This is a real piece of forgotten Jewish working-class culture. I’ve put up a number of Socialist Jewish songs and anthems in Yiddish and Hebrew, including the Communist Internationale and the anthem of the Russian/Polish Bund. The Bund were the mass Jewish socialist party in Poland, fighting for the rights of Polish Jews who strongly rejected Zionism and wished to live in peace and equality in their native country with their gentile Polish compatriots. This song, Dem Arbeters Lid, ‘The Workers’ Song’, from Jane Peppler’s channel on YouTube, is characteristically Jewish but also strongly internationalist It says at one point that ‘race and nationality mean nothing to you’. It comes from the Jewish Labor Movement, which I would imagine is the American Jewish socialist movement, as shown by the thumbnail of a picket line of lady tailors on strike. It’s composer, Louis Gilrod, used as the tune the American song ‘The Mother of the Girl I Love’. It’s in Waltz time and reminds me very strongly of Edwardian British parlour songs.
It opens by describing the exhausted, penniless, ‘self-enslaved’ Jewish workers toiling as tailors. Their children are naked and their wives sick and weak. But they will bring about a new social order in which they will be free and there will be no rich and poor. These are sentiments that would no doubt leave the British Jewish Labour Movement, now a part of the Labour party, screaming in fury along with some of the other Blairites. Because somehow, some of them have got it into their tiny minds that socialism is anti-Semitic because it’s against capitalism. Presumably the Blairite moron who said this Radio 4 didn’t realise that by equating capitalism with Jewry she had just expressed the same views as Hitler and other grotty fascists, such as our own wretched Oswald Mosley. The picture of the squalor and poverty of the workers in the garment industry is absolutely accurate. Many, perhaps most of the Jewish immigrants to America were Yiddish-speaking Romanian fleeing persecution in that country. They were dirt poor, living in poorly furnished, overcrowded tenements, sometimes even just occupying stairwells. Many of the women were poorly paid workers in the garment industry. One of the most horrific disasters that hit the New York Jewish community in this period was a fire that broke out in one of the upper stories of one of the clothing factories. This resulted in tens, perhaps over a hundred dead. some of the women were killed because there were no adequate exits, and so leapt to their deaths. As for the myth of Jews sticking together against gentiles, the factories’ owners were also Jews who lived in the affluent districts uptown with their gentile neighbours.
That’s the only way I think Tzipi Hotovely can fairly be described. She’s the Israeli ambassador who was hurried off the campus at LSE by the cops and her security guards as protestors against the genocidal brutality of the Israeli state made their feelings extremely clear. Needless to say, the government and the Blairite Labour leadership have metaphorically clutched their pearl in horror at what a terrible deed has been done to her. The protests have been condemned by Priti Patel and Starmerite rentagob Lisa Nandy. Mike has put up a couple of pieces about the incident, pointing out that Hotovely was never in any danger because of the police protection she enjoyed. And today he’s posted another article quoting a number of well-informed Twitterers and commenters, including Asa Winstanley of the Electronic Intifada; the Groaniad journo Owen Jones, Natalie Strecker; Another Angry Voice and a Palestinian gent, Omar Ghraeib, which showed exactly how deeply unpleasant her extreme Israeli nationalist views are.
The Nakba, the forced expulsion of 800,000 Palestinians to create the nascent Israeli state in 1948 is well-documented. Historians have uncovered that it was achieved through massacres of thousands of Palestinians. People were gunned down hiding in mosques for sanctuary. A group of women tried to appease the Israeli troops through bringing them baskets of rice. They were shot in the stomach. All documented fact, covered in histories of the reality of the creation of Israeli on videos available on the internet. I think a few of them were put up by Abi Martin of The Empire Files on Tele-Sur. But Hotovely has declared this all ‘a lie’. This is, to me, as deplorable as the Nazis and anti-Semites peddling their lies that the Holocaust never happened, or the Turkish state covering up the Armenian genocide. But it’s also not just the Nadba she denies. She claims there’s no Palestinian people – a common trope of the Israeli state and its supporters over here. It started with Gold Meir and the Zionist pioneers claiming that the Palestinians were really recent settlers from Syria and other Arab nations because the landlords were absentees in those countries. It comes from the old Zionist slogan ‘A people without a land for a land without a people’ – except the land already had a people. Hence all the lies that the Palestinians don’t really exist, which I’ve seen repeated on extreme right-wing American and Canadian websites.
As an Israeli far-right nationalist, she wants Arab villages razed to be replaced by Jewish settlements. In May she was one of the main speakers at a Zionist demonstration in support of the Israeli embassy. During which the demonstrators showed just what kind of disgusting human beings they were by chanting in favour of burning down Palestinian villages and supporting Rabbi Mei Kahane, the founder of Kach. This is a group so extreme that even the Israelis call it a terrorist organisation. She so right-wing that she’s even called for Israel to invade Jordan and Syria. This is bonkers, but it would be supported by Ted Hagee’s Christians United for Israel, which would also like Israel to invade and annexe parts of Egypt and Iraq. Technically I think Syria is still at war with Israel due to the Israeli occupation of the Golan Heights. A madman or -woman calling for real, renewed armed war is obviously a threat to peace in the Middle East. Which, incidentally she’s never given her explanation of how it can be achieved. A war-hungry maniac like her should not be let anywhere near power or international relations.
But let’s be fair, it’s not just Palestinians she hates. She also despises Jews, who protest against the Israeli state’s atrocities. In one of her wretched tweets she sneered at German Jewish critics, claiming in very anti-Semitic language that they were only doing it for the money. ‘Oy vey my German Euros!’, she tweeted. The mad right-wing Zionists trying to shut down any criticism of Israel do so by screeching that any critical remark must be an anti-Semitic trope. But this is a real one: that of the money-grubbing Jew. And right-wing Zionists also accuse their critics of being ‘offensive’! Well, I can only imagine how offensive her remarks must be to Jewish Germans, because the myth that Jews are materialistic, greedy and exploitative was at the heart of Nazi Jew-hatred and persecution. I’m also at a loss to know quite where she thinks these ‘German Euros’ that she claims were somehow being paid to her country’s Jewish German critics come from. They aren’t going to come from the German state, which supports Israel, nor its people, who are generally very friendly and well-disposed towards Jews. Germany is so welcoming towards Jews that many Israelis go there for their holidays. Nazism is banned under the Basic Law and Mutti Merkel’s government tried over and over to show that Germany was now a pluralist, anti-racist society that welcomed ethnic minorities. I dare say that there are individual Nazis ensconced in parts of the German state. But the German state as a whole is very, very definitely not going to give any kind of support to real anti-Semites.
The German-Jewish critics of Israel seem to me to be determinedly anti-racist generally. There’s a video on the web somewhere of the awesome Jackie Walker speaking at one of their meetings, and being given a warm welcome. This was after she was expelled from the Labour party on a trumped-up charge of anti-Semitism. She’s been subject to a torrent of horrendous abuse ever since, some of it viciously racist. She’s Black, and so her racist attackers have claimed she can’t be Jewish. There’s a vicious anti-Black racism in Israel. Abi Martin made a documentary a few years ago about the abuse and physical assaults made against Black Israelis. This included a maniac stabbing a baby in the head. The German Jews, who welcomed Walker and gave her a platform are far better people than Israel’s White supremacist defenders.
And just to show us what the state Hotovely so enthusiastically represents is actually like, Omar Ghraeib have tweeted about the shooting of a 13-year old Palestinian boy by an Israeli soldier, and Agent Rachel Swindon has also tweeted about the Israeli army’s destruction of water pipes serving four Palestinian villages. This is quite common, and is a method of squeezing the Palestinians in an attempt to force them off their land. Israeli soldiers also throw chemicals into Palestinian wells to make the water undrinkable. And the tweeters also rightly point out that the UN has condemned Israel as practicing apartheid.
Nandy was yelling that the demonstration was terrible attack on free speech. Which also shows what a revolting hypocrite Nandy is. As Daniel Finn points out, Nandy will not breathe a word in defence of the Palestinians. Her commitment to anti-Palestinian racism is ‘quite extraordinary’.
Of course, Patel and Nandy have also screamed that the demonstration was ‘anti-Semitic’. No. Definitely no! Many of Israel’s most ardent critics are themselves decent, Torah-observant and secular Jews. They’re severely normal, self-respecting people, who aren’t ‘anti-Semitic’ or ‘self-hating’ or any of the other wretched, vile smears that have been thrown at them. Some of them are Haredi Jews, who believe they are to remain in galut – exile – until the coming of the Messiah, as commanded in the Hebrew Bible and Torah. Others do so because they believe Israel violates the fundamental principles of the liberal Judaism they were raised in. You know, the type of Judaism that takes as its watchword ‘Jews should always be for the oppressed, never the oppressor’. And many are socialists following the ideas of the pre-War Bund, the Jewish socialist party that wanted Jews to stay in their ancestral homelands, fighting to be accepted as equals and friends by their gentile compatriots. Over here the British Jewish community before the First World War held exactly the same attitude. They wanted to be seen as patriotic Brits and Englishmen and women, not foreigners. The British Jewish establishment actually condemned the Balfour Declaration because they were afraid it would make gentile Brits see them as foreigners. It would create anti-Semitism. Philip Gould has posted a tweet from a Jewish group over here critical of Israel, Na’amod: British Jews Against Occupation. Now I don’t claim to be any kind of expert of Judaism, but I think it’s clear from their Hebrew name that they aren’t self-haters and anti-Semites. Natalie Strecker has also posted a tweet showing that, in contrast to Israeli nationalist propaganda, it is far-rightists like Hotovely who are unrepresentative of the Jewish community: “Imagine being so racist that you think a white supremacist who believes Palestinians should be subject to genocide represents Jews!!!” This was in response to someone called Caolan, who claimed that the protests were all anti-Semitic.
Way back in the early part of this century, Blair got into terrible trouble when he arrested the Chilean Fascist dictator, General Pinochet. Pinochet was responsible for horrific torture and massacres, which included the murder of a Spanish lad. Spain had put out an extradition for his arrest. Pinochet had arrived in Britain and was visiting his old friend, Maggie Thatcher. Blair pounced and had him arrested for crimes against humanity pending extradition to Spain. Thatcher and the right screeched in protest because, well, Thatcher and a large section of the Tory party support right-wing Fascist thugs like Pinochet, and he had given us aid during the Falkland’s conflict. It was all horribly bungled, as Pinochet should have been officially told first that he was not welcome over here. Blair’s regime was also guilty of human rights violations because of its grubby illegal invasion of Iraq. But in this instance it was trying to act in accordance with international law and humanity.
Hotovely is not the head of her state, but Israel is still guilty of many of the crimes for which Pinochet’s regime is abominated and reviled. I think it can be fairly said that rather than being defended and protected, the British state should be demanding her withdrawal because her racism is so much opposed to genuine, liberal British values.
In my opinion, she’s a Fascist of the same stripe as Pinochet, who should be facing tough questions from the International Court of Human Rights. But the British establishment just loves foreign Fascists if they’re on our side. And so we could expect nothing but smears and condemnation of the LSE protestersby Patel and Nandy.
Jonathan Hoffman is a fanatical Zionist activist, who regularly protests against and tries to disrupt pro-Palestinian meetings and events because they are, to him, ‘anti-Semitic’. Even when the events are organised by Jewish and other organisations, who are very careful to exclude real anti-Semites and neo-Nazis. He and his bizarre antics have been all too frequently discussed and documented by Tony Greenstein, not least because of the extreme right-wing company he keeps. Tony has many times put up photographs showing Hoffman parading around in the company of extremist, islamophobic outfits like the EDL and Britain First. He was photographed outside demonstrating against one pro-Palestinian meeting next to Paul Besser, Britain First’s intelligence officer. Which must surely be a contradiction in terms, coming from that organisation. A few months ago Hoffman and one of his mates, to my recollection, lost a court case and were convicted of harassment. According to Tony’s article today, it was of a Palestinian woman. But Hoffman evidently hasn’t learnt his lesson, because he’s been out disrupting meetings again.
This time it was the turn of East London Humanists, who are affiliated to the National Secular Society, who felt his ire. They’d committed the heinous crime of inviting David Rosenberg, of the Jewish Socialist Group, to speak about anti-Semitism. Hoffman duly lost his fragile mind once again, and turned up with six other ‘vigilantes’ as he describes them, to disrupt the meeting. Tony has a photo on his blog of him with a couple of them standing next to two Israeli flags. Why the anger? Because David Rosenberg’s another Jewish critic of Israel’s barbarous treatment of the Palestinians. Thus, according to Hoffman, he’s an anti-Semite and a ‘renegade Jew’, and the East London Humanists are guilty of anti-Semitism for inviting him there, apparently. Hoffman complains that as the Humanists actively oppose religion, they are a pain to the Jews. As Tony himself points out in the article, the Humanists oppose all religions, not just Judaism. I certainly don’t support either Humanism or the National Secular Society, who, in my opinion, can be extremely intolerant in their attempts to force religion out of the public sphere. But I don’t think you can accuse them of racism. Nathan Johnstone’s book on New Atheist myths, which I reviewed a few days ago, attacked Dawkins and co. for their vitriolic rhetoric, which he believed could all too easily spark vicious persecution. But he acknowledged that Dawkins and the others, including Sam Harris, were actually humane people, who genuinely sympathised with the oppressed and marginalised. I also have the impression that there’s a split between the old-fashioned Humanists and the New Atheists about their rhetoric. Many Humanists and atheists are disgusted with the New Atheists because of their intolerance, which they associate with religion. So while I don’t doubt that Humanists object to Judaism as a religion, along with Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and the other faiths, I’m sure that they’re genuine supporters of the Jewish people’s right to live in peace, equality and safety, along with people of other races and ethnicities.
Also, David Rosenberg himself is very far from being any kind of ‘renegade Jew’ or anti-Semite. I’ve blogged about several articles from his excellent blog, Rebel Notes. Rosenberg is, like Tony, a very firm opponent of racism and anti-Semitism. He has spoken at meetings in Britain and abroad against racism and Fascism. He was in Warsaw a few months ago, attending a ceremony commemorating the heroes of the Jewish uprising against the Nazis. This included children from the local schools singing one of the rebels’ songs in Yiddish. He also posted another piece on his blog about the speech he gave at an anti-racism meeting in Manchester, in which he praised the local Jewish, Socialist, Communist and trade union activists in that great city for sticking it to Mosley and his stormtroopers when they tried to goosestep around it. He has also posted pieces about an exhibition at the London Jewish Museum on Marxism and Jewish identity, in which he viewed Marx as in the line of Jewish prophets and campaigners against oppression and exploitation. It’s glaringly obvious that Rosenberg wouldn’t do any of this, if he were a genuine anti-Semite.
But Hoffman and his fellows have decided Rosenberg is a Jew-hater, because his socialism is informed by the stance of the pre-War Jewish Bund. This was the Jewish socialist party in eastern Europe and the former Russian Empire. They saw the Jewish people’s homeland as whichever countries they lived in. They had no intention of supporting a separate Jewish state, and actively campaigned against Zionism. They demanded instead that Jews should live as equal fellow citizens with their gentile neighbours. This was by far the majority view of European Jewry at the time. But it runs counter to the right-Zionist message, which is that true Jews have always wanted their own state. And so Zionist extremists like Hoffman smear activists like Hoffman, Tony and Jackie Walker, as anti-Semites.
Hoffman is also upset ’cause he doesn’t like Tony mentioning how he keeps company with people, who could be described as Fascists. So Tony’s put up photos of him marching around with the EDL and their Jewish division, the JDL, as well as Paul Besser and a few other extreme right-wing Zionists.
Don’t be misled. It’s people like Hoffman and other extreme right-wing Zionists, both Jewish and gentile, who are behind the anti-Semitism smears against pro-Palestinian activists. Those they attack and smear are very frequently genuinely anti-racist opponents of anti-Semitism. Tony states that he has never seen Hoffman protest against genuine racists and Fascists. He has pointed out over and over again that the Zionist right will collaborate with real anti-Semites in order to advance their goals of getting more Jews to emigrate to Israel. Which is why the Conservative Jewish establishment in this country, like the Conservative establishment generally, has done everything it can to smear Corbyn and his supporters in the Labour party as anti-Semites, even when Corbyn and they have a proud record of combating racism and supporting the Jewish community. And they can be especially vicious in their attacks on genuinely left-wing Jews, who support the Palestinians.
The real fanatical bigotry here didn’t come from Rosenberg or the East London Humanists. It comes from Hoffman and those like him. They’re responsible for smearing decent people, and their lies are being used by a right-wing political establishment and media to prevent a Corbyn government getting into power. Because it would actually do something for British working people, who naturally include Jews.
Last Saturday’s edition of the I also carried a story reporting that a Polish paper was planning to print stickers attacking gay rights. The article, ‘Paper prints anti-LGBT stickers’, by Samuel Osborne, on page 31, ran
A Polish newspaper plans to hand out “LGBT-free zone” stickers in its next issue. Gazeta Polska tweeted a preview of the stickers, which show a rainbow flag with a black cross over it.
The weekly publication, which has a circulation of about 11,000, openly supports the conservative governing Law and Justice Party (PiS). The stickers are due to be distributed on Wednesday with next week’s issue.
Georgette Mosbacher, the US ambassador to Poland, criticised the move.
She tweeted: “I am disappointed and concerned that some groups use stickers to promote hatred and intolerance.
“We respect freedom of speech, but we must stand together on the side of values such as diversity and tolerance.”
Earlier this year, another right-wing newspaper in Poland published an article on its front page on “how to recognise a Jew.”
This is chilling stuff, showing how quickly the Law and Justice Party, and similar governments in the rest of eastern Europe, are quickly dragging their nations into very real Fascism and anti-Semitism. This is the same government, remember, which against the express wishes of the mayor of Warsaw, allowed far right, Fascist organisations to march alongside ordinary, patriotic Poles on their national holiday celebrating Poland’s liberation from German, Austrian and Russian imperialism. The Law and Justice Party is strongly anti-gay, nationalistic and with a strong current of anti-Semitism. There was an international outcry a few years ago when they introduced a law criminalising the mention or discussion of Polish collaboration in the Holocaust. I gather, however, from a Polish commenter to this blog that the law doesn’t, however, prevent all discussion of Polish collaboration in this most horrendous of war crimes.
However, as with Viktor Orban’s similarly intolerant and Fascistic Fidesz government in Hungary, there’s been precious little denunciation of the Polish government’s increasing turn to Fascism from the official Jewish bodies in this country, like the Board of Deputies, or papers like the Jewish Chronicle. Why? Poland, Hungary and other eastern European countries are purchasing arms from the Israelis. And so readers of the Groaniad a few years ago were treated to a nauseating piece by Stephen Pollard, the Jewish Chronicle’s non-Jewish editor, informing them that Poland’s government wasn’t anti-Semitic. They were ‘good friends of Israel’.
Yes, they are ‘good friends of Israel’. And that’s a major cause of offence to many Israelis. Jewish bloggers and commenters like Tony Greenstein and David Rosenberg over here have reblogged stories from Israeli papers about Israeli human rights activists, who are outraged by the way any number of very real Fascists from right across the globe have been welcomed by the Israeli state. All they have had to do is pay an official visit to the Holocaust monument at Yad Vashem, and their own mass murders, assassinations, torture and mass imprisonments are discreetly overlooked.
Let’s also make it very clear that while anti-Semitism and racism is rising in eastern Europe, just as it is over here, not all Poles or eastern Europeans are racists or sympathetic to the far right. Way back in April, David Rosenberg put up an article describing a ceremony the previous day held at the Ghetto Fighters’ monument in Warsaw, celebrating the heroic uprising against the Nazis during World War II. The folks assembled for the event flew the red flags of the Jewish Bund, the Jewish socialist group, along with one for the International Brigade from the Spanish Civil War. This celebrated the Poles who left their country, to fight against Franco and the Fascists. One side of this flag was in Yiddish, commemorating the Jews, who fought in the Naftali Botwin company in the Dombrowski battalion. There was also a choir from one of the Warsaw schools, which has a multicultural curriculum. These were mostly, if not almost all non-Jewish, but they proudly sang the Yiddish songs of the Jewish resistance, like “We will Outlive Them!’
There were Poles, who courageously defied the Nazis and aided and rescued Jews, and are commemorated with their own memorial in Poland. And the Polish nation itself, along with the other Slav peoples, suffered their own horrific persecution under the Nazis. Hitler considered the Slavs, like the Jews and Gypsies, to be subhuman. An area of land extending deep into Ukraine was to be cleared of its traditional inhabitants and colonised by Germans. If the Nazis had won, the Slavs would have been reduced to an agricultural peasantry, whose only function was to provide food for their Nazi masters. Non-Jewish Poles were massacred, pressed into force labour, and had their villages destroyed. And Hitler had worse planned. He said that the war against the Poles would be a war of extermination.
But the re-emergence of real, vicious racism and intolerance in eastern Europe, which extends not just to gays and Jews, but also to Muslims and other non-Whites, is being ignored by the British Jewish establishment and the Israeli state. David Rosenberg has blogged about his concern for these nations’ Jewish minorities, as have other Jewish commenters, including senior academics. But the very real threat these communities face is ignored, because the Israeli state and the British Jewish establishment that supports it, is more determined to destroy genuinely anti-racist critics of Israel through false charges of anti-Semitism.
Which shows just how hypocritical organisations like Jewish Chronicle, the Board of Deputies and the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism really are.
I found this grimly fascinating snippet in today’s I for 22nd February 2019 on page 2, entitled ‘British pensioners on Hitler handouts’. It runs
Dozens of British pensioners are still receiving secret payments from Germany for collaborating with the Nazis, a group of Belgian MPs claim. They say the former collaborators, along with ex-SS guards, could be receiving up to £1,100 tax-free cash per month, thanks to a decree made by Hitler that was not revoked.
I can very well believe it. And how these Nazis and collaborators got here is a real scandal that the British secret state most definitely does not want the public to know about. They were recruited by the British intelligence agencies after the War, because they were believed to be useful in tackling the threat of Soviet espionage during the Cold War. I’ve got a feeling the West German secret service also recruited them for the same reason. This is probably also the reason why Hitler’s decree giving these horrors pensions was never revoked. And their presence in the West German intelligence agencies didn’t do them any good whatsoever. Markus Wolf, the head of the East German secret service still turned the West German spy agency into Swiss cheese.
Ken Livingstone discusses the scandal of the recruitment of former Nazis and their collaborators in his 1987 book, Livingstone’s Labour. He describes how some of them were giving jobs in the mining industry, and the disgust of the other miners at seeing them and their Nazi tattoos in the showers. Livingstone’s book, with its strong condemnation of any kind of racism, amply demonstrates that whatever Red Ken was, he definitely wasn’t an anti-Semite. Indeed one Jewish blogger, who belonged to the Jewish Socialist Group, posted up a piece stating that the man Private Eye dubs ‘Leninspart’ drew the ire of the Board of Deputies on one occasion because he gave the Jewish Socialists a small grant. This angered the Board, which is in any case very Conservative establishment, because the Jewish Socialist Group were not affiliated to them and so were outside their control. They were, to quote another anti-Semitic trope ‘the wrong kind of Jews’. You know, not nice, cosy, right-wing Jews that are part of the British right-wing establishment. The other kind of Jews, all those awkward fellows from eastern Europe, who were into anarchism, socialism and Marxism. The kind of people in the Jewish Bund in Poland and the former Russian Empire, who wanted to live in their ancestral homelands in peace, friendship and equality with their gentile compatriots. The type of Jews the British Zionist establishment is trying to smear as ‘anti-Semitic’ and ‘self-hating’.
Livingstone called out these Nazis thirty years ago, which is probably one of the reasons the British establishment cordially hates him. And the Blairites and Israel lobby in the Labour party despise him because he dared to tell the truth about Israel: that the Zionists did collaborate with Hitler for a while to send Jewish colonists to Israel. And the Board despises anyone who does not automatically and uncritically support Israel and its ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians, just as they really despise genuinely socialist Jews.
It’s almost certainly true that British Nazis are receiving pensions from the Third Reich. And it’s a glaring scandal that they were ever recruited in the first place. Those pensions should be stopped, the British secret state’s recruitment of them should be made very public. And Livingstone and all the others, who have been unjustly smeared as anti-Semites should be readmitted into the party and duly given apologies.
With the departure of the Maleficent Seven, as they’ve been dubbed by left-wing vlogger Gordon Dimmack, the witch-hunters for anti-Semitism in the Labour party have been in full cry. Not only have they, and their most recent addition, Joan Ryan, been lying about there being a culture of bullying and anti-Semitism in the Labour party, but Margaret Hodge took it upon herself to accuse another Labour MP, Ruth George, of anti-Semitism.
Why?
Because George suggested that Umunna, Berger, Gapes, and co. could be funded by Israel.
George had posted this on Facebook:
Support from the State of Israel, which supports both Conservative and Labour ‘Friends of Israel’, of which Luciana [Berger] was chair, is possible and I would not condemn those who suggest it, especially when the group’s financial backers are not being revealed.
It’s important for democracy to know the financial backers for any political group or policy.
She later apologized, saying that she had not meant to invoke a conspiracy theory.
The incompetent, foul-mouthed and mendacious Margaret Hodge had appeared on Radio 4’s PM programme to denounce it as an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory. This was at the prompting the interviewer, Evan Davies, who said, ‘Raising questions about finance and Jews is the no-no here?’. Furthermore, Hodge also claimed that criticizing America was also anti-Semitic, because of the power of the Israel lobby there. Which caused one of Mike’s fine commenters’ Jaws to gape open in absolutely astonishment.
But as Mike pointed out in his article on it, there was no anti-Semitism in George’s statement. She did not repeat the classic anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about the Jews, or a cabal of Jews, being the secret power behind world politics, or controlling the press, Hollywood, international finance or communism. She spoke simply about Israel. And Mike quotes the I.H.R.A. definition of anti-Semitism, which says that accusations of anti-Semitism can only be made about Jews, not the state of Israel.
He also makes the point that the Independent Group have formed themselves as a company, so they can avoid the electoral laws which demand they identify their backers. So Mike concludes that it is perfectly reasonable question whether the state of Israel is funding them. And we won’t know, and won’t be able to trust them, no matter who is funding them, until the Independent group actually open their books to show who their donors are.
But it’s also a good question for another reason. Gordon Dimmack, a left-wing broadcaster on YouTube, has pointed out in one of his videos that Luciana Borgia, sorry, Berger, was head of the Labour Friends of Israel. And the other six were all members. And the Israel lobby has form in interfering in British politics. Al-Jazeera filmed Shai Masot of the Israeli Embassy in their documentary, The Lobby, plotting with a Tory functionary about deciding who should be a member of the Tory cabinet. They wanted Alan Duncan out, because he’s a critic of the Israeli state’s brutal maltreatment of the Palestinians. Instead, he wanted him replaced by Boris Johnson, who was an absolute disaster as Foreign Secretary.
Many have people have pointed out that the campaign to smear the critics of Israel in the Labour party looks very much like hasbara, the Israeli term for their civilian propaganda. One of those was Cyril Chilson, a British citizen, who was formerly an Israeli. Chilson is Jewish, his mother was a Holocaust survivor, and his father a member of the Red Army, who participated in the Soviet liberation of the death camps. Mr Chilson served in the IDF, including part of their propaganda department. This man, who in no way should be regarded as an anti-Semite, recognized the accusations for what they were: Israeli psy-ops. And because he called it precisely what it was, the anti-Semitism smear machine swung into action, and called this son of heroic Jewish parents an anti-Semite.
Dimmack also goes further in one of his videos, and accuses the media people claiming that George’s question was anti-Semitic, of anti-Semitism in their turn. This includes Channel 4 News’ Krishnan Guru-Murthy. Murthy was one of those, who replied to George’s post claiming, or suggesting that she was an anti-Semite. But Dimmack points out that it is anti-Semitic to claim that all Jews share the same qualities or opinions. Murthy’s comment suggested that all British Jews were supporters of Israel, if he genuinely believes that criticizing Israel is anti-Semitic. But all British Jews very definitely don’t. The Jewish long-term critic of Israeli racism and general avowed foe of Fascism, Tony Greenstein, and other Jewish bloggers have made the point, over and again, that many Jews don’t support Israel. Many Orthodox Jews don’t, because they believe that Israel can only be refounded by the Lord through the Messiah, and until then they, as the Lord’s servant nation, are commanded to remain in exile. The Yiddish-speaking Jewish masses of eastern Europe, who backed the Bund, the Jewish Socialist party, followed its slogan of ‘Wherever We Are, There’s Our Homeland’. They wanted to remain in Poland, Lithuania and elsewhere as equal citizens with their gentile fellow-countrymen.
And the Board of Deputies of British Jews, which has also joined in with the hysterical accusations of anti-Semitism, also doesn’t represent all Jewish Brits. It doesn’t represent Orthodox Jews, or the third of the Jewish community in Britain which is secular. It only represents the United Synagogue. And even there, it’s questionable who it represents. Its members are elected by their synagogues. But some of them don’t hold regular elections, as they have sitting members, while others don’t allow women to vote. And the Board explicitly defines itself as a Zionist organization in its constitution, so anti-Zionist Jews can’t become members.
George asked a perfectly reasonable question, and one to which she, and the rests of us are entitled to an answer. She wasn’t being anti-Semitic. But the real anti-Semitism comes from claiming that all Jews are supporters of Israel, with its accompanying accusation that those Jews, who don’t, are also self-hating anti-Semites. Repulsive!
Tony Greenstein has today put up on his blog a review of Karl Sabbagh’s The Anti-Semitism Wars: How the British Media Failed their Public, published by Skyscraper Publications. This is a full-scale attack on the anti-Semitism smears against the Labour party and particularly Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters, as well as the Israel lobby, the Jewish establishment, including former Chief Rabbi and Fascist marcher Jonathan Sacks, and the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, who have been its promoters. The contributors include not only Sabbagh, but also Tony Greenstein himself, Cyril Chilson, Tom Suarez, Eve Mykytun, and Kerry-Ann Mendoza. This is about the way the Israel lobby and its various organs and supporters have vilified and tried to silence perfectly decent, anti-racist people, like Mike, simply for the crime of legitimately criticizing Israel, or defending those who have. And absurdly, many of those who’ve been smeared have been Jewish, like Greenstein and Chilson, a former Israeli officer, now naturalized British academic.
The first chapter, by Sabbagh, describes the beginning of the smears and witch hunt with Gordon Brown’s urging the Labour party to adopt the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism, the Zionist smears against Corbyn after he told two Zionist activists making a nuisance of themselves at a pro-Palestinian event that they didn’t understand the British sense of humour, and examining the role of the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism and Jonathan Sacks in claiming that anti-Semitism was now on the rise in Britain.
Greenstein’s article covers his own suspension from the Labour party, but also argues that the anti-Semitism smears are part of concerted campaign by the Deep State. This is because the American, British and Israeli authorities see Corbyn as a threat. This campaign is being run through the Guardian, and particularly its columnist, Jonathan Freedland, who also writes for the Jewish Chronicle. Greenstein supports this claim by citing the book, Inside the Company about the CIA’s destabilization of South America by a former agent, Philip Agee. He also notes how the Beeb’s journo, John Tusa, also fronted stories from the Agency. He then goes on to describe the witch hunt against the Labour party in more detail.
Sabbagh is another victim of anti-Semitism smears. A medical journalist, his crime was to write an article describing the Deir Yassin massacre in 1981, just as a group of doctors were preparing to fly to Israel for the ‘medical Olympics’. Sabbagh wanted to warn people that the event may be held in an Israeli mental hospital, some of whose wards were the scene of the atrocity. He, the organization he worked for, and the medical journal which published the article were then subjected to a deluge of complaints and accusations of anti-Semitism chiefly from outraged Jewish doctors, beginning with the Israeli Medical Association.
This campaign of abuse, vilification and intimidation began again in 2008 against Dr Derek Summerfield when he dared to write an article in the British Medical Journal about the effects of Israel’s bombardment of Gaza. The campaign was organized by the Zionist lobby group, HonestReporting.
Chilson describes his persecution and suspension from the Labour party, because he dared to post comments criticizing Israel on Twitter. It shows just what a farcical kangaroo court the disciplinary panel hearing his case was. Members of the panel interrupted his testimony, threatened to throw him out, and then were astonished at the end when he refused to agree that the hearing was fair!
Suarez’s chapter describes how the Israel lobby tried to shut down his lecture tour promoting his 2016 book, State of Terror: How Terrorism Created Modern Israel, describing atrocities by the Irgun and Lehi terrorist organisations. The campaign was joined and aided by the Israeli embassy and the Daily Heil, as well as the Jewish Chronicle and the Board of Directors of British Jews.
The book also includes a piece on the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism by Appeal Court Judge Sir Stephen Sedley making it very clear that it isn’t fit for purpose.
Eve Mykytun’s article is an expose of the tactics the Israel lobby uses to silence its critics. This shows how the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism and its founder and leader, Gideon Falter, lies to smear people, and grossly misuses and inflates statistics. The article examines two cases of people, who hold genuinely anti-Semitic views, who were prosecuted by the state at the instigation of the CAA. Another, genuine anti-Semite, Gilad Atzmon, also appears, who asks what Jewishness means if Israel is a Jewish state, as well as attacking Falter for ‘making his living from anti-Semitism accusations’.
Chapter 8 is a transcript of Al-Jazeera’s programme, The Lobby, which exposed Shai Masot at the Israeli plotting to decide who should be in the cabinet, and Joan Ryan in the Labour party making a false accusation of anti-Semitism against another member.
Chapter 9 is an interview by Kerry-Ann Mendoza of Stephen Orszczuk, the foreign editor of Jewish News, one of the newspapers that combined with the Jewish Chronicle and another rag to smear Corbyn. Oryszczuk criticized this vilification, and went on leave from the paper soon after.
Chapter 10 comprises a report from the Committee for Privileges and Conduct of the House of Lords about an accusation of anti-Semitism against Baroness Tonge. She had chaired a meeting at the Palestine Return Centre as part of a campaign to obtain an apology from Britain for the Balfour Declaration.
There are also several appendices. The first is a collection of quotes from prominent Zionists about gentiles, which would definitely be considered anti-Semitic if non-Jews had made them about Jews. The third is an extract from the Media Reform Coalition report, Labour, Anti-Semitism and the News.
Greenstein concludes his report by saying that is packed with information, making it and will be a handy reference to the anti-Semitism smear campaign which all activists should have, and giving details how it can be ordered from him through his paypal account.
This looks like a very thorough exposure of the malign lies and racism of the Israel lobby and their smears of decent, anti-racist men and women. I’ve no doubt that the campaign of persecution against Corbyn and his supporters is being done by the Deep State, as Corbyn’s support of the Palestinians challenges British colonial and post-colonial policies towards supporting Israel against the secular Arab states in the Middle East. And many journalists and researchers have demonstrated how the smear and vilification campaign against Israel’s critics are being directed by the Israeli state and its Office of Strategic Affairs.
And the Zionists are also deeply racist. Mike found that out when they smeared him. When they couldn’t get the better of him in an argument he had with them over the Net, they resorted to sneering and belittling him as a non-Jew. They are also viciously anti-Semitic towards those they consider to be ‘the wrong Jews’. People like Tony Greenstein, Martin Odoni and Jackie Walker, who criticize Israel and follow the Bund’s line that Jews’ homelands are where they happen to live around the world with the non-Jewish peoples of that country. These Jews, who like Cyril Chilson may be the children of Holocaust survivors, are subject to the most disgusting abuse as ‘kapos’, and told that they and their families should have died in the Holocaust.
This is a book, which should be in the bookshops, instead of some of the mendacious books, like the one by a Zionist, that maintain the smears. But I doubt very much that it ever will be. The mere idea of this book being published at all is probably enough to send the Israel lobby, the Jewish press, the Board of Deputies and the corrupt British media establishment all howling with rage.
I fervently wish Karl Sabbagh, Tony Greenstein, Cyril Chilson, Kerry-Ann Mendoza and everyone else who contributed to it all the very best, and hope that it enjoys excellent sales. May it lead to further exposes and demolitions of the Lobby, its vile undermining of our democracy and political parties, and its attempts to create division and fear between Jews and gentiles.
I found this video from RT which was posted yesterday, Wednesday 21st November 2018 on YouTube. It reports that the Quakers have banned investing in companies which profit through Israel’s occupation of Palestine. The Quakers stated that
Our long history of working for a just peace in Palestine and Israel has opened our eyes to the many injustices and violations of international law arising from the military occupation of Palestine by the Israeli government.
With the occupation now in its 51st year, and with no end in sight, we believe we have a moral duty to state publicly that we will not invest in any company profiting from the occupation.
This is, apparently, the first time a British church had made such a move, and the Quakers have been criticized by Jewish groups, which claim that it is a reference to the Boycott, Divestment and Sanction movement. the Board of Deputies of British Jews called the Quakers decision ‘appalling’ and said that it must be reversed. Quaker leaders, however, state that the decision recalls protests against apartheid South Africa and the slave trade.
The video then moves into a discussion about the decision with Les Levido from Jews For Boycotting Israeli Goods and Rafi Bloom, co-chair of Northwest Friends of Israel.
The Quakers are, of course, absolutely right. Israel is an apartheid state, and the West Bank is under military occupation. The Quakers are rightly famous for their pacifism. One of our aunts was a member of CND in the 1980s, and I got the impression that among the religious groups supporting the movement were the Quakers and Roman Catholic Franciscan friars. As for the Slave Trade, they were one of the main groups behind the Abolitionist movement when it first appeared in the 17th and 18th centuries. One of the great Quaker campaigners against it in the British Caribbean was Woolmer, a hunchbacked dwarf, who used to carry around with him a hollowed-out Bible filled with blood. When he saw a planter approaching, he used to stab the knife into the Bible, sending the blood spattering as a visual protest of the blood spilt through the infamous trade. Philadelphia, the city founded by another Quaker, William Penn, was also the home of many of the American Quaker campaigners against the slave trade. Later on they were joined by the Methodists and the evangelical wing of the Anglican church in Britain. I’ve also got a feeling that many Quakers may also have been involved in the legalization of homosexuality in Britain. Gerard Hoffnung, the musician and cartoonist, was a Quaker and a supporter of this movement to end the persecution of gays.
It’s to be expected that Jewish groups like the Board of Deputies of British Jews were going to be outraged at the church’s decision, but I note that the reporter does not say that they denounced them as anti-Semites. As the Quaker’s have always promoted peace and tolerance, such an accusation simply wouldn’t be credible.
I haven’t watched the debate, however, because I’ve no respect for the North West Friends of Israel. From reading Bookburnersrus, Martin Odoni’s and Tony Greenstein’s blogs, it’s very clear that they’re another bunch of thuggish bully-boys. Martin describes a meeting at a Quaker meeting house in Manchester, when the Jewish American reporter and activist Max Blumenthal was speaking about his latest book on Israel and its crimes. The Zionist activists there first tried to stop him entering, and then loudly heckled, sneered and guffawed throughout his talk until they were finally turfed out by the rozzers. And of course, they made the ridiculous claim that they were being silenced because they were Jews, when in fact they were thrown out because they were just there to disrupt and prevent other Jews talking and hearing about what was really going on.
Tony Greenstein described some of their members in one of his blogs. At least two were failed businessmen, one of whom was a lawyer, who’d been struck off. Quite apart from the usual contingent of Islamophobes and supporters of the EDL. They’re in no position to lecture the Quakers or the Jewish Israel-critical peeps, who have to suffer their anti-Semitic abuse, about morality.
The day before that report, the 21st, RT posted another piece discussing Airbnb’s decision not to list homes in the occupied West Bank, which also enraged the Israeli state. The company’s press room stated
We concluded that we should remove listings in Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank that are at the core of the dispute between Israelis and Palestinians.
About 200 homes were to be removed from the list. The Palestinian authority welcomed the move, as they had previously requested the company to remove such listings. The Israelis, however, condemned it, and used the time-worn tactic of screaming racism.
Yariv Levin, the Israeli tourism minister, declared
This decision is completely unacceptable. This is pure discrimination, something that is taken only against Jews that are living in Judaea and Samaria. This is actually a racist decision – and more than that, I do believe that it is a double standard that is taken only against Israel, against Jews that are living here in Israel.
The anchorwoman then goes on to talk to Mustafa Barghouti, the General Secretary of the Palestinian National Initiative, about the issue, as well as a former commander in the Israeli air force. Barghouti states that the UN resolutions say that the settlements in the West Bank are completely illegal, they are discriminatory, as they are built on land stolen from the Palestinians, and any relationship with these illegal settlements are a violation of international law. He says that Airbnb has taken the right decision, as they stood to lose a lot due to the boycott against them. And what is really racist and discriminatory is the apartheid system the Israelis have created, which favours Israelis over Palestinians.
The Israeli spokesman, Reuven Berko, cited simply as ‘Middle East expert’, rants about Airbnb being ‘cowards to Islamic terrorists, I don’t know what’, accuses them of anti-Semitism and ignoring the right of the Jews to their homeland in Judea and Samaria and asks how many Christians are angry about this. He states that this is an awful step against history, against fate.
It’s the usual specious rubbish. The Biblical state of Israel certainly existed, and was the homeland of the Jewish people in antiquity. But it has not existed for centuries. For many Jews, their real homeland was the country in which they and their forebears had lived in the Diaspora. And the Bund, the Jewish Socialist movement, made that very clear in their slogan ‘Wherever we live, that’s our homeland’. And many Orthodox Jews feel that Israel cannot be restored except by the hand of the Almighty and the Messiah. Until that happens, modern Israel is to them nothing but a blasphemy.
As for appealing to Christian anger about this, the lead Christian Zionist movements, like Ted Hagee’s Christians United for Israel, are millennialists, who believe that the restoration of Israel will usher in the End Times and Christ’s Second Coming, along with the destruction of those Jews, who won’t convert to Christianity. In fact, the indigenous Christians of Palestine have almost been completely cleansed from Israel. The Christian population before 1948 was 25 per cent. Now it’s only one per cent. American Zionist Christians put this down wholly to persecution from Muslims. Now Muslim Palestinians have persecuted their Christian fellow countrymen, whom they see as collaborators. But Palestinian Christians have also and are being persecuted by the Israeli state and the settlers. The Israelis have closed churches as well as mosques, and both churches and mosques have been attacked and desecrated by mobs of Israeli settlers.
In my somewhat limited experience, Muslim Brits are better informed about this than British Christians. I studied Islam when I was at College as part of my Religious Studies minor degree. I can remember reading the equivalent of the parish magazine from one of the British mosques. It contained an article attacking the closure of one of the mosques in Palestine and its conversion into a disco. The article also noted that a nearby Christian church had also been closed by the Israelis.
A few years ago Channel 4 also screened a programme about the relationship between Christianity and other faiths, in which the presenter travelled to Israel. There he encountered an Israeli ‘shock jock’ radio host, who ranted about Christians. The programme also covered a march of militant Israelis on a church used by Messianic Jews. These are Jews, who have accepted Christ as the messiah, but still observe the Mosaic Law. This is my opinion, but I think they’re very similar to the Christian community of which the Gospel writer St. Matthew was a part, as this is traditionally regarded as the Jewish Gospel, and St. Matthew is concerned to assimilate Christ’s teaching to that of the Jewish sages. The settlers were stopped at the church entrance by the Muslim doorman. And apparently, it was actually quite common to have Muslims at the door of Christian churches protecting the worshippers from religious violence from outside.
And if we are going to talk about racism and discrimination, a friend of mine, who studied Judaism at College also told me that in the 1960s the Israelis threw out tens of thousands of indigenous Jewish Palestinians, because they were culturally Arab. There have been articles in Counterpunch by the magazine’s Jewish contributors, which have pointed out that Israel is a European/American Jewish colony, whose founders had a despicable racist contempt for the Mizrahim, Jewish Arabs, or Arabicized Jews.
The Quakers and Airbnb are right to boycott Israel’s occupation of Palestine. And the real racism and apartheid is by Israel against the indigenous Arabs, who have been Jewish, Christian and Muslim, and have suffered discrimination, persecution and ethnic cleansing by the Israeli state.
This is a very short video from the Iranian state news service, Press TV. It’s about a couple of minutes long. It was put up on the 2nd of November 2017, just a couple of weeks ago, and reports the call by the Palestinian authority for Britain to apologise for the Balfour Declaration, and recognise an independent Palestinian state.
It was the Balfour Declaration that pledged Britain to support the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine ‘without prejudice to the Arabs’. This part of the Declaration was soon broken, and while Britain tried to give at least the appearance that it was maintaining an even hand between the Jewish settlers and indigenous Arabs, in fact it favoured the European Jewish colonialists.
In fact the British government has refused to apologise for the Declaration, and said that it was ‘proud of it’. This little bit is accompanied by everyone’s favourite braggart, Old Etonian, and lethally incompetent ego maniac, Boris Johnson. He’s shown chuntering away, but it’s silent so normal folks don’t have to put up with his god-awful braying, blustering voice.
The clip also includes a brief interview with Richard Silverstein in Seattle, who notes how the Declaration led to the disinheritance of the Palestinians, and describes the recognition of an independent Palestine as ‘a no-brainer’. He believes that the importance of the Balfour Declaration was overstated, and says that there isn’t much of a case for paying reparations to the Palestinians, as Britain didn’t pay the Israelis for what they had suffered under the Mandate either. He also puts Palestine into the wider context of colonial politics and oppression, saying that Britain treated the Arabs in Palestine the same way it treated its other colonial possessions in India, across the Middle East and Africa.
Political and Corporate Corruption in Iran
I’ve previously refrained from putting material up from Press TV, because I heartily despise the Iranian government. It’s an extremely authoritarian state, which oppresses ordinary working people and its constituent ethnic minorities for the benefit of the mullah-merchant princes. These are members of the ulema, who also have extensive links to the merchants of Tehran bazaar and their own business interests. There’s a special term in Farsi, the ancient language of Persia, for the merchant-mullahs, and the ulema currently running the country definitely don’t like. I think they had the last journo or political dissident jailed for using it. There is also a massive underground Christian church in Iran, which, unlike its Chinese counterpart, is very much unknown in the West. It’s very heavily persecuted, contrary to various Hadith and passages in the Qu’ran, where Islam’s Prophet states that ‘there should be no compulsion in religion’. And I shall blog about that little injustice further, as it says as much about the cynical use of religion by the American military-industrial complex to advance their interests.
Iran Diverse and More Tolerant than Expected
I am also very much aware of the bloodcurdling nature of the Iranian rhetoric about Israel, and how former president Ahmedinejad’s speeches have been very plausibly interpreted as advocating the complete destruction of the state of Israel. However, Iran’s remaining Jewish community is quite well treated. I also understand that the country’s ancient Zoroastrian community, who were the country’s official religion under the Persian Empire, is also tolerated and respected. About three per cent of the Iranian population are Armenian Christians, who historically took refuge in Iran to escape persecution elsewhere in the Middle East.
It’s a very diverse country ethnically. Only 51 per cent of the country speaks the official language, Farsi. Other ethnic groups include Kurds, Baluchis, Arabs, Reshtchis and various tribes speaking languages related to Turkish. The Iranians I’ve met have been very relaxed and matter of fact about the different religious monuments and places of worship that are scattered across their ancient nation. I was asked a few years ago by a Shi’a Muslim Iranian friend if I’d ever seen the Christian churches, that had been built around the Black Sea. There is an Anglican church, whose membership is composed of indigenous Iranians in Tehran, and I personally know people, who have been sent Christmas by Muslim friends, which they purchased in this church.
In short, whatever I think of the mullocracy, the country itself has always struck me as modern, tolerant and cultured. The last should come as no surprise. This is the nation that produced the great poets Firdowsi, who composed the epic history of the Iranian nation, the Shah-Name, and Saadi. Looking through the library, I found an English translation of the latter illustrated by none other than Private Eye’s Willie Rushton. Iran’s government are not its people.
The Balfour Declaration against Wishes Diaspora Jews
But I’ve decided to reblog this piece, because what it has to say about the Balfour Declaration is important. With the Declaration, Britain gave away land, which was not ours to give, and which we had absolutely no right to give away. I’ve already blogged about the way the majority of Britain’s Jewish community at the time were dead against the Declaration. They had absolutely no wish to move once again to another foreign country. They wanted to be accepted for what they were – Brits, like everyone else. The only difference is that they were of a different religion, Judaism.
I’ve also read the same thing about Hungarian Jewry, in a book I borrowed on the history of Judaism a couple of decades ago from one of my aunts. The book’s author, if I recall correctly, was a Christian priest, who admired the Jews and hated anti-Semitism. It stated there that most Hungarian Jews in the late 19th and early 20th century considered themselves ‘Magyars of the Israelitish religion’. You can see that by the way Stephen Fry talks about his Jewish grandfather. He was a Hungarian Jew, but Fry always talks about him as a ‘Magyar’ – the ethnic Hungarians’ term for themselves. Georgy Ligeti, the avant-garde composer, whose weird pieces Lux Aeterna and Atmospheres formed part of the sound track to Stanley Kubrick’s epic 2001: A Space Odyssey, is also of Hungarian Jewish heritage. He has said in an interview that his family’s surname was originally something very German or Yiddish, but that they changed it to a Hungarian equivalent out of patriotism and national pride. Which disproves so much of that awful, vile bilge Viktor Orban and his wretched Fidesz party are either claiming or insinuating about the country’s remaining Jewish population.
And I’ve blogged before about how Tony Greenstein, one of Zionism’s greatest critics, has pointed out that the Yiddish-speaking Jewish masses in pre-War Poland supported the Socialist Bund, and wanted to be accepted as equal citizens with the same rights as their gentile Polish compatriots. Britain’s Jews were not isolated in wishing to remain in their ancestral European countries. They were part of the mainstream. A mainstream that the Israel lobby in the Tories, the mainstream media, and spurious anti-racism groups like the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism and the squalid, malicious libellers of the Jewish Labour Movement in the Labour Party, are desperately trying to conceal and obscure. Heaven forfend if you try to mention this, or that the Zionists occasionally collaborated with Nazis and their fellow-travellers to persecute diaspora Jewry. They get terribly upset and start ranting that you’re an anti-Semite.
Suppression of Alternative Media by Western Neoliberal Elite
I also reblogged this because it was from Press TV. I despise the Iranian government, but I also heartily despise the way the American political-military-industrial caste is now trying to suppress alternative news sources. This means going after RT, because, er, they actually do their job as journos and cover issues like racism, growing poverty, the crimes of empire and the exploitative nature of capitalism. And so they’ve created another Red Scare, in which RT is the secret hand of Vladimir Putin corrupting American politics. And the Tories over here are doing exactly the same.
The Censorship of Alex Salmond by the Beeb
Alex Salmond now has his own show on RT in Britain. I can’t think of a single reason why he shouldn’t, and at least one good reason why he should: the Beeb heavily censored and deliberately misquoted and then edited out his own words at the Scots independence referendum t’other year. Nick ‘Macclesfield Goebbels’ Robinson asked Salmond if he was worried that the big financial houses would leave Edinburgh for London if Scotland got its independence. Salmond gave him a full answer, stating that he was not worried, and was confident that this would not happen. He quoted various sources from within the financial sector.
Oops! Salmond wasn’t supposed to do that. So over the course of the day, the footage was carefully edited down so that it first appeared that Salmond gave only a cursory reply without much substance. Then it was edited out completely, and ‘Goebbels’ Robinson blithely told the camera that Salmond had not answered his question.
Which was a sheer, blatant, unashamed lie.
Apart from this, Salmond as the former leader of the Scots Nats is in a particularly good position to take up a job for RT. Scotland has always had particularly strong links with Russia. I can remember attending an academic seminar on this when I was hoping to do a degree in Russian at one of the unis in Birmingham. That went by ’cause I didn’t get the grades. I can also remember being told by an aunt, whose husband was Scottish, and who had very pro-Soviet opinions, that the Russians were particularly keen on the works of Rabbie Burns. It was part of the curriculum when they learned English.
This has not stopped Theresa May urging Salmond not to take up the job. Which just follows all the Tories, like Boris Johnson’s equally demented father, who criticised the Labour party because some of their MPs and activists appeared on RT. While conveniently ignoring the various Tories, who had.
So more hypocrisy and scaremongering. No change, there then!
Galloway and Press TV
George Galloway also has, or had, his own show in Press TV, and is an outspoken supporter of Palestinian rights. I’ve been wary about him ever since he launched the Respect party, and the way the media monstered him when he saluted Saddam Hussein for his indefatigueability. But I’ve developed a considerable respect for him since then, because so much of what I’ve heard him say about the neoliberal elites and their warmongering attempts to start a conflict with Russia is absolutely correct.
The Anti-Muslim Right and al-Jazeera
The Republicans in America and the anti-Islamic right also hated Al-Jazeera. The Qatar-based broadcaster is supposed to be another source of evil propaganda and disinformation, this time covering for ‘radical Islam’. I think this might be because Al-Jazeera, like RT and Press TV, are showing us in the West what we are doing in the Middle East. Like the hundreds of thousands our bombs are killing, and the millions, who are being thrown out of their homes and forced into refugee camps and exile. The masses, who don’t have food, water, electricity and medical care, because the secular welfare states that have provided this have been destroyed in pursuit of big profits by the multinationals. Just like their people are being persecuted and butchered by sectarian killers, and their women and children enslaved by those savages in ISIS as Daesh tries to roll back the gains they have made. And yes, there has been a Muslim Feminist movement. Just like there has been one in Christianity and Judaism. But you count on Tommy Robinson and the English Defence League not to tell you that. Just as you can count on ISIS, with the backing of the Saudis, in trying to destroy it. Or at least leave it severely restricted.
The War on Domestic Alternative News
And once the elite have finished with the alternative news networks, they’ll try and finish off domestic American and British alternative news sources. Like The Young Turks, the Jimmy Dore Show, the David Pakman Show, Sam Seder’s Minority Report and Democracy Now! in the US. As well as the alternative, left-wing bloggers and vloggers, Google and Facebook are trying to marginalise as ‘fake news’. They’ve even developed algorithms to take traffic away from these sites. I’ve a very strong suspicious Mike’s been hit with it over here, as have several other bloggers. If I remember correctly, they’ve even tried to censor Tom Pride of Pride’s Purge, claiming he wasn’t suitable for children as his material was ‘adult’. It was, but only in the sense that you had to be a mature adult, who actually thought about the issues, to read it.
And once the people at the margins are suppressed, the elite are going to go for the mainstream.
And all we can expect from the mainstream broadcasters is more propaganda denying the reality of poverty, of climate change, of the misery created by the destruction of the welfare, the privatisation of the NHS over here and the refusal to implement single-payer in America, and the sheer, catastrophic lies about how climate change isn’t really occurring.
And as the media gets censored, the brutality of the police and the military will get worse. Black Lives Matter has raised the issue of the cavalier way some cops kill Blacks for the slightest of reasons. But recent arrests and brutalisation of White protesters have also demonstrated that this casual thuggery is also moving towards the White population as well. Counterpunch a few weeks ago put up a piece about a secret US forces report, which predicted that in the next couple of decades, US policing would become more militarised. The army would be used to quell the riots and disturbance that would break out thanks to poverty and increased racial friction.
Orwell’s going to be proved right. In 1984 he asks what the future will be like. The chilling, famous reply is: a jackboot stamping on a human face. Forever.
Without any alternative media to protest, because they’re all in jail or hiding on trumped up charges of treason.
Instead, we’re going to be treated to the lies of shills and hacks like ‘Goebbels’ Robinson and ‘Arnalda Mussolini’ Kuenssberg. And fed racist, Tory drivel by the Murdoch media, the Weirdo Barclay Twins and Paul Dacre.
And the good rabbi does not mince his words, as you’ll see later.
I found this on a YouTube channel entitled ‘Jewish Bund’. I don’t know who they are, but my guess is they’re probably politically left-wing. The Jewish Bund was the Jewish Socialist organisation in the countries of the Russian Empire. Along with the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, it was one of the constituent organisations of the Russian Social Democratic Party, before it fragmented completely into competing factions, which were then overtaken and suppressed during the Bolshevik coup of 1917.
It’s a video from an organisation, True Torah Jews against Zionism. I don’t know anything about the organisation, but it is obvious that they are another organisation of Torah-observant Jews, who reject Zionism as incompatible with the principles of Judaism.
The video was posted in 2015, and was prompted by Netanyahu’s visit to America. Netanyahu, with his usual lack of any kind of modesty or self-effacement, declared that he was not only Israel’s emissary, but also that of world Jewry. The rabbi and his interviewer, who is also clearly an observant Jew, soon set about demolishing that claim.
The rabbi points out, again and again in this video, that Netanyahu’s claim is ridiculous. He makes the point that Jews are and have been resident in very many countries. It’s a religion that comprises people of different nationalities. The rabbi’s own ancestors lived in Poland for 500 hundred years. Netanyahu doesn’t speak for him. He also rejects Netanyahu’s claim to represent him on religious principles, as well as simple nationality. Netanyahu is secular. He doesn’t observe the Torah, the Mosaic code. So he clearly doesn’t speak for the rabbi and other, Torah-observant Jewish people like him. The rabbi states that it’s as if the King of Bulgaria turned up in America, claiming that he represented and spoke for the Jewish people. Not only would the claim be demonstrably wrong, but people would laugh and ask, jokingly, what right the Balkan monarch had to claim that they do. Netanyahu doesn’t represent world Jewry, just Israel.
He and his interviewer state that the majority of rabbis have condemned Zionism down the ages. How then can Netanyahu make this claim? Rabbi Shapiro states that they’ve been doing it since the foundation of Zionism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He states that one of the great pioneers of the Zionist movement used an obscure point of Roman law, which allows someone to deputise for another as their proxy, to argue that he and the Zionist movement therefore represented the world’s Jews. The rabbi then goes on to argue that they had to adopt this tactic, as otherwise, without a country of their own, no-one would listen to them.
He then attacks this piece of rhetoric not only for its obvious falsehood, but because of the danger it presents to diaspora Jews. Rabbi Shapiro states that there is a threat implicit in it. It’s to show foreign politicians that there are people in their countries, who have outside loyalties that can be mobilised against them, if Israel’s desires are not complied with. This the rabbi understandably considers a vile slur against diaspora Jews living in their countries outside Israel. The ideals of the Torah determinate that Jews should live and work for the benefit of the nations in which they are resident. But this claim, and its hidden threat, are actively harmful to Jews by making it appear that they are quite ready to work against the best interests of their home countries and their fellow citizens for the good of Israel, a foreign power.
He is also scathing about another piece of rhetoric that is used along with the claim: that of the Holocaust. He is understandably offended with the cynical way Zionists use the horrific suffering of Jews during the Shoah in order to gain sympathy.
The video also puts up that notorious statement from one of the founders of Zionism, that anti-Semites will be more useful as allies to Zionists than decent people, with no prejudices, because they share the Zionists’ goals of getting Jews to emigrate.
The interviewer then asks the rabbi what can be done about this situation, when the media seems determined to marginalise and ignore voices like theirs. The rabbi is not downhearted. He states ‘We’re Jews. We have God on our side!’ He states that the Lord, who protected Mordechai and Esther during the Persian Empire, will protect them, just as He protected Jews from extinction over the last two thousand years. He advises his viewers that they can help combat Netanyahu’s pernicious claim by talking to their gentile fellows, and telling them that the Torah does not support what Netanyahu says, and that Jews are loyal fellow Americans.
I’ve no doubt that the rabbi is correct. Historians and critics of Israel have described over and over again how Zionism was a minority viewpoint amongst the world’s Jews. For many Torah-observant Jews, the state of Israel was a blasphemy, as they believed that Israel could only be restored by the Messiah. Tony Greenstein a few weeks ago put up a piece about a book and interview by a Canadian rabbi on Jewish opposition to Zionism. He also described in a piece about one of the non-Zionist leaders of the Warsaw Ghetto, Marek Edelman, how the majority of the Yiddish-speaking Jews of Poland voted solidly for the Bund and its campaign for Jews to take their place as fellow, equal citizens of their home countries.
And the rabbi’s fear that Netanyahu’s claim to represent Jews the world over casts suspicion on diaspora Jews by implication as agents of a foreign power was shared by the majority of British Jews at the time of the Balfour Declaration. The leaders of Britain’s Jewish community were very highly integrated into British culture and society. When Balfour was devising the Declaration, they – and the only Jewish member of his cabinet – objected for the same reason the rabbi above did. They wanted to be seen as loyal fellow Englishmen and women. You can see it in the oath of the Jewish equivalent of the Boys’ Brigade, in which boys swore ‘to be a good Englishman and good Jew’. And no doubt in very many other ways, in which they expressed their pride in being British and their loyalty as equal fellow Brits.
This is the video that Netanyahu very definitely would not want anyone to see, and neither would the Neocons, who have been guiding American imperial policy in the Middle East since Bush’s invasion of Iraq, or the Christian religious right, who are more fervent in their Zionism than America’s Jews. These are the people the media is determined to exclude. I’ve put up videos from YouTube from other Jewish organisations showing vast demonstrations in New York, with a crowd of about ten thousand or more, which the makers have claimed have not been covered by the American media.
And it’s clear why they don’t want videos like this to be seen: it destroys the right-wing claim that Israel is synonymous with Jewry, and that those, who don’t back Israel are anti-Semites. Even if, like these guys, they are religious observant men and women guided by the Torah, the Tanakh (Hebrew Bible) and the Talmud.
Beastrabban\'s Weblog 