To Jon Lansman and Owen Jones racism exists in your head – it has nothing to do with politics, society or power relations
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| The arrogant and narcissistic Lansman is the real author of the Jewish Chronicle heading - he has consistently failed to stand up to the false anti-semitism campaign |
The Jewish Chronicle, which is a Zionist propaganda tract edited by the far-Right Steven Pollard, has declared war. In a front page Leader, over a picture of Jeremy Corbyn are the words ‘Anti-Semitic and a racist.’ Only Momentum’s idiot fuhrer, Jon Lansman, still pretends that the anti-Semitic smear campaign is about anti-Semitism. To everyone with eyes to see and a brain to think it is obvious that the artificial anti-Semitism crisis of the past 3 years has but one target – Jeremy Corbyn. Anti-Semitism is a cynical weapon. According to the JC:
Moshe Machover Interviewed on Real News Network on Labour's New Antisemitism Code of Conduct
Dame Margaret Hodge’s confrontation of Jeremy Corbyn in a corridor of the House of Commons, calling him an “antisemite and a racist”, seems to have burst a dam.... there has been an understandable reluctance in some quarters to confront the appalling reality that the leader of the party, and our nation’s most likely next prime minister, is indeed as Dame Margaret describes him.
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| Jackie Walker has been one of the principal victims of the anti-semitism witchhunt |
It gives me no pleasure to say that I was right. I have repeatedly argued that the real target of the witch-hunt is not Jackie Walker, Marc Wadsworth or myself but Jeremy Corbyn. On my Scottish tour last month in Scotland I had but one message. I have repeatedly emphasisedthat ‘Myself, Jackie Walker, Marc Wadsworth are just collateral damage. The target is Corbyn and the Left, whether he realises it or not.”
This time around there isn’t even the pretext of a long-forgotten mural, or a Facebook post. It is about removing Corbyn. The ostensible reason is the refusal to adopt wholesale, undigested, the bogus IHRA Definition of Anti-Semitism which Hungary’s anti-Semitic leader Viktor Orban is quite comfortable with.
Right-wing Labour MP, Margaret Hodge, who was accused by Alan Johnson, the Blairite Cabinet Minister of echoing BNP propaganda and who, when leader of Islington Council deliberately covered up the rape and abuse of children in care, accused Corbyn of being ‘a fucking anti-Semite, a racist.’
If all you read or heard was the press or BBC you would get the impression that Labour’s failure to adopt the IHRA meant that Labour supports anti-Semitism. It is implied that the IHRA is a universally accepted definition of anti-Semitism which only the political equivalent of flat earthers or anti-Semites reject. All opposition to a ‘definition’ whose sole purpose is to conflate anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism is simply erased.
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| This is anti-semitism - Netanyahu joining in the anti-semitic attacks on George Soros |
Supporters of Israel don’t even pretend that this is not their object. Stephen Pollard, the Jewish Chronicle editor, accusedLabour of being ‘institutionally anti-Semitic’ because it had failed to adopt the entire IHRA definition of anti-Semitism.
‘instead of adopting the definition as agreed by all these bodies, Labour has excised the parts which relate to Israel and how criticism of Israel can be antisemitic.’
Zionists throw up their hands in horror when you suggest that the ‘anti-Semitism’ allegations are about Israel! Oh no these liars argue, it is about anti-Semitism but then, at the first opportunity, they revert to Israel and Zionism like dogs returning to their vomit.
Jon Lansman, the unelected dictator and owner of Momentum is perfectly well aware of the racist nature of the Israeli state. In an article Labour’s antisemitism code is the gold standard for political parties he made it clear he spoke of Israel’s ‘racist state policies, not just in relation to the occupation and settlements, but also within Israel itself – the segregation of housing, education, employment, and systematic economic disadvantage.’
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| This is real racism - hundreds of Israeli Jews demonstrate against an Arab having a house in the all-Jewish city of Afula |
Lansman has a very good understanding of Israel but he is a Zionist, a Jewish supremacist. Lansman is fully aware of the demonstrations in the northern city of Afula where hundreds of Israeli Jews took to the streets to protest against the sale of a house to an Israeli Arab, yet he is incapable of drawing the conclusion that it is Zionism, the imperative for a Jewish state, that is responsible.
Israel is the equivalent of Apartheid South Africa or the Deep South at the time of Jim Crow. If there was any political depth or integrity, to either Lansman or Owen Jones, then they would question Israel’s claim that it is a democracy. A state which demolishes Arab villages in order to replace them with Jewish settlements and towns, is an ethnocracy. Yet the whole of the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism, is predicated on the idea that Israel is a liberal democracy.
Nowhere has Lansman or Owen Jones, mentioned that the IHRA is based on the idea that ‘criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic.’ How can criticism of Israel mirror that applied to liberal democracy when Israel is a Jewish supremacist state? Which other European state shoots down unarmed demonstrators or maintains a starvation siege of 2 million people?
In his recent Guardian article Lansman accepts that one of the IHRA illustrations of anti-Semitism, ‘Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavour’ can only be an attack on freedom of speech, given that Israel is undoubtedly a racist state. Lansman even has a dig at the Zionist Board of Deputies:
I don’t think these organisations, many of which failed to come out against the Blackshirts marching through Cable Street, or those that welcomed the presidency of Donald Trump have the credibility to criticise a political party’s robust, thorough and far-reaching code of conduct.
However the article as a whole was dire. Instead of pointing out that the IHRA ‘definition of anti-Semitism’ is more concerned about Israel than anti-Semitism, Lansman bent over backwards to argue that Labour’s new Anti-Semitism Code incorporates all bar one of the IHRA illustrations.
Lansman never bothers to ask what kind of definition is it that requires 11 arbitrarrily drawn up, barely literate illustrations? Corbyn’s fatal mistake was in ever adopting the IHRA. Corbyn should have rejected it out of hand. The Right have adopted it because it is a stick to attack the Left with and Lansman thinks he’s being clever in joining in. Former Court of Appeal judge Sir Stephen Sedley, who is himself Jewish made the obvious point that the IHRA ‘fails the first test of any definition: it is indefinite.’
Lansman and Owen Jones seems incapable of making the connection between Israel’s racist policies and the allegations of anti-Semitism. They seem to believe that the latter are genuine despite the fact that there has been no credible evidence for them. Those making the accusations, such as Jonathan Arkush, the Trump supporting Tory who headed the Board of Deputies, even accused Jewdas, a Jewish group, of being a “source ofvirulent anti-Semitism’.
There is a simple question that puts matters into perspective which is: ‘If Jews in Britain experienced the racism that Palestinians undergo would they have genuine grounds to complain about anti-Semitism’.
People like Jonathan Freedland suggest that because most Jews identify with Israel (Freedland quoted 93% but he ignored the Yachad survey The Attitudes of British Jews to Israel that show 31% of Jews declare they are not Zionists and that only 59% of British Jews define themselves so). Labour and the left have an antisemitism problem
But even if a majority of British Jews identify with Israel so what? Challenging an identity is not racist. What if a majority of Muslims in this country had identified with Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa against Salman Rushdie? Would that have meant you were anti-Muslim to oppose it? Or if a majority of Africans were to identify with FGM? Would it be racist to oppose FGM? If British Jews support Israel then that is reactionary and racist. Opposing Jews as Jews is anti-Semitic but not opposing the ideas that Jews hold.
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| Owen Jones - The Guardian's token leftist and a complete airhead |
Below is an extract from an interviewthat Owen Jones conducted with Lansman. It concedes everything and accepts that ‘anti-Semitism’ is a problem. Not once do these airheads consider that when you are defending Apartheid, the best form of defence is to malign your opponents. Not once do they ask why, if the real concern is about anti-Semitism, that Israel has the closest relations with anti-Semitic regimes such as Hungary and Poland (the Visigrad 4).
Since the purpose of Momentum is to defend Jeremy Corbyn, it is an outrage that Lansman, as its Chair, is legitimising the anti-Semitism attack on Corbyn.
Below is the transcript of Jones interview with Lansman. Jones makes cheesiness into an art form and sycophancy into a badge of honour. He doesn’t try to probe Lansman’s clichés.
Jones starts off by asserting that anti-Semitism is a ‘big problem’ on the Left and this is an assumption throughout. The problem is the repeated assertions by the Zionist, Labour’s Right and the mass media of this problem. Evidence of anti-Semitism is thin.
Lansman says that people are in denial about anti-Semitism. Why is this strange? Should they admit to something that doesn’t exist? He says anti-Semitism is different from other forms of discrimination whilst never saying how it is different. He then defines anti-Semitism as something people ‘have within them.’
This is the liberal explanation of racism. Racism is not something that arises from the psyche. Peoples’ prejudices arise from the society they live in. Racism is the justification for imperialism and colonialism. Refugees come here as a result of what we have done in their countries and then racism rears its head in opposition to immigration. This racism does not affect Jews who are White in this society. Anti-Semitism has all but died out.
It is sickening that at a time when Black British citizens have been deported to the West Indies, after 50+ years living here, that people like Lansman go on about an almost non-existent form of racism, a prejudice at worst. This blindness to real racism, against Black and Asian people, Roma and Gypsies, is itself racist. It is ironic that only 8 Labour MPs voted against the 2014 Immigration Act which created a ‘hostile environment’ that led to Windrush scandal. When Uncle Tom Chuka Ummuna goes on about ‘anti-Semitism’ we should remember that he supported the 2014 Immigration Act.
It is no accident that the right-wing press, the Sun and the Mail who employed Katie Hopkins as she compared refugees to vermin, are full of headlines attacking ‘Labour anti-Semitism’.
Let us be clear. Jews do not suffer deaths in custody, stop and search, deportations, economic discrimination etc. This is an exercise in false victimhood. The right-wing assertion that anti-Semitism is a major problem when it is not is in itself a form of racism. The false anti-Semitism campaign is about false victimhood.
Jones is particular facile when comparing male feminists who deny they are sexist to those who deny they are anti-Semitic. The relationship of men to women is not comparable to the relationship of Jews to non-Jews. Sexism exists both on a personal and societal level. Men have relationships with women in an entirely different way from that between Jews and non-Jews. Jones and Lansman also omit non/ anti-Zionist Jews who have been the target of the false anti-Semitism allegations and who have borne the brunt of the witch-hunt.
Lansman says anti-Semitism is a ‘prejudice in ourselves’. If that is all it is then it’s not much. Elsewhere he describes it as ‘unconscious’. If you aren’t even conscious of it then it doesn’t exist.
Jones suggests the problem is education which gives Lansman the excuse to suggest that supporting the Palestinians leads people to believe that Jews are ‘bad people’. This is an example of how Lansman can’t distinguish between Israel, Zionism and Jews. Support for the Palestinians has nothing to with hostility to Jews anymore than opposition to Apartheid in South Africa was about hating Whites. This statement demonstrates that Lansman is an entrenched Zionist. If people need education it isn’t about anti-Semitism but about Britain’s colonial and imperial past, including Zionism.
Lansman gives two examples of anti-Semitism. Someone accused him of being a member of the chosen race. Lansman is a Zionist, he believes that Israel was recompense for the Holocaust and he has justifiedIsrael’s ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians in 1948 to create a Jewish state. Clearly he accepts the Zionist notion of a chosen people or a master race which is entitled to dispossess the natives.
Lansman’s second example of anti-Semitism is even more absurd. Someone said to him that they hate Israel for pretending to speak for all Jews. It is obvious that that person referred to the Israeli state and Zionism. Israel says it is a Jewish state, it has just passedthe Jewish Nation State Law which means that it speaks not only for its Jewish citizens but for all Jews. When Netanyahu spoke to the US Congress he claimed to speak as the Prime Minister not just of Israel but the whole Jewish people. This is the basis of the Jerusalem Programme of the World Zionist Organisation. Why is this anti-Semitic?
Lansman also stated that ‘there was a remarkable level of agreement’ on the NEC about anti-Semitism. If so that is extremely worrying. It means that virtually the entire left of the NEC, bar Peter Willsman, has been fooled into accepting the right-wing narrative that Labour is an anti-Semitic party. Their failure to understand that anti-Semitism is being weaponised is pathetic. This is testament to the remarkably low level of political consciousness of Momentum NEC members.
Finally the reason why I describe Lansman and Owen Jones as racists is that according to their own self-indulgent and transparently superficial conversation, they are both racists since they themselves hold that everyone is infected with racism.
Racial prejudice reflects society and when society changes people change. Zionism however treats anti-Semitism, in the words of Leo Pinsker’s Autoemancipation,as an inherited disease, a pathology. In so far as Lansman and Jones are Zionists they are racists.
Part of the problem is that both Lansman and Jones, because they reject any Marxist understanding of class and racism in favour of a petty bourgeois idealism and empiricism, are both susceptible to Zionist identity politics which portrays the supporters of Israel as victims. That is the depths to which these two have sunk. They are playing into the hands of Generation and Identity, Europe’s new fascists. They too claim they are victims, of migrants. Zionists and Jewish supporters of Zionism are not victims. That is why Trump and Breitbart, Bannon and Richard Spencer all support them.
What is remarkable about these two is despite their own self belief, how crude and simplistic their understanding of racism really is.
OJ: How big a problem is anti-Semitism because it does exist on the Left and it strikes me that there is a broader pool of people on the Left who are in total denial?
JL: I think it is a problem that people are in denial of it. I think that is very different from other forms of racism and other forms of discrimination, sexism, homophobia etc. which people recognise that they have within them, they have to overcome. Why is it that people recognise those things in themselves but do not recognise the possibility even of anti-Semitism?
I also think an overglossy portrait of the Labour Party is painted by people who say that the Labour Party has always been an anti-racist party. Well yes it has always been anti-racist for the most part but there have always been problems, there have always been examples of racism within the labour movement.
OJ: Do you think one of the problems is for example you’ll come across the type of man who will go I’m a feminist so I can’t possibly be sexist. In the same way you get people who are left-wing who say I can’t possibly have any bigotry or racism because I’m left-wing so they then don’t interrogate their own prejudices.
JL: Every single one of us has grown up in a society which is racist, which is sexist, which is homophobic and every one of us is bound to have some of that within us. There is no one free of that and we should all be looking for signs of those things in ourselves in order to ensure that we do not act on the basis of. Our anti-racism has to involve searching for examples of anti-Semitic prejudice in ourselves at this moment, in the Labour Party, when we have clearly lost the support of the Jewish community.
OJ: Socialism has been very weak as a mass political force certainly in this country for so long and what happened in 2015 is that it dramatically changed very very quickly and hundreds of thousands of people got involved interested in politics, often for the first time or certainly for a very very long time in many cases but there wasn’t the political education there. There’s a crisis of political education on the left of the labour movement. How was that addressed and do you think that Momentum is part of that?
JL: I think it is a systemic problem. If you come into politics for the first time and you haven’t got a framework into which to put issues of racism or anti-Semitism then you are likely to think of people as good people or bad people and thinking of some people as bad people or in the context of the Arab-Israeli conflict might lead you, if you support Palestinian rights, to thinking of Jews as bad people. And that becomes a problem. So we do have a lot of education to do. I think we need to do direct education about the roots of anti-Semitism and other forms of racism and discrimination but specifically in the short term anti-Semitism.
OJ: There are some who argue that the Labour leadership has just failed to grasp the nettle on anti-Semitism what do you say to that and what do you think they have to do now?
JL: I think we’ve all failed to act sufficiently quickly, deeply and the problem is bigger than I used to think. I’ve seen it. It appears on my own Facebook feed.
OJ: Can you give examples?
JL: There’s been the more overt things like someone the other day who said ‘I suppose you think you are a member of the chosen race’ which is overtly anti-Semitic. But there are other people who’ve said things like ‘I hate Israel for pretending to speak for all Jews.’ And I thought you are saying Israel the State says that or the Israeli government? Or do you mean all Jews? Hate Israel? That’s something you hate Jews for or Israelis for? It seems to me that’s an overreaction.
It may well be that Israeli politicians don’t speak for us. They don’t speak for me. I’m a British person they don’t speak for British Jews actually. Not on matters of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. They might speak for Jews in Britain if they were making statements about the oppression of Jews in another country. In Hungary for example. Then they might speak for other Jews but they don’t speak for me on all matters. Of course I have strong disagreements with all Israeli governments over at least the last 2 or 3 decades.
And yet someone says this who appears to be a socialist who’s hating people or a country for that reason. That can only be seen I’m afraid as anti-Semitic. Inadvertent or not.
OJ: There was this story about leaked minutes from the National Executive Committee suggesting you and others actually hadn’t, in some cases had suggested actually these aren’t anti-Semitic or whatever. That had caused divisions and that had been leaked. What do you say about that?
JL: Well I haven’t actually had the benefit of seeing these leaked minutes and I am a member of the National Executive so I can’t really comment on what I haven’t seen. But I do remember the meeting pretty well and it wasn’t like that at all. Actually on anti-Semitism there was a remarkable level of agreement. I proposed because of the problems that we have been experiencing that we review the whole process by which we consider cases of anti-Semitism that are brought to our attention. From the point that the charges are brought to what the rules say through how they are investigated to how they are brought to the NEC, if they are passed on to the National Constitutional Committee which is the final court if you like, how that handles them. And has taken much too long to process them up to now. So that was a fantastic level of unity.
OJ: What is your message then to people who say about the NEC of the Labour Party which is now a majority of people on the Left that it isn’t going to deal with anti-Semitism properly.
JL: There isn’t one single person on that NEC who doesn’t want to deal thoroughly with anti-Semitism. And not only that we are more united on anti-Semitism than we are on pretty much anything else in the Party in wanting to eradicate it. I can assure you that Left and Right and everything in between, on the National Executive will deal with this issue.
We note with dismay and outrage the front-page headline in today’s Jewish Chronicle, which uncritically quotes Labour MP Margaret Hodge’s description of Jeremy Corbyn as ‘antisemitic and a racist’. This is a deeply offensive and very likely libellous statement. It is extraordinary that these accusations are being hurled at a time when, contrary to much public reporting, the Labour Party is in fact engaging very carefully and sensitively with the issue of antisemitism, on which it has accepted the core IHRA definition.
This inflammatory and insulting rhetoric, seemingly supported by many leading Anglo-Jewish institutions and voices, risks bringing our community as a whole into disrepute, and consequently fuelling real antisemitism. We strongly urge all Jews in Britain, whatever their political allegiances and views, to join us in repudiating the misuse of this very serious allegation, which imperils the norms of reasonable and civil discourse that we must all uphold.