This is going to be another controversial video because of where it comes from: Paul Joseph Watson. Yeah, I know, he’s another far right mouthpiece. He was Alex Jones’ British buddy over on Infowars, which pushed just about every bizarre conspiracy known to humanity. He was one of the celebrity rightists who broke UKIP, along with Mark ‘Count Dankula’ Meacham and Carl ‘Sargon of Akkad’ Benjamin. When those three joined the party, all the genuine anti-racists left. Party collapse followed, as well as refounding as the Brexit party, now Reform or whatever.
But here Watson makes a perfectly valid point. It’s in response to Scott Adams, the creator of the Dilbert cartoon strip, torpedoing his career by telling Whites to stay away from Blacks. He said this in response to a poll which found that just under 50 per cent of Blacks thought it wasn’t okay to be right, or didn’t know if it was or wasn’t. He took this as showing that this proportion of the Black American population hated Whites. He therefore told Whites to stay away from Blacks, even though just over 50 per cent of Blacks had no problems with Whites and ‘don’t know’ doesn’t necessarily translate to ‘hate Whites’.
What Watson objects to in this video is that Critical Race Theorist and anti-racist activist, Robin DiAngelo, says much the same thing from the Black perspective but doesn’t suffer the same consequences as Adams. He presents a clip of her saying that Blacks need their own separate spaces away from Whites. Now this attitude ain’t new. I encountered it years ago in the editorial/ ‘things you should know about’ column in the newsletter of the Black and Asian Studies Association newsletter, no. 31 or perhaps 32, c. 2002, when I was working at the Empire and Commonwealth Museum in Bristol. I wasn’t impressed. One of the columnists for the Financial Times had reviewed a book on the Empire and post-war immigration, and, if I recall correctly, had criticised it for saying nothing about what it called ‘reverse colonisation’ and ‘liberal apartheid’. Liberal apartheid is the system of goods and services set up exclusively to benefit Blacks and ethnic minorities. The call for separate Black spaces, however well meant, is effectively a call for a return to segregation. When coupled with an opposition to restrictions on non-White immigration, as was also expressed in the same column, it becomes effectively a form of colonialism in which Whites are to be excluded from certain spaces for the benefit of non-White immigrants. I don’t doubt, though, that those making these demands wouldn’t see it like that and would be terribly offended by the very idea. Nevertheless, it’s there, and it’s causing further racial division and conflict. But it’s seen as acceptable because the people advocating it come from the left and do so on the part of an underprivileged ethnic minority.
I got this message from the internet petitioning group, Avaaz. It’s from Sonia Guajajara, an Amazonian warrior and the first ever Minister of Indigenous People in Brazil.
‘Dear friends from Avaaz,
I am Sonia Guajajara, a warrior of the Guajajara people of the Brazilian Amazon, and the first-ever Minister of Indigenous Peoples of Brazil.
Today Indigenous leaders from around the world are at the United Nations to deliver an urgent call to save the Amazon and commit to zero deforestation. We need your help to make this louder!!
Here is part of what I said
“Human greed is pushing the Amazon towards a dangerous point of no return. We live in an economic system where everything that is in nature can be privatized or purchased. This unrestrained exploitation of the common goods of nature does not generate wealth, but wears down and impoverishes the planet. It is time to fight for the good of humanity and for a new story. A story where indigenous peoples lead… because we know the way.”
I invite you to watch my full speech below. Hear my words as a call to action — don’t just support us, fight with us. If you resonate with this message, please urgently share my call with everyone you know and be part of the movement to save the Amazon.
For the past few years, you and the rest of the Avaaz community have been key allies of Indigenous peoples, from the Amazon to the Congo basin, and around the world. And together, I have every hope that we will achieve a future where our rights will be respected, and our planet will be safe.
With hope and determination, and love for the planet,
Sonia Guajajara, Minister of Indigenous Peoples of Brazil, together with the Avaaz team’
I’m more than happy to pass this message on, as the Amazon is under threat from loggers and ranchers, and its people are in danger of being dispossessed. This was graphically shown in one of the Beeb’s travel documentaries a few years ago, where the presenter went to live with one of the Amerindian peoples. They were very suspicious and it was quite a tense atmosphere because of the threat to indigenous land. There were public meetings being staged and the mood was very angry. I am not remotely surprised, as these peoples have been terribly harmed by colonial encroachment. I read somewhere that at one point the Brazilian farmers were shooting them for sport. The current demands for decolonisation going through western society and academia is disastrously flawed, but it is based on a memory of real injustices, even if these get mixed up with myths and false history.
This might interest some of the readers of this blog, who are interested in the rich history of Africa. The Conversation has posted an article by Nancy Bird, a postdoc research assistant at UCL, ‘DNA study opens a window into African civilisation that left a lasting legacy’ about how she and her fellow researchers analysed DNA samples from Africa to reconstruct the movement and expansions of different ethnic groups in the continent before European colonisation. The article describes their methodology and talks about how the samples were collected and analysed, and that there had been little genetic sampling and research of this type previously in Africa. The article then goes on to discuss some of their findings.
These begin with the probability that two ethnic groups in what is now Cameroon, the Kanuri and Kotoko, are descended from three ancestral peoples in the Kanem-Bornu empire, which flourished for 1000 years after its foundation c. 700 AD and covered northern Cameroon, northern Nigeria, Chad, Niger and southern Libya. The study also revealed how African genetic heritage had been affected by the Arab expansion into Africa. This included Arab contact with the kingdom of Makuria in the Sudan. The signed a peace treaty with the Arabs in 700 AD, which allowed the kingdom to survive for 700 years. The genetic evidence revealed that the racial mixing occurred after the treaty was beginning to breakdown and the Arabs were expanding into the area. The study also examined the genetic legacy left by the southern Arab migration into Africa that resulted in the empire of Akxum, which covered what is now Ethiopia, Djibouti and part of Yemen and was considered one of the world’s four great powers alongside Persia, China and Rome. It also suggested that the expansion of the Bantu languages was the result of migrations from a part of Cameroon which began in 2,000 BC and had spread south and east over the next 2000 years. But the study also revealed that they had spread west as well. During their expansion, the Bantu met and mixed with other ethnic groups. No-one knows what caused this expansion, but it may have been climate change.
The article concludes
‘It’s vital that scientists analyse more DNA from genomes of African people. As we do so, it will undoubtedly reveal an intricate picture of the continent’s rich past.’
Last week my local Labour party held its monthly meeting, online because of the continuing Covid lockdown. There was a monthly report from our local MP, Karin Smyth,along with reports from the two conference delegates. This was followed by a speech from the Unison liaison – I’m afraid I’ve mistakenly said that she’s Unite in the letter, for which I apologise to Unite – and that’s when I got sick and tired of it all and quietly left.
Smyth’s talk was highly informative and chilling in her description of the government’s continuing campaign to privatise the NHS and replace it with a system financed by private health insurance as in America. She supports Starmer, but is very committed to protecting the NHS for which I respect her.
I was less impressed with the two delegates, who supported Starmer and David Evans’ measures destroying party democracy and purging the left. It’s blatant factionalism and the reasons they gave were spurious. They claimed that as Starmer only had 200 MPs, he needed to shore up his support so that he has 40 to form a cabinet. But he has no shortage of supporters in the parliamentary party, and so the rationale makes no sense. They did, however, vote for the Green New Deal, but didn’t vote for the measure supporting the Palestinians. They claimed they didn’t understand it. I think it’s far more likely they shared Starmer’s aggressive Zionism and support for the current far-right Israeli government’s colonisation of Palestine through the construction of illegal settlements and the consequent suffocating restrictions on those of the indigenous Palestinians.
But I was most annoyed by the Unison liaison’s speech talking about how she’d been indifferent to the problem of Labour anti-Semitism, but had just attended a ‘powerful’ presentation about the terrible abuse our Jewish brothers and sisters in the Labour party were suffering from the Left. What was this abuse? Why, it was all tropes, as you’d expect. This is just Zionist propaganda. Tropes are invoked to smear reasonable criticisms of Israel by decent people through contrived parallels to real anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and myths. As I have said ad nauseam, the people targeted for these smears are mostly genuine anti-racists and opponents of anti-Semitism, many of whom – indeed the majority – are self-respecting Jews. These are people, who frequently lost relatives in the Holocaust and have suffered genuine abuse and violence from real anti-Semites and Nazis.
I have therefore sent off this email of complaint. It criticises the delegates’ Starmerite factionalism, and the leadership itself for calling for a return to Blairism. I attack Blair’s further privatisation of the Health Service, the introduction of the Work Capability Tests and the bullying tactics used by the DWP on claimants. I also attack Blair for his illegal invasion of Iraq and Libya, and the consequent destabilisation of the Middle East. A destabilisation that prepared the way for the rise of ISIS. I also make it plain that I oppose Blair’s corporatism and his grant of government positions to the captains of industry and his support for big business over the wishes of communities and their small businessmen and women. I make it very clear that I feel Blair and his policies are not to be supported or revived, and that Starmer has shown that he is completely treacherous and untrustworthy. He will, I feel, turn on his own supporters the moment it suits him, and his support for the NHS at this moment is merely tactical.
I also attack the Unison lady’s talk, pointing out that this has probably been given by JLM, a Zionist organisation, who aren’t interested in Jews but protecting Israel and its barbarous treatment of the Palestinians. I denounce the mass purges from the party of Starmer’s critics and critics of Israel, and briefly describe my own experience of being so accused. I end by asking to present my case at a future meeting of the party.
I may well have set myself up for expulsion as another evil lefty troublemaker, but I can’t let these evil policies and falsehoods go unchallenged. Here is my email below:
“Dear Sir/ Madam,
Thank you for sending me this month’s reports. However, I must express here my very strong disapproval and dismay of some of the views expressed by the speakers at this month’s meeting and particularly the actions of the conference delegates. This does not extend to the great work of our local MP, Karin Smyth. I very much appreciate all the very hard work she does for her constituents and defending the NHS against Tory privatisation.
Unfortunately, I cannot say the same of the Labour leadership. Keir Starmer’s return to Blairism is a source of severe concern. Tony Blair in office continued and extended further the Thatcherite policies of the previous Tory governments. Indeed, they have complained that he went further in his privatisation of the NHS than they would have dared if Labour had stuck to its traditional defence of the Health Service. For example, when the Community Care Groups were set up they were given powers not only to purchase services from private medical companies, but also to raise funds privately. The polyclinics were supposed to be privately run, and he continued handing over doctor’s surgeries to private health companies as well as the management of hospitals to private healthcare chains.. Please see books like Raymond Tallis’ and Jacky Davis’ NHS – SOS for further details.
I am also disgusted by the bullying attitude towards welfare claimants and the Work Capability Tests that Blair also introduced. This has seen genuinely poor and disabled people thrown off benefits for the most trivial reasons, leading to great hardship, deprivation and death. This should be ended now. The unemployed and disabled should not be supported by food banks but by a properly funded and functioning welfare state, and damn whatever Rupert Murdoch and Geordie Greig say in their wretched propaganda sheets. But I see precious little evidence of this from Starmer. Indeed, he seems to favour extreme right-wing members, who believe that conditions should be made even harsher for the unemployed!
We also suffered from massive corporate corruption by Blair giving places in government to the private companies that the same departments were supposed to be regulating. The result was a colossal increase in the expense of public works and the favouring of these companies over the wishes of local communities and their businesses. See Bremner, Bird and Fortunes’ You Are Here and George Monbiot’s Captive State, for example. Blair also showed his absolute contempt for international law and the British people with his illegal invasion of Iraq. Yes, Saddam Hussein was a monster, but the invasion of Iraq left the country in chaos and destroyed what had been one of the most secular societies in the middle east with something like a welfare state where women could pursue careers outside the home. This is all gone. 200,000 people have been killed and millions more displaced, contributing to the refugee crisis we see now. Moreover it gave a space for the emergence of the monstrous ISIS. It has also, in my opinion, further contributed to the alienation of Muslims in Britain and abroad, as has Blair’s similar participation in the overthrow of another tyrant, Colonel Gadaffy.
I am utterly disgusted that Kier Starmer should believe Tony Blair is a leader worth emulating and to whom the Labour party should return and refer for its policies. I do not trust him to continue defending the NHS once is power, and I am afraid MPs like Karin will be faced with the difficult choice of supporting the leader or supporting the NHS. The purges and long list of broken promises to members show that Starmer is, in my opinion, utterly without principle and treacherous and I am afraid that valued MPs like Karin will also be purged if they dare to show any independence against him.
I am deeply disgusted by the conference delegates’ support for the leadership’s motions affecting party democracy. These are entirely partisan, and go against both the democratic traditions of the party and the views of many of the ordinary members. Starmer seems determined to purge the party of the left and make Labour into another, perhaps not even paler, version of the Conservatives. At the same time, he seems to have done precious little to oppose them in parliament, to the point that he has been easily ridiculed and mocked by Johnson, to the applause of the media.
I was also disappointed by the delegates’ refusal to support the motion in favour of the Palestinians. The motion is not difficult to understand. The Israeli state is colonising Palestinian territory with the construction of illegal settlements in defiance of international law. At the same time there is a system of apartheid in Israel that persecutes Palestinians as second class systems. This has to stop if Labour really believes in peace and equality in the Middle East. I fear the delegates’ refusal to support the motion has less to do with a failure to understand the situation than Keir Starmer’s support for the hard-right government in Israel.
This brings me on to the comments by the Unite liaison officer and her praise for the ‘powerful’ training she had received showing the ‘terrible abuse’ Jewish members of the party had received from the left through tropes. She comes across as a thoroughly decent woman, though naive and uninformed, and I fear that she has been terribly mislead by people I can only describe as liars, propagandists and smear merchants. People who, in my certain experience, have smeared thoroughly decent, genuinely anti-racist people, including staunch opponents of anti-Semitism, as Jew-haters. Starmer handed over anti-Semitic training to the Jewish Labour Movement, an extremely partisan and biased organisation. According to the organisation’s Jewish critics, they used to be Paole Zion, ‘Workers of Zion’, a Zionist organisation which describes itself as the sister party to the Israeli Labor Party. This organisation was moribund until it suddenly received an injection of funds from persons or persons unknown a few years ago.Its Jewish critics have pointed out that its members do not have to be either Jewish or members of the Labour party, as is the case with their ideological opponents in Labour, Jewish Voice for Labour. Yet the Jewish Labour Movement is somehow privileged as speaking for Labour’s Jewish members and Jewish Voice for Labour demonised as anti-Semitic ‘commies’ by right-wing Labour MPs like Neil Coyle.
In my experience organisations like the JLM are not interested in tackling anti-Semitism. They are there to counter criticism of Israel and Zionism, and the use of literary tropes is the only method they can use to do so. And their targets have been overwhelmingly Jews. Jewish Voice for Labour have complained that Jews are 300 times more likely to be accused of anti-Semitism than non-Jews. Those accused have included self-respecting men and women, who frequently lost relatives and friends in the Shoah, and who, along with their gentile friends and supporters, have suffered real anti-Semitic abuse, harassment and assault from genuine Nazis and anti-Semites. I cannot express sufficiently my absolute disgust at this deplorable persecution. Miri Hillel, a Jewish journalist, has said that many Jews are afraid of speaking out against this campaign of official harassment because of the effect it has on their families. Those accused of anti-Semitism are subjected to horrendous, foul abuse because of these lies and smears. .
As for terrible anti-Semitic tropes, this is being done to silence criticism of Israel by finding spurious literary and historical parallels with real anti-Semitism. Thus, any mention of Israeli embassy official Shai Masot’s covert negotiations with British civil servants to exclude Alan Duncan, a critic of Israel, from the cabinet, as a plot or conspiracy is loudly denounced as an example of the old myth of Jewish conspiracies like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. But Masot was plotting and engaged in a conspiracy in the true sense of the word. Describing it as such does not connect it to real, poisonous anti-Semitic myths like the infamous Protocols or the more recent myth of the Great Replacement. Such literary criticism, and that’s all it is, is done not to protect Jews, but as a cynical campaign to deflect criticism from Israel by misrepresenting its critics as anti-Semites.
I myself haver personal experience of the witch hunt against critics of Israel. A few weeks ago I was told I was under investigation following complaints of anti-Semitism about an article on my blog. What the complainants objected to was almost wholly statements I had made criticising Zionism. They objected to my statement that all states and ideologies, including Zionism and Israel, should be open to examination and criticism, even though the I.H.R.A. definition of anti-Semitism says that criticism of Israel is perfectly acceptable provided the country is not held to a higher standard than others. They also didn’t like my statement that many gentiles initially did not support Zionism because it was too closely linked to real anti-Semitism, even though this is historically documented fact. They also considered that I was being anti-Semitic simply for stating another historical fact, which is that Zionism was, up to the Second World War, a minority position among European Jews. Most of them wished to remain in their homes, fighting for equality and to be accepted as fellow Brits, Frenchmen, Germans, Poles and so on rather than move to a country to which they felt no connection. Again, documented historical fact. I am further disgusted by the deplorable way Starmer is trying to silence reasonable opposition to Israeli’s barbarous treatment of the Palestinians through mass expulsions and the proscription of organisations defending those unfairly purged, such as Labour Against the Witch Hunt and the Labour In Exile Network.
I was so outraged at the Unite lady’s speech defending the JLM training that I left the meeting. I feel that the meeting has been very one-sided in the views presented. I would therefore very much like to talk about my experiences of what I can only describe as a factionalist with hunt the demonises and expels decent people and exposing them to real anti-Semitic abuse and violence at a forthcoming meeting.
First off, I’m sorry I haven’t posted anything for a few days. I’ve been busy with other things down here, but normal service will be resumed as soon as possible. Yesterday, our Tory government announced that they were going to put a new memorial up commemorating the Holocaust. And Sargon of Gasbag, the man who broke UKIP, and his mate Callum over at the Lotuseaters Youtube channel have asked the obvious question: why? The proposed memorial has received widespread approval, especially from the Board of Deputies of British Jews, who were highly delighted. They claimed it was needed because Holocaust denial was growing in the UK and we needed to be reminded of our part in the Shoah, the great crime against the Jews, and also against the disabled, gays and the Roma. But as the commenters on the Lotuseaters video have pointed out, they said nothing about the Slav peoples of eastern Europe, who were also massacred. This is true. Hitler hated the Slavs, and in his Tabletalk he makes it clear he was looking forward to the extermination of the Czech. After the Jews, the Poles formed the largest number of the victims of Nazi massacre and extermination, particular Polish Roman Catholic clergy. Slavs were considered subhuman under the Nuremberg race laws. Their lands were targeted for German colonisation, and those Poles, Russians and Ukrainians lucky enough to survive were to serve as an uneducated peasant class producing agricultural goods for their German masters.
The Lotuseaters are men of the right, and the extreme right at that. I find their videos difficult to watch because of the idiot sneering at the Labour party, idiot ‘woke’ lefties and similar comments that also come out of the mouth of the mad right-winger, Alex Belfield. Particularly annoying in this video was all their jokes about Jeremy Corbyn and anti-Semitism, and how he especially wouldn’t like the memorial and agrees with Holocaust denial. It’s just right-wing libel. Corbyn, like George Galloway, has never denied the Holocaust and has a proud record of standing up for the Jews in this country, as he has done for Blacks and other ethnic minorities. His crime wasn’t anti-Semitism, but standing up for the Palestinians. The Israeli state and the ultra-Zionists, like the Board of Deputies, can’t justify it, so they smear those criticising their ethnic cleansing of Israel’s indigenous population as anti-Semites. This include proud, self-respecting Jews, who are tarnished and demonised as ‘self-hating’.
But the Lotuseaters are right to ask why we need such a memorial. They say we entered the War to stop the persecution of the Jews, when the Nazis and USSR had signed a non-aggression pact to divide Poland between. Callum even claimed that when the Soviets took over their part of Poland, they handed over its Jewish inhabitants to the Nazis to massacre. Well, I haven’t heard that before and neither did Sargon, but it doesn’t surprise me. Stalin was a vicious anti-Semite, and during the Weimar period western Communists were ordered to collaborate with Nazis despite the Nazis hatred of Marxist socialism and their persecution of the KPD under the Third Reich. It’s wrong to say we entered the War to save the Jews. We didn’t. We declared war on Nazi Germany because of our defensive alliance with France and Poland. Although there was little outright anti-Semitic persecution in Britain, low-level anti-Jewish sentiment was widespread and acceptable. There was considerable sympathy for Nazism amongst the British aristocracy, with various high-ranking individuals joining pro-Nazi organisations like the Anglo-German Fellowship. The father of Geordie Grieg, editor of the Heil, was a member of one such group. On the other hand, the Fascist parties and groups remained generally small. Britain passed laws banning the stirring up of racial hatred, and once war was declared Oswald Mosley, the head of the BUF, was sent to the Tower of London and his stormtroopers interned on the Isle of Man along with other enemy aliens. And our troops did liberate some of the concentration and death camps, along with the Russians and our other allies, and we did save the survivors from starvation, or as many as we could. There were Nazi sympathisers who served as auxiliaries in the Waffen SS, the British division of which served as the basis for neo-Nazi organisation the League of St. George. But as far as I know, there was absolutely no British state involvement with the Holocaust and I haven’t heard of any British commercial involvement with it, either. I’m therefore puzzled when the Board says it was needed to remind us of our role in it.
As for anti-Semitism in Britain, only 7 per cent of Brits have negative view about Jews. The majority have positive views of them, and a smaller number consider them no better or worse than anyone else. The Lotuseaters state that the Holocaust is taught as part of the British history curriculum. There are Holocaust deniers knocking around, but there are very few of them, at least among the vast majority of severely normal Brits, who despise them. I wondered if behind the cloaked language which didn’t name anybody in particular, the real fear was about the possible growth in anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial amongst Muslims. It’s rife in the Middle East because of the Israeli colonisation and ethnic cleansing of Palestine, and the humiliation inflicted on the Arab nations during the Six Day War. I have the impression that the majority of British Muslims despise Israel for its maltreatment of the Palestinians. However, Tony Greenstein has pointed out that the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism offer no supporting statistics or information on their website for their statement that the majority of anti-Semites are Muslim.
David Cameron apparently approved the monument five years ago in 2016, but Boris has only just given it the go-ahead. My impression is that this has precious little about commemorating the Holocaust for itself, and everything to do with generating support for Israel. Peter Oborne in his documentary for Channel 4’s dispatches 11 years ago described how the Israel lobby had effectively captured Britain’s political parties, and especially the Tories, through parliamentary friendship groups, sponsored trips to Israel and donations from pro-Israel Jewish businessmen. Any British paper or broadcaster, including the Beeb, that dared to cover atrocities by the Israelis and their allies, like the Lebanese Christian Phalange, were attacked and smeared by the Board as anti-Semites. Hence the attacks on the Labour party and Jeremy Corbyn, and the capture of the party of Keir Starmer, who has declared himself to be ‘100 per cent Zionist’. Hence also the foundation of front organisations claiming to represent Jews and combat anti-Semitism, but which are really concerned with persecuting and smearing critics of Israel, like the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism and the Jewish Labour Movement, previously Paole Zion, Workers of Zion. These two organisations were founded to combat the rise in anti-Israel sentiment following Israel’s bombardment of Gaza. My guess is that Israel and it’s satellite organisations and mouthpieces in the UK have been rattled by British support for the Palestinians following the riots around the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian districts in east Jerusalem ready for Israeli settlement. This all looks to me very much like the Israel state exploiting the Holocaust to garner support on the one hand, and the Tories using it to signal their compliance with Israel and its genocidal attitude to the Arabs on the other.
The Holocaust was a monstrous crime against humanity and it is entirely right that British schoolchildren are taught about it. But this new memorial looks like it has nothing to do with remembering the victims of the Shoah, but is simply a PR exercise to shame Brits into supporting Israel and its ethnic cleansingof the Palestinians.
It’s not about censoring history but about including the ignored or omitted perspectives of the colonised peoples themselves.
Zelo Street put up a brilliant piece on Sunday refuting nonsense printed in the Torygraph by their reporter Christopher Hope. Hope had been talking to the universities minister, Michelle Donelan, who was extremely concerned about the ‘culture war’ being waged in the universities. She was afraid that those unis, who were decolonising their curricula were engaged in a massive piece of historical censorship. Like the former Soviet Union, they were removing those incidents that were not regarded as stains. This greatly concerned her as a former history student who was also a vehement champion of preserving our history.
This provoked a number of academics and/or students, whose universities were involved in this restructuring of their history curricula, to put her right. They informed her that this wasn’t about removing awkward parts of British colonial history, but adding to it by including the perspectives of the subject peoples we ruled and all-too frequently abused and exploited.
Alex Stevens from the University of Kent put this up:
“Dear [Michelle Donelan] ‘Adding stuff in to enrich our understanding’ is *exactly* what decolonising the curriculum is doing at my university”.
Edward Anderson of Northumbria University also agreed, posting the following
“When we decolonise curricula, it’s almost always ADDING more stuff in: scholarship & perspectives from the Global South, source material of the colonised not just coloniser, etc. [Michelle Donelan] must know this, but chooses to peddle a straw man, fictitious idea of what uni’s do”.
Coventry University’s Andrew Jowett backed this up with his remark
“She has no idea what she’s talking about. It’s not about ‘taking things out’ of the curriculum, it’s about contextualising what is taught and ensuring other cultures and indigenous peoples are represented in the curriculum. Maybe she should attend a webinar on it”.
And then came Dr. Priyamvada Gopal, who teaches colonial literature at Cambridge
“Let’s break this down for [Michelle Donelan]. When we ‘decolonise’, we put the ‘offensive’ bits BACK IN. To give a random example, we tell [the] story of Winston Churchill not just as unimpeachable war hero–but as a man of empire & race science. We don’t pander to white snowflakery”.
Gopal was the centre of controversy last summer in the Black Lives Matter protests, when she was falsely accused of hating Whites because she’d put up a tweet ‘White don’t matter as White lives’, which I think she intended to mean that White lives have no more or less intrinsic value than anyone else’s. Their value lay simply in being human lives. This was in response to an enraged White chap flying over a local football match on a plane towing the banner ‘White Lives Matter’. I think another of Gopal’s tweets had been altered and the fake version reproduced by the right-wing press to present Gopal as wishing for a real White genocide. Gopal sued for libel, and I believe won.
The comments about Churchill were provoked by the denunciation s of the Great Man at a conference on his legal at Churchill College, Cambridge. Churchill was denounced by some of the speakers as responsible for the horrific Bengal famine, which killed 3-6 million Indians, and a White supremacist. Kehinde Andrews, a prominent Black racial activist, was present at this event, who is notorious for claiming that the British Empire was worse than the Nazis.
This provoked a reaction from offended Tories, like Nicholas Soames, who declared that if they were going to denounce the British wartime PM, then they shouldn’t use his money. The right-wing historian of Africa and the British Empire, Andrew Roberts, also wasn’t impressed. He is the co-author of a paper, published by the right-wing think tank Policy Exchange, defending Churchill. But I think that the allegations against Churchill are absolutely correct. He was an imperialist and White supremacist. It was the dominant ideology of the time and obviously very strong in the British and colonial ruling class. He was also responsible for the Bengal famine through the sequestration of their grain in order to feed British troops in Europe. The result was mass starvation in India, while the emergency requiring its use never came. Nevertheless, Churchill refused to release it to where it was really needed, blaming the Indians themselves for their plight. It was all their fault for having too many children. His attitude shocked many senior British officers and colonial administrators, who compared him to the Nazis.
Zelo Street described Donelan’s interview and her views as
Once again, we have a Government minister apparently not in command of their brief, with their ignorance amplified by a shameless propagandist for the sole purpose of riling up his paper’s base and demonising purveyors of inconvenient thought.
He concludes that, as for her reference to the Soviet Union, that is exactly where her government is taking us, but you won’t read it in the papers. Quite. We have a very authoritarian government, which really is determined to censor history. And the press are right behind her.
This looks like an attempt by a failing government to whip up some popularity by playing the race card. The approved Tory view of the British Empire as essentially benevolent is under attack from evil lefties, and so must be defended at all costs. Just as Britain is being invaded by all those evil refugees crossing the Channel in dinghies.
Meanwhile, people continue to die from the Coronavirus, and the government is determined to push through the welfare cuts which Mike has documented as killing the poor, the disabled and the unemployed.
But we mustn’t look there. They’re just welfare scroungers. We must be worried about the attack on our imperial history and great leaders like Winston Churchill. Even when those attacks are historically accurate.
I know this is a provocative question, but it needs to be asked. Yesterday Mike put up an excellent piece about the hypocrisy and moral cowardice of the Labour leadership. Angela Rayner had admitted that Jeremy Corbyn was right when he said that the amount of anti-Semitism in the Labour party was exaggerated. Nevertheless, it was right to suspend him because of the hurt they caused. Mike points out in his article that Rayner has effectively admitted what the victims of the anti-Semitism smear campaign have known for years – that Labour will expel people who tell the truth about it. He also says
“Hurt” and “distress” are irrelevant if they are not based on facts. And how do we know that the people saying they were “hurt” and “distressed” actually were? There are a lot of liars out there.
Quite. As the old saying goes, ‘truth hurts’. And it seems from this that the self-proclaimed ‘Jewish community’ that claims to be so hurt, simply can’t or won’t handle the truth. But then, they don’t represent the Jewish community, and they aren’t really hurt by anti-Semitism.
Organisations behind Anti-Semitism Smears Unrepresentative of Britain’s Jews
How dare I say these terrible things, which I dare say some people could twist to sound anti-Semitic. Easily, because the facts are on my side. The people behind the accusations and smears that Jeremy Corbyn and the party he led were anti-Semitic most certainly don’t represent all of the Jewish community, but Zionist sectarians. Tony Grenstein and other great, self-respecting Jewish anti-racists and critics of Zionism have pointed out again and yet again that these accusations come from Zionist organisation. The Campaign Against Anti-Semitism was founded in 2012 or thereabout specifically to combat the rising hostility to Israel provoked by the bombing of Gaza. Labour Against Anti-Semitism are pretty much the same type of people in the Labour party. The Jewish Labour Movement used to be Paole Zion, Workers of Zion, and is the sister party to the Zionist Israeli Labour Party. In my view, both of these groups are deceptively and deliberately misnamed. The Campaign Against Zionism should be renamed the Campaign For Anti-Semitism, as it exists solely to manufacture accusations of Jew-hatred. As for the Jewish Labour Movement, it’s been shown that you don’t have to be Jewish or a member of the Labour party to join. It’s really a Zionist infiltration group, but obviously ain’t going to describe itself as such. And they will probably accuse you of spreading the anti-Semitic trope of Jewish conspiracies if you do. Nevertheless, it’s the truth. And the truth ain’t racist or anti-Semitic. It just is.
Chief Rabbis Sacks and Mirvis Ultra-Zionists
As for Chief rabbis Jonathan Sacks and Ephraim Mirvis, or ‘Mirv the Perv’ as I think he should be known, both of these gentlemen are, in my opinion, racist ultra-Zionists. Yes, I realise that over here they talk the language of anti-racism and interfaith dialogue. But Mirv spent years learning the Torah in one the hardline Israeli settlements. The settlers, or at least a very large majority of them, believe that all of Eretz Israel should belong to the state of Israel, and the Palestinians expelled and their lands colonised by Jews. Sacks and Mirvis also took contingents of British Jews to the March of the Flags in Jerusalem, despite pleas from British Jewish organisations not to do so. What’s the March of the Flags? It’s the day when the Israeli equivalent of Fascist boot-boys march through the Muslim quarter of Jerusalem waving the Israeli flag and vandalising Palestinian property. Palestinian kids are told not to go out on that day for fear of assault by these thugs. I see no difference between it and the Orange Marches through Roman Catholic areas in Northern Ireland. Or indeed through the attempted marches of Oswald Moseley and the British Union of Fascists through the East End of London and other Jewish areas in the 1930s.
Board of Deputies Zionist and Sectarian
Then there’s the Board of Deputies of British Jews, which sounds like it should represent the whole Jewish community. It don’t. It doesn’t represent secular Jews, who comprise a third of all British Jews. They also don’t represent the Orthodox, who have their own, separate organisation. And they really don’t represent Haredi Jews, who reject Israel because it’s a secular state. For the Haredi and Jews like them, Israel can only be restored by the Almighty through the Messiah. Until that time, the Children of Israel are required to remain in galut – exile – and pray for the health of the city, just as their ancestors did in exile in Babylon. Haredi Jews are viciously persecuted by the Israeli state because they refuse to recognise it. From what I gather, they are due to overtake the United Synagogue as the main Jewish sect in Britain in a few decades. And they have particular respect for Jeremy Corbyn for the efforts he and Diane Abbott have made on behalf of their community.
Tony Greenstein and others have pointed out that the Board of Deputies is, by its constitution, a Zionist organisation. So it obviously doesn’t represent non- or anti-Zionist Jews. These range from religious Jews, like the Haredi, to politically liberal and secular Jews, who object to the Israeli ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. Whether religious or secular, these Jews believe that by doing so, Israel is violating the central tenets of traditional Jewish morality. As someone once said, ‘To be a Jew is always to side with the oppressed, never the oppressors’. In fact, the Board really only represents the United Synagogue. And probably not all of them, as some have sitting representatives where there hasn’t been an election for years. Other synagogues won’t allow women to vote. And the fact that it is the United Synagogue driving these smears is shown very clearly in many of the articles the I has published smearing Labour as anti-Semitic. Alongside the name of the author of so many of these hit pieces was the statement that they were a member of the United Synagogue. The Board is therefore a sectarian organisation, that no more speaks for the whole of the Jewish community than the Archbishop of Canterbury speaks for all British Christians, who are also divided into a number of different sects and denominations.
Corbyn Not Anti-Semitic
As for the hurt these mamzers claim to have felt, it’s a peculiarly selective kind of hurt. The South African Jewish politico, Andrew Feinstein posted a video this weekend showing very clearly that Corbyn wasn’t an anti-Semite. This includes footage of the former Labour leader denouncing it and all other forms of racism in a fiery speech in 2002 and of him meeting and being warmly greeted by members of the Jewish community, including a rabbi. Feinstein showed stats from a 2015 survey showing that Labour had the second-lowest incidence of anti-Semitism in British political parties. Two years later, another survey showed that Labour was the joint lowest.
Feinstein’s arguments should carry particular weight, as he has personal, family experience of real, murderous anti-Semitism. His mother’s family is a holocaust survivor, who lost 39 members of her family in Auschwitz. Feinstein has not only been to Auschwitz, but has also lectured there. I believe he was also subjected to anti-Semitic abuse by a real Fascist, which is where the vast majority of real anti-Semitism lies.
Hypocrites Behind Smears Not Concerned with Greater Anti-Semitism in Tories and Fascism
I believe the same stats showed that there was more anti-Semitism in the Tory party. And certainly the internet fan groups for BoJob and Jacob Rees Mogg the blogger Jacobs Mates dug up includes among their vicious racists and Islamophobes anti-Semites, who believe that non-White immigration is an evil plot by the Jews to exterminate the White race. Labour was placed under immense pressure to adopt the I.H.R.A. definition of anti-Semitism in full, complete with examples. But no such pressure was placed on the Tories, who haven’t. It’s a peculiar kind of hurt, that has no objection to anti-Semitism in the Tories, but like Violet Elizabeth Bott in the Just William books ‘thcweems and thcweems’ until it’s sick at its much lower incidence in Labour.
Anti-Semitism Smears Weapon to Defend Israel against Criticism
Of course the Jewish organisations accusing Labour of anti-Semitism aren’t doing it because of real anti-Semitism. They’re doing it because they want to defend Israel. Israel’s behaviour towards the Palestinians is indefensible on rational, factual grounds, so all they can do is smear critics as anti-Semites. As Norman Finkelstein, another leading Jewish critic of Israel has said, the Israel lobby is a machine for manufacturing anti-Semites.
And Jews like Andrew Feinstein are horrified and sickened by the cynical, political use of such accusations, not least because it cheapens the deaths of the six million, who were murdered by the Nazis.
Jewish Critics of Israel Victims of Anti-Semitic Ultra-Zionist Smears
But this is precisely what the people behind the anti-Semitism smears are doing. And many of the people they smear are self-respecting Jews, who as critics of Israel can, like Shraga Stern, a Heredi supporter of Jeremy Corbyn, justly claim to have been victims of sectarian anti-Semitic abuse and vilification.
Conclusion
The Jewish organisations claiming to have been hurt by Labour anti-Semitism are liars, both about the incidence of anti-Semitism in the Labour party and their motives for denouncing it. They were protected and supported by a lying Labour party bureaucracy, and are now by a lying Labour leadership. And these smears were spread by a lying British political and media establishment terrified of a revived Labour party that would actually do something for working people. Who of course include Jews. Always have done, always will do, ever since it was founded.
‘Hurt’ nonsense! This is a nasty pack of lies that smears decent people, cheapens real victims of anti-Semitism and desensitizes people to the real anti-Semites in the Fascist fringe. How utterly, utterly contemptible!
On Tuesay I put up a piece comment on the plans by two Black entrepreneurs to set up a Blacks-only town in rural Georgia, to be named Wakanda after the fictional African supertechnological nation in Marvel’s Black Panther. The idea’s part of a long tradition of American ideal communities, beginning with the first Puritan settlers. it recalls the Utopian Socialist communities of the 19th century as well as the Free Black townships set up by Baptist missionaries in Jamaica, Antiqua, Demerara and Berbice in order to protect the newly freed former slaves from re-enslavement by the planters. However, coming nearly a century and a half after the abolition of slavery in America and the British Empire, this looks more like the compounds and proposed colonies of White racists, that have been set up in the Hayden Lakes area of America and which a group of British Nazis tried and failed to set up on a French farm.
Paul Boateng and the Black and Asian Studies Association
Way back in 1984/5 the Black British Labour politician, Paul Boateng, called for the establishment of autonomous Black communities in Britain. He was criticised for this in the pages of the Observer, which rightly viewed it as an attempt by Blacks to introduce apartheid. I’ve mentioned before that when I was doing voluntary work for the Empire and Commonwealth I was for a time corresponding with a Black studies organisation. This was the Black and Asian Studies Association, based in London. I split with them over the views they expressed of Whites in a copy of their magazine they sent me. I think it was no. 32/33, around about 2001-3 or so. One of the views, which I objected to was their comment that Blacks need their own space. I presume they meant by this separate arts and community centres, rather than separate geographical areas. When Blacks and other ethnic groups are a minority, and a depressed minority, this is actually reasonable and just. But they made it after reporting an article in the Observer that predicted that after the middle of this century Whites would be a minority in Britain and Europe. This was followed by another comment firmly rejecting any restrictions on non-White immigration, because it was racist. Now there was no comment about the Observer article itself. It was simply presented as something their readers should know about. I don’t know whether the editor believed the prediction or not. They could have felt it was alarmist. I don’t know. But coming after this prediction, the continued support for unlimited immigration and separate spaces for Blacks – but not for Whites – struck me as simply a form of colonialism.
Demands for Muslim Autonomous Colonies
I recall reading a passage in Ali A. Allawi’s The Crisis of Islamic Civilisation (New Haven: Yale University Press 2009) in which he discusses the establishment of autonomous Muslim communities in America. He bases his argument on the methods used by the British in founding their own colonies. The British themselves were a minority, and so they encouraged the citizens of other European nations to settle in their colonies in exchange for which they promised to respect and preserve these peoples’ own languages, culture and laws. Thus America should permit the similar establishment of autonomous Muslim communities, who would be free to follow their own culture under sharia law but which nevertheless would still be loyal to the American state. Allawi, a former Minister of Defence and Minster of Finance in the postwar Iraqi government, is a critique of both the westernisation of Islam and Salafi fundamentalism and Islamism. But this call for Islamic colonisation really can’t be tolerated. The best defence against it is the American separation of church and state, which was used against the followers of one of the grunge gurus from India when he tried to set up a theocratic town in Oregon.
The radical Islamist Anjem Chaudhry made the same demand for an autonomous Muslim community in the pages of the Financial Times colour supplement for the 1st January, 2000. Chaudhry, then running an outfit called Sharia4Belgium, was claiming that Muslims should have their own separate community with Arabic as its language under sharia law. I think he may have been able to argue this as Belgium is already split into several different regions occupied by its different traditional ethnic groups – French-speaking Wallonia, Flanders and a German-speaking enclave. Chaudhry’s own lack of engagement with Belgium’s traditional peoples is shown in the title of his organisation. The 4/for pun simply doesn’t work in either of the country’s two majority languages, French or Flemish. This is another demand for what is in effect Muslim colonisation.
Way back in the 1990s I briefly tried a postgraduate degree researching British Islam. I eventually gave up, partly because I couldn’t handle some of the polemic coming from the radical fringes. During this time I came across similar arguments contained in books from British Islamic publishers. One was on sharia law by Ibrahim E. Doi, the former head of the Islamic society at Oxford University. Another was a guide to the adab, the traditional Muslim system of morals and courtesy. The introductions to both books demanded the establishment of independent, autonomous Muslim communities, governed by sharia law, in Britain. If these were not permitted, then British multiculturalism was a sham.
Self-Enclosed Communities in Britain and Germany
Since then I have seen plenty of articles in the press, including liberal journals like Prospect, worrying about the increasing separation between White and Muslim communities. There was an article a while ago in that magazine discussing a city in the north of England, where the Muslim and non-Muslim White communities were nearly separate with a minimum of interaction. Other articles elsewhere in the press have mentioned the situation in Germany, where the Turkish minority may also form self-enclosed communities. It has been argued that in these communities, people can get by without any knowledge of German, supported as they are by Turkish businesses and able to watch and listen to Turkish broadcasting. But I don’t believe I’ve ever come across anyone discussing the demands for separate Islamic colonies, at least not in Britain. It’s possible that the journos writing those articles don’t know about and neither do British politicians. I’ve also never heard Tommy Robinson mention them either, so it seems very likely that he and his gang of thugs don’t know about it. On the other hand, it’s also possible that the authorities are aware of them. They’re just not publicising them for fear of riots and the breakdown of ‘community cohesion’. The same reason they permitted the Asian paedophile gangs in Rotherham to go on for so long.
In many ways this is doubtless a good thing, as you can imagine the massive scaremongering and islamophobia that would be generated by the right, including Tommy Robinson and the EDL and the Daily Heil. 9/11 saw a rise in hate crimes against Muslims, and Boris Johnson’s infamous article in the Torygraph attacking the burqa resulted in further physical attacks on the minority of Muslim women clad in the garment. Several were murdered.
Sharia Law Small Minority in British Islam
It’s important not to exaggerated the numbers of western Muslims, who may support this view. One of the papers a few years ago notoriously claimed that the majority of British Muslims wanted the establishment of sharia law here. In fact a close reading of the stats showed that only 5 per cent of Britain’s Muslims wanted it, and then only where it didn’t conflict with British law. I’ve heard that most Muslims in the West base their ideas on Islamic law on the Qu’ran, where most of this is about inheritance, rather than systems of government. I very much doubt that the majority of Muslims would welcome the formal imposition of what amounts to a system of autonomous ghettos, and certainly not those immigrants who have come to Britain to escape persecution in very draconian and authoritarian Islamic states.
The demands for separate, autonomous Muslim communities seem to be attempts by Islamic traditionalists to impose their views on the majority of their coreligionists, who seem more comfortable in a multi-faith society allowing the free interactions of people with different religious or non-religious views. And the general Muslim community seems to have become less insular, stressing engagement with wider British society rather than retreat. This has been shown in Muslim restaurants feeding the poor and homeless during the Christmas period, and community festivals like Eid, commemorating the end of Ramadan. This is celebrated with a large feast, which the Muslim community in parts of Bristol shared with their non-Muslim fellow residents.
No No-Go Zones in Britain
Fox News made itself a massive laughing stock a few years ago when it hysterically claimed that Muslims were taking over Britain. Birmingham was 100 per cent Muslim, which surprised the mayor and people of that great city. There were no-go areas in towns throughout Britain, where non-Muslims feared to tread. This was also angrily refuted by the mayors and politicos of those towns so accused, as well as ordinary British peeps.
Nevertheless, these calls for segregation do seem to be still around. A while ago I noticed in the ‘ethnicity’ shelves in Bristol’s Central Library a book by a prominent Muslim woman from one of the northern cities. I can’t remember who she was, but one of her claims was she was a matchmaker and an agony aunt, who had appeared on the Beeb’s Asian Network. The book’s blurb stated that it was about the rise of racial conflict and violence between Asians and other ethnic groups, and offered ‘a surprising solution’. The only surprising solution I can think of is segregation. I didn’t look at the book, so I might be wrong.
Belfield on Islam in Birmingham
I also wonder if this, or similar views, are secretly held by some of the leaders of Britain’s Muslim communities. Following the stabbings in Birmingham, right-wing radio host and Youtuber Alex Belfield put up video calling for Birmingham’s authorities to clamp down on the threatening environment in one particular area of the city. Some of this was uncontroversial. He specifically mentioned the druggies on the streets there. But he also, and some of the callers to his programme, claimed that there was a Muslim presence there which was overpowering and threatening to non-Muslims. He attacked the chanting coming from the local mosque, as well as preaching, some of which seemed to be political by Muslims on the street. This, he said, was not tolerated in other towns.
I wouldn’t like to say that Belfield is personally racist. Certainly one of the callers supporting his view wasn’t. She said she had no problem with the Black population of the area, who were also Brummies. But he is vehemently anti-immigrant, condemning the arrival of asylum seekers from Calais. He also seems to be have been taken in by the rumours that the stabbings were committed not by a Black Brit with mental health problems, but by one of the Somalian asylum seekers he and Nigel Farage have been moaning about. He also attacked Leeds English language local radio for broadcasting warnings about the Coronavirus in Urdu, which is the language, or one of the languages used on the Beeb’s Asian Network, which is also based in Leeds.
Covert Support for Extremism Among Some British Muslim Leaders
But there is a problem in that the leaders of Birmingham Central Mosque and British Islamic organisations have a history of saying one thing and believing quite another. Ed Hussain in his book, The Islamist, an account of his time as a militant Islamic radical, describes the various leaders of the British Muslim community, who visited No. 10 to reassure Tony Blair that they supported his campaign against Islamic radicalism, all the while holding the very beliefs they affected to condemn. It’s therefore quite possible that the leaders of whatever mosque Belfield was attacking may want Muslim autonomous areas, and are acting on this belief as far as they can in a democratic, pluralist society. I hope not, but I don’t know.
This is a situation that needs watching. It will be interesting to see if Black British and Muslim radicals start making demands for autonomous areas following developments in America. If so, they need to be discussed, refuted and fought. Such views would be unacceptable coming from White supremacists and racists, and should be no more tolerated coming from any other colour or religion.
This shows just how extreme ideologies of diversity and affirmative can be taken so that they end up looking very much like the old racist institutions of apartheid and segregation they were supposed to combat. A few days ago I caught some of the Conservative sites on YouTube talking about the opening of a cafe for Whites only at the University Michigan. Amazingly, this seems to have been done by their Centre for Social Inclusion, which at least speaks the language of diversity, rather than old style White racial supremacists. The hosts of the American Conservatives YouTube news channel, Timscast, have put up a piece about it, in which they blame White liberal writers on race and racism for this development. Specifically Robin Di Angelo. Di Angelo’s the author of a bestselling book, White Fragility, and has said that she feels uncomfortable in the presence of Blacks. I think her book is supposed to be an expose of White racism and is a piece of polemic aimed at combating anti-Black racism. But the presenters of Timscast decided that she was a racist herself, who really wants Whites and Blacks to be segregated and the creation of such Whites only spaces.
This came just after Donald Trump passed a law banning the teaching of critical race theory in the police and other federal departments. They haven’t been proscribed at right. They can still be taught privately elsewhere. They just can’t be taught in the various organs of the federal state. Sargon of Gasbag, the Sage of Swindon, has put out his video hailing it as a true anti-racist measure. From what I gather, Critical Race Theory teaches that all Whites are racist, and that the American state and its institutions are therefore also racist.
Kimberle Crenshaw
In his video, the man who broke UKIP reads out excerpts from the introduction of Kimberle Crenshaw’s Critical Race Theory, published in 1996. This is an anthology of texts about the theory. It states that it had its origins in the 1970s amongst a group of White Marxist legal scholars, New Left and Counterculture activists in a Conference for Critical Law Studies. This brought together law professors, students and practicing lawyers, who were subsequently called ‘the Crits’. This led to the foundation of Critical Legal Studies. The focus on race and racism emerged following the departure of Derek Bell, a Black law professor, left Harvard. Bell’s students demanded he be replaced by another Black tutor. When the university refused to grant this, they set up an alternative course continuing Bell’s teaching. This was the first institutional use of Critical Race Theory. These Black activists also attacked Critical Legal Studies itself, most of whose members were White, as a site of hierarchy and power. These were the Critical Race Crits, who split from the Marxists on the issue of racism. They were dissatisfied with the Marxists’ explanation of racism as a function or creation of capitalism.
No, this is a Crite from the movie Critters. Not a Crit.
Critical Race Theory and its supporters reject the ideas of colour blindness, integration and assimilation and the mainstream Civil Rights movement, which they believe has been appropriated by liberal ideologies. This includes Martin Luther King’s dictum that a man should be judged on his character, rather than his colour. As part of this, they have also attacked the Supreme Court’s support for a colour-blind attitude to race. They instead turned to radical Black movements like the Black Panthers, advocating the development of Black racial consciousness to attack and undermine the existing racial order.
There’s a clip on YouTube, which has been used by a number of Conservative vloggers like Sargon’s Romanian friend, Vee, which clearly demonstrates the Critical Race Theorists’ own racism towards Whites. This is of a young Black American woman, Ashleigh Shackleford, telling a roomful of Whites that, as White people, they are all racist and nothing they can do will change it. She doesn’t mean to offend them, but they are all demons to her. This attitude isn’t just confined to her. My mother encountered a similar attitude amongst a group of anti-racism activists brought into her school to teach anti-racism following the race riots of 1981/2. They also made unwarranted assumptions based on class and Whiteness. One of them told Mum that she had to be racist, because she was White and middle class. Mum was naturally not impressed, not least because she grew up on a council estate in Bristol. She told the woman that she didn’t know her.
Sargon attacked the Critical Race Theorists’ advocacy of Black racial consciousness by arguing that it also legitimates White supremacy. White racists can use it to argue that, if Black racial consciousness is legitimate, then it must also be for Whites. In fact, the Critical Race Theorists strongly reject and attack any comparison between their attitude and White racism. But Sargon has a point, and it does seem supported by the opening of the Whites only café by Michigan University as a socially inclusive gesture.
Way back in the 1990s, the Financial Times discussed the development of what it called liberal apartheid in a review of a book on the British Empire. The FT complained, if I remember aright, that while the book covered migration and the movement of peoples across the world during the Empire, it said nothing about the reverse colonisation that occurred afterwards. It used this term to mean the immigration to Britain of non-Whites from former colonies. And it used liberal apartheid to describe the various services that are available only to Blacks and other ethnic minorities. It considered these as one of the forces responsible for the increased separation of Whites and Blacks into different communities.
I’ve no doubt that pro-Black anti-racists would angrily reject terms like ‘reverse colonisation’ and ‘liberal apartheid’ because of the comparison they make between non-White immigration and affirmative action and White imperialism and colonisation. But liberal apartheid is a suitable description for some of these policies. For example, New York University has started building Blacks only student accommodation at the request of its Black students, who don’t want to room with Whites. One university somewhere also opened a student centre, that was exclusively for the use of non-Whites, including Blacks, Asians, Hispanics and indigenous Americans. There’s another clip on YouTube of a Black woman telling the Whites that were in there to leave. In Britain there are also Black only housing blocks, at least in London. I’ve no doubt these separate spaces and policies supporting ethnic minorities were set up in response to a genuine need. The Black housing blocks in London were set up because Blacks had trouble getting accommodation. But it is also itself a form of segregation.
And when this policy of creating separate spaces for ethnic groups, who feel marginalised and at risk, is applied to Whites, as now seems to have happened at the University of Michigan, the liberal apartheid of affirmative action looks very much like its old version designed to exclude and marginalise Blacks and people of colour.
And it also shows how bizarre extreme ideologies by Black anti-racists are, that Donald Trump, a racist himself, many of whose supporters are real racists and White supremacists, suddenly appears to be an anti-racist by banning them.
I’m not going to link to them, but here are the titles of the videos I’ve cited if you want to google them on YouTube.
Sargon’s video has the title ‘Major Win for Patriots: Trump Bans Critical Race Theory’.
Vee’s video is ‘What Is Critical Race Theory and Why Did Trump Ban It?’
The Timscast video is ‘Segregation Resurfaces as WHITES-ONLY Cafe Is Opened At a College in the Name of INCLUSION’.
One of the points John Newsinger makes in his chapter on Palestine in The Blood Never Dried: A People’s History of the British Empire, is that both Britain and America had double standards when it came it came to Jews fleeing Nazi persecution. While they were more than prepared to encourage it in Palestine, where the refugees came to colonise, they were less willing to allow them to enter their own countries. In 1935 the US only allowed 4,837 Jews to enter the country, for example. In that same year the number of Jewish immigrants to Palestine was 66,472. This would have been the equivalent of 2 million Jews entering Britain. The Arab intellectual, George Antonius, was acutely aware of this and sympathetic to position of the Jewish refugees. But he didn’t see why the burden of such immigration should be borne by the Arabs. Newsinger quotes his comment
The treatment meted out to the Jews in Germany and other European countries is a disgrace to its authors and to modern civilisation, but posterity will not exonerate any country that fails to bear its proper share of the sacrifices needed to alleviate suffering and distress. To place the burden upon Arab Palestine is a miserable evasion of the duty that lies upon the whole civilised world. It is also morally outrageous. No code of morals can justify the persecution of one people in an attempt to relieve the persecution of another. The cure for the eviction of Jews from Germany is not to be sought in the eviction of Arabs from their homeland; and the relief of Jewish distress may not be accomplished at the cost of inflicting a corresponding distress upon an innocent and peaceful population.
Unfortunately, the Palestinians are still being oppressed and ethnically cleansed by the Israelis because of Europe’s moral failure, not just in the rise of Nazism and the persecution of Jews in the first place, but also our refusal to accept our share of Jewish refugees.
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