Yesterday CJ put up yet another fascinating piece about ghosts and parapsychology, in which he attempts to develop and clarify some his own ideas on the subject. I’ve been responding to the other pieces he’s written about it, in which he’s also covered UFOs and the social stress theory of paranormal sightings. My comments have been well received by him and he hopes other people will do the same.
Before the 19th century, ghosts were a noisy lot. They moaned and rattled chains in haunted houses, and when they appeared to witnesses spoke. Often this was to complain that their physical remains were unburied and they could not rest without them being found and given a decent send off. Other times it was a dire warning about their post-mortem state and the sins that had led them there. One ancient Greek writer recorded that decades after a particularly bloody battle the ghosts of those slain used to rise up regularly to talk to the local farmers, giving them advice on the proper way to cultivate their vines. Then in the 19th century a change occurred. Instead of being noisy and communicative, ghosts instead became silent visions. There have been at least one bit on the history of ghosts. The one I remember was by Finucane, which, if I recall correctly, was published by the Humanist publishing house Prometheus Books. This apparent change and others in spectral behaviour supports the sceptical argument that ghosts, whatever they are, aren’t spirits of the dead but more likely a psycho-social phenomenon, changing as society and expectations of what ghosts are and how they should behave change.
The Magonian’s reviewed one of these books way back in the 90s, and concluded that the apparent reduction of ghosts to silence was bound up with Victorian attitudes towards the lower orders. Ghosts, like proles and tradesmen, were things that should be seen and not heard. The Society for Psychical Research, set up in the 19th century to examine ghosts and other phenomena, thereby recorded ghosts as noiseless. In his piece yesterday, CJ described how his research decades ago convinced him that no such change in the ghost phenomenon had occurred and that ghosts were definitely not, or not always, silent but were often noisy. Going back through the SPR’s literature, he found out that he wasn’t the only person to make this discovery, but that Tony Cornell and Gauld had also come to the same conclusion at the tail end of the 1970s. So why did the SPR, dedicated as it was and is to the objective study of the paranormal, decide that ghosts were a visual, quiet phenomenon?
The answer lies in the fraught relationship the early SPR had with the Spiritualists and their own theory on the origins of ghosts. During its investigations, the SPR debunked a number of fraudulent mediums. This led to the organisation being viewed by Spiritualists such as Stainton Moses and others as hostile and determined to discredit Spiritualism and other psychic phenomena. As a result, Moses and the other Spiritualists departed from the Society. One of the other organisation the SPR managed to alienate was Madam Blavatsky’s Theosophical Society. Blavatsky claimed, amongst other psychic powers, to be in receipt of messages from Koothumi and the other Ascended Masters. These took the form of physical letters fluttering down from the ceiling at the Society’s meetings. The SPR was called in to examine the phenomenon. Their man was a lawyer, who already had under his belt the metaphysical scalps of various fraudulent mediums. He examined the house, and found that there were gaps in the floorboards in the room immediately above that in which Blavatsky and co held their seances. These were large enough for someone to post one of these metaphysical letters down to the room below. His report concluded that this was the most probably answer. Understandably, Blavatsky and her supporters were very definitely not pleased and there was a rift between them and the SPR until the 90s or so. The SPR then issued another report repudiating the findings of a century or so before and concluding that the appearance of the letters was genuinely mysterious and paranormal.
In fact there are very good reasons for doubting Blavatsky’s claimed mystical powers. Ireland’s greatest modern poet, W.B. Yeats, fell afoul of her for daring to question the truth of her spiritual pronouncements. Blavatsky claimed that if you crushed a flower at the time of the full moon, and placed a jar over its remains and allowed the moonlight to shine through, you would see the spirit of the flower. Yeats noted that it was a full moon that night when Blavatsky said all this, and suggested they try it. At which point Blavatsky threw a strop, and Yeats ended up being ejected from the Society. On another occasion, Blavatsky claimed to be able to levitate a glass. ‘Go up,’ she said, and it rose up. She then commanded it to go down, which it did. The demonstration of psychic powers would, however, have been even more convincing had she not been holding the glass at the time. There has been a book on the Theosophists written from a sceptical standpoint, which also suggested that Colonel Olcott, an American army officer who was one of its leaders, was there as part of a scheme to weaken British rule in India. It also suggested that Olcott’s interest in the young Indian lad, Krishnamurti, whom the Society had decided was the new messiah, was less than spiritual. In the end, Krishnamurti broke with the Theosophists by teaching that everyone had the spiritual power to save themselves. He also aroused the scorn of the late Fleet Street TV critic, Clive James, when he was interviewed by Malcolm Muggeridge on British television in the 70s. Muggeridge was deeply interested in religion and questions of faith. On his programme, he remarked on how Krishnamurti seemed serene and self-realised. What was the old boy’s secret? The secret, the great sage told him, was simple: stop thinking. James was not impressed, as society, in his hopelessly two-eyed view, has advanced through a lot of people thinking very hard. This included whoever had made Krishnmurti’s very elaborate shirt and particularly the whole through which he stuck his self-realised bonce. Another friend of mine had absolutely no time for the Theosophists because of one of their spokesmen’s apparent attitude to the Holocaust. One of them had appeared on British TV back in the 60s or so, and stated that Hitler’s attempted extermination of the Jews was all due to their bad karma. He very definitely wasn’t impressed at this noxious opinion, and I’ve no doubt very many other severely normal Brits shared his views.
But back to ghosts. The SPR’s characterisation of ghosts as a purely visual phenomenon wasn’t due to social snobbery. The Society at the time was indeed packed with the great and good of Victorian and Edwardian society, including scientists, philosophers and politicians, some of whom became Prime Minister. It’s a very far cry from the situation today, where there is considerable official scepticism to the paranormal and parapsychology is regarded by many as a pseudoscience. Despite its socially elevated membership, the Society weren’t snobs. They would pay the membership fees of ordinary, less lofty individuals who wished to join but couldn’t afford to. The reason for their view that ghosts were quiet and silent came from their theory for the origins of ghosts. They believed that ghosts were a kind of hallucination generated by another mind. This could be a living person or deceased. Thus, spooks, when they appeared, were silent. They coined the term ‘telepathy’ for the mental faculty they believed allowed people to create such psychic images. In the 1920s the English philosopher C.W. Broad believed in the reality of telepathy, reasoning that it must exist to allow the spirits of the departed to communicate in the hereafter.
But the SPR did not believe that telepathy was the only psychic ability. They also believed that some individuals could move objects by the power of their minds, a phenomenon they named psycho- and telekinesis. The two terms are almost synonymous, but CJ states that psychokinesis particularly means movement by a mind. Hence, presumably, that poltergeists were also the creation of a mind, including that of the person at the centre of the phenomenon. The SPR therefore drew a distinction between ghosts – silent and visual – and poltergeists – physical and audible. Ghosts that made a noisy were placed in the poltergeist category. CJ found that there was in fact no distinction between the two, and so coined a new term, polterghosts, to make this clear. Ghosts could also make a noise and throw objects about.
I suspect that the Magonians’ view that the SPR’s ideological decision that ghosts were purely visual was due to social snobbery comes from the experience some of them had with various leading members of BUFORA, at one time the leading British UFO organisation. Although I wouldn’t like to say this is the case now, some of the leading lights of that organisation had very right-wing view. They recalled a talk at one BUFORA meeting by a man, who stated that when the UFO aliens finally took over the world, they would restore it to its traditional agricultural economy and social order, which they would rule ‘with a rod of iron’. Which suggests that this chap was a member of the aristocracy and hankered after its restoration after it was deposed by the growth of mass, industrial society. He, and other, similar members of BUFORA, also apparently viewed the UFO phenomenon as a weapon against modern science and the low social origins of the men and women who pursued it. Instead of properly brought young ladies and gentlemen from the public and grammar schools, who studied respectable subjects like the Classics, these were frightful plebs from the secondary moderns. When two scientists from Cambridge appeared at a BUFORA meeting, the host sneered at them as the ‘petty godlings of the laboratory’. Not surprisingly, the pair didn’t appear again.
I think in fact many of Britain’s leading scientists were probably educated at public and the former grammar schools. As for the situation today, in the few times I’ve had anything to do with the established UFO societies, including BUFORA, I haven’t seen any social snobbery. Back in the 90s I went to a couple of meetings of the Bristol UFO Bureau, which was one of the country’s oldest UFO organisations, dating from the 50s. Rather than being anti-science, many of their members were also members of the city’s Astronomical Society. At one meeting one of the lecturers from Bristol university gave a talk on Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, while a lady from the Astronomical Society talked about Mars and where it could be seen in the sky at that time of year. I think they may have invited someone from the local Rationalist Society to attend the meeting as well. When I went again, a little while later, I found a copy of the Rationalist’s account of the meeting. He described it as marked by hysterical credulity, at one point writing ‘What wouldn’t they believe?’ This clashed with my experience, which was that the people there listened quietly and respectfully, as people usually do at meetings, and that the tone was quietly inquisitive rather than highly charged emotionally. Yes, before the meeting some people were discussing whether NASA had faked the moon landings, but this was because there was a piece about that conspiracy theory and the photos from the Moon’s surfaced that apparently showed this in that day’s issue of the Independent. Bristol’s Rationalists evidently shared Carl Sagan’s fears that the West was about to drown in a tidal wave of superstition, abandoning science for astrology and the New Age. Despite the popularity of the X-Files on TV at the time, I saw little evidence at the BUFOB meeting that there was any kind superstitious hysteria there.
There have been very many changes in the ghost experience and accounts of the afterlife over the centuries. In the ancient and medieval worlds apart from ghosts there were also walking dead, the corpses of the deceased wicked rising from the grave to spread disease and death as recounted by William of Newborough in his Chronicle. Apart from zombies in Haiti, I am not aware of any similar phenomena in the modern west beyond the flicks of George A. Romero and other ‘orror directors. But if the ghost phenomenon hasn’t changed, and the spooks are as noisy and disruptive as they ever were, then this does provide evidence that they’re an objective phenomenon and not a socially determined hallucination.
I know that many of the readers of this blog have very different attitudes towards the trans issue and so may find the following essay offensive. It is certainly not my intention to insult or offend anyone, but merely to examine a distinct sociological aspect of the mass trans movement as it has emerged over the last decade or so. This has taken it far beyond the issue of the appropriate treatment of adults and children suffering distress or confusion about their biological sex. If this was simply the case now, I believe that it would have been quietly and amicably resolved a few years ago, and would be of no more interest than the question of suitable treatment for other people suffering distressing psychological and mental health conditions.
But the medical question has been co-opted by radical postmodern political activists and has been transformed and broadened as part of today’s identity politics. The ideologues behind this movement see it as part of a broader agenda to radically transform western society, and the mass movement that has emerged from this is bitterly intolerant of its critics and detractors. It has thus taken on the sociological character of a religion, and in some aspects particularly resembles historic heretical sects and cults as explained below.
Mutilating the Flesh for the Spirit: Trans Ideology as Quasi-Religion
According to the ideologues, adherents and activists of trans ideology and practice, trans identity, and the social and medical transitioning of troubled and psychologically confused individuals from their birth to the opposite sex is entirely rational and scientific, based on a scientifically recognised and confirmed medical condition. Its gender critical detractors, however, such as Barry Wall of the EDI Jester channel on YouTube and his many followers, are harshly sceptical of this ideology. For them, stripped of its scientific trappings, the trans movement is ‘a flesh-sacrificing cult’ with its basis in the Cartesian dualist separation of mind and body. A recent commenter, furiousfemale996 on one of the Jester’s posts, ‘Queering Classrooms – LGB Alliance Responds’ recommended that if the trans ideology is taught in schools, it should not be taught as a sexual identity like homosexuality in PSHE, but instead taught in RE as a religious cult: ‘They need to teach all kids how to recognise the signs of a cult.’
In fact, sociologists of religion such as Clifford Geertz have formulated the concept of quasi-religions to describe secular ideologies and movements that perform some of the sociological functions of religion, and the trans ideology certainly conforms in many respects to such a classification. Indeed, the concept of religion itself is notoriously difficult to define. While most people would automatically regard religion as the worship of supernatural beings, these are absent in some religions. The Latin term ‘religio’, from which the modern English ‘religion’ is derived, means literally ‘to tie together’ and may originally have meant something like filial piety to the Romans. Many cultures do not recognise a religious sphere as distinct from the secular as the two are so bound up together in their way of life. Snorri Sturluson, the 13th century writer of the collection of Viking myths, the Edda, described Viking paganism as ‘an old law’. Some sociologists of religion eschew discussions of the supernatural and define it as about ‘matters of ultimate concern’. Another academic definition simply states that it divides the world into the important and valuable and less important and valuable. There are also secular religions, such as Humanism and its predecessor, the Ethical Church Movement of the 19th century, that developed as rationalist, scientific alternatives to supernatural religion. The sociological description of these as quasi-religions, rather than simply religions, is important as many atheists take considerable offence to their movements being described as a religion. The ‘quasi’ element in the term serves to differentiate these movements from supernatural religion proper, while emphasising that they still perform some of the socialogical functions of religious belief and worship.
The secular movements identified as quasi-religious include nationalism, Humanism and the totalitarian political ideologies of Nazism and Communism, the latter because their doctrines of the Thousand Year Reich or the age of true communism have strong similarities to millennial, apocalyptic Christianity. Religions commonly have a set of core doctrines, rituals and ethics so that their adherents form a distinct ideological and moral community.
The core beliefs of the trans ideology may be simply described thus:
Everyone has a unique gender identity distinct from their biological sex. For trans people, this gender identity is opposite to that of the sex they were born as. This gender identity represents their authentic sex, and must be recognised and protected through progressive legislation. As members of the opposite sex trapped in the wrong bodies, they also require medical and surgical intervention to transform their bodies into those of the identified sex. At the same time, following the ideas of postmodern feminist Judith Butler and her text, Gender Trouble and the doctrines of Queer Theory, sex itself is a matter of social performance following socially constructed ideas of masculinity and femininity. Thus, sex is reduced to a matter of fashion and stereotypical gender roles and activities, distinct from the biological, embodied reality. This has led to nonsensical statements from politicians like Keir Starmer that only one per cent of women have penises, or circular definitions of womanhood such as ‘a woman is anyone who identifies as one.’ At the same time, the trans community and its supporters draw a clear moral distinction between themselves and their critics. The trans community has appropriated the general gay rights movement, presenting itself as an integral part of the general gay and bisexual community, which is conceived as uniquely loving. An LGBTQ+ cartoon to promote gay and trans acceptance among children reviewed and critiqued by the ‘femalist’ pro-woman activist, Kelly Jay Kean-Minshull, presents this community as animals in a parade. One of them has the mastectomy scars from ‘top surgery’, the polite euphemism for double mastectomies performed on trans identifying girls and women. The voiceover, singing a version of ‘The animals went in two by two, hurrah’, declares that they love each other so proudly.
Trans people are also presented as uniquely virtuous and persecuted. Outside the realm of the blessed elect are the gender critical fallen, creatures of absolute hate, prejudice, and malignity. As Maria MacLachlan of the Peak Trans vlog on YouTube and other gender critical feminists have discussed and demonstrated, these activists accuse feminists like MacLachlan of being Nazis, planning a ‘trans holocaust’, who must be physically fought, beaten and killed. See her video ‘Awful Argument 8: Terfs Are Rightwing’. MacLachlan has herself been physically assaulted by a trans activist, and has documented similar attacks on gender critical feminists in videos such as ‘Another day, another trans activist bully, another feminist assaulted’. In America, gun-toting goons in black bloc have appeared as stewards for trans rallies. This may be considered as a political paramilitary uniform, which would be banned over on this side of the Atlantic under legislation designed to suppress genuine Fascists like Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists. As I write this, the government is deeply concerned with the issues of political and religious extremism and is busy formulating a definition of such that would allow the proscription of dangerous anti-democratic groups. A definition of extremism and terrorism could fairly include the violent, paramilitary wing of trans activism but due to the identification of trans with pro-gay liberalism and its advocacy from the left, is unlikely to do so.
Rather than being rational and scientific, the core doctrines of the trans movement resemble supernatural religion, and particularly Platonic Gnosticism. The distinction between a gendered mind separate from the body does indeed bear a marked kinship to Cartesian mind-body dualism, with the twist that the ghost in the body’s machine has its own gender. It also resembles Gnosticism in that primacy is given to the disembodied gendered mind with the body given much less regard. In Platonism, the ancient Greek philosophy derived from the great philosopher, the human soul comes from the realm of the spirit among the stars. In Gnosticism this realm is the creation of a good god, as opposed to that of matter, in which these spirits are entrapped. Matter is the creation of the evil god, and the flesh body a prison from which the Gnostic believer hoped he would be freed on death to ascend to the higher realms through belief in the Gnostic cult’s salvific message.
The trans cult eschews this supernatural, post-mortem doctrine in favour of a this-world practice in which the trans person has their flesh altered and mutilated so that they may ‘live their authentic lives’. At the same time, ideas of femininity and masculinity divorced from their biological reality, also resemble Plato’s transcendent forms. These are the patterns for the material world and its objects, which are their expressions. Thus, for example, there is the transcendent idea of a dog, or a man or woman, beyond the individual dogs, men, and women of material reality. In Queer Theory, this transcendent idea of gender is superior to biological reality. The idea of that sex alone, divorced from the reality of the physical body, is considered authentic. The biological sex is considered false, almost a product of mara, the realm of illusion in Hinduism, when it contradicts the inner conception of the sex of the trans person. The rhetoric that trans people must be accepted as their preferred sex or altered to conform to it to live their authentic lives comes partly from the contemporary emphasis for authenticity in popular culture. Rap musicians, for example, frequently talk about ‘keepin’ it real’. But it also seems to derive from Kierkegaardian existentialism and its stress on an authentic faith and life.
Gender mutilation is also a part of many cultures and religions, ranging from FGM, male circumcision to castration. Male circumcision is an important rite of passage among the Dowayo people, studied by the anthropologist, writer and broadcaster Dr Nigel Barley. In his book The Innocent Anthropologist Barley states that the Dowayos regarded circumcision as removing the biological elements that prevent boys from being real men. In a passage discussing how widespread the practice is amongst cultures throughout the globe, he states that in some societies the testicles may be hacked off. As the Jester has stated, there have been religions that practised castration, such as the Christian Skoptzi, as well as the Galli, the priests of Cybele in ancient Rome. They castrated themselves and dressed as women. Some shamans were also transvestites. The trans ideology resembles these castration cults, especially with WPATH’s embrace of the Eunuch Archives and eunuch as a gender identity.
But Queer Theory goes beyond individual transformation to call for radical social change. Some members of the movement have called for the destruction of the bourgeois heterosexual family, such as a recent trans person, Samantha Hudson, promoting Doritos in their Spanish advertising campaign. Internet trans activist Jeffrey Marsh has also suggested to the confused and distressed young people watching his YouTube channel that they should break with their biological parents if they refuse to accept their imaginary gender identity. This is particularly pernicious, as Clive Simpson and Dennis Kavanagh, the hosts of the gender critical Queens’ Speech podcast, have made clear. Many young gay people have suffered from being disowned and rejected by their families unable to accept their sexuality. This has caused them no little upset and distress, and is clearly not something to be blithely recommended to naïve children. But radical trans activism goes much further. The mathematician and fierce critic of postmodern woke nonsense, James Lindsay, in one of his anti-woke New Discourses podcasts has critically analysed a piece published in an American educational journal by two LGBTQ+ activists, one of whom is a drag queen. For them, drag queen story hour is not just about promoting literacy and toleration towards gay and trans people amongst young children. It is about creating an alternative, queer identity among children and youngsters in order to turn them into radical social activists. This queer identity is deliberately made unstable in order to alienate them from bourgeois society. Instead of their biological family, the children are to be turned instead to the trans and queer community as their real family. This again resembles the radical cults and ideologies that seek a radical transformation of society, including Nazism and Marxism, which attacks the family in The Communist Manifesto.
The trans movement also resembles radical cults in its separation of the trans individual from the outside world. The trans community is presented as uniquely loving and accepting, in contrast to the normal world outside the movement. Members of the trans community may encourage youngsters undergoing a crisis of gender identity to flee their homes to live and reside with them. It is exactly the same as the way religious cults have sought to separate their believers from their friends, family and community outside them. It also resembles ‘lovebombing’, a strategy also used by cults to capture new converts. In the initial phase of proselytization these cults impress upon their new members how the cult loves and values them. As the person is drawn into the cult, the attitude hardens until they may be subjected to harsh punishment inflicted for breaches of the cult’s discipline or morality. Questioning the cult’s doctrines and seeking to leave are particularly harshly dealt with. Detransitioners, former trans people who have regretted their decision and sought to revert to their previous birth sex, are shunned and excluded from their former trans colleagues, and may even be abused and vilified like heretics and apostates.
Whatever its scientific trappings, it is clear from this analysis that the trans movement counts in many respects as a secular quasi-religion. Even the claims of a scientific basis do not disqualify this identification. Since the rise of science, many new religious movements have claimed a scientific basis for their doctrines. One of the small press Spiritualist magazines published in Bristol in the 1990s proudly declared that it was ‘in support of psychic science’.
The designation of a movement as a religion or quasi-religion is not a comment on its moral content or nature, even though many people in today’s sceptical, secular society consider religion as intrinsically irrational and malign. Much bloodshed and oppression has been inspired by religion, but at their best religions have also inspired tremendous altruism and social advance. The French historian of science, Jean Gimpel, in his The Medieval Machine, described how Christian religious belief resulted in scientific breakthroughs and advances in the 14th century. Several of the mathematical treatises from India and the Islamic world collected by Henrietta Midonick in her Treasury of Ancient Mathematics: 1 begin with a dedication to Brahma, in the case of Hindu India, and Allah for Islam. And while Humanism is a quasi-religion, it is very far from violent and oppressive movements such as Fascism and Communism.
What the designation of quasi-religion for the trans movement does mean is that its claims to scientific objectivity needs to be scrupulously and critically examined and rejected. At the same time, as Mr Wall’s commenters have suggested, it should be taught in RE rather than PSHE. Britain is now a multicultural, multifaith society. Regardless of what one feels about their truth content, most of the traditional religions since the Enlightenment are benign, offering their believers hope and comfort in a transcendent realm away from the trials and sufferings of the flesh as well as stressing the importance of altruism and moral conduct. Others, particularly some of the most notorious New Religious Movements that emerged in the ‘69s and ‘70s, are much more malign. School students should be taught that intolerance, repression, and cult-like behaviour are not confined to supernatural religions. They are also to be found in the secular realm amongst ideologies and movements that would angrily reject any claims of a religious or quasi-religious basis. Yet they are there, and children should be given the skills and reasonable scepticism to identify them as such and so avoid them. And this needs to include the trans movement as a grave threat to young minds and bodies.
Further Reading
Jonas, Hans, The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings of Christianity, 2nd Edition (London: Routledge 1963).
Smith, John E., Quasi-Religions: Humanism, Marxism and Nationalism (Basingstoke: MacMillan 1994).
Thurlow Richard, Fascism in Britain: A History, 1918 -1985 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1987)
Wilson, Bryan, Religion in Sociological Perspective (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1982)
Well, George Galloway won the by-election in Rochdale yesterday, and the pro-Israel establishment and media have had a meltdown. I came across a headline today from one of the right-wing news and comments channels on YouTube proclaiming that it was a ‘black day for British Jews’. No, I really don’t think so. But it was a black day for the Israel lobby.
The right has tried to frame the current war in Gaza as a justified reprisal by Israel, which has a natural right to defend itself, against evil anti-Semitic Muslims. And the protests held up and down Britain in protest at the mass killing and displacement of Gazans by the IDF, which according to the Palestinian authorities, has now reached 30,000, have similarly been denounced as anti-Semitic and the marchers ‘Islamists’. Israel does have a right to defend itself, and Hamas’ brutal murder of 4,000 people at a music festival is a terrorist atrocity. But Israel’s reprisal has massively exceeded the number of Israelis killed, just as Operation Cast Lead in 2012 was massively disproportionate to any terrorist incident or mass protest that provoked it. Douglas Murray has appeared on Jewish YouTube channels denying that the IDF’s invasion of Gaza is ethnic cleansing. Well, in the words of Christine Keeler, ‘he would, wouldn’t he’. News channels like Middle East Eye have dug out comments and speeches from the Israeli leadership, including, I believe, Prime Minister Isaac Herzog, stating openly that ethnic cleansing is exactly what they’re doing. It has also been reported that that the IDF plan, or planned, to expel the Gazans firstly to refugee camps in Egypt, and then to Europe.
The pro-Palestine marches have been composed of Brits from a variety of backgrounds. Very many, possibly the majority, are Muslims deeply concerned about the treatment of their co-religionists in the Holy Land. A minority of these may justly be called Islamist, because of their shouts of ‘Jihad’ including one group who filmed waving its black flag while lying to everyone else that it was really the shahada, the Muslim creed. But many are White, including Jews, who have said how welcome they felt among the demonstrators, including the Muslims.
There are points of concern with the process of the election up in Rochdale. Starmer, who has declared himself to be ‘100 per cent Zionist’, withdrew the whip from the Labour candidate because he repeated what the Egyptians said about the Israelis not responding to their warning of an impending attack, with the addition of a bit of speculation of his own. Such as why was the music festival actually moved further towards Gaza, and why was it that the placed was ringed by IDF bases only four miles away, but it took eight hours for the troopers to respond to the atrocity? Stalin and his faction immediately accused the Labour guy of making anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, and so imply that somehow asking these questions was tantamount to spreading the lunatic and genuinely vile smears that Jews secretly control the world and are plotting the destruction of Whites, Muslims, Blacks or whoever else is claimed to be their victims. But Israel does have a genuine history of staging false flag attacks. The most notorious of these was the attack on the USS Liberty during the Six Day War. It was stationed off the coast monitoring the conflict. This alarmed the Israelis, who were afraid they’d pass on its intelligence to Egypt, and so Israeli troops boarded the ship and slaughtered its crew. There is genuine, and genuinely revolting anti-Semitism in the Arab world. You can buy the infamous Tsarist forgery the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in Egypt, and a few years ago it was serialised on Egyptian television. But the Labour party’s candidate’s question actually seem reasonable. They aren’t about Jews, but about the Israeli state and military, who do have a record of lying.
In these circumstances, and with Starmer’s refusal to back a ceasefire until he started losing Muslim votes, it was almost inevitable that Galloway would win. Galloway has a long record of supporting Arab nations. I’ve heard he converted to Islam, and that his first wife was Palestinian. He is not, however, an anti-Semite. The News of the Screws journo who used to go around posing as an Arab sheikh in order to entrap the great, the good and the not-so-good into saying or doing something indiscreet or criminal tried it with Galloway over the Holocaust. The Fake Sheikh arranged to meet him for lunch at a London restaurant. On his way in, Galloway recognised the hack’s minder, nicknamed Jaws. Like the Bond villain, this guy was approaching seven feet tall and had a mass of gold teeth resembling the character’s steel gnashers. Galloway was put on alert, which was justified when the Fake Sheikh asked him if he thought the Holocaust was a good thing. Galloway responded as any decent person would, and said it was an horrific crime against humanity, and the hack went back to his office disappointed. Galloway, as far as I’m aware, isn’t an anti-Semite by any stretch. He’s just critical of Israel’s treatment of its indigenous Arabs. As many proud and self-respecting Jews and Israelis are also. There have been mass protests against the Gazan genocide by Israelis and also by Jewish Americans.
Britain’s Jewish community has been worried about its waning social and political influence for a number of years now. About half a decade or so ago there were reports that the community was worried that it was losing the concern of the British public for its issues and history of persecution in favour of other ethnic groups. Hence there were a series of events intended to celebrate Jewish achievement to British society and culture. These naturally included festivals about Jewish comedians and literature. The last was featured on the One Show. A lady speaking for the festival said you didn’t have to be Jewish to go to it. Galloway’s victory does show the strength of Britain’s Muslim electorate and its concern for Palestine, and in this sense it shows that the Israel lobby, which identifies itself with the Jewish community, has lost ground. But as the mighty Tony Greenstein has pointed out, Judaism and Jewishness does not equal Israel. Zionism was a minority movement among European and American Jews before the War. In America this lack of interest continued until the late ’60s and ’70s. It ended with the rise of Neo-Cons, and their identification of Israeli values with American Christian values. Now the pendulum’s swinging back, American Jews are turning away from Israel, and most of the country’s support now comes from bonkers right-wing Christian organisations like Jack Hagee’s Christians United For Israel. Just don’t tell ’em Palestinians are also Christians, and they’ve also been subjected to abuse and violence by the Israeli state and right-wing settlers.
I think much the same thing is happening in Britain’s Jewish community, despite the oft-touted statistic that 70 per cent or more of Britain’s Jews believe that Israel is very important to their identity. Tony critiqued that stat a few years ago, showing that the true figure was probably rather less. The campaign in the Jewish community to unseat Corbyn as leader of the Labour party because of his pro-Palestinian, but not anti-Semitic views, was chiefly led by the United Synagogue. This is only one sect amongst the diverse variety of Jewish denominations and political and religious tendencies, as well as organisations like the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, which seems spectacularly unconcerned about real anti-Semitism in Britain, but terribly worried about any criticism of Israel. A fair number of the victims of the Labour party’s anti-Semitism witch hunt were Jewish critics of Israel. Some of these men and women have received abuse, violence and threats after the pro-Israel organisations smeared them because of their views. One of these was a lady in Devon, who had her car firebombed after one of these gutter hatemongers put her location on a map.
Galloway is an avowed anti-racist and definitely not an anti-Semite. The pro-Palestine marchers are also, in the majority, simply that: pro-Palestine. Whatever may be said about the genocidal implications of the phrase ‘from the river to the sea’ – and remember, Likud also uses this as part of its foundational ideology, the vast majority of these people certainly do not want the persecution and annihilation of the Jewish people.
His victory is not a black day for Jewish Brits. But it is a crack in the political grip of the Israel lobby.
Two schools have been in the news this past week or two, one because of threats made to staff over the prohibition of ‘free Palestine’ badges and the other because of attempts by Muslims pupils to overturn its secular culture and allow Muslim prayer. These events have been particularly reported and commented on by GB News, the channel that has two political biases: right and far right. This piece is a response in particular to the channel’s Patrick Christie, who has had a few things in particular to say about it.
One of these schools is Berkeley school, which has been the subject of a mass protesters outside its gates denouncing it. This is because the school stopped a pupil from wearing a ‘free Palestine’ badge. Rumours then spread, which have been denied by the school, that the lad was then bullied. The school states that it has a rule banning political badges. However, the badge’s prohibition has provoked angry protests. Free Palestine stickers and posters have appeared all over the surrounding area, including on private individual’s houses. One resident said that it happened on her house, and that there had been people driving around the area staring at her and other residents in an intimidating manner. This particularly upset her, because previously the area had been well-integrated and harmonious. Staff at the school itself had received death threat. It has been closed, and may never reopen, because it received a bomb threat along with a racially abusive phone call. In the meantime the school has resorted to distance learning for its pupils.
The other school is Michaela school, run by ‘Britain’s strictest headmistress’ Katherine Birbalsingh. This has very high academic scores, although listening to the discipline imposed on its pupils it sounds like a soul-crushing nightmare to me. Among other rules, pupils have to be silent in the corridor. Before I fell ill with the myeloma, I used to help out doing voluntary work with one of the local junior schools in my area. My job was simply to sit there and listen to the kids with reading difficulties read. The school at the time was run by the local authority, and was full of the stuff you’d expect and want on the walls of primary school. It had the children’s art and craft on display, as well as the rules commanding respect, tolerance and firmly banning bullying on the entrance lobby. It seemed the kind of happy school I remember when I was an ickle sprog. Then it was taken over by an academy chain against the wishes of the headmaster and staff. The head resigned, as did many of the ordinary teachers, and the ethos of the school changed. The art came off the walls, leaving them bare except for the school rules and safety regulations. Pupil behaviour was also clamped down upon. Like Birbalsingh’s school, talking in the corridors was banned. It changed from a cheerful learning environment to a grim, repressive place. I don’t know if the school’s scores improved, but it seemed to me that its joylessness was more likely to stop children wanting to come and learn than encourage them. Especially if work they and their teachers were proud of no longer appeared on its walls.
Birbalsingh is a secularist. She believes that for multiculturalism to work, religious differences, at least in her school, have to be minimised and removed. Hence she does not permit prayer. Some Muslims therefore started praying outside in the school playground using their jackets as prayer mats. This was duly forbidden as well. One pupil therefore took the school to court stating that the ban was unfair as it particularly affected Muslims. Muslims are required by their religion to pray five times a day. However, this seems to have been part of general attempt to enforce Muslim religious observance on the other pupils. Muslim girls wearing their hair free faced pressure to wear the hijab, for example. I think the court ruled in favour of the pupil. Birbalsingh as now announced that she is going to launch an appeal to ban prayer in school generally.
There are a number of aspects to these events and the reporting by GB News. The channel is especially keen on ‘culture war’ issues, such as the trans debate. It also gives due coverage to the news about the Pakistani Muslim grooming gangs. Christie compared the intimidating behaviour and the death threats made against Berkeley School with the mass protests against the teacher at the school in Batley, who was hounded out and is now in hiding because he showed his pupils the cartoons of Mohammed as part of a debate on freedom of speech. As obnoxious as Christie is, I think he’s right here. The same venomously intolerant forces are at work and need to be clamped down on. This is not about denying the protesters their rights to protest. It is about stopping threats and intimidation from an intolerant section of the Muslim community, especially when it involves death threats and reports of masked men hanging around the premises.
But I’m also aware that this is part of a wider campaign from the right-wing news channel to smear the left and the pro-Palestine campaign. The right-wing media have been running the line that the demonstrators against the genocide in Gaza are anti-Semites and Muslim supremacists, and this is an attempt to cow non-Muslim Britain with a series of shows of strength. As when they turned up to pray outside 10 Downing Street or Whitehall. For decades a section of the Conservative right has been spreading the idea that the left and militant Islam will combine to suppress traditional European freedoms and establish an Islamic state governed by sharia law. Anthony Burgess, the writer of A Clockwork Orange and author of the first Proto-Indo-European dictionary, wrote a book in the 1980s as a response to Orwell’s classic 1984. This book, with the rather obvious and unoriginal title 1985, was set in a Britain where the trade unions united with militant Muslims to start a revolution. This showed me exactly where the political sympathies of the man dubbed ‘Britain’s most pretentious writer’ lay. Then in the first years of this century the Spectator reviewed an SF book, set round about now in France, where the remains of French socialism had united with the Muslims to establish an Islamic state and had started a new Holocaust against the Jews. Because to the person who wrote this piece of literary trash, Socialists and Muslims are all anti-Semites. This line is being pushed now because of the attitude among the militant Zionist right that any criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic. Even if it comes from proud, principled Jews deeply involved with their community and their gentile friends.
Birbalsingh’s case is slightly different. As it is developing, it appears to be becoming a contest between the forcible observance of Islam in the school environment, and a forcible secularism. I am not a secularist. I am very much a person of faith. This blog was initially set up for Christian apologetics, to defend religion in general and Christianity in particular against the attacks by the New Atheists in the first decade or so of this century. Mike and I went to an Anglican church school. I have Roman Catholic cousins who went to the Roman Catholic schools in Bristol. I also have Methodist and Baptist friends. I have not noticed any sectarian prejudice and hatred among the peeps in my part of Bristol, although I am aware of the situation in Northern Ireland and in Glasgow. The teachers at my old school included Methodists, Roman Catholics and Presbyterians and they all had a horror of religious bigotry and violence. I support parents’ right to bring their children up in their religion and to send them to a faith school if they so wish. Provided, of course, that the teaching in that school conforms to British values of democracy, freedom of belief and conscience, religious tolerance and genuine racial equality.
Here I differ from Talk Radio Tory mouthpiece, Julia Hartley-Brewer, who also took it upon herself to weigh in on this subject. She wanted religion to be kept out of schools altogether and didn’t want children to be divided according to their parents’ religion. I dare say that if this came from a woman or man of the left, the Daily Mail would have heart attack and condemn it as an attack on traditional British belief and culture. But as it comes from her, the Mail and other right-wing organs and personages will remain silent.
But I think this part of a strategy by some militant Muslims to impose Muslim belief and observance on non-Muslim schools and organisations. And I think it probably has its ultimate origin in Pakistan. A few years ago I heard from a Christian Pakistani lady about the immense pressure Christians in Pakistan are under to convert to Islam. Her father had been the headmaster of a Christian school. The leading schools in Pakistan are Christian and Muslims are desperate to get their children into them. But they also put pressure on the headmasters to convert.
A few years ago there was a case in this country where a Muslim had been desperate to get his son into the local Christian school. When he succeeded, he then sued the school demanding that all the Christian iconography and ethos be removed, because it went against his Muslim beliefs and sensibilities. And I’ve heard of other cases like it in the charity sector.
I honestly don’t want prayer or religion removed from schools or the public sector. A presumably Muslim commenter to one of these videos noted that Roman Catholic schools provided prayer rooms for Muslim pupils, claimed that praying only took five minutes and ‘had many benefits’. That may be so, but I gather that Birbalsingh’s school is in a very ethnically and religious mixed area and that she felt that secularism was necessary for multiculturalism to work. My sympathies here are with her school. If the school rules ban prayer and this applies to everyone, then pupils coming to the school voluntarily should obey it. If they cannot, then they should perhaps choose another school.
And those choosing to practise their religion should not force it on those that don’t.
I just found this while looking through YouTube just a few moments ago. It’s a piece of old news, as it comes from Middle East Eye’s coverage of the pro-Israel demonstration nine days ago. And it adds a whole new twist to the accusations of anti-Semitic chanting. There have been several accusations that demonstrators have chanted anti-Semitic slogans at the ceasefire rallies for Palestine. But this video shows the pro-Israel demonstrators hurling cries of ‘Judenrat!’ at the counter protestors. This is anti-Semitic. The Judenraten were the councils set up in the Jewish ghettos by the Nazis, whose members had the horrific job of selecting which members of their communities would be sent to the death camps. I think I’ve come across this insult before, directed against Jews like Tony Greenstein, Jackie Walker and Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi, who dare to criticise Israel’s barbarous treatment of the Palestinians.
The woman pointing this out on the video also points her finger at a couple of individuals she claims are Fascists. One of these is ‘Brexit Brian’, whom she claims is a friend of Tommy Robinson. Robinson was unceremoniously given the boot from the pro-Israel demonstration to the upset of the British islamophobic right. But clearly, some of his mates still managed to get themselves into it. I’ve also come across accusations that Robinson’s ejection was somewhat hypocritical as supposedly the BNP were allowed to march. How credible that accusation is, I really don’t know. But as some of the leaders from the Zionist extreme right were caught hobnobbing with Britain First’s intelligence officer at a demonstration, it’s plausible. Whatever the truth, the Nazi chanting recorded here are part of the same sectarian anti-Semitism that was behind Starmer and the Labour right’s purge of Israel-critical Jews and others in the party. Anti-Semitism from any direction should be unacceptable. But it’s a pity that the cops looking on didn’t arrest these protestors.
This is a short posted on YouTube by M0hammedadwash3re16. It’s a clip of a speech by Israel’s Chief Rabbi saying that a negro needs to have two White parents and an apparent comparison to monkeys. I don’t know if it’s quite what the reverend gentleman quite said or intended, as it’s clearly been extracted from a longer speech. I can, unfortunately, quite believe that the Chief Rabbi said it and meant it just as it appears. Tony Greenstein on his blog and broadcasters like Abbie Martin on Tele Sur have described the vicious racism in sections of Israeli society. The Mizrahim, the Arabicised Jews of the Middle East, were sneered at by the Israelis as ‘human dust’ and racial inferiors, and only allowed to immigrate because the state needed their labour. The Egyptian comedian Bassem Yousuf in an interview described the Israeli state’s sterilisation of Jewish Ethiopian women. And there have been TV reports of attacks on Black Israelis and the vilification of Black migrants as ‘infiltrators’. A few years ago, the Sephardic rabbi, Ovadia Yusuf, got into the pages of Private Eye. He had claimed that the Holocaust was the Ashkenazi getting their just desserts for their sins under the law of karma. Judaism has no such concept, and this was just an expression of vile bigotry. More recently, Yusuf denounced Christianity. This is the side of Israel that is not covered by mainstream news outlets, and some of the very worst racists are, unsurprisingly, in Likud and its coalition parties. Very many Jews view these racists as a disgrace, especially as American Jews strongly supported the Black civil rights struggle. But discussion of Israeli racism is naturally banned by those pro-Israel organisations that smear even the mildest criticism of the country as ‘anti-Semitism’, and wish to promote the image that the Israel-Palestinian conflict is one of a good, ,democratic, western-style state against evil Arab Muslims.
GB News, the company that, according to one Labour MP, has two political biases, right and far-right, put up a video this morning claiming that imams and other preachers in Britain’s mosques had been making anti-Semitic sermons. This came from another journalist, who’d been filming in Israel. He mentioned the large number of Brits and Israelis, who had families in Britain, who were worried about the situation over here and the lack of support for Israel and support for the Palestinians. He then returned to Britain, and secretly filmed what some mullahs were saying from their pulpits, which bore out their fears of virulent anti-Semitism. The broadcaster played a clip of these.
Some of it was simply expressions of anger at the oppression of Muslims by ‘Jews’. In that sense, it was anti-Semitic as it came from a conflation of the Jewish people with Israel. This is, unfortunately, understandable given the way right-wing Zionists have tried to make Jewish identity synonymous with Israel. Netanyahu passed a law making every Jew a citizen of Israel whether they wanted to be or not. There are quite a number of Jewish critics of Israel, indeed, 3/5 of the victims of Stalin’s and Evan’s anti-Semitic witch hunt are Jewish, which means that they’re probably not self-hating anti-Semites but just severely normal Jewish Brits who don’t want Israel committing its crimes in the name of their faith and people.
One of the mullahs recited that passage from the Qur’an about the trees and rocks betraying the Jews to be killed by the righteous at Judgement Day. This is almost inevitable, as the passage is often used by the radical anti-Semites. I’m not going to defend it. One preacher said that the Zionist state was like somebody occupying your house, attacking you and then accusing you of violence if you scratch back. It is a defence of terrorism, but it isn’t without a certain degree of truth in that Israel is oppressing the Palestinians and their response to terrorism tends to be massively disproportionate, as with Operation Cast Lead and the last bombing of Gaza.
And there was another imam, who talked about the genocide of the Palestinians. This is something the Israelis really don’t want talked about, and certainly don’t want described as such. You could probably argue against it on semantic grounds. But nevertheless, the Palestinians are being ethnically cleansed. B’Tselem, among other historians and human rights activists, have shown that there were massacres of Palestinians up and down Israel in the 1948 Nakba, despite official Israel historiography. Those Palestinians who fled into exile have not been allowed to return because they would upset Israel’s demographic composition as a Jewish state. There is an apartheid system to keep Israelis and Arabs apart, and Arab wages lower than Israelis’. Palestinian farmers are bound by choking regulations that certainly do not apply to Israelis. IDF soldiers throwing chemical weapons down Palestinian wells to make the water undrinkable, and Israeli settler will launch attacks on Palestinian villages. The whole point of this policy of oppression and persecution seems to be to force the Palestinians to leave.
But you get into serious trouble if you call it genocide or compare it to the Holocaust, as Tony Greenstein has done. But Tony, who has a very deep grasp of Jewish and Israeli history and that of the Holocaust, has made a very good argument comparing it to the Nazi persecution of the Jews before 1942 and the Final Solution. Jews were prevented from getting jobs and forced out of their businesses, which were handed to gentile Nazi supporters. They were legally prevented from marrying non-Jews, and subject to beatings and forcible participation in humiliating displays. In one of these they were forced to push marbles or balls down a street with their noses. The Nazis had not, however, decided on their extermination and were allowing those who could afford it to emigrate. They didn’t care where they went, so long as it was away from the Reich.
You can also compare the Israeli state’s ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians to the Nazis’ attempted colonisation of Slavic eastern Europe. A long strip of land stretching from Poland through Ukraine and into Russia was designated for German colonisation. Polish villages were razed in preparation for the new German settlements. The Nazi race laws declared Poles, Russians and other Slavs to be untermenschen, subhuman, and prohibited their marriage to Aryans. They were to be a subordinate class of agricultural workers and peasants supplying produce to the colonists of the new Reich.
Or we could compare it to Mussolini’s policies towards Jews and the Black and Arab subjects of his revived Roman Empire. The 1937 race laws also banned Jews from various jobs, including education, and declared them racially inferior. Mercifully, it wasn’t as extreme as the Nazis’, and 80 per cent of Italian Jews survived the War. In Africa, Tripolitania was marked out to be an Italian colony and land subsequently earmarked for Italian colonisation while the indigenous Arab population was brutalised. And then there is the matter of the Italian invasion of Ethiopia. The Fascist authorities were terrified by the prospect of Aryan Italians interbreeding with Black Africans, despite a popular song of the time describing a man falling in love with a dusky African girl and taking her back to Italy to be kissed by the sun. As a result, they also passed laws banning such racial intermixing. There aren’t quite laws like this in Israel, but material promoting relationships and marriage between Arabs and Jews has been banned by the culture ministry, as well as anything celebrating Palestinians culture. There are also rabbis and organisations offering helplines and advice to dissuade Jews thinking of becoming romantically involved with Arabs.
It is therefore not anti-Semitic to call the Israeli persecution of the Palestinians what it is: ethnic cleansing, and the comparisons with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy are valid. I despise the preachers’ identification of the Jewish people as a whole with Israel and its policies, but I understand why this has been done.
The inclusion of the clip with the preacher talking about a Palestinian genocide is clearly intended to give the impression that any discussion of the Palestinians’ persecution as such is anti-Semitic, and so stop it from being discussed.
This is wrong, and should be rejected, just as anti-Semitism and all other forms of racism should.
Trump has marked this Jewish festival with his customary lack of grace and need to score off political opponents. According to a story in today’s Independent, ‘Trump marks Rosh Hashanah with antisemitic post’, by Gustav Kilander, recent politics’ worst loser took the holy day to accuse liberal Jews of voting to destroy America and Israel by voting for Joe Biden. The article begins
‘Donald Trump decided to mark the Jewish New Year by sharing an antisemitic message stating that “liberal Jews” voted to “destroy America and Israel” by supporting President Joe Biden.
“Just a quick reminder for liberal Jews who voted to destroy America & Israel because you believed in false narratives!” the image said. “Let’s hope you learned from your mistake & make better choices moving forward! Happy New Year!”
The image posted by Mr Trump also included a flyer from JEXIT, a group based in Florida working to push the message to Jewish Americans “that the Democratic Party has abandoned them and Israel,” The Times of Israel has reported.
“Wake Up Sheep. What Natzi /Anti Semite ever did this for the Jewish people or Israel?” the flyer states.
It goes on to list Mr Trump’s measures to move the US embassy “from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem which is Israel’s true capital. No other president had the b**** to do it”.
“Trump recognizes Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights,” it adds. “Trump recognizes Israel’s sovereignty over settlements in Judea & Samaria.”
“Trump signs an executive order for Judaism to be a nationality in addition to a religion so it would fall under the category Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964,” the JEXIT sheet said. “That act prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color and national origin in programs receiving federal financial assistance. Institutions that violate Title VI may lose their federal funding. This means that BDS will have a hard time harassing Jewish students on college campuses.”
“May 2020 – Trump Signs the ‘Never Again’ Education bill into law which allocates millions of dollars to expand Holocaust awareness and create websites with curriculum tools for teachers nationwide!” the flyer states.
“Clearly, one of the greatest Anti Semites of our time!” it concludes with apparent sarcasm.
Mr Trump has long employed the antisemitic trope that Jewish Americans have dual loyalty to Israel and he has spoken to and about Jewish Americans as if Israel is their country and not the US.’
The article then goes on to discuss the occasions when Trump has talked about Israel as if it were American Jews’ real, home, as when he called Netanyahu their Prime Minister. It quotes the Anti-Defamation League as saying that anti-Semitic incidents increased after these. And the article also mentioned how he’s still claiming that the election was rigged, casting doubt on the whole American political process.
Trump’s clearly trying to appeal to that section of American Jewry that passionately supports Israel, and thinks any criticism of it or attempt to prevent the further expansion of Israeli settlement in Palestine as dreadfully anti-Semitic. This isn’t too surprising, given that his son-in-law is a property developer involved in the construction of these settlements. As for American Jews themselves, they’ve never formed a monolithic community and many of them, such as Norman Finkelstein, have been extremely trenchant critics of Israel. It’s only been since the 1970s that many American Jews strongly identified with Israel. Until that time various right-wing Jewish magazines lamented that they had no interest in Israel nor wanted to settle there. And it looks like attitudes may be swinging back that way, with an increasing number of younger Jews either not being interested in Israel, or being actively critical because of its brutal maltreatment of the Palestinians.
But Trump isn’t the only one politico pushing the line that criticism of Israel is somehow anti-Semitic and demands absolute and uncritical support for it, especially from Jews. It’s been the same over here with the political-media establishment, the Labour right and Keir Starmer, and their attacks on Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters.
Trump is a sectarian anti-Semite, and so are they. It’s long past time people saw past them and banished them from politics.
That was a headline I caught this morning when I briefly glanced at the internet newsfeed this morning. This comes after rioting in Jerusalem between pro- and anti-government Eritreans. There was a piece of news yesterday that Netanyahu was planning to expel Eritreans from Jerusalem. And then it was followed by this headline this morning. The reports about these incidents state that Israel really isn’t keen on accepting asylum seekers. This comes from its determination to remain an ethnically Jewish state, and there have been reports of an extremely authoritarian and discriminatory attitude towards African migrants trying to pass through the country into Europe. There have also been reports of a strong current of anti-Black racism in the country, with Jews of Black African origin, such as those from Ethiopia, abused, threatened and assaulted.
I was told yesterday that the editor of the Jewish Chronicle, a newspaper with a proud future behind it, is writing a book, Israelophobia, in which he claims that criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic. I think he may well have his work cut out with Netanyahu’s regime. Not only is Israel an apartheid state with institutional discrimination against the Palestinians, but many ordinary Israelis are worried about the direction their country is taking. Netanyahu’s government has passed legislation curbing the freedom of the judiciary. An independent judiciary is a fundamental democratic institution. Israeli citizens have been concerned about this assault on one of their fundamental civic freedoms, and there have been demonstrations. One report profiled a family, who immediately after the Sabbath meal on Friday went out to demonstrate. Liberal and secular Israelis feel under threat because of the favouritism Netanyahu and his coalition partners show to the nationalists and right-wing settlers. Some of these extreme right-wing groups are exempt from national service, and so the burden of defending the country falls to liberal Jews. Many have been talking about emigrating. It’s been suggested that about a third of the population may leave, mainly middle class professionals in science, medicine and law. Well, if they do emigrate, we should be glad to have them to fill our skills shortage. And we could do with a few lawyers, keen to preserve democracy, to guard against the assaults on it in this country. The number of prospective emigrants might be exaggerated, as over the past few decades many people in Britain have said that they’re going to leave if a particular party get in, and then very conspicuously don’t. But even so, it shows the outrage of ordinary Israelis to Netanyahu’s creeping authoritarian.
And then there was this headline that he was considering expelling all Africans. If Netanyahu did say something like that, then I don’t see how anyone can reasonably claim that Israel is not turning into a Fascist state. This is, after all, ethnic cleansing of the type the NF wanted for Britain and Oswald Mosley wanted for British East Africa. He wanted the indigenous Black inhabitants to be expelled and the colonies developed as White states. Buddyhell, the left-wing blogger behind Guy DeBord’s Cat, in one of his pieces about Israel noted that in the 1920s the Jewish settlers in Palestine even had their own, proper, Fascist outfit, the Maximalist Legalists, who wanted to model the future Jewish state on Mussolini’s Italy. Well, Musso threw in his lot with Hitler, passing discriminatory race laws against Jews and Black Africans while the Nazis rounded up Jewish Italians for slaughter in the Holocaust.
But just as anti-racists and liberals are worried about the rise of the far right in Europe, it seems the spectre of genuine Fascism is also rising in Israel.
This story from the Torygraph came up on my YouTube feed earlier this evening. According to the article ‘Israel’s actions in West Bank like Nazi Germany, says retired general’ by James Rothwell in today’s edition of the wretched rag, Amiram Levin, the commander of the Israeli army’s northern forces and former Mossad spy – I think he may have been the agency’s deputy director – has called Israel an apartheid state.
The description of Israel as an apartheid state and its comparison to Nazi Germany will come as no surprise to pro-Palestinian campaigners. People like Jeremy Corbyn, Jackie Walker and Tony Greenstein have been demonstrating the truth of this description very clearly for decades. Walker became a critic of Israeli apartheid in the 1970s after she was asked why she campaigned against apartheid South Africa but not Israel. Comparing the state of Israel and the parties and officials that have created the country’s system of segregation and oppression, and who have presided over the decades’ long ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians from their own homeland to Nazis has been angrily denounced as anti-Semitic by the country’s most zealous defenders. But dissident Israeli intellectuals have themselves made the comparison. One highly respected Israeli chemist and philosopher, whose name at the moment escapes me, called the racist ideology of the Israeli state ‘Judaeonazism’. Tony Greenstein, himself one of the many Jews purged from Labour for criticising the Israeli state’s racism, has made the point that Israel’s maltreatment of the Palestinians resembles the persecution of the Jews by the Nazis before the launch of the obscenity of the Holocaust in 1942. It also resembles the Nazi colonisation of eastern Europe, in which a tract of land stretching from Poland through Ukraine and into Russia was to be cleansed of it indigenous population, their towns and villages erased, ready for German colonisation.
But despite the accuracy of the comparison and the sheer brute fact that Israel is an apartheid state, anyone making these criticisms will be immediately denounced as anti-Semitic. This is despite the fact that Israel’s critics include many self-respecting Jews, like the actor Miriam Margolies. She appeared in a book of papers criticising the bombardment of Gaza nearly a decade ago, describing herself as a ‘proud Jew, and an ashamed Jew’. Ashamed, no doubt, by the brutality Israeli showed towards the country’s indigenous Arabs. There have been a number of Israeli activists and organisations who’ve attacked the state’s brutality. These include Breaking the Silence, an organisation of ex-service personnel, who bear vocal witness to the atrocities by the Israeli military they have seen and participated in. There is also the human rights organisation B’Tselem, which attacks the official myths of the country’s foundation and shows how the Palestinian territories have been steadily encroached upon and annexed over the decades.
Levin is clearly a soldier and a patriot, and so I wonder how the Likudniks and bug-eyed ultra-nationalists are going to handle his criticism. I don’t doubt he’s going to be attacked and denounced, if he hasn’t been already, but they can hardly call him self-hating and anti-Semitic as they have done to too many others.
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