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Could Corbyn have become Prime Minister if he hadn’t appeased the Right? Open Letter to Jeremy Corbyn

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Corbyn’s acceptance of the Zionists'‘anti-Semitism’ narrative coupled with his continual apologies made him look weak, leading to Labour’s defeat  

Bob Dylan's I Threw It All Away sums up Corbyn's Disastrous Political Strategy
When the history of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party comes to be written the judgement is not going to be a kind one. It will show that Corbyn, in his attempt to become Prime Minister , tried to explain away his own history by attributing it to a series of mistakes or misunderstandings.
On Palestine Corbyn became virtually silent as the ‘anti-Semitism’ attacks mounted. The Palestinian representative in Britain, Manuel Hassassian describedCorbyn as ‘an ardent, staunch supporter of the Palestinians and now we hardly see any statements coming from him in support of Palestine.
A question that no one has asked is whether it was inevitable that Corbyn would fail to become Prime Minister? Is Labour condemned to elect crypto-Tories as leaders? Is a paid up member of the British Establishment the best we can hope for?
This is certainly the message of Tony Blair, who arguedthat when “a traditional left-wing party competes with a traditional right-wing party’ the outcome is‘the traditional result” That was when Blair was predicting that Ed Miliband would lose because he was too left-wing!
Is the only purpose of the Labour Party to make capitalism more palatable and to provide palliatives instead of cures? Is there any place or role for a left inside the Party? Is Labour’s role that of a second party of capitalism, a British version of America’s Democrats?
Corbyn in the wake of the 2017 Election - unfortunately he refused to fight the Right
There is another way of putting it. Why is it that in 2017 Labour achieved the highest swing in a General Election since 1945 whereas in 2019 it achieved the worst result since 1935?
Len McCluskey put his finger on it - the Zionists wouldn't accept Corbyn's concessions because there was only one thing they were interested in - the removal of Corbyn himself
Defeat was not inevitable
Victory, although difficult in 2019, was not impossible. However Corbyn’s strategy, if you can call it that, of appeasing the Right and the ‘anti-Semitism’ mongers made defeat inevitable. By forever apologising and temporising Corbyn made himself and the Labour Party seem weak and inarticulate.
Throughout the witchhunt, Owen Jones scabbed on socialists and fawned at the feet of the Zionist JLM
The explanation for why Labour did so badly in 2019 cannot be understood in terms of Brexit, still less Corbyn’s own personality.
What we witnessed since the election of Corbyn in September 2015 was a concerted and co-ordinated campaign to discredit him and all he stood for. It was a propaganda war fronted by the BBC and The Guardian. The ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ establishment came together in a concerted attempt to remove Corbyn as leader.

Hajo Meyer, a former inmate of Auschwitz compared Zionism to the Nazis, as he was entitled to do.  Many Israelis do.  Cowardly Corbyn backed off and said 'sorry'
The ‘Anti-Semitism’ Heresy Hunt
This campaign began even before Corbyn was elected as leader. On 7th August 2015 the Daily Mail led with an ‘exclusive’ which revealedthat Corbyn had ‘long-standing links'with a ‘notorious Holocaust denier and a group, Deir Yassin Remembered’. After this there was a whole series of faked ‘anti-Semitic’ incidents and people who were picked off, one after the other, with Corbyn remaining silent.
What word other than Apartheid describes a situation where some of the inhabitants of a state are not nationals or full citizens?  that was what happened to the Jews in Germany under the Nuremburg Laws
It began with Gerald Kauffman and ‘Jewish money’ and quickly progressed to Vicky Kirby’s remarksabout ‘Jewish noses’ (she had been quoting from the play Infidels by Jewish writer David Baddiel). Then there was the affair of Oxford University Labour Club. Its Chair Alex Chalmers resigned when the Club decided to support Israel Apartheid Week. Asa Winstanley later revealedthat Chalmers had been an intern for Israeli propaganda group BICOM.
Labour Against the Witchhunt - first public meeting - Tony Greenstein (standing), Moshe Machover, Jackie Walker, Marc Wadsworth and Ken Loach
The Zionists later gained revenge for this and other revelations when Asa was suspended from Labour and refusedpress credentials for the last Labour Party conference. Again Corbyn said nothing.
There were consistent denials that the ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign was about Israel. Anyone who suggested otherwise was anti-Semitic! The Zionists proved this when they clamoured to change the definition of anti-Semitism from someone who hates Jews to someone who hates Israel and Zionism.
For some strange reason the JLM objected to my comparison between them and the BNP's Nick Griffin! 
There was a division of labour between the Jewish Labour Movement and Labour Friends of Israel. The JLM concentrated on anti-Semitism whereas LFI defended what Israel did, including the use of snipers against demonstrators in Gaza. Individual JLM officers such as Louise Ellman however repeatedly defendedIsrael’s abuse and torture of Palestinian children.
The anti-Semitism campaign was not spontaneous. It was the product of the press and Zionist groups operating in concert with the British Establishment. It is clear that the campaign was planned and co-ordinated between the various actors amongst whom were the Israeli Embassy, the British state and its offspring such as the Integrity Initiative and of course the US government, as Secretary of State Mike Pompei admitted. See for example Al Jazeera’s The Lobby.
The fake 'antisemitism' campaign began with an attack on Gerald Kaufman, the Jewish father of the house, himself a Zionist, who deprecated what Israel had become
This however is not an analysis of the campaign against Corbyn so much as a look at the reaction of Jeremy Corbyn to the attacks upon him.
At first Corbyn was not directly accused of anti-Semitism. That would come later. He was held to be responsible for Labour’s ‘anti-Semitism’ by his various actions such as meetings with ‘terrorists’. If the Zionists are to be believed the Labour Party had never had anti-Semites in it before!
The New Statesman abandoned its lukewarm support for the Palestinians and wholeheartedly backed the Zionist campaign attacking Corbyn
Genuine Anti-Semitism
Of course, in a party, of over half a million, there will be a few anti-Semites.  Just as there will be a few paedophiles. However no one would say Labour is overrun with them. Indeed in the past the situation was far worse. Sydney Webb, the founder of the Fabians and the New Statesman, who became Colonial Secretary in 1929 explained that there were “no Jews in the British Labour party” and that while “French, German, Russian Socialism is Jew-ridden. We, thank heaven, are free”, the reason being because there was “no money in it”.
The pro-Zionist Home Secretary during the war, Herbert Morrison, refused to admit Jewish refugees from the Nazis during the war and thus condemned thousands to the gas chambers. Strangely enough there have been no victims of Labour ‘anti-Semitism’.
The IHRA outlaws comparisons between Israel/Zionism and the Nazis - but such comparisons are common in Israel - that is what accusations of antisemitism are in practice
Where it all began
Corbyn’s failures began with an interviewwith Krishna Guru-Murphy on 13 July 2015. When pressed as to why he used the term ‘friends’ in relation to Hezbollah and HamasCorbyn blustered and got angry but refused to confront the question which was that neither organisation was a terrorist organisation. They are both conservative Islamist groups but they come from the people who they work among and represent. Terrorists are people who, despairing of mass support, use violence and terror as a substitute. ISIS is a classic example.
Hamas was createdby Israel as a counter to secular Palestinian nationalism. Hezbollah came out of Israel’s invasion of Lebanon when over 20,000 Lebanese were murdered by Israel bombing of population centres. If ever the word ‘terrorist’ had any meaning then it was as a description of Israel. Corbyn knew this but couldn’t say it because it contradicts the western narrative about terrorism.

Details of the accusations were leaked to The Times and The Telegraph but I was yet to learn what they were 
Corbyn’s said that he was a ‘peacemaker’which completely evaded the question of whose side he was on in imperialist wars. Either you are on the side of the oppressed or the oppressor.
Everytime the Zionists made accusations of anti-Semitism Corbyn denied he was an anti-Semite. The problem was that the Zionist definition of anti-Semitism was not the ordinary common one of hatred or dislike of Jews as Jews.
The Oxford English Dictionary has a very simple definition, hostility to or prejudice against Jews.’ The Zionist definition is hostility to the Israeli state. If you question the apartheid and racist nature of the Israeli state then you are an ‘anti-Semite’.
Tony Greenstein the Royal Courts of Justice after winning an injunction against the Labour Party
Netanyahu’s coalition government, which includes the JLM’s ‘sister party’ the Israeli Labor Party, has agreed on the annexation of the illegal settlements on the West Bank. Netanyahu has  announced that  Palestinians living in the annexed areas won’t become Israeli citizens, unlike the Jewish settlers. This is the classic definition of Apartheid.  Two sets of people living in the same area but with differential rights. This was what happened in South Africa but if you call it Apartheid you are now held to be anti-Semitic!  What the Zionists are saying is that something can be anti-Semitic and true!  A remarkable achievement thanks to Corbyn's cowardice.

It is as if, during Apartheid in South Africa you were allowed to criticise the policies of the Nationalists but if you attacked Apartheid itself and White Supremacy you were an anti-White racist.
A column I used to write for the Brighton & Hove Independent
Anti-Semitism
Essential to the creation of the anti-Semitism ‘disinformation paradigm’ is the idea that British Jews are an oppressed minority. Any attack on their ‘identity’ is therefore anti-Semitic. Logically if any group in Britain identifies with a repressive state then to oppose that state is racist.
We are seeing this today with the assertionby the Hindu Forum of Britain that support for the self-determination of Kashmir is ‘Hinduphobia’.  Does this sound familiar? If support for the Palestinians and opposition to Zionism is ‘anti-Semitism’ why shouldn’t opposition to Hindu racism be ‘Hinduphobic’?
Birds of a feather - Narendra Modi and Netanyahu
India’s far-Right Prime Minister Narendra Modi, as Chief Minister of Gujarat, presided over anti-Muslim riots which claimed at least 2,000 lives. Last August Modi unilaterally revoked Article 370 of the Indian Constitution which gave Kashmir autonomy. Kashmir has been under military occupation ever since.
The last Labour Conference passed a resolution unanimously supporting Kashmir’s self-determination. Unilaterallyafter a meeting with Labour Friends of India Starmer revoked this and decreed that the question of Kashmir is a ‘'bilateral issue for India and Pakistan'.
Unsurprisingly there is a bromancebetween Netanyahu and Modi. Hindu nationalists see Israel as their model ethno-nationalist state. They share a common enemy – Muslims. A state based on religion was the basis for Europe’s fascist and anti-Semitic states in the 1930’s and 1940’s. Hungary, Romania and the Nazi puppet states of Croatia and Slovakia all considered they were ‘Christian’.
John McDonnell came under heavy criticism for speaking alongside Jackie Walker at the TUC Conference in 2016 - it was the last time he gave any support to the victims of the antisemitism purges - he later urged that Margaret Hodge should not be disciplined for attacking Corbyn and pressed for the reinstatement of Alistair Campbell
No one has yet pointed out howBritish Jews are oppressed. Jews do not suffer economic discrimination nor are they victims of state violence or discrimination. The chief victims of anti-Semitic attacks are mainly Orthodox Hasidic, i.e. those sections of British Jewry who are least Zionist.
British Jews have escaped state anti-Semitism, which certainly existed in the pre-war period when the police were sympathetic to Moseley’s fascists. It is not so today.
When the Zionists feared that Corbyn might fall and McDonnell replace him, the Guardian and Jewish Chronicle immediately began digging into his past record, despite his fawning to the Board of Deputies
Throughout the ‘anti-Semitism’ heresy hunt of the past five years I wrote dozens of articles warning against where Corbyn’s Appeasement strategy was leading. I have put a guide to these articles and their contents on Google drive. The Israeli state has become the ‘new Jew’ and this is the ‘new anti-Semitism’.
The Guardian's cartoonist Steven Bell is the only genuine journalist on the Guardian today - which is why its despicable Editor Kath Viner censors him regularly
On 1st November 2015 in Appeasement is no way to fight the Labour Right I wrote that Corbyn had to fight back not appease his enemies. 
‘Whilst Corbyn is making a virtue out of necessity, in turning the other cheek, he should remember that even Jesus used whips to drive the money lenders out of the Temple.  Corbyn’s experiment in the ‘new politics’ is simply postponing the inevitable whilst the Prince of Darkness (Mandelson) plots away.’
It was crystal clear that the Right could not be appeased. In their view the Labour Party was there to manage capitalism, not change it. This is a fundamental divide that can never be reconciled. In practice the Labour left solved the dilemma in the time honoured fashion by moving to the Right.  Those that move the other way, like Tony Benn, are our heroes but they were few and far between.
Despite being praised as an almost saint-like character by his adoring supporters Corbyn didn’t hesitate to throw his friends under the bus.
Corbyn betrayed anti-racist campaigner Marc Wadsworth, someone who had been responsible for introducing Nelson Mandela to the Steve Lawrence campaign - the Board of Deputies, which had never participated in the Lawrence campaign deliberately misinterpreted the MacPherson report in order to pretend that victims are always to be believe (the Zionists believed they were victims)
Not just me but comrades like Ken Livingstone, Marc Wadsworth and Chris Williamson as well as a host of other socialists – Jackie Walker, Pete Willsman, Christine Shawcroft – were also betrayed. 
Even if Corbyn did not recognise what he was up against this cannot have been true of his advisers, Seamus Milne, scion of the British Establishment and like James Schneider an Oxbridge graduate.  It is inconceivable that Milne was not aware of what was happening. The other explanations I will leave to your imagination.
Below is an Open Letter because I think we all deserve some answers as to why Jeremy Corbyn failed, at any stage, to fight back against the Right.
Tony Greenstein



Open Letter to Jeremy Corbyn
29 May 2020
Dear Jeremy,
Millions of people who put their faith in you as Leader of the Labour Party saw their hopes dashed and their dreams of a fairer and just society destroyed last December. Instead we face a return to the days of Tony Blair with the election of (Sir) Keir Starmer.
Part of the original accusations against me including saying that Israel was waiting for holocaust survivors to die so they could save the money - it was a surprise to my investigator when I showed him that I was quoting from an Israeli paper!
One factor above all was responsible for Labour’s election defeat and that was your ‘strategy’ of appeasing the Right whilst throwing your friends to the wolves. In particular your failure to stand up to the fake ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign and call it out for what it was. An attempt to undermine and destroy your leadership.
The fake ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign began even before you became leader. On 7thAugust 2015 the Daily Mail led with an ‘exclusive’ which revealedthat you had ‘long-standing links'with a ‘notorious Holocaust denier and a group, Deir Yassin Remembered’. This story was immediately taken up by the Jewish Chronicle and the Guardian.
An article I wrote for the Morning Star
Did it never occur to you or your well-paid advisers, that ‘anti-Semitism’ was being weaponised? Did it not occur to you that there might be some connection between the aforesaid campaign and the election as leader of someone opposed to NATO and United States foreign policy?  Given your past record in supporting the Palestinians surely it must have been obvious that your enemies would use any stick to beat you with and that ‘anti-Semitism was a particularly useful cudgel?
According to the Board of Deputies Jonathan Arkus, Corbyn was an anti-Semite.   According to Corbyn or Rebecca Wrong Daily if you deny you are an anti-Semite then you must be!
Surely you, above all, must have been aware that the standard response of supporters of Israel, i.e. Zionists, to criticism of Israel is to allege anti-Semitism? One of your main accusers, Jonathan Arkush, President of the Board of Deputies openly called you an anti-Semite. Why? Because “delegitimising the state of Israel is anti-Semitic.” Take note, not hate of Jews but hatred of a racist, apartheid state.
The Editor of the Jewish Chronicle was even clearer. instead of adopting the [IHRA] definition as agreed by all these bodies, Labour has excised the parts which relate to Israel and how criticism of Israel can be anti-Semitic.’  Labour was therefore ‘institutionally anti-Semitic’.  The Los Angeles based Wiesenthall Centre named you‘anti-Semite of the year’ ahead of a Californian synagogue killer!
In other words, anti-Zionism equals anti-Semitism.  Which if true, would have meant that the majority of pre-Holocaust Jewry were anti-Semitic!
Zionism and Anti-Semitism
Ironically Zionism has never had a problem with genuine anti-Semitism. That is why the list of anti-Semitic leaders welcomed in Israel’s Holocaust Propaganda Museum Yad Vashem is endless. It began in 1976 with the visit of Apartheid Prime Minister John Vorster, who had been interned during the war as a Nazi sympathiser and it continues today with the visits of open Hitler admirers such as Bolsonaroand Duterte.
When it began in the late 19th century Zionism was seen as a form of Jewish anti-Semitism. This was why the vast majority of Jews opposed it. When the first Zionist Congress was held in 1897 it was going to be in Munich. It was because of the oppositionof the local Jewish community that it was transferred to Basel.
Zionism has never had a problem with genuine anti-Semites because both agree that Jews do not belong in non-Jewish society. The Zionist idea that Jews formed a nation, was precisely why Zionism was welcomed by anti-Semites.
Theodor Herzl, the founder of Political Zionism, wrote in his Diaries [pp. 83/84] that "the anti-Semites will become our most dependable friends, the anti-Semitic countries our allies". So it has proven. The list of anti-Semites, from Drumont to Heydrich, Le Pen to Orban who have sung Zionism’s praises is endless.
If the Labour Party was genuinely overrun with anti-Semitism then the Zionist movement and the Jewish Chronicle wouldn’t be in the least concerned. Anti-Semitism in the Tory Party has certainly never bothered them. Contrast the silence with Boris Johnson’s genuinely anti-Semitic and racist 72 Virgins. After all the Tories sat in the European Parliament in the same ECR group as fascists and anti-Semites such as Roberts Ziles and Michal Kaminsky.
I first worked with you nearly 40 years ago, in the wake of Israel’s invasion in 1982 of Lebanon, in my role as Chair of the Labour Movement Campaign on Palestine. I probably chaired up to a dozen meetings at which you spoke. If I had been anti-Semitic then I’m sure that you would have noticed!
Our letter defending Jackie Walker - today the Letters Page has gone the same way as the rest of the Guardian
In March 2016 I was suspended as part of the Zionists’ ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign. Jackie Walker, another Jewish anti-Zionist was suspended, twice in 2016, as were Marc Wadsworth and Ken Livingstone. Two Black people, two Jewish people and the former Mayor of London who had pioneered anti-racism in local government. These were the targets of the so-called anti-Semitism campaign and still you remained silent.
On 21 August 2015 I wrotethat ‘Being perpetually on the defensive is not good enough’. I urged you to ‘speak out now’ against the purge of thousands of your potential voters.’ If you had followed my advice then events might have turned out very differently.
Instead you continued to appease and placate those who sought to remove you. In November 2016 in Appeasement is no way to fight the Labour Right I wrote that your ‘strategy appears to be one of feeding the lions rather than shooting them.  Appeasement is rarely a successful strategy. At best it buys time.
Quite rightly you reacted angrily to accusationsthat you were an anti-Semite. Unfortunately you failed to understand that the anti-Semitism you were accused of had nothing to do with hatred of Jews and everything to do with hostility to Zionism.
The ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign was never about anti-Semitism
Anti-Semitism as most people understand it is hostility to or prejudice against Jews. This ‘anti-Semitism’ was hostility to Israel.
The obvious thing to do was to fight back. It would have been easy to have mobilised your supporters to fight back against McNicol, the Labour Right and the Tory supporting Board of Deputies. You had the membership on your side.
The Israeli Labor Party's leader Isaac Herzog gives a fulsome welcome to Trump.  The JLM is the British wing of the ILP.
The same Board of Deputies which was promiscuous in its accusations of anti-Semitism fell over itself to welcomeDonald Trump to power. The same White Supremacist whose election campaign consisted of anti-Semitic ads, gestures, dog whistles and allusions to Jewish financial power As Dana Milbank wrotein the Washington Post ‘Anti-Semitism is no longer an undertone of Trump’s campaign. It’s the melody.
According to Corbyn's idiotic logic  if you deny you are an anti-Semite then you are part of the 'problem'
Denialism
In what was a political case of Stockholm Syndrome you ended up mouthing the platitudes of your accusers. In an article Jeremy Corbyn outlines plans to accelerate expulsion of antisemites from Labour’s ranks you were quoted as saying that
 ‘‘It is wrong to deny there is antisemitism in the Labour Party... those who deny that it does exist are part of the problem’
What you were effectively saying was that your accusers were right and that you too were part of the problem. 
The argument that says that to deny that you are anti-Semitic is to confirm your guilt is the argument of Joe McCarthy and Torquemada. It is what those who conducted the witch trials in Salem, New England in the 17th Century said. As Elizabeth Reis wrote:
“During examinations, accused women were damned if they did and damned if they did not. If they confessed to witchcraft charges, their admissions would prove the cases against them; if they denied the charges, their very intractability, construed as the refusal to admit to sin more generally, might mark them as sinners and hence allies of the devil.”
The only women who were hanged at Salem were those who denied their guilt. This is the ‘logic’ of fascist ‘justice’ yet you accepted it. To protest one’s innocence is to admit one’s guilt. Only in the Nazi Peoples Courtof Ronald Freisler was this principle in operation. In the leaked Labour Report it is called denialism.
If there is one person who bears responsibility for Labour's election defeat and the overthrow of Corbyn it is Momentum's multi-millionaire owner, Jon Lansman
The IHRA
In December 2016, after Theresa May had adopted the IHRADefinition of Anti-Semitism you followed suit?  Why?  The Oxford English Dictionary definition ‘hostility to or prejudice against Jews’ is pretty comprehensive. The 38 word definition of the IHRA, with its talk of a ‘certain perception’was intentionally vague.
In addition the IHRA came with 11 illustrations of ‘anti-Semitism’, 7 of which included Israel.  Did you learn absolutely nothing from over 30 years work supporting Palestine solidarity not to know that supporting Palestinians is never anti-Semitic?  Yet to criticise Israel for its racist treatment of the Palestinians, beginning with their expulsion in 1948, was anti-Semitic according to the IHRA.
Today in the Labour Party any criticism of Israel/ Zionism is considered anti-Semitic. This is the result of the ‘fast track’ expulsions that you supported at the last Labour Party conference. Conference was promised that they would only be used in exceptional cases but this was a lie.  It is being used in virtually every case.

Luke Akehurst justified the murder by sniper fire of unarmed Palestinian demonstrators because they were allegedly Hamas members - presumably the 70+ children who were killed were also members of Hamas, as if this was any justification. However supporting the murder of  Palestinian children was not an offence in Corbyn Labour
No one however was ever expelled for anti-Palestinian racism under your watch. When Luke Akehurst, Director of We believe in Israel, supportedthe cold-blooded murder of unarmed demonstrators in Gaza, including children and medics, he wasn’t disciplined. Why? If someone had supported the murder of Jewish children they would have been expelled instantly. Or do Palestinian lives count as less than Jewish lives?
The Board of Deputies blamed Palestinian victims of Israeli snipers for their own deaths - yet Corbyn still fawned and placated them
The New Witchhunt that You Helped Encourage
I am informed that at the present time, following Keir Starmer’s meeting with the Jewish Labour Movement, that ‘investigations’ have begun into 25 Jewish members of the Labour Party. What kind of anti-Semitism is it when Jews are the main target?
Perhaps when the Tories get round to holding an inquiry into Islamaphobia they could demonstrate their sincerity by expelling a few Muslims?  Crazy?  That is where your appeasement has ended up.
Blairite advisor McTernan urged the Tories to smash the rail unions and supported tax avoidance - Momentum and Lansman welcomed him into their fold but I was expelled for opposing Zionism and racism
Unfortunately many Jews today support the Israeli state and Zionism. British Jews today bears no resemblance to the working class Jews of the East End 80 years ago who were indifferent or hostile to Zionism. British Jews have moved upwards socio-economically, outwards geographically and to the right politically. 

Solidarity is the basis of socialism yet Momentum and the Socialist Campaign Group offered no solidarity to victims of the witchhunt
Even under Labour’s first Jewish leader, Ed Miliband, the JC reportedHuge majority of British Jews will vote Tory.’ Contrast this with the election in 1945 when the England’s first ever elected Communist MP Phil Piratin owed half his votes to the Jewish voters of Mile End.
25 years ago many Muslims supported the fatwaagainst Salman Rushdie for his book, Satanic Verses.Would it have been Islamaphobic to have supported Rushie’s free speech?
Supposing there had been a 100,000 strong Afrikaaner community in Britain which identified with Apartheid in South Africa. Would it have been racist against Afrikaaners to oppose Apartheid? This is the absurd proposition that you have bought into.
Momentum helped feed the antisemitism witchhunt and encourage fascists like the individual below
Instead of Apartheid being held to be wrong we might have been told to be ‘sensitive’ to the feelings of the racists’ sympathisers living in north London’s suburbs.
Even if every single Jew in Britain supported Israel would that have made it right? Most German émigrés in the 1930’s supported Hitler. Would it have been anti-German to be anti-Nazi?
White supremacists, from the EDL and Tommy Robinson to Richard Spencer, the neo-Nazi founder of the alt-Right, love Zionism. Spencer even declaredthat he was a White Zionist. This is the state whose opponents are now being expelled.

Until I read the Leaked Report I would not have believed that Corbyn personally and his Office (LOTO) had urged the Compliance Unit to speed up the expulsions 

Betrayal – the Leaked Report is Shocking
By refusing to stand up to the Zionists ‘anti-Semitism’ claims and forever apologising you gave the impression of weakness and it was this that was fatal to your election hopes. I had however assumed that it was under pressure that you abandoned your friends and comrades. 
Until I read Labour’s leaked Report I assumed that the attempts to expel Jackie, Ken, Marc and myself were out of your hands.  It was all the actions of the Blairite machine.
Racist witchhunter and head of Compliance Unit John Stolliday - he ran the 'antisemitism' witchhunt despite using terms like 'beaker' a reference to Ed Miliband's nose

Marc Wadsworth and Jacqui Walker - betrayed by Corbyn
I was therefore stunned to read that Laura Murray, who worked in your office, had emailed the corrupt racist John Stolliday asking:
could we have an update on the current status of the cases of Ken Livingstone, Jacqui [sic] Walker, Tony Greenstein and Marc Wadsworth and a clear timetable of when they will all be heard by the NCC and when a final decision will be made on them. The Jewish Labour Movement expressed frustration that these cases have taken such a long time to be heard, as they feel that it is difficult to begin the process of rebuilding trust between the Labour Party and the Jewish community whilst we have still not dealt with these cases. (page 336)
Lloyd-Russell Moyle, who was co-chair of the Campaign Group, refused to support Chris Williamson and when I challenged him about this at a public meeting, lied to me about this - he has now taken Starmer's shilling
The word treachery isn’t adequate to describe my feelings when I read this. Well we were all expelled bar Ken who resigned. And then you went on to betray Christine Shawcroft and Chris Williamson MP.
Perhaps you can tell me whether in fact our expulsions ever did ‘rebuild trust’ with this mythical ‘Jewish community’? No sooner had you expelled one person than the Zionists produced another 10 names.
By expelling us (the actual reason was never anti-Semitism) you proved that the Labour Party was anti-Semitic. In so doing you dug your own grave.
The Jewish Labour Movement's corrupt Chair Jeremy Newmark defending Ruth Smeeth who lied and dissembled about Marc Wadsworth - Ruth Smeeth was revealed as a CIA asset by Wikileaks
You could have fought back
Today 25 Jewish members of the Labour Party face expulsion in order to reassure Israel’s supporters that Labour will always back the racists.
You had a clear choice when you were elected leader.  You could either fight the Right or appease them.  For the first year, when Owen Smith challenged you for the leadership, you fought the Right.  The result was that you deprived Theresa May of her majority in the 2017 General Election. A performance which I had predicted.
It was at this point, when you were at the peak of your power, you could have called for the resignation of Iain McNicoll who had openly sabotaged Labour’s election chances by refusing to support challenges to Tory incumbents.
A letter in the Jewish Chronicle by the founder of the 43 Group, Morris Beckman savaging the do nothing tactics of the Board of Deputies - the Board has only ever been interested in fighting anti-Zionism

When it came to opposing the anti-Semitic thuggery of the British Union of Fascists in the 1930's and the National Front of the 1970's the Board of Deputies advocated that Jews do nothing except hide
In June 2017 you could have squashed the ‘anti-Semitism’ nonsense. If you had made a speech on anti-Semitism you could have buried the issue for all time. You would have received the overwhelming support of party members and you would have put your opponents on the defensive. You could have also explained why you were not going to support the IHRA. After all, your mum and my dad were at the Battle of Cable Street fighting the Moselyites in 1936. They didn’t need a definition of anti-Semitism to recognise what anti-Semitism was.
It would have been a very simple speech. You could have started by condemning anti-Semitism and making it clear that this means racist hatred of Jews as Jews and not criticism of Israel or Zionism. Anti-Semitism is about those who don’t like Jews, of which there are virtually none in the Labour Party.
You could then have condemned the weaponisation of ‘anti-Semitism’ by the supporters of Israel as a means of avoiding having to defend things like the imprisonment and torture of children, Palestinian children that is.
If you had been bold you could have explained that if Jews in Britain experienced a fraction of the racism and discrimination of Palestinians then they would rightly complain of anti-Semitism. You could also have condemned the use of Jews as an alibi for British foreign policy.
Of course you did none of these things and just before the local elections in May 2018, Luciana Berger pulled out of a hat the bankers’ muralthat had long been erased in 2012.  It was obvious that this issue  had been kept in reserve by those seeking to do as much damage as possible to Labour’s local election chances. Berger should have had the whip removed, as should Margaret Hodge.
Norman Tebbit of the 'cricket test' (Indians supporting the Indian test team were held not to be genuine Britons) attended his first 'anti-racist' demonstration with the Zionists
This was followed by an ‘anti-racist’ demonstration outside Parliament organised by the Board of Deputies.  Attendees included those well know opponents of racism – Norman Tebbit and Ian Paisley.
When the JLM, in an attempt to win sympathy, threatened to disaffiliate from the Labour Party, instead of welcoming such a prospect you pleaded with them to stay. This however did not stop the JLM from voting to no confidence you at their AGM.
In the Labour Party at the present time, to tell the truth about Israel is to be condemned as ‘anti-Semitic’. The fact that the Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu openly declaresthat Israel is “not a state of all its citizens” is ignored.  Israel has just announced that when it annexes the Jordan Valley it will not give citizenship to the Arabs who live there.  This used to be called ‘apartheid’.  Do you have another word for it?
The situation of socialists and anti-imperialists in the Labour Party today is far worse than if you had never been leader. Today to be an anti-racist in the Labour Party is to live in danger of expulsion. 
When the ‘anti-Semitism’ accusations started flying, instead of openly reaching out to those British Jews who are not Zionists, such as the many in the growing Ultra Orthodox community in Stamford Hill, 35 of whose rabbis defendedyou against the attacks from the Board of Deputies, you granted the reactionary Board sole rights of audience.
It was not as if you didn’t have enough chances.  The one way of intimidating the Labour Right would have been to support Open Selection of Labour candidates.  Yet at the 2018 Labour Party Conference you persuaded Len McCluskey, Unite’s General Secretary, to break his mandate and oppose Open Selection. When you were Secretary of Labour Against the Witchhunt in the 1990’s mandatory reselection was an article of faith amongst the left.
As his final act of appeasement Corbyn elevated Tom Watson to the House of Lords
Perhaps the final insult to Labour members and those unfairly expelled was to propose that Iain McNicol and Tom Watson should be elevated to the House of Lords. 
As Bob Dylan wrotein the aptly titled I threw it all away’.
Once I had mountains in the palm of my hand
And rivers that ran through every day
I must have been mad
I never knew what I had
Until I threw it all away
Yours etc.
Tony Greenstein



[1]             See for example Ellman’s contribution to parliamentary debates such as that on 6th January 2016 on Child Prisoners and Detainees: Occupied Palestinian Territories and  Palestinian Children and Israeli Military Detention of 7 February 2018.


Open Letter to the Socialist Group of Campaign MPs - Reject the New McCarthyism – Reject the Board of Deputies 10 Pledges

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PLEASE SIGN THIS PETITION & GIVE THE SOCIALIST CAMPAIGN GROUP OF MPs A BACKBONE



For over four and a half years there was a sustained campaign of vilification and defamation alleging that the Labour Party was overrun by ‘anti-Semitism’. It was a campaign initiated by that well known opponent of racism, the Daily Mail in an article written even before Jeremy Corbyn had even been elected, alleging that he had associated with a holocaust denier.

Of course there were a handful of anti-Semites in the Labour Party but that was not the purpose of the campaign. There are in every party.  No doubt there are some paedophiles amongst Labour’s half a million members.  Would anyone say it is ‘overrun’ by them?

The purpose of the ‘anti-Semitism’ smear campaign was clear from the start. To remove and destabilise Corbyn. It succeeded in its objective because a large section of the Labour Left, including the Campaign Group and Jon Lansman’s Momentum bought into it.

That is why a key demand of the Zionists and Jewish Labour Movement was to redefine anti-Semitism. If you asked the average person what anti-Semitism was they would answer that it was someone who didn’t like Jews. The OED defines anti-Semitism as hostility to or prejudice against Jews’. The IHRA definition of anti-Semitism, which after 3 years of an incessant campaign the NEC adopted, defines anti-Semitism in terms of hostility to Israel.

Even Kenneth Stern, who drafted the IHRA has written opposing the use of the IHRA to chill free speech. Why is it that Campaign Group MPs are so frightened of doing the same?

It is therefore no accident that the first victims of the ‘anti-Semitism’ witchhunt were Jewish and Black anti-racists such as Tony Greenstein, Jackie Walker and Marc Wadsworth. It is also no surprise that Asa Winstanley, a journalist on Electronic Intifada who wrote extensively on this campaign for example How Israel lobby manufactured UK Labour Party’s anti-Semitism crisis was also suspended.

In the past week Professor David Miller, co-author of Bad News for Labour, has also been suspended. Its book launch during Labour Party conference was cancelled by Waterstones after the normal volley of abuse and intimidation from Zionists. Understandably they feared that a book by 5 academics which carefully examined the evidence for Labour ‘anti-Semitism’ would be embarrassing. In the end the book launch was put on by Brighton and Hove Labour Left Alliance and the Rialto Theatre.

Pluto Press described the book as revealing “shocking findings of misinformation spread by the press, including the supposedly impartial BBC, and the liberal Guardian.” It is no surprise that the ‘anti-Semitism’ witchhunt has ensnared Black and Jewish anti-racist activists, journalists and now academics. This is how McCarthyism spreads its wings.

By buying into the ‘anti-Semitism’ narrative and failing to see where it came from the Socialist Campaign Group and Momentum aided a campaign whose only purpose was to remove Corbyn as leader.

Despite doing everything asked of him, the campaign against Corbyn was relentless. In the words of Len McCluskey the Board of Deputies ‘won’t take yes for an answer’. Of course they wouldn’t.  Their only aim was to remove Corbyn. The only MP who had the courage to stand up to this campaign was Chris Williamson and to its shame, the Campaign Group refused to give him its support when Tom Watson and company were on the attack.

The Board of Deputies 10 Commandments (Pledges)

During the leadership election Campaign Group member Rebecca Long-Bailey pledged her support for the 10 Commandments.  Commandment No. 5 stipulates that anyone who shares a platform with someone who has been expelled/ suspended should be suspended. This is McCarthyist guilt-by-association.

No Platform has traditionally been reserved for fascists not socialists. In accepting the BOD dictates members of the Campaign Group are abandoning free speech and civil liberties.

When Diane Abbot and Bell Ribeiro-Addy addressed a Zoom meeting they were targeted by the BOD for having been in the same meeting as Jackie Walker and Tony Greenstein. Both Jackie and Tony are Jewish. Their only ‘crime’ is to oppose Zionism.


The BOD represents the most reactionary section of British Jews. It is the same Board which warmly welcomed Donald Trump to power in the United States, despite him running an anti-Semitic election campaign. Trump, the most pro-Zionist President in US history, has just praised the ‘good bloodlines’ of Henry Ford, who received the highest civilian award from Nazi Germany. Yet unsurprisingly the Israeli government is full of praise for Trump.

This disinformation paradigm was built on the lie that ‘anti-Semitism’ drove the Jewish community away from Labour. Ever since the 1960’s the majority of British Jews have voted Tory. In 2015 the JC reported Huge majority of British Jews will vote Toryand just 22% would vote Labour, despite it having its first Jewish leader, Ed Miliband.

In 1939 both Aneurin Bevan and Stafford Cripps were expelled from Labour. Even the most Neanderthal right-winger didn’t demand that anyone speaking with them should be expelled.

If the Board demands that people should be suspended for associating or speaking with those expelled then there is just one reason - to protect the Israeli state.

Israel is a state which from its inception was based on ethnic cleansing. Today it rules over 5 million Palestinians who have neither civil or political rights. This is what the IHRA and you, by your silence, are defending. This is imperialism not anti-racism.

Historically the Labour Party was as much a party of the Empire as the Tories, except we dressed it up in the language of trusteeship. Today Labour has become the party of Zionist settler colonialism, all in the name of fighting ‘anti-Semitism’.

The Board of Deputies’ concern about anti-Semitism is very recent. In 1936 they advised Jews to stay indoors and allow Moseley’s British Union of Fascists to march unhindered, at the Battle of Cable Street, through the Jewish areas of East London.

When the Anti-Nazi League was formed in response to the growth of the National Front in 1977, what was the Board’s response? Total hostility. Searchlight Magazine wrote that:

"In the face of mounting attacks against the Jewish community both ideologically and physically, we have the amazing sight of the Jewish Board of Deputies launching an attack on the Anti Nazi League with all the fervour of Kamikaze pilots... It was as though they were watching a time capsule rerunof the 1930's, in the form of a flickering old movie, with a grim determination to repeat every mistake of that era. "(Issue 41, November 1978)

The Board’s position is committed to defend Israel, right or wrong. Clause 3(d) of its Constitution states that the Board shall take ‘Take such appropriate action as lies within its power to advance Israel's security, welfare and standing.’

In March 2018 the Board blamed unarmed protesters in Gaza for their own deaths when Israeli snipers fired on them. Today it refuses to criticise the annexation of the West Bank.

Israel is an apartheid state. Racism is part of the DNA of a state whose Prime Minister openly states that Israel is not a state of all its citizens. For example hundreds of Jewish communities legally refuse to admit Arabs, who are confined to just 2½% of the land. In South Africa this was called Apartheid. In Starmer’s Labour it’s called ‘Jewish self-determination’.

Have you ever wondered why Richard Spencer, the neo-Nazi founder of the alt-Right declares that he is a ‘White Zionist’? Or why racists and anti-Semites the world over, from Bolsonaro, Duterte and Hungary’s Orban are the best friends of Israel?

The Jewish Labour Movement

The driving force of the ‘anti-Semitism’ smears is the JLM which is not Labour’s Jewish wing. The JLM is affiliated to the World Zionist Organisation whose Land Theft Divisionhas pioneered the settlements in the West Bank.

The JLM calls itself the ‘sister party’of the Israeli Labor Party. In fact it is the British wing of this racist party. Today the ILP, the part of government for 30 years, is reduced to just 3 seats. The ILP has just gone into coalition with Netanyahu and it too has made a Pledge. To support the annexation of the West Bank settlements.

Have you ever wondered why it is that the veterans of the fight against Apartheid in South Africa have called Israel another form of apartheid? Archbishop Desmond Tutuhas termed Israel as worse than South African apartheid. Ronnie Kassrills, the Jewish commander of the ANC’s military wing wroteI fought South African apartheid. I see the same brutal policies in Israel’. This is what the false allegations of ‘anti-Semitism’ are about.

Keir Starmer has made his position clear in an interview with the Times of Israel: “I support Zionism without qualification.” Zionism is about establishing a Jewish ethno-nationalist state that today’s White Supremacists see Israel as a model and with good reason. When Israel bars asylum seekers and seeks to deport those that have slipped through it is because they will dilute the ‘Jewish identity’ of the state.

When Israel’s Education Ministry bans a book depicting a teenage romance between a Jew and Arab from the High School syllabus it does it because it undermines students’ understanding of their ‘Jewish identity’. Opposition to sexual relations between the races was fundamental to South Africa, the Deep South and Nazi Germany.

We are asking you to:

1.            join us in opposing the continuation  of the anti-Semitism witch-hunt.  It is aimed at anti-racists and anti-imperialist supporters of the Palestinians not anti-Semites.

2.           oppose the Board of Deputies 10 Pledges whose aim is to close down discussion and debate on Palestine and Zionism.

3.           recognise that Keir Starmer represents the hard-Right in the Labour Party. His attempt to bury the leaked Labour Report with a Whitewashby appointing a panel of Progress supporters confirms that. He has made it clearthat he is returning Labour to the austerity-lite politics of Ed Miliband.

4.           That we should do what the Right did for the duration of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership. We should oppose the attempt by Starmer to return us to the era of New Labour.

We believe that no member of the Campaign Group should serve in the Shadow Cabinet and provide Starmer with ‘left’ political cover.  Starmer is a member of the British Establishment and the Trilateral Commissionalongside such luminaries as Henry Kissinger. Starmer is the darling of the Tory press. He has even been endorsed by George Osborne.

The history of the Labour Left is one of appeasing Labour’s Red Tories. That is why the Scottish working class has abandoned the Labour Party. The only way of winning back the Red Wall is by offering them some red meat.

In Solidarity   

 

Tony Greenstein and others







Brighton and Hove Trades Council NHS Demonstration Outside Hove Town Hall

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There was a massive shortage of PPE because the supply chain had been privatised – 

No to Privatisation, Underfunding and Fragmentation of the NHS


The reason why there was a massive failure to supply PPE was because of the fragmentation caused by privatisation. When the emergency came the privateers were unable to cope. Eleven of them, such as DHL, the parcel delivery service, which is not known for its expertise on public health, would then select other suppliers who would in turn commission others.

Report co-author Professor David Hall of the University of Greenwich said:

“Privatisation of the NHS supply chain has created a complex, fragmented, unresponsive and bureaucratic mess which has left us unprepared and ill equipped to tackle the current crisis.

“So much responsibility has been outsourced to so many contractors that the Secretary of State literally cannot know what he is doing.

“It is shocking that DHL, the parcel-delivery subsidiary of Deutsche Post, has been deciding how to spend over £4 billion of the NHS budget.”

These firms, whose sole motivation is profit, have an entirely different way of going about ensuring PPE supplies.  Instead of stockpiling for an emergency, they operated according to ‘just in time’ contracts.  Keeping large stocks is unprofitable.

Below I reprint an articlefrom the Morning Star on the Report by We Own It into the PPE failure. This was not inevitable, it was the consequence of introducing the internal market and the profit motive into the NHS.

When you are a private supplier your concern is the bottom line not the needs of the NHS. It is no surprise that Keir Starmer, busy launching a new witchhunt in the Labour Party against ‘anti-Semitism’, has said nothing about this. As a Blairite tool he too is committed to the continuation of stealth privatisation in the NHS.

The government has also announced a 2 year public sector pay freeze. So all those nurses and doctors who people have been applauding every Thursday night for risking their lives will be repaid with a pay freeze as the placard of a health worker attending our demonstration said.

Workers and members of Brighton and Hove Trades Council staged a demonstration outside Hove Town Hall on 1st June to protest at the attempt of the government to force schools to take children regardless of the effect on the spread of coronavirus.

The numbers of deaths are still in the hundreds per day and there is a danger of a second wave of infections or simply the first wave flaring up again. But to the government the needs of capitalism come first.

Tony Greenstein

Private profit hitting public health

Mass outsourcing in the ‘fundamentally dysfunctional’ NHS supply chain blamed for disastrous ongoing shortage of PPE

PRIVATISATION is at the centre of the “fundamentally dysfunctional” sourcing of vital personal protective equipment (PPE) to NHS trusts, a report by We Own It found yesterday.

The privatisation of the NHS supply chain and its break-up into 11 outsourced contracts has contributed to the “ongoing fiasco” of the failure of the health service to acquire and distribute sufficient PPE to medical staff, according to the report by the public-ownership campaign group.

Instead of being handled by civil servants directly employed by the NHS, privateers such as DHL are in charge of selecting suppliers for the health service, the report revealed.

These suppliers in turn select other private companies to make specific items, such as PPE gowns, for them and then hand them to yet another private logistics company to deliver them to the trusts.

NHS trusts have been told not to source PPE from local suppliers but to use this centralised system. In doing so, every piece of equipment goes through four separate layers of profit-taking.

Report co-author Professor David Hall of the University of Greenwich said: “Privatisation of the NHS supply chain has created a complex, fragmented, unresponsive and bureaucratic mess which has left us unprepared and ill equipped to tackle the current crisis.

“So much responsibility has been outsourced to so many contractors that the Secretary of State literally cannot know what he is doing.

“It is shocking that DHL, the parcel-delivery subsidiary of Deutsche Post, has been deciding how to spend over £4 billion of the NHS budget.”

Mr Hall said the entire system must be simplified and brought under direct NHS control, with clear lines of accountability. It is work that should be done by civil servants employed by the NHS.

Such workers are responsive to the needs of their fellow workers in the NHS, with a public-service culture of prioritising safety, long-term planning and smart use of skills and resources within the NHS, local communities and the local manufacturing sector, Mr Hall added.

A central problem the report identifies is the “just in time” business model used by logistics contractors such as Unipart in the stocking and distribution of PPE.

This model creates the risk that sufficient supplies are not available to manage unforeseen events such as the coronavirus pandemic, the report said.

We Own It director Cat Hobbs said: “It is beyond scandalous that so much of the coronavirus response has been handed over to private companies — companies that have failed time and time again to deliver.

“Whether it is Unipart or Deloitte, Movianto or Clipper Logistics, these companies should be kept well away from our NHS.”

Ms Hobbs said the crisis has revealed that the NHS is made far more vulnerable by privatisation, and the failings — from the distribution of sufficient PPE to the ineffective approach to testing — lie at the door of private companies.

“From now on, we need to ensure that our NHS is run in the interest of public health, not private profit,” she said. “In doing so, the government needs to reinstate it as a fully publicly owned and run health service.”

We Own It has launched a campaign demanding that the NHS be put in charge of managing its supply chain, that no new private contracts be granted during the coronavirus crisis, and that the NHS be reinstated as a fully public service.

 


When George Floyd was Murdered There Was Outrage – When Iyad Hallak, an Autistic Palestinian was Murdered, Noone Said Anything

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Black Lives Matter and so do Palestinian Lives – Israel’s Murderous Border Police Escape Unscathed




Five days after the murder of  George Floyd by the Minneapolis police, Iyad Hallak, an autistic 32 year old, was also murdered.  This time by the Israeli Border Police, who are the most violent of all Israeli police units.

But whereas the reaction to the murder of George Floyd has rightly been international outrage, riots and demonstrations, the reaction to the murder of Iyad is virtually zero.

Iyad Hallak

The Socialist Campaign Group of MPs has even issued a statement on the murder of Floyd even as some of their hypocritical MPs give their fulsome support to the ‘anti-Semitism’ allegations.

American society is built on racism and slavery.  The United States not only represses its own Black population but it exports its racist terror to a host of other countries, including Palestine. 

Abu Thuraya murdered by Israeli snipers at the Gaza fence

Iyad Hallak was not the first disabled Palestinian to be murdered by Israeli security forces.  There was for example Ibrahim Abu Thuraya, a double amputee who was shot dead by Israeli troops at the Gaza border fence in December 2017. 

What is remarkable though is the lack of any international reaction to the murder of Iyad.  His death at the hands of Israel’s police is one of a number involving disabled Palestinians who didn’t understand the instructions of Israel’s military/police. When he didn’t stop they simply mowed him down with gunfire.


There is however a difference. Medaria Arradondo, chief of the Minneapolis police, instantly fired all four policemen involved in the murder of George Floyd. Derek Chauvin, who was the police officer whose knee was on George Floyd's neck, has now been charged with 2nd degree murder and manslaughter. The other 3 officers - Tou Thao, Thomas Lane & J. Kueng - have been charged with aiding and abetting murder.

Contrast the situation in Israel.  Not one of the Border Police who gunned down Iyad has been arrested, still less charged.  One of the Police was put under house arrest, but he has since been released.

Of course there is a Police investigation but as Gideon Levy noted, when the Israeli Police investigate themselves they also acquit themselves. This time will be no different.

As the investigation of the murder of Israeli Palestinian school teacher, Yaqoub Mousa Abu al-Qia'an, in Umm al Hiran demonstrated, Israel’s Internal Police Investigation Department is corrupt and perfectly prepared to ‘lose’ and manipulate evidence in order to acquit those they are allegedly investigating.  Where that is not possible they simply ignore the evidence.

The ‘investigation’ by Israeli Police is likely to find that it was a ‘tragic accident’, that Iyad was murdered. A case of mistaken identity. Of course this never seems to happen to disabled and autistic Israeli Jews.  What Israel won’t do is to charge the murderers with the crime that they committed.  After all their job is to prevent ‘terrorism’ and Iyad was a Palestinian which is as nearly good as being a terrorist.

If Palestinians in East Jerusalem where Iyad lived were to riot and demonstrate then there would be many more dead Palestinians.  In Israel, the right to protest is a Jewish privilege. Unsurprisingly a Jerusalem court issued a ‘gag order’ preventing the naming of Iyad’s killers because Israeli courts are also part of the racist consensus.

In America, there is a thin sugar coating of democracy resting on a repressive and undemocratic state in which the Police are equipped with all the paraphernalia of an army. But even in the United States, despite the urging of Trump, demonstrators aren’t generally shot.

However the United States, Democrats and Republicans, are responsible for funding, arming and supporting the Israeli state. Indeed American Police forces send their officers over to Israel for ‘training’.

As Azadeh Shahshahani, Ilise Benshushan Cohen writeU.S. Police are Being Trained by Israel—And Communities of Color Are Paying the Price.

Eyad al-Halaq, who according to his family, had a mental age of a six-year-old child, was on his way to a school for children and adults with disabilities where he was a student when Israeli police spotted a “suspicious object that looked like a pistol.” In fact it was his mobile phone.  A simple mistake to make except it's one that's never made in the case of Israeli Jews.

Al-Halaq, ran away from the police out of fear. The response of the police was to shoot at him at least 7 times. Israeli police issued a statement saying that after they “neutralized” the “suspect,” they conducted a body search and found no weapon in his possession. Even the word 'neutralise'signifies that he was a terrorist and also not quite a human being.

One officer “suspected [al-Halaq] was a terrorist because he was wearing gloves” — something extremely common given the coronavirus pandemic. 

 “Israel has been on a killing spree,” Hanan Ashrawi said in a statement, referring to the case of al-Halaq, and the killing of 37-year-old Fadi Aqed 24 hours earlier. 

Aqed was gunned down by Israeli soldiers at a bus stop outside Ramallah after the soldiers claimed he tried to ram them with his car. No soldiers were injured in the incident, while Aqed’s family said that he was on his way to pick up his wife when his car skidded off the road. 

“The latest execution-style killing brings, to at least 21, the number of Palestinians killed by Israeli occupation forces in such senseless acts of violence since January,” Ashrawi said. She added that “murders, land appropriation, home demolitions, and other acts of structural violence are on the rise.”

The only measures taken against the police officers, according to Haaretz is that one officer was released “under restrictive conditions” while the other was placed under house arrest.

B’Tselem said that : “Those responsible for harming Palestinians go unpunished, and the victims receive no compensation for the harm they suffer. The few, isolated exceptions serve only to amplify the illusion that the law enforcement systems in place are functioning properly.”

See Killing of unarmed, autistic Palestinian in Jerusalem sparks outrage, Yumna Patel, Mondoweiss, 31.5.20.

Attacks on Journalists(thanks to Canary)

In Minneapolis, police fired rubber bullets at CBS Newspathreporter Michael George and his crew. His sound engineer was hit. Meanwhile, police also shotMSNBC‘s Ali Velshi with a rubber bullet. He noted that State Police supported by National guard fired unprovoked into an entirely peaceful rally

Police targeted another MSNBC crew:

Ed Ou, a photographer for NBC, was injured by police officers in Minneapolis during a confrontation with protestors violating curfew near a police station. He received a scalp wound from a projectile and needed hospital care.  Credit...Peter van Agtmael for The New York Times


and used tear gas against journalists:

KSTP reporter Ryan Raiche and his crew sufferedsimilar, as did a USA Todaycontributor. Police shot a Reuters journalist with rubber bullets. They also targeted someone with an actual press helmet on:

And again, this time another group of journalists including one from Vice News:

— Michael Anthony Adams (@MichaelAdams317) May 31, 2020


CNN journalist Omar Jimenez were arrested live on air by Minnesota police whilst the police ignored all other white journalists and cameramen.


Similar stories emerged from journalists in Kansas, Detroit, multipleones inLos Angeles and in New York, more in Chicago, more from Kentucky, Washington, some in Denver, Dallas, and Las Vegas,

Also, police have attacked or harassed foreign journalists, including Canadian broadcaster CBC‘s Susan Ormiston; Andrew Buncombe from the UK’s Independent; Kurdish and Japanese journalists; one from Sweden, and Nine News Australia‘s US crew,

Some of the media’s own reporting of the attacks on its own journalists cast doubt on the veracity of the attacks.

CNN did similar – framing what is clear as ‘appeared’ and making the vehicle the offender, not the police officer driving it:

As Noam Chomsky wrote in 1988:

The mass media serve as a system for communicating messages and symbols to the general populace. It is their function to amuse, entertain, and inform, and to inculcate individuals with the values, beliefs, and codes of behavior that will integrate them into the institutional structures of the larger society.

In other words, the corporate media can’t be seen to be promoting anti-police narratives. And as Chomsky concluded:

a propaganda approach to media coverage suggests a systematic and highly political dichotomization in news coverage based on serviceability to important domestic power interests.

Thanks to Steve Topple, The Canary, Here are the 30+ journalists US police have attacked during George Floyd protests

'Being Black in America Shouldn't Be a Death Sentence.' What About Being Palestinian?

Gideon Levy, 30 May 2020, Ha’aretz

Did you see the American police officers? Did you see how they choked George Floyd to death in Minneapolis? Did you see Officer Derek Chauvin kneeling on his neck, pinning him down, with Floyd begging for his life until he died five minutes later? What racist police forces they have in America, how brutal. Now Minneapolis is burning after a black citizen was executed because of his skin color. The mayor apologized, the four officers involved were fired, Chauvin was indicted. America is a cruel place for black people and its police are racist.

A few days after Minneapolis, on Saturday morning, in Jerusalem’s Old City, Eyad Hallaq, a 32-year-old autistic man, was on his way to the Elwyn Center for disabled people. Border Police officers claimed they believed he was holding a gun – there was none – and when they called out for him to stop, he started running. The penalty was death. The Border Police, the most brutal of all units, knows no other way to overpower a fleeing autistic Palestinian except to execute him. The cowardly Border Police officers fired some 10 bullets into Hallaq as he fled, until he died. That’s how they always act. That’s what they’ve been trained to do.

The Israel Defense Forces and the Border Police have a special weakness for the disabled. The slightest wrong movement or sound could sentence them to death. In another Old City, of Hebron in March 2018, soldiers killed 24-year-old Mohammad Jabari, who was mute and mentally ill, and whose neighbors called him “Aha-Aha” because those were the only syllables he could say. They ambushed and shot him near a girls’ school, claiming he was throwing stones. He left behind a 4-year-old son, an orphan.

The nickname for another young man, Mohammad Habali, was Za’atar (hyssop); nobody knows why. He was also mentally ill and used to walk around with a stick. Israeli soldiers executed him by shooting him in the head from about 80 meters away. That happened in December 2018 opposite the Sabah Restaurant in Tul Karm, just after 2 A.M., while he was moving away from the soldiers and the street was quiet.

Two years earlier the army killed 23-year-old, mentally disabled Arif Jaradat, in the town of Sa’ir. His family called him Khub, which means love. Whenever he saw soldiers he would shout at them in Arabic, “Not my brother Mohammed.” He meant to say, “Don’t take my brother Mohammed.” Mohammed, Arif’s older brother, was abducted from his home and arrested at least five times by soldiers right in front of him. On the day Arif died they heard him shouting his usual cry at the soldiers. “He’s disabled, don’t shoot him,”somebody managed to shout at the soldiers, but they didn’t care. They shot Khub to death too.

None of these unfortunate mentally disabled people were endangering the soldiers or the Border Police personnel at all. The autistic Hallaq wasn’t endangering anyone either. The Border Police officers shot him because that’s how they do things. They did it because he was a Palestinian and because live fire is the first and preferred option of the occupation forces.

The Border Police are no less brutal or racist than the police in the United States. There, they shoot black people, whose blood is cheap, and in Israel they shoot Palestinians, whose blood is even cheaper. But here, the killing puts us to sleep; there it sparks protest. The mayor of Minneapolis, Jacob Frey, who happens to be Jewish, was quick to apologize to the black community of his city. “Being black in America should not be a death sentence,” he said.

Neither should being a Palestinian be a death sentence, but no Jewish Israeli mayor ever said anything like that. The police officer who choked Floyd to death wascharged with third-degree murder, his colleagues were fired. In Israel, the department in the Justice Ministry that investigates police misconduct is investigating the officer who shot Hallaq. The end, as in all other cases like it, is known.

Meanwhile, in America, the police are brutal and racist.

Police officers are targeting journalists covering protests.

Reporters and news photographers say they are being roughed up by the police, shot with projectiles and arrested while covering demonstrations against racism and police brutality across the country. The U.S. Press Freedom Tracker and a writer for the Bellingcat website have eachtracked about 100 instances of reporters being harassed or injured at the protests.

In interviews, reporters said they had identified themselves as members of the press before police drew their weapons or pepper-sprayed them.

Tyler Blint-Welsh, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, said he was hit multiple times by police officers while covering a protest in New York on Sunday. “I was backing away as request, with my hands up,” Mr. Blint-Welsh, who is black, wrote on Twitter. “My NYPD-issued press badge was clearly visible.”

Andrea May Sahouri, a reporter for The Des Moines Register, was pepper-sprayed and handcuffed in zip-ties after identifying herself as a journalist while covering a protest at a Des Moines mall on Sunday evening. She streamed video live from the back of a police vehicle, and was later released.

The arrest of journalists covering demonstrations and riots is common in autocratic countries, but has been rare in the United States, where freedom of the press is protected by the First Amendment.

Many reporters, photographers and press advocates said the treatment of journalists by police officers in the last week reflected an erosion of trust in the news media that has seeped into law enforcement under President Trump, who has deemed critical coverage of his administration “fake news” and has frequently labeled some news organizations and journalists with variants of the phrase “enemies of the people.

On Sunday, Mr. Trump blamed the news media for the protests in a tweet, calling journalists “truly bad people with a sick agenda.”

Starmer’s War on Jews - by expelling Jewish anti-Zionists, the Labour Party has now become ‘institutionally anti-Semitic

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An anti-Semite in today’s Labour Party is what a Communist was in McCarthy’s USA

 

It is becoming clear that suspensions & expulsions have increased exponentially under Keir Starmer’s new regime. There is no longer any pretext that the Labour Party is targeting ‘anti-Semitism’. Anyone who is critical of the Israeli state or Zionism is a target. Free speech and debate, which is essential in any party claiming to be socialist or democratic has been abolished.
Just this week a long-time friend, Becky Massey, a former member of Hove Labour Party Executive, an anti-racist and Palestine solidarity supporter, received a letter of suspension and under the new ‘fast-track’ rules was expelled just 15 days later.  No hearing, no dialogue. 
This was not the first time that Luciana Berger resigned over 'antisemitism' - whenever support for the Palestinians is too great Berger smells 'antisemitism'
Becky’s ‘offence’ was to tweet that “The 99% of people will have the best friend in Chris Williamson as an MP who, if reelected, will work for them. I resigned from Labour to spend more time fighting for socialism.'” However Starmer is in favour of readmitting Luciana Berger to the Labour Party despite standing against Labour for the Lib-Dems.  Indeed 4 of her critics have just been suspended for ‘anti-Semitism’. What Becky wrote is a valid and legitimate expression of an opinion.
All of this can be laid at the door of Jeremy Corbyn and Jennie Formby.  People need to get out of their heads that Corbyn was sacrificed on the altar of principle. On the contrary his continuous apologies to the racists and Zionists have paved the way for mass expulsions of socialists.
In his recent interviewwith Middle East Eye Corbyn stated that:
I also introduced a system where egregious cases could be dealt with very quickly, but still within the ambit of rules of natural justice. So I feel that the attacks on me have been extremely unfair on this.
This is a lie. The fast-track procedures, which were sold to the last Labour Party conference on the basis that they would only be used in the most ‘egregious’ cases, have been used in virtually every case.
I am now informed that every ‘anti-Semitism’ case is now being dealt under these procedures.  Only sexual harassment cases are going to the National Constitutional Committee (because as we know sexual harassment is far less serious than fake anti-Semitism).
This began under Corbyn. He is therefore lying by pretending otherwise.. Good anti-racists are being expelled at the behest of supporters of the Apartheid Israeli state and Corbyn has been the Zionists’ useful fool.
Not only did Corbyn prove a disastrous leader by refusing to stand up to an ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign that is being used to target Black, Jewish and Muslim anti-racists but he laid the basis for a witch-hunt which is likely to be the most draconian and ruthless in the history of the Labour Party.
Corbyn’s interviewmakes it clear that he still does not get it that the allegations of ‘anti-Semitism’ in the Labour Party had nothing to do with anti-Semitism.  Of course you could find a few, very few, genuine cases of anti-Semitism.  You could have done so any time in the last 100 years.  The question is why it only came to the surface under Corbyn and the answer is ‘Israel’.
Corbyn’s vanity was such that when he was accused of anti-Semitism he protested.  He didn’t protest when hundreds if not thousands of others were likewise accused. He didn’t even get it that because Zionists define anti-Semitism as opposition to racism and Zionism they were talking a different language.
Those who campaigned on Labour ‘anti-Semitism’ ranged from the Tory press, Theresa May and the various Zionist lobby groups, not least the racist Jewish Chronicle and the Board of Deputies, a group that has never campaigned against racism, or even anti-Semitism, in its history. That Corbyn didn’t understand where the campaign was coming from, despite having a plethora of well-paid advisers, shows how flawed and shallow were his politics.  He was a left social democrat out of his depth. For all his talk about US imperialism when it came down to it he did not recognise a state originated campaign aimed at destabilising the Labour Party.
Extract from letter that Labour's witchhunters call antisemitic
Who are the real victims of Starmer’s ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign
1.           The Wavertree Four
The Wavertree Four sent a letter to their MP Paula Barker, a member of the Campaign Group no less, as a result of an articlein the local Jewish Telegraph. In that letter the four officers of Wavertree Constituency Labour Party - chair Nina Houghton, secretary Kevin Bean, women's officer Helen Dickson and BAME officer Hazuan Hashim were suspended.
According to the letter of suspension the principal objection is to their statement taking issue with Paul Barker’s article:
’Luciana leaving the Labour Party was a shock to many and I find it deeply regrettable that she felt she could no longer stay….’
Scab Labour MP Paula Barker
The 4 accused are alleged to have:
‘engaged in conduct prejudicial and / or grossly detrimental to the Party...’  in that they
1. may reasonably be seen to demonstrate hostility or prejudice based on race, religion or belief; and / or
2. may reasonably be seen to involve antisemitic actions, stereotypes and sentiments; and / or
3. undermines the Party’s ability to campaign against racism.
Article by scab Labour MP Paula Barker
What is the evidence that the 4 accused have engaged in ‘anti-Semitic actions’ and ‘demonstrated hostility or prejudice based on race, religion or belief’ such that the Labour Party’s ‘ability to campaign against racism’ has been undermined?  What tropes or memes have they engaged in? 
Remember that the person they are criticising, Paula Barker, is not even Jewish. In other words, even disagreeing with the received wisdom that Luciana Berger was a victim of Labour ‘anti-Semitism’ is itself anti-Semitic. This is in essence saying that someone accused of a crime who pleads innocence has, by his plea, proved that he is guilty!  It is the ‘logic’ and mentality of Nazi justice which incorporated the decisions on guilt or innocence to the Police in the Lodz ghetto.
The salient part of the Wavertree 4’s letter stated that:
We have to express our disappointment and hurt that someone we campaigned for so wholeheartedly appears to have reiterated the inaccurate and factionally motivated position on anti-Semitism which was used in order to personally attack and seriously undermine Labour’s socialist programme during the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn.
There are a number of points made in the article that we would take issue with, but the most important is the statement that:
’Luciana leaving the Labour Party was a shock to many and I find it deeply regrettable that she felt she could no longer stay….’
Though we accept that it was not explicitly stated that Luciana Berger was forced out of the Labour Party by anti-Semitic abuse from members of Wavertree CLP, Paula’s words will most certainly be taken to imply that we, as a CLP, were responsible. This accusation has been repeated by our political opponents, such as the anti-Corbyn Labour right and the Liberal Democrats on numerous occasions, culminating in Tom Watson’s calumny, under the protective cloak of parliamentary privilege, that Luciana Berger had been ‘forced out by racist thugs’ in Wavertree CLP. In the furore that followed, individual officers and members, such as our then chair, were subject to further abuse and false allegations in the
I defy anyone to find a trace or hint of racism or anti-Semitism in the above letter. What the 4 accused were doing was to challenge the narrative that Luciana Berger was forced out of the Labour Party by anti-Semitism.  This was  a lie but challenging Zionist lies is now evidence of ‘anti-Semitism’.
Luciana Berger has a history of resigning from organisations because of ‘anti-Semitism’.  According to an article‘Why I had to resign’ in the Guardian of 15th April 2005:
Last week I resigned from my position as a National Executive Committee member, because of a continued apathy within the National Union of Students to Jewish student suffering.
And what did this ‘suffering’ consist of? 
i.                   Gilad Atzmon’s statement at SOAS that burning down a synagogue was a ‘rational act’.  Atzmon is anti-Semitic.  Of that there is no doubt. However it is untrue that he was justifying arson against Jewish targets.  As he made clear in a letterto the Guardian, the statement he made was quoted inaccurately and taken out of context:
I claimed that since Israel presents itself as the 'state of the Jewish people', and bearing in mind the atrocities committed by the Jewish state against the Palestinians, any form of anti-Jewish activity may be seen as political retaliation. This does not make it right.’
There are many things that Atzmon has said which are anti-Semitic.  This was not one of them!
ii.                 Berger then equates anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism asking, in all innocence: Many people claim that being anti-Israel/Zionist isn't being anti-semitic. But why does hatred of Israel lead them to turn a blind eye to the Protocols on a GUPS pamphlet?’
The obvious answer is that it doesn’t, except in Luciana’s mind.
iii.              Luciana then asks readers to ‘look at the Israeli boycott (sic!) motions put to this month's Association of University Teachers conference.’ Quite what the AUT, now UCU, has to do with ‘anti-Semitism’ in the NUS is not clear and what has Boycott to do with anti-Semitism?
The methodology is quite clear.  Luciana has spent her political life equating opposition to Zionism and the Israeli state with anti-Semitism. According to Wikipedia Luciana Berger was Director of Labour Friends of Israel, a propaganda group that is an extension of the Israeli Embassy from 2007 to 2010.  In other words Luciana is a fully fledged racist who uses ‘anti-Semitism’ as a means of justifying and defending Israel’s record.
The Israeli Labor Party, which LFI supports, is now in coalition with Netanyahu and has agreed to the annexation of 30% of the West Bank.  So much for their support for a 2 states solution. The same ILP also supports the proposal that none of the Palestinians in the area annexed will be Israeli citizens.  This is straight out of the South Africa apartheid playbook.
It is clear beyond doubt that the Wavertree Four have been suspended for their criticisms of Berger.  Unfortunately the Lansmanites in Wavertree Labour Party, instead of supporting their officers are doing their best to stab them in the back. As I have said previously, Lansman and his  cohorts were responsible for the defeat of Corbyn.  They are now actively aiding Starmer’s witchhunt.
Other offences that the Wavertree 4 are accused of include organising a meeting ‘Covid-19 and the crisis of capitalism: Can Modern Monetary Theory solve it?’ with speakers Chris Williamson and Michael Roberts, a Marxist economist.  Clearly anti-Semitic!
The third offence, I’m not sure whether this is an example of ‘anti-Semitism’, was advertising a Socialist Appeal meeting ‘Fighting for a Socialist Labour Movement.’ If like Starmer you believe that socialism is inherently anti-Semitic then I guess this too is an offence of race hatred!
What the attack on the Wavertree 4 demonstrates is that Free Speech in the Labour Party does not exist.  What makes this worse is that Paula Barker is a member of the useless Socialist Campaign Group of MPs. This snivelling apologist for the racist Berger, should have spoken out immediately about the attack on her constituency officers.  Instead, like the rest of the Campaign Group she has remained silent.
The scandalous nature of the accusations against the Wavertree 4 is highlighted by the articleby David Rosenberg of the Jewish Socialists Group concerning one of the four – BAME officer Hazuan Hashim. Far from being a racist Hazuan is a long standing anti-racist activist.  It is a sad commentary on Starmer’s Labour that anti-racist activists are being suspended and expelled from the Labour Party at the instigation of Zionists and racists like Berger.
Screenshot of participants in meeting between the racist Jewish Labour Movement and the racist Starmer
Other Victims of the ‘Anti-Semitism Witchhunt
i.                   I understand that in his meetingwith the Jewish Labour Movement Keir Starmer was handed a hit-list. Prominent amongst those included in it were the leadership of Jewish Voices for Labour.  It is no surprise that Jewish anti-Zionists should be prominent targets.  When Apartheid was the political system in South Africa, special anger was reserved for White opponents of Apartheid.  They were held to be ‘traitors’, a term that Zionists use against Jewish anti-Zionists. 
ii.                Mike Cushman of JVL’s Executive is understood to be under investigation and my understanding is that 25 Jewish members of the Labour Party are under ‘investigation’.  Mark Elf, who used to produce Jewssansfrontieres blog has also been suspended for ‘anti-Semitism’. I also suspect that Glynn Secker will be somewhere to the top of the JLM hitlist.
As I said at the time of my own expulsion, if you want to fight ‘anti-Semitism’ then what better than to expel anti-racist Jews.  It is understandable that the Zionist movement, many of whose leadership welcomed Hitler to power in 1933, should invest its energies in attacking anti-Zionist Jews.
Dr David Miller - suspended for writing a book that Zionists don't like
iii.             Professor David Miller of Bristol University.  David Miller was one of 5 academics who wrote Bad News for Labour, a book that looked at the evidence for Labour’s anti-Semitism allegations and found them wanting. This caused great annoyance to the Zionists in the Jewish Labour Movement.  The last thing they wanted was a serious academic study of their false allegations. 
iv.             The JLM therefore organised the volley of abuse, including threatening and abusive phone calls and social media attacks, on Waterstones in Brighton for hosting the book launch.  As a result Waterstones buckled and cancelledthe book launch. After furious responses from their customers admitted their mistake.

The Bad News for Labour booklaunch which was relocated from Waterstones
Fortunately this was during Labour Party conference and as a group of us had organised a Free Speech venue in Brighton we put on the event ourselves at the Rialto Theatre.
As Pluto Press highlightedin their press release, it was Bad News for Academic Freedom. But this is what Starmer’s witchhunt is about.
The monster Momentum meeting which led to panic by the Labour Right and the fraudulent cancellation of election results at Labour's AGM

v.                Brighton and Hove Labour Parties have taken a particular toll.  We were at the forefront of the Corbyn revolution. In a massive AGM, which the Labour Party’s corrupt officers overturned, we evicted the old Right.  As my articleson the Leaked Report makes clear, corrupt Labour officials reversed the election results on wholly bogus premises. Not only has Becky Massey been expelled another comrade, Pam Page has been suspended.
Pam Page and Becky Massey (suspended/expelled) from Hove and Brighton Pavilion Labour Parties
vi.             I have also received information that a Labour Party member of over 50 years has also been suspended as part of Starmer’s McCarthyist witchhunt. He too is being dealt with under the fast-track procedures that Corbyn introduced.
Kat Buckingham, who was the 'investigator' had made up her mind long before - extract from leaked Report
vii.          Ella Downinghas also been suspended.  Her offence?  Among other things posting a meme saying that ‘you can’t hold hands with god when you’re masturbating’ and referring to Jesus as a ‘sky Jew’.  Clearly anti-Semitic!
viii.         Dan Dowling was suspended for posting wholly anti-Zionist articles such as one graphic quoting the late Israeli Education Minister Shulamit Aloni, possibly the only anti-racist to have been an Israeli government minister, that ‘anti-Semitism is a trick we always use.’ Something which Starmer’s witchhunt demonstrates.
It is clear that the witchhunt that began under Corbyn and Formby, a witchhunt that never, not once, targeted anti-Palestinian racists like Luke Akehurst or Luke Stanger, which attempted to appease the unappeasable, the Israel Lobby and the Labour Right, has now been widened to engulf a major portion of the Left. 
What should we do?
The first thing is to join Labour Against the Witchhunt and also their Facebook Group. It is essential that there is a co-ordinated response to the current attacks.  This is the only specifically anti-witchhunt group. It is very understandable that people in such a situation should resign however I strongly urge people not to resign. That is what the Right wants and we should resist the temptation.
The Corbyn Project has been defeated thanks to the spinelessness of Corbyn and McDonnell and the treachery of people like Lansman.  However it would be tragic if the thousands of people who were attracted by a left-wing leader were to dissipate and go to the four winds.  There are a number of organisations that people should join nationally including Labour Left Alliance, Don’t Leave Organise and Chris Williamson’s Festival of Resistance.
If however you are expelled it is important both at the local and national level to keep in touch with and organise with fellow socialists. This is something I have tried to impress on the Labour Left Alliance. At present Don’t Leave Organise has not taken on board the thousands of Labour Party members resigning or being expelled and suspended.
What is most important is that you and others of a similar mind form local Socialist and Labour left groups that include members of the Labour Party and those who are unattached/ suspended/ expelled.
In short it is time that we fight back against the new racist leadership of the Labour Party led by Mogadon Man ‘Sir’ Keir Starmer. As the COVID-19 crisis demonstrates, the democratic organisation and control of society by those who live in it as opposed to the corrupt corporate lobbyists who knobble those in power is more urgent than ever.
Below I reprint an article from the JVL site by Murray Glickman.
Tony Greenstein
“Everyone should feel able to take part in discussion about our party, country and world.”
(Code of Conduct: Antisemitism and other forms of racism, Party Rulebook 2020, p.116)
The issue
A large number of Jewish Labour Party members have faced, or currently do face, formal investigation by the party on charges of antisemitism. JVL is aware of at least 25 such investigations: that is unlikely to be the full tally.
This number is far too high to be the result of chance or attributable to circumstances specific to individual cases. On the contrary, it suggests that Jewish party members are disproportionately exposed to being investigated for antisemitism.
No precendent
I am Jewish and reasonably well read in Jewish history. I am only too aware that my ancestors, near and remote, have been accused of all manner of hateful things over the centuries. But I don’t know of any precedent in which a group of Jews has been accused — institutionally accused — of antisemitism.
I know that I share a close Jewish identity with those accused so far. That makes me frankly fearful that it may be only a matter of time before my turn comes. In a sense it already has: I have now been the victim of slurs portraying me as antisemitic on several occasions, all pretty clear violations of the Party’s code of conduct on social media.
I am beginning to feel distinctly unwelcome as a Jew in the Labour Party.
Jewish emotional life and antisemitism
Just as much as members of other social groups, Jewish individuals vary enormously in outlook and mental attitudes.
In my experience, however, there is one constant: everyone raised in a Jewish family setting – hugely diverse though these are — grows up knowing what antisemitism is in the depth of their being. We all carry the fear of it with us through our lives. Knowing Jewishness from the inside as I do, I can honestly say that the idea of Jews being accused — virtually en masse — of antisemitism is something I cannot get my head around.
No reason to know
As JVL’s Support Officer, I have advised many distressed party members facing investigation. In the process I have looked in detail at a large number of individual NOIs [Notices of Investigation] issued by the party. Below I set out some observations on them that can, I believe, shine some light on why accusing Labour Jews of antisemitism has become so routine.
The Party does not go in for ethnic monitoring of members under investigation, and I am prepared to believe officials are actually unaware of the disproportionate number of Jewish members being investigated on the most implausible of grounds — antisemitism. This article is intended as a wake-up call. It is now time for the Party to act.
If we want to understand how this situation has crept up on the Party, we need to look at the methodology it uses in its investigations. I highlight three areas of concern:
·         the contested terrain of Jewish political history
·         uncontextualised fragments used as evidence
  • complainants’ identities and motivations, and the provenance of ‘evidence’
1. Jewish political history
Jewish political history is just as contested as, say, the British variety. There is, however, a key difference: whilst most party members will have some familiarity with the political history of our country, it has become clear to me that few have even a basic acquaintance with Jewish political history. Why should they?
NOIs typically come with lists of questions. I have seen a lot of them, and have given the questions a lot of thought. The conclusion I have come to is that, all too often, they have been drafted by people who have no background in the contested terrain of Jewish political history. Here is where I think we should start in order to understand why the Party has accused so many of its Jewish members of antisemitism,
As a Brit I am deeply interested in the history of my country. At the same time I am, as a socialist, no supporter of nationalistic narratives of British history. Some may call that ‘anti-British’, but I would never in a million years expect the Labour Party to agree. As a Jew, I am also deeply interested in the history of my ethnic group. But again, as a socialist, I am no supporter of nationalistic narratives of that history either. In no way does it make me ‘anti-Jewish’. But Jewish members like me stand accused of antisemitism by the Party for just this reason. It must stop.
2. Uncontextualised fragments
I have seen enough NOIs to be familiar with their format. This typically comprises ‘evidence’ in the form of one or more social media posts the member under investigation is alleged to have shared, coupled with a set of questions referring to them. These questions are predominantly brief and open-ended in the extreme — often no more than a demand for the member to ‘explain’ what he or she meant by a given post or their ‘reasons’ for sharing it.
What is striking is that these posts are presented without context. (I call them ‘uncontextualised fragments’). The onus to provide context is placed entirely on the member under investigation.
To judge by this way of treating members, the Party does not seem to accept any responsibility for making inquiries of its own, prior to issuing an NOI, into the context of a post — for example, by studying the political situation within which it appeared or the thread from which it derives its meaning.
I believe this format is inherently unfair, not least when used in the course of accusing Jewish members of antisemitism. When this happens, the Party’s failure to examine context for itself combines with deficient knowledge of the political terrain to produce a toxic mix.
3. Complainants’ identities and motivations, and the provenance of ‘evidence’
When one individual accuses another before a tribunal with the power to impose sanctions, the intentions of the accuser as well as those of the accused must be liable to scrutiny. The integrity of the process depends on it.
There is no indication in any NOI I have seen that the Party takes steps to gather information on the identities and motivations of complainants, or on how they came by the ‘evidence’ they have submitted. Based on what I have seen however, I think I can safely say that the complainant is hardly ever a Jewish person who has been subjected to antisemitic abuse personally directed at him or her. (Precisely this happened to me recently in a local shop. I know what it feels like.)
The vast majority of items alleged to be antisemitic that I have seen in NOIs are posts which have been shared in small social-media bubbles and then quickly forgotten by all concerned. They only come to light, often years afterwards, because a systematic trawling operation has been undertaken to seek them out. We have also now had it officially confirmed (in the recently leaked party report), that a very small number of complainants is responsible for a large number of complaints.
If a formal disciplinary process is to be fair, it must start with a serious attempt by the Party to bring together all the relevant information t can, whether that strengthens or weakens the case against the member under investigation. The identities and motivations of complainants may often be of critical importance to the case, as may the provenance of material complained about. It is worrying that the Party seems perfectly content to operate in a state of ignorance on these matters. The responsible way forward would be for it to make sure from now on that it gathers this information in advance of issuing NOIs. It might then see complaints in a clearer perspective and sometimes take a different view on whether a formal investigation is actually warranted. At the very least, the process of drafting investigation questions would be significantly better informed.
All this could go a long way towards rescuing the Party from the absurd position it has put itself into — in which, as a non-Jewish organisation, it accuses Jews of antisemitism and then delivers judgement on them.
Conclusion
I understand the external pressures the Party is under to appear macho on antisemitism. But I don’t think it is an exaggeration to say that bowing to these pressures has put the Party in the invidious position of effectively targeting Jewish members for being the Jews they are. I call for a comradely dialogue on how to stop all this.
Some of the most vicious episodes in the history of antisemitism have occurred when powerful non-Jewish institutions have seen fit to persecute individual Jews who have for one reason or another come to their notice. The most notorious example is the Dreyfus affair, but the mediaeval Barcelona Disputations also come to mind. The treatment of Shylock in the Merchant Of Venice depicts the same in dramatic form. I hear faint but painful echoes of these in the way the Party is behaving. As a Jewish member, I should not find myself writing this.
I assert my right as a party member to post this critical reflection on party affairs. This right is confirmed in the passage from the party rulebook quoted at the beginning of the article. It is worth noting that it forms part of the Code of Conduct on Antisemitism.

Why is the Nazi holocaust more important than the Slave Trade and the Death of 10 million Africans in the Belgian Congo?

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There is no greater insult to the memory of the 6 million than to exploit their deaths, as the Holocaust Education Trust does, in order to legitimise Israel’s foul racism 

Below is yet another excellent article from Gavin Lewis, Israel, Holocaust and the Un-existing of Black Victimhood. It has prompted me to write an introduction which is longer than the article itself.  My apologies but it’s a topic that doesn’t lend itself to brevity!

If you Google ‘books on genocide in Belgian Congo’ you come up with just one book.  Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa. If you type in ‘Nazi holocaust’ then you have an endless selection.

There are literally thousands of books, from every conceivable angle, on aspects of the Holocaust. Most are worthless but nonetheless no respectable library is without a shelf (at least).

How is it that the Jewish Holocaust (because there are few books on the other victims – the Disabled, Gypsies, Russian POWs, Political Prisoners, Jehova Witnesses) has received such attention yet the genocide of Black Africans has not?

In these days of Black Lives Matter there is one, obvious, answer. White lives matter more. Yet this is not the whole answer, indeed it is not even half an answer. The Irish Famine is also not top of the book lists. Admittedly the British killed ‘only’ one million but the accepted figure of Jewish dead in the Holocaust is 6 million. The estimated number of dead in the Belgian Congo is 10 million. The estimated death from the Slave Trade is about 14 million.

Of course the industrial extermination of the Jews of Europe was, by any stretch of the imagination, horrific.  But was death by gas or shooting worse than castration, chopping off of limbs, burning and skinning alive. It took minutes to expire from bullets or cyanide gas, whereas the tortures of the Belgian colonial sadists are unimaginable.

George Floyd

One thing is for certain. It isn’t about the special place of Jews before the anti-Semites get their heartbeats racing. Indeed for a long time after the Holocaust there were very few books about the Holocaust written, albeit they were the best. Raul Hilberg’s The Destruction of European Jewry, Gerald Reitlinger’s The Final Solution and Gerald Fleming’sHitler and the Final Solution. Today there are more good histories such as Richard Evan’s trilogy on the Third Reich and Christopher Browning’s The Origins of the Final Solution.

In post-war America the Holocaust was played down to the point of non-existence. During the McCarthy era emphasising the Holocaust was likely to incur accusations of being a Communist. At the funeral for the executed Rosenbergs the Song of the Warsaw Ghetto was sung.

Nor was the Israeli state any different. In the late 1940s and early 1950s the Holocaust was barely mentioned in Israel. In a 220 page Israeli history textbook published in 1948, just one page was devoted to the Holocaust compared to 10 pages on the Napoleonic wars. [Idith Zertal, Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood, p. 94]

Why the change and when did it start to come about? Both Peter Novick [the Holocaust in American Life] and Norman Finkelstein [the Holocaust Industry] agree that the change began after Israel’s victory in the 6 Day War in 1967. By defeating Egypt’s President Nasser and slaying the dragon of Arab nationalism, Israel had proved its utility to US imperialism. It represented a dagger at the heart of the Arab East.

In Israel itself attitudes began to change with the show trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961.  Eichmann was, of course, guilty of all that he was accused of and deserved to hang but that wasn’t the point of the trial. It wasn’t to reveal information  so much as to begin the process of using the Holocaust as a source of Israel’s legitimation. Israel claimed the Holocaust as its inheritance, as well as a source of financial reparations.

Previously Holocaust victims had been seen as a source of shame in Israel.  Unlike the brave Israelis, who slaughtered Arabs without mercy, yea even the suckling on a mother’s breast, the Jews who went to the gas chambers were seen as cowards. 

Hayyim Nahman Bialik

Hayyim Nahman Bialik, the national Zionist poet, spokeof the ‘disgraceful shame and cowardice’ of the Jewish victims of the 1903 Kishinev pogrom. Yitzhak Greenbaum, of the Jewish Agency Executive Committee, spoke of ‘unparalleled feelings of burning shame.’ ‘Sheep to the slaughter’ in the words of Eichmann’s prosecutor Gideon Hausner.

The first Holocaust survivors to arrive in Palestine were called sapon(soap) after the myth that the bodies of victims were made into soap.

Hanzi Brand wrote of how, when she settled on Kibbutz Gvata Haim, the other members ‘talked about their war to avoid hearing about hers. They were ashamed of the Holocaust.’ [Tom Segev, The 7th Million, p. 471]

Peter Novick spoke of the prevailing view in the Yishuv that holocaust survivors represented the ‘survival of the worst.’ In Ben Gurion’s view they were

hard, evil and selfish people and their experiences destroyed what good qualities they had left.

Ben Gurion went on to add that they were

‘A mob and human dust, without language, without education, without roots and without being absorbed in tradition and the nation’s vision.’

David Ben Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister had already demonstrated during the war his indifference to the genocide of Europe’s Jews. His only concern was that the extermination of Europe’s Jews would render the establishment of a Jewish state irrelevant and reduc the number of immigrants to Israel.

Ben Gurion’s official biographer, Shabtai Teveth quoted Ben Gurion as saying that

‘where there was a conflict of interest between saving individual Jews and the good of the Zionist enterprise, we shall say that the enterprise comes first.’ (The Burning Ground, p. 855)

It is therefore clear that the obsession, because it is an obsession, with the Jewish holocaust and the almost complete ignoring of, for example, the British genocide in Bengal which killed an estimated 32 million people, has nothing to do with genuine horror.

We can see that quite clearly with Holocaust Memorial Day which excludes all genocide before the Nazi Holocaust.  So there is no mention of the Armenian Holocaust, the Slave Trade or what happened in the Belgian Congo. Why? What possible logic is there for time limiting which Holocausts are deserving of attention?

The only conclusion is that the Nazi holocaust of the Jews serves a major ideological and propaganda purpose in terms of legitimising western imperialism and capitalism. The Nazi Holocaust  makes western capitalism seem anti-racist whereas in fact the way it is used is to reinforce its racism and imperialism. There simply is no other explanation.

If you go to the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust’s web page on the Holocaust it tells you that ‘The Holocaust (The Shoah in Hebrew) was the attempt by the Nazis and their collaborators to murder all the Jews in Europe.’ The pageon the Holocaust deals exclusively with the Jews. It says nothing about the Euthenasia campaign between 1939-1941 when about 100,000 mentally and physically handicapped Germans were murdered, mainly by carbon monoxide poisoning.

As Henry Friedlander’s excellent The Origins of Nazi Genocide argues, the Holocaust began in 1939 not 1941/2. The very same gas trucks used to murder the disabled, and German Jewish disabled were singled out in particular, made their way to Chelmno, near Lodz in Poland and there they established the first extermination camp in December 1941.

This prioritisation of the Jewish holocaust is not only racist but it’s also bad history.  It treats the Holocaust, in the words of Tom Segev, as a ‘bizarre cult of memory, death and kitsch’ in which false memory is used to bolster the Zionist narrative of eternal anti-Semitism.

The deliberate use of the Holocaust as a propaganda weapon is illustrated by another organisation, the Holocaust Education Trust. Set up by the late paedophile and President of the Board of Deputies Lord  Greville Janner, it is now presided over by Karen Pollock, who played a bit role in the fantasy drama of ‘Labour anti-Semitism’.

Idiotic comment from Karen Pollock who exploits the Holocaust for the purposes of the Israeli state and Zionism - what possible connection has Corbyn's comments on the ECRC got to do with the dead of the Holocaust?

The HET is a wholly Zionist outfit and Pollock has shamelessly used the HET, a charity, to bolster the fiction that the Labour Party was institutionally anti-Semitic and to plug the IHRA. 

What has the Holocaust got to do with the IHRA’s Working Definition of Anti-Semitism?  The latter, conflates Zionism and anti-Semitism and it is sponsored by the racist International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance.  Britain’s delegate to the IHRA is right-wing Tory Eric Pickles, former Chair of Conservative Friends of Israel, an anti-Muslim and anti-Roma bigot who also defended the Tory alliance with fascists and anti-Semites in the European Parliament.

These Zionists have no shame in exploiting the Holocaust for the cause of Israel

Among those who back the IHRA is Hungary’s anti-Semitic Prime Minister Viktor Orban, the United States’s White Supremacist President Trump and a host of anti-Semitic leaders in Western Europe.  The IHRA is a definition that anti-Semites love.

The IHRA, which has been condemnedas ‘unfit for purpose’ by Geoffrey Robertson QC has nothing whatever to do with the Holocaust or Holocaust Education. The use of the HET and the Holocaust by pro-Israel propagandists explains exactly why the Holocaust has been turned into solely the Jewish Holocaust.

Karen Pollock - Zionist nonentity who exploits the Holocaust on behalf of Israel's apartheid regime

Pollock herself is a nonentity, a two-bit player in the Zionist game but her poisonous racist view that to attack and criticise Zionism is anti-Semitic besmirches the memory of the Jewish victims of the Holocaust, the overwhelming majority of whom were not Zionist.

The real record of the Zionists during the Holocaust is not one to be proud of. They first denied the Holocaust having welcomed the rise of the Nazi government as a golden opportunity to strengthen the Jewish state-in-the making. Ben Gurion saidof the beginning of the war, which sealed the fate of German and Poland Jewry, that it was ‘'a rare opportunity to achieve the “Zionist solution”, the only true solution to the problem of the Jewish people

Berl Katznelson, Ben Gurion’s deputy, saw the rise of Hitler to power as ‘“an opportunity to build and flourish like none we have ever had or ever will have”.

Gavin Lewis’s article is therefore very welcome and I hope that you find it stimulating.

Tony Greenstein

Israel, Holocaust and the Un-existing of Black Victimhood

Gavin Lewis   Media   December 24, 2019

In his book The Holocaust Industry, political scientist Norman Finkelstein argues that an ideological construct has taken shape around the Holocaust that is used to cloak Israel with the status of “victim state” despite its “horrendous” human rights record. One of the key planks of this ideology is the notion of ‘uniqueness’, both of the European Holocaust and of Western Jews as victims.

In November 2019, Roger Hallam, one of the founders of the environmental movement Extinction Rebellion, was caught up in a highly controversial media storm in which he was accused of anti-Semitism. Hallam had contradicted the ideology Finkelstein had identified, describing the Holocaust as just another genocide—as he phrased it “just another fuckery in human history“—which, by example, he compared to the death toll in the Belgian Congo.

The constructed media notion of supposed offence to European Jews was highly specialised in that it was restricted to white, heterosexual, able-bodied, politically conservative victims. If insult had been genuinely given by Hallam it was also an offence to gay, disabled, black and leftist victims of Nazi eugenics and extermination policies.

Germany had been occupied at the close of the First World War by French-African colonial troops branded the ‘Black Horror’ by the Germans. The colonial troops fathered a generation of mixed race Germans known pejoratively as ‘Rhineland Bastards’ who were smeared as ‘half apes’ by Adolf Hitler in his autobiographical screed, Mein Kampf.

These inconvenient black victims are hardly ever mentioned in the Western media’s Holocaust-invoking, pro-Israel reportage; though they, along with the disabled and gay, were among the first to be victims of Nazi sterilisation and forced euthanasia policies.

Martin Niemoller

Similarly, political victims of the Nazis are now also excluded from mention, despite the fact that the resonant postwar reflection about fascist oppression was Martin Niemöller’s poem beginning, “First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a communist (Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist).”

Ironically the left, and particularly the UK Labour Party, were the prime targets of the pro-Israel media witchhunt, which has demonstrated both the totalitarian nature of attacks on ordinary working-class socialists and the strategic function of excluding them from the list of historic Nazi victims. It is also worth recalling that the people that actually fought during the Second World War and were responsible for postwar reconstruction used the inclusive term ‘Nazi Crimes against Humanity’. Decades later we have—as Finkelstein has observed—slipped into using highly selective labels like Shoah and Holocaust which implicitly create a hierarchy of victimhood.

As for Hallam’s comparative comments, Adam Hothschild, in his history King Leopold’s Ghost, cites the Belgians killing of 10 million Africans in the Congo. This genocide was caused by a horrific regime of mass castrations, floggings and starvation on an almost industrial scale.

The horrors of the Belgian Congo are so well established in history that Mark Twain can be cited as one of the early anti-colonial campaigners against the slaughter. The missionary Alice Seeley Harris photographed the colonial disciplinary practice of cutting off the hands of the children who had, held in forced labour, failed to meet rubber harvest quotas (see image below). The death toll of victims from this practice was considerable, and the collection of hands became a form of currency by which soldiers proved they’d upheld colonial authority and carried out their kill rates.

However, the weight of historical evidence does not shame those political and media elites who structured Labour’s moral panic upon a hierarchy of victimhood privileging a specific white ethnic identity. The black-Jewish political activist Jackie Walker similarly tried to point out that victims of slavery were absented from Holocaust Memorial Day. The fact that a figure of “60 million and more” has long been the accepted number of victims of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and even featured in Toni Morrison’s Pulizer Prize-winning novel Beloved did not protect Walker from being smeared as a anti-Semite.

Walker, however, was correct: slavery and the other colonial Holocausts that—like the state of Israel—are a manifestation of white settler domination, are systematically excluded from Holocaust Memorial Day. The same media that claims to care about anti-Semitism covers up this racist double standard rather than treat it as a scandal. In fact, strategies of black Holocaust denial were a feature of Cathy Newman’s infamous interview with Walker on Britain’s Channel 4 News in September 2016.

The largest Holocaust in human history is not included in Holocaust Memorial Day, and is now rarely mentioned in contemporary media coverage of the event. David Stannard, in his book American Holocaust, cites 100 million killed in the conquest of the Americas. In the United States you can hardly bump into a Native American; there are now about 6.5 million left, often ghettoised in the reservation system, out of a general population of 327 million.

Ursula K. Le Guin

In the week both before and after Hallam’s comments, the BBC twice broadcast a biographical documentary about the novelist Ursula K. Le Guin. In the film, Le Guin talked about her parents, anthropologist Alfred Kroeber and his wife Theodora’s friendship with Ishi, the last surviving member of the Native American Yahi people. When Ishi died, his tribe died with him. So within the timeframe that Hallam was being smeared, popular culture was highlighting that an ethnic group can actually become extinct due white colonial Holocaust. Yet this extermination was still being given subordinate treatment compared to to white Western victims.

The UK establishment has a vested interest in downplaying the horrors of historic Western imperialism. The British had torture camps in Kenya, and have recently had to compensate victims of torture and military rape in colonial Cyprus. Britain’s conquest of a quarter of the planet was facilitated by a eugenics ideology in which the victims of imperialism were (whatever their ethnic identity) regarded as interchangeable lesser human ‘wogs’, a term that originated as a slur targeted at the African disapora but was used throughout the empire.

A Congolese man looking at the severed hand and foot of his five-year-old daughter who was killed, and allegedly cannibalized, by the members of Anglo-Belgian India Rubber Company militia. Photo by Alice Seeley Harris.

The extent of the death toll in colonial India was described by historian Mike Davis in his book Late Victorian Holocausts. Contradicting the media spin that colonial deaths took place over a much longer time period than the Nazi Holocaust, historian Amaresh Mishra in his book War of Civilisations: 1857 cited how the British, in putting down an Indian uprising, presided over “untold Holocaust” which caused the deaths of almost 10 million people over 10 years beginning in 1857.

The historian and former UN under Secretary General Shashi Tharoor recorded the figure of 35 million deaths attributable to the entire history of the British Raj in his books Inglorious Empire and An Era of Darkness. Again, this death toll is not mentioned on Holocaust Memorial Day.

The only qualitative difference between white settler Holocausts and Nazi crimes is that the Western empires and independent colonies relied on mixed military slaughter and methods derived from the theories of population sustainability popularized by cleric and scholar Thomas Robert Malthus, whereby disease and starvation were deliberately imposed on Indigenous peoples. The Nazis, by comparison, utilized the machinery of militarism coupled with Fordist industrialised methods. There is, however, no reason outside of racism and complicity in the ideology of global Western expansionism to explain away why black and brown deaths should be treated as somehow subordinate or second-class.

An early example of German empire envy illustrates the lack of genuine demarcation between Western colonial Holocausts and later Nazi crimes. In 1904, many years before the Nazis came to power, Germany exterminated 75 percent of the Herero tribe in Namibia (amounting to 60,000 people), and embarked on a horrific project of human experimentation on tribal survivors that was later resumed against Europeans—including an overwhelming number of western Jews—in Second World War death camps. For black historians like Clarence Lusane and Tina Campt, the Nazis simply brought Western colonial, eugenics-motivated slaughter back to the European mainland. Isn’t the corporate media being racially selective about which victims matter, simply replicating Nazi racist hierarchies?

Perhaps the answer is that racist double standards of the comparative value of human life and Nazi rhetoric are with us once again, covertly advancing the agendas of both the Israeli colonial project and those who champion the current manifestation of Western imperialism. Israel not only oppresses the Indigenous Palestinian population, it has subjected black Jews to long-term forced contraception injections, established neighbourhoods operating whites-only housing policies, and authorized hospitals to dump so-called ‘black blood’ donations as unclean. However, based on the ‘uniqueness narrative,’ the International Holocaust Remembrance Coalition (IHRC) working definition of anti-Semitism attempts to exempt Israel from scrutiny of racist practices. This begs the question: If Israel could stand up to examination on these issues, why would it need an exemption from scrutiny?

The US-led Western powers are responsible for over a million deaths in Iraq plus more across the region. In subsequent election campaigns, Guardiancolumnist Polly Toynbee suggested voters should ignore the death toll and instead vote New Labour on the basis of its alleged investments in infrastructure. This was a version of the old Nazi apologist mantra “never mind the death camps, look at the autobahn”. More recently, Nick Robinson of the supposedly impartial BBC characterised criticism of Western imperialism as “a failure to support our armed forces”. Interestingly, this is the same slur Nazis hurled at the German White Rose Peace activists they persecuted.

Much of the rhetoric supporting the new imperialism—particularly the spin of people like Nick Robinson—is based upon a traditional ‘civilising the primitive savage’ ideology. Within this framework, the black and brown peoples of the world are supposedly too inferior for their countries to be permitted to evolve, make mistakes and develop without violent Western exploitation. The enormous number of deaths from historic and ongoing conquests are subsequently ‘buried’ in corporate media coverage.

It is interesting to reflect, even on recent history, where these notions of innate Western superiority versus Indigenous inferiority have led us; sometimes characterised as ‘the onward march of Western civilisation’. Long after the Second World War, when the West had supposedly learned from failing to recognise the humanity of white Europeans, the stuffed and mounted bodies of black and Indigenous peoples were still to be found in Western museums as examples of ethnic primitiveness. The Negro of Banyoles, a controversial piece of taxidermy of a San individual, which used to be a major attraction in the Darder Museum of Banyoles, was only returned to Africa in 2000 after activists had shamed the neighbouring 1998 Barcelona Olympics and subsequently kept up their protests. The Royal Society of Tasmania kept Truganini’s remains until 1976 and the French only returned Saartjie Baartman, the so-called Hottentot Venus, in 2002.

Currently, it appears horrified indignation at racism is now only to be expressed within a hierarchy of victimhood, strategically sympathetic to those supporting a global ideology of the onward march of white Western civilisation.

Gavin Lewis is a freelance black-British mixed-race writer and academic. He has published in Australia, Britain, Canada and the United States on film, media, politics, cultural theory, race and representation. He has taught critical theory, film and cultural studies at a number of British universities.

 


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Black Lives Matter Takes Over Brighton With Monster Demonstration

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It’s not about defence of statues of mass murderers but racism and police murder


[the sound quality on this video is not good – I recorded it using the gaming feature on Windows 10 [Windows Key+G and then Windows Key + AltR] if anyone knows why there is this background interference please let me know at tonygreenstein111@gmail.com]



Chichester also saw a massive demonstration

And they came in their thousands, from everywhere. As I drove to the demonstration I could see that this was going to be a massive demonstration. As we were setting up a Palestine photo shot at the Clocktower, people streamed passed from the station in their multitudes.
It is difficult to estimate how large the demonstration was.  At least 15,000 and possibly more.  It was the largest demonstration I’ve seen in Brighton in over 45 years of living here.
I brought with me an Open Letter to the Leader of Brighton and Hove Council Nancy Platts and the Leader of the Green Group, Phelim MacCafferty.
Last week Platts and MacCafferty sent a statementBrighton & Hove City Council stands in solidarity with protesters in America in which they said “As anti-imperialists we recognise that America has been built on the slavery, dispossession and subjugation of its native and BAME population.’
These are the same people who supported in October 2018 the adoption by Brighton and Hove Counci of the Zionist IHRA misdefinition of anti-Semitism which characterises anything except anodyne criticism of Israel as ‘anti-Semitic’.
The IHRA was a definition written in Israel and for the benefit of Israeli colonialism.  Because of the way it has been used to brand support for the Palestinians as ‘anti-Semitic’ even its author, American academic Kenneth Stern has branded it, in testimony to the US Congress as ‘chilling’ free speech and gone to describe it in the Guardian as a weapon in the hands of the Zionist Right to prevent free speech.
None of this prevented Platts and MacCafferty supporting this imperialist definition of ‘anti-Semitism’ at the same time trying to be seen as supporting Black Lives Matter.  It’s what’s called hypocrisy.
Below are some photos from the demonstration.
Tony Greenstein

You Can’t Be An Anti-Racist If You Are Not An Anti-Imperialist – Racism isn’t prejudice but the Justification for Colonialism

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Starmer should have gone down on both knees – to ask for forgiveness for his support for Zionism & Apartheid - you can’t pick & choose which victims of racism you support



Keir Starmer’s Statement – apologies for the poor quality which is beyond my control. The original can be seen here
Whatever his other faults, Jeremy Corbyn was a dedicated opponent of Apartheid in South Africa.  He even got arrestedpicketing the South Africa High Commission.
Starmer is completely different.  He was elected as Leader having acceptedthe Board of Deputies’s 10 Commandments (Pledges) drawn up by the Board of Deputies whose constitutioncommits it to defend Israel right or wrong.
Starmer was quotedin the Times of Israel has saying that ‘I support Zionism without qualification.”He then goes on to say ‘“If the definition of ‘Zionist’ is someone who believes in the state of Israel, in that sense I’m a Zionist.”
This means that Starmer, who fully understands the implications of what Zionism and a ‘Jewish’ state means, is a fully-paid up racist. He knows fully well that an ethno-nationalist Jewish state cannot be other than a state that relegates non-Jews to a guest status.
A Zionist is not someone who believes in the State of Israel in the abstract. It’s someone who supports Israel, as a Jewish state as opposed to a state of its own citizens.  As Netanyahu has often repeated, Israel is not a state of its own citizens but only of its Jewish citizens.  That is Apartheid.
That is why you get the phenomenon of what happened in Afula, a nearly 100% Jewish city in Israel.  Last summer, hundreds of Israelis in Afula demonstratedagainst the sale of a single house to an Arab.  The demonstrations included the Mayor and Deputy Mayor of Afula.  This is what a Jewish state means in practice and it is this that the wretched Starmer and his useless deputy, Angela Rayner support.
Netanyahu has made it clear that when and if Israel annexes 30% of the West Bank including the Jordan Valley, it will only be annexing the land.  The people or rather the Palestinian people will not be granted Israeli citizenship. This is not just the policy of Netanyahu but of the whole Israeli government, including the Israeli Labor Party.
Palestinians in ‘enclaves’ will continue to live under military law.  This is what is called Apartheid but maybe the wretched Starmer has another word for it?  Zionism?
The Jewish Labour Movement  describe the ILP as their ‘sister’party. Since the ILP has signed up to Netanyahu’s vision of legally entrenched Apartheid I look forward to them disaffiliating from them!
The JLM has been waging the ‘anti-Semitism’ war in the Labour Party with the full blessing of Starmer. On March 16 Starmer met with the JLM and they handed him a list of activists, especially Jewish activists, to target for expusion.
If we are to take Starmer at his word, he opposes the racist violence of the United States Police whilst supporting the Israeli state’s violence against Palestinian people.
In August 2016 Black Lives Matter caused a storm amongst the Zionists when, after sending a delegation to Israel/Palestine they adopteda policy which termed Israel an Apartheid state.  They also supported BDS and accusedIsrael of waging a genocidal war against the Palestinians.
Why?  Because Black people are the best able to recognise and understand the similarities between their experiences and that of the Palestinians. Of course White Liberals were outraged. None more so than Zionists who believed that their ‘support’ for BLM could, as has historically been the case with the leaders of America’s Black community, be exchanged for support for Israel.
BLM have refused to engage in this game of bartering support in exchange for betraying the Palestinians. That is why the Zionists have for the last 4 years been doing their best to undermine BLM. 
The present mass movement in the United States coupled with the historic support of America’s Jews for the Democrats, something reinforced by the naked anti-Semitism of Trump’s Christian Zionism, means American Jews have been even more repelled by the Republicans. America’s Jews know that racism against Black people is waged by the same people that would like to see them under the racist thumb.
That is one more reason why support for Israel is against the interests of America’s Jews. Israel is supported by the most racist elements in the USA.
But for Starmer to take the knee when he has openly come out in support of the Zionist state is the purest hypocrisy.
I watched Starmer’s video statement with growing disbelief. Starmer can’t help the fact that he is a a wooden version of a human being. What he can help though is engaging in a piece of political theatre. His statement oozed with insincerity.
 ‘I was shocked and angered at the killing of George Floyd’ he began. Does anyone seriously believe this for a moment? As James Smith wrotelast January ‘In 2009 and 2010, Starmer refused to prosecute the police officers accused of killing Jean Charles de Menezes and Ian Tomlinson (although in the latter case, he changed his mind in 2011 when new evidence came to light).’
In the Tomlinson case there was a Metropolitan Police and Independent Police Complaints Committee cover-up with a first post-mortem conducted by a dishonest and incompetent pathologist, who even the Met had reported to the Home Office in 2005.  He repeatedly failed to record bruises to the body in victims.  A trick he repeated with Tomlinson. Something which wasn’t helped by the fact the police had asked him to "rule out any assault or crush injuries associated with public order".
Whenever the Police were given an opportunity they lied.  Until video evidence surfaced they alleged the Police had tried to save Tomlinson but that they came under a hail of missiles.  When film emerged, there were no missiles nor any attempt to save Tomlinson.
In all this the IPCC and the Met colluded. Starmer, as Director of Public Prosecutions refused until a jury reached a verdict of unlawful killing to prosecute the policeman, Simon Harwood, who had a string of complaints against him.  In the end the jury acquitted him after a half-hearted prosecution.
Five days after George Floyd was murdered Palestinian Iyak Hallak, a 32 autistic man, was mowed down like a cornered animal, by the Israeli Border Police. The final 3 bullets killed him cowering in a garbage hut whilst his carer screamed to them that he was disabled.
In Israel none of the police have been arrested still less charged.  Starmer, who professes to be moved by the killing of George Floyd has said nothing.  Why? Because Starmer has declared he is a Zionist which means that he supports a Jewish supremacist state. 
Israel - Where the technique of knee on neck was first invented
Zionism aims to keep the Israeli state as Jewish as possible which is why ‘Jewish settlement’ is a national virtue written into the Jewish Nation State Law. It is why ‘demography’ i.e. the number of Arabs in the state is a national obsession.
 Jewish settlement means settlement at the expense of the Palestinians.  Within 1948 Israel it means Judaisingthe Negev, Galilee or Jerusalem. It is about displacing the indigenous population, which is why half Israel’s Arab villages are unrecognised, liable to be demolished at any time.
Netanyahu has introduced a raft of racist legislation in the Knesset as part of his belief in the ‘Zionist dream’.  Legislation such as the 2011 Admissions Committee Law which allows Jewish communities to legally bar Arabs, thus getting around an earlier court ruling in the case of Kadan which stated that Arabs could not be prevented from renting or leasing the 93% of Israeli land held for the ‘Jewish People’
Starmer, who is determined to appease Labour’s Zionist lobby, spokeof how ‘... the last week has shone a spotlight on the racism...’ He even had the audacity to quote Martin Luther King’s saying that ‘injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere’. You would look in vain for Starmer saying anything about the injustices against the Palestinians. His wife’s family lives there.  We can only conclude that Starmer is a conscious racist
In his statement Starmer went on to
‘reflect on injustices in our own country... we must face to and understand and redress the systemic racial discrimination that exists in our own communities... the Labour Party stands with Black communities in our country and across the world because Black Lives Matter.’
This is the man who as DPP ensured that people caught over claiming their benefit, a minor problem compared to the billions lost in tax avoidance, could receive up to 10 years in prison.
When we readthat
Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer and deputy Angela Rayner have taken the knee in solidarity with “all those opposing anti-black racism”.
It is clearly a cynical attempt to cash in on public support for BLM. Starmer as DPP he was supremely unconcerned about Black deaths in custody
When Starmer says that George Floyd: “must not become just another name. His death must be a catalyst for change.” the insincerity of this pale, white stiff representative of the British Establishment is clear to all.  Starmer is the epitome of the Establishment’s opposition to change.  That was why he was their chosen candidate to replace Jeremy Corbyn.
It is six years since the deaths of Eric Garner in New York from a chokehold in which he shouted ‘I can’t breathe’ and Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.
On 2nd August the Movement for Black Lives issueda policy document which stated that
The US justifies and advances the global war on terror via its alliance with Israel and is complicit in the genocide taking place.’
It described Israel as an Apartheid state and supported BDS.
According to CNNits Vision for Black Livesincluded ‘dozens of thoughtful policy recommendations designed to promote concrete, real-world solutions to racial and economic inequality.’ Unfortunately the Platform has disappeared from the Internet.
However it sparked a four year war by Zionist groups against BLM. In the The Tablet of 5 August 2016 Jonathan Greenblatt, Executive Director of the Anti-Defamation League, labeledthe genocide slur “repellent”:
Prime amongst the Zionist groups attacking BLM was the right-wing Zionist Organisation of America. When Trump came to power, the Z ZOA invitedSteve Bannon to be its guest of honour at its annual gala dinners in 2016 and 2017.  In 2016 a Jewish demonstration led by IfNotNow and Jewish Voices for Peace led to Bannon not turning up. 
In 2017 he did brave the Jewish mob accompanied by another Trump advisor, a genuine 24 carat neo-Nazi, Hungarian neo-Nazi Sebastian Gorka, a member of the fascist Vitenzi Rend with linksto other anti-Semitic Hungarian groups.  [See EXCLUSIVE: Senior Trump Aide Forged Key Ties To Anti-Semitic Groups In Hungary, Forward, 24.2.17.] and Anti-Semites feted by Zionist Organization of America Electronic Intifada 15.11.17.]
Unfortunately the ZOA, led by far-Right bigot Mort Klein, has no tactical sense. So when it began criticising BLM at the very moment it was leading a mass movement, other Zionist groups and organisations took fright. The Jerusalem Post reportedthat
A coalition of Jewish and pro-Israel groups have called for Morton Klein, president of the Zionist Organization of America, to be expelled from Jewish umbrella groups, accusing him of "bigotry" and "hatred" following a number of tweets by Klein in which he accused Black Lives Matter (BLM) of antisemitism and promoting violence.’
On 6 June Klein had urged the Southern Poverty Law Center to put BLM on their list of hate groups, tweeting:
"BLM is a Jew hating, White hating, Israel hating, conservative Black hating, violence promoting, dangerous Soros funded extremist group of haters."
Klein mixes anti-Black racism with anti-Semitic conspiracy theories involving George Soros as the all-powerful Jewish financier.
These Zionist groups, which have sat with the ZOA for years, tolerating Klein’s anti-Arab racism and bigotry, have suddenly woken up.  As the Times of Israel put it on 10th June ‘At time of racial strife, US Jewish groups call to expel ZOA from umbrella org
It wasn’t always like this.  In April 2018 Ha’aretz reportedthat a range of Zionist groups in the United States ‘condemn Black Lives Matter Platform for Accusing 'Apartheid' Israel of 'Genocide'‘.AccordingtoBoston’s Jewish Community Relations Council,
“We cannot and will not align ourselves with organizations that falsely and maliciously assert that Israel is committing ‘genocide,’”
a statement from the group read.
“We reject participation in any coalition that seeks to isolate and demonize Israel singularly amongst the nations of the world.”
In December 2016 Fox News’s reporttold how
an investigation conducted by the Haym Salomon Center reveals the group’s embrace of anti-Semitism and collaboration with a State Department-designatedterror group.’ 
What led to this?
‘In August, Black Lives Matter singled out Israel for condemnation, declaring it an “apartheid” state engaged in “genocide.” These accusations angered Jewish leaders, many of whom had steadfastly supported the BLM cause.  Nonetheless, despite what can only be described as a total lack of relevance to its own agenda, BLM did not back down.’
The Zionists decided that opposition to apartheid in Israel was totally irrelevant to the fight for racial justice in the United States. That is what is called White Privilege.
Not backing down is indeed a sin in the eyes of Zionist groups accustomed to getting their way with the likes of Jeremy Corbyn. Their particular target was the Dream Defenders, who represent young migrants to America who are under most threat especially since Trump has removed the immunity from deportation.
Their offence was to proclaim solidarity with Palestinians. Fox explainedthat
DD claims that the black community in America, together with Palestinians in the “occupied” territories of Israel, are all victims of state-sanctioned violence. As such, the two causes are related and should learn “resistance” from each other.
This was a result of a joint trip to the Palestinian territories in January 2015 by BLM and DD, the latter of which devoted‘an entire page’ of the DD web site is devoted to Palestinian solidarity. Unfortunately the web page is also missing.
The ADL, which calls itself an anti-racist organisation, has also been heavily involved in funding and organizing the trips of American Police to Israel to learn the latest techniques in repression, including the neck hold which Israel patented. The ADL in years gone by undertook spyingon the anti-apartheid movement at the behest of South Africa’s secret police BOSS.
When Starbucks staff calledthe police after accusing Black customers of ‘loitering’ in April 2018, they set up a training day in racism awareness for their staff, which included the ADL. After protests from BLM Starbucks dropped the ADL from its ‘bias training’. Politico describedhow
‘Bowing to pressure from African-American activists, Starbucks excluded the Anti-Defamation League from an upcoming daylong anti-bias training session.... Almost immediately after the April 17 announcement, activists attacked Starbucks over the ADL's involvement, citing the ADL's support for Israel and its arms-length relationship to the Black Lives Matter movement.’
The activists describedhow
“The ADL is CONSTANTLY attacking black and brown people. This is a sign that they are tone deaf and not committed to addressing the concerns of black folk.”
As Cat Brooks, the co-founder of the Anti Police-Terror Project, told ABC News
"You can't be a piece of an anti-bias training when you openly support a racist, oppressive and brutal colonization of Palestine."
The Washington chapter of Black Lives Matter, meanwhile, tweeted that the ADL was "ultra pro-cop," and cited a 2016 letter in which Greenblatt said
"ADL has not endorsed the Black Lives Matter movement" because "a small minority of [its] leaders ... supported anti-Israel — and at times anti-Semitic — positions."
In Co-opting Black Lives Matter to target Israel,  Israel’s largest freesheet (owned by Sheldon Adelson) quoted Mark Greendorfer, president of the Zachor Legal Group attacking
"The cynical use of the Black Lives Matter by groups backed and controlled by foreign terror movements is nothing less than a repeat of the many other times that terror groups have used human shields to push their violence and hate,",
If Starmer is sincere in his support of BLM then he will have to drop his support for Zionism . But we know that he is anything but sincere.  When the statue of Edward Colsten was  thrown into Bristol’s harbour Starmer condemned the demonstrators.  You have to obey the law however unjust it is.  Martin Luther King’s take on this was slightly different. In Letter from Birmingham Jail he wrote
"How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?" The answer is found in the fact that there are two types of laws: there are just laws, and there are unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that "An unjust law is no law at all."
Starmer would, if he’d been around at the time, told Anne Frank off for breaking the law by hiding from the Gestapo. As for the Suffragettes and Emily Davidson bringing down the King’s horse at the Derby, he would have been besides himself with rage. After all, the law must be obeyed, come hell or high water.
If you are going to quote Martin Luther King you can’t pick and choose which bits you like and which bits to ignore.  What MLK said came as part of a whole.
Meanwhile, as Canary shows, the attempts to demonise BLM, on both sides of the Atlantic proceed apace.
Tony Greenstein

Cowardice and Opportunism - Counterfire Virtue Signal that they will Obey the Zionists’ 10 Commandments

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Lindsey German reassures the Labour Party that Stop the War Coalition will have nothing to do with expelled members of the Labour Party
(A shorter version of this blog post, Cowardice and Opportunism can be read in this week’s issue of Weekly Worker)

This is a meeting to defend free speech on Palestine and Zionism and to fight the McCarthyist campaign to no platform anti-Zionists - you can access is via Youtube or Facebook 
Conceding to the charge of 'anti-Semitism' against anti-Zionists
It is always disconcerting when members of groups claiming to be on the Marxist or socialist left, jettison their principles and basic solidarity for the sake of unprincipled alliances with those to their right. It is usually called Opportunism or Political Cowardice. Unfortunately that is true of the SWP break-away, Counterfire.
During the course of Labour’s leadership campaign the Board of Deputies of British Jews, which has support for Israel, right or wrong, hardwiredinto its constitution, issued an updated version of the 10 Commandments.  Their 5th Commandment was a slight change on the version handed down to Moses on Mount Sinai.
Instead of ‘honour your father and mother’ there is ‘thou shalt not have anything to do with those expelled or suspended from the Labour Party.’ The title of these commandments is ‘Provide no platform for bigotry’.
The Zionists’ false anti-Semitism campaign against the Labour Party has been a prime example of what Orwell termed ‘doublethink’. Racists accusing anti-racists of racism and bigots accuse their opponents of bigotry. 
This is the same Board of Deputies which has just agreed to take no position on Israel’s annexation (theft) of a third of the West Bank.  It refuses even to comment on Netanyahu’s declarationthat Palestinians in the territories annexed to Israel will not be granted Israeli citizenship. That Keir Starmer takes his orders on how to fight ‘anti-Semitism’ from a group that justifies Apartheid in Israel speaks volumes about Starmer’s statement of solidarity with Black Lives Matter.
Rosa Parks in a 'white' seat on a bus
It is of course of a piece with his condemnationof the 10,000 strong demonstration in Bristol which toppled the statue of Edward Colston and threw it in the River Avon. No doubt, if Starmer had been around in 1955 when Rosa Parks refusedto accept segregation on a bus he would have told her that although segregation should have gone long ago the law must be obeyed.
The Daily Mail too is eager to fight 'anti-Semitism'
Don’t Leave Organise Meeting
On April 29th at a Don’t Leave Organise meeting of 600, Diane Abbot and Bell Ribeiro-Addy were the main speakers. Jackie Walker and myself spoke from the audience. The very next day all hell broke loose with the Jewish Chronicle heading‘Communal outrage over participation of Abbott and Ribeiro-Addy’. Of course British Jews were completely unconcerned about this contrived affair but the Zionist leaders of it were certainly ‘outraged’ at people exercising freedom of speech.
The Board of Deputies demanded that the two MPs should be suspended. Starmer reprimandedboth of them for not having scoured the audience to pick out people expelled or suspended from the Labour Party. 
Speaking in the same meeting with two Jewish anti-Zionists is now defined as anti-Semitic under Sir Keir Starmer! An allegation which is about as logical as saying that the Earth is flat. But if you repeat a lie long enough, as Goebbels observed, it then becomes received wisdom. Goebbels also stated that the truth is the biggest enemy of the fascist state.
Given the numbers being expelled under the ‘fast track’, no hearing procedures that Corbyn introduced, there’s going to be very great difficulties knowing who is allowed to speak in the future!

Banned Persons Under Apartheid
What one would expect of Sir Keir Starmer QC, being a former Director of Public Prosecutions, is that he proposes draft legislation to enforce the Board’s Commandments.  If he is looking for a legal precedent he could do worse than look to South Africa’s Internal Security Act 1992 which governed the category of banned persons. Under this Act, a banned person was prohibited from attending meetings of any kind, speaking in public, or publishing or distributing any written material. It proscribed broadcasters and the press from broadcasting, publishing or reporting the banned person's words.
This would be much fairer on MPs and other Labour Party members because it would obviate the need to know the background of all those in their audience.
Original advert for Birmingham StWC Meeting
Salma Yaqoob and Stop the War Coalition
On 12th May I was invited to speak to a Birmingham Stop the War Committee meeting along with Paul Kelemen. Salma Yaqoob was also invited to speak and the meeting was advertised as such.
Zionist ex-MP and warmonger Ian Austin attacks Salma Yaqoob
Almost immediately the Zionists, in the form of former Labour MP Ian Austin and the so-called Campaign Against Anti-Semitism  demandedthat Salma be suspended from the Labour Party. Salma herself denied having agreed to speak but given that the Right is out to get her, a tactical withdrawal in the circumstances would be totally understandable.
Which didn’t stop the New Statesman’s Ailbhe Rea pontificatingthat ‘Starmer is facing his first test over anti-Semitism’. The irony is that the New Statesman was founded by a genuine anti-Semite, Sidney Webb, who once exclaimedthat ‘French, German, Russian socialism is Jew-ridden. We, thank heaven, are free.’ His explanation being that ‘There’s no money in it.’ [Paul Kelemen, The British Left & Zionism – History of a Divorce, p. 20, Manchester University Press, 2012]
The vile Zionist group, CAA, are criticised by StWC as 'irresponsible' 
The reality is that Labour anti-Semitism, the genuine kind that is, has been the repository of the Right, figures like Herbert Morrison.
But at least the New Statesman had the good grace, after complaints from Jackie and myself, to alter Rea’s abysmal piece of writing by accepting that neither of us were expelled for anti-Semitism. Even the New Statesman, mouthpiece for the Fabians and the Labour Right accepts that lies need should be corrected.
Lindsey German
Would that the same were true of Lindsey German, Convenor of Stop the War Committee and one of the founders of Counterfire. Counterfire likes to present itself as the with-it, up-to-date revolutionary and avante garde alternative to the staid and boring Socialist Workers Party from which it originated.

Stop the War Coalition Statement that Counterfire's Lindsey German Endorses 
When the furore over Salma Yaqoob erupted, Stop the War Coalition, of which she is a patron, issued a statement in defence of Salma. No one can complain of this, even though the statement was extremely defensive and goes out of its way to state that it ‘is implacably opposed to anti-Semitism’ thus lending credence to the idea that the attacks on Salma and the two Black MPs were really about anti-Semitism. It also, in the context of condemning the vitriol and abuse levelled against the three Black women said that it is ‘deeply irresponsible of the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism to be adding fuel to this fire.’
Counterfire refused to stand up to the Zionist attacks on free speech
The CAA is a far-Right, Islamaphobic organisation, with close ties to the Israeli Embassy and almost certainly funded by the Israeli state.  Calling it ‘irresponsible’ for encouraging this abuse is like asking Tommy Robinson to condemn Islamaphobia. That is what fascists and racists do.
The statement strenuously avoids using the terms ‘Zionist’ or ‘Apartheid’ to describe the Israeli state instead calling for ‘justice’ for the Palestinians, which is something most Zionists could sign up to. It is a liberal phrase that avoids the political questions at the heart of the Palestinians’ Question.
The statement goes on to say that Stop the War Committee ‘refuse(s) to accept that criticism of the Israeli government and its policies can be construed as anti-Semitic.’ Again this is liberal Zionist phraseology not anti-Zionism. Even the most right-wing Zionists, including the CAA accepted that mere criticism of Netanyahu and the Israeli government isn’t anti-Semitic. The IHRAmisdefinition of anti-Semitism is quite clear about this.  It states that:
‘criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic.’
 It is only when people criticise the Jewish supremacist, i.e. Zionist nature of the Israeli state itself, or in the words of the IHRA
‘claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor’
that the accusation of anti-Semitism is levelled. Far from owing anything to a Marxist analysis this is just liberal flatulence, pure sound and fury signifying an abandonment of any class analysis of the Israeli state.  I don’t believe that this is accidental. 
John Rees

Sir Stephen Sedley, a former Court of Appeal Judge, who is himself Jewish, is hardly a revolutionary socialist as John Rees and Lindsey German would claim to be.  Yet Sedley in ‘Defining Anti-Semitism’ was able to deconstruct the IHRA in a way that Counterfire and Stop the War Committee seem completely unable to.  Sedley wrote that:
‘Endeavours to conflate the two [Anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism] by characterising everything other than anodyne criticism of Israel as anti-Semitic are not new.... ‘
Sedley went on to state that the seventh IHRA illustration of ‘anti-Semitism’
‘‘Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g. by claiming that the existence of a state of Israel is a racist endeavour.’
‘bristles with contentious assumptions about the racial identity of Jews, assumptions contested by many diaspora Jews but on which both Zionism and anti-Semitism fasten, and about Israel as the embodiment of a collective right of Jews to self-determination.’
It is a sad day when so-called revolutionaries find themselves to the right of a former Court of Appeal Judge!
Why do I say that this liberal Zionist hogwash is not just accidental or sloppy wording but a deliberate attempt to accommodate to Labour’s ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign and in particular the surrender of the Campaign Group of MPs to that campaign?
It lies in the final two sentences of the statementwhich read:
‘Local StWC groups act autonomously in deciding their platforms, but we note that Tony Greenstein has never been asked to address a national StWC meeting.  StWC rejects both anti-Semitism and abusive language in political debate.’
This is, as I told Lindsey German, nothing less than political scabbing. Political and class treachery. It is saying to the Labour Right and Ian Austin that unfortunately local Stop the War groups are autonomous and the national group can do nothing about them.  However the National Stop the War Committee is more responsible and has never had and never would have Tony Greenstein on its platforms.
Why else advertise the fact that I’ve ‘never been asked to address a national StWC meeting’? Does StWC regularly publish lists of people who they are not going to invite to address them?!
The final sentence makes it even clearer.  The statement had already said that the StWC was ‘implacably opposed to anti-Semitism’. Why repeat it? It is abundantly clear that it can only refer to me. It also refers to ‘abusive language’.  This was precisely the charge or should I say pretext that was levelled at me during my expulsion.
Permit me to give a few examples of ‘abuse’ that I was guilty of. The first was when I used the term ‘crooked McNicol’ about the Labour Party’s General Secretary, Iain McNicol. My charge sheet stated that
Mr Greenstein uses the word "crook" or "crooked" to describe Mr lain McNicol no less than 17 times’ .
It went on to explain that ‘A crook is a dishonest or criminal person. Mr Greenstein uses the work to abuse Mr McNicol.’ I agree with their definition! The reason I called McNicol crook was that thousands of Labour Party members had been suspended for the sole ‘crime’ of voting for Jeremy Corbyn.  My own vote, as a registered supporter, was fished out of the electronic ballot box. 
Calling McNicol ‘crooked’ was not abuse but an accurate description. Well after Labour’s leaked report this was precisely the adjective that Len McCluskey used!
Another example of the ‘abuse’ I was guilt of was when, according to the same charge sheet,
‘In the same article, Mr Greenstein insults Tom Watson MP by saying that his behaviour reminds him of the comment that he has "every quality of a dog except loyalty"
Was this abuse? After Corbyn was elected leader Watson pledged his undying loyalty. I think we know how that turned out.
The CAA, in its attack on Salma Yaqoob noted, the ‘second charge’ at my expulsion hearing
‘related to abuse, including calling the Jewish then-Labour MP Dame Louise Ellman a “supporter of child abuse”
 The CAA is, for once, correct. In January 2016 and again in February 2018, in debates in the House of Commons on Israel’s treatment of Palestinian children, Ellman defended Israel’s abuse, including sexual abuse, blindfolding, torture, beatings and isolation of Palestinian children on ‘security’ grounds. Nothing moved her. Is it seriously suggested that my description of Ellman was abuse?
The Origins of Counterfire
Counterfire’s repetition of this charge is truly shameful. And why has it done so?  Because it seeks the patronage of Labour MPs and other worthies. Rather than standing up for its principles it bows to their prejudices and what is the received wisdom of the ruling class that the Labour Party is overrun with anti-Semitism.
The behaviour of Counterfire, which effectively controls StWC, is not accidental.  Counterfire came out of the SWP. It was a right-wing split. When the SWP’s coalition with George Galloway in Respect collapsed in 2008, John Rees took the blame.  It was he who had led the break-up of the Socialist Alliance in order to form a cross-class non-socialist party, Respect, based on communalism. In Respect’s founding conference in 2004 Rees had arguedthat
“We … voted against the things we believed in, because, while the people here are important, they are not as important as the millions out there. We are reaching to the people locked out of politics. We voted for what they want.”
The things the  SWP voted against in Respect included a woman’s right to choose in deference to Galloway’s anti-abortion views.
There was also what Socialist Unity called John Rees and the Tory Money. In essence a cheque for $10,000 was sent to Respect by Khansaheb Civil Engineering, a Dubai-based subsidiary of Interserve plc private finance experts.
Interserve managed a number of PFI-backed schools and hospitals in the UK. The boss was Lord Blackwell, head of the Conservative government’s policy unit from 1995 to 1997. When Galloway insisted the money was sent back, since he could smell a rat, Rees got the donor to make it out to a now long forgotten SWP front, Organising for Fighting Unions.
When the SWP Central Committee found out it insisted that Rees return the cheque again! It is clear that Rees was quite prepared to make a bonfire of his principles in order for Respect and now Counterfire to succeed.  In essence there are no principles that he isn’t prepared to sacrifice.
Solidarity or a lack thereof
Perhaps the most fundamental of all socialist principles is solidarity against the common enemy.  Whatever our differences as socialists when we see fellow socialists under attack from the capitalist state or their lackeys in the Labour Party socialists express solidarity and give support.  This is really the ABC of socialism. 
The SWP were therefore quite right to remove John Rees from their Central Committee although they were clearly to blame for ever having agreed to the Respect Party in the first place. Lindsey German accompanied and supported Rees throughout, resigning from the Labour Party with him.
When I first read the statement on Salma Yaqoob I assumed that the references to me were penned by an office novice. Perhaps naively I assumed that wiser heads would delete the sentences in question.  I therefore wrote on 23 May and when there was no reply I wrote again a week later asking that the statement be amended. On 4 June Lindsey German responded in her role as Convenor of StWC: It was short, sweet and to the point:
‘In response to your communications: We are not changing the statement issued, which made no allegations against you.  We will not engage in any further correspondence on this issue.’
It was, as they say economical with the truth! It is true there was no direct allegations against me but, as libel lawyers will argue, there was an innuendo meaning which made it quite clear that allegations were being made. The sole reason being to placate and reassure Labour MPs and trade union bureaucrats that StWC would not be taking up the cudgels against the false anti-Semitism campaign that led to Jeremy Corbyn’s removal.
What is truly pitiful is that Counterfire’s Lindsey German, and presumably Counterfire itself, sees no connection between preventing imperialist wars and the Zionist use of ‘anti-Semitism’ as a weapon of political war. Indeed it seems to see no connection between Zionism and imperialism, not least because it doesn’t seem to acknowledge there is such a thing as Zionism.
The Irony of John Rees, Lindsey German and Gilad Atzmon
The irony is that if anyone was guilty of tolerating and condoning anti-Semitism it is Rees and German. Between 2005 and 2010 the SWP had a close working relationship with Gilad Atzmon, an open anti-Semite who has doubted the veracity of the Holocaust.
In June 2005 Jews Against Zionism held a picket of an SWP meeting with Atzmon as the speaker at Bookmarks. You can read the statement we issued after the picket on Labournet.  It is headed The Socialist Workers Party - Apologists for Racism?
Atzmon has written so much anti-Semitic material it is difficult to know where to start.
In Guide to the Sayings of Gilad Atzmon, the anti-Semitic jazzmanI noted that Atzmon subscribed to the world Jewish conspiracy theory, the kernel of Nazi anti-Semitism, when he wrote
we must begin to take the accusation that the Jewish people are trying to control the world very seriously.’
Even more disgustingly Atzmon wrotethat
‘If the Nazis ran a death factory in Auschwitz-Birkenau, why would the Jewish prisoners join them at the end of the war?... Why were the Jews hated? Why did European people stand up against their next-door neighbours? Why are the Jews hated in the Middle East.’
For over 5 years the SWP worked with Atzmon, defending him throughout as an Israeli anti-Zionist. Rees and German said nothing.
Throughout this time I wrote more than a dozen articles for Weekly Worker attacking the SWP’s links with Atzmon and calling on them to cut them. For example in February 2008 I wrote Time to say goodbye, the subtitle of which was ‘Why does the SWP not break its links with holocaust-denier Gilad Atzmon?
As Asa Winstanley, the Associate Editor of Electronic Intifada tweeted, I was Atzmon's nemesis.  I made it my mission to purge the Palestine Solidarity Campaign of all traces of his influence. Not because Jews would suffer as a consequence of Atzmon’s anti-Semitism but because the Palestine solidarity movement would. 
Yet despite this I do not accuse either Rees or German of anti-Semitism. What they are is political opportunists, who use revolutionary rhetoric to cover up their reformism and complete lack of socialist principles. Even to the extent of working with a well-known anti-Semite. What I cannot accept is their innuendo allegation that I have ever tolerated anti-Semitism.
It is this opportunism, the desire to have the name of an MP adorn their notepaper that leads to them being willing to concede to the Zionist anti-Semitism campaign, to the point where they echo the witchhunters’ accusations. Likewise their decision to frame their own criticism of Israel not in terms of an anti-Zionist, settler colonial analysis and anti-apartheid perspective but in terms which even liberal Zionists could accept.
Tony Greenstein

What’s Left of Labour? Come and hear Professor David Miller who has just been forced out of the Labour Party by Racist Zionists

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What are the Prospects for Labour? Come and hear Professor David Miller - driven out of the Labour Party by racists and Zionists


What has Starmer’s Labour got to offer politically in addressing domestic and international issues? Poverty and Covid-19, Black Lives Matter, Palestine, and Kashmir?
Brighton and Hove Labour Left Alliance is putting on another zoom meeting to help you while away all those hours in self-isolation!
Join us for a discussion with Kerry-Anne Mendoza, David Miller, and Katherine Connelly.
Professor Miller is one of 5 academic authors of Bad News for Labour. Zionist pressure during the Labour Party conference forced Waterstones to cancel the book launch.  Fortunately Brighton & Hove Labour Left Alliance stepped in and held the book launch.

Speaker bios:
David Milleris Professor of Sociology at the University of Bristol and the co-author of Bad News for Labour:AntiSemitism, The Party and Public Belief.
Kerry-Anne Mendoza is a writer, journalist, social commentator, and the editor of The Canary.
Katherine Connellyis a writer, historian, activist, and editor of Counterfire. She led the school strikes against the Iraq war in 2003 and co-ordinated the Emily Wilding Davison Memorial Campaign in 2013. Her biography of Sylvia Pankhurst was published by Pluto Press in 2013.
Professor David Miller forced to resign from the Labour Party this week
According to the Jewish Chronicle’s political correspondent ‘liar’ Lee Harpin, who was arrestedfor hacking into people’s voice mails, Professor David Miller has resigned from Labour blaming “the Zionist movement” only weeks after he was suspended from the party over allegations that did not involve antisemitism claims.
You might think that this is just another example of Labour ‘anti-Semitism’. Perhaps Liar Lee believes that the Jewish Chronicle’s readership is even more stupid than he is.
The Zionist CST clearly doesn't understand that academic freedom means the right to disagree with them!
The Zionist movement in Britain has targeted Professor Miller consistently.  On August 14th last year Simon Rocker wrote  about how the Zionist Community Security Trust
“has called Bristol University "an utter disgrace" over its response to a complaint the CST made about a lecture linking it to the spread of Islamophobia.
The community’s defence organisation protested in March over a lecture given earlier in the year by sociology professor David Miller which claimed that parts of the Zionist movement were funding hatred of Muslims.”
Professor David Miller's statement of resignation
What you might wonder has ‘community defence’ got to do with the contents of a lecture. Did he attack Jews? No he criticised Zionism, a political ideology and movement.
Why was the CST contacting Bristol University? Have they never heard of academic freedom? These Zionist groups monitor lecturers, encouraging students to secretly record them and then like the little McCarthyites they are inform on them to their racist patrons. Let me give the CST and any other Zionists a little lesson in Judaism.
Informing on people, Lashon hara, is the vilest of sins in the Jewish religion. Thousands of Jews have died because of it, not least in the Holocaust because of informers. According to Chabad
lashon hara, negative talk, is a sin that has caused numerous tragedies for the Jewish people, and indeed the world, since the very beginning of history.
According to the first point in the above article
Lashon haraliterally means “bad talk.” This means that it is forbidden to speak negatively about someone else, even if it is true.
The Nazi informers told the truth but their crimes were no less for it. Anne Frank was murdered because of an informer.  The fact that the Zionist movement is based today on this sin is proof in itself that there is nothing inherently ‘Jewish’ in Zionism.
There is absolutely no doubt that parts of the Zionist movement, such as the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism fund and deliberately stir up  anti-Muslim racism.
Professor Miller wrotethat he believed his suspension
“has much to do with my record of evidence-based research on  the Zionist movement and its influence on the British left and British politics more widely”.
and that
“my work shows the Zionist movement is an actually existing transnational network of organisations, which work tirelessly to justify Israel’s ongoing dispossession of the Palestinians. It works in collaboration with the leading Western imperial powers, most obviously the US and UK.”
As Asa Winstanley wrote in New Labour purge against Israel critics
David Miller is an expert on the propaganda operationsof state and corporate lobbies. He has documented the methods and history of the pro-Israel lobby for years.’
Amongst Miller’s crimes was suggesting ‘that most claims of antisemitism in the Labour Party were false.’ As the list of Jewish casualties of the ‘anti-Semitism’ allegations grows longer this is becoming ever more obviously true. As the JC noted
“Last year, the Community Security Trust had highlighted how he was “teaching his students that a wide range of British Jewish groups are one of the most important causes of Islamophobia today”.
Mark Gardner, the CST’s Director of Communications claimed that:
"This vile slur includes the Board of Deputies, the Jewish Leadership Council, CST and others, including groups that focus on Israel, such as Bicom, UJIA, ZF and JNF.''
Gardner, a virulent Zionist, must be joking. The JNF refuses to lease or rent the 93% of land it controls in Israel to non-Jews. It is a viciously racist organisation.
Israel is the most anti-Islamic state in the world (alongside India). It has passed specifically anti-Muslim legislation such as the anti-Muezzin law. As Ha’aretz wrote The ‘Muezzin Law’ Is a Stain on the Law Books
Israel state policy has repeatedly been to divide and rule between Christian and Muslim Arabs.
Israel  has waged a war against the Al Aqsa mosque, invading it with armed troops to attack worshippers. See e.g. Israeli forces storm Al-Aqsa Mosque with tear gas, stun grenades
Why does Gardener think that the world’s leading neo-Nazis and Islamaphobes admire Israel if not because of its anti-Muslim hatred?  The role call is a long one. As Ha’aretz askedWhy Is Mainstream Jewish Philanthropy Funding anti-Muslim, Far Right Pamela Geller?
As the Southern Poverty Law Centre wrote:
Pamela Geller is currently one of the most flamboyant anti-Muslimactivists in the United States. Geller relentlessly pushes her Muslim-bashing on her blog, “Atlas Shrugs,” and is also a contributor to the far-right Breitbart News. …
Geller’s style consists of broad-brush denunciations of Islam, and preposterous claims such as that President Obama is the "love child" of Malcolm X..
  
Then there is Robert Spencer, Geller’s partner in crime who arguesthat the Palestinians ‘were invented’.  Both of them have been banned from entering Britain.
To say nothing of Richard Spencer -  neo-Nazi founder of the alt-Right – who declares himself a White Zionist.  Newsweek informs us that White Supremacist Richard Spencer Is a Fan of Israel's Nation-State Law.
And of course there are British fascists such as Tommy Robinson, who has also declaredthat he is a Zionist.  And there is Britain First.  See Far-right Britain First fosters ties with Zionist movement
The fact is that racists and fascists the world over love Israel for its Muslim bashing. If the CST don’t like David Miller telling the truth, then that’s tough.  It’s called freedom of speech.
The CST using ‘Jewish Defence’ as a pretext, has engaged in spying on lecturers in an attempt to destroy free speech on Israel. In the same articlethe CST admits that it supplied Bristol University with a copy of a slide it alleged had been used in a lecture that listed the “Zionist movement (parts of)” as one of the “five pillars” of Islamophobia.
‘The Jewish security group called Bristol University "an utter disgrace" over its response to the complaint and the failure to take action.’
One wonders what action the CST would like Bristol to take? Clearly they want him dismissed.
Rebecca Gould whose 'egregious' attack by the CAA was denounced by the author of the IHRA 
We know what the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism demands in the case of lecturers who upset it.  It calls for their sacking. It targetedProfessor Rebecca Gould in February 2017 for a thoughtful article she wrote for Counterpunch on how people like the CAA and Israel use the Holocaust as a weapon against the Palestinians.
Dr Rebecca Gould, a lecturer at the University of Bristol, has been caught red-handed having written a sickening article about antisemitism.
Even Kenneth Stern, the American academic who drafted the Zionists IHRA misdefinition of anti-Semitism launched a scathing attack on what the CAA had done in Rebecca Gould’s case. In testimonyto the US Congress he wrote:
Perhaps most egregious, an off-campus group citing the definition called on a university to conduct an inquiry of a professor (who received her PhD from Columbia) for antisemitism, based on an article she had written years before.26 The university then conducted the inquiry.27 And while it ultimately found no basis to discipline the professor, the exercise itself was chilling and McCarthy-like
Let’s have a closer look at the CST’s sister organisation, the CAA. Its Anti-Semitism Barometer 2019 demands:
‘FULL PROSCRIPTION OF HAMAS. In 2001, the UK proscribed Hamas’ military wing, ... However, it has not proscribed its political wing. Hamas is a genocidal antisemitic terrorist organisation which seeks the murder of all Jews worldwide. Article 7 of the HamasCovenant issued in 1988, which remains Hamas’ governing document states that: “The Day of Judgment will not come about until Muslims fight Jews and kill them.
One could of course dredge up similar war-like statements from the Bible e.g. the Book of Joshua is about a Jewish genocidaire, who is a heroto the Zionist movement and former Premier David Ben Gurion.
The original Hamas Charter, which has always been a dead letter, was disavowedin 2017. Dr. Ahmed Yousef, an adviser to Ismail Haniyeh (the senior political leader of Hamas), claimedthat Hamas has changed its views over time since the charter was issued in 1988. In 2010 Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal stated that the Charter is "a piece of history and no longer relevant, but cannot be changed for internal reasons."
In May 2018 Bassem Naeem wrote an articlefor the Guardian, Hamas condemns the Holocaust. Strangely enough the Zionists never quote it!
Hamas is not anti-Jewish. Jews such as Ha’aretz’s Amira Hass have lived in the Gaza Strip without any harm coming to them. Jews have been regular visitors to Gaza. Of course when Israeli soldiers massacre their people in the name of the Jews then they will react accordingly.
CAA’s suggestion that Hamas is ‘a genocidal antisemitic terrorist organisation’ is a blatant example of Islamaphobia. Indeed the obsessive Zionist attacks on Hamas for its resistance activities are Islamaphobic.  The word ‘genocidal’ better applies to the State of Israel than  Hamas. Israel has killed thousands of Palestinian civilians in Gaza. Hamas has killed very few Israelis in retaliation for the carpet bombing of Gaza and all the other attacks.
Attacks on Hamas are a regular feature of Zionist propaganda. Zionist organisations like the Board of Deputies justifiedIsrael’s murder by snipers of unarmed demonstrators through the false allegation that they were members of Hamas.  No doubt this included the 70+ children these vile murderers have mown down.
Starmer's session with the Jewish Labour Movement including handing him a hit list of people to expel
Hamas isn’t an organisation I support politically. It is a conservative Islamist group but the vast majority of Zionist attacks on it are spurious and racist. 
Not oncehas the CST or indeed any Zionist organisation disavowed the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism and its vile hostility to Muslims.  Indeed they work together and the Jewish Labour Movement, supposedly on the left of the Zionist movement, submitted a joint complaint to the EHRC about Labour ‘anti-Semitism’
Let us have a look at a 2016 CAA Report  British Muslims and antiSemitism.  It is as vile a piece of Islamaphobic propaganda as you will find. It has a picture of a man, we don’t know his religion but he’s dark so that will do, on the front cover holding a ‘Hitler was right’poster. The implication is clear. All Muslims are Hitler supporters. The fact that this man was an oddity and that Hitler support is the prerogative of the far-Right elude them.
The Report included a full colour (later reduced to a Black and White silhouette after complaints) profile of a Muslim Male which if it had been the typical Jew i would have stimulated cries of ‘anti-Semitism’ from here to Lands End.  The link to the full report including the graphic has now disappeared. The CAA report read:
Today, our analysis of the ICM survey of British Muslims for Channel 4 and Juniper Television shows that the gradual buildup of understanding and friendship between Britain’s Jews and Muslims has been utterly eclipsed by growing antisemitism amongst British Muslims.
On every single count, British Muslims were more likely by far than the general British population to hold deeply antisemitic views. It is clear that many British Muslims reserve a special hatred for British Jews, rating Jews much less favourably than people of other religions or no religion, yet astonishingly British Muslims largely do not recognise antisemitism as a major problem.
It has long been suspected that sections of the British Muslim population harboured hatred towards British Jews. This survey goes some way to identifying pockets of prejudice, but it also shows that the prejudice is horrifyingly widespread.
Imagine if the same were said about British Jews?  There is no doubt that if such a survey were taken of British Jews then you would indeed see the depth of Islamaphobia in the Jewish community as a result of Zionist propaganda against Arabs over the years.
Come and hear David Miller explain why the Zionists are out to get him tonight at 7.00 p.m.
Come and also hear Kerry Ann Mendoza whose Canary news site has been under continual attack from the Zionists and the Labour Right.  It performs an invaluable service in combating mainstream media narratives.
Please REGISTER herefor the meeting
Tony Greenstein

Defend Free Speech and Reject the Attempts of the Apartheid Regime in Tel Aviv and their British Puppets to Ban Anti-racists and Anti-Zionists

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The Board of Deputies issued 10 Commandments (Pledges) which ‘Sir’ Keir Starmer is implementing – the 5th Commandment means no platforming Black and Jewish anti-racists


It is of course strange because the 5th of the original 10  Commandments, was 'thou shalt honour thy father and mother' not 'thou shalt not speak with Jewish anti-Zionists and those expelled for anti-Zionism.'  
In the Board of Deputies history it has neverorganised a demonstration against fascists or racists.  When Sir Oswald Moseley’s British Union of Fascists tried to march through the Jewish East End on October 4 1936, the Board told Jews to stay at home and keep quiet.  Thousands of Jews, including my father, ignored them and the Zionists.

But when Jeremy Corbyn got elected the Board waged an all out war on him. On 26thMarch 2018 they organisedan ‘Enough is Enough’ demonstration outside Parliament calling Corbyn a racist.  They were joined by fellow racists, Norman Tebbit of the ‘cricket test’ (if you were an Indian and supported the Indian cricket team you weren’t really British) and Ian Paisley Jnr. MP, the Protestant bigot from Northern Ireland.
The Board of Deputies is mandated by its own Constitution, Clause 3(d) to ‘Take such appropriate action as lies within its power to advance Israel's security, welfare and standing.’ 
This is Israel today - but Keir Starmer just loves Zionism
That was why the Board was so insistent that the Labour Party accept a new definition of ‘anti-Semitism’.  The old one in the Oxford English Dictionary, ‘hostility to or prejudice against Jew’ was obviously useless when it came to defending Israel.  Whereas the IHRA, a 500+ word ‘definition’ which includes ‘Israel’ in 7 of its 11 examples is tailor made.
It is as if it were anti-Brazilian to demonstrate against Bolsonaro or we were anti-Chilean when we demonstrated against Pinochet.
Margaret Hodge - one of the leading witchhunters was praised by the BNP for her housing policies
It is unfortunate that some on the Left, in particular Counterfire but also the SWP, still don’t get it.  They still think it’s about anti-Semitism. They still shout ‘I am not anti-Semitic’as if the Zionists are in the slightest concerned.
Zionism begins from an abandonment of the fight against anti-Semitism.  It believes that Jews form a separate nation from those they live amongst and that they should live in their own nation state, Israel.
Not for nothing did the founder of Zionism write in his Diaries (p.231) that
‘Anti-Semitism, too, probably contains the Divine will to Good, because it forces us to close ranks, unites us through pressure, and through our unity will make us free.’
That is why anti-Semites love the IHRA.  It’s not about hating Jews but hating Zionism.  That is why from Tommy Robinson to neo-Nazi Richard Spencer and DonaldTrump, you can both hate Jews andlove Israel as the ideal ethno-nationalist state.
At the end of April, Jackie Walker and I spoke at a meeting at which Dianne Abbot MP and Bell Ribeiro-Addy spoke.  All hell broke loose with the Zionists demanding both MPs be suspended. The Jewish Chronicle reportedthat
A frustrated Oswald Moseley
Tony Greenstein, who was expelled over antisemitism allegations, and Jackie Walker, who was booted out of Labour on gross misconduct charges, both participated in Wednesday evening's meeting of the newly formed 'Don't Leave, Organise' group, who also received the backing of former Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell.
Last May I spoke at a Birmingham Stop the War Coalition meeting to which Salma Yaqoob had been invited.  Immediately Ian Austin, the nasty little right-wing twerp who heckled Jeremy Corbyn during the Chilcott debate, an avid warmonger, called for Salma’s suspension. Salma denied having ever accepted the invitation but regardless it should be obvious to all that this Zionist McCarthyism has to be fought.
The Zionist tactics resemble the actions of the Apartheid regime in South Africa which, under the 1982 Internal Security Act had a class of ‘banned persons’ who could neither be associated with, quoted or published.  They are the tactics of the Board of Deputies and their Zionist supporters, Starmer included.
It is regrettable that in a statementthat Stop the War Coalition put out defending Salma Yaqoob, instead of attacking the witchhunters they sought to allay the fears of their Labour MP patrons. Lindsey German, their Convenor, refused to take down the last 2 sentences of a statement which read:
Local StWC groups act autonomously in deciding their platforms, but we note that Tony Greenstein has never been asked to address a national StWC meeting.  StWC rejects both anti-Semitism and abusive language in political debate.’
Lord John Mann, one of the leading 'antisemitism' campaigners is an anti-Gypsy bigot
Normally organisations publicise who has spoken on their platforms not who hasn’t!  StWC was however seeking to placate the witchhunters and their Labour patrons who refused to give Chris Williamson any support when he was suspended. 
neo-Nazi Richard Spencer just loves Israel
Tomorrow we are holding the first in what we hope will be a series of meetings highlighting the growth of McCarthyism in the Labour Party.  Chaired by Chris Williamson, Ken Livingstone, Jackie Walker, Marc Wadsworth and myself will be speaking.
You can tune in on either Youtube or Facebook.  We look forward to you joining us. 
We will not be silenced
Tony Greenstein
You can access the meeting via these 2 links

Hundreds at Zoom Meeting Say – Stand up to Starmer Help Build the Campaign for Free Speech on Palestine & Zionism in the Labour Party

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The Cowardice of the Campaign Group of MPs and the ‘revolutionary’ Counterfire


Chris Williamson - Chair of the meeting


Last night hundreds tuned in to Youtube, Facebook and Zoom to a meeting called by the main victims of the Anti-Semitism witchhunt.  You can listen to the meeting here
It was chaired by former Labour MP, Chris Williamson. Speaking were Jackie Walker, Marc Wadsworth, Tony Greenstein and Max Blumenthall from the United States.
White supremacist Richard Spencer and other racists, such as Keir Starmer, just love Israel
The witchhunt has taken a heavy personal burden on many people.  Many have become depressed and ill because of the false allegations. When people who have devoted their life to anti-racism are accused by racists of ‘anti-Semitism’  then it can be extremely depressing.
Some, like Pauline Hammerton, died because of the callousness of Labour’s witchhunters.  It was a witchhunt directed solely at the pro-Corbyn left.  Yet despite this Corbyn signed up to an anti-Semitism campaign designed to remove him.
This is what Starmer and the Labour Right are defending - open apartheid in Israel
Corbyn was both cowardly and stupid.  Despite 30+ years of work over Palestine Corbyn never got it.  Never understood how malicious and vindictive the Zionist movement is.  Never understood that Zionism isn’t a nice friendly form of Jewish identity but it is the ideology that dictates the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.
This is the Israel that Keir Starmer is defending
Corbyn voluntarilyadopted the IHRA after Theresa May because he thought he was being clever to wear the Crown of Thorns. He came to realise that the crown can be a heavy burden.
Corbyn introduced the fast-track expulsion procedure and lied that it would only apply to the most ‘egregious’ cases whereas it applies now to every ‘anti-Semitism’ case.
All of us have borne a heavy load but we are determined that the fake anti-Semitism narrative will not win out. Truth will prevail.
Marc Wadsworth speaking tonight
Marc Wadsworth described in detail the events of that June day at the Chakrabarti press conference when Ruth Smeeth MP didn’t like to be challenged over her dealings with a Telegraph journalist.  She walked out shouting ‘how dare you’ ‘how dare you’ like the spoilt brat she was. Almost unbelievably Index on Censorshiphas just made this harridan its Chief Executive.  I hope people protest and ensure that this fake NGO doesn’t receive another penny in donations.
Tony Greenstein speaking to a large picket at the Marc Wadsworth hearing
I described the background to the witchhunt and also made passing mention of the cowardice of the ‘socialist’ Campaign Group of MPs, all of whom we had invited to speak to the meeting but none had responded.
Jackie Walker speaking to the meeting
Jackie Walker spoke next and described the anti-Semitic nature of the witchhunt.  25 Jewish members of the Labour Party are currently suspended.  Why?  Because they are anti-racists who detest what the Israeli state is doing to the Palestinians.
Max Blumenthall gave a riveting description of events on the other side of the pond and Chris Williamson gave us some background on how he had been stabbed in the back by fellow ‘socialists’ in Parliament.
Max Blumenthall speaking to the meeting
Unfortunately Ken Livingstone, who is 75 today, was unable to be with us.  However we intend to insure that at future meetings that Ken is with us.
The meeting is intended as a start.  We have to roll back these attempts by a foreign state, Israel, through its agents, the Jewish Labour Movement and the Board of Deputies, to try and roll back civil liberties and democratic freedoms in this country.
Tony Greenstein speaking
That is why the Campaign for Freedom of Speech is the beginning not the end.
Unfortunately sections of the far-left, including Stand Up to Racism and in particular Counterfireand their front organisation, Stop the War Coalition, although they oppose the ‘anti-Semitism’ witchhunt in theory, in practice they accept its dictates.
Ad for Birmingham StWC Meeting which sparked off the Statement from Lindsey German
In the case of Stop the War Coalition, when I was invited to speak to Birmingham StWC, Salma Yaqoob was forced to withdraw because of the pressures on her.
Most racists today - from Tommy Robinson to Ian Austin support Israeli Apartheid
StWC put out a statement defending Salma but including the following 2 lines:
Local StWC groups act autonomously in deciding their platforms, but we note that Tony Greenstein has never been asked to address a national StWC meeting.  StWC rejects both anti-Semitism and abusive language in political debate.
The behaviour of Counterfire is naked cowardice and I have written an Open Letter to Lindsey German the Convenor of StWC demanding that this statement is amended.  Lindsey German, who with her partner John Rees, left the SWP 10 years ago have retained its method of opportunism and having no fixed principles.
2 racists together - Smeeth and Berger
When they were in Respect they urged that their supporters in the SWP vote against a woman’s right to choose an abortion. When in the SWP, despite their protestations about ‘anti-Semitism’ now, they worked with an open anti-Semites Gilad Atzmon for 5 years.  At one stage Jews Against Zionism had to picket a meeting that the SWP had put on for Atzmon.  His topic on the night was Otto Weininger, who was described apocryphally by Hitler as ‘the only good Jew – he killed himself’.
Stop the War Coalition's Cowardly Statement
Thursday June 18 2020
Dear Lindsay German,
Further to our previous correspondence regarding the Stop the War Coalition [StWC] statementin defence of Salma Yaqoob.  This statementcame about as a result of an invitation to me to address a meeting of Birmingham StWC on May 12th.
Salma was also asked to speak to the meeting and it was advertised as such.
Almost immediately the political rattlesnake that goes by the name of Ian Austin, the former warmongering MP, called on the Labour Party [LP] to suspended Salma for speaking on the same platform as myself, an expelled member. Being seen with the ‘wrong sort of Jew’ is, according to Zionist Doublethink another example of the ‘anti-Semitism’ pandemic.
Lindsay German - there are no principles that Lindsay isn't willing to trade - abortion/gay rights they're all up 4 sale
My objection is to the final 2 sentences of your statementwhich reads:
Local StWC groups act autonomously in deciding their platforms, but we note that Tony Greenstein has never been asked to address a national StWC meeting.  StWC rejects both anti-Semitism and abusive language in political debate
The real meaning of your statement is that anyone who is expelled or suspended will not be welcome on StWC platforms . The statementis a disgrace. It not only betrays those who have been expelled or suspended but it sells out the Palestinians. The whole point of the purge is to chill debate on Palestine and opposition to Zionism as even Kenneth Stern, the person who drafted the IHRA misdefinition of anti-Semitism now admits.
The final sentence of your statement: ‘StWC rejects both anti-Semitism and abusive language in political debate’ clearly refers to me. ‘Abuse’ was the pretext for my expulsion. 
FYI the major example of ‘abuse’ was me calling Louise Ellman, a supporter of Palestinian child abuse. Not oncebut twice, during debates in Parliament on the treatment of Palestinian children – arrests in the early hours, blindfolding, beatings, sexual assault of girls, torture, refusal of access to parents and lawyers – Ellman defend the Israeli military.  My expulsion hearing deemed this ‘abuse’.  I’m surprised Counterfire should be in agreement.
Your statement says that StWC ‘refuse to accept that criticism of the Israeli government and its policies can be construed as anti-Semitic’ Most Zionists would agree with you! The IHRA misdefinition of anti-Semitism explicitly states that ‘criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic’. The IHRA’s main purpose is to outlaw criticism of the specifically Zionist i.e. Jewish supremacist nature of the Israeli state.
Solidarity is the ABC of socialism. You have shown a complete lack of solidarity as we were attacked by a full spectrum of the Establishment media. What you should have said was that
‘Tony Greenstein is welcome to appear on a national platform. We refused to be bullied and blackmailed by the supporters of Zionism and Israeli Apartheid.’
Tonight we held a large zoom meeting with Max Blumenthall, Jackie Walker, Marc Wadsworth and myself. It was chaired by Chris Williamson.  Ken Livingstone was unfortunately ill.  We are determined to resist the Board of Deputies and Keir Starmer. I’m sorry that Counterfirewon’t join us.
When I emailed StWC asking them to delete the last 2 sentences of the statement, Lindsey German, StWC Convenor and founding member of Counterfire responded:
In response to your communications: We are not changing the statement issued, which made no allegations against you.  We will not engage in any further correspondence on this issue.
The statement that I have never spoken on a national StWC platform is curious. Most organisations advertise who is speaking on their platforms, not who is not speaking! This is virtue signalling to the witchhunters that StWC will abide by their conditions and and that you won’t do anything to embarrass Campaign Group MPs by hosting those who have been suspended/ expelled from the LP. This is betrayal not solidarity.
Kate Connelly, the Editor of Counterfire, spoke Wednesday night at a meetingof Brighton & Hove Labour Left Alliance [LLA]. I therefore asked Kate how she reconciled Counterfire’s theoretical opposition to the Zionists’ ‘Anti-Semitism’ Campaign, which led to Corbyn’s defeat, with your complicity with that campaign. Unsurprisingly Kate had no answer.
During the leadership contest Keir Starmer agreed the Zionists’ 10 Commandments, No. 5 of which states ‘thou shalt not speak or otherwise associate with those suspended or expelled’. This is a slight change from the previous version, to ‘love, honour and obey’ one’s parents.
The Labour Right and the Zionists are seeking to purge the LP of its anti-imperialist elements. Clearly Palestine is at the centre of this. I am amazed that a group that calls itself revolutionary and Marxist does not understand the connections between British foreign policy, imperialist war and the ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign in the Labour Party.
The reason for the fake ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign was Corbyn’s opposition to NATO’s wars, Trident and his support for the Palestinians. Unfortunately, like Counterfire, Corbyn did not understand Zionism, the ideology and movement, behind the establishment of Israel.
What is glaringly absent from your statementis any condemnation of the McCarthyist campaign of the Zionists. The attempt to create a category of ‘banned persons’as per the Internal Security Act in Apartheid South Africa should be fought tooth and nail.  It closes down free speech for the Left. Jewish anti-Zionists and Black anti-racists.
Instead of signalling to Labour’s witchhunters that expelled and suspended members won’t appear on StWC platforms, what you should have done is to say that those who have been falsely accused of anti-Semitism are welcome to appear on StWC platforms.
Instead of reinforcing the political cowardice of patrons who are Campaign Group MPs or trade union officials, you should have been encouraging them to resist this state sponsored campaign. You should have encouraged your patrons to issue a collective statement repudiating Starmer’s McCarthyism whilst he is still weak. 
Instead you pandered to the same political cowardice that led to the Campaign Group dissociating itself from Chris Williamson. Your behaviour to date is shameful. You are revolutionary in theory and reformist in practice.
I look forward to an apology, a deletion of the offending parts of the statement and a clear statement saying that you will not co-operate, in any shape or form with Labour’s purge.
Twice in the past 8 months Brighton and Hove LLA have invited speakers from Counterfire to address our meetings. I understood that you rejected the opportunism of the SWP, from which you came. The SWP allows far-Right Zionists to take part in marches against racism.
Clearly we were wrong and until you clarify your position I am opposed to inviting any further speakers from Counterfire or having anything else to do with you or StWC.
Yours in solidarity

Tony Greenstein



The Lies and Deceit of David Collier – When Everything is Anti-Semitic, Nothing is Anti-Semitic

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How could such a vile racist have been the pin-up boy of the Guardian and the Fake ‘Anti-Semitism’ Merchants?


One of the good things about the lockdown and coronavirus is that you can organise large Zoom meetings, with international speakers and hundreds of people in the audience, at little or no cost.
Collier is always the victim
Even better, because there is no physical location, the Zionists can huff and puff but there’s nothing that they can do to ban them! No cowardly Methodist minister, quaking Quaker or Anglican vicar who, on hearing the word ‘anti-Semitism’, goes weak kneed and into a sweat at the behest of the apostles of  Apartheid before banning a meeting about the Palestinians. No longer can people assuage their guilt over the Holocaust by attacking the victims of Zionist colonisation.
It was therefore to be expected that David Collier, who has the chutzpah to title himself an ‘independent researcher’ would go into a hissy fit about the Campaign for Freedom of Speech’s first public meeting last Thursday.
‘This research is fully independent. I am not affiliated with any political group or community organisation. I believe this independence is important and adds to the integrity of the work.’
To paraphrase Mandy Rice-Davies, if you believe that you will believe anything. In fact there are good reasons to suspect that much of his ‘research’ is a cut and paste job and photoshopped.
A few words about Collier.  The Guardian has called him an activist journalist’and a businessman’.  To the Sunday Times he was an ‘anti-Semitism researcher’. In fact he is a humourless propagandist, an Israeli businessman resident in Britain. He is mild-mannered and pleasant in person but he keeps company with the worst trash of the Zionist far-Right.
Collier at a demonstration with Paul Besser of Britain First (in blue raincoat)
No fascist, racist (or anti-Semite) is too extreme for him as long as they are pro-Israel. Tommy Robinson and his supporters, members of Britain First and the EDL, even veteran fascist Jonathan Hoffman. All are welcome under Collier’s big tent. The only qualification is that they must be 100% in support of Israel and fortunately today most neo-Nazis are pro-Zionist. For example Richard Spencer, the founder of the alt-Right, calls himself a ‘White Zionist’.
Dr Brian and David Collier - keeping company with fascists is all part of the 'fight against antisemitism'
Yet despite this, during the ‘anti-Semitism’ attacks on Jeremy Corbyn he was treated by Britain’s press as a neutral researcher. To call him an ‘activist journalist’ is like calling Hannibal Lecter a face surgeon. Collier bears as much relationship to journalism as Mussolini did to democratic politics. He is a crude propagandist but for Jonathan Freedland that is more than enough.
‘Mad’ Mel P (as she used to be known in her punk days!), writing in the Sunday Times, calledCollier a
‘British Jew who devotes much of his life to chronicling the anti-Israel and anti-Jewish attitudes which have become epidemic in political and intellectual life.’ 



David Collier with his family - evicted from Pal Expo 3 years ago
It was no surprise that Collier didn’t like our meeting. Zionism is and always has been a totalitarian movement. In Israel, contrary to the fools who believe Israel is ‘the only democracy in the Middle East’there is stringent censorship, torture is legal, imprisonment without trial is a daily occurrence and the Defence Ministry has its own unit Malmab which raids archives looking for documents to seize which tell the story of the expulsion of the Palestinian refugees. There is an official narrative that the Palestinians ran away, despite the Zionists begging them to stay.  Unfortunately the historical record says otherwise.
Zionism’s whole political strategy is about demonising its opponents. The last thing it wants is to debate its own record because when it does it invariably loses.  There is really no defence that explains the sexual abuse, torture, blindfolding and denial of access to lawyers or their parents for Palestinian children as young as 12.
Apparently Collier didn't appreciate our meeting! 
It is far better to shout ‘anti-Semitism’ or accuse Jewish people of being ‘self haters’ ‘traitors’ etc.
Freedom of speech and Zionists have the same relationship to each other as oil and water. However the lengths that Collier went to to attack the meeting on Free Speech are pitiful even by Collier’s low standards.
The first thing is to conjure up an absurd headline. The absurder the better. So Collier describes the Freedom of Speech Meeting thus:
Collier (standing) overlooking well known fascist Jonathan Hoffman
Why it was toxic Collier doesn’t say, apart from making it clear that he doesn’t like free speech and doesn’t want to debate Zionism.
Collier and his fascist friends are not great believers in free speech. His only concern is fighting ‘anti-Semitism’. Not the type of anti-Semitism which involves hatred of Jews but anti-Zionism which is about criticism of Apartheid.
Collier was a member of the shadowy far-Right Jewish Defence Forces Facebook group until this blog outed him
You might think that Collier had a small problem. In the most toxic and anti-Semitic meeting the world has ever seen, 3 out of the 4 speakers were Jewish! Jackie Walker, Max Blumenthall and myself. Chris Williamson was chairing the meeting. Ken Livingstone, the pioneer of anti-racist work in local government was unfortunately ill and Marc Wadsworth is a long-standing Black activist. Clearly this was going to be a very ‘toxic’ meeting.
Collier with fellow fascist Jonathan Hoffman
So how did Collier solve this dilemma? Fear not, Collier is nothing if not inventive. He simply does not mention that Max and myself are Jewish, although anyone with a few brain cells might work it out from our names.
In the case of Jackie Walker Collier’s solution is quite ingenious (at least for a racist). He speaks of ‘Jackie Walker’s adoption of a Jewish identity’. In other words she is not a real Jew. Now Jackie has a Jewish father and a non-Jewish mother. It is true that Orthodox Jews trace Jewish lineage through the mother however Reform Jews accepts as Jewish anyone with 1 Jewish parent, regardless of their gender. In fact historically the Jewish religion originally traced descent through the father as the Patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, demonstratae.
Israel’s 1950Law of Return, the racist foundation stone of the Israeli state, which gives any Jew the right to emigrate to Israel whilst denying that same right to the Palestinians, goes even further than the Nazi definition of a Jew on which it is modelled. Not only is someone considered Jewish who has one Jewish grandparent but their partner and their children are also considered Jewish!
So how is it that Collier denies Jackie Walker’s Jewishness? Well you see not only is Zionism racist against Palestinians but it is also racist against Black people. Ethiopian Jews are considered almost as bad as Arabs in Israel. Indeed Israel no longer takes Falasha Jews. The Orthodox Rabbinate in Israel has long cast doubtabout their being Jewish even while, at the same time, accepting as Jewish Russians who have no discernible Jewish ancestry.
According to the Zionists Jackie is Black or Schvartze in Hebrew (which roughly means nigger). Zionism is not just a Jewish supremacist movement but it is also a White supremacist movement, albeit that the latter takes second place to its hostility to non-Jews and Palestinians in particular.

At one time the Black Hebrews who came from the United States were not recognised as Jews and many were deported back to the United States.  Even though this practice has now ceased, the Black Hebrews largely live by themselves near Dimona in the Negev. Likewise Israel’s hostilityto the 40,000 Black refugees from Africa in Israel is heightened by a quite vicious racism which considers them little different to monkeys. The former Sephardi Chief Rabbi of Israel, Ovadia Yosef and his successor, his son Yitzhak Yosef, made a specific comparison between Africans and monkeys. Shas, which is the political party that the Yosefs are the titular heads of, is in the ruling coalition.
It’s true that Collier was unable to say that I had ‘adopted’ a Jewish identity since my father was a rabbi and my grandfather was a Tsadik. Collier solves this problem by the simple expedient of ignoring it!
Indeed since Collier and most of today’s Zionists, including the Chief Rabbi, claim that Judaism and Zionism are one and the same, it takes little imagination to understand that in their eyes, if you are not a Zionist you cannot be a Jew! This despite the fact that a century ago the most vehement opposition to Zionism came from the religious Orthodox and even today Agudat Yisrael, which is represented in the Knesset, defines itself as non-Zionist.  Clearly god has changed his mind! Collier goes on to say that the event ‘forms part of the ongoing Williamson campaign to start a new political movement.... Jews need not apply.’  So an event, 75% of whose speakers are Jewish, is one which won’t allow Jews to join!
Collier goes on to deprecate my remarks that Labour ‘anti-Semitism’ is ‘manufactured, simulated, created and falsified’ before he goes on to say that ‘When they talk about free speech, they mean they want freedom to attack the Jews.’
The strange thing is that Collier is unable to quote even one thing, from any of the 4 speakers, which is anti-Semitic or attacks Jews. Strange that isn’t it?  If you attended a BNP or EDL meeting, like Collier, you would have no difficulty quoting racist phrases.
Collier’s main complaint is that my speech ‘which was mostly incoherent waffle’ although he seems to have understood it nonetheless, is ‘about the incredibly well funded and coordinated campaign, which he is certain does not originate in the UK.’
Apparently that is anti-Semitic. Yet it is a fact that Zionist campaigns in Britain are well-funded. For example the well funded BICOM propaganda agency and its various offshoots.
David protests that he is ‘just some unfunded researcher, sitting with little more than a keyboard, access to the internet, an Oyster card...’ My heart bleeds for dodgy Dave. I would find it very strange if Collier hasn’t received funding and support from the Israeli state. Indeed it would be remarkable if he hadn’t however proving it is another matter.
But let’s assume that David is just an isolated unfunded fascist. There is the small matter of the Al Jazeera programme, The Lobby, which showed, over 4 programmes, how involved the Israeli Embassy had been in destabilising the Labour Party with fake ‘anti-Semitism’ allegations.
It is a fact that Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs is headed by Brigadier General Sima Vaknin-Gil  who was previously the Chief Israeli censor. She has admitted that the Ministry ‘liases’ with US pro-Israel groups. It has a budget of $50m to oppose BDS. What does Collier say about the article by well-known Israeli journalist, Yossi Melman Israel's anti-BDS campaign: Propaganda and dirty tricks, subtitled, ‘Israel's Ministry of Strategic Affairs is carrying out underhand 'special operations' to undermine the global BDS movement’.
Is this anti-Semitic I wonder?  It is alleging all the things and more that we were saying? Is Melman’s views toxic or is it simply that David can’t handle people who disagree with him.
Perhaps the Guardian’s Pro-Israel donors spent over $22m on lobbying and contributions in 2018 is also anti-Semitic?  After all it’s true and today it seems that anything that is true must be anti-Semitic almost by definition!
We also know for a fact that Israel lobby organisations channel money to its favoured candidates via Super PACS. All this is well known.  It is also a matter of record that the election campaign of Keir Starmer was funded by some very well known Zionists such as Sir Trevor Chinn to the tune of £50,000.
David unfortunately makes a common mistake.  He can’t tell the difference between conspiracy theories and conspiracies. The CIA is nothing if not a conspiracy. Its attempts to destabilise governments it doesn’t like, assassination attempts, terrorist bombs in Lebanon etc. are a matter of record. It has plotted and planned the destabilisation of numerous countries.  See for example How The CIA Overthrew Iran's Democracy In 4 Days.
Of course there are conspiracy theorists who imagine that 9/11 was the work of a handful of Israelis or David Icke’s lizards, rather than accepting more simple and obvious explanations but it is not a conspiracy theory to say that Israel actively seeks to interfere in the political processes of western countries. Still less is it anti-Semitic.
Collier even objects, on the grounds of ‘free speech’, to the deletion of a comment on Youtube that ‘Chris Williamon, Jackie Walker and Marc Wadsworth were rightly expelled because because they are racist anti-Semites.’Since this is untrue it is perfectly right to delete it.  There is no reason why we should put up offensive lies.
David doesn’t understand that racist abuse, which is what the above is, is an attack on free speech.  Libels like that are used to try and deny us a platform. It is also a lie. Chris Williamson was not expelled and the charges against Jackie and Marc did not mention anti-Semitism.  So what Collier is trying to uphold is the right to lie and defame.  All in the name of  the fight against ‘anti-Semitism’.
Free speech is about the right to put forward your own views without some racist toad phoning up a venue and threatening and abusing them if they don’t cancel a meeting.
Collier is a good example of a Racist who calls anti-racists ‘racist’
Just as the National Front and British National Party used to accuse their opponents of being ‘anti-White’ racists so do today’s Zionists attack their opponents as ‘anti-Semites’.
Racist booklet by John Mann led to a formal interview with the Police
One of the hallmarks of Labour’s ‘anti-Semitism’ drivel was the phenomenon of racists like Tom Watson and John Mann, accusing anti-racists of ‘anti-Semitism’.  It is as if anti-Semitism is not a form of racism but a species apart.
There was Tom Watson as Election Campaign Co-ordinator in 2004’s by election in Birmingham’s Hodge Hill putting out a leaflet which said ‘Labour is on your side, the Lib Dems are on the side of failed asylum seekers." In 2010 Watson was defending racist Labour MP Phil Woolas, who was removed from Parliament by the High Court after having waged a campaign intended to make the ‘white folk angry’. Watson explainedthat ‘I’ve lost sleep thinking about poor old Phil Woolas and his leaflets.
Or there is the small matter of Lord John Mann, the ‘anti-Semitism Czar’ putting out a booklet, The Bassetlaw Anti-Social Behaviour Handbook, describing Gypsies and Roma as a problem of social behaviour. Which is little different from the Nazi description of them as ‘asocial’.
Keeping Company with Tommy Robinson’s Supporters
During the height of the ‘anti-Semitism’ witchhunt in May 2016 Collier took part in a debate which was ostensibly on the question of 2 states.  Suffice to say most participants were in favour of 1 Apartheid state and the Palestinians would be given a choice between emigration or living as guests in their own country.
Participants include ‘Mad’ Melanie Phillips and Brian John Thomas, the main promoterof Tommy Robinson in Israel. Clearly this was just the type of speakers panel which we should have sponsored!
Collier however distinguished himself with his own racist contribution. There are no Palestinians he informed us.  For Collier the Palestinians do not exist.
‘The Palestinian refugee was forged as a weapon. It was created as an artificial entity inside a paradigm of ‘no to normalisation’ and it cannot exist outside that paradigm.
You will notice that David, who is so concerned with ‘anti-Semitism’, except when the anti-Semites are supporters of Israel, could not even bring himself to call the Palestinian refugees human beings.  He referred to them as ‘it throughout. What he calls ‘normalisation’ means accepting their status as resident aliens in a Greater Israel.
Collier with KKK (Sharon) Klaff who when South Africa abolished Apartheid found Israel a more hospitable climate
He then coyly refers to how
Itwill do anything it can to stop any type of settlement. And today, as demographics have changed in the West, this weapon has taken up camp here too.
The Palestinians aren’t human beings.  They are just a weapon.  Which conjures up the old racist images of Africans as dangerous creatures.
What Collier means by ‘demographics have changed in the West’ is the fascist ‘replacement theory’ whereby Muslims are invading Europe and changing its character.  It is the kind of murderous racism that Jews once experienced. His solution?
Collier speaking to a far-Right Herut meeting
You scrap the ridiculous definition of a Palestinian refugee You dismantle UNWRA...’
UNWRA is the United Nations Welfare and Relief Association. It provides the food and basic means by which the refugees can live. In fact that well-known anti-racist Trump has done just that. As far as Collier is concerned they can starve.  After all western induced famines were very common in the British Empire.
Collier calls his rubbish 'research'

Collier’s article ends up with the ritual ‘Please support this research if you can’.  Well I know that a fool and their money are easily parted but if this is what Collier calls ‘research’ then he should be sued under the Trades Description Act.

Tony Greenstein

I have done a number of blogs on the poisonous Collier including:

How the British Press were willing dupes of an arch-racist

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


For 6 years Black Lives Matter Were Attacked as ‘anti-Semites’ by the Zionists – Today they suffer from amnesia

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Since BLM describe Israel as a Genocidal Apartheid State and Support BDS – is Starmer is going to expel them for ‘anti-Semitism’?


When I saw ‘Sir’ Keir, the pin-up of George Osborne and the British Establishment take the knee I could not help but smell the sulphurous stench of hypocrisy. Black Lives Matter are, according to the IHRA and the 10 Commandmentsanti-Semitic.

By supporting BDS they single out Israel from all other countries. In addition they call it a genocidal, apartheid state. Starmer should be giving BLM the boot not offering them his carefully tailored knee.
The Telegraph, in what even for it was a particularly stupid and bizarre article Why Black Lives Matter protests are a catalyst for anti-Semitism argued that ‘extreme anti-racism’ causes anti-Semitism. This is where the fake anti-Semitism campaign leads. Anti-racism equals anti-Semitism. Classic double think.
Leaving to one side whether you can have ‘extreme’ as opposed to ‘moderate’ anti-Semitism, what it is saying is that its definition of ‘anti-Semitism’ (anti-Zionism) is a form of anti-racism! I agree but that’s why it’s not anti-Semitism!
Israel's policy towards Black refugees is worse even than that of Donald Trump
Please Spare a Thought for the Zionists’ Dilemma!
It’s not often that I ask readers of this blog to put themselves in the shoes of the Zionists. However I am going to ask you to make the effort in the case of BLM. I am asking you to empathise with them. As Ali Abunimah says
Israel lobby groups have long seen the Black Lives Matter movement as a threat and have tried both to disrupt and co-opt it.’
In 2018, Al Jazeera’s leaked undercover documentary The Lobby–USA revealed how the Israeli government and its lobby worked to disrupt the BLM movement. Undercover footage showed an Israeli official complaining about the BLM “problem.”
It also revealed how The Israel Project, a now defunctorganization, pulled strings behind the scenes to get a BLM fundraiser in a New York City nightclub cancelled.
Britain's Zionists attacking BLM as 'anti-semitic'
The problem that the Zionists face is how to deal with the threat that BLM represents. For some Zionists BLM should be confronted head on. However those Zionists who are not head bangers realise that if they do this, whilst they may win the plaudits of the White Supermacists they will lose the majority of Jewish youth and the Democratic Party. They are caught on the horns of a dilemma and it is interesting to see how they are wriggling!
For nearly 6 years all wings of the Zionist movement criticised and attacked BLM. Liberal Zionists said that they supported the demands of BLM but they were pained by their description of Israel, the world’s only Jewish state, as a genocidal, Apartheid state.
Sure Israel provided training in the latest techniques of repression for most US police forces. And yes it’s true that the neck hold is an Israeli invention. However they wish that BLM wouldn’t involve itself in international matters and confine itself to the United States.
The hypocrisy of AIPAC knows no bounds

Aipac, ADL and Police Training
Right-wing Zionists never liked BLM, regardless of its attitude to Israel. Zionism and anti-racism made strange bedfellows to the Zionist Organisation of America and its Chairman Mort Klein.
Even AIPAC, the pro-Republican Israel lobby group must have found it painful to have to condemn George Floyd’s murder writing that:
On the eve of George Floyd’s funeral, we join with millions of Americans who continue to mourn his murder. His death is a shattering reminder of the injustice & inequities that Black Americans still endure in our society. The scourge of racism, intolerance & inequality must end.
Palestinians identify with George Floyd
Of course if George Floyd had been a Palestinian then AIPAC would have been calling him a ‘terrorist’. Naturally Sussex Friends of Israel, which was founded by Fiona Sharpe of Labour Against Anti-Semitism,attackedBLM as ‘anti-Semitic’. To SFI any form of anti-racism is ‘anti-Semitism’.
Sussex Friends of Israel, of which former Brighton Councillors Emma Daniels and Julie Cattell and ex-leader Cllr. Daniel Yates are members calls BLM 'antisemitic'
The Anti-Defamation League, which funded and provided Police training, bringing US police on junkets to Israel for “counterterrorism” and other kinds of joint training.was also unhappy with BLM but it preferred not to cut off its nose to spite its face.
Between 5 and 13 September 2015 the ADL helda National Counter-Terrorism Seminar in Israel. ADL plays a key role in the relationship between Israeli and US police whilst, at the same time, decrying police violence in the US. No one is suggesting that US police racism is a consequence of this training, but the fact that ADL is involved in training and refining their techniques of oppression, should give the lie to the ADL’s profession of support to the Black struggle.

The purest hypocrisy - ADL was training the killers
The Militarisation of the United States Police
In August 2018 Jewish Voice for Peace determinedthat three years previously Peter Edge, who was promoted to Acting Deputy Director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) under President Trump, attended a training in Israel, as part of the Anti-Defamation League’s 2015 National Counter Terrorism Institute Seminar. ICE are the thugs who deport and brutalise migrant families and children.
An article The US-Israel Military Relationship and the US-Mexico Border revealed that Homeland Security Director Kirjsten Nielsen’s recent trip to Israel included a visit to the “hi-tech” fences blockading Gaza. Israeli Security Minister Gilad Erdan ‘reckons’ that some of what Nielson saw and learned in Israel“will certainly be implemented in what the United States is setting up on its border with Mexico.”
Trump and Netanyahu have continuously praised one another for their border militarisation policies and walls. In an interview with Fox News, Trump called a wall on the US’s southern border
“good for the heart of the nation in a certain way, because people want protection, and a wall protects. All you’ve got to do is ask Israel. They were having a total disaster coming across, and they had a wall. It’s 99.9 percent stoppage.
In response Netanyahu wrote
“I built a wall along Israel’s southern border. It stopped all illegal immigration. Great success. Great idea.”
Using Israel as a reason not to support BLM
Maayan Belding-Zidon wrote on the 10 June 2020 telling fellow Zionists ‘Stop using Israel as an excuse not to support Black Lives Matter’. Belding-Zidon highlighted the fact that in 2016,
‘Jewish voices from across the U.S. political spectrum came out in opposition to the platform of the Movement for Black Lives, which claimed that U.S. military aid to Israel makes the U.S. complicit in “the genocide taking place against the Palestinian people.” Many progressive Jewish organizations denounced only this section and endorsed the rest of the platform, calling for an end to mass incarceration, demilitarization of the police, etc.
However other, more conservative Zionists, used this as an excuse to distance themselves from Black Lives Matter as a whole.’ The description of Israel as an Apartheid state proved BLM was ‘a threat to the assimilation of Jews into undifferentiated American whiteness.’
This debate took on a heightened form with the current upsurge in BLM over the murder of George Floyd. It was clear to all except the atavistic Zionist Organisation of America that they were facing a mass movement of millions. It was simply not possible for the Zionists, much as they wanted to, to attack BLM as ‘anti-Semitic’.
Thousands of young Jewish kids, who are already skeptical towards an Israel that is admiredby white supremacists and anti-Semites identify with BLM. They realize that the racism that lay behind Derek Chauvin’s murder of George Floyd is the same racism that led to the murderof 11 Jews at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh.

Dianne Lob
Zionist Organisation of America and HIAS
It was only two months ago that the ZOA objectedvehemently to nomination of Dianne Lob, as the next Chair of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations [CPMAJO]. Why? Because she was a past Chair of the Hebrew Immigrant Advisory Society.
ZOA charged that HIAS was part of an “unholy consortium of Jewish and anti-Israel groups” fighting Trump’s immigration policies.’
Historically HIAS provided support for Jewish refugees from Europe but today Jews are not refugees. So it is mainly Black and Muslim people who receive its aid. In the eyes of ZOA that is a crime.
Anti-Muslim Bigot Frank Gaffney piles in against Lob
Dianne Lob is as committed a Zionist as the rest of the 50 strong Committee. She describedherself
as someone deeply devoted to Jewish values and to the importance of safeguarding the special U.S.-Israel relationship”.
What the Zionist right mean when they called her ‘anti-Zionist’ is anyone who is that she isn’t a 100% racist. Lob is a corporate Democrat and head of global business development for international investment management firm AllianceBernstein.
The objections of the ZOA were partly successful. Instead of taking over as Chair at the beginning of June 2020, she will have to wait until April 2021. Even this compromise was only agreed after a 31-8 vote with 5 abstentions. As the Times of Israel reported
 ‘Leading the charge was Morton Klein’s Zionist Organization of America, which has strongly opposed efforts to resettle Muslim refugees from Arab countries in the United States and Europe — something that has topped the HIAS agenda in recent years because of unrest in the Muslim world.
In other words the objections were based on pure racism. The ZOA is the oldestZionist organisation in America, being founded in 1897, the year of the first Zionist Congress. It is funded by Trump backer, Sheldon Adelson and fiercely supports his White Supremacist agenda.
The ZOA is proving embarrassing to the more astute Zionists
The target of HIAS is interesting itself. Robert Bowers, the fascist who murdered worshippers at the Tree of Life synagogue was obsessedwith HIAS and the supposed role of Jews in bringing immigrants into the USA. This was at the time of the Congressional elections and Trump was lambastingthe refugee caravan in Central America and threatening to set the military on them. 
Bowers subscribed to the far-right theme that ‘the Jews’ were working to subvert the White nations by welcoming Black people into their country. That is what lay behind the slogan of Trump’s ‘fine people’ at Charlottesville who chantedthe Jews will not replace us’.
The Tree of Life was a liberal synagogue that had agreed to help fundraise for HIAS. Like the majority of American Jews they were the most liberal section of the White population (unlike Britain where Jews are the most reactionary section!).
This enraged Bowers. He postedon social media, just hours before opening fire that:
‘“HIAS likes to bring invaders in that kill our people. I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics, I’m going in.”
Two and a half weeks earlier, he had written,
“Why hello there HIAS! You like to bring in hostile invaders to dwell among us?”
Another post read,
“Open you Eyes! It’s the filthy EVIL jews Bringing the Filthy EVILMuslims into the Country!!”
BLM is a racist, Soros funded organisation - and the ZOA dares to say its BLM which is antisemitic!
The Zionist Organisation of America
If the CPMAJO had any morals or scruples then the ZOA and its racist supporters would have been kicked out years ago.
The ZOA, like most Zionist groups, love to accuse anti-Zionists of ‘anti-Semitism’ and even liberal Zionists of the same sin. The reality however is that they are guilty of what they accuse others of.
In 2016, after Trump’s election who did they inviteas a guest of honour to address their annual Gala dinner? None other than Steve Bannon, who was Trump’s Strategic Advisor. The same Bannon whose wife testifiedin their 2007 divorce that
‘the biggest problem he had with Archer [an elite private school for girls] is the number of Jews that attend.’
Bannon did a no showbecause of a large demonstration by Jewish groups, IfnotNow and Jewish Voice for Peace.
Hungarian neo-Nazi Sebastian Gorka was  guest of honour at the ZOA's 2017 Gala Dinner - seen wearing the Vitezi Rend medal
The ZOA invited him again in 2017 and this time they also invitedSebastian Gorka, a fully paid–up fascist nut. At Trump’s inauguration ball he decided to wearthe Vitezi Rend, a medal issued by the Hungarian Order of Heroes, which collaborated with Hungary’s Nazi government during the World War II.
Up till now the ZOA has been a member of the CPMAJO. Their anti-Muslim bigotry, their dalliance with anti-Semites, their love of Trump and their mutual hostility to HIAS, were of no consequence.
Yet when the ZOA decided to attack Black Lives Matter there were loud calls for their removal. The Jerusalem Post reportedthat
Progressive Jewish groups have accused Morton Klein, president of the Zionist Organization of America of 'bigotry' and 'hatred' for his opposition of Black Lives Matter.
Steve Bannon - ex-Trump advisor and ex-Editor Breitbart
The statement was issued by the New Israel Fund and other ‘liberal’ Zionists.  Why now? According to their statement:
“The continued presence of Klein and the ZOA in important umbrella groups is an affront to Jews of color and all people of color, and to the overwhelming majority of all American Jews. It undermines any pro-Israel, pro-peace advocacy and damages the collective reputation of our community.” (my emphasis)
The Murder of Iyad Hallak
The clue lies in the last sentence. These hypocrites, who have never once spoken out about Zionist racism, Israel’s slaughter of Palestinians or even the murder5 days after George Floyd of Iyad Hallak, an autistic Palestinian, are worried that a full frontal attack by Zionists on BLM will backfire and undermine their ‘pro-Israel, pro-peace advocacy’.
Sebastian Gorka - the ZOA's neo-Nazi dinner guest
If there was even an ounce of sincerity amongst these liberal Zionists then they would have condemned the murder of Iyad. Already wounded, trapped in a garbage hut and with his carer screamingthat he was autistic they pumped the final 3 bullets into his body.
Unlike in Minneapolis no Policemen have been arrested, still less charged. There is an ‘investigation’ but Israeli police investigations never result in charges of murder. Netanyahu could not even bring himself to condemn the murder because Israel’s finest thought they were dealing with a ‘terrorist’ and since Iyad was a Palestinian they had every right to think that.
Unbelievably the ZOA deals in the same tropes about Soros as the Jewish financial puppet master as America's neo-Nazis
Mort Klein’s offence is to saywhat Zionist liberals believe but won’t say openly, namely that Black Lives Matter
is a Jew hating, White hating, Israel hating, conservative Black hating, violence promoting, dangerous Soros funded extremist group of haters,”
Mort Klein has no tactical sense.  He doesn’t know when to shut up. His colleagues know that now is not the time to attack BLM, not least because it will damage the reputation of Israel in the eyes of Jewish youth who are already cynical about Israel, witness the growth of groups like Jewish Voice for Peace and Ifnotnow
That and only that is the reason why other Zionist groups have calledfor the expulsion of the ZOA from the CPMAJO. The Times of Israel reportedthat the
Tweet by Mort Klein vilifying Black Lives Matter seen as galvanizing liberal support to remove Zionist Organization of America from Conference of Presidents
We should be under no illusions that there is any major difference of principle between Mort Klein and Diane Lob and her supporters.
Israel Hayom and Conspiracy Theories
The Zionists have been working overtime to blunt and subvert the message of BLM. According to Sheldon Adelson’s Israel Hayom what is happening is Co-opting Black Lives Matter to target Israel. This is up with all those other conspiracy theories.  We are told that
Efforts to link police brutality in the United States with the Israel Defense Forces maintaining security against Palestinian attacks have flooded the internet.
If it wasn’t for White people manipulating Black Lives Matter they would never have worked out for themselves that Israel has been training US police forces into becoming even more deadly than they already are. This kind of conspiracy theory is strangely reminiscent of the theory that Jews manipulate Blacks and Muslims in order to destroy the White nations. It goes by the name Replacement Theory.
Groups on the far-Right and far-Left, including pro-Palestinian organizations with links to terrorism, have been engaged in a campaign to co-opt the Black Lives Matter movement to target and delegitimize Israel.
"The cynical use of the Black Lives Matter by groups backed and controlled by foreign terror movements is nothing less than a repeat of the many other times that terror groups have used human shields to push their violence and hate," Mark Greendorfer, president of the Zachor Legal Group, told JNS.
A "civil-rights movement (Black Lives Matter) has been hijacked by extremists to push an agenda focused on promoting hate, in the form of anti-Semitism, rather than seeking justice," he said.
Exchanging Support for Israel for Support for BLM
Back in April 2016 Sam Kestenbaum explainedthat the problem was ‘a ‘new platform[the link doesn’t work now!]of BLM ‘that describes Israel as an “apartheid state” committing “genocide” against the Palestinian people’.’ Kestenbaum explained that since the beginning of BLM in 2013, in the wake of the Police murder of Michael Brown
‘Jewish groups across the country have struggled to strike the right tone in their responses to the movement. Activists aligned with Black Lives Matter have frequently visited the occupied Palestinian West Bank in what some call “solidarity tours,” as recently as July 30
Henn Mazzig in When Jews Attack Black Lives Matter, It Only Fuels Anti-Semitismwrotethat Zionists who believe that they can trade off support for Israel in exchange for support for BLM is not working:
The message black people are getting today from some in the Jewish community is that they think black lives don’t matter. Would you think otherwise if a video emerged of a Jew being choked to death by a cop and non-Jews said they couldn’t support our movement because, say, the Anti-Defamation League said something they don’t like? ...
Why were these (3) women able to impart their anti-Israel policies on the Black Lives Matter platform? They were deeply committed to the movement. Pro-Israel voices, like the ones in my replies, were not.
Attacking Black Lives Matter only fuels anti-Semitism [i.e. anti-Zionism], making it easier to paint Jews as racists...
Although countless Jews and Zionists support Black Lives Matter... these voices railing against the movement undo some of that unifying work. Another was Rachel Gilmer of Dream Defenders, a Jewish anti-Zionist.
If you want to change Black Lives Matter Israel agenda, you need to show up for them. Because by showing up for racial justice, we are actually showing up for ourselves....
When I posted Black Lives Matter online, the responses from Jews in America were shocking.
Some started bombarding me with replies that Black Lives Matter (BLM) is an anti-Israel cabal. That they are not protestors but looters and criminals. ... A few people claimed it was all “George Soros’s doing.” I pointed out that anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists like former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke were employing the same rhetoric. One American Jew replied, “Well, he is right about Soros.”
There is a serious debate taking place in the Zionist movement in the United States which sees the antics of those like Mort Klein as damaging support for Israel. Behind closed doors they agree with most of what he says. Their disagreement is with the way he says it.
Rabbi Ari Hart, of the Bayit Hebrew Institute of Riverdale, wrote on his public Facebook page that he was “struggling with #BlackLivesMatter but I believe black lives matter,”
Boston’s Jewish Community Relations Council issued a statement
“We cannot and will not align ourselves with organizations that falsely and maliciously assert that Israel is committing ‘genocide.We reject participation in any coalition that seeks to isolate and demonize Israel.”
The platform of the “Movement for Black Lives,” was BLM’s “first comprehensive document”. The section on foreign policy (“Invest-Divest”) criticizes American military aid to Israel. Israel is
“a state that practices systematic discrimination and has maintained a military occupation of Palestine for decades,”
It calls on activists to “build invest/divestment campaigns” to end “US Aid to Israel’s military industrial complex” and credits Adalah, an advocacy group for Arab rights, among its “authors & contributors.”
As Ha’aretz notes
Right-wing Jewish groups, including the Zionist Organization of America have condemned Black Lives Matter since the movement’s early days.’
The Anti-Defamation League
Ha’aretz quotesthe ADL’s Jonathan Greenblatt as saying that racial justice for African Americans is one of “the struggles of our time.”
This is the purest hypocrisy. It is a wonder that Greenblatt’s nose isn’t six foot long! In August 2016 the Tablet quotedGreenblatt as saying of BLM’s Platform that:
it’s repellent and completely inaccurate to label Israel’s policy as “genocide.” (it) completely ignores incitement and violence perpetrated against Israelis by some Palestinians, including terror inside the country and rocket attacks lobbed from Gaza.
The article also informed readers that ‘The ADL’s extensive material on Black Lives Matter, including school lesson plans, has now been quietly removed from its website.
Liberal Zionist Peter Beinart describedBLM’s Platform as ‘stupid’ for talking of Israeli genocide. BLM’s Platform did not go over well with the what The Tablet called ‘some of Black Lives Matter’s hitherto staunch progressive allies.
Greenblatt tweeted that We need justice for everyone who has been a victim of racist policing & violence.’  Which sounds very much like ‘All Lives Matter’ the racist response to the specific violence against Black people.
This is the same ADL who saidthat
‘An influx of millions of Palestinians into Israel would pose a threat to its national security and upset the country’s demographic makeup.’
Isn’t that Trump’s agenda?  Sure he puts it a bit more crudely, in terms of Mexican rapists and shithole countries in Africa, but isn’t he too trying to preserve American culture and demographic make-up?
The Tablet had nothing to say about the Occupation, land confiscation, the ethnic cleansing of Jerusalem etc. Even liberal Zionist groups are PEPs – Progressive Except for Palestine.
Unbelievably the Zionist Tablet gives a soft-ball interview to America's leading academic holocaust denier, Kevin MacDonald
The Tablet may lambast the ‘bigotry’ of BLM but it’s not above indulging in some of its own.  Quite amazingly in its current issue it contains a full length interview with Professor Kevin MacDonald, the foremost academic supporter of White nationalism and Holocaust denial in the USA. As the introduction to the interview explains:
The specifics of the Jewish [evolutionary] strategy on American soil... include encouraging mass immigration and promoting cultural relativism and multiculturalism—which he describes as ideological tools that Jews use to fracture the organic cohesion of their white Christian host culture. MacDonald’s theories and writing inspired the slogan “the Jews will not replace us” which energized the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville.
In other words Jews act as one and their behaviour is genetically and biologically programmed. Stripped of its academic jargon this rhetoric is part of the old Nazi idea that Jews subvert the Gentile nations in order to rule over them. Yet a prominent Zionist journal prints an interview with an open neo-Nazi.
The ADL and Spying for Apartheid South Africa
We should not forget the lawsuit begun in 1992 accusingthe ADL of spying on behalf of the Apartheid regime in South Africa (not Israel!). It was settled for $178,000.
Israel was then an ally of South Africa's white- supremacist government, and the ADL's chief intelligence-gatherer in the Bay Area, Roy Bullock, later admitted he was being paid by South Africa.
The suit claimed that the ADL was working to suppress domestic criticism of Israel by compiling dossiers that it shared with police, the Israeli government and its own supporters. The ADL said it was legally monitoring hate groups and political extremists.
After Bullock and a San Francisco police inspector were seen talking to South African agents in 1992 police seized more than 10,000 files from the two men and ADL offices in San Francisco and Los Angeles. See: Jewish defense group settles S.F. spying suit
ADL and Starbucks
The balancing act that ADL perform, training the US Police whilst professing horror at the death of Black men at their hands fools noone. When Starbucks staff called the Police because two Black men were ‘loitering’in their coffee house it provoked national outrage.
Starbucks set aside a day when their premises were closed for ‘anti-bias training.  Who was called upon to provide it?  The ADL! This caused an uproar among  Black and left-wing activists. As a result Starbucks were forced to drop the ADL from their training plans.
None of this prevented Liel Leibovitz from denouncing Starbucks for ‘giving in tobigotry’ in The Tablet. In The ADL Kicked Out of Leading Starbucks’ Diversity Training Leibovitz wrote:
Considering the fact that Jews are, by far, the most prominent targets of hate crimes in America these days, giving in to anti-Semites and removing the ADL from a diversity training initiative of a major American corporation is particularly heinous.
America’s Jews are obviously not the ‘most prominent targets’ of racist attacks. Secondly calling BLM ‘anti-Semites’ betrays the real agenda.
Leibovitz blamed the decision on Tamika Mallory, ‘a leader of the Women’s March and vocal supporter of Louis Farrakhan’ who tweetedthat the ADL was an organization dedicated to “constantly attacking black and brown people.” Another example of Zionist guilt-by-association which avoids what she said. Whether Tamika is or is not a member of the Nation of Islam is neither here nor there.
ADL and Police Training
US police forces have been trained courtesy of the ADL in the latest techniques of repression, including neck holds. Israel’s police have so much more ‘on hands’ or ‘on neck’ experience of repression. In Partnering with Law Enforcement the ADL boastthat
ADL works with every major federal, state and local law enforcement agency, from the Federal Bureau of Investigation to major city police departments, state police, highway patrol and sheriffs’ departments. Over the past decade, we have trained 150,000 law enforcement personnel—at no cost to taxpayers. This work is designed to protect people and communities from hate, extremism and terrorism.
The ‘problem’ that the Zionists faced was described in 2017 in a leaked report written by the ADL and the Reut Institute. It bemoaned how campaigners had successfully been
able to frame the Palestinian struggle against Israel as part of the struggle of other disempowered minorities, such as African Americans.
The report warned that intersectionality “undermines Jewish communities’ agendas, including support for the State of Israel.” The Israel lobby and Zionist hasbara were happy with identity politics because it was simple to define Jewishness in terms of Zionism and Israel. Jews were just one more equally oppressed group.
But intersectionality asked more difficult questions such as where the source of inequality comes from. Intersectionality argued that oppression is not one dimensional. American Jews don’t suffer from police violence, disproportionate imprisonment or economic discrimination. To say that being Jewish is equivalent of being Black is to negate the oppression of the latter. Oppression has many causes – economic, class, race, imperialism etc.
Starmer’s Racist Hypocrisy
Was there anything more sickening than seeing Starmer and Rayner taking a knee in an empty conference room, on a plush carpet? This is the same Starmer who is busy expelling anyone ‘guilty’ of opposing Israeli Apartheid or Zionism.
Starmer’s racist witch-hunt is netting hundreds of Black and Jewish members of the Labour Party. All in the service of Tel Aviv and Netanyahu’s coalition with the Israeli Labor Party. Because the organisation driving the witch-hunt is none other than the British wing of the almost dead ILP, the Jewish Labour Movement.
Instead of taking the knee, Keir Starmer should be expelling BLM members for supporting BDS and calling Israel a Genocidal, Apartheid State!
Black members of the Labour Party understand Starmer’s hypocrisy which is why he is expelling so many of them. Most are not collaborators like the David Lammy, who abstained in the vote on the ‘hostile environment’ 2014 Immigration Act, as did all but one of Labour’s useless Black MPs. Lammy is a paid up supporterof Labour Friends of Israel.
In Black lives do not matter in IsraelDavid Sheen wrote of how, on March 17, one of Israel's two chief rabbis, Yitzhak Yosef, called black people "monkeys" and the Hebrew equivalent of the N-word in his weekly sermon. He said the same two years previously that all non-Jews - Africans, Arabs, or otherwise - could only live in Israel if they agree to serve the country's Jewish population.
Israel's other chief rabbi, Yisrael Lau, used the N-word to describe Black athletes on his very first day in office in July 2013. In 2010 dozens of Israeli rabbis, led by Safed’s Chief Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu, a paid official of the Israeli state, issued an edict forbidding Jews to rent their homes to non-Jews. As Ha'aretz explained:
Dozens of Israel's municipal chief rabbis have signed on to a new religious ruling that would forbid the rental of homes to gentiles in a move particularly aimed against Arabs
When Lammy and Starmer support Israel and demonise its opponents as ‘anti-Semitic’ they are actively supporting this racism. Below are extracts from an important articleby Ramzy Baroud on the role of Israel in militarizing the United States police.

 The ‘Palestinian Chair’: Exposing Israel’s Direct Role in US Violence

The militarization of the US police and its use of deadly violence against suspected petty criminals, or even non criminals, is a relatively new phenomenon that has been largely imported from Israel.
Israeli torture tactics, including the infamous ‘Palestinian Chair’, became the crown jewel of the American military’s systematic violence used in America’s immoral wars from Iraq to Afghanistan, to elsewhere.
Writing in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz in 2016, Rachel Stroumsa arguedthat the ‘Palestinian Chair’ is “but one of many examples of ties and seepages between the security practices of Israel and America,” adding that “the CIA explicitly justified its use of torture in depositions to the Senate Intelligence Committee by citing High Court of Justice rulings.”
The fact that thousands of American police officers have been trained by Israelis, thus the burgeoning of violent military-like tactics used against ordinary Americans, is only one link in a long chain of ‘deadly exchanges’ between the two countries.
The US-Israel Military Relationship and the US-Mexico Border
The horrific impacts of border militarization and the practices of racist agencies like Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) on border communities, immigrants, and people of color across the US have been well documented for years.
Feeding into US imperialist policy, Israel has been an important partner and supporter of the militarization of the border and border agencies in a number of ways:
US-Israel law enforcement exchange programs
Many of these exchanges are sponsored by US-based organizations, including AIPAC, ADL, GILEE, JINSA, and the Jewish United Fund.
The growing Israeli role in shaping the American security state allowed Israel to push its political priorities past its traditional stronghold over the US Congress to individual states and, eventually, to city councils across the country

Black Lives Matter platform author defends Israel ‘genocide’ claimTimes of Israel 10.8.16.

NEW YORK (JTA) — The co-author of the Black Lives Matter platform passage accusing Israel of “genocide” defended the term, saying Israel’s actions fit in its wider definition.
Ben Ndugga-Kabuye co-authored the statement along with Rachel Gilmer, the former board member of a Zionist youth group. Ndugga-Kabuye told JTA he understood why Jewish groups disagree with the statement, but was perplexed that it has received so much attention.
He compared it with the accusations of genocide that black activists have leveled at the United States and called the Israeli-Palestinian conflict one of many international conflicts US black activists feel connected to.
 “The way we look at it is, we take strong stances,” Ndugga-Kabuye, a New York City organizer for the Black Alliance for Just Immigration, told JTA. “The demand we’re making is we’re against the US continuing funding and military aid to the government of Israel. These are all things that are going to be in debate.”
The platform, released August 2 by The Movement for Black Lives coalition, is largely a statement of the goals of a movement that coalesced around police violence directed against black people in the United States, mass incarceration of African-Americans and other domestic issues.
But it also calls for ending US military aid to Israel and accuses Israel of being an apartheid state. The platform includes a link to a website promoting the movement to boycott, divest and sanction Israel called BDS.
“The US justifies and advances the global war on terror via its alliance with Israel and is complicit in the genocide taking place against the Palestinian people” reads the “Invest/Divest” section of “A Vision for Black Lives.”
A string of Jewish organizations, from the Anti-Defamation League to the Reform movement and National Council of Jewish Women, has condemned the genocide and apartheid language as well as the BDS endorsement. T’ruah, a rabbis’ human rights group that opposes Israel’s West Bank occupation, also criticized the document.
Most of the organizations took pains to note that they are sympathetic to other parts of the platform, many of which jibe with liberal Jewish positions on the criminal justice system, economic justice and immigration.
“While we are deeply concerned about the ongoing violence and the human rights violations directed at both Israelis and Palestinians, we believe the terms genocide and apartheid are inaccurate and inappropriate to describe the situation,”
NCJW wrote in a statement. “Further, BDS is too often used to de-legitimize Israel’s right to exist.
Jewish Voice for Peace, which supports BDS, was the rare Jewish group that endorsed the platform in its entirety.
On Tues., Dec. 15, more than 300 Jewish activists in Boston marched for the Black Lives Matter movement, including members of Jewish Voice for Peace (photo credit: Ignacio Laguarda/Wicked Local)
Ndugga-Kabuye said state actions don’t need to rise to the level of the Holocaust or other historical genocides to deserve the term, which he said could connote unjust state killing of a disadvantaged group. He compared his usage of the word to We Charge Genocide, a group that opposes police violence in Chicago.
“We’re talking about a structure of violent deaths that are state sanctioned, that are without accountability, and that are ongoing,”
he told JTA.
“We can say this is what’s happening in Palestine and not equate it with what’s happening in South America. It doesn’t say it’s the same number of people being killed or the [same] manner of people being killed.”
T

It’s Time for Starmer to Go – Israel’s Use of the Knee-on-the-Neck is not an Anti-Semitic Conspiracy Theory – It’s a Fact

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So now it’s official – the ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign of the past 5 years was, after all, about Israel not hatred of Jews



Only yesterday I posteda blog ‘For 6 years Black Lives Matter Were Attacked as ‘anti-Semites’ by the Zionists – Today they suffer from amnesia’.
I described how Israel was training thousands of US Police in repression techniques, including the knee on the neck.
Today Starmer sacked Rebecca Long-Bailey from the Shadow Cabinet for retweeting Maxine Peake who pointed out this elementary fact.
Please sign and share the Petition we have set up calling for Starmer to go.  He is unfit to be Leader of the Labour Party.  We cannot have a racist and imperialist at the head of a party that claims to be socialist.
We should be grateful to Starmer. He has clarified the situation. As we always said, the fake ‘anti-Semitism’ smear campaign was always about Israel and never about genine anti-Semitism, i.e. hatred or hostility to Jews as Jews.
Corbyn stupidly accepted that the 'antisemitism' campaign to remove him was legitimate
It is unfortunate that Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell gave legs to the fake ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign, whose sole purpose was his removal as Leader by admittingthat Labour ‘had a problem’ with anti-Semitism.
It enabled malicious Zionists like Margaret Hodge to then claim that if you denied Labour was anti-Semitic then you were ‘part of the problem’.
Naturally the Board of Deputies and the Jewish Labour Movement welcomed Starmer’s actions because both these bodies are first and foremost Zionist groups, committed to defend the apartheid Israel.
Jon Lansman didn’t condemn Starmer’s actions. It was all a big mistake’.  Lansman pleaded that
Sir Keir was elected to end factionalism...and I think he's made it harder for himself to unite the party."
Starmer was elected to root out the left in the party. Even more pathetically Lansman went on to explain that
‘Rebecca Long-Bailey is just as committed to ending anti-Semitism within the party "as he and I are."
Instead of defending her tweet RLB dissociated herself from Maxine Peake's comments on Israel
Lansman and Momentum have learnt nothing and forgotten nothing. They still don’t get it.  This isn’t and never was about anti-Semitism. It was always about support for the world’s only Apartheid State.  It was about support for imperialism and bipartisanship in foreign policy with the Tories, which Israel symbolises.
Israel's finest use the knee-on-neck as a matter of routine
That is why all Momentum can do is to call for the reinstatement of RLB. We do not care about her.  She is a weak individual who signed up to the very ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign that has caused her sacking. She calls herself a Zionist. She supportedthe expulsion of Chris Williamson. She is a victim of her own stupidity. 
What mattersis that a simple statement of fact that Israel trains thousands of US Police in the techniques of repression has been branded an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory.
By his action Starmer is now signed up, 100%, behind Israel’s military repression of the Palestinians. He is unfit to be Labour leader.
It is a factthat Israel trains the United States Police in repressive techniques to use against Black people. The major US Zionist group, the Anti-Defamation League boasted that
Over the past decade, we have trained 150,000 law enforcement personnel—at no cost to taxpayers. This work is designed to protect people and communities from hate, extremism and terrorism.
Well we saw what ‘protection’ of people from terrorism meant when 5 days after George Floyd was murdered, Israel’s notorious Border Police gunned down Iyad Hallak, a 32 year old autistic Palestinian in East Jerusalem. They had ‘mistaken’ his mobile phone for a gun. A mistake they never make in the case of Jews.
The details of Iyad’s murder are gruesome. According to Ha’aretz, an already wounded Iyad took shelter in a garbage hut.  His carer screamed that he was autistic.  He cried 'I'm With Her,'‘The Cop Opened Fire Anyway’ and pumped the final 3 of 7 bullets into his body. Unlike in Minneapolis no police have been arrested, still less charged.  The police killers are still employed. There is an investigation but like all such Israeli police investigations it will go nowhere.
This is what Sir Keir Starmer is defending, just as he defendedthe murder of Ian Tomlinson by the Metropolitan Police until public pressure forced him to back down.
Starmer sacked Rebecca Long-Bailey for supporting an ‘anti-Semitic conspiracy theory’. By definition an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory such as the belief that Jews are controlling the world, is untrue and has no basis in fact.  If it is true they it can’t be anti-Semitic.
Unless Starmer is saying that anti-Semitism is based on fact. If so it is Starmer who is the anti-Semite. 
Historically Zionism has always justified anti-Semitism by saying that Jews in the diaspora brought their problems on themselves by not having their own country. As Israel’s first Justice Minister Pinhas Rosen said‘Palestine is an institute for the fumigation of Jewish vermin’.
You can find this quote and many similar ones in Joachim Doron’s Classic Zionism and modern anti-Semitism: parallels and influences’(1883-1914),in Studies in Zionism 8, Autumn 1983 and the Journal of Israeli history No. 4.
Fundamental to Zionist anti-Semitism towards Jews outside Israel is the foundational principle called the Negation of the Diaspora. It is still common amongst Zionists. When Zionism first arose it was seen by most Jews as a form of Jewish anti-Semitism.  Both the anti-Semites and the Zionists said that Jews were a separate nation who shouldn’t live amongst non-Jews.
Do the  Israeli Police train Americas Police forces in the Knee on the Neck Hold?
According to Amnesty International, hundreds of US law enforcement officials have gone through training in Israel, while thousands more have been trained by Israeli forces in the United States. 
Middle East Eye has documented the similarities between the militarised tactics of US police forces and Israeli police against Palestinian protesters. The use of this form of restraint is very common to Israeli police as this videoof its use against a Jewish American protesting at the march of the far-Right in Jerusalem demonstrates.
Neta Golan, of the International Solidarity Movement said:
“When I saw the picture of killer cop Derek Chauvin murdering George Floyd by leaning in on his neck with his knee I remembered noticing when many Israeli soldiers began using this technique when we were protesting in the West Bank sometime in 2006.
Israel pioneered the knee-on-neck hold that killed George Floyd. It is not an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory to say so. It is true.
Starmer is a Racist Hypocrite
Barely two weeks ago Starmer ‘took the knee’ in solidarity with Black Lives Matter. This was an empty and meaningless gesture. He issued a video statement quoting Martin Luther King that ‘injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.’ Starmer even expressed his support for BLM.
In 2016 BLM called Israel an Apartheid and genocidal state and supported BDS.  For this they were criticised as anti-Semitic by Zionist groups. Starmer is echoing this criticism of BLM.
Clearly injustice to the Palestinians does not feature on Starmer’s horizon. That is why this pompous starched-white representative of the British Establishment needs to go.  He is a racist supporter of Israeli settler colonialism.
Starmer and Rayner take the knee to BLM whilst supporting similar tactics by Israeli Police
In April 2018 Black Lives Matter forced Starbucks into excluding the Anti-Defamation League from training their staff following the arrest of 2 Black men for ‘loitering’ at a Philadelphia coffee house.
Starmer has just demonstrated that Labour is a pro-imperialist pro-Zionist party.  That is why he must go.

What is the difference between a Prostitute and a Journalist? One sells their body, the other sells their mind

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The New Statesman's Stephen Bush & Ailbhe Rea Are a Perfect Illustration of Journalists Who Reinforce Rather than Question Those in Power
It is a question that has often puzzled me? Why is it that 90+% of journalists have no integrity or honesty? It can’t just be the money. Does the atmosphere and norms of a newsroom corrupt them? Or are most journalists already corrupted before they even begin their jobs?
It reminds me of the saying of Humbert Wolfe:
you cannot hope to bribe or twist 

(thank God!) the British journalist.
But, seeing what the man will do 
unbribed, there’s no occasion to.

In an interview with Noam Chomsky in February 1996 Andrew Marr fatuously asked “How can you know I’m self-censoring?” Marr smugly assumed that Chomsky would not be able to answer this question since no one can get inside the mind of another. But Chomsky responded:
“I’m not saying you’re self-censoring. I’m sure you believe everything you say. But what I’m saying is if you believed something different you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting.”
As Marr admitted this was unanswerable, not because it was a conspiracy as he alleged but because it wasn’t a conspiracy. Marr would not be fronting the BBC’s key Sunday politics show if he was not a right-wing Tory. It is inconceivable that such a programme could be hosted by a socialist journalist.
Andrew Neil, who was so concerned about 'Labour antisemitism' hired holocaust denier David Irving to examine the Goebbels Diaries for the Sunday Times
It is hard to point to one mainstream TV political correspondent who isn’t on the Right. Andrew Marr, Laura Kuensberg, Andrew Neil, Fiona Bruce, Robert Peston, Michael Crick etc are all right-wing. Andrew Neil, as Editor of the Sunday Times, employed a holocaust denier, David Irving, to examine the Goebbels Diaries and employed an open anti-Semite, Taki at The Spectator.
Despite this Andrew Neil was a fervent advocate for the ‘Labour is anti-Semitic’ narrative. Indeed he asked the killer question of Corbyn, ‘will you apologise to the Jewish community for anti-Semitism’ at the last election. If Corbyn hadn’t been so stupid and if Seamus Milne had bothered to brief him for the interview, then Corbyn could easily have turned the tables.
Does anyone think that Boris Johnson became a Telegraph columnist by chance, having already been sacked by The Times for lying? Does anyone think that Jonathan Freedland would be in a position to be the Guardian’s gatekeeper if he wasn’t an integral part of the British Establishment and almost certainly an Intelligence Asset?
The fact that a brilliant journalist like John Pilger, a man who played a key part in revealing the role of the United States in genocide in East Timor and Pol Pot in Cambodia and who is responsible for saving the life of thousands with his journalism, can be kept off the BBC and out of the British press illustrates Chomsky’s point.
Julian Assange
The role of the yellow press is best illustrated by the torture of Julian Assange. His lawyers fear for his life in Belmarsh yet the Press have not raised a squeak of protest. I feel guilty even comparing journalists to prostitutes. Prostitutes are forced to sell their bodies and can at least take a shower afterwards. Journalists cannot expunge their treachery so easily given that they betray people with malice aforethought.
The Guardian exploited Assange and Wikileaks for a series of exposessuch as Kenyan President Daniel Arap Poi looting hundreds of millions of pounds and placing it in over 30 countries. 
As Editor Alan Rusbridger wrote:
In Britain the Guardian was, for many months, the only paper to write about WikiLeaks or to use any of the documents they were unearthing.’
And how did the Guardian repay Assange after he had sought sanctuary in the Ecuadorian Embassy after the submission of an extradition request from Sweden on bogus allegations of rape, whose sole purpose was to send him back to the United States?
There were a constant stream of attacks by people like Suzanna Moore, perhaps the most disgusting ‘journalist’ of all. It’s no coincidence that one of the papers she used to attack Assange was the New Statesman.
In one tweet Moore called Assange a ‘flattened guinea pig’.  to which I responded that I could only assume that it was a bird that Moore had sat on. 
Germaine Greer observed that Moore possessed “hair bird's-nested all over the place, fuck-me shoes and three fat inches of cleavage.’
Marina Hyde is a 'journalist' without any seeming purpose to her
If you want to get the measure of the treachery of Guardian journalists such as Marina Hyde, James Ball etc. then read ‘How the Guardian’s deferential mediocrities behaved like a pack of wolves in defence of the special relationship & the British state’. John Pilger called her behaviour ‘slow witted viciousness.’
The lies and fake news of the Guardian as they tried to undermine Julian Assange
This culminated in November 2018 in a Guardian fake news story about talks between Trump’s Campaign Manager Paul Manafort and Assange in the Ecuadorian Embassy. There was no truth in it but the Guardian have refused to provide any proof of their allegations.
But this is not just true of the mainstream press. It is equally true of the New Statesman, a magazine that likes to think of itself as on the radical wing of the British press but in reality functions as a repository for failed Establishment journalists who like to think of themselves as radical.
Audrey, Berry and Campbell
To be fair, it has had periods in the 1970’s and 1980’s when the New Statesman was a radical paper. One of its journalists was a friend of mine from the days of Brighton Voice, Duncan Campbell, who was prosecuted with two others in what became known as the ABC Trial.
Campbell together with Crispin Aubrey and John Berry were charged under the Official Secrets Act but the case blew up in the face of the State. All 3 were convicted but such was the atmosphere surrounding the case that custodial sentences were not imposed.  It was an example of a right-wing Labour government in action.
Today Campbell would have no place in the New Statesman which functions as a repository for mediocrities or failed Guardianistas.
In much the same way journalists of the calibre of Jonathan Steele, John Palmer and David Hirst  would not be employed by The Guardian today.
As John Pilger observed
many journalists now are no more than channelers and echoers of what Orwell called the official truth. They simply cipher and transmit lies. It really grieves me that so many of my fellow journalists can be so manipulated that they become really what the French describe as functionaires, functionaries, not journalists.
New Statesman – a Propaganda Vehicle for the JLM
The New Statesman bought into the fake ‘anti-Semitism’ smear campaign 101%, acting like a propaganda vehicle for the Zionist (Jewish) Labour Movement. They printed a piece by Mike Katz and Adam Langleben denying that their then Chair Ivor Caplin had accepted Labour’s Anti-Semitism Code of Conduct in 2018.
The Jewish Chronicle report Jewish Labour Movement chair condemned over Labour antisemitism meetingclaimed that Caplin ‘was 'played' by Labour leadership’. At the next JLM AGM Caplin was heavily defeated, with less than 20 votes against 160 for Mike Katz as Chair. Caplin didn’t appreciat that the whole purpose of the ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign was that the issue could never be resolved without Corbyn’s resignation. It wasn’t about anti-Semitism.
That famous Zoom meeting
When Jackie Walker and I spoke at a Zoom meeting with Dianne Abbot and Bell Ribaire-Addy – the Press narrative was about Anti-Semitism not Free Speech and none more so than Ailbhe Rea’s Labour’s Zoom call row reveals a party deeply divided over racism
You might think it an absurdity that two Jewish people, one of whom was Black, could be used as an example of ‘anti-Semitism’. But this all took place in the context of the narrative that anti-Semitism = anti-Zionism.  Since both of us were Jewish anti-Zionists, we were therefore anti-Semites according to the ‘logic’ of Israel’s defenders.
The attempt to ‘no platform’ us by the Board of Deputies, which has unquestioning support for Israel and Zionism hardwiredinto its constitution, is no different to the banning of anti-Apartheid activists in South Africa under the 1982 Internal Security Act. Just as Jewish anti-Zionists are hated by Zionist Jewish Supremacists, so White anti-Apartheid activists were hated by supporters of Apartheid. Indeed we are both termed ‘traitor’ by the respective nationalists.
The witless Rhea wrotethat Keir Starmer is facing his first test over antisemitism since becoming Labour leader’. As George Orwell observed in 1984
“War is peace.
Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength.”

Two Jewish anti-Zionists who use their Jewish identity to oppose the actions of a racist ‘Jewish state’ which separates and segregates its Arab citizens in schools, employment and housing, even to the extent of operating segregated maternity wards, where Jewish women can give birth without the presence of Arab women,  are called ‘anti-Semitic’. We used to be called ‘racist’ by the National Front and BNP as part of their ‘'Defend Rights for Whites' campaign.
Instead of dealing with the question at the heart of the issue, namely whether criticism of Israel and Zionism is anti-Semitic Rea meekly accepted the Zionist narrative. Rea wrote:
He [Starmer] has come in for criticism, however, for not expelling the pair, having signed a pledge during his leadership campaign promising to suspend MPs or activists “who support, campaign or provide a platform for people who have been suspended or expelled in the wake of antisemitic incidents”.
The row exposes the complexities underlying Starmer’s clearly stated and simple commitment to stamping out antisemitism within Labour...
There is, firstly, the practical challenge of trying to implement the above pledge in an online context. The fifth of the Board of Deputies’ pledges to stamp out antisemitism outlines a clear “no platform for bigotry” policy,...
Nowhere does Rea explain how ‘stamping out anti-Semitism’ accords with banning 2 Jewish anti-Zionists.
If this had been 1933 then Rhea would have been asking the same questions as Viscount Harmsworth when he whitewashed Hitler’ anti-Semitism, alongside most of the British press, the Daily Mirror and Times included. Harmsworth wrote that:
‘They have started a clamorous campaign of denunciation against what they call 'Nazi atrocities,' which, as anyone who visits Germany quickly discovers for himself, consists merely of a few isolated acts of violence.’ 
This was a time when both Churchill and Lloyd George welcomed Hitler to power as a bastion of defence against Communism.
What kind of Uncle Tom calls criticism of Israeli Apartheid an 'antisemitic trope'? Step forward Stephen Bush
Stephen Bush, the Political Editor of the New Statesman, is if anything worse than Rea. In his piece for the ‘i’ he accepts that Starmer’s mission is ‘to rid the Labour party of the taint of antisemitism’.
Starmer has appointed a Committee of hand picked right-wingers in order to gloss over the racism revealed in Labour’s leaked Report. See for example Yomi Adegoke’s The leaked Labour report reveals a shocking level of racism and sexism towards its black MPs.
Bush has nothing to say about this or indeed the anti-Semitism of the head of the Compliance Unit, John Stolliday who referred to Ed Miliband as ‘beaker’.
When you think that those who were behind Labour’s ‘anti-Semitism’ smear campaign were John Mann, a virulent anti-Roma racist and Tom Watson, who in the 2004 by-election in Birmingham Hodge Hill, issued as Campaign Manager a leaflet which saidLabour is on your side, the Lib Dems are on the side of failed asylum seekers."
The same Tom Watson who ‘lost sleep’ when racist Labour MP Phil Woolas was removed from Parliament by the High Court, having waged an election campaign designed to ‘make white folks angry’ There is only one conclusion you can draw. Stephen Bush is yet another example of a presstitute as well as an Uncle Tom journalist.
A friend has just rung me up, she is a Black woman, to tell me that she is being investigated by the Labour Party because she commented on social media about the fact that the genocide in the slave trade and in the Congo is ignored whilst the holocaust of Jews (but no others) is prioritised.  She feels aggrieved. She is an anti-racist campaigner yet she is being targeted by Labour with the full support of Bush.
The ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign has targeted not only Jewish anti-racists but also Black activists such as Marc Wadsworth and my friend. Black people ask why anti-Semitism, a marginal prejudice in Britain, is held to be so important whilst actual racism, such as Windrush is ignored. Yet they are told by the Labour Party that they are responsible for preventing Labour campaigning against racism! This is one of the charges now made by the witch-hunters. And Uncle Tom journalists like Stephen Bush lend their name to this campaign.
There is no Jewish Windrush scandal. No Jews have been deported. There is no state racism against Jews. Jews are not disproportionately imprisoned or the victims of Police violence because they are White.  Yet collaborators like Bush, in their eagerness to please the British Establishment, bend over backwards to repeat the ‘anti-Semitism’ mantra about Labour anti-Semitism.
To Bush alleging that Israel trains and helps militarise police forces in the United States is an ‘anti-Semitic conspiracy theory’. The fact that this is well documented by groups like Amnesty International is irrelevant. ‘Journalists’ like Bush never ask basic questions such as why Black Lives Matter consider Israel an Apartheid and Genocidal State. BLM have been repeatedly accused of ‘anti-Semitism’. It would no doubt be worth more than their jobs to mention this and would lead to him no longer being invited on BBC programmes.
Wikipediatells us that Presstitute is a ‘portmanteauof pressand prostitute’.  It is a journalist who writes what their Editor expects. A journalist who writes to please those in power but whose writing is devoid of all substance and analysis. It is not the ‘why’ but the ‘how’that is important. They writing is descriptive rather than analytical. They describe procedure and process and assume their case without ever arguing or explaining it.
For example the Labour Party at the Zionist insistence adopted the IHRA misdefinition of anti-Semitism in September 2018.  Why?  To redefine anti-Semitism in such a way as to net criticism of Israel. Yet virtually none have spoken out.  When my dad, like thousands of other Jews, ignored the Board of Deputies to take part in physically opposing the British Union of Fascists, he didn’t need a definition of anti-Semitism to know what it’s about.
For Bush and Rea ‘Labour anti-Semitism’ is received wisdom. It is part of what Chomsky called ‘manufacturing consent’.
Labour anti-Semitism’ became a ‘disinformation paradigm’ in which all evidence to the contrary was excluded. ‘Journalists’ like Rea or Bush would never think of asking such basic questions as to why the whole of the Tory press, which is so unconcerned about other forms of racism, was obsessed by ‘Labour anti-Semitism’.
Why should the Daily Mail and Sun, which employed Katie Hopkins, for whom refugees were ‘cockroaches’, a term the Nazis applied to the Jews, be so concerned about ‘anti-Semitism’? Such simple questions were never asked because their answers would throw into doubt the basic assumptions of the paradigm.
 Or why Boris Johnson, who calls Black people ‘picanninies’ with ‘water melon smiles’ and who has written a novel, ’72 Virgins’ which depicted Jews as controlling the media, is also concerned about ‘Labour anti-Semitism’. Such basic questions as these have never occurred to presstitutes like Rea or Bush.
Julian Assange
The purpose of the writing of ‘journalists’ like Bush and Rea is to reinforce the disinformation paradigm and the existing narrative. It is not to challenge it or ask questions. Of course it wasn’t always like this. Julian Assange is a prime example of a journalism which revealed horrific war crimes.
Chelsea Manning served 10 months in solitary confinement rather than betray Julian Assange - Guardian journalists couldn't even give up their lunchbreak
Assange is paying for his journalism with his liberty and possibly his life but this is of no concern to the Bushes and Rhea’s of the New Statesman or the yellow press in Britain. If you want to look for someone with integrity and courage you have to go to the United States where Chelsea Manning endured 10 months imprisonment in solitarity confinement rather than testify against Assange. The only sacrifices Rea and Bush are likely to make is in foregoing the best seats in a restaurant.
Tony Greenstein
Open Letter to Ailbhe Rea
Dear Ms Rea,
On 1stMay this year, you wrote an article‘row over Diane Abbott and Bell Ribeiro-Addy’s online meeting with expelled members’. Jackie Walker and myself were in the audience when both MPs spoke and after they had spoken we both spoke.
Any radical journalist with an ounce of integrity would have asked why the Board of Deputies were concerned with preventing our free speech. What had they to fear? Someone who wasn’t simply acting as an echo chamber for the lies and deceptions of the purveyors of Labour’s false anti-Semitism campaign would have asked a few questions.
However you are not the kind of journalist to ask questions of those in positions of power. You are the equivalent of a faithful court reporter, who records the views of the powerful. Those who are responsible for the ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign are nothing if not powerful.
They include for example Donald Trump who, when telling4 Black Congresswomen to ‘go back home’added for good measure that they hate Israel and are anti-Semitic. The same Trump who tellsAmerican Jews that their ‘real home’ is Israel and that they “don’t love Israel enough.’
Of course the Board of Deputies which welcomedTrump to power has no objection to such anti-Semitism because Zionism’s foundational beliefs is that Jews do not belong in non-Jewish society.  That was the whole point of Zionism.
 It would be churlish to point out all the figures on the far-Right who love Israel and Zionism. People like the neo-Nazi founder of the alt-Right Richard Spencer, a ‘White Zionist’. Or Tommy Robinson for whom Israel is the embodimentof the ethno-nationalist state.
An honest journalist might point out that the Board has support for Israel and Zionism hardwired into its constitution and ask if there was any connection with it taking umbrage at 2 Jewish activists, one of whom was Black.  However you are neither honest nor a journalist.
A journalist with an ounce of integrity would ask why an organisation which has never concerned itself with the anti-Semitism of the far right should be concerned with preventing free speech of Jewish anti-fascists.
If you had been daring you might have drawn an analogy with South Africa and ‘banned persons’ under the 1982 Internal Security Act. It was a criminal offence to quote or even mention the existence of banned persons. White opponents of Apartheid, like Jewish anti-Zionists today, were particular targets.  
Anyone who has pretensions to the title ‘journalist’ might ask why it is that the Board of Deputies opposedJews in the 1930s physically confronting Moseley’s British Union of Fascists and in the 1970s did the same with the Anti-Nazi League which was ‘constantly under attack from the Jewish Board of Deputies.’ according to Paul Holborrow.
Why is it that the Board of Deputies’s first ‘anti-racist’ demonstration was not against the National Front or BNP but against Jeremy Corbyn? Any journalist who was not prostituting themselves to the powerful would have asked these simple and obvious questions.
Any journalist with even an iota of honesty would have asked why the Board’s demonstration includedNorman Tebbit of the ‘cricket test’ and Protestant bigot Ian Paisley MP. This must have been the first ‘anti-racist’ demonstration for both of these gentlemen or for another two Uncle Toms, Sajid David and Chuka Ummuna.
Of course you asked none of these questions because you don’t see your role as asking questions of those in power. Your duty is to echo the views of the British Establishment.
If you were to ever exercise the grey matter between your ears you might understand why a ‘Jewish’ State in a land whose indigenous population was ethnically cleansed cannot be other than a racist state. By its own definition Israel is a state of its Jewish citizens only. However you are not employed to think either.
In Afula crowds of demonstrators, led by their Mayor, protested at the sale of a house to an Arab in an all Jewish city. Dozens of rabbis in Israel have forbidden the letting of homes to Arabs. But you and Bush, are journalists in name only.
For Stephen Bush to cover up the crimes of Apartheid Israel is to make him complicit. The use of the charge of ‘anti-Semitism’ is no different to the accusations of ‘anti-White’ racism that the Apartheid regime in South Africa levelled at opponents. This is why Bus is an Uncle Tom journalist. Any Black journalist who defends Apartheid is a collaborator.
Yours is not to reason why. Yours is but to libel and lie. Even your references to Jackie Walker and I having been expelled for ‘anti-Semitism’ had to be corrected. You hadn’t bothered to ask simple questions such as why, despite being suspended for ‘anti-Semitism’ the Labour Party didn’t charge us with anti-Semitism. Strange that.
If you had been particularly adventurous you might have drawn an analogy with McCarthyism in America when people were banned from public platforms and prevented from working in the film industry. People like Pete Seeger to Charlie Chaplin.
If you or Bush had been around no doubt you would have cried ‘communist’ at fellow journalists. Both of you are the direct descendants of the ‘liberal’ journalist Arthur Schlesinger who went out of his way to attack those who were ‘communists’. When you shout ‘anti-Semite’ today you are doing no more than those who used to shout ‘Communist’.
The irony of all this is that the New Statesman was founded by a genuine anti-Semite, Sidney Webb. Webb, who was Colonial Secretary in Ramsay MacDonald’s 1929 government, proclaimed that ‘French, German, Russian socialism is Jew-ridden. We, thank heaven, are free.’ And why? ‘There’s no money in it.’. [Paul Kelemen, The British Left & Zionism p. 20]. Ramsay MacDonald when visiting Palestine in 1922 contrasted the Zionist pioneers with
‘the rich plutocratic Jew, who is the true economic materialist. He is the person whose views upon life make one anti-Semitic. He has no country, no kindred... he is an exploiter of everything he can squeeze. He is behind every evil that Governments do... He detests Zionism because it revives the idealism of his race.’ [David Cesarani, Anti-Zionism in Britain, p.141].
It is ironic that you and Stephen Bush, in your condemnation of ‘anti-Semitism’ are working for a publication founded by an anti-Semite!  You are indeed Webb’s bastard children.
Have a good day! 
Tony Greenstein

Visit ‘Cry the Beloved Country’ – Palestinian Exhibition from Gil Mualem-Doron

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This event for Refugee Week 2020 will be showing at P21 Gallery in September 2020.



‘Cry the Beloved Country' is an exhibition by Dr Gil Mualem-Doron, an Arab/Israeli artist that was scheduled for 2ndApril.  Unfortunately it was caught by the COVID-19 lockdown. It is now being shown online until it is ready, probably on 27 September to be displayed physically.
Cry the Beloved Country’will include a presentation of photography and film projects on the subject of Palestinian refugees and a conversation with the Palestinian historian Dr Salman Abu Sitta, the artist Dr Gil Mualem-Doron, Eitan Bronstein Aparicio the founder of the NGO Zochrot and De-Colonizer and the curator Ghazaleh Zogheib.
The event will include the presentation of the photography project "Present Absentees" about Palestinian internal refugees in Israel which won the third prize in the Long Exposure category in Local Testimony / World Press Photo 2020 and screening of the film To Gaza and Back Home - by Eitan Bronstein Aparicio and De-Colonizer.
The film documents the story of the destroyed Palestinian village of al-Ma’in, the Israeli settlement that was built on top of it, the story of the village's refugees and the reaction of the Israeli settlers when they faced the place's history when it was presented to them in an exhibition in one of the buildings that survived the destruction.
This Event is supported by Art Council England and Hub Collective.
Cry the Beloved Country’ was also a famous novel written in 1948 by the South Africa liberal Alan Paton.  I read it at school and it opened my eyes to Apartheid.
If you want to see the exhibition online please register here: or 
https://tinyurl.com/ybdpx3ko 

“Cry, the beloved country” is a nightmarish series of room installations and photography works dealing with the links between Great Britain, Israel and Palestine and depicting the catastrophic results of this unholy conundrum.  Built as a journey into “the heart of darkness” the exhibition is intended to negate many Israelis and Zionists supporters’ view of Israel as a “villa in the jungle”.

Dr. Gil Mualem-Doron (1970) is a Arab-Jewish artist, born and based in the UK. Mualem-Doron’s work is research-based, often transgresses social norms with a focus on issues such as identity politics, nationalism, placemaking and histories of place, social justice, and transcultural aesthetics. The exhibition’s text is written by the curator Galit Eilat director of Meduza Foundation  (Netherlands) and Eilat co-curated the [12] 31st São Paulo Biennial.
The exhibition title “Cry, the beloved country” is taken from an article published in the most read Israeli newspaper, Maariv, in 1953, by its chief editor Dr Ezriel Karlebach. In the article Karlebach compares some of the new state laws against the Arabs who became Israeli citizens to Nazi laws in the mid 1930s.
The article's title was taken from the well-known book by the same name, written in 1948 by the South African writer Alan Paton, and in which he depicts the rise of the apartheid regime. This article, alongside research into expressions and deeds by Israeli politicians, rabbis and settlers, inform the centrepiece of the exhibition – the reconstruction of an installation – a performance piece that took place on the eve of the centenary of the Balfour Declaration in Trafalgar Sq. 
In the performance, an actor dressed in a Klu Klux Klan cloak, partly made from Mualem-Doron’s Jewish prayer shawl, is standing and saluting Nelson’s statue whilst holding the Israeli Flag. The installation in the gallery includes photographs from this intervention as well as two others that took place in Tel Aviv and led to a near arrest of the artist.
The ground floor is occupied by a film installation juxtaposing a “postcard image” of Tel Aviv beach on the sunny day of the April 2019 election with chilling soundtracks of testimonies of Palestinians who have suffered attacks on beaches in Israel and Gaza. For the visitors to hear the soundtracks they have to use their bodies to physically obscure the projected image.
On the way to the gallery’s dark basement, the visitors encounter forty portraits of Israeli Palestinians (Palestinian who stayed during the 1948 war in what now is Israel and who are therefore Israeli citizens). The participants’ portraits were taken with a historical image of the village in which they or their parents were born and grew up in is projected on them and the wall behind. The land and houses of these people were confiscated after 1948 and their village was destroyed, along with 400 or so other villages in historical Palestine. 
The lands where the village stood is now part of the Zionist National Trust Forest and in part of a Kibbutz. Considered by the state of Israel as “Present Absentees”, they are among the hundreds of thousands of Israeli- Palestinians who are de facto internal refugees. This body of work recently won a 3rd place award at the photography exhibition Local Testimony which is part of the Magnum World Press photography exhibition, 2019.
The basement contains three other works that depict the relations between the British colonisation of Palestine and the present situation. The large installation is made out of 400+ Victorian roof tiles printed with Palestinian embroidery patterns, commemorating the destroyed Palestinian villages during and after the 1948 war. Broken tiles also form parts of miniature sculptures that link the current gentrification process in Jaffa to the Judaification of the old city. They also feature in a film depicting the destruction of the last remains of a Palestinian village on a beach in Tel Aviv.
In the past five years Dr. Gil Mualem-Doron has won several grants from the Art Council England additional to other public and private bodies, was commissioned to create new works by Counterpoints Arts, Brighton Pride, the Mayor of London and Ben & Jerry’s. His work has been exhibited at places such as Tate Modern, Turner Contemporary, the South Bank Centre, the Jewish Museum (London), and the People’s History Museum, Manchester, Haifa Museum of Art (Israel) and at Vrystaat Kunstefees Arts Festival, South Africa. Recently he gained artist residencies and solo exhibitions at Umm El-Phemem Gallery, Israel and Greatmore Art Centre in Cape Town, South Africa. More about Mualem-Doron can be found on www.gildoron.co.uk
The exhibition will be accompanied with a series of film screening and discussion on the issue of the Palestinian Nakba and the right of return, the parallels between South Africa’s Apartheid and Israel and a round table on the differences and similarities between political, activist, collaborative and transgressive art practices. 
p.s.
"The Holocaust should bring us to ponder our public lives and, furthermore, it must lead anyone who is capable of taking public responsibility to do so," Golan said. "Because if there is one thing that is scary in remembering the Holocaust, it is noticing horrific processes which developed in Europe – particularly in Germany – 70, 80, and 90 years ago, and finding remnants of that here among us in the year 2016…It's scary to see horrifying developments that took place in Europe begin to unfold here…"
IDF deputy chief, Yair Golan in a Holocaust MemorialDay speech, Israel, 5th May 2016

“We now have a law that confirms the Arab population as second-class citizens. It, therefore, is a very clear form of apartheid. I don’t think the Jewish people survived for 20 centuries, mostly through persecution and enduring endless cruelties, in order to now become the oppressors, inflicting cruelty on others. This new law does exactly that. That is why I am ashamed of being an Israeli today.”
Daniel Barenboim on the Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People, Today, I Am Ashamed to Be an Israeli (July 22, 2018), Haaretz.

A link to high-resolution images, a photoshoot at the gallery and an interview with Mualem-Doron can be arranged by contacting the artist on 07954439301 or gilmdoron@gmail.com or the P21 Gallery 020 7121 6190 or info@p21.org.uk 
Further information about selected works:
The sea is the same sea, and the Arabs...” a film installation (London’s Square, Tel-Aviv, Israel 2019).
The film and images from the installation can be viewed here:

The film installation juxtaposes a “postcard image” of Tel Aviv’s beach during the sunny day of April 2019 election with a chilling soundtrack made of a series of testimonies of Palestinians who were victims of racially motivated attack which took place at several beaches in Israel in the past few years. None of the perpetrators of these were found or jailed.
In addition, the installation includes an audio interview with two Palestinian women from the Occupied Territories who saw the sea for the first time after they were smuggled there for a getaway day with their children. The last recording is taken from a well-known media record of  Huda Ghalia, age 11, who lost all of her family in an attack on Gaza beach, in 2006 by the Israeli marines.
Visitors who would like to hear the alternative soundtrack to the film via headphones have to block with their bodies part of the projected image, casting a shadow on the screen that opens the space to these often muted and forgotten voices.
The title of the installation“The sea is the same sea, and the Arabs...” is part of a well known quote by Yitzhak Shamir, the extreme right-wing terrorist and former Israeli prime minister. The full quote, 

“The sea is the same sea and the Arabs are the same Arabs” 

implied that "the Arabs had not changed their animosity towards Israel and their desire to throw the Jews into the sea"– a view cherished and propagated by the current prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
 Cry, the beloved country (2015) A mixed-media installation and street intervention
The work comprises of a mannequin wearing a Ku Klux Klan costume, partly made from a Jewish prayer shawl that was used originally by the artist in his Bar Mitzva ceremony. The figure is positioned to gaze at a series of quotes written on the gallery’s wall as if trying to decipher their origins:  Adolf Hitler? Al Qaeda?  The KKK? Donald Trump? Or Israeli rabbis and politicians. The answer is by all but it is very hard to guess the origins as the phrasing and the themes of these quotes are very similar. The visitors will be able to obtain online the quotes with the reference of their authors/utterers.     The room installation was firstly conceived for an art gallery in Tel Aviv in the wake of the Duma village arson attack which resulted in the loss of life of three of the same family members; 18-month-old Ali Dawabsheh was burned alive in the fire, while both his parents died from their injuries within weeks. After the submission of the work to the gallery an email from the gallery manager stated that
a. the work is not art
b.  it is too risky for the gallery to show and
c. that it is a family-friendly gallery and this will deter families from participating in other activities.  
As a result a street intervention was staged outside Tel Aviv Museum of Art, in response to death threats the artist received from one of the Museum’s trustees after creating work in responding to “Operation Protective Edge”  / Gaza war 2014. Another intervention took place outside the “Independence Hall” in Tel Aviv and in
London’s Trafalgar Square on the day of the 100th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration.
The full texts used for the work and images from the street interventions in London and Tel Aviv can be found on the work’s webpage mentioned above .
3.    “Present Absentees” socially engaged photography project (Israel, Umm El Faheem   Gallery and the Elderly House, 2019). 
[shepherd]
The project depicts the issue of “Present Absentees” or Internally Displaced Persons (IDP’s) in Israel. Present Absentees are Palestinians who fled or were expelled from their home in Mandatory Palestine by Jewish or Israeli forces, before and during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, but who remained within the area that became the state of Israel. They are regarded as absent by the Israeli government because they were absent from their homes on a particular day, even if they did not intend to leave them for more than a few days, and even if they left involuntarily. IDPs homes, property and lands were seized by Israel. 274,000 Arab citizens of Israel (1 out of 4) are
IDP. The project was created during an Artist’s Residency at Umm El Fahem Gallery, Israel and the photographs were taken in the gallery as well as in The Elderly House in the town. Local residents were invited for a photoshoot in which they were photographed on the background of historical photos of Al-Lajoun – a nearby village where they or their ancestors were born. The houses and the land of the village were confiscated by the state after 1948 and the village was destroyed shortly after.
The land and some of the survived buildings belongs today to the Jewish National Fund (KKL in Hebrew) and used as a park. In 2017, KKL-JNF friend and supporter Jose Luis Mendoza, president and founder of the Catholic University of San Antonio of Murcia, Spain donated further funds to cover the area of the village with further forest trees. Other parts of the village land were given to Kibbutz Megido in which until today one of the village mosques is located. In the last decade, the original residents of El Lajun were trying to negotiate as well as start legal cases, aiming to gain back some of the lands that were taken. Others created plans that envisaged the re-building of the village. More info about the village can be found here:
The participants in the photoshoot were asked to choose which of the historical photos, taken from Umm El Fahem Gallery archive,  they would like to be photographed with. The photos were projected on a wall and the participants were positioned in front of the projected image. They could not see the projected image that was behind them and blinded by the light emitted from the projector, they could not see the action, the photographic act nor the photographer. One of them described his experience as being in a visual vacuum – blinded and left only with his thoughts or memories of the village. Only after the photo was taken the participants could see on the camera’s digital screen how they were positioned in the village landscape and chose the photo that they were happy with.  The project was chosen to be exhibited in Edut Mekomit / Local Testimony 2019 in the Eretz Israel Museum. 
4. No Man’s Land  (Hama’s Series) 2019
I met Hamad (pseudonym)  during an Artist’s Residency at Umm El Fahem Gallery, Israel. He is the third generation of a family that originated in  Al-Lajoun village that was under heavy attack in 1948 War and then was destroyed by the state of Israel. The village’s lands were confiscated by the state and were given to the Jewish National Fund (KKL in Hebrew) and now are used as a park.
Other parts of the village land were given to Kibbutz Megido in which until today one of the village mosques is located. A few ruined buildings and the village’s graveyard are still there.
Hamad from time to time visits the site where his granddad’s house used to be. The photos, taken in the dead of the night, depicts him meandering in the fields that now belong to the kibbutz, next to some ruins and in the graveyard. Not wanting to be recognized I suggested he will wear a cloth, resembling Jalabia – traditional regional wear. There are almost 300,000 ghosts like Hamad haunting the Holy Land.
5.     “Visit Israel – You Will Never Be the Same” Series of photo collages with Active Stills collective (2016)
A series of photographs by the celebrated Israel-Palestinian photography collective ActiveStills and the photojournalist Michaela Whitton that is used as a mock tourism campaign by the Israeli Tourism Ministry, using the ministry's latest campaign slogan and modified logo. 


Brighton and Hove Demonstrates Its Opposition to Annexation and the Theft of Yet More Land

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Netanyahu Proposes to Annex One-Third of the West Bank but not Grant Israeli Citizenship to the Palestinians – According to the Board of Deputies and Sussex Friends of Israel this is Democracy not Apartheid

 




Last Saturday and again yesterday, 1st July, when Netanyahu announced the date when one-third of the West Bank would be officially annexed, i.e. stolen, Brighton and Hove PSC demonstrated at Brighton Clocktower
Since Netanyahu announced that the Palestinian residents of the stolen one-third will not get citizenship one wonders how Zionists such as Sussex Friends of Israel and the Board of Deputies can possibly pretend that Israel is the ‘only democracy in the Middle East.’ The Board of Deputies has, despite considerable Jewish opposition, even from Zionists, refused to oppose Netanyahu’s theft plans.
This is the same Board that the racist leader of the British Labour Party Keir Starmer has formed an alliance with in their fight against ‘anti-Semitism’.
Tony Greenstein

A Tribute to Ze’ev Sternhell – A Child Survivor of the Holocaust - who Warned of the Danger of Fascism in Israel 'akin to early Nazism'

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In Starmer’s Crazy Labour Party even a Holocaust Survivor would be expelled for ‘anti-Semitism’

Ze’ev Sternhell, who died on June 21 was 85. He was one of that rare species – a genuine intellectual who was also a Zionist. Perhaps that was because his roots lay in Europe. He was also a rare example of a Zionist who wasn't a racist.
Sternhell was a child survivor of the Przemysl ghetto. He was  smuggled out of the ghetto by his aunt, uncle and Polish non-Jews to Lwow. He was brought up as a Catholic in Krakow and in 1946 he emigrated to France and in 1951 to Israel.
Sternhell speaking at a protest meeting
Quoting Kant and Rousseau that human will is the source of morality, he argued in The Founding Myths of Israel [TFMI] that
‘a state cannot be liberal as long as religion plays a major role in governing society and politics, or as long as the state is defined as the operative arm of the nation.’
This principle was established with the French and American Revolutions of the 18th century. It is a principle that Israel, as the nation state of the Jews rejects in favour of ethno-nationalism.  It is the reason why, fascists, racists and even neo-Nazis the world over admire Israel as their model. People such as Richard Spencer, Donald Trump, Tommy Robinson and Viktor Orban call themselves Zionists.
Sternhell sawthat an important component of fascism is its interpretation of history. Jewish and Zionist history were being interpreted ‘as a process of ethnic determinism’ in which different groups are seen as inherently inferior.
Yet the paradox was that despite being a representative of that declining section of Israeli Jews who wanted to see an Israel freed of racism and chauvinism, Sternhell was a Zionist.  Indeed he was a ‘Super Zionist.’ telling Ha’aretz:
“The establishment of the state was like the creation of the world for me. It transported me to a kind of rapture. I am not only a Zionist, I am a super-Zionist. For me, Zionism was and remains the right of the Jews to control their fate and their future. I consider the right of human beings to be their own masters a natural right. A right of which the Jews were deprived by history and which Zionism restored to them. That is its deep meaning.”
Sternhell speaking at a protest meeting
Unfortunately this was not true. Zionism could only succeed in conquering the country at the expense of the Palestinians. They became the masters over the Palestinians.There was no other way. Sternhell was incapable of seeing that his liberation was at the expense of the Palestinians. Nor is it true that Zionism was about the right of the Jews to control their fate. Even in Israel the democratic rights of Jews are growing narrower, just as they did in South Africa.
I first came across Ze’ev Sternhell when I read The Founding Myths of Israel where he comprehensively showed that the Israeli Labor Movement, which charlatans in the British Labour Party held up to be a model of socialism, was nothing of the sort. The Israeli Labor Party (Mapai) and its ‘trade union’ wing, were staffed by unelected functionaries.  It was wholly undemocratic, its officials not being elected and was riddled with corruption. From the very beginning Mapai was anti-socialist.
What was called ‘constructive socialism was merely an Eretz Israeli version of nationalist socialism.’ Sternhell explains that he used the term ‘nationalist socialism’ because national socialism‘has been contaminated by its association with the Nazis.’ (pp. 6-7) He described the founders of Labour Zionism as ‘first and foremost nationalists. Some were purely nationalist and violently anti-socialist.’(p.18)
Despite his withering criticism of Israeli society, Sternhell like many others in the Israeli Peace Camp such as Uri Avnery and Yeshayahu Leibowitz, Sternhell believed that Israeli society had been corrupted by the 1967 War.  He accepted the expulsion of the refugees in 1948 but saw the conquest of the West Bank and Gaza as an expression of imperial expansion. There was no moral basis to it.
“Whereas the conquests of 1949 were an essential condition for the founding of Israel, the attempt to retain the conquests of 1967 had a strong flavor of imperial expansion,” he wrote. (p. 336, FMOI)
He tried his hand at politics when in 1977 he set up a group (Circle 77) aimed at persuading the Israeli Labor Party to renounce settlement of the West Bank.
“We thought about bringing everything back and achieving the end of the conflict [with the Arabs] based on the 1967 borders. We very quickly understood that it was impossible to speak with [party leaders] Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres or Motta Gur about giving back territory,” he said. 
Protesting outside Sternhell's home against the bomb that was intended to kill him 
His award of the Israel prize in 2008 had led the settlers to try and block it in the High Court. A similar award to Leibowitz had triggered a similar reaction, led by Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, such that he was forced to decline it. In 2008 a religious settler from Florida, Jack Teitel, planted a bomb at Sternhell’s home which caused a minor injury. Sternhell called the religious Zionists who spearheaded the settlements a ‘cancer’.
Arthur Hertzberg wrote in a review of TFMI that Sternhell had written that Israel must give up its commitments to Zionism, to being a ''Jewish state,'' and become the state of all its citizens. This is to be achieved by abolishing every trace of special status for Jews and their religious and cultural heritage.’
Having read the book I cannot find any such passage disowning Zionism. This is the standard reaction of Zionists for whom any criticism of Zionist racism or chauvinism is an attack on Zionism itself.  Hertzberg was actually right but he failed to understand that Sternhell, like many people, could hold two contradictory ideas in his head. In actualité Sternhell remained a Zionist who detested the way it had developed. Such contradictions are becoming rarer today.
Sternhell was a world authority on fascism and he warned that this was the direction that Israel was taking. In Israel, Growing Fascism and a Racism Akin to Early NazismSternhell wrote that
The left is no longer capable of overcoming the toxic ultra-nationalism that has evolved here, the kind whose European strain almost wiped out a majority of the Jewish people.’
Sternhell was a columnist for Ha’aretz for 50 years, Describing interviews with Smotrich and Zohar, two members of the Knesset he wrote that ‘we see not just a growing Israeli fascism but racism akin to Nazism in its early stages.’
Like every ideology, the Nazi race theory developed over the years. At first it only deprived Jews of their civil and human rights. It’s possible that without World War II the “Jewish problem” would have ended only with the “voluntary” expulsion of Jews from Reich lands. After all, most of Austria and Germany’s Jews made it out in time. It’s possible that this is the future facing Palestinians.
Of course in Britain under the IHRA misdefinition of anti-Semitism that anti-Semites love so much, ‘drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis’is termed ‘anti-Semitic’. Unfortunately the Labour Party bought into this nonsense that has been purveyed by police state functionaries like Jonathan Freedland of the Guardian. Chakrabarti wrote a report that said:
it is always incendiary to compare the actions of Jewish people... to those of Hitler or the Nazis or to the perpetration of the Holocaust.’ [The Shami Chakrabarti Inquiry]. 
Sternhell saw that the role of an intellectual in society ‘is to criticize the regime and point out societal flaws,” This did not make him very popular in Israel where telling the truth can be a crime. Much like the Labour Party under Starmer!
The tragedy of Sternhell is that he could not escape from the confines of Israeli society and Zionism even though he railed against its racism and chauvinism. Sternhell did not see that the drift to extreme racism and fascism was a consequence of setting up a Jewish settler colonial society in someone else’s country. In an interviewSternhell gave with Ari Shavit in Haaretz in 2008 he said:
I did not come to Israel to live in a binational state,” he said. “If I had wanted to live as a minority, I could have chosen places in which it is both more pleasant and safer to live as a minority. But neither did I come to Israel to be a colonial ruler. In my eyes, nationalism that is not universalist, nationalism that does not respect the national rights of others, is a dangerous nationalism.
Unfortunately the mindset which sees a society as comprising ethnic majorities and minorities is accepting the framework of ethnic exclusivism. It is but a short step to racism.
Nationalism by definition, even of the most progressive kind, is not universal. By saying he did not want to live in a binational state Sternhell was saying that he wanted a Jewish state with a permanent Jewish majority.
This inevitably breeds a racist mindset since the State will take steps to ensure that the minority is kept as small as possible and as marginal as possible. What he couldn’t face up was the contradiction in his ideas. He saw where Israel was heading but he was unable to grapple with the contradictions of being anti-racist and a Zionist.
Ha’aretz describedfascism as a problem of culture, having ‘a coherent and significant ideology’ that looked for answers ‘that neither capitalist liberalism nor revolutionary socialism had managed to deal with.’ I haven’t read his writings on fascism but I suspect that we would have had much to disagree about!  Fascism is noticeable for not having a coherent ideology unlike Marxism.
Nonetheless Ze’ev Sternhell was a sincere opponent of the drift to the open far Right in Israel today and he wasn’t afraid to make comparisons between Israel and the early stages of Nazi Germany. See:

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