Yesterday I bought a copy of Patrick Marnham’s The Private Eye Story: The First 21 Years (London: Andre Deutsch/Private Eye 1982). This was partly because I still have some affection and respect for the magazine for the really good work it has done exposing the effects of austerity and privatisation. But it’s also because I’m still really perplexed at it continuing to push the anti-Semitism smears. And there was a time when it actually stood up to Zionist bullying and accusations of anti-Semitism.
The book tells how the Israelis attacked Private Eye as anti-Semitic because of its reports of Israeli atrocities during the 1967 war. They also caught the Zionist Federation attempting to close down criticism of Israel in the Guardian by threatening to withdraw Marks and Spencer’s advertising. Marnham writes
In the first half of 1966, sales were 39,868. In the first half of 1972, when Paul Foot left, they were 98,047. Not all the readers were equally pleased about this success. Among the least enchanted were Zionist sympathisers who objected to Private Eye reporting Israeli atrocities after the 1967 war.
In fact that war found Private Eye, with the rest of the press, generally sympathetic to Israel. But the balance quickly shifted as news of events behind the Israeli publicity screen began to reach Greek Street. An article about Moshe Dayan’s political ambitions (‘One Eyed Man for King’) in July 1967 led to many cancelled subscriptions. By November the novelist Mordechai Richler had become so offended by Private Eye’s line that he complained in The Observer that the paper was making jokes worthy of the Storm Trooper, the organ of the American Nazi party. Shortly afterwards two Labour MPs who were ardent Zionists followed this up by likening Private Eye to Der Sturmer, the organ of the German Nazi party in the thirties. Unlike Der Sturmer, Private Eye published these letters, although at that time it had no regular readers’ letter column.
In 1972 Private Eye was able to show how Zionists brought pressure on more orthodox publications. It revealed that Lord Sieff, then president of the Zionist Federation of Great Britain and chairman of Marks and Spencer, had written to The Guardian in 1967 to protest against reports of the Middle East war, while threatening to withdraw all Marks and Spencer advertising unless there was an improvement. After the editor of The Guardian had been confronted by the source of the Eye’s story, he agreed that the letter had indeed been written. (pp. 127-9).
Marnham also gives the magazine’s reply to accusations that it is anti-Semitic. Former editor Richard Ingrams felt that Jews were now too sensitive, and many of those accusing the magazine of anti-Semitism were Jews, who had been caught in wrongdoing. This passage contains a nasty racial epithet for Jews, which I’ve censored. It is, however, in full in the original.
To the criticism that Private Eye is anti-semitic Ingrams replies that it is no more anti-semitic than it is anti-any other minority. He told Ann Leslie of the Daily Mail that he thought the Jews had ‘become much too sensitive; they should be more tolerant of criticism, as they used to be.’ Anne Leslie interpreted this to mean that he yearned for a Golden English Age, ‘when Jews knew their place and laughed bravely when called “***s”; not a word Private Eye has ever used, though quite a useful one for adding a little read racialist meat to Miss Leslie’s article.
Others, apart from Zionists, who accuse Private Eye of anti-semitism are those who are attacked by it. Esther Rantzen once seriously claimed that Private Eye only wrote about her husband, Desmond Wilcox, because she herself was ‘both a successful woman and a Jew’. Sir James Goldsmith also tried to explain the Eye’s hostility on the grounds that he was a Jew. The Jewish Chronicle was not very impressed. Its columnist Ben Azai wrote on 13 May 1977: ‘Apart from an intermittent concern about Israel, Goldsmith was only vaguely aware of his Jewishness until Private Eye began what he regarded as a personal vendetta against him. Scratch a semi-Jew and one will discover a full one.’ (p. 205).
The Eye has also been accused of anti-Semitism for its ‘In The City’ column, where many of the crooks and fraudsters it has exposed have been Jewish. The magazine also strongly rebuts this accusation.
The only remark made about ‘Slicker’ by Richard which I really object to is his line over Jews. When he is asked why people say Private Eye is anti-semitic he usually says that there just happen to be a lot of Jews in the City and so we happen to expose a lot of Jewish crooks. In ‘Slicker’ has attacked more non-Jews than Jews. If Jews are there it is because they are crooks, not Jews. And we have twice run stories in ‘Slicker’ attacking the City for being anti-Semitic’. (pp. 135-6).
The Eye still runs some excellent articles criticising Israel. In last fortnight’s issue, for example, it ran a story about how the Israeli authorities were not releasing the bodies of Palestinians they’d shot as ‘terrorists’ for burial. But this has not stopped it pushing the line with the rest of the press that Corbyn and his supporters are anti-Semitic, and that the very credible, authenticated allegations of Israeli involvement in the smear campaign is nothing but ‘conspiracy theories’.
I intend to talk about this in greater depth in another article, but I think there are several reasons for it. Firstly, while the Eye was first left-wing, that shifted during the Wilson era, as the book says, when it attacked the Labour governments of the day. Its network of contacts extends into the political establishment. American left-wing commenters and activists like Jimmy Dore have said that it’s because of this that the American media simply regurgitates the material they’ve been fed by establishment politicos. They’re afraid that if they criticise the people giving them this information and granting interviews, it’ll all dry up. I think the same is probably true of the Eye. I’ve also pointed out how the magazine’s founders were all very definitely members of the establishment, as is its current editor, Ian Hislop. And while there was a time when the magazine was disreputable – so much so that the Monday Club once accused it of being an organ of Commie subversion – it’s now very respectable. And I also think another strong motive is fear. Hislop and the rest may well be afraid that if they step out of line, they will suffer the same treatment as Corbyn and Momentum. And one of the accusations against the Eye is that it is the victim of its success. Other magazines were able to pursue a solid left-wing line, because they didn’t have the Eye’s assets. But the Eye isn’t poor, and so successful libel actions against it are profitable. Hislop and the others may simply feel that supporting the people – including Jews – who’ve been falsely accused simply isn’t worth it.
When exactly was the Jewish Labour Movement founded? The group claims that it’s merely Paole Zion, ‘Workers’ of Zion’, a Jewish socialist organisation that has been part of the Labour party for over a century, simply revamped and with a different monicker. It’s why they’re hoping that the stories about them debating whether or not to disaffiliate from Labour will be so harmful to the party. Imagine the headlines: ‘Labour now so anti-Semitic that historic Jewish group has now been forced out’. Except that, according to an article posted three days ago on the 7th March 2019 by the Electronic Intifada, the group may have been founded much more recently. Like 2004. Or later still, 2015.
The JLM used to have a page on their website, now deleted, in which they told the world that it had been set up in 2004 by its then chair, Louise Ellman, as Paole Zion’s successor.
And there’s also a very embarrassing transcript of a section of the al-Jazeera documentary, The Lobby, which was never used, in which embezzler and Labour councillor Jeremy Newmark states that it was founded in 2015 to fight Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders. No-Morals told a meeting of the organisation’s youth wing in 2016 that actually it’s origins were the year before, when ‘a bunch of us’ sat in a coffee shop in Golders Green, and decided to refound the JLM. This was supposed to be about tackling anti-Semitism in the Labour party, but it’s really all about Israel. No-Morals is a pro-Israel activist and has close connections to the Israeli government and its London embassy. He claimed that Corbyn had been forced to back down from a boycott of Israel because of pressure from the group, and said that they need to replicate that on broader issues. He stated that the key to his movement was behind the scenes lobbying, legal leg-work and Engage, a left-wing campaign against anti-Semitism. The article quotes him as saying
“We built a robust political discourse, rooted in the politics of the left and deployed it in their own backyard,” he wrote.
If people walked away from the party, Newmark argued, “Israel’s case will be lost by default.”
This little snippet adds more information to a growing pile confirming that the anti-Semitism row in the Labour party isn’t remotely about real anti-Semitism. It’s about the Israel lobby and the Blairites smearing opponents of Israel in the party. In the case of the Blairites, this is partly a simply strategy to hold to power in a political landscape that has changed, and where Blairite neo-liberalism is hated and reviled. And both the Blairites, as fervent Zionists, and the Israel lobby are desperately trying to smear Israel’s critics as increasing numbers of decent people are becoming aware of the country’s racism, it’s vicious persecution of the Palestinians and its constant meddling in the internal affairs of other countries through lobbying groups. It’s especially venomous in its treatment of Jewish critics of Israel, who are reviled in anti-Semitic terms that recall the vilification of Jews under Julius Streicher and his wretched propaganda, Der Sturmer, for the Nazis. They are also accused of being anti-Semitic, self-hated, and disloyal to a country in which they were not born or have any desire to visit, let alone move to. To the Israel lobby, they are ‘the wrong kind of Jews’, another anti-Semitic trope.
As the JLM clandestinely seems to admit, it’s less than 20 years, if that, its departure from the Labour Party will be no great loss. Indeed, some of us are looking forward to it.
More fun at the expense of right-wing hacks and hate-mongers Rod Liddle and Melanie Phillips from Private Eye. According to this fortnight’s edition, for 8th-21st March 2019, Liddle and Phillips held an event supporting the ‘freedom to offend’. But no-one was interested. The article on page 8 runs
FORGET the Rumble in the Jungle; consign Frost v Nixon to the history books. As the Eye went to press this Monday evening, London was preparing itself for the event that would eclipse them all: “Spectator and Sunday Times columnist Rod Liddle makes the case for the freedom to offend. Rod will be in conversation with Melanie Phillips”.
For just £32.50, organisers at the How to Academy were offering tickets to a “no-holes-barred (sic) approach to what it is and is not acceptable to say in the 21st century”.
Alas, despite the Spectator’s boast last year that Liddle’s pulling power was enough to sell out the 2,300-seat London Palladium,m his popularity seems to have wanted. A full fortnight before the Rod/Mel smackdown, self-described audience-booster website Central Tickets was trying to convince its “community of seat fillers” to make up the numbers at the event, paying just a “nominal booking fee” of £4. Any gluttons for punishment taking up the offer were given strict instructions: “Don’t mention complimentary tickets in or around the venue. Do not make social media posts referencing free tickets.
The Tory press has been pushing the ‘freedom to offend’ stance for some time. It’s part of the usual torrent of complaints about ‘political correctness’ stifling free speech. And they are also ostensibly firmly against racist hate crimes being investigated as such only on the perception of the person offended. Over two decades ago I remember the Heil publishing a long rant against Labour’s introduction of this legislation, complaining that perfectly decent people would now be accused of racism simply on the subjective judgment of the offended person.
Er, no. That’s not what the legislation says. As Mike’s pointed out time and again, the legislation states that a possible hate crime is to be recorded as a hate crime if the victim believes that it is, but is to be investigated in the same way as any other crime. And this includes ascertaining whether it is, in fact, a hate crime.
And it’s cant and hypocrisy anyway. The right really isn’t interested in the ‘right to offend’ as such. Both Liddle and Phillips are venomous islamophobes. Liddle is notorious for saying that there should be more islamophobia in the Tory party, while Phillips is constantly talking about the threat Islam poses to Judaeo-Christian western and British society. She published the book, Londonistan, about how the country’s capital is now the largest centre of Muslim terrorists in Europe. When these two talk about the right to offend, like the Mail and the rest of the right-wing press they mean the freedom to demonise and vilify Blacks and other ethnic minorities. And particularly Muslims.
But this doesn’t apply to Zionists and Zionist Jews, as the press is fully against anyone offending them. And this is what many of the anti-Semitism accusations come down to: not that Jews were really being vilified or demonised, as they notoriously were by the Nazis in the pages of Der Sturmer. Or that the information in the material which forms the basis of their complaints is incorrect. That’s irrelevant. Shai Masot at the Israeli embassy was certainly conspiring with British officials to have Alan Duncan removed from the government, but simply describing it as a conspiracy is anti-Semitic. Because of the real anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, you see. No, they’re quite happy to accuse innocent, decent people of anti-Semitism due to personal offence. Marc Wadsworth was accused of anti-Semitism partly because, according to the Heil, he had made Ruth Smeeth cry. He hadn’t, but fact has never been of particular concern to the Heil in these matters. And Mike was accused of anti-Semitism because someone had been ‘upset’ by one of his pieces. And then there’s the matter of libel. Because it was the Sunset Times, along with other rags like the Jewish Chronicle, which published the libels against Mike that he’s an anti-Semite and holocaust-denier.
In fact, I fully support the ‘right to offend’. George Orwell wrote about the political writer’s job being to tell people things that they don’t want to hear. It’s a quotation often used by news journalists, including hacks like Liddle. But Liddle and Phillips aren’t really interested in the right to tell uncomfortable truths. That’s why the right has given its full, malign support to the anti-Semitism smears and witchhunt in the Labour party. They’re only interested in the right to smear, and create racial hatred and division. Because it’s through racism and hatred, including that of the poor, the unemployed, and ethnic minorities, that the Tories thrive and their vile press sells their papers.
But possibly not for much longer. By and large the younger generation is much less racist than the older generation of readers and bigots, who seem to be the core of the internet groups demanding that Rees-Mogg and Boris Johnson should lead the Tory party. And the Spectator and Sunset Times were clearly promoting Liddle and Phillips as a pair of journalistic big hitter, who could be expected to draw crowds in. But they didn’t. And I hope this will continue, until there’s no-one left reading these genteel, up-market hate-sheets.
This is absolutely unbelievable. And to people, who have suffered genuine anti-Semitism, or who have stood up for those, who have, this must come as a very sick joke. Tony Greenstein, a Socialist, anti-Zionist and anti-racist blogger, who is himself Jewish, has run a series of articles pointing out that the Zionists have very frequently collaborated with Nazis and real anti-Semites. Both have had the same goals. The Nazis wanted to clear the Jews out of their countries, while the Zionists have as one of their core beliefs the conviction that anti-Semitism cannot be fought, and so the Jews must have a country of their own. And so you had the Ha’avara agreement between the Nazis and the Zionists, in which the Nazis smuggled some Jews out to what would become Israel. This was before the Nazis revoked the agreement and decided on their policy of mass extermination. Even after the Nazis were murdering the Jewish people in the death camps, some Zionists still held out the hope that some Nazis could be persuaded to spare some and send them to Israel. It’s why George Soros despises the Zionists. Soros is of Hungarian Jewish heritage, and the leader of the Zionists in Fascist Hungary, Kasztner, collaborated with the Nazi deportations from this disgusting view.
And the hatred is reciprocated. Soros won’t give any of his billions to Israel, and so the Israelis hate him in turn. Last week, Yair Netanyahu, the son of Benjamin Netanyahu, posted a cartoon about George Soros lifted from the Nazi website, the Daily Stormer. This shows Soros alongside one of David Icke’s reptoids and an anti-Semitic caricature of a Jew. Netanyahu junior took the offending cartoon down, but not before it had been praised by David Duke, the former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, and one of the most anti-Semitic figures in American politics, as well as the Daily Stormer itself. The Stormer takes its name from the Nazi propaganda rag, Der Sturmer, edited by Julius Streicher, that vilified and smeared the Jews during the Third Reich.
Now the editor of the website, Andrew Anglin, has appeared on Israeli TV, saying that he defends Yair Netanyahu because he’s against liberal Jews, making a clear distinction between Israelis and diaspora Jews. Greenstein comments that the two presenters, including a woman, Michelle Ghora, who’s supposed to be investigating him, appear sympathetic. Ghora even makes a comment about how you can’t really blame people for resenting their – in other words, Jewish – interference in their politics.
Anglin goes further, and says ‘I’ve just become informed that there is a Jewish-Israel alt-Right. I’m happy about this…. They are using some of our memes, it is based upon our movement, they are bothered, sick of the same people in the same way.’
Greenstein notes that
Anglin is making a clear distinction between Israeli Jews and Zionists, who are racially aware and Diaspora Jews who are up to their old tricks, controlling other nations. In this you see the coming together of Zionist ideology, which was always hostile to the diaspora and neo-Nazi anti-semitism.
Earlier in his piece he also comments on the sheer hypocrisy of the Zionist lobby in this country, like the Jewish Labour Movement, when anti-Zionists call Israel what it is – a racist state.
Anglin’s not the only American Fascist to appear on Israel TV arguing that American Fascism and the Israelis have something in common. So did Richard Spencer, the head of the Alt-Right, who told his interviewers that he admired the Israelis for creating their own ethnic state, and he wants to do the same for White America.
Not that Britain’s Zionists are necessarily any better. Tony Greenstein also put up a piece a week or so ago commenting on how Jonathan Hoffman, the leader of the Zionist Federation of England and Wales, organized a protest outside a pro-Palestinian conference. One of those who joined his picket was Paul Besser, who was the intelligence officer of Britain First, the banned Fascist outfit that Thomas McNair, the assassin of Jo Cox, belonged to.
Tony Greenstein’s photo showing Hoffman, left, together with Besser, right.
Way back in the 1990s, the Raelians, a UFO new religious movement run by Claude Vorilhon, now called Rael, wanted to open an embassy in Jerusalem, ready for when the aliens – the Elohim, according to them, return. This got into controversy because of the symbol chosen by the Raelians: a Star of David containing a swastika. Naturally, this wasn’t going to go down very well in the Jewish state, many of whose citizens either were, or were descended from, the victims of the Nazis. But having seen how Yair Netanyahu and his supporters are embracing real Nazis and Fascists, even to the point where one of their leaders claims that there is an Israeli Alt-Right, that symbol seems horribly appropriate.
And it also means that the Zionist lobby in the UK – the misnamed Campaign Against Anti-Semitism and the Jewish Labour Movement – have no business whatsoever smearing genuine anti-racists and opponents of anti-Semitism, like Ken Livingstone, Jackie Walker and Mr. Greenstein himself as anti-Semites.
A few days ago Mike put up a piece reporting how internet providers and servers are throwing out Nazi and White supremacist internet sites after the violent Nazi march in Charlottesville last Friday.
In this clip from The Young Turks, hosts Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian report and comment on Indiegogo’s and Google’s refusal to host the Nazi site, The Daily Stormer. The site takes its name from the Nazi newspaper, Der Sturmer, which was notorious for its anti-Semitic vilification of Jews. The Daily Stormer is blatantly racist and White supremacist, viciously denigrating Jews, Blacks and, of course, homosexuals.
After Heather Heyer, one of the protesters, was killed by the Nazi, who drove his car into 20 people, the Daily Stormer wrote a piece deriding her as ‘a 32-year old, fat, childless slut’. This was too much for their service provider, Indiegogo, who told them that they were terminating their contract.
The Stormer then tried to sign on with Google. They had no luck there. After three hours, Google told them they were refusing to host them, and they had 48 hours to find another web server, who would.
Uygur and Kasparian also attack the false equivalence Trump and the Republicans made between the anti-Nazis and the Nazis, especially Black Lives Matter. BLM came in for particular vilification for a chant some of the protesters on a march sang in mockery of the cops, ‘Pigs in a blanket, watch them fry’. The Republicans regularly portray and attack the left as being extremely violent, while in fact the violence comes mainly from the extreme right.
Yesterday the French philosophical feline, Guy Debord’s Cat, put up a great article rightly condemning the Scum and the Daily Heil for claiming that Jeremy Corbyn is somehow a supporter of terrorism. This follows leaked information that MI5 kept a file on him in the 1980s because he, along with many other members of the Labour party and the Left at the time, advocated talking to the IRA in order to end the cycle of violence in Northern Ireland.
I’ve already posted a couple of pieces about this smear. It also appeared in the Torygraph and the Sunday Torygraph, as well as the Scum and Mail. Buddy Hell describes how the Sun’s editorial column, ‘The Sun Says’ claimed that innocent people were murdered because Corbyn and John McConnell ‘sucked up to the IRA’. Mr Hell states that this was an attempt to make Corbyn appear somehow responsible for Monday nights horrific terrorist attack in Manchester.
Equally grotesque was the cartoon by the Daily Mail’s ‘Mac’, real name Stanley McMurty. This shows a couple peering out from behind their curtains as a couple of men with Kalashnikovs and black ski masks head up the drive. Below is the hilarious caption, “Oh dear. Will you answer the door? I think they’re canvassing for Jeremy Corbyn”.
The Cat describes the Sun’s attack on Corbyn as what it is: libel. He says
isn’t journalism or anything like it. It’s a blatant smear; a character assassination that is based entirely upon a historical revisionism. But The Cat has a question: who signed this off? This is evidently libellous and we know Murdoch has pockets that are as deep and as wide as the Pacific Ocean, but did The S*n’s editorial team think it could swerve around the law? Clearly it did and the paper has learned nothing from the Leveson Report.
As for Mac’s wretched cartoon,
Mac can claim he’s being humorous, but it doesn’t wash: this is a blatant piece of propaganda dressed up as humour. In this, it is reminiscent of the cartoons found in Der Sturmer, the official newspaper of the Nazi Party (below).
Underneath is a cartoon from the Nazi newspaper showing a cowed, blonde ‘Europa’, being shown off by a stereotypical evil Jew to a stereotypically thuggish Black man. Unfortunately, this type of racism and the racist conspiracy theory it produced didn’t die when Hitler blew his brains out in the Berlin bunker. The real, anti-Semitic neo-Nazis really do believe that the Jews are promoting racial intermixing between Whites, Blacks and other people of colour in order to destroy the White race. This presumably includes the members of the Alt-Right screaming about ‘White genocide’ whenever they see a film or TV series with a non-White as the star. And especially if the lead is female.
The Cat goes on to make the point that
What is quite absent from the claims about Corbyn’s non-existent sympathy with terrorists, is any acknowledgement on the part of the media’s interviewers and commentators of the role of the British state in Loyalist violence. Worse, perhaps is the morbid nostalgia that seems to accompany these claims. It’s as though the Good Friday Agreement never happened and the power-sharing government never existed. Instead, what we’re treated to are selected fragments of Tory memory larded with a narrative that’s been constructed from misrepresentations and outright lies. For the Tories and others, the Provisional IRA is still active and still bombing the country. Meanwhile, the Loyalist paramilitaries are treated, in not so many words, as heroes or simply not mentioned.
He also points out that May is trying to look like a stateswoman again, after her party cut the police, army and firefighters over the past seven years. He concludes
Who’s the bigger threat to the country? I’d say it’s Theresa May and the British press. (Emphasis mine).
There’s an abundance of evidence showing that the British secret state colluded with Loyalist terrorists in Ulster, and that the SAS operated in secret there, beyond the control of the regular army, as a death squad murdering prominent republicans. The parapolitics magazine, Lobster, has published any number of articles on this over the years.
Regarding the question of who signed off on the Scum’s smear of Corbyn, it may well have been the paper’s editor, without any referral to the Dirty Digger himself. One of the facts that emerged about Murdoch’s sordid empire has been that, while Murdoch has tried to present himself as being a ‘hands-off proprietor’, he still bears the responsibility for the actions of his underlings. They’re very carefully selected to do exactly what he wants them to do. He doesn’t have to interfere in the day to day running of his empire of filth, because he knows they’ll do exactly what he wants anyway.
And in cases where the Digger’s own views are required, Murdoch has a very cavalier attitude to libel. It was reported by one of his underlings that when the question of libel comes up, Murdoch used to look over to his legal advisor, who would hold up the number of fingers representing the thousands of pounds or so that News International would have to pay in fines and damages if the victim sued. Murdoch would take note of the figure, and if it was low enough compared to the number of papers he hoped to sell with the smear, authorise its publication.
As the judge tells Norman Stanley Fletcher in the voiceover in the opening titles of the Beeb’s prison comedy, Porridge, he’s ‘an habitual criminal’. Unfortunately, unlike the character played by Ronnie Barker, he has never been sent to HM Prison Slade for five years.
The Sun itself also has form for publishing racist material. Way back in the 1990s, or the first years of this century, Private Eye reported that the Scum had had 19 judgements against it by the Press Complaints Commission on this score. This includes its cartoons. One of the most noxious showed a couple peering at a line of pigs marching in the street waving placards. The caption read ‘Now the pigs are protesting against being compared to Arabs’.
And Mac in the Daily Mail has also published other racist, or racially offensive, cartoons. This seems to clash with the effort of at least one of their cartoonists to appear hip and bohemian. I remember a documentary on TV back in the 1990s, which featured the Heil and showed its cartoonist at the time. From what I recall, he seemed to be dressed in the Beatnik style of 1950s intellectuals. This made an impression, as the Daily Mail is anything but hip and bohemian. It’s ferociously anti-intellectual to the point where I get the distinct impression that Paul Dacre and the entire editorial staff would have a fit if they caught someone in the office reading Sartre or any of the French phenomenologists.
Also, the title of the Sun’s editorial column is surely a misnomer. The Scum has slavered, screamed, shrieked, yelled, ranted, raved, accused, denounced, thundered and harangued, but it has never, ever merely ‘said’ anything.
And through its history, it has spread lies and smears about the Labour party and its leaders. It’s started doing it again, doing to Corbyn precisely what it did to Michael Foot, Ken Livingstone and the others back in 1983.
Don’t be taken in by the lies and hysteria.
Vote Labour on June 8th for a genuinely safer Britain. Without the Sun’s and Daily Mail’s xenophobia and ultra-nationalism.
Back in April, Tony Greenstein wrote a series of articles about Zionist collaboration with the Nazis in support of Ken Livingstone. Livingstone, along with too many others, including Mike, has been smeared as an anti-Semite because of his criticisms of Israel and Zionism. Livingstone when he was leader of the GLC was notoriously anti-racist, and his 1987 book, Livingstone’s Labour, not only shows his very firm support for ethnic minorities, it also heartily condemns the British state’s recruitment of former Nazis and Nazi collaborators as part of their strategy to undermine and contain Communism during the Cold War. Those given sanctuary in Britain, often in the mining industry, were men, who had actively participated in the Holocaust and the pogroms against the Jews in eastern Europe. They had committed some of the most heinous and sickening crimes against humanity.
But no matter. Livingstone was smeared as an anti-Semite, because he had dared to say that Hitler had briefly supported sending Jews to Israel.
He had. This was the Ha’avara agreement. It was an early pact with the Zionist leaders in Palestine to smuggle Jews there as part of their efforts to build the future Jewish state. Hitler only supported it from expediency. He was never a Zionist, but he did want to expel the Jews from Germany using any means he could.
Nevertheless, the Ha’avara agreement is a documented historical fact. And Greenstein in the article below shows that it was a hardly a secret. The Nazis had a medal struck to commemorate Baron von Mildenstein’s diplomatic visit to the Zionist authorities in Palestine. Von Mildenstein was head of the Jewish desk of the Gestapo, the infamous Nazi intelligence agency. The medal bore the legend
‘Ein Nazi Faehrt Nach Palastina Und Erzaehlt Davon in Angriff’.
This roughly translates as ‘A Nazi Travels to Palestine and Tells the Story about it in the Angriff. Angriff, which means ‘Attack’ in German, was one of the Nazi newspapers, along with the vile Der Sturmer.
On their side, the Zionist press ran a cartoon of a depressed Adolf slumped at his desk, drunk, and with a gun in front of him. One of his brown shirts is seen bursting into the room, waving a piece of paper. The caption, in Hebrew, reads ‘Don’t worry Hitler, the Jews of Palestine are helping you’.
Greenstein’s article also shows the cover and discusses the contents of a book on the Ha’avara agreement, The Transfer Agreement: The Dramatic Story of the Pact Between the Nazis and Jewish Palestine, by the right-wing Zionist historian, Edwin Black.
He also shows up the hypocrisy of the Daily Express attack on Livingstone as an anti-Semite, when that paper, along with the Daily Mail, was venomously pro-Hitler. There’s a photograph of the front page from 1933 with the vile headline ‘Judea Declares War on Germany – Jews of all the world unite in action’. This laid the blame for the Nazi persecution of the Jews firmly on the victims themselves, and was repeatedly used by the Nazis in their propaganda, citing it as proof that they were attacking the Jews for reasons of self-defence.
Much of the article is devoted to refuting the claims of Professor Rainer Schulze, a German historian, who had weighed in against Livingstone a year earlier on this issue. Schulze claimed that Zionism and Nazism did not share the same goals. But as Greenstein shows, they certainly shared some.
For example, the Zionist newspaper, Judisches Rundschau carried an article on its front page supporting the infamous Nuremberg Laws, which stripped Jews of German citizenship. He also notes how prominent Zionist organisations, including Mapai in Palestine, and Jewish organisations that had been dominated by them, such as the Board of Deputies of British Jews, actively campaigned against the trade boycott of Nazi Germany. Greenstein also quotes other historians of the Third Reich, and even Reinhard Heydrich, writing in the SS newspapers, Die Schwarze Korps, that the Nazis were keen to promote Zionism amongst German Jews.
Moreover, in June 1933 the German Zionist Federation sent this memo to Hitler claiming that that they and he had similar interests. This said
On the foundation of the new state, which has established the principle of race… fruitful activity for the fatherland is possible. Our acknowledgement of Jewish nationality provides for a clear and sincere relationship to the German people and its national and racial realities. Precisely because we don’t wish to falsify these fundamentals, because we too are against mixed marriages and are for maintaining the purity of the Jewish group…. Boycott propaganda… is in essence fundamentally unZionist, because Zionism wants not to do battle but to convince and to build.
He also quotes other Zionist leaders, like David Ben-Gurion, who stated very clearly that they only supported the emigration of Jews from Nazi Germany if they came to Palestine. As for the transfer agreement, by which Jews were allowed to send their finances to Israel, the Zionists made it very clear that this was about securing investment for the future Jewish state. The survival of the people, who sent it, was much less of a priority.
Greenstein also refutes the Zionist claim that describing Israel as a colonialist settler state is somehow horribly anti-Semitic, simply by showing how the Zionist leaders described it as such themselves. Herzl described it as such in a letter to that most notorious of British colonialists, Cecil Rhodes. And Vladimir Jabotinsky also described the Jewish settlement of Palestine, and the consequent forcible expulsion of the indigenous Palestinians, as ‘colonial’.
Greenstein concludes
There isn’t even one instance of any reference to a ‘national liberation movement’ in the writings of the founders of Zionism. Zionism only became a national liberation movement when colonialism got a bad name! Today’s Zionists have decided to disguise what even the Zionists themselves used to admit was a colonialist movement in the apparel of the oppressed in order to deceive the innocent. Rainer Schulze’s history lessons are in reality an act of deception.
Rainer Schulze finished his article by indulging in a piece of straw man rhetoric:
‘Any claim that Nazis and Zionists ever shared a common goal is not only cynical and disingenuous, but a distortion of clearly established historical fact.’
That is, of course, true. But no one has claimed that they shared common goals. Clearly the Zionists didn’t support the mass genocide of European Jewry. Marshall Petain collaborated with the Nazis but that doesn’t mean he supported the aims of the Nazis. He collaborated because he didn’t want a Nazi occupation of France. When a weaker party collaborates with a stronger party they rarely if ever share the same goals. Unfortunately Professor Schulze, having very little knowledge or understanding of the topic he wrote about decided to engage in an old debating tactic. Attack something your opponent hasn’t said!
This effectively refutes the main charge of anti-Semitism against Ken Livingstone, though the terror of Maggie Thatcher and the Jewish Labour Movement has said other things since, which are not supported by historical fact.
It also helps to clear Mike of the libel against him, as Mike also did not say that Hitler was a Zionist. In fact, the woefully misnamed Campaign Against Anti-Semitism itself tacitly recognised that fact in its article against Mike, as it deliberately misquotes him and accuses him of saying things he never said.
Mike, and those he defended, are not anti-Semites. They were decent men and women. Some of them were Jews, and the gentile friends of Jews, who had dedicated their careers to fighting racism in all its forms, including anti-Semitism. Many of them had suffered real, anti-Semitic attacks themselves, or had close family who had.
It is a disgrace and complete travesty that these people should be so smeared. It is not Mike and people like Livingstone, Jackie Walker, and many, many others, who have lied and misused history. It is the Zionists of the Jewish Labour Movement and their allies in the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism. They are the real hate-mongers in this.
Trump’s cabinet is notorious for the number of anti-Semites, Fascists and Nazis in it, like Steve Bannon, the head of Breitbart, and Richard Spencer, the founder of the Alt Right. And now here’s another one, Sebastian Gorka. Gorka’s Trump’s Deputy Assistant. In this video from the David Pakman show, Pakman and his producer, Louis, talk about the links between Gorka and the Hungarian ant-Semitic extreme right, and how he worn in public the medallions and decorations of Hungary’s anti-Semitic dictators and extreme nationalist parties. He has, for example, worn a pin associated with Admiral Horthy’s regime. Horthy was the dictator of Hungary from 1922 onwards, who was officially listed as a collaborator with the Nazis by the US government. He also defended the use of the Arpad Flag, the emblem of the Arrow Cross Party, the anti-Semitic extreme nationalist party that governed Hungary during the period of the Third Reich. From 2002 to 2007 Gorka was active in Hungarian extreme rightwing politics. He appeared and collaborated with anti-Semites, neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers, and was part of the movement to organise another extreme Right-wing party, which has the goal of putting Christianity back into Hungary’s constitution. He also wrote for an extreme rightwing newspaper, Magyar Demokrita, which the US government has officially listed as anti-Semitic and Holocaust-denying. He also worked for the Hungarian National Committee, whose 2004 yearbook contained the following call to purge Hungary of its Jews:
We need to get the Jews out. In fact, we need to take back our country from them. We need to take back our stolen fortunes. After all, these upstarts are sucking on our blood and are getting rich off our blood. This is vile, obscene stuff, which could easily have come from Goebbels himself or Julius Streicher’s Der Sturmer. Gorka has also said that it’s right that foreign leaders should be afraid of Trump.
Pakman and Louis remark on how it is strange that Trump denies being an anti-Semite, has a Jewish son-in-law and a daughter who converted to Judaism to marry her husband, but nevertheless surrounds himself with these Fascists. Pakman states that it’s probably because Trump holds many anti-Semitic images and stereotypes about Jews, but doesn’t think that he actually hates them. These beliefs still enable him to stand next to one on a political platform. Pakman and Louis also consider that Trump’s slogan, ‘American first’, also may play a part in making him comfortable with the presence and cooperation of anti-Semites and Nazis. The slogan ‘America first’ comes from the country’s isolationist stance between the First and Second World Wars, when the country did not want to enter the war against Fascism in Europe or allow in European refugees.
Pakman finally concludes this piece by observing that, despite announcing that he is a ‘proud American’, Gorka’s another one of the pesky immigrants to the US. He was born in London of Hungarian parentage. But as he’s White, Trump’s administration likes him.
In actual fact, there’s been a section of the Republican party that has included racists and outright Nazis for a very long time. They’ve been around ever since the US – and Britain – recruited former Nazis, included members of the SS and Gestapo – to use against the spread of Communism during the Cold War. ‘Red Ken’ Livingstone has a couple of chapters on this in his 1987 book, Livingstone’s Labour, which should show very strongly that the old newt fancier is no kind of anti-Semite. America has supported a long, bloody list of Fascist dictators abroad since the Second World War, such as General Pinochet in Chile, and the various Fascist regimes and death squads in Guatemala, Panama and Nicaragua. The World Anti-Communist League includes American ultra-Conservatives as well as Fascists and Nazis from across the world. And in the 1980s Reagan also supported Ukrainian nationalists and Nazi collaborators in his campaign against the USSR.
Links between the Republican party and international Fascism are therefore nothing new. What is new here is that they’re now obvious and blatant, whereas before they were all hidden from the voting public to a greater or lesser extent. It was monstrous that these thugs and torturers should ever have been a part of American politics or supported by US foreign policy. But their appearance as a formal part of Trump’s cabinet is deeply ominous, as it shows the normalisation of such Fascism as part of American politics. If this continues, and openly Fascist politicians and aides are given posts and public offices, you have to wonder how long it will be before American democracy itself is undermined and replaced by a racist, right-wing dictatorship.
Here’s another step towards real Fascism by the Trump administration. In this clip from Democracy Now! anchor Amy Goodson and her co-host talk to Andrea Pitzer about yet another policy of Trump’s, which is very close to the Nazi vilification of the Jews. Pitzer is the author of One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps. She and the Democracy Now! team discuss Trump’s proposal to publish official lists of crimes committed in sanctuary cities – those towns where the officials are unwilling to comply with Trump’s deportations of illegal immigrants. They point out that this is exactly what the Nazis did in the pages of their ‘newspapers’ Der Sturmer and Das Neues Volk with the Jews. Der Sturmer had a column called ‘Letterbox’, in which its readers were encouraged to send it stories about crimes committed by Jews. The Nazi life-style magazine, Das Neues Volk, which was mostly about wonderful Aryan families and their beautiful homes, also carried stories about crimes supposedly committed by Jews, or Jewish-looking people. This section of the clip illustrates the point by showing covers of the rags with their illustrations showing the blood libel – the anti-Semitic smear that Jews ritually kill gentile, Christian children, along with other vile charicatures.
They also point out that in America some newspapers have also used the same tactic of vilifying ethnic minorities. Before Japanese internment during World War II, the San Francisco Chronicle used to run stories about how the Japanese minority were unassimilable, and how they were also responsible for crime. More recently, Breitbart ran a ‘Black Crimes’ list, and their CEO, Steve Bannon, is now one of Trump’s closest advisors in the White House.
The show points out that immigrants to America have a lower crime rate than those committed by members of the host population. Some of this is possibly to avoid drawing attention from the immigration authorities. However, they also point out that detailing crimes committed by immigrants without providing any context is very dangerous, and it serves to place them in a simplistic ‘good’ versus ‘evil’ view of immigration. And this is particularly dangerous, as this view has the official imprimatur of a government document.
They also briefly discuss another of Trump’s proposals, that immigrants should hand over their cell phone information. Pitzer points out that totalitarian government is impossible without a secret police. Even with the resources of the Nazi state, it was still difficult for them. Himmler apparently used to complain about not having enough men. But you don’t need quite so many staff with the massive expansion of the American surveillance state and its powers and abilities to spy on the electronic communications of American citizens. This is far more than the Nazis had.
This is very frightening, and should concern everyone who’s genuinely concerned about racial justice and personal freedom on either side of the Atlantic. Over here in Britain, Black and ethnic minority campaigners bitterly objected to the way the British right-wing press misrepresented them as being disproportionately responsible for crime. The issue became particularly controversial after the 1981/2 ‘race riots’, when the newspapers became blatantly racist in equating Blacks with crime and anti-White racism. And sections of the Tory press are notoriously ready to run stories about immigrant criminality today, such as the Daily Heil and the Scum. If Trump goes ahead with this, and it is not successfully challenged, it will emboldened UKIP and very large sections of the Tory party to do the same, as well as encourage rags like the Mail, the Sun and the Express to become even more racist in their equation of Blacks and other ethnic minorities with criminality.
Last week the Guyanese-born investment banker, Gina Miller, succeeded in her legal action to force the government to open up the decision on the start of the Brexit process to the rest of parliament. Three judges ruled in her favour, and the result has been a tide of right-wing hatred and vilification directed against the lady herself and the judges, who made the ruling. And Nigel Farage, the former leader of UKIP, has come out of the woodwork once more promising to lead a march against the decision.
Mike in his article on the original decision reports personal threats Miller received, including rape, and comments that she should ‘f*** off’ back to her own country, and people telling her that Brits were sick of foreigners telling them what to do. She has also been denounced as a traitor to democracy.
Miller herself hit back at her critics and those, who insulted and threatened her. Mike quotes the press report on this incident, in which she told the International Business Times
“Yes there has been a deluge of hatred and anger but this is because people were lied to in respect to the EU referendum, and because (of) irresponsible figures like Farage and tabloid media who lack any understanding of parliamentary democracy and the rule of law that is the bedrock of our civil society”.
The reaction of part of the Tory right, and the Daily Mail and Express has been hysterical. On the Beeb’s Question Time, Sajid Javid, who Private Eye suggested looks like The Claw, one of the villains from one of Gerry Anderson’s puppet SF series, went over the top, exclaiming that the ruling was an attempt ‘to thwart the will of the British people’.
The Express, never known for anything like statesmanlike restraint and diplomacy, declared that “Today this country faces a crisis as grave as anything since the dark days when Churchill vowed we would fight them on the beaches.”
Not to be outdone in the ultra-patriotism stakes, the Daily Mail put photos of the three judges on its front page along with the screaming headline ‘Enemies of the People’. As Mike, Tom Pride and many others have pointed out, the Heil is never very far from Nazism, and this was another instance where the rag’s headline almost exactly reproduced the propaganda and stance of the Nazi party. The cartoonist Gary Barker put up the image of the Heil’s front page, along with a similar page from one the Nazis’ newspapers, denouncing a line of judges as ‘Volksverrater’. Barker translates this as ‘Enemies of the People: Get Out of the Way of the German People’s Will’. This isn’t quite right. A more literal translation would be ‘Betrayers of the People’ or ‘Race Traitors’ – the German word volk has an ethnic connotation, which the word ‘people’ doesn’t have. The sentence underneath reads something like ‘shoved out of the German racial community’. That’s roughly what the German Volksgemeinschaft means, rather than ‘common people’s will’. Volksgemeinschaft was obviously one of the key planks of Nazi domestic ideology. I don’t know where Barker got the page from, but it looks very much like the Nazi newspaper, Der Sturmer. On its own, Sturmer just means an impetuous fellow. The Nazi newspaper of the same name is infamous as the vehicle through which the Nazis, under the rag’s editor, Julius Streicher, demonised the Jews. Back in the 1980s the goose-steppers in the BNP or NF decided to launch their own version, The Stormer, which was similarly intended to spread hate against Jews and non-Whites. Mike in the title of his article on this appalling headline asks if it is proof that the UK is shifting towards Nazism. I’d say that it was. English doesn’t quite have a word for ‘racial community’ like the Nazis’ Volksgemeinschaft, but the ideology is certainly there on the Tory xenophobic right. Daniel Hannan, the Tory MEP for Devon, who’d like to privatise the NHS, has raved in his column on the Telegraph blogs about ‘the Anglosphere’, meaning the English-speaking world, and there certainly is a tendency in the American Libertarian Right to view this in racial terms. White Anglo-Saxons are inclined towards free trade and small government, according to them, while the Irish and Continental peoples are genetically determined to be the enemies of freedom favouring Socialism and big government. This is despite the fact that Adam Smith based his views on free trade as the foundation of the ‘Wealth of Nations’ on those of the French physiocrats. And the hostility of the Heil and Express to non-White immigration is notorious.
As for the Fuhrage’s declared intention to lead a mass demonstration of 100,000 outside the high court to protest against the judges’ ruling, Mike states in the title of his piece on it that ‘someone should tell Nigel Farage this is the UK, not Nuremberg’.
Mike has defended the democratic basis of the judges’ decision, pointing out that far from being traitors to democracy, the judges have upheld it. Their decision does not affect the Brexit decision, which has been settled by the referendum. It does, however, prevent Theresa May and her cabinet from deciding how it is to be implemented solely by herself, and then presenting it to the rest of us as a fait accompli. This, Mike quite rightly points out, would be despotic. He rebuts the Javid’s stupid comment by making the point that the judges merely upheld the sovereignty of parliament, which is enshrined by law. He shows how ridiculous it is to compare their lordships’ decision with the threat of Nazi invasion, as well as the homophobia in the Express’s article, which attacked one of the judges for being ‘openly gay’. As if the man’s sexuality had anything to do with the judicial soundness of his decision. And he rightly quotes the Angry Yorkshireman on the ridiculous bigotry and hypocrisy of the Heil’s attitude, who wrote:
“Thus anyone who doesn’t agree that Theresa May should be allowed to behave like a dictator by bypassing democratic accountability and making up the law as she goes along is an ‘enemy of the people’ (as decided by a bunch of right-wing hacks working for a billionaire sociopath who lives in Monaco to avoid paying British taxes!).”
The ranting of the Tory ‘Leave’ campaign on this shows the fundamental racism and authoritarianism which runs all the way through them. The Tory right are deeply undemocratic. They would far prefer that the issues were settled by a small coteries of elite, moneyed individuals in their favour. Parliament is grossly unrepresentative of the economic background of British society. Most MPs are millionaires, as Mike has shown again and again in the meme showing this fact. Even so, they represent a wider and more diverse circle than May and her cabinet. As for Gina Miller not being ‘British’, Guyana is a former British colony, and before Thatcher altered the immigration law in the 1970s, citizenship of a British colony or member of the commonwealth automatically granted the right to immigrate to this country and be considered a British citizen. This principle was held by an older generation of imperialists, including Winston Churchill. By their standards, she’s as British as the rest of us. You could even argue that as someone born in Guyana, she also has a perfectly reasonable right to bring her court action. One of the arguments of the ‘Leave’ campaign has been that if Britain leaves the EU, we will have greater freedom to develop trade links with our Commonwealth partners. As a lady born in one of those former colonies, she therefore has every right to make sure she and the other prospective trading partners are properly represented in these decisions.
The Tory attitude also contradicts one of the fundamental principles of democratic freedom articulate by John Stuart Mill. Mill was concerned that the views of the minority should always be protected and represented, even to the extent of being over-represented. He stated that if everyone in the country held the same political opinion, with the exception of one man, that one man should still be allowed to hold and express his views without suppression. But the Tories behind all this hysterical ranting clearly don’t believe that the views of the general public should be represented in the ability of parliament to vote and decide on this issue, rather than just May and her privileged cronies.
It’s also highly hypocritical. Remember when the Tories were complaining at how ‘presidential’ Tony Blair was, and how he was sidelining parliament? They were right – Blair was presidential. But this shows that their objections to a presidential style of British politics, in which power is concentrated in the hands of the Prime Minister in a manner more suitable to the American political system, was purely tactical. Once presidential power is in the hands of a Tory PM, all objections mysteriously disappear, and it is the defenders of the sovereignty of the British people and parliament, who are vilified as ‘enemies of the people.’ Perhaps, like the judges denounced by the Nazis, they’d like to see them shoved out of a British volksgemeinschaft.
This has to be stopped. Mike is quite right to recommend that people stop buying these dreadful right-wing rags, and vote out the Tories. They’re the real enemies of democracy and popular sovereignty here. Not the EU, and not the judges.
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