Making a Medieval Fiddle

I’m into early music and early musical instrument, if you hadn’t already noticed from some of the videos I’ve put up. I found this short video, ‘How To Build a Medieval Fiddle’ on Alexsandro Novais’ YouTube channel. It’s only about two and a half minutes long and is accompanied, I assume, by the sound of the finished instrument playing a piece of medieval music. The video consists of a series of clips showing the various stages of construction, including bending the wood to form the sides. I tried making a few medieval and early modern instruments myself back in the 90s, building up the sides from very thin sheets of plywood I found in a model shop, and was never at this level of superb craftsmanship.

GB News’ Mike Graham Thinks You Can Grow Concrete

Here’s a bit of light relief after some of the heavy, serious issues in the news. Political Custard put it up on his channel on YouTube, and it’s an oldie but goodie. It comes from about a year ago, and is a clip from Mike Graham’s show on GB News in which he attempted to outwit a spokesman from Insulate Britain. Political Custard has give Graham a Kn*b Award for his prize stupidity during the brief interview. Graham begins with a sneer, suggesting that the lad is unemployed. He politely replies that he’s a carpenter. Graham responds by saying it can’t be renewable, because it involves cutting down trees. Oh yes it is, says the lad. Trees are renewable. You can plant more trees to replace those you’ve cut down. You can’t do that with concrete. You can’t grow concrete.’

‘Oh yes, you can. You can grow concrete’, replies Graham, who has obviously been left temporarily bereft of brains and common sense. The lad only replies, ‘No, you can’t’, before he is dismissed by Graham, who says he can’t stand the sight of him. More likely it had just dawned on Graham that he had shown himself to be a colossal thicko and, if the interview continued, he’d be even more humiliated and shown up.

This says all you need to know about the mighty intellects on GB News. And now, for extra laughs, they’ve added Boris Johnson!

Labour and Palestine’s Call for Ceasefire Now

‘#CeasefireNOW – share our statement.

SPREAD THE WORD: FB Share here // Retweet here

L&P STATEMENT: Labour Must Lead Demands for An Immediate Ceasefire

Labour & Palestine is horrified by the escalating violence in Israel and Palestine and the callous response of the UK government. We call on the Labour Party to act to help bring about an immediate ceasefire, as called for by the UN, the TUC and many others.

We are appalled by the loss of life of both Israelis and Palestinians and believe that the targeting and attacking of civilians and the imposition of collective punishments are, as is clear in international law, war crimes that must be condemned by all.

The UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, has said this latest outbreak of violence and slaughter of innocent civilians does not take place “in a vacuum”. The war in Gaza did not start on 7 October – it is a direct result of Israel’s illegal and brutal military occupation of Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem since 1967.

The Israeli state has actively supported the building of illegal settlements in the West Bank, arrested and detained thousands – including hundreds of children – demolished homes and stood by while heavily armed illegal settlers viciously attacked Palestinians.

These breaches of Palestinian human rights have been well documented by the UN, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem, among others. Yet these acts of violence, intimidation and oppression have been allowed to reach a new high since the extreme right-wing administration of Benjamin Netanyahu took office last year.

The failure of the parties to the Oslo Accords, including the UK, to fulfil the promises made to the Palestinian people of an independent state, have made any route to peace increasingly difficult.

The UK government’s uncritical support for Israel’s illegal actions is completely wrong.

The Labour Party must now lead demands for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire and the full application of international law to apply equally to all peoples.

Labour & Palestine.‘

Stop the War Coalition on Two More Weeks of Protests for Gaza

‘🇵🇸 2 More Weeks of Mass Action in Solidarity With Palestine 🇵🇸 

As the horrific attacks on Palestinians in Gaza intensify, the six groups organising the demonstrations are calling for two more weeks of mass action in solidarity with Palestine and against our government’s disgraceful support for Israel’s assault.

This Saturday we are calling for co-ordinated local protests organised by the movement around the country around lunchtime with a one minute silence at 1pm. In London, we are asking groups to organise protests locally and then come in to Central London for a rally in Trafalgar Square at 3pm. Graphics and links to follow.

Please send details of all your local protests to office@stopwar.org.uk

We will then be holding a national demonstration in London on the following Saturday 11th November. We need to make this demonstration larger than the 500,000 that came out this past Saturday.

The local marches and protests are vital in themselves and they are also a means to broaden and deepen the movement and to build support for the national demonstration on 11th November.

We urge all our groups, members and supporters to push for support in your local union branches, to organise street stalls, and to put on meetings to promote the Palestinian cause and to build the actions. We also urge groups to start organising transport to the November 11th demonstration. 

Online Public Meeting: Why Trade Unions Should Stand With Palestine

We’ve called an emergency public meeting to discuss the situation in Palestine and what trade unionists can do to build the movement.

Please invite any contacts you may have in the trade unions who might be interested in building the movement at this vital time.

Thursday 2nd November, 6.30pm

Speakers:

Palestinian Trade Unionists TBA

Alex Gordon, RMT President

Louise Regan, NEU

Sean Vernell, UCU NEC
More TBA

RSVP Here‘

Ill health and distance prevent me from attending their rallies in London, but I’m putting this up for anyone who is interested in attending. As as Turkey has begun rattling its sabre at Israel threatening war, we desperately need a ceasefire and a peaceful end to the conflict before it leads to full-scale war in the Middle East.

Bertrand Russell’s Last Letter Condemning Zionism and Israeli Brutality towards the Arabs

This comes from the Blogging Theology website. I think it’s host is an ex-Christian. If he is, then I don’t endorse any content there which is critical of Christianity. In this video, he talks about one of Bertrand Russell’s last published pieces, a letter in which he attacked Israel’s policy towards the Arabs, the country’s aggressive imperialism and the bombing raids it was then conducting deep into Egypt. As the host explains, Russell was one of the most brilliant minds of the 20th century. He was a mathematician and philosopher, who with his mentor Alfred North Whithead attempted to reduce mathematics to logic in his Principia Mathematica, and who knew and corresponded with other leading philosophers such as G.E. Moore and Wittgenstein. He was also a leading public intellectual, an atheist, anti-imperialist, and a pacifist, who backed the war against Hitler as the lesser evil, a critic of Stalin and one of the leading figures in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. There’s a clip of a BBC journo interviewing him on one of the CND marches. The journo asks him why he opposes nuclear weapons. Russell politely replies that it is because they threaten the end of humanity ‘and some of us think that would be a very great pity.’

Russell wrote his letter in 1970, when Israel was at war against its Arab neighbours and carrying out bombing raids deep into Egypt. Among other issues, Russell criticised Israel for annexing Arab land militarily, and then calling for negotiations with the Arabs, all from a position of strength. As for bombing civilians, experience had shown that this would not cow the Arabs, but make them even more determined, just as American bombing raids had made the Vietnamese, and Hitler’s bombing raids on Britain had the British. The letter was read out posthumously by leading Egyptian politicos the very day after Russell passed away.

Russell’s words are as relevant now in the assault on Gaza as they were when he wrote them 53 years ago. It’s a pity our leaders haven’t heeded them in the half-century since. The conflict is spreading unrest across the world and making the Middle East even more unstable. Further wars are threatened, which will result in more mass death and loss of human life. Some fear it could trigger World War 3, and end humanity. And as Russell said with his understatement ‘that would be a great pity’.

Sanity and Ceasefire now!

Labour Social on the Spoof Titles Suggested for Boris Johnson’s New Show

Here’s something which I hope will lift your spirits in these dark and troubling times. It’s a short video of only two minutes from the Labour Social channel on YouTube. It’s been announced that Boris Johnson is going to get his own show on GB News, and Labour Social asked their viewers to come up with alternative titles for it. If your fans of creative abuse, this piece is for you. The host, Graham Hughes, describes Bojob as a ‘clown school reject’ and dubs him ‘Pennyunwise’. Which is suitable, as Gillyflowerblog, one of the great commenters here, remarked on another post about this awesome media event how unwell he looked. As if he was ready for the shroud, in her words. Well, it seems he has returned looking like a supernatural horror from the undead, like all of the Tory party’s economic theories. Hughes also describes our former prime minister as a ‘nefarious, lazy, coked-up binbag filled with custard topped off with a half-chewed bit of straw’. Gosh, that’s harsh. I like custard, and am thinking fondly of custard pies. I really don’t want them associated with Johnson. There is also some very inventive name-calling of GB News. He calls them GeeBeebies, Gammon Box News and states that it isn’t a news channel but a propaganda loss-leader paid for as a tax-dodge by extreme right-wing billionaires. My guess is that this description is exactly right. The dulcet-toned Irish vlogger, Maximilien Robespierre, said pretty much the same in his video on the subject. He said that the people financing GB News had deep pockets and didn’t mind that it was making a loss. It just served to get right-wing talking points out to the public. The only difference is that Hughes says that the propaganda is to entrench the privilege of the grotesque inbreeds of the British aristocracy. Well, I think it’s more than just the aristos, but the global superrich, which includes the aristocracy as well as other members of the global elite. As shown by the fact that among its presenters is Jacob Rees-Mogg, the Minister for Preserving Aristocratic Privilege. Early in his career as a prospective MP he went campaigning in a small fishing town in Scotland. His platform was the necessity of keeping the House of Lords.

Hughes then goes on to discuss his call for alternative names for BoJob’s show, and gives some of his favourites. And it’s a long list, beginning with ‘Lying Low’, ‘Fabrication for the Nation’, ‘Pork Pies with Boris Johnson’, ‘Fake Off’ – which could also be a command, as well as pun on the BBC show ‘Bake Off’, and ‘I would Lie To You’. And so on.

Hughes notes that Johnson is going to get a lot of money for the show. He charges $1 million for his speeches in America, and gets paid £1 million a year for his scribblings in the Daily Hate, so he’s likely to get paid a similar sum for his show.

Here’s the video. Enjoy!

Avaaz Petition to Joe Biden to Call for Ceasefire in Gaza

This came through at midday today, and of course I’ve had no reservations signing it.

‘Dear friends,

Over 8,000 people are dead in Palestine and Israel. A child in Gaza is being killed every 15 minutes. This is absolute madness and it is getting worse. As Israel’s closest ally, the American president holds the key to a ceasefire that would prevent thousands more from dying — sign this urgent call for peace and we’ll deliver it to President Biden and in media across the world.

ADD YOUR NAME

“Dear President Biden and global leaders,

How many more children must die before you support the global call for a ceasefire?

How many are enough?

As people from across the world, we call for an immediate ceasefire and an end to the blockade in Gaza.

Stop raining death on innocent people.

Ceasefire NOW!

ADD YOUR NAME“

Over 2 million people live in Gaza, and almost 50% are children under 18. The blockade has left them largely without drinking water, food or fuel. This is illegal under international law. Hospitals are operating on wounded civilians without anesthesia. Imagine – screaming, wounded children with no painkillers to help them.

Now, calls for help from Gazans have no way out with the airstrikes cutting off access to cell phones, internet and landlines — and the rest of the world is unable to see what’s really happening.

This isn’t a targeted strike on Hamas — it’s the collective punishment of an entire people.

The Israeli people are also in danger. After the horror of October 7th, their far-right, Trump-like Prime Minister is drawing them into a war that could take years and thousands more lives. Standing with Israel does not mean standing with PM Netanyahu or supporting a war that will make everyone less safe.

With key governments, like the US, giving Netanyahu the greenlight to plunge into war, the hawks of war are far louder than the voices for peace. And that is one thing we can change if we act together — demanding the leadership we need to bring security and justice to both sides.

Join the massive call to STOP this insanity before it’s too late. Add your voice below and Avaaz will put our message in ads around the world and deliver it directly to key heads of state.

Add your voice to the global call to stop this war now!

There is no liberation for any of us when we let this kind of harm come to innocent people, and we all have a role to play in stopping it. We can be the people who choose justice over revenge. Who choose life over death. Who choose peace over war. Let’s call the world to its senses together!

With hope and determination,

Nell, Abdelrahman, Alice, Christoph, John, Kanika, Lily, Mo and the rest of the Avaaz team

More information:

Israel moves to “new phase” of war with Hamas in major incursion in Gaza (Axios)

Gaza in communications blackout as Israel intensifies siege (The Guardian)

The space for peace and Jewish-Arab solidarity is shrinking in wartime Israel (NPR)

Hostilities in the Gaza Strip and Israel – reported impact | Day 21 (OCHA)

What is Gaza’s Ministry of Health and how does it calculate the war’s death toll? (AP)

Post-9/11 wars have contributed to some 4.5 million deaths, report suggests (Washington Post)’

New Islamic Party Set Up in Britain after Labour Loses Muslim Support

This afternoon racist vlogger Ethan Winstanley posted a piece on his YouTube channel reporting the registration at the Electoral Commission of a party calling itself the Muslim Party of Great Britain. This was illustrated by a copy of the registration form. The party stated that it was set up to represent ‘all minority of Britain’ (sic) and to tackle the problems that ‘lingure’ in the great country of Great Britain. Winstanley noted that its exclusive focus on ethnic minorities excluded the White majority, and wondered what this would mean for Whites when we become a minority in fifty years’ time.

I’ve been looking for a bit more information about this group. So far all l’ve found was an article by Beachcomber in yesterday’s (27th October 2023) Daily Express, which quotes the above and expresses some scepticism about its chances of success with the remark ‘good luck with that.’ Winstanley, in his piece was frightened by the prospect that this organisation would enjoy explosive success and growth. I’d be surprised if this happens, given that there have been attempts to establish Islamic parties before. I remember when, way back in 1989, the Beeb reported the foundation of the Islamic Party of Britain. This lasted up until 2006. According to Wikipedia:

‘The Islamic Party of Britain is a defunct political party in the United Kingdom that was active from its formation in 1989^[1] until 2006. The IPB was opposed to both capitalism and communism. David Musa Pidcock, a Sheffield man who converted from Roman Catholicism to Islam while working as an engineer in Saudi Arabia, founded and led the party.^[1] The IPB published a quarterly magazine entitled Common Sense.

The party entered the 1992 general election, standing three unsuccessful candidates in the constituencies of Bradford, a city with a large Muslim minority, and one in a London constituency, Streatham.

Founding

The Islamic Party of Britain was founded in September 1989 by Muslims who had grown dissatisfied with the Labour Party, a party that has traditionally gained the support of Muslims in Britain. Many Muslims were unhappy with the atheism of Neil Kinnock, the Labour leader, and wanted a party that would cater specifically for the needs of Muslims. Many also felt that both Labour and the Conservatives had not done enough to help Muslims in the controversy over Salman Rushdie‘s book The Satanic Verses.^[2]

Performance

The Islamic Party never achieved a seat in either house of Parliament. Pidcock represented the party in the 1990 Bradford North by-election, earning 800 votes (2.2%), finishing fourth from ten candidates.^[3]

At the 1992 general election, the party stood candidates in each of the three constituencies in the City of Bradford. All finished in last place, with leader Pidcock in Bradford West performing best, on 471 votes (0.96%).^[4] It also stood a candidate in Streatham, coming fifth of seven candidates.^[5] ‘

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_Party_of_Britain

This looks like an attempt by someone to exploit the collapse of Muslim support for the Labour party caused by Starmer refusing to apologise for the Israeli state’s war crimes in Gaza, an attitude that is causing division in the Labour party. 29 local councillors have so far resigned, Richard Burgon is preparing an early day motion calling for a ceasefire, Sadiq Khan has called for a ceasefire and Mick Lynch of the RMT has challenged Starmer to call for a ceasefire. Clearly the founders of the new Muslim party hope to fill this vacuum. My guess is that they’ll find it very difficult. New parties have to do a lot of campaigning for years before they get anywhere near to national relevance. UKIP is an example of this. I think they spent 10 years campaigning before their breakthrough into national politics, and even then their impact was much less significant than would appear from Farage’s propaganda and the excited media coverage at the time.

The party’s establishment is ominous, however, in that it marks the arrival, or attempted arrival of the sectarian politics of Muslim countries such as Pakistan and countries with a sizable Muslim population such as Bangladesh. If the party does have any kind of success, it will lead to further divisions in Britain along racial and religious lines and possibly lead to the kind of conflict and violence that has erupted in India and which was seen earlier this year in rioting between Hindus and Muslims. Of course, it’s also possible that the party will vanish as quickly as it’s been set up, depending on whether the Labour party is able to win back Muslim support and integrate them into mainstream, secular politics.

Labour Friends of Israel Former Director Responds to Left-Wing Call for Ceasefire with Insane Rant

If you want to see just how insane the Starmerites are in their unqualified support for Israel and its atrocities, and how they have absolutely no arguments at all except rage and ad hominem attacks, please go to Turn Left’s channel on YouTube for his ‘The Labour Right Are Horrible’ video. Turn Left is another left-wing socialist channel that, like Kernow Damo’s, gives extremely good, insightful commentary on the news and politics. In the above video, the host talks about an interview and debate James Schneider, one of the co-founders of Momentum, gave on TalkTV. His opponent was David Mencer, a former director of Labour Friends of Israel, and who, in the opinion of Turn Left, appeared like a Question Time gammon. The topic was Labour’s stance on Gaza. Schneider criticised Starmer, saying that there was a failure of leadership. Starmer was like America, in that he supported Israel like the right and the media. He took his cues from America, so that if they moved a little bit in one direction, so did he. That’s why he was in trouble. The British people realised that responding to one atrocity with another was wrong. 76 per cent of Brits wanted a ceasefire. And as Britain had supplied Israel with many of its weapons, so we had a chance as outsiders of influencing it.

All reasonable, logical and, as Turn Left said, uncontroversial. So how did Mercer respond?

With what Private Eye used to call ‘a foam-flecked rant’. Indeed, it was almost worthy of Alex Jones himself.

Mercer replied by ranting about Jeremy Corbyn and anti-Semitism, and how evil Scheider was by facilitating it as part of Corbyn’s team. It was because of this anti-Semitism that he, Mercer, had been forced to leave the party he’d been in for twenty years and go to Israel. He called Schneider a poundshop, university-level politician who should go back there and leave politics to its real practitioners, and declared he wasn’t properly Labour because he had been a Lib Dem and had written for Tory home. The video acknowledges that there was a problem with anti-Semitism in the Labour party, but instead of being a ruthless tyrant, Corbyn was too weak. Margaret Hodge called him a ‘f**king anti-Semite’ from the ballot box and nothing happened.

Well, Corbyn himself wasn’t anti-Semitic, and had strong Jewish support from Jewish Voice for Labour, Jewdas and the local Haredi Jewish community. He was prevented from acting on some of the anti-Semitic incidents because the Blairites kept these from him. And he was weak in that he did not realise that the accusations of anti-Semitism were made in bad faith by his opponents in order to remove his supporters and ultimately Corbyn himself. Turn Left also makes the point that it was hypocritical for them to attack Schneider because he hadn’t always been Labour while telling the party that it should change direction and welcome former Tory MPs. Schneider responded to that part of the rant by saying that many of the biographical details were wrong, but he wasn’t going to start arguing down that route.

At one point, the interviewer turned back to Schneider for his response. And you could hear Mercer carrying on ranting in the background.

Mercer also talked about how, if the anti-Semitism against Israel wasn’t fought, it would take root in Britain. 100,000 people had marched in support of Palestine chanting ‘From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will Be Free’. Turn Left made the point that this was only 100,000 people. And sarcastically commented ‘who knew they were all members of Hamas’. He didn’t say anything about the chant, which does call for the destruction of Israel when the best course may be the transformation of Israel so that it gives full political and civil rights to both Palestinians and Jews, not just de jure but also de facto. But from off camera you can hear a voice remark on the march ‘It was safe. I was there’. Mercer ends his part of the interview by calling Schneider a Hamas supporter, and that he also supports the murder of civilians and beheading of babies, to which Schneider shakes his head sadly.

Turn Left ends by talking about how there was no substance in Mercer’s rant, and that Mercer and people like him are dangerous and, as people, worse than many Tories. Astonishing as that may seem. They’re dangerous because they target the Socialist left as people and vilify them as though they were absolutely evil. This has real world consequences. Someone did punch Corbyn and another politico was possibly assaulted.

The video shows that the Starmerite, pro-Israel right of the party has no arguments against the call for a ceasefire. All they have is rage, and grotesque personal smears and abuse.

And there is the question Turn Left makes at the end:

Do you feel safe with the prospect of them governing you?

GB News Accuses Mosque Preachers of Anti-Semitism For Mentioning Genocide of Palestinians

GB News, the company that, according to one Labour MP, has two political biases, right and far-right, put up a video this morning claiming that imams and other preachers in Britain’s mosques had been making anti-Semitic sermons. This came from another journalist, who’d been filming in Israel. He mentioned the large number of Brits and Israelis, who had families in Britain, who were worried about the situation over here and the lack of support for Israel and support for the Palestinians. He then returned to Britain, and secretly filmed what some mullahs were saying from their pulpits, which bore out their fears of virulent anti-Semitism. The broadcaster played a clip of these.

Some of it was simply expressions of anger at the oppression of Muslims by ‘Jews’. In that sense, it was anti-Semitic as it came from a conflation of the Jewish people with Israel. This is, unfortunately, understandable given the way right-wing Zionists have tried to make Jewish identity synonymous with Israel. Netanyahu passed a law making every Jew a citizen of Israel whether they wanted to be or not. There are quite a number of Jewish critics of Israel, indeed, 3/5 of the victims of Stalin’s and Evan’s anti-Semitic witch hunt are Jewish, which means that they’re probably not self-hating anti-Semites but just severely normal Jewish Brits who don’t want Israel committing its crimes in the name of their faith and people.

One of the mullahs recited that passage from the Qur’an about the trees and rocks betraying the Jews to be killed by the righteous at Judgement Day. This is almost inevitable, as the passage is often used by the radical anti-Semites. I’m not going to defend it. One preacher said that the Zionist state was like somebody occupying your house, attacking you and then accusing you of violence if you scratch back. It is a defence of terrorism, but it isn’t without a certain degree of truth in that Israel is oppressing the Palestinians and their response to terrorism tends to be massively disproportionate, as with Operation Cast Lead and the last bombing of Gaza.

And there was another imam, who talked about the genocide of the Palestinians. This is something the Israelis really don’t want talked about, and certainly don’t want described as such. You could probably argue against it on semantic grounds. But nevertheless, the Palestinians are being ethnically cleansed. B’Tselem, among other historians and human rights activists, have shown that there were massacres of Palestinians up and down Israel in the 1948 Nakba, despite official Israel historiography. Those Palestinians who fled into exile have not been allowed to return because they would upset Israel’s demographic composition as a Jewish state. There is an apartheid system to keep Israelis and Arabs apart, and Arab wages lower than Israelis’. Palestinian farmers are bound by choking regulations that certainly do not apply to Israelis. IDF soldiers throwing chemical weapons down Palestinian wells to make the water undrinkable, and Israeli settler will launch attacks on Palestinian villages. The whole point of this policy of oppression and persecution seems to be to force the Palestinians to leave.

But you get into serious trouble if you call it genocide or compare it to the Holocaust, as Tony Greenstein has done. But Tony, who has a very deep grasp of Jewish and Israeli history and that of the Holocaust, has made a very good argument comparing it to the Nazi persecution of the Jews before 1942 and the Final Solution. Jews were prevented from getting jobs and forced out of their businesses, which were handed to gentile Nazi supporters. They were legally prevented from marrying non-Jews, and subject to beatings and forcible participation in humiliating displays. In one of these they were forced to push marbles or balls down a street with their noses. The Nazis had not, however, decided on their extermination and were allowing those who could afford it to emigrate. They didn’t care where they went, so long as it was away from the Reich.

You can also compare the Israeli state’s ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians to the Nazis’ attempted colonisation of Slavic eastern Europe. A long strip of land stretching from Poland through Ukraine and into Russia was designated for German colonisation. Polish villages were razed in preparation for the new German settlements. The Nazi race laws declared Poles, Russians and other Slavs to be untermenschen, subhuman, and prohibited their marriage to Aryans. They were to be a subordinate class of agricultural workers and peasants supplying produce to the colonists of the new Reich.

Or we could compare it to Mussolini’s policies towards Jews and the Black and Arab subjects of his revived Roman Empire. The 1937 race laws also banned Jews from various jobs, including education, and declared them racially inferior. Mercifully, it wasn’t as extreme as the Nazis’, and 80 per cent of Italian Jews survived the War. In Africa, Tripolitania was marked out to be an Italian colony and land subsequently earmarked for Italian colonisation while the indigenous Arab population was brutalised. And then there is the matter of the Italian invasion of Ethiopia. The Fascist authorities were terrified by the prospect of Aryan Italians interbreeding with Black Africans, despite a popular song of the time describing a man falling in love with a dusky African girl and taking her back to Italy to be kissed by the sun. As a result, they also passed laws banning such racial intermixing. There aren’t quite laws like this in Israel, but material promoting relationships and marriage between Arabs and Jews has been banned by the culture ministry, as well as anything celebrating Palestinians culture. There are also rabbis and organisations offering helplines and advice to dissuade Jews thinking of becoming romantically involved with Arabs.

It is therefore not anti-Semitic to call the Israeli persecution of the Palestinians what it is: ethnic cleansing, and the comparisons with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy are valid. I despise the preachers’ identification of the Jewish people as a whole with Israel and its policies, but I understand why this has been done.

The inclusion of the clip with the preacher talking about a Palestinian genocide is clearly intended to give the impression that any discussion of the Palestinians’ persecution as such is anti-Semitic, and so stop it from being discussed.

This is wrong, and should be rejected, just as anti-Semitism and all other forms of racism should.