Petition Started to Sack Keir Starmer as Leader of the Labour Party

There’s been outrage after Keir Starmer sacked Rebecca Long Bailey from her position on the shadow cabinet yesterday. Her crime was simply tweeting about an interview with the actress Maxine Peake in the Independent. Peake and RLB had condemned the training of US police by the IDF, who had taught them to keep suspects and protesters down by putting their knees on their necks. It was this hold that had killed George Floyd. RLB had begun her tweet by stating that systematic racism was a global issue, mentioning that the American cops were taught the hold from seminars with the Israeli security forces.

This outraged the Zionist fanatics and the Tories, like the Tory peer and Murdoch hack Daniel Finkelstein, John Rentoul, the keeper of the Blair flame in the Labour Party, and the noxious Dave Rich, who immediately declared that RLB was peddling an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory and demanded Starmer sack her. But it isn’t a ‘conspiracy theory’. It’s solid fact, as established and verified by Amnesty International. Mike in his piece about this disgraceful scandal has supported RLB’s statement through passages from Amnesty reporting that law enforcement officials from a series of American states – Florida, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, California, Arizona, Connecticut, New York, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Georgia, Washington State, and the police of Washington DC, have travelled to Israel for training. He has also reproduced a passage from the Jerusalem Post reporting that a city in North Carolina has actually banned training and other forms of exchange between their police and the IDF because of the IDF’s brutal repression and maltreatment of the Palestinians. He also points out that what RLB said was not anti-Semitic. She did not say Jews had taught the police the use of the technique. She had said the IDF. The two are not synonymous, no matter what Marie van der Zyl of the Board of Deputies wishes to claim.

Starmer, honouring his obligation to the Board after he signed their ridiculous and highly manipulative 10 pledges, has asked RLB to resign. This was angrily attacked by the peeps on Twitter, including Simon Maginn, Kerry-Ann Mendoza, Ash Sarkar, and Tom London. Even Owen Jones, who has supported the anti-Semitism smears, called it an absurd overreaction.

But as Mike himself has pointed out, Starmer has not sacked Rachel Reeves, the odious right-winger in the party who laid a wreath at the statue of Nancy Astor. Astor was the first British woman MP, but she was also a vicious anti-Communist and anti-Semite, who thought that Adolf Hitler was the right man for Germany and tackling both of these issues.

Mike has also reproduced RLB’s own series of Tweets explaining and clarifying her comments. She states that she put up an previous clarification of her comments, which had been agreed by Starmer, but was told to take it and her retweet down. This means that Starmer is using her Tweet as a pretext to get rid of her. It’s all part of his campaign to purge the Labour Party of the left, and anti-Semitism is just the pretext, not a real cause.

Long-Bailey’s sacking tells us all we need to know about Keir ‘double-standard’ Starmer and his racist Labour Party

In fact under Starmer Labour has allowed racism to go unpunished. But it’s the racism of his supporters against Blacks and BAME MPs, supporters and activists.

Zelo Street in its article also quotes the Middle East Eye, which states

“The Israeli police force has tried to distance itself from any perceived imilarities, issuing statements denouncing what happened and stating that its officers are not trained to use knee-to-neck techniques. But photographs taken as recently as March have shown Israeli forces using the same restraint on unarmed protesters just yards from the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem’s Old City”.

The Street concludes

‘The training of US law enforcement officers by the Israeli military is not an “anti-Semitic conspiracy theory”. It’s not “5G level stuff”. No-one “blames Jews”. But this does enable pundits to look away from holding a catastrophically inept Government to account.

And it allows the Tories to get away with rather more blatant anti-Semitism. The kind that none of those bleating at Maxine Peake seem to notice. I’ll just leave that one there.’

See: https://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2020/06/maxine-peake-and-no-anti-semitism.html

Tony Greenstein, the long-time critic of Israel and Zionism, was so incensed by Starmer’s actions that he has put up an article that also proves very clearly that the training of American cops by the IDF is most definitely not a ‘conspiracy theory’ but solid fact. he has this quote from Neta Golan of the International Solidarity Movement.

“When I saw the picture of killer cop Derek Chauvin murdering George Floyd by leaning in on his neck with his knee I remembered noticing when many Israeli soldiers began using this technique when we were protesting in the West Bank sometime in 2006.”

He has also stated that Starmer’s support for Black Lives Matter is hypocritical, as the Israel lobby despises BLM because it also criticises and condemns the Israeli state’s maltreatment of the Palestinians. He provided more than ample evidence of this in an article he put up yesterday.

See https://azvsas.blogspot.com/2020/06/for-6-years-black-lives-matter-were.html

He also notes that this isn’t about attacking anti-Semitism. It is about defending the Israeli apartheid state and the bi-partisan imperialist foreign policy in the Middle East that Labour shares with the Tories. He states that a racist and imperialist cannot be leader of a socialist party, and has therefore set up a petition calling for Starmer to go. A link to it is in his article on RLB’s sacking at:

https://azvsas.blogspot.com/2020/06/its-time-for-starmer-to-go-israels-use.html

I think this link should also take you there if you put it in the search box.

http://chng.it/CJg7z8QNGY

I’ve signed it, as I agree absolutely with what Tony, Mike and Zelo Street have all said. This isn’t about anti-Semitism. It’s simply using the anti-Semitism smears to justify the unjustifiable – apartheid in Israel, and the smearing and purge of entirely decent, anti-racist people from the Labour Party in favour of racist red Tories.

If you feel the same, please consider signing Tony’s petition. Though I’m afraid that it may provide Starmer with more names of people he can purge.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tony Greenstein Review of Book on Zionism’s Alliance with Anti-Semites and Nazis

Tony Greenstein has frequently stated that Zionism is the Jewish form of anti-Semitism. This is so, because Zionism accepts and adopts the anti-Semitic assumption that Jews and gentiles are fundamentally, irreconcilably different and incompatible. Jews will never be accepted in non-Jewish society, and so must have their own country. He has also pointed out, over and over again, that in order to achieve this aim, Zionists have allied themselves with real anti-Semites, people and regimes who support Zionism purely for the racist goal of cleansing their countries of Jews. This is how it is that the Nazis made a pact, the Ha’avara Agreement, with the Zionist settlers in Palestine, to smuggle German Jews there during the British Mandate. It is why the Zionist Jewish newspaper in Germany, the Judischer Rundschau, enthusiastically welcomed Hitler’s vile Nuremberg laws, telling their readers that the Nazis shared their views that Jews and (gentile) Germans were racially different, and that they should wear their yellow stars with pride. It is why the Zionist leader in Hungary during the War, Rudolf Kasztner, made a deal with the Nazis that allowed hundreds of thousands of Jews to be deported to the death camps so that some might be sent to Israel. And after the War, Israel employed former Nazis, such as the SS officer Otto Skorzeny, who had committed horrific atrocities and massacres of Jews, as spies.

But Israel has very carefully manipulated history to present the opposite idea. Instead, Zionism poses as the protector and saviour of the world’s Jews. In the 1970s it rescued Jewish communities from persecution in Africa, particularly Ethiopia. Any mention of Zionism’s alliances with real, murderous anti-Semites is very carefully suppressed by the mainstream media and political establishment. Those who dare to speak out are smeared and vilified as anti-Semites themselves. This happened with Ken Livingstone, who dared to say, quite correctly, that Hitler initially supported Zionism. It happened with Mike of Vox Political, after he sent the Labour Party a text, The Livingstone Delusion, showing that the Trotskyite newt-fancier was historically correct. Both Leninspart and Mike were then publicly accused of anti-Semitism and expelled from the party.

But people are still speaking out and denouncing Israel and Zionism for their crimes against the Jewish people. Last Wednesday, 11th March 2020, the mighty Tony Greenstein reviewed a book by Stanley Heller, Zionist Betrayal of the Jews, from Herzl to Netanyahu. Tellingly, it’s self-published, but is available from the Middle East Crisis Committee of Woodbridge, Connecticut. It’s a long review, with Greenstein selecting only a few of the most notorious instances of this sordid history of collaboration and betrayal. And it begins with this meme.

The review first appeared in the Weekly Worker. It includes Ben Gurion’s indifference to the plight of Jews fleeing Nazi Germany for safety in Britain and America. He made it clear that he’d rather half of the Jewish emigrants were murdered, if a proportion would go to Palestine. Then there’s Zionism’s founder, Theodor Herzl, and his own acceptance of anti-Semitism. He notes that the smear campaign against those within the Labour Party, who are critics of Israel, like Ken Livingstone, has zero evidence supporting them. Which is the majority of victims are anti-Zionist Jews, like Greenstein himself. The papers that loudly supported Charlie Hebdo when it was the victim of a vicious islamist attack, loudly proclaiming freedom of speech and the right to offend, kept very quiet when it came to Leninspart and the other victims of the witch hunt. Leninspart lost his job with LBC, who had no qualms about employing Katie Hopkins, who mixes with and loudly supports real Fascists. Greenstein also states that it builds on Lenni Brenner’s 51 Documents – Zionism Collaboration with the Nazis and the same author’s Zionism in the Age of the Dictators, although it doesn’t share that author’s own views of the relationship between the two.

The book explodes the myth that Herzl was converted to Zionism by the Dreyfus affair. In fact, he secretly believed Captain Dreyfus was guilty, and was instead influenced by Karl Luegerer, the anti-Semitic mayor of Vienna, who also influenced Hitler. Greenstein’s review also covers Herzl’s meeting with the Tsarist minister, von Plehve, responsible for a pogrom in Kishinev. Jabotinsky met Petlyura, the White Russian leader, responsible for the murder of 50,000 Jews. Jabotinsky’s supporters later collaborated with the anti-Semitic regime in Poland which followed the death of Joszef Pilsudski, and the Italian Fascists. Instead of the Zionists, the only Jewish organisation that fought anti-Semitism in Poland was the Bund. The Stern Gang, the notorious Jewish terrorist group in Israel’s war of independence against Britain, was also quite content to see the Nazis imprison Jews in ghettos across Poland. He also discusses the indifference of American Jewry to what was being done against their coreligionists in Europe under the Nazis. The Zionist leaders of American Jewry did not want Jews to find safety anywhere except Palestine, and actively campaigned against those Jewish organisations that did. They even wrote to Roosevelt demanding the deportation of two Jewish leaders as ‘worse than Hitler’ for this reason.

The book also describes how Israel supported Latin American Fascist regimes. They recognised the Bolivian Fascist regime and the military junta that preceded it, supplying civilian and military aid, even though it was not recognised by American president Jimmy Carter and was sheltering the Nazi war criminal, Klaus Barbie – the infamous ‘Butcher of Lyons’. Israel also had good relations with Paraguay, whose dictator, Alfredo Stroessner, admired the Nazis and welcomed Mengele as a guest. The response of the Israeli ambassador to Paraguay, when asked about this, was that Israel wasn’t looking for the notorious Auschwitz human vivisectionist, even though the West German government was.

The book also a chapter on Israel’s current collaboration with contemporary anti-Semitic regimes, like that of Viktor Orban in Hungary, who looks back to Admiral Horthy’s dictatorship from the 1920s till late in World War II. It has also praised the Lithuanian leader Saulis Skvernelis, despite the fact that Lithuanian schools celebrate as heroes the Nazi-allied nationalists, who collaborated in the murder of 95% of the country’s Jewish population. Israel also had warm relations with Austria’s neo-Nazi Hans Christian Strache, Modi and his wretched Hindu nationalists and their supply of arms to the Ukrainian neo-Nazi Azov Battalion.

And not surprisingly, Israel also enjoys a very close relationship with Donald Trump, who said that the Nazis are Charlottesville had ‘good people’ on their side, and selected Pastor Ted Hagee of Christians United for Israel, to preside over the opening of the first American embassy to Israel in Jerusalem. This is despite Hagee believing that Hitler himself was a ‘half-breed Jew’. To be fair, I’ve known people, who also believe Hitler was half-Jewish, who definitely weren’t anti-Semites. There is evidence that Hitler may have been partly of Jewish descent through his grandmother, who had been a domestic servant in a Jewish home and who may have borne the son of her employers’ illegitimate child.

Greenstein concludes

In short, when Zionists talk about ‘anti-Semitism’, it is a camouflage to hide their own collaboration with genuine anti-Semites.

Heller has done us a great service in writing this all too short book. I can heartily recommend it as an hors d’oeuvres. However it is only a taster. The full story of Zionist collaboration with anti-Semites, the Nazis included, will take up a much larger volume.

See: http://azvsas.blogspot.com/2020/03/the-truth-that-labour-dare-not-speak.html

This adds more evidence showing that it is the critics of Israel, who had history on their side during the Labour anti-Semitism witch hunt. The people like Leninspart, Mike and Greenstein himself, who dared to say that Israel collaborated with the Nazis. The real anti-Semites here are therefore Zionism and its supporters – the Board of Deputies, Chief Rabbinate and organisations like the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, which try to suppress real genuine history and smear entirely decent, non- and anti-racist people, including self-respecting Jews, as anti-Semites.

it can therefore reasonably be said that Israel and Zionism are an anti-Semitic endeavour.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Steampunk Airplanes from the 19th Century

A few days ago I put up a post about 19th century attempts to produce steam-driven carriages and cars, which were very much like the kind of vehicles imagined by 20th century Cyberpunk writers. Cyberpunk is the type of science fiction, which takes as its starting point the fiction of H.G. Wells and Jules Verne, and imagines what the world would have been like, if the Victorians had had spacecraft, flying machines, cars and so on.

As well as inventing steam cars, carriages and buses, the century also saw a series of inventors put their minds towards flight. Balloons had been known about and used since they were invented in the 18th century. While some scientists and engineers, like Cugnot in France, attempted to create dirigible balloons – the ancestors of the Zeppelins and other airships of the 20th century, others tried to create heavier-than-air craft using wings, partly based on observing the way birds fly. These were the precursors and ancestors of the Wright brothers’ plane flown at Kittyhawk.

Such flying machines appear in the Science Fiction of the period. There are flying ships in Bulwer-Lytton’s early SF novel, The Coming Race. These frequently had fantastic designs, that would have been completely impossible to fly, such as the flying machine invented by one Mr Broughton in the short story, The Fate of the Firefly, by the Rev. J.M. Bacon. This is described as like

the skeleton of some antediluvian monster bird or flying fish. There were huge lateral wings, in texture like a bat’s, there was a pointed beak and a neck whose vertebrae were jointed pully blocks, but the body was too complex for comprehension, though it clearly contained an engine of some sort, with a tank which also did duty as a table. The story was accompanied by the following illustration of the ‘plane’.

See Hilary and Dik Evans, Beyond the Gaslight: Science in Popular Fiction 1895-1905 (London: Frederick Muller Ltd 1976) 81-5 (pp. 81, 82).

Other, more serious attempts to create a flying machine, can be seen in the book Images of Aviation: A Century of Flight, by John W.R. Taylor (Brimscombe Port: Tempus 1999). This includes Leonardo da Vinci’s attempts to produce the airplane, as well as various early balloons. It also has a photo of a model of the glider invented by George Cayley in 1849, which successfully lifted a ten year old boy off the ground. This was succeeded in 1853 by a vehicle, which successfully carried one of Cayley’s servants. The vehicle crash landed, however, and although the man mercifully survived, he and Cayley were so shocked by the crash that Cayley turned his back on flight. He is, however, now recognised as one of the founders of the airplane and the science of aeronautics.

Another British inventor, William Henson, produced a design in 1842 for an ‘aerial steam carriage’. Henson built the machine, but it failed to fly when it was tested in 1847. The steam carriage was launched from a ramp, but the small steam engine driving its two propellers lacked the power to keep it in the air. It is, nevertheless, a very good piece of engineering, as all the components are exactly where they should be in a working aircraft.

After experimenting with clockwork models in the 1850s, the French naval officer, Felix du Temple, successfully launched a monoplane carrying a sailor in 1874. The device was powered by a steam engine, and took off from a ramp. It wasn’t very successful, staying aloft only for a few moments. Still, this was another important milestone on the way to powered flight.

Twenty years later, the pioneering Russian aviator, Golubov, managed a flight of between 65 to 100 feet in monoplane – a plane with only one set of wings – designed by Alexander Fedorovich Mozhaisky. like du Temple’s plane, this was also launched from a ramp.

Another French inventor, Clement Ader, made what French historians still claim was the first recognised flight in a powered airplane in the Eole. Powered by a 20 hp steam engine, this flew eight inches off the ground for 165 feet at Armainvilliers in October 1890. The flight was uncontrolled, however, and the design of the machine itself was basically impractical with its bizarre bat wings.

Sir Hiram Maxim also tried his hand at flight, creating an immense steam-powered biplane, which he attempted to fly at Baldwyn’s Park in Kent in 1894. This briefly cleared its guide rails before it hit a guard rail and crashed, after which Maxim called an end to his experiments in flight.

The end of the 19th century saw further developments in flight from Otto Lilienthal in Germany, who constructed a series of man-carrying gliders, as well as other aviators in the very first years of the 20th century, such as Richard Pearse in New Zealand and Gustave Whitehead of Bridgeport, Connecticut. Their machines are much more like those of the Wright brothers, which came after them.

I find the Victorian machines interesting, however, as they show not only the immense imagination and invention of the engineers and scientists of the period, but they are so much like some of the machines of Cyberpunk SF that you really do wonder what they world would have been like, if they had been more successful and flight had been successfully invented fifty years or so before the Wright brothers.

From 2012: Fraud and Failure in Maximus, American Work Programme Contractors

This comes from Private Eye for the 29th June – 12th July 2012, and concerns the history of failure and corruption in Maximus, an American company that IDS awarded a contract for running the Work Programme.

Welfare to Work

Dirty Max

It’s probably just as well hardly anyone in the UK has heard of welfare-to-work firm Maximus, which has government contracts worth £176m to run Iain Duncan Smith’s Work Programme in west London and the South-east. In the US its record includes fraud and failure on a grand scale.

In 2007 Maximus was fined $30.5m over accusations that it cheated Medicaid, the US equivalent of the NHS, by making tens of thousands of false claims on a “payment by results” contract.

Washington State had hired the firm to help it make savings, both sharing money claimed from the national Medicaid system for children in foster care. But Maximus, in a plan called “Operation Lightning Rod”, increased its income by making claims for children who had not received care.

After the fraud was exposed Maximus said it would not sign any more “contingency-based contracts” where it was paid from “savings” in state expenditure. But the UK’s Work Programme is just such a contingency-based, payment-by-results contract.

In 2007 Maximus was also sued by Connecticut for the “abject failure” of its computer system which was supposed to run a police database, including real-time police record checks. The state’s attorney-general said: “Maximus minimized quality – squandering millions of taxpayer dollars and shortchanging law enforcement agencies.” He said the database could “make a life and death difference to police and other law enforcers”, so the failure was unacceptable. In 2010 Maximus settled the case for $2.5m.

In the same year the firm recorded losses of $37m after its work with Accenture for Texas collapsed. It was main subcontractor on a scheme to run the state’s health benefits; but after 5,000 benefit clerks were made redundant, the replacement databases and call centres, failed, families were arbitrarily cut off from benefits and Texas lost millions in national funds.

So, like A4E, another company with a history of failure and corruption was awarded the government contract to handle the Work Programme.