The Israel Lobby’s Racist Persecution of Jackie Walker

Both Jewish Voice for Labour and Jackie Walker herself have issued statements following her mistrial by the Party at a grotesque kangaroo court and subsequent expulsion. The veteran anti-racism campaigner was targeted by the Israel lobby because of her support for the Palestinians against Israeli state oppression and ethnic cleansing and because she was a close ally of Jeremy Corbyn.

So they smeared her as an anti-Semite, first using a sloppily-worded statement in a private internet discussion she was having with two other colleagues in which she said that her ancestors – the Jews – were the chief financiers of the slave trade. She should have said ‘among the chief financiers of the slave trade’. Walker is an educator and historian, and she is able to back up her contention with entirely reputable scholarship by mainstream Jewish historians. But the poor wording of her statement allowed them to put her together in the public’s eyes with real anti-Semites like the head of the Nation of Islam, Louis Farrakhan. Farrakhan believes that the slave trade was run by the Jews. It wasn’t, and his statements that it was are total nonsense. But this was how the CAA, who looked through her internet history, were able to present her. This was the cause of her first suspension.

She was then suspended again after the Zionist frauds of the Jewish Labour Movement secretly recorded her at a workshop on the proper commemoration of Holocaust Memorial Day questioning their definition of anti-Semitism and what she perceived as the Day’s exclusive focus on the Jewish experience. She felt that every people, who had suffered similar genocide, like Blacks, should be included. Now this is a part of Holocaust Memorial Day, but for making these comments she was again smeared as an anti-Semite. The Labour Party knew that couldn’t stick, and so changed the charge to one of ‘behaviour against the Party’. Or something like that. This charge could have come straight out of Stalin’s Soviet Union, where anyone who did anything Stalin and his fellow despots didn’t like was accused of ‘anti-party activities’. It was a charge the inmates of gulags sent up by referring to it instead as ‘anti-party farting’. Her hearing last week was so grotesque that she walked, and was subsequently found guilty of the above anti-Stalin flatulence and expelled.

The JVL’s statement condemning this travesty, posted on 27th March 2019, begins

The decision to expel Jackie Walker from membership, and the whole process leading up to this shameful conclusion, are a travesty of justice.

The Party has enabled a process in which a principled and fearless member has been persecuted by violation of trust, by media campaign, through bullying by senior members within the party, and by a seriously flawed process which has allowed racist commentary on her person to form part of the charge against her.

It goes on to state that she is not the only person to be treated like this, and ask why the people with access to the mass media haven’t been reined in and themselves charged with bringing the party into disrepute. They state that it doesn’t bring the party into disrepute to challenge a deeply flawed definition of anti-Semitism, nor call the party to live up to its reputation by condemning all racisms and all holocausts. What does bring it into disrepute is the suppression of free speech in order to appease the powerful. They conclude that they believe it will not be long before the Party is ashamed of this episode in its history.

https://www.jewishvoiceforlabour.org.uk/blog/jackie-walker-expelled-a-shameful-passage-in-labour-history/

Absolutely.

Jackie and her legal team have issued a statement explaining why she walked out of the Party’s kangaroo court, describing the background to the case, and then dealing with individual points about her prosecution. These are

1. The Labour Party’s submission on what constitutes anti-Semitism.
2. The Party’s reliance on racist statement to prosecute her.
3. Other racist statements against her.
4. Her hearing was a secret court.
5. It was at a secret venue.
6. They failed to put the intended charges to her.
7. The lack or loss of investigatory records.
8. A late submission of evidence by the Party.
9. Prejudicial statements by Labour MPs.

This is followed by her own explanation of why she walked out.

Much of this is very similar to how others, like Mike, have been mistreated by a court determined to find them guilty whatever the evidence.

One of the most disgusting features of what is overall a colossally prejudiced and contrived miscarriage of justice are points 2 and 3 – the racist character of the statements used to prosecute her and then victimise her. These need to be quoted in full, with Walker’s own words, to show how grotesque and revolting they are. This contains extremely strong language, which I am not going to blank out as I believe the impact of such vile language should not be blunted in this case. Jackie and her legal team write

2. LP relies on racist statements to prosecute me

It is beyond any sense of fair process that in prosecuting me for antisemitism for my asking a training session for a definition of antisemitism in September 2016, that the LP, astonishingly, has submitted racist and discriminatory statements made about my colour, gender, appearance, ethnicity and heritage, to support its misconceived case against me.

The LP relies on anonymous witnesses who have written:

“[JW is] a white middle-aged woman with dreadlocks”

“Walker- who claims to be part Jewish”

And also on the written witness evidence of Mike Katz who states:

“… JW uses her self-identification as a black woman and a Jew as cover to put her beyond criticism…”

There is no conceivable place in a fair disciplinary process for such statements to be allowed in evidence.

As a black person I have long campaigned for the proper recognition and memorialisation of those who died and suffered during the shameful period of the slave trade.  During the training session I was making the point that it would be fitting to include the victims of the slave trade as well as other pre-Nazi genocides in the Holocaust Memorial Day commemorations.  In prosecuting me for raising that comment, again astonishingly, the LP relies on an anonymous witness who writes:

​“I am not at all happy regarding her obsession with African genocide and the holocaust”

I have repeatedly asked those conducting my disciplinary process for anonymous and racist evidence to be removed from the evidence presented by the LP.  My applications have not been agreed.

That is unfair.

I applied to the Panel to adjourn my case to allow the reliance on racist material by the LP to be referred to the Equality and Human Rights Commission for investigation. My application was rejected.

That is unfair.

3. Other racist and threatening remarks 

I have been subjected to threatening, racist and abusive remarks throughout the time I have had to wait for the LP to carry out its disciplinary process. Some examples of the material sent to me have included:

“Jackie Walker is as Jewish as a pork pie, stop harassing Jews you fucking Nazi scum”

“Jackie Walker and her defenders can go hang”

“Jackie Walker’s Jewishness is a hastily constructed identity to protect her from the backlash of her antisemitic comments”

“Her father whom she barely knew apparently was Jewish so she isn’t Jewish…nothing to do with her colour”

“We should send people like you to the fucking gas chamber! Palestine does not exist, nor did it ever exist. Israel has been a Jewish homeland for 3,000 years! Moron”

“Was that thundercunt referring to you wanting to see Corbyn shove Jackie Walker into a burning bin? You didn’t mention ethnicity”

“God, what a fucking anti-Semite black Jewish working class female Momentum vice-chair Jackie Walker is! Can’t think why Labour want rid”

The above examples were submitted by me as part of my documents in the disciplinary process yet the Panel hearing my case still did not allow my application to remove racist and discriminatory evidence being relied on by the LP.

That is unfair.

See: https://www.jewishvoiceforlabour.org.uk/blog/why-jackie-walker-has-withdrawn-from-lp-disciplinary-hearing/

Some of these statements, and further abusive material sent to Jackie, can be found in the JVL article Jackie Walker – Abused and Vilified, posted on 11th February 2019. This reproduces the actual Tweets themselves, complete with the identities of the people who sent these disgusting texts.

See: https://www.jewishvoiceforlabour.org.uk/blog/jackie-walker-abused-and-vilified/

From this it seems that the members of the Israel lobby and Labour Right, who brought this prosecution, were partly motivated by sheer anti-Black racism. They did and do not believe that a Black woman can really be Jewish. This is belied by the facts. There are clearly Black Jews. The Jon Pullman documentary, Witchhunt, about her persecution, features comments by an American professor of Afro-Jewish history. Sammy Davis Jnr, the Hollywood legend, was a Black Jew. There have been communities of Black Jews in Ethiopia for thousands of years, and the strong influence of the Hebrew Bible in Ethiopian Christianity has led some scholars to suggest that the country was originally Jewish before King Ezana converted it to Christianity in the fourth century. There is also an indigenous Jewish community in India. I don’t know, but I would also imagine that they were not White either, but share the same Asian physical appearance as other Indians.

Racism seems to be a large part of mindset of certain Zionists and their promoters and defenders in this country. Karl Sabbagh’s book, The Anti-Semitism Wars, has an appendix of racist quotes by prominent Zionists about non-Jews. And Mike found when the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism were accusing him of anti-Semitism, because he defended Ken Livingstone, when they found he was calmly refuting them they turned to sneering at him as a gentile instead. They are also profoundly racist towards Jewish opponents of Israeli apartheid. Tony Greenstein and Martin Odoni have described how they’ve been vilified as ‘Kapos’ and worse. Greenstein has even been told by one irate man that he wished he and his family had died in the Holocaust. The vilification inflicted on Jewish critics of Israel is such that it would automatically be condemned as anti-Semitic if it came from a non-Jew.

It is not Jackie Walker and the other innocent victims of the witchhunt, who are racists and anti-Semites. The racism and anti-Semitic verbiage comes from the Israel lobby and its allies, the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism and Jewish Labour Movement, and embraced and supported by the Conservatives and Conservative Jewish organisations like the highly unrepresentative Board of Deputies of British Jews.

The media has also extensively covered the genuine anti-Semitic abuse sent to right-wing members of the Labour Party like Luciana Berger. But they are absolutely silent when it comes to the anti-Semitic abuse sent to genuinely left-wing Jews, and the anti-Black racial abuse sent to Jackie. And I’ve seen nothing about the racist abuse sent by the CAA against Mike, despite the fact that he handed a dossier of it over to the police.

The Israel lobby and its allies in the media are a disgrace. Not only are they themselves deeply racist, they stoke racism against their opponents as part of their campaign of intimidation against them. And by remaining silent about it the right-wing media in their turn are utterly complicit. It is they, who should face investigation, trial and prosecution, not decent, privileged anti-racist people like Jackie, Mike, Martin, Tony and the others, who genuinely despise anti-Semitism and Fascism.

The Rights’ Conflation of Anti-Semitism and Anti-Capitalism and the Erasure of Left-Wing Jewish History

Just as the Jewish Chronicle may have itself been guilty of anti-Semitism by denying that one of the signatories to the letter of support for Corbyn and the Labour party sent to the Sunday Times, so other members of the right may also be aiding anti-Semitism by their repeated use of the conspiracy theory that the Jews are the real force behind capitalism.

Three days ago, on 16th March 2019, David Rosenberg of the Jewish Socialist Group, an ardent campaigner himself against racism, anti-Semitism and thus Zionism, put up on his blog an article discussing this very point, which had been published that day in the Morning Star. He began by commenting on the statement by Blairite Labour MP Siobhain McDonagh to John Humphrys on Radio 4 that ‘anti-capitalist politics are at the root of anti-Semitism’. Rosenberg states that it’s an appalling slur against everyone fighting against the poverty and inequality of Tory Britain, but it also revealed that the Right, even those, who think they are pro-Jewish, still believe anti-Semitic stereotypes, as McDonagh obviously thinks that Jews are rich capitalists.

He goes on to discuss how this is at the heart of the anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that sees the Jews as using their wealth to control the banks and governments. A theory that was pushed by Henry Ford, an Episcopalian Christian and founder of the car manufacturer that bears his name, in his paper the Dearborn Independent. Ford believed that the Jews caused World War I, and published the infamous Tsarist forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. And someone else who believed this poisonous nonsense, and was Ford’s biggest fan in Europe, was one A. Hitler.

Rosenberg goes on to discuss how there are Jews, who identify the Jewish community with capitalism, banking and property and so accuse the anti-capitalist left as anti-Semites. He then cites Richard Mather, who claimed in an article in the Jerusalem Post that ‘the Labour party’s call for the seizure of property’ was part of ‘anti-Semitic class warfare’, and pieces written by the editor of the Jewish Chronicle, Stephen Pollard, and one of his journos, Alex Brummer, who both claimed that Corbyn was an anti-Semitic threat to Jewish capitalists, with Pollard harking back to Corbyn’s attack on the bankers that caused the financial crash ten years ago. Rosenberg tweeted in response to this nonsense that of Pollard and Corbyn, one of them thought all bankers were Jews. And it wasn’t Corbyn.

Rosenberg goes on to say that

In my 61 years I’ve never met a Jewish banker. I’ve met unemployed Jews, Jewish decorators, post-office workers, van drivers, taxi drivers, shopworkers, social workers, secretaries, teachers, pharmacists, and several comedians.

He reinforces this point by describing how Arnold Brown, a Jewish comedian, who came from a poor background in Glasgow, tore up the floorboards at his home one day after the other schoolkids told him that all Jews were rich. He also makes the point that the racist Right use the stereotype of the rich Jewish capitalist to divert popular anger away from capitalism to particular Jewish figures, who are supposed to be responsible for its ills, such as Rothschild and Goldman Sachs to George Soros today, demonised by Trump and a slew of extreme right-wing regimes because he funds agencies for migrants and refugees and anti-government demonstrations.

But he also makes the point that this stereotype also erases the strong history of Jewish left-wing anti-capitalist activism, writing

When McDonagh, Mather and Pollard repeat stereotypes of Jews as capitalists, they not only feed these conspiracy theories, but also erase an outstanding tradition of Jewish anti-capitalism. People know the famous Jewish revolutionaries, like Marx, Trotsky, Rosa Luxemberg, Emma Goldman, but it was in mass Jewish workers’ movements such as the Bund, and among the Jews so numerous in socialist and communist parties over the last 120 years, that anti-capitalism was ingrained. In 1902, a Russian Jewish bookbinder, Semyon Ansky, wrote a Yiddish song to honour the Bund’s struggles for social justice. The movement adopted it as its anthem. One powerful verse translates as:

“We swear to the heavens a bloody hatred against those who murder and rob the working class. The Tsar, the rulers, the capitalists – we swear that they will all be devastated and destroyed. An oath, an oath, of life and death.”

He goes on to say that he is going that day to march and speak with the Jewish Socialist Group on a national demonstration in London against racism and Fascism, including the anti-Semitism that is rising in central and eastern Europe and Trump’s America with the Pittsburgh shooting.  He concludes

At street level, far right organisations concentrate physical attacks more frequently on Muslims, Roma, migrants and refugees, but when they want to explain to their supporters who they believe holds power in the world they fall back on Jewish conspiracy theories as surely today as they did in the 1930s. The fight against antisemitism, Islamophobia and anti-migrant propaganda are absolutely linked and we must combat them together.

See: https://rebellion602.wordpress.com/2019/03/16/the-anti-antisemitism-that-actually-promotes-jew-hating/

Absolutely. Rosenberg’s blog is particularly fascinating for the pieces he publishes about the Bund, the socialist party of the eastern European masses in the Russian Empire. It’s a history that I doubt many non-Jews know about, as the Yiddish-speaking communities the Bund represented were murdered by the Nazis. If people outside the Jewish community know about it at all, it’s probably because of the movement’s connection to the Russian Socialist movement. The Bund were, with the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks, part of the Russian Social Democratic Party, the parent organisation of the Russian Communists. It was their withdrawal from the party conference in 1909, when Lenin demanded that there should be no separate organisation for Jewish socialists, that made the Bolsheviks the majority faction and gave them their name, from ‘Bolshe’, the Russian word for bigger.

But the articles by David Rosenberg and other left-wing Jewish bloggers and vloggers reveal a rich, lost history of Jewish anti-capitalist struggle. One of the remarkable consequences of the anti-Semitism smears is that this history is being rediscovered and brought to public attention as Jewish Marxists and socialists refute these smears. Jon Pullman’s film, The Witchhunt, attacking these smears and particularly the libelous hounding of Jackie Walker, includes a brief mention of the Bund, including black and white footage of their demonstrations and banners. If Channel 4 had kept to its original charter as an alternative BBC 2, the Bund and its legacy would be a very suitable subject for a documentary. It could also easily be screened on BBC 4. But I doubt that this will ever happen because the stereotype of the rich Jew is too important a weapon against the anti-capitalist left for it to be refuted by such a thing as actual history.

And if left-wing Jewish history, like that of the Bund, is being forgotten, some contemporary works on the Jewish community may inadvertently reinforce the stereotype of the rich Jew. Back in the 1990s an aunt gave me a book about the Jewish community in Britain, The Club. It was a mainstream book by a very respectable mainstream publisher, but from what I can remember about it, it was about the elite section of British Jewish society, the top 100. I think it was written from an entirely praiseworthy standpoint – to celebrate Jewish achievement, and to how how integrated and indeed integral Jews were to British society and culture. But books like it can give an unbalanced picture of Jewish society in Britain by concentrating on the immensely wealthy and successful, and ignoring the ordinary Jewish folk, who live, work and whose kids go to school and uni with the rest of us, and whose working people marched in solidarity with us.

It’s fascinating and necessary that the history of Jewish socialism is being rediscovered, and that activists in the Bund’s tradition, like Rosenberg, continue to write, demonstrate and blog against racism and anti-Semitism as part of the real struggle by working people.

 

 

Trailer for Jackie Walker’s One-Woman Show ‘The Lynching’

Jackie Walker is, as readers of the blog well know, the former vice-chair of Momentum, who frightened the Blairites and the Israel lobby in the Labour party so much that they smeared her as anti-Semite. It’s a ridiculous charge, as her mother is a Black American civil rights activist and her father a Russian Jew, who met on a civil rights demo. Walker herself is also a Jew by faith, her partner is Jewish, and her daughter attends a Jewish school. She is anti-racist activist herself. She was targeted for smearing because she’s a critique of Israel and its horrific maltreatment of the Palestinians. And so they accused her of anti-Semitism after uncovering a poorly worded sentence in a discussion she was having about Jewish involvement in – but not responsibility for – the slave trade.

She has been suspended from the Labour party, but is fighting back. Jon Pullman, the director of this trailer, has produced a film, Witchhunt, about her smearing by the Labour Party and the Israel Lobby. This is so potentially damaging to that section of the Labour party that Luciana Berger, now a member of the Independent Grouping of Anti-Democrats, threw a strop and demanded the cancellation of its screening at the Labour party. And shortly afterwards, the MP who booked the room, Chris Williamson, was suspended for the stance he had taken against the anti-Semitism smears in a speech.

Two years ago in 2017 Walker also toured Britain with her show, The Lynching, about her persecution.  This is the trailer posted on YouTube on August 9th, 2017, for her show.

It begins with her walking down a beach, before showing her reading out some of the vile messages that she has been sent on her computer. Like ‘racist, fascist Jew-hater’, ‘Put her in a bin, throw petrol over her’, ‘Set her on fire’, ‘Lynch the bitch’. Other messages on the computer claim that she isn’t really Jewish, and that her Jewish identity is just an artfully constructed guise. She then appears on stage, set with teaching equipment, and with a black doll hanging from a noose in a corner. At the front of the stage is a banner with the slogan ‘Anti-Semitism is a crime. Anti-Zionism is a duty’. She explains that those were just some of the Tweets.

She then appears back walking down a hillside towards a beach. She explains that she got a blank from the mainstream media. All they wanted was a particular story, which wasn’t one that included details or context. Back on the stage she explains to her audience that she’s going to tell them a story tonight about a witch hunt, about fake news, interspersed of screen shots of some of the reports, including the astonishingly wrong claim that she denied Hitler was responsible for the Holocaust. She states this was an attempt to smash the most extensive, radical movement in her lifetime.

She states that she’s saying that if the mass media don’t want to give a balanced report, then ‘we have to do it ourselves’. She is then shown introducing herself to her audience, saying that up to two years ago she was barely known as a teacher, writer, as an anti-racist activist and a supporter of Jeremy Corbyn. And then in May her life was totally transformed. Israel and the agents of Israel and the supporters of Israel are targeting people like her all across the world. She was having dinner when the phone rang and she was told she’d been suspended for anti-Semitism. She says she was thinking of ways of getting her story out to people, especially people, who wouldn’t normally come to a political meeting.

She states that the story starts with her mother, who she explains was a Black civil rights activists. She imitates her mother’s voice, and quotes her explaining that in some places lynching is so popular they have it twice a week. She also explains that her father was a Jewish Russian Communist involved in the civil rights movement, where her parents met. She imitates him saying that as a Communist, he believes that Black people had been at the bottom of the pile, not just for a few years, but hundreds, who weren’t even thought of as human beings. Walker then explains that she wanted to make politics personal. She then returns to quoting her father, who said it wasn’t just him who wanted to support ‘coloured’ people’s rights. All his Jewish comrades were there. She then returns to explaining that she always knew that her father was Jewish, her mother had always discussed it, and she knew that her mother also had Jewish ancestry. As she became politically aware of what that meant, of that whole struggle, she became increasingly an anti-Zionist Jew, identifying with that position.

She explains that for hundreds of years Black people, who were fighting enslavement got nowhere. They were lynched and worse for attempting to liberate themselves. Here she appears on stage showing a photo of such lynching, with the bodies of two Black men grotesquely dangling from a tree. She also reads from one of the Noddy books, in which Noddy reproaches a golliwog for stealing his things, and says they shouldn’t be allowed in Toytown, but made to live in Gollitown with the other Gollies, while clutching a golliwog.

The video then shows her saying that Blacks were fighting against overwhelming political and economic forces and there are strong similarities between that and what is happening in Israel and Palestine now. She says that being open about her family and her background is absolutely critical to understanding her political work. And of course it what the mainstream media and the Israel lobby, who’ve been in many ways mounting the campaign against her, cannot bear.

Back on stage she says, ‘They wanted a lynching. A political lynching. So she thought she would get her own court of public opinion. And you’re -‘ she gestures at the audience – ‘are going to be that for me tonight’.

As well as at home, on the stage and on the beach, the video also shows her handing round a flyer for her show outside a cathedral during one of the festivals, and talking to the camera in a park.

It looks like The Lynching was a fascinating, inspiring show, and Walker is clearly a woman of great resilience to have endured such vile smears. As are the other people, who’ve also been vilified and abused, like Ken Livingstone, Tony Greenstein, Marc Wadsworth, and Mike over at Vox Political.

The lynching campaign of the Blairites and the Israel lobby is still going on. It claimed Chris Williamson this week. But perhaps if more shows like that are put on, and more people protest and defy their persecutors, and bring their cases instead to the court of public opinion, it may be halted.