Evening Standard Publishes Anti-Semitic Cartoon – Board of Deputies and Official Jews Silent

Wednesday’s edition of the I also carried the news that the various organs of the Jewish establishment, which took it upon themselves to smear Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters as anti-Semites, issued a joint statement celebrating their meeting with the new leader of the Labour Party, Keir Starmer. They were Marie van der Zyl of the Board of Deputies, Jonathan Goldstein of the Jewish Leadership Council, Gerald Ronson, the chairman of the Community Security Trust, and Mike Katz, the head of the Jewish Labour Movement, formerly Paole Zion. They declared that Starmer had done more to tackle anti-Semitism in Labour that Corbyn did in four years of leadership.

This is a flat-out lie. Corbyn and his supporters were never anti-Semitic. Quite the opposite. Corbyn did much for the Jewish community, as various other Jewish groups recognised. Real anti-Semitism was at the lowest it had been for years during his leadership. But he was a critic of Israel, and so the official Jews declared that he had to be an anti-Semite. It’s the only way they can defend Israel against criticism of its indefensible ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians.

Starmer’s meeting with these knaves and clowns was a capitulation. He, along with the rest of the leadership hopefuls, had signed up to the Board’s 10 pledges for dealing with anti-Semitism. These can be summarised as the immediately expulsion without defence of anyone they decide is an anti-Semite. And that definition is very elastic, and applies only to pro-Palestinian activists, critics of Israel, and those, who try to defend them. The Board of Deputies, Jewish Leadership Council, Community Security Trust and the Jewish Labour Movement are all Zionist organisations, though you may be accused of anti-Semitism for pointing this out. Fact means nothing to these scoundrels. They are also Conservative to the core, which is why they also had a very party political motive for wanting Corbyn removed. It was very noticeable that Starmer’s meeting with them didn’t include left-wing Jewish groups, like Jewish Voice for Labour and the Jewish Socialist Group. Because they were the wrong kind of Jews.

And this contemptible lack of interest in defending the Jewish community as a whole, and in particular left-wing Jews, was shown very clearly in the Jewish establishment’s culpable silence on Tuesday over the publication of a cartoon in the London Evening Standard. Drawn by their cartoonist, Christian Adams, this portrayed Keir Starmer welcoming Ed Miliband back into the party. It was supposed to be a comment on Starmer’s own leadership that he was welcoming a former leader, who had been a failure. But it was a comment on George Osborne’s editorship of the Standard, that Adams showed Miliband with a hooked nose, buck teeth and clutching a bacon sandwich. Dripping a reddish substance. Miliband is Jewish, and the attacks on him when he was Labour leader definitely had an anti-Semitic tinge. Miliband’s father was the Marxist intellectual, Ralph Miliband. Miliband pere was a refugee from Belgium. He was a fierce critic of this country’s class system and the public schools that maintain it. But there is no question of his loyalty. He fought bravely for Britain in World War II to overthrow Nazism. But the Heil decided to run a feature calling him ‘The Man Who Hated Britain’ as an attack on his son. Yes, we’re back to the British establishment’s fears and vilification of Jewish intellectual, ‘rootless cosmopolitans’ and the idea that Jews have no loyalty to the country in which they reside.

But Miliband’s true patriotism and bravery during the War contrasts strongly with the Mail’s. This was the newspaper that hailed Oswald Mosley’s vile BUF with the headline ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts!’. Even when it dropped him, it still carried on supporting Hitler and publishing anti-Semitic headlines about Jewish refugees and so on. And the father of former editor, Paul Dacre, rather than serving in the army to defend our great nation, was instead far behind the lines covering the glamorous world of showbiz and celebrities.

As for the physical depiction of Miliband, who doesn’t have a hooked nose or buck teeth, they’re common to the racist depiction of a number of different ethnicities. But that does include the Jews. As does the bacon sandwich. The right-wing press ridiculed Miliband for eating a bacon sandwich ‘weirdly’. But many on the left also saw there another anti-Semitic trope. It was too similar to the medieval forms of ritual humiliation, in which Jews were forced to eat pork. As for the red substance, that was probably tomato sauce. But it also looked a bit like blood, which brings back the blood libel – that Jews ritually murder Christians in order to use their blood to make the matzo bread eaten at Passover. This vile smear has been at the centre of horrific pogroms and massacres down the centuries.

I realise these are just tropes, but that is how the official Jews of the Israel lobby judge whether something is anti-Semitic. It is, if it can be shown to conform to a literary trope or historical parallel. Even if what is being reported, such as the Israeli massacre of Palestinian civilians, is true.

By their own standards, Adams’ cartoon is anti-Semitic.

But the London Evening Standard is edited by former Tory chancellor George Osborne. and as the Jewish establishment is Tory to a core, Miliband is ‘the wrong kind of Jew’. The Board and the rest of them were culpably silent.

Both Mike and Zelo Street put up articles attacking the cartoon, the Standard and the hypocrisy of the Jewish establishment. As did Martin Odoni, another Jewish victim of the anti-Semitism witch hunt in the Labour Party. Martin commented

“Come on, BoD, come on, David Collier, come on, Jonathan Hoffman, and all you other self-righteous Zionist squealers cheaply using Jewish identity as a cover story for Israeli political gain. We know that the Evening Standard is a Tory newspaper, and therefore an ally of yours. But if you ever want to retain the slightest remnant of credibility, you need to protest this more loudly than any deed by anyone you have attacked in the Labour Party over the last five years.

“Because unlike almost all of the deeds you have attacked, this is absolutely explicit. It is an outrageous racial caricature, by the very standards you have insisted on imposing. You cannot apply them selectively.”

And both Mike and Zelo Street show Tweets from a variety of people showing that Martin’s definitely not alone. The silence of the Board and its fellows has been noted by very many people, who are disgusted.

Mike concludes his article with the comment

‘We’ll be waiting a long time for the Bod, JLC, JLM, CST and all the named champions of the fight against (Labour)(alleged) anti-Semitism to say anything, I reckon!

But what do you think?’

Well, it’s Friday as I write this, and all those august bodies have said not a dicky-bird.

Which shows you they aren’t interested in tackling real anti-Semitism, but only criticism of Israel and the socialist left.

See: https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2020/04/07/while-starmer-bends-backwards-for-right-wing-jewish-groups-the-tories-are-making-anti-semitic-jokes/

https://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2020/04/tory-ex-chancellor-promotes-anti.html

https://thegreatcritique.wordpress.com/2020/04/07/george-osborne-publishes-and-promotes-anti-semitic-cartoon-deathly-silence-from-bod-and-the-media/

‘I’ Newspaper and Sunday Times Claim David Miliband May Lead Blairite ‘Centrist’ Party

Today’s I newspaper for the 12th November 2018 also ran an article following a piece in yesterday’s Sunday Times, which suggested that the launch of the new, Blairite ‘centrist’ party is coming nearer, and that David Miliband, the brother of the former Labour leader Ed, may return to Britain to head it. The article by Richard Vaughan stated

David Miliband is mulling a return to frontline politics as head of a new centrist party, it has emerged.

Plans are under way to launch a fresh political party, with speculation mounting it could be just months away.

Labour MPs, unhappy with the direction of the party under Jeremy Corbyn, are believed to be in talks about forging a breakaway party from the centre ground and looking at Mr. Miliband to lead it.

According to the Sunday Times, the former foreign secretary is eyeing a return to London, having spent the last four years running the aid charity, the International Rescue Committee in New York.

The newspaper also reported that Mr. Miliband met prominent Labour donors Sir Trevor Chinn and Jonathan Goldstein.

His decision to leave UK politics followed his unexpected defeat to his brother Ed for the Labour leadership in 2010. Mr. Miliband sparked rumours of a return in the summer wyhen he said in an interview that he brought PG Tips and Marmite back to his home in the US, adding: “Of course I’ll come back. It’s my home. I’m British.”

Centrist Labour backbenchers still view Mr. Miliband as the “king over the water”, harbouring hopes that he will step back into the political limelight under a new party.

It comes amid persistent reports that Tony Blair is in discussions to create a new party, with suggestions that his one-time political apprentice could take on the job of leading it. Another favourite to lead such a party is the former business secretary Chuka Umunna, who has been one of the most vocal critics of the Labour leadership.

Should there be any chance of a new centrist party being established in time for a general election before Britain leaves the EU, then it would have to be launched before the end of January.

Under parliamentary procedure, 28 January is the latest possible date that an election can be called before Brexit day on 29 March. (p. 15).

Okay, there’s a lot to unpack here. Let’s get started. Firstly, the source of this bit of speculation – and speculation is all it is, rather than news – is the Sunday Times. This is the entirely trustworthy establishment paper, owned by the honest, deeply moral newspaper magnate, Rupert Murdoch, that libeled Mike as an anti-Semite last year. And it is this paper, which is repeating the nonsensical smear that the former Labour leader, Michael Foot, was a KGB spy. Despite the fact that when they ran this story 20 or so years ago, Foot defended his name in the courts, sued ’em for libel, and won. One of the reasons the rag is repeating the smear is because Foot’s dead, and the dead can’t sue for libel. But there is no further corroborating evidence, the charge is still malicious nonsense, and the editor publishing this is still a complete slimeball. In my opinion, of course.

Now let’s attack the claims about the proposed ‘centrist’ party, which might have members from ‘centrist’ Labour MPs. Firstly, there is nothing centrist about the Labour right. They are Thatcherite infiltrators, who follow their former leader Tony Blair, in rejecting socialism and embracing Thatcherite neoliberalism. Thatcher hailed Blair as her greatest achievement. The Blairites thus stand for more privatization, including that of the NHS, and a similar attack on the welfare state and workers’ rights. Blair and his cronies continued Thatcher’s policy of ‘less eligibility’, taken over from the workhouses, to make applying for benefits as difficult and humiliating as possible in order to deter people from claiming them. And I personally know people who didn’t sign on when they unemployed, because of the degrading way they were treated. It was the Blairites too, who introduced the work capability tests for those applying for disability benefit. This was on the advice of the American insurance fraudsters, Unum, based on spurious medical research, which has been criticized as scientific nonsense. Again, this was following the Tories. Unum had been advising Peter Lilley, when he was their health secretary in the 1990s. Lilley introduced the Private Finance Initiative as a deliberate policy to open up the health service to private enterprise. And this was following Thatcher, who would have liked to privatise the NHS wholesale, but was only prevented by a cabinet revolt. As for the unemployed, the Blairites’ contempt for the jobless was clearly shown more recently when one of them – can’t remember whether it was Rachel Phillips or Reed, said a few years ago that if Labour got into power, they would be even harder on the unemployed than the Tories. Which is a very good argument for making reselection of MPs in the party mandatory.

The Labour centrists are nothing of the kind. They are actually extreme right. The real moderates are Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour left, who are a return to the Social Democratic politics of the traditional Labour party. They are definitely not ‘Communists’, ‘Trotskyites’, ‘Stalinists’ or whatever other insults Joan Ryan and the press hurl at them.

Now let’s analyze this ‘centrist’ party that the press have been speculating about for nearly a year. At the moment, it has zero policies and precious few members. One of those, who was part of the project, fell out with the others and left. The early newspaper reports stated that it was being launched with the aid of donors. This should ring warning bells with everyone concerned with the corruption of today’s corporate state. Blair’s Labour party was a part of the corporate takeover of politics. They took funds from corporate donors, like David Sainsbury, and put them into government posts, where they influenced government policy to their benefit. George Monbiot describes the way this corrupted the Labour government and its policies in his book, Captive State. It looks like the centrist party, if it is ever launched, will be intended to maintain the dominance of corporate power over the political parties, against Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour party, which has actually expanded its membership to become the largest socialist party in Europe and which actually represents the wishes of grassroots members. Its other policy seems to be that Britain should remain in the EU. I believe this, but the party otherwise represents too much of a threat to ordinary people’s lives, health and livelihoods to ever be worth voting for.

The party’s Blairite foundations also mean it is going to be Atlanticist in geopolitical orientation. That is, it will support America and American policies. Blair and the other architects of New Labour were members of BAP, or the British-American Project for the Successor Generation. This was a Reaganite project to recruit future political and media leaders, give them sponsored study trips to America, so that they would return staunch supporters of the Atlantic alliance. Blair’s pro-American stance could clearly be seen by the way many of the companies lining up to run Britain’s privatized industries or manage what was left of the state sector, including the NHS, were American. Miliband is part of this. I really don’t think it’s any accident that he scarpered off to America after he lost the leadership contest to his brother. And Blair’s own extreme right-wing views is shown by the fact that he accepted an invitation to attend an American Conservative convention at the request of former president George Bush.

The other policy is likely to be staunch support for Israel and its continuing ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. I don’t know who Jonathan Goldstein is, but one of the possible funders of the new party, Trevor Chinn, was revealed a few months ago as one of the big donors to the Israeli lobby in the Labour party, giving money to Labour Friends of Israel. He’s one of the people behind the Israel lobbyists and their smears of anyone standing up for the Palestinians as anti-Semites. These smears are vile, libelous and deeply offensive. Those smeared as anti-Semites include not just non-Jewish anti-racists, like Mike, but also self-respecting secular and Torah-observant Jews, like Jackie Walker, Martin Odoni, Tony Greenstein and so on. Some of those they’ve smeared are the children of Holocaust survivors, and people, who’ve suffered real racist and anti-Semitic attacks.

If launched, this supposedly centrist party will represent nothing but corporate greed, especially of transatlantic multinationals. Oh yes, and support for the Likudniks and other members of Benjamin Netanyahu’s increasingly Fascistic government coalition, and their persecution of Israel’s indigenous Arabs. It will not support the welfare state, the NHS or the rights of British working people to decent jobs, working conditions, dignity and pay.

That’s if this wretch party ever gets launched at all. It’s been debated for about year now, and the Labour right have been threatening to desert the party and found a new one for even longer. So far, fortunately, they haven’t done so. And it’s possible they never will. Mike over at Vox Political published a piece a little while ago pointing out that new parties find it very difficult to establish themselves as major forces in politics. UKIP was founded in the 1990s, and despite decades of hard campaigning, it’s still -fortunately – pretty much a fringe party. And some of us can remember the Labour party split in the 1980s, when the right-wing rebels left to form the SDP. There was much noise then about them ‘breaking the mould’ of British politics. The result was that they had no more than a handful of MPs, and after forming an alliance with the Liberals then merged with them to become the Lib Dems. Which remains smaller than either Labour or the Tories.

As for right-wing Labour MPs splitting off on their own, Mike showed very clearly why they wouldn’t really want to do that, either. Independents also struggle to get themselves elected. If they ever left the party to run as independents, they’d almost certainly lose their seats at the next election.

The centrist party will thus very likely be a complete non-starter, funded by businessmen to maintain their power over British politics at the expense of the NHS, the welfare state and working people, and preserve British alliance with right-wing parties and business elites in America and Israel. But it is being touted by the newspapers like the Sunday Times and the I, because they fear and hate Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party, and see it as a way of destroying it and the chance of real change for working people in this country.

Who Do the Board of Deputies Really Represent? Rich Snobs!

Jonathan Arkush’s smear against Corbyn and Jewdas as anti-Semites also set me wondering who Arkush and his fellows really represent in the Jewish community. Arkush and various other members of the Board of Deputies of British Jews are fully paid up, true-blue Tories. So they obviously don’t represent the many left-wing British Jews. Which Arkush more or less admitted when he accused the Labour leader of ignoring mainstream Jewry.

But I don’t think Arkush represents them either. I think he represents an elevated, corporate elite, which looks down on everyone else. I can remember a conversation I had many years ago with two friends of mine, who lived in a very affluent, Jewish area of London. They weren’t impressed with the people there, who were very, very clannish. If you weren’t part of their circle, you were no-one.

There’s nothing uniquely Jewish in all this, despite the claims of anti-Semites. You find rich snobs in all religions and in mainstream, gentile society. I’m very much aware of the perception of Christians as righteous, sanctimonious snobs, who look down on everyone else. As a general statement, it’s utterly false, but it is true of some groups. Like the very middle class Evangelicals, who support Trump and are trying to destroy what little remains of the American welfare network. Because they see the rich, not the poor, as the truly blessed and righteous.

And the religious types surrounding Theresa May and the Tory party undoubtedly hold the same views. In one of their articles, Lobster mentioned how, under the Tories, the DWP is stuffed with right-wing, largely Evangelical Christians, but drew back from calling it a conspiracy.

And then there’s the general snobbery and bigotry in the Tory party itself. Like the comments about the homeless ‘They’re the people you step over coming out of the opera’. Toby Young’s sneering comments about the poor, the disabled and Blacks, Asians and other non-Whites or members of immigrant groups. As well as his loathsome misogyny. Ben Bradley and the other Tories, who want to have their left-wing opponents sterilised. That kind of middle class snobbery is rife in the Tories, regardless of religion.

And it seems to me very strongly that Jonathan Arkush, the Board of Deputies of British Jews, and the Jewish Leadership Council represent the same type of howling snobs in their own community. Rich corporate types, who feel threatened by left-wing Jews and Jewish organisations, and who are doing their best to smear them as ‘anti-Semitic’.

Arkush and Goldstein, the head of the Jewish Leadership Council, are snobs and bigots, who should be made to apologise for the use of anti-Semitic smears and tropes against decent people, and particularly left-wing Jewish organisations. No-one should be allowed to get away with bigotry, no matter how ‘respectable’. Not the Chief Rabbi, and certainly not the President of the Board of Deputies of British Jews.

The Anti-Semitism Smears and the Tories’ Long History of Racism

On Monday, the Jonathan Goldstein of the Jewish Leadership Council and the President of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, Jonathan Arkush, wrote a letter complaining that Corbyn had done nothing to tackle what they claimed was the rampant anti-Semitism in the Labour party, and that Corbyn had consistently sided with anti-Semites against Jews. This was accompanied of a mass demonstration outside parliament organised by the two organisations.

Arkush and Goldstein’s claims are frankly lies. Jeremy Corbyn has consistently opposed all forms of racism, including anti-Semitism. He is the only MP, for example, who has been arrested for protesting against apartheid in South Africa. He also has the support of very many Jews, and Jewish organisations, who rallied to support him on social media.

The real issue here, which Arkush and Goldstein’s smears of anti-Semitism are meant to cover up, is Corbyn’s attitude towards Israel. They claim he’s anti-Israel and anti-Zionist. He isn’t, but he is pro-Palestinian. But this is too much for the Israel lobby, who smear anyone, who wants justice and dignity for the Palestinians as anti-Semite. Even if they are proud, self-respecting Jews, who have suffered real anti-Semitic assault and abuse. Or decent, anti-racist gentiles, who have also been the subject of vilification and assault by Nazis.

Arkush is a true-blue Tory, as well as a massive hypocrite. He himself has been very keen to meet racists and anti-Semites, when it suits his agenda. Tony Greenstein on his site has a picture of him enthusiastically greeting Donald Trump and Steve Bannon, one of the anti-Semitic fixtures of the White Supremacist Alt Right. As for the Board of Deputies of British Jews fighting anti-Semitism, Greenstein also points out that when Oswald Mosley was goose stepping about the East End of London with his Blackshirts, the Zionists were telling Jews to keep out of the way and stay indoors. I don’t blame them for it, as Fascism has always been violent and brutal, and they would no doubt have attacked and beaten Jews they found on the street. But Fascists won’t go away if you hide from them. They’ll simply carry on. Fortunately, a number of Jews, trade unionists, and Communists weren’t prepared to leave the streets to them, and fought them head on. The result was the ‘battle of Cable Street’, which ended with Mosley and his squadristi routed from the East End. I am not recommending violence. I don’t approve of it. But sometimes, it’s inevitable. And for all the claim that Mosley wasn’t originally anti-Semitic and was genuinely perplexed at Jewish opposition, he and his wretched party were. And if the Nazis had invaded, or the BUF somehow gained power, it’s very highly likely that he would have aided the Holocaust and the extermination of Jewish Brits.

The Tories have, of course, taken all this as an opportunity to claim that Labour is riddle with anti-Semitism, unlike them. This covers up the fact that the Tory party has a very long history of racism and anti-Semitism going right back to the Die-Hards of the First World War. One of the other left-wing bloggers put up a very extensive list of Tory racist and anti-Semitic organisations, or racist organisations, whose membership was drawn from the Tories.

Like the British Fascists. They were a bunch of right-wingers, founded by a middle-class lady, who’d been emancipated by the Women’s Suffrage Act but had a hatred of organised labour. They modus operandi was to supply blackleg labour during strikes, disrupt socialist meetings and attack left-wingers and trade unionists. They once attacked a van belonging to the Daily Herald. They weren’t really Fascists, but Conservatives, and Mosley called them what they were. He declared they were ‘Conservatives with knobs on’. He asked their leaderene what she thought of the corporate state. Faced with the notion of an industrial parliament which included trade unionists as well as management and capital, she vehemently rejected it as ‘socialism’. Which confirms how little she knew about either Fascism or socialism.

The there’s the various Tory pro-Nazi groups founded in the 1930s – the Anglo-German Fellowship, the Link and a number of others, and on and on. One of the nutters involved in these groups wanted to found a group to purge the Tories of Jews. The Monday Club was riddled with anti-Semites until there was purge in 1970. But as the blogger showed, the anti-Semites were still there, still active.

And while we’re on the subject of racism, why didn’t Arkush and his fellows on the Board protest against the appointment of Toby Young to May’s universities watchdog. I am not accusing Young of anti-Semitism. But he is a eugenics fanatic, and attended a eugenics conference at University College London, which certainly did include real racists and White Supremacists. Eugenics was an integral part of Nazi ideology. Quite often when Nazis and other racists talked about the ‘biologically unfit’ as well as the poor and disabled in general, they also meant non-whites and Jews. But I don’t recall Arkush and the Board making any letters of complaint or raising any natural concerns about Young’s appointment.

And then there’s this election poster from 1902.

Okay, so the foreign master sacking his British worker to make way for his fellow foreigner isn’t explicitly described as a Jew. But the anti-Semitism is very definitely there. It was put up at a time when the Conservatives were worried about the mass immigration of eastern European Jews. They spoke Yiddish, a language descended from the medieval German middle Franconian dialect. Hence the foreign master speaks with a very middle-European accent. And while the term ‘alien’ simply means ‘foreigner’, in the language of the 19th and early 20th centuries it was very often used to mean Jews. The anti-Semitic nature of the poster is very blatant.

As you’d probably expect it to be. This was the era of the British Brothers’ League and other Conservative anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic organisations.

But the Tories want people to forget all this, and just see Labour as a hotbed of anti-Semitism. Despite many Jews in the party having said and written that they have personally never experienced it in the Labour party.

But it’s a good smear against Labour, and Corbyn, and everything he has done for Jewish Brits as well as his desire for a just treatment of the Palestinians. And that’s what Arkush, Goldstein and their friends in the Tories are really afraid of.

Arkush and Goldstein Go Pemberton Billing

This morning, Mike put up a piece taking a part the letter written by Jonathans Arkush and Goldstein attacking Jeremy Corbyn for being too soft on the supposed rampant anti-Semitism in the Labour party. The story’s also covered in the I newspaper, which doesn’t name the two. It just describes the letter as written by ‘Jewish community leaders’. In fact, one of them is from the Jewish Leadership Council and the other is from the Board of Deputies of British Jews. They accuse Corbyn of ignoring the issues that are important to mainstream British Jews. Their real concern, however, is revealed in their comments about how Cobyn and the Labour party under him are motivated by the Far Left’s hatred of Zionism, Israel, and the Israel lobby. As Mike has shown, Corbyn is not far left. He’s centre-left. He only appears far left compared to the Blairites and the Tories, who want everything privatised, including the NHS, following the ideological dictates of Margaret Thatcher. But then, factual accuracy is not these guys’ concern. Smearing the left and the opponents of Israel’s ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians is.

Mike’s put up a couple of videos showing that Corbyn has always been an opponent of racism and anti-Semitism, so Arkush and Goldstein’s smear of him and his followers as anti-Semites is the purest nonsense. Nor is he an opponent of the state Israel. I was told this by a commenter on one of my posts about Israel and the Israel lobby, who objected to my using the term ‘Zionism’. He felt it played into the hands of those smearing the Labour leader. I am happy to be corrected. But what Corbyn does oppose is Israeli apartheid, its oppression of the indigenous Palestinians, and its seven decades long campaign to purge them from Israel. It is this, which Arkush and Goldstein are defending when the smear the Labour leader, and the other critics of Israel. They cannot defend Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, as it’s indefensible. So indefensible that they object to anyone even mentioning it or describing Israel as an apartheid state, or comparing it to Nazi Germany, even though the comparison is apt in so far as Nazi policy went as far as 1942 and the launch of the Final Solution. And unable to describe the brutal maltreatment of the Palestinians by the Israelis, all the Israel lobby can do is try to silence its critics by accusing them of anti-Semitism. Any mention of Israeli atrocities in the press will get the journalists responsible for the article smeared as anti-Semites. I put up a documentary from Channel 4’s Despatches, broadcast in 2009 and present by Peter Oborne, which described just how nasty, bullying and mendacious the Israel lobby is. Among those they threatened and accused of anti-Semitism were Alan Rusbridger, the editor of the Guardian, and respected BBC journos Jeremy Bowen. When one of the Dimblebores attacked them for their smears, they also had the BBC investigate him for anti-Semitism.

Mike states that this letter has been written to stop Labour winning the coming council elections. He’s undoubtedly right. This would terrify the Blairites and the Israel lobby, quite apart from the Tories. But the right of both of these organisations to speak on behalf of the wider Jewish community is questionable. The Jewish Leadership Council is very closely connected to explicitly Zionist groups. But it’s under something of a cloud, as its former chief, Jeremy ‘No Morals’ Newmark was embezzling money from Jewish charities. They sacked him, but decided not to call in the rozzers in order to avoid a scandal. As for the Board of Deputies of British Jews, its members are nominated by their synagogues, so it doesn’t speak for secular Jews. Nor are they democratically elected. They are also true-blue Tory establishment. They are determined to maintain themselves as the top Jewish organisation in the UK by exerting a monopoly of control over all other Jewish organisations. One of the reasons the Board hated Ken Livingstone was because Leninspart gave a small grant when he was head of the GLC to a Jewish Socialist group that wasn’t affiliated to them, and which was beyond their control. Temper tantrums and accusations of anti-Semitism followed.

Their letter is also rather desperate. An increasing number of Jewish Americans are turning against Israel because of its maltreatment of the Palestinians. This includes many, who have suffered anti-Semitic abuse and assault themselves. Over here there are Jewish, pro-Palestinian organisations, that very definitely do not accept anti-Semites. But you won’t hear about them from liars and smearers like Arkush and Goldstein. Very many of the people in the Labour party, who have been smeared as anti-Semites, are decent, self-respecting Jews. And many of them have suffered real anti-Semitic abuse and attack by Fascists and racists. But because they have criticised Israel, the Israel lobby has smeared them as anti-Semitic and ‘self-hating’. A grotesque, monstrous libel. As for speaking for the wider Jewish community on the issue of Israel, at the moment something like 77 per cent of British Jews say that Israel is very important to their sense of identity. But how long this will last, if Jewish young people over here follow the lead of Jewish Americans, is a very good point. It looks like the Israel lobby is well aware of this possibility, and are starting to panic.

This is simply another instance of the arch-Tory Jewish establishment smearing anyone, who stands up for the Palestinians, as an anti-Semite. Especially those on the Left. As others have shown, the Tories have a very long history of anti-Semitism and connections to real Fascist organisations. But there’s hardly a mention of this from the Israel lobby and the likes of Goldstein and Arkush.

The Israel lobby’s promiscuous use of accusations of anti-Semitism reminds me of Pemberton Billing and his ‘little black book’. Pemberton Billing was an extreme right-wing Tory MP around the time of the First World War with a particular paranoid hatred of gays. He maintained he had a book with the names of 50,000 ‘devotees of Sodom and Lesbia’, who were aiding the Germans. Of course, British society back then was very homophobic. Homosexuality was illegal, and homosexuals generally bitterly hated. But Billing went far beyond the usual levels of hate and prejudice. He went off and smeared a number of people as supposed gays. And when one sued for libel, the case collapsed because Billing then accused the judge of being one of those in his book.

I am not accusing Arkush and Goldstein of being homophobic. I am accusing them of trying to start another witch hunt against the Labour party using fake accusations of anti-Semitism in the same way that Pemberton Billing libelled many good people with his accusations of homosexuality and treason.

This latest letter is a grotesque, politically motivated attempt to smear Jeremy Corbyn and prevent the Labour party getting into power. It shames the people the two, who wrote it, and the mendacious, biased press, who uncritically repeat its lies.