Anti-racists and Anti-fascists should cut their links with Hate not Hope - You can’t fight fascism with racism
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| Lowles condemns Corbyn's decision to chair a meeting involving an anti-Zionist Jewish survivor of the Holocaust, Hajo Meyer. Talking about Israel's constant misuse of the Holocaust is 'quite terrible.' |
It’s a very simple argument. Israel is an apartheid state. If you support the world's only apartheid state then you are no anti-fascist. You can’t oppose the Islamaphobic far-Right whilst supporting the Zionist attack on Corbyn. Israel today is rightly seen by the fascist Right as an Islamaphobic state. Yet HnH is attempting to insert itself into Labour’s debate on ‘anti-Semitism’ and on the wrong side.
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| Nick Lowles of Hope not Hate |
In his article Labour and antisemitism: the way back from this new low Nick Lowles of Hope not Hate comes down on the side of the Labour Right, Tom Watson et al, who want Labour to adopt the IHRA definition of antisemitism which will render all meaningful criticism of Israel as antisemitic.
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| Nick Lowles playing down the impact of Bannon, who is pursuing Trump's agenda which is seeing a breakup in the European Union |
The wilful blindness of Hope not Hate’s Nick Lowles beggars belief. The main forces behind the far-Right in the UK and Europe are also the most ardent supporters of Israel. Steve Bannon, the anti-Semitic Christian Zionist and former Trump adviser; Richard Spencer, the neo-Nazifounder of America’s alt-Right, Geert Wilders, the Dutch fascist and Tommy Robinson.
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| Jonathan Arkush, President of the Board of Deputies addressing a Zionist rally which includes Robert de Jonge at hte front in a yellow starred teacher. |
I have written a number of investigatory articles on the Zionist supporters of Tommy Robinson. The Zionist Establishment in this country is not prepared to disown people like Jonathan Hoffman who keep company with Britain’s fascists and neo-Nazis. Jonathan Arkush, the past President of the Board of Deputies who spearheaded the campaign against Corbyn, was more than willing to address meetings that included these fascists.
Richard Spencer, the neo-Nazi founder of the alt-Right describes himself as a White Zionist for good reason. Israel is the model racial nationalist state for Generation Identity. A state which is based on the supremacy of only the Jewish section of its citizens. A state which is currently trying to expel 40,000 African refugees because they are the wrong colour and ethnicity, all with the supportof the Israeli Labour Party. Israel is, as the debate over the Jewish Nation State Law demonstrated, an apartheid society. It is a state based not merely on its Jewish citizens but Jews everywhere. Palestinians who live in Israel have no such rights.
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| What is terrible is the way the Zionist press sings in unison |
In his article Labour and antisemitism: the way back from this new low Lowles says that the question is not whether there is anti-Semitism in the Labour Party, but the ‘perception’ of an existentialist threat. So when the Zionist press go around stirring up peoples’ fears, we have to treat those fears as if they have some basis in reality?
The fact that Corbyn has been bullied into apologising for something that doesn’t exist proves nothing other than that you can coerce people into saying virtually anything. The Moscow Trials proved that innocent people confess to things they haven’t done all the time.
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| Lowles support for removing veteran left winger Pete Willsman from the NEC lines him up with the Right of the Labour Party |
If the Zionist press believe that Corbyn’s long record of support for the Palestinians constitutes an ‘existentialist threat’ then ‘existential’ has lost all meaning. Lowles repeats the Zionist mantra that ‘Some people are talking about leaving the country if Labour wins a General Election.’ This is the kind of blackmail that was used in Nicaragua and Venezuela when people like Hugo Chavez were elected. In Latin America under Reagan, many in the small and privileged Jewish communities left and this was used by Reagan and Bush as proof of ‘anti-Semitism’ whereas if it is proof of anything it is that the political and economic interests of many Jews no longer coincide with the poor and oppressed. Zionism consistently encourages Jews to go to Israel and the fake antisemitism moral panic provides an ideal opportunity.
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| Gerry Gable, the arch-Zionist and Jewish racist who is editor of Searchlight |
In a racist sop to identity politics Lowles says he doesn’t feel it is his right ‘as a non-Jew to deny the right of my Jewish friends to feel as they do.’ No one is denying anyone the right to ‘feel as they do.’ What I object to is the smearing of people who are appalled at Israel’s human right record with the label ‘anti-Semite.’
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| Ahed Tamimi, gaoled by a military court for 8 months has emerged as the Palestinians' hero - Lowles professes himself shocked at her sentence but doesn't ask why a 17 year old Palestinian girl is gaoled for 8 months for slapping a soldier and a soldier, Elor Azaria, who murdered a wounded Palestinian who was unconscious, is given 9 months |
I don’t of course know who Lowles pro-Jewish friends are. Clearly they aren’t anti-Zionist Jews or even members of Jewdas. They are the same rich, privileged White Jews who see Corbyn as a threat and are threatening to leave.
Lowles continues the same trite point that the Freedlands of this world make, namely that Labour ‘cannot put itself in the position of saying that it understands antisemitism better than those who suffer it.’ The problem is that Jews don’t ‘suffer’ anti-Semitism today. That is why we have a bogus campaign utilising false anti-semitism.
Racism however isn’t a matter of perception or intuition, but a question of practice. Who is it who ‘suffers’ anti-Semitism today? What we are really talking about is bogus, fictitious anti-Semitism!
When Jews really did experience anti-Semitism before World War I, it was because people like the Zionists’ friend Lord Balfour wanted to keep them out and the British Brothers League in between attacking them complained they wouldn’t mix with them.
As we wrote in our letter to the Guardian, Jews today don’t suffer from immigration controls. There is no Jewish Windrush. There are no Jewish deaths in police custody and Jews are not the subject of violence or economic discrimination. Anti-Semitism today is a matter of prejudice not state racism. ‘Anti-Semitism’ is a phantom conjured up whenever Israel is on the agenda and that is what the IHRA is about.
The problem with some people who believe they are still on the Left is that they hide their stupidity beneath what they think are profound insights. Thus Lowles tells us that ‘For most of the last century the Labour Party was the natural political home of British Jews.’ The person who was most knowledgeable about the Jewish working class in the East End was the historian, William Fishman who told how on 26 January 1894 between five and six hundred Jewish unemployed invaded the Great Synagogue in Duke’s Place, in protest at remarks on unemployment which the Chief Rabbi had made. One hundred Police with truncheons drawn were called to evict them. [East End Jewish Radicals 1875-1914, p.205]
Today a letterfrom 69 rabbis is seen as some kind of proof of anti-Semitism. When the Jewish working class fought for better wages and conditions, the last people they turned to were rabbis or Zionists.
When I was young, in the 1950’s and 1960’s, there were queues round the block for Blooms, the kosher restaurant in Whitechapel in London’s East End. Today the restaurant is gone because the Jews have gone. They have moved to Golders Green and the London suburbs. They have become wealthier and more conservative. There are relatively few Jewish trade union activists, certainly not in manual unions. To pretend that Labour’s position on Israel (which is what the anti-Semitism allegations amount to) is responsible for Jewish estrangement from Labour is either a product of ignorance, dishonesty or both.
Thirty five years ago, in The Jewish Community in British Politics, [Clarendon Press, 1983] Jewish Chronicle columnist and academic Dr Geoffrey Alderman demonstrated that the Jewish community had lurched to the Right. Those who think we are witnessing something new should read the chapter Return to the Right. Alderman described the by-election in Finchley North in 1978. It had a large Jewish electorate. Sir Keith Joseph, Thatcher’s mentor made an openly racist appeal for Jewish support by attacking the immigration of Black and Asian people. The Tories gained Ilford North with a swing of 6.9% ‘but among Jewish voters there the swing to the Conservatives was a massive 11.2%.’ (p.149) In other words Jews were even more hostile to immigration than others in the White community.
The move of Jews to the right occurred long before Corbyn became leader of the Labour Party. Perhaps Lowles has forgotten the attacks on Ed Milband? The Times of Israel published Ed Miliband has a very Jewish problem in August 2014 and 8 months later the Spectator led with How Ed Miliband lost the Jewish vote. We even had the Guardian’s Maureen Lipman drops long-standing support for Labour party in October 2014, a trick she managed to repeat recently! and YNet, the online site for Israel’s largest paid newspaper, Yediot Aharanot led with British Jews turn away from Ed Miliband's Labour Party, the subheadline of which was ‘New poll also shows dramatic drop in support for Labour, after Jewish leader's comments on Israel, support for Palestinian statehood vote.’
All this talk of a ‘Jewish vote’ is itself anti-Semitic. Jews don’t vote as Jews but as British people who happen to be Jewish. Israel comes fairly low down on the list of their concerns. In 2015 Yachad, a liberal Zionist group commissioned a survey The Attitudes of British Jews Towards Israel. The percentage of those identifying as Zionists (59%) had dropped 12% since a previous study five years before.
The whole Jewish community is barely 300,000. It is doubtful if more than 100,000 Jews vote. Compared to the number of Muslims, these numbers are trivial. Why then the concern about the voting habits of Jews? Because Jews are being used by the political establishment to justify Britain’s relationship with Israel.
Even if every Jew in Britain based their identity around Israel, it would still not be anti-Semitic to oppose Israel as a racist state and Zionism as a racist ideology. Criticism of religious or philosophical beliefs are never racist unless that criticism is a substitute for an attack on the people who hold those beliefs.
Just suppose that a majority of British Africans supported FGM (Female Genital Mutilation) it would not be racist to oppose FGM. Likewise criticism of the Niqab is not anti-Islamic. However, as Boris Johnson showed, if you attack the people who hold such beliefs, whilst pretending that you are only engaged in innocent banter then yes you are racist.
British Jews were moving to the Right well before Corbyn was even in Parliament. The Jewish Labour Movement 92-4% vote for Owen Smith two years ago speaks volumes. The JLM are the racist representatives of the racist Israeli Labour Party. They are affiliated to the World Zionist Organisation, whose Land Settlement Division funds and plans Jewish settlement in the West Bank, despite the purported two state position of the JLM.
Lowles argues that Labour should adopt the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism because it is ‘the internationally recognised definition of antisemitism and... fully allows criticism of the policies and actions of the Israeli government.’ This is a double lie. The IHRA states that ‘criticism of Israel similar to that levelled against any other country cannot be regarded as anti-Semitic.’ In other words since Israel is not like any other country any anti-Zionist criticism is automatically rendered as potentially anti-Semitic.
The IHRA has already been used to stifle criticism of Israel as an apartheid state. Hugh Tomlinson QC and Stephen Sedley, the Jewish former Court of Appeal Judge, have both warned that the IHRA has the potential to ‘chill’ free speech but Nick Lowles knows better.
Even the author of the IHRA, Kenneth Stern, in testimonyto the House of Representatives in November 2017 warned that:
The definition was not drafted, and was never intended, as a tool to target or chill speech on a college campus. In fact, at a conference in 2010 about the impact of the definition, I highlighted this misuse, and the damage it could do.
Stern spoke about how the IHRA was ‘was being employed in an attempt to restrict academic freedom and punish political speech’. For Lowles to claim otherwise means he is either a knave or a fool, or most likely both.
Nor is the IHRA‘the internationally recognised definition of anti-Semitism’. It is in its own words a ‘working definition’, the old EUMC Working Definition on Anti-Semitism which the EU’s Fundamental Rights Agency junked around 2011. It has been swallowed whole by the IHRA and relaunched as a diplomatic protocol agreed between the leaders of 31 states, including the anti-Semitic governments of Poland and Hungary.
The IHRA’s whole purpose is to prevent criticism of Zionism, the ideology of the Israeli state and its racist colonial foundations. Comparisons between Israel and Nazi Germany, of which there are many, are perfectly valid and not in any way anti-semitic. The IHRA's purpose is to negate all but the most anodyne criticism of Israel in particular questions such as why it behaves as it does..
Lowles calls for the dropping of disciplinary action against the Margaret Hodge whilst referring to Ken Livingstone’s ‘repeated anti-Jewish slurs’. No examples to back up this lie are given.
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| Searchlight's Zionism and racism led to a major estrangement between the magazine and many of its ethnic minority readers |
Hope not Hate was formed in 2004. In 2011 it split from Searchlight anti-fascist magazine in an unseemly battle about money and resources. Despite this some of us had high hopes that the Searchlight era of duplicity and trading information with the secret state were over. Over the years Searchlight had become more and more distrusted by anti-fascists because of the way its editor Gerry Gable operated. See The Death Agony of Searchlight Anti-Fascist Magazine
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| Maurice Ludmer - the founding editor of Searchlight |
Searchlight was founded by Maurice Ludmer in February 1975. Ludmer came from the labour movement and was President of Birmingham Trades Council. His anti-fascist work was part of his anti-racist work with people like the Indian Workers Association. He was first and foremost a socialist and a communist unlike his successors Gerry Gable and Nick Lowles. Unfortunately Gable and Lowles forgot what Ludmer had once said:
‘‘If every organisation in Britain that can be defined as fascist were to go out of existence tomorrow, we would still have a profound and deep-rooted problem of racism in our society. The truth of the matter is that there is no need to import racist ideas via pro-Nazi organisations; racialism in Britain is based on our own history of 350 years of colonialism. National Front activists have not introduced racialism but rather used and exploited what already exists in abundance.'
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| Mark Hosenball, American journalist who was deported from Britain for exposing GCHQ - Gable did his best to undermine support for the campaign |
Ludmer’s successor Gerry Gable saw Searchlight as a bourgeois anti-fascist journal which obtained information on fascists through trading information about the left with the secret state (MI5/SB) and Israeli intelligence. One such example was the Gable Memorandumsent to his boss Barry Cox at London Weekend Television in which Gable tried to discredit Mark Hosenball, a journalist, and Phil Agee, a former CIA agent. The Labour Government at the time, under Home Secretary Merlyn Rees were trying to deport Agee and Hosenball. In the memo Gable refers to his Intelligence sources as ‘Left Watchers’ by which he means MI5. He is clearly trying to lobby LWT not to treat the trial known then as the ABC trial sympathetically. In other words Gable was acting as an MI5 agent. He wrote:
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| Phil Agee - CIA Caseworker who exposed the role that the CIA played in South American countries |
The arrest of Campbell/Berry and Aubrey has caused a civil rights row, but according to my top level security service sources, they inform me in the strictest confidence that for about four years Campbell, Berry and Kelly and others have been systematically gathering top level security material. Campbell, who claims to have only an interest in technological matters in as far as the state is involved, had done four years detailed research into the whole structure of the other side of not only our Intelligence services but those of other NATO countries.
Searchlight since the death of Maurice Ludmer has been openly Zionist. Not only was Searchlight trading information with MI5/Special Branch but it was actively trying to split and destabilise the anti-fascist movement. At the 1985 Conference of Anti-Fascist Action in Birmingham the main debate occurred over allegations by Searchlight that the Class War Anarchist group were in an alliance with the National Front and fascists. There was no proof that this was true and none was ever forthcoming but coming from what had, until then, been a well respected anti-fascist journal, respected because of the work of Ludmer, the allegations had to be treated seriously.
At this conference, at which I was elected onto the Executive of AFA, a decision was narrowly taken to suspend Class War from membership of AFA until an Inquiry looked into the allegations. Amazingly Searchlight was unable to supply any evidence whatsoever to back up its allegations. A fellow member of AFA’s Executive, Unmesh Desai (now a right-wing councillor on the Greater London Authority) confirmed this to me. As the AFA Report into Searchlight Allegations Against Class War concluded:
‘Despite the leading role of SEARCHLIGHT Magazine in the affair, and despite many approaches to the magazine for evidence, the sum total of material from Searchlight was nil. We are bemused by Searchlight’s role in this affair.’
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| Smeeth is one of the most detestable of Labour MPs, quite an achievement in a group which has its fair share of villains |
See also my own article for the Newsletter of Palestine Solidarity Campaign Undermining Anti-Fascists, Defending Zionism. Despite the appointment of Ruth Smeeth as Deputy Director in 2010, she later became a right-wing Zionist Labour MP in 2015, we had high hopes that HnH would not follow the Searchlight path. It produced the very useful Counter-Jihad Report. In an article Hope Not Hate refuses to be bullied, which was an article criticising Gilad Atzmon, the anti-Semitic jazz musician, Lowles rebutted claims that his attack on Atzmon, an ex-Israeli jazz musician who portrayed himself as a Palestinian supporter were motivated by wider sympathies for Israel:
Let’s put aside the Israel/Palestine question (after all I have never once vocalised my opinion on this subject though my detractors are quick to accuse me of being part of a co-ordinated Zionist conspiracy) and let’s look at what Gilad Atzmon actually says
It is extremely unfortunate that HnH and Nick Lowles have gone back on this promise and followed Searchlight down the road to a reactionary ‘anti-fascism’ which ends up supporting the very system that produces fascism. HnH’s attackson Jackie Walker have been equally as disgusting.
We can only suggest that Nick Lowles and his followers take to heart the advice of Maurice Ludmer above.
Tony Greenstein