Today’s Indie has published an article in their ‘Voices’ section by Smriti Singh, ‘Voices: British Indians have a racism problem – we need to be honest about it’ talking about anti-Muslim prejudice in the British Hindu community. This has been generated by Modi and his Hindu-supremacist BJP, with their hatred of non-Hindu minorities and particularly Muslims. Anti-Muslim messages and images have as result been published not just for domestic Indian Hindus audiences, but also for the consumption of Hindu communities abroad, particularly in Britain. The article begins
‘I was recently sent a WhatsApp clip of a street vendor in India, dressed in a manner that suggested he was Muslim, apparently spitting into food containers. The clip was clearly doctored and shared in the name of “raising awareness”. But in fact it was intended to stir up more hatred against India’s Muslims – not just there, but among Hindus here in Britain.
I come from a family of immigrants – my parents came to the UK from India and we all experienced racism, particularly in the early days. Yet despite this, I am heartbroken by how much racism I am seeing from British Hindus today, directed at Muslims and stirred up by India’s extreme right-wing government.
Since the election of the BJP government in 2014, Hindu fundamentalism has been growing in India. Legislative changes from the top, with the judiciary and mainstream media capitulating to this agenda, are turning India from a secular country to one that puts “Hindu” first.
In 2019, the BJP passed the Citizenship Amendment Act, providing Indian citizenship to refugees from Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan – but specifically excluding Muslims. Muslim girls who wear the hijab are increasingly excluded from schools. There are frequent reports of lynchings of Muslims for (allegedly) killing cows. Day-to-day life for religious minorities, particularly Muslims and lower-caste Hindus, is becoming harder.’
Respect to the Indie for publishing this article, which would surely annoy Diane Abbott. I’ve said for a long time that racism in Britain is complex and not simply a case of White prejudice against and victimisation of people of colour. I’ve heard that in some schools in Bristol, the big problem of racial friction and gang fighting in the playground wasn’t between Blacks and Whites, but between various groups of Asians. But the mainstream anti-racists really don’t seem to want to recognise the complexity of situation or that it simply isn’t Whites against non-Whites. One Asian man at a Labour gathering asked Diane Abbott about doing something about racism amongst Britain’s different ethnic communities. She reply that she didn’t want anything done, because ‘they’ would use it to ‘divide and conquer’. Which shows you how fixed and racist her own anti-racist views paradoxically are.
This little article from the wretched Torygraph turned up on my internet news feed. According to the right-wing rag, Justin Welby, the current Archbishop of Canterbury, said he was deeply moved at the abuse suffered by J.K. Rowling and others like her for her views on gender during a debate on freedom of speech in the House of Lords yesterday. During the debate, Lady Jenkin, for the Conservatives, attacked the dangers of cancel culture and the abuse of gender critical women like J.K. Rowling and Kathleen Stock. She said that it wasn’t just the abuse on social media that was wrong, but that their livelihoods were being threatened. This was deterring more people from standing up in their defence. She also said that it wasn’t a case of women versus trans people.
Okay, the Tories in their own way are also trying to shut down debate and democracy through putting increasing restrictions on the right to demonstrate and proposing legislation that would allow them to ignore the judgements of the courts. And this is before we get to Priti Patel’s fascistic desire to strip members of ethnic minorities of British citizenship if they commit a crime, which would turn them into second class citizens.
But it is good that at last someone in authority is taking notice of the abuse and worse hurled by trans rights activists at J.K. Rowling. She’s been accused of hating trans people, and wanting them all dead. None of which is remotely true. She has said simply that transwomen are not women. As did professor Kathleen Stock, who was forced out of her post due student demonstrations including threats of violence. One of the worst aspects of Rowling’s persecution is the complete silence of PEN, the organisation that defends writers worldwide from persecution. A worthy cause, but Private Eye has run several articles in its literary section reporting that PEN has said not a dickie bird against Rowling’s persecution which has included death threats. This has demonstrated the power of the trans lobby, and the fear many have that if they too speak out, they will suffer the same treatment.
Of course trans rights activists have the right to express their views, but not to hurl abuse or issue threats of violence and death. These should be unacceptable whoever makes them. J.K. Rowling and others should have their freedom of speech respected and defended by the authorities against the mob. And it is excellent that it is being done at last, even if it is by the right.
This week the Tories once again took away more of the British people’s hard-won freedoms with the Nationality and Borders bill, proposed by Dominic Raab and the noxious Priti ‘Vacant’ Patel. This allows the government to strip a naturalised Brit of their citizenship, without giving notice to the person concerned. It follows the 2002 act that allowed the government to strip someone of British nationality so long as they had another. Then there’s the 2014 Immigration Act, pushed through by Tweezer when she was home secretary, that allows the government to strip someone of their citizenship, even if it left them stateless, so long as they could apply to another country for theirs. The Home Office decided that notifying the person affected could be done simply by putting it in their file if their whereabouts were unknown. The High Court ruled that this was insufficient, and so Patel has including legislation exempting the process from judicial review. Which has been described by Ian Dunt at inews as retrospective legislation denying people their right to appeal. It doesn’t matter how long the naturalised person has been here. They could have been here their entire lives, Patel and Raab can still strip them of their British nationality. This has been excused on the pretext that it would stop foreign criminals using human rights legislation to avoid deportation, particularly under the legislation protecting ‘the right to family life’. This is another Tory lie. Mike has pointed out that no foreign criminal has ever dodged deportation using that clause. The effect of the act is to turn immigrants into second-class citizens. This has chilling implications for the rest of us, because what Tony Benn said was true: the Tories start their attacks on people’s rights with immigrants before moving on to the settled population. But as this appears to target Blacks, Asians and channel migrants, it will inevitably be supported by racists.
It’s alarmed very many people. The increased restrictions on immigration have been criticised by a number of Jewish organisation, including Reform Judaism. They have stated that Jews who fled to Britain in the 1930s were not protected in 2021. According to Zelo Street, the Board of Deputies has expressed similar concerns. But Zelo Street has also pointed out that Patel’s and Raab’s wretched legislation particularly affects Jews because of Israel’s ‘Right of Return’. According to this, all Jews everywhere have the right to settle in Israel. Benjamin Netanyahu went further, and declared that every Jew around the world automatically had Israeli citizenship. This didn’t impress the growing number of Jews critical of Israel and its persecution of the Palestinians. One Jewish American said on the Net how ridiculous it was that he, who came from Anchorage in Alaska and had never been to Israel, had the right to settle their, while his friend, a Palestinian, was banned from entering his homeland. And the Israeli state certainly seems to share this sentiment when it comes to The Wrong Kind of Jews. There have been a number of instances where Jews, who have voiced criticisms of Israel, have been very quickly rounded up by the Israeli authorities and put on the next flight home when they’ve tried to enter the country. It’s obviously a case of all Jews being citizens of Israel, except for those that aren’t.
But the effect of Netanyahu’s wretched piece of legislation combined with Patel’s and Raab’s is that any Jew, who gained their British citizenship through naturalisation can now be stripped of it, as there is somewhere else they can go. The Street notes that despite all the screams about Corbyn and anti-Semitism, in reality genuine anti-Semitism comes from the far right. And this is the direction in which this government is moving. The Street concludes
‘That may not be the current intention of Ms Patel and her pals. But, with the certainty of night following day, after they come for the Muslims, the far-right come for the Jews.
And the far-right have now been quietly emboldened. Be afraid. Be very afraid.’
Absolutely. But one other thing may be said about this vile piece of legislation and Britain’sJ ewish community:
It would never have been passed by a Corbyn government and Jews would have been protected.
Corbyn was never an anti-Semite. Indeed, he is one of the most anti-racist MPs and has spoken up in the House and elsewhere in support of the Jewish community. He was simply critical of Israel and its persecution of the Palestinians. But the militant Zionists, who denounced him and his supporters as Jew-haters don’t distinguish between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. As a result, Britain has been denied a government, which would have actively defended the rights of Jews alongside other ethnic groups. Instead we have an increasingly extreme right-wing Tory government, which is taking those rights away, alongside those of the mainstream, White, gentile population.
And unfortunately, this is a government that has the support of those who claim to represent Britain’s Jews. When Tweezer got in, she was congratulated by the Chief Rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis. Who was one of those pushing the anti-Semitism smears against Labour. Now, partly thanks to this smear campaign, British Jews are left vulnerable to real anti-Semitic persecution. All done perfectly legally by the next racist, who fancies his or her chances as the new Oswald Mosley.
The BUF also had women members, who used to go out goose-stepping to defend Britain from Communism. I wonder if Patel’s wardrobe contains the odd black shirt and jackboots?
This is another excellent piece of news I found in Wednesday’s issue of the I, for 16th September 2020. It reports that the Spanish government has passed a historic law banning the glorification of General Franco, the country’s Fascist dictator, and granting reparations to his victims. The article reads
Spain has passed a law to give reparations to the victims of the late dictator General Francisco Franco.
The Democratic Memory Law will ban the foundation which guards the memory of the dictator and fine those who glorify Franco up to 150,000 euros (£138,000).
The mausoleum where Franco’s body lay for more than four decades will also be transformed into a civilian cemetery as part of other changes. School children will be taught about the law.
This is the same law that an earlier article in that same day’s edition reported offers Spanish citizenship to the descendants of Brits who served in the International Brigades that fought against Franco in the Spanish civil war. It’s a great piece of news. Franco was a butcher, who held on to power from the his victory at the end of the civil war to his death in 1975. There’s evidence, but no proof, that he may have been helped launch his rebellion against Spain’s Republican government by our secret services.
Spanish liberals have fought long and hard to overturn his legacy. Spanish archaeologists have faced considerable resistance to the excavation of the mass graves of the old thug’s victims. His mausoleum was particularly offensive. He claimed that it was a monument to everyone who fell in the civil war, regardless of what side they were on. In fact it solely glorified Franco and his Fascists. And he continued to cast a long shadow over Spain even decades after his death. I remember the looks of real horror and fear that came into the face of young Spaniards back in the 1990s at the mere mention of his name.
There was a statue of him on horseback somewhere, which has become a rallying point for Fascist scumbags from across Europe. I don’t know whether that’s still around, but the Spanish people made their own efforts to take it down. Way back in the 1980s its hindquarters were blown off with a bomb. And he was another dictator, who liked having towns and villages named after him. One of these got into the news in 1980s as it changed its name. I can’t remember precisely what the new name was, except that it roughly translated as ‘Our Town’ or ‘Our Village’. Which is obviously better than Pueblo Franco or whatever.
He was like the rest of the dictators in that he was of much less than imposing stature. I’ve got a biography of him somewhere, which said that he was under five foot tall and had a high, piping voice. He was a pious Roman Catholic, and his father had left his mother for another woman, leaving her to bring him up. He was thus very chaste, and so when he was an officer in Spanish north Africa, the other troops thought he was gay because he didn’t visit the brothels.
He was a brutal disciplinarian. When he was an officer in north Africa, he had an Arab/Berber solider shot after the man threw his meal at him. He was ruthless in his treatment of the north Africans, and treated the Spanish the same way in the civil war and his reign afterwards.
It’s great that at last the Spanish have been able to undo his cult, and are offering citizenship to the descendants of the people, who fought against him, and reparations to his victims. It’s just a pity that it’s taken all this time to do it.
I found this great piece of news in yesterday’s I newspaper, for Wednesday, 16th September 2020. It’s a piece by Graham Keeley, ‘Spanish offer to those in UK related related to civil war heroes’, reporting that Spain is offering citizenship to the descendants of the British volunteers who fought against General Franco and his Fascists. The article reads
British descendants of the members of the International Bridgade, which fought fascism in the Spanish civil war, have been offered Spanish citizenship as part of a new law which confronts the legacy of the dictatorship of General Francisco Franco.
Some 2,500 British volunteers went to Spain to support the Republican government against an armed uprising by Nationalist troops loyal to General Francisco Franco in the conflict between 1936-1939.
Yesterday Pablo Iglesias, the Spanish deputy prime minister, confirmed that descendants of the International Brigades “that fought for the liberty and against fascism in Spain” would be eligible for Spanish citizenship.
He tweeted : “Now is the time to say from this government to these heroes and heroines: thanks for coming.”
About 35,000 members of the International Brigades from around the world fought in Spain. No British volunteers are still alive.
Jim Jump, president o fthe International Brigade Memorial Trust, told I: “We are delighted. It honours the descendants who have kept up the memories of their relatives who went to Spain to fight fascism. It comes at an important time when Spain tries to deal with its past.”
The offer of nationality to the descendants was one of the measures in the Democratic Memory law, which was passed by Spain’s government and which also offers reparations to the victims of General Franco.
The article is accompanied by a box explaining that the novelist George Orwell was nearly killed when he was shot in the neck while fighting in a left-wing militia, the POUM. Orwell famously describes his experience fighting in Spain in his Homage to Catalonia.
This is great news, as Spanish liberals have fought long and hard to combat Franco’s legacy. When I was studying for my archaeology Ph.D., I went to a seminar where a Spanish archaeologist described the excavations that were being carried out on the mass graves of those massacred by the Spanish dictator.These were being done despite opposition from the surviving members of the Spanish extreme right. There’s also controversy over Franco’s mausoleum. Franco claimed that this was to commemorate everyone, who fought in the civil war. In fact, it just glorifies him and his fellow Fascists.
But there have also been other moves to celebrate the contribution of the International Brigade. The anti-racist, anti-religious extremism organisation Hope Not Hate reported a couple of years ago that a brewery had launched a pint commemorating the International Brigade, though I’ve forgotten what the beer was called.
I also wonder if this initiative is another, liberal response to allow some Brits with links to the country to get round Brexit. A few years ago the Germans granted citizenship to British Jews, who left their country fleeing the Nazis. And the Irish have also offered citizenship to Brits, whose grandparents were Irish.
Next week’s Radio Times for 20th-26th April 2019 has a long interview with veteran thesp Miriam Margolyes. It’s partly publicity for her forthcoming documentary, Miriam’s Dead Good Adventure, in which she explores death and how people cope with it. This includes venturing into the kind of territory Louis Theroux explored in his Weird Weekends all those years ago, when he explored the weirder margins of American society. In her case, Margolyes meets a group, who believe they can use orgasmic energy to stave off death forever, making them immortal. Needless to say, she doesn’t believe a word of it.
Most interestingly, Margolyes discusses the anti-Semitism allegations against the Labour party and Jeremy Corbyn, making it very clear that she doesn’t believe in them either. She condemns the Israeli oppression of the Palestinians, and describes how her view have led to her being vilified by pro-Israel groups and individuals, like Maureen Lipman. And like Jackie Walker, another Jewish anti-Zionist lady of mature years, she was radicalised through her opposition to apartheid in South Africa. This section of the interview runs
A Labour Party member, she has firm opinions about anti-Semitism accusations directed at the party. “Jeremy Corbyn, who is an excellent constituency representative, a serious person, is not an anti-Semite. I don’t think there is the extent of anti-Semitism in the Labour Party that people seem to imply,” she says. “I think it’s to do with trying to stop Corbyn from being prime minister”. She is also critical of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. “It’s just a fact that the Israelis have behaved appallingly, they continue to do so, and people are dying. I am ashamed, as a Jew, of what’s been done in my my name. I can’t bear it. And for that I’m vilified and people won’t come to see the plays I’m in. I’ve become, as it were a kind of minuscule Vanessa Redgrave when she was vilified for her political position. But I am right. I have no doubt about that whatever”.
I wonder how it feels to be separated from your own community. “It hurts me,” she says. “I’m so Jewish, and so happy to be Jewish. And the schism between me and Maureen Lipman, which is the manifestation of this chasm, causes me pain.”
Lipman is a very public supporter of Israel. IN 2015 she demonstrated with pro-Israeli groups outside a production of a pro-Palestinian play in London. “She feels that I am a wicked traitor to my people,” says Margolyes. “And I feel that she’s a fool.” The two appeared together in a 1989 British Telecom commercial spoofing Jewish domestic life, now Margolyes admits it would be difficult if they met in the street. “I hope I would be civil. I’m sad because I admire Maureen, and I have known her for a long time. She’s been a friend, and now it’s not possible any more. I expect she might be said, too. But she said don’t communicate with me again and I haven’t.”
She says she feels compelled to stand against injustice in the world. “For me, it’s the same sort of cause as apartheid. I was marching on South Africa House when I was young and, unfortunately, it’s now my own people I’ve got to march against. That’s painful, but I won’t pretend. If you can’t tell the truth when you’re 77, when are you going to tell it?”
Jewish Opposition to Zionism as Anti-Semitism
Over a decade ago she was one of a number of public figures, who condemned the Israeli bombardment of Gaza, and she made her Jewishness very plain then too. She stated that she was a ‘proud Jew, and an ashamed Jew’. She says in the interview that she doesn’t believe in God, but she loves Jewish life, the cooking, culture and community. She shares her happiness with her Jewish identity with many of the other Jewish critics of Israel, both Torah-observant and secular/ atheist, who have also been vilified for their stance against the Israeli oppression and ethnic cleansing of the indigenous Arabs. People like Jackie Walker, Tony Greenstein, Martin Odoni and many others. And many Jewish critics of Israel find it utterly ridiculous, even anti-Semitic, that they should be considered traitors by their community, because they’d don’t support a foreign country that they weren’t born in. Greenstein, David Rosenberg, and the Israeli historian, Ilan Pappe, have made the point that until recently the majority of the Jewish people rejected Zionism, partly because they were afraid that it would lead to accusations that Jews’ loyalties were divided between their homeland and that of the Jewish state. Indeed, at the beginning of the Zionist project, Zionism was strongly associated with anti-Semitism because of the number of real Jew-haters, who wanted to expel their Jewish populations to some other country, and the establishment of a Jewish state would be perfect for this purpose. The majority of Jews wished to stay in their native homelands and be accepted as equal citizens with their gentile fellow countrymen and women. The establishment of the state of Israel has indeed led to diaspora Jews being accused of being more loyal to Israel than their home countries, not least because Benjamin Netanyahu actually declared that the Jewish people and Israel are synonymous and identical. All Jews, everywhere, are citizens of Israel. The Palestinians, however, are not. Which is why activists like Tony Greenstein make it very clear that Israel isn’t a democracy, as it is not a state of its citizens but of a single, privileged ethnic group.
Maureen Lipman’s Attack on Ed Miliband
As for Maureen Lipman, she’s a great actor, but she has boiled her brain on this issue. She’s claimed to have left the Labour party because of Corbyn. She didn’t. She left it a few years ago when Ed Miliband, who’s Jewish, became leader. Miliband made some mild policy departures from a rigidly pro-Israel line, so Lipman threw a strop and left, ranting about how the party was now anti-Semitic. She wasn’t the only one. As Mike and the other left-wing bloggers have pointed out, the anti-Semitism smears date from this time, long before Corbyn became leader. Which makes utter nonsense of the claim that Corbyn, one of the most anti-racist and determined opponents of anti-Semitism, is a Jew-hater.
Other Victims of Witchhunt Silenced by Media
It’s refreshing that the Radio Times should give space to Margolyes’ views, and I’m sorry that she, too, is suffering vilification and smears for her opposition to Israel that other critics and activists, both Jewish and non-Jewish, are also receiving. But unfortunately the media, including the Beeb, is still determined to repeat these smears and libels. Those abused, like Mike, may be able to correct these attacks through IPSO, but it’s very difficult for the victims to take their attackers to court for libel. This is largely because of the huge costs involved, but also because there are time limits on libel actions and the newspapers do everything they can to stall and stonewall them until they run out of time. And I have yet to see any part of the lamestream media invite those, who have been smeared as anti-Semites, onto their programmes to defend themselves. The noble exception to this have been the new, alternative broadcasters like RT and Novara Media. George Galloway has had Jackie Walker and Tony Greenstein on his show, Sputnik, on RT to make their case and describe their experience of victimisation in the anti-Semitic witchhunt. But the Beeb, ITV, Channel 4, Channel 5 and others have yet to do so. Meanwhile Laura Kuenssberg and the other liars of the BBBC newsroom have been free to continue their promotion of the lies and smears against Corbyn and his supporters without any criticism or dissent whatsoever, urged on by the rest of the mendacious right-wing media and Jewish establishment.
I’m pleased Margolyes has been able to present the other side of the argument in the RT, and would like other anti-Israel activists also to have the opportunity to explain their position and rebut the anti-Semitism smears. But the majority are ordinary people, like Mike, Greenstein, Walker, Odoni, Wadsworth and Chilson, who aren’t already media figures and so are denied a proper, sympathetic platform. And so the lies and smears continue.
According to today’s I, for 9th April 2019, the American Democrat politician, Beto O’Rourke, has called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a racist, citing CNN. The article, ‘Israeli PM racist, says top Democrat’, runs
Democratic White House hopeful Beto O’Rourke has branded Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a “racist” and an obstacle to peace in the Middle East. He made the remarks while discussing the US-Israel relationship and the Israeli leader’s vow to annex Jewish settlements in West Bank, said CNN (P. 2).
Now I have my doubts about how true this statement is. There have been allegations that CNN has deliberately misquoted Democrat politicos to make them look bad, and I think some of them involve supposed comments about Israel. But there should be absolutely no doubt that Benjamin Netanyahu is racist, and that the Israeli state, contra to the I.H.R.A. definition of anti-Semitism, really is a deeply racist endeavour. It defines itself as the Jewish state so that all Jews, everywhere, are citizens of Israel. This excludes Israel’s indigenous people, the Palestinians, from citizenship. Netanyahu has declared that the Palestinians are treated equally, but this equality really exists only on paper. In practice there is a system of rigid apartheid. Jews live under Israeli law, Palestinians under military law. 95 per cent of Israeli land is held by the Jewish National Fund, which will not lease it to non-Jews. There are separate roads for Jews and Arabs, some municipalities will not allow Arabs to live in their areas. Arabs have suffered their land being confiscated to build new settlements for Jewish settlers, IDF squaddies cut down their olive trees, a vital source of income, and throw pollutants in their wells and cisterns to make the water undrinkable. Palestinian homes and villages are demolished. There are economic restrictions intended to stifle Palestinian farming and business, while Jewish farms, settlers and businesses receive generous support from the state. The tourist trade too is subject to strict regulations privileging Jews. Non-Jews are legally forbidden from working as tour guides, even when they are Christians taking tourists to the country’s great Christian monuments. I assume the same situation applies to Muslims, who also wish to visit their religious sites. Netanyahu’s governing coalition now includes a viciously racist party for Jewish settlers, the remnants of the terrorist movement Kach, which demands the cleansing of all non-Jews from Israel. Naturally, not all Jews support this, and ‘racist’ is one of the kinder epithets I’ve heard applied to Netanyahu. I’ve heard one Jewish professor refer to him as ‘that bastard Netanyahu’.
The American political establishment, and especially the Republicans, firmly supports Israel. There have been a long line of senior American politicos turning up to pledge their support to Israel at AIPAC’s conventions. This year a number of Democrats, including Bernie Sanders, who is Jewish, refused to go. And there is still controversy raging about the comments by Minnesota Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, who said that Congress had been bought by the Israelis. She was right, AIPAC and other Zionist organisations, like Ted Hagee’s Christians United For Israel, are able to purchase American support for Israel by generously funding individual politicians. Just like the various parliamentary Friends of Israel groups within the British parties obtain Israeli funding and trips to Israel from the Israeli government and Zionist donors.
And the Israel lobby also responds to its critics in America exactly the same as it does over here: it smears them as anti-Semites. So we’ve seen Trump, who’s had genuine anti-Semites from the Alt Right, like Steve Bannon and Sebastian Gorka, in his coalition, now declare that the Dems are now the anti-Semitic party. Just as the Republicans and corporate Democrats smeared Omar as a Jew hater for her comments.
If Beto O’Rourke did make that comment about Netanyahu – and that’s a big if, as Congress has previously given the wretched bigot a massive standing ovation – then it means that the Israel lobby in America is losing its grip. People are turning away, including the Jewish community. One of the contributors to Lobster stated in an article published back in the ’90s that the Israeli delegates in Washington are not liked. Privately, many American politicians and staffers loath them. And it looks like that pent up hatred of official Israeli racism may now be coming out, as leading American politicians get sick of them and their intransigence towards the Palestinians.
The result is that as the Israelis’ grip on western politicos loosens, we can expect more accusations and smears of anti-Semitism. Ireland has already passed a law banning Israeli goods from the Occupied Territories. And according to the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, Jeremy Corbyn and Jackie Walker are the #2 threat to Jews around the world(!) This is nonsense, except in the very limited sense that Corbyn and Walker are genuine supporters of the Palestinians and are serious about finding a just solution to the Israel/Palestine conflict. We’ve already seen Gabriel Pogrund, the soulless hack from the Sunset Times, launch an attack on the Labour party as a whole, as well as the Jewish Labour Movement declaring a vote of ‘no confidence’ in Corbyn. We can expect a further storm of angry, lying denunciations as the Israel lobby tries to scare politicians on both sides of the Atlantic into line.
From the Israeli far Right to the British sort. Jacob Rees-Mogg was in the I today, 2nd April 2019, denying that he had endorsed Germany’s far right Alternative Fuer Deutschland. Mogg had yesterday reposted one of their videos stating that it was no wonder Britain saw bad faith behind every move from Brussels. The article in the I, entitled ‘Rees-Mogg denies far-right support’, runs
Jacob Rees-Mogg has denied supporting a German far-right party after he was criticised for sharing a speech by its leader.
The MP said that the address by Alice Weidel of the Alternative for German (sic) (AfD) party was “of real importance” because it showed a “German view of Brexit”. He shared a clip of the speech on social media. Labour MP David Lammy accused him of “promoting Germany’s overtly racist AfD party”.
Mr Rees-Mogg told LBC radio: “I’m not supporting the AfD, but this is a speech made in the Bundestag of real importance because it shows a German view.” (p. 7).
Zelo Street covered this story when it broke yesterday. In the Sage of Crewe’s account, one of those stating that Mogg had indeed endorsed the far right outfit was Jeremy Cliffe, of the Economist, who described the AfD as ‘racist’. This statement might carry more weight for Tories, as the Economist is the magazine of right-wing free market orthodoxy. The article in Zelo Street also drew on a feature from last September’s Suddeutscher Zeitung to show precisely what kind of party the AfD was. Bjorn Hocke, the leader of the AfD in the Bundestag, was at a demonstration in Chemnitz with Lutz Bachmann, the founder of the rabidly islamophobic movement, Pegida. And that February, Pegida chiefs had visited a convention of the Saxon branch of the AfD in Hoyerswerda. The newly elected state chairman, Jorg Urban, had declared that the two organisations had similar goals, and that AfD state organisations should decide independently whether to work with Pegida.
Musa Okwongo also posted comments on Twitter stating that the AfD has also asked for the reintroduction of Nazi terminology to political discourse, and made speeches that one political commentator in the Bundesrepublik called ‘full-on neo-Nazi’. I’m not remotely surprised. A few months ago I put up a piece about an article in the American radical magazine and website, Counterpunch, on the Alternative fuer Deutschland. That article presented very extensive evidence that the AfD was viciously racist with Nazi connections. Some of its financial backers, who live outside Germany, have connections going back to Nazi Germany. Not only does the party hate and vilify Muslims and other immigrants, it has demanded the return of reichsburgerschaft. This is the Nazi doctrine that only White, ethnic Germans should be citizens, somewhat similar to the NF/BNP doctrine of racial nationalism. Leading members of the AfD have also attacked Germany’s Holocaust memorial as ‘a national shame’, and one has gone so far as saying that if they get into power, they would open ‘underground trains to Auschwitz’. Which sounds very much like they’d like a return of the Holocaust.
Zelo Street’s article also reports that Pegida also has connections to Tommy Robinson. Well, I think Robinson did found, or at least try to get into, Pegida UK. Lutz Bachmann has been friends with Robinson ever since the two met in Tenerife, where Robinson was having a holiday with his family and Bachmann has a holiday home.
Zelo Street also points out that this isn’t the first time Mogg has had connections with the far Right. Way back in 2013, when the Observer embarrassed him by reporting that he had been guest of honour at the annual dinner of the Traditional Britain Group. They’re a far-right, anti-immigrant outfit in the Tory party, whose leaders also have an unpleasant fixation with the Nazis. Mogg had been warned not to attended, but he dismissed the warnings as a smear. He claimed that he checked with Tory HQ, who told him they had nothing on them. Zelo Street comments that this is no excuse, as enough was known about the TBG at the time for Mogg to have known to keep well away. But he didn’t, and so it’s no surprise that he’s now again genuflecting before the far right.
The article concludes
Jacob Rees Mogg gave Traditional Britain Group, a deeply unpleasant convocation of racists and xenophobes, a legitimacy it did not, and does not, merit. He’s now begun to flirt with a group linked directly to the far-right both in its native Germany, and here in the UK.
Yet he remains an ostensibly mainstream Tory MP, is talked of as a candidate for high office, and his views are eagerly sought by media outlets. I’ll just leave that one there.
The situation becomes much worse when you consider that Mogg is a member of the European Research Group, along with Boris Johnson, who were reported a few days ago as calling themselves ‘Grand Wizards’. As any fule kno, this is one of the grades in the Ku Klux Klan. Laura Kuenssberg, who reported this, then tried to backtrack after it sparked understandable outrage. First she said that the information came from only two sources, and then that the ERG didn’t realise the Fascist connotations of the term when they thought of it. Which I frankly don’t believe. The Tories have a very long history of right-wing individuals dressing up as or behaving like Nazis, even when they don’t have real links to the far right. Like back in the 1980s when the Union of Conservative Students was singing ‘We Don’t Want No Blacks or Asians’ and ‘Hang Nelson Mandela’ and demanding the introduction of racial nationalism as official Tory policy. And then there were the various members of the aristocracy and Tory party, who formed pro-Nazi organisations just prior to the Second World War like the Link and the Anglo-German Fellowship.
If this had been done by someone in the Labour party, there would have been no question that they would have been attacked as a racist and their expulsion demanded. Corbyn did the most of all the party leaders to campaign for remaining in the EU, but he was still pilloried for supposedly not giving his absolute support to the Remain campaign. At the same time, the Right and the Israel lobby are still trying to oust him from the Labour leadership by claiming that he is not doing enough to combat the nonexistent wave of anti-Semitism in the Labour party.
But as Zelo Street has pointed out, Mogg has been now caught several times in connection with the far right, first with the TBG and now with the AfD. But he’s still being considered as a respectable Tory ready for high office, and a suitable subject for media interviews.
This shows exactly the alarming double standards about Fascism and racism in both the Tories and the media.
This video was put on YouTube two years ago, in March 2017, by Brighton BDS, the local branch of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and oppression of the Palestinians. It’s one of two videos from that meeting, in which Greenstein and Jackie Walker respectively tell of how accusations of anti-Semitism are used to stifle justified criticism of Israel. Both Greenstein and Walker are Jewish critics of Israel, and despite their being firm anti-racists and anti-Fascists, have thus been smeared as anti-Semites.
Greenstein begins his speech by welcoming his audience, and congratulating them in that they are going to see two anti-Semites for the price of one. He explains that the accusations of anti-Semitism have nothing to do with real anti-Semitism. They’re the method used to silence critics of the unjustifiable, like Israel’s destruction of a Bedouin village in the Negeb desert to make way for a Jewish village. And Administrative Detention, where the only people detained without trial are Palestinians. It is also difficult to justify a law which retroactively legalises the theft of Palestinian land, and the existence of two different legal system in the West Bank, one for Palestinians and the other for Jews. He states that in most people’s understanding of the word, that’s apartheid. It’s certainly racist. And it’s easier to attack critics as anti-Semitic, than deal with the issues concerned.
And Israel doesn’t operate in a vacuum. It receives more aid from the United States than every other country in the world combined. Israel is defended because it’s a very important partner of the West in the Middle East. It’s critics do single out Israel, because it’s the only apartheid state in the world, the only state that says one section of the population – Jews – will have privileges, while the other section won’t. He states that there are many repressive states in the world, but there is only one apartheid state. The Zionists then reply that there’s only one Jewish state. Greenstein responds to that by pointing to 1789 and the liberation of the Jews in France during the French Revolution, the first people to be granted such emancipation. The French Revolution established the principle that the state and religion should be separate. This is also a cardinal principle of the American Constitution, but it doesn’t exist in Israel. Greenstein states that he has the right to go to Israel, claiming citizenship, and get privileges like access to land because he’s Jewish, while Yasser – a member of the audience – has no such rights, despite being born their and having a family there, because he’s not Jewish. You can’t say it’s not racist and unjust, and so they accuse people, who criticise it, of anti-Semitism.
He makes the point that it’s like the British in India. They didn’t claim they were going there to exploit the natural wealth of India, and pillage and rape it. No, they justified it by saying they were going there to civilise it by getting rid of Suttee, the burning of a man’s widow on his funeral pyre. He cites Kipling’s metaphor as the Empire as a burden on the White man’s back. It was the Empire on which the sun never set, which was because, as some people said, God didn’t trust the British. It wasn’t just the Conservatives, but also the Labour party, who justified British imperial rule in these terms. The Labour Party justified it as trusteeship. Britain held the lands in Africa and Asia in trust for their peoples until they came up to our standard of civilisation.
It’s the same with Israel today. When Britain and America support Israel, they don’t do it because it’s colonisation, or because Jewish mobs go round Jerusalem every Jerusalem Day chanting ‘Death to the Arabs’, utter anti-Muslim blasphemies and their other actions, which mean Arabs have to stay in their homes to avoid being attacked by thousands of settler youths. It’s because of anti-Semitism and some vague connection with the Holocaust. But opposing Israel is in no way anti-Semitic. He states that the definition of anti-Semitism is simple. It is ‘hostility to Jews, as Jews’. He states that a friend of his, the Oxford academic Brian Klug, worked that out years ago. He then talks about how the Working Definition of Anti-Semitism was devised in 2004 to connect anti-Semitism with Israel by the European Monitoring Commission. It met much resistance, and was opposed by the University College Union, the National Union of Students opposed it along with other civil society groups. In 2013 the EUMC’s successor took it down from its website and it fell into disuse. It was then revived as the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of anti-Semitism. This then emerged a few months previous to the meeting, when a Home Affairs Select Committee report, apart from attacking Jeremy Corbyn and Shami Chakrabarti for tolerating anti-Semitism in the Labour party, came up with this new definition. This takes 500 words to say what could be said in 50.
One of these is accusing Jews of being more loyal to each other than their own nation. He shows that definition is nonsense by stating that if he received a pound for every time he was called a traitor because he was an anti-Zionist, he’d be quite rich. The essence of Zionism is that Jews owe a dual loyalty, and their main loyalty is to Israel. Israel defines itself as the Jewish state, not just for its own citizens, but for Jews everywhere. This is unique, as most countries have a citizenship based on that country, to which everyone belongs, and a nationality. Britain has a British nationality. That nationality applies to everyone who lives in a particular place. If Scotland became independent, as the SNP made clear, then everyone living in Scotland would have Scots nationality. The same with France and Germany. But in Israel there is no Israeli nationality, although it says so on the Israeli passport. But the Hebrew translates as ‘citizen’ not ‘nation’, but the Israelis assume most people are too stupid to notice the difference. There are hundreds of nationalities in Israel, primarily Jewish, but also Arab, Islamic, Christian and those of other religions. But the only nationality that counts is Jewish, and it applies not only to Jewish citizens and residents, but also Jews wherever they live. He states that this is the foundation stone of Israeli racism, that some people – Jews- are returning, because their ancestors were there 2,000 years ago. This is one of the many racist myths that abound.
He then goes on to another definition, ‘Denying the Jews the right to self-determination’. He states that he asked Joan Ryan, the Labour MP and chair of Labour Friends of Israel, when she was wittering on about how anti-Semitic to oppose the Jewish right to self-determination about it. He wrote her a letter, to which she never replied, which asked her when precisely Zionism talked about the Jewish right to self-determination. It’s only very recent. If you look back at Zionist documents, like The Jewish State, by the founder of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, it talks about colonisation. The first Zionist congress, held in 1897, was a result of the publication of Herzl’s pamphlet. The Zionists never talked about Jewish self-determination, they talked about colonisation and did so for most of their history. But with the change in zeitgeist they changed it to Jewish national self-determination. But this means that Jews are not citizens of the country where they live. He compares Jews to Roman Catholics, as the idea that all Roman Catholics form the same nation is clearly a retrogressive step. In many ways it’s an anti-Semitic step, as it says that Jews do not belong in the countries in which they live, as they’re all one and the same.
He goes on to talk about Herzl himself, and encourages his audience to Google him, if they haven’t already. Herzl was a Viennese journalist, who operated in Paris. His diaries are particularly interesting, as if you read all four volumes of them, you find he talks about anti-Semitism as having the divine will to good about it. In other words, there would be no Zionism without anti-Semitism, which provides the propulsion for Jews separating out of their own nations and going on for what he hoped would be a Jewish nation. Herzl traveled around Europe trying to create an alliance between Zionism and one of the imperial powers of the time. Eventually in 1917 they reached an agreement with the British imperialists, Lloyd George’s war cabinet, the Balfour Declaration, in which Britain granted them the land of Palestine over the heads of the Palestinians, who were not asked for their opinion.
When Herzl was going around the European princes, he met the Kaiser’s uncle, the Grand Duke of Baden, who told Herzl that he agreed with him and supported him. This was because Herzl told him that Zionism would take the revolutionary Jews away from the socialist movement and move them to a pure national ideal. The Grand Duke said he had no problems supporting Zionism except one. If he supported Zionism, which was at that time very small, only a handful of Jews supported Zionism up to 1945, then people would accuse him of being anti-Semitic. Most Jews at the time considered Zionism to be a form of anti-Semitism. Greenstein asks how many people know that on Lloyd George’s war cabinet, the one member who opposed the Balfour Declaration was its only Jewish member, Sir Edwin Montague, who later became the Secretary of State for India. He accused all his fellows of anti-Semitism, because they didn’t want Jews in Britain, but wanted them to go to Palestine. And he states that is what they’re opposing today. The opposite is true when they accuse Israel’s opponents of being anti-Semitic. It is the Zionist movement that has always held that Jews do not belong in these countries and should go to Israel. We see it today in the election of Donald Trump. There has been an outbreak of anti-Semitism, and the Zionist movement has no problem with it, because Trump is a good supporter of Israel. And the appointment of Steve Bannon was welcomed by the Zionist Organisation of America, who invited him to speak at their annual gala in New York. He didn’t attend because there was a large demonstration of leftists and anti-Zionists. He concludes that if someone today tells him he doesn’t belong in this country, they’re either a Zionist or an anti-Semite.
Greenstein thus exposes the real agenda behind the anti-Semitism accusations and the utter hypocrisy of those making them, as well as the real anti-Semitism that lies at the heart of Zionism itself. It’s to silence critics like Greenstein and Walker that they, and so many other decent anti-racists, have been accused of anti-Semitism while the real anti-Semites, like Bannon and Sebastian Gorka, have been given enthusiastic welcomes by the Israeli state.
However, the decision by many Democrat politicos not to attend the AIPAC conference this weekend may indicate that there’s a sea change coming in the American people’s tolerance for this nonsense. Hopefully it won’t be too long before Israel’s critics like Greenstein and Walker are properly recognised as the real opponents of racism and anti-Semitism, and the people who smeared them held in contempt for their lies and vilification.
Just like the rest of the Conservative establishment, just when you think the Jewish Chronicle can’t go any lower, they do. This afternoon Mike put up a piece reporting and commenting on a story from the Skwawkbox about that rag’s attempts to discredit a letter published in the Sunday Times written by 12 Holocaust survivors in support of the Labour party and its leader, Jeremy Corbyn. As part of its attempt to rebut the letter, the JC has tried attack the credentials of one its signatories. This individual, it claimed, couldn’t be a proper Holocaust survivor because they left Germany in 1939 when they were two years old.
But as Steve Walker of the Skwawkbox and Mike in his article point out, this claim is nonsense as the definition of Holocaust survivor used by the Yad Vashem centre in Jerusalem is any Jew, who lived for any time under Nazi domination and survived. And that definition must therefore include those, who lived in Germany in the ’30s.
I suspect here that the Jewish Chronicle probable considers a Holocaust survivor as someone who survived the the system slaughter of the Jews carried out under the Final Solution from 1942 until the end of the War. However, the Nazis began their persecution of Jews and other ethnic, religious and political groups almost from the moment Hitler seized power in 1933. The Boxheim scandal of 1931 showed that the Nazis were intending to set up concentration camps, and the first at Esterwegen and Dachau were established in 1933. By August 1941, four months before the infamous Wannsee Conference of January 1942, there were 10 main camps with 25 satellites. In April 1933 there was a boycott of Jewish businesses and legislation was passed expelling Jews from the civil service and the universities. This was followed in October by the passage of the Reich Chamber of Culture and the Press Law, which prepared from the removal of the Jews from journalism. 1935 saw the passage of the infamous Nuremberg Laws and the Reich Citizenship Law, which restricted German citizenship only to full-blooded gentile Germans. Marriage and extra-marital sex between Jews and non-Jews were forbidden. This was followed by legislation in 1937 permitting Jewish businesses to be confiscated without any legal justification. All German anti-Semitic legislation was applied to Austria after that country was annexed in 1938. This was succeeded by further laws passed in April demanding the registration of Jewish wealth, the Munich synagogue was destroyed in June, and the Nuremberg in August. That same month Hitler issued a decree demanding that all male Jews should be called ‘Israel’ and all female ‘Sarah’. In October all Jewish passports had to be stamped with the letter ‘J’ for Jude, the German for Jew, and 17,000 Polish Jews were expelled from Germany. After the assassination of the German diplomat Ernst von Rath by Herschl Grynszpan in Paris came the horrific pogrom of Kristalnacht. 20,000 German Jews were imprisoned as businesse, homes and synagogues were attacked and looted. Further decrees expelled the Jews from the economy and demanded them to pay a collective fine of 12,500 million marks to pay for the destruction. At the same time, Jewish students were expelled from schools. In December, non-Jews were allowed to take over formerly Jewish companies. In April 1939 all Jewish valuables were confiscated and the law on tenancies passed, which supposed to force Jews to live together in ‘Jewish Houses’. In September the curfew was introduced forbidding Jews from being out after dark, and all their radios were confiscated in order to prevent ‘treachery’. The first deportations of Jews from Germany, mainly from Pomerania in what is now northern Poland, began the next year in February 1940.
See: D.G. Willliamson, The Third Reich (Harlow: Longman 1982) pp. 39-40.
James Taylor and Warren Shaw, A Dictionary of the Third Reich (London: Grafton Books 1988), ‘Anti-Semitism’, pp. 37-8; ‘Concentration Camps’, 88-91; ‘Crystal Night’, 92-3; ‘Jews in Nazi Germany’, pp. 190-2; ‘Nuremberg Laws’, 261.
It’s therefore very clear that even before the commencement of the Final Solution in 1941/2 Jews were under immense persecution in Germany and then Austria. A Times journalist reported that the situation in the latter was so desperate that some Jews were contemplating suicide. See The Faber Book of Protest. And the entry for ‘Final Solution’ in Taylor and Shaw, above, states that it is still uncertain whether the term ‘resettlement’ was also used as a euphemism for murder when it was used of the Jews in the late 1930s. (p. 126).
Mike also notes in his article the Ha’avara Agreement signed between Nazi Germany and the German Federation of Zionists to send Jews to Israel, making the point that the only reason the Federation signed the agreement was fear of Nazi persecution. It allowed the escape of 60,000 Jews to Palestine, then under the British Mandate, who are therefore also Holocaust survivors.
The short-lived collaboration between the Zionists and Nazis were what allowed the witch-hunters to smear and demand the suspension of Ken Livingstone. However, it is verifiable fact, documented by Zionist historians of the Holocaust like David Ceserani, the Yad Vashem Holocaust Centre, and mentioned in Taylor and Shaw, who write
At the outset the Nazis had tried to drive the Jews out of German living space, and were briefly in collaboration with the zionist movement. (p. 38).
Mike also believes that the Jewish Chronicle’s article may itself be anti-Semitic. He writes
In fact, the JC piece may itself be described as anti-Semitic. The IHRA working definition of anti-Semitism includes among its examples “denying the fact, scope, mechanisms… or intentionality of… the Holocaust”, and the accusation in this piece certainly does so.
He also states that the Jewish Chronicle has tried to suggest falsely that many of the signatories didn’t know what they signing. But they did, and some even suggested alterations. Mike concludes
What a weak response from people who have trumpeted their righteousness for years! And what will they try next?
I don’t know what the witch-hunters will try next, but it’s going to be foul. They’ve already shown they’re not averse to falsifying history, as John Mann did when he denied that Hitler signed any agreement with the Zionists. Just as they have shown they abuse and smear their Jewish opponents using rhetoric that would be unhesitatingly denounced as anti-Semitic if used by non-Jews. But they are given a free pass on this by a complicit British establishment and media.
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