I can’t say I’ve any enthusiasm for the victory of Paulette Hamilton in the Erdington by-election. Yes, she beat the Tories and is an NHS nurse, which ought to count in her favour. But the turnout was low and despite Starmer’s attempt to talk this up as a some kind of amazing victory and turnaround for the party after the disasters of the Corbyn years, it has been no such thing. It seems to show, if anything, that Erdington’s voters are reacting to Starmer’s reheated Blairism the way Brits reacted to it the first time when Blair was in government. They couldn’t tell the difference between the two main parties and despised Blair’s spin and managerialism. They felt ignored, alienated and dissatisfied. I suspect that was the case on Thursday when so many simply stayed away from the polling stations rather than vote but a pair of parties that simply doesn’t represent them.
Hamilton herself was also in the right-wing press for another reason. In 2015 she was at conference celebrating Malcolm X set up by the Organisation of Black Unity, entitled ‘Ballot or Bomb?’ Hamilton was one of the speakers, and said that although she’d prefer people to use their vote, there might need to be an uprising to deal with racism. A spokesperson for the Labour party then tried to explain her comments away by saying that she was referring to the unrest that broke out in 1981/2 with the anti-racist rioting in Bristol, Toxteth, Brixton and elsewhere.
If that’s what she did mean, then I’m still not impressed. I was at school during the riots, and although they were followed by a national debate about racism and the introduction of positive discrimination, I don’t see anything admirable in the riots themselves. A Black friend of mine at college denied, as many others have also done, that they were about race. Other commentators have said that they were ‘insurrections against the police’. My friend was particularly upset about the number of small children he knew, who told him they were joining the rioting. He was a big, sporty bloke, but said he felt like crying. As for the violence, firebombs were thrown at police cars along with other violence and destruction. And there were White radicals about Bristol trying to get other schoolchildren to join in. I remember leaving school one evening during the rioting. Standing on a raised platform containing one of the trees lining the pavement out of the school was a White guy with a long beard like Karl Marx, shouting down a megaphone. ‘Do you hate the teachers?’ he screamed. ‘Do they make you wear school uniform?’ And then he told the kids to go down and join the rioting in St. Paul’s. The headmaster in assembly the next day told us that if anybody did, they’d be expelled. I don’t think there were many interested in joining in anyway.
Hamilton’s speech was seven years ago, and people can change. It may be that she’s no longer a radical firebrand willing to contemplate violence and rioting to improve conditions for British Blacks. But I’m still not impressed. Rioting and violent militancy may seem all very well from a distance, but they’re frightening when you’re in the middle of them. I’ve relatives, who were forced to move out of their flat to somewhere safer during unrelated rioting in another part of Bristol. And rioting harms Black as well as White and Asian businessmen. A Black friend of mine had to close his business after it was trashed and looted during the 2012 riots.
Hamilton may feel that the terrible conditions in Black British communities may require rioting and an uprising to tackle them, but it was an irresponsible attitude. I find myself wondering with the Tories whether someone who holds such views is suitable as an MP.
I hope I’m wrong and that’s she grown out of them in the intervening years. And that she’ll serve her constituents well. All of them, whether they’re Black, White or Brown.
Oh the irony! Melanie ‘Mad Mel’ Phillips, Daily Mail hack, author, and determined opponent of anti-Semitism and Islamism, has been slapped down for an article she wrote in the Jewish Chronicle denying Islamophobia. According to her highly informed opinion (sarcasm), islamophobia is simply a made-up term used to close down criticism of the Islamic world, including Islamic extremism.
According to Zelo Street, without any trace of irony or self-awareness, Phillips started the piece off by conflating anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism. Anti-Zionism, she declared, was merely the latest mutation of anti-Semitism. The two, according to her, share ‘the same deranged, obsessive falsehoods, demonic conspiracy theory and double standards. It is furthermore an attack on Judaism itself, in which the land of Israel is an inseparable element.’ This is twaddle. Zelo Street points out that Zionism and Judaism certainly aren’t the same, because how else can you explain Christian Zionism? It’s a good question, especially as Christian and non-Jewish Zionism often stemmed from anti-Semitism. Many genuine anti-Semites and Fascists supported the foundation of a Jewish state as a way of clearing Jews out from their own countries. This attitude was so strong that, when one German aristocrat was approached by the Zionists c. 1920 and asked why he didn’t support the creation, he replied that he did, but didn’t want to make it public in case people thought he was an anti-Semite. The Nazis and other European Fascists considering setting up a Jewish homeland in Madagascar, and the were similar schemes among British Fascists for Uganda. This was succeeded by the infamous and short-lived Ha’avara Agreement between the Zionists and the Nazis, in which the Nazis smuggled Jewish settlers in Palestine, then under the British Mandate. But mentioning this, according to the Israel lobby in this country, means that you’re an anti-Semite. Look what happened to Mike when he did in his long piece defending Ken Livingstone, The Livingstone Delusion.
The identity of Zionism and Judaism is also highly dubious. Ultra-Orthodox Jews, such as the Haredi and True Torah Jews, passionately reject the state of Israel for religious reasons. They believe that Israel can only be founded by direct divine action through the Messiah. Modern Israel was founded by secular atheists, and so to them is an abomination. Before the Second World War, most Jews throughout the world, whether in America or Europe or wherever, simply wanted to be equal citizens of the countries, where they had lived for centuries, if not millennia. They regarded these as their real homelands.
As for the accusation that anti-Zionism is based on conspiracy theories, well, there is a mass of very strong evidence showing that the attacks on anti-Zionists and critics of Israel as anti-Semites are very much instigated and supported by the Israeli state through its Office of Strategic Affairs. And recognising that is very different from believing idiotic, murderous myths about the Jews controlling capitalism and trying to destroy the White race.
Philips then went on to declare that ‘Islamophobia’ was invented by the Muslim Brotherhood to mimic antisemitism’. Er, no. Zelo Street states that the term was invented before 1923, citing the article in Wikipedia, which suggests that the term was first used in a 1918 biography of the Prophet Mohammed by the painter Alphonse Etienne Dinet and the Algerian intellectual Sliman ben Ibrahim. The Muslim Brotherhood wasn’t founded until 1928. Philips then went on to claim that “‘Islamophobia’ appropriates to itself the unique attribute of antisemitism – that it is deranged – in order falsely to label any adverse comment about the Islamic world as a form of mental disorder”. Zelo Street succinctly demolishes this absurd claim by stating that the term is simply used to describe anti-Muslim bigotry. Which is correct. I haven’t heard of anyone seriously suggesting that anti-Muslim prejudice is a form of mental illness, or demanding that those who allegedly suffer from it should somehow need psychiatric treatment to cure them. Philips then continued “The concept of ‘Islamophobia’ is thus profoundly anti-Jew. Islamophobia’ is not equivalent to antisemitism. It facilitates it”.
The Board of Deputies found these sentiments to be unpalatable, and issued the following statement in professed solidarity with Muslims and others suffering racism. the Jewish Chronicle’s “fearless journalism has been at the forefront of tackling antisemitism & its denial. The publication of this piece was an error. Anti-Muslim prejudice is very real & it is on the rise. Our community must stand as allies to all facing racism”.
The Muslim Council of Britain also wasn’t impressed. Zelo Street quote a tweet by Miqdad Versi, describing how the Jewish Chronicle has a lot of previous in stirring up anti-Muslim sentiment, especially with articles by Philips. Versi said
“We should not be surprised by the Jewish Chroncile – it’s not the first time. When many Muslims were reeling after the massacre in Christchurch, they published a similar hate-filled piece by Melanie Phillips.They lied about the [MCB] & had to correct their lie … They lied about a Muslim charity, falsely linking it to terrorism, necessitating an apology and paying libel damages … When Baroness Warsi speaks up against Islamophobia in the Conservative Party, its editor tries to slur her … In one of a *number of articles* intending to undermine the definition of Islamophobia, it made false claims of links to extremism, about Professor Salman Sayyid, which it had to retract … This latest article is not a one-off but part of a pattern of behaviour – an editorial line on Muslim-related issues as the thread shows”.
Zelo Street concludes that at least the Board of Deputies has called the Jewish Chronicle out on this one. It’s just a pity that it won’t have any effect on either Philips or the editor, Stephen Pollard.
I also find the Board’s statement somewhat hypocritical.
David Rosenberg of the Jewish Socialist Group stated in one of his articles that when he was growing up in the 1980s, the Board of Deputies did not want Jews such as himself attending any of the anti-racism marches or protests by organisations like Rock Against Racism. The ostensible reason was that they were trying to stop Jewish youth from hearing anti-Zionist propaganda. But others on the Left thought the real reason was simple racism on their part. Whatever the reason, some of the meetings held by Jewish anti-racists had to be held in non-Jewish venues, like Quaker meeting houses and church halls, because the Board forbade synagogues to allow them to meet there.
The Board of Deputies is a Zionist organisation. It’s in their constitution. And as such, it has absolutely no qualms accommodating real Islamophobes. Let’s take their mass demonstrations with the Chief Rabbi and the Jewish Labour Movement against Jeremy Corbyn last year or so. The former Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, has led a group of British Jews to participate in the annual March of the Flags in Jerusalem. This is when Israeli super-patriotic bovverboys parade through the city’s Muslim quarter waving the country’s flag, vandalising Arab property and terrorising the neighbourhood’s people. Liberal Jewish organisations asked Sacks not to go. But he went anyway. As far as I am aware, there was not a peep of criticism from the Board, and they were happy to join the attacks on Corbyn by Sacks and his successor, Ephraim Mirvis, who may also have participated in the March. I also remember that among the protesters was one young man wearing a Kach T-shirt. Kach are an Israeli far-right organisation, which was banned under their terrorism laws. I am similarly aware of no criticism of this man by the Board.
In my experience, the issue of the Palestinians looms very large amongst this country’s Muslims. I studied Islam at College in the 1980s and early ’90s. I once came across the equivalent of a Christian parish magazine put out by one of the mosques. Among its articles was coverage of the closure of a mosque and a nearby church by the Israeli authorities. The Israeli state has a policy of closing down unauthorised non-Jewish places of worship as part of the general pressure and discrimination against the Palestinians. And certain sections of the Muslim community in this country were very aware of it. My guess is that the mosque that published the article wasn’t alone in its concern for its coreligionists in the Holy Land, and that this attitude is general and persists to the present day. That does not mean that they all hate Jews or want to see Israel destroyed and its people massacred. It does mean, though, that they want the religious and ethnic persecution of the Palestinians stopped. But the Board of Deputies flings around accusations of anti-Semitism in order to stop criticism of Israel for its actions against the Palestinians.
If the Board of Deputies is really serious about standing in solidarity with Muslims against racism, then one excellent place would be to start protesting against the treatment of Muslims – and by extension Christians – in Israel.
Until that happens, the Board is just being hypocritical.
The late, great Bill Hicks once said, ‘We live in a world where the good die young, while mediocrities thrive and prosper’. And on Tuesday, two days ago, one of the more noxious of those mediocrities, Tracy Ann Oberman, appeared in the ‘Sixty Seconds’ interview column in the Metro. That’s the free newspaper given away to passengers on buses. The former Dr Who cyberwoman was talking about her latest role as the heroine, Brenda, in the crime drama Mother of Him, the mother of a son, who has committed a terrible crime. Inevitably, the questions then moved on to the abuse she had received for her campaign against anti-Semitism. This ran
You’re no stranger to facing a barrage of abuse online since speaking out against Labour’s alleged anti-Semitism problem. Did that feed into the play?
My speaking out on anti-Semitism and misogyny, in particular in my old party, Labour, and the trolling I received didn’t really feed in because the character of Brenda is not an actor or celebrity and didn’t put herself out there. It made me think that social media has a positive side, which is to give people a chance to put out their story when they otherwise would have been unable to.
Why has anti-Semitism reared its head now?
All racism and misogyny is there somewhere beneath the surface but up until the past few years it was kept to people mumbling in pubs and private areas as it wasn’t deemed acceptable to say in public. I think there’s been a big change since 2017. The left should be better, as should the right- but that is not my affiliation so someone else needs to police them. You can deny you have a problem with it as much as you like but it’s here and it’s thriving.
Your experience with trolling on social media fed into your podcast, Trolled. Have people responded positively to it?
I’ve had such incredible feedback. I get handwritten letters and cards and tweets from people who enjoyed it. I think people have found it very empowering and cathartic to be able to talk about it. Everybody I had on my podcast was championing a different cause and every single one of us had exactly the same sort of trolls. So it is less to with the issue and more to do with the type of person who wants to abuse someone they disagree with.
This is the most self-promoting, hypocritical balderdash.
The anti-Semitism Oberman and the other witch-hunters are so keen to root out isn’t anti-Semitism per se, but rather criticism – including very justified criticism – of Israel. That’s why Oberman and the rest of the witch-hunters have been attacking Corbyn and his supporters. They do criticise Israel and its slow-motion ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. And Oberman, the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, the Jewish Labour Movement and the rest of the wretched lot can be very justly accused of anti-Semitism themselves. Very many of their victims have been Jews, like Jackie Walker and Tony Greenstein, to name only two. As a result, these decent people have suffered the most appalling trolling and abuse. Walker has been told that she can’t be Jewish, ’cause she’s Black, obviously by White racists ignorant of the indigenous Black Jewish people of Africa and Afro-Jewish people in the Diaspora. They’ve demanded that she be lynched – not a joke to someone, whose mother’s people in America really suffered that atrocity – and her body dumped in bin bags, or set on fire. Tony Greenstein has been physically attacked, and told by right Zionists that they wish his family had died in the Holocaust. And any Jew, who criticises Israel, will be called that their a ‘traitor’. As they point out, you can’t be a traitor to a country you weren’t born in, or have never visited. But Netanyahu, contrary to the I.H.R.A. definition of anti-Semitism, which says that Jews cannot be accused of being more sympathetic or loyal to a foreign power, has declared all Jews, everywhere, to be citizens of Israel, and automatically expects their immediate, unconditional loyalty. Needless to say, he’s being sadly disappointed, as increasingly more Jews are giving him the two-fingered salute and ignoring Israel completely or showing solidarity with the Palestinians. To be a Jew, as one pro-Palestinian Jewish American has said, ‘is always to side with the oppressed, never the oppressors’.
The witch-hunters targets also include decent, anti-racist gentiles, like Ken Livingstone and Mike. They went after Leninspart because he dared to cite respected history, that Hitler did initially support Zionism. Tony Greenstein and Prof. Newsinger over at Lobster, and many others, including Mike, have cited chapter and verse of respected histories showing that this is absolutely right. But as Greenstein has shown, Israel has repeatedly tried to suppress any mention of its collaboration with Nazi Germany, including the collusion of Zionist activists, like Kasztner in Hungary, with the Nazis in the deportation of hundreds of thousands of Jews to Auschwitz.
Many of the people smeared as anti-Semites by people like Oberman are anything but.
Quite often, they, Jews and gentiles, have been active against racism, like the Black anti-racism campaigner, Mark Wadsworth. Mike and I were brought up with an awareness of the horrors of the Shoah, and Mike at College was invited to be one of the speakers at a commemoration of those murdered in it by one of his Jewish friends. They have often themselves been the subject of racist or anti-Semitic abuse and attack.
And as for trolling, Oberman, her friend Rachel Riley, and the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism have done more than their fair share of this against decent people like Mike, Jackie and Tony. Riley herself has connections, it seems, to David Collier’s Gnasherjew troll army.
And Oberman has no business lecturing anyone on free speech.
She and her bestie, Rachel Riley, are suing 16 people, including Mike, for libel because they reblogged material showing how they bullied a 16 year old girl with anxiety issues after calling her an anti-Semite. Why? She dared to support Jeremy Corbyn, and didn’t want to have anything to do with them when they wanted her take time out from school to meet them to be ‘re-educated’. Riley is suing Mike, despite not being able to answer his question about what was libelous in the material he reblogged.
At the moment, they’re trying to wear down Mike’s defence by raising technical legal issues in the hope, it seems, of using up Mike’s money so that he won’t be able to afford to defend himself. Mike is still appealing for contributions to his defence fund, and is very grateful for the generous support he’s received from people really concerned with justice and free speech. See:
I remember coming across the image below when I was at college, stuck up on the walls of the Religious Studies department. As you can see, it’s of Hitler making his usual, lazy salute with his hand flung casually back, into which a giant figure representing capitalist big business is giving him wads of notes.
The original was by John Heartsfield, born Helmut Herzfeld, a radical German-born artist. He was a member of the Dada avant-garde artistic movement and a Communist. The original work had the legend Millionen Stehen Hinter Mir – Millions Stand Behind Me’, as well as Kleiner Mann bittet um grosse Gaben – ‘Small Man Asks for Big Donations.’
The image is obviously about how big business funded the Nazis. It’s not entirely accurate, as the Nazis were first ignored by the large corporations, and they were funded instead by small businesses and the lower middle class. But Hitler later appealed to them and once in power Nazi policy always favoured monopoly capitalism.
But you could easily replace the photograph of Hitler with that Tweezer, Tony Blair or one of the Independents. Especially the Independents. As I’ve discussed many times, they’re all corporatists, who let their donors in big business decide their policies and send their staff to ‘assist’ them, and give their donors posts in government, in return for their funding. They are also, all of them, hostile to working people. They are anti-union, for privatisation and austerity, and against the welfare state.
And that is why they, and the media, so viciously hate Jeremy Corbyn. Not only does he intend to turn back Thatcherism and actually empower people, he and Bernie Sanders in America are doing so by appealing to ordinary party members and their money rather than big business.
So get corporate money out of politics, the Blairites, Independents and Tories out of government, and Jeremy Corbyn in. And may Bernie do the same to the corporate Democrats and Republicans in America!
Okay, I’ve been trying to avoid blogging about the Nazis over the Christmas period. The season of peace and goodwill seems to me to be too precious to be spoiled with discussion of Hitler and his band of thugs. But I found a very interesting passage in Hitler’s Mein Kampf last night, which is very similar to the ideas some Libertarians and members of the Republican party over the other side of the Pond and various people on the British extreme right have on citizenship and military service.
I’ve discussed before how many of them follow the ideas of the late SF author, Robert Heinlein, in his book Starship Troopers, that only those, who have served in the armed forces should be granted citizenship and the right to vote. Starship Troopers was filmed by Paul Verhoeven, the director of Robocop and the Arnie version of Total Recall, amongst other movies, in the 1990s. He intended the film to be a satire, but some of those who saw the movie appear to have missed the point. I put up a piece from YouTube a little while, which pulled the book apart and showed the Fascistic worldview underneath, as well as the way the book contradicts itself on certain points.
Hitler made it clear in several passages in Mein Kampf that only those, who had served in the army through National Service should qualify as citizens. The passage here comes from the 1933 English abridged translation, published by Paternoster Row in London as My Struggle. On page 163 Hitler wrote
The Army also is not there merely to teach a man how to march and stand at attention, but it has to act as the final and highest school of national instruction. The young recruit must, of course, learn the use of his weapon, but at the same time he must continue his training for his future life. In that school the boy shall be transformed into a man; he shall not merely learn to obey, but shall be trained with a view to commanding at some future time. He shall learn to be silent, not only when he is justly blamed, but to bear injustice in silence, if necessary.
Fortified by the confidence in his own strength, filled with the esprit de corps which he feels in common with the rest, the boy shall attain to the conviction that his nation is unconquerable.
When his military service is over he must be able to show two documents: his legal papers as citizen of the State, which allow him to take part in public affairs, and his certificate of health, stating that, as regards health, he is fit to marry.
In the next paragraph he states that girls should be educated to be mothers.
In the case of female education, the main stress should be laid on bodily training; and after that, on development of character; and, last of all, of the intellect. But the one absolute aim of female education must be with a view to the future mother.
He returns to the theme later in the chapter ‘Citizens and Subjects of the State’, where he rejects the traditional Weimar categories of citizenship, where people were either state citizens or foreigners. He attacked that because
Race and nationality play no part in it. The child of a negro who once lived in a German protectorate and now is domiciled in Germany is automatically a citizen of the German State.
The whole procedure of acquiring State citizenship is not very different from that of becoming a member of an automobile club for instance. (p. 174).
He demanded instead that ‘the national State’ should divide ‘its inhabitants into three classes: State citizens, State subjects and foreigners’ and went on
In principle, birth only gives the status of a subject. This does not carry with it the right to serve yet as State official nor to take active part in politics, in the sense of voting at elections. In the case of every “State subject” race and nationality have to be proved. The “subject” is free at any time to cease being a subject and become a citizen in the country corresponding with his nationality. The “foreigner’ is only different from the “subject” in that he is a subject in a foreign State.
The young “subject” German nationality is bound to undergo the school education which is laid down for every German. Later on he must consent to undergo the bodily exercises as laid down by the State, and finally he enters the Army. Military training is universal. After his military service is over, the healthy young man with a blameless record will be solemnly invested with the rights of State citizenship. This is the most important document for his whole life on earth.
It must be held in greater honour to be a citizen of this Reich, even if only a crossing-sweeper, than to be a king in a foreign State.
The German girl is a “State subject”, but marriage makes her a citizen. But a German woman engaged in business may be granted rights of citizenship. (p. 175).
This is very close to Heinlein’s and the Libertarian’s ideas, with the exception that I don’t think Heinlein argued that women should only become citizens by marrying or becoming business entrepreneurs. It’s also very close to the attitudes of the Republican right and Fox News. A little while the Conservative propaganda broadcaster aired a piece saluting an American college that had made military style training a mandatory part of the curriculum for its freshers.
As for women, the extreme Right in both Britain and America is worried about the low birthrates in the West compared with Islam and the Developing World. They also have extremely traditional views about gender roles, so Libertarians like Vox Day and other antifeminists demand that women should stay at home to raise children rather than go out to work. Hitler’s recommendation that women should qualify for citizenship if they marry or have a business career looks positively progressive by comparison.
Heinlein’s ideas have also been taken over by part of UKIP. One of the leading Kippers a while ago said he thought it was a good idea. It’s questionable whether he really believed it or was simply try to appeal to the Rightists that did.
The belief that only those who have done their national service should be citizens on its own does not make someone a Fascist or a Nazi. But it is an undemocratic, Nazi idea. It should be rejected not just for itself, but also because it is part of the wider complex of Nazi ideology, which could all too easily follow its adoption.
I found this video from RT which was posted yesterday, Wednesday 21st November 2018 on YouTube. It reports that the Quakers have banned investing in companies which profit through Israel’s occupation of Palestine. The Quakers stated that
Our long history of working for a just peace in Palestine and Israel has opened our eyes to the many injustices and violations of international law arising from the military occupation of Palestine by the Israeli government.
With the occupation now in its 51st year, and with no end in sight, we believe we have a moral duty to state publicly that we will not invest in any company profiting from the occupation.
This is, apparently, the first time a British church had made such a move, and the Quakers have been criticized by Jewish groups, which claim that it is a reference to the Boycott, Divestment and Sanction movement. the Board of Deputies of British Jews called the Quakers decision ‘appalling’ and said that it must be reversed. Quaker leaders, however, state that the decision recalls protests against apartheid South Africa and the slave trade.
The video then moves into a discussion about the decision with Les Levido from Jews For Boycotting Israeli Goods and Rafi Bloom, co-chair of Northwest Friends of Israel.
The Quakers are, of course, absolutely right. Israel is an apartheid state, and the West Bank is under military occupation. The Quakers are rightly famous for their pacifism. One of our aunts was a member of CND in the 1980s, and I got the impression that among the religious groups supporting the movement were the Quakers and Roman Catholic Franciscan friars. As for the Slave Trade, they were one of the main groups behind the Abolitionist movement when it first appeared in the 17th and 18th centuries. One of the great Quaker campaigners against it in the British Caribbean was Woolmer, a hunchbacked dwarf, who used to carry around with him a hollowed-out Bible filled with blood. When he saw a planter approaching, he used to stab the knife into the Bible, sending the blood spattering as a visual protest of the blood spilt through the infamous trade. Philadelphia, the city founded by another Quaker, William Penn, was also the home of many of the American Quaker campaigners against the slave trade. Later on they were joined by the Methodists and the evangelical wing of the Anglican church in Britain. I’ve also got a feeling that many Quakers may also have been involved in the legalization of homosexuality in Britain. Gerard Hoffnung, the musician and cartoonist, was a Quaker and a supporter of this movement to end the persecution of gays.
It’s to be expected that Jewish groups like the Board of Deputies of British Jews were going to be outraged at the church’s decision, but I note that the reporter does not say that they denounced them as anti-Semites. As the Quaker’s have always promoted peace and tolerance, such an accusation simply wouldn’t be credible.
I haven’t watched the debate, however, because I’ve no respect for the North West Friends of Israel. From reading Bookburnersrus, Martin Odoni’s and Tony Greenstein’s blogs, it’s very clear that they’re another bunch of thuggish bully-boys. Martin describes a meeting at a Quaker meeting house in Manchester, when the Jewish American reporter and activist Max Blumenthal was speaking about his latest book on Israel and its crimes. The Zionist activists there first tried to stop him entering, and then loudly heckled, sneered and guffawed throughout his talk until they were finally turfed out by the rozzers. And of course, they made the ridiculous claim that they were being silenced because they were Jews, when in fact they were thrown out because they were just there to disrupt and prevent other Jews talking and hearing about what was really going on.
Tony Greenstein described some of their members in one of his blogs. At least two were failed businessmen, one of whom was a lawyer, who’d been struck off. Quite apart from the usual contingent of Islamophobes and supporters of the EDL. They’re in no position to lecture the Quakers or the Jewish Israel-critical peeps, who have to suffer their anti-Semitic abuse, about morality.
The day before that report, the 21st, RT posted another piece discussing Airbnb’s decision not to list homes in the occupied West Bank, which also enraged the Israeli state. The company’s press room stated
We concluded that we should remove listings in Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank that are at the core of the dispute between Israelis and Palestinians.
About 200 homes were to be removed from the list. The Palestinian authority welcomed the move, as they had previously requested the company to remove such listings. The Israelis, however, condemned it, and used the time-worn tactic of screaming racism.
Yariv Levin, the Israeli tourism minister, declared
This decision is completely unacceptable. This is pure discrimination, something that is taken only against Jews that are living in Judaea and Samaria. This is actually a racist decision – and more than that, I do believe that it is a double standard that is taken only against Israel, against Jews that are living here in Israel.
The anchorwoman then goes on to talk to Mustafa Barghouti, the General Secretary of the Palestinian National Initiative, about the issue, as well as a former commander in the Israeli air force. Barghouti states that the UN resolutions say that the settlements in the West Bank are completely illegal, they are discriminatory, as they are built on land stolen from the Palestinians, and any relationship with these illegal settlements are a violation of international law. He says that Airbnb has taken the right decision, as they stood to lose a lot due to the boycott against them. And what is really racist and discriminatory is the apartheid system the Israelis have created, which favours Israelis over Palestinians.
The Israeli spokesman, Reuven Berko, cited simply as ‘Middle East expert’, rants about Airbnb being ‘cowards to Islamic terrorists, I don’t know what’, accuses them of anti-Semitism and ignoring the right of the Jews to their homeland in Judea and Samaria and asks how many Christians are angry about this. He states that this is an awful step against history, against fate.
It’s the usual specious rubbish. The Biblical state of Israel certainly existed, and was the homeland of the Jewish people in antiquity. But it has not existed for centuries. For many Jews, their real homeland was the country in which they and their forebears had lived in the Diaspora. And the Bund, the Jewish Socialist movement, made that very clear in their slogan ‘Wherever we live, that’s our homeland’. And many Orthodox Jews feel that Israel cannot be restored except by the hand of the Almighty and the Messiah. Until that happens, modern Israel is to them nothing but a blasphemy.
As for appealing to Christian anger about this, the lead Christian Zionist movements, like Ted Hagee’s Christians United for Israel, are millennialists, who believe that the restoration of Israel will usher in the End Times and Christ’s Second Coming, along with the destruction of those Jews, who won’t convert to Christianity. In fact, the indigenous Christians of Palestine have almost been completely cleansed from Israel. The Christian population before 1948 was 25 per cent. Now it’s only one per cent. American Zionist Christians put this down wholly to persecution from Muslims. Now Muslim Palestinians have persecuted their Christian fellow countrymen, whom they see as collaborators. But Palestinian Christians have also and are being persecuted by the Israeli state and the settlers. The Israelis have closed churches as well as mosques, and both churches and mosques have been attacked and desecrated by mobs of Israeli settlers.
In my somewhat limited experience, Muslim Brits are better informed about this than British Christians. I studied Islam when I was at College as part of my Religious Studies minor degree. I can remember reading the equivalent of the parish magazine from one of the British mosques. It contained an article attacking the closure of one of the mosques in Palestine and its conversion into a disco. The article also noted that a nearby Christian church had also been closed by the Israelis.
A few years ago Channel 4 also screened a programme about the relationship between Christianity and other faiths, in which the presenter travelled to Israel. There he encountered an Israeli ‘shock jock’ radio host, who ranted about Christians. The programme also covered a march of militant Israelis on a church used by Messianic Jews. These are Jews, who have accepted Christ as the messiah, but still observe the Mosaic Law. This is my opinion, but I think they’re very similar to the Christian community of which the Gospel writer St. Matthew was a part, as this is traditionally regarded as the Jewish Gospel, and St. Matthew is concerned to assimilate Christ’s teaching to that of the Jewish sages. The settlers were stopped at the church entrance by the Muslim doorman. And apparently, it was actually quite common to have Muslims at the door of Christian churches protecting the worshippers from religious violence from outside.
And if we are going to talk about racism and discrimination, a friend of mine, who studied Judaism at College also told me that in the 1960s the Israelis threw out tens of thousands of indigenous Jewish Palestinians, because they were culturally Arab. There have been articles in Counterpunch by the magazine’s Jewish contributors, which have pointed out that Israel is a European/American Jewish colony, whose founders had a despicable racist contempt for the Mizrahim, Jewish Arabs, or Arabicized Jews.
The Quakers and Airbnb are right to boycott Israel’s occupation of Palestine. And the real racism and apartheid is by Israel against the indigenous Arabs, who have been Jewish, Christian and Muslim, and have suffered discrimination, persecution and ethnic cleansing by the Israeli state.
Here’s a little light relief from some of the heavy stuff. It’s a musical interlude with an anti-Nazi message. Die Krupps are a German Metal/Industrial band, who presumably take their name from the big German armaments firm. The video and song’s based on the fact that during the Second World War the Nazis kept the German army, the Wehrmacht, fighting by giving them Privitin – the drug amphetamine, commonly called ‘Speed’.
It begins with a statement by the band that they do not condone Fascism or drug taking, before showing the airmen of the Luftwaffe zooming around the sky snorting the drug like it was going out of fashion. They are then either shot down by the RAF, or collide, and fall to Earth, on which is projected the grotesque face of Hitler himself.
However grotesque the video is, it’s based very solidly on fact. The Nazis did use drugs to keep their pilots in the air. I’ve forgotten precisely what the drug was, but it got into American drug culture as ‘Nazi Crank’, and became a real problem among some Native Americans.
The video also reminds me of one of the transatlantic underground comics, or comix, that was around in the 1980s. This was Hitler’s Dope, the cover of which featured the Fuehrer snorting something highly suspicious while behind him and to his right sat a bare-breasted Eva Braun. As the people, who produced the comix tended to be college-educated Hippies with left-wing political views, I doubt very much that this was a piece of pro-Nazi propaganda.
Just as I don’t believe that the real goose-stepping idiots of the Far Right anywhere in Europe, whether Germany, France, Britain or wherever, would find the video’s depiction of the Nazis and the Luftwaffe remotely attractive.
It would probably send them berserk with rage. Which is a very good reason to show it!
On Wednesday, 13th June 2018, Mike annnounced that he had set up a crowdfunding page to raise money for him to take to court the organisations and publications that have libelled him as an anti-Semite. He has had to do this, because he simply doesn’t make enough from the Vox Political page to pay the legal fees himself, and so he has turned to the generosity of his readers.
He posted up the description of his case, and why he needs the money, which he has put on his JustGiving page. This runs
“My name is Mike Sivier. You may know me as the writer of the Vox Political website.
I am probably best-known as the man who forced the Conservative government to reveal the number of sick and disabled benefit claimants who had lost their lives after being denied benefit, after a two-year campaign.
In 2017, immediately before local government elections in which I was standing as a Labour candidate, an organisation calling itself the Campaign Against Antisemitism published an article falsely alleging anti-Semitism by me. I believe the intention was to corruptly spoil my chance of being elected.
The piece ‘quotemined’ investigative articles I had written about claims of anti-Semitism against Labour Party politicians, using only those words that could present the most prejudicial impression about me, in order to falsely suggest hatred of the Jewish people. A weblink to the article was then sent to the Labour Party, in an attempt to have my membership suspended. This led to newspaper articles including one in which my local Conservative MP libelled me.
Labour obligingly suspended my membership, and subsequently launched a one-sided investigation in which I was found guilty despite being absent from the proceedings, at which none of the evidence I had presented to the party was mentioned by the investigator.
A copy of the report to the Labour Party committee that heard my case was then handed to a member of the national press. This led to further newspaper articles claiming I was not only an anti-Semite but also a Holocaust denier (an innovation by the Labour Party investigator).
I have been trying to persuade all those involved to retract their unfounded claims and apologise. These lies have harmed my main business – the Vox Political website – by encouraging readers to believe I should be avoided because of the unacceptable views they have attributed to me.
My attempts seem unlikely to produce positive results so it seems I must resort to court action.
I need your support to fund the court campaign to clear my name.
Please support this case and share. As a Labour Party member, I believe in equal opportunities for all people, no matter the colour of their skin, their religion or ethnic background, or any other accident of birth. My campaign to force the Tory government to release its sickness and disability death figures was an example of my commitment to end discrimination, prejudice and hate based on such characteristics.”
He ends his article with an appeal to readers to support him, either by donating or sharing the link, or both, which is
All this is absolutely true. And I’ve written time and again that Mike is no racist, Anti-Semite or any kind of Nazi. He and I had an uncle, who was of Jewish descent, with whom our family used to go on holidays when we were children. Our father had done his national service in Germany, not far from Belsen concentration camp, and showed us the photos he’d taken of the remains of that terrible place, and the memorial the British army put up to the Jews murdered there.
He has always enjoyed the friendship of people of different cultures, religions and nationalities. One of his mates at college was a Muslim Nigerian. And while he was there, he was one of the speakers reading out the names of some of the victims of the Holocaust in a performance commemorating them and the others butchered in the Shoah. He had done this at the invitation of a female Jewish friend, who was deeply moved by his performance.
One of the books I’ve got on my shelf on the Third Reich was given to me by Mike after he went on a College trip to Berlin. It’s on the Nazi Sicherheitsdienst – the infamous ‘Security Service’, which formed a part of the apparatus of state terror in the Third Reich. It was published by the-then West German government to acccompany an exhibition on the SD and the horrors they perpetrated following the redevelopment and archaeological investigation of the organisation’s headquarters in what was then West Berlin. As well as information on the SD and the other parts of the Nazi secret police, like the Gestapo and the Krimipolizei, the ordinary criminal police, who were also responsible for persecuting political and ethnic enemies of the Nazi order, the book also gave due coverage of the Nazis’ victims. It described the network of camps, and gave the figures for the number of Jews and other victims murdered in the occupied countries. It also had a photographs and potted biographies of some of the most notable victims. It is most definitely not the kind of book Nazis, ant-Semites and Holocaust deniers want people reading, let alone give to their relatives.
Mike and I grew up in the ’80s, when the NF and BNP were very much in the news and trying to make their presence felt through terrorising and attacking people of colour and lefties. It was also the decade when Blacks and Asians also fought back against racism with the support of White sympathisers. There was a real fear at the time that the BNP or something like them could gain power, especially under Thatcher’s noxious government, with its links to South American Fasciss like Pinochet and the horrific Rios Montt. This fear was expressed in some of the comic literature that both he and I read, which dealt with issues like racism and persecution.
It shows the absolute contempt for truth or any kind of journalistic integrity that he, and so many others like him, have been smeared and libelled by the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism and the scumbags of the right-wing press. I full support Mike in his court battle, and hope others will too.
I got this disturbing email today from the good peeps at the anti-racism/anti-religious extremism organisation, Hope Not Hate, reporting that some very nasty and notorious pieces of Fascist, anti-Semitic and Holocaust Denial material are being sold by this country’s big booksellers. They’d like this scandalous situation to be brought to more people’s attention on Facebook and Twitter. The email went
David,
I’m not sure you’re going to believe this… these antisemitic, Holocaust-denying, and fascist books are listed right now for sale online at Waterstones, Foyles, WHSmith, and Amazon.co.uk:
Do you think huge, reputable booksellers should profit from hate content — not to mention lend credibility to hardcore racist views? We don’t.
Last week, we contacted these retailers to bring it to their attention. Only Foyles and Waterstones even responded and neither made any commitment to pulling down these extreme materials. So we’re going to take action.
If you agree that major booksellers should stop making hate readily available, let them know. Join us in kicking up a storm on social media now:
These booksellers are acting dangerously. Despite our queries, Waterstones and Amazon’s sites continue to list The Turner Diaries, a book explicitly credited with inspiring the Oklahoma City bombing, which killed 168 people.
It looks like our pressure is already working – over the weekend, a number of these titles, including famous Holocaust denial book Did Six Million Really Die?, disappeared from Foyles’ website. If we can make some noise, they’ll listen, and ultimately, act.
Let’s make it clear these booksellers can’t ride this out. Join together to create public outcry at this very urgent concern.
If the images are too small for you to see clearly, they include pictures of the covers of David Irving’s The War Path, with a picture of Adolf on the front, the notorious Tsarist forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, two notorious pieces of Holocaust Denial, Did Six Million Really Die? and Curated Lies – The Auschwitz Museum’s Misrepresentations, as well as the Turner Diaries and Oswald Mosley’s Fascism for the Million.
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion are a very notorious piece of the type of bogus conspiracy theories I was talking about yesterday. They were forged by the Tsarist secret police to encourage the already anti-Semitic Nicholas II to persecuted the Jews even harder. It purports to be the minutes of secret meeting of global Jewish leaders discussing their plans to rule the world and enslave gentiles. It successfully deceived many people in the 1920s, before it was very clearly shown to be a fake, with articles demonstrating that this was so in the Times and other parts of the press. Even so, some of the people, who were convinced by it still continued to protest that if it wasn’t factually true, then it was still somehow symbolically true. It’s been a significant influence promoting anti-Semitism and Fascism.
This isn’t the first time there’s been an outcry at it being on sale in a mainstream bookshop. It was quoted at length by Bill English, an American conspiracy theorist, who believed the Illuminati were running things secretly behind the scenes, and aliens were really coming down to abduct and experiment on us. English claimed, however, that where the passages he included referred to the Jews, they were really referring to the Illuminati. This led to a branch of Waterstones in one of the northern cities stocking it. It was also quoted by David Icke in his book, The Robots’ Rebellion. This is why there have been protests and accusations that Icke is an anti-Semite, although Jon Ronson in his Secret Rulers of the World, where he covered one such demonstration in Canada, said that he believes Icke isn’t anti-Semitic, but really does believe the world is being run by evil reptoid aliens.
David Irving is the notorious Holocaust Denier, who ended up losing a libel case against an American academic, who showed up page by page how his book on Hitler and the Holocaust misquoted and distorted the works it cited and falsified history. The last I heard of him, he was serving a jail sentence in Austria, one of the countries where Holocaust Denial is a crime.
The Turner Diaries is a bizarre piece of SF that also became notorious in the 1990s, after it was revealed that it influenced Timothy McVeigh, the America militiaman, who blew up the Federal building in Oklahoma City. It’s written as a series of diary entries by a White race warrior, who is part of violent uprising against ZOG – that’s the Zionist Occupation Government, not Ahmed Zogu, the former king of Albania. The hero and his fellow Nazis are also determined to stop the ‘Zionists” planned destruction of the White race through racial intermixture. There’s an infamous passage in there, where he talks about hanging a whole load of college girls for this ‘crime’, as well as making sure that America becomes a pure White homeland, and Blacks and other non-Whites are either cleansed or put firmly in their place.
Mosley was, of course, the leader of the British Union of Fascists during the Second World War, who then tried briefly to come back into politics as the leader of the Union Movement in the 50s and early 60s. Despite his best efforts, we’re very lucky that his Fascism very definitely did not appeal to millions.
I’m not on Facebook or Twitter, but I’m very happy to publicise this noxious state of affairs.
None of these books should be sold by any reputable booksellers. They are evil and very dangerous, and should be taken off their on-line shelves now.
I’m telling this story to make it even clearer that Mike isn’t Holocaust denier, and that he and I were brought up knowing about the atrocity by parents, who hated and despise the Nazis and their crimes like every other decent person.
Our father did his national service in Bielefeld in Germany. It was a town then on the borders of the former West Germany. While he was there, he visited the remains of Belsen concentration camp, and took pictures. I can remember him showing them to Mike and myself when were both in junior school. This was way back in the 1970s, when war comics were in vogue – not just Battle, but also Warlord, the war stories in Action, like ‘Hellmann of Hammer Force’, and the DC Thompson war comics in Commando Picture Library. This was also the decade when there were an increasing number of films about the Second World War. Mike and I read the war comics, and this led us at the time to ask questions about the Second World War. It might have been in response to one of these that Dad got out his photo album to show us his photos of the ruins of the camp. This worried Mum. She was afraid that the photos, and the story behind them, would be too upsetting for us and give us nightmares. It didn’t. From what I can remember, the photos mostly showed grassed over pits. These, our father told us, were where the Nazi burned and buried the bodies of those they’d murdered. Talking to him last night, he said that from one pit they pulled 12,000 human remains. I’d have to look up how many were killed in toto at the wretched place, but the simple figure of 12,000 for that just one pit is shocking. He’s also said several times that no birds sang there. I’ve heard that about the other concentration camps as well. It’s as if the monstrous evil the Nazis committed infected the very land itself, desecrating it of all life.
A few decades later, Mike himself visited one of the other Nazi concentration camps – Sachsenhausen. I think this was when he was at college, studying modern European literature. Part of the course included a trip to West Berlin, and I think it was while he was there that he visited the remains of that particularly abomination.
The real Nazis make disgusting jokes about the Holocaust, when they’re not trying to convince the world that it didn’t happen, or was a lot smaller than reputable historians have shown. I don’t think they tend to visit them, though. Mike is very, very definitely not a Holocaust denier, nor anti-Semite, and those, who are smearing him are vile, disgusting political manipulators committing libel.
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