Ultra-Zionists’, Blairites’ and Tories’ Anti-Semitic Abuse of Labour Pro-Palestinian Activist

On the 27th October last year, 2018, Labour Left Voice put up a post about the disgusting anti-Semitic abuse hurled at their consultant and convenor, Sally Eason. Eason had been on the receiving end of abuse twitter messages from Jeremy Corbyn’s opponents in the Labour Party, whom she had outed as members of a troll network. This continued for several years without anything being done about it, even though she complained to Sam Matthews and Labour’s Compliance Unit. So she left, setting up Left Labour Voice as a support network for socialists who were in the same position as herself.

Her departure from the Labour party has not stopped the abuse, and the post reports that there is now a third twitter account parodying her. This one does so as ‘Sally the Jew’. It’s because Eason is of Sephardic Jewish descent on her mother’s side. The Sephardim are the branch of the Jewish people, who settled in the Iberian peninsula. Their vernacular language, Ladino, was a form of Old Spanish. They are named after a Biblical Hebrew term that was believed to refer to Spain.

This troll account attempts to dox her and reveal her location as well as intimidate her. Labour Left Voice also notes that it’s stolen their logo.  It’s followed by a number of the anti-Semitism witch-hunters, including the head of the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism. It lists those following the troll account as

*Emma Feltham (Picken) Lewisham East CLP Labour currently under investigation JLM

*Euan Philipps (AKA @Bellatrixlittle) Tonbridge & Malling CLP Labour currently under investigation JLM

*Labour Against Antisemitism – Official

*Tracy Ann Oberman – Actress Ex Labour

*Simon Myerson QC Ex Labour

*Saul Freeman @nudderingnudnik – Ex Labour – LAAS

*Mark Hopkins – @lifeonacanal Conservative

*Professor David Hirsh – Ex Labour

*Matthew Ravenhilll – Chair Taunton West branch Labour Party.

*Steve Silverman – Head of Campaign Against Antisemitism (CAA)

*Dan Fox – Ex Director of Labour friends of Israel

*Jonathan Hoffman – Consultant and activist LAAS – member of Herut UK

*Labour Intl CLP Moderates – AKA TheGreenKnight200 / RosalieJulius / JewsagainstJC – Jessica Jacobs-Schiff Ex Intl Labour / JLM LAAS

*Rosemary Emery – LAAS, Llanelli CLP JLM

*Chris Evans JLM, Labour and LAAS

*Zoe Kemp (78Soylentgreen) LAAS, JLM – formerly Hampstead & Kilburn CLP

*Denny Taylor – Current Labour member LAAS JLM

*Karen Bradley (RedTory2016) Ex Labour

*Gnasherjew – David Collier, Richard Millett, Simon Cobbs, Joseph Elfassy, John Arnott, CAA.

How anti-Semitic are the posts? Very. This is an example.

The post quotes Buddy Hell, of the Guy Debord’s Cat blog, as saying looking at them is like ‘bathing in sewage’. It makes this observation on the membership of this troll network and their objectives: to get rid of Jeremy Corbyn and his leftist Jewish supporters.

What is clearly obvious here is that rather than the left being antisemitic. We have a mix of Labour Right, Tories and the Far-Right who are working together to ATTACK leftist Corbyn supporting Jews. Their common interest: Ultra Nationalism and the fear of Jeremy Corbyn recognising Palestine. Jonathan Hoffman is a Conservative and member of Herut UK, a Far-Right organisation and can be seen marching with the EDL on protests but is also bizarrely the consultant for the outfit Labour Against Antisemitism, whose non Jewish operators Euan Philipps, Emma Feltham and Denny Taylor also follow the above parody.

It also reproduces a number of anti-Semitic tweets attacking her from various sock accounts connected with the Gnasherjew troll farm. Like the one below.

Some of those sending Eason abusive twitter messages were Euan Philipps and Mandy Blumenthal of the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism. The post goes on to describe the problems Eason has had combating these troll accounts. It says

Sadly Twitter has been no help at all despite continuously reporting the problem for 2 years at least. The previously Twitter suspended Gnasherjew brags of being reinstated by the CAA and CST and that they have a ‘human handler’ at Twitter. The problem is as shown above, that the CAA are part of the abuse. There is a conflict of interest. The CAA is worryingly also a police agency – although we suspect that the current Met police investigation into the CAA incitement of death threats to Corbyn will alter that relationship.

Another problem here is that Twitter is US based and the extremely Pro Israel Anti Defamation League (ADL) took over as Account Managers in around February of this year as monitors for antisemitism across all of America’s Social Media. Many times the UK police have said that US Twitter refuse to pass over details of the troll accounts. There is a political impasse.

The post states that the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism are – or were – under investigation for inciting death threats against Jeremy Corbyn. LLV reiterate that their mission is to help Left Labour/ Pro-Corbyn members, who were under attack for their beliefs by the above accounts and their superiors at CLP level. They ask victims of such attacks to get in touch with them and share their stories, whether its of vexatious claims or targeted attacks by the above, and give the email address which can be used to do so. They also conclude

We will keep you informed of the progress in the current police investigation as and when we are updated with any major news. As for now, we encourage all socialists to block the above accounts, be careful of the tone and language used in your posts and deprive these agenda driven accounts of a target.

At the time of writing JLM, CAA, BoD and the Labour Party have not responded to our tweets.

See: https://lableftvoice.co.uk/your-shout/f/october

Eason’s not the only one to receive anti-Semitic abuse, simply because she’s a person of Jewish heritage, who supports Corbyn. It’s been dished out to Jackie Walker and Tony Greenstein, and I’ve no doubt any number of others. Just as gentiles like Mike have also been abused and smeared as an anti-Semite for the same reason.

What is particularly interesting is that among the abusers from the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, Labour Against Anti-Semitism, Jewish Labour Movement and Labour Friends of Israel are our old friends Tracy Ann Oberman, Jonathan Hoffman Karen Bradley – the one from The Apprentice?  – and David Collier, John Arnott and chums from Gnasherjew.

These scumbags have, in my opinion, no call whatsoever to accuse anyone else of being anti-Semitic. Not when they appear to be posting vile anti-Semitic abuse themselves. And anyone wondering if there’s any truth to any of their claims should take a look at the abuse they produce and spread and then ask themselves the following:

Who is going to be more trustworthy – decent, genuinely anti-racist people, both Jews and gentiles, who are targeted for abuse, like Eason, simply because they support Jeremy Corbyn? Or a bunch of vile, abusive right-wing trolls, who fling around anti-Semitic smears while hypocritically claiming to combating it? 

Because that’s how I view them.

Jewish Comics Artist Eli Valley Attacks the ‘Kapo’ Insult Hurled by Zionists

It must be the week for comics and the Israel lobby. This time last week the bug-eyed Zionists of JVLWatch tried again to smear Mike as an anti-Semite using his ‘Hardboiled Hitler’ strip from Violent. Violent is Mike’s small-press homage to the 1970s comic, Action, which caused outraged and ended up being banned because of its violent content. In ‘Hardboiled Hitler’, Mike satirizes the Fuehrer, presenting him as a superhero, who is nevertheless a grotesque, posturing, inept, flatulent clown. The flatulence is entirely historically accurate. Hitler suffered from meteorism – chronic flatulence. Apparently it got very loud and nasty when he was in full rant. JVLWatch, whoever they are, tried to present the strip as a glorification of the Nazi regime and that the poisonous clouds surrounding Hitler represented the gas chambers used to murder the Jews. They weren’t. The noxious fumes surrounding Hitler all came from the Fuehrer’s bottom, and very definitely didn’t make him look at all heroic or glamorous. Various newspapers have also tried to make the same claim that Mike’s anti-Semitic using the strip. And as Mike says, when he complained to the press-regulator IPSO about them, the regulator dismissed their claims out of hand.

On Tuesday Tony Greenstein put up on his blog a page of art by the American left-wing Jewish comic artist and writer, Eli Valley, published in Jewish Currents, attacking the ‘Kapo’ insult. The Kapos were the heads of the Warsaw ghetto under the Third Reich. The Nazis cruelly delegated to them the responsibility of choosing which of their community should be sent to the extermination camps, which they did under duress. If the leaders refused, the SS would have attacked and killed everyone there.

Since then it’s become an insult the Israel lobby hurls at those Jews, who criticize Israel and Zionism for its crimes against the Palestinians. In the page reproduced by Greenstein, Valley turns the insult around and hurls it back at them, showing how the Zionists deserve the epithet far more than the people they slander. He explains how he was once attacked in this way by the editor of the Jewish magazine, Commentary, because he published a story about a Jew’s crisis of conscience after Israeli settlers burned alive a Palestinian child. The current Israeli ambassador to Israel also used it against the centre-left Jews of J-Street. He goes on to make the point that the Israeli right believe that the lessons of the Holocaust are that gentiles will always hate Jews, who must survive by any means necessary. That means attacking as treason even objection to the most Fascistic forms of Israeli nationalism. Hence Netanyahu joined demonstration attacking Yitzhak Rabin as a Nazi.

But to Valley, the real Kapos are the supporters of Trump and Netanyahu, the people who support Trump’s separation of immigrant children from their parents in his own concentration camps on the Mexican border. He shows the similarity between recent American immigrants, who have committed suicide fearing deportation, and those Jews who did the same in Franco’s Spain fearing that they would be sent back to the Third Reich. He also attacks the Orthodox Union for its award to Trump’s politico, Jeff Sessions. American Jews, he argues, have forgotten the other lesson of the Holocaust, that atrocities like this should never again happen to anyone, anywhere, ever again.At the heart of this problem is the way the Jewish community has allowed Jewish identity to be defined by a mainly Zionist, Orthodox right-wing minority. The result is that the Jewish community has internalized this view, and sees themselves through its lens. Hence when Jews declared that they felt ashamed to be Jewish after Israeli snipers killed over a hundred Gazans, this showed that they had accepted the belief that only Israel embodied authentic Jewish values. The strip concludes by that Jews need to take control of the vernacular to express the values they share, and use it to excommunicate people like arch-Zionist Trump supporter, Sheldon Adelson. Valley concludes by comparing them to the real Kapos, who had no choice about their collaboration with the Nazis. He states of the Zionists and other Jews supporting Trump ‘Kapo doesn’t begin to plumb the depths of their betrayal.’

It’s strong stuff which makes an excellent point, particularly because of Trump’s own connections to and support for the genuine anti-Semites of the extreme right. Greenstein also provides a link in his article to the webpages for Valley and his work. Valley’s published a collection of his strips from over the years, Diaspora Boy, in which he attacks right-wing abuse and corruption in the Jewish community and wider American society. The webpages also have samples of his work. And along with the critical praise is a quotation from a very offended person, who felt that it shouldn’t have been published anywhere. Valley’s been compared to Robert Crumb, but that’s not quite right. His view of society and humanity is as bleak and vicious as Crumb’s, but his style is more like that of Charles Burns in his 1990s alternative comic, Skin Deep.

Greenstein also adds more awkward facts to support Valley’s view of Zionists as the real Kapos. Like the Ha’avara agreement between the Nazis and Israel in 1933 that broke the international Jewish boycott of Nazi Germany and the suppression of the Auschwitz Protocols by Hungarian Zionist Erich Kasztner in order to preserve a treaty between them and the Nazis. He describes how the founder of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, came to believe that anti-Semitism was inevitable and couldn’t be fought when he was in France during the Dreyfus scandal. Hence the head of the Israeli Labor Party, Avi Gabbay, told American Jews that the real place was in Israel after the Pittsburgh massacre on Saturday. And how Berl Katznelson, the founder of the Israeli party Mapai, declared the Nazi seizure of power in 1933 was an opportunity for the Jews to build and flourish as never before, at a time when the rest of German Jewry were preparing to protest. This is also the reason why Ben Gurion opposed the Kindertransport evacuating Jewish children from Nazi Germany to Britain, because they wouldn’t be taking them to Israel. As for the real Kapos, Greenstein writes

The kapos were themselves prisoners who were destined for extermination. They had no control over their situation and their collaboration, if that is what it was, was forced. Who knows what any of us would do in such a situation? The Jewish Agency was under no such compulsion yet it willingly collaborated lobbying the Gestapo not to allow Jewish emigration to countries other than Palestine.

He then goes on to discuss the way members of the Fascist right, like Britain First, are accusing genuine anti-racists of racism, and how the National Front and BNP try to present themselves as protecting British Whites from Black racism. He also mentions how Zionists frequently tell their Jewish opponents that they wish they and their families had died in the Holocaust. One of the victims of this vile abuse was Aurora Levins Morales, a Black Jewish New Yorker.

He also attacks James Dyer, a Christian Zionist and member of the Sussex Friends of Israel – a group that’s also close to the EDL – who called him a ‘Kapo’. He goes on to connect him to Christian millennialist support for Zionism, which believes that the foundation of Israel is part of the End Times. Before Christ returns, however, the world will suffer a great tribulation. And in the Book of Revelation this will result in the destruction of the vast majority of Jews, except a small number who convert to Christianity. One of the most prominent Right-wing American Christian leaders is Jack Hagee, the head of Christians United for Israel, who also believes that Hitler did God’s work. He’s one of the two pastors Trump has appointed as ambassadors to Israel. He goes on to connect this with Christian anti-Semitism during the Third Reich, such as the German Lutheran church’s installation of the pro-Nazi bishop, Ludwig Muller as Reich Bishop, and Monsignor Tiso, the Roman Catholic prelate in Slovakia who presided over the deportations to the death camps there. He concludes

It is therefore no surprise that today the successors of Muller and Tiso are to be found supporting the Zionists and decrying any notion of Palestinian rights. It is even less of a surprise that they assuage their consciences with the taunt of ‘Kapo’.

http://azvsas.blogspot.com/2018/11/kapo-anti-semitic-insult-that-zionists.html

To be fair to Hagee, he’s not the only person, who believed that Hitler did God’s work. Apart from Hitler himself, I think Holocaust survivor and acclaimed author Elie Wiesel also stated that Hitler was God’s servant, based on the way God in the Old Testament uses foreign invaders like the Assyrians and Babylonians to punish Israel before punishing them in turn. Wiesel, incidentally, was certainly no self-hating Jew. He was a staunch supporter of Israel, who never criticized its brutal maltreatment of the Palestinians.

And Christian Zionism has been attacked for its racism and distorted theology by the Christians of the American Presbyterian Church in several books, which have been reviewed by the Electronic Intifada, and which I’ve blogged about.

But Greenstein’s article and Valley’s cartoons show very graphically how the real Kapos and collaborators with Fascism are the Zionists, both Jewish and Christian.

Louise Mensch and American Republicans Demand War with Iran

Mike over at Vox Political has this piece reporting an article in the Canary commenting on the latest frenzy of sabre-rattling and jingoism from former Tory MP and full-time airhead motormouth, Louise Mensch: http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2016/01/15/this-renowned-tory-wants-to-blunder-into-full-blown-war-with-iran/. Yesterday, an American ship strayed into Iranian waters and was duly captured. Its crew were later released. According to the Canary, the American military ain’t bothered by the incident. They’ve said it was a genuine mistake. So, from their point of view, it’s ‘My bad, no problem, guys!’

This isn’t good enough for the Repugs by far, and the usual suspects have worked themselves into a frenzy demanding Obama bomb them back into the Stone Age. The pro-war party naturally includes the usual recidivists like Tom Cruz. Cruz is almost as bad as Trump in his hatred of Muslims, but it more concealed about it. And in some of his proposed policies, he’s actually worse. He also has absolute no clue about affairs in the Middle East. He got very huffy with a group of Middle Eastern Christians he was addressing a few years ago, when they responded very badly when he started telling them they should support Israel. He really didn’t know that, although they’re Christians, the people to whom he was talking were also the indigenous peoples of the Middle East, Arabs and Assyrians. They share the comment resentment towards Israel across the Middle East as a modern settler state. Moreover, Christian Palestinians in Israel are monitored and have suffered discrimination by the Israeli authorities. They’ve also been attacked by their Muslim compatriots as collaborators. So the Christian population of the Holy Land has declined from about 25 per cent to 1 per cent.

As for attacking Iran, this would be a monumentally bad move. The article in the Canary, to which Mike’s piece is linked, list a number of very good reasons why attacking Iran would be a very bad idea. Not least is the fact that any attack in Iran would be countered by more military force and determination than the other campaigns in the Middle East, and would result in a nightmarish war would that would last for many, many years.

Iran is the Shi’a state, and so is the leader and protector of region’s Shi’a Muslims. Any attack on Iran would provoke the rest of the Shi’a into hostilities against America. The result would be that America and the West would end up fighting everyone in the Middle East, with the Israel and Turkey. As Shi’a, the Iranians are also the enemies of al-Qaeda and ISIS, who under the command of the Saudis have targeted and massacred Shi’a in Iraq and Syria as ‘rejectionist heathens’. By attacking Iran, America would be deliberately alienating and provoking a potentially useful ally.

Of course, the Republicans also hate Obama for what they consider to be his betrayal of America by signing a deal on nuclear power with Iran. If you listen to them, Obama has allowed the Iranians to develop nuclear missiles. A year or two ago they were running ads against the President’s negotiations with the Iranians, frightening Americans with pictures of America suffering a nuclear attack. In reality, Obama’s deal has actually ended any Iranian programme to develop a nuclear weapon, while still leaving them space for the peaceful development of nuclear power.

This is particularly a blow to Netanyahu, who was also trying to scare everybody with the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran, using pretty much the same scare tactics that were used in the ‘dodgy dossier’ about Saddam Hussein having weapons of mass destruction that could be deployed within 45 minutes. Netanyahu claimed that Iran was only a year away from building an atomic bomb. This was absolute rubbish, and senior Israeli generals and intelligence officers said so.

Netanyahu would like a war with Iran, because of the Iranian regime’s poisonous hatred of Israeli and its very ostentatious support for the Palestinians. The American Republicans publicly share these sentiments. But the reality is more likely it’s another, grubby attempt to nick their oil. Back in the 1950s, the Americans and Britain overthrew the Iranian Prime Minister, Mossadeq, after he dared nationalise the Iranian oil industry. This meant the seizure of the property of Anglo-Persian Oil, now BP. The oil industry was renationalised by the Iranians, who have made the date of this a national holiday. And while Iran is keen to sell its oil and other industrial products, it won’t allow foreigners to invest or own Iranian industry.

This has driven the plutocrats berserk. Forbe’s has place the country very high up in its list of countries lacking ‘commercial freedom’. Which seems to mean in their case, countries that won’t allow mega-rich multinationals to buy up their firms.

This is the real reason Cruz and the other Republicans want a war with Iran. It’s about more than American pride and jingoism, though that’s also one of the powerful drivers. It’s about more than defending Israel. It’s the same reason America and his poodle, Bliar, invaded Iraq: oil, and the seizure and looting of whatever industries and companies Haliburton and the rest of the American multinationals think worth getting their mitts on.

Bush at the beginning of the Iraq invasion convinced himself and his fellow Neocons that somehow, the American and western forces would be hailed as liberators by the Iraqi people. As events have shown, that has manifestly failed to occur. The result has been a further destabilisation of the country, along with the radicalisation that has spawned ISIS. The same would happen again if America went to war with Iran.

Like Iraq, Iran is a mosaic of different ethnic minorities. 51 per cent of the population speak Farsi, modern Persian. Other ethnic groups include Kurds, Various Turkic-speaking peoples, peoples speaking languages related to Persian, and Arabs in the West of the country. The Kurds have been fighting a war with the Iranian government to have their own, autonomous homeland since the 1970s. There have also been jihads by the Turkish peoples, after the government began seizing their land to give to Farsi speakers. If central government in Tehran was shattered, the result could be another bloody mess of ethnic conflict and cleansing such as has occurred in Iraq.

And all so that big oil can get its hands on yet another country’s supplies.

Cruz and co. are ignorant stooges for the big corporations. Mensch is also, though in this case I wonder if some of it’s the result of all the E she was trying to get her colleagues to take when she was a shop assistant in the 1980s. These people have nothing to offer the world except more blood, pain and suffering, all so that big business can once again boost their profits.

They should never be allowed anywhere near public office. Boot them out.

The Ancestors of Democracy in Ancient Iraq?

Ancient Greece is rightly venerated as the place where western democracy began. However, Daniel E. Fleming, in a book published in 2004, suggested that the origins of western democracy may lie even further back and to the east, in ancient Mesopotamia, now modern Iraq. In his book Democracy’s Ancient Ancestors, Fleming examined 3,000 letters from the archives of the ancient city of Mari, finding in them evidence for collective leadership and early democratic ideas and vocabulary in the city’s myths and literary traditions.

I haven’t read the book, but I think I can see where Fleming is coming from. The cities of the Babylonian Empire were ruled by three different layers of government. There was the governor, appointed by the emperor; the city’s local ruler, the mayor; and the karim, or chamber of commerce. This last could be the popular assembly of a limited kind that provided the proto-democratic element in the Babylonian political system.

The Babylonians were also rather like us, in that they also expected their rulers to act in their interests, and had a cynical contempt for them when they didn’t. There’s one Babylonian story about a citizen, who gives the mayor a golden cup, expecting a suitable favour in return. When he doesn’t get it, the citizen arranges a series of four incidents, in which the mayor has the living daylights beaten out of him in consequence. Okay, so it isn’t democracy so much as a bribe, but it does show that there were limits placed on the actions of their rulers, and the citizenry considered it their right to mete out appropriate justice when their rulers didn’t govern on their behalf.

Aside from this, since Edward Said’s Orientalism, there has been a move by some historians to challenge the simplistic notion of a free, democratic West versus a despotic East. Said traced this idea back to Herodotus’ The Histories, and the Father of History’s account of the Persian War as a battle between Greek democracy and Persian absolute monarchy. Sasan Samiei, for example, in his book Ancient Persia in Western History: Hellenism and the Representation of the Achaemenid Empire , wrote a measured attack on this view, in particular examining and contrasting the works of Goethe and Gibbon.

Said’s Orientalism was an attempt to challenge what he viewed as Western imperialist attitudes towards Arabs and their cultures, attitudes, which justified American and European imperialism and domination. The same attitudes have been seen as influencing Frank Miller’s 300, about the Spartan victory over the Persians at Marathon. Clearly histories like Samiei’s are important as they challenge the assumptions about the Near East and the Arab and Iranian worlds, which see them as a terrible ‘Other’ implacably hostile to the West and democracy, and which partly justify Huntingdon’s theory of renewed ‘culture wars’ between the democratic, free West, and a despotic, Muslim East.

And I wondered if Fleming’s book also didn’t provide another key to explaining the destruction of the priceless Assyrian artefacts by Isis a few weeks. They weren’t just trying to destroy the remains of a civilisation they considered to be pre-Islamic and therefore idolatrous. They were trying to destroy the reminders that Iraq had a history and culture going back thousands of years, in which democracy, rather than the rule of force, may have played a part. This last might provide a point a rapprochement between the West and Iraqi Islam. ISIS despise the West, and would like to provoke us into further attacking Iraq and its people further, in order to create more chaos. This would, they hope, further cut the rug from under the moderates and radicalise more of the people against us. Smashing those artefacts was part of that process, in the hope it would incense the West, as well as destroy the ancient, and possibly democratic legacy, of that ancient civilisation.