Double Down News are another left-wing, alternative news site and agency. In this video, Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi of Jewish Voice for Labour, talks about the abuse and attempts to silence her she and the other left-wing, pro-Palestinian Jews have faced. She describes what a breath of fresh air Jeremy Corbyn was and the hope he gave people like herself, that there would be real change at last after 30 years in the Labour party. She talks about the eminent Jewish academics, who have criticised the establishment’s exclusive concentration on support for Israel as the defining factor in Jewish identity, and the powerful role left-wing Jews like herself have played in combating racism and prejudice all over the world, from the battle against Mosley’s BUF to the American Civil Rights movement and apartheid South Africa.
Anti-Semitic Abuse for Being Pro-Palestine
She begins by describing the abuse she personally got when she was 19 and presented a pro-Palestinian talk at Uni. she was called ‘safe-hating’, ‘the wrong kind of Jew’, ‘anti-Semitic’ and a ‘kapo’. This is especially despicable, as they were the Jewish collaborators with the Nazis in the concentration camps. She is bitterly critical of this type of abuse, not just because it’s especially offensive for people who have really suffered under Nazis and other vicious anti-Semites – she equates it with being called a ‘paedophile’ – but because it also delegitimises the struggle against real Fascists. Here the video shows footage from the notorious Charlottesville Nazi gathering, with the storm troopers of the Alt Right marching along chanting ‘The Jews will not replace us.’ Wimborn-Idrissi’s talk and the abuse she received was covered by the Jewish Telegraph, who put it all on the front page. Which shows you what a despicable, right-wing establishment rag it is.
Heijo Meyer and Israel’s Nazi-like Persecution of the Palestinians
She also gives the real truth about Corbyn’s infamous attendance at the speech given by Heijo Meyer, which was used to pillory Corbyn as an anti-Semite. Of course he’s no such thing, and the video shows images of the greatest prime minister Britain rejected demonstrating against racism, including his arrest for protesting against apartheid. Meyer was a Dutch Holocaust survivor – and the video shows this with Meyer rolling up his sleeve to show the tattoo on his forearm which the Nazis used to mark the inmates of the death camps. Meyer’s was speaking at a Holocaust Memorial Day event. He was describing how the techniques used by the Nazis to dehumanize people like him – Jews – in the camps to enable them to murder them are also being used by Israel against the Palestinians. And what Wimborne-Idrissi says is horrifying is that the parallels are there.
This section of the footage is grim, as it show the Palestinian victims of Israeli aggression – homes in rubble, a disabled person tipped over in their wheelchair by Israeli squaddies, a little girl with horrifically blackened, swollen eyes.
The talk was part of a series of events that also showed other communities had suffered oppression, like the Travellers. But they were shouted down by a very obnoxious, very vociferous group of Zionists. She found it deeply disgusting that these people were trying to shout down and intimidate an eighty year old man, and urged Corbyn to call the rozzers to have them removed. And in fact the fuzz were prevailed upon to do their duty. But unfortunately by that time they’d been successful in drowning out the Travellers, so that people hardly heard a word from them.
The Media Silencing of Left-Wing Jews
Naomi points out that the media refuses give Jews like her a voice. Instead they give space to organisations like the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism as if they were long established and authoritative. There the video show a group waving placards, ‘Labour – For the Many Not the Jew’. This is the mendacious slogan dreamed up by novelist Howard Jacobson when he was in New York. Which is a good and sufficient reason for no-one to buy his books or listen to anything he has to say ever again. It also shows the Beeb’s Kirsty Wark and other journos as an example of this media bias. But Jews have opposed Zionism and Israel for a long time. This is accompanied by images of prominent Jewish critics of Zionism like the awesome Norman Finkelstein and various anti-Zionist Jewish conventions. Some of these are in Black and White, and are of packed, mass meetings. One looks like the Bund. This was the mass socialist party of eastern European Jews. Its slogan was ‘Wherever We Are, That’s Our Homeland’, and they were fiercely anti-Zionist.
She talks about Marek Edelman, one of the heroes of the Warsaw Uprising, who said that ‘to be a Jew is always to side with the oppressed, never the oppressor’. And that was why Jews like her aligned with the oppressed and fought against racism, and why it was just so revolting that their opponents wished to associate Jewry with the type of people they’d always fought against. She tells how the Jewish journalist, Anthony Lerman, has published articles attacking the anti-Semitism smears in the Labour party, and also Kenneth Stern’s criticism of the abuse of the I.H.R.A. definition of anti-Semitism. Stern is the Jewish academic, who formulated it. He meant it to be used in compiling statistics about anti-Semitic abuse. But he is concerned about the way it is being used to silence critics of Israel. He testified on this to Congress, and the video has a clip of his speech. He says he’s worried about the way its being used against Jewish non-Zionist college students and the way organisations are compiling dossiers and passing round opponents on critics of Israel. The anti-Zionist college students should also be heard. This is significant, because I think Stern is himself a Zionist. He’s just a decent man and not a racial fanatic like some of the organisations abusing his definition of anti-Semitism. But unfortunately all you hear are the pro-Israel fanatics. You don’t hear or see anything broadcast or printed by Lerman or Stern, except a few learned articles if you look online.
Fleeing Real Anti-Semitism, and Hope for the Future
She also talks about some of her and her families experiences as refugees from the pogroms and persecutions in eastern Europe, of not fitting because you’re weird with a funny accent. But there has to be hope. Jeremy Corbyn brought 300,000 new people into the party. And an increasing number of a new generation of young Jews, especially in America, are turning away and against Israel.
She concludes by praising Double Down News for giving left-wing Jews like herself a voice, and urges people to support it.
Naomi makes excellent points, and people should hear not just her voice, but the many other Jews like her. She is right to point out, early in the video, that the political and media establishment are anti-Semitic in their attempts to create the impression that Jews constitute a single, monolithic block. That’s what their oppressors have always done.
Unfortunately the media has shown that they have absolutely no intention of giving any space to good peeps like Jewish Voice for Labour, Jewdas and the Jewish Socialist Group. The Beeb, a company which increasingly looks like it has a proud future behind it, has been one of the leaders in pushing the anti-Semitism smears. And it wonders why it comes fifth ranked as trustworthy by the British public, lower even than Channel 5.
The Beeb is reviled as left-wing and ‘woke’ by the Tories and their poodle media because of its anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-homophobic stance, and ’cause they see it as anti-Brexit. But in domestic politics and economics, it’s solidly pro-Tory and pro-Israel. Hence its steadfast refusal to let any other voice be heard, Jewish or gentile, to contradict the anti-Semitism.
But left-wing, sincerely anti-racist folks of all religions and ethnicities have and are waking up to the Beeb’s disgusting bias. Which is why they’re joining the right in switching it off.
If we are going to hear the real truth, it has to come from news sites like Double Down News, Sam Seder’s Majority Report and the David Pakman Show in America, Amy Goodson of Democracy Now! and Abby Martin of Tele Sur, Ash Sarkar of Novara Media and Kerry-Ann Mendoza of The Canary. She’s another anti-racist gentile, who’s been accused of anti-Semitism, despite having a Jewish partner. Seder and Pakman are both Jewish. Seder has described himself as the most Jewish guy you know, and has no time whatsoever for Israel screaming anti-Semitism ever time America cuts its aid budget.
When we hear the truth, more often than not it comes from these broadcasters. Because it surely is not coming from the establishment media.
And now a bit of news from across the Pond. This is a clip from David Pakman, the host of a left-wing news show on the Net. Here he comments on a leaked recording of the ‘White Nationalist’ Richard Spencer going off on a racist rant using extremely ugly words for Jews and people of colour. He calls the latter ‘octoroons’, which Pakman takes to mean Black. It doesn’t quite. It’s an old racist term for a person of mixed-race, who is one-eighth Black. Under the racist legislation of the time, I think these people were still viewed as Black, even though they were mostly White. Rather than simply showing Spencer’s hatred of Blacks, it shows his absolute hatred of anyone with any Black ancestry, or indeed his White opponents. ‘Cause in his demented worldview, anyone who genuinely believes in a multiracial, tolerant society has got to be at least partly Black.
Pakman, who is himself Jewish and so one of the targets of Spencer’s hate, explains why this rant is so important and revealing. Spencer has tried to disassociate himself from gutter racism. In his public appearances he is well dressed, and avoid coarse, ugly racist terminology. He’s a White Nationalist, who wants a White ethno-state, but he wants it all done with respect. He wants a ‘kinder, gentler ethnic cleansing’, as Pakman puts it. If that’s possible. But the rant, with its slurs against Jews and Blacks/ people of mixed race, in which he raves about how people like him owned them, and they saw someone with a face like his looking down on them, explodes all that. It shows the vicious, gutter hatred and racism behind the carefully crafted image.
Pakman interviewed Spencer a few years ago, and says that no-one who was paying attention to that interview would be surprised by this outburst. Because that’s the substance of Spencer’s ideology. The only people who are going to be surprised are those, who were caught out by Spencer image, smart, intelligent and polite. But the rant shows what really underneath.
Ironically, the recording was leaked by Milo Yiannopolis, whom Pakman describes as another right-wing bomb-thrower. Yiannopolis explains that he has done so because he and Spencer have always despised each other. Spencer sees Yiannopolis as another race-mixing Jew – except that he doesn’t use that term, but another racist slur – paedophile, while he has always though of Spencer as a racist in a cheap suit. He claims he has released the recording because Spencer sneaked into a karaoke session when Yiannopolis was singing and, unbeknownst to him, filmed himself making Nazi salutes. Well, that was one of the incidents that helped discredit Yiannopolis. But Yiannopolis was also massively discredited when he appeared on the Joe Rogan Show making comments that appeared to justify paedophilia, as Pakman says.
The leaked recording also shows the type of people the right-wing Zionists are allying themselves with. Spencer has described himself as a ‘White Zionist’ and supporter of Israel, because is the model of the kind of ethno-state he wants to create in the US. A little while ago the wretched Nazi appeared on Israeli TV, explaining his pro-Israel views. His warm reception by right-wing Zionists contrasts with their attacks on genuine anti-racists and opponents of anti-Semitism, like Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters in the Labour party. And Tony Greenstein has put up a number of articles, ad nauseam, showing how the Zionist extreme right has always allied themselves with Nazis and anti-Semites, against liberals and Socialists both Jewish and non-Jewish, who have campaigned for the rights of Jews to live in their traditional homelands, alongside their gentile fellows, in peace, friendship and equality.
Don’t be taken in by either Spencer, or a corrupt Conservative political and media establishment that want you to ignore people like him, and believe their lies that Corbyn and ant-racists like him are the real anti-Semites.
David Pakman is an American YouTube broadcaster and journo, who reports and comments on the news from a generally left-wing, liberal perspective. He’s not a socialist, but because he is highly critical of conservatism, he comes gets mountains of splenetic abuse from the Right. His method of dealing with this is to turn some of the worst into a regular feature on his show. In ‘Hatriot Mail’ a voice artist reads out, in the kind of educated, ‘classy’ tones usually received for discussions of the great works of American political writing, the angry letters he and his co-hosts have received for comic effect. These letters are generally ill-spelled, ungrammatical, stream of consciousness rants by demi-literates. As examples of how deranged, uneducated and moronic the fanatics of the American Right are, they’re hilarious. But the abuse they contain is horrendous. There are attacks on Pakman’s and his co-host’s masculinity, ranging from just calling them wimps and ‘soyboys’ to outright homophobic abuse. Pakman isn’t gay, neither, as far as I know, are his producers and co-hosts. Not that this would be anyone’s business but their own if they were. But nevertheless, the Hatriots rant about how gay they are. Pakman is also Jewish, and was born in Argentina, a fair bit of the abuse he receives is bitterly racist and anti-Semitic. But, because he’s a liberal, he’s also attacked for being a socialist, which to some of the authors of these vile screeds means he must be an anti-Semite himself, as the Nazis were socialist. Because they said so. Pakman himself has refuted that historical distortion, pointing out that by that logic, the Democratic Republic of North Korea is therefore a democracy, along with other examples of nations and organisations claiming to be something that they really aren’t.
Here’s a couple of examples of that section of his programme from YouTube. The first clip, from 2016, contains two letters. The first of this ranting scrawls abuses Pakman for being Jewish and then libels him as a rapist. Oh, and it also claims that Donald Trump is superior to Hillary. In the second, the anti-Semitism is ramped up to full-scale conspiracy level. The writer shrieks that Pakman isn’t really concerned with Trump’s boorish, sexist attitude to women, or that Trump said that many Mexicans were rapists. No, the reason Pakman is against Trump, is because he’s Jewish, and Trump is a threat to Jewish supremacy in the US. That’s why Pakman also supports Hillary: her masters, according to this Nazi, are Jewish.
In the second clip, the letter accuses him of being Nazi and claims that across Europe and America the liberals and socialists are preparing to exterminate the Jews again, all while performing a sex act on their Muslim masters. It ends with the puerile insult ‘You smell!’ Which itself shows all too clearly the infantile level of the writer’s mind. Rather more seriously, it tells him to kill himself and his mother.
Pakman is really cool regarding that vile instruction. He states on the video that he won’t joke about it. Instead, he encourages and advises anyone, who is contemplating suicide to contact a helpline, whose number he gives.
While it’s great how Pakman has turned all this abuse around in his favour, so that his audience can have a hearty laugh at his abusers’ expense, to the point where Pakman is even selling ‘Hatriot Mail’ merchandise, like calendars, this segment of his show does show the poisonous racism and prejudice of part of the American Right. And the anti-Semitism and accusations of anti-Semitism aren’t confined to America, by any means.
Which is why I’ve put it up here.
Because I think it also describes the vile abuse Jewish supporters of the Labour Party and Jeremy Corbyn are going through. I’ve mentioned before the disgusting insults Jackie Walker has received ever since the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism and the Jewish Labour Movement conspired to have her expelled from the Labour party, libeling her, with the full complicity of the British press and media, as an anti-Semite. She’s been told she should be lynched, be killed and her body dumped in a bin-bag among other abusive messages. This is despite the fact that she’s ethnically Jewish through her father, is Jewish by faith, her partner’s Jewish and her daughter attended a Jewish school. And that she has always, following the example of her parents, fought against racism. Tony Greenstein, another passionate opponent of every kind of racism and Fascism, also receives horrific abuse. Because he’s a Jewish critic of Israel, like Jackie, he’s had enraged Zionists call him a ‘traitor’ and say that they wish he and his family had been murdered by the Nazis. One Jewish American even assaulted him, for which he was arrested, not the assailant. And these are just two. Zelo Street put up another piece two weeks ago about the abuse Andrew Feinstein, a Jewish supporter of Jeremy Corbyn, received simply for responding to Telegraph journo Alison Pearson’s smear of the Labour leader. She had libeled him as “an appalling anti-Semite Marxist”. Feinstein’s mother was a Holocaust survivor, and 39 members of her family had been murdered in the Shoah. He himself had experienced anti-Semitism in South Africa. And he himself has lectured at Auschwitz on genocide prevention. Feinstein therefore said that he could ‘state categorically that Jeremy Corbyn is not an anti-Semite’.
This set off the odious David Collier, one of the main witch-hunters and smear artists, and Daniel Sugarman, one of the deadbeat hacks at the Jewish Chronicle, who then began vilifying Feinstein as an anti-Semite, against all the plentiful evidence against. Feinstein responded to the gruesome twosome by challenging them to a debate on anti-Semitism in the Labour party, Holocaust Remembrance and racism. He concluded his series of tweets with them with
“The crazy cowardly reactionary assault on me has only made me more determined to use my family & political history to fight the weaponisation of antisemitism 4 reactionary political ends. I’ll always fight racism in all its forms. Thanks 4 all the support”.
And Zelo Street concluded its article on this squalid episode thus:
It’s sad that Jews who conclude independently that Jeremy Corbyn is not an anti-Semite find themselves under attack for their freely expressed political choice – and castigated for telling that their families were decimated at death camps like Auschwitz and Theresienstadt. And the talking up of seemingly random Twitter accounts as Corbyn-supporting activists is very poor journalism. It almost smacks of desperation.
It smacks of desperation because it is desperate. It’s the reaction of a couple of Zionist fanatics, whose only response to any refutation of their smears is to repeat them and smear their opponent, even when he obviously has an impeccable record of experiencing and combating racism and anti-Semitism. Which is why Feinstein, and Jews like Jackie and Tony are particularly abused and vilified. They are living denials of Zionism’s claim to absolute and uncritical support from the Jewish community, proof that other interpretations of Jewish faith, identity and political commitment are possible by self-respecting Jews.
And like the anti-Semitic abuse and the accusations of Nazism directed at David Pakman, they also show that the real Jew-hatred and prejudice comes from the Right, with the latter now used to discredit the Left.
If this is true, then it’s frightening. It’s another step closer to midnight for the nuclear clock.
In this video from the David Pakman Show, posted yesterday, 20th February 2019, Pakman and his producer, Patrick, report that whistleblowers have gone to the House Oversight Committee, which oversees the ethical conduct of the American government, with evidence that Trump has been transferring nuclear secrets to Saudi Arabia. This has been going on as recently as last week. And it’s not simply hearsay either. They have named the corporations allegedly involved, one of which is IP3. If true, Trump’s actions are possibly illegal. Under the Atomic Act, the president must have the consent of Congress before passing on information which could lead to the construction of a nuclear weapon to a foreign power.
Pakman states that this might make sense of some of the other contacts the Trump administration has had with the Saudis. For example, Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, had made numerous trips there, which may also be connected. Also Michael Flynn, Trump’s former security adviser, now convicted, also made frequent trips there, some of which were not declared, and some of them were in connection with IP3, one of the companies involved in the deal.
Pakman and Patrick also discuss the hypocrisy of the Trump administration in this. Trump accused Hillary Clinton of similarly doing a deal with a foreign power passing on uranium in a quid-pro-quo deal, which was utterly unfounded. They also point out that Trump withdrew from the nuclear treaty with Iran because the Iranian government was a viciously repressive Islamic monarchy which despised its own people. But this is also true of Saudi Arabia.
Trump is already suspected of doing some kind of secret deal with Putin and the Russians. But the House Democrats are trying to expand this to cover other countries as well. Pakman speculates that they may soon need yet another special investigator to look into these allegations.
You have to wonder how corrupt Trump can actually get. At the last count, there were 17 separate legal investigations into him. In terms of sheer corruption he makes Richard Nixon look clean, although so far he hasn’t been personally responsible for as much death and suffering across the globe.
Pakman and his producer aren’t quite right when they describe Iran as a monarchy. It isn’t. It’s a theocracy. The absolute head of state is the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei. However, it does have a democratic component in an elected presidency, even if the law severely restricts the choice of candidate largely to observant Muslims, if not actual members of the ulema, the Islamic clergy.
However, Iran is in some respects more liberal than the Saudis. In Saudi Arabia, any religion other than Wahhabi Islam is illegal. In Iran, the Dhimmis, meaning those monotheist faiths tolerated by Islam since the Prophet Muhammed – Judaism, Christianity and the ancient religion of Iran, Zoroastrianism – are tolerated. Six seats are reserved for them in the majlis, the Iranian parliament. There has been another crackdown and mass arrests of political dissidents recently, and the regime is extremely repressive. Trade unions are banned, and the conditions in the workers’ camps in the oil industry have been compared to concentration camps. But nevertheless, I got the impression that Iran has a greater degree of personal freedom than Saudi Arabia.
There was justifiable alarm at the possibility that Iran may acquire nuclear weapons a few years ago because their last president, Ahmedinejad, was a millennialist. He believed that the end of the world was nigh, and that the Muslim equivalent of the final war between good and evil, similar to Christian End Times belief, was imminent. Just as others have been similarly alarmed at the Christian millennialism of past Republican American presidents, including Ronald Reagan and George ‘Dubya’ Bush, who also believed that the end of the world was coming, and they had to arm America for final battle with the Antichrist.
I haven’t heard any suggestion that the Saudis are also millennialists waiting for the final battle with the as-Salihi al-Dajjal, the figure in Islam corresponding to the Antichrist in Christianity. But5 they are a brutal, genocidal regime. We’ve seen how the Saudis are deliberately targeting and slaughtering civilians in Yemen, including women and children, simply for being Shi’a. And Shi’a Muslims in Saudi Arabia living in villages without running water or electricity, and are forbidden to practice their religion or possess their holy books. And a few years ago, one of the chief Saudi religious authorities – I don’t know whether it was the Sharif of Mecca or the Grand Mufti – declared that the Shi’a were heretics, who were ‘worthy of death’.
There is considerable evidence that the Saudis were behind 9/11, and that the responsibility for the atrocity reached right up to the highest levels. And the current king’s intelligence chief also supported, armed and funded al-Qaeda terrorists and insurgents in Iraq and Syria, not to mention Daesh before they turned on the Saudis themselves, and urged the faithful there to rise up and overthrow the monarchy.
I am as concerned about the acquisition of nuclear technology by Saudi Arabia as I am about its development by Iran. In fact more so, as I think the Iranians were genuine when they said they wanted to develop nuclear power, rather than nuclear weaponry. And if they were to develop nuclear weapons, then it might be simply to protect themselves from American and Saudi attack and invasion.
I am also reminded here of another country that illegally developed nuclear weapons in the Middle East: Israel. They weren’t, and still aren’t, supposed to have them. But the world has turned a blind eye, and the whistleblower there, Mordechai Vanunu, was arrested and has spent something like 17 years in jail. Presumably you’re a horrible anti-Semite if you raise concerns about the Israelis’ possession of a nuclear capability.
Trump should not be passing on nuclear secrets to Saudi Arabia. If this is true, then this threatens further nuclear proliferation in the Middle East, and increases the possibility of an atomic conflict. A horrendous possibility, that could lead to the absolute destruction of all life on our already imperiled, beautiful world.
Get this madman and the other Republican maniacs out of the White House!
I found this clip from the David Pakman Show, reporting that Alex Jones, the main man behind the conspiracy internet show, Infowars, has been accused of being a racist, anti-Semitic, misogynist perv by two former members of staff. One of these is a Black woman, Ashley Beckford, who claims that Jones and other members of senior management leered at her, made comments about her colour, called her ‘coon’ and that she was not given the same terms and conditions as the other members of staff, who weren’t Black. She also claims that she was being groomed for some kind of sexual relationship with Jones, who often appeared shirtless around her.
The other person suing Jones is Rob Jacobson, a Jewish guy, who had worked for Jones for 13 years before he was sacked. He claims that Jones regularly humiliated him because of his Jewish heritage, referring to him as ‘that Jewish individual’ or ‘the resident Jew’, and on occasion pronouncing his name ‘Yakobson’, presumably his attempt to imitate a Yiddish pronunciation.
Pakman, who is himself Jewish, makes fun of Jones, asking rhetorically how anybody could be surprised at these accusations, knowing what a sane individual Jones is. Behind him there’s a video playing of Jones ranting and banging the table like a foam-flecked Hitler on speed. He also jokes about how Jones’ behaviour must have been cause by the ‘male vitality pills’ he tries to flog on his wretched show. There is some good news for Jones, though. His audience are so paranoid and obsessed that everything’s a conspiracy, that they’ll believe this one is too.
His producer here goes on to raise the reasonable point that its doubtful how far these accusations can be trusted. Jacobson was working for him for 13 years before he was sacked, or released, and has only now come forward with these allegations. It might be a case of disgruntled employees trying to hit back at the employer who sacked them.
having said that, Black American women do suffer more from sexual harassment than White Americans, according to an article I read in Counterpunch. There’s a perception that Black women are ‘easy’, and so some White guys harass and sexually assault them, which they would not dare to do to a woman of their own colour.
The section of the video reporting this latest development with Jones and Infowars is relatively short. Most of the video is David Pakman promoting a self-help book. I realise he needs the money from sponsorship, but it is still irritating. Here’s the video:
Remember Sebastian Gorka, who was one of Trump’s key advisers in government, before the Orange Buffoon lost his rag and sacked him, like he’s done to so many others? Gorka was of Hungarian extraction, and had strong links to the Hungarian Far Right. He wore the insignia of the Vitezi Rend, the Hungarian chivalric order set up by Admiral Horthy, the Hungarian dictator, who led the country into a pact with Nazi Germany and assisted them with the Holocaust and deportations of Jews in his country. Gorka has also been personally active in a number of Hungarian Far Right organisations, and was one of the founders of one of them.
Turns out Gorka’s a wanted man. In this clip from the David Pakman Show, host David Pakman and his producer discuss the news that Gorka is wanted for firearms offences in Hungary going back before he became a member of Trump’s cabinet. Gorka has responded to this by making a non-denial. He Tweeted that the warrant was put out after he moved to America, adding ‘moron’ for good, insulting effect. But as they point out, this isn’t actually a denial that he is wanted for these crimes. Pakman also draws parallels of moving to America from South America, where he grew up. It’s perfectly possible that Gorka committed the offences after he emigrated to the US. Just because his primary residence is now the USA, does not mean he hasn’t been back to his family’s old homeland from time to time. Just as it doesn’t mean that because someone lives in California they have never been out of that state.
Pakman and his producer also point out that this also has dire implications for Trump’s claims that he’s hard on immigration and stands for law and order. Well, no, clearly he doesn’t. He claimed he was going to be super-hard on vetting his staff. He clearly wasn’t, otherwise Gorka’s arrest warrant would have been flagged, noted, and he wouldn’t have got the job. On the other hand, perhaps he was, and the Generalissimo of Reality TV didn’t care. Pakman also contrasts Gorka with the Mexican and Hispanic immigrants, who enter America to do physical work, like labouring. This wasn’t the case of a normal immigrant, who actually does something useful, like put in windows, fix the plumbing or mow the lawn. No, Gorka was a criminal immigrant, whom Trump took into the White House itself.
The last minute or so of the clip is a piece of advertising for their sponsors. I’m sorry for this, but I realise that shows like Pakman will only survive by advertising, and need sponsorship. Because Google is desperately trying to close down any left-wing news sites on the spurious grounds of combatting fake news.
As far as Gorka’s unsavoury activities and connections go, I honestly don’t think that Trump cares. He’s surrounded himself with all kinds of deeply unpleasant characters with extreme right-wing views, like Richard Spencer and the Alt Right. A century ago Gorka’s own ethnicity would have been problem for American nativists. Back in the 1920 right-wing American ethnic nationalists really didn’t like immigrants from eastern and southern Europe, like Poles and Hungarians, because they were considered racially inferior. Hitler in his Table Talk remarks that Hungarians are ‘men of the Steppe’, which is sort-of true in that the Magyars had been steppe nomads before the entered the Pannonian March in the 9th/10th century. And the Nazis despised the Poles and other Slavs as racial inferiors. Millions of Poles and related peoples were imported into Nazi Germany to work as slave labour. However, the Nazis strictly outlawed any sexual contact between Germans and Poles as a threat to Aryan racial purity. And if you look at some of the diagrams showing the differences between peoples in Nazi texts, like the handbook given out to the Hitler Youth, they portray the Poles and the other Slavs – Russians, Belorussians, Ukrainians, Czechs, Slovaks, Ukrainians and so on – as having very Asiatic features similar to those of the Chinese and other east Asian peoples.
This racist contempt for the Slavonic peoples was reversed after the War, when the Nazis turned their attention to Black and Asian nationalist movements, and non-White immigration. The Shoah had made anti-Semitism absolutely unacceptable to most people, although in Britain and America groups like the National Front, BNP and the American Nazi Party were still goose stepping around in Nazi uniforms as late as the 1970s. Then the White Nationalists decided that Magyars and particularly Slavs, weren’t subhuman after all, and started actively recruiting them. Hence the re-emergence in these countries of anti-Semitism, now allied with a vicious Islamophobia, amongst a plethora of Far Right parties. And Sebastian Gorka’s inclusion in Trump’s cabinet of horrors, along with other prominent leaders and spokespeople for the racist Right.
Hungarian workers, like the other varied immigrant groups in America and the new, Hispanic immigrants Trump and his supporters despise, contributed greatly to building the American economy. One of the heroes of working class folklore amongst the steelworkers of Pittsburgh, was Hungarian. He became a larger than life figure, similar to Paul Bunyan in the logging camps of the West, and was reputedly able to paddle and splash in superheated molten metal. This came at a time when working people had strong unions, which could demand respect and insist on their rights. All of which has been destroyed by pernicious Reaganomics and the neo-liberal assault on the working and lower middle classes that has followed it.
We need more working class heroes like the immigrant workers, Irish, Chinese, Italian, Slav, Hungarian, and oppressed domestic indigenous groups like Afro-Americans, who physically built America, toiling on its roads, railways and factories. And as Pakman points out, the Hispanic immigrants have proved themselves invaluable in doing dirty jobs no-one else wants to do. In fact, after one town kicked them all out, it then found it had a labour shortage and appealed for them to come back.
What we don’t need, is more far Right racists like Gorka and his domestic counterparts in the Alt-Right, Klan and various Nazi parties.
This is why Google, Facebook and the mainstream media hate left-wing, progressive and Socialist bloggers and vloggers. People are sick of their lies, and know that they’re corrupt. And they say it.
In this clip from The Jimmy Dore Show from July 2016, the American comedian and his guests comment on a clip from a Bernie Sanders rally in Philadelphia. The crowd spontaneously turned towards the section of the stadium where the media were positioned, and chanted ‘the media is corrupt’, while pointing fairly and squarely at them.
Dore makes the point that not only are people fed up with establishment politics and its corruption, they’re also sick of establishment media. ‘How’, he asks rhetorically, ‘can it not be corrupt, when just five guys own it? Five guys!’ As for how the media felt having the crowd turn on them, he speculates that they’re already so soulless they didn’t feel anything. It’s all about money and simply getting on TV, whatever happens. It has nothing to do with presenting the news. It is, in his words, ‘all about selling soap to people’.
And their ears are so stuffed with money that they don’t hear it when the ghosts of Christmas past, present and future come calling. Scrooge should have been like them, and stuffed money in his ears when they turned up in Dicken’s story, A Christmas Carol.
Well, now we’ve seen how the corporate media is reacting to this, both in the US and this side of the Pond. They’re corrupt, they know they’re corrupt, but rather than doing anything about it, like raising standards and actually reflecting what’s important to severely normal citizens, they’re just taking the corporate money and representing the corrupt politicos and their corporate paymasters. It’s just business as usual.
And they way they’re responding to criticism is by trying to drive out and slander the independent media outlets, and the myriad bloggers and vloggers, who are telling it like it is. It’s why YouTube is demonetizing videos by left-wing broadcasters like The Young Turks, Secular Talk, David Pakman and Sam Seder. It’s why Facebook is prioritizing corporate content, to deprive independent bloggers like Mike over at Vox Political of an audience.
It’s why one of the soulless corporate shills from the Groaniad penned a piece last week loftily claiming that corporate media hacks like his paper were the acme of journalistic standards, while all you’d get from the independent media and bloggers like Mike are lies, sloppy reporting and fake news.
Despite the fact that a lot of lies and fake news has always come from the mainstream press.
As for Mike, he’s a qualified journalist, who worked on a series of local papers. He even edited one for a time. Mike cares deeply about what he writes, about professionalism and proper journalistic standards, and checks the accuracy of his stories.
And so do very, very many other bloggers. For example, Another Angry Voice. I don’t know the Angry Yorkshireman’s background, but his pieces are carefully and thoughtfully argued and meticulously footnoted.
And they’re not the only bloggers doing quality journalism on the Net. The disability websites, like DPAC and others are goldmines for information about the government’s attacks on disabled people, and the pseudoscientific nonsense on which the Work Capability Tests are based on. There are thousands, perhaps millions of others, all saying what the corporate, mainstream media, including the Beeb, do not want you to hear.
Support them. Read them, and reblog them if you like what they say. Don’t let them be silenced.
Donald Trump has alarmed scientists and laypeople with the anti-science stance of his administration. They’re alarmed at legislation he’s passed allowing the teaching of evolution and climate change as fact to be challenged in schools, who may also be compelled to teach Creationism and present the arguments of the lobbyists in the oil industry that deny the reality of climate change.
Trump’s comments about space also appear to have caused serious pain to Apollo 11 astronaut, Buzz Aldrin. Aldrin is a genuine American hero. He was the second man to step out on the Moon after Armstrong. He was deeply religious. A devout Roman Catholic, her age himself Holy Communion while on the lunar surface, but afterwards became more ‘New Age’ in his beliefs. He has also been a committed champion of America’s space programme and of opening up the High Frontier to ordinary folks.
In this clip, David Pakman discusses the very pained expressions crossing the old flyboy’s face at Trump’s rambling speech. Trump was passing legislation supposed to reaffirm and strengthen the American space programme. It’s clear from his comments that Trump himself actually doesn’t have a clue about space. At one point, after he signs the piece of legislation, one of his aides remarks ‘To infinity and beyond!’
This, of course, is the watchword of Toy Story’s Buzz Lightyear. However, Trump fails to recognise the quote, and thinks it’s about the law, commenting, ‘It is infinity. Well, it could be infinity.’
And when Trump does for a moment appear to understand what he’s talking about, it’s actually quite sinister. At one point he starts talking about how space exploration will benefit American industry.
Well, space does indeed have the potential to benefit industry. There are substances, such as ultra-pure crystals, that are difficult to create on Earth, but can be made much more easily in microgravity. But that’s not what Trump’s talking about.
What the Orange Buffoon is talking about is how good space will be for American defence contractors, which raises the horrendous issue of the militarisation space, which is prohibited under international law.
Pakman comments about how, after his immense achievement in landing on the Moon, and then having his patience tested by a conspiracy theorist, who challenged him with the statement that he hadn’t really gone to the Moon, the 87-year old spaceman now looks as though he’s really in physical pain at Trump’s incoherent speech.
Unlike the conspiracy theorist, Trump did actually walk away from his meeting with Aldrin. The challenge to the old astronaut’s integrity and achievement was too much for him to bear, and he decked the offender. Clearly, Aldrin has too much respect for the presidency to hit its current incumbent. But it seems very clear Trump’s ignorance was a bit too much for him.
Here’s another threat to liberty in the UK: the further expansion of the massive surveillance state erected by New Labour and the Tory-Lib Dem coalition.
After the terrible atrocity in Manchester last week, Theresa May and the Tories demanded greater regulation of the internet in order to crack down on terrorism. At first, this doesn’t look too unreasonable. ISIS and al-Qaeda before it have disseminated their propaganda through the Net. Several British converts, including the stupid schoolgirls, who ran off to the Middle East to be jihadi brides, were drawn to the terrorists through the loathsome beheading videos these butchers put out.
However, there are dangers as well. Further regulation means that the state has greater powers to spy on all of us, and presents a danger to free speech and conscience generally.
In this clip from the David Pakman Show, Pakman and his producer, Patrick Ford, point out the dangers of such legislation. They cite the intelligence whistleblower, Edward Snowden, who made the point that despite the massive expansion in the American surveillance state after 9/11, there is no evidence that the increased policing of the net prevented further terrorist attacks. They also ask their audience to imagine what would happen, if a generation arose, who believed climate change did not exist because all references to it had been scrubbed from the Net, or if the government used its regulation of the Web to whip up support for another war.
Pakman and Ford state clearly that they are afraid we Brits are going down the same road America went down after the attack on the Twin Towers.
Pakman and Ford are absolutely right to be very worried about this. Blair stood for the expansion of the surveillance state in Britain before 9/11, as did John Major, the Tory prime minister before him. And privacy and civil liberties groups have been extremely worried about this intrusion into the lives and private matters of innocent citizens and the threat it poses to genuine freedom.
The terror attack in Manchester was just the latest pretext to take more of our freedoms away. A few years ago it was the threat of paedophilia and pornography. Tom Pride, of Pride’s Purge, found that some of his readers were finding it difficult to view him, because their internet provider had decided that his blog was ‘adult’ and so not suitable for children. The blog is indeed adult, but only in the sense that it’s a political blog, dealing with an adult topic. Which sometimes involves very forthright language from Mr Pride. But it certainly ain’t porn, and its blocking – and those of similar left-wing blogs – looked very much like an attempt by the Tories and their Lib Dem enablers to clamp down on left-wing bloggers.
Just as YouTube has taken the campaign against fake news as the opportune to demonetise left-wing vloggers. This will force left-wing news programmes off YouTube by denying them the advertising money they need to support them.
Britain has some of the harshest anti-terror legislation in Europe. Thanks to Blair, Cameron and Clegg, British law now provides for secret courts, where you can be tried without knowing the precise charges, the evidence against you, or who your accuser is, and where the press and the public are excluded, if the government decides that a normal, public trial would be a threat to national security.
As I’ve pointed out time and again, this is the travesty of justice the great Czech writer, Kafka, described in his book The Trial and The Castle, and which became horrific realities in Nazi Germany and Stalinist USSR.
As Pakman and Ford point out, no-one is arguing that governments shouldn’t have the tools they need to prevent terrorism. But this should not mean a further erosion of civil liberties.
I believe we are very much at that point now.
Don’t let May use the terror attacks to create a totalitarian surveillance state, where the only material allowed on the Net is right-wing, Tory propaganda.
Vote Labour on June 8th for a sensible approach to terrorism.
After Sunday’s terror attack on London, Donald Trump responded with a disgusting Tweet sneering at Sadiq Khan, the capital’s mayor. Trump said
At least 7 dead and 48 wounded and Mayor of London said “there is no reason to be alarmed.”
The Orange Buffoon then followed this with
Pathetic excuse by London Mayor Sadiq Khan who had to think fast on his “no reason to be alarmed” statement. MSM is working hard to sell it!
In fact, Mayor Khan was misquoted. He has said London is the safest city in the world, but that’s a relative statement. It does not mean, and he made it clear that it did not mean, that there was no danger.
This would, of course, be lost on Trump, a political opportunist, islamophobe and general numbskull, who would not recognise the important point, and distinction, Khan made.
Mike over at Vox Political has asked the vital question of why his state visit should be allowed to go ahead, when he can’t even show proper respect to our capital’s mayor?
And Theresa May has added insult to injury – and shown her similar lack of backbone – by failing to rebut Trump’s slur. In a press conference, May was asked something like five times if she would had or would criticise Trump for his statement. She didn’t. Instead, she went on about how Mr Khan is ‘doing a good job.’ You can see the transcript and video of this over at Mike’s blog, as well as reading the disgusted Tweets against May’s cowardice that followed.
I will say one thing in May’s favour: she did at least acknowledge that Khan was doing a good job. But the fact that she hasn’t condemned Trump’s remarks, as the Tweeters like Owen Jone, Tom London, and others Mike has reblogged, have said, shows she isn’t fit to be Prime Minister.
Isobel Tweeted
Sadiq Khan is the Elected Mayor of London, May is an insult to her office, we have no space in the UK for Trump who insults or elected Mayor.
Mike’s article concludes
This is the will of the country.
We don’t want our government to welcome a US President who insults us after we have been attacked.
And we certainly don’t need a prime minister who won’t condemn the man who utters such an insult.
Trump’s sneering attack on the man the people of London chose as their mayor doesn’t surprise me. A week ago after the Manchester terror attack the conspiracy theorist, Alex Jones, sneered at the young victims of that atrocity as ‘liberal trendies’, many of whom ‘supported open borders to let the Islamicists’ in. He later repeated the slur, stating that they had ‘run the white flag up’ to Islamicists.
Jones has given his unswerving support to Trump, and had him several times on his programme, Infowars, when Trump was campaigning for the presidency. Jones has claimed that the US government orchestrated the Oklahoma bombing, the 9/11 attacks and that the kids killed in the Sandy Hook school shooting were actors. He claims that the incident was faked so that the American government could bring in greater gun controls.
He also believes that real babies are sacrificed to Satan at occult ceremonies attended by the global elite in Bohemian Grove; that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama were satanically possessed, and that Barack Obama was going to have everyone incarcerated in FEMA camps.
In the clip below from The David Pakman Show, Pakman and his producer discuss Jones’ smears and the fact that Infowars has been given a press pass to attend Trump’s meetings. Pakman makes the point that one of the victims of the Manchester suicide bomber was an eight year old girl. How was this innocent child a ‘liberal trendie’?
Of course, Jones is an islamophobe, who believes that Britain has surrendered to Muslims by passing legislation outlawing hate speech. He thinks this makes it illegal to criticise Islam.
It doesn’t. You can still criticise Islam, just as you can any other religion or ideology. Or at least, you should. What you can’t do is spread hate against Muslims simply for being Muslims.
Now there are extremists within the Muslim community, who do want to stop criticism of Islam. The people demonstrated against Salman Rushdie’s book, The Satanic Verses in the 1980s, Mohammed Akhtar, Kalim Saddiqui and the rest, did want to make blasphemy against Islam an offence in British law. And there have been riots and screams for the deaths of those Muslims believed had blasphemed against their religion around the world. One of those, whose beheading was demanded by the bigots and the fanatics, was the previous pope after he quoted a medieval Byzantine emperor’s views on Islam.
But the legislation the British government introduced was designed to protect innocent Muslims from attack by racists and xenophobes, simply for their faith, when they were normal, peaceable people. It was designed, not to surrender to the Islamists and bigots, but to stop them creating the hatred and division they wish to exploit to radicalise more Muslims.
Jones doesn’t recognise this, and so he thinks we’re soft on them. And he’s not alone. There are plenty of extremely right-wing Republicans, who believe the same. And it looks very much like Trump is one of them. Hence the sneers.
Given these sneers from Trump and Jones, and Trump’s own vicious islamophobia, it would be an injustice and a mistake to let him enter the country on a state visit.
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