Here’s more evidence that Trump has Fascistic tendencies. A piece by Amanda Seitz in yesterday’s I for 3rd September 2020, ‘Trump uses conspiracy theory about race protests’ reported that Trump was blaming the various Black Lives Matter protests and riots on shadowy plotters. The article ran
President Donald Trump is promoting a baseless conspiracy theory to claim that recent race protests have been orchestrated by powerful people in “dark shadows” intent on undermining his re-election prospects.
The claim first took root on Facebook and Twitter earlier this year after racial justice protests swelled across the country following the deaths of Black Americans in police custody. Thousands of social media users shared posts suggesting a covert network was coordinating the protests and rioters were descending on communities across the country.
Mr Trump appeared to amplify those unfounded conspiracy theories in an interview with Fox News host Laura Ingraham that aired Monday night, suggesting that protests in Washington during the Republican National Convention were orchestrated by unspecified forces.
“We had somebody get on a plane from a certain city this weekend. And in the plane, it was almost completely loaded with thugs wearing these dark uniforms, black uniforms with gear and this and that,” said Mr Trump, adding that the matter is under investigation.
Given the increase in paranoia and the proliferation of belief in spurious theories about secret conspiracies since the ’90s, it was almost inevitable that somebody would also claim that the mass protests against Trump are due to THEM. When riots have broken out here in Britain, some people have tried to explain them as having been planned and carried out by organised radical groups from outside the area. The groups blamed were either anarchists, some other group from the far left, if not simply described as ‘the far left’, or else just nameless malcontents intent on stirring up trouble.
Trump hasn’t identified who he thinks is behind this conspiracy, but the unvoiced fear here is that he’s talking about the Jews. He’s been accused of anti-Semitism, and although his daughter’s husband is Jewish and she is a convert to Judaism, his aids have included a number with links to the Alt-Right, like Steve Bannon and his supporters have included real anti-Semites, racists and White supremacists. Remember when the Alt-Right’s leader Richard Spencer greeted Trump’s election with ‘Hail Trump! Hail our race!’ One of the conspiracy theories about the Jews is that they are deliberately encouraging non-White immigration and racial mixing to destroy the White race as part of their programme for world domination. I don’t know if Trump believes this poisonous nonsense, but the danger is that a section of the American public does and could act on it. The shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue a few years ago was committed by a gunman, who believed it and chose the synagogue and its congregation because they were active helping immigrants and asylum seekers find refuge in America.
It’ll be very interesting to see what the Anti-Defamation League have to say about this. They’re the chief Jewish organisation in America fighting anti-Semitism. They’ve criticised Trump before for his racism, as when he tried to stop immigration from Muslim countries. But the ADL is also staunchly Zionist, and Trump is a solid supporter of Israel and its aggressive campaign to annex even more Palestinian land. Tony Greenstein has pointed out on his blog that time and again Zionists will betray Jews to real anti-Semites, if they believe it will benefit Israel. One example is a notorious quote from David Ben Gurion that he would rather a small number escape the Nazi Holocaust to settle in Israel and the rest die, rather for all of them escape to Britain. Then there’s the recent example of Stephen Pollard, the gentile editor of the Jewish Chronicle, defending a Polish politico from the Law and Justice Party. This is another extreme right-wing nationalist party, which passed legislation banning blaming the Nazi persecution of the Jews in Poland on Polish collaborators. Pollard declared that the politician couldn’t be anti-Semitic, as he was a good friend of Israel. Liberal Israelis have also criticised the way their country’s leaders have welcomed real Fascist dictators and butchers. These have tried to present a veneer of respectability through visiting the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial.
And Tony’s also pointed out that the Zionist organisations in America dislike Black Lives Matter. BLM are pro-Palestinian, seeing the position of Black Americans as comparable to that of Israel’s indigenous Arab people. He’s also shown that the American Zionist organisations have attempted to win over Black support through offering theirs for Black anti-racism and civil rights campaigns. But BLM won’t compromise on this issue, and so have won the animosity of many Zionist groups and organisations.
It’ll therefore remain to be seen what the Zionist Jewish groups will say, if anything, about Trump’s comments. Will they condemn them, and so criticise someone they regard as an ally? Or will they remain silent because Trump’s America is Israel’s strongest supporter and they too hate Black Lives Matter?
On Saturday Zelo Street revealed that there’s a real crisis at the Grauniad. Its readership has plummeted and in response, Kath Viner has announced a swingeing round of job cuts and redundancies. Whole sections of the Saturday edition will vanish for good. The Street went on to ponder whether left-wingers should go on defending and buying it. One the one hand, the standard of its journalism is a cut above the rest of the press. On the downside, it ain’t the paper it was ten years ago.
In Zelo Street’s opinion, the paper has conceded too much to the press pack and the groupthink that infests the rest of the media. It would not expose political corruption, like the Hamilton scandal that caused such outrage and merriment in the 90s. Nor would it expose the phone-hacking scandal. It would not go out on a limb to defend whistleblowers from the intelligence agencies, like Edward Snowden. As regards the Labour Party, it backed Ed Miliband against Corbyn, and then Kier Starmer. And it always reported on Corbyn from the hostile perspective of his enemies. And so now it is on its last legs, its supporters like Zelo Street are wondering whether to go on with it. As you can tell from the replies his piece has received, others are very sure they won’t. They despise it for his fascination with America, which has turned its politics to that of American Democratic centrism, way to the right of traditional British politics. They despise the fact that Viner and her lead columnists are all alumni of Oxford University, so that their views reflect those of the metropolitan bubble. And they really hate it for its Blairism, pushed by people like Marina Hyde and Polly Toynbee. This was another cause of its fascination with America, among other things. Blair was a firm Atlanticist, and wished to turn the Labour Party into the domestic equivalent of the Democrats.And they also hate the way it pushed the anti-Semitism smears under Jonathan Freedland.
I share their feelings. I can’t say I’m a Guardian reader – I’ve only ever read it occasionally. In some ways it’s too left for me, and too right-wing in others. As regards the Labour party, it and the Absurder have a long history of promoting the Liberals in the 1975 general election. I believe that in the 2017 election it actually ran an editorial telling people to vote Lib Dem.
And it tried everything it could to smear Corbyn. One of the most risible was a letter it published from some deranged female, arguing that he and Bernie Sanders were obviously homophobes and misogynists because they preferred loose, baggy clothing over fitted outfits. This was back to the bad old days of the male-dominated trade union movements of the 1970s. This was published despite the fact that Bernie has turned up at the invitation of many women’s groups and feminist rallies because of the support he’s given the American women’s movement. I’m sure the same is true for Corbyn. As the former Labour leader has listed break-making as one of his hobbies, he can’t be said to be a stickler for upholding traditional gender roles.
And then there was the anti-Semitism smears. They were pushed as hard as they could by Freedland and others. Many of the hacks, like Jessica Elgot, who co-penned the recent article repeating the libel that Mike was an anti-Semite, were out-and-out members of the extreme Zionists now comprising the British Jewish establishment. As I’ve blogged again and again, they define anti-Semitism almost wholly in terms of anti-Zionism. No Jewish voices critical of Israel, whether liberal Zionist or anti-Zionist, religious or secular, may be allowed to be heard. Historical truth is covered up and propaganda and lies pushed in its place. Corbyn was never an anti-Semite, and neither were his followers. Especially not his followers. But they pushed it until this gentle man, who has actually done so much in his career to support the Jewish community, appeared to be little less than Hitler incarnate.
Rusbridger wasn’t perfect. He seemed almost an enamoured of Blair as the rest of the media. But he stood up to the Israel lobby. He appears in Peter Oborne’s documentary for Channel 4’s Dispatches on the Israel lobby describing how, when he accurately reported atrocities committed by Israel and her Christian allies in Lebanon, he would be paid a visit by the head of the Board of Deputies and his pet lawyer, screaming that it was anti-Semitic. As they did to everyone, even highly respected foreign correspondents like Jeremy Bowen and Orla Guerin at the Beeb. Now that situation has been reversed, with Groaniad hacks publishing dangerous, vile nonsense about how politicos from Poland’s Law and Justice party, which has a streak of anti-Semitism a mile wide, aren’t really Jew-haters because they’re good friend of Israel. Israel is a good friend of every murderous bastard, even if they are real Nazis, so long as they buy their guns and armaments.
Most of the Groaniad’s readers were left-wing Labour. They heartily supported Corbyn, and the Graun repaid them by attacking their hero and, by extension, they themselves, at every opportunity. And the hacks themselves were also hypocrites. One of the commenters on Zelo Street’s article states that none of the named, celebrity hacks on the rag was willing to take a pay cut to protect the jobs of the minions further down the journalistic ladder. And despite its own attacks on the system of unpaid internships, it used more unpaid workers than the other rags.
Viner has only herself to blame for this mess. If she wanted to win back readers, she’d go back on all this, clear out the Blairites and start producing reports and comment from a genuine, traditional Labour perspective. She start protecting whistleblowers and start writing genuinely critical articles against Israel and defend those falsely accused of anti-Semitism. But she won’t do that, because she’s a Blairite through and through.
She is killing the Guardian. And as it stands now, I and thousands of others don’t care if it dies.
The onward march of the extreme right in eastern Europe takes another fateful goosestep. Viktor Orban, the already very authoritarian president of Hungary, has used the Coronavirus crisis as the pretext to pass legislation destroying the last vestiges of the democracy there, establishing him as the country’s virtual dictator.
On Monday, Zelo Street posted a piece based on an article in the Groaniad, reporting that Hungary’s parliament, dominated by his xenophobic Fidesz Party, was expected to grant him sweeping powers. These will give Orban the ability to rule by decree. Elections will be banned. The speaker of the Hungarian parliament and parliamentary groups will be informed of the government’s actions. However, spreading false information will become a criminal offence punishable by a long prison sentence. It will be prerogative of Orban’s Fidesz MPs to decide when the emergency is over. Orban has said that when it is, he will surrender all his powers without exception. However, there’s absolutely no guarantee of this, as the laws he passed in 2016 against asylum seekers, which were also supposed to be temporary, are still in place. It’s therefore possible that a compliant parliament will allow Orban to hang on to some or all of them.
Zelo Street stated unequivocally that the EU should expel Hungary because of this seizure of power. The Sage of Crewe pointed out that when the EU was the EEC, and only consisted of France, West Germany, Italy and the Benelux countries – Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg, the dictatorships to the east and west of the bloc stood absolutely no chance of getting. This meant the Fascist dictatorships of Portugal and Spain, Greece under the military rule of the colonels, Ceausescu’s Romania and the DDR (East Germany) under Erich Honecker. He remarks that Hungary’s continued membership of the EU has been a test for its remaining member states, one that they have so far failed to tackle. He concludes
‘Viktor Orbán may be more Chaplin than Hitler. But if the values of the EU are to mean anything, the Union cannot permit a dictatorship within its club. So expel the SOB.’
Zelo Street describes this legislation as an ‘enabling law’. The reference is to the Enabling Act which formally made Adolf Hitler dictator of Germany and suspended parliamentary democracy. And the Nazis, and the Italian Fascists before them, also seized power in response to a crisis. Fascist governments are crisis regimes. In the case of Italy and Germany, the crisis was first of all the breakdown in parliamentary democracy, as the pillars of the liberal regime in those nations stopped cooperating. In Germany this led to the president, Hindenburg, ruling by decree. This was succeeded by the recession caused by the Wall Street Crash and the massive uncontrolled inflation that saw the Mark as worth far less than the paper it was printed on. This discredited capitalism for millions of Germans, leading to a surge in votes for the Nazis and the Communists. And finally there was the Reichstag fire, which allowed the Nazis to declare a state of emergency and begin rounding up subversives. Which meant anybody who didn’t cede power to Hitler, and particularly Communists and the democratic socialists of the SPD.
Fidesz is extremely xenophobic and, like many political parties in the former eastern bloc, in particular anti-Semitic and islamophobic. I’ve no doubt Orban would be overjoyed if he could somehow blame the pandemic on Gypsies, Jews, homosexuals and Muslims. And I’m afraid that where Orban’s gone, other countries will follow, such as Poland under the Law and Justice Party. Or even Britain, where Boris has also passed legislation granting him extraordinary sweeping powers to deal with the pandemic emergency.
The EU’s failure to do so is an indictment of the hypocrisy of its leading politicos. Years ago Private Eye published an account of the EU’s dictatorial attitude towards the states then seeking membership in its ‘Brussels Sprouts’ column. The terms and conditions were very detailed and were not open to negotiation. Or at least, not very much. One of the countries joining was the Czech Republic. It’s president, Vaclav Klaus, was so outraged by his country’s dictatorial treatment, and told the EU negotiating team that his country had not suffered such treatment for nearly 30 years. This was in the late ’90s – early 2000s, so he was probably referring to the Russian invasion which ended the Prague Spring, the attempt by Czech premier Anton Dubcek to make Communism popular and democratic. This infuriated two of the EU’s team, the French former radical, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, and a German MEP. They immediately climbed on their high horses and started angrily shouting about how the EU was the opposite, and was the champion of democracy. And I can remember how, about ten years ago, the EU managed to leave many people highly unimpressed when it sanctimoniously awarded a peace prize to itself, claiming that it had successfully kept the peace in Europe. Well, possibly. But I also think NATO and a general fear across the continent of another war had played a major party. If the EU is unable, or unwilling, to do anything about Orban’s seizure of power, then all the verbiage about defending democracy is simply empty, vacuous nonsense. As readers of this blog will know, I am absolutely no supporter of Brexit. But it is true that EU is an immensely flawed institution.
It’s too much to claim that the EU is some kind of authoritarian superstate, an EUSSR, as the Kippers and Brexiteers liked to describe it, or some kind of successor to the Third Reich or Napoleon’s empire. But with Orban seizing dictatorial power, it is true to say now that the EU is no bulwark of democracy either.
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.
This disturbing video comes from The Michael Brooks Show. Brooks was a co-host on Sam Seder’s Majority Report, and, like him, is Jewish. They have the same stance on Israel, attacking the Israeli state and its persecution of the Palestinians. Brooks’ criticism of this ad is all the more acute because he is partly of German Jewish heritage, the people, who first suffered the horrific persecution under the Nazis that led eventually to the attempted extermination of the Jewish people across Europe.
Brooks simply says that this is one of the most disturbing political ads ever. It’s for Ayelet Shaked, the Justice Minister in the current Likud coalition government. He describes her as far, far Right, because of the horrific comments she’s made about the Palestinians. She’s recommended killing Palestinian children, so that the ‘snakes’ don’t grow up and try to avenge their parents’ deaths by the Israelis. This is a truly Fascist statement. Himmler and the Nazis made almost exactly the same comment to justify their extermination of whole communities, which defied them. Like the Czech village of Lidice, where all males over the age of 13 were hanged. Brooks states he came to it after he was on Israeli television discussing apartheid.
The advert, in Hebrew with English subtitles, shows Ayelet spraying on perfume from a bottle marked ‘Fascism’. At the end of it, after she finishes spraying herself, she says, ‘Smells like democracy to me’.
And after further brief statements about how disturbing the ad is, that’s how this segment of The Michael Brooks Show ends. I don’t think the message behind Shaked’s video could be anymore explicit: she is actively embracing Fascism. Or if not quite that, it’s a piece of Orwellian Doublespeak where words have the opposite meaning, like ‘War is peace’. Perhaps it’s meant as rebuff to her critics, who are denouncing her as a Fascist. She might be trying to claim in a twisted way that she’s a democrat. But it’s still appalling, even if that’s the case, as it seems to suggest that what others call Fascism, she calls democracy. Which just means she’s still embracing and supporting Fascism.
Not that factions within Israeli society haven’t explicitly supported Fascism in the past. Apart from the Israeli state’s Fascistic persecution of the Palestinians, Buddy Hell has pointed out on the Guy Debord’s Cat blog that in the 1920s the early Zionist pioneers had a Fascist party, the Maximalist Legalists, who wanted to create a Fascist corporative state like Mussolini’s Italy. And Fascists and apologists for dictatorship have claimed that their regimes are somehow more democratic than the democracies. Both Hitler and Mussolini used plebiscites to legitimise their regimes, and then claimed that this proved their governments’ democratic superiority. In the 19th and early 20th centuries a series of Latin American writers and philosophers drew on Thomas Carlyle’s On Heroes and Hero-Worship to claim that the continent simply couldn’t be governed through Anglo-Saxon-style democracy, and needed the rule of great men – the caudillos, military dictators – in order to make progress. Two of these have titles which suggest their authors considered that personal dictatorship in Latin America somehow constituted a unique form of democracy suited to the continent. These were Las democracias latinas de America by the Peruvian author Francisco Garcia Calderon and Cesarismo democratico by the Venezuelan sociologist Laureano Vallenilla Lanz.
Brooks says of this video that it hasn’t been discussed much in America. There’s no need to ask why. The establishment in America, Britain and Europe supports Israel as an outpost of western democracy and culture in the Middle East. This support is strongest on the Conservative Right. In the 1970s American Conservatives claimed that Israel should be supported because of its Judaeo-Christian culture, declaring that ‘their values are our values’. A few weeks ago the wretched Katie Hopkins, who has now made herself so personally toxic that she’s been sacked from the Heil, made the same claim. Well, Mussolini also made a similar claim that he was supporting Christianity and specifically Roman Catholicism after he signed the Lateran Accords with the papacy in the late 1920s. the support Fascism received from large sections of the European Christian churches has been a stain on their reputation ever since, and has been one of the major causes of the massive growth in atheism in western Europe in the 20th century. That hasn’t stopped the religious Right in America continuing to support brutal right-wing regimes, like General Pinochet in Chile and the vicious Contras in Nicaragua. Ronald Reagan even notoriously declared that the latter were ‘the moral equivalent of our founding fathers’. Radical critics of America and its history of racism and the systematic repression of left-wing movements would probably agree. Thus the mainstream news organisations aren’t going to show or discuss this advert, because Shaked’s embrace of Fascism would immediately discredit Israel in the eyes of most severely normal people in America, Britain and elsewhere.
The advert is particularly damaging to specific examples of what may be considered anti-Semitic in the I.H.R.A. definition of anti-Semitism. This rules that it is anti-Semitic to compare Jews to Nazis, claim that Israel is a racist endeavour, or compare its persecution of the Palestinians to the Holocaust. Now Shaked in this advert hasn’t actually gone that far. She isn’t spraying herself with a perfume called ‘Nazi’, ‘Third Reich’, or ‘Hitler’. But she isn’t far off. Marxist historians would actually say that she has. Soviet historians did not refer to ‘National Socialism’ when discussing Nazism, in case this suggested that Hitler’s dictatorship was somehow similar to their own system of government. They referred to it instead as ‘Nazi-Fascism’. There are differences between Nazism and Fascism, but to most people the regimes are more or less synonymous. Nazism was a form of Fascism, and Mussolini passed racist and anti-Semitic legislation in imitation of Hitler’s Germany. If this was shown on TV and in discussed everywhere in the press, the Israel lobby could hardly try to silence those calling Israel racist and Fascist for its persecution of the Palestinians, when one of its leading cabinet ministers is shown in a campaign advert created by her own team fully embracing the accusation.
Whatever the Israel lobby now says, no matter how hard they deny it and try to silence those, who speak out about it, Shaked’s advert shows that she has no problem with Fascism, or at least being described as a Fascist. In the meantime Israel is supplying arms to real, extreme right-wing and anti-Semitic regimes like Fidesz in Hungary, the Law and Justice Party in Poland and the blatant Nazis of the Azov battalion in Ukraine. And Jewish bloggers like David Rosenberg have made their fears for these nations’ Jewish minorities very clear.
How overt does Israeli racism have to get before our media notices, or has the moral courage and integrity to report on it. And if Oswald Mosley returned to lead the BUF goose-stepping through the East End, would the Jewish Chronicle and Board of Deputies support him if he bought Israeli guns for his stormtroopers and paid his tributes to those murdered by his Nazi counterparts at Yad Vashem?
Very many congratulations to Mike, who has finally won his battle with the newspaper Private Eye refers to as the Sunset Times. Today Mike put up a piece over at his blog reporting that after over a year the rag has finally published a retraction stating that their accusations that he was an anti-Semite and a holocaust denier are false, and explaining what Mike really said and meant in his interview with them.
The Sunday Times is the last of the newspapers, which libeled Mike, to admit that it was wrong and smeared him. The other newspapers, which already made retractions and clarifications following the press regulator, IPSOS, ruling against them, were the Mail, the Sun, the Jewish Chronicle and the Express. Mike’s piece reporting this not only includes the text of the ST’s article admitting their piece on him was wrong, but also the relevant parts of the IPSOS ruling, as well as his own further remarks and clarifications.
This is excellent news, as it’s long past time that these newspapers finally told the truth and made it clear that they were wrong and that Mike is by no means any kind of Jew-hater or denies the terrible reality of the Nazi’s appalling murder of the Jews, along with millions of other victims. Mike states that ‘This is a huge victory for the fight against false allegations of anti-Semitism.‘ But the struggle against these malign accusations and the people who made and are still making them continues.
He explains that the Sunset Times smeared him after someone in the Labour Party leaked a confidential report about him to the Murdoch rag. The newspaper printed what they thought were the strongest parts of this vile document, parts which have now been disproven as lies and smears. This did not prevent Mike from being expelled from the Labour party at a kangaroo court last November, all because someone said that they were ‘upset’ by the articles he’d published. Mike states that the original accusations were made by the fringe extremist group masquerading as a charity, the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism. The CAA made their false allegations just before Mike was due to stand as a candidate in his local council elections, and which Mike believes was a corrupt attempt to prevent him being elected.
He concludes his article
This is what we must resist – false claims against innocent people, made to create political advantage. That is what this is about – not anti-Semitism, but power.
Mike’s entirely correct about this. The Campaign Against Anti-Semitism is seriously and deceptively misnamed. It isn’t remotely interested in tackling genuine anti-Semitism, but instead is part of the Zionists’ attempt to close down criticism of the Israeli government and military for the appalling barbarism inflicted on the Palestinians by smearing those, who protest against it and their defenders as anti-Semites. The CAA and the other people and organisations in this malign campaign have smeared genuinely decent, anti-racist women and men, who have frequently themselves suffered for their determination to combat racism and real, genuine anti-Semitism. These have included proud, self-respecting Jews, like Jackie Walker, Tony Greenstein and Martin Odoni, as well as passionate non-Jewish anti-Fascists like Ken Livingstone and Mark Wadsworth.
And just as decent anti-Nazis have been smeared, the Israel lobby has lent its support to real Fascists, like the Law and Justice Party in Poland, Viktor Orban and Fidesz in Hungary, and feted real Fascists like Richard Spencer of the Alt Right, Steve Bannon and Sebastian Gorka in Israel itself, to the horror of many thousands of decent Israelis.
Mike has won a profound victory, but the people, newspapers and organisations behind this campaign of lies and vilification are still continuing with their malign falsehoods, including the Zionist organization, the Jewish Labour Movement, previously Paole Zion, and the Blairites in the Labour party. It’s high time this smear campaign was utterly and totally discredited, and the decent people they have hounded out of the Labour party given a proper apology and had their membership restored.
Throughout his battle with the press, Mike has enjoyed the support of the very great people, who comment and enjoy his blog. Some of whom have posted their congratulations to him in the comments section of his article. One of the most interesting of these was from Alas Poor Uric, who remarked
Excellent news Mike, and well done! You have actually made a significant contribution to those of Jewish background (like myself) who have been disturbed by the misuse of anti-semitism for political reasons. The media Reform Group:
‘The Media Reform Coalition has conducted in-depth research on the controversy surrounding antisemitism in the Labour Party, focusing on media coverage of the crisis during the summer of 2018. Following extensive case study research, we identified myriad inaccuracies and distortions in online and television news including marked skews in sourcing, omission of essential context or right of reply, misquotation, and false assertions made either by journalists themselves or sources whose contentious claims were neither challenged nor countered. Overall, our findings were consistent with a disinformation paradigm. ‘
You have shown more discernment on this issue than some in the Jewish community itself.
This is interesting, as it confirms what many other people have been saying: that this is a deliberate campaign of misinformation. There have been articles elsewhere that have claimed that this is all being run by a section of the Israeli Foreign Ministry as part of their hasbara campaign of civilian propaganda.
And there are a very large number of people, not just Jews, who are like Uric in being concerned at the political misuse of accusations of anti-Semitism. It cheapens the term, so that it loses its power to warn and defend Jews against the threat of real anti-Semites and Nazis.
So congratulations to Mike, and thanks to everyone, who has supported him in his fight. And I wish it will not be long before everyone, who’s been smeared receives similar retractions and apologies from the liars, who maligned them.
This is another video from the Boston-based Real News network. It’s a report on the steady march towards the extreme right by the Polish government’s Law and Justice party, and their collaboration with Fascism and Holocaust revisionism. The country’s a member of the EU and NATO, and is bitterly hostile to Russia, from whom it has requested America provide protection. Donald Trump is thus considering building a new NATO base there, named after himself. Naturally.
The video discusses the march through Warsaw last month, November, 2018, to commemorate the centenary of Poland’s independence. 200,000 people attended. The march was, however, initially organized by the Far Right, and attended by extreme right-wing groups from all over Europe. The march was then co-sponsored by the government, and the president, Andzrei Duda, marched in front of a number of explicitly Fascist organisations.
The programme talks about this with Dr. Dovid Katz, an academic specializing in the rise of Fascism in eastern Europe, who is rightly alarmed by these developments. He states that Fascism exists in many countries, but it bodes badly for democracy when the government partners with it. He describes how the Polish government has been increasingly taking the country towards Fascism. Katz says that this is ‘so sad’ because Poland was the first major country invaded by Hitler, with no disrespect to Czechoslovakia. It’s thus particularly alarming to see Nazis marching on Poland’s hallowed national day, along with the president and thousands of other, non-Nazi people, who nevertheless felt comfortable marching with the Far Right. He pays tribute to the mayor of Warsaw, Hanna Gronkiewicz-Waltz, who tried to prevent the march from going ahead, but was overruled by the rest of the council. As well as leading politicians, the Groaniad reported that the Polish armed forces also marched side by side with Fascist organisations like the National-Radical Camp, or ONR, the successor to a pre-War anti-Semitic organization, as well as the Italian Fascist organization, Forza Nuova.
Gronkiewicz-Waltz apparently came from the Centrist party, but her attempt to ban the march was overturned by Duda, who announced that it would go ahead as the Rightists had originally planned. A court also overturned the ban, effectively combining the government and Fascist marches. The government put a cordon of military police between the two marches, but Katz argues that this really did nothing to distance the government from the Fascists. Katz states that the governments collaborating with the Far Right, such as those in the three Baltic states, use similar tactics, but they don’t morally make any difference. He makes the point that on this sacred day, the government is showing that it’s in solidarity with people who believe in Aryan purity, who hate Jews, Blacks, Roma and gays. In other words, all the same people the Nazis hated.
The documentary notes that the Law and Justice party began as a nominally centre right party with a strong Christian orientation. Since taking power in 2015 it has moved further right. This year, 2018, it purged the supreme court of a third of its members, and reappointed their successors in October, provoking protests. It has also become increasingly nationalistic. Katz states that as centre-right party, it was ostensibly like the British Tories and American Republicans. But its far-right character has been revealed by its neutralization of democracy through the attacks on the independence of the judiciary. He states that it’s to Poland’s credit that there is a vibrant opposition which has led to the situation being covered, unlike similar events in the Baltic states.
But parallel to the attacks on democracy is the rise of ethnic nationalism and an emphasis on the racial purity of the Polish people. This has also come with a rise in anti-Semitism. The video shows a clipping from a newspaper report about a hostel that declared that it was only for Poles, Jews were forbidden. This is despite the majority of Polish having been either killed or fled during the Holocaust. In February this year, Duda passed a law criminalizing the mention of Polish complicity in the Holocaust. This effectively made Holocaust revisionism mandatory, and anyone who discussed the reality of Polish complicity in the Holocaust could be jailed for up to three years. Katz states that it is important to recognize that most Poles aren’t anti-Semites and never were. In the case of the Holocaust, a quarter of the Righteous Gentiles, the rescuers of Jews, in Europe during the Nazi era came from Poland. He also states that for hundreds of years, the Polish kingdom and then the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth provided a haven for Jews and other minorities. But these new Fascist forces are tapping into the worst forms of Polish nationalism and Roman Catholicism, which also had a deep anti-Semitic theological tradition built into them, which the Nazis were easily able to exploit. And the term ‘Christian’ here is being used as a dog-whistle for ‘ethnic Poles’. Katz states that Poland is a very ethnically homogenous country. There is no challenge to Polish ethnic identity. It’s the Far Right attempt to create and exploit problems, which don’t exist. And the real victims of this attempt to create a Fascist state are the Poles.
Katz goes on to say that Poland was different from the Baltic states and western Ukraine, in that it was the victim of the Nazis, and so has nothing to fake history about. The law banning any discussion of Polish involvement in the Holocaust was also expressed in blatantly anti-Semitic terms. In the Baltic states, however, the wording of similar laws is much more deceptive. The equivalent law in Ukraine talks about equal evaluation of totalitarian regimes. Which means that if someone says that only the Nazis committed genocide, and that the Soviet crimes, as horrific as they were, don’t constitute genocide, then they can be sent to prison. In Latvia this is five years, 2 years in Lithuania, three in Hungary and 10 in Ukraine.
The international outcry that followed the passage of Poland’s Holocaust law forced the government to amend it to make it less severe and remove the jail sentences. But this problem isn’t confined to Poland. Katz is a member of the web journal, Defending History, which tracks Holocaust revisionism in eastern Europe. They stress that Fascism is appearing elsewhere in eastern European NATO member states. The anti-Semitism in the Baltic isn’t overt – the government sponsors Jewish plaques, conferences and memorials, but there is still the Fascist emphasis on ethnic purity and the desire to falsify the history of the Holocaust.
Katz is an excellent speaker, who clearly has a deep respect for Poland and its people. He’s also right about Poland providing a refuge for the Jews during the centuries of persecution. And there are monuments in Poland to those, who helped the Jews in the Holocaust.
Poland was the victim of genocide and ethnic cleansing under the Nazis. Hitler himself said that the war against the Poles would be one of extermination. Of the gentile Christians, who were persecuted by the Nazis, the majority were Polish Roman Catholics. The Nazis despised the Slavonic peoples of eastern Europe as non-Aryan subhumans. The handbooks issued to the Hitler Youth urging them to keep themselves racially pure had diagrams showing the typical features of the peoples of Europe. Those of the Slavic peoples, beginning with the Poles, are shown has becoming increasingly east Asian, with high cheekbones and slanted eyes, until they finally merge into those of the peoples of China and the other Asian countries.
Nevertheless, there is a deep strain of anti-Semitism and xenophobia in these countries that is being exploited. I wonder how much of the trend towards Fascism in Poland is being driven by the same economic and psychological forces behind the rise of the Far Right in Hungary. Poland’s another state that had to fight for its independence against domination by the German, Austiran and Russian Empires, and was threatened by the Turkish conquest of the Balkans and expansionism from the 15th to 17th centuries. I’m left wondering if the Polish people also suffered through the collapse of Communism, like those of Russia and Hungary. And if they also, like Hungary, were badly hit by the 2008 financial crash.
And despite their affected concern with defending Jews from anti-Semitism, Israel and its lobbyists in Britain will not attack the Polish government. Because Poland, like Ukraine and Hungary, has bought Israeli arms. Thus Stephen Pollard, the editor of the Jewish Chronicle, appeared in the pages of the Guardian to deny that the Law and Justice Party was anti-Semitic, because they were good friends of Israel.
One of our uncles was Polish, a man who worked his way across Europe from Germany to France until he came to Britain. He was a decent man, who worked hard to support his family. It’s horrifying that his country is going down the same path towards Fascism, and that Nazism is rising again in eastern Europe with connivance of these nations’ governments.
Everyone in the West has to join together to fight it, before it undermines all of western civilization.
Also according to Hope Not Hate, the remains of the BNP were also going to hold a conference at the Talbot Social Club, Blackpool, on the 22nd September 2018. The advertised topic was ‘White victims of Multiculturalism’, but Hope Not Hate suggested instead that, given the people attending, the conference was going to be about Jews and the Holocaust. The anti-racist, anti-religious extremism organization’s article, written by Matthew Collins, gives a graphic description of the very poor levels of hygiene in some of the establishments in which the BNP held their conferences, as well as the very sordid antics those attending got up to. Orgies and drug-taking are only part of it, and it makes for grim reading. It also gives a list and very brief biographical notes of those speaking at the event.
One of those speaking is Andrew Brons, a long-time Nazi. In the 1980s Brons was a member of the ‘Strasserite’ wing of the National Front. These took their inspiration from Otto and Gregor Strasser, the two members of the Nazi party, who took the ‘socialist’ section of the party’s ideology seriously. Hitler had them purged during the Night of the Long Knives. One of the brothers was killed, and the other fled the country.
Like many others in the NF, Brons liked to dress up in Nazi uniform in the 1970s. He got into the pages of Private Eye for one such incident, which the Eye republished again in the 1990s or early part of this century, when he poked his head out of whatever stone he’d been hiding under once again.
Brons and another Nazi had been and about in Birmingham in Nazi dress, shouting, and, in the Eye’s words, frightening old ladies. A member of Birmingham’s finest arrived to give Brons and the other storm trooper the advice to desist. The officer, incidentally, was Asian. Brons didn’t take the advice, and instead gave the officer a lecture on how there was freedom of speech in this country. But he didn’t expect someone from an inferior race, like the good constable, to understand this.
Which clearly shows what a racist idiot Brons is, and how he was stupidly doing his level best to get himself arrested and spent some time down in the cells.
And from the descriptions of the rest of the stormtroopers planning to attend, they’re no better.
I don’t doubt that some Antifa were there to protest the event. But somehow I doubt very much that there will be anyone from the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism or the Jewish establishment there to demonstrate against these very real racists and anti-Semites. Because they’re far more interested in concocting fake accusations against Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour party in order to preserve Israel from criticism over its vile treatment of the Palestinians. Besides, Israel itself welcomes members of the Far Right, like Trump’s former aide, Steve Bannon, Richard Spencer, the founder and leader of the Alt Right, and Sebastian Gorka, so long as they support the country. As does Stephen Pollard, the gentile editor of the Jewish Chronicle, who wrote a piece in the Groaniad declaring that Michal Kaminski of the far-right Law and Justice Party in Poland wasn’t an anti-Semite, because he was a good friend of Israel.
You can therefore expect no-one, or hardly anyone, from the Jewish establishment to turn up there to protest against people who are, unlike Corbyn, very definitely an existential threat to British Jews.
Viktor Orban is the president of Hungary and the leader of the Fidesz party, a far right, ultra-nationalist outfit which is deeply anti-Semitic. One of the Jewish bloggers put up a list of the regime’s comments about the Jews. They’re deeply, viciously anti-Semitic and could have come straight from the Nazis during the Third Reich. But, like Poland’s Law and Justice Party, the Israel lobby claims they’re not anti-Semitic, because they’ve bought a lot of Israel armaments. And so Israel and its satellite organisations in this country defend deeply racist regimes, which really do appear to present a real existential threat to their countries’ Jewish populations.
And the Tories also support them. Last week the EU was going to pass an official motion censuring Hungary for its racism, which is also directed towards Muslims and immigrants. The Tories in the European parliament voted against it and blocked the motion. Tweezer has tried to excuse herself from this support of Fascism by claiming that she didn’t know which way they were going to vote. This is a likely story. Dave Cameron, her predecessor, took the Tories out of the main bloc of centre-right European parties in the EU parliament, and instead put them alongside the far right with ultra-nationalist and far right parties like the Sweden Democrats and the True Finns.
She could also have had an idea which way the EU Tories were going to vote by reading the Spectator. Their columnists were similarly deeply impressed by Orban and his storm troopers. And according to Private Eye for 4-17 May 2018, this attitude within the Tory rag had spread to its wine column. The Eye wrote
The last Eye noted the enthusiasm of some bigwigs at the Spectator for Viktor Orban, the nationalist prime minister of Hungary, despite a leader in the magazine criticizing Orban’s crackdown on press freedom. Now the Spectator turf war has spread to… the wine column.
Bruce Anderson wrote last week that he had been invited to the Hungarian embassy to taste some sweet Tokaji wine, courtesy of the ambassador, “a good friend of President Orban’s”. Anderson opined: “Mr Orban is much demonized… [he]is a patriot and a Christian: how deeply unfashionable. He believes Hungary should control its own borders: how un-European…Having escaped Soviet rule, he is not interested in being told what to do by the Germans. How absurd: does he not realise that it is more than 70 years since the Germans tried to exterminate anyone?”
Meanwhile, one of Hungary’s most popular newspapers, belonging to a tycoon who recently broke faith with Orban, has just closed after 80 years, as has a radio station with the same owner. Still, some bottles must be troken in the name of producing a nice Tokaji! (p. 9).
Anderson neglects to mention in his piece that it wasn’t just the Germans, who were responsible for the mass murder of Hungary’s Jews. It was the Hungarian regime, led by Admiral Horthy, that was responsible for allying the country with Nazi Germany and allowing the Nazis and the SS to operate within its borders to deport Jewish Hungarians to the death camps.
Alsom you can see, there’s absolutely no mention of Orban’s anti-Semitism or islamophobia, or his party’s deep hatred of Gypsies as well as immigrants. The Eye’s article just mentions the regime’s threat to the freedom of the press, as though this was only thing that Orban’s regime threatened.
Rosenberg’s article is particularly interesting, as he states that it was because one member of the Board of Deputies of British Jews expressed mild displeasure at Cameron throwing the Tories in with the Polish Law and Justice Party that led to the creation of the Jewish Leadership Council.
A previous slightly left-leaning president of the Board of Deputies, Vivian Wineman, expressed concern in 2010 about David Cameron’s decision to link with the Polish Law and Justice Party in founding the Tories’ current Euro Parliament group. Unfortunately that seems to have been the very last time the Board commented negatively on Tory behaviour and alliances in Europe. There is really no excuse for the Board of Deputies’ shameful silence that has persisted until this week’s events. And there are certainly no excuses now, having expressed concern, for the Board of Deputies not to demand some action by the Tories now that the vote has taken place .
It was discontent with the Board having the temerity to speak out in 2010 that led a group of Jewish businessmen and professionals to announce the formation of the (unelected) Jewish Leadership Council as a rival source of authority in the Jewish community. That Jewish Leadership Council, the Campaign Against Antisemitism, Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis, who all enthusiastically waded into rows over Jeremy Corbyn and alleged antisemitism have been strangely quiet since the Tories lined up with some of the ugliest right-wing forces in Wednesday’s vote in the European Parliament. Maybe it has been a Jewish holiday that I didn’t know about where you are not allowed to criticise Tories – or maybe it is just the case that their concern about antisemitism is more politically selective, and they certainly haven’t wanted to upset either the Tory Party or their friend Benjamin Netanyahu.
Beastrabban\'s Weblog 