Simon Webb Asks What the Scientific Arguments against a Racial Link to IQ Is, and Why Are We Afraid of Discussing It?

Our favourite internet (non)historian this afternoon put up a video asking the above question. Even though it only last just over five minutes, I got just halfway through it before I turned it off and went looking for something less contentious and more edifying. Webb’s argument is that all the opposition to anthropological studies linking race to IQ are ideological rather than scientific. I don’t know enough about scientific, or pseudo-scientific racism to be able to fully refute him there. But I guess a start could be made by reading the late Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man, which is about how Darwinian evolution was utilised in the 19th and early 20th centuries to prove the inferiority of non-Whites and women. I can also remember reading an article in a student magazine in the 80s/90s by Marek Cohn that covered this topic. Cohn is, I believe, certainly not a right-winger. He argued, if I recall correctly, that the same data the racial scientists had used to argue that there were real differences between different races in IQ was then re-evaluated after the War and the horror of Nazism to argue the reverse. Which suggests that, whatever its supporters say, the evidence is at least ambiguous.

As for the question why were are reluctant to discuss any link between race and IQ, it’s because it has been used to justify terrible oppression and crimes against humanity. The reluctance isn’t complete. A few years ago Channel 4 screened a series which looked at these differences. In one programme they found that northern Europeans are more resistant to the cold than southern European and Blacks. They also found that east Asians have much less to resistance to alcohol than westerners. This was put down to the orient having tea, rather than alcohol, for generations as their drink of choice. Although I am aware that they also had palm and rice wine, like saki in Japan.

It also covered the extremely delicate subject of cognitive differences between Aboriginal Australians and others. The programme made it clear that this was a sensitive subject because of the way IQ and cognition had been used to oppress and disinherit these incredibly ancient people. However, studies have shown that the visual cortex of indigenous Australians contains 25 per cent more neurons than in people of other races. As a result, they have excellent visual memory. The programme showed Aboriginal people outperforming Whites in memory tests of objects placed before them. It was put forward that the Aboriginal brain had evolved this way to help them find their way in the trackless wastes of the Outback and desert. Landscapes that seem featureless and confusing to westerners are full of landmarks to indigenous Australians. Aboriginal children lag behind other races in education, and it was suggested that their teaching could be improved by taking advantage of this racial skill.

I think the strongest warning against finding some races inferior comes from H.G. Wells. Wells had his fair share of prejudices himself. Biographers have noted that he himself confessed to being a racist and an anti-Semite. But Wells also wrote powerful pieces against racism, extracts from which I have put up here. In one of his SF works, which actually looks forward to a future utopia in which the world has been united into a single state and people of different races mix freely and in equality, he states that if a people were found to be racially inferior, it would be better to exterminate them rather than have them live as slaves. It’s a sentence that chills the blood after the Holocaust.

But the point is clear: decent people don’t want to find a connection between race and IQ, because it has and can lead back to slavery and other horrors.

And that, I believe, answers at least part of Webb’s question. As he himself very likely knows.

Book Setting British Empire and the Debate in Its Historical Context

Jeremy Black, The British Empire: A History and a Debate (Farnham: Ashgate 2015)

This is another book I got through the post the other day after ordering it from a catalogue. Jeremy Black is, according to the book’s potted biography, Professor of History at Exeter University, and the author of over 100 books. He’s also written for the Journal of Military History, RUSI, which is the journal of the Royal United Services Institute and History Today. The list of other publications about the British Empire lists another book edited by him, The Tory World: Deep History and the Tory Theme in British Foreign Policy, 1679-2014. From this, it might be fair to conclude that Black’s a man of the right.

I read his book, Slavery: A Global History a few years ago when I was writing my own book on the British Empire and slavery a few years ago, and really enjoyed it. Instead of dealing with the British transatlantic slave trade in isolation, it showed how slavery was widespread right across the world and described how the British imperialists tried to end it in their subject territories. I bought this because, in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests, British imperialism has once again become a matter for heated debate and violent denunciation. The motives of the people behind some of these denunciations and demands for justice seem more than a little suspect to me. For example, a month or so ago one of the speakers in an Arise Festival online meeting was the head of the Black Liberation Movement, the British branch of Black Lives Matter. In her speech she declared that Britain should take asylum seekers ‘because you oppressed us under colonialism’. The short answer to that is that this was supposed to be corrected when the former colonies were granted their independence. Instead, many of them very swiftly degenerated in horrific, murderous dictatorships, like Idi Amin’s Uganda and Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe. There was a very deliberate decision in her speech to ignore and gloss over post-colonial misgovernment and oppression, no doubt because it doesn’t fit the narrative she wants to present of Britain being responsible for all her former colonies’ woes.

I am also not impressed by the very loud demands for Oxford University to remove Cecil Rhode’s statue. Don’t get me wrong, he was a blackguard. He’s supposed to have said that the people he liked to employ were greedy sycophants, or something like that. Some critics have also said that his imposition of the colour bar in Rhodesia was particularly hypocritical, as he didn’t personally believe in it. But pre-colonial east Africa was hardly some idyllic Wakanda. Many of the indigenous peoples practised slavery themselves, and were preyed on by Arab, Swahili, Marganja and Yao slavers. And you can argue that, as horrendous as White rule was, it was far better than Mugabe’s genocidal dictatorship. The people calling for the statue’s removal seem to me to be Black African nationalists, butthurt over what they see as a slight to their racial and national dignity. But I also wonder if some of its also motivated by a consciousness of their nations’ failures post-independence.

I bought the book as it promised to discuss the debate surrounding the British Empire as telling its history. Black states that it needs to be seen in its historical context and not judged by the standards of the present day. This is actually what I was taught in my first year of studying history at College. You’re not supposed to create ‘goodies’ and ‘baddies’ of history, because if things had turned out differently, our standards and culture would have been different.

The blurb for the book runs

What was the course and consequence of the British Empire? The rights and wrongs, strengths and weaknesses of empire are a major topic in global history, and deservedly so. Focusing on the most prominent and wide-ranging empire in world history, the British Empire, Jeremy Black provides not only a history of that empire, but also a perspective from which to consider the issues of its strengths and weaknesses, and right and wrongs. In short, this is a history both of the past, and of the present-day discussion of the past, that recognises that discussion over historical empires is in part a reflection of the consideration of contemporary states.

In this book Professor Black weaves together an overview of the British Empire across the centuries, with a considered commentary on both the public historiography of empire and the politically-charged character of much discussion of it. There is a coverage here of social as well as political and economic dimensions of empire, and both the British perspective and that of the colonies is considered. The chronological dimension is set by the need to consider not only imperial expansion by the British state, but also the history of Britain within an imperial context. As such, this is a story of empires within the British Isles, Europe, and, later, world-wide. The book addresses global decline, decolonisation, and the complex nature of post-colonialism and different imperial activity in modern and contemporary history. Taking a revisionist approach, there is no automatic assumption that imperialism, empire, and colonialism were ‘bad’ things. Instead, there is a dispassionate and evidence-based evaluation of the British Empire as a form of government, an economic system, and a method of engagement with the world, one with both faults and benefits for the metropole and the colony.

Black states that criticism of British imperialism is also a criticism of capitalism, which in many cases is very definitely and obviously true. However, he also criticises Kwesi Kwarteng’s history of the British empire for its denunciations of British colonial oppression in some of the colonies, like Nigeria. And while British imperialism may well have brought some benefits, much of it is still indefensible by modern standards. Like the plantations in Ireland, the genocide and dispossession of indigenous peoples, like aboriginal Australians and the American Indians, the seizure of native land in Africa and so on. He notes that the most successful colonies are White settler nations like Australia, Canada and New Zealand, but this hardly outweighs the disastrous consequences of the White invasion for the indigenous peoples.

I haven’t read it yet – I’m still making my way through a number of other books – but I hope to do so, and will probably blog about it in the future to give my views and conclusions about what looks like a timely and provocative book.

Duce Trump Fascistizes American Education

Yesterday Mike put up a piece about Donald Trump’s proposal to attack the ‘liberal indoctrination of America’s youth’ by making American education even more patriotic. Trump made his announcement in a Constitution Day speech at the White House Conference on American History at the National Archives Museum. CNN quoted the Orange Generalissimo as saying:

“We must clear away the web of twisted lies in our schools and classrooms and teach our children the magnificent truth about our country. We want our sons and daughters to know that they are the citizens of the most exceptional nation in the history of the world,” Trump said.

He also denounced the New York Times’ 1619 Project, which has been awarded a Pulitzer Prize for its aim to teach American students about slavery, ‘toxic propaganda’.

Trump is instead going to launch a national commission to promote patriotic education, which will be called the 1776 Commission.

Mike and a number of the peeps on Twitter naturally aren’t impressed, making the obvious comparison to the Hitler Youth, the perverted Nazi version of the boy scouts.

https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2020/09/18/donaldtrump-accused-of-launching-us-version-of-hitleryouth/

In fact, it looks far more to me like the way Mussolini’s Fascists and the Nazis reformed the Italian and German school system to indoctrinate their countries’ young people with their perverted ideas and values. For example, Declaration 1 of the Italian Fascist School Charter of 1939 states

Schools are the cornerstone of the solidarity that binds together all social forces, from the family to the corporation to the party. They shape the human and political conscience of new generations in the moral, political and economic unity of the Italian nation whose full realization is found in the fascist state.

Fascist schooling has as its aim to introduce a popular culture inspired by the eternal values of the Italian race and its civilisation, into the realm of practice by means of study (understood as the shaping of mature human subjects). Through the promotion of work, schools bring this culture to bear on the concrete activities carried out by the trades, arts, professions, sciences and armed forces.

Olivia E. Sears, trans., ‘Excerpts from the School Charter: The Twenty-Nine Declarations: Principles, Goals and Methods of Fascist Schools (1939)’, in Jeffrey T. Schnapp, ed., A Primer of Italian Fascism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press 2000), 314-7, p. 314.

I don’t think Trump’ll go as far as the Nazis in their reform of the German education. They introduced special courses on the origins of the Nazi party and biology, stressing Mendelian genetics. I also don’t think that, unlike the Nazis, he’ll start issuing school leavers with a 10 point eugenics plan for their lives, telling them ‘health is a precondition of eternal beauty – choose not a playmate but a comrade for marriage – wish for as many children as possible’. Though Toby Young’s a supporter of eugenics, so you wonder about him. Trump also won’t go as far as introducing the history syllabus suggested in the Nazi National Socialist Educator, in which senior secondary schoolchildren were to be taught that everything from the industrial unrest and profiteering of pre-First World War Germany, it’s defeat and the chaos and dismemberment afterwards were all caused by the Jews. In weeks 25-28 on that course the poor souls got to be taught about Adolf Hitler and National Socialism, declared to be ‘Judah’s Foe!’. In weeks 33-6 to they had ‘National Socialism at grips with crime and the underworld’ foisted on them, which was supposed to teach them about ‘Jewish instigators of murder’. The course finally ended with ‘Germany’s youth at the helm! The victory of faith.’ This was described as ‘The last fight against Judah’. The syllabus recommended the appropriate reading matter for each section. For Adolf Hitler this included Mein Kampf, and at the end included the Reich Party Congress.

(See ‘A Nazi History Syllabus’ in D.G. Williamson, The Third Reich (Harlow: Longman 1982) p. 86.)

I bet the poor kids could hardly contain their boredom. On the other hand, Trump’s supporters and cabinet officials also included members of the White supremacist Alt Right, some of whom were anti-Semites. It’s a good question then, what they’d like to inflict on the minds of America’s kids.

History can be a particularly controversial area because of its role in shaping national identity and self-image. That’s especially true when it comes to issues of race and persecution. And that’s not confined to America. A few years ago one of the Conservative Australian politicos caused a furor when he declared that he was sick of the ‘black armband’ view of Australian history. By which he meant that Australians should constantly be taught about and feel guilty for the genocide of the Aboriginal people. The Tories would like to do the same thing with our education system. Michel Gove a few years ago also managed to annoy people, when he said he didn’t want the ‘Blackadder’ view of the First World War taught. Which neglects the fact that Blackadder is very definitely comedy.

The Tories want to impose on British schoolchildren a flag-waving, patriotic view of our country’s past and what it did around the world. But this would be to falsify history. Historians recognise that you can never get to an absolutely objective view history. But nevertheless, that is what you aim for as far as is possible. And you need to understand the history behind present-day political and social movements in order to make sense of them. You don’t have to be supporter of Black Lives Matter, for example, to recognise that it’s a powerful movement that does have the support of very many people, and that the movement’s rise can be explained through the history of persecution of American and British Blacks.

Trump’s announcement also seems to follow some of the movements among the local, state schoolboards in the US. A few years ago the Republican administration in Arizona voted to take the civil rights movement of the school syllabus, arguing that it was decisive or some such nonsense. What did they decide to replace it with? Readings from the speeches of Ronald Reagan. We’re almost back to Nazi Germany and the enforced reading of Hitler’s Mein Kampf in schools, and the various other wretched dictatorships around the world, whose citizens had to consume their leader’s literary efforts. Like Chairman Mao and his little red book in China. Reagan at least praises freedom and democracy, but the reality for the South American victims of the American empire was Fascism and mass murder during his tenure of the White House.

A week or so ago Trump banned the teaching of critical race theory to the police and other departments of the American state. And I think he was quite right. Critical race theory states, quite overtly, that all Whites are racist and that any institution established by Whites is therefore automatically discriminatory to people of colour. It is itself a nasty, racist doctrine that should have no place being taught for the same reason that White supremacist ideology shouldn’t either. But Trump’s demand that American schooling should be even more patriotic is wrong and deeply troubling.

He seems to want Americans to support their country ‘right or wrong’. Which brings to my mind a line from the 1980s British space detective series Star Cops. Interviewing a suspect, the hero Nathan Spring remarks of the other’s patriotism, ‘My country right or wrong, eh?’

‘There are worse philosophies.’

‘Yes, most of them start with that one.’

It’s the same with Trump’s view of history. This is another, troubling move towards Fascism with ideology taught as fact. It is not education. It is indoctrination and propaganda.

Radio 4 Programme Next Thursday on the Repatriation of Looted Museum Exhibits Following Black Lives Matter

The Radio Times also states that next Thursday on Radio 4 at 11.30 am there’s a documentary on the debate about the repatriation of looted African artefacts now on display in British museums. The blurb for it on page 125 of the Radio Times runs

In the wake of protesters in Bristol pulling down a statue of 17th-century slave trader Edward Colston, Gary Younge talks to museum curators as they review what is on display.

There’s an additional piece by Simon O’Hagan on the previous page, 124, which adds

Museums might be closed, but curators are keeping busy reassessing what they have on display – minds focused by the toppling of the statue of slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol in June. In the words of one curator, “in Britain you’re never more than 150 miles rom a looted African object.”

Presented by Gary Younge, who discovers that when the public is re-admitted to museums after lockdown, there is a distinct possibility that some display cases may have notable absences.

The debate over the return of looted and seized objects to indigenous communities around the world has been going on for several decades. Much of it is about the display of human remains. A few years ago a series about the British Museum showed that august institution repatriating a set of indigenous Australian burials to Tasmanian people from which they were seized. It’s not just African and indigenous peoples demanding that their ancestors and their property should be returned. The Greeks have famously been demanding the return of the Elgin Marbles for decades, if not since they very moment Lord Elgin collected them in the 19th century. In very many cases, I don’t doubt that the moral argument is with those demanding their return, and that it’s the right thing to do.

The mention of the toppling of Edward Colston’s statue in Bristol adds a dimension that complicates the issue. The repatriation of these objects is supposed to be about modern, western museums correcting the moral injustices of an imperial past. But many of the looted objects themselves are the products of slaving societies, and were seized by British forces during wars fought to extirpate the slave trade.

The Benin Bronzes are case in point. These are superbly sculpted bronze heads, which were made as part of shrines to the chief’s oba. Literally meaning ‘right arm’, the word also denotes his spiritual power, rather like the numa of the pagan Roman emperors. However, Benin, then Dahomey, was a major centre of the African slave trade. It had a plantation economy centred on cotton production like the American Deep South, and was a major exporter. So much so that the British launched a war against them from 1850 to 1852 after their king, Guezo, refused to give it up and continued trading. The bronzes were seized by the victorious British forces.

Nobody was talking about their repatriation until the 1980s, when ‘African radical’ and the highly controversial leader of Brent council, Bernie Grant, demanded their return. I’ve no doubt that Grant was motivated by genuine indignation about the humiliation of an African nation by the British empire. But there is an irony here in that such a very outspoken opponent of anti-Black racism should have been seeking to return objects that had been taken as part of military action against an African slave state. And one that had absolutely no qualms, and grew rich, from enslaving the ancestors of Black Brits, West Indians and Americans like Grant.

Ditto with some of the objects that may have been returned to Ethiopia. A year or so ago the I reported that a particularly holy cross belonging to the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, which had been seized by the British army in the 19th century, had also been repatriated to its country of origin. I wondered if the relic had also been looted in a similar campaign launched in that century to stop Abyssinian slave-raiding across the border into Sudan and what is now Kenya. If so, then it could be argued that it should not be repatriated, as it was a legitimate spoil in a war the British were justified in waging.

And let’s not be under any illusion that the African slaving nations wouldn’t also have enslaved the British servicemen they fought. One of the documents I found cataloguing the materials on slavery in the Empire and Commonwealth Museum in Bristol was a parliamentary blue book on the British action against the African slavers in Lagos. One of the chiefs involved stated that if he won, he was going to shave the head of the British commander and make him carry his palanquin. Which sounds very much like a declaration that he intended to enslave him.

I think the area of the repatriation of objects looted from Africa is much more complicated morally than is being discussed and presented, and that African involvement in and culpability for the slave trade is being quietly glossed over in order to present a cosy, straightforward narrative of imperial aggression and guilt.

 

Backlash against the Queen for Allowing Johnson Dictatorship

Mike’s also put up today a piece about the rising resentment towards the Queen for agreeing to Johnson’s demand to prorogue parliament. The Queen, as our hereditary monarch, is unelected. Boris Johnson is unelected: he was installed by a clique, that happened to form a majority in the Tory party at the time. The Tories are a minuscule part of the British people, and aren’t even the largest political party anymore. They’ve been massively eclipsed by Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party. The only people in this sordid affair, who did have a democratic mandate were our MPs. They have been elected by us, and it is to prevent them continuing to represent the will of their constituents and block Johnson’s no deal Brexit, that the Blonde Beast sought the Queen’s permission to rule without parliament for a set period. He has thus demonstrated his contempt for parliament. And arguably, so has the Queen.

Mike states that the monarchy is now desperately trying to backpeddle from this mess. Nicholas Witchell, the Beeb’s royal correspondent, has said that she has never refused to accept the advice of her ministers, and always follows precedent. Mike also quotes the oleaginous hominid stick insect, Jacob Rees-Mogg, who asked the Queen to do this on BoJob’s behalf, as saying that the Queen now feels ‘Boxed in’. Rees-Mogg said

“She and her advisors, I have little doubt, will be frankly resentful of the way this has been done and will be concerned at the headlines which say ‘Queen suspends Parliament.”

Mike comments

Rightly so – because, as current slang has it, the optics are terrible.

People are saying democracy has been denied by an unelected monarch acting on the wish of an unelected prime minister.

And they know she could have stopped him.

He then follows this with a selection of comments from twitter. These are by the QC Chris Daw, the comedian Nish Kumar, the Labour and Co-op MP for Edmonton, Kate Osamor, and ordinary people like Isobel and Lin#CorbynOutrider.

Chris Daw in his tweet states that the first thing they teach at law school is that it is the Queen in parliament, who is sovereign.

Not the Government, not the Prime Minister, and no, not the public via a referendum.

What has happened today rips up centuries of stable government.

It’s an outrage.

This relationship between crown and parliament has been at the heart of the British constitution since at least the days of Queen Elizabeth. It was set down in the 17th century in the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, although this codifies the constitutional view of earlier generations. It is this relationship which has prevented Britain from becoming an absolute, autocratic monarchy, as happened in France.

Isobel’s tweets express the anger and bewilderment of no doubt all too many other Brits, who wonder why the Queen has allowed this to happen. They now see her as rich, remote and isolated from the poverty the Tories have inflicted, content to see the country reduced to a mess. She tweeted

If she is resentful why did she allow it to happen? she knew it would cause a constitutional crisis whilst she carries on with her holiday in Balmoral the country is falling apart because SHE said YES.. she has lost any credibility she hAD she is happy to see UK in a mess.

perhaps the Queen+her family would like to go and live in a Tory Container for the Homeless, shall we demand the Royal Gravy train is cut off – when Boris gives Buck house to Trump.. he will do anything for the fool will she be happy in a Container like the homeless have to be?

I’ll give the Queen the benefit of the doubt here. I really don’t think that she thought that she did have a choice, as Johnson is the leader of the government. But she could have withheld her consent. This reminds me of the time the Australian Tories petitioned he in the ’70s to get rid of the-then Aussie Prime Minister, Gough ‘Wocker’ Whitlam. Because Whitlam was a Labour MP, and was doing too much to empower the working men and women, who have built that great Pacific nation. One of the priests at my local church is rather left-wing, and spent several years out in Oz, working with the poor, homeless and marginalised, including the indigenous people. He said to me one day that he wondered how long it would be, if Corbyn got in, before the Tories petitioned her to do to him what they did to Whitlam. By this example, not long. Not long at all.

Lin#CorbynOutrider tweeted that the Queen didn’t care less until she saw #abolishthe monarchy trending.

Mike concludes

That’s the nub of the matter, isn’t it?

And when this crisis is all over, with Dictator Johnson and his cronies banished to the waste-bin of history, it seems likely the people will want to seek assurances that this can never happen again.

We will need checks and balances to ensure that no unelected head of state can ever again deny us our right to representation.

It seems that, with a few penstrokes, the Queen may have put an end to the British Royalty.

See: https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2019/08/29/abolishthemonarchy-backlash-against-queen-for-meekly-rubber-stamping-johnsons-parliamentary-shutdown/

Mike’s article was based on a piece in the garden. But the I also published a similar piece about how there was now a backlash against the monarchy. Not just from this, but also from Andrew’s relationship with convicted paedophile Epstein.

The Tories under Cameron and Johnson are wrecking this country. They are actively causing the break up of the UK and riding roughshod over the British unwritten constitution, for their own selfish, personal and party interest. And they and their Yellow enablers in the Lib Dems dare to claim that Corbyn is a threat!

Antony Gormley Presents Programme on Stone Age Art

According to the Radio Times for 26th January to 1st February 2019, tomorrow, Saturday, 26th January, Antony Gormley will be presenting a programme on the origins of art way back in the Stone Age. As well as trotting round the world looking at various Paleolithic sites, he also meets and talks to the modern practitioners of this ancient art, Aboriginal Australians. The programme’s entitled ‘Antony Gormley: How Art Began’, and the blurb for it on page 52 of the Radio Times runs

One of Britain’s most celebrate sculptors travels back in time and journeys across the globe to piece together how art began. Once we believed that it all started with the cave paintings of Ice Age Europe, but new discoveries are overturning that idea. Deep inside the caves of France, Spain and Indonesia, Gormley finds beautiful, haunting and surprising works of art. The creator of the Angel of the North asks what these images from millennia ago tell us about who we are.

There’s rather more information about the programme by David Butcher on page 50, which says

Yes, it’s a documentary about prehistoric cave art. How often over the years have we seen an arts presenter in torchlight, sighing about the ineffable power of cave painting?

But this is different. This is Antony Gormley, one of our great artists, who by lucky chance is also a better talker about art than most presenters, making a pilgrimage not just through the French caves that he first visited on his honeymoon (we see a holiday snap) but also venturing further afield to Indonesia and Australia, looking for the first stirrings of human creativity.

“This is a cathedral of joy in living things,” he says in a cave called Les Combarelles. “I think we’ve found a Palaeolithic Picasso,” he jokes in Niaux. And in an extraordinary scene at Pech Merle, with its 28,000-year-old paintings of horses, a local expert demonstrates how they were made, by chewing up charcoal and delicately blow-spitting on the rock.

The ancient cave paintings of northern Spain and southern France are superb, extremely naturalistic depictions of the creatures roaming that part of the Mediterranean during the Old Stone Age 28,000 years ago. Some of them seem to have been deliberately painted on distinctly shaped pieces of rock, so that if you come into the part of the caves where they are they appear to move. When Picasso saw them over a century ago, he was so utterly astonished at their superb quality that he declared ‘We have invented nothing!’

At the turn of the Millennium 18 years ago, Hugh Quarshie, one of the actors in Casualty, presented a programme on the art and artefacts of the Stone Age on New Year’s Eve. One of the speakers he interviewed about them was a director of Horror flicks – I’ve forgotten whom. But he made some very interesting points about the parallels between Palaelithic art and his type of movie. They were both initiatory experiences which you viewed in darkness.

There seems to have been a definite religious/ritual purpose to their production. Most of them are found in chambers deep in the cave systems, which are extremely difficult to reach. To get to one of them you literally have to squeeze through on your stomach. There was very probably an aural component to their painting as well. Quite often the rocks near them have musical properties. Their lithophones which produce musical tones when struck. It therefore seems that some of them were being played while the artists worked producing these amazing pieces of work.

No-one quite knows why these wonderful paintings were made. It’s been suggested that they may have been made to secure success in hunting, or for fertility. Others have suggested that they were produced as part of shamanic rituals, in which the painters attempted to pass through the membrane between this world and that of the spirits. Whatever the reason they were created, they’re superb. I’m not a fan of Gormley’s work, but this looks well worth watching.

Anthropologist, TV presenter and former member of Time Team Alice Roberts also talked about the ancient cave paintings of Europe this week in the last edition of her The Incredible Human Journey, the series in which she traced humanity’s emergence and spread out of Africa tens of thousands of years. This week she talked about some of the very earliest human remains found in Europe, including those of modern Homo Sapiens from around 30-40,000 years ago from a cave in Romania. A forensic artist then reconstructed what one of them may have looked like from one of the skulls found. Roberts and the artist remarked on the person’s absence of any distinct racial characteristics. It was a definite human face, but it was neither Black, White or Asian, although they pointed out that we believe the people at this time had dark, Black skin. But it comes from a time before the development of modern racial characteristics.

They also reconstructed the face of a Neanderthal from about this time. They were stocky, powerfully built people with big noses and strong brow ridges. Although they died out, some of them interbreed with the invading modern humans, so that the DNA of modern people outside Africa contains about 3%-9% Neanderthal genes. The reconstruction didn’t have any hair. Contemplating it Roberts said that although Neanderthal women probably found modern human men very handsome, and that human women obviously found something in Neanderthal males, she wouldn’t have fancied mating with them. Well, each to his or her own taste. Looking at the reconstructed Neanderthal head, it reminded me of nothing so much as that of Beeb TV presenter and former felon, Dom Littlewood.

She also covered the ancient cave paintings, talking to a French artist who worked using the same techniques. He was shown blowing charcoal on to the rock behind his hand trying to create a stenciled handprint, just like those left by the ancient artists. Like the article in the Radio Times, Roberts said that it had to be made using a distinct technique. You couldn’t take it all into your mouth and just spit it out. Instead the artist blew it out in a constant stream of spitting, leaving his hand black with charcoal. It’s quite a time consuming process, and Roberts and the artist said that some works could take as long as week.

The art of the palaeolithic is fascinating and enigmatic. We’re learning more about it and the people who produced it, but so much still remains lost in the mysteries of time.

JudeoNazism: Jewish Scholar Yeshayahu Leibowitz’s Term for Israeli Fascism

In an article attacking the decision of the Green members of Brighton and Hove’s council to adopt the I.H.R.A. definition of anti-Semitism, Tony Greenstein quoted a number of senior Israeli figures – Naftali Bennett, the minister for education, Avigdor Liberman, Netanyahu’s wretched defence minister, to show how they matched Nazi pronouncements against the Jews. In so doing, they conformed to what the Israeli Orthodox religious scholar, Yeshayahu Leibowitz termed ‘Judeonazism’. Greenstein wrote

In an interview with The Times of Israel it was reported that Israel’s Education Minister, Naftali Bennett, had stated that ‘he would instruct the IDF to shoot and kill any Palestinians who cross into the country from Gaza’. When questioned as to whether or not that would also apply to children Bennett responded ‘“They are not children — they are terrorists. We are fooling ourselves. I see the photos.” Bennett says IDF should shoot to kill Gazans who cross border [8.10.18]

The statement of Bennett, who is the leader of HaBayit HaYehudi (Jewish Home), a religious settlers’ party, is that of a Nazi. It is reminiscent of Himmler’s speech to Nazi leaders in the Polish city of Posnan on October 6th 1943 when he explained why the killings had to include Jewish children: “I did not assume to have the right to exterminate the men… and have the avengers personified in the children to become adults for our children and grandchildren.”[Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, p.259]

Palestinian children to Bennett are no different from Jewish children to Himmler. To both they represent the devil in child form. That was why Israeli polymath and orthodox religious scholar, Professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz described the settlers as Judeo-Nazis. Naftali Bennett is a prime example of a Judeo-Nazi. He subscribes to a racial philosophy of Jewish supremacism no different from Nazi ideology.

But under the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism ‘Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis’ can be anti-Semitic even though Israelis regularly make such comparisons themselves. For example even Deputy Chief of Staff General Yair Golan at a Holocaust Remembrance Day commemoration two years ago caused a storm when he stated that

‘If there’s something that frightens me about Holocaust remembrance it’s the recognition of the revolting processes that occurred in Europe in general, and particularly in Germany, back then – 70, 80 and 90 years ago – and finding signs of them here among us today in 2016. IDF Deputy Chief Likens ‘Revolting Trends’ in Israeli Society to pre-Holocaust Germany.

Another member of Netanyahu’s Cabinet, Defence Minister Avigdor Liberman remarked that he would like nothing more than to see the drowning of thousands of Palestinian prisoners in the Dead Sea. Again the label Judeo Nazi would be apt. His Deputy as Defence Minister, Rabbi Eli Dahan is also no slouch. In a radio interview he explained that to him Palestinians ‘“are like animals, they aren’t human.” and that “A Jew always has a much higher soul than a gentile [non-Jew] , even if he is a homosexual,”

To understand the full import of the above it is important to recognize that for Orthodox Jews being gay is an abomination which merits the death penalty, but even a gay Jew has a ‘much higher soul’ than a non-Jew. These are just some of the people who inhabit the present Israeli cabinet. Yet to call them what they are, Judeo-Nazis is anti-Semitic under the shabby, incoherent and contradictory collection of words that goes under the title of the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism.

See: http://azvsas.blogspot.com/2018/10/brighton-and-hoves-green-councillors.html

Greenstein’s article contains links to a piece in the liberal Israeli paper, Haaretz, describing just how Netanyahu’s administration and the Israel it has created conforms to Professor Leibowitz’s concept, and to the Wikipedia entry on him.

Leibowitz was professor of biochemistry, organic chemistry and neurophysiology at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University, as well as a prolific writer on Jewish and Western philosophy. He also passionately believed in the separation of religion from state. In a 1968 essay, ‘The Territories’, he predicted a chilling future for Israel as a totalitarian, colonialist surveillance state. According to Wikipedia, he wrote

The Arabs would be the working people and the Jews the administrators, inspectors, officials, and police—mainly secret police. A state ruling a hostile population of 1.5 to 2 million foreigners would necessarily become a secret-police state, with all that this implies for education, free speech and democratic institutions. The corruption characteristic of every colonial regime would also prevail in the State of Israel. The administration would suppress Arab insurgency on the one hand and acquire Arab Quislings on the other. There is also good reason to fear that the Israel Defense Forces, which has been until now a people’s army, would, as a result of being transformed into an army of occupation, degenerate, and its commanders, who will have become military governors, resemble their colleagues in other nations.

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

While the I.H.R.A. definition of anti-Semitism forbids comparing Jews to Nazis as anti-Semitic, the comparisons are there, as Greenstein has pointed out many times. And Israeli politicians, including Netanyahu’s domestic opponents, have regularly accused each other and the Israeli premier of being Nazis.

The I.H.R.A. definition of anti-Semitism also forbids holding Israel to higher standards than other countries. This again is intended to prevent or stifle criticism of Israel and its barbarous treatment of the Palestinians. But as far back as 1905 H.G. Wells attacked Jewish racism alongside that of the English, the Germans and the Italians in his book, A Modern Utopia. The book is a quasi-science fictional description of Wells’ ideas about what would constitute the ideal state. Wells himself believed passionately in a global, world government, in which all the races of humanity would share a common language and culture, and would live, work, study and move around the globe freely in peace and harmony. The chapter ‘Race in a Modern Utopia’ is one long diatribe against racism and racial prejudice which still remains acutely relevant. It is marred only by the fact that Wells was a eugenicist, who did believe that the undeserving poor and ‘inferior’ races should be prevented from breeding. In practice, however, he felt that even those races considered inferior at the time, Australian Aborigines and the Khoisan peoples of South Africa, would still contain skilled individuals, who would be allowed to have children and contribute to this new, global civilization.

About the growing European racism in his time, he wrote

And just now, the world is in a sort of delirium about race and the racial struggle. The Briton forgetting his Defoe, the Jew forgetting the very word proselyte, the German forgetting his anthropometric variations and the Italian forgetting everything, are obsessed by the singular purity of their blood, and the danger of contamination the mere continuance of other races involves. True to the law that all human aggregation involves the spirit of opposition to whatever is external to the aggregation, extraordinary intensifications of racial definition are going on; the vileness, the inhumanity, the incompatibility of alien races is being steadily exaggerated. The natural tendency of every human being towards a stupid conceit in himself and his kind, a stupid depreciation of all unlikeness, is traded upon by this bastard science. With the weakening of national references, and with the pause before reconstruction in religious belief, these new arbitrary and unsubstantial race prejudices become daily more formidable. They are shaping policies and modifying laws, and they will certainly be responsible for a larger proportion of the wars, hardships and cruelties the immediate future holds in store for our earth. (pp. 118-9, my emphasis).

Wells’ predictions have horrifically been born out. In Africa, just a few years after Wells wrote this, the Germans embarked on a deliberate campaign to exterminate the Herrero in Africa. Then there were the Armenian massacres by the Turks, which convinced Hitler that he could murder the Jews without consequence from the other nations. And even after the War, Mosley was drawing on respected scientists to show that certain races were inferior, and therefore Blacks and other peoples should not be allowed to mix and intermarry with White Britons.

And across the world, including Israel, Fascism is rising again. Including Israel, which is quite prepared to support the Fascistic regimes in Poland and Hungary with their venomous hatred of Jews, Muslims, immigrants and Roma. Dr. Who last Sunday remined us of the courage and achievement of Rosa Parks in challenging racial oppression. And H.G. Wells, one of the ancestors of the series through his The Time Machine, still remains acutely relevant in his denunciation of racism today.

And as Wells, Prof. Leibowitz and Tony Greenstein, amongst others, have shown, Jewish Fascism exists alongside its gentile forms, and all have to be fought and combated.

TNT Nation: Daily Mail Racists Freak Out as Cheddar Man Revealed as Black

One of the big stories last week was the unveiling of the reconstructed face of Cheddar Man. As Jeff Waldorf points out in this clip from TNT Nation, this is a prehistoric man, named after where he was found, and not a man literally made of cheese. Cheddar Man, or rather, his skeleton, was found in the caves in Cheddar in Somerset, England, way back in 1906. The skeleton’s 16,000 or so years old, and so dates from about the end of the last Ice Age. The scientists reconstructing his features also used for the first time DNA analysis to gauge his skin and eye colour. And it turns out that he had ‘dark to black skin’ and blue eyes.

They scientists were able to do this using DNA they were able to extract from the skeleton. This had genetic markers similar to those for dark skin, which is also present in ten per cent of the modern British population. Cheddar Man’s colouring was a surprise for the scientists, as they expected him to have white skin and blond or light hair, as an adaptation to the extreme cold. Commenting on the revelation that he was black, one scientist said that it showed that British has not always been associated with Whiteness. It had changed, and would change again in the future. I think they were also able to trace the ultimate origins of Cheddar Man’s people, as they entered Britain from a route across southern Europe ultimately going back to Turkey.

I’m not surprised by this revelation. It’s been suggested since at least the 1990s that the first anatomically modern humans – Homo Sapiens Sapiens – who entered and colonised Europe, were dark-skinned. Back in the 1990s a Channel 4 series on human evolution showed a reconstruction of these people, as they would have looked 40,000 or so years ago, edging along the primeval European countryside as Black. The programme also consciously reversed the idea, promoted in many past books and articles on them, that the Neanderthals were Black. The programme instead argued that they would have had light skins as an adaptation to the arctic temperatures in Europe. If you also look at the remains of our ancient ancestors, you also find that they have more archaic features, like a strong brow ridge, than the other humans in Africa, who were much more gracile. I think its these archaic features which led some archaeoanthropologists to state that some of these humans were of the same physical build as Aboriginal Australians, because these ancient people have also retained some features of archaic humanity.

The real shock, as one of the articles about Cheddar Man said last week, is how recently White skin and hair evolved – in the last 10,000 years or so. It’s much more recent than they expected. However, I can remember reading in a review of the film The Clan of the Cave Bear in Starburst one of the criticisms of that movie. It starred Daryl Hannah as a Cro Magnon woman growing up with a family of Neanderthals. Hannah’s blond, and the article pointed out that blonde hair is only supposed to have evolved 10,000 or so years ago – much later than the age the film, and the book on which it was based, by Jean Auel, is set.

The revelation that Cheddar Man was Black, however, set the racists off. And here Waldorf reads out and tears to pieces some of the comments about this story left on the Daily Mail’s website. And they go from the reasonable, to the completely mad.

Waldorf begins with the comment from one individual, who wonders if the genetic reconstruction is accurate, given the age of the skeleton and difficulty of extracting genetic information from remains that ancient. He states, however, that he isn’t a scientist, but has simply watched a lot of documentaries. Waldorf mocks him for this, which is actually unfair. It’s a reasonable question, as the impression I’ve had from watching the same kind of documentaries is that ancient DNA can be extremely delicate, and is very often fragmentary, so it can actually be very difficult to extract useful genetic information from human remains. I can remember reading an article a few years ago, which made this point when discussing the Neanderthals to show why scientists have not tried to recreate them genetically.

And then there’s the completely bonkers. Another commenter wondered if there wasn’t something deeper going on here. They smelt a conspiracy, as the revelation that Cheddar Man was Black came after, so this person believed, the collapse of the ‘out of Africa’ theory of human origins, and the proof that the Ancient Egyptians weren’t African. First of all, if the theory that humans first evolved in Africa and then spread outwards across the globe has collapsed, then no-one’s told me. Or any of the anthropologists and archaeologists working in this field. The only people I can think of who reject the theory are, er, marginal thinkers. Or cranks. Waldorf takes apart the claim that the ancient Egyptians weren’t Africans, by pointing out that ancient Egypt actually had a very diverse population, and that in the south they tended to be darker than in the north. Also, Egypt is part of Africa.

This comment seems to echo back to the views of some of the White racial supremacists that the ancient Egyptians, as the citizens of an advanced ancient civilisation, couldn’t possibly be Black, and were instead White and European in appearance. This is, of course, vehemently rejected by AFrocentrist historians, who argue instead that they were Black. If you look at the way the ancient Egyptians depicted themselves in their art – in the tomb paintings, for example, they are lighter than the darker skinned Nubian peoples to their south. Male ancient Egyptians are portrayed as having reddish brown skin, while women are yellow. Nubians are painted with black skin. Even so, they are still darker than the Europeans, which appear in their art, such as the people of Minoan Crete. These are depicted with pink skin. The scientifically accepted view is that the peoples of North Africa, including ancient Egypt, were White.

However, way back in the 1990s or the early part of this century some anthropologists reconstructed the faces of people from Roman Egypt. This found that their features were more strongly African than the portraits of them painted on to their mummy cases, which made them look more European. There were definite cultural and economic reasons why an ancient Egyptian really wouldn’t want to be seen as ‘Black’. Roman Egypt was a horrible, racist, apartheid state, where the indigenous Egyptian population was taxed more than those of Greek or European descent. This would have left many Egyptians with feelings of inferiority about their African features, which they would have tried to cover up.

There was also the suggestion by one archaeologist that the ultimate origins of the ancient Egyptian civilisation lay in a Black tribe from further south, which migrated to the north. This archaeologist came to this conclusion through examining some of the early henge monuments, which predate the ancient Egyptian civilisation proper by thousands of years. I think these were similar to those in the Black African nations further south. One of the stones in these monuments also seemed deliberately shaped to resemble a cow. Hathor was the ancient Egyptians’ cow goddess, and so there’s the suggestion that she was a survival from this ancient, pastoralist Black African culture.

I also came across another story in the paper recently, which said that the ancient Egyptians weren’t African after all. I didn’t get the opportunity to read it – I only glimpsed the headline in passing – and so can’t really comment on it. But it seems unlikely to me. The Egyptologist John Romer criticised the notion that the ancient Egyptians were White way back in the 1990s in his Channel 4 series, Great Excavations. In one episode, he discussed the various diffusionist theories of human evolution and progress, and how they were influenced by 19th century theories of racial supremacy and conquest. Diffusionism is the archaeological theory that advances in civilisation occur through successive societies and races conquering their predecessors. Early archaeologists were busy examining the remains of these past cultures, and especially their skull and head shapes, in order to develop a classification of the various races these different physical types represented. As the ancient Egyptians were an advanced civilisation, they confidently expected them to have their origins in the lighter skinned peoples further east.

Except that they didn’t. The ancient Egyptian people remained the same stock, unchanged, as their culture developed and flourished around them. They created their culture themselves, without any other invading race creating or imposing a superior culture after them. Of course, at times ancient Egypt was conquered by outside nations, such as the Semitic Hyksos kings and the Nubians, who produced a line of Black pharaohs. They were also an important power themselves in the ancient Near East, at one point holding Syria and Palestine. But ancient Egyptian culture was their own creation, and not the result of invasion by some biologically superior race. And as far as I know, the only people, who believe that the ancient Egyptians had blonde hair and blue eyes are neo-Nazis.

Now I think there is a subtle message behind this recent discovery of Cheddar Man’s complexion. I think some of the comments made by the experts about his colouring and Britishness – that it is only relatively recently that White skin has evolved, and that Britishness is not necessarily connected to Whiteness – have been made to make an anti-racist point. It wasn’t just the scientist quoted by the TNT clip. There was another quote in the papers by someone saying that we may have to rethink the relationship between Britishness and Whiteness. It’s a reasonable, scientifically informed comment. But the recreation of Cheddar Man with dark skin clearly touched a nerve amongst the racists reading the Daily Heil.

As for Cheddar Man himself, he still has descendants in the area. Or at least, a descendant. A few years ago scientists sampled his DNA, and then tested the other people in Cheddar to see if they were related. It turns out one of them was – the headmaster of the local school. He was quite happy about it, but his mother was really upset, worrying what people would think. Well, if they’re sensible, they won’t think anything disparaging. As I said, these people were exactly like us modern humans. They had the same physical features and the same intelligence. They weren’t lumbering ape-men by any means. The only difference between modern people and them is that they lived over 10,000 years ago, when much of Britain was a frozen wilderness. I can even imagine some people being slightly envious, that this chap has an ancestry that can be traced back to this incredibly remote period.

Jodi Magness on the Archaeology of Early Islamic Settlement in Palestine

One of the other books in the winter edition of the Oxbow Bargain Book Catalogue for Winter 2017 is Jodi Magness’ Archaeology of the Early Islamic Settlement in Palestine. The blurb for this says

Archaeological evidence is frequently cited by scholars as proof that Palestine declined after the Muslim conquest and especially after the rise of the Abbasids in the mid-eighth century. Instead, Magness argues that the archaeological evidence supports the idea that Palestine and Syria experienced a tremendous growth in population and prosperity between the mid-sixth and mid-seventh centuries.

Eisenbrauns, 2003, 9781575060705, Hardback, was £49.99, now £14.95.

Magness is an Israeli archaeologist, who has written some brilliant, very accessible, popular books on the archaeology of the Holy Land. I recognise that my own religious views mean that I have a bias towards Biblical archaeology and the Ancient Near East, as opposed to the later, Muslim periods. However, western concerns with these periods have meant that precious later evidence of Muslim culture and towns have been destroyed as archaeologists have dug through them to get to ancient Egypt, for example. The British archaeologist John Romer was particular critical about this in one edition of his series on the history of archaeology for Channel 4, broadcast in the 1990s, Great Excavations. In one sequence, he sifted through the sand around one excavated ancient Egyptian monument, picking out pieces of Islamic period pottery, and sadly remarked, ‘There was a whole town here once.’ And explained that it had been either destroyed, or at least its remains had, by archaeologists determined to get at what was underneath from antiquity.

Which of course, may partly explain – but does not justify – the Islamist rage against pre-Islamic Egypt and its monuments. Like the pyramids, which they’d love to destroy.

Magness’ conclusions don’t really surprise me. There’s an argument about the demographic and economic conditions of the late Roman Empire at the time of the Muslim conquests. Part of the reasons for the Fall of the Roman Empire was economic stagnation, as I’ve pointed out before to combat the rubbish spouted by right-wing politicos and classicists like Boris Johnson. During the late Byzantine Empire, towns shrank, and many disappeared completely as they were abandoned. Those that survived tended to consist of a castle or fortification and a church around which was a much smaller settlement.

The nascent Islamic Empire put the region in touch with an expanding state that grew to cover the Near East and spread into parts of India. It gave merchants the opportunity to establish trade networks across a vast area. Furthermore, even when the Byzantines and Muslim emperors were still at work, Christians in the early caliphate were not prevented from contact with their spiritual superiors and coreligionists in Byzantium. Also, the official Byzantine ‘Melkite’ church, as it was known in Egypt, had persecuted the various ‘Jacobite’ or ‘Nestorian’ sects, which they considered heretical, often with horrific tortures. The result was that when the Muslims conquered the region, the persecuted masses opened the gates to them and welcomed them as liberators.

At the moment, however, Netanyahu, the Likudniks and the other members of the Israeli religious right in his coalition seem to be determined to erase any history of Palestine, that challenges its exclusive Jewish character. There are any number of books and articles by western historians attacking this and comparing it with militant nationalist movements elsewhere. Such as by Philip Rahtz, a very respected British archaeologist from my part of the West Country in his book, Invitation to Archaeology. This is not anti-Semitic, and Rahtz himself has always been anti- or at least, non-racist. He describes in the above book how shocked he was when an apparently liberal Australian student he was teaching was deeply surprised by his interest in the archaeology of Aboriginal Australians. ‘But they’re just apes!’ she exclaimed.

Netanyahu and his thugs are determined to close mosques and churches, or at least keep them very tightly controlled, just as the illegal settlers they support seize Palestinian land and homes in the Occupied Territories. So I really don’t know how long a genuinely open archaeological investigation of the Islamic period will last.

Neve Gordon on the Double Standards of British Government’s Anti-Semitism Legislation

Last week, the British government used its new definition of anti-Semitism to ban National Action, a vile neo-Nazi ‘youth organisation’, whose members have openly called for another Holocaust in Britain against the Jews. Hope Not Hate, one of the anti-Fascist, anti-religious extremism organisations, cautiously welcomed the ban, but said they could not understand why it could not have been done much earlier using existing legislation.

I wondered when it was introduced whether it could be a first attempt by the government to legitimise a piece of problematic legislation by using it to ban a group, about whom there is little controversy, before using it to ban more problematic organisations. I said in my blog post that there seemed to be nothing controversial about the definition of anti-Semitism adopted by the British government, but was suspicious about how the legislation would be used.

It now seems I was right to do so.

Neve Gordon, an Israeli activist, who fights for the rights of the Palestinians to civil rights and their own independent state, has written a short piece in this weekend’s Counterpunch criticising the legislation. She begins by stating that anti-Semitism is on the rise globally and needs to be tackled. But she states clearly that the working definition of anti-Semitism adopted by the British government is hypocritical and dangerous, as

says that anyone who subjects Israel to ‘double standards by requiring of it behaviour not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation’ is an anti-Semite.

She then goes on show how the British government uses double standards all the time when criticising human rights abuses by China, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Sudan. These could be used to show that the British government was Islamophobic, and, in the case of Sudan, guilty of ‘another type of racism’. She concludes

The definition of anti-Semitism adopted by the British government is itself a manifestation of a double standard, since it treats Israel differently from every other country in the world rather than as a nation among nations.

See: http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/12/16/anti-semitism-double-standards/

From this it appears to me that the purpose of the anti-Semitism legislation to criminalise criticism of the state of Israel, under the guise of tackling ant-Semitism. This was, after all, the reason behind the anti-Semitism allegations in the Labour party in the summer. Those slandered of anti-Semites were not. They were in most cases principled men and women, with proud personal histories of campaigning against racism, including anti-Semitism. What they were guilty of was standing up for the rights of the Palestinians against decades of horror by the Zionist state. They were also terribly guilty of being historically well informed. Jackie Walker, who is half Black and half-Jewish, with a Jewish partner and daughter, was condemned as an anti-Semite because she dared to state that the Holocaust, horrific as it was, was not a unique event and was comparable to other cases of ethnic cleansing and persecution, such as the slave trade in the case of Black Africans. She also discussed the way many Jews were also active in the slave trade, while recognising that the overall responsibility for it lay with White Christian nations. And Ken Livingstone was attacked and suspended because he was entirely accurate about the way the Zionist settlers had co-operated with the Nazis in the colonisation of Israel before the implementation of Hitler’s revolting Final Solution.

The Israel lobby vehemently attacks any criticism, no matter how warranty, with accusations of anti-Semitism. The definition of anti-Semitism enunciated by Benjamin Netanyahu explicitly links it to anti-Zionism. Critics of Israel are also smeared as anti-Semites by the allegation that they are especially critical of Israel, more so than any other nation. Mike, over at Vox Political, had just this accusation thrown at him by a commenter to one of his blog posts about Israel and the anti-Semitism accusations. This commenter claimed that Mike was hypocritical in attacking Israel for human rights violations, while tolerating the behaviour of the Turkish government in Cyprus. Mike responded by pointing out that he didn’t agree with that, either. Now it seems Theresa May has passed legislation that would allow her to smear and prosecute people like Mike using the new legislation by making the same allegations, no matter how demonstrably false and risible they are.

While there are Nazis and anti-Semites, who do use anti-Zionism as a cover for their real Jew hatred, the reason why left-wing critics of Israel, including many Jews and Israelis, like Neve Gordon, is because Israel is a western country. And its persecution of the indigenous inhabitants, the Palestinians, is exactly like the way other western nations, like Britain, treated the indigenous peoples of the countries they colonies. Such as the genocide of the Native Americans, the Aboriginal Australians, slavery, segregation in America and apartheid in South Africa, and the Nazi Holocaust and extermination of other groups, such as the mentally handicapped and ill, Gypsies, and Poles and Russians. And I have absolutely no doubt that very many of the same people are also concerned about human rights violations in the rest of the world, like Communist China and its treatment of Tibet, dissidents and people of faith, the rise of Hindu extremism and the persecution of Muslims, Sikhs, Christians and Hindu dissidents and moderates by Modi and his wretched BJP. Nor are they complacent about the brutality and thuggery committed by the various African kleptocrats and despots.

They criticise Israel and its brutal treatment of the Palestinians, because Israel has not been subject to the same criticism and isolation as many of these other nations.

It also seems to me that the new legislation follows similar laws passed in America, which are designed to prevent the American state or local authorities from supporting the BDS movement. This is the movement that encourages people to boycott and divest from Israeli companies operating in the occupied West Bank. So far 30 per cent of the companies located there have been forced to move out. It is dangerously successful, and many, especially younger, American Jews are becoming increasingly indifferent or critical of Israel and its brutality towards its indigenous people.

Hence this malign piece of legislation, which is intended to protect a vicious, intolerant regime while claiming to protect Jews from vicious intolerance.

It also show the mendacity of the British press and media. The piece of the legislation that was cited in the I newspaper made no mention of criminalising criticism of Israel. It just followed the standard definition of anti-Semitism as hatred of Jews for being Jews. There was no mention of Israel. Now it may be that Neve Gordon is wrong, but I honestly don’t believe this. This government has lied again and yet again, without any qualms. And when it has not lied, it has attempted to defend itself by withholding information and official documents. And the media has also shown itself consistently mendacious about the anti-Semitism smears in the Labour party, endlessly recycling the lie that those smeared were anti-Semites when the opposite was true. The silence on this part of the legislation shows how little the British media really values free speech and journalistic independence.

Neve Gordon is right. Anti-Semitism is on the rise globally. You can see amongst the Alt-Right Nazi goons that turned up a few weekends ago at the Ronald Reagan room to scream ‘Hail Trump! Hail our race!’ It’s there in the Jobbik party in Hungary, and other viciously racist parties across eastern Europe. And its there in Britain, with Jack Renshaw and the other junior storm troopers of National Action. They’ve been banned. But the purpose of the legislation wasn’t to criminalise them. It was to close down free speech. Their ban was simply to make it all seem respectable.