Do Immigrants Come Here to Sponge Off the Welfare State? Or Simply Looking for Work and Opportunities?

This is a response to a video posted up today on YouTube by Simon Webb of History Debunked. I’ve posted up a number of his videos because I think he does have a point when it comes to some of the bad history, if not plain myths and fabrications that are being retailed as sound, authoritative Black History. I’ve been criticised for some of this by some of great commenters on this channel, who take issue with some of his views and believe he had an agenda. And they’re right. Webb is a right-wing, Telegraph-reading Tory, some of whose views are deeply suspect if not actually abhorrent. He believes in the ‘Bell Curve’ nonsense that says that Blacks are intellectually inferior to Whites, who are in turn inferior to Asians. Interestingly, the American Conservative Thomas Sowell, who is no supporter of affirmative action programmes, consigns that one to the bin in a video about the myths surround Black education. This states that the fall in Black scholastic achievement has been so sudden that even the writer of the Bell Curve said it could not be explained by genetic factors. He also put up a video stating he didn’t want a wave of eastern European refugees coming to this country, and has posted pieces about the deportation of immigrants and defending Enoch Powell. Today he posted a video discussing Milton Friedman’s pronouncement that you couldn’t have unlimited immigration and a welfare state.

Yeah, that Milton Friedman. The Chicago economist who believed in absolute free markets and wanted to privatise everything and end the welfare state. The man who supported General Pinochet, the former dictator of Chile, because the Fascist butcher was a follower of his wretched economic doctrines. The man who supported Fascist coups, because the masses were so much in favour of the welfare state that they would never vote into power politicians who would destroy them. The Milton Friedman who cursed the world with Monetarism before that spectacularly showed itself to be a colossal failure in the late 1980s-early ’90s. I see absolutely no reason why any sensible or decent person should take Friedman and his views at all seriously.

Webb seems to believe that the welfare state is under pressure because of continued mass immigration. This brings to this country waves of the global poor, who must be fed, clothed and housed with the resources of the welfare state. But people cannot afford to pay the additional taxes required to fund this, hence the welfare state and the NHS are under considerable pressure and near collapse.

Now he’s right in that very many immigrants to this country are extremely poor, especially those from outside Europe. Hence the demands for specific policies and welfare expenditure for Blacks and ethnic minorities. But his video seems to assume that extra-European immigrants really come here to sponge off the welfare state. That’s certainly the impression you get from the Tory propaganda regurgitated by the right-wing press. But is it true?

I honestly don’t think so. In fact the reality may be the complete opposite. I don’t believe that all of the immigrants arriving here are simply refugees seeking asylum. But I don’t think they’re here to sponge off the welfare state either. I think many come here seeking better opportunities and jobs. Years ago I tried doing a postgraduate degree on Islam in Britain. I had to give it up, but not before I’d done some reading about Islam, history and immigration. One of the books I bought was a series of potted biographies of people from the Middle East from the early 19th century to the present day, their lives illustrating the wider history, conflicts and issues affecting the region and its peoples. One of these was of a Moroccan immigrant to the Netherlands. This man had immigrated to Europe simply looking for work. There wasn’t any available in his native country. The immensely profitable fig groves were all owned by wealthy and powerful landowners, who kept outsiders out. There were also little jobs in manufacturing, as Moroccans preferred to buy foreign goods from countries like Italy. And so it was left to him and others like him to come to Europe searching work. He was scathing about European attempts to limit immigration, as when he had first arrived in the 1970s employers, such as the one he worked for in Germany, were so desperate for labour that they gave out the necessary forms there and then.

I’ve also read that it’s immigrant labour which also contributes disproportionately to the tax burden. They tend to work in poorly paid jobs that we wouldn’t normally take, and don’t take as much time off or rely so much on the welfare state, contrary to what the Tories allege. But claiming that they do serves the purpose of whipping up hatred against them and allowing the Tories a pretext for cutting welfare benefits. Because you don’t want all that money spent on foreign scroungers. But as Tony Benn said, how the government treats immigrants shows how it would also like to treat native Brits. And this has been born out by the expansion of food banks. These were set up after Tony Blair stopped illegal immigrants from being eligible for state benefits. Then the Tories under Cameron and Iain Duncan Smith decided that they would be whizzo for keeping native Brits from starvation – just – if they took their benefits away through sanctions and increased legislation designed to restrict eligibility. Because the poor are also scroungers, at least to the editors of papers like the Meil, Depress and Torygraph.

As for problems funding the NHS and the welfare state, these exist not because of asylum seekers, but because the Tories have massively cut expenditure in order to give massive tax cuts to the rich. While shifting the tax burden to the poor. And in the case of the NHS, it’s also being done to prepare for its privatisation. It has zip to do with the burden of caring for extra people through immigration.

I think there are problems with mass immigration, not least that of separate, parallel communities. But I don’t believe that people are coming to this country because of the welfare state.

If they are not coming here seeking refuge and sanctuary from persecution, it seems to me that they are coming here to work. Anything else is just right-wing propaganda.

A Corbyn Government Would Have Defended People’s Rightful British Citizenship

This week the Tories once again took away more of the British people’s hard-won freedoms with the Nationality and Borders bill, proposed by Dominic Raab and the noxious Priti ‘Vacant’ Patel. This allows the government to strip a naturalised Brit of their citizenship, without giving notice to the person concerned. It follows the 2002 act that allowed the government to strip someone of British nationality so long as they had another. Then there’s the 2014 Immigration Act, pushed through by Tweezer when she was home secretary, that allows the government to strip someone of their citizenship, even if it left them stateless, so long as they could apply to another country for theirs. The Home Office decided that notifying the person affected could be done simply by putting it in their file if their whereabouts were unknown. The High Court ruled that this was insufficient, and so Patel has including legislation exempting the process from judicial review. Which has been described by Ian Dunt at inews as retrospective legislation denying people their right to appeal. It doesn’t matter how long the naturalised person has been here. They could have been here their entire lives, Patel and Raab can still strip them of their British nationality. This has been excused on the pretext that it would stop foreign criminals using human rights legislation to avoid deportation, particularly under the legislation protecting ‘the right to family life’. This is another Tory lie. Mike has pointed out that no foreign criminal has ever dodged deportation using that clause. The effect of the act is to turn immigrants into second-class citizens. This has chilling implications for the rest of us, because what Tony Benn said was true: the Tories start their attacks on people’s rights with immigrants before moving on to the settled population. But as this appears to target Blacks, Asians and channel migrants, it will inevitably be supported by racists.

It’s alarmed very many people. The increased restrictions on immigration have been criticised by a number of Jewish organisation, including Reform Judaism. They have stated that Jews who fled to Britain in the 1930s were not protected in 2021. According to Zelo Street, the Board of Deputies has expressed similar concerns. But Zelo Street has also pointed out that Patel’s and Raab’s wretched legislation particularly affects Jews because of Israel’s ‘Right of Return’. According to this, all Jews everywhere have the right to settle in Israel. Benjamin Netanyahu went further, and declared that every Jew around the world automatically had Israeli citizenship. This didn’t impress the growing number of Jews critical of Israel and its persecution of the Palestinians. One Jewish American said on the Net how ridiculous it was that he, who came from Anchorage in Alaska and had never been to Israel, had the right to settle their, while his friend, a Palestinian, was banned from entering his homeland. And the Israeli state certainly seems to share this sentiment when it comes to The Wrong Kind of Jews. There have been a number of instances where Jews, who have voiced criticisms of Israel, have been very quickly rounded up by the Israeli authorities and put on the next flight home when they’ve tried to enter the country. It’s obviously a case of all Jews being citizens of Israel, except for those that aren’t.

But the effect of Netanyahu’s wretched piece of legislation combined with Patel’s and Raab’s is that any Jew, who gained their British citizenship through naturalisation can now be stripped of it, as there is somewhere else they can go. The Street notes that despite all the screams about Corbyn and anti-Semitism, in reality genuine anti-Semitism comes from the far right. And this is the direction in which this government is moving. The Street concludes

‘That may not be the current intention of Ms Patel and her pals. But, with the certainty of night following day, after they come for the Muslims, the far-right come for the Jews.

And the far-right have now been quietly emboldened. Be afraid. Be very afraid.’

https://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2021/12/borders-bill-and-anti-semitism.html

Absolutely. But one other thing may be said about this vile piece of legislation and Britain’sJ ewish community:

It would never have been passed by a Corbyn government and Jews would have been protected.

Corbyn was never an anti-Semite. Indeed, he is one of the most anti-racist MPs and has spoken up in the House and elsewhere in support of the Jewish community. He was simply critical of Israel and its persecution of the Palestinians. But the militant Zionists, who denounced him and his supporters as Jew-haters don’t distinguish between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. As a result, Britain has been denied a government, which would have actively defended the rights of Jews alongside other ethnic groups. Instead we have an increasingly extreme right-wing Tory government, which is taking those rights away, alongside those of the mainstream, White, gentile population.

And unfortunately, this is a government that has the support of those who claim to represent Britain’s Jews. When Tweezer got in, she was congratulated by the Chief Rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis. Who was one of those pushing the anti-Semitism smears against Labour. Now, partly thanks to this smear campaign, British Jews are left vulnerable to real anti-Semitic persecution. All done perfectly legally by the next racist, who fancies his or her chances as the new Oswald Mosley.

The BUF also had women members, who used to go out goose-stepping to defend Britain from Communism. I wonder if Patel’s wardrobe contains the odd black shirt and jackboots?

Labour and Trade Union Staffers Trying to Protect Anti-Black and Asian Racists

Here’s another scandal that’s erupted in the wake of the leak of the damning report showing how the Blairite faction in the Labour party deliberately intrigued against Corbyn and left-wing MPs and activists, even to the point of working for a thrown election. Now elements in the party and the union, GMB, are trying to protect anti-Black and Asian racists.

Mike put up a piece on Thursday reporting that the suppressed document also stated that the Black MPs, Diane Abbott, Dawn Butler and Clive Lewis, had been victims of racism and racial profiling. A video conference meeting apparently confirmed this, supporting a motion that said that the report had highlighted damning examples of casual workplace racism at the highest levels of the party, and showed how racism against Black, Asian and ethnic minority members were ignored. The meeting called for letters of solidarity to be sent to Abbott, Butler and Lewis.

This was, however, blocked by Labour Party staffers, with one staffer named in the report claiming that it didn’t happen, and to send the letters would be an admission of guilt. Gabriel Pogrund, the Sunday Times hack who libeled Mike as an anti-Semite and Holocaust denier, further reported that a motion was put before the Labour Branch of the union GMB demanding that General Secretary Jennie Formby should personally apologise to the members named in the report. Furthermore, Unison general secretary Dave Prentis also promised his protection to two of his senior staffers named in the report as plotting against Corbyn. They’re probably Emilie Oldknow and John Stolliday.

Mike in his article asks if these are the same people, who were happy to demand the persecution and expulsion of left-wing members, like Mike, because of false press reports. He states that if so, they are not acting in good faith and their memberships should already have been suspended. He also asks whether it’s time for vote of ‘no confidence’.

See: https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2020/04/16/responses-to-leaked-labour-report-shows-the-party-and-unions-must-kick-out-the-racists/

This squalid incident shows the double standard within the Labour party and wider society between racism towards Jews and people of colour. Tony Greenstein has pointed out in his incisive critiques of the anti-Semitism smears how racism against Jews is given a higher profile and harsher condemnation than that against Blacks and Asians. Jews are generally less subject to racist abuse and assault. They are not subject to stop and search, nor targeted for deportation. They aren’t rounded up to be put on flights to supposed countries of origin, which they may never have seen in their lives, like the Windrush migrants. At the other end of the political spectrum, Times parliamentary sketch writer Quentin Letts has made a very similar point. In his book Bog-Standard Britain, Letts argues that there is a hierarchy of respect and power of minorities. Jews are either at the top, or near to it. Blacks, Asians and Muslims lower down or at the bottom.

Some of this inequality can be explained as an entirely understandable reaction to the Holocaust. This has made anti-Jewish racism far less acceptable. It’s also perhaps due to the fact that the traditional European Jews are White and highly assimilated. The Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment of the 18th and 19th century, was a reform movement within Judaism that attempted to adapt Jewish culture so that Jews could also participate in wider European society. The result of this has been that most European Jews are highly integrated. Except when wearing traditional Jewish garb, such as the kippah, most British Jews look, dress and behave exactly like their gentile compatriots. And they’re largely accepted by the great mass of British society as fellow Brits. Tony Greenstein stated that the majority of anti-Semitic abuse and violence was directed against Orthodox Jews, who obviously still retain a distinctive dress and are therefore ‘other’ in a way that Liberal and Reform Jews are not.

Class also plays a large part. Tony has also stated that 60 per cent of the British community is middle or upper middle class. They are therefore economically important and socially respectable in a way that other demographic groups are not.

This contrasts with Blacks and Asians, who are marked as different through their skin colouring. While Blacks and some Muslims have been present in Britain and western Europe from the Middle Ages, the majority are recent immigrants to these shores. Large sections of these communities have a distinctive dress and language, and are therefore more radically other than indigenous Jewish Brits. They are also more likely to be poorer and less well educated, and were used over here as cheap labour. These are generalisations, of course, and you can find exceptions to them. Chinese and Indians are like to be as affluent, educated and occupying the same ranks in the social hierarchy as Whites. Working class White boys are far less likely than the children of ethnic minority background to get good grades at school and progress to university. Blacks and Asians have also suffered their own holocausts, such as slavery and the Bengal famine of the War years, when Churchill ordered the sequestration of grain as backup supplies for British troops. The result was an estimated death toll of 2-6 million. Churchill refused to release the grain to feed the starving Indians, and blamed it on them having too many children. His attitude shocked many British officers and colonial administrators, who explicitly compared it to the Nazis.

But these atrocities are historic, and many of them took place far away from Blighty, so that the majority of Brits have never heard of them. Slavery was officially abolished in the British Empire in 1837, although the infamous ‘Coolie Trade’ in indentured Indian labourers continued into the 20th century. The result is that racism towards Blacks and Asians is far more acceptable than anti-Semitism.

Which means that the people determined to unseat Corbyn were able to exaggerate the extent of real anti-Semitism in the Labour party for a right-wing political and media establishment to present as evidence that the Labour leader was a real, existential threat to Jews when he was absolutely nothing of the sort.

And now it seems that right-wing elements in the party are demonstrating their double standards by denying that anti-Black and Asian racism exists, and seeking to defend and protect those guilty.

Whatever they do, they’re still racists. They should be held to account and expelled, not apologised to.

 

Song Spoofing Nigel Farage: ‘I’m Gonna Tell 500 Lies’

Here’s another piece of highly political pop from YouTube, this time courtesy of the Joe channel. It’s a Cassetteboi style piece in which various clips of Nigel Farage have been carefully edited and spliced together to make him look stupid. Very stupid. In this instance, it’s to make it appear that he’s singing about all the lies he’s told people about Brexit and immigration now that he’s founded yet another anti-EU party, the Brexit Party.

The song’s a version of the Proclaimer’s ‘500 Miles’, called ‘(I’m Gonna Tell) 500 Lies’, and begins with a shot of parliament, full of Nigel Farage, where one of them holds up a piece of paper saying ‘He’s lying to you’ with an arrow pointing to another Nigel Farage. The lyrics run

When you wake up, well you know I’m gonna be, I’m gonna be the man who sold a lie to you. And when we go out,well you know I’m gonna be the man who acts as Putin’s fool. When you’re suffering, well you’ll know I’ll never be the man who’s suffering with you. And if you’re Muslim, or a Syrian refugee, then you’re not welcome in my outright UKIP coup. ‘Cos I would tell 500 lies and I would tell 500 more just to stoke up hate and xenophobic bile until we’re out the door. And if you’re working, well you know there’s gonna be, there’s gonna be all sorts of low-paid work for you. Because the migrant, who does the work that you won’t do has been deported and they’re back in the EU. If you’re a patient, with medication overdue remember I’m the reason why it can’t get through. Then when you’re hospitalised, no-one’s there to care for you ‘cos half the nursing staff have been deported too. So chew on that because there’ll be no f***ing food.

Then as the music carries on without any further vocals, there are captions explaining that Farage has stood for election to the House of Commons seven times since 1994, and has never been successful. He was first voted as leader of UKIP in 2006 and has campaigned for Brexit ever since. And it still hasn’t happened.

Which shows that he’s a failure as well as racist bigot.

Unfortunately, the song is correct about the terrible results we can expect from Brexit. There is a shortage of nursing and other medical staff thanks to Brexit, and it is predicted that there will be problems obtaining supplies of medicine and food. Indeed, the press reported that Tweezer was setting up a special government committee to tackle this. And Brexit has stoked up massive racial prejudice against Muslims and Syrian asylum seekers as well as migrant workers from the EU.

I very much doubt that the Brexit party will get anywhere electorally, but Brexit and the parties promoting it – UKIP and the Eurosceptic wing of the Tories – are badly damaging Britain, harming its economy, the health service and the welfare of non-White citizens and migrant workers.

They have to be voted out, and a proper anti-racist government put instead. A government headed by Jeremy Corbyn, who, despite the lies, is one of the most anti-racist politicos in Britain’s parliament.

 

Jewish Comics Artist Eli Valley Attacks the ‘Kapo’ Insult Hurled by Zionists

It must be the week for comics and the Israel lobby. This time last week the bug-eyed Zionists of JVLWatch tried again to smear Mike as an anti-Semite using his ‘Hardboiled Hitler’ strip from Violent. Violent is Mike’s small-press homage to the 1970s comic, Action, which caused outraged and ended up being banned because of its violent content. In ‘Hardboiled Hitler’, Mike satirizes the Fuehrer, presenting him as a superhero, who is nevertheless a grotesque, posturing, inept, flatulent clown. The flatulence is entirely historically accurate. Hitler suffered from meteorism – chronic flatulence. Apparently it got very loud and nasty when he was in full rant. JVLWatch, whoever they are, tried to present the strip as a glorification of the Nazi regime and that the poisonous clouds surrounding Hitler represented the gas chambers used to murder the Jews. They weren’t. The noxious fumes surrounding Hitler all came from the Fuehrer’s bottom, and very definitely didn’t make him look at all heroic or glamorous. Various newspapers have also tried to make the same claim that Mike’s anti-Semitic using the strip. And as Mike says, when he complained to the press-regulator IPSO about them, the regulator dismissed their claims out of hand.

On Tuesday Tony Greenstein put up on his blog a page of art by the American left-wing Jewish comic artist and writer, Eli Valley, published in Jewish Currents, attacking the ‘Kapo’ insult. The Kapos were the heads of the Warsaw ghetto under the Third Reich. The Nazis cruelly delegated to them the responsibility of choosing which of their community should be sent to the extermination camps, which they did under duress. If the leaders refused, the SS would have attacked and killed everyone there.

Since then it’s become an insult the Israel lobby hurls at those Jews, who criticize Israel and Zionism for its crimes against the Palestinians. In the page reproduced by Greenstein, Valley turns the insult around and hurls it back at them, showing how the Zionists deserve the epithet far more than the people they slander. He explains how he was once attacked in this way by the editor of the Jewish magazine, Commentary, because he published a story about a Jew’s crisis of conscience after Israeli settlers burned alive a Palestinian child. The current Israeli ambassador to Israel also used it against the centre-left Jews of J-Street. He goes on to make the point that the Israeli right believe that the lessons of the Holocaust are that gentiles will always hate Jews, who must survive by any means necessary. That means attacking as treason even objection to the most Fascistic forms of Israeli nationalism. Hence Netanyahu joined demonstration attacking Yitzhak Rabin as a Nazi.

But to Valley, the real Kapos are the supporters of Trump and Netanyahu, the people who support Trump’s separation of immigrant children from their parents in his own concentration camps on the Mexican border. He shows the similarity between recent American immigrants, who have committed suicide fearing deportation, and those Jews who did the same in Franco’s Spain fearing that they would be sent back to the Third Reich. He also attacks the Orthodox Union for its award to Trump’s politico, Jeff Sessions. American Jews, he argues, have forgotten the other lesson of the Holocaust, that atrocities like this should never again happen to anyone, anywhere, ever again.At the heart of this problem is the way the Jewish community has allowed Jewish identity to be defined by a mainly Zionist, Orthodox right-wing minority. The result is that the Jewish community has internalized this view, and sees themselves through its lens. Hence when Jews declared that they felt ashamed to be Jewish after Israeli snipers killed over a hundred Gazans, this showed that they had accepted the belief that only Israel embodied authentic Jewish values. The strip concludes by that Jews need to take control of the vernacular to express the values they share, and use it to excommunicate people like arch-Zionist Trump supporter, Sheldon Adelson. Valley concludes by comparing them to the real Kapos, who had no choice about their collaboration with the Nazis. He states of the Zionists and other Jews supporting Trump ‘Kapo doesn’t begin to plumb the depths of their betrayal.’

It’s strong stuff which makes an excellent point, particularly because of Trump’s own connections to and support for the genuine anti-Semites of the extreme right. Greenstein also provides a link in his article to the webpages for Valley and his work. Valley’s published a collection of his strips from over the years, Diaspora Boy, in which he attacks right-wing abuse and corruption in the Jewish community and wider American society. The webpages also have samples of his work. And along with the critical praise is a quotation from a very offended person, who felt that it shouldn’t have been published anywhere. Valley’s been compared to Robert Crumb, but that’s not quite right. His view of society and humanity is as bleak and vicious as Crumb’s, but his style is more like that of Charles Burns in his 1990s alternative comic, Skin Deep.

Greenstein also adds more awkward facts to support Valley’s view of Zionists as the real Kapos. Like the Ha’avara agreement between the Nazis and Israel in 1933 that broke the international Jewish boycott of Nazi Germany and the suppression of the Auschwitz Protocols by Hungarian Zionist Erich Kasztner in order to preserve a treaty between them and the Nazis. He describes how the founder of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, came to believe that anti-Semitism was inevitable and couldn’t be fought when he was in France during the Dreyfus scandal. Hence the head of the Israeli Labor Party, Avi Gabbay, told American Jews that the real place was in Israel after the Pittsburgh massacre on Saturday. And how Berl Katznelson, the founder of the Israeli party Mapai, declared the Nazi seizure of power in 1933 was an opportunity for the Jews to build and flourish as never before, at a time when the rest of German Jewry were preparing to protest. This is also the reason why Ben Gurion opposed the Kindertransport evacuating Jewish children from Nazi Germany to Britain, because they wouldn’t be taking them to Israel. As for the real Kapos, Greenstein writes

The kapos were themselves prisoners who were destined for extermination. They had no control over their situation and their collaboration, if that is what it was, was forced. Who knows what any of us would do in such a situation? The Jewish Agency was under no such compulsion yet it willingly collaborated lobbying the Gestapo not to allow Jewish emigration to countries other than Palestine.

He then goes on to discuss the way members of the Fascist right, like Britain First, are accusing genuine anti-racists of racism, and how the National Front and BNP try to present themselves as protecting British Whites from Black racism. He also mentions how Zionists frequently tell their Jewish opponents that they wish they and their families had died in the Holocaust. One of the victims of this vile abuse was Aurora Levins Morales, a Black Jewish New Yorker.

He also attacks James Dyer, a Christian Zionist and member of the Sussex Friends of Israel – a group that’s also close to the EDL – who called him a ‘Kapo’. He goes on to connect him to Christian millennialist support for Zionism, which believes that the foundation of Israel is part of the End Times. Before Christ returns, however, the world will suffer a great tribulation. And in the Book of Revelation this will result in the destruction of the vast majority of Jews, except a small number who convert to Christianity. One of the most prominent Right-wing American Christian leaders is Jack Hagee, the head of Christians United for Israel, who also believes that Hitler did God’s work. He’s one of the two pastors Trump has appointed as ambassadors to Israel. He goes on to connect this with Christian anti-Semitism during the Third Reich, such as the German Lutheran church’s installation of the pro-Nazi bishop, Ludwig Muller as Reich Bishop, and Monsignor Tiso, the Roman Catholic prelate in Slovakia who presided over the deportations to the death camps there. He concludes

It is therefore no surprise that today the successors of Muller and Tiso are to be found supporting the Zionists and decrying any notion of Palestinian rights. It is even less of a surprise that they assuage their consciences with the taunt of ‘Kapo’.

http://azvsas.blogspot.com/2018/11/kapo-anti-semitic-insult-that-zionists.html

To be fair to Hagee, he’s not the only person, who believed that Hitler did God’s work. Apart from Hitler himself, I think Holocaust survivor and acclaimed author Elie Wiesel also stated that Hitler was God’s servant, based on the way God in the Old Testament uses foreign invaders like the Assyrians and Babylonians to punish Israel before punishing them in turn. Wiesel, incidentally, was certainly no self-hating Jew. He was a staunch supporter of Israel, who never criticized its brutal maltreatment of the Palestinians.

And Christian Zionism has been attacked for its racism and distorted theology by the Christians of the American Presbyterian Church in several books, which have been reviewed by the Electronic Intifada, and which I’ve blogged about.

But Greenstein’s article and Valley’s cartoons show very graphically how the real Kapos and collaborators with Fascism are the Zionists, both Jewish and Christian.

Marci Phonix: Get Rid of All the Tory Party for the Deportations

This is another very short clip, that’s well worth watching, from RT. It’s about a minute long, and shows the Grime Artist Marci Phonix talking to Afshin Rattansi about the Windrush deportations.

Phonix states that Amber Rudd wasn’t the only person responsible. The Tories hoped to put all of it on her, and when she was gone, the problem would be over. This was just a bit of deflection. But the Windrush deportations were an outrage which has turned the whole country upside down. And those higher up in the party should take responsibility.

Rattansi asks him if he thinks Theresa May should do so, and resign. Phonix responds by stating that May could have stopped the deporations at any time, but she didn’t. And it’s not just May. It’s the entire party. As far as he’s concerned, they all should go.

Phonix is absolutely right. The responsibility goes back all the way to May, when she was Cameron’s Home Secretary. It was May, who set up the ‘hostile environment’ policy and removed the legislation that specifically exempted Windrush migrants and their children from deportation. She bears direct responsibility. But she did while working for Cameron, and so the whole party is also responsible. Especially as Mike and the left-wing bloggers he follows have shown that racism, Islamophobia and anti-Semitism are endemic and far more prevalent in the Tories than they or their friends in the media want to admit.

The Tories should go. Now.

British Man, Who Has Never Left UK, Threatened with Deportation to Uganda

This grim little video was sent to me by Jo, one of the great commenters on this blog. It’s a video from that nefarious Russian propaganda outlet, RT. And it’s about yet another immigration scandal.

It’s an interview with Kyle Herbert, a British fast food worker, who has never left the UK, who was told by the immigration authorities that he was here illegally and threatened with deportation. As a result, he was suspended without pay for two weeks while he sorted the problem out. He wanted to carry on working, but was told by his supervisor to go home, because if he didn’t, the firm would be fined £20,000 for employing him as an illegal alien.

This happened two years ago, and the video dates from the 3rd May, 2018. Herbert decided to come forward with his story now because of similar recent scandals over immigration. The immigration service states that they have corrected the mistake, and apologised.

This shows the dangerous mistakes that are occurring in the immigration service, quite apart from the very deliberate attempts to deny people benefits or citizenship. On Friday, Mike put up the story of Stevie Leishman, a Scots gent, who had returned to Blighty after spending seven weeks backpacking around the world. He then made a claim for Universal Credit, only to be turned down. The reason given was that they were unsure whether he would be an habitual resident of this country, as he made his claim too soon after he returned. The DWP then informed him that he must be treated as someone ‘who is not in the UK’.

Which is truly astonishing. Mike’s post includes comments from both Leishman’s and Mark Andrews’ Supporting Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell Facebook pages expressing their sheer incredulity at the DWP’s decision. And Mike himself comments

It is clearly part of the “hostile environment” policy, even though it isn’t being administrated by the Home Office.

Other examples quoted in the comment thread under Mr Andrews’s post include a homeless person who was excluded for spending four months abroad picking fruit – after 16 years in the British Army, and a woman who left her abusive husband in Dubai and fled to the UK.

It seems if anyone has been out of the UK for two consecutive weeks in two years, they may be defined as a foreigner and denied benefit.

If anything, this is worse than the Windrush scandal.

That travesty concerned people who were born abroad but had the right to stay in the UK.

This targets people who have always been UK citizens.

And Theresa May is at the heart of it. How many times do we have to hear these accounts before she – and her government – are removed?

This is clearly using individual’s travel abroad as an excuse to deny them benefits, just like benefit sanctions are imposed on the flimsiest pretexts and the work capability tests are also imposed to define seriously ill people as ‘fit for work’ so that they too can be thrown off benefits. It’s all part of the Tories’ schemes to deny benefits and real support to the poor, in order to create a cowed workforce, willing to accept starvation wages, zero hours contracts and absolutely no job security. Oh yes, and give massive tax breaks to the rich.

This whole network of depriving the poor, the unemployed and the disabled of needed benefit money has to end now. We desperately need to get May and her vile Tory government out, and a proper, Labour government led by Jeremy Corbyn in.

Oswald Mosley’s Qualified Support for the State of Israel

Okay, it’s been a few days since I put up anything critical of the Israel lobby and their libellous mouthpieces in this country and the Labour Party, the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism and the Jewish Labour Movement, previously Paole Zion. So here goes.

The fanatics in the Israel lobby have a very simple metric for determining who is and who isn’t an anti-Semite: support for Israel. Or at least silence over its 70 year long campaign of violence, massacre and ethnic cleansing against the indigenous Palestinians. Within limits, a European politician can be as anti-Semitic as they like, provided that they support Israel. Concerns have been raised about the increasingly anti-Semitic and racist policies of the current Polish government. This has recently outlawed blaming Poles for the crimes of the Nazis, and the Polish authorities have also given their backing to a campaign to whitewash the village of Jedwabne of its part in an anti-Semitic pogrom during the Second World War. This was when the villagers rounded up the local Jewish community, and burned them alive in a barn. But there is now a campaign ‘to preserve the good name of Jedwabne’ that denies this occurred, which is receiving official backing.

Despite this, Andrew Pollard, the head of the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, stuck his head up and appeared in the pages of the Groaniad a little while ago to declare that the current Polish president was not an anti-Semite, because ‘he is a good friend of Israel’.

What Pollard and his chums overlook, and desperately hope everyone forgets, is that anti-Semites and Fascists did back initially Jewish emigration abroad and a separate homeland for the Jews as way of removing them from this country. But they want this covered up. When anyone mentions the Ha’avara Agreement between Nazi Germany and the embryonic Jewish state in Palestine to send Jews there, as Ken Livingstone did, the CAA and JLM go bug-eyed with rage and start libelling them as ‘anti-Semites’. Just as they’ve done to Mike, for daring to point out that Livingstone and the others were historically correct on this issue.

So where did the British Fascist leader, Oswald Mosley, stand on the issue of Israel and Palestine? Mosley was the leader of the British Union of Fascists, which later in the 1930s under the influence of the rise of the Nazis renamed itself the British Union of Fascists and National Socialists. Mosley was interned during the War, but attempted to return to British politics as head of a new Fascist movement called British Union during the 1950s and ’60s. His opinion on Israel in this later phase of his political career can be found on pages 137-8 of his 1961 book Mosley-Right or Wrong (London: Lion Books). This reads

Question 136. What is your attitude to Israel?

Answer. I adhere to the policy of a Jewish national home, which I suggested in The Alternative (published in 1947) as follows: –

” For over two thousand years the Jews have asked for a national home, and sought again to become a nation … To this end I propose the partition of Palestine and the placing of Jerusalem under a super-national authority which will afford Christian, Arab and Jew impartial access to their Holy Places. It is plain that even the whole of Palestine would not afford an adequate home to the Jewish population, even if it all were available without outrage of justice in the treatment of the Arabs. Such statesmanship would, therefore, in any case, be confronted with the problem of finding additional living room for the Jews. It is, naturally, desirable to provide such accommodation as near as possible to the Home Land of Palestine. But this consideration is not now so pressing in view of the rapid facilities for travel provided by modern transport… No insuperable difficulty should be encountered, therefore, even if the main bulk of the Jewish population had to live at some distance from the traditional national home. Palestine would remain a home to them in the same sense that the Dominions regard England as home.”

And I have emphasised repeatedly that this entire problem must be solved in a manner that humanity, as a whole, will approve.

Unfortunately, comprehensive settlements, which combine morality with foresight, are not customary in the world of the old parties, and the Jewish state of Israel was born amid the savage brutality which occurs when such governments yield to force what they refuse to reason. The consequence has been a legacy of cumulative hatred, perpetuated by western incompetence and aggravated by Soviet arms-dealing. But we still seek a progressive and peaceful solution for the future.

First, we must eliminate all possibility of another armed conflict in that area, especially in view of the increasing availability of atomic weapons. We should make it clear that we shall not permit any Arabs to cut two million Jewish throats. And equally we cannot allow aggressive expansion of the Israelis into neighbouring lands; they already have a million dispossessed Arabs on their conscience and our hands. it is quite possible to keep order in these easily accessible regions, without plunging about in the minor military operations that have previously disgraced a British government, slow to defend the interests of our own people but hysterically eager to act on behalf of others.

A united Europe-co-operating with a friendly and helpful America- would have little difficulty in developing new lands and organising any required sorting out of populations. Large-scale migration may well be inevitable, if friction between various unsuitable peoples is not to degenerate into chaos and bloodshed; this has become pressing in Africa. As I wrote in The European in December 1953: “There is plenty of room for both Jews and Arabs in the great area of the middle-East, all that is lacking is union, will and energy to accomplish the task. Whatever policy emerges must be based on reason, justice and the consent of the leading minds in both the Jewish and Arab peoples; all parties and opinions have behind them errors in this sphere which must never be repeated. Let us never again clash with the conscience of the world.”

Mosley by this time was trying to deny that he’d ever been an anti-Semite, and the first part of the chapter containing this passage contains his denials. Richard Thurlow, in his Fascism in Britain 1918-1985 argued that Mosley himself had originally not been an anti-Semite, and was genuine puzzled by the Jewish community’s hostility to his movement. He gave the issue over to one of his lieutenants to explain. This Nazi came to the BUF from one of the smaller, anti-Semitic Fascist groups, and so eagerly explained it to Mosley as part of the supposed Jewish conspiracy theories flying around in those groups. This then caused Mosley to make anti-Semitism an integral part of BUF policy. In fact Stephen Dorril, in his biography of Mosley, Blackshirt, has shown that Mosley was an anti-Semite from the start.

And a few years ago I remember reading an article in the Heil by a Jewish journalist, who had interviewed Mosley in Nice in the 1970s. He stated that the wannabe British Fuhrer was still very anti-Semitic, with deeply abhorrent views about the Holocaust.

Mosley’s own views in the 1930s on the ‘Jewish problem’ were expressed in his pamphlet Tomorrow We Live. In it, he stated that under his Fascist regime, the majority of the Jewish population would be deported. A few Jews would remain after being carefully examined to make sure they conformed to British values and civilisation, but would be kept away from gentile Brits through a system of apartheid.

Regarding his later views on Israel, this largely follows the UN recommendations at the time. The only exception is his statement that the Middle East could be developed as a home for both Jews and Arabs. This seems to follow his general plans to develop the world’s resources through careful planning. Which included developing East Africa for White Europeans.

Mosley was the leader of the largest, and most infamous of the British Fascist groups before the Second World War, and despite ‘Mosleyite’ being used as a term of abuse within Fascist circles today, his influence in the British Far Right is still extremely strong. But after the War he gave his qualified support to the creation of the Jewish state, at least in his rhetoric and published statements.

This is a fact of history. And the question is, do the CAA, JLM and the Israel Advocacy Movement want people to know about this? Or would they scream and libel as anti-Semitic anyone who dared to point this out?

Answers on a postcard please.

As you can guess, it’s almost certainly the latter.

Dr Gerald Horne on Trump as the Product of the Racist History of the US

This is another fascinating video from Telesur English. It’s from an edition of the Empire Files, in which the host, Abby Martin, interviews Dr. Gerald Horne, the chair of History and African American Studies at the University Houston. Dr. Horne is the author of 20 books on slavery and black liberation movements. The blurb for the video on YouTube states that his most recent work is The Counterrevolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States.

The video is just over half an hour long, and it completely overturns the entire myth of the founding of the United States, in which the Founding Fathers were noble idealists, intent on bringing about a truly democratic state in which all men would be free. In fact the opposite was true. The Founding Fathers were either slave-owners, or else otherwise deeply connected to slavery and slave trade through their business interests. Instead of noble liberators for everyone, they were deeply opposed to granting Black Americans their freedom.

Dr. Horne argues that they were the products of British imperialism and its slave trade, which was first introduced into the Caribbean and then shifted north to the English colonies in North America. He traces the history of Black enslavement and anti-Black racist movements from the American Revolution to the American Civil War, and thence to the formation of successive waves of the Klan. His intention is to show that Trump is not an historical aberration, a strange historical throwback on America’s long progress to freedom and liberty, but a product of America’s racist history and the mass support anti-Black movements have enjoyed and exploited throughout it.

The programme begins by explaining the background to the Confederate monuments, which the Unite the Right stormtroopers marched to defend in Charlottesville the week before last. These were not simply memorials to great generals or valiant soldiers, as the myth around them says. Most of the Confederate monuments in the US were erected in two periods – the period of Jim Crow in the 1920s and ’30s, when the segregation laws were being introduced, and the 1950s when the Civil Rights movement was beginning. They were set up to convey a very specific message: that while Black Americans were technically free, the ‘Negro’ had better know his place beneath the White man. Or else.

He then goes on to describe the emergence of slavery in the US. He states that Britain at the end of the 16th century was ‘a failed state’. The British Civil War of the 1640s between Charles I and parliament was a quasi-bourgeois revolution, which gave some rights to the British merchant and middle classes. The real bourgeois revolution was the Glorious Revolution of 1688, which allowed the middle classes to exert more political control, and allowed British merchants to wrest control of the slave trade away from the Crown as a royal monopoly.

The most important part of the British empire in the New World at the time was the Caribbean, and particularly Jamaica. These colonies became immensely profitable due to sugar. However, in the 1720s there was an economic crisis in Caribbean slavery, so some of the major Caribbean slaveowners moved north, to Carolina and other parts of the US. It was from these slave-owning families that the Founding Fathers were descended.

Horne also briefly discusses the role north American slavery played in the definition of White identity. Back in Europe, the different European peoples saw themselves as members of separate nations – English, Irish, Scots, French, Germans and so on. it was only when they crossed the Atlantic to America that they created an overarching racial identity to differentiate them from their Black slaves.

Horne then goes on to argue that the major catalyst for the American Revolution was the American colonists’ frustration at the British governments attempts to limit slavery and stop further colonial expansion beyond the Alleghenies. One of the critical moments in this was the Somerset Case, which ruled that slavery was illegal in England. The ruling was expanded to Scotland a year later. The taxes against which the Boston Tea Party was staged included those levied on slaves. They had been imposed by the British government as a deliberate anti-slavery measure. The British government was also tired of expending men and treasure in the various wars against the continent’s indigenous peoples. This angered the colonists, who longed to expand and seize native American land to the west. One of those, who stood to make a profit from this, was George Washington, who was a land speculator. As indeed, in a curious historical parallel, is Donald Trump. The Founding Fathers also feared and hated Black Americans, because the British had given their freedom to all Black Americans, who remained loyal. As a result, the Black Americans were solidly behind the British against the emerging independence movement.

Dr. Horne then goes on to talk about the American Civil War, and Lincoln’s emancipation of the slaves held by the Southern states. Horne points out that it was felt at the time that Lincoln had somehow broken the rules of war, and done the unthinkable by arming the slaves. As for Lincoln himself, he didn’t have much sympathy with them, and was considering deporting them after the end of the war. Horne goes on to discuss how the deportation of Americans of African descent continued to be discussed and planned at various periods in American history afterwards. It was yet again discussed in the 1920s, when there was a movement to deport them back to Africa.

After the ending of slavery in American following the defeat of the South, many of the American slave-owners and traders fled abroad, to continue their business overseas. Several went to South America, including Brazil, while others went to Cuba.

After the Civil War came the period of reconstruction, and the foundation of the Ku Klux Klan in the late 19th century. Horne also talks about the lynching movement during this period of American history, which continued into the early 20th centuries. Not only were these intended to terrorise Black Americans to keep them in their place, but at the time they also were also almost like picnics. Photographs were taken and sold of them, and White spectators and participants would cut the fingers off the body and keep them as souvenirs. Dr. Horne remarks that, sadly, some White homes still have these digits even today.

He also talks about the massive influence D.W. Griffith’s viciously racist Birth of a Nation had on the Klan, boosting its membership. Klan groups began to proliferate. In Michigan, one branch of the Klan concentrated on fighting and breaking trade unions. Later, in the 1950s, the Klan entered another period of resurgence as a backlash against the Civil Rights campaign.

Horne makes the point that in this period, the Klan was by no means a marginal organization. It had a membership in the millions, including highly influential people in several states. And the Klan and similar racist organisations were not just popular in the South. The various pro-slavery and anti-Black movements also had their supporters in the North since the time of the Civil War. He also argues that the campaign against segregation was extremely long, and there was considerable resistance to Black Americans being given equality with Whites.

He also states that one of the influences behind the emergence of the Alt-Right and the revival of these latest Fascist and White supremacist movements was the election of Barak Obama as the first Black president of the US. Obama was subject to rumours that he was really Kenyan, with the whole ‘birther’ conspiracy theories about his passport, because he was Black, and so couldn’t be a proper American. And it is this bitter hostility to Obama, and the perceived threat to White America which he represents, that has produced Trump.

Watching this video, I was reminded of Frederick Douglas’ great speech, What To the Slave is the Fourth of July? Douglas was a former slave and a major voice for abolition in America. His speech noted how hollow the rhetoric about the Founding Fathers protecting Americans from slavery under the British, when they themselves remained slaves in reality.

He’s right about the rule of the sugar economy in saving the British colonies in the Caribbean, though from my own reading about slavery in the British Empire, what saved these colonies first was tobacco. It was the first cash crop, which could easily be grown there.

The role opposition to the British government’s refusal to allow further colonial expansion in provoking the American Revolution has also been discussed by a number of historians. One book I read stated that British colonial governors were encouraged to intermarry with the indigenous peoples. Thus, one of the governors on the British side actually had cousins amongst one of the Amerindian nations. The same book also described how the British granted their freedom to Black loyalists. After their defeat, the British took them to Canada. Unfortunately, racism and the bleak climate led them to being deported yet again to Sierra Leone. There were also Black loyalists settled in the British Caribbean colonies. One report on the state of colony instituted by its new governor in the early 19th century reported that the former Black squaddies were settled in several towns, governed by their own N.C.O.s under military discipline. These Black Americans were orderly and peaceful, according to the report.

As for the former American slave traders, who emigrated to Latin America, this is confirmed by the presence of one of the witnesses, who appeared before the British parliament in the 1840s, Jose Estebano Cliffe, who was indeed one of the émigré merchants.

Cenk Uygur and The Young Turks have also described the horrors of the lynchings in the Deep South, including the picnic, celebratory aspect to these atrocities. They made the point that if news reports today said that similar lynchings had been carried out by Arabs in the Middle East, Americans would vilify them as savages. But that attitude doesn’t extend to those savages in the US, who carried out these atrocities against Blacks.

It’s worth mentioning here that Blacks weren’t the only victims of lynching. Tariq Ali in an interview in the book Confronting the New Conservatism about the Neocons states that in Louisiana in the 1920, more Italians were lynched than Blacks.

The video’s also worth watching for some of the images illustrating Dr. Horne’s narrative. These include not only paintings, but also contemporary photograph. Several of these are of the slaves themselves, and there is a fascinating picture of a group of Black squaddies in uniform from the Civil War. I found this particularly interesting, as the photographer had captured the character of the soldiers, who had different expressions on their faces. Some appear cheerful, others more suspicious and pessimistic.

There’s also a very chilling photograph of people at a lynching, and it’s exactly as Dr. Horne says. The picture shows people sat on the grass, having a picnic, while a body hangs from a tree in the background. This is so monstrous, it’s almost incredible – that people should calmly use the murder of another human being as the occasion of a nice day out.

This is the history the Republican Party and the Libertarians very definitely do not want people to read about. Indeed, I put up a piece a little while ago at a report on one of the progressive left-wing news programmes on YouTube that Arizona was deliberately suppressing materials about racism, slavery and segregation in its schools, and making students read the speeches of Ronald Reagan instead. As for the removal of Confederate monuments, right-wing blowhard and sexual harasser Bill O’Reilly, formerly of Fox News, has already started making jokes about how ‘they’ want to take down statues of George Washington. Nobody does, and the joke shows how little O’Reilly really understands, let alone cares about the proper historical background behind them. I’ve no doubt that Dr. Horne’s interpretation of history would be considered by some an extreme view, but it is grounded in very accurate historical scholarship. Which makes it an important counterbalance to the lies that the Republicans and Libertarians want people to believe about the country and its history.

TYT Nation on Calls for the Deportation of Jews & Immigrants and ‘Liberal Genocide’ at Trump Rally

More militant racism and hate from Trump’s Fascistic supporters. In this piece from TYT Nation, Jeff Waldorf, the host, comments on a video produced by Dan Cohen of the Real News of a pro-Trump rally at Maricopa County. This is only part of a much longer report by Cohen, which Waldorf urges his viewers to see. The clip shows some of the attendees, speakers and the emcee, Tim Horn, pouring out their hatred of the above groups. One man states that America is a Christian country, and that if immigrants don’t like it, they should leave. Another man, a Vietnam War veteran, claims that the Communists and ‘sharia law Muslims’ are in cahoots to bring down America, and that when ‘Sharia law Muslims’ enter a classroom, they kill all the children and other people in it. One of those interviewed is the 13 year old boy, who proudly claims to have started the chant ‘Build that wall!’ at one of the Orange Generalissimo’s rallies. As he’s speaking, the lad looks aside for one moment, and casually comments, ‘If she’s really that Jewish, she should go back to her own country’. One man also rants about how gays should go to Gaza. One of the speakers also declares that if they want to take their country back, they should free a few people from prison, and jail some others.

Horn claims that the Democrats are really ‘the Socialist Party of America’, because ‘liberals hate this country’ and have got into the schools and universities to brainwash its children and destroy it. One man even comments that he ‘can’t wait for that Liberal genocide’.

Waldorf makes some highly incisive observations on the way these people have themselves been misinformed and deliberated deceived by their leaders, the rich. The Left doesn’t hate America. They want to introduce free healthcare and better opportunities for the poor and immigrants, because they love their country and its people, and want everyone to benefit, including Republicans. He also points out that there are no plans to murder Republicans, but if we’re talking about Communists and Muslims, well, Ronald Reagan and the Republicans armed the Mujahideen to fight the Russians when they invaded Afghanistan. He goes on to say how these people are terribly afraid, afraid of anyone different from themselves, to the extent that they want to build this wall around America. It’s a fear based on ignorance. And as for that wall, it’s supposed to cost $25 billion, although no-one knows how that money is going to be raised, and it may well cost more far more. And that wall is not going to protect the rest of the country. ‘Good luck with building ‘sky-walls in New York to defend the city from planes’, Waldorf remarks sarcastically.

As for the Jewish girl, who’s supposed to go back to her own country, well, how can she? She’s an American. This is her country.

He also makes the point that the rich are behind this, deliberately creating and stoking this fear in order to keep the poor and middle class divided, so they can pick their pockets.

There are a number of points that leap out looking at this video. The first is the conspiracist thinking that believes that ‘the Left’ hates America, and has a deliberate policy of infiltrating America’s educational institutions. This is the old rubbish about ‘cultural Marxism’ trying to introduce ‘Communism’ by attacking European and American Christian, capitalist White culture. As for the stupid theories of an alliance between Islamists and Communists/ Leftists, the British novelists Anthony Burgess believed in that load of nonsense. Back in the 1980s he wrote a riposte to George Orwell’s great dystopian novel, called 1985. In this wretched book the trade unions ally with radical Muslims to bring about a totalitarian revolution. Burgess was one of the great figures of 20th century British literature, and used to make a great show of his erudition. Thus Private Eye called him, ‘the most pretentious man in English literature’. Well, it doesn’t matter how great a literary giant he was, he was still talking nonsense with that book. More recently, writers like Frederick Raphael have been spouting the same nonsense about how the remains of European Socialism will unite with the Muslims to start another holocaust of the Jews. Raphael gave a glowing review of a book with just this theme, set in the 2020s, about a decade ago in the page of the Spectator.

As for ‘sharia law’ Muslims killing children in American schools, no, they won’t. From what I’ve heard over here, much of the information warning the authorities of possible attacks from the Islamists comes from Muslims, who would like to live under Islamic law. There is clearly a problem here, as implementing such law would be divisive and deprive liberal or secular Muslims of the opportunity and ability to integrate into wider British society. Nevertheless, the point needs to be made that just because a Muslim believes in sharia law does not mean that they automatically support terrorism.

But if we are talking about extremely conservative Muslims, who have killed schoolchildren, then we should mention Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia is a country governed by an extremely narrow and intolerant version of sharia law. Its armed forces have deliberately killed children, and other civilians in attacks on mosques, hospitals, factories and schools in neighbouring Yemen as part of their campaign against Shi’a Islam. The weapons they have used in these atrocities, including cluster bombs, which are banned under international treaty, have been sold to them by America and Britain.

Waldorf is also correct when he says that these fears are being stoked by the rich to divide America in order to pick the pockets of ordinary people. This is absolutely correct. Since Margaret Thatcher in England and Ronald Reagan in America took power at the dawn of the 1980s, there has been a massive transfer of wealth upwards from the poor and middle class to the rich as welfare programmes have been closed down, and industries privatised and deregulated. Wages have been deliberately kept stagnant. The earnings of the rich 1% have been massively inflated as they have enjoyed generous tax cut after tax cut. Meanwhile, those taxes have been transferred to the poor.

This policy is continuing under Donald Trump. Trump is repealing Obamacare, which will see millions of poor Americans deprived of affordable health insurance. He has done this in order to give even more tax cuts to the rich, while the poor will receive absolutely nothing of the kind. This is because corporations and the rich fund America’s politicians, who respond by doing exactly what their paymasters want. And what they want is a poor, cowed workforce deprived of all but the most minimal rights. It’s also the guiding vision of the British Conservative party.

The way to give prosperity back to ordinary Americans – and Brits – is for the ordinary people to unite, and not let themselves be deceived by lies and fearmongering about ‘liberals’, non-Whites, Jews and Muslims. We need to stand together, whatever our race or religion, to make sure that ordinary people, of whatever religious or non-religious persuasion or colour, have decent jobs, a proper welfare support infrastructure, and proper healthcare. Everything, in fact, which Trump in America and Theresa May in Britain wishes to deprive them.