Simon Maginn is, I believe, a Jewish Labour member of the type Starmer, the Blairites and the Israel lobby despise. He’s put up a series of videos critically refuting the anti-Semitism smears in the Labour party, each one dealing with a separate part of it. In this video he attacks a story retailed by former comedian David Baddiel in his book, Jews Come Last, that going around one Labour conference was a pamphlet about the Holocaust that mentioned all the other groups target by the Nazis except the Jews. The central theme of his book is that crimes and offences against Jews are taken less seriously than those against other books. Baddiel was also one of the media figures telling the world and anyone who would listen that Jeremy Corbyn was terribly anti-Semitic and so was the Labour party. I don’t know whether the man Julie Burchill once described as looking like his fellow comedian’s, Rob Newman’s, afterbirth, is just naive and gullible, and has simply swallowed everything the British media said about Corbyn and the Labour party, or whether he is actively malign.
As Simon shows, there is zero substance to this story, making it impossible to check. The leaflet has never been produced, and there are no accompanying details about it. Baddiel doesn’t mention what conference it was at, or where, who produced it. There was a pamphlet produced by the Socialist Workers in 2008 in Leicester that didn’t mention the Jews. This seems to have been a genuine oversight and the result of bad editing by the writers, rather than actual anti-Semitism. But it was not by the Labour party and was long before Jeremy Corbyn became its head. Simon therefore considers this allegation refuted.
As for crimes against other groups given priority over Jews, one of the allegations at the beginning of this century made against the French authorities was that they treated Islamophobic crimes more seriously than anti-Semitic offences. But this was because there was greater prejudice against Muslims than Jews. If I remember correctly, only 5 per cent of the French population considered that Jews weren’t real Frenchmen compared to 30 per cent plus for Muslims. Jews were given less priority not because of anti-Semitism, but because of its absence. If something like this is happening in Britain, my guess is that it’s for the same reasons. Tony Greenstein has cited statistics several times which show, contra the allegations of the Community Service Trust and the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, that the majority of severely normal Brits either have positive views of Jews, or consider them no better or worse than anyone else. And even without the smear campaign, my own impression is that people take allegations of anti-Semitism and Nazism extremely seriously.
Yes, I know that according to the I.H.R.A. definition of anti-Semitism, it may be anti-Semitic to compare Jews to Nazis. In the normal run of things, I’d be inclined to agree. But the term ‘Judaeonazi’ was coined by an Israeli chemist and philosopher to describe that type of militant Israeli nationalism and its attendant horror perpetrated on the Palestinians, which are exactly comparable to gentile Nazism and Fascism. Tony Greenstein has argued the case that Israel’s persecution of the Palestinians isn’t like the Holocaust, but it has very strong similarities to the Nazis’ persecution of the Jews before 1942. This was the period when Jews were rapidly stripped of their rights as Germans, had their property despoiled, were thrown out of their jobs, especially in academia and the professions. They could not hire ‘Aryan’ servants, and without any means to support themselves, were left to starve to death. Those who could emigrated. Others mistakenly stayed in Germany and Austria believing that Hitler and his scumbags were only a passing phase. And then there was the beatings and the sadistic humiliations, like being forced to push marbles along the gutter with their noses. It’s horror like this that give the lie to the claims made a few years ago by certain ‘slebs that Britain with Corbyn as head of the Labour party was somehow like the Nazi dominated central Europe of 1938. It was nowhere close, and the very claim is a grotesque smear.
Mike put up a piece today reporting and commenting on a speech Keef Stalin gave to Labour Friends of Israel. One of the other speakers apparently was the grotesque monster Tzipi Hotovely. She’s the Israeli ambassador who was given a very cold welcome by the students at LSE nearly a week ago. They were so vehement in their opposition to her presence that she ended up fleeing with her security guards and the rozzers. Patel and Nandi got on their hind legs to condemn it as intolerance, but the protest wasn’t nearly as intolerant as Hotovely herself. This is a woman who believes that Israel should occupy all of Palestine, that the Nakba, the ethnic cleansing of the country that occurred at the foundation of the Jewish state in 1948, is a ‘Palestinian lie’ and that Arab villages should be razed and Jewish settlements built instead. And her British supporters are as bad. At one Zionist demonstration at which she spoke, the crowd chanted about burning down Arab villages and in support of Kach. Kach is a terrorist organisation founded on the teaching of far right Israeli activist Meir Kahane. I’ve got a feeling Kahane was involved in the Gush Emunim attempt to bomb the Dome of the Rock mosque in Jerusalem in order to bring about a war between Islam and Israel and the return of the Messiah. Dangerous, dangerous fanatical nutters.
So what did Keef Stalin have to say for himself? Well, apparently he condemned ‘anti-Zionist anti-Semitism’. Well, the Zionist right loves to conflate the two, but they’re really separate. Zionism is an ideology, not a people or religion. It first appeared among European Christians, who wanted the Jews to relocate to the Promised Land in accordance with Biblical prophecy in order to bring about Christ’s return. It was also supported by genuine anti-Semites like Richard Wagner as a way of cleansing Europe of them. The vast majority of Jews up until World War II and its horrors wished to stay in Europe and be accepted as fellow citizens by their gentile fellows. The British Jewish establishment actually condemned the Balfour Declaration in favour of the foundation of a Jewish state in Palestine. They did so because they were afraid it would lead to gentile Brits regarding them as foreigners rather than loyal, patriotic Englishmen who happened to be Jewish. In fact Zionism was linked in many people’s minds as a form of anti-Semitism. When Herzl tried seeking the support of a German aristocrat for his Zionist programme in the 1920, the man told him he didn’t want to be involved. Far from being an anti-Semite, he was a friend of the Jews and feared that if he supported Zionism, he would be thought a Jew-hater. I admit that real anti-Semites have also been hostile to Israel – some Nazis certainly were so after the War. But Israel’s left-wing critics aren’t anti-Semitic. They include many Jews and the main, pro-Palestinian organisations, like the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign, does not accept anti-Semites. Thus when Gilad Atzmon, a genuine self-hating Israeli, tried to get into one of their events he was very definitely shown the door.
Starmer also claimed that he wanted ‘every Jew to count’. So would an awful lot of Jews in the Labour party. Starmer’s and the Blairite’s vile witch hunt against critics of Israel is overwhelmingly directed against Jews. They’re five times more likely than gentiles to be accused of anti-Semitism. I’ve said over and again that these are decent, self-respecting people, who have very often lost relatives in the Holocaust and been victims of real anti-Semitic abuse and assault themselves. It also includes many gentiles, who also haven’t an anti-Semitic bone in their body and who have been very active fighting anti-Semitism and racism. Like the Black anti-racist activist smeared as an anti-Semite by Ruth Smeeth, Marc Wadsworth. These people are being silenced and horribly smeared, because they’re the wrong kind of Jews. The Board of Deputies, as one of the peeps on Twitter Mike quotes, aren’t remotely interested in defending them. Well, of course not. The Board of Deputies has been one of the organisations leading the witch hunt against critics of Israel. And the Board doesn’t represent anyone in the Jewish community except the United Synagogue. It’s a sectarian organisation that somehow claims to represent British Jewry in all its diversity, and woe to anyone who points out that Jews aren’t, and never were, a monolithic group.
Starmer goes further and talks about how he was given a ‘brilliant book’ on how Jewish racism is held to a higher standard by former comedian David Baddiel. Baddiel’s extremely intelligent and hilariously funny. I saw him at the Cheltenham Festival of Literature reading from his latest novel, Time For Bed. He had the crowd in stitches. Unfortunately, he’s another intellectual whose chosen to check his brains in over his own Zionist prejudices. Years ago he popped his head up claiming that Corbyn was anti-Semitic. Now he’s repeating the old lie that criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic because other nations aren’t held to the same standards. Cobblers. Jackie Walker has said that she became a critic of Israel through her anti-apartheid activism. She was an opponent of apartheid South Africa, as you might expect from a woman of colour, whose mother was a Civil Rights activist from Georgia, USA. She turned against Israel after a friend asked her how she could oppose South Africa but not apartheid in Israel. Good question, especially as apartheid South Africa was an ally of Israel in the 1970s.And speaking for myself, I have always opposed the Chinese occupation of Tibet. Years ago, when I was at College, I went to a performance of traditional Tibetan Buddhist music hosted by the college because I wanted to support the Tibetans’ attempts to keep their culture alive against enforced Chinese acculturation. I also don’t have any time for Turkey’s and Iran’s persecution of the Kurds nor the current Chinese regime’s genocidal persecution of the Uighurs of Sinkiang. And nor, I am sure, do any of the people criticising Israel. Tony Greenstein is a very proud anti-Fascist. He’s written a book on The Struggle Against Fascism on the South Coast and is very proud of the way the good peeps of Brighton and Hove, Jews and gentiles, stuck it to Oswald Mosley when he tried campaigning there. He opposes Zionism because it is a Jewish version of Fascism, which has internalised the anti-Semitic lie that Jews and gentiles are completely separate and never the twain can meet. The same noxious attitude behind the Nazis’ Nuremberg Laws.
And David Baddiel is hardly innocent of racism himself. Back in the ’90s he used to poke fun at a Black football player who had a rather exotic hairstyle by turning up on his and Rob Newman’s comedy programme in blackface as the character Mr. Pineapple Head. Tony’s got pictures of it up on his site somewhere. He points out that Baddield would be prosecuted for this in California, where it is illegal to mock ethnic hairstyles. I think people with daft hairstyles are fair comic material, whatever their race, but he has a point.
Which brings us on to Starmer’s attitude to Blacks and Asians. While he’s loud in condemning ‘anti-Zionist anti-Semitism’ – which he seems to believe is the only real kind of anti-Semitism – he is completely indifferent to the rather more severe racism suffered by people of colour. Now the level of deprivation and marginalisation varies with religion and ethnic group. Chinese do better academically and in employment that White Brits. Indians are about the same, or just below. But Blacks and Muslims are very definitely at the bottom of the heap. I’ve made it very clear that I have absolutely no time whatsoever for Black Lives Matter and Critical Race Theory, which I believe are distorting history to present a grotesquely anti-White ideology, as racist as the anti-Black racism they oppose. But BLM has at its root a genuine problem with Black poverty and deprivation, problems that do need to be tackled. Starmer is indifferent to this, however. He very desultorily took the knee, described it ‘as a moment’ and showed an opportunistic attitude to it. He is also indifferent to the bullying suffered by Black and Asian MPs and activists, like Diane Abbott. A third of our Muslim brothers and sisters in the party have reported islamophobic incidents, but Starmer is ignoring them. Possibly because the bullies responsible are his supporters.
He also seems to want to purge them. Last week Mike put up a piece reporting that a group of six or so Black and Asian MPs were set to be purged. These included Diane Abbott, Apsana Begum and Zara Sultana. Belfield put up a mocking video parodying Abbott claiming that she was due to retire. Well, that’s the first and only time I heard of it. I’ve mixed feelings about Abbott. She’s highly intelligent and on a good day can be brilliant. On a bad day she spouts anti-White rubbish. When Sasha Johnson was shot, the police urged people not to speculate. Abbott, however, jumped in with both feet, claiming that she been attacked by a White supremacist. It was natural, considering Johnson’s radical anti-racism, verging, in my opinion, on Black Fascism. But Johnson wasn’t shot by a white man. She was shot by four Black men, who seem to have been targeting her partner. Everything about it looks gang related rather than anything political. But Abbott wasn’t just wrong – the statement itself was dangerous. In such a tense racial situation, it would have been easy to start a riot. Mercifully it didn’t happen. More recently she gave an interview, which has been widely reposted by the right. Questioned about Labour’s immigration policy, but she meanders incoherently, mumbling first about wanting ‘free access’ before trailing off into a string of unconnected, and unfinished musings. People were asking whether she was drunk. I wondered if it was due to immense stress. She receives half of all the abusive mail sent to women MPs. She was also attacked in her own home by her drug-addict son. He went for her with a pair of scissors so that Abbott had to lock herself in the bathroom and call for the fuzz. After an incident like that, she really couldn’t be blamed if she did want to retire to concentrate more on her family.
But that’s not the reason. I suspect the reason is that she was a friend and lover of Jez Corbyn and is still his ally. And as she’s left-wing, she’s not going to be the type of Black that will appeal to all the Tory voters Starmer wishes to appeal to.
Apsana Begum may have been on the list because she was recently tried for housing benefit fraud. She blamed it on her husband, and claimed she knew nothing about it. This is quite credible, and I believe she’s been acquitted. But to the Tories she’s as guilty as sin. It wouldn’t surprise me if the ostensible reason Starmer wanted to get rid of her was because of the trial – Caesar’s wife must not only be chaste, but she must be obviously chaste, as the old saying goes. But she’s another left-winger and so has to go.
I’ve heard absolutely no reason why Zara Sultana could possibly be targeted for dismissal. In fact it seems that if she is being targeted, it’s because she’s too good at her job. She’s an intelligent Muslim woman who land very effective blows against Bozo and the damage done by four decades of Thatcherism, as well as defending her community. She’s a left-wing threat to Starmer, and if he does want to purge, that’s why. She’s doing what he should damn well be doing.
Throughout this there seems to be an attitude that Jews, especially Zionist Jews, suffer more prejudice than any other ethnic group. But the opposite is true. Years ago Quentin Letts, a long-term Mail columnist now writing for the times, produced a league table of relative deprivation among different ethnic and demographic groups in his book, Bog Standard Britain. Jews were at the top for having the most privilege, Blacks the least. Sixty per cent of Jews are upper middle class and most severely normal Brits have a positive or neutral view of their Jewish compatriots. Only 8 per cent of the British public are anti-Semites. That’s clearly too high, but I would imagine it was far less than the proportion of the British public who are prejudiced against Blacks, Asians and particularly Muslims. Years ago the French were being accused of anti-Semitism because anti-Semitic incidents supposedly received less attention than islamophobic. According to the Financial Times, which was then a liberal newspaper actually worth reading, this was because the French authorities were more concerned about the much higher level of prejudice against Muslims. Only five per cent of French folks thought that Jews weren’t really French. When you got to Muslims, the figure was 20-30 + per cent, if I remember correctly. Tommy Robinson is able to get away with his far right antics because this prejudice is shared by a certain number of Brits. But it’s a carefully selected prejudice. Robinson is very pro-Jewish and pro-Israel. He marched with the Jewish Defence League, a Jewish bunch of far right Islamophobic thugs and has said that if there was a war between Israel and the Palestinians, he’d fight for Israel. And the Alt Right just loves Israel. A year or so ago Richard Spencer, the founder of the Alt Right, the man who enthusiastically screamed ‘Hail Trump! Hail our race!’ when Trump won the presidential election, turned up on Israeli TV. No, he doesn’t despise Israel, as you’d expect from Starmer’s ghastly rhetoric. He enthusiastically supports it. He’s a ‘White Zionist’, and Israel is the type of ethnostate he’d like for White, gentile America. The anti-racist activist Matthew Collins even says that when he was in the BNP and other Nazi groups, one of his fellow stormtroopers told him privately that he really didn’t understand the hatred of the Jews. I’ve been told that one of the British Nazis even founded a group, Fascists Against Anti-Semitism, to try and persuade the British public that they weren’t all Jew-haters keen to restart the Holocaust.
Yeah, right. Pull the other one, it’s got bells on.
And there’s a section of the Jewish community that reciprocates this racism. According to Tony Greenstein, the respected Jewish historian and very establishment figure, Geoffrey Alderman, was under pressure in the 1970s to withdraw his finding in a book on the British Jewish community published in the 1970s that 2 per cent of Jews voted NF because they didn’t want their children going to school with Blacks. The call was made by the Board of Deputies, who also didn’t like Jews attending Rock Against Racism events for the ostensible reason that Jewish youth might hear anti-Zionist propaganda. I also read on Tony’s or perhaps another Jewish blog that one Jewish Conservative MP in Barnet could be seen hobnobbing with the NF/BNP thugs at elections lamenting that the Nationalist vote was split between the two parties. When you have Jewish Conservatives supporting the NF, it shows just how integrated one section of the Jewish community is and at the same time is so bonkers you wonder if you’ve wandered into a parallel reality.
This is what Starmer’s leadership stands for: racism, anti-Semitism, apartheid and ethnic cleansing. He supports a viciously persecutory state and specifically smears purges Jewish peeps who oppose it. Israel is supported by real Fascists and racists, but he tells us that it’s opponents are anti-Semites. Meanwhile he is utterly indifferent in the poverty, marginalisation and real prejudice and violence suffered by people of colour and specifically Blacks and Muslims. He appears to support rich, Zionist, Conservative Jews, rather than the 40 per cent of the Jewish population that’s as poor and squeezed as the rest of us. That part of the Jewish population that worries about rights of work, about the health service, how they will pay for social care, whether they can afford to put food on the table and the disgrace of an immensely wealthy nation like Britain feeding the poor, the disabled and the unemployed through food banks rather than a functioning welfare state. You know, the same type of issues that caused Jews to join trade unions, found socialist groups and join the Labour party in the first place. The same Jews who are concerned about the government’s increasingly stringent asylum policy, and who are also concerned about the rise of Islamophobia and other forms of racism. You know, traditional Jewish Labour, who share the same fears and aspirations as the wider traditional members of the party. The people Starmer wants to purge.
The good peeps on Twitter haven’t been slow to condemn Starmer’s wretched speech. Go to Mike’s piece to read what such awesome peeps as Another Angry Voice, Jackie Walker – whose tweet also contains a clip of Starmer’s rant – Owen Jones, Barnaby Raine, David Rosenberg, Heather Mendick, Aaron Bastani, Ammar Kazmi, Simon Maginn, Tom London, and Chris Williamson, amongst many others, have to say about it.
Starmer is a racist disgrace. He should not be in the Labour party, yet alone its leader. If anything, he should be goose-stepping about with Tommy Robinson and the wretched EDL.
Next Monday at 9.00 pm on BBC 2, the Beeb is showing the documentary, Confronting Holocaust Denial with David Baddiel. The blurb for this in the Radio Times runs
Despite being one of the most documented events in history, one in six people worldwide believes the Holocaust has been exaggerated or denies that it ever took place. Here, David Baddiel anatomises that denial, from the Nazis’ bid to hide what they were doing to the roles of the British establishment in downplaying the extent to which Jews were the victims and of social media in affording anti-Semitism a platform. David also visits Chelmno, where tens of thousands died, and meets Rachel levy, one of the Holocaust’s few remaining survivors.
I absolutely don’t have a problem with confronting and refuting Holocaust denial whatsoever. It was one of the most monstrous crimes of the 20th century, and the people who deny or minimise it do so in order to sanitise Nazism in the hope of some day getting it back into power. They’re despicable. But I do have issues with this programme, because I’m afraid of a hidden pro-Zionist agenda that will boost the anti-Semitism smear merchants.
Part of this is their choice of presenter. David Baddiel is a brilliantly funny comedian. I went to see him once at the Cheltenham Literary Festival talking about his new book, and he had the room in stitches. He’s also ferociously intelligent with a double first and doctorate from Oxford. But he’s also one of Groaniad’s commentariat, who pushed the anti-Semitism smears against Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters. He appeared on various TV shows making these claims. He also wrote a piece in the Guardian claiming that Corbyn was a terrible anti-Semite because he pronounced Jeffrey Epstein’s name ‘Epshtein’. This was supposed to be an attempt to make the deceased magnate and paedophile less English or, rather, American, by stressing his non-English-speaking origins.
It’s a rubbish argument. Unless you’re aware that Epstein, or others with the same name, are Jewish and pronounce it differently, the name looks German. And Corbyn gave it the German pronunciation. There’s nothing inherently racist in that. Consider the number of gentile Brits with foreign names, like the Eurosceptic politico Mark Francois. Presumably his surname is given the French pronunciation, but this is not taken to mean that Francois is less British. Although it is ironic that someone with a continental name should have such a hatred of the European Union. Similarly, Mike and myself have also had people pronounce our surname incorrectly as if it were French. It isn’t, and that’s not how we say it. But I don’t believe that the people mispronouncing our surname did so deliberately or were consciously trying to denigrate us as somehow not really British or English.
Also, Baddiel himself is hardly innocent of racism. Older readers of this blog may remember the show he and Frank Skinner had on the Beeb in the ’90s, Fantasy Football League. This was a bit of sport comedy. But one of the recurring ‘jokes’, in retrospect, seems at best tasteless, and at worse markedly racist. Baddiel used to appear in blackface wearing a pineapple and dreadlocks in order to mock the appearance of the Black footballer, Jason Lee, who was then playing for Nottingham Forest. He was taking the mick out of Lee’s hairstyle, which was a mixture of the corn rows and dreads. But this led to ‘pineapple head’ being used as a racist insult against Blacks with a similar hairstyle. Tony Greenstein included a piece about this from The Weekly Worker when he attacked Baddiel for pushing the anti-Semitism smears last year.
Baddiel invented the slur ‘Pineapple Heads’ for Black people with ‘Dredds & Cornrows’. Professor Ben Carrington details the strategic exploitative depths into which this campaign of the TV series Fantasy Football plunged and further extended its impact on other Black citizens. “David Baddiel ‘Blacked up’ (evoking the barely coded racist imagery of the minstrel shows) with a pineapple on his head out of which Jason Lee’s dreadlocks were growing – the ‘joke’ being that Jason Lee’s ‘dreads’ resemble a fruit on top of his head. This joke was then carried out with increasing frequency for the rest of the series, with young children sending in drawings of Jason Lee adorned with various fruit on his head. The pineapple joke was then taken up by football fans in the terraces who chanted songs about Jason Lee’s hair and significantly transcended the normally insular world of football fandom and entered into the public domain as both a descriptive term and a form of ridicule (‘Pineapple Head’) for any black person with dreads tied back”.
Inevitably, many of those subjected to the abusive copy-cat street ‘ridicule’, Carrington identifies were children.
Now I realise that this was a long time ago, and things were slightly different in the ’90s, but it was still pretty tasteless even then. I don’t know if Baddiel regrets the joke, but I doubt that he ever gave it much thought, to be honest. But with this on his record, he may not be the best presenter of a programme dedicated to exposing a particularly nasty form of racism.
And I really don’t want the programme to confer on him a spurious moral authority then next time he starts screaming about anti-Semitism in the Labour party. Because people will believe his lies and smears simply because he presented a programme about Holocaust denial, and because he was correct about that, so he must somehow be correct about anti-Semitism in Labour.
One of the issues the programme tackles is the way the British authorities tried to play down the Jews as the victims of Nazi atrocities, because they feared that if they included them gentiles would not believe it. There’s a long article about the documentary in the Radio Times, which includes this
More unsettling is the document Baddiel examines at the National Archives in Kew, a memo from a British official warning that stories of Nazi atrocities will only be effective in the eyes of the British public if the victims can be shown to be “indisputably innocent”. That, writes the official, means the victims must include no violent criminals, and no Jews. To Baddiel, “that was a very serious form of denial. It was laying the ground for a general sense of disbelief towards the Holocaust.”
But there’s also a Zionist double standard here. The Zionist organisations initially also didn’t want Jews singled out as the particular victims of the Nazis. They were afraid that if they did so, it would mean that the world would regard the Jews as being too weak to have their own state. By that same logic, Zionism is also guilty of laying the ground for Holocaust denial. But Baddiel and the Radio Times say nothing.
He also tackles the problem of Holocaust denial among the Palestinians in Gaza. The Radio Times says of this
He hears a Palestinian scholar explain that high rates of Holocaust denial in Gaza owe more to a desire to hurt Jews in their most sensitive spot than a genuine refusal to believe the facts. Baddiel understands that logic – then admits to the camera that his own understanding has made him “uneasy” because, as he tells me later, “Where does understanding shade into legitimacy, into saying “This isn’t quite so bad”? The next thing you know, you’re accepting Holocaust denial.In the film, that the point at which I’m most uncertain.”
But this also raises the issues of Zionist double standards and the way they have manipulated the Holocaust for their own political ends. The Palestinians have their own counterpart of the Shoah, the Hebrew term for the Holocaust. This is the Nakba, an Arabic word for disaster or catastrophe, which the Palestinians use to describe the foundation of Israel and its consequent massacre and ethnic cleansing of the indigenous Arab population. The Israeli state, in contrast to its historians, admits that some villages were massacred, but the reality is that there were many, many more. The victims included unarmed men, women and children, including those walking towards the Zionist soldiers with gifts of food, and seeking shelter in mosques. The Israeli state also maintains that the Palestinians were told by their own leaders to flee, but subsequent research has shown that this again is fake history, and these instructions or the rumours of them were manufactured by the nascent Israeli spy agencies. But this is also consistently denied by the Israelis.
And the Israeli state does exploit the Holocaust as a political symbol. In one Holocaust Day ceremony, Israeli troopers marched into the arena in which the commemorations were being held. But as soon as Orla Guerin, the Beeb’s Israel correspondent, mentioned this, she was attacked as an anti-Semite by the Zionist shills, including the Beeb’s former head of programming. Baddiel is right to call out Palestinian Holocaust denial, but it does need to be put in context as a reaction to their history of ethnic cleansing by the Jewish state. It is not simply an act of malicious spite just for the sake of it.
Baddiel and the Beeb are doing a good job by tackling Holocaust denial. But I am afraid that the selection of Baddiel as presenter, and the programme’s omission of Zionist complicity in it, and in ethnic cleansing in Palestine, will act to give it a pro-Israel, pro-Zionist slant. And Baddiel’s own racist jokes about Black hairstyles could be seen as showing the Beeb has double standards of its own. Racism against Blacks is acceptable, while anti-Semitism is not.
But racism is racism, whatever the colour or ethnicity of the person perpetrating it.
Today’s I for 12th February 2019 also carried the news that J.K. Rowling, Rachel Riley and Tracey-Ann Oberman were in a meeting with former members of Blair’s staff to launch this new, Centrist party that has periodically been mooted for the past year or so.
The article by Jane Clinton, ‘Rowling and Riley ‘plotting Blairite party’, on page 26 of the paper, runs
Countdown’s Rachel Riley and former EastEnders actress Tracy Ann Oberman have joined forces with advisers from Tony Blair’s government and JK Rowling’s agent to create a centrist breakaway Labour party.
Riley and Oberman, who are both Jewish, have been attacked by Labour supporters for criticizing Jeremy Corbyn’s handling of the anti-Semitism row that has engulfed the party. Riley revealed last month that Channel 4 bosses ordered extra protection following her comments.
They met Blair’s former chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, and his former speechwriter, Philip Collins, last Tuesday at the London offices of Ms Rowling’s agent, Neil Blair. There were 50 supporters present.
Details of the event, confirmed by I, include the creation of a pro-European centrist party which would appeal to the left of the Conservative party and the right of Labour.
Observers believe its creation would be the death knell for the Liberal Democrats.
At the meeting, during discussions as to who should be leader of the new party, Rowling’s name was shouted out to applause.
The Harry Potter author has been critical of Mr Corbyn, but leadership is not believed to be her ambition. Instead, it is thought shemay offer financial backing or fund a think-tank.
The good peeps over at Zelo Street have already critiqued this piece of Blairite aspiration, and pronounced the new party DOA. They note that such a party has been mooted several times, the names of various right-wing Labour MPs have been suggested in connection with it. And each time take-off has been aborted or not even attempted.
They point out that people have been proclaiming the death of the Lib Dems since the 1950s, but each time such predictions have been greatly exaggerated. The article goes on to mention the serious matter of Riley’s and Oberman’s conduct, which makes them totally unsuitable as leaders for any new party. Oberman threatened to sue blogger Shaun Lawson because he mentioned her in one of his tweets and in an article. Why? Because Riley, Oberman and their followers had viciously attacked and smeared a 16-year old schoolgirl and her father with false claims of anti-Semitism. The girl, who suffers from anxiety anyway, was threatened and harassed. Zelo Street concludes
Well-documented and cringe-inducing harassment, to boot. If that is the depth of the political talent pool available to the new Centrist party, it’s going to look more like a puddle.
Right now, it looks as though this new venture is DOA. No surprise there, then.
Mike was also on the receiving end of the wrath of Riley and her army of fanboys for a piece he did reporting Lawson’s article and Riley’s and Oberman’s bullying of the teenager. And yes, they tried smearing him as an anti-Semite. Rowling’s also tried attacking Mike over social media, and got her rear end handed to her as a result. If I remember correctly, Rowling, Riley and Oberman are part of a little circle with Z-list actress Frances Barber, Al Murray and David Baddiel, who believe that they are genuinely tackling racism. They’ve been quoted as joking with each other about whether this is 1936 or not. Of course it isn’t. If this really was anything like 1936 there’d be no question of it. Real anti-Semitic mobs wearing Fascist uniforms, like Oswald Mosley and his Blackshirts would be goose-stepping into Jewish and working class areas trying to provoke fights and intimidate the people there. You would hear speech from bigots and Nazis telling everyone that Jews were an unassimilable threat, and that further Jewish immigration should be curbed. And the same Nazis would also talk openly about Jews being ‘the money power’ behind capitalism and communism and plotting to destroy the White race. And as for Germany, Jews would be progressively banned from getting jobs or entering the universities, their businesses closed, and themselves publicly beaten and humiliated. while trade unionists, socialists, communists, anarchists, recidivist criminals, neurotics, the long-term jobless, sex workers and other dissidents and individuals the Nazi state decided were undesirable and ‘dysgenic’ would be rounded up to be worked to death in the concentration camps. The Alternative Fuer Deutschland are a bunch of Nazi goons, and there is the spectre of read Fascism and Nazism in eastern Europe – in Poland, Hungary, the Baltic States and Ukraine. But here in Britain is very much not like 1936. Not yet.
Tony Greenstein has repeatedly pointed out that while there has been an increase in anti-Semitic incidents, Jews in Britain as a group are very comfortably middle class and most definitely do not suffer the real persecution of other ethnic minorities. For example, they are not being forcibly and unjustly deported, like the Windrush migrants. Other groups, such as Blacks, Asians and Muslims suffer far higher levels of violence and abuse. I haven’t heard any mainstream politician attacking the Jews or demanding that Jewish immigration be stopped. But there have been any number of Conservative and Kipper MPs making racist comments about Muslims and suggesting that they are incompatible with the British way of life.
As Riley’s and Rowling’s friends, Frances Barber also weighed in to accuse Mike and Owen Jones of being anti-Semites, while David Baddiel seems to have swallowed the Integrity Initiative black propaganda about Corbyn. I found a video on YouTube commenting on him declaring that Corbyn was an agent of Putin.
They’re spouting dangerous nonsense. The vast majority of the people accused of anti-Semitism in the Labour party were smeared because they were Corbyn’s supporters, members of the party’s left-wing, or critics of Israel. It was part of the campaign by the Blairites to hang on by attacking ordinary Labour party members. The Jewish establishment and the Zionists in the Labour party got involved because they support the Israeli state’s policy of ethnic cleansing and the construction of illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank. That was clearly shown in the Al-Jazeera documentary, The Lobby, when Joan Ryan attempted to get an ordinary Labour party member thrown out as an anti-Semite because she had the temerity to ask Ryan a question she couldn’t answer. She wondered what the Jewish Labour Movement was doing to promote the two-state solution, and what would be done about the illegal settlements in Palestine if the solution was successfully put into operation. As for this country’s Jewish establishment, the Board of Deputies declares itself in its constitution to be a Zionist organization, and the other year former Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sachs led a party of British Jews to the March of the Flags. This is an annual event where the Israeli equivalent of skinhead boot-boys march through the Muslim quarter vandalizing homes and property and threatening its people. Liberal Jewish organisations urged Sachs not to go, but he ignored them. They were ‘the wrong kind’ of Jews, you see.
As for the rise of Fascism in eastern Europe, this is being assisted and defended by Israel, whose supporters, like Stephen Pollard, the far right editor of the Jewish Chronicle, declare them to be ‘good friends of Israel’ because they buy Israel arms. And so are the remaining Jews of eastern Europe put in danger through lack of support from Israel. All while Israel proclaims itself to be the protector of Jews worldwide.
As for this supposed Centrist party, I can remember it being touted last year, when it was supposed to have millions of pounds in funding ready for, along with legions of corporate donors. At one point Blair’s son, Euan, was discussed as a founding member and possible leader. Then it all collapsed again. It had no members, no policies, and one of the founders walked out after a disagreement with the others.
All this Centrist party represents is continuity Blairism. Which means more privatization, more NHS privatization, more attacks on the welfare state, meaning more homelessness and starvation, and more corporatism. Which means that in exchange for funding, private industry can have their chairmen and senior management appointed to positions in government and the civil service.
Rowling, Riley, Oberman and Barber are a disgrace. The Centrist party Rowling and her friends Riley and Oberman are expected to lead represents nothing but further corporate exploitation and misery. It has collapsed several times before, and will do so again. No matter how much it is puffed by the papers.
Here’s a political development that the Tories really won’t welcome. They’ve been trying to present themselves as a new, anti-racist party, ever since David Cameron made a great show of cutting links with the Monday Club, and throwing out members connected with the BNP and the rest of the Fascists. They’re now trying to present themselves as completely untouched by racial or religious prejudice, unlike the terrible Labour party, which is infested with anti-Semites.
In fact, the Labour party is not infested with anti-Semites. The incidence of anti-Semitism under Corbyn in the party has gone down, whatever spurious poison Gideon Falter and the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, Frankie Boyle, David Baddiel, John Mann, Ian MacNichol and the rest may utter to the contrary. And very many of those accused of it, as I’m heartily tired of saying, are anything but. They’re decent people, who’ve fought against, and often suffered genuine anti-Semitic abuse and assault. Their real crime is that they despise the Israeli government and its persecution of the Palestinians. Or have made the point, as Jackie Walker did, that other nations and ethnicities have also endured genocides comparable to the Holocaust under the Nazis, and these should also be commemorated. The Tories and their allies in the press and in the Blairite right in the Labour party are weaponising such accusations in order to unseat Corbyn. Whom they fear and despise as someone, who genuinely wants to do something for the poor, rather than wreck this country and its great people with more neoliberalism.
And the Tories are as nasty as ever. There’s the same racism there. In fact, the levels of it in the Tories are much higher than in Labour. And Mike put up a post the other day, reporting on the suspension of a number of Tory candidates in the run up to the council elections for racism. Many of those were suspended for Islamophobia.
Now the Muslim Council has stepped in, and demanded that the Tories launch an investigation into it. In this video from RT, the terrible Russian propaganda outfit reports that they have a called for an independent inquiry due to Islamophobic incidents within the party now occurring weekly. Their letter to the Tories lists three council candidates, who were suspended. They are:
Mark Payne, suspended for Islamophobic tweets on social media.
Alexander van Terheyden, for the same.
And Darren Harrison, who had links with Generation Identity, which RT describe as an anti-Islamic organisation.
The report shows some of their posts, as well as comments from people determined that the Islamophobia in the Tory party has gone on far too long: Simon Maginn, Crumpets and Tea and Rachel Swindon. The latter’s name seems familiar. I think she may well be one of the people Mike follows on Twitter.
It’ll be interesting to see how the Tories respond to this. It was one of the Muslim Tories, who said in an interview a week or so ago that Islamophobic incidents occurred weekly in the Tories. Simon Maginn in the post RT shows in their video states that there have been demands for an investigation by the Muslim Council for two years now. The Tories have obviously ignored it, and will most likely do their best to sweep it under the carpet. While their more than willing to exaggerate the incident of racism in Labour, when it comes to them they make a great show of punishing the person responsible, quite often trivially, and then briskly declaring that the issue is over and the problem dealt with.
It isn’t. Not by a long chalk.
The Tories are a deeply racist party, and Islamophobia is only part of the problem. We’ve seen just how racist they are in their treatment of the Windrush Children, the victims of the Grenfell Tower Fire, and the rest of Tweezer’s despicable ‘hostile environment’ policy. The Muslim Council’s call for an investigation into Tory Islamophobia is to be welcomed. But this is just the tip of a very nasty iceberg.
And while we’re at it, please can we have an investigation into anti-Semitism in the Tory midst. Despite their claims that they don’t have it, and it’s only in the Labour party, Anti-Semitism does exist in the Tories. And if the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism is to be believed (they’re not, but let it go for the sake of argument) and anti-Semitism is rampant in British society, then it needs to be examined and combated in the Tories.
Except that the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism and Jonathan Arkush, the President of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, won’t want to do that. They’re true-blue Tories, whose interest in anti-Semitism seems simply to be to use against Jeremy Corbyn and critics of Israel. And as Tories, they definitely don’t want anti-Semitism investigated in the Tory party.
In which case, they are letting their political bias allow the real anti-Semites and Nazis to go unpunished. And perhaps, if they are unwilling to defend Jews from real, vicious persecution, they should resign. Or submit to another, genuinely impartial inquiry, to see if they are doing their job.
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.
Norris McWhirter, Founder of the Freedom Association and probable supporter of the anti-Semitic and racist League of Empire Loyalists
The extreme Right-wing Conservative MEP, Daniel Hannan, amongst his other attacks on the Left and the NHS, criticised the comedian David Baddiel for his film criticising Norris McWhirter in his online Telegraph column. Baddiel had made the terrible offence of comparing the Freedom Association, which McWhirter founded, to the BNP. Guy Debord’s Cat has also posted a detailed critique of Hannan’s comments, ‘Hannan: McWhirter is a Decent Man (Because I Say So)’ at http://buddyhell.wordpress.com/2010/12/24/hannan-mcwhirter-was-a-decent-man-because-i-say-so/.
In fact Baddiel’s comment about the Freedom Association being similar to the BNP has more than a little truth in the context of McWhirter’s extreme Right-wing political views. There is evidence that McWhirter was a member of the League of Empire Loyalists, a Fascist, anti-Semitic organisation that formed the National Front along with the BNP, the Greater Britain Movement and Racial Preservation Society. Even if he was not formally a member, McWhirter and his brothers subscribed to Candour, the League’s magazine, which attempted to spread its highly conspiracist view of the decline of British civilisation due to a global Jewish conspiracy. It was the same view as that of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party, with the exception that the Nazis obviously focussed on Germany rather than Britain.
McWhirter and the Aldermaston March
The February 1989 issue of the Freedom Association’s newsletter, Freedom Today, printed a photograph of a car containing Norris McWhirter and his elder brother, Kennedy, surrounded by a crowd of angry CND protesters at the first Aldermaston March in 1958. The photograph was supposed to show the violent nature of peace marchers. According to the Times the McWhirters had appeared at the march in a car shouting at the crowd through a loudspeaker. They told the demonstrators that they were each guilty of increasing the threat of war and voting with their feet for ‘Soviet imperialist domination’. They then turned into a field, where they got out and attempted to display their own placards. They then scuffled with some of the marchers, and were forced to get back into the car. The marchers then started to rock it. The police eventually appeared, and managed to get the McWhirters and their car out of the crowd and away from the demonstration.
McWhirter and the LEL
Norris McWhirter stood as the Conservative candidate for Orpington in 1964. However, it looks very much like that if they weren’t formal members of the League of Empire Loyalists, they supported them sufficiently strongly to take part in some of their stunts. George Thayer in his book, The British Political Fringe: A Profile, published in 1965 stated that as the League supported nuclear weapons they ‘made a habit of harassing the Aldermaston marches’. Rosine D’Bouneviallel, a member of the League with custody of their records, confirmed that the incident was one of the LEL stunts. She did not state that the McWhirters were members of the League, but did say that they subscribed to candour.
See ‘Kennedy McWhirter 22/10/23 – 3/11/89’ in Stephen Dorril, ‘Gone but not Forgotten’, in Lobster 19: 10-13 (11).
A.K. Chesterton and the League of Empire Loyalists
The League of Empire Loyalists was founded in October 1954 by Arthur Keith (A.K.) Chesterton, a cousin of the writer G.K. Chesterton, and one of the ideologues of Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists. Its members including the future leaders of the National Front and related Fascist organisations, John Tyndall, Martin Webster, Colin Jordan and John Bean. It Strongly campaigned against any infringement of British sovereignty, including British involvement in a future EU or federated Europe, as well as the UN, NATO, SEATO and CENTO. It also demanded that Britain should not relinquish its Empire, but should continue to maintain and strengthen it. It also demanded that Non-White immigration to the UK should be stopped.
Chesterton, Anti-Semitism and Fascism
Chesterton split from Mosley and the BUF in 1938, and supported the British war effort against Nazi Germany. He was thus, unlike Mosley, never charged with treason. He was, however, extremely anti-Semitic. Apart from the BUF, he was also a member of the Nordic League, whose membership also included Serocold Skeels, a known Nazi agent, and William Joyce, Lord Haw Haw. Like the Nazis, the Nordic League also demanded the extermination of the Jews, and Chesterton fully shared their vile views. Chesterton later wrote a pamphlet attacking the leader of the BUF, complaining that Mosley had been deceived by the leader of one of the other factions within the BUF, which itself had become a parody of German Nazism. The pamphlet was published by the National Socialist League, the similarity of whose name to Hitler’s party was certainly not accidental. After the War Chesterton retreated from the genocidal implications of earlier extreme anti-Semitism, through his opposition to Nazism and friendship with individual Jews like Joseph Leftwich. He denounced the racial anti-Semitism of Houston Steward Chamberlain and the Nazi ideologue, Alfred Rosenberg, and demanded that those responsible for the death camps should be hanged. Like Mosley he also strenuously denied that he was a Fascist after the War.
Anti-Semitic Conspiracy Theories and the LEL
Chesterton was a professional journalist. He was the deputy editor of the Fascist magazine, Truth, from 1944 to 1953. In 1953 he was also literary adviser to Lord Beaverbrook, and founded the anti-Semitic newspaper, Candour. Chesterton was strongly influenced by the anti-Semitic conspiracy theories of Father Denis Fahey, A.N. Field, Douglas Reed, C.H. Douglas and Nesta Webster. He believed that Jewish financier and bankers, controlled by Bernard Baruch and Paul and Max Warburg, had been responsible for funding all the social unrest around the globe from the Russian Revolution onwards. The Bretton Woods and Dumbarton Oaks agreements, along with the World Bank, Council on Foreign Relations, the Bilderberg Group, Trilateral Commission and United Nations were part of a plot to establish a global Jewish ‘One World’ superstate and destroy the British Empire. In his 1965 book, The New Unhappy Lords, Chesterton made it clear that he believed that global Communism was merely a subordinate branch of this international conspiracy. Moscow and Peking were, he declared, merely ‘branch offices’, while the headquarters of the conspiracy was in New York. Despite his denial that he was a Fascist, and disapproval of political violence, this is very much the same conspiratorial view as Hitler’s, except that it was updated to include the new, post-War supranational organisations.
Political Stunts
The League attempted to spread its vile ideas not by marches or demonstrations, but through a series of disruptive stunts. Amongst these were the blowing of bugle horns at Conservative party conferences. When Krushchev and Bulganin arrived at Victoria Station as part of their détente peace tours of the West, the League’s members shouted that Anthony Eden had shaken hands with a murderer. They also gatecrashed the 1958 Anglican Lambeth Conference disguised as Greek Orthodox bishops. As racist imperialists, they also disrupted meetings of the Movement for Colonial Freedom and the Anti-Slavery Society.
Whatever Hannan says about McWhirter, it is clear that he had some extremely unpleasant Right-wing views, which could fairly be described as Fascistic. If he was indeed a subscriber to Candour, as claimed by the keeper of the LEL’s records, then he was clearly at least one of their fellow travellers. He may not have formally joined the League out of a desire to maintain his membership of the Tories. After their disruptive antics at the 1958 Tory party conference led to fighting between the conference’s stewards and members of the Leagues, the Conservatives took strong measures to throw out League sympathisers. The Freedom Association has also supported brutal and repressive extreme Right-wing dictatorships, so Baddiel actually was right to compare the Freedom Association to the BNP and attack the noxious views of its founder. And by his own support for McWhirter, Hannan has also shown how extreme his own political views are.
For further information on the League of Empire Loyalists, see Kevin Koogan, ‘The League of Empire Loyalists’ in Lobster 46, Winter 2003, pp. 26-9, and Richard Thurlow, Fascism in Britain: A History, 1918-1985 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell Ltd 1987).
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