Johnson’s Cowardice When Confronted With Starmer’s McCarthyism Speaks Volumes About the Socialist Campaign Group and the Labour Left
It was nothing if not predicable. A member of the Socialist
Campaign Group collapsed like a pack of cards when threatened by Starmer’s
bullies. Instead of standing her ground and defying Starmer to do his worst,
instead of defending what she had said, she chose to preserve her parliamentary
career above principle.
What a contrast with holocaust survivor Stefan Kapos, who when
he was told last week by a Labour apparatchik not to speak at a Holocaust
Memorial Day meeting organised by the Socialist Labour Network, or he could be
expelled, immediately
resigned. The SCG prefer instead to capitulate.
If John McDonnell, Zara Sultana and the rest of the opportunists
in the SCG had any principles, still less strategy, they would have immediately
backed up Kim Johnson and gone on the offensive, defending that she had said,
calling out Starmer’s racism and challenging him to do racist worst. Instead
they remained silent.
When, during Israel attacked Gaza in 2009 Gerald Kaufman, a Jewish
MP who was not even on the left, compared
Israel to Nazi Germany, no one even thought that he should be disciplined. Even
Tony Blair, a renowned Zionist, didn’t entertain the idea of removing the Whip.
That shows just how far down the road we have come with Starmer.
When Kaufman died in 2017 the Jewish Chronicle told its
readers that he was ‘reviled’. Marcus
Dysch wrote:
He compared Israeli soldiers serving during the Gaza conflict of 2009
to the Nazis who forced his ancestors to flee Poland.
His “here we are, the Jews again”
comment when Labour MP Louise Ellman rose to speak in the chamber in 2011 was
not just crass, but specifically targeted, knowingly full well the hurt that
would – and did – follow.
It is not as if there isn’t proof a plenty that Israel is an
apartheid state. It is also clear to all except wilful racists like Starmer, that
Israel’s government is stuffed with extreme racists and fascists.
All the major human rights organisations, from B’Tselem’s Reportto Human Rights Watch’s A
Threshold Crossedto Amnesty International’s Israel’s
apartheid against Palestinians, that Israel is guilty of the crime of
Apartheid.
Starmer embracing Louise Ellman, the MP for Liverpool Riverside and Tel Aviv South, who defended the Israeli army's abuse of Palestinian children
If we could turn the clock back 90 years then
Starmer would have had no difficulty explaining why Hitler had come to power.
He is a man without principle dedicated to defending imperialism come what may.
When a delegate at Labour’s conference last
September pointed out that the Zelensky regime had banned trade unions and incorporated
neo-Nazis into his regime Starmer had him immediately suspended.
Kim Johnson prostrating herself at the feet of Starmer & the Israel lobby
The truth of what Kim Johnson said, before she
recanted like a victim of Stalin’s purges, is self evident. Israel has de facto annexed the West Bank but denies
any rights to its Palestinian inhabitants unlike the Jewish settlers who have
the full protection of Israeli civil law.
Israeli maps treat the West Bank as part of Greater Israel.
The Green Line has long disappeared. In the West Bank two different sets of laws
apply to two different peoples – Jews and Palestinian. That is the quintessential
definition of apartheid.
But within Israel Apartheid also exists. There are
over 60 laws which explicitly
discriminate against Israeli Palestinians.
The 2003 Citizenship
Law prevents Israeli Palestinians from marrying Arab spouses living outside
Israel. The Admissions Committee
Law 2013 enables hundreds of Jewish communities to bar Israeli Arabs from living
amongst them.
The Jewish Nation State Law reserves
national self-determination only for ‘the Jewish people.’ 93% of Israeli land
is reserved
solely for the use of Jews via the Jewish National Fund.
Arabs are confined within their towns and villages
which are unable to expand, unlike Jewish towns because they are deliberately
surrounded by Jewish communities.
In the Galilee, East Jerusalem and the Negev/Naqab
there is a deliberate policy of Judaisation.
If you want an equivalent then you only need to recall Nazi Germany’s policies
of ‘deJewification’.
Israel isn’t a fascist but a settler colonial state but that
doesn’t make it better. Arguably it makes it worse. America wasn’t a fascist
state but its settlers exterminated millions of the indigenous native Indians.
The Israeli government is, however, stuffed with people who
proudly declare that they are fascists. Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s new Finance
Minister who is in charge of the Civil i.e. Military Administration in the West
Bank said that ‘My
voters don’t care if I’m a homophobe or fascist’. Miri Regev, Israel’s new Minister
of Transport said ‘I’m happy to be a
fascist’.
Smotrich is on record as opposing
having Arab women share maternity wards with Jewish women but to Starmer this
too is ok.
Even the European Union of Jewish Students has warned
against ‘Fascist’ Ben Gvir, the new Police Minister. Calling Israeli Ministers
and the Israeli state ‘fascist’ is commonplace but for Keir Starmer, any
criticism of the United States’s racist Rottweiler is forbidden.
The Independent reported
that:
Sir Keir’s spokesman denounced the use of both the
terms “apartheid” and “fascist”, saying many will have taken offence at the
latter in particular. He told reporters: “As a first step we would obviously
want her to withdraw the remarks that she used for sure.”
Johnson’s crime was giving ‘offence’. No doubt many Germans would have taken
offence at criticism of Hitler’s regime and racist Whites like Starmer would
have taken offence at criticism of South Africa but so what? If telling the
truth gives offence then so be it.
If anything the description of people like Bezalel Smotrich
and Ben Gvir as fascists is too kind. The proper description of them is Jewish or
Judeo-Nazis. The Times of Israel reported,
on election night Gvir
interrupted his own victory speech… to pay tribute
to the radical settler Rabbi Dov Lior and to his former political partner
Bentzi Gopstein, the head of the racist and homophobic Lehava organization.
Rabbi Dov Lior is Chairman of the Jewish Rabbinical Council of
the West Bank and Chief Rabbi of Kiryat Arba and Hebron. He is also an
unreconstructed racist, even by Israeli standards.
In 1994, he supported
the murder by an American settler, Baruch Goldstein, of 29 Palestinian
worshippers at the Ibrahimi Mosque. Lior then issued
a religious edict, saying,
There is no such thing as enemy civilians in war
time. The law of our Torah is to have mercy on our soldiers and to save
them....A thousand non-Jewish lives are not worth a Jew's fingernail.
Lior praised Goldstein, calling
him a “great saint and rabbi … may his
memory be blessed”. Ben Gvir, until
recently, had a poster on his wall of Baruch Goldstein.
Not to be outdone, Rabbi Yaacov Perrin, officiating at Goldstein’s
funeral, told
mourners that even 1 million Arabs “are
not worth a Jewish fingernail.” Angry voices in the congregation shouted, “We are all Goldsteins!” and “Arabs out of Israel!”
Several months after the
massacre, Lior told
disciples in Kiryat Araba near the occupied West Bank city of Hebron
Jewish blood was redder than non-Jewish blood … and that a Jewish life
is preferred by the Lord than a non-Jewish life.
In 2009 Rabbis Yitzhak Shapira and Yosef Elitzur wrote Torat HaMelech, a religious guide to
killing non-Jews legally. Among their insights was the ruling
that the ‘Prohibition 'Thou Shalt Not
Murder' applies only 'to a Jew who kills a Jew.' Non-Jews are "uncompassionate by nature"
and attacks on them "curb their evil
inclination," while babies and children of Israel's enemies may be
killed since "it is clear that they
will grow to harm us."It was immediately
endorsed by Dov Lior.
Another hero of Gvir is Benzi Gopstein of the fascist Lehava
whose slogan
is ‘assimilation is a holocaust’.
Like its Nazi forebears it openly campaigns against miscegenation, sexual or
personal relations between Jew and Arab.
Lehava thugs openly attack Arabs who they suspect of liaisons
with Jewish women and in one
attack 105 Palestinians were wounded and 22 hospitalised in a pogrom in Jerusalem.
Lehava activists were also responsible for arson at one of
the few mixed Jewish-Arab schools, the Hand in Hand in Jerusalem. One of those
who set fire to the school received
3 years in prison. If he had been a Palestinian the sentence would have been 3
or 4 times that.
As someone equally hostile to Christians Gopstein has advocated
burning churches too. These are the friends of Israel’s new Police Minister,
Itamar Ben Gvir who is now in charge of directing Israel’s police. Yet Labour’s
racist leader, Keir Starmer, objects to calling the Israeli government ‘fascist’
or apartheid. But then
Starmer or was quoted
as saying ‘I support Zionism without qualification.’
There is nothing that Israel could do that would disturb
Starmer and Biden. All that matters is its strategic role in the Middle East.
Labour has a racist as leader yet the SCG, instead of following in the
footsteps of previous
generations of socialists like Mervyn Stockwood and Lord Soper keeps quiet
in the hope of keeping their parliamentary seats.
There really is nothing more contemptible than the likes of Kim
Johnson or Richard Burgon apologising
for even the slightest criticism of Zionism or Israel.
Tony Greenstein