This is Zionism and this is what Ephraim Mirvis is Defending – Jewish Racism in a Jewish State

November 29, 2019, 4:21 pm

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Zionism is not a ‘euphemism’ for Jews – it is a Synonym for an Apartheid Society based on Jewish Supremacy & Systematic Racial Discrimination

 

One of the quainter customs which Israel has inherited from its European past is the pogrom. A pogrom is where members of the majority community organise a riot and attack members of the minority. In Czarist Russia these were common and thousands of Jews died until the Bolsheviks made it a capital offence. The name of Kishinev was infamous until the Nazi atrocities dwarfed it. It is one of the reasons that there are 300,000 and not 50,000 Jews in Britain.

In South Tel Aviv where the majority of Israel’s 40,000 Black African refugees live there is a constant war of attrition from the ‘poor White’ Misrahi Jews that live there. In 2012 ‘Culture’ Minister Miri Regev and her far-Right friends entered for a racist rally against asylum seekers and provoked a pogrom with their incitement. For this of course they have never been punished.

Raed Salah however, leader of the now banned Northern Muslim League has been repeatedly gaoled for ‘racial incitement’. Israel’s ‘anti-racist’ laws are only ever used against the victims of racism. There have been numerous other attacks such as the murderof a lone Eritrean refugee in the Beer Sheva bus depot for which his attackers were given community service. You see his attackers thought he was an Arab terrorist (he wasn’t White) which in Israel is an understandable mistake to make. Or there are the attacksby the government funded Lehava on Arabs suspected of the crime of dating Jewish women in Jerusalem.

But it’s not simply individual Israelis who are guilty of racism.  It is the Israeli state that sets the example. Ha’aretz reported that the Israeli state, having deducted 2.5% from Palestinian workers to pay for a Sick Fund, rarely if ever paid the monies out.

Kav La’oved, a non-Zionist workers organisation obtained an injunction forbidding the Israeli state simply giving the money back to the employer.  As even Histadrut, the Zionist union said,

 “The workers are entitled to some of the accumulated funds, because although they were insured with the sick pay fund, in fact it was almost impossible for them to receive any sick pay,” the Histadrut said.

Ha’aretz reported that:

Until the beginning of 2019 employers automatically set aside 2.5 percent of their Palestinianworkers’ wages for a “sick pay fund,” run by Israel's Population and Immigration Authority. But the process of receiving sick pay is much longer and more complicated for Palestinians than for their Israeli counterparts. The requests are usually filed only for serious diseases and injuries and require an intricate labyrinth of administrative and medical permits. Only rarely is the sum paid in full.

This is, of course, the reality of a system whereby workers living under Occupation have no rights whatsoever.  Arbitrary deductions are made from their wages for a sick fund that never pays out. But this is just the tip of the iceberg.

Ha’aretz reports that the Ein Hanya spring was recently opened in Southern Jerusalem however the Police stipulated that it was only ‘on the explicit condition that Palestinians not be allowed to enter the site.’ And course this is completely reasonable you may think. After all what is a Jewish state for if it can’t even keep Arabs out of swimming pools and natural springs.

So the Spring was kept under heavy guard by the police and Border Police, who even closed the road leading to Palestinian towns. Hundreds of Israelis visited the site. Previously residents of the neighboring Palestinian village of Al-Walaja regularly visited it, thus it was enjoyed by both Israelis and Palestinians for years before Israel decided to turn it into an official park.

The spring was officially inaugurated as a tourism site two years ago, but its opening has been repeatedly delayed, for two reasons. One was a dispute over whether entry fees should be charged. The other was the police’s demand that Palestinians not be allowed to enter.

What kind of democracy is it, you may ask, where the Police can stipulate that one section of the population is barred from a social and recreational facility?  Does anywhere come to mind?

Ha’aretz also reported that

‘Police have also demanded that the Ein Yael checkpoint be moved farther south, so that it would separate Palestinian towns from the spring. The estimated cost of moving the checkpoint is 12 million shekels ($3.4 million).’

A small price you might think for making the spring Arabrein (after the Nazi Judenrein).

Now as readers will be aware, in a state based on racial supremacy it is vital that a strict demarcation line be drawn between the Herrenvolk (master race) and the Untermenschen (lower races). Fortunately, despite the ability of non-Jews to convert to Judaism, Israel’s Conversion Authority have wisely decided to exclude Palestinians.

Yes I know some of you may feel squeamish about this and even call it racist, but it really isn’t. In Hungary and Slovakia during the war, we had the phenomenon of Jews queuing up to convert to Christianity and thus thwart the efforts of the regime to classify them as Jews fit for deportation.  Unfortunately it rarely worked as the Nazis, like the Israeli regime, were not fooled by Jews suddenly wishing to become Christians.  Likewise Israel’s authorities are not fooled by Palestinians wishing to become Jews.  They are fully aware of the real reasons behind such religious ardour.

It is therefore  gratifying to learn that Rabbi Yitzhak Peretz, director of the Israeli government’s Conversion Authority explained that

‘Israel’s authority handling conversions to Judaism rejects Palestinian applicants without review because of their ethnic origin, its head said.’

during a discussion at the State Control Committee of the Knesset, the Israeli parliament. Foreigners have to apply to the Special Cases Panel of the Conversion Authority.

“The threshold requirements are that applicants be sincere and that they are not foreign workers; infiltrators; Palestinian or illegally in the country.”

Now dear reader, you probably believe that there is no mention in the Talmud or the Torah of these exceptions.  Of course historically as long as the individual was honest and sincere and willing to undergo he conversion process, s/he would be accepted as Jewish.

But in Israel things are not so simple. Being Jewish is not a religious but a racial characteristic, much like it was in Nazi Germany. And in Nazi Germany, once a Jew always a Jew, so someone whose parents had converted freely to Christianity 50 years previously was still a Jew or a Mishlinge (half or quarter Jew).  Hence in Germany and in Hungary you had the phenomenon of Christian Jews – Jewish by race, Christian by religion.

Similarly in Israel. If you are a foreign worker, brought into the country to perform menial labour, then you must understand you have no rights however long you are in the country. Why? Because you are living in a Jewish state. 

Of course there is always a temptation to convert amongst the Palestinians given all those privileges that you are entitled to if you are Jewish.  But if every Palestinian could convert where would Israel be?  It would have no one to discriminate against. Before long we would have an equal society and that would mean no ‘Jewish’ State.

Obviously your immigration status must have a bearing on your motive in wanting to convert. For example your children will be able to have a good education in a Jewish school rather than an under funded Arab one. You will be able to live in hundreds of Jewish communities if you are Jewish. Quite rightly Rabbi Peretz has seen through all of this.

And as if to prove what I say is true, Ha’aretz reports that an Indian born couple, Tina and Minin Lopez, who came to Israel 12 years ago to work as nurses, were detained alongside their 7-year-old daughter Eliana and their one-year-old baby. You see it is irrelevant if you were born in Israel. Unlike many countries being born in Israel confers no rights on you. What matters is your ethnicity – being Jewish.

Ha’aretz reports that Immigration Authority inspectors broke into the home of the Lopez family in south Tel Aviv and detained them along with their seven-year-old daughter Eliana, who attends school in Tel Aviv, and their one-year-old toddler.

Yes I know some of you will be saying that at least the toddler is innocent but that really is besides the point.  The fact is that he is not Jewish and he along with his sister are trying to stay in a land reserved for Jews.

We are told that the arrest comes amid a ‘wide crackdown on migrant workers throughout Israel.’ Now you know why Theresa May, with her ‘hostile environment policy’ had such a fondness for Israel.

People have to understand that Israel is no ordinary country.  It is a Jewish ethnic state and no matter how long you have lived and worked in the country you are not Jewish. Apparently the Immigration Authority came under fire in recent weeks for arresting two Filipino, Israeli-born children as they prepared to go to school.

Thirteen-year-old Gena Antigo and 10-year-old Ralph Harel were released on a $8,510 bail each after an appeals court ruled that their arrests and the decision to deport them and their mothers were wrong because the minors' welfare was not taken into consideration. Just as in Britain, sometimes the courts are too soft-hearted for their own goods.  However you will be happy to know that ‘Justice Minister’ Ayelet Shaked has instituted a crackdown on do gooder judges and slowly the Supreme Court is being stacked with settler judges like Noam Sohlberg who will have no truck with this liberal nonsense about human rights.

As Ayelet has often reminded people, when there is a conflict between national i.e. Zionist considerations and universal concepts of human rights then the latter must give way. Or as the Jewish National Fund once put it, Jewish people haven’t dreamed of a democratic state but a Jewish state for 2,000 years.

The court also ruled that minors under the age of 12 should receive a hearing before a decision is made to deport them. 1,000 students, teachers and parents demonstrated outside of Givon Prison against the detention Antigo and Harel. This makes you want to despair.  Clearly some Israelis don’t understand that a Jewish state can’t afford to just let any old non-Jew stay in the state.

Demonstrators held signs reading: "We won't let them deport Gena,""They're children just like us" and "No evil in our schools." I can imagine the despair on Ayelet and Netanyahu’s faces.  No their children are notjust like us.  For one they are not Jewish.  They don’t even have Jewish souls, which is a very important factor in the after life. As Eli Dahan, the former Deputy Minister of Defence said, even gay Jews have higher souls than non-Jews.

Of course there are some racists and anti-Semites like that Corbyn fellow who oppose the world’s only Jewish state.  These kind of people would probably have opposed the world’s only Aryan state or the world’s only White Christian state (South Africa). Clearly they are nothing more than degenerate left-wingers and communists.

Fortunately the BBC’s Tory Laura Kuensberg and the rest of the media recognise a racist when they see one and no, I was not referring to Boris Johnson.

Tony Greenstein

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The Jewish Chronicle is Heavily Criticised by the Independent Press Standards Organisation for Lying about Audrey White and Refusing to either Retract the lies or Co-operate with an Investigation

December 1, 2019, 5:39 pm

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‘Liar’ Lee Harpin, the JC's Political Correspondent was Previously Arrested for his part in the Hacking Scandal at the Daily Mirror

Audrey White is a legend in her own lifetime. A woman who has fought oppression, sexual harassment and bigotry in all its forms all her life. Lee Harpin, the Jewish Chronicle’s Political Editor, who lied about her repeatedly, has spent his journalistic life defending racism and ethnic cleansing. Harpin isn’t fit to shine Audrey’s shoes.

This week the Jewish Chronicle has been forced to print the adjudication of IPSO, albeit 5 months late. IPSO is normally seen as the tame creature of the newspaper industry. It is some measure of the Jewish Chronicle and its Editor Stephen Pollard’s contemptible behaviour that IPSO has criticised them in such strident terms.

The Jewish Chronicle printed 4 articles, which consisted of a series of lies, about Audrey White. They were

 “Ex-Militant Tendency activist accused of bullying Louise Ellman lied about date of birth to rejoin Labour”, published online on 25 February 2019 – now deleted

“Plot to oust MP Ellman spearheaded by a former member of the Trotskyist Militant Tendency”, published online on 25 February 2019. This article is still online

“Bullied’ Louise Ellman nears exit”, published in print on 1 March 2019; - deleted

“Labour MP Dame Louise Ellman ‘considering her future’ in party amid rumours of more resignations”, published online on 1 March 2019 Arendt still online

The articles alleged that Audrey had:

1.      been “expelled” from the Labour Party in the 1980s

2.       “lied” about her date of birth on her application to re-join the Party in 2015, “on the day Jeremy Corbyn became leader.”

3.      been “amongst a group of militants who repeatedly interrupted” their MP Louise Ellman while she delivered a speech at a constituency meeting.

4.       “received a number of formal warnings from the Party over allegations of bullying against Party members“,

5.       “falsely claimed that a Labour councillor was under investigation by the police for having ‘cruelly taunted’ a ‘disabled pensioner suffering from cancer’”. One article reported that the complainant had been a member of the Socialist Party.

The Jewish Chronicle employed the Jonathan Freedland ‘defence’ viz. that it had relied upon ‘confidential sources’ for its claims.

All the allegations proved to be false. When Audrey sent the Jewish Chronicle proof that their allegations were lies they simply refused to print any correction.  That was why IPSO, normally seen as a fangless poodle added the following rider:

Independent Press Standard Organisation Ruling against Jewish Chronicle

The Committee expressed significant concerns about the newspaper’s handling of this complaint. The newspaper had failed, on a number of occasions, to answer questions put to it by IPSO and it was regrettable the newspaper’s responses had been delayed. The Committee considered that the publication’s conduct during IPSO’s investigation was unacceptable.

The Committee’s concerns have been drawn to the attention of IPSO’s Standards department.

In the past 4 years, the Jewish Chronicle has waged such a, deceitful, distorted and downright dishonest campaign against Labour Party activists and Jeremy Corbyn. The Jewish Chronicle has quite knowingly accused a host of anti-racists of anti-Semitism. It is therefore no surprise that at the end of the day they and ‘Liar’ Lee Harpin simply resorted to inventing facts.

'Liar' Lee Harpin

It has been one of the minor themes of this McCarthyist campaign that Louise Ellman and Luciana Berger, two Zionist Labour MPs, were forced out because they were Jewish. The reality is that they were not wanted because of their right-wing Zionist politics. Many of the people seeking their removal were themselves Jewish including my friend, the late Sam Semoff. Little facts like these never got to make it into the pages of the JC, which is an expensive propaganda sheet.

Without the efforts of Councillor Nick Small, Liverpool might have a new hospital

One of the people propagating the lies about ‘anti-Semitism’ in Riverside was Ellman’s best friend, Councillor Nick Small. Small has been at the centre of the ‘anti-Semitism’ allegations. It was Small who directly intervened in 2011 with the Legal Aid Board to stop them funding Sam Semoff, who was pursuing a judicial review against the government decision to put the rebuilding of the new Royal Liverpool Hospital out to PFI. The contract was given to Carillion, a get rich quick company who went bankrupt last year. Much of Carillon’s building work turned out to be below standard. See Remembering Sam Semoff – an American in exile fighting to defend the NHS

Small was successful and Sam was forced to drop his legal action. The hospital is still waiting to be built. According to the Health Service Journal the Royal Liverpool University Hospital Trust is seeking an extra £300 million because of the actions of Nick Small. The hospital was originally estimated to cost £335 million. If anyone should have been expelled from the Labour Party it was Councillor Nick Small, the neo-liberal cuckoo in the Labour Party.

Small objected at one meeting of Riverside Labour Party to the suggestion of Helen Marks, herself Jewish, that it is the actions of Israel, which describes itself as a Jewish state, against the Palestinians that is responsible for anti-Semitism. Small called this anti-Semitism when in fact it’s so obvious that it barely needs stating. The 2010 Incidents Reports of the Community Security Trust stated that:

The year 2009 saw a record number of anti-Semitic incidents as a consequence of reactions to the Gaza conflict at the beginning of that year,which acted as a ‘trigger event’ affecting the incident totals for January, February and March 2009.  

The full Report of Jewish Voices for Labour’s investigation into the Jewish Chronicle’s lies can be read here.

‘Liar’ Lee was also involved in the hacking scandal at the Daily Mirror and he was at one point arrested by the Police. Over the past few years Harpin has repeatedly lied and traded in disinformation. He has become a practitioner in the dark arts of Black Propaganda, as part of the Jewish Chronicle’s Fake Anti-Semitism Campaign. The full IPSO decision can be found here.

I had the privilege to meet Audrey when I was doing an interview with RT’s Sputnik. Audrey was nominated as one of BBC Radio 4’s ‘100 most influential women of the century’ (for defending women from sexual abuse in the workplace). Audrey was also heavily involved in raising money for a plaque dedicated to the 49 Liverpool Councillors who were surcharged for defying the Tory Government and bankrupted in the 1980’s. She invited me to attend the unveiling of the plaque at the Casa Club in Liverpool on the eve of the Labour Party Conference in Liverpool in 2018.

The Committee expressed significant concerns about the newspaper’s handling of this complaint. The newspaper had failed, on a number of occasions, to answer questions put to it by IPSO and it was regrettable the newspaper’s responses had been delayed. The Committee considered that the publication’s conduct during IPSO’s investigation was unacceptable. The Committee’s concerns have been drawn to the attention of IPSO’s Standards department.

Audrey White made her name in 1983 when she became a pioneer in the fight against sexual harassment at work. She was the manager of a clothing store in Liverpool. When her area manager sexually harassed four women in her team, she complained – and was sacked.

The staff were too scared of losing their jobs to stand up for her. Audrey began picketing the store the next day. The picket was maintained, with banners and petitions,  from opening to closing time for five weeks. ‘And no one crosses a picket line in Liverpool!’

‘On the picket we had dockers, car workers, staff from unemployed centres, union members, local activists.’

We didn’t even know the phrase ‘sexual harassment’ back then.

We learned how bad things were: women came up to us on the picket and said, “I had a wonderful job but my boss would do this, so I had to leave.” And, “I didn’t go along with what the boss wanted, so I got demoted”. When the company finally agreed to meet with us, they wouldn’t discuss the sexual harassment complaints, even though I’d got statements from the girls. They claimed I’d been sacked because I wasn’t ‘bubbly’ enough.

Once we lined up pickets at the Manchester and London stores, the company relented. I remember phoning the pickets from London and saying, “You can take the pickets off because we’ve won!”

My story shows that a woman can win – even a woman in a shop in 1980’s Britain.

In 1988, Audrey’s story was made into a film – Business As Usual. Here she is with Glenda Jackson, who played her character. See

Audrey White - Fighting back against sexual harassment

 

PRESS RELEASE FROM MERSEYSIDE PENSIONERS’ ASSOCIATION

– Nov 28, 2019

Anti-Labour smears of Jewish Chronicle exposed by Independent Press Standards

Merseyside Pensioners Association welcomes the findings of the Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO) in upholding the complaint by one of our members against the Jewish Chronicle for publishing smears and falsehoods against Labour activists in Liverpool.

Audrey White, who was nominated as one of BBC Radio 4’s ‘100 most influential women of the century’ (for defending women from sexual abuse in the workplace) was targeted by the Jewish Chronicle with a litany of lies and falsehoods reported by Lee Harpin – an ex-News of the World journalist arrested in connection with the phone-hacking scandal.

Harpin penned four separate articles containing incendiary and unsubstantiated claims discrediting the 68-year-old pensioner and Labour activist from Liverpool, Riverside. IPSO’s committee stated that “the publication’s (Jewish Chronicle) conduct during IPSO’s investigation was also unacceptable” and has been escalated to IPSO’s Standards Department.

The “significantly misleading claims” published by Harpin and the Jewish Chronicle included the accusation that Audrey (and other activists) had ‘bullied’ local MP Louise Ellman by acting as “a group of militants who repeatedly interrupted the MP” during a constituency meeting; as well as claims that Audrey had “lied about her age” to re-join the Labour Party; was previously “expelled from the Labour Party” and a “former member of the Socialist Party.”

Evidence provided to IPSO, including a recording, exposed these reportings to be patently false and “significantly misleading.” Malcolm Kennedy ex-Lord Mayor of Liverpool also fed the smears by ludicrously comparing one Labour constituency meeting to a ‘Soviet show trial’ — audio recordings of the event found that this too was “significantly misleading” and that constituency meetings were not “rowdy” as characterised by the paper.

The Jewish Chronicle also reported that Audrey had made a “false claim” that a local Labour Councillor was under police investigation for taunting a disabled Corbyn-supporting pensioner who suffers from cancer. Evidence from Merseyside Police’s Hate Crime Unit provided to the Press Standards Investigation concluded that it was “not false to make this claim” and that the publication had provided a “serious and misleading impression of Audrey’s conduct towards Labour politicians.” This conclusion is particularly welcomed by our organisation as the “disabled pensioner” is critically acclaimed photographer and filmmaker Phil Maxwell, a valued member of the Merseyside Pensioners Association.

The findings make clear that the reporting of the Jewish Chronicle and journalist Lee Harpin fall far below the professional and ethical standards expected of journalists working today — particularly as pertains to accuracy and fact-checking (the most basic principles of reporting).

Merseyside Pensioners Association has itself been a target of the Jewish Chronicle and we condemn the personal attacks, fake news and fabrications employed by this journal (and others) to peddle the narrative that Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party has been overrun by ‘militants’ and/or is ‘institutionally anti-Semitic.’ Tragically anti-Semitism continues to exist across society (as well as all major political parties) and politically motivated misreporting of this nature undermines serious efforts to tackle racism in all its forms.

The adjudication in particular exposes the divisive and politically-motivated tactics being used by certain areas of the press and Labour Party to promote the impression that Louise Ellman MP was ‘bullied‘ out of the Labour Party by local activists. Not only does irresponsible journalism like this smear innocent people, it creates division within our communities and tarnishes the reputation of our city (Liverpool) — a city all-too-familiar with the willingness of powerful and unaccountable newspapers to slur ordinary people (without reply).

The MPA congratulates Audrey in persevering with a nine month struggle to clear her name and we look forward to the Jewish Chronicle publishing the remedy as mandated by the ruling. We also ask for a suspension of these kind of politically motivated press-smears against Labour activists, as we fight an election for the Corbyn-led Labour government our country needs.

See also

IPSO hammers Jewish Chronicle for attacks on Labour supporter – and its conduct during investigation

Press regulator slams Jewish Chronicle for ‘misleading’ and ‘inaccurate’ stories about a Corbyn supporter

Xmas Appeal for the Al Tawfawk Centre of Jenin Refugee Camp

December 2, 2019, 10:34 pm

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Please support the children of Palestine this Xmas

Once again I am asking you to dig deep and support the ALTawfawk Centre. As a trustee for The Brighton Trust I am asking you to contribute what you can afford to making Xmas in Palestine that bit more bearable for the children of Palestine.  .

As a result of an approach from members of the New Education Union in Brighton and Hove the Trust agreed to adopt a community centre in Jenin. So far both Brighton and Hove Unison and Unite SE/6246 Branch have contributed.  We hope to be able to send the Centre as large a donation as possible before Xmas.

This is fromthe Head Teacher Mona Jalamnh‎ 

I am the head teacher and founder of Al-Tawfawk English Center in the Jenin Refugee Camp, Jenin, Palestinian Territories. We are in desperate need of volunteers to make the center bigger, safer, and better for our kids.

We currently have three rooms, and five local volunteer teachers. We serve kids aged 6-16 after school, and currently we have 52 students. Our goal is to provide a safe, clean environment for the kids, where they can have a healthy snack and learn English to better their futures. If funding is secured, we would like to open up another floor of the building that we rent, so that we could take 2-6 year-old children during school hours (8am to 2pm), and have additional space for other students.

We have been open for nearly six years. I started with only 4 students, and now, unfortunately, I have to turn students away. This is because we have a lack of space and qualified teachers. Our dream is to expand the school to allow more students to study, as well as attract volunteers who speak English as their first language. We prefer education-based volunteers, and would require background checks, but our main requirement is unaccented examples for the children to practice with.

Our biggest need, currently, is funding. We need to complete some repairs on the rooms that we currently use, and we sometimes struggle to pay the rent. Students pay for the classes, if they can. However, if they cannot, we have a system in place that allows them to continue in the classes. If funding is secured and we are able to expand, our next need will be volunteers.

We are looking for young men and women who love kids and are interested in Arabic culture. Room and board would be provided for the volunteers, but we don’t have much money to offer as compensation. We currently have room for three volunteers, and if interested, we ask that they stay a full school year (9 months), to have continuity for our students.If you, or anyone that you know, are interested in this project, or if you have any more question, please contact me at

al.tafawk.center.jenin.camp@gmail.com .

Thank you for your time, Mona Jalamnh

Jenin was the subject of a massacre in 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 US funding to UNWRA. The Al Tawfawk Centre is the only one left standing.

The Brighton Trust has agreed to donate £50 per month to the Centre. I would like to appeal to all those who read this to consider sending a donation, however small or large to the following account.  We will then forward it on.

For more information about the Centre see their Facebook page. We will 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

AND PLEASE MARK IT ‘AL-TAWFAWK’

Tony Greenstein

Why Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis Finds It Difficult to Oppose Any Form of Racism Bar 'Antisemitism'

December 6, 2019, 9:28 am

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The Guardian Hides the Fact that  Mirvis, Trained as a Rabbi on the Settlement of Alon Shvut and supports Israel's far-Right settlers

Not content with the regular Jonathan Freedland column peddling what Justin Schlosberg has called the ‘disinformation paradigm’ about ‘anti-Semitism’ [Many Jews want Boris Johnson out. But how can we vote for Jeremy Corbyn?] the Guardian decided that its readers deserved a second helping.

Simon Sebag 'Windbag' Montefiore

They therefore dug out a relative of the Montefiore family, Simon Sebag Montefiore, who I will rename Windbag, whose original offering was that ‘This antisemitism poisons any good Labour might do’.  Perhaps if Windbag had sat down and thought for a moment, before setting finger to keyboard, he might have realised that the fake 'antisemitism' campaign was designed precisely in order to stop Corbyn doing. It has no other purpose.

So what was the ‘anti-Semitism’ that Sebag-Shaw was obsessed with?  The subheadline told us that ‘It is possible to criticise Israel without being antisemitic but Corbynists are obsessed with the country’s destruction’. 

The regular  Freedland anti-Corbyn column

Unfortunately that is not true.  Very few Corbyn supporters are in favour of a de-Zionisation of the Israeli state, i.e. turning it into a non-racist state of all its people instead of just some of them, which is what talk of 'the country's destruction' means.

There is however a better way of putting it.  It’s actually very difficult to criticise Israel and also be anti-Semitic. Criticism of the military occupation, the discriminatory laws, the state that only claims to represent its Jewish citizens and much else besides have nothing whatsoever to do with anti-Semitism.

However if you are a supporter of Israel then it is difficult to support Israel without being a racist or anti-Semite.  Take the founder of the alt-Right in the USA, Richard Spencer.  He doesn’t like Jews.  He organised the march in Charlottesville where the far-Right marched to the chant of ‘the Jews will not replace us’ (Question – why would we want to replace you?).

My letter in this week's Sunday Times responding to Rod Liddle's normal racist rant

Spencer is a 24 carat anti-Semite. He has spoken of ‘de Judaising’ the Holocaust.  In fact this has already happened to a large extent. The Holocaust is used as an ideological prop for western imperialism. It has already been divorced from the situation of the Jews who were murdered. Richard Spencer proclaims that he is a proud White Zionist. His ideal state White American state is a reflection of the Jewish state of Israel. 

Israel defines itself in terms of its herrenvolk. It is a Jewish Supremacist state and the Jewish Nation State Law make it clear that Israel is a state only of its Jewish citizens. When Israeli actress, Rotem Sala, declared:

“Dear god, there are also Arab citizens in this country, when the hell will someone in this government convey to the public that Israel is a state of all its citizens and that all people were created equal, and that even the Arabs and the Druze and the LGBTs and - shock - the leftists are human."

Benjamin Netanyahu felt he had to correct her:

“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,” he wrote.

Likewise our own Tommy Robinson, who hangs around with all sorts of neo-Nazis, is a fervent admirer of the Israeli state, is never more proud that when picturedsitting on Israeli tanks. To him the Palestinians are the Muslims of Israel.

Another neo-Nazi is Katie Hopkins, formerly a ‘journalist’ with the Sun and Mail, who believes that refugees are ‘cockroaches’. Katie just loves the racism she experienced in Israel, so much so that she was a guest at the Zionist Federation dinner last year, but when it came to the shooting of ordinary American Jews at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, she believed that they had brought it on themselves by going out of their way to support America’s refugees.  This was also the opinion of the far-Right in Israel, such as its most popular rap artist, The Shadow.

None of the above however disturbs Simon Windbag Montefiore. The only question that disturbed him was Corbyn’s handling of Andrew Neil’s about a “Rothschild Zionist… world government”. He tells us that ‘Rothschild Zionist’‘has a dark history as a 21st-century strain of medieval racism.’

Windbag-Montefiore reaches back into the darkest history of diaspora Jewry and anti-Semitism. 

Evil moneylenders with mixed loyalties inspired Edward I’s terror that culminated in the hanging of 269 innocents, then the expulsion of all Jews in 1290.

As if there is any comparison with Israeli, the Sparta of today, where the army is the most venerated institution in the State. This is simply yet another example of how anti-semitism historically, including the Holocaust, is used to justify Israel's barbarities today.

In fact there are certain comparisons between Israel and medieval anti-Semitism but probably not the ones that Windbag-Montefiore recognises.

The hanging of 269 innocents that he refers to bears comparison with the same number of unarmed demonstrators who have been picked off by Israeli snipers at the Gaza fence in the past 18 months. The expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290 bears more than a passing resemblance to the expulsion of ¾ million Palestinians from Israel in 1948.  However I suspect that this was not what Windbag was referring to!

Instead Windbag gives us a detour that included Stalin’s anti-Semitism and of course a revisiting of all Corbyn’s crimes namely the

‘mural of hooknosed Jewish bankers, alliances with antisemitic terrorists... Corbyn himself has met with Holocaust denier Paul Eisen.’

It’s difficult to understand the connection with Stalin since even Windbag admits Corbyn is not Stalin. But for the Guardian’s editors any mud will stick. 

It's even harder to detect any hooknosed Jewish bankers in the Corbyn mural. This is another one of those lies that grows with the telling. There were 6 bankers, 2 of whom were Jewish, none of whom had hooked noses.

And yes Corbyn met Paul Eisen.  That's because he is a constituent of his!

Hamas and Hezbollah are neither anti-Semitic nor terrorists. They are a resistance thrown up by their own people against the aggression of those who call themselves the soldiers of the Jewish state. Neither group would exist but for Israel’s murderous attacks on the Palestinian and Lebanese people.

Unsurprisingly some of their statements aren’t politically correct.  I suspect that most people would not react in a sophisticated manner if a group of soldiers murdered your kids, dropped a bomb on your house, beat up your friends and did it in the name of the Jews. When the Zionist terrorist group Irgun hanged two British soldiers in Palestine in 1946, then there were anti-Jewish riots in England. Imagine if this was a daily occurrence. In fact Palestinians are far more sophisticated in their understanding of racism than the average Briton.

Anti-Semitism is about myths of Jews not their actual deeds. Things like Jews poisoning wells and baking their bread from the blood of non-Jewish children. The evil deeds of Zionism are self-evident. They occur everyday in the West Bank where the army looks on as settlers burn Palestinian olive groves, steal their land and water and conduct random attacks on those farming the land. Unless Zionists are now saying that historically anti-Semites had a just cause then there is no comparison with Israel’s deeds as Windbag-Montefiore maintains.

It was over 10 years ago that Bassem Naeem wrote an article Hamas condemns the Holocaust. This was before the days when Freedland got his claws into all aspects of the Guardian’s coverage.  Naeem stated that:

‘neither Hamas nor the Palestinian government in Gaza denies the Nazi Holocaust. The Holocaust was not only a crime against humanity but one of the most abhorrent crimes in modern history. We condemn it as we condemn every abuse of humanity and all forms of discrimination on the basis of religion, race, gender or nationality.’

Strangely this article and many subsequently statements, including Hamas’s abandonment of its original Charter, have been forgotten.  As has the role Israel played in the creation and sponsorship of Hamas.

It is a myth that Hamas or indeed Hezbollah are anti-Semitic. Of course people can always point to anti-Semitic statements but then we can also point to statements by Israeli leaders about Palestinians as ‘drugged cockroaches’‘wild beasts’ animals’ etc.

Many Jews have visited and even lived in Gaza.  They have not been persecuted for being Jewish.  It is in Israel itself that one sees demonstrations against the sale of a house to an Arab or Arabs being barred from springs and swimming pools.

Hezbollah was created as a result of Israel’s barbarous invasion of Lebanon in 1982 when 20,000 people were murdered.  It isn’t Hezbollah who are murderous racists and terrorists but the Israeli army. Windbag for some reason doesn’t blame the actions of the Israeli army, which proclaims it acts on behalf of all Jews, for the increase in antisemitism.

Windbag also supports a two state solution that will never occur. So do most Zionists in Britain but very few where it counts, Israel. He bemoans that ‘Labour is now controlled by this thuggish camarilla while frontbench “moderates” passively enable Corbyn.’ It is the ‘moderates’ who are so addicted to Trident and supported the Iraq War. Perhaps supporting the annihilation of millions is the opposite of ‘thuggish’?

A few of hundreds of similar columns in The Guardian

The Guardian

In just one year FiveFilters.orgfound over 100 Guardian articles attacking Corbyn.  Van Badham told us, one month before the 2017 General Election that ‘Labour has a chance if it replaces Corbyn’.That must go down in the book of the 100 best Guardian Predictions.

And a week before the same election Freedland was proclaiming ‘No more excuses: Jeremy Corbyn is to blame for this meltdown’ except that I don’t recall Freedland congratulating Corbyn on the biggest swing to Labour since 1945.  Strange that.

My favourite though is ‘Don’t tell me you weren’t warned about Corbyn’ by the Nostradamus of our age, Nick Cohen. Whatever Cohen predicts you can assume that the opposite will occur.  It really is worth betting on it. Cohen warned us 3 months before the general election that:

‘The Tories have gone easy on Corbyn and his comrades to date for the transparently obvious reason that they want to keep them in charge of Labour.

In an election, they would tear them to pieces. .. Will there be 150, 125, 100 Labour MPs by the end of the flaying? My advice is to think of a number then halve it.’

And his final piece of advice? ‘In my respectful opinion, your only honourable response will be to stop being a fucking fool by changing your fucking mind.’ Such is the intellectual sophistication of our Nick.

Windbag was particularly obsessed about Corbyn’s response to Andrew Neil’s question about a Labour member who talkedabout ‘Rothschilds Zionists run Israel and world governments”. This is part of a wider methodology of associating Israel with anti-Semitism in the past.  This is what the IHRAhas described as

‘speech, writing, visual forms and action, ... sinister stereotypes and negative character traits... mendacious, dehumanizing, demonizing, or stereotypical allegations about Jews as such or the power of Jews as collective... the myth about a world Jewish conspiracy or of Jews controlling the media, economy, government or other societal institutions.

So if you accuse the Israeli government or settlers of poisoning Palestinians with gas and chemical weapons, which are documented facts, or poisoning their water sources then this is a repetition of the medieval myth of Jews poisoning wells!

For example the Guardian's David Hearst describedhow in the Palestinian village of al-Amniy

Mohammed Ahmad Jabor's water cistern has been destroyed three times this year. The last time was by the settlers. The settler attacks come generally at night and where they cannot destroy water cisterns they poisonthem by putting chicken carcasses in them.

According to Windbag's 'logic' David Hearst was an anti-Semite for describing the actions of Israeli settlers.  Even though what he described was true.

What eludes Windbag is quite simple. Israel is not a Jew of the 13^th century. Israel is not a holocaust victim.  It is a mini-superpower. I suspect that if the modern Israeli were to meet his medieval counterpart he would react in horror. Indeed if the Israeli settlers, who claim an umbilical link to Abraham, were to meet a Hebrew tribesman of 500 BC then I suspect he would recoil from him, see in him a Palestinian and shoot him as a terrorist!

It is true that the Nazis and anti-Semites before them equated Jews with the Rothschild’s family.  The name Rothschild was the symbol of greedy Jews who had profited out of the blood, sweat and tears of those who fought and died on the battlefield and Waterloo. The Nazis even made a film about Nathan Rothschild, the founder of the British branch of the family.

However when today people talk about ‘Rothschild Zionists’ they are trying in their own muddled way to explain why the major powers in the world, the United States and the European Union, including Russia and China, support Israel right or wrong. They see in this a conspiracy rather than a manifestation of their interests, political and military. Since Israel calls itself a Jewish state they naturally see it as a Jewish conspiracy.  Is this the same as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion?  Of course not.

What people wrongly do is to ascribe to Israel the power of the Rothschilds, who are insignificant today rather than to the interests of western imperialism. After all it must have occurred, even to Windbag himself, that when the most reactionary politicians on the planet – Trump, Orban, Bolsinaro, Duterte - to name but a few, pay homage to and support and praise Israel that opposing Israel has nothing to do with anti-Semitism.

Trump gives Israel $4 Billion a year, not out of love for Jews but from a naked calculation of where America’s interests lie.

Talk of ‘Rothschilds Zionists’ is not necessarily anti-Semitic but is a pathetic and puerile attempt to explain the power of Israel and Zionism today.  In other words it is instrumental.  In fact it explains nothing and is in danger of seeing Israel, as people like Gilad Atzmon do as the product of something inherently Jewish rather than as the offspring of western colonialism.

Ephraim Mirvis

The Guardian though has not just been busy attacking Corbyn it has also done its best to defend Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis.  You will remember his article on November 25 What will become of Jews in Britain if Labour forms the next government?.

What was so remarkable about it was its gall. Mirvis wrote, presumably tongue in cheek that

‘Wherever there is evidence of it, including in any of our political parties, it must be swiftly rooted out. Hateful prejudice is always wrong, whoever the perpetrator, whoever the victim.’

Is this the same man who grew up in Apartheid South Africa and then transferred his sympathies to the apartheid settlements in the West Bank? What none of the papers dare mention is that Mirvis received his rabbinical training in the yeshiva of Har Etzion in the settlement of Alon Shvut. He trained among the most bigoted racists and seemingly noticed nothing.  Because no one is more racist than the religious settlers.  The chief rabbi of the settlers, Dov Lior is famous for his statement that a Jewish fingernail is worth more than a thousand non-Jewish lives.

Mirvis proclaims to be concerned about 'anti-Semitism' but not about any other form of racism

This is the same Ephraim Mirvis who joined his predecessor Jonathan Sacks and thousands of far-Right settlers on the 2017 Jerusalem Day ‘March of Flags’. The favourite chant of the settlers was ‘Death to the Arabs.’ Mirvis had no hesitation in joining those who desire nothing more than the expulsion of the Palestinians. 

Haaretz’s Bradley Burston described the March as:

an annual, gender-segregated extreme-right, pro-occupation religious carnival of hatred, marking the anniversary of Israel's capture of Jerusalem by humiliating the city's Palestinian Muslims.

marchers vandalized shops in Jerusalem's Muslim Quarter, chanted "Death to Arabs" and "The (Jewish) Temple Will Be Built, the (Al Aqsa) Mosque will be Burned Down," shattered windows and door locks, and poured glue into the locks of shops forced to close for fear of further damage.’... And they repeated Samson's prayer in Judges 16:28: "May I avenge (the loss of) my two eyes with one act of vengeance against the Palestinians – may their name be blotted out!"

Sacks had extended a “personal invitation” to Diaspora Jews to join him on a trip to Israel which includes “leading” the March of the Flags on Jerusalem Day and “dancing with our brave [Israeli Defence Force] soldiers” in the settler enclave inside Hebron.

Haaretz Anna Roiser pleaded with Sacks not to attend, saying:

one of the world’s most respected rabbis sends a message of normalization and acceptance of the occupation...  Many Jews in the Diaspora work hard to emphasize that being Jewish is not synonymous with supporting the Israeli government, and that supporting Israel’s right to exist is not synonymous with supporting the occupation. Rabbi Sacks’ actions risk undermining these messages.

Not only did Sacks ignore them he marched together with Ephraim Mirvis. It seems that Mirvis finds it difficult to oppose any other form of racism bar ‘anti-Semitism’. See Chief Rabbi and Lord Sacks should not back this march

Now if Jeremy Corbyn or members of the Labour Party were to call out ‘Death to the Jews’ as they did in pre-war Poland and Germany then Mirvis might have something to complain about.

That is why I sent an unpublished letter to the Guardian in the wake of Mirvis’s outburst in The Times.

 Dear Sir/Madam,

If there is one thing guaranteed to increase anti-Semitism in this country it is the sight of Jewish leaders attacking a Labour Party that represents the only hope for millions of British people. Britain’s Chief Rabbis have a habit of supporting the Conservative Party dating back to Immanuel Jakobovitz’s support for Margaret Thatcher but none have been this blatant.

Ephraim Mirvis’s attack on Corbyn has absolutely nothing to do with racism or anti-Semitism. This is the same person who was singing the praise of Norman Tebbit’s cricket test not so long ago.

Nor is Mirvis’s instruction to Jews not to vote Labour about despair. ['It reflects the despair': chief rabbi's criticism of Labour strikes a chord] It is part of a well co-ordinated campaign to use ‘anti-Semitism’ as a means to damage and destroy Labour’s electoral prospects.

This is the same Ephraim Mirvis who joined his predecessor Rabbi Jonathan Sacks and thousands of far-Right settlers on the 2017 Jerusalem Day ‘March of Flags’. The favourite chant of the settlers on these marches is ‘Death to the Jews.’ Mirvis had no hesitation in joining those who desire nothing more than the expulsion of the Palestinians.

It is because Jeremy Corbyn bought into the myth that anti-Semitism was a problem in the Labour Party that he is now facing such problems. It is however curious that in the thousands of stories on Labour ‘anti-Semitism’ there is a marked absence of evidence.

Yours faithfully,

Tony Greenstein

Unsurprisingly it was not printed. As I wrote to the Guardian Letters Editor Rory Foster and his deputy:

rory.foster@guardian.com, toby.chasseaud@guardian.com

Dear Rory

The Guardian, like most other papers has seen fit not to provide any details on the far-Right Zionist politics of the present British Chief Rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis.

Where once the letters columns were used to widen the debate in the Guardian you now fulfil the role of Jonathan Freedland's gatekeeper against anti-Zionist contributions or indeed any incisive debate.  

I therefore submit the following letter knowing full well that Guardian censorship shall ensure that it is not published.

Tony Greenstein

Letters Editor

Kings Place,

90 York Way

London N1 9GU

Dear Sir/Madam,

Gus John’s resignation from the Church of England’s advisory body is welcome after Justin Welby’s endorsement of the Chief Rabbi’s attack on Jeremy Corbyn. [Academic quits C of E body over chief rabbi's Labour antisemitism comments, Guardian 3.12.19]

Welby has been completely silent over such trifles as the Windrush Scandal and the ‘hostile environment’ policy. Yet when it comes to ‘anti-Semitism’ he enthusiastically endorses an attack by Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis on Jeremy Corbyn, one of 6 Labour MPs to vote against the Immigration Act 2013.

At the same time Welby  has nothing to say about Tory Islamaphobia or Boris Johnson’s repeated racist comments for example calling Black people picanninies?

The British media, the Guardian included, has elided over the background of Mirvis who lectured that ‘Wherever there is evidence’ of racism including in any of our political parties, it must be swiftly rooted out.’ This didn’t prevent Mirvis from endorsing Norman Tebbit’s notorious cricket test.

But perhaps Mirvis, who grew up in Apartheid South Africa, didn’t notice the racism of his fellows when training as a rabbi in Har Etzion yeshiva in the settlement of Alon Shvut. The same settlers who believe that they have a god given right to the land that they have stolen from the indigenous Palestinians.

This is the same Ephraim Mirvis who took part in the March of the Flags on Jerusalem Day in 2017 where the favourite chant of the settler youth is ‘Death to the Arabs’ despite pleas from Ha’aretz’s Bradley Burston not to do so.

Justin Welby in endorsing Mirvis’s attacks on Corbyn is a hypocrite.  But then so too are those, the Guardian included, who have deliberately excised all details of the background of Rabbi Mirvis.

Yours faithfully,

Ephraim Mirvis’s attackon Corbyn has absolutely nothing to do with racism or anti-Semitism. This is the same person who was singing the praise of Norman Tebbit’s ‘cricket test’ not so long ago. The ‘cricket test’ was devised to show that the ‘real home’ of Britain’s Asian population is not in England but India and Pakistan.

Ironically if the same test were applied to British Jews then it would show that many of them belong in Israel!  Which is what the Zionists desire most of all.

Mirvis’s instruction to Jews not to vote Labour is part of a well co-ordinated campaign to use ‘anti-Semitism’ as a weapon to inflict damage and destroy Labour’s electoral prospects. We see this in the Jewish Chronicle, which could be renamed the 'Anti-Corbyn Weekly'.

In this week's Letter to Readers, Jewish Chronicle Editor Stephen Pollard writes that:

there is just one fundamental issue for the vast majority of our community – doing what we can to stop Jeremy Corbyn becoming PM.

What has made it the anti-Semitism smear campaign effective is the fact that Corbyn, instead of standing up to it from the start and saying that Labour did not have an anti-Semitism problem, that the allegations against it were malicious and without foundation, bought into the narrative. Everytime Corbyn apologised he proved his critics were correct.

No one forced Corbyn to adopt the IHRA misdefinition of anti-Semitism originally. It was all his own work.

If Mirvis was seriously concerned about anti-Semitism in political parties then he would have asked why the Conservative Party’s MEPs supportedthe anti-Semitic Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban in a no confidence vote in the European parliament.  The reason is that Orban may not like Jews very much but he is the best friend of Israel. Likewise he could ask why  Tory MEP’s sit in the same political group (ECR) in the European parliament as fascists and anti-Semites.

Tony Greenstein

Labour’s Election Campaign - Expect the Worst – Hope for the Best

December 7, 2019, 4:30 pm

≫ Next: Open Letter to Seamus Milne: If Labour Fails at the Polls Today Then You Will Bear a Heavy Responsibility for What Has Happened

≪ Previous: Why Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis Finds It Difficult to Oppose Any Form of Racism Bar 'Antisemitism'

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Corbyn has only himself (& Seamus Milne) to blame for Labour’s predicament

This article was first printed in the Weekly Worker 

In previous elections I had little difficulty in predicting the outcome. It was clear in 2015 that Ed Miliband’s ‘austerity lite’ would fall fail. In Scotland it was a complete disaster.

In 2017 contrary to all those who believed that Labour’s election campaign would be a rerun of 1983 under Michael Foot, the ‘longest suicide note in history’ according to the late Sir Gerald Kaufman MP, I foresaw that the Tory campaign under ‘strong and stable Theresa May would crumble. 

In two blogs, on April 20^thand on June 3^rd I foresaw that a hung parliament, or even a Labour victory, was possible.

Why? This was the peak of Corbyn’s popularity. The ‘anti-Semitism’ moral panic had still not got off the ground, the Labour Left was still united. The Corbyn movement and what was a popular upsurge demonstrated that it wasn’t a handful of entryists in the Labour Party, as the Labour Right tried to fool itself into believing, but a popular movement outside the party that had impacted inside the party.

Above all young voters turned out in unprecedented numbers and voted decisively for Labour. According to an NME‘s exit poll 56% of 18-34s voted in the 2015 election, including 53% of those aged between 18 and 24, a 12% increase over 2015.  60% of 18–34s and two-thirds of those aged 18–24 voted Labour. The results of this were shown in the unprecedented victory of Rosie Duffield in the university town of Canterbury.

However if one week is a long time in politics then two and a half years is an eternity. The Labour Party today is not the same party that campaigned so confidently in 2017. Certainly its manifesto is more radical than it was two years ago but it is equally clear that it is having much less of an impact.

Chris Williamson giving a lift to Brighton's village idiot, currently suspended for racism and sexual harassment, Luke Stanger

Today you cannot speak of a unified left inside the Labour Party since Jon Lansman’s Momentum has got into bed with the Right. When the NEC came to decide, in the wake of the High Court decision that Chris Williamson’s suspension was unlawful, it decided by 21-5 that he would remain suspended and ineligible to stand as a Labour candidate. He had been resuspended just before the High Court hearing as a precaution against an adverse verdict. Just one of the trade union representatives, from the FBU, joined 4 out of the 9 CLP representatives, in voting to rescind Chris’s suspension.

The case of Chris Williamson is pivotal and marks the end of the Corbyn Project as we know it. I have seen proof that Corbyn had indicated to Chris before the NEC meeting that his suspension would be lifted. In the event Corbyn decided not to attend the NEC hearing and he made no statement in his support, as has been the case throughout the whole ‘anti-Semitism’ affair when his supporters, such as Ken Livingstone, have been targeted.

Chris Williamson’s original suspension for ‘anti-Semitism’ had not only been unlawful it had been based on a completely falsified and distorted version of what he had actually said taken out of context.His statement ‘we have backed off too much, we have given too much ground, we have been too apologetic” was clearly referring to the false accusations of anti-Semitism as he had also prefigured it by saying that ‘The party that has done more to stand up to racism is now being demonised as a racist, bigoted party.’ 

Jonathan Freedland has led the Guardian's intelligence driven attack on Corbyn - using Jews as the prop

Whereas the Establishment and their media lackeys, from the Tory tabloids to the Guardian and BBC, were taken unawares in 2015, that is not the case today. The Labour Right too were stunned into silence. Who can forget the shock and horror on Stephen Kinnock’s face in the fly-on-the-wall documentaryLabour: The Summer That Changed Everythingwhen the exit polls predicted a hung parliament? His wife, ex-Danish Prime Minister Helle Thorning Schmidt arrived and asked a shell-shocked Kinnock “Why are you doing this?” in respect of an interview he had agreed to.  “I don’t know.” he replied. “You don’t know anything.” she responded and his only comment was ‘“I know.”

Kinnock and others were stunned at the fact that Corbyn had gained the biggest swing to Labour since 1945 and increased the number of seats.Who can forget the predictionsof the Observer’s Nick Cohen barely a month before the election was called that Labour would get around 25% of the vote. Apparently the Tories had ‘gone easy on Corbyn’ because ‘they want to keep them in charge of Labour’. However ‘in an election, they would tear them to pieces.’ 

This latter day Nostradamus asked ‘Will there be 150, 125, 100 Labour MPs by the end of the flaying? My advice is to think of a number then halve it.’  To those on the left who supported Corbyn he had only one piece of advice: ‘your only honourable response will be to stop being a fucking fool by changing your fucking mind.’ If I was a betting man I would look for the latest Nick Cohen prediction and bet on the opposite!

For neo-con Stephen Pollard, the main task of the Jewish community is stopping Jeremy Corbyn becoming PM

Today there are two issues that are dragging Corbyn down. The first is the ‘anti-Semitism’ smear campaign. According to the Jewish Chronicle and others Corbyn is an ‘existential threat’ to Jews in Britain. Corbyn himself is, in the words of Margaret Hodge, a ‘fucking anti-Semite.’

For four years the Labour Party has been the subject of a concerted and determined campaign to paint it as anti-Semitic. The outlines of this campaign were the subject of a 4 part undercover documentary by Al Jazeera.

Tommy Robinson also condemns 'anti-Semitism' with his new film 'Shalom'

We even have Tory Ministers, fresh from the Windrush Scandal and their ‘hostile environment’ attacking the Labour Party as an anti-Semitic party whilst at the same time their MEPs in Europe sit in the European Conservative Reform group with fully fledged fascists, racists and anti-Semites, one of whom Roberts Zile, the Latvian member, openly marching every year with the veterans of the Latvian Waffen SS.

All academic and other studies of the Labour Party’s ‘anti-Semitism’ problem show that it is miniscule and indeed far less than in the wider society yet because it failed to rebut these allegations from the start and took them in good faith Corbyn has been wounded. Instead of a campaign against the very real state racism in British society we have had a concentration on what is at worst a marginal prejudice against White people.

It is no accident that those behind the false anti-Semitism allegations were responsible for a barrage of abuse that led to the cancellation of the launch for Bad News for Labour, a book by 5 distinguished academics. Facts and the ‘anti-Semitism’ smear campaign don’t make for comfortable allies.

Another lover of Israel if not Jews

The Labour Party jumped through all the hoops it was required to and on every occasion this rebounded on it.  It adopted the 500+ word IHRA ‘definition’ of anti-Semitism which as the Jewish former Court of Appeal Judge, Sir Stephen Sedley said isn’t even a definition.Labour agreed a ‘fast track’ system for expelling those accused of ‘anti-Semitism’,. It has led to people being summarily expelled for nothing other than hostility to the Israeli state.

The more people Labour investigated, suspended and expelled the more this has been taken as ‘proof’ of the problem. The more victims of false allegations the more Labour provided proof of the very problem they tried to deny. As Len McLuskey wrote in frustration at the campaign of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, they won’t take yes for an answer!

Although people rarely mention anti-Semitism on the doorstep or in conversations, what it has done is enabled the political narrative to focus on Labour rather than the racism of the Government. It has established a dominant ruling class ideological hegemony When Corbyn was challenged to apologise by Andrew Neil he should have responded that he had nothing to apologise too but instead Corbyn looked and sounded like a wounded animal. Instead of calling out the weaponisation of ‘anti-Semitism’ as a means of defending the world’s only Apartheid state, Israel, Labour decided to examine the minds of its members when racism is deadly, not when its expressed in tweets but when it comes in the form of immigration raids or fascist gangs.

The second major disaster and one which is likely to prove more damaging at the polls is Brexit. We have a Prime Minister who is by any definition amoral, who doesn’t even know how many children he has sired. Someone whose ability to tell the truth matches that of Donald Trump.  Even with the vicious bias of the Tory press it should not have been that difficult for Corbyn to put Johnson on the back foot.

Labour’s victory over its critics in 2017 was, to a large extent, due to the perception that it was opposed to Brexit.  Certainly that was true in the South. Now however Labour has got into the position where it’s seen by opponents of Brexit as supporting Remain and vice versa. Socialists can argue about whether Brexit has any positive virtues or whether, as I believe, it is a far-Right project, but it is difficult to see how taking a position not to have a position can be anything else than a self-inflicted wound. It is falling between 2 stools.

Apparently Corbyn is going to negotiate a withdrawal agreement and then, come a referendum, not support either his own deal or Remain. That is simply not credible. Instead of going to Labour voters in the North and arguing that Brexit will be an economic disaster for them, which it will, Labour is seen as having no position on the key political issue of the day.

How then will Labour fare in the election?  This is probably the most difficult election to call. I fear a Tory majority but there may well be a hung parliament though if the Lib Dems continue to slide in the polls that may be less likely. What is clear is that there is no surge to Labour. I cannot see a Labour victory or an increase in the present number of seats. By failing to see that the British Establishment would do all they could, in conjunction with the United States and Israel, to ensure that an anti-imperialist would not become Prime Minister the Left has to face the future with a Labour Party minus Jeremy Corbyn.

For that we can thank a number of people including Jon Lansman, Corbyn’s abysmal adviser Seamus Milne, the Socialist Campaign Group of MPs who said nothing throughout, John McDonnell who was always eager to please those who accused Labour of ‘anti-Semitism’ and above all Corbyn himself. I fear the exit polls on December 12^th and only hope that, as Micawber remarked, something turns up.

Tony Greenstein

Open Letter to Seamus Milne: If Labour Fails at the Polls Today Then You Will Bear a Heavy Responsibility for What Has Happened

December 11, 2019, 6:22 pm

≫ Next: Labour’s Electoral Disaster is the Price of Appeasement - You Don't Apologise to Someone Trying to Kill You

≪ Previous: Labour’s Election Campaign - Expect the Worst – Hope for the Best

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Your strategy of apologising for ‘anti-Semitism’ neutrality on Brexit and Appeasement of the Right has led to Disaster

Dear Seamus,

Short of a miracle, Jeremy Corbyn is not going to become the next Prime Minister. Yet after 9 years in opposition Labour should have had little difficult in winning the General Election, despite the ferocity of attacks on it.  Austerity has provided the ideal opportunity to be rid of Johnson and his acolytes.

Because of Jeremy Corbyn’s disastrous handling of the fake ‘anti-Semitism’ attacks, coupled with the absurd policy of neutrality on Brexit whilst accepting that we should be part of the NATO alliance fir war, I fear that we are going to fall short of what was achieved in 2017. As I blogged recently and in the Weekly Worker, I expect the worst whilst hoping for the best.

Has Seamus Milne Sunk Corbyn's Hope of Becoming Prime Minister?

You were Corbyn’s Strategic Advisor and that meant drawing up a strategy not making fire fighting into a fine art.

It should have been clear from the outset that Corbyn, who more than anyone was identified with the anti-war, anti-NATO wing of the Labour Party, would come under fierce attack when elected as leader in September 2015. With your experience you above all should have understood what covert destabilisation was. Because that is what we have been witnessing for the past 4 and a half years.

American imperialism isn’t just for third world countries.  It has interfered repeatedly in Europe when it felt necessary as with Operation Gladio, in Italy. Imperialism isn’t just a jargon word but a description of how western capitalism maintains itself politically and economically.

You above all should have known that the United States and its allies here and in Israel would stop at nothing to destabilise Corbyn’s leadership in alliance with the Zionist movement.  The United States doesn’t give the Israeli state $4+ billion a year because of its love for Jews.

Trump is a good example of an anti-Semite who loves Israel and Zionism. When referring to American Jews tendency to criticise Israel he remarked that ‘some Jews don’t love Israel enough.’

Indeed if you are or should be aware that Zionism has no interest in combating anti-Semitism.  Zionism from the beginning accepted anti-Semitism as a natural phenomenon that could not be fought and should therefore be accepted.  Why?  As the editor of the Zionist paper Die Welt, Jacob Klatzkin explained:

‘If we do not admit the rightfulness of anti-Semitism we deny the rightfulness of our own nationalism... Instead of establishing societies for defence against the anti-Semites who want to reduce our rights, we should establish societies for defence against our friends, who desire to defend our rights.’

Did it never occur to you that there was something strange about the Board of Deputies of British Jews or the Jewish Chronicle’s apparent enthusiasm for fighting anti-Semitism? This is the same Board of Deputies and Jewish Chronicle that urged Jews to stay at home when Oswald Moseley tried to march the British Union of Fascists through the East End of London in October 1936.

The same Jewish Chronicle which has conducted a ceaseless war against Corbyn warned‘Jews are urgently warned to keep away from the route of the Blackshirt march and from their meetings.’

I realise that being a scion of the British Establishment - Winchester and Oxford - your dad having been Director of the BBC, your parents would have run a mile from confrontation with the fascists. However Jeremy’s mother was there and so was my father.

I’ll let you into a secret. My dad didn’t need a 500+ word IHRA definition of anti-Semitism in order to know what anti-Semitism was.  All he had to do was go down the wrong road and get his head kicked in or worse. It is unbelievable that with the Zionists bellowing for the adoption of the IHRA, with no caveats or get out clauses, you were unable to perceive that anti-Semitism was being weaponised in support of the world’s most racist state, Israel.

Fascism and anti-Semitism has never been fought with a definition. The IHRA had an altogether different purpose which was to conflate anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism. It would seem that all your previous writings and political involvement counted for naught when you smelt power.

You were after all closely connected with the Communist Party, including being the business manager of Straight Left, the pro-Soviet faction in the CP.

Having written The Enemy Within: The Secret War Against the Miners, about the Great miners' strike which focused on the role of the Intelligence Services you cannot but have been aware of what the Deep State in Britain would do to undermine a perceived opponent of the United States and the NATO Alliance.  After all Corbyn had been elected as leader of the second major political party in the US’s closest European ally.  All this is or should be bread and butter to you.

Your inability to put into practice the insights gained from years of activism and journalism suggests that you never really believed half of what you wrote. Or that theory and practice had difficulty in reconciling with each other.

So how can we account for your hamfisted, counter-productive advice in respect of the accusations of ‘anti-Semitism’?  They didn’t begin with the infamous mural but in the summer of 2015 before Jeremy was even elected when the Daily Mail, followed swiftly by the Jewish Chronicle, alleged that Corbyn was an associate of Paul Eisen a holocaust denier.

It should have been obvious even then that anti-Semitism was being weaponised by those whose purpose was to defend the most racist state in the world, Israel and the ideology of that state, Zionism.

The Eisen allegations were followed by attacks on the late Sir Gerald Kaufman, a Jewish MP, Father of  the House and supporter of the Palestinians and then the affairof Oxford University Labour Club where allegations of anti-Semitism were made on the basis of the club supporting the university’s Israel Apartheid Week.

The Oxford allegations were comprehensively debunkedby Asa Winstanley in two articlesElectronic Intifada when Asa demonstrated that Alex Chalmers, the Chair of the Labour Club who was behind the allegations of ‘anti-Semitism’ turned out to have been an intern for BICOM, the main Israeli propaganda group in Britain.

Ken Livingstone - thrown under the bus by Corbyn and Milne

There then followed a whole series of manufactured incidents.  Ken Livingstone was accused of anti-Semitism for having mentioned that the Nazis had had a close relationship with the Zionist movement, which is a demonstrable fact.

The lynch mob that accompanied Ruth Smeeth to Marc Wadsworth's Expulsion Hearing

Marc Wadsworth was then accused of anti-Semitism for criticising CIA asset Ruth Smeeth MP at the Chakrabarti press conference for her buddy relationship with Telegraph reporters.

What an absolute disgrace that someone who was integrally involved in the Stephen Lawrence campaign, who introduced Nelson Mandela to Stephen’s parents, a pivotal moment in the campaign, should be expelledfor criticising racist Labour MP and hoax ‘victim’, Ruth Smeeth?

Marc didn’t even know Smeeth was Jewish yet her tantrum and fake after event tears, because no-one saw them at the time, were allowed to dominate the narrative. Corbyn, no doubt on your advice, refused to defend Marc when challenged during the current campaign. Indeed when Labour Against the Witchhunt held a picket of his expulsion hearing members of Corbyn’s office had the gall to askMarc to call off the demonstration.

What I find most puzzling is why it was not obvious early on that there was something strange about all these accusations of anti-Semitism coming from the right-wing press, who are not normally concerned about racism?  When I was suspended in March 2016 it was immediately clear what was going on.  The idea that with Jeremy’s election there had been a sudden upsurge in ‘anti-Semitism’ is about as likely to be true as sightings of the Yeti.  It was clearly part of a developing narrative and it was your job, as Strategic Director to get on top of it.

When Jeremy was accused of ‘anti-Semitism’ he responded painfully insisting that he wasn’t.  It was painful watching because it was clear he didn’t get it. The ‘anti-Semitism’ he was being accused of was not hatred of Jews but hatred of what Israel does.  He may not have worked it out but that’s what you are paid to do.

There isn’t a Palestine Solidarity activist in Britain who hasn’t been accused of ‘anti-Semitism’. It goes with the territory.  When we engaged with the National Front and fascist activists we were accused of being ‘anti-White’ hating the white race etc. Racists always project their own view onto others. What was there about these fake accusations of anti-Semitism that you didn’t understand?

Maybe the most ugly aspect of all of was the way you advised Jeremy to abandon old comrades and friends in the hope that throwing them overboard would somehow help you reach land sooner. It turned out, of course, that the more concessions you made the greater the attacks.

I thought that one lesson we learnt from the 1930’s was that you don’t appease an aggressor. You appeased the Jewish Labour Movement and the Board of Deputies.  Did they thank you?  No, in the wordsof Len McLuskey ‘Jewish Community Leaders Are Refusing To Take 'Yes' For An Answer’.  And why do you think that might be?  Why is it that every concession that you’ve made was never enough?

The answer is really very simple but it seems that it didn’t penetrate your consciousness or the thick head of John McDonnell whose pathetic pleadingson how Labour should have got on top of the ‘anti-Semitism’ allegations sooner suggest he will be easy meat for the banks and speculators if he should ever become Chancellor.

The goal of the JLM and the Zionists was simple.  It was to secure the head of Jeremy Corbyn. Nothing else would do. When a full  frontal challenge by Owen Smith failed in 2016 then the covert ‘anti-Semitism’ war was stepped up, though strangely enough I’ve never come across someone Jewish who has ever experienced this Labour ‘anti-Semitism’.

However as we know, BBC Panorama found 7 ‘victims’.  Strangely enough, despite not informing its viewers, all 7 happened to be officers of the Jewish Labour Movement.

And something else that hasn’t penetrated either Corbyn’s or McDonnell’s skulls is that the JLM isn’t the Jewish section of the Labour Party. Leaving aside that a majority of its members are right-wing non-Jews, it is, by its own admission, the ‘sister party’ of the Israeli Labour Party, a party that is all but extinct in Israel today. 

The JLM is also a member of the World Zionist Organisation, which specialises in the theft of land of Palestinians on the West Bank. According to Ha’aretz, the WZO has a special Settlement ‘Land Theft’ Division. Yet the JLM is not only affiliated to this racist colonising organisation it is affiliated to the Labour Party.  Despite this it is not supporting the Labour Party in the general election.

As I revealed, in the early 1980’s Jeremy sponsored a Labour Movement Campaign on Palestine conference, one of whose demands was to disaffiliate Poale Zion which was renamed JLM. He understood all the arguments then.

It seems you allowed him to forget that it was the Israeli Labour Party that was responsible for the Nakba, the expulsion of the Palestinian refugees. The JLM not only is the direct inheritor of  this tradition but it was effectively refounded in 2015 with just one purpose in mind – the removal of Jeremy Corbyn.

You will understand then that when the JLM threatened to disaffiliatefrom the Labour Party, which of course was nothing more than grandstanding, Corbyn sent them a message pleading for them to stay! Never in history has a man on death row pleaded with his executioner to stay a while longer in order that he can finish the job. Even Jesus Christ didn’t beg the Roman soldiers to torment him a little longer.

Yet the journalist who revealed all of this, Asa Winstanley of Electronic Intifada, has been suspended from the Labour Party for the ‘crime’ of journalism, that is telling the truth.  Of course the official pretext is ‘anti-Semitism’ but that just proves how ‘anti-Semitism’ has become debased.

It is an outrage that you and Jeremy haven’t spoken up about Asa’s suspension and told the execrable Jennie Formby, a worthy successor to Iain McNicol, to reverse this injustice.

There was a time in the 1990’s when I and others were suspended during the Kinnock witchhunts over the poll tax. At that time a certain Jeremy Corbyn was Secretary of Labour Against the Witchhunt.  I can only imagine his reaction if the then Labour Party had adopted ‘fast track’ expulsions without even a hearing.

I helped refound LAW two years ago.  Who would have thought that our main antagonist would be Jeremy Corbyn?

The job of a Strategic Advisor, if words are to have any meaning, is to devise a strategy.  Yet it would appear that you had no strategy apart from running so fast that you hoped your opponents wouldn’t catch up with you.

All this should have been clear to you when the Zionists put pressure on the Labour Party to adopt the IHRA misdefinition of anti-Semitism in September 2018.

Whose idiotic idea was it to adopt the IHRA in December 2016 following Theresa May’s embrace of it?  Did it not occur to you that if May, the person who introduced the ‘hostile ‘ and sent Home Office vans into areas with immigrant communities telling them to ‘go home, was concerned about anti-Semitism that something wasn’t right?

Israel is a state that armed and equipped the Guatemalan Junta when it butchered up to 200,000 Mayan Indians and which today arms and trains the Burmese Junta in its genocidal war on the Rohinga.

The Israeli state has about as much to do with the traditional Jewish values of justice and the fight against oppression as a ham sandwich has to do with keeping a kosher diet.

Today in the Labour Party criticism of Israel is tantamount to ‘anti-Semitism’. Historically it was always the anti-Semites who supported Zionism in the hope that it would rid them of their Jews.  Arthur Balfour, Edouard Drumont and Adolf Eichmann were just 3 of the many anti-Semitic supporters of Zionism.

According to Mark Gardener of the Community Security Trust your only objection to the IHRA was to one half of one bulletin  point which described Israel as a racist state (endeavour).  Really?  Did you have no objection to the example which said that ‘double standards’ in criticising the world’s only apartheid state is anti-Semitic? Wasn’t ‘double standards’ the same defence that supporters of Apartheid in South Africa used?

Why is the IHRA example which says comparisons between Israel and Nazi Germany are anti-Semitic? People compare states such as Iran to the Nazis? Why should Israel be a special case? Would you say that a child survivor of a Nazi ghetto, Ze’ev Sternhell should also be accused of anti-Semitism for writing an articlein Ha’aretz ‘In Israel, Growing Fascism and a Racism Akin to Early Nazism.’

Two years ago Israel’s Deputy Chief of Staff Yair Golan in a speech at Holocaust Memorial Day reflected that:

“If there is something that frightens me about the memories of the Holocaust, it is the knowledge of the awful processes which happened in Europe in general, and in Germany in particular, 70, 80, 90 years ago, and finding traces of them here in our midst, today, in 2016.”

If Yair Golan had been a member of the Labour Party he would have been suspended or expelled as an anti-Semite.  The Zionist ‘anti-Semitism witchhunt has meant that even honest Zionists are susceptible to an allegation that has nothing to do with actual anti-Semitism.

What I’ve been describing is how far free speech has been under attack and demoted in the Labour Party.  In order to assuage the racist defenders of the Israeli state, a state where dozens of Jewish rabbis issue edicts forbidding the renting of homes by Jews to Arabs, it is forbidden to say that Israel is a racist state. 

That is the tragedy of Corbyn’s leadership. He has presided over a regime that is more intolerant of free speech and debate than even Blair or Kinnock.  And you Seamus Milne have been Strategic Advisor to this pitiful regime of intolerance. 

What I find difficult to understand is why someone who was considered an expert on the Middle East and Palestine should find anything attractive in the IHRA ‘definition’ of anti-Semitism.  The only reason that the IHRA, formerly the EUMC Working Definition of Anti-Semitism was created was in order to ensnare criticism of Israel within the web of ‘anti-Semitism’.

If you don’t understand this I suggest that you readThe Working Definition of Antisemitism – A Reappraisalby the main author of the IHRA, American academic Kenneth Stern. The IHRA was the brainchild of Dina Porat, Chief Historian at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Propaganda Museum in Jerusalem which regularly entertains all manner of racist, fascist and anti-Semitic guests in the name of fighting ‘anti-Semitism’.  I refer to creatures such as Duterte, Hungary’s Orbanand Brazil’s Bolsinaro, all of whom have paid their homage at Yad Vashem in the past year.

It is little wonder that Daniel Blatman, a Holocaust Studies researcher at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem calledYad Vashem a

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

Possibly your main failure was to question the claim of the Board of Deputies of British Jews to represent British Jewry. The Board of Deputies represents at best one-third of British Jews. It represents neither secular Jewry nor the Ultra Orthodox. 

When 34 Orthodox Rabbis from the Union of Orthodox Hebrew Congregations wroteto defend and support Jeremy why the silence? Of course it didn’t make the headlines, since only Skwawkbox and the Jewish Chronicle reported it, the latter to discredit it.  When Rabbi Mayer Weinberger wrote supporting Jeremy on behalf of the Executive Board of the United European Jews organisation why did you say nothing? 

What is it that makes you spurn those within the Jewish community that try to support you. As the Canary observed, it was the letter from a rabbi that won’t make the front pages of most of the mainstream media. However that is no reason for your paralysis.

Instead of openly meeting with Jewish Voices for Labour you have reinforced the most reactionary section of the Jewish community.

It is no accident that during the election campaign the Jewish Chronicle has devoted every issue to attacking Corbyn.  In his letter to readers last week, its far-Right editor Stephen Pollard wrote that ‘there is just one fundamental issue for the vast majority of our community – doing what we can to stop Jeremy Corbyn becoming PM.’

All your appeasement has come to nought.  The nadir was Corbyn’s pathetic response to Andrew Neil.  But it wasn’t just Corbyn’s fault.  What is the job of a Strategic Advisor and Media specialist if not to brief Corbyn in advance?  When Neil asked whether he was going to apologise to the Jewish community Corbyn should have responded that there was nothing to apologise for.

And when Neil persisted Jeremy could have responded that he wasn’t going to take lessons from someone who employed a holocaust denier, David Irving, when he was editor of the Sunday Times, to examine the Goebbels diaries. To say nothing over his presiding over a diet of racism as Chairman of the Board of The Spectator.  Just what do you do in your job?

Was it beyond your ability to brief Jeremy on the racist background of Tom Watson, the hypocrite who pretended to be concerned about ‘anti-Semitism’? This was the same Tom Watson who backed racist Labour MP Phil Woolas who had a run an election campaign in 2010 to ‘make the white folk angry’.  When the High Court removedWoolas for lying about his Lib Dem opponent Watson wrotehe had ‘lost sleep over poor Phil.’

In 2004 Watson ran a racist campaign in the Birmingham Hodge Hill by election 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.”

All but 6 Labour MPs abstained on the vote on the 2013 Immigration Act, which introduced the ‘hostile environment’ policy of Theresa May yet these self-same people are apparently concerned about ‘anti-Semitism’.  John Mann, the anti-Semitism ‘czar’ was interviewedby Police over the hate pamphlet he wrote labelling Gypsies and Travellers as a problem of anti-social behaviour.

Why was a full frontal attack on the Tories over the Windrush Scandal and the deportation of Black British  citizens not highlighted.  This would have shown up the hypocrisy of those concerned about ‘anti-Semitism’.  As far as I’m aware British  Jews have not been deported back to wherever they may once have come from.

Instead of fighting back Corbyn, with your ‘advice’ has become little more than a political punchbag. It is difficult to know just what your role is. In the words of Ali Abunimah, in an email to me,

It has been so incredibly frustrating to watch Corbyn refuse to fight back and even worse continue pandering to the smears. It is hard to believe that a politician who has been at it so long can be so absolutely naive about how the Israel lobby works. They cannot be appeased. They have to be fought, and when you do fight in a clear and principled way, people rally to you. He could have defeated them, but instead he let them run the show. Appalling!

And if the fake anti-Semitism campaign has not been your finest hour then how to explain the position on Brexit?  Clearly you find it difficult to let go of the days when the Soviet Union opposed the Common Market because it preferred to see Europe divided, which was the original reason for the Communist  Party’s opposition to the EEC.

Today it is, or should be obvious that Brexist means coming under the domination of the United States. There is no third way. Labour could have campaigned on a position of Remain and Reform and cleaned up the Remain vote.  In addition it could have put a socialist argument in the North that Brexit would simply continue the deindustrialisation that began under Thatcher.  That it wasn’t Europe but the Tories pursuit of monetarism that closed the mines, shipyards and steel mills.  But enchanted as you are with the Communist  Party’s British Road to Socialism you were unwilling to stand out for such basic socialist ideas such as the free movement of workers.

How else to explain the absurd position where Corbyn will apparently negotiate a new deal on Brexit and then take no position on it in the Referendum?  Whilst writing this letter I have increasingly wondered just what you did to earn your £100,000+ salary? Because whatever else you did Seamus Milne, the one thing you didn’t do was help provide Jeremy Corbyn with any sense of strategy or direction. 

Unless of course loving your enemies, including Margaret Hodge, counts as a strategy.  The problem though is that whilst loving his enemies Corbyn has presided over the most dictatorial and authoritarian regime for socialists and anti-racists.

The very idea of ‘monitoring’ social media posts and trying to get inside peoples’ heads is or should have been anathema.  Racism exists in society and is obviously reflected in the Labour Party. The way to tackle racist ideas, such as the belief that immigrants ‘steal’ peoples’ jobs or lower the price of labour is by education.

If Labour lose on Thursday then it will in part be because you failed so comprehensively. Indeed if you had been a fully paid up agent of MI5 you could not have been more successful. And given their expertise in running people like Harry Newton, who was trusted by so many for so long in CND, I don’t think we can ever be quite sure who you were really working for.

Yours sincerely,

Tony Greenstein          

Labour’s Electoral Disaster is the Price of Appeasement - You Don't Apologise to Someone Trying to Kill You

December 13, 2019, 8:44 pm

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Lansman, McDonnell and Owen Jones Did What the Right and Labour’s Enemies Couldn’t Do – They Undermined the Corbyn Project from Within

Every Cloud has a Silver Lining – at least Smeeth, Swinson, Berger, Chuka and Ellman are gone

What is so infuriating about Labour’s defeat, the biggest electoral defeat since 1935, was that it didn’t have to happen. Time and time again I and others warned that the allegations that Labour was riddled with anti-Semitism, that it was institutionally anti-Semitic, were part of a deliberate campaign of destabilisation.

When the history of this period is written and the files are opened, not least in Washington, then we will learn the origins of the ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign. I have no doubt that the ‘anti-Semitism campaign’ was coordinated and orchestrated by para-state forces and then taken up in conjunction with the Tory tabloids and the Guardian. It did not arise spontaneously.

What is also clear is that these allegations could have been made over the past 100 years with much greater accuracy. It was Sydney Webb, Colonial Secretary under Ramsay MacDonald and founder of the Fabians, who wrotethat there are 

“no Jews in the British Labour party” and that while “French, German, Russian Socialism is Jew-ridden. We, thank heaven, are free”, adding that was probably the case because there was “no money in it”.(Paul Kelemen, The British Left and Zionism: The History of a Divorce, Manchester University Press 2012, p.20)

Or Herbert Morrison, Home Secretary in the war-time coalition who strained every muscle to prevent Jewish refugees entering Britain.

Yet people like Owen Jones made themselves feel good about spreading the lie that opposition to Israel’s genocidal attacak on Gaza in 2014, when 2,200 people were murdered, including 550 children, was motivated by anti-Semitism.

Owen Jones saidin response to a speech by Glenn Secker of Jewish Voices for Labour that ‘I strongly oppose calling the JLM ‘a fifth column’ – who I regard as comrades and have been proud to speak at their events.’

Jon Lansman also thought he was so clever when he repeatedly spoke at Jewish Labour Movement meetings.  The JLM, which is the overseas wing of the almost dead Israeli Labour Party is also an affiliate of the World Zionist Organisation, a body which funds settlements and steals land from Palestinians.

Lansman must have been brain dead if he did not realise that the only purpose of the JLM was to remove Jeremy Corbyn. His particular invention was ‘unconscious’anti-Semitism. Quite how one can recognise something if it is invisible and unconscious, indeed why it is even important, he never explained. Don’t we have enough all too conscious racism?

I have called Lansman a racist, not because he hates people of a different colour but because he consciously promoted the idea that anti-Semitism, a minor marginal prejudice against a section of White people, was all important whilst saying nothing about the very real racism that led to the murder of over 70 people in Grenfell and the death of Black Britons who were illegally deported by Theresa May to the West Indies in the Windrush Scandal.

Instead of calling out the Labour Right, Ian Austen, Tom Watson and those Labour MPs who didn’t even vote against the 2014 ‘hostile environment’ Immigration Act Lansman focussed on Jews.

I’m not aware of any Jews who are at risk of deportation because they are Jews or of police violence or disproportionate imprisonment of Jews or any other measure of state anti-Semitism.

If there was any doubt that the ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign was bogus then the campaign to force the Labour Party to adopt the IHRA ‘definition’ of anti-Semitism was the final, clinching proof. The only purpose of the IHRA is to conflate anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism.

But it wasn’t just Lansman.  John McDonnell never hesitated to givethe allegations his backing, to ‘prove’ that unlike Corbyn he was genuinely concerned about ‘anti-Semitism’. He told Ken Livingstone to apologise ‘because the Jews are a forgiving people’. He also told Chris Williamson to apologise but not once did McDonnell call into question the fact that the Board of Deputies represents a minority of the most reactionary Jews in this country.

Not once did any of the above 3 ask themselves why it should be that anti-Semitism had only now arisen as an issue.  Or why the Daily Mail, not a paper known for its commitment to anti-racism, should be so concernedabout anti-Semitism.

It was obvious, even before I was suspended in March 2016, that this was not a spontaneous phenomenon.  It was contrived, sponsored by Zionist groups like the misnamed Campaign Against Anti-Semitism and pushed by a Board of Deputies which has never fought anti-Semitism.  I can remember in the 1970’s they did their best to play down incidents of anti-Semitism like grave daubing. They attacked the Anti-Nazi League because it was backed by the anti-Zionist SWP.

I wrote 3 articles during the General Election for my blog and Weekly Worker and another one for Al Jazeera. The first one, just after the election was called was:

Corbyn can win BUT it is unlikely without a clear position on Brexit and a clear rejection of the anti-Semitism narrative - A hung parliament is likely but 2019 will not be a rerun of 2017-Johnson is not May

I wrote that ‘those who imagine that Corbyn is going to gain a majority are going to be disappointed’

At the last election Momentum was seen as having contributed significantly to the result.  This time because of its lack of democracy, in essence a plaything of its owner Jon Lansman, it is unlikely to be able to repeat the performance.  ... No one has done more than Lansman to lose this election through his sectarian Zionism and his endorsement of the Israeli, US and British strategy of destabilising Corbyn.

I  confess I agonised over saying outright that Labour was going to lose the election because, like most people, I desperately wanted them to win.  But the longer it went on, the more certain I became that Labour couldn’t win. The ‘anti-Semitism’ smears were being deployed increasingly effectively. Perhaps the turning point was when the Chief Rabbi wrote his infamous article Labour antisemitism: Corbyn not fit for high office, says Chief Rabbi Mirvis

What was Corbyn’s response?  Did he go onto the attack and point out that Ephraism Mirvis had blessed the racist Boris Johnson?  Did he point out that Mirvis was a supporter of the far-Right settlers in Israel or that he had endorsed Norman Tebbit’s infamous ‘cricket test’? No, he suggested a meeting with Mirvis!

Last week I wrote in the Weekly Worker Expect the Worst – Hope for the Best. I wrote that Corbyn’s throwing Chris Williamson was ‘pivotal and marks the end of the Corbyn project as we know it.’ Williamson was one of a number of friends who Corbyn had dispensed with as excess baggage. There was Ken Livingstone, Marc Wadsworth, Peter Willsman etc.

I also wrote an article last week for Al Jazeera Is Jeremy Corbyn a 'threat' to British Jews?about the suggestion that Corbyn represented an ‘existential threat’ to British Jews as the Jewish Chronicle and other Zionist newspapers had written. Finally, on the eve of poll, I laid the blame for what was to come on his ‘strategic advisor’ Seamus Milne who had plotted Corbyn’s disastrous strategy of appeasement.

I wrote ‘Your strategy of apologising for ‘anti-Semitism’ neutrality on Brexit and Appeasement of the Right has led to Disaster’. By then I was convinced that the election campaign had been nothing less than a car crash. What we didn’t know was how bad this disaster would be. I had expected that maybe we would see a loss of 20-30 seats.  I didn’t realise that it would be the worst performance since 1935.

The question is why? Was it inevitable?  The basic ideas in the Manifesto,  nationalisation of rail, an end to the tax dodging of multi-nationals was popular but it has to be seen as part of a coherent strategy, not just as a series of give aways like free broadband.

The anti-Semitism attacks were designed to give the Tories a moral legitimacy. It was not, as liar Ruth Smeeth has stated, because people on the doorstep were mentioning anti-Semitism.

The problem was that Corbyn, instead of pointing to Boris Johnson’s record of racism including his anti-Semitism, had repeatedly apologised, accepted his opponents barbs and promised to do better.

Corbyn never understood and here the failure is above all that of Seamus Milne, that the ‘anti-Semitism’ smears were designed to create a narrative of the untrustworthy, weak Corbyn. Corbyn completely played into their hands. The ‘anti-Semitism’ attacks were framed in such a way that they could never be solved to the satisfaction of his accusers.

It is always possible to find the odd racist or anti-Semite if you look hard enough. The Tory Party is full of them.  Why Tory MEPs even sit alongside anti-Semites in the European Parliament.

The analogy I use is of paedophilia.  Of course the Labour Party will have its share of predatory paedophiles. All parties have them, but do we therefore say that the Labour Party is ‘overrun’ by them? 

Boris Johnson wrotea book, 72 Virgins packed with racist stereotypes, about Jews, Black people, Muslims. He wrote about Russian oligarchs ‘who ran the TV stations (and who were mainly, as some lost no time in pointing out, of Jewish origin),’ The Independent notedthat ‘Near the beginning of the book Mr Johnson uses an extended metaphor to depict a traffic warden working in Westminster as a “hunter-gatherer” because he is an African immigrant.’

As a number of Jewish academics and other personalities, including the former Chair of the JLM, Jeremy Newmark, wrotein a letter to The Guardian, Boris Johnson

portrays a Jewish character, Sammy Katz, with a “proud nose and curly hair”, and paints him as a malevolent, stingy, snake-like Jewish businessman who exploits immigrant workers for profit. There is nothing subtle about this. We know what antisemitism looks like.

Yet the Chief Rabbi and the Board of Deputies had nothing to say because Johnson has always been 100% pro-Israel.  That and only that was Corbyn’s failure.  He had been seen as a supporter of the Palestinians.

Of course it was difficult to combat the systematic distortion and defamation by the mainstream Tory media, including the Guardian. But it was not an invention of the Daily Mail that Corbyn had apologisedfor anti-Semitism in the Labour Party.

When Andrew Neil repeatedly asked him to apologise to the Jewish community what Corbyn should have done was say he had nothing to apologise for.  Instead he avoided the question.  He should have gone onto the attack and said that he wasn’t taking lessons from someone who had employed holocaust denier, David Irving, as an ‘expert’ to examine the Goebbels diaries. Neil’s excusefor employing Irving and paying him a six figure sum was that ‘He is a technician, one of the few qualified technicians in the country. It is as a technician we are using him.’

If Seamus Milne had his wits about him then Corbyn could have used this to devastating effect.  Instead?  Nothing. 

Brexit

The other major problem was Corbyn and Milne’s approach to Brexit. Yes the northern working classes had supported Brexit but why?  Because of despair and disillusion they turned to nationalist and chauvinist solutions. It was Labour’s duty to point out that it was not Europe that had deindustrialised the north of England but Thatcher and the Tories. An open position on Remain would have won over much of the South and Labour could have campaigned for Reform and Remain in the North.  It is the job of political parties to win people to their side not to accommodate racism and bigotry. Behind Brexit, a project of the Right and far-Right, is a racist agenda.  That’s why Trump is so supportive of Nigel Farage and Brexit

Instead we had the idiotic idea that Corbyn would negotiate a new Brexit agreement, put it to the vote and then not even take a position on his own negotiated settlement. How can that be credible?

As D.D. Guttenplan wrotein The Nation:

The first duty of an opposition leader is to mount an effective opposition, and on Johnson’s signature project—dragging Britain out of Europe—Corbyn was never close to effective.

Where do we go from here

As could be expected the BBC and media are full of the idea that if only Labour turns to the Right and returns to the golden days of Blair then all will be well.  They forget that Blair’s government took us into Iraq and Afghanistan.  That it was a government of war which attacked migrants and benefit claimants. As time wore on, they lost 4 million votes.  Gordon Brown beget David Cameron.

All over Europe the rightward parties of social democracy are declining.  In France the Socialist Party of Francois Mitterand barely exists.  In German the SPD is also declining. In The Netherlands and Sweden too.  Right-wing social democracy has no answers to neo-liberalism and the rise of the far-Right.

The real question is whether the Left in the Labour Party can get its act together.  One thing is for certain.  Momentum is brain dead and useless.  It is a private company not a movement.  It’s no wonder that when Farage set up his Brexit Party he modelled it on Lansman’s private ownership of Momentum.

We have a Socialist Campaign Group of MPs in parliament which has proven totally useless at opposing the witchhunt and the anti-Semitism narrative. They are a set of prima donnas jockeying for position like Ms Long-Bailey. The last of the old guard, himself ill, Dennis Skinner has lost his seat in Bolsover.  A real and genuine tragedy for a man who put everything into the 1984/5 Miners Strike.

The Socialist Campaign Group’s co-Chair Lloyd Russell-Moyle lied to me about the position of Chris Williamson, saying that he had been given a road back to reinstatement when it was clear that the Right objected to him coming back at any price. His fellow co-chair, Laura Pidcott, has lost her seat, which is a genuine tragedy.

The Labour Representation Committee has withdrawn from the Labour Left Alliance, thus continuing the tradition of the Left in splitting and resplitting.

If the hopes of 2015-2017 are to be maintained then there will be a need to build a new organisation of the left which can overcome its systematic sectarianism.

We need to face fairly and squarely the problems of the age we are living in.  We have trade unions which are today much weaker than they were 40 years ago, with half the membership.  We have an extremely low level of strikes. The northern working class no longer remembers its tradition of militancy because it no longer has the same bases of power. The dockers are no more, the miners don’t exist. We have a working class that has been restructured and atomised.

The Corbyn project, which was a genuine mass movement that came into the Labour Party is no more.  Momentum is today a shadow.

I had Laura Parker, Momentum’s General Manager and Lansman’s faithful puppet writing to me just before the polls closed saying:

‘However tonight goes, it's clear something special is happening.

You see it in our faces as we campaign. You feel it in those countless moments of warmth and new found friendship. Every cup of tea shared on a cold night canvassing. Every smile from a passerby when they see you're with Labour.

Our movement feels different now. Bigger and shot through with hope and determination. Held together with bonds of solidarity that connect us like never before....

I feel so lucky to have shared this election with you. Now let's move forward

As Private Eye used to say ‘pass the sick bag Alice.’ Momentum is the group in which Jon Lansman, with the support of Corbyn and McDonnell,  mounted a coup against democracy.  The membership of Momentum has no control or power over the leadership

A new movement can only arise over the dead body of Momentum but it cannot simply be an alliance of the usual sects.  Can it be done?  Quite frankly I a sceptical. The Left does not have a good track record in overcoming sectarianism.

Our message is not that Labour’s General Election defeat was inevitable but that the Right in the Party, in alliance with their friends at the BBC and The Guardian, consciously planned and hoped for defeat as a way of defeating the Left.

Unless that is recognised then all will be lost.  Before the Labour Party can be transformed we have to ‘encourage’ its Red Tories to depart and for all those expelled and suspended to be reinstated. 

In other words we need to return fire with fire.  It will be interesting to see who in the  Campaign Group has the guts to take up the fight.  And who will finally have the courage to nail the fake antisemitism campaign? Labour must attack the racism of the Tories not other Labour members. And that must include the disaffiliation of the JLM which couldn’t even support the party it is affiliated to.

However we should not be too despondent.  Luciana Berger and Ruth Smeeth, the purveyors of fake victimhood have been removed.  As has Louise Ellman and the Lib Dems reactionary leader and Jo Swinson and Nigel Dodds of the DUP. Swinson’s defeat was particularly sweet.

Tony Greenstein

See also Neil Faulkner and Phil Hearse’s Election analysis. A victory for the Far Right. A crisis for the Left.

The Planting of Bombs in Lebanese Cities - Why Israel is a Terrorist State

December 17, 2019, 3:28 pm

≫ Next: The main reason that Labour lost the Election is because, for the past 4 years, the Labour Right Waged War on Corbyn

≪ Previous: Labour’s Electoral Disaster is the Price of Appeasement - You Don't Apologise to Someone Trying to Kill You

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Jeremy Corbyn’s Failure to Rebut the ‘terrorist’ label played a major part in his downfall

It began with an interview on Channel 4 with Krishna Guru-Murphy on 13^thJuly 2015 when Corbyn was pressed as to why he used the term ‘friends’ in relation to Hezbollah and Hamas. He blustered and got angry but never nailed down the lie at the heart of the question which was that neither organisation was a terrorist organisation. They are both Islamists and both reactionary, but they come from the people they work among and represent. Terrorists are people who, despairing of mass support, use violence as a substitute.

Corbyn’s proffered and increasingly thin excuse that he was a ‘peacemaker’ which completely evaded the question of whose side you take in what were imperialist wars of mass destruction. Either you are on the side of the Palestinians and the Lebanese or the Israelis.  ‘Peace making’ completely avoids having to take a stance. It is a coward’s way out.

It was Lord Carrington, Margaret Thatcher’s first Foreign Secretary, who stated that ‘one man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist’. Corbyn could have thrown the whole terrorist thing back in Murphy’s face.  Hamas was the creation of the Israeli state.  Indeed so was Hezbollah, which only came about as a result of Israel’s genocidal invasion of Lebanon in 1982 which killed 20,000 people.

Below is a story from Mondoweiss.  It is not a story that is likely to appear in the British press any time soon because it runs counter to the narrative that Israel fights ‘terrorism’ rather than it is a terrorist state.  Because after all our friends couldn’t possibly be terrorists and plant bombs in the middle of cities!

Ariel Sharon (right) Israel's mass murdering Prime Minister

Yet for two years, the Israeli Defence Forces and Mossad used a cover name, the Front for the Liberation of Lebanon from Foreigners, to plant dozens of bombs in market places and public areas in Lebanon killing hundreds of civilians and injuring many more.

Israel’s actions were classic actions of destabilisation, blaming the bombings on a war between Palestinian factions. As Rémi Brulin observes, it wasn’t Hezbollah and Hamas but Israel which developed the art of the terrorist bomb.  Indeed they could be said to have learnt their skills from their Zionist teacher.

Tony Greenstein

How the Israeli military censor killed a story about ‘terrorist’ bombing campaign in Lebanon in 1980s

Rémi Brulin on October 23, 2019 11 Comments

Front page story in the New York Times in 1983 on a terrorist bombing that killed Palestinians in Lebanon. The bombing campaign has now been confirmed as an Israeli one that claimed 100s of innocent lives.

June, 1980. Over the previous weeks Israeli air and sea attacks on “Palestinian and leftist positions” have been“almost nightly events.” According to Christian Science Monitor journalist Helena Cobban, however, a “more sinister Israeli hand is seen behind some of the increased unrest throughout the country.” Indeed, “several enormous car bombs have exploded here recently in locations with a heavy concentration of Palestinian or Syrian population.” At least two were claimed by a group calling itself the Front for the Liberation of Lebanon from Foreigners (FLLF).

The mysterious group’s modus operandi, Cobban writes, “seem[s] to indicate the influence of some Israeli extremist groups”like the ones behind car-bomb attacks against three Palestinian mayors in the West Bank on June 2. To an “embittered Palestinian scholar,” who spoke to Cobban, they also brought to mind “the terror-bombings launched against Palestinian villages by Mr. Begin’s own Irgun extremist group” in the 1940s. “Then, the aim was to drive us out of Palestine, and they largely succeeded… Now they want to drive us out of Lebanon. Where can we go? The Israelis are going mad, but this time round, the world cannot support their terror. Or can it?”

Over the following 3 years, hundreds of Palestinian and Lebanese civilians were killed, and many more wounded, by explosive devices hidden in baskets, on bicycles or mules, in cars or trucks. After each attack, calls to the media were placed claiming responsibility in the name of the FLLF. Palestinian and Lebanese officials repeatedly insisted that the FLLF was merely a fiction intended to hide the hand of Israel and its Christian rightist allies. Israeli officials rejected such accusations, insisting rather that the bombings were part of an internecine war amongst rival Arab factions. Several of these bombings are included in the RAND and START“terrorism databases.”

In August 2012, the New Yorker published a profile of Meir Dagan, the former head of Mossad. Dagan was known as a “ruthless agent,” David Remnick writes, and his career was rumored to have included “operations of all kinds – car bombing, poisoning, cyberwar.” Indeed, before Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982 Yigal Sarna and Anat Tal-Shir, two reporters for the Israeli daily Yediot Ahronot, had investigated the possibility that Dagan had “led a secret unit across the border whose mission was to instigate terrorist events that would justify an incursion.”Remnick adds: “Military censors killed the story, Sarna told me. Dagan acknowledges the censorship but denies the thrust of the story.”

Israeli journalist Noam Sheizaf posted Remnick’s story on his Facebook page and, as he wrotein 972 Magazine, Sarna commented as follows: “Indeed, the censorship [on these stories] has been on for years. Horrifying things were done there, not just planned.”

Yet another profile of Dagan published in Haaretz in 2016 presented a more detailed account of the story and, this time, explicitly mentioned the FLLF.

Before the invasion of Lebanon in 1982, military correspondent Amir Oren reported, an officer who served under Dagan “claimed that on orders from the IDF, under cover of the Front for the Liberation of Lebanon from Foreigners, deadly strikes were being carried out against Palestinian targets, and the casualties included innocent civilians.” That anonymous complaint “reached the press,”he said, “and from there – even though the military censor forbade publication – it reached Begin.”

The complaint named four senior Israeli officials: Raphael Eitan, the IDF Chief of Staff; Meir Dagan, the commander of the South Lebanon Region; head of Northern Command Avigdor Ben-Gal; and Shlomo Ilya, an intelligence officer. Yehoshua Saguy, the head of Military Intelligence, looked into the allegations and concluded that they were accurate. His complaint led nowhere however: according to Oren, Prime Minister Menachem Begin “didn’t want to believe it, especially on the eve of an election.”

In February 2018 Ronen Bergman, at the time the senior correspondent for military and intelligence affairs for Yedioth Ahronoth, published Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassination.

Ronen Bergman with his book at the Fifth Avenue Barnes and Noble in February 2018. Photo from Instagram.

This extensively-researched book contains several pages devoted to the FLLF operation. Based on interviews with officials involved in the operation or who were aware of its existence at the time, it confirms that the Palestinians had been right all along: the FLLF was indeed a creation of Israel, a fictitious group used by senior officials to hide their country’s hand in a deadly ‘terrorist’ campaign.

The group was created by Eitan, Ben-Gal and Dagan in 1979. In the words of David Agmon, head of the Northern Command Staff of the IDF, the objective was to “cause chaos among the Palestinians and Syrians in Lebanon, without leaving an Israeli fingerprint, to give them the feeling that they were constantly under attack and to instill them with a sense of insecurity.” Bergman makes no reference to Shlomo Ilya, the intelligence officer mentioned in Oren’s Haaretzarticle.

In its early stage, the group used explosives “concealed in cans of oil or preserves” that were built in a metal shop of Kibbutz Mahanayim where Ben-Gal lived at the time. The explosives themselves were sourced from the IDF’s bomb disposal unit so as to “minimize the chance that any connection with Israel might be revealed.”

Eitan, Ben-Gal and Dagan were unable to keep their operation airtight however. In Rise and Kill First, Bergman provides fascinating accounts of early (and unsuccessful) efforts by senior officers and members of the government to push back against such methods, accounts that confirm the accuracy of Remnick’s and Oren’s stories.

In 1980 Yehoshua Saguy, the head of Military Intelligence, informed Deputy Defense Minister Mordechai Zippori that Ben-Gal was conducting “rogue operations” inside Lebanon. In one instance, a car bomb meant for PLO personnel had detonated on a main road in southern Lebanon, killing an unspecified number of “women and children.”

In June 1980, the month when Helena Cobban’s Christian Science Monitor story was published, a meeting was convened in the Prime Minister’s office. Zippori accused Ben-Gal of conducting “unauthorized actions in Lebanon” and insisted that “women and children have been killed.” Ben-Gal replied that this was incorrect (“Four or five terrorists were killed. Who drives around in Lebanon in a Mercedes at 2 a.m.? Only terrorists”) and assured Menachem Begin that he had received permission for the action. The Prime Minister accepted these assurances and, Bergman writes, from that point on “the top brass realized there was no point in asking the prime minister to rectify the situation.”

The story investigated by Yigal Sarna and Anat Tal-Shir was accurate. And Dagan’s denials to Remnick were lies.

When the Israeli military censor banned publication of the story, therefore, it covered up serious state crimes that had already been committed. Even more problematically, this decision made it possible for Israel to continue, following Likud’s (very narrow) victory in the 1981 legislative elections, to use the FLLF to conduct an ever deadlier, and fully covert, campaign of “terrorism.”

On August 5, 1981, Menachem Begin picked Ariel Sharon to replace him as Defense Minister. As Israelihistorianshave long documented, for the next 10 months the Begin government engaged in military operations, from the air and the ground, in order to goad the Palestinians into a military response that would be used to justify a major military offensive into Lebanon.

As Rise and Kill First documents in detail, the FLLF bombings were an integral part of this Israeli strategy of provocation. Indeed, the new Defense Minister immediately decided to “activate” the FLLF operation and sent Eitan as his personal emissary to “keep an eye” on the clandestine operation. Remarkably, at the time Eitan was serving as Begin’s “counterterrorism” adviser.

Sharon “hoped that these operations would provoke Arafat into attacking Israel,” Bergman writes, “which could then respond by invading Lebanon, or atleast make the PLO retaliate against the Phalange, whereupon Israel would be able to leap in great force to the defense of the Christians.”

“By mid-September 1981,” he explains, “car bombs were exploding regularly in Palestinian neighborhoods of Beirut and other Lebanese cities.”

Several of these bombings were covered in the US press at the time.

On September 17, 1981, a car bomb exploded outside of the command center shared by the PLO and its Lebanese leftist allies in the port city of Sidon, killing over 20, most of them women and children who lived in nearby apartment buildings, John Kifner reported in the New York Times.

Two days later, another “terrorist bomb” killed four in a crowded movie theater in West Beirut, Kifner reported. The FLLF claimed responsibility, but Palestinian officials immediately insisted that the group is “fictitious,” a ploy used by Israel to hide its hand in these attacks.

On October 1, a car exploded near PLO offices in a crowded street in Moslem west Beirut, killing 90, as Kifner and the UPI reported. Several other vehicles loaded with explosives were found and defused in Beirut and Sidon “in what was intended as a devastating blitz against Palestinians and leftist Lebanese militiamen by rightist terrorists.”

The FLLF claimed responsibility, but a PLO official blamed Israeli agents for planting the bomb in “sort of a secret war” against Palestinians. Lebanese Prime Minister Chafik Wazzan agreed. Because the cease-fire was preventing Israel from “persisting in its acts of destruction and killing in Lebanon through its air force or other attacks,” he argued, it was “looking for other tactics, the cowardly ones to which it is currently resorting either directly or through agents.’ Israeli officials rejected such claims, insisting instead that the bombings were part of a ‘war among gangs which make up the PLO.”

A RAND report on ‘recent trends in international terrorism’ published in April 1983 describes a few of these bombings in some detail. The death toll from these few bombings adds up to 120. By comparison, and according to the same RAND report, in 1980 and 1981 combined Palestinian ‘terrorists’ killed a grand total of 16 people. As UPI journalist Fred Schiff wrote at the time, over just two weeks the FLLF’s ‘wave of terror bombings’ in its totality claimed 308 lives.

Portion of database compiled by Rand on the Front for Liberation of Lebanon from Foreigners

Importantly, at the exact same time Israeli officials were conducting an extensive public relations (or ‘hasbara’) campaign aimed at convincing the rest of the Western world, and especially the United States, of the seriousness of the threat posed by “terrorism.” In this narrative, Israelis were the main victims, and never the perpetrators, of “terrorism,” while the Palestinians were the main perpetrators of “terrorism,” never its victims.

This campaign was extraordinarily successful, and since the mid 1980s the American and Israeli discourses on “terrorism” have been virtually indistinguishable. A number of actors, from elected officials to “terrorism experts,” played a central role in this deeply ideological process of meaning production.

The military censor’s decision to ban Sarna’s and Tal-Shir’s story, and thus to cover up the fact that senior Israeli officials were, at that exact same time, conducting a large scale campaign of “terrorism” in Lebanon, was just as central to this process.

The censor’s decision made it possible for Israeli leaders to insist, in June 1982, that the invasion of Lebanon was justified in the name of fighting “terrorism.” Remarkably, it made it possible for Ariel Sharon to take to the pages of the New York Times in August 1982 and insistthat Israeli troops “were greeted as liberators for driving out the terrorists who had raped and pillaged and plundered” the country. They had followed the Jewish doctrine of tohar haneshek, “the moral conduct of war,”Sharon added, a policy that stood “in vivid contrast to the P.L.O.’s practice of attacking only civilian targets.” 

Ariel Sharon drinks to the death of the Palestinians of Sabra and Chatilla

When he penned this Opinion piece, the Israeli defense minister had been personally conducting “terrorist” attacks in Lebanon for a full year.

The FLLF bombing campaign would continue until late 1983. Its deadliest attacks were covered on the front pages of the New YorkTimesand the WashingtonPost. The actual number of victims of this Israeli “terrorist” campaign will probably never be known. Still, it seems quite clear that, as Lee O’Brien, a U.N. official, wrote in MERIP in October 1983, between 1979 and 1983 the FLLF bombs did kill at least several hundred civilians, wounding countless more.

Rise and Kill First provides a clear picture of the inner workings of this Israeli “terrorist” campaign. The explosives were “packed in Ariel laundry powder bags” so as to look like “innocent goods” when going through roadblocks. Women were chosen to drive “to reduce the likelihood of the cars being caught” on the way to their target, and the cars themselves were “developed in the IDF’s Special Operations Executive.” As one Israeli intelligence officer told Bergman:

With Sharon’s backing, terrible things were done. I am no vegetarian, and I supported and even participated in some of the assassination operations Israel carried out. But we are speaking here about mass killing for killing’s sake, to sow chaos and alarm, among civilians, too. Since when do we send donkeys carrying bombs to blow up in marketplaces?

Another one added:

I saw from a distance one of the cars blowing up and demolishing an entire street. We were teaching the Lebanese how effective a car bomb could be. Everything that we saw later with Hezbollah sprang from what they saw had happened after these operations.

Rise and Kill First was published in February 2018. It was very positively reviewed in the US press. Bergman gave public talks, was interviewed on TV news programs, and his work was praised by prominent ‘terrorism experts.’ The book made several bestseller’s lists and was nominated for a number of end-of-the-year awards.

And yet, over the last 18 months Bergman’s extraordinary revelations about the FLLF operation have not been mentioned or discussed once in the US media. This is the case even though, unlike Sarna and Tal-Shir, American journalists (including prominent figures such as Thomas Friedman, who personally covered FLLF bombings on the front page of the New York Times in the 1980s) operate in a country where the press is free from censorship.

Front page of the New York Times from February 6, 1983 featuring an article by on Thomas Friedman on a bombing by the Front for the Liberation of Lebanon from Foreigners

As a consequence, in the United States the terms of the public debate about Israel, the Palestinians and “terrorism” have remained unchallenged. The Palestinians continue to be presented as the perpetrators, and never the victims, of “terrorism.” Israelis continue to be presented as the victims, and never the perpetrators, of “terrorism.”

This public discussion has thus been allowed to proceed as if the FLLF bombing campaign had never happened, as if the Palestinians had never been the victims of this widespread campaign of “terrorism,” as if this campaign hadn’t been directed by some of the most prominent Israeli figures of the last decades, men who repeatedly claimed to be absolutely opposed to “terrorism,” men who defended their country’s repeated uses of force as justified by the uniquely evil nature of the threat posed by “terrorism.”

It is time to break the silence surrounding Israel’s “terrorist” campaign in Lebanon.

It is time to question the validity of a discourse that has only led to more violence and more deaths, a discourse that could never have emerged but for an act of state censorship.

In the name of historical truth.

In the name of the FLLF’s hundreds of forgotten victims.

In the name of victims of “terrorism” everywhere, regardless of the identity of the perpetrators.

Rémi Brulin

Remi Brulin received his PhD at La Sorbonne Nouvelle (Paris) in 2011. His dissertation is a historical analysis of the American discourse on "terrorism," and can be accessed and downloaded here. He has taught at New York University, George Washington University and, currently, at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. You can follow him on Twitter here: @rbrulin.

 See also The remarkable disappearing act of Israel’s car-bombing campaign in Lebanon or: What we (do not) talk about when we talk about ‘terrorism’

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The main reason that Labour lost the Election is because, for the past 4 years, the Labour Right Waged War on Corbyn

December 20, 2019, 2:23 pm

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We Should NOT Support Rebecca Long Bailey – she is a female Neil Kinnock – Critical Support Should Be Given to Clive Lewis and Richard Burgon

Graham Bash (left), Chair Rebecca Massey and John Rees (right)

Last Monday Brighton and Hove Labour Left Alliance, which over the past 6 months has replaced the now defunct Brighton and Hove branch of Lansman’s Private Company (Momentum Ltd.) held a packed meeting at The Rialto on Where Do We Go Now?

The speakers were John Rees, from Counterfire (formerly of the SWP) and Graham Bash of the LRC and Editor of Labour Briefing, as well as Political Officer of Jewish Voice for Labour.

Pathetic racist Fiona Sharpe, founder of Sussex Friends of Israel, engaging in a last bit of vitriol against Waterstones and the Rialto, for the 'crime' of  supporting free speech.

The Rialto was where we held a number of events last autumn, during Labour Party conference, after the Zionists had done their best to close down free speech in Brighton. We held the book launch for Bad News for Labour,which the Zionists had successfullyforced Waterstones to cancel, as well as Jackie Walker’s film The Witchhunt (which had been due to premiere at the Liverpool Labour Party last year but which was prevented by a bomb threat which the Police didn’t investigate).

Part of the audience at the Rialto

Graham pinpointed the essential contradiction behind the rise of Corbyn which was the decline in working class struggle and strikes at the very same time that Labour elected its most left-wing leader ever. It is this that helps explain the political demoralisation in the northern ‘Red Wall’ constituencies that led to many working class people voting Tory.

As Graham made clear, there is no obvious successor to Jeremy Corbyn. Rebecca Long Bailey, who is apparently the Socialist Campaign Group candidate, appears to be running on a joint slate with the even more right-wing Angela Rayner.

When Angela Rayner was chosen to address the Board of Deputies she chose to first distance herself from her previous description of Norman Finkelstein’s book, Holocaust Industry, as ‘seminal.  She then launched into an attack on me! According to the Jewish Chronicle Rayner said that she was ‘glad activists such as Tony Greenstein had been expelled and said "those who distort history by likening Hitler to Zionism are no longer welcome".

John Rees mentioned that when he visits the Stop the War Coalition offices, in the same building as Corbyn’s constituency office, he is there hard at work on behalf of his constituents. We are unlikely to see someone who has devoted himself to the poor and oppressed again at the top of the Labour Party.

An excellent discussion ensued after Graham and John had spoken. B&H LLA hope to organise another meeting next month on the scandal surrounding Julian Assange’s incarceration.

Why Rebecca Long-Bailey Should NOT Be Supported

There are many on the Left who are saying that RLB is  the least worst candidate.  I disagree. RLB stabbed Chris Williamson in the back when according to the Jewish Chronicle she told the Zionist Jewish Labour Movement’s Vice Chair Stephane Savary that Williamson ‘should not be a member of the Labour Party and that she did not know how he had not already been expelled.’

Possibly one reason Chris should not have been expelled was that he was fitted up by racists who lied and distorted what he actually said. But when you are comforting Zionists truth flies out the window.

Angela Rayner - the lightweight partner of RLB is standing for Deputy Leader as part of a nightmare ticket

Let us remind ourselves what it was that Chris Williamson actually said because it is a microcosm of the lies and distortions and the contempt for truth by those for whom ambition is all.

The Yorkshire Post, the BBC and many others reported that Chris said that the Labour Party was "too apologetic" over anti-Semitism. What he actually said was:

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 have backed off too much, we have given too much ground, we have been too apologetic.”

Tom Watson 'lost sleep' over the sacking of racist Labour MP Phil Woolas - Rebecca Long Bailey was happy to sign Watson's petition calling for the suspension of Chris Williamson

If RLB is prepared to support the expulsion of a Socialist MP and sign a petition by the racist Tom Watson on the basis of deliberate misreporting by the Tory press then no one should be under any illusions as to what direction she will take the party.

The news is that Black MP Clive Lewis, who supported Marc Wadsworth, is standing for the leadership. It is true that Clive is no anti-imperialist but neither is RLB. Clive has shown more independence than RLB and did at least stick his neck out on occasion. Given that he is Black that in itself is a reason for supporting, everything else considered.

I urge socialists in the Labour Party to critically support Clive Lewis.

RLB explainedto the racist rag that is the Jewish Chronicle, a paper that in the election campaign unceasingly for anyone but Corbyn and which openly called him an anti-Semite, that but for her membership of the Shadow Cabinet she would have signed Tom Watson’s petition calling for resuspension of Chris Williamson (ruled unlawful by the High Court).

Phil Woolas's racist leaflet caricaturing all Muslims as violent Jihadists - Rebecca Long Bailey was happy to sign Woolas supporter Tom Watson's petition

This alone should prevent the Left from supporting Long-Bailey.

The fact that John McDonnell, who has made his peace with Blair and Campbell, wants RLB to succeed Corbyn, should be another reason for not supporting RLB. Let us remind ourselves that when the High Court removed racist Labour MP Phil Woolas from the House of Commons for running an election campaign which, in the words of his own agent, was designed to ‘make the white  folk angry’ Watson wroteon Labour Uncut that he had ‘lost sleep thinking about poor Phil.’ If RLB was prepared to sign a  petition by this racist she is no socialist.

RLB also toldmembers of the JLM, which didn’t even support Labour in the General Election, that ‘she is aware Jeremy Corbyn has lost the trust of the (Jewish) community’. This was of course the same allegation made about Labour’s only Jewish leader, Ed Miliband. In fact the Labour Party has long since lost the confidence of British Jews, most of whom have voted Tory since the 1960’s.

People should face facts.  The Jewish ‘community’ today, in particular the synagogue going adherents of the United Synagogue which the Board of Deputies represents (about 30% of British Jews) are a reactionary community whose identity is shaped by the Israeli state’s oppression of the Palestinians.

Just imagine that at the time of Apartheid there had been a large community of exiled South Africans. According to RLB’s racist logic we should have supported Apartheid for fear of upsetting the identity of white racists.  This is exactly the same situation today. Jews who support Israeli Apartheid are either ignorant or racist or both.

RLB has been engaged in a love-in with the Board of Deputies of British Jews, who more than any other body, were responsible for the fake anti-Semitism campaign.  A body that supportedthe mowing down of unarmed demonstrators in Gaza and which has supported every war against the Palestinians and every aspect of Israel’s Apartheid policies.

This political lightweight, who has all the charisma of a dictaphone, produced a slick videoclaimingthat that had been “born to the sound of the roar of the Stretford end”  Since she was born on 22^nd September 1979, when Man United were playing away to Wolverhampton, this is quite a remarkable feat!

Where the Blame Lies for Labour’s Defeat

As this blog has repeatedly said, Jeremy Corbyn made, over the past 4 years, grievous mistakes, not least in abandoning old comrades like Ken Livingstone and Chris Williamson. But ultimately Corbyn is not responsible for the disaster last Thursday. Neither is Seamus Milne, his disastrous adviser or John McDonnell, despite his rapprochement with Alistair Campbell and his perpetual backsliding and overtures to the Right of the Labour Party.

The blame for what happened lies with the Parliamentary Labour Party who waged an unending war against Corbyn. People like Margaret Hodge, Wes Streeting, Louise Ellman, John Mann, Ian Austin and the two fake ‘victims’ of anti-Semitism – Ruth Smeeth and Juliana Berger.

If only Corbyn and Len McLuskey had supported Open Selection at the 2018 Labour Party Conference. Fortunately every cloud has a silver lining and the last five are no longer in parliament having either not stood, left the Labour Party for the Lib Dems or deserted to the Tories. 

It is noteworth that Austin, Mann and Ivan Lewis, who was suspended for sexual harassment, all backed the Tories. The victory of the Tories was , despite public protestations of horror, welcomed by the Peter Kyles and Jess Phillips of the PLP.  Indeed in an unguarded moment Phillips, a ‘feminist’ friendof anti-abortion Rees-Mogg, was caught expressing her delight at Labour’s defeat.

WHERE TO WE GO FROM HERE?

As John Rees made clear there is no Labour MP of the calibre of Corbyn.  None with his record. Whoever replaces him, for all their faults, will be politically worse. That is the reality we must face.

Those tempted to support RLB should remember when the Left backed Neil Kinnock against Roy Hattersley after the 1983 election.  Kinnock came from the Left and despite his betrayalof Tony Benn in the Deputy Leadership Election in 1981 was supported by the Left against the right-wing Hattersley. 

In fact Kinnock used his antecedents in the Left in order to betray the Left.  Whereas Kinnock paved the way for Blair and supported him throughout his premiership Hattersley became a trenchant critic.

My suggestion is that we don’t repeat the same mistake twice with RLB. If she is prepared to sacrifice the Palestinians to her own political ambitions, cuddling up to the reactionary and racist Zionists then she isn’t worth the candle.

It is essential that the Labour Left regroups and draws the necessary conclusions from the General Election. It is untrue that it was Brexit that defeated Labour. Brexit is symptomatic of a demoralisation and despair amongst a working class that has seen industry in the North of England laid to waste and devastated by monetarism and austerity. Brexit is the product of political defeat.

The antagonism to Corbyn was not hostility to his programme  It is unfortunate that Corbyn appeared weak and indecisive because he refused to stand up to the Right.  In appeasing the Right and apologising to Zionists he weakened himself in the eyes of the working class electorate. Instead of a Manifesto which promised lots of goodies there should have been a narrative about how Labour would reverse the 30+ year transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich. Reforming capitalism is simply not enough.  Socialism is about replacing capitalism not reforming it.

In the short term the Labour Left Alliance needs to regroup and the LRC, a group which has achieved little or nothing in its sad history and which has McDonnell as its President, is going to have to decide whether to follow the sectarian stance of its current Executive or try and build a strong left inside the Labour Party.

The Labour Left needs to understand that there is a need for left unity that straddles those in and those out of the Labour Party, especially given so many of us have been expelled.  The existing left groups outside the Labour Party are constitutionally sectarian and all too often divorced from reality. The question is whether the Labour Left is up to it given that large sections of the previously Corbyn left has been taken in  by identity politics, which is what their concern over ‘anti-Semitism’ is. 

There is a battle ahead and RLB will be on the wrong side of it. The battle also needs to extend to the trade union movement, without which the Labour Party would never have adopted the IHRAmisdefinition of anti-Semitism.

We should also be campaigning for the readmission of Chris Williamson and an acknowledgement of the injustice done to him.  An injustice which led to the loss of Derby North to the Tories.

Tony Greenstein

Christmas in Bethlehem Behind the Apartheid Wall

December 21, 2019, 2:21 pm

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Brighton and Hove Palestine Solidarity Campaign reminds people that in the birthplace of Christ, Xmas has to be celebrated under military occupation – this is what Israel calls ‘freedom of worship’ 

See A Palestinian Christian explains what it feels to celebrate Christmas in Bethlehem today.

Youtube Removes Video of Zionists Shouting ‘Hitler Was Right’ at Jewish Protesters Against Ethnic Cleansing in Jerusalem - Their Excuse? Hate Speech!

December 21, 2019, 6:03 pm

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Either Youtube Doesn’t Understand the Difference Between Racism and Anti-racism or They Are Deliberately Covering for Zionism’s Genocidal Wing

Nearly 10 years ago I published a blog, Hitler was right say Zionists. It described how Zionist hecklers had shouted 'Hitler was Right' at Israeli Jews who were protesting at the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian families from Sheikh Jarrar in Jerusalem.  Police were about to evict families who had lived there for generations in order that Jewish settlers could move in.

Zionism is a warped racist ideology based on creating an ethnically pure ‘Jewish’ State in Israel. Any Jew who opposes Zionism is considered a ‘traitor’ ‘kapos’ ‘self hater’ and other neo-Nazi terms. Some Zionists go so far as to wish that anti-Zionist Jews had perished in Auschwitz.

I have received tweets and posts myself saying that the Zio concerned would be happier if I and my family had perished in an extermination camp.  This is the sick side of Zionist self-hatred. Based on racial supremacy Zionists can’t understand that some Jews are anti-racist.  It is this behaviour that gives the lie to their claims to be concerned about ‘anti-Semitism’.

This was posted by a supporter of anti-miscegenation group Lehava that the government helps fund

My blog post described how those shouting ‘Hitler was Right’ at these protestors were conforming to Zionist ‘logic’.  Historically one of the foundations stones of Zionism was the ‘Negation of the Diaspora’. Literally Zionism hated the Jewish diaspora (Galut). It held that the Jewish nation could only live in Palestine.  Those who refused to go to what is now Israel deserved everything they got. Zionism aimed to wind up the Galut though in practice Israel has been a parasite on Jewish communities abroad.

An example of a tweet I got from a Zio - 'shame your family survived world can do without cunts like you.'

These Zionists were saying to the anti-racist Jewish Israelis that you are no different from those Jews in the diaspora.  You have universal not Zionist values.  You are therefore no different from the Jews who died in Hitler’s extermination camps. Indeed like them you deserve to die in an extermination camp if you don’t subscribe to our racist values such as the ethnic cleansing that brought Israel into existence.

In the words of Jacob Klatzkin, Editor of Die Welt,(1909-1911)paper of the Zionist Organisation

 ‘If we do not admit the rightfulness of anti-Semitism we deny the rightfulness of our own nationalism... Instead of establishing societies for defence against the anti-Semites who want to reduce our rights, we should establish societies for defence against our friends, who desire to defend our rights.’

Of course this is not the only example of Zionists and Israeli Jews identifying with Hitler and the Nazis.  Earlier this year Rabbis Radler and Cashtiel, who run the Eli pre-military school toldtheir students, among other things, that Hitler was right.

According to Rabbi Giora Radler the Holocaust was a ‘divine punishment’ designed to ‘encourage’ Jewish people to leave the diaspora and that the true Holocaust “is secular culture in which we believe in man, that is the Holocaust.”

According to the learned Rabbi “Hitler was the rightest person there was” Hitler's only fault was that he was on the wrong side, meaning against the Jews. This is a familiar theme of the far-Right in Israel.  Hitler was right he just got the wrong people (unfortunately these idiots don’t understand that the Palestinians didn’t live in Germany!).

Zionism today has a neo-Nazi wing which believes that Jews in Europe brought the Holocaust on themselves.  It actually understands what motivated Hitler and like the anti-Semitic President of Christians United for Israel, Pastor John Hagee, sees Hitler as the agent of god sent to drive the Jews to Israel.

People forget that Zionism not only collaborated with the Nazis but important sections of the Zionist leadership actually welcomedthe Nazis to power.  For example Berl Katznelson, Deputy to David Ben Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister and Chairman of the Jewish Agency saw the rise of Hitler as “an opportunity to build and flourish like none we have ever had or ever will have”. [Francis Nicosia, Zionism and Anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany, p.91. Tom Segev, The 7^th Million, p.18).

I therefore posted the filmon Youtube. The corporate idiots who run Youtube have a limited understanding of racism and other forms of bigotry.  They call it ‘diversity’ and ‘hate’ speech.   Racism is not a word that corporate scum use very often because it implies politics, i.e. who owns what and why.  Which is where racism is located.  These corporate bums depoliticise racism and call it ‘hate speech’. Much like the liberal equal opportunist left that reduce everything to 'hate speech' and therefore ignore the role of race and class.

For example I actually do hate rich parasites and exploiters in society!  According to Youtube that is ‘hate speech’.

It should have been obvious to Youtube that when I posted a video ‘Hitler was Right’ I wasn’t saying that I believed Hitler was Right, rather I was demonstrating how beneath the surface Zionism contains the very same strands of genocidal racism which in Germany led to the Holocaust.

But of course the idiots who run Youtube have few politics and even fewer ideas.  Despite proclaiming that ‘We review educational, documentary, artistic and scientific content on a case-by-case basis’ it is clear that this is a lie.  Anyone with half a brain cell who reviewed this video would understand what it was saying.

These idiots, in a standard message, posted that

‘Content glorifying or inciting violence against another person or group of people is not allowed on YouTube. We also don't allow any content that encourages hatred of another person or group of people based on their membership in a protected group.’

Far from encouraging hatred I was trying to combat it by exposing what the Zionists really believe.  No doubt some idiot Zionist took offence at this video and complained. So I am asking you to retweet it and post it on social media and upload it to Youtube to defy the censors of Youtube.

I have postedthis video up again and challenged Youtube to suspend me as they’ve threatened to do under their racist 3 Strikes policy. I have also posted it on my google drive in case they take it down again because once an idiot always an idiot.

In my Appeal to Youtube I said:

How dare you do this?  I have been an anti-racist all my life. 

This video 'Hitler was Right' was a video of what right-wing Zionists said about other Jews who oppose ethnic cleansing.  This is about what is happening in Israel today. Shame on you for supporting Israel's far Right. U are idiots

Tony Greenstein

What would you say if an organisation that supported Apartheid in South Africa claimed to be anti-fascist?

December 23, 2019, 6:51 pm

≫ Next: Xmas Under Occupation in Ramallah

≪ Previous: Youtube Removes Video of Zionists Shouting ‘Hitler Was Right’ at Jewish Protesters Against Ethnic Cleansing in Jerusalem - Their Excuse? Hate Speech!

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Nick Lowles Hope not Hate's Editor Openly Supports Israeli Apartheid – any Socialist or Anti-Racist Who Supports Them Is a Fake

Today I received a heartwarming Xmas message from Nick Lowles of the misnamed Hope not Hate.  It boasted of many achievements, most of which had nothing to do with it, including:

Hope not Hate should re renamed Hate not Hope for its role in demonising Chris Williamson

‘We Stopped Tommy Robinson from Winning His Election’‘We Beat Nigel Farage and the Brexit Party’‘We Took on Donald Trump’ etc. It is after all the season of Santa Claus.

There is however a less amusing side to HnH. For the past four years they have provided an ‘anti-fascist’ cover to the demonistation of a whole range of anti-racist and anti-imperialist activists in the Labour Party, many of them Black and Jewish, such as Jackie Walker, Marc Wadsworth, Chris Williamson, the former MP for Derby North and Ken Livingstone, the former Mayor of London.

This is not surprising since for five years, before becoming an MP, Ruth Smeeth was Deputy Director of HnH. Before that she was Director of Public Affairs and Campaigns at the Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre (BICOM), the main pro-Israel propaganda group in Britain. She is a member of Labour Friends of Israel and after the defection of Luciana Berger she became Parliamentary Chair of the Jewish Labour Movement.  In short Smeeth is a racist supporter of Apartheid.

Can you imagine the late John Carlisle, MP for Luton North, an apologist for South African Apartheid, whom we used to nicknamethe member for Bloemfontein West being anywhere near an anti-fascist organisation? Yet Ruth Smeeth is all over HnH.

As Nobel Peace Prize winner, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, statedIsrael is worsethan Apartheid South Africa was. When Apartheid was in existence in South Africa Israel was its closest partner. As Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu boasted, Israel is a state of its Jewish citizens, not its Palestinian citizens. 5 million Palestinians living in Greater Israel have no vote.  Within Israel 93% of the land is barred to Israeli Palestinians. The Israeli government spends money fundinggroups like Hemla, charitable wing of the fascist Lehava organisation, opposing Dorit Rabinmixed marriages.

An obsession with racial purity is the hallmark of a society based on the principles of race. In 2015 Israel’s Education Ministry bannedfrom the syllabus, Dorit Rabinyan’s Borderlife, because it depicted a relationship between an Arab woman and a Jewish man. Dali Fenig, from  the Education Ministery explained:

According to Wikileaks Ruth Smeeth is a Protected Asset

 “The story is based on a romantic motif of impossible prohibited/secret love. Young people of adolescent age tend to romanticize and don’t, in many cases, have the systemic vision that includes considerations involving maintaining the national-ethnic identity of the people and the significance of miscegenation.” (my emphasis)

Miscegenation is an ugly word that means the mixing of races. It is defined as

‘mixing that is perceived to negatively impact the purity of a particular race or culture. Anti-miscegenation is a prominent theme of racial supremacist movements, including white supremacy.’

And in the era of Segregation and Jim Crow laws, States passed lawsforbidding miscegenation. Yet this is the Israel that Ruth Smeeth and HnH are prominent supporters of and opposition to this is ‘anti-Semitism’ according to HnH.

Smeeth is also prominent member of the JLM which is affiliatedto the World Zionist Organisation. The WZO is one of the main pillars of Israeli Apartheid. It has what Ha’aretz called a ‘land theft division’.  It is complicit in the colonisation of the West Bank. And this trollope was not only Deputy Director of HnH but her politics permeate throughout this bogus ‘anti-fascist’ organisation.

I don’t care if 99.9% of British Jews were to support Israel. It would still not be anti-Semitic to oppose Zionism. It would just mean that British Jews were racists. Fortunately this is not the case but this is the basis on which HnH and others term anti-Zionist ‘anti-Semitic’.

Thirty years ago I wrote an articleSEARCHLIGHT Undermining Anti-fascists, helping Zionists’ for Palestine Solidarity magazine. It is as relevant now as it was then.

Hate not Hope is a honey trap, a money making operation for owner, Nick Lowles.  Despite its attempt to portray itself as a campaign, it is a Limited Companyno. 08188502. It has no democratic structures or accountability.

Smeeth is one of its 7 directors. According to its accountsit has assets and liabilities of nearly a thousand pounds.

However there is also Hope Not Hate Charitable Trust No. 02738367.  This has had 31 officers, 23 of whom have resigned, including Sonia Gable, wife of Searchlight Anti-fascist Magazine and Ruth Smeeth, who resigned shortly before becoming an MP in March 2015.

HnH is the bastard child of Gerry Gable’s Searchlight Magazinewhich used to trade information on Marxists and Anarchists to MI5 and the Special Branch in return for information on fascists. Searchlight is now almost defunct, having not updated its website for nearly 8 months.

Searchlight and HnH fell out in an unseemly squabble about money. It was a split without any principle and was mourned by the Jewish Chronicle as a ‘tragedy’.Whether the falling out of a gang of thieves merits such a description I shall leave to my readers!

Searchlight Editor Gerry Gable was caught with his pants down in 1977 when a memoto his Editor at London Weekend Television, Barry Cox, was leaked to the New Statesman. This was when the then Labour government was in the process of deporting former CIA agent Phil Agee, who had blown the cover on CIA operations in South America, and radical journalist Mark Hosenball. As far as Gable was concerned the organiser of their Defence Campaign, Phil Kelly (later Editor of Tribune) was a PLO terrorist.

HnH continued with the political methods of Searchlight, not least the belief that opposition to Zionism is ‘anti-Semitic’. This is personified in the disgusting Ruth Smeeth who falsely alleged that Marc Wadsworth, a Black anti-racist activist who introduced the family of Stephen Lawrence to Nelson Mandela, which was what put the campaign on the map.

So when I received Nick Lowles piece of puff today I decided to write him a letter, which I’m happy to share with you!

The parliamentary lynch mob in support of Ruth Smeeth

Dear Nick,

Thank you for your Xmas message about all your ‘achievements’

You are However Much Too Modest.

Haven't you forgotten another few ' achievements'? Please permit me to list them:

1.    We Helped Propagate the Poisonous Zionist Campaign that Falsely Alleged Anti-Semitism in the Labour Party

2.    We did this in conjunction with our former Deputy Director and CIA Asset Ruth Smeeth MP whose seat We Also  Helped Lose

3.    We targeted Black Anti-racists such as Jackie Walker and called them racists, in much the same way as the National Front used to accuse anti-fascists of (anti-White) racism. The allegation in this case was that they were ‘anti-Jewish’.

4.    Ruth Smeeth, a ‘protected’ asset of the US Embassy according to Wikileaks, demonised Marc Wadsworth and falsely accused him of ‘anti-Semitism’ because he had called out her links with the Tory press.

5.    We even targeted Anti-Zionist Jews like Tony Greenstein and Moshe Machover

6.    We also targeted and demonised anti-racist MP Chris Williamson

Yes I agree Nick.  You have indeed achieved a lot during the past year.  You will forgive me if I don’t contribute towards your funds given that the Israeli Embassy is more than willing to step in.

Best wishes

Tony

Xmas Under Occupation in Ramallah

December 24, 2019, 10:29 pm

≫ Next: A Big Thank You From the Al Tafawk Centre, Jenin, West Bank, Palestine

≪ Previous: What would you say if an organisation that supported Apartheid in South Africa claimed to be anti-fascist?

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Israel Appears to be Promoting the Xmas Celebrations in Bethlehem this Year as part of normalisation of the Occupation

Hence why it appeared on the BBC - however they still can't erase the Apartheid Wall 

A Big Thank You From the Al Tafawk Centre, Jenin, West Bank, Palestine

December 26, 2019, 8:13 am

≫ Next: Now They are Accusing Bernie Sanders of Anti-Semitism - Let’s Hope He’s Doesn’t Follow in Corbyn’s Footsteps & Apologise to his Accusers

≪ Previous: Xmas Under Occupation in Ramallah

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We raised £860 for the children of the Jenin Refugee Centre

Last month we launched our biannual appeal for the Al Tafawk Centre in Jenin.  We raised a record amount.  Most of the schools in the area have closed because of Trump’s cutting off of funding to UNWRA. Many of the children rely on the Centre for their only meal of the day, so every penny is needed.

We asked people to channel any money they wanted to pay via The Brighton Trust which paid the £25 transmission charge. Amongst those giving were Brighton and Hove UNISON (Local Government) Branch (£100) and UNITE SE 6246 Branch (£100).

We will be making another appeal around May/June as the Centre is particularly busy over the summer when there is no school.  Once Again Many Thanks and here are a few pictures of a child holding the receipt.

If you would like to contribute in the run up to the summer please send any donation to:

The Brighton Trust,

Sort Code 09-01-28

Account Number: 91420311

Tony Greenstein

Now They are Accusing Bernie Sanders of Anti-Semitism - Let’s Hope He’s Doesn’t Follow in Corbyn’s Footsteps & Apologise to his Accusers

December 27, 2019, 7:52 am

≫ Next: The ‘Anti-Semitism’ Wars Continue as Britain’s Zionist Leaders Declare That They Want To tear up the Chakrabarti Report and Purge the Left

≪ Previous: A Big Thank You From the Al Tafawk Centre, Jenin, West Bank, Palestine

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In America today it is the Zionists' friend Donald Trump, who is the bastion of Anti-Semitism and White Supremacism 

Phillip Weiss of Mondoweiss has just penned an article about a newly launched Zionist campaign to portray Bernie Sanders as an anti-Semite. As Bernie rises in the polls, the Zionists are becoming worried. They are hoping to replicate the success they had in Britain with Jeremy Corbyn.

Let us hope Bernie Sanders learns from Corbyn’s abysmal failure to understand the campaign against him and what he was up against. One lesson is particularly important.

Never ever apologise to these malevolent McCarthyists. Their concern is not about anti-Semitism it is about Israel. In their minds Israel is the ‘new Jew’.[i]If you apologise all it will prove is that they are right and you are anti-Semitic.

You may think that such a campaign is crazy. After all, Bernie is Jewish and if elected he would  be the first Jewish President of the United States. I hate to disappoint you but today 'anti-Semitism' has little or nothing to do with Jews or anti-Jewish hatred.  It’s about Zionism and Israel.

There was no greater opponent of racism than Jeremy Corbyn. Throughout his career he had been a great friend of the oppressed. Even getting arrested fighting Apartheid in South Africa. He supported all manner of Jewish causes. Even Professor Geoffrey Alderman, a right-wing Zionist and historian of British Jewry, asked Is Jeremy Corbyn really anti-Semitic?[ii]Alderman’s conclusion was that ‘the grounds for labelling him an anti-Semite simply do not exist.’ However Geoffrey Alderman is that rare creature, an honest Zionist.

By way of contrast, the Editor of the Jewish Chronicle, Stephen Pollard, a founder member of the Islamaphobic Henry Jackson Society[iii]is Alderman’s opposite.  Pollard, who led the campaign against Corbyn, is a man who would stop at nothing and for whom no depth was too low and no ditch was too deep when it came to defaming Corbyn.

The Jewish Chronicle and the Zionist Board of Deputies of British Jews waged a virulent defamatory campaign to paint the hapless Corbyn as the next Oswald Moseley, if not Hitler himself.  In a letterto his readers during the recent General Election campaign Pollard wrote that:‘Over the next six weeks we will discover if the  British public are prepared to put an anti-Semite into Number Ten.’[iv]

A hapless Corbyn never understood what had hit him

Pollard was joined on November 26^th by the Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis, who calledfor a vote against the Labour Party.[i]Mirvis, who trained as a rabbi at the Har Ezion Yeshiva at the Alon Shvut settlement had no hesitation in working with racist far-Right settlers.[ii] Despite the pleaof Nina Morris-Evans in Ha’aretz and others, he chose to participate in the March of the Flags on March 24 2017 on Jerusalem Day with settler youth whose favourite chant was ‘Death to the Arabs’.[iii]  Ephraim Mirvis grew up as part of the White Jewish community in Apartheid South Africa. It is clear that Mirvis failed to learn any lessons from the demise of Apartheid.

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[i]           Labour antisemitism: Corbyn not fit for high office, says Chief Rabbi Mirvis, The Times, 26 November 2019, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/labour-antisemitism-corbyn-not-fit-for-high-office-says-ephraim-mirvis-0thlclsns

[ii]          Yeshivat Har Etzion, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yeshivat_Har_Etzion

[iii]          Chief Rabbi and Lord Sacks should not back this march, Jewish News, 25.5.17., https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/chief-rabbi-and-lord-sacks-should-not-back-this-march/

Corbyn never knew what hit him when he was accused of anti-Semitism. He resembled a rabbit, frozen in the headlights of a car. His only response to the accusations were that he wasn’t personally anti-Semitic. He never seemed to understand that when Zionists accuse someone of ‘anti-Semitism’ they don’t mean hatred of Jews but opposition to Zionism and the Israeli state.

Instead Corbyn and advisers such as Seamus Milne did their best to appease and please those who were intent on destroying them. What was tragic was that the more Corbyn did to please his detractors the more they demanded of him. If Corbyn had converted to Judaism and promised to go on Aliyah it is doubtful that that would have been enough.

Len McLuskey, General Secretary of Britain’s biggest union UNITE, wrotein Huff Post that ‘Corbyn Has Answered Concerns On Anti-Semitism, But Jewish Community Leaders Are Refusing To Take 'Yes' For An Answer’.[viii]Which was of course true. The Zionist leaders of British Jewry were interested in only one thing and that was the head of Jeremy Corbyn.  That was why, no matter whom he threw under the bus - Ken Livingstone, Chris Williamson, Peter Willsman, Marc Wadsworth, Jackie Walker or myself – it was never enough. It was Corbyn’s own scalp which the Zionist lobby wanted.

It is extremely unfortunate that those who should have known better, not least Jewish Voice for Labour, imagined to the end that this was about anti-Semitism.  It was NEVER about anti-Semitism, which was why arguing that ‘only’ 0.06% of members of the Labour Party had been accused of anti-Semitism was irrelevant. Tom Watson had declaredthat as long as there was one single ‘anti-Semite’ in the Labour Party the campaign would go on.[ix]

The obvious answer to Watson and others on the Labour Right who were so concerned about ‘anti-Semitism’ was to ask them whether this also applied to other forms of racism and if so, whether Watson, John Mann, Louise Ellman and Ruth Smeeth would be handing in their resignations any time soon.

Watson, Ellman and Mann had all supported the ‘hostile environment’ policy of the Tories, which led to the Windrush Scandal and the deportation of dozens of Black British citizens ‘back’ to the West Indians.[x]Why was it that only 6 Labour MPs, including Corbyn, McDonnell and Diane Abbot, had opposed the 2014 Immigration Act which made the ‘hostile environment’ policy law?[xi]

Now the same is happening in the United States to Bernie Sanders. Of course Sanders is not Corbyn. For one thing he is more intelligent. For another he is himself Jewish. But what started in Britain has not stayed in Britain.

A new group, Democrats Against Anti-Semitism has been set up.[xii]  Does this ring any bells?  It seems as if the troll group Labour Against Anti-Semitism, which was composed of anyone but Labour supporters, has migrated across the Atlantic.

Democrats Against Anti-Semitisminformtheir audience that ‘Sanders may be ethnically Jewish, but his rhetoric, voting history and associations have not reflected the values of a friend of Jewish people…’

As Elli Valley points out even the term ‘ethnically Jewish’is anti-Semitic implying Jews are a race, as anti-Semites have historically asserted. Jews are not an ethnicity, race or tribe. The only difference between Jews and non-Jews is their religion. There is no single Jewish culture.

DAS are quite up front about their agenda.  It is all about Israel, not hatred of Jews.

‘Speaking of anti-Israel dogwhistling, Sanders himself, much like his comrades, has preached anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian and, at times, blatant anti-Semitic talking points…’ [xiii]

Barri Weiss of the New York Times

Supporters include Bari Weiss, the Jonathan Freedland of the New York Times and its Opinion Editor, although she is somewhat more intelligent than Jonathan.

Boris Johnson's racist and antisemitic book

There are a number of striking parallels between the United States and Britain.  In Britain the Zionist Establishment concentrated their fire on Corbyn even though they were aware that it was Prime Minister Boris Johnson who was the genuine racist and anti-Semite. Not only had he calledBlack people ‘picanninies’ with ‘watermelon smiles’ but he had penned an openly racist and anti-Semitic book 72 Virgins in 2004.

72 Virginsreferredto Arabs as having “hook noses” and “slanty eyes”,[xiv] described a mixed-race person as “coffee-coloured” and others as “half-caste”. The term “Negroid” was also used.

It describeda Jewish character as an ‘unethical businessman with a large nose’, who exploits immigrant workers and black women. Johnson described a Jewish character called Sammy Katz, as having a

“proud nose and curly hair.” He spoke of ‘some kind of fiddling of the figures by the oligarchs who ran the TV stations (and who were mainly, as some lost no time in pointing out, of Jewish origin).

What was remarkable about the confected ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign was that not one anti-Semitic comment could be attributed to Corbyn.  Imagine if he had made the comments quoted above. Exactly the same is true of Sanders.  

Whilst anonymous Internet Zionist groups like Democrats Against Anti-Semitism are set up to attack a Jewish candidate, the President of the United States, Donald Trump, is a vicious racist and anti-Semite who receives the plaudits of the Zionist lobby. His former Strategic Advisor, Steve Bannon, the founder of the racist, sexist and homophic Breitbart News was a guest of honour at the 2017 Zionist Organisation of America annual gala dinner.[i]

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[i]           Anti-Semites feted by Zionist Organization of America, Electronic Intifada, 15 November 2017, https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/michael-f-brown/anti-semites-feted-zionist-organization-america

Hasidic Jews take selfies at Trump Rally

Donald Trump's History of Anti-Semitism Which Zionism Ignores

Trump’s election campaign for President in 2016 was the most anti-Semitic in American history as Dana Millbank explained.[xvi]Examples of his anti-Semitism included:

Ø Telling Jewish Republicans that they wouldn’t support him “because I don’t want your money.”

ØTweeting an image from an anti-Semitic message board with a Star of David atop a pile of cash. Trump later objected to his campaign’s decision to remove the image.

ØSaying “I don’t have a message” for supporters who threatened anti-Semitic violence against a Jewish journalist, and Melania Trump saying the writer “provoked” the threats.

ØBranding his campaign with the “America First” slogan of the anti-Semitic pre-war movement.

ØAlleging that “blood suckers” and “a global power structure” including “international banks” are secretly plotting against ordinary Americans.

ØAnd, when urged by the Anti-Defamation League to stop using traditionally anti-Semitic tropes, repeats the tropes in an ad with images of prominent Jews, including George Soros.

Ø Once in office, in addition to making common cause with the Nazis of Charlottesville, who were ‘fine people’ Trump stocked his administration with white nationalists like Bannon, Steve Miller and Sebastian Gorka.

Trump has also hesitated to condemn the rise of anti-Semitic threats, issued a Holocaust remembrance statement without mention of Jews; lamented the attempts to silence Alex Jones, who peddles anti-Semitic conspiracy theories; and declared himself a “nationalist” having made verbal attacks on “globalists,” particularly George Soros.[xvii]

In a speech on October 13 2016 Trump told supporters that Hillary Clinton “meets in secret with international banks to plot the destruction of U.S. sovereignty”. The Zionist Anti-Defamation League issued the mildest of rebukes urging Trump to “avoid rhetoric and tropes that historically have been used against Jews.”

Trump’s response to his critics was a final campaign advert illustrated with images of prominent Jews: George Soros (accompanied by the words “those who control the levers of power”), Fed Chair Janet Yellen (with the words “global special interests”) and Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein (following the “global power structure”). The ad said Hilary Clinton partners “with these people who don’t have your good in mind.”

Trump retweeted a message from @WhiteGenocideTM, phony crime statistics that originated with neo-Nazis and a quote from Benito Mussolini. His campaign blamed an intern for tweeting an image of Nazi soldiers superimposed on the American flag next to Trump’s likeness.

Breitbart News, the alt-right website which was run by Trump’s previous campaign chief, Steve Bannon, referred to Bill Kristol as a “renegade Jew” and journalist Anne Applebaum as a “Polish, Jewish, American elitist.”

But it’s not simply crude anti-Semitic stereotypes that the Zionist attack dogs going for Bernie Sanders are happy with.  Trump also embraces the most anti-Semitic wing of Zionism itself which holds that Jews owe a loyalty to Israel over and above that of the United States.

That is why it is ironic that the IHRA  definition of ‘anti-Semitism’ states that ‘Holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel’ is anti-Semitic. Obviously it is anti-Semitic to do so but it is Zionism which purports to speak on behalf of all Jews, wherever they live.  That is why Israel calls itself a ‘Jewish state’. A state not just of its Jewish citizens but of all Jews.

In August Trump toldreporters that ‘Jewish people that vote for a Democrat – I think it shows either a total lack of knowledge or great disloyalty. And who were they disloyal to?  Israel. This prompted Conservative Republican media pundit Ann Coulter to tweet` “Could we start slowly by getting them”– i.e. the Jews – “to like America?”

Trump has accused Jews of not loving Israel enough.  Imagine that he were to accuse an American Muslim of not loving Pakistan enough!  This should not be a surprise. ‘Dual Loyalty’ is inherent in Zionism which consciously seeks to alienate Jews from the states they live in. In 2013 a questionnaire was distributed in America asking Jewish respondents to indicate where their allegiance would lie in case of an Israeli-U.S. crisis. It was sponsored by Israel’s Immigrant Absorption and Foreign ministries and was only halted by Netanyahu when it received unfavourable publicity.

In his addressto Sheldon Adelson’s Israeli-American Council Trump spoke of

These socialist, gay-loving, abortion-advocating, Democrat-voting Jews of America (who) are not real Jews. No way – they don’t even love Israel. But you do. You are the genuine Chosen People of our era.

Trump and his non-Jewish Conservative supporters have taken upon themselves the right to define who is a Jew based on their support of Israel. 

The most ludicrous example of Trump’s redefinition of anti-Semitism was when he told 4 Black Congresswomen to ‘go home’ accusing them of ‘anti-Semitism’ for having criticised Israel.

When Ilhan Omar called on the US to use aid money to pressure the Israeli government to ensure "full rights to Palestinians Trump describedher as hating Israel and Jews.American Jews who voted Democrat were ‘disloyal or ignorant".[xviii] Accordingto Trump Rashida Tlaib, the first Palestinian American elected as a Congresswoman, ‘hates Israel and all Jewish people. She is an anti-Semite. She and her 3 friends are the new face of the Democrat Party. Live with it!’

Trump explainedthat "Five years ago, the concept of even talking about this ... even three years ago, of cutting off aid to Israel because of two people who hate Israel and hate Jewish people... I can't believe we're having this conversation."

The ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign against Bernie Sanders is likely to be every bit as ugly as that against Jeremy Corbyn, especially if he continues his present progress in the polls.

Below are two articles on a subject I will return to.  Trump’s recent Executive Order which treats Jews not as a religious group but a national/racial community.  Criticising the State of Israel will potentially be seen as anti-Semitic and subject to prosecution under civil rights legislation.

Trump Elevates an Anti-Semitic Slur Into Law

False claims of national origin play into the goals of the Christian and Israeli right.

By Judith Butler

| December 21, 2019, 11:34 AM

Hasidic Jews shoot selfies under a banner that reads: "Uman Loves Trump", prior to the annual Rosh Hashanah celebration on September 9, 2018 in Uman, Ukraine. Sean Gallup/Getty Images

When U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar made the controversial claim, “I want to talk about the political influence in this country that says it is OK to push for allegiance to a foreign country,” she was criticizedby many for invoking an old anti-Semitic trope of dual loyalty to the United States and Israel.

The then-mayor of Chicago, Rahm Emanuel, replied in the Atlantic,

“Representative Omar is repeating some of the ugliest stereotypes about Jews—tropes that have been unleashed by anti-Semites throughout history. She is casting Jewish Americans as the other, suggesting a dual loyalty that calls our devotion to America into question.”

Omar’s own explanation was that she had not intended to characterize Jews as a group but was objecting to the pressure put upon elected representatives like her to display loyalty to another country, Israel. That wasn’t good enough for Emanuel, who claimed,

“In embracing [this trope], Omar is associating herself with calamities from the Spanish Inquisition to the Russian pogroms to the Holocaust. That’s not historical company that any American should want to keep.”

But one of Omar’s loudest critics keeps that same company. In April, in a speech delivered in Las Vegas to the Republican Jewish Coalition, Trump referred to Israel’s leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, as “your prime minister.” He addressed American Jews as if they were Israelis, closing the historical and conceptual gap between them. Trump warnedthat a Democratic victory in 2020 “would cripple our country and very well could leave Israel out there all by yourselves.”

Trump’s “you” made a presumption about Jewish loyalty. Although rebukedby the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee, Trump continues to harp on the same themes. He revived another anti-Semitic trope of Jewish obsession with profit by telling an assembled Jewish audience that Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s wealth tax would not gain their support, and that Jews should “be my biggest supporters because you’ll be out of business in about 15 minutes.”

The Executive Order on Combating Anti-Semitism, issued by Trump on Dec. 11, follows in part from this sequence of remarks. It both seeks to put the slur of dual loyalty into law and attempts to appeal to Jews and to combat anti-Semitism on campuses by denying the vast history of Jewish cultures, practices, and forms of belonging that precede the emergence of the State of Israel and continue to proliferate outside of that framework for understanding Jewish life.

The Anti-Semitism Awareness Act, introduced in 2018, stalled in Congress for reasons well articulatedby the American Civil Liberties Union: It threatened to chill academic environments, suppress critical thought, and mandate political positions that ought to be openly contested. The president’s order has effectively leapt over that stalemate. Viewpoints that fail to conform to foreign policy and histories of Jewish life that do not comport with biblical forms of state legitimation will become fugitive forms of knowledge, suspected or accused of anti-Semitism.

As others have written, this order poses a direct threat to the study of Palestinian and Jewish social and political history, culture, and forms of belonging, as well as potentially suppressing activism and public speech in favor of Palestinian freedoms and rights as well as dissident Jewish views on Israel.

This order, however, does something even more insidious: It seeks to regulate the very idea of who is Jewish by either assuming a national affiliation with the State of Israel or testing the lack of that affiliation.

This order, however, does something even more insidious: It seeks to regulate the very idea of who is Jewish by either assuming a national affiliation with the State of Israel or testing the lack of that affiliation.

The “real” Jew, in the order’s framing, not only supports Israel but also belongs to Israel as one belongs to a nation, and the “false” Jew is critical of Israel or finds their Jewish values and practices outside of the Zionist framework.

The order seeks to close the gap between Jews who are U.S. citizens and Israeli Jews, at the expense of Palestinian citizens of Israel and those left stateless. The manifest aim of the executive order is to include anti-Semitism as a civil rights violation so that it can be prosecuted in the same way that discrimination on the basis of race, color, and national origin already are. Considered as a religion, Jews are only protected by laws that prohibit discrimination on the basis of religion. And though the order recognizes that religion is one way to define a Jew, it seeks to set national belonging as another. Under the terms of the order, no matter where Jews reside in the diaspora, they are held to have a common national origin.

There is no clear historical evidence of that national origin, and even if there were, it does not follow that modern states should be based on biblical lore. By assuming that Jews are bound together by belonging originally to the biblical “nation of Israel” and that this nation is continuous with the present State of Israel, it enters the Bible into a contemporary definition of the nation-state and nationality. This move nods toward those evangelicals who want biblical authority to guide foreign policy and who have long seen the state of Israel as a necessary fulfilment of prophecy, and it also portrays the biblical nation of Israel as actualized in the present in the State of Israel.

Generations of thinkers have wrestled with forms of Jewish belonging and affiliation—secular, religious, post-national—but the Trump administration bypasses the complexity of Jewish history and debates with a spurious claim of national origin, backed up by biblical authority. This biblical claim is one of the founding justifications for the State of Israel, and for the expansion of its borders—the same claims that dispossessed more than 700,000 Palestinians of their land in 1948 and that deprive over 4 million of them of their rights today. No surprise, then, that this executive order will strengthen efforts to suppress Palestinian advocacy efforts on campuses and throughout the public sphere.

Who has reduced Judaism to this? Where are the rabbis? The Bundists, who sought a socialist form of Jewish belonging? The Mizrahim, Jews of Arab descent who lived alongside Muslims? This claim not only binds all Jews together in this biblically established national origin but also establishes the State of Israel, conceived as the fulfillment of that biblical notion, as the continuation of the original or defining embodiment of Jewish life and its true representative. This definition implies that all Jews truly belong to the State of Israel, whether or not we have ever been its citizens; further, the State of Israel is held up as the true and only representative of the Jewish people.

Under this framework, Jews do not quite belong in the United States, as has always been the contention of the evangelical anti-Semites or the neo-Nazis who describe themselvesas “white Zionists.”

In this framing, Jewish loyalty must belong to Israel first—rendering them second-class citizens elsewhere.

Many histories disappear in this telling: Jews who refused to go to Israel or who were sent back from its borders, communist and socialist and anarchist Jews, universalists, secularists, Bundists. The argument of the Talmudist Daniel Boyarin that the Jewish people should be understood as an expressly diasporic nation is not acceptable in a Judaism framed this way. The myriad transnational histories of the Jewish people do not finally converge in a so-called return to a state of Israel. These crossings and migrations, and the communities they created, meticulously traced by historians and geographers, are effaced by this crude welding together of biblical past and with the anti-democratic nation-state.

Anyone who now criticizes the State of Israel, defined as the representative national unity of the Jewish people, is now framed as criticizing the Jews and engaging in anti-Semitism. Criticize the State of Israel and you criticize the nation of the Jews, and since Jews are now a nationality represented by the State of Israel, you may now face charges of anti-Semitism under the Civil Rights Act. The circle closes, sacrificing critical speech and thought, freedom of expression, the understanding of Jewish history and culture in its diversity outside the framework of biblical and political Zionism, and the rights of assembly and expression that should be accorded to public advocacy for Palestinians.

Those who claim that Jews are not legitimately or adequately represented by the State of Israel, or who hold that Jewish values are in fact antithetical to the policies of the Israeli state, fail to conform to these standards of Jewish identity and can more easily be accused of disloyalty. A litmus test has been established. Omar’s supposed accusations of dual loyalty are precisely what is now prescribed by the executive order.

Critically, this order coincides with the far-right politics of Israel itself, legitimatized and endorsed by the Trump administration. The Israeli government has long invoked biblical claims to legitimate land theft. It continues now in the effort to declare legal all settlements on the West Bank, reaffirmedby U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo as U.S. policy on Nov. 18, and in Netanyahu’s proposal to annexthe West Bank, for which he uses the biblical name Judea and Samaria. Although the executive order invokes national origin as a different basis of discrimination against Jews than religious belief, it proceeds to enshrine a specific religious belief in law that has been mobilized for political purposes as a defining feature of an entire people.

The executive order also repeats and solidifies the basic tenets of what’s known as the nation-state law, adopted by the State of Israel in July 2018. The nation-state law asserts “Jewish settlement as a national value” and affirms that “the right to exercise national self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish people.” Israeli nationality was previously separated from religious criteria, but now the state describes itself as a “Jewish collectivity” that bears the sole right to political self-determination within its borders. The more than 20 percent of Israeli citizens of Palestinian origin are now officially second-class citizens. Indeed, the nation-state law explicitly rules out the principle and practice of Palestinian self-determination, thus destroying the basis for an independent Palestinian state or for the possibility of a shared form of governance between Israelis and Palestinians. It sets up Palestinians as second-class citizens who will be disadvantaged when making any claim of discrimination and licenses the silencing of Palestinian advocacy on campuses and in the public sphere more generally.

The nation-state law also affirms“Jewish settlement as a national value.”The boundaries of the State of Israel are imagined as eventually matching the geographical entirety of biblical Palestine, thus making occupation permanent and suspending the basic rights of Palestinians for not just their lands but to shape their own political futures. Just as Trump’s definition of the Jews as bound by national origin invokes a biblical mandate translated into settler expansion, so the nation-state law proclaims Israel as the original and potential state of all Jewish people, provided they comply with both rabbinic and political standards. Just as the Jews are now defined as a nation by Trump, so the nation of Israel establishes itself as the representative of all Jews.

The effort to patrol and censor Palestinian advocacy on U.S. campuses is now strengthened by the order’s acceptance of the definition of anti-Semitism formulated by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, which includes as examples the “targeting of the State of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity” and “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.” As these criteria become adopted by courts and government agencies, universities, backed by the U.S. Department of Education, can more easily make draconian decisions about suppressing campus groups such as Students for Justice in Palestine or Jewish Voice for Peace, and about cutting programs that include teaching and scholarship from any number of perspectives that do not conform to the definitions and perspectives now enforced by U.S. domestic and foreign policy.

Will grounded knowledge on the Middle East based on evidence and subject to peer review still receive funding if it fails to mimic and enforce U.S. foreign policy? Can we know the history of Palestine or the history of the Jews under such conditions? Can Palestinians still openly call for their rights and their political freedoms, or will their desire for freedom and equality be forever punished by the crude and twisted allegation of anti-Semitism? The threat of censorship now clearly looms.

The executive order is a cruel exploitation and abuse of the charge of anti-Semitism in a world in which actual xenophobia, racism, and anti-Semitism are on the rise. The solid ground for both knowledge and politics is now slipping as Trump enshrines anti-Semitism, ignorance, and injustice into law.

Judith Butler is Maxine Elliot Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Program of Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley. Her next book, The Force of Nonviolence, is forthcoming from Verso.

Trump First, Jews Later

Israeli government officials are helping to normalize the violent anti-Semitism of the Christian right.

BYMAIRAV ZONSZEIN

 | NOVEMBER 6, 2018, 4:06 AM

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks with U.S. President Donald Trump prior to the president's departure from Ben Gurion International Airport in Tel Aviv on May 23, 2017. (KOBI GIDEON/GPO VIA GETTY IMAGES)

When U.S. President Donald Trump arrived in Pittsburgh last week following the single deadliest attack on Jews in American history, Pittsburgh’s mayor and elected officials refused to meet him. The only public official to greet him was the Israeli ambassador to the United States, Ron Dermer—an American and former Republican Party operative who became an Israeli citizen and close confidant of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Presenting Israel’s talking points, Dermer equated the anti-Semitic massacre with left-wing campus boycotts of Israel and made a point of defending Trump in the face of charges that the president’s inflammatory campaign rhetoric amounted to incitement. Even the former Anti-Defamation League chief Abraham Foxman—who has always stood by the Israeli establishment—denounced the Netanyahu government’s decision to stand in solidarity with Trump.

Dermer’s baseless and harmful moral equivalency attests to the deep-rooted ideological and political bond between Israel and the Christian right in the United States and Europe—a bond that willingly overlooks and downplays white nationalism and Christian anti-Semitism in exchange for the promotion of Israeli political interests and dominance in the Middle East.

What Pittsburgh cemented is just how far the Israeli leadership is willing to go to protect its nationalist interests, even at the expense of condoning explicit forms of anti-Semitism that are couched in a form of white Christian supremacism hostile to immigrants and people of color, especially Muslims—a form of Trumpian xenophobia that fits the Israeli government’s worldview like a glove.

The former American Jewish Congress head Henry Siegman, who was born in Germany in 1930, told Israeli Minister of Education Naftali Bennett in New York days after the attack that he knows about a thing or two about anti-Semitism, adding, “It is not very wise of you coming to tell us that this is not your problem just because he’s helping Israel.”

Israel has never tried to hide its alliance with the Christian right. Netanyahu welcomed Trump as president despite anti-Semitic tropes in his election campaign and provided a decidedly overdue and muted response to neo-Nazis chanting “Jews will not replace us” in Charlottesville last year. Unlike in France, where Netanyahu has repeatedly called for French Jews to leave for Israel in the wake of terrorist attacks, there was no such call after the Pittsburgh synagogue massacre. The message seems to be that keeping diaspora Jews safe comes second to fawning over Trump.

Last year, addressing the annual conference of Christians United for Israel—the largest U.S. pro-Israel lobbying group—Netanyahu said the country has “no better friends on earth.” Netanyahu went on to rabble-rouse the crowd with his Huntingtonian rhetoric:

“It’s a struggle of civilizations. It’s a struggle of free societies against the forces of militant Islam,”

he said.

“They want to conquer the Middle East, they want to destroy the State of Israel, and then they want to conquer the world.”

Christian Zionists—specifically evangelicals—support Jewish ethnonationalism and the implementation of a Greater Israel devoid of Arabs because they believe the return of Jews to the Holy Land will bring about the End of Days, when Jesus restores a divine kingdom in which all Jews either perish or become Christians. This is an inherently anti-Semitic theological position, but Israel has long dismissed it in favor of political support. And it didn’t begin with Netanyahu.

Menachem Begin, Israel’s prime minister from 1977 to 1983, was the first Israeli leader to openly endorse the support of the Christian right in America and he did so for obvious political reasons. In the fall of 1981, after Israel’s bombing of the Osirak reactor in Iraq and its anti-PLO campaign in Lebanon, Begin faced criticism from U.S. Christian groups. The National Council of Churches had called on Reagan to stop arms shipments to Israel.

Begin made the strategic decision to tap into the religious right, which he presciently realized was a burgeoning power base in the United States. Begin formalized his relationship with the Rev. Jerry Falwell, then the head of the Moral Majority, by declaring the organization’s members devoted friends of Israel, with an explicit nod to the fact that it was putting aside anti-Semitic undertones. As Begin said at the time: “There are some who object to this. But if a man or group will stretch out his hand and say, ‘I am a friend of Israel,’ I will say, ‘Israel has very strong enemies and needs friends.’”

That logic has guided Israel’s foreign policy in Europe as well in recent years. While Israel relies on the billions in aid it receives from Washington annually, the same cannot be said for Netanyahu’s alliance with far-right leaders in Europe.

In July, Netanyahu welcomed Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban to Israel, despite his Fidesz party’s notoriously anti-Semitic, xenophobic, and anti-gay platform.

Netanyahu also turned a blind eye to the fact that Orban has praised Nazi ally Miklos Horthy as an “exceptional statesman” and that he ran his last election campaign on an explicitly anti-Semitic platform targeting George Soros. This campaign recently produced tangible gains: Soros’s Open Society Foundations, which promotes democratic causes, was forced out of Hungary earlier this year, and just last month the U.S.-accredited Central European University that Soros founded in Budapest announced it would also be forced to leave. Across the Atlantic, a Trump-loving extremist sent pipe bombs to the 88-year-old philanthropist.

Israel’s Foreign Ministry has not only backed Orban’s attacks on Soros, but it also has peddled its own incitement and conspiracy theories against Soros for funding Israeli anti-occupation and human rights groups. In February, Netanyahu accused Soros and the New Israel Fund of funding a campaign against Israel’s plan to deport African asylum-seekers—a very similar charge to Trump’s baseless accusation that Soros is behind the caravan of migrants from Central America. Other figures who have vilified Soros include former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke and Netanyahu’s son Yair, who posted an anti-Semitic meme of Soros last year, which won praise from Duke and the neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer.

Support for Israel also allows white supremacists to make the claim that they are immune from anti-Semitism.

This was clearly on display last week when Iowa Rep. Steve King—a Republican who has openly endorsed Nazi sympathizers and white supremacists in the United States, Canada, and Europe—lashed out at a constituent who likened his racist rhetoric to that of the Pittsburgh shooter, responding, “It is not tolerable to accuse me of being associated with that guy who shot 11 people in Pittsburgh. I am a person who has supported Israel since the beginning.”

Netanyahu has not only demonstrated that anti-Semitism is tolerable if it means garnering support for Israel; he went a step further and dabbled in Holocaust revisionism when he signed an agreement with Poland earlier this year that effectively absolves the country of its role in the extermination of its Jewish population during World War II, despite ample evidence of passive and active collaboration. In a rare move, Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust museum condemned the agreement.

While Israel may have much to gain geopolitically from disregarding threats posed by Christian anti-Semitism and white supremacy—and branding anti-Semitism as an exclusively Islamic phenomenon instead—this has had disastrous results in the United States.

As Brookings Institution senior fellow Daniel Byman recently pointed out in Foreign Policy, the Pittsburgh shooting was a terrorist act:

“It is hard to imagine armed Islamic State supporters marching through town singing the praises of Islamic law while the government claims it has no power to act due to the First and Second Amendments.”

Since 9/11, the United States has both ignored the domestic threats posted by white supremacists and failed to confront white supremacists within the law enforcement community.

According to a recent report in the New York Times, “White supremacists and other far-right extremists have killed far more people since Sept. 11, 2001, than any other category of domestic extremist.” And according to the Anti-Defamation League, 71 percent of extremist-related fatalities in the United States between 2008 and 2017 can be traced to members of the far-right or white-supremacist movements.  Islamic extremists were responsible for just 26 percent.

The 11 people murdered in Pittsburgh were not targeted just for being Jewish, but also for being identified with a pro-immigration, pro-refugee, liberal worldview that is anathema to Trump’s nativism, which peddles in classic anti-Semitic tropes. As the philosopher Slavoj Zizek argued last year,

“In the antisemitic imagination, the ‘Jew’ is the invisible master who secretly pulls the strings, which is why Muslim immigrants are not today’s Jews … nobody claims they secretly pull the strings—if one sees in their ‘invasion of Europe’ a secret plot, then Jews have to be behind it.”

The toxic combination of Israel’s alliance with the Christian right and Trump’s racist and xenophobic rhetoric has led to a reality in which, just 70 years after the Holocaust, Israel is excusing and normalizing the sort of violent anti-Semitism that it so often reminds the world is the reason why a Jewish state exists.

Mairav Zonszein is a journalist who splits her time between the United States and Israel. She has written for the Washington Post, the New York Times and +972magazine. Twitter: @MairavZ

See also

Trump’s Pitch to Israelis and Evangelicals: Make America Hate (Jews) Again

Bradley Burston

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[i]           The New Jew-Hatred: Right and Left, https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/new-jew-hatred-right-left/Commentary, December 2017.

[ii]          The Spectator 8 May 2019 https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2019/05/is-jeremy-corbyn-really-anti-semitic/

[iii]          The crocodile tears of Stephen Pollard, Jewish Voices for Labour 4 August 2018, https://www.jewishvoiceforlabour.org.uk/article/the-crocodile-tears-of-stephen-pollard/

[iv]          Stephen Pollard, The Editor’s Letter, 31 October 2019, https://drive.google.com/file/d/1yIyL467xI-Mea1LyqkEnR7pmU_G2IWfb/view

[v]          Labour antisemitism: Corbyn not fit for high office, says Chief Rabbi Mirvis, The Times, 26 November 2019, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/labour-antisemitism-corbyn-not-fit-for-high-office-says-ephraim-mirvis-0thlclsns

[vi]          Yeshivat Har Etzion, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yeshivat_Har_Etzion

[vii]         Chief Rabbi and Lord Sacks should not back this march, Jewish News, 25.5.17., https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/chief-rabbi-and-lord-sacks-should-not-back-this-march/

[viii]        Corbyn Has Answered Concerns On Anti-Semitism, But Jewish Community Leaders Are Refusing To Take 'Yes' For An Answer, Huff Post, 16 August 2018, https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/anti-semitism-labour_uk_5b7573dee4b0df9b093ccbc6?guccounter=2

[ix]          Labour supporter exposes Tom Watson's anti-Corbyn sabotage in a heated phone-call, 2 March 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=24&v=kMxyewuQITk&feature=emb_logo

[x]          Chased into 'self-deportation': the most disturbing Windrush case so far, The Guardian 14 September 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/sep/14/scale-misery-devastating-inside-story-reporting-windrush-scandal

[xi]          Just 6 Labour MPs voted against the 2014 Immigration Act that caused the Windrush Scandal – no prizes for guessing who they were, The London Economic, https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/news/just-6-labour-mps-voted-against-the-2014-immigration-act-that-caused-the-windrush-scandal-no-prizes-for-guessing-who-they-were/19/04/

[xii]         https://twitter.com/DemAntisemitism/status/1208737547167252480

[xiii]        https://twitter.com/DemAntisemitism/status/1208737566746300416

[xiv]        https://www.pinknews.co.uk/2019/11/28/boris-johnson-novel-2004-seventy-two-virgins-racist-misogynistic-homophobic/, Boris Johnson’s resurfaced novel contains horrific ‘racist, misogynistic, homophobic’ references, Pink News, 28 November 2019.  

[xv]         Anti-Semites feted by Zionist Organization of America, Electronic Intifada, 15 November 2017, https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/michael-f-brown/anti-semites-feted-zionist-organization-america

[xvi]        Anti-Semitism is no longer an undertone of Trump’s campaign. It’s the melody, https://tinyurl.com/na99wfp Washington Post, 7 November 2016 and Trump’s America is not a safe place for Jews, 28 October 2018, https://tinyurl.com/y7svgpc4 

[xvii]        President Trump’s ignorant attack on George Soros, Washington Post, 5 October 2018, https://tinyurl.com/sfeapwq

[xviii]       Jews Who Vote Democrat Are Disloyal or Ignorant, Trump Says, Ha’aretz 20 August 2019, https://www.haaretz.com/us-news/.premium-jews-who-vote-democrat-are-disloyal-or-ignorant-trump-says-1.7726405 

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The ‘Anti-Semitism’ Wars Continue as Britain’s Zionist Leaders Declare That They Want To tear up the Chakrabarti Report and Purge the Left

January 1, 2020, 6:57 pm

≫ Next: The Campaign Against Antisemitism’s Joe Glasman Claims Credit for the Defeat of Jeremy Corbyn

≪ Previous: Now They are Accusing Bernie Sanders of Anti-Semitism - Let’s Hope He’s Doesn’t Follow in Corbyn’s Footsteps & Apologise to his Accusers

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Tory Jonathan Goldstein, Elected by No-One, ‘Sets five tests for Labour’ – Abandon Corbynism and all trace of Socialism and Anti-Imperialism

Norman Finkelstein recallsin the chimera of British Anti-Semitism how his mother, a survivor of the Nazi concentration camps, remarked that ‘It’s no accident that Jews invented the word chutzpah.’

Chutzpah is a Yiddish word meaning audacity, cheek, to have a nerve. The best example of Chutzpah is the tale of a Jewish boy, who was hauled before a court of law having murderedBboth his parents.  Pleading for mercy the boy declared that the court should be lenient because, after all, he is now an orphan!

Jonathan Goldstein is ‘chairman’ of the wholly unelected Jewish Leadership Council. It used to consist of big Jewish capitalists such as Stanley Kalms of Dixons and Micky Davis of the mining giant Xtrata. Today it consists of the good and great of various Jewish and Zionist organisations. Goldstein is about as reactionary a Tory as it’s possible to find but nonetheless he believes that he has the right to dictate to the Labour Party what it should do and how it should do it.

He believes that Unite trade union should be sorted out and he wants all trace of what he calls ‘Corbynism’ eradicated. It will be a test of the current  leadership candidates as to which one is prepared to stand up to this moral blackmail.  We know that Keir Starmer and Rebecca Long-Bailey will haul up the white flag of surrender. It will be interesting to see whether Ian Lavery is prepared to do what Corbyn shied away from and that is to call these reactionary Zionists out for the racists they are.

It is almost as if Ed Miliband's leadership was a dry run for Corbyn - despite Miliband himself being Jewish

The JLC has been one of a number of major Zionist groups involved in the fake anti-Semitism campaign. They are pleased with their ‘success’ at having defeated Corbyn. The issue of ‘anti-Semitism’ was barely mentioned on the doorstep. Its impact lay in the inability of Jeremy Corbyn and his advisors to stand up to these political blackmailers and to tell them to fuck off back to the sewers which they share with their friend Donald Trump.

If Corbyn had had a backbone and McDonnell hadn’t tried to please these supporters of Israeli racial supremacy when the Zionists first began making accusations of ‘anti-Semitism’, then the Zionists’ could have been shown the door. As it is Corbyn and McDonnell got into the situation whereby the more they apologise the deeper was the hole that they were digging for themselves.

Maureen Lipman also abandoned Corbyn over Israel, sorry 'antisemitism' - Miliband was a dry run for Corbyn

‘Anti-Semitism’ has long been the tried and tested accusation of defenders of Zionism. There isn’t a single Palestine solidarity activist in Britain who hasn’t been accused of ‘anti-Semitism’. When you openly proclaim, as Zionist organisations repeatedly do, that anti-Zionism equals anti-Semitism then it is obvious that opponents of Israel’s occupation regime and its  inbuilt racism will be accused of ‘anti-Semitism’.

Corbyn’s silence and inability to push back against the accusations was unforgiveable.  It was a prime example of the inability of the Labour left to articulate any clear and unambiguous class politics. Corbyn supported the Palestinians but he treated it as a human rights not a political question. Zionism to him was a mystery.

Now however the Zionists have had their appetites whetted. These reactionary Tories now believe that they can set ‘tests’ for the Labour Party. Note that they haven’t set any tests for a Tory party led by an out and out racist, Boris Johnson, whose book 72 Virgins is replete with anti-Semitic memes and tropes.

Boris Johnson described‘a Jewish character as an unethical businessman with a large nose, who exploits immigrant workers and black women’. You might think that Goldstein and the Zionist claque, if they were seriously interested in anti-Semitism might have fired a broadside at Johnson. According to the Jewish Chronicle’s Rosa Doherty Johnson ‘depicted Jews as controlling the media and being able to “fiddle” elections in a novel he wrote when he was a backbench Conservative MP.’

Lest we forget, the Daily Mail, which today opposes 'antisemitism' attacked Ed Miliband because of his 'alien' Jewish Marxist father Ralph Miliband

He also described a Jewish character called Sammy Katz, as having a “proud nose and curly hair.”

He also described Kosovan Muslims as having “hook noses” and called a group of characters “pikeys”, a slur for Travellers.

However you can rest assured that when Goldstein calls for ‘a zero tolerance approach to anti-Jewish racism’ you can be sure that what he doesn’t mean is genuine anti-Semitism of the Boris Johnson or Britain First variety.

What Goldstein means is anti-Zionism.  Opposition to the only apartheid state, Israel, that exists in the world today.

Goldstein talks of the election result being ‘a day of extraordinary relief’ for British Jews.  If that true it was because a nasty and dishonest campaign of lies and libels had been waged against Corbyn and the Labour Party for the past 4 years.  If British Jews felt insecure it was because their own leaders had campaigned to instil fear and insecurity in Britain’s Jews.

What Norman Finkelstein wrote in his essayalmost exactly describes what happened to British Jews. It was an classic example of mass psychosis and hysteria:

If residents of Salem, Massachusetts, experienced deep anxiety about witches; if Americans experienced deep anxiety about Communists; if White southerners experienced deep anxiety about Black rapists; if Germans experienced deep anxiety about a “Judeo-Bolshevik” conspiracy; and if, for that matter, Christians experienced deep anxiety about Jewish ritual child-murderers—if an anxiety is widespread, surely it doesn’t necessarily, or even probably, follow that it is a rational fear. It could just as plausibly have been induced by powerful social forces standing to benefit from a deliberately contrived paranoia. Or, in the case at hand, it could spring from Jewish hypersensitivity—in light of historical experience wholly understandable—to a phantom anti-Semitism (see Woody Allen’s Annie Hall).

It is strange that a letter signed by 34 Orthodox Jewish rabbis never made it into one mainstream newspaper or the BBC - the powers of self-censorship in Britain newspapers must be the envy of police states the world over

Britain’s Jews are not subject to any form of state anti-Semitism. They do not experience economic discrimination, police harassment or violence, charges of driving whilst Jewish, disproportionate imprisonment or violent racist attacks.  They are a privileged section of the White population. The only section of the Jewish community which is distinguishable and which has suffered physical attacks, the Orthodox Jewish community is the very one which has distanced itself from the Zionist leaders’ attacks on Corbyn.

There is no basis to Zionist complaints that the Labour Party is racist. The fact that the Goldstein and the Board of Deputies’s Marie van der Zyl have said nothing about Tory MEP’s sitting with anti-Semites in the European Parliament or their support for Hungary’s anti-Semitic Prime Minister Viktor Orban demonstrates what their real agenda is and it isn’t anti-Semitism.

They said the same about Labour's only Jewish leader as Corbyn - he'd lost the 'trust' of Britain's Jews - why?  Because he had supported a Palestinian state

The lie that Corbyn lost the trust of Britain's Jews is demonstrated by the fact that most British Jews had not supported the Labour Party since the 1950's

Jonathan Goldstein’s 5 demands include

1.            ‘tearing up’ the Chakrabarti Report because it is a ‘whitewash’. What they mean is it didn’t say that anti-Zionism was ‘anti-Semitic’.

2.            An independent disciplinary process in other words more people should be expelled for supporting Palestinians and the Kangaroo Court should become a fixed institutioin.

3.            A ‘zero-tolerance approach to anti-Jewish racism.’  Perhaps Goldstein would like to implement a similar approach to anti-Muslim racism in the Jewish community and do something about the band of Zionists who make friends with people like Tommy Robinson.

4.            ‘A commitment to political education and a real effort to address left-anti-Semitism’. No, not right-wing anti-Semitism, because most fascists and genuine anti-Semites today love Israel, seeing in it their ideal state. And what is ‘left anti-Semitism’?  Goldstein doesn’t say but we can guess it involves the IHRA and Israel.

5.            ‘Condemn and proscribe factions within the party or any affiliated trade union.’  In other words an intensification of the witchhunt and an extension of it to Unite, the LRC, Labour Briefing and even Momentum.

A separate article‘Corbyn’s exit ‘won’t end anti-Semitism’ states that ‘Goldstein also urges Corbyn’s successor to take on the Unite union.’ which is seen as on the Left. In other words the Zionists today are acting as the stalking horse of the ruling class and urging an attack on the left as a whole.

A failure to stand up to these McCarthyists and a continuation of Corbyn’s useless appeasement policy will destroy the left inside the Labour Party.

In these circumstances the left has to come together, ditch the nonsense that anti-Semitism is a problem in the Labour Party and go on the offensive. The first target should be the scab Jewish Labour Movement which is affiliated to the racist land thieves of the World Zionist Organisation. The JLM didn’t even support Labour in the general election. If there is to be a Jewish section it should not make support for Israel a condition of membership and nor should it be affiliated to the Israeli Labour Party, a racist party of ethnic cleansing which has less than 5% support amongst Israeli Jews today.

The Zionists are the cutting edge of the British ruling class. They will have their supporters both in the Parliamentary Labour Party and the unions, the GMB and to a lesser extent UNISON too. Dave Prentis in particular can be relied on to back them up.

Rebecca Long-Bailey has already hauled up the white flag. There is no way that this charlatan should become the Left’s candidate.  The only alternative in sight is Ian Lavery, former General Secretary of the National Union of Miners.

The ruling class is going to take advantage of Labour’s defeat on December 12^th to try and purge the Labour Party of anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism.  It is up to the Left to stop them.

Don’t say you haven’t been warned!

Tony Greenstein

The Campaign Against Antisemitism’s Joe Glasman Claims Credit for the Defeat of Jeremy Corbyn

January 4, 2020, 10:33 am

≫ Next: Green Party Witchhunt Against Shahrar Ali, its former Deputy Leader at the behest of the Islamaphobes of the Campaign Against Antisemitism

≪ Previous: The ‘Anti-Semitism’ Wars Continue as Britain’s Zionist Leaders Declare That They Want To tear up the Chakrabarti Report and Purge the Left

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The Charity Commission Refused to Deregister the CAA in 2017 for Political Campaigning - I Have Resubmitted My Complaint Before Going to the Charity Tribunal

I have just submitted a renewed complaint to the Charity Commission against the Campaign AgainstAnti-Semitism who, as people know, I have also sued for libel. The outcome of the interim hearing to determine the meaning of anti-Semitism (it didn’t determine any meaning!) is here.

I have also had a longstanding petition against the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism which has nearly 8,000 signatures.  If you haven’t already sign please do.

According to the Charity Commission this type of abuse is perfectly charitable!

I have submitted my complaint in the wake of Joe Glasman,  Head of Political and Goverment Investigations at the so-called Campaign Against Antisemitism taking credit for the defeat of Jeremy Corbyn at the hands of his 'Macabees'.

John Bercow, the former Speaker of the House of Commons, who is also Jewish, in an interview in GQ magazine stated that there wasn't a 'whiff' of antisemitism about Corbyn.

Professor Geoffrey Alderman, a Jewish Chronicle columnist for 14 years and a right-wing Zionist wrote that there was no substance to the allegations of antisemitism against Corbyn

Glasman believes that his vile gang of racists has something in common with Hebrew tribesmen fighting their battles against the Assyrians 2,000+ year ago. The reality is that if the Zionists came across these Hebrews toay they and their Israeli friends would be the first to shoot them as 'terrorists' and 'infiltrators'.  Their claim to a direct biological lineage is the stuff of which racial myths are made. 

Just what charitable purpose was served by calling a demonstration against Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party?  The Charity Commission doesn't say

In February 2017 I submitted a complaint to the Charity Commission, which was then chaired by the racist and Islamaphobic bigot, William Shawcross.  Unsurprisingly the complaint did not get very far.

The Charity Commission was chaired from 2012-2018 by the racist bigot and Islamaphobe

In the light of the CAA’s unremitting campaign against Corbyn since then, a campaign about which they have boasted, I have submitted a second complaint and if (when) it is rejected I will take it to the First Tier Charity Tribunal.

This is the kind of vicious targeting of a vulnerable Palestinian student that the Charity Commission has endorsed as compatible with its charitable objectives

The CAA specialises in demonising people such as Exeter student Malaka - she was accused of being a 'terrorist supporting antisemite' .  The allegations the CAA made were completely untrue and the Daily Mail/Express and the local Devon Live apologised for them.  Not so the CAA.

Rather than rehearse the evidence against the CAA please read my complaint and also previous blog posts, hereand hereas well as a reporton my libel action

The one thing that the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism doesn’t do is to campaign against anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism of the traditional kind is all but ignored by it but ‘anti-Semitism’ of the anti-Zionist or  pro-Palestinian variety is very much its concern.

The CAA's pamphlet 

The CAA says in its charitable objectives that its purpose is to create racial harmony yet in its pamphlet British Muslims and Antisemitism it accuses British Muslims of being 'more likely by far than the general British population to hold deeply anti-Semitic views. It is clear that many British Muslims reserve a special hatred for British Jews...' 

The photograph above, the cover of a CAA Report on Muslims and 'antisemitism' implies that Muslim supporters of the Palestinians are Hitler supporters on the basis of the actions of one idiot.  It is an example of their idiot.  Was the paedophile abuse of former President of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, Lord Janner, typical of Jews?  Would that be antisemitic?

This full colour profile was taken down after protests to be replaced by the Black and White version below

The full report which included a racist full colour profile of the ‘typical’ Muslim was taken down after protests. It was replaced by a black and white version. [1]The image of a Muslim was accompanied by a strap line ‘More likely to be’ and then there were a series of bubbles:

Male,

In Social Housing,

Older than 35,

Working,

Living in Scotland

or in England South of the Midlands,

Sympathetic to Terrorism,

Extremism or violence,

First Generation Immigrant

It should not be necessary to point out how racist and offensive this description of Muslims by a ‘charity’ is. Just imagine that a Muslim charity posted a similar image of the ‘typical Jew’. One suspects the Charity Commission would not take more than 3 years to move into action given its previous record of action in respect of Muslim charities.

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[1]          https://tinyurl.com/ukzn5lp

On 20^thFebruary 2017 there appeared an article CAA exposes lecturer as author of sickening Holocaust article but University of Bristol defends “academic freedom”.[1] Ms Gould’s offence had been to publish an article ‘Beyond Anti-Semitism’ several years before.[2]There was nothing in the article, concerning the use to which the Holocaust has been put, that Israeli historians have not said. For example Professor Ze’ev Sternhell, a child survivor of a Polish ghetto wrote In Israel, Growing Fascism and a Racism Akin to Early Nazism[3].

The CAA called for the University to dismiss Dr Gould. As its scare quotes demonstrate, it has complete contempt for academic freedom. Perhaps this is in furtherance of their charitable objectives?

Kenneth Stern, who drafted the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism, in written testimony to the US House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary argued that “The definition was not drafted, and was never intended, as a tool to target or chill speech on a college campus.”[4] Stern cited the case of Professor Gould:

“Perhaps most egregious, an off-campus group [CAA] citing the definition called on a university to conduct an inquiry of a professor (who received her PhD from Columbia) for antisemitism, based on an article she had written years before.The university then conducted the inquiry.And while it ultimately found no basis to discipline the professor, the exercise itself was chilling and McCarthy-like.”

Mr Gideon Falter, Chief Executive of the CAA called on the university to dismiss Dr Gould. The University concluded that “the article is not anti-Semitic and does not breach the proper bounds of freedom of speech and academic freedom.”

Perhaps the Charity Commission would care to explain how targeting academics for McCarthyite witchhunts is compatible with the CAA’s charitable objectives.

Jackie Walker – the CAA accuse the first Israeli Prime Minister David Ben Gurion of Holocaust denial

Jackie was expelled from the Labour Party for ‘“prejudicial and grossly detrimental behaviour against the party” not anti-Semitism.  However the CAA has no less than 67 articles on its website attacking Jackie as an ‘anti-Semite’.

The most egregious example of the CAA's dishonesty and systematic distortion occurred on 7^th February 2017. The CAA put up ‘Jackie Walker Posts Text Asking Whether Hitler Can Really Be Blamed for the Holocaust’.[3]What Jackie actually said was:

‘If I were an Arab leader, I would never sign an agreement with Israel. It is normal. We have taken their country. It is true G-d promised it to us, but how could that interest them? Our G-d is not theirs. There has been anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz but was that their fault? They see but one thing: we have come and we have stolen their country. Why would they accept that?’

It is difficult to understand the psychopathology and mental gymnastics by which the above statement could be read as a denial of Hitler’s responsibility for the Holocaust. However the CAA managed it.

What the CAA did not realise that this quote was taken from The Jewish Paradox, a book by Nahum Goldmann, the first President of the World Jewish Congress and President of the World Zionist Organisation . The quotation came from David Ben Gurion, the first Prime Minister of Israel. Ben Gurion was responsible for the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians but even he was capable of reflecting reflecting on the situation of his victims. Ben Gurion understood that what Hitler had done was not the Palestinians’ fault even though they had paid the price. But to the CAA any attempt to understand the Palestinian point of view, especially when the Holocaust is mentioned, is tantamount to Holocaust denial.

When they realised their mistake the CAA quickly removed the article and pretended nothing had happened. No apology was ever offered for having all but accused Jackie Walker of being a holocaust denier. Before this post had been taken down it was widely publicised on social media and many people, including the idiot political correspondent of Jewish News, Jack Mendel, commented on it.

To date there have been 535 hostile articles attacking Jeremy Corbyn.  Given that charities are supposed to be non-party political this is outrageous and the fact that the Charity Commission has done nothing to date about it is symptomatic of how all wings of the State mobilised against a radical leader of the Labour Party.  It is confirmation of the Marxist belief that the bourgeois state is never neutral politically between capital and labour, left and right.

Tony Greenstein

Green Party Witchhunt Against Shahrar Ali, its former Deputy Leader at the behest of the Islamaphobes of the Campaign Against Antisemitism

January 7, 2020, 4:48 pm

≫ Next: The Campaign Against Antisemitism Issues Copyright Notice Over Joe Glasman's Video Forcing Youtube to Take It Down

≪ Previous: The Campaign Against Antisemitism’s Joe Glasman Claims Credit for the Defeat of Jeremy Corbyn

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 As the Zionists Wage Their ‘Anti-Semitism’ Wars, Caroline Lucas and the Green Party Leadership Have Abandoned Support for the Palestinians and BDS

Who would have thought, that in the fight against ‘anti-Semitism’ that Caroline Lucas and the Green Party Executive would get into bed with the overtly racist, far-Right Campaign Against Antisemitismwhich is almost certainly funded by the Israeli government’s dirty tricks Ministry of Strategic Affairs under Gilad Erdan

I remember back in 2005 when I stood for Brighton Pavilion on behalf of the Alliance for Green Socialists. I did a hustings with Keith Taylor the Green Party candidate (who later became MEP for the South East).

I asked Keith why did he think that Greens everywhere move to the Right when. I cited the fact that the first war that Germany had fought in post-1945 was in Afghanistan under the Green’s Foreign Minister Joshka Fischer. Why in Ireland did the Green Party enter a coalition with Fine Gael to introduce austerity, which resulted in them being decimated at the next elections?

Why you might ask did the Greens, when they controlled Brighton Council, ally with the Tories to finance, the hideous i-360 (called the eyesore locally) a speculative venture to put a tower into the sky which is losing money hand over fist.  Or why indeed did the Green Party councillors ally with the Tories and New Labour last year in Brighton & Hove to support the IHRA?

Why indeed have the Green Party in Austria just formed an alliance with the racist Conservative Peoples’ Party?  A coalition agreement which will mean an immediate attack on Muslims including a ban on headscarves in schools, attacks on immigrants and a succumbing to Prime Minister Kurz’s racist agenda.

The answer is simple. The Green Party is a classic petit-bourgeois party that moves left when it is opportune and to the right when the winds are blowing in that direction.  It is a party entirely devoid of class politics and principle. It aims to green capitalism without understanding that production for profit and environmentalism don’t make for easy bedfellows.

I copy below an edited article by Les Levidow, a longstanding Jewish anti-Zionist in Green Left Blog. It shows how the leadership of the Green Party [GP], including Caroline Lucas (& Peter Tatchell) have done their best to get the GP to support the IHRA ‘definition’ of anti-Semitism, a definition pioneered by Dina Porat, a Zionist ideologue at the Tel Aviv Kantor Centre, whose aim was explicitly to render criticism of Zionism/Israel ‘anti-Semitic’.

At the November 2018 GP conference, Shahrar Ali, its Home Affairs Spokesperson, successfully proposed that the conference not support an Executive motion in support of the IHRA. 

This was in the days before Caroline Lucas became an MP. Today the alliance with Jo Swinson and the other 'antisemitism' merchants has moved her to the Right

Instead the GP leadership has behaved as undemocratically as all other major political parties. So much for their talk of a different way of organising politically. When the far-Right, openly racist, Campaign Against Antisemitism [CAA] targeted Shahrer Ali with a bogus complaint of ‘anti-Semitism’, instead of dismissing it, the GP instituted a disciplinary inquiry.

Shahrar Ali (on the right)

The CAA in its Report British Muslims and Antisemitism stated that:

the gradual buildup of understanding and friendship between Britain’s Jews and Muslims has been utterly eclipsed by growing antisemitism amongst British Muslims.

On every single count, British Muslims were more likely by far than the general British population to hold deeply antisemitic views.... many British Muslims reserve a special hatred for British Jews, rating Jews much less favourably than people of other religions or no religion, yet astonishingly British Muslims largely do not recognise antisemitism as a major problem.

It has long been suspected that sections of the British Muslim population harboured hatred towards British Jews. This survey... shows that the prejudice is horrifyingly widespread.

The reportincluded a racist full colour profile of the ‘typical’ Muslim. It was taken down after protests and replaced by a black and white version. The image was accompanied by a strap line ‘More likely to be’ and then there were a series of bubbles:

Male, In Social Housing, Older than 35, Working, Living in Scotland or in England South of the Midlands, Sympathetic to Terrorism, Extremism or violence, First Generation Immigrant. 

Just imagine the outcry if a Muslim group posted a similar image of the ‘typical Jew’. The CAA used on its front cover a picture of a Black person holding a ‘Hitler was Right’ poster. The message being that most Muslims are supporters of the Holocaust.

Yet the GP Executive have accepted a complaint against Shahrer Ali from the CAA, which is chaired by Gideon Falter. Falter is Vice Chairman of JNF UK and a trusteefor the JNF Charitable Trust. The JNF is a pillar of Israeli apartheid. It controls 93% of Israeli land from which Arabs are barred. The JNF portrays itself as a ‘green’ charity because it plants forests and parks on the ruins of razed Palestinian villages thus participating in their ethnic cleansing. 

Caroline Lucas and the Green Party are happy working with the Vice Chair of this overtly racist organisation

On 3^rdAugust 2007 the Jewish Chronicle staged a debate, in the wake of the Kadan case in Israel where the Supreme Court ruled that the practice of allocating land only to Jews was illegal. The article was entitled ‘Is it racist to set aside Israeli land for Jews only’. To most people it’s a no brainer that it is racist but not for Falter.

In its submission to Israel’s Supreme Court the JNF pleadedthat:

JNF lands are not state lands.... JNF ownership of JNF lands is total, private, and separate from the state. The JNF purchased all of the land in its possession from previous owners by means of funds donated incrementally by Jews from all over the world for the purpose of purchasing land in Eretz Israel to be held and developed on behalf of the Jewish people. JNF trusteeship is not and cannot be given or granted to the entire Israeli public. JNF trusteeship is preserved solely for the Jewish people, on whose behalf it was founded and acts.

Peter Tatchell also used to be on the left - today he embraces the same IHRA as Eric Pickles and Donald Trump

The Knesset overturned this ruling in 2011 with the Reception Committees Law. On its website the JNF proclaimed that

over 70% of the Jewish population in Israel opposes allocating KKL-JNF land to non-Jews while over 80% prefer the definition of Israel as a Jewish state, rather than a state of its own citizens.’

Yet Caroline Lucas, Peter Tatchell and co-leader Sian Berry, joined forces with the CAA against a Black member of their own party.

Caroline Lucas – A Tale of Absorption into the British  Political Establishment

I have had a lengthy correspondence with Caroline Lucas [CL]over the IHRA. Our conversation traces how she has never been able to defend the supporting the IHRA.

On 28^th May 2017 I wrote to CL saying that

‘I was surprised to find out that you supported a definition of anti-Semitism that is being used to restrict free speech by defining opposition to Zionism and Israel as anti-Semitic. It is to be hoped that you rethink this position. The IHRA is a creature of the Right and people like Eric Pickles’

CL responded on 30 May stating that

‘There has been considerable debate about this in the Green Party and the Executive Committee recently adopted a position that notes the IHRA definition and the importance of not conflating criticism of Israel with genuine anti-Jewish racism. It also stressed its commitment to working across the Green Party to advance understanding of and protect against antisemitism, drawing where helpful on the IHRA definition, at the same time as protecting freedom of speech and promoting Green Party policy on Israel and Palestine.’

This is what is called having your cake and eating it or supporting two fundamentally contradictory things.  You can support the IHRA Definition of Anti-Semitism or you can support freedom of speech.  What you cannot do is support both. CL told me that:

I have taken on the various concerns raised with me about the IHRA definition and have noted the position of Green MEPs. If you are aware of any more helpful definitions, particularly when it comes to illustrative examples, I’d be interested to see them and raise with the Green Party for our ongoing work. My support for the IHRA definition is on record because I signed an Early Day Motion. At the moment I am not able to remove my name but shall enquire whether that’s possible if I am re-elected to Parliament on June 8.

What CL was saying was that she wanted to withdraw her support for the IHRA EDM but that she wasn’t allowed to do so. She added that:

 ‘Please be assured that, as a passionate and long standing advocate of Palestinian rights, I reject any idea that support for Palestine equates with antisemitism and share your concern about any attempts to prevent activities or silence voices designed to highlight the ongoing occupation of Palestine and the Israeli authorities' complicity in human rights and other abuses.’

Of course I did know of another definition of anti-Semitism. It is the Oxford English Dictionary Definition of anti-Semitism which unlike the IHRA doesn’t take over 500. It states that ‘Anti-Semitism is hostility to or discrimination against Jews.’ 6 words.

I wrote back on 31 May 2017 stating that:

Reading between the lines I am taking it that you have now had second thoughts about the IHRA definition.  That is extremely welcome. You  may not know it but the University College Union at its annual conference last week voted to reject the IHRA definition as lecturers know how this definition is being misused on campuses.

I agree that we must always be vigilant concerning anti-Semitism.  Only last week members of PSC in Brighton were amongst those who picketed an attempt by the Front Nationale to hold a meeting at the King & Queen pub.  It is the supporters of Israel who are aligning themselves with the far-Right.’  

I continued:

‘You asked me whether there are any more helpful definitions of anti-Semitism.  I do not understand this quest for definitions of anti-Semitism.  Racism is hatred of the other and it takes the form of discrimination, violence, abuse and stereotyping.... This obsession with defining anti-Semitism only comes about because of the desire to find a definition which includes opposition to Israel and Zionism.... I don’t need a definition to know when someone is being anti-Semitic!  But you can’t be racist against a state and that is what the IHRA is about...’

When my dad joined 100,000 others in stopping Oswald Moseley’s British  Union of Fascists marching through the East End in 1936 he didn’t need a definition of anti-Semitism to know what it was.

On 16^th October 2018 CL wrote to me again.

You make lots of arguments but for me this essentially comes down to one key point, namely that I disagree with you as to whether the IHRA definition prevents criticism of the Israeli government and its actions by automatically labelling it antisemitism.

I don’t agree that the definition means criticism of Israel is automatically antisemitic. Rather, it makes clear that there has to be some kind of manifestation of hatred towards Jews for that to be the case.  I recognise the definition is being used to try to shut down criticism and debate in some contexts, but I think that’s a misuse of the definition and will continue to say as much. I therefore advocate its adoption – with the very helpful clarifying amendments from the cross party Home Affairs Select Committee on this specific point.

My response on 17 October 2018 was that:

I don’t doubt that you support the Palestinians but unfortunately you support a definition of ‘anti-Semitism’ whose sole purpose it is to equate that support with hatred against Jews....

It is as if 42 years ago you had criticised the South Africa government for its policies of shooting the inhabitants of Soweto but drawn the line at criticising Apartheid.

You accept that the definition is being used to shut down criticism of Israel but then you say that this is a misuse of it.  I disagree. Such ‘misuse’ is inherent in the definition itself. When Stephen Sedley, the Jewish former Court of Appeal Judge says, that:

Endeavours to conflate the two (anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism) by characterising everything other than anodyne criticism of Israel as anti-Semitic are not new. What is new is the adoption... of a definition of anti-Semitism which endorses the conflation.

Is he wrong?  Why? Hugh Tomlinson QC stated that

‘there is likely to be lack of consistency in its application and a potential chilling effect on public bodies which, in the absence of definitional clarity, may seek to sanction or prohibit any conduct which has been labelled by third parties as antisemitic without applying any clear criterion of assessment.

Is that also wrong? Geoffrey Robertson QC argued that 

the looseness of the definition is liable to chill legitimate criticisms of the state of Israel and coverage of human rights abuses against Palestinians.

Stephen Sedley went further stating that the IHRA ‘fails the first test of any definition: it is indefinite.’ I am leaving to one side the incoherence of a definition which says that Accusing Jewish citizens of being more loyal to Israel, Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination and Holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel are anti-Semitic. If Israel is the fulfilment of Jewish self-determination, i.e. the Jews are a nation, then it is obviously correct to hold them responsible for Israel’s actions. Likewise if Israel is the Jewish national state then why shouldn’t someone accuse Jews of being more loyal to Israel? Is it racist to accuse British people of being more loyal to Britain than France?

The question that puzzles me is why the hell would you want to use a definition of anti-Semitism that is so politically incoherent and which lends itself to the suppression of free speech? What is it about the definition that, despite all these flaws, makes it so attractive?

The only conclusion I can reach is that you are unwilling to go against the Establishment consensus. That you value your position as a member of the British Establishment, albeit its radical green fringe. I am referring to a consensus forged by the State Department in Washington which first adopted the IHRA definition (in its previous EUMC guise). The IHRA is a definition of anti-Semitism which chimes with America’s foreign policy interest in supporting Israel, right or wrong.  

Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount that ‘man cannot serve two masters’. I would say that you cannot both support the Palestinians and a definition of anti-Semitism that renders such support anti-Semitic.’

Surprising as it might seem I never received a reply!

Tony Greenstein 

Les Levidow, a Jewish member of the Green Party wroteon the Green Left Blog:

Since 2016 a systematic campaign has been weaponizing alleged antisemitism in order to protect the racist Israeli regime from criticism, especially from the global campaign of Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS).  This has been conflated with antisemitism through the so-called ‘IHRA definition of antisemitism’, which serves a racist agenda.  The GP leadership has colluded with this agenda in several ways – by concealing official support for the BDS campaign, promoting the IHRA definition within the GP and abusing its disciplinary procedure to retaliate against a prominent critic.   A pro-Palestine re-orientation will depend on members holding the leadership accountable for its collusion and pushing it instead to promote BDS as anti-racist.  

The 2005 Palestinian call for BDS has been the focus of the global movement of Palestine solidarity. Its many supporters include the GP. It has voted for ‘active participation’ in the BDS campaign, e.g. conference motions in spring 2008 and autumn 2014.  BDS was featured in the Green Party GP’s magazine and was promoted by its former Leader Natalie Bennett.  Some members established a BDS Facebook page. 

Yet the GP’s pro-BDS policy has nearly disappeared. It is absent from the International Policy webpage,hidden in the autumn 2014 motion on Israel’s Ground Invasion, and absent from 2019 election statements, which have been deceptive in this regard. Meanwhile the leadership has been accommodating the pro-Israel lobby which has been falsely accusing Israel’s critics of antisemitism. 

Since 2017 the GPleadership has been promoting the IHRA definition.  Moreover, a prominent member has sponsored a complaint from a racist pro-Israel campaign group against another member who led opposition to the IHRA definition.  By undermining the Green Party’s pro-Palestine policies, the leadership has provoked internal unease and revolt. GP

Not coincidentally, the smear campaign escalated shortly after the Labour Party elected a new Left-wing, anti-imperialist leadership in 2015.  Pro-Israel activists trawled members’ social media posts going back several years, including anti-Israel comments.

Weaponizing alleged antisemitism is psychological warfare protecting the UK’s alliance with the Israeli regime. This agenda generates fear that a unitary ‘Jewish community’ faces an ‘existential threat’ from pro-Palestine policies and politicians. The UK government encourages and exploits this fear to justifythe UK’s pro-Israel policies as necessary for ‘social cohesion’. 

Green Party autumn 2018 conference: members revolt against pro-IHRA leadership

After the  Tory government adopted the IHRA full definition in December 2016, many politicians did likewise. Having slandered Ken Livingstone as antisemitic, John Mann MP sponsored an EDM supporting the IHRA definition; signatories included Caroline Lucas MP. When local authorities voted for motions supporting the IHRA definition, they were supported by GP politicians such as Caroline Russell and Sian Berry (co-Leader). 

Jewish members of the GP sent email messages denouncing those politicians’ actions and encouraged other members to do likewise.  The politicians gave scant responses, denying any contradiction with BDS or anti-Israel criticism. 

The GP’s internal conflict eventually erupted at the autumn 2018 conference.  Prominent politicians endorsed a pro-IHRA motion.  It was countered by an anti-IHRA motion, led by Shahrar Ali, who has been a Home Affairs spokesperson, Deputy Leader and frequent candidate of the GP. 

The pro-IHRA leadership was unnerved by this revolt.  A new procedural motion proposed to remit the original ones, apparently for fear that the pro-IHRA motion would be defeated.  Conference voted to remit both. 

Caroline Lucas and the Green Party have sacrified BDS as the price of entry to the British Foreign Policy Establishment

The pro-Israel Jewish Chroniclereported the outcome as a ‘failure’, implying that the obstacle was antisemitism.  It reproduced the title of my Green Left magazine article, ‘Palestine solidarity under racist attack’.  My article included a cartoon (below) mocking the racist agenda of false allegations; strangely, this too was reproduced by the Jewish Chronicle

When an anti-IHRA motion was put forward for the subsequent conference, the Standing Orders Committee ruled that the IHRA definition may come up again only if the two contrary motions were reconciled in a single motion – obviously impossible.  This ruling protects the pro-IHRA leadership from further debate, defeat and embarrassment.  As a substitute for political debate, the leadership has abused the disciplinary procedure, as explained next.  

Leadership retaliates against Shahrar Ali, members again push back

In retaliating against Shahrar Ali, the leadership instrumentalised the so-called Campaign Against Antisemitism which has been promoting a racist Islamophobic, anti-Palestinian agenda.  The CAA has made false allegations of antisemitism against many of Israel’s critics, especially Labour Party members, including many Muslims and Jews.  Indeed, it throws such allegations at Jewish pro-Palestine groups who criticise pro-Israel groups for weaponising alleged antisemitism (as in this article).  One Jewish target of its false allegations, Tony Greenstein, led a petition asking the Charities Commission to deregister the CAA as a Right-wing lobby group with no charitable aims.

The CAA also promotes Islamophobic stereotypes, featuring a scary dehumanised image of ‘antisemitic Muslim males’ (2016 report, page 8).  They ‘are more likely to sympathise with terrorism, violence and extremism’; those terms are left undefined.  In the UK political context, so-called ‘extremism’ encompasses anyone opposing the racist Prevent programme or supporting resistance to the Israeli regime.  

Eventually the CAA launched false allegations against a prominent GP member, Shahrar Ali.  They cited his denunciation of Israel’s attack on Gaza at a 2009 rally outside the BBC, as well as his speech opposing the Party’s adoption of the IHRA definition at the 2018 Autumn conference. Under pressure from pro-Palestine members, the GP Regional Council (GPRC) refuted the false allegations, followed by a similar 2018 press release.

In 2019 the CAA escalated the attack by sending the GP a formal complaint about allegedly antisemitic comments by Shahrar Ali. The complaint was sponsored by a prominent GP member who has chosen to remain anonymous.  The Disciplinary Committee could have simply rejected the complaint on numerous grounds, especially its racist agenda.  Instead it initiated an investigation, asking Shahrar Ali for a response to the allegations.

In October 2019 his supporters launched a petition which quickly gained over a hundred signatories from GP members including many elected officers, local candidates and Councillors.  It said, ‘To take up this complaint would be to collude in an anti-Palestinian agenda that would also discredit the GP. It is astonishing that the Party could fall for such a tactic, unwittingly or through lack of political courage.’ The petition concluded with these demands:

We call upon the Green Party to withdraw this politically motivated and internally damaging complaint and to work alongside Shahrar Ali to respond, as appropriate, to politically motivated attacks in the best tradition of the Green Party.

The GP must also, as a matter of urgency, instead investigate the hostile environment which misuse and abuse of process risks engendering internally.

Some members of the GP Executive Committee (GPEx) received, circulated or signed the petition.  Some proposed that its next meeting discuss the conflict, possibly to suspend the disciplinary procedure against Shahrar Ali.  But the meeting declined to add such an agenda item, on the spurious grounds that GPEx does not consider individual cases. The leadership evaded the generic issue of the racist accuser and its false allegations, thus colluding with them.

The Disciplinary Committee decided instead to take up a subsequent complaint that Shahrar Ali allegedly brought the GP into disrepute for publicly sharing the petition supporting him. Again the complainant chose to remain anonymous.  Thus the disciplinary procedure escalated the leadership’s retaliation for Shahrar Ali’s prominent role against the IHRA definition.  The complaint inverts reality, namely: that the leadership has been discrediting the GP by colluding with a racist agenda and then bureaucratically persecuting an anti-racist critic, while evading political debate over its shameful role.  

General Election 2019: Green Party leadership promotes IHRA definition, while members again push back

In the 2019 General Election, the GP’s pro-Palestine policy was again softened and concealed.  The Manifesto’s section on global justice says: ‘Seek resolution in line with international law and the principles of self-determination to long running conflicts, illegal occupations and human rights violations.’  Indeed, that has been a key aim of the GP supporting ‘active participation’ in the BDS campaign –absent from the manifesto.

The leadership further colluded with the Board of Deputies of British Jews and its racist agenda.  As political background, the Board has consistently supported Israel’s attacks on Palestinians, especially its Gaza massacres in 2008-09 and 2014.  After Israel killed numerous civilians at the Gaza border in 2018, the Board’s statement blamed Hamas; in response, hundreds of Jews denounced the Board for placing no responsibility on Israel. 

Jeremy Corbyn criticised Britain’s failure to call for an independent investigation as ‘morally indefensible’.  In response, the Board pleaded self-defence by Israel, as grounds to denounce his modest demand for an investigation.  The Board also has led false allegations of antisemitism.  This consistently racist pro-Israel agenda indicates its political aims when intervening in the 2019 general election.  

The Board sent political parties ‘10 commitments for GE2019’, especially to ‘Adopt, promote and implement the full IHRA Definition of Antisemitism’. An honest response from the GP might have read as follows:  ‘Our autumn 2018 conference debated the IHRA definition, ultimately voting to remit both the pro-IHRA and anti-IHRA definitions for future consideration’.  Instead its response said, ‘The GP is likely to consider adopting the IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism at a policymaking session of its party conference in the future’.

The GP’s response was circulated to Parliamentary candidates as guidance with this encouragement: ‘Candidates who sign the [IHRA] definition are welcome to promote this on social media, as some already have.’ By anticipating its future adoption and omitting BDS, the guidance misled candidates about the GP’s policies and debates.  Some candidates expressed unease to other members, thus alerting them to the deception.  

Soon dissenters consulted numerous members.  Together they drafted more honest responses to several questions from the Board of Deputies.  This alternative version deleted the prediction that a future conference would consider the IHRA definition; and it added a linkto the GP’s policies strongly criticising Israel.   But the leadership’s response was unsatisfactory.

Its strong support for the IHRA definition facilitated yet more ‘antisemitism’ allegations.  In November 2019 the CAA announced the results of trawling social media posts.  The CAA denounced several Parliamentary candidates of the GP (again Shahrar Ali) for statements contravening the IHRA as grounds to demand their expulsion. As reported in the Jewish Chronicle,  several candidates had drawn analogies between Nazi Germany and Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, or they suggested that ‘complaints of antisemitism were being used to defend Israel’.  

A Green Left statement countered the false allegations against GP candidates.  It reiterated previous criticism of the IHRA’s Israel examples as an invalid basis for identifying real antisemitism.  By contrast, the GP leadership may have difficulty in defending its candidates while supporting the IHRA definition.

In parallel Palestine Solidarity Campaign had sent all Parliamentary candidates a questionnaire. Of 290 candidate responses across all parties, 138 of them were from the GPEW.  This had the highest response rate, giving pro-Palestine answers to nearly all the questions.   The questionnaire was not mentioned in the GP’s email briefings to candidates.   

Conclusion: hold the leadership accountable

Since 2017 the GP’s leadership has been undermining its pro-Palestine policy.  It has been concealing support for BDS and promoting the IHRA definition, a key weapon against BDS. The leadership has colluded with a wider racist agenda, especially from the Board of Deputies and the CAA  

Given these higher stakes for the BDS campaign, how will the GP leadership respond?  By further colluding with a racist agenda and retaliating against anti-racist critics? Or else by defending its pro-Palestine policies?  A pro-Palestine re-orientation will depend on members holding the leadership accountable for its collusion and pushing it instead to promote the GP’s BDS policy.

Les Levidow  is a Member of Green Party of England and Wales (GPEW), Camden branch and Member of Steering Group, Jewish Network for Palestine (JNP). He is a member of Camden Green party and a Green Left supporter.

For Email correspondence between Tony Greenstein and Caroline Lucas see here

The Campaign Against Antisemitism Issues Copyright Notice Over Joe Glasman's Video Forcing Youtube to Take It Down

January 9, 2020, 8:52 am

≫ Next: Open Letter to Rebecca Long-Bailey – Your acceptance of the Board of Deputies’s 10 Pledges means there is no real difference between you and Keir Starmer

≪ Previous: Green Party Witchhunt Against Shahrar Ali, its former Deputy Leader at the behest of the Islamaphobes of the Campaign Against Antisemitism

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What is it about Glasman's antisemitic and hubristic video that the so-called Campaign Against Antisemitism Finds Embarrassing?

Joe Glasman - the face of mad as pants Zionism

I am mystified.  Joe Glasman of the far-Right Zionist 'Campaign Against Antisemitism' has issued a copyright notice to Youtube forcing them to take it down from my channel.

This is extremely unusual for a political video. After all it has no commercial possibilities (who would pay to see this nutcase?). Clearly Glasman finds his racist, antisemitic, reactionary and hubristic video embarrassing.

All the more reasons to share and download it.

Tony Greenstein

Open Letter to Rebecca Long-Bailey – Your acceptance of the Board of Deputies’s 10 Pledges means there is no real difference between you and Keir Starmer

January 12, 2020, 3:47 pm

≫ Next: The Jewish Chronicle's Contempt for its readership knows no limits - they treat them as idiots (probably because they are)

≪ Previous: The Campaign Against Antisemitism Issues Copyright Notice Over Joe Glasman's Video Forcing Youtube to Take It Down

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Socialists, Anti-racists and Anti-imperialists Cannot Support a Candidate Who Supports Israeli Apartheid and Racial Supremacy in the name of opposing ‘anti-Semitism'

Dear Rebecca,

50 years ago, when I was 16, the first demonstration I took part in was against the visiting Springbok Rugby tour from South Africa. The demonstrations had been organised by Peter (now Lord) Hain.

Those who refused to support the Boycott of South Africa included the Wilson government. It seems we have come circle with your cuddling up to the Board of Deputies, who have supported every war and every attack against the Palestinians. Palestine is the South Africa of today.

In 1994 Apartheid officially ended as Nelson Mandela was elected President. Unfortunately Apartheid remains in Greater Israel where Jewish only settlements, linked by Jewish only roads, dominate.

In Israel where the far-Right reigns supreme, the structures of apartheid are just as real as in South Africa. 93% of Israeli land is off-limits to Israel’s Arab citizens who are confined to 2% of the land. In over 70 years not one single Israeli Palestinian town or village has been built in Israel despite a 10-fold increase in population.

The 10 Pledges that RBL has signed up to - all she needs is a pair of handcuffs

Zionist settler colonisation proceeds apace. One half of Israel’s Arab villages are ‘unrecognised’ i.e. liable to instant demolition. In January 2017 hundreds of Israeli Police invadedthe Bedouin village of Umm al-Hiran in the Negev evicting its residents. Their ‘crime’? They weren’t Jewish. In their place has been constructed the Jewish only town of Hiran. This is what the Board of Deputies ‘pledges’ is designed to defend and what you have signed up to.

In 2010 the Chief Rabbi of Safed, Shmuel Eliyahu issued an edict forbidding Jews to rent or sell homes to Arabs. Eliyahu is a paid official of Israel. When this racist edict was criticised dozens of Israeli rabbis supportedit. That too is what the pledges are about.

I could give you dozens of similar examples. In 2011 the Reception Committee Law was passed allowing hundreds of Jewish villages to exclude Israeli Arabs. The passing of the Jewish Nation State Law in 2018 defining Israel as a Jewish state meant, in the wordsof Benjamin Netanyahu that Israel is ‘not a state of all its citizens’.

This is why veterans of the struggle in South Africa have declared that Israeli Apartheid is even worse than it was in South Africa, especially in the West Bank where there is a strict regime of pass controls, state violence and land theft.

In the wordsof Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, ‘Their [Palestinian] 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." That is why Tutu supports the BDS campaign.  Mandla Mandela, grandson of Nelson Mandela was even more forthright:

Like Madiba and Desmond Tutu before me, I see the eerie similarities between Israel’s racial laws and policies towards Palestinians, and the architecture of apartheid in South Africa. We South Africans know apartheid when we see it. In fact... in some respects, Israel’s regime of oppression is even worse.

This is the purpose of the Board of Deputies pledges. It is what lay behind the ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign for the last 4 years which ended with Jeremy Corbyn himself being accused of ‘anti-Semitism’.

This was the Board of Deputies warning when genuine anti-Semites were around - keep away, do nothing

The Board of Deputies, have never fought anti-Semitism. My father, like Jeremy’s mother, took part in the 1936 Battle of Cable Street against Moseley’s British Union of Fascists. The Board of Deputies toldhim and other Jews to stay at home.

The BOD repeated the same trick in the 1970’s. When the Anti-Nazi League was confronting the National Front, the BOD attacked it with ‘all the fervour of a kamikaze pilot’ according to the Searchlightanti-fascist magazine.

The 500+ word IHRA ‘definition’ that you support is not even a definition. In the words of Stephen Sedley, a Jewish former Court of Appeal Judge, it is ‘open ended’. Its only purpose is to portray opposition to Zionism as ‘anti-Semitic’. That is why 7 of its 11 illustrations of ‘anti-Semitism’ relate to Israel not Jews.

Why should you need a definition of anti-Semitism unless it is to close down free speech? My dad did not need a definition of anti-Semitism to oppose it. Anti-Semitism is hatred of Jews not support of Palestinians or opposition to Apartheid.

Not one word of condemnation of Israel for shooting at unarmed demonstrators including children - this is the real agenda of the Board of Deputies

Even American academic Kenneth Stern, who drafted the IHRA, has testifiedthat it ‘chills’ free speech. I suggest you read Stern’s articlein The Guardian ‘I drafted the definition of antisemitism. Rightwing Jews are weaponizing it.’ Even Donald Trump has just issuedan Executive Order on Anti-Semitism incorporating the IHRA. This is the man who calledneo-Nazis ‘fine people’!

It is no accident that anti-Semites such as Trump, Johnson, and Hungary’s Viktor Orban love the IHRA. The IHRA redefines opposition to the United States’s watchdog in the Middle East as ‘anti-Semitism’.

The least one can expect of a candidate for Leader of the Labour Party is an unequivocal commitment to free speech. Your willingness to bow to the demands of the Zionist lobby, the people who defendbombing UN schools with white phosphorous, renders you unfit to become Leader.

The Board of Deputies concern about 'antisemitism' doesn't extend to the civilian victims of Israeli sniper fire

The Board of Deputies is NOT the representative of British Jews. It is a pro-Israel advocacy group. It represents 30% at best of British Jews. This is the same Board which supportedIsrael’s use of snipers against unarmed demonstrators in Gaza killing to date over 70 children.

The demand that you only talk to the most reactionary section of the Jewish population in this country is outrageous.

The first victims of the ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign were Jewish. Both Jackie Walker and myself were expelled. Others were suspended. Just as White opponents of Apartheid in South Africa were vilified by other Whites so too are Jewish opponents of Zionism. It is a pity that you are unable to muster the courage to tell supporters of Israeli Apartheid where to go.

When it comes to a genuine racist who uses terms such as 'banana smiles' and 'pikeys' then the Board of Deputies welcomes them warmly

If the Board of Deputies were seriously concerned about anti-Semitism then instead of profusely welcomingBoris Johnson as Prime Minister (‘We have had a long and positive relationship with Mr Johnson’) they would have queried his commentsin 72 Virgins about Jews controlling the media, as well as other racist comments. Johnson described‘a Jewish character as an unethical businessman with a large nose, who exploits immigrant workers and black women’. The Mogg described opponents of Brexit as ‘illuminati’a term beloved of anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists.

I am not concerned at your pathetic attempts to portray yourself, a prosperous solicitor living in a posh part of Salford, as someone who is working class. No one is fooled bar you.

What is concerning is that you don’t seem to have an anti-racist bone in your body. You are oblivious to what imperialism means at a time when the United States is on the warpath. You are seemingly unaware of the fact that Trump, fresh from telling 4 Black Congresswomen to go home then accuses them of being ‘anti-Semites’ and ‘haters of Israel’ (at least he is honest enough not to make a distinction).

In view of your decision to get into bed with the most right-wing, racist section of British Jews, whilst having nothing to say about genuine racism in British society such as the Windrush Scandal, there seems no reason why socialists should support you.

What first alerted me to your lack of principle was when you toldthe Jewish Labour Movement, which is affiliated to the World Zionist Organisation, (it has a land theft division), that you ‘did not know how he had not already been expelled’ referring to Chris Williamson and said that if you could you would have signed Tom Watson’s petition to have him (unlawfully) resuspended.

Socialism is about solidarity. It is about defending the oppressed not the oppressor. Chris Williamson refused to bow to a baying mob of right-wing Labour backbenchers. Unfortunately you ran for cover.

Our experience of fake left candidates like Kinnock is that they can be worse than honest right-wingers. You may be the candidate of Jon Lansman but you are no socialist.

I’ll leave you with one thought.  If Jews in Britain experienced even a fraction of the discrimination that Palestinians do in Israel then they would indeed have cause to cry ‘anti-Semitism’. As it is they don’t.

In solidarity,

Tony Greenstein