearing two Jewish anti-Zionists debate Zionism will threaten the well being of the spoilt Jewish darlings and JAPs (Jewish American Princesses) who are students at Goldsmith? 
Needless to say, when a hack needs a quote then who better to turn to than the misnamed Campaign Against Anti-Semitism.  They believe that the presence of Professor Moshe Machover and myself on campus is "deeply troubling". The University is “welcoming onto campus a number of individuals who have a history of baiting Jews or outright antisemitism”.
The term ‘anti-Semitism’ has been so shop soiled of late that it has lost its effect.  Now we are ‘Jew baiting’ if we disagree with Zionism and anti-Palestinian racism. Indeed we have a ‘history’ of doing this.  I guess I also have a history of opposing fascists such as Tommy Robinson and the EDL, who Zionists like the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism work with. 
The head of the college even looks like one of those hated feminist leftist do gooders
And if this was not bad enough, then Douglas Murray, the frothing at the mouth Islamaphobe  who is Associate Director of the cold-war Henry Jackson Societypenned in the following day’s Telegraph, Our anti-capitalist, anti-Western universities no longer care about excellence
This mild mannered, man is the same person who, in 2009, described Robert Spencer, the leader of "Stop the Islamization of America (SIOA)", as a "very brilliant scholar and writer". He is so brilliant that along with Pamela Geller he got himself banned from entering Britain. He is responsible for Jihad Watch which is allied to David Horowitz’s Freedom Centre and Frontpagemag.com an overtly racist and Islamaphobic web site.
In a 2006 speech to the Pim Fortuyn Memorial ConferenceMurray demanded that “conditions for Muslims in Europe must be made harder across the board.”:
All immigration into Europe from Muslim countries must stop. In the case of a further genocide such as that in the Balkans, sanctuary would be given on a strictly temporary basis. This should also be enacted retrospectively. Those who are currently in Europe having fled tyrannies should be persuaded back to the countries which they fled from once the tyrannies that were the cause of their flight have been removed. And of course it should go without saying that Muslims in Europe who for any reason take part in, plot, assist or condone violence against the West (not just the country they happen to have found sanctuary in, but any country in the West or Western troops) must be forcibly deported back to their place of origin.”
So if you sympathise with attacks on American troops in Iraq or Saudi Arabia or wherever you should be ‘forcibly deported’.  Bang goes freedom of speech.
Murray wrote in The Spectator that ‘There are certain things in Britain about which it is impossible to speak frankly. The birth rate of the Muslim population is a prime subject” The birth rate of Black and Asian people has always been an obsession with racists and neo-Nazis.
Yet this racist buffoon is given space in The Torygraph to proclaim that banning beef and hosting a Communist University means an end to civilisation as we know it.
Murray told the Telegraph’s readers that ‘tragedy always follows close on comedy’s heels and this tragedy ‘can also be glimpsed on the Goldsmiths campus.’   Why pray tell? Because Goldsmiths ‘is hosting a summer school involving a series of lectures organised by the Communist Party of Great Britain.’
Shocked as you may be dear reader there is more.
‘The lecturers include Tony Greenstein, the founding member of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, who last year achieved the almost unachievable when he was expelled from Labour for using terms like “Zionist scum” and accusing “Zionists” of “collaborating with the Nazis”. Also lecturing at the Communist summer camp is an activist called Graham Bash who will be addressing students on the subject of “How can we transform the Labour Party into a vehicle of socialism?” A lecture whose aims might be said to already have been achieved.
I know it’s not much consolation to someone who even the Tory front bench broke off relations with in 2011 because he was seen as a racist and extremist, but being expelled from the Labour Party these days, if you are Jewish and a socialist, is quite easy!
Still I don’t want to spoil a good story since The Telegraph’s readers enjoy having something to shock them over their tea and marmalade first thing in the morning. Murray engages in an attack not merely on Goldsmiths but on what he calls an ‘only slightly watered-down version of the full-throated communism’ at Cambridge University no less. He tells us of ‘a great tide has swept across the university system in America as in Britain’.  By now babbling like a hyena on heat Murray splutters that ‘It is a culture war waged with tools such as “de-platforming”, claims for “safe spaces” and more. Most of all it exists in the Academy’s fetishisation of “diversity”.
Now where have I heard of culture wars before?  Oh yes, it is a standard  meme of the fascist right
As Noah Berlatsky wrote in Jewish Currents after a neo-Nazi opened fire at Poway synagogue earlier this year, “Cultural Marxism” is a trope that is rapidly spreading from the far right to the conservative mainstream.’ It was first popularised by Andrei Brevik, the Norwegian neo-Nazi (and Zionist) who murdered 77 young people.  This is what Douglas Murray is arguing for and what The Telegraph is quite happy to print in the name of fighting socialism and defending Zionism.

Meanwhile if you are interested in a debate between Moshe Machover and myself on whether or not Israel’s Jews constitute a nation, then take yourself off to Goldsmith’s College this Friday for a no doubt riveting debate! Beef I’m afraid will not be on the menu!

 The details are here! And here is the timetable.  Our debate is timed for 4.45 p.m. this Friday at Goldsmith's University St James London SE14 6AD

Tony Greenstein

Viewing all 2426 articles
Browse latest View live