Unfortunately, Melanie Phillips wasn’t the only person this week violating the provisions of the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism in Israel’s favour. So was Ephraim Mirvis, the world’s worst Chief Rabbi. Mirv appeared in the page of the wretched right-wing libel sheet, the Jewish Chronicle, talking about his speech to AIPAC explaining why he told the British Jewish public not to vote for Labour because of Jeremy Corbyn. AIPAC is one of the very largest pro-Israel lobbying organisation in America. The largest is Ted Hagee’s equally vile Christians United for Israel, but AIPAC is extremely influential. Leading American politicos, including presidential candidates like Hillary Clinton, have appeared before it, pledging their undying support for Israel and seeking the organisation’s endorsement. And its leaders include such charmless nerks as Sheldon Adelson. Adelson’s a casino billionaire, who has apparently made it public that his first loyalty is to Israel. The IHRA definition of anti-Semitism says it is anti-Semitic to accuse Jews of being more loyal to a foreign country. For the vast majority of Jews, this is undoubtedly the case – they’re loyal citizens and accusing them of such disloyalty would be anti-Semitic. But in Adelson’s case, apparently, it’s true.
Mirv’s Violation of IHRA Anti-Semitism Definition
Mirv declared that Prime Ministers of Israel and key Jewish leaders have been graciously and warmly welcomed at No. 10 under the Conservatives. As Mike points out in his article, they’ve also been welcomed by Labour leaders. One of these was Tony Blair, who received considerable backing from the Israel lobby, which is probably one of the reasons why the Blairites were able to make such an alliance with the Israel lobby in the Labour Party to attack Corbyn. He then went on to ask rhetorically “What would happen if the next incumbent was Jeremy Corbyn? What would the consequences be for Jews and Judaism and the State of Israel?” As Mike also points out, that also violates another stipulation of the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism – that Jews should not be identified with Israel.
Unfortunately, Zionists do it all the time. Netanyahu passed a law nearly a decade ago making all Jews everywhere automatically citizens of Israel. Many Jews weren’t impressed. There are very many Israel critical and anti-Zionist Jews. These include ultra-Orthodox Haredi Jews, who believe it is their God-given duty to remain in exile and work for the good of the countries in which they live, until the Messiah comes to restore Israel. This cannot be the work of a secular state, which is an abomination. They’re a growing section of the British Israeli population. In a few years they will account for a third of it, and will have overtaken the United Synagogue as the largest section of British Jewry. Other Jews are critical of Israel from a belief in traditional liberal Jewish values, and despise the country for its barbarous ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. And these are also a growing part of the American Jewish population. An increasing number of American Jewish young people have no interest in Israel, or actively oppose it because of its treatment of the Palestinians. Enrollment in the heritage tours, which the Israeli state gives American school leavers so that they can visit Israel, is falling. One Jewish American, commenting on Netanyahu’s wretched citizenship law, said it was ludicrous that he, who had been born in Anchorage in Alaska, was a member of country he’d never been to, while his friend, a Palestinian, had no right to return to the country of his birth. And this opposition to Israel is shared by Jews, who have experienced genuine anti-Semitism.
Chief Rabbinate and Board of Deputies Not Representative of British Jewry
And then there’s the claim of the Zionist Jewish establishment to represent all of Britain’s Jews. Er, no, they really don’t. The Jews have never been a monolithic community. That’s a fantasy of anti-Semites. They’re as disparate and varied in their attitudes, opinions and values as every other ethnic or religious group. As Jewish bloggers like Tony Greenstein and David Rosenberg have pointed out, the Board of Deputies really only represents the United Synagogue. And its questionable how many of them it represents. Some synagogues don’t allow women to vote, others have sitting deputies whom they haven’t changed for years. And the Board’s constitution explicitly defines itself as a Zionist organisation, so non-Zionists need not apply. And needless to say, as they’re based on the synagogues, they don’t represent that third of British Jewry that is secular. But never mind. Once upon a time ’twas said that the Anglican Church was the Tory party at prayer. That was true at one time, as the Tory party stood for the monarchy, the established church and the landed aristocracy. But since Thatcher the Anglican Church has also criticised Tory policy on poverty, leading to disputes between the Tories and the Archbishop of Canterbury. It now seems that the Anglican Church is no longer such a staunch upholder of Conservatism. That role now seems to have been taken over by the United Synagogue, who can always be relied on to produce another anti-Semitism smear against Labour when the Tories are in trouble.
As for the Chief Rabbinate, as Mike has said on his blog, traditional Jewish theology and law stipulates that no rabbi’s opinion is any better than any other rabbi’s. And so when Mirvis speaks, it could be said that he speaks for himself alone, or rather, just himself and those who choose to share his opinions. The old retort Winston Churchill once gave a member of the House Lords therefore seems to apply to him: ‘The honourable member represents only himself, and I don’t like his constituency’.
Mirvis himself is a true-blue Tory, and welcomed the ascension of Tweezer as Prime Minister. He is also very much a Zionist thug. He and his predecessor, the noxious ‘Reform Jews are enemies of the faith’ Jonathan Sacks, both led British contingents to the annual March of the Flags in Jerusalem. That’s the unedifying occasion when ultra-patriotic Israeli boot-boys go marching through the Muslim quarter of Jerusalem, waving the Israeli flag around, vandalising Palestinian property and terrorising the locals. Sacks was requested by a liberal Jewish organisation not to go. He ignored them.
Jews Safe and Respected Under Corbyn
Not every Tory was happy about Mirvis’ decision to attack Corbyn. Simon Kelner wrote a piece in the I attacking it, stating that if Corbyn did win the election, nothing would happen to Britain’s Jews. There would be no riots, no pogroms. Now Kelner promoted the anti-Semitism smears as enthusiastically as all the other Fleet Street hacks. And in writing his piece he may well have been afraid that Corbyn would get in, and Mirv’s predictions of rampant Jew-hatred would have been exposed as the fearmongering it was. And as a consequence, the reputation of Chief Rabbinate would have been very badly damaged.
But Kelner would have been right. Nothing would have happened to Britain’s Jews under a Corbyn administration, because neither Corbyn nor his supporters are anti-Semites. Quite the opposite – Corbyn has always worked for the Jewish community. And he would have continued to do so. What would have happened is that Israel would have come under pressure to obey UN resolutions regarding the treatment of the Palestinians. And the ability of the Israel lobby to smear critics of Israel as anti-Semites would be severely damaged.
Jews Historically Indifferent or Opposed to Israel and Zionism
As for the relationship between British Jews and Israel, my guess is that the situation would have gone back to that pre-1969 and the launch of the Neo-Con project. William Kristol announced it in an American Jewish magazine as a method for encouraging Americans, and that included American Jews, to support Israel. Norman Finkelstein, that redoubtable Jewish American critic of Zionism, has pointed out that Kristol launched Neo-Conservatism because American Jews weren’t interested in Israel. They had no interest going to an unknown country, when they could make comfortable lives for themselves in America. David Rosenberg has said that until World War II, Zionism was a tiny minority in European Jewish opinion. Most Jews wished to remain in the nations of their birth, as equal citizens. The slogan of the Jewish socialist party, the Bund, was ‘Wherever we live, that’s our homeland!’. My guess is that British Jews have the same attitude. The Balfour Declaration was opposed by the British Jewish establishment, as they wanted Jews to be, and to be seen as, patriotic fellow Brits. They did not want to be accused of being foreign or having divided loyalties, and felt very strongly that the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine would lead to such anti-Semitic accusations. If British Jews migrated, my guess is that most of them would have gone to the same destinations as their gentile counterparts – America, or one of the White majority Commonwealth countries – Canada, Australia or New Zealand. Jews have been dinkum Ozzies since the 19th century. In the 1870s Rabbi Davis of the Sydney Synagogue took part in a rally against the enslavement of the indigenous Polynesians along with his Christian compatriots in the Anglican, Methodist and Presbyterian churches. According to Patridge’s Dictionary of Historical Slang, the Australian term ‘Cobber’ comes from the Hebrew ‘Cobar’, which means ‘comrade’. If Corbyn had got in, it’s possible that all that would have resulted is that more Jews would have become indifferent to Israel. An attitude that’s probably growing anyway.
Conclusion
Mike in his piece on Mirv’s wretched speech asks if the Chief Rabbi is more concerned about representing Israeli racism than Britain’s Jews. I don’t think Mirvis is able to distinguish between Judaism and Israel, so taken is he with the Zionist lie that the two are one and the same. And at present, the absolute, uncritical support he and the Board demand for Israel does mean supporting racism, apartheid and ethnic cleansing.
An increasing number of British Jews, including those who consider themselves Zionist, oppose this. But it seems that Mirvis really doesn’t represent them.
Said K. Aburish, The Forgotten Faithful: The Christians of the Holy Land (London: Quartet 1993).
Aburish is a Palestinian, born in Bethany, and the author of several books about the Arabs and specifically the Palestinians and their persecution by the Israelis – A Brutal Friendship, Children of Bethany – The Story of a Palestinian Family and Cry Palestine: Inside the West Bank. In The Forgotten Faithful he tackles the problems of the Christians of Palestine, talking to journalists, church official, charity workers, educationalists, businessmen and finally of the leaders of the PLO, Hanan Ashrawi. Christians used to constitute ten per cent or so of the Palestinian population before the foundation of Israel. Now they’re down to one per cent. Much of this decline has been due to emigration, as educated, skilled Christians leave Israel to seek better opportunities elsewhere, and the indigenous Christian future in the Holy Land, the in which Christianity first arose, is uncertain.
Said states clearly the issues driving this decline early in his book – persecution by the Israelis, and particularly their attempt to wrest the lucrative tourism industry from them on the one hand, and the rise of Islamic fundamentalism on the other. He writes
Twenty-five years of Israeli occupation have been disastrous for Palestinian Christians. In addition to the widely known closures of schools, imprisonment and torture of children, deportation of dissenters and activists, the expropriation of land owned by individuals and church-owned property, the Christians’ primary source of income, tourism and its subsidiary service businesses, have been the targets of special Israeli attempts to control them. In other words, when it comes to the Israeli occupation, the Christians have suffered more than their Muslim countrymen because they have more of what the Israelis want.
Furthermore, the rising tide of Islamic fundamentalism is confronting the Christians with new problems against most of which they cannot protest without endangering the local social balance, indeed their Palestinian identity. Muslim fanatics have raise the Crescent on church towers, Christian cemeteries have been desecrated, the statues of the Virgin Mary destroyed and, for the first time ever, the Palestinian Christians are facing constraints on their way of life. In Gaza a Muslim fundamentalist stronghold, Christian women have to wear headscarves and long sleeves or face stoning, and Christian-owned shops have to close on the Muslim sabbath of Friday instead of on Sunday.
These combined pressures come at a time of strain between the local Christian communities and both their local church leadership and the mainline churches of the West. The mainline churches in the West are accused of not doing enough to help them financially or drawing attention to their plight, for fear of appearing anti-Semitic and to a lesser degree anti-Muslim. The local church leaders are caught between their parishioners’ cry for help and the attitude of their mother churches and have been undermined by their identification with the latter. In addition to problems with the mainline churches, Christian evangelist groups from the United States, Holland and other countries support the State of Israel at the expense of local Christians. The evangelists accept the recreation of Israel as the prelude to the second coming to the extent of ignoring local Christian rights and feelings, a fact overlooked by Muslim zealots who blame the local Christians for not curbing their insensitive pro-Israeli co-religionists.
Two subsidiary problems contribute towards closing the ring of helplessness which is choking the local Christian communities of the Holy Land. The suffering inflicted on them by others and the direct and indirect results of the neglect of outside Christianity still haven’t induced their local church leaders to cooperate in establishing a common, protective Christian position. The traditional quarrel, alongside other disputes between the Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox churches, continues and its stands in the way of creating a constructive Christian front. Furthermore, the Israelis make the appearance of favouring them against their Muslim nationals, a divide-and-rule policy which contributes towards inflaming the feelings of ignorant Muslims who do not understand the reasons behind the Israeli actions and use them to justify whatever anti-Christian feeling exists. (pp. 2-4).
The Palestinian Christian community has largely been middle class, assimilated and patriotic. They have provided the Palestinian people with a large number of businessmen and professionals, including a significant part of the membership and leadership of Palestinian nationalism and the PLO, as well as the civil rights lawyers working to defend the Palestinian people from persecution by the Israeli state and military. They have also been active establishing charities to provide for the Palestinians’ welfare. Said visits one, which specialises in rehabilitating and providing training for people physically injured and mentally traumatised by the Israeli armed forces. Visiting a Palestinian hospital, he also meets some of the victims of the IDF wounded and crippled by the IDF, including a young man shot by a member of the Special Forces simply for spraying anti-Israeli graffiti on a wall.
This isn’t an anti-Semitic book, as Aburish talks to sympathetic Israeli journalists and academics, but he describes very clearly the violence and bigotry that comes not just from the Israeli state and army, but also from Jewish religious fanatics. In the first chapter he describes a group of Israeli soldiers sneering at Christian Palestinians, and how he deliberated placed himself between a group of Jewish schoolboys and an elderly Ethiopian nun going through one district of Jerusalem. The boys had first started insulting her, and then began throwing stones at her and Aburish before the local, Jewish inhabitants rushed into the street to drive them away. The churches and monasteries in that part of town are close to an area of Jewish religious extremists. They’re not usually physically aggressive, but they make it very clear they don’t like Christians being there.
Nor is it anti-Muslim. The Christians community itself sees itself very firmly as part of the Palestinians. Many Christian men have adopted the name Muhammad in order to show that there is no difference between themselves as their Muslim fellow countrymen. And historically they have been fully accepted by the Muslim community. Aburish talks to the headman of a mixed Christian-Muslim village. The man is a Christian, and historically Christians have formed the headmen for the village. The Christians also point with pride to the fact that one of the generals of Saladin, the Muslim leader who conquered Palestine back from the Crusaders, was a Greek Orthodox Christian. Aburish is shocked by how extremely religious the Muslim community has become, with Friday services packed and one of his aunts traveling to the al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem to pray. This, like the less obvious religious revival among the Christians, is ultimately due to Israeli pressure and the failure of secular Palestinian politicians. There is no truth in politics, so they seek it instead in Islam and the pages of Qu’ran. And behind this rise in Islamic intolerance are the Saudis. Aburish recommends better Muslim-Christian dialogue to tackle this growing intolerance.
Aburish hears from the Palestinians how their land is seized by the Israelis for the construction of new, Israeli settlements, how people are shot, beaten, injured and maimed, and the attempts to strangle Palestinians businesses. This includes legislation insisting that all tourist guides have to be Israeli – a blatant piece of racism intended to drive Christians out of the tourist business through denying them access to the many Christian shrines, churches and monuments that are at the heart of the industry. Christian charities and welfare services don’t discriminate between Christian and Muslim, but they are oversubscribed and underfunded. And the churches are more interested in defending their traditional institutional privileges than in helping their local flock. They look west, and are more interested in promoting and defending the churches’ response to the worlds’ problems as a whole, while the Palestinians are also being pulled east through their Arab identity. Senior Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox clergy are often foreigners, who cannot speak Arabic and may be to a greater or lesser extent indifferent to the needs and problems of their congregations. The Palestinian Christians are also hampered by the fact that they don’t want to acknowledge that they have specific problems as a minority within the wider Palestinian nation, partly for fear of further antagonising the Muslim majority.
Nevertheless, some Palestinian Christians choose to remain, stubbornly refusing to emigrate while they could get much better jobs elsewhere. And all over the world, expatriate Palestinian communities are proud of their origins and connection to the land. Aburish even talks to one optimistic Palestinian Christian businessman, who believes that Cyprus provides the model for a successful Palestine. There local people have built a thriving commercial economy without having the universities and educational institutions Palestine possesses. And some Palestinian Christians believe that the solutions to their crisis is for the community to reconnect with its oriental roots, reviving the traditional extensive Arab family structure, which has served Arabs so well in the past.
The book was published a quarter of a century ago, in 1993, and I’ve no doubt that things have changed since then. But not for the better. There have been recent magazine articles by National Geographic, among others, that report that the Palestinians are still suffering the same problem – caught between the hammer of the Israeli state and the anvil of Islamic fundamentalism. Christian Zionism, however, has become stronger and exerts a very powerful influence on American foreign policy through organisations like Ted Hagee’s Christians United for Israel. Netanyahu’s vile Likud is still in power, and Israeli politics has lurched even further to the right with the inclusion of Fascist parties like Otzma Yehudat – Jewish Power – in the wretched coalition. And some British churches maintain a very determined silence on the problems of the Palestinians. According to one anti-Zionist Jewish blog, the Methodist Church has passed regulations at its synod preventing it or its members officially criticising Israel. Because of the church’s leaders was friends with members of the Board of Deputies of British Jews.
I am very well aware of the long, shameful history of Christian anti-Semitism and how real, genuine Nazis have also criticised Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians and claimed that they’re just anti-Zionist, not anti-Semitic. I have absolutely no desire whatsoever to provoke further bigotry against the Jewish people. But Israel is oppressing the Christians of Palestine as well as the Muslims, but we in the West really don’t hear about it. And I’m not sure how many western Christians are really aware that there is a Christian community in Palestine, or how its members largely identify totally as Palestinians. Certainly Ted Cruz, the American politico, didn’t when he tried telling a Middle Eastern Christian group that they should support Israel. He was shocked and disgusted when they very firmly and obviously didn’t agree. He made the mistake of believing they had the same colonialist attitude of western right-wing Christians, while Middle Eastern Christians are very much the colonised and know it. Hence the fact that according to Aburish, many Palestinian Christians look for theological support to South American Liberation Theology and its Marxist critique of colonialism. And they also supported Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq, as a secular Arab state that would allow them to maintain their religious identity and culture.
The book’s dated, and since it was written the Christian presence in the Holy Land has dwindled further. Aburish describes in strong terms what a catastrophe a Palestine without indigenous Christians would be. He writes
The growing prospect of a Holy Land Christianity reduced to stones, a museum or tourist faith without people, a Jerusalem without believers in Christ, is more serious than that of a Rome without a Pope or a Canterbury without an archbishop. It is tantamount to a criminal act which transcends a single church and strikes a blow at the foundations and the very idea of Christianity.
I thoroughly recommend this book to every western Christian reader interested in seeing an alternative view of the religious situation in Palestine, one of that contradicts the lies and demands of the right-wing press. Like an article by the Torygraph’s Barbara Amiel back in the 1990s, which quoted a Christian mayor as stating that the Christian community welcomed the Israeli occupation. His might, but as the book shows, most don’t. Or that scumbucket Katie Hopkins telling us that we should support Israel, because it represents Judaeo-Christian values and civilisation, a claim that would outrage many Jews.
One of the major issues confronting the survival of the indigenous Christian community in Israel is emigration. Christians constitute one of the best educated and most skilled sectors of Palestinian society and economy. Historically they have provided much of the area’s political leadership, serving as mayors, village headmen and in important positions in the P.L.O., and have also been active running businesses, particularly tourism, and providing for the Palestinian people’s welfare through charity. But their numbers have been decimated through pressure from the state of Israel on the one hand, and Islamic fundamentalism on the other, which views them as collaborators with the Israeli state. Before the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, Christians comprised about 1o per cent of the Palestinian population. Now it’s down to about 1 per cent. Unable to find suitable jobs in Israel and the Occupied Territories to due the system of Israeli apartheid, and with their businesses and farms heavily squeezed by the mass of regulations and legal obstacles put in the way of all Palestinians, many are emigrating to America, Europe and Australia.
But it’s not only the Christian community that has sought better opportunities elsewhere. I found this fascinating reference to indigenous Jewish emigration from Israel in a passage discussing Christian emigration from the Holy Land in Robert Brenton Betts, Christians in the Arab East (London: SPCK 1979) on page 76 discussing the problem of obtaining the correct figures for emigration from the Israel:
No sectarian emigration figures are available for Israel (largely because they government does not wish to acknowledge publicly the large number of Jews, especially from the Sephardim, who are emigrating as well)….
The Sephardim, or Sephardic Jews are the descendants of the medieval Spanish Jews, who were expelled from the country by Ferdinand and Isabella in the Fifteenth century with the Muslim Moors. Their vernacular language is Ladino, a form of Old Spanish. After their expulsion, many found sanctuary under Islam in North Africa and the Middle East. Israel claims to be the nation state of all Jews, everywhere, something which is denied by non- or anti-Zionist Jews, whether secular, Liberal, Reform or Orthodox. Historically Reform Judaism rejected Zionism because they felt that their future lay as equal citizens in their traditional European homelands. And many Orthodox Jews reject Zionism because they believe that Israel can only be restored by divine action through the Messiah. Until then, they believe that their duty as devout Jews is to remain in exile as commanded by the Almighty.
But the emigration of indigenous Jews from Israel raises further issues challenging the supposed identity of the state of Israel and the Jewish people. For anti-Zionists, Israel isn’t a restoration of ancient Israel, but a White settler state like the other colonies established by Europeans at the expense of the indigenous peoples in the Americas, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. They point to Israeli racism against non-White Jews, such as those from Ethiopia, as well as the persecution of the Mizrahim, Arab Jews. The Zionist pioneers initially were reluctant to admit them, calling them, amongst other derogatory epithets, the ‘dust of the Earth’. They were held to be biologically inferior to White, European and American Jews. The labor shortage due to the lack of White colonists from the West eventually forced the Zionist authorities to admit them, but they were heavily discriminated against. They were given the worst and lowest paid jobs and housing and were educated in separate schools from the Ashkenazim. As a result, many of them have become even more racist and intolerant than mainstream Israeli society. In the 1960s, tens of thousands of Arab Jews were expelled from Israel because they were culturally indistinguishable from Arabs, or so I understand. And from reading this, it appears that many Sephardic Jews, who had lived in Palestine for centuries, also left of their own accord.
Which would appear to confirm that Israel really isn’t the ‘nation state of the Jews’, whatever Benjamin Netanyahu and the other racial nationalists in his coalition say, because clearly there has been a sector of the indigenous Jewish population that has not welcomed the establishment of Israel, or been properly treated and respected by Israeli society and its authorities.
Persecution and discrimination are not confined just to Christians and indigenous Jews. All Palestinians have been brutally maltreated by Israeli expansion and colonization, whether Jewish, Christian or Muslim, and Christian Palestinians have been at pains to point out that they are persecuted because they are Palestinians, and to show solidarity with their Muslim compatriots. But there’s also a story here of the persecution of the indigenous Jewish community, who have also sought refuge in emigration. And it’s been hidden in order to maintain the stance that Israel is the state of all Jews, everywhere, world-wide. The emigration of the Sephardim strongly indicates that, at least as far as these emigrants go, this definitely isn’t the case.
On Monday, Ken Livingstone resigned from the Labour party. He had been suspended from the party following the smears that he was an anti-Semite and had claimed that Hitler was a Zionist. This was completely untrue. As Red Ken goes on to say in the interview with RT, he never claimed that Hitler was a Zionist, only that he briefly supported Zionism. It is abundantly clear if you read Livingstone’s 1987 book, Livingstone’s Labour, that a racist of any stripe is the very last thing the former head of the GLC is. He makes it very clear that he is firmly opposed to anti-Semitism as well as anti-Black and anti-Irish racism, and details with the disgust and outrage the way the British state recruited Nazis, including those responsible for pogroms against the Jews and the Holocaust, as agents in the Cold War struggle against Communism. The claim that Livingstone said Hitler was a Zionist is an invention of John Mann, the Blairites and the Israel lobby, and repeated ad nauseam, ad infinitum, by the Conservative press and media in order to smear and discredit him. And they are still doing it. Deborah Orr, one of the wretched columnists in the I newspaper, claimed that he had said the Hitler was a Zionist, which shows how much she, and her editor, care about factual reporting. Mike has also covered on his blog how the Israel lobby continue to point to an interview Red Ken gave on Sky as showing that he was anti-Semitic. Which also shows they haven’t bothered to watch it, as in the interview Ken thoroughly refutes the allegations and shoots down those making them.
In this interview, Livingstone answers the question why it has taken him so long to resign. He replies that his instinct has always been to fight on to the end, whether it was against Thatcher or Tony Blair. But he chose to resign now because the controversy and lies surrounding him were becoming too much of a distraction. He was suspended two years ago in 2016. After a year, there was another three day hearing, which couldn’t refute the charges against him, and so extended the suspension for another year. He wanted to take his accusers to court, but was told by his lawyer that it would take at least two years to get there. He considered that it was too much of a distraction from Labour’s real programme under Corbyn, which he makes very clear has a real chance of winning.
When asked about whether the allegations have damaged Labour’s chances, for example, in Barnet, which has a high Jewish population, Red Ken said that of course people would be shocked when they hear that he said that Hitler was a Zionist, that it’s not anti-Semitic to hate Jews in Israel, or that Jews are Nazis, but he was struck by the number of Jews, who came up to him on the street to tell him that they knew what he said was true. This was that in 1933 Hitler and the Zionists made a deal to send some Jews to Israel. They didn’t like each other, but as a result, 60,000 Jews emigrated to Palestine. If they had stayed in Germany, they would have been murdered in the Holocaust. So it’s the lesser of two evils, according to Livingstone.
When the interviewer asks him if these allegations haven’t put a dent in Labour’s electoral chances, such as in Barnet, Livingstone tells him that half a dozen Jews have asked him on the street why he claimed that Hitler was a Zionist. And he’s told them that he never said that. Unfortunately, Livingstone never completes that reply due to a technical fault.
The interviewer then moves on to ask him if he really believes that Labour has a chance under Corbyn. Livingstone says clearly that everyone said that Labour would be wiped out during the next election. But in fact, Corbyn delivered the greatest increase in the Labour vote since the 1945 election, and they came within two per cent of the Tories. They could have gotten more, if the party had been united and MPs hadn’t been trying to unseat their leader. He states that Corbyn has excellent plans for massive public investment, improved service, creating new jobs and investing in high tech industries. That connected with people, and will connect with people at the next election.
The interview ends with the question of what Livingstone will do now that he’s retired from politics and whether he will return. Livingstone states that he retired from politics after he lost the election to Boris Johnson in 2012. Now he’s an old age pensioner and a house-husband, walking the kids and feeding the dog.
It’s a very, very good interview with Livingstone making it very clear that he definitely did not say what the liars in the Blairites, the Israel lobby and the press have accused him of. As for Jews telling Livingstone that they know he didn’t say those things, I can well believe this. Mike has put up innumerable pieces on his blog showing the support of many Jews and Jewish groups for Corbyn and the victims of the anti-Semitism smears, pointing out that there is absolutely no truth in them. Especially as so many of those libelled as anti-Semites are self-respecting Jews. The alliance between the Nazis and the Zionists is solid historical fact, and included in respected historical studies of the Holocaust, such as that of the Zionist historian, David Cesarani. It was called the Ha’avara agreement, and there’s a page on it on the site of the International Holocaust Museum in Israel. All you have to do is google it to find out that what Livingstone said was the truth.
Mike is disappointed with Ken’s decision to resign, as this also affects the legal chances of those, like him, who have been smeared trying to defend Livingstone. He writes
The shame of it is that certain people will take Mr Livingstone’s decision as an admission of guilt – and that he will not have the opportunity to put the record straight.
That means he is letting down others who have been put in the same situation (like This Writer).
I’m not backing down – and if Labour’s disciplinary panel find against me, I’ll happily sue the party because my good name is not a negotiable commodity.
It goes without saying that I’m backing Mike, and everybody else who has been foully smeared by these contemptible knaves, 100 per cent. While I understand why Livingstone has raised, I am afraid this will just serve to encourage the Blairites and the Israel lobby in their campaign against Corbyn and the true Labour moderates. They will not be placated by just taking down a few, sacrificial supporters, like Livingstone. Now that they’ve seen their campaign is effective, they will keep on and on. The best defence is attack, and the only way to tackle them is to meet them head on, and refute every one of their dam’ lies. They are not as secure as they think they are. The Blairites live in holy terror of the constituency parties deselecting them. The Israel lobby itself is becoming painfully aware that smears of anti-Semitism aren’t having the affect they used to have. And Jonathan Arkush’s own position as president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews is looking very rocky after his disgusting comments trying to cast the blame on the victims of the Gaza massacre, rather than the Israelis.
The Blairites and the Israel lobby are bullies. They are in a far weaker position than they wish to appear, and are responding by smears, lies and throwing their weight around. But you can stand up to bullies, and bring them down.
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.
And the good rabbi does not mince his words, as you’ll see later.
I found this on a YouTube channel entitled ‘Jewish Bund’. I don’t know who they are, but my guess is they’re probably politically left-wing. The Jewish Bund was the Jewish Socialist organisation in the countries of the Russian Empire. Along with the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, it was one of the constituent organisations of the Russian Social Democratic Party, before it fragmented completely into competing factions, which were then overtaken and suppressed during the Bolshevik coup of 1917.
It’s a video from an organisation, True Torah Jews against Zionism. I don’t know anything about the organisation, but it is obvious that they are another organisation of Torah-observant Jews, who reject Zionism as incompatible with the principles of Judaism.
The video was posted in 2015, and was prompted by Netanyahu’s visit to America. Netanyahu, with his usual lack of any kind of modesty or self-effacement, declared that he was not only Israel’s emissary, but also that of world Jewry. The rabbi and his interviewer, who is also clearly an observant Jew, soon set about demolishing that claim.
The rabbi points out, again and again in this video, that Netanyahu’s claim is ridiculous. He makes the point that Jews are and have been resident in very many countries. It’s a religion that comprises people of different nationalities. The rabbi’s own ancestors lived in Poland for 500 hundred years. Netanyahu doesn’t speak for him. He also rejects Netanyahu’s claim to represent him on religious principles, as well as simple nationality. Netanyahu is secular. He doesn’t observe the Torah, the Mosaic code. So he clearly doesn’t speak for the rabbi and other, Torah-observant Jewish people like him. The rabbi states that it’s as if the King of Bulgaria turned up in America, claiming that he represented and spoke for the Jewish people. Not only would the claim be demonstrably wrong, but people would laugh and ask, jokingly, what right the Balkan monarch had to claim that they do. Netanyahu doesn’t represent world Jewry, just Israel.
He and his interviewer state that the majority of rabbis have condemned Zionism down the ages. How then can Netanyahu make this claim? Rabbi Shapiro states that they’ve been doing it since the foundation of Zionism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He states that one of the great pioneers of the Zionist movement used an obscure point of Roman law, which allows someone to deputise for another as their proxy, to argue that he and the Zionist movement therefore represented the world’s Jews. The rabbi then goes on to argue that they had to adopt this tactic, as otherwise, without a country of their own, no-one would listen to them.
He then attacks this piece of rhetoric not only for its obvious falsehood, but because of the danger it presents to diaspora Jews. Rabbi Shapiro states that there is a threat implicit in it. It’s to show foreign politicians that there are people in their countries, who have outside loyalties that can be mobilised against them, if Israel’s desires are not complied with. This the rabbi understandably considers a vile slur against diaspora Jews living in their countries outside Israel. The ideals of the Torah determinate that Jews should live and work for the benefit of the nations in which they are resident. But this claim, and its hidden threat, are actively harmful to Jews by making it appear that they are quite ready to work against the best interests of their home countries and their fellow citizens for the good of Israel, a foreign power.
He is also scathing about another piece of rhetoric that is used along with the claim: that of the Holocaust. He is understandably offended with the cynical way Zionists use the horrific suffering of Jews during the Shoah in order to gain sympathy.
The video also puts up that notorious statement from one of the founders of Zionism, that anti-Semites will be more useful as allies to Zionists than decent people, with no prejudices, because they share the Zionists’ goals of getting Jews to emigrate.
The interviewer then asks the rabbi what can be done about this situation, when the media seems determined to marginalise and ignore voices like theirs. The rabbi is not downhearted. He states ‘We’re Jews. We have God on our side!’ He states that the Lord, who protected Mordechai and Esther during the Persian Empire, will protect them, just as He protected Jews from extinction over the last two thousand years. He advises his viewers that they can help combat Netanyahu’s pernicious claim by talking to their gentile fellows, and telling them that the Torah does not support what Netanyahu says, and that Jews are loyal fellow Americans.
I’ve no doubt that the rabbi is correct. Historians and critics of Israel have described over and over again how Zionism was a minority viewpoint amongst the world’s Jews. For many Torah-observant Jews, the state of Israel was a blasphemy, as they believed that Israel could only be restored by the Messiah. Tony Greenstein a few weeks ago put up a piece about a book and interview by a Canadian rabbi on Jewish opposition to Zionism. He also described in a piece about one of the non-Zionist leaders of the Warsaw Ghetto, Marek Edelman, how the majority of the Yiddish-speaking Jews of Poland voted solidly for the Bund and its campaign for Jews to take their place as fellow, equal citizens of their home countries.
And the rabbi’s fear that Netanyahu’s claim to represent Jews the world over casts suspicion on diaspora Jews by implication as agents of a foreign power was shared by the majority of British Jews at the time of the Balfour Declaration. The leaders of Britain’s Jewish community were very highly integrated into British culture and society. When Balfour was devising the Declaration, they – and the only Jewish member of his cabinet – objected for the same reason the rabbi above did. They wanted to be seen as loyal fellow Englishmen and women. You can see it in the oath of the Jewish equivalent of the Boys’ Brigade, in which boys swore ‘to be a good Englishman and good Jew’. And no doubt in very many other ways, in which they expressed their pride in being British and their loyalty as equal fellow Brits.
This is the video that Netanyahu very definitely would not want anyone to see, and neither would the Neocons, who have been guiding American imperial policy in the Middle East since Bush’s invasion of Iraq, or the Christian religious right, who are more fervent in their Zionism than America’s Jews. These are the people the media is determined to exclude. I’ve put up videos from YouTube from other Jewish organisations showing vast demonstrations in New York, with a crowd of about ten thousand or more, which the makers have claimed have not been covered by the American media.
And it’s clear why they don’t want videos like this to be seen: it destroys the right-wing claim that Israel is synonymous with Jewry, and that those, who don’t back Israel are anti-Semites. Even if, like these guys, they are religious observant men and women guided by the Torah, the Tanakh (Hebrew Bible) and the Talmud.
Well, not the real Sargon of Akkad, one of the great founders of Assyrian civilisation in ancient Mesopotamia, obviously. He’s been dead for about 3,000 years.
No, this Sargon of Akkad is a British vlogger from Swindon, real name Carl Benjamin, who was a major figure in the internet sceptics’ movement. Unfortunately, he moved from simply vlogging on subjects like atheism and scepticism, to becoming a mouthpiece for all manner of extreme right-wing views. I have a feeling he’s one of those people, who consider themselves politically moderate, while pushing all manner of racist, misogynist and generally politically extremely illiberal bilge. I think he’s turned up recently to at least one Alt Right or manospherian conferences.
In this very short little video, Kevin Logan calls him out for his defence of some truly astonishingly horrific comments by another right-wing blogger, Mouthy Buddha. Mouthy Buddha claimed that Hitler was very lenient with the Jews in the Holocaust, and ‘was a decent man’. And, oh yes, that the Jews got what they wanted after the war – a Jewish homeland – because of the Shoah.
Sargon goes on to say that Mouthy Buddha ‘did nothing wrong’ and that he was ‘steel-manning’ the argument for the Holocaust. Ominously, he goes on to say that he intends to do a series on ‘the Jewish question’.
Logan has responded by intercutting Sargon’s comments with footage from Mouthy Buddha himself, and a film clip of a bloke on a train saying exactly what these views about the Holocaust are: ‘Bullsh*t’.
He ends by putting up in front of Sargon’s face the words ‘You F***ing Pr*ck!’
Sorry for the language, peeps, but I think that the obscenity is entirely justified in the context of rebutting an obscene view. And the attitude that Hitler was somehow humane in his maltreatment of the Jews is far more obscene than any foul language or profanity.
The ‘steel-manning’ Sargon refers to is supposedly a rhetorical device in which one tries to undermine one’s opponent’s argument by putting in even stronger terms, as opposed to ‘straw-manning’, which is deliberately misstating it in far weaker terms. I hadn’t heard of ‘steel-manning’ before, and I don’t think many other people have either. One of the commenters on Logan’s video on YouTube states that it was thunk up by an internet group, and isn’t recognised by professional philosophers and scholars of logic and rhetoric.
There was nothing humane or restrained about the Nazis’ brutalisation of the Jews. Nothing at all. And the evidence for their extreme cruelty is so widespread and well-known that it isn’t necessary to provide any sources for it. All you have to do is go and look at any of the books on the Third Reich or the Holocaust by a mainstream publisher to see for yourself how horrific the Holocaust was.
As for the ‘Jews’ getting what they wanted from the Holocaust in the foundation of Israel as an independent state three years after Nazi Germany’s defeat, in 1948, it’s true that some Zionist groups and organisations were certainly more than happy to collaborate with the Nazis in the hope of creating further Jewish emigration to Palestine, such as during the brief Ha’avara agreement and the Sterngang. That’s established historical fact. It’s acknowledge by Zionist historians, like David Cesarani. It is only apparently denied by some Zionist groups, who attempt to defend themselves from the charge of collaboration by smearing those, who raise the issue of ‘anti-Semites’.
However, the Zionists were only one section of the Jewish community. The vast majority of Jews wanted to remain in the countries of their birth, as fellow citizens with the same rights and privileges as their gentile fellow countrymen. And they fought hard and bitterly against the Nazis and the other Fascist, anti-Semitic regimes. Those Zionists, who collaborated with the Nazis are entirely unrepresentative of the Jewish people as a whole. This has been pointed out again and again by anti-Zionists, including self-respecting Jewish scholars and activists like Tony Greenstein.
But Israel as a settler colony for European Jews was founded before the Holocaust, after Britain obtained control of Palestine during the period of the Mandate granted by the League of Nations. The followed the Balfour Declaration, in which the British Foreign Minister, Arthur Balfour, pledged that the British Empire would support a Jewish state in the area.
So Mouthy Buddha’s very, very wrong there. Norman Finkelstein and other anti-Zionist writers have pointed out how the Holocaust has been exploited by Israel and its supporters to garner international support, and that, quite understandably, Jewish emigration to Palestine did increase after the War. But reputable historians have also pointed out that during the War comparatively few Jews went to Palestine. The majority fled elsewhere, particularly to America.
As for writing blog posts about ‘the Jewish Question’, there is no question at all about the Holocaust. I’ve already blogged about how an American judge in California officially ruled that the evidence for the Holocaust was so plentiful that it could not reasonably be doubted. The same should go for the brutality of the Nazis and their collaborators, who instituted and conducted it.
It is, however, entirely fair and reasonable to discuss the historical complicity of various Zionist groups and individual Zionists, who hoped to exploit Nazi and anti-Semitic persecution generally to support their political goals of an independent Jewish homeland in Palestine, but this is very different from claiming that the Jews as a whole were somehow complicit in their own persecution. And it is this latter claim Mouthy Buddha has apparently made here, and it can rightly be attacked as anti-Semitic.
I am absolutely astonished that anyone outside of the various Nazi groups and their own twisted, ahistorical worldview, could ever make those comments, and if they were intended as a rhetorical tactic, it was certainly a poor one. Not least because of the way such comments and will be used by the extreme Right to encourage support. But that’s if Mouthy Buddha’s remarks were simply a piece of ill-judged rhetoric as Sargon says. But from the looks of it, it doesn’t seem that it was. Either way, Sargon is wrong about Mouthy Buddha having done nothing wrong. His comments were abhorrent and dangerous, and he should never have made them. The Alt Right have risen to prominence through their use of the internet. They and their vile views should be attacked and refuted at every turn, not given more ammunition to assault democracy and decency.
This is another important clip from Sam Seder’s Majority Report, in which Seder and his co-hosts discuss Trump’s vile moral equivalence between the Nazis at Charlottesville and the anti-Nazi counterprotesters. They make the point that his advisors, who are now declaring their horror at Trump saying that there were fine people on both sides – which means he thinks Nazis and White supremacists can be fine people – aren’t really horrified at his racism per se. They were quite well aware of how privately racist Trump was. What has shocked them is that he revealed it publicly.
After debating whether the mass resignations of the businesspeople on his manufacturing council did so out of genuine moral concern, or because they simply didn’t want to be associated with such noxious opinions simply for commercial reasons, they then get on to the topic of the two Jewish members of Trump’s cabinet, Gary Cohn and Steve Minuchin. Seder and his fellows on the programme are Jewish, so for them it’s particularly shocking and unacceptable that any self-respecting Jew should give aid to someone actively supporting Nazis. Seder says of Cohn that he must be profoundly grateful that it’s a long time till October, when he has to go to the synagogue for the Rosh Ha-Shanah festival. When he turns up then, there are going to be a lot of people looking at him. He states very clearly that the Jewish community should put pressure on Cohn to resign from Trump’s cabinet. Once he goes, Minuchin won’t want to be the only Jew left in it. After he’s gone, there’ll be a cascade of people resigning.
Seder debates which Jewish organization should put the pressure on these two men. He doubts the ADL would do it, because they’re a right-wing organization. J-Street might, possibly. But he concludes forcefully that there should be a coalition of left-wing rabbis, who believe in equality, who should stand outside their door first thing after sundown on Friday evening. This is when the Jewish Sabbath begins.
I’m not surprised that a couple of Trump’s leading officials are Jewish, despite his equivocation about the Nazis at Charlottesville. You can always find people in all races or religions, who are prepared to support those, who hate or would otherwise wish to harm their community. Karl von Luegerer, the anti-Semitic mayor of Vienna, who influenced Adolf Hitler, had Jewish friends. When he challenged about them by his fellow anti-Semites, he declared ‘I decide who’s a Jew and who isn’t’. One of the scandals of American support for the Nazis during the Third Reich was that this included prominent banking families, who advanced loans to them even while Jews were being deported and exterminated.
Many American, and for that matter, British Jews, are either emigrants or the children and grandchildren of Jewish Germans, who were forced to flee the country during the Nazi era. And these people had relatives, who were killed in the Holocaust. Michael Brooks has said in a previous video, in which he refutes criticism that the show and his boss, Seder, are anti-Semitic, that not only is he Jewish, but he’s specifically German Jewish. Trump’s willingness to support the goosesteppers has a direct, personal relevance for very many members of the American Jewish community.
Seder also attacks Cohn and Minuchin as they’re the weak links in Trump’s chain of command. The others aren’t directly affected by Trump’s support for the White supremacists and racists. They might even support it. But this isn’t the case for Cohn and Minuchin.
Regardless of their personal ethnic or religious background, I hope they, and others of Trump’s cabinet, do resign. Seder says in the video that the only Black official in Trump’s administration has done the decent thing and handed in his notice.
You can’t give the slightest support to Nazis and White supremacists. Trump states that there were ‘very fine people on both sides’. Part of the problem is that some Nazis and White supremacists can be personally very charming people. Way back in the 1990s I was listening to a programme on the Beeb, in which a German Jewish fellow described how he had successfully infiltrated and brought down a neo-Nazi group over there. He states that they included some people, who were otherwise perfectly friendly. They included not just real anti-Semites, but also normal Germans, who didn’t believe the Holocaust had occurred. Primo Levi, the Italian chemist and writer, states in his memoir of his incarceration during the Holocaust that there was personally no difference in character between the guards and the people interned. In his words ‘they had our faces’.
This is one of the aspects of the Holocaust, which make it so horrific and chilling. You don’t need to claim that Hitler was some kind of demon-possessed black magician, as some of the writers on the occult fringe have done. There was nothing supernatural or paranormal about the Nazis’ evil. Instead, it shows how otherwise normal people, who went back to their families at weekends or during leave as loving members, were capable of the most monstrous crimes against humanity.
As Mike pointed out with the Tweets he put up on his post from a very wide range of people, including Mr Sulu from Star Trek, George Takei, being a Nazi automatically rules you as a fine person. Or as Mr. Takei said, he ‘never met a fine White supremacist. Ever.’
Like Seder and his fellows, Takei has personal reasons to hate White supremacism. He’s a Japanese-American, who was active in the struggle to get reparations for the members of his community interned as enemy aliens during World War II.
Historians and political scientists have also pointed out that when the Nazis started out, they initially received miniscule support. The numbers, who voted for them in the early ’20s were comparable to those, who backed the BNP or NF today. The year before their election victory, Hitler’s party was bankrupt and had to go begging on the streets. One of the factors that boosted their support, apart from the Wall Street Crash and an agricultural crisis in Schleswig-Holstein, which allowed them to pose as the party of the beleaguered peasant farmers, was that influential members of the upper classes openly supported them. This included the philosopher Heidegger, who announced ‘Ich sage ‘Ja!’ – ‘I say ‘Yes!’.
This is the very good reason why no-one with any political power, or personal or social cachet, should give the slightest support to Fascism or Nazism. And why it’s necessary to condemn Trump, and deprive him of any support, for his own support for them.
The hideous political ghost of Henry Kissinger reared its head the other day in the Democrat debate between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders on PBS. Hillary was proud that Kissinger complimented her on the way she had run her department, and basked in the old politico’s compliment. Bernie Sanders, however, made it very clear what he thought of this pillar of the Nixon administration, and said he was proud that Kissinger was not his friend.
In this clip from The Young Turks, John Iadarola presents the argument that Kissinger is a war criminal, exactly as his detractors allege. Actually, on this issue, there isn’t much to ponder: the old bastard’s actions and statements speak for themselves, and indict Kissinger as one of the great monsters of the late 20th century. Iadarola sums it up by saying that he is a man no-one should want to have as a friend, and especially not someone who wants to be a presidential candidate.
Among the facts against Kissinger are the following:
* When he was in the State Department, Kissigner worked to prolong the Vietnam War as long as possible.
* He encouraged Nixon to bug and intimidate his political enemies.
* He supported the secret bombing of Cambodia and Laos, which killed untold thousands of people and destabilised the country, leading to the rise of a murderous regime that butchered millions.
* He also engineered the 1973 Chilean coup, and similar military interventions in Rhodesia, East Timor and Argentina.
Iadarola also gives some damning quotations from Kissinger’s own mouth. These range from the simply cynical – such as his belief that intelligence isn’t necessary for the use of power, and is sometimes an impediment, to the truly monstrous. He stated that military men were dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns in foreign policy, which possibly explained why he was so massively unconcerned about their deaths in the Vietnam War. In 2000 he said approvingly that he could think of no better way to unite America than behind an terrorist attack an American overseas target, and that George Dubya was the man to do this. He also asked during the Vietnam War why Americans should ‘flagellate’ themselves for what the Cambodians were doing to each other. He was also quite prepared to work with the Khmer Rouge regime, despite the fact that he knew they were massacring ten of thousands of their own people. Indeed, he himself called them ‘murderous thugs’.
During the 1991 race riots on the West Coast, he stated that although Americans weren’t prepared to accept UN troops there today, they would tomorrow if they promised to restore order. He said people feared the unknown, and to protect themselves from it the peoples of the world would willing plead for their leaders to take power, so that individual rights would wither before the world government. He also stated that the emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union was not an American concern. And if the Soviets stuffed them into gas chambers, that wasn’t an American concern either. He did, however, concede that ‘perhaps [it was] a humanitarian concern.’ This is particularly cynical, considering that Kissinger was himself Jewish. The 1970’s were the decade that saw an increasing interest in the Holocaust, including a TV series of the same name. This is particularly shocking because of the profound horror the Holocaust justifiably still evokes for Europeans and Americans.
I began this article with a quote from Monty Python’s Henry Kissinger song. And the correct answer to those lines should be ‘No. We are not ‘missing yer”. It was Kissinger winning the Nobel Peace prize after the bombing of Hanoi that made Tom Lehrer, the great satirical song writer, to give up. After all, what’s left to lampoon if reality does something that grotesque.
Mike over at Vox Political has published a lot on his blog over the past few days, which I definitely want to reblog. One of the pieces of news he tackled was the accusation by UKIP’s Fuehrer, Farage, and Guido Fawkes, that a female labour candidate had demanded the deportation of Myleene Klass. Klass had joined Griff Rhys Jones and other members of rich and selfish in complaining about Labour’s proposed Mansion Tax. The Labour lady had replied by suggesting that if Klass didn’t like it, she could simply emigrate.
This in itself shouldn’t be controversial, as in the past a number of other rich celebs have threatened to emigrate if Labour got in and raised taxes. These have included Phil Collins, and, I think, Paul Daniels. However, Farage and Fawkes seized on it, and started shouting that as Klass was the daughter of an Austrian father and Filipino mother, the Labour politico had demanded her deportation.
Not true. As Mike points out, emigration is voluntary. Furthermore, the Labour lady had made absolutely no mention of Klass’ immigrant background. She was demanding she consider emigration as rich woman, who obviously didn’t like a particular Labour policy. Her Britishness wasn’t in question, as she would have joined others like herself, like Collins. The only people shouting about deportation were Farage and Fawkes, and in their cases it looks highly hypocritical.
The ‘I’ the other day covered a story in which both Farage and his Conservative opponents were accused of using the language of the BNP. In the election campaign for Rochester and Strood, Farage had suggested that EU immigrants be limited by a fixed term of residence in Britain. They would then be forced to leave after the term had expired.
Farage and the Introduction of Fixed Terms of Residence for Immigrants
You can tell Farage had an expensive, public school education, as this is essentially the metic system from ancient Greece, dressed up for a return in 21st century Britain. In ancient Greece, foreign merchants and tradesmen could reside in the various Greek city states for a period of seven years. After the seven years were over, these resident foreigners – metics – would have to return to their home countries. Classics have always been one of the staples of the public school curriculum, and it shows that, whatever Farage claims to the contrary, his outlook is still very much one of the privileged upper classes. He is definitely not standing with your average British worker.
Tories: Only BNP Represent White Working Class
The Tories also managed to get themselves mixed up in this controversy when one of them stated that the only party that stood for the White working class were the BNP. Well, that must explain why they go around beating up trade unionists, Socialists, Communists and activists for women’s rights, as well as Blacks, Asians, Liberals and anyone who looks at them funny. Guido Fawkes, although a Tory, is no exception to this. He’s very much a man of the very hard Right, and so to hear him shouting that Labour is demanding the deportation of foreigners is hypocritical, to say the least.
Farage and Fawkes Hypocrites on Deportation
The whole accusation directed against the Labour lady actually strikes me as a piece of deliberate misdirection and obfuscation by Farage and Fawkes in order to draw attention away from the fact that UKIP and the Tories really are demanding the expulsion of foreigners.
And in the case of UKIP, they don’t just want to drag us back to the Victorian period, but all the way back to ancient Greece in the fifth century BC. They don’t get more reactionary than that.
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