New Labour’s Connections to Fascism

Yesterday the EHRC’s report into anti-Semitism in the Labour party was published, and was spun for all it was worth as confirmation that Jeremy Corbyn was anti-Semitic and so was the party under him. Except for all those brave, Zionist Blairites that spoke out and denounced him and his followers, of course. Followers that included large, vocal numbers of entirely self-respecting Jews, who were attacked and vilified as self-hating anti-Semites themselves.

One of those, who decided to put his oar into all this was Ed Balls, a former New Labour cabinet minister. As Mike has pointed out on his blog, this is very much a case of a man in a glass house throwing stones. Not only did Balls once turn up at a party dressed as a Nazi, he also presented a BBC programme a year ago in which he met real Nazis. Apparently he even said he liked them, and that they were nice. So there’s just a little touch of hypocrisy here.

See: https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2020/10/28/ed-balls-speaks-out-about-labour-anti-semitism-who-cares/

Now dressing up as a Nazi for a student party is obviously tasteless and offensive, but doesn’t necessarily mean that someone’s a Nazi. But some of the accusations of anti-Semitism used against Corbyn’s supporters were far less substantial than such pranks. For example, there was the lad, who posted an image of a Jobcentre with the slogan ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ on its sign. This was supposed to be anti-Semitic for disrespecting Jewish suffering in the Holocaust. But this ignores the fact that the slogan was used on all concentration camps, including those housing gentile political prisoners. And the slogan accurately describes the Tory mentality towards the disabled and long term sick. Iain Duncan Smith actually said so in an online article, before someone told him that quoting the Nazis approvingly doesn’t look good, and he removed the offending paragraph.

If you want a second example, consider the press feeding frenzy which occurred when Corbyn was seen to nod in agreement when Heijo Meyer, a Holocaust survivor, said that Israel was doing to the Palestinians what the Nazis did to him. Oh, the anti-Semitism! What foul perfidy and Jew-hatred! Except that Nazis don’t usually agree with Holocaust survivors. The Nazi strategy is to try to deny that the Shoah ever happened, or claim that it was somehow smaller than it really was. They don’t usually support Holocaust survivors, who speak about their experiences.

And there’s obviously a profound difference between Israel and Jews. The two definitely aren’t synonymous, and according to the I.H.R.A. definition of anti-Semitism which the Board of Deputies and the Chief Rabbi were so desperate to foist upon the party, it is anti-Semitic to confuse the two. Which is very obviously the case with Corbyn’s accusers. It isn’t anti-Semitic to criticise Israel for its crimes against the Palestinians, any more than attacking Saudi Arabia for its human rights record automatically means that you hate Arabs.

As for meeting Nazis and describing them as nice people, unfortunately, I can well believe that some of them are personally nice people. A German Jewish bloke, who infiltrated a neo-Nazi organisation leading to its exposure in the German media, said the same about some of them when he was interviewed. He said that amongst the Nazis he met were ordinary, otherwise decent Germans, who believed the Holocaust never happened. That’s part of the danger. Murderous, dangerous ideas can be held by otherwise entirely decent people. One of the Islamist scumbags who murdered Lee Rigby all those years ago put up a video telling the world that he was really a nice person, who would help old ladies up the stairs. And I dare say he was right. If all Nazis and jihadis were antisocial, ranting, bullying maniacs, nobody would join them or stay in their organisations for very long. They’d leave because of their noxious personalities. But unfortunately, Nazis and other murderous extremists don’t always behave like their stereotypes, and this does mean that they can appear plausible. That fact that Ed Balls personally liked some of them doesn’t mean that Balls is a Nazi. Just like the fact that because Corbyn appeared alongside Palestinian activists, who had terrible views on killing Israelis, doesn’t mean that Corbyn supported their views. But no such doubts were extended to the Labour leader.

It was almost to be expected that Balls or one of his New Labour colleagues was going to comment about all this. Not only was Balls a former cabinet minister under Blair and Brown, but like Blair and other members of the New Labour clique, he’s also an alumnus of BAP – the British-American Project for the Successor Generation, to give it its full title. This was a Reaganite scheme in which promising British politicos from all parties were sought out and given opportunities to work and study in America in order to cement the Atlantic alliance. After going on one of these BAP jaunts to meet American right-wingers, Blair returned to England convinced of the need to retain our nuclear deterrent, while previously he had believed in getting rid of it.

America supports Israel, and Blair and Brown were ardent supporters of America, and so it follows that they too would support Israel. Apart from the fact that they supported Israel anyway, for which Blair received funding from pro-Israel Jewish businessmen. This was garnered through the efforts of Lord Levi, who Blair met at a gathering at the Israeli embassy. And mentioning that doesn’t make you an anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist either.

But Blair also had personal connections to Fascism. He was mates with Berlusconi, whose Forza Italia party was in coalition with the Alleanza Nazionale. The Allianza Nazionale were former Fascists, after the neo-Fascist party, the Movimiento Sociale Italiano or Italian Social Movement, was dissolved by its leader, Gianfranco Fini, and reformed as a centre-right Conservative party. The best comment I’ve seen on Fini was in the pages of a book I read on Fascism years ago. It showed a photo of Fini when the Fascists were discarding the black shirts and adopting business suits in an attempt to make themselves look respectably middle class. It was called ‘filofascismo’, presumably a portmanteau of the Italian for filofax and Fascism. Fini appeared in a suit and round-rimmed glasses with business jacket slung casually over his shoulder. The photo was captioned ‘Would you buy a used ideology from this man?’ The answer is, ‘No, no, I definitely wouldn’t. Not even dressed up as Conservatism’.

More sinisterly, David Mills, the husband of New Labour minister Tessa Jowell, was a lawyer engaged to defend a genuine Fascist. I got a feeling this guy was one of those responsible for the Bologna railway bombing in the late ’70s. This was a Fascist terrorist atrocity in which the squadristi bombed that Italian town’s railway station, killing and maiming something like 121 people.

This shows up New Labour’s hypocrisy and that of the Tories and their accomplices in the media even more. Corbyn, like other members of the Labour left, was smeared as a supporter of the IRA because of his concern for a just peace in Northern Ireland. He wasn’t, and various Ulster Loyalists have said that he was fair and perfectly civil and friendly towards them. But this was ignored in the scramble to vilify him as a supporter of Irish nationalist terrorism. But obviously, as David Mills’ example shows, it’s perfectly acceptable to the British right for the spouses of New Labour ministers to work for genuine Fascists responsible for killing and mutilation of over a hundred innocents.

And that should also raise genuine questions of anti-Semitism. The Italian Fascists originally hadn’t been anti-Semitic. Mussolini himself had ridiculed Hitler’s biological racism, but as Nazism took over from Italian Fascism as the more influential movement, Mussolini tried to ingratiate himself and his regime by adopting racism. In 1937 the Fascists published their manifesto on race and passed legislation defining the Italian people as Aryans, and banning Jews from certain professions. The Charter of Verona, which set out the ideology of Mussolini’s rump Fascist state in Salo, declared that Jews weren’t part of the Italian nation. And contemporary Italian Fascists, like Fascists everyone, are violently anti-immigrant and racist.

Considering Blair’s and co.’s connections to real Fascism, Balls has got absolutely no business accusing Corbyn and his supporters of anti-Semitism whatsoever.

After Christchurch Massacre, Beeb Invites Nazi on to Newsnight

This is another story from Tim Fenton over at Zelo Street, and it’s absolutely unbelievable. Just as the world was in shock and mourning for the 49 Muslim lives lost and the many more wounded at the hands of Fascist gunmen in Christchurch, New Zealand, the Beeb decided to get the views of the other side of the incident on Newsnight. They invited on Benjamin Jones, the leader of Generation Identity UK. Zelo Street then quotes Wikipedia to show why they’re considered a Fascist organization.

According to the Wikipedia article, Generation Identity have gone in for such racist stunts as distrusting soup containing pork in order to exclude Jews and Muslims, and in 2018 Facebook banned them for hate speech and extremist content. In December that year, Al-Jazeera broadcast another documentary, Undercover Hate, in which one of their journo infiltrated Generation Identity, and secretly filmed them racially abusing and attacking immigrants in Lille, calling for violence against Muslims, and which alleged they had contacts with the Front National.

Zelo Street then gives a series of tweets from rightly angry members of the public wondering what got into the Beeb’s heads. One of them, Tom Kibasi, demanded answer from Esme Wren, the programme’s editor, and said he would be putting in a complaint. Novara Media’s Ash Sarkar also complained, and said that it showed how disposable Muslim lives were to the Beeb. She also said she didn’t recall ISIS being given a chance to speak on Newsnight after the Manchester bombing. But Waqas Tufail did remember how Newsnight had on Anjem Chaudhury, the Islamist extremist, after the murder of Lee Rigby, and complained that some things don’t change.

The article concludes

Is Newsnight trying too hard to be a bit edgy? Is this the current idea of balance at the programme? Someone isn’t engaging brain first. And that’s not good enough.

See:
https://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2019/03/bbc-platforms-actual-nazi.html

This once again raises the question of bias on the Beeb. I can remember a decade or so ago when it seemed Nick Griffin and the BNP were about to make their final breakthrough into British politics. The Beeb caused uproar then when they invited him on to Question Time. And Buddy Hell over at Guy Debord’s cat has consistently argued that the television producers are softer on their treatment of the Far Right than they are with the left, inviting leading figures in the National Front and even Oswald Mosley onto their programmes to be interviewed. The Beeb’s argument in these cases is that it has duty to represent all forms of opinion across the spectrum. A case is also made that by bringing Fascists on to television and interrogated, they can be shown for what they are and their appeal tackled and undermined. The argument against that is simply that they are being given a platform to disseminate their vile views.

There’s also more than just a whiff of hypocrisy here. The Beeb has joined the rest of the media in its smearing of Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour party as anti-Semites. But to my knowledge absolutely none of those smeared – Ken Livingstone, Jackie Walker, Tony Greenstein, Cyril Chilson, Martin Odoni, Mike Sivier, Marc Wadsworth and so on – have been invited onto any mainstream news or current affairs show to present their side. As far as I know, the only news networks that have were the alternative media, like RT, which had both Livingstone and Walker on, if I recall correctly. And I’m not surprised, because if they really allowed Leninspart, Walker and co. to speak, it would show how utterly shallowed and false these accusations are.

And so we have the serious injustice that genuine anti-racists are debarred from appearing on television because of utterly false accusations of Jew-hatred, while the real racists are given a platform after those, who share the views commit horrific acts of violence.

This shows that there is something very, very wrong with mainstream, and particularly BBC news. It is no longer fit for purpose.

CounterPunch on British Spies’ Recruitment of Islamist Fighters against Syria

On April 5 CounterPunch posted an article on their blog examining the number of Islamist extremists, who the British intelligence agencies had tried to recruit, including a number, who had then been caught travelling to Syria. They concluded that there are very strong reasons for believing that the spooks are trying to recruitment them as part of a strategy to overturn Assad’s regime.

The article begins by noting that British intelligence was responsible for the ‘dodgy dossier’, the spurious intelligence document claiming that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, which provided the pretext for Blair to join Bush’s invasion. They then note that 500 British citizens have gone to Syria, 50 of whom have subsequently been killed in fighting. They then discuss the individual cases of those who have been approached by the spooks. These include:

Michael Adebolajo, one of the killers of Lee Rigby;

Three sisters from Bradford, who decamped to Syria. It seems they had been contacted by NECTU, the North East Counter Terrorism Unit, who had actively encouraged them to go to Syria to contact their brother, who was already there;

Mozzam Begg, who claimed MI5 had given him permission to train recruits for Syria;

Aimen Dean, who in Radio 4 interview claimed he had been recruited by MI6. Part of his duties included training impressionable Muslims to fight in Syria;

Bherlin Gildo, who had been intercepted travelling from Copenhagen to Manila to attend a terrorist training camp. His trial at the Old Bailey collapsed when it became apparent that if it carried on, it would lead to embarrassing revelations about Britain’s spies;

Siddharta Dhar, who was caught trying to travel to Syria for the sixth time. The intelligence services had also attempted to recruit him;

And the original ‘Jihadi John’, Mohammed Emwazi, was also known to the British intelligence service, who had also tried to recruit him.

They conclude:

These cases demonstrate a couple of irrefutable points. Firstly, the claim that the security services would have needed more power and resources to have prevented these abscondances is clearly not true. Since 1995, the Home Office has operated what it calls a ‘Warnings Index’: a list of people ‘of interest’ to any branch of government, who will then be ‘flagged up’ should they attempt to leave the country. Given that every single one of these cases was well known to the authorities, the Home Office had, for whatever reason, decided either not to put them on the Warnings Index, or to ignore their attempts to leave the country when they were duly flagged up. That is, the government decided not to use the powers already at its disposal to prevent those at the most extreme risk of joining the Syrian insurgency from doing so.

Secondly, these cases show that British intelligence and security clearly prioritise recruitment of violent so-called Islamists over disruption of their activities. The question is – what exactly are they recruiting them for?

At his trial, Bherlin Gildo’s lawyers provided detailed evidence that the British government itself had been arming and training the very groups that Gildo was being prosecuted for supporting. Indeed, Britain has been one of the most active and vocal supporters of the anti-government insurgency in Syria since its inception, support which continued undiminished even after the sectarian leadership and direction of the insurgency was privately admitted by Western intelligence agencies in 2012. Even today, with ISIS clearly the main beneficiaries of the country’s destabilization, and Al Qaeda increasingly hegemonic over the other anti-government forces, David Cameron continues to openly ally himself with the insurgency.

Is it really such a far-fetched idea that the British state, openly supporting a sectarian war against the Ba’athist government in Syria, might also be willfully facilitating the flow of British fighters to join this war? Britain’s long history of collusion with sectarian paramilitaries as a tool of foreign policy – in Ireland, Afghanistan and throughout the Gulf – certainly suggests this may be so.

Go to their article at: http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/04/05/british-collusion-with-sectarian-violence-in-syria/ for further information.

As for the reasons why the British government should want to overthrow Assad, my guess is that a number of them are about the geopolitics of the Middle East, as well as the Neo-Con, Neo-Lib urge to get their hands on the Syrian state’s assets and then sell them off, just as they did to Iraq. Assad’s regime is Ba’ath, which is secular, Arab nationalist and Socialist. They’re allied with the Russians and, although the country has not been in military conflict with Israel for some time, technically it is still at war. And oil may still be a priority, due to the proximity to several pipelines. On several of the American Conservative blogs after the Iraq invasion there were demands for the war to be expanded to oust Assad. My guess is that Britain is covertly following this policy by arming and supporting Islamist fighters.

If this is the case, then there’s a huge irony here. Islamists bitterly hate the state of Israel, and yet if they are being recruited by the West to overthrow Assad, they are being so as part of a strategy to defend Israel from a nation that has supported the Palestinians. Which should be a good reason for any prospective jihadi to think better of it and stay at home. As well as not becoming a murderous thug, whose organisations have done nothing but spread brutality, chaos and murder amongst the already beleaguered and suffering people of the Arab and Muslim world.

Laughing at UKIP and Britain First

I found these jokes about UKIP on the Facebook pages Britain Furst and Britian First, parodying the Fascist splinter group, Britain First. This new squad of stormtroopers claim to be non-racist, but in fact split off from the BNP. Their policies are, of course, militant super-patriotism, and a hatred of immigrants and Islam. They also specialise in fraud and raising money under false pretences, and tastelessly exploiting the vicious murder of Lee Rigby to push their own anti-Islamic views. The Angry Yorkshireman over at Another Angry Voice has an excellent article demonstrating that they are indeed, Fascists, ’12 things You Should Know about Britain First’, whatever they claim to the contrary at http://anotherangryvoice.blogspot.co.uk/2014/06/12-things-britain-first.html. He has also put up a previous post detailing why he has reported them to the Electoral Commission, because of their misleading advertising. They use issues like animal cruelty to advertise themselves, without mentioning that they are a political party, so that many of the genuine animal lovers who may donate to them are probably unaware that they are a bunch of Fascists. The article’s ‘An Open Letter to the Electoral Commission’, at http://anotherangryvoice.blogspot.co.uk/2014/06/open-letter-electoral-commission.html.

The two parody sites have also taken a pop at the racism and xenophobia in UKIP, which is desperately trying to shake off its reputation as the ‘BNP-lite’. Despite Farage’s assertion that they are a non-sectarian and non-racist party, they certainly seem to contain more than their fair share of racists and xenophobes. The stormtroopers of Britain First only managed to put up two candidates at the election, both in Wales, and so urged their supporters in the rest of the UK to vote for UKIP. Hence the parodies of the latter party on the two satirical sites. Here are some of the jokes they put up as a response.

This was posted by Julian Brown on Britian First:

Those of us who grew up in the ’80s may remember their song, ‘I want to know what love is’, which had the lines, ‘I want you to show me’.

‘Britian First’ themselves post this one, with following explanation:

Now we all know my felings on Nigel farade ( clue : hes a LEFTIE LIBERAL ) but when he did that interveiw last week i thought he exelled himself !! He said what were all thinking and if you say you werent thinking what Nigel was thinging then youre clearly lieing !! But how do you know weather youre neighbers are Romanien or German ?? Well , heres a czech list ( Gerrit ?? ) to find out !@!

Then there’s this from Britain Furst. This refers back to David Icke’s bonkers idea that the world is secretly run by a conspiracy of Reptoid aliens, who have passed themselves off for thousands of years as members of our ruling elites. This includes members of the royal family and, er, Ted Heath, the former Conservative Prime Minister. In an interview on an internet radio show, Icke stated that in the 1980s he was called on to do a television interview. Entering the dressing room, he found Ted Heath already there. Icke greeted him, but the veteran Tory politician said nothing, but coolly looked him up and down. As he did so, he betrayed his reptilian nature as his eyes went completely black.

I think this story says more about the possible lighting conditions in TV dressing rooms, and the bizarre state of Icke’s own mind and the fallibility of human memory than it ever does about the supposed reptilian nature of Tory politicos. There are indeed many reptiles on the Tory benches, but sadly, none of them come from outer space and their cold-blooded nature is only metaphorical.

Britain Furst is at https://www.facebook.com/BritiainFurst?fref=ts, while Britian First can be found at https://www.facebook.com/britianfirst?fref=ts. They’re both strongly recommended if you love laughing at Fascists and want to stop them by making them look more ridiculous than they already are.