The Jewish Chronicle's Contempt for its readership knows no limits - they treat them as idiots (probably because they are)

January 13, 2020, 2:38 pm

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Political Correspondent 'Liar' Lee Harpin inflates the pre-war membership of Poale Zion (now the JLM) by tens of thousands

It was a pretty stupid mistake but then ‘Liar’ Lee Harpin, the Jewish Chronicle’s Political Correspondent is pretty stupid. He is used to getting his information from hacking into other peoples’ phones, hence normal journalism is alien to him.  For those not aware, he was arrested by Police when working for the Daily Mirror but unfortunately he wasn't charged.

Shapurji Saklatvala - first Communist MP in England

In a puff piece in the Jewish Chronicle ‘Hundreds join Jewish Labour Movement to vote on who succeeds Jeremy Corbyn’ Liar Lee informed the Jewish Chronicle’s gullible readership that

‘While JLM once counted tens of thousands of members during the group’s pre-Second World War heyday, the 3,000-strong membership list is the highest it has been over the past decade.’

I therefore wrote a simple letter to the Editor, the far-right Islamaphobe and member of the Henry Jackson Society, Stephen Pollard, also former editor of The Express, pointing out just a few of Liar Lee’s many inaccuracies:

This article was a lie from beginning to end but no one at the Jewish Chronicle cares any longer about the truth

i.                   The JLM wasn’t in existence before the war. Poale Zion ‘the Workers of Zion’ was the name of the Israeli Labour Party’s British wing. It changed its name in 2004 as a cursory look at Wikpediawould have told LL.

ii.                 Far from its membership being in the ‘tens of thousands’ before the war, it barely reached 500! Jewish workers had contempt for Zionism.  Zionism was a movement of the reactionary middle class not workers. Even after the war it only climbed to 1,500 according to Paul Kelemn’s authoritative British  Zionism and the Left.

'Liar' Lee Harpin's previous speciality was phones - other peoples!

iii.              I could have added that if the JLM boasts a membership of 3,000 then it is its highest ever.  I doubt it had even 200 members a decade ago.  It had been defunct and was only refoundedin 2015 with the specific task of campaigning against Jeremy Corbyn. In short the JLM is an arm of the Israeli state inside the British Labour Party rather than an organisation of Labour supporting Jews. That is why it refused to support Labour in the last election.

iv.              One should take the claimed 3,000 membership with a hefty dose of salt.  As I’ve written before the majority of the JLM’s members are non-Jewish.  So much for its claim to represent Jewish labour members. If more Jewish members are joining now, as Liar Lee claims, then it is highly unlikely they are Labour Party members or even supporters of the Labour Party (you don’t need to be a Labour Party member to join the JLM).  Given the JLM’s campaign against Corbyn it is likely to attract the likes of Jonathan Hoffman and others closer to Zionism’s fascist wing.

Liar Lee Harpin - after a spell hacking phones at The Mirror Lee felt quite at home at the Jewish Chronicle

Below is my letter to the Jewish Chronicle correcting a few of their mistakes.  Unsurprisingly my letter was not published.

Phil Piratin Communist MP for Mile End 1945-50 - over half his voters were estimated to be Jewish

In my letter I too made a minor mistake. Phil Piratin was not the only Communist MP to have sat for an English constituency. In fact Shapurji Saklatvala was elected for Battersea  North in October 1922, defeated in 1923 and was elected again from 1924 to 1929.  However Saklatvala was endorsed by the then Labour Party in 1922 and de facto in 1924.  Unlike the Jewish Chronicle, I admit to even the most minor of errors!

Given the lies that Liar Lee and his Editor have told for the past 4 years about Jeremy Corbyn and ‘anti-Semitism’ in the Labour Party LL’s ‘mistake’ concerning the JLM must be considered trivial indeed.

Tony Greenstein

The Editor

Stephen Pollard,

The Jewish Chronicle,
915 High Rd,
London,
N12 8QJ

Dear Stephen,

I realise that Lee Harpin has always had a tenuous grip on reality, hence his appointment as your political correspondent, however his claim [Hundreds join Jewish Labour Movement to vote on who succeeds Jeremy Corbyn, January 6^th 2020] that the Jewish Labour Movement ‘once counted tens of thousands of members during the group’s pre-Second World War heyday’, has taken his ability to invent facts to new, undreamt of heights.

I realise that you will consider me pedantic but prior to 2004 there was no JLM. The group was called, more accurately, Poale Zion, an organisation which all good class conscious Jewish workers avoided like the plague.

According to Paul Kelemen’s 2012 book ‘The British Left and Zionism – History of a Divorce’ the pre-war membership of PZ stood at 500 (see page 98) before increasing to 1,500 after the war. Much as you would like to rewrite history, so as to pretend that British Jews were always solid Zionists, the fact is that the Jewish working class of the East End was indifferent if not hostile to Zionism.

It was Jewish workers in the East End constituency of Mile End who voted overwhelmingly in 1945 to elect the only Communist MP that has ever sat for an English constituency, Phil Piratin. You see the anti-fascist struggle against the genuine anti-Semitism of Sir Oswald Moseley’s British Union of Fascists and support for Zionism did not go hand in.

Yours truly,

Tony Greenstein

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Hunger for 50 million, no medical care for 40 million and yet a Massive Imperial Army Spread Across the Globe

January 16, 2020, 3:37 pm

≫ Next: Jonathan Hoffman, former Vice-Chair of the Zionist Federation makes a bid to be placed on the Sex Offenders Register

≪ Previous: The Jewish Chronicle's Contempt for its readership knows no limits - they treat them as idiots (probably because they are)

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This is the United States and the ‘Special Relationship’ that Labour Politicians Defend – this is what the ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign is about

When the Board of Deputies, which represents at best 20-30% of British Jews presented its 10 Commandments, Labour politicians fell over themselves to signal their acquiescence. Not merely Keir Starmer and Emily Thornberry but the ‘left’ candidate Rebecca Long-Bailey

Of one thing we can be sure. The Board of Deputies is not and never was concerned about anti-Semitism in Britain. Not merely because it is at historically low levels (despite the propaganda that tells you otherwise) but because the Board is a Zionist group.  Zionism from its inception was founded on the belief that anti-Semitism could not be fought. Which is why it never fought it.

Anyone disagreeing with me is invited to read a copy of the founding pamphlet of Political Zionism, Theodor Herzl’s The Jewish Stateor more accurately The State of the Jews. Herzl positively boasted of how useful and helpful anti-Semitism was to his Zionist project:

‘the governments of all countries scourged by Anti-Semitism will be keenly interested in assisting us to obtain the sovereignty we want.... Great exertions will hardly be necessary to spur on the movement. Anti-Semites provide the requisite impetus’

In other words anti-Semitism was vital if the Zionist movement was to succeed. Herzl also accepted all the calumnies and stereotypes (or ‘tropes’ to use the current lingo) about Jews.  He wrote:

‘When we sink we become a revolutionary proletariat... when we rise there rises also our terrible power of the purse.’

In his Diaries he wrote (p.9) that

I understand what anti-Semitism is about. We Jews have maintained ourselves, even if through no fault of our own, as a foreign body among’ the various nations. In the ghettos we take on a number of anti-social qualities

The US in Iraq

As Yigal Elam, an Israeli Labour Zionist Historian wrote:

‘Zionism did not consider anti-Semitism an abnormal, absurd, perverse or marginal phenomenon. Zionism considered anti-Semitism a fact of nature, a standard constant, the norm in the relationship of the non-Jews to the presence of Jews in their midst… a normal, almost rational reaction of the gentiles to the abnormal, absurd and perverse situation of the Jewish people in the Diaspora.’ [Zionism and its Scarecrows, Moshe Machover, Maria Offenburg, Khamsin 6]

If the Board of Deputies was concerned about anti-Semitism then it would have taken up the question of the Tory Party’s MEPs sitting in the European parliament with fascists and anti-Semites.  It might even have questioned Boris Johnson over the  many anti-Semitic and racist phrases and parts in his 2004 book 72 Virgins.

But of course the attacks on Corbyn had nothing to do with anti-Semitism but his anti-Americanism. This is well understood by the Labour Right – Keir Starmer, Emily Thornberry, Jess Philips. It is part of our unwritten constitution that both major parties must not question our relationship with the United States.

It is on that basis that I copy two articles.  The first on hunger in the United States. At a time when the US military is literally spending hundreds of billions of dollars a year fighting wars abroad, 50 million Americans go hungry, in particular children and 40 million Americans have no medical insurance cover.

‘The secret of politics under capitalism is to persuade the poor that they should hate other poor people. Their enemy is the 'scrounger', the asylum seeker, the disabled. Anyone but those responsible.’

The secret of politics under capitalism is to persuade the poor that they should hate other poor people. Their enemy is the 'scrounger', the asylum seeker, the disabled. Anyone but the rich. Scapegoatism is built into capitalist politics. What is essential is that people don't blame those who accumulate unprecedented wealth. They are the 'wealth creators' and in this New Labour was as complicit as the Tories.

The article by John Whitehead lifts the lid on American imperialism and its reach across the globe. This is and should be one of the major issues in the Labour Party leadership election. That is why the craven and pathetic acceptance by Rebecca Long-Bailey of the BOD Commands is not a triviality, some kind of irrelevancy. It is crucial to any definition of what it means to be a socialist or left in the 21st century.

That is why the idea that RBL should be supported is not one I support. Anyone who’s socialism rests on the shoulders of US imperialism is not a socialist. 

Tony Greenstein

The Richest Country’s Empty Plates. 50 Million Hungry Americans

By Larry Romanoff

December 19, 2019 "Information Clearing House"–

In July of 2013, Rose Aguilar wrote a wonderful article for al-Jazeera (1), in which she discussed the dire hunger crisis that envelops the US today. In her article, she brought back a memory of something I had long forgotten, an event that so outraged the American public that the government was temporarily forced to respond with more humane policies. That event was a 1968 CBS special hour-long documentary called Hunger in America, in which viewers literally watched a hospitalized child die of starvation. Nixon responded because the public outrage left him no choice, but Reagan quickly dismantled those improvements.

When Reagan came to power in 1980, there were 200 food banks in the US; today there are more than 40,000, all overwhelmed with demand and forced to ration their dispersals. Before 1980, one out of every 50 Americans was dependent on food stamps. Today, it is one out of four. Before Reagan, there were 10 million hungry Americans; today there are more than 50 million and increasing.

A substantial part of the Great Transformation included not only tax cuts and other benefits for the wealthy, but a simultaneous massive reduction in budgets for social programs – in spite of the fact that Reagan and the secret government were creating the conditions that would desperately require those same social programs.

That 50 million hungry Americans today includes the 25% of all children in the US who go to sleep hungry every night. About 25% of the American population today cannot buy sufficient food to remain healthy, with most of these being hungry for at least three months during each year. It is so bad that many college students have resorted to what we call “dumpster-diving” – looking in garbage bins for edible food.

Larry Romanoff is a retired management consultant and businessman. He has held senior executive positions in international consulting firms, and owned an international import-export business. He has been a visiting professor at Shanghai’s Fudan University, presenting case studies in international affairs to senior EMBA classes. Mr. Romanoff lives in Shanghai and is currently writing a series of ten books generally related to China and the West. He can be contacted at: 2186604556@qq.com. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Note

(1)        https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/07/201371892231367525.html

The United States Can't Afford Universal Health Care But It Can Afford a Massive Military

Come Home, America: Stop Trying To Dominate The Planet and Put an End to Wars-Without-End

By John W. Whitehead

“Let us resolve that never again will we send the precious young blood of this country to die trying to prop up a corrupt military dictatorship abroad. This is also the time to turn away from excessive preoccupation overseas to the rebuilding of our own nation. America must be restored to a proper role in the world. But we can do that only through the recovery of confidence in ourselves…. together we will call America home to the ideals that nourished us from the beginning. From secrecy and deception in high places; come home, America. From military spending so wasteful that it weakens our nation; come home, America.”—George S. McGovern, former Senator and presidential candidate

January 10, 2020 "Information Clearing House"–

I agree wholeheartedly with George S. McGovern, a former Senator and presidential candidate who opposed the Vietnam War, about one thing: I'm sick of old men dreaming up wars for young men to die in.

It’s time to bring our troops home.

Bring them home from Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. Bring them home from Germany, South Korea and Japan. Bring them home from Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Oman. Bring them home from Niger, Chad and Mali. Bring them home from Turkey, the Philippines, and northern Australia.

That’s not what’s going to happen, of course.

The U.S. military reportedly has more than 1.3 million men and women on active duty, with more than 200,000 of them stationed overseas in nearly every country in the world. Those numbers are likely significantly higher in keeping with the Pentagon’s policy of not fully disclosing where and how many troops are deployed for the sake of “operational security and denying the enemy any advantage.” As investigative journalist David Vine explains, “Although few Americans realize it, the United States likely has more bases in foreign lands than any other people, nation, or empire in history.”

Don’t fall for the propaganda, though: America’s military forces aren’t being deployed abroad to protect our freedoms here at home. Rather, they’re being used to guard oil fields, build foreign infrastructure and protect the financial interests of the corporate elite. In fact, the United States military spends about $81 billion a year just to protect oil supplies around the world.

The reach of America’s military empire includes close to 800 bases in as many as 160 countries, operated at a cost of more than $156 billion annually. As Vine reports, “Even US military resorts and recreation areas in places like the Bavarian Alps and Seoul, South Korea, are bases of a kind. Worldwide, the military runs more than 170 golf courses.”

US military cadets

This is how a military empire occupies the globe.

Already, American military service people are being deployed to far-flung places in the Middle East and elsewhere in anticipation of the war drums being sounded over Iran.

This Iran crisis, salivated over by the neocons since prior to the Iraq War and manufactured by war hawks who want to jumpstart the next world war, has been a long time coming.

Donald Trump, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton: they all have done their part to ensure that the military industrial complex can continue to get rich at taxpayer expense.

Take President Trump, for instance.

Despite numerous campaign promises to stop America’s “endless wars,” once elected, Trump has done a complete about-face, deploying greater numbers of troops to the Middle East, ramping up the war rhetoric, and padding the pockets of defense contractors. Indeed, Trump is even refusing to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq in the face of a request from the Iraqi government for us to leave.

Obama was no different: he also pledged—if elected—to bring the troops home from Iraq and Afghanistan and reduce America's oversized, and overly costly, military footprint in the world. Of course, that didn’t happen.

Yet while the rationale may keep changing for why American military forces are policing the globe, these wars abroad (in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, Yemen and now Iran) aren’t making America—or the rest of the world—any safer, are certainly not making America great again, and are undeniably digging the U.S. deeper into debt.

War spending is bankrupting America.

Although the U.S. constitutes only 5% of the world's population, America boasts almost 50% of the world's total military expenditure, spending more on the military than the next 19 biggest spending nations combined.

In fact, the Pentagon spends more on war than all 50 states combined spend on health, education, welfare, and safety.

The American military-industrial complex has erected an empire unsurpassed in history in its breadth and scope, one dedicated to conducting perpetual warfare throughout the earth.

Since 2001, the U.S. government has spent more than $4.7 trillion waging its endless wars.

Having been co-opted by greedy defense contractors, corrupt politicians and incompetent government officials, America’s expanding military empire is bleeding the country dry at a rate of more than $32 million per hour.

In fact, the U.S. government has spent more money every five seconds in Iraq than the average American earns in a year.

Future wars and military exercises waged around the globe are expected to push the total bill upwards of $12 trillion by 2053.

Talk about fiscally irresponsible: the U.S. government is spending money it doesn’t have on a military empire it can’t afford.

As investigative journalist Uri Friedman puts it, for more than 15 years now, the United States has been fighting terrorism with a credit card, “essentially bankrolling the wars with debt, in the form of purchases of U.S. Treasury bonds by U.S.-based entities like pension funds and state and local governments, and by countries like China and Japan.”

War is not cheap, but it becomes outrageously costly when you factor in government incompetence, fraud, and greedy contractors. Indeed, a leading accounting firm concluded that one of the Pentagon’s largest agencies “can’t account for hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of spending.”

Unfortunately, the outlook isn’t much better for the spending that can be tracked.

A government audit found that defense contractor Boeing has been massively overcharging taxpayers for mundane parts, resulting in tens of millions of dollars in overspending. As the report noted, the American taxpayer paid:

$71 for a metal pin that should cost just 4 cents; $644.75 for a small gear smaller than a dime that sells for $12.51: more than a 5,100 percent increase in price. $1,678.61 for another tiny part, also smaller than a dime, that could have been bought within DoD for $7.71: a 21,000 percent increase. $71.01 for a straight, thin metal pin that DoD had on hand, unused by the tens of thousands, for 4 cents: an increase of over 177,000 percent.

That price gouging has become an accepted form of corruption within the American military empire is a sad statement on how little control “we the people” have over our runaway government.

Mind you, this isn’t just corrupt behavior. It’s deadly, downright immoral behavior.

Americans have thus far allowed themselves to be spoon-fed a steady diet of pro-war propaganda that keeps them content to wave flags with patriotic fervor and less inclined to look too closely at the mounting body counts, the ruined lives, the ravaged countries, the blowback arising from ill-advised targeted-drone killings and bombing campaigns in foreign lands, or the transformation of our own homeland into a warzone.

That needs to change.

The U.S. government is not making the world any safer. It’s making the world more dangerous. It is estimated that the U.S. military drops a bomb somewhere in the world every 12 minutes. Since 9/11, the United States government has directly contributed to the deaths of around 500,000 human beings. Every one of those deaths was paid for with taxpayer funds.

The U.S. government is not making America any safer. It’s exposing American citizens to alarming levels of blowback, a CIA term referring to the unintended consequences of the U.S. government’s international activities. Chalmers Johnson, a former CIA consultant, repeatedly warned that America’s use of its military to gain power over the global economy would result in devastating blowback.

The 9/11 attacks were blowback. The Boston Marathon Bombing was blowback. The attempted Times Square bomber was blowback. The Fort Hood shooter, a major in the U.S. Army, was blowback.

The assassination of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani by a U.S. military drone strike will, I fear, spur yet more blowback against the American people.

The war hawks’ militarization of America—bringing home the spoils of war (the military tanks, grenade launchers, Kevlar helmets, assault rifles, gas masks, ammunition, battering rams, night vision binoculars, etc.) and handing them over to local police, thereby turning America into a battlefield—is also blowback.

James Madison was right: “No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.” As Madison explained, “Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes… known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.”

We are seeing this play out before our eyes.

The government is destabilizing the economy, destroying the national infrastructure through neglect and a lack of resources, and turning taxpayer dollars into blood money with its endless wars, drone strikes and mounting death tolls.

Clearly, our national priorities are in desperate need of an overhauling.

At the height of its power, even the mighty Roman Empire could not stare down a collapsing economy and a burgeoning military. Prolonged periods of war and false economic prosperity largely led to its demise. As historian Chalmers Johnson predicts:

The fate of previous democratic empires suggests that such a conflict is unsustainable and will be resolved in one of two ways. Rome attempted to keep its empire and lost its democracy. Britain chose to remain democratic and in the process let go its empire. Intentionally or not, the people of the United States already are well embarked upon the course of non-democratic empire.

This is the “unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex” that President Dwight Eisenhower warned us more than 50 years ago not to let endanger our liberties or democratic processes.

Eisenhower, who served as Supreme Commander of the Allied forces in Europe during World War II, was alarmed by the rise of the profit-driven war machine that emerged following the war—one that, in order to perpetuate itself, would have to keep waging war.

We failed to heed his warning.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, there’s not much time left before we reach the zero hour.

It’s time to stop policing the globe, end these wars-without-end, and bring the troops home before it’s too late.

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His new book Battlefield America: The War on the American People  is available at www.amazon.com. Whitehead can be contacted at johnw@rutherford.org.

See also No Kid Hungry

Jonathan Hoffman, former Vice-Chair of the Zionist Federation makes a bid to be placed on the Sex Offenders Register

January 17, 2020, 5:36 pm

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Hoffman, ex-Board of Deputies officer and guest of the Israeli Embassy, admits to viewing Revenge Porn of the rape of British Cyprus girl – Ambrosine Shitrit also lines up in support of the ‘Israeli boys’

People will  be aware of the case of the British girl who was almost certainly raped by 12 Israeli males last July in Cyprus. The Police released the Israelis and arrested the girl instead and after a gruelling 8 hour 'interview', without benefit of lawyers, coerced her into admitting that she had made it up. Cypriot police have a track record in coercing rape victims into making such confessions.

The reasons behind what happened are not too difficult to work out. Israel has close economic and political ties with Cyprus. Cypriot police and their judicial system have a long history of bias against women, which was exemplified by Judge Michalis Papathanasiou who ruledthat "All the evidence shows that she had lied and prevented the police from doing other serious jobs."

In fact there was no evidence other than her confession. It is a case which has disturbed many people, including the British government and Israeli feminists who know that the macho culture in Israel tolerates if not encourages violence against women including rape. The Israeli men returned home to a hero’s welcome.

The Jerusalem Post wrotehow:

Spontaneous celebrations broke out at Ben-Gurion Airport with dancing, bottles of champagne opened, choruses of “Am Yisrael Chai” and “Our father in heaven, how good is God,”as well as chants of “the Brit is a whore.”

It was like a hero’s welcome – except that there aren’t any heroes in this sordid affair, just some morally ambiguous Israeli teenagers who went abroad to drink and maybe search for sex. There’s nothing new in that, but the cavalier attitude expressed by the teens and their families should be disturbing for us all.

While they should indeed feel gratitude and joy at the charges being dropped and their return home, there’s nothing in their boorish behavior that warrants a celebration.

Instead, there should be remorse and reflection over the depths to which Israeli society has plummeted, where it’s seen as perfectly normal behavior –  spurred by this alarming era of widespread, easy-access online pornography – for several friends to share a sexual partner, film the proceedings and then share the videos with others.

According to the Daily Mail, support for the 12 boys, even in Israel, has evaporated. They write that:

This week, two of Israel’s top celebrity journalists, Guy Meroz and Orly Vilnai — the Richard and Judy of Tel Aviv — described how they’d travelled to Cyprus and interviewed the British girl many times and are convinced she is telling the truth.

‘She was raped without question,’ Orly told viewers yesterday. ‘We are both convinced she was physically raped. We met a wonderful young woman whose trauma was loud and clear in almost all her behaviour. She bites her fingernails, at times she “gets stuck” and goes into a world from which she needs to be woken up.’

Indeed one of the gratifying things is the level of support in Israel, especially amongst women, for the girl in Cyprus. According to Ha'aretz:

Several dozen Israeli activists arrived in Cyprus Monday to protest the court decision the next day, carrying signs reading "Stop victim blaming" and "We believe you."

"I hope that our support will uplift the young woman and that the Israeli men who hurt her will internalize their serious and offensive actions," said Orit Sulitzeanu, Executive Director of The Association of Rape Crisis Centers in Israel. Another protest is slated for Tuesday in front of the Cypriot Embassy in Tel Aviv.

In what is a strikingly similar case, a Scandinavian woman who alleged she was raped by 2 men outside a nightclub was also forcedby Cypriot police to withdraw her accusation, after an 8 hour ‘interview’ or face prosecution and prison.

There are two factors that make it certain that the girl is telling the truth and that she was gang raped.

i.                  The number of Israeli men, 12, who had sex with her.

ii.              The fact that they took a video recording of what happened.

The attitude in Israel to what happened reflects the Talmud where rape of a non-Jew (shiksa is the colloquial phrase – which comes from Sheketz - unclean) is not equivalent to the rape of a Jewish woman. Just as murder of a non-Jew is not as serious. This attitude undoubtedly lies behind the welcome given to the 12 Israeli males.

Hoffman is worried by 'antisemitism' i.e. that there might be criticism of Israel if his attackers are shown to be rapists

None of this however concerns Israel right-or-wrong advocate Jonathan Hoffman. When it’s a contest between the ‘goys’ (non-Jews) and Israeli Jews then the latter are always, without doubt, right.

Hoffman has form.  He was, until this blog exposed him, a member of the Jewish Defence Forces Facebook group which was founded by Mordechai Kedar.  Kedar, a lecturer at Tel Aviv’s Bar Ilan religious university has established a reputation for himself as an advocate of rape in war .

Accordingto Kedar

‘The only thing that deters a suicide bomber is the knowledge that if he pulls the trigger or blows himself up, his sister will be raped,'

Kedar believes that because of the honour code prevalent in Palestinian society, men will do anything to avoid their sisters and women being raped, including submitting to Israeli armed force.  ‘Terrorism’ can therefore be stopped simply by the threat of rape.

Kedar’s vile views did not stop Sussex Friends of Israel hostingKedar on a tour in 2014 or indeed the Zionist Federation nationally.

Jonathan Hoffman commented on Twitter:

‘Aya Napia case: it was consensual. I have seen the videos.’

was breathtaking as an apology for rape.  How  could one possibly tell from a video if sexual intercourse was consensual? Was the recording of what happened consensual? Without going into the ins and outs of rape, if a woman is forced to have sex then that means participating in something that she doesn’t want to do.  The ‘enjoyment’ is itself a form of coercion.

In any case the allegation, as far as I understand, is that the first encounter may have been consensual but that what followed was anything but.

Hoffman however was taken aback by the force of reaction. On TwitterHoffman complained he was subject to ‘ludicrous attacks’ from ‘the womens rights lobby’ for defending the Israeli rapists.‘How dare a man examine the evidence’ he proclaimedon his blog except of course he wasn’t examining any evidence unless watching Revenge Porn counts as evidence. He was defending Israelis, right or wrong, under the pretext that not to do so would mean allowing anti-Semitism to go by default.

Hoffman’s twisted thinking, that you have to defend anything Israel does, from torture, mass murder, theft of land and child abuse, is standard practice for the Zionist movement. Shooting unarmed demonstrators, including children, is  perfectly acceptable. The Board of Deputies and Labour Friends of Israel do it all the time.

However it would seem that the reaction of Jewish women, despite being Zionists, took Hoffman by surprise. First off was Rosa Doherty of the Jewish Chronicle who describedhis behaviour as ‘vile’. Second was Keren David of the Jewish Chronicle, who made the obvious point (well obvious to everyone except the ultra-Zionists) that ‘The furore over their victim’s treatment is in no way fuelled by anti-Jewish prejudice.’

Hoffman finds it difficult to understand that civilised people condemn rape regardless of the perpetrator and regardless of the victim. This is not Nazi Germany or the segregationist South where Jewish/Black men were held to be particularly lecherous and aggressive.

It is simply irrelevant whether the perpetrator is Jewish and who is the victim. Janice Turner’s articlein The Times, Claim rape and a social media assault begins, which hinted at powerful actors defending the Israeli men, particularly riled Hoffman.

As far as Hoffman was concerned ‘An allegation of rape such as this clearly has the potential to incite antisemitism.’ for which read criticism of Israel, for example Janice Turner’s noting that Cyprus is a playground for Israeli youth and that their interest in a gas pipeline from Israel means that a blind eye will be turned to matters such as this.

Hoffman therefore announced that

‘I thought it important to do some research into the case. Obviously that included viewing the videos taken by one (or more) Israelis since they were central to the case. Assuming the girl was not too inebriated to give consent, there is no sign in the videos of anything other than consensual sex.’ 

In case you were wondering, Hoffman reassures us that ‘I do not have the videos.’ Whether or not that is true will depend on the result of a Metropolitan Police search of his house!

If the making of Revenge Porn is an offence it is likely that viewing of it is also an offence. Regardless what kind of human rodent would watch such a video? One can only assume that that is how Hoffman gets his kicks.

But whilst even Jewish Chronicle reporters distanced themselves from the Israeli attackers not so Ambrosine Shitrit of Pegida, an associate of Hoffman and a Tommy Robinson fan. Shitrit phonedup Nick Ferari on LBC to announce that ‘as a woman’ she supported the Israeli ‘boys’ as she called them. She understood how terrible it was for them to have been falsely accused.

Even Ferrari, who is vociferously pro-Zionist, was taken aback.  Shitrit expressed her sympathy for the rapists. ‘Thank goodness’ she opined that they had recorded their vile deeds. It beggars belief but these were the people who the Board of Deputies held hands with at last summer’s Al Quds demonstration.

Of course Shitrit wasn’t speaking as a woman but as a Zionist and her loyalty to Zionism is stronger than the fact that she is a woman. Zionism uber alles.

Perhaps the final word should be left to Hoffman.  Apparently his interest in the matter is that he has been falsely accused of rape/sexual assault.  He writes:

Even worse is that I bear the scars of a false sex assault allegation by an Israel Hater. Rosa Doherty knows it – but still she attacked me.

As Dixon of Dock Green used to say:  ‘There is more in this than meets the eye.’!!

Lenzner – Hoffman’s Partner in Crime is in Trouble Too

I hate to report that Damon Lenzner, the twice-bankrupt close associate of Hoffman is again on his uppers following his conviction alongside Hoffman at Hendon Magistrates Court last June.  

Dodgy Damon claims he “can recruit” but a quick check on Companies House shows his recruitment companies have been bankrupted twice for failing to pay National Insurance and VAT to HM Customs. The companies deducted substantial funds from mainly unfortunate East European workers but failed to pass it on to the revenue authorities, not once but twice, owing hundreds of thousands of pounds.

Dodgy Damon is always boasting about his “street activism” for the Israeli terror state – however, it has not gone unnoticed that his conviction, like the convictions of Hoffman and Laurent Kachauda are, significantly, all in connection with offences against defenceless women. Hoffman is no supporter of the Burqa but was seen wearing one as he finally showed up at Westminster Magistrates Court on foot, a Warrant having been issued for his arrest.

Dodgy Damon seems to be having difficulty finding employment since his conviction at Hendon Magistrates Court and has been reduced to performing as a jobbing “Quizmaster” at sundry pubs but getting only the occasional job from Q1– a pub quiz company,

“Jonathan Hoffman and Damon Lenszner pleaded guilty to offences under the Public Order Act at Hendon Magistrates’ Court on Wednesday”- Ben Welch, Jewish Chronicle.

Lenszner had to spend the Summer wearing long trousers instead of his usual grubby shorts to cover up the Home Curfew Leg Tag he was sentenced to wear by Judge Neville Dean at Hendon Court while fellow buffoon Jonathan Hoffman created great mirth – not least but especially within the  mainstream British Jewish community -  by wearing a burka to court.

Jonathan Hoffman however continues to be a distinguished invited guest to the Israeli Embassy. Let’s hope he doesn’t treat them to a film show!

Acknowledgement – special thanks to my brave correspondents who, as you know, keep me very well-informed on the sad lives of the pathetic gang of misfit losers who associate with criminal thugs like Hoffman, Lenszner and Kachauda.

Not to mention the gossip about the bitter feuds breaking out within the group ! !! – such as  screeching mad  “Israeli” harridan Yochy Davis: now trying to take over from Sharon Klaff and Ambrosine Shitrit and boss them around,  now threatening poor old Thor Halland with the Police, always  looking down on poor losers  Gemma and Michael. while all the time trying to get invites to the Embassy – one thing is certain: Gemma, Michael, Mark, Paul, Harvey and Thor will not be getting any invites to the Embassy any day soon if Yochy has any say in it.

Israel, is the only state in the world where torture is legal

January 19, 2020, 9:01 am

≫ Next: Smoke Without Fire – Anti-Semitism Without Jews

≪ Previous: Jonathan Hoffman, former Vice-Chair of the Zionist Federation makes a bid to be placed on the Sex Offenders Register

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Israeli Doctors are Actively Complicit in Aiding and Abetting Torture but according to Emily Thornberry that IS WHY Israel a ‘beacon of freedom’

According to Emily Thornberry “Modern Israel is a beacon of freedom, equality and democracy”. Israel is also the only state in the world where torture is legal. See It’s now (even more) official: torture is legal in Israel

In 1987 the Landau Commission, which was set up as a result of the Bus 300 Affair, when two Palestinian prisoners were murdered by senior officers (one General Yitzhak Mordechai was later promoted to Command of the Southern Region), found that the use of violence, or ‘moderate physical pressure’ as they termed it, against prisoners was an acceptable method of interrogation. They argued, in the light of what they called "the concept of the lesser evil", that

Elyakim Rubinstein, Supreme Court Justice who approved of the use of torture

"actual torture . . . would be perhaps be justified in order to uncover a bomb about to explode in a building full of people . . . whether the charge is certain to be detonated in five minutes or in five days."

"To put it bluntly, the alternative is: are we to accept the offence of assault entailed in slapping a suspect's face, or threatening him, in order to induce him to talk and reveal a cache of explosive materials meant for use in carrying an act of mass terror against a civilian population, and there by prevent the greater evil which is about to occur? The answer is self evident."[15]

This was the justification that the Nazis used for torture. Defence of the State against its enemies. Chaired by Supreme Court Judge Moshe Landua, the Commission's Report stated:

Israeli torture victim

"The effective interrogation of terrorist suspects is impossible without the use of means of pressure, in order to overcome an obdurate will not to disclose information and to overcome the fear of the person under interrogation that harm will befall him from his own organization, if he does reveal information."^[16]

"The means of pressure should principally take the form of non-violent psychological pressure through a vigorous and extensive interrogation, with the use of stratagems, including acts of deception. However, when these do not attain their purpose, the exertion of a moderate measure of physical pressure cannot be avoided."

In 1999 the Supreme Court, sitting as the High Court, ruledin Public Committee Against Torture in Israel v the Government of Israel, PD 73(4) 817 (1999) that the law does not permit the use of torture. However they also ruled that in a ‘ticking bomb’ case the use of such methods might not  cause the torturers to be legally culpable.

Prof. Yuval Shany explained in Back to the ‘Ticking Bomb’ Doctrine how the decision of Israel’s High Court in December 2017 in Abu Ghosh v. Attorney-General effectively reinvigorated the ‘ticking time bomb’ defence of Israel’s torturers.

The result is, as Btselem documents, that Shin Bet have continued to use torture as a routine method of interrogation with the connivance of the Israel’s Supreme Court. Since 1967 73 prisoners have been tortured to death.

Last December a Report from Addameer, the Palestinian Prisoner Support Unit and Legal Aid Group stated that

The occupation authorities, in particular, the Israeli intelligence agency “Shabak” resorts to torture and ill-treatment as standard operating procedure in a systematic and wide-scale approach against Palestinian detainees. Over the past three months, the intelligence agency subjected a number of detainees at Israeli interrogation centers to severe physical and psychological torture without any form of monitoring and protection.

The reaction of the Israeli state to Addameer’s Report was to impose a ‘gag order’ preventing them from printing details of the case of torture.  This too, as Emily will explain is another example of Israeli democracy at its best!

Other examples include 21-year-old Palestinian student Mays Abu Ghosh who is currentlyin an Israeli jail cell and a victim of torture. Mays, who was arrested for her activism, has been interrogated so violently that her parents could barely recognize her – yet this horrific story is being met with no huge outcry and very little media attention.

On August 29, Mays was arrested in her home during a sweep of Palestinian student activists and detained under trumped-up charges. 

Demonstration protesting at the death under torture of Arafat Jaradat in an Israeli G4S prison

As a student journalist, Mays has been a vocal advocate of Palestinian rights. Now she’s being tortured for her lifelong resistance to displacement, and being labeled a “major terrorist” for her work organizing with fellow students against Israeli oppression of Palestinians. Her “crimes” include participating in a conference about the Palestinian right of return in Lebanon, and speaking about her late brother on a radio program.

When her parents were finally allowed to visit, Mays was so bruised and visibly wounded she was almost unrecognizable. Her mother couldn’t hug her because her body was in too much pain.

Join us in calling for an END to Israeli torture and for the release of Mays Abu Ghosh and the many others wrongly jailed.

Addameer describes some of the torture techniques:

The Banana Position - Israel's own invention

·         Positional torture (stress positions): Israeli intelligence officers forced the detainees into a number of stress positions such as the banana position,[2] the frog position, sitting on an imaginary chair, squatting and many other different positions. Almost in all of these stress positions, the detainees would lose their balance and fall on the ground, which would lead to a harsh beating by the officers and then forcing the detainee back into the stress position. Other used stress positions included standing on their toes while their hands were shackled above their heads to a wall. Another position included sitting on a chair while handcuffed to the back, where the hands were positioned on a table behind the detainee’s chair. A third position involved the detainee laying on the ground with his/her hands chained to each other with iron cuffs and positioned behind his/her back. This position also includes officers sitting on the detainee to place pressure on his/her body while beat him/her ferociously.  

Illustrative use of torture

·         Harsh beatings: Israeli occupation intelligence officers used extreme methods of beatings against the detainees using their hands, legs, knees and even their fingers. The officers hit, slapped, punched, poked (using their fingers), and kicked the detainees. These methods resulted in severe and life-threatening injuries that included broken ribs, inability to walk, brutal bruises, swelling marks on the skin, ulcer wounds…etc. The officers, who exceeded five in number in some cases used to blindfold the detainees’ eyes so they would not expect the beating or know where it is coming from. Several of those detainees appeared in their court sessions with marks on their bodies, expressing severe pain, or in some cases arrived on wheelchairs. In one of the cases, the harsh beating was committed with the intention to kill the detainee, who was in fact transferred to the hospital in serious condition after around 30 hours of severe and extreme methods of beatings. In another case, the harsh beating aimed at injuries caused by a police dog during the arrest, the interrogators intended to target those previously obtained injuries, which were mainly on the detainee’s genital area causing the wounds to re-open twice. Also, in many other cases, the method of pulling the facial hair from its roots causing injuries and swelling marks was used.

An actor plays the role of torture victim

·         Sleep deprivation: this technique was implemented through different methods, in some cases the detainees spent around twenty days sleeping from one to three hours a day. Even when those detainees were sent to their cells to sleep, they would be disturbed with loud and eerie sounds made by the prison guards, the voices of other detainees being harshly beaten or the sound of knocking on their cell doors. In some cases, sleep deprivation ranged from 30 to 60 continuous hours, where the detainee would not be sent to sleep at all during these hours and would be woken up if he/she falls asleep during the interrogation. Some detainees were harshly slapped on their faces to wake up, others were also splashed with water. Detainees described the slaps as extremely severe causing them to feel dizzy.

·         The use of family members (emotional blackmailing): psychological torture and ill-treatment were used on the majority of these detainees, focusing on threats against their family members, and loved ones. Israeli occupation forces used the policy of collective punishment through arresting and bringing in some of the family members mostly to al-Mascobiyya interrogations center and Ofer prison. Eight family members for seven different detainees were arrested, and another ten family members were brought in for questioning. Some of these relatives were kept for a number of days while others were kept for hours. In all the cases, family members and loved ones were mainly brought in to pressure the detainees themselves. The interrogators made the detainees assume that their relatives got arrested and will be tortured as well. Relatives included fathers, mothers, brothers, daughters, wives, etc.

Palestinians dressed up as torture detainees

·         Interrogation at Israeli secret prisons: at least one of the detainees Addameer has documented their cases have stated that they were taken to unknown centers. The detainee said that the interrogators at this center were all face-covered and wearing a different uniform than the known usual uniforms. It has been revealed in the past that Israel has secret prisons that are removed from maps and airbrushed aerial photographs.[3]

Others such as Samir Arbeed have been left permanently disabled as a result of their experiences See Israel/ OPT: Legally-sanctioned torture of Palestinian detainee left him in critical condition

What is particularly reprehensible is the involvement of Israeli doctors and physicians in the use of torture. Doctors who monitor prisoners in order that they can help the torturers decide how far to go, who declare when a prisoner is fit enough for further torture and who deliberately lie in medical reports in order to cover for the torturers. Comparisons with American doctors who collaborated with the CIA in water boarding and SS doctors spring to mind.  See the article below How Israeli doctors enable the Shin Bet’s torture industry.

And far from the Israeli Medical Association opposing this they give the green light for such doctors to continue what they are doing. See for example the articleby John Yudkin, Emeritus Professor at University College, London.

Physicians for Human Rights-Israel has stated that if the IMA refused to allow doctors to serve in security units commonly deploying torture the practice would come to a halt. The medical presence in these units offers moral legitimation to Israel’s interrogators. See Global medical watchdog complicit with Israeli abuses.

Yoram Blachar

In 2009 more than 700 doctors from around the world calledfor the Israeli President of the World Medical Association, Yoram Blachar,to step down, calling him “unfit for office” and claiming that he had turned a blind eye to the “institutionalised involvement of doctors” in torture in Israel.

In a letter they said that the appointment of Blachar, who was President of the Israeli Medical Association as president of the WMA was “a matter of grave concern.” The signatories, who included professors and doctors from 43 countries, said that the appointment

“makes a mockery of the principles on which the WMA was founded in 1947, which was a response to egregious abuses by Germany and Japan in World War Two.”

Other prominent doctors who 

support Israel’s use of torture include Sir Michael Marmot, former President of the WMA and a Professor at UCL.

Last November Heba al-Labadi and Abdul Rahman Mi’ri, two Jordanians who had been savagely tortured, were released from Administrative Detention (i.e. imprisonment without trial), Heba went on a 40 day hunger strike and this forced the Jordanian government to insist on the release of its nationals or face a freeze or worse in their diplomatic relations. The arrest of Labadi Mi’ri, a cancer survivor, was a major PR disaster for Israel. See A lesson for the Palestinian leadership: Real reasons behind Israel’s arrest and release of Labadi, Mi’ri

Tony Greenstein

How Israeli doctors enable the Shin Bet’s torture industry

By +972 Magazine October 7, 2019

From approving brutal interrogation techniques to writing false medical reports, doctors in Israel have taken an active role in the torture of Palestinian prisoners.

By Ruchama Marton

Illustrative photo of an Israeli soldier blindfolding a Palestinian prisoner. (Nati Shohat/Flash90)

If the Shin Bet runs a school for its agents and interrogators, the curriculum most certainly includes a class on how to tell a lie. The texts taught, it seems, do not change with the years. In 1993, responding to accusations that the Shin Bet brutally tortured Palestinian detainee Hassan Zubeidi, then Commander of the IDF Northern Command Yossi Peled told Israeli journalist Gabi Nitzan that “there is no torture in Israel. I served for 30 years in the IDF and I know what I am talking about.”

Twenty-six years later, Deputy Chief of the Shin Bet and former Shin Bet interrogator, Yitzhak Ilan repeated the same line to news presenter Ya’akov Eilon on national television while speaking about Samer Arbeed, a 44-year-old Palestinian who was hospitalized in critical condition after he had been reportedly tortured by the Shin Bet. Arbeed is suspected of organizing a deadly bombing that killed a teenage Israeli girl and wounded her father and brother at a spring in the West Bank in August. Ilan bristled at the notion that the Shin Bet was somehow responsible for Arbeed’s condition.

Putting aside these absurd forms of denial, as a doctor and founder of Physicians for Human Rights – Israel, I have always been troubled by how Israeli doctors cooperate with and enable Israel’s torture industry.

In June 1993, I organized an international conference in Tel Aviv on behalf of PHR against torture in Israel. At the conference, I presented a Shin Bet medical document that had been discovered by chance by Israeli journalist Michal Sela. In the document, the Shin Bet doctor was asked whether the prisoner in question had any medical restrictions when it came to keeping them in isolation, whether they could be tied, whether their face could be covered, or whether they could be made to stand for prolonged periods of time.

The Shin Bet denied such a document ever existed. “There is no document. It was simply an experimental paper that is not in use,” the agency claimed. Four years later, a second document, suspiciously similar to the first, came to light. That document asked doctors to sign off on torture in accordance with several previously agreed-upon clauses.

The first document, along with other findings, were published in the book titled “Torture: Human Rights, Medical Ethics and the Case of Israel.” The book cannot be found in Israel; Steimatzky, Israel’s oldest and largest bookstore chain, has banned its sale. Perhaps this is further proof that there is no torture in Israel.

After the document was uncovered, PHR turned to the Israel Medical Association and asked it to join the struggle against torture. The IMA requested that PHR hand over the names of the Shin Bet doctors who signed off on the document so that they could be dealt with internally.

I refused to hand over the names and told the IMA attorney that I was not interested in going after rank-and-file doctors — I wanted to change the entire system. That meant doing away with legitimacy granted to confessions exacted under torture, educating IMA members about non-cooperation with torturers, and particularly providing active help to those doctors who do report on suspicion of torture or brutal interrogations.

Back then, the IMA was satisfied with putting our statements while doing nothing to prevent the Shin Bet’s doctors from cooperating with torture. Furthermore, the organization failed to fulfill its obligation to establish a forum for doctors to report on suspected torture.

An ethical, moral, and practical failure

But it is not only doctors in the Shin Bet and the Israel Prison Service that collaborate with torture. Doctors in emergency rooms across Israel write false medical opinions in accordance with the demands of the Shin Bet. Take, for example, the case of Nader Qumsieh from the West Bank city of Beit Sahour. He was arrested in his home on May 4, 1993 and was brought to Soroka Medical Center in Be’er Sheva five days later. There a urologist diagnosed him a hemorrhage and a torn scrotum.

Qumsieh testified that he was beaten during his interrogation and kicked in his testicles.

Ten days later, Qumsieh was brought before the same urologist for a medical examination, after the latter had received a phone call from the Israeli military. The urologist wrote a retroactive letter (as if it had been written two days earlier), without actually conducting an additional examination of the patient, in which he said that “according to the patient, he fell down the stairs two days before he arrived in the emergency room.” This time, the diagnosis was “superficial hematoma in the scrotal area, which corresponds to local bruises sustained between two and five days prior to the examination.” The urologist’s original letter, written after the first examination, disappeared from Qumsieh’s medical file.

History teaches us that doctors everywhere easily and effectively internalize the regime’s values, and many of them become loyal servants of the regime. That was the case in Nazi Germany, in the United States, and in various countries in Latin America. The same goes for Israel. Qumsieh’s case, along with countless others, reflects the ethical, moral, and practical failure of the medical establishment in Israel vis-à-vis torture.

Already back in the 18th century, jurists — rather than doctors — published legal opinions accompanied by proof that there is no connection between causing pain and getting to the truth. Thus, both torture and confessions exacted through pain were legally disqualified. One can only assume that the heads of the Shin Bet, the army, and the police know this bit of history.

And yet, torture — which includes both mental and physical cruelty — continues to take place on a large scale. Why? Because the real goal of torture and humiliation is to break the spirit and body of the prisoner. To eliminate his or her personality.

The legal understanding for forbidding torture is based on the utilitarian idea that one cannot arrive at the truth through inflicting pain . But doctors are committed — first and foremost — to the idea that anything that causes physical or mental harm to a patient is prohibited.

The Shin Bet medical eligibility document allows for sleep prevention, it allows interrogators to expose prisoners to extreme temperatures, to beat them, to tie them for long hours in painful positions, to force them to stand for hours until the vessels in their feet burst, to cover their heads for prolonged periods of time, to sexually humiliate them, to break their spirits by severing their ties to family and lawyers, to keep them in isolation until they lose their sanity.

The Shin Bet’s medical eligibility form is not the same as the one used to check eligibility to join the air force or even to drive a car. This kind of “eligibility” leads the prisoner directly into the torture chamber — and the doctor knows this. The doctor knows to what kind of systematic process of pain and humiliation he or she is lending their consent and approval. It is doctors who oversee the torture, examine the tortured prisoner, and write the medical opinion or the pathology report.

The white robe passes through the torture chamber like a lurking shadow during interrogations. A doctor who cooperates with Israel’s torture industry is complicit in that very industry. If a prisoner dies during interrogation, the doctor is an accomplice to his or her murder. Doctors, nurses, medics, and judges who know what is taking place and prefer to remain silent are all accomplices.

We must unconditionally oppose all forms of torture — without exceptions. We, citizens of a democratic state, must refuse to cooperate with the crime of torture, and all the more so when it comes to doctors.

We must also not hide behind the idea that torture is a symptom of the occupation while telling ourselves that the practice will disappear when the occupation ends. Torture is a worldview according to which human rights have no place or value. It existed well before the occupation and it will continue to exist if we do not change that worldview.

Violent and cruel investigative practices do not benefit national security even if they are committed on its behalf. Torture causes a spiraling destruction of our very social fabric. Not only do those who carry out this terrible kind of “work” lose the values of morality, human dignity, and democracy, but also all those who remain silent, unwilling to know. In fact, all of us.

Dr. Ruchama Marton is the founder of Physicians for Human Rights – Israel. This article was first published in Hebrew on Local Call. Read it here.

Israel/ OPT: Legally-sanctioned torture of Palestinian detainee left him in critical condition

30 September 2019, 16:58 UTC

Updated: 30 October 2019, 12:07 UTC

The legally-sanctioned torture of a Palestinian detainee during interrogation by officers from Shin Bet, Israel’s Security Agency, further exposes the complicity of Israel’s authorities, including its judiciary, in the systematic violation of the human right to be free from torture, said Amnesty International today.

Samir Arbeed was arrested on 25 September on suspicion of being involved in the killing of a 17-year-old Israeli girl Rina Shnerb.

According to Israeli media reports and Samir’s lawyer, a “judicial body” granted Shin Bet special permission to “use exceptional ways to investigate” in his case, effectively sanctioning the use of methods amounting to torture during his interrogation.

“It is utterly outrageous that the use of torture during interrogations continues to be sanctioned by the Israeli authorities, from the Shin Bet, through the executive branch and all the way to the Supreme Court,”

said Saleh Higazi, Amnesty International’s Deputy Middle East and North Africa Director.

“Under international treaties, which legally bind Israel, the use of torture cannot be justified under any circumstances. This case exposes Israel’s claims that its judiciary upholds human rights as a complete sham.”

The use of torture cannot be justified under any circumstances. This case exposes Israel’s claims that its judiciary upholds human rights as a complete sham

Smoke Without Fire – Anti-Semitism Without Jews

January 20, 2020, 8:08 pm

≫ Next: Emily Thornberry, (Lady Nugee), is standing for the leadership of the Labour Party as the racist and Zionist candidate

≪ Previous: Israel, is the only state in the world where torture is legal

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 A Critical Review of 

Antisemitism and the Labour Party 

Edited by Jamie Stern-Weiner, Verso, 2019

 

Below is a Review of Anti-Semitism and the Labour Party, an Ebook Below is my Review of Anti-Semitism and the Labour Party, an Ebook brought out shortly before the General Election and edited by Jamie Stern-Weiner. It is a critical review because the book fails to come to terms with what the anti-Semitism attacks are really about.

If, as I have argued for the past 4 years, the ‘anti-Semitism’ attacks by the Board of Deputies and the Zionists are not about anti-Semitism but Israel/Zionism then it is futile ‘proving’ that only 0.06% or whatever of Labour members are anti-Semitic.  Even assuming that those expelled were genuine anti-Semites whereas of course most of those, like Jackie Walker, Marc Wadsworth and myself are committed anti-racists, it is irrelevant.

The Labour Party is supposed to be the party of the working class. If that is true then it will also include all the mass of petty prejudices and chauvinism of capitalist  society, including racism, that circulate in the working class. What Marx called the 'muck of ages'. That will inevitably include anti-Semitism. Those who plotted and planned the Board of Deputies and Zionist campaign knew full well that if they looked they could find ‘anti-Semitism’.  It has always been there. It has nothing to do with Jeremy Corbyn and the Left. 

‘Anti-Semitism’ provided the ideal pretext to attack Corbyn and unfortunately in accepting the framework of the anti-Semitism attack, viz. that the attacks are genuinely about anti-Semitism, books such as this do little to help in the fightback.

The Zionist demonstration against 'antisemitism' outside Parliament March 2018 - it was the first 'antiracist' demonstration that Norman Tebbit, Ian Paisley and Sajid David had attended

This is the fatal mistake that Jewish Voice for Labour made. It assumes the campaign was about Jews but of course it was not. That is why you have the phenomenon of non-Jewish racists, like the hapless Lukey Stanger, attacking Black anti-racists as ‘anti-Semitic’.

This isn’t so strange as it seems.  When Donald Trump told 4 Black Congresswomen to ‘go home’ he added for completeness that they were ‘anti-Semites’ because they hated Israel. In Donald Trump and the Zionists’ eyes, Israel = Jews.

The Zionist Campaign to Paint Corbyn as an Antisemite had to overcome the difficulty that he was an antiracist activist

Jamie sent me a copy of the book on 26^th November and we engaged in a short correspondence.  I wrote that though his and Alan Maddison’s article ‘Smoke Without Fire’ was impressive, nonetheless

The point though is that however logical, fact filled etc. it is it fails to understand one point. This campaign is not based on logic or rationale.  It is a campaign in defence of ruling class capitalist interests and the Zionist leaders are quite happy to perform like dancing bears for that establishment.  It is in many ways reminiscent of the role that Jews used to play in Eastern Europe, the tools of the nobles or kings which brought so much wrath down on their heads.

The anti-Semitic slogan of the 'antisemitism' smear merchants - it implies that all Jews are of the 'few' not the 'many'

Jamie replied that

 ‘Of course, the campaign serves interests - but that does not mean its claims should not be debunked. The Iraq War also served ruling interests, but it was still important to critique the arguments for war on the evidence.’

Which is of course true but the problem is that politically the whole campaign is based on debunking the lies of our opponents rather than pushing an alternative narrative that is about Palestine and Zionism.

Although I didn’t realise it at the time, one of the weakest essays in the collection by Richard Kuper, ‘Hue and Cry over UCU’, was written in 2011 for Open Democracy on the situation concerning the University College Union. The article was relevant then and irrelevant now. Richard’s comments on the EUMC Working Definition of Anti-Semitism now the IHRA are ill-thought out and I’m sure he would no longer stand by them, in particular his comment that refers to ‘six relatively unproblematic examples of antisemitism’ being the first 6 examples of ‘anti-Semitism’ that is given.

In one sense this series of essays, which are highly uneven in quality, encapsulate all the mistakes made by people in the ‘anti-Semitism wars’ in the Labour Party.

As these wars show every sign of continuing I can only hope that some attention is paid to this analysis.

Tony Greenstein 

Jamie Stern-Weiner did his best to avoid any serious discussion of the relationship of Zionism to the antisemitism campaign

Smoke Without Fire (this review appears in Weekly Worker)

It is saidthat those who fail to learn from the past are doomed to repeat it. It would seem that the contributors to this title were determined to prove the truth of this aphorism.

The centrepiece of this Internet book is Smoke Without Fire, referring to the ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign against the Labour Party: Their conclusion being that:

‘no persuasive evidence has been presented to demonstrate that antisemitism within the Labour Party has increased since 2015..’

How then to account for the widespread perception to the contrary? Why is it that between 15 June 2015 and 31 March 2019 there were five and a half thousand articles on Labour ‘anti-Semitism’ in the national press? [1]

Or to put it another way. How is it that the Windrush Scandal, when dozens of Black British citizens were illegally deported to the Caribbean has garnered only a fraction of such coverage? Why is it that genuine racism is a matter of indifference for the British media but ‘anti-Semitism’ garners such attention?

Jamie Stern-Weiner and friends have consciously avoided the question of Israel and Jamie clearly harbours illusions in Zionism as an ideology

Weiner and Maddison’s observe that:

‘There were no witches in Salem; Jewish elders did not gather in a graveyard at night; a Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy did not target Nazi Germany. The allegation that Labour is rife with antisemitism is of a piece with these fantastic antecedents.

But if the allegations of anti-Semitism against the Labour Party are of a piece with the belief that Salem was host to a coven of witches, then what were they about?  Where did they come from?  On this Weiner and Maddison and indeed virtually all the contributors are silent.

If Labour’s ‘anti-Semitism’ affair was not about anti-Semitism then what was it about? Virtually no one in this collection is prepared to call out the BBC/Daily Mail smear campaign for what it was. A vicious, right-wing campaign, using bogus allegations of anti-Semitism as a stick to beat a left-wing leader of the Labour Party who was held to represent a threat to all that the British Establishment held to be dear to them.

When the Daily Mail and the BBC are concerned about racism, then surely it cannot be too difficult to figure out what has happened? There seems to be a reluctance amongst these luminaries of the left elites to say what is or should be obvious namely that we have just witnessed the destabilisation of a political party by state actors, British and foreign.

At the beginning of 2017 Al Jazeera broadcast a four-part programme, The Lobby, which provided a snapshot of what had been happening.  Clearly the Israeli state and its surrogates, Labour Friends of Israel and the Jewish Labour Movement, were actively organising for the overthrow of Corbyn using anti-Semitism as their chosen weapon.

Equally clearly the British and American states were also involved. That is why there was no interest by the British government in inquiring as to why an Israeli intelligence operative, Shai Masot, was plotting the downfall of Britain’s Deputy Foreign Minister, Alan Duncan. Anyone acquainted with the actions of the CIA and the intelligence agencies, as documented by ex-CIA agent Phil Agee in Inside the Company, should not have been surprised. 

Just contrast this with the reaction should Al Jazeera’s programme have focussed on the activities of an Iranian political agent seeking the downfall of particular government ministers.

In Jeremy Corbyn we had the election of someone who was anti-Nato, a supporter of the Palestinians and a well known opponent of US foreign policy, to the leadership of the second major party in the US’s closest ally in Europe. Why would the Americans not intervene to prevent Corbyn becoming Prime Minister? Do the left social democrats and liberals who contributed to these essays really believe that the United States wouldn’t intervene in British politics if its interests were at stake?

In 20 or 30 years, when the present furore has died down, some enterprising young researcher or journalist, perhaps on The Guardian, will obtain details under freedom of information legislation about what really happened, which was a conspiracy against democracy.

Antisemitism and the Labour Party was distributed as an EBook two weeks before December 12^th. It claimed to ‘bring(s) together the most rigorous and penetrating analytical writings on the ‘Labour antisemitism’ affair.’ Unfortunately, with the exception of two articles by Norman Finkelstein and that by Justin Schlosberg, all the contributions suffer from the same fallacy, namely that what it calls the ‘strange events that have warped British politics since 2015’ are actually about anti-Semitism.

Finkelstein in his chapter on the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism points the finger at Zionism and Israel but others seem strangely reluctant. Daniel Finn’s Corbyn Under Fireconcludes that if Chakrabarti’s  recommendation

‘to ‘use the term “Zionist” advisedly, carefully and never euphemistically ... and to ‘resist the use of Hitler, Nazi and Holocaust metaphors, distortions and comparisons in debates about Israel/Palestine’

had been heeded then ‘some of the controversies of the past two years could have been avoided.’ Complete nonsense. Indeed the exact reverse of the truth. Far from avoiding the use of the term ‘Zionist’ people should have emphasised that the attacks on the Labour Party came from the Zionist

If Luciana Berger could resurrect a six year old long erased mural in the East End to attack Corbyn with then why would Hitler comparisons make any difference?

But if people had fought back and not accepted the ‘anti-Semitism’ framework.  If they had argued that ‘Zionism’ meant a political settler colonial project that anti-Semites like Trump and Orban were only too happy to support then perhaps some much needed political clarification might have been injected.

Is it seriously suggested that when the Israel State funds campaigns against miscegenation and when mobs chant ‘Death to the Arabs’ or when Israeli law recognisesthe right of Jewish communities to bar Arabs as members, that comparisons with pre-Holocaust Nazi Germany are inappropriate?  That when Israel uses the Holocaust to justify its barbarism that it is inappropriate for us to respond in kind?

Was it anti-Semitic for Hannah Arendt in ‘Eichmann in Jerusalem: the Banality of Evil’ to compare Israeli laws forbidding marriage between Jew and Arab with those of the Nuremburg Laws? Was Professor Ze’ev Sternhell, an expert on fascism and a childhood survivor of the Polish ghetto of Przemyśl, wrong to writethat in Israel there is a ‘Growing Fascism and a Racism Akin to Early Nazism’?

Jamie Stein-Werner continues where Finn left off with his report on the 2017 Labour Party Conference. He says that

‘whereas ‘Nazis[m]’ and ‘apartheid’ unambiguously refer to extreme oppression, ‘Zionism’ might denote any one along a spectrum of beliefs ranging from the harmful to the benign (e.g., support for the right of Jews to collective self-determination.’

It’s no wonder that the JLM had it so easy when even our supporters fail to understand that Zionism was a reflection of anti-Semitism and is the ideological font of racial supremacy in Israel.

This acceptance of Jewish racism originated with Jon Lansman’s Left Futures and Why the Left Must Stop Talking About ‘Zionism’. The fact that every act of racism in Israel is justified by reference to the ‘ideals’ of the Zionist vision is simply obliterated.

When appeals were made for the right of African refugees to stay in Israel Interior Minister Elli Yishai was quotedas saying that ‘The migrants are giving birth to hundreds of thousands, and the Zionist dream is dying’[2]The whole debate around these refugees was conducted in terms of Zionism’s desire for as Jewish a state as possible and a permanent Jewish demographic majority.

Every act of racism in Israel is carried out in the name of preserving the ‘Jewish’ state and its majority. It is the failure to take this on board in their critique of Israel and Zionism that lies behind much of the failure of the opposition to the anti-Semitism witchhunt.

Only Finkelstein raised the issue of genuine racism against Black people which should have been the major plank of our fightback.

How many Jews have been shot dead by police or railroaded into jail? Whereas being Black or Muslim closes doors, being Jewish opens them.

Where was the anger with those, Tory and New Labour, who had introduced a ‘hostile environment’ policy which led to Windrush? Not one contributor pointed the finger at the Labour Right’s complicity in supporting the 2014 Immigration Act and in playing the race card.

I have long campaigned to highlight Tom Watson’s supportfor Labour MP Phil Woolas who was removed as an MP by the High Court after having waged an election campaign based on ‘making the white folk angry’. Or Watson’s rolein the 2004 by-election in Hodge Hill where he issued a leaflet ‘"Labour is on your side, the Lib Dems are on the side of failed asylum seekers."

There was a total failure by Corbyn to call out the Daily Mail and Sun, who employed Katie Hopkins, who describedrefugees as ‘cockroaches’. This is also reflected in the contributions to this book.  We should have responded to the hypocritical nature of the attacks on us rather than scurrying to find ‘evidence’ of how many anti-Semites there were in the Labour Party.

Sentiments that Rebecca Long-Bailey finds difficult to endorse

6 days before the General Election I wroteExpect the worst, hope for the best. The night before the election, whilst campaigning for Chris Williamson, I penned an Open Letter to Seamus Milne which read that ‘the strategy of apologising for ‘anti-Semitism’ and appeasement of the Right had led to Disaster’.

I had sleepless nights asking myself how Corbyn could win. ‘What’ I asked myself, ‘had I missed’?  People were confident. Hundreds of Momentum supporters were flooding marginal constituencies. Was I a natural born Jeremiah, forever a Cassandra? It was clear to me that Corbyn Labour’s inability to stand up for its beliefs and to rebut the smears were going to result in an election defeat. The only question was ‘how bad it was going to be’. In 2017, when even my closest comrades in Brighton and Hove Momentum were gloomy I had been optimistic. In two blog articles I had predicted a hung parliament and even victory.

It was the inability of Corbyn and McDonnell to fight back against this state-inspired campaign, including throwing Chris Williamson to the wolves, that spelt the end. It was not that ‘anti-Semitism’ was raised on the doorstep, rather that his permanent apologising, temporising, failing to answer questions and an inability to go on the offensive and face down his critics that was not only depressing but demeaning. Corbyn appeared weak and it was this that led to the low opinion of him on the doorsteps. After all how would Corbyn and McDonnell stand up to a much fiercer onslaught when in government?

When I had been suspended in March 2016 for ‘comments you are alleged to have made’ (I only learnt what these comments were when I read The Telegraph and Timestwo weeks later) it was immediately clear that the allegations of ‘anti-Semitism’ had nothing to do with anti-Semitism. In 2018 I was expelled as part of the ‘anti-Semitism’ moral panic as was Marc Wadsworth and then Jackie Walker. Ken Livingstone was forced out too and yet Corbyn failed to speak out

Anti-Semitism and the Labour Party contains 20 different contributions and there are 21 different testimonies from Jews in the Labour Party. The most obvious lacuna is that nowhere in the nearly 300 pages is there any contribution from someone, Jewish or non-Jewish, who has been the victim of Labour’s ‘anti-Semitism’ witchhunt.  Neither Jackie Walker, Ken Livingstone, Chris Williamson, Marc Wadsworth, Asa Winstanley or myself was invited to contribute. It is as if the testimony of those who were at the sharp end of what happened was of no account.

This arrogance reminds me of the question posed by Rudolph Vrba, the Jewish escapee from Auschwitz in April 1944. Vrba was deliberately ignored and rendered anonymous by Israel’s Holocaust historians, because what he had to say did not accord with Zionism’s holocaust narrative. Vrba asked who was the better historian: ‘those of us who saw the Nazis in action in Auschwitz’ or ‘those who did not have direct experience with the Nazis’? [3]

This book contains many good essays but there are also a considerable number of mundane stocking fillers. One of the worst is by David Rosenberg of the Jewish Socialist Group. Appearing in July David spoke of ‘improvements’ in Labour’s procedures for handling complaints of anti-Semitism. David imagined that Labour’s right-wing had

‘been pushed back. The detail will be discussed more and refined before Labour Conference. And it has been confirmed that antisemitism will not be separated out but these processes will apply to all complaints that discrimination/abuse has occurred against members across the range of protected characteristics.

This is a pure flight of fantasy. At the Labour Party conference it was agreed that people would be expelled by a fast track procedure without so much as a hearing. In practice any statement critical of Israel can and does lead to expulsion. David was also silent on the unlawful suspension of Chris Williamson.

In reality this campaign was not about procedures. The focus on that was another red herring which unfortunately David and much of the JSG swallowed. However good the procedures (to do what?) they could never have satisfied Labour’s opponents.

Meanwhile all other examples of racism have been ignored. Black and Muslim people have been primary targets of the ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign.  Anti-racist campaigner Marc Wadsworth, who played a pivotal role in the Stephen Lawrence campaign was expelled at the behest of Ruth Smeeth, a former Israel lobbyistfor BICOM.

In Brighton and Hove notorious right-winger, Lukey Stanger, who statedthat Travellers were ‘frequently a nasty blight on communities’ has been suspended for months with no sign of an impending expulsion. Stanger was protected by Tom Watson.

Luke Akehurst, the Director of We Believe in Israel who openly campaigned to defend Israel’s murder of unarmed Palestinian demonstrators, including children, in Gaza by Israeli snipers,[4]has not been disciplined.  We can only assume that Palestinian lives are worth less than Israeli or Jewish lives.

David Rosenberg bears a greater responsibility than most. He lives in Corbyn’s constituency and knows Corbyn personally. David did his best to ensure that there was no criticism of Corbyn’s feeble tactics even though it should have been obvious that it was only counter-pressure that might have led to Corbyn fighting back.

Even worse Jon Lansman was (is?) a member of the JSG. When I posted an article on the Jewish Socialists’ Facebook Group it was removed by David’s partner, Julia Bard. When I persisted in criticising the JSG’s refusal to support Jackie Walker I was removed altogether.

David has been pivotal in the formation of Jewish Voice for Labour. I refused to join JVL because I opposed a Jewish only group when the ‘anti-Semitism’ attacks were not about Jews or anti-Semitism. The first rule of any political campaign is not to accept your opponents’ terms of reference.

That is why JVL has failed to make any impression on the witchhunt or anti-Semitism campaign. The attacks were always about Israel, Zionism and wider British foreign policy, not Jews or anti-Semitism. JVL consistently refused to criticise Corbyn’s weak leadership or raise the wider question of racism in the Labour Party.

In the Chimera of British Anti-Semitism Norman Finkelstein notes that the fear in the Jewish community of an impending Corbyn government did not mean they had anything to fear.

If residents of Salem, Massachusetts, experienced deep anxiety about witches; if Americans experienced deep anxiety about Communists; ... 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. (p.41)

Instead of tackling head on reports of the disaffection of British Jews the Jewish Chronicle’s campaign to instil fear was simply ignored and allowed to fester.

Where I disagree with Finkelstein’s is his references to an ‘outsized Jewish political power’. It is true that Zionist groups such as the Jewish People Policy Planning Institute boasts of such power. It is also true that Jews are disproportionately represented amongst the wealthy, in the media, politics and academia.

But does this therefore translate into Jewish Power? Do all Jews possess the same class interests? Unless we believe that Jews are acting in concert, as an organised block or caste, then we should avoid the ethnicisation of what are historic, political, social and economic phenomenon.

There is no separate Jewish interest or lobby in society. Of course the Zionist lobby purports to represent all Jews but we should not accept their claim. In the United States politics is ethnicised precisely because of the weakness of class politics. Lenni Brenner is another American anti-Zionist who falls into this trap.

Finkelstein is a brilliant writer however he is not infallible. Although he is not using the concept of ‘Jewish power’ in an anti-Semitic sense there is no doubt that ‘Jewish Power’ is both an anti-Semitic and a Zionist concept. It suits Zionism to pretend that Jews worldwide, apart from us ‘self haters’ all support Israel. It suits anti-Semites to make ‘Jew’ and ‘Israel’ synonymous.

It was Paul Eisen, whose alleged association with Corbyn first began the anti-Semitism campaign, who published ‘Jewish Power’, the first of 3 articles which mapped his coming out as a holocaust denier.[5]

Being Jewish is no barrier to being accused of 'antisemitism'

When Finkelstein says that ‘Were it not for the outsized power of British Jews, it’s hard to conceive that British society would be interminably chasing after a hobgoblin’ he has completely missed the point.  Just as there can be anti-Semitism without Jews, as in Eastern Europe, so there can be an anti-Semitism smear campaign without Jews as the United States may be about to prove with Bernie Sanders.

Daniel Finn got it right when he wrote that ‘Israel’s supporters are not an external force that has bent the British ruling class to its will. They are the outriders of that class.’ Zionism is the ruling class’s cutting edge. The fake anti-Semitism campaign had nothing whatsoever to do with ‘Jewish Power’. Daniel is also right when he wrote that ‘A narrative can still be false even if it contains truthful elements: in fact, there are very few that don’t.’  Indeed I would argue that in that one sentence Daniel summed up everything about the ‘anti-Semitism’ smears. Yes there were anti-Semites in the Labour Party. There always have been. The campaign was not however about them.

Of course there will be people with anti-Semitic or conspiracy ideas in their heads in the Labour Party. There always have been. But it was only when Corbyn was elected leader that the hunt began to find them. Such people are not a threat to Corbyn or even anti-Semitic in any meaningful sense. They are certainly no threat to Jews.

There will also be people in Labour who support racist immigration controls, who believe that migrants take British jobs and who believe that Gypsies are a social nuisance. The way to deal with them is by way of education and debate.  If Labour is to be the party of the working class then it cannot exclude those who offend its middle class sensibilities.

It is a sign of the theoretical and political poverty of the Labour Right that it resorted to disciplinary measures and it is equally a measure of the intellectual bankruptcy of the Labour Left that it has given way to the Right on this. This book does not challenge that vacuum.

Jews in Britain were the alibi, the pretext for the British Establishment. It was extremely useful to be able to wage the war against Corbyn in the name of Britain’s Jews. In much the same way that British imperialism justified its occupation of India by reference to its campaign against Suttee not the exploitation of the Indian peasantry. Opposition to anti-Semitism had a ring of moral righteousness that support for austerity lacked!

It was however the weakness of the Labour Left and this book reflects that weakness, that it failed to draw any conclusions from who supported the ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign. The same Daily Mail which supported Hitler and the British Union of Fascists and which campaigned against the admission of Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany. Then there was the BBC and the Sun. Yet not once did Corbyn or Lansman point out these basic facts.

The ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign was adopted by a Tory Party which has historically been riddled with anti-Semitism and which even today sits, in the European Parliament in the ECR group with fascists and anti-Semites.

Justin Schlosberg and Laura Laker’s article ‘Labour, Antisemitism, and the News - A Disinformation Paradigm’ is well worth reading for the detail it provides on the overwhelming bias, not only of the printed press but the broadcast media and the BBC in particular. They are the only contributors to refer to the outrageous and unlawful suspension of Chris Williamson MP.

Richard Kuper’s outdated Hue and Cry over the UCU adds nothing to the criticism of the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism by Hugh Tomlinson QC, Geoffrey Robertson QC and Sir Stephen Sedley. It is truly abysmal. It is difficult to know why it was included. Kuper refers to ‘six relatively unproblematic examples of antisemitism’ amongst the 11 illustrations of ‘anti-Semitism’. In fact they are all problematic. His first example is

‘Calling for, aiding, or justifying the killing or harming of Jews in the name of a radical ideology or an extremist view of religion.’

Is Richard seriously suggesting that calling for the killing of Jews in the name of a ‘moderate’ ideology or religion is acceptable? Clearly what this ‘illustration’ is about is demonising Muslims.

Richard also says that ‘using the symbols and images associated with classic antisemitism’ – could hardly be anything but anti-Semitic.’Where has Richard been? It is part of Zionist hasbara (propaganda) to associate criticism of Israeli practices today with medieval anti-Semitism. When criticism is made of documented examples of settlers poisoning Palestinian water sources, this is compared to medieval allegations that Jews poisoned wells. As Finkelstein notes:

Israeli hasbara (propaganda) itself promiscuously exploits the ‘blood libel’ charge (i.e., that Jews murdered Christian children for ritual purposes) in order to silence critics by reversing its sting. mere mention of Palestinian children killed by Israel typically prompts accusations of a ‘Global Blood Libel against Israel’

Richard says that another example ‘Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination’‘could be antisemitic.’ I disagree. There is no scenario in which this is anti-Semitic. It is the concept of a single Jewish people, in practice a Jewish race, which is anti-Semitic.

In what is a far more well thought out analysis of the IHRA Finkelstein argues that socialists, who for too long have sought to restrict free speech on the grounds of not ‘hurting the feelings’ of one group or another or because of a desire to achieve a ‘safe space’ (are there any under capitalism?) have colluded with the government’s attacks on free speech.

It is on the grounds of free speech that the Left should have made its stance, instead of being the censorious, nannying busy bodies that too many on the left have become. Instead of banning or expelling people for transphobia we should have encourage debate on the issue.

Finkelstein quotes Marx saying that ‘You must have doubts about everything’. This should be emblazoned on the Left’s banners.

Finkelstein also points to the problems with Brian Klug’s alternative definition of ‘anti-Semitism’ as

‘a form of hostility to Jews as Jews, where Jews are perceived as something other than what they are’.

I agree that anti-Semites often take issue with Jews for what they are, not for what they are not.  So someone who hates Jews for being too clever or good businessmen is not anti-Semitic! Brian’s definition is too clever by half and we would do better to rely on the OED definition of anti-Semitism: ‘hostility to or prejudice against Jews.’

Only Antony Lerman makes the point in When Jews Are Just Fodder for the Tory Propaganda Machine that when Tories, like Jacob Rees-Mogg make reference to Jews as the ‘Illuminati’ pulling the strings, a genuinely anti-Semitic remark, no one criticises him. The same could be said of Boris Johnson’s book 72 Virgins which is replete with racist and anti-Semitic comments. This and the Tories supportfor Viktor Orban in the European Parliament

Jeremy Gilbert’s trite Antisemitism, Cosmopolitanism and the Politics of Labour’s ‘Old’ and ‘New’ Right-Wingsis another Xmas stocking filler. Jeremy tells us that ‘there will be no more suspensions of party members simply because they support Corbyn and the party machinery think they can get away with suspending them.’ Where has Jeremy been?

Tom Mills and David Miller’s article for Ceasefire ‘Notes on Power, Elites, and Anti-Racism’ is a useful corrective to the idea that seems to have gotten hold that criticising elites in society is now anti-Semitic (presumably because Jews make up most of the elites!). According to Siobhan McDonagh MP, not the sharpest tool in the Labour Right’s toolbox, anti-capitalism is anti-Semitic because Jews are capitalists!  Thus the fake ‘anti-Semitism’ comes full circle.

The final article is ‘Jews, Antisemitism and the Law’ by Naomi Wayne who works for the Equal Opportunities Commission for Northern Ireland. It is a timely reminder of the pending investigation by the Equalities and Human Rights Commission, who have made a partisan political intervention in Labour’s internal affairs launching an Inquiry into the accusations of anti-Semitism. 

When all the candidates for Labour leadership have committed themselves to accepting the EHRC investigation report we should be clear that this is a ruling class stitch-up.

Unfortunately this Ebook is less than the sum of its parts. I recommend that those interested in this subject read Bad News for Labour, whose book launch the Zionists tried unsuccessfully to stop at the Labour Party Conference and the earlier Labour’s Anti-Semitism Wars, to which I contributed.

Tony Greenstein

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[1]              Philo, Berry Schlosberg, Lerman & Miller, Bad News for Labour, p. vii,Pluto Press, London, 2019.

[2]          Israel PM: illegal African immigrants threaten identity of Jewish state, Guardian 20.5.12.

[3]          Ruth Linn, Escaping Auschwitz: A Culture of Forgetting - p. 108.

[4]              https://twitter.com/lukeakehurst/status/996742505193525248?lang=en

[5]          You can read Eisen’s article hereand a response by Joel Finkel here. You will not that at this stage Finkel did not call Eisen a holocaust denier but it was clear, not least from his defence of Israel Shamir, that he was on the road to becoming one.

Emily Thornberry, (Lady Nugee), is standing for the leadership of the Labour Party as the racist and Zionist candidate

January 22, 2020, 5:00 pm

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According to Thornberry – Israel is a ‘beacon of freedom, equality and democracy’ despite torture being routinely used, censorship being standard and imprisonment without trial being the norm for Arabs

Emily Thornberry has, quite undeservedly, gained a reputation, as being on the Left, albeit the soft-Left. This is because she was one of the few who didn’t resign in the ‘chicken coup’ of the summer of 2016. There can be no doubt however that Thornberry is a die-hard racist and Zionist.

According to Thornberry, if you don’t support a Jewish state, a state based on Jewish ethnicity, a state that excludes non-Jews from the national collective, then you are ‘anti-Semitic’.

Palestinian child imprisonment is one of Thornberry's examples of Israeli democracy at its best

It is a sign of the political and intellectual poverty of social democracy that people like Thornberry have no understanding of history. The idea that one’s civic and political rights should depend on one’s religion went out with the French Revolution.

Britain took slightly longer than France before Jewish Emancipation was enacted. It was finally on 26 July1858 that Lionel de Rothschild took his seat as the first Jewish member of the House of Commons. He had first been elected for the City of London in 1847 but had had to swear an oath ‘on the true faith of a Christian’.

According to Emily Thornberry this is an example of why Israel is a 'beacon of freedom'

The battle against religious coercion and for the separation of Church and State was one of the main democratic achievements of the bourgeoisie revolutions. Under feudalism rights were inherited.

Israel is a Jewish state as was spelt out by Benjamin Netanyahu in response to popular Israeli actress, Rotem Sala who exclaimed:

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."

Netanyahu promptly explainedthat

 ‘“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,”

Netanyahu was of course correct. Israel is a state of the Jewish people not its non-Jewish citizens. According to Thornberry, if you support the same solution that was achieved in South Africa, a non-racial state for all who live there, then you are anti-Semitic.

This is what Labour’s ‘anti-Semitism’ crisis has been about. That is why the IHRA‘definition’ of anti-Semitism,that the Zionists were so insistent on, conflates anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. According to Lady Nugee ‘We need to get on our hands and knees and ask for forgiveness’ to the ‘Jewish community.’  Accordingto Thornberry

When an expert looks into a problem you have – whether it’s a doctor, a mechanic, or a plumber – you take their advice and follow it without thinking twice.

So when the Board of Deputies, the Jewish Labour Movement (JLM), and imminently the Equalities and Human Rights Commission give the Labour Party specific recommendations about how we need to root out the poison of antisemitism from our movement, our starting point must not be to dispute their proposals but ensure every single one is implemented unless we can rationally explain why not.

The mind numbing stupidity of Lady Nugee beggars belief. The BOD, JLM are all political actors not technical experts. As for the EHRC they are a state body whose interference in a democratic political party should have been condemned from the beginning. The fact that Nugee welcomes the EHRC intervention demonstrates how distant she is from socialist politics.

The idea that there are any ‘experts’ when it comes to anti-Semitism is debatable. But the idea that the JLM, affiliated to the World Zionist Organisation, which funds the theft of Palestinian land is an ‘expert’ in anti-racism is obscene. The JLM are racist apologists.

In what the Independent described as ‘a warning aimed at members of Jeremy Corbyn’s inner circle’ Thornberry calledfor staff fingered by the EHRC to be “out the door immediately”. Her comments were seen as ‘an attack on Mr Corbyn’s senior advisers, including his former chief of staff Karie Murphy’. Clearly Lady Nugee’s loyalty to Corbyn was contrived and calculated.

Thornberry is also an opportunist.  She is one of 36 Labour Friends of Israel sponsors who are also supporters of Labour Friends of Palestine.  She not only supports the Palestinians but she also supports their oppressors!  That’s what’s called even-handedness.  

Substitute 'Thatcher' for 'Thornberry' and 'South Africa' for 'Israel' and you should have the measure of Lady Nugee

In an articlefor Labour List Thornberry stated that ‘People who believe Israel does not have the right to exist should be drummed out of the Labour Party.’  What she means is Israel’s right to be a racist state not the right of Israelis to live there under a non-racial regime just like White South Africans were welcomed to stay after the end of Apartheid. What matters to Nugee is Israel’s role as the West’s warrior state.

The Balfour Declaration

Similarly Thornberry used a speechcommemorating the centenary of the Balfour Declaration, which began the process of Palestinian ethnic cleansing, to make the same point. She stated that

‘there should be no place in modern society, and – let me stress – no place in the Labour Party for anyone who holds that kind of abhorrent view.’

It would seem that if you deny the right of a racist state, Israel, South Africa or Nazi Germany, to exist then you have no place in modern society, let alone the Labour Party! Maybe, being a lawyer, Thornberry wants to reinstate the feudal concept of the outlaw.

Of course it was somewhat ironic for Thornberry to denounce racism when praising the Zionists’ friend Arthur Balfour. Balfour when Prime Minister introduced the Aliens Act 1905 preventing Jewish refugees from Czarist Russia entering Britain was. Before become Foreign Minister he was also known as ‘Bloody Balfour’. As Chief Secretary for Ireland he ordered troops to open fire killing 3 Irishmen who were demonstrating in Mitchelstown, County Cork.  In 1893, he spoke in parliament describing how Cecil Rhodes, the godfather of white supremacy, was “extending the blessings of civilization.” Two years later – then in opposition – he described Black people as “less intellectually and morally capable” than whites. [The racist worldview of Arthur Balfour, David Cronin]

Clearly paying tribute to a racist and imperialist went to Thornberry’s head.  Under the guise of opposing racism, she called for anti-racists to be expelled from the Labour Party and society. Let us remind ourselves of who the man was who signed the Balfour Declaration, which enabled Britain to give the land of the Palestinians to the Zionist settlers.

In 1906, the House of Commons was engaged in a debateabout the native blacks in South Africa. Nearly all members of Parliament agreed that the disenfranchisement of the blacks was evil. Not so Balfour, who – almost alone — argued against it.

“We have to face the facts men are not born equal, the white and black races are not born with equal capacities: they are born with different capacities which education cannot and will not change.”  

It is no surprise that Balfour is a hero to the Zionists. What is surprising is that he is a hero to a prominent Labour politician.

It should be noted that like most non-Jewish Zionists, Balfour also didn’t like Jews very much either. He told Chaim Weizmann, President of the Zionist Organisation and Israel’s first President, that ‘he agreed with some of Cosima Wagner’s ‘anti-Semitic postulates’. Apparently Germany’s Jews had

“captured the German stage, press, commerce and universities and were putting into their pockets, only a hundred years after emancipation, everything the Germans had built up in centuries”. [Chaim Weizmann, Trial and Error, p. 153].

As Leonard Stein noted, if Balfour was an ardent Zionist, “it was not out of a sentimental tenderness for Jews”. When the leader of British Jewry, Lucien Wolf, appealed to him to intercede with the Russian government to end Jewish persecution, Balfour “admitted that the treatment of the Jews was abominable beyond all measure”, but went on to remind Wolf that “the persecutors had a case of their own”.  See Centrepiece of imperial strategy.

Corbyn apparently passed the invitation to speak to Thornberry who was only too happy to pay tribute, on behalf of the Labour Party, to someone who was both an anti-Semite and a white supremacist.

It is understandable that the Jewish Labour Movement should honour the memory of Balfour. The JLM’s ‘sister party’ the almost defunct Israeli Labour Party organised a colour bar in Palestine. Jewish employers who employed Arabs were picketed by the Zionist trade union Histadrut

Historically Labour support for Zionism and colonisation in Palestine was on a par with its support for the British Empire. It was only a minority of Labour members under people like Fenner Brockway who supported the Movement for Colonial Freedom (renamed Liberation) from 1947 onwards.  The Attlee government built the welfare state on the backs of Black and Asian people.

The Kibbutz was portrayed as an oasis of socialism where there were no private property relations and everything was shared in common.  The fact that no Arab could be a member of the Kibbutz was ignored. The natives rarely featured in social democracy’s vision of the world. Today the Kibbutzim are no longer mentioned.

It was the Lebanon War in 1982 that led to a political realignment. Tony Benn, Eric Heffer and others on the Labour Left resigned from Labour Friends of Israel after the latter’s support for the Lebanon War. It was the Right who took up the cudgels for Zionism. This was because of the increasingly open support for the Israeli state from America. The Right of the Labour Party, as symbolised by Blair’s support for Bush’s war in Iraq, has always seen support for US foreign policy as axiomatic.

The Labour Left today has forgotten why Tony Benn and Jeremy Corbyn supported the Palestinians. Israel was seen, rightly, as the armed watchdog of US imperialism and the West, not as some kind of cuddly refuge for Jews searching for their identity. 

There should be no place in Labour for Israel’s ‘Right to Exist’

Thornberry made two statements that need to be challenged.  If you challenge the Israeli state’s ‘right to exist’ then you should not be in the Labour Party.  I wonder if Lady Nugee would have said the same about the Apartheid State’s ‘right to exist’. We should challenge every racist and ethno-nationalist state’s ‘right to exist’.  No state has a ‘right to exist’ least of all racist states.  Only human beings have the right to exist.  

The Israeli state is a special kind of state like its South Africa cousin of 25 years ago. It is a self-declared ‘Jewish state’ – which means it is a State of Jews, not merely Jews in Israel but throughout the world.  A Report by the Pew Research Centre Israel’s Religiously Divided Societyshowed that 48% of Israeli Jews support the physical expulsion of Israel’s Arab citizens, compared to 46% who don’t.

The Israeli state is the most racist state in the world. The Israeli Democracy Institute’s 2017 Report ‘Jews and Arabs:  Conditional Partnership’found that 2/3 Israeli Jews are opposed to Arabs buying land anywhere but in Arab areas (3% of Israel’s total land) and 25% oppose them buying any land!  This is the state that Emily Thornberry defends up to the point of expelling socialists from Labour. This is the state that Thornberry calls a ‘beacon of freedom’.

A Palestinian State

Thornberry’s response is that a Palestinian state should exist side by side with Israel. In other words Partition, segregation and ethnic cleansing.  Such a state wouldn’t even be a Bantustan. The Bantustans  in South Africa had greater powers than the enclaves envisaged for the Palestinians.

After 50 years of military dictatorship in the West Bank and Gaza (as well as the Golan Heights) there is no prospect of any Palestinian state emerging.  The leader of the Israeli Labour Party, Avi Gabbay made Labour’s position quite clear in an interview with Israel’s Channel 2.  

“I won’t evacuate settlements in the framework of a peace deal, If you are making peace, why do you need to evacuate?  If you are making peace, why do you need to evacuate?”

Without dismantling the settlements there can never be a two state solution. Gabbay is right. No Israeli government could possibly withdraw over ½ million settlers without a civil war. There is no political force in Israel that wants a 2 state solution.  Zionism has always claimed the whole of the Land of Israel, not half. God gave all of it!

Thornberry is aware of this.  She knows that the settlements are here to say. She also knows that Israel cannot give the vote or accord any basic democratic political or civil rights to the 5+ million Palestinians living under occupation without the end of the Jewish state.

As the Jewish National Fund, one of the main architects of Israeli apartheid made clear when challenged over its policy of only allocating land to Jews,

 ‘A survey commissioned by KKL-JNF reveals 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 as the state of all its citizens.’

The situation in the Occupied Territories will continue indefinitely because Israel is not prepared to become a democratic state at the expense of being a Jewish state.  In reality there are no Occupied Territories. There is no border except in the heads of racist hypocrites like Thornberry, between Israel and the West Bank. The Green Line has gone. It does not appear on Israeli maps. In its place is an Apartheid state from the Mediterranean to the Jordan in which half the population has no rights whatsoever and a small proportion of the Palestinian, some 1.5 Israeli citizens are seen as a fifth column in Israel’s midst, awaiting a future move to ‘transfer’ them.

Those who talk of a non-existent Peace Process are deliberately drawing a shroud over the real issue, democratic rights for all Israelis and Palestinians.If Thornberry can’t understand that human beings should not be divided on grounds of ethnicity it is she who should be expelled.

Israel uses torture routinely against Palestinian prisoners and it even uses it against children, Palestinian children of course. 60% of Palestinian children who are detained are tortured by Israeli forces.

Yet in what Asa Winstanley called‘a groveling address in front of the Israeli ambassador at the Labour Friends of Israel annual dinner’ in November 2017, Emily Thornberry declared that

‘even today... modern Israel stands out as a beacon of freedom, equality and democracy, particularly in respect of women and LGBT communities.’

As Private Eye used to say:  ‘Pass the sick bag Alice.’

Tony Greenstein

Without an anti-Zionist critique solidarity with the Palestinians is nothing more than charity

January 24, 2020, 3:58 pm

≫ Next: Palestine Solidarity Campaign AGM 2020 – an exercise in futility

≪ Previous: Emily Thornberry, (Lady Nugee), is standing for the leadership of the Labour Party as the racist and Zionist candidate

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Solidarity with the Palestinians is primarily a Political not a Human Rights issue

Theodor Herzl appropriated the Star of David

I was reading through the papers for the Palestine Solidarity Campaign AGM this Saturday. I did a word search on ‘Zionism’ and ‘Zionist’. In the entire Annual Report, the first 18 pages of the 32 pages of conference documents, the words do not appear.  They only occur in resolutions from members.

This is not a pedantic point. Imagine the Anti-Apartheid Movement opposing the human rights violations of the White Supremacist state without once mentioning Apartheid! Or opposing the terrible conditions that existed amongst the slaves in the sugar islands in the 18^th century without once mentioning the cause – slavery.

The refusal, because it is a refusal to mention the dread word ‘Zionism’ is fundamental to the political cowardice and timidity of the Socialist Action leadership of PSC. It is pro-Palestinian without being anti-Zionist. It’s like being a vegan whilst going hunting animals.

PSC has no analysis of the Israeli state. PSC calls Israel an apartheid state, which is correct, but how it got there is a mystery. Presumably it was, as the Zionists claim, an act of God. PSC literally has nothing to say about the Zionist movement and how and why Israel became a racist and apartheid state. That is why it avoids criticising the Zionist movement in Britain today.

Thus it is that when the Zionists of the Jewish Labour Movement wanted to make mere mention of the word ‘Zionism’ an example of the ‘abuse’ of Jews and therefore ‘anti-Semitism’ there was no resistance from PSC since they don’t even use the word themselves. Everything is on the level of human rights and discrimination.

Yes of course Israel systematically discriminates against Palestinians and tramples on their human rights but if you read the literature and output of PSC you would never know why that was so.

Thus it is that some of the worst Zionists in the Labour Party, Emily Thornberry and Lisa Nandy (who amazingly is Chair of Labour Friends of Palestine despite being an avowed supporter of the anti-Semitism campaign) have appeared on the platform of PSC. 

India's BJP Prime Minister Narendra Modi finds solace with a fellow bigot and racist

Thornberry is quite prepared to condemn individual Israeli actions, such as demolitions or shooting of unarmed protestors.  However she also supports Israel as an ethnically Jewish and therefore racist state. She is a patron of Labour Friends of Israel and a hard line Zionist.

Whilst most Jews boycotted Nazi Germany the Zionists struck up a trade agreement with it

In what Asa Winstanley called‘a groveling address in front of the Israeli ambassador at the Labour Friends of Israel annual dinner’ in November 2017, Thornberry declared that

‘even today... modern Israel stands out as a beacon of freedom, equality and democracy, particularly in respect of women and LGBT communities.’

In an articlefor Labour List Thornberry stated that ‘People who believe Israel does not have the right to exist should be drummed out of the Labour Party.’  According to Thornberry‘We need to get on our hands and knees and ask for forgiveness’ to the ‘Jewish community.’

Yet because this vile racist is prepared to condemn some Israeli human rights abuses she is considered a fit person to adorn PSC platforms. The same is equally true of Lisa Nandy who stated during the recent leadership election debates that:

‘“We gave the green light to anti-Semites,” said Nandy. “Never again do I want to be door knocking with members of the party and be called racist.”

According to Chakrabarti's pathetic report, Auschwitz hero and escapee Rudolf Vrba was antisemitic for comparing Zionists to Nazis

Shami Chakrabarti in her Report stated that

‘But surely it is better to use the modern universal language of human rights, be it of dispossession, discrimination, segregation, occupation or persecution and to leave Hitler, the Nazis and the Holocaust out of it?

It is of course tempting and easy to promote Palestine as an issue of human rights.  Only the hardest of hard line Zionists would defend Israel’s treatment of Palestinian children. But at its core Palestine solidarity is not a human rights issue but a political question of the Zionist attempt to make the Israeli state as Jewish as possible.

Israel is a state of a special kind. A self-proclaimed ethno-national state that represents only part of its population. It is a state that bases its claim to legitimacy on the Holocaust despite the fact that it treats the actual Holocaust survivors still alive today despicably.

According to the Zionists Ze'ev Sternhell, a childhood survivor of the Polish Ghetto of Premzyl is an anti-Semite

According to the German Finance Ministry Germany has paid $78 billion pounds in reparations to the survivors of the Holocaust. Yet instead of giving it directly to the victims it went via the Israeli government and the Jewish Claims Conference, a byword in nepotism and corruption.

It is estimated that one-third of Holocaust survivors today in Israel live in poverty. Zuta needs a ventilator but could not afford the cost of $5,000 to purchase one.  So she was trapped in her home for 3 years. $5,000, a fraction of the cost of bombing a house in Gaza but the latter is more important.

Dor Roth made headlines in 2013 when she memorably shouted down members of a committee at a hearing in the Israeli parliament.

“Ben-Gurion made a pact, promising we would receive money for the rest of our lives,”Roth demanded, in reference to Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion. “What have you done with the money?”she screamed, pointing her finger at the seemingly unfazed politicians. “Seeing a Holocaust survivor who can’t afford to heat his home in the winter and can’t afford to buy food or medicine is your disgrace. I don’t care about your committees. They mean nothing to us. I came all the way here to ask you one thing: Let us die in dignity.”

In the name of the Holocaust Israel has aligned itself with virtually every tyrant and dictator across the globe.

Pogroms in Israel - just like those in Eastern Europe

That is why Chakrabarti is wrong.  When Israel uses the Holocaust, the Nazis and Hitler to legitimate itself then it is reasonable to look into comparisons between Zionism and Nazism.

The reason that the Palestinians are not primarily a human rights issue is because in the world as it is today there are worse examples of human rights atrocities.  The Rohinga in Burma, Kashmir, the Kurds of Turkey.

Emily Thornberry's opposition to BDS was not an obstacle to being a guest of PSC

It was the same with South Africa. It was one of the themes of apologists for Apartheid to point to the record of the Black African countries surrounding South Africa. Mugabe was hardly an example of a regime at peace with its population. Botswana and many other African countries had and still have despicable human rights records.

However Apartheid in South Africa was unique because it treated people in a particular way because of some unchangeable characteristic of theirs – colour in South Africa, race (religion) in Nazi Germany and religion (nationality/race) in Israel.

That is what makes Israel unique. The treatment of the Palestinians occurs because they are not Jews. Whereas Iran oppresses all Muslims just about equally Israel reserves its main force of oppression for the Palestinians, including those who are Israeli citizens.

It is because PSC is not anti-Zionist that they were unable to respond to the ‘anti-Semitism’ attacks of the Zionists.  When the ‘anti-Semitism’ narrative became a predominant one in Britain PSC’s voice was missing because it had nothing to say. 

It was unable, for example to argue that Zionism has always traded on anti-Semitism indeed been in alliance with it.  Nor could it argue that Zionism and anti-Semitism both shared a common characteristic – that the Jews did not belong in the countries they lived in. Nor could they call out the Board of Deputies and the Jewish Labour Movement for being primarily Zionist groups because for PSC even the word ‘Zionist’ is now a no go area.

However the word Zionist and an analysis of Zionism is more relevant than ever.  You cannot understand Israel and its role in the world unless you understand how it came into being and you cannot do that unless you understand the role and history of the Zionist movement. That history include the history of Zionist collaboration with anti-Semitism, which includes the Nazis.  When Ken Livingstone was leader of the GLC he gave enormous help to the fledgling PSC. He however was given no support when he came under attack by the Zionists.

In short if you aren’t an anti-Zionist you aren’t in the end a true friend of the Palestinians.  You are really like one of those people, Thornberry and Nandy, who claim to be friends of both Zionism and the Palestinians.  But as Jesus observed, you cannot serve two masters and in practice Thornberry and Nandy, being exponents and supporters of the relationship with the United States, are committed Zionists even whilst they proclaim their sympathies with the Palestinians.

PSC in its desperate search for respectability has abandoned any form of anti-Zionism because it doesn’t want to put off its erstwhile friends amongst the trade union bureaucracy.

There is also another reason to be an anti-Zionist. Israel calls itself a Jewish state and not surprisingly some people react to that and the cruel behaviour of Israel by attributing that to Jews as a whole.  Having an anti-Zionist critique means that the blame is put where it belongs, on the western support that enables Israel to do what it does.

Tony Greenstein

Palestine Solidarity Campaign AGM 2020 – an exercise in futility

January 29, 2020, 9:36 am

≫ Next: Zionism's Holocaust Hypocrisy - Netanyahu uses Holocaust Memorial Day to call for a War on Iran and the International Criminal Court

≪ Previous: Without an anti-Zionist critique solidarity with the Palestinians is nothing more than charity

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For the Socialist Action leadership of PSC the last 4 years of fake ‘anti-Semitism’ smears and the defeat of Jeremy Corbyn did not happen

One of the few highlights of last Saturday’s AGM of Palestine Solidarity Campaign was the excellent speech of Omar Barghouti, co-founder of PACBI (the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel) and a co-founder of the BDS movement.

Almost alone Omar denounced the IHRA for branding BDS and solidarity with the Palestinians as anti-Semitic.  Fortunately Omar didn’t stay for the rest of the day!

Clearly someone hadn’t briefed Omar properly because the first thing he said was that the last time he spoke at PSC’s AGM (2012) the session had been chaired by none other than a certain Jeremy Corbyn! Prior to becoming leader of the Labour Party Corbyn had attended every AGM for a decade. He spoke, chaired and participated in sessions.

Jeremy Corbyn is now a non-person in PSC - never to be mentioned

 Omar had obviously not been made aware that Jeremy had become a non-person in PSC since being elected Leader. You could search the Annual Report and Plan 2019 without coming across a single mention of him. Of the General Election defeat in December?  No mention either. Indeed the first mention of Corbyn is in Resolution 5 by Brighton and Hove PSC. 

It is as if Corbyn had never existed. And this is understandable. Because when you are seeking the approval and attention of Lisa Nandy and Emily Thornberry and others on the right of the Labour Party you have to keep your distance from people like Corbyn and even more so Chris Williamson.

PSC AGM 2020

The fact that the Zionists were congratulating themselves at how effective their smear campaign had been just proved that it was better to say nothing. With all the ‘logic’ of a child, PSC Executive believes that if you say nothing about something then it doesn’t exist.

When I spoke in the debate (if that’s the right word) on the Annual Report, I remarked that the wonderful thing about PSC Conference is that it operates in a parallel universe. It’s like living in a bubble.  However bad things are on the outside of the conference hall, everything is going fantastically and according to plan inside.

The Board of Deputies supported Israeli snipers mowing down unarmed Palestinian demonstrators - children and medics included

The repeated attempts of the Board of Deputies and the Zionists to ban our meetings? Doesn’t happen. Zionism has been abolished. Indeed Zionism never existed. You can search the Executive documents and there isn’t a single mention of the dreaded words ‘Zionism’ and ‘Zionist’.

It is as if Israel, for reasons unknown, has chosen to be beastly to the Palestinians. Perhaps the weather in that part of the world makes people horrible. What happens to the Palestinians has nothing to do with a Zionist movement, which doesn’t exist. There is no logic behind the dispossession of the Palestinians. Unsurprisingly some people then conclude that it's because of something inherent in 'Jewishness'.

If PSC Executive had any imagination it could use issues like these to demonstrate why Israel is an apartheid society - instead all it does is rely on an abstract slogan

After all Israel is a Jewish state and nothing PSC has ever said contradicts that fact or brings into question Israel’s self-description.

Below I include a redacted transcript of an email conversation I had after the AGM with someone who attended it. As you can see, he didn’t seem to get the difference between ‘Jews’ and ‘Zionists’. This email correspondence demonstrates one thing – the appalling level of political consciousness in PSC. 

The BOD supported Israeli snipers being used to prevent Palestinians returning to their homeland

PSC Executive and those who control it have deliberately discouraged any form of political education within PSC. I cannot remember, within living memory, PSC nationally ever sponsoring a tour by an Israeli or Jewish anti-Zionist. There is no attempt to provide any explanation for what is happening in Palestine bar the crudest nationalist formulations. 

There is no analysis of the Zionist movement in Britain and who it is or what it does. Not once has PSC called out the Board of Deputies for what they are, a bunch of racists reactionaries whose primary concerns are support for Israel.

From Socialist Action's web site - the only time they come out of hiding

When I say ‘those who control it’ I am referring to the subterranean quasi Stalinist group Socialist Action and the other offshoots of the long gone International Marxist Group, such as the Communist League. SA are unique on the left in having virtually no open or public presence, no paper, just a web site and an occasional email list.

A Nike sweatshop in Shenzhen - Socialist Action sees this as the future of socialism

Yet despite this they managed to insert themselves, firstly into the inner circles of Ken Livingstone when he was at the GLC and then into Corbyn’s inner circle. They are a group whose chief theoretician, John Ross, seriously believes that the sweatshopsof Shenzin and the concentration camps for one million Uighurs are examples of socialism rather than an authoritarian form of state directed capitalism.

Although there was no mention of the defeat of Corbyn there is little doubt that the effects of that defeat took their toll. The conference was without doubt more right-wing than last year. Whereas last year, when I stood for Secretary against SA’s Ben Soffa I obtained nearly 40% of the vote, this year I obtained 22%.

A concentration camp for Uighurs - to Socialist Action this is socialism in action

Both motions on the IHRA Definition of ‘Anti-Semitism’ went down to defeat. It is crystal clear that PSC Executive/Socialist Action have accepted defeat on the issue. This was summed up by Jonathan Rosenhead of Jewish Voice for Labour who said we have to accept defeat and move on. Whilst this might make some tactical sense in terms of the 150 Councils that have adopted the IHRA, at least temporarily, it makes no sense more generally.

This defeatism is wholly counterproductive. The IHRA is the main weapon, not only of the Zionists, but the ruling class in its attempt to outlaw free speech on Palestine and Zionism. It is about British foreign policy in the Middle East.

Corbyn with Shami Chakrabarti - they allowed Ruth Smeeth - Labour MP for the CIA to dominate proceedings with her fake tears and wounded ego

The IHRA is being used by Trump to tar BDS with the label of ‘anti-Semitism’ in the United States and in Germanyby the Bundestag. The fact that the neo-Nazis in the Bundestag wanted to go even further than the CDU/SPD/Greens and make BDS illegal should have provided PSC with ammunition to counter those who alleged ‘anti-Semitism’. The neo-Nazi AfD declared that they were ‘‘Israel’s one true friend in parliament’

The fact is that the Palestine solidarity movement simply cannot afford to accept defeat on the IHRA and move on. What it means is accepting decisions such as that of Tower Hamlets Mayor, New Labour’s John Biggs, on Holocaust Memorial Day to ban a meeting by Stand Up To Racism because it included Glynn Secker, National Secretary of JVL.

This was the notice that the Board of Deputies placed in the Jewish Chronicle the week before the Cable Street demonstration when the fascists were prevented from marching through the East End of London - their concern about 'antisemitism' took second place to their support for the Metropolitan Police and the Home Secretary

It is disgraceful that SUTR/SWP disinvited Glynn as a result of the Board of Deputies intervention thus accepting that the Zionists can dictate who our speakers are allowed to be. Groups like the SWP claim to be 'revolutionary' and yet they surrender without a whimper.

Ironically PSC Executive and local Tower Hamlet’s activist Sybil Cock was boasting of their work in Tower Hamlets. Last year the Council’s Mayor refused to allow the Altab Ali park, named after a victim of racists, as a rallying point for the Big Ride for Palestine.

Stand up to racism stand up to all forms of racism bar Zionism - they don't want to offend right-wing Jews in Britain - a racist kith and kin argument

What did PSC demand? They asked the Council, not to withdraw support for the IHRA but to add a free speech clause to the policy!

It’s as if you were to ask the BNP to sign a declaration that they won’t discriminate against anyone! The whole point of the IHRA is that it is intended to prevent free speech. Adding a free speech clause is meaningless verbiage as the Labour Party has shown that a similar ‘free speech’ clause is meaningless.

As I tried to stress, although the battle against the IHRA has been lost for the time being in local government it is very much a live issue in universities.  To abandon the fight against it, and I hope that Jonathan Rosenhead’s views don’t represent JVL, is irresponsible and political cowardice.

Some universities have adopted the definition (UCL) and some haven’t (SOAS, Bristol). Given that the lecturers union UCU is the only trade union to oppose the IHRA there is a good basis for an alliance amongst students and academics in opposition to the IHRA. I suggested that PSC call a demonstration on the campuses of any university which adopts the IHRA and that in the meantime it sets in train a campaign with academics and students.

But for PSC/Socialist Action the IHRA is no longer a priority. They are perfectly happy to allow the Zionists (a banned word in PSC) to use this weapon unchallenged.

The other curious incident was concerning trade union support for the IHRA. Their international officer, in fact there are 3, twice denied to PSC AGM my assertion that Unite supports the IHRA. Yet the Unite branch that I was representing had been told clearly and unequivocally that Unite has endorsed the IHRA. On 27^thAugust 2019 I received the following from the General Secretary, Len McLuskey:

With regards to IHRA, Unite’s position is to support the Labour Party’s stance on this.

I don’t see how much clearer Len could have been.

McCluskey, Len

Tue, 27 Aug 2019, 16:34

Dear Tony

We have met with JVL and Gail Cartmail, Assistant General Secretary, acts on behalf of myself and Unite in terms of any liaising/involvement; so my “promise” has been honoured, long ago.

With regards to IHRA, Unite’s position is to support the Labour Party’s stance on this.

Please feel free to contact Gail if you have any further issues.

Len

General Secretary

Unite the Union / Unite House / 128 Theobald's Road / Holborn / London  WC1X 8TN

The UNISON delegate also stated that UNISON didn’t support the IHRA which is an outright lie. My branch was informed months ago that the Executive did support it.  Dave Prentis was fawning around Adam Langleben of the JLM when he lost his council seat in 2018.

What is clear is that all the trade union representatives on Labour’s National Executive supported the IHRA. What this is really about is that PSC Executive are refusing to challenge the trade union leaders on the issue of the IHRA, despite Stan Keable having been sacked by Hammersmith & Fulham Council for exercising his right to free speech. This too is in line with Socialist Action’s ‘strategy’ of sweet talking rather than politically challenging the trade union bureaucracy.

PSC AGM 2020

Essentially the trade union leaders, craving respectability, sought to solve the ‘anti-Semitism crisis’ by caving in to every demand of the Zionist Board of Deputies. They supported the IHRA despite the fact that it impinges on the rights of their own members. They supported it despite their own pro-Palestinian policy including support of BDS, which the IHRA deems ‘anti-Semitic’.

At the PSC trade union conference last October I was asked to leave the conference because I was handing out leaflets on the IHRA. Ben Jamal, the Director of PSC, wrote to Brighton and Hove PSC refusing to incorporate the IHRA as part of the agenda of the conference.

The next major campaign, and an emergency motion to that effect was passed, commits PSC to resisting the new Tory Government proposals to make BDS illegal in the public and statutory sector. The withdrawal of investments by Councils, Pension Funds, Universities or any public body from companies because they want to boycott Israel will be illegal.

My fear is that any campaign that PSC are involved in is destined to be a failure. That much was made clear when it was announced that PSC had taken part in a meeting of 35 unnamed organisations already. The theme Ben Soffa announced would be the threat to freedom of speech.

I made the point that the main thrust of our opposition to the government proposals is not on the grounds of free speech (it is difficult to see how it prevents free speech except in the American sense) but on the threat to international solidarity. Not only would the government proposals have made the Boycott of South Africa illegal (as Margaret Thatcher did at the time) but it would also have made the Jewish Boycott of Nazi Germany illegal. This is the best answer to the Zionist charge of ‘anti-Semitism’.

Boycott has an honourable history in Britain from the Boycott of Slave Grown Sugar, to the Boycott of English Land Agents and Rackateers in Ireland (hence the name) to the Jewish Boycott of Nazi Germany and the Boycott of South Africa. The Tories, who are perfectly happy to work with racist and repressive regimes are, understandably concerned at any threat to profitability.

Such a campaign offers great potential to actually legitimise BDS and put it on the map but with the dead hand of PSC behind it, it is difficult to see how any campaign led by PSC will be a success.

In 1933 all over the world Jews and others began a massive boycott of Nazi Germany. Without doubt it made the Nazis worried as Germany was an export driven economy and the Boycott was hitting them hard. For June 1933 exports were down by 68% compared to May.  For the first 6 months of 1933 exports were down by 51%, which given the Boycott didn't kick in till late March was remarkable. There was a real chance the Nazi regime could be overthrown but it was this that worried them. The accession of the Nazis had been seen by the Zionist leaders as a 'great opportunity' for the Zionist movement in Ben Gurion's words.

The Zionists therefore refused to support the Boycott and instead negotiated a trade agreement, Ha'avara with the Nazis, whose purpose was to destroy the Boycott, which it did. This is the basis of the accusation that Zionism collaborated with the Nazis.

The Zionists are consistent in their opposition to Boycott (unless it’s Iran!). However many people won’t see it that way. Ben Soffa’s fatuous point that the Boycott of Nazi Germany was not about Council investment is wrong. In the ‘30’s the demand was that everyone, including public institutions, should refrain from buying German goods. The parallels with Israel could not be more exact.

There was one surprise in the elections. The long standing but otherwise unknown Campaigns Officer Steve Bell was ousted by BDS activist Adie Mormech. I suspect that Adie will either be incorporated into the overall culture or left stranded.

A motion on opposition to Zionism by ultra Maoists wasn’t taken because the proposer wasn’t present, which is a pity, since it would have made an interesting debate!

The most absurd motion that I’ve ever read, which was in the end remitted to the Executive, along with an amendment of mine which deleted most of the resolution, came from Camden PSC and Sabby Sagall.  It seriously proposed adopting the definition of anti-Semitism from the Zionist thug group otherwise known as the Community Security Trust.

I also proposed a resolution on opposition to 2 States. It should be clear today with Israel about to annex much of the West Bank, having been given the green light by Trump, that the two state solution is dead (if it has ever been alive). The response from PSC Executive was that it is for the Palestinians not us to decide.

What this means in practice is hiding PSC’s tacit support for 2 States using the Palestinians as their firewall. It is of course a pretext since the Palestinians aren’t in a position to decide anything. In any case it is irrelevant.

It is absolutely clear that Palestinian opinion has swung decisively against 2 States. Only the Quisling administration of Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah still supports (in theory anyway) 2 states. The job of a solidarity organisation is different from that of a national liberation movement (which unfortunately the Palestinians do not posses).

Our job as a solidarity organisation is to persuade people and organisations to support the Palestinians and oppose Zionism. The first question people ask is what do we want, what is the ideal solution, what are we aiming for.

Given a situation where there is today one Greater Israel the demand for one state, where everyone has equal political, religious and civil rights, is not only obvious to anyone but PSC but it shows that the Zionists' main objection is to a democratic, non-racist state.  However PSC is more concerned with accommodating the trade union leaders who wish to both support the Palestinians and not fall out with the Zionists.

When I introduced the resolution I stressed that 2 States is an Apartheid solution. Can anyone imagine the Anti-Apartheid Movement 30 years ago supporting 2 states – one for Whites and one for Blacks ?  Yet that is effectively the position of PSC. It is no wonder that it rejects any mention of the word ‘Zionism’ because it might be forced to conclude that the Israeli state is an illegitimate state. Instead support for the two state solution means that PSC can call Israel ‘apartheid’ without specifying what that means in terms of the replacement (if any) for the Zionist state.

As the title of this piece indicates, PSC AGM is an exercise in futility. It is pointless because there is no serious debate on the Annual Report and Plan which are nodded through. There is no mechanism for amending them. PSC Executive is the nearest to a self-perpetuating oligarchy. Because the leadership wants to keep their control over PSC they want an organisation which says nothing politically and has a sterile political culture. 

PSC is intellectually bankrupt. It takes no part in the many debates over Palestine and Zionism that have occurred over the years because the group which control it, Socialist Action, also have nothing to say on Palestine apart from mindless slogans.

The question which I asked the AGM remains unanswered namely what is the purpose of PSC? Presumably not merely to educate and inform British people and win the labour movement to its side but to translate that support into political effectiveness. Yet today there isn’t one MP, bar Corbyn himself, who is a patron of PSC. There are no MPs willing to support BDS openly. The one MP who was prepared to stand up and oppose Zionism, Chris Williamson, was abandoned and received no support from PSC. And Baroness Jenny Tonge was abandoned at last year's conference when she came under attack from the 'antisemitism'  smear campaign.

When PSC decided to abstain from the ‘anti-Semitism’ witch hunt and to say nothing about the attacks of the Zionists on Corbyn they demonstrated how futile and purposeless is the organisation. Corbyn was the most pro-Palestinian leader any major political party has ever had. It was inevitable that he would be the victim of a Zionist ambush. It was the duty of PSC to speak out against the Zionist dirty tricks brigade.  Instead they said nothing and in a letter to Brighton and Hove PSC, Ben Jamal stated that it had been decided not to give support for individual ‘disciplinary cases’.

The expulsions of Jackie Walker, Marc Wadsworth and myself were not disciplinary but political. The same goes for the suspension and expulsion of hundreds of others. Even when Electronic Intifada journalist Asa Winstanley was suspended for having written things offensive to the Jewish Labour Movement, PSC Executive and their officers said nothing, not even about the spiteful and vindictive decision to deny him a press pass.

If I was in the Zionist Federation I would go down on my hands and knees every day and give thank for the fact that Palestine Solidarity Campaign are so supine and timid. If I was of a conspiratorial bent....

Tony Greenstein

An Exchange of Emails with an Antisemitic Member of PSC

Below is an example of how the low level of political consciousness fostered by PSC leads to anti-Semitism.  If it is not Zionism and settler colonialism that is to blame for the plight of the Palestinians then it must be ‘the Jews’. This is the line of Gilad Atzmon, the well known anti-Semite.  Michael Rabb contacted me to explain how he had supported my amendment ‘to stand up to the Jews’ even though I had not moved any such amendment! 

Suffice to say my patient attempts to explain the difference between Jews and Zionists did not make an impression. Michael was quite flattered when I said that I intended to quote him on a blog. He responded that no one had ever quoted him before.  I was tempted to say that I wasn’t surprised!

Michael also copied for my approval a clearly anti-Semitic cartoon of a ‘typical Jew’. It’s the kind of cartoon (of Muslims) that the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism are well known for.

Like Atzmon Michael ended up concluding that I was a ‘Zionist’!

Dear Tony,

I was on the other side of the aisle yesterday but I waved my red voting card in support of your amendment to stand up to the Jews and this awful IHRA campaign to smear the struggle for free Palestine as anti-semitic.

We have actually met (last February, attended some kind of show with XXX).

Anyway would like to offer my support for any actions or campaigns you are generating to confront this present day Jewish McCarthyism.  Speaking only for myself as an old bald homeless amurikan "anti-semite", we must stand up to this campaign of intimidation.

I attach a cartoon I drew a couple of years ago and an article I just wrote about fighting back.

in solidarity, End Israel, Free Palestine,

Michael

Fight Back

Michael Rabb, London, January 22, 2020

Last night I attended a meeting at SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies) at London University in Bloomsbury.  The meeting was sponsored by the SOAS Palestinian Society and was titled 'BDS, Boris and IHRA's Attack on Free Speech'.  Asa Winstanley of Electronic Intifada and Neve Gordon of Queen Mary University of London were the panelists.

To start Asa sketched the current state of the BDS campaign and where it may go in the future.  Neve delved into the politics of the recent election and what a threat the IHRA's (International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance)  definition of anti-semitism is to free speech and to the BDS movement and to the Palestine liberation struggle.

Neve made the basic point that the accusation of "antisemitism" used by Israel to attack the BDS was a very real threat to the movement for free Palestine.  He called zionism a 'genius' movement and said the BDS movement had been set back by the "anti-semitic strategy" used by Israel and it's supporters and is in trouble.   He cited the Labour Party's catastrophic loss as an example of how effective the smear of anti-semitism was chilling debate and stopping criticism of Israel.  He called on the movement and particularly young people to develop an effective response.  He said it was a grave mistake to underestimate one's opponent.

There were several proposals from the attendees as to how to cope with Israel's and the Jews' anti-semitism accusation strategy.   They included forming alliances and coalitions with other causes and activist groups and seeking like-minded Israelis as cohorts in the struggle.

Finally towards the end of the discussion, I offered an 'American' point of view.  

The current politics of anti-semitism are similar to the red scare and McCarthyism intimidation in the USA in the 1950s.  McCarthy deemed himself the high priest of what was American, and communism was un-American. Blacklists and ostracism flourished and guilt by association ruled the day.  The progressive-socialist movement in America was effectively shut down.  You can't even say the word communism in the USA.

The lesson learned from the political dialogue of the 50s is that it does no good to shrink away and be intimidated by the bullying and demagogic bigotry.

Compliance with and appeasement of the zionists is fundamentally dishonest.  Signing the IHRA definition of anti-semitism which includes criticism of Israel and zionism as "anti-semitism" betrays the struggle for free Palestine.  It's dishonest because it validates the false premise that criticism of a state or a people is racist and cannot be based on objective moral and legal reasons.

Anti-semitism like all racism is a form of bigotry or hatred that belittles and disparages a group of people because of some innate trait or intrinsic characteristic.   But BDS doesn't attack Israel or Jews because of who they are.   BDS attacks Israel because of what it is doing.  This is precisely why the anti-semitism accusation is false.  It is not racist or anti-semitic to demand that criminals stop doing the crime of genocide.

As with the smear of "communism" in the USA, the false accusation of anti-semitism is relentless.

Trying to appease or pacify racism only encourages it.

What must be recognized in the struggle for free Palestine is that this is fundamentally a war of Jews against the Palestinians.  Zionism is the Jewish project to build a Jew sate in Palestine using crimes against humanity to accomplish its purpose:  genocide, ethnic cleansing and apartheid.

BDS is just one strategy the Palestinians are using in their struggle against the Jews -- but importantly BDS announces it's intention:  "end the occupation of ALL Arab lands."  This is not just a throw away term.  It is requisite to Palestinian freedom.  This does not mean ethnically cleansing Jews from Palestine, but it necessarily means dismantling the Jewish state and regime change.

I made the observation that in standing up to this zionist IHRA construct of anti-semitism, that we had to be willing to say "End Israel".  And that being explicitly anti-zionist was critically part of the struggle for free Palestine.  You can't be shy about what the struggle and the BDS movement are really about.  If we are; if we try to appease the zionists and accept the definition of anti-semitism as criticism of Israel, we are doomed to defeat.

And here's the logical extension and key to fighting back against this dishonest anti-semitism attack:  you must acknowledge and be honest that in announcing the objective of ending the Jewish state, you recognize that the struggle is fundamentally posed against the Jews.  Yes, 'the Jews', the vast majority of whom are zionist and support Israel and it's continued existence.  Anti-Jew in this context and by the INRA (International Nakba Remembrance Alliance) definition is not anti-semitic!   It simply recognizes who is doing the genocide against the people of Palestine.

Michael

Tony Greenstein

26 Jan 2020, 17:46 (3 days ago)

Hi Michael,

Sorry we didn't chat.  You talk about 'stand(ing) up to the Jews.'  I am Jewish.  Boris Johnson and Eric Pickles, to name but 2 aren't Jewish.  It is really important not to pose the issues as one's of a conflict between religious groups.  Zionists are both Jewish and non-Jewish and although the Zionists claim to speak on behalf of all Jews these claims should not be accepted.

Likewise your reference to   ' confront(ing) this present day Jewish McCarthyism'. This McCarthyism is unfortunately coming from a broad swathe of the Right in this country who are shamelessly using Jews as a stick to beat supporters of Palestine.

Your cartoon is of a typical Jew which poses the issues in exactly the wrong way.  This is a problem of PSC avoiding the use of the term 'Zionist' but it is important not to drive Jews into the arms of the Zionists or accept their claims.

Thanks for supporting my amendment but I hope you will realise that we need to be theoretically and politically clear against our opponents.

Michael Rabb

26 Jan 2020, 20:54 (3 days ago)

Dear Tony,

yes I know you are a Jew.  as I understand about half the PSC are.  yes there a Jews who stand up to 'the Jews' .  but (and I know you know this) the vast (90% ?) of Jews worldwide are zionist.  The Jews support Israel, the Jewish state that is doing the genocide.  I am not posing the issue as a conflict between or among religious groups.  You cited the Board of Deputies yesterday in arguing that we had to fight back !!  I know you know this.  it is baffling as to why you patronize me with this reductionist response to my posit that we must confront the Jews in this struggle against the IHRA definition and campaign against the free Palestine movement.  As Omar said yesterday there's nothing Jewish about genocide.  but that doesn't change the fact that Jews are doing genocide.

Likewise, it is Jewish McCarthyism.  In the USA the attack is organized and led by AIPAC and the ADL .  Here I think it's the CAA (which I think you have some first hand experience with).   Of course the right wing racists and christian zionists, and Islamophobes have joined in but that does not change the the fact that this strategy of using anti-semtism grew from the Israel's and the Jews' zionist campaign to counter BDS.

I thought we were on the same wave length in fighting back against this awful Jew-led McCarthyesque campaign to shutdown the BDS movement.

I guessed wrong.

Michael

Tony Greenstein

26 Jan 2020, 22:04 (3 days ago)

Dear Michael

I don't think half PSC are Jewish.  Maybe around 10%. You are posing it as 'standing up to the Jews' but it isn't a Jewish v non-Jewish fight and its wrong to pose it in such a fashion.  Apart from anything else it doesn't help people understand who we are fighting. It is irrelevant if the vast majority of Jews worldwide are Zionists, though it's not 90%.  The last time opinion was tested 59% of British Jews said they were Zionists.  The reason its wrong is that it obscures who the fight is really against.  And that is imperialism the British state etc.

Some of the most vociferous Zionists aren't Jewish - from Trump to Eric Pickles to Johnson, John Mann etc. This is about imperialism and western interests not an ethnic identity. It is therefore completel wrong to describe it as an 'awful Jew-led McCarthyesque campaign' because its not true.  Boris Johnson's government isn't 'Jew-led'.  It is a racist pro-imperialist government.

The attack on BDS is by western governments who use Jews as the pretext.  Hence in West Germany the neo-Nazi AfD are the most hostile to BDS.

It is irrelevant if Jews are doing the genocide.  It is not because they are Jews but because they are settler colonialists which is why Omar said there is nothing Jewish about genocide. The Indian army in Kashmir is not Jewish and the fact that it is Hindu is equally irrelevant.

I hope I have made my position explicable because it is a very important point and the comments you made would be used against us if the Zionists ever discovered them

tony

Michael Rabb

27 Jan 2020, 10:14 (2 days ago)

wow !  "It is irrelevant if Jews are doing the genocide."

please check your Jewishness.

Michael Rabb

27 Jan 2020, 17:59 (2 days ago)

      and you need to think about who is doing the genocide and how to stop it.

it's the Jews.

Tony Greenstein

27 Jan 2020, 17:52 (2 days ago)

What all the Jews?  Would it be different if they were Budhists?  There are actually Israeli Jews who are opposed to what is happening.  A small minority but still a minority.  What is equally important is that those who support them include the largest Zionist organisation in the USA, Christians United 4 Israel, which is 1.4 million strong and the Christian Zionist lobby.

You need to stop thinking in terms of Jews and non-Jews and in terms of social and political forces such as imperialism.

On Mon, Jan 27, 2020 at 18:26 Tony Greenstein <tonygreenstein111@gmail.com> wrote:

do you have problems with your eyesight? Specsavers do quite good deals these days.

It's not 'the Jews' but the Israeli state which calls itself a Jewish state  which carries out the massacres.  When pogroms were carried out against Catholics in Northern Ireland by Protestants would you have said it was 'the Protestants' without any qualification? Northern Ireland, Ulster, called itself a Protestant State and was based on Protestant supremacy.  Are all Protestants thereby tarred with the same brush or do you qualify it by saying Northern Irish Protestants?

I realise that you have difficulty understanding that sometimes labels are deliberately designed to mislead but the claim that the attacks on Palestinians is 'Jewish' reinforces Israel's claim to be a Jewish state representing all Jews.  You don't actually undermine what they are doing but reinforce it.

The logic, in so far as there is any, of what you are saying is that there should be a war against 'the Jews'.  I suspect that such idiocy is exactly what the Zionists desire people to advocate and plays into the hands of people like John Mann who say that any support for the Palestinians is 'antisemitic'

tony

Michael Rabb

Sun, 26 Jan, 16:15 (3 days ago)

But Auschwitz and the extermination? I haven’t heard any rational person argue that Israel is doing the same thing to Palestinians.  -- Phil Weiss

Hey Phil,

have you heard of the Nakba ?  

Genocide is a crime no matter Jews doing it !!

check it out .

Michael 

Michael,

Phil Weiss's article is a good one.  Israel is engaged in what Ilan Pappe calls 'incremental genocide' but no one is claiming that they are exterminating a whole people as the Nazis tried.

The Nakba was primarily a case of ethnic cleansing not genocide, though it did include a number of serious massacres.  My previous point applies!

tony

Michael Rabb

Sun, 26 Jan, 18:16 (3 days ago)

Tony,

please refer to the UN convention on genocide (i included) . Incremental or not it's still genocide. you (phil) are incorrect.  btw what the Nazis did in ww2 is roughly equivalent to what the Jews have done (and are doing) based on % population 'exterminated'.  

Michael

tony

clear enough:  the dreaded zionist epithet comes out ... "anti-semitism".   You show your true allegiance, zionist Tony.

please relax with the passive aggressive zionist responses ... it is you who are obviously troubled with your own identity and can't accept that 'the Jews' are doing the crime of genocide to the people of Palestine.  And perhaps this is why you seem to have some trouble understanding what i am saying.   

The first thing that must happen in stopping a crime in progress is identifying the criminal. But you cannot do that:  you adopt some tortured logic that it doesn't matter who is doing the genocide.  Somehow to call out the criminal actors is racist.

It is the racist Jew state instituted by it's own law to privilege the 6 million Jews who are carrying out the genocide against the people of Palestine.  In then same way that the German people supported the Nazis in WW2, Jews world wide have been supporting Israel.  It is not a racist thing to say the Turks did it to the Armenians, or the Hutus did it the Tutsis.  and it's not racist to call out what Jews have been doing to the Palestinians for the last 100 years.  

What the Jews are doing to the Palestinians is genocide. This must be recognized and confronted.  

Again, I do not attack the Jews for their racial identity.  I accuse Jews of perpetrating the crime of genocide.  Like Omar Barghouti said there is nothing Jewish about genocide, ethnic cleansing nor apartheid.  But the Jews in Israel supported by millions of Jews worldwide are doing all three.

And you are 'zionist':  you support the survival of Israel. You will not acknowledge the objective of the BDS for Israel to end the occupation of all Arab lands.  This means the 'state' Israel must be dismantled, there must be regime change.  You cannot say the words "End Israel".  Why not?

I am happy to be quoted. (I don't think anyone has ever bothered to 'quote' me before.) Will this be in the vein of appeasing the Jewish McCarthyesque CAA who are leading the charge against BDS as anti-semitism? or will you be delivering an apology to the Board of Deputies?

oh, and as long as your quoting me feel free to publish my cartoon highlighting Jew McCarthyism.

again, nothing inherently Jewish about McCarthyism, but Jews are definitely doing it.

we (even if we're Jews) have to stand up to it!!

not that there is any hope of having a legitimate conversation with you given your Jewish zealotry, and especially now that you have defaulted into patronizing sarcasm,

but one last attempt:

there are 6 million Jews in the only 'democracy' in the middle east who are doing genocide against the Palestinians.  We (yes even Jews) need to organize to make them stop.  This includes actions, strategies etc. away from the front lines to counter the very effective Jewish lobby, diaspora, etc. e.g., the IHRA /CAA/AIPAC ETC. Jewish McCarthyism.

here's a plan:

Step 1:  stop it

Step 2: dialogue -- truth and reconciliation forum

Step 3:  apology

Step 4:  new state based on equality

Step 5:  reparations

the first step (see above and please go to spec savers cause you haven't noticed this even though I put it to you several times) is STOP IT.

it's not complicated:  end the Jew state.

can you even say those words?

if not you are a zionist.

good luck, Tony.  I know it is so tough dealing with the cognitive dissonance.

Michael 

the cognitive dissonance is all yours.  You oppose the Israeli state, a Jewish (not Jew) state from a Palestinian perspective but you do so from a racist understanding.

You also have some difficulty in comprehending what I am saying. I don't know whether its cognitive dissonance or something more serious.

For the last time - it is irrelevant who the perpetrators in Israel are and what they call themselves. Primo Levi, the Auschwitz survivor, described the Palestinians as Israel's Jews.  I guess you won't understand that narrative.

Racial supremacy, given the right set of circumstances, can be the role of any group - Jewish, Black, White, Chinese etc. The markers, the badge or identity of the perpetrators are quite irrelevant to what they are doing. 

Attacking them for their ethnic or racial identity is meaningless. Racism isn't a response to racism.

I am well aware of the population of Israel and I'm surprised that you find it difficult to work out whether I'm a Zionist or not.  Fortunately the Zionists have no such difficulty.

I think those of us who are Jewish anti-Zionists do all we can to oppose Zionism which is why I find your antisemitism counter-productive.  Is that clear enough?

I will be writing and blogging about the PSC AGM and I trust that you have no problem with me quoting your pearls of wisdom?

---

Zionism's Holocaust Hypocrisy - Netanyahu uses Holocaust Memorial Day to call for a War on Iran and the International Criminal Court

February 1, 2020, 6:26 pm

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In 1988 Auschwitz Survivor, Yehuda Elkana, wrote that it was better to forget the Holocaust than to allow it to be used to strengthen Israel's virulent anti-Arab racism and nationalism

When BBC reporter Olga Guerin, in a report from Jerusalem, stated that

“In Yad Vashem’s Hall of Names, images of the dead. Young soldiers troop in to share in the binding tragedy of the Jewish people. The state of Israel is now a regional power. For decades, it has occupied Palestinian territories. But some here will always see their nation through the prism of persecution and survival.”

all the guns in the Zionist armoury let fire. By stating the obvious, that Israeli identity is bound up with the Holocaust even whilst it is oppressing the Palestinian people, the Zionist guns began firing. Shh, you mustn’t mention the Holocaust in the same breath as the Palestinians.

Danny Cohen, the BBC's former Director of Television whinging about mentioning Palestinians and the Holocaust in the same breath

Even more absurdly, despite the BBC’s cameras filming Israeli soldiers filing into Yad Vashem, the Zionist Holocaust Propaganda Museum, Danny Cohen, a  former Director of BBC Television, said:

“The attempt to link the horrors of the Holocaust to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is deeply offensive and upsetting.  

I guess it would probably offend, and possibly upset too, those war criminals who think it is acceptable to seize a 12 year old child from her bed in the early hours of the morning before blindfolding, beating and throwing her into a freezing, bug infested cell without food or water for sexually abusing her. Indeed it would be nice to think that they are offended, although I doubt it.

The Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, which only exists to defame supporters of the Palestinians and anti-Zionists, was the first to splutter its outrage.

“drawing comparisons between Israeli policy and the Nazis” is against what it called ‘the international definition of antisemitism’.

As far as I know there is no such definition. Perhaps they were referring to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance which gives as an illustration of anti-Semitism ‘Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.’ The CAA omit however the qualifying clause which says that this could be anti-Semitic ‘taking into account the overall context’. Strange that!

Professor Yehuda Elkana - author of 'Time to Forget'

The IHRA itself is a good example of the Zionists’ hypocrisy. This ‘definition’ of anti-Semitism mentions Israel, which is a state not a person, in 7 of its 11 illustrations. Clearly it is the Zionists who use the Holocaust in order to protect Israel!

The Board of Deputies also complained and the far-Right Editor of the Jewish Chronicle, Stephen Pollard, screeched that he could not

‘recall a more foul – sickening, indeed – report by any journalist, either in print or broadcast.’

Pollard is not one to understate his case. However I can think of far more sickening reports such as the BBC interview with Benjamin Jones of the neo-Nazi Generation Identitywhen reporting on the murder of 50 Muslims in New Zealand last year. However racism from the neo-Nazi Right does not concern Pollard. His only worry is with ‘left anti-Semitism’.

The pretence that the Holocaust has nothing to do with Israeli Jewish identity and its treatment of the Palestinians is the purest hypocrisy. The Holocaust is the dominant metaphor in Israel and among Zionists. How many times have Zionist ideologues, like Trump’s Ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, called their opponents ‘kapos’ or ‘self-haters’. Kapos were the coerced orderlies of the Nazi camps. ‘Self hater’ is a term of abuse that the Nazis aimed at German anti-fascists.

As Daniel Blatman, the Chief Historian at the Warsaw Ghetto Museum, a Holocaust researcher at the Hebrew University wrote:

The Holocaust is a large component of Jewish Israelis’ national identity. It serves the right’s proto-fascist, racist, victim-centered discourse, meant to whitewash the ongoing crime against the Palestinians and to put the Christian world in a position of eternal apology.

If Danny Cohen and Pollard are correct then this is beyond foul or offensive. It is positively criminal!

The Holocaust – using memory as a political weapon

When Western leaders commemorate the liberation of Auschwitz 75 years ago we can be sure that their purpose is not preventing another Holocaust. Their aim is to incorporate the Holocaust into an ideology of racism and exclusion. The Holocaust is the ideal reason to go to war these days as the lessons of appeasement are wrongly applied to every act of aggression. Memory of the Holocaust has become an integral component of western imperialism. Every victim of imperialism has become another ‘new Hitler’.

Today even the far-Right pays homage to the Holocaust and Zionism, from Tommy Robinson to neo-Nazi Richard Spencer (Spencer favours ‘de-Judifying’ the Holocaust)!

Eitay Mack, an Israeli human rights attorney, compared Yad Vashem, to a ‘Laundromat, washing out the sins of the various dictators and anti-Semites who pass through its doors these days’. Blatman also made the same comparison writing that Yad Vashem

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

My heart breaks when I see my colleagues, honest and faithful researchers of the Holocaust, giving tours of this historic museum, apparently under compulsion, to the evildoers the Israeli government sends to Yad Vashem to receive absolution in the name of Holocaust victims in exchange for adding a pro-Israel vote at international institutions.

Holocaust Memorial Day

In 2001, 56 years after Auschwitz, war criminal Tony Blair, instituted Holocaust Memorial Day. New Labour had at the same time been waging war against ‘bogus asylum seekers’. 80 years earlier, the Daily Mail was also campaigning against the admittance of ‘bogus’ refugees, Jews from Nazi Germany. None of which prevented it from launching the ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign against Jeremy Corbyn.

‘I have yet to hear a single teenager come back from Auschwitz and say that we mustn’t abuse others the way we were abused.... The message is always the opposite. Gaza is permitted because of Auschwitz.’Gideon Levy

Blair’s friend Bill Clinton was another hypocrite. On a visit to Rwanda in March 1998, Clinton expressed regret for failing to

fully appreciate the depth and the speed with which [Rwandans] were being engulfed by this unimaginable terror.

Joyce Leader, the U.S. Embassy’s deputy chief of mission in Kigali at the time, told a meeting in 2014 that

“We had a very good sense of what was taking place. It was clear that a systematic killing of Tutsi was taking place in neighborhoods.”

Timothy Longman, associate professor of political science at Boston University, remarked that:

When President Bill Clinton flew to Rwanda in 1998 (in a trip in which he never left the airfield), he claimed that he simply didn’t know what was happening in Rwanda. We now have further evidence that Clinton’s claims were false. It is not that the U.S. government didn’t know what was happening in Rwanda. The truth is that we didn’t care.

Which was the British government’s position during the WW2. Anthony Eden, Britain’s Foreign Secretary, opposed issuing a warning to the Germans in 1944 as to the consequences of continuing the extermination of the Jews. Eden told the Americans that such a declaration would be to the Jews’ disadvantage but like Blair and Clinton, he too was lying. The real reason Eden told the War Cabinet’s Refugee Committee, was that such a declaration ‘is likely to be redoubled pressure upon us for measures of rescue.’ [Meier Sompolinsky,   The British Government and the Holocaust, pp. 128-129]

In other words Eden feared the consequences of the Nazis not murdering their victims.

On April 22^nd, 1993, one year prior to the Rwandan genocide, Clinton opened the Washington Holocaust Museum with these words:

this museum is not for the dead alone, nor even for the survivors... it is perhaps most of all for those of us who were not there at all. To learn the lessons, to deepen our memories and our humanity, and to transmit these lessons from generation to generation....

The evil represented in this museum is incontestable.... So we must stop the fabricators of history and the bullies as well. Left unchallenged, they would still prey upon the powerless; and we must not permit that to happen again.

Which demonstrates not only that words are cheap but that establishing Holocaust museums has nothing to do with preventing genocide.

What happened in the Nazi Holocaust was repeated in Rwanda and Cambodia and the West’s response was identical each time. Not only did the USA do nothing to halt the genocide but French troops actively aided them. Chris McGreal recalled:

The French army turned its back on many others, including the French embassy's Tutsi staff, who were mostly abandoned to their deaths despite desperate pleas to diplomats they had worked with for years. The French soldiers did rescue some Rwandans. They took the assassinated president's wife (a notorious anti-Tutsi extremist in her own right), and various Hutu politicians who helped organise the genocide. They also remembered the French embassy dog, which was carefully loaded on to an army lorry while a Tutsi man who ran up to beg for help was turned away.

SUTR Brighton Holocaust Memorial Day meeting with Gaby Weiner author of 'Tales of Loving and Leaving'and Jason Porter, 'Hidden from History: The Nazi persecution of homosexuals' -

None of this stopped the French government from trying to blame the victims of the Rwandan genocide for their own deaths, despite the fact that France was the only state which had troops on the ground during the genocide. Far from trying to halt the genocide, French troops actively protected the Interahamwe murderers.

None of this has prevented President Macron from declaring that anti-Zionism is a form of anti-Semitism. A decision endorsed by the French parliament. Every racist and reactionary politician now opposes ‘anti-Semitism’ when Israel is the issue.

But if the hypocrisy and deceit of Western leaders is their trade mark then today in Israel and elsewhere the dead of the past have become the ideal cover for the West’s war mongering

The Need to Forget

In 1988 Professor Yehuda Elkana, Rector of the Central University of Europe in Budapest, (which Hungary’s anti-Semitic Prime Minister Orban forced out of the country) issued a famous Declaration in Ha’aretz ‘The Need to Forget’. Elkana was not only a distinguished academic he was one of the few child survivors of Auschwitz. He had been abandoned in November 1944 with his parents in one of the last transports. As his obituary noted:

‘In today's Labour Party Elkana would be expelled for antisemitism’

Elkana experienced profound unease with the way in which the Holocaust was being manipulated by governments of Right and Left to craft an atavistic Jewish national identity.

It is a measure of the poverty of intellect. the intimidation and contempt for freedom of speech in the Labour Party today that anyone saying such a thing would be expelled for ‘anti-Semitism’. Elkana spoke of

a particular interpretation of the lessons of the Holocaust and the readiness to believe that the whole world is against us, and that we are the eternal victim. In this ancient belief,... I see the tragic and paradoxical victory of Hitler. Two nations, metaphorically speaking, emerged from the ashes of Auschwitz: a minority who assert, "this must never happen again," and a frightened and haunted majority who assert, "this must never happen to us again."

Elkana described how

The very existence of democracy is endangered when the memory of the dead participates actively in the democratic process. Fascist regimes understood this very well and acted on it.

I was always opposed to Holocaust Memorial Day because the idea of the State commemorating the victims of the Holocaust or any other act of genocide strikes me as obscene. It is inevitably going to end up using the Holocaust as an ideological prop for its own racism.

The British state that deports Black British citizens to the Caribbean and which wages a colonial war in Iraq considers itself fit to commemorate the dead of the Holocaust and pronounce on anti-Semitism. Elkana quoted Thomas Jefferson, who wrote that democracy and worship of the past are incompatible.

Is it seriously suggested that the Israeli state, which armed and trained the death squads of Guatemala as they murdered up to 200,000 Mayan Indians, is fit to commemorate the Jewish dead of the Holocaust? Why does a state which has armed and equipped the death squads of El Salvador, the Argentinian Junta (which murdered up to 3,000 Jews) and Pinochet, to say nothing about Apartheid South Africa, have anything to say about the lessons of the Holocaust?

Would we accept lessons on anti-racism from the BNP? Or take guidance on care for the elderly from Dr Harold Shipman? Perhaps we should employ the Yorkshire Ripper to advise on tackling domestic violence? Israel may call itself the Jewish state but if it can’t even support the Holocaust survivors who it has exploited since the beginning of the State what it says about the Holocaust should be ignored.

How can the Israeli state, which today arms the Burmese Junta as it commits genocide against the Rohinga people have any right to lecture other people on the lessons of the Holocaust?

It is hard to think of a state that abuses, tortures and massacres its own people (bar Syria and Iran) that doesn’t receive help from Israel.

When Israel allowed Vladimir Putin to speak at its World Holocaust Forum propaganda event on January 23^rdat Yad Vashem whilst refusing to allow Poland’s President Andrzej Duda to speak, the whole ceremony became embroiled in a war about which country was the worst collaborator with Nazi Germany – Russia for signing a pact with Hitler in August 1939 or Poland for the anti-Semitism of much of its population before and during the war.

Netanyahu used the Forum, which was supposedly about the Jewish Holocaust dead, to urge the world to wage war against Iran. Can one think of any greater desecration of the memory of the Holocaust victims than to use them as the pretext for another war?

Netanyahu also called for‘concrete actions, sanctions against the international court, its officials, its prosecutors, everyone.” Their crime? Having the temerity to consider investigating Israel for war crimes! Netanyahu calledit “pure anti-Semitism”

As even the legal advisor to Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs noted, the idea for the Court aroseover 50 years ago in the wake of the Nazi atrocities in the Second World War. It speaks volumes that Israel is now proposing sanctions against the ICC.

The commemorations in Jerusalem are only part of a wider Holocaust cult which sees thousands of young Israelis travel every year to Auschwitz. Of course it is a good idea for people to see and learn from the horrors of Auschwitz and the other Nazi camps. However the purpose of sending Israeli youngsters to see Auschwitz is not in order to instil anti-racism, quite the contrary. As Elkana wrote:

What is the child supposed to do with these memories? Many of the pictures of those horrors are apt to be interpreted as a call to hate.

And in Israel today it is amongst the young that one finds the most virulent expressions of hatred. In 2007, the Association for Civil Rights in Israelreported that 75% of Jewish youths said Arabs were less intelligent and less clean than Jews. All the old anti-Semitic stereotypes. Hitler refered to the Jews’ lack of cleanliness, ‘water shy’ in Mein Kampf, p.42).

Almost half of young Israelis (48%) said Israeli Arabs should not have Knesset representation or the right to vote. This is why Elkana concluded that:

For our part, we must learn to forget! Today I see no more important political and educational task for the leaders of this nation than to take their stand on the side of life, to dedicate themselves to creating our future, and not to be preoccupied from morning tonight, with symbols, ceremonies, and lessons of the Holocaust. They must uproot the domination of that historical "remember!" over our lives

What is the purpose of remembering the dead of the Holocaust if not to warn future generations of the evils of racism? Yet in Israel Holocaust memory does the exact opposite. It reinforces the most ugly forms of racism. The same is true of Western states who on the one hand are content to penalise those who rescue refugees from the waters of the Mediterranean and yet shed crocodile tears over Jews who perished in the Holocaust because they could not find refuge.

Ha’aretz’s Gideon Levy best summed up why State Holocaust Worship can only reinforces racism. In an article On This Holocaust Remembrance Day, Let Us ForgetLevy wrote:

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

That is why the more liberal Israeli high schools are endingtrips to Auschwitz because they recognise that they are fuelling the rise of racist nationalism.

As Israeli historian, Professor Edith Zertal noted in Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood, whilst Zionism nationalised the Holocaust, ‘it excluded the direct bearers of this memory – some quarter of a million Holocaust survivors who had immigrated to Israel.’ The impoverishment of the Holocaust survivors who live in Israel, one-third of whom live in poverty despite the billions of dollars Israel received from Germany in reparations, is a scandal. (Israel Is Waiting for Its Holocaust Survivors to Die.) Israel is devoted to exploiting the memory of the Holocaust  but ignores its victims.

It is inevitable that Israel, an ethno-nationalist for whom racism is part of its DNA, will use the Holocaust to justify its present practices. This is equally true of those western states who use the Holocaust as part of their own ideological legitimation.

If the Holocaust is to be remembered it should be by those who were affected or their relatives. It is absurd for the State to commemorate victims of racism given that western states are, without exception, racist themselves.

See also How School Trips to Hebron Resemble Visits to Auschwitz

Ha’aretz, Gideon Levy, Auschwitz, Holocaust Memorial Day, Gaza, Holocaust Olga Guerin, Danny Cohen, anti-Semitism, Yad Vashem, CAA, BBC, Palestinians, IHRA, Daniel Blatman, Eitay Mack, Board of Deputies, Stephen Pollard, Jewish Chronicle, David Friedman, Generation Identity, Benjamin Jones, Tommy Robinson, Joyce Leader, Bill Clinton, Duterte, Pinochet, Pinochet, Argentinian Junta, Timothy Longman, Daily Mail, Rwanda, Chris McGreal, Anthony Eden, Washington Holocaust Museum, Yehuda Elkana, Putin, Andrzej Duda,

Defend Free Speech – Free Julian Assange

February 3, 2020, 6:23 pm

≫ Next: Keir Starmer is the candidate that the Deep State & the British Establishment want you to vote for

≪ Previous: Zionism's Holocaust Hypocrisy - Netanyahu uses Holocaust Memorial Day to call for a War on Iran and the International Criminal Court

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Join Julian’s Father John Shipton's Fight For Justice at Brighton Labour Left Alliance Meeting

Brighton & Hove Labour Left Alliance is proud to support the fight of Julian Assange for Justice. The British State’s persecution of Julian began in 2013 when Sir Keir Starmer, who is standing to become Leader of the Labour Party, was Director of Public Prosecutions. Starmer was instrumental in the judicial persecution of Assange for the ‘crime’ of being a journalist.

We are pleased that Julian’s father John Shipton will be joining us. Find out more about his son's plight - and what socialists can do to help: Doors open at 7pm on Thursday, February 6, at the Rialto Theatre, 11 Dyke Road, Brighton BN1 3FE.

STOP PRESS: We are delighted to announce that the meeting will also hear from Joseph Farrell (@SwaziJAF), Wikileaks ambassador and board member of The Centre for Investigative Journalism.

If you haven't already reserved your seat, please register here. Limited spaces available!

Julian Assange is languishing in solitary confinement in HM Prison Belmarsh, a Category A prison known as the British version of Guantanamo Bay. In 2001 and 2002 it was used to detain a number of people indefinitely without charge or trial under antiterrorism legislation.

Julian was due to be released in September last year, after completing his sentence for breach of bail conditions. But a vindictive judge ordered his status in jail should change - “from a serving prisoner to a person facing extradition.”

Amnesty International UK has warned there are "real risks of serious human rights violations" if he is extradited.

The charges brought against him in the US include “computer misuse” and the “unauthorised disclosure of national defence information”. That is the job of any journalist worth his salt. Without Julian Assange and Wikileaks we would not know that American pilots played games shooting people from the air in Iraq.

Julian’s gravest offence was to expose the truth about American war crimes and the appalling abuses of state and corporate power. He should be celebrated, not incarcerated.

Instead, Julian faces a sentence of up to 175 years in captivity.

Jeremy Corbyn has said any attempt to extradite Julian should be opposed by the British government. However if Keir Starmer takes over then Labour is likely to fall into line with the security state.

Meanwhile, veteran journalist John Pilger has described the conditions in which Julian is held in Belmarsh as “barbaric”.

Join us to find out more about his son's plight - and what socialists can do to help: ALSO

Join the Brighton and Hove Labour Left Alliance to oppose those who would join with the Tories in constructing a security state. Details on the night.

Doors open at 7pm on Thursday, February 6, at the Rialto Theatre, 11 Dyke Road, Brighton BN1 3FE.

Keir Starmer is the candidate that the Deep State & the British Establishment want you to vote for

February 4, 2020, 2:53 pm

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≪ Previous: Defend Free Speech – Free Julian Assange

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Starmer Prosecuted Julian Assange,

Refused to prosecute the Police Killers of Ian Tomlinson & advocated 10 year prison sentences for Claimants – Anyone who thinks he is a socialist needs their head examining!

Above is the video of Ian Tomlinson, a man going about his job selling newspapers, who was viciously attacked by the Police riot squad. Starmer is personally responsible for the killers getting off scot free. He is a Red (or Pink) Tory.

Unity candidate?

Starmer has made great play in the election for Leader that he is the ‘unity candidate’ – only he can bridge the gap between left and right.

Starmer is the candidate of MI5 and the Political Police – he is Establishment down to his manicured fingers. ‘Sir’ Keir has pointed to his role in providing legal advice to striking miners and print workers.  This is true but it was a long time ago when he was a socialist. Today he is the darling of the Right.

As Director of Public Prosecutions he was, as the Canarystates, ‘responsible for prosecuting all those lovely people he previously defended.’

Activists in his Holborn and St. Pancras constituency have spoken out in a letter to the Camden New Journal. Over 30 Labour Party members, including Stephen Kapos, a child survivor of the Hungarian Holocaust and the Budapest Ghetto and anti-racist campaigners Amanda Sebestyen and Jewish Socialist Group member Ruth Appleton wrote that:

Time and time again, as left-leaning members we have been subjected to hostility and abuse... Those that are close to Keir Starmer, rather than welcome involvement from the left, have actively prevented it....

Keir Starmer presides over a constituency Labour Party which contains only officers with a history of outright opposition to Jeremy Corbyn. As left-leaning party members we have been completely marginalised by the right in the local party who support Keir Starmer.

Claiming to be the unity candidate should be more than a catchy campaign slogan. We are gravely concerned that under a Keir Starmer leadership all socialists in the party will be treated as we have been.

Therefore any socialist thinking about supporting Keir Starmer should think again and instead support a candidate that welcomes and supports socialist policies and encourages the active involvement of socialist members!

Attacking Benefit Claimants

One of the particularly ugly features of New Labour was the repeated attacks it made on benefit claimants. It began in 1997 with the removal of single parents allowance and they never looked back. New Labour ran ads on ‘benefit thieves’ but never about tax dodgers even though far more benefit is left unclaimed than lost through false claims.

 The scale of multi national and other tax dodging is huge yet ‘Sir’ Keir was unconcerned about prosecuting his establishment buddies. The Independent of 16^th September 2013 reported that ‘Benefit cheats face 10 years in prison as Keir Starmer sets out 'tough' new Crown Prosecution Service guidelines.’

People on benefit, by definition, live in poverty. The level of JSA, £75 per week, makes it impossible to live on it for any prolonged period of time.  It is probably what ‘Sir’ Keir pays for a good bottle of wine when he sits down to have a meal in a fancy restaurant.

At a time when New Labour gave out corporate tax breaks, handed lucrative contracts to PFI companies like Carillon to privatise the NHS and paid farmers 'set aside grants' not to grow food, the attack on benefit claimants was one of the most disgusting features Blair's period in office. Starmer was more than happy to contribute to New Labour's attack on civil liberties.

Someone trying to put clothes on their children and feed their empty stomachs by earning a few pounds a week over and above their poverty allowance from the state was branded a criminal whereas the real criminals who hid  billions away in offshore islands got off scot free. ‘Sir Keir’ said nothing about them and recommended no prison time for his rich friends. 

The Murder of Jean Charles de Menenzes

In the wake of 7/7 Jean Charles Menenzes was murdered by the Metropolitan Police. He was shot at point blank range. The Daily Record (14.2.09.) wrote about how the family of Jean Charles de Menezes dropped their legal battle for justice last night after prosecutors refused to bring charges over his death.

They said almost four years of relentless campaigning had brought them little closer to holding any individual to account for the innocent Brazilian's death.

Keir Starmer QC, Director of Public Prosecutions, approved a decision not to prosecute any police over the shooting.

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

Starmer Explains His Refusal to Prosecute a Police Killer

Police Murder of Ian Tomlinson

As George Monbiot wrote in Ian Tomlinson ruling: we must all fight this whitewash‘First Blair Peach. Then Jean Charles de Menezes. Now Ian Tomlinson. It is our duty to raise Cain this time.’

Perhaps the most outrageous decision of all was Starmer’s decision not to prosecute the Police over the murder of Ian Tomlinson, who was viciously attacked by the Police in central London.

 ‘Hundreds of thousands of us have now seen the footage of the newspaper-seller shambling peacefully home from work. We've seen how, without warning or provocation, PC Simon Harwood attacked him from behind, hitting him with a baton then shoving him to the ground. We know that the officer had unlawfully removed his badge, and that his face was obscured by a balaclava. We know that, a few minutes afterwards, Ian Tomlinson collapsed and died. We also know that the Metropolitan police lied about his death to the media and to Tomlinson's family.

Fifteen months later the director of public prosecutions, Keir Starmer, decides that "there is no realistic prospect of a conviction against [Harwood] for any offence arising from the matter investigated and that no charges should be brought against him". The evidence for his role in Tomlinson's death, Starmer says, is contradictory, and the time limit for pressing lesser charges has sadly expired. Starmer provides no convincing explanation of why it has taken him so long to make his decision, or of why a jury should not be allowed to make its own assessment of the evidence.

Now picture the opposite case: a civilian launching an unprovoked attack on a policeman, captured on film, which is immediately followed by the policeman's death. The Crown Prosecution Service ponders and dithers before deciding that the assailant should get away scot free. Implausible? You have just understood that in the United Kingdom equality before the law exists only in textbooks.

Looking Shifty - would you vote for this man?

Starmer Covered Up for the Metropolitan’s Spy Cops and their wrongful convictions

(see A message to anyone thinking of voting for Keir Starmer in the Labour leadership race)

Equally appalling was that Starmer was DPP when revelations were published about the first known ‘spycop’, Mark Kennedy. Kennedy infiltratedenvironmental and anticapitalist groups between 2003 and 2009. In 2011, a trial of environmental activists accusedof plotting to break into Ratcliffe power station collapsed after it emerged that the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) had covered up vital evidence. This consisted of recordings Kennedy had made of planning meetings. Starmer was present in court the day the case was thrown out.

20 people already prosecutedfrom the same action had their convictions overturned. And a further 29 people convictedof blocking a train carrying coal to Drax power station also had convictions quashed due to Kennedy’s involvement.

The CPS ordered an investigation into what had happened. Interviewed about the ensuing report in 2011, Starmer said:

If Sir Christopher Rose had found systemic problems, then I would quite accept perhaps a retrospective look at all the cases. But he didn’t, he found individual failings.

But it was systemic. In 2015, the Guardianreportedthat 83 people could have been wrongfully convicted after evidence of spycop involvement was withheld. On 6 January, the Guardian publisheddetails of the case of an 81-year-old man trying to get a conviction overturned for an anti-apartheid protest in 1972. Following revelations from the Undercover Policing Inquiry, he discovered that the person he was convicted alongside was actually an undercover police officer.

The Campaign Opposing Police Surveillance claims:

If the other 150 or so officers have similar tallies [as Kennedy], it means about 7,000 wrongful convictions are being left to stand. It may well be that spycops are responsible for the biggest nobbling of the judicial system in English history. So Starmer’s suggestion that Kennedy’s actions were not systematic is bullshit.

Released papers showed the Crown Prosecution Service had been deeply involved – they knew about the plan before the arrests, they worked with the police to withhold evidence from the defence and the courts.

Starmer's one word endorsement of the expulsion of a Jewish anti-Zionist should make it clear where his sympathies lie on Israel and Palestine

Fake Anti-Semitism Campaign

I have a personal interest in this.  I was the first Jewish person to be expelled under the fake anti-Semitism campaign. After all if you want to fight ‘anti-Semitism’ it’s a good idea to expel a few Jews! But this was not about Jews or anti-Semitism but Israel. When I was expelled on February 18^th2018 who was first out of the stalls to  support the expulsion?  Arise Sir Keir with this tweet from the 'unity' candidate.

As the Telegraph wrote inKeir Starmer: the high-flying law man desperate to stress his working class credentials

Sir Keir has spent his life “fighting for justice, standing up for the powerless”, but cringes if anyone brings up his knighthood, let alone his £1.8 million house.

And Politics Home, run by Kevin Schofield, an ex Sun ‘journalist’ reported that Keir Starmer – top prosecutor lurches left to cement favourite status.

Anyone who is fooled by this ‘lurch to the left’ is truly pathetic. Starmer is the candidate for the Police, MI5 and the British State that eviscerated Corbyn.  It was just one of Corbyn’s idiocies that when Starmer resigned in the chicken coup that he was let back in to wreak more havoc.

In his resignation letter Starmer wrotethat

‘In the last few days I have maintained my support for you notwithstanding my reservations. However. the resignations across the Shadow Cabinet and the Shadow Frontbench … materially change this. It is simply untenable now to suggest that we can offer an effective opposition without a change of leader.’

Starmer was also criticisedfor the decision not to prosecute the black cab rapist John Warboys on further charges which allowed him to apply for parole and very nearly get it.

It is quite clear that ‘Sir’ Keir’s claims to left-wing credentials, based on his youth, are fake and phoney. He long ago abandoned all of that. His revolutionary days are behind him. 

Starmer demonstrated during his time as DPP that he was deeply hostile to civil liberties. The decision over Ian Tomlinson’s death was particularly shocking. A bent Home Office pathologist, who was contradicted by 2 other pathologists and who was the subject of disciplinary proceedings by his own professional association was used by Starmer as an excuse to allow a killer Policeman to go free.

This decision, on its own, makes Starmer unfit to be Labour leader. He is literally an accessory after the fact to Police murder.

And those 'feminists' supporting Starmer should be aware that Women Against Rape, based in Camden, pressed Starmer, as head of the CPS to end the policy of prosecuting rape survivors disbelieved by the police, similar to the recent case in Cyprus.

Starmer refused to change the policy, undermining women’s ability to report rape and landing some in prison for years.

See Oliver Eagleton's The case against Keir Starmer

Tony Greenstein

Why Israel is an Apartheid State

February 5, 2020, 8:31 pm

≫ Next: The Scandal of Jo Bird’s Suspension - Jon Lansman’s Corrupt War on Democracy

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Why a settler colonial Jewish State is Inevitably a Racist State

   

A few years ago ex-President Jimmy Carter was pilloried for suggesting that Israel was pursuing a policy of Apartheid in the Occupied Territories.[i]Today even ex-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak says that without a peace agreement Israel will become an apartheid state.[ii]Yet this should not blind us to the differences between Zionism in Israel and Apartheid in South Africa in terms of political economy. Whereas Apartheid sought to exploit the labour power of Black South Africans, Zionism seeks to exclude it altogether. 

The other major difference is that, until recently, Israel did not engage – at least openly – in ‘petty Apartheid’. There were no signs saying ‘Jews Only’. Institutional and state discrimination remained hidden beneath the surface although it was just as real. Even today in the West Bank there are no 'Jews only' signs on the road.  It's just that the Army doesn't need a sign to enforce what is Military Law.

Flags of the Apartheid States

Racial segregation ‘separate development’ was integral to the political and legal doctrine of South African Apartheid.[iii]There is however more than one way of skinning a cat. In Israel, the same principles that Apartheid South Africa stood for have been achieved, without the need to declare them openly. 

In a survey of 400 teenagers, 35% of Jewish youth had never spoken to an Arab teenager and 27% of Arab youth had never spoken to a Jewish teenager.[iv]Israeli Jews and Palestinians are educated separately, live separately and socialise separately. The instruments of power in Israel are in the hands of the Jewish majority not the Palestinian minority.

The reaction of the JNF in 2005 to the decision in Kadaan that you could not refuse to sell land to Arabs

The roots of Israeli Apartheid go back to before the British Mandate. The JNF bought land and then expelled the peasants who were farming it. The policies of the Zionist colonisers were Jewish Labour, Land and Produce. First the Zionists expelled the Arabs from the economy and then from the country altogether. It was this which caused the riots of 1929. As the Hope-Simpson Report reported:

‘the result of the purchase of land in Palestine by the Jewish National Fund has been that land has been extra-territorialised. It ceases to be land from which the Arab can gain any advantage either now or at any time in the future. Not only can he never hope to lease or to cultivate it, but, by the stringent provisions of the lease of the Jewish National Fund, he is deprived for ever from employment on that land. … It is for this reason that Arabs discount the professions of friendship and good will on the part of the Zionists…’

‘That this replacement of Arab labour by Jewish labour is a definite policy of the Zionist Organisation is also evident from the following quotation, taken from A Guide to Jewish Palestine, published by the Head Office of the Keren-Kayemeth Leisrael –The Jewish National Fund – and the Keren-Hayesod, in Jerusalem in the 1930s…

The Arab population already regards the transfer of lands to Zionist hands with dismay and alarm. These cannot be dismissed as baseless in light of the Zionist policy described above….

The policy of the Jewish Labour Federation is successful in impeding the employment of Arabs in Jewish colonies and in Jewish enterprises of every kind.’ ^[v]

The Jewish Labour Federation was Histadrut, founded in 1920 as the General Federation of Hebrew Labour. It was a Jewish only ‘trade union’.

In South Africa the Group Areas Act 1950 forbade Black people from living in the same town as Whites. In Israel the same objective was achieved through indirect means. Land in towns such as Kiryat Shmona was owned by the JNF and could not therefore be rented by non-Jews. Legislation was not needed to prevent Arabs from renting flats in Safed. An edict by its Chief Rabbi, Shmuel Eliyahu, that Jews were forbidden to rent apartments to Arabs, was sufficient.^[vi]

In 2000 Israel’s Supreme Court ruled in the case of Ka'adan that it was illegal to refuse to sell state lands, including those owned by the JNF, to non-Jews. The Court hadn’t wanted to reach this ruling, however it was left with no choice.^[vii]In 2005 Attorney General Mazuz decided that the 93% of state land which is controlled by the Israel Lands Administration, including that owned by the JNF, could be sold to non-Jews.^[viii] This undermined the whole basis on which the Zionist movement had colonized Palestine.^[ix]

In 2011 the government responded to the concerns of those who believed that selling ‘Jewish’ land to non-Jews undermined the very basis of Zionism by introducing the Reception Committees Law. This allowed small communities, under 500, (now increased to 700) to determine whether or not someone ‘fitted in’ to their community based on a set of social criteria. Instead of direct discrimination there would be what we know as indirect discrimination. Ostensibly Arabs would be rejected, not because they were non-Jews but because they didn’t fit in with existing Jewish communities. It is a distinction without a difference. This is how racism in Israel has traditionally operated. Instead of following the example of Apartheid South Africa and introducing legislation that forbade Arabs from leasing or buying ‘Jewish’ land, , Israel left it to the good sense of Jewish communities to reject Arabs who wanted to access Jewish land and to the regulations of para-state groups like the JNF.^[x]

In the United States, the Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, ruled that racially separate facilities did not violate the Constitution.^[xi] Segregation, the Court said, was not discrimination. In practice separation has always meant inequality, otherwise why have it? It was not until Brown v Board of Education 1954 that the ruling in Plessy was overturned. In Israel separation is not decreed in law but comes about as the consequence of administrative practices, regulations, land, social and employment policies that are guided by Zionism, which is a state ideology.  A Jewish state cannot be other than a racist state because of the settler colonialist context in which it was established. Being Jewish in Israel is as important as being White was in South Africa.

In the 2006 Democracy Institute Survey, 62% of Israelis wanted the government to encourage local Arabs to leave the country ^[xii]and 75% of Jews didn’t approve of sharing apartments with Arabs. Over half of Israeli Jews believed that the marriage of a Jewish woman to an Arab man is equal to national treason, according to a survey by the Geocartography Institute. 55% said “Arabs and Jews should be separated at entertainment sites”.’^[xiii]

In 2014 the Democracy Institute found that 62.9% Jews disagreed with the statement that ‘Jewish citizens of Israel should have greater rights than non-Jewish citizens.’ But when it came to more concrete questions, such as whether it was acceptable for Israel to allocate more funding to Jewish localities than to Arab ones, then 47.2% agreed compared to 47.5%; who disagreed.

In the 2016 Pew Opinion Survey a plurality (48%) of Israeli Jews wanted Israeli Palestinians to be expelled from the country. 79% believed that Jews are entitled to preferential treatment.^[xiv]

Anofficialpolicyof apartheid and racialsegregation would be problematic because of Israel’s political dependence on the West. It would also create difficulties for diaspora Jews. How could one support apartheid in Israel and oppose anti-Semitism in one’s own country? The problem for Zionism is how to achieve an apartheid society without being seen to do so.

Zionism has therefore deployed a number of different strategies to achieve a Jewish supremacist society. One method was the use of para-state organisations such as the JNF to implement discrimination, another was the use of indirect discrimination – using an ostensibly neutral policy that in practice is discriminatory.  For example in order to get a job in many areas you have to have served in the army! In Israel Arabs, with the exception of the Druze, do not serve in the Army.^[xv]

In Israel all families with more than four children received a special grant. The problem was how to restrict this to Jews. The innocuously titled Discharged Soldier’s (Reinstatement in Employment) (Amendment No. 4) Law 1970 achieved this purpose by restricting such benefits to those who had served in the army or whose relatives had served. Uri Avneri, a member of the Knesset, in a speech opposing the law stated that:

‘The intention is to encourage births among one part of the population of Israel and to effect the opposite among the other part, to pay grants to the hungry children of one part of the population and withhold them from the hungry children of another part, the distinction… being an ethnic one…’

However the Haredi section of Israeli society also didn’t serve in the Army. The solution to this ‘problem’ was to pay a grant equivalent to the benefit directly to the Ministry of Religion which then disbursed it to Orthodox Jews.

Virtually every section of Israeli society – from manufacturing and trade, education (except universities), teaching, the civil service – is segregated. Arab areas of society, be it education or local government are underfunded compared to their Jewish counterparts. For the year 2013/14, per-student funding in high schools was 35 percent to 68 percent higher for Jews than for Arabs.^[xvi]  Fewer Arabs per head of population go to university.

However when it comes to poverty then Arabs are the winners! As the Jerusalem Post noted, the Annual Poverty Report ‘relayed a startling gap between different population groups in Israel. The incidence of poverty among Arab families in 2012 was a staggering 53.4% compared to 14.1% among Jewish families. 36.6% of poor families in Israel today are Arabs.^[xvii]

Because of the Occupation Israel is becoming an openly apartheid society. In the West Bank there are two systems of law – one for Jewish settlers and another for Palestinians. Even in pre-1967 Israel, the calls for an openly apartheid society are increasing. At the ‘peace talks’ Tsipi Livni MK, a “moderate” Zionist, tried to include the areas where Israel’s Arabs live in the areas that would be exchanged for the settlement blocs of the West Bank.^[xviii] There has been a whole raft of legislation, such as the 2011 Nakba Law, specifically targeted at Israel’s Arabs. The Zionist Right wish to go from the implicit to the explicit, from hidden to overt discrimination.

Police violence against Israeli Palestinians is another area of inbuilt and systemic discrimination. When demonstrations took place in Kafr Kanna in response to the killing of 22-year-old Khir Hamdan by the Police, Netanyahu called for the withdrawal of citizenship from Israeli Palestinians who he alleged had rioted. Those taking part in Jewish riots have never been threatened with the loss of citizenship, because Israel is a Jewish state.^[xix] The Police killing was captured on video and showed the Police had lied and deliberately murdered an Arab teenager.  About this Netanyahu had nothing to say.

By way of contrast, when an Ethiopian soldier was captured on camera being beaten up by the Police, there were riots. Netanyahu’s reaction to this was to invite the soldier to his residence and hug him whilst denouncing anti-Ethiopian racism.^[xx] 

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[i]           Jimmy Carter: Israel's 'Apartheid' Policies Worse Than South Africa's, Ha’aretz 11.12.06.,

[ii]          Netanyahu policies may turn Israel into apartheid state – former Israeli PM, RT, 17.6.16.

[iii]          http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apartheid

[iv]          In the survey of 400 Jewish and Israeli teens, 27% of Arab Israelis reported never having spoken with a Jewish youth.   http://www.jpost.com/Arab-Israeli-Conflict/Survey-35-percent-of-Jewish-Israeli-teens-have-never-interacted-with-Arab-peers-404831

[v]          Palestine: Report on Immigration, Land Settlement and Development, SIR JOHN HOPE SIMPSON, October 1930 http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/hope-simpson-report.

[vi]          Poll: 55% back rabbis' anti-Arab ruling, http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3998010,00.html Dozens of top Israeli rabbis sign ruling to forbid rental of homes to Arabs, http://www.haaretz.com/news/national/dozens-of-top-israeli-rabbis-sign-ruling-to-forbid-rental-of-homes-to-arabs-1.329312, Ha’aretz 7.12.10.

[vii]         Battling against Israeli 'apartheid', BBC News, Lucy Ash, 23.12.04., http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/4111915.stm

[viii]        Ha’aretz, 27.1.05. AG Mazuz Rules JNF Land Can Now Be Sold to Arabs , http://www.haaretz.com/ag-mazuz-rules-jnf-land-can-now-be-sold-to-arabs-1.148348

[ix]          For hostile reactions see for example Is This Land Still Our Land? The Expropriation of Zionism, Azureonline, No. 36, Spring 2009, Golovensky and Gilboa, http://azure.org.il/article.php?id=492

[x]          'Laws won't help get rid of Arabs’, YNet, 29.11.10., 'Laws won't help get rid of Arabs, http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3990861,00.html

[xi]          It was not finally overturned until Brown v. Board of Education 1954.

[xii]         http://en.idi.org.il/tools-and-data/guttman-center-for-surveys/the-israeli-democracy-index/ http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3248693,00.html

[xiii]        ‘Marriage to an Arab is national treason’ 27.3.07, YNet. http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3381978,00.html Roee Nahmias

[xiv]        Israel’s Religiously Divided Society, Pew Research Centre, https://tinyurl.com/y38wdrnv

[xv]         The definition of indirect discrimination is where a policy, criteria or practice is imposed, which is ostensibly neutral, but which in practice a whole class of people (for example women) find it more difficult to achieve.

[xvi]        For Jews and Arabs, Israel’s School System Remains Separate and Unequal, Ha’aretz 7 July 2016,

            http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-1.729404

[xvii]        Annual report shows 1.7 million Israelis living below poverty line, 17.12.13. http://www.jpost.com/National-News/Annual-report-shows-17-million-Israelis-living-below-poverty-line-335255

[xviii]       Palestine Papers, Permanent Revolution, Autumn 2011 see Clayton Swisher, Al Jazeera: Introducing the Palestine Papers, https://leaksource.wordpress.com/2011/01/24/al-jazeera-introducing-palestine-papers-live-updates/

[xix]        Netanyahu: Those who call to destroy Israel should have citizenship revoked, +972 Magazine, 8.11.14., http://972mag.com/bibi-those-who-call-to-destroy-israel-should-have-citizenship-revoked/98537/ Meet the Arab-Israelis living in fear of expulsion, Residents in the flashpoint Israeli town of Kafr Kana fear mass expulsion if a controversial new law designating the country a Jewish state is approved, The Telegraph, 1.12.14, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/israel/11263845/Meet-the-Arab-Israelis-living-in-fear-of-expulsion.html

[xx]         Netanyahu hugs black Jewish soldier who was assaulted by Israeli police officers sparking riots by Ethiopian Jews, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3067010/Israeli-president-says-Ethiopian-protest-exposes-wound.html

The Scandal of Jo Bird’s Suspension - Jon Lansman’s Corrupt War on Democracy

February 7, 2020, 5:07 pm

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Even Tony Blair did not suspend socialist candidates standing for election – Lansman's corrupt racism marks a new low 

Any socialist who stays in Momentum believing that there is anything ‘left-wing’ about the organisation needs their head examining. Lansman, its Chair and Owner, has become the Chief Witchhunter and Jennie Formby his silent accomplice.

If Lansman spoke the truth about Israel today he would be suspended from the Labour Party!

So lacking in confidence is Lansman in the chances of his 2 White candidates (to replace two Black members of the National Executive) that he decided to take out the front runners – Jo Bird and Mohammed Azam.

This is what is normally called gerrymandering. It is electoral corruption. Remember that the Chakrabarti Report recommended that:

The Campaign Against Antisemitism Barked and Lansman Jumped

such an interim suspension being public ought to be the greatest exception rather than the rule, in for example, a case where the person concerned continues (despite warning) with public repetition of their allegedly offending remarks and publicity of their suspension is the only way to protect the reputation of the Party. (my emphasis)

It seems that all the worst aspects of Chakrabarti have been implemented (‘zio’ being anti-Semitic) but not those parts dealing with due process and natural justice.

The suspension of Jo Bird on charges of ‘anti-Semitism’ is entirely bogus. The idea that if you want to fight ‘anti-Semitism’ that you should suspend and expel Jewish anti-racists and anti-Zionists belongs to the world of Doublespeak and 1984.

When Lansman was a socialist he too criticised 'Jewish Apartheid' - now anyone saying this will be suspended

Anti-Zionist Jews, by definition are anti-racists.  People who refuse to accept the argument of ‘kith and kin’, that you should support any iniquity or injustice because it is carried out by Jews.  Lansman subscribes to all the most vile racist tropes. ‘Kith and kin’ used to be the argument of supporters of Apartheid South Africa, that those who were implementing apartheid were ‘our’ stock.  For Lansman it is being Jewish that matters.

John McDonnell backs the Right again

Lansman has become a vile racist and Zionist. There was a time when he criticised the Board of Deputies for weaponising anti-Semitism. He was not reluctant to call Israel an apartheid state. He spoke of the ‘Shame’ of the Board of Deputies ‘for marring Holocaust day with a false accusation of antisemitism’. This was in respect of an allegation that a cartoon of Netanyahu cementing the bricks in a wall with the blood of Palestinians.

But that was in 2012. In 2020 Lansman, the campaign manager for the pathetically weak Rebecca Long-Bailey, endorsesthe Board of Deputies 10 Pledges which include the IHRA misdefinition of anti-Semitism. Allegations of Apartheid and comparisons between Israel and Nazi Germany are now ‘anti-Semitic’. Indeed anything the Board or Israel’s apologists say is anti-Semitic must be accepted as holy writ.

Today suggesting that 'antisemitism' complaints are fake is itself proof of antisemitism - but there was a time when Lansman made the same allegation - it's a great pity that Lansman can't suspend himself now for past iniquities!

Lansman has gone along with all of this. He has learnt nothing from the disaster of December 12^thand how acceptance of the Zionist agenda and the continual apologies for 'antisemitism' coupled with the witchhunt merely emboldened Labour enemies.  Now Jo Bird, who hasn’t a racist bone in her body, is the latest sacrificial lamb on the altar of Lansman’s vanity.

Although he doesn’t seem to use it any longer, you might want to leave a message on Lansman’s mobile (07710 541410) and text a message!  Or send him an email at jonlansman@me.com. I’m sure that he will appreciate your concerns!

Jewish Voice for Labour have issued a statement on their Facebook page.

Labour List has reported that Jo Bird has been suspended. The Party keeps confidential what Jo, the only Jewish candidate standing for the NEC, has been suspended for. Given previous events, we have to assume that it because of allegations of antisemitism.

Jo is the leading left candidate running for the NEC so the timing of this suspension is deeply suspicious and has the hallmarks of a deliberate attempt to undermine members' wishes and Party democracy.

We urge all Labour Party members to argue for Jo’s candidature to be considered at CLP nominating meetings. If this is prevented members should consider the option of calling an emergency AMM/GC as soon as possible after the nominating meeting to discuss and condemn threats to the Party’s democracy from the misuse of our disciplinary processes to secure partisan advantage in internal elections.

If the suspension is for antisemitism we can say we have known Jo for a long period and worked closely with her. We know she is a proud Jew and opposed to antisemitism just as she is has shown over the years to be an active opponent of all racism.

Suspension before investigation is an extreme measure and the Party must show to all members why they have taken such a step in the middle of an election process.

The Lansman of 2012 would have long ago been suspended in today's Labour Party

I have posted a short comment beneath the statement regretting that they describe Jo as ‘proud to be Jewish.’

It is a pity that this statement is marred by the phrase 'We know she is a proud Jew '. Being a Jew is nothing to be proud of (or ashamed of). It is a fact of life, an accident of birth. When people proclaim they are proud of their ethnic, religious origins it is usually a sign that racism is on the agenda. You know proud Hindus in India. Proud Jews in Israel.

I am sorry that this stupid remark has marred an otherwise good statement.

I should add that Hannah Arendt was asked whether she was a proud Jew and was filled with Ahavath Israel, love of the Jewish people. She responded that no, she loves her friends and acquaintances not a whole people and that being born a Jew is nothing to be proud of.

What is crucially important is that the fight against Jo’s suspension and the electoral corruption that is part and parcel of it is not hindered by the requirement that the process of kept confidential. This is an outrageous stipulation designed to prevent people campaigning against injustices. It is the decision of the person accused, and no one else, whether it should be confidential.  Given it has already been publicised I hope Jo doesn’t stick by a stipulation designed to inhibit any campaign in her support.

Even bourgeois justice doesn’t require that the accused remain silent!

There is however one thing that JVL can do.  A component part of JVL is the Jewish Socialist Group. Among its members is one Jon Lansman!  It would be symbolically important for JSG to expel the treacherous Lansman from its ranks.

Tony Greenstein  

Packed Brighton Labour Left Alliance Meeting Hears the Father of Julian Assange Demand his Son’s Release – Journalism isn’t a Crime

February 9, 2020, 10:39 am

≫ Next: The School of the Americas is Still Going Strong - Its Purpose? To Keep Latin America Safe for US Multinationals

≪ Previous: The Scandal of Jo Bird’s Suspension - Jon Lansman’s Corrupt War on Democracy

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Emma Daniel, the Brighton Councillor whom voters booted out last May, chairs a meeting with Keir Starmer, the man who first began extradition proceedings against Assange

It’s been quite a week. On Thursday John Shipton, Julian Assange’s father, speaking at a packed meeting at Brighton’s Rialto Theatre, described the conditions his son is experiencing in Belmarsh, Britain’s Guantanamo. Assange’s crime? He revealed, through leaking thousands of documents, the extent of the United States’s war crimes in Iraq.  The other speaker was Joseph Farrell, Wikileaks Ambassador and editor.

The man who prosecuted Assange, Sir Keir Starmer, was Director of Public Prosecution at the time. The extradition was formally to Sweden on a bogus and trumped-up charge of rape as Craig Murray has documentedin detail. Indeed the original arrest warrant wasn’t even issued by a Swedish court but by the Prosecutor. When it was eventually brought before a Swedish court it was thrown out. See Why the Assange Allegation is a Stitch-up.

Assange’s original objection to extradition was that this was a ruse to deport him on to the United States. Sweden denied this was true but that has since been proven to be a lie. The Obama administration had been sitting on sealed indictments for years.

Assange meeting at The Rialto, Brighton's Free Speech Centre, on Thursday

Starmer could easily have stipulated that the extradition request would only be proceeded with on condition that there was no onward extradition to the United States. Assange also asked Sweden directly to agree to this.  Both Sweden and Starmer refused. Starmer wasn’t inclined to make this a condition since he was himself anxious that Assange be deported to the United States.

Starmer’s whole record as DPP was one of the utmost hostility to protesters and campaigners. He conspired with Police as to how to best crack down on students protesting against the fee increases and according to Olive Eagleton the CPS during  Starmer’s tenure advised undercover police officers on how to infiltrate left-wing campaign groups via a ‘domestic extremism’ specialist. When it was alleged that undercover agents had given false evidence in court and formed sexual relationships with activists in order to spy on them, the CPS launched an investigation into covert policing that was widely considered to be a whitewash.

Brighton & Hove PSC's  stall at the Clocktower Saturday

There is a letterin Camden New Journal by Lisa Langstaffe of Women Against Rape. WAR have long campaigned against the Police charging women who make allegations of rape, which are not believed or upheld, with having made false allegations. Given the low level of convictions for rape and the treatment women experience from the Police such prosecutions are likely to deter more victims from going to the Police. However to Starmer this was of no concern. When Cyprus Police charged and a court convicteda British women for alleging rape against 12 Israelis even the government protested at the unfairness of the process.

Assange meeting at The Rialto, Brighton's Free Speech Centre, on Thursday

Langstaffe alleged that despite Starmer claiming to be concerned about the low level of convictions for rape, he repeatedly refused to prevent false Police prosecutions of women

One case Lisa alleged was that of a girl of 15 who was raped. She was charged with lying when police claimed to have found no sperm on her T-shirt from her rapist. A second investigation by another police force found the sperm and the man was finally prosecuted. She was saved from prison and later sued the police for £20,000.

For Emma Daniel handing out leaflets  = 'lurking' - she is a post-modern feminist for whom truth is always relative

Emma Daniel – right-wing former Brighton Councillor, Racist, Zionist and Starmer Supporter

Earlier this week I was leafleting Starmer’s meeting for the Labour Left Alliance in support of Richard Burgon and Rebecca Long-Bailey for Deputy and Leader (the latter on the grounds that she was the least worst candidate). Who should turn up but an apoplectic Zionist and former Labour councillor, whom the electorate ejected last May, Emma Daniel.

What was I doing leafleting a Labour meeting when I was expelled was the gist of Daniel’s incoherent splutterings. It is a novel argument that expulsion by a Labour Party kangaroo court should deprive you of the right to freedom of speech.  But there’s little point convincing a Zionist of this since this is what they are defending in Israel.

Not a happy bunny!

There was little point in persuading Daniel that it was absurd to expel Jewish anti-racists for ‘anti-Semitism’ whilst leaving people like her untouched. It’s even more absurd when non-Jews like Daniel accuse Jews of ‘anti-Semitism’ especially when they never have anything to say about genuine examples of racism, like the Windrush scandal. I’m not aware that Jews, unlike Black people, face deportation from Britain for being the wrong religion. Nor am I aware than being Jewish whilst driving is an offence whereas being Black and driving is still considered an offence by many in the police force.

The boring chaired by the even more boring

Realising that I was failing to persuade someone who is not terribly bright I tried another tactic. I told her that being called an anti-Semite by a racist scumbag is a compliment. At that Daniel beetled inside since she had Starmer’s meeting to chair.

Imagine Ms Daniel’s surprise when on Saturday I was outside Brighton’s Grand Hotel with the same leaflets! Being a few sandwiches short of a picnic, Daniel found it genuinely puzzling that expelled Labour members should have any rights. I pointed out that being expelled is an honour – Nye Bevan managed it 3 times, as did Sir Stafford Cripps and Michael Foot! The names of their right-wing opponents are long forgotten. She then resorted to taking a photo of me (why? Don’t the police have enough?) so I reciprocated.

Israeli Apartheid maims a boy of 14

What Emma Daniel and her fellow losers last May are concerned about isn’t a non-existent ‘anti-Semitism’ but criticism of Israel, a ‘Jewish’ state that is in fact an Apartheid state. I won’t go through the arguments as they are here.

As Hagai el-Ad, director of Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselemposted on Twitter, the founder of Apartheid, South African Premier Henrik Verwoerd, used the same excuse for segregation, about the unalterable differences between the races, as Zionism to explain why Black Africans could not live in the same society as Whites. For Israel substitute Jew and Arab. A Jewish state means, by definition, a state with as few non-Jews and Arabs as possible.

As Dr Verwoerd, acknowledged,

"The Jews took Israel from the Arabs after the Arabs had lived there for a thousand years. In this I agree with them. Israel, like South Africa, is an apartheid state,"

No this is not a picture that you show your kids to frighten them into behaving - it's Julie Cattell - right-wing Zionist and former councillor who when she was defeated had no personal vote whatsoever!

Emma Daniel was one of a trio of right-wing Zionist women, MacBeth’s ‘weird sisters’, all of whom lost their seats at the last election or were forced to stand down – the others were Julie Cattell and Caroline ‘Poison’ Penn. The latters’ behaviour was so offensive to vulnerable adults that she was forced to resign 5 months early. As their bio on the Council’s website says ‘Not currently an elected councillor.’

All 3 of the above are members of the Zionist Jewish Labour Movement. The purpose of making false ‘anti-Semitism’ allegations, often against Jewish anti-racists, is to distract attention from Israel’s war crimes.

former councillor Caroline 'poison' Penn

The JLM is both an affiliateof the World Zionist Organisation, which funds the theft of Palestinian land in the West Bank and the Israeli Labour Party, a party that once controlled the Israeli government, which perpetrated the Nakba and is today fighting for its life. It also subscribes to the Jerusalem Programme of the WZO the first of whose 6 points state that the foundations of Zionism are:

The unity of the Jewish people, its bond to its historic homeland Eretz Yisrael, and the centrality of the State of Israel and Jerusalem, its capital, in the life of the nation;

How I wonder does that fit in with the IHRA misdefinition of anti-Semitism which defines ‘anti-Semitism’ as ‘Holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel’ is anti-Semitic.’ A definition that the JLM assiduously pushes? If Israel and its theft of Jerusalem is ‘central’ to the Jewish ‘nation’ that is all Jews in the world, then how can it be anti-Semitic to blame Jews for what Israel does in their name? It’s like having your cake and eating it!

Of course I reject the argument that Jews bear any automatic responsibility for what Israel does. But I also reject the idea that Jews form a separate nation or that Israel is central to them. However the JLM does subscribe to this poisonous anti-Semitic idea.

Petty trolls and vipers like Daniel are, in themselves, pretty insignificant. They are the foot soldiers of the British ruling class. Mere sound and fury signifying nothing. As I told Daniel, the Labour Party expels people like me who have been arrested opposing fascists all their life and allows racists like her to point the finger at Jews and others who reject the racism of the world’s only apartheid state.

Let us give an example of the kind of thing Labour’s 3 Witches are defending because it’s always good to make the ‘anti-Semitism’ controversy, which is often abstract, concrete.

Thanks to Gideon Levy and Alex Levac in Ha’aretz earlier this week, we know the details of how the Israeli army, which describes itself as the ‘most moral occupation in the world’ shot a Palestinian child of 14 in the head, for absolutely no reason. Of course the IDF subsequently lied about a non-existent riot in the area.  They always do.  Bear in mind that whenever video surfaces to challenge the army’s lies, without exception, the Israeli Army’s PR proves to be a tissue of lies.

Levy and Levac describedhow 4 teenagers were on the way back from the village playground, when they spotted Zionist soldiers laying in ambush and took cover. When Mohammed Shatawi stood up for a moment, he was shot. Now he’s in a vegetative state

Let us remember that Daniel, Cattle and Poison Penn are in business to defend the actions of the Israeli state. Like their friend Luke Akehurst of We Believe in Israel they will defend what Israel does in the West Bank just as Akehurst, Labour Friends of Israel and the Board of Deputiesdefendedshooting unarmed demonstrators, including children and medics, in Gaza. Cattle, Daniel and Penn are despicable creatures but they are mere pawns in Israel’s war against the Palestinians. They are, if you like unwitting racists. Indeed I am reliably told that Emma Daniel considers herself an anti-racist.

The real blame for a situation where Jewish councillor Jo Bird is suspendedas a result of anonymous complaints of ‘anti-Semitism’ in the middle of an election, with the pathetic Corbyn, McDonnell and Formby. They have given the racists their head.  It was Corbyn and his abysmal adviser Seamus Milne, who accepted the fake anti-Semitism narrative and promised to do their best to root out non-existent anti-Semites.

It has to be admitted that the witchhunters got a good crop of anti-Semites. Besides myself there was the Black Jewish anti-racist Jackie Walker, long-time Black campaign Marc Wadsworth, Ken Livingstone who pioneered anti-racist work in local government, Chris Williamson, the sole socialist in the PLP as well of course as Electronic Intifada journalist Asa Winstanley who has just resignedfrom the Labour Party after having been suspended and treated in the usual outrageous fashion. Corbyn of course has said nothing about any of this. He threw his friends under the bus with increasing regularity. By accepting that ‘anti-Semitism’ was a problem Corbyn simply reinforced the attacks on him as an ‘anti-Semite’. Every apology proved his enemies were right.  The more he did to try and  speed up the disciplinary process the more it proved that the Zionists were right. It was both pathetic and tragic to watch. It is as if Corbyn had no advisers who could sit him down and explain that what was happening was an Establishment campaign to be rid of a subversive as they saw him.

Corbyn will go down in history, not as a Tony Benn figure who inspired people but as a limp, apologetic creature who caved in to the Right and their destabilisation project. Every time he promised ‘to do better’ he merely confirmed there was a problem.

I don’t know whether Corbyn has yet worked out why there is no interest in Boris Johnson’s genuinely anti-Semitic book 72 Virgins.  McDonnell, who has travelled to the Right ever since 2015, will no doubt welcome Jo’s suspension as proof that something is being done. After all, if you are going to fight ‘anti-Semitism’ it always helps to expel and suspend Jews!

It says everything about Corbyn that his own CLP, Islington North, has votedto nominate Starmer. The Corbyn wave has ended up with the hard Right even more entrenched. Now even his own CLP has moved to the Right.

Tony Greenstein

The IDF Troops Weren't at Risk, but They Shot a Palestinian Boy in the Head Anyway

Four teens were on the way back from the village playground, when they spotted the soldiers laying in ambush, and took cover. When Mohammed Shatawi stood up for a moment, he was shot. Now he’s in a vegetative state

Gideon Levyand Alex LevacFeb 07, 2020

The family meeting area can be found next to the neuro-intensive care unit on the 12th floor of the modern tower at Hadassah University Hospital, Ein Karem, Jerusalem. It is a vast space with a high ceiling, stone-faced walls and picture windows overlooking a wooded Jerusalem landscape; bronze sculptures, the gift of donors from America, adorn the space. A metal plaque proclaims the hall as being dedicated to “children who lead the way to a kinder path.”

Sitting at the far end of the room – deserted on an afternoon this week – on a wooden bench donated by the Pittsburgh Jewish community, with a Muslim prayer rug at his feet, is a man in a gray sweat suit, his face crestfallen, his heart broken. Mohand Shatawi sits alone here. Not far away, behind the automatic doors leading to the ward, in one of the spacious and well-equipped rooms, physicians are fighting to save the life of his 14-year-old son, Mohammed. The youth’s head is bandaged, his chest rises and falls at the pace of the mechanical ventilator; he’s hooked up to numberless tubes and a sea of monitors report on his condition. Mohammed is a vegetable. He’s been like this ever since an Israel Defense Forces soldier fired a bullet into his head, last week.

Despair, pain, agony are etched on Mohand’s face, whose aloneness is heightened by the cavernous space around him. No one else from his village of Qaddum, west of Nablus, has a permit that will allow them to join him here in his time of anguish. He’s been here a week now, sleeping on the floor and praying for his son’s life. Actually, he hardly sleeps. He buys whatever meager food he can afford. Once every so often, he enters the ward to look at his son. It’s a brutal sight. For our part, we’ve never seen so many tubes and monitors hooked up to a boy.

Mohand, 48, is a taxi driver. Each day at 3 A.M., he leaves his house in Qaddum to drive local workers to the Eyal checkpoint, on their way to jobs in Israel. For the rest of the day, until the evening, he plies the Ramallah-Qalqilyah route. Day in and day out, he provides this way for his wife, their four sons and two daughters. Now Mohammed is hovering between life and death. In a split second last Thursday, after the lively boy who got back from school and went outside to play with his friends, according to their testimony, had a shot fired at his head, and became a patient lying in a vegetative state in the neuro-intensive care unit of Hadassah.

Qaddum is one of the last villages of struggle and resistance that haven’t yet backed down. The struggle here is over the main access road to the village, which has for years been completely blocked because of the settlement of Kedumim that was built at its edge. Every weekend, a group of villagers, together with an ever-dwindling number of Israeli and foreign activists, position themselves on the forbidden road, which is littered with stones, shell casings and scorched tires, after years of protest. The soldiers lie in wait for them between the olive trees, fire tear-gas canisters at them and chase them into the village. Occasionally they shoot. Sometimes with live ammunition. There are frequent injuries and fatalities.

We were in Qaddum last July, after soldiers shot Abd el-Rahman Shatawi in the head with live ammunition during the weekly demonstration there. A 10-year-old boy who looks even smaller than his age now, he was standing innocently at the entrance to the home of a friend in the village, when soldiers took aim from a distance and shot him in the head. From Qaddum we drove to Safra Children’s Hospital, at Sheba Medical Center, Tel Hashomer, and entered room 9 of the children’s intensive care unit. The unit’s director, Prof. Gidi Paret, told us at the time that there was hope for the boy. His father, Yasser, didn’t leave his son’s bedside for weeks. Abd el-Rahman too is in a vegetative state today, in a rehabilitative hospital in Beit Jala, adjacent to Bethlehem, completely paralyzed and unable to speak. Every Thursday, his father comes to take him home in the car, placing him on the back seat, bringing him back on Sunday. A weekend at home.

Abd el-Rahman is from Mohammed’s family, they’re both from the same village, in the words of the iconic Hebrew song.

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This week we went to Qaddum again, and from there to the IC ward, this time in Hadassah. The circumstances are horrifyingly similar: In each case a child was shot in the head, with appalling results. Last summer it was a live round, this winter it was a rubber-coated metal bullet that slammed into a boy’s head and wrought devastation. That’s what happens when no soldier is ever punished.

On the second floor of one of the first houses in the village, a group of men is sitting idly. They are relatives of the father and his wounded son, who are now far from here. After a short time, Qusay Shatawi, who’s 13 and was an eyewitness to the event, arrives. A year younger than Mohammed, in the eighth grade, he was with Mohammed last Thursday when the soldier shot him. The boy is still clearly traumatized: His legs move ceaselessly from side to side in agitation, his face is pale, he speaks in a whisper, he looks frightened as he tries to reconstruct what happened.

School ended around noon, and they went home. They’d arranged to go at about 2 o’clock to a building at the edge of the village that belongs to the local council and is used as a kind of community center, where the children play in the yard. The kids go there every Thursday afternoon. Muayad Shatawi, an older man, and our escort through the streets of the village, stops a few children and asks where they go on Thursdays. To the muntazah, they reply – to the playground. It was a sunny day, Qusay says, and they wanted to get a tan. After hanging around in the yard for a time they decided to go home. There were just four of them, aged 13 and 14. The area was quiet, Qusay recalls.

One has to question his account, however. The IDF Spokesperson says that some 40 youths showed up, and that they were burning tires. These were the days immediately following the publication of President Trump’s “deal of the century.”

As they made their way up toward the village, they noticed soldiers standing on the ridge of the hill that overlooks the road. This is not the battleground road, which is below, in the valley, but it, too, is covered with stones and rocks, also shell casings, including live rounds, attesting to the demonstrations that are held here as well. We walked on the road with Qusay. It was his first time here since Thursday.

Below in the valley is the building with the yard where they’d been, and here, above us, is where the soldiers were waiting. With a slope this steep, the soldiers on top of the hill and the children below them, there is no way the children could have posed any sort of threat to the troops. It’s impossible to throw stones upward, to such a steep height. So here, in the shade of the boulder by the roadside, next to the village’s water reservoir, says Qusay, the children thought they were sheltered.

It was after three o’clock. A few minutes later, Mohammed stood up to check whether the soldiers were still on the hilltop. The moment he raised his head, Qusay heard two shots. One missed, but the second struck Mohammed on the right side of the head. He fell to the ground, bleeding. The three other boys picked him up and ran with him toward the village down the road. In the meantime, village residents who heard the shots began arriving.

Muayad Shatiwi, who has grandchildren Mohammed’s age, was first on the scene. He relates that he saw the boys carrying their wounded friend, took him from them and placed him in his car, which was brought to the site. They tried to get him to a hospital in Nablus, but the road was blocked because of an accident. They had to turn around and go back, all the while with the boy lying on the back seat. Now their plan was to get to the hospital in Qalqilyah, to the east of the village. Next to the Karnei Shomron settlement they were stopped by a police car. They showed the police officers the bleeding boy, but they delayed them, Muayad says. By his reckoning, they lost about half an hour. In the meantime, a Palestinian ambulance they’d called arrived. Mohammed was transferred to the ambulance and taken to Rafidia Hospital in Nablus.

At the same time, Mohammed’s grandfather called the boy’s father, who was in Ramallah with his taxi, and told him his son had been lightly injured. Mohand hurried to the hospital in Nablus, where he learned that his son’s condition was serious to critical. At 9 P.M., it was decided to transfer him to Hadassah. Mohand was allowed to accompany his son in the ambulance. 

In response to a request for comment, the IDF Spokesperson Unit’s made this statement to Haaretz: “Several days ago, a violent disturbance developed in which about 40 Palestinians took part in Kafr Qaddum, which is in the area of the Shomron territorial brigade. In the course of the disturbance, tires were burned and stones were thrown at IDF forces at the site. IDF fighters responded with crowd control means. A claim about a Palestinian who was wounded by a rubber bullet is known about.”

And in the family hall, dedicated to the children who will lead us to a kinder path, sits Mohand Shatawi, praying for his son’s life.

The School of the Americas is Still Going Strong - Its Purpose? To Keep Latin America Safe for US Multinationals

February 11, 2020, 5:13 pm

≫ Next: Pauline Hammerton –Expelled for Supporting the Palestinians on the 7th February (‘anti-Semitism’ in Labour Newspeak) Found Dead One Week Later

≪ Previous: Packed Brighton Labour Left Alliance Meeting Hears the Father of Julian Assange Demand his Son’s Release – Journalism isn’t a Crime

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Founded in 1946 and renamed in 2001 the School of Americas is where Latin America’s Dictators and Torturers are Trained in the Dark Art of Subverting the Peoples' Will

In 2001, after being in the public spotlight, the institution where so many torturers and mad dog dictators had learnt their skills was renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation.  However the role it performed was exactly the same as it had been before.

In 1961, US President John Kennedy ordered the school to focus on teaching "anti-communist" counterinsurgency training to military personnel from Latin America. According to anthropologist Lesley Gill, the label '"communist"was a highly elastic category that could accommodate almost any critic of the status quo.'

Beginning in 1961, Nicaraguan Dictator Anastasio Somoza sent Nicaraguan officers to the school to attend a 46-week course in their final year of training. Somoza himself made occasional visits to the school. In 1963 it changed its name from the U.S. Army Caribbean School to the School of the Americas.

According toMajor Joseph Blair, a former instructor at the school, "the author of SOA and CIA torture manuals [...] drew from intelligence materials used during the Vietnam War that advocated assassination, torture, extortion, and other 'techniques'."^[ The authors of the manuals "believed that oversight regulations and prohibitions applied only to U.S. personnel, not to foreign officers."Use of the manuals was suspended under Jimmy Carter over concerns about their correlation to human rights abuses but were reinstated under Ronald Reagan.

For those who don't get this cartoon - pictured is George Bush whose flagship policy domestically was 'leave no child behind' in education

Between 1970 and 1979, cadets from Chile, Colombia, Bolivia, Panama, Peru, and Honduras made-up 63% of the school's students. In 1980, the United States increased economic aid to Honduras. Journalist Ray Bonner reported that much of this aid would go toward training military officers at the School of the Americas and training programs within the continental United States. Hundreds of Hondurans were trained at the school during the 1980s, when the country became increasingly critical to Reagan's efforts to overthrow and defeat the Nicaraguan Sandinistas and other revolutionary guerrilla movements in the region. During the 1980s, Mexico, El Salvador, and Colombia made-up 72% of the school's cadets.

On September 21, 1984, the school was expelled from Panama.

School of the Americas Watch is an advocacy organization which was founded by Father Roy Bourgeois and a small group of supporters in 1990 to protest the training of mainly Latin American military officers by the School of the Americas (SOA). SOA Watch conducts a vigil each November at the site of SOA, located on the grounds of Fort Benning, a U.S. Army military base near Columbus, Georgia, to protest human rights abuses committed by some graduates of the academy or under their leadership, including murders, rapes and torture and contraventions of the Geneva Conventions.

Military officials state that even if graduates commit war crimes after they return to their home country, the school itself should not be held accountable for their actions. Responding to "mounting protests" spearheaded by SOA Watch, in 2000 the United States Congress renamed the School of the Americas the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC), rather than closing the academy. In addition, all students must undergo a minimum of eight hours of class on human rights and the principle of civilian control of the military.

One of the handbooks - subtle isn't the name!

Inspired by the case of slain Archbishop Óscar Romero, who said "we who have a voice must speak for the voiceless," former priest Roy Bourgeois, Larry Rosebaugh OMI, and Linda Ventimiglia posed as military officers and crossed into Ft. Benning in 1983. They climbed a tree near the barracks housing Salvadoran troops and read the final homily of Archbishop Oscar Romero through megaphones. Bourgeois and his companions were arrested and Bourgeois was sentenced to 18 months in prison for trespassing onto Federal property. Protesting against the teaching of torture is an offence in the United States!

Bourgeois and his followers began to research the School of the Americas, conduct public education campaigns, lobby Congress, and practice nonviolent resistance at the School of the Americas facilities.

Following the November 1989 murders of six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her daughter at the Central American University in El Salvador in which graduates of the School of the Americas were involved, SOA Watch organized an annual protest to be held on the anniversary of the massacre beginning the next year. The event has been held every year since then.

See The School Of The Americas Is Still Exporting Death Squads and Controversial 'School of the Americas' Closes (in fact the only thing that changed was the name)

SCHOOL OF THE AMERICAS. STILL THE SCHOOL FOR KILLERS? And

Shut Down the School of the Americas/ WHINSEC By Dévora GonzálezAzadeh Shahshahani Jacobin

NORTH AND SOUTH THE PEOPLE SAY "CLOSE THE SOA!"

Shut Down the School of the Americas/ WHINSEC

BY

DÉVORA GONZÁLEZ 

AZADEH SHAHSHAHANI

Jacobin Magazine November 15 2019

The School of the Americas/WHINSEC in Fort Benning, Georgia, has become notorious for training and enabling torturers, dictators, and massacres throughout the Western Hemisphere...The school is still training...ICE and the Border Patrol.

On November 16, 1989, the US-trained and funded Salvadoran Atlacatl Battalion entered the grounds of El Salvador’s Central American University (UCA) and brutally murdered six Jesuit priests, sixteen-year-old Celina Ramos, and her mother, Elba Ramos. Nineteen of the twenty-five Atlacatl Battalion soldiers were graduates of the US Army School of the Americas (SOA) — a combat training institution with the ostensible aim of instructing Latin American militaries in control tactics over armed counterinsurgent groups.

SOA was founded in the Panama Canal Zone in 1946 and expelled from Panama to Fort Benning near Columbus, Georgia, in 1984. The slain Jesuit priests worked in solidarity with El Salvador’s poor and marginalized and were outspoken critics of the country’s military dictatorship. They are among the 75,000 civilians murdered during the US-backed war in El Salvador between 1980 and 1992.

The SOA has trained more than 83,000 Latin American security forces since its founding. Notorious graduates of the SOA— including nearly a dozen dictators and some of the worst human rights violators in the continent — are guilty of using torture, rape, assassination, forced disappearance, massacres, and forced displacement of communities to wage war against their own people. Former Panamanian president Jorge Illueca stated that the School of the Americas was the “biggest base for destabilization in Latin America.” US-led and supported state violence abroad has ravaged and devastated communities in Central and South America, many of whose people are forced to migrate north.

On September 20, 1996, under intense public scrutiny, the Pentagon released the SOA training manuals, which advocated torture, extortion, blackmail, and the targeting of civilian populations. The release of these manuals proved that US taxpayer money was used to teach Latin American state forces how to torture and repress civilian populations.

A US congressional task force reported that those responsible for the 1989 UCA massacre in El Salvador were trained at the US Army School of the Americas, and as public pressure mounted to close the SOA, the Department of Defense responded by replacing the School of the Americas with the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC) in January 2001. The measure passed when the House of Representatives defeated a bipartisan amendment to close the school and conduct a congressional investigation by a narrow ten-vote margin. The opening of WHINSEC is not grounded in any critical assessment of the training, procedures, performance, or consequences of the training program it copies. Further, it ignores congressional concerns and the public outcry over the SOA’s past and present links to human rights atrocities.

To this day, WHINSEC continues to train Latin American security officers — including immigration officials.

In 2015, the first US Border Patrol agent graduated from the infamous training facility. On October 24 of this year, a contract between Border Patrol and Winchester Ammunition became public, confirming that Border Patrol purchased 33 million rounds of bullets and could purchase more than 330 million additional rounds over the next five years. Training of Border Patrol staff at Fort Benning coupled with their increased firepower is setting the stage for US state agents to wage war against undocumented migrants and refugees at border crossings and within the United States.

Over the past fifteen years, nearly one hundred people have been killed by US Border Patrol as a direct result of their excessive use of force, including the cross-border killings of fifteen-year-old Sergio Adrián Hernández Güereca in 2010 and sixteen-year-old José Antonio Elena Rodríguez in 2012. Both teenagers were on Mexican soil when they were shot at and killed by US Border Patrol agents located on US soil. Not a single Border Patrol agent has ever been held legally accountable for these crimes. According to a recent internal government report obtained by Quartz, criminal misconduct by border officers is at a five-year high.

In addition to US Border Patrol agents now being trained at the location notorious for instructing Latin American security forces in civilian-targeted warfare, on September 9 of this year, an unredacted Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) report revealed that ICE agents will also begin training there. The report divulged that ICE contracted New Mexico training systems company Strategic Operations for almost $1 million to build realistic models of US cities at Fort Benning. This will be a training facility meant to simulate raids that ICE teams would carry out in places like Chicago and Arizona, and the ICE Special Response Teams will be trained to deal with immigrants crossing the border.

There are already extremely detailed designs of buildings meant to imitate the kinds of places that ICE teams will raid, such as a two-story brick residential building typical of Chicago and a single-family six-room home typical of Arizona, complete with “set props” such as furniture, clothing, and toys. According to the contract, the plans include expansion for the future, with as many as fifty more buildings to be added to the training facility.

ICE agents have carried out violence against immigrants across the country. In July, video surfaced of ICE officers in Kansas City assaulting a man named Florencio Millan-Vazquez in front of his children and girlfriend; they smashed his car window and dragged him out to arrest him after claiming there was a warrant for his arrest, despite not providing evidence of this. More recently, an immigrant man was shot by ICE agents in Nashville, Tennessee, this past September and had to be hospitalized. ICE remains a human rights threat across the United States.

The United States is directly implicated in training and financing the perpetrators of gross human rights violations. In South and Central America, this violence is marked by military, economic, and political intervention, in addition to training proxy fighters at the SOA/WHINSEC. Now, US Department of Homeland Security agents are being trained at the same location in the same tactics of civilian-targeted warfare. The results are already clear: lethally trained and heavily militarized state security forces that target civilian populations, specifically communities of color, without meaningful oversight or accountability.

On the thirtieth anniversary of the UCA massacre, human rights organizations are continuing to call for the closure of the SOA/WHINSEC training facility at Fort Benning. The school’s crimes aren’t just evident in the atrocities of the past — they’re also still found in the horrors along the US-Mexico border and through the atrocious violence of ICE today. Those who are horrified by the crimes of the Border Patrol and ICE should join the call to shut down the SOA/WHINSEC and similar training centers.

Dévora González is a field organizer with the School of the Americas Watch; she tweets @SOAWatch.

Azadeh Shahshahani is legal and advocacy director for Project South and a past president of the National Lawyers Guild. She tweets @ashahshahani.

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Pauline Hammerton –Expelled for Supporting the Palestinians on the 7th February (‘anti-Semitism’ in Labour Newspeak) Found Dead One Week Later

February 14, 2020, 10:13 am

≫ Next: Former Columnist and Historian of the Jewish Community, Professor Geoffrey Alderman, is Banned by Jewish Chronicle Editor Stephen Pollard

≪ Previous: The School of the Americas is Still Going Strong - Its Purpose? To Keep Latin America Safe for US Multinationals

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Pauline was Killed by Lansman, the Jewish Labour Movement and all those who supported the IHRA, a Charter for making false charges of ‘anti-Semitism’ against anti-racists

The Labour Party believes a few token words absolves it from its duty of care. Their actions led to the death of Pauline

This is a post I wish I didn’t have to write but I have long feared I would have to write. Repeatedly I have been told by good socialists, suspended and expelled by the Labour Party, how depressed they felt at being falsely accused of anti-Semitism by those whose only purpose in life is to defame supporters of the Palestinians, anti-Zionists and anti-racists.

It is outrageous that good socialists and anti-racists have been defamed and smeared for opposing the world's most racist state, Israel.

The Lynch mob accompanying Ruth Smeet to Marc Wadsworth's Kangaroo Court

We have had 4 long years of fake and false allegations of ‘anti-Semitism’ by hypocrites, liars and defamers such as Luciana Berger and Ruth Smeeth.  Racists whose only mission was to defame anti-racist activists. We all remember how Smeeth falsely accused Marc Wadsworth of ‘anti-Semitism’ at the Chakrabarti press conference, despite him not even knowing that she was Jewish. To criticise these Zionist drama queens is anti-Semitic.

This was Pauline's last Facebook post

When the Labour Party adopted the IHRAmisdefinition of anti-Semitism in September 2018 and when at last year’s conference, with the support of the pathetic Corbyn, ‘fast track’ expulsions were agreed, i.e expulsions without even a hearing, it was inevitable that sooner or later, someone would become so depressed that they would kill themselves. Fast-track expulsions, of which there were 25 in just one day this month, were a fast track ticket to someone’s suicide.

To Jon Lansman, Pauline Hammerton's death is a price worth paying to rid the Labour Party of anti-Zionists

If any one person had the ability to stop the adoption of these proposals and the IHRA in its track it was Jon Lansman. More than any one person it is Lansman who bears the blame for Pauline's death. Owen Jones, who has acted as a cheerleader to the expulsion of anti-racists should also look to what’s left of his conscience.

Mike Katz, Chair of the JLM, has played a key role in defaming anti-racist activists on behalf of the world's most racist state

A cursory look at Pauline Hammerton’s Facebook page shows that she was anything but a racist.  She was a decent, kind, concerned person who hated all kinds of oppression. Pauline was Chairof Manchester Socialist Health Association. That was why she supported the Palestinians. Pauline was the kind of person who should be welcomed and respected. Instead she was expelled at the instigation of Mike Katz and his fellow war-criminals in the Jewish Labour Movement , the overseas wing of the Israeli Labour Party.

Carl Sergeant - found dead after allegations made against him

Pauline Hammerton, who died a week after learning that she had been expelled under these murderous fast-track procedures, was not the first to die. In November 2017, Welsh Assembly Member Carl Sergeant, who had been suspended without being given any details, was found dead at his home. He had committed suicide. Sam Matthews, Head of Disputes had previously hung up on a call from him.

The self-pitying Head of Disputes who saw it as his mission to lie, deceive and expel socialists

Matthews was later to claim in the BBC Panorama programme Is Labour Anti-Semitic that he had been suicidal at not being able to expel at will!

In the wake of Carl Sergeant’s suicide and the criticism of their behaviour, letters of suspension contained details of how to contact the Samaritans or the CAB.  There were also details of the Labour Party’s ‘Safeguarding Unit’ and a phone number, 0207 783 1134.  I have just phoned this number and been answered with a voice mail before the 4.30 cut off time. This is how the Labour Party fulfils its duty of care.

Owen Jones, this vacuous airhead, has acted as a cheer leader to Labour's killers

The Shadow NEC site said concerning Sergeant’s death:

‘What we do know from well researched evidence is the impact that public suspension, media pressure, isolation and not knowing what you have been accused of does to people’s mental well being.

There is much documented evidence that our party has been told repeatedly of the impact this treatment has had on individuals, irrespective of the nature of the allegations.

It eats into you, you cannot find an area to concentrate your defence on.

You believe yourself to be a decent person that cares about the world and society but a person/persons you believe in, see as a decent friend and fellow politician tells you that you have behaved in a way that you failed to recognise.

Your identity fragments, your hope dissipates, you fear you are a monster, you no longer know yourself.

What is so outrageous about all of this is that good socialists, kind and caring people, are being expelled because they object to the world’s only Apartheid State. A state that was best friends with Apartheid South Africa, armed and trained the Guatemalan Junta which killed 200,000 Indians and which today arms the Burmese Junta. It's description of itself as a 'Jewish state' is the greatest single reason for antisemitism today. It associates Jews everywhere with its war crimes.

Israel's Prime Minister Netanyahu has no problems greeting genuine anti-Semites like Hungary's Viktor Orban, a man who believes that the pro-Nazi war leader, Admiral Horthy was an 'exceptional statesman'

Israel is a state that is best friends with anti-Semites such as Viktor Orban of Hungary and Duterte, an open Hitler admirer, President of the Philippines.  To say nothing of  Trump’s anti-Semitism which manifests itself in the belief that Israel is the state of American Jews.

From Balfour to Trump, Bolsinaro to Orban, Vorster to Tommy Robinson, the best friends of the Zionists have always been anti-Semites.

The irony of all this is that it is anti-Semites who historically have been the best friends to anti-Semites.

Tommy Robinson, another supporter of Zionism, stands on an Israeli tank

When Russian Jews came to Britain to escape the Czarist pogroms at the end of the 19^th and beginning of the 20^th century, the anti-Semitic British Brothers League was formed.  Its President William Stanley Shaw, a Christian Zionist wrote in the Jewish Chronicle (8.11.1901) that:

I am a firm believer in the Zionist movement, which the British Brothers League will do much incidentally to foster. The return of the Jews to Palestine is one of the most striking signs of the times…. All students of prophecy are watching the manifold signs of the times with almost breathless interest

Arthur Balfour, hero of the Zionist movement for his Balfour Declaration in 1917 introduced as Prime Minister in 1905 the Aliens Act designed to keep Jews out of Britain.  Anti-Semitism and Zionism are Siamese twins, joined together at the hip.

Pauline Hammerton RIP

 If you don’t want Jews to live in your country what better solution than to send them to Palestine.

We should not rest until those who were responsible for Pauline’s death, who murdered her by expulsion, are themselves expelled. Jeremy Corbyn by his silence is complicit in Pauline’s death. He could have spoken out at any time but he took the coward’s way out.

Jennie Formby  bears a heavy responsibility for Pauline's death

If Jon Lansman has any integrity, the fixer and manipulator who has long shown that power is his only principle, will resign from the Labour Party.  Jennie Formby and all those who were responsible for this tragedy should also consider their positions.

RIP Pauline Hammerton – we will not forget you.

Tony Greenstein

The Witch Hunt may now have taken its heaviest possible price

Martin Odoni

Rest in peace, Pauline Hammerton

by Martin Odoni

Pauline Hammerton, a long-term Labour activist from Hulme in Manchester, was fast-track-expelled from the party on the 4th of February for supposed ‘anti-Semitism’ – in reality, just for her support for the Palestinian people, who are being slowly crushed by Zionist occupation.

Pauline was found dead just seven days later. She had been left distraught by her expulsion, and although the cause-of-death has not yet been confirmed, the suspicion is that she suffered a haemorrhage brought on by the shock.

I had met Pauline a few times at demos and other meetings, and so, although I did not know her well, her death has come as a shock, to me personally, and to other activists across the north-west. Her dedication to justice was tremendous, and the callous mistreatment she received from a party that she had given so much to must have been the bitterest blow imaginable.

The deceitfulness and irresponsibility of the witch-hunt against scarcely-existent anti-Semitism in the Labour Party, carried out by Anglo-Zionist fanatics both outside and within that party, have badly damaged the lives of many innocent people. But now they appear to have taken the heaviest possible toll of all – an innocent life.

I do not expect the consciences of smear merchants like Margaret Hodge, Luciana Berger, Wes Streeting, David Collier, Zvi Solomons, Jonathan Hoffman, Ian Austin, and others of their ilk, to be tweaked in the slightest by this. Like all fanatics, they do not have consciences, no interest in right or wrong, only a blind hunger for power for the movement into which they have buried their individuality. They will probably relish the knowledge of their ability to destroy lives. At best, they will say, “Well, we’re very sorry to hear that this has happened, but…” before offering a nauseatingly dishonest list of reasons why this proves that people should not condemn Israel.

The Zionist lobby in the UK has always been amoral, indifferent to human lives, and only interested in ethics when they can be used as a weapon against opponents. But this marks the point at which the smear campaign has crossed the line. Their irresponsible aggression against innocent people to advance their failed ideology has now become a life-and-death matter in Britain, as it has long been in Palestine.

The question is, how do the rest of us respond?

Pauline Hammerton, rest in peace.

Correction: This article had previously indicated that Pauline was expelled on the 7th February. In fact, her letter of expulsion was sent on the 4th of February, and the 7th was apparently the date she opened it.

Former Columnist and Historian of the Jewish Community, Professor Geoffrey Alderman, is Banned by Jewish Chronicle Editor Stephen Pollard

February 15, 2020, 6:46 pm

≫ Next: At the Zionist Leadership hustings it was hard to tell who was the worst Zionist – Thornberry, Nandy, Starmer or Long-Bailey

≪ Previous: Pauline Hammerton –Expelled for Supporting the Palestinians on the 7th February (‘anti-Semitism’ in Labour Newspeak) Found Dead One Week Later

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Alderman’s 'Crime' was telling the truth about the Zionists' Antisemitism Disinformation Campaign  

An email from the Jewish Chronicle’s Stephen Pollard to Professor Geoffrey Alderman, a columnist for 14 years, was blunt and to the point: “as editor I no longer wish to have you in the paper.” A decision confirmedby Pollard in a phone conversation.

There are many, almost too many ironies, in this affair. Alderman is nothing if not a man of many contradictions but he has one, abiding fault as far as Pollard and the Zionist claque are concerned. He is too honest. Being an academic he feels an obligation to tell the truth. An almost unpardonable sin in the Court of Stephen Pollard.

Alderman's latest academic research project is a study of the Jewish contribution to crime in the UK. In an interviewwith the Times Higher Education Supplement of July 13 2017 he said that ‘In the Oxford empirical tradition, I shall go wherever the evidence takes me.’

For Zionists, for whom defence of Israel right or wrong is all, this is entirely the wrong approach. The truth is secondary to the hasbarah (propaganda). That is why Zionists do so badly when they debate anti-Zionists.

The Zionist approach to such a study would be first to agree on the conclusions, namely that Jewish involvement in crime was minimal. Only then would they begin gathering evidence. You can see why Pollard had had enough of the good professor!

Alderman though is not your average progressive, still less a socialist.  He is religious and right-wing, as one would expect of someone who is Professor of Politics at the Britain’s only private university, Buckingham. But like Peter Oborne, the Tory journalist, he is a maverick and the Zionist tent has no room for mavericks.

What is surprising about Pollard’s decision is that it took him so long! Unlike previous editors, for example the late Geoffrey D Paul with whom I often crossed swords, Pollard has transformed the JC from a newspaper into a propaganda tract.  Dissenting opinions are rarely tolerated, which is why it is so boring. The idea of giving anti-Zionists space to debate issues or fairly covering the actual situation of the Palestinians in Israel and the Occupied Territories would be enough to give its contributors a (kosher) heart attack.

Alderman was a successor to another maverick columnist, Chaim Bermant, who died 22 years ago. Although Bermant was anti-gay and hostile to the left, Bermant was the only person who consistently raised matters like the oppression of the Palestinians. He supported recognition of the PLO long before it was popular. He was also a fierce critic of the Orthodox. In an Obituary Letter to the Guardian I quoted his observation that the Orthodox fear peace because then there would be intermarriage (between Jew and non-Jew) ‘the worst of all sins in their eyes.’ Bermant also wrote that the ‘greatest threat to the character and integrity of the Jewish state comes from Jews not Arabs.’

 Long and loud was the clamour of the JC’s readership for Bermant’s head but to his credit, the JC’s Editor stood up for him and freedom of speech. That was why the JC was a lively publication even if it made you chew your hair at times. It also had interesting contributors such as its Literary Editor, T.R. Fyvel, who succeeded George Orwell as literary editor of Tribune.

Not so today at the JC where you have to make do with such luminaries as MI5’s man at The Guardian, Jonathan Freedland and ex-communist reactionary David Aaronovitch. Pollard, the ex-Editor of the Daily Express and friend of its pornographic proprietor, Richard Desmond (someone who might be a useful subject for Alderman’s research!) doesn’t do free speech which was why he was a founder of the Henry Jackson Society, a nest of Islamaphobes and what used to be called ‘police state Democrats’.

Alderman is no friend of the Palestinians. He has no understanding of their suffering or the racist nature of Zionism. He doesn’t understand the contradiction inherent in a Jewish state which is bound to trample on what were once considered Jewish values such as justice, opposition to oppression and socialism.

The expulsion of the refugees and the military occupation of the West Bank, to say nothing of the apartheid nature of Israel are not Alderman’s concerns. When an Italian member of the International Solidarity Movement Vittorio Arrigoni was murdered in 2011 by an Islamist in Gaza, Alderman infamously welcomedhis murder:

Few events - not even the execution of Osama bin Laden - have caused me greater pleasure in recent weeks than news of the death of the Italian so-called "peace activist" Vittorio Arrigoni. [This was no 'peace activist' Jewish Chronicle 13.5.11].

I suspect the above piece was more bravado and bluster but nonetheless it was shocking.

I said that Alderman was a man of contradiction, a ‘communal gadfly’ as the Jewish Chronicle article described him when he left the Board of Deputies to the sound of boos.

In an Interviewwith the Times Higher Education Supplement (13.7.17.) Alderman outlined his philosophy in the statement that ‘Folks don’t like the truth, do they? Even academic folks. Very sad.’ It would make a good epitaph for Stephen Pollard when the grim reaper comes a calling.

I said that Alderman was a man of contradictions and he is. Ironically he, of all people, in an article A man who deserves banning called, in November 2015, for the banning of another Jewish dissident, Gerald Kaufmann MP. In what was a prime example of the artificial hysteria generated by the fake anti-Semitism campaign, the Jewish Father of the House of Commons was targeted by groups such as the misnamed Campaign Against Anti-Semitism for having used the phrase ‘Jewish money’ in regard to the contributions of the Conservative Friends of Israel to Tory Party funds.

As I wrote in Geoffrey Alderman and Gerald Kaufman –Jewish Chronicle Columnist’s Exercise in Hypocrisy

surely this wasn't the same Geoffrey Alderman who wrote, in an article Obama’s false  Iran Alternative (14.8.15) of ‘the fact that Jewish money, albeit American-Jewish money – is being used to this end has led the president to adopt an unfortunate and worrying rhetoric.  Israel and its supporters are warmongers and American-Jewish money is being used to drag America into war.’ 

Alderman’s main sin in Pollard’s eyes has been to contradict the JC’s incessant propaganda barrage to the effect that Corbyn is the worst anti-Semite since Adolf Hitler. Having worked with Corbyn Alderman knew that this was not true and last May he wrote an article in The Spectator Is Jeremy Corbyn really anti-Semitic? in which he stated that:

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

Alderman went on to describe how:

In 1987 the West London Synagogue approached Islington Council with a startling proposal: to sell its original cemetery to property developers, destroying the gravestones and digging-up and reburying the bodies lying under them. This cemetery (dating from 1840) was not merely of great historic and architectural interest – in the view of orthodox Jews, the deliberate destruction of a cemetery is sacrilegious. So when Islington Council granted the planning application, a Jewish-led and ultimately successful campaign was launched to have the decision reversed. I was part of that campaign. So was Jeremy Corbyn. Meanwhile, the then-leader of Islington Council (1982-92), whose decision to permit the destruction of the cemetery was eventually overturned, was none other than Margaret Hodge

As if this was not blasphemy enough, Alderman went on to declare that ‘in my view context is, again, paramount.’ Alderman wrote that:

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

In the eyes of Pollard and the Board of Deputies Alderman had committed a Chillul Hashem, the desecration of the name of God, which is about as great a sin as man is capable of viz. telling the truth.

Of course to most normal people it is obvious that Jeremy Corbyn is not anti-Semitic. As Alderman points out he is a philo-semite, the exact opposite. But Zionists are not normal. Their values are, above all, those of state worship and veneration of the land over the people who live on it. To that end lying is just a means to an end.

Alderman isn’t the first journalist to suffer punishment at the hands of the Zionist press for expressing a dissenting opinion. Stephen Oryszczuk the foreign editor of Jewish News dared to criticise his own paper’s attack on Corbyn. He told The Canary:

It’s repulsive. This is a dedicated anti-racist we’re trashing. I just don’t buy into it at all.

Neither did the Jewish News editor as Oryszczuk was immediately put on gardening leave and soon after parted company.

Ironically Shraga Stern, wrote an articleAmong Charedim, Jeremy Corbyn's defeat is not being celebrated at all. Charedim are ultra-Orthodox Jews. Presumably Pollard was on vacation or out celebrating in the week after the general election to let this article slip through. Or maybe Pollard, knowing that the JC's circulation is continuing to decline sees Orthodox Jewry as a lucrative market.

Stern, a spokesman for Britain’s Ultra Orthodox Jews, had previously co-ordinated a joint letter from 34 Orthodox Rabbis dissociating themselves from the Board of Deputies attack on Corbyn. 

Yes I know that you didn't hear about this letter. That was because the BBC and the Press decided that it bore the wrong message. The subtitle of Shraga Stern's article was ‘The outgoing Labour leader has a distinguished record of support for our concerns’. Stern wrote that:

As the Campaign Against Antisemitism was forced to concede, a Deltapoll commissioned by the Jewish Leadership Council shortly before the election actually found that only 16 percent of 2017 Labour voters were wavering about voting for the Labour Party again because of the anti-Jewish prejudice that seems to have obsessed Mrs van der Zyl and the Deputies’ two ecclesiastical authorities, United Synagogue “chief rabbi” Ephraim Mirvis and Sephardi rabbinical authority Joseph Dweck.

In the Orthodox Jewish communities within which I live in Hackney, what was much more important was Labour’s promise to abolish Ofsted, which is currently engaged in what can only be described as a crusade against Torah-Orthodox schools.

Note how Stern puts Chief Rabbi in scare quotes.  Ephraim Mirvis is not recognised as a Jewish authority by the Ultra-Orthodox.  Or as Alderman wrote in the Guardian (13.7.12) ‘Once, the chief rabbi represented all British Jewry. No longer ‘

This was because of Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks response to a Home Office consultation on gay marriage in which he wrote that

"Our understanding [they declared] of marriage from time immemorial has been that of a union between a man and a woman. Any attempt to redefine this sacred institution would be to undermine the concept of marriage." The submission also made the point that "any attempt to exclude the possibility of a religious ceremony for such [gay] couples would be subject to challenge to the European court of human rights, on the grounds of discrimination"– a fear that is shared by other faiths.

This then is the background to the banning of Alderman, someone whose integrity and honesty  is in sharp contrast to that of Pollard, who is the human equivalent of a rattle snake on heat. On 2nd February Alderman issued a statement

Statement by Professor Geoffrey Alderman

Jewish academic Professor Geoffrey Alderman has been no-platformed by the UK’s oldest Jewish newspaper, the Jewish Chronicle.

Announcing this, Professor Alderman has made public the contents of an email sent to him by the Jewish Chronicle’s editor, Stephen Pollard.

In that email, Pollard told Alderman that “as editor I no longer wish to have you in the paper.”

This decision was confirmed by Pollard in a phone conversation with Alderman on 31 January 2020.

Following that conversation Alderman said:

“I am saddened immeasurably by Stephen Pollard’s decision, on which he refused absolutely to elaborate when we spoke on 31 January.  I began writing for the Jewish Chronicle in 1974 and from 2002 until 2016 I wrote the paper’s main weekly Comment column. Since then I have continued to contribute to the paper from time to time. Stephen’s decision to ban me entirely from writing for the paper has come without warning and without any rationale that he has seen fit to share with me. I simply don’t know why the decision has been taken, and can only speculate.”

Such is the level of Pollard’s dishonesty that he wouldn’t even give a reason for his decision.  However they are not hard to fathom. Amongst Alderman’s crimes we should include an articlein The Independent headed ‘This Labour Party row will not be settled by relying on a flawed and faulty definition of antisemitism’.

Attacking the IHRAmisdefinition of ‘anti-Semitism’, which has the status amongst Zionists of the tablets of stone that Moses carried with him on Mount Sinai, is another cardinal sin.

In his article Alderman wrote that the 11 examples of anti-Semitism in the IHRA

‘embed numerous internal contradictions. One example affects to condemn as antisemitic “drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.” But the preamble that introduces all 11 examples explains that manifestations of antisemitism “might include the targeting of the state of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity. However, criticism of Israel similar to that levelled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic.”  

Well, a number of political regimes around the world have been criticised because they are alleged to be pursuing policies reminiscent of the Nazis. So how in principle can it be antisemitic to draw a comparison between “contemporary” Israeli policy and that of the Nazis? 

Alderman compounded his ‘crimes’ by making a submission to the Equality & Human Rights Commission slating the IHRA definition. Indeed one of the wondrous things about the IHRA is that no academics or legal scholars defend it and yet it continues to dominate the narrative.  Another example of Marx’s dictum that the ruling ideas in society are the ideas of the ruling class.

Geoffrey Alderman, who is Professor Emeritus at the University of Buckingham, has written 16 books, several of which are on the history of the Jews in the UK. These include The Jewish Community in British Politics, Modern British Jewry, British Jewry Since Emancipation and London Jewry and London Politics 1889-1986. In 2011 was awarded the Chaim Bermant Prize for Journalism. His website is www.geoffreyalderman.com. He is also a monthly columnist for the Jewish Telegraph.

However you will be pleased to know that although Geoffrey Alderman is now banned from writing for the Jewish Chronicle, Pollard’s pages will still be open for the Daily Mail’s racist columnist Melanie Phillips whose latest piece is ‘Don’t fall for bogus claims of ‘Islamophobia’’

I should add one other thing.  I first came across  Alderman’s name in 1978 when the Board of Deputies was launching ‘kamikaze attacks’ (Maurice Ludman, Editor Searchlight No. 41) against the Anti-Nazi League because of its anti-Zionist founders. The ANL bothered the Board far more than the National Front.  Alderman along with others like Miriam Karlin criticised their approach. See also Jewish Voice for Labour’s Jewish academic no-platformed by Jewish Chronicle

Tony Greenstein

At the Zionist Leadership hustings it was hard to tell who was the worst Zionist – Thornberry, Nandy, Starmer or Long-Bailey

February 20, 2020, 8:23 pm

≫ Next: Malek Issa, a Palestinian child aged 8, loses his eye after being shot by Israeli police - Israel is 'considering' an investigation

≪ Previous: Former Columnist and Historian of the Jewish Community, Professor Geoffrey Alderman, is Banned by Jewish Chronicle Editor Stephen Pollard

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A personal letter to Rebecca Long-BaileyYou're no Corbyn Continuity Candidate You're Keir Starmer’s reflection

Last Thursday the Jewish Labour Movement, Labour Friends of Israel and Jewish News jointly staged hustings for the 4 leadership  candidates. All of them tried to outbid each other in their condemnation of Labour Party ‘anti-Semitism’.

Perhaps we should put the ‘anti-Semitism’ Disinformation Paradigm into perspective. According to a new survey by former Tory Party Treasurer Lord Ashcroft, 73% of Labour Party members believe the issue of anti-Semitism has either been invented outright or wildly exaggerated by Corbyn’s opponents. Amongst socialist members of the Labour Party this rises to 90%. Just 22% of members believe anti-Semitism is a serious problem (6% of the Left).

Despite all the propaganda - 3/4 of Labour Party members believe the 'antisemitism' allegations were invented or wildly exaggerated

Amongst Momentum members 92% believe that the ‘anti-Semitism’ allegations were an invention or wildly exaggerated.  Jon Lansman is completely out of touch, even with his own members. This is the context in which the debate last week took place. See Poll: Labour members say anti-Semitism crisis “invented”

Rebecca Long-Bailey, the ‘left’ candidate gave a toe-curlingly embarrassing display of subservience to Israel’s supporters. In the words of Sienna Rodgers of Labour List

Rebecca Long-Bailey kicked off the Jewish Labour Movement hustings... with an apology for the “hurt and anxiety” caused by Labour antisemitism ... she ... vowed to prioritise: a disciplinary process that is “legally independent, free from political bias or interference”; educating members; and calling out antisemitism.

You could not put a piece of paper between any of the candidates. Having been persuaded against my better judgement to support RBL, having previously described her as a wannabee Neil Kinnock, it is doubly disappointing to realise that I was right all along!

Realising that dialogue is the spice of life and the enemy of the totalitarian ideology that is Zionism, I decided to send a personal letter to Becky. Being an ex-solicitor I am sure she will have no problem in digesting the contents!

Tony Greenstein

Dear Becky,

This is, as you will appreciate, a painful letter to have to write. However knowing you as I do I am sure you will understand why I felt it necessary to put pen to paper or rather finger to keyboard.

Despite my many doubts about your recent move to the right, in particular your support for the expulsion of Chris Williamson and the Board of Deputies’ 10 Commandments (Pledges), I reluctantly accepted the argument from comrades that you were the least worst of the 4 candidates.

It was on the basis that you were still, just, a socialist, that I supported you and gave out leaflets supporting you and Richard Burgon at various meetings in Brighton and Hove.

Yesterday I was rung up by a friend in Brighton Kemptown CLP. Her question was simple. Who should she vote for? After listening to you at the Zionist hustings I couldn't in good conscience recommend a vote for you.

It should have been obvious just by the list of sponsors what this hustings was about. Socialism isn't just a word. It means anti-racism and anti-imperialism being an integral part of one's politics. Any socialist worthy of the name would have refused to take part in hustings sponsored by Labour Friends of Israel.

Surely you are not so naive as to believe that an organisation which has not once condemned Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land or its Apartheid practices could be genuinely opposed to anti-Semitism?

According to the murderous 'logic' of Labour Friends of Israel, the responsibility for Israel shooting unarmed protesters lies with Hamas, not Israel!  RBL is quite happy to keep company with this scum

Have you forgotten the response of LFI to the news that Israeli snipers were firing at unarmed demonstrators at the Gaza fence? They blamed those who died for their own deaths.

Over 500 children have been injured and over 70 have been murdered in cold blood by the Israel’s army since March 2019. Yet what was the response by LFI? It tweeted ‘Hamas must accept responsibility for these events.’ Except that Hamas didn’t shoot those who died or who were crippled by exploding ammunition deliberately designed to disable.

Imagine that a Palestinian organisation had blamed Israel for the deaths of 70 Jewish children. Would you have spoken on their platform? If not why do you speak under LFI’s banner. Do Palestinian lives not count? It seems Becky that you need to examine your own racism before pointing the finger at others.

LFI also supported the attack on Gaza in 2014, as it has done all Israel’s wars. 2,200 Palestinians were murdered, including 551 children. Do tell me what your description would be of someone who supported the murder of 500+ Jewish children.  Racist? Anti-Semitic? Yet when it comes to the blood of Palestinian children you turn a blind eye.

LFI's stance is not surprising as one thing Al Jazeera’s programme, The Lobby, made clear was that Labour Friends of Israel is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Israeli Embassy.

The Board of Deputies blamed those who were killed for their own deaths

The Board of Deputies too blamed the Palestinians. Their statement said that ‘the responsibility for the violence lies with Hamas’ before going on to support the murder of unarmed demonstrators: ‘Israel is defending its people from repeated violent attempts at mass invasion.’  they wrote. 

The idea that Palestinian refugees trying to return to the lands they were expelled from should be shot down in cold blood says everything about the Board. Whatever else they represent it is not the socialist traditions of British Jewry.

The Board of Deputies openly supported the murder of unarmed Palestinians in Gaza yet has the gall to talk of 'antisemitism'

21 year old medic Razan has come to symbolise the State Terrorism of Israel whose snipers picked off Razan for no other reason than that she was there

Even medics, such as 21 year old Razan Najar, have been murdered by Israeli snipers. All to the approval of the same BOD whose 10 Commandments you have agreed to. According to these 10 'pledges' you must not communicate with anti-racist or socialist Jews.

The Board of Deputies spent more time attacking the ANL than the National Front

I would be interested in an explanation as to how demanding that the Labour Party only communicate with the reactionary BOD, has anything to do with fighting anti-Semitism since the BOD has always opposed the fight against fascism and those who are genuinely anti-Semitic.

When it came to challenging genuine anti-Semites the Board of Deputies urged Jews to keep their heads down and say nothing - only Israel concerns them

In the 1930’s the Board opposed physical resistance to the British Union of Fascists telling Jews to stay at home during the Battle of Cable Street. In the 1970’s when the National Front was growing stronger they did the same. According to Paul Holborrow, Secretary of the Anti-Nazi League

‘We were constantly under attack from the Jewish Board of Deputies ... because of the SWP’s anti-Zionism.’

The Board of Deputies has only ever been concerned about one thing, supporting Zionism and the State of Israel, opposition to which they term ‘anti-Semitism’.

You opened the hustings by paying tribute to the great Jewish MPs that Manchester has had. You might have mentioned the late Gerald Kaufmann MP, Father of the House of Commons. In 2009 he made one of the great parliamentary speeches. He said, during Operation Cast Lead, when 1,400 Palestinians were murdered that:

My parents came to Britain as refugees from Poland. Most of their families were subsequently murdered by the Nazis in the holocaust. My grandmother was ill in bed when the Nazis came to her home town of Staszow. A German soldier shot her dead in her bed.

My grandmother did not die to provide cover for Israeli soldiers murdering Palestinian grandmothers in Gaza.

You stated that ‘our Jewish Community just didn’t feel safe or welcome within our party.’ This is the big lie that Goebbels spoke of. There is no evidence whatsoever that even one Jew felt unsafe in the Labour Party. True the racists of the JLM, the British wing of the ILP may have felt uncomfortable when defending Apartheid but that surely is good.

What is remarkable about the fake ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign was the number of Jews who were victims. Not only was Jackie Walker and myself expelled, but numerous anti-Zionist Jews such as Glynn Secker and Jo Bird were suspended. Professor Moshe Machover, the founder of Matzpen, the Israeli Socialist Organisation was also expelled, until Sam Matthews was forced to reinstate him.

Oozing insincerity Emily Thornberry promised to expel anti-Zionists from the Labour Party - this despicable woman gained just 1.9% of the Zionist vote!

You stated that you would ‘act on the recommendations of the EHRC’ and that you find it very shameful that the Labour Party is being investigated by them. It’s not shame but outrage you should be feeling at the interference by a State body in the internal affairs of the Labour Party. The EHRC is not and never has been an anti-racist body. It is a body consisting of the great and good whose purpose is to ensure 'diversity' and neutralise anti-racist campaigning.

The Equality and Human Rights Commission has never  condemned the Tory government over the Windrush Scandal, still less investigated it. It has remained silent over the recent deportations of Black British citizens to the West Indies and said nothing about Islamaphobia in the Tory Party or the racism of the Prime Minister. This is unsurprising since the EHRC is chaired by a Zionist, David Isaac. 

It is no surprise that no other forms of racism failed to get a mention at these Zionist hustings. Zionists are interested in defending, not combating racism.

Your response to the resignation of Louise Ellman and Luciana Berger proves that you represent the abandonment of everything Corbyn stood for. You said that it was ‘absolutely devastating & shameful that we had MPs leaving the party because they didn’t feel welcome.’ thus implying that anti-Semitism played a part in their decisions. This is a total fabrication. 

Ellman was targeted, not because she is Jewish but because she was a vitriolic right-winger who defended Israel’s mistreatment of Palestinian children. Arresting children in the middle of the night, blindfolding and beating them, including sexual abuse.  All of these practices this wretch of a woman defended. Many of her political opponents were Jewish. I suggest you read ‘The Riverside Scandal’ and then apologise.

Luciana Berger was another Blairite parachuted in to Liverpool Wavertree. The Chair of her own constituency was Jewish. She was hated, not because she was Jewish but because she was a nasty right-winger who was Director of LFI from 2007-2010.

One can only presume from your fatuous remarks that you only support the deselection of MPs if they are not Jewish!

You spoke of a ‘breakdown of trust’ between the Jewish community and the Labour Party. Leaving aside that there is no single Jewish community, the facts are that the Jewish community has long deserted Labour. For over 50 years British Jews have voted Tory in overwhelming numbers. In 2015 64% of Jews voted Tory and just 15% voted Labour despite having a Jewish leader, Ed Miliband.

But even this is untrue. Jeremy Corbyn forfeited the support of British Zionists but Labour never had their support anyway. Orthodox Jewry did not criticise Corbyn and 34 Orthodox Rabbis wrote a joint letter condemning the Board's attacks on Corbyn but of course the BBC and the prostitute press preferred not to publicise this.

As recently as last December Rabbi Ephraim Padwa, Head of the 35,000 Union of Orthodox Hebrew Congregations wrote a letter condemning those who called Corbyn 'antisemitic'. Yet instead of aligning yourselves with these and other Jews you preferred to ally yourself with the most racist and reactionary section of British Jews.

The Jewish Community Hasn't Supported Labour for 50 Years

I suggest you read Daniel Staetsky’s article in The Times of Israel, How British Jews vote and why they vote this way.  The ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign of the past 4½ years has been a wholly artificial creation whose sole aim was to remove Jeremy Corbyn.

On December 5^th 2019 just 1 week before the election, the editor of the Jewish Chronicle, Pollard, in a letter to readers wrote that

‘over the next 6 weeks we will discover if the British public are prepared to put an anti-Semite into Number Ten.’

Was this a false allegation? If so then why is it antisemitic to say that similar allegations against Labour Party members are also false? According to Zionist propagandists denial of false allegations of 'antisemitism' is proof of one's guilt! 

In just the same way denial of being a witch at Salem in the 17th century was held to be proof that you were a witch. I thought we had come just a little way in the past 300+ years but it would seem not. Instead Beccy you stand in the tradition of Cotton Mather and those whose false accusations led to the witch-trials which in turn led to the murder of 19 people, including 14 women.  

Elizabeth Reis wrote about the dilemmas that faced women in the witch trials: 

"During examinations, accused women were damned  if they did and damned if they did not. If they confessed to witchcraft charges, their admissions would prove the cases against them; if they denied the charges, their very intractability, construed as the refusal to admit to sin more generally, might mark them as sinners and hence allies of the devil."

Rebecca Long-Bailey signed up to the 10 McCarthyist Demands of the Board of Deputies without a whimper

In fact the only women who were hanged at Salem were those who denied their guilt.  You stand Rebecca in the traditions of 

In May 2018 the President of the Board of Deputies, Jonathan Arkush, stated that Corbyn ‘has anti-Semitic views.’ Clearly this was a lie but it wasn't the only lie.  So why are you giving comfort to these racists? 

Rebecca Long-Bailey, Lansman's Protege Declares She is a Zionist 

Perhaps most shocking of all was your declaration that you are a Zionist.

Israel is an ethno-nationalist state, i.e. a state not of its own citizens but of the mythical ‘Jewish people’. When Netanyahu says that Israel is ‘not a state of all its citizens’ he is right. That is an admission that racism is part of Israel's DNA.

No state has a right to exist. Did the Apartheid, Francoist or Nazi states ‘have a right to exist’. Why?  States are not people.

Keir Hardie - member of the Trilateral Commission and a friend of the secret policeman

Zionism is the racist ideology that has guided the Israeli state from its foundation. Even before 1948 the Israeli Labor Party operated a colour bar, campaigning for Jewish Labour i.e. a Boycott of Arab Labour. Today the ILP supports the deportation of Black African refugees because they are not Jewish and therefore threaten the Jewish demographic majority of Israel.

The Jewish National Fund, which owns and controls 93% of Israeli land deliberately excludes Arabs from access to it. What is a Jewish state if not a state that discriminates against those who are not Jewish?

I realise that you know nothing about the Israeli state but are you seriously suggesting that criticism of Zionism and its bastard offspring, the Israeli state, which armed and trained the death squads of Guatemala as they murdered up to 200,000 Mayan Indians, is anti-Semitic? Is criticism of Israel for arming and equipping the death squads of El Salvador, arming the Argentinian Junta (which murdered up to 3,000 Jews) and Pinochet, to say nothing about Apartheid South Africa, antisemitic?

Yes of course Israel's supporters cry ‘anti-Semitism’.  What else can they say? If you can't attack the message then attack the messenger.

For ‘socialists’ such as you to defend such a state because it is ‘Jewish’, as if the Holocaust entitles Israel to support neo-Nazi regimes, is shameful.

What does Zionism mean in practice? Demonstrations in Afula against the sale of a single house to an Arab. The edict by the Chief Rabbi of Safed, Shmuel Eliyahu, forbidding Jews from renting property to Arabs.  Eliyahu is a paid Israeli state official. It means the Reception Committee Law of 2011 allowing Jewish communities to ban Arabs from living there. Zionism means that maternity wards in Israel are segregated into Jewish and Arab. Education too is segregated and even Higher Education is now falling victim.

I doubt if there is a single Palestine solidarity activist in Britain who hasn’t been accused of ‘anti-Semitism’. Jewish anti-Zionists, who are the equivalent of Whites South Africans who opposed Apartheid, are called ‘self-haters’, the same term that the Nazis used against German anti-fascists.

You said, like the other candidates, that you support a 2 state solution. That is no solution. It is dead as a dodo. The only reason LFI and JLM support 2 states is because they know it won’t happen. It is a smokescreen for Apartheid. The only solution is a single state where Jews and Arabs have equal rights.

Stephane Savary drops the mask.  It's no longer about 'antisemitism' but Israel's right to be a racist

It is strange that 'socialists' such as yourself are unwilling to support a single state where there are equal rights for all citizens.  Because that is what the 'antisemitism' campaign is really about. Today Lisa Nandy is being criticised because she supports the Right of Return of Palestinian refugees.

Far from being the Corbyn continuity candidate you represent a radical break from Corbynism. Unlike Jeremy you have no record of activism. Socialist and anti-racist politics are to you abstractions.

It is clear that there is no genuine difference between you and the other candidates. It is not surprising that despite your grovelling to the Zionists when the JLM came to vote on which candidate to support you obtained a mere 1.4%! Even Jeremy Corbyn in 2016 obtained 4%!!

It must be galling that unlike Pontius Pilate you haven’t received your reward of 30 pieces of silver. Clearly the price of treachery has fallen victim to inflation.

Kind regards

Tony Greenstein

Lisa Nandy - the Zionists' favourite

A Highlight of RBL’s Contributions

In Manchester where we have had some of the greatest Jewish MPs

It was absolutely devastating to see what they faced... our Jewish Community just didn’t feel  safe or welcome within our party. It was absolutely shameful that we were in that situation. We have to say sorry and I’ll say sorry again tonight.

 We have to have processes in the party that are legally independent, free from any political bias or interference

Education to stop the conspiracy theories and tropes that are emerging across the left

I’ve said very clearly that I’ll adopt the Board of Deputies 10 pledges. I’ll act on the recommendations of the EHRC. I find it very shameful that we are being investigated by them.

Peston: Labour did better than expected at the 2017 election and then anti-Semitism exploded as an issue... Why has it taken so long to tackle the scandal of anti-Semitism. What have you done over the last couple of years to try and eliminate the scourge of anti-Semitism. Peston says he’ll start with Becky because Thornberry suggested on Newsnight that you didn’t do enough and you were on the NEC.

RLB attributes anti-Semitism to the large influx after 2015.  We had a breakdown of trust between the Jewish communal organisations and the Jewish Labour Movement.

Says she spoke ‘privately’ to people to call for ‘auto-expulsions’

So I don’t think the Party gave the right response to that programme (Panorama). As the party of workers and trade unionists we should not have called out former members of staff.  Whether they were correct or not ‘was a completely different matter’.

We also have to recognise what those particular staff were going through.

Peston: would you welcome Luciana Berger and Louise Ellman back into the party?

RLB: that was absolutely devastating & shameful that we had MPs leaving the party because they didn’t feel welcome.

Peston intervenes to point out that Berger stood against the party

RLB: What Luciana, Louise and our other colleagues have been through is absolutely shocking and how they managed to cope with that is an absolute miracle.

Peston: Is that a yes?

RLB:I would, yeah.

RLB: We’ve got to do everything the EHRC wants and more. We have to adopt the Board of Deputies 10 pledges. We’ve got to roll out a robust educational progamme with the JLM.

Question from the floor: Would any of you describe yourself as a Zionist?

Thornberry:I believe in the State of Israel therefore I’m a Zionist.

Keir Hardy:  I believe in the State of Israel, a secure Israel I also believe in an independent Palestinian state (Peston intervenes) I don’t describe myself as a Zionist but I understand, support and sympathise with Zionism.

Lisa Nandy:I believe Jewish people have the right to national self-determination. That makes me a Zionist.

RBL:On Zionism I also agree with a secure Israel alongside a viable Palestinian state and a 2 state solution. I suppose that makes me a Zionist.  I agree with Israel’s right to exist and self-determine

Malek Issa, a Palestinian child aged 8, loses his eye after being shot by Israeli police - Israel is 'considering' an investigation

February 22, 2020, 8:15 pm

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≪ Previous: At the Zionist Leadership hustings it was hard to tell who was the worst Zionist – Thornberry, Nandy, Starmer or Long-Bailey

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If you call Israel a racist state for targeting Palestinian children then Jennie Formby, Laura Murray and Jon Lansman will suspend you for ‘anti-Semitism’

The report below from Mondoweiss is about a boy 8 years old, Malek Issa, who was shot last week in the face with a rubber-coated steel bullet by a policeman whilst he was out buying a sandwich. 

As the video shows it was a normal bustling Saturday afternoon in Jerusalem when the child was attacked by a psychopathic policeman.

Rather than the officer being arrested and charged, as would be the case in a liberal democratic state, which Israel pretends to be, the usual lies about ‘riot control’ were provided by the Police PR department .

As the video demonstrates there was no riot. Just an out of control Israeli animal. The fact that the Police have already provided a series of lies as justification guarantees that there will be no consequences or prosecution.  After all the child is not Jewish so what does it matter? Israel is a Jewish state and democratic rights, even for children, only apply to Jews.

Let us be reasonable and not make too much of a fuss. Otherwise you may find yourself accused by the Jewish Labour Movement and its Siamese twin Labour Friends of Israel of ‘anti-Semitism’ for ‘singling out Israel’ and operating ‘double standards’ by only criticising Israel.

The IHRA definitionof ‘anti-Semitism’ which the Labour Party has adopted is quite clear:

‘Applying double standards by requiring of it [Israel] a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.

is anti-Semitic.

Have you criticised The Netherlands because its police blinded a child with a rubber bullet?  No?  Then you are anti-Semitic. It’s no use protesting that Netherlands police don’t shoot children in the face. That is irrelevant.  You have to treat Israel in exactly the same as a liberal democracy and if you don’t you are ‘anti-Semitic’.

And if you are a Labour Party member then Jennie Formby and her familiar, Laura Murray, backed up by Jon Lansman, will suspend you for ‘anti-Semitism’.  Because it is naturally assumed that all Jews in Britain will be offended by criticism of the Israeli Police. 

You will probably say at this point that associating British Jews with what Israel does is also anti-Semitic. Well it is but so is criticising Israel, since it is a Jewish state.  Since British Jews identify with Israel they make ‘take offence’.  And guess what? Being offensive to Jews, even racist Jews, is also ‘anti-Semitic’!

Justifying the murder of unarmed Palestinian demonstrators, on the pretext they are members of Hamas, an Islamic party, is perfectly acceptable in the party of Formby, Lansman and Laura Murray

Confused?  Well of course you are because the Zionists are allowed by the Right to have their cake and eat it. If you criticise Israel in a way that is not the same as your criticism of other countries then that is anti-Semitic.

Of course defining criticism of Israel as anti-Semitic means Jews have an interest in Israeli oppression. And that is certainy anti-Semitic! And just to confuse matters even further the Board of Deputies, whose pledges the abysmal Long-Bailey has signed up to, regularly issues statements supporting Israel’s latest war crime.

The death of Palestinian children is not unusual. 56 were killedin 2018. In 2019 33 were killed. Although I don’t have the figures for children injured it must be in the hundreds, perhaps over a thousand since on just one day in October, the 80th Great Return march, 43 children were shot in Gaza.

As Nir Hasson of Ha’aretz reported, in 2014, the police swapped their softer, blue sponge-tipped bullets for the tougher black ones that cause more serious injuries. Quite understandable as Palestinians are known to be thick-skinned. Although Police regulations forbid officers from shooting at upper parts of the body, and they are not permitted to shoot minors with these bullets, not a single police officer has been charged with illegally shooting sponge-tipped bullets.

The Justice Department announcedthat it has yet to decide whether to open an official investigation or summon the officer in question just in case you were concerned.

The Labour Right’s ‘anti-Semitism’ offensive and by Right, I include Lansman, Murray and Formby, is designed precisely to prevent criticism of Israel as a racist state. Because it is only a racist state that singles out the children of one ethnic group for this special treatment.

I have previously written to Jennie Formby asking why ex-NEC member Luke Akehurst, Director of We Believe in Israel, a Zionist lobby group, has not been suspended for supportingIsraeli snipers maiming and killing Palestinian demonstrators, children included (over 70 have been killed in the Great Return demonstrations). Formby has not responded which is not surprising since her position is indefensible.

However although supporting the murder of Palestinian children is acceptable in today’s Labour Party, posting a cartoon of a Palestinian being silenced by cries of ‘anti-Semitism’ is considered anti-Semitic. This is the reason that Mehmood Mirza, the socialist candidate for a BAME position on the NEC, is the latest left candidate to be suspended by the crooks and gerrymanders of Southside.

It is clear that the witchhunt of socialists in the Labour Party is a racist one and it is led by 3 racists – Formby, Lansman and Murray.

Palestinian boy, 8, loses eye after being shot by Israeli police in Jerusalem

The story of a Palestinian boy who lost an eye after being shot in the face by Israeli police has angered Palestinians across the occupied territories who see the incident as another tragic example of Israel’s wrongful targeting of Palestinians with excessive force.

Eight-year-old Malek Issa was on his way home from buying a sandwich on Saturday afternoon in the occupied East Jerusalem neighborhood of Issawiya when he was shot in the face with a rubber-coated steel bullet fired by an Israeli police officer.

Issa’s family told local media that the boy had left a restaurant and was headed home when he was shot by police, allegedly at point blank range.

While Israeli police claimed that their officers were engaging in “riot control” measures in Issawiya, video footage of the moments before the shooting, published by Haaretz, shows what appears to be normal activity in the street.

Amid a number of unassuming pedestrians and vehicles, a child in a blue hoodie, purportedly Issa, can be seen dashing across the street and disappearing around the corner, out of sight of the camera.

Moments later, all the pedestrians in view of the camera suddenly duck their heads, seemingly in response to the gunshots, and beginning running. A group of young men are then seen rushing out from the side street where Issa had entered, carrying his flailing body into a civilian car to be taken to the hospital.

By Tuesday, the family of Issa reported that his condition had stabilized, but that he had lost sight in his left eye, and would be needing surgery likely to remove his eye and to stop internal bleeding.

In a video published by the Wadi Hilweh Information Center, a Palestinian NGO in the neighboring town of Silwan, Issa’s father Wael says his son “escaped death” and that there was likely no brain damage — something the family feared would happen due to the severity of his injuries.

#العيسوية #اصابة الوالد: "اصابة مالك كانت قاتلة… نجا من الموت.. لكنه فقد بصره في العين اليسرى "آخر تطورات الحالة الصحية للطفل مالك عيسى 8سنوات والذي اصيب السبت بعيار مطاطي وهو في طريقه الى منزله عائدا من مدرسته .. برفقة شقيقاته حاملا حقيبته المدرسية وبعض السكاكر!! #تفاصيل#Issawiya#InjuryThe child's father: "Malek's injury was fatal … He survived … but he lost his sight in the left eye."The latest development of the health condition of the boy, Malek Issa, 8 years old, who was wounded with a rubber bullet on his way home from school .. accompanied by his sisters, carrying his school bag and some candy !! #details

Posted by ‎Wadi Hilweh Information Center – Silwan مركز معلومات وادي حلوه -سلوان‎ on Tuesday, February 18, 2020

Wael added that there was fear that if doctors could not control the internal bleeding, the inflammation from Malek’s left eye could spread to his right eye.

No stone throwing or ‘rioting’ preceded shot

Israeli police told the media that the officer in question claimed to have fired his weapon at a wall for “calibration” purposes, and that he thought Issa was hit by an alleged Palestinian stone-thrower.

In a report, Haaretzquoted eyewitnesses who said Israeli policemen were just “standing there” in the neighborhood, and that no stone throwing or “rioting” was happening.

The witnesses said that the officer was knowingly aimed at the boy and fired directly at him. One witness, a local bus driver, said that when he confronted the officer over what he had done, “he told me to move on,” while his fellow officers threatened to beat the bus driver up.

According to Haaretz, the Justice Ministry’s unit for investigating police officers took statement from eyewitnesses, but was not yet undertaking an official investigation, but rather a “probe” into the incident.

As of Wednesday, the policeman in question had not yet been summoned by the ministry to give an official statement on the matter.

It remained unclear if the officer was still on active duty following the shooting.

An all too common occurrence

The shooting of Issa struck a chord with Palestinians across the occupied territory due to the chilling familiarity of the incident.

Stories like Issa’s are not uncommon: a 10-year-old boy suffered severe brain damage after being shot in the head with live ammunition in Kafr Qaddum last fall; a 14-year-old boy lost his leg after being shot while playing soccer with his friends last spring; a 15-year-old boy lost a portion of his skull after being shot in the head in 2018.

In each of the cases listed above, the Palestinian boys who were injured were reportedly engaged in mundane activities, like Issa, and were still targeted by Israeli forces. Additionally, in each case, no wrongdoing was found on part of the soldiers or officers responsible.

Palestinians and human rights groups have long criticized Israel for its excessive use of force against Palestinians and the lack of accountability for the Israeli soldiers who commit such crimes.

In East Jerusalem, residents complain of over policing of their neighborhoods by Israeli police, unnecessary stops and searches of minors and young men, and frequent raids and arrests.

Over the past year, Issawiya has been subject to an increased Israeli police presence, daily raids, including on schools, and the forceful arrest of residents.

In June, a 21-year-old youth from the town was shot dead during protests. Rights groups later said that he posed no direct threat to soldiers at the time.

Locals alleged that the number of arrests in the last half of 2019 is as high as 600, with child arrests in Issawiya making up 41 per cent of all child detentions recorded in East Jerusalem.

See

Palestinian Boy May Lose Eye After Jerusalem Police Shoot Him With Sponge-tipped Bullet

Jerusalem Mayor Visits Palestinian Boy Who Was Shot in the Face by Policeman

The Torture of Chelsea Manning is Payback for Having Revealed US War Crimes

February 25, 2020, 11:26 am

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≪ Previous: Malek Issa, a Palestinian child aged 8, loses his eye after being shot by Israeli police - Israel is 'considering' an investigation

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As Julian Assange's Hearing Continues Chelsea Manning Continues to be held in Coercive Custody

 

Today I attended a noisy demonstration by a few hundred people outside the combined institution of Belmarsh prison and magistrates court. Belmarsh court is contained within Woolwich court.

Here is the strange thing. It was actually Westminster magistrates court, which was where the  proceedings were originally brought, which is sitting. All the judges are from Westminster.  Why then hold it at Belmarsh?  Because it is an ‘anti-terrorist’ court although Assange is not charged with terrorism.

To the State what Assange did, in leaking their secrets, was worse than terrorism.  It threatened the security state with letting in some sunlight.

High steel railings surround the complex and the atmosphere is  one of a siege. The demonstrators outside the security ring and the Defendant inside.

There is an excellent report of what happened by Craig Murray, the former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan. Your Man in the Public Gallery – Assange Hearing Day 1. Murray wrote of the presiding magistrate that:

Murray wrote of Horthy ‘Baraitser makes zero pretence of being anything other than in thrall to the Crown, and by extension to the US Government.’

Roger Waters at demonstration

Baraitser’s intention is to humiliate Assange, and to instill in the rest of us horror at the vast crushing power of the state. The inexorable strength of the sentencing wing of the nightmarish Belmarsh Prison must be maintained. If you are here, you are guilty.

It’s the Lubyanka. You may only be a remand prisoner. This may only be a hearing not a trial. You may have no history of violence and not be accused of any violence. You may have three of the country’s most eminent psychiatrists submitting reports of your history of severe clinical depression and warning of suicide. But I, Vanessa Baraitser, am still going to lock you up in a box designed for the most violent of terrorists. To show what we can do to dissidents. And if you can’t then follow court proceedings, all the better.

Murray described the Prosecutor James Lewis QC addressing the majority of his remarks, not to the Court but to the Press. He even handed out copies of the speech to the press.

James Lewis QC made the opening statement for the prosecution. It consisted of two parts. The first and longest part was truly remarkable for containing no legal argument, and for being addressed not to the magistrate but to the media.

His original statement was provided in cut and paste format to the media. His contradiction of it would require a journalist to listen to what was said in court, understand it and write it down. There is no significant percentage of mainstream media journalists who command that elementary ability nowadays. “Journalism” consists of cut and paste of approved sources only. Lewis could have stabbed Assange to death in the courtroom, and it would not be reported unless contained in a government press release.

In other words the average MSM journalist was too stupid to understand for example that Baraitser had pointed out to Lewis that his statement that Assange’s prosecution could mean any journalist could be extradited for having published material covered by the Official Secrets Act or the American equivalent was simply not reported.

Press prostitutes are not very good when confronted with such detail as Lewis was forced to admit, contrary to his press release, that anyone publishing US secrets concerning their war crimes could be extradited.

There were also about a dozen gilet jaune protesters who had travelled from Paris overnight to join the demonstration.

According to the report in the Guardian the demonstration was clearly heard in the court.  However Craig Murray suggests that was not true but that this was an excuse for that the magistrate Baraitser used to explain why Assange couldn’t hear. The real reason being the bullet proof cage he was held in.

Baraitser had previously refused to accede to a request to postpone proceedings because Assange had had difficulty preparing his case or even gaining access to his lawyers.

Prior to November the Judge in the case had been Lady Emma Arbuthnot,the Westminster chief magistrate who is enmeshed in a conflict of interest. Her husband Lord Arbuthnot of Edrom, a former British defense minister, “has financial links to the British military establishment, including institutions and individuals exposed by WikiLeaks.” Her ladyship had also received gifts “including from a military and cybersecurity company exposed by WikiLeaks.”

In other words this was the British Establishment at its corrupt worst.  But although Baraitser has taken over the case, according to the UK courts service, the chief magistrate is ‘responsible for… supporting and guiding district judge colleagues.’”

See Consortium News 16.11.19. Arbuthnot Out as Assange’s Judge, Says WikiLeaks Lawyer Jen Robinson

The Torture of Chelsea Manning

However I want to focus not on Julian Assange but Chelsea Manning who isn’t receiving the same attention. This incredibly brave woman has been locked up for most of the past 2 years for refusing to testify before an institution known as a Grand Jury.

In 2013, Chelsea Manning, a former US army intelligence analyst was convicted of violating America’s Espionage Act and sentenced to 35 years imprisonment. In January 2017 Barack Obama commuted Manning’s sentence to end in May 2017.

Manning was responsible for leaking hundreds of thousands of documents relating to the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan. These were subsequently published by WikiLeaks,

Manning’s most infamous war crime exposé was the video of a US Army helicopter in Baghdad firing on civilians, including a Reutersphotographer and his driver. The crew also fired on a van that stopped to rescue one of the wounded men, killing a father and severely wounding two of his children to the whoops of delight of the murderers, who of course were not prosecuted.

In March 2019, Manning was compelled to testify to the WikiLeaks grand jury. She refused to do so. It was as she later explained a matter of principle. Consequently, she was imprisoned. She was released on May 9^th, but re-arrested a week later for refusing to testify before a new Grand Jury and returned to jail. She was fined $1,000 a day and gaoledfor the duration of the new Grand Jury’s term. Manning commented:

I have been separated from my loved ones, deprived of sunlight, and could not even attend my mother’s funeral. It is easier to endure these hardships now than to cooperate to win back some comfort, and live the rest of my life knowing that I acted out of self-interest and not principle.

The Institution of the Grand Jury

The institution of the Grand Jury is unique to the United States and Liberia. Countries that have abandoned it include England, Scotland, Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, France, Belgium, Japan and Sierra Leone.

Letter from Chelsea Manning to Judge Anthony Trenga

On May 28 2019Chelsea Manning wroteto the Judge who had imprisoned her about how:

Early grand juries acted independently... Now, the grand jury process means the prosecutor decides what the grand jurors see – and what they don’t see. The grand jury imagined by the drafters of the fifth amendment – which did not involve a prosecutor – bears no resemblance to what we see today, where more than 99.9% of indictments sought are granted.

Grand juries have been historically used against activists, They are an institution that is used to undermine due process ‘even when used as intended.’They have now become an

unbridled arm of the police and prosecution in ways that run contrary to the grand jury’s originally intended purposes. ...

She described them as institutions which ‘could indict a ham sandwich.’

The second problem with grand juries is that ‘they don’t indict law enforcement.’ This was vividly demonstrated in November 2014 when a grand jury refused to indict police officer Darren Wilson for having killed Michael Brown, an unarmed youth in Ferguson, Missouri, for the crime of being Black. Historically grand juries

were used to indict abolitionists, but not people capturing and re-enslaving people seeking freedom from bondage. They were used to indict reconstructionists, while actively protecting lynch mobs. Both the ‘ham sandwich’ statement and selective indictment happen because of grand jury secrecy....

The original grand jury was more than an investigator; they were supposed to protect citizens not just from unjust indictments but from unjust laws. In England, grand jurors who even allowed a prosecutor to come into the grand jury room were seen as having violated their oath....

In 2019, the federal grand jury exists as a mockery of the institution that once stood against the whims of monarchs. It undermines the Fourth Amendment’s protections against unreasonable search and seizure, and the Fifth Amendment’s guarantees of due process.....

Even the Department of Justice released a report acknowledging that “grand juries are notorious for being ‘rubber stamps’ for the prosecutor for virtually all routine criminal matters.”

Manning observed that ‘it is more than six times as likely that you will be struck by lightning than that a federal grand jury will decline to indict.’

in the Antebellum South, grand juries routinely indicted anti-slavery activists for sedition, while those in the North sometimes refused — but charges would re-presented to new grand juries until they stuck.

Manning wrote that the Grand Jury

bears far more resemblance to the Court of the Star Chamber than to its intended role as a bulwark against arbitrary state power. Apart from the fact that the grand jury itself does not impose punishments, the biggest difference between the grand jury and the Court of the Star Chamber is that Star Chamber proceedings were in fact largely open to the public...

The investigative grand jury as we know it was developed in the wake of McCarthy, during the Nixon years. It was developed purportedly to battle organized crime, but was promptly used to subpoena members of anti-war groups, the women’s movement, and black liberation groups.

Chelsea Manning ended her letter by saying that

I understand the idea that as a civil contemnor, I hold the key to my cell – that I can free myself by talking to the grand jury. While I may hold the key to my cell, it is held in the beating heart of all I believe. To retrieve that key and do what you are asking of me, your honor, I would have to cut the key out, which would mean killing everything that I hold dear, and the beliefs that have defined my path.

Manning’s lawyers have issued a motion, arguing that their client is incoercible and so should be released. Coercive confinement is considered a violation of international law.

An investigation by Mark Curtis and Matt Kennard has revealed extensive links between former home secretary Sajid Javid, who signed the US extradition request, and leading US political figures who called for the murder of Assange.

Manning is a recipient of many awards, including the Guardian’s Person of the Year and the Sean MacBride Peace Prize

See  Bid to free Manning launched as explosive new evidence threatens to end Assange extradition 22 February 2020

Chelsea Manning Spent Most of the Last Decade in Prison. The U.N. Says Her Latest Stint Is Tantamount to Torture.

The Intercept 2 January 2020

It is the very definition of torture to submit a person to physical and mental suffering in an effort to force an action from them. Since May, Manning has been held in a Virginia jail for refusing to testify before a federal grand jury...

Former U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning addresses reporters before entering the Albert Bryan U.S. federal courthouse in Alexandria, Va., on May 16, 2019., Win McNamee/Getty Images

On New Year’s Eve, as personal reflections on the last decade flooded in, Chelsea Manning’s account tweetedthat she had spent 77.76 percent of her time since 2009 in jail. That same day, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture Nils Melzer publicly releaseda letter accusing the USA of submitting Manning to treatment that is tantamount to torture.

It is the very definition of torture to submit a person to physical and mental suffering in an effort to force an action from them. Since May, Manning has been held in a Virginia jail for refusing to testify before a federal grand jury investigating WikiLeaks. Manning has not been charged with or convicted of a crime. And her imprisonment on the grounds of “civil contempt” is explicitly coercive: If she agrees to testify, she can walk free. If she continues to remain silent, she can be held for the 18-month duration of the grand jury or, as the U.N. official noted, “indefinitely with the subsequent establishment of successive grand juries.”

Each day she is caged, Manning is also fined $1,000. Manning has made clear, she would “rather starve to death” than comply with the repressive grand jury system, a judicial black box historically deployed against social justice movements.

“Such deprivation of liberty does not constitute a circumscribed sanction for a specific offense, but an open-ended progressively severe measure of coercion,”

Melzer’s November letter stated that Manning’s imprisonment fulfills “all the constitutive elements of torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment” and “should be discontinued or abolished without delay.” The letter asks that the U.S. government provide factual and legal grounds for Manning’s ongoing imprisonment and fines, “especially after her categorical and persistent refusal to give testimony demonstrates the lack of their coercive effect.”

Manning’s supporters and legal team have long stressed that no such legal grounds exist. Manning has proven again and again that her grand jury resistance is unshakeable; the coercive grounds for imprisonment are thus undermined and her jailing is revealed to be purely punitive. Federal Judge Anthony Trenga, who ordered Manning’s torturous incarceration, should be compelled to release her as a point of law, regardless of U.N. censure. This is not to say, however, that coercive incarceration is defensible in cases where it works to compel testimony — it is not. Manning’s resistance has highlighted the brutality of the practice tout court. 

SeeUnited Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture Letter on Chelsea Manning pages

In a statement from jail, Manning said, “I am thrilled to see the practice of coercive confinement called out for what it is: incompatible with international human rights standards.” The grand jury resister is, however, under no illusions about the U.S. government’s willingness to flout its purported human rights obligations. As she put it, “even knowing I am very likely to stay in jail for an even longer time, I’m never backing down.”

Indeed, as the U.N. special rapporteur noted, his predecessor wrote a number of appealsto the U.S. government from 2010 onwards regarding the cruel and torturous treatment to which Manning was subjected prior to and during her confinement in military prison. Yet her 35-year sentence was not commuted until 2017 by President Barack Obama. Manning noted in her New Year’s Eve tweet that she spent 11.05 percent of the last decade in solitary confinement and over half of her years behind bars “fighting for gender affirming care.” She attemptedto take her own life twice during her time at the military prison in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

If Melzer’s letter fails to sway the government, it should, at the very least, serve as a public reminder to support a political prisoner. Though the last decade of Manning’s life has been marked by torture, she has responded with fierce resistance and struggle for liberatory social justice at every turn. In the tweet tabulating her last 10 years, Manning ended by noting that she devoted “0.00%” of her time “backing down.” The U.N. special rapporteur’s recognition of her refusal to be coerced is welcome. Our solidarityis more than deserved.

(This article has been edited)

Natasha Lennard is a contributing writer at The Intercept. Her work covers politics and power and has appeared in Esquire, The Nation, and the New York Times opinion section. Her book "Violence," with Brad Evans, will be released this year.

See Bid to free Manning launched as explosive new evidence threatens to end Assange extradition