Introducing Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi: One of the ‘Wrong Type of Jews’

Double Down News are another left-wing, alternative news site and agency. In this video, Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi of Jewish Voice for Labour, talks about the abuse and attempts to silence her she and the other left-wing, pro-Palestinian Jews have faced. She describes what a breath of fresh air Jeremy Corbyn was and the hope he gave people like herself, that there would be real change at last after 30 years in the Labour party. She talks about the eminent Jewish academics, who have criticised the establishment’s exclusive concentration on support for Israel as the defining factor in Jewish identity, and the powerful role left-wing Jews like herself have played in combating racism and prejudice all over the world, from the battle against Mosley’s BUF to the American Civil Rights movement and apartheid South Africa.

Anti-Semitic Abuse for Being Pro-Palestine

She begins by describing the abuse she personally got when she was 19 and presented a pro-Palestinian talk at Uni. she was called ‘safe-hating’, ‘the wrong kind of Jew’, ‘anti-Semitic’ and a ‘kapo’. This is especially despicable, as they were the Jewish collaborators with the Nazis in the concentration camps. She is bitterly critical of this type of abuse, not just because it’s especially offensive for people who have really suffered under Nazis and other vicious anti-Semites – she equates it with being called a ‘paedophile’ – but because it also delegitimises the struggle against real Fascists. Here the video shows footage from the notorious Charlottesville Nazi gathering, with the storm troopers of the Alt Right marching along chanting ‘The Jews will not replace us.’ Wimborn-Idrissi’s talk and the abuse she received was covered by the Jewish Telegraph, who put it all on the front page. Which shows you what a despicable, right-wing establishment rag it is.

Heijo Meyer and Israel’s Nazi-like Persecution of the Palestinians

She also gives the real truth about Corbyn’s infamous attendance at the speech given by Heijo Meyer, which was used to pillory Corbyn as an anti-Semite. Of course he’s no such thing, and the video shows images of the greatest prime minister Britain rejected demonstrating against racism, including his arrest for protesting against apartheid. Meyer was a Dutch Holocaust survivor – and the video shows this with Meyer rolling up his sleeve to show the tattoo on his forearm which the Nazis used to mark the inmates of the death camps. Meyer’s was speaking at a Holocaust Memorial Day event. He was describing how the techniques used by the Nazis to dehumanize people like him – Jews – in the camps to enable them to murder them are also being used by Israel against the Palestinians. And what Wimborne-Idrissi says is horrifying is that the parallels are there.

This section of the footage is grim, as it show the Palestinian victims of Israeli aggression – homes in rubble, a disabled person tipped over in their wheelchair by Israeli squaddies, a little girl with horrifically blackened, swollen eyes.

The talk was part of a series of events that also showed other communities had suffered oppression, like the Travellers. But they were shouted down by a very obnoxious, very vociferous group of Zionists. She found it deeply disgusting that these people were trying to shout down and intimidate an eighty year old man, and urged Corbyn to call the rozzers to have them removed. And in fact the fuzz were prevailed upon to do their duty. But unfortunately by that time they’d been successful in drowning out the Travellers, so that people hardly heard a word from them.

The Media Silencing of Left-Wing Jews

Naomi points out that the media refuses give Jews like her a voice. Instead they give space to organisations like the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism as if they were long established and authoritative. There the video show a group waving placards, ‘Labour – For the Many Not the Jew’. This is the mendacious slogan dreamed up by novelist Howard Jacobson when he was in New York. Which is a good and sufficient reason for no-one to buy his books or listen to anything he has to say ever again. It also shows the Beeb’s Kirsty Wark and other journos as an example of this media bias. But Jews have opposed Zionism and Israel for a long time. This is accompanied by images of prominent Jewish critics of Zionism like the awesome Norman Finkelstein and various anti-Zionist Jewish conventions. Some of these are in Black and White, and are of packed, mass meetings. One looks like the Bund. This was the mass socialist party of eastern European Jews. Its slogan was ‘Wherever We Are, That’s Our Homeland’, and they were fiercely anti-Zionist.

She talks about Marek Edelman, one of the heroes of the Warsaw Uprising, who said that ‘to be a Jew is always to side with the oppressed, never the oppressor’. And that was why Jews like her aligned with the oppressed and fought against racism, and why it was just so revolting that their opponents wished to associate Jewry with the type of people they’d always fought against. She tells how the Jewish journalist, Anthony Lerman, has published articles attacking the anti-Semitism smears in the Labour party, and also Kenneth Stern’s criticism of the abuse of the I.H.R.A. definition of anti-Semitism. Stern is the Jewish academic, who formulated it. He meant it to be used in compiling statistics about anti-Semitic abuse. But he is concerned about the way it is being used to silence critics of Israel. He testified on this to Congress, and the video has a clip of his speech. He says he’s worried about the way its being used against Jewish non-Zionist college students and the way organisations are compiling dossiers and passing round opponents on critics of Israel. The anti-Zionist college students should also be heard. This is significant, because I think Stern is himself a Zionist. He’s just a decent man and not a racial fanatic like some of the organisations abusing his definition of anti-Semitism. But unfortunately all you hear are the pro-Israel fanatics. You don’t hear or see anything broadcast or printed by Lerman or Stern, except a few learned articles if you look online.

Fleeing Real Anti-Semitism, and Hope for the Future

She also talks about some of her and her families experiences as refugees from the pogroms and persecutions in eastern Europe, of not fitting because you’re weird with a funny accent. But there has to be hope. Jeremy Corbyn brought 300,000 new people into the party. And an increasing number of a new generation of young Jews, especially in America, are turning away and against Israel.

She concludes by praising Double Down News for giving left-wing Jews like herself a voice, and urges people to support it.

Meet The Wrong Type of Jew, The Media Doesn’t Want You To Know Exists | Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi – YouTube

Naomi makes excellent points, and people should hear not just her voice, but the many other Jews like her. She is right to point out, early in the video, that the political and media establishment are anti-Semitic in their attempts to create the impression that Jews constitute a single, monolithic block. That’s what their oppressors have always done.

Unfortunately the media has shown that they have absolutely no intention of giving any space to good peeps like Jewish Voice for Labour, Jewdas and the Jewish Socialist Group. The Beeb, a company which increasingly looks like it has a proud future behind it, has been one of the leaders in pushing the anti-Semitism smears. And it wonders why it comes fifth ranked as trustworthy by the British public, lower even than Channel 5.

The Beeb is reviled as left-wing and ‘woke’ by the Tories and their poodle media because of its anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-homophobic stance, and ’cause they see it as anti-Brexit. But in domestic politics and economics, it’s solidly pro-Tory and pro-Israel. Hence its steadfast refusal to let any other voice be heard, Jewish or gentile, to contradict the anti-Semitism.

But left-wing, sincerely anti-racist folks of all religions and ethnicities have and are waking up to the Beeb’s disgusting bias. Which is why they’re joining the right in switching it off.

If we are going to hear the real truth, it has to come from news sites like Double Down News, Sam Seder’s Majority Report and the David Pakman Show in America, Amy Goodson of Democracy Now! and Abby Martin of Tele Sur, Ash Sarkar of Novara Media and Kerry-Ann Mendoza of The Canary. She’s another anti-racist gentile, who’s been accused of anti-Semitism, despite having a Jewish partner. Seder and Pakman are both Jewish. Seder has described himself as the most Jewish guy you know, and has no time whatsoever for Israel screaming anti-Semitism ever time America cuts its aid budget.

When we hear the truth, more often than not it comes from these broadcasters. Because it surely is not coming from the establishment media.

BBC Fifth Most Trusted News Broadcasters

Or should that be ‘fifth most distrusted’ for news. Mike today has put up a piece commenting on the finding by Ofcom that that the Beeb is behind Sky News, Channel 4, ITV and Channel 5 in poll of audience trust and belief in their impartiality. He contrasts this finding, which shows that of these five broadcasters, the Beeb is considered to be the least trustworthy and impartial and Sky News the most, with Andrew Marr’s comments about possible competition from GB News and Murdoch’s planned TV news service. Marr was upbeat, believing that audiences would prefer BBC impartiality to overtly opinionated broadcasters like Fox News. He also claimed that the Beeb didn’t have a left-wing bias with remarks about the Director-General Hugh Carleton Green. He claimed Green had a far more anti-hierarchical, anti-Conservative bias than today.

The right-wing internet broadcaster Alex Bellfield was ranting about Ofcom’s findings yesterday. He’s an ex-employee of the Beeb and hates them with a passion. He regularly denounces them as a source of ‘woke’ bias for its continuing anti-sexism anti-racism and pro-LGBT stance. So he was highly delighted with this bit of news.

The Beeb has come under strong attack for its supposed anti-Conservative stance, partly because the Tories themselves want it privatised and its place in broadcasting filled by right-wing commercial broadcasters like their backer, Rupert Murdoch. I don’t doubt that the lack of trust the British public has for the Beeb largely comes from the regular attacks in the right-wing press.

But it also reflects the lack of trust those on the left also have with the broadcaster. When it comes to politics and international affairs, I have very, very little trust in the Beeb. The Corporation was part of the general media frenzy pushing the bogus anti-Semitism smears against Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour party, and are still doing so. Last Friday an alleged comedian on Have I Got News For You, Fin Taylor, joked about bombing Jeremy Corbyn supporters at Glastonbury. There’s been wide criticism of the joke, but the Beeb has naturally defended it. I’ve covered this in a previous blog post, where I mistakenly referred to Taylor as Torbin or Toibin/Tobin. I’m absolutely sure Taylor was invited on to the show because he was anti-Corbyn, and could be counted on to make some kind of dig at him. The Beeb just didn’t expect how much outrage it would provoke.

I’m also extremely sceptical about its foreign news. For example, it has consistently claimed that the 2012 Maidan Revolution in the Ukraine was democratic, despite the fact that it was carefully staged by Victoria Nuland of the US state department and the National Endowment for Democracy, the autonomous body to whom the American state has delegated its policy of regime change since taking it away from the CIA and their ‘Health Alteration Squad’. Putin is an autocratic thug, but in this instance the Russians are the wronged party. But you won’t hear that from the Beeb.

Just as you won’t hear news that the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were about anything other than giving these countries freedom and democracy, when the reality is that they were attacked and occupied for their oil or strategic importance to the oil industry, and for western multinationals to seize their state industries in the case of Iraq.

The Beeb in many areas simply isn’t a trustworthy broadcaster. Far from being objective, it simply pushes establishment propaganda. Which I don’t doubt its hacks and management, coming as they seem to do from very middle class, very Tory backgrounds and living in the London metropolitan bubble, believe is genuinely objective news and analysis.

Now the Beeb’s under threat from Murdoch and the other private broadcasters. Once upon a time it could have counted on the support of people on the left. But it has alienated them with its overt Conservative bias and its repeated demonisation and vilification of Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters as anti-Semites and Jew-haters.

Which means that both left and right distrust the Beeb. Neither of whom believe it is impartial, whatever Marr says or chooses to believe.

BBC is named as least objective news provider – which we all knew already | Vox Political (voxpoliticalonline.com)

Alexei Sayle on Comedy and Politics in Yesterday’s ‘Metro’

Alexei Sayle, one of the pillars of the ’80s Alternative Comedy wave which spawned The Young Ones, French and Saunders, the Comic Strip and Ben Elton was interviewed in yesterday’s Metro (27th September 2019). The man’s 67, but still angry – although the interview also says he’s mellowing – and stars in a series on Radio 4 set in a sandwich bar and due to have a headline gig at the Southport Comedy Festival. Speaking to the paper’s Jade Wright, Sayle talked about his career, the state of modern comedy and attacked austerity, the Tories and supposedly ‘moderate’ politicians, who support them. It’s interesting in that Sayle also champions Jeremy Corbyn, without the paper trying to attack the Labour leader in response or a snide aside. The interview on page 51 and continued on page 54 is entitled ‘Sayle Now On’. It’s too long for me to type it up as a whole, but here’s the bits where he mostly talks about politics, along with his family background and the lack of left-wing comedians today.

Alexei Sayle might have been in the comedy business for 40 years, but he’s not lost any of his flair for contemporary analysis. His take that ‘austerity is the idea that the 2008 financial crash was caused by Wolverhampton having too many libraries’ has been spreading like wildfire on social media. May that’s because, as he claims, there’s a surprising shortage of anti-establishment comedians.

‘There’s a gap in the market. Even if they didn’t believe in it, you’d expect someone to do it, just for the money,’ he says. ‘there were loads of left-wing comedians in the 1980s. Where are the new Ben Eltons now?’

His new Radio 4 show, Alexei Sayle’s Imaginary Sandwich Bar, in which the Wolverhampton library gag first appeared, is the Liverpool comedian on his usual erudite, and angry, form. As is evident from the show, he’s become a passionate advocate for Jeremy Corbyn and the grassroots movement he has created. ‘When people sneer at Jeremy Corbyn, it drives me nuts,’ Alexei says. ‘To hear him being called a racist by racists, it’s beyond belief. And yet I have friends who are taken in by this s**t.’

‘I hear him talk, and it makes sense, then it gets deliberately misrepresented by people who have something to gain from that, people who are very much part of the establishment.

Alexei grew up in Liverpool. His mum, Molly, was a pools clerk from a Lithuanian Jewish family and his father, Joseph, was a railway guard. Both were members of the Communist Party. But, while always political, he was keen from a young age to find his own voice. ‘I don’t have a crystal ball, but I think things are changing’, he says. ‘Voters are seeing through the politicians who claim to have moderate views, but actually what they’re saying is really quite extreme.

‘For a long time the politicians from all parties were all fighting over the votes in the middle. Politics went from strongly right-wing to mildly left-wing and there were lots of voices that didn’t get heard at all, loads of people who didn’t vote.

‘You had all these modern, careerist MPs who were almost indistinguishable from each other. But austerity has disproportionately affected young people and other groups who felt there was no one to speak for them. There are new people registering to vote all the time. Maybe they have more hope now.’

So is Alexei more hopeful, too? ‘Yes,’ he says, before pausing. ‘Maybe. More so lately. Suddenly, from nowhere, they have a genuinely left-wing leader and new voices who are vocally opposing austerity as the political ideal it is.’

‘It was never a necessity for force terminally ill people to look for jobs or to close libraries. That was a series of political decisions that didn’t really save any money any way. Now we have a leader who will speak up.’

I was never a fan of Sayle’s comedy myself, as I simply didn’t find it funny. Much of it just struck me as just abuse, without anything really deep being said. But here he’s pretty much right. The only thing I differ from him here is when he says that things have gone from extreme right to mildly left-wing. Blair was always a member of the Thatcherite extreme right. He and the rest of New Labour really did want to sell off the NHS, although I think he definitely believed in making sure that medical care was free. And he also introduced the work capability tests that have caused so many desperately ill people to be thrown off benefits, to live and die in starvation and misery. What differed about Blair is that he was genuinely anti-racist, pro-gay and anti-sexist – so long as they supported him – and was careful to sound slightly left-wing. Even when he was aiming at the same voting constituency as the Tories, using the same ministers, who had crossed the floor from the Tory party, like Chris Patten, and was taking money from the same corporate donors.

But people are waking up to how they were fooled and the country run down by the ‘moderates’ as well as the Tories and the Lib Dems. People do feel they have hope for a better future under Corbyn. As for comedy, the complaint on the right is that there are few right-wing comedians and that it’s all biased against the Tories. Which is rubbish. Buddy Hell over at Guy Debord’s Cat also wrote a blog piece complaining that the contemporary aspiring comedians he’d seen really don’t have anything funny to say. Their act simply consists of them telling the story of their life. I’m not in show business, so I have no idea why this should be so. It might simply be that the people who aspire to be comedians have been inspired by the autobiographical, observational comedy of people like Sayle, but don’t really have anything to say. It may also simply be that as the left-wing comedians of the 1980s matured and were overtaken by other comics, there was a reaction against the older generation’s political comedy. Even so, shows like The Last Leg are still managing to put a well aimed kick to the Tories. But perhaps, if more people are being inspired politically by Corbyn, this will also spur a new generation of angry left-wingers to subject the establishment to bitter scorn and derision. While showing that there can be a better world without people like Johnson, May, Cameron, Swinson and the rest of them, of course.

 

Private Eye Attacks Facebook Group for People Suspended from Labour

Private Eye has published much excellent material, and over the past few days I’ve blogged about some of the material revealed in this fortnight’s issue. But the magazine does have a very pronounced anti-Corbyn bias, and does seem to have swallowed, and regurgitated all the bilge smearing Corbyn and his supporters in the other parts of the lamestream media. It does seem to take as fact that the smears that Momentum is full of abusive misogynists and anti-Semites, and that the Labour leader and his supporters are ‘hard Left’ and Trotskyites. They aren’t. Corbyn and Momentum really are just traditional Labour, standing for the old Social Democratic policy of a mixed economy, and strong and healthy NHS and welfare state. All of which is anathema to the Thatcherite right – the Blairites – who have tried to position themselves as moderates when in fact the truth is, they’re the extremists. They’re extreme right. And outside the Labour party this is also unwelcome to the Tories and the mainstream media and its bosses pushing for more privatisation and further policies to destroy the welfare state and push the working class further into poverty. Because they see it as good for business having a cowed workforce on poverty wages.

In this fortnight’s Eye, for 15th-28th June 2018 on page 10, the pseudonymous ‘Ratbiter’ has published an article attacking a Facebook group for those suspended from the Labour party, and the attempts of its members to make contact with officials close to Corbyn to obtain justice or redress. It accepts absolutely uncritically the charges against them. And the end of the article once again repeats the claim that those suspended for anti-Semitism are automatically guilty, with an example of an anti-Semitic post from one of those in the group.

But many of those suspended from the Labour party for anti-Semitism and other offences are anything but, as shown in the cases of people like Mike, Tony Greenstein, Jackie Walker and very many others. As I’ve blogged about ad nauseam, ad infinitum. The article therefore needs to be carefully critiqued. It runs

Suspended Animation
Facebook has a secret and carefully vetted political group called Labour Party Compliance: Suspensions, Expulsions, Rejections Co-op. As the ungainly title suggests, it is a online hangout where Corbyn supporters facing disciplinary action for abuse, anti-Semitism and other loveable quirks can nurse their grievances in private. Or so they think.

Screenshots of the site obtained by the Eye show that the outcasts are not so far out in the cold they don’t have access to the highest levels of Corbyn’s Labour.

Take 17-year-old Zac Arnold, who has been suspended from the Forest of Dean Labour Party. He revealed he had “been given the email of someone called Thomas Gardiner by James Schneider at JC’s office, who said he would be a useful contact over my suspension”. He asked his fellow pariahs “what your thoughts are and if you know him”.

They certainly knew Schneider. “I have chatted with James,” said Caroline Tipler, the founder of the “Jeremy Corbyn Leads Us to Victory” Facebook group. “I def think it would be useful to make contact”. The best way to get back into the party would be to start by “making a tentative enquiry and gauge from the response whether to progress it from there”.

The “someone called Thomas Gardiner” to whom young Zac referred is a Labour councillor from Camden. When Corbyn assumed total control of the Labour machine in March by installing Jennie Formby, Len McCluskey’s former mistress, as Labour’s general secretary, Formby’s first act was to call in Gardiner.She sent John Stoliday, the head of Labour’s compliance unit, on gardening leave and put Gardiner in charge of overseeing complaints against members. So he is certainly a “useful” man to know for as any Corbyn supporter facing troublesome allegations – as indeed is Schneider, who works in the leader’s office alongside fellow Old Wykehamist Seumas Milne as Corbyn’s director of strategic communications.

Suspended members appear to think that, so long as they discuss their prejudices in private, they will be fine. Their Facebook group is splattered with posts painting Labour activists as victims of a Jewish conspiracy. “They will try to silence you,” reads one. “They will try to discredit you. Because you are not allowed to criticise Jewish politics.” But their own group suggests
that you are, as long as you aren’t caught and have friends in high places.

So what’s going on here? Well, first of all, the fact that Ratbiter claims to have had screenshots passed to him of the Facebook page shows that it’s not based on his research. It’s from an outside organisation. From the way this is about smearing Corbyn supporters as anti-Semites, it looks like it’s the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism or the Jewish Labour Movement up to their vile tricks again. The CAA’s modus operandi is simply to go back over people’s internet conversations in search of something vaguely anti-Semitic they can use, and then grossly distort it so that they can smear them. They did it to Mike, taking his comments out of context and grossly misreporting what he actually said. They did it to Jackie Walker and her conversation with two others on Facebook about the Jewish participation in the slave trade. Again, a serious issue, which reputable historians are discussing. Walker never said that Jews were responsible for the slave trade, or that they were exclusively in charge of it. She said that the ultimate responsibility lay with the Christian monarchs and states which employed them. There are, however, real anti-Semites, who claim that the Jews were responsible for the slave trade, and so the CAA smeared her, a practicing Jew with a Jewish partner, as an anti-Semite. Just like they’ve smeared Ken Livingstone, because he dared to talk about an embarrassing truth: that the Nazis did reach an agreement with the Zionists to send Jews to Israel, before they decided on the Final Solution. And then there was that entirely artificial controversy a month or so ago, where they smeared Corbyn himself as an anti-Semite, because of a post he made admiring a piece of street art showing bankers around a table resting on the bodies of black men. Only two of the bankers were Jewish, but nevertheless, the CAA and the Board of Deputies of British Jews frothed that it was ‘anti-Semitic’, trying to link it to all the vile theories about the Jewish banking conspiracy.

Unable to unseat Corbyn at the leadership elections, the Blairites and the Israel lobby have been trying to oust him gradually by suspending and smearing his supporters. As happened to Mike. The CAA’s vile article smearing him was passed on to the Labour party, who suspended him just as he was about to fight a council election as the Labour candidate in his part of mid-Wales. As Mike has blogged, he has appealed against his suspension, but was tried once again by another kangaroo court, very much like the one that decided that the veteran anti-racist campaigner, Marc Wadsworth, was an anti-Semite. The Labour party’s compliance unit is so determined to refuse justice to expelled or suspended members on trumped up charges of anti-Semitism, that there is now an organisation set up to fight them on this issue: Labour Against the Witch Hunt, one of whose organisers is the redoubtable Tony Greenstein. I think another is Walker herself. As for Wadsworth, he has gone on a triumphant tour defending himself up and down the country. His campaign was launched in London with Alexei Sayle. Sayle’s parents are Romanian Jews, who were card-carrying Communists, and Sayle himself was one of the leaders of the new, politically correct Alternative Comedy in the 1980s. He was very anti-racist, anti-sexist and pro-gay rights, as were the others that emerged at the same time. So he is very definitely not anti-Semitic.

Clearly, the movement to discredit the smear campaign against decent people unfairly libelled as anti-Semites is gaining ground, otherwise Ratbiter wouldn’t bother writing the article, and attacking and revealing the officials close to Corbyn, who may be prepared to give assistance to them.

Now let’s deal with their quotation that ‘you are not allowed to criticise Jewish politics’. Is this anti-Semitic? Or is simply a clumsy way of expressing a truth: that any criticism of Israel, or support for the Palestinians, will result in you being smeared and suspended. I strongly believe it’s the latter. And the issue of Israel has been deliberately confused with Jews by Israel and its satellite, Zionist organisations themselves. Netanyahu a few years ago declared that all Jews, everywhere, were citizens of Israel. Of course, it’s a risible statement. Many Jews don’t want to be citizens of Israel, a land with which they have no connection, and certainly not at the expense of the country’s real, indigenous inhabitants. Netanyahu and the other maniacs in his coalition don’t want all Jews to be citizens of their country either. Liberal or genuinely left-wing Jews, or Jews, who simply ask too many questions about the Palestinians and dare to think for themselves, rather than swallow Likudnik propaganda, aren’t let in. or if they’re there already, they get thrown out. As have dissident Israelis, like one historian now at Exeter University, Ilon Pappe, who was driven out of his homeland because he dared to describe and protest his nation’s long history of ethnically cleansing the Palestinians.

The organisations behind the smear campaign are Jewish organisations, or claim to be pro-Jewish, like the CAA and the Jewish Labour Movement, which was formerly Paole Zion, ‘Workers of Zion’. Now these organisations clearly don’t represent all Jews. They only represent those, who are fanatically and intolerantly pro-Israel. They also have gentile members, so it’s highly questionable just how ‘Jewish’ these Jewish organisations are. Those smeared by them include self-respecting and Torah-observant Jews, and they have subjected them to the kind of abuse, which would automatically be considered anti-Semitic if it came from a non-Jew. Indeed, many of the Jews smeared by them feel that there is a particular hatred of Jewish critics of Israel. Just like the founders of Zionism were absolutely dismissive of diaspora Jews.

Given this, it should be no surprise if a non-Jew, who has been smeared, becomes confused and says that you can’t criticise ‘Jewish politics’, meaning Israel. Because these Jewish organisations, including the Board of Deputies of British Jews, insist that you can’t. And deliberately so, in order to make it easier to claim that all critics of Israel are anti-Semites.

This is a nasty, mischievous and deceitful article. It is designed to further isolate Corbyn by smearing his supporters and attacking the official close to him, who may be able help them. And it repeats the lie that all of those smeared are anti-Semites. It’s publication is a disgrace to Private Eye.

Tory Chairman Lies about Abuse from Labour Party

Another day, another lie from the Tories. The Tory chairman, Brandon Lewis, was in the papers yesterday because of comments he made on the Andrew Marr Show on Sunday. Lewis claimed that Tories were afraid to go on the internet because of abuse from the Labour party and Momentum members. Apparently, he mentioned Esther McVile as a victim of this abuse, claiming that John McConnell had made a speech demanding that she be lynched. He then claimed that he was making all the Tories sign a document pledging them not abuse their political opponents, and challenged Jeremy Corbyn to do the same.

This story was then taken up by a number of right-wing papers and magazines, including the Tory rag, the Spectator, and here in the West Country, the Western Daily Press. But the truth wasn’t quite like Lewis claimed. Mike’s written a long piece tearing apart Lewis’ comments to show how false and nasty they are. First of all, the comments made by McConnell were made three years ago, so they’re hardly contemporary. Secondly, he was quoting other people. Ah, replied the Speccie, but he was doing so approvingly. Whether he was or wasn’t clearly depends on a matter of perception, I feel. As for making Tories sign a pledge of good conduct, you can ask a number of questions about this. Like it clearly didn’t apply to Toby Young, when he wrote pieces advocating eugenics, commenting on women’s breasts, saying he had his d*ck up the a**e of one woman, and talking about masturbating over pictures of starving Africans. All of which qualify Young as a truly loathsome human being. But nevertheless, Tweezer wanted him as part of the universities regulatory board. Possibly because he is vociferously against everything modern educationalists stand for, like diversity, anti-racism and anti-sexism. They’re the values most student union bodies very strongly support, and which hardline Tories sneer at as ‘political correctness’ and moan that they are stifling free speech. And Young was almost certainly put in because he’s another Tory who wants to privatise education. Witness his leadership of the ‘free school’ movement.

And most odiously, as Mike points out, Lewis tried to portray McVile as a victim.

McVile isn’t, not by any stretch of the imagination. She’s a very rich woman, who has made a very good living by killing the disabled. She and her husband run a production company, which I believe may have been responsible for the Benefit Street series of programmes on Channel 4. Under her aegis, tens of thousands of disabled people have been unfairly declared ‘fit for work’, and been left to starve to death after having their benefits cut off. Mike has covered these deaths, as have Stilloaks, DPAC, Johnny Void and many, many others. Some of those, who have taken their lives left suicide notes behind stating that it was the removal of their benefits that were driving them to this extremity.

But still the Tories deny it.

McVile presided over this system, for which, as a government minister, she was very handsomely paid compared to the rest of us, and definitely far more than the poor souls, who are forced to rely on state benefits. She carried on with her task of murdering the poor gleefully and without remorse. She’s an evil woman.

Now I don’t believe that there is any abuse from Labour or Momentum. I’ve heard that song before, when the Blairite women were all complaining that they were suffering misogynist abuse from Corbyn’s supporters. They weren’t, and an extensive checking of various posts showed it. But it has set the narrative for the Thatcherite right to tell lies about Corbyn and the Labour left. Whether it is true or not is immaterial. The Tories lie like Goebbels, and Lewis’ comments are yet another smear campaign.

There’s also more than a touch of hypocrisy about the claims, too. Quite apart from the vile comments and writing of Toby Young, you only have to look at Twitter to see frothingly abusive comments from outraged Tories, or look at the comments they leave on left-wing vlogs and videos on YouTube.

If the Tories are scared to go on social media, I can think of a couple of reasons why, which have nothing to do with abuse. Firstly, the Tory front bench are solidly public school boys and girls, who all went to Oxbridge. The ancient Romans didn’t have information technology. The closest they got was the Antikythera Mechanism, a kind of geared computer, which showed the position of the planets. It’s a masterpiece of ancient engineering. However, public school classics are all about generals, emperors and Roman politicians, not the work of the rude mechanics and craftsmen. Aristotle in his politics firmly demanded that these should not be allowed a voice in the political life of his perfect state. That was to be reserved for leisured gentlemen, who should have a forum of their own so that they didn’t mix with the trades- and craftspeople, who actually made things and supplied services.

And one of the complaints I’ve seen of the Oxbridge educated upper classes is that they still have this snobbery towards science. Boris Johnson is possibly the most notable of those public schoolboys and girls advocating the classics, which were used in previous centuries as part of the education system to show the young of the upper classes how to govern. Despite Harold Wilson’s comments in the 1960s about Britain embracing the ‘white heat’ of technology, science and engineering were very much the province of the oiks in secondary moderns, and definitely looked down upon.

And I also think that the real some Tories may be avoiding going on social media, is that they’re all too aware that people know they’re lying, and will correct them. Go see some of Mike’s articles for comments left on social media by very well informed commenters, tearing into Tweezer’s and Jeremy Hunt’s lies over housing and the state of the NHS, for example.

And I also think that if people are making extreme remarks about how vile Esther McVey is on social media, some of them at least have a right. Lewis can afford to act shocked. He’s another, very middle class professional on a very tidy income. He is not poor and desperate, as McVey’s victims are. He can therefore afford to be complacent about their very real fear and despair. He is part of the Tory machine working towards their impoverishment and starvation, and so he has a vested interest in playing down the horrific reality behind their comments. If you go in for an interview at the Job Centre, you will be humiliated by clerks trying to get you off their books as quickly as possible. This will leave you fuming with rage, but there is absolutely nothing you can do about it. Especially as they will sanction you without a moment’s hesitation for the most trivial of reasons. This system has been created and is overseen by the Tories, including Esther McVile. She therefore deserves to be an object of anger, hate and loathing by people, who are genuine victims. What Lewis hates and fears is the amount of hatred there is for her, and the fact that it’s expressed, as the Tories demand absolute deference from the rest of us. Remember how the Daily Mail went berserk with rage when Thatcher died, because people in the north had the audacity to celebrate and burn her in effigy?

There must be no clue how much the Tories and the leaders are hated, in any media, ever. And so he demands that people, who have every right to loath McVile, stop talking about how repulsive and murderous the Wicked Witch of the Wirral, responsible for the genocide of the disabled, really is.

And so he falsely accuses Labour of abuse, while defending a woman who is directly responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of disabled people.

She’s a disgrace. So is he. Get them out.

Tony Greenstein on Zionist Lies and Smears in New Statesman

The other day I put up a long piece attacking the outrageous bias against Jeremy Corbyn in Private Eye. This clearly chimed in with what very many of my readers have observed, and feel strongly about, and I got comments about it from Florence and Jeffrey, amongst others. Michelle also sent in this comment, remarking on the way the supposedly left-wing New Statesman, was also biased against Corbyn, and linking to a piece on it by Tony Greenstein, another blogger. She wrote:

Hi Beastie, it seems to be a generic problem for the ‘intellectual’ press, in similar vein here’s a piece on the NewStatesman with similar tactics by Tony Greenstein:
http://azvsas.blogspot.co.uk/2016/08/the-lies-deceit-of-new-statesman_8.html?m=1

Mr Greenstein’s article is well worth reading. The article is about his disgust with the increasingly right-ward bias of the Staggers. He was particularly angered by its printing of an article claiming that anti-Semitism is rife in the Labour party by Simon Johnson. Johnson’s a senior member of a pro-Zionist Jewish organisation. Greenstein states that Johnson’s group is unelected and unrepresentative. Greenstein was so annoyed by the article, and its uncritical repetition of these false allegations, that he wrote a letter of complaint to the Staggers, the text of which he includes in that blog post. He decided to put it up himself, as he felt sure that the Statesman’s editors weren’t going to print it.

Like many of the others accused of anti-Semitism by the Zionists, Mr Greenstein is Jewish. He’s a member of the Jewish Labour party organisation, and is also active against racism and Fascism. But he’s been suspended because of supposed anti-Semitism. This is because he’s a fierce critic of Israeli racism and its persecution and ethnic cleansing of the indigenous Palestinians. Greenstein describes just how nasty this racism is in his piece. He also remarks on how ridiculous it is that, under the Israeli law of return, he has the right to return to a country that he has never visited, while Palestinians, who were born in Israel, but who fled or were driven abroad by the Israelis, are banned from settling in the country of their birth.

This clearly is monstrous, just as it is monstrous that accusations of anti-Semitism should be levelled at Mr Greenstein, simply for speaking for speaking the truth. As for the allegations of anti-Semitism, he’s in good company. Other victims of that accusation include Jackie Walker, who is half-Jewish on her father’s side, and whose partner is Jewish. Ms Walker is also a woman of colour. Her mother was a Black woman, who was thrown out of America for activism in the Civil Rights movement. And Ms Walker has similarly been active against racism and Fascism in this country. In America, the head of Bernie Sanders’ Jewish Outreach department in his campaign to win the Democratic presidential nomination, was also forced to resign because of allegations of anti-Semitism. She was also Jewish, and very active in her community. And Sanders is himself Jewish.

And some of the gentiles, who have been accused of anti-Semitism, are also obviously anything but. Ken Livingstone’s GLC, as I’ve said before, was notorious for being ‘right-on’. It was anti-racist, anti-sexist, and very pro-gay rights, to the fury of Maggie Thatcher. In his book, Livingstone’s Labour, ‘Red’ Ken states that he was opposed to all forms of racism, whether anti-Semitism, or against Blacks and the Irish. He also devotes sizable sections of two chapters describing and attacking the recruitment of Nazis responsible for the persecution of the Jews during the Third Reich, by us to serve in British intelligence against the threat of Communism in the Cold War.

Perhaps I’m missing something, but in my experience, avowed Jew-haters tend not to go on anti-Fascist marches and demos, risking personal violence by some extremely nasty characters with long histories of racist attacks. I don’t think many people, who despise their ethnic or religious heritage, actively join groups for the people of that community, or readily identify themselves as belonging to that group. Rather, they do the opposite, and try to deny that they belong to it. At the most extreme of this, is some of the self-hating Jews, who deny their heritage completely and join Neo-Nazi organisations. There was a case a while ago in America of the leader of a group of Nazis over there, who committed suicide after it got out to his fellow stormtroopers that he was Jewish.

I admit that’s an extreme case, but none of the people accused of anti-Semitism are remotely like it. Quite the opposite. And considering how serious the charge of anti-Semitism is, after the horrors perpetrated by the Nazis and similar genocidal organisations, it should be used sparingly against those who really are. Otherwise, it’s a very gross slander.

And Mr Greenstein also points out that by using the accusation to slander those who aren’t, there is the danger of the boy, who cried ‘wolf’. If you abuse the term so frequently, then it loses its seriousness, and clears the way for the genuine anti-Semites and Nazis to make their claims without fear of opposition, because the term has been so abused so as to become meaningless.

Anti-Corbyn Controversy Hits Bristol East

This Saturday the local BBC news for the Bristol region, Points West, reported that a meeting of the Bristol East Labour party had become intensely heated over the issue of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership. So much so, that two of the anti-Corbyn opposition claimed that the anti-Corbynites had been abused. One of them, a young woman, said that one of her male comrades had left in tears, saying that this was ‘not his party’. The Bristol East Labour MP, Thangam Debonnaire, then was interviewed outside her home, declaring that Jeremy Corbyn was ‘too divisive’ and should leave. The report then passed to Angela Eagle, also shown coming out of her front door, to denounce Corbyn as ‘unelectable’ and ‘divisive’, and announce that she would be running for leadership of the party, and would unite everyone. A spokesman for Momentum made the point that the Labour party had massively expanded under Corbyn, and stated that the incident didn’t happen.

Now, if the Blairites at the meeting were genuinely abused, I feel sorry for them. People should have controlled their tempers, and their should have been more personal respect. If all that was said was true…

But that’s a big ‘if’. The Blairites have lied, and lied again, in a sequence of mendacity that would have made Goebbels proud. They made much of Corbyn being heckled at a gay rights rally, when the heckler was actually a member of the Lib Dems. Another stunt was the product of Tom Mauchline, an employee of Portland Communications, the PR company owned by the son of Jack Straw. They produced a Tee-shirt proclaiming ‘Eradicate Blairite Scum’, which was shown off to smear the Corbynites, when in fact it was produced by yet another Blairite and her pet ‘media guru’. Or, to put it in plainer language, ‘pretentious IT moron’. Mike last week also carried a story that at a meeting over on the other side of the country, the Corbynites had subjected the Blairite faithful to a volley of homophobic abuse. Except that they hadn’t. One of the women present had a daughter, who had recently married her same-sex partner. This lady had very definitely attended the wedding. She was, therefore, obviously not a woman who would tolerate homophobic abuse. This lady claimed that nothing of the sort of happened, and was very clear about it. Frankly, I don’t believe that Corbynites would indulge in homophobic abuse. They’re too left-wing. The Labour left, which emerged in the 1980s, and of which Corbyn and his deputy, John McConnell, were a part, were very firmly anti-racist, anti-sexist and pro-gay rights. You think of the fury in the press when one of the London constituencies put up Peter Tatchell. And all the jokes about ‘looney-left’ councils like Brent advertising for non-gender specific personnel, and run by Black lesbians. It’s rubbish.

And then there’s the whole matter of the anti-Semitism accusations, which has seen decent, sincerely anti-racist opponents of anti-Semitism, some of them even Jewish, smeared for what were actually fair criticisms of Israel and its appalling maltreatment of the Palestinians.

As for the Blairites’ claim that Corbyn is unelectable, the opposite is true. Corbyn has won three bye-elections. He has massive grassroots support in the Labour party. It is the 172 rebel Labour MPs, and their leader, Angela Eagle, who are divisive. And if anyone’s betrayed the working class, it’s them. For twenty years the Blairites carried out a programme of privatisation, including the privatisation of the NHS, for corporate interests, along with the dismantling of the system of welfare benefits. Jobs in government were given to the most mendacious and exploitative of the captains of industry. Blair himself had a wide-eyed admiration of Thatcher, private enterprise and the rich.

If Eagle had any decency, she and the others would rethink their basic policies, renounce their intentions to oppose Corbyn, and stand down to let others, who will support him, take their place. And if they can’t do that, they should leave the party.

Lobster on the Anti-Semitism Allegations, the Zionists and the Nazis

Mike has posted up yet another piece, which shows the disgusting attitude of the Blairites and their willingness to do anything to unseat and smear Jeremy Corbyn. It seems Sami Chakrabarti’s inquiry into anti-Semitism in the Labour party has generally given the party a clean bill of health. However, that hasn’t been good enough for Ruth Smeeth and Sam Stopp, two members, who seem absolutely convinced that the party is riddled with it and it’s all Corbyn’s fault. In the case of Smeeth, it seems to be because someone else in Labour called her a traitor because she was giving some assistance to the Torygraph in writing an article about it. And as she’s Jewish, she decided it must be because of her religion/ ethnicity, rather than in the fact that she was helping the notoriously anti-Socialist paper. In the case of Stopp, it’s because he looked at a speech in which Corbyn made it clear that Jews weren’t responsible for the actions of Israel, any more than Muslims were responsible for atrocities committed by ISIS, and came to the direct opposite of what was being meant. He perversely concluded that Corbyn was saying that Jews were responsible for the actions of Israel, and like Smeeth, promptly threw his toys out of the pram. See Mike’s article: http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2016/06/30/farcical-anti-semitism-accusations-fly-at-anti-semitism-inquiry-report/

These accusations about anti-Semitism in the Labour party are partly based on Ken Livingstone’s statement that Hitler too supported sending Jews to Israel. This was perfectly true, but was too much for the historically challenged Blairites, who in the person of John Mann, threw a fit and started accusing Red Ken of being a Nazi himself. Of course the old Leninist newt-fancier isn’t. When he was the head of the GLC, it was notorious for being right-on, anti-racist, anti-sexist and anti-homophobic. In his 1987 book, Livingstone’s Labour, Leninspart makes it very clear that he has no truck with racism, whether against Blacks, Jews or Irish, and provides deep and telling criticism of how the British and American governments recruited the real thing as part of their campaign against Communism. The Nazis they recruited as anti-Communist spies included heinous individuals, who had taken active part in the Holocaust and pogroms against the Jews during the invasion of the USSR. I’ve blogged about this before, many times, and quite simply I’m sick of having to explain it yet again.

John Newsinger, one of the long-time contributors to the parapolitics magazine, Lobster, has also put up a piece about the scandal, entitled in ‘Livingstone, Zionism and the Nazis in issue 71 of the magazine for Summer, 2016. Newsinger is, or was, a history prof at Bath Spa university. He makes it clear at the beginning of the article that’s he’s not impressed with Leninspart, because he played into the hands of the Blairites and their appalling allies in the Labour Friends of Israel and the Israeli ambassador to Britain, Mark Regev, an Israeli ‘hawk’. But he cites histories of the Holocaust written by Jewish historians, including David Cesarani, to show that Livingstone was historically correct. He also goes on to show, more specifically, the vile attitude of Israel’s founders to the plight of their fellows under the Nazis in Europe. The great Zionist pioneers had nothing but utter contempt for Jews, who wished to stay in their European homelands, and were more than content to see the Nazis persecute and butcher them, if it meant that some would go to Israel.

Cesarani himself was the son of Italian Communists, and a strong supporter of Zionism. He briefly became disillusioned while staying America, but when he came back to Britain, he returned not only to Liberal Judaism, but also was one of the first to equate anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism. Nevertheless, Cesarani’s book on the Final Solution provides abundant quotes showing the Livingstone was correct. Cesarani’s book states that the Zionists took very little interest in defending Jewish Germans, and were opposed to Jewish organisations, such as the Centralverein and the Reichsbund Judischer Frontsoldaten, a patriotic Jewish servicement’s league, that did. For the RjFS, leaving Germany was out of the question. It was a form of surrender. Cesarani describes how the Nazis actively promoted the Zionists as a way of getting the Jews out of Germany anyway they could, even providing quotes from those responsible. In 1935, Reynhard Heydrich wrote in the SS newspaper, Das Schwarze Korps, that the Nazi regime was ‘in complete agreement with the great spiritual movement within Jewry itself, the so-called Zionism, with its recognition of the solidarity of Jewry throughout the world, and the rejection of all assimilationist ideas.’

Cesarani also provides some chilling quotes showing the indifference of leading Zionists to their people’s suffering. He describes how (I)n January 1934, the
American, James McDonald, was appalled by the attitude of Chaim Weizmann when he ‘expressed his contempt for German Jews as a whole, his indifference to their fate, and for that matter, his indifference to the fate of millions of Jews elsewhere, just so long as a saving remnant could be preserved in Palestine’. pp. 132-133) This grotesque attitude was also shared by David Ben Gurion, who told a closed meeting of the Jewish Agency ‘If I knew that all the Jewish
children of Europe could be saved by settlement in Britain and only half could be saved by settlement in Palestine, I should choose the latter’. He also notes that Zionists and Orthodox Jews were quite satisfied with the ban on mixed marriages in the Nazis’ notorious 1935 Nuremberg Laws.

Cesarani’s book also describes how the Nazis supplied arms and support to the Haganah, the Jewish organisation in Palestine that helped the British crush the First Intifada, the Palestinian insurrection against the Mandate. Eichmann also gave his support to people smugglers, like Bernard Storfer, whom he put in charge of the illegal emigration of Jews to the embryonic Israeli colony. While Newsinger is clearly not a Zionist, he is deeply impressed with Cesarani’s scholarship, and urges Lobster’s readers to look at Cesarani’s first book, Justice Delayed: How Britain Became a Refuge for Nazi War Criminals. This describes how the post-War Labour government recruited immense numbers of Nazis as potential recruits for SIS, one of Britain’s intelligence agencies. Among those recruited were the 9,000 members of the SS’ Galician Division, Ukrainians responsible for horrific atrocities in that part of the USSR. He also rightly takes the British government to task for failing to take in Jewish refugees during the Third Reich. In his concluding paragraph, he states that a firm resistance to anti-Semitism must be a part of any determined anti-Zionist campaign, as it was only due to anti-Semitism in Europe that there was any real support for Zionism. He ends with this observation:

If the United States, Britain, and other countries had opened their doors to Jews fleeing the Nazis, these countries would almost certainly have been the destiny of choice for the overwhelming majority of European Jews. Instead, the doors were kept closed except for a comparative few. Once again, this was anti-Semitism at work. It was European anti-Semitism, culminating in mass murder and
attempted genocide, that made the Zionist project viable at the expense, we have to insist, of the Palestinian people. Consequently the fight against anti-Semitism is a vital part of the fight against Zionism.

This is very much the attitude of most liberal critics of Israel. The American radical left magazine, Counterpunch, has also run articles recently on how Winston Churchill and the British government bowed to the prejudice and xenophobia expressed by papers like the Daily Mail, and had German and Austrian Jews interned as ‘enemy aliens’ during the War in camps with the very Nazis that were persecuting them. And Newsinger also shows that, despite his obvious anger at Livingstone for giving the Israel lobby a weapon, the great newt fancier was very largely correct.

The article is at: http://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/free/lobster71/lob71-livingstone.pdf. Read it for the information that the Blairite’s don’t want you to have.

Hope Not Hate on the Disgusting Views of Kipper Lee Harris

As Britain tries to come to turns with the assassination of Jo Cox by a committed, Nazi, Lee Harris, the Kipper candidate for Shotton and South Hefton in the council elections last year, abandoned any attempt at maintaining a tactful silence. While expressing his own disgust at Cox’s murder, Harris posted on social media a strongly worded condemnation of everything Jo Cox stood for. He wrote on social media

Let us not forget that it is cultural Marxist, PC, Europhilic MPs like her we have to thank for the sorry state this nation is in.

Her ideology was cancerous to this nation, and now her comrades shamelessly milk her death in a desperate attempt to shame us into staying in a corporatist dictatorship.

I’m sure some will be offended by this post, and those who are, I know will be the virtue signalling SJW [Social Justice Warriors] that are milking her death in a last ditch attempt at shaming us into staying in the EU.

See: http://www.hopenothate.org.uk/ukip/ukip-continue-their-overbearing-sensitivity-4925

This is pretty much typical of some of the verbiage and jargon coming from the extreme Right. Anti-racist activists and those on the genuine Left are attacked as ‘Social Justice Warriors’ and ‘cultural Marxists’. Right-wingers like Harris think that ‘cultural Marxism’ means the Frankfurt school and the tactics formulated by the Italian Communist, Antonia Gramsci, of attempting to change the nature of European and American capitalist society by attacking its culture. It isn’t. ‘Cultural Marxism’ was the term coined by British Marxists when Maggie Thatcher passed a law purging them from teaching in Higher Education. They got round this by making the fine distinction that they weren’t ‘Marxist’, but ‘Marxian’ – that is, they were Marxists by culture, not politics. It’s a very tenuous distinction, but it did manage to allow them to keep their jobs.

As for being called a ‘Social Justice Warrior’, while it is a term of contempt, the fact is that since that social justice – anti-racism, anti-sexism and attitudes to combat poverty and improve the circumstances of the working class, disabled and unemployed, are still under threat. There have been enormous strides made since the 1970s in tacking racism and sexism, but these are still extremely powerful issues where discrimination is very much present. As shown by the fact that Harris and many of the Brexiters haven’t been able to reconcile themselves to the fact that Cox was murdered by someone with a very long commitment to the Nazi Right.

Harris himself has a particular hatred of the Labour party. Hope Not Hate a few piccies of election pamphlets in the above article, in which he promises ‘to continue the failings of the Labour Party. It has let our communities down for too long!’ He also says, ‘Labour once stood for the working class, defending our way of life, defending our jobs, but now all they care about is pandering to big donors and big business. They are the party that started to privatise the NHS after all’.

This is a fair description of the greed and neoliberal economic policies at the heart of Blairite ‘New Labour’, but it doesn’t represent either Ed Miliband or the party’s new leadership under Jeremy Corbyn. As for the EU being a ‘corporatist dictatorship’, there’s a reasonable point mixed in with a gross lie. I’ve put up material discussing the massive power the EU constitution does give to corporations, and there are indeed several points in European commercial law that strongly protect and promote neoliberal economics. However, the EU is not a dictatorship, and it is a gross distortion to say that it is. This line seems to come from the old Eurosceptic idea that the EU is merely Napoleon’s Empire or Adolf Hitler’s Nazi-dominated Europe resurrected and marketed to Europe’s peoples in a more palatable form. It isn’t. It was set up by European statesmen, including Winston Churchill, after the War in the hope that by promoting European unity, such extreme nationalist movements and the drive by individual countries to conquer and dominate the country would be successfully combated. I don’t think it’s been entirely successful. Unfortunately, EU policy does represent too much the interest of the big EU nations, like France and Germany, at the expense of the smaller nations. But I do think that it has done much to promote international peace and reconciliation after the War, and so has done much to calm international tension, even if it has not succeeded in altogether eradicating it.

As for Harris’ comments about the Labour – if Harris was serious about them from a left-wing perspective, he could have joined a number of alternative Socialist groups and organisations. Buddy Hell, over at Guy Debord’s Cat, was so disillusioned with the Blairite takeover the Labour party that he joined Left Unity, if I recall correctly. I think one of the small, alternative Socialist parties was formed from all the trade unionists and Labour party members, who were thrown out of the Labour party because they did not back Bliar and Broon’s austerity campaigns.

But Harris hasn’t done that. Instead he’s moved to the Right, and shown how he despises much of the ideology of the Left with his attacks on ‘social justice warriors’. If you look through many of the classic statements of Socialism, several of them make the point that Socialists champion the working class in order to bring about a classless society, and as part of a general campaign to establish greater social equality. Marx, Engels and the early Fabians had some vile attitudes to what they considered to be less developed, backward nations, but as early as the 1920s the Labour party adopted a policy of granting the colonies their independence at the earliest possibility. Even when they were committed to the British Empire, such as in the book Empire, Your Empire, published by the Left Book club, they were critical of the way Britain’s imperial possessions around the world were being exploited. The author of that book wanted these countries developed, but in the interest of their indigenous peoples. As indeed did the veteran Socialist thinker and writer, G.D.H. Cole.

As for Labour privatising the health service, unfortunately, much of this was done by Bliar and Broon. But they were following policies established in the 1980s by Maggie Thatcher. Thatcher and Geoffrey Howe had looked at ways of abolishing the NHS and replacing it with a private medical service such as that in America. They didn’t, because they knew that it would lose them the next election. Also, Patrick Jenkin, the Health Secretary, reported just how awful American medical care was after he went on a fact-finding mission to the US. Nevertheless, she wanted more private medical care in and outside the NHS, including tax relief for people with private medical insurance. She also introduced further charges for hitherto free medical treatments in the NHS. One of these was eye tests at opticians. She stopped that, and then had one of her cabinet ‘vegetables’ try to con the nation into believing that after charges had been introduced, demand had actually gone up. It was Thatcher, who removed compulsory state funding for the elderly in nursing homes, with the result that many people now have to mortgage or sell their elderly relatives’ houses to pay for the tens of thousands of pounds it costs a year to keep them in such homes. She also picked a fight with the dentists, so that the majority left the NHS. And then Peter ‘I’ve got a little list’ Lilley introduced the Private Finance Initiative specifically as a way for big business to make money out of the health service under John Major. Bliar and Broon expanded this cruddy system, but they didn’t invent it.

Despite appealing to working constituents, Harris is, like the Kipper leadership, a Tory. He wants to capitalise on many people’s genuine disaffection from the Labour party due to neoliberal leadership of the Blairites. But he himself is very much a man of the right, and his stance is shown by the fact that he is not concerned with defending the NHS from its privatisation by Cameron and the Lib Dems. This has been going on for over half a decade now. Even last year he could not plead ignorance of it, not if he was serious about defending the NHS or his constituents against austerity and the cuts.

The Break-Up of American Zionism and the Anti-Semitism Allegations

I’m aware that I’m in serious risk of doing this subject to death, but this needs to be said. I’ve put up several blogs featuring the videos of talks and interviews given by Israeli and American Jewish activists and historians – Ilan Pappe, Elizabeth Baltzer and Norman Finkelstein, laying bare the terrible history of Israel’s persecution and systematic ethnic cleansing of the indigenous Palestinian population. As I’ve repeatedly said, this is because of the smears against leading figures in the Labour party that they are anti-Semites, when they are nothing of the sort, and demonstrably nothing of the sort. Ken Leninspart, when he was leader of the GLC, was notorious and reviled for his anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-homophobia stance. And if you want to read what he has to say about anti-Semitism, it’s written down in his book, Livingstone’s Labour. He decries it as one of the worst forms of reaction, along with all other forms of racism, whether it be against Blacks, Jews and Irish. Naz Shah has the backing of her local synagogue. And Jackie Walker is the daughter of a Russian Jew and Black civil rights activist, deported from America as one of the ‘Reds under the Bed’ McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover were so scared of. Her other half is also Jewish. It’s truly grotesque that she should be slandered as an anti-Semite when it is clearly not the case.

Jimmy Carter

These slanders have not been confined to Britain. They were made against the Jewish Outreach Officer of one of the Democratic presidential candidates. The lady was forced to resign, despite the fact that she was not only Jewish, but a very active member of her community dedicated to their welfare. They even tried it on with Jimmy Carter, who was just about called everything bar a card-carrying member of the American Nazi party and supporter of Stormfront. Again, dead wrong. I can remember way back in the 1970s when old peanut teeth hosted the Camp David peace negotiations between Israel and Egypt. In his own state, he was instrumental in removing the colour bar and segregation laws against people of colour. He is not, and never has been an anti-Semite or a Nazi, whatever his failings as president were. And he certainly doesn’t have the sheer amount of blood on his hands that his successor, Reagan, had through his sponsorship of real Fascists in South and Central America.

And Carter showed that he wasn’t afraid to prove he was innocent of all charges, guv. He went in front of the students at Brandeis University, the biggest secular Jewish university in the US to debate one of the author of the smears, Alan Dershowitz. He got three or four standing ovations simply for appearing on stage. And when it came to Dershowitz’s time to speak, 2/3 of the audience walked out even before the old Neo-Con warmonger had opened his mouth.

Jewish Americans Liberal

American Jews are overwhelmingly liberal. Most of them want a two-state solution – for the Palestinians to have their own state. By and large they despise George Dubya Bush and 70 per cent of them are opposed to the war in Iraq. And despite the move of the majority of Israeli voters to the right, Ilan Pappe stated in his video that Israelis were decent people. He stated that going around, talking to people, especially small businessmen and farmers, who knew what it was like to have to struggle to make something for yourself, won people over to the Palestinian cause.

Livingstone, Shah and Walker Historically Correct

Nothing Leninspart, Shah or Walker said should be remotely interpreted as racist. Red Ken was factually correct: Hitler did briefly support Zionism and the emigration or deportation of the Jews to Israel. Walker was smeared because she compared the treatment of Black Africans under slavery to the Holocaust, and the persecution of the Palestinians in Israel. Now, I can understand historians picking at this to see if they really are equivalent. Africans were captured and worked to death simply as instruments of labour, rather than because there was a conscious desire to exterminate Black Africans, as in the Holocaust. Though against that was the gradual erection of the whole intellectual edifice trying to justify their enslavement as racially inferior, just as the Nazis used twisted biological theory to justify their extermination of the Jews. It’s reasonable for historians and political scholars to debate the similarities and dissimilarities between them. But I don’t think many genuine scholars, certainly not of the slave trade or the Holocaust, would dispute that these are terrible crimes against humanity. And the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians should be no different. There is a real debate on the legal definitions of genocide, because there are so many of them. So many, in fact, that I’ve heard an academic of the subject state that these definitions should be dropped simply in favour of ordinary, common sense. When states, or their majority populations start persecuting an ethnic group or trying to suppress their identity through force, then it’s genocide.

What also comes out is that the views of Livingstone et al by and large are supported by historical scholarship, including those of mainstream historians. Finkelstein states that there’s little difference between Israeli school textbooks and dissident, left-wing scholars on the origins of Israel. It is known that Israel had a programme of ethnic cleansing from the very first. It is incontrovertible that Israel is engaged in mass torture and human rights violations. And Finkelstein himself states that it is the Israelis, not the Palestinians, who consistently failed to ‘give piece a chance’ in the words of Lennon and Ono.

Denial of Palestinian’s History ‘Historicide’

As for the view produced by the historian, Peters, that there were no Arabs until the Jews settled in Israel, bringing development and jobs, this has been comprehensively disproven. Finkelstein or Pappe, I can’t remember which, describe it as ‘historicide’, the deliberate destruction of a people’s historical reality.

Jewish and Israeli Opposition to Persecution of Palestinians

There is absolutely no question that the facts are on the side of the accused. And I honestly believe that if Leninspart, Shah and certainly Walker were given the chance to rebut their enemies in debate at a university, they would do so in the same way Carter and his supporters vociferously routed Dershowitz. 72 per cent of British Jews say that Israel is important to them, compared to only 50 per cent of American Jews under 35. But that does not mean that British Jews do not want to see an end to their country’s persecution of the Palestinians. There are Jewish organisations in Israel helping the Palestinians defend their homes, families and livelihoods. You can find pictures of Orthodox rabbis in the long, black coats and broad-brimmed hats, forming cordons and lying down in front of bulldozers. University anti-racism and Palestinian solidarity groups have invited members of these organisations to speak. It would surprise me not one whit if many of those Brits reaching out to Palestine were Jews, and active members of their universities’ Jewsocs.

Political Motives behind Accusations

This isn’t about historical truth, however. This is about the Israel lobby trying to derail any criticism of the state and its persecution of the indigenous Arabs with accusations of anti-Semitism. It’s about the Blairites trying to hang on to power in Labour party by playing the race card against Jeremy Corbyn. But those accused have no real case against them. In any just court of law, they would be declared innocent, with damages found against their accusers.

Libel and Establishment Lies and Smears

Unfortunately, when it comes to libel, there is no justice in Britain. You are guilty until proven rich. And the accusations suit the British establishment very well. The Tories love it, because it harms Labour. And the Beeb’s Newsnight programme with Evan Davis uncritically swallowed all the guff from the guests that Labour had an ‘anti-Semitism problem’. One of the guests on RT’s Going Underground, with Afshid Rattansi, stated that the smears looked like the establishment coup against a leftwing British prime minister, as described in the novel and Channel 4 TV series, A Very British Coup. Listening to Finkelstein, I think that’s entirely plausible. There were smears by the establishment against Harold Wilson, which accused him of being a Communist spy. Many of them seemed to come from MI5. Finkelstein states that American funds Israel far and beyond the amount it gives to other nations, because it sees it as defending its interests in the Middle East.

Britain and America Supporting Israel to Retain Power in Region

I believe that this, or something like it, explains the British establishment’s attitude to the allegations. I can remember reading years ago a discussion on a right-wing American website about Israel, the Arabs and Britain under the Mandate. The site took the bog-standard right-wing American view that Brits must be anti-Semites, ’cause all Europeans hate Jews, as shown by the Holocaust and the increasingly secular nature of European society. The participants in the debate argued that the British deliberately set the Jews and Arabs at each other’s throats in order to maintain their control over the region. They quote the correspondence between one of the British officers involved in the Mandate, on this point. The quote was merely his own conclusion after studying the situation, and did not conclusively prove that it was so. They also quoted other correspondence, in which one British politician accused another wishing to establish a Jewish presence in the region as a kind of outpost of British influence, similar to Protestant Belfast amidst Roman Catholic Ireland.

It would not surprise me if something like that were the case. It may simply be that Britain gives unconditional support to Israel, because the Americans also give Israel their unconditional, or nearly unconditional support, in order to retain influence in the region. And since we declined as a world power, we’ve been acting as the American Empire’s junior partner and lickspittle. One former British ambassador to the US even went on Radio 4 and said that he was told by the Mandarins in London that his job was to go to Washington and ‘get up the American’s arse and stay there’.

The Beeb is the voice of the British establishment. It’s news programmes consistently support the Conservatives and industry, especially finance industry, against Labour and the trade unions. The establishment undoubtedly identifies British interests with those of Israel, though Robin Ramsey, the editor of Lobster, has said that the Beeb ties itself in knots trying to deny that it is pro-Zionist. So it is, unfortunately, a foregone conclusion that the Beeb and the establishment won’t give the accused a fair hearing. Not if there’s even more millions to be made from another bloody war.

Fighting Back against the Lies

Which doesn’t mean that the accused can’t win. The mainstream American media is also very staunchly pro-Israel and rabidly demonises the Arabs and the Muslim world. Despite this, in the polls Israel is just one point more popular amongst Americans than Iran. And you consider the massive negative campaign and image of that country in American media. The Israel Lobby – AIPAC and the leadership of J Street in America, the Labour Friends of Israel and BICOM over here, know that they’re losing the public’s hearts and minds. Hence the smears. I think the best course would be for Livingstone, Shah and Walker to stand up to them, call them out on their lies. Don’t expect any honesty from the press, ’cause that went long ago. But do it in the court of popular opinion – at public meetings, university seminars and talks, at literary events. Adam Shatz, of the London Review of Books, introduced Finkelstein and Baltzer when they spoke in New York. Perhaps the LRB can be relied on to give an unbiased platform. They should, at least regarding Jackie Walker. I can remember way back in the 1990s they published a piece on slavery at the time it was once again coming back into national consciousness. The treatment of Black people, and their abuse and discrimination, is of obvious acute interest to Jackie Walker, and so I think that more than some of the other media, they could be more inclined to give a sympathetic hearing.

This ain’t just about defending a group of accused Labour MPs. This is also about defending free speech and historical scholarship against the personal smears and gross historical distortions of a mendacious and deceitful establishment. An establishment that is prepared to grind down and destroy Jews, as well as Muslims, Christians, and those with no religion, in its campaign to preserve a monstrously racist order.