Israel’s Supporters and the JLM are not happy with the election results
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Al Jazeera under cover reporter captures Joan Ryan MP making a joke about a corrupt £1m payment intended to destabilise Corbyn
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| Al Jazeera under cover reporter captures Joan Ryan MP making a joke about a corrupt £1m payment intended to destabilise Corbyn |
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| ex-Blairite Home Office Minister MP Joan Ryan leads attack on Corbyn. Ryan's only claim to fame was claiming the second largest expenses in 2005/6 and coming top of the expenses league the following year! Voted out in 2010 she spent much of the time getting people to delete critical references to her expenses on Wikipedia |
Most people in the Labour Party are delighted that instead of a Nick Cohen meltdown [Don’t tell me you weren’t warned about Corbyn] Labour under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership gained over 40%, the highest vote since 2001 and the largest increase of any party since Attlee in 1945. I said most people, not all people. Even sections of the Right, Owen Smith, Chuku Ummuna and even Peter Mandelson paid tribute to Jeremy Corbyn and ate generous helpings of humble pie.
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| Jeremy Newmark sits side by side with Mark Regev, Netanyahu's personal PR man, who justified the massacre of 2200 Palestinians in Gaza 2 years ago |
However there were some people who were bitterly disappointed. They had been hoping to launch a volley of venomous attacks on ‘Corbyn the loser’ as soon as the polls closed. People like Joan Ryan MP, the Chair of Labour Friends of Israel had made it clear during the election that she preferred pro-Zionist Theresa May to Corbyn. Jeremy Newmark, the Chair of the Jewish Labour Movement and the defeated candidate in Finchley and Golders Green, must have gone to bed a bitter and disappointed man. All his good work undermining Corbyn had been undone at a stroke by this youth rebellion.
Labour Friends of Israel and Jewish Labour Movement MPs and candidates consistently attacked Jeremy Corbyn during the election campaign and said vote for them despite Corbyn. Not just the execrable Joan Ryan but Hove’s Peter Kyle, Wes Streeting and Jeremy Newmark. Loyalty to Apartheid Israel is far more important to them than a Labour win in Britain.
Things have gone quiet on the ‘anti-Semitism’ front of late. What with the General Election and the terrorist attacks and now the awful tragedy of the Grenfell Tower, the fake ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign has gone quiet. We haven’t even had any news about ‘Labour anti-Semitism’. I no longer have to look over my shoulder before going out in the morning in case someone is about to attack me!
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Tulip Siddiq is one of the pro-Israel MPs trying to reignite the fake anti-Semitism campaign |
Unlike the atrocious attack on Finsbury Road mosque and the massive increase in Islamaphobic attacks in the wake of the recent terrorism attacks, Jews have it pretty good. They are a small, relatively prosperous white minority. Anti-Semitism is a marginal phenomenon, which exists mainly on social media where one nut can create a storm. When anti-Semitism was a problem in Britain, in the 1930’s and immediately after the war, then it was the same Tories who today love Israel who barred Jews from their golf clubs and believed they were an alien minority.
It is because of the lack of real anti-Semitism that the Zionist lobby has decided to try and rekindle the false and fake ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign. Zionism has no problem with genuine anti-Semitism. On the contrary it has historically welcomed it because without anti-Semitism there would not have been enough immigrants for Israel.
The success of Jeremy Corbyn in turning the Tory tide is making these racists sick to the gills which is why they are trying to relaunch the false ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign in the hope of dividing the Party, sowing dissent and providing succour to the Tories. False anti-Semitism and false victimhood are their chosen strategy for defending a state which demolishes Palestinian homes, even of Israel’s own Arab citizens in order to make way for Jewish homes and towns.
In Israel ‘Judification’ is official policy. Google ‘The Koenig Plan’ or the ‘Prawer Plan’. In Nazi Germany they had deJewification campaigns. Israel is a state which officially does its best to stop Jews and Arabs having sexual relationships. A Jewish state means a Jewish Supremacist State. It isn’t a constitutional adornment. Purity of race and a Jewish settler state goes hand in hand. This is what Ryan, Kyle and Newmark are defending.
It is essential that if there is a further round of false ‘anti-Semitism’ allegations that Jeremy Corbyn stands firm and calls it out. There is no future in trying to appease the supporters of Israel. You cannot appease racists or the supporters of racism. If Corbyn had, at the very start, said that yes he condemns anti-Semitism and he also condemns false accusations of anti-Semitism directed against supporters of the Palestinians (and even against Jewish anti-Zionists) then he could have defused these attacks early on.
Corbyn above all knows that the ritual response of Zionism’s supporters to opposition to Israel and what it does to the Palestinians has always been false accusations of ‘anti-Semitism’. They even invented a ‘new anti-Semitism’ since the traditional anti-Semitism (hatred or hostility to Jews) didn’t accord with hatred of racist Israel.
Nothing Corbyn says or does will ever satisfy Israel’s supporters. They are part of the NATO supporting friends of US imperialism. Corbyn will never be acceptable to them which is why the Left in the Labour Party needs to be resolute in opposing any further appeasement of these people. If they think the Labour Party is anti-Semitic then they should clear off and join the Tory Party, the traditional home of genuine anti-Semitism.
Read Asa Winstanley’s important article below from Electronic Intifada
Tony Greenstein
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| The Jewish Chronicle edited by ex-Express editor Jonathan Pollard, is up to its old tricks - Jeremy Corbyn is apparently a liability. |
Labour Friends of Israel chair Joan Ryan, center, suggested Theresa May would be a better prime minister than Jeremy Corbyn. (Facebook)
“I was wrong about Jeremy Corbyn” said failedLabour leadership challenger Owen Smith the day after the UK general election.
Corbyn gained 30 seats for Labour despite media predictions he could loseas many as 80.
In so doing, Corbyn deniedConservative Prime Minister Theresa May her majority – a triumph for Labour relative to the consensus that the party was heading for disaster.
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| This was the message of Jewish Labour Movement - don't support Corbyn - the Zionists are now sick over the result |
Smith’s line summed up the general attitude of Corbyn’s critics in the Parliamentary Labour Party.
Three-quartersof them called for him to go last year, in a failed coup which was swiftly followed by Smith’s leadership challenge.
But in the wake of last week’s unexpected electoral gains, once-critical Labour lawmakers and political commentators have lined up to eat some of the same humble pie as Smith. In a gesture of reconciliation, Corbyn brought Smith back into the Shadow Cabinet this week.
Some hardliners, however, have rejected Corbyn’s outstretched hand – none more so than the party’s internal Israel lobby.
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| Jeremy Newmark, Chair of JLM and failed candidate in Finchley & Golders Green - branded a liar by an Employment Tribunal in Fraser v University Colleges Union |
Making demands
Writing in the right-wing Jewish Chronicle on Wednesday, Labour Friends of Israel chair Joan Ryan demanded that Corbyn cut ties with the Palestine Solidarity Campaign to prove Labour is a “credible party of government.”
Ryan’s demands are extraordinary, especially since she used the general election campaign to bad-mouth her own party and its leader.
The PSC responded to Ryan, saying that “our values are those of principled respect for the human rights of everyone – Palestinian and Israeli – as well as international law.”
“We know that these are the values to which Jeremy Corbyn subscribes,”the group added. “That is why we are proud to have him as a patron.”
Ryan also slammed Corbyn as having “long-standing involvement with anti-Israel activism” and called for him to atone by holding talks with Israel’s Labor Party– a racist organization which has recently been in talksto join the hard-right government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
She also threatened to revive yet again the anti-Semitism witch hunt which engulfed Labour last year, when dozens of members were suspended without due process, often based on grossly exagerated or entirely fabicated charges.
Ryan herself was caught personally engaging in concocting false anti-Semitism charges against a party member who questioned Labour Friends of Israel’s position on Israeli settlements, which are illegal under international law.
Yet in her Jewish Chronicle article, Ryan demanded that Corbyn “address adequately the problem of anti-Zionist anti-Semitism within Labour’s ranks.”
Undermining Corbyn
In fact, over the last year, Corbyn repeatedly denouncedanti-Semitism and ordered an independent inquiry– the Chakrabarti report– which has led to institutional changes within Labour.
Ryan ran a defeatist election campaign, which amounted to sabotage of the Labour leader’s chances of entering 10 Downing Street as prime minister.
“Many” local people “tell me they have more confidence in Theresa May as prime minister than they would have in Jeremy Corbyn,” she wrote in a letter to voters in her district.
Despite her attacks on Corbyn, Ryan, like dozens of other Labour lawmakers who had worked against him, was re-elected on the coattails of his popular manifesto.
Yet anonymous “figures” and “sources” have continued to denounce Corbyn to The Jewish Chronicle and otherright-wing media this week.
The Jewish Chroniclequoteda “senior pro-Israel Labour” source explaining that the tactic used by Ryan of talking down the party’s chances had been part of a broader pro-Israel strategy.
“I told people Corbyn absolutely would not win and they could vote Labour,” the source said. “We managed to get people who hate Corbyn to vote for Corbyn’s Labour Party.”
“Bang on his door”
But these pro-Israel elements are evidently shocked and disappointed that under Corbyn’s leadership the party did too well at the ballot box.
The source indicated that the pro-Israel forces would continue to undermine Corbyn just as the Labour Party is more confident than it has been in years.
“Communal groups”– a reference to pro-Israel organizations that claim to speak on behalf of the Jewish community – “will have to do what they did before and either ignore him [Corbyn] or work around him,” the source said.
The source also predicted that pro-Israel lawmakers will “be happier to bang on his door now – about anti-Semitism or Israel.”
Like other Corbyn critics, Tulip Siddiq, a Labour Friends of Israel supporter, was re-elected with an increased majority – despite her own efforts to keep the anti-Semitism witch hunt rumbling.
After the election, she toldthe Jewish News that “there are elements of anti-Semitism in the party that have not been dealt with properly.”
She vowed the she, along with Labour Friends of Israel leader Ryan and fellow member Wes Streeting“will stand up … we can’t go on like this.”
Blurring the line
FailedLabour parliamentary candidate Jeremy Newmark, a veteran leader in the UK’s Israel lobby, wrote in The Times of Israel on Wednesday that after the election, “many things remain unchanged” and “we still need to turn a corner regarding anti-Semitism in the Labour Party.”
Newmark called for the Chakrabarti report to be “revisited,” despite the fact that the Jewish Labour Movement, the internal party pro-Israel group that he heads, had initially welcomed it last year as “sensible and firm.”
Newmark also called for a mooted Labour Party rule book change put forward by his pro-Israel group to again be pushed at the party conference in September.
The change would “recognize that it is not acceptable to use Zionism as a term of abuse”– potentially making criticism of the Israeli state’s official ideology an infraction punishable by expulsion from Labour.
The rule change would also apply to Zionism a definition of a racist incident “which places particular value upon the perception of the victim/victim group.” In other words, a concept developed to protect vulnerable groups from bigotry would be co-opted to protect Israel from criticism by giving Israel’s apologists the right to determine which criticisms of Israel they deem “anti-Semitic.”
If adopted, such a rule would further conflate anti-Semitic bigotry against Jews, on the one hand, with anti-Zionism – opposition to Israel’s exclusivist ideology that discriminates against Palestinians– on the other.
Blurring the line between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism has been a key objective of Israel and its surrogates.
New-old lines of attack
Newmark also revealed the lines of attack the Israel lobby will use against Corbyn. “The immediate agenda is clear,” he wrote, calling for two prominent Labour critics of Israel to be expelled: former London mayor Ken Livingstoneand Jewish anti-racism activist Jackie Walker.
None of the smearsused by hostile media and right-wing Labour lawmakers last year seemed to work.
Even the false and grossly exaggerated charges of anti-Semitism had their limits.
But bereft of ideas to stop Corbyn eventually entering Number 10 – as now looks increasingly plausible– Israel’s allies in the Labour Party appear determined to bring this manufactured crisis back.