Dan Hodges Predicts Inevitable Challenge to Sunak from Boris

More on the infighting breaking out in the Tory ranks as their popularity continues to crumble. The right-wing mouthpiece dubbed by Zelo Street as the Blues musician ‘Whinging Dan Hodges’, according to a video put up this morning by That Preston Journalist, has said that it’s only a matter of time now before Johnson tries to get back into power and oust Sunak. This will probably happen after the Tories take a kicking in the council elections in May. That Preston Journalist felt that even if Johnson was able to improve the Tories’ popularity a little bit, it wouldn’t be enough and they should spend some time in opposition in order to rebuild.

I agree, but with one difference. They should go into opposition and never come out.

Dan Hodges Lies about Liberal Left Hating White Working Class

Yesterday I put up a piece attacking ‘Celebrity Radio’ host Alex Bellfield, who had falsely claimed that ‘lefties’ had done nothing about the sweatshops in Leicester. As I explained in my piece, the problem wasn’t with the left. The Labour MP for Leicester East, Claudia Webbe, had talked about the problems with the area’s sweatshops in a Zoom online meeting on Saturday afternoon organised as part of the Arise festival of the Labour Left. Webbe made it very clear that she and others had tried to get the authorities to act about the appalling conditions and low pay in the city’s garment industry, but they were ignored.

Now another right-wing hack is also spreading lies about the ‘liberal left’. Yesterday a video appeared on my YouTube page from Talk Radio. This one had had the title ‘Dan Hodges – Liberal Left View White Working Class as the Enemy’. Hodges is a writer for the Daily Mail. Such is the quality of his journalism that readers of Zelo Street know him as ‘the celebrated Blues artist Whinging Dan Hodges’. It’s an old chestnut. The Tories have been pursuing this line for years. Way back in 2003/4 the Spectator was publishing pieces like ‘Blackened Whites’ about how anti-racist activists were maligning the working class. These articles contained lines such as ‘there is only one minority not welcome under Labour on the streets of central London – White men’. They also opined about how the Left despised working class Whites because of their patriotism, amongst other values.

This is a flat-out lie. It was another one that was shown as such by the speakers at Saturday’s conference. The first of these was Black Labour MP Bell Ribeiro-Addy. She gave a superb speech making it clear that Labour stood for the working class in all its diversity, and that we should not allow the working class to be divided. It was a theme repeated again and again by nearly all the speakers there, including, I believe, Corbyn’s deputy, John McDonnell.

Owen Jones, the bete noir of the rabid right, made the same point in his brilliant book Chavs: The Demonisation of the Working Class. He dispels accusations of racism made against the unions during a strike. I’ve forgotten the precise details, but the media presented it as if it had been caused by White workers refusing to work alongside Blacks and Asians. In fact the reverse was true. The strike had been called by the union partly because of the exploitation of BAME workers. There is racism in the working class,  and a feeling of marginalization. The latter has its roots in the way New Labour turned its back on the working class in order to chase middle class Tories. This created a constituency of White, low-skilled, working class people in their fifties for UKIP. See the excellent study of that particular piece of populism when it was led by the Fuhrage, Revolt on the Right.

I don’t believe Black Lives Matter has helped this situation. Although the demonstrators have repeatedly stressed that they are not against Whites – I’ve mentioned the meme of the cute little Black girl holding a placard spelling this out – and there was another placard with the slogan ‘We’re Not Trying to Start a Race War – We’re Trying to End One’, unfortunately that is the impression some BLM protests make. The right-wing put up another video a few days ago about a group of BLM protesters demonstrating against White privilege in Birmingham. The photograph for that video showed a White middle-aged women waving a placard with the slogan ‘Use your White Privilege for Good’. This is particularly tin-eared. Whites and ethnic minorities are not homogenous communities occupying distinct places in the social hierarchy. While Whites generally have higher status, better jobs and education, and are more prosperous than Black, this is certainly not uniformly the case. Some ethnic groups, such as the Chinese, outperform Whites. Indians are only slightly behind Whites in society as a rule. Muslims and Blacks are at the bottom, but nevertheless there are many Whites who are as poor or poorer than parts of those ethnic groups. And the worst performing group at school are White working class boys. By waving such placards, the protesters appear to show that they are indeed elite middle-class Whites with a hatred of the working class. But if they do, those protesters do not speak for all left-liberals.

The Labour left support the White working class, just as they support all the disparate communities of the working class. The Tories don’t. They only appear to in order to garner votes, fostering racial antagonism in a very cynical policy of divide et conquera. As we’ve seen over the past ten years of Tory rule, they have cut welfare benefits, frozen pay and introduced mass unemployment and job insecurity to Whites as well as Blacks and Asians, while at the same time lying to them in the pages of the Scum, the Heil, Torygraph and Spectator that they are really defending them. It’s a classic piece of misdirection that the racist elites have done for centuries. In 17th century America the colonial rulers after Bacon’s rebellion found a way to prevent White indentured labourers joining forces in revolt with Black slaves: they simply defined Whites legally against Blacks, but gave them no extra rights nor privileges. White indentured labourers were as exploited as before, but it worked. Whites felt themselves to be superior and no longer joined Black revolts quite as they did. Although many White working people, as well as liberal Whites further up in the social hierarchy could still have considerable sympathy for Black slaves. James Walvin in one of his books on slavery has a passage from a 19th century article stating that in Scotland, the women who demand slave emancipation are working class.

The likes of Hodges have been lying to Black and White for a long time. It’s time we stopped listening and exposed this lie for what it is. Working people of all colours unite – you have nothing to lose but your chains, as Marx could have said.

 

Mail on Sunday about to Dox Jolyon Maugham

The lamestream media really are becoming vile and dangerously vindictive. Of course, we knew that all too often they were absolute scumbags already from the way they’ve smeared and libeled decent left-wingers like Michael Foot, Mike from Vox Political, Jackie Walker, Ken Livingstone, Marc Wadsworth and so many, many others. Foot was libeled as a KGB agent, something that even Private Eye found ridiculous and disgusting. Mike, Walker, Wadsworth and Livingstone were all smeared by the press as Jew haters and Holocaust deniers, simply for the horrendous crime of being true Labour folks, and daring to criticise Israel for its apartheid and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. Or because they dared to stand up for those who had. As a result, they’ve had to endure unspeakable abuse on social media. Walker’s been told by racists that she can’t be Jewish, ’cause she’s Black, and that she should be lynched, set on fire and her body dumped in bin bags. And Mike showed me the other day the splenetic abuse he gets from bigoted morons, who’ve swallowed the lies about him. But the media seems to be digging ever lower depths.

Laura Kuenssberg yesterday revealed that Omar Salem, the father of a sick child at a hospital BoJob was visiting, was a Labour activist and gave out his twitter handle. This has resulted in this principled man getting a mountain of abuse from the indignant, vitriolic right. Because Salem had the temerity to tell BoJob how disgusting his destruction of the health service is. It doesn’t matter that a doctor at the hospital shares Salem’s disgust and outrage at the poor service the hospital is providing because of the cuts. The Beeb and the rest of the Tory propaganda machine laughingly called the mainstream media cannot tolerate any criticism of the party. Dissenters must be crushed, vilified, humiliated and terrorised into silence.

Now it seems they’re going to do it to Jolyon Maugham, a long time critic of government policy. According to Zelo Street, Maugham has tweeted that the Mail on Sunday is going to dox him. That is, they’re going to reveal his private address. This comes after he has received death threats because he opposes Brexit. This is mentioned in an article discussing how the Mail on Sunday’s hack, ‘Whinging’ Dan Hodges, has lied on twitter about Jon Lansman’s move to replace the post of deputy leader of the Labour party, which was vetoed by Jeremy Corbyn. Said veto has the support of Lansman, but never mind. Hodges has lied about the decision, claiming that the Labour office now resembles a scene from the Death of Stalin but without the jokes. When this was very obviously shown to be wrong, Hodges claimed that Lansman was going to be set up to take the fall for the decision by  Corbyn. He was going to be the patsy, just like Lee Harvey Oswald was for the JFK assassination. Peter Oborne, who left the Torygraph because he was disgusted at the way the editors were slanting stories in line with the wishes of their advertisers, said it was part of the ‘deformation professionelle’ of journalism. For which he also claimed partial responsibility. Oborne’s very definitely a man of the right, but he does have journalistic integrity which is more than the hacks at the MoS have. And he’s been reviled by the press for it. Tim Fenton, the man behind the Zelo Street blog, also has experience of this kind of intimidation. After he published an article criticising the Speccie for supporting Tommy Robinson, Robinson and his islamophobic stormtroopers turned up on his doorstep.

And if all this wasn’t sordid enough, apparently the ‘Fake Sheikh’ Mazher Mahmood is also working behind the scenes at the Mail on Sunday. This is the scam artist, who used to work for the News of the World trapping unwitting slebs into saying or doing something indiscreet or illegal. He dresses up and poses as an Arab sheikh in order to ingratiate himself with his victims. He’s got some aristos into trouble for saying something uncomplimentary about the royals, got a Radio 1 DJ the sack after persuading him to buy drugs for him, and tried to get George Galloway to say something monstrous about the Holocaust. But Galloway recognised him and didn’t fall for it, stating instead that the Holocaust was a crime against humanity. Mahmood’s employment was supposed to have stopped due to the phone hacking scandal, but apparently he’s still running around doing the same old tricks. Still, the Zelo Street article has a handy photo of him, so keep it handy if you’re a public figure. And bear in mind that he’s as much Arab nobility as I am, even if he is Asian.

See: https://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2019/09/dan-hodges-cut-righteous-crap.html

But doxing people after they’ve received death threats. This looks like the media’s way of putting people in genuine fear for their lives, but in a manner that allows them to deny any responsibility. Hitler and Goebbels used to do that kind of thing against their enemies in Weimar Germany, before they moved on to outright assassination themselves. Joachim C. Fest describes in his book, The Face of the Third Reich, the way they’d smear political opponents, including members of the Weimar police and civil authorities, as Jews even when they weren’t simply for propaganda purposes. It was deliberately dangerous, as other right-wing groups were also carrying out attacks and assassinations on the ‘traitors of Versailles’, as they called the mainstream Weimar parties. Now the Mail and its sister paper are doing exactly the same and for the same reason: they also believe that the people they smear are traitors, though because of their opposition to Brexit.

And so BoJob and the Tory press and media are leading us ever further into real Fascism and state terror.

Richard Seymour on the Anti-Semitic Smears against Jeremy Corbyn

The decision against Ken Livingstone yesterday, sentencing him to suspension for another year because of his entirely accurate statement about the initial collaboration between the Nazis and the Zionists was declared to be anti-Semitic, brought fresh denunciations and anger from Jewish leaders. Members of the Jewish establishment from Rabbi Mirvis, the Chief Rabbi of the British Empire, downwards, ranted about how Labour was riddled with anti-Semitism, the sentence was insufficient, and Red Ken should be expelled.

It’s all nonsense. As the five Jewish Labour party members, whose statements Mike put up on his blog yesterday pointed out, the Leninist newt-fancier had said absolutely nothing anti-Semitic. Indeed, at least one pointed out that in her experience she had encountered no anti-Semitism in the party. Florence in her comments about this shabby affair states that Labour has far fewer racists and anti-Semites in its ranks than the Tories. What really infuriated Mirvis and his fellows wasn’t that Ken was an anti-Semite, but that he and Naz Shah – who actually had a very good relationship with her local synagogue – had dared to criticise Israel for its brutal and barbarous treatment of its indigenous population. The Zionists have worked long and hard to try to forge a spurious equivalence between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism. It’s rubbish, because not all Jews are Zionists by any means, and that the real definition of Anti-Semitism, as used by Wilhelm Marr, the founder of the League of Anti-Semites, was hatred of Jews simply for being Jews. The League of Anti-Semites were one of the odious precursors to the Nazi party, so this definition of anti-Semitism comes from ‘the horse’s mouth’.

Furthermore, two of the people giving their statements about this issue came from homes, which were staunchly Zionist. One lady stated that her mother had lived in Palestine after being forced to leave Ukraine due to the anti-Semitist outrages there. Her paternal grandmother had also been an active supporter of Zionism in Britain. In a letter sent to the NCC, and signed by 30 Jewish Labour party members in support of the man Private Eye calls ‘Leninspart’, the signatories point out that not only aren’t all Jews Zionists, but many Zionists believe that Zionism itself has to be open to criticism, and hence the outrage to Ken’s entirely accurate statement is unwarranted.

Richard Seymour, in the chapter on how Project Fear failed to stop Corbyn in his book Corbyn: The Strange Rebirth of Radical Politics, also discusses some of the anti-Semitism smears against the Labour leader. He writes

One of the most insidious attacks from the Right was organised by the Jewish Chronicle, edited since 2008 by the Tony-Blair worshipping neoconservative pundit Stephen Pollard. In an article published a month before the outcome, the Chronicle posed a series of ‘key questions Jeremy Corbyn must answer’. Most of these were insinuation, guilt-by-association tactics. So, for example, it queried his links to Carlos Latuff, whom it characterised as ‘the notorious anti-Semitic cartoonist.’ Latuff is notoriously pro-Palestinian, but support for Palestine is a far cry from anti-Semitism. Even the Jewish daily Forward considers it a ‘stretch’ to call his cartoons ‘anti-Semitic’. Far more insidious was the attack on Corbyn for supporting Raed Salah, whom the Chronicle depicted as ‘a man convicted of the blood libel’. This was particularly obnoxious, because Salah had been the subject of a deportation struggle, in which these claims of anti-Semitism were used by the government to support his expulsion from the UK. What the Chronicle failed to mention was that Salah won that court case precisely because these claims were shown to be false and based on mistranslations. The fact that Salah was being slandered by the government is the reason why Corbyn, quite ethically, stood by him. Nonetheless, the Chronicle’s article provided material for reams and reams of similarly insinuating media attacks, such as Dan Hodge’s claim that Corbyn’s victory would be ‘cheered by terrorists and racists; and it served as ammunition for Labour mayoral candidate Sadiq Khan to attack Corbyn in the Daily Mail for ‘encouraging terrorism’. (pp. 35-6).

The Zionists have had very strong links to Blair and New Labour ever since Blair bumped into the future Lord Levy at a gathering at the Israeli embassy in the 1990s. It was Levy, who got Blair funding from Jewish businessmen, funding that allowed him to be independent of the unions, whom he despised. The Blairite coterie have benefited from trips to Israel, paid for by the Israeli state, and have given their wholehearted support to Israel.

This has absolutely nothing to do with real anti-Semitism, about which, as one of those giving their statements yesterday pointed out, the Board of Deputies of British Jews will say nothing if it also serves their purposes. The Board kept their mouths firmly shut when the Mail used dog-whistle tactics to make a series of anti-Semitic smears against Ed Miliband when he was Labour leader. This is all about a Blairite political establishment, which was always a minority, trying to cling on to power, hysterically supported by a Zionist establishment desperate to criminalise support for the Palestinians against Israel’s massacre and deportation of them.

Medialens on the Bias against Jeremy Corbyn

Michelle, one of the many great commenters on this blog, sent me a link to the article, ‘Killing Corbyn’ at Media Lens, which describes the disgusting media bias against Jeremy Corbyn. This includes the fawning coverage of the coup plotters by Laura Kuenssberg at the BBC, and her attempts to sneer at, belittle and disparage Corbyn’s leadership at whatever chance she gets; her statement that Tom Watson was telling Corbyn to resign, which he wasn’t; and then an entirely contrived story that Corbyn had been heckled at a Gay pride event. He had, but the heckler, Tom Mauchline, worker for Portland Communications, a PR firm which worked for the disgusting Liz Kendall, when she was campaigning for the leadership of the party. I think it was Kendall, who said that Labour would be even harder on those on benefits than the Tories. It’s strategic counsel is Alistair Campbell, Blair’s spin doctor and one of the New Labour clique that took us into the carnage of the Iraq invasion.

It goes on to discuss BBC News’ live feed, ‘the Corbyn Crisis and Brexit’, in which the vote to leave the EU is presented somehow as being a product of Corbyn’s leadership, and playing down the contemporary drama in the Tory party. The anti-Corbyn bias is strongly contrasted with the positive portraits of the two possible successors to Cameron, Boris Johnson and Michael Gove. The Beeb isn’t the only section of the media hostile to Corbyn. The supposedly left-wing newspapers, the Guardian and Observer have also run hit pieces.

The nadir was reached with a piece in the Mail on Sunday by Dan Hodges, which was illustrated with a photoshopped image of Corbyn in a coffin under the headline ‘Labour MUST Kill Vampire Jezza’. When challenged, Hodge’s denied that he wrote the headline. He’s right – that’s done by the subeditors, but he didn’t reply when challenged if he actually objected to them.

The article provides further information on how the campaign against Blair in the Labour party is the work of the Blairites, desperate to hang on to their waning power. They’re doing so through Portland Communications, the PR firm, whose clients include a whole host of the usual multinational villains, like Nestle’s and Barclay’s. It’s also being supported by Left Foot Forward Ltd, a company run by Will Straw, the son of Jack Straw, one of the leading members of Blair’s government. Jack Straw also turned up recently as one of the leaders of Cameron’s inquiry into the Freedom of Information Act. He’s a dyed-in-the-wool authoritarian, who was moaning that it was to liberal and too much information was now available to the public. The proles should instead shut up and just be grateful for what their masters deign to tell them. The article concludes that all of this is predictable, as Corbyn is a genuine threat to corporate power and the establishment, and they are doing everything they can to destroy him.

Tory Bloodlust, Corbyn, and the Drone Strike against ‘Jihadi John’

Okay, this is going to be another article commenting on the current situation in the Middle East. I’m sorry about this, if you’re bored with the subject, guys. Please stay with me. This stuff’s important. But I guess you already know that very well already.

Last week it was reported that the Americans had killed Mohamed Emwazee, aka ‘Jihadi John’, in a drone strike. Emwazee was the British ‘executioner’ with a London accent, shown murdering prisoners in ISIS’ propaganda videos. This was a subject of celebration, with David Cameron appearing on TV to praise the Americans for having done a good job well done, and make various comments about British-American co-operation, intelligence-sharing and so forth.

And then the right-wing press over here decided that they were going to attack Corbyn for not being sufficiently militaristic. The good blogger over at Zelo Street has written a very good piece about this at http://zelo-street.blogspot.co.uk/2015/11/jihadi-john-bloodlust-exposed.html. Among the pack baying for Corbyn’s blood was the editor of the Sun, Tom Newton Dunn, Dan Hodges and Toby Young at the Torygraph, Paul Staines of Guido Fawkes and Andrew Neil, known to readers of Private Eye as ‘Brillo Pad’. They attacked Corbyn for saying that it would have been better if Emwazee had been tried in a court of law. This wasn’t enough for the above rightists, despite the fact that Corbyn had prefixed it with a statement that ‘Jihadi John’ had been held to account for his brutal and callous crimes’. Not quite the soft statement the Tories were making it out to be, but still not bloodthirsty enough for them.

The article in Zelo Street makes it clear that capturing ‘Jihadi John’ would have been exactly the right course, given the precedents for it. The Israelis captured and tried Adolf Eichmann, one of the Nazis responsible for the Holocaust. There’s a quote by Eichmann in which he states that he had absolutely no regrets about what he did. I can’t remember the exact wording, but it’s something on the lines that only weaklings regret what they have done. It’s one of those noxious statements that make you think that however the Israelis killed him, whether by firing squad or hanging or whatever, it was too good for the b*stard. The Israelis would have been justified shooting him out of hand. But they didn’t. They put him on trial and had him convicted according to the rule of law. Just as the Europeans and Americans did with Radovan Kardzic, one of the Serb generals responsible for horrendous war crimes in Bosnia. He was captured, and tried at the Hague for his crimes against humanity.

And in fact, there are a number of other, very good reasons why it is better to capture and try individuals like Emwazee, rather than killing them in drone strikes.

Firstly, as a way of gaining hearts and minds, drone strikes are counterproductive. Where they’re being used against Taliban enclaves in Pakistan, they’ve actually managed to increase support for the Islamists. Part of this, supposedly, is that the local people feel it’s a cowardly method of fighting. The drones are remotely operated by someone hundreds or even thousands of miles away from the battle field.

Secondly, as a matter of simple military precision, they aren’t very good. I’ve put up a report about them from The Young Turks, which showed that rather than precisely targeting their victims, they simply home in on their mobile phone signals. The result has been that the wrong people have often been killed, simply because they were holding the intended victim’s phone at the time of the attack. This has included the mother of the Jihadis. Those killed in the strikes have also been bystanders, who may not have had anything to do with the victims except having been standing in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The third argument against them is perhaps the most serious. Many liberal Americans have opposed drone strikes, such as that which killed Anwar Awlaki, on the grounds that are a form of extra-judicial execution. Or assassination, if you prefer. Anwar Awlaki was the Islamist preacher killed in a drone strike in Yemen. He was a deeply unpleasant piece of work, having preached murderous jihad and planned numerous terrorism offences. He was also an American citizens, and many Americans were upset about the way the president – in this case, Obama, had ordered his death without having him caught and tried.

All of this also applies to the drone strike against ‘Jihadi John’ Emwazee. And you don’t have to have any illusions about how brutal and thuggish Emwazee was to be concerned about the manner of his death, and the implications it has for global justice. Zelo Street states that he was scum. He was. Utterly. The man butchered innocents and boasted about it, with no remorse whatsoever. He pretty much got what he deserved, at least if his own low standards were applied to himself. But justice demanded that he be captured and tried.

As for Dunn, Brillo Pad, Young, Staines and the rest of them, don’t expect them to make reasoned, nuanced criticism of Corbyn. They aren’t. They’re frightened, and they’ve decided that the best way to destroy him is to make him out to be a dangerous subversive, who supports the IRA, ISIS and other terrorist organisations. Even if he doesn’t quite say what they want you to believe he said. That the ‘narrative’ they’re using, and they’re going to stick to it, according to Goebbels’ maxim that if you use a lie big enough for long enough, then it becomes the truth.