On a more optimist note, yesterday’s I also carried a report on page 8 by Harriet Line, ‘Labour ‘would end in-work poverty by end of first term’. This ran
Labour will eliminate the “modern-day scourge” of in-work poverty by the end of the party’s first full term back in office, John McDonnell is to promise.
The shadow Chancellor will pledge to make structural changes to the economy, ensure public services are free at the point of use and provide a strong social safety net to tackle the issue if his party enters government.
Mr McDonnell is to set out his party’s plans in a speech at the launch of the Resolution Foundation’s Living Standards Audit this morning.
He will say:”Behind the concept of social mobility is the belief that poverty is OK as long as some people are given the opportunity to climb out of it, leaving the others behind.
“I reject that completely, and want to see a society with higher living standards for everyone as well as one in which nobody lacks the means to survive or has to choose between life’s essentials.”
“Without any one of these three elements, we will not be able to achieve the sustained eradication of poverty, the dramatic narrowing of inequality, and the transformation of people’s lives that will be the central purpose of the next Labour government.
“The Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) said last year that ‘in-work poverty is the problem of our times’.
“I am committing today to ending this modern-day scourge, to eliminating in-work poverty by the end of Labour’s first full parliamentary term.”
The JRF executive director, Claire Ainsley, commended Labour’s “significant ambition” as being “the right thing to do”.
She added: “Delivering this commitment should be the No 1 focus for political leaders after Brexit.”
Now expect this to be attacked by the Tories, Lib Dems and Blairites. And I don’t doubt that they’re playing up about anti-Semitism in the Labour party again to try to drown out this message. It’s the precise thing they, and their masters in business, really don’t want people to hear.
All of these groups are Thatcherites to the core, and Thatcherism accepted the Neoliberal doctrine, derived from 19th century laissez-faire economics, that wages should be as low as possible. She also believed in making life harder for the unemployed in order to force them to take care of themselves, and this has been extended to other groups, like the working poor. Their poverty and poor conditions are supposed to be justified by lowering labour expenses in business, thus allowing them to become more profitable and enriching managers, proprietors and shareholders. And the constant refrain of Tories in response to complaints about low wages is that if you don’t like it, you can get another, better job elsewhere. Because the free market will supposedly also act to make employers try to remain competitive by offering the best terms and conditions to their workers. Even when the same market forces are expected to act against that very thing.
It’s Labour’s determination under Corbyn to end in-work poverty, to empower workers, giving them proper wages and restoring the welfare state after its decimation by forty years of Thatcherism, that the Tories, Lib Dems and Blairites find so threatening. And Margaret Hodge let this hidden agenda behind her faction’s attack on Corbyn and his supporters out the bag a few weeks ago.
She condemned Corbyn and his supporters for offering the working class ‘bribes’, like the above, which they could never fulfill.
Which shows that Hodge and her fellows are simply died in the wool Thatcherite entryists, who have no place in a genuinely socialist, Labour party.
As for the ability of Labour to bring this about, it reminds me of a story about a young American farm boy and the Progressive Party back in the 1920 and ’30s. The Progressive Party aimed at improving conditions in rural America, where there was and is much massive poverty. Among their policies, the Party promised to build roads to every farm. The story goes that a group out in the American countryside was discussing this. They turned to a local farm boy, whom they knew was a supporter of the Progressives, and asked him if he really believed the Progressives could actually do it. The lad replied, ‘If my dog can tree it, I’ll have it’.
And Labour can end in-work poverty, despite the threats and screams from the right.
Next week’s Radio Times also says that next Wednesday, 10th July 2019, there’s a drama, The Left Behind, on BBC 1 at 10.35 pm after the news about young White men drawn into Fascism. The play’s set in an unnamed Welsh town, and is about a working class lad, Gethin, who becomes increasingly radicalised as his life collapses through poverty. The blurb for it on page 78 of the magazine runs
Factual drama from the Bafta award-winning team behind Killed by My Debt and Murdered by My Boyfriend. Gethin is a working-class teenager in a south Wales town with no secure job, housing or future. As he seeks solace online, he is increasingly attracted to anti-immigrant sentiment as a way of explaining why he’s been “left behind” in his own country.
The additional piece about it by Alison Graham on page 77 runs
Gethin is a nice lad, part of a fractured family, but he is close to his sister and niece. He has a handful of good mates and not much of a job – he’s on a zero-hours contract in a fast food takeaway shop.
But the fates conspire to send Gethin (Sion Daniel Young, who is excellent) completely off the rails as the fragile thread that hold his life together unravel and snap, leading to tragedy.
The Left Behind looks at the rise of far-right extremism in the poorer parts of Britain through the prism of Gethin, a young man looking for easy targets who blames outsider for robbing him of everything worthwhile.
The mag also has a feature about the programme on pages 20-21 by Claire Webb, pointing out the working class roots of the play’s author, Alan Harris. Harris’ parents were forced to sell their house in Tonteg, near Cardiff, when he was a child, and he grew up in a caravan on his grandfather’s smallholding. After he graduated, he had a series of poorly-paid jobs, including selling Santa hats in the street and working in a car park. He was also homeless for a time, sleeping on friends sofas or in their spare rooms. He got his break into theatre after training as a journalist and submitting scripts to a theatre group encouraging new writers. The article quotes him as saying ‘We don’t see honest stories of White working class men.’ It also states that he spent a lot of time talking to people using food banks and a community centre in one of Cardiff’s most deprived suburbs. He says
“They told me people feel powerless,” he says. “It is a case of being left behind, but it’s also a case of being left out. There are a lot of people in the UK who have no hope of progressing, and once hope is gone, a wedge is driven between different sections of our society and extremism is very good at exploiting that wedge. Online radicalisation does that well: it turns personal problems into a crusade.”
The article contains the chilling statistic that in 2018 there was a 36% increase in the number of far-right extremists referred to the government’s Prevent programme. Harris spoke to a counterterrorism expert working on the programme as part of his research. It says he was frightened by how quickly people can become radicalised, and how the far-right organisations have smartened up their act.
“These are well organised, respectable-looking organisations,” he explains. “They don’t turn up in red braces with a skinhead. They turn up in a suit with a much more professional attitude. They realised that the old model wasn’t working from a recruiting point of view.”
The article also states that these organisations’ supporters are concentrated in Britain’s post-industrial towns and cities, which is why the drama’s producers set in south Wales.
To the possible objection that the programme is a sympathetic treatment of a violent extremist, Harris replies that we need to under where they’re coming from if we are to tackle domestic terrorism.
“Society tries to ignore these things but they’re happening, whether we like it or not. Understanding these people is a movement towards making society better.”
For one scene, in which a chipper councillor is confronted by residents angry at the lack of social housing, the producers used working class extras drawn from that area, and asked them to improvise. And their raw, pent up anger exploded. They ripped the councillor to shreds to the point where Harris felt sorry for the actor.
Asked if he was apprehensive that Cardiff’s working class communities would be offended by the drama, Harris replies
“Not at all. I think it’s a good thing to shine a light on the problems that some people experience. Hopefully those issues of housing, of employment, will ring true with a lot of people from Cardiff and the surrounding area. Hopefully it’s bits of their lives reflected back at them. I don’t have all the answers, but at least we can ask questions.”
While this isn’t a programme I can I’d like to watch, it does seem to be an honest attempt to grapple with the underlying issues behind the far-right’s attempts to reach out and recruit disenfranchised working class Whites. But the responsibility for the growth in racism goes far beyond the Fascist right itself, right to the heart of the neoliberal establishment. At one level, the Nazis are only building on the extreme nationalism and racism that’s been pushed for decades by the Tories and the Tory press – the Scum and the Heil are two notorious examples. But it also includes the supposedly more upmarket Spectator, which, as the Sage of Crewe has pointed out, employs the anti-Semitic Taki and is increasingly Alt Right.
And among the causes of the growth of Fascism in this country is Blair and the New Labour project. Blair abandoned socialism and the party’s traditional working class base to appeal instead to Tory swing voters. They fully embraced and participated in the destruction of the NHS and the welfare state, with Gordon Brown particularly enthusiastic about encouraging a flexible job market. In other words, job insecurity. And Tony Greenstein has repeatedly pointed out how hollow and non-existent are the Blairites’ attempts to deal with Fascism. Margaret Hodge, now the darling of the anti-Semitism smear merchants, was so negligent in her treatment of the growth of Fascism in her constituency, that the BNP actually sent her flowers when seven of their stormtroopers were elected on to Tower Hamlets local council. As for Tom Watson, he was a friend of Phil Woolas, a New Labour politico, who ran a very racist campaign against a Lib Dem opponent, claiming that he was soft on immigration and encouraged Muslim radicalisation. Woolas said that his campaign was about getting White men angry. And David Rosenberg on his blog warned that the anti-Semitism witchhunt was designed to purge the Labour movement of genuine Left-wingers and anti-racists, and that this was damaging real opposition to Fascism in working class communities. The witchhunt and Blairism meant that recent anti-racist counterprotests were, for the first time, outnumbered by the Fascists. And to add insult to injury, the Nazis chanted ‘Anti-Semites! Anti-Semites!’ at their genuinely anti-racist opponents. Rosenberg has shown repeatedly on his blog how proper campaigning in working class communities, by socialists determined to give working people better opportunities and conditions, will devastate Fascist organisations by depriving them of the real, social and economic issues they exploit to misdirect rightly angry Whites into hating Blacks, Asians and other ethnic minorities.
The play looks like a good, honest account to deal with the growth in working class racism by showing that it is partly caused by the real despair in these communities at their poor and declining conditions. And tackling those and combating Fascism means attacking and combating the Tories and New Labour, who have caused them and seek to exploit the anger they’ve caused in turn by scapegoating ethnic minorities.
Nearly three weeks ago Margaret Hodge, the Blairite MP for Barking, opened her mouth and let the cat out the bag, revealing the real reasons she and the rest of the Thatcherite entryists in the party want their leader gone. And it has zilch to do with anti-Semitism. The real reason she and the other Blairites loathe and detest him and his supporters is because, like the rest of the political and media establishment, they’re neoliberals. They believe utterly that socialism is dead, that there is no point challenging the right-wing media, and that there has to be more privatisation, because private enterprise is always superior to state-run industries, even when, in the case of the railways, the utilities and the NHS, it very obviously isn’t.
They also despise the working people, whom they claim to represent. Blair, Mandelson, Brown and the rest of the shabby bunch concentrated on winning over swing voters, who could also vote Tory. Hence they stole the Tories’ policies, got Murdoch and sections of the right-wing media to back them, and even tried ingratiating themselves with the Daily Heil. They believed, like the Tories, that the unions were an obstacle that had to be crushed, and that a large proportion of those claiming benefit were malingerers and scroungers. And so they inflicted the Work Capability Tests on the disabled, and continued to make signing on for unemployment benefit, or Jobseeker’s Allowance, as it’s become, as hard and humiliating as possible.
And all the while they continued to suck up to the rich, offering businessmen and senior executives places in government, in return for donations to the party.
This was, according to Blair and the rest of the establishment, a post-ideological age. By which they mean post-socialist. Thatcher’s policies had to be introduced into the Labour party for it to compete with the Tories. Because, as Thatcher herself said ad nauseam, ‘There Is No Alternative’.
And Hodge revealed she believed this nonsense absolutely when she claimed that Corbyn pledges to nationalise the railways, water and part of the electricity grid, end the privatisation of the NHS, restore the unions, and give working people greater rights at work, job security, proper wages and a strong welfare state, was simply offering them bribes. She said
“I want to lay the party that brings honesty into our politics. What we’ve got, if we do have anything, is a whole range of unrealistic promises, whether it’s on reversing all the cuts of the last decade, whether it’s on promising that we’ll do away with tuition fees, those are promises that will not be fulfilled. And that unrealism, those sorts of bribes, actually in my view, in an era of scepticism, simply against policies or politics is not the way to win election”.
In his post about this revealing outburst from Hodge, Zelo Street commented
There you have it: in Hodge world, you’re only going to get elected by shrugging your shoulders and leaving all the homeless out on the streets, leaving Universal Credit in place, leaving the NHS in an increasingly parlous state, and yes, leaving millions of poor people to their fate.
Absolutely. And it’s not just Hodge, who to my mind looks like an alien from Dr. Who with one of the bizarre hairdos Mrs. Slocombe used to sport in the classic Beeb comedy, Are You Being Served?. What she’s articulated is what passes for realism amongst the Blairites. Because Thatcher said so.
Margaret Hodge Alien
Zelo Street also mentioned that she demonstrated last year that the attacks on Corbyn had precious little to do with anti-Semitism, when the Groan reported that she “has signalled that Labour MPs critical of Jeremy Corbyn are digging in for a long struggle against his leadership as she suggested that the antisemitism row would only end if he stood aside”.
Needless to say, real Labour activists and supporters weren’t remotely impressed. The Sage of Crewe gave examples of their reaction to Hodge’s repugnant views on Twitter. Matt Turner’s comment, apparently, was typical.
“Can anyone, in all honesty, tell me why the hell Margaret Hodge is in the labour party? Sitting on her £70+k a year plus expenses and having the audacity to say reversing austerity is somehow a bribe? She’s not the one dying on the street struggling to feed her children”
And Eric the Socialist asked the reasonable question how she could still be in the Labour party campaigning on a platform in which she didn’t believe.
“Margaret Hodge has left labour. Right? Surely she can’t say her own party are trying to bribe the electorate with unrealistic policies AND still be in the Labour party?”
I am therefore not remotely surprised that she was one of the 118 Labour MPs, who shamefully demanded Chris Williamson’s re-suspension as an ‘anti-Semite’. This has absolutely nothing to do with real anti-Semitism, and everything to do with attacking a key Corbyn ally. Someone who actually wants to return the party to its socialist and working class roots, and do something for the people she and the rest of the Blairites despise.
And as for Hodge’s opposition to anti-Semitism, she did so little to combat the BNP in her constituency, that when they seven seats on Tower Hamlet’s council, I believe they actually sent her a bouquet of flowers.
There are very many issues I’d like to blog about, but I have to cover this one. It’s an absolute travesty. Jackie Walker, the Black Jews anti-racist historian, activist and educator, has been expelled from the Labour party after she walked out of what was another kangaroo. Walker has suffered years of vilification and foul abuse because she is what the Israel lobby inside and outside the Labour party can’t stand: a Jewish opponent of Israel and its ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. If you watch Jon Pullman’s film, Witchhunt, which is about her persecution and those of other critics of Israel, she tells how she came into anti-Israeli apartheid activism. It was in the 70’s when she was part of the campaign against apartheid in Namibia. And through her activism against apartheid in southern Africa, she moved on to questioning it and campaigning against it in Israel.
It’s glaringly clear that Walker is no anti-Semite nor any kind of racist. But because of her activism and the fact that she was an ally and supporter of Jeremy Corbyn, the Israel lobby and the Conservatives, including the Thatcherite ‘moderates’ moved to smear her. They did so first by delving back into her Facebook posts and finding an old discussion with two colleagues in which she said that her people – the Jews – were the chief financiers of the slave trade. She should have said ‘among the chief financiers of the slave trade’. Walker is fully able to support the latter statement using established historical fact by conventional scholars, some of whom are Jewish. However, the sloppy wording of her statement allowed her to be presented by the CAA as anti-Semitic. That’s when she was suspended the first time. She was suspended again when she was secretly recorded at a training day on Holocaust Memorial Day run by the Jewish Labour Movement questioning their use of International Holocaust Remembrance Definition of anti-Semitism. This is a perfectly fair question, as the definition has been criticised by one of its authors, Kenneth Stern, for suppressing free criticism of Israel, and the Scots appeal court Judge, Sir Stephen Sidney, who is Jewish, amongst others. When Marc Wadsworth, the Black anti-racist activist, asked for a definition of anti-Semitism when he was hauled up before a similar kangaroo court, the wretched tribunal had to adjourn. When they returned, it was in the company of four lawyers, all arguing. In fact, the proper definition of anti-Semitism is straightforward. Following the definition of Wilhelm Marr, the 19th century German, who coined the term, it’s simply hatred of Jews as Jews. But the I.H.R.A. definition includes references to Israel, including describing it as a racist endeavour. Hence the insistence on its adoption by the Israel lobby, determined to suppress criticism of Israel for its racist oppression of the Palestinians.
In fact, Jackie walked out of her hearing after they refused to allow her to make an opening statement. She published a detailed account of her experience at the Jewish Voice for Labour website. And Mike in his piece about it, put up on Wednesday, describes how close it was to the treatment they gave him. Both Jackie and Mike were suddenly presented with new information against them at the very last minute. The charge against them was not a normal definition of anti-Semitism. In Jackie’s case, the definition used was whether an ordinary person reading or hearing her comment would consider them anti-Semitic. She remarks that it is an extraordinary dilution of the real definition of anti-Semitism as hatred of Jews. Similarly, the charge against Mike was that an anonymous individual, who thus legally didn’t exist, had been offended by what he wrote on his blog. She also states that she was not informed in advance of the identities of the panel, so she could check whether they would give her a fair trial. Neither was Mike, who remarked that if had been able to do this he would have refused to participate unless a new panel was selected.
Jackie has also complained about prejudicial comments made about her by Labour MPs. Mike has also said that he suffered the attention of Labour MPs, who wanted simply to find anyone accused guilty and that there was a directive in the charge sheet against him by the NEC to do so. Jackie also said that the Party was guilty of breaches of confidentiality in giving out private data, just as Mike is pursuing the Labour party for doing so. And while Mike was allowed to speak in his case, he was constantly interrupted by a panel that simply wasn’t interested in whether he was guilty or not.
Mike states in his article about Jackie Walker leaving the kangaroo court that
Put it all together and we see that Labour’s failure to follow its own rules, and its determination to smear party members who speak out about injustice, is not only habitual – it appears to be party policy.
He states that those responsible should feel a deep and abiding shame, and that they should resign. If they won’t, then they should be identified and pursued. But that will be difficult as they’re trying to purge everyone who might be a threat to them. Nevertheless, the identification of clear breaches of procedure in these cases should be enough to begin a dialogue.
Shortly after the hearing, Jackie was formally told she had been expelled from the party. Not for anti-Semitism, but for ‘prejudicial and grossly detrimental behaviour against the party’. This is a catch-all charge that actually means nothing. Her real crime, as Mike and the very many others he quotes in his article about this foul affair, was that she said something that offended a right-wing, Zionist/ pro-Israeli-government Jew. And by expelling her, the Labour party has shown that it is determined to persecute left-wing Jews, who want a peaceful solution to the Israel/Palestine problem. Walker’s expulsion was the subject of biased articles in the Guardian and Labour List, and rants by the Jewish Labour Movement, which claimed that she was able to carry on making a mockery of the party’s procedures because she had support of members of the party leadership, the NEC and MPs. Thus ignoring awkward facts like she was attacked in a letter signed by 38 Labour MPs and her expulsion was welcomed by poisonous egomaniac Margaret Hodge. The JLM then continued with its lies by saying that despite warm words, little had been done to tackle the scale and impact of anti-Semitism within the Labour party. Which is a bold statement to make after secretly and unethically recording her comments at the Holocaust Memorial training day. The Board of Deputies of British Jews, the Jewish Leadership Council and the Community Security Trust then made a statement that nobody wins in this latest ugly case of disreputable behaviour. To which Mike responds that this statement clearly contradicts the facts, as it doesn’t identify the disreputable behaviour as the secret recording of Jackie’s comments.
Mike’s article on Jackie’s expulsion states that it is mortifying for everyone in the Labour party, who believe the members deserve better from their leaders, and then proceeds down the list of breaches of basic justice they committed against her. The charge against her, of detrimental behaviour against the party, can mean anything and everything, as Martin Odoni has pointed out. It’s as unjust as the way the party threw out the I.H.R.A. definition of anti-Semitism in Jackie’s previous trial, and used instead the definition that something was anti-Semitic if an ordinary person thought it was. Which Mike states is claptrap. And then there’s the breach of the party’s own disciplinary procedures by giving her new evidence days before the trial.
Mike states plainly that
We are left to contemplate – not a disgraced anti-Semite who has finally been made to face justice, but an honourable campaigner, falsely-accused, falsely-expelled, and wrongly vilified by a disgraced, debased and corrupted political machine.
He goes on to say that if Jeremy Corbyn himself is reading this, it is to be hoped that he burns with shame at this travesty committed by his subordinates in an underhanded campaign to remove him from the leadership. Corbyn has been able to beat the accusations against him so his opponents have turned instead to attacking his allies. And he has let it happen. He can’t stop the persecution on his own. He needs the help of the NEC, but they haven’t lifted a finger to stop it but have cheered on the persecution carried out by the compliance unit and the NCC.
Mike concludes
Labour needs root-and-branch reform of all three organisations. And it needs it yesterday.
Everything Mike’s written about this shabby affair is absolutely right. Tony Greenstein, another principle Jewish campaigner against all forms of Fascism, who was also expelled on trumped up charges of anti-Semitism because of his opposition to Israel, has made the point time and again that Corbyn and his advisors have consistently given in to the witchhunters in the hope of appeasing them. But this hasn’t worked. It has just encouraged and emboldened them, and they will only stop when they have removed him as head of the Labour party.
As for the organisations involved in smearing Walker and the other victims of the witchhunt, despite their pretensions to honesty and virtue they are deeply immoral and deceitful. The Jewish Labour Movement claims to speak for all Jews in the Labour party. It doesn’t. It is, as its founder, embezzler Jeremy Newmark has said, set up to use the same methods to attack Israel’s critics and opponents elsewhere within the Labour party. It’s members don’t have to be Jewish – and it’s been claimed that the majority are gentiles. And they don’t even have to be members of the party. They’re a Zionist entry group, but position themselves as the true voice of Jews within the party to the exclusion of other Jewish groups like Jewdas, Jewish Voice for Labour and so on, who do support Corbyn and whose members are actually Jewish. The Board of Deputies of British Jews is another Zionist organisation that really only represents the United Synagogue. It doesn’t represent the Orthodox, many members of whom have published letters in support of Corbyn. Nor do they represent secular Jews. The Jewish Leadership Council was set up as a rival to the Board by much the same affluent, Tory-voting establishment types that serve on the Board. The Community Security Trust are a private vigilante group, trained by Mossad, who for some reason have been given considerable powers to patrol Jewish communities to protect them from harm. No other ethnic or religious groups have this privilege, despite the fact that Muslims and mosques are more at risk of attack and vandalism than Jews and synagogues. Also, the CST grossly inflates the incidence of anti-Semitism and has a history of unprovoked, vicious assaults on anti-Zionism campaigners. Tony Greenstein described some of this in a post he put up back in January. And it’s a long, ugly list. Those assaulted by the CST thugs include women, Muslims and Jews. One victim was an elderly rabbi, who was punched in the face! This is the deplorable behaviour of Fascists, like the viciously anti-Semitic banned terror group, National Action. But somehow the CST and its thugs have state approval. And the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism is really only interested in attacking left-wing critics of Israel, and has little to say about real, genuine anti-Semites and Fascists.
Walker, Marc Wadsworth, Ken Livingstone, Tony Greenstein, Mike and so many others have been expelled and smeared to satisfy a politically biased, grossly unrepresentative Zionist establishment. An establishment that has shown itself repeatedly to be manifestly unjust and deeply mendacious. It is this establishment and their right-wing allies, both in the Labour party and without, which needs to be held up to examination, and should have their lies and machinations exposed. And those responsible for the witchhunt should be called out and utterly disgraced for their vilification and demonisation of decent, anti-racist women and men.
It wasn’t just the Irish challenging their governments over support for Israel during the bombardment of Gaza. In the video below from 2009, posted on YouTube by setfree68, the veteran Labour MP Gerald Kaufman also bitterly criticises Israel for its attacks on civilians. Kaufman himself, as his speech makes very clear, was Jewish and his family also suffered under Nazi persecution, with many of relatives being murdered. He makes an explicit parallel between the way the Nazis treated them and the other Jews, and how the Israelis were then treating the Palestinians. Kaufman was one of the MPs, who lost his seat and was convicted of fiddling his expenses during that scandal a few years ago. Nevertheless in many ways he was a fine politician, and certainly spoke the truth here with real moral courage that certainly was not shared by the former Labour leader, Tony Blair.
He begins by addressing the deputy speaker, and describes how he was brought up as an Orthodox Jew and a Zionist. On a shelf on his family’s kitchen was a tin box for the Jewish National Fund into which they put coins to help the pioneers building a Jewish presence in Palestine. He first when to Israel in 1961 and states that he has since been there more times than he could count. He has family and friends in Israel, one of whom fought in the wars of 1956, 1967 and 1973, and was wounded in two of them. He states that he is wearing a tie-clip made from a campaign decoration awarded to one of his friends, which he presented to Kaufman. He states that he knew most of the prime ministers of Israel, starting with the founding PM, David Ben-Gurion and describes Golda Meir as his friend, along with deputy prime minister Yigal Alon, who was the general, who won the Negeb for Israel in the 1948 War of Independence.
He states that his parents came to Britain as refugees from Poland, and that most of their families were subsequently murdered by the Nazis in the Holocaust. His grandmother was ill in her bed when the Nazis came to her hometown of Stashev, and she was shot dead in her bed by a German soldier. He then goes to state that his grandmother did not die to provide cover for Israeli soldiers murdering Palestinian grandmothers in Gaza. The present Israeli government ruthlessly and cynically exploits the continuing guilt among gentiles over the slaughter of Jews in the Holocaust as justification for their murder of Palestinians. The implication is that Jewish lives are precious, but the lives of Palestinians do not count. He mentions that on Sky News a few days previously an Israeli arm spokeswoman Major Liebovich was asked about the Israeli killing of, at that time, 800 Palestinians. The total, he says, is now a thousand. Leibovich replied that five hundred of them were militants. That, he states unhesitatingly, is the reply of a Nazi. He says that he supposes that the Jews fighting unhesitatingly for their lives in the ghetto could have been dismissed as militants.
He then goes on to discuss Hamas and the problems they pose for a proper peace. He states that the Israeli foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, asserts that her government will have no dealing with Hamas because they’re terrorists. Livni’s father was Atan Livni, chief operations officer of the terrorist Irgun Tzvi Liun, who organised the blowing up of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, which killed 91 victims, including four Jews. Israel was born out of Jewish terrorism. Jewish terrorists hanged two British sergeants and booby trapped their corpses. Irgun, together with the terrorist Stern Gang massacred 254 Palestinians in 1948 in the village of Deir Yassin. Today, the present Israeli government indicates that they would be willing in circumstances acceptable to them to negotiate with the Palestinian president, Abbas, of Fatah. He declares that it’s too late for that. They could have negotiated with Fatah’s previous leader, Yasser Arafat. who was a friend of Kaufman’s. Instead they besieged him in a bunker in Ramallah where Kaufman visited him. It’s because of the failings of Fatah since Arafat’s death that Hamas won the Palestinian election in 2006.
Hamas, he says clearly, is a deeply nasty organisation, but it was democratically elected and is the only game in town. The boycotting of Hamas, including by our own government, has been a culpable error from which dreadful consequences have followed. He says that the great Israeli foreign minister, Abba Eban, with whom Kaufman campaigned for peace on many platforms, said ‘You make peace by talking to your enemies’. However many Palestinians the Israelis murder in Gaza, they cannot solve this existential problem by military means. Whenever and however the fighting ends, there will still be 1 1/2 million Palestinians in Gaza and 2 1/2 million more Palestinians in the West Bank, who are treated like dirt by the Israelis with hundreds of roadblocks and the ghastly denizens of the Jewish settlements harassing them as well. Kaufman predicts that a time will come, not so long from now, when they will outnumber the Jewish population in Israel. It’s time for our government, he declares, to make clear to the Israeli government that its conduct and policies are unacceptable, and to impose a total arms ban on Israel. It is time for peace, he says, but real peace, not the solution by conquest which is the Israelis’ real goal, which is impossible for them to achieve. He concludes with the stinging words ‘They’re not simply war criminals, they’re fools!’
The video ends with the address of a couple of websites. I haven’t visited them, and so I can’t vouch if they are reasonable websites or not, so be careful.
Kaufman’s statesmanlike speech makes it very clear that he isn’t a knee-jerk anti-Israeli, nor is he ashamed of his Jewish background. Indeed, from this it’s clear that he’s proud of his connections to Israel. But like very many decent people of every race and creed, he was disgusted by the Fascistic violence of the Israelis against the indigenous Arabs.
He is also absolutely correct about Israel’s cynical exploitation of gentile guilt over the Holocaust. This is quite different from the proper commemoration of the Holocaust and its victims, which should serve as a reminder that terrible atrocities were committed in civilised Europe, and that such horrors could indeed occur again if it is not properly remembered. And we need that now, when real Fascists, Nazis and anti-Semitic regimes are taking power in Hungary, Poland, the Baltic States and Ukraine.
But the Israelis and their supporters do exploit the Holocaust. We’ve seen it with the way the Israel lobby smears their opponents as anti-Semites, and people like Mike as Holocaust deniers. Indeed, Margaret Hodge used the Holocaust to smear Corbyn when she whined that her suspension was like that of the Jews in eastern Europe waiting for the Nazis’ knock at the door. Of course, it was nothing like that, and Jews and non-Jews, whose relatives really had suffered arrest and imprisonment by the Nazis angrily reminded her of that. Norman Finkelstein also addressed it in his book, The Holocaust Industry, in which he described how the Israeli state and greedy lawyers enrich themselves by suing governments and organisations for compensation and monies owed to Holocaust survivors and their families, but then swallow this in legal fees. Thousands of Holocaust survivors have been swindled like this, and left in poverty in Israel.
As for Hamas, they’re horrific. But they were democratically elected, something Killary lamented in a recorded phone call. The time is long past when governments around the world should be indulging Israel and its genocidal policies. But they will, because of geopolitical reasons. Israel is the West’s key ally in the Middle East, along with Saudi Arabia. And they sell guns and other weapons to eastern Europe, as well as no doubt buying all that ‘wonderful kit’ David Cameron raved about as an arms factory in Lancashire.
The Democrat politicos who aren’t going to AIPAC this weekend have made a great moral decision. It is one which I hope more of the world’s politicians follow, and that I hope it also pays off as an increasing number of people in America and Europe turn away from Israeli brutality. As for Kaufman, he may have been a crook, but he would have been a far better Foreign Minister than that clown Boris.
Oh ho! Mike today posted a very interesting article about two letters written by Jewish supporters of Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour party, which the anti-Semitism witch-hunters will definitely not like.
One was written to the Groaniad by 200 Jewish ladies, who were angered by the formerly left-wing newspaper’s unqualified support of Margaret Hodge. Hodge was disappointed that so few people have been charged with anti-Semitism, as she personally had denounced 200 people. They pointed out that of 111 people she had accused, only 20 were actually members of the Labour party. The other 91 were nothing to do with the party’s disciplinary procedure and her complaints against them were a waste of the party’s time.
They also said that her other claims – that the party should shut down those branches which had expressed loyalty to Chris Williamson, or refused to adopt the I.H.R.A. definition of anti-Semitism should be similarly treated as suspect. They supported Williamson’s statement that the party had been too apologetic in its treatment of the anti-Semitism accusations, and stated that the I.H.R.A. definition of anti-Semitism had been shredded by two QCS and the Jewish human rights specialist, Sir Geoffrey Bindman, and the Jewish retired appealed court judge, Stephen Sedley. Their letter concludes
All signatories to this letter grew up in the shadow of the Holocaust. We know we must maintain eternal vigilance against antisemitic resurgence. But we also celebrate our Jewishness, especially the disputatiousness (pace our aphorism: two Jews three opinions) central to Jewish identity. We are terrified by Margaret Hodge’s attempt to hijack our history and rewrite our identity and by unwillingness to investigate, fact check and challenge her allegations.
The Groaniad refused to print the letter, on the grounds that it didn’t say anything new. So two Jewish Labour ladies, Naomi Wayner and Leah Levane, one of whom was a signatory to the letter, published an article about it and the text of the letter in the Prole Star.
Mike comments that this means that probably more people will see it and read it than if it had been published by the paper.
The Sunday Times, when of the offenders in the media smears of decent people as anti-Semites, also printed a letter by 12 Holocaust survivors. They state that they don’t believe the party is perpetrating any hostility or prejudice towards Jews, and if it is, it is minimal, and no more prevalent than in any other party. And rather than considering Jeremy Corbyn a threat, they say he has been over backwards for Jews.
They also state
Media attention on the Labour Party in general, and on Corbyn in particular, is being generated by anti-Labour and anti-Corbyn mischief makers, who unfortunately are over-represented within the so-called Anglo-Jewish leadership — a leadership whose legitimacy is not recognised by the mainstream Haredi (strictly Orthodox) Jews.
The Jewish Chronicle, a paper with a proud future behind it, has criticised the letter, and in particularly claimed that the authors or somehow connected to Shraga Stern, the Orthodox Jew, who appeared in a photo with Corbyn during his visit to Finsbury Park mosque. The paper also claimed that the rabbis who signed an earlier letter of support for Corbyn didn’t know what they were signing. According to the Skwawkbox, both claims have been thoroughly refuted. See:
Mike also notes that the film Witchhunt, about the persecution of anti-Zionists and Corbyn supporters within the Labour party, has just been released. He hasn’t seen it yet, but encourages everyone to do so. He ends his article
The mainstream – the ‘establishment’ – will try hard to regain the initiative; we have seen one attempt already in the response of the Jewish Chronicle. The best advice you can take is to use your own intelligence and make up your own mind, based on the evidence available and the reliability of those providing it.
I’m surprised that the Sunset Times published the article by Holocaust survivors, but perhaps they were afraid of the bad press they’d get if they didn’t. As Jewish bloggers like Tony Greenstein, Martin Odoni and David Rosenberg have pointed out, Orthodox Jews are not represented by the Board of Deputies of British Jews, and don’t recognise the Chief Rabbi. And I suspect that Haredi Judaism of some of the signatories may well also be embarrassing to some of the witchhunters. According to a recent article by Shaun Lawson, a liberal Zionist, witchhunter Jonathan Hoffman tried to shut down Jewish supporters of Corbyn with a questionnaire asking them about how Jewish they were in terms of synagogue attendance, activity within the Jewish community, adherence to the Jewish purity laws and Torah, and so on. He had to abandon this approach. From what I gather, the Haredi are a Jewish revival movement, who call Orthodox Jews into a full observance of the Mosaic Law. Which means that there can be absolutely no question about their Jewishness, not that Hoffman’s wretched questionnaire could ever quantify that and the merest suggestion that it could is ridiculous. The Jewish community is divided in its adherence to the Law, from the very strict – the Orthodox and the Haredi, to the less so, like Reform Jews. But all of them view themselves as devout Jews, just as I’ve no doubt the third of the community that is secular also do not deny or are ashamed of their heritage.
As for Shraga Stern, who the Jewish Chronicle seems to believe was somehow involved in persuading the Holocaust survivors to write their letter, he has also received a threatening message because of his appearance with Corbyn, just like Mrs Manson. Is the Jewish Chronicle trying to stir up more hatred against him through its article?
I’m sure Mike’s right that further attacks will come, especially as Survation has put Labour five points ahead of the Tories. But with claims like anti-Semitism, you do have to exercise proper scepticism and critical thinking. You have to ask what the issues really are behind the article, who is writing it, and what they are not telling you.
Okay, so I was wrong. Yesterday I wrote a piece commenting on a story in Private Eye that Trevor Chinn, a Zionist businessman, looked like he was going to take his funding away from Tom Watson and his attempt to stage a backbench revolt against Corbyn, and give it instead to the Lib Dems. This section of the story is, as far as I know, true. However, I connected it to the debate the Jewish Labour Movement, real name Paole Zion, was going to stage about whether they should disaffiliate from Labour. I speculated that Chinn, as a Zionist, was taking his money out of Labour because his attempts to boost the Israel lobby weren’t working, and that this may also apply to the JLM.
Unfortunately, I was wrong. The Jewish Labour Movement, which only represents Zionist Jews in the Labour Party, despite the rulings and rantings of Labour’s Compliance Unit and the NEC, voted by majority of its members in Manchester and London to stay on. If they can be believed, of course. It has also been said that no vote was held at all.
Whether this was true or not, what is true is that it was all a stunt. Asa Winstanley of the Electronic Intifada posted a series of Tweets which showed that he wasn’t at all surprised,. Indeed, he even predicted it. He had expected a group of right-wing Labour MPs to split away, followed by the JLM, as the Movements Fuhrer, Jeremy Newmark, had done the exact same thing to disrupt the University and College Union several years ago. It’s done to pretend that Jews are leaving en masse in protest at the anti-Semitism they experience whenever an official body starts criticising their favourite apartheid state. In fact, the tactics had worked and put a chill on any discussion of Israel for a time. But it also put the JLM in court, and the beak was not impressed. He attacked them for using litigation to try and shut down free speech. The judge was particularly critical of the leader of this fiasco, one Jeremy Newmark. Winstanley stated
Newmark was singled out by the judge for giving particularly “preposterous,” “arrogant” and “disturbing” evidence which showed contempt for freedom of speech. He was basically called a liar by the judge — giving “untrue” evidence.
Nomark is the former head of the Jewish Leadership Council, where he showed his complete absence of morals there. They quietly let go of him when he was caught embezzling. No-Morals has been described as ‘bent as a nine-bob note’ and ‘a one-man crimewave’ by one Jewish blogger. After leaving the JLC, he then took over the moribund Paole Zion in the Labour Party, pumped money into it, and reinvented it as the Jewish Labour Movement, and himself as a Labour activist.
But how mighty is this gang of zealots? Er, not very. It has a membership of only 2,000. And you don’t even have to be a member of the Labour Party to join. Which is how David Collier, one of the people behind the Gnasherjew online persona, got in. And which also turns around Collier’s rage at the Beeb inviting Jewish Voice for Labour on to Newsnight. Predictably he accused the Corporation of anti-Semitism and claimed that they were only a fringe movement. Which is what could also be said about the JLM, with their paltry membership and abuse they mete out to Israel-critical Jews like Tony Greenstein, Jackie Walker and others.
Collier and the Jewish Labour Movement is what Norman Stanley Fletcher, the sage of Slade Prison, used to call ‘charmless nerks’. The organisation tweeted about its decision with its members’ usual surly lack of grace. Zionists like Collier and the JLM threaten their opponents online as well as in person, and this post was no exception. They told Labour politicos and councillors that if they stood with JLM, the JLM would stand with them. But if they were against them, they wouldn’t. Which is basically coded language meaning that if they didn’t support the JLM and their war against Corbyn, they’d attack them.
If they were expecting the legions of ordinary people in the party, to be cowed and chastened by the news, they were to be severely disappointed. Marxy spoke for many when he said
Dear JLM
We don’t respond to threats.
Do as you wish.
Labour Party Membership.
This was all just a stunt. While it might take in the public, 29 per cent of whom supposedly now believe the lies about Labour Party anti-Semitism retailed by the media, it didn’t impress Labour’s real supporters. Rather than being aghast at the JLM disaffiliating, like the 200 Labour Party right-wingers such as Ruth Smeeth and Margaret Hodge, most of the real Labour supporters were ready to clap and cheer.
This group of Zionist entryists and surly, domineering racial supremacists have been indulged for too long. It’s about time they were thrown out for racism and bullying.
Here’s another reason why no-one should give their trust or their votes to the Independent Grouping. Apart from the fact that they’re deadbeat Blairites and Tories, who stand for privatisation, including that of the NHS, the destruction of the welfare state, tuition fees, shifting the tax burden to the poor away from the rich, and supporting Theresa May with a confidence and supply motion in order to stop Labour gaining power. Margaret Hodge, one of the most vociferous of the Blairites smearing her Corbyn supporters as anti-Semites has shown that she will try and ignore and play down accusations of child abuse in areas under her authority.
In 2003 a scandal broke out about Hodge’s suitability to sit in Blair’s cabinet. Liz Davies, a social worker, had uncovered incidents of child abuse in Islington council’s care homes, when she was leader of the council. Hodge had first tried to cover it up, claiming that children in care homes were ‘disruptive’. She had also insulted one of the former inmates who had come forward to tell of his experience of abuse, Demetrios Panton. Panton was now an adult, and Hodge apologised to him for her abuse. Nevertheless, in the Davies’ eyes, this still meant that she was totally unsuited for serving as Children’s Minister in Blair’s government.
I found this recording of an interview Davies gave on The World Tonight in 2003, posted up by Desiring Progress on YouTube in 2013. I haven’t heard all of it, but in what I have heard, Davies makes her views of this whole sordid business and Hodge’s attempts to stop news of the abuse coming out very clear, and she demands Hodge’s resignation.
Hodge is a massive liar when it comes to accusations of anti-Semitism. The programme’s host states that she was supposed to be a good children’s minister under Blair. However, from this it’s clear that Hodge’s first response to accusations and reports of child abuse in organisations for which she is responsible has not been to believe and protect the children, but to try to protect herself and cover it up. No doubt if something like that happened again now, she accused the whistleblower of anti-Semitism to try to make them look guilty, rather than herself.
She is a liar, a slanderer, and an opponent of those genuinely concerned with the protection and welfare of vulnerable children, an attitude made worse by her group’s absolute contempt for democracy. We need to have bye-elections now, and get her out of parliament.
It seems the media really are absolutely terrified of Corbyn getting into No.10, as they’re increasing their vilification. Not only are the accusations that he, and his supporters in the Labour party, are anti-Semites are coming thick and fast from the Independents and the Blairites with the Labour split, but the right-wing, and specifically the Murdoch press, are falling back on the old canard that he’s a Trotskyite.
This morning, the good fellow at Crewe behind the Zelo Street blog put up a piece demolishing the latest attempt by the Murdoch press to defend Tom Bower’s biography of the Labour leader. This is the hit piece on Corbyn, which has screamed that he’s a ruthless operator, who has skillfully removed all ‘centrist’ – read: Thatcherite – opponents – who stood in the way of his ruthless ascent to power.
The claim itself is nonsense. Corbyn won the first Labour election partly because the Thatcherite vote was split between three candidates. And far from being a ruthless Machiavellian intriguer, one of the complaints I’ve heard is that he isn’t ruthless enough. When he first came to power, he was expected to purge the party bureaucracy of Blairites, just as Blair and Brown had purged the apparat before them and stuffed it full of their supporters. But he didn’t. If he had, we wouldn’t be suffering this mess now.
As for the revelations in Bower’s biography that supposedly reveal what an absolute blackguard he is, they’re incredibly disappointing. One of the worst of these came from his ex-wife, who says that he ignored her emotional needs, was boring and talked about politics all the time. What a bastard! This is hardly spousal abuse, It’s just two people, who were unsuited to each other. This fortnight’s Private Eye sent it all up with a spoof of it, by Tom Boo-hoo-hooer, with the title ‘Chapter 94, How Corbyn Wet the Bed, Cried All Night and Pooed his Nappies’.
Faced with this ridicule, the Times has seen fit to try to defend Bower, with the allegation that Corbyn is an academic failure – he apparently got two ‘Es’ and a failure at ‘A’ levels – but became a Trotskyite while teaching geography in Kingston, Jamaica. Corbyn went over there as part of the VSO programme. Apparently it was his experience of the 1968 Kingston riots that turned him into a radical leftist determined to create a British Communist state.
Zelo Street remarks that there are several problems with this. Firstly, no-one in Corbyn’s family told Bower about this, and the idea that they were deliberately concealing it from the old hack is absurd. David Osland on Twitter pointed out that at the time it would have been difficult for Corbyn to have become a Trotskyite in Jamaica, as there was then no Trotskyite movement there. Another Tweeter also pointed out that the real Trotskyites had Corbyn down as a trendy leftie, like Margaret Hodge, rather than anything further and more serious. John Field then made the point that most people accusing him of being a Trotskyite don’t actually know what a Trotskyite is. The article concludes
‘Exactly. Bower has been touring the TV studios, rambling on about communism without one gram of fact to back it up. He is just smearing with the objective of delegitimising Corbyn.
Trouble is, he’s not very good at it. Bit like the press which is enabling him, then.’
And that’s also my experience of talking to people, who believe he’s Trotskyite: they don’t know what a Trotskyite is, and don’t off any evidence that he is one. None whatsoever. They don’t provide any evidence that he belonged to any Marxist organisation, let alone specifically Trotskyite one, or that he believes or has said anything remotely about Trotskyite dogma. It’s just smears without any shred of supporting evidence. But it’s said by the Times, the Mail and the rest of the dying press, so their readers believe it.
I wonder about the sanity of some of the witch-hunters accusing people of anti-Semitism in the Labour party. Or at least their sense of proportion. Margaret Hodge, who claimed that Ruth George’s perfectly reasonable inquiry into whether the Labour Splitters were funded by Israel, is a case in point. She caused outrage and disgust a few months ago when she screamed at Corbyn in the House of Commons, and reviled him as ‘a f***ing anti-Semite’. For which she was duly suspended under Labour party rules that apply to everyone.
This was too much for her sensitive soul, and she compared the stress this had caused her with the fear Jews in the Third Reich felt, waiting for the knock on the door from the Gestapo ready to send them to the death camps. People, who really had had family imprisoned in the concentration camps were rightly outraged. Hodge was attacked for her grossly insensitive comments by Jews, whose family had been sent to these murder factories, and also by non-Jews, who had also had family members incarcerated for their opposition to Hitler’s Reich. Like a young man, whose Sudeten German grandfather was sent there because he was a Communist.
The witch-hunters were also outraged a week or so ago when Jenny Formby dared to reveal the truth about anti-Semitism in the Labour party: there actually wasn’t a lot of it, and only a very few people had actually been expelled. This was too much for them, who can’t stand the thought that anyone they’ve denounced could possibly be innocent. Hodge herself whined that this couldn’t possibly be true, as she’d denounced 200 people.
200? What party did she think she was in? The BNP, the Klan or something? The Labour party is now, thanks to Corbyn, the largest Socialist party in Europe, and as a mass party it obviously is going to include some anti-Semites. But real research shows that anti-Semitism in the Labour party has actually fallen under Corbyn, and is lower than in wider British society. Also, other Jews and Jewish groups have come forward, like Jewish Voice for Labour, and a group of Orthodox rabbis. The good rabbis said that they had absolute confidence in Corbyn, while the peeps at Jewish Voice for Labour said that although there was anti-Semitism in the party, they had never personally, or only very rarely, ever personally experienced it. These were Labour members of long standing, who had been active in their local constituency parties.
But the accusations of anti-Semitism aren’t really about anti-Semitism. Not as it is defined by Wilhelm Marr, the founder of the German Bund Anti-Semiten, who coined the term. He said that it was hatred of Jews, simply as Jews. This is the standard dictionary definition. What Hodge and co see as anti-Semitism is actually criticism of Israel. And long term Jewish critics of the Israeli state and its brutal maltreatment of the Palestinians, like Norman Finkelstein, have made the point Israel defends itself by accusing its critics of being anti-Semites. And this is what has been going on here.
And what the witch-hunters decide is a basis for an accusation of anti-Semitism is very, very wide. One young man was accused of anti-Semitism and expelled, or suspended, because he posted a picture of a Jobcentre sign carrying the slogan ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’, the infamous inscription above the gates of Auschwitz. His accusers maintained that he was somehow denigrating Jewish suffering in the Holocaust. But he wasn’t. He was denigrating the suffering of the jobless inflicted by the DWP under Ian Duncan Smith. Who had begun an article actually quoting this infamous slogan, and saying that it should be rehabilitated because of its usefulness in getting people back into work. It was, he wrote, part of his ethos. Not surprisingly, his editors weren’t impressed, and this part of his article was removed a few hours later. But the Gentleman Ranker had said, nonetheless. And Tony Greenstein and others also pointed out that the inscription was on all the concentration camps, whose members also included the long-term unemployed, people declared arbeitscheu, or ‘workshy’, by the Nazis.
In fact Hodge’s denunciation of 200 hundred people doesn’t remind me of serious accusations, so much as the hysterical persecutions that have occurred in very repressive societies in the past. Like the witch craze in 16th and 17th century Europe, in which people could be accused of witchcraft for the flimsiest of reasons. Or the horrific purges of Stalin’s Russia, where voicing even the slightest comment, which could be considered disrespectful of the tyrant could see you arrested by the NKVD and sent to the gulags. One man was arrested simply for remarked that Stalin didn’t seem quite well when the dictator coughed or something similar during a speech. It also reminded me of all the nutters that wrote into the FBI denouncing anyone and everyone as a Communist agent during the Red scare of the Cold War. Or indeed of the quarter of the East German population that were spying on their friends and neighbours to the Stasi.
It also reminds me of a very dark joke I heard once by an American comedian years ago on one of Bob Monkhouse’s shows on the Beeb in the 1980s. This was a series in which Monkhouse interviewed other comedians, including Pamela Stephenson before she returned to psychiatry. One of his guests was an American comedian, whose act included a parody of the stereotypical, racist southern sheriff. Putting on the accent and persona, the comedian told the following joke.
‘You know, I can tell if someone’s a murderer simply by the look in their eye. And if they got that look in their eye, I hang them. Well, one day I saw this black man, and he had that look in his eye. So I hung him.’
If you know the history of lynching in the Deep South, then it’s probably not a joke. Blacks – and other minorities – were lynched for almost no reason at all, simply for being ‘disrespectful’ to Whites. And the local community would celebrate their deaths, holding a mass party and even breaking pieces off the victims bodies to take home as souvenirs. Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks has described this in one of their videos. British anti-racist YouTuber Kevin Logan has also mentioned it in one of his, complete with a photograph taken as one such lynching, showing the crowds gathering and rejoicing around two lynched Blacks. Some idea of the pressure and fear of that environment came across very clearly in the Dr. Who story at the beginning of the season about Rosa Parks.
I’m not accusing Hodge of being racist. But I am accusing her of having the same paranoia that has motivated witch-hunters and persecutors, like those in Stalin’s Russia and the anti-Communist fanatics of the ’50s.
So what did those 200 people do, that made her accuse them of anti-Semitism. Does she think she has the ability to see if someone’s an anti-Semite, just by looking in their eye? And did she accuse those 200 simply because they looked at her funny? It might not have been quite because of that, but I very much doubt that the reason she gave was much stronger.
