I dare say you’ve seen the various spluttering in the media and online. There’s been frothing outrage on the Islamophobic right after the events of Wednesday night. At the same time as the abortive debate on the SNP’s motion for a ceasefire in Gaza, there was a Stop the War protest outside parliament as well as other protests outside MP’s constituency offices. As a result, GB News and other right-wingers have been accusing MPs, and particularly the Labour party, of cowardice for supposedly giving in to Islamist demands. GB News in particular has been ranting about how Britain is now under Islamist mob rule, a stance echoed and repeated by others on the nationalist/populist right.
There are several criticisms of this view which clearly demonstrated it to be completely false.
Firstly, it wasn’t an Islamist protest. It was a protest against Israel’s ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians in Gaza, present as a reprisal for Hamas’ butchery of the kids at a music festival. As such, it naturally involved a large number of Muslims. Which is pretty much as you’d expect, as Muslims are keenly interested and deeply upset by the treatment of their coreligionists in Israel and the Occupied Territories. But the Palestinians aren’t just Muslims – they’re also Christians, and there are any number of videos on YouTube of Christian clergy and lay people being abused, spat at and struck by bigoted Israelis. This is the face of Israel that the Israel lobby and the official Jews of the Chief Rabbinate, Board of Deputies, Jewish Chronicle and Campaign Against Anti-Semitism don’t want westerners knowing about. They want you to believe that the only people persecuting Christians in the Holy Land are Muslims. It’s true that Christians are persecuted by Muslims, but they’re also persecuted by Israeli settlers and quite often the people literally standing between Christians worshipping in church and an mob of Israeli fanatics intent on destruction is the Muslim doorman. The secular Israeli state also persecute the Orthodox Jews of Jerusalem’s Old Jewry. These are the descendants of 19th century Jewish immigrants to the Holy Land, who came to practise their faith in the land of their ancestors. They reject, however, Israel as a secular state and, like their brethren and sisters overseas, believe that Israel will only be restored by divine will under the Mashiach – the Messiah. You can find videos on YouTube of them being tormented and beaten up by the IDF. If you want to know how Israel really treats the Palestinians, I strongly recommend reading the blogs and books produced by Israel-critical Jews, like Ilan Pappe, Norman Finkelstein, Tony Greenstein, Jackie Walker, Martin Odoni and so on. Also, the marchers for Palestine included a number of severely normal White Brits. The Islamophobes have made much of Starmer being confronted by ‘Islamist’ protesters on the train and on the station in Edinburgh. Well, I’ve seen the video, too, and most of them looked White to me.
Now I do think that the right does have a point when it comes to the massed protests outside MPs constituency offices. It does look like intimidation after MP David Freer announced he was resigning because of the abuse and threats he and his family suffered. This comes after the murder of Amess by an Islamist fanatic, as well as the attack on Lib Dem MP a few years ago by a nutter with a Samurai sword in which the MPs assistant was tragically killed, as well as the assassination of Jo Cox back in 2015 by a native British rightist. I agree with the Stop the War Coalition that such protests should not be banned, as it would isolate MPs from public opinion, but believe it was wrong to do so in this case. Not least because it hands ammunition to a government determined to curb any kind of public protest.
Secondly, the Labour party doesn’t appear to have given in, whatever it looks like from outside. From what has been said by critics of Labour’s behaviour towards the SNP motion, it appears like the opposite, carefully crafted to look like a call for a ceasefire. According to a message I put up from the StWC yesterday, Starmer presented the motion after a phone call with Israeli PM Isaac Herzog. Herzog is in no way a peacenik, and I’ve come across several quotes from him indicating that he has an absolute and unyielding hatred of the Palestinians. It looks like Starmer deliberately added his amendments knowing that this would upset the SNP and they’d walk out. Damo Kernow, the man from the ancient British kingdom of Cornwall, has put up several videos about this. He notes that Labour’s amendment stripped out any criticism of Israel and removes the stipulation that the ceasefire should be immediate. He also notes that the speaker, Lindsay Hoyle, allowed the amendment to go ahead despite breaking parliamentary rules he declared were antiquated. These were rules that had last been amended in the 1980s during the IRA bombing campaign. Hoyle has very strong pro-Israel views, and proudly tells the world how his grandfather was one of the founders of Labour Friends of Israel. This now looks less like parliament caving in to Muslim opinion than a carefully crafted piece of sabotage designed to look like genuine support for a Palestinian ceasefire. Which is what you’d expect from a master of lies and deceit like Starmer. As the Native Americans used to say in Westerns during their pow-wows with the cavalry, ‘White man speak with forked tongue’. Well, definitely not all White men, but definitely in the case of Starmer. He’s made a career out of it.
But I don’t doubt that there were Islamists among the marchers. Any kind of left-wing protest attracts firebrands and extremists. I was at secondary school during the St. Paul’s riots in Bristol in 1980/81. Our school fortunately wasn’t affected, but I do remember a White guy standing on the stone square supporting the trees lining the school entrance, ranting down a megaphone trying to incite the kids to join the rioters. Mahyar Tousi put up a video showing a group of Muslims waving the black banner of Jihad, while telling the cops and everyone else that it was merely the shahada, the Muslim creed. It wasn’t, and waving an enemy banner is outlawed, so they should have been arrested. But these are the bigots and extremists, who I’ve no doubt comprised only a small minority of the crowd.
And the statement that Britain has now fallen and is now under the Islamist heel is more than a little exaggerated. Last time I looked, King Charles was still ensconced on the throne, not a caliph. Rishi Sunak is still PM – unfortunately – and not a mullah, as in Iran. I live in Bristol, which is a multicultural city with its fair share of mosques, as well as Hindu temples and Sikh gurdwaras. I haven’t seen any rampaging Muslims hordes up my way, nor from anywhere else in the city. I’ve mentioned how Patrick Christys, one of the esteemed fixtures of GB News, more Grievous Bodily than Great British, put up a video calling for sharia law to be banned. Well, last time I looked, sharia law had no official standing and only five per cent of Muslims wanted it introduced. Over 70 per cent of Muslims polled believe Islam was compatible with British society. But Grievous Bodily News has form when it comes to alarmism and scaremongering, so it’s no surprise that they’re doing it now about the protests for Gaza.
I do think, however, that we also need to be very cautious and suspicious of some of those marching. I’ve no doubt that the Islamists are trying to exploit massed Muslim opinion against the war in Gaza in the same way some Marxist sects used to practice ‘revolutionary entryism’ and deliberately infiltrate conventional, social democratic parties like Labour in order to disrupt and radicalise it. The critical event that mobilised specifically Muslim politics in Britain, according to the scholar Alfred Kepel in his book, The Revenge of God, was the confected outrage over the Satanic Forces. This was falsely accused of blasphemy by the Ayatollah Khomeini as a cynical political gesture to take the spiritual leadership of the Islamic world away from Saudi Arabia. It has led to death threats and attempts on the lives, some of them all-too successful, of the author, Salman Rushdie and his publishers. I can remember the mass book burnings in Bradford, and the rantings of its leaders, Mohammed Akhthar and Kalim Zaddiqie. Akhthar’s pamphlet, Be Careful With Mohammed, was a full-scale attack on Christianity and western secular democracy, and exaltation of Islam as absolutely perfect. It ended with a short section ‘What Western Intellectuals Think of Islam’, containing a series of quotes condemning the religion from various writers and public figures. As for Zaddiqui, He was filmed in a BBC documentary, The Trouble with Islam, telling his congregation that ‘British society is a monstrous killing machine, and killing Muslims comes very easily to them’. When he was challenged, Zaddiqui muttered some nonsense about the publication of Rushdie’s notorious book marking the beginning of ‘a holocaust of Muslims’. That was 30 and more years ago, and it’s no more come true than Alex Jones’ telling the world that Obama was going to become a dictator and put ordinary, White Christian Americans in FEMA camps. I don’t doubt that some of the Islamists who joined the marches are considering ways in which they can spread their disaffection and hate amongst bog-standard ordinary Muslims who simply want peace and dignity for the Palestinians.
We cannot let the forces of hate use the marches to spread fear of the Islamic threat on one hand, and Islamist disaffection on the other. The marches are not Islamist mob rule, and are not to be presented or used as such.
Here’s another short video, this time from Haber Lutfen’s YouTube channel, against the atrocity now being perpetrated in Gaza by the Likudnik state. It begins with an elderly lady explaining in broken English how she’s been protesting against the maltreatment of the Palestinians as part of the anti-occupation bloc for twelve years. The Palestinians, she explains, have been occupied for 75 years, which has caused much pain and suffering, especially to the Palestinians. But it has hurt Israelis too. They need peace, but the government only wants democracy for Israelis.
The woman proudly sports a knitted headband, showing Israeli and Palestinian colours, which she made herself, and it also shows the hands of Jews and Arabs coming together. The video also show the crowd of demonstrators and their placards demanding a ceasefire and the recall of Israeli forces.
This reminds me of previous demonstrations that have occurred in which Palestinians and Israelis have united to condemn the violence and the failure of the politicians to end it. Back in the ’90s Israeli and Palestinian young people organised a British ‘tea and cake’ demonstration. This symbolised their utter disgust with their respective politicians by making a pointed statement that they’d rather return to the British Mandate. Of course, they didn’t really, as it was the British Mandate that is partly responsible for the terrible mess made by the emergence of the Israeli state and the Nakba. But you can understand their rhetorical point.
This is another video the right in this country won’t want people seeing. They’re pushing the narrative that the marchers calling for a ceasefire and a free Palestine are all terrible ultra-left anti-Semites, who are a real, physical threat to Jews. Doubtless some of the extremists in the demos in the West are, but they also include Jews, some of whom have even organised them. Like the Labour official sacked by Starmer. The Community Security Trust, founded ostensibly to protect Jews and their institutions from anti-Semitic attack, has forcibly separated Jews and Muslims marching against the Israeli state’s persecution of the Palestinians. In one incident, one of their stewards hit an elderly rabbi in the face. And Chief Rabbi Efraim Mervis and his predecessor, Jonathan Sacks, have led parties of British Jews on the annual March of the Flags in Jerusalem. This has been when Israeli boot-boys march around the Arab quarter of east Jerusalem to intimidate its inhabitants. Liberal British Jews appealed for them not to go, but they went anyway. The pro-Palestinian left in Israel are immensely courageous. The Likud and other right-wingers have ranted against them and called for them to be denied voting rights. Netanyahu has passed legislation trying to silence human rights organisations like Beth T’selem and Breaking the Silence. And the Jewish opposition to the occupation of Palestine in this country have been denounced as evil, self-hating anti-Semites.
These people don’t look self-hating to me. And I imagine you could get a very sharp reaction if you dared say they were anti-Semitic.
Ignore the racist rhetoric. Jews and Palestinians, as well as people of all faiths and none are coming together over this issue.
This is another piece, from the AP Archive channel on YouTube, that I imagine some news outlets and right-wing mouthpieces probably don’t want people to see either. It’s of an ecumenical Christian service in Jerusalem where, as one reverend gentleman explains, they are all Christians, who believe in a Creator, and so are praying for the people, who have been killed in Gaza. The clergy include Orthodox and Roman Catholic priests, monks and nuns. The mainstream narrative would have us all believe that all Palestinians are Muslims, that that this is a confrontation between militant Islam and Israel. This shows you that the Palestinians are also Christians, and that they also are praying for their people’s dead.
Okay, a number of right-wingers have appeared on YouTube pouring scorn at the gay protest group, ‘Queers for Palestine’. This is another piece of what’s come to be known as pink-washing. Israel is supposed to be nice, liberal and worthy of support because homosexuality is legal there, and the Jerusalem Mardi Gras is supposed to be a major spectacle and tourist attraction. This contrast with Palestine, where gays are supposedly persecuted because it’s a Muslim country. Hence the sneers by Douglas Murray and co.
I don’t know about Gaza under Hamas. They are a bunch of Islamofascists, and so it’s more than possible that gays may be persecuted there. But they weren’t in the West Bank when radical journalist and broadcaster Abbie Martin visited it a few years ago. Martin used to be on RT America before she fell out with the broadcaster and moved to Tele Sur. She presented a documentary for the channel on the plight of the Palestinians. It should still be on YouTube. Talking to Joe Rogan, she said that going to Palestine it was nothing like she had been told. This included the attitude that gays were persecuted. She found the opposite: there were openly gay couples around.
I don’t doubt this. For centuries Islam, or parts of it, had a far more tolerant attitude to homosexuality than the west. In Egypt the laws against it had become a dead letter by the 12th century. There was also a very strong gay culture in Pakistan and in parts of Afghanistan. I think the current persecution of gays by ISIS and similar extremists is primarily a revivalist reaction to the more permissive attitudes towards gays in the west.
So I’m sceptical about these sneers about a homophobic Palestine. It’s just another smear to present Israel in a good light and vilify the Arabs.
I’ve posted up a number of pieces attacking Afrocentrism and its whacky and ahistorical ideas. Afrocentrism has its roots in 19th century Black American authors, who believed that ancient Egypt was a Black civilisation. I don’t think at the time this was an unreasonable claim. Watching some of the videos by Afrocentrists on YouTube, it appears they got some of their ideas from contemporary scholarly writings. One such video began by asserting that Champollion, the French linguist who finally cracked Egyptian hieroglyphics, believed they were a Black civilisation. The ancient Egyptians in their art clearly portrayed themselves as darker than Europeans, but not as dark as the Nubians, whom they depicted as really Black. Where it becomes unreasonable is when it asserts that ancient Egypt was the fount and source of Greek, and hence western civilisation, and claims that Black people were the original inhabitants of Britain, America, Vietnam, China, Japan and elsewhere.
There’s also a very strong belief in the Black community that Jesus must have been Black. At one level it’s kind of natural, as White Europeans have seen him in the terms of their own race, and portrayed him as White. He wasn’t either, of course. The Jews were a Semitic people, related to the Arabs and other related peoples in the Middle East, such as the Assyrians and Aramaeans. Hebrew is very closely related to Ugaritic, the ancient language of Byblos now in Syria. Christ would have had an olive complexion like these people, rather than that of a sub-Saharan Black African.
But there are rumours that a Black director is planning a film about Christ, in which not only Our Lord but everyone in Jerusalem will be Black. I don’t know if this will include Pontius Pilate, who was a White Roman. This seems to follow Black racial doctrine rather than historical reality.
But the desire to promote all the Biblical figures as Black Africans seems to have gone a step further. I found a video yesterday of a group of Black people discussing a video they had found claiming that the various locations in the Bible were really in sub-Saharan Africa. More specifically, the video they were discussing claimed it was on the border with Namibia.
This is bonkers, but no more bonkers than Ahmed Osman, who claimed that the Bible had really been set in Saudi Arabia, or the 19th century British author E. Cummings Beaumont. Beaumont had decided that the various states and civilisations in the Bible couldn’t possibly be those of the modern countries of Egypt, Palestine and Greece. No! Those ancient nations could only have been located in modern Britain. I found a copy of his book once in one of the secondhand bookshops in Cheltenham, and haven’t been able to find it since. It’s a classic of barmy literature.
Behind these claims are ethno-nationalism and the idea that only one’s own people are sufficiently great and noble enough to have been these great nations. In the case of Afrocentrism, it’s partly a backlash against the extremely low view of Black people as a race and their civilisations and cultures up to the middle of the 20th century. The Black American founders of Afrocentrism wrote their books in order to show that Blacks were also capable of creating great civilisations like ancient Egypt, and were therefore the equal of Whites. It’s an entirely noble motive, but has led to the appropriation of the history and achievements of other cultures. Early this week I found a video by Black American conservative Amala Ekponobi in which she put right a video by a smug American Black girls claiming that the Amerindians were wrong and Blacks were the first people in America.
There is a problem in that in America, Afrocentrism has entered the academy with universities teaching courses on it. And it seems to be influencing Black history over here, as when a book on Black British history claimed that Black people had built Stonehenge.
This needs to be stopped, and genuine history taught instead of racial, and racist myths.
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.
I found this short video from Middle East Eye and several others showing Israeli soldiers and settlers attacking Christians and desecrating churches ahead of the Holy Fire ceremony in Jerusalem. This is the service during which a fire spontaneously ignites at one of the major churches in Jerusalem. Other videos show Israeli settlers abusing and spitting at Christian nuns. I am not putting this up to stir up any kind of hatred against Jews. Indeed, the people that have done so much to talk about this and reveal the anti-Christian bigotry as well as the other forms of racism in the Israeli state, its far right ruling parties, and the settlers, have been Jews like the mighty Tony Greenstein. I’m putting it up because this is what the mainsteam media and the Anglican and Methodist churches in Britain won’t show, nor will Christian Zionist organisation in the America like Ted Hagee’s Christians United for Israel. There was much coverage a little while ago of the conflict between the Israelis and Palestinian Muslims at the al-Aqsa mosque, but there was never any mention about this. Palestinian Christians are leaving the Holy Land because of this kind of pressure and violence. But in the mainstream media the Palestine/Israel conflict is always presented as one between Islam and the Israeli state. Some of this is due to western backing of Israel as an outpost of western culture and influence in the Middle East. Some of it is no doubt fear of being accused of anti-Semitism by the Israelis, along with accusations that Christianity is itself intrinsically anti-Semitic. The Israeli state wants the money from Christian pilgrimages to the Holy Land, and so its keen to play these incidents down. But it comes from the theology of the various Israeli far right parties, which view Christians as idolaters and Jew haters, who, like Muslims, must be cleansed from Israel, and churches as ‘houses of idolatry’ that must be destroyed.
Starmer has declared himself a ‘100 per cent’ Zionist. In that case, I would like him to make a protest against this brutality by the Israeli far right, and why he isn’t standing up for Christians, Muslims and Israeli liberals and anti-racists, who are being attacked by this intolerant, far right regime.
Condemn anti-Semitism.
Condemn Israel persecution of Palestinian Christians, Muslims and other minorities in a brutal apartheid state.
This comes from the History Upscaled channel on YouTube, and shows the original footage and then a colorized version of footage of Jerusalem and its people at the Jaffa Gate, shot by the Lumiere brothers. It’s very short, just over a minute long, but it’s a fascinating glimpse of Jerusalem in the final years of the 19th century before the establishment of the state of Israel and the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians.
I wonder how Keir Starmer, who is ‘100 per cent Zionist’ and determined to push through legislation banning conversion therapy for gay and transgender peeps is going to react to this. The Rev. Simon Sideways is a right-wing YouTuber. I think he might be a trucker, as his videos are frequently of him, sat behind a wheel, driving somewhere and giving his opinions on illegal immigration and woke ideology. He describes himself as a White activist, but as far as I know, he’s not an anti-Semite. In the video below he attacks calls from two members of the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, for industry and medicine to be able to deny their services to members of the LGBT community for religious reasons. These are members of the coalition partners of Netanyahu’s Likud, the Religious Nationalist Party. In other words, far right religious fanatics. The type of people one Israeli intellectual called ‘Judaeonazis’. He starts by asking whether such a policy would be acceptable in Britain if it came from a similar ruling coalition between extreme secular nationalists on one hand and Christian fundamentalists on the other. Clearly it wouldn’t. He’s also perplexed at how a people, who have suffered such terrible persecution over the centuries, such as the Holocaust, could inflict similar persecution on other marginalised groups. As it stands, the pair demanding the right to discriminate against gays state that, in the case of medicine, this should only be done if there are other people willing to provide the treatment that religious individuals and companies are withholding. Yeah, I’m sceptical about this. This is how it starts, but if people give into this, before long they’ll be a blanket permission for everyone to withhold their services from gays. He also says it doesn’t seem very godly, given that God made everyone.
Okay, the prohibition against male homosexuality is found in the Bible. It’s amongst the various laws in Leviticus. There is no similar legislation against lesbianism, though the Talmud refers to it as ‘the practices of the Egyptians’. However, there are about 600+ laws in the Old Testament, and hundreds more in the Oral Law preserved by the rabbis in the Talmud. From what I understand, liberal interpreters of the Law don’t consider it any more important than some of the others, and I don’t doubt that some Jews probably ignore it altogether as something more fitting to another time. Much homosexuality in the ancient world was paedophilia, and so I think some have interpreted this verse as a ban on that, rather than a ban on consensual sex between adult men. As for how a persecuted nation can behave like this to another persecuted group, Jews are human beings and human being are capable of terrible persecution, regardless of their nationality, race or religion. Just look at what the Israeli state has done and is doing to the Palestinians. Of course, there are liberal Jews, who are going to be as outraged about this as Sideways, because they believe that liberal values are at the heart of Judaism. For them, so I understand, to be a Jew is always to side with the oppressed, never the oppressor.
Sideways also wonders how the UN will react, noting that they have previously passed 50 or so resolutions against Israel for breaches of international law. I don’t know, but from previous occasions, they’ll probably ignore them and accuse the UN of being anti-Semitic.
This might, however, damage some of their public relations image. Critics of Israel have talked about ‘pinkwashing’ by the Israeli state. This is using it’s liberal attitude to homosexuality, shown in such events as the Jerusalem Mardi Gras, to present the country as a beacon of liberalism and tolerance against Palestinian, Arab, Muslim homophobia. A while ago the Beeb showed a series about gay people in Britain. One of the men shown was a young chap with a Jewish boyfriend. He was very much impressed with this apparent Israeli tolerance to the point he was considering converting to Judaism. If the Israeli coalition passes this wretched legislation, that gay-friendly image will take a hit.
My guess it won’t get passed and I’ll be surprised if this story is widely reported. If such legislation was passed, then it should be a problem for Starmer. How would he be able to justify such absolute support for a persecutory state while at the same time opportunistically declaring his support for some of those people likely to suffer under such laws?
Or would he and the Israeli nationalists who support him go back to the old tactic of smearing anyone who makes such a criticism an anti-Semite?
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