I found this vicious little piece of bitter satire on YouTube yesterday. It’s produced by Aamon Animations, whose brief description on the platforms states that he makes animations ranging from political memes to comic horror. Yedolf is obviously a combination Kanye West’s preferred epithet, ‘Ye’, and Hitler’s first name. West, as you’ll remember, effectively torpedoed his career and lost something like a hundred million after ranting about the Jews controlling the music industry. The dialogue in the animation appears to genuine, which is combined with computer generated caricatures of West, Alex Jones, Ben Shapiro and some other right-wing American pundits that are truly grotesque. Especially when West develops snail’s horns after eating one of the molluscs.
The video includes American right-wing media hacks talking about the threat of Secular Humanists with Jewish last names – which obvious means atheist Jews, raising the old canard about banking at its top levels being run by people with Jewish last names. In other words, the old Jewish banking conspiracy. Then Ben Shapiro appears to endorse West, stating that he’s not mad and states the issues clearly. I don’t think you can call Shapiro anti-Semitic, because I think he’s Jewish. But assuming that he’s talking about West’s anti-Semitic rant, he has shown that he’s prepared to endorse a conspiracist nutter for political expediency, and in the instance throw Jews under the bus.
And then there’s the interview between West and Jones. West goes really anti-Semitic in this one, declaring that Hitler had his good points when Jones tells him he sounds like the Nazi leader. West really, really needs to do some proper reading about Hitler and the Third Reich, and not crap that comes from White Supremacists and Black anti-Semites like the Nation of Islam. I really do wonder if he’d say that if he knew that among the groups the Nazis persecuted were the mixed-race children of Black American squaddies and White German women when the country was occupied by the Allies after the First World War. They organised a programme of sterilisation against them. As a self-respecting man of colour I would hope that this would help disabuse him of the notion that there was anything positive about Nazism.
West’s opinions were too much for Jones, who splutters that his channel believes in freedom of speech, but nevertheless what West has said is unacceptable. Or words to that effect. And when Jones declares that West has gone too far, the man who has absolutely no regard for any kind of libel he can throw at his opponents, then several red lines have clearly been crossed.
I was unaware just how noxious West’s comments were. The impression I got was that he said little more than that the Jews controlled the music industry, but kept Blacks down – vile stuff, but unfortunately held by a number of Black artists who have similarly sabotaged their careers uttering this nonsense. I wasn’t prepared for how really unpleasant it was. I don’t like cancel culture, but if this is right, West deserves to be well and truly cancelled.
But one of the most revealing aspects is that there were too many American conservatives prepared to support him, even though parts of the Republican party are claiming to be the true friends of the Jews and staunch supporters of Israel.
This needs watching. Despite the allegations against the left, anti-Semitism is still present on the right.
Remember Candace Owens? She the young, Black American right-winger who turned up over here a few years ago to launch Turning Point UK with Ben Shapiro. This was supposed to be the British branch of the American conservative youth organisation, Turning Point USA. She got into trouble then for her massive ignorance about the Nazis. She declared that Hitler wasn’t a nationalist, because he wanted everybody to be German, and that his actions would have been alright if they’d been confined to Germany. The answer is ‘No’ to both statements. Hitler didn’t want everyone to be German – he just wanted the Germans to rule over Europe, or at least eastern Europe. And exterminate the Jews, of course, because they weren’t German. His dictatorship, imprisonment of political opponents and the persecution of Jews, Gypsies and gay people would have still been utterly monstrous even if he kept it to Germany. It really is amazing how Owens could make such a monumentally stupid statement.
Now she seems to have done something similar. According to a report by Alternet’s Brandon Cage, on her show on the Daily Wire, Owens opened her mouth to defend basketball player Kyrie Irving, who had caused massive offence for his weird views. He’s an anti-vaxxer, Flat Earther and believes in the New World Order. But Owens argued that Irving is the victim of overzealous persecution by the Anti-Defamation League and the National Basketball Association. She backed up her case by pointing to how the film ‘Hebrews to Negroes: Wake Up Black America’, became a bestseller on Amazon after Irving promoted it. According to the Washington Free Beacon, the film not only denies the Holocaust it also claims that Jews have falsified the historical record to conceal their true nature and power. It also states that Whites can’t be authentic Jews, beliefs which the article says inspired the perp behind a shooting a kosher supermarket last year in New Jersey. This sounds like bog-standard Black Hebrew Israelite anti-Semitism. Organisations like the Black Hebrew Israelites believe that only Blacks who have experienced transatlantic slavery are the real Jews. There’s apparently a similar outfit over here in Birmingham, according to Simon Webb, who turn up in paramilitary uniform ranting their nonsense against Jews and Whites in the streets unmolested. Webb was annoyed that they were getting away with it, while Whites with just a trace of racism were rounded up for prosecution by the cops.
According to Owens, the book’s popularity somehow exonerates Irving, because if you over-censor something, you end up asking if it’s true and how they could keep this information from us. She said
‘I was right. Last night, #HeroestoNegroes was trending on Twitter. It was a top trend on election night, no less, and everybody under the trend was saying ‘I’m watching it right now, I’m watching it, why would they try to take this from us?’ Why would they try to keep this information from us?’ And that is what happens when you over-censor information.
It was never necessary to attack Kyrie Irving, even if you felt that the information in this documentary was bad. And there are plenty of people that have spoken out and said that. The extreme efforts that the ADL went through in coalition with the NBA to punish him and their efforts to then demand that Amazon take this documentary down, of course, was going to pique people’s interest.
Not only is the documentary the top documentary on Amazon, but it’s also the book – which I didn’t know they had a book – is now a bestseller on Amazon’s list. If you go to Amazon bestsellers, you will see ‘Heroes to Negroes.’ It is one of the bestselling books.‘
She also protested against demands for Amazon to withdraw the film as an attack on free speech, and said people had a right to be wrong. Then she defended people reading Mein Kampf.
‘A little reminder, if you actually go on Amazon right now, you can order and read ‘Mein Kampf.’ It is not an endorsement of Adolf Hitler to read a historical textbook. It just is not, right? And the idea that we should be censoring all this information and no one should see it because it hurts some group of people, to me, just does not gel well with our First Amendment rights.
Amazon, still not in trouble, don’t know how Kyrie Irving’s entire life is on the line, but nobody is talking about Amazon, but they are making a ton of money. So Kyrie Irving is losing money and Amazon is making tons of money. Think about that for a second.‘
Okay, I’ll defend her comments about reading Mein Kampf. It certainly isn’t a textbook, but it is read like one by people, who want to understand the beliefs that motivated Hitler and his murderous regime. The monster’s Tabletalk, as recorded by Martin Bormann, has also been published. Here in the UK, the OUP edition has a foreword by Hugh Trevor-Roper discussing ‘The Mind of Adolf Hitler’ and making it very clear how bizarre, poisonous and semi-educated Hitler’s views are. People generally read it to gain insight into Hitler, not because they think he might be right about the Jews. Or at least, I hope they don’t. Hebrews to Negroes is different. People are reading it because they’re interested in its ideas about the Jews. And yes, people have a right to be wrong. The ability to be wrong is one of the fundamental human freedoms. But there are ideas so dangerous, that people have to be protected from them. No decent person wants to see a repeat of the Holocaust. That’s why books like Hebrews to Negroes should be banned, like the infamous Tsarist forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
There seems to be a large amount of anti-Semitism in certain parts of Black America. Webb posted a video about it the other day on History Debunked, which pointed to a wretched book published in the 80s by the Nation of Islam as the source of the poisonous myth that the Jews were responsible for the transatlantic slave trade. But decades before then the book Colour Prejudice noted that there was a lot of anti-Semitism amongst the Blacks in Harlem. Some of it might come from the Jewish-owned stores there originally refusing to employ Black sales staff, though the Italian and Greek-owned businesses also didn’t. And not all Black Americans were happy with the racist rhetoric of protesters like Sufi Abdul Hamid, who organised Black labour protests against the stores in the 30s. Indeed, Hamid lost control of the protest movement because his coalition partners thought he’d gone too far. You can’t defend films like Hebrews to Negroes, in the same way you can’t defend Egyptian television’s serialisation a few years ago of the Protocols.
Some things just shouldn’t be published, and you’re harming people when they are.
Mark Pattie, one of the many great commenters on this blog, left a remark earlier today noting that Benjamin Netanyahu has appointed Ben Gvir as ‘kingmaker’. Netanyahu is the new Israeli president, and Itamar Be Gvir is a raging anti-Palestinian racist. He’s so extreme that in a recent piece about the Israeli elections the Beeb described him as ‘far right’. He is, as one of his demands is for the expulsion of ‘disloyal Arabs’. ‘Far right’ is strong language, especially as the I.H.R.A. definition of anti-Semitism says that it may be anti-Semitic to compare Jews to Nazis. But the comparison is certainly there, and valid, as the mighty Tony Greenstein has been showing for a very long time. Israeli policy towards the Palestinians is comparable to the Nazi persecution of the Jews before the initiation of the ‘Final Solution’ in 1942. You can also compare it to the Nazi occupation of Poland, in which a tract of land extending into Ukraine and Russia was cleared of its Slavic inhabitants ready for German colonisation.
But let’s stay with the ‘kingmaker’ epithet, shall we? If we’re talking about kings, I supposed the English king most like the demented Ben Gvir would be Edward I, the kind who expelled the Jews from England and who was the centre of a British Fascist cult, English Mystery, in the 1920s and 30s.
And it seems the Israel lobby is getting ready to make insinuations of anti-Semitism yet again against left-wing politicians. Ben Shapiro, one of the leaders of the right-wing American organisation, Turning Point, has posted a video this evening complaining that while the outgoing Israeli president, Yair Lapid, has congratulated Netanyahu on his election victory, Biden hasn’t done so. Well, if I was a politico, I wouldn’t want to congratulate the leader of an administration that had a monstrous bigot like Ben Gvir in it. But the attitude also reminds me of various incidents where the Israelis flung accusations of anti-Semitism against Barack Obama. Obama gave them the Iron Dome missile defence system. He also gave them aid, but because they didn’t get the amount they demanded, the Israeli government through a fit and screamed ‘anti-Semitism’.
This did not impress the very Jewish Sam Seder, head honcho of the left-wing ‘Majority Report’ news and commentary YouTube channel. Seder stated very clearly that if he was the president and they did that to him, he’d cut the aid by a third and ask them if they still wanted to complain about anti-Semitism. Unfortunately, no western leader would dare to do this because of the power of the accusation. Which is unfortunate, as now the Middle East is confronted by a real racist maniac in power with Netanyahu.
I know there’s a danger of this blog just repeating stuff from the right, and that it’s not reciprocated on their part. But I do feel that I should promote some of their material when it’s correct. And in this case, I think Candace Owen’s take on Black Lives Matter, or at least it’s American incarnation, is entirely correct. Owen’s is a Black Conservative activist, who has said some monumentally stupid stuff in the past. A few years ago, came over here to launch Turning Point UK with another, White American conservative active, Ben Shapiro. Turning Point UK is the British subsidiary of the American right-wing activist group, Turning Point. It’s supposed to be converting British yoof to conservatism, but as far as anyone can make out, it’s impact over here is marginal. It looks like a scheme to get the right-wing public over the Pond to give donations to Turning Point in the mistaken belief that they’re spreading the right-wing gospel of private enterprise and saving us from Communism and the welfare state.
As the press conference for the launch of Turning Point UK, Owens and Shapiro were keen to defend nationalism. Someone therefore naturally raised the question of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. No, said Owens, Hitler wasn’t a nationalist because he wanted everyone to be German. But his policies would have been perfectly all right if they’d been confined to Germany.
This is monumentally stupid.
Hitler and his thugs were definitely nationalists. They said it openly, and it was in the name of their damnable party: the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. And he didn’t want everyone to be German. Rather, he wanted the Germans to be dominant, ruling people in Europe, and especially over the remaining Slav populations after eastern Europe had been conquered and peoples like the Czechs had received the same treatment as the Jews. And no, the suspension of democracy, imposition of a one-party state, persecution and annihilation of the Jews, Gypsies and other peoples deemed ‘subhuman’ and the eugenic murder of the disabled, the incarceration of neurotics, the long-term unemployed and homosexuals and all the other horrors of the Third Reich would not have been acceptable if he’d confined it just to Germany.
But I think she had done something positive this time in turning her jaundiced eye on Black Lives Matter. They were responsible for many of the protests-cum-riots that broke out in America and elsewhere around the world following the death of George Floyd. Although that was the immediate cause, behind it was the issue of the continuing poverty, unemployment, low academic performance, crime and despair of Black America. They demanded for immediate, radical action against the systemic racism they saw as the cause. They received millions in donations from ordinary people and corporations. But that money was swallowed up by the leadership, as they gave themselves millions to purchase luxury housing and pay their relatives hundreds of thousands for services provided. And the Black people on whose behalf they claimed to be campaigning didn’t see a penny. Owens and her film crew went out to find the truth of what was going on. The result is the documentary, The Greatest Lie Ever Sold, premiering on the Daily Wire, a conservative channel.
The trailer shows Owens talking about how she got interested in it and says that BLM got $80 million in donations. I thought the number was higher – $90 million or over. It shows the incriminating tax invoice, that shows what the money was spent. This doesn’t mention they multimillion dollar houses but does mention transgender events or people and various types of sex worker, which I hadn’t heard about before. It shows her talking to Black people in some of the areas devastated by the rioting, who state they never saw any of the money and things are worse than before. Here’s the video
Black Lives Matter have tried to spin the anger and investigations as attempts to discredit them by the right, big corporations and the White system. In fact, I understand it started when the movement’s employees started getting hit with demands that they weren’t to disclose information about the charity’s affairs to lawyers and the people in the impoverished communities, who expected to be receiving money from them, wondered why they weren’t. And many Blacks, not just Conservatives, despise them not just for their corruption, but how they exploited real Black death and poverty simply to enrich themselves.
The organisation is Marxist, with extreme doctrines demanding the abolition of the traditional western nuclear family and seems to be following Critical Race Theory in regarding all Blacks as oppressed, and all Whites as oppressors – a divisive, nonsensical and racially vindictive doctrine. I very much believe that thanks to them and other organisations pushing the woke nonsense, race relations have got worse. I know this comes from the conservative right, but I think they were absolutely correct in exposing the organisation and its corruption.
This is a very interesting and no doubt controversial video from Sam Seder’s Majority Report, in which he shows the link between Shapiro’s rhetoric about ‘good’ and ‘bad’ Jews and an attack on a synagogue in Indiana. Shapiro is a Republican mouthpiece, a very aggressive Zionist and Jewish. Seder’s also Jewish, describing himself as ‘the most Jewish guy you know’. But Seder’s also left-wing and a determined critic of Israel. He takes Shapiro to task for his sharp distinction between good and bad Jews, based on ethnicity versus religious practice, as distinction which is also made by neo-Nazis. And ‘bad Jews’ are Jews, who vote Democrat and specifically for Barack Obama.
Seder wondered what would happen if a public figure said something that inspired someone to commit a horrible act. And not only did they inspire the perp, they also made an equation that the perp cited as the cause for his committing the horrible act. Shapiro tried this with the Nazi, who shot up the synagogue in Pittsburgh, claiming that the Nazi was following an ideology similar to Ilhan Omar, the Muslim Congresswoman and critic of Israel. This is untrue. The Nazi didn’t, and he didn’t cite Omar as an explanation for his murder of the Synagogue’s congregation. But it has happened in the case of Shapiro and two Nazis, who vandalised a synagogue in Indiana.
The Nazis were Nolan and Kiyomi Brewer, and their crime was painting a Nazi swastika and Iron Crosses on a wall of a synagogue in Carmel. Nolan, the husband, was apparently law abiding, docile and passive. He was drawn into it by his wife, Kiyomi. She stated in her defence that she was led into the dark world of Nazism through mainstream right-wing news sites and organisations like Ben Shapirok Breitbart and Fox News. She then moved onto Stormfront, and then a Nazi site on the Discord Server. She and her husband also stated in the court papers that they deliberately selected that particular synagogue because it was full of ethnic Jews. This follows the neo-Nazi claim that Hitler wasn’t against religious Jews, but only against ethnic Jews.
Seder then shows with a series of tweets from 2011, 2016 and this year, that Shapiro himself makes the distinction. In one, he claimed that the Jewish community had always been undermined by bad Jews, and that these bad Jews voted Democrat. In the 2016 tweet, he said that there was a distinction between ethnically and religious Jews. Bernie Sanders was ethnically Jewish, and so passed the first standard, but not a Jew at all by the second standard.
Seder also shows a clip from the interview Shapiro gave with Andrew Neil, which was so embarrassing for Shapiro that he claimed that Neil was some kind of Leftist. Neil isn’t. He’s a Tory. Neil asked him about his claim that bad Jews voted for Barack Obama. Shapiro then tried to get around it by saying that American Jews were largely secular, and so his claim about nonreligious Jews was correct. Neil wasn’t going to be diverted, and stated that he hadn’t said that. He had said that bad Jews voted for Barack Obama.
Shapiro apparently has a list of stupid things he’s said on his website, and this comment is now one of them. But as Seder shows, Shapiro was still defending his comment on Neil’s show just weeks before in 2019. This is disgusting, and he wonders how many times Shapiro can say stupid things like it, which go down on his list, before newspapers like the New York Times stop giving him fawning headlines like ‘The Philosopher for the Cool Kids’. Seder cites her a tweet by Almanaqa refuting another tweet by Shapiro denying that he planned the synagogue attack. He didn’t, and nobody is saying that he did. But his rhetoric did inspire the attackers. Seder also makes the point that this is what the Intellectual Dark Web, so beloved of extreme right-wing ideologues, is actually about – Nazi sites like Gab. He concludes by attacking Shapiro once again for his comments and demanding that he be held responsible for them.
I’m blogging about this because this isn’t just an American problem. In this country the lamestream media, the Conservatives and the Blairites in the Labour party are using the same Nazi distinction between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ Jews to smear the Jewish supporters of Jeremy Corbyn, as Jewish and gentile left-wing bloggers like Tony Greenstein, Martin Odoni, David Rosenberg, Jewish Voice for Labour, Mike Sivier, Tim Fenton of Zelo Street and Tom of Another Angry Voice have pointed out.
It isn’t quite a distinction between ethnic and religious Jews, as the racism has included very religious, ultra-Orthodox Jews like Shraga Stern. But there is a particular venom within the Zionist right at Israel-critical Jews, like Greenstein and Jackie Walker, who are subjected to the vilest abuse. Abuse which would be considered anti-Semitic if it came from gentiles.
And right-wing Zionists do ally themselves with the Islamophobic and Nazi right. They have links to Tommy Robinson and the EDL, as well as Paul Besser and Britain First. Tony Greenstein’s put up long articles identifying the organisations and individuals involved. These include Jewish Fascist organisations, like Herut. When the Board of Deputies and Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis organised their farcical rally against the Labour party last year, two of the Zionists attending sported T-shirts bearing the Kach logo. Kach was a Judaeo-Nazi terrorist organisation banned in Israel. And then there’s the antics of the former Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, who led a British contingent to the March of the Flags day in Israel. This is when Jewish Nazi thugs march round the Muslim quarter of Jerusalem, vandalising homes and businesses and intimidating the locals. The same Jonathan Sacks, who declared Reform Jews were ‘enemies of the faith’. Which is the rhetoric of persecution.
Those smeared as an anti-Semites by the witch-hunters – the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, the Board of Deputies and so on – have received death threats. Jackie Walker has been horrendously vilified. She has been told that she’s not Jewish, because she’s Black, and that she should be lynched and her body burnt or put in bin bags. Chris Williamson, the Labour MP, who rightly said that Labour had given too much ground to those making false accusations of anti-Semitism, has also received death threats.
So I wonder how long it’s going to be before someone attacks a Jewish supporter of Jeremy Corbyn, and then states in court that they were doing it because he or she was ‘the wrong type of Jew’, and they were radicalised by Sacks, Mirvis, Gideon Falter and Marie van der Zyle.
It isn’t just in Britain that the Israel lobby is trying to suppress criticism of Israel and its seven decades long persecution of the Palestinians as anti-Semitism. In America, the very Orwellian-sounding Anti-Semitism Awareness Act has been introduced to Congress. And it does exactly the same, but makes it an offence. The ACLU has criticised the act, and sent a letter to Congress protesting it. In this short video of just over four minutes from Secular Talk, host Kyle Kulinski explains how the act will shut down criticism of Israel, and pro-Palestinian and pro-BDS groups at American universities.
The ACLU says of the act
The Anti-Semitism Awareness Act, recently introduced in Congress, will likely be used to silence constitutionally protected criticism of Israel.
There has been a rise in anti-Semitic attacks on Jews, but the ACLU observes
Anti-Semitic harassment is already illegal under federal law. The new bill does not change that fact. But its overbreadth makes it likely that it will instead silence criticism of Israel that is protected by the First Amendment.
The proposed legislation, for example, defines speech that applies a “double standard for Israel” or denies “the Jewish people the right to self-determination,” as evidence of anti-Semitism. It also directs the Department of Education to consider such speech in its investigations, which could result in a loss of funding for schools.
Kulinski begins by criticising the title of the Act itself, comparing it to the Patriotism Act, which similarly took away many of the constitutionally protected freedoms Americans enjoyed in order to protect them from terrorism. Just as the very title Patriotism Act sought to suppress criticism of its contents on the grounds that no American could possibly be against patriotism, the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act does the same, as no decent person would be in favour of anti-Semitism.
The clause about ‘double standards on Israel’ means that if students founded a pro-Palestinian or pro-BDS group on campus, their opponents could shut it down by asking them why they aren’t protesting against the human rights violations of Saudi Arabia. If the group also advocated a single state solution to the problem, in which Israel became Israel-Palestine, with the Palestinians enjoying equal rights under the law, including the right of return, this would also be illegal under the terms of the Act, as it would deny the character of Israel as an exclusively Jewish state, and so consequently the right of the Jewish people to self-determination.
Kulinski ends his video with a jibe at the self-appointed defenders of free speech on the American right – Ben Shapiro and others – wondering when they are going to protest this violation of it. Of course, they’re not, as they’re only interested in defending the speech they believe in from attack. So Kulinski states that he’s not going to hold his breath waiting for them, because he’d die.
You can bet that if this becomes law in America, it won’t be too long before it crosses the Atlantic, and the British and European pro-Israeli establishment will be falling over themselves to introduce something similar over here.
This is a video from the American left-wing news show, The Young Turks, in which main man Cenk Uygur comments on the appalling views of American Conservatives on the Israeli state’s persecution of the Palestinians. One of them remarked on American television about how wonderful and transparent Israeli democracy was. He thought it was the most democratic country in the world. He also praised Israeli walls. These were great too, unless you believed that Palestinians were people.
He was referring to the wall built by the Israelis, to keep the Palestinians the Israelis expelled from their ancestral homes out. The Israelis have been trying to expel all of the Palestinians from Israel and the occupied territories ever since the Nakba at the birth of Israel. They have also refused to readmit Palestinians, who fled the massacres committed by the Israel forces at the time, for purely racist reasons. They have said quite openly that they weren’t going to allow them to return as this would upset the ethnic composition of Israel as a Jewish state.
Uygur then comes to the comment of Ben Shapiro, a very young Republican political commentator, who for some reason they revere as some kind of great intellectual. Shapiro tweeted that Israelis like to build, while Palestinians prefer to bomb and live in sewage. Uygur makes the point that the reason the Palestinians live in squalor is because they don’t control their economy and the Israeli state is forcing these conditions upon them. He also point out that with this, the Republicans are demonising the Palestinians, just as the Nazis demonised the Jews. And it’s done for the same reason: to make their genocide easier.
He also acknowledges that Arabs and Palestinians also demonise Jews and Israelis, and he’s very firmly against that as well. They’re all human beings, and the only proper solution to this is a two-state solution. He also praises the ‘If Not Now’ movement, which demonstrated against the murder of the protesters yesterday. This is made up of young Jews and rabbinical college students.
But there was one person, who was pleased with the murder of the protesters: Anne Coulter. She tweeted that Israeli soldiers had killed 28 protesters (the total number is 59), before asking ‘Can we do that?’
She was referring to Trump’s plans to build a wall to keep the Mexicans out. Uygur argues passionately that if the Israelis get away with shooting the Palestinian protesters caged in Gaza, then it’ll encourage Trump to believe he can shoot Mexicans trying to enter the US. Because just as the Israeli state demonises the Palestinians as terrorists, so the Trump and the Republicans claim that Mexicans are rapists, drug abusers and members of criminal gangs like MS-13.
And if that happens, you can also bet it’ll have a knock-on effect over this said of the pond. We’ll have the islamopobes and anti-immigration lobby over here claiming that we need to have the right to shoot illegal immigrants for the same reason.
Readers of this blog will know very well that the Zionist lobby in Britain and America has repeatedly smeared decent, anti-racist people with the accusation that they are anti-Semites, when their only offence is that they have dared to hold Israel to the same moral standards as the rest of the world.
Israel is a racist state, which occupies the Palestinian territories on the West Bank, and which has engaged in a decades long campaign of brutalization and ethnic cleansing towards the indigenous Arabs population.
Those, who oppose this policy of massacre, persecution and expulsion include Torah-observant, and secular Jews as well as decent, anti-racist gentiles. Despite the fact that very many anti-Zionists and supporters of Palestinian rights are self-respecting Jews, who may be active members of their community, they are vilified as anti-Semitic, or self-hating, every bit as much as the non-Jewish opponents of the Israeli state. Indeed, some are subject to worse abuse.
Sam Seder’s Majority Report is a left-wing internet news programme. Mr. Seder and at least one other of his fellow presenters and staffers on the show is Jewish. In 2014 they made a series of videos reporting the carnage in Gaza, and fiercely criticized the Israeli state’s oppression of the Palestinian people. They also attacked and mocked a Republican mouthpiece, Ben Shapiro, for his stupid accusations about Obama’s administration similarly being anti-Semitic.
So, inevitably, the show received a message from a viewer accusing them of anti-Semitism. In this clip below, the presenters Michael Brooks and Matt Binder, defend themselves and the show from these accusations and make the point that criticizing Israel is not anti-Semitism. The presenter begins by stating that he reported the numbers of Palestinian and Israeli casualties, 500 Palestinians to 15 or 16 Israelis, not because he believed that they should be higher or more equal, but because he felt that there should be none at all. No-one should have died, regardless of whether they were Israeli or Palestinian. He also makes the point that his Jewish identity, which is specifically a German Jewish identity, is very important to him.
He states that the use of the accusation of anti-Semitism to close down a conversation about the systemic abuse of human rights by Israel, a sovereign state, is cynical and cheapens anti-Semitism. He states that he doesn’t often read the comments on YouTube. Sometimes the comments are anti-Semitic. Sometimes, after condemning actions by Hamas, and then offering an objective assessment condemning occupation, bombardment and civilians (by Israel), they have been called anti-Semitic. He states that he cannot understand the mindset, but believes some of those, who make the accusation are too caught up emotionally to make a rational judgement.
But with others, it is just a cynical ploy to stop criticism. And one which he states insults the long history of genocide, exodus, expulsion, torture and persecution that the Jewish people have suffered down the centuries. It cheapens also the Jews, who have been tortured and killed simply because of their Jewish identity by terrorists and suicide bombers. It’s a cheap, disgusting parlour trick. He states very clearly that Israel needs to be held to the same moral standards as a normal nation state, not criticized because it is Jewish, nor excused for its wrongful actions for the same reasons either.
The Israeli government and those before it have a policy of expanding Israeli settlement and limiting those of Palestinians. This is a vital issue, and using the accusation of anti-Semitism to stop it is disgusting and disingenuous.
Sam Seder is attacked because he mocked Ben Shapiro, who called Obama’s government one of the most anti-Semitic administrations. The presenter states that this is stupid, and calling Seder himself anti-Semitic is moronic. Seder, he states, is one of the most Jewish people around, outside the Ultra-Orthodox Jews, who live in Crown Heights. Many of whom, he says, are lovely people, as he used to live around there. If you’re going to describe him as ‘anti-Semitic’, at least say he’s self-hating instead.
As for Ben Shapiro, the presenter describes him as ‘a prepubescent little schmuck’ whose statement was too much even for Trump’s spokeswoman, Megyn Kelly. To call them, the producers of the show, anti-Semitic because they spent three minutes mocking him, shows how stupid the caller is, and they have to have compassion on that. But he also makes the point that it’s clearly wrong to call this mockery anti-Semitic, and claim it comes from the same motives as the Holocaust and the murder and torture of Jewish people, such as those, who were killed by the terrorists in Mumbai.
He and the producer then make a few sarcastic, but very accurate points about being called ‘anti-Semitic’ and accused of denying the Holocaust in their turn, simply because they have told their accusers that they’re morons and made even more comments mocking Shapiro.
I’ve put this up as this response to the accusations of anti-Semitism by Sam Seder’s fellow broadcasters – Seder himself goes on to rebut it himself in a later video – because it’s also an excellent response to the smears made by the Zionist lobby over here against Ken Livingstone, Jackie Walker and the many other decent people, who were targeted simply because they supported Jeremy Corbyn, as well as people like Mike, who was smeared simply because he dared to defend Livingstone, Walker and several of the others on grounds of historical accuracy.
Many of those smeared and suspended from the party were Jews, or of Jewish heritage, and had suffered genuine anti-Semitic abuse. One person had had her son attacked by a British Nazi. As for the non-Jews smeared as anti-Semites, like Mike, these were anti-racists, and many of whom similarly had a proud personal history of attacking anti-Semitism. Like Red Ken, who attacks it, along with anti-Black racism, and the British state’s recruitment of real Nazis in their battle with Communism during the Cold War, in his 1987 book, Livingstone’s Labour. These were real Nazis, who had committed horrific crimes against Jews during the Holocaust.
For the non-Jewish people smeared as anti-Semites, the other point the presenter raised remains valid: the accusation of anti-Semitism is a cheap, disgusting rhetorical smear to try to shut down their pertinent criticism of the state of Israel for its crimes. And by using anti-Semitism in this way to deflect criticism of a sovereign nation – Israel- for its disgusting human rights abuses on the same grounds as other nations are attacked and criticized, grotesquely cheapens and insults the real history of Jewish persecution and the memory of those, who suffered.
Critics of Israel, who have suffered these smears, like Norman Finkelstein, have made the same point again and again. But the Zionist lobby carries on with the same vile libels. And the point needs to be made: as well as being a cheap response in itself, it’s also a case of crying wolf. As we’ve seen from the events in Charlottesville several days ago, there are now real Nazis on the march, killing people. These are the real anti-Semites, and if that accusation has to retain its power to shock and reveal just how vile the real Nazis are, then it should not be squandered on vilifying decent people, just for the benefits of the supporters of a vile, racist state, who can only defend their country by smearing decent people as the type of goose-stepping, chanting thugs, who killed an innocent woman and injured 19 others in Charlottesville.
Beastrabban\'s Weblog 