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James Baldwin on Black-Jewish Relations, Israel and the United States

August 27, 2020, 7:25 pm
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Israel wasn’t created because non-Jews loved Jews but to protect Western interests

James Baldwin who died in 1987 aged 63 was a Black American essayist, novelist, playwright, poet and social critic.
With the novel Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), a distillation of his own experiences as a preacher’s son in 1930s Harlem and the essay collection Notes of a Native Son (1955), Baldwin established himself as a prophetic voice of his era. Baldwin remains not only a chronicler of his epoch but a thinker who helped shape it. One of the great modern prose stylists, he applied his passion, wit, and relentlessly probing intelligence to the fault lines of American society while remaining true to his early credo:
“One writes out of one thing only—one’s own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give.”
 “I fell under the spell of Baldwin’s voice. No other black writer I’d read was as literary as Baldwin in his early essays, not even Ralph Ellison. There is something wild in the beauty of Baldwin’s sentences and the cool of his tone, something improbable, too, this meeting of Henry James, the Bible, and Harlem. I can see the scratches in the desk in my room where I was reading ‘Notes of a Native Son,’ Baldwin’s memoir of his hated father’s death the day his father’s last child was born in 1943, one day before Harlem erupted into the deadliest race riot in its history. I can feel the effects of this essay within me still.”
Darryl Pinckney, The New York Review of Books, April 4, 2014 from the Library of America
For a biography of Baldwin see here 
My attention was drawn to Baldwin, Israel and the Jews by an essay by Stephen Salaita, James Baldwin and the Jewish State. Salaita was subject to a Zionist witchhunt at Illinois University at Urbana-Champaign in 2014 when critical remarks he made on social media about Israel’s genocidal attack on Gaza were used as a pretext to withdraw a tenured job offer. After a major campaign by Palestine solidarity supporters and academics, including being censured by the Association of American University Professors and a boycott by visiting professors, a settlement was reached.University of Illinois OKs $875,000 settlement to end Steven Salaita dispute
The whole episode, including the lies and destruction of email evidence by former Chancellor Phyllis Wise, who was a casualty of her own witchhunt, was extensively detailed by Electronic Intifada at the time. See
Univ. of Illinois protected white supremacist, but not Steven Salaita, report finds

Steven Salaita settles lawsuit with Univ. of Illinois

Univ. of Illinois official who fired Steven Salaita admits to destroying evidence

Salaita’s article was based on Baldwin’s ‘The Cross of Redemption – Uncollected Writings and in particular an essay Blacks and Jews.
The essay consists of a transcript of a remarkable discussion held by Baldwin, who was a professor at the University of Massachusets-Amherst. As Salaita notes, Baldwin’s ideas on Zionism and Israel arose in the context of the 1984 Presidential election in which Jessie Jackson, a civil rights campaigner who stood for the Democratic nomination in 1984 and 1988, had used the epithet “Hymietown” to describe New York City in what he thought was an off-the-record conversation with a journalist.  (“Hymie” is an anti-Jewish slur.)  When the comment was reported, it erupted into a scandal. 
Baldwin claimed that “Jesse is singled out for particular reasons.”Hymietown, is hardly the most anti-Semitic slur that has ever been levelled. New York is famous for the large number of Jews, some 2 million, who live there. Hymie, a reference to a typical Jewish name simply emphasised the Jewish presence in New York. It reminds me of Jo Bird’s play on words– ‘Jew process’ rather than ‘due process’.
It was an artificial controversy in which the Zionist lobby sought to weaponise anti-Semitism against a radical Black candidate. As Nathan Perlmutter the neo-liberal Executive Director of the Anti-Defamation League, a Zionist organisation that had previously spied on anti-Apartheid activists on behalf of BOSS, the South African secret police, said of Jackson’s apology for the remark:
“He could light candles every Friday night and grow side curls, and it still wouldn’t matter. He’s a whore,”
. The controversy was a forerunner of the attacks on Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar and Alexander Ocasio-Cortez. The difference this time around is that instead of apologising they stood up to their detractors and that is why they all won their primaries. If Corbyn had done the same instead of cowardly throwing his supporters under a bus then he might be Prime Minister now.
They say there's no Zionist lobby!
Blacks, Jews and America
What is remarkable about Baldwin’s comments are how perceptive he was about the reasons for the establishment of Israel and the relationship between Zionism and anti-Semitism.
Noting how ‘the black American singles out the American Jew because so much of the black inheritance comes from the Old and New Testament’ Baldwin observed how Black people
‘unconsciously tends to expect more from a Jewish person than he expects from anybody else. And because the American Jew in this country is essentially a white man, this expectation is always defeated with a resulting accumulation of bitterness.’
Baldwin put it down to American Jews ‘acting on the minor inheritance and rejecting the major one’, which I interpret as meaning that Jews, instead of looking to their past role in the fight against racism and exploitation, instead choose the ‘minor’ issues of slavish obedience to Israel’s dictates and their own material situation.
Baldwin emphasised that
‘a black man does not expect from an American white man what he expects from an American Jew, and when that expectation is defeated, a certain bitterness ensues’ whereas if Jews were like William Buckley, a well-known neo-liberal ‘from whom obviously I expect nothing.’ [Laughter from audience.]
In remarkably perceptive off-the-cuff remarks Baldwin remarks on how ‘Whenever Israel is mentioned one is required, it appears sometimes to me, to maintain a kind of pious silence. Well, why? It is a state like other states.’
Think of the Labour Party 36 years later.  You can say what you want about Chile, South Africa and France and no one will pay a blind bit of notice, but mention Israel and the ‘anti-Semitism’ witchhunters of Starmer and they will be all over you.
If you criticise Israel for poisoning a well then this will be immediately deemed ‘anti-Semitic’ because historically Jews were accused of poisoning wells.  The 2nd example of the IHRA states:
Making mendacious, dehumanizing, demonizing, or stereotypical allegations about Jews as such or the power of Jews as collective — such as, especially but not exclusively, the myth about a world Jewish conspiracy or of Jews controlling the media, economy, government or other societal institutions.
No matter that the Zionist poisoning of water is a demonstrable fact. In 1948 the Zionists poisoned the water supply of Acre with dysentery. The evidence for this comes from the files of the International Committee of the Red Cross files, which became available, 50 years after the event , under the reference G59/1/GC, G3/82, sent by ICRC delegate de Meuron from 6 May to about 19 May 1948.
Baldwin spoke about how Israel ‘came into existence as a means of protecting Western interests at the gate of the Middle East.’
Bearing in mind how Corbyn and McDonnell didn’t get it after 5 years of abuse, Baldwin reached for the heart of the problem that caused so much confusion in the Labour Party:
in order to be a Zionist, it is not necessary to love the Jews. I know some Zionists who are definitely anti-Semitic. And to be a Jew is not necessarily to be a Zionist.
Referring to the confected Hymietown remark of Jesse Jackson, Baldwin again realised what was happening:
There is something about the whole anecdote which rubs me the wrong way, something that —I smell a rat somewhere, it doesn’t seem entirely—can we use the word?—kosher. [Laughter from audience.] Be that as it may, the press, the media... is now saddling Jesse Jackson with the label or the suggestion of being anti-Semite, of being an anti-Semite. I think I know Jesse well enough to say that that seems to me exceedingly unlikely.
This exactly mirrors the fake campaign in the Labour Party. Any remark, however humorous, about Jews was interpreted as ‘anti-Semitic’ whereas the racist troll, Luke Stanger, could be suspended for two years for saying that Travellers and Gypsies are a ‘nasty blight’ on society. If he had referred to Jews he would have been fast-tracked out of the Labour Party but idiot Corbyn and the servile McDonnell never got it.
We only have to think of Donald Trump’s remarks: “I think any Jewish people that vote for a Democrat, I think it shows either a total lack of knowledge or great disloyalty.” And who were they disloyal to?  Well Trump clarified this too. Israel!  But Netanyahu and the Zionist chorus showed no interest in genuine anti-Semitism. For the Zionists Trump’s support for Israel trumps his anti-Semitism.
Baldwin noted that
‘for the most part the American Jew is simply, in the black person’s life, nothing but another white American, who goes to church on Saturday instead of Sunday.’
Speaking of the weaponisation of anti-Semitism and how the Zionist lobby uses trivial examples of anti-Semitism, which Jackson’s certainly was, to mount an attack on a radical Black candidate:
‘it would seem to be a pity if it [Jackson’s campaign] can be destroyed by this ancient red herring of anti-Semitism which I’ve seen drag through so many discussions with such disastrous results over so many years.
Baldwin’s comments on White  liberals, many if not most of whom were Jews, was telling in view of the conflictsthat arose in for example New York between Black parents and White, mainly Jewish school teachers.
when the civil rights movement was in Alabama... they were very indignant. And then I watched what happened imperceptibly but fatally when that same movement moved north to Brooklyn, to Pittsburgh, Detroit, and New York. And their attitudes changed.... Their attitudes changed because they began to feel more and more threatened, and a liberal facade or even a liberal attitude was not enough to deal with the speed with which the movement was moving
When a student questioned Baldwin’s assertions about the foundation of the Israeli state and misattributed to him the suggestion that Israel was founded to protect oil interests, Baldwin replied that:
I said to protect the vital interests of the Western world... but I would be lying to you and lying by my own experience if I said to you that the Europeans—the English, the Dutch, the Germans, the French—impressed me as having any very vivid concern for Jews. The French are still anti-Semitic, so are the British, so are the Dutch, so are the Poles, so are the French. They’ll probably be anti-Semitic until the nation disappears
Baldwin immediately gets what Corbyn and his gaggle of sycophants, from Seamus Milne to Karen Murphy and Jennie Formby didn’t get. Israel was not established because of any concern for Jews. It is only a Jewish state in its racial make up, not its values or ethics. Baldwin elaborates upon this declaring that:
Part of the hazard of being a Jew, historically and... actually, morally, historically of being a Jew, is finding yourself doing the Christian’s dirty work. You see what I’m saying? It’s not a condemnation; it’s simply a fact. So it is in that sense to say that Israel is useful to the Western interests.
Unlike many people these days and organisations like If Americans Knew which portray the United States as the pawn of Israel, Baldwin understood very well that Israel is ‘doing the Christian’s dirty work.’
The only disagreement I would have with Baldwin was on the question of Israeli sales of arms to South Africa where he said:
‘As far as I know, Jesse has said nothing about arms sales to South Africa, and I don’t think he will, you know. The arms sales to South Africa on the part of Israel are again an example of the traditional role that Jews have often played in Christendom.’
That isn’t quite true. Even when the West imposed an arms embargo on the Apartheid state Israel still supplied it with weaponry, including nuclear arms.
However all in all it was an extremely interesting lecture, even more so because many of these issues were barely visible back in 1984.
Tony Greenstein
Blacks and Jews – extracts – James Baldwin
Because the most awful thing about the black American relationship to Jews, to the American Jew, is that the black American singles out the American Jew because so much of the black inheritance comes from the Old and New Testament—so much of our imagery: “Let my people go,” all of those legends black people have lived with and made real up until this hour—and that means that unconsciously a black person tends to expect more from a Jewish person than he expects from anybody else. And because the American Jew in this country is essentially a white man, this expectation is always defeated with a resulting accumulation of bitterness, because the American Jew is acting on the minor inheritance and rejecting the major one.
a black man does not expect from an American white man what he expects from an American Jew, and when that expectation is defeated, a certain bitterness ensues. I might feel very differently about my ex–running buddies if in fact they were all Calvinists, if they were people like William Buckley, from whom obviously I expect nothing. [Laughter from audience.]
What is behind it, in another way, has to do with something else— something else which no one ever wishes to discuss. And that is the actual role in the Middle East of the state of Israel. Whenever Israel is mentioned one is required, it appears sometimes to me, to maintain a kind of pious silence. Well, why? It is a state like other states. It has come into existence in a peculiar way. But it does not, does not, become a state because people who wrote the Balfour Declaration, or Winston Churchill, or for that matter anyone in Europe, or in the Western world, really cared what happened to the Jews. I wish I could say differently, but I would be lying if I did—it came into existence as a means of protecting Western interests at the gate of the Middle East.
In any case, in order to be a Zionist, it is not necessary to love the Jews. I know some Zionists who are definitely anti-Semitic. And to be a Jew is not necessarily to be a Zionist. I’m putting it to you this way in the attempt to clarify something which is happening all around us. All of this is triggered by the incipient attack on Jesse Jackson, who allegedly made, or has confessed to having made, an anti-Semitic remark in a private conversation, while a reporter was listening. There is something about the whole anecdote which rubs me the wrong way, something that —I smell a rat somewhere, it doesn’t seem entirely—can we use the word?—kosher. [Laughter from audience.] Be that as it may, the press, the media, to which we owe so much, which is so enlightening for us all, is now saddling Jesse Jackson with the label or the suggestion of being anti-Semite, of being an anti-Semite. I think I know Jesse well enough to say that that seems to me exceedingly unlikely.
it is true that for the most part the American Jew is simply, in the black person’s life, nothing but another white American, who goes to church on Saturday instead of Sunday.
What I myself may think of Mr. Jackson, Reverend Jackson, in the privacy of my own house has nothing to do with this possibility, and he’s the only candidate which offers us this possibility. And it would seem to be a pity if it can be destroyed by this ancient red herring of anti-Semitism which I’ve seen drag through so many discussions with such disastrous results over so many years.
it is not enough to be a liberal, to have the right attitudes and even to give money to the right causes. You have to know more than that. You have to be prepared to risk more than that. I am telling you this because I have watched what happened to many of my liberal friends when the civil rights movement was in Alabama, let us say, in the Deep South, and they were [inaudible] very indignant. And then I watched what happened imperceptibly but fatally when that same movement moved north to Brooklyn, to Pittsburgh, Detroit, and New York. And their attitudes changed. I really hate to put it to you that way, but that is what happened. Their attitudes changed because they began to feel more and more threatened, and a liberal facade or even a liberal attitude was not enough to deal with the speed with which the movement was moving
In talking about Israel before, you said that Israel wasn’t set up because anyone else [cared] about the Jews, but you implied it was set up to protect oil interests in that area. And I would argue that point and say that I think after centuries of despoil that there was a bit of that, [but] that this was an area that the Jews did deserve as their homeland, and I just find it hard to accept that it was set up to protect oil interests.
 BALDWIN: I said to protect the vital interests of the Western world, and I don’t mean to be sardonic or cynical, but I would be lying to you and lying by my own experience if I said to you that the Europeans—the English, the Dutch, the Germans, the French—impressed me as having any very vivid concern for Jews. The French are still anti-Semitic, so are the British, so are the Dutch, so are the Poles, so are the French. They’ll probably be anti-Semitic until the nation disappears
why do they think that the Jews are going to protect Western interests and Israel doesn’t even have the oil?
BALDWIN: Oh! Yeah, I know that. I didn’t say oil, I said the vital interests of the Western world. Part of the hazard of being a Jew, historically and actually, and part of precisely the danger I was talking about when I began about the way a Jew intrudes himself on a black person’s attention because he is the only white man you see. But then part of the hazard, actually, morally, historically, of the Jewish … of being a Jew, is finding yourself doing the Christian’s dirty work. You see what I’m saying? It’s not a condemnation; it’s simply a fact. So it is in that sense to say that Israel is useful to the Western interests.
STUDENT: I have a question on anti-Semitism and Israelis or Jews doing America’s dirty work. Has Jackson made any censorious remarks about Israeli arms sales to South Africa? And could you maybe talk about how Jackson might take a position on Israel and arm sales to South Africa?
BALDWIN: As far as I know, Jesse has said nothing about arms sales to South Africa, and I don’t think he will, you know. The arms sales to South Africa on the part of Israel are again an example of the traditional role that Jews have often played in Christendom. It is, uh … After all, the state of Israel, as a state, that is to say, in terms of who is responsible for it, where the money comes from, is a—what is a polite word we use?—it is a Western state, it is a Western creation, it is a Western responsibility, isn’t it? And Israel selling arms to Israel, selling arms … I mean, South Africa, well, we all know that. I think it would serve very little purpose to single out Israel as the supplier of arms to South Africa when the real supplier of arms, not only to South Africa but to many, many other parts of the world, is not the state of Israel, but France, England, this country above all—you see what I’m saying? The state of South Africa, the state of Johannesburg, cannot be blamed on Israel—you see what I’m saying?

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The Labour Representation Committee AGM is this Saturday - If It’s Serious About Defeating the Right It Should Get Rid of its President, John McDonnell

September 1, 2020, 4:08 pm
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WHAT IS JEWISH VOICE FOR LABOUR FOR? When Your Strategy Has Failed It’s Usually a Good Idea To Change Direction Not Dig A Deeper Hole 


Instead of criticising Starmer's refusal to confront Boris Johnson over privatisation, PPE, nurses wages etc. McDonnell praises him



The LRC is holding its long delayed AGM this Saturday. The Labour Left has suffered a cataclysmic defeat at the hands of a state sponsored ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign. If the LRC is serious about reversing that defeat then it first needs to engage in a serious evaluation of what went wrong and why.

The Labour Right demonstrated in the past 5 years that it was happy to unite with the Tories and the Zionists in order to defeat Corbyn and the Left. If the price of that alliance was a General Election they were prepared to pay that price. As the Leaked Labour Report made clear Labour’s witchhunting staff were grief stricken at Labour’s success.

Today Labour’s witchhunters don’t even bother to hide the fact that criticism of Israel will result in expulsion. The ‘mistake’ as the LRC Executive Statement puts it of Labour’s adoption of the IHRA in September 2018 was nothing less than Corbyn and the Labour Left stabbing itself in the back.  The IHRA, by making criticism of Israel equivalent to ‘anti-Semitism’ meant that from thereon in there was no need to find people in the Labour Party who didn’t like Jews.  It was enough not to like Israeli Apartheid.



The first thing the LRC should do if it is serious about learning from the past is to remove John McDonnell as its President. Instead of acting as Corbyn’s praetorian guard and spearheading the Left’s advance, McDonnell scabbed on those who did fight. He didn’t merely appease the Right he went out of his way to please them. Who can forget his interview with Alistair Campbell, who was instrumental in the drive to war in Iraq, when McDonnell supported Campbell’s reinstatement to the Labour Party, after having voted for the Lib Dems, he supported.

I don’t recall McDonnell supporting the reinstatement of Jackie Walker, Marc Wadsworth, Chris Williamson or myself, to say nothing of the hundreds of other members who were victims of a cruel and vicious witchhunt which literally drove some veteran members to their deaths. McDonnell’s behaviour was unforgiveable. He demonstrated that if he had become Chancellor of the Exchequer that he would have been putty in the hands of the capitalists and stockmarket spivs.

Last week  McDonnell demonstrated that his lurch to the Right has not stopped.  Almost alone amongst commentators he statedthat ‘Keir’s got this exactly right.’ Starmer’s approach to the COVID-19 crisis, has amounted to giving Johnson a free pass and saying nothing about the thousands of uncounted deaths in care homes. The massive failure to deliver on PPE was a consequence of privatisation but Starmer again has said nothing. For McDonnell to praise his ‘constructive opposition’ means he has sold the pass.

Tom Watson 'lost sleep' thinking about 'poor racist Phil'

When it came to the fake ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign McDonnell told us Labour should take its advice from the Tory/Trump supporting Board of Deputies. When Margaret Hodge accused Corbyn of being a ‘fucking anti-Semite’ McDonnell urged that she should not be disciplined. No one was keener to haul up the white flag than McDonnell. McDonnell saw himself as the worthy successor to Hugh Dalton, Attlee’s first Chancellor, the guardian of sound capitalist finance.

At the very beginning of Corbyn’s leadership McDonnell demonstrated the direction he was heading in when he apologised on BBC Question Time for his Republican past and for having said that the IRA were ‘brave’.

Unless the Labour Left are capable of a serious analysis of what went wrong during Corbyn’s leadership and wake up to the fact that the ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign was a State directed campaign of destabilisation then they aren’t a serious left. The mere fact that the racist Tory tabloids were so concerned about anti-Semitism should have told McDonnell something. However he was so determined that Corbyn and he should come to power through appeasing rather than fighting the Right that he ignored all the signs that the ruling class was determined that this would not come to pass.

The LRC Executive’s Statement‘Learning from mistakes of the past five years’ (paras. 12-17) is frankly pathetic.  Corbyn didn’t make the odd mistake, he embarked on a wholly mistaken strategy of appeasement of the Labour Right. Appeasing John Mann and Tom Watson was like appeasing a rabid dog. They needed to be put down not stroked.

That is why I am moving a reference back of the statement on Saturday. We shall see whether or not the Conference turns out to be a lap dog or not.


Corbyn’s decision to throw his friends abroad and act as a punch bag to the Hodges and Bergers was not only cowardly it was insane. His inability to understand what the ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign was about was inexcusable. Corbyn was not an innocent abroad. I chaired many Palestine meetings in the 1980’s where Corbyn spoke. There is no doubt that he knew very well that ‘anti-Semitism’ is the first accusation that Zionists make when support for the Palestinians is on the agenda. So why the hell didn’t he say that instead of repeating by rote that ‘I am not an anti-Semite’.

The LRC was well placed to make a strategic intervention in the past 5 years. Instead it chose to do nothing. It was capable of challenging Jon Lansman’s disastrous dictatorship in Momentum, the primary cause of Labour’s defeat yet it kept quiet. This raises the question as to what purpose the LRC serves.

On the eve of poll last December, whilst Momentum, Lansman and the LRC were fooling themselves into believing that Corbyn was on the road to victory, I penned an Open Letter to Corbyn’s closest advisor, Seamus Milne, the architect of the disaster on December 12th. When the government’ files are made public in 30 years we will no doubt know who Seamus Milne, Laura Murray, Andrew Fisher and Corbyn’s other advisers were actually working for because it wasn’t for a Corbyn victory.

Too many on Labour’s gullible Left like Lansman’s former poodle, Laura Parker, were taken in by the idea that Starmer was a unity candidate who would preserve the best of Corbyn’s Manifesto. Contrast this with a post I wrote last February Keir Starmer is the candidate that the Deep State & the British Establishment want you to vote for. I wrote that

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

Jewish Voice for Labour

It's increasingly difficult to know what JVL's strategy is.  I suspect that they don't know either. When the so-called Centre Left Grassroots Alliance met to carve up the left slate for Labour's National Executive elections, Momentum and the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy, both of which failed to oppose and in Momentum's case supported the witchhunt vetoed the nomination of JVL's Jo Bird. Instead of walking out there and then JVL accepted what amounted to a continuation of the witchhunt.  

Because of her prominence and the STV method of election, Jo would almost certainly have secured a place.  Instead JVL simply capitulated to a slate that includes at least one Lansman supporter of the witchhunt.  

Jewish Voices for Labour have absolutely no excuse for this abject surrender to Momentum Forward who include a number of witchhunters in the form of the AWL. JVL made their first appearance at the 2017 Labour Party conference at a packed meeting during which Len McLuskey of Unite promised his union would affiliate. Unfortunately JVL, because of its political timidity and failure to understand the nature of the 'antisemitism' campaign has failed to live up to its promise.

I didn’t join the JVL because I was sceptical about JVL being Jewish only and having a second tier of membership for non-Jews. I’m not opposed to Jewish organisations within the Palestine solidarity movement as a matter of principle but the Labour Party was not a solidarity movement. It was an arena where the class struggle was reflected.

Even more stupidly JVL declared that anyone, Zionist, non-Zionist and anti-Zionist could join though in practice the number of Zionists who did join must be on the fingers of one hand. What this betrayed though was a failure to understand that what was happening had nothing to do with Jews, still less anti-Semitism. It was a combined attack from the British Establishment and its Israeli/Zionist counterparts. To refuse to take a question on Zionism didn’t make you stronger but weaker ideologically.

Al Jazeera's The Lobby demonstrated that the Israeli State was up to its neck in Labour's 'antisemitism' problems - and the JLM's Jeremy Newmark (centre) is sitting with Israeli agent Shai Masot (left) who left Britain in a hurry after it was revealed that he was engaged in dirty tricks

British Jews, or the most reactionary amongst them, played their traditional role in the campaign to remove Corbyn. They were the playthings of others. The Zionist leaders of the Board of Deputies, the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, the Jewish Labour Movement and Jewish Chronicle did their best to create an atmosphere of fear amongst British Jews and it is clear that they succeeded in that task.  After all the middle class are particularly susceptible to ideological campaigns. It was the German middle class who voted overwhelmingly for Hitler in 1933.

In reaction to a survey by the Israeli funded Campaign Against Anti-Semitism that suggested that anti-Semitism in Britain was almost on a level with that in the 1930’s, Ha’aretz’s Anshel Pfeffer, who is a mainstream Zionist observedthat:

‘Jews are represented in Britain in numbers that are many times their proportion of the population in both Houses of Parliament, on the Sunday Times Rich List, in media, academia, professions and just about every walk of public life. To compare today’s Britain, for all its faults, with the Jews’ situation in 1930s exhibits a disconnect from reality which borders on hysteria.

A ‘disconnect bordering on hysteria’. It’s a good summation of the whole fake anti-Semitism campaign.

Just as Jews were the middlemen in pre-capitalist society and in settler colonial societies like Algeria and Morocco, so they once again became the stool pigeons for others in the campaign to be rid of Corbyn. That was why the ‘strategy’, if one can grace it with that term, of JVL, of being a Jewish ‘cover’ for Corbyn had no impact. The Campaign Against Corbyn was never about Jews or anti-Semitism.  It was about defaming the Left as ‘anti-Semitic’ and JVL fell straight for it.

Corbyn of course saw it all as a personal attack on him, hence why he kept parroting the statement that he wasn’t anti-Semitic. It’s not a personal attack to say that Corbyn is not the brightest tool in the box. He never seemed to understand that when they attacked him as an anti-Semite they were not using ‘anti-Semitism’ in its traditional meaning, dislike or hatred of Jews but hatred of what Israel does. Corbyn never took the trouble to understand what was happening. What is surprising is that those who were more intelligent than him, like Seamus Milne also did not get it.  That is why I suspect that at least one of his closest advisors were also working for the British state.

The rest is history. Led by Lansman and the trade unions, Labour’s ‘left’ NEC decided to commit political suicide by endorsing the IHRA ‘definition’ of anti-Semitism. You have to wonder that people who called themselves socialists allowed themselves to endorse a ‘definition’ that allowed critics of Israeli apartheid to be classified as ‘anti-Semites’.

It is untrue that Corbyn simply made a mistake or two.  From the moment he was elected, indeed even before, he went out of his way to appease the Zionists.  In the debate between the four candidates that the JLM sponsored and Jonathan Freedland chaired in July 2015, Corbyn went out of his way to praise Israel.  It is as if 35 years of being in the Palestine solidarity movement hadn’t left a single imprint on the airhead.

Of course there were a few anti-Semites in the Labour Party. Always have been, always will be but the Zionists had no problem with anti-Semites under previous leaders. Indeed they got into bed with more than a few. When Herbert Morrison, as Home Secretary during the war, refused to admit more than a token number of Jewish refugees from the Nazis, the Zionists said nothing.  Indeed they endorsed such a position since they too were opposed to the admission of refugees.

David Rosenberg of the Jewish Socialists Group, who knows Corbyn well, was instrumental in the JVL’s disastrous strategy. Rosenberg was happy to assure people that there was ‘some’ anti-Semitism in the Labour Party thus totally missing the point that it was not about anti-Semitism and never had been.

Tom Watson declared that he wouldn’t rest until every last anti-Semite was removed from the Labour Party. This is the man who as Campaign Organiser in the Birmingham Hodge Hill by-election in 2004 had issued a leaflet informing electors that ‘"Labour is on your side, the Lib Dems are on the side of failed asylum seekers."

Racist Labour MP Phil Woolas - was defended by Tom Watson and John Mann

The same Tom Watson who, when the racist Labour MP Phil Woolas was removed from Parliament by the High Court for lying about his Lib Dem opponent, which was based on a strategy of ‘making the White folk angry’declaredthat he had ‘lost sleep thinking about poor Phil.’

Or there was the ‘anti-Semitism Czar’ John Mann, who issueda scurrilous Anti-Social Behaviour handbook in which he identified Gypsies and Travellers as a law and order problem of anti-social behaviour.

What JVL should have done, but it was left to the Anti-Zionist Jewish Network and Labour Against the Witchhunt, was to demand that the racist Jewish Labour Movement should be disaffiliated from Labour. Despite its claim that it was a Jewish section of the Labour Party it is affiliatedto the World Zionist Organisation. Jewish anti-Zionists are not welcome whilst non-Jewish racists are.

JVL and the LRC, together with Red Labour (which only exists on social media) instead of teaming up with the Labour Left Alliance decided instead to organise separately in Don’t Leave Organise.

At a meeting on April 29thwith Dianne Abbot and Bell Ribairo Addy on the platform, Jackie Walker and myself spoke from the floor.  Immediately the Zionists demandedthat the two MPs should be suspended. Unfortunately the MPs caved in to Starmer and apologised. Whilst JVL was right to issue a statementin solidarity with Abbot and Ribeiro-Addy they omitted to stand up for the right of Labour Party members and MPs to speak with and on the same platform as those unjustly suspended and expelled.

They also had nothing to say about Abbot and Bell Ribairo-Addy caving in and apologising to Starmer. If JVL is not prepared to encourage Labour MPs to develop a backbone who will?

Campaign for Free Speech

It is because of the failure of both the LRC and JVL to campaign against the Board of Deputies’s McCarthyite 10 Commandments that four of us – Jackie Walker, Marc Wadsworth, Chris Williamson and myself, teamed up to organise a series of meetings on the subject of Free Speech.

The first meeting in June included Max Blumenthall and largely escaped Zionist censure, apart from the authentic representative of the fascist wing of Zionism, David Collier. 

The second meeting in July, which apart from the four of us included Professor David Miller of Bristol University, who was himself suspended, Tariq Ali and Norman Finkelstein proved somewhat more controversial.  Since the meeting was about free speech Norman Finkelstein decided that he would be his normal  controversial self in the course of which he praised David Irving, the holocaust denier as a good historian and also asked the rhetorical question of what actually is the Holocaust. He also, somewhat facetiously, said he didn’t know who had killed Christ, missing the point that that was not the point.

The Don't Leave Organise meeting where Dianne Abbot and Bell Ribaire Addey were reprimanded for appearing with Jackie Walker and myself

Norman was certainly being his normal provocative self. That was why he was invited!  When I came back at the end of the meeting I pointed out that Irving had falsified and tampeed with his sources to fit in with his thesis that Hitler knew nothing about the Holocaust and I also added a rider to Norman’s comments about Christ Killers.

However there is no doubt that Irving, who is undoubtedly a neo-Nazi, is a good German military historian.  At least that’s what the experts say! In the famous libel trial Irving v Penguinwhich Rosenberg and others relied on, Judge Gray found, in s.13.7 that:

as a military historian, Irving has much to commend him. For his works of military history Irving has undertaken thorough and painstaking research into the archives. He has discovered and disclosed to historians and others many documents which, but for his efforts, might have remained unnoticed for years. It was plain from the way in which he conducted his case and dealt with a sustained and penetrating cross-examination that his knowledge of World War 2 is unparalleled. His mastery of the detail of the historical documents is remarkable. He is beyond question able and intelligent. He was invariably quick to spot the significance of documents which he had not previously seen. Moreover he writes his military history in a clear and vivid style. I accept the favourable assessment by Professor Watt and Sir John Keegan of the calibre of Irving's military history (mentioned in paragraph 3.4 above) and reject as too sweeping the negative assessment of Evans (quoted in paragraph 3.5).

Of course the Zionists exploded in their normal hypocritical manner. What is surprising is that the Zionist attacks were taken up by Rosenberg in an article published on the JVL blog, Who is David Irving? Rosenberg wrote that:

Even more shocking was after Finkelstein spoke not one of the other panelists, some of whom have played a significant part in anti-racist campaigns, used any of their concluding remarks to challenge Finkelstein’s praise for Irving. Disgraceful. I hope they will do so now.
There also followed an article by Rob Ferguson of the SWP. Ferguson pontificated about anti-Semitism and holocaust denial whilst claiming that but for the SWP we would already have been overrun by neo-Nazis.
I sometimes feel that people like Rosenberg and Ferguson live in a time bubble. Holocaust denial and people like Irving were dominant in the fascist scene 30 years ago.  That was the time when holocaust denial groups like the BNP and the National Front were the main fascist organisations. That is not true today.  Today’s far-Right accept the holocaust as part of the price for their alliances with the Zionist movement and the Israeli state. It clearly has not yet dawned on both Rosenberg and Ferguson that people like Tommy Robinson are admirers of the Israeli state. Holocaust denial is irrelevant to them.
In any event the responsibility for holocaust denial having spread beyond a small coterie of neo-Nazis is that of the Zionists who have continually used the holocaust as justification for Israel’s crimes.
Mike Rosen's letter to the Socialist Worker protesting about their alliance with Gilad Atzmon
The response defending the SWP linkup with Atzmon came from Lindsay German and Hannah Dee of their Central Committee and a former member Viv Smith
Rob Ferguson, a loyal SWP member, kept quiet for over 5 years whilst the SWP dallied with an open anti-Semite and someone who dabbled in holocaust denial, viz. Gilad Atzmon. In a series of articles in the Weekly Worker, Socialist Unitysuch as Time to say Goodbye I asked why it was that a so-called Marxist organisation was in alliance with someone who spoke about ‘Jewish Marxism’?  No answer was ever received. 
Rob Ferguson also kept quiet during the SWP’s rape scandal when four different women accused the SWP’s National Secretary Martin Smith of having raped them. A Disputes Committee accused the woman of effectively lying and asked her about her past sexual history. To put it bluntly Rob Ferguson is a died-in-the-wool SWP hack but it seems that JVL has taken him to its bosom.
When the SWP worked, for over 5 years, with Gilad Atzmon, Rob Ferguson kept his mouth shut
. In the Guardian’s Comment is Free I wrote about how
‘when the Socialist Workers Party first invited Atzmon to give a talk at their Bookmarks bookshop in London in June 2005, a large picket was organised by Jews Against Zionism.’
I can’t remember Ferguson ever protesting at the time but then given that the SWP has erased the whole episode from their collective memory that is not surprising. When Mike Rosen wroteto the SWP protesting about their alliance with Atzmon Hannah Dee, who was on the Central Committee and Viv Smith, who was on the CC, wroteto defend him. Lindsay German, now of Counterfire, also joined in pointing out that anti-Semitism is not the main form of racism today.  Which was true but why should that excuse the SWP’s link up with Atzmon?
You can see a timeline heredetailing Atzmon’s links with the SWP.  Neither Rosenberg nor Ferguson ever protested about their tie up. And here is an interviewwith Atzmon in Socialist Worker.
Deborah Maccoby intervened in the discussion on the JVL Blog to explain that Rosenberg was wrong when he said that no one had challenged Finkelstein’s comments: I certainly took them up and more importantly Deborah pointed out that Finkelstein was a fierce critic of Irving notwithstanding his comments at the Zoom meeting.
But in fact Tony Greenstein did take up Finkelstein’s comments on Irving. This is what Tony said: “ I agree [David Irving] is a historian – one can’t take it away from him. The problem is that his politics has got in the way of his history and his research – and he clearly did tamper with his sources, if my reading of the libel trial is correct”.
This is not so much a challenge as an expansion, qualification and clarification – but in fact all Finkelstein said was that, in his view, Irving is a real, substantial historian – a judgment with which Tony agreed. This doesn’t mean that Finkelstein does not agree in his turn with Tony that Irving has tampered with sources and that his politics have got in the way of his history and research.
In The Holocaust Industry (p.71, footnote 60), Finkelstein states clearly that Gordon Craig is right to dismiss “Irving’s claims on the Nazi holocaust as obtuse and quickly discredited”, but goes on: “Craig nonetheless continues: ‘He knows more about National Socialism than most professional scholars in his field and students of the years 1933-1945 owe more than they are always willing to admit to his energy as a researcher and to the scope and vigour of his publications….his book Hitler’s War remains the best study we have of the German side of the Second World War, and, as such, indispensable for all students of that conflict.”
In the main text, Finkelstein calls the politics and motivations of writers like Irving as “scurrilous” and describes Irving as “notorious as an admirer of Hitler and sympathizer with German national socialism.”
There is no sign that Finkelstein has changed the views expressed in The Holocaust Industry.
Despite Debbie’s comments above Rosenberg simply lied in his final comment that
I was so surprised that they didn’t react after he said these things. I did not attend the event at the time but heard about the comments first through a third party, so I then sat down and watched and listened, and was duly shocked.
Of course I accept that only Finkelstein himself is responsible for those words. There is no absolute obligation on others to comment one way or another about his words. But it still surprises me that as far as I know the other panelists haven’t condemned them.
Why do I mention these things?  Because the meeting was organized in the context of the Zionist demands to shut down free speech in the Labour Party and in particular that of anti-Zionists and Palestinian supporters.  On this Rosenberg has nothing to say.
David Rosenberg boasts about his friendship with Corbyn being a constituent of his.  There is no doubt that he has been in frequent contact over the past 5 years.  Unfortunately rather than providing a corrective he simply reinforced Corbyn’s errors by accepting the Zionist narrative that anti-Semitism in the Labour Party was a problem.  If the Labour Party had a problem with racism it was over its previous support for the ‘hostile environment’ policy not anti-Semitism.  Yet Rosenberg was happy to reinforce the mainstream narrative.
David throughout the past 5 years treated the Jewish Labour Movement as if it were a legitimate organisation. As Chair of the Cable Street Memorial Committee he gave it a speaker at the Cable Street Commemorations four years ago. As Asa Winstanley wroteon Electronic Intifada and as most of us understood long before this, the JLM was revived by the Israeli Embassy and its operatives as the chosen instrument to bring down Corbyn.  Unfortunately, because of his Jewish chauvinism Rosenberg was unable to see or comprehend that the Zionist movement was acting as a coherent political force with the aim and intention of forcing Corbyn out and that the JLM was part of it.
When I was a member of the Jewish Socialist Facebook group I had a post criticizing Jon Lansman, a member of the JSG, removed by Rosenberg’s partner, Julia Bard. The JSG these days seems to resemble a family business more than a political organisation. When I posted a blog criticizing the JSG for not having supported Jackie Walker I was removed altogether.
The JSG also took over the Jews for Jeremy Facebook Group and promptly stifled any attempt to develop an organisation of the same name. Throughout the past 5 years Rosenberg argued against anyone on the Left criticizing Corbyn. The result has been that apart from the far left, there was no countervailing pressure on Corbyn.  It is little wonder that he ended up surrendering to the Zionist narrative.
In his latest post on his blog Rosenberg writes about Irving’s friends in the National Rebirth Poland – NOP, a neo-Nazi group. It is well known that the NOP have a branch in London and have worked assiduously with a range of far-Right groups.
Unfortunately Rosenberg demonstrates that his political analysis is bankrupt when he describesthe NOP as ‘Far-Right anti-Zionists who describe Zionism as “a power structure of colossal proportions that straddles the globe.’
This is not a minor mistake. It goes to the heart of why, despite his pretensions, Rosenberg and the JSG are notanti-Zionist. Anti-Zionism is a form of anti-racism.  It is the ideology of opposition to Zionist settler-colonialism. To be an anti-Zionist is to be an anti-racist. Poland’s NOP and Greece’s Golden Dawn are amongst the few fascist and neo-Nazi groups these days who purport to support the Palestinians.  However these groups are bitterly Islamaphobic and racist towards Arabs. They are is anti-Semitic not anti-Zionist. When they use the term ‘Zionist’ what they really mean is ‘Jew’. To give them credibility as anti-Zionists simply demonstrates that Rosenberg and by extension the JSG does not and never did understand what anti-Zionism was.
I did point this last point out in response to Rosenberg on his blog but since he doesn’t take criticism lightly it was not published!

Tony Greenstein


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Has Biden Blown It? Is America About to Re-Elect a Fascist and White Supremacist as President?

September 6, 2020, 11:49 pm
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The Democrats are Reprising Clinton’s Mistakes. When Will the American Left Dump the Democrats?

Ever since the onset of COVID-19 I have engaged in Zoom meetings with friends in the United States and elsewhere every Sunday evening. The Coronavirus pandemic has changed my lifestyle just like many others. My American friends assured me until recently that as Trump sank further in the polls as a result of his almost comical handling of COVID-19, the victory of Jo Biden was certain.
Logically they had to be right. Trump’s initial dismissal of COVID-19, his refusal to wear a mask and his railing against the lockdown, coupled with his advice that people might want to inject themselves with disinfectant, have led to the deaths, so far, of over 180,000 [see below] Americans. To say nothing of his taking hydroxychloroquine, a drug for which there is no evidence that it is beneficial.
The death rates (deaths/confirmed cases) vary widely from 28.85% in Yemen to just 0.05% in Singapore suggest that there have been vastly more cases of COVID in Yemen than those recorded, whereas in Singapore it would seem that the number of deaths have been under reported. The death rate in the UK is the third highest in the world, 12.2% (41,000 deaths out of 340,000 confirmed cases suggests that there has been a mass testing failure). The United States rate is 3.05% [186,000 deaths out of 6.114 million]
The UK death rate of 624 per million is the fourth highest compared to the United States 569 per million placing it in 9th place.
Of course the rate of testing also varies widely with the UK the second highest (259,000) and the US fourth highest (256,000) per million.
The US has the highest number of deaths in the world (191,000) with Brazil the second highest 124,000 and the UK fifth at 41,000.  Countries following neo-liberal policies and herd immunity have topped the list.
Given that UK deaths are far higher than the official 41,000 (care homes have been massively under-recorded) it suggests that as Disraeli was rumoured to have said, there are lies, lies and damned statistics!
Trump came to power promising that Americans would win again. It is one promise that has come true with a vengeance as the United States has the highest death rate in the world.
Trump has almost perfectly demonstrated why, when society faces a crisis, neo-liberalism has nothing to offer. Without a sustained intervention by the State, coupled with a universal and comprehensive health care system, COVID-19 will not be beaten, certainly not without the absence of a vaccine. And unless a vaccine is available free to all then it will be bound to keep reoccurring.
It might therefore be thought that all the Democrats had to do in November was to place the ball in an empty goal. Trump is so obviously a liar, a vainglorious, barely coherent braggart, clearly corrupt (why else would he resist handing over his tax records?) handing out free pardons to those who have covered him and who ran a charitable fund in New York in a criminal fashion.
But that would be to underestimate the capacity of the Democrats to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. If they fear the victory of Trump then they also fear the consequences of victory.
The problem quite simply is that the Democrats are as committed to capitalism and neo-liberalism every bit as much as the Republicans. That was why the Corporate Democratic Establishment – led by Clinton and Obama – pulled out all the stops to prevent Sanders winning the Presidential nomination. Whereas 69% of Americans supporta universal single payer health care system, the Democrats are as beholden to the US Health Care Companies as the Republicans. Biden has made it clear that he opposesany such notions.
Despite spending more on healthcare than comparable countries, the U.S. has the lowest life expectancy and performs poorly on a variety of health outcomes. Thus, our complex network of insurance plans is wasteful — in large part due to high administrative costs and lack of price control. [Single payer healthcare: Pluses, minuses, and what it means for you]
In a pandemic neo-liberal capitalism has no answers. The virus has an annoying habit of crossing national boundaries and those of social class. Without a universal health care system it is almost impossible, absent an effective vaccine, to defeat COVID-19.
It is noticeable that China and Vietnam, which despite capitalist economic systems are controlled by parties calling themselves communist and where the political system controls the economic direction have fared so much better in the pandemic.
Cuba fares even better. It has an infant mortality of 4.76 per 1,000 live births compared to 5.9 in the USA. Life expectancy is 79.2 years in Cuba compared to 78.8 in the USA.
You would therefore think that all the Democrats had to do was to campaign for a comprehensive health care system in which no one would be left untreated because of inability to pay.
But the problem is that the Democrats are as wedded to the capitalist system as the Republicans. The idea of spending more on health care and less on the US’s bloated military ($700+ billion) and instituting a 10% cut in the military budget has been fiercely resisted by the majority of Democrats in Congress. In July the proposal was defeated 324-93. The Democrats were split, with 92 voting for the amendment and 139 voting against it. 
This is despite 56% of voters supporting a cut and the fact that 53% of discretionary federal spending goes to the military-industrial complex, some $1.25 trillion.
Biden, who hasn’t seen a war he couldn’t support, is opposed to any cut in ‘defence’ (actually war) expenditure and fiercely defends the US’s $4 billion donation to Israel’s military. The Democrats are beholden to the US Health Care System, which combines massive profitability with the world’s largest per capita expenditure. Profits over people.
Just as the Hilary Clinton’s only selling point was that she wasn’t Donald Trump, the same is true of Biden. He has nothing to offer the 30 million Americans who were left without health care by Obamacare. Biden has nothing to say to the millions of American workers who, because they have lost their jobs, have also lost health insurance at the very time when they need it most.

Nothing can illustrate the failings of capitalism more than the application of the market, whose only god is profitability. We can see this in the UK where the growing privatisation led to the initial massive failure to provide Personal Protective Equipment resulting in hundreds of deaths amongst doctors and nurses. By granting a franchise to private companies to provide PPE, the NHS all but guaranteed that the provision of PPE would fail in an emergency. These companies not only subcontracted out their own responsibilities to other companies, providing a tangled network that was as weak as its weakest point, but it ensured that no one in the government or NHS could do the blindest bit about it. As George Monbiot wrote:
Four layers of commercial contractors, each rich with opportunities for profit-making, stand between doctors and nurses and the equipment they need. These layers are then fragmented into 11 tottering, uncoordinated supply chains, creating an almost perfect formula for chaos.

See How NHS Privatisation Contributed to the PPE Scandal

The result is that Trump, the narcissistic bigot and White Supremacist has engineered a White backlash against Black Lives Matter. Instead of coming out clearly against the endemic violence and racism of the Police and in support of Black Lives Matter, the largest such movement in the US’s history and promising change, including defunding America’s racist police forces, the Democrats have lined up in support of the Police and against what they call ‘rioting’ - the mobilisation of the oppressed.
Trump by way of contrast barely disguises his contempt and hatred for Black people and anti-racists.  His ire is directed at Antifa and anti-fascists whilst at the same time defending the murder by a militia member of 2 anti-fascists in Wisconsin and encouraging the police murderof an anti-fascist, Michael Reinoehl, in Portland.
Instead of fighting on an agenda of social change Biden has been forced onto the ‘law and order’ agenda of Trump. Given Biden’s own record in supporting mass incarceration and the death penalty, it is little wonder that the polls are narrowing between Trump and Biden.
It is of course possible that Biden, given the multiple failures of Trump, may yet win the election but my own feeling is that the longer the campaign goes on, the likelier it is that Trump will win again. Literally the Democrats have nothing to offer but a senile Biden.
On the major foreign policy issues, there is no difference between Biden and Trump.  Both are equally pro-Israel and supportive of US imperialism. Indeed Trump has been far more wary of getting involved in new wars than the Democrats.  On confronting China the Democrats are equally warlike.
The attacks on Black Lives Matter demonstrators in the United States, with the state giving active encouragement to the militias and white supremacists demonstrate that democracy in the United States is skin-deep and essentially a lie. Nothing speaks louder than the hypocritical support of those like the BBC for demonstrations in Belorussia and Hong Kong whilst staying silent about the militarised police attacks on demonstrators in the USA.
My American friends tell me that the US election is now on a knife edge. Perhaps. But what is clear beyond doubt is that the Left will never succeed in the United States until it jettisons the Democrats, who have traditionally been the graveyard of protest. Instead of bowing to the campaign by the Democrat Establishment Sanders should have stood as an independent in the elections. Nothing is so necessary as mobilising the working class and poor in the United States behind a campaign for universal health care, a proper welfare system (rather than the present one for the super-rich) and the slashing of expenditure on the military combined with democratic control of the US police and their demilitarisation.
Instead we see the growing incorporationof radicals in the Democrat and the move to the right of people such as New York Congresswoman, Alexander Ocasio-Cortez.
It may yet turn out that Biden will defeat Trump because even the most stupid American voter will be able to see through his use of racism as a means of negating opposition to tax cuts for the rich and impoverishment of the poor.  However I wouldn’t bet on it and if I were to place a bet it would be on Trump winning.
Either way the Left in the United States has to abandon any hope that it will be able to transform a corporate Democratic Party into a vehicle for change. Today the Democrats, once the party of White Supremacy, is incapable of offering even a return to the Big Society of Lyndon B Johnson.
Yet the strategy of triangulation, minimising the policy differences between yourself and your opponents is the strategy of Keir Starmer. This is what makes the supportof John McDonnell for Keir Starmer’s COVID strategy nothing less than criminal.
Tony Greenstein

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Violence and Extreme Racism Against Palestinians will continue to be the norm as long as Israel is a Jewish state

September 9, 2020, 6:39 pm
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In Poland and Germany they chanted ‘Death to the Jews’ - in Israel they chant Death to the Arabs’ - but if you compare this to the Nazis you are anti-Semitic!



What is shocking about Israel  is not the exceptional cases of violence and murder, such as the firebombing and burning alive of the Dawabshe’s five years ago. It was an attack that left both parents and baby Ali dead and four year old Mohammed, with 60% burns.
Neither is the refusal to compensate the surviving child, Mohammed, anything remarkable.  Israel is a Jewish state and it is understandable that non-Jews, even if they are victims of Jewish terrorism, should not be entitled to such sums. The logic of Avigdor Lieberman, the Defence Minister at the time, was that paying Mohammed compensation would have meant a transfer of money from Jewish to non-Jewish hands.
Not even the burning alive from the inside of 16 year old Mohammed Abu Khdeir, who had petrol poured down his throat, and the racist decision of Israel’s High Court that the homes of his killers would not be demolished, is difficult to understand. Of course Palestinian ‘terrorists’ have their homes or those of their families destroyed as a matter of course.
 The High Court’s rationale was that there is no need to deter Jewish terrorists, because they are part of the family, unlike Palestinian terrorists who definitely aren’t one of us. And if you demolish a ‘Jewish house’ then that is a loss to the whole Jewish community. In a Jewish state such logic is impossible to defeat.
Another such case which is beginning to wend its way through the Israeli court system is a case concerning 5 members of the Border Guards, the most brutal and racist of all Israeli units. Gideon Levy and Alex Levac documenthow these thugs and criminals have been charged with 14 incidents of armed robbery, aggravated assault, abusing a helpless person, theft, destruction of evidence etc. These animals, because there is no other word for it,
humiliated, kicked, beat bloody and robbed Palestinian laborers who were trying to get to their jobs in Israel..... They went about it day after day, in mid-July, when the Meitar checkpoint in the southern West Bank, near Hebron, was closed due to the coronavirus pandemic. ...Most of the cases occurred in the middle of night, far from the eyes of others, during the predawn “shift” when Palestinian laborers from the territories set out on their long journey to work in Israel, to build its houses and pave its roads. According to the charge sheet, the accused would order the workers they hunted down and caught to empty their pockets and then confiscate their money. But to enhance the experience they would make the workers lie on the ground and beat them, kicking them all over, including on the head, punching them and threatening them with their weapons. Then the officers are alleged to have split the plundered money between them.
You must understand that the Israeli state has not turned over a new leaf. There has not been a change in policy regarding not prosecuting violent members of the army. These animals were so proud of what they were doing that they filmed their own actions to impress their girlfriends with their prowess. And no doubt their female companions looked adoringly into the eyes of these brave heroes as they consummated their relationships. In other words these animals convicted themselves.
I should add that Israel does not approve of corruption and theft by the military.  Not because it has any principled objection to stealing from Palestinians.  After all they have stolen most of their land, but because the right to steal Palestinian property is that of the State alone If every soldier has the right to steal then military discipline and order will break down as each soldier becomes an entrepreneur in his own right.
No soldier was ever prosecuted for war crimes in Gaza in 2014.  Murdering Palestinians, including children, is not a criminal offence.  However those caught stealing Palestinian credit cards were prosecuted because such behaviour is inimical to good order.
It was the same with the Nazis. Himmler also had SS members shot for theft of Jewish property. Killing Jews, of course, was no crime but individual theft of Jewish property was theft of State property. Such actions were held to undermine the SS’s moral order and had to be stamped out. See 'I Waited for the Bullet That Would End This Nightmare': Palestinians Brutalized by Israeli Cop Gang Speak Out
These are such horrific incidents that even Netanyahu will denounce them as unacceptable. In the case of the Dawabshes Shin Bet was even willing to torture the Jewish suspects in order to gain confessions. Torture in the case of Palestinians is the norm and goes unremarked but the torture of Jews? This was unacceptable to Zionist opinion and the Israeli court ruled these confessions inadmissible.
Palestinian confessions are never ruled inadmissible, however this too is different, because, as we all know, Palestinians have difficulty telling the truth unless they are forced to do so. The racist logic is impeccable and if you don’t understand it that is probably because you are anti-Semitic!
What is truly shocking is the routinised and normative racism in the Israeli state, both to Arab citizens of Israel and Palestinians of the Occupied Territories. It is the acceptance of such racism that is terrifying and which can only be explained by Israel’s existence as a Jewish state.
Below are a number of articles documenting this racism.  The first article by Jonathan Ofir concerns the lynching of an Eritrean refugee, Haftom Zarhum. Zarhum’s real crime was being in the wrong place at the wrong time. His second crime was even more unforgivable in the eyes of Beersheba’s District Court.
Death of an Eritrean ‘Infiltrator’
I covered this terrible story at the time in Death of an Eritrean ‘Infiltrator’. On October 15 an Israeli Arab opened fire in Beersheva’s bus station killing one soldier and wounding 11 others. Haftom was not even Palestinian but his dark skin was enough. He was, quite understandably, mistaken for the Palestinian attacker and shot 8 times.  Although incapacitated the blood thirsty mob were not satisfied. The video I posted at the time is almost impossible to watch. It involves benches being thrown at his head and a savage beating to satisfy the blood lust of his attackers.
Ynetreported that medics trying to evacuate Zarhum “ran into objection from the crowds at the scene, who blocked their way and called out ‘Death to Arabs,”Arabs out!’ and ‘Am Israel Chai’ (‘The people of Israel still live’).”
Two of the civilian attackers agreed to a plea deal. One received 4 months in prison and the other got 100 days of community service and 8 months probation. But the two security officers who were involved in the beatings quite understandably efused to accept a plea deal. The Israeli court agreed with them and they were acquitted.
As you might expect Jewish Judge Aharon Mishnayot, a former military judge, was not unsympathetic to the security guards. He said he was “certain that the defendants were convinced that the deceased was one of several terrorists”. As is well known, if you kill someone because you believe they are a terrorist then it stands to reason that you should be acquitted if you kill them under a mistaken belief.
It was the time of the ‘knife Intifada’ when nerves were on edge. The attacks had “created an atmosphere of fear and panic in the public”. Judge Mishnayot refused to
“ignore the connection of the event to the frequent terror events that had occurred in the state in those days, before the event at hand and the implications that this may have on the state of awareness of the involved”.
The fact that Haftom had already been incapacitated made no impression on the learned judge. That the actions of the mob were purely vengeful made no difference either.
Alma Bilbash noted a comparative case when in 2005 an Israeli soldier, Eden Nathan Zada, opened fire on a bus at the Palestinian-Israeli village of Shefa-Amr, killing four and wounding twelve. After having been restrained and handcuffed, he was beaten to death by the crowd. In this case it was the actual terrorist who was beaten to death.
That did not stop the State putting his attackers on trial and six Israeli Arabs were convicted of attempted manslaughter and aggravated battery. 3 were sentenced to 2 years prison, the others to 20, 18 and 11 months prison. But of course there is no comparison because the attackers in Beersheba were Jewish whereas in Shefa-Amr those who killed Zada were Arabs. Israel is a Jewish state and one should not therefore judge the actions of Arabs and Jews in the same way.
The Murder of Ahmad Manasra
Two articles by Gideon Levy and Hagar Shezof in Ha'aretz concern an Israeli soldier who shot and killed one Palestinian and injured another.  The details are as simple as they are shocking.
The soldier fatally shot 23-year-old Ahmad Manasra who was killed while helping another Palestinian who had also been shot and seriously wounded by the same soldier. The soldier was charged with negligently causing death but was not charged with wounding the other man.
A car accident occurred in March 2019, when a Palestinian, Alaa Raida, was driving with his wife and two daughters. Another car crashed into them near the village of al-Khader, then fled the scene. When Raida got out of his car and waved his hands at the fleeing car, the soldier shot him, wounding him. Ahmad Manasra, who happened to be passing in a car, got out and was about to help Ahmad when he was shot. The pretext was that stones were being thrown. Since the soldier was in an armed pillbox he was clearly in no danger even if that had been true.
However the military authorities reached a plea deal.  The military prosecutor proposed a sentence of three months’ community service in lieu of prison for an Israeli soldier accused of negligently shooting an innocent Palestinian to death.
Of course if it had been the other way round then there would have been screaming headlines about Palestinians with ‘blood on their hands’ who deserve life. The idea that a Palestinian guilty of killing an Israeli soldier would receive community service is risible.  This after all is Israel and Israel is a Jewish state.
Israeli youth shout ‘death to the Arabs’ as cleaners hide in a wooden building – the Police arrest both attackers and victims!
Two articles below concern the situation at a beach on the Sea of Galilee, a favourite destination for Israeli holiday makers.  Naturally it is left to Israeli Palestinians to clean up.
One of the cleaners described how they brought a group of Hitler, sorry Hilltop youth,
“a garbage bag, and one of the girls in the group said that she doesn’t need the bag. ‘The Hasbani Stream is mine, Be’er Sheva is mine and so is Hebron. The whole country is mine and you are the ones who have to clean it,’ she said."
You may tut tut but this girl is right. She should be congratulated on her knowledge of Jewish religious law, at least as taught by Israel’s neo-Nazi rabbis. According to Ovadia Yosef, the Sephardic Chief Rabbi of Israel, who on his death had the largest attendance at his funeral (over 1 million) of anyone in Israel:
“Goyim were born only to serve us. Without that, they have no place in the world; only to serve the People of Israel,”
“Why are gentiles needed? he asked. They will work, they will plow, they will reap. We will sit like an effendi and eat,” he said to some laughter.
As you can see Ovadia Yosef was quite justly renowned for his wisdom. I should add, as the son of an Orthodox Rabbi myself, that the Jewish religion should no more be blamed for Ovadia Yosef’s Nazi-like racism than the Christian religion should be blamed for anti-Semitism or Islam for ISIS. There is nothing inherently racist in any religion. But when religions are tied to a state and that religion is used to demarcate the boundaries between inhabitants then that state will inevitably be racist. Religion provides the excuse, the rationale but it doesn’t create the kind of societies that employ this racism.
According to Bassam Zoabi, the work supervisor, the cleaners hid in a prefab structure, with some 200 people gathering around. He said people threw stones at the structure and yelled “death to Arabs,” [a favourite chant in Israel] and that pepper spray was used.
The policedenied that the cleaners complained. Indeed once the Police arrived the Arab cleaners expressed their gratitude to the Jewish Hitler youth for having thrown stones at them.  It was clearly a peace gesture.
It was not surprising in the circumstances that the Israeli Police arrested 5 people – 2 of the stone throwers and 3 of the cleaners. I know some people may cavil at this but it is quite fair.  The Police refused to discriminate. They treated all parties as equal.  This is even more fair when you think that the cleaners imposed themselves on Israel’s Hitler Youth by suggesting that they might consider cleaning up their own mess.  These children understood that in a Jewish state they were entitled to make a mess and that non-Jews, instead of complaining, should clean up and be quiet.
The final article is self-explanatory. It involves Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe, a renowned intellectual who was invited to a culture festival in Germany.  Germany has not been immune from Black Lives Matter and the accompanying debate on racism. But Germany’s leaders are also signed up to Zionism.
Mbembe’s ‘crime’ is supporting BDS.  Naturally Felix Klein, Germany’s federal commissioner for the fight against antisemitism, demanded the revocation of Mbembe’s invitation to participate in the festival, on the grounds that the philosopher had denied the distinctive status of the Holocaust and had supported BDS. Indeed, Mbembe has frequently likened the colonial occupation of Palestine to the apartheid regime in South Africa.
Such terrible crimes as Mbembe’s demand no less than Nazi style banning and persecution.  All in the name of fighting ‘anti-Semitism’ of course.
Germany’s ruling class has sought to expiate their guilt over the Holocaust by the simple expedient of transferring it onto the shoulders of the Palestinians. The German ruling class was never deNazified.  Its first post-war Chancellor Konrad Adeneur had as his Chief of Staff, Hans Globke, who was instrumental in drafting the Nuremberg Laws. Globke was the second most powerful person in post-war Germany.
Globke had been responsible for the bright idea of giving every German Jew a name – Israel for males and Sara for females. This helped with identification. Globke, although a civil servant in the Nazi Ministry of Interior, was responsible for the murder of 20,000 Jews in Thessaloniki. When Eichmann contactedthe Interior Ministry and asked for Globke's permission to kill them he received it.
However Globke was protected by powerful interests and Israel, under Ben Gurion had reached an agreement with Adeneur not to rake up the past history of Germany’s leaders and top civil servants in exchange for reparations and arms supplies. The Holocaust provided Israel with many lucrative advantages and in exchange Israel agreed not to divide the Western alliance by raking up charges of Nazi complicity. 
Instead it was the Arabs and their supporters who became the new Nazis. So although Achille Mbembe is idolised in German universities for his theories of post-colonialism he had trespassed on what is a fundamental principle. Do not criticise Israel lest you open a can of worms. Germany’s guilty conscience over the Holocaust is lubricated by arms to Israel and defamatory accusations of ‘anti-Semitism’ against anyone who doesn’t toe the line.
This is what is termed the new McCarthyism.
Tony Greenstein
Yesterday, an unbelievable verdict came down at the Beersheba District Court in Israel:
Two Israeli security officers were acquitted in a case involving the lynching of Haftom Zarhum, an Eritrean refugee, although they were filmed beating him and repeatedly dropping a bench on his head. The judge cited “reasonable doubt”.
The bloodthirsty mob lynching in October 2015 was part of a string of “mistaken identity” incidents in Israel. A terror attack had in fact taken place earlier at the Beersheba central bus station; a man from an unrecognized Bedouin village in the Negev opened fire, killing a soldier and wounding 11 others.
Zarhum was a passerby, who was mistaken for the shooter by a security guard because he was dark skinned. A police spokesman in the wake of the incident said that it was “not clear if [Zarhum] is involved with the event or if he was shot due to his exterior appearance.”
Zarhum was shot 8 times. Though he had been incapacitated, the mob continued to beat him heavily, shouting “terrorist!”, “Kill him!”, “break his head, son of a bitch!”. The two officers were in that mob. The Times of Israel notes:
“The indictment said that in the aftermath of the attack, [combat soldier Yaakov] Shimba kicked Zarhum in the head and upper body with force. It said [Prison Services officer Ronen] Cohen threw a bench onto him, and after another man removed the bench he took it and again dropped it on the prone man.”
The indictment states that although Zarhum was one of the most seriously wounded in the fracas, he was evacuated to hospital only after all other wounded were evacuated (per Haaretz).
The lynchers celebrated the killing on live TV broadcast, when they still believed that Zarhum was the shooter.
It is important to note, that the autopsy concluded that Zarhum died from his gunshot wounds, not from the beatings, but the beatings were severe. The prosecution stated that
 “the defendants committed serious acts of violence towards the late citizen Haftom Zarhum, who was already shot, wounded and profusely bleeding, from a motive of vengeance and in order to relieve their anger, and not as the defendants claimed from self-defense”.
Originally, four people were charged in this case, and two of them were civilians. The civilians took a plea bargain in 2018 which downgraded the charge from “causing injury with grave intent” (which entails potential 20 years prison) to “abusing the helpless”. One was sentenced to four months in prison and the other got 100 days of community service and eight months of probation and was ordered to pay NIS 2,000 (approximately $550) compensation to Zarhum’s family.
But the security officers would not take a deal – they pleaded not guilty, and they got what they wanted from the judge – acquittal.
The judge Aharon Mishnayot has a long record as a military legal advisor and judge (from 1990, judge from 1998), and he spent the last part of his military career 2007-2013 as head judge of the military courts in the Occupied West Bank.
The judge stated that after having seen the evidence, he was “certain that the defendants were convinced that the deceased was one of several terrorists”, that the (mostly lone wolf) attacks of the time had “created an atmosphere of fear and panic in the public”, and that he could not
“ignore the connection of the event to the frequent terror events that had occurred in the state in those days, before the event at hand and the implications that this may have on the state of awareness of the involved”.
But the defendants were not responding to a security threat as such. They were acting in revenge. The judge is thus suggesting that pure revenge for Palestinian attacks is a mitigating circumstance.
The judge added, that that while the prosecution stated that the defendants could distinguish between “neutralizing a terrorist or who seemed to be one, and attacking an innocent person”, he is
“afraid that such appraisal is true for a utopian reality, where one can easily distinguish between good and bad and between friend and predator, but it defies the actual reality and to the real world, and does not correctly reflect the complex circumstances of the difficult situation, into which the people in the central station were unfortunately drawn at the evening of the attack, including the defendants”.
So the lynch mob, and in particular the security officials, were, according to the judge, simply victims themselves – victims of an “unfortunate circumstance”.
But what about Zarhum? Was he not really the victim of this “unfortunate circumstance” in a much more deadly way? And were not the lynchers creating this deadly circumstance in a singular way? After all, he was just a passerby, killed for his skin color.
And what would happen if Palestinians, for example, act like the defendants did?
Alma Bilbash noted a comparative case on her Facebook page: in 2005 an Israeli soldier, Eden Nathan Zada, opened fire on a bus at the Palestinian-Israeli village of Shefa-Amr, killing four and wounding twelve. After having been restrained and handcuffed, he was beaten to death by the crowd. So here we had an actual, certain, terror attack, with an ensuing lynching of the terrorist.
Let’s put aside the lopsided power structure of Palestinians in Israel in relation to the Jewish State. Eventually, six Palestinian Israelis were convicted – four of attempted manslaughter, two of aggravated battery. Three of them were sentenced to two years prison, the others to 20, 18 and 11 months prison.
Orly Noynotes in her Facebook post another comparison – to the case of Shlomo Haim Pinto from 2015, an Israeli Jew, who decided to stab a Palestinian in a supermarket out of a “spiritual calling”, but mistook Uri Razkan, a Mizrahi Jew, for a Palestinian, stabbed him and caused him moderate injuries. Pinto was sentenced to 11 months prison.
Noy comments that Pinto only went to prison because his victim was Jewish. If Razkan was not Jewish, it is possible to assume that judge Mishnayot from the Zarhum case would have acquitted Pinto due to “reasonable doubt”. She summarizes the “race pyramid that prevails here”:
“If you are a dark-skinned man, you are, per definition, in a risk group. Your skin color marks you as a target. If you are Jewish and your murderer was in uniform, you’ll get some media coverage but forget justice or sentence. If you’re not Jewish and your murderer wore uniform, say thank you if you don’t get declared a terrorist post-mortem. If you’re Jewish and your attacker was Jewish not in uniform, there’s a chance that he would pay for his deeds. If you are not Jewish and your attacker was Jewish not in uniform, your family will get a full 2000 Shekels that will bury you. If you’re Palestinian, whether your murderer wore uniform or not, be sure that you will be declared a terrorist after your death”.
Commenting on yesterday’s verdict, Ronen Cohen’s attorney Zion Amir said that Cohen was a hero:
“There is no doubt that this is a big day for an officer who acted heroically during the incident, and instead of an award got an indictment. I am glad that the court acquitted him after an almost five-years legal battle.”
Cohen is not the only hero in the killing of Hafton Zarhum. The soldier and fellow defendant Yaakov Shimba deserved a medal of honor for his acts, according toIsraeli general (res.) Gershon Hacohen. Hacohen testified in the case two years ago and although admitting to not even having read the charges, he opined that charging the soldier is “immoral” and that the soldier is “worthy of respect” since he “didn’t shoot one bullet”. (Neither did George Floyd’s killer, Derek Chauvin, notes Edith Breslauer on Facebook.)
Another general who testified in 2018, Dan Biton, opined that the soldier acted “calmly”, even when he cursed Zarhum.
“He came from Golani (infantry brigade), so I don’t need to add anything. If he was from Armory it wouldn’t have been like that. It is calmness (to curse) which belongs to some from Golani. Whoever comes from Golani curses unconsciously. In the end, when examining the event throughout, he acted calmly”.
Just imagine how it would have been if Shimba had a bad day. It was a good day after all, per general Biton.
There was no doubt that Haftom Zarhum was lynched. There is absolutely no doubt that the two defendants were a central part of his lynching. But because they suspected Zarhum was a terrorist, although they never saw him touching a fly nor posing any kind of danger to them, in fact was incapacitated, their bloodthirsty revenge was “reasonable”. That’s “reasonable doubt” for you, in Israeli Newspeak.   
Israel's Top Court to Hear Appeal Against Deal With Soldier Who Killed Innocent Palestinian
Military prosecutors are seeking a penalty of three months’ community service for the soldier who shot Ahmad Manasra, who was helping another Palestinian who was shot and wounded by the same soldier
Hagar Shezaf
Hagar Shezaf
Published on 03.09.2020

Military prosecutors have proposed a sentence of three months’ community service in lieu of prison for an Israeli soldier accused of negligently shooting an innocent Palestinian to death.
Supreme Court Justice Noam Sohlberg has ruled that three judges of the High Court of Justice will hear an appeal against a plea bargain reached with the soldier who fatally shot 23-year-old Ahmad Manasra.
The victim was killed while helping another Palestinian who had been shot and seriously wounded by the same soldier. The soldier was charged with negligently causing death but was not charged with wounding the other man, even though that shooting is mentioned in the indictment. Two weeks ago, military prosecutors asked for a penalty of three months’ community service.
According to the indictment, a car accident occurred in March 2019, when a Palestinian, Alaa Raida, was driving with his wife and two daughters. Another car crashed into them near the village of al-Khader, then fled the scene. Raida stopped his car near an intersection, got out and waved his arms at the fleeing car. According to the indictment, the soldier, who was in a concrete pillbox near the intersection, thought Raida was throwing stones at Israeli cars. He called out a warning and fired into the air before shooting Raida.
In contrast, an affidavit submitted by Raida says he was shot outside his car without warning, contravening the army’s rules of engagement. He was wounded in his stomach and evacuated from the area in serious condition.
“Anyone reading the indictment can see that this was an execution,” said attorney Shlomo Lecker, who submitted the appeal.
“Raida was shot while stopping at a traffic light at an illuminated intersection, while exiting his vehicle. Ahmad was shot while fleeing for his life. It was [rifle] fire directed straight at him.”
The indictment notes the assistance Manasra gave Raida, after arriving at the scene with three other friends who were returning with him from a wedding in Bethlehem in the West Bank. The three helped evacuate Raida to the hospital, while Manasra stayed at the scene with Raida’s wife and daughters, helping them start their car. According to the indictment, he was shot while emerging from his car, and shot again while trying to flee.
The military prosecution’s response to the appeal shows that the soldier deleted messages he had sent other soldiers regarding the incident. Moreover, it is noted that soldiers who had served with the accused remarked that he was very enthusiastic about using his weapon in some kind of operation. A source familiar with the case says the deleted messages were found on other phones, and that the soldier’s version was consistent.
The appeal notes that no other soldier testified that stones were thrown at that location and that no one was in danger. No other soldier saw the entire incident unfold. Footage from surveillance cameras was collected, but it was argued that the quality was poor. Some soldiers who testified during the trial said that right after the incident, the accused told them that he had shot stone throwers.
It also turned out that stones were found in the area, but the indictment made no mention of stone throwing. Military prosecutors labeled this case as “complex,” since the incident occurred during operations in a tense area in which other incidents were taking place. They added that this incident happened soon after an alert was issued regarding a possible attack. However, they noted that the soldier’s training for dealing with such events was “somewhat flawed.”
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The response to the appeal notes that the soldier was questioned under caution three times, as were his commanders. According to the soldier’s attorney, he felt that civilians were endangered by stone throwing before he opened fire. The soldier claimed that he was following the rules of engagement and that this was the first time he had used his weapon in an operation. Before his hearing, prosecutors had intended to charge him with negligent cause of death, causing aggravated bodily harm and destruction of evidence. After the hearing, they signed a plea bargain in which the soldier admitted to one charge, negligent cause of death.
Opening fire under the rules if engagement is a central issue in this case, since according to the soldier, he acted appropriately when he shot Raida. That is why wounding Raida is not part of the indictment.

Even for the Wild West Bank, This Is a Shocking Story

Gideon Levy
A young Palestinian's attempt to help a stranger shot by Israeli troops costs him his life
It was appallingly cold, rainy and foggy on Monday of this week at the southern entrance to Bethlehem. A group of young people stood on the side of the road, gazing at something. Gloomy and toughened, they formed a circle around the concrete cube in which are sunken the spikes of a large billboard – an ad for Kia cars that stretches across the road. They were looking for signs of blood, as though they were volunteers in Zaka, the Israeli emergency response organization. They were looking for bloodstains of their friend, who was killed there five days earlier. Behind the concrete cube they found what they were looking for, a large bloodstain, now congealed. The stain held fast despite the heavy rain, as though refusing to be washed away, determined to remain there, a silent monument.
This is where their friend tried, in his last moments, to find protection from the soldiers who were shooting at him, probably from the armored concrete tower that looms over the intersection a few dozen meters away. It was to here that he fled, already wounded, attempting to take cover behind the concrete cube. But it was too late. His fate was sealed by the soldiers. Six bullets slashed into his body and killed him. He collapsed and died next to the concrete cube by the side of the road.
Even in a situation in which anything is possible, this is an unbelievable story. It’s 9 P.M. Wednesday March 20. A family is returning from an outing. Their car breaks down. The father of the family, Ala Raida, 38, from the village of Nahalin, who is legally employed paving roads in Israel, steps out of his Volkswagen Golf to see what has happened. His wife, Maisa, 34, and their two daughters, Sirin, 8, and Lin, 5, wait in the car. Suddenly the mother hears a single shot and sees her husband lean back onto the car. Emerging from the car, she discovers to her astonishment that he’s wounded in the stomach. She shouts hysterically for help, the girls in the car are crying and screaming.
Another car, a Kia Sportage, arrives at the intersection. Its occupants are four young people from the nearby village of Wadi Fukin. They’re on the way home from the wedding of their friend Mahmoud Lahruv, held that evening in the Hall of Dreams in Bethlehem. At the sight of the woman next to the traffic light appealing for help, they stop the car and get out to see what they can do. Three of them quickly carry the wounded man to their car and rush him to the nearest hospital, Al-Yamamah, in the town of Al-Khader. The fourth young man, Ahmad Manasra, 23, stays behind to calm the woman and the frightened girls. Manasra tries to start the stalled car in order to move it away from the dangerous intersection, but the vehicle doesn’t respond. He then gets back out of the car. The soldiers start firing at him. He tries to get to the concrete cube but is struck by the bullets as he runs. Three rounds hit him in the back and chest, the others slam into his lower body. He dies on the spot.
The army says that stones were thrown. All the eyewitnesses deny that outright. Nor is it clear what the target of the stones might have been. The armored concrete tower? And even if stones were thrown at cars heading for the settlement of Efrat, is that a reason to open fire with live ammunition on a driver whose car broke down, with his wife and young daughters on board? Or on a young man who tried to get the car moving and to calm the mother and her daughters? Shooting with no restraint? With no pity? With no law?
We visit the skeleton of an unfinished apartment on the second floor of a house in Wadi Fukin. It’s an impoverished West Bank village just over the Green Line, whose residents fled in 1949 and were allowed to return in 1972, and which is now imprisoned between the giant ultra-Orthodox settlement of Betar Ilit and the town of Tzur Hadassah, which is just inside the Green Line. A wood stove tries to rebuff the bitter cold in the broad space between the unplastered walls and the untiled floor. A grim-looking group of men are sitting around the fire, trying to warm themselves. They are the mourners for Manasra; this was going to be his apartment one day, when he got married. That will never happen now.
Only the memorial posters remain in the unbuilt space. A relative and fellow villager, Adel Atiyah, an ambassador in the Palestinian delegation to the European Union, calls from Brussels to offer his shocked condolences. One of the mourners, Fahmi Manasra, lives in Toronto and is here on a visit to his native land. The atmosphere is dark and pained.
The bereaved father, Jamal, 50, is resting in his apartment on the ground floor. When he comes upstairs, it’s clear he’s a person deeply immersed in his grief though impressive in his restraint. He’s a tiler who works in Israel with a permit. He last saw his son as he drove along the main street in Bethlehem as his son was going to his friend’s wedding. Jamal was driving his wife, Wafa, home from another wedding. That was about two hours before Ahmad was killed. In the last two days of his life they worked together, Jamal and his son, in the family vineyard, clearing away cuttings and spraying. Now he wistfully remembers those precious moments. Ahmad asked to borrow his father’s car to drive to the wedding, but Jamal needed it to visit the doctor, and Ahmad joined the group in Wahib Manasra’s SUV.

Quiet prevails in the shell of the unfinished apartment. Someone says that Manasra was already planning the layout of his future home – the living room would be here, the kitchen there. Maisa Raida, the wife of the wounded driver, is at her husband’s bedside at Hadassah Medical Center, Ein Karem, Jerusalem, where he’s recovering from his severe stomach wound. He was brought there from Al-Khader because of the seriousness of his condition. Major damage was done to internal organs in his abdomen and he needed complicated surgery, but he seems to be on the mend.
Maisa told a local field investigator from a human rights group that at first she didn’t realize that her husband was wounded. Only after she stepped out of the car did she see that he was leaning on the vehicle because of the wound. She yelled for help, and after the young men stopped and took her husband to the hospital, she got back into the car with Manasra, whom she didn’t know. While they were in the car with her daughters, and he was trying get it started, she heard another burst of gunfire aimed at their car from the side, but which didn’t hit them.
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She had no idea that Manasra was shot and killed when he got out of the car, moments later. She stayed inside, trying to calm the girls. It wasn’t until she called her father and her brother-in-law and they arrived and took her to Al-Yamamah Hospital that she heard that someone had been killed. Appalled, she thought they meant her husband but was told that the dead person had been taken to Al-Hussein Hospital in Beit Jala.
Eventually, she realized that the man who was killed was the same young man who tried to help her and her daughters; he was dead on arrival. Before Maisa and her daughters were taken from the scene, an officer and soldiers from the Israel Defense Forces came to the stalled car and tried to calm them.
Manasra was dead by then, sprawled next to the concrete cube. He was a Real Madrid fan and liked cars. Until recently he worked in the settlement of Hadar Betar, inside Betar Ilit. His little brother, 8-year-old Abdel Rahman, wanders among the mourners in a daze.
After Jamal Manasra returned home, his phone began ringing nonstop. He decided not to answer. He says he was afraid to answer, he had forebodings from God. He and his wife drove to the hospital in Beit Jala. He has no rational explanation for why they went to the hospital. From God. “I was the last to know,” he says in Hebrew. At the hospital, he was asked whether he was Ahmad’s father. Then he understood. He and his wife have two more sons and a daughter. Ahmad was their firstborn.
We asked the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit a number of questions. Why did the soldiers shoot Ala Raida and Ahmad Manasra with live ammunition? Why did they go on shooting at Manasra even after he tried to flee? Did the soldiers fire from the armored watchtower? Do the security cameras show that stones were indeed thrown? Were the soldiers in mortal danger?
This was the IDF’s response to all these questions:
“On March 21, a debriefing was held headed by the commander of the Judea and Samaria Division, Brig. Gen. Eran Niv, and the commander of the Etzion territorial brigade, Col. David Shapira, in the area of the event that took place on Thursday [actually, it was a Wednesday] at the Efrat junction and at the entrance to Bethlehem. From the debriefing it emerges that an IDF fighter who was on guard at a military position near the intersection spotted a suspect who was throwing stones at vehicles in the area and carried out the procedure for arresting a suspect, which ended in shooting. As a result of the shooting, the suspect was killed and another Palestinian was wounded.”
“The possibility is being examined that there was friction between Palestinians, which included stone-throwing.
“The inquiry into the event continues, parallel to the opening of an investigation by the Military Police.”

After the group of young people found what they were looking for – bloodstains of their friend, Ahmad – they reconstructed for us the events of that horrific evening. It was important for them to talk to an Israeli journalist. They’re the three who came out alive from the drive home after the wedding. One of them, Ahmad Manasra – he has the same name as the young man who was killed – wouldn’t get out of the car when we were there. He’s still traumatized. Wahib Manasra, the driver of the SUV, showed us where the stalled VW had been, and where they stopped when they saw a woman shouting for help.
Soldiers and security cameras viewed us even now, from the watchtower, which is no more than 30 meters from the site. Wahib says that if there was stone-throwing, or if they had noticed soldiers, they wouldn’t have stopped and gotten out of the car. Raida, the wounded man, kept mumbling, “My daughters, my daughters,” when they approached him. He leaned on them and they put him in their car. By the time they reached the gas station down the road, he had lost consciousness. Before that, he again mumbled, “My daughters.”
Wahib and the other Ahmad, the one who was alive, returned quickly from the hospital, which is just a few minutes from the site. But they could no longer get close to the scene, as a great many cars were congregated there. They got out of the car and proceeded on foot. A Palestinian ambulance went by. Looking through the window, Wahib saw to his horror his friend, Ahmad Manasra, whom they had left on the road with the woman and her girls, lying inside. He saw at once that Ahmad was dead.

Littering and Violent Racism Break Record as Israelis Flock to Sea of Galilee Shores

'They tell us we have no place in this country, that we’re their slaves’

Cleaners recount tales of discrimination and disrespect

Noa Shpigel
Noa Shpigel
Published on 31.08.2020

In the final week of August, beaches along Sea of Galilee and streams in the Galilee are reflecting two facets of Israel. On one side, hundreds of thousands of citizens with nowhere to fly are descending on every water source or footpath, leaving behind mountains of garbage. Trailing them and attending this mess are workers who, for meager pay and under difficult conditions, have to contend with a country in which discarded beer cans and snack food wrappers have become an inseparable part of the landscape. And these workers, who remain behind to return nature to some semblance of normalcy, report constant daily bullying and expressions of racism by visitors.
Towards the weekend, cleaning staff on Levanon Beach on the eastern side of the Sea of Galilee, or Lake Kinneret, could breathe more easily for a while. This is when the profile of visitors changes, with families with children replacing groups of young adults. As children frolick in the water and smoke rises from a barbecue, Tarek Hassuna, from the Arab village of Misr, who has worked here for a decade, describes an incident from the previous day.
“We swept the grassy area with eight workers at midday”,he says. Then they encountered a group of young people who looked like hilltop youth, an idiom for young, radical Israeli settlers, so called because they originally lived on unsanctioned illegal outposts on West Bank hills.
“We brought them a garbage bag, and one of the girls in the group said that she doesn’t need the bag. ‘The Hasbani Stream is mine, Be’er Sheva is mine and so is Hebron. The whole country is mine and you are the ones who have to clean it,’ she said."

“I didn’t argue with her. I called my supervisor and he sent a policeman, who came within seconds. He told them that if they didn’t clean up, they’d have to leave. We now have inspectors and policemen accompanying us while we work.”
Hassuna says that incidents like these have pushed some of the older cleaners to stop working.
“They have families, they’re afraid. I’m 45. Girls come looking for an argument. There are bins right there but they throw garbage next to them on purpose.”
A visit to the beach shows some garbage next to a bin, as well as vandalized equipment. This bothers the workers less than the harassment by visitors.
“This year, most of the visitors are okay,” says 53-year-old Bassem Zoabi, also from Misr. “But there are young people making racist comments. This year they’ve crossed all lines: One manager was even beaten up," he says, before recounting an incident from two weeks before. Three cleaners asked a group of young people on the beach to lower the volume of the music they were playing, and a clash broke out, with dozens of youths taking part. The police said that this was not a racially-motivated incident and detained three workers as well.
“My workers hear calls such as ‘death to Arabs’ and ‘dirty Arab’ all the time. Our managers back us and we can call them anytime,” says Zoabi. “I only hope no one is murdered here. Other nearby beaches don’t have this. I don’t know why it happens only here.” He shows us photos of broken toilets and excrement smeared on walls. He’s been working these beaches for 30 years, currently as a contractor. He says that this year is unusually harsh by any standard.
Zoabi’s son Sharif has been working here for a decade. He too talks about racist taunts he is constantly subjected to.
“The minds of 14-year-old children are full of hatred and racism. They tell us we have no place in this country, that we’re their slaves. I don’t respond when they curse us and the police. They use drugs and alcohol. Two girls pushed a worker into a latrine yesterday, telling him to clean it. They break bottles and children cut their feet, and we get the blame.”
Hassuna says that in the past there was the odd troublemaker, but now they are the majority.
“You have some good ones, but most have grown up on hatred. We live near a kibbutz and have never felt that. I served in the army and contributed to the state.”
The head of the regional council said that this team is devoted, working hard to keep the beaches clean, but that the violence and racism must be condemned.
Not all visitors behave that way. One of them notes how clean and quiet the area is. He jokes with the cleaners that if everyone disposed of their garbage like he does, they’d have no work.
The western side of the lake is somewhat different. Most of the cleaners are Sudanese. Ibrahim Abdullah has been working there for seven years.
“There is more filth here now, more garbage. Some people don’t talk nicely. Some drunk Arabs quarreled with me two weeks ago. They despise Sudanese. Some of them laugh at us.”
A friend of his, also from Sudan, proudly shows his Israeli ID card. He’s been working here for nine years, also saying some people don’t clean up when they leave. His mobile phone was stolen for the first time this year, after all the years he’s worked here.
Merciless heat
Small numbers of cleaning staff along streams in the north have to contend with masses of visitors, many of whom leave behind creative forms of garbage. One cleaning contractor shows us photos of carpets and armchairs left in the area.
“People don’t care about cleanliness here. They don’t see these sites as needing to be kept clean. Ten percent of the visitors clean up while the rest leave their garbage behind. Bags they leave here are scattered at night by wild animals and the garbage gets into the water, floating down to the Kinneret,”
he says.
This contractor hasn’t encountered physical violence, but he has been cursed. He takes it lightly, noting that the police are often summoned.
“Workers aren’t heeded when asking people to pick up their garbage so they call their supervisors. When these are also ignored, they call the police. This happens every week.”

Signs forbidding people to stay overnight at Snir Stream are ignored, as are requests to keep the noise down, avoid lighting fires or swimming. The head of the regional council says that spending time in nature makes people better and is good for the local economy. “Just obey the rules and keep it clean,”he asks.
The cleaning contractor says that when he distributes garbage bags, some people understand while others get angry, saying that it’s obvious that they have to clean up.
“But ultimately, most people don’t. The young ones are the worst. They cause damage and say that only suckers clean up. Let the state or the contractor clean up, they say.”

Israeli Police Detain Five in Brawl at Beach, Witness Says Teens Shouted 'Death to Arabs'

People threw stones as cleaners hid in a prefab structure, witness says Brawl began after cleaners asked teenagers to lower music, investigation finds
Noa Shpigel       Published on 19.08.2020
Five people were detained on Tuesday on suspicion they were involved in a brawl at a Sea of Galilee beach that, according to an initial investigation, erupted after cleaners asked teenagers to turn down the volume of their music. 
According to witness Bassam Zoabi, the work supervisor at the beach, at one point the the cleaners hid in a prefab structure, with some 200 people gathering around. He said people threw stones at the structure and yelled “death to Arabs,” and that pepper spray was used. Local authorities confirmed that stones and tear gas were used and calls of “Death to Arabs” were heard. The police, however, said the cleaners didn’t complain about slurs or stones.
The five suspects, two boys aged 15 and 16 and three cleaners, were released with restrictions and ordered to stay away from the beach. None of those involved required medical attention.
“The cleaning workers and their shift supervisor, who were collecting trash, came to a group of youths and asked them to turn off the music because it’s a quiet beach, and [the youths] jumped them,”
said Zoabi.
“The workers hid in the caravan. When I got there, I saw 200 people throwing stones at the caravan and yelling. If we hadn’t gotten there they would have set them on fire.”
Zoabi was critical of the police.
“Who did the police take? They took the cleaning workers for questioning. They were questioned from 1:00 A.M. until 11:00 A.M.. They didn’t arrest even one of the 200 who attacked [them].”
He said that the racism exhibited during the incident is not new, although on Tuesday things escalated further than usual.
“Every night people shout ‘Death to Arabs.’ It’s been like that for a month already,”

How Israel Became Exempt From the Global Reckoning Over Racism

World sensitivity to racism and oppression is surging, but historical injustice in Israel is hardly drawing to an end. In fact, it’s only getting worse
Ofri Ilany        Published on 18.06.2020
For a few weeks, a furious debate has been raging in the German media, centering around the Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe. In the eyes of many, Mbembe, who has taught at Yale and Berkeley, is the most influential African intellectual of our time. He is one of the most prominent and most incisive thinkers about postcolonialism in the present period. He coined the term “necropolitics,” referring to the use of political power to determine who will live and who will die.
Mbembe is well known among the educated public in Germany; some of his books have been published there, and he has been the recipient of prestigious awards. He is also an active participant in the debate over the rise of authoritarian regimes worldwide. But the attitude toward him underwent a sea-change lately, when he was accused of being anti-Israel and of “relativizing the Holocaust.”
Felix Klein, Germany’s federal commissioner for the fight against antisemitism, demanded the revocation of Mbembe’s invitation to participate in a culture festival, on the grounds that the philosopher had denied the distinctive status of the Holocaust and had supported BDS. Indeed, Mbembe has frequently likened the colonial occupation of Palestine to the apartheid regime in South Africa.
In previous cases, anyone accused of denying Israel’s right to exist would immediately find him- or herself persona non grata in Germany. But in this case, the dilemma was especially difficult. Mbembe is a popular interviewee in the culture and thought columns of the German press; when the opinion of an African intellectual is wanted, he is sought out.
Furthermore, postcolonial theory is a popular field in academic and literary realms in Germany, and the delegitimation of Mbembe spells the complete rejection of that line of thought. What’s the solution? To pontificate about postcolonialism and resistance to racism, but to mark out Israel as a special case to which the rules of the postcolonial debate do not apply.
The German case is exceptional, because German politicians and media outlets are known for their shameless refusal to countenance any and all criticism of Israel. But the Mbembe affair marks a fundamental paradox that characterizes current public discourse in Europe and the United States. Sensitivity toward racism and white arrogance is on the rise in liberal circles. In the wake of the recent protests in the United States, lively discussions are being held on questions of diversity, appropriation and recognition of colonial crimes. Yet simultaneously, the commitment to the Palestinian cause and the struggle against the occupation is on the wane.
In Britain, former Labor Party leader Jeremy Corbyn mustered considerable support but was marked as a dangerous fanatic mainly because of his statements against Israel. Increasing numbers of platforms and media outlets worldwide can be seen to shy away from even using the word “occupation” – and this is at a time when Israel is declaring its intention to found an almost overtly apartheid regime in the Jordan Valley.
Different rules have always applied to Israel, both from within and without. Here, anti-African racism is more or less official policy. When it comes to asylum seekers in Israel, there isn’t even an attempt to pretend that black lives matter. The authorities work overtime to embitter the lives of refugees from Africa, at times invoking openly white-supremacist rhetoric. Palestinian resistance – even verbal – to the violence of the army, the police and the Shin Bet security service is also classified as “support for terrorism.”
Moreover, when soldiers kill a Palestinian child, the Israeli media tend to worry principally about the PR damage the event might entail. The Israeli government knows that there is hardly any effective barrier today against whatever policy it wants to implement in the territories. At most, there will be feeble remonstrations from Europe.
Precisely at a time of a worldwide awakening of opposition to racism, Israel is considering a horrific scenario that the left has been warning about for 50 years: annexation of the territories. At the moment of truth, attempts to prevent the move seem to be both scattered and hesitant. Racism is infuriating, but the occupation is a yawn.
Different explanations exist for the indifference to the Palestinians shown by world public opinion. It’s related to the political changes in the United States and Europe, the disintegration of Arab nationalism and also the weakness of the Palestinian national project. But what’s odd is that the Palestinians don’t especially interest even President Trump’s avowed opponents – all those young, sensitive people who are waking up and venting their wrath on the streets and in the social media. Most of them couldn’t give two hoots about any annexation plan.
Poor visuals
The explanation for this paradox may lie in the fact that the occupation has yet to be transformed into a dilemma associated with the morality of one’s lifestyle. The questions that currently engage the liberal classes touch on the individual’s consumer choices. Should one use cow’s milk or soy milk? Is it right to watch reruns of the television series “Friends” even though there are no blacks in it? And what do we do with the books ofJ.K. Rowling, who spoke out against trans people? The occupation, in contrast, is an old, musty political issue. It doesn’t have a visual representation like blackface, and to understand what it’s all about you have to be acquainted with maps and historical dates.
In Israel, too, there are many who want to take part in the current discussion about the issues of racism and cultural appropriation. If it plays well in Hollywood and on HBO, naturally it will sooner or later reach Israel’s hip consumers of culture. As such, we can imagine a group of with-it young folks from the Har Adar settlement or from Ariel University conducting a discussion about whether the safari ad campaign featuring model Rotem Sela, for the clothing retailer Castro, is racist, and whether it’s legitimate for a celebrity to have their photo taken for Instagram next to Black Lives Matter demonstrators. Enlightened Israelis too want to engage in historical recognition and reckoning, and to take a knee on behalf of the oppressed.
The problem is that in Israel, historical injustice isn’t even approaching its conclusion. In fact, it’s just getting worse. One can’t deal with processing the crimes of the past when the crimes belong to the present and the future.
Admittedly, issues of the “new politics” – the politics of self, focusing on the body and identity – have shunted the Palestinian question to the margins of consciousness, both in Israel and everywhere else. Even so, perhaps this situation will ultimately give rise to hope for the Palestinian people, which is being crushed under the occupation. Possibly all that’s needed is to adapt resistance to the occupation to the logic of the contemporary political discourse. To frame the anti-Palestinian racism as a question of lifestyle and cultural representation.
Some are already moving in this direction, with slogans like “Palestinian Lives Matter,” but they are having little success. Still, it might happen – if, say, a young Palestinian-American woman who’s queer and vegan is discovered as the next hot thing on Netflix.

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John McDonnell and Laura Pidcock Defy the Board of Deputies’s 10 Commandments by appearing in Zoom Conference with Jackie Walker and Tony Greenstein

September 13, 2020, 3:08 pm
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The Zionist Attempts to Close Down Debate on Zionism Lies in Ruins After Last Weekend’s LRC Conference


At last Saturday’s Labour Representative Committee’s AGM  John McDonnell and Laura Pidcock decided to take a day trip to the Left.
Gone was the McDonnell who wanted war criminal Alistair Campbell reinstated in the Labour Party and who said that Starmer’s COVID strategy was 100% correct. Now he talked of Solidarity and even the Grunwick Strike (past battles always make social democrats more at ease than current ones)!
Amongst those listening and taking part were Jackie Walker and Tony Greenstein. McDonnell and Pidcott didn’t bat an eyelid. Surely they hadn’t forgotten the Board of Deputies ’10 Commandments’ No. 5 of which stipulated that
Any MPs, Peers, councilors, members or CLPs who support, campaign or provide a platform for people who have been expelled or suspended in the wake of anti-Semitic incidents should themselves be suspended from membership
Jackie Walker is also mentioned in Commandment No. 4, alongside Ken Livingstone, as someone who will never be readmitted to the Party. McDonnell and Pidcock up to now have never made it clear whether they reject or accept the BOD's McCarthyist programme, whereas the miserable Rebecca Long-Bailey signed up to the Commandments in an attempt to gain the racist vote in her bid for Labour’s leadership.
I have to say that I am extremely pleased that John McDonnell and Laura Pidcock, whose behaviour throughout the witchhunt has not been a model of socialist solidarity have now seen the error of their ways. The repentance of the sinner on the Road to Damascus is to be welcomed.
The Zionist attempt to construct a ‘banned list’ is no different in principle to the actions of their good friends in the Apartheid regime. I’m pleased to say that their attempts  now lies in ruins.
The Conference itself was a damp squib. I was ruled out of order when attempting to move reference back of the section of the LRC’s dire statement‘Learning from mistakes of the past five years’. Clearly the leadership of the LRC has learnt nothing at all.
I copy the relevant section of the Executive Statement below. It asks ‘Did Jeremy make mistakes? Of course he did’ and then concludes that  ‘Frankly his conduct as an individual has been heroic.’ Perhaps I have an aversion to hero worship, but to me his conduct wasn’t so much heroic as idiocy on stereoids. Others may call throwing your friends and comrades under the bus cowardice.
Not once did it seem to Corbyn that the anti-Semitism attacks, on him and others, were the normal Zionist Weaponisation of Anti-Semitism. Because if he had realised this he might have called it out. Despite employing numerous advisers it doesn’t seem to have occurred to Corbyn that what he needed to do was to fight back and devise a strategy which consisted of more than the words ‘I surrender’.
Firstly by making a major speech explaining that when you have to justify house demolitions of civilians as part of Israel’s ongoing ethnic cleansing or imprisonment without trial of children as young as 12 then ‘anti-Semitism’ is about the only card you can play.
Over ¾ of Labour’s membership consistently refused to accept that Labour had an anti-Semitism problem yet Corbyn insisted on appeasing enemies who would not be appeased. Corbyn had a duty to call out the gaggle of Blairites and what John Prescott called the ‘bitterites’ who levelled the charge of anti-Semitism at anyone they disliked.
Instead Corbyn threw his friends, one by one, under the bus to appease Tom Watson and the Jewish Labour Movement and then in the final insult to the members tried to ennoble Watson as well as Iain McNicol.
In the Leaked Report that Starmer is doing his best to bury the following appears on page 306 and in with slightly different wording on pages 333, 346 and 573. There are other references to ‘rebuilding trust’with the Jewish community without once stopping to ask themselves why only 22% of Jews voted for his predecessor, the Jewish Ed Miliband.
Jeremy Corbyn himself and members of his staff team requested to GLU that particular antisemitism cases be dealt with. In 2017 LOTO staff chased for action on high-profile antisemitism cases Ken Livingstone, Tony Greenstein, Jackie Walker and Marc Wadsworth, stressing that these cases were of great concern to Jewish stakeholders and that resolving them was essential to “rebuilding trust between the Labour Party and the Jewish community”. GLU often failed to quickly progress these cases, as well as on several cases of antisemitism that LOTO staff directly raised or discussed with GLU.
Well all the above named were expelled or forced out of the Labour Party. Did it ‘rebuild trust’ with the mythical Jewish community?  Of course not.  Our expulsions merely ‘proved’ that the Labour Party had an anti-Semitism problem so they upped their demands and Corbyn and the even more servile Jenny Formby rushed to expel even more people even more quickly. To do this they devised the fast track expulsion procedures so that people could be expelled without a hearing.
The 2019 Labour Party Conference was told that these fast-track procedures would only be used in ‘egregious’ cases but that was a lie. They have been used in every ‘anti-Semitism’ case. And the faster Formby expelled people the more this proved Labour had a problem with ‘anti-Semitism’ so they expelled even more people.
It doesn’t seem to have occurred to Formby and Corbyn that by expelling anyone who mentioned the word ‘Zionism’ in anything other than a positive light they were simply hastening their own demise. They surrendered the narrative to their enemies.
Was the Zionist Establishment and the Board of Deputies pleased . with them?  Of course not.  The Zionists knew that they had Labour’s leadership on the run and they pursued them even more.  Corbyn forgot Mick McGahey of the National Union of Miner’s advicethat ‘they’ll stop chasing you when you stop running,” Corbyn, McDonnell and Formby never stopped running.
In the end Corbyn was subject to an ambush during the General Election by the racist Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis, who trained to become a rabbi at the Har Etzmon Yeshiva on the West Bank settlement of Alon Shvut.  And what was Corbyn’s response?  To ask for a meeting with him!  Heroic? I can think of other words!
Hero Worship Sections of the LRC Executive Report
12.       Did Jeremy make mistakes? Of course he did. Everyone does. We, as loyal Corbynistas in the LRC, criticised Corbyn who, pressured by the trade union barons, accepted a process less democratic than the open selection called for by the majority of the membership. That spiked the move to Party democratisation.  How important were these mistakes? 
13.       We must remember what a weak position Corbyn – and the left in general – was in, with a hostile PLP and Party bureaucracy, and unprecedented vilification from the media. Frankly his conduct as an individual has been heroic. The fundamental problem was that he alone was unable to overcome the forces ranged against him in our movement. He was in a very weak negotiating and bargaining position. 
14.       There was an irreconcilable contradiction between the need to transform the party and build a radical democratic grassroots movement and the need to reach an accommodation with a right wing PLP.  The leadership feared a right wing split off from the PLP would make an election victory more difficult and yet to abandon the grassroots would be to give up in advance on the chance of a lifetime of achieving a radical Labour government.
15.       It was a mistake to fail to facilitate the building of an independent grassroots movement. It  was a serious error not to defend Corbyn’s supporters from the witch-hunt by accepting the narrative of what were grossly distorted and politically weaponised allegations of antisemitism which helped to divide and demoralise the Labour left
16.       The most fundamental mistake made by Corbyn’s team was increasingly focusing on triangulating Brexit policies and parliamentary procedures rather than mobilising and educating the rank and file. To combat that would have required a giant mobilisation leading to a wholesale democratisation of the labour movement – a mammoth task that the left failed to achieve.
17.       We live in unprecedented times. Johnson’s administration looked set fair last year for five years of government with very little opposition in sight. Now, with the onset of the pandemic and the prospect of economic collapse, they must know they are on the rack. What of the opposition? Unfortunately under Keir Starmer the PLP seems by a majority to accept the role of a ‘loyal opposition’, playing Parliamentary games with the Tories. But of course it’s not just up to them. The threats facing the labour movement are vast. But so are the opportunities, if our movement is prepared to take advantage of them.
The LRC is unable to come to terms with what happened during Corbyn’s leadership, not least the way its own President, John McDonnell, was the leading appeaser. This is betrayed in the poverty of its analysis (if one can dignify it with such a description). And because it draws no lessons from the debacle of Corbyn’s leadership it has nothing to say about how the Left should go about tackling the right-wing leadership of Keir Starmer.
According to Andrew Fisher’s new book, after Margaret Hodge’s description of Corbyn as a ‘fucking anti-Semite’ whenMcDonnell urged that she should suffer no consequences, Corbyn didn’t speak to him for months.  It would have been even better if Corbyn had openly called for her suspension.
The LRC was in a prime position during the past 5 years to become the leading organisation of the Left in the Labour Party. Instead it sat on the sidelines and failed to organise any opposition to the Right’s counter offensive. The LRC allowed Lansman’s Momentum to first cement its position, move to the Right and in the end destroy the Corbyn Project it had been founded to protect. Now the LRC is an organisation without a role and without much of a voice either.
Laura Pidcock is seen by activists as having a relatively clean pair of hands compared to McDonnell.  However as co-Chair of the Campaign Group of MPs it was she who told Chris Williamson not to turn up to meetings anymore once he had been suspended.
McDonnell, who was always willing to speak up for the likes of Alistair Campbell and the British National Party’s favourite MP, Margaret Hodge, kept his silence like a Trappist monk when Chris Williamson was resuspended as a result of a petition of right-wing peers and MPs organised by Tom Watson.
Even now the LRC, spurns unity with the Labour Left Alliance and instead takes part in the stitch-up that is known as the Centre Left Grassroots Alliance who, along with the CLPD and Momentum, vetoed Jo Bird’s candidature for the NEC.
Still, at least those of us expelled as a result of Corbyn’s betrayal can be grateful to McDonnell and Pidcock for their belated opposition to the Board of Deputies’s McCarthyite 10 Pledges!
Tony Greenstein
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In Memory of the 2,000+ victims of Sabra & Chatilla who died when the Zionists set the Fascist Phalange on unarmed and defenceless women and children

September 17, 2020, 6:57 pm
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The Night that Arik Sharon and the Zionists set the fascist wolves onto Palestinian women and children

Perhaps the most haunting memory I have concerns the visit I made to Lebanon in the summer of 1979 at the invitation of the PLO. We were refused visas by the London Embassy of Lebanon and instead had to travel via Syria across the land border. I was on a delegation from the British Anti-Zionist Organisation.
At that time Lebanon was still in the throes of a civil war. In June 1976, with the United States and Israel having given the green light, Syria invaded Lebanon in order to ensure that the Phalangists and their Maronite allies weren’t defeated by the combined forces of the left in the Lebanese National Movement, which the PLO supported, somewhat reluctantly at first.
The remains of Tel al-Zataar  refugee camp which was destroyed, along with its inhabitants in 1982 after the Phalange besieged it, with the support of Syrias Baathist government
There are still some fools who have illusions in the Syrian Ba’ath Government.  But when the Palestinians and their allies were on the brink of power in Lebanon Syria, with the full blessing of Saudi Arabia and the Arab League, invaded Lebanon to prevent their triumph.
In 1979 there was a vacuum in Lebanon. No group held power. The leftists, Druze, Palestinian, Shi’ite and Murabitoun, the Sunni Nasserist militias held power in West Beirut. The Phalange and Christians occupied East Beirut.
Ariel Sharon, Defence Minister and mass murderer who was personally responsible for the massacre at Sabra and Shatilla.  He was also best friend of Shimon Peres, leader of the Israeli Labour Party
The remains of Tel al-Zataar  refugee camp which was destroyed, along with its inhabitants in 1982 after the Phalange besieged it, with the support of Syrias Baathist government

A member of our delegation and myself decided to visit what remained of the refugee camp Tel al-Zatar in East Beirut. It had been subject to a 3 month siegefrom June till August when it fell to the fascist forces aided by Syria. Up to 50,000 lived in the refugee camp and an estimated 4,000 Palestinians were massacred by Syria’s ‘Christian’ allies.  To this day thousands of the dead remain unaccounted for.
Our delegation to the PLO in 1979
In order to see what remained of the camp it was necessary to cross the border, a veritable no-man’s land with the Lebanese Army dug in, between West and East Beirut and we had to get 2 taxis as no taxi would cross into hostile territory.  On our way back we were detained by the Lebanese army because we had no visas in our passports.

Beirut synagogue at Wadi Abu Jamil which I visited in 1979 - during Lebanon's civil war it came under siege from Israel's Phalangist friends - it was relieved by troops of the PFLP
We explained to them that we had come to Lebanon at the invitation of the Syrian occupying power, which was technically true! After about an hour or so we were released since the Lebanese army was de facto under the control of the Syrian military.
The remains of Tel al-Zataar  refugee camp which was destroyed, along with its inhabitants in 1982 after the Phalange besieged it, with the support of Syrias Baathist government
Whilst in Beirut we were given tours of the camps including sewing and woodwork workshops. There are a couple of photographs here.  It is a sad and sobering thought that most of those we met would have been butchered just 3 years later because of the utter stupidity of the PLO and Arafat in leaving the camps undefended and taking the word of the Zionists and their American backers to protect the camps. It was criminal irresponsibility not to ensure that if they had to leave, that sufficient arms weren’t left behind to ensure that the camps would remain protected.
children playing in the streets and alleways of the refugee camps - 3 years after this photo was taken most if not all of them would have been slaughtered by Israel's Phalangist allies
On 6th June Israel invaded Lebanon. The pretext was the attempted assassination of the Israeli Ambassador in London, Shlomo Argov.  In fact the assassination attempt had nothing to do with the PLO and was the work of the Abu Nidal group, which had been expelled by the PLO and which was the creature of Iraq’s Ba’athist government. In any event it was a pretext and Argov himself later condemned the invasion.

The remains of Tel al-Zataar  refugee camp which was destroyed, along with its inhabitants in 1982 after the Phalange besieged it, with the support of Syrias Baathist government
Israel's invasion of Lebanon began June 6, 1982. Following the assassination of the Lebanese President Bashir Gemayel on September 14th, whom Israel had imposed on Lebanon and who Syria is widely suspected to have assassinated in a car bomb, Israeli troops entered and occupied West Beirut, contrary to all its previous promises.
The remains of Tel al-Zataar  refugee camp which was destroyed, along with its inhabitants in 1982 after the Phalange besieged it, with the support of Syrias Baathist government
A deal was reached between the PLO and Americans whereby the PLO troops left for Tunisia by ship and the US promised to defend and protect the Palestinian refugee camps. Once again the PLO believed American promises although of course their position by then was extremely weak.
The remains of Tel al-Zataar  refugee camp which was destroyed, along with its inhabitants in 1982 after the Phalange besieged it, with the support of Syrias Baathist government
On September 16, 1982, the Phalangists, fascists who were known to harbour a deep hatred for the Palestinians, entered the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in West Beirut. The excuse for allowing the Phalange to enter the camps was that the PLO had left hundreds of ‘terrorists’ behind. The Phalange massacred an estimated 2,000 civilians.
The Israelis fired flares throughout the night to light up the killing fields - thus allowing the militiamen to find their way through the narrow alleys of the camps. The massacre went on for two days. When the massacre had Israelsupplied the bulldozers to dig mass graves. Refugees who had escaped to the perimeter of the camp were turned back by the Zionist soldiers.
Israel in the form of its Prime Minister, Menachem Begin tried to excuse their behaviour by blaming it on the ‘Christians’ but it was like putting a rattlesnake in a baby’s cradle. It was inevitable that the Phalange would perpetrate a massacre. 
The remains of Tel al-Zataar  refugee camp which was destroyed, along with its inhabitants in 1982 after the Phalange besieged it, with the support of Syrias Baathist government
Israeli troops surrounded the camps to prevent the refugeesfrom escaping. In Israel a 300,000 demonstration was held to protest the massacre and the government set up the Kahane Commission. In 1983 Ariel Sharon, the Israeli Defense Minister, was held to bear "personal responsibility" for the slaughter. However this was a whitewash.  The decision to invade Lebanon and then Beirut was a collective decision of the Israeli cabinet, not least its Prime Minister Menachem Begin.
Many people thought that Sharon’s career was over but I predicted, and unfortunately I was right, in an article in Tribune, that Sharon would sooner or later come back as Prime Minister. I was right and this most bloodthirsty of monsters came back in time to trigger of the Al Aqsa Intifada.
It is worth reminding ourselves that all the Israeli Zionist parties, from Likud to the ‘leftist’ Mapam and what became Meretz, supported the invasion of Lebanon. Only Israeli anti-Zionists were opposed from the start though, as the Lebanese resistance took its toll, more and more people began to oppose what happened. 
Dov Yermiyah, dissident Israeli Colonel who was dismissed for his criticisms of the Zionists' barbarity
Perhaps the most famous opponent of the war was Dov Yermiya, a reserve Lieutenant Colonel who openly condemned Israel’s bombing of Ain al Hilweh refugee camp.  He said it reminded him of World War II. Because of his open criticisms of the war he was dismissed and he later wrote a War Diary of describing what he had seen. Dov died aged 101 and shortly before his death he announced that he had rejected Zionism. He said of Israel that ‘we have become a nation of savage thugs.’
For further information see Sabra and Shatila:  New Revelations on America’s complicity in what happened.
Below is a personal testimony as to what happened by Dr Alfout Mahmoud.
Two Palestinian women walk past the dead bodies
Continuous Terror
by Dr. Olfat Mahmoud

It was 10 am on Wednesday, September 16, 1982 and I was on duty at Accra Hospital, one of the Palestinian hospitals for Palestinian refugees in Beirut, Lebanon. The Israeli occupation of Lebanon was ongoing and the camps were surrounded by Israeli troops. Throughout the night we had heard stories of terrible things happening in Sabra and Shatila camp just adjacent to us but did not believe them.
“Suddenly we were interrupted by the sound of intense gunfire at the hospital entrance. The foreign nurses urged us all to leave immediately as they were not in danger and could care for the patients. The Lebanese militia were attacking from the position the Israelis had just vacated. Several other nurses and I were on the ground floor. We ran to a window at the back of the hospital, with seconds to spare we clambered out and ran into the garden of a villa behind the hospital. The front gate of the villa was locked; the only way out was over the fence. Once over this, we ran for our lives towards the bridge and then scattered.

We heard that Lebanese militiamen had also killed nurses at Gaza Hospital located inside Sabra and Shatila camp. The foreign nurses and doctors there testified on the Saturday morning, as militiamen were marching them down the camp's main street, they saw hundreds of mainly women and children under guard sitting by a large and recently dug pit. Soon after this, they heard repeated shooting for 10 minutes or more, accompanied by screams and cries.
For two days and nights after the massacre, I slept as if in a coma. I had nightmares filled with the people who'd been slaughtered, all the people I'd known and loved and who were no longer there. When I finally woke up, I found a black cloud of grief and despair had settled around me. Nothing could shift it. It was shot through with flashes of terror that at any moment soldiers would come crashing through the door to kill me and my family. I couldn't bear to listen to the news, and I would cry easily. I just wanted to run away from everything, but my limbs felt too heavy to move. My body was like lead. And my throat was constricted constantly.” *
This is part of my memory of the massacre that took place in the Sabra and Shatila camp in Beirut, Lebanon 38 years ago. Over 2,000 women children and old men were massacred. I can never forget this and nor can all those who witnessed it and were survivors like me.
The tragedy of Sabra and Shatila was and still is a powerful reminder of the occupation of Palestinian land. It is a powerful reminder of the failure of international efforts to find a peaceful settlement to Israeli illegal occupation and to the Palestinian refugees’ endless cycle of displacement. This massacre is only one of the terrible massacres that have affected Palestinians but for me it was and is still an unforgettable traumatic event. Many survivors continue to live in Sabra and Shatila, struggling to make a living and haunted by their memories of the slaughter. To this day, justice has not been served for the war crimes that took place there despite efforts to take this massacre to the International War Crimes Tribunal. It serves as a powerful and tragic reminder of the vulnerability of Palestinians and Palestinian refugees.
On August 4, 2020, the Beirut port suffered from a terrifying and devastating blast that killed over 200 people, made homeless around 300,000 and caused extensive damage to the city. I have been through wars and the massacre but as I heard the shattering of glass, and the movement of the house, I was truly terrified and initially thought that the house was collapsing around me. Just few weeks after that, a new fire erupted in the port. All what happened and is still happening, brought back the painful memories of Sabra and Shatila massacre.

When Sabra and Shatila massacre happened and the killing and slaughter ended, its effects lived on. People were terrified and children would scream whenever they saw the army passing by. Now, after these recent tragic events in Beirut the consequences remain. The sound of breaking glass causes my heart and others to stop with fear. When the fire erupted in the port last week, we all started to open the windows and doors hoping to minimize damage from an expected blast. Many left their houses in terror. Even though we were still under the pressure of widespread cases of COVID-19 and the streets were crowded.
As years pass people in Lebanon, including us Palestinian refugees, continue to witness tragedies that bring back terrifying and tragic memories. I always ask myself, why are innocent people dying because of greed, negligence, corruption, brutality, and lack of humanity? In the face of this ongoing and overwhelming despair my solace comes through my humanitarian work to fight for justice and dignity for Palestinian refugees. I call on people everywhere to fight for justice in whatever way what they can. I have also found strength in prayer and my religious beliefs and so I pray daily for peace and justice for my people and for the other 80 million of refugees and displaced people in the world.

*This is an excerpt from Tears for Tarshiha by Olfat Mahmoud
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SHORTS: As I Predicted , the Zionist Attempt to Blacklist Expelled Members Backfires as McDonnell and Pidcock Defy the Board of Deputies McCarthyism Policy - Starmer Simply Ignored Them

September 20, 2020, 6:58 pm
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Imad Barghouti, a Professor of Space Physics at Al Quds – a University under Occupation - is Imprisoned Without Trial for Expressing His Opinions on Facebook – Please Sign the Petition

Fourth Black Lives Matter Demonstration in Brighton  is Smallest Yet


1.         Zionist McCarthyism and McDonnell

A week ago I bloggedthat John McDonnell and Laura Pidcock had defied Zionist instructions to ‘Sir’ Keir Starmer that Labour members must not appear on the same platform as expelled members of the Labour Party.
Well the Zionists huffed and puffed. McDonnell, who scabbed on Chris Williamson whilst acting as Lansman’s cheerleader for the fake ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign, protested that it was ‘ridiculous’ for him to know that Jackie Walker and me were in attendance.

The Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, an organisation funded and controlled by Israel’s Dirty Tricks Ministry of Strategic Affairs, huffed and puffed that it was McDonnell’s response that was ridiculous.  Jackie was a member of the Labour Representation Committee’s Executive. 

For once I have to agree with the CAA. How could McDonnell not know? I was as visible to him as he was to me, and since I had already spoken at the Conference shortly before him, how could he not know I was in attendance?

Of course the principled position to have taken would have been to say that this is not Israel and he is not going to accept any Apartheid banned list from a bunch of Zionists.
The problem is that McDonnell has no principles. This is a man who sat silently whilst Jewish anti-racists were expelled for ‘anti-Semitism’ and then spoke out against the expulsion of Alistair Campbell, the war criminal who was Blair’s spin doctor when he went to war with Iraq.
Laura Pidcock, another scab, has said nothing at all which just about sums her up – pretty vacant! Well vacant anyway.

Of course what McDonnell and Pidcock and before them, Diane Abbot and Bell Ribairo-Addy, could have done was to protest at the very idea of banning anti-Zionists and anti-racists. Unfortunately the Campaign Group of MPs has said nothing about Starmer taking his orders from the Board of Deputies and the Israeli Embassy.  Once you have embarked on a strategy of appeasement there are no limits to how far you will go to please the Right.

The Jewish News reported that the Board of Deputies called for the party to launch an investigation, though into what I am not sure.  The evidence is clear.  John and Laura were happy to share virtual company with Jackie and me! Just accept it.

I am also posting the appeal from Professor Barghouti, a space scientist at Al Quds University. He has been administratively detained by the Israeli army for having posted hostile comments on the Occupation on Facebook. Where are the voices of outrage from Israeli academics at this outrage?  This is why we should Boycott Israeli Universities.
Administrative Detention, which was introduced to Palestine by the British colonial authorities is better known in Ireland as internment without trial. It is by definition the action of a military/police state.
There is no pretence that Professor Barghouti is a ‘terrorist’. His only offence is that he has spoken against Israel’s occupation. Quite amazingly a Military Court ordered his release yet he has still been kept in custody demonstrating that justice in the Military Court  system is a complete fiction. Israel’s military courts have a 99.74% conviction rate.
The Zionist Times of Israel allegesthat Professor Barghouti has spoken at Hamas rallies at Al Quds University.  So what?  Hamas is a legitimate Palestinian organisation which when elections were last held was the most popular Palestinian group. When genocidal Zionist groups like Yamina stand in Israeli elections without difficulty why is it that a conservative Islamic group is considered beyond the pale?
Of course Starmer, who has pledged to defend Israel right or wrong and the racist Vice Chair of Labour Friends of Israel, Peter Kyle MP, have said nothing at all. Like the 3 Wise Monkeys they see, say and hear nothing. Criticism of Israel is now an expulsion offence.
The following letter is being circulated by Scientists for Palestine. You can sign a petition demanding Prof. Barghouthi’s release here.
Dear colleagues,

I’m writing this letter as I await the Israeli military occupation court to review the Israeli military commander’s decision to put me under administrative detention for four months. This order overruled a court decision to release me on bail, while I await yet another trial for exercising my internationally protected right of expressing my opinion on my social media. And my next appearance before the military judge/court will be a closed session, showing that even Israeli authorities are ashamed of these proceedings. 

For those of you who don’t know about administrative detention, it has been a central practice of the Israeli occupation since the early days of the British mandate, over seventy years ago; administrative detention allows for a military commander to order your arrest based on secret reports and without trial. The administrative detention can last up to six months, but can be renewed indefinitely1. This practice systematically abuses Palestinian human rights and is designed to subjugate the Palestinian people and deny their freedom. 

In the Israeli military courts it doesn’t matter that I’m a professor of space physics, nor it matters that I’m 50 years old, father of five and grandfather of one lovely boy, nor that no Israeli professor would ever be convicted for expressing her/his public opinion on Facebook! The only thing that matters in front of their courts is that I’m a Palestinian and I’m thus labeled, dehumanized, and stripped of my basic human rights. And with no fear by the Israeli military apparatus of real persecution for what they are doing to me.

Dear colleagues, I ask you to take a few minutes of your time to act in support of Palestinians and against the illegal procedure of administrative detention with a post demanding the abolition of this practice, or a discussion with your students and colleagues on the fact that in today’s 21st century world, Palestinians professors are being held without trial. 

I know justice will never be served as long as Palestinians remain under occupation, but I take courage and inspiration from the words of Desmond Tutu, “in a situation of injustice, if you remain neutral then you have chosen the side of the oppressor”.

With respect, 


Prof. Imad Ahmad Barghouthi 
Department of Physics, AQU
Occupied Palestine
Currently in the Ofer Israeli prison camp

Notes

1. There are cases of Palestinians who spent over 5 years in continuous administrative detention, and some who have experienced over 20 years of on and off administrative detention in Israeli military occupation prisons.


Samidoun, the Palestinian Prisoner Network reportedthat:

On Thursday, 16 July, Palestinian astrophysicist Imad Barghouthi was once again seized by Israeli occupation forces when he was stopped at a checkpoint in occupied Anata. The repeated arrests and targeting of Barghouthi, a scientist with a strong international reputation, has sparked outrage by international academics and researchers. He is expected to be brought before an Israeli military court on Thursday, 23 July. Samidoun demands the immediate release of Imad Barghouthi and all detained Palestinian scientists, academics, researchers and students!
A professor of physics at Al-Quds University, Barghouthi is a former NASA employee (who earned his Ph.D. at Utah State University) who has been targeted for multiple occasions for imprisonment. Palestinian students, researchers and academics continue to face harsh repression from the Israeli occupation, including researchers like Ubai Aboudi and the hundreds of Palestinian students currently jailed by Israel.
In many cases, detained academics and researchers are jailed without charge or trial under administrative detention orders, which are indefinitely renewable – Palestinians spend years at a time jailed without ever being charged or tried. If they are instead brought before an Israeli military court, they face a 99.74% conviction rate, “evidence” obtained through torturous interrogations and bogus charges for things like posting on Facebook or attending public events organized by student organizations.
The detention of Imad Barghouthi and his fellow Palestinian scholars and students reflects the ongoing and fundamental denials of of Palestinian rights to education and academic freedom, underlining the necessity of the international academic boycott of Israeli academic institutions. Such institutions are deeply complicit in the structures of occupation that deny Palestinian human rights at all levels.
We urge supporters of justice in Palestine and the right to science everywhere to stand with Imad Barghouthi and join the call for his freedom.
**
We are recirculating the following statement, released today by Scientists for Palestine, about the case of Imad Barghouthi, as well as further resources on the case.

Freedom for Imad Barghouthi

A violation of the right to science anywhere is an attack to scientists everywhere.
On Thursday, July 16th 2020, renowned Palestinian scientist Imad Barghouthi was detained by Israeli military forces during a routine stop at a military checkpoint outside of Anata. A military court hearing is scheduled for Thursday July 23rd to discuss the case of professor Barghouthi, an astrophysicist at the university of Al-Quds in East Jerusalem. No charges have been brought against him and his lawyer fears that he will be put under administrative detention, an illegal measure commonly used by the Israeli military forces to put Palestinians in arbitrary detention without any charges or trials.
This is not the first time that the Israeli military forces have arrested professor Barghouti, one of Palestine’s most prominent scientists. In 2014 he was placed under administrative detention for two months, and in 2016 he was again detained for six months. In both cases his arrest triggered a significant indignation of the international Scientific community.
Scientists for Palestine condemns the continuous and arbitrary harassment of Professor Barghouthi in the strongest possible terms and calls on all members of the International Scientific community to demand the immediate release of our colleague. The right to science is protected under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (article 27), as well as the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (article 15). The violation of the right to science anywhere is an attack to scientists everywhere.
Black Lives Matter Demonstration in Brighton is the Smallest Yet But Still Determined
I don’t know what has happened in other areas of the country but Brighton has had monthly Black Lives Matter demonstrations since the murder of George Floyd in June. The first demonstration was the largest ever seen in Brighton, over 20,000. Successive demonstrations have been smaller, about 10,000 and 3,000.  Today’s was again down – about 1,000.
No more demonstrations will be held in the winter because of the danger of COVID-19. However the decline in numbers suggests that the steam is running out of the campaign, despite the energy of the demonstrators.
The demands included White Supremacy is the Enemy, Silence is Compliance, Refugees are Welcome, Sussex Police are also Racist and calls for Justice for Jay Abatan, a Brighton resident who was murdered in 1999 and whose murder Brighton Police didn’t bother to investigate.  Indeed Brighton Police were socialising with his killers on the night when he was attacked with his brother. Basic things like taking photographs of the crime scene and securing it weren’t undertaken.
I marched with a Palestinian flag. Once again Brighton & Hove PSC  had a banner welcome at the Clocktower. It is unfortunate though that BLM, at least in Brighton, did not seem to have any awareness of the links between imperialism and racism as slogans about the oppression of Black people in other countries was conspicuous by its absence.
I took a number of photos and a couple of videos which I’ve stitched together.
Tony Greenstein
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As Soon as the Green Party Took Control of Brighton & Hove Council They Provoked a Strike with Housing Repair Workers

September 22, 2020, 9:34 am
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It is an Iron Rule of Politics that when Green Parties Get A Taste of Power They Move to the Right




Whatever their fluffy radical words when in opposition about Green New Deals, workers’ rights and a fairer society, once they get into power Green Parties move inexorably to the Right. This is not a British phenomenon but a universal political law.
Of course this is often of great disappointment to naïve green activists who believe that their party is actually a different, more honest type of party from the mainstream.
Smug and Self-satisfied Brighton Council leader Phelim McCafferty provoked dispute with housing repair team by refusing them entry to the sick pay scheme
In July the Green Party took control of Brighton & Hove Council. The reason for that was that ‘Sir’ Keir Starmer’s purge of the Labour Party for ‘anti-Semitism’ included three Labour Councillors, two of whom promptly resignedcausing Labour to lose control. Anti-Semitism’ you understand is somewhat like COVID-19, it never goes away and whenever mention is made of Israel then it flares up again out of nowhere.
No sooner had they got their hands on the levers of power and their newly inflated salaries had hit their bank accounts than the new Green Administration under Phelim McCafferty provoked a strike from the housing repair workers.
Under the previous Labour administration the housing repair service was brought back under public control, a very welcome step. Previously they had worked for the Mears Group. The Council sought to harmonise wages and conditions and the proposal from the new Administration was that the workers would have to take a pay cut of £4,000 a year or else they wouldn’t receive sick pay.
Picket outside Hove Town Hall
The GMB is quotedas saying that:
‘“Green council leader Phélim Mac Cafferty today has supported his officers in Brighton and Hove to cut the salary of housing repair services staff by £4,000 a year and not to give them sick pay and stop all negotiations with the GMB.”
What is happening today is almost a replica of what happened in 2013 when the Greens last controlled the Council. Then, under Jason Kitcat, the Green Administration also proposed savage pay cuts.  At that time it was for the refuse workers.  This time it is the housing repair workers. Also members of the GMB. Clearly the Greens don’t much like manual workers!
But in 2013 the situation was somewhat different.  There was a rebellion amongst the Green councilors. Not this time.  It would seem that they have all moved to the right, without exception.  Not one voice from the Green councillors has been raised against McCafferty’s impersonation of Mr Gradgrind.
This was Brighton last time there was a Green council
‘almost half the local Green councillors, including the deputy leader Phelim McCafferty.’ supported the strike according to Davy Jones,  the then parliamentary candidate for Brighton Kemptown, in 2013. Today the Council is led by Phelim McCafferty. Phelim came from the left not the right of the Green Party. He used to work for the TUC’s Institute of Employment Rights and I can remember having a drink with him when he would complain about his more conservative colleagues.
Phelim was also a member of Palestine Solidarity Campaign and regularly joined our picket at the clocktower during Israel’s Operation Cast Lead in 2008/9. He’s not only stabbed the Council workforce in the back, he stabbed us too!
Despite the Green conference effectively rejecting the IHRA Caroline Lucas and the rest of the Green leadership have acted as if it was Green Party policy
Phelim has long been on the road to respectability.  In 2018, he junked a decade and more of support for the Palestinians. He refused to meet the local PSC group and at Council he and the whole of the Green Group voted with the Tories and Labour to support the IHRA definition, which had been drawn up in Israel with the express purpose of conflating anti-Zionism and support for the Palestinians with anti-Semitism.
But it’s not just the Greens on Brighton & Hove Council. This isn’t an odd exception. Caroline Lucas, the only Green MP in the House of Commons has been on her own road to purgatory. She started off as a left wing candidate supporting strikers but this time around she has kept silent. In 2013 she spoke to a large strike meeting giving them support.  Today there hasn’t been a whisper out of Caroline.
Caroline Lucas was part of the Green Party mafia that attempted to railroad the party conference in 2018 into supporting the IHRA and since then have acted as if the IHRA was policy anyway. The Green Party had previously suspended a friend of mine Debbie Fink for ‘anti-Semitism’, despite her being Jewish. In fact I’ve lost count of the number of times she’s been suspended! 

The fightback against the IHRA was led by Shahrar Ali, who is now standing for election as leader of the Green Party.  Surprise surprise, shortly after the conference Shahrar, who was at one time a Deputy Leader of the GP, was also suspended for ‘anti-Semitism’. You see ‘anti-Semitism’ is a very contagious disease and like COVID-19 there is no vaccine at present other than to move as rapidly as possible to the right.
The complaint against Shahrar came via the far-Right Israeli funded Campaign Against Antisemitism.  The treachery of those who used the CAA to suspend a party colleague is beyond belief but such is the state of the Green Party at present  116 Green Party members signed a petition against this trampling over democracy in the Green Party.
But it’s not just the British Green Party. In Ireland the Green Party have done exactly the same as Brighton’s Greens.  In 2008 they supported Fine Fail’s austerity government and in the 2011 elections they were wiped out. Ireland suffered greatly during the financial crash and the Green Party coalition made sure that the Irish working class and the poor suffered. I had some experience of this when I was briefly hospitalized in Ireland and saw the extent of the cuts.
In the February 2020 elections in Ireland the most popular party was Sinn Fein, a radical left wing anti-imperialist party. The two conservative parties, Fine Gael and Fine Fail, who as recently as 2007 obtained 69 percent of the vote, managed just 43 percent between them. As Eoghan Gilmartin Tommy Greene wrote
Less than 10 years after the vicious austerity programme it helped Fianna Fáil implement between 2007 and 2011 had brought the party to the point of decimation, Eamon Ryan has signed up his grouping once again to an agenda of severe fiscal restraints and tax breaks for corporations, in exchange for a series of modest environmental proposals and three government ministries. This brand of ‘eco-austerity’ is sure to deepen neoliberalism’s grip on policy, while doing little in real terms to combat climate change.
Shahrer Ali speaking against the IHRA Israeli definition of 'antisemitism'
In Germany it was a Green-SPD Coalition Government which in 2001 under Joshka Fischer voted to become the first post-war German government to send troops overseas to fight in a war in Afghanistan.
Everywhere they get a taste of power the Greens are eager to demonstrate that they are loyal supporters of capitalism and don’t want to change the very system that has caused climate catastrophe. Instead they want to ‘green’ capitalism unable to perceive that capitalism is inherently destructive of the planet’s eco system for the very simple reason that it is a system based on profit not need.  Capitalism forsakes such trivialities as planning in favour of a market free for all.  The Green Party lacks all class politics and probably thinks imperialism is a brand of soap. It is a party of the radical petit-bourgeoisie, which in an economic crisis rapidly shifts to the Right.
The behaviour of Phelim McCafferty and the Brighton Greens is therefore not exceptional in any way. They end up careerists just the same as any bourgeois politicians because they don’t have any firm principles.  Despite all of their talk about a basic income the Greens will happily jettison the more radical parts of their programme for a slice of power.
In the UK the Green leaders are happy to support the IHRA, devised to undermine support for the Palestinians with accusations of ‘anti-Semitism’ even against the wishes of their own rank and file. For Caroline Lucas support for the IHRA was the price of working with Jo Swinson, the reactionary leader of the Lib Dems whose defeat in the General Election in December was one of the bright spots of an otherwise gloomy night. Brexit seemed to be the only issue of importance to the Green Party.
As the Labour Party moves to the Right under Starmer it is a fool’s choice to believe that the Green Party offers a radical still less socialist alternative.  Anyone harbouring such illusions will find themselves jumping from the frying pan into the fire.
Tony Greenstein
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Noone Better Represents the Opportunism and Lack of Principle of the Campaign Group of MPs than Brighton Kemptown MP Lloyd Russell-Moyle

September 24, 2020, 8:57 pm
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The Height of Unreality - Sacked by Starmer for offending Zionists LRM Pledged ‘to support Keir in defending and furthering the manifesto we stood on’



I must confess I’ve never had much respect for Lloyd Russell-Moyle, my local MP.
In March 2016 I was suspended from the Labour Party and expelled two years later. I had been targeted by the Jewish Labour Movement, which throughout the Corbyn period operated as an arm of the Zionist movement and the Israeli state.
Quoting from a Ha'aretz article was seen as 'antisemitic' - since we mustn't tell the truth about how Israel uses the Holocaust to cover its war crimes and much else
The allegations against me were motivated by my anti-Zionist politics as became clear when I had my investigation interview with Labour’s hapless Regional Secretary, Harry Gregson. I blogged about it hereand the transcript is here.  Gregson asked me about my comment that ‘Israel is waiting for its holocaust survivors to die’, so I handed him a copy of Ha'aretz, an Israeli paper with the exact same headline and asked Gregson if he was suggesting Ha'aretz too was anti-Semitic!
Even at this early stage of the witch-hunt it was criticism of Israel, not hate of Jews, which were behind the allegations of ‘anti-Semitism’.
A motion was put to the District Labour Party opposing my suspension and it was carried. LRM was the Chair of the District Party.  Did he then write to Iain McNicol, Labour’s crooked General Secretary to inform him of the local party’s policy? Well yes he did but only to ask that my expulsion be sped up, in the course of which he made a number of false allegations.!
Lloyd Russell-Moyle's letter to the witchhunters
All this was revealed when I did a Subject Access Request. Although Moyle’s letter was blacked out, it wasn’t difficult to work out who had penned it.
Naturally I wrote to oily Moyle asking what he thought he was doing. Lloyd Russell-Moyle – the Double Barrelled Hypocrite who was imposed as Chair of Brighton & Hove Labour Party. Moyle offered me a ‘limited apology’: ‘I believe Point 3 is, in hindsight poorly worded from myself.’ Being a generous soul I accepted the apology. LRM, who makes Uriah Heep seem straightforward and honest wrote:
‘I am of a firm belief that one should say things publicly which are kind, and if you are unable to say that then one must be quite (sic) and say nothing on blogs and social media, esp about members.’
And who, I thought, could argued with a sentiment which could have formed part of the Golden Rule and the Sermon on the Mount. Clearly Moyle was a kind Christian fellow and I had misjudged him!
Imagine my surprise when someone sent me a copy of a Facebook discussion with comments about me from this latter-day John the Baptist:
‘‘I am the chair of his clp [District Labour Party in fact] and can tell you he is an abusive, unpleasant little man.  I have told him that to his face.’
Leaving aside the small fact that he told me nothing to my face, other than engaging in small talk (and on one occasion apologising for his rudeness), these comments seemed slightly at odd with Moyle’s preaching about speaking kindly of people! Clearly Oily was already in training to be an MP even though he hadn’t yet been chosen as a candidate.
Lloyd Russell-Moyle (back right) and David Roger (front right)
I mention all of this because a friend in Brighton Palestine Solidarity Campaign, David Roger, wrote to Moyle on 14th June after being suspended from the Labour Party, asking for support. In response his secretary wrote 3 days later, telling David that
‘Lloyd believes that anti-semitism has no place in the Labour Party and is pleased to see Keir acting so proactively to demonstrate this.’
The implication being that David is anti-Semitic.
David respondedon 21st June telling Moyle that he found his response
‘chilling and sadly confirmatory of my fears that ambition and career advancement have overtaken principle and ethics.’
Which is as good a description of Moyle as anything I could muster. The fact that false charges of anti-Semitism are being made against activists like David for the sole reason that they support the Palestinians was not something that troubled Moyle in the slightest.
I also wrote a letter to Moyle pointing out that he was happy to attenda Palestine solidarity social with the brave volunteers on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla with David. Moyle was also happy to have his photo taken with David but he is too gutless to take up his case.
Come July and Moyle was himself subject to much the same false allegations of anti-Semitism for commentshe had made in 2009. At that time, unencumbered by office, LRM stated that Jewish claims to Israel were "not progressive in [their] very nature" and that Zionism was a "dangerous nationalist idea".
It’s difficult to disagree with either propositions. Zionism’s bastard offspring, the Israeli state, has been in a state of perpetual war with the Palestinians and its neighbours since 1948 whilst at the same time portraying itself as the victim.
A tweet from a JLM supporter
However instead of standing by his comments Moyle crawled:
“I have now deleted these posts and recognise why they were offensive,” insisting that “I am completely and unreservedly committed to supporting Keir Starmer and Angela Rayner’s pledge to rid the Party of antisemitism.”
Where, I wonder, do they get these people?  Is it a condition of being a member of the Campaign Group that you have to agree to having your backbone removed?
Divina Levrini (left)
I reminded Lloyd that amongst those who had sailed on the boat to Gaza was Divina Levrini, a young Swedish woman who, like the others, was badly beaten up and tortured by the Israeli commanders who seized the ship.  Divina, who was already ill, died soon after and who knows whether her treatment at the hands of the Israelis, which included denying her medication, played any part in this. 
The idea of apologising for describing Zionism, a racist Jewish Supremacist ideology, as nasty’ is abject political cowardice.
One might hope that people like Divina, who went on a boat despite being ill, because of her concern for the people of Gaza might give Oily the courage to stand up to the racist defenders of the Israeli state.  Unfortunately not.
The JLM, British branch of the Israeli Labour Party, which pretends to be concerned with anti-Semitism when its sole concern is Israel and Zionism, decided to go for Moyle. The Jewish News headline was Labour’s Jewish affiliate tears into shadow minister after Zionism posts apology
In an attempt to save his fast disappearing ministerial career Moyle did what come naturally to him, he grovelled.
“I am completely and unreservedly committed to supporting [Labour leader] Keir Starmer and [deputy leader] Angela Rayner’s pledge to rid the party of antisemitism. I have met previously with the Jewish Labour Movement and will be reaching out to them again now,”
This however was insufficient and Starmer gave Moyle a choice – resign or be sacked. Moyle then claimed that
owing to a campaign by right-wing media my position has become untenable. I shall return to backbenches for the time being to support Keir in defending and furthering the manifesto we stood on and to achieve a Labour government
However Joshua Garfield, a JLM operative, was in no mood to be charitable, tweeting:’
Journalists were repeatedly told that Lloyd would be reaching out to JLM. We never heard from him. It appears he opted to step down instead of reaching out to us. This was no 'right-wing media campaign,' it was his own error of judgement.
And in a statement to the Jewish News the Zionists put the boot in:
‘The Jewish Labour Movement (JLM) said it had had no formal contact with the MP since the 2017 election when he “spontaneously” joined a planned meeting between its officers and a parliamentarian.
“Lloyd Russell-Moyle has, in his short time in Parliament, managed to attract constant controversy in relation to antisemitism, which has caused deep upset and distress within the Jewish community in Brighton and Hove,”
“In isolation, each event would have at best pointed to a blind spot on anti-Jewish racism. Taken together they appear to be a pattern of behaviour that is simply not acceptable for a front bench member of the Parliamentary Labour Party,”
As we can see quite clearly, comments about Zionism are called by the liars of the JLM ‘a blind spot on anti-Jewish racism.’ That is the answer to fools like Jeremy Corbyn who speak of ‘denialism’.
It is ironic that someone who has gone along with the fake ‘anti-Semitism’ witchhunt has become a victim of it based on an 11 year old description of Zionism (not Jews).
Of course the obvious thing for Oily to do would have been to fight back and defend his ground saying the evidence that Zionism is a nasty form of nationalism is clear and unequivocal. It is a rather mild description of a state which shoots down children protesting in Gaza
However Moyle wanted to keep his place in the Shadow Cabinet so ambition ruled that one out. Naturally the Campaign Against Antisemitism also joined in
Mr Russell-Moyle has a terrible record on antisemitism,… A spokesperson for Campaign Against Antisemitism said: “It was deeply disappointing that Sir Keir Starmer appointed Mr Russell-Moyle to his Shadow Cabinet, given his record. Mr Russell-Moyle should still face disciplinary proceedings over his past conduct.”
Their conclusionswere that ‘Mr Russell-Moyle’s statements and actions qualify as antisemitic discourse.’ But then anything critical of Zionism is ‘anti-Semitism’ according to the CAA.
Below is the email I received from Divina detailing her treatment at the hands of Israel. This is the state whose ideology is Zionism. What kind of cowardice is it that makes it impossible for Moyle to stand his ground?
We were taken to Givon prison where we were tortured in different kind of ways. The women were sleep deprived more than the men. We were six women in one dirty cell with a hole in the ground. The guards would come in and yell every one or two hours (it's hard to know how often because we had no watches. Only the clothes we had on us.) They beat at the walls and lockers and made us stand up in the middle of the night, sometimes they just came in and counted the beds with a loud voice or came in with a huge stick and beat the walls. Sometimes they had gloves and handcuffs they showed but never used...

They hit my friend, a 75 year old woman who four months before got a hip replacement surgery. They did not really beat us anytime before or after that in jail so we thought that they are so used to beat Palestinians so they forgot that our embassies were ready to act if something like that would happen

I was deprived of my important medicines for 36 hours. After that my embassy complained, but I got just the half dose of the most important one, none of the other medicines. The embassy yelled at a guard to give me my medicines and he said that I would get an appointment with the doctor. But he told me in perfect English that he doesn't understand English and I have to speak Arabic.

Later the embassy and our Swedish state department sent a doctor to the airport to immediately meet me after my flight home. ...We were stolen of our driving licenses, medicines, phones, money and creditcards. Most of our luggage is gone. I came home with only a small bag with random clothes I found. I was 2,5 months at sea, so I had much more with me.
What is really amazing is that someone like RLM is held to be on the left of the Parliamentary Labour Party. The sad reality is that the Campaign Group of today is just a shadow of what it was 30 years ago when people like Tony Benn and Joan Maynard were members.
The total lack of backbone and principle in the Campaign Group is what makes socialists despair of the Labour Party. Their collective failure to call Starmer what he is, a Blairite automaton, shows how pathetic the group is.
Below is the letter I sent to  Lloyd Russell-Moyle
Dear Lloyd,
I received a copy of the following email which you sent to David Roger. I am appalled.
'Lloyd believes that anti-semitism has no place in the Labour Party and is pleased to see Keir acting so proactively to demonstrate this.'
You call yourself a supporter of the Palestinians. You have made a number of fine speeches on Palestine and I remember your attendance at the reception for the Gaza Freedom Flotilla, all of whom were very badly beaten up, tortured, when they were captured in international waters by Israel's state pirates. Your presence was appreciated by all those present.
You may recall meeting Divina Levrini, the red-headed Swedish singer, who was already seriously ill.  She died soon after returning to Sweden, even though she was no older than her early 30s.  Below I have quoted an extract of her experiences when kidnapped by Israel. I published this as an obituary, Divina Levrini – A Star that will forever burn brightly in our memories,
Divina despite her fatal illness devoted herself to the Palestinian cause and gave her life for it.  No one expects you Lloyd to do the same. However we also don't expect you to use the Palestinians for the purpose of advancing your own career. 
In the Times of Israel  Keir Starmer was quoted as saying that:
“I do support Zionism I absolutely support the right of Israel to exist as a homeland. My only concern is that Zionism can mean slightly different things to different people, and… to some extent it has been weaponized. I wouldn’t read too much into that. I said it loud and clear — and meant it — that I support Zionism without qualification.”
Zionism is the founding ideology of the Israeli state.  It is the ideology of 'Jewish settlement' as per the Jewish Nation State Law which Ha’aretz describes as enshrining discrimination in Israel’s constitution . It is the ideology that dictates that 93% of Israeli land is off limits to the Palestinians.  It is the ideology of the demographic fear of having too large an Arab minority in the ‘Jewish State’ and therefore dictates that there can be no marriage between Arab and Jew. Mixed sexual relations are a social taboo in Israel. Zionism is the ideology which dictates that half the villages of Israeli Arabs are 'unrecognised' which means they lack the most basic facilities such as running water and are in danger of immediate demolition.  No Jewish villages or communities are 'unrecognised'.
When you say that you support Starmer's 'pro-active' anti-Semitism campaign what you mean is that you support the current suspension of 25 Jewish members of the Labour Party for ‘anti-Semitism’ and the ‘investigation’ of hundreds if  not thousands more.
Contrast this concern about ‘anti-Semitism’ with the fact that Luke Akehurst supported Israeli snipers firing on unarmed demonstrators in Gaza killing medics and over 70 children. Akehurst has not been expelled. If someone had justified the murder of Jewish children then their feet wouldn’t touch the floor.  I can only conclude that Jewish lives are more precious than Palestinian lives to the racists who are conducting the present bout of expulsions.
I already know that you supported my expulsion because I obtained under SAR the email you sent to Iain McNicol urging that it be sped up. But you also support the classification as 'antisemitic' of people like Divina because I don't know a single Palestine solidarity activist who hasn't been called an anti-Semite. It is trite knowledge that ‘anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism’ is the operative slogan of the Zionist movement.
As Mick Davis, Chair of the Jewish Leadership Council, stated in his evidence to the Home Affairs Select Committee on Antisemitism:
Zionism is so totally identified with how the Jew thinks of himself, and is so associated with the right of the Jewish people to have their own country and to have self-determination within that country, that if you attack Zionism, you attack the very fundamentals of how the Jews believe in themselves.
The above statement is not only nonsense but quintessentially anti-Semitic. The home of British Jews, myself included, is Britain.  It is only anti-Semites who tell me to ‘go back to Israel’. Indeed that is why anti-Semites, from Trump to Orban to neo-Nazis like Richard Spencer and Tommy Robinson support Zionism and Israel. Is that so hard to understand?
Starmer’s ‘proactive’ campaign on anti-Semitism has become a campaign against anti-Zionist and anti-racist Jews as well as Black activists such as Marc Wadsworth and Jackie Walker. If Labour’s leaked report is correct then the only people that the anti-Semitism witch-hunt didn’t affect were the handful of genuine anti-Semites in the Labour Party.
That is why when the fake ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign was at its height, the Zionists demanded that anti-Semitism be redefined.  Instead of the OED definition of ‘hostility to or prejudice to Jews’ there was substituted a 500+ word IHRA Working Definition which included 11 illustrations of ‘anti-Semitism’, 7 of which referred to Israel.  Calling Israel a racist state is an expulsion offence.
The only MP who stood up for his principles and opposed the IHRA was Chris Williamson and he was betrayed.  When I challenged you about this at a public meeting you told me that Corbyn had provided a route back to him. This was a lie.
You and the Campaign Group have also been remarkably silent about the Board of Deputies 10 Commandments (Pledges) which, in best  McCarthyist fashion, make it a disciplinary offence to be seen with someone who is suspended or expelled.  It prohibits meeting with ‘fringe’ i.e. anti-Zionist and anti-racist Jews.  Perhaps you could let us know what your position on this is?
You entered Parliament as a supporter of Jeremy Corbyn yet you endorsed a campaign whose sole purpose was to remove him. The ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign was never about anti-Semitism or hatred of Jews.  It was always about removing someone who was seen as hostile to the British-United States special relationship and NATO.
It has been suggested to me that compared to Peter Kyle MP, the MP for Hove, whose support for Israel right or wrong is notorious, we should be grateful for your support for the Palestinians.  I disagree. I would prefer the honesty of the enemy I know than the fickle friendship of someone whose support is opportunistic and liable to change.
Black Lives Matter in 2016 came out in support of BDS, calling Israel an Apartheid state and genocidal.  It was rewarded by accusations of ‘anti-Semitism’ by the usual suspects. Mort Klein, President of the Zionist Organisation of America, urged that BLM be put on a list of hate groups, calling them
 ‘a Jew hating, White hating, Israel hating, conservative Black hating, violence promoting, dangerous Soros funded extremist group of haters.
According to the Telegraph, which was prominent in the fake ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign, Black Lives Matter protests are a catalyst for anti-Semitism. This is the ‘anti-Semitism’ that Keir Starmer is busy prosecuting and which you are endorsing. 
If you sincerely support the Palestinians and oppose Israeli Apartheid, as recognised by all the veterans of the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa such as Archbishop Desmond Tutu, you will reconsider your facile support for Starmer’s ‘anti-Semitism’ witchhunt. 
If you decline this opportunity to put clear red water between you and Sir Keir then the only conclusion that I and other activists can draw is that you are first and foremost an opportunist committed to your own career above all.  I am sure that you wouldn’t want to be remembered in that light.
Fraternally,
Tony Greenstein


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Brighton & Hove Labour Left Alliance Zoom Meeting on White Privilege and the Fight Against Racism - Tuesday September 29, 7.00 pm

September 27, 2020, 6:13 pm
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White Privilege? Is this the Cause of the Racism that led to George Floyd’s Murder or is it Another Example of Identity Politics?

I have to confess that after years being involved in the anti-fascist and anti-racist movement that it was only recently that I became aware of the concept of White privilege in conversation with a supporter of the Black Separatist group, the Nation of Islam, led by Louis Farrakhan. However it seems to have taken off amongst a wider layer of Black activists. I want to explain why I am opposed to what I consider a reactionary and bankrupt slogan.

Apart from being well known for a series of anti-Semitic statements such as

‘The Jews, a small handful, control the movement of this great nation, like a radar controls the movement of a great ship in the waters. … The Jews got a stranglehold on the Congress."

Farrakhan’s views are comprehensively reactionary. I’m not interested in what is the reflective racism of a section of Black people, Farrakhan’s comments were not a threat to Jews. They merely represent the backward consciousness of a section of the most oppressed group in American society.

Farrakhan’s ire is not directed against US capitalism and imperialism. On the contrary what he has always campaigned for is a space for Black capitalism, hence his ‘buy Black’ slogan.

The NOI has repeatedlybeen found to have links with White supremacist groups. According to the Southern Poverty Law Centre, in 1962 American Nazi Party boss George Lincoln Rockwell appeared at NOI’s 1962 Saviours’ Day Convention, christening Elijah Muhammad, NOI’s leader as the Hitler of blacks. In another, Malcolm X, on departing from NOI in 1964, spoke of an Atlanta meeting between NOI and the KKK in an attempt to establish mutual working conditions. Other contacts included the ‘Third Positionists’ in Britain’s National Front.

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Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam is very similar to Marcus Garvey’s Back to Africa movement which also preached the need to build Black businesses and in fact set about creating some such as the Black Star Lineand the Negro Factories Corporation. It also advocated the colonisation of Africa (which had already happened when freed slaves colonised Liberia and Sierra Leone).

In June 1922, Garvey met with Edward Young Clarke, the Imperial Wizard of the KKK. Garvey made a number of speeches in the months leading up to that meeting in some of which he thanked the whites for Jim Crow. Garvey once stated:

I regard the Klan, the Anglo-Saxon clubs and White American societies, as far as the Negro is concerned, as better friends of the race than all other groups of hypocritical whites put together. I like honesty and fair play. You may call me a Klansman if you will, but, potentially, every white man is a Klansman as far as the Negro in competition with whites socially, economically and politically is concerned, and there is no use lying

Unsurprisingly this embrace of the Klan  produced a fierce and hostile reaction amongst Black people. The "Garvey Must Go" Campaign gained momentum after Garvey held a secret meeting with Edward Young Clarke, the leader of the Ku Klux Klan, in June 1922. Immediately afterward, Randolph and Owen's Messenger magazine published an article entitled "Marcus Garvey! The Black Imperial Wizard Becomes Messenger Boy of the White Klu Klux Kleagle."

Marcus Garvey

Garvey doubted whether whites in the United States would ever agree to African Americans being treated as equals and argued for segregation rather than integration. Garvey suggested that African Americans should go and live in Africa. He believed‘in the principle of Europe for the Europeans, and Asia for the Asiatics" and "Africa for the Africans at home and abroad".

Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association and Farrakhan’s NOI are Black Separatist organisations which see no connection with capitalism or an alternative to a system based on exploitation. On the contrary they seek to create a Black bourgeoisie with which to combat the White bourgeoisie.  It is a movement of the Black petit-bourgeoisie which is unable to see beyond skin colour.  It had no social or political analysis.

In this the NOI and UNIA were not unique.  Garvey’s movement was known as Black Zionism.

Garvey’s UNIA and Farrakhan’s NOI are examples of a certain tendency in a section of oppressed peoples. When racists say you are different from us and we cannot live together, instead of fighting the principle of racism they adopt it as their own. This was equally true of Zionism. It never quarreled with anti-Semitism on principle, it simply wanted to adopt the same principles in respect of non-Jews.

The difference was that whereas powerful forces in the West gave their support to Zionism, all except the White supremacist fringe has given no support to Black Separatism. What made Zionism become more than a fringe Jewish Messianic movement was the fact that it was a colonial project from the start and its alliance with British colonialism. As Trotsky wroteof the Back to Africa movement:

“The American Negroes gathered under the banner of the ‘Back to Africa’ movement because it seemed a possible fulfilment of their wish for their own home. They did not want actually to go to Africa. It was the expression of a mystic desire for a home in which they would be free of the domination of the whites, in which they themselves could control their own fate” (On Black Nationalism, Leon Trotsky, International Socialism 43, April/May 1970)

This was equally true of Zionism. It traded on the idea of a Jewish ‘longing’ to return ‘home’ to Palestine. After all it is repeated every day in their prayers ‘next year in Jerusalem.’ But this too was nothing more than a pious longing to be free of oppression. When faced with the choice of going to Palestine or the United States just 1% of the 2.5 million Jews who fled the Russian pogroms between the mid-19thcentury and 1914 chose Palestine. There was nothing to stop them going to Palestine. The Ottoman Empire, of which Palestine was a part, had no internal borders. 99% of Jews chose Britain or the United States as their promised land.

The_SS_Yarmouth_Black_Star_Line_1919

By way of contrast Malcolm X started off his political life in the NOI and moved to the left as he saw the futility of Black Separatism. On March 24th Malcolm X announced that he was leaving the NOI.  From this point onwards he moved towards a position whereby he saw capitalism not skin colour as lying at the heart of Black oppression.

“You can’t have capitalism without racism”, he said once in a rally in Harlem. On another occasion, when he was talking about the liberation struggles in Africa, he statedthat:

“You can’t operate a capitalistic system unless you are vulturistic (...) You show me a capitalist, I’ll show you a bloodsucker.”

He went even further showing that he was moving towards a class position:

“We are living in an era of revolution, and the revolt of the American Negro is part of the rebellion against oppression and colonialism which has characterized this era....It is incorrect to classify the revolt of the Negro as simply a racial conflict of Black against white, or as a purely American problem. Rather, we are today seeing a global rebellion of the oppressed against the oppressor, the exploited against the exploiter.”

 

 

On February 21 1965, Malcolm X was assassinated in the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem, New York City. However the Police were not interested in the identity of his assassins.  Instead two of the three people convicted were innocent but framed by the New York Police. It is now known, thanks to the film Who Killed Malcolm X that new evidence points the finger at four members of a Nation of Islam mosque in Newark, N.J., depicting their involvement as an open secret in their city. One of those convicted, Talmadge Hayer, was also a NOI supporter. He was caught by Malcolm X’s bodyguard and rescued by the Police with a handgun.

As Joel Whitney argues in The Murder of Malcolm X

There was nothing J. Edgar Hoover feared more than a charismatic black radical who could inspire the oppressed to fight back. And that’s why, according to a compelling new series, the FBI had its fingerprints all over Malcolm X’s murder.

The NOI hated Malcolm X because his ideas were proving attractive in the America of the 1960’s with the riots and Black Panthers. He also upset their cosy relationship with the White Establishment. He was subject to close surveillance by the FBI and the counter-insurgency Cointelpro program.

Why White Privilege?

The slogan White Privilege is the product of Separatist not Socialist politics and should be rejected as such. It offers no solution.  What it does do is locate racism in skin colour. It offers no class perspective or path ahead. Like all forms of identity politics it locates oppression in the individual not the state.

Identity Politics are a backward and reactionary attempt to explain oppression in terms of fixed identities rather than the class nature of society. The ideas of White Privilege are as simplistic as they are superficially attractive.  However they must be rejected.

At a time when millions of White people in the United States and Britain have marched and demonstrated against White racism, all White Privilege does is to take the focus off the structures of a racist society and the state and turn them on Whites as individuals. It is looking through the wrong end of the telescope

Conceptually White Privilege is bankrupt on the most basic intellectual level. It is unable to explain the racism that Irish people experienced. It has nothing to say about the persecution of Roma and Gypsy people or indeed about racism directed against East European people, an integral part of the Brexit campaign.

It also has nothing to say about colonialism and imperialism, which are the direct causes of racism. I don’t know what the views of the 2 main speakers, Jackie Walker and Kerry Ann-Mendoza are.  I am sure it will be an interesting discussion. For the meeting I have prepared a discussion document which you can link to here.

If you want to attend the meeting please register in advance here. 

Tony Greenstein


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Campaign for Free Speech on Palestine – Come and hear Ali Abunimah, Editor of Electronic Intifada and Ben Norton of Grayzone

September 29, 2020, 7:15 pm
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Today Zionism is the main enemy of free speech only last week Zoom cancelled a San Francisco University seminar featuring Leila Khaled



On Thursday we will be holding the third meeting around Free Speech on Palestine and Israel in the wake of the Board of Deputies 10 Commandments, no. 5 of which instructs people not to appear on a platform with anyone expelled or suspended for ‘anti-Semitism’ from the Labour Party.

In fact the 10 Commandments are looking very frayed at the edges with John McDonnell and Laura Pidcock having successfully defied them at the Labour Representation Committee AGM a few weeks ago.

Steve Silverman of the CAA with Danny Thomas, Tommy Robinson's criminal bodyguard

Steve Silverman of the CAA with Danny Thomas, Tommy Robinson's criminal bodyguard

Our last meeting with Norman Finkelstein proved somewhat controversial with the usual Zionist attacks in the Jewish Chronicle the CSTand an absurd one in The Times of Israel implying that Finkelstein is a Holocaust deniers. Not forgetting of course the misnamed Campaign Against Anti-Semitism which labels any support of the Palestinians as ‘anti-Semitic’. 

Steve Silverman of the so-called Campaign Against Antisemitism with Mel Gharial - the link person between the Zionists and Tommy Robinson

Zionist Hypocrisy over ‘anti-Semitism’

On 7th August 124 Zionist groups purporting to speak on behalf of Jews, sought to impose the IHRA misdefinition of anti-Semitism on Facebook. What was ludicrous was that these organisations included genuine anti-Semites, racists and fascists!

As even the Jewish Chronicle pointed out these organisations include the Middle East Forum (MEF), whose President, Daniel Pipes is an open racist and part of the ‘counter-jihad’ movement. The MEF was, by their own admission, ‘heavily involved’ in funding the legal defence of Tommy Robinson, who was gaoled for contempt of court.

Steven Silverman of the CAA (back to camera) with Paul Besser of Britain First

Tommy Robinson is not only a virulent Islamaphobe and racist, he was a member of the neo-Nazi holocaust denying British National Party and to this day maintains links with neo-Nazis.  Nonetheless Tommy Robinson lovesIsrael and even declaresthat he is a Zionist.

Other racist groups signing the Open Letter to Facebook include the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, which openly lied to the Jewish Chronicle when it declares that it had no links to Tommy Robinson. In fact it works closely with the group of far-Right Zionists around Jonathan Hoffman and Paul Besser who themselves form a Zionist fan club for Robinson.

Another group of racists petitioning Facebook was North West Friend of Israel which has also demonstrated with Tommy Robinson and fascist supporters. Not forgetting of course the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God– the biggest evangelical church in Brazil. A supporter of Brazil’s fascist President Bolsonaro, anti-abortion and anti-Indian

Also amongst the signatories was the Haym Salomn Centre, which states its aim as being “combating antisemitism, Islamic terrorism and defending Western values.” Classic identitarian politics of the far-Right.

The Haym Salomn Centre also attacks “leftist stories funded by George Soros in outlets like the New York Times and Huffington Post.” Attacks on George Soros as funding the ‘liberal’ media are standard Jewish conspiracy theories. 

Not forgetting our old friends the Zionist Organisation of America led by Mort Klein. The ZOA distinguished itself after Trump was elected by inviting the anti-Semitic Steve Bannon, Trump’s special advisor as a guest of honour. Bannon told his former wife that he didn’t want his girls going to a school where there were lots of ‘whiny brat’ Jewish children. The ZOA also invited Sebastian Gorka, a member of the Hungarian fascist Vitezi Rend.

But it’s not just Facebook. As the 2 articles below demonstrate, there is a concerted attack by the Zionist movement, aided and abetted by the Trump and Johnson administrations, to prevent us speaking out.

Absurdly this is in the name of fighting ‘anti-Semitism’ as if anti-Semitism was a phenomenon separate from what most people understand as racism.  Equally absurd is the fact that Trump, a by-word for White Supremacy and racism purports to oppose racism.  The same is true of Boris Johnson, an equally vile racist.

Below are 2 articles on how Zoom, which has become very popular with the left in the wake of COVID-19 prevented a meeting at San Francisco with Leila Khaled.  Leila Khaled was accused of being a ‘terrorist’ because she is a member of the leftist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

Any organisation that opposes the Israeli state is classified as terrorist by the United States. Nelson Mandela and the ANC were also deemed ‘terrorists’ in their time. All opposition to colonialism and imperialism is defined as terrorism. What we don’t want are large media companies thinking they have the right to decide what we can and can’t hear, even to the extent of closing of a meeting held by a university. What was worrying was that both Facebook and Youtube cooperated in this act of censorship.

The last CFS meeting with Norman Finkelstein and Tariq Ali and David Miller

Zionist organisations today stand in the forefront of those attacking academic freedom.  Always in the name of ‘anti-Semitism’ of course as if Jews have a vested interested in the oppression of the Palestinians.

When the lockdown first occurred I joked that the Zionists would now have a problem because they couldn’t intimidate hall owners anymore into cancelling meetings.  Now it seems that they have found a way to ‘persuade’ the owners of Zoom, the largest company marketing meeting room software. It remains to be seen whether what happened at San Francisco University is a one-off but it points to the need for the socialist movement to develop its own software to enable meetings so as to bypass Facebook, Zoom and Youtube.

Indeed there is a need for a socialist social media rather than having to put up with the control freakery of Facebook.

The Meeting Tomorrow

Ali Abunimah is Founding Editor of Electronic Intifada, the most popular and respected Palestinian web site in the world, whose articles told the story of the Zionist ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign in the Labour Party.

Ali was the first to speak out against anti-Semites such as Israel Shamir and Gilad Atzmon in or around the solidarity movement. In the latter case he helped author a joint letter from Palestinians and Arabs, Granting No Quarter: A Call for the Disavowal of the Racism and Antisemitism of Gilad Atzmon.

Other speakers include Ben Norton, Associate Editor of the Grayzone, an Investigate Journalism enterprise as well as your usual favourites – Jackie Walker, Tony Greenstein and Marc Wadsworth. The meeting will be chaired by Chris Williamson, the only principled MP in the Labour Party who stood up to the Zionist fake anti-Semitism campaign.

Come and join us

Tony Greenstein

 Zoom cancels panel featuring Leila Khaled amid protests from pro-Israel groups

Zoom announced that it will deny its services to San Francisco State University today to block an online panel featuring Leila Khaled from happening with its software. Pro-Israel groups, including one partially funded by the Israeli government, are taking credit for the cancellation.

By Michael ArriaSeptember 23, 2020

Zoom has announced that it will deny its services to San Francisco State University (SFSU) today and block an online panel featuring Leila Khaled from happening with its software. As a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), Khaled was connected to two plane hijackings that took place in 1969 and 1970.

The event (which was titled “Whose Narratives? Gender, Justice & Resistance”) was to be sponsored by SFSU’s Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas Studies Program and the Women and Gender Studies Department.

A statement from the company to the group reads, “Zoom is committed to supporting the open exchange of ideas and conversations, subject to certain limitations contained in our Terms of Service, including those related to user compliance with applicable U.S. export control, sanctions, and anti-terrorism laws. In light of the speaker’s reported affiliation or membership in a U.S. designated foreign terrorist organization, and SFSU’s inability to confirm otherwise, we determined the meeting is in violation of Zoom’s Terms of Service and told SFSU they may not use Zoom for this particular event.”

The event was protested by a number of right-wing, pro-Israel groups including The Lawfare Project. The Act.IL app, which targets the BDS movement and is partially funded by the Israeli government, has taken credit for helping to cancel the Zoom event:

Michael Bueckert, a PhD student in sociology and political economy at Carleton University who tracks the app online, points out that its users have sent emails to the California State University Board of Trustees and informing them that they “may be violating US law by supporting a terrorist.”

Saree Makdisi, a professor of English and Comparative Literature at UCLA, tweeted, “This is what happens when we subcontract our universities to Zoom: they decide which events are acceptable and which aren’t. It’s outrageous.”

“This is a dangerous attack on free speech and academic freedom from Big Tech: Zoom cannot claim veto power over the content of our nation’s classrooms and public events,” said Palestine Legal director Dima Khalidi in a statement “The threat to democracy is elevated by the fact that Zoom’s decision to stamp out discussion of Palestinian freedom comes in response to a systematic repression campaign driven by the Israeli government and its allies.” 

Organizers and individuals connected to the event have been responding to criticisms since the event was announced.  After SFSU President Lynn Mahoney wrote an article declaring that she welcomed diversity but condemned hate, former political prisoner (and scheduled panelist) Laura Whitehorn wrote Mahoney a letter about the webinar.

“Leila Khaled is a leader in the movement for the rights of the Palestinian people,” the letter reads. “She has fought in many ways for the right of return to historic Palestine, and she will offer important lessons and information about the history of women’s involvement in working for the rights of the Palestinian people under occupation and in exile. I found your acceptance of a narrative that brands her a terrorist or a hater to be deeply offensive and in conflict with what I believe an educator should say, teach, and promote.”

People who signed up for the event received an email from organizers, saying that they expect the school to “uphold our freedom of speech and academic freedom by providing an alternative venue to this open classroom.”

Update: Since this post was published, Facebook removed the event page from its site and YouTube shut down the stream just minutes into the talk.

Big Tech’s dangerous attack on free speech and academic freedom: Zoom, Facebook, and YouTube censor SF State Palestine class

Three tech giants censored an online class featuring Palestinian, Black, Jewish and South African activists at San Francisco State University, after pro-Israel advocacy groups complained.

The open classroom event “Whose Narratives?: Gender, Justice & Resistance” featured Palestinian activist Leila Khaled and was scheduled to take place at 12:30 PDT before being erased from Zoom, Facebook and YouTube.

One day before the scheduled event, Zoom announced it would not permit the event with Ms. Khaled to take place. Zoom had previously threatened to terminate the account for the entire California State University (CSU) systemif SFSU allowed the event to proceed.

Facebook removed the event page the day of the event, and YouTube repeatedly shut down streams of the event within minutes after they began streaming on that platform.

“This is a dangerous attack on free speech and academic freedom from Big Tech: Zoom cannot claim veto power over the content of our nation’s classrooms and public events,” said Dima Khalidi, director of Palestine Legal. “The threat to democracy is elevated by the fact that Zoom’s decision to stamp out discussion of Palestinian freedom comes in response to a systematic repression campaign driven by the Israeli government and its allies.” 

The event is organized by the Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas (AMED) Studies program and program in Women and Gender Studies at SFSU and features Ms. Khaled in conversation with several prominent activists from Black and South African liberation movements and Jewish Voice for Peace.

As of Wednesday morning, event registration was open on Zoom and an event page was live on Facebook. By 9:30 a.m. PDT, both pages had been taken down.

“This censorship violates our freedom of speech and academic freedom as faculty to teach, deprives our students from the right to learn, and denies the general public the right to hear from speakers who are not readily available on mainstream media,” said Drs. Rabab Abdulhadi and Tomomi Kinukawa, co-organizers of the event, in an email to the SFSU Provost Jennifer Summit. “SFSU and CSU should not participate in such censorship directly or indirectly.”

“It’s outrageous for Zoom, which has assumed such a prominent role in online learning during the pandemic, to interject itself into this university-approved classroom event by threatening to sever its contract with CSU completely,” said attorney Dan Siegel, who is representing Professor Abdulhadi.

Zoom’s actions followed pressure from right-wing Zionist organizations including the Lawfare Project and an Israeli government-sponsored app that is taking credit for the cancellation.

These right-wing groups peddle a dangerously over-broad theory that hosting Ms. Khaled, who is 76, to discuss critical narratives of resistance, gender and sexual justice constitutes criminal activity. They argue that because she has been publicly affiliated with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a group that the U.S. has designated as a terrorist organization, professors at San Francisco State are not allowed to host her as a speaker.

Ms. Khaled is not being compensated for her talk and the exchange of ideas in a university setting is constitutionally protected free speech.

Several of the other speakers were part of resistance and liberation movements that were once criminalized, including:

  • Sekou Odinga, a former member of the Black Liberation Army and political prisoner for 33 years
  • Ronnie Kasrils, a Jewish anti-Zionist activist and former member of the armed wing of the African National Congress
  • and Laura Whitehorn, a political prisoner for 14 years and current member of Jewish Voice for Peace, which has been attacked by Zionist groups and the Israeli government. 

Dr. Rabab Abdulhadi, a prominent Palestinian scholar-activist has faced relentless attacks from Zionist organizations – most recently after giving a guest lecture at UCLA in 2019 where she critiqued Zionism as a political ideology of supremacy akin to white supremacy.

UCLA concluded that there had been no wrongdoingin an investigation of the lecture due to a complaint from a student who disagreed with her views.

Despite this, the right-wing Zionist group StandWithUs filed a federal civil rights complaint against UCLA in October 2019 over the lecture, which the Trump administration opened as a formal investigation in January 2020 following an executive order adopting a distorted redefinition of antisemitism that targets advocacy for Palestinian rights.

Last month, over 120 pro-Israel groups sent a letter lobbying Facebook to censor criticism of Israel by labeling it as hate speech using Trump’s definition of antisemitism. Adopting this definition will give even broader latitude to the censorship of Palestine advocacy.

“Right-wing Israel proxy groups, the Trump administration, and Big Tech firms are conspiring to censor any and all discussion about or advocacy for Palestinian freedom at a time when Trump’s foreign policy seeks to liquidate the Palestinian issue,” said Dima Khalidi. “They will not succeed, because people who believe in democracy, dissent, and freedom for all will not be silenced.”

The General Union of Palestine Students at SFSU issued the following statement: 

“If SFSU prides itself on its values of critical ethnic studies thought, and representation in curriculum of all ethnicities and races, it should itself as an institution uphold those values and defend its faculty against censorship and attacks. SFSU must ensure that Zoom does not have control over its curriculum.”

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APOLOGIES For Not Having Posted In The Past Few Days But I’ve Been Overcome With Grief At Trump Catching China Virus!

October 3, 2020, 5:20 pm
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 I will not wish that anything bad happens to Trump – rather I will quote from Dylan’s Masters of War



There is a rich irony in Donald Trump having succumbed to the Coronavirus (or Chinavirus) having done his best to write it off as a hoax or mild dose of flu.

However I’m not going to wish that Trump dies.  Rather I hope that he suffers the fate of 6 (at least) children who perished at his hands in US custody for the ‘crime’ of having been ‘illegal refugees’.

What happened to those children in US custody was murder and as Trump is such an avid supporter of the death penalty I can only hope he recovers sufficiently in order that he can be put to death by due process of the law.  However since that is not possible given the state of US ‘justice’ I am prepared to accept the advice of the last stanzaof Bob Dylan’s Masters of War.

I understand that the social media giants – Facebook and Twitter and Tiktok – are taking down posts that wish Trump an early demise. These monopoly representatives of capitalism and the racist warmongers are behaving exactly as we expect them to. Twitter has consistently provided a platform for the racist and warmongering output of Trump including his admiration of White supremacists.

We can expect nothing more from these hypocrites who won’t tolerate anyone wishing death on Trump but they are happy to accept his racist rantings against the most defenceless people in society.

Tony Greenstein

And I hope that you die
And your death'll come soon
I will follow your casket
In the pale afternoon
And I'll watch while you're lowered
Down to your deathbed
And I'll stand over your grave
'Til I'm sure that you're dead

Bob Dylan Lyrics

"Masters Of War"

Come you masters of war
You that build the big guns
You that build the death planes
You that build all the bombs
You that hide behind walls
You that hide behind desks
I just want you to know
I can see through your masks

You that never done nothin'
But build to destroy
You play with my world
Like it's your little toy
You put a gun in my hand
And you hide from my eyes
And you turn and run farther
When the fast bullets fly

Like Judas of old
You lie and deceive
A world war can be won
You want me to believe
But I see through your eyes
And I see through your brain
Like I see through the water
That runs down my drain

You fasten all the triggers
For the others to fire
Then you set back and watch
When the death count gets higher
You hide in your mansion'
As young people's blood
Flows out of their bodies
And is buried in the mud

You've thrown the worst fear
That can ever be hurled
Fear to bring children
Into the world
For threatening my baby
Unborn and unnamed
You ain't worth the blood
That runs in your veins

How much do I know
To talk out of turn
You might say that I'm young
You might say I'm unlearned
But there's one thing I know
Though I'm younger than you
That even Jesus would never
Forgive what you do

Let me ask you one question
Is your money that good
Will it buy you forgiveness
Do you think that it could
I think you will find
When your death takes its toll
All the money you made
Will never buy back your soul

And I hope that you die
And your death'll come soon
I will follow your casket
In the pale afternoon
And I'll watch while you're lowered
Down to your deathbed
And I'll stand over your grave
'Til I'm sure that you're dead


 

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At a time of Black Lives Matter We Should Remember and Learn the Lessons of Those Who Fought for Civil Rights in the Deep South

October 5, 2020, 4:22 pm
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How a Black Spy Infiltrated the Confederate White House,the Freedom Riders and 6 Heroines of the Struggle




It is Black History Month and it is opportune to cover some of the heroes and heroines of America’s civil rights struggle. It is noticeable how, in the United States, there is a Holocaust museum in Washington but no equivalent institution to remember the victims of slavery or to commemorate the struggle to end desegregation and the fight against Jim Crow.

Very little if any mention is made of the role of Black people in the American civil war, which is depicted as a struggle between the good Whites of the North and the bad Whites of the South. People like Mary Bowser (Richards) who worked in the home of Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederacy in Richmond Virginia.

Elizabeth Van Lew

Bowser had been freed by Elizabeth Van Lew who used her inheritance to free Mary and other slaves. Van Lew co-ordinated what was a veritable Black spy ring at the heart of the Confederacy including Bowser. Another member of this spy ring was John Scobell.

 The Freedom Riders were civil rights activists who rode interstate buses into the segregated SouthernUnited Statesin 1961 and subsequent years to challenge the non-enforcement of the United States Supreme Court decisions Morgan v. Virginia(1946) and Boynton v. Virginia(1960), which ruled that segregated public buses were unconstitutional.[3]The Southern states had ignored the rulings and the federal government did nothing to enforce them. The first Freedom Ride left Washington, D.C. on May 4, 1961, and was scheduled to arrive in New Orleans on May 17.

Gloria Richardson, Dr. Rosa L. Gragg and Diane Nash

Below are two articles on the Freedom Riders and Diane Nash in particular. I have also copied below a tribute to 6 Black heroines of the civil rights struggle.  Coretta Scott King should be well known to people but the other five are less well known.

Also  there is an article on the late Congressman John Lewis, who was arrested no less than 40 times. Lewis symbolised the political co‑option of  the Black  struggle into the American power struggles. Lewis, who campaigned against desegregation supported the Jim Crow State of Israel. Nothing better demonstrates this than the fact that Jo Biden won the Democratic nomination because of the vote of Black people in South Carolina and elsewhere in the South on Super Tuesday.

This is the same Jo Biden who started off his political life as a segregationist and who supported the mass incarceration of Black people under Bill Clinton. There is a lesson here for Black Lives Matter which is also showing signs of sinking into the swamp of Black identity politics.

Tony Greenstein 

Confederate President Jefferson Davis occupied an anxious home in Richmond, Virginia, during the Civil War. A steady leak of information dripped from the highest ranks of the Confederacy to the Union. Davis was wary of a mole in his house, but had no idea how to stop the flow of information. Little did he know, a Union spy found her way into deepest parts of the Confederate White House as part of an abolitionist woman’s spy ring.

These women, Elizabeth “Crazy Bet” Van Lew and Mary Bowser, a freed slave who posed as a Davis’s servant, worked together to bring down the political fixtures of the South from the inside out.

Spies were common on both sides of the Civil War. Van Lew organized a spy ring in the heart of the Confederacy and Bowser, with her photographic memory and incredible acting skills, was able to relay critical intelligence to Van Lew, which would then make its way to the Union.

Spying on the most elite members of the Confederacy required the deception of more than just the enemy. In order to keep from exposing themselves, the women needed to fool society around them. They opted to be labeled as senseless and stupid instead of revealing themselves as the canny operators that they were.

Elizabeth Van Lew. (Credit: Virginia Museum of History & Culture/Alamy)


Van Lew was born in 1818 into an affluent family in Richmond. After receiving her education as a teenager in Philadelphia, she began to see the injustice of slavery throughout the country. And as she got older, her stance against slavery only got stronger, despite the fact that her family owned slaves.

Following her father’s death in 1843, Van Lew and her widowed mother freed the slaves that the family owned, and Van Lew used the money from her father’s death—$10,000 (about $200,000 in today’s currency)—to buy and free the relatives of the slaves that her family had owned.

“No pen, no book, no time can do justice to slavery’s wrongs, its horrors,” Van Lew wrote in her diary, as reported by author Elizabeth R. Varon in the biography Southern Lady, Yankee Spy: The True Story of Elizabeth Van Lew, A Union Agent in the Heart of the Confederacy.

Among the many freed slaves was young Mary Bowser, born Mary Jane Richards. Believed to have been born between 1839 and 1841, Richards remained a servant for the Van Lew family after attaining her freedom. Bowser was given special treatment from the time she was baptized as an infant at the family’s church, and was sent by Van Lew to the North, possibly Philadelphia, to receive a formal education. At the end of Richards’ education, Van Lew dispatched her as a missionary to the West African nation of Liberia in 1855.

Richards stayed in Liberia, which was founded by freed American slaves, until 1860, but was unhappy living there. When she finally came back to America, she was promptly arrested, likely because of a law that prohibited black Virginians who had lived in a free state or gotten an education from returning. She spent 10 days in jail before Van Lew paid her bail.

Richards used aliases from the moment that she was apprehended to the time that she was released, going by both Mary Jane Henley at her arrest and Mary Jones at her release—an early precursor to her ability to take on the role or title that best benefitted her scenario. The records that follow her life bear witness to the many names she used. She married fellow Van Lew servant Wilson Bowser on April 16, 1861, and was then known as Mary Elizabeth Bowser. The Civil War erupted just four days before the marriage.

Shortly afterward, Van Lew began volunteering as a nurse at the tobacco warehouse in Richmond—the capital of the Confederacy—that housed Union prisoners and would later become known as Libby Prison. In July of 1861, she and her mother started to bring food, clothes, books, medicine and other materials to the prisoners.

Unbeknownst to the guards, Van Lew was unofficially helping the Union with her deliveries, hiding messages and plans for escape in her deliveries. She even housed escaped Union soldiers, helping them as they tried to make their way back to the North.

Van Lew’s assistance to enemies of the Confederacy was met with disdain in Richmond, where residents were proud of the pro-slavery stance that their government upheld, shunning—and sometimes threatening—those that were sympathetic to the Union cause. But under the guise of a false persona in which she mumbled nonsense and was easily distracted, “Crazy Bet” was left alone by her fellow Southerners.

Word of Van Lew’s efforts to help the Union reached military leaders in the North, namely General Benjamin Butler, who sent a representative to recruit her as a Union spy. Under the instruction of Butler, Van Lew started to grow her network of spies, having them deliver dispatches in a colorless ink that could only be deciphered when milk was applied to the page.

Van Lew’s most valuable asset in her spy operation was Mary Bowser, who was able to spy for the Union in an entirely different way: from the vantage point of a domestic servant. After cleaning and cooking at several functions for the family of Confederate President Jefferson Davis, Bowser was hired as a full-time servant in the Confederate White House.

There, she swept and dusted in the nooks and crannies of Davis home, reading the plans and documents that were laid out or hidden in desks, and reporting her findings to Van Lew. Equipped with a photographic memory, she was a troublesome spy to have behind enemy lines.

There’s not much information as to what Bowser was able to report back as a spy, as all of her dispatches to Van Lew were destroyed out of fear that they would lead to severe repercussions. However, Van Lew’s diary entries imply that Bowser’s reports were critical in helping the Union navigate their way towards victory during the war.

“When I open my eyes in the morning, I say to the servant, ‘What news, Mary?’ and my caterer never fails!” Van Lew wrote. “Most generally our reliable news is gathered from negroes, and they certainly show wisdom, discretion and prudence, which is wonderful.”

As the war came to a close, in 1865, Van Lew was thanked personally by Union General Ulysses S. Grant. “You have sent me the most valuable information received from Richmond during the war,” he reportedly told her.

Grant even gave Van Lew money for her services to the Union. Unfortunately, it wasn’t enough to cover the money she had already spent operating a spy ring of more than a dozen people; she had largely exhausted her inherited wealth during the Civil War. Afterward, she was left poor and abandoned by her community after it was revealed that she was a Union spy.

On Van Lew’s deathbed, in 1900, the story of Mary Bowser came to light in press accounts. In the Richmond and Manchester Evening Leader, it was reported that Van Lew described a “maid, of more than usual intelligence” who was educated out of state, sent to Liberia and planted as a servant to Davis during the war. A decade later in a Harper’s Monthly interview, Van Lew’s niece, Annie Randolph Hall, identified the woman as Bowser.

Bowser, meanwhile, did not wait long to tell of her incredible exploits. In fact, just days after the fall of the Confederacy, Bowser, using her maiden name Mary Jane Richards, began to teach former slaves in the area. In 1865, she traveled throughout the country, giving lectures about her experiences at war under the name Richmonia Richards.

The New York Times listed one such event with the notice “Lecture by a Colored Lady,” which stated

“Miss RICHMONIA RICHARDS, recently from Richmond, where she has been engaged in organizing schools for the freedmen, and has also been connected with the secret service of our government, will give a description of her adventures, on Monday evening, at the Abyssinian Baptist Church, Waverley-place, near Sixth-avenue.”

Fittingly for a former double agent, Richards’ speeches often contradicted one another, leaving historians befuddled as to her actual story. One thing that remained consistent, however, were reports of her sarcastic and humorous speaking style. As Richards traveled the country, records of her whereabouts begin to fade, in true spy fashion. She was last seen meeting abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe in Georgia in 1867, sharing the riveting story of her life as a spy yet again.

Slaves, freedmen spied on South during Civil War

WASHINGTON — In the Confederate circles he navigated, John Scobell was considered just another Mississippi slave: singing, shuffling, illiterate and completely ignorant of the Civil War going on around him.

Confederate officers thought nothing of leaving important documents where Scobell could see them, or discussing troop movements in front of him. Whom would he tell? Scobell was only the butler, or the deckhand on a rebel sympathizer's steamboat, or the field hand belting out Negro spirituals in a powerful baritone.

In reality, Scobell was not a slave at all.

He was a spy sent by the Union army, one of a few black operatives who quietly gathered information in a high-stakes game of cat-and-mouse with Confederate spy-catchers and slave masters who could kill them on the spot. These unsung Civil War heroes were often successful, to the chagrin of Confederate leaders who never thought their disregard for blacks living among them would become a major tactical weakness.

"The chief source of information to the enemy," Gen. Robert E. Lee, commander of the Confederate Army, said in May 1863, "is through our negroes."

Little is known about the black men and women who served as Union intelligence officers, other than the fact that some were former slaves or servants who escaped from their masters and others were Northerners who volunteered to pose as slaves to spy on the Confederacy. There are scant references to their contributions in historical records, mainly because Union spymasters destroyed documents to shield them from Confederate soldiers and sympathizers during the war and vengeful whites afterward.

"These kinds of spies and operatives come up over and over again, many of them unnamed and rarely do they receive glory," said Hari Jones, curator of the African American Civil War Museum in Washington, who lectures on the Civil War's African American spies.

Jones and other experts are hoping the 150th anniversary of the Civil War will include some measure of remembrance for these officers, some of whom are included in exhibits at the African American Civil War Museum's new facility, which will hold its grand opening on July 16-18.

Allan Pinkerton, head of the Union Intelligence Service at the onset of the Civil War, detailed his recruitment of black spies in his autobiography, including a couple of successful missions by Scobell and the extraction of valuable papers from a Union defector. Scobell in particular, Pinkerton said, was a "cool-headed, vigilant detective" who easily duped the Confederates around him by assuming "the character of the light-hearted, happy darkey." Pinkerton said.

"From the commencement of the war, I have found the negroes of invaluable assistance and I never hesitated to employ them when after investigation I found them to be intelligent and trustworthy,"

Harriet Tubman is the most recognizable of these spies, sneaking down South repeatedly to gather intelligence for the Union army while also leading runaway slaves to freedom through the Underground Railroad. Often disguised as a field hand or poor farm wife, she led several spy missions into South Carolina while directing others from Union lines.

Another spy, Mary Elizabeth Bowser, was born a slave to the Van Lew family, who freed her and sent her to school. Bowser then returned to Richmond, where Elizabeth Van Lew was running one of the war's most sophisticated spy rings.

Somehow, Van Lew got Bowser a job inside the Confederate White House as a housekeeper. Bowser then proceeded to sneak classified information out from under Confederate President Jefferson Davis' nose.

According to the memoirs of Thomas McGiven, the Union spymaster in Richmond whose cover was that of a baker who delivered to the Confederate White House, Bowser

"had a photographic mind. Everything she saw on the Rebel President's desk she could repeat word for word. Unlike most colored, she could read and write. She made the point of always coming out to my wagon when I made deliveries at the Davis' home to drop information."

Stories about Bowser, who is also known as Ellen Bond, Mary Jones or Mary Jane Richards, show up as early as May 1900 in Richmond newspapers, and her name was revealed in 1910 in an interview with Van Lew's niece, according to Elizabeth Varon, author of a book about Van Lew.

There is no proof that Bowser existed beyond these recollections. Van Lew, like Pinkerton before her, requested that Union forces turn over all her intelligence records at the end of the Civil War and destroyed them, leaving no proof of her vast network.

Jefferson Davis' wife, Varina, publicly denied that a black female spy could have infiltrated their White House.

But Varon's book suggests that Bowser's true name was Mary Richards, she survived the Civil War and married a man named Garvin. Richards even writes in an 1867 letter that during the Civil War she was "in the service ... as a detective."Others are not as well-known.

Take, for example, the three slaves who escaped the Confederate army on Morris Island, outside Charleston, S.C., in 1863 and went to Union Brig. Gen. Q.A. Gillmore with crucial information.

"They were officers' servants, and report, from conversations of the officers there, that north and northwest faces of Fort Sumter are nearly as badly breached as the gorge wall, and that many of our projectiles passed through both walls, and that the fort contains no serviceable guns,"

Gillmore said in a report to his army superiors.

Using African American troops, Gillmore later ordered the attack on Fort Sumter, which was retaken by the North in February 1865, almost four years after the Civil War began with the Confederates firing on the federal facility and taking it over.

One such informant was Marie Louvestre (sometimes spelled Touvestre in historical records), a former slave working for a Confederate engineer who was transforming the USS Merrimac into the Virginia, the first Confederate ironclad warship. Realizing the importance of her employer's breakthrough, Louvestre took some of the paperwork, headed north and requested a private meeting with Navy Secretary Gideon Wells.

The Union navy was working on a similar ship, the USS Monitor. Louvestre, Wells said in an 1873 letter,

"told me the condition of the vessel, and took from her clothing a paper, written by a mechanic who was working on the `Merrimac,' describing the character of the work, its progress and probable completion."

The Union navy intensified its construction of the Monitor and sailed it down to Virginia, leading to the world's first ironclad naval battle, a stalemate that kept the rebel navy from breaking the federal blockade of Norfolk.

Union forces weren't the only ones operating a black spy network in the South.

Black abolitionists also ran a vast private network called the "Loyal League,""Lincoln's Legal Loyal League" or the "4Ls," which spied for the North and spread word about the war among the black slaves. Scobell was a member of the 4Ls, Pinkerton said, and used the network to get information to Washington, D.C.

"I traveled to about the plantations within a certain range, and got together small meetings in the cabins to tell the slaves the great news. Some of these slaves in turn would find their way to still other plantations — and so the story spread. We had to work in dead secrecy," with "knocks and signs and passwords,"

said George Washington Albright of Holly Springs, Miss., in 1937.

Utmost secrecy was needed for these spies because of the consequences for those who were caught.

James Bowser, a free black from Nansemond County, Va., decided to help the Union army by spying on the South, according to Virginia Hayes Smith of Norfolk, Va., an elderly black lady who related Bowser's story to Virginia Writers Project field interviewers in 1937. Her recollections were subsequently published in the book "Virginia Folk Legends."

Bowser's white neighbors, some of whom coveted Bowser's farmland, heard rumors of his activities, Smith said. A mob of planters attacked Bowser's house at night and dragged out Bowser and his son.

"After severely beating both father and son, the horde made Bowser lie on the ground and stretch his neck over a log like a chicken on a chopping block," said Smith, "Then someone cut his head off. The plan was to kill the boy in the same manner, but the more thoughtful ones disagreed. They suggested that he be left to carry the news of this ghastly example back to the other Negroes. The mob gave in."

Another Virginian, a free black bricklayer named Martin Robinson, was killed on the spot.

Robinson was considered "faithful and reliable" by the Union hierarchy, and already had helped Union officers escape from the infamous Libby Prison in Richmond, wrote Louis M. Boudrye, chaplain of the 5th New York Calvary.

Union forces wanted to attack Richmond in 1864 to free Union soldiers and spies held by Confederates at Belle Isle, a small island in the middle of the James River. Colonel Ulric Dahlgren was to cross the James River eight miles to the south and press north into the city while other Union forces attacked from other directions. Robinson, who lived in the area, was sent by the Bureau of Military Intelligence to take Dahlgren's troops and horses to the best place to cross the river.

When they arrived, the river was impassable. Robinson panicked. Dahlgren decided Robinson had deliberately deceived him. However, the river normally would have been passable had it not been for flooding from heavy rains, Confederate veteran Richard G. Crouch said in 1906.

"The colonel ordered him to be hung — a halter strap was used for the purpose, and we left the miserable wretch hanging by the roadside,"Boudrye said.

How Freedom Rider Diane Nash Risked Her Life to Desegregate the South

Now an icon of the Civil Rights Movement, Nash was arrested dozens of times for non-violent protests—including while six months pregnant.

 “Diane, you’ve gotten in with the wrong bunch.”

Those were the words that civil rights activist Diane Nashheard when her grandmother found out she was involved in the Civil Rights Movement in 1960. Imagine her grandmother’s surprise when she found out that Nash wasn’t just involved, but was leading the charge of the Nashville student sit-ins. Later, in fact, she would go on to help coordinate the Freedom Rides.

The response of Nash’s family was one that many others would express throughout her journey: fear. And with the violence and discrimination that was rampant throughout the country in the 1950s and ‘60s, it’s easy to see why.

Musician and actor Harry Belafonte with Freedom Riders Diane Nash and Charles Jones, discussing the Freedom Riders movement, 1961. Afro American Newspapers/Gado/Getty Images


Nash was born in 1938 and raised in Chicago, away from the strong racial divisions that saw African Americans treated as second-class citizens under Jim Crow laws in the South. It wasn’t until she enrolled at the historically black Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1959 that she came face-to-face with overt discrimination.

“There were signs that said white, white-only, colored. [The] library was segregated, the public library. Parks, swimming pools, hotels, motels,”

she recalls.

“I was at a period where I was interested in expanding: going new places, seeing new things, meeting new people. So that felt very confined and uncomfortable.”

Diane Nash

Among the many facilities that weren’t available to Nash and her peers were restaurants that served black customers only on a “takeout basis,” which meant they weren’t allowed to sit and eat inside. Instead, black patrons were forced to eat along the curbs and alleys of Nashville during the lunch hour.

Nash couldn’t adhere to these rules. In her eyes, that would be agreeing with the unjust laws. But before she could take a stand against these restaurants—essentially protesting the government itself—she needed a plan of action. Enter Jim Lawson, an activist who had studied Gandhi’s nonviolent movement in India, and taught workshops on progress and change through nonviolence at a Methodist church near the university.

The spring after she enrolled at Fisk, just shy of 22 years old, Nash became a leader in the Nashville Student Central Committee, which organized sit-ins at discriminatory restaurants throughout the city. Faced with a fuming community that did everything in their power to remove the students, Nash encountered the frightening scenarios that she had prepared for during Lawson’s workshops.

Charles H. Percy, right, chairman of the platform committee of the Republican Party, speaking with Walter Bradford, Diane Nash, and Bernard Lee on July 20, 1960. AP Photo

Leading up to her first sit-in, in February 1960, Nash worried about being arrested. She’d voiced her concern in the workshops, saying that she’d help with phone calls and organizing but in the end, she would not go to jail. “But when the time came, I went,” she says, of the dozens of arrests she’d face in the not too distant future.

The success of the sit-ins on May 10 that year would make Nashville the first southern city to desegregate lunch counters in the country. But that was only the beginning for the young activist.

The same year, Nash traveled to Raleigh, North Carolina, to meet with other progressive students in the South and form the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). The organization would work with other major organizations within the Civil Rights Movement, including the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE).

In 1961, the Nashville Student Central Committee received a notice from CORE that they were beginning the Freedom Rides, a nonviolent protest to desegregate interstate bus travel and terminals that started in Washington, D.C., before making its way through southern states. The student activists offered to help in any way they could. It wouldn’t be long before they were called on to fulfill that request.

As the Freedom Rides went from one state to another, the participants found themselves in increasing danger from angry communities vehemently against the idea of integration. The aggression came to a head as the Freedom Rides reached Alabama. The buses were burned and the activists beaten on May 14, 1961, forcing them to retreat to New Orleans. From there, it was up to Nash to carry the torch with a new group of Freedom Riders.

“We recognized that if the Freedom Ride was ended right then after all that violence, southern white racists would think that they could stop a project by inflicting enough violence on it,”

she says.

“And we wouldn’t have been able to have any kind of movement for voting rights, for buses, public accommodations or anything after that, without getting a lot of people killed first.”

So Nash and her peers continued the Freedom Rides, despite the objections of many powerful people, including Attorney General Robert Kennedy. Kennedy had instructed his assistant, John Seigenthaler, to speak directly with Nash in an attempt to call off the Freedom Rides. With so much bloodshed in Alabama, he urged the chairwoman to back down from the violence that undoubtedly awaited them on the trail.

“People understood very well what could happen,” says Nash, who explained to Seigenthaler that the participants in the Freedom Rides had given her sealed envelopes with their wills, in the event of their deaths. “Fortunately, I was able to return all those sealed envelopes.”

The Freedom Rides concluded in the fall of 1961 with yet another victory for the Civil Rights Movement; the Interstate Commerce Commission made segregated bus travel and terminals illegal, effective November 1st. However, Nash’s strength would again be tested when she faced law enforcement later that year. And this time, she was pregnant.

In 1961, Nash was arrested for “contributing to the delinquency of minors” after encouraging young people to fight for desegregated buses in Mississippi. At the time, she was living with her husband, James Bevel, in Jackson. The couple, who met through activism, had been spreading a message of nonviolence within the community.

Nash’s attorney had wrongly advised her that she did not need to appear in court, which resulted in a warrant for her arrest. Six months pregnant at the time, Nash went to court to surrender to the authorities. She was facing a two-year prison sentence.

“When I surrendered, I sat in the front seat of the courtroom and the bailiff told me to move back and I thought ‘I [might be here] for two years, I’m not moving anywhere,’” she says. “So they charged me with contempt of court for refusing to move to the back.”

The contempt of court sentence lasted for 10 days. While in jail, the only thing on Nash’s mind was her unborn child. She was determined to do everything she could so that her child would enter a world that was equal for all Americans, regardless of race.

After serving out her sentence for contempt, the judge declined to hear Nash’s other case. Nash believes the federal government tapped her telephone line and listened in when she told organizations in the Civil Rights Movement that she was pregnant and headed to jail for up to two years. On the heels of the horrific imagery of the bloodied and beaten Freedom Riders that had been spread far and wide, they surmised that Mississippi didn’t want to find itself, once again, at the center of a national political debate.

As a result, the government reduced Nash’s sentence for “contributing to the delinquency of minors” without formally addressing it. This left Nash in a predicament. She didn’t want the prejudiced justice system she had been fighting against to think that she was indebted to it. She was ready and willing to serve her full sentence, after all.

“When I got home, I wrote Judge Moore a certified return-receipt letter. I said, ‘In case you should change your mind and you want me, here’s where you can reach me,’” Nash recalls. And though the judge never took her up on the offer, Nash was always ready to do what was necessary to make a mark. To change the world, she says with a laugh, “sometimes you have to be bad.”

Six Unsung Heroines of the Civil Rights Movement

Below are a few of the women who contributed to the fight for equal rights for Black American women.

While their stories may not be widely known, countless dedicated, courageous women were key organizers and activists in the fight for Civil Rights. Without these women, the struggle for equality would have never been waged. “Women have been the backbone of the whole civil rights movement,” activist Coretta Scott Kingasserted in the magazine New Lady in 1966. Here are a few of their stories.

Rev. Dr. Pauli Murray

1. Rev. Dr. Pauli Murray (1910–1985)

Brandeis University professor Dr. Pauli Murray, 1970. (Credit: AP Photo)

The Draftswoman of Civil Rights Victories

The writings of The Rev. Dr. Anna Pauline “Pauli” Murray were a cornerstone of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, the 1954 Supreme Court case that ended school segregation, but the lawyer, Episcopal priest, pioneering civil rights activist and co-founder of the National Organization for Women wouldn’t be made aware of that extraordinary accomplishment until a decade after the fact.

In 1944, Murray was the only woman enrolled at Howard Law School—and at the top of her class. While discussing Jim Crow laws, Murray had an idea. Why not challenge the “separate” in “separate but equal” legal doctrine, (Plessy v. Ferguson) and argue that segregation was unconstitutional? This theory became the basis of her 1950 book, States’ Laws on Race and Color, which NAACP attorney Thurgood Marshall called the “bible” of Brown v. Board of Education.

In 1965, Murray and Mary O. Eastwood co-authored the essay “Jane Crow and the Law,” which argued that the Equal Protection Clause in the 14th Amendment should be applied to sex discrimination as well. In 1971, a young lawyer named Ruth Bader Ginsburg successfully argued this point in Reed v. Reed in front of the Supreme Court. Murray was named as a co-author on the brief.

Murray died in 1985, and in the decades since, public awareness of her many contributions has only continued to grow. Murray was sainted by the Episcopal Church in 2012, a residential college at Yale was named in her honor in 2017, and she has become an LGBTQ icon, thanks, in part, to the progressive approach to gender fluidity that she personally expressed throughout her life. Despite all this, as she wrote in the essay “The Liberation of Black Women” in 1970: “If anyone should ask a Negro woman in America what has been her greatest achievement, her honest answer would be, ‘I survived!’”


Mamie Bradley, mother of lynched teenager Emmett Till, crying as she recounts her son’s death, 1955. (Credit: Afro American Newspapers/Gado/Getty Images)

2. Mamie Till Mobley (1921–2003)

Inspirational Mother of a Martyr

Mamie Till Mobley’s story is one of triumph in the face of tragedy. Though she never sought to be an activist, her resolve inspired the civil rights movement and “broke the emotional chains of Jim Crow,” the Rev. Jesse Jackson would remark upon her death.

On August 28, 1955, Mobley’s 14-year-old son, Emmett Till, was brutally murdered in Money, Mississippi, by two white men who claimed that Till had “wolf-whistled” at one of their wives. When Till’s mutilated corpse was found three days later in the Tallahatchie River, Mississippi officials tried to dispose of the body quickly, but Mobley obtained a court order to have her only child’s remains returned to Chicago. Though his casket arrived padlocked and sealed with the state seal of Mississippi, Mobley insisted that her son’s brutalized body be displayed during his funeral. “I want the world to see what they did to my boy,” the grieving mother explained.

“Mrs. Mobley did a profound strategic thing,” Jackson later toldthe New York Times. “More than 100,000 people saw his body lying in that casket…at that time the largest single civil rights demonstration in American history.” Until her death in 2003, at the age of 81, Mobley advocated for underprivileged children and against racial injustice. Although she never got justice for her son (his murderers were acquitted by an all-white male jury), Mobley didn’t let it dampen her spirit. As she told a reporter: “I have not spent one minute hating.”

Bronx resident Claudette Colvin

Bronx resident Claudette Colvin in 2009. (Credit: Julie Jacobson/AP Photo)


3. Claudette Colvin (born 1939)

The Teenager Who Refused to Give Up Her Bus Seat Before Rosa Parks

When Claudette Colvin‘s high school in Montgomery, Alabama, observed Negro History Week in 1955, the 15-year-old had no way of knowing how the stories of black freedom fighters would soon impact her life. “I knew I had to do something,” she later told USA Today. “I just didn’t know where or when.”

Colvin got her chance on March 2, 1955, when she boarded a bus in downtown Montgomery. She and three other black students were told to give up their seats for a white woman. Colvin, emboldened by her history lessons, refused. “My head was just too full of black history,” she stated in an interview with NPR.

“It felt like Sojourner Truth was on one side pushing me down, and Harriet Tubman was on the other side of me pushing me down. I couldn’t get up.”

Colvin was arrested and eventually put on indefinite probation. Though Colvin’s courageous act occurred nine months before Rosa Parks’similar protest, the NAACP chose to use the 42-year-old civil rights activist as the public face of the Montgomery bus boycott, as they believed an unwed mother—Colvin became pregnant when she was 16—would not be the best face for the movement. Colvin felt slighted, but later joined three other women—Mary Louise Smith, Aurelia Browder and Susie McDonald—as the plaintiffs in Browder v. Gayle, the case that ultimately overturned bus segregation in Alabama.

Colvin rarely talked about her heroic actions until the 1990s. “I’d like my grandchildren,” she said, “to be able to see that their grandmother stood up for something, a long time ago.”

Maude Ballou, in 2015, with a photo of herself taken when she served as Martin Luther King, Jr.’s secretary from 1955 to 1960. (Credit: The Washington Post/Getty Images) - The “Daredevil” Who Served as MLK’s Right-Hand Woman

4. Maude Ballou (1925-2019)

In 1955, Maude Ballou—a young mother who had studied business and literature in college and was program director of the first black radio station in Montgomery, Alabama—was approached by her husband’s friend, a young minister and activist named Martin Luther King, Jr., to be the personal secretary.

After agreeing, Ballou became the Rev. Dr. King’s right-hand woman from 1955 until 1960, years of great unrest and transforming events that included the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the publication of King’s first book, Stride Towards Freedom, and the Prayer Pilgrimage for Peace in Washington, D.C.

Her work placed Ballou in enormous danger. In 1957, she was listed as number 21 on the Montgomery Improvement Associations list of “persons and churches most vulnerable to violent attacks.” (King was at the top of the list.) Her children’s lives were threatened, and KKK members watched her at work through the windows of the church. But Ballou just kept on working. “I was a daredevil, I guess,” she toldThe Washington Post in 2015.

“I didn’t have time to worry about what might happen, or what had happened, or what would happen,” said Ballou, who went on to serve as a teacher and college administrator. “We were very busy doing things, knowing that anything could happen, and we just kept going.”

Ballou passed away on August 26, 2019. She was 93 years old.

Diane Nash at the 2011 Search For Common Ground Awards at the Carnegie Institution for Science, 2011. (Credit: Leigh Vogel/Getty Images)

5. Diane Nash (born 1938)

Freedom Rider and Nonviolent Student Activist for Desegregation

A native of Chicago, Diane Nash hadn’t experienced the shock of desegregation within the Jim Crow South until she attended Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. The “Whites Only” signs scattered throughout Nashville inspired Nash to become the chairperson of the Student Nonviolent Coordination Committee (SNCC) in 1960, where she organized sit-ins at segregated lunch counters throughout Nashville. Nash kept the group’s commitment to nonviolence front and center at the sit-ins, which proved very effective in ending the discriminatory practices within the restaurants.

The following year, Nash took over responsibility for the Freedom Rides, a protest against segregated bus terminals that took place on Greyhound buses from Washington D.C. to Virginia. The Freedom Rides, which were initially organized by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), encountered a mob of angry segregationists as they entered Anniston, Alabama, and were brutally beaten and unable to finish the route. SNCC—under the direction of Nash— continued the protest from Birmingham, Alabama, to Jackson, Mississippi.

Before setting off with a group of 10 students from Nashville, Nash received a call from John Seigenthaler, assistant to Attorney General Robert Kennedy Jr., who tried to persuade her to end the Freedom Rides, insisting the bloodshed would only continue if they persisted. Nash, unshaken by the stance of the White House, told Seigenthaler that they knew the risks involved and had already prepared their wills before continuing the Freedom Rides.

Nash later moved back to Chicago and went on to serve as an advocate for fair housing practices. Her contributions to the success of Civil Rights movement have been increasingly recognized in the years since. In 1995, historian David Halberstam described Nash as “bright, focused, utterly fearless, with an unerring instinct for the correct tactical move at each increment of the crisis.”

Coretta Scott King attending a ceremony dedicating an engraved marker in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on the 40th anniversary of the March on Washington. (Credit: Allison Silberberg/Getty Images)


6. Coretta Scott King (1927–2006)

Human Rights Activist, Pacifist, Musician

In 1968, just days after the assassination of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., his wife, Coretta Scott King, took his place at a sanitation workers’ protest in Memphis. A few weeks later, she kicked off his planned Poor People Campaign. She had long been politically active, but her husband’s death galvanized her activism.

King earned a bachelor’s degree in Music and Education from Antioch College, and had met her future husband while studying at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston. In the early years of the civil rights movement, she hosted a series of popular “Freedom Concerts,” raising thousands of dollars for the movement.

After her husband’s assassination, King campaigned tirelessly to make his birthday a national holiday, and raised millions to establish the Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change. An avowed feminist, she was active in the National Organization for Women, and was an early advocate for LBGTQ rights. During the 1980s, she was a vigorous opponent of apartheid.

King understood that she would be remembered as a widow and human rights activist, but, as she once said, she hoped to be thought of a different way:

“as a complex, three-dimensional, flesh-and-blood human being with a rich storehouse of experiences, much like everyone else, yet unique in my own way…much like everyone else.”

John Lewis 'good trouble'

‘Good Trouble’: How John Lewis and Other Civil Rights Crusaders Expected Arrests

John Lewis was arrested 40 times during the civil rights movement.

Activists who practiced civil disobedience in the 1960s knew their opponents wouldn’t show them civility in return. Congressman John Lewis, a leader of the civil rights movement who co-founded the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, was arrested 40 times between 1960 and 1966 for protesting racist laws and practices in the Jim Crow South. During the first attempt to march from Selma to Montgomery for voting rights on March 7, 1965, state troopers and “deputized” white men beat him so badly they fractured his skull.

Lewis, who died on July 17, 2020 at age 80, often spoke of what he called “good trouble.” Getting arrested for trying to march across Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge—which bears the name of a Ku Klux Klan leader—was an example of this. Speaking atop the same bridge 55 years after the events of that day, known as “Bloody Sunday,” he urged listeners to “get in good trouble, necessary trouble, and help redeem the soul of America.”

The Greensboro Lunch Counter Sit-Ins

Lewis’ first arrest was during a lunch counter sit-in in 1960. On February 1 of that year, four Black college students had sat at a “whites-only” lunch counter at a Woolworth’s in Greensboro, North Carolina. As expected, the staff refused to serve them; but the students refused to leave. They remained in their seats and stayed until closing. The next day, they came back with more students to do it again.

The Greensboro sit-ins sparked a wave of similar protests in which students protested lunch counters’ racist policies by publicly violating them. Lewis, Diane Nash and other members of the Nashville Student Movement began organizing sit-ins in their city. On February 27, Lewis sat at a Woolworth’s lunch counter in Nashville where angry white patrons beat him and his fellow protestors and tried to pull them off their seats. When the police arrived, it was the protestors, not the attackers, whom they arrested. This was 20-year-old Lewis’ first arrest.

“I didn't necessarily want to go to jail,” he recalled in a 1973 interview for the Southern Oral History Program.

“But we knew…it would help solidify the student community and the Black community as a whole. The student community did rally. The people heard that we had been arrested and before the end of the day, five hundred students made it into the downtown area to occupy other stores and restaurants. At the end of the day ninety-eight of us were in jail.”

The pressure worked: That spring, lunch counters in Nashville began serving Black customers.

The Freedom Riders

The next year, student activists traveled through the south on public buses to protest the federal government’s refusal to enforce the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1960 ruling in Boynton v. Virginia that segregated public transportation was unconstitutional. Lewis was one of the original 13 Freedom Riders who started off on May 4, 1961 in Washington, D.C. Many more joined the trip or started their own Freedom Rides that summer. One of those who joined was Lewis’ fellow Nashville activist Reverend C.T. Vivian, who died at age 95 on July 17, 2020, the same day as Lewis.

The first violent attack on the Freedom Riders came only five days into their journey, when Lewis attempted to enter the “white” waiting room in the Greyhound terminal in Rock Hill, South Carolina. A group of angry white men beat up Lewis and two other Freedom Riders. On May 14, a white mob in Anniston, Alabama set fire to a bus carrying nine Freedom Riders and then beat up the passengers.

White mobs continued to attack Freedom Riders in Birmingham, where the city’s police commissioner arrested Lewis and his fellow riders. Afterward, the commissioner drove them to a remote area near the Tennessee border known for Klan terrrorism and left them there. In Jackson, Mississippi, police officers arrested Lewis, Vivian and other Freedom Riders, sending them to Parchman Farm. At the infamously brutal state penitentiary, guards beat them and forced them to work on the penitentiary’s massive farm without pay.

Once again, the arrests drew national attention—as activists hoped they would—putting pressure on officials to act. That fall, the Interstate Commerce Commission finally enforcedBoynton v. Virginia by demanding that interstate bus services integrate their bus seating and terminals.

The Legacy of ‘Good Trouble’

After the Freedom Rides, Lewis continued to play a key role in the civil rights movement. In June 1963 he became the chairman of SNCC. The next month, he was the youngest speaker at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

“We are tired of being beaten by policemen,” he told the crowd from the Lincoln Memorial.

“We are tired of seeing our people locked up in jail over and over again. And then you holler, ‘Be patient.’ How long can we be patient? We want our freedom and we want it now. We do not want to go to jail. But we will go to jail if this is the price we must pay for love, brotherhood, and true peace.”

For the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, Lewis “live-tweeted” the day as he’d experienced it. “I was hit in the head by a state trooper with a nightstick. My legs went out from under me,”he wrote. “I thought I saw death. I thought I was going to die.” TV stations broadcast the violent footage around the country in 1965, pressuring the government to act by passing the Voting Rights Act later that year.

In 1987, Lewis became a U.S. Congressman, representing Georgia’s 5th District in the U.S. House of Representatives. He held the position until his death in 2020. Yet even as a Congressman, he continued to get into what he called “good trouble.” His last arrest was on October 8, 2013. Posting a picture of it online, he tweeted: “Arrest number 45, protesting in support of comprehensive immigration reform.”

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Please Sign Our Letter to the Guardian - Why Did The Guardian Fail to Cover the Extradition Proceedings of Julian Assange in September?

October 6, 2020, 5:13 pm
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What Explains the Hostility of Guardian Columnists to Assange and the Silence of Owen Jones & George Monbiot?

Please Sign Our Letter to the Guardian




The Guardian’s behaviour over Julian Assange has been despicable. It took the Wikileaks revelations and turned them into a series of front page headlines and a lucrative book by David Leigh and Luke Harding.  In return the Guardian and its prostitute ‘journalists’ (really flatterers at the Court of the Establishment) have stabbed him in the back.

There are of course a few journalists who have come out of this with flying colours.  First and foremost is John Pilger.  There have also been those two dissident Tory journalists –  Peter Oborne and Peter Hitchens who have revealed that there is still some integrity left in the British media.

Perhaps the most despicable of all are the two ex-Communist Party ‘journalists’ David Aaronovitch and Suzanne Moore. Moore posted an infamous tweet calling Assange a ‘flattened guinea pig’ (presumably she had sat on it first!) and followed up by calling him a ‘massive turd’ which is the kind of comment you might expect from journalists who have been awarded the Orwellian prize.

Of course when the United States and Sweden decided to frame the original extradition charges  in terms of a false allegation of rape, they knew that right-wing identity politics feminists, such as Jess Phillips, would jump on board.

Add caption

What is noticeable, as Jonathan Cook, whose excellent article I post below observes, the ‘radical’ journalists on the Guardian – Owen Jones, George Monbiot – have failed to say anything apart from an article over a year ago by Jones. Monbiot believes he has nothing to say on Assange though he has, as Jonathan Cook reminds us, said far too much about other non-environmental obsessions. Tackling the state is not their thing, especially when it might offend the Guardian's Editor Kath Viner.

See George Monbiot’s excuses for not speaking out loudly in defence of Assange simply won’t wash

I have drafted a letter to the Guardian which I’d ask you to sign. The Guardian Letters Editor, Rory Foster, has stipulated that mobile phone numbers must be provided so I have included a field for that. I can promise that the information will be kept strictly confidential.

However it is highly unlikely that the Guardian will print the letter.  In the past two years the insidious censorship and anti-Corbyn bias spread into the letters page with the retirement of the previous editor Nigel Wilmott.  Foster is nothing if not the obedient servant of Kath Viner, the Guardian’s overpaid editor. So it will be very likely to end up as an Open Letter. However it is right to give the Guardian the right of first refusal!!

As Rebecca Vincent of Reporters Without Borders declared:

I am not exaggerating when I say I have felt more welcome, respected, and able to do my job as an NGO observer in more professional conditions at a prison campus in Turkey than I have at Woolwich Crown Court or the Old Bailey Court in London. I am embarrassed for my country.

(see Journalism on trial: an eyewitness account of Julian Assange’s extradition hearing on Canary).

My letter is here. The links in it do not come out on Google Docs.  Also it is the first time I have tried doing a petition on Google Docs so I’m prepared for it to go belly up.  So if you send me your information ALSO please send it to tonygreenstein104@gmail.com then that will ensure a back up just in case.

Also see Nafeez Ahmed’s ‘Palestineis not an environment story’. Although it is 6 years old it is as relevant now as it was then. It is a story of how the Guardia peremptorily sacked a blogger taken on for environmental stories when he dared to cover Israel’s plunder of Gaza’s gas sources.

It is a telling reminder, if you needed one, that you should BOYCOTT THE GUARDIAN

Dear Sir/Madam,

The Guardian should hang its head in shame. During the month of September Julian Assange faced extradition proceedings in a British court. Although your readers wouldn’t know it from your coverage, prosecution lawyer James Lewis QC now accepts that any journalist publishing ‘state secrets’ can face charges under the United States Espionage Act.

The ‘crimes’ that Assange is accused of committing include revealing war crimes such as the air raid which killed 12 Iraqis, including 2 Reuters journalists, that was falsely portrayed as a firefight.

The Guardian benefited enormously from Wikileaks with front page headlines and a book, 'WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy' by David Leigh and Luke Harding. In the words of John Pilger ‘the Guardian creamed off WikiLeaks' revelations and claimed the accolades and riches that came with them’. 

The Five Filters website has compiled a list of dozens of Guardian articles that illustrate its overwhelming hostility towards Assange. These attacks were often personal and couched in the most puerile terms.

Particularly invidious was James Ball, who confidently declared that ‘The only barrier to Julian Assange leaving Ecuador’s embassy is pride’. Ball assured his readers that ‘The WikiLeaks founder is unlikely to face prosecution in the US.’

Far more damaging was Luke Harding and Dan Collyn's article alleging that Paul Manafort, Trump’s ex-campaign manager, held secret talks with Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy. This article is widely accepted to be false, a product of disinformation. It has been comprehensively discredited e.g. by The Intercept yet the Guardian refuses to retract it and apologise.

Given the massive implications for press freedom in prosecuting a journalist for espionage, which is usually understood as spying on behalf of a foreign power, we would expect the Guardian to not only have covered the trial proceedings but to be campaigning vigorously at this threat to investigative journalism.

Instead, with the sole exception of a guest article by Brazil's Lula de Silva, the Guardian has remained virtually silent, apart from publishing a snide and churlish article by Hadley Freeman. Instead it is left to dissident Tory journalists like Peter Oborne and Peter Hitchens and journalists with integrity such as John Pilger, to take up the cudgels on behalf of Assange.

In the light of the Guardian’s previous battles for press freedom, your present lack of coverage of the Assange is shameful.

Yours faithfully,


The US is using the Guardian to justify jailing Assange for life. Why is the paper so silent?

Jonathan Cook

22 September 2020

Julian Assange is not on trial simply for his liberty and his life. He is fighting for the right of every journalist to do hard-hitting investigative journalism without fear of arrest and extradition to the United States. Assange faces 175 years in a US super-max prison on the basis of claims by Donald Trump’s administration that his exposure of US war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan amounts to “espionage”.

The charges against Assange rewrite the meaning of “espionage” in unmistakably dangerous ways. Publishing evidence of state crimes, as Assange’s Wikileaks organisation has done, is covered by both free speech and public interest defences. Publishing evidence furnished by whistleblowers is at the heart of any journalism that aspires to hold power to account and in check. Whistleblowers typically emerge in reaction to parts of the executive turning rogue, when the state itself starts breaking its own laws. That is why journalism is protected in the US by the First Amendment. Jettison that and one can no longer claim to live in a free society.

Aware that journalists might understand this threat and rally in solidarity with Assange, US officials initially pretended that they were not seeking to prosecute the Wikileaks founder for journalism – in fact, they denied he was a journalist. That was why they preferred to charge him under the arcane, highly repressive Espionage Act of 1917. The goal was to isolate Assange and persuade other journalists that they would not share his fate.

Assange explained this US strategy way back in 2011, in a fascinating interview he gave to Australian journalist Mark Davis. (The relevant section occurs from minute 24 to 43.) This was when the Obama administration first began seeking a way to distinguish Assange from liberal media organisations, such as the New York Times and Guardian that had been working with him, so that only he would be charged with espionage.

Assange

Assange warned then that the New York Times and its editor Bill Keller had already set a terrible precedent on legitimising the administration’s redefinition of espionage by assuring the Justice Department – falsely, as it happens – that they had been simply passive recipients of Wikileaks’ documents. Assange noted (40.00 mins):

If I am a conspirator to commit espionage, then all these other media organisations and the principal journalists in them are also conspirators to commit espionage. What needs to be done is to have a united face in this.         

During the course of the current extradition hearings, US officials have found it much harder to make plausible this distinction principle than they may have assumed.

Journalism is an activity, and anyone who regularly engages in that activity qualifies as a journalist. It is not the same as being a doctor or a lawyer, where you need a specific professional qualification to practice. You are a journalist if you do journalism – and you are an investigative journalist if, like Assange, you publish information the powerful want concealed. Which is why in the current extradition hearings at the Old Bailey in London, the arguments made by lawyers for the US that Assange is not a journalist but rather someone engaged in espionage are coming unstuck.

My dictionary defines “espionage” as “the practice of spying or of using spies, typically by governments to obtain political and military information”. A spy is defined as someone who “secretly obtains information on an enemy or competitor”.

Very obviously the work of Wikileaks, a transparency organisation, is not secret. By publishing the Afghan and Iraq war diaries, Wikileaks exposed crimes the United States wished to keep secret.

Assange did not help a rival state to gain an advantage, he helped all of us become better informed about the crimes our own states commit in our names. He is on trial not because he traded in secrets, but because he blew up the business of secrets – the very kind of secrets that have enabled the west to pursue permanent, resource-grabbing wars and are pushing our species to the verge of extinction.

In other words, Assange was doing exactly what journalists claim to do every day in a democracy: monitor power for the public good. Which is why ultimately the Obama administration abandoned the idea of issuing an indictment against Assange. There was simply no way to charge him without also putting journalists at the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Guardian on trial too. And doing that would have made explicit that the press is not free but works on licence from those in power.

Media indifference

For that reason alone, one might have imagined that the entire media – from rightwing to liberal-left outlets – would be up in arms about Assange’s current predicament. After all, the practice of journalism as we have known it for at least 100 years is at stake.

But in fact, as Assange feared nine years ago, the media have chosen not to adopt a “united face” – or at least, not a united face with Wikileaks. They have remained all but silent. They have ignored – apart from occasionally to ridicule – Assange’s terrifying ordeal, even though he has been locked up for many months in Belmarsh high-security prison awaiting efforts to extradite him as a spy. Assange’s very visible and prolonged physical and mental abuse – both in Belmarsh and, before that, in the Ecuadorian embassy, where he was given political asylum – have already served part of their purpose: to deter young journalists from contemplating following in his footsteps.

Jane Parkinson

Even more astounding is the fact that the media have taken no more than a cursory interest in the events of the extradition hearing itself. What reporting there has been has given no sense of the gravity of the proceedings or the threat they pose to the public’s right to know what crimes are being committed in their name. Instead, serious, detailed coverage has been restricted to a handful of independent outlets and bloggers.

Most troubling of all, the media have not reported the fact that during the hearing lawyers for the US have abandoned the implausible premise of their main argument that Assange’s work did not constitute journalism. Now they appear to accept that Assange did indeed do journalism, and that other journalists could suffer his fate. What was once implicit has become explicit, as Assange warned: any journalist who exposes serious state crimes now risks the threat of being locked away for the rest of their lives under the draconian Espionage Act.



This glaring indifference to the case and its outcome is extremely revealing about what we usually refer to as the “mainstream” media. In truth, there is nothing mainstream or popular about this kind of media. It is in reality a media elite, a corporate media, owned by and answerable to billionaire owners – or in the case of the BBC, ultimately to the state – whose interests it really serves.

The corporate media’s indifference to Assange’s trial hints at the fact that it is actually doing very little of the sort of journalism that threatens corporate and state interests and that challenges real power. It won’t suffer Assange’s fate because, as we shall see, it doesn’t attempt to do the kind of journalism Assange and his Wikileaks organisation specialise in.

The indifference suggests rather starkly that the primary role of the corporate media – aside from its roles in selling us advertising and keeping us pacified through entertainment and consumerism – is to serve as an arena in which rival centres of power within the establishment fight for their narrow interests, settling scores with each other, reinforcing narratives that benefit them, and spreading disinformation against their competitors. On this battlefield, the public are mostly spectators, with our interests only marginally affected by the outcome.



 Gauntlet thrown down

The corporate media in the US and UK is no more diverse and pluralistic than the major corporate-funded political parties they identify with. This kind of media mirrors the same flaws as the Republican and Democratic parties in the US: they cheerlead consumption-based, globalised capitalism; they favour a policy of unsustainable, infinite growth on a finite planet; and they invariably support colonial, profit-driven, resource-grabbing wars, nowadays often dressed up as humanitarian intervention. The corporate media and the corporate political parties serve the interests of the same power establishment because they are equally embedded in that establishment.

(In this context, it was revealing that when Assange’s lawyers argued earlier this year that he could not be extradited to the US because extradition for political work is barred under its treaty with the UK, the US insisted that Assange be denied this defence. They argued that “political” referred narrowly to “party political” – that is, politics that served the interests of a recognised party.)

From the outset, the work of Assange and Wikileaks threatened to disrupt the cosy relationship between the media elite and the political elite. Assange threw down a gauntlet to journalists, especially those in the liberal parts of the media, who present themselves as fearless muckrakers and watchdogs on power.

Unlike the corporate media, Wikileaks doesn’t depend on access to those in power for its revelations, or on the subsidies of billionaires, or on income from corporate advertisers. Wikileaks receives secret documents direct from whistleblowers, giving the public an unvarnished, unmediated perspective on what the powerful are doing – and what they want us to think they are doing.

Wikileaks has allowed us to see raw, naked power before it puts on a suit and tie, slicks back its hair and conceals the knife.

But as much as this has been an empowering development for the general public, it is at best a very mixed blessing for the corporate media. 

Today’s column is a salute to Julian Assange, selflessly raising the bar on nightmare houseguest stories https://t.co/bgqeEakGBj

— Hadley Freeman (@HadleyFreeman) April 20, 2019

In early 2010, the fledgling Wikileaks organisation received its first tranche of documents from US army whistleblower Chelsea Manning: hundreds of thousands of classified files exposing US crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. Assange and “liberal” elements of the corporate media were briefly and uncomfortably thrown into each others’ arms.

On the one hand, Assange needed the manpower and expertise provided by big-hitting newspapers like the New York Times, the Guardian and Der Spiegel to help Wikileaks sift through vast trove to find important, hidden disclosures. He also needed the mass audiences those papers could secure for the revelations, as well as those outlets’ ability to set the news agenda in other media.

Liberal media, on the other hand, needed to court Assange and Wikileaks to avoid being left behind in the media war for big, Pulitzer Prize-winning stories, for audience share and for revenues. Each worried that, were it not to do a deal with Wikileaks, a rival would publish those world-shattering exclusives instead and erode its market share.

Gatekeeper role under threat

For a brief while, this mutual dependency just about worked. But only for a short time. In truth, the liberal corporate media is far from committed to a model of unmediated, whole-truth journalism. The Wikileaks model undermined the corporate media’s relationship to the power establishment and threatened its access. It introduced a tension and division between the functions of the political elite and the media elite.

Those intimate and self-serving ties are illustrated in the most famous example of corporate media working with a “whistleblower”: the use of a source, known as Deep Throat, who exposed the crimes of President Richard Nixon to Washington Post reporters Woodward and Bernstein back in the early 1970s, in what became known as Watergate. That source, it emerged much later, was actually the associate director of the FBI, Mark Felt.



Far from being driven to bring down Nixon out of principle, Felt wished to settle a score with the administration after he was passed over for promotion. Later, and quite separately, Felt was convicted of authorising his own Watergate-style crimes on behalf of the FBI. In the period before it was known that Felt had been Deep Throat, President Ronald Reagan pardoned him for those crimes. It is perhaps not surprising that this less than glorious context is never mentioned in the self-congratulatory coverage of Watergate by the corporate media.

But worse than the potential rupture between the media elite and the political elite, the Wikileaks model implied an imminent redundancy for the corporate media. In publishing Wikileaks’ revelations, the corporate media feared it was being reduced to the role of a platform – one that could be discarded later – for the publication of truths sourced elsewhere.

The undeclared role of the corporate media, dependent on corporate owners and corporate advertising, is to serve as gatekeeper, deciding which truths should be revealed in the “public interest”, and which whistleblowers will be allowed to disseminate which secrets in their possession. The Wikileaks model threatened to expose that gatekeeping role, and make clearer that the criterion used by corporate media for publication was less “public interest” than “corporate interest”.

In other words, from the start the relationship between Assange and “liberal” elements of the corporate media was fraught with instability and antagonism.

The corporate media had two possible responses to the promised Wikileaks revolution.

One was to get behind it. But that was not straightforward. As we have noted, Wikileaks’ goal of transparency was fundamentally at odds both with the corporate media’s need for access to members of the power elite and with its embedded role, representing one side in the “competition” between rival power centres.

I bet Assange is stuffing himself full of flattened guinea pigs. He really is the most massive turd.

— suzanne moore (@suzanne_moore) June 19, 2012

The corporate media’s other possible response was to get behind the political elite’s efforts to destroy Wikileaks. Once Wikileaks and Assange were disabled, there could be a return to media business as usual. Outlets would once again chase tidbits of information from the corridors of power, getting “exclusives” from the power centres they were allied with.

Put in simple terms, Fox News would continue to get self-serving exclusives against the Democratic party, and MSNBC would get self-serving exclusives against Trump and the Republican Party. That way, everyone would get a slice of editorial action and advertising revenue – and nothing significant would change. The power elite in its two flavours, Democrat and Republican, would continue to run the show unchallenged, switching chairs occasionally as elections required.

From dependency to hostility

Typifying the media’s fraught, early relationship with Assange and Wikileaks – sliding rapidly from initial dependency to outright hostility – was the Guardian. It was a major beneficiary of the Afghan and Iraq war diaries, but very quickly turned its guns on Assange. (Notably, the Guardian would also lead the attack in the UK on the former leader of the Labour party, Jeremy Corbyn, who was seen as threatening a “populist” political insurgency in parallel to Assange’s “populist” media insurgency.)



Despite being widely viewed as a bastion of liberal-left journalism, the Guardian has been actively complicit in rationalising Assange’s confinement and abuse over the past decade and in trivialising the threat posed to him and the future of real journalism by Washington’s long-term efforts to permanently lock him away.

There is not enough space on this page to highlight all the appalling examples of the Guardian’s ridiculing of Assange (a few illustrative tweets scattered through this post will have to suffice) and disparaging of renowned experts in international law who have tried to focus attention on his arbitrary detention and torture. But the compilation of headlines in the tweet below conveys an impression of the antipathy the Guardian has long harboured for Assange, most of it – such as James Ball’s article– now exposed as journalistic malpractice.



 The Guardian’s failings have extended too to the current extradition hearings, which have stripped away years of media noise and character assassination to make plain why Assange has been deprived of his liberty for the past 10 years: because the US wants revenge on him for publishing evidence of its crimes and seeks to deter others from following in his footsteps.

In its pages, the Guardian has barely bothered to cover the case, running superficial, repackaged agency copy. This week it belatedly ran a solitary opinion piece from Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Brazil’s former leftwing president, to mark the fact that many dozens of former world leaders have called on the UK to halt the extradition proceedings. They appear to appreciate the gravity of the case much more clearly than the Guardian and most other corporate media outlets.



 But among the Guardian’s own columnists, even its supposedly leftwing ones like Gorge Monbiot and Owen Jones, there has been blanket silence about the hearings. In familiar style, the only in-house commentary on the case so far is yet another snide hit-piece– this one in the fashion section written by Hadley Freeman. It simply ignores the terrifying developments for journalism taking place at the Old Bailey, close by the Guardian’s offices. Instead Freeman mocks the credible fears of Assange’s partner, Stella Moris, that, if Assange is extradited, his two young children may not be allowed contact with their father again.

Freeman’s goal, as has been typical of the Guardian’s modus operandi, is not to raise an issue of substance about what is happening to Assange but to score hollow points in a distracting culture war the paper has become so well-versed in monetising. In her piece, entitled “Ask Hadley: ‘Politicising’ and ‘weaponising’ are becoming rather convenient arguments”, Freeman exploits Assange and Moris’s suffering to advance her own convenient argument that the word “politicised” is much misused – especially, it seems, when criticising the Guardian for its treatment of Assange and Corbyn.

The paper could not make it any plainer. It dismisses the idea that it is a “political” act for the most militarised state on the planet to put on trial a journalist for publishing evidence of its systematic war crimes, with the aim of locking him up permanently.



 Password divulged

The Guardian may be largely ignoring the hearings, but the Old Bailey is far from ignoring the Guardian. The paper’s name has been cited over and over again in court by lawyers for the US. They have regularly quoted from a 2011 book on Assange by two Guardian reporters, David Leigh and Luke Harding, to bolster the Trump administration’s increasingly frantic arguments for extraditing Assange.

When Leigh worked with Assange, back in 2010, he was the Guardian’s investigations editor and, it should be noted, the brother-in-law of the then-editor, Alan Rusbridger. Harding, meanwhile, is a long-time reporter whose main talent appears to be churning out Guardian books at high speed that closely track the main concerns of the UK and US security services. In the interests of full disclosure, I should note that I had underwhelming experiences dealing with both of them during my years working at the Guardian.

Normally a newspaper would not hesitate to put on its front page reports of the most momentous trial of recent times, and especially one on which the future of journalism depends. That imperative would be all the stronger were its own reporters’ testimony likely to be critical in determining the outcome of the trial. For the Guardian, detailed and prominent reporting of, and commentary on, the Assange extradition hearings should be a double priority.

So how to explain the Guardian’s silence?

The book by Leigh and Harding, WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy, made a lot of money for the Guardian and its authors by hurriedly cashing in on the early notoriety around Assange and Wikileaks. But the problem today is that the Guardian has precisely no interest in drawing attention to the book outside the confines of a repressive courtroom. Indeed, were the book to be subjected to any serious scrutiny, it might now look like an embarrassing, journalistic fraud.

The two authors used the book not only to vent their personal animosity towards Assange – in part because he refused to let them write his official biography – but also to divulge a complex password entrusted to Leigh by Assange that provided access to an online cache of encrypted documents. That egregious mistake by the Guardian opened the door for every security service in the world to break into the file, as well as other files once they could crack Assange’s sophisticated formula for devising passwords.

Much of the furore about Assange’s supposed failure to protect names in the leaked documents published by Assange – now at the heart of the extradition case – stems from Leigh’s much-obscured role in sabotaging Wikileaks’ work. Assange was forced into a damage limitation operation because of Leigh’s incompetence, forcing him to hurriedly publish files so that anyone worried they had been named in the documents could know before hostile security services identified them.



This week at the Assange hearings, Professor Christian Grothoff, a computer expert at Bern University, noted that Leigh had recounted in his 2011 book how he pressured a reluctant Assange into giving him the password. In his testimony, Grothoff referred to Leigh as a “bad faith actor”.

‘Not a reliable source’

Nearly a decade ago Leigh and Harding could not have imagined what would be at stake all these years later – for Assange and for other journalists – because of an accusation in their book that the Wikileaks founder recklessly failed to redact names before publishing the Afghan and Iraq war diaries.

The basis of the accusation rests on Leigh’s highly contentious recollection of a discussion with three other journalists and Assange at a restaurant near the Guardian’s former offices in July 2010, shortly before publication of the Afghan revelations.

According to Leigh, during a conversation about the risks of publication to those who had worked with the US, Assange said: “They’re informants, they deserve to die.” Lawyers for the US have repeatedly cited this line as proof that Assange was indifferent to the fate of those identified in the documents and so did not expend care in redacting names. (Let us note, as an aside, that the US has failed to show that anyone was actually put in harm’s way from publication, and in the Manning trial a US official admitted that no one had been harmed.)

The problem is that Leigh’s recollection of the dinner has not been confirmed by anyone else, and is hotly disputed by another participant, John Goetz of Der Spiegel. He has sworn an affidavit saying Leigh is wrong. He gave testimony at the Old Bailey for the defence last week. Extraordinarily the judge, Vanessa Baraitser, refused to allow him to contest Leigh’s claim, even though lawyers for the US have repeatedly cited that claim.



Further, Goetz, as well as Nicky Hager, an investigative journalist from New Zealand, and Professor John Sloboda, of Iraq Body Count, all of whom worked with Wikileaks to redact names at different times, have testified that Assange was meticulous about the redaction process. Goetz admitted that he had been personally exasperated by the delays imposed by Assange to carry out redactions:

At that time, I remember being very, very irritated by the constant, unending reminders by Assange that we needed to be secure, that we needed to encrypt things, that we needed to use encrypted chats. … The amount of precautions around the safety of the material were enormous. I thought it was paranoid and crazy but it later became standard journalistic practice.

Prof Sloboda noted that, as Goetz had implied in his testimony, the pressure to cut corners on redaction came not from Assange but from Wikileaks’ “media partners”, who were desperate to get on with publication. One of the most prominent of those partners, of course, was the Guardian. According to the account of proceedings at the Old Bailey by former UK ambassador Craig Murray:

Goetz [of Der Spiegel] recalled an email from David Leigh of The Guardian stating that publication of some stories was delayed because of the amount of time WikiLeaks were devoting to the redaction process to get rid of the “bad stuff.”

When confronted by US counsel with Leigh’s claim in the book about the restaurant conversation, Hager observed witheringly: “I would not regard that [Leigh and Harding’s book] as a reliable source.” Under oath, he ascribed Leigh’s account of the events of that time to “animosity”.

Scoop exposed as fabrication

Harding is hardly a dispassionate observer either. His most recent “scoop” on Assange, published in the Guardian two years ago, has been exposed as an entirely fabricated smear. It claimed that Assange secretly met a Trump aide, Paul Manafort, and unnamed “Russians” while he was confined to the Ecuadorian embassy in 2016.

 Manafort

Harding’s transparent aim in making this false claim was to revive a so-called “Russiagate” smear suggesting that, in the run-up to the 2016 US presidential election, Assange conspired with the Trump camp and Russian president Vladimir Putin to help get Trump elected. These allegations proved pivotal in alienating Democrats who might otherwise have rallied to Assange’s side, and have helped forge bipartisan support for Trump’s current efforts to extradite Assange and jail him.

The now forgotten context for these claims was Wikileaks’ publication shortly before the election of a stash of internal Democratic party emails. They exposed corruption, including efforts by Democratic officials to sabotage the party’s primaries to undermine Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton’s rival for the party’s presidential nomination.

Those closest to the release of the emails have maintained that they were leaked by a Democratic party insider. But the Democratic leadership had a pressing need to deflect attention from what the emails revealed. Instead they actively sought to warm up a Cold War-style narrative that the emails had been hacked by Russia to foil the US democratic process and get Trump into power.

No evidence was ever produced for this allegation. Harding, however, was one of the leading proponents of the Russiagate narrative, producing another of his famously fast turnaround books on the subject, Collusion. The complete absence of any supporting evidence for Harding’s claims was exposed in dramatic fashion when he was questioned by journalist Aaron Mate.


 

Harding’s 2018 story about Manafort was meant to add another layer of confusing mischief to an already tawdry smear campaign. But problematically for Harding, the Ecuadorian embassy at the time of Manafort’s supposed visit was probably the most heavily surveilled building in London. The CIA, as we would later learn, had even illegally installed cameras inside Assange’s quarters to spy on him. There was no way that Manafort and various “Russians” could have visited Assange without leaving a trail of video evidence. And yet none exists. Rather than retract the story, the Guardian has gone to ground, simply refusing to engage with critics.

Most likely, either Harding or a source were fed the story by a security service in a further bid to damage Assange. Harding made not even the most cursory checks to ensure that his “exclusive” was true.

Unwilling to speak in court

Despite both Leigh and Harding’s dismal track record in their dealings with Assange, one might imagine that at this critical point – as Assange faces extradition and jail for doing journalism – the pair would want to have their voices heard directly in court rather than allow lawyers to speak for them or allow other journalists to suggest unchallenged that they are “unreliable” or “bad faith” actors.

Leigh could testify at the Old Bailey that he stands by his claims that Assange was indifferent to the dangers posed to informants; or he could concede that his recollection of events may have been mistaken; or clarify that, whatever Assange said at the infamous dinner, he did in fact work scrupulously to redact names – as other witnesses have testified.

Given the grave stakes, for Assange and for journalism, that would be the only honourable thing for Leigh to do: to give his testimony and submit to cross-examination. Instead he shelters behind the US counsel’s interpretation of his words and Judge Baraitser’s refusal to allow anyone else to challenge it, as though Leigh brought his claim down from the mountain top.

The Guardian too, given it central role in the Assange saga, might have been expected to insist on appearing in court, or at the very least to be publishing editorials furiously defending Assange from the concerted legal assault on his rights and journalism’s future. The Guardian’s “star” leftwing columnists, figures like George Monbiot and Owen Jones, might similarly be expected to be rallying readers’ concerns, both in the paper’s pages and on their own social media accounts. Instead they have barely raised their voices above a whisper, as though fearful for their jobs.

These failings are not about the behaviour of any single journalist. They reflect a culture at the Guardian, and by extension in the wider corporate media, that abhors the kind of journalism Assange promoted: a journalism that is open, genuinely truth-seeking, non-aligned and collaborative rather than competitive. The Guardian wants journalism as a closed club, one where journalists are once again treated as high priests by their flock of readers, who know only what the corporate media is willing to disclose to them.

Assange understood the problem back in 2011, as he explained in his interview with Mark Davis (38.00mins):

There is a point I want to make about perceived moral institutions, such as the Guardian and New York Times. The Guardian has good people in it. It also has a coterie of people at the top who have other interests. … What drives a paper like the Guardian or New York Times is not their inner moral values. It is simply that they have a market. In the UK, there is a market called “educated liberals”. Educated liberals want to buy a newspaper like the Guardian and therefore an institution arises to fulfil that market. … What is in the newspaper is not a reflection of the values of the people in that institution, it is a reflection of the market demand.

That market demand, in turn, is shaped not by moral values but by economic forces – forces that need a media elite, just as they do a political elite, to shore up an ideological worldview that keeps those elites in power. Assange threatened to bring that whole edifice crashing down. That is why the institutions of the Guardian and the New York Times will shed no more tears than Donald Trump and Joe Biden if Assange ends up spending the rest of his life behind bars.

See also

George Monbiot’s excuses for not speaking out loudly in defence of Assange simply won’t wash

 

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If SOAS Cares For Its Reputation It Should Send Racist Professor Hezser, Head of the Jewish Studies Centre, on an Unpaid Vacation to learn what Zionism means for the Palestinians

October 12, 2020, 8:34 pm
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According to Hezser’s articlein the Jewish Chronicle she is bewildered where the ‘erroneous and simplistic equation’ between Zionism & Colonialism comes from

According to the Head of SOAS’s Jewish Studies Centre, Junk Professor Hezser, Israel’s military rule and occupation of the West Bank is merely a ‘continuation of a forcefully interrupted 3,000-year old Jewish history in the Middle East.’

Let us leave aside the fact, as Tel Aviv University Professor Shlomo Sand has shown in The Myth of the Jewish Nation that there never was a Jewish exile from Palestine. The idea that rights deriving from where one’s ancestors lived 3,000 years ago trumping those who live there today is a product of Western Colonialism and Orientalism. The same myths of a 1,000 year Reich justified Hitler’s colonisation of  Eastern Europe and the expulsion of its inhabitants.

Catherine Hezser's racist article in the Jewish Chronicle - she purports to be surprised that students see Israel as a product of European colonialism

But in reality not even this is true. Jews from Europe and America had no physical connection whatsoever with Palestine or Israel.  Their only claim is that they profess a religion whose centre is Jerusalem. That does not confer any material rights over those living there.

The Jews who left Judea and Palestine over 2,000 years ago did so because the land would not support them. Palestine saw many peoples, among whom were the Hebrews, wander over the area. The idea that this gives people who are Jewish and living in London the right to displace the indigenous population is a fascist idea.  SOAS should not be in the business of propagating racial myths.

2,000 years ago a million Jews were living in Alexandria alone as well as other Hellenised cities such as Antioch and Seleucia. According to Jewish historian Salo Baron there was an explosion of Jews in the Middle East at the time owing to massive proselytising. He suggests there were 8 million Jews living in the Middle East. Sand suggests half that number. The Jews, like the Phoenicians before them, became a trading people.

David Feldman, based at Birkbeck College next door to SOAS, is Director of the Pears Institute for the Study of Antisemitism

The pastoralist Jews who remained in Palestine after the destruction of the second temple either converted to Christianity or remained speaking Aramaic. With the Arab invasion they largely converted to Islam whilst continuing to speak Aramaic, a biblical form of Hebrew.

The irony, as Israel’s first Prime Minister David Ben Gurion and its second President Yitzhak ben Zvi accepted, is that the Palestinians, not the Jewish settlers, are the descendants of the ancient Hebrews. [see e.g. Dov Ivri’s Most Palestinians Are Descendants Of Jews]. Ben Gurion even sent Moshe Dayan with a rabbi to convert the Bedouin!

Smiling on an occupation that imprisons and tortures children, keeps Palestinians short of water and steals their land - all in the name of 3,000 years of 'Jewish history'

In Jewish-Roots Arabs in Israel in the far-Right settler news agency Arutz Sheva, Tzvi MiSinai claimed that ‘Up to 85 percent of Arabs in greater Israel stem from Jewish ancestors, it is estimated’. The article describes how

‘One Arab says his father told him the secret of his family’s Jewishness on his deathbed, while another one, on the backdrop of a photo of the saintly Cabalistic sage Rabbi Abuchatzeira on his wall, says their roots have been known in his family for generations. Wrapping what apparently used to be kosher tefillin on his arm, he says, “My father used to do this, and he taught us to do it whenever someone was sick or in trouble.”

The myth of a Jewish ‘exile’ from Palestine and the idea of their ‘return’ is a Christian racial myth born of colonialism’s desire to establish a friendly settler state adjacent to the Suez Canal. That is why the first western Zionists were Evangelical Christians like Lord Palmerstone and Shaftesbury and also why the vast majority of western Jews were hostile to Zionism when it began.  Because if Jews belonged in Palestine they didn’t belong in England.

SOAS - founded to train colonial administrators has never shaken off racists such as Catherine Hezser

Yet according to Hezser, the right of Brooklyn bible basher to ‘return’ and steal the land is superior to that of indigenous Palestinians who have lived in Palestine for hundreds of years. The ‘right of return’ of Jews who’ve never  lived or even been to Israel trumps that of the indigenous population according to Hezser.

SOAS’s Jewish Studies Centre is nothing of the sort.  It is an Israeli propaganda institute. It is clear looking at its luminaries that there is no place for the third of Anglo-Jewry who don’t call themselves Zionists. It is equally clear that Hezser is unconcerned about the rich tapestry of Jewish life in the Diaspora. Racial myths of Jewish kingdoms only trump the rights of those who are suffering under Israeli apartheid in the minds of racist academics like Catherine Hezser.

SOAS was founded in 1916, a year before the Balfour Declaration, to train a generation of colonial administrators in the skills necessary to administer the British Empire.  Although it is now known as one of Britain’s more radical universities there are still some who look longingly at its former role.

I have written before about the Zionist attempt to control the narrative in higher education institutions.  At Sussex University a Propaganda Chair in Israel Studies was set up in 2012, named after Yossi Harel. It was funded by George Weidenfeld, the right-wing Zionist publisher who admitted that his motive was the fight against anti-Zionism and ‘antisemitism.’ As Electronic Intifada asked at the time

What is the real agenda behind the teaching of Israel studies in Western universities? While its leading advocates profess a commitment to “rigorous academic scholarship,” the subject cannot be considered politically neutral. The idea for these studies was conceived because of a perception among Israel’s supporters that some US-based professors were too sympathetic towards Palestinians.

In Nazi Germany there were Chairs in Racial Anthropology, a wholly bogus science. Today there are departments in Israel Studies, often masquerading as Jewish Studies, whose purpose is entirely political.

Whilst Catherine Hezser works in a Jewish not Israel Studies Department the suspicion must be that this department is flying under false colours. It clearly treats being Jewish as synonymous with being a Zionist which is itself a form of anti-Semitism. What is obvious is that Hezser doesn’t understand the difference. She is unsuited to running a car boot sale let alone an academic department.

Yale Pulled the Plug on Bogus 'Antisemitism' Institute

In 2011 Yale University closed the Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Antisemitism because it lacked academic rigour. Despite the outcry even Robert Wistrich, the director of the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University agreed with the decision. However America’s Zionists jumped up and down.

Denying the Undeniable – The Link Between Zionism and Colonialism

I must confess that I had to rub my eyes when I first read Hezser’s article, where she wrote:

In their essays, students often associate Zionism with European colonialism, presenting the State of Israel as the outcome of a European colonial takeover of Palestinian territory. I always wonder where this erroneous and simplistic equation comes from.

If Hezser seriously believes that there is no association between Zionism and European colonialism then she is clearly unfit to be head of department.

The history of Zionism is quite clear. The Zionist movement sought the sponsorship of an imperialist partner from its very beginning in the late 19th century. The whole of the life of Theodor Herzl, the founder of Political Zionism, was devoted to such a search. He journeyed to Czarist Russia, 3 months after the notorious Kishinev pogroms of  April 1903 to seek an audience with von Plehve, the Interior Minister who organised and financed the Black Hundreds pogromists responsible for the death of thousands of Jews. Herzl begged him:

‘Help me to reach land sooner and the revolt will end. And so will the defection to the Socialists.’

This can be found in the Diaries of Theodor Herzl, p. 1,526.  It would appear that Hezser is unaware of this obvious primary source of information on the beginnings of Zionism.

Herzl was excoriated for his behaviour towards Plehve. The pogroms drove two and a half million Jews from Russia to the shores of America and Britain. Herzl’s servile behaviour towards the Czarist regime, in which he pledged that the Zionist movement would offer no criticism of the Czarist regime (he kept his word) prefigured similar behaviour towards the Nazi state.

Herzl visited the leaders of Europe, from the Pope to Kaiser Wilhelm II, the Italian King Victor Emmanuel and the Ottoman Sultan seeking an imperial sponsor. Herzl wrote in his Diaries (p.118) that the Grand Duke of Baden, the Kaiser’s uncle

‘took my project for building a state with the utmost earnestness. His chief misgiving was that if he supported the cause, people might accuse him of anti-Semitism’

When Zionism first arose its fiercest opponents were Jews. The anti-Semites were telling Jews to get out and the Zionists were saying ‘we agree’. As Professor Francis Nicosia, Professor of Holocaust Studies at Vermont University wrote

‘whereas today non-Jewish criticism of Zionism or the State of Israel are often dismissed as motivated by a deeper anti-Semitism, in Herzl’s day an opposite non-Jewish reaction, one of support for the Zionist idea, might have resulted in a similar reaction. [Zionism and Anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany (p.7)

Although Nicosia is a Zionist he is also an honest, well respected academic. Hezser isn’t so much an academic as a cheap ideologically driven propagandist.

Historically the main supporters of Zionism have been anti-Semites. Zionism was a means of being rid of their Jews. Even today anti-Semites like Donald Trump, Steve Bannon or Tommy Robinson are gushing in their support of Israel and Zionism.

For example William Stanley Shaw, President of the British Brothers League, a proto-fascist anti-Semitic group formed in London’s East End in 1901 to oppose the immigration of Russian Jews to Britain, wrote in a letter to the Jewish Chronicle : (8.11.01)

I am a firm believer in the Zionist movement, which the British Brothers League will do much incidentally to foster. The return of the Jews to Palestine is one of the most striking signs of the times…. All students of prophecy are watching the manifold signs of the times with almost breathless interest

Other anti-Semitic supporters of Zionism in its early years included the leader of the anti-Dreyfussards in France, Edouard Drumont. One of the principal supporters of Zionism in Britain was Arthur J Balfour. In 1905 Balfour as Prime Minister introduced into the House of Commons the Aliens Act designed to keep Jewish refugees out of Britain. Balfour didn’t much like Jews but he loved Zionism.

Balfour was known as ‘Bloody Balfour’ after the death of 3 people when Police opened fireon a political protest in Mitchelstown, County Cork. In a debate in Parliament in 1906 Balfour defendedrefusing to give the vote to Black people in South Africa.

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

Chaim Weizmann, Israel’s first President described a conversation he had with Balfour on 12 December 1914. Balfour told him of a conversation he once had with Cosima Wagner, the anti-Semitic widow of Richard Wagner. Balfour explained that ‘he shared many of her anti-Semitic postulates.’ Instead of protesting Weizmann

‘pointed out that we, too… had drawn attention to the fact that Germans of the Mosaic persuasion were an undesirable and demoralizing phenomenon…’ [Leonard Stein, The Balfour Declaration p.154].

Contrary to Hezser’s belief that there is a 3,000 year racial link between Jews and the Hebrew tribesman wandering around the land of Canaan, the reception for Political Zionism among Jews was anything but warm. The only member of Lloyd George’s War Cabinet to oppose the Balfour Declaration was its sole Jewish member, Sir Edwin Montagu, who wrotea memo to fellow members ‘on the Anti-Semitism of the Present (British) Government’.

It is no more true to say that a Jewish Englishman and a Jewish Moor are of the same nation than it is to say that a Christian Englishman and a Christian Frenchman are of the same nation https://tinyurl.com/yxpopr9b

The same sentiments were expressed by the Central Conference of American Rabbis in the Pittsburgh Declaration of 1885.

“We consider ourselves no longer a nation but a religious community, and therefore expect neither a return to Palestine... nor the restoration of any of the laws concerning the Jewish state.”  [Alan Taylor, Zionism and Jewish History, Journal of Palestinian Studies, Winter 1972,  p.41]

All of this is well known yet Hezser in her article complaints that ‘Judaism is reduced to a religion and often referred to as a “faith” by students.’ She calls this a ‘Christianising approach to Judaism (which) contributes to the Eurocentric view of Zionism as a form of European colonialism.’

Zionism formed an alliance with British imperialism in 1917 and the Palestine Mandate was created in 1920 (formally in 1922). To deny such obvious facts demonstrates that Hezser does not belong in an academic institution.

Herzl wrote to Cecil (above) asking for support because Zionism is 'something colonial'

At almost the same time as Britain’s Palestine Mandate began (1922) there occurred the Partition of Ireland (1921). The criminals and thugs of the Black and Tans, who had fought against Irish Republicans, were then transplanted to Palestine. None of this is relevant in Hefzer’s blinkered and racist myopia.

Quoting Aidan Beatty Hezser speaks of the “long and oddly intertwined history” of Irish nationalism and the Zionist movement. Total nonsense. There was a certain admiration for physical force Republicanism by Lehi, a Zionist terror group which proposed an alliance with the Nazis against the British (something that today’s Zionists keep quiet about) but Irish Republicanism was a movement of the left not right. What Beatty, in a very poor article, refers to as the attempted seduction of De Valera, was an approach by some Zionist stalwarts to the leader of the Free State in Dublin. By this time De Valera did not represent the Republican movement but was an opponent of it.

I am not faulting Hezser for knowing as little about Irish history as she does about Zionism and Jewish history. But it is well known that Irish Republicanism, as Beatty points out, since The Troubles began in 1969, have supported the Palestinians.  As Britain’s first Military Governor of Jerusalem, Sir Ronald Storres wrote the Zionist project was ‘a ‘little loyal Ulster in a sea of hostile pan Arabism.’ (Orientations)

If there is any doubt that Zionismsaw itself as a colonial movementthen we can go to Herzl’s Diaries again.

The founder of Political Zionism, Theodor Herzl, in his letter to Cecil Rhodes had no doubt that Zionism was 'something colonial'

No one doubts that Cecil Rhodes, the Prime Minister of Cape Colony from 1890-1896 after whom Rhodesia was named was a colonialist.  On January 11th Herzl wrote him a begging letter in which he said:

“You are being invited to help make history...it doesn’t involve Africa, but a piece of Asia Minor; not Englishmen but Jews… How, then, do I happen to turn to you since this is an out-of-the-way matter for you? How indeed? Because it is something colonial… I want you ... to put the stamp of your authority on the Zionist plan and to make the following declaration to a few people who swear by you: I, Rhodes have examined this plan and found it correct and practicable. It is a plan full of culture, excellent for the group of people for whom it is directly designed, and quite good for England, for Greater Britain…."

If Ms Hezser seriously wonders where the association between Zionism and colonialism comes from she should not be teaching at SOAS. Given her doctrinaire view of history, based on racial myth not serious study, she should not be an academic.

Extract from Ben Gurion's Rebirth & Destiny speaks about colonisation

There is no doubt that Zionists saw Zionism as a colonial project. David Ben Gurion’s Rebirth & Destiny refers repeatedly to ‘colonization’ and ‘colonies’. This of course was before the era of national liberation movements when colonialism became a dirty word.

Jabotinsky, the founder of Netanyahu's Revisionist Zionism had no doubts that Zionism was the same as colonialism

There is also the famous essay of Vladimir Jabotinsky, the inspiration for Likud, The Iron Wall,which appeared in Razsviet:

My readers have a general idea of the history of colonisation in other countries. I suggest that they consider all the precedents with which they are acquainted, and see whether there is one solitary instance of any colonisation being carried on with the consent of the native population. There is no such precedent. The native populations, civilised or uncivilised, have always stubbornly resisted the colonists, irrespective of whether they were civilised or savage.

For the benefit of Hezser, the text of The Iron Wall can be found on the website of the Jewish Virtual Library.

I don’t intend to devote much time to Hezser’s worthless article in the Jewish Chronicle. Suffice to say, she:

i.                   Fails to understand the difference between the ancient Roman, Byzantine and Greek empires and the modern European empires.  Just let us say that the mode of production, feudalism rather than capitalism, meant that there was no comparison with the extraction of surplus value and resources.  Ancient empires were not settler colonial empires they were intended for plunder not the export of capital. The colonists merged with the natives over time rather than setting up apartheid structures.

ii.                 Hezser’s talk of a ‘forcefully interrupted 3,000-year old Jewish history in the Middle East.’ is a projecting back into history of Zionist fables and her own fantasies. European Jews had nothing to do with Palestine. When 2.5 million Russian Jews fled the pogroms just 1% went to Palestine, the other 99% went to the United States and Britain. Jews no more thought of Palestine as their home than Kenya.

iii.              The Jewish religion was centred on Jerusalem but that was a religious/spiritual orientation. It had no political significance. That was why when the Zionists first colonised Palestine they did it in opposition to the Jews living there. Since Hezser has such difficulty finding sources I suggest that she reads Weizmann’s Trial and Error which speaks of the Old Yishuv, which was anti-Zionist.

iv.              Hezser speaks of the ‘liberation of Palestine from the British’. This is ahistorical nonsense.  Zionism formed an alliance with British imperialism from 1917 onwards. Its settler formation grew under the protection of British bayonets. It fought alongside and was armed by the British when they fought the Arab Uprising from 1936-39 in just the same as the Ulster Protestants were armed and trained by the British.

v.                 It is true that the Zionist militias came into conflict with the British and fought them from 1945 onwards but how is this different from the two Boer wars that the Afrikaaners fought against the British? There always comes a time when the settlers rebel against the mother country but this was not a war of liberation, at least not in the eyes of South Africa’s Black people.

vi.              Hezser speaks of a history that includes Jewish communities in Syria, Egypt, and Persia. There were Jewish communities all over the Middle East but it they never saw a need to uproot and go to Palestine. The oldest Jewish community in the world was in Iraq, some 2,500 years old.  The Babylonian Talmud is more authoritative than the Jerusalem version.

Extracts from Ben Gurion's Rebirth & Destiny Speak About Colonisation not National Liberation

vii.            The Zionist movement sought to destroy and uproot the Arab Jewish communities and transplant them to Israel as a substitute working class for the Palestinians whom they’d just expelled.  Their methods included planting bombs in Baghdad to simulate anti-Semitism.

viii.         From the start of the Zionist project the Ashkenazi Jews saw Yemenite Jews as inferior and a source of physical labour. There was and is the ongoing scandal in Israel of the theft at birth of thousands of mainly Yemenite babies by white Europe Jewish settlers.

ix.              The Zionist attitude to the Yemenite Jews was as racist as the Whites in South Africa. Arthur Ruppin, the most important figure in pre-state Zionist history, believed that racial differences within the Jewish people was crucial. The main body of Jewish settlers in Palestine had to come from the Ashkenazi Jews of Eastern Europe since the Oriental and Sephardic Jews ‘were not suitable since they carried Semitic dysgenic elements.’ Hezser’s belief that European Jews are semitic was also true of Wilhelm Marr, the anti-Semite who first coined the term ‘anti-Semitism’ in 1879! 

x.                 Yemenite Jews were imported as cheap labour to Palestine. They experienced such extreme suffering that the death toll between 1912 and 1918 approached 50%. They were paid far less than Ashkenazi Jews, starvation wages. They received next to no medical attention and Bloom described Ruppin’s attitude to the Yemenites as one of ‘pathological stereotyping.’  Hezser can read this in the essay by Etan Bloom What the Father had in mind. (p. 340)

Hezser might also want to read Etan Bloom’s Ph. D thesis for Tel Aviv University‘Arthur Ruppin and the Production of the Modern Hebrew Culture’ but I am conscious of having already given her more than enough reading material for the time being.

We should leave the rewriting of history to the anti-Semites that Zionism has so much in common with.  It might be helpful if SOAS were to give Hezser a long sabbatical in order that she can catch up with some long overdue reading!

SOAS recently made swingeing cuts of £17 million in its budget. There were fears that Hezser’s post might go but the Zionists ran a campaign to save her job. Whilst I’m not in favour of cuts in the case of this racist academic I am baffled as to why she wasn’t told to dispense her wisdom elsewhere.

Tony Greenstein

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The alliance between Israel, Zionism and Hindu Nationalism is based on a shared belief in ethnic cleansing and ethno-nationalism

October 16, 2020, 11:08 pm
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Just as ‘anti-Semitism’ is used to attack anti-Zionists so supporters of the Dalits and Kashmiri self-determination are accused of ‘Hinduphobi’

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu greet during the India-Israel Business Summit in New Delhi on January 15, 2018. MONEY SHARMA/AFP via Getty Images


Imagine my surprise when Gideon Falter of the misnamed Campaign Against Anti-Semitismappeared in a Delhi Muslim newspaper, the Milli Gazette. Falter was attending a meeting in 2018 at the House of Commons at the invitation of Tory MP Bob Blackman, ‘the rabidly pro-Hindutva Tory MP from Harrow East’,a patron of the CAA.

Falter told the meeting that he and his supporters would do all they could to help eradicate the ‘duty’ on the government to make Caste an aspect of race in the Equality Act of 2010. [UK Government will repeal caste law]  Lord Jitesh Gadhia, a Tory Party donor, and Blackman then called for the need to learn from the way the CAA had got the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism passed in the Labour Party.

What Blackman meant was that ‘Hinduphobia’ should be weaponised against opponents of Hindu racism in the same way as ‘anti-Semitism’ has been weaponised against opponents of Israel’s government.

The meeting was not about Israel but India and a campaign to prevent the inclusion of caste discrimination as a protected characteristic under the 2010 Equality Act. Hindu chauvinists don’t even acknowledging the existence of caste discrimination just as most Zionists don’t recognise anti-Arab racism in Israel. Dalit (untouchable) organisations have long campaigned for a law against caste-based discrimination. Eventually the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act 2013 imposed a 'duty' on the government to make caste an aspect of race in the Equality Act only to abandon it in response to the claims of Hindu racists that it would be ‘hinduphobic’.  Ring a few bells?

Just as the IHRA has been used by racists against anti-racists, so ‘Hinduphobia’ is now being weaponised against anyone who opposes the military occupation of Kashmir and the pogroms against Muslims, Dalits and other minorities in India. The ‘logic’ behind the false accusations of ‘anti-Semitism’ and ‘hinduphobia’ is that if you oppose their racist ethno nationalism it is because you oppose them as Jews or Hindus not because you oppose racism. The supporters of Apartheid in South Africa and British fascist groups used to make similar claims.

As Amrit Wilson observedwith the election of Jeremy Corbyn the Hindu far-Right began to strengthen their links to Israel’s supporters in Britain. The passing of a resolution at the 2019 Conference calling for self-determination for Kashmir was the final straw.

Students protesting against the arrest of union president Kanhaiya Kumar at the JNU campus in February 2016. Photograph: Hindustan Times/Getty


Narendra Modi, has been Prime Minister of India since 2014. His administration was complicit in the 2002 Gujarat riots when around 2,000 Muslims died in pogroms and riots. Up till 2014 he was bannedfrom entering the United States because of his role in the pogroms in Gujarat, where he was Chief Minister from 2001 to 2014.,

Modi is a member of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a Hindu nationalist paramilitary group. The BJP is widely regardedas the political arm of the RSS.

The RSS was founded in 1925 by Keshav Baliram Hedgewar. Some of the most prominent figures in the RSS deeply admired Fascism and Nazism..

Senior RSS members had direct links to both Mussolini and Hitler. The RSS admired the way Mussolini and Hitler built a powerful economy and military under the banner of patriotism and nationalism.

VD Savakar an early RSS leader approved of Hitler’s persecution of Jews. In 1940 he said at a meeting, “Nazism proved undeniably the savior of Germany."

The BJP was officially formed in 1980 though its history can be traced much further back to the pre-1947 era when Hindu nationalists not only demanded an independent India, but one completely dominated by Hindus.

The current BJP is the successor of the Keshav Baliram Hedgewar, Mussolini, Hitler, Bharatiya Jana Sangh (BJS) party, which itself was the political arm of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, a group that espoused openly militant Hindu activism and the suppression of minorities in India.

Following the BJP victory in the 2019 general election he revoked the special status of Jammu and Kashmir. He also introduced the Citizenship Amendment Act, which resulted in widespread protests across the country.

In Delhi this resulted in pogroms beginning on 23 February with Hindu mobs attacking Muslims. Of the 53 people killed, two-thirds were Muslims who were shot, slashed with repeated blows, or set on fire. By mid-March many Muslims had remained missing.

Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University, a byword for secularism and liberalism in times past was attacked. Samanth Subramanian describedhow the attack by 50-60 Hindu fascists was led by the Akhil Bharatiya Vidya Parishad (ABVP), the youth wing of the RSS.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi gestures during a rally

Videos of the attacks leaked out through social media in real time. The police were called, but they didn’t move to stop the violence. Instead, a posse of policemen installed itself at JNU’s gate, allowing no one in. Yogendra Yadav, a political activist, arrived at the gate at 9pm.

Ninety minutes later, the attackers emerged, still masked and armed. Even then, the police detained no one. Instead, they were permitted to walk away as if nothing had happened. When Yadav’s colleague took photos, Yadav was set upon by a knot of men, knocked down and kicked in the face. The police did nothing. Later, from a video, Yadav identified a local ABVP official among those who had hit him. In a statement, the ABVP blamed the attacks on “leftist goons,” but on television members admitted that the masked, armed men and women on campus were part of the ABVP. Still, the Delhi police pressed no charges. “The police gave the goons cover, gave them free rein on campus,” Yadav said. A JNU professor went further, claiming that: “The police are complicit.”

The onslaught on JNU marked the middle of a season of nationwide protest, provoked by a new law. The Citizenship Amendment Act, passed by parliament on 11 December 2019, provides a fast track to citizenship for refugees fleeing into India from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Refugees of every south Asian faith are eligible – every faith, that is, except Islam. It is a policy that fits neatly with the RSS and the BJP’s demonisation of Muslims, India’s largest religious minority. To votaries of Hindutva, the country is best served if it is expunged of Islam.

The "Hitlers Den" pool parlor in Nagpur, epicenter of Hindu nationalismCredit: Shrenik Rao/Madras Courier

Professor Sumantra Bosewroteabout how

India’s Hindu nationalists and the Israeli right have a remarkable mutual affinity. Benjamin Netanyahu welcomedNarendra Modi to Israel in 2017 with these words: “Prime minister Modi, we have been waiting for you for a long time, almost 70 years … We view you as a kindred spirit.”

Shrenik Rao wrote that:

 “In 2004, when now-Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi was the Chief Minister of Gujarat, school textbooks published by the Gujarat State Board portrayed Hitler as a hero, and glorified fascism. The tenth-grade social studies textbook had chapters entitled "Hitler, the Supremo," and "Internal Achievements of Nazism."

A section on the "Ideology of Nazism" read:

"Hitler lent dignity and prestige to the German government. He adopted the policy of opposition towards the Jewish people and advocated the supremacy of the German race."

The social studies textbook published by the state of Tamil Nadu in 2011 included chapters praising Hitler’s "inspiring leadership" and "achievements." A poll conducted by the Times of India in 2002 found that 17 percent favoured Adolf Hitler as "the kind of leader India ought to have." 

See Shrenik Rao, Hitler’s Hindus: The Rise and Rise of India’s Nazi-loving Nationalists,.

Tamil Nadu, Times of India, Bal Thackeray, the leader of the Hindu chauvinist group Shiv Sena, who on his death in 2012 was accorded a state funeral in Bombay, created a brand of Hindu fascism which sought inspiration in Nazi genocide. “There is nothing wrong,” he said in an interview in 1993 with Time magazine,

“if Muslims are treated as Jews were in Nazi Germany.If you take Mein Kampf and if you remove the word 'Jew' and put in the word 'Muslim', that is what I believe in.”

Jews have lived in India for over a millennium without problems. After Kristallnacht the Indian National Congress issued a declaration against Hitler’s Germany. Both Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru condemned the Nazi treatment of Jews.

Speaking in 1939 in Calcutta, V. D. Savarkar, an early mentor of the RSS and ideological godfather of Hindutva identified Indian Muslims as a potential traitorous people “like the Jews in Germany.” Narendra Modi has had a lifelong association with the RSS.

Kashmiri youth protesting against India throw bricks and make fire to block traffic on a road in Srinagar, Indian controlled Kashmir, Sunday, Oct. 27, 2019.


Savarkar spelt out why Hindus should rule India and others should either be expelled or merged into the Hindu majority.  ‘The Aryans who settled in India at the dawn of history already formed a nation, now embodied in the Hindus, he wrote.

“Hindus are bound together not only by the love they bear to a common fatherland and by the common blood that courses through their veins and keeps our hearts throbbing and our affection warm but also by the of the common homage we pay to our great civilization, our Hindu culture.”

There was no greater admirer of Hitler and Mussolini than Savarkar. In a speech delivered in 1940 Savarkar said:

There is no reason to suppose that Hitler must be a human monster because he passes off as a Nazi or Churchill is a demigod because he calls himself a Democrat. Nazism proved undeniably the savior of Germany under the set of circumstances Germany was placed in.

Another senior RSS member, Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar, also praised Nazism and believed the ideology should be applied to India. German race pride has now become the topic of the day,” he wrote.

“To keep up the purity of the race and its culture, Germany shocked the world by her purging the country of the Semitic Races -- the Jews. Race pride at its highest has been manifested here. Germany has also shown how well-nigh impossible it is for races and cultures, having differences going to the root, to be assimilated into one united whole, a good lesson for us in Hindustan [India] to learn and profit by.

M.S. Golwalkar, who was the leader of the RSS for over 30 years enthusiastically advocated for an India dominated by Hindus.

“There are only two courses open to the foreign elements, either to merge themselves in the national race and adopt its culture, or to live at its mercy so long as the national race may allow them to do so and to quit the country at the sweet will of the national race,”

… The foreign races in Hindustan must either adopt the Hindu culture and language, must learn to respect and hold in reverence Hindu religion, must entertain no idea but those of the glorification of the Hindu race and culture, i.e., of the Hindu nation and must lose their separate existence to merge in the Hindu race, or may stay in the country, wholly subordinated to the Hindu Nation, claiming nothing, deserving no privileges, far less any preferential treatment not even citizen’s rights.”

If one were to replace “Hindu” with “German,” Golwalkar’s words would match Hitler’s rhetoric almost exactly.

Hitler’s autobiography, Mein Kampf, has gone through countless editions in India and has been a bestseller in the country for decades. It is especially popular among businessmen who see it as a self-help guide for how determination and strength can produce success.

Much of Nazi ideology and imagery came from the symbols and history of ancient India – indeed, the swastika was based on a Hindu symbol of strength and good fortune. The legendary myth of the invasion of prehistoric India by the “Aryan” tribes would, centuries later, provide Hitler with his notion of a “super master race” that was destined to dominate the world.

India’s Narendra Modi addressing the BJP campaign rally ahead of Delhi state elections in New Delhi earlier this year. Photograph: Manish Swarup/AP


Sumantra Bose explainedthat there’s a “profound admiration of generations of Hindu nationalists for Zionism.” Israel provides them with a model nation state. For Zionism it’s not a problem dealing with Hitler lovers as long as they love Israel too.

Why India’s Hindu nationalists worship Israel’s nation-state model’,

During World War II, some Indian nationalists received explicit support from German Nazis -- in fact, some Indian soldiers even served in Hitler's armies and in the notorious SS.

The swastika is an ancient Indian Hindu syymbol Photo: Reuters


See Hindu Nationalist’s Historical Links to Nazism and Fascism

Amrit Wilson explainedthat since Modi came to power in 2004, he

Has unleashed an on-going Tsunami of hate with  Muslims, Christians and Dalits being lynched and raped on the flimsiest of pretexts and sometimes for no reason other than their identity, with human rights activists, journalists, lawyers and dissenters, being attacked and in some cases, as with feminist journalist Gauri Lankesh, assassinated. Through all this the Hindutva forces have continued to glorify Modi in the communities of Indian origin in Britain.

These are the forces that Keir Starmer sought to appease when he declared that Kashmiri independence was a matter for the India Government and he ripped up Labour Party policy no Kashmir. From Zionism to Hindutva, there appears no form of bigotry that Sturmer is not prepared to make concessions to.

See How Hindu supremacists are tearing India apart

India’s Alliance With Israel Is a Model for the World’s Illiberal Leaders

From arms deals to occupation in Kashmir and the West Bank, Modi and Netanyahu increasingly share the same ethnonationalist worldview.

BySomdeep Sen

| September 10, 2020, 5:02 AM

In late November 2019, there was widespread outrage over a video of the Indian Consul-General in New York, Sandeep Chakravorty, in which he suggested to a gathering of Kashmiri Hindus that India should follow the Israeli model, and build settlements in the Kashmir Valley to secure the return of Hindus. Kashmiri activists and journalists were shocked by his apparent support for Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories. But this is only one of many recent examples of a growing political love affair between India and Israel.

Nobody is too racist to keep company with Sturmer

Ties between the two countries have not always been this friendly. In October 1937, a decade before Indian independence from British rule, the Indian National Congress passed a resolution that declared its support for the Palestinian national movement. It assured “the Arabs of the solidarity of the Indian People with them in their struggle for national freedom.” A year later, Mahatma Gandhi wrotethat the “cry for the national home for the Jews” in Palestine had little appeal for him. He added: “Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English or France to the French.”

Maintaining this position after independence, India was one of only 13 countries—and one of only three non-Muslim countries—to vote against the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine. India officially recognized the State of Israel in 1950, but relations between the two countries remained largely informal until the end of the Cold War. As one of the architects of the Non-Aligned Movement, India’s official allegiance remained with its Arab allies.

Members of India’s Hindu nationalist organisation Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) at a rally near Hyderabad. Photograph: STR/AFP via Getty Images


As the doors of its embassy opened in Tel Aviv in 1992, India cautiously built its relations with Israel while maintaining its official commitment to the Palestinian cause.

When United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine Cold War Non-Aligned Movement, Israel, the United Kingdom, and France invaded Egypt and sparked the Suez Crisis of 1956, India expressed its support for its nonaligned ally, Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser, and its stance against Western imperialism in the region. In 1974, India recognized the Palestine Liberation Organization as the sole, legitimate representative of the Palestinians; it was the first non-Arab country do so. Of course, Israel enjoyed the strong support of the West while India had well-known political leanings towards the Soviet Union, so the two countries almost inevitably found themselves in opposing camps during the Cold War.

But with the fall of the Soviet Union, India embarked on a process of economic liberalization that included a drastic reduction in import tariffs and the removal of restrictions on foreign direct investment. India also saw this as an opportunity to reposition itself in a new world order, and in 1992 established formal diplomatic relations with Israel. As the doors of its embassy opened in Tel Aviv, India cautiously built its relations with Israel while maintaining its official commitment to the Palestinian cause.

Having already recognized the State of Palestine in 1988, India inaugurated its representative office in Gaza in 1996, which later moved to Ramallah. India also consistently voted in favor of the Palestinian position at the United Nations. This included the vote on the General Assembly resolution against Israel’s separation wall in 2003, for Palestine’s full membership of UNESCO in 2011, and for Palestine’s non-member observer status in the U.N. General Assembly in 2012.

BJP supporters at a rally in New Delhi in December 2019. Photograph: Prakash Singh/AFP via Getty Images

At the same time, Indian-Israeli relations began to encompass a wide array of economic, technological, and strategic partnerships. In 2006, the Indian and Israeli agricultural ministries signed a Memorandum of Understanding, leading to the Indo-Israeli Agricultural Project which focused on increasing India’s agricultural productivity and water use efficiency. Bilateral trade has also increased from $200 million in 1992 to $5.84 billion in 2018. And, compared with the same period in the previous year, Israeli goods and services exportsto India were up 4.6 percent in the first nine months of 2019.

However, the most significant facet of Indian-Israeli relations is a robust security-defense cooperation. The foundations of this cooperation were laid long before 1992. During the Sino-Indian War of 1962, the Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion expressedhis “fullest sympathy and understanding” and, on the request of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, supplied weapons to India. India sourced Israeli weapons during the India-Pakistan wars of 1965 and 1971. Since the early days of its establishment in 1968, the Research and Analysis Wing—India’s external intelligence agency—has also maintained close relations with Israel’s Mossad.

Israel has replaced Russia as India’s preferred all-season weapons supplier. For instance, when India conducted nuclear weapons tests in 1998, it faced international condemnation. But while the Clinton administration imposed economic sanctions and banned the export of U.S. weapons and military technology, Israel refrained from criticizing India. Instead, over the years Israel worked on building its brand as a reliable, but apolitical, partner. During the Kargil War in 1999, it supplied the Indian Air Force with UAVs and surveillance systems. Israel also upgraded India’s aging, Soviet-era MiG-21 fighter jets and supplied Laser Guided Bombs and 160-mm mortar shells.

Security personnel patrol in Srinagar on February 11, during a one-day strike to mark the anniversary of Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) founder Maqbool Bhat's death. TAUSEEF MUSTAFA/AFP via Getty Images 


Aug. 5 marks one year since Modi revoked Kashmir’s special status. But Kashmiris will be mostly cut off—high-speed internet has been shut off to the region once again.

Today, Israel is secondonly to Russia as India’s largest weapons supplier. But while Russian supplies fell by 47 percent in 2015-2019, weapons imports from Israel increased by 175 percent. India is also the largest buyer of Israeli weapons, buying 46 percent of Israel’s exports. Both countries are part of the Joint Working Group on Counterterrorism and have signed agreements on mutual legal assistance in criminal matters, cooperation in homeland security, protection of classified material, and cybersecurity. Indian Police Service trainees visit the Israel National Police Academy every year for training. The Indian Border Security Force uses Israeli-developed smart fencing systems as well as radar and surveillance technology in the volatile Kashmir valley.

In the midst of the ongoing pandemic, the Indian Ministry of Defense and its Israeli counterpart are also collaborating on developing a rapid testing system. And to this end, an Israeli delegation collected 20,000 samples from Indian COVID-19 patients in early August 2020.

India’s overtures toward Israel are no longer a low-key affair. It is something that India’s government and many Indians celebrate. In 2008, following the Mumbai attacks, Indian talking heads were already proposing the Israeli approach to fighting terrorism. A poll conducted by the Israeli Foreign Ministry in 2009 showed that 58 percent of Indians supported Israel and that India ranked above the United States (56 percent), Russia (52 percent), Mexico (50 percent), China (48 percent), and Italy (39 percent).

During Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s 2018 visit to India, his last evening in the country was marked by a special event “Shalom Bollywood” attended by Indian film industry heavyweights. At the event, Netanyahu declared, “We believe in Bollywood. The world loves Bollywood. Israel loves Bollywood. We want Bollywood in Israel. We are putting our money where our mouth is.” Drive—the Indian version of Fast & Furious—was released in November 2019 on Netflix; it is the first Hindi movie to be filmed in Israel. The scenes were shot in Tel Aviv and partly funded by the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office and the Ministry of Tourism, with the expectation that a positive portrayal of Israel in Hindi films would boost tourism from India.

It wasn’t a coincidence that the Indian Consul General in New York was speaking to a gathering of Kashmiri Hindus. The return of exiled Hindus to Kashmir has long been central to the Hindu nationalist political agenda. And for the Consul General, Israel serves as a model for the way exiled people might reclaim their homeland. So, referring to the controversial revocationof Article 370 and 35A of the Indian constitution, Chakravorty described the move as an attempt to protect Hindu culture in Kashmir—not unlike the way Jewish people maintained their cultural identity in their years of exile.

He went on to declare: “The Kashmiri culture, is the Indian culture, it is the Hindu culture.”And it has been under the leadership of Hindu nationalist governments that Indian-Israeli relations have blossomed, as a majority of the most important diplomatic exchanges have taken place when the BJP has been in power in New Delhi.

The electoral successes of the BJP have meant that what was once a fringe Hindu nationalist love affair with Israel has now become a matter of public policy.

Israel has always been popular among the Hindu right. In 1967, the Hindu nationalist party Bharatiya Jana Sangh reacted to the Six Day War by drawing parallels between India and Israel. One of the founding fathers of the paramilitary Hindu nationalist organization, RSS Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar, may have once expressed his sympathies for Nazi Germany. But the present-day organization has repeatedly declared its support for efforts to strengthen India’s ties with Israel.

In 2016, the RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat voiced his admiration for the Jewish state when he said,

“Israel was attacked by surrounding Islamic countries on five occasions, but the Israeli people repulsed their aggressions and extended their boundaries due to strong resolve to save motherland.”

But the electoral successes of the BJP have meant that what was once a fringe Hindu nationalist love affair with Israel has now become a matter of public policy. Officially, India now considers Israel a strategic partner as both countries—each under its right-wing leadership—position themselves as bastions of progress and democracy while surrounded by hostile Muslim nations. In this sense, they consider each other to be natural allies, engaged in a historic struggle against terrorism and Islamic fundamentalist forces.

It is no surprise then that StandWithUs, a pro-Israel advocacy organization that publishes pamphlets in Hindi and the Israeli Consul General for South India Dana Kursh, reacted to India passing the controversial Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) by saying:

“India as a sovereign nation has the right in enacting the CAA … India’s sovereignty is to be respected and she knows how to protect her people.”

India, for its part, displayed the extent of its alliance with Israel when in June 2019 it voted against granting Palestinians consultative status in the U.N.’s Economic and Social Council. Responding to the vote—a historic shift in India’s usual, pro-Palestine voting record at the U.N.— Netanyahu tweeted, “Thank you @NarendraModi, thank you India, for your support and for standing with Israel at the UN.”

Trade, cultural exchange, and strategic partnerships—including the arms trade—are the building blocks of international relations. But as India now openly expresses (and celebrates) its support for Israel in international forums and Israel, in return, expresses its support for India’s controversial laws and constitutional amendments, it is evident that the India-Israel relationship is no longer purely a matter of realpolitik; it is also being strengthened by a shared ideology.

The India-Israel relationship is no longer purely a matter of realpolitik; it is also being strengthened by a shared ideology.

The consequences of this are significant. India, and its Hindu nationalist leadership, has found an ally that is willing to publicly support its widely criticized and often draconian political moves. At the same time Israel, has found an ally willing to cultivate a political, economic, and strategic partnership irrespective of its conduct towards Palestinians.

It may be too early to assess the long-term impact of such an alliance. Nonetheless, authoritarian leaders in Brazil, Russia, Hungary, Azerbaijan, and the Philippines have also upgraded their diplomatic relations with Netanyahu’s Israel. Today’s warm Indian-Israeli ties may soon become a model for strongmen across the world—an alliance that combines diplomatic cover in Washington with military support for populist leaders while easing the consequences of their illiberal ways.

British Indian groups condemn Kashmir protest on Diwali as 'Hinduphobia'

As part of a counter-campaign, 100 British Indian groups said it had hired a digital billboard vehicle to traverse London streets to spread the 'inclusive and universal' message of the festival.

Published: 28th October 2019

By PTI

LONDON: An umbrella group representing over 100 British Indian organisations on Sunday condemned the "Free Kashmir" demonstration by pro-Pakistani groups, planned to coincide with Diwali, as an act of Hinduphobia and racism.

As part of a counter-campaign, the group said it had hired a digital billboard vehicle to traverse central London streets to spread the "inclusive and universal" message of the festival.

"The fact that this protest is occurring on the same day as Diwali is an act of Hinduphobia and racism," notes a collective statement issued by the groups.

"It is equivalent to an antisemitic group demonstrating on the holy day of Hannukkah or an anti-Muslim group demonstrating on Eid. This is why many British Indian individuals and community groups are upset,"

it notes, welcoming London Mayor Sadiq Khan's call for the protesters to cancel their plans.

"This request was refused. The Pakistani demonstration is trying to divide people in the UK, especially on religious grounds. Instead of the nuanced debate needed on Jammu, Kashmir and Ladakh, they are inciting religious and ethnic hatred on the streets of London by hijacking the festival of Diwali,"

the statement adds.

The message hit social media as a number of pro-Pakistani and separatist groups plan to kick-start a march across Parliament Street as part of the so-called "Free Kashmir" protest held annually on October 27, as the "Black Day" when Indian troops allegedly entered the then princely kingdom of Kashmir in 1947.

Following widespread concerns raised across the board, including in the House of Commons, Scotland Yard had imposed strict restrictions on the route of the march to deny permission for it to culminate before the Indian High Commission in London.

The Metropolitan Police imposed the pre-event conditions under Sections 12 and 14 of the UK Public Order Act, which refer to preventing serious disruption to the community, and warned that failure to adhere to the conditions could lead to arrest and prosecution.

"We understand that this is a significant anniversary date for those protesting, and also recognise this falls on the important Hindu festival of Diwali.

My intention on the day will be to balance the rights of those protesting with those who may be affected by it.

We will take all necessary steps to prevent crime and disorder,"

said Metropolitan Police Deputy Assistant Commissioner Matt Twist, the Gold Commander in charge of the policing operation.

Twist reiterated this message in a reply to Pakistani-origin peer, Lord Nazir Ahmed, who is one of the key organisers of the protest and had called for the restrictions to be lifted in a letter to the Met Police.

In his reply, Commander Twist said:

"To be clear I have not in any way sought to ban the pro-Kashmiri protest. In order to minimise serious disruption to the community, I have asked for the pre-event conditions.

"This has only been done to ensure we correctly balance the rights of those who want to protest, with those in wider London who may be disproportionately affected by the serious disruption it would cause."

The Indian High Commission in London had issued a diplomatic "note verbale" seeking appropriate safety measures following clashes involving similar protesters, which had caused damage to India House on August 15 during Indian Independence Day celebrations.

The restricted route prevents the protesters from assembly anywhere near the Indian mission in Aldwych and must culminate at Trafalgar Square instead.

The organisers of the protest march, including groups such Muslim Action Forum, World Muslim Federation, Pakistan Patriotic Front, Overseas Pakistan Welfare Council, had expressed their anger at the restrictions and even threatened court action.

According to the Met Police details on the permissions sought for the proposed march, an estimated 5,000-10,000 protesters are expected to turn out for the march from across the UK.

The London Mayor has pledged a "robust" policing plan to deal with any violence or breaches of the strict conditions imposed on the protesters.

The Far-Right Is Going Global

An unofficial visit by nationalist European leaders to Kashmir highlights the solidarity of far-right movements across the globe.

Eviane Leidig

 

In October 2019, 23 members of the European Parliament (MEPs) visited Kashmir, just two months after the Indian government removed the region’s special autonomous status. The trip sparked controversy when it was revealed that most of the MEPs belonged to far-right political parties, including France’s National Rally (formerly National Front) and Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). It wasn’t just the affiliations of these visitors that drew attention: The MEPs had been granted access to Kashmir even as foreign journalists and domestic politicians were barred access to the region, and the Indian-administered government had imposed an internet shutdown since August.

This visit was the latest example of the growing ties between the far-right in India and Europe, a connection that is rooted primarily in a shared hostility toward immigrants and Muslims, and couched in similar overarching nationalistic visions. Today, with the populist radical right ascendant in India and in several European democracies, the far-right agenda has been increasingly normalized and made a part of mainstream political discourse.

The link between far-right ideologies in these regions long predates the relatively recent rise of right-wing populist leaders. In the 1930s, Hindu nationalists collaborated with key figures in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany in order to help advance their extreme right-wing projects. In the 1930s, Hindu nationalists collaborated with key figures in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany in order to help advance their extreme right-wing projects. One of the pioneers of Hindu nationalism, V.D. Savarkar, once wrote that India should model its approach to its “Muslim problem” on that used by the Nazis to deal with their “Jewish problem.”

Similarly, European ideologues like Savitri Devi (born in France as Maximiani Portas) described Hitler as an incarnation of the Hindu god Vishnu. Nearly four decades after she died, her ideology remains popular among American white nationalists. The manifesto of Anders Behring Breivik, the Norwegian terrorist who killed 77 people in 2011, also expressed an affinity for the Hindu nationalist approach to Islam that highlights many contemporary European attitudes toward Muslim immigrant populations.

“The only positive thing about the Hindu right wing is that they dominate the streets. They do not tolerate the current injustice and often riot and attack Muslims when things get out of control, usually after the Muslims disrespect and degrade Hinduism too much,”

Breivik wrote before bombing a government building in Oslo and killing dozens of children at a summer camp.

“India will continue to wither and die unless the Indian nationalists consolidate properly and strike to win. It is essential that the European and Indian resistance movements learn from each other and cooperate as much as possible. Our goals are more or less identical.”

More recently, Steve Bannon, the former White House chief strategist and editor in chief of the far-right site Breitbart News Network, had considered creating a Breitbart India in 2015 after Narendra Modi became prime minister of India. Bannon has long admiredModi, once calling him “a Trump before Trump.” Meanwhile, European supporters of Modi and his nationalist message include the leader of the Dutch far-right Party for Freedom (PVV) Geert Wilders.

The MEPs’ visit to Kashmir sheds light on the solidarity of the global far-right. Although they were sent invitations on behalf of Madi Sharma, a Brussels-based entrepreneur and president of the NGO Women’s Economic and Social Think Tank (WESTT), the visit itself was funded and organized by an NGO registered in New Delhi called the International Institute for Non-Aligned Studies (IINS)—a group that shares the same IP address as the obscure news websiteNew Delhi Times.

Steve Bannon has long admiredNarendra Modi, once calling him “a Trump before Trump.”

This website, in turn, is connected to a global network of think tanks, companies, NGOs, and, significantly, over265 local media outlets in 65 countries. EU DisinfoLab, which conducts research on disinformation campaigns targeting European Union member states, recently concludedthat the media outlets tied to the New Delhi Times are attempting to influence international institutions and elected representatives.

While the ideological leanings of the New Delhi Times are unclear, its network of media outlets syndicate content criticizing Pakistan’s role in Kashmir, and they regularly take Islamophobic editorial stances. Although those positions are not unusual in the Indian media landscape, it is rare for such outlets to lobby on a global scale. Two notable websites in this network—EP Today and Times of Geneva—maintain strong connections to NGOs and think tanks in Brussels and Geneva, in effect serving as lobbying interests to the EU and the United Nations.

Sharma promised invitees “a prestigious VIP meeting” with Modi in addition to their trip to Kashmir. The MEPs stated that the purpose of the visit was to “gather information” on the situation in Kashmir. Although the MEPs were technically an unofficial delegation, they received clearancenot just to tour Kashmir, but also to meet with several senior members of the Indian government and military. Government ministries have publicly stated that they were not involved in arranging the visit, although it is unlikely that such clearance could have been obtained without approval from high-level authorities.

Before visiting Kashmir, the MEPs went to New Delhi to meet Modi, who saidthat the delegation would gain “a better understanding of the cultural and religious diversity of the region.” While in Kashmir, the European delegation went on a guided tour through the capital of Srinagar before having lunch at the Indian Army Headquarters, where they saw maps of supposed terrorist training camps in Pakistan, where attacks in Kashmir are allegedly plotted.

Several MEPs, including far-right Czech MEP Tomas Zdechovsky and National Rally MEP Thierry Mariani, later used social media to share their experience meeting the prime minister; Mariani, for example, tweetedin support of the Indian government’s policy in Kashmir. Mariani also toldreporters that “we stand with India in its fight against terrorists,” while AfD MEP Lars Patrick Berg accusedthe media of branding them “Muslim-hating Nazis.” Both Marianiand Berghave called for stronger border security in the EU, linking migration to potential Islamist terrorist attacks.

The Kashmir issue is a rallying cry for much of Europe’s far-right. Europe’s nationalists share a deep concern over Islamist extremism, as well as an overarching vision of national strength. In many ways, they see Modi’s hardline stance in Kashmir as indicative of their own aims.

An Indian soldier questions a man on a street during a curfew in Srinagar on August 8, 2019. Tauseef Mustafa/AFP/Getty Images


The latest crisis in Kashmir began when Modi’s government revoked Article 370 of the Indian Constitution, thereby removing Jammu and Kashmir’s special autonomous status. Wilders openly tweetedhis support of the revocation of Kashmir’s autonomy the day it was announced. The British columnist Katie Hopkins also expressedsolidarity and has more recentlyclaimed that Hindus are the victims of ethnic cleansing in Kashmir.

The Kashmir issue is a rallying cry for much of Europe’s far-right. Europe’s nationalists share a deep concern over Islamist extremism, as well as an overarching vision of national strength.

The immediate pretext for Modi’s move was brewing unrest in the region. An ongoing separatist insurgency has gripped Kashmir since 1989, and Pakistan has played a substantial role supporting violent separatist groups in the region. Islamist terrorist attacks remain an everyday reality on the ground, and they have sometimes spilled over into India itself. This includesthe 2008 Mumbai attacks, in which Lashkar-e-Tayyiba, a Pakistan-based Islamist group seeking Kashmiri unification with Pakistan, launched a massive attack in Mumbai killing 164 people.

The situation continued to escalate in February 2019, when Pakistan’s Air Force launched a series of airstrikes in Indian-controlled Kashmir, leading to Indian retaliation. Periodic airstrikes have been conducted intermittently since—arguably boosting Modi’s popularity with his base and helping him win reelection last year.

Although the pretext for the constitutional change was regional unrest, there are broader goals. Hindu nationalists have long sought to expand India’s territorial reach into what was once British-controlled India—including not only Kashmir but also Pakistan, Bangladesh, and other parts of South Asia.

An Indian policeman comes out from a jail in downtown Srinagar, Jammu and Kashmir, on April 5. Tauseef Mustafa/AFP/Getty Images

In much the same way that Hindu nationalists see Islamist extremism as an existential threat to the nation, European far-right figures often characterize extremist-inspired attacks as foreign threats, even when the perpetrators are fellow citizens. Following the 2017 Westminster attack in London, for example, National Rally leader Marine Le Pen called on France to take “control” of its borders, despite the fact that the attacker was a British-born Muslim convert.

The far-right in India and Europe are learning from each other, and their abilities to govern according to a shared ideological agenda rooted in Islamophobia are evolving in parallel.

A few months later, the Manchester Arena bombing led the far-right Hungarian Fidesz parliamentary leader Lajos Kósa to state that

“terrorism doesn’t start with a ‘suicide bomber.’ It starts when terrorists illegally come to Europe and many people actually assist them.”

The attacker in this case, too, had been born in the United Kingdom to Libyan refugees, but far-right figures still used the attacks to condemn Islamist extremism and promote their Islamophobic, anti-immigrant agendas. Members of the South Asian diaspora living in Western countries have also played their part in helping to promote a Hindu nationalist agenda through lobbying and fundraising for organizations based in India.

Although the visit of the MEPs was widely criticizedin the international community for flouting diplomatic norms, it signals a new development in Indo-European relations: Far-right narratives have become part of the global mainstream. The far-right in these two regions are learning from each other, and their abilities to govern according to a shared ideological agenda rooted in Islamophobia are evolving in parallel.

Although transnational bonds between nationalists may seem counterintuitive, their visions are not necessarily contradictory, and they may continue to complement each other so long as the Muslim “other” remains their common enemy. If far-right nationalists have it their way, it is likely that Indo-European relations will be reshaped along Islamophobic lines.

Eviane Leidigis a researcher at the Center for Research on Extremism
at the University of Oslo. Twitter: @evianeleidig

Kashmir Is a Dress Rehearsal for Hindu Nationalist Fantasies

How Hindu Nationalism Went Mainstream

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Gavin Williamson’s Attempt to Force Universities to Adopt the IHRA is like a Mafia Boss offering his clients ‘Protection’

October 18, 2020, 10:02 pm
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The IHRA has NOTHING to do with anti-Semitism – it is an attempt to redefine the Palestinian liberation struggle as ‘anti-Semitic’


Perhaps the only good thing that Theresa May did in her time in office was to sackGavin Williamson for being a liar.

Of one thing we should be under no doubt. The IHRA ‘definition’ of anti-Semitism has nothing to do with anti-Semitism and everything to do with using the memory of the Holocaust dead to provide moral legitimacy to racism and imperialism. Its purpose is to negate anti-Zionism, Palestine solidarity and Western foreign policy. One of the least remarked upon aspects of the IHRA is how genuine anti-Semites have no quarrel with the IHRA. The IHRA is there to defend Israeli Apartheid NOT Jews.

The IHRA has nothing to do with anti-Semitism and everything to do with using the memory of the Holocaust dead to provide moral legitimacy to racism and imperialism

Both the Polish and Hungarian governments have adoptedthe IHRA and are amongstthe 31 member countries of the IHRA alliance.

Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban won the 2018 General Election with a transparently anti-Semitic campaign against George Soros, who was a childhood survivor of the Hungarian holocaust. Pictures of Soros were plastered everywhere with the slogan ‘Let’s not allow Soros to have the last laugh’ which bears a remarkable similarity to Hitler’s ‘Prophecy’ speech on 30 January 1939, which he repeated many times. Hitler promisedthat if there was another world war then

The Jewish race which only received my prophecies with laughter … that I would then among many other things settle the Jewish problem. Their laughter was uproarious, but I think that for some time now they have been laughing on the other side of their face. Today I will once more be a prophet: If the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevization of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe!’.

Orban describedAdmiral Horthy, the pro-Nazi ruler of Hungary, who oversaw the deportation of nearly half a million Jews to Auschwitz as an ‘exceptional statesman’. None of this prevented Benjamin Netanyahu forging a close alliance and friendship with Orban.

Poland, as part of the Vizigrad 4, has a government which is stuffed with anti-Semites. Defence Minister Antoni Macierewicz told listeners to the anti-Semitic Catholic radio station Radio Maryja in 2002 that he had read Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a notorious anti-Semitic forgery by the Czarist secret police and that “Experience shows that there are such groups in Jewish circles.” Polish defence minister condemned over Jewish conspiracy theory

Hitler, in Mein Kampf wrote that

‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion‘are based on a forgery’, the Frankfurter Zeitung moans and screams once every week: the best proof that they are authentic.’

Anna Zalewska, Poland's Education Minister discounted two well-documented massacres of Jews, including Jedwabne, by calling them a matter of opinion. When far-right nationalists marched in Warsaw in 2018, brandishing slogans and signs that said “Clean Blood,” “White Europe” and “Europe Will Be White.” Foreign Minister Witold Waszczykowski saidthe march was fuelled by “patriotic behavior of Poles” and displays of xenophobia were “incidents” that were “of course, reprehensible.” See Why are anti-Semitic regimes so attractive to Israel and the Zionist movement?

It speaks volumes that there has been no criticism by the IHRA Alliance of either Poland or Hungary. Jew hate is the ‘wrong form of anti-Semitism’.

On 9th October Gavin Williamson wroteto Vice Chancellors ‘asking’ them to adopt the IHRA misdefinition of anti-Semitism. According to Williamson the number of universities who have adopted it, about 20% is ‘shamefully low.’ The full letter can be seen hereand here. Williamson tweetedhis letter making threats to suspend the funding of any university which defied his dictat. Such are the government’s methods of ‘persuasion’.

Williamson accuseduniversities of ignoring anti-Semitism whilst putting his hand on  his heart and bleeting that

‘I believe sincerely that adopting the IHRA definition is morally the right thing to do….You should have no doubt: this government has zero tolerance towards anti-Semitism.’

This is the same Gavin Williamson who has never displayed the slightest interest in any other form of racism. Williamson has said not a word about the Windrush scandalin which the government deported hundreds of Black British citizens to the West Indies, where some of them languished and died in poverty. Williamson has said nothing about the ‘hostile environment’ policy or the criminalisationof those who rescue refugees from the Mediterranean. It is the European Union’s unofficial policy that the more refugees who drown the greater will be the deterrent to future refugees. On all this Williamson has nothing to say. Nor has the IHRA Alliance.

You would think that organisations like the Holocaust Educational Trust would draw the very simple lesson from the holocaust that we should open our doors to refugees. If the Jews of Germany had found a refuge in the United States they would not have been exterminated but the anti-Semites, backed up by the Zionists of the time, opposed lowering the immigration barriers. Today Israel is trying to deport40,000 Black African refugees because they are neither Jewish nor White. Hence Zionist holocaust memorial groups shut their mouths and avert their eyes.

There is a very simple moral here.  When the State takes over the messages of anti-racism and converts them into ‘hate speech’ it depoliticizes the fight against racism and subverts it to its own racist agenda.

The IHRA was the product of a small group of Zionists, led by Kenneth Stern of the American Jewish Committee, whose goal was to define criticism of Israel as ‘anti-Semitic’.

At a conference ‘The Working Definition of Antisemitism - Six Years After’ organised by the Stephen Roth Institute,Mike Whine explained that the reasons for creating the WDA were

‘the demonization and disproportionate criticism of Israel which masqueraded as anti-Zionism, and which came increasingly from Muslims’.

Kenneth Stern, the principal author of the IHRA and an American academic, has spent much of the past decade railing against what he sees as the ‘bastardisation’ of the IHRA and in particular its use to brand individuals and groups as anti-Semitic. In testimonyto Congress in November 2017 he argued that ‘The definition was not drafted, and was never intended, as a tool to target or chill speech on a college campus.’[1]Perhaps not in his eyes but that was not how his fellow Zionists saw it.

When Zionism first arose it was seen as a Jewish form of anti-Semitism. The anti-Semites wanted Jews out of Europe and the Zionists also wanted them to go.  As Lucien Wolfe of the Board of Deputies wrote: [

I have spent most of my life in combating these very doctrines, when presented to me in the form of anti-Semitism, and I can only regard them as the more dangerous when they come to me in the guise of Zionism. They constitute a capitulation to our enemies.’.

There was more than an alliance of convenience between Zionism and anti-Semitism. Zionism saw the Jews in the diaspora as having been the cause of the anti-Semitism they suffered. In the wordsof Jacob Klatzkin, Editor of the Zionist paper Die Welt and one of the founders of the Encyclopedia Judaica

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

Theodor Herzl the founder of Political Zionism was effusive about anti-Semitism. He wrote in The Jewish State that:

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

Herzl lavished praise on anti-Semitism, without which there would be no Zionism.  It contained ‘the Divine will to Good, because it forces us to close ranks,… and through our unity will make us free.’

The definition has been criticised by academics such as Brian Klug, David Feldman, and Antony Lerman; and jurists including Hugh TomlinsonQC, Stephen Sedley, Geoffrey Bindman QC, and Geoffrey Robertson QC.

Tomlinson describedthe IHRA as ‘vague’ and ‘confusing’, that ‘lacks clarity and comprehensiveness’ and has a ‘potential chilling effect on public bodies.’

Lerman, a former Director of the Institute of Jewish Policy Research stated that

‘Not only is there now overwhelming evidence that it’s not fit for purpose, but it also has the effect of making Jews more vulnerable to antisemitism, not less.’

Sir Geoffrey Bindman described the 38 word IHRA definition as

‘poorly drafted, misleading, and in practice has led to the suppression of legitimate debate and freedom of expression.

Stephen Sedley, a Jewish former Court of Appeal Judge  said the IHRA ‘fails the first test of any definition: it is indefinite. He also described it as

‘placing the historical, political, military and humanitarian uniqueness of Israel’s occupation and colonisation of Palestine beyond permissible criticism.’

David Feldman, Director of the Pears Institute for the Study of Anti-Semitism described it as ‘bewilderingly imprecise”. Geoffrey Robertson QC  stated that it would ‘chill free speech’ and that it was ‘not fit for purpose’ 

Williamson, like all right-wing supporters of the IHRA, has never responded to any of these criticisms. In so far as the purpose of the IHRA is to use Jews and the the dead of the holocaust to legitimise attacks on solidarity with the Palestinians it is anti-Semitic. Jews are being used as patsies for Western foreign policy in the Middle East.

One of the major justifications of the IHRA is that whatever its faults it is the ‘self-definition’ of anti-Semitism by Jews. This is yet one more lie. The idea for a definition that conflated anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism originated in Tel Aviv’s Kantor Centre for the Study of Contemporary Jewry. The brain behind it was Dinah Porat, Chief Historian at Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust Propaganda Museum.

Hannah Weizfeld of the liberal Zionist Yachad complained that ‘when Jewish communities call for Labour to adopt the IHRA definition of antsemitism they are not allowed to define their own oppression.’ [2]  Jonathan Freedland likewise complained that:

On the left, black people are usually allowed to define what’s racism; women can define sexism; Muslims are trusted to define Islamophobia. But when Jews call out something as antisemitic, leftist non-Jews feel curiously entitled to tell Jews they’re wrong.[3]

Of course this dishonest polemic is all to be expected from these intellectual pygmies. No one on the left says that there is a ‘right to define’ one’s oppression. Oppression isn’t fixed anyway.

Such a formulation is racist as it assumes that there is one opinion amongst Jews, Blacks, Muslims etc. How people see their oppression is mediated by class, race and sex.  That is why collaborators with racism are to be found in particular amongst the Black and Jewish petit bourgeoisie whose goal is to create a capitalist paradise where they too can become exploiters and oppressors.

Not for nothing was Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association termed Black Zionism. Benyamin Neuberger wrotethat

Du Bois

The ideologues of Black nationalism had a warm and sympathetic attitude toward Zionism, too, which they saw as a paradigm for Black nationalism. … W.E.B. DuBois, one of the most important Black leaders in the first half of the 20th century told the Second Pan-African Congress (1919) that the "African movement means to us what the Zionist movement must mean to the Jews".

The IHRA has eleven illustrations of ‘anti-Semitism’, seven of which refer to the Israeli state. What for example has ‘Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis’ got to do with anti-Semitism? 

Israelis use the Nazis and the holocaust as a metaphor continually. According to Williamson and Keir Sturmer, when Professor Ze’ev Sternhell wrote In Israel, Growing Fascism and a Racism Akin to Early Nazism he was being anti-Semitic. [Ha’aretz, 19.1.18]., The fact that Sternhell was a world authority on fascism and himself a child survivor of the holocaust is irrelevant to racists like Williamson. What is clear is that its not Jews who are ‘self defining’ but people like Williamson and the Israeli state who are doing it on their behalf.

But even if it were true that Jews had all, except for the ‘wrong sort of Jew’ agreed on the IHRA so what?  The IHRA says that calling Israel a racist state ( ‘endeavour’) is anti-Semitic. But Palestinians in Israel are the subject of vicious racism, from police killings to confiscation of land, lower welfare benefits, no student grants etc. If Williamson is correct then anti-Semitism can now be true!  Can there be anything more anti-Semitic?

Why a definition of anti-Semitism?

The first question that should be asked in the case of the IHRA is why is there a need for a definition? When my father took part in the Battle of Cable Street against Oswald Moseley’s British Union of Fascists on October 4 1936, he was told not to do so by the very people who today are so concerned about ‘anti-Semitism’. Unfortunately Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell did not possess the political courage or intellectual capacity to call out these hypocrites for what they were. 

Did my dad need  definition of anti-Semitism before he joined with over 100,000 Jewish and non-Jewish workers in defeating Moseley?  Of course not. As he told me once, if you walked down the wrong street such as Ridley Road in the East End and you were Jewish the chances were you would get your head kicked in.  There is a perfectly good definition of anti-Semitism in the OED. Anti-Semitism is ‘hostility to or prejudice against Jews’ as Jews.  However if your real agenda is defence of Israel it is obviously unsatisfactory.

The IHRA isn’t even, as Stephen Sedley, a Jewish Appeal Court Judge wrote, a definition since it is indefinite. At 500+ words long it is obviously not a definition. It is a political formulation with only one purpose, to brand support for the Palestinians as anti-Semitic.

There have been dozens of articles written on the IHRA, most of them critical. There has been no serious defence of the contents of the IHRA.  Its defenders use identity politics as a means of supporting it. Because Jews allegedly support it, there is no need for further argument. In essence it is indefensible.

However the IHRA has been supported by the Establishment press, including both Keir Sturmer and Boris Johnson. Jeremy Corbyn voluntarily adopted it in December 2016 after Theresa May had embraced it. Once again Corbyn was a complete fool, making a rod for his own back.  The IHRA doesn’t rest on argument but the naked interests of those who support it.  As Marx observed the ruling ideas in any society are the ideas of the ruling class.

When I challenged Caroline Lucas the Green MP for Brighton Pavilion as to why she was supporting it, her only response was that it didn’t prevent support for the Palestinians.  In fact she is wrong.  The IHRA is there to prevent all but the most anodyne criticism of Israel.

Gavin Williamson’s threats are bluster.  There is no way he can stop funding 80% of universities.  However it needs a collective defence by universities, who should tell Williamson where to go.

It is also important that Palestine Solidarity Campaign, which has all but abandoned the fight against the IHRA, wake up to the fact that this is a battle that can be won if only they abandon their lethargy. Jewish Voices for Labour too have been flying the flag of surrender and at last PSC AGM its supporters, Naomi Wimborne-Iddrissi and Professor Jonathan Rosenhead provided cover for PSC Executive and told members that we had to recognise that some battles were lost.

It is a political battle that has to be won. Too many Palestinian solidarity activists believe that all is needed is more direction action and activism. That is important but to neglect the political struggle such as against the IHRA or to believe that all that is necessary is to  advertise the latest Israeli atrocities is to allow the Israel lobby an empty goal.

There should be a vigorous campaign against those universities such as Bristol and UCL which have adopted the IHRA. Our message should be that the IHRA has nothing to do with anti-Semitism and everything to do with suppression of free speech. The Zionists are jumping up and down at the refusal of academics to be brow beaten.  It is up to us to support them.

Liberty, the civil rights group, has passed policy opposingthe IHRA yet it refuses to campaign on the issue, basically because its right-wing leadership opposes that policy.  They need to be challenged.

This is a battle that can be won but if PSC, JVL and other groups simply go through the motions it will be lost and if it is lost then Palestine solidarity work will be that much harder on campus.

For further information see Robert Cohen’s excellent Open Letter to the Vice Chancellor of Lancaster University ‘don’t let Gavin Williamson bully you into adopting IHRA’

Tony Greenstein


[2]          Jewish Chronicle, 13.7.18., Labour needs to realise Jews' identity is inexorably linked to Israel, https://tinyurl.com/y6be5a6k

[3]          The Guardian, 29.4.16., My plea to the left: treat Jews the same way you’d treat any other minority, https://tinyurl.com/y6dw8t4c

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Please Support the Labour Left Alliance’s 6 Candidates for Labour’s National Executive Elections

October 19, 2020, 7:19 pm
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Roger Silverman is the only Jewish Anti-Zionist Candidate Standing because Jewish Voice for Labour Cowardly Accepted Momentum’s Veto and Withdrew Jo Bird


The Left has its back to the wall in the Labour Party.  The worst thing it can do is engage in wishful thinking.

As I predicted before the leadership elections, Keir Starmer is the candidate that the Deep State & the British Establishment want you to vote for. Despite Sturmer’s claim that he was the ‘Unity candidate’ ‘he is Establishment down to his manicured fingers’ and notwithstanding his youthful days of radicalism ‘Today he is the darling of the Right.’

I quoted from two Jewish members of his Holborn & St. Pancras constituency, Ruth Appleton and Amanda Sebestyen, that

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

Their advice was that

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

Momentum was split. Half of them, including Laura Parker Lansman's right hand woman, supported Sturmer. They also supported Angela Rayner, a right-wing nonentity against Richard Burgon and on the day Sturmer’s election was announced they issued a ludicrous statement that claimed victory!

We are proud too that, in four and a half years, Jeremy Corbyn and the movement that supported him has changed our party for the better and given voice to the hopes of millions who felt unrepresented in politics.... ... This is our victory. And we should be proud.


Coming from the organisation that did more to secure Corbyn’s defeat than anyone, it is no surprise that they claimed Sturmer’s election as a victory.

My own reaction was slightly different: Mogadon Man Assumes the Leadership of the Labour Party as Lansman’s candidate is crushed‘Starmer represents a return of the Blairite Right’ was my comment.

The Centre Left Grassroots Alliance Should Be Put Out To Grass

The Centre Left Grassroots Alliance was reconvened in order to stitch up a slate for the NEC.  The LLA was not invited. Meanwhile Momentum had held its own internal elections and Lansman’s Renewal slate was comprehensively defeatrf by the Momentum Forward group. Unfortunately there was no change of political perspective.

What Jo doesn't say is that she's standing for the Councillors' 2 seats because Lansman's successors and CLPD vetoed her candidature

Both Momentum Forward and the CLPD put a veto on Jo Bird, a Jewish anti-Zionist and member of JVL from being a candidate. Lansman had previously attacked JVL for not representing the ‘Jewish community’ which should be considered a good thing since the Jewish community is a reactionary and racist one that has voted Tory for the past half a century. Unfortunately, rather than refusing to back down and insist that Jewish anti-Zionists cannot be vetoed, JVL hauled up the white flag of surrender, suitably kosherised!

Jo Bird is now one of 2 candidates standing in the Councillors section which means she has no chance of being elected.



By way of contrast the lead candidate on the LLA slate is Roger Silverman, a Jewish anti-Zionist.  I have known Roger for over 20 years and he is a sound Marxist. For those who are interested in these things, Roger is the son of Sydney Silverman MP whose parliamentary life was devoted to the abolition of the death penalty.

I can therefore recommend, without a moment’s hesitation, that members, whoever else they vote for, put Roger at No. 1.  I would also recommend that the rest of the LLA slate be supported before you vote for any other candidates. The full slate is:

1.     Roger Silverman

2.     Chaudhry Qamer Iqbal

3.     Carol Taylor Spedding

4.     Ekua Bayunu

5.     Alec Price

6.     Steve Maggs


Even if the JVL doesn’t understand what is at stake, the Jewish Chronicle certainly does. ‘Liar’ Lee Harpin, its Political Correspondent, who was arrested in the hacking scandal, wrotea witchhunting article targeting shadow cabinet member Lyn Brown, the MP for West Ham, for supporting Roger and thus hinting to Sturmer that he should sack her for dangerous lefty tendencies.

The LLA has launched a petitionwhich is an Open Letter to JVL calling on them to support Roger.  In view of the fake ‘anti-Semitism witchhunt continuing and even increasing there is a burning need for an anti-racist, anti-Zionist, socialist Jew on Labour’s National Executive to call out the racist stiff that goes by the name of Sturmer (for those who think I am misspelling his name Der Sturmer was the anti-Semitic paper of Nazi Julius Streicher, Gauleiter of Franconia who was hanged after the war).  Sturmer’s racist support for Israel should result in his suspension.

If Roger Silverman is the ‘wrong sort of Jew’that is only because today most British Jews are, consciously or otherwise racists.  Anti-racists are a distinct minority in what is a very conservative community.  Ironically it was the Ultra Orthodox Union of Hebrew Congregations that dissociatedthemselves from the Board of Deputies attacks on Corbyn.

I recommend supporting 4 of the CLGA 6, Mish Rahman (who is a signatory of the LLA), Ann Henderson, Yasmin Dar, Gemma Bolton. Ann and Yasmin are already on the NEC and they have been good on the witchhunt.  Nadia Jama from Sheffied is a supporter of Lansman’s Renewal Momentum.  In Sheffield she supported Lansman’s coup and constitution, aimed at removing expelled members from Momentum.  She deserves absolutely no support.  I would rather see Luke Akehurst on the NEC than this treacherous Lansmanite.. 

Exactly the same goes for Laura Pidcock.  She made a name for herself early on as an MP for a number of ‘left wing’ anti-Tory soundbites but when it came to it she was as insubstantial as the rest of the Campaign Group.  Pidcock not only refused to speak out against Corbyn and Formby’s witchhunt but she personally told Chris Williamson, as co-Chair of the Campaign Group, that he should no longer attend group meetings. Chris was the only Labour MP with any guts and Pidcock not only scabbed on him but on Corbyn too, because the anti-Semitism allegations weren’t about me or Chris or Jackie but designed to remove Corbyn.

I would also recommend a vote for Cameron Mitchell and Mark MacDonald QC who, very kindly, gave me invaluable support legally in 2017 when, against the advice of all the other lawyers I consulted, he encouraged me to bring an action for an injumction against the Labour Party. The injunction succeeded  in December 2017 in delaying proceedings but not preventing them.

It really is shameful and an act of political cowardice that JVL accepted a veto on Jo Bird's candidacy.

Re Nadia Jama

There must be no return to the CLGA of old which put right-wingers like Ann Black on the NEC.  Come 2016 it was Black, as Chair of the Disputes Committee, who signed off on the suspension of Brighton & Hove and Wallasey Labour Parties.  The Leaked Labour Party Report makes it clear that both parties were stitched up.  I have twice emailed Black to ask if she regrets the decision she took to act on the allegations of lying right-wingers like Brighton Council Leader Warren Morgan.  Black has not responded!

Nadia Jama was prominent in the attempt by the Lansmanites in Sheffield Momentum to impose Lansman’s undemocratic constitution after his coup in January 2018. The first few attempts were defeated. Then Jama and her clique brought everybody and their granny to a meeting where they then had a (small) majority in favour of the constitution. Nadia Jama was a very vocal supporter of the constitution and of imposing it (which meant that 3 members of the local Momentum Steering Committee, who had been expelled by Labour, were unable to be re-elected to the SC - which was the point of the whole exercise. Everybody knew it and members debated at length how this was a witch-hunting constitution, because it barred from Momentum membership all those who had been expelled by the Labour Party. Needless to say, Sheffield Momentum imploded after that and the anti-witchhunt left went on to form Sheffield Labour Left. Local Momentum is now well and truly dead.

Nadia was briefly one of the two candidates supported by Lansman for the NEC by-election in February 2020, but he dumped her for Lauren Townsend and Leigh Brennan. She continued to stand though, but only got 13 CLP nominations.

However, she clearly remained a supporter of his (and vice versa) and was a signatory of Lansman's 'Momentum Renewal': She then apparently joined the LRC between February 2020 and August 2020, because it was the LRC who proposed her to be on the CLGA slate for this election, despite being told of what had happened the LRC nominated her.

Tony Greenstein


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Richard Seymour’s Journey to the Right Continues As He Abandons Class whilst Glorifying the Attractions of Fascism

October 21, 2020, 7:28 pm
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 Firstly it was ‘unconscious anti-Semitism’ that was Labour’s problem now we have a rewriting of the fight against German fascism

One of the iron rules of left politics is that refugees from the SWP’s internal regime almost invariably move to the right. So it is with Richard Seymour. The politico-psychological reasons for this I will leave to others. The sense of political freedom that comes from not having to pay lip service to a particular political line perhaps? Or maybe the stress of having to pretend that some organisation or other is really a genuine manifestation of the popular will rather than an SWP front group no doubt takes its toll.

Richard Seymour - is he the Guardian's replacement for the ever insipid Owen Jones? 

Richard Seymour who has had his Lenin’s Tomb blog since 2003 became a licensed critic within the SWP. Just as Kremlinologists became adept at reading between the lines of official Soviet pronouncements in order to gauge which way the wind was blowing, so some of us became adept at reading between the lines of Seymour’s blog.

The ideal German family in 1937

It all exploded in 2013 with the SWP’s rape scandal when women who accused the National Secretary, Martin Smith (Comrade Delta!) of rape and sexual assault found themselves under attack. At a kangaroo court, (Disputes Committee) they found themselves being questioned about their sexual history and they found themselves becoming the accused. The nearly all women Committee (the only the male member, Pat Stack dissented) cleared Smith and convicted the women of defaming an upstanding Central Committee member. They were even barred from the emergency conferences which discussed what had happened to them and other women (including a friend of mine) who were victimised and dismissed from their jobs with the party. All under the benevolent gaze of Kings College's Professor Alex Callinicos. This was the catalyst for Richard Seymour and hundreds of others to resign from the SWP. 

Jews in Stuttgart being marched to the deportation trains in 1941

Seymour, like many others was enthused by the election of Jeremy Corbyn as he wrote The Strange Rebirth of Radical Politics.

In April 2016, a month after I was suspended and as the witchhunt was just getting going Richard wrote a remarkably perceptive article Pitch forks at the ready in which he wrote of the ‘dishonesty, hypocrisy and malice’ of the attacks ‘which is more redolent of a McCarthyite inquisition than a real debate.’

Which of course was absolutely correct. Ken Livingstone had just been suspended for supporting Naz Shah’s meme about how it would be so much cheaper if Israel was transferred to the United States. Seymour wrote that

‘it is a grave mistake for anyone to either quietly condone the suspension [of Livingstone] out of a misguided sense of realpolitik... or vocally support the suspension in the vain hope that throwing one more carcass into the ravening maw of the right-wing mob will placate it... If you rebuke someone, they’ll demand suspension; if you suspend them, they’ll demand expulsion; if you expel them, they’ll wonder why it took you so long to get round to expelling antisemites...’

You cannot win by obeying this logic. And the logic which has been used to condemn Livingstone... will soon enough be turned on others. Corbyn, for example. If Greenstein can be suspended for criticising Zionists, if Bouattia can be vilified for the same, and if Livingstone can be monstered as a “Nazi apologist” for referencing actual historical facts, then how long before another round of demonisation of Corbyn on the basis of his supposed ‘connections’ to extremists... Pusillanimity in the face of this kind of inquisition is its own kind of liability. The more you concede, the more you are obliged to concede.... Alan Johnson, doyen of the 'antitotalitarian left' ... has stated the case very clearly:“Save your pitch fork for Corbyn”

Hotel Silber - former Gestapo HQ in Stuttgart

If Richard had confined himself to this analysis then he would not have gone wrong. But unfortunately, before long he was revising his opinions and trying to find something new to say. This is the problem with left-wing writers who want to keep the eye of editors in the bourgeois media. They end up trimming and cutting.

Two years later I came across Labour’s Antisemitism Affair on America’s Jacobin site. Jacobin is the premier left-wing publication in America for which I had previously contributed Rewriting the Holocaust about Netanyahu’s attempt to blame the Palestinians for the Final Solution (& thus exonerate Hitler). Now Seymour was hedging his bets. Yes ‘anti-Semitism’ had been weaponised but that was not to say that it did not have some basis.

Crowds Outside Hotel Silber in the 1930s

I wrotethat Seymour was

‘mired in the swamp of identity politics… a Jewish identity based around Israel and Zionism, suitably dressed up as a concern with anti-Semitism, is equally as valid as a Palestinian identity based on ethnic cleansing. If Jews can claim that they are oppressed because of hostility to Israel who is going to countermand this? When class and race are removed from the equation who is to decide who is oppressed and who is the oppressor? Everything is subjective and personal. All identities are equally valid, albeit some are more equal than others.’

I observed that

‘People who prize themselves on their detachment from the struggle and who adopt an aloof and condescending attitude to those who are involved in political battles are destined not to hang around for too long.

Unfortunately Richard did not heed my advice that

One of the hallmarks of socialist or left-wing writers is their commitment to the overthrow of the system we live under.  They employ their talents on our behalf not just their own…. People such as John Pilger, Naomi Klein, Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein and Tariq Ali have demonstrated their commitment under fire.  However the Left is also plagued by opportunists and turncoats, fair weather friends and erstwhile socialists like Owen Jones, … Others, like Nick Cohen, simply jack-knifed to the right.  American neo-conservatism is littered with the bodies of ex-leftists…’

There was no attempt by Richard to explain the origins of Labour’s ‘antisemitism’ campaign.  It was if it had appeared by magic.  An example of political spontaneous combustion. The idea of a deliberately co-ordinated and engineered campaign to destabilise Labour didn’t occur to Seymour.  The possibility of state interference completely eluded him. Seymour referred to the famous mural by Mear One, that was used by Luciana Berger to undermine Labour at the 2018 local elections, as being automatically antisemitic. Not once did he ask how a mural, which had been erased for 6 years, had come into prominence just before the 2018 local elections.  That, and only that, was the issue.

Hotel Silber in the 1930s

When talking about Livingstone’s remark that Hitler supported Zionism, Seymour changed his tune. No longer was it the case that ‘at worst he made a clumsy attempt to say something that is true.’ Now Seymour was of the opinion that Ha'avara, the Transfer Agreement between the Zionists and the Nazi state, was not so much a case of  Hitler ‘ “supporting” Zionism so much as using every expedient to expel Jews from Germany.’

But this was not true. Ha'avara was agreed to by the Nazis as a means of undermining the Jewish led Boycott of Nazi Germany. For a time the Nazi government, at the behest of the Zionists, forbade Jews going anywhere but Palestine. The Gestapo acceded to the Zionist demands that those taking advantage of Ha’avara should only go to Palestine.  Seymour git all of this horribly wrong. German Jews could always take their money out of the country. True there were massive confiscatory taxes which only got worse but Ha’avara made it worse, not better for Jews seeking to emigrate.

The Communist Party of Germany

According to the American Jewish Yearbook less than one in 7 of the nearly 450,000 German and Austrian Jews who got out went to Palestine (60,000) and that is larger than most estimates. Ha’avara was about the richest Jews, who could have gone elsewhere, not poor and working class Jews.

Nor is it true that the Nazis didn’t support the Zionist movement.  They did, vociferously, against the 98% of German Jews who were not Zionists. When the Nazis arrested thousands of Jews after Kristallnacht, orders came the next day from Heydrich that Zionist Jews were to be released immediately.  Zionist historian David Cesarani wrote describing how ‘The efforts of the Gestapo are oriented to promoting Zionism as much as possible and lending support to its efforts to further emigration.” (my emphasis) [The Final Solution (p.96)] Lucy Dawidowicz described how, on 28th January 1935, Reinhardt Heydrich issued a directive stating that

‘the activity of the Zionist-oriented youth organizations … prior to their emigration to Palestine lies in the interest of the National Socialist state’s leadership.’ These organisations therefore ‘are not to be treated with that strictness that it is necessary to apply to the members of the so-called German-Jewish organizations (assimilationists)’.  [Lucy Dawidowicz, War Against the Jews, pp.118]

Dr Joseph Mengele - the 'angel of death' fled to Paraguay and died in Brazil - Israel refused to call for his extradition as that would have upset relations with both these countries

Seymour accused Jackie Walker, by attending the ‘training session’ of the Jewish Labour Movement on anti-Semitism, of waging a ‘factional war’.  Seymour describes her comment that Holocaust Day was not “open to all people who experienced a holocaust.” as wrong. In fact Seymour was wrong. The holocaust in the Belgian Congo and Namibia are excluded as are all genocides before 1939. 

One unfortunate characteristic of Seymour is that he tends to pontificate about subjects he knows nothing about. For example Seymour quoted uncritically from a survey by the far-Right Campaign Against Antisemitism without asking whether it was designed to produce certain outcomes.

In Analysis: British Jewry and a feeling of insecurity Jonathan Boyd, Executive Director of the Institute for Jewish Policy Research described the CAA’s findings as being ‘based on a survey with little, if any, methodological credibility.’  Boyd described the finding that 45% of British people were anti-Semitic as a ‘deeply flawed read of the data’. The IJPR found the CAA's survey to be 'littered with flaws' and 'irresponsible'. Due to 'quite basic methodological flaws and weaknesses', its poll of British Jews had 'very limited capacity' to assess the representativeness of its sample.

Seymour quoted uncritically the CAA's findings without probing deeper.  Even the Zionist Community Security Trust’s Dave Rich wasn’t so superficial.  He observed that:

Nazi pageantry to hypnotise the masses

‘This latest poll showed something else that is interesting… that people who believe antisemitic things about Jews rarely think of themselves as antisemitic…. It is as if antisemitic ideas circulate in society and influence the stereotypes people believe about Jews, but this does not affect how people imagine they relate to actual, living Jews who they know or might meet…. Even people who believe there is a global Jewish conspiracy or deny the Holocaust are affronted by the notion they might be antisemitic. What antisemites really think

The CAA claimed that more than half of British Jews felt that anti-Semitism echoed that of the 1930s. Anshel Pfeffer in Ha'aretz observedthat if the CAA believed that “then it’s hard to take anything they say about contemporary anti-Semitism in their home country seriously.” Pfeffer noted, regarding the statement that Jews talk about the Holocaust too much in order to gain sympathy:  “too many Jews … are often too quick to bring up the Holocaust in order to make a point. … Holding that opinion doesn’t necessarily make you an anti-Semite.”  In other words a number of the anti-Semitic stereotypes were not anti-Semitic!

There were other indications that Seymour was writing in complete ignorance of what he was writing about. He described Gary Spedding, a Walter Mitty character, as a ‘Jewish left-winger’ citing his article We in the Palestinian Solidarity Movement Have a Problem With anti-Semitism.

If Seymour had been following my blog then he would have read my articles Gary Spedding - The Zionist Cuckoo in the Palestine Solidarity Nest, Gary Spedding Calls in the Police - I have been harassing him!, Gary Spedding – the Self-Proclaimed Expert on ‘anti‑Semitism’ and Jewish Voices for Labour Expels Gary Spedding & its Zionist wing (or some of them) - after much Blood, Sweat & Bile. However Seymour knew nothing about Spedding other than he was always happy to provide a rent-a-quote.

Spedding is not Jewish (nor is he left-wing, he is a former member of the Alliance Party in Northern Ireland) although that doesn’t prevent him telling Jews just what is and is not antisemitic. Spedding is not a Palestine solidarity activist and his claims to that effect are widely derided. He has no involvement with any Palestine solidarity organisation. He has been an avid supporter of the witchhunt and confessed to breaking down with tears of joy when I was expelled. Like most SWP exiles Seymour is trying to find a progressive space between the politics he once espoused and the SWP's right-wing critics. 

The KPD's Red Front Fighters Paramilitary Group - Banned by the SPD Government in 1929

Seymour has surpassed himself with his latest article The masses against the masseson German fascism. It can be read on the blog of Jewish Voices for Labour who, for some strange reason, decided to republish it.  When I went to the Patreon site, where it originated, I was asked for my credit card! Not only Rupert Murdoch operates behind a pay wall.

He begins as he continues telling us that 

‘It’s too easy to be antifascist on the molar level, and not even see the fascist inside you, the fascist you yourself sustain and nourish and cherish with molecules both personal and collective.”

The fascist inside you is an interesting concept. It is as if fascism is some kind of pathology that we are all infected with.  It mirrors the Zionist claim that anti-Semitism is a ‘virus’.  If what Seymour meant to say was that all of us have contradictory sides to us, that socialists can be oppressors on the personal level, then that is true but it is a product of living in a class society. 

Irony is sometimes lost on the Socialist Workers Party

Seymour writes that 

there was not a huge gap between the “Wild-frei” gangs, with their Dionysian sexual rituals – many of whom would join the Nazis – and the insolent SS boys who loved to strut about in their leather, and the girls who went into paroxysms of excitement when the stormtroopers showed up. 

I don’t know about the orgasmic excitement of the Fräulein but I can’t think of a more absurd comparison than between repressed Nazi sexuality and Dionysus, the Greek god of sensuality and hedonism as opposed to the austere Apollo and the Nazi ideal of youth: '"swift as a greyhound, as tough as leather, and as hard as Krupp's steel."

If Seymour knew anything about the Nazis and sexuality he would know about the disturbed, repressed, mysoginist and sadistic sexuality of the SS with their leather fetish. He might also care to acquaint himself with Richard Evans The Coming to Power of the Third Reich [p. 375] and the raid on Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science on 5 May 1933. The National Socialist Student League and then the SS destroyed and burnt thousands of books, documents and photographs in this world famous centre.  Fortunately Hirschfeld himself was abroad. The Institute was a champion of homosexuality, women's sexual freedom including abortion.  It stood for everything that the Nazis hated.

In his follow-up book, The Third Reich in Power [pp. 205-6] Evans describes the subversive power of jazz and swing and their attractions to the youth and how:

‘the free-and-easy social mixing of Jews, half-Jews and non-Jews in the social scene of the swingers was crassly at odds with the dictates of the regime’s racial policy. What had begun as an act of adolescent cultural wilfulness was rapidly becoming a manifestation of political protest.’

Annette Dumbach and Jud Newborn describe how, in 1936, 1,500 German youth had organised to attack Hitler Youth leaders at night. Likewise in Munich a group calling itself Red Anchor formed to attack anyone in the Hitler Youth. These groups had spread to Berlin and Cologne and in Leipzig two 17 year olds were sentenced to 3 years hard labour when the Gestapo caught them. [Sophie Scholl and the White Rose, p.39]

Of all this Seymour is blissfully unaware yet the Anti-Nazi League and Rock Against Racism capitalised on this image of Nazis as austere and disciplined when they coined the slogan NF=No Fun. We painted the National Front as austere and censorious.

Seymour went on to quote Daniel Guérin, who concluded after a visit to Germany that fascism

“surged forth from the depths of the German people. It’s because of its popular appeal that it was irresistible, that it swept everything else away;’

Seymour commented that ‘Somehow the masses had come to desire fascism.’ A quite amazing observation that is at variance with the facts. Seymour says that this led many of Guerin’s readers ‘to suspect he had lost his marbles.’ The same observation could be made about Seymour.

However I prefer to believe that Guerin simply changed his mind as his Fascism and Big Business is well worth reading,

It is true that Hitler’s main base of support was among the petit-bourgeoisie, the middle-class and the peasants but the working class remained impervious to his attractions.

What is really unforgivable is that in order to prove his point Seymour simply resorts to distortion. He writes that ‘between 1928 and 1933, the Nazis had added 16.5 million votes to their support.’

Either Seymour is ignorant or he is deceiving his readers. The March 1933 election was not free. Coming after the Reichstag fire it was held under a state of terror. Despite this the Nazis only got 44% of the vote and the KPD and SPD retained over 12 million votes.

Seymour omits to mention the two 1932 elections. He resembles another falsifier of history, Daniel Goldhagen and his Hitler’s Willing Executioners which held that Germans, all Germans, were eliminationist murderers. [see David North’s A critical review of Daniel Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners

In July1932 37.3% (13.75m) supported the Nazis compared to the 13.24m (35.9%) vote for the workers’ parties. However in November 1932 the Nazi vote fell to 11.74m (33.09%). The combined vote for the workers’ parties 13.2 million (37.3%) was one and a half million more than the Nazis’. By November 1932 the Nazis had passed the peak of their popular support.

Seymour misses these complexities because it would ruin his bankrupt thesis about the mass attraction of fascism. It was precisely because the Nazis were losing support and the fierce opposition to them by Germany's workers that the military and industrialists put Hitler in power.

But for Stalin's Third Period dating from the 6th Congress of the Comintern in 1928, in which reformist parties were termed ‘social fascist’, and the refusal to form united fronts with workers who supported social democracy, Hitler could have been defeated. The KPD was under Stalin’s thumb and Stalin was happy to see Hitler coming to power as a way of dividing the western powers. The KPD stupidly followed the foreign policy demands of Stalin rather than the needs of the German working class. But Seymour has other, somewhat more right-wing fish to fry.

Seymour writes that

‘Millions were infected by volkisch, racial-nationalist ideas, long before Hitler was even a clamorous, minatory nuisance in the fringes of the German Right.’

In fact volkish organisations had declined in number in the Weimar period.  Hitler and the Nazis played down anti-Semitism to the point of invisibility in the run-up to the 1933 elections. As Raul Hilberg wrote anti-Semitism in Germany ‘never became altogether respectable or truly prevalent.’ [The Goldhagen Phenomenon, p.723]

Ian Kershaw wrote that the millions of extra votes in the 1930 elections ‘‘were in no sense anti-Semites’. [Popular Opinion and Dissent, p.230] Zionist historian David Cesarani stated that Hitler’s attacks on Jews ‘diminished to vanishing point.’in the run up to the 1933 elections yet Seymour, whether out of design or ignorance, chooses to portray the German population as thoroughly anti-Semitic.

Seymour speaks of ‘a broad popular consensus favouring core elements of the fascist agenda.’ This is BBC history. Seymour writes that in the 1933 elections

‘the Nazis had a clear plurality in all but two constituencies. Moreover, it’s clear that on top of the Nazis’ 44 per cent of the vote, millions of centrist and conservative voters were willing to accept a dictatorship against the Left.’

Actually this is not true. The Catholic Centre Party and Bavarian Peoples Parties were dissolved by Hitler in July, just before the Pope agreed a Concordat with the Nazis in which he agreed that the Church would abstain from politics.

Seymour writes that his ‘version of events hasn’t been tenable for a long time.’ Well not amongst socialist historians but amongst the Neil Fergusons and Andrew Roberts I imagine that Seymour will receive a warm welcome! Seymour quotes Zionist historian Otto Dov Kulka

in the run up to the Nuremberg Laws (1935) and Kristallnacht (1938), the Nazi leadership was being pressured to act by violent demonstrations and pogroms.

and that ‘most disturbing is the role that a large, radicalised minority played in catalysing the regime’s offensive against Jews.’ as well as a ‘mass hysteria about Jewish “race defilers” This is simply not true.  He himself recounts this was called a ‘mass psychosis’ by a member of the Gestapo. Nearly all these riots and pogroms were by members of the SA and SS. Seymour informs his readers that

‘the same pattern of agitation occurs before and during Kristallnacht. The regime radicalised its base with intense propaganda, who in turn catalysed and consolidated the regime’s agenda.’

This is rubbish. The majority of Germans, including even members of the Nazi Party, were revolted by the SA pogroms of November 9-10 1938. The same Otto Dov Kulka wrote about how a Gestapo situation report after Kristallnacht reported how ‘the Communists declared their solidarity with the Jews’ and how this had found ‘eager support in middle-class and especially clerical circles.’[‘Public Opinion’ in Nazi Germany and the ‘Jewish Question’, p. 140].

Kershaw wrote of his

‘admiration for the courageous minority – overwhelmingly communist workers – who fought uncompromisingly against the Nazis…the vast proportion of them workers’ were put in ‘protective custody’ [Popular Opinion, p.71]

 Of Germany’s workers Seymour says nothing because it doesn’t accord with his narrative and in any case he clearly hasn’t read around the subject.

Kershaw wrote of Germans’ hostile attitude to Kristallnacht despite ‘the conditions of extreme terror and intimidation in which people live.’ (p.271) According to Seymour civil society was terrorised but that it was also an instrument in terror. ‘The masses were deployed against the masses.’

Kulka wrote of how ‘in some places the police stepped in to halt acts of terror only after the maltreatment of Jews aroused spontaneous popular opposition.’  What is Seymour’s take on this?

‘the tumult, in which cops were frequently called “Jewish lackeys” if they intervened, risked causing a rift with police who had thus far been smoothly integrated into the Third Reich.’

Seymour writes of how

‘the consensus behind the Nazi regime did not fall apart, according to Ian Kershaw, until the middle of the war when it became clear that Hitler was leading Germany to disaster.’

In conditions of extreme terror, 75,000 communists were placed in concentration camps between 1933 and 1935, of whom thousands were murdered. The idea of consensus seems a particularly strange way to describe what was happening.

The Nazi regime made every effort to inject anti-Semitic poison into the body politic but there is every indication, from the empty cinema halls for its anti-Semitic films that they were unsuccessful. Even Himmler was forced to admit that every German had his favourite Jew in his October 1943 Posen speeches.

When in 1937 Hitler opened a House of German Art in Munich a contrasting exhibition was held of ‘Degenerate Art’. It was soon closed down as the crowds flocked to it rather than the Aryan Art.

Seymour argues that the popularity of the Nazis was due to the fact that living standards rose. They did for big business and to a lesser extent the middle-class but not the working class with the exception of those working in the armament industries. From 1933 to 1939 wages fell, the number of hours worked rose by 15 per cent, serious accidents in factories increased and workers could be blacklisted by employers if they attempted to question their working conditions. Seymour should consult the GCSE History syllabus!

Seymour is taken  up with ‘the erotic glamour of (fascism’s) organised violence.’ Since Seymour begins his essay with Daniel Guerin’s visit to Germany before the Nazi accession to power, he should also consider what Guerin said in Fascism and Big Business:‘All ‘anti-fascism’ that rejects it [socialism] is but vain and deceitful babbling.’ (p.13) It is a message that Seymour’s former comrades in the SWP could also take to heart!

It’s not often that I agree with Graeme Atkinson of Searchlight magazine but his comments on the JVL blog were spot on.

‘Richard Seymour’s article is shallow and, sad to say, rather politically uninformed about the class nature of Hitler fascism and German working class’s resistance to it.’

The only mystery is why JVL thought it worth republishing this worthless, reactionary article. JVL seems to be attracted to trendy ex-leftists embarked on the road to the Right.

Tony Greenstein

↧

Picket of Guardian Calls for their Yellow Journalists and Luke Harding to Start Telling the Truth About Julian Assange Rather Than Being a Conduit for the Security State

October 23, 2020, 5:13 pm
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 Guardian Refuses to Print Letter Signed by over 1,600 people criticising their lying, dishonest coverage as tame leftists Owen Jones & George Monbiot Steer Clear of Assange


It must have been a shock to the Guardian’s ‘journalists’ on Thursday when 50 of us turned up, complete with whistles, banners and musical instruments, to say nothing of a sound system and loud hailer, to picket their offices in York Way, next to Kings Cross railway station.

The Guardian is now a scab paper

The reception from the public was phenomenal with motorists, lorry and bus drivers and even white van man hooting. It can’t have been a peaceful time for the Guardian’s journalists cowering away in their offices preparing their latest bile.

What amazed me about their all glass offices was that there was no sign or other indication that it housed the Guardian and Observer. Clearly those inside are so ashamed of what they produce that they don’t want to advertise their presence to the outside world.

The Guardian and its assorted collection of misfits going by the name of ‘journalist’ profited enormously from Wikileaks. The Guardian had a series of front page headlines, see hereand here, especially regarding the attack by a US helicopter that murdered 16 people including 2 Reuters journalists. Even this past June Paul Daley ran a large feature 'All lies':how the US military covered up gunning down two journalists in Iraq

The Guardian in the form of its execrable courtier come MI5 journalist, Luke Harding, put out a book Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy. In comparison to Harding Judas is a model of loyalty. It is clear from his book ‘Collusion’ that Harding has strong links to the Intelligence Services, including the CIA. They used to call such creatures company journalists, writing what they were paid to tell.

Harding published a password to the cache of Wikileaks documents that he had promised Assange to keep confidential and then lied about how Assange said that he couldn’t care less if named informants were killed. Other journalists present at the time deny that any such thing was said. 

Luke Harding and his conspiracy theories about the Russians having got Trump elected got their comeback when he was interviewed by Aaron Mate of Real News. Harding thought that it would be a normal BBC style interview where he is fed soft ball questions. When Mate challenged Harding over his assertions that Trump was in effect a Moscow agent, Harding became so pissed off that he simply left the interview at the end!

Harding co-authoredwith Dan Collyns a fake news article on how Julian Assange met with Trump’s campaign manager Paul Manaforte, not once but three times at the Ecuadorian Embassy. The story was clearly a piece of black propaganda fed to him by MI5 or a similar intelligence agency. Given that the Embassy was under close surveillance at the time, the CIA had subornedthe security company inside the Embassy into spying on Assange and his lawyers, you might have thought that there would be some evidence from security cameras, the signing in book and passing strangers if Manafort had paid Assange a visit.  In fact not a scrap of evidence has ever been produced yet the Guardian, like the media pimp that it is, did not have the courage or honesty to own up and apologise. Subsequently Glenn Greenwald comprehensively rubbishedHarding/Collyn’s article in the Intercept.


As I made clear when I spoke to the assembled masses, the Guardian has now got into bed with the security services under its overpaid editor (£350K+ a year) Kath Viner. The Guardian is now on the D-Notice Committee which MI5/MI6 use to pre-warn newspapers to steer clear of certain topics.  Under Viner and Freedland the Guardian has abandoned any critical overview of the security services.

There was a time when the Guardian refused to collaborate with the D-Notice system. Yet today it makes a pathetic attempt to explain away its collaboration as a ‘collaborative spirit (that) works’. Apparently the ‘rebranded system balances national security and freedom of the press’ This nonsense was demolishedby Mark Curtis and Matt Kennard in How the UK Security Services neutralised the country’s leading liberal newspaper

It wasn’t Guardian journalists but dissident Tory ones, such as Peter Oborne and even Peter Hitchens, the self-styed ‘Jabotinsky Zionist’ who have come out in support of Assange. The Guardian’s tame ‘left’ journalists – Owen Jones and George Monbiot – have kept their silence and behaved like prostitutes on a leash. Monbiot, according to Jonathan Cook, a former Guardian journalist and winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for journalism, said that the reason he hadn’t mentioned Assange is that he has nothing to say or add on the subject.  This in itself is a searing indictment. He could start by dissecting the Guardian’s behaviour!


Rather than go through the list of vituperative articles by the Guardian’s miserable presstitutesI refer people to 5 Filters article The Guardian's war on Assange - Dump the Guardian! where they list 44 articles attacking Assange including James Ball’s classic doppelganger The only barrier to Julian Assange leaving Ecuador’s embassy is pride. Ball confidently predicted that

‘The WikiLeaks founder is unlikely to face prosecution in the US, charges in Sweden have been dropped – and for the embassy, he’s lost his value as an icon.’

If anyone is suffering from a surfeit of pride it is James Ball who refuses to apologise or explain this and similar articles.

This is the level of 'humour' from the Guardian's snide Hyde - what I ask myself is Marina Hyde for?


Unfortunately one bad thing that hasn't gone away is Marina Hyde and her tedious 'jokes'

Possibly the most vitriolic and poisonous of the presstitutes is Marina Hyde, whose wit and wisdom is to callAssange ‘possibly even the biggest arsehole in Knightsbridge.’ That is what passes for humour at the Guardian these days. I’ve often wondered what Marina Hyde is for.  She is neither humorous nor does she possess any visible signs of intelligence, which probably means that she is over qualified to work at the Guardian these days.

I write with a certain amount of anguish, as I took the Guardian every day for nearly 40 years.  Even when I was scraping by on income support I always ensured that I could afford a copy and when I went abroad I usually hunted down a copy.  No longer.

These were the days of journalists like the path-breaking Michael Adams, who personally had a major impact on me when I saw him speak as a schoolboy in Liverpool.  People like David Hirst, their brilliant Middle East correspondent, John Palmer their socialist European Editor, Jonathan Steele, Victor Zorza who alone among the press predicted the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, Victoria Brittan and Richard Gott.  Serious and committed journalists who had integrity and ethics.

Today what is there now that Gary Younge has gone?  What I don’t understand are the pathetic insipid creatures who actually contribute money to the Guardian on the web as if it were a charity! We need to remind them of the massive salaries of Viner, Freedland and co. The Guardian is a massive media company not a charity and we should Boycott the Guardian,

The only decent journalist on the Guardian is their cartoonist Steve Bell and Kath Viner has terminated his contract.

Not one Guardian ‘journalist’ felt brave enough to come down and meet us leaving it to 2 security guards as they hid away. A message was read out from Jonathan Cook and another solidarity message from Chris Williamson, the former MP for Derby North. Jonathan’s speech was based on a recent blistering article.

Here’s what John Pilger saidabout the Guardian’s behaviour:

‘The Guardian has exploited the work of Assange and WikiLeaks in what its previous editor called "the greatest scoop of the last 30 years". The paper creamed off WikiLeaks' revelations and claimed the accolades and riches that came with them.

With not a penny going to Julian Assange or to WikiLeaks, a hyped Guardian book led to a lucrative Hollywood movie. The book's authors, Luke Harding and David Leigh, turned on their source, abused him and disclosed the secret password Assange had given the paper in confidence, which was designed to protect a digital file containing leaked US embassy cables.

When I first saw this I wondered what flattened guinea pigs meant but then I realised it was probably when the oversized Moore sat on one. More schoolgirl 'humour'

Glenn Greenwald, who used to work at the Guardian describedLuke Harding’s method:

The Guardian’s happy to be used ...if you publish something like a totally fake story, there are so many benefits to it and almost no consequences. ...If you look at Luke Harding’s traffic metrics, they went through the roof. That’s an incentive scheme to continue to do shitty journalism. ...

...I've come to peace with the fact that this story will never be retracted even though everyone - including at the @Guardian, I am sure - knows it is utter bullshit - a joke - but it's still worth notingbecause it shows how unmoored the media is to any notions of accountability

Media Lens saidof Harding’s fake Manafort article that

No shred of evidence has ever been produced for this claim, which WikiLeaks and Manafort have both vehemently denied, and the story has been widely regarded as fake from virtually the hour of its publication. Luke Harding, the lead journalist on the story, and his editors Paul Johnson and Katharine Viner, have never apologised or retracted the story; nor have they responded to the many challenges about it. As we have previously noted, the Guardian has a disreputable record in publishing nasty, abusive and derogatory pieces about Assange.

Matt Kennard tweeted (@KennardMatt)

The treatment of Julian Assange by the Guardian has been so disgusting its beyond words. He took all the risk. Will probably never experience freedom again. And they just collected their awards and turned the newspaper into one big attack sheet. No campaign to free him. Nothing.

Thursday was the first picket of The Guardian. We intend to do a monthly picket of this rag as and until it faces up to its responsibility. 

I should add that I tried to contact Guardian Letters on at least 5 occasions and left voicemails. It seems that the new Letters Editor Rory Foster has decided to use voicemail as a shield against readers.

Meanwhile many thanks to the Morning Star for printing the letter in its Thursday edition last week. Unfortunately despite promises to the contrary, Canary failed to do so. The full letter can be seen here

Tony Greenstein

Latest News from the Defend Assange Campaign

Ten years ago today, WikiLeaks released the largest classified military leak in history: the Iraq War Logs.

The Assange Defense Committee will release a video tomorrow to commemorate this anniversary. The video explores the background of the leaks, what was revealed, and their impact. Today, we want to give you a sneak preview of our video!

What Happened?

In early 2010, U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning was alarmed by the abuses she saw on the ground in Iraq. Her superior officers showed little concern, so she eventually decided to share evidence with the media.

When national news outlets weren’t interested, she contacted WikiLeaks and later sent them the files. WikiLeaks reviewed them, redacted sensitive information, and released 391,832 documents online several months later.

What Was Revealed?

The three biggest categories of revelations are:

1.    Civilian Casualties. At least 15,000 unreported civilian casualties, which had been concealed by coalition forces, were verified as a result of the release.

2.    War Crimes: The Iraq War Logs showed how coalition forces had killed journalists and other innocent civilians, often dishonoring their memories by labelling them “enemy killed in action” in order to cover up the events.

3.    Human Rights Abuses: The documents revealed that U.S. forces knew prisoners they turned over to allies were subjected to abuse, torture, rape, and murder, but that they had a “formal policy of ignoring such allegations.”

The Iraq War Logs were a major factor in helping to public opinion about the war. We hope you will watch and share our video on social media (check us out on Twitter and Facebook), or visit our blog at AssangeDefense.org.

Solidarity,

Assange Defense Committee

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