Lobster have also published a very interesting review by John Newsinger, a historian at one of Bath’s universities, of the latest work by American right-winger David Rubin, ‘Confronting Radicals: What America Can Learn from Israel’. Rubin has published a number of works claiming that America and the West are under threat from Islam and the left. Rubin’s Jewish, but his books are aimed at the Christian right, arguing that America can only be saved if it returns to Biblical, Judaeo-Christian values and securely allies itself with Israel against Islam. Although Rubin’s Jewish, his books are addressed to right-wing Christians because American Jews overwhelmingly vote Democrat and despite the alliance between the right and Israel. Newsinger begins his review by discussing Rubin’s book, The Islamic Tsunami: Israel and America in the Age of Obama, which came with an endorsement from David Horovitz and notorious right-wing Christian preacher, Pat Robertson. It’s an all-out, shockingly vitriolic attack on Islam, which among other things, compares Mohammed to Hitler. But what I found really shocking is his recommendations for dealing with Islam in America. He wants an end to Islamic immigration, bans on certain forms of Islamic observance and limiting the size of Muslim families. Oh yes, and he wants an end to hate speech legislation. Newsinger writes
Rubin puts forward a plan for how to defeat this attempted Muslim takeover. Among his recommendations are an immediate ban on all Muslim immigration into the United States; encouraging Muslims already in the country to use birth control and to limit the size of their families; banning the call to prayer and Muslim dress; and the expulsion of ‘actively hostile Muslims’, a category that includes all those Muslims who do not embrace ‘Judeo-Christian’ values. He makes clear earlier in the book that he does not really believe that it is possible for any Muslim to become a genuine American. It is also vital to oppose hate speech legislation ‘which in practice will be used as a big brother technique to curtail the free speech of those who dare to speak out against Islamic ideology’. More generally, it is necessary to assert the values of ‘Judeo-Christian civilization’ throughout the education and legal systems, and a return to ultra-patriotism ‘based on the American biblical tradition and the religious values promoted by the Founding Fathers’. The maintenance of a close partnership with Israel is also obviously essential. He even considers whether or not it would be a good thing if the United States actually took over Syria and Iran. Would, he asks, ‘a little old-fashioned American “colonialism” [ . . . .] be so terrible’? The answer is, of course, yes.
This is terrifying stuff. Now I think he has point about hate speech legislation. It is being used to stop reasonable debate about race and immigration as well about the trans ideology and whether transwomen should be allowed into women’s spaces. And I think there are real problems within British and western Islam. There does seem to be a section of the Islamic community in Britain which has active hostility towards Christianity, Judaism and the secular values of the west, and which does regard western, non-Muslim women with contempt because of the sexual freedom they enjoy. But clearly, this does not mean all western Muslims. As for the restrictions he wishes to place on Islam in the west, this resembles the legislation passed by the Spanish crown during the Reconquista which finally culminated in the expulsion of the Moors by Ferdinand and Isabella. It also brought to mind some of the restrictions placed on Jews in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. I think they were also subject to restrictions on marrying and having families. And obviously, there’s the shadow of the race laws the Nazis introduced against the Jews before the Introduction of the Holocaust.
It’s also worth quoting Newsinger’s comments on the way American Jews reject views like Rubin’s, and the reasons behind Rubin’s venomous denunciation of Barack Obama. Rubin seems to see the former president as some kind of closet Muslim or ally backing the nefarious schemes of Islam and the Left to bring down America:
Two points need to be made here. First, The Islamic Tsunami was not n any way targeted at American Jews. Its audience was the US Christian Right, i.e. white evangelical Christians. The overwhelming majority of American Jews actually voted for Obama, both in 2008 and in 2012. He got 78% of the Jewish vote in 2008 and 69% in 2012. Moreover, Hillary Clinton got 71% of the Jewish vote when she ran against Donald Trump in Indeed throughout Trump’s Presidency, of all religious groups, it was American Jews who gave Trump his lowest approval rating, and in 2020 they voted overwhelmingly for Joe Biden. The great majority of American Jews are Democrat in sympathy and completely reject the Israeli alliance with the Republican and Christian Right. And as for Obama being hostile to Israel, it is worth noting that his administration provided more military aid to Israel than any previous administration, and in 2016 ‘concluded a new ten-year agreement providing a total of $38 billion in military aid to Israel, which the White House described as “the largest single pledge of military assistance in U.S. history”’. Rubin’s quite outrageous assault on Obama was not motivated by his supposed hostility to Israel, but by his refusal to endorse the expansionist agenda pursued by Benjamin Netanyahu and the Zionist Right.
This bears out what has been said elsewhere that American Jews are turning away from Zionism, or at least the ultra-Zionism of Benjamin Netanyahu and his fellows. The largest Zionist organisation in America in terms of membership is Ted Hagee’s Christians United for Israel. It also sheds more light on the way the anti-Semitism witch-hunters specifically target Jews and Jewish critics of Israel.
Views like Rubin’s, with his endorsement of Islamophobic politicians like Gert Wilders are frightening. At the moment they’re fringe, but there is the possibility that if the ultra-Zionists gain strength, they will take America and the west down the route of real, jackbooted Fascism in their determination to stamp out the radical left and Islam.
Here’s another bit of art I’ve made. This time it’s a cartoon lambasting the current purging of left-wingers in the Labour party, and particularly those critical of Israel, all under the pretence that it’s about combating anti-Semitism. It isn’t. It’s Starmer, Evans and the Blairite right trying to silence and expel anyone who stand up from real socialism and decries the Israeli state’s persecution of the Palestinians. And there’s more than a bit of anti-Semitism in it. Jewish Voice for Labour only the other day submitted a report to the Forde Inquiry and the Equalities of Human Rights Commission pointing out that four-fifths of those purged have been Jewish, and Jews are more than 300 times more like than gentiles to be smeared as anti-Semites and purged.
I realise that there’s no better way to flatten a joke than to explain it, but to make sure there are no misunderstandings, this is what it all stands for. This is my particular view of what is going on, and in my opinion what is going on is comparable to a medieval inquisition by the Blairites on behalf of the Israeli state. The figures in Klan robes represent just such bigoted, inquisitorial justice. I chose their robes rather than the real costume of the Holy Office or Spanish Inquisition because they are more recognisable but have the same religious overtones in my view. David Evans, who is charge of this perverted kangaroo court justice, also wears them. This is because I regard him as chief inquisitor. I am not saying that he is personally anti-Semitic, although the witch hunt over which he presides certainly is. In my opinion, that is.
The figures at the bottom are supposed to be Jackie Walker, Tony Greenstein and Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi, who represents Jewish Voice for Labour. They are all Jewish. Walker and Greenstein have been purged as part of this witch-hunt. I think Wimborne-Idrissi is still a member, but she and her organisation of real Jews have suffered the same accusations of anti-Semitism. Grotty individuals like Neil Coyle have tweeted demanding JVL’s expulsion along with other ‘commies’. And before anyone claims that it’s anti-Semitic because it attacks Zionism, Zionism has never been solely a Jewish movement. It arose in the 19th century among Christians, who wanted the Jews to return to Palestine in order to hasten Christ’s return. It has also been popular amongst real anti-Semites, like the composer Richard Wagner. Wagner had Jewish friends, but he wanted the Jews to move back to Palestine so Germany would be rid of them. See Karl Dietrich Bracher, The GermanDictatorship. And as I’ve said very many times, in terms of membership the biggest Zionist organisation in America is Pastor Ted Hagee’s Christians United for Israel. I’d also like to point out that I do respect the opinion of left-wing Zionists, who believe in Israel but want humane treatment for the Palestinians. I should really have called it ‘the ultra-Zionist inquisition’, but this is too much of a mouthful.
And finally, the caption is, of course, a parody of the famous Monty Python sketch. Unfortunately the inquisition in the Labour party isn’t offering anybody comfy chairs Except, of course, for the backsides of those in charge of this corrupt, compromised ‘justice’.
On Thursday I submitted my defence against the utterly false accusations of anti-Semitism levelled against to the Labour party. Although the complaints procedure is severely flawed, perhaps deliberately so in order to secure convictions of guilt more easily, I felt I had no choice. I had seven days to respond and they were determined to go ahead with the charges even if they didn’t have a response from me. In my defence I not only refute the anti-Semitism charges, but I also voice my criticisms of the entire complaints and disciplinary procedure. I also include a biographical statement making it clear that by upbringing and education I am not an anti-Semite. Here is my defence. Be warned: It is long.
Antisemitism Accusations: Refutation
I have never been an anti-Semite, and, given the horrors perpetrated against the Jewish people, especially the Holocaust, find this form of racism particularly abhorrent. I therefore find these accusations to be nothing short of vile calumny.
The Accusations: Baseless and Insubstantial
I have looked at the accusations and the evidence that have been levelled against me, and find them to be so baseless, contrived and ahistorical that they are actually both personally insulting and an attack on real scholarship by people who I can only surmise are sectarian political propagandists. As you will be aware, I am an historian and archaeologist with a doctorate in the latter subject. I consider historical truth extremely important and have nothing but absolute contempt for those who wish to falsify or deny history. And I am afraid this is precisely what my accusers have done. Let’s go through the accusations.
David Sivier (the Respondent) has engaged in conduct prejudicial and / or grossly detrimental to the Party in breach of Chapter 2, Clause I.8 of the Labour Party Rule Book by engaging in conduct which:
may reasonably be seen to demonstrate hostility or prejudice based on religion or belief ;
Engages in stereotypical allegations of Jewish control in the media, economy, government or other societal institutions;
Repeats stereotypical and negative physical descriptions/descriptions or character traits of Jewish people, such as references to wealth or avarice and equating Jews with capitalists or the ruling class;
i.1 Shows David Sivier posted the following quotes on this blog on December 5, 2020 at 9:19 pm;
“I’m not surprised that the Blairites and ultra-Zionist fanatics wanted to purge Tony Greenstein from the Labour party, as they have done with so many other entirely decent people.”
“Or rather more narrowly, support for the current viciously racist Israeli administration” ” believe that the Palestinians should be treated decently and with dignity, have also suffered anti-Semitic vilification and abuse if they dare to protest against Netanyahu’s government.”
” far from being a pro-Jewish stance, Zionism in the 19th and early 20th centuries was associated with anti-Semitism.”
“he had previously not come forward to add his support because he didn’t want people to think that he was a Jew-hater.” “These quotes clearly show that the criticisms of Israel and the Zionist movement by people like Tony Greenstein and the others are historically justified,”
I should begin by stating that I find this a very poorly constructed document. It seems that you have a list of accusations, which you have decided must be applied to all cases such as mine involving accusations of prejudice, regardless of their individual applicability. Furthermore, you provide no supporting argument for these accusations. You simply reproduce the prohibitions from the party handbook, the blog post which appears to offend you and a list of quotes. Some of these, which you seem to find anti-Semitic, are anything but. For example, with the above quote
“My own preferred view is that anti-Semitism is simply hatred of Jews as Jews, and that no state or ideology should be beyond debate and criticism. This includes Israel and Zionism,”
Your objections themselves, if I am reading you correctly, show considerable prejudice.
It was Wilhelm Marr who defined anti-Semitism as hatred of Jews as Jews, regardless of religion or ideology. Marr was the founder of the German League of Anti-Semites. Are you telling me that the definition of anti-Semitism, used by the anti-Semites themselves, is somehow anti-Semitic? If so, you are depriving historians of the means to judge and understand the actions and motives of real anti-Semites, people responsible for the most horrendous crimes.
Are you stating that there are certain states and ideologies that are beyond criticism? Does this attitude apply to highly repressive regimes such as North Korea, the Islamic State and the Taliban’s seizure of Afghanistan? Does this principle mean that I may not criticise other, viciously racist, murderous regimes like Nazi Germany or Stalin’s Russia? Or, come to think of it, Idi Amin’s Uganda and Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe or even apartheid South Africa. By adopting this attitude, you appear to be siding with monstrously oppressive regimes rather than the grand, democratic socialist tradition of universalism and human rights.
You seem to believe that Israel and Zionism should be exempt from debate and criticism. But where a state violates human rights and engages in systematic persecution, it should be criticised, as should the underlying ideology. The IHRA definition of anti-Semitism, which has been foisted on the party, only says that criticism of Israel may be considered anti-Semitic, if similar criticisms are not applied to other countries. But I do apply them to other countries on my blog. You just have selected a single blog post, and decided that it is representative a general attitude of particular hostility to Israel because of the religion of its founders and government. This is not the case.
The accusers seem to mistakenly conflate anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism and opposition to or criticism of the state of Israel. But as I have said above, Wilhelm Marr, the founder of the League of Anti-Semites, viewed anti-Semitism as hatred of Jews as Jews, regardless of religion or ideology. Georg von Schoenerer, an Austrian nationalist, stated ‘Religion is only a mask- the foulness is in the blood’. See Peter Vansittart, Voices 1870-1914 (London: Jonathan Cape 1984) XV. Also ‘Anti-Semitism’ in Taylor, James, and Shaw, Warren, A Dictionary of the Third Reich (London: Grafton Books 1988) 37, ‘Der Politischen Antisemitismus’ in Ritter, G.A., Das Deutsche Kaisserreich 1871-1914: Ein Historisches Lesebuch (Goettingen: Vandenoeck & Ruprecht1981)131.. This excludes Zionism. Judge Sedley has also expressed and promoted a similar definition of anti-Semitism as a particular attitude towards Jews as Jews. The racial basis of anti-Semitism was also demonstrated by the Nazis in their persecution of the Jews. Talmudic Jews were persecuted and sent to the death camps because of their race, not their religion. The Karaites were allowed to go unmolested because they are held by some to be descended from gentile converts to Judaism, such as the Khazars.
Zionism cannot be equated with Judaism. Zionism is an ideology, not a religion. Nor can it be viewed as uniquely Jewish phenomenon. The first individuals to argue for the resettlement of Jews in Palestine were fundamentalist Christians. This has continued, to that the largest Zionist organisation in America today is Pastor Ted Hagee’s ‘Christians United for Israel’. And anti-Semites have also supported Zionism. Witness the scheme of anti-Semites around the time of the Second World War to depart Jews to Madagascar, for example. See ‘Madagascar’ in Taylor and Shaw, ibid, 225. Or the brief agreement Adolf Hitler signed with the Zionists, the Ha’avara Agreement, to support German Jewish emigration to the nascent Jewish colonies.
I have also taken care not to smear all Zionists. You will note that I refer to ‘ultra-Zionist fanatics’. While I condemn utterly and absolutely the Israeli state’s persecution of the Palestinians, I have every respect for those Israelis, who are working for a genuine and just peace between Israel and the Palestinians. My objections are not to the Israeli people, but to their right-wing politicians and military. I respect left-wing Zionists, such as those Israelis who received vile personal abuse for praying the kaddish over dying Palestinian civilians, who had been shot by the IDF.
I also consider Tony Greenstein and the other victims of the witch hunt to be decent people, and do not find anything anti-Semitic in my declaration of support for them or the views and actions of these people themselves. I have seen absolutely nothing to suggest Mr Greenstein has ever been a self-hating anti-Semite. He has rightly shown great pride in the way the anti-Fascists from his home town of Brighton and Hove gave Oswald Mosley and the BUF a damn good hiding when they tried to recruit there. He has also written with pride about the group of former Jewish servicemen, including the hairdresser, Vidal Sassoon, who took the fight against the Fascists to the streets after the War when groups like Mosley’s BUF and the Britons, and others sought to come back. I have also made it very clear that I particularly condemn the victimisation of Jews in this current witch hunt, Many of these, have personally experienced anti-Semitic abuse and assault. I am very much aware that very many Jewish Brits have lost relatives in the Holocaust. Indeed, I personally know Jewish people who have. Which is why I regard the way Jews have been singled out for what I consider to be baseless smears to be especially vile and abhorrent.
And there is abundant and undeniable evidence that Israel is a racist state. It practices apartheid between Jews and Arabs. Intermarriage between the two is discouraged, there are separate roads for Jews and Palestinians, Palestinian farmers and businesses suffer strangling regulations which do not apply to Israelis and their homes, which have been there for millennia, have been and are being demolished to make way for Jewish settlements. This is established fact. Am I to assume that my accusers have decided that I must be anti-Semitic on the grounds that I am repeating facts about a state’s treatment of its indigenous population? In which case, my accusers have shown themselves hostile to objective truth.
Now there is the question of the various statements I cite in the essay that express anti-Semitic or anti-Zionist attitudes. But these come from the historical figures, who uttered them. Are you saying, for example, that the Nazi ideologue, Alfred Rosenberg, did not write in his notorious Myth of the 20th Century that Jewish emigration to Palestine must be encourage?
Are you telling me that Francis Nicosia made up his statement that the Nazis wished to encourage Jewish emigration to Palestine? I understand Mr Nicosia is an entirely respectable, mainstream historian. Please let me know if you do believe that he has falsely represented Nazi policy in this regard, and that you therefore regard him as a possible anti-Semite, so I may inform him and his lawyers.
As you should be aware from reading my blog post and Tony’s article, each quote and extract from a historical text is properly supported with the source from which it is taken clearly cited You therefore seem to be upset that I am discussing aspects of Zionist history that you would clearly prefer kept quiet. But in a properly democratic society and organisation, issues such as this should be open to discussion, even if they are uncomfortable for those who hold them. My accusers seem to wish to sanitise the history of the Zionist movement. Perhaps I should contact the Historical Association and inform them that the Labour party is now engaged in historical censorship and that if they come to power, orthodox, respectable mainstream historians will be accused of anti-Semitism simply for mentioning these uncomfortable truths about Zionism?
The Quotations
You have presented me with a list of quotes, but, as with the article itself, if you have not provided me with any arguments informing me what, if anything, is offensive or anti-Semitic about them. And many of them, if correctly read, are clearly the reverse.
“Zionism was until recent decades very much a minority position among European Jews.” This is as I understand it, based on my reading of Jewish history and Jewish socialists. I understand that the Bund, the main Jewish party in pre-War Poland, explicitly rejected Zionism and its members sought to be seen as fellow Poles of the Jewish faith. As did Jewish Brits, Frenchmen, Germans and so on. See Ilan Pappe’s Ten Myths About Israel, pp. 249, for example, as well as the other historians and historical figures I quote in my article. .The description of Zionism as a minority position is therefore neither a distortion of history nor anti-Semitic. There is nothing anti-Semitic in rejecting Zionism when one also supports the Jewish people’s struggle for dignity and equality at home, in contrast to the attitude of the Nazis, for example. Far from it. It shows that one values Jews as vital fellow citizens.
“it is an internalisation of gentile anti-Semitism, with which it has collaborated, including in the mass murder of Jews, such as in the Holocaust, by real anti-Semites.” I consider this statement also to be fair and justified. Anti-Semitism has at its heart the belief that Jews and gentiles are racially distinct and incompatible. This was the attitude of the founders of Zionism, such as Theodor Herzl and Ben Gurion. It was also the attitude of that most notorious of 19th century anti-Semites, Wagner. Wagner had Jewish friends, but hated them as a people and wanted them deported to Palestine. See the book The German Dictatorship by Karl-Dietrich Bracher. And the Zionists did collaborate with the Nazis. The Judischer Rundschau, the main German Jewish Zionist newspaper, praised the vile Nuremberg laws and urged Jewish Germans to wear the magen Dawids forced upon them with pride. The nadir came in the case of Rudolf Kasztner, who willingly collaborated with the Nazis in sending Hungarian Jews to the death camps just so that some could be sent to Israel instead. This is documented fact, not an anti-Semitic slur. Again, the accusation here seems to be another assault on historical truth.
“he had previously not come forward to add his support because he didn’t want people to think that he was a Jew-hater.”
Again, this is historically true. Pappe explicitly mentions the case of a German aristocrat in his book. Again, documented fact which my accusers seek to deny.
“These quotes clearly show that the criticisms of Israel and the Zionist movement by people like Tony Greenstein and the others are historically justified,”
Not an anti-Semitic statement – Israel is a state, like any other, and so deserves to be criticised like any other repressive or persecutory state. And I believe by criticisms of Zionism are also historically and politically justified, based on the scholarship Mr Greenstein has cited and which I have personally read. As I have said, Zionism is not Judaism. It is an ideology that has been shared by many gentiles, including anti-Semites, and rejected by many Jews. Any attempt to claim that Zionism = Judaism is a gross distortion of history, and religious and political identity.
“My own preferred view is that anti-Semitism is simply hatred of Jews as Jews, and that no state or ideology should be beyond debate and criticism. This includes Israel and Zionism.”
There is no anti-Semitism in this statement. Quite the contrary – I have made it clear that no state or ideology should be beyond debate and criticism. The operative words are ‘state’ and ‘ideology’. I have not said ‘religion’ or ‘people’. I have made it clear that my criticisms and condemnation are against the state of Israel and its right-wing leaders and military. I am not against Jews, Judaism or the Israel people qua Jews, Judaism or the Israeli people. I have said that anti-Semitism, in the words of its founder, was about hatred of Jews as Jews, regardless of their religion or the ideologies they may hold. I realise that this is rejected by the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism, but this states that criticism of Israel may be anti-Semitic, if Israel is singled out for criticism while other states aren’t. If you read my blog, you will be aware that I condemn all persecution and ethnic cleansing everywhere, including the Holocaust, the slave trade, the Turkish persecution of the Kurds, and the current Chinese genocide against the Uighurs. I comprehensively reject the claim that I am anti-Semite, based on this highly selective reading of this quote.
“I’ve come across the adage, ‘Two Jews, three opinions’.
No anti-Semitism here, either, from what I can see. The saying is actually Jewish, not something that has been applied to Jews by gentiles. It is also the title of a book by Barbara Davis, published in 2019 by Resource Publications. Its ISBN number is 1532673329. This was about the Jewish Community School Network, founded in 1980, which was based on klal Yisrael, the unity of the Jewish people, and intended to unite Jews of different religious views. Hence the title. See the Amazon page here: Two Jews, Three Opinions: Amazon.co.uk: Davis, Barbara Sheklin: 9781532673320: Books
I believe I encountered the saying in an essay written by two rabbis as part of a two-day symposium called by the American president to combat the rise of Fascism in Europe. Their argument was that Jews are an innately democratic people, who have always valued debate and discussion against enforced political and religious conformity. I make the point that it supports the idea that the Jewish community is not monolithic, but diverse and pluralist – admirable qualities that multiculturalism seeks to promote against anti-Semitism and Fascism. I have also used the quote to demonstrate the admirable pluralism of the contemporary British Jewish community, and the attempts by British Zionists to present British Jewry as some kind of monolithic community is the type of misrepresentation used by totalitarian regimes, such as the Nazis against their opponents.
Furthermore, Jews aren’t the only people, who religious disputatiousness became proverbial. During the Reformation in the Netherlands, it was said that if there were three Dutchmen, two would form their own sects and accuse the third of being a heretic. And yet the Netherlands has a noble tradition of religious tolerance. It was one of the few nations, for example, which didn’t expel the Jews, one of the more famous members of its community being the 17th century philosopher Baruch Spinoza. I believe it to be this tradition of religious debate and pluralism that has made Dutch society, like British Judaism, a solid bedrock of democratic values.
“people, who hold entirely reasonable opinions critical of Israel are being vilified, harassed and purged as the very things they are not, racists and anti-Semites.”
This is my opinion, based on the published writing of many of the victims of the witch-hunt and my personal relationships with some of them. I have seen nothing in the writings of Tony Greenstein, as I have said, that is, in my opinion, remotely anti-Semitic. Indeed, Mr Greenstein, like so many of the people I personally know, has suffered abuse and vilification for his Jewishness. I also know other Jews and gentiles, who have had the same experience, including real anti-Semitic assault. Or if gentile, they have been abused and vilified for supporting Jews and attacking anti-Semitism. This is my personal experience. I therefore reject the accusation, and regard it in itself as supporting anti-Semitism.
Now let’s go through some of the other accusations levelled against me.
may reasonably be seen to involve antisemitic actions, stereotypes and sentiments;
Baseless. As I’ve said, I am not an anti-Semite and will not publish genuinely anti-Semitic material. My argument is against the state of Israel and the ultra-Zionists that support it, not Jews or the Jewish religion. If the arguments are used do involve anti-Semitic actions, stereotypes and sentiments, it is most often when I have refuted them, as I have done so in posts against the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, for example. I have also noted the use of ‘anti-Semitic tropes’ as a way of denying political reality. The IDF has a practice of poisoning the wells of Palestinian villages with a noxious substance to make the water undrinkable. This is similar to the medieval anti-Semitic accusation that the Black Death was spread by the Jews poisoning the wells. But the medieval lie should not be used to stop the reportage of current IDF practice. One is fact, the other malign falsehood. What matters is fact and truth. Anti-Semitic Jewish stereotypes should not be invoked to suppress current reality.
Engages in stereotypical allegations of Jewish control in the media, economy, government or other societal institutions;
In the words of the Comic Book Guy in the Android’s Dungeon in the cartoon, The Simpsons, ‘Hah! You jest!’ This is the only way I can see this accusation, so far is it from reality. I have repeatedly condemned the classic anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about Jewish capitalists and control of the media, government and economy in my blog, as expressed in the Nazis’ vile lies about Jewish bankers, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the current Fascist fear that the Jews are importing non-Whites to replace the White population. I have very specific criticisms of the way parts of Britain’s Zionist milieu has sought to mobilise the media and exerted control of the political parties. This is based on my observation of the way the accusations of anti-Semitism were enthusiastically adopted by the wider British political and media establishment in order to discredit Mr Corbyn and his supporters. I have not suggested that Jews control the media, economy or government. I have said that the allegations mobilised by right-wing Zionists were taken up by the British state and press. This was not done through coercion or any form of covert Jewish control, and the quote makes that clear.
Accuses the Jews as people, or Israel as a state, of inventing or exaggerating the Holocaust;
I have never said that the Jews or Israel have invented the Holocaust. Far from it, I have always bitterly opposed Holocaust denial. Nor have I accused the Jews or Israel of exaggerating the Holocaust, which is something else that Nazis have done and which I wholeheartedly reject. And I am at a loss to know how this accusation applies to me regarding the above article. The article does not state that the Holocaust was invented or exaggerated. This accusation is therefore inapplicable, and I can only regard as a grotesque smear.
Repeats stereotypical and negative physical descriptions/descriptions or character traits of Jewish people, such as references to wealth or avarice and equating Jews with capitalists or the ruling class;
My piece was about historical anti-Semitism and its links to Zionism. No discussion of real anti-Semitism can be made without repeating the smears and allegations of anti-Semites themselves. As you should be able to discern for yourself, repeating and discussing the views of anti-Semites does not necessarily constitute an endorsement of them. And the article should, I hope, make it clear that I do not endorse the real anti-Semitic views of the individuals I cite, such as Alfred Rosenberg.
Now let’s turn to the questions you have for me personally. Many of these are innocuous and reasonable, but others are much more sinister. Certain of them remind me of forced confessions of guilt of the accused in the show trials of Stalin’s Russia and the ‘self-criticism’ of dissenters and non-conformists in Mao’s China. The objective seems to secure admissions of guilt, followed by due repentance and contrition following the pattern of inquisitions and ideological persecution down the centuries.
Here are my replies.
Please see the evidence attached overleaf. The Party has reason to believe that this is your Word Press web blog account. Can you confirm this is the case?
A. Yes, that’s true.
2) The Party further has reason to believe that you posted, shared or endorsed these statements yourself. Can you confirm this is the case? If not, each individual piece of evidence is numbered so please specify which of the pieces of evidence you are disputing posting, sharing or endorsing?
A. This is also true.
3) Taking each item in turn, please explain your reasons for posting, sharing or endorsing each numbered item of evidence included in this pack?
4) Chapter 2, Clause I.8 of the Labour Party Rule Book provides:
“No member of the Party shall engage in conduct which in the opinion of the NEC is prejudicial, or in any act which in the opinion of the NEC is grossly detrimental to the Party. The NEC and NCC shall take account of any codes of conduct currently in force and shall regard any incident which in their view might reasonably be seen to demonstrate hostility or prejudice based on age; disability; gender reassignment or identity; marriage and civil partnership; pregnancy and maternity; race; religion or belief; sex; or sexual orientation as conduct prejudicial to the Party: these shall include but not be limited to incidents involving racism, antisemitism, Islamophobia or otherwise racist language, sentiments, stereotypes or actions, sexual harassment, bullying or any form of intimidation towards another person on the basis of a protected characteristic as determined by the NEC, wherever it occurs, as conduct prejudicial to the Party. The disclosure of confidential information relating to the Party or to any other member, unless the disclosure is duly authorised or made pursuant to a legal obligation, shall also be considered conduct prejudicial to the Party.”
What is your response to the allegation that your conduct may be or have been in breach of this rule?
A. I deny that I have breached this rule. At no point do I support or endorse anything in the above article that may be considered bigoted or prejudicial against the above people and groups. As I have made clear, the post is a criticism of Zionism’s historic links to anti-Semitism. It is certainly not an endorsement of anti-Semitism. As for Zionism, I have made it clear that it is an ideology, and ideologies should be open for debate and criticism.
5) The Code of Conduct: Social Media Policy states that members should “treat all people with dignity and respect” and that “this applies offline and online.” Do you think your conduct has been consistent with this policy?
A. The Labour party has a tradition of robust debate and criticism. I consider my post to be entirely within this. Furthermore, I consider the question hypocritical. At the time of writing, members of the party’s right-wing, including prominent supporters of Mr Starmer, have uttered vile comments and smears on social media. I refer particular to Neil Coyle’s tweet vilifying Jewish Voice for Labour as ‘communists’ who should be expelled. I also note that the accusations and expulsions of innocent, decent people smeared by the party as anti-Semites has resulted in them being deluged with the vilest criticism. Jackie Walker, for example, has received messages stating that she cannot be Jewish, because she is Black, and that she should be lynched, set on fire, killed and her body dumped in bin bags. It seems here that the party has a policy of making such contrived accusations, publicising them, but leaving it to others to do the actual dirty work of vilification and harassment.
6) Looking back at the evidence supplied with this letter, do you regret posting, sharing or endorsing any of this content?
No, because I believe it to be truthful, warranted and necessary.
7) Do you intend to post, share or endorse content of this nature again in the future?
So long as innocent people are being so smeared and vilified and Israel’s history is being falsified, then yes, I do.
8) Are there any further matters you wish to raise in your defence?
I find this attitude to be repulsively partisan, hypocritical and a diversion from the rising prejudice against Muslims, left-wing Jews and people of colour in the party. I utterly condemn this mercenary use of the accusation of anti-Semitism. As they accuse me of anti-Semitism, real hatred against the Jews is rising in the Labour party, as well as other forms of racism. I note that many of the victims of this scummy witch hunt are decent Jews, like Mr. Greenstein. I note that the Jews and their gentile supporters, who have been accused, also have a proud record of standing up not just against Zionism, but also against other forms of racism. They have demonstrated and denounced apartheid South Africa abroad, and the NF, BNP and domestic Fascists over here. Muslim brothers and sisters in the Labour party are also subject to rising abuse and harassment. One third of our Islamic kin have said that they have experienced such prejudice and maltreatment in the party.
Keir Starmer has also taken no action against the Labour apparatchiks who have abused and bullied Black MPs and activists, like Diane Abbott. This is despite his opportune and cavalier embrace of Black Lives Matter. As a result, Labour is haemorrhaging Muslim and Black members, party workers and supporters. There is a wide belief that Labour cannot be trusted to tackle racism, and has nothing but contempt for its Muslim and Black members. As it has for its left-wing, Jewish members.
9) Is there any evidence you wish to submit in your defence?
Please see the personal statement below.
Personal Information
I come from an Anglican Christian family that has always rejected Jew hatred. My grandmother, who was an active trade unionist and member of the Labour party, had a deep respect for the high degree of learning of the Jewish rabbis. One of my uncles, with whose family we used to go on holiday before his sad death in the 1980s, was Jewish, with the almost stereotypical surname of Hyman. I remember him and his wife, my aunt, with warm affection.
From an early age, I was very much aware of the horrors of the Holocaust. I particularly remember a strip in the boy’s war comic, Battle. This was about a group of squaddies fighting their way through Nazi lines until the reached a concentration camp. This strip showed a glimpse of the horrific conditions the inmates were kept in, as the last panel showed the troopers shocked and horrified by the sight of the emaciated inmates.
My father did his national service in Bielefeld in Germany. His best friend while in the army was Jewish, who remarked on Dad’s lack of any animus against Jews. My father is justly very proud of the respect and friendship he earned through his lack of prejudice, an attitude that he has passed on to me. During his time in Bielefeld, Dad visited the remains of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. He photographed the memorial set up to its victims, the legend of which bilingual in English and Hebrew. When I was a child Dad showed me the photographs of the graves and the remains of the camp and told me how the Jews had been murdered there. This has obviously left a very strong impression on me.
I was a junior schoolboy in 1977 when Punk exploded on the British pop scene. Unfortunately, some idiots at the time took it upon themselves to wear swastikas and other Nazi regalia. This was also at a time when war films were popular at the cinema and on British television, along with war comics such as Battle,Warlord, Commando Picture Library and so on. I remember asking my mother about the Nazis and the Swastika. She told me that they were a group of very evil men, and that if she caught me wearing one, she’d spank my bottom. It’s the kind of comment I’ve no doubt was made by many decent parents up and down the country. In my mother’s case, she had a personal reason to detest the Nazis. One of her school friends had a Jewish surname, and during the War the girl and her family had been very much afraid of Nazi invasion and the child’s consequent murder.
I was educated at a Christian, Anglican comprehensive school, St. Mary Redcliffe, by Christian teachers, clergy and support staff. All of whom had a hatred of racism and sectarian bigotry. I can remember a number of sermons preached in assembly that particularly condemned the sectarian violence in Northern Ireland as well as anti-Black racism, referring to the colour bar in Rhodesia. The school taught the Holocaust long before it became part of the school syllabus. At the same time the school was active in trying to dispel prejudice against non-Christian religions. I particularly remember the RE teacher, a vicar’s wife, showing a gentleman from the city’s Jewish community up the stairs as he carried a number of the holy artifacts of his faith, such as the menorah.
I took my first degree at another Christian institution, the College of St. Paul and St. Mary, which I believe has now expanded and gained university status as the University of Gloucestershire. My major was in History, which included a course on the rise of Communist and Fascist Regimes in Europe. This has given me an extensive knowledge of the nature and history of these dictatorial, persecutory regimes and the scholarship behind it. It also gave me considerable insight into the political mobilisation of antisemitism, and the nature of political antisemitism as formulated by its founders and activists, like Wilhelm Marr, the founder of the Bund Antisemiten, the League of Anti-Semites, one of the odious precursors of the Nazi party. I therefore feel justified in some of the definitions of anti-Semitism, which you have chosen to interpret as evidence in themselves that I am a Jew-hater. This, in my opinion, is an ignorant and intellectually dishonest assault on historical fact.
My minor subject was in Religious Studies. One of the mandatory courses in my first year was on the Old Testament/ Hebrew Bible. As with my secondary school, I was taught by Christian lecturers, who had a deep hatred of Fascism and Communist totalitarianism. I understand that the mother of one of my lecturers, a man who had a deep respect for China and its people, had died in a Maoist concentration camp. The theology lecturer also told us that he had such a deep repugnance to Friedrich Nietzsche, whose philosophy was pillaged by the Nazis to support their vile doctrines, that he was not going to teach it.
Our Old Testament lecturer was a renowned authority in his field who had a very warm affection for the Jewish people. The Holocaust was taught as part of the Judaism course, one of the elective courses in that part of the degree. This particular gentleman was powerfully moved by the sufferings of the Jewish people in this most terrible of anti-Jewish persecution, a feeling he passed on to his students. The lecturer I studied under for this part of the course shared his colleague’s profound respect for the Hebrew Bible and the Jewish people. One of the essays we were set was to explain the Psalmist’s delight in the Pentateuch. At the same time, he was keen for his students to experience modern varieties of Jewish faith and tradition. At the time I was taking the course, there was a pop musician on tour, whose pieces included the Kaddish as played on a synthesiser: “The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. Blessed be the name of the Lord forever.” This particular musician was playing in Cheltenham. He described the piece as deeply moving, and urged us all to listen to it. I should also say here that I also took the College’s course on Islam, which was taught by an excellent Indian lecturer who believed in interfaith dialogue and harmonious coexistence. I have Muslim friends, and am particularly worried about the resurgence of islamophobia in British society, of which the accusations against me seem to be a part.
I have had many Jewish friends, and readers of my blog will know that I have repeatedly condemned and attacked real antisemitism. I do not publish articles or comments that are genuinely anti-Semitic, such as those that preach noxious, murderous lies such as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the conspiracy theories about Jewish bankers. For an example of this, please see my comments about a video on YouTube by the Irish Nationalists of Eire, whose leader talks about international financial capitalism. This man states he wants Jewish financial involvement in the ‘Irish slave trade’ investigated, which more than suggests he is a supporter of such noxious conspiracy theories. I make it very clear that I condemn it and them.
I have also written for a number of fringe magazines, in which I have also done my best to attack the resurgence of Fascism in fringe western culture. One of these was the return of the Nazi saucer myth, the belief that the Nazis successfully constructed flying saucers. See, for example, my article ’Gazumrah’s Sons: The Pyschopathology of the Nazi Saucer Myth’ in Magonia, 63, May 1998, 11 -14. Many perfectly decent people have been taken in by this, but among its supporters and propagandists are real Nazis such as Wilhelm Landig and Ernst Zundl. Much of this material is so ludicrous as to make you wonder how anyone could believe it. For example, the conspiracy theories about Jews running the world has been promoted by Hatonn, who purports to be a 9/12 foot tall reptilian alien from the Pleiades, as channelled back in the ‘90s by an elderly American lady. This is noxious and bonkers, but the channeler was not without influence on the American right. Colonel Bo Gritz, one of the leaders of the Militia movement, was among those visiting her to listen to her messages. See the relevant chapter in Adam Parfrey’s Cult Rapture for further information. For my condemnation of this and other forms of Nazism, racism and anti-Semitism, I refer you to issues of the sceptical UFO magazine, Magonia.
Since graduating, I have sought to expand my own knowledge of Jewish faith and the history of Bristol’s Jewish community. I have tried to each myself Biblical Hebrew, for example. I also discuss the archaeology of Bristol’s medieval Jewish community in my 2004 book, Anglo-Saxon and Norman Bristol. I discuss the construction of the houses in Norman Bristol’s Jewish quarter, and the remains of a miqveh, a Jewish ritual bath, which was discovered on Hotwells Road. I am pleased that my city also has a very fine synagogue on Park Row and that one of the neighbouring hotels is named after King David, which surely suggests ties between Bristol’s Jewish community and Israel.
I have also voiced my opposition to the Tories’ persecution of the poor and unemployed by comparing them to other victims of the Nazis. During the Third Reich, the habitual unemployed, amongst others, were denounced as ‘asocial’ and sent to the camps. They were forced to wear a badge, just as our Jewish brothers and sisters were made to wear theirs, on their prison uniform. In the case of the unemployed and arbeitschau, the badge was a black triangle containing a white ‘A’, for ‘asoziale’. I am also greatly concerned with the persecution of religious minorities in Putin’s Russia. Pentecostal Christians were particularly persecuted during the Soviet dictatorship, and now the Arkhiplut has raised similar accusations and persecution against the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Dissenting Christians, such as the followers of Pastor Bonhoeffer and particularly the Jehovah’s Witnesses and Seventh Day Adventists were also martyred in the camps for their refusal to conform to the Reich’s anti-Semitism and disloyalty in rejecting Hitler as a secular messiah. I have no right to wear the Magen Dawid, as I’m not Jewish an don’t wish to be seen to be ‘Jewsplaining’ or cynically exploiting the Shoah.. But I am religious and I have been unemployed, so to show my solidarity with the victims of those persecutions, I made cardboard copies of the badges they were forced to wear in the Nazi camps and posted up a video about is on YouTube. This is at This was my attack on totalitarianism and the persecution that has directly affected people like me. See my video at Protesting Against Benefits Sanctions with Nazi Unemployment Badge – YouTube
I do not expect you to know about my life history or be aware of fringe publications like Magonia. This is why it is dangerous to the accused and the party to make such accusations of anti-Semitism based on a highly selective, prejudicial reading of a single article. I have been also been accused of bringing the Labour party into disrepute. I have not done so. I am simply airing my opinions on what I consider to be a particularly odious campaign of smear and lies against innocent people according to the party’s century old tradition of internal democracy and robust debate. I contend instead that it is my anonymous accusers, who have brought the party into disrepute by their false accusations against fine, anti-racist Jewish and gentile women and men. This is amply shown by the Labour party haemorrhaging members, trembling on the verge of bankruptcy, the failures and bare victories in the local and by-elections and the plummeting popularity of the party’s leader, Keir Starmer.
Blog Posts Attacking Anti-Semitic Conspiracy Theories
As I have said, I have also published several pieces on my blog attacking real anti-Semitism and noxious anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, such as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. These are at the heart of modern Fascism and Nazism, and constitute a real, existential threat to Jews. Here is a selection of such posts.
History Debunked Tears to Shreds the Protocols of the Elders of Zion
Simon Webb, the man behind the YouTube channel History Debunked seems to me to be a man of the right. The channel’s devoted to refuting fake history, but much of the myths it debunks are false claims made in the name of anti-racism by Black activists. He also believes that there are racial differences in intelligence, with Blacks on average less intelligent than Whites, and Whites also on average less bright than Asians. In other words, the Bell Curve stuff that has been loudly denounced and refuted over the past decade or so. That said, his videos are always based on solid fact and well argued, and I don’t believe that he is personally racist. Indeed, he has put up a video about home schooling, in which he states very clearly that not only has he done it himself, but he is also helping and giving advice to a group of Black British parents, who wish to do it.
In this video History Debunked takes on the infamous Tsarist forgery, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Webb states that he’s doing this after some of his previous videos were taken down by YouTube, or he was warned that they may be taken down because of their controversial content. But this video is not only historically right, no-one should be able to accuse him of racism or hate speech because of it. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is a notorious anti-Semitic forgery, which is at the heart of the various stupid conspiracy theories about the Jews secretly trying to take over the world through controlling the media, banks, business and so on. It was concocted in the very early 20th century by the Russian monk, Nilus, for the Tsar’s secret police, the Okhrana, in order to make Nicholas II persecute the Jews even more harshly. As Nicholas II believed in the Blood Libel, the myth that Jews murder Christians to use their blood in the matzo bread at Passover, it’s hard to see how Nicholas could be even more anti-Semitic. Especially as his attempts to prosecute one Jewish man, Beilis, for this, was worrying his ministers who viewed it as a serious embarrassment to the autocracy.
In the video, Webb shows how the Protocols was based on an earlier book, a Dialogue between Machiavelli and Montesquieu in Hell. This was an attack on the government of Napoleon III of France, who French liberals feared was trying to take over and control everything, including the press and business. He illustrates this through pointing to some of the metaphors that Nilus took from the earlier book. The Dialogue describes Napoleon as having a hundred arms, like the Hindu god Vishnu, each arm extended into some part of society. And here it appears again in the Protocols, which describes the Jewish conspiracy as like the Hindu deity with hundreds of arms extending through society.
Apart from the Dialogue, Nilus also plagiarised Theodor Herzl’s Altneuland Herzl was the founder of modern Zionism, and the Altneuland was his attempt to depict and popularise a Jewish state. In my view, Zionism has caused immense suffering and conflict in the Middle East, and led to the persecution and ethnic cleansing of the indigenous Palestinians. I’d say they were entirely justified in despising Herzl’s book. But it isn’t about a global conspiracy or a programme for the mass enslavement of non-Jews, as the Protocols purports to be.
Webb jokes that if there is a Jewish conspiracy as the Protocols claims, then it can’t be much of one if they’ve had to take their ideas from a satire published decades earlier about Napoleon III, and Herzl’s Altneuland. He also states that the other daft conspiracy theories about Jews are ultimately based on the Protocols. One of these is the Kalergi Plan. From what little I know of it, the Kalergi Plan is supposed to be a secret plot by a cabal of European leaders to import non-Whites into the continent and the west in order to destroy the White race. Yep, it’s another permutation of that heap of bilge.
Here’s History Debunked thoroughly refuting the Protocols.
The Protocols are notorious as a forgery, but have been massively influential in spreading real Fascism and Jew-hatred. They inspired many of the Fascist movements that arose after the First World War. At least one of the British papers serialised them, until they saw sense and realized that they were a forgery. Then they published criticisms and refutations. However, even when readers of the wretched book have had it shown to them that they’re a forgery, such is their power that some of them continue to believe that they’re ‘symbolically true’.
The Protocols have been responsible for some of the most horrific anti-Semitic persecution and violence. And unfortunately they’re still being published. Apparently you can’t pick up copies on street corner kiosks in Putin’s Russia, and they were turned into a major television series on Egyptian TV. Way back in the 1990s a branch of Waterstone’s in this country stocked them because they were cited by various UFO conspiracy theorists that Reptoid aliens really were running the world or some such nonsense. One of these books claimed that the ‘Jews’ referred to in the Protocols were really the Illuminati of much contemporary American conspiracy theorising. No, the authors of the Protocols meant to attack the Jews, and whether someone chooses to believe that it’s really about the Illuminati or not, the Protocols are still vile, dangerous, murderous rubbish.
There’s a large body of literature debunking the Protocols. One of the classics is Norman Cohn’s Warrant for Genocide. And this video is also an excellent short but acute refutation of them.
Conspiracy Book’s Debunking of Anti-Semitic Forgery ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’
A week or so ago I put up a post about The Mammoth Book of Cover-Ups by Jon E. Lewis, and its chapter roundly debunking Holocaust denial. The book is a popular volume on conspiracy theories, describing and frequently debunking 100 such conspiratorial beliefs about the death of Princess Diana, the Men In Black, the assassination of J.F.K., and Martin Luther King, Area 51, Ronald Reagan, the Priory of Zion of Holy Blood, Holy Grail infamy and many more, including Holocaust denial.
Another infamous anti-Semitic conspiracy theory, that also gets thoroughly disproven, is the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which the book gives in its full title, the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, and deals with on pages 433 to 450. The Protocols are a notorious forgery, concocted by the tsar’s secret police, the Okhrana, to encourage Nicholas II to be even more anti-Semitic and persecute the Jews even worse than he already was. It is one of the leading sources of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, and was read and influenced many Fascists. It was proven to be a forgery as long ago as the 1920, but even after this was revealed, some of those, who had read it continued to be maintain that it was symbolically true, even if it wasn’t factually. Unfortunately, the book continues to have a very wide circulation, particularly in the Middle East and in eastern Europe.
The history of this vile book is briefly described on pages 433-5. The chapter states that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion was first published in 1897 as an appendix to the book, The Antichrist Is Near At Hand by the Russian writer, Sergei Nilus. It claims to be an instruction manual for a cabal of anonymous Jews planning to conquer and subdue the Christian world.
It states that the chief points of the Protocols are that the plot will remain invisible until it is so strong it cannot be overcome; government is to be increasingly centralized; press freedoms shall be restricted; gentile are to be distracted by games and amusements; and all non-Jewish religions will be swept away.
The book was immensely popular in Russia and the rest of the world. One enthusiast was the industrialist Henry Ford, of motor industry fame, who printed sections in his newspaper, the Dearborn Independent. He believed it exactly described the world situation as it was in his time, and used them to try to influence the US senate to stop America joining the League of Nations.
The first person to show that the Protocols were a forgery was Lucien Wolf. In his The Jewish Bogey and the Forged Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion of 1920 showed that sections of the Protocols had been lifted with only very minor changes from a satire written by a French lawyer, Maurice Joly, Dialogue aux Enfers entre Montesquieu et Machiavelli (“Dialogue in Hell between Montesquieu and Machiavelli”). This was itself influenced by Eugene Sue’s 1843 conspiracy novel, The Mysteries of Paris. The Protocols was also based on the 1868 novel, Biarritz, by the German spy Hermann Goedsche, written under the pseudonym Sir John Retcliffe. This had a chapter describing how a fictitious group of rabbis met at midnight every century in a cemetery to plan the further progress of Jewish world domination.
Lewis suggests the Protocols were probably forged by Matvei Golovinski, one of the agents of the Okhrana. He hoped to justify the tsarist regime’s persecution of the Jews by whipping up a scare about revolutionaries in the pay of the Jews planning the downfall of the monarchy. As a result, pogroms were launched against the Jews in 1905-6. And the truth of the conspiracy described by the Protocols was seen by all too many people as confirmed by the Russian Revolution of 1917, some of whose leaders happened to be Jews.
After the Nazi seizure of power in Germany, Adolf Hitler made the Protocols compulsory reading in schools. Lewis goes to describe how, despite or because of their influence in causing the Holocaust, the Protocols continue to be held as ‘fact’. Egyptian television broadcast a series in 2000 that claimed there was a connection between the Protocols and the foundation of Israel. The Protocols could also been found in al-Qaeda training camps. They’re also popular with Hamas, and in America they’re distributed by Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam. That section of the chapter ends
In fact, wherever anti-Semites gather you’ll find well-thumbed copies of the Protocols. That any of these organisations or their adherents could not discover within at most thirty seconds’ worth of research that the Protocols are, as a Swiss court described them as long ago as 1935, “ridiculous nonsense”, forgeries and plagiarism, beggars belief.
The book gives each conspiracy a threat level, according to how apparently plausible they are. You won’t be surprised to find that the threat level of the Protocols is zero.
The chapter also lists for further reading the following:
Norman Cohn, Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, 1996.
Daniel Pipes, The Hidden Hand: Middle East Fears of Conspiracy, 1998.
Lucien Wolf, The Jewish Bogey and the Forged Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, 1920.
The book provides extracts from the main documents behind or about the various conspiracies, so that readers can make up their own minds. This includes the Protocols, extracts from which are reproduced on pages 436-50. Lewis obviously trusts his readers to follow his entirely correct judgement of the Protocols, and similarly realise that they are a forgery. This is also useful, because opponents of anti-Semitism, racism and Fascism can read them without having to give money to Nazis, anti-Semites and Islamists.
I wondered if they’re shouldn’t be a proper, scholarly edition of the Protocols, written by orthodox historians and opponents of anti-Semitism, aimed not just at debunking the Protocols, but also for decent people interested in its noxious influence on Nazism and other anti-Semitic ideologies. The Bavarian government did something like this a little while ago to Mein Kampf after it came out of copyright. The government had used its ownership of the book’s copyright to prevent its publication in Germany. When this expired, they decided that the best way to combat its adoption once again by neo-Nazis would be to prepare a properly annotated version by mainstream historian of the Third Reich.
The problem with suppressed literature is that it acquires a glamour simply by being forbidden. I doubt very many people in Britain have even heard of the Protocols, but they are published and read by Nazis, and briefly appeared on the shelves of one bookshop in the north of England during the conspiracy craze of the 1990s because they were cited by one of the UFO conspiracy theorists, Bill English, in his book, Behold a Pale Horse. In this situation, it is very good that apart from general books on Fascism and Nazism, there are works specifically dedicated to exposing and debunking this vile, murderous hoax.
Hope Not Hate: Fascist and Holocaust Denial Literature on Sale at Mainstream Bookshops
I got this disturbing email today from the good peeps at the anti-racism/anti-religious extremism organisation, Hope Not Hate, reporting that some very nasty and notorious pieces of Fascist, anti-Semitic and Holocaust Denial material are being sold by this country’s big booksellers. They’d like this scandalous situation to be brought to more people’s attention on Facebook and Twitter. The email went
David,
I’m not sure you’re going to believe this… these antisemitic, Holocaust-denying, and fascist books are listed right now for sale online at Waterstones, Foyles, WHSmith, and Amazon.co.uk:
Do you think huge, reputable booksellers should profit from hate content — not to mention lend credibility to hardcore racist views? We don’t.
Last week, we contacted these retailers to bring it to their attention. Only Foyles and Waterstones even responded and neither made any commitment to pulling down these extreme materials. So we’re going to take action.
If you agree that major booksellers should stop making hate readily available, let them know. Join us in kicking up a storm on social media now:
These booksellers are acting dangerously. Despite our queries, Waterstones and Amazon’s sites continue to list The Turner Diaries, a book explicitly credited with inspiring the Oklahoma City bombing, which killed 168 people.
It looks like our pressure is already working – over the weekend, a number of these titles, including famous Holocaust denial book Did Six Million Really Die?, disappeared from Foyles’ website. If we can make some noise, they’ll listen, and ultimately, act.
Let’s make it clear these booksellers can’t ride this out. Join together to create public outcry at this very urgent concern.
If the images are too small for you to see clearly, they include pictures of the covers of David Irving’s The War Path, with a picture of Adolf on the front, the notorious Tsarist forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, two notorious pieces of Holocaust Denial, Did Six Million Really Die? and Curated Lies – The Auschwitz Museum’s Misrepresentations, as well as the Turner Diaries and Oswald Mosley’s Fascism for the Million.
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion are a very notorious piece of the type of bogus conspiracy theories I was talking about yesterday. They were forged by the Tsarist secret police to encourage the already anti-Semitic Nicholas II to persecuted the Jews even harder. It purports to be the minutes of secret meeting of global Jewish leaders discussing their plans to rule the world and enslave gentiles. It successfully deceived many people in the 1920s, before it was very clearly shown to be a fake, with articles demonstrating that this was so in the Times and other parts of the press. Even so, some of the people, who were convinced by it still continued to protest that if it wasn’t factually true, then it was still somehow symbolically true. It’s been a significant influence promoting anti-Semitism and Fascism.
This isn’t the first time there’s been an outcry at it being on sale in a mainstream bookshop. It was quoted at length by Bill English, an American conspiracy theorist, who believed the Illuminati were running things secretly behind the scenes, and aliens were really coming down to abduct and experiment on us. English claimed, however, that where the passages he included referred to the Jews, they were really referring to the Illuminati. This led to a branch of Waterstones in one of the northern cities stocking it. It was also quoted by David Icke in his book, The Robots’ Rebellion. This is why there have been protests and accusations that Icke is an anti-Semite, although Jon Ronson in his Secret Rulers of the World, where he covered one such demonstration in Canada, said that he believes Icke isn’t anti-Semitic, but really does believe the world is being run by evil reptoid aliens.
David Irving is the notorious Holocaust Denier, who ended up losing a libel case against an American academic, who showed up page by page how his book on Hitler and the Holocaust misquoted and distorted the works it cited and falsified history. The last I heard of him, he was serving a jail sentence in Austria, one of the countries where Holocaust Denial is a crime.
The Turner Diaries is a bizarre piece of SF that also became notorious in the 1990s, after it was revealed that it influenced Timothy McVeigh, the America militiaman, who blew up the Federal building in Oklahoma City. It’s written as a series of diary entries by a White race warrior, who is part of violent uprising against ZOG – that’s the Zionist Occupation Government, not Ahmed Zogu, the former king of Albania. The hero and his fellow Nazis are also determined to stop the ‘Zionists” planned destruction of the White race through racial intermixture. There’s an infamous passage in there, where he talks about hanging a whole load of college girls for this ‘crime’, as well as making sure that America becomes a pure White homeland, and Blacks and other non-Whites are either cleansed or put firmly in their place.
Mosley was, of course, the leader of the British Union of Fascists during the Second World War, who then tried briefly to come back into politics as the leader of the Union Movement in the 50s and early 60s. Despite his best efforts, we’re very lucky that his Fascism very definitely did not appeal to millions.
I’m not on Facebook or Twitter, but I’m very happy to publicise this noxious state of affairs.
None of these books should be sold by any reputable booksellers. They are evil and very dangerous, and should be taken off their on-line shelves now.
Levinsohn was a 19th century eastern European rabbi, whose book, whose title translates into English as ‘No Blood’ refuted the Blood Libel.
I found this entry on him while flicking through The Oxford Dictionary of World Religions, edited by John Bowker, (Oxford: OUP 1997). This states
Levinsohn, Isaac Baer, or Ribal (1788-1860). Hebrew author. Levinsohn’s literary output was mainly polemical. He was one of the founders of the Haskalah movement in Russia, and he was concerned with the position of the Jews in eastern Europe. His best-known work, Te’udah be-Yisrael, (Testimony in Israel, 1828), described the Hebrew language as ‘the bond of religion and national survival’, and he argued against the use of Yiddish. His book considerable influence on Jewish life in Russia, although it was banned by the Hasidim. He also wrote Beit Yehudah (House of Judah, 1838) which was an attempt to answer Christian questions about Judaism, and Efes Damim (No Blood, 1838) which was written to refute the blood libel. (p. 575).
I really don’t know anything about him apart from this article. However, I thought people here might want to know about him because of the way the Blood Libel – the medieval myth that Jews used the blood of Christian children in the matzo bread at Passover – has been a central part of much anti-Semitism. It’s included in the grotesque tsarist forgery, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which has been instrumental in promoting anti-Semitism and Nazism ever since it was cooked up by the tsar’s secret police, the Okhrana, to encourage him to persecute the Jews even more.
There has been a resurgence of Fascism and Nazism across the western world. In America we’ve seen the rise of the Alt-Right and various other White supremacists around Donald Trump, while in eastern Europe there are a number of anti-Semitic and vehemently islamaphobic parties, like Fidesz in Hungary. There has been particular concern this week over Poland, because the present government has just passed a law making it a criminal offence to attribute guilt to Poles for the crimes of the Nazis. And in Germany the very anti-Semitic and islamaphobic Alternative Fuer Deutschland has entered the Bundestag for the first time. This party contains some real Nazis, including one character, who denounced the Holocaust Memorial in Germany as ‘a badge of shame’, and declared he wanted to set up an underground railway to Auschwitz. These are horrifying, vile people, who need to be fought.
Thus, while I don’t really know anything about Isaac Levinsohn, I thought it might be useful to know about him, because he wrote one of the most important refutations of the Blood Libel myth. Just in case there’s anyone out there trying to promote that stupid and murderous lie.
George Soros and Genuine Neo-Nazi Conspiracy Theories
Left-wing and anti-racism bloggers, commenters and campaigners have pointed out again and again how right-wing conspiracy theories about the supposedly nefarious activities of the financier George Soros, such as those promoted by the far-right Fidesz government in Hungary, conform to the poisonous Nazi conspiracy theories about evil Jewish bankers. Mainstream Conservatives have also blamed Soros’s influence for opposition to their policies in Britain. For example, Jacob Rees-Mogg, apart from accusing John Bercow and another Jewish politico of being ‘Illuminati’ – which has its own anti-Semitic overtones – also claimed that George Soros was financing the Remain campaign.
But the conspiracy theories about George Soros don’t just resemble Nazi mythology. They are a part of it, at least in some of the material that arose from the neo-Nazi fringe in the 1990s. In his book on contemporary Nazi paganism, Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism and the Politics of Identity (New York: New York University Press 2002) Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke discusses the work of Jan van Helsing, real name Jan Udo Holey, and his 1993 Geheimgesellschaften und ihre macht im 20. Jahrhundert (Secret Societies and their Power in the 20th Century). Two years later, in 1995, Helsing published Geheimgesellschaften 2. This consisted of his extended responses to interview questions. As you can imagine, despite Helsing’s avowed denials, it is a deeply anti-Semitic book. Goodrick-Clarke writes
Here he denies the charge of anti-Semitism, claiming Jewish friends and colleagues, before making the disingenuous distinction between Semitic Hebrews and Ashkenazi Jews or Khazars, who are his real antagonists in the persons of Rothschilds, Warburgs, the English royal family (!), Marx, Lenin, Stalin, etc. This ploy recapitulates the progressive disqualification of Jews from their Israelite heritage in Christian Identity doctrine. He then reprints several pages of Dr. Johannes Pohl’s vicious translation of the Talmud that was published by the Nazi Party in 1943 as anti-Semitic propaganda. On the Protocols, Helsing simply denies that their authenticity is an important issue: they exist and they are being applied. To complete his anti-Jewish rotomontade, he reveals that former Chancellor Helmut Kohl was born Henoch Koch and shows how George Soros is ruining East European economies through his liberal economic writ. Helsing’s dubious sources, his constant repetition of Jewish names as members of private and public organisations, and above all his emphasis on the assets and powerbroking influence of the Rothschilds as the top Illuminati family leave no doubt that his conspiracy theories are aimed at Jewish targets. (P. 296, my emphasis).
In case any of this sounds remotely credible, it’s worth noting that the royal family aren’t Jewish and neither were Lenin or Stalin. Stalin definitely not – he was a bitter anti-Semite. Helmut Kohl, the former German chancellor, wasn’t Jewish either. Van Helsing also believed that there’s a secret Nazi underground base in Antarctica, as well as colonies of other Reich Germans in the Canaries, the San Carlos area of Argentina, the Bermuda Triangle and the Himalayas. They also have a standing army of 6 million soldiers, including immigrants from Aldebaran. Yes, van Helsing believes the Nazi saucer mythology, in which Adolf and his band of thugs were helped by aliens from the star Aldebaran, who told them how to build flying saucers. Of which the Reich Nazis have an armada of 22,000.
When Jacob Rees-Mogg or the other Tories rant about George Soros, they are repeating an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory and should be criticised for it. But Conservative anti-Semitism has received nowhere near the amount of attention as the anti-Semitic smears against Corbyn and the Labour party. This is despite anti-Semitism being far lower in Labour. John Mann, the Tories’ anti-Semitism tsar, has shown himself completely uninterested in investigating it in the Tories, and blocked and called the children’s poet, Holocaust educator and broadcaster Michael Rosen a troll when he tried to draws Mann’s attention to some examples.
This shows how fake the Tories’ concern about anti-Semitism really is, just as the inclusion of George Soros in van Helsing’s wretched, vile anti-Semitic conspiracy theories show the real Fascism in similar fears about the financier in Tories like Rees-Mogg.
These are a selection of some of the posts about this subject I have published on my blog. I could list many more, but I hope these will be sufficient to show that I am definitely no anti-Semite, and that the charges against me have no validity.
Starmer’s continuing purge of the Labour left, and especially left-wing Jews critical of Israel, is meeting resistance. As Mike put up yesterday, Pamela Fitzpatrick has put the bargain basement Stalin on notice that she may take legal action against the Labour party for her ‘autoexclusion’. Starmer wants to expel because last year she gave an interview to Socialist Appeal, one of the four groups he wants to expel from the Labour party. But this was at a time when Socialist Appeal was still perfectly acceptable. This is retroactive justice, the criminalisation of individuals and groups for actions that were perfectly legal at the time they were committed. It’s a hallmark of tyrannies and dictatorships from Nazi Germany to Stalin’s Russia, as Fitzpatrick herself has pointed out. She tweeted
I am starting to wonder, given my line of work, as to whether the practice of introducing laws with retrospective effect, the presumption of guilt until proven innocent, the denial of appeal rights and lack of fair process is to be future Labour policy for our justice system.
This is, of course, grossly hypocritical coming from Starmer. As Steve Sammut pointed out, between 1986 and 1988 Starmer was editor of Socialist Alternatives, a magazine published by the International Marxist Tendency. Labour Party Marxists are another group Starmer has decided to expel, despite the fact that, unlike Militant Tendency in the 1980s, I’ve seen zero evidence that they are an entryist group trying to take over the party. Indeed, many of the socialist societies that came together to form the Labour party were either Marxist or Marxist influenced. And when the scandal about Militant hit Labour in the 1980s, the Swedish Social Democrats responded by saying that they had absolutely no problem with the Marxists remaining in their party, providing that they didn’t engage in those tactics. These tactics, used to subvert democracy in the party, have been taken over and applied wholesale by the real entryists, the Blairites now headed by Starmer and David Evans in the NEC.
And let’s be clear – this is an inquisition. Starmer is actually using the language used by the Christian and Roman Catholic church to excommunicate heretics. The concept of ‘autoexclusion’ was devised in the fourth century to justify the excommunication of the Donatist schismatics of north Africa. The argument was that the Church isn’t excommunicating them. Rather they are excommunicating themselves through their beliefs and actions. It’s a doctrine that isn’t confined to the sphere of religion, however. Andre Breton, the ‘Pope of Surrealism’, used it when he wanted to throw dissident artists out of his artistic movement. His victims included a group of Christian artists interested in using the techniques of Surrealism to explore their religion, which caused the militant Marxist atheist to go berserk.
But Jewish Voice for Labourare also showing thereal anti-Semitism behind these purges.
They have just submitted a report to the Equalities and Human Rights Commission and the ongoing Forde Inquiry showing that the vast majority of the witch hunt are Jews. Four out of five of those accused of anti-Semitism are Jewish. If we had a decent media in this country, this would be reported and more than demonstrate that these accusations have nothing to do with real anti-Semitism. Instead, it’s all about protecting Israel and presenting the Board of Deputies as the real representatives of Britain’s very diverse Jewish community. Of course, the Board are nothing of the sort. Tony Greenstein and other great Jewish activists and bloggers have demonstrated that the Board really represent only the United Synagogue, who seem to be the Jewish members of the Conservative party at prayer, just as the old adage said that the Anglican Church is for Christians.
Mike reports that JVL’s statement, submitted on the 24th August 2021, runs
“We have become aware of seven new investigations of Jewish Party members. Notifications of new investigations and auto-exclusions are arriving on a daily basis.
“This means it would appear that over four times more Jewish than non-Jewish Labour Party members have faced actioned complaints of antisemitism. The disproportion is even greater in relation to JVL Committee members and officers. The staggering numbers suggest that these Jews are nearly three hundred times more likely to be investigated than non- Jewish Labour Party members. In all these cases the charges of so-called antisemitism are deeply offensive.
“Dozens of Jewish members are now being targeted by Labour as antisemites, for voicing an understanding of antisemitism that is a direct product of our Jewish political and personal heritage.
“The effect of rejecting or ignoring complaints made by JVL members of antisemitism; our experience of bullying and harassment; and the refusal to consult or involve JVL in, for instance, the EHRC required Action Plan; all show disdain for our status and roles as Jews.”
Their personal understanding of real anti-Semitism appears to me to be absolutely incontrovertible and corresponds to what the founders of modern anti-Semitism actually said. Slugs like the Austrian anti-Semitic politico, Carl von Schoenerer, stated that they hated Jews simply for being Jews. Their religion or other opinions were immaterial. Indeed, there was a nasty little rhyme they sang that said that Judaism wasn’t the issue. The ‘swinishness’ was in the blood. This is quite different from the verbose, convoluted and extremely flawed definition of anti-Semitism formulated by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance and used to chill criticism of Israel, as one of its authors, Kenneth Stern, has admitted.
And Jewish Labour members like Andrew Feinstein have pointed out the massive injustice in smearing decent, anti-racist Jews as anti-Semites when so many of them have been personally affected by the Holocaust. He regards their persecution by a reactionary Labour party leadership as indefensible.
And he’s right. I’ve read that half of the British Jewish population lost family members in the Shoah. And the victims of the NEC’s and now Starmer’s witch hunt has included proud, decent Jews, who have personally experience anti-Semitic abuse and violence, as well as anti-racist gentiles who have also suffered the same for their activism in support of the Jewish community.
The overwhelming preponderance of Jews as victims of the anti-Semitism witch hunt should absolutely put the lieto any claim that these people are really self-hating and anti-Semitic.
This is all about silencing criticism of Israel, and particularly Jewish critics, because their simple existence refutes the lies and propaganda by Netanyahu and his British supporters that all Jews everywhere are proud Israelis, and that the British Jewish community uncritically supports Israel.
And the witch-hunt against left-wing Jews in the Labour party is part of a strain of political anti-Semitism stretching back to the wretched Protocols of the Elders of Zion. One of the accusations levelled by the right against their opponents on the left is that they follow the classic anti-Semitic conspiracy theories by confusing Jews with capitalism and the control of the government and the economy. But the Protocols of the Elders of Zion also claimed that Jews were also responsible for socialism and communism. A little while ago I blogged about a letter from Craig Ferguson published by the JVL at their site, which pointed out that British anti-Semitism was originally targeted at left-wing Jews. The British newspaper magnate who published the Protocols in the 1920s himself drew a distinction between loyal, patriotic British Jews, and radical, communist Jewish immigrants flooding in from the continent. The witch-hunters clearly seem to be guided by that kind of anti-Semitism in their attacks on JVL. The Labour MP Neil Coyle even called for their expulsion along with other ‘commies’.
And Michelle Laufer clearly showed Starmer’s personal hypocrisy in targeting entirely decent left-wing Jews considering his own dismal record of lies and intriguing as party leader in this tweet:
I’ve just heard Starmer on the radio saying he and Labour need to be honest with the British public so they can learn to trust the Labour party again. As a Jewish member of the Labour party who has had to watch other Jewish members abused, suspended and expelled as anti- Semitism has been weaponised, I’d like to know if he’s going to be honest about this. Is he going to be honest about the fraudulent way he in which he became leader, his broken pledges, the gerrymandering of Party democracy, the silencing of members of criticise apartheid Israel, his fawning obedience to the Board of Deputies who do not represent the views of the majority of Jews in this country and the imposition of antisemitism training by the Zionist Jewish Labour Movement.
Well no, of course Keef Stalin isn’t. He’s an authoritarian liar, and this would destroy him and the other Thatcherite entryists driving this witch-hunt, as well as his attempts to ingratiate himself with all those Tory voters out there.
Mike concludes his article with these comments
And the problem isn’t anti-Semites; it’s him – and the entryists who are supporting him because they know falsely accusing Labour socialists (the people for whom the party was originally created) of a heinous offence will make the party unelectable, leaving the way clear for the Tory corruption that we have seen under Boris Johnson.
I think it’s just a matter of time until this particular house of cards comes crashing down around Starmer and his allies.
I hope so. And I hope it brings down everyone else who was involved in this vicious vilification and persecution of decent people, including David Evans and the woefully misnamed Jewish Labour Movement.
I’ve reblogged on here several videos from Simon Webb’s History Debunked channel, in which Webb, an author, has disputed some of the false history being promoted by Black and anti-racist activists. He’s definitely a Telegraph-reading Tory, but much of his material, when he backs it up with relevant sources, appears sound. One issue which I’m not happy about, however, is his embrace of the ‘Bell Curve’ theory of a racial intellectual hierarchy. This was proposed by an American academic a few years ago, and caused a storm of controversy and outrage. It proposes that the various races differ in their intellectual capabilities. The Chinese and east Asians are the most intelligent, Blacks the least. Whites are somewhere in the middle. Now I remember being told when I was a child that the Japanese had the highest IQs of any people in the world. While 100 was the European average, theirs was 120. And it was considered to be an established biological fact among many mainstream biologists that Blacks were intellectually inferior. This was used as the rationale for limiting Black immigration to the US and was a major part of the eugenics movement. It has also kept Blacks from achieving their full educational potential. Akala in his book Natives, states that some of the teachers who taught him – not all, but some – believed it and so thought that he too must be more stupid than his White classmates.
But while many anthropologists and biologists did believe Blacks were intellectually inferior, others made it very plain they thought the reverse was true. The missionaries Samuel Crowther and Frederick Schon were two of them. Crowther was a ‘man of colour’, a man of mixed African and White European heritage, who went to bring Christianity to Africa, for which he became the first Anglican bishop of Africa outside the British empire. He held this post until racists in the Anglican church had it taken away from him. His fellow missionary, Frederick Schon, was a Swiss Protestant pastor. During the 19th century they were called up to testify about slavery and the Christian mission to Africa before the parliamentary commission of inquiry tasked with overseeing Britain’s attempt to exterminate slavery and the slave trade. The gentlemen of the committee asked them if the African pupils in the schools they set up were intellectually inferior to White, British children. They responded that they weren’t. Indeed, they felt they were actually rather more intelligent than White Brits. That is until they hit 14 or 15, when they became dull and uninterested. To prove that Black Africans were intellectually equal, they submitted various essays on Divinity, as RE was called back then, discussing God and Christianity, which had been written by these pupils. The good reverend gentlemen’s experience of teaching in Africa does rebut the claims by the supporters of the Bell Curve that Blacks are somehow less intelligent than Whites.
I admit, however, that their statement that the children lose interest and appear to become less intelligent when the hit their mid-teens is a problem. But this could well be due to cultural factors. Nigel Barley’s book anthropological novel, TheCoast, certainly suggests this is the case. Set in the 19th century, this about a British Christian missionary to west Africa, who utterly fails to convert the locals. In one episode, the missionary sets up a school for the local children, who are utterly uninterested in what he tries to teach them, until he starts talking about money. The African state in which the missionary is attempting to spread the Gospel, Akwa, is a very mercantile culture and its people are keenly interested in trade, including the local schoolchildren. Barley states in his introduction that Akwa is based on a number of historical states in that region of Africa. He’s a professional anthropologist, who has written a number of books, including his hilarious account of trying to do research among the Dowayo people of Cameroon, The Innocent Anthropologist. I’ve no doubt that, although fiction, The Coast is based on historical and anthropological fact. And it may have been similar cultural forces that resulted in Crowther’s and Schon’s school pupils similarly losing interest in the European schooling they were receiving when they entered puberty.
There is a problem with Black educational underachievement in the UK, for which a number of explanations have been suggested, including institutional racism in British society and the school system. Other factors may also include the breakdown of the Black family in particular, and the growth of urban gang culture.
Crowther’s and Schon’s experience of actually teaching in Africa, as well as Barley’s book, suggests that Black academic underperformance is almost certainly due to cultural and social factors, rather than biology.
Okay, the Batley and Spen by-election has happened, and the results are. The good news is that the extreme right-wing parties, who went there hoping to clean up, have all done spectacularly badly. I saw something that said they only got two per cent of the vote, and lost their deposits. So well done to the good voters of that constituency. More problematic is the fact that the Labour candidate, Kim Leadbeater, won, scraping through with a majority of 360 odd votes. As Mike’s pointed out in his piece about the election, this has effectively turned a Labour safe seat into a marginal. But Starmer has hailed it as a great victory, and according to one of the papers has told everyone that Leadbeater is the ‘future of Labour’.
I profoundly hope he’s wrong, but I fear that under is persecutory, opportunistic and factional leadership, he might be right.
Leadbeater was apparently parachuted into the constituency on a shortlist of precisely one. She was not even a Labour member until four months ago. She’s another Blairite Tory – I won’t say Tory lite’, as these scumbags may be more extreme in their views than the true Tories. Also according to Mike, in 2017 she was telling disabled people that there was no magic money tree for them. Despite the fact that the Tories raid the magic money tree whenever its convenient for them or their patrons, the superrich. Then there’s a whole orchard of the plants. As for her policies in this campaign, the Preston Journalist posted the video below analysing her electoral video. In it she talks about fighting local problems like litter and dog mess. This is all well and good, but as the Preston Journalist points out, it’s local authority stuff. MPs deal with bigger issues like attracting investment to the area. He also argued she made a mistake, in that, as the local council was Labour and so should have been tackling these issues, she’s attacking her own side.
I think there’s a simple reason behind her failure to articulate a set of policies: under Starmer, Labour doesn’t have any. There’s a policy review going on at the moment, but Starmer was elected promising to continue the great manifesto polices set by Jeremy Corbyn. Which he then promptly broke, ditching the policies, suspending the Labour leader and going on yet another witch hunt against his supporters. Like Blair, Starmer doesn’t really have any different policies. He’s a Tory, as are his supporters and the Blairite party bureaucracy. They have nothing to offer working people except more privatisation and the destruction of the welfare state and NHS for corporate profit. Like Blair, his whole election strategy seems to be to appeal once again to the middle class, swing voters and corporate donors, with the promise that somehow his administration will be more efficient at carrying out Tory policies than the Conservatives themselves. But as he has no real policies himself, he’s constantly flailing around trying to find an issue that he can jump on. The last one was trans rights. Before then he opportunistically took the knee to support BLM, even though he dismissed it when it broke out last year. Worse, he has shown himself entirely complacent and unwilling to confront real racism, and particularly the bullying of Black MPs and activists like Diane Abbott, in the party. Hence Black people are deserting the party in droves. So apparently, are Muslims.
One of the issues at the election was Kashmir. Simon Webb, the man behind the History Debunked Channel, produced a video discussing this in which he sneered at the Labour party. I’ve said many times before that Webb is a Torygraph reading Conservative, although he also said he didn’t have much time for Boris’ crew either. He’s a staunch critic of multiculturalism, and so said that it was a peculiar situation when an election in an English town could be decided by the situation in a country thousands of miles away. He also talked about pro-Palestinian demonstrations by Labour supporters in a neighbouring area, and then repeated the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism’s line that most Muslims are anti-Semitic. Webb is very pro-Israel, and he says he spent some time in Israel when he was younger working on a kibbutz, as many idealistic young people did way back in the 80s or so. He claimed that Muslim antagonism to Starmer’s leadership was anti-Semitic. They hate the Labour leader because his wife’s Jewish and his children are being raised in that faith. This is the first I’ve heard of it, and quite honestly I don’t care about the personal religious beliefs of himself or his family either. What matters far more is that Starmer has declared himself a firm Zionist, and continued the witch hunt against decent, anti-racist folk, including Jews and gentiles, who have fought real anti-Semitism, who have dared to make even the mildest criticism of Israel. As for Kashmir, Modi is a Hindu supremacist, whose party persecutes not just Muslims, but also Sikhs and Christians, as well as liberal Hindus concerned about his assault on democracy, plurality and interfaith tolerance. There are good reasons why people of all three of those faiths, and not just Muslims, should be sceptical about Starmer’s apparent backing of Modi. Muslims have an especially good reason to despise Starmer, because of the brutality of the Indian occupation. A month or so ago, Private Eye did a ‘Letter From Kashmir’ about it. Among other atrocities, this mentioned how Indian troopers were rounding up Muslim youths and then raping them. It’s a very good reason why people, who care about human rights, should be concerned about Starmer and his support for the Indian prime minister. But I doubt you’ll hear a word about this from Starmer.
Webb’s comments about Muslims, Kashmir and Palestine also shows the double standard behind the IHRA’s definition of anti-Semitism. According to this, which the Board of Deputy and its allied Zionist organisation were so keen to foist on the Labour party, it is anti-Semitic to claim that Jews are more loyal to another country. In all too many cases, this is true. Central to the real, anti-Semitic conspiracy theories is the belief that Jews have no love or loyalty to their host nations, and are really more loyal to rival nations. At the time of the First World War, Jewish German businessmen like Mond were suspected by the xenophobic right of being more loyal to Germany, while in later years it’s been Israel. When the fear hasn’t been that the Jews are just more loyal to each other, of course, and are actively plotting to enslave their non-Jewish compatriots.
But that example of anti-Semitism also raises problems, as there are Jewish Zionists, who made no secret that their primarily loyalty was to Israel. One of the most notorious of these was the casino magnate, Sheldon Adelson, who made no secret that his first loyalty was not to his home, America, but to Israel. There’s a double standard in Webb’s attitude in that I assume he would find it anti-Semitic for Jews to be accused of such conflicting loyalties, but not British Muslims.
Back to Leadbeater, it seems to me that she was selected primarily because she’s the sister of the late Jo Cox, assassinated years ago by a Nazi. She’s also a lesbian, and while this shouldn’t make any difference to whether someone’s suitable for a political career, I think support for gay rights and anti-racism are also a part of the Blairite political ideology and one of the few areas that mark the Labour party as a party of the left. It’s been pointed out that Blair was a liberal, not a socialist. He ditched the party’s Clause IV, pledging it to nationalisation, but retained the concern for tackling prejudice against minorities, which is a liberal policy. But Starmer’s complete lack of interest in retaining Black and Muslim voters shows that he’s not really interested in anti-racism either. And as the Tories also claim to support gay rights since David Cameron’s leadership, and Johnson has marked Pride week or month by decorating the front of No.10 in Pride colours, I don’t know how far support for that issue differentiates the two parties.
The mad right-winger, Alex Belfield, also couldn’t resist the opportunity to take another swipe at Diane Abbott. Abbott, apparently, congratulated Jeremy Corbyn for Leadbeater’s victory. To Belfield, this is yet another demonstration of how stupid she is. Well, I can’t say Abbott is my favourite MP, but I think she’s right. Under Corbyn, Labour’s majority in the constituency was 8,000. I think Leadbeater’s election was helped by the scandal about Hancock’s affair and subsequent resignation, but I’m sure that it was also helped by some of those, who had voted Labour under Corbyn, continuing to support the party.
Before the election, people were predicting that Labour would lose and it would spell the end of Starmer’s leadership of the party. That hasn’t happened, and it looks like he’s still going to hang on. But it’s not a stunning victory, and the Tories know it. Sargon of Gasbag and his fellow Lotus Eaters put up a video afterwards laughing at how terrible the result was. While it’s good that Labour was able to hang on to the seat after the humiliation of the previous elections, it’s still doesn’t dispel the fears of further electoral disaster.
Together, Leadbeater and Starmer decimated the Labour majority in Batley and Spen, showing how much of a busted flush Blairism is and why Starmer still needs to go as party leader.But he’s determined to hang on, and so we can expect further and worse results in the future.
Here’s another video from another Conservative youtuber, Simon Webb. Webb’s channel, History Debunked, specialises in attacking various myths and pseudo-history being pushed as authentic Black history. In this video he attacks the call from supporters of Critical Race Theory that there should be separate schools for Black pupils, and particularly for boys. He has seen for himself how such schools actually lead to worse academic performance and behaviour in such a school in Tottenham in Haringey. But some of the reasons for its failure – management by parents, instead of qualified teaching staff – are also a major problem for the Thatcherite free school project, which was intended to allow parents to break out of the state education system.
Webb begins by quoting a passage describing how one Black activist, Derek Ball, urged Blacks to abandon their demands for integrated schooling during the Civil Rights struggle, and instead concentrate on building good, all-Black schools to boost Black educational achievement. The argument for these is that, despite attending the same schools as Whites and Asians, Blacks, and particularly Black boys, still fall behind because of the lack of suitable role-models.
Webb describes how the Seventh Day Adventists in Haringey in 1980 set up their own, all-Black school as part of this ideology. Staff at the school, John Loughborough, were good, moral, upstanding people. Unfortunately, they had a problem recruiting proper teaching staff, so they were being taught by the friends and relatives of the people who founded it, who wanted a job. Webb states he noticed how the academic achievement and basic behaviour of the children of friends, who sent their kids there, progressively decline. Their interest in and performance in vital subjects like maths and physics declined. At the same time, their interests narrowed to Black music, culture and politics. The teaching staff were unable to keep discipline, and so their behaviour became worse, instead of better. By the 1990s, when Haringey closed it down, it was the worse school in the borough.
Webb states that he has heard similar stories from across the Pond, and there are also similar stories about Muslim and Orthodox Jewish schools in this country. In the case of the Orthodox Jewish school, the educational curriculum was extremely narrow, so that its former pupils were left unprepared for life in wider British society. The same is true of the Muslim schools, while many of the pupils at the former John Loughborough school have a chip on their shoulder about how poor their schooling was, and its inability to prepare them for mainstream British society. He states that the problem with schools is that their management requires a very specific set of skills, which most parents don’t have. He states that in all the similar schools of which he knows, Black, Muslim, Orthodox Jewish, there are similar problems – a narrow curriculum, safeguarding issues and poor discipline.
The demand for racially segregated schools to benefit Blacks goes back several decades. I can remember the idea being debated in the 1990s. Round about the time Bristol City Museum was setting up its ‘A Respectable Trade’ exhibition about the city’s role in the slave trade, a women wrote into the local paper, then the Bristol Evening Post, calling for such schools. There were similar moves before then. After the riots in the St. Paul’s area in 1981/2, the council sent into schools various teams and advisors to teach the children not to be racist. This included the school at which my mother taught. This was accepted by staff and parents, though I do remember that the headmaster at the time refusing to allow the same anti-racist educators to take Black children out of the school to have special lessons on their Black identity, or something like that, as he was firmly against any kind of segregation.
I also recall Thatcher’s attempt to break up the state education system. As well as the City Academies, which were so terrible she and her education secretary, Norman Fowler, were actually winding up before Blair later relaunched them as academies when he came into power, she also announced she was passing legislation for free schools outside Local Education Authority Control. No longer would parents have to tolerate sub-standard education as the hands of evil lefty teachers and local councils. No! Parents would now have the power to break free and found their own schools, run how they wished. Which would undoubtedly do well due to market forces. All absolutely tripe, of course. Teaching really is a skilled profession, which not everyone can do. But right-wing governments like those of the Tories and Blair have been able to use it as a political football and partially privatise it by playing on the general belief that ordinary people know how to teach and manage a class better than the professionals. I remember back in the 1980s how the right-wing press, including the Bristol Evening Post, was constantly attacking teachers with scare stories about Communist teachers indoctrinating children. Thatcher herself, in one of her wretched speeches, was scathing about ‘anti-racist mathematics’, while her lapdog paper, the Scum, ran the story about children in Brent or Lambeth being taught to sing ‘Ba Ba Green Sheep’ because the original nursery rhyme, ‘Ba Ba Black Sheep’, was supposedly racist.
And the concerns about the narrowness of the curriculum in some of the free schools and academies run by religious organisations are perfectly justified. A few years ago there were concerns about the Muslim schools up north, with allegations that they were being run very strictly in accordance with traditional Islamic practice. The sexes were segregated, discipline harsh, and the curriculum narrowly religious. There have been allegations since that this wasn’t the case, and such concerns were the result of Islamophobia. The Christian schools set up by a the evangelical Christian head of a haulage company have also been criticised for their severe and humiliating discipline, as well as teaching Creationism as science. As for Orthodox Jewish schools, the French academic, Alfred Kepel, in his book about the rise of religious fundamentalism, The Revenge of God, describes one such school in Paris where the only secular subject was maths.
I am certainly not against faith-based schools. Both Mike and I went to an Anglican church school and got a Christian education. But the school also strongly condemned sectarian and racial prejudice, and did take children to other, non-Christian places of worship, like the local mosque, as a way of teaching them about those faiths.
Nevertheless, the very narrow focus of some religious or racial organisations in the education they wish to provide should be of concern. Whatever their faith or none, children need and deserve a broad education which promotes their personal achievement and growth and prepares them for wider British society rather than isolating them in self-imposed ghettoes. And they also need to be taught by properly qualified, experienced and skilled staff, rather than ordinary people, who wrongly think they can teach thanks to decades of being told so by the right-wing press.
The free schools and academies may not provide this, and in many cases they certainly don’t. But they make profits for the academy chains and support the Tory ideology of attacking the state provision of education.
I’ve no doubt that racially segregated education is a failure, regardless of whether it is intended to benefit Blacks or other ethnic minorities. So are the free schools and academies generally.
All of them should be wound up, and schooling returned to the state and control of local authorities.
One of the most shocking stories this week is the trial of Daniel Hussein, who is accused of having murdered two Black women as part of a demonic pact. When the rozzers searched Hussein’s home, they found a handwritten document in which Hussein pledged to sacrifice a woman a month to a demon in return for which the demon would make him win the national lottery, allow him to live in luxury and wealth and protect him from being discovered. Well, as the old proverb goes, ‘the Devil is a gentleman who doesn’t keep his word’. It’s an horrific crime of the type that’s committed by evil maniacs and which used to furnish plots for the X-Files.
Simon Webb of History Debunked put up a video yesterday commenting on it. He pointed out that while such pacts with Satan and the forces of hell were part of the medieval European, Christian worldview, as shown in the Faust legend about the 16th century German magician who sold his soul to the Devil, it’s been absent in the West for six hundred years. So what has caused it’s return? He points to Islam. He says that he has nothing against the religion, but it surprised at how little westerners actually know about it. In his experience, the belief in djinn – the genies of the Arabian Nights – witchcraft and sorcery is a major part of the worldview of the average Muslim, and mentions that the other Friday he was talking to three young Muslim men of 17-19 at a further education college about the djinn that was supposed to be tormenting one of them. It is this worldview, held by two million Muslims in this country, that has meant that parts of Britain have regressed to the Middle Ages without anyone noticing.
Okay, belief in the djinn is part of the Muslim worldview. They’re mentioned in the Qu’ran, which states that one of their number is Iblis, Shaitan or the Devil. The ex-Muslim atheist vlogger Harris Sultan put up a video a month or so ago laughing at a Pakistani mullah, who was claiming to have met the djinn and officiated at their marriages. Way back in the 1990s or early part of this century, a Yemeni newspaper apparently caused a sensation by printing photos of what it claimed were the djinn. Alas not. They were really carvings at an adventure park somewhere in Britain.
But the prevalence of a belief in djinn doesn’t explain a crime like this. There are, after all, large numbers of Christians worldwide who believe in a real, literal Devil, but that hasn’t meant that crimes like Hussein’s are any more common in Christianity. The black magician Aleister Crowley spent more time than almost anyone else casting spells and summoning demons while posing as ‘the Great Beast 666’ but he only joked about sacrificing children. I think he was simply enjoying himself far too much with a life of sex, drugs, necromancy and mountaineering to want to do anything really evil.
It’s also open to doubt how rationalistic the West really is. A survey of mystical experiences among the western public in the 2000s showed that actually they were quite common, but people were simply reluctant to talk about them in case people thought they were mad. The historian of modern witchcraft, Owen Davies, found that ordinary people retained a very strong belief in the existence of witchcraft long after the passage of the 1736 Witchcraft Act. This act effectively ended the witch-hunts in Britain by making it illegal to pretend to be a witch or have occult powers for monetary gain. It saw witchcraft as a form of fraud, rather than a real, demonic force. But the records of court cases in which mostly elderly women were attacked and cut on their foreheads shows that the mass of the British population still believed in it. In folklore, it was believed one way to get rid of a witch’s curse was to attack them and cut them ‘above the breath’. Davies’ book, published in the 90s, provides a wealth of supporting information that shows that belief in real, Satanic witchcraft continued into the 20th century. This is apart from the rise of Wicca and modern neo-paganism, which is a separate thing entirely, in my opinion, which owes more to 19th century occultism and ritual magic than traditional British folklore.
What the murders remind me of most is some of the horrific Satanic crimes carried out back in the 1990s. This was the age of the Satanism scare, when some fanatical evangelical Christians and militant feminists were running around accusing perfectly innocent people of membership of Satanic covens and the ritual abuse and murder of children. The Fontaine Report, an official government investigation into this, found that there was no evidence such covens existed.
In addition to this, there were unfortunately, real, unpleasant people who did torture and murder people for Satanic kicks. These were mostly mixed-up teenagers and young people, like the Haemogoblins, a teenage gang in America who thought they were vampires. There was also a whole vampire subculture based on the novels of Anne Rice, some of whose members may have taken the whole thing waaaay too seriously. But most of these really shocking crimes were committed by youngsters, who’d read too much bad horror literature. Quite often what they knew about Satanism came from one of the rubbish evangelical books supposedly revealingly it, or from Heavy Metal records. Which has caused problems for some rock stars, who were only interested in producing awesome music. As Ozzy Osbourne told the British investigative reporter Robin Cook, ‘I have enough trouble conjuring myself out of bed in the morning, let alone evil spirits.’
The ritual murder of which Hussein is accused looks far more like the crimes committed by these mixed-up, White nutters than something uniquely Muslim. And I think that if he did commit it, then the same factors will probably be found to have motivated him.
I don’t think we have to worry about large numbers of Muslims making pacts with the Devil and dragging us back to the Middle Ages just yet.
For a brief period about 1991 I tried pursuing a research degree in British Islam. I ended up giving it up because it would have been mostly sociology and I was having difficulty getting informants, and because I found it difficult to cope with some of the anti-Christian polemic. I’ve Muslim friends, and didn’t want my experience of this material poisoning my relationship with them or my overall view of British Islam. I’ve blogged before about the passages I found in books published by British Islamic publishers like TaHa calling for autonomous Muslim colonies in the UK. But one of the very worst books I found was one of the college bookshelves literally demonising Whites. This was published in Pakistan, but in English and so clearly aimed at the global Muslim community. It was written by someone who had clearly spent time in Britain before moving back to Pakistan. And a fair section of it was loud denunciations of White Brits and British society for being mean and racist.
In the years since, I forgot its title, but the book’s sheer vitriol has stayed with me, and I do think that it and books like it are fuelling the rise of militant Islam around the world and the alienation of many western Muslims. Among the book’s claims was that the White peoples of Europe, particularly those who speak languages related to German, Dutch, English and the Scandinavian languages, are the descendants of the tribes of Gog and Magog, known in Islam as Juj and Majuj. These are anti-Muslim peoples, the servants of al-Dajjal, the Muslim equivalent of the anti-Christ in Christianity, who were walled up behind a mountain chain by the Islamic hero Dhu’l-Carneyn. I went Googling for it yesterday to see if I could find it on the internet. I think I have, or something very like it. It’s Cain’s Creed, The Cult(s) of Rome, by Dr. Omar Zaid. The book seems to be largely a rant directed against the Roman Catholic church and particularly the Jesuits, as well as, inevitably, the Jews. It draws heavily on the bonkers 19th century anti-Catholic Protestant diatribe, the Two Babylons. If it isn’t that book, then Zaid’s is very like it and certainly following it ideological line in the demonisation of White Europeans. Zaid put up a blog post about his wretched tome, which contains this dainty little passage.
This region (Anatolia, Syria, Lebanon, Khazaria etc.) is a major focus of Monotheism’s eschatology and deviancy as it holds ancient houses of satanic cults that are directly related to the present globalist menace. It appears that Gog & Magog refer to the peoples descended from Tubal-Cain and Noah’s errant stock that became Slavonic and Teutonic Caucasian Races respectively and then trod in all directions during the course of two dispersions, reaching Egypt, Persia, Pakistan and beyond.
See ‘GOG & MAGOG BY DR. OMAR’ at Gog & Magog by Dr. Omar – zaidpub, which is an extract from Omar Zaid’s book, Cain’s Creed, The Cult(s) of Rome, published by Dar al-Wahi.
If it is the same book, then it also contains long passages ranting about how Whites Brits are all racist and callous. He states that we don’t care if an elderly woman dies in the street, but shamefully get upset about the maltreatment of dogs, which are an unclean animal in Islam. But he’s also massively impressed with how wealthy the country is, which betrays something of the mentality of the hostile invader. It very reminiscent of Napoleon’s description of Britain – ‘a good land with a bad people’.
Now I’m very much aware that this is only one book, but I can remember that as an undergraduate studying Islam for my Religious Studies minor that one of the lecturers told us that some of the material being published in Pakistan was vitriolically anti-Christian. This was nearly forty years ago, and I think the situation must have become much worse since as the country has become intolerantly religious. Christians and other religious minorities, like the Shi’a and Ahmadis are increasingly persecuted, accused and imprisoned under spurious blasphemy charges or murdered in mob violence.
Now I am very definitely not trying to demonise Muslims here by posting about it. I’m very aware of the rise of Islamophobia, especially as stoked by Boris Johnson and the Tory party, despite their denials. I can quite believe that the author was the victim of terrible racism in Britain, having heard of some of the ‘pranks’ and maltreatment meted out to Asian workers at the time and more recently.
But I wanted to discuss this to make the point that other nations and cultures too have their own prejudices and racial hatreds. The BLM protests have renewed discussions and attacks on White western racism, but there is little or no discussion or examination of Black and Asian prejudice. This exists, but is denied and any mention of it suppressed or silence by accusations of racism in turn. You’re a racist bigot if you dare talk about anti-White racism in Britain or elsewhere. And so we have a very unbalanced view where all Whites are increasingly seen through the lens of Critical Race Theory as embodying White privilege and embedded in a racist system, while any attempt to discuss Black and Asian anti-White racism is furiously denied.
This has to change. All forms of prejudice and racial hatred have to be fought and attacked, even if this is uncomfortable for parts of the Left.
Because if it isn’t, the Tories will exploit it to divide the working class and inflict more misery, poverty and death on working people of all colours and religions.
I’m a fan of the British folk musician John Renbourne, formerly of the group Pentangle way back in the ’60s and ’70s. I first encountered his music through the album Ship of Fools, which I bought way back in the late ’80s/ early ’90s. ‘Traveller’s Prayer’ is a peculiarly haunting piece with its mixture of pagan and Christian imagery, addressed as a hymn to the moon.
‘Gurt lush’ is a Bristol dialect expression, used for anything tasty or delicious. I found this video of the Gurt Lush choir and the Gurt Western Orchestra – gurt is a West Country word meaning ‘great’, ‘big’ – performing the piece at the Colston Hall in Bristol in 2015 on the Choir’s channel on YouTube. They’ve put up this description of the piece and its origins in Scots Gaelic folk hymns.
This lovely pagan hymn was composed by virtuoso guitarist John Renbourn, once a member of Pentangle. The melody is very much in the Protestant hymn-tune tradition, but the harmonies sound older and darker; and the words seem to come from somewhere older still, from times when pre-Christian pagan traditions continued to be mingled in with superimposed Christian beliefs. Renbourn in fact based his lyric on a prayer titled A Ghealach Ur (The New Moon), which used to be recited on the Isle of Barra in the Outer Hebrides. This was collected in the late nineteenth century by an excise man and folklorist named Alexander Carmichael who travelled widely in the Highlands and Islands. Carmichael made friends with the Gaelic-speaking tinker folk in many places and they shared with him their traditional travellers’ prayers, stories, invocations and healing rites. He gathered these together and published them in 1900 as a collection titled Carmina Gadelica.
I’m definitely not a pagan, and just like this piece because it’s a beautiful piece of a music, although I must confess that I do like its pagan and Christian imagery. I hope you also enjoy it.
