Petition to Restore the Whip to Jeremy Corbyn

The former Labour leader has been readmitted to the party but Starmer has refused him the Labour whip following whining and moaning by the usual rightist troublemakers. I’ve just received this email from Labour Against Austerity asking people to sign a petition calling for the whip to be restored.

ACTION ALERT: Restore the Whip to Jeremy Corbyn

Add your name here // Share here // Retweet here

As reported here (retweet here), there is growing support across the labour movement for the PLP whip to be restored to Jeremy Corbyn following his re-instatement into the Labour Party.
 
We are writing to ask you help us get 50,000 signatures on the petition here to this end. As Richard Burgon MP said, “Jeremy should immediately have the whip restored. At a time of national crisis, division in the Labour party serves nobody but the Tory Government.” Please take 30 seconds to spread the word by sharing here on Facebook and retweeting here.
 
We would also like to take this opportunity to welcome to our email list everyone who opted-in to receive communications after signing our change.org petitions on RLB and JC – welcome! Together we can defeat the Tories’ reactionary agenda and build a better future.
 
Yours in solidarity,
The Labour Assembly Against Austerity Volunteers Team.
 
PS: Please take 30 seconds to spread the word by sharing here on Facebook and retweeting here.

…..

I’ve had absolutely no hesitation in signing it. If also feel that this is a terrible injustice to the only political leader, who offered a real solution to the country’s problems and the massive impoverishment of its working people, then please do likewise.

Outrage as Iain Duncan Smith Given Knighthood

This is a really sick joke, and shows the absolute contempt the Tories have for the poor, the unemployed and the disabled. Iain Duncan Smith, the architect of the Tories welfare reforms, has been given a knighthood in the New Year’s honours. Smith is the pompous nonentity who was briefly the leader of the Tory party at the beginning of this century before David Cameron took over. It was a period of failure, in which the party utterly failed to challenge Blair’s Labour Party. He was, however, a close ally of his successor, and has also served Boris. He tried to stand up for Johnson when our farcical Prime Minister was denied the lectern in Luxembourg, claiming that the Luxembourgers should be grateful to us because we’d liberated them during the War. But we hadn’t. The Americans had. And under Tweezer he’d also peddled the line that there would be no legal divergence between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK.

But what Smith is most notorious for is mass murder. As head of the Department of Work and Pensions, he was responsible for the welfare reforms, including the Work Capability Assessments and the system of benefit sanctions, that have seen hundreds of thousands denied the welfare payments they need and deserve. He is also responsible for Universal Credit and Personal Independence Payments. UC is supposed to combine all the welfare payment into a single system. It has proven catastrophically flawed, with people waiting weeks or months for their payments, which have been significantly lower than the previous system. Mike in his article about it quotes statistics that some of those on UC are £1,000 a year worse off. But this jumped-up, odious little man boasted that Universal Credit would be as significant in lifting people out of poverty as the ending of slavery in the British Empire in 1837.

The result of IDS’ reforms is that at least 130,000 people have died. The true figures may well be higher, as the DWP has been extremely reluctant to release the true figures, as Mike and other disability campaigners have found. His attempts to get the Department to release them under the Freedom of Information Act were refused, then stonewalled. Finally Smith’s Department released some figures, but interpreted his requested so that they weren’t quite the figures Mike had requested.

As well as the financial hardship there is the feelings of despair and humiliation that his reforms have also inflicted on the poor. Doctors and mental health professionals have reported a rise in depression and suicide. The Tories, naturally, have repeatedly denied that their policies have any connection to people taking their own lives, even when the person left a note explicitly stating that this was why they were.

Some sense of the despair IDS’ wretched reforms has produced in young people is given by the quotes from them in Emma Bond and Simon Hallworth’s chapter, ‘The Degradation and Humiliation of Young People’ in Vickie Cooper’s and David Whyte’s The Violence of Austerity. ‘Julie’ said

The way that it feels walking into the JobCentre is that you are there to do what you are told to do and that’s it and then you leave. They are not there to actually help you it is just like, you have to do this and if you don’t do this or you won’t get no money. (p. 79).

And ‘Bridget’ described how she felt so low at one point she contemplated suicide.

I am ashamed to admit it but I did feel suicidal at one point. I felt so down after I was made redundant that I felt that there was no point. I had worked really hard at school and I got good grades but for what? I was happy when I got my job, it wasn’t that well paid but it had prospects and a career path – or so the recruitment agency told me – I had my flat and that and I thought I was OK. But when it [the redundancy] happened I felt like I had been hit by a brick wall. I got really down especially when I went to the JobCentre and they would not help me. I felt so depressed. I could not afford my rent. I lost my flat and the few things I had saved up for. I did not know where to turn. I took drugs for the first time in my life – I felt so wretched. I wanted to die. I was too ashamed to tell my parents that I had lost my job. (p. 80).

But IDS, as Zelo Street reminds us, is the man who laughed at a woman talking about her poverty in parliament. He’s also blubbed on television, describing how he met a young woman, who didn’t believe she’d ever have a job. ‘She could have been my daughter!’ he wailed. But this is just crocodile tears. He, like the rest of the Tory party, have no love whatsoever for their victims as the guffaws with Dodgy Dave Cameron in Parliament showed.

Mike in his piece about the wretched man’s ennoblement has put up a large number of Tweets by ordinary people expressing their outrage. One woman, Samanthab, states how rotten the honours system is when it rewards not just IDS, but other creeps and lowlifes, like the sex abusers Jimmy Savile, Stuart Hall and Rolf Harris.

The outrage is so great that one NHS psychiatrist, Dr Mona Kamal Ahmad, has launched an online petition at Change.Org calling for the scumbag’s knighthood to be withdrawn. She describes him as responsible for some of the cruellest welfare reforms this country has ever seen and notes that Britain is the first country the United Nations has investigated for human rights abuses against the disabled. She states clearly that the suffering and impoverishment in Britain today is a direct result of Smith’s welfare reforms.

30,000 people, including myself, have already signed it. If you want to too, go to Mike’s article at: https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2019/12/28/will-you-sign-nhs-doctors-petition-to-stop-iain-duncan-smith-receiving-knighthood/ and follow the links.

See also: https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2019/12/27/chorus-of-derision-greets-announcement-that-iain-duncan-smith-is-to-be-knighted/

https://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2019/12/arise-sir-duncan-cough.html

New Anti-Fracking Petition on Change.org

I had this email sent to me by Change.org, asking if I would like to add my name to a petition launched by Bob Dennett against the resumption of fracking in the UK. The email reads

News just in from the High Court: fracking is set to start in the UK for the first time since 2011, when it caused two earthquakes.

Bob has been campaigning against fracking since the earthquakes happened near his home in Lancashire.

He says that the council failed to properly assess the safety risks, and that fracking could cause serious health and environmental problems across the country. Despite the High Court ruling, he’s vowing to keep fighting – but he needs your help.

His petition to ban fracking in the UK has 116,000 signatures – will you add your name?

Petitioning Claire Perry
Ban fracking before it’s too late!

Petition by Bob Dennett
Kirkham, UK

On the last day before parliament broke up for the summer recess, the government snuck in its approval for fracking near where I live in Lancashire. This will be the first fracking in the UK since drilling by the same company in 2011 caused two earthquakes, and will pave the way for it to spread across the country.

Fracking – which involves drilling into the earth to extract shale gas – poses a serious risk to our health and our environment. This is why I’m calling for it to be banned.

In April 2011 I was woken up by my house shaking so hard that I thought a large vehicle had collided with the building. I quickly realised that it was an earthquake which was later proved to be caused by Fracking Company Cuadrilla drilling for shale gas. Ever since then I’ve been campaigning against fracking to protect future generations, including my own grandchildren.

Where fracking is happening in the US, Canada and Australia, people are getting sick as a result of the toxic chemicals they are exposed to via air and water. Even our own government reports acknowledge that emissions of polluting chemicals in the air will increase. Pollution brought about by the fracking operation can also kill crops and pose a severe threat to wildlife. Methane leaks from gas wells and pipelines make fracking a serious contributor to climate change, more serious than CO2.

The UK’s anti fracking movement is made up of ordinary people doing whatever we can to protect our communities, our lands and our grandchildren against huge fossil fuel industries.

I refuse to let earthquakes, contaminated water and climate change be an accepted part of the world that we hand down to our grandchildren.

Please sign now to tell the government to ban fracking!

As this message points out, fracking has been a major threat to the environment across the world. When Cameron threatened to introduce it over here, communities up and down Britain organized against it, including near Keynsham, a small town near where I live in Bristol.

If you want to add your name to the petition, go to

https://www.change.org/p/ban-fracking-before-it-s-too-late?recruiter=75092145&utm_source=share_petition&utm_medium=copylink&utm_campaign=psf_combo_share_initial.pacific_abi_select_all_contacts.select_all.pacific_email_copy_en_gb_4.v1.pacific_email_copy_en_us_3.control.pacific_email_copy_en_us_5.v1.pacific_abi_gmail_send.variation.lightning_share_by_medium_message.control.lightning_2primary_share_options_more.control&utm_term=438308

After the BDJ, It Should Be the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, Who Need to Be Criticised and Investigated

If not broken up altogether, as the malign, libellous and morally corrupt organisation it really is. I’ve commented already on a post Mike put up on Thursday, reporting the barrage of criticism the Board of Deputies had called upon itself from outraged citizens up and down this country. They were enraged at the Board’s comments on the Gaza massacre, and the way they placed the blame, not on the Israeli squaddies, who murdered 60 people and wounded 200 more, but on the victims. Ah, it was all the fault of Hamas, who put all the 40,000 or so Palestinians massing at the fence, up to it. After all, 50 of those killed were members of Hamas.

It doesn’t matter if they were members of Hamas or not. They were unarmed. This makes their killings assassinations, which is the mark of a death squad. Which is Fascism.

Also, what about the 10 that weren’t members of Hamas? They didn’t deserve to die. Not least the baby that was killed when Israeli squaddies threw a tear gas grenade into a tent.

Liberal Judaism and Yachad wrote letters to the Board stating that the Board had grotesquely misrepresented their views. And ordinary, individual Jews were also incensed. One of them was the comic actor David Schneider, who said very plainly that the Board didn’t represent Jews like him.

Mike opened his article with the smug face of the Board’s president, Jonathan Arkush, who he said was soon to be ex-president of the Board.

Well, we live in hope.

https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2018/05/17/huge-backlash-against-supporters-of-israeli-government-over-gaza-massacre/

Arkush is a nasty piece of work, not least for the way he’s weaponised the anti-Semitism smears against the Labour party, and tried to make Corbyn the sole person responsible for it. It’s a lie, as he must surely know, as anti-Semitism has gone down in the Labour party under Corbyn. It’s now lower than in ordinary British society. And as Mike’s repeatedly pointed out, if you want to see real, baying racists and anti-Semites, with the vilest of views, you have to look at the Tory and Tory affiliated web-pages.

But when Arkush and the Board attack the Labour party for being anti-Semitic, this is only a cover for their real concern: to stifle criticism of Israel. And the Israel lobby has been using that smear since the 1980s. So much so that the American Jewish critic of Israel, Dr. Norman Finkelstein, has described it as a machine for manufacturing anti-Semites.

It’s a tactic shared and employed wholesale by the odious Campaign Against Anti-Semitism. And it was explicitly set up to stifle criticism of Israel caused by their treatment of Gaza. It’s founder, Gideon Falter, was left unnerved by the popular opposition to Israel aroused by the bombardment of Gaza in 2007 or so. He did what the Israel lobby always do in such circumstances, and defined criticism of Israel as anti-Semitic. Oh yes, in debates the pro-Israel pundits and speakers will allow that Israel should rightly be the subject of criticism where it’s justified. But in practice, any support for the Palestinians is met with outrage, and claims of anti-Semitism. Especially if you call it an apartheid state, or point out just how similar it is to Fascism or the Nazi policies towards the Jews before they embarked on the horrors of the ‘Final Solution’ in 1942.

The Campaign Against Anti-Semitism hasn’t said a peep about the Gaza massacre. They don’t represent British Jewry in the same way as the Board, and so there’s no call for them to. But you can bet they’ve been watching the wave of outrage against the Board for its vile comments, and been taking notes, if not names. The Israel lobby hates even the reporting of atrocities committed by Israel or its allies. They alleged that respected BBC foreign correspondents Jeremy Bowen and Orla Guerin were anti-Semites for their reports on the conflicts between Israel and its neighbours. They were particularly upset by Bowen’s report that the massacres of Muslim Palestinians by the Christian phalange in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Lebanon were committed by Israel’s allies. Alan Rusbridger, the editor of the Guardian, described in an interview with Peter Oborne in his Despatches programme on the Israel lobby how he was regularly placed under pressure by the Board demanding that he retract articles on Israeli crimes and human rights violations because they are anti-Semitic.

It isn’t just the Board that needs to be investigated and reformed because of their support for the shooting of unarmed civilians. It’s the entire Israel lobby, including the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism. Their patrons, as Mike and Tony Greenstein has pointed out, are largely Tories with a history of racism and Islamophobia. And they have been principally involved with the anti-Semitism smears against members of the Labour party, in conjunction with pro-Israel organs like the Labour Friends of Israel. There have been calls for the latter group to be expelled from the party, just as there has been an internet petition on Change.org to have the CAA deregistered with the Charity Commission for being a political organisation, not a charity.

It has been the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism that libelled Mike as an anti-Semite and holocaust denier just because he had the temerity to defend Ken Livingstone. Just like they’ve libelled and smeared so many other decent people, Jew and gentile, even those, who have spent their lives combating racism and anti-Semitism. Even those, who have suffered genuine anti-Semitic abuse and assault themselves.

And just as many British Jews were rightly angered by the Board’s comments about Gaza, so Jewish Brits have also been annoyed by the way the Campaign presumes to speak for them. Especially when its pronouncements are made by gentiles like Luke Akehurst or Stephen Pollard, who then go on to declare that all British Jews, as Jew, must support Israel. They are rightly incensed at being told what they must believe as Jews by those, who aren’t.

Criticism of the Israel lobby should not stop at the Board and its vile president. It has to go beyond, to organisations like the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, BICOM and others.

Arkush should be called on to resign for his comments. And so should Gideon Falter, and his wretched smear group be broken up for its similar tactics, libels and goals.

Petition Against the Deportations

Change.Org, the internet petitioning organisation, also has a petition to stop the charter flights deporting the Windrush migrants. Mike has a link to them on his blog. I’ve also signed the petition, and if you want to do so too, it’s address is at:

https://www.change.org/p/theresa-may-mp-stop-the-charter-flight-pvt070-deporting-people-to-jamaica-in-may?

Change.Org Internet Petition Against Libyan Slave Markets

On Saturday I put up pieces from RT reporting the demonstrations outside the Libyan embassies in Paris and Rome against the slave markets that have opened in Libya, where the Islamist savages are selling Black migrants from sub-Saharan Africa.

‘Eric Seven’ in France has launched an internet petition on Change.Org to get the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein to close the markets.

His description of the petition and its purposes states

Currently, in Libya, migrants are being sold on “slave markets”.

Thousands of West African men, women and children passing through Libya are sold on “slave markets” before being subjected to forced labor or sexual exploitation (rape, forced prostitution). These people are sold for between $200 and $500 as property.

Originally from Nigeria, Senegal or Gambia, the migrants are captured as they travel to northern Libya, from where they intend to reach Europe by crossing the Mediterranean. Throughout this journey, they fall prey to armed groups and networks of smugglers who sometimes try to extort money from them.

This crime, this human trafficking must STOP immediately!

Please sign this petition to ask the Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson, the UN and the African Union to take immediate and concrete measures to stop this human trafficking.

I’ve already signed it. If you want to as well, the petition is at:

https://www.change.org/p/stop-migrants-becoming-slaves-in-libya-close-the-slave-markets?utm_medium=email&utm_source=petition_signer_receipt&utm_campaign=triggered&share_context=signature_receipt&recruiter=75092145

I wish Eric Seven all the best for his petition, but I really don’t have much faith in the ability, or even the willingness, of the international authorities to close the slave markets down. Boris is incompetent braggart, whose colossal ineptitude for the job as Foreign Secretary has left Nazanin Zeighari-Ratcliffe looking at a further 16 years in an Iranian jail on trumped up charges of trying to ‘soft-topple’ the Iranian regime. He is interested in Libya, but only in so far as Sirte can become another Dubai. As soon as they’ve cleared all the bodies of the hundreds of people, who were killed in a gun battle between the police and Islamists away, that happen to be inconveniently lying there. And I doubt if the Americans will be willing to do anything. The groups currently enslaving Black Africans are the same people, or the same kind of people, that Obama, Hillary Clinton and Dave Cameron supported as their proxies to overthrow Colonel Gaddafi. Apart from which, I think there’s too much anarchy in the country, which is torn by civil war and now has two parliaments, for any central authority to crack down on these criminal gangs.

Libya has been destroyed, and this barbarism has re-emerged, simply because Gaddafi defied American imperialism and was threatening to reject the petrodollar in favour of the Gold Dinar, to be used throughout the Middle East and Africa. The neocons and big business profit again, and the peoples of the Middle East and Africa pay the price.

Internet Petition to Limit Sales of Acid to Prevent Attacks

Last week Mike put up several articles commenting on the recent spate of acid attacks, one of which was the horrific assault on Resham Khan and her cousin when they were out driving. Mike asked how it was that the acid used in the attacks was so easily available.

Yesterday I got a message from Change.org stating that they had a new petition launched by Sarmad Ismail, which he intends to deliver to Amber Rudd. Mr. Ismail wishes to limit sales of acid, so that they are only available to those, who hold a license. To obtain one of these, the purchaser should have to go through background checks and be entered into a police database.

I’ve signed the petition. If you want to sign it too, it’s athttps://www.change.org/p/uk-parliament-prohibit-the-purchase-of-acid-to-those-without-a-licence?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=&utm_source=113407&j=113407&sfmc_sub=269081008&l=32_HTML&u=22259682&mid=7259809&jb=5753

Mike’s Campaign for Justice Rejected by Police, Who Can’t Get their Excuses Right

Last night, Mike over at Vox Political has posted a piece reporting that the police have declined to investigate those, who libelled him as a anti-Semite the other week in order to prevent his election as a local councillor for Radnorshire. Mike had asked the Powys police to investigate them, as libelling someone’s personal character and behaviour to interfere with their chances in an election is a crime under the 1983 Local Government Act.

However, Mike received a message from the local rozzers stating that they had contacted John Stolliday of the Labour Party Compliance Unit, who told them that make had been suspended pending a formal investigation. The flatfeet therefore concluded that it would be ‘inappropriate’ to engage in an investigation.

Mike has replied to them, stating that this excuse does not stand up as the libels were made against him personally for his activities outside the Labour party, and asked for the name of his superior officer if the plod he has been dealing with so far is not up to the job.

He concludes

You can’t see this but I am actually shaking with rage at the injustice of this.

It seems to me that the officer concerned either can’t be bothered or is actually seeking to pervert the course of justice.

I am extremely disappointed, like Mike’s many other friends and supporters, to hear this. But I am not surprised. It seems to me that the reason the cops don’t want to pursue this investigation is because it’s too much of a hot potato. This is just my speculation, but it strikes me that they don’t want to run the risk of being seen to interfere in a complex political dispute involving accusations of racism. The police force generally down the years has acquired something of a reputation for institutional racism – not, I should mentioned, in Powys, but simply generally – and it strikes me strongly that this officer is afraid that if he defends Mike, he risks his career by being accused of anti-Semitism himself.

And so he hopes that if he doesn’t do anything, somehow it’ll all blow over and he can go back to solving normal crimes, which won’t have unpleasant political consequences.

I hope, however, that this will only be a temporary setback for Mike, and that he will manage to get those who smeared him with these appalling allegations brought to account for their crimes.

One of the organisations chiefly responsible for these smears is the woefully misnamed Campaign Against Anti-Semitism. This claims to be tackling anti-Jewish hatred in the UK. In reality, it is a Zionist organisation that has no interest whatsoever in combating the real anti-Semites in the NF, BNP, the former National Action and other Fascist groups and parties. It exists solely to silence critics of Israel’s barbarous policy of brutal persecution and expulsion against the indigenous Palestinians. Its tactic in this is to smear decent people making entirely reasonable criticisms and protests as anti-Semites, even when they are sincere anti-racists, including self-respecting secular or Torah observant Jews and their friends and gentile allies.

Their other tactic has been to exaggerate grossly the real level of anti-Semitism amongst the general British and European populations, in order to make Jews feel unsafe and suspicious of the gentile neighbours and compatriots. This is done with the explicit agenda of getting more European Jews to migrate to Israel.

The organisation is also deeply Islamophobic, and has published many articles claiming that British Muslims in particular are anti-Semitic, in ways which, if they were said about Jews, would have them screaming ‘Anti-Semitism!’

See the following article by Tony Greenstein: https://electronicintifada.net/content/campaign-against-antisemitism-campaign-against-palestinians/19916

Mr Greenstein is a trade unionist, Labour party member, anti-racist and anti-Zionist. He states that he has written a book, The Struggle Against Fascism in Brighton and Hove. While this doesn’t sound very impressive compared to legendary confrontation with the Blackshirts, such as the Battle of Cable Street and the other fights in London’s East End, it does actually show how committed he was to combating the real, jackbooted racism and anti-Semitism when it showed its head. One of the leaders of the NF lived for a time in Brighton back in the 1970s, and its thugs attacked trade unionists, feminists and other left-wing or minority organisations with their habitual violence. They physically attacked the offices of a feminist organisation, which I believed also helped unmarried mothers, and published the names and addresses of local trade unionists in their magazine, until local trade unionists and ethnic minority organisations hit back. So Mr Greenstein and his brothers and sisters in the unions, Labour party and the Left in general did an excellent job of standing up to real, physical thuggery and beating.

Mr Greenstein has also set up an internet petition on Change.org asking the Charity Commission to remove the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism’s charitable status, as it is a political organisation that does no public good. The petition is at

https://www.change.org/p/the-charity-commission-to-get-the-charity-commission-to-deregister-the-zionist-campaign-against-anti-semitism?utm_source=embedded_petition_view

I’ve signed it, and if you feel strongly about the way Mike, and other decent people like him are being outrageously smeared by this vile, pernicious group, you may also like to.

In the meantime, I wish Mike and everyone else in the Labour party, who has been libelled as an anti-Semite the very best in their campaigns for justice, and to Tony Greenstein for his efforts also to bring them to some kind of account.

And I will certainly be posting more critical articles about them, and similar organisations, and the way they lie and vilify decent, sincerely anti-racist men and women, who genuinely stand up against those who spread hatred against Jews.

See: http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2017/05/16/vox-political-writers-call-for-justice-is-rejected-by-police-who-cant-even-get-their-excuse-right/

Richard Falk: Another Pro-Palestinian Scholar Smeared as an Anti-Semite

Another week, another decent person smeared by the ultra-Zionists as an anti-Semite.

Another decent, self-respecting Jew smeared as ‘self-hating’.

This time, the victim of the smears was Richard Falk, the Albert G. Milbank emeritus professor of international law at Princeton, and Visiting Distinguished Professor in global and international studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Professor Falk describes his experience of Ultra-Zionist abuse and harassment in an article in Monday’s Counterpunch. He had just had his book, Palestine’s Horizon: Towards a Just Peace, published by Pluto Press a few weeks ago, and was on a speaking tour about his book of universities in England and Scotland. The book was published at the same time the UN issued a report concluding that Israel was indeed an apartheid state. This led to such a campaign by the special snowflakes of Zionism against Professor Falk, that the universities of East London and Middlesex cancelled his visits for reasons of health and security. He states that one factor in their decision may have been the highly disruptive behaviour adopted by the Ultra-Zionists when he gave an earlier talk at the LSE.

He states that he had never previously had universities cancel his visits, even though considerable pressure had been exerted on them to do so. And in addition, he suffered personal attacks on him as ‘anti-Semitic’ and ‘self-hating’.

Back in the US, the Zionists attempted to prevent his book selling by writing negative reviews about it on Amazon. He went on Facebook to encourage his friends to write positive reviews of the book. The Ultra-Zionists then resorted simply to writing one or two sentence attacks on the book, which just attacked it without even engaging with the content of the book itself.

This again, was a new tactic to him. He describes it as

‘an innovative version of digital book burning, and while not as vivid visually as a bonfire, its vindictive intentions are the same.’

He states that beyond the attacks on him and his book there is a wider campaign by Israel against its critics, including the Boycott, Divest and Sanction movement, defying UN NGOs, banning foreign tourists from visiting Gaza or the West Bank, and smearing the country’s critics as ant-Semites. As part of this campaign, the entire body of US senators sent a letter to Antonio Guterres, the UN Secretary General, demanding a new, friendlier approach to Israel, an attitude Professor Falk describes as ‘arrogant’ and ‘blue-washing’.

He states that Israel has now embarked on a war of cultural aggression, aided by groups such as UN Watch, GO Monitor and AIPAC, aided by ‘flame-throwing militants’ at street level who resort to symbolic forms of violence. This sets a very dangerous precedent and is profoundly anti-democratic as it is leading government to close down debate on policies affecting the lives of a long oppressed people.

Professor Falk concludes

There are two further dimensions of these developments worth pondering: (1) In recent years Israel has been losing the Legitimacy War being waged by the Palestinians, what Israeli think tanks call ‘the delegitimation project,’ and these UN bashing and personal smears are the desperate moves of a defeated adversary in relation to the moral and legal dimensions of the Palestinian struggle for rights. In effect, the Israeli government and its support groups have given up almost all efforts to respond substantively, and concentrate their remaining ammunition on wounding messengers who bear witness and doing their best to weaken the authority and capabilities of the UN so as to discredit substantive initiatives; (2) while this pathetic spectacle sucks the oxygen from responses of righteous indignation, attention is diverted from the prolonged ordeal of suffering that has long been imposed on the Palestinian people as a result of Israel’s unlawful practices and policies, as well as its crimes against humanity, in the form of apartheid, collective punishment, ethnic cleansing, and many others. The real institutional scandal is not that the UN is obsessed with Israel but rather that it is blocked from taking action that might exert sufficient pressure on Israel to induce the dismantling of apartheid structures relied upon to subjugate, displace, and dispossess the Palestinian people over the course of more than 70 years with no end in sight.

See http://www.counterpunch.org/2017/05/08/israels-new-cultural-war-of-aggression/

This is precisely right. And it hasn’t just happened to Professor Falk, as we’ve seen. The Israel lobby’s determination to stop any criticism of their country’s oppression and ethnic cleansing of the indigenous Palestinians, and their support for the Blairites in the Labour party, were behind the spate of anti-Semitism accusations against Labour members and activists last year, including Ken Livingstone. Mike’s defence of those unfairly accused has seen him also vilified and suspended from the Labour party on the utterly spurious and contemptible accusation that he is an ‘anti-Semite’.

He isn’t. Neither are the people he defended. Many of them were convinced anti-racists, and included Jews, who had suffered real assault and intimidation because of their ethnicity, and gentiles, who had suffered the same for their solidarity with their Jewish friends and comrades.

As Professor Falk makes clear, this is all part of a campaign to prevent proper debate and scrutiny of Israel, and give the Palestinians the peace and justice they deserve.

In the meantime, I find it shameful that British universities have caved in to this foul bullying. Just as it is repulsive and abhorrent that decent people are being slandered as anti-Semites.

I cannot say that I’m entirely surprised by Prof. Falk’s statement that in their cultural war against his book, the Ultra-Zionists had to resort to writing one or two lines, which didn’t engage with the book at all. My impression of the Zionists waging this war is that they’re not just moral pygmies, but also stunted intellectually. They can’t refute what their critics are writing, and so their only recourse is abuse and misrepresentation.

Mike has asked the police to investigate those, who have libelled him, including the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, the Zionist front group responsible for the smear. There is also a petition by Tony Greenstein urging the Charity Commissioner to strip them of their charitable status on Change.org. Mr Greenstein states that the CAA provides no public benefit and only smears critics of Israel, while having little or nothing to say about the real Fascists and anti-Semites running amok. Mike has a link to the petition on his blog post discussing the libel and deselection: http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2017/05/06/no-council-seat-for-vox-political-writer-because-of-politically-motivated-interference/

Internet Petition to Revoke Charitable Status of Zionist Front Group Campaign Against Anti-Semitism

Mike put up a piece yesterday explaining how he had been suspended by the national Labour party because of libels spread by the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism that he was an anti-Semite. These libels were repeated by the local Welsh press and then echoed by the local Conservative MP. As I’ve blogged many times before, Mike is very definitely not anti-Semitic in the slightest. He has friends of different races, and does not judge people on their ethnicity, religion or sexual orientation.

He is proud to have been invited by one of his female friends to be a reader in a performance for Holocaust Memorial Day when he was at College. I remember his obvious pride in telling me how the girl, who was Jewish, told him that his performance reading some of the names of those butchered by the Nazis had left her profoundly moved.

Mike’s crime is simply that he stood up for the very many other decent, anti-racist women and men, who have been falsely defamed as anti-Semites, simply because they have criticised the state of Israel for its discrimination and ethnic cleansing against the Palestinians. Those smeared have, as I have said, included both gentiles and Jews, many of whom have suffered abuse and violence themselves because of their Jewish heritage or, if they are non-Jews, because of their friendship and solidarity with Jews.

In his article Mike linked to a petition on Change.org by Tony Greenstein. This is to get the Charity Commission to deregister the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism because it does not do what it claims to. The organisation isn’t interested in genuinely defending Jewish people against prejudice and discrimination. Instead it is a Zionist front organisation, which exists solely to exploit the Jewish people’s history of persecution as a weapon to smear Israel’s critics. Mr Greenstein’s explanation of his petition runs:

The so-called Campaign Against Anti-Semitism is a McCarthyite Zionist propaganda organisation whose aim is to smear and libel opponents of Israel’s apartheid regime.

Ever since its formation during Operation Protective Edge in the summer of 2014, when over 2,000 Palestinians, including 551 children were murdered by Israeli missile attacks and shelling of civilian areas, it has sought to tarnish supporters of the Palestinians and anti-Zionists with the label ‘anti-Semitism’.

The fact that the CAA is officially a registered charity is outrageous. It provides no Public Benefit, the test of any charity nor are its activities remotely charitable. It is a nakedly right-wing political Zionist organisation.

Last Friday it attacked a member of Hove Labour Party and a Momentum supporter Rebecca Massey. She has since received death threats. Yesterday it smeared the veteran Israeli Jewish anti-Zionist Emeritus 80 year old Professor Moshe Machover as ‘anti-Semitic’. With its attack on Machover, the CAA has reached a new low.

A cursory search of its archives reveals almost nothing on fascist groups, who are anti-Semitic holocaust deniers. There are however 21 entries for Jewish Labour MP Gerald Kaufman, who supports the Palestinians, 70 entries for Jeremy Corbyn and 29 for Shami Chakrabarti – all of them hostile. There were 8 for Theresa May, but only to congratulate her!

The CAA’s purpose is to limit freedom of speech by attacking as ‘anti-Semitic’ opponents of the Israeli state. Please support this petition.

I’ve signed the petition, stating that I have done so because of its libels against Mike and other decent, anti-racist people.

And the other people mentioned in Mr Greenstein’s introduction, who have also been falsely smeared as anti-Semites, certainly shows the malign nature of this organisation. I think Gerald Kaufman was one of those MPs, who were caught fiddling their expenses a few years ago. However, I have never seen anything to doubt his integrity as a genuine voice for peace and justice in the Middle East, to which he has been a frequent visitor.

Like Gerald Kaufman, Jeremy Corbyn has also been smeared because he too supports the Palestinians.

As for accusing Shami Chakrabarti, the civil liberties campaigner, this shows how deeply politicised the organisation is. The very accusation is farcical.

I am also horrified and revolted that they have smeared the Hove Labour party member, and supporter of Jeremy Corbyn Rebecca Massey, and that the lady has received death threats as a result.

Just as I am by their smear of Prof. emeritus Moshe Machover. Professor Machover has been referenced several times by organisations campaigning against the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. I believe I have seen him mentioned several times in articles in Counterpunch. The fact that they have so smeared such a distinguished scholar, not sparing his years, tellingly shows how utterly bereft of genuine integrity these people have.

They are moral pygmies trying to support a brutal, racist regime through libels and intimidation against people who are their moral superiors in every way. The fact that they can only use libels also shows that they have no real arguments to support them, and can only attack their critics using twisted lies.

There has been a rise in anti-Semitic incidents in recent years, just as there has been an increase in racism generally. But these people are not interested in
combating genuine abuse and violence, and their failure to do so gives the lie to their claim that they are.

It’s high time this bullying stopped, and the organisation was brought to account for its foul smears.

If you would like to sign the petition, it’s at https://www.change.org/p/the-charity-commission-to-get-the-charity-commission-to-deregister-the-zionist-campaign-against-anti-semitism?utm_source=embedded_petition_view

Or you can go to Mike’s article at http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2017/05/06/no-council-seat-for-vox-political-writer-because-of-politically-motivated-interference/ and use the link there.