Desperate Tories Now Reduced to Anti-Semitism Smears Again

Do I scent fear hitting the Tory ranks? Surely not! But the proof is there, as the increasingly desperate Torygraph and the Jewish Chronicle are reviving the old smear that Jeremy Corbyn is an anti-Semite. But they’re simply parroting the claim of James Cleverly, the Tory chairman – and Mike’s absolutely right that his monicker is a misnomer – that Jewish families are going to leave the UK, ’cause they’re afraid of what Corbyn’s going to do if he gets in.

Really? I don’t believe it!, to use Victor Meldrew’s old catchphrase. Has anybody asked the views of Corbyn’s many Jewish supporters? Like, you know, Jewish Voice for Labour? Jewdas, with whom Corbyn spent a Passover seder? Mr Shraga Stern and the Haredi community, who Corbyn gave his support to their campaign to save their historic London cemetery from redevelopment? Or just ordinary, grassroots Jewish Labour voters, like those, who have appeared on YouTube and in print stating clearly that there is anti-Semitism in the Labour party, but they personally haven’t experienced it.

No, clearly not, because this would undermine the narrative the British political establishment want to push: that Jeremy Corbyn is a vicious anti-Semite, and so are his supporters – decent, anti-racist women and men like Jackie Walker, Tony Greenstein, Marc Wadsworth, Ken Livingstone, Mike, Martin Odoni and too many others. The pro-Israel right is pushing this for all it’s worth, because Corbyn isn’t an anti-Semite. But he does want a just peace in Israel with the Palestinians. And that can’t be tolerated. As for the Tories, they’re simply using any smear they can to destroy Labour, while it’s been repeated by the Blairites within the party as a way of ousting him and purging his supporters.

As for the two papers pushing this story, they’re going down the tubes at a rate of knots. The Torygraph has lost much of its readership, partly due to its mercenary editorial policy, which has seen it sacrifice journalistic integrity to the interests of its advertisers. And the Jewish Chronicle is under the helm of Stephen Pollard, who’s as Jewish as I am. Hence writer and academic Michael Rosen, who I think was Children’s Poet Laureate, has accused him of ‘Jewsplaining’. Yes, Pollard’s a non-Jew, who’s taken it upon himself to tell Jews what to believe as Jews. But he’s also a right-wing hack, who when he was with the Depress and similar rags wrote foam-flecked rants demanding the destruction of the welfare state, attacking the trade unions, and claiming that Labour and the Scary Muslims are going to destroy western civilisation.

The Tories have been pushing this line for a long time, ever since around about 9/11, I think. I remember Frederick Raphael giving a glowing review in the Spectator to a novel set a few years hence, in which the remains of the socialist parties in the EU and the Scary Muslims have joined together to begin a new Holocaust. And long before Corbyn won the Labour party leadership, the Right were already leveling accusations of anti-Semitism. Their target was Ed Miliband, who was, er, Jewish. And there was more than a shade of anti-Semitism in their attacks on him. Like the Mail’s article attacking his father, Ralph Miliband, as the ‘Man Who Hated Britain’. Miliband pere was a Belgian immigrant, who fled here from the Nazis. And unlike the father of former editor Paul Dacre, who stayed put in Britain as their society correspondent, Miliband fought for this country in the War. And then there’s the Mail’s own infamous history of supporting Mosley and the British Union of Fascists, and how the father of the newspaper’s current editor, Geordie Grieg, was a member of one of the pro-Nazi British societies before the War.

And the anti-Semitism continues, along with the islamophobia and bog-standard racism. Zelo Street has posted a very good riposte to Sunday’s Andrew Marr Show, where the show’s host interviewed John McDonnell. Of course Marr had to raise the question about what Labour was doing to allay the fears of the Jewish community about anti-Semitism. It’s now part of the standard set of questions the media now ask. But they don’t ask it of the Tories, despite the flagrant examples in the Tory ranks.

For example, how about Jacob Rees-Mogg calling John Bercow and Oliver Letwin ‘illuminati’ in parliament? As I’ve blogged previously, the Illuminati were a freethinking sect, who infiltrated the Freemasons in Bavaria. They are now at the centre of a bonkers conspiracy theory, which sees them as the secret force behind the world’s governments, manipulating politics and industry. Not all varieties of this theory are anti-Semitic. In some, they’re just the global elite, who are seen as Masonic Satanists. But it does merge with the stupid, murderous theories about Jewish bankers. The accusation so alarmed one Jewish academic, that he wrote an article about it revealing the anti-Semitic underpinnings behind the accusation. But it was about the Tories, so the media ignored it. Oh well, at least Mogg didn’t accuse Bercow and Letwin of being members of the Zionist Occupation Government.

Then there’s Priti Patel’s support of the Viktor Orban, the head of the viciously anti-Semitic and islamophobic Fidesz party of Hungary, and her denunciation of the ‘north London liberal elite’. Now she might be referring simply to rich liberals in that part of London. But it also sounds very much like an attack on a certain religious/ethnic group, who stereotypically live in Golders Green.

Gove has also tried to smear Labour again with another accusation of anti-Semitism, following a tweet from an individual, who wasn’t a member of the party. Apart from the fact that Labour can’t suspend people who aren’t members, Gove himself was also criticised by the Jewish Chronicle, amongst others, for opposing an attempt by the European Parliament to censure Orban’s government in Hungary for its anti-Semitism.

And this is all quite apart from the rabid islamophobia and racism of the various twitter and Facebook groups supporting Boris and Jacob Rees-Mogg, and Gove’s equally odious wife, Sarah Vine, declaring that the statement that there should be ‘less Islam in Britain’ was funny.

Going back to the claim that Jewish families are going to leave Britain to escape Corbyn, Mike points out on his blog how this resembles Phil Collins’ statement back in the early ’90s that if Labour won the election, he’d go to America. Well, he didn’t. The Tories won the ’92 election, so he didn’t have to. But he didn’t leave when they won the ’97 election either.

It also reminds me of the curious case of Danny Cohen. Cohen was a senior Beeb executive, who bogged off to Israel claiming that Labour was anti-Semitic and Britain was unsafe for Jews. Not that unsafe, however, as I think he’s come back. So much for the claim that contemporary Britain is like Germany in 1937. It isn’t, not by a very long chalk.

Treat all this as just more scaremongering from the Tories. It’s just more lies, from a desperate and lying party. And one that hopefully will be out of power after the election.

For more information, see: https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2019/11/04/jewish-families-will-leave-this-nonsense-claim-is-the-upshot-of-the-labour-anti-semitism-witch-hunt/

https://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2019/11/michael-gove-more-tory-anti-semitism.html

 

Gordon Dimmack on Frankie Boyle Pushing Anti-Labour Anti-Semitism Smears on New Show

Another week, another pile of steaming BBC propaganda against Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour party. In this video, Gordon Dimmack talks about the first edition of Frankie Boyle’s new show, Frankie Boyle’s New World Order, and in particular it’s very strong bias towards Israel, and against the Labour party. Boyle began the show with a joke about the Israelis shooting Arabs. This was topical, as the show was broadcast the same week as the Gaza massacre. But this was cut. This was the only joke or comment Boyle made about Israel. Instead, Boyle spent a long time talking about the problems of the Labour party under the headline ‘In four years time Labour will lose Britain’s last ever general election’. He then went on to discuss its putative problem with anti-Semitism with David Baddiel.

Dimmack says about the video on its YouTube page:

As the BBC cut his jokes about Israel, Frankie Boyle and David Baddiel have come under fire for discussing anti-Semitism in the Labour party, rather than the Gaza massacre – but is it fair they are under attack? Or is this another case of BBC editing?

I’m afraid I can’t tell you. The video’s just over 34 minutes long, and I only had the heart to watch the first couple of minutes. This just seemed to tell you all you really needed to know: that it was just the Beeb repeating the smears against the Labour party again. If you want to see it, here it is:

I am not surprised that the Beeb cut the joke about the Israelis. I dare say the Corporation would defend, and argue that they had to do it on grounds of taste. However, Peter Oborne in his programme on the Israel lobby for Channel 4’s Despatches noted that of the record many of the BBC newsroom staff said that there was pressure on them from higher management to give a positive bias to stories about Israel. Presumably this pressure came from managers like Danny Cohen, the Beeb’s director of programming, who ran off to Israel a few years ago screaming the Israel lobby’s lies that anti-Semitism was at its highest in Europe since the 1930s, and Jews should move to Israel for their safety. He’s since returned from Britain, so obviously the level of anti-Semitism in this country isn’t like that of Nazi Germany. In fact, it’s nowhere near. Polls show that only 7 per cent of Brits have negative feelings about Jews. Most people either have positive views of them, or simply don’t see them as either bad or good.

And while I’m not complacent about the problem of anti-Semitism and racism in British society, with the exception of grotesque Nazi groups like the banned terrorist organisation, National Action, there aren’t nutters goose-stepping around in uniforms, trying to hold torchlight rallies or swearing their eternal allegiance to Hitler. And those groups that do, like National Action, have minute memberships. As an electoral force, the BNP is effectively defunct, as they announced a few months ago that they wouldn’t be fighting the council elections.

As for anti-Semitism in the Labour party, Mike has pointed out that yes, it does have its anti-Semites. But anti-Semitism is actually lower in it than in the rest of British society and some other, competing parties: like the Tories. But most of the people, who’ve been accused of anti-Semitism were cynically smeared as such, not because they were, but because they opponents of Israel, or at least its seven-decades long policy of persecution and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. Or, like Mike, they defended those, who had been smeared.

I’m not impressed with David Baddiel appearing on the programme either. He is a really funny comedian and comic writer, and very intelligent. He’s got a Ph.D. from Oxford, along with a double first. But if he does really believe that the Labour party has a genuine problem with anti-Semitism, then all I can say is that he’s checked his brains at the door and allowed himself to be deceived by the Israel lobby.

I’ve no doubt that if you complained about the show’s content to the Beeb, you’d just get the standard piece of pompous verbiage telling you that everyone in the Beeb’s news team is trained to be scrupulously impartial. Or they’d tell you that the programme represents the presenter’s personal views; or that the BBC is required to represent a wide variety of viewpoints, and so on.

Whatever they would say to justify it, this is still just more of the Beeb’s right-wing, Conservative, pro-Israel bias against Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party.

RT: Protesters Say Why They’re Against Trump’s Embassy Move to Jerusalem

Trump movement of the American embassy to Jerusalem has caused widespread protests. Palestinians in Gaza have gathered at the enclosing fence to protest. 59 of them have been killed by Israeli soldiers, and something like a further 200 injured.

In this short video from RT, the protesters state exactly why they are against the movement of the embassy. One young man says its because Jerusalem is a contested city, where 35-40 per cent of its occupants – the Palestinian Arabs – are under occupation. A young woman says that Trump is gambling with the lives of both Palestinians and Israelis, which he has no right to do. The journo then asks Ahmed Tibi, an Israeli parliamentarian, what he thinks. Tibi responds by stating that it is a licensed demonstration, but immediately it began they were attacked, he was attacked, because of the Palestinians, and they were pushed back. He states Jerusalem is occupied territory. It should be the capital of the state of Palestine. The video then shows someone pushing Tibi back, while a woman states that they have tried to arrest the head of the Palestinians in Israel. She goes on to say that they will not allow this, and goes on to insist on their right to protest.

Mike has written a superb piece about the shooting of Palestinian protesters by the Israelis, and the shameful attempts to excuse the Israeli state by the Board of Deputies of British Jews and Labour Friends of Israel. He calls out the Beeb for remaining silent and not condemning this atrocity. And he puts up Tweets from ordinary people, including those whom the Board would probably describe as ‘the wrong type of Jews’, who have condemned the Israeli armed forces. He also shows footage of Israelis also protesting the move and the IDF shooting of Palestinian protesters.

Mike explains, despite the probability that the Israel lobby and the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism will find this yet another reason to smear him, why Gaza can fairly be compared to a concentration camp. He talks about the Nakba, the Palestinian term for their persecution, massacre and ethnic cleansing when Israel was set up, and that the Israeli state is engaged in a campaign of genocide against them. And he cites and shows various Israeli politicians, who have not minced words and talked about the killing of Palestinians in very bloody terms. One of these is a female politico, who talks about not only killing terrorists and demolishing their homes, but also about killing their entire families. This has sparked condemnation from the people Mike follows on Twitter, which include not only Muslims like Aleesha and Nadim Ahmed, but also Jeremy Corbyn, Craig Murray, who compares the shooting of Palestinians by Israeli soldiers to the Yemeni kids killed by British bombs, as well as Tom London, Shlomo, David Clarke and the comic actor, David Schneider. A number of Labour and SNP MPs also stood outside Parliament in support of the Palestinians, though this is a mere handful compared to the larger number, who kept their mouths firmly shut.

The Board of Deputies of British Jews and Labour Friends of Israel both issued statements blaming Hamas for putting the people of Gaza and the Palestinians up to protesting, thus causing them to get shot. These are nasty, weasel words. Others, including Tony Greenstein, long ago despatched that nasty excuse for Israeli atrocities. Palestinian society is split between a number of political factions. Hamas doesn’t have the absolute totalitarian control to move 40,000 people to the fence enclosing Gaza. What is driving the Palestinians is the simple fact that this is another assault on them, their national identity and their right to their ancestral homes. The Board and LFI also took those statements down when they found they weren’t convincing anyone, but people have taken screenshots of them.

And those trying to defend Israel have also brought back the old excuse that ‘Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East’. There are two answers to this. The first is that it isn’t. Lebanon is also a democracy. It’s different from Israeli and Western democracy, in that the various sects and religions are also guaranteed particular places in their parliament, according to the size of their population in a system known as consociality, but it’s still a democracy. The other argument is that it may be democracy for the Israelis, but it isn’t for the Palestinians. Yes, there are Arab members of the Knesset, and an Arab party is represented, but the Palestinians themselves live under an oppressive system of apartheid. And it shouldn’t matter whether a country is a democracy or not, atrocities are atrocities and the state or government which commits them is just as guilty as any other.

Mike makes it also clear that he feels the reason why no-one in the media is condemning these atrocities, or worse, they’re actually giving their support, is because they’re afraid of being libelled as anti-Semites. He states that these cowed journos shame us all. Mike’s a journalist, who prizes fairness and integrity, for which he was greatly respected by the people in local government when he was a local hack.

And he’s right about this. Norman Finkelstein has said in one of his videos that the Israel lobby has been smearing the country’s critics as anti-Semites since the 1980s. In fact he called them ‘a machine for creating anti-Semites’. And years ago, when the Israeli state started bombarding Palestine, a book came out entitled The Political Uses of Anti-Semitism. It was a volume of essays highly critical of Israel, half of which were authored by Jews. I also remember that one of the people, who spoke out against that was the thesp Miriam Margolies, who said she spoke as ‘a proud Jew, and an ashamed Jew’.

Shlomo, one of peeps on Twitter Mike has reblogged, urges everyone not to believe that Jews are somehow enemies within, who support Netanyahu 100 per cent, and that Jews are as British as anyone else. Shlomo isn’t the only Jewish Brit, who feared that Israel and its actions would result in British Jews being suspected as dangerous foreigners in their own country. Samuel Montague, in his famous memorandum, objected to Balfour’s decision to back the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine for precisely this reason.

As for Jerusalem, the UN resolution that recognised Israel stated that it should be a free city. As al-Quds, it’s the third holiest city in Islam, and so its occupation by the Israelis was bound to be bitterly resented. More than that, the Israeli paper Haaretz published an article a years or so ago reporting that hostility by the Israeli inhabitants against Arab residents was increasing along with calls for them to be expelled. The reporter was appalled at this, and called for a little more tolerance.

Mike’s statement that the Israeli state’s campaign of persecution against the Palestinians is genocide may well draw the ire of people like the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, but he isn’t alone in describing it as such. One of those, who includes the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians with other forms of genocide is the Israeli professor at Hebrew university in Jerusalem, who wrote a whole book entitled Genocide. This includes the Holocaust, naturally, though the Israel lobby hate anybody comparing the two. I’ve got a copy of the book on my shelf.

As for the Beeb’s silence, Lobster years ago commented that the corporation ties itself in knots trying to convince itself and others that it’s biased reporting is, in fact, impartial. Peter Oborne, in his Despatches investigation into the Israel lobby stated that off the record, many of the journalists and researchers in the Beeb’s news team complained that there was considerable pressure from management not to criticise Israel. This brings to mind the case of Danny Cohen, a very senior member of BBC management, who shot off to Israel a few years ago complaining of rising levels of anti-Semitism in Europe. Jews weren’t safe, and so should move to Israel. Which is the standard line of the Israel lobby. He’s since come back to Britain, which indicates that anti-Semitism can’t be that rife in Britain.

And then there are the geopolitical reasons, which might influence the Beeb’s culpable silence. Comparisons were made between the creation of Israel and the establishment of Northern Ireland by the Ulster Protestants, and it was suggested at the time that the British government was trying to create a little Jewish enclave amongst the Arabs in the same way that one of Ulster’s cities was a little Protestant enclave amongst the Roman Catholics. Which implies that behind this lies more British imperialism. Especially as Britain’s foreign policy in the region relies on two allies, the Israelis and the Saudis. The Beeb’s the state broadcaster, and it seems to me that it’s reporting reflects long term establishment views. And so they’re not going to be critical of the Israelis, in order to avoid alienating a valuable ally in the region.

And so, despite the horror of ordinary Brits and people across the world, the mainstream media remains silent about these atrocities.

For Mike’s brilliant analysis of the media’s silence and what’s happening, go to his post at https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2018/05/15/heres-why-people-are-afraid-to-denounce-the-genocidal-brutality-of-the-israeli-regime/

Corbyn Falsely Smeared Again as Anti-Semite by Campaign Against Anti-Semitism

Another week, another anti-Semitism smear. This time they’re attacking Jeremy Corbyn himself. Last Saturday was Holocaust Remembrance Day, and the Labour leader wrote his own, personal message in the Holocaust Book of Remembrance. He was then accused of anti-Semitism by the former BBC director of television, Danny Cohen, and his friends at the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, who demanded that the Labour leader apologise. Corbyn was an anti-Semite, the claimed, because his message did not specifically mention Jews.

Oops! It turns out that Corbyn did mention Jews. And the messages of the leaders of the other parties didn’t mention them, or not explicitly. Theresa May’s messages didn’t, neither did Vince Cable’s, the leader of the Lib Dems. Nor did Rabbi Mirvis, the Chief Rabbi, explicitly mention Jews either in his message. The Campaign Against Anti-Semitism was duly caught out, and torn to shreds by people disgusted at their lies and hypocrisy on Twitter. Three days later, on Monday, they issued a grudging non-apology for their mistake, still maintaining that there was a problem with anti-Semitism in the Labour party.

As I’ve blogged about many times previously, the anti-Semitism smears against Corbyn, Momentum and a large number of ordinary members of the Labour party, including Mike himself, are politically motivated. The Blairites in the Labour party were very closely linked to the Israel Lobby. Both these groups hope to hold on to power by smearing Corbyn and his supporters as anti-Semites, even though the allegations are nothing but a pack of lies. Lobster issue 74 has a couple of pieces on the anti-Semitism smears, including one by the former Labour MP, Colin Challen. Challen states very clearly that there isn’t a problem with anti-Semitism in the Labour party. Or if there is, it’s no bigger than the amount of anti-Semitism found anywhere else. Various Jewish members of the Labour party have also written pieces making it clear that, in their experience, there is no anti-Semitism in the party, and that they have personally never encountered anti-Semitic abuse or attitudes from its members.

A little while ago I received a comment from a reader, who took issue with one of my pieces about the antics of the Zionists and the Israel lobby. He complained that by talking about ‘Zionists’, rather than specifically attacking Benjamin Netanyahu and the other, racial nationalist members of his coalition, I was handing the people making these smears a loaded gun. He pointed out that Corbyn was a supporter of Israel, and had appeared and spoken to a number of pro-Israel groups.

I’ve no doubt that he’s correct. I used the term ‘Zionists’ to describe the Israel lobby, because the very founders of Israel planned on the ethnic cleansing and deportation of the Palestinians. The brutality and atrocities committed by Netanyahu, Likud and their allies are merely the latest phase of a long campaign of oppression and persecution that goes right back to the nation’s very foundation. But the commenter is right that the critics of Israel and its barbarity don’t support its destruction. There’s an interview with Norman Finkelstein, a very prominent Jewish American historian, and critic of Israel, who makes that very clear.

There is instead a debate within the critics of Israel how to combat Israel’s ethnic cleansing and give freedom and dignity to the indigenous Arabs. The most popular, at least until a few years ago, was the ‘two state’ solution, in which the Palestinians were to be given their own state. Many of Israel’s critics believe that this should be achieved by Israel withdrawing to its pre-1967 boundaries. This is a move that the Israelis themselves reject, claiming that it would strategically weaken Israel and leave the country open to attack.

The other suggested solution is that the nature of the Israeli state has to change, so that the Arabs are also granted full Israeli citizenship. This would be unacceptable to most Zionists, as Israel was set up to be the Jewish state. Only Jews are allowed to immigrate to Israel and settle as citizens under the Law of Return. Altering the law so that the indigenous Arabs are also Israeli citizens, with all the rights and privileges currently enjoyed by Israelis, would change the formal ethnic basis of the Israeli state and society.

Corbyn is a threat to the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism and its mouthpieces, like Danny Cohen, not because he’s an opponent of Israel, but because he’s a supporter of the Palestinians. And so they’ve decided to smear him, and anyone who dares support him or criticise Israel.

As for Danny Cohen, I see absolutely no reason why any decent, reasonable person should take anything he says in this respect remotely seriously. Cohen was the director of television at the Beeb until a few years ago, when he went off to Israel. He claimed that Europe was no longer safe for Jews, and that there was a resurgence of anti-Semitism comparable to that of the 1930s in Germany, and advised other Jews to follow his example and move there. It’s the standard line retailed by the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism and the other groups in the Israel lobby, and it’s pure twaddle. The stats actually show that 70 per cent + of all Brits have a positive or neutral attitude towards Jews. Only five per cent of the British public have negative views of Jewish people.

The same is true of France. The Financial Times way back in the first years of this century published an article stating that only five per cent of French people considered that Jews weren’t really French. The numbers, who consider that Muslims aren’t really French is much higher at something like 15 per cent.

And Tony Greenstein, a Jewish critic of Zionism, as well as a firm opponent of all forms of racism and Fascism, has pointed out that in Britain, there is much more racism against Blacks, Asians and Muslims. But the racism experienced by these groups isn’t treated as quite so serious and outrageous as anti-Semitism. This is so, even though some Black and African historians have argued that Africa also experienced its own Holocaust through the depredations of the slave trade. During the roughly three centuries the trade was in existence, about 12 million or so people were carried off from the Continent into bondage in the New World. It’s been estimated that a similar number of Africans were also killed by the slavers during their raids. The 19th century abolitionists themselves gave very graphic accounts of whole regions, that had been depopulated thanks to slave raiding.

I also wondered if these latest smears against Corbyn were also a diversion, to take attention away from another incident that’s embarrassed the Israelis. This is the case of Ahed Tamami, a 16 year-old Palestinian girl, who was arrested for slapping a Jewish soldier. Well, he and a few other goons had burst into the girl’s house. I think they also shot another member of her family, though I can’t remember whether it was a father, brother or other relative. But for that act of terrible disrespect, the girl has been arrested and tried for his crimes against the Israeli military. There’s been a public outcry about it, and the other child prisoners the Israelis drag through their military courts. Israel’s one of the very few nations to do this, and try children as adults. But only if they’re Palestinians. Faced with this awkward and shameful incident, it wouldn’t surprise me if someone in the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism decided that the best form of defence was attack, and so decided to smear Corbyn once again. And especially now that Tweezer is very weak politically, with various challenges to her leadership coming from within her party.

I’m not complacent about the threat of anti-Semitism. It is present in Britain, and has come to the fore once again in the various Nazi sects, like National Action, now banned. Eastern Europe has seen the emergence of a number of ultra-nationalist, anti-Semitic and Islamophobic parties. The Alt-Right is gaining power in the US through its connection to Trump, while in Germany the last elections saw the Nazi Alternative Fuer Deutschland enter the Bundestag for the first time. This is a party that includes real Nazis among its members. Various leading members have made speeches denouncing Germany’s Holocaust Memorial as a badge of shame, and vowed to build an underground railway to Auschwitz.

These are real threats to European Jews, along with other ethnic minorities, and ordinary, decent people, who don’t want their countries transformed into Fascist dictatorships. But its seems that these threats don’t concern Cohen and the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism quite so much as smearing decent people simply for the crime of sticking up for the Palestinians and exposing Israeli atrocities against them.

Zionist Fearmongering and Israel’s Demographic Crisis

Tuesday evening I got the news from Mike, of Vox Political, that he’d been libelled as an anti-Semite by the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, who wish to have him deselected as his local Labour candidate in the Powys council elections. As I blogged yesterday, Mike is actually one of the least prejudiced people I know. As his record shows, he is not remotely anti-Semitic, or prejudiced against anyone else based on their skin colour, religion or sexual preference. When he was at College, he was asked by one of his Jewish friends to be a reader in her commemoration of the victims of the Holocaust. Mike was one of those reading out some of the names of the millions butchered by the Nazis. He was very proud of the fact that the girl was deeply moved by his performance.

Mike’s real crime is to oppose the attempts of the Israel lobby and the Blairites within the Labour party to silence Israel’s critics by smearing them as anti-Semites. It’s standard practise for the Zionist lobby in general. Decent people, who stand together with the Palestinians against their brutalisation, massacre and expulsion, are libelled as racists. The victims includes not only anti-racist gentiles, but also proud Jews, from the secular to the Torah-observant. Indeed, many of the Jewish victims of these smears believe that the Zionist lobby especially singles out Jews for particular vilification. Those so maligned by the Zionists also include Israelis, like Dr Ilan Pappe, who was forced out of his homeland because of his determination to present and publish the truth about Israel’s crimes against humanity. But Dr Pappe is no self-hating Jew, and has defended his people, the Israelis. In one video I put up a few months ago, he spoke about how Israelis were decent people, who just need the facts of their country’s terrorisation of the country’s indigenous people explained to them. Before he was forced out, he was very proud at opening his home, every Thursday evening, to his fellow Israelis so he could do just that. He states that these evenings were very well attended by decent, but confused Israelis, seeking the truth.

While I am certainly not complacent about the threat of anti-Semitism and other forms of racism in the West, I am very sceptical of some of the grosser claims about it made by apologists for the Israeli regime. These are a gross distortion of what is really happening and are made, not to protect British or European Jews, but to provide further colonists for Israel.

Over the past decade and a half, various individuals have come forward claiming that the situation facing Jews in Europe today is exactly like that which faced their parents and grandparents in the 1930s. This often reaches extremely grotesque and hysterical anticipations of a renewed Holocaust in the very near future. Round about 2004 the Conservative magazine the Spectator, published a review of an American book set in France in the next decade or the 2030s. The remnants of the Socialist parties in the European parliament had joined forces with the burgeoning Islamic parties to begin the process of exterminating the Jews. This farrago was given a glowing review, if memory serves me correctly, by Frederick Raphael, then back in the media eye after his work on the script for Stanley Kubrick’s last film, Eyes Wide Shut. This was part of a standard narrative being sold to the European and American public by the Zionist right after 9/11. There were various books published in America, which claimed that the response of the Left after 9/11 and their attempts to defend innocent Muslims against victimisation, showed that liberals in America and Socialists in Europe where inherently anti-Semitic.

Many of those making these libels offered a simple solution for European Jews: they should emigrate to Israel. This was made by a rabbi in the south of France following attacks on Jews in his country a few years ago. One of the top level bureaucrats at the BBC, Danny Cohen, resigned and emigrated to Israel a few years ago, making the same claims.

As a Brit and a European, I don’t recognise these portrayals of my continent and my country, although I do realise that there is a terrible culture of anti-Semitism in eastern Europe. These claims aren’t made to combat genuine anti-Semitism. They’re made to encourage Jews to move to Israel, because of the profound demographic crisis the country is facing. That crisis is explained in the chapter on modern Israel in the history textbook, The Modern Middle East, edited by Albert Hourani.

In the 1990s there was a poll of Jewish young people, which asked them where they would rather live. Would they rather live in America, where their neighbours were Christians, who loved them, or Israel, where their neighbours were Muslims, who hated them? I’ve forgotten the exact figure, but about 75 per cent of the youngsters, who responded said ‘America’.

The country’s leaders are also faced with a demographic crisis caused by Arab immigration, lower Israeli fertility and pressure from the Likud party’s coalition partners, who want to colonise the West Bank. Jewish Israelis are less fertile, in the strict demographic sense of having fewer children, than Arabs. As a result, many Israelis fear that they will be outbred by the Arabs, thus undermining Israel’s character as the Jewish state. Moreover, diaspora Jews are becoming increasingly assimilated into the general population. On May 21, 1986, The New York Times carried this snippet under the headline ‘Concern in Israel over Immigration’.

… Prof. Robert Bacchi, head of the Hebrew University statistics department, told the Cabinet that today’s 9.5 million Jews living outside of Israel would shrink to about 8 million by the year 2000 if current demographic trends in assimilation, intermarriage and low birth rates continues.

Prime Minister Shimon Pere said the answer is that every Jewish family in Israel should have four children. On Sunday the Cabinet approved in principle the allocation of as much as $20 million to help 6,000 infertile Israeli couples have children.

Quoted in Adam Parfrey, ‘Eugenics: The Orphaned Science’, in Adam Parfrey, ed. Apocalypse Culture, expanded and revised edition (Feral House 1990) 227-8.

The Israeli state relies on Arab labour in many sectors of the economy, to perform menial or other low-waged work that Jewish Israelis do not with to perform, like fruit picking. In some areas, such as the Negev, the Jewish population is extremely thinly spread. But Likud’s coalition partners are keen to expand Jewish colonisation of the Occupied Palestinian territories on the West Bank, as part of their programme to create a greater Eretz Israel matching the boundaries of ancient Israel. However, to do so with Israel’s present population would mean withdrawing Jews from areas like the Negev to colonise these areas. As a result, they would become wholly, or almost wholly, Arab.

It seems very clear to me that Likud and their ethno-nationalist partners are trying to solve this problem by encouraging Jewish emigration by the diaspora in which fearmongering and anti-Semitic slurs are a major instrument. Israel’s critics are vilified and the all-too real threat of rising anti-Semitism grotesquely exaggerated and misrepresented, in order to make European and British fear and distrust their gentile compatriots, in the hope that they will move to Israel to bolster that country’s declining share of the population.

It’s a vile policy, that goes back to the 1930s. A little while ago I posted a piece about how some of the Zionist leaders made it quite clear that they were happy for the Nazis to butcher Jewish Europeans, if that encourage the survivors to move to Israel. They really hated those patriotic Jewish organisations, like the League of Jewish Servicemen, the Bund Judischer Frontsoldaten, in Germany, who fought for Jews to continue to live in peace in their historic European homelands.

Fears of a similar holocaust are being played up by the Zionists for exactly the same reasons today. It’s a vile, racist policy designed to make European Jews feel insecure and suspicious of wider, gentile society, in order to provide more colonists for what is a European settler state. Right up to the point of smearing and vilifying Jews and Israelis, who object to this policy, as anti-Semites themselves.

Hence the lies and smears, of which Mike, Ken Livingstone, Jackie Walker and so many, many others, have been victims. We need to stand together, Jews and gentiles alike, against these lies and attempts to divide us. Just as we need to stand together against the genuine anti-Semites now crawling out of the woodwork, the Islamophobes, and those who would stir up hatred against Blacks, Asians, gays or whoever.

Danny Cohen, the BBC, and the Anti-Semitism Allegations

Mike has put up several pieces on the anti-Semitism allegations. In one of them, he particularly criticised Newsnight for its spurious debate about them. On it, Evan Davies, who has also written a book detailing his neo-liberal, right-wing views, interviewed a number of people about the allegations. All of them believed that the allegations were correct. Not one of the challenged the idea that Labour was anti-Semitic.

One of the people on the panel was Danny Cohen. Now, if this is the same person I’m talking about, then it’s highly questionable whether he should have been on the programme at all, as he is hardly an unbiased, independent speaker. There was a Danny Cohen, who was formerly one of the leading managers – he may have been one of the controllers – of the BBC, before resigning and going to Israel. He also issued a statement that Britain and Europe were unsafe for Jews, and that they should also move to Israel. If that Danny Cohen, was the same Danny Cohen as the man who appeared on Davies’ programme, then he already has very strong biases, of which the viewer should be informed and which deserved to be questioned themselves.

Cohen was not alone in making these claims about the security of the Jews in Europe. They’ve been running since 2004 or so. I can remember reading a book review in the Spectator, about a novel by an American author set in the future, in which the remains of European Socialism join with the Islamists in the European parliament to bring about a new holocaust of European Jewry. If memory serves me right, Frederick Raphael was somehow involved with this, though I can’t remember whether he wrote it or just reviewed it approvingly. This is, of course, a gross smear, and comes very much from the Republican Neo-Con Right. Extreme right-wing Republicans like the very swivel-eyed Glenn Beck really do believe that Socialism is the same as Nazism, ’cause, er, the Nazis said they were. They then go on about how if Socialists like Bernie Sanders get into power, they’re going to take away America’s freedom. Beck himself has burst into tears several times on his show, wailing that they’re about to take him away. You can see the same nuttiness with Alex Jones on his Infowars programme. It’s on Youtube, so if you want to see how deranged part of the American political landscape is, you can have a look at it. There’s even a segment where he rants about Obamacare in a Reptile mask. Because Obama is part of the Reptoid alien Illuminati elite. Or something.

There have indeed been increased attacks in Jews. However, the majority of racially motivated attacks since 9/11 have been against Muslims, which disproves the allegation that Jews are more at threat in Europe than other groups. A Palestinian writer in the weekend Financial Times a decade or more ago said that in France, where the French authorities were cracking down on anti-Muslim violence more severely than anti-Semitic crime, it was not because the French state or people hated the Jews. Quite the opposite. In polls, the number of French people, who said that Jews weren’t really French, was very low: about 5%. The numbers who responded that Muslims weren’t really French was much higher, and anti-Arab sentiment in some parts of France was very marked. Yasmin Alibhai-Browne wrote a piece in the Independent several years ago describing her family’s experience of being shunned, ignored and very badly treated during a holiday in France, because she and her children were obviously Asian, despite their father being White. In fairness, she also wrote another piece several years later, saying what a wonderful time she’d had in France and how so much had changed.

In fact, the Zionist lobby has very definite demographic reasons for trying to make Jews feel unwanted and unsafe in Europe, and encouraging them to move to Israel. There’s a controversy there about the relatively higher fertility of the Arab population. Generally, Arab families have more children than Jewish Israelis, and so there’s a fear amongst some Israelis that they will soon be outbred. It’s very similar to the idea of ‘Eurabia’ in the Euro-American anti-Muslim right. In this view, Europe is under siege from Islam. Europeans have much smaller families than Muslims, and so in a few generations the Muslims will have outbred the rest of us, and we will be a minority in our own countries. It’s actually a load of rubbish, but it does have terrible emotive power.

There are other ways in which Israel is being placed in a difficult position through demographic change. The Zionist right, such as Likud, and in particular the ultra-Orthodox Haredis, wish to colonise the occupied West Bank as part of their programme, as they see it, to redeem all of Eretz Israel, the Land of Israel. They have bitterly attacked those Israelis, who have dared to suggest that it would be much better to withdraw. But this, however, means withdrawing some parts of the Israeli population from certain areas, such as the Negev, which already have a very high Arab population, mostly Bedouin. In the chapter on contemporary Israel in the book The Modern Middle East, edited by Albert Hourani, it states that there is a real possibility that if Israel continues encouraging Jewish settlement in the occupied territories, the resulting loss of population from the Negev and other areas will leave them with majority Arab populations.

This is obviously the very last thing Benjamin Netanyahu and the Zionist right want. A few years ago Netanyahu was asked whether his government would ever give the right of return to the Palestinian families who fled their homes in Israel in 1947 following the Israeli uprising and war with the Arabs. Netanyahu stated very firmly that he would not, because it would upset the fundamental ethnic character of Israel as the Jewish state.

It therefore seems very clear to me that Cohen’s comment about the rise in hostility to Jews in Europe and his recommendation that they emigrate to Israel, has little to do with the real situation, and everything to do with the need of the Israeli state to find more colonists to bolster their population against the Arabs. Cohen’s appearance with Evan Davies on Newsnight suggests that these manufactured allegations of anti-Semitism against the Labour Party and its leader, are part of this hard-Right Zionist agenda.