The Mask of Deceit Slips from the Face of Chakrabarti as She Supports Livingstone’s Expulsion

On the day when I gave my evidence Chakrabarti had such a stinking cold that I wasn’t sure how much she took in. Naomi Wimborne-Iddrissi from Free Speech on Israel accompanied me. Yet I remembered that she asked me about the publicity and press leaks that had accompanied my suspension and sure enough her condemnation of leaks by the Compliance Unit figured prominently in the Report. 

Nonetheless, almost uniquely on the left, I was not overwhelmed by the Chakrabarti Report.  Like many others I was pleased at her recommendations over the disciplinary process and her emphasis on due process and natural justice.  I was also happy at the way she dealt with the attempt of the Jewish Labour Movement and the Zionists to distort the recommendations of the MacPherson Report into Stephen Lawrence, which had proposed that where someone complained of a racial attack it was the Police’s duty to record the attack as a racial incident. 

The Zionists, who had never once been part of the Stephen Lawrence campaign used this recommendation to say that when someone said they had been the victim of a racial incident they were to be believed without further question or investigation. The subjective viewpoint of the ‘victim’ was all that was necessary. 

So according to this ‘logic’ where a woman complains of rape the man is automatically guilty.  Where someone complains of being the victim of a racial attack they are to be believed automatically.  Court hearings, cross-examination and evidence would become redundant.  Such a system sounds more like Israel’s policy of ‘administrative detention’ or internment without trial.  Suffice to say, any manner of racists, Zionists especially, could claim to be the ‘victim’.  Chakrabarti dispensed with this nonsense quite thoroughly.

Yet I was not happy with the sections on Zionism and racism. My blog post Chakrabarti – A Missed Opportunity to Develop an Anti-Racist Policy for Labourdid not prove popular.  I can remember giving a talk on the Chakrabarti Report to the London Communist Forum and Professor Jonathan Rosenhead of the LSE and FSOI came along to critique my contribution. As did others.  In some ways this led to a parting of the ways politically with FSOI. Yes Chakrabarti’s Report had been good in some areas but its belief that Zionism was merely a rich strand of Jewish identity and its belief that comparisons between Zionism and Nazism were ‘incendiary’ and its description of the term ‘zio’ as racist I believed were fundamentally mistaken. Chakrabarti had no concept or understanding of what Zionism meant.

I also said that Chakrabarti was no radical.  She has always been a conservative defender of civil liberties. She is a former Director of Liberty (formerly the National Council for Civil Liberties) which has a record of people like Harriet Harman, Patricia Hewitt and others jack knifing to the illiberal right.  Chakrabarti seemed no different.

Her appearance on the BBC’s Sunday Politics show has proven me correct. Chakrabarti launched into a vicious attack on Ken Livingstone. Ken had learnt nothing from his behaviour.  He had been given a very lenient sentence and had then repeated the same ‘offence’.  He had brought the Labour Party into disrepute.  His mentioning of Zionist collaboration with the Nazis was an attack on all those Jews trying to escape Germany and so she went on.

What Chakrabarti revealed is that she is a petty minded, illiberal ignoramus who knows nothing about Zionism, the Jewish supremacist ideology of the Israeli state. Perhaps this gullible fool might take to heart the lessons of the past few days when Israel has murdered 60 Palestinians for the crime of trying to cross the fence that separates the concentration camp of Gaza from the Israeli state.  A fence that divides a land of plenty from a land of hunger, dirty water, poverty and no electricity or medicine.  Over 2,000 people were injured and many of them will die in the next few days and weeks because the health facilities of Gaza are overwhelmed, they don’t have the medicines and the ordinance that the Israeli troops use are explosive bullets deliberately designed to cripple and maim for life.

Despite this no less than 83% of Israelis support this gunning down of unarmed Palestinians.  Every survey of Israeli Jewish opinion shows that a majority of Israelis are deeply racist in not wanting to live next to Arabs, wanting their physical expulsion from Israel and a large majority even wanting to deprive them of the vote.

The main fear of Israelis is not ‘terrorism’, because these are unarmed civilians but the nightmare that refugees who were expelled from Israel in 1948 are seeking to Return.  This naked and raw racism is an integral part of Zionism.  Zionism isn’t some cuddly form of identity politics it is the belief that Jews have superior rights over non-Jews.  It means a permanent Jewish majority in Israel and state policies aimed at ensuring that as few Palestinians or non-Jews live in the country. It is also Zionism which dictates that the 40,000 Black African refugees in Israel have to leave. They are a threat to the Jewish racial majority. 

What Livingstone said was simply a matter of fact.  It is incontestable that the Nazis supported Zionism in Germany. It has nothing to do with an attack on Germany’s Jews not least because Zionism represented 5% at most of German Jews before the advent of Hitler. Many Zionists welcomed the rise of the Nazis to power because they saw it as a golden opportunity to prosper.  For years the Zionist movement alone in Germany had propagated the belief that Jews were a separate people who did not belong in Germany at all.  They were an alien people.  As Noah Lucas, a Zionist historian wrote:

This is not even controversial.  Other Zionist historians – Saul Friedlander, Shabtai Teveth, David Cesarani – also come to the same conclusion. Of course this is embarrassing to Zionism’s merchants of false ‘anti-Semitism’. How can they accuse others of anti-Semitism if they themselves subscribe to a movement which is a Jewish version of anti-Semitism?  Hence the cries and the squawks of Zionism’s apologists.

What Chakrabarti is really saying is that because Livingstone insists on expressing his viewpoint, even though he is right, he has to be expelled.  Like the illiberal tyke that she is, Chakrabarti doesn’t attack Livingstone’s views instead she attacks his right to express them.  Hence why she frames her criticism in terms of ‘bringing the party into disrepute’ the standard McCarthyist charge of those who wish to demonise someone whilst avoiding challenging their argument. Chakrabarti talks about a ‘lenient’ sentence, because Livingstone was not expelled the first time round for speaking his mind thus assuming that there has been any offence committed.

Let us remember that this hypocrite was Director of a group allegedly dedicated to protecting peoples’ civil liberties.  Here she is directly attacking someone’s right to express their views about a matter of history without being penalized. Instead of repeating what he said Ken should have shut up.  This is no academic matter. I am defending Stan Keable who is in danger of losing his job at Hammersmith & Fulham Council because he dared to express his view that the Nazis and the Zionists collaborated.

Instead of defending the right to freedom of speech within the Labour Party Chakrabarti talks about Livingstone’s ‘offence’ as if criticising Zionism’s record during the Holocaust is some kind of thought crime.

This pathetic little echo of dictators past went on to say that it would be ‘very difficult for any rational decision maker’ to allow Ken to stay in the Labour Party. Of course this execrable woman has no problem in allowing the defenders of Israel’s shoot to kill policy in Gaza, the stalwarts of Labour Friends of Israel such as Joan Ryan MP, to remain in the Labour Party. Chakrabarti has no problem with Louise Ellman and her defence of the imprisonment, torture and sexual abuse of Palestinian children to  remain in the party because, like Chuka Ummuna Chakrabarti too has nothing to say about the politics of race.  She too is an accepted part of the White establishment, Black outside White inside.  There have been no expressions of support for either Marc Wadsworth or Jackie Walker.  Support for Israel is a sine qua non of being accepted in the British Establishment.

In her final flourish this establishment muppet talks of ‘incendiary’ remarks.  Presumably anything which upsets the supporters of Apartheid Israel is incendiary i.e. controversial.  As for equating Jews with the Nazis Chakrabarti merely demonstrates her own ignorance of what Zionism is.  Livingstone criticised the Zionist movement not the Jewish victims of Nazism.  The fact that she doesn’t understand this is a good reason why she should shut up and learn something about the period in question.  Instead this police state democrat calls for the expulsion of Livingstone for daring to dissent.

Tony Greenstein