First you say that Zionism is the same as being Jewish, then, when people criticise Israel you cry ‘anti-Semitism’
What is remarkable about the false anti-Semitism campaign waged by Labour’s racistDeputy Leader Tom Watson and child abuse supporter Margaret Hodge is how often they get away with it.
[There was a time when Jewish Chronicle then Daily Express Editor Stephen Pollard wrote about Hodge that ‘It’s difficult to imagine a more blatant, shameful and utterly contemptible piece of two-faced hypocrisy than the behaviour of Margaret Hodge‘. It was true then and it’s true now!
Jeremy Corbyn became Labour leader because of a desire to see fundamental change. However the people who supported him were political novices who were unprepared for the backlash that followed.
It was not easy for the Right to attack Corbyn who won as the anti-Austerity candidate. Arguing, as did the Dark Prince Peter Mandelson that he was “intensely relaxed about people becoming filthy rich” whilst people were using food banks or sleeping on the streets did not convince many people. Liz Kendal tried it in 2015 and flopped with 4.5%.
‘Anti-Semitism’ was a much more useful weapon, almost custom made. It had an aura of moral righteousness about it. Fighting ‘anti-Semitism’ could make even the worst reactionary feel good. It is, as I once wrote in an essay for Return No. 5, ‘The False Anti-Semitism of the Right’.
Fighting for lower taxes for the rich is far less morally uplifting than opposing racism against those who suffered from attempted extermination. Even if it means getting into bed with racists!
The Daily Mail, which during the 1930’s supported Hitler abroad and Sir Oswald Moseley’s British Union of Fascists at home in addition to campaigning against the admission of Jewish refugees from the Nazis, began the fake anti-Semitism campaign with a story allegingJeremy Corbyn had worked with a holocaust denier Paul Eisen.
There is a good tradition for this kind of thing. When British imperialism conquered India it did it so in the name of fighting Suttee, a Hindu custom of burning widows on the pyre of their husbands. It didn’t mention bleeding India dry of its wealth and resources or blasting peoplefrom the barrels of cannons.![]()
That is why it is disappointing that Richard Burgon MP, one of the better members of Corbyn’s Shadow Cabinet should first denyand then distance himself from his perfectly reasonable view that Zionism is a threat to peace.
Zionism basedits whole project on the slogan that Palestine was a ‘land without a people for a people without a land’. The slogan had first been coined by a Christian Restorationist, Alexander Keith.
The main accusation against Burgon should have been that it was a statement of the obvious. Saying Zionism is a threat to peace is like saying that dogs bark or fish swim. Why should be want to deny it?
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| The JLM demonstrate that their concern is Zionism not anti-Semitism |
It is irrelevant whether or not Burgon remembered saying that Zionism is a threat to peace. Obviously he must have believed it and why not? Israel has, since it was founded, based its whole existence on creating enemies. First it was Gamel Abdul Nasser of Egypt, then the PLO, then Hezbollah and now Iran. The Israeli state could not justify its existence without an enemy.
Recently the enemyhas become the 40,000 Black refugees within its borders whose only crime is to be Black and not Jewish. The term used by Netanyahu is ‘infiltrators’which the Israeli Labour Party’s Avi Gabbay repeated. Infiltratorsconjures up another enemy of Israel, the Palestinian refugees who ‘infiltrated’ back into Palestine after their expulsion in 1948. Hundreds if not thousands of them were murdered by the Israeli army in the 1950’s. Calling refugees ‘infiltrators’ is an attempt to equate them with ‘terrorists’.
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| The lies of Jonathan Freedland - the famous mural had no 'hooked-nose' Jewish bankers in it and 4 of the bankers were non-Jewish |
But it’s not only within the Middle East that Israel has been a threat to peace. It has consistently supported the most repressive and genocidal regimes abroad. It actively aided the genocide in Guatemala where up to 200,000 Mayan Indians were slaughtered. It supported the death squad regime in El Salvador. Shipped weapons to the Nicaraguan Contras when the US Congress cut them off. It supported Pinochet in Chile (Israel’s Supreme Court recently refusedto allow the files to be opened on ‘national security’ grounds). It armedthe neo-Nazi Junta of Argentina between 1976-1983 when it murdered up to 3,000 Jews and of course more recently it armed the Burmese regime as it committed genocide. Israel was also of course the main arms supplier to the Apartheid regime in South Africa, including nuclear weapons.
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| Tom Watson defended 'poor Phil'who campaigned on this racist leaflet from Phil Woolas in 2010 - the High Court removed Woolas from the Commons for lies in a campaign that aimed to 'make white folk angry' |
Colin Shindler describedin the Jewish Chronicle how
Despite a US arms embargo, Israel trained personnel and provided equipment which could be used against Pinochet’s opponents. In 1989 Eitan Kalinsky and his wife were sent as Israeli emissaries to teach at the Jewish school in Santiago. They attended the now public protests against Pinochet’s regime and were amazed to note that the riot-control vehicles had been manufactured by Beit Alfa, a left-wing Hashomer Hatzair kibbutz.
Kibbutz Artzi was the kibbutz federation of the so-called Marxist Zionist Mapam party!
So the question is why Burgon didn’t proudly admit that he called Israel a threat to world peace and defy his accusers to do their worst? After all Israel is an openly apartheid state which for half a century has maintained a military dictatorship in the Occupied Territories.
The reason is Zionist Political Terrorism. The fake anti-Semitism campaign run by the Israeli Embassy, as Al Jazeera documented, has successfully intimidated otherwise decent politicians like Richard Burgon into denying their own private views.
The JLM have successfully demonised Ken Livingstone, Chris Williamson, Jackie Walker, Marc Wadsworth, Chris Williamson and others, myself. Included. Unfortunately, instead of Momentum standing up to them, Jon Lansman and Owen Jones have gave gone along with the McCarthyites.
When Burgon first stated Zionism was a threat to peace, Joan Ryan MP wrote an open letter on 16th August 2016 to him. I replied with another Open Letter four days later! This was a dead issue deliberately resurrected by the JLM in order to continue with its campaign of intimidation and vilification.
If Burgon had had the guts to stand up to the JLM and Katz and call these petty racists out, as Moshe Machover for example did, then Katz would have been reduced to the insignificant straw man that he is.
The arguments used by Katz of the Jewish Labour Movement to attack Burgon are interesting and show the dishonesty of the Zionists. Katz statedthat ‘the vast majority of British Jews identify as Zionists’ and that Burgon was therefore ‘insulting a core part of their identity.’
Leaving aside how you can ‘insult’ an identity as opposed to agreeing or disagreeing with it, his basic premise is untrue. In British Jews Attitudes to Israel conducted in 2015 just 59%, down from 71% five years previously, defined themselves as Zionists. 31% of British Jews said they were not Zionists. 59% is not ‘overwhelming’.
Howevereven if an overwhelming majority of British Jews supported Zionism what would that say? That the majority of British Jews were racists? Stupid? Ignorant? Choose your adjective. However if Zionism is racist, as it clearly is, then the views of British Jews are irrelevant. Truth is more important.
Racism is about dehumanisation. Racism defines people as inferior according to arbitrary attributes such as ‘race’, colour or religion. It is not about challenging a political identity.
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| Salman Rushdie |
When 40 years ago Salman Rushie publishedSatanic Verses the vast majority of Muslims considered it an insult to their identity as Muslims. Copies of the book were publicly burned and a fatwa was put on the head of Salman Rushdie by Ayatollah Khomeini. Many of us on the Left had no hesitation in supporting Rushdie’s right to publish his book unharmed. Were we racist because we were opposed to a core element of some Muslim’s identity? Of course not.
If some Africans believe that FGM is part of their identity is it racist to oppose it? Zionism is just as much of a threat to Palestinians and FGM is. If some Jews identify as Zionists that paints them as incorrigible racists who identify with the historic oppressors of Jews.
The right to criticise religion is a fundamental part of any free society. Likewise the right to call an ideology, Zionism, racist or a threat to peace is called freedom of speech. It is irrelevant whether Zionism is the core part of the identity of many Jews. So what? It is also the core identity of Evangelical Christians and opposition to Zionism is the core identity of many anti-Zionist Jews.
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| Eric Pickles defended the Tory link-up with anti-Semitic and racist parties in the European parliament |
The tragedy is that under the baleful influence of the Zionist Jon Lansman, fake leftist Owen Jones and others such as Shadow Foreign Minister Emily Thornberry, supported by cowardly trade union leaders such as Dave Prentis, the Labour Party has adopted the IHRA definition of ‘anti-Semitism’ which conflates criticism of Israel and Zionism with anti-Semitism. That is why out and out racists like Tory Eric Pickles have signed up to a definition of anti-Semitism that provides an ideological underpinning for British foreign policy.
What the present campaign of equating anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism is doing is to identify British Jews with Zionist atrocities. All the things that the Israeli state does is equated with British Jews. That is why supporting Zionism is the best way to support anti-Semitism.
The fake anti-Semitism allegations have been much in evidence in the local elections. In Brighton the only Black woman council candidate, Alex Braithwaite has been suspended from Brighton Labour Party. It is too late for her name to be taken off the ballot paper and we hope that in two days time she will nonetheless be elected to the council.
Another Labour Party member, Amanda Bishop, foolishly believed that Alex’s removal was as a result of the actions of local Jews, since what was done was in the name of the Sussex Jewish Representative Council and she made a suggestion on Facebook, more in jest, that we should march to the local synagogue! She too has been suspended although Amanda too has a long and good record as an anti-racist in the days of Apartheid. The fake anti-Semitism campaign is being used by racists to attack anti-racists.
The only effect of the fake anti-Semitism campaign is to INCREASE anti-Semitism. And that too will be welcome to Zionism because without anti-Semitism there is no Zionism or emigration to Israel.
Tony Greenstein