The Jewish Labour Movement – Hardly Jewish, Not Really Labour

A few days ago the Jewish Labour Movement raised their heads again to have another pop at spreading the anti-Semitism smears. Despite all the glowing publicity they’ve been given and their constant assertions that they, and only they, represent Jews in the Labour party, the truth is the complete opposite. They don’t really represent Labour’s Jews. They’re not even really representative of the Labour party, and shouldn’t really be affiliated with it. But they do represent aggressive ultra-Zionism.

Let’s start with their membership. They are hardly a mass organisation. They’ve got at most 200 members, though it’s probably that the active membership is probably less than that. You don’t have to be Jewish to join. As a result, it’s been estimated that about 2/3 of their members are as Jewish as myself. You also don’t have to be a member of the Labour party, and some of them definitely aren’t, like arch-Conservative and Zionist activist Jonathan Hoffman.

The organisation is basically just Paole Zion – the old Zionist Jewish organisation refounded. This was moribund until 2012, when it suddenly received a massive injection of cash. The project to found the JLM was started in a coffee shop in Golders Green by a Zionist activist, who wanted to do so in order to protect Israel from criticism from Labour after the public outrage against the bombardment of Gaza. It’s a Zionist entryist organisation, which somehow claims that it represents all of Labour’s Jews, rather than a very small number.

There are other Jewish organisations that back Corbyn. Jewish Voice for Labour, Jewdas – with whom the Labour leader spent a Passove Seder the other year, to the outrage of the Board of Deputies. and the Jewish Socialist Group. But none of these are going to be interviewed by the Conservative, lamestream media, because they refute the story the media wants to push that Labour is institutionally anti-Semitic. Just like the media does not want to print the letters Corbyn has received from supportive rabbis and Haredi Jews, who appreciate the efforts he has put in on behalf of Britain’s Jewish community.

Corbyn isn’t an anti-Semite. The Jewish Labour Movement is almost a complete contradiction in terms. It is completely unrepresentative of the Labour party and its Jewish members. The media is lying to you to keep Corbyn out by any means possible.

Ignore the lies and smears. Corbyn is fighting for a country that works for all its people, whether they’re Jewish, non-Jewish, Black, White, Asia, Muslim, Christian, Hindu, Buddhist or whatever. The Tories are only fighting for themselves and their extremely rich corporate donors and bosses.

Vote for Corbyn and genuine anti-racism.

 

Sargon of Akkad Exposes Lib Dem Lies

Remember Sargon of Akkad, otherwise known as Carl Benjamin, the Sage of Swindon? Sargon was the internet personality who, along with Mark ‘Count Dankula’ Meechan and Paul Joseph Watson, managed to destroy UKIP at the last elections. The party’s head decided that he could revive its flagging fortunes by inviting these three people aboard. He was counting on them bringing their audiences with them, but instead everyone with reasonable political opinions fled. Much of the rest went over to the Fuhrage’s new Brexit party, which is really just a corporate cult of personality pretending to be a party. Which left UKIP with a derisory membership and even more internal feuding, culminating in the resignation a few days ago of their Fuhrer, Richard Braine. Yes, Dick Braine was running the party.

As I’ve pointed out, Sargon has some extremely right-wing opinions. He’s anti-feminist, anti-immigration, and a ‘classical liberal’. Which means he’s a 19th century free trade liberal, who would now be an extremely right-wing Tory. He wants complete privatisation and an end to the welfare state, including the privatisation of the NHS.

So why give one of his videos a platform here?

Because on the subject of the Lib Dems, he’s right.

Sargon begins by talking about how the Fib Dems are doing extremely well in the polls, especially in Wokingham, Dominic Raab’s constituency, where they are only a few places behind the Tories. Jo Swinson, their leader, claims to be running a cleaner campaign, opposing the Trumpian politics of political deception. But as he goes on to prove, she and her party are using very Trumpian tactics.

He talks about the Fib Dem leaflet, that claimed that the Lib Dems were the leading party behind the Tories in Bath and North East Somerset. But this was in answer to a very specific polling question. Those polled were asked which parties they’d vote for, if the Tories and Lib Dems were neck and neck. The real opposition to the Tories in that part of Somerset, just south of me, is Labour.

He goes on to show the clip from Sky, where Beth Rigby tries to question Jo Swinson about this. Rigby rightly says it’s misleading. Oh no, denies Swinson, they tell you what the figures refer to. Yes, they do. In very small print of the type that people don’t read. Swinson then bangs on about how Labour voters, who don’t want Brexit, have been deceived and are turning to the Fib Dems instead.

And this isn’t the only instance where the Fib Dems were lying. Kate Burley also tried to tackle New Labour defector Luciana Berger on the subject of the Fib Dem’s mendacity. Berger is standing for them in Golders Green. Burley tries to pick her up on their election pamphlet, which quotes the Groaniad and Sky News as saying that the party’s ready to win the election. In fact those quotes don’t quite come from those sources. They come from Jo Swinson, as reported by the Groan and Sky News. But Berger denies any deceit. She just carries on with a spiel about how the Fib Dems have taken over from Labour as the opposition to the Tories in Golders Green, and that people are looking for a new type of politics.

And then Sargon shows just how Trumpian their election material is. Their pamphlets are all about Swinson, and how she’s going to be the next PM. It’s exactly like Trump, because like his campaigning, it’s all about the leader.

He also attacks another lie from the Fib Dems, where they claimed they were ahead of Labour and neck and neck with the Tories in Putney. Except that it was another lie. They’d never even polled in Putney.

The video ends with him attempting to rebut their stock rhetorical argument by saying that people should vote for them, as they are the only party that stands for Remain. But as Sargon reminds us, most people voted for Brexit. He has nothing against Trump and Trumpian politics, but they can’t say they’re opposed to it when they’re actually doing exactly that. They’re whole campaign is a good way of discrediting themselves.

This is all completely true, unlike just about everything Swinson says.

Mike put up a piece on his blog a few days ago showing how the Fib Dems were lying about their putative lead over Labour in BANES and elsewhere. But this is just one in a long line of porkies they’ve been spewing. Remember a little while ago, when Swinson was complaining that when all the other leaders were doing their best to campaign for Britain to remain in the EU, Jeremy Corbyn ‘was nowhere to be seen’? The truth was actually the reverse. Corbyn had been crisscrossing the country and travelling from city to city campaigning. It was Swinson who hadn’t. Except for one, halfhearted tweet.

Where were you, Swinson, when Remain needed you?

As for the image she tries to give of her party being full of ardent europhiles, keen for us to remain in the EU, only two per cent more of their membership are in favour of staying than the Labour party’s.

And Swinson has pointedly refused to say whether or nor she’d go into coalition with the Tories in the case of a swung parliament. Which means, to me, that she does. Which makes all the guff about her standing for Remain just so much electioneering rhetoric.

And Berger is also a liar. 

I wouldn’t be surprised if the Fib Dems have overtaken Labour in Golders Green. It’s because Berger and the rest of the Blairites, the Tories and the Israel lobby have been trying to scare Jewish Brits witless by telling them that Corbyn and his supporters are genocidal anti-Semites. The reverse is true. Corbyn has always stood up for Britain’s Jews, just as he has done so for all of Britain’s diverse communities. What Berger and her colleagues in the Blairites and the rightwing Zionist organisations found absolutely intolerable is the fact that he wants a genuinely just peace between Israel and the Palestinians. And hence the accusations of anti-Semitism and the hysterical screams that a Britain under his government wouldn’t be safe for Jews. Piffle.

Berger herself has genuinely received death threats and abuse online. But I think that some of her other claims of abuse by Labour party members have been shown to be false.

Berger is a liar, from a party of liars, led by a liar.

And you can tell the moral squalor of the party when someone as right-wing as Sargon points it out and almost looks good in comparison.

Desperate Tories Now Reduced to Anti-Semitism Smears Again

Do I scent fear hitting the Tory ranks? Surely not! But the proof is there, as the increasingly desperate Torygraph and the Jewish Chronicle are reviving the old smear that Jeremy Corbyn is an anti-Semite. But they’re simply parroting the claim of James Cleverly, the Tory chairman – and Mike’s absolutely right that his monicker is a misnomer – that Jewish families are going to leave the UK, ’cause they’re afraid of what Corbyn’s going to do if he gets in.

Really? I don’t believe it!, to use Victor Meldrew’s old catchphrase. Has anybody asked the views of Corbyn’s many Jewish supporters? Like, you know, Jewish Voice for Labour? Jewdas, with whom Corbyn spent a Passover seder? Mr Shraga Stern and the Haredi community, who Corbyn gave his support to their campaign to save their historic London cemetery from redevelopment? Or just ordinary, grassroots Jewish Labour voters, like those, who have appeared on YouTube and in print stating clearly that there is anti-Semitism in the Labour party, but they personally haven’t experienced it.

No, clearly not, because this would undermine the narrative the British political establishment want to push: that Jeremy Corbyn is a vicious anti-Semite, and so are his supporters – decent, anti-racist women and men like Jackie Walker, Tony Greenstein, Marc Wadsworth, Ken Livingstone, Mike, Martin Odoni and too many others. The pro-Israel right is pushing this for all it’s worth, because Corbyn isn’t an anti-Semite. But he does want a just peace in Israel with the Palestinians. And that can’t be tolerated. As for the Tories, they’re simply using any smear they can to destroy Labour, while it’s been repeated by the Blairites within the party as a way of ousting him and purging his supporters.

As for the two papers pushing this story, they’re going down the tubes at a rate of knots. The Torygraph has lost much of its readership, partly due to its mercenary editorial policy, which has seen it sacrifice journalistic integrity to the interests of its advertisers. And the Jewish Chronicle is under the helm of Stephen Pollard, who’s as Jewish as I am. Hence writer and academic Michael Rosen, who I think was Children’s Poet Laureate, has accused him of ‘Jewsplaining’. Yes, Pollard’s a non-Jew, who’s taken it upon himself to tell Jews what to believe as Jews. But he’s also a right-wing hack, who when he was with the Depress and similar rags wrote foam-flecked rants demanding the destruction of the welfare state, attacking the trade unions, and claiming that Labour and the Scary Muslims are going to destroy western civilisation.

The Tories have been pushing this line for a long time, ever since around about 9/11, I think. I remember Frederick Raphael giving a glowing review in the Spectator to a novel set a few years hence, in which the remains of the socialist parties in the EU and the Scary Muslims have joined together to begin a new Holocaust. And long before Corbyn won the Labour party leadership, the Right were already leveling accusations of anti-Semitism. Their target was Ed Miliband, who was, er, Jewish. And there was more than a shade of anti-Semitism in their attacks on him. Like the Mail’s article attacking his father, Ralph Miliband, as the ‘Man Who Hated Britain’. Miliband pere was a Belgian immigrant, who fled here from the Nazis. And unlike the father of former editor Paul Dacre, who stayed put in Britain as their society correspondent, Miliband fought for this country in the War. And then there’s the Mail’s own infamous history of supporting Mosley and the British Union of Fascists, and how the father of the newspaper’s current editor, Geordie Grieg, was a member of one of the pro-Nazi British societies before the War.

And the anti-Semitism continues, along with the islamophobia and bog-standard racism. Zelo Street has posted a very good riposte to Sunday’s Andrew Marr Show, where the show’s host interviewed John McDonnell. Of course Marr had to raise the question about what Labour was doing to allay the fears of the Jewish community about anti-Semitism. It’s now part of the standard set of questions the media now ask. But they don’t ask it of the Tories, despite the flagrant examples in the Tory ranks.

For example, how about Jacob Rees-Mogg calling John Bercow and Oliver Letwin ‘illuminati’ in parliament? As I’ve blogged previously, the Illuminati were a freethinking sect, who infiltrated the Freemasons in Bavaria. They are now at the centre of a bonkers conspiracy theory, which sees them as the secret force behind the world’s governments, manipulating politics and industry. Not all varieties of this theory are anti-Semitic. In some, they’re just the global elite, who are seen as Masonic Satanists. But it does merge with the stupid, murderous theories about Jewish bankers. The accusation so alarmed one Jewish academic, that he wrote an article about it revealing the anti-Semitic underpinnings behind the accusation. But it was about the Tories, so the media ignored it. Oh well, at least Mogg didn’t accuse Bercow and Letwin of being members of the Zionist Occupation Government.

Then there’s Priti Patel’s support of the Viktor Orban, the head of the viciously anti-Semitic and islamophobic Fidesz party of Hungary, and her denunciation of the ‘north London liberal elite’. Now she might be referring simply to rich liberals in that part of London. But it also sounds very much like an attack on a certain religious/ethnic group, who stereotypically live in Golders Green.

Gove has also tried to smear Labour again with another accusation of anti-Semitism, following a tweet from an individual, who wasn’t a member of the party. Apart from the fact that Labour can’t suspend people who aren’t members, Gove himself was also criticised by the Jewish Chronicle, amongst others, for opposing an attempt by the European Parliament to censure Orban’s government in Hungary for its anti-Semitism.

And this is all quite apart from the rabid islamophobia and racism of the various twitter and Facebook groups supporting Boris and Jacob Rees-Mogg, and Gove’s equally odious wife, Sarah Vine, declaring that the statement that there should be ‘less Islam in Britain’ was funny.

Going back to the claim that Jewish families are going to leave Britain to escape Corbyn, Mike points out on his blog how this resembles Phil Collins’ statement back in the early ’90s that if Labour won the election, he’d go to America. Well, he didn’t. The Tories won the ’92 election, so he didn’t have to. But he didn’t leave when they won the ’97 election either.

It also reminds me of the curious case of Danny Cohen. Cohen was a senior Beeb executive, who bogged off to Israel claiming that Labour was anti-Semitic and Britain was unsafe for Jews. Not that unsafe, however, as I think he’s come back. So much for the claim that contemporary Britain is like Germany in 1937. It isn’t, not by a very long chalk.

Treat all this as just more scaremongering from the Tories. It’s just more lies, from a desperate and lying party. And one that hopefully will be out of power after the election.

For more information, see: https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2019/11/04/jewish-families-will-leave-this-nonsense-claim-is-the-upshot-of-the-labour-anti-semitism-witch-hunt/

https://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2019/11/michael-gove-more-tory-anti-semitism.html

 

Just How Many Members of the JLM Are Really Jewish?

As Jeremy Corbyn becomes more popular, so the vile right-wing establishment and media, and particularly the Sunset Times, are determined to smear him and the Labour party as anti-Semites. One of the leaders of this campaign within the Labour Party has been the JLM, or the Jewish Labour Movement. Who I believe should be more accurately called the Zionist Bowel Movement. They claim to represent the Labour Party’s Jewish members and have been active denouncing anyone they can on the Labour left as a Jew-hater.

In reality, what they consider to be anti-Semitism is very narrow: it’s opposition to Israel and Zionism, rather than anti-Semitism in the proper meaning of the word: hatred of Jews as Jews. It honestly isn’t surprising, as the Jewish Labour Movement is the successor to Paole Zion, or ‘Workers of Zion’, a Jewish Zionist organisation that became affiliated to the Labour Party in the 1920s, and which campaigned for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. But Paole Zion was more or less moribund when it was taken over in 2014 or so by embezzler Jeremy Newmark, of the Jewish Leadership Council, who told his friends in a Golders Green coffee shop that he wanted to work for Zionism from inside the Labour party, using the tactics Zionists had already used in the Universities and Colleges Union. The Zionist Bowel Movement has repeatedly claimed that anti-Semitism is rife in the Labour Party, and last week loudly held a meeting to discuss disaffiliation, because the party was allegedly no longer a place where Jews were comfortable.

In fact, this is news to many of the Party’s Jewish members, who acknowledge that there probably is anti-Semitism in Labour, but haven’t met it personally themselves in all their years of membership. Labour also have a number of other Jewish organisations, like the superb Jewish Voice for Labour, which has attacked the anti-Semitism witch-hunt and defended its innocent victims, like Jackie Walker. I’ve also no doubt that the Party has very many other Jewish members, who are not members of specifically Jewish organisations. Many people don’t want to be put in boxes or defined by religion or ethnicity. One of these was Dr. Jonathan Miller, the satirist, broadcaster and opera director. When he was introduced on one programme back in the 1960s as a Jew, he replied by stating that he was ‘Jewish’. ‘I’m a Jewish. I have no interest in being a minority’. Which I dare say is probably the attitude of many assimilated Jews comfortable with their British and Jewish identities.

From their public pronouncements, you could be forgiven for believing that the Zionist Bowel Movement had a mass membership. After all, they claim to speak for the Jewish members of a party, which now has a quarter of a million members. They claimed to have 2000 members, which is trivial compared to that of the Party in general. And it’s probably less than that. From the voting numbers recorded at their general meeting on the issue of disaffiliation, it appears that they may only have 150 members. And not all of those of are Jewish. The Jewish Labour Movement is open to gentiles, and you don’t have to be a member of the Labour Party. Tony Greenstein on his blog stated that as many of 2/3 of the Bowel Movement’s members were actually non-Jews. That’s a hundred out of 150. So you have the spectacle of a Jewish organisation, of which only a third are actually Jewish, trying to tell a party of a quarter of a million that anti-Semitism is rampant in their ranks, in the face of the majority of its members and proper Jewish organisations with an equivalent or higher membership, who assert that it isn’t. And some of these other Jewish organisations have members who are really Jewish.

The JLM is such a pompous organisation, and its claims to represent Labour’s Jews so grotesque, that I was tempted to send them a letter offering to become a member. I’m not Jewish, but have read books on Biblical Hebrew and have the piano music for Hava Nagila, which puts me on the same level as many of their other members. And no, I’m not sneering at Jews or promoting Jewish stereotypes with this comment. I am attacking and satirising a mendacious organisation that has done nothing but spread smears and destroy innocent people’s lives. And they have done this not for any good reason, but simply to defend Israel and its terrorist actions against the Palestinians from criticism. Far from representing the party’s Jewish members, they should be seen as a marginal organisation which grotesquely tries to reduce the rich variety of Jewish opinions on the question of Jewish identity to simply equating it with Zionism and support for Israel.

And in doing so they have smeared decent people, including genuine, Torah-observant and secular Jews. The JLM really only represents Zionism under the pretence of standing for the party’s Jews. And if they departed from the Party tomorrow, absolutely nothing would be lost. Indeed, as Mike and many of the other bloggers have shown from comments posted on Twitter, many people, Jewish and non-Jewish, would be delighted.

The Electronic Intifada: JLM Was Founded to Fight Corbyn

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.”

See: https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/asa-winstanley/jewish-labour-movement-was-refounded-fight-corbyn

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.

Comedy Fuhrer Joshua Bonehill in Court Again

I found a tiny piece on page two of today’s Mirror, reporting that Joshua Bonehill, Yeovil’s comedy caudillo, is up before the beak again in Taunton. Bonehill’s a notorious fantasist, who imagines himself as the ‘Founder’ and leader of a mighty Fascist legion, ready to take Britain back from the failures of democracy and multiculturalism. In reality, he’s like so many other past sawdust Caesars in that his awesome Fascist army consists of, er, just him actually. And it’s even debatable how seriously he takes his role as Britain’s Fuehrer in waiting. In a now deleted blog post, he declared that his stance as a Fascist leader was merely a carefully contrived post in order to troll the real Nazis and the rest of the British public.

According to EDL News, an anti-racist website set up to tackle the English Defence League, Bonehill had announced on his blog that he was planning to descend on Glastonbury to give out anti-Semitic pamphlets and challenge ‘Leftist tyranny’. See their article ‘Joshua Bonehill goes to Glastonbury Music Festival’. They declared that he’d probably be going with some imaginary friends, in other words, all the Fascist stormtroopers he claims he has following him, but who strangely don’t appear anywhere and seem to exist only in his head. They also forecast that, as it was a cool pop festival, Bonehill probably wouldn’t get very far before being turfed out.

The Mirror article made no mention of whether Bonehill had actually gone to Glastonbury. It merely reported that he was being charged with inciting racial hatred ahead of this Saturday’s proposed Neo-Nazi march on Golders Green. I’ve got a feeling that even if Bonehill hadn’t been charged, he still wouldn’t have been able to go to that noxious rally as there’s a court order against him, but I could be wrong.

Not that this is the first time Bonehill’s been in court. He’s got several convictions already for harassment. The last one was for his harassment of a woman in Hertfordshire, because she spurned his advances. Even after he sent her a Nazi swastika, which he claimed had been touched by Adolf. Well, who could resist a romantic gift like that? He’s also been guilty of hacking into people’s blogs to present them falsely as paedophiles, and spreading all manner of lies about the pubs out of which he’s been thrown. Quite apart from trying to break into a police station to steal uniforms and equipment, and being thrown out of a supermarket, in which he’d tried to defecate.
He really does appear to be quite a charmless thug.

He’d better be careful though. I think that some of the punishments meted out to him have been suspended sentences. In which case, if he’s broken one of these, he could find himself whisked off for a holiday at Her Majesty’s Pleasure, and one which he very definitely won’t enjoy.