Last week, the American rapper Kanye ‘Ye’ West successfully managed to torpedo his career and popularity by making stupid and bigoted comments about Jews. Unfortunately he isn’t the only person to hold stupid and malign anti-Semitic beliefs. His comments, however, led to one YouTuber putting up a half-hour long video examining whether Michael Jackson was anti-Semitic. I don’t know whether Jackson was or wasn’t. He may have been, but at the end of his life one of his friends or associates was, I believe, a rabbi, Shmuely Boteach. This suggests he probably wasn’t, or if he was, that any anti-Semitic views he had may have been nuanced and riddled with exceptions. But I confess, I didn’t watch that part of the video because I’m not that interested in Michael Jackson. As far as I’m concerned, Jackson was an immensely talented musician and dancer, but a deeply flawed human being. He seemed to me to be a perpetual child, surrounding himself with toys and exotic animals, and his musical achievements are tarnished by the accusations of child abuse.
What I found interesting instead was the beginning of the video, which included clips of other rappers and Black musicians airing their prejudices and negative opinions about the Jews. Many of them were complaints that they were being exploited by the music industry, which they believed was run by the Jews. I dare say that there may be a higher proportion of Jews in the music business, as there supposedly is or has been with the film industry. But this doesn’t come from any kind of stupid conspiracy to control the media. It’s simply because the entertainment industry, by and large, was more tolerant of Jews than other sectors of society. As for exploitation, there are any number of White musicians as well who’ve fallen out with the record label and feel they’ve been cheated on issues of recording rights and royalties. Where this has occurred, it’s been because their managers or the recording companies are acting as exploitative individuals. Again, it’s got nothing at all to do with race, and everything to do with the fact that there are people in every industry who will try to exploit and cheat their clients.
The video began with Professor Griff, who was sacked from NWA because of his anti-Semitic views, and included a clip of Griff explaining them and the circumstances of his sudden exit from the band. And from what he said, Griff certainly appeared to have genuinely Nazi views. He claimed he carried a library of books on them around in a suitcase, in order to educated people, and he’d lay them out on a table. These included such classic anti-Semitic texts as Henry Ford’s The International Jew. Ford was certainly a member of the extreme right. He hated socialism and trade unions, as well as Jews and Lord knows who else. I think he was a favourite of Hitler and the Nazis, who also believed that Blacks were racially inferior. One nasty piece of Nazi doctrine, according to Orwell, was that Blacks could interbreed with gorillas. I really do wonder why any self-respecting person of colour would read anything by people who believed such vile rubbish.
He then came out with some of the class anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, like the Jews caused World War II. This is still being repeated by White fascists after Hitler and Oswald Mosley over here in the UK. No, the Jews had nothing to do with it. The War started because Hitler invaded Poland, thus provoking France and Britain who had made pledged themselves to defend the country.
He also talked about the Rothschild’s and other Jewish banks extending credit and loans to Nazi Germany. This is true. They did, along with a number of other big American companies like IBM. This has absolutely nothing to do with the owners of these banks being Jewish. It’s simply because they, and the other gentile-owned companies that did business with the Nazis, were run by utterly amoral people who cared only about profit. Their dealing with the Nazi was naturally deeply and bitterly resented by ordinary Jewish peeps. And it should be a problem for any daft conspiracy theories about a secret Jewish plot to gain global domination. I really don’t understand how that can be squared with Jewish banks, which are an integral part of this putative conspiracy, collaborating with a regime dedicated to destroying their people. There are attempts to do this, in which a distinction is drawn between the Jewish elite behind the conspiracy and normal, decent Jews, but it’s still an obvious, glaring inconsistency that should show that the conspiracy theory is utter nonsense.
I do wonder where this anti-Semitism in parts of Black popular culture comes from. The Nation of Islam and Louis Farrakhan are one source. Farrakhan blames the Jews for the slave trade and in the 1980s a ‘historical research institute’ connected with the sect published a book promoting this idea. Proper historians of the slave trade dismiss the idea. Very few of the merchants involved in the trade in America were Jewish. I think Hugh Thomas says there were just four in his excellent book The Slave Trade. There were Jewish financiers involved, but again I don’t think there were that many. And as has been pointed out by historians of transatlantic slavery and anti-racist activists, they were employed by Christian princes.
I do wonder if some of this Jew-hatred comes from racial politics in Harlem during the 1920s and ’30s. The book Colour Prejudice notes that there was considerable anti-Semitism among Harlem’s Black community. This might come from the fact that many of the stores were White-owned, and despite selling to a Black clientele they wouldn’t employ Black staff. This resulted in a concerted campaign by an alliance of Black labour organisations against the policy. They organised a boycott of these stores under the slogan ‘Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work’. One of the leaders of the boycott was Sufi Abdul Hamid, a colourful figure who dressed in exotic eastern robes. He was another native-born Black American, who had converted to a form of Islam. Hamid was particularly vehement against the Jewish owners of such stores, as well as Greeks and Italians, who he derided as ‘spaghetti-slingers’. The boycott was successful, but Hamid lost control of the movement because the other leaders were acutely embarrassed by his racism. See the chapter on Hamid and his literary followers, ‘”In Turban and Gorgeous Robe”: Claude McKay, Black Fascism and Labor’ in Mark Christian Thompson, Black Fascisms: African American Literature and Culture Between the Wars (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press 2007), 87-116.
And against ideas of a Jewish racial antipathy towards Blacks, there’s the long history of Jewish support for the Black Civil Rights movement. Many Jews worked as social workers, school teachers and other professionals within the Black community and so were deeply sympathetic to their cause. The awesome Black Jewish pro-Palestinian activist, Jackie Walker, is an example of this. Her mother was a Black civil rights activist from Georgia and her father was a Russian Jew. Her parents met at a rally by the Communist party. I’ve forgotten the fellow’s name, but one of the Jewish supporters and campaigners for the civil rights of Black Americans was a rabbi.
Griff’s endorsement of Ford’s wretched tome did confirm something that I’ve suspected: that Black anti-Semites were also reading and being influenced by White racists. The same thing appears to be the case in much Afrocentric literature about ancient Egypt being the source of both European and African civilisation. It’s based on long out-disproven theories by White colonial anthropologists, for whom the Egyptians were White Hamites, who spread southward and colonised the continent. The Black Afrocentrists who took over this view simply flipped the races, so that the Egyptians were Black. The result, however, was much the same in that the indigenous African peoples were denied the credit for their own cultural achievement made independently of Egypt, whatever skin colour the Egyptians had.
If the ultimate source of Black American anti-Semitism does come from the racial politics of pre-World War II Harlem, then it’s profoundly depressing that it should still cast a shadow over race relations nearly a century later. Quite apart from the fact that no-one, of any colour, should believe Nazi conspiratorial rubbish.
Andrew Laurence is a right-wing YouTuber, whom I normally wouldn’t bother with. He posts videos satirising the Left in the character of an extremely ‘woke’ academic. I largely don’t find them either funny or witty. They’re mostly just the usual trite Tory talking points about the loony Left, Corbyn and so on. But this time he has a point. His rant, in the guise of the woke professor Dr Gideon Micropenis, attacks Brighton and Hove council for having introduced Critical Race Theory into its schools. This seems to be based on an article in today’s Telegraph, which reports that children are being taught that if they’re White, they’re at the top of a racial hierarchy, and at the bottom if they’re Black. The council’s currently governed by the Greens, who seem responsible for this material. Laurence slams it as teaching White kids to feel guilty about the slave trade, for which they personally aren’t responsible and have absolutely nothing to do with. Here’s the video
The Torygraph article by Ewan Somerville, on which his rant is based, ‘Children aged seven to be taught that they are not ‘racially innocent”, begins
‘Children as young as seven are to be told they are not “racially innocent” because they view “white at the top of the hierarchy” as part of diversity training for teachers.
Brighton and Hove City Council has been accused of “indoctrinating” children through its five-year plan for an anti-racist education system, which endorses critical race theory and white privilege – contentious ideologies that have sparked protests.
The council states that all teachers require the training, which will inform “specific racial literacy-focused lessons” for pupils. The Green-controlled authority is in a row with parents opposed to the classes and one has launched a petition to have the training scrapped, which has attracted 4,000 signatures.
Kemi Badenoch, the equalities minister, has previously told the Commons that schools teaching white privilege as an uncontested fact are breaking the law.
The Telegraph has obtained recordings, PowerPoint slides and reading lists that form the “Racial Literacy 101” sessions. Teachers began the training in the autumn term, and 300 have undertaken it so far.
Brighton is the first British authority to roll out such training, and the hour-long session covers the history of the slave trade and racism in contemporary society.’
The article also reports that a petition against it has been started by a man, Adrian Hart, whose son is at sixth form college in the town, with the campaign group Don’t Divide Us.
While I really don’t have much time for Laurence and his right-wing humour, this time I think he’s absolutely right. Critical Race Theory is a nasty postmodern doctrine that rejects class as the instrument of social oppression and replaces it with race. All Whites are held to be privileged, while Blacks are held to be oppressed. It also rejects claims that racism has improved, holding instead that it has simply become better hidden. Furthermore, its adherents bitterly oppose the civil rights legislation introduced following the heroic protests and demonstrations by Martin Luther King and Malcolm X because these have had the effect of incorporating Black people into bourgeois society. Critical Race Theory began as a radical movement within American Marxist lawyers, and it believes that the only way a true anti-racist society can be created is through revolution. It aims to increase racial consciousness and agitation to that end, rather than bring people together. See the relevant chapter on CRT in James Lindsay’s and Helen Pluckrose’s Cynical Theories (London: Swift 2021). And it is indeed venomously anti-White. There are clips on the web of a young Black woman, Angela Shackleford, telling a class room of Whites that they were not born into a humanity and are devils to her. It does absolutely nothing to solve the problem of racism, bring Whites and Blacks together or really improve conditions for Blacks. It just seems to me that it merely increases racial resentment on the one hand and racial guilt on the other.
As for the Greens, in Bristol Cleo Lake, the Green councillor for Cotham, introduced a motion in the local council last year, that reparations for slavery should be paid to ‘all Afrikans’ in the city. This would actually take the form of increased grants and funding to Black organisations to create prosperous, self-sustaining Black communities. It was seconded by Asher Craig, the head of Equalities at the council and the deputy mayor, and passed by all the parties except the Conservatives. And unfortunately, I think this time the Tories were right.
I don’t have a problem with increased funding for Bristol’s Black communities, as there are problems with unemployment, drugs, and crime, along with feelings of marginalisation. But it shouldn’t be connected to the slave trade, at least, not for all ‘Afrikans’. It makes Britain assume responsibility for African peoples we didn’t enslaves, and who themselves actively participated in the trade as well as practised it within their own states. It also does what CRT does, and divide people into virtuous, enslaved Blacks and evil White oppressors.
It further looks to me from Lake’s statement about ‘all Afrikans’ that she’s an Afrocentrist. This is a pseudo-discipline that holds that the Egyptians were Black and created the roots of modern, western civilisation, which the Greeks and Romans stole. It also claims that they created a unified culture in Africa after colonising them. It claims that every achievement of African culture and civilisation is therefore due to the ancient Egyptians, and where this is mixed by practices viewed as barbaric, such as human sacrifice, it is due to racial degeneration. It further holds that there is a single African psychology and philosophy held by both western Blacks and Black Africans. Blacks are held to be less logical, but more emotional, intuitive and communal in organisation compared to Whites. Who are supposed to be competitive, aggressive and exploitative, among a number of other unpleasant features. Some Afrocentrist writers have described Whites as ‘albinistic mutants’. I don’t know if Lake holds these extreme views, but it seems very much to me that she holds at least some Afrocentric views. To me, this makes her entirely unsuitable for formulating a genuinely workable racial policy or for teaching an objective history of Africa and its relations with the outside world.
Critical Race Theory and Afrocentrism have nothing positive to say or add to real discussions of race and Black history and should be banned.
I’ve commented before attacking Critical Race Theory and its rejection of conventional academic standards and norms, as well as its dangerous anti-White intolerance. But CRT is only one of a number of similar disciplines that can be grouped together under the title of ‘social justice’ ideologies that share a similar outlook and origin. These arose in the 1980s and 1990s from Post-Modernism and represent a real attack on the fundamental concepts and values of Enlightenment liberalism, individualism, science and objectivity.
The Grievance Studies Hoax
I found the video below on YouTube, entitled Applied Postmodernism – How ‘Idea Laundering’ Corrupting American Universities. It’s of a talk given by the scholars Peter Boghossian, James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose at the Aspen Jewish Centre in Aspen, Colorado, on 30th July 2019. These three were so fed up with the quality and venom of ‘social justice’ pseudo-scholarship that they devised the ‘Grievance Studies’ hoax. They submitted 20 spoof papers to various postmodern academic journals, drawing on these disciplines’ previous literature to support deeply morally repugnant conclusions. One of these papers concluded that men should be trained like dogs not to participate in rape culture, while another said that straight White men at college should be trained to the floor to teach them about their privilege. Seven of these papers were accepted and a further seven were under consideration before the group ‘fessed up and they were withdrawn. Not only were these spoof papers accepted, but they were even praised approvingly by the journals’ editors. The reviewer of the paper about treating men literally like dogs called it ‘an important contribution to knowledge’.
Student Unrest at Evergreen College
The group were prompted to stage this hoax by a violent, extremist student protest at Evergreen University. This was one of the least racist universities in the US, but radical students took it over, wandering about campus with bats and dragging people out of cars, claiming that it was intolerably racist. Only one of the academics, Brett Weinstein, stood up to the students. He committed the unconscionable crime of asking them what their evidence was. This was vehemently rejected and Weinstein himself pilloried because the postmodern ideologies that motivated these students does not permit any questioning. If someone simply asks for evidence, or presents any criticism, this is seen as proof of their racism or bigotry.
Two of the academics speaking, Boghossian and Lindsay are American. The third, Helen Pluckrose, is British. She begins the talk by explaining that she was moved to start investigating and opposing these ideologies through her research as a feminist historian. She was interested in 14th century women’s spiritual writing, but was told that her research would not be accepted unless she examined it through the postmodern feminist ideological lens. If she continued pursuing her own ideological independent view, she would be blocked from doing a Masters and a doctorate. She sees herself as being attacked for standing up for the reality of biology and traditional liberal values in the broadest sense. The group are critical of the modern college environment with its safe spaces intended to protect people from encountering opposing ideas. This has created a generation of brittle students, who are unable to cope with opposing ideas when they encounter them.
Postmodern Ideologies of Power and Identity
The ‘social justice’ disciplines they attack and expose are the theoretical humanities which have arisen since the 1990s – Critical Theory, Post-Colonial Theory, Queer Theory, disability studies, fat studies and so on, which are all part of the general Cultural Studies movement, which is based on postmodern philosophy. These are founded on the ideas that knowledge isn’t something that exists independently and objectively, but is invented. Western knowledge is an oppressive system of knowledge that has been created by White men through language. It is not objective, but represents instead the universalisation of the values of these elite White men. Instead of seeing society as consisting of individuals, these disciplines see it as composed of different demographic groups with different relationships to power. White men speak with power, women and ethnic minorities have no power. The ideologies are prejudiced against great White men and western knowledge, but are favourable to women’s and eastern knowledge. These different demographic groups have different values. Science is consciously rejected as an instrument of oppression of elite White men. These disciplines demand instead that it should include feelings, personal experiences and cultural traditions. But these demands are made without any supporting rational argument.
Idea Laundering
The term ‘idea laundering’ was coined by Brett Weinstein. Just as money laundering allows criminals to present tainted money as really coming from legitimate sources, so idea laundering allows deeply flawed scholarship to gain a false respectability. It’s the process by which opinions, rather than solid fact, are published in academic journals as established, peer-reviewed research. This is then given further respectability through references in the work of other, succeeding scholars. One of the examples of this Helen Pluckrose cites is the feminist text, Doing Gender. This starts with the idea that men and women are cognitively identical, but have been socialised into different roles. The book has been immensely influential, and has spawned a number of other books with similar titles expanding and applying its ideas. And some of these are absolutely crazy. One of these books states that heterosexual men are only attracted to women because they have been socialised to do so, a complete rejection of the reality of human sexual reproduction. Another example cited is Critical Dietician Studies. This was founded by a group of postmodernists as a venue for their own papers after they were rejected by mainstream journals of nutrition. One of their papers approvingly refers to Lenin for his ideas about nutrition, despite the fact that Lenin is one of the very last people to be considered an authority on it.
Social Justice Movements’ Intolerance
The group state that they weren’t the first people to comment on this poor and highly ideologically driven scholarship, but no-one else knew what to do about it. When another critical academic, Bruce Gillie, tried to publish a paper defending colonialism, not only was it rejected but he himself received death threats. They state that their academic opponents do not play by the conventional rules of engagement. Boghossian later describes how he had someone follow him into a gents’ toilet in order to beat him up, but was fortunately prevented by the presence of Brazilian judo instructor. These highly intolerant ideas aren’t just in academia, but are increasingly found outside it. For example, there was a recent article in the Washington Post entitled ‘Why Can’t We Hate Men?’. The group state that they have received emails and inquiries asking for help from professors, students and others, including a lawyer from the Canadian equivalent of the Bar Association, the EU parliament, and even knitting and hiking groups, which have become divided by these ideologies.
Another part of this new, postmodern, ‘social justice’ scholarship they attack is the notion of White privilege. This is based on Peggy MacKintosh’s Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack. This is simply concerned with perceived racial privilege rather than economic or educational privilege. It would not accept that a Black millionaire is more privileged than a homeless White man. These ideas have developed so that it states that the mere recognition by White people that they are privileged isn’t enough. They are actively complicit in it because they are born into and speak with a system of White privilege and oppression. The fundamental attitude is that racism exists everywhere, and the question is never whether it exists, but how it manifests in a particular circumstance.
Personal Politics and Strategies to Tackle Postmodernism
The group state that they aren’t Conservatives. They’re actually liberal atheists, but they believe there should be a place for Conservative scholarship in the academy. They coined the term ‘Grievance Studies’ not to deny that there were genuine grievances, but to look at the scholarship based on postmodernism using particular grievances and issues. This pseudo-scholarship is based on a profound cultural relativism, denies universal values and standards, and the individuals. Pluckrose states that as a feminist historian she wants to examine issues of social justice rigorously without deny biology. But this is impossible with postmodernism.
When asked how they intend to combat these movements, they state that they aim to do so by clearly explaining the issues and providing resources. Lindsay and Boghossian wrote a book together, How To Talk to Someone You Disagree With. Pluckrose is writing a book on the origins of the ‘social justice’ movement. I think someone has made a film about the hoax, as the group several times refer to it and the video seems to be about the panel discussion that followed a screening of the film. Boghossian talks about going into the ‘belly of the beast’, showing the film in colleges and building a movement there. They’re also constructing a website.
One major obstacle is the educational establishment. They state that teaching in the US is now based very much on a postmodern, ‘social justice’ book, The Pedagogy of the Oppressed. This is designed to look for and attack racism, sexism and other forms of bigotry at the expense of factual learning. Another problem is that liberals aren’t pushing back against these ideas as there doesn’t seem to be a good alternative. Decent people don’t want to be seen as against social justice. The issue is therefore to show that this ‘social justice’ scholarship is illiberal by those who genuinely want equality and a level playing field.
Attacks by Opponents
The three are asked about how they have been personally affected by this affair. Pluckrose states that as an independent scholar, she isn’t at the same risk as Boghossian, a tenured academic. Nevertheless she has had her views extremely misrepresented, been called a fascist and had her family’s internet accounts cloned so that trolls can attack her online. Lindsay says that he is also independent and that his experience is therefore almost the same as Pluckrose’s, and that he has lost friends and family. He states he is against racism and sexism, but just wants the scholarship about it to be better.
It is Boghossian who has suffered the most. He states that he is hated by his colleagues at the university, and has been the target of a persistent campaign of harassment and smears. There have been hit pieces on him in newspapers. He has been accused of criminal activities and maltreating his family, who have also been targeted. Less seriously, he has also been accused of supporting Trump and being pro-life, as well as being a Nazi and a grifter. The group give a further example of how this postmodern ‘social justice’ movement is pushing ideology at the expense of fact. They cite a book for maths teachers that urges them to use the subject as a way of indoctrinating students with this ideology.
Social Justice Postmodernism Not as Popular as Appears
They believe, however, that these ‘social justice’ movements are really just a small, but very powerful and influential minority and that it is opposed by many on the left. This is the old economic left and the socialists against the new identitarian left. There is also opposition from liberals, centrists and the centre-right. I think they are quite amused by the fact that, although liberal atheists, their ideas have been adopted by the Conservative religious right and are now taught in Southern Baptist seminaries. But they believe that this small, but highly influential ideological minority is nevertheless exercising a chilling culture. They talk about performative falsification. This is when people appear to go along with ideas they don’t hold, and even become enforcers for them out of fear that they will be targeted otherwise. They talk about receiving letters from students apologising for signing petitions against them, who felt that they would suffer if they didn’t. As far as the universities go, it appears to be the elite universities that suffer the most from this ideology. Pluckrose cites here recent demonstrations at Oxford and Cambridge. The lower tier universities aren’t quite so affected, as they have more students from working class backgrounds, who want practical knowledge and can’t afford to be concerned so much with social theory.
The group believes that these ideas could not have gained their power without the internet. However, they existed in the universities as far back as the 1980s. Postmodernism first arose in the 1960s as a movement by disaffected Marxists to analyse and deconstruct the existing power structures. This petered out as they seemed to be of no practical use. They were taken up again in the 1980s at the tail end of the Civil Rights movement by scholars and activists determined to give them a practical application. An example of this is Kimberley Crenshaw and the Black identity politics, which drew very much on postmodernism.
Regarding the future, Pluckstone has great hope in student groups, who have contacted her to speak to them and send information. There is a counterbalance to the ‘social justice’ movement, but at present it can’t speak. It needs resources and to find others like them. People do need to speak freely about it. University professors want to challenge it, but feel silenced. They describe how they have been contacted by a left-wing psychologist, who wishes to tackle social justice issues, but objects to the way the ‘social justice’ movement handles them. He wanted advice on what he could do.
What Parents Can Do
The group are asked what parents can do to resist this indoctrination. This is an issue that particularly affects Pluckstone, as she is also a parent. She explains that she talks to her fifteen year old daughter about issues like freedom and equality, and that reverse racism and sexism are still racism and sexism. She advises parents that when they get messages from the school stating that they are going to teach diversity and equality, they should ask the school why they are going to teach it that way. This shows the school that they will get pushback if they are too ideological. She states that it is rather different in England, where Christianity is present in schools, but she advises them to concentrate on the rules, which are rather stronger in America, preventing religious or political indoctrination in schools.
The group also advises people to be aware of language, as there are certain ‘trojan horse’ words which smuggle in the ideology. One such is ‘equity’. This does not mean ‘equality’, but simply making up for past injustices. Another code word is ‘critical’, which in this context does not mean ‘critical thinking’. They also recommend the book Kindly Inquisitors by Jonathan Rausch, which is suitable for 12-13 year olds, and which lays on the need to defend freedom of speech. They also attack Robin Di Angelo’s White Fragility as an example of the type of best-selling ‘social justice’ book they oppose.
They also believe that children know when they’re being lied to, and this could result in the baby being thrown out with the bath water. If the teaching becomes too ideological, not only will children reject the ideology, but also the solid teaching in which the ideology is embedded. As an example of how unselfconsciously intolerant ‘social justice’ ideology is, the group describe how they took the twelfth chapter of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, in which he describes his aims for the Nazi party, and carefully edited it to be about intersectional feminism. This was one of the spoof papers that were successfully submitted to various postmodern journals. In this instance it was taken up by a feminist journal.
A member of the audience suggests that they should produce soundbites that would appeal to fifteen year olds. The group say that they are going to produce a variety of books aimed at beginners’, intermediate, and advanced levels so to be intelligible to different people of all ages and ability. Boghossian also says that he is compiling a ‘turnkey’ syllabus for university professors.
Postmodern Attacks on Medicine
As an example of how this ideology is negatively affecting people, they talk about the use of pronouns. People are now being required to give their pronouns not as a statement of their own gender identity, but to show they are in line with the gender ideology. One of the three talks about how he personally knows one woman, who was a rape victim and very uncomfortable when she was asked what her pronouns were because of her experience. They also describe how cancer researchers have been placed under pressure by pro-fat activists not to say that obesity is a factor in some cancers because this is prejudicial against fat people. At the same time, extreme disability activists have placed medical professionals under pressure to withhold information on autism and deafness because it would be ‘ableist’ not to want to have a disabled child. This shows the power of the movement. When money corrupts academia, it’s immediately recognised and opposed. But this ideological corruption of education is much more difficult to see and so more acceptable. They also state that young people speak the jargon of postmodern social justice fluently, because they are surrounded by it all the time.
I’ve put this video up not to support the Conservative right, but because, as this group has shown, the postmodern ‘social justice’ movement is viciously intolerant and attacks fundamental ideas of individual freedom, dignity and individual worth on which western liberal society is based and which are at the heart of the politics of both the mainstream left and right.
And its because of their intolerance, divisiveness and racism and sexism that these ideas need to be fought by those on the left.
Double Down News are another left-wing, alternative news site and agency. In this video, Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi of Jewish Voice for Labour, talks about the abuse and attempts to silence her she and the other left-wing, pro-Palestinian Jews have faced. She describes what a breath of fresh air Jeremy Corbyn was and the hope he gave people like herself, that there would be real change at last after 30 years in the Labour party. She talks about the eminent Jewish academics, who have criticised the establishment’s exclusive concentration on support for Israel as the defining factor in Jewish identity, and the powerful role left-wing Jews like herself have played in combating racism and prejudice all over the world, from the battle against Mosley’s BUF to the American Civil Rights movement and apartheid South Africa.
Anti-Semitic Abuse for Being Pro-Palestine
She begins by describing the abuse she personally got when she was 19 and presented a pro-Palestinian talk at Uni. she was called ‘safe-hating’, ‘the wrong kind of Jew’, ‘anti-Semitic’ and a ‘kapo’. This is especially despicable, as they were the Jewish collaborators with the Nazis in the concentration camps. She is bitterly critical of this type of abuse, not just because it’s especially offensive for people who have really suffered under Nazis and other vicious anti-Semites – she equates it with being called a ‘paedophile’ – but because it also delegitimises the struggle against real Fascists. Here the video shows footage from the notorious Charlottesville Nazi gathering, with the storm troopers of the Alt Right marching along chanting ‘The Jews will not replace us.’ Wimborn-Idrissi’s talk and the abuse she received was covered by the Jewish Telegraph, who put it all on the front page. Which shows you what a despicable, right-wing establishment rag it is.
Heijo Meyer and Israel’s Nazi-like Persecution of the Palestinians
She also gives the real truth about Corbyn’s infamous attendance at the speech given by Heijo Meyer, which was used to pillory Corbyn as an anti-Semite. Of course he’s no such thing, and the video shows images of the greatest prime minister Britain rejected demonstrating against racism, including his arrest for protesting against apartheid. Meyer was a Dutch Holocaust survivor – and the video shows this with Meyer rolling up his sleeve to show the tattoo on his forearm which the Nazis used to mark the inmates of the death camps. Meyer’s was speaking at a Holocaust Memorial Day event. He was describing how the techniques used by the Nazis to dehumanize people like him – Jews – in the camps to enable them to murder them are also being used by Israel against the Palestinians. And what Wimborne-Idrissi says is horrifying is that the parallels are there.
This section of the footage is grim, as it show the Palestinian victims of Israeli aggression – homes in rubble, a disabled person tipped over in their wheelchair by Israeli squaddies, a little girl with horrifically blackened, swollen eyes.
The talk was part of a series of events that also showed other communities had suffered oppression, like the Travellers. But they were shouted down by a very obnoxious, very vociferous group of Zionists. She found it deeply disgusting that these people were trying to shout down and intimidate an eighty year old man, and urged Corbyn to call the rozzers to have them removed. And in fact the fuzz were prevailed upon to do their duty. But unfortunately by that time they’d been successful in drowning out the Travellers, so that people hardly heard a word from them.
The Media Silencing of Left-Wing Jews
Naomi points out that the media refuses give Jews like her a voice. Instead they give space to organisations like the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism as if they were long established and authoritative. There the video show a group waving placards, ‘Labour – For the Many Not the Jew’. This is the mendacious slogan dreamed up by novelist Howard Jacobson when he was in New York. Which is a good and sufficient reason for no-one to buy his books or listen to anything he has to say ever again. It also shows the Beeb’s Kirsty Wark and other journos as an example of this media bias. But Jews have opposed Zionism and Israel for a long time. This is accompanied by images of prominent Jewish critics of Zionism like the awesome Norman Finkelstein and various anti-Zionist Jewish conventions. Some of these are in Black and White, and are of packed, mass meetings. One looks like the Bund. This was the mass socialist party of eastern European Jews. Its slogan was ‘Wherever We Are, That’s Our Homeland’, and they were fiercely anti-Zionist.
She talks about Marek Edelman, one of the heroes of the Warsaw Uprising, who said that ‘to be a Jew is always to side with the oppressed, never the oppressor’. And that was why Jews like her aligned with the oppressed and fought against racism, and why it was just so revolting that their opponents wished to associate Jewry with the type of people they’d always fought against. She tells how the Jewish journalist, Anthony Lerman, has published articles attacking the anti-Semitism smears in the Labour party, and also Kenneth Stern’s criticism of the abuse of the I.H.R.A. definition of anti-Semitism. Stern is the Jewish academic, who formulated it. He meant it to be used in compiling statistics about anti-Semitic abuse. But he is concerned about the way it is being used to silence critics of Israel. He testified on this to Congress, and the video has a clip of his speech. He says he’s worried about the way its being used against Jewish non-Zionist college students and the way organisations are compiling dossiers and passing round opponents on critics of Israel. The anti-Zionist college students should also be heard. This is significant, because I think Stern is himself a Zionist. He’s just a decent man and not a racial fanatic like some of the organisations abusing his definition of anti-Semitism. But unfortunately all you hear are the pro-Israel fanatics. You don’t hear or see anything broadcast or printed by Lerman or Stern, except a few learned articles if you look online.
Fleeing Real Anti-Semitism, and Hope for the Future
She also talks about some of her and her families experiences as refugees from the pogroms and persecutions in eastern Europe, of not fitting because you’re weird with a funny accent. But there has to be hope. Jeremy Corbyn brought 300,000 new people into the party. And an increasing number of a new generation of young Jews, especially in America, are turning away and against Israel.
She concludes by praising Double Down News for giving left-wing Jews like herself a voice, and urges people to support it.
Naomi makes excellent points, and people should hear not just her voice, but the many other Jews like her. She is right to point out, early in the video, that the political and media establishment are anti-Semitic in their attempts to create the impression that Jews constitute a single, monolithic block. That’s what their oppressors have always done.
Unfortunately the media has shown that they have absolutely no intention of giving any space to good peeps like Jewish Voice for Labour, Jewdas and the Jewish Socialist Group. The Beeb, a company which increasingly looks like it has a proud future behind it, has been one of the leaders in pushing the anti-Semitism smears. And it wonders why it comes fifth ranked as trustworthy by the British public, lower even than Channel 5.
The Beeb is reviled as left-wing and ‘woke’ by the Tories and their poodle media because of its anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-homophobic stance, and ’cause they see it as anti-Brexit. But in domestic politics and economics, it’s solidly pro-Tory and pro-Israel. Hence its steadfast refusal to let any other voice be heard, Jewish or gentile, to contradict the anti-Semitism.
But left-wing, sincerely anti-racist folks of all religions and ethnicities have and are waking up to the Beeb’s disgusting bias. Which is why they’re joining the right in switching it off.
If we are going to hear the real truth, it has to come from news sites like Double Down News, Sam Seder’s Majority Report and the David Pakman Show in America, Amy Goodson of Democracy Now! and Abby Martin of Tele Sur, Ash Sarkar of Novara Media and Kerry-Ann Mendoza of The Canary. She’s another anti-racist gentile, who’s been accused of anti-Semitism, despite having a Jewish partner. Seder and Pakman are both Jewish. Seder has described himself as the most Jewish guy you know, and has no time whatsoever for Israel screaming anti-Semitism ever time America cuts its aid budget.
When we hear the truth, more often than not it comes from these broadcasters. Because it surely is not coming from the establishment media.
Yesterday Mike put up a piece about Donald Trump’s proposal to attack the ‘liberal indoctrination of America’s youth’ by making American education even more patriotic. Trump made his announcement in a Constitution Day speech at the White House Conference on American History at the National Archives Museum. CNN quoted the Orange Generalissimo as saying:
“We must clear away the web of twisted lies in our schools and classrooms and teach our children the magnificent truth about our country. We want our sons and daughters to know that they are the citizens of the most exceptional nation in the history of the world,” Trump said.
He also denounced the New York Times’ 1619 Project, which has been awarded a Pulitzer Prize for its aim to teach American students about slavery, ‘toxic propaganda’.
Trump is instead going to launch a national commission to promote patriotic education, which will be called the 1776 Commission.
Mike and a number of the peeps on Twitter naturally aren’t impressed, making the obvious comparison to the Hitler Youth, the perverted Nazi version of the boy scouts.
In fact, it looks far more to me like the way Mussolini’s Fascists and the Nazis reformed the Italian and German school system to indoctrinate their countries’ young people with their perverted ideas and values. For example, Declaration 1 of the Italian Fascist School Charter of 1939 states
Schools are the cornerstone of the solidarity that binds together all social forces, from the family to the corporation to the party. They shape the human and political conscience of new generations in the moral, political and economic unity of the Italian nation whose full realization is found in the fascist state.
Fascist schooling has as its aim to introduce a popular culture inspired by the eternal values of the Italian race and its civilisation, into the realm of practice by means of study (understood as the shaping of mature human subjects). Through the promotion of work, schools bring this culture to bear on the concrete activities carried out by the trades, arts, professions, sciences and armed forces.
Olivia E. Sears, trans., ‘Excerpts from the School Charter: The Twenty-Nine Declarations: Principles, Goals and Methods of Fascist Schools (1939)’, in Jeffrey T. Schnapp, ed., A Primer of Italian Fascism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press 2000), 314-7, p. 314.
I don’t think Trump’ll go as far as the Nazis in their reform of the German education. They introduced special courses on the origins of the Nazi party and biology, stressing Mendelian genetics. I also don’t think that, unlike the Nazis, he’ll start issuing school leavers with a 10 point eugenics plan for their lives, telling them ‘health is a precondition of eternal beauty – choose not a playmate but a comrade for marriage – wish for as many children as possible’. Though Toby Young’s a supporter of eugenics, so you wonder about him. Trump also won’t go as far as introducing the history syllabus suggested in the Nazi National Socialist Educator, in which senior secondary schoolchildren were to be taught that everything from the industrial unrest and profiteering of pre-First World War Germany, it’s defeat and the chaos and dismemberment afterwards were all caused by the Jews. In weeks 25-28 on that course the poor souls got to be taught about Adolf Hitler and National Socialism, declared to be ‘Judah’s Foe!’. In weeks 33-6 to they had ‘National Socialism at grips with crime and the underworld’ foisted on them, which was supposed to teach them about ‘Jewish instigators of murder’. The course finally ended with ‘Germany’s youth at the helm! The victory of faith.’ This was described as ‘The last fight against Judah’. The syllabus recommended the appropriate reading matter for each section. For Adolf Hitler this included Mein Kampf, and at the end included the Reich Party Congress.
(See ‘A Nazi History Syllabus’ in D.G. Williamson, The Third Reich (Harlow: Longman 1982) p. 86.)
I bet the poor kids could hardly contain their boredom. On the other hand, Trump’s supporters and cabinet officials also included members of the White supremacist Alt Right, some of whom were anti-Semites. It’s a good question then, what they’d like to inflict on the minds of America’s kids.
History can be a particularly controversial area because of its role in shaping national identity and self-image. That’s especially true when it comes to issues of race and persecution. And that’s not confined to America. A few years ago one of the Conservative Australian politicos caused a furor when he declared that he was sick of the ‘black armband’ view of Australian history. By which he meant that Australians should constantly be taught about and feel guilty for the genocide of the Aboriginal people. The Tories would like to do the same thing with our education system. Michel Gove a few years ago also managed to annoy people, when he said he didn’t want the ‘Blackadder’ view of the First World War taught. Which neglects the fact that Blackadder is very definitely comedy.
The Tories want to impose on British schoolchildren a flag-waving, patriotic view of our country’s past and what it did around the world. But this would be to falsify history. Historians recognise that you can never get to an absolutely objective view history. But nevertheless, that is what you aim for as far as is possible. And you need to understand the history behind present-day political and social movements in order to make sense of them. You don’t have to be supporter of Black Lives Matter, for example, to recognise that it’s a powerful movement that does have the support of very many people, and that the movement’s rise can be explained through the history of persecution of American and British Blacks.
Trump’s announcement also seems to follow some of the movements among the local, state schoolboards in the US. A few years ago the Republican administration in Arizona voted to take the civil rights movement of the school syllabus, arguing that it was decisive or some such nonsense. What did they decide to replace it with? Readings from the speeches of Ronald Reagan. We’re almost back to Nazi Germany and the enforced reading of Hitler’s Mein Kampf in schools, and the various other wretched dictatorships around the world, whose citizens had to consume their leader’s literary efforts. Like Chairman Mao and his little red book in China. Reagan at least praises freedom and democracy, but the reality for the South American victims of the American empire was Fascism and mass murder during his tenure of the White House.
A week or so ago Trump banned the teaching of critical race theory to the police and other departments of the American state. And I think he was quite right. Critical race theory states, quite overtly, that all Whites are racist and that any institution established by Whites is therefore automatically discriminatory to people of colour. It is itself a nasty, racist doctrine that should have no place being taught for the same reason that White supremacist ideology shouldn’t either. But Trump’s demand that American schooling should be even more patriotic is wrong and deeply troubling.
He seems to want Americans to support their country ‘right or wrong’. Which brings to my mind a line from the 1980s British space detective series Star Cops. Interviewing a suspect, the hero Nathan Spring remarks of the other’s patriotism, ‘My country right or wrong, eh?’
‘There are worse philosophies.’
‘Yes, most of them start with that one.’
It’s the same with Trump’s view of history. This is another, troubling move towards Fascism with ideology taught as fact. It is not education. It is indoctrination and propaganda.
Congratulations and respect to Jackie Walker and twitter user and campaigner Simon Maginn for finally getting the Beeb to admit it misquoted Jackie Walker, smearing her as an anti-Semite. Walker, as I’ve described many, many times, was the vice-chair of the pro-Corbyn group, Momentum, who was smeared by the Israel lobby and the Blairites and expelled from the Labour party as part of a purge of pro-Palestinian activists and genuine, traditional Labour members and activists. Walker’s Facebook page had been scrutinised by members of the Israel Advocacy Movement for material they could use against her. They found a passage from a private conversation she had had with two or three other colleagues, in which she made the entirely historically correct statement that her people – the Jews – were among the chief financiers of the slave trade. This was then taken out of context by the low-life scumbags of the IAM, who claimed that she said that the Jews were the chief financiers of the slave trade. Walker’s a woman of colour and Jewish by descent and faith. Her partner’s Jewish, and her daughter attends a Jewish school. She and her parents, who met on an American civil right march, have always campaigned against all forms of racism, including anti-Semitism. But truth doesn’t matter to the Zionist witch-hunters, who actively smear critics of Israel’s brutal treatment of the Palestinians as anti-Semites in order to silence them. The Zionists’ smear was then taken up by the Macclesfield Goebbels, Nick Robinson. The Beeb’s journo claimed that Walker had said that the Jews controlled the slave trade, and that this was an example of the anti-Semitism in the Labour party.
Simon Maginn complained to the Beeb about this gross distortion of what she’d said when Robinson tweeted it back in February. And now, six months later, the Beeb has finally admitted that Walker had been misquoted. Mr Maginn tweeted about his victory yesterday, putting up a picture of the letter he’d received. An official from the Corporation’s Executive Complaints Division wrote
What she had said, however (in response to a friend who had raised the question of ‘the debt’ owed to the Jews because of the Holocaust), was “Oh yes – and I hope you feel the same towards the African holocaust? My ancestors were involved in both – on all sides as I’m sure you know, millions more Africans were killed in the African holocaust and their oppression continues today on a global scale in a way it doesn’t for Jews… and many Jews (my ancestors too) were the chief financiers of the sugar and slave trade which is of course why there were so many early synagogues in the Caribbean. So who are victims and what does it mean? We are victims and perpetrators to some extent through choice. And having been a victim does not give you a right to be a perpetrator.” ‘Even allowing for the element of compression often seen in tweets, I think the paraphrase of Ms Walker gave an insufficiently accurate impression of her actual words, so I am upholding that aspect of your complaint.’
Mike in his article about this points out that this is exactly what he said when he blogged about Jackie’s victimisation nearly three years ago. He described how the IAM misquoted her and sent their material to the Jewish Chronicle, so it could publish the smear. Mike wrote that this had led to her receiving abuse by people claiming to be anti-racism campaigners, albeit only of the kind relating to the Jews. And that these were the same kind of people, who claim the Holocaust exclusively for the Jews, omitting the murder of the Roma, the sick and disabled, and other groups, who suffered genocide under the Nazis.
This is absolutely correct. The intolerant defenders of Israel really do have a policy of claiming Nazi genocide exclusively for the Jews. Tony Greenstein has posted a piece about it, pointing out that the Holocaust Museum at Yad Vashem describes the other groups targeted by the Nazis for extermination only as ‘victims of persecution’. But although Mike was entirely correct, the witch-hunters and smear-merchants in the Labour party used it as part of their allegation that Mike himself is an anti-Semite. The party said that “qualifying racism in this way Mr Sivier has done is dismissive of antisemitism. There are very few, if any campaigners who ‘claim the Nazi holocaust exclusively for Jews’. Stating this discredits and diminishes antisemitism and the work done by campaigners.”
But Mike in his defence provided plentiful evidence showing that pro-Israel campaigners do precisely this, quoting the prize-winning author Elie Wiesel, Lucy Dawidowicz, a right-wing Zionist and historian of the Holocaust, and a piece by Jonathan Freedland in the Guardian in July last year. He also cites a letter by Jewish activists and campaigners protesting against Jackie’s suspension, which cited Yehuda Bauer, the professor of Holocaust Studies at Hebrew University, Jerusalem. Mike also cites other assertions that claim the Holocaust exclusively for the Jews from people attacking him on social media. These include Beth Rosenberg, Christina Wallis and ‘Plastic Fantastic’.
Mike therefore raises the question of when the Labour party will apologise to Jackie and himself. But he’s realistic, recognising that the prejudice in favour of the witch-hunters is too strong in the Labour party at the moment. He concludes, however
But I do think there is a clear message here – that the Labour Party machine now needs to engage in full and open discussion with those of us it has wronged, about its reasons for attacking perfectly innocent people, for dragging our names and reputations through the dirt, and for protecting those who have lied about us – both inside and outside the organisation.
How about it, Jennie Formby? Let’s have an open debate – or are you afraid?
Unfortunately, I doubt very much that any such debate will ever be allowed to be held. The victims of the witch-hunt aren’t just facing the forces of the Zionist lobby and the Blairites within the Labour party, but the entire Conservative establishment and the Israel lobby outside. Both groups realise they cannot win by allowing a fair debate, because the facts are against them. The only way they can defend Israel and try and prevent the revival of socialism and a return of the Labour party to its traditional pro-working class policies, is through smears, lies and vilification. If they do decide to hold a fair debate, and the witch-hunters lose and the party is forced to readmit the victims and apologise, the party will be viciously attacked by the Tories and the Tory press. They will falsely claim that the party is once again siding with the anti-Semites and try to stir up fresh outrage.
But this is no reason why the party should not be challenged to hold an open debate, and for the Tories, the Israel lobby and their allies in the press should not be fought and their lies attacked and refuted again and again. Until it’s very clear to the public who the liars are. And the real racists are the Blairites and Zionists, who claim that only the Jews suffered genocide under the Nazis, and vilify decent, self-respecting Jews, who attack this falsification of history, with the same rhetoric the Nazis used.
I think for most of us outside the Black anti-racist movements, this country’s Black history and its tradition of Black activism against racism, imperialism and exploitation is largely unknown. It’s overshadowed to a large extent by the inspirational American civil rights movements of the 1960s, and its heroes and heroines. Towering figures like Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and Rosa Parks. A few Black British anti-slavery activists from the 18th and 19th century, like Olaudah Equiano and Mary Prince, are known to a certain extent, as well as the Crimean War nurse and heroine Mary Seacole. But that’s it. And I think for most mainstream Brits, Blacks and other non-Whites only entered politics and got elected to public office in the 1980s with Diane Abbott, Bernie Grant, Paul Boateng and others.
But Black and Asian activism goes right back to the 19th century, and Britain has had elected BAME politicians since the early 20th century. The BBC 2 series, Victorian Sensations, mentioned two in the second episode of the series broadcast Wednesday night, 29th May 2019. Victorian Sensations is about the massive scientific, social and political changes that shook Victorian society in the 1890s. Last week’s was on scientific advances in electricity and Roentgen’s discovery of X-rays, which revolutionised medicine. The pioneers of X-ray examination, however, paid a terrible price for their research in skin cancer caused by their machines. One British pioneer ended up losing the fingers on one hand, and another arm was amputated completely.
This week’s edition was on ‘Degeneration’, and the late Victorians’ fears of racial, social and imperial decline. This covered the ideas of racial decline in H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine, Francis Galton and the birth of the eugenics movement, aimed at preserving and improving British biological stock; the controversy over the New Woman, liberated Victorian ladies, who dared to move out of the traditional female domestic role and pursue masculine hobbies like cycling; Hans Nordau’s book, Degeneration, Lombroso’s Criminal Man, and the fears about mental illness, which resulted in entirely blameless people banged up in lunatic asylums for the most trivial reasons, like a pathetic young man, who was incarcerated for masturbation. It also covered Oscar Wilde, the Aesthetic Movement and the Decadents, including Arthur Symonds, Havelock Ellis and the first sympathetic scientific research in homosexuality. But one of the most interesting pieces in the programme was right at the end, when presenter Paul McGann spoke to a modern Black activists about two Black British activists, who came to Britain from the West Indies, and founded pioneering Black anti-racist movements. One of them was Celeste Matthews, who became a Methodist minister, and founded a Black rights magazine attacking imperialism, Lux.
Another pioneering Black rights activist, who gained public office later in the second decade of 20th century was John Archer. He was elected Mayor of Battersea in 1913, becoming the first person of African descent to hold public office in London. In 1918 he became the first president of the African Progress Union, a post he would hold for three years. This was formed to promote ‘the general welfare of Africans and Afro peoples’ and spread knowledge of Black history. There’s an extract from the speech he gave at the Union’s first meeting in Colin Firth’s and Anthony Arnove’s great anthology of British radical writing and activism throughout history, The People Speak: Democracy Is Not A Spectator Sport (Edinburgh: Canongate 2013). This runs
The people in this country are sadly ignorant with reference to the darker races, and our object is to show to them that we have given up the idea of becoming hewers of wood and drawers of water, that we claim our rightful place within this Empire … That if we are good enough to be brought to fight the wars of the country we are good enough receive the benefits of the country … One of the objects of this association is to demand – not ask, demand; it will be ‘demand’ all the time that I am your president. I am not asking for anything, I am demanding. (p. 189).
Unfortunately we really don’t know about the great history of Black activism in this country. Victorian Sensations gave a small glimpse of this on Wednesday, and I’d like to know more. Not only is this worthwhile in itself, as a piece of British history that’s been unfairly neglected, but we also need it to combat that growing racism that’s spreading across Europe and which has resulted in Farage’s Brexit party getting 36.7 per cent of the vote in the Euro elections last week.
This is another great video from Labour Against the Witchhunt, a group formed to defend decent Labour party members, who have been suspended, expelled and smeared as anti-Semites, amongst other lies. It was filmed on 15th May 2018. Marc Wadsworth is the Black Labour party anti-racist activist, who was smeared as a Jew-hater by the vile Ruth Smeeth, because he embarrassed her by commenting on her passing information to a journo from the Torygraph at a press event. He was prevented from getting a fair hearing partly because a group of White Labour MPs and Zionist smear merchants descended on the tribunal to pressure them into giving a ‘guilty verdict’.
Hew begins by thanking the audience for turning up, and the people who organised the event, Tina Workman, Tony Greenstein, Jackie Walker, Moshe Machover, and others. He states that they have been ratcheting up the party passing reinstatement motions. This is going really well. Ealing North and Luton South have passed resolutions, as well as places he hasn’t even heard of, like Stroud in Gloucestershire. All around the country there is a great upsurge of anger, of rage, at an injustice. And it isn’t about him, as Alexei [Sayle] has said. It’s about an attack and turning back the tide of having a socialist for the first time as leader of the Labour party, and all his allies, like myself, Tony [Greenstein] and Jackie [Walker] are collateral damage because they’ve dared to defend him and, in a sense, take a bullet for him. That’s what he was doing when he spoke out at the Shami Chakrabarti report on the 30th June 2016. He says that they will remember the fraught political atmosphere that surrounded that meeting with people, who the organisation he then belonged to, Momentum Black Connections, described as ‘traitors’, the 172 who signed a motion of ‘No confidence’ in Corbyn. They included an individual he personally got into trouble for. He’s not going to big them up any more, and give them fame from his name, but his audience knows who they are. This is a battle that has been lost. But they are fighting a war, and they will win, but they will throw everything at them.
He then say what a spectacle it was when the 18,19,20 – they say 40 or 50, but he can count, and it wasn’t that many – of white MPs, led by Wes Streeting – and they have to think of a nickname for him – marching on his hearing, against one Black man, to influence the outcome of that NCC kangaroo court. He’s free to call it that now, as that’s what it was. He faced a panel of that famous left-wing from the GMB, Maggie Cousin, and the wingman, Douglas Fairbairn, from the steelworkers’ union – never says a word, just nods every time Maggie says something. And he’s says he’ll leave the name of the Unite member out of it for now, as he’s a member of Unite and a very loyal person, but he can’t help what others may find out as a result of doing due diligence. He quotes Chris Williamson, who said it was a perverse decision. The hearing took two days. People like Graham Batch put in a witness statement, Mike Kushman, David Rosenberg, Naomi Winborne-Idrissi. Fantastic Jewish support. This is not Black people versus Jewish people. This is Jewish people and Black people fighting side by side for justice on a cause. And let them never divide us, for that is what they seek to do! He says that he’s not an anti-Semite, his audience knows he’s not an anti-Semite, and the MP who accused him knows he’s not an anti-Semite. In fact when she went out of the room and put that statement out attacking Corbyn, he was just collateral damage. She didn’t have a clue who he was. He was just some Black awkward bugger, who’d called her out doing something she didn’t ought to with the Daily Telegraph, another Labour supporting paper.
It’s interesting, he says. You can judge people from the company they keep. On the one side you have Kevin Schofield, the former Sun journalist, who’s now running PoliticsHome. You’ve got Richard Angel, director of Progress, I can’t remember whether he was on the left or the right, but it doesn’t matter as he’s very much on the right, Jennifer Gerber, director of Labour Friends of Israel. That was the little crew that was out that day to get Corbyn. And don’t forget that the Chakrabarti report was against anti-Semitism and all forms of racism. So he had every right, didn’t he? – to talk about the underrepresentation of African, Caribbean and Asian people in that room, and among the staff and the journalists? All of that was lost as the journalists, who turned on him as one of their number, had no interest in the report and its issues. They were out to get Corbyn that day. They were like a pack of wolves, and he has never seen anything like it in forty years of journalism. They were rabid. He then mentions that Tina Godshaw, from the press office of the National Union of Journalists was present, and that they’ve worked very closely together at Lambeth Momentum. And so they were on a mission.
But he’s slowly rowing back. He’s got a rebuttal strategy. He’s taken on the Jewish Chronicle. It’s been settled by IPSO and 14 stories have been corrected. They had to take the word ‘abuse’ out of those stories, as he did not abuse that MP. He says he was heckled in the meeting ‘How dare you! How dare you! How absolutely dare you!’ A Black man daring to speak up at a nearly all White meeting about Black representation. ‘How dare I!’ Perhaps, he muses, that’s the slogan for a future T-shirt.
But they’ve made progress. A poll of nearly 3,000 people, ordinary members of the public, came out more than 94 per cent against his expulsion. Expulsion revulsion! There’s been an outcry. The Black community is stirring. He was on a radio station. He was supposed to be on for half an hour, they wouldn’t let him go after an hour. He identifies the station as Genesis Radio, and points out Jennifer Lee, who was the programme’s presenter that night, and who would be speaking later. Nana Asante of the Black Labour Movement has run a fantastic petition campaign, which is on Change.org. Sometimes as Black people, they’re slow to stir – a sleeping giant – but when they get on the move, you saw the Civil Rights movement, the anti-apartheid movement, the Panthers and the Black Power movement. They are mighty. Small but tallowa, as they say in Jamaica. Small but mighty. And they’re beginning to stir. The Voice newspaper carried a story supporting the campaign. Last week it was the story that had the most views. It’s beating stories about Black American celebrities, like Megan Markle in terms of hits.
How do they go forward? London is just the beginning. This is just a springboard to a national tour, where he will be able to talk directly to the public, as some people have raised questions. Like after watching a fifty-five second video clip that’s online of him talking at the Chakrabarti meeting, they ask ‘Surely he can’t have been chucked out of the party at that meeting because of what he said? There must be more.’ Well, there is no more. In the hearing over two days they played that clip about 15 times and dissected it, every bit of it. And there is no more. There were two charges of which he was found guilty. One is the incident in the video, and the second charge was that he dared defend himself in an article in The Voice and on his own website, The Latest.com, and retweeted a few of Tony Greenstein’s sage offerings online and some others. And so he is guilty in some way of exacerbating the original charge. So it’s just nonsense. He has a brilliant team of lawyers, about four of them at the last count, and they’re putting together a case, on Monday the Labour party will get a very heavy-duty letter from his lawyers, who have said that he has substantial grounds for the Labour Party having breached its own rules on contract, on human rights, and there’s a small issue of defamation. There are a few individuals he may have to go after.
‘Let me,’ he says, ‘leave you with this insight into the hearing’. When his fantastic barrister Althea Brown of Doughty Street, a great Black woman, challenged the Party to give a definitive definition of what it had adopted as its version on anti-Semitism, they couldn’t answer. They had to call an adjournment. And they accused Walker of daring to say in that private JLM meeting, which she thought was a safe space to have a debate about all matters Jewish and anti-Semitism, when she asked for a good working definition of anti-Semitism. The party themselves couldn’t come up with that definition. They couldn’t. Was it the I.H.R.A.? Was it the I.H.R.A. couple of sentences? Was it the I.H.R.A. couple of sentences plus examples, seven of which are about Israel? They didn’t know. They had to call an adjournment, and they came back into the room with four lawyers, all disagreeing with each other and saying well, maybe they can take into account the examples. But that’s not party policy, is it? That’s making it up as you go along.
So we’ve got a problem. And the problem isn’t pockets of anti-Semitism in the party, it’s the fact that certain unscrupulous right-wing individuals have weaponised false accusations of anti-Semitism and that must be fought against. ‘I am totally and utterly opposed to anti-Semitism,’ he concludes, ‘and all forms of racism, bigotry and prejudice, and I’ve fought them all my life, and I will continue to fight them side by side with Jewish sisters and brothers. Thank you for coming today. Thank you very much indeed.’
One of the things that is very clear from Mike’s kangaroo court hearing is that Mike is no racist. He never was, and never will be. And growing up in the 1980s when the NF was once again seeking power, racism was attacked by a new generation of Black activists and Black politicians took their place as Labour MPs, we became very conscious of this issue and the need to combat it everywhere and every time it arose. One of the subjects Mike tackled in his attack on the false claims of anti-Semitism levelled against other Labour party members, was the racist abuse directed at Jackie Walker, the vice-chair of Momentum. Walker had attended a Holocaust Day training workshop organized by the Jewish Labour Movement, formerly Paole Zion, the British branch of the Israeli Labour party. She had then committed the unpardonable sin of objecting to the workshop’s exclusive focus on the suffering of the Jews to the exclusion of other groups, who have also suffered genocide. Her comments were secretly recorded, she was accused of anti-Semitism, and suspended from the party.
It is a farcical, shameful accusation from hypocrites and moral nullities. Walker is Jewish and a woman of colour. Her father was a Russian Jew, and her mother a Black American civil rights activist. They met during a civil rights march. Both sides of her family thus know only too well the reality of bigotry, racism and violent intolerance. After her comments were leaked, she suffered further racist abuse from those pretending to be the opponents of anti-Semitism. Mike discussed this in one of his posts, and the faceless Stalinists of the party bureaucracy accused him in turn of anti-Semitism. The NEC dismissed Mike’s concerns out of hand, and made a pompous statement that Mike’s very mention of the issue was
grossly offensive to those the Party seeks to represent particularly the Jewish community. Comments like these have had and continue to have a serious impact on the Party’s position as an inclusive organisation, which stands against antisemitism.
and ‘dismissive of anti-Semitism’.
Utter bilge!
Mike and some of the Jewish bloggers have shown the vile tweets directed at people like them on Twitter by Zionists, who very much claim that the focus should only be on the Jewish Holocaust. And the racist abuse suffered by Walker herself was appalling. Among the insults hurled at her was the charge that she couldn’t be Jewish, because she was Black. This is despite the fact that there are African Jews, of which the Falashas are probably the best known. Indeed, the Bible records that one of Moses’ wives came from Cush, which is now part of modern Ethiopia. There have been a number of documentaries and pieces by journalists exposing the violent racism in Israel against Black Africans, including Jews of Ethiopian heritage, who have come to Israel. Furthermore, the transatlantic Zionist right, or at least elements of it, also take the view that only Jewish suffering must be commemorated on Holocaust Memorial Day. Kathy Shaidle, an extreme right-wing Canadian Conservative/ Republican activist made that very clear on her blog, Five Feet of Fury. She took particular ire at Bernie Farber, the head of the main Canadian Jewish organization. Because Farber was a decent man, who felt Jews should sympathise and show solidarity with all other marginalized and persecuted groups. When Darfur in the Sudan was attacked and its people killed and rape by the Islamist Janjaweed militia, Farber organized a ‘Shabbat for Darfur’, a day of fasting and prayer in the Jewish tradition. Farber also had the temerity to take part in gay pride march to show his solidarity with Canada’s gay citizens. And Farber’s not alone in his views. As one left-wing, anti-racist Jewish activist said, to be a Jew is always to support the oppressed, never the oppressor.
There is no question that in making this accusation, the NEC were very much supporting racism. Mike makes that clear in his blog post about this issue, and condemns it as disgusting.
And when Mike argued against the accusation, posing awkward questions of his own, Cousins interrupted to prevent those presenting the accusations from answering. And when Mike succeeded in getting them to answer, it was clear why Cousins was so keen not to let the presenter answer the questions: she couldn’t. You can read Mike’s account of this over at his blog, at https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2018/11/15/labours-ruling-committee-is-racist-the-evidence-is-undeniable/
Nor is Mike alone in finding the NEC’s and Maggie Cousin’s persecution of decent members of the Labour party under the pretext of combating anti-Semitism racist.
Jackie Walker made the same accusation in an event in Islington in May this year, 2018, which was part of a tour of the country by Marc Wadsworth, supported by the comedian Alexei Sayle, and Jackie Walker and others, including a number of Black anti-racism activists. Marc Wadsworth was the Black anti-racism campaigner, who was himself smeared by Ruth Smeeth and a complicit Tory press as an anti-Semite because of a remark he made about her passing on information to a Torygraph hack at Labour party meeting. Wadsworth didn’t know she was Jewish and made no reference to Jews in his comments. But Smeeth, a Zionist and Blairite, smeared him as an anti-Semite anyway.
And as with Walker, it’s a charge that is utterly ridiculous. Wadsworth was a dedicated campaigner, one of his whose achievements was getting the parents of the murdered Black teenager, Stephen Lawrence, to meet Nelson Mandela. He had also worked closely with the Board of Deputies of British Jews in fighting the BNP in the ’80s and ’90s after a series of anti-Semitic assaults in parts of London. He is very, very far from being an anti-Semite. But he was a supporter of Jeremy Corbyn, and so the Blairite and Zionist right of the party chose to smear him in the campaign to topple the Labour leader.
And presiding over the kangaroo court that smeared him as an anti-Semite was – yes, you guessed it! – Maggie Cousins.
The three other Black speakers that evening were also concerned about the racist persecution of the Windrush generation, and anti-Black racism within the Labour party. They claimed that the report by Shami Chakrabarti on racism with in the Labour party, had been ignored when it came to other races. One of these speakers, Angela Lee, a presenter on the Genesis channel, was particularly concerned about low expectations of Black children and the higher rates of expulsion for them in schools, including those in Islington. See http://islingtontribune.com/article/the-muddle-around-a-conflict-within-labour
Cousins is a hard-right Zionist, but she isn’t a member of the Jewish Labour Movement or Jewish Voice for Labour on the other side, and so she masquerades as being impartial.
As for Zionism, non-Zionist Jews like Tony Greenstein and David Rosenberg have argued very strongly and convincingly that it is itself a deeply and perniciously racist ideology. It is anti-Semitic, in the sense that it is a capitulation to anti-Semitism. Its founder, Theodor Herzl, believed that anti-Semitism could not be overcome, and that Jews’ only hope lay in creating a state of their own, for which they should co-operate with anti-Semites. He thus praised Arthur Balfour, for passing the Aliens Act against eastern European Jewish immigration to Britain, as well as the British Brothers’ League, a racist organization campaigning against such immigration. The Zionist organization in Nazi Germany fully supported the racist Nuremberg Laws at the time other Jewish organization were campaigning against them. Its newspaper, the Judischer Rundschau, even told its readers that they should wear the yellow Star of David forced on them by Nazis with pride. Chaim Herzog opposed the kindertransport, which evacuated Jewish German children to Britain. He stated he’d prefer it if nearly all of the Jews in Germany were exterminated, if only a few went to the Jewish settlements in Palestine rather than the majority were saved by going to Britain. In Hungary, Rudolf kasztner made a deal with the Nazis to send some tens of thousands of Jews to the death camps, on the condition that some might be spared to go to Israel.
And Israel is still making alliance with real Nazis and anti-Semites, praising the far-right regimes in Poland and Hungary, and hosting British and American influential far right figures like Stephen Bannon, Richard Spencer and Tommy Robinson. And they have the same vile opportunism towards genuine anti-Semitic atrocities. After the Pittsburgh massacre last weekend, the Israeli ambassador to America claimed the rise in anti-Semitism in America was partly due to ‘left-wing activism on campus’. This was a coded attack on the BDS campaign, amongst other things. He also urged Jews to move to Israel.
The shooter had chosen the Tree of Life synagogue, because they were active helping asylum seekers come to America through a Jewish charity. An Israeli rapper notorious for his Fascistic lyrics odiously declared that you couldn’t blame the shooter and those like him, because they were fed up of liberal Jews interfering in their country’s politics.
Utterly, utterly repugnant.
There is also a very strong streak of what would be rightly seen as anti-Semitism if it came from gentiles in Zionist attacks on Israel-critical Jews. They are viciously attacked as ‘kapos’, with some wishing that their families had died in the Holocaust.
And David Rosenberg on his blog, Rebel Notes, has posted his account of how the Board of Deputies of British Jews in the 1980s was strongly opposed to Jews going on anti-racist marches when they were to protect and defend other racial groups. Thus meetings of Jewish anti-racists had to be held in venues like Quaker Meeting Houses because many synagogues closed their doors to them. The official reason was that the Board was afraid Jewish marchers would be exposed to anti-Zionist propaganda. But some left-wing campaigners believed the real reason was that the Conservative Jewish establishment wanted to keep them away from the Left.
And this is apart from Israel’s persecution of the Palestinians, its imprisonment of them in a system of apartheid and slow, ethnic cleansing. None of which can be defended, which is why Israel’s advocates smear those, who criticize it as anti-Semites.
This is what Cousins and Labour’s NEC are supporting: a vicious, hypocritical and persecutory ideology and state, which attacks real anti-racists and opponents of anti-Semitism. It is an ideology, who strongest advocates in Britain have never wanted British Jews to involve themselves in the struggles of other ethnic groups for equality and dignity. The Israel lobby in the Labour party wishes the genuine sufferings of Blacks in history to be ignored, rather than commemorated with that of the Jews. And for the marginalization of Labour’s Black members and those in Labour-run councils to continue in silence. Ken Livingstone was also concerned about Black representation in the Labour party. It’s in his book, Livingstone’s Labour. Which may well be another reason they smeared him as an anti-Semite.
So perhaps it’s about time we fought back, and named Cousins and the NEC for what they are, and tell them very firmly what we tell the BNP, National Action, the EDL and the rest of the thugs and bully-boys of the Far Right:
Matthew Bolton, How To Resist: Turn Protest to Power (London: Bloomsbury 2017)
About this time last week, hundreds of thousands of people were out on the streets marching to demand a second referendum on Brexit. It was the biggest demonstration since 2 million or so people marched against Blair’s invasion of Iraq. And as Mike commented in his blog post about it, as likely to do as much good. Blair and his corrupt gang ignored the manifest will of the people, and went ahead anyway, determined to prosecute a war whose real reasons were western imperialism and multinational corporate greed. The march failed to stop the war and the chaos it caused is still ongoing. Just as last week’s march will also fail to prevent the Tories doing whatever they want.
It’s a disgusting situation, and this book is addressed to everyone who’s fed up with it. The author, Matthew Bolton, is an organizer with the campaigning group Citizens UK and their Living Wage campaign. And the book is addressed to people, who have been on the march, and are sick and tired of being ignored. Right at the very beginning of the book, he writes
This book is for people who are angry with the way things are and want to do something about it; for people who are frustrated with the system, or worried about the direction the country is going in. For people who are upset about a particular issue, or want a greater say in the changes happening in their neighbourhood. They’ve posted their opinions on social media and they’ve shouted at something they’ve seen on the news. They’ve been on the big march and they’ve been to the ballot box, but what more can be done? This is for people who want to make a change, but they’re not sure how. (p.1)
A few pages later he describes the dangers to democracy and the increasing sense of powerlessness people now feel when decisions are taken out of their hands by politicians.
What’s at stake here is more important than simply helping people who care about particular issues to run effective campaigns. It’s about democracy. In the past, people who wanted to make a difference, and believed in change fought for democracy with sweat, blood and courage. The Chartists, the Suffragettes and other endured prison and faced death in their struggle for the chance to have a say in the governance of the country. They organized and campaigned to force the ruling elites to open up our political system to influence by the majority of the people. It is a great misunderstanding to think that they were fighting for the chance to put a cross in a box once every few years. They were fighting – week in, week out – for power. Fighting for more people to have more influence.
Over time, we have become confused. Now we have the vote, we have mistaken politics for Parliament and have come to see democracy as something to watch on television or follow on Twitter, like spectators at a football game – or worse, to switch off from it completely, losing trust in politicians, losing trust in the media, losing trust in the system. Democracy doesn’t just mean ‘to vote’, it means people power. It means embedding political action into our day-to-day lives, in our communities and workplaces. It is a vision of a society where power is distributed amongst the people, not concentrated in the hands of the few. It’s not an end state, but a constant struggle for people to fight for a seat around the decision-making table.
But it doesn’t feel like we are at the table. It feels like we are on the menu. Power is being concentrated in the hands of an increasingly small circle of people. We have a revolving door of Cabinet ministers becoming bankers, becoming newspaper editors, becoming chief executives. We have been lulled into a false sense of security, thinking that our democratic system would create a better future for us all. But it doesn’t look that way. By lunchtime on the first Wednesday in January, after just two-and-a-half days’ work, FTSE 100 bosses will have earned more than the average person will earn that entire year. The generation now in their twenties will be the first in modern times to be worse off than their parents. What we want for ourselves and our children – a decent job, a home, a health service, a community – is under threat. (pp. 4-5).
He then discusses how the political terrain has shifted immensely recently, with people demanding change, giving as examples the vote to Leave in the Brexit referendum and the election of Jeremy Corbyn. But he also makes the point that you need a strategy and that winning campaigns are very well planned and organized. And he gives two examples: Rosa Parks and Abdul Durrant. While the action that sparked off the bus boycott that began the Civil Rights movement in earnest was presented as spontaneous in Dr. Who, in reality it was very carefully planned. The Montgomery chapter of the NAACP had been planning a boycott for a year before she refused to give up her seat. They had already tried this with three other Black passengers, but had failed to light the fuse of public indignation. This time, they found the right person with Rosa. Durrant was a leader in the East London Communities Organisation, part of Citizens UK, who worked nights as a cleaner in HSBC in Canary Wharf. He led a campaign to get better pay for workers like him, and then organized a media and mass protest to get it.
As for Bolton himself, he comes from a working/ middle class family. His father’s family were working class, his mother’s solidly middle class. He attended Cambridge university, but went to the state primary in his part of London. The local area was very rough, and his mother wanted him privately educated, and he was lucky enough to get a scholarship to a private school in Dulwich. He says that it was at this time that the stark difference between conditions in south London and the bubble of privilege in Dulwich began to grate on him. He was mugged twice in his neighbourhood, once at the point of a knife, punched several times in the face, and violently carjacked. After private secondary school, he went to sixth form at a state school that also had its fair share of problems. He describes how some of his friends from private school went on to work with a family friend in the City, which he describes as a conveyor belt to a decent university and a great career. Others had to avoid gang trouble on their way home, looked after their young siblings in the evening because their mother was working nights, scrimped and saved to pay the gas meter, and then tried to do their homework. He continues
It wasn’t just the unfairness that made me angry: it was the fact that as a society we say success is determined by how clever you are and how hard you work. If you fail, it’s your fault. That convenient lie made me angry then and it makes me angry now. (p. 21).
The book describes the strategy he has devised over years of campaigning to affect change. It starts off by identifying the issue you are particularly angry about – it could be anything – and identifying the people in authority who may be able to do something about it. He rejects the idea that powerlessness is somehow noble, and recommends instead that protestors concentrate on developing their power, as well as appealing to those that already have it to help them through their self-interest. The book also talks about the correct strategy to adopt in meetings and talks with those in authority and so on. It is all about mobilizing popular protest for peaceful change. After the introduction, pieces of which I’ve quoted above, it has the following chapters:
1. If You Want Change, You Need Power
2. Appreciating Self-Interest
3. Practical Tools to Build Power
4. Turning Problems Into Issues
5. The Action is in the Reaction
6. Practical Tools to Build a Campaign
7. Unusual Allies and Creative Tactics
8. Finding the Time.
9. The Iron Rule.
I’m afraid I didn’t finish reading the book, and have no experience of campaigning myself, so I can’t really judge how useful and applicable it is. But just reading it, it seems to be a very useful guide with sensible, badly needed advice for people wanting to mount effective campaigns on the issues that matter to them. And Bolton is absolutely right about the rising, obscene inequalities in our society and the crisis of democracy that has developed through the emergence of a corrupt, self-interest and interlinked media-political-banking complex.
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