A Respectable, Academic Examination of Jews in the American Slave Trade

Simon Webb put up a piece yesterday about how one of the London bookshops had a whole bookcase devoted to the transatlantic slave trade. I’m not surprised at this development. Bookshops are businesses, after all, and exist to sell books. And transatlantic slavery is very much a subject of contemporary controversy and debate, and so you can expect that there’s a demand for books on it. Especially in London, with its large Black population. Nor am I worried by some of the books that branch of Waterstone’s or whoever are stocking. One of the books on the shelf shown in the thumbnail to the video is Slavery and Slaving in African History This is a very respectable academic discussion of the subject. It traces the history of slavery in the continent right back into prehistory and describes historic and contemporary indigenous slavery in Africa, as well as obviously the transatlantic slave trade. Webb is concerned, rightly in my opinion, that many discussions of Black slavery omit the involvement of Black Africans themselves. This book certain doesn’t play that aspect down, and I can imagine that any militant anti-racists seeking to put the blame solely on the west would be very disappointed with it. But it also contains information on contemporary African organisations, set up by former slaves, to campaign against the continued existence of human bondage on the continent.

The history section in Bristol’s branch of Waterstone’s also contained a sizable number of books on slavery. Madge Dresser, one of the lecturers of the University of the West of England, former Bristol Polytechnic, ran a course on the transatlantic slave trade. She also published a book, Slavery Obscured, on Bristol’s continued participation in the slave trade after it had been banned. I made a note of the books on the shelves, as well as a few others I found interesting at the time.

One of these was Saul Friedman’s Jews and the American Slave Trade, which is an academic rebuttal of the lies of the Nation of Islam that the Jews were responsible for the American slave trade. The description of it on Amazon runs

‘The Nation of Islam’s Secret Relationship between Blacks and Jews has been called one of the most serious anti-Semitic manuscripts published in years. This work of so-called scholars received great celebrity from individuals like Louis Farrakhan, Leonard Jeffries, and Khalid Abdul Muhammed who used the document to claim that Jews dominated both transatlantic and antebellum South slave trades. As Saul Friedman definitively documents in Jews and the American Slave Trade, historical evidence suggests that Jews played a minimal role in the transatlantic, South American, Caribbean, and antebellum slave trades.Jews and the American Slave Trade dissects the questionable historical technique employed in Secret Relationship, offers a detailed response to Farrakhan’s charges, and analyzes the impetus behind these charges. He begins with in-depth discussion of the attitudes of ancient peoples, Africans, Arabs, and Jews toward slavery and explores the Jewish role hi colonial European economic life from the Age of Discovery tp Napoleon. His state-by-state analyses describe in detail the institution of slavery in North America from colonial New England to Louisiana. Friedman elucidates the role of American Jews toward the great nineteenth-century moral debate, the positions they took, and explains what shattered the alliance between these two vulnerable minority groups in America.Rooted in incontrovertible historical evidence, provocative without being incendiary, Jews and the American Slave Trade demonstrates that the anti-slavery tradition rooted in the Old Testament translated into powerful prohibitions with respect to any involvement in the slave trade. This brilliant exploration will be of interest to scholars of modern Jewish history, African-American studies, American Jewish history, U.S. history, and minority studies.’

Friedman is the sort of scholar the mighty Jacky Walker was talking about in her discussion of Jewish involvement in the slave trade on the interwebs, which was picked out and used by the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism to smear her as a terrible Jew-hater – despite the fact she’s Jewish and her family are Jewish! At nearly £37 for the paperback edition, and £127 for the hardback, it’s certainly not cheap. Nevertheless, it’s necessary. I haven’t read it, but looking at the blurb it looks like a very good book to recommend to anybody with an interest in this area. And especially those who might be taken in by the lies of Farrakhan and his cronies.

Here’s the link to the Amazon page: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Jews-American-Slave-Trade-Friedman/dp/1138526576.

The Stupidity of Black Anti-Semitism

Last week, the American rapper Kanye ‘Ye’ West successfully managed to torpedo his career and popularity by making stupid and bigoted comments about Jews. Unfortunately he isn’t the only person to hold stupid and malign anti-Semitic beliefs. His comments, however, led to one YouTuber putting up a half-hour long video examining whether Michael Jackson was anti-Semitic. I don’t know whether Jackson was or wasn’t. He may have been, but at the end of his life one of his friends or associates was, I believe, a rabbi, Shmuely Boteach. This suggests he probably wasn’t, or if he was, that any anti-Semitic views he had may have been nuanced and riddled with exceptions. But I confess, I didn’t watch that part of the video because I’m not that interested in Michael Jackson. As far as I’m concerned, Jackson was an immensely talented musician and dancer, but a deeply flawed human being. He seemed to me to be a perpetual child, surrounding himself with toys and exotic animals, and his musical achievements are tarnished by the accusations of child abuse.

What I found interesting instead was the beginning of the video, which included clips of other rappers and Black musicians airing their prejudices and negative opinions about the Jews. Many of them were complaints that they were being exploited by the music industry, which they believed was run by the Jews. I dare say that there may be a higher proportion of Jews in the music business, as there supposedly is or has been with the film industry. But this doesn’t come from any kind of stupid conspiracy to control the media. It’s simply because the entertainment industry, by and large, was more tolerant of Jews than other sectors of society. As for exploitation, there are any number of White musicians as well who’ve fallen out with the record label and feel they’ve been cheated on issues of recording rights and royalties. Where this has occurred, it’s been because their managers or the recording companies are acting as exploitative individuals. Again, it’s got nothing at all to do with race, and everything to do with the fact that there are people in every industry who will try to exploit and cheat their clients.

The video began with Professor Griff, who was sacked from NWA because of his anti-Semitic views, and included a clip of Griff explaining them and the circumstances of his sudden exit from the band. And from what he said, Griff certainly appeared to have genuinely Nazi views. He claimed he carried a library of books on them around in a suitcase, in order to educated people, and he’d lay them out on a table. These included such classic anti-Semitic texts as Henry Ford’s The International Jew. Ford was certainly a member of the extreme right. He hated socialism and trade unions, as well as Jews and Lord knows who else. I think he was a favourite of Hitler and the Nazis, who also believed that Blacks were racially inferior. One nasty piece of Nazi doctrine, according to Orwell, was that Blacks could interbreed with gorillas. I really do wonder why any self-respecting person of colour would read anything by people who believed such vile rubbish.

He then came out with some of the class anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, like the Jews caused World War II. This is still being repeated by White fascists after Hitler and Oswald Mosley over here in the UK. No, the Jews had nothing to do with it. The War started because Hitler invaded Poland, thus provoking France and Britain who had made pledged themselves to defend the country.

He also talked about the Rothschild’s and other Jewish banks extending credit and loans to Nazi Germany. This is true. They did, along with a number of other big American companies like IBM. This has absolutely nothing to do with the owners of these banks being Jewish. It’s simply because they, and the other gentile-owned companies that did business with the Nazis, were run by utterly amoral people who cared only about profit. Their dealing with the Nazi was naturally deeply and bitterly resented by ordinary Jewish peeps. And it should be a problem for any daft conspiracy theories about a secret Jewish plot to gain global domination. I really don’t understand how that can be squared with Jewish banks, which are an integral part of this putative conspiracy, collaborating with a regime dedicated to destroying their people. There are attempts to do this, in which a distinction is drawn between the Jewish elite behind the conspiracy and normal, decent Jews, but it’s still an obvious, glaring inconsistency that should show that the conspiracy theory is utter nonsense.

I do wonder where this anti-Semitism in parts of Black popular culture comes from. The Nation of Islam and Louis Farrakhan are one source. Farrakhan blames the Jews for the slave trade and in the 1980s a ‘historical research institute’ connected with the sect published a book promoting this idea. Proper historians of the slave trade dismiss the idea. Very few of the merchants involved in the trade in America were Jewish. I think Hugh Thomas says there were just four in his excellent book The Slave Trade. There were Jewish financiers involved, but again I don’t think there were that many. And as has been pointed out by historians of transatlantic slavery and anti-racist activists, they were employed by Christian princes.

I do wonder if some of this Jew-hatred comes from racial politics in Harlem during the 1920s and ’30s. The book Colour Prejudice notes that there was considerable anti-Semitism among Harlem’s Black community. This might come from the fact that many of the stores were White-owned, and despite selling to a Black clientele they wouldn’t employ Black staff. This resulted in a concerted campaign by an alliance of Black labour organisations against the policy. They organised a boycott of these stores under the slogan ‘Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work’. One of the leaders of the boycott was Sufi Abdul Hamid, a colourful figure who dressed in exotic eastern robes. He was another native-born Black American, who had converted to a form of Islam. Hamid was particularly vehement against the Jewish owners of such stores, as well as Greeks and Italians, who he derided as ‘spaghetti-slingers’. The boycott was successful, but Hamid lost control of the movement because the other leaders were acutely embarrassed by his racism. See the chapter on Hamid and his literary followers, ‘”In Turban and Gorgeous Robe”: Claude McKay, Black Fascism and Labor’ in Mark Christian Thompson, Black Fascisms: African American Literature and Culture Between the Wars (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press 2007), 87-116.

And against ideas of a Jewish racial antipathy towards Blacks, there’s the long history of Jewish support for the Black Civil Rights movement. Many Jews worked as social workers, school teachers and other professionals within the Black community and so were deeply sympathetic to their cause. The awesome Black Jewish pro-Palestinian activist, Jackie Walker, is an example of this. Her mother was a Black civil rights activist from Georgia and her father was a Russian Jew. Her parents met at a rally by the Communist party. I’ve forgotten the fellow’s name, but one of the Jewish supporters and campaigners for the civil rights of Black Americans was a rabbi.

Griff’s endorsement of Ford’s wretched tome did confirm something that I’ve suspected: that Black anti-Semites were also reading and being influenced by White racists. The same thing appears to be the case in much Afrocentric literature about ancient Egypt being the source of both European and African civilisation. It’s based on long out-disproven theories by White colonial anthropologists, for whom the Egyptians were White Hamites, who spread southward and colonised the continent. The Black Afrocentrists who took over this view simply flipped the races, so that the Egyptians were Black. The result, however, was much the same in that the indigenous African peoples were denied the credit for their own cultural achievement made independently of Egypt, whatever skin colour the Egyptians had.

If the ultimate source of Black American anti-Semitism does come from the racial politics of pre-World War II Harlem, then it’s profoundly depressing that it should still cast a shadow over race relations nearly a century later. Quite apart from the fact that no-one, of any colour, should believe Nazi conspiratorial rubbish.

Saturn as the Abode of the Dead in Victorian Science Fiction

I put up a post the other day about an early 20th century SF story from 1901, in which Jesus Christ is raised on Mars and sent to Earth by the Martians to enlighten us. They rescue Him from the crucifixion, and bring Him back to Mars. It struck me that the story may have been an influence or at least prefigured the idea that later arose among UFO contactees and researcher that Christ was an alien. The best-known of the various UFO religions that believe this is the Aetherius Society, founded in the 1950s by former taxi driver George King. King was into eastern mysticism, and became aware of his mission as spokesman for the Space Brothers when he heard a voice in his kitchen one day telling him to prepare to be the voice of interplanetary parliament. The Aetherius Society believes that King was the recipient of spiritual messages from Aetherius, an alien on Venus, and that Jesus is also there on the planet. Louis Farrakhan, the head of the Nation of Israel, also claimed that he’d been taken aboard a UFO and shown how Jesus and his predecessor as head of the religion, W.D. Fard, were also on Venus. Both Christ and Fard were Black, and Fard was directing and preparing for the coming apocalyptic war against the Whites that would free Black America.

Looking through the SF collection Born of the Sun again today, I found another early SF story with a religious or supernatural dimension. This was John Jacob Astor’s 1894 A Journey in Other Worlds, in which Saturn is inhabited by the spirits of the dead. I think this was influenced by contemporary spiritualism and trends in psychic research. The followers of the 18th century Swedish scientist and mystic, Immanuel Swedenborg, believed that he had travelled in spirit across the Solar System and that the various planets were inhabited, including by the spirits of the departed. This was also the same time, I think, that mediums like Helene Smith believed that they were receiving telepathic messages from Mars. The Surrealists were fascinated by these mediumistic accounts, and one collection of Surrealist writings contains a drawing, done automatically, of Mozart’s house on either Jupiter or Saturn. There’s definitely a religious element in much Spiritualist speculation about space and early Science Fiction, and I’m very sure that this has had an influence on the UFO phenomenon and its accounts of contacts with spiritually advanced, benevolent alien beings.

Adolf Hitler and Black and Asian Anti-White Racists on the Extermination and Enslavement of Racial Enemies

A few days ago I put up a couple of posts showing the very close similarity between far right Labour MP Neil Coyle’s comments about Jewish Voice for Labour and the Nazis’ and British Fascists’ denunciations of ‘communist’ Jews and Jewish influence in politics. But unfortunately it’s not only White bigots who seem to share their attitudes and rhetoric. Many Black and Asian allegedly ‘anti-racist’ ideologues and activists do to.

The Black Lives Matter protests across the world were an attempt to raise awareness about the supposed greater incidence of Blacks being shot and killed by the police. Behind them was outrage and frustration at the continuing material poverty, high unemployment, lack of educational achievement, crime and drugs in the Black community. BLM groups, such as those in Bristol, were keen to present themselves not as racists trying to cause division, but as sincere anti-racists trying to draw people together. The organisation’s Bristol branch put up posters that included the statement that they weren’t trying to start a race war. They were trying to stop one. But unfortunately the protests were accompanied by highly racist, genocidal statements and attitudes from high profile members of the Black and Asian communities. A Black American academic, Britney Cooper, caused outrage when she appeared on the Black American internet show, The Root, declaring that Whites were dying out, and ‘may be we should help them along’. An Asian academic at a New York university, who specialised in the psychology of racism, stated she fantasised about shooting Whites. A recent video put up by the New Culture Forum also contained a selection of tweets from angry Black activists. One of these stated that the poster looked forward to destroying White prosperity and livelihoods, and forcing Whites to endure the same poverty as BAME people. The tweeter’s name is blurred, but it looks like Priyamvada Gopal, the professor of Colonial and Postcolonial literature at Cambridge.

These comments are almost exactly like those of the Nazis, and particularly their attitude to Poles and Slavs. In 1942 Martin Bormann wrote

‘The Slavs are to work for us. In so far as we do not need them, they may die. Slav fertility is undesirable. They may possess contraceptives or abort, the more the better. Education is dangerous. We shall leave them religion as a means of diversion. They will receive only the absolutely necessary provisions. We are the masters, we come first.’

Joachim C. Fest, The Face of the Third Reich, page 204.

In fact there has been a strain of viciously anti-White racism present in Black political culture for a very long time. Afrocentrism holds that Blacks are intellectually and spiritually superior to other peoples, especially Whites, who are supposed to be more stupid, less spiritual, intuitive and cruel. These attitudes are reinforced by Post-Colonial and Critical Race Theory, which see Whites, even when they are opposed to racism, as deeply racist and embedded in and part of a culture which privileges them. A year or so ago right-wing videos on the Net showed a clip of one lecturer, Angela Shackleford, telling a White class that they were not born into humanity, cannot change, and that they were ‘devils’ to her.

And some Black rhetoric and activism has crossed the line into overt Fascism. Marcus Garvey, who held paramilitary parades in New York, once declared that Hitler and Mussolini learned everything from him. In the 1970s his son announced, during the Jamaican celebrations of the great man’s birth, that Garveyism must become Black National Socialism, for Africa also needed its Lebensraum. Before she was shot by a criminal gang, Black activist Sasha Johnson demanded a Black militia to safeguard Blacks against the police, whom she accused of being like the Klan. She duly appeared on platforms with them, dressed alike in stab vests. Johnson fancied herself as ‘the British Black panther’, but her parade violated British legislation going back to the 1930s against political paramilitary uniforms aimed squarely at Fascist organisations like Mosley’s BUF.

And Black British politicians have encouraged and extended a welcome to deeply racist Black American activists. Back in the 1980s ‘Black radical’ Labour politician Bernie Grant invited over here Louis Farrakhan, the head of the Nation of Islam. The Nation of Islam demands a Black-only state. Now more or less a science fictional space cult, it believes that Whites were created by an evil Mekkan scientist, Shaitan, to destroy the purity of the Black race. It is also very definitely opposed to the welfare state. If this had been a White politician, he would have been denounced as Fascist and his visit accompanied with protests from the Left. But Grant excused him, saying he didn’t agree with everything he said, but regarded him as an elder statesman.

The Left tends to turn a blind eye to such racism. It is fixated on the real threat of White racism and fascism, to the extent that it ignores anti-White racism and refuses to accept it. Matthew Collins, the author of the Demonisation of the White Working Class, in an interview on the New Culture Forum YouTube channel, remarked that when his book came out it was bitterly criticised as itself racist by the left-wing press because of its discussion of Whites forced out of Black majority areas due to anti-White racism. The publication of Ed Hussein’s book, Among the Mosques, about Muslim anti-White hatred, was also greeted with accusations of racism and Islamophobia by the left.

This attitude is itself profoundly racist and a mistake, because anti-White racism in the past has at times reached and exceeded the same extent as White racist crimes against people of colour. In 2006 the Independent report that the racist murder of Whites was almost at the same level as the racist murders of Blacks. And back in the 1990s the newspaper also covered a report, published by the then Committee for Racial Equality, written by Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, that racist attacks on Whites now amounted to 60 per cent of the total number of such incidents. This was the first time it had done so. Since then I’ve no doubt that it’s been overtaken by assaults against people of colour, especially Muslims after 9/11. But the threat of a revived, violent anti-White racism is still there in my opinion, especially as it could be encouraged by the anti-White rhetoric and ideologies of Post-Colonial and Critical Race Theory and its adherents.

I don’t believe that the extent of these pernicious ideologies should be exaggerated. Such people don’t speak for all Blacks or Asians by any means, just as the real Nazis never represented the vast majority of Whites. But these attitudes and ideologies do need to be fought. They should not be indulged in or promoted by the left because they come from the left and are supposed to be about defending and promoting persecuted, marginalised peoples. Rather the left needs to unite against them. There needs to be left-led anti-racist marches, with both Blacks, Asians and Whites, against Muslim grooming gangs. There needs to be a no-platform on campus against Post-Colonial and Critical Race Theory racists, just as there are for White supremacists and Fascists. But there isn’t. And so such issues are left to the right and genuine racists like the Islamophobic Tommy Robinson.

This needs to be stopped and radically changed now. Racism and Fascism can appear in all peoples and colours, including Black and Asians. And it needs to be fought be all races together.

Black and White, unite and fight!

Did Farrakhan Get His Ideas about White Origins from Fu Manchu Novels?

I’ve also been reading Stephen Howe’s history and critique of Afrocentrism, Afrocentrism – Mythical Pasts and Imagined Homes (London: Verso 1998). Afrocentrism is a pseudo-historical movement that claims that the ancient Egyptians were really Black, and that their ideas are really at the centre of European civilisation as they were passed on or appropriated by the Greeks and Romans. The book shows that it began in the early 19th century, and different Afro-centrists had different views of this glorious imagined past. Some believed that the real, great civilisation had been the ancient Ethiopians, who colonised ancient Egypt. Others claimed that the original ancient Greeks and Romans, as well as the Carthaginians, had been Black, civilising the White European savages. And there was considerable difference of opinion about the ancient Egyptian’s Blackness. Some Afrocentrists considered that the Egyptians were a mixture of Black African, White and Semitic races, and so while not White, and would have suffered under the segregation legislation, weren’t exactly purely negro either. This seems about right to me. They clearly depicted themselves as darker than the Europeans they were in contact with. Ancient Egyptian art commonly portrays Egyptian men as having reddish-brown skin, and women as yellow. The Minoans, however, are painted pink, while the darker-skinned people further south are portrayed as Black. And the rock paintings of Tassili n-Ajjer in the Sahara show that, thousands of years ago when the desert was green, groups of Blacks and Whites crossed and lived in it. It would be perfectly natural for these groups to have mixed and intermarried.

But the most bizarre ideas about racial origins seem to come from Louis Farrakhan’s branch of the Nation Islam. This holds that Black people were the original human race, and came originally from the Moon via Mecca. They also believe that White people are the creation of an evil Meccan scientist, Shaitan, to destroy the purity of the White race. Howe, in one of his footnotes, states that this idea is remarkably similar to one of Saxe Romer’s infamous Fu Manchu novels, The Island of Fu Manchu. Which leaves you wondering about Farrakhan’s choice of reading matter.

Black History Month Website Forced to Delete Article Describing Whites as ‘Genetically Defective Mutants’

October is Black History Month, set up to educate people, and particularly Blacks, about their history and achievements. And already the controversy has started. The Lotus Eaters put up a piece yesterday commenting on a report in Telegraph that the Black History Month website, which is not run by the government although it contains ads from various state organisations, had taken down a piece denigrating Whites that had been up for three years.

Posted in 2018, the article quoted American Frances Cress Welsing, who claimed that White people originally evolved as genetically defective mutants, who were driven out of Africa by the indigenous Blacks. Settling in Europe, their lack of melanin made them more immoral and their innate racism caused them to create White supremacy. It was only after an investigation by the Torygraph that this was taken down.

Clearly, this is pure hate and as evolutionary palaeoanthropology, it’s utter bilge. Sargon of Gasbag in his video commenting about it states that white skin evolved in northwest Europe 7,000 years ago to allow Europeans to absorb enough of the vitamins humans need from sunlight in the cold, overcast climate of northern Europe. I think the biology’s correct, but I’m not sure about the location or timescale on the grounds that many of the peoples of the Near East, like Turks, Arabs and Iranians can have White complexions. There have even been blondes in Syria and the Caucasus. But it is true that humans lost their initially dark complexions as they adapted to the European climate when they first entered the continent 60,000 or so years ago.

Welsing’s anti-White rant is typical of a Black ideology, Melanism, that’s been around for decades. Roughly speaking, Melanism states that Black people are physically, intellectually and spiritually superior to Whites because they possess a greater amount of the pigment melanin, which not only produces the darker skin colour, but is also found in the brain. There have been a number of Black writers promoting this anti-White nonsense, some of whom have been officially judged racist. Way back in the ’90s, biologist and snail expert Steve Jones met a group of British melanists in his series on genetics, In The Blood.

Welsing’s description of Whites as ‘genetically defective mutants’ is of kind with the weird views on the origins of Whites of the Nation of Islam, although far less bonkers. The Nation of Islam believe that Whites were created by the evil Mekkan scientist Shaitan 70,000 years ago in order to destroy the purity of the Black race. The Nation of Islam itself has precious little to do with real Islam. It’s based around the worship of W.D. Fard, a Syrian, who migrated to the US in the 1920s and who was worshipped as God. Its present leader, Louis Farrakhan, is extremely anti-Semitic and blames Jews for the slave trade. He also claims that a UFO landed while he was meditating on a Mexican mountain back in the ’80s-90s, and took him to a ‘mother wheel’ in space, where he was told that Fard, Jesus and other religious figures, who of course were all Black, are alive and well on Venus and directing the war against Whites. The Nation of Islam are also Black separatists, who want their own, Blacks-only state carved out of America. There’s been controversy about them in Britain. Back in 1980s Bernie Grant invited Farrakhan to come to Britain, despite the fact that Farrakhan despises the welfare state. Grant tried to excuse himself by saying that he regarded Farrakhan as an ‘elder statesman’ and didn’t endorse all his views.

The Nation of Islam, as far as I know, isn’t involved with Black History Month, or at least, not in any official capacity. But there clearly is a danger in that some of the organisations that want to be involved clearly do have very racist views. These should no more be tolerated than White Fascists.

One Positive Feature of Black Lives Matter: It Doesn’t Include the Nation of Islam

Unlike Mike, I have grave reservations about the Black Lives Matter movement. It has excellent intentions, but I feel it is unintentionally divisive and open itself to criticism for its simplistic view of racial hatred. But flicking through some of the old newspaper cuttings I kept in my scrapbook, I really that it has made one positive step over the mass anti-racism protests following the murder of Stephen Lawrence over twenty years ago. No idiot has invited the National of Islam over here.

Stephen Lawrence, as older readers of this blog will remember, was a Black teenager murdered in a racist attack by a White gang. It became a national scandal due to the Met police’s complete lack of interest in prosecuting the crims responsible, who were all the sons of leading London gangsters. It was incompetence on a massive scale, with elements of corruption and showed the institutional racism in the capital’s police force. It resulted in mass anti-racism demonstrations across Britain.

And joining these demos were the racist extremists. Lawrence’s parents made appeals for their son’s death not to be exploited. The BNP were threatening to turn up at some these. They had been active spreading lies about the late teenager, falsely claiming that he had been a gang member, who terrorised his schoolmates in order to shake them down for their dinner and other money. And from the other side, ‘African radical’ Bernie Grant, the head of Brent council, took it upon himself to invite into the country the Rev. Louis Farrakhan and his legions from the Nation of Islam.

The Nation of Islam has precious little to do with genuine Islam, whether Sunni or Shi’a. It’s a weird mixture of Sudanese Sufism, Black Freemasonry, and UFO space brothers contact ufology. It’s based around the worship of W.D. Fard, a Syrian immigrant to the US, who on his immigration papers was listed as ‘White’. It was while he working in a car factory that Fard was worshipped as another incarnation of the Almighty. This is incredibly heretical to orthodox Muslims. While Mohammed described Christ as ‘the purest of the Prophets’, conceived through divine action in the Virgin Mary, and that God poured out his spirit upon Him when He was a child in the cradle, they differ from Christians in that they strongly reject the doctrine of the Incarnation. The Nation of Islam naturally believe that Christ was also Black, a belief not confined to them, of course.

But there’s a large SF element to the religion as well. They also belief that Black people are the original human race, and arrived here millions of years ago from the Moon. They are superior to everyone else biologically, intellectually and spiritually. Eons ago they created a super-scientific civilisation. White people are albinistic mutants created by the evil Mekkan scientist Shaitan to destroy Blacks and their achievements. You won’t be surprised to hear that they’re also viciously anti-Semitic, wrongly blaming Jews for slavery. Farrakhan himself believed that he was taken aboard a UFO while meditating on the top of a Mexican mountain. He was transported to a giant Mother Wheel orbiting the Earth, which they conveyed him to Venus, where Fard and Jesus now reside, directing the war against Whites. Although their manifesto states that they believe in the dignity of all races and their right to self-determination, the National of Islam was are racial separatists. They demand that Blacks be given a separate country of their own, comprised of four states taken from the southern USA.

The Nation of Islam is also very strongly opposed to the welfare state, which they believe takes away Black people’s self-reliance. This alone should have had Grant thrown out of the Labour party, as it’s clearly incompatible with the core Labour doctrines of supporting the welfare state. And their separatism should have been incompatible with Labour’s ideas of anti-racism. Grant defended his invitation by saying that he had his views, and Farrakhan had his, and they didn’t always agree, but he regarded Farrakhan as ‘an elder statesman’. Well, he was, but chiefly in spreading more racist friction and especially anti-Semitism. He was a political liability, and effectively killed Jesse Jackson’s campaign to become America’s first Black president 15 years before Obama when Jackson started cosying up to him. Al sharpton was also trying to get into Britain at the same time. He’s still around, and seems to have quietened down somewhat with age. But in the ’80s and ’90s one of his tactics was to try to call attention to the terrible living conditions for Blacks in America by leading marches through White areas with highly racially charged chants. He claimed that by referring to them as his ‘troops’ he was only being metaphorical. May be so, but many feared that they would turn violent and they were deliberately provocative.

Farrakhan’s proposed visit to Blighty was opposed by a number of organisations, including Jewish groups, who had every right to be concerned. Racial extremists like him should never have been invited in the first place. The Black Lives Matter protests, although not without faults – there have been violent confrontations with the police – are mostly peaceful multiracial, including Whites and Asians as well as Blacks. They have been at pains to point out that they aren’t against Whites or trying to start a race war, just against anti-Black racism.

And in that they’re a definite improvement over the Stephen Lawrence protests and the way that Bernie Grant and the National of Islam tried to exploit them.

 

Is Black Anti-Semitism Behind the Attacks on Jews in New York?

Yesterday came the shocking news that there had been yet another anti-Semitic attack in New York. The attacker had pushed into a rabbi’s house where he and a group of others were celebrating Hanukkah, and stabbed five of them. And Carl Benjamin, aka Sargon of Akkad, the Sage of Swindon, has posted a video about it.

Sargon is the right-wing ranter, who broke UKIP. He’s a ‘classical liberal’, or rather Libertarian, who believes in privatising everything, destroying the welfare state even further, and is anti-feminist and racist. So it should come as no surprise that he supports Donald Trump. Sargon is the man who sent the Tweet to Jess Philips telling her that he wouldn’t even rape her. When he joined UKIP and was selected as one of their two candidates for the south-west constituency in the Euro elections, the branch in his own town of Swindon asked for him to be deselected. Gloucestershire UKIP disbanded in disgust, and he was greeted with protests and thrown milkshakes and fish in places like Bristol and Truro on his election tour.

But this time Sargon seems to have raised an interesting issue and made a decent point. In his video, he goes through some of the newspaper coverage of the incidents. Yesterday’s attack is sadly only one of a number that have been carried out in recent weeks, so that several of the members of the Jewish community affected have said that they felt they were living in Nazi Germany.  Sargon noted how the newspapers claimed that the attackers were of both genders and all races, male and female, Black and White. He found a piece where one newspaper columnist called for Jews and Blacks to unite against their common enemy, white supremacy. But Sargon stated that in all the incidents he’d seen, the perpetrators had been very largely Black, although there were a few Hispanics. And he quite naturally wondered why.

Now it could be that the idea that the attacks are committed by Blacks is an illusion. It’s possible that there were equal numbers or more of Whites involved, but for some reason these were not covered as examples. Or else they were reported, but Sargon couldn’t find them when he searched the net. Certainly there have been terrible anti-Semitic attacks carried out by White racists this year.

But some of the attacks may also be due to causes peculiar to certain forms of Black radicalism. If that’s true, then it must also be stressed that this is only going to be a minority within America’s Black community, just as White racists like Richard Spencer certainly do not represent all White Americans.

Sargon suggested that it might be connected to a speech by the head of the Nation of Islam, Louis Farrakhan, which was taken down from YouTube. Farrakhan, whose anti-Semitism is notorious, had ranted about the Jews, at one point comparing them to Termites. Given that the attackers seemed to be largely Black, he didn’t see how Trump or White supremacy could be blamed. He claimed that Trump didn’t have any problem with Jews, as his daughter had converted to Judaism. So, he asked, why were Blacks attacking Jews? He then made the perfectly reasonable point that we wouldn’t know unless somebody asked them.

It is possible that Farrakhan’s highly inflammatory rhetoric against Jews could have inspired some of the attackers. Farrakhan is the head of the Nation of Islam, a Black Muslim organisation that, from the standpoint of orthodox Islam, is highly heretical. It’s a mixture of 19th century Freemasonry, Sudanese Sufism and elements of Ufology. It’s central doctrine is that W.D. Fard, a Syrian immigrant to the US, is the Son of God. Farrakhan claims that he was taken up to a flying ‘mother wheel’ by a UFO from a mountain in Mexico, and shown that Fard is alive and well and living on Venus, directing the war against Whites. The religion calls for the creation of a separate nation for Black Americans as it considers that they will never have justice or equality under White domination. They also believe that hundreds of thousands of years ago Blacks had an advanced civilisation, travelling to and exploring the Moon. White people are albinistic mutants created by a renegade Meccan scientist. Way back in the 1990s Farrakhan was predicting that American would be destroyed by a nuclear attack from an alliance of Muslim nations, that would free Black Americans. The religion is obviously bitterly hostile to Whites, or at least White civilisation. Given the immense exploitation and injustice Blacks have suffered in American and western history, it’s understandable.

Farrakhan also has a particular hatred of the Jews, because he blames them for the slave trade. Mainstream, respectable scholarship, such as Hugh Thomas’ comprehensive The Slave Trade, actually shows that Jews formed a tiny minority of slave traders and slave-owners.

A number of right-wing American websites also reported that the man responsible for an attack on a Jewish supermarket just before Christmas was a member of the Black Hebrew Israelites. This was a response to one of the left-wing Democrat politicos, who claimed that it was the vile work of a White nationalist. The Black Hebrew Israelites were founded c. 1964 by two preachers of Black Judaism, Gerson Parker, who took the name Nasi Hashalom, and Louis Bryant, who became Nasi Shaliach Ben Yehuda. Hashalom was the group’s spokesman, and revered as the Messiah. In 1969 they established a community in Dimona in Israel. The group believe that the only real Jews are Black Americans of slave ancestry.  Jews are fakes, and are part of the conspiracy to hide Black Americans’ real, spiritual identity from them. They will be destroyed, along with the rest of the religion’s enemies, at the Battle of Armageddon. This didn’t impress the Israeli authorities, who ruled that the Black Hebrew Israelites were not genuine Jews, and so could be legally deported. However, this hadn’t occurred by 1992, and the group was reported to have good relations with the Israeli authorities.  

It’s possible that the growth in the Nazi and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories in the White population may also have encouraged similar poisonous ideas in the Nation of Islam. The September 8th, 1992 issue of the religion’s newspaper, The Final Call, carried an article that suggested that the American government was planning to fake an alien landing in order to set up a tyrannical one-world government. The article featured an interview with UFO researcher Nario Hayakawa, who said

The U.S. government behind a veil of secrecy, is testing these aerial devices or select pilots may be receiving instructions [from alien beings] on how to fly these disk shaped crafts developed by the government for the purpose of staging a fake extraterrestrial event in the very near future, perhaps around 1995… Secret international banking groups and other global secret groups are going to forcefully eliminate international borders and create some kind of controlled society… The most amazing weapon they will use to do this will be the extraterrestrial threat. 

(See Donna Kossy, Kooks: A Guide to the Outer Limits of Human Belief (Portland: Feral House 1994) 27).

This is very similar to some of the ideas promoted by White conspiracy theorists at the time, like Bill Cooper in his book, Behold a Pale Horse. Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince also suggested that there was a conspiracy to create a Fascist social order with a fake alien landing in their book, The Stargate Conspiracy, published at the same time. This last book does not, however, blame the Jews and is certainly not anti-Semitic.

These ideas have been around for decades, however. This raises the question of why these attacks are being carried out now.

While Sargon is right that Trump’s daughter converted to Judaism – she did so when she married Jared Kushner, his son-in-law – Trump’s administration did contain allegedly genuine anti-Semites like Steve Bannon and Sebastian Gorka, and he did have links to and sympathy for the Alt Right. It might be that the growth in far right activism and racist rhetoric that his presidency has encouraged among White nationalists and racists like Richard Spencer has encouraged a similar increase in racism and anti-Semitism among some Black radicals.

On the other hand, it may also be that these attacks arise from tensions that a particular to the Black community. But left-wing commenters may also be right in that Trump’s neoliberal economic policies have resulted in more Americans of all colours facing terrible poverty. This is going to exacerbate racial tensions as groups compete over scarce resources. And the economic and social sense of threat this creates may cause some to seek out the Jews as scapegoats.

Racism and anti-Semitism have to be fought in all their forms. But the underlying economic causes have to be tackled as well – the poverty and the sense of despair and alienation this generates.

And that means electing a government that Sargon is definitely opposed to: one that will overturn decades of neoliberalism and restore genuine prosperity and a proper welfare net to working people. A government headed by Bernie Sanders.

 

 

Anti-Black Racism and the Anti-Semitism Smears

Looking back at two of the most notorious instances, where decent anti-racists have been smeared as an anti-Semites, it occurred to me that behind them there’s a very nasty strain of anti-black racism. These two cases were the attacks on Jackie Walker, the vice-chair of Momentum by the Campaign Against Truth and the Jewish Labour Movement, and against Marc Wadsworth by Ruth Smeeth. Both were not only passionate and committed campaigners against all varieties of racism, they were also Black.

Walker is Jewish by descent and faith. Her partner is Jewish, and she sent her daughter to a Jewish school. She is an outspoken opponent of Israeli apartheid, and began attacking it through her activism against its counterpart in South Africa. Because of this some Zionist organisation has apparently identified her as the second most dangerous threat to Israel along with Jeremy Corbyn.

She was accused of anti-Semitism when snoopers from the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism dug up an old Facebook conversation between her and two or three other historians and scholars discussing Jewish financial involvement in the slave trade. Walker made it clear that she was looking at it partly from the angle of being a Jew herself. She said that the Jews involved were ‘my people too’. It’s a legitimate area of historical research, and Jackie has subsequently very ably defended herself by citing studies of this by mainstream, respectable Jewish historians. Nowhere did she claim that the Jews were solely responsible for the slave trade, or even its main investors. She has made it clear that the responsibility for the slave trade lies with the Christian monarchs of the states that engaged in it.

Nevertheless, her words were taken out of context and further distorted, and she was the subject of a vile article in the Jewish Chronicle claiming that she had. This formed the basis for a complaint against her to the Labour party demanding her expulsion. She was also accused of anti-Semitism by the Jewish Labour Movement. They secretly recorded her at a workshop on the proper commemoration of the Holocaust for Holocaust Memorial Day. Jackie complained that she was unable  to work with their definition of anti-Semitism and objected to the way Holocaust Memorial Day concentrated exclusively on Jewish suffering to the exclusion of other groups, who had also suffered similar genocides, like Black Africans. I believe the definition of anti-Semitism to which she objected wasn’t the normal definition that it is simply hatred of Jews as Jews, but the IHRC definition, which conflates it with opposition to Israel. And while Holocaust Memorial Day does mention the holocausts of other ethnicities, there is increasing hostility amongst some Zionists on their inclusion. As Tony Greenstein has shown, the Israeli state is keen to present the Holocaust as a unique phenomenon which targeted only Jews, despite the Nazis’ determination to murder other groups and races, like the Roma and the disabled, not to mention the Slav peoples they intended to enslave and turn into a class of peasant serfs.

Jackie was duly expelled from the party, though not for anti-Semitism, which he accusers couldn’t prove, but on other, spurious charges, like bringing the party into disrepute or some other nonsense. Since then, she has been the victim of sustained, vicious abuse. She has been told that she should be hanged from trees, or killed and her body dumped in bin bags. This is so vile, that she has forbidden her daughters from reading her email, because she doesn’t want to see them upset by the abuse their mother is getting. And amongst these accusations is the claim that she cannot be properly Jewish, because she’s black. Which is itself definitely racist.

Now it seems to me that at the heart of these smears against Walker is the assumption that, as a Black anti-racist activist, she must be an anti-Semite. This is based on the very public comments several decades ago of two leading Black American figures, Louis Farrakhan and the Reverend Jesse Jackson. Farrakhan is, or was, the head of the Nation of Islam, the religious movement led by Malcolm X. Although it sees itself as a form of Islam, it is by Muslim standards highly heretical. It’s based around the worship of W.D. Fard, a Syrian immigrant to the US, as God incarnate. It also has elements of those new religious movements centred on UFOs, like the Aetherius Society. Farrakhan claims that he was taken up by a UFO from a mountain in Mexico to an orbiting ‘mother wheel’, where he was told that W.D. Fard and Jesus were alive and well on Venus, where they would direct the future war against Whites.

As well as bitterly hostile to Whites, Farrakhan is also vehemently anti-Semitic. He really does believe that the Jews were responsible for the slave trade. This is definitely rejected by every proper scholar of the subject, including Jackie herself. 

In the late 1980s and 1990s, Farrakhan organised a series of events protesting against the conditions of Black people in America. One of the most spectacular was the ‘Million Man March’, in which a million Black men were to march on Washington D.C. It was supposed to be a men-only event, as the religion has very traditional views on sex and gender roles. Women were supposed to be at home, looking after the children. And it was supposed to be for Blacks only. In the event, the organisers could only reach the numbers they wanted through letting Whites join.

The Reverend Jesse Jackson was a Christian minister, who was also a Black anti-racism activist. He was popular, and at one stage it looked like he might win the Democratic presidential nomination. Eddie Murphy in his stand-up comedy routine included jokes about the shock White racists would get after they drunkenly voted for him as a joke, only to wake up the next morning to find Jackson in the White House. It’s possible that two decades before Barack Obama, America could have seen its first Black president. Jackson’s political ambitions took a nosedive, however, when he began to move close to Farrakhan and made anti-Semitic comments. The most notorious of these was when he called New York ‘Hymietown’ because of its large Jewish population.

It therefore seems very strongly to me that the accusations of anti-Semitism against Jackie Walker were partly intended to recall the real anti-Semitism of Farrakhan and Jackson. The implication there seemed to be that because she dared discuss Jewish involvement in the slave trade, she must share Farrakhan’s odious views. Not least of which is because she’s a Black anti-racist activist, and so was he.

Ditto with Marc Wadsworth. He was smeared by Ruth Smeeth because he caught her passing on information to a Torygraph journo next to her at a Labour party event. She then claimed that he was guilty of using the anti-Semitic trope of Jews as leaders of a conspiracy against her. The lamestream press had a field day with this, repeating this lie and even screaming that he was the Labour activist, who made her cry.

Wadsworth is not Jewish, but he is a committed anti-racist activist. Among his achievements was getting the parents of the murdered Black teenager, Stephen Lawrence, to meet Nelson Mandela. He also worked with the Board of Deputies of British Jews to formulate improved legislation to protect Jews from real anti-Semitic violence after a spate of attacks by the NF/BNP in the Isle of Dogs in the 1980s. He’s very, very definitely not a racist. But truth doesn’t matter to these scoundrels, and they libelled him as such anyway.

Like Jackie Walker.

I think part of the underlying assumption here is that both Jackie and Marc must be racist themselves, because they’re Black. When riots broke out in Black communities across Britain in the first years of Thatcher’s reign c. 1981/2, the Tory press claimed that they weren’t caused by poor social conditions, lack of opportunities, high unemployment suffered by British Blacks, or institutional racism in British society. No! The real reason Blacks in Toxteth, Liverpool, St. Paul’s, Bristol, and Brixton in London, was because they were anti-White racists. And although nearly four decades have passed since then, I think that’s still the assumption, or the implication, behind the accusations against Marc and Jackie. Black anti-racism activists must be anti-White, and anti-Semitic, because of the assumptions and events of over three decades ago.

Meanwhile, it’s noticeable how uninterested in combating racism, or actively racist those making the accusations of anti-Semitism are. the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism has precious little to say about real Fascism and anti-Semitism, preferring to rail instead against Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters. Margaret Hodge did so little to combat the NF/BNP in Islington, that when the BNP’s Derek Beacon and his storm troopers got onto Tower Hamlet’s council, they sent her a bouquet of flowers. Tom Watson, who has done his best to facilitate these accusations in the Labour party, was a friend of Phil Woolas, who was prosecuted for running an islamophobic campaign portraying Muslims as terrorists. David Rosenberg of the Jewish Socialist Group has written on his blog about how the Board of Deputies of British Jews in the 1980s did their level best to prevent Jews from going on anti-racist marches and events like Rock Against Racism. The ostensible reason was that they were afraid Jews would be exposed to anti-Zionist propaganda. But others suspected that the real reason was that the Board did not want them mixing with people from different races and communities. And the respected historian of Jewish community in Britain, Geoffrey Alderman, was put under pressure by the Board in the 1970s to remove from his book his finding that 2 per cent of the Jewish community in the UK voted for the BNP because they hated Blacks and didn’t want their children going to school with them.

Of course, the people making these defamatory accusations of anti-Semitism against decent people don’t confine them to Blacks. They also make them against Whites, and particularly against Jews critical of Israel. These latter, who obviously include Jackie, are subjected to the most vile abuse, which would automatically be considered anti-Semitic if it came from non-Jews. Like some of the comments Tony Greenstein has received by Zionist Jews, telling him that they wish he and his family had died in the Shoah.

But it seems to me that behind the smears of Jackie Walker and Marc Wadsworth there is nevertheless a very strong undertone of anti-Black racism, a racism that permeates their accusers and the right-wing media, which supported those smears.

 

 

The Israel Lobby’s Racist Persecution of Jackie Walker

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Absolutely.

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

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

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

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

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

2. LP relies on racist statements to prosecute me

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

The LP relies on anonymous witnesses who have written:

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

“Walker- who claims to be part Jewish”

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

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

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

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

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

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

That is unfair.

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

That is unfair.

3. Other racist and threatening remarks 

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

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

“Jackie Walker and her defenders can go hang”

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

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

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

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

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

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

That is unfair.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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