I have a kind of love-hate relationship with Private Eye. Mostly I like it, but today I find myself wishing there was another satirical magazine around, one that wasn’t captured by the political-media complex. One that genuinely was subversive, crusading and really brought you the news that the papers and the lamestream media wouldn’t, and didn’t want you to know about. Because Private Eye is establishment. Its founders were all public schoolboys, as is its current editor, Ian Hislop. And yesterday it showed.
It ran an article on the imminent departure from politics of Diane Abbott for her letter to the Absurder stating that Jews don’t experience racism, and when they do, it’s like the prejudice against people with ginger hair. Unlike Blacks, who were enslaved and forced to the back of the bus under segregation. She ignored the Holocaust and the fact that across parts of Europe and America various institutions, like the universities, set limits on the number of Jews they would take in case they became dominated by Jews. I’ve also heard from people of Jewish heritage that California at one time wouldn’t allow Jews to own property. Abbott is completely wrong, as she’s been told by everyone.
I don’t believe, though, that Abbott is an anti-Semite. She just doesn’t believe anyone except people of colour, and that means primarily Blacks, suffer racism. And she doesn’t want racism by non-White ethnic groups discussed, because ‘they’ would use it to ‘divide and rule’. Aside from which, as Tony Greenstein has shown citing the stats, there isn’t a lot of anti-Semitism amongst severely normal Brits. 77 per cent of British people have positive views of the Jews. Five per cent hate them, and the reminder don’t care one way or another. Given those stats, it’s easy to see how she forgot about the real persecution Jews have historically suffered.
But this was not enough for the writer of the article on Abbott’s coming fall. The anonymous author, styling himself ‘Steeplejack’, said that her views were normal for Corbyn and his faction. He then quoted some Communist who said that Corbyn never really sympathised with the Jews because of their wealth. Okay, according to the stats 60 per cent of British Jews are upper-middle class. This section of the Jewish community doesn’t vote Labour. They’re Conservatives, as shown by Ephraim Mirvis, the Chief Rabbi of the British Empire, nipping round to No. 10 to congratulate Tweezer on her elevation to Prime Minister. The liberal parts of the community generally vote Lib Dem, according to the same stats, with only a few voting Labour. And some parts of the Jewish community are very right-wing, like the two per cent who voted for the National Front in the 1970s. ‘Steeplejack’s’ article believed that it was quite right that Abbott was going to be retired and that Corbyn had been effectively purged from the party, and ended with the announcement that they were coming after John McDonnell next.
You’ll note that at no time does the article mention that Corbyn had and continues to have the strong support of that part of the Jewish community that hasn’t become entranced by the Tories. They didn’t quote anyone from Jewish Voice for Labour, Jewdas or the Jewish Socialist Group. Because they are the wrong sort of Jews. They’re all evil self-haters and anti-Semites because they support him and criticise Israel. They didn’t go to Shraga Stern for comment, who welcomed Corbyn into his synagogue. Stern’s a Haredi Jew. Their theology holds that Israel will only be restored with the return of the messiah. Until then, Jews should stay patiently in exile, working for the good of the wider community. The Haredi community has a strong respect for Corbyn as he stood by them when they opposed the commercial development of their historic cemetery. But again, the wrong sort of Jews.
Now we come to the question of the identity of ‘Steeplejack’. The last of the Eye’s correspondents pushing this nonsense was outed as a Blairite Guardian hack. I don’t know who this guy is, but the pseudonym suggests he fancies himself in the mould of Fred Dibnah, the steeplejack and broadcaster. Dibnah was very good at explaining industrial history and Britain heritage of invention, but he had very reactionary views. He didn’t believe that women should go out to work, for example. ‘Steeplejack’s’ monicker suggests he is similarly right-wing, though probably not to that extent. And he’s almost certainly another establishment journalist.
Which is what is wrong with Private Eye. You get the views of the lamestream media. It’s critical, but only up to a certain extent. The magazine thus pushed the line that Starmer was an anti-Semite for all it could, because that was what the establishment was saying, and the magazine and its editor and contributors shared the same fears of a socialist revival. It also won’t tell you that the current Ukrainian president, Volodomyr Zelensky, is a quasi-dictator very much in the same mould as Putin. Because Zelensky’s on our side against Russia, and so the people must not know that the Orange Revolution was stage managed by Obama’s Victoria Nuland at the State Department and the National Endowment for Democracy. Private Eye aren’t anti-establishment, just a slightly critical section of it.
John McDonnell and the Socialist group of MPs are one of the very few things keeping me in the Labour party. And now it’s clear Starmer wants to purge them, with the support of the media and goblins like Private Eye.
Or does he mean the Wrong Kind of Jews and others accused of anti-Semitism ’cause their evil socialists and critics of Israel?
I got this round-robin message from the leader of the Labour party this afternoon.
‘Dear David,
In October 2020, the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) published a damning report into antisemitism in the Labour Party.
At that time, I was clear the Party accepted the EHRC’s report in full and would implement all of its recommendations. We agreed an Action Plan with the EHRC in December 2020, and since then, we have worked tirelessly to right the wrongs of the past and to tear out antisemitism from our Party by its roots.
Today, it was announced that the EHRC have been satisfied with our progress and the significant changes we have made. Accordingly, the Action Plan has formally concluded.
While this is an important moment, it is not one for celebration. Rather, it is one for reflection. As to how a Party that has always prided itself on its anti-racism and its commitment to equality could have fallen so far.
This announcement demonstrates we have turned the corner. However, the job of restoring Labour is not complete. It shows we are heading in the right direction, and I assure you that there is not a hint of complacency in that confidence. I know there is still much to do.
We will not rest for a moment until not only have we changed the Labour Party for the better, but our country, too.
Thank you,
Keir Starmer Leader of the Labour Party’
The storm of allegations of anti-Semitism against the Labour party and individual members, often men and women of deep integrity and humanity, and which cost Corbyn the election and the party’s leadership, were whipped up by a corrupt political and media establishment appalled at the prospect of a return to power of a man committed to genuinely empowering working people. They baulked at the renationalisation of the utilities, despite the fact that every day shows this is urgently needed. They hated the idea of reversing the privatisation of the NHS and most of all they feared and loathed the return of strong trade unions, workers’ rights and proper welfare state that actually supports its citizens. There was also a foreign policy element too. They also hated Corbyn because he was an idealist who shared Robin Cook’s dream of an ethical foreign policy and specifically his support for the Palestinians.
This fear and loathing was shared by the right-wing, Zionist section of the Jewish community that considers itself that communities official ‘establishment’. This included the Board of Deputies of British Jews, which in reality speaks for the United Synagogue and no-one else, two Chief Rabbis, who both led contingents of Jewish Brits on the ‘March of the Flags’ in which Israeli bovver boys terrorise the Arabs of East Jerusalem, the Jewish Leadership Council, which split with the board because they weren’t right-wing and pro-business enough for them, and various other organisations that were set up in the wake of the bombardment of Gaza to promote Israel and drive away support for the Palestinians. These included the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism and the woefully misnamed Jewish Labour Movement, whose members don’t have to be Jewish or even members of the Labour party. Their accusations were taken up by the British mainstream, who’d found that smearing Corbyn as a Commie and Trotskyite hadn’t worked. But the charge of anti-Semitism stuck. Corbyn backed down when he should have fought, and sacrificed his allies in the belief that this would placate his enemies. It didn’t, and people like the mighty Tony Greenstein knew it wouldn’t and tried to tell him so. But he didn’t listen.
And then there were the vipers within the Labour party, who collaborated with all this. The right-wing faction that conspired against Corbyn at every opportunity, whose members were on Conservative websites and forums, who misdirected election funding from where they were needed, organised coups and bullied Black and Muslim members. They also did their best to conceal instances of real anti-Semitism from the leadership in order to keep the smear going.
When are these malign enablers of real anti-Semitism going to be thrown out of the party?
Well, I reckon they won’t, because they supported Starmer. And Starmer was also personally keen to keep the smears going as a tool for his purges of the left. Hence, even though he was told by his lawyers that he would win a court case against one set of allegations, he folded and gave them the money they demanded.
Israel’s Far Right government this week has declared they’re going to recognise a slew of illegal Jewish settlements in Palestine as punishment for the disturbances at Christmas. This is in contravention of international law. Where’s a statement condemning this from Starmer? Oh, wait, he’s ‘100 per cent Zionist’, so there won’t be one. This is despite the fact that numerous Zionist human rights organisations like B’Tselem have condemned the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. And suffered for it from militantly nationalist regimes that have declared them, like the Jews in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, to be the enemy within.
And what does this statement mean?
It looks like, although the EHRC is satisfied, Starmer still intends to continue his witch hunt because there is still much work to do and we have to reflect on how an anti-racist party became steeped in anti-Semitism. Well, when you realise that the majority of those accused of anti-Semitism were Jews, who had often experienced real abuse and assault because of their religion or ethnicity, and that one of the gentiles smeared and purged was a Black anti-racist activist who had worked with the Board of Deputies to combat real anti-Semitic violence by the BNP in the 1980s, it’s clear that this is all bogus.
The anti-Semitism smears and witch hunt were a tissue of lies from beginning to end. And Starmer knows it, and supported it. And it looks like he means to keep the pressure up even after it is all supposed to have ended.
This is very interesting. Al-Jazeera, the Arab news agency that broke the story about Shai Masot and his attempts to influence the selection of the Tory cabinet years ago to benefit Israel, has reported that a group of 100 scholars have written to the UN urging it to reject the definition of anti-Semitism by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. The report begins
‘More than 100 scholars have urged the United Nations not to adopt the controversial International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of anti-Semitism due to its “divisive and polarising” effect.
In a statement published on Thursday, the 128 scholars, who include leading Jewish academics at Israeli, European, British and American universities, said the definition has been “hijacked” to protect the Israeli government from international criticism.
They also called on the UN to instead rely on universal human rights instruments and different resources, such as the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism.
“Let us be clear: We wholeheartedly welcome the commitment of the UN to fight anti-Semitism and commend the UN for its vital efforts in this regard,” the statement said.
“What we object to and strongly warn against is that the UN would jeopardise this essential fight and harm its universal mission to promote human rights by endorsing a politicised definition that is instrumentalised to deter free speech and to shield the Israeli government from accountability for its actions.”’
Precisely. Kenneth Stern, one of the scholars who drew up the definition, and a Zionist himself, has testified that it is being misused to stifle debate and reasonable criticism of Israel. That’s why the self-appointed leaders of the British Jewish establishment, the Jewish Chronicle, the Chief Rabbis and the Board of Deputies of British Jews went absolutely berserk at the Labour party under Corbyn’s leadership a few years ago. Corbyn had committed the unconscionable crime of being pro-Palestinian and the Labour party had not adopted the I.H.R.A. definition, and so they went frantic with the rest of the British media and political establishment painting him as something he most definitely wasn’t: anti-Semitic.
In fact, a range of Jewish academics and legal experts, including a former Scottish appeal court judge, have condemned the I.H.R.A. definition of anti-Semitism. A far better definition of anti-Semitism is that used by the League of Anti-Semites, the late 19th century German hate group that coined the term: hatred of Jews as Jews, regardless of religion or any other dimension.
But the article is also interesting because it contains this photo by Reuters’ Henry Nicholls of a Jewish protester outside a meeting of Labour’s NEC. I didn’t see this on the news, and I bet you didn’t either. Corbyn had a great deal of support amongst the Jewish community, brave people who have been especially vilified in the most disgusting terms by the zealous defenders of Zionism.
I found another highly amusing video from GB News on YouTube the other day. It was so amusing I didn’t watch it, but just enjoyed its title. Because it was about the Scots comedian, Leo Kearse, getting terribly ‘frit’ as Thatcher would have said, about the possibility that Jeremy Corbyn might make a bid to be mayor of London.
If only.
This seems to follow a story in the Depress which came up on my internet news page last week, reporting that Corbyn’s supporters were urging him to try to return as party leader or something. It wasn’t clear quite what, but obviously all good, virtuous right-wingers who hate Mayor Sadiq Khan because he’s some horrible anti-White, anti-British leftie Muslim supremacist are also alarmed that Corbyn might try for the job. And evening more frightening, he might just get in.
Kearse himself has appeared on a number of right-wing media and news outlets. He’s been a regular guest on the Lotus Eaters and GB News, where he frequently appears on a spot where they analyse what the papers are saying. Sometimes there’s a point to what he’s saying, such as when he appeared in mock Nazi uniform as a representative of the ‘Love’ party to confront Scots minister Humza Yusuf. Yusuf and the SNP had passed legislation banning hate speech, but the boundaries of the law were set so wide, and the types of individual and groups so numerous, that Kearse and others took it as an assault on free speech. They saw it as totalitarian, and hence Kearse turned up as a Nazi to protest it. He marched around, stating that no-one could possibly object to what he and the ‘Love’ party stood for, because they represented love. Of course, the Love party didn’t exist, and this was a piece of satire directed against Yusuf and the SNP. Whatever you feel about the intention of the act – and I doubt very many decent people really want to tolerate abuse aimed at people simply because of their sex, gender identity, race, religion, sexuality, or disability, I do think he had a point in that legislating against hate speech really does threaten free speech. There’s the question of who defines what hate speech is, and that reasonable discussion and criticism of vital issues is limited and curtailed by well-,meant, but badly framed laws.
He also had a point when he attacked the Scottish university and its students, who had a young student of international law disciplined and attacked because she dared to question whether transwomen were women and stated that sex and gender were defined and based on biology. It might not be a point of view that the pro-trans lobby agrees with, but it is a reasonable one, and in my view, not bigoted, but simply common sense. Her freedom of speech and belief should have been protected, and I think that Kearse was right to defend her and mock the academics and students who tried to make her life a misery.
At other times Kearse is just boorish. He had some kind of debate on GB News with a young, feminist comedian, Smurthwaite. I forgotten what the subject of the debate was, but he peppered whatever he was saying about the topic with gibes about how nobody watches women’s football. It’s almost certainly true that the audience figures for the women’s game are lower than the men’s, but some of that is probably because it’s only within the past decade or so that the women’s game has been a broadcast sport on British television. It really took off in Italy back in the 1980s, when women’s games, according to a Beeb documentary, attracted crowds of 30-40,000. Also, the size of the viewing audience doesn’t actually say anything about the quality of the game itself. When women’s football began being broadcast, Private Eye’s TV critic remarked that the quality of the football was just as good, but with fewer ponytails. Other people have commented that while women don’t have the same physical power as men, they make up for it in being more skilled. Another comment I’ve heard is that they play a better game ’cause there’s less showing off. Having seen some prize examples of this during previous World Cups, I can believe it.
Eventually, Smurthwaite allowed that people weren’t watching women’s football, at which point Kearse cried exultantly, ‘At last, some truth!’ Which isn’t an argument, just boorish needling and sneering.
I’ve got a feeling that Kearse, like the Lotus Eaters and the rest of the lamestream media, including Private Eye, believes that Corbyn really is an anti-Semite and ‘far left’. The truth is ‘no’ on both counts. Corbyn wasn’t and isn’t anti-Semitic, just pro-Palestinian. He also had a proud record of standing up for Britain’s Jewish community and had a sizable number of Jewish supporters in the Labour party. But these were outside British Jewry’s right-wing establishment – the Chief Rabbinate, the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the United Synagogue – who all took it upon themselves to vilify Corbyn as the latest incarnation of Nazi evil. As for being ‘far left’, Corbyn really stands for a return of the post-War consensus: nationalised public utilities, a properly nationalised and funded NHS, strong trade unions and a proper welfare state that gives people what they need to live on, instead of leaving to food banks or choosing between whether they want to eat or heat their homes.
This strikes me as far more frightening to the Tories than Communism or Trotskyism because it’s far more realistic. It gave the British people a rising standard of living for three decades until the election of Maggie Thatcher. And if it returns and shows itself to be popular and successful. it will have shown the Thatcherite experiment to be what it is – a dismal, malign failure.
And that scares the living daylights out of the political, economic and media elite. Hence the desperate scramble to vilify Corbyn in any way possible, and the absolute terror in right-wingers like Kearse that he might return.
And worse, become mayor of England’s capital. Where he actually would do something for the working man or woman, rather than deceive them with lies about Brexit and cutting taxes.
The conspiracy and parapolitics magazine :Lobster has a new website with a different format. But fortunately it’s still publishing very informed news and comments about the covert political machinations that are rarely reported in the mainstream press, and which the mainstream media and the political establishment would quite often very much like to hush up. And one of these pieces of news, as discussed in the ‘News from the Bridge’ column in the magazine’s current issue, is that Lord Levy is once again abroad in the Labour party obtaining Israeli money for the Labour party. This was the situation about a quarter of a century ago after Blair bumped into Levy at a social gathering at the Israeli embassy. Levy arranged for Blair to get funding from the Israelis and Zionist Jewish businessmen in Britain. This allowed the future war criminal to stay independent of the union’s funding and pursue his programme of turning Labour into a centre-right party based on Thatcherism.
Rather more interesting, however, is the article’s remarks about the current state of the Labour party’s finances. These have declined drastically from the heady days when Corbyn was its leader. Then the party had a membership so large it dwarfed the Tories, making it the largest socialist party in Europe. Its finances were correspondingly extremely healthy too, as these members supported the party through their subscriptions. The Blairites’ campaign to purge the party of socialists and critics of Israel has resulted in a catastrophic fall in membership through decent people being smeared and thrown out of the party as anti-Semites, and other, left-wing members simply walking away due to the Blairites and Starmer taking the party sharply to the right. And they’ve made it very clear that they don’t want traditional Labour people as supporters and activists, as they regard them as Commies, Trotskyites and worse. No, they want to make the party safe for nice Thatcherite neoliberals, who will make the right noises about combating racism, prejudice and so on without necessarily doing anything about them.
But it seems that the loss of the party’s members isn’t the only the reason Labour’s finances are in trouble. Apparently, much of its finances is going to pay the lawyers for their role in defending the party from legal action brought about by the purges. This is no doubt one of the reasons that I, and doubtless other remaining Labour party members, get emails and letters from the party every so often begging for donations. I haven’t responded to them for a number of reasons, one of which is that the party wouldn’t be in its dire financial situation if it hadn’t treated its mass membership and supporters with such absolute contempt that they were either driven out or simply resigned because its leadership no longer represented them.
And there’s an additional racial factor in all this. Very many of the people smeared as anti-Semites and purged were Jews. There are statistics arguing that Jews formed the majority. These were decent, self-respecting folk, who were targeted simply because they didn’t toe the line on supporting Israel and its persecution of the Palestinians. This is sectarian anti-Semitism. It came from that section of the Jewish community which fancies itself as British Jewry’s ‘establishment’ – the Board of Deputies of British Jews, the Chief Rabbinate and such rags as the Jewish Chronicle. In fact, as Jewish bloggers and commenters have made very clear, these organisations represent only a declining fraction of the Jewish community. The Board of Deputies really only represents the United Synagogue, whose members also included some of the journos attacking Corbyn in the lamestream media. The I‘s writer, Simon Kellner, was one such, and there were other writers, who appeared in the papers after whom was the note so-and-so ‘is a member of the United Synagogue’. In the fact the Jewish community is as diverse in its members religious and political views as just about everyone else in British society generally. From what I understand, Judaism never has and isn’t a monolithic community and the only people who’ve ever claimed it is are genuine anti-Semites, like the Nazis.
The definition of anti-Semitism the witch-hunters use conflates anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism. But the best definition of anti-Semitism is simply hatred of Jews simply for being Jews, regardless of politics or race. And I’m dam’ sure that the Jews purged as anti-Semites by David Evans and Starmer are very aware and have more knowledge of real anti-Semitism than they’d like. Many of them are the victims of real anti-Semitic abuse and violence, or they lost family members in the Holocaust. I read somewhere, I’ve forgotten where, that half of British Jews had relatives murdered by the Nazis. This makes a mockery of the party’s policy of demanding those suspended for anti-Semitism to attend retraining on it by groups like the Jewish Labour Movement, formerly Paole Zion.
One of the latest victims of the purges is Jonathan Rosenhead, emeritus professor operations at the London School of Economics. Prof. Rosenhead is Jewish, but that hasn’t stopped the apparatchiks of suspending him for anti-Semitism. They’ve also told him that, despite his lifetime of political activism and his ethnicity/ religion, he has to go for compulsory retraining so he can be told how to think about anti-Semitism. I suspect that Prof Rosenhead could probably give the fanatics running the retraining course lessons on anti-Semitism, what it is, how it arises and how it must be fought, rather than have to listen to their nonsense.
The Lobster article, in fact, gives decent people two reasons not to donate to the Labour party. One is that the money from those donations are going the party’s official, sectarian anti-Semitism in smearing and purging Jewish members, as well as decent gentiles. The other is that the donations are going to the lawyers who fought the party’s victims when they tried to seek justice through the courts. People like Mike, for example, who tried to sue them for breach of contract.
As far as I’m concerned, these are reasons enough to want to tell Starmer or whoever where to stick it the next time they send a message appealing for donations.
They are in this financial mess because of their hostility and persecution of decent people, and I object to being asked to collude in this persecution by funding their legal team. If they need to pay their legal expenses, then they should do what their victims have been forced to do. They should pay it out of their own personal finances, rather than expect the very members they despise to do it for them.
We are pleased to be inviting members in the South West to attend anti-semitism awareness training from the Jewish Labour Movement. It will take place over Zoom on Wednesday 6th July at 7pm.
Please email’ ————–‘to register and the meeting link will be sent closer to the date.
Best wishes,
Labour South West’
I should cocoa! The very cheek! Just in case you need reminding, the Jewish Labour Movement was one of the Jewish organisations deeply involved in the witch-hunt against Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters in the Labour party for alleged ‘anti-Semitism’. I put ‘anti-Semitism’ inverted commas because these organisations, including those outside the party like the Chief Rabbinate and the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism were not, in my opinion, genuinely concerned with anti-Semitism in its true and original sense. This is a hatred of Jews, simply for being Jews, regardless of political or religious opinions on their part. I have made this point again and again on this blog, citing some of the 19th century founders and leaders of modern organised anti-Semitism in Wilhelm Marr’s Bund Antisemiten or League of Anti-Semites. The Jewish Labour Movement used to be Paole Zion, Workers of Zion, and was virtually moribund until a decade or so ago when in received an injection of cash from person or persons unknown. The Labour Party has always had Jewish members and the parliamentary party has, or used to have, slightly more than the Tories. There are a number of other Jewish organisations in the Labour party and on the left, such as Jewish Voice for Labour and the Jewish Socialist Group, not to mention Jewdas, with whom Jeremy Corbyn spent a Passover Seder. Corbyn also received strong backing from the Haredi Jews, who believe it is their duty to stay in galut, exile, until they are called back to Israel by the Messiah. In the meantime, they are to cooperate with the peoples in whose lands they reside to build better societies and to ‘pray for the health of the city’ as commanded by the Prophet in the Hebrew Bible. And I’ve no doubt there are many other Jews in the Labour party, who are not party of any Jewish organisation, because, like Dr. Jonathan Miller, they consider themselves Brits, who happen to be Jewish, and don’t want to be part of a minority.
But these Jews and their organisations are not recognised as properly Jewish and are actively opposed and maligned by the Jewish Labour Movement. The JLM’s focus, like the other organisations behind the witch-hunt, is to combat anti-Zionism and silence any criticism of Israel’s barbarous treatment of the Palestinians. And they do this by smearing their enemies as anti-Semites. And very many of their victims are Jews, which make their claims to be tackling anti-Semitism risible.
Mike was told by the Labour party that he would be allowed to remain in it after he was smeared as an anti-Semite if he attended anti-Semitism training by the JLM. Mike’s only crime was to point out that Ken Livingstone was entirely correct when he said that Adolf Hitler initially supported Zionism. He did. It was the Ha’avara Agreement, a shameful pact with the German Zionists to smuggle German Jews into British mandate Palestine. It was done as a way to cleanse Germany of Jews. The pact was short-lived, but it happened. Mike refused, as he is not and has never been and never will be an anti-Semite and attendance would have been taken as a tacit admission of guilt.
Jackie Walker is another of their victims. They secretly recorded her at workshop to discuss the best ways to commemorate the Holocaust. Holocaust Memorial Day not only commemorates the Jewish Holocaust, but also the many other genocides that have disfigured human history. Walker is a Jew by faith and blood. Her father was a Russian Jews, and so she knows from family experience more than most about real anti-Semitic persecution. Her mother was a Black American civil rights activist, and so was deeply concerned about another form of racial persecution against her people. Walker’s crime was to ask what the event would do about commemorating other holocausts, such as those against Black people. Since the great Black activist and scholar W.E.B. DuBois, many Blacks and White sympathisers have regarded the slave trade and slavery as a Black holocaust. Walker asked a decent question. But for some reason this was regarded as ‘anti-Semitic’ and she was smeared and purged.
I think most severely normal Brits are aware of the dangers of anti-Semitism. The documentaries about the Second World War and the Nazis shown on television necessarily include the Nazi persecution of the Jews and the Shoah. There have been a number of award-winning Hollywood films about the Holocaust and the heroes who rescued Jews, like Schindler’s List, which came out in the ’90s. I also remember the outrage and campaigning on the left in the 70s and 80s against the NF and BNP when they were marching about trying to get votes, and similar fears and disgust when the BNP briefly revived and its noxious leader, Nick Griffin, was invited onto Question Time. There are very many excellent books about the Holocaust, and some of the late Clive James’ best TV criticism is from the 70s when Fascist and Nazi scumbags like Oswald Mosley, Albert Speer and Baldur von Schirach were interviewed on British TV. James expertly took apart their lies and false protestations of innocence to reveal the real malignity underneath.
Part of my undergraduate course in history was on the rise of Fascist and Communist regimes in Europe, and I still have the books I bought during then. I’ve also done some reading on Fascism since then, including on its post-War varieties. I’m also interested in conspiracy theories, the most infamous of which are those about some secret Jewish conspiracy which controls both capitalism, socialism and communism to enslave the White race. These theories became prominent again in the ’90s when they were incorporated into the UFO mythology and the right-wing conspiracy theories about the Illuminati, another group who are supposed to be controlling world events, the economy and politics from behind the scenes. David Icke believed that the world is secretly run by Reptoid aliens. He caused alarm and outrage because he used quotations from the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a Tsarist anti-Semitic forgery, to support his crank ideas. Icke isn’t an anti-Semite, and genuinely seemed to believe that the world was run by extraterrestrials rather than Jews. Other UFO researchers, like the late Bill English, did the same, though when they cited the Protocols they claimed they should be read as talking about the Illuminati, rather than the Jews. Nevertheless these quotations were in danger of making the Protocols seem respectable to the point where a branch of Waterstones in one of the northern towns stocked them.
I totally accept that respectable scholars and lay people have to be very careful when it comes to some of the material on topics like the Nazis and Holocaust. Real anti-Semites and Nazis try to disguise their awful views and attempts to deny or minimise the Holocaust by setting up respectable-sounding magazines. Often they use coded language. For example, a very respectable folklorist wrote a piece in one of the urban folklore magazines back in the ’90s to tell how he’d been taken in by such tactics and to warn other to be on the guard. He had been researching tales of atrocities committed by the Germans during the First World War. He came to the conclusion that one of these, the story that the Kaiser’s troops had crucified a Canadian soldier, was bogus and may have been just allied propaganda. He was then approached by a history magazine with a respectable-sounding title, who asked him if they could reprint his article. He innocently agreed, only to find out later it was a Nazi rag. Its editors were using stories of allied propaganda to suggest that the Holocaust was also nothing but fiction. But as an American judge has ruled, the Holocaust is so well documented that its existence cannot be sanely denied. The scholar was shocked and disgusted, and so wrote the article to let others know about the deception and to be on their guard about similar tactics and approaches.
As for coded language, the believers in a world-wide conspiracy to enslave humanity talk about the globalists, the Illuminati, or the global elite. Sometimes this is innocent of anti-Semitism, and they really are talking about a secretive group of leading politicos, capitalists and so on, which isn’t some Jewish conspiracy. But sometimes it isn’t, and is code for ‘Jews’. I’ve also noticed that while Simon Webb of History Debunked isn’t an anti-Semite or anti-Zionist by any stretch of the imagination, some of his commenters do seem to be. There’s a lot of talk by them about the Great Replacement, the idea that the Jews are trying to destroy the White race with non-White immigrate. There’s also comments about ‘small hatted people’, or ‘people with small hats’, which sounds very much like its about the Jews, referring to the kippa skullcaps many observant Jews wear.
Sometimes you really do need to be careful and be informed so you’re not taken in by such language and deceit. But the Jewish Labour Movement won’t help you.
They’re concerned to discredit criticism of Israel using literary criticism and citing entirely bogus conspiracy theories about the Jews from the past. Remember when Shai Masot was caught plotting with a senior British civil servant to decide who should or shouldn’t be in the cabinet? This could rightly be called a conspiracy. But if you called it that, or described the two as plotting, you were the using an anti-Semitic trope because of all the genuinely stupid, poisonous and entirely mythical anti-Semitic conspiracy theories in the past. The same if you report the atrocities committed by the Israeli state and IDF against Palestinians, especially if they can get in a reference to the Blood Libel, that Jews sacrificed Christian children to use their blood in the matzoh bread at Passover. This vile medieval smear has been responsible for numerous anti-Semitic pogroms. However, the Israeli state now is manipulating its memory to close down reasonable criticism. When the IDF shot a Palestinian woman a few years ago, one of the respectable newspaper cartoonists produced picture of her burning in the fireplace while Netanyahu, the-then president of Israel, hobnobbed with the US president. This was promptly denounced by the Israelis as anti-Semitic, because the fire recalled the gas ovens of the Holocaust. Similarly, when Gerald Scarfe drew a cartoon of the Israelis building their wretched wall to keep the Palestinians out using Arab blood, the Israelis again demanded a retraction and an apology because the blood supposedly referred to the infamous Blood Libel. And so another piece of entirely reasoned, reasonable and absolutely not anti-Semitic criticism and comment was again silenced. And this is what the Jewish Labour Movement also does in its events about anti-Semitism. They have nothing to do with making people genuinely aware of the threat of anti-Semitism and the way it is coded. They are all about discrediting justifiable criticism of Israel through using literary devices to make them apparently connected to past anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and innuendo.
I have absolutely no intention of going to this monstrous charade. If I want information and guidance on genuine anti-Semitism, I’d try to consult the JLM’s Jewish victims – Tony Greenstein, Jackie Walker, Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi, Martin Odoni and others, self-respecting decent people, who have been smeared by the anti-Semitism witch-hunters as self-hating. Even though these people are Jewish and have fought against anti-Semitism and other forms of racism. Or I would contact Marc Wadsworth, the Black anti-racism activist. He was smeared as an anti-Semite, again using literary tropes, because he caught a Jewish Labour MP passing on a party brochure to a Torygraph hack. Oh, it was the trope of the disloyal Jew, they claimed. This was despite the fact that Wadsworth didn’t know the politico was Jewish, and had in the 1980s worked with the Board of Deputies about passing legislation to protect Jews against genuine anti-Semitic violence by the NF or BNP. Or I’d go to someone like Mike, who can tell fact from fiction, well-researches his stories and who was asked by a Jewish friend at College to be one of the readers in her performance commemorating the Holocaust’s victims.
All of the above have a far better understanding of anti-Semitism, or a more honest one than the Jewish Labour Movement and its highly ideological, distorted view of what counts as Jew hatred.
I’ve said it before: Judaism is a religion. The Jews are a people. Zionism is an ideology. Israel is a state. Judaism and its people are not synonymous with the modern state of Israel. Under a free society, all ideologies should be able to be examined and criticised, including Zionism. States can and do commit horrible atrocities, for which they should criticised. Israel should not be an exception merely because its people are Jews. Only hatred of Jews, simply for being Jews, should count as anti-Semitism.
Fight racism! Fight anti-Semitism! And don’t be taken in by bogus propaganda like that of the Jewish Labour Movement.
There’s a fascinating video on YouTube of the performance by Jewish radical musicians Daniel Kahn and Psoy Korolenko of the Bundist song ‘In Zaltsikn Yam’. It was sent over the internet to the Melbourne Bund as part of the 120th anniversary celebrations of the foundation of the Bund, the mass Russian and Polish Jewish socialist party in 1897. Korolenko sings it in three languages, Yiddish, English and Russian. It’s militantly socialist and stridently attacks the rich and Zionism in no uncertain terms.
It begins with the tears of the Jews running into the sea, but the tears of the rich are clear, while those of the poor are bloody. It also sings about Jews and gentiles marching together are comrades in their shared homelands. As for Zionism, it says that the call for Jews to return to Israel is what they’ve heard from the priests. It’s just putting Jews back into another ghetto. The Zionists are concerned with the Jewish people’s fathers in their grave, but have no concerns for the present generation. But there’s a new messiah – the working man, who will transform the world.
It’s a great song which makes the Bund’s anti-Zionism very clear, preformed by too excellent musicians. It also adds further weight to the amount of historical scholarship showing that it was the secular Bund that represented the majority Jewish opinion in Poland and eastern Europe before the Second World War, and not Zionism. That said, I have issues with it that prevent me from putting the video up on this blog. I’m an Anglican Christian, but I found the rejection of the Jewish hope for the Messiah actually shocking and blasphemous. And if it shocks a gentile like me, I wonder how offensive it must be to religious Jews. I also realise that many religious Jews, even some Israelis, are critical of Israel or just disgusted at its treatment of the Palestinians. I’ve blogged before now of Haredi and other very Orthodox Jews, who believe their religious duty is remain in the countries to which Jews have been scattered, until Israel is redeemed by the Messiah. I understand from one of the Jewish anti-Zionist bloggers that one former Chief Rabbi held that view. When he was asked whether the redemption of Israel then would have the same result in the removal of the Palestinians, he replied that under the Messiah it would be done peacefully through negotiation. There are Israeli human rights groups like B’Tselem that are under attack from the right-wing Israeli establishment because they criticise their country for its ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. I also remember the way Israeli nationalists attacked and vilified a group of liberal Israelis because they said the kadish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, over a dying Palestinian who’d been shot by the IDF. The song interests me as a historical artefact and as part of an alternative tradition of Jewish radicalism that still holds a place in current Jewish society.
But I don’t feel I can put it up on this blog because I genuinely don’t want to offend anyone’s religious beliefs.
My issue is with the Israel lobby and Israel’s ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians, and with the way Zionist groups are trying to rewrite history so that only they appear as the true champions and expression of Jewish political aspirations, and definitely not with Jews or Judaism.
If you want to see the video for yourself, it’s on the Bund Melbourne channel on YouTube, and has the Yiddish title of ‘In Zaltsikn Yam – Bund 120 Yoyvl 2017’.
I’ve been drawing cartoons recently to express my views and anger over certain events, like Keir Starmer’s destruction of the Labour party in order to make it another Tory party. In this cartoon below I attack former Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks and the current Chief Rabbi, Efraim Mirvis, for leading parties of British Jews in the annual ‘March of the Flags’. This is the occasion where flag-waving ultra-patriotic Israeli boot boys goose step through the Muslim quarter of east Jerusalem. It’s all done to intimidate the Muslim, Palestinian population. Tony Greenstein has put up on his blog film of the vandalism and deliberate intimidation the marchers commit, as well as descriptions of the marches from the other side, the Palestinians. They state that as children they are told by their parents to get off the streets in case the marchers pick on them. Liberal Jews in this country implored the rabbis not to go, but they ignored them.
Jonathan Sacks is the face on the left, though I’m afraid the way I’ve drawn him he looks more like the late Gerry Adams. Adams, however, in my opinion is the much better man, as with Ian Paisley he was instrumental in brokering the peace deal in Northern Ireland. Sacks also caused outrage a few years ago when he declared that Reform Jews were ‘enemies of the faith’. It’s the genocidal language used by religious bigots to justify the massacre of their enemies, from medieval Christians murdering Jews and heretics to the wars and sectarian violence between Roman Catholics and Protestants. The face to Sacks’ right is Efraim Mirvis. It was after I drew this that it struck me he looks a bit like one of the Hairy Bikers. Again, I’ve got more respect for them. Unlike Mirvis they have never justified anyone’s persecution or ethnic cleansing. Far from it. They travel around talking to everyone in the quest to show people how to cook great food. Sacks and Mirvis participated in the March of the Flags on separate occasions, but for the purposes of the cartoon I’ve put them together. The face at the top of the page is of the leader of the British Union of Fascists, Oswald Mosley. The figures in black at the top right are him and the other fascists in their uniform as they appeared when they marched through Cable Street. It’s based on a contemporary photograph. It’s because Mosley and his thugs marched through the Jewish areas of the East End in order to intimidate Jews, just as the people on the March of the Flags do so through Muslim Jerusalem in order to intimidate the people there. The same reason the Loyal Orange Order marches through Roman Catholic, nationalist areas in Northern Ireland. And the graffiti reading ‘Gas the Arabs’ is based on a real piece of graffiti, which shows how close some Israeli bigots are to real Nazism.
The march is the action of Fascist thugs, and no man of God, of whatever religion, should take part in such marches.
I found this video from Middle East Eye on YouTube of the demonstration in London sometime this week against Israel’s attacks on the Palestinians. The protest was held outside Downing Street, and the video features comments from a woman from the Muslim Association of Britain, Jeremy Corbyn and a gent from the Stop the War Coalition. The Muslim woman points to how large the demonstration is and how it shows people are getting increasingly angry. Corbyn says that the US and Britain are close to Israel, and so must urge it to it stop. He adds that there are very many people and organisations in Israel who also believe it is wrong. And the gent from the Stop the War Coalition states that Britain is complicit in Israel’s attacks through our connections with them.
They are not wrong. Earlier this evening I watched a bit of an on-line left Labour party rally by the Socialist Group of MPs. Hosted by Bell Ribeiro-Addy, this Virtual rally included such great MPs as Jeremy Corbyn, Diane Abbott, and Rebecca Long Bailey. Zara Sultana gave a superb speech condemning the Israeli attacks, as did John McDonnell. He also called for the whip to be restored to Jeremy Corbyn and for Corbyn’s supporters to be readmitted to the party. Absolutely! One or the other of those two great MPs also said that one of the reasons the Israeli police fired on the protesters in the al-Aqsa Mosque was to clear the way for a march by Israeli extreme right-wingers. This was the annual ‘March of the Flags’, when Israeli far right bovver boys march through Muslim east Jerusalem vandalising Palestinian property and threatening the local people. Former Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks and the current Chief Rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis, have both gone on it. Sacks even led a party of British Jews against the request not to from a British liberal Jewish organisation. That’s right, Sacks and Mirvis were rubbing shoulders there with the Israeli equivalent of the BNP. And these were the men, who accused Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters of being anti-Semites when they were and are definitely no such thing.
I don’t support Palestinian terrorism, but the Israeli attacks and massacres of innocent people and the theft of their homes and land must stop. Now.
I’m not surprised that the Blairites in the Labour party had Tony Greenstein thrown out as an anti-Semite in their vile witch-hunt, and the Zionist Jewish establishment hates him with a passion. He’s that most dangerous creature, you see, a self-respecting, passionately socialist and anti-racist Jew, who loathes Zionism as a Jewish form of Fascism. And with a wealth of documented fact at his fingertips, he is more than able to cut through the hasbara – the official Jewish propaganda – and prove it. His articles, frequently reprinting and commenting on stories of persecution and atrocity reported in the Jewish press, convict Zionism as an ideology and the Israeli military and political establishment again and again of crimes against humanity.
He is, like the mighty Jackie Walker, Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi and Ilan Pappe, the ‘wrong kind of Jew’, who must be silenced and persecuted at all costs. Just like the western mainstream media really doesn’t want you to hear such dissident Jewish voices, whether from liberals and the left, or from the extremely traditional. The latter include the ultra-Orthodox Hasidic Jews, who reject modern Israel out of their belief, rooted in the Talmud and the Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible, that Israel can only be restored and her people redeemed by divine action through the Mashiach, the Messiah. This was also the view of some members of Britain’s Jewish establishment. He has quoted a former Chief Rabbi, who also rejected the Israeli state for the same reason. This reverend gentleman believed that not only should and would Israel be redeemed in this way by the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, but the removal of the Palestinians from the newly restored nation would be done through peaceful negotiation and agreement. Israel has done neither. He has also quoted other prominent figures from Britain’s Jewish community, who hated Zionism as a Jewish version of the anti-Semitism they had so staunchly fought against in gentiles. Zionism seemed to these men to be a concession to the prejudiced view that there were profound racial difference between Jew and gentile and the two could never mix. Thus, according to the anti-Semites, they should be kept apart. The ultimate development of this idea was that Jews should be given their own state, to which diaspora Jews should be encouraged or forced to emigrate.
In his latest piece, posted on Saturday, Tony posts and comments on an article by Gavin Lewis, a mixed-race Black British writer, who chillingly describes Israel’s racist persecution of Black Jews in an article published in America’s Monthly Review Online on December 4th, 2020. Lewis discusses Israel’s refusal to allowance entry to a Black American Jewish mother, Idit Malka and her son, when they tried to visit the country. They were detained for 10 hours before being deported. Before her departure, an Israeli woman screamed at her that Israel was no country for ‘Cushim’, an Israeli term of abuse for Blacks. In 2013, Haaretz and The Times of Israel reported that over 130,000 Black Jews had been forcibly sterilised by the Israeli authorities, a policy that evokes Nazi eugenics. YTNews in 2009 reported that some Israeli neighbourhoods, such as Ashkelon, who maintained a Whites only police. The Daily Beast also reported in 2017 that Israeli kindergartens also had a policy of segregation, separating White and Black toddlers. The Israeli state has also rejected blood donations from Blacks as ‘unclean’. The San Francisco Bay View National Black Newspaper also reported in 2016 that racial discrimination against Blacks in Israel was so appalling, that 300 Black Jews had declared their intention not to report for reserve service because of official racism against Ethiopian Jews.
The article also discusses the theft of babies born to Yemeni parents, who were sold to Ashkenazi Jewish parents, because of the racist belief that Yemeni Jewish culture was so inferior that it was an unsuitable environment for raising Jewish children. Just as shocking was that many of these innocents had been given an experimental treatment. The hearts of some of the dead babies were surgically removed for study by American doctors curious about the absence of heart disease in Yemen. He also talks about the massive racial hatred against Palestinians and Arabs, including the incident where two Chechen players were hounded out of Beitar Jerusalem football club.
Lewis states unequivocally that Israel is an apartheid state, as Desmond Tutu and former President Jimmy Carter has said, but the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism has ruled that it is anti-Semitic to compare it to Nazism, even though this is clearly warranted by some of its policies. He also describes how Israeli racism is routinely covered up by western politicians. In Britain, Labour’s odious leader, Keir Starmer, sacked Rebecca Long-Bailey from his team after she correctly pointed out that the choke-hold that killed George Floyd had been taught to the police by the Israelis. His action may not be un-adjacent to the fact that Starmer had received a £62,000 donation from a pro-Israeli lobbyist.
The second-class status of Black Britons is also shown in the differences in treatment between them and members of Britain’s gay community regarding visits to potentially hostile countries and regions. In 2016 the British government and media warned gay, bi and trans people not to visit North Carolina. But neither Starmer nor the rest of the political and media class have taken it upon themselves to warn Black Brits of the dangers of visiting the parts of Israel that are off the tourist itineraries.
Over the other side of the pond, America’s politicos and media have thrown their weight behind Israel. CNN even sacked one of their reporters, a Black American, Dr. Marc Lamont Hill, because he publicly sided with the Palestinians. Although he was an American, Hill was considered inferior to the interests of Israel, a foreign country, because of his colour.
In his afterword, Lewis compares contemporary Israel to the White settler societies of the US, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Rhodesia, and their respective systems of apartheid, segregation and/ or official policies of limiting or banning non-White immigration. He concludes
Yet, in twenty-first-century, in the form of Israel, Black and Indigenous peoples of the world are expected to put up with variants of these traditional white-settler offenses. And, alarmingly, even parts of the left are threatened into exempting Zionism from the sort of critique and anticolonial resistance leveled against other white-settler societies.
Tony’s introduction to the piece is also worth reading, as he argues that it is a mistake to see Israeli racism purely in terms of White supremacy. It’s a Jewish supremacist state, in which only Jews can be citizens and enjoy full civil rights. He also describes how the Mizrahi Jews, who were Arabic in culture and language, were so maltreated that the once formed a Black Panthers organisation of their own in solidarity with the Black American group. Since then, the Mizrahim have become even more fanatically anti-Arab than the Ashkenazim who founded Israel, who then supported Menachim Begin. At the same time Ethiopian Jews in Israeli have no sympathy for the Palestinians, but wish instead to have racial equality with White Jews of European, or White American descent. Nevertheless, colour prejudice is a major factor. Yemeni Jews were tested to see if they had ‘Negro’ blood, and a group of Ugandan Jews were refused Jewish citizenship because of their colour.
This is horrific stuff, and it’s an indictment of mainstream western politicos and the media that this is not reported and condemned over here. Or if it is, it’s done very half-heartedly. The theft and infanticide of the Yemeni babies is comparable to the Nazi theft of blonde children from Slav parents, such as the Poles, to be brought up by approved, ‘Aryan’, German parents. The Nazis considered these children to be the product of German bloodline amongst conquered, ‘subhuman’ Slavs.
It also bears a horrible similarity to one of the crimes of the Magdalen Laundries in Ireland. These were homes run by the Roman Catholic church for unmarried mothers. These unfortunate women had their babies removed to be sold for adoption to rich Americans while their mothers were forced to work as laundrywomen. But only strong, bonny babies had this good fortune. The weak were left to perish in ‘dying rooms’. Incidentally, when a leading member of the Irish feminist organisation, The Countess Didn’t Fight For This, revealed this during a discussion with Graham Linehan and his conversationalists, Helen Staniland and Arty Morty it reduced the latter to tears. Linehan and his allies have been terribly reviled for their opposition to the transgender craze and accused of transphobia. I believe this to be profoundly wrong – they are moved instead by the great harm transgender ideology is doing to the vulnerable, especially girls and young women. But like Posie Parker, they certainly do not wish to see transpeople themselves assaulted or murdered. Morty is a gay Canadian, deeply immersed in his community. His unostentatious tears over the deaths of children left to die in Eire to me amply demonstrate that he, Linehan and Staniland very definitely do not wish harm on anyone. If the Nazi-like experimentation and mass deaths of the Yemeni children had been performed by a gentile organisation, like the Roman Catholic Church, it would eventually have been exposed across the world. There has been a film about one woman’s experiences of it, Philomena, which I believe stars Steve Coogan as the British reporter who uncovers the heroine and her story. It’s a testament to the institutional power of the Roman Catholic church in Eira that this horrific policy continued until the ’90s. But it was eventually exposed, along with the systematic abuse of children in the Roman Catholic and other churches, including my own, the Anglican Church, across the world. Would the media and politicians have allowed the story to get out if it were instead an Israeli organisation preying on Jews? I somehow doubt it.
Tony’s and Lewis’ articles amply demonstrate that Israel is a profoundly racist state. But anyone who tells the truth about this in the lamestream media or politics over here will be viciously attacked and hounded on the grounds that they are ‘anti-Semitic’. Even if they are decent, self-respecting men and women, who had suffered anti-Semitic abuse and assault themselves, or, if gentiles, because they dared support Jews, Blacks and Asians to live in peace, equality and dignity.
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