RT: Transport for London Bans Posters Attacking Balfour Declaration

This video from RT over here in Blighty discusses the controversy surrounding the plans to commemorate the centenary of the Balfour Declaration. This was the pledge by the British foreign minister, Arthur Balfour, that the British would support the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. There have been protests and demonstrations by Palestinians in London, who argue that the Declaration should not be celebrated. Instead, the centenary should be used to apologise for the historic crimes and injustice meted out to the Palestinian people.

Eisa Ali, one of the presenters of this piece, then discusses how the Palestinian Mission here commissioned a series of posters to show the oppression and ethnic cleansing suffered by the Palestinians under what critics, like the Palestinian ambassador Manuel Hassassian, have rightly described as an apartheid regime. These show a series of ‘before’ and ‘after’ images. One is of a thriving Arab town, full of homes and with its mosque, as it was before the Israeli occupation. After the creation of Israel, it becomes ruins, containing nothing but rubble, although the mosque still stands.

These posters were banned by Transport For London, which didn’t want to put them up. However, some individual black cabs are showing them. The Palestinian ambassador states that he believes that there was pressure on TFL from two sides, including the government, not to show these posters. He states that to add insult to injury, Theresa May has also invited Benjamin Netanyahu over for a meeting.

Looking at Mr. Hassassian’s name, it seems to me that he might be a Christian, or of Christian descent. It should be remembered that 25 per cent of Palestinians were Christian before the establishment of the state of Israel. That proportion has gone down to one per cent. The American religious right has claimed that this is due to Muslim intolerance. That’s certainly there, as Christians have been victimised by Muslim Palestinians as suspected collaborators. But it’s also because they’ve also been subject to massacre and expulsion as Arabs, just like their Muslim friends, relatives and neighbours. As for Jewish Palestinians, they were tolerated only because their labour was needed. The leaders had inherited all the racist assumptions about Arab inferiority of the European countries they came from, and they believed that the Mizrahim, Jewish Arabs, like Arabs generally, were culturally if not racially inferior. In the 1960s tens of thousands of Jewish Palestinians were officially expelled from Israel, because they were held to be Arabs, not Jews, on the grounds of their cultural assimilation.

I mention the decline of the Christian Palestinian population simply to put the matter straight, not to stir up any more Christian anti-Semitism, which I absolutely condemn.

I just want to make the point that Christians in America are being deliberately given a very distorted view of events in order to bolster western colonialist attitudes towards the Palestinians as a whole, and generate Islamophobia against the Muslim population, in order to manufacture support for what is a White, imperialist settler state.

Theresa May has also said in the Commons that the Balfour declaration should be celebrated.

No. It shouldn’t.

This doesn’t come from any racism towards Judaism or the Jewish people. This country has benefited immensely from the contribution of its Jewish people in just about all areas of life, culture and endeavour.

It simply comes from the fact that Palestine was not ours to give. Its indigenous people had been there for millennia, even if Arabs were relative newcomers, having conquered the region in the 7th century AD. Palestine contained not only Muslims, but also Arabs and Jews, as well as the Samaritans, who are mentioned in the Bible, and who are gaining in numbers.
The result of the Balfour Declaration was their massacre and expulsion from their historic lands. Those that remain are forced into what have been described, with more than a little justification, as ghettoes, and are subject to a form of apartheid. This has all been described by many highly courageous Jewish and Israeli journalists, writers, and activists, as well as by the Palestinians themselves and others.

It has also resulted in immense harm to the wider Jewish people. At the time of the Declaration, the majority of Britain’s Jewish community, including its leading families, who had been here since the 17th century, were resolutely against it. They wanted to be accepted as fellow Brits, and were afraid that the passage of the Declaration would mean that they would be suspected of dual loyalty. The businessman and presenter of the British version of The Apprentice, Sir Alan Sugar, said in one programme that he had been a member of the Jewish version of the Boy’s Brigade. He didn’t mention it, but the lads enrolled swore an oath ‘to be a good Englishman and a good Jew’. You can also see the pride in British citizenship in paintings such as David Blomberg’s modernist depiction of the interior of a Jewish bath house, which is painted in the red, white and blue of the Union flag.

Similar views were held by the Jewish communities elsewhere across Europe and the world, in Germany, where there was originally much less anti-Semitism than Britain, and Poland. But the Declaration has contributed to anti-Semitism through the fear that Jews, or an influential portion of them, have more loyalty to Israel beyond that of the other nations in which they live. And Zionist groups have at time collaborated with the real anti-Semites, in the hope that rising persecution of Diaspora Jews will result in more of them emigrating to Israel. Tony Greenstein and others have shown on their blogs and writings, over and over again, using and reproducing contemporary documents, that this was the case. But simply repeating this historical fact will get you smeared as an anti-Semite.

This should not be to condemn Israelis. Professor Ilan Pappe, an Israeli historian, now at Exeter University, who was driven from his homeland because of his courageous defence of the truth against official lies and persecution, has defended his former compatriots as decent people. In one interview he described how he opened his house up, every Thursday night, to anyone, who wanted to visit him to hear his side of the story. He shortly found that his front room was full of people wanting to hear what he had to say, and find out for themselves whether he was the terrible anti-Semite the officials claimed.

It should be to condemn the actions of successive Israeli governments, in constructing a racist, genocidal state. And the actions of Britain itself, and our officials and politicians, for their part in the massacre and dispossession of an entire people.

The Daily Mail and Milliband: Proof You Can Tell He’s Doing Something Right

The Daily Mail’s attack on Milliband’s father suggests that the leader of the Labour party must really have them rattled. They can’t, it seem, be content to attack the man’s policies, but have to launch an ad hominem attack, not just on the man, but on his father. Ralph Milliband died in 1994, and so can’t answer back, nor sue for libel. As Milliband said in his right-to-reply piece, reproduced on Kittysjones’ blog, ‘You can’t libel the dead, but you can smear them’. Now Ralph Milliband was a distinguished Marxist intellectual, and this intellectual legacy appears to threaten the Conservatives, even if his sons, as members of New Labour, don’t share his views.

Milliband states that the Mail’s article is purely based on a single entry his father made in his diary when he was an adolescent. I can well believe this. From what I understand about the experience of Jewish immigrants to Britain of Milliband’s senior generation, rather than hating Britain, many of them were extremely patriotic. The office of ‘Chief Rabbi of the British Empire’ in British Judaism was modelled on the position of the Archbishop of Canterbury as head of the Anglican Church. The motto of the Jewish equivalent of the Boy Scouts was ‘to be a good Jew and a good Englishman’. One of the paintings by the 20th century avant-garde artist, David Bomberg, shows the interior of a Jewish bath house. The colours used are red, white and blue, those of the Union flag. I have the impression, though I’m no art historian and know next to nothing about Bomberg, that this was a genuine expression of his love for his country.

What many European emigres didn’t like about Britain was its anti-intellectualism and ‘boy’s club’ atmosphere. Many of them were extremely highly educated and cultured men and women, and they disliked the philistinism they found in British society. Those raised in the Continental intellectual culture, regardless of their religion or ethnicity, have often commented on its comparative absence over this side of La Manche. One British Jewish intellectual, Steiner, compared Britain with France. In France, he said, they’d fight duels over disagreements about Hegel. In Britain the attitude is simply, ‘Oh, don’t be so silly’. I think Steiner liked the British attitude as showing far more common sense, while being aware of just how hostile British culture could be to intellectual debate. The Daily Mail, however, has over the years done its level best to keep this tradition of fierce anti-intellectualism going. Way back in the 1990s Paul Johnson, one of the Mail’s columnists, wrote a book Intellectuals. This took a number of leading intellectual figures, such as Karl Marx, Kenneth Tynan, Hans Christian Andersen and so on, and examined not their ideas, but their own personal lives. Most of them were shown to fall far below the standards of correct behaviour and bourgeois decorum demanded by the Daily Mail. As did Johnson himself, who all the while he was pontificating on British moral decline and the evils of today’s lax sexual behaviour was regularly getting a good spanking by his mistress. Private Eye wrote a mock hagiography for him in their ‘Lives of the Saints’ column, in which the great man said to his mistress ‘You must spank me on the botty and show me no mercy!’ Now it’s pretty true that many great men had feet of clay, and some of them were pretty horrible human beings. As Private Eye pointed out in its review of Johnson’s book, the shoddiness of their private lives no more invalidates their work than the second-best bed negates the beauty and value of Hamlet.

And some of the pieces written by the Daily Mail’s writers over the years are bizarre, if not absolutely bonkers. JUlie Burchill once wrote a piece in the Mail of Sunday, which, through several turns of highly convoluted, and indeed, sheer lapses of logic, attacking the sincere anti-Fascists, like Orwell and Steven Spender, who went to Spain to fight Franco in the Civil War. They were not motivated by heroism and the desire to see a Europe free of Fascist tyranny, according to Burchill. No, they were just like the tourists, who go to Spain to watch the bullfights. Burchill has said of her writing before now that she starts with a drink in front of her, which by the time she’s finished is all gone. She has also boasted of taking enough cocaine to stun the Colombian army. Reading pieces like that, I believe her. As for attacking the anti-Fascist veterans of the Civil War, this raises once again the spectre of Conservative hypocrisy. Orwell in one of his articles described how the Stock Exchanged cheered General Franco when he launched his revolt against the Republic. The leader of the National Front in the 1960s, Fountaine, was a former Tory, who had fought for Franco during the Civil War. he was thrown out of the Conservative party after making anti-Semitic comments about Jewish influence at one of the party’s meetings. He wasn’t the only Tory to admire the Spanish dictator. Martin Pugh in his book on British Fascism between the wars also notes that Winston Churchill also admired him for his authoritarian leadership. Churchill was certainly not an anti-Semite, but his opposition to Nazi Germany came from a conviction that a strong, militarised Reich threatened the British Empire, not from an opposition to Fascism per se. Hence Orwell’s comment in another of his articles that the run-up to Second World War hade produced some truly remarkable turns of events, ‘such as Winston Churchill running around pretending to be a democrat’. In the Tory party, Anthony Eden was a much stronger, and far more determined opponent of Fascism.

As for Paul Johnson, he himself is also capable of making bizarre, distorted attacks on the character of great men. A decade ago now he attack the great Russian novelist, Tolstoy, in the pages of the Spectator, for being responsible for the rise of Stalin. This is such a gross distortion of Tolstoy’s views and character that, as with Burchill, you wonder if he was drunk or on drugs when he wrote it. Tolstoy was a communist, who believed in the collective ownership of property. He was not, however, a Marxist, but Christian, as well as a vegetarian, pacifist anarchist. Unlike Marxism, which holds that society is formed and progresses through inexorable social and economic laws, Tolstoy believed that history was made not through impersonal processes, but through the actions of millions of individual people. He expressed his distinctive view of history as formed by countless individuals, rather than the actions of great men, in his masterpiece, War and Peace. He got his idea on passive resistance from the tactics used by a Chechen Sufi leader, who was captured and exiled to Russia after the Russian invaded his country. Tolstoy himself wrote pamphlets denouncing violence, and in turn influenced Gandhis own conception of the Hindu doctrine of ahimsa – nonviolence. As an anarchist, he also hated the state for its violence and oppression. In contrast to Stalin, who demanded absolute devotion, constituting a form of secular worship, Tolstoy himself lived simply. Despite being a member of the aristocracy, he wore a peasant’s smock and taught himself their skills, such as sewing boots. There is absolutely no comparison whatsoever between Tolstoy and Stalin, and the great novelist would have been repelled and revolted by everything Stalin stood for.

The vicious, mean-spirited attack on Ralph Milliband is just another demonstration of the Heil’s abysmally low standards of journalism: bizarre, ad hominem rants with little basis, or even concern, for factual accuracy.

Now both Pride’s Purge and Kittysjones have written excellent pieces, which I’ve reblogged, on how the Mail supported Mosley and Hitler. In fairness to the Daily Mail, they did run pieces critical of him after his organisation’s intolerance and thuggery became very clear. Nevertheless, there still remained some respect for the man even after he had been discredit and revealed as an anti-Semite and would-be fuhrer. One of his biographers, Skidelsky, maintained that Mosley was not actually anti-Semitic, and only became so after he encountered opposition from the Jewish organisations. skidelsky points out that Mosley’s notorious ‘biff boys’, the uniformed stewards at his rallies, were trained by the Jewish boxer, Ted Lewis. According to Skidelsky, Mosley was far more influenced by Mussolini than Hitler. This view has now been rejected by later historians. Martin Pugh points out that Mosley’s BUF contained a large number of anti-semites, and that Mosley quickly turned to Hitler and the Nazis when Mussolini’s leadership of international Fascism began to wane. After Hitler’s seizure of power, Mosley changed the BUF’s name to ‘the British Union of Fascists and National Socialists’. Mosley was indeed a Nazi, and so shares their guilt for the horrors they committed.

This has, however, only been recognised very recently. When Mosley died, the newspapers all printed sympathetic, even glowing obituaries. The BBC’s satirical sketch show, Not The Nine O’clock News sent this up at the time in their song about him. If you listen to it right to the end, you’ll find that the point of the satire isn’t so much Mosley himself, but the fact that the newspapers all wrote obituaries praising him. Here it is: