David Starkey is also one of the speakers at the National Conservatism conference, and once again has stirred up controversy because of his comments on race. According to the Independent, the Tudor historian said that the left is jealous of the Holocaust and wants to replace it with Black Lives Matter. And they’re not interested in protecting Black lives, but it tearing down western, White culture. The article says
‘Left-wing activists are “jealous” of the Holocaust and want to replace it with slavery, a leading historian has said.
In a speech to the National Conservatism conference in London, David Starkey claimed that groups such as Black Lives Matter were attempting to destroy “white culture” and “do exactly what was done to German culture because of Nazism and the Holocaust”.
He said: “The determination is to replace the Holocaust with slavery. In other words, this is why Jews are under such attack from the left, there’s jealousy, fundamentally. There is jealousy of the moral primacy of the Holocaust and a determination to replace it with slavery.”
The historian’s comments brought swift condemnation, with Daniel Sugarman, public affairs director at the Board of Deputies of British Jews, tweeting that they were “pathetic attempts to drive a wedge between communities” that “will not work”.’…
‘In his speech to the National Conservatism conference on Wednesday, Dr Starkey renewed his criticism of Black Lives Matter, denying that the movement cared about black lives at all.
To applause from the audience, he said: “Movements like critical race theory and Black Lives Matter are not what they pretend to be.
“They are attempts at destroying the entire legitimacy of the Western political and cultural tradition.
“The idea that they are there to defend black lives is a preposterous notion. They do not care about black lives, they only care about the symbolic destruction of white culture. We have to be absolutely clear about this.”
He added: “The narrative of Black Lives Matter is that Western culture and Anglo-American culture in particular are fundamentally morally defective, they are characterised by the mark of Cain and their strategy is to do exactly what was done to German culture because of Nazism and the Holocaust.”’
Starkey’s wrong about the left seeking to replace the Holocaust with slavery, but he does have a point about Critical Race Theory and Black Lives Matter being used to discredit White culture. Jackie Walker, a Jewish woman of colour, was unfairly charged with anti-Semitism by the witch-hunters in the Labour party a few years ago because she dared to ask questions about how other genocides, such as the Black Holocaust of slavery, would be commemorated as part of Holocaust Memorial Day. She said this in a Labour party workshop about the proper commemoration of the Day, which stated that there would be no restrictions on what anyone could say. I think she’s technically wrong to describe transatlantic slavery as a holocaust. The Holocaust and similar genocides are deliberate attempts to wipe out nations and ethnicities. That wasn’t the case with transatlantic slavery, which aimed at the forced use of the enslaved peoples’ labour. This doesn’t remove the fact, however, that the violence and cruelty involved in the transatlantic slave trade was horrendous and it contributed to increased warfare and conflict in Africa, as tribes competed to capture slaves to sell to Europeans. The ceremonies on Holocaust Memorial Day also include the remembrance of other genocides, and Walker definitely did not want to replace the Holocaust with the slave trade, merely add it to the other atrocities also commemorated. Walker’s case, which was an attempt to silence a long term and principled critic of Israel, is the only one I know that comes anywhere close to a demand to replace the Holocaust with the commemoration of slavery. And she didn’t do that. When left-wingers have denounced the commemoration of the Holocaust, it’s been because of the way it is used as a propaganda device to muster support for Israel against the Palestinians. Who are being ethnically cleansed from their traditional home.
Starkey has much more of a point with Black Lives Matter and Critical Race Theory. Black Lives Matter was a response to a deep felt issue – what was perceived as racism in the American police which resulted in the greater shooting of Blacks. In fact, Black and other Conservatives have challenged this, and shown that more police get shot than Blacks, and more Whites are shot and killed by cops than Blacks. The organisation itself is Marxist, and rejects capitalism and the traditional family. In America, it’s also been rocked by scandal as its leader, Patrice Cullors, has used the millions donated to the organisation to enrich herself, her relatives and lieutenants. There have been a couple of similar scandals in Britain. A Black Lives Matter activist from Bristol is being sued for similarly taking donations. And a few days ago it was reported that the British Film Institute is taking a BLM-supporting film maker to court. She received funding from them to produce a documentary about Black liberation and the BLM movement, but hasn’t done so. Moderate and Conservative Black commenters have also criticised BLM for ignoring the problem of Black on Black violence and killing, which seriously afflicts many Black communities in America and Britain. Innocent Black people are still being murdered, but the movement ignores those lives unless the killers are White.
At the same time, Critical Race Theory holds that Whiteness is a bourgeois quality that automatically gives White people a privileged position in western society, which is intrinsically and systematically racist. The amount of racism in western society hasn’t changed, but only become more hidden. Hence demands to ‘destroy White privilege’ and for Whites to ‘be less White’. Slavery has become part of this, because the current disadvantaged state of Black communities in America and Britain is attributed to the slave trade and its legacy. Hence the demands for reparations. And yes, it is being used to delegitimise those nations. The 1619 Project about the influence of slavery and racism in America deliberately took that date as part of its name, because it considers it the true date of the founding of America. This was when the first Black slaves were imported into the nascent British colonies. At the same time, Britain is also coming in for criticism because of slavery and imperialism. For campaigners, the two or intrinsically linked, despite the fact that the later British empire and its annexation of Africa was partly motivated by a crusading zeal to stamp out slavery and the slave trade. Apart from the toppling of slavers like Edward Colston in Bristol, there are campaigns by Critical Social Justice activists to censor art and literature connected to slavery. And one of the problems is that slavery and imperialism is framed as something that only Whites do to people of colour. One of the arguments used by the slave-owners against the abolitionists was that slavery had been practised across the world down through history, and its abolition would leave Britain vulnerable to other nations and empires that had no such moral scruples. I’ve put up videos from the Arab, Turkish and Iranian world about their Black citizens, who also have their origins in those countries’ slave trades. Dubai, to its credit, has a museum to its history of slavery and slave trading. But few in the west seem to be aware of this and there is an active opposition amongst western anti-racism campaigner to tackling the resurgence of real slavery in Africa and elsewhere in the world. One of the left-wing writers in the I, Emma Maltby, rejected such demands as a distraction from the goal of achieving racial equality in the west. And Critical Postcolonial Theory rejects any criticism of extra-European societies traditional cultures as racist. Radical ideologies like Critical Race Theory and Postcolonial Theory are part of the wider movement of Critical Theory which is a postmodernist revision of Marxism that seeks to overthrow capitalism, patriarchy and the gender binary as part of the intersectional leftism called for by the German-American Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse in the 1960s.
I’m not a fan of Starkey, and he’s way off with his complaint about leftists trying to replace the Holocaust with slavery. But he does have a point in that slavery is being used as an ideological weapon against traditional western culture as part of a wider, postmodern assault on the Enlightenment values of individualism, rationality and reasoned debate. And this not only bothers those on the right, like Starkey, but also people on the left, like Helen Pluckrose, one of the trio of critics of Postmodernism and its assault on western culture with Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay. They have pointed out that CRT and related ‘isms’ differ strongly from the traditional anti-racism and feminist movements.
You can therefore criticise them without necessarily wanting the extremely right-wing economic and social order called for by people like Starkey.
I am very definitely not a fan of Toby Young. He’s a very right-wing Tory with nasty eugenicist views. I think he’s part of the Spectator crew and something of a sleazeball, as Hill Street Blues’ officer Mick Belcher would describe him. If memory serves me right, he was one of the people behind a proposed free university, which collapsed a few years ago. Tweezer appointed him to the body that’s supposed to represent Britain’s students, despite the fact that it’s been at least a couple of decades since he was one. He got into Private Eye a few years ago for attending a eugenics conference at one of the London universities. Along with him were members of various American far right groups, who believed that race really did define intelligence and Blacks were biologically less bright than the rest of us. They also weren’t in favour of the welfare state, for the old, old reason that it’s a waste a money supporting people who can’t fend for themselves. In other words, some of the people there could be reasonably described as Nazis.
And his attitude to women leaves much to be desired. A few years ago he managed to cause mass disgust on Twitter or one of the social media platforms by describing how he watched female MPs on TV, commenting on their busts. Back in the 90s he wrote a piece for GQ about how he had been a ‘lesbian for a day’. He then revealed in the article that he’d dressed up in drag and then decided to go trolling through New York’s lesbian bars looking for a snog. He had successfully passed himself off as gay woman in two of them, before he was discovered in a third and had to beat a hasty retreat. Or been thrown out. Whatever. This is the kind of antics many lesbians are complaining about from trans-identified men, or possibly straight men claiming to be trans. They object to clearly biological men demanding romance or sex from them because they claim to be trans. There have been transwomen giving presentations on ‘Breaking the cotton ceiling’, which means getting into lesbians’ cotton underwear. Graham Linehan, formerly the writer behind Father Ted and now an anti-Trans activist, has remarked that one of the lesbian dating sites is actually full of bearded men, who are about as feminine as he is, all claiming to be trans. Well, Tobes tried this trick decades ago. But I wouldn’t like to see him as any kind of trans pioneer.
But his Free Speech Union does have a point.
Young and the others set this up to protect people from persecution because of their views. These are mostly individuals, whose views or comments are deemed offensive because of racism, sexism, homophobia or anti-trans. He appeared on a video on GB News talking about the work the Free Speech Union had done defending two such individuals. One was a railway worker, who’d been sacked because of a comment he’d posted on social media. He lived in one of the towns up north with a large Muslim community. After the lockdown was lifted, he posted that it was a relief no longer having to live in an alcohol-free Muslim caliphate. Someone complained to the company, and he was sacked. The Free Speech Union, however, took up his case, and an industrial tribunal declared in his favour that he was a victim of unfair dismissal and awarded him damages. The second case was a Christian woman, who offended woke sensibilities by stating that the Christian ideal of marriage should be the heterosexual one of a man and woman. Now I’d say that this was perfectly correct and normal, and that holding such a view doesn’t mean that you automatically hate gays or people in same-sex marriages. I’m absolutely sure you can hold such a traditional view of marriage, while recognising that gays also have the right to marry and for their marriages to be respected. But this traditional view was too much for someone, and she suffered because of it.
Now I realise that many people do disagree with these views, and particularly with the railway worker’s comments. It is islamophobic. But that’s the point. For free speech to mean anything, it has to include offensive or unpleasant speech. Free speech that only permits approved speech whether by the authorities or the populace, is no such thing. I’m not a free speech absolutist. There have to be limits, which in my opinion includes holocaust denial, the promotion of paedophilia or which urges people to commit other crimes, like incitement to riot. I’d also include real incitement to racial hatred, though my fear is that such reasonable legislation has been broadened too far to include comments which someone simply finds offensive, rather than which genuinely threatens the safety of Blacks and other people of colour. The guy’s remark is offensive and tasteless but not, I think, really worth his job.
Young explained that the Union would like to pass legislation protecting people from being sacked for their views, if they expressed them as private individuals and not as work or representatives of a company or organisation. He also talked about getting the trade unions to back such legislation, considering that the trade unions were founded to protect workers talking about their companies’ pay and conditions. Well, it was a bit more than that. They were founded to fight for workers’ pay and conditions, but yes, opposing victimisation for one’s views is part of that.
He also proposed having a two-year limit on what could be used to attack someone from their web history. Here I definitely agree with him. There have been a number of cases where politicos, celebrities and ordinary mortals have been embroiled in scandals because of something they said online a few years ago, sometimes when they were much younger. Quite often it’s people, who’ve said something unpleasant or bigoted about people from ethnic minorities and gays, sometimes when they were very young. Private Eye has done this several times. Quite often they’ve printed pieces showing that whatever such a politician, industrialist or media figure thinks now, back in the day he or she had very different views. Sometimes very far back, like in the ’80s or ’90s. People change, and don’t necessarily hold the same views they had when they were in their teens or twenties.
But another reason I’m prepared to give such legislation my approval is because it might stop some of the persecution by the witch hunters. The stock in trade of persecutory groups like the woefully misnamed Campaign Against Anti-Semitism and David Collier and the GnasherJew troll farm is going through their targets’ internet history looking for anything they can misrepresent as anti-Semitism. They’ve done it to a lot of people, many of them Jews and firm opponents of anti-Semitism. They did it to the great Jackie Walker, a self-respecting Jew by faith and blood and a very committed anti-racist activist. Jackie had been discussing the involvement of Jewish financiers – who she explicitly stated were members of her own people – in the slave trade. This is historic fact, and Jackie, as a proper historian and academic, has produced an enormous amount of mainstream scholarship by respected and respectable historians to support it. She has also made the obvious point that these financiers were working for Christian, European kings and states, with whom the ultimate responsibility lies. Again, perfectly correct. But she left out a word, which allowed the CAAS to misrepresent her grotesquely as an anti-Semite. That, and the Jewish Labour Movement secretly recording some of her perfectly reasonable comments about commemorating other groups’ holocausts, like the slave trade, during a workshop on commemorating the Holocaust, has led to her being expelled from the Labour party and receiving the most horrific abuse.
Another victim of the witch hunters was a perfectly innocent Jewish lady in Devon. She was mentioned in an online film Mike and other Corbyn-supporting peeps appeared on promoting a documentary refuting the accusation that Jeremy Corbyn is an anti-Semite. That film opened with a group of venerable rabbis in long beards, dark coats and broad-brimmed hats stating very clearly that Corbyn was no such thing. Many of the speakers, including Mike himself, were victims of the witch hunt and what looks to yours truly as gross libel. One of these wretched witch hunting groups had posted a map of the locations of anti-Semites, and this lady and her address were on it. As a result, she not only received abuse but her car was firebombed.
This is what is called ‘stochastic terrorism’.
This is the name given to the type of online activism when someone deliberately posts comments that will rile people up against a particular group or individual to the point where they may physically attack them. But the remarks that provoke and encourage the assault are carefully phrased so that the person making them can always disavow responsibility: ‘T’wasn’t anything I said, your honour. It’s nothing to do with me and I didn’t intend anything like it should happen.’ Except, of course, they did. As in my view was the case with this lady.
Toby Young is a Tory with deeply unpleasant views. But I do think the Free Speech Union has a point and deserves support.
Especially if it prevents malign witch hunters doxing innocent people, leading to attacks on them and their property.
All around the world there are states and arseholes trying to cover up the genocides their countries and favoured political regimes have perpetrated. Over here, the right-wing pseudo-historian David Irving is notorious for his books minimising the Holocaust, for which he lost a libel case and ended up in an Austrian prison, where Holocaust denial is a crime. Tzipi Hotovely, the Israeli ambassador, is an enthusiastic Judaeonazi who has declared that the Nakba – the Palestinian equivalent of the Holocaust when the indigenous Arab population was massacred and ethnically cleansed at the foundation of Israel – to be a ‘Palestinian lie’. She also support razing Palestinian villages to build Jewish settlements, believes that all of Palestine should belong to Israel and would like to start another war with Syria and Egypt. She’s a racist fanatic whose difference from European Nazis is one of race, not genocidal nationalism. And I caught I headline on the Internet yesterday reporting that the prize-winning Turkish novelist, Orhan Pamuk has been jailed once again for ‘insulting Turkish nationality’. What this means is that he committed the terrible crime of talking openly about the Armenian genocide and maintaining it was fact as opposed to the cover-ups and lies of the Turkish state.
The Armenian genocide was a series of massacres carried on the orders of the last Ottoman emperor in the last days of the Turkish empire. It was a response to a failed revolt by the Armenians during the First World War. The Armenians were encouraged to believe the west would help them, and were tragically let down. In response, the Ottoman emperor issued a firman, an imperial decree, the Armenians were rounded up en masse, forced to march through the desert, starved, shot, bayoneted and crucified amongst other horrible methods of extermination. No reputable historian believes that the massacres didn’t happen and there is plentiful evidence, documentary and eyewitness, to support it. Including by serving Turkish officers who were disgusted and opposed to it. But the Turkish state continues to deny it, and anyone maintaining that it actually occurred, like Pamuk, will be jailed under a law forbidding the insulting of Turkish nationality.
This has also caused problems at the annual commemoration of the Jewish Holocaust by the Nazis. A few years ago various other Holocausts experienced by other nations and peoples were also commemorated at the ceremonies around Holocaust Memorial Day. When Jackie Walker got accused of anti-Semitism by the Jewish Labour Movement simply for asking what was going to be done about the commemoration of other Holocausts, such as that against her people, the Black Atlantic slave trade, at a workshop on Holocaust Memorial Day, she was actually asking a reasonable question. Other Holocausts were indeed mentioned on camera during the proceedings. Except the Armenian massacres. People, especially Armenians, were upset and wanted to know why. They were reassured that there was a ceremony to commemorate the Armenian Massacres, but that it was held off camera. Which is precisely the kind of mealy-mouthed double-talk you expected from Blair’s government.
I suspect the real reason was geopolitical diplomacy. Blair didn’t want to start a row with the Turks. The west needs Turkey to be a part of NATO and a bastion of western power in the Middle East. But not enough to allow Turkey to join the EU, and potentially flood Europe with even more Muslim immigrants as is the fear of certain right-wing Tories. Remember all that rubbish about 7 million Turkish immigrants finding their way to Europe if Turkey joined the EU?
But the Armenian Massacres have a direct connection to the Nazi Holocaust. They’ve been described as ‘the first genocide of the 20th century’. This isn’t quite true – the first genocide was the attempt by the German authorities in southern Africa to exterminate the Herero tribe after they revolted. The Armenian massacres were rather later. Nevertheless they had a far greater impact. The refusal of the great powers – Britain, France and America – to intervene taught Hitler that they could similarly persecute and murder the Jews with impunity. He summed it up in the phrase, ‘No-one remembers the Armenians’.
Well, to be fair, some Jews do. Years ago Mike and I went to see a play at Quaker’s Friar’s theatre in Bristol. Burning Issues was a updated version of King Lear, set in a struggling Jewish-owned publishers. It was a family drama centre around the conflict between the aging patriarch, who was head of the firm, and his children. The company is losing money hand over fist and the children wish to save it by publisher more popular books with a wider appeal to the reading public. The father, however, is determined to publish a lavish atlas of the Holocaust. As the play goes on and the man’s estrangement from his family worsens, it becomes clear that the old man may have been through the horror of the Shoah himself. He talks about coming back to nothing except a devastated Europe. The only person who really understands him his Armenian housekeeper, he feels. Because the Jews and the Armenians have clearly undergone similar horrors.
It’s a great play, and if the lockdown is ever lifted and you feel that it’s the type of play you want to see, please go to see it. I can remember seeing a number of excellent plays performed locally in the ’90s when Mike was briefly the theatre critic with one of the local newspapers. Some of the very best were performed in pubs, ranging from 17th/18th century French comedic classics to far more modern plays, One of my favourites was an adaptation of the classic Key Largo, about a man struggling to come to terms with the his betrayal of the Internationalists after being captured by the Fascists during the Spanish Civil War. This won prizes when it appeared in the 1940s, and really is one of the great classics of 20th century stage and film. It’s theatre like this which, without sounding snobbish or pretentious, makes a city genuinely civilised.
Pamuk’s arrest simply for speaking the truth about the Armenian massacres is another assault on real objective history by a highly authoritarian state. Revealing the truth about your nation’s dark deeds is not insulting. Indeed, it’s necessary so that a society can come to terms with it and move on. Apart from the more simple fact that covering up massacres and genocide is a disgraceful act in itself. Unfortunately, I don’t expect Starmer to raise any questions about the proper commemoration of the Armenian Massacres. I doubt he even knows where Armenia is. He’s too concerned with trying to silence people in the Labour party who challenge Israel’s gradual ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians.
Orhan Pamuk is a courageous man, and I stand with him in his attempts to challenge official lies. As I do with everyone set against mass murder and violence.
And this is also why I believe that Tzipi Hotovely is a disgusting human being who should be thrown out of the country, rather than defended, regardless, or especially, because she’s the Israeli ambassador.
More trolling from the darker parts of the internet. Mike reported on Saturday that a hashtag campaign had been started against left-wing journalist and author Owen Jones. The hashtag declared in crude language that Jones practiced the kind of solitary behaviour that tradition has it makes you grow hair on the palms of your hands and ruins your eyesight. It started after a group of Alt Right thugs shouted ‘Oi, you w*nker’ at him live on British TV. Jones himself said of the incident that if he could survive fascists chasing him on the street, then he could survive a hashtag campaign set up by people who need their hard drives checking.
Laura Murray told him that the person – and I use that term loosely – responsible for the troll campaign against him is the same individual, who posts pictures of her in a bikini in various positions in order to degrade and humiliate her. This person is one ‘Basil Brush/Bruscetta’, who is a massive fan of Rachel Riley. He endorsed a thread from Riley in which she attacked a certain 16 year old girl as an anti-Semite. Bruscetta’s website didn’t last, and was taken down. So his supporters linked it to one attacking their idol. Which apparently was done by members of the GnasherJew troll farm, David Collier and another odious jerk, Jack Silver. Collier was moaning that Twitter’s removal of the hashtag against Jones showed it to be a fake news site, as Jones is an anti-Semite and therefore akin to a Nazi!
Saaaaaay whaaaaat!
In what parallel world are this idiots living? Jones is no kind of Nazi. Indeed, he’s been criticised by Tony Greenstein – also definitely not a Nazi – for being too accommodating to the anti-Semitism smear campaign of which Riley, Collier and co. are a part against critics of Israel and supporters of Jeremy Corbyn in the Labour party.
As Mike explains, the clip used to troll Jones was of the abuse screamed at him from right-wing pro-Brexit campaigners when he was being interviewed outside parliament in January. Riley also tried to attack Jones with smears and shockingly inaccurate comments about his coverage of Holocaust Memorial Day.
Mike concludes his article about this
She protested at the time that she is not a supporter of the far right. Maybe that’s true; I don’t propose to comment on it, one way or the other.
But questions need to be asked about why supporters of the far right seem so keen to link themselves with her.
There’s more that could be said about this. Much more. Alongside the comments about Jones’ supposed solitary practices was another line calling him a ‘Stalinist’. This obviously comes from the far right. In some ways it’s ironic. Stalin was a brutal dictator with a venomous hatred of the Jews. After the Nazis broke the pact they’d made for the occupation of eastern Europe with the former Soviet Union, Stalin lamented what the Soviet and Nazis could have achieved together. And one of the major figures in post-War American Nazism, Francis Parker Yockey – a bizarre figure who was very much like the Nazi playwright in Mel Brookes’ The Producers – was a supporter of the Soviet Union because he saw it as a bulwark of civilisation against the decadence caused by democracy. The real Alt Right have more in common with Stalin than they’d like to admit.
The hashtag campaign against Jones was also supported by Carl ‘Sargon of Akkad’ Benjamin, the man who broke UKIP. I think Sargon’s Jewish, and he has argued online with the Alt Right. But despite describing himself as a ‘classical Liberal’ – for which read ‘Libertarian’ – Sargon’s own politics are so close to that of the Alt Right that some have commented that he is a gateway to them. A soft introduction leading to the harder, more racist stuff further away from the mainstream.
Despite Collier and co.’s claim that they’re fighting anti-Semitism, they’re doing no such thing. Like the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, they’re almost completely uninterested in real, right-wing anti-Semitism. They’re against anti-Zionism or simply criticism of Israel, which they deliberately conflate with anti-Semitism. And they attack it on the left for two reasons.
At the most superficial level, they do it because they’re bullies.
The people they attack, people like Mike, Tony Greenstein, Jackie Walker, Ken Livingstone, Chris Williamson, Sally Eason and so on are decent people. They aren’t trolls, and so don’t response with the high level of abuse the real anti-Semites would. GnasherJew and Riley’s fan are not going to attack the trolls that post real anti-Semitic material, like those who consider the Holocaust a great joke, because their campaign of hate wouldn’t touch them. The trolls would just start making coarse comments on their sexuality, which would probably be homophobic and accuse them of being paedophiles. Further attacks on them by Riley’s fans and Collier and his fellow scumbags would just be treated with amusement, and provide them with further ammunition for trolling them. But the people on the Labour left GnasherJew and Riley attack instead aren’t like that. They can be bullied and cowed. And so they do.
And there’s no great mystery why racists like the Alt Right support Riley.
Tony Greenstein has observed that historically, Zionism’s allies have always been the Far Right. The Islamophobic right in Britain – Britain First and the English Defence League strongly support Israel because they hate Muslims. Tommy Robinson even boasted that if there was a war with the Palestinians, he’d fight for Israel. They also admire Israel because it’s the kind of ‘ethnostate’ they’d like to create in the West. Richard Spencer, the founder of the Alt Right, appeared on Israeli TV, where he declared himself to be a White Zionist. Just as Israel is a racial state in which the only true citizens are Jews, so Spencer and co. wish to create a White ethnostate in America, where only Whites will enjoy full civil rights and Blacks, Asians and Hispanics will have been ‘peacefully’ cleansed.
And the Alt Right also have an enemy in common with Israel’s supporters, at least on the Right.
They hate and fear genuine left-wingers. Which is why they were both determined to bring down Jeremy Corbyn. He was both a critic of Israel and determined to bring back the welfare state, strong trade unions and a mixed economy. All of which are abhorrent to those on the Far Right, like Spencer and Sargon, and the Blairites in the Labour party. Which is why you had the Blairites in the Labour party, like Joan Ryan of Labour Friends of Israel, sneering at Corbyn’s supporters in Labour as ‘Stalinists’, ‘Trotskyites’ and Communists.
I am not accusing Riley of being a Fascist or a member of the Alt Right. But she needs to think very clearly about the way she is supported by them, and do what she can to discourage it.
Otherwise some would be justified in calling her a hypocrite. If not worse.
Looking back at two of the most notorious instances, where decent anti-racists have been smeared as an anti-Semites, it occurred to me that behind them there’s a very nasty strain of anti-black racism. These two cases were the attacks on Jackie Walker, the vice-chair of Momentum by the Campaign Against Truth and the Jewish Labour Movement, and against Marc Wadsworth by Ruth Smeeth. Both were not only passionate and committed campaigners against all varieties of racism, they were also Black.
Walker is Jewish by descent and faith. Her partner is Jewish, and she sent her daughter to a Jewish school. She is an outspoken opponent of Israeli apartheid, and began attacking it through her activism against its counterpart in South Africa. Because of this some Zionist organisation has apparently identified her as the second most dangerous threat to Israel along with Jeremy Corbyn.
She was accused of anti-Semitism when snoopers from the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism dug up an old Facebook conversation between her and two or three other historians and scholars discussing Jewish financial involvement in the slave trade. Walker made it clear that she was looking at it partly from the angle of being a Jew herself. She said that the Jews involved were ‘my people too’. It’s a legitimate area of historical research, and Jackie has subsequently very ably defended herself by citing studies of this by mainstream, respectable Jewish historians. Nowhere did she claim that the Jews were solely responsible for the slave trade, or even its main investors. She has made it clear that the responsibility for the slave trade lies with the Christian monarchs of the states that engaged in it.
Nevertheless, her words were taken out of context and further distorted, and she was the subject of a vile article in the Jewish Chronicle claiming that she had. This formed the basis for a complaint against her to the Labour party demanding her expulsion. She was also accused of anti-Semitism by the Jewish Labour Movement. They secretly recorded her at a workshop on the proper commemoration of the Holocaust for Holocaust Memorial Day. Jackie complained that she was unable to work with their definition of anti-Semitism and objected to the way Holocaust Memorial Day concentrated exclusively on Jewish suffering to the exclusion of other groups, who had also suffered similar genocides, like Black Africans. I believe the definition of anti-Semitism to which she objected wasn’t the normal definition that it is simply hatred of Jews as Jews, but the IHRC definition, which conflates it with opposition to Israel. And while Holocaust Memorial Day does mention the holocausts of other ethnicities, there is increasing hostility amongst some Zionists on their inclusion. As Tony Greenstein has shown, the Israeli state is keen to present the Holocaust as a unique phenomenon which targeted only Jews, despite the Nazis’ determination to murder other groups and races, like the Roma and the disabled, not to mention the Slav peoples they intended to enslave and turn into a class of peasant serfs.
Jackie was duly expelled from the party, though not for anti-Semitism, which he accusers couldn’t prove, but on other, spurious charges, like bringing the party into disrepute or some other nonsense. Since then, she has been the victim of sustained, vicious abuse. She has been told that she should be hanged from trees, or killed and her body dumped in bin bags. This is so vile, that she has forbidden her daughters from reading her email, because she doesn’t want to see them upset by the abuse their mother is getting. And amongst these accusations is the claim that she cannot be properly Jewish, because she’s black. Which is itself definitely racist.
Now it seems to me that at the heart of these smears against Walker is the assumption that, as a Black anti-racist activist, she must be an anti-Semite. This is based on the very public comments several decades ago of two leading Black American figures, Louis Farrakhan and the Reverend Jesse Jackson. Farrakhan is, or was, the head of the Nation of Islam, the religious movement led by Malcolm X. Although it sees itself as a form of Islam, it is by Muslim standards highly heretical. It’s based around the worship of W.D. Fard, a Syrian immigrant to the US, as God incarnate. It also has elements of those new religious movements centred on UFOs, like the Aetherius Society. Farrakhan claims that he was taken up by a UFO from a mountain in Mexico to an orbiting ‘mother wheel’, where he was told that W.D. Fard and Jesus were alive and well on Venus, where they would direct the future war against Whites.
As well as bitterly hostile to Whites, Farrakhan is also vehemently anti-Semitic. He really does believe that the Jews were responsible for the slave trade. This is definitely rejected by every proper scholar of the subject, including Jackie herself.
In the late 1980s and 1990s, Farrakhan organised a series of events protesting against the conditions of Black people in America. One of the most spectacular was the ‘Million Man March’, in which a million Black men were to march on Washington D.C. It was supposed to be a men-only event, as the religion has very traditional views on sex and gender roles. Women were supposed to be at home, looking after the children. And it was supposed to be for Blacks only. In the event, the organisers could only reach the numbers they wanted through letting Whites join.
The Reverend Jesse Jackson was a Christian minister, who was also a Black anti-racism activist. He was popular, and at one stage it looked like he might win the Democratic presidential nomination. Eddie Murphy in his stand-up comedy routine included jokes about the shock White racists would get after they drunkenly voted for him as a joke, only to wake up the next morning to find Jackson in the White House. It’s possible that two decades before Barack Obama, America could have seen its first Black president. Jackson’s political ambitions took a nosedive, however, when he began to move close to Farrakhan and made anti-Semitic comments. The most notorious of these was when he called New York ‘Hymietown’ because of its large Jewish population.
It therefore seems very strongly to me that the accusations of anti-Semitism against Jackie Walker were partly intended to recall the real anti-Semitism of Farrakhan and Jackson. The implication there seemed to be that because she dared discuss Jewish involvement in the slave trade, she must share Farrakhan’s odious views. Not least of which is because she’s a Black anti-racist activist, and so was he.
Ditto with Marc Wadsworth. He was smeared by Ruth Smeeth because he caught her passing on information to a Torygraph journo next to her at a Labour party event. She then claimed that he was guilty of using the anti-Semitic trope of Jews as leaders of a conspiracy against her. The lamestream press had a field day with this, repeating this lie and even screaming that he was the Labour activist, who made her cry.
Wadsworth is not Jewish, but he is a committed anti-racist activist. Among his achievements was getting the parents of the murdered Black teenager, Stephen Lawrence, to meet Nelson Mandela. He also worked with the Board of Deputies of British Jews to formulate improved legislation to protect Jews from real anti-Semitic violence after a spate of attacks by the NF/BNP in the Isle of Dogs in the 1980s. He’s very, very definitely not a racist. But truth doesn’t matter to these scoundrels, and they libelled him as such anyway.
Like Jackie Walker.
I think part of the underlying assumption here is that both Jackie and Marc must be racist themselves, because they’re Black. When riots broke out in Black communities across Britain in the first years of Thatcher’s reign c. 1981/2, the Tory press claimed that they weren’t caused by poor social conditions, lack of opportunities, high unemployment suffered by British Blacks, or institutional racism in British society. No! The real reason Blacks in Toxteth, Liverpool, St. Paul’s, Bristol, and Brixton in London, was because they were anti-White racists. And although nearly four decades have passed since then, I think that’s still the assumption, or the implication, behind the accusations against Marc and Jackie. Black anti-racism activists must be anti-White, and anti-Semitic, because of the assumptions and events of over three decades ago.
Meanwhile, it’s noticeable how uninterested in combating racism, or actively racist those making the accusations of anti-Semitism are. the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism has precious little to say about real Fascism and anti-Semitism, preferring to rail instead against Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters. Margaret Hodge did so little to combat the NF/BNP in Islington, that when the BNP’s Derek Beacon and his storm troopers got onto Tower Hamlet’s council, they sent her a bouquet of flowers. Tom Watson, who has done his best to facilitate these accusations in the Labour party, was a friend of Phil Woolas, who was prosecuted for running an islamophobic campaign portraying Muslims as terrorists. David Rosenberg of the Jewish Socialist Group has written on his blog about how the Board of Deputies of British Jews in the 1980s did their level best to prevent Jews from going on anti-racist marches and events like Rock Against Racism. The ostensible reason was that they were afraid Jews would be exposed to anti-Zionist propaganda. But others suspected that the real reason was that the Board did not want them mixing with people from different races and communities. And the respected historian of Jewish community in Britain, Geoffrey Alderman, was put under pressure by the Board in the 1970s to remove from his book his finding that 2 per cent of the Jewish community in the UK voted for the BNP because they hated Blacks and didn’t want their children going to school with them.
Of course, the people making these defamatory accusations of anti-Semitism against decent people don’t confine them to Blacks. They also make them against Whites, and particularly against Jews critical of Israel. These latter, who obviously include Jackie, are subjected to the most vile abuse, which would automatically be considered anti-Semitic if it came from non-Jews. Like some of the comments Tony Greenstein has received by Zionist Jews, telling him that they wish he and his family had died in the Shoah.
But it seems to me that behind the smears of Jackie Walker and Marc Wadsworth there is nevertheless a very strong undertone of anti-Black racism, a racism that permeates their accusers and the right-wing media, which supported those smears.
This past week has been dominated by the ceremonies commemorating the 75th anniversary of D-Day, when Allied forces landed in Normandy in 1944 in an invasion that was to roll back the German forces. With the Soviet advance across eastern Europe, the invasion eventually led to the final defeat of Nazi Germany and the liberation of Europe. The news coverage of the various displays, ceremonies and discussions of the events of D-Day and their historical significance have also included the Holocaust, and calls for its survivors each to be given proper honours by the Queen.
I’ve absolutely no objection to this. These men and women, now obviously thinned by time and old age, survived a true living hell at the hands of a regime that has come to symbolise tyranny and mass murder at its darkest, most extreme and malign. I also believe that the Holocaust needs to be taught, remembered and properly understood and placed in its historical, sociological and political context. The forces of the extreme Right, though severely beaten, are always at the political margins, seeking to gain a foothold back into power. Thanks to neoliberalism and its impoverishment of the masses in order to benefit the elite super-rich, Fascism and extreme right-wing populism is now on the rise again across Europe and America, from Donald Trump in the US to UKIP and the Brexit party here in the UK, Marine Le Pen and her crew in France, and the AfD in Germany. These last contain some unreconstructed, real Nazis, who have denounced their country’s Holocaust monument as ‘a badge of shame’ and have said that when they get into power, they will open up an underground railway to the infamous death camp. And then there’s the various bitterly racist and anti-Semitic regimes in eastern Europe, like Viktor Orban’s Fidesz in Hungary, the Baltic states and their determination to honour as patriotic heroes Nazi collaborators during War, and the truly Nazi Azov battalion in the Ukraine.
Now more than ever we need to show how genocidal Fascism arises, and leads nations to commit the most horrific atrocities.
However, nearly a month ago, on the 13th May 2019, Tony Greenstein, a Jewish activist against all forms of racism and Fascism, and particularly its Jewish form, Zionism, put up a piece on his blog arguing that the Holocaust should not be commemorated. It’s a highly controversial piece, and obviously shocking to very many. But Greenstein is not alone, and his piece is backed up by very strong arguments. For example, it was only after the 1967 War that Israel began commemorating the Shoah. Before then they played it down and actively discouraged its commemoration. It was felt that the sufferings of the Jewish people would reflect badly on their ability to found a new state for themselves. The survivors themselves were vilified. Greenstein states that in Israel they were subject to the disgusting epithet ‘sapon’ – soap – from the myth that the Nazis turned the bodies of those murdered in the gas chambers into the substance.
Greenstein also shows that, despite Holocaust Day being a regularly part of the Israeli calendar and the emphasis on the Holocaust and its commemoration in the Israeli education system, with young Israelis taken on trips to Auschwitz, there is no proper understanding of it or the reasons behind it. Instead, Israelis are simply taught that it was due to anti-Semitism. The result is that the Holocaust is used to foster the sense of national persecution and intense patriotism, especially against the indigenous Arabs. Forty-four per cent of young Israelis don’t believe that Arabs should be elected to the Knesset. And no Israeli, after visiting Auschwitz, has gone to the walls and fences around Gaza, and vowed ‘Never again’ for its citizens as well.
As for the Shoah’s survivors in Israel, many of them live in abject poverty, denied the compensation that Israel has claimed on their behalf. Which shows how hypocritical the Israeli state’s attitude to the welfare of these people, who endured so much, actually is.
But the Zionists are determined that the Holocaust should be considered a unique event, a phenomenon that occurred only to the Jews. In fact Gypsies were also singled out for extermination because of their race in Nazi Germany, and the techniques of mass murder – gassing with Zyklon B cyanide gas – was developed first to destroy the congenitally disabled, who were also considered racially undesirable. The Holocaust also had a precedent in the Armenian Massacres, the attempt by the Young Turks regime to exterminate the entire Armenian people, when they rose up against their imperial masters during the First World War. Hitler was encouraged to move to the mass extermination of the Jews by his observation that the great powers – Britain, France and America – had done nothing to stop this genocide. ‘Who remembers the Armenians?’ he remarked.
And in order to preserve the idea that the Holocaust was a unique event, peculiar only to the Jews, some Zionists have also done their best to discourage comparable commemorations of the Nazi murder of the Romany and disabled, or the Turkish slaughter of the Armenians. Greenstein wrote
The elevation of the Jewish Holocaust above all other acts of genocide not only suggests that it is unique but that it has nothing to tell us beyond the fact that it occurred. If the purpose of remembering and commemorating acts of genocide is to prevent their reoccurrence and to act as a warning against their repetition, why single out one act of genocide? The genocide of the Gypsies and the Disabled are all but omitted from Holocaust museums such as Yad Vashem and the Washington US Holocaust Museum. The genocide of Africans in the slave trade or Armenians forms no part of Holocaust Memorial Day.
Indeed from the days of Herzl onwards there has been a determined refusal by Zionism to acknowledge the Armenian massacres and genocide. Lucy Dawidowicz, a prominent Zionist historian went so far as to say that unlike the Nazis, the Turks had a ‘rational’ reason for massacring Armenians. Elie Wiesel, Alan Dershowitz and Arthur Hertzberg, all prominent Zionists, withdrew from an international conference on genocide in Tel Aviv when the sponsors refused to remove sessions on the Armenians. (Novick pp. 192-193, Finkelstein pp. 69-70) The Zionist lobby in the United States has repeatedly opposed any commemoration of the Armenian holocaust.
Yehuda Bauer, Professor of Holocaust Studies at the Hebrew University Jerusalem, in a debate with Dr Sybil Milton, the Senior Resident Historian at the US Holocaust Memorial Council argued that
‘the tragedy of the Gypsies’ whilst being ‘ no less poignant, and no less horrible’ was nonetheless not part of the Holocaust. Whilst ‘it happened at the same time as the Holocaust, and there are of course many similarities. Yet it appears to me that the Holocaust is very much a unique case. If someone prefers to call it Judeocide, that is his her privilege. It is exactly the same thing: it is the mass murder of the Jews at the hands of the Nazis.’
For Zionism the Holocaust is a Jewish only affair. Sybil Milton, who was herself Jewish, responded succinctly:
‘(The) Nazi genocide, popularly known as the Holocaust, can be defined as the mass murder of human beings because they belonged to a biologically defined group. Heredity determined the selection of the victims. The Nazi regime applied a consistent and inclusive policy of extermination- based on heredity- only against three groups of human beings: the handicapped, Jews, and Gypsies.’
This correspondence ‘Gypsies and the Holocaust’ can be found in The History Teacher, Vol. 25, No. 4. (Aug., 1992), pp. 513-521.
Wiesel’s, Dershowitz’s and Hertzberg’s decision to walk out of the international conference on genocide because its inclusion of the Armenian massacres, in my view, is no doubt a direct contradiction of the fellowship many Jews feel towards them because of both peoples’ shared experience of genocide. It can be seen, for example, in the play, Burning Issues, which Mike and I saw at the theatre in Quakers Friars here in Bristol way back in the ’90s. Set in the American publishing industry, it’s similar to King Lear in that the drama is about an elderly, failing patriarch being challenged by his children. In this case, the central character is an Jewish publisher, who is determined to bring out an exhaustive encyclopaedia of the Holocaust. His fixation with the Third Reich is damaging sales, however, and his children wish to rescue the firm from bankruptcy by ditching the project and publishing something far more popular instead. The old man is himself a survivor of the Shoah, and his closest relationship is with his Armenian cleaner through the shared bond of surviving the attempted extermination of their peoples. The behaviour of Dawidowicz, Wiesel, Hertzberg and Dershowitz in their refusal to allow the extermination of other groups into the memorialisation of the Holocaust, even when they are directly comparable and relevant, is disgusting and should rule them out utterly as any kind of moral authorities on this subject.
Greenstein goes on to consider how the Israeli Holocaust Museum, Yad Vashem, has been used to whitewash many extreme right-wing political leaders from around the world. People like Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, who has compared himself to Hitler, and the leader of the Austrian Freedom Party, which was founded by two former members of the SS. These politicians sign agreements with Israel, duly visit Yad Vashem, at which they lay wreaths, and then are duly legitimised by Israel’s Zionist establishment as friends of the Jews.
He also describes how Yad Vashem doesn’t discuss the Nazis’ murder of other ethnic groups during the Holocaust, quoting one of the journalists for the Israeli paper Haaretz. He says
Blatman noted the absence of Yad Vashem from the 5thGlobal Conference on Genocide in Jerusalem in 2016. Why? It has nothing to say on anything bar the Jewish genocide. Blatman wrote of how
None of the hundreds of scientific events organized by Yad Vashem has been dedicated to the Holocaust and genocide…. You have to look hard to find any reference to the destruction of other populations in the Holocaust, and its chief aim seems to be to silence criticism. Similar museums in Paris and Washington hold regular activities on these topics
Whilst Yad Vashem studies what happened to the Jews in Polish or Ukrainian cities ‘they rarely address Nazi atrocities against other ethnic groups’. They study the minute detail of what happened to the Jews without ever seeing the wider picture. Yad Vashem ‘helps keep the Holocaust in a narrow Jewish ghetto that serves the xenophobic manipulations Israel makes of it.’
That is why Yad Vashem has never given birth to a comprehensive book on the Holocaust such as Gerald Reitlinger’s The Final Solution or Raul Hilberg’s Destruction of the European Jews. Holocaust research in Israel has done nothing to combat racism.
In fact, Yehuda Elkana, an Israeli historian, believed instead that the commemoration of the Holocaust had been so appropriated and corrupted by the Zionists, including Yad Vashem, that it was actively fostering Israeli racism. The only lessons they had learned from it was that Jews were victims, and so they were morally empowered to do anything against those they considered enemies with force. Elkana therefore argued that the Holocaust needs to be forgotten. Greenstein also quotes another Jewish scholar, Gideon Levy, who made the same point.
Greenstein himself writes
The Holocaust cannot be forgotten. The question is how it is remembered, by whom and for what purpose. Zionism’s abuse of Holocaust memory has to be challenged. Under capitalism all memory serves a purpose.
And concludes
The Holocaust needs to be reclaimed by the Left and Anti-Fascism. For too long the Zionist movement has got away with harnessing the Holocaust to the chariot of racism and ethnic cleansing.
Absolutely. If Europe is to be saved from the new wave of racism and Fascism, it has to be by showing how similar the Holocaust is to the other prejudices and strains of racism now spreading across Europe. Like hatred of Blacks, Asians and Islamophobia. This needs to be done because vicious islamophobes like Tommy Robinson will declare their support for Israel and march with the extreme Right Jewish Defence League on the grounds that Israel is an outpost of western civilisation that needs to be defended from Islam.
It is absolutely disgusting that Zionism, or at least leading Zionists, are not allowing and indeed have actively blocked the commemoration of similar genocides against other ethnic groups in their memorialisation of the Holocaust. Just as it also shows that Jackie Walker had a point in her complaint that the plans by the Jewish Labour Movement to commemorate the Shoah also left out the genocidal persecution of other peoples and races, like the slave trade in Black Africans.
It is entirely right that survivors of the Holocaust should receive proper honours by her Maj at the 75th anniversary of D-Day. But we desperately need to remember also that they were and are not alone as the victims of attempted extermination. These horrors continue today, such as the Chinese state’s attempts to destroy the culture and ethnic identity of Uighurs of Sinkiang. The victims of these genocides are every bit as worthy as the generation, who passed through the Shoah, and their suffering every bit as deserving of commemoration and condemnation.
Both Jewish Voice for Labour and Jackie Walker herself have issued statements following her mistrial by the Party at a grotesque kangaroo court and subsequent expulsion. The veteran anti-racism campaigner was targeted by the Israel lobby because of her support for the Palestinians against Israeli state oppression and ethnic cleansing and because she was a close ally of Jeremy Corbyn.
So they smeared her as an anti-Semite, first using a sloppily-worded statement in a private internet discussion she was having with two other colleagues in which she said that her ancestors – the Jews – were the chief financiers of the slave trade. She should have said ‘among the chief financiers of the slave trade’. Walker is an educator and historian, and she is able to back up her contention with entirely reputable scholarship by mainstream Jewish historians. But the poor wording of her statement allowed them to put her together in the public’s eyes with real anti-Semites like the head of the Nation of Islam, Louis Farrakhan. Farrakhan believes that the slave trade was run by the Jews. It wasn’t, and his statements that it was are total nonsense. But this was how the CAA, who looked through her internet history, were able to present her. This was the cause of her first suspension.
She was then suspended again after the Zionist frauds of the Jewish Labour Movement secretly recorded her at a workshop on the proper commemoration of Holocaust Memorial Day questioning their definition of anti-Semitism and what she perceived as the Day’s exclusive focus on the Jewish experience. She felt that every people, who had suffered similar genocide, like Blacks, should be included. Now this is a part of Holocaust Memorial Day, but for making these comments she was again smeared as an anti-Semite. The Labour Party knew that couldn’t stick, and so changed the charge to one of ‘behaviour against the Party’. Or something like that. This charge could have come straight out of Stalin’s Soviet Union, where anyone who did anything Stalin and his fellow despots didn’t like was accused of ‘anti-party activities’. It was a charge the inmates of gulags sent up by referring to it instead as ‘anti-party farting’. Her hearing last week was so grotesque that she walked, and was subsequently found guilty of the above anti-Stalin flatulence and expelled.
The JVL’s statement condemning this travesty, posted on 27th March 2019, begins
The decision to expel Jackie Walker from membership, and the whole process leading up to this shameful conclusion, are a travesty of justice.
The Party has enabled a process in which a principled and fearless member has been persecuted by violation of trust, by media campaign, through bullying by senior members within the party, and by a seriously flawed process which has allowed racist commentary on her person to form part of the charge against her.
It goes on to state that she is not the only person to be treated like this, and ask why the people with access to the mass media haven’t been reined in and themselves charged with bringing the party into disrepute. They state that it doesn’t bring the party into disrepute to challenge a deeply flawed definition of anti-Semitism, nor call the party to live up to its reputation by condemning all racisms and all holocausts. What does bring it into disrepute is the suppression of free speech in order to appease the powerful. They conclude that they believe it will not be long before the Party is ashamed of this episode in its history.
Jackie and her legal team have issued a statement explaining why she walked out of the Party’s kangaroo court, describing the background to the case, and then dealing with individual points about her prosecution. These are
The Labour Party’s submission on what constitutes anti-Semitism.
The Party’s reliance on racist statement to prosecute her.
Other racist statements against her.
Her hearing was a secret court.
It was at a secret venue.
They failed to put the intended charges to her.
The lack or loss of investigatory records.
A late submission of evidence by the Party.
Prejudicial statements by Labour MPs.
This is followed by her own explanation of why she walked out.
Much of this is very similar to how others, like Mike, have been mistreated by a court determined to find them guilty whatever the evidence.
One of the most disgusting features of what is overall a colossally prejudiced and contrived miscarriage of justice are points 2 and 3 – the racist character of the statements used to prosecute her and then victimise her. These need to be quoted in full, with Walker’s own words, to show how grotesque and revolting they are. This contains extremely strong language, which I am not going to blank out as I believe the impact of such vile language should not be blunted in this case. Jackie and her legal team write
2. LP relies on racist statements to prosecute me
It is beyond any sense of fair process that in prosecuting me for antisemitism for my asking a training session for a definition of antisemitism in September 2016, that the LP, astonishingly, has submitted racist and discriminatory statements made about my colour, gender, appearance, ethnicity and heritage, to support its misconceived case against me.
The LP relies on anonymous witnesses who have written:
“[JW is] a white middle-aged woman with dreadlocks”
“Walker- who claims to be part Jewish”
And also on the written witness evidence of Mike Katz who states:
“… JW uses her self-identification as a black woman and a Jew as cover to put her beyond criticism…”
There is no conceivable place in a fair disciplinary process for such statements to be allowed in evidence.
As a black person I have long campaigned for the proper recognition and memorialisation of those who died and suffered during the shameful period of the slave trade. During the training session I was making the point that it would be fitting to include the victims of the slave trade as well as other pre-Nazi genocides in the Holocaust Memorial Day commemorations. In prosecuting me for raising that comment, again astonishingly, the LP relies on an anonymous witness who writes:
“I am not at all happy regarding her obsession with African genocide and the holocaust”
I have repeatedly asked those conducting my disciplinary process for anonymous and racist evidence to be removed from the evidence presented by the LP. My applications have not been agreed.
That is unfair.
I applied to the Panel to adjourn my case to allow the reliance on racist material by the LP to be referred to the Equality and Human Rights Commission for investigation. My application was rejected.
That is unfair.
3. Other racist and threatening remarks
I have been subjected to threatening, racist and abusive remarks throughout the time I have had to wait for the LP to carry out its disciplinary process. Some examples of the material sent to me have included:
“Jackie Walker is as Jewish as a pork pie, stop harassing Jews you fucking Nazi scum”
“Jackie Walker and her defenders can go hang”
“Jackie Walker’s Jewishness is a hastily constructed identity to protect her from the backlash of her antisemitic comments”
“Her father whom she barely knew apparently was Jewish so she isn’t Jewish…nothing to do with her colour”
“We should send people like you to the fucking gas chamber! Palestine does not exist, nor did it ever exist. Israel has been a Jewish homeland for 3,000 years! Moron”
“Was that thundercunt referring to you wanting to see Corbyn shove Jackie Walker into a burning bin? You didn’t mention ethnicity”
“God, what a fucking anti-Semite black Jewish working class female Momentum vice-chair Jackie Walker is! Can’t think why Labour want rid”
The above examples were submitted by me as part of my documents in the disciplinary process yet the Panel hearing my case still did not allow my application to remove racist and discriminatory evidence being relied on by the LP.
Some of these statements, and further abusive material sent to Jackie, can be found in the JVL article Jackie Walker – Abused and Vilified, posted on 11th February 2019. This reproduces the actual Tweets themselves, complete with the identities of the people who sent these disgusting texts.
From this it seems that the members of the Israel lobby and Labour Right, who brought this prosecution, were partly motivated by sheer anti-Black racism. They did and do not believe that a Black woman can really be Jewish. This is belied by the facts. There are clearly Black Jews. The Jon Pullman documentary, Witchhunt, about her persecution, features comments by an American professor of Afro-Jewish history. Sammy Davis Jnr, the Hollywood legend, was a Black Jew. There have been communities of Black Jews in Ethiopia for thousands of years, and the strong influence of the Hebrew Bible in Ethiopian Christianity has led some scholars to suggest that the country was originally Jewish before King Ezana converted it to Christianity in the fourth century. There is also an indigenous Jewish community in India. I don’t know, but I would also imagine that they were not White either, but share the same Asian physical appearance as other Indians.
Racism seems to be a large part of mindset of certain Zionists and their promoters and defenders in this country. Karl Sabbagh’s book, The Anti-Semitism Wars, has an appendix of racist quotes by prominent Zionists about non-Jews. And Mike found when the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism were accusing him of anti-Semitism, because he defended Ken Livingstone, when they found he was calmly refuting them they turned to sneering at him as a gentile instead. They are also profoundly racist towards Jewish opponents of Israeli apartheid. Tony Greenstein and Martin Odoni have described how they’ve been vilified as ‘Kapos’ and worse. Greenstein has even been told by one irate man that he wished he and his family had died in the Holocaust. The vilification inflicted on Jewish critics of Israel is such that it would automatically be condemned as anti-Semitic if it came from a non-Jew.
It is not Jackie Walker and the other innocent victims of the witchhunt, who are racists and anti-Semites. The racism and anti-Semitic verbiage comes from the Israel lobby and its allies, the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism and Jewish Labour Movement, and embraced and supported by the Conservatives and Conservative Jewish organisations like the highly unrepresentative Board of Deputies of British Jews.
The media has also extensively covered the genuine anti-Semitic abuse sent to right-wing members of the Labour Party like Luciana Berger. But they are absolutely silent when it comes to the anti-Semitic abuse sent to genuinely left-wing Jews, and the anti-Black racial abuse sent to Jackie. And I’ve seen nothing about the racist abuse sent by the CAA against Mike, despite the fact that he handed a dossier of it over to the police.
The Israel lobby and its allies in the media are a disgrace. Not only are they themselves deeply racist, they stoke racism against their opponents as part of their campaign of intimidation against them. And by remaining silent about it the right-wing media in their turn are utterly complicit. It is they, who should face investigation, trial and prosecution, not decent, privileged anti-racist people like Jackie, Mike, Martin, Tony and the others, who genuinely despise anti-Semitism and Fascism.
There are very many issues I’d like to blog about, but I have to cover this one. It’s an absolute travesty. Jackie Walker, the Black Jews anti-racist historian, activist and educator, has been expelled from the Labour party after she walked out of what was another kangaroo. Walker has suffered years of vilification and foul abuse because she is what the Israel lobby inside and outside the Labour party can’t stand: a Jewish opponent of Israel and its ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. If you watch Jon Pullman’s film, Witchhunt, which is about her persecution and those of other critics of Israel, she tells how she came into anti-Israeli apartheid activism. It was in the 70’s when she was part of the campaign against apartheid in Namibia. And through her activism against apartheid in southern Africa, she moved on to questioning it and campaigning against it in Israel.
It’s glaringly clear that Walker is no anti-Semite nor any kind of racist. But because of her activism and the fact that she was an ally and supporter of Jeremy Corbyn, the Israel lobby and the Conservatives, including the Thatcherite ‘moderates’ moved to smear her. They did so first by delving back into her Facebook posts and finding an old discussion with two colleagues in which she said that her people – the Jews – were the chief financiers of the slave trade. She should have said ‘among the chief financiers of the slave trade’. Walker is fully able to support the latter statement using established historical fact by conventional scholars, some of whom are Jewish. However, the sloppy wording of her statement allowed her to be presented by the CAA as anti-Semitic. That’s when she was suspended the first time. She was suspended again when she was secretly recorded at a training day on Holocaust Memorial Day run by the Jewish Labour Movement questioning their use of International Holocaust Remembrance Definition of anti-Semitism. This is a perfectly fair question, as the definition has been criticised by one of its authors, Kenneth Stern, for suppressing free criticism of Israel, and the Scots appeal court Judge, Sir Stephen Sidney, who is Jewish, amongst others. When Marc Wadsworth, the Black anti-racist activist, asked for a definition of anti-Semitism when he was hauled up before a similar kangaroo court, the wretched tribunal had to adjourn. When they returned, it was in the company of four lawyers, all arguing. In fact, the proper definition of anti-Semitism is straightforward. Following the definition of Wilhelm Marr, the 19th century German, who coined the term, it’s simply hatred of Jews as Jews. But the I.H.R.A. definition includes references to Israel, including describing it as a racist endeavour. Hence the insistence on its adoption by the Israel lobby, determined to suppress criticism of Israel for its racist oppression of the Palestinians.
In fact, Jackie walked out of her hearing after they refused to allow her to make an opening statement. She published a detailed account of her experience at the Jewish Voice for Labour website. And Mike in his piece about it, put up on Wednesday, describes how close it was to the treatment they gave him. Both Jackie and Mike were suddenly presented with new information against them at the very last minute. The charge against them was not a normal definition of anti-Semitism. In Jackie’s case, the definition used was whether an ordinary person reading or hearing her comment would consider them anti-Semitic. She remarks that it is an extraordinary dilution of the real definition of anti-Semitism as hatred of Jews. Similarly, the charge against Mike was that an anonymous individual, who thus legally didn’t exist, had been offended by what he wrote on his blog. She also states that she was not informed in advance of the identities of the panel, so she could check whether they would give her a fair trial. Neither was Mike, who remarked that if had been able to do this he would have refused to participate unless a new panel was selected.
Jackie has also complained about prejudicial comments made about her by Labour MPs. Mike has also said that he suffered the attention of Labour MPs, who wanted simply to find anyone accused guilty and that there was a directive in the charge sheet against him by the NEC to do so. Jackie also said that the Party was guilty of breaches of confidentiality in giving out private data, just as Mike is pursuing the Labour party for doing so. And while Mike was allowed to speak in his case, he was constantly interrupted by a panel that simply wasn’t interested in whether he was guilty or not.
Mike states in his article about Jackie Walker leaving the kangaroo court that
Put it all together and we see that Labour’s failure to follow its own rules, and its determination to smear party members who speak out about injustice, is not only habitual – it appears to be party policy.
He states that those responsible should feel a deep and abiding shame, and that they should resign. If they won’t, then they should be identified and pursued. But that will be difficult as they’re trying to purge everyone who might be a threat to them. Nevertheless, the identification of clear breaches of procedure in these cases should be enough to begin a dialogue.
Shortly after the hearing, Jackie was formally told she had been expelled from the party. Not for anti-Semitism, but for ‘prejudicial and grossly detrimental behaviour against the party’. This is a catch-all charge that actually means nothing. Her real crime, as Mike and the very many others he quotes in his article about this foul affair, was that she said something that offended a right-wing, Zionist/ pro-Israeli-government Jew. And by expelling her, the Labour party has shown that it is determined to persecute left-wing Jews, who want a peaceful solution to the Israel/Palestine problem. Walker’s expulsion was the subject of biased articles in the Guardian and Labour List, and rants by the Jewish Labour Movement, which claimed that she was able to carry on making a mockery of the party’s procedures because she had support of members of the party leadership, the NEC and MPs. Thus ignoring awkward facts like she was attacked in a letter signed by 38 Labour MPs and her expulsion was welcomed by poisonous egomaniac Margaret Hodge. The JLM then continued with its lies by saying that despite warm words, little had been done to tackle the scale and impact of anti-Semitism within the Labour party. Which is a bold statement to make after secretly and unethically recording her comments at the Holocaust Memorial training day. The Board of Deputies of British Jews, the Jewish Leadership Council and the Community Security Trust then made a statement that nobody wins in this latest ugly case of disreputable behaviour. To which Mike responds that this statement clearly contradicts the facts, as it doesn’t identify the disreputable behaviour as the secret recording of Jackie’s comments.
Mike’s article on Jackie’s expulsion states that it is mortifying for everyone in the Labour party, who believe the members deserve better from their leaders, and then proceeds down the list of breaches of basic justice they committed against her. The charge against her, of detrimental behaviour against the party, can mean anything and everything, as Martin Odoni has pointed out. It’s as unjust as the way the party threw out the I.H.R.A. definition of anti-Semitism in Jackie’s previous trial, and used instead the definition that something was anti-Semitic if an ordinary person thought it was. Which Mike states is claptrap. And then there’s the breach of the party’s own disciplinary procedures by giving her new evidence days before the trial.
Mike states plainly that
We are left to contemplate – not a disgraced anti-Semite who has finally been made to face justice, but an honourable campaigner, falsely-accused, falsely-expelled, and wrongly vilified by a disgraced, debased and corrupted political machine.
He goes on to say that if Jeremy Corbyn himself is reading this, it is to be hoped that he burns with shame at this travesty committed by his subordinates in an underhanded campaign to remove him from the leadership. Corbyn has been able to beat the accusations against him so his opponents have turned instead to attacking his allies. And he has let it happen. He can’t stop the persecution on his own. He needs the help of the NEC, but they haven’t lifted a finger to stop it but have cheered on the persecution carried out by the compliance unit and the NCC.
Mike concludes
Labour needs root-and-branch reform of all three organisations. And it needs it yesterday.
Everything Mike’s written about this shabby affair is absolutely right. Tony Greenstein, another principle Jewish campaigner against all forms of Fascism, who was also expelled on trumped up charges of anti-Semitism because of his opposition to Israel, has made the point time and again that Corbyn and his advisors have consistently given in to the witchhunters in the hope of appeasing them. But this hasn’t worked. It has just encouraged and emboldened them, and they will only stop when they have removed him as head of the Labour party.
As for the organisations involved in smearing Walker and the other victims of the witchhunt, despite their pretensions to honesty and virtue they are deeply immoral and deceitful. The Jewish Labour Movement claims to speak for all Jews in the Labour party. It doesn’t. It is, as its founder, embezzler Jeremy Newmark has said, set up to use the same methods to attack Israel’s critics and opponents elsewhere within the Labour party. It’s members don’t have to be Jewish – and it’s been claimed that the majority are gentiles. And they don’t even have to be members of the party. They’re a Zionist entry group, but position themselves as the true voice of Jews within the party to the exclusion of other Jewish groups like Jewdas, Jewish Voice for Labour and so on, who do support Corbyn and whose members are actually Jewish. The Board of Deputies of British Jews is another Zionist organisation that really only represents the United Synagogue. It doesn’t represent the Orthodox, many members of whom have published letters in support of Corbyn. Nor do they represent secular Jews. The Jewish Leadership Council was set up as a rival to the Board by much the same affluent, Tory-voting establishment types that serve on the Board. The Community Security Trust are a private vigilante group, trained by Mossad, who for some reason have been given considerable powers to patrol Jewish communities to protect them from harm. No other ethnic or religious groups have this privilege, despite the fact that Muslims and mosques are more at risk of attack and vandalism than Jews and synagogues. Also, the CST grossly inflates the incidence of anti-Semitism and has a history of unprovoked, vicious assaults on anti-Zionism campaigners. Tony Greenstein described some of this in a post he put up back in January. And it’s a long, ugly list. Those assaulted by the CST thugs include women, Muslims and Jews. One victim was an elderly rabbi, who was punched in the face! This is the deplorable behaviour of Fascists, like the viciously anti-Semitic banned terror group, National Action. But somehow the CST and its thugs have state approval. And the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism is really only interested in attacking left-wing critics of Israel, and has little to say about real, genuine anti-Semites and Fascists.
Walker, Marc Wadsworth, Ken Livingstone, Tony Greenstein, Mike and so many others have been expelled and smeared to satisfy a politically biased, grossly unrepresentative Zionist establishment. An establishment that has shown itself repeatedly to be manifestly unjust and deeply mendacious. It is this establishment and their right-wing allies, both in the Labour party and without, which needs to be held up to examination, and should have their lies and machinations exposed. And those responsible for the witchhunt should be called out and utterly disgraced for their vilification and demonisation of decent, anti-racist women and men.
The next anti-Semitic conspiracy theory Verber claims is held by people in the Labour party is ‘Twisting or denying the facts of the holocaust’. The example he gives of this is ‘Chris Williamson’s series of unfortunate events’. He writes of this conspiracy theory
Wander into any coffee shop in Tel Aviv and you will hear all manner of Israelis criticising the government of the day. But none of the Nazis’ anti-Semitic policies are remotely similar to any passed by Israel. The Nazis set out to murder every Jew in Europe and then – had they got their way – across the globe.
Each innocent Palestinian life that has been lost in the conflict with Israel is a tragedy, as it every Israeli life. But Gaza is not Auschwitz. Comparing the two is a lie, a low blow deliberately calculated to cause hurt and pain to a community still in trauma.
Other versions of this conspiracy theory include attempts to play down the Holocaust’s significance or event to question its existence.
Now look what’s being done here. It’s a classic example of ‘bait and switch’. For most people, ‘twisting or denying the facts of the Holocaust’ would mean straight out Holocaust denial, or the noxious variants of it that minimise the numbers murdered. But that’s not what concern Verber. He’s upset because, gasp, some people are comparing Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians to the Nazis. His statement that none of Israel’s policies are comparable to the Nazis is a flat-out lie. Firstly, Israel is an apartheid state. Only Jews can be citizens. This is identical to the Nazis’ policy that only ethnic Germans could be German citizens. The country’s indigenous Arabs also live under separate laws and may only use specific roads. Many municipalities in Israel have passed legislation forbidding property to be let to non-Jews. Furthermore, the country was born partly through a series of massacres against the Arabs. Those making the claim that Israel resembles Nazi Germany, like Tony Greenstein, qualify that statement by saying that it is like Nazi Germany before the launch of the Holocaust in 1942. Gaza is not Auschwitz, as Verber says. But I don’t think anyone has said it was. It has, however, been described as an open-air ghetto.
As for comparisons to Nazi Germany being hurtful to a community still in trauma, this is massively hypocritical. Israelis accuse their politicians of being Nazis all the time. There was even a cartoon in one newspaper of Netanyahu in Nazi uniform.
Now we come to what Verber calls ‘Chris Williamson’s series of unfortunate events’. This begins with Williamson signing a petition against Islington Council’s banning of Jazz saxophonist Gilad Atzmon, a Holocaust denier. Verber notes that he later claimed that he didn’t know about Atzmon’s views. It’s possible. Atzmon considers himself to be a supporter of the Palestinians, although the mainstream Palestinian solidarity movement doesn’t want to have anything to do with him because of his toxic views about Jews. But Atzmon is hardly a household name, and if the petition claimed that he was being banned because of his support for the Palestinians, then it’s quite possible that Williamson signed it in all innocence.
But there is more half-truths and malign insinuations that follow. He states that Williamson has several times shared a platform with Jackie, who has been suspended for falsely accusing Jews of financing the slave trade and playing down the importance of the Holocaust, and defended Ken Livingstone, who said that Hitler supported Zionism. I’ve dealt with the accusations against Walker and Livingstone ad nauseam. Neither of the two are racist, and especially not Walker, who is a Black Jew, believes in Judaism as a religion, sends her daughter to a Jewish school, and has a Jewish partner. The quote the CAA used to claim that she believes Jews financed the slave trade was lifted out of context from a personal discussion with three friends, where it was understood that she was talking about how some Jews financed and profited from the slave trade. Which is true, as she cites the literature and authorities to back up her comment. As for downplaying the importance of the Holocaust, she did no such thing. She was secretly recorded by the Jewish Labour Movement at their Holocaust Memorial Day workshop questioning the exclusive focus on Jews at the expense of other ethnicities, that have also suffered Holocausts. She also asked them to give her a definition of anti-Semitism she could work with. When Marc Wadsworth asked the same question at his tribunal, when he was smeared as an anti-Semite, the tribunal called for an adjournment. When they returned, it was accompanied with four lawyers, all arguing. Walker was singled out because she did not accept the I.H.R.A. definition of anti-Semitism, because it is used to suppress criticism of Israel. As for Leninspart, he was right about Hitler and Zionism. Before the Final Solution was introduced, the Nazis were keen to find anyway of getting rid of Germany’s Jews. And this meant sending them to Israel through the short-lived Ha’avara Agreement. Which is historical fact.
Verber also goes on to say that Williamson has warned of ‘certain dark forces ‘ using their contacts in the media and power to undermine Corbyn. But as we’ve seen, there is abundant evidence to show that these fears are not unfounded, not least as regards Israel.
Verber concludes this section with the words
Outright Holocaust denial has been moved to the fringes even of the world occupied by conspiracy theorists. Given the vacuum, new and more subtle ways of trivialising and attacking the Holocaust have had to be created.
Well I dare say, but this doesn’t apply to criticism of Israel for ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians or the smears against Walker and Livingstone. The last two haven’t denied or played down the Holocaust at all, and neither has Williamson. This is just more lies and smears from him, to try to make them seem anti-Semitic monsters.
This is the video for Jon Pullman’s movie, Witchhunt, about the persecution of former Momentum vice-chair, Jackie Walker, on the completely risible and mendacious charge of anti-Semitism. As I’ve said many times before, Walker is a Jewish lady of colour. Her mother was a Black civil rights activist and her father a Russian Jew. They met on a civil rights demo. She is also a Jew by faith, her partner is also Jewish, and she sends her daughter to a Jewish school. All her life she has campaigned against racism, including anti-Semitism. But she does not agree with the I.H.R.A.’s definition of anti-Semitism or the Jewish Labour Movement’s handling of Holocaust Memorial Day. And so a trumped up charge of anti-Semitism was brought against her on the basis of a sloppily worded statement about Jewish involvement in the transatlantic slave trade, a trade that was initiated and very largely in the hands of Christians. As she has pointed out.
The video begins with the overwhelming election of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader. It then moves to Evan Davies and Rabbi Julia Neuberger claiming that there is an anti-Semitism problem in the Labour party. A man, speaking outside the Department of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London stating that the establishment will do anything they can to rubbish Corbyn and anyone close to him. It then goes on to show the various news presenters stating that Walker had been suspended. Then Walker appears to state that what was happening to the Palestinians was unspeakable, and you couldn’t ignore it. Followed by footage the Israelis sending planes to bomb and strafe Gaza, and an injured Arab child being taken out of an ambulance. Walker states that, for her, Gaza was the last straw. Corbyn is shown speaking at a pro-Gaza demonstration. Erdan, an Israeli apparatchik, speaks of economic and political warfare.
The great Israeli mathematician and supporter of Palestinian rights, Moshe Machover, who was also thrown out of the Labour party for anti-Semitism, before being readmitted because of public outcry, appears to describe the appoint of Erdan as the ‘head of this ministry’, which appears to be the Ministry of Strategic Affairs and Public Diplomacy. There’s a headline from the Electronic Intifada talking about the Anti-Semitism smear campaign. Walker quotes her mother, who said, ‘You can make anyone look a devil if you want to.’ There is then a map showing the links between the various anti-Zionist organisation from what appears to be pro-Israeli propaganda. Machover appears again to state that the goal of the Zionists is to make anyone who is non-Zionist or anti-Zionist appear anti-Semitic. This is followed by footage of a baying mob of Zionists all claiming to be demonstrating against anti-Semitism.
Jewish Voice for Labour’s Naomi Winborne-Idrissi appears, stating that this is all taking place during a shift to the right, in this country as well as others, and that Jeremy Corbyn is a threat. A young man says that what we find is an overwhelming emphasis on sources mobilising against Corbyn with a particular agenda. There is a shot of page from the Media Reform Coalition on the anti-Semitism smear against Corbyn, which they state is a disinformation campaign. A Black man says that people want moral slurs. They don’t want balanced stories. They want black and white stories. Walker says that what they are seeing with anti-Semitism, they have seen with McCarthyism. She is followed by Machover again saying that Walker was selected as a test case. Walker herself says that someone in the Compliance Unit said that the case against her was ‘pretty weak’. But this pretty weak case has smashed her reputation. A white-haired man says the pressure and attacks on Walker, with her lifetime of fighting racism, is to send a message ‘we can get you’.
The video ends with the film’s title fading out against a black background.
This is the trailer for a movie, that frightened Luciana Berger so much that she complained to the Labour party about its screening, and had it cancelled. And I don’t doubt that she was also one of the snitches claiming that Chris Williamson, the MP who booked the room for it, is a terrible anti-Semite who should be suspended.
And no wonder. It looks like cinematic dynamite that could well blow more than ‘the bloody doors off’ the whole revolting anti-Semitsm smear charade. It seems very clear from this that Corbyn, his associates and in this instance, Walker herself, are very much the targets of a very coordinated and orchestrated Israeli and establishment smear campaign. And it obviously is going to get both very worried. To use a turn of phrase from the SF movie Aliens, it’s going to make them stop their grinning and drop their linen’.
The film is due to be released March 17th, and will tour various British cities with its director, including Brighton and Derry in NI. I will be delighted if it comes to Bristol or anywhere nearby where I can catch it.
My very best wishes to Jackie, and to all involved in this movie. May you prevail, and the hatemongers, smear-artists and spineless moral cowards, who support them be swept away.
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