We are pleased to be inviting members in the South West to attend anti-semitism awareness training from the Jewish Labour Movement. It will take place over Zoom on Wednesday 6th July at 7pm.
Please email’ ————–‘to register and the meeting link will be sent closer to the date.
Best wishes,
Labour South West’
I should cocoa! The very cheek! Just in case you need reminding, the Jewish Labour Movement was one of the Jewish organisations deeply involved in the witch-hunt against Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters in the Labour party for alleged ‘anti-Semitism’. I put ‘anti-Semitism’ inverted commas because these organisations, including those outside the party like the Chief Rabbinate and the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism were not, in my opinion, genuinely concerned with anti-Semitism in its true and original sense. This is a hatred of Jews, simply for being Jews, regardless of political or religious opinions on their part. I have made this point again and again on this blog, citing some of the 19th century founders and leaders of modern organised anti-Semitism in Wilhelm Marr’s Bund Antisemiten or League of Anti-Semites. The Jewish Labour Movement used to be Paole Zion, Workers of Zion, and was virtually moribund until a decade or so ago when in received an injection of cash from person or persons unknown. The Labour Party has always had Jewish members and the parliamentary party has, or used to have, slightly more than the Tories. There are a number of other Jewish organisations in the Labour party and on the left, such as Jewish Voice for Labour and the Jewish Socialist Group, not to mention Jewdas, with whom Jeremy Corbyn spent a Passover Seder. Corbyn also received strong backing from the Haredi Jews, who believe it is their duty to stay in galut, exile, until they are called back to Israel by the Messiah. In the meantime, they are to cooperate with the peoples in whose lands they reside to build better societies and to ‘pray for the health of the city’ as commanded by the Prophet in the Hebrew Bible. And I’ve no doubt there are many other Jews in the Labour party, who are not party of any Jewish organisation, because, like Dr. Jonathan Miller, they consider themselves Brits, who happen to be Jewish, and don’t want to be part of a minority.
But these Jews and their organisations are not recognised as properly Jewish and are actively opposed and maligned by the Jewish Labour Movement. The JLM’s focus, like the other organisations behind the witch-hunt, is to combat anti-Zionism and silence any criticism of Israel’s barbarous treatment of the Palestinians. And they do this by smearing their enemies as anti-Semites. And very many of their victims are Jews, which make their claims to be tackling anti-Semitism risible.
Mike was told by the Labour party that he would be allowed to remain in it after he was smeared as an anti-Semite if he attended anti-Semitism training by the JLM. Mike’s only crime was to point out that Ken Livingstone was entirely correct when he said that Adolf Hitler initially supported Zionism. He did. It was the Ha’avara Agreement, a shameful pact with the German Zionists to smuggle German Jews into British mandate Palestine. It was done as a way to cleanse Germany of Jews. The pact was short-lived, but it happened. Mike refused, as he is not and has never been and never will be an anti-Semite and attendance would have been taken as a tacit admission of guilt.
Jackie Walker is another of their victims. They secretly recorded her at workshop to discuss the best ways to commemorate the Holocaust. Holocaust Memorial Day not only commemorates the Jewish Holocaust, but also the many other genocides that have disfigured human history. Walker is a Jew by faith and blood. Her father was a Russian Jews, and so she knows from family experience more than most about real anti-Semitic persecution. Her mother was a Black American civil rights activist, and so was deeply concerned about another form of racial persecution against her people. Walker’s crime was to ask what the event would do about commemorating other holocausts, such as those against Black people. Since the great Black activist and scholar W.E.B. DuBois, many Blacks and White sympathisers have regarded the slave trade and slavery as a Black holocaust. Walker asked a decent question. But for some reason this was regarded as ‘anti-Semitic’ and she was smeared and purged.
I think most severely normal Brits are aware of the dangers of anti-Semitism. The documentaries about the Second World War and the Nazis shown on television necessarily include the Nazi persecution of the Jews and the Shoah. There have been a number of award-winning Hollywood films about the Holocaust and the heroes who rescued Jews, like Schindler’s List, which came out in the ’90s. I also remember the outrage and campaigning on the left in the 70s and 80s against the NF and BNP when they were marching about trying to get votes, and similar fears and disgust when the BNP briefly revived and its noxious leader, Nick Griffin, was invited onto Question Time. There are very many excellent books about the Holocaust, and some of the late Clive James’ best TV criticism is from the 70s when Fascist and Nazi scumbags like Oswald Mosley, Albert Speer and Baldur von Schirach were interviewed on British TV. James expertly took apart their lies and false protestations of innocence to reveal the real malignity underneath.
Part of my undergraduate course in history was on the rise of Fascist and Communist regimes in Europe, and I still have the books I bought during then. I’ve also done some reading on Fascism since then, including on its post-War varieties. I’m also interested in conspiracy theories, the most infamous of which are those about some secret Jewish conspiracy which controls both capitalism, socialism and communism to enslave the White race. These theories became prominent again in the ’90s when they were incorporated into the UFO mythology and the right-wing conspiracy theories about the Illuminati, another group who are supposed to be controlling world events, the economy and politics from behind the scenes. David Icke believed that the world is secretly run by Reptoid aliens. He caused alarm and outrage because he used quotations from the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a Tsarist anti-Semitic forgery, to support his crank ideas. Icke isn’t an anti-Semite, and genuinely seemed to believe that the world was run by extraterrestrials rather than Jews. Other UFO researchers, like the late Bill English, did the same, though when they cited the Protocols they claimed they should be read as talking about the Illuminati, rather than the Jews. Nevertheless these quotations were in danger of making the Protocols seem respectable to the point where a branch of Waterstones in one of the northern towns stocked them.
I totally accept that respectable scholars and lay people have to be very careful when it comes to some of the material on topics like the Nazis and Holocaust. Real anti-Semites and Nazis try to disguise their awful views and attempts to deny or minimise the Holocaust by setting up respectable-sounding magazines. Often they use coded language. For example, a very respectable folklorist wrote a piece in one of the urban folklore magazines back in the ’90s to tell how he’d been taken in by such tactics and to warn other to be on the guard. He had been researching tales of atrocities committed by the Germans during the First World War. He came to the conclusion that one of these, the story that the Kaiser’s troops had crucified a Canadian soldier, was bogus and may have been just allied propaganda. He was then approached by a history magazine with a respectable-sounding title, who asked him if they could reprint his article. He innocently agreed, only to find out later it was a Nazi rag. Its editors were using stories of allied propaganda to suggest that the Holocaust was also nothing but fiction. But as an American judge has ruled, the Holocaust is so well documented that its existence cannot be sanely denied. The scholar was shocked and disgusted, and so wrote the article to let others know about the deception and to be on their guard about similar tactics and approaches.
As for coded language, the believers in a world-wide conspiracy to enslave humanity talk about the globalists, the Illuminati, or the global elite. Sometimes this is innocent of anti-Semitism, and they really are talking about a secretive group of leading politicos, capitalists and so on, which isn’t some Jewish conspiracy. But sometimes it isn’t, and is code for ‘Jews’. I’ve also noticed that while Simon Webb of History Debunked isn’t an anti-Semite or anti-Zionist by any stretch of the imagination, some of his commenters do seem to be. There’s a lot of talk by them about the Great Replacement, the idea that the Jews are trying to destroy the White race with non-White immigrate. There’s also comments about ‘small hatted people’, or ‘people with small hats’, which sounds very much like its about the Jews, referring to the kippa skullcaps many observant Jews wear.
Sometimes you really do need to be careful and be informed so you’re not taken in by such language and deceit. But the Jewish Labour Movement won’t help you.
They’re concerned to discredit criticism of Israel using literary criticism and citing entirely bogus conspiracy theories about the Jews from the past. Remember when Shai Masot was caught plotting with a senior British civil servant to decide who should or shouldn’t be in the cabinet? This could rightly be called a conspiracy. But if you called it that, or described the two as plotting, you were the using an anti-Semitic trope because of all the genuinely stupid, poisonous and entirely mythical anti-Semitic conspiracy theories in the past. The same if you report the atrocities committed by the Israeli state and IDF against Palestinians, especially if they can get in a reference to the Blood Libel, that Jews sacrificed Christian children to use their blood in the matzoh bread at Passover. This vile medieval smear has been responsible for numerous anti-Semitic pogroms. However, the Israeli state now is manipulating its memory to close down reasonable criticism. When the IDF shot a Palestinian woman a few years ago, one of the respectable newspaper cartoonists produced picture of her burning in the fireplace while Netanyahu, the-then president of Israel, hobnobbed with the US president. This was promptly denounced by the Israelis as anti-Semitic, because the fire recalled the gas ovens of the Holocaust. Similarly, when Gerald Scarfe drew a cartoon of the Israelis building their wretched wall to keep the Palestinians out using Arab blood, the Israelis again demanded a retraction and an apology because the blood supposedly referred to the infamous Blood Libel. And so another piece of entirely reasoned, reasonable and absolutely not anti-Semitic criticism and comment was again silenced. And this is what the Jewish Labour Movement also does in its events about anti-Semitism. They have nothing to do with making people genuinely aware of the threat of anti-Semitism and the way it is coded. They are all about discrediting justifiable criticism of Israel through using literary devices to make them apparently connected to past anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and innuendo.
I have absolutely no intention of going to this monstrous charade. If I want information and guidance on genuine anti-Semitism, I’d try to consult the JLM’s Jewish victims – Tony Greenstein, Jackie Walker, Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi, Martin Odoni and others, self-respecting decent people, who have been smeared by the anti-Semitism witch-hunters as self-hating. Even though these people are Jewish and have fought against anti-Semitism and other forms of racism. Or I would contact Marc Wadsworth, the Black anti-racism activist. He was smeared as an anti-Semite, again using literary tropes, because he caught a Jewish Labour MP passing on a party brochure to a Torygraph hack. Oh, it was the trope of the disloyal Jew, they claimed. This was despite the fact that Wadsworth didn’t know the politico was Jewish, and had in the 1980s worked with the Board of Deputies about passing legislation to protect Jews against genuine anti-Semitic violence by the NF or BNP. Or I’d go to someone like Mike, who can tell fact from fiction, well-researches his stories and who was asked by a Jewish friend at College to be one of the readers in her performance commemorating the Holocaust’s victims.
All of the above have a far better understanding of anti-Semitism, or a more honest one than the Jewish Labour Movement and its highly ideological, distorted view of what counts as Jew hatred.
I’ve said it before: Judaism is a religion. The Jews are a people. Zionism is an ideology. Israel is a state. Judaism and its people are not synonymous with the modern state of Israel. Under a free society, all ideologies should be able to be examined and criticised, including Zionism. States can and do commit horrible atrocities, for which they should criticised. Israel should not be an exception merely because its people are Jews. Only hatred of Jews, simply for being Jews, should count as anti-Semitism.
Fight racism! Fight anti-Semitism! And don’t be taken in by bogus propaganda like that of the Jewish Labour Movement.
I’ve been meaning to put up something about this ever since I got the wretched message from the Labour’s party’s wretched Disputes Team in the Governance and Legal Unit, but didn’t get round to doing so. As some of you may remember, I got a series of emails from the Disputes Team or whoever a little while ago telling me that I was being investigated for anti-Semitism because of a particular blog post. Naturally I argued very strongly against the accusation, and demanded to know the identity of my accusers as per natural justice in a British court of law. I was told they wouldn’t divulge that information, and Labour party investigations aren’t part of the British justice system. This is very true, as the principles of justice that are supposed to animate our legal system are completely foreign to it, as numerous people falsely accused of anti-Semitism can attest.
Several months later, on the 22nd March of this year, 2022, I got the following email from the Labour party. They decided that I had contravened the provisions on anti-Semitism and racism in the party, and that this was hampering the party’s fight against racism! But they haven’t expelled me. No, I’ve been issued with a formal warning, which will stay on my record for 18 months. Here’s the text of their message
‘
Notice of Outcome of Investigation: Formal Warning
We are writing to inform you that the Labour Party (the Party) has concluded its investigation into the allegation that you had breached Chapter 2, Clause I.11 of the Party’s Rule Book (the Rules).
A panel of the National Executive Committee (the NEC Panel) met on 18 March 2022 and considered all of the evidence that the Party put to you and any evidence submitted by you in response.
Summary of the Findings of the NEC Panel
The NEC Panel found on the balance of probabilities, that you posted an article on your blog on 05 December 2020.
The NEC Panel concluded that your conduct was in breach of Chapter 2 Clause I.11 of the Rules. In particular, your conduct undermined the Labour Party’s ability to campaign against racism. In coming to this conclusion, the NEC Panel considered that your conduct contravened the provisions of the Code of Conduct: Antisemitism and other forms of racism.
Taking into account all relevant evidence the NEC Panel concluded that the appropriate outcome is to issue you with this Formal Warning pursuant to Chapter 2, Clause I.1.D.iii of the Rules.
The NEC Panel wishes to make clear that your conduct has fallen short of the high standards expected of Party members and to remind you of the importance of behaving consistently with the Rules and Codes of Conduct at all times.
This Formal Warning will remain on your Labour Party membership record for a period of 18 months. If you commit any further breach of the Rules during that period, an NEC Panel may take this Reminder of Conduct and the behaviour that led to it into account in dealing with that breach.
Consequently, any restrictions that the Party may have imposed on your membership rights pending the outcome of this investigation have now ended. This includes any administrative suspension of your membership that may have been in place.
Conduct Expected of Labour Party Members
The Party expects you, in common with all members, to engage in civil, measured discourse, online and offline.
It also expect members to conduct themselves in a manner that avoids any discrimination or harassment on grounds of race, religion or any other protected characteristic inside the party and in wider society and support, and not to undermine, the Labour Party’s ability to campaign against all forms of racism and prejudice.
Members of the Party agree not to engage in any conduct that is prejudicial or grossly detrimental to the Labour Party. This includes any conduct that demonstrates hostility or prejudice based on a protected characteristic; sexual harassment; bullying or intimidation; and unauthorised disclosure of confidential information.
Members must also comply with the provisions of the NEC’s Codes of Conduct, which are publicly available online here:
The Party urges you to read the NEC’s Codes of Conduct carefully and bear them in mind whenever you are involved in Labour Party activities and in discussion and debate, online and offline, about political issues and ideas.
Yours sincerely,
Disputes Team
Governance and Legal Unit
The Labour Party
c.c.
Labour South West’
I’ve been late posting anything up about this because my reaction to it is that of Catherine Tate’s schoolgirl Lauren: ‘Am I bovvered? Do I look bovvered? I ain’t bovvered’. I was expecting to be thrown out, as so many excellent people have been before me. Indeed, considering the calibre of people purged or accused of alleged anti-Semitism, like Mike, Martin Odoni, Jackie Walker, Tony Greenstein, Mark Chilson, Marc Wadsworth, Asa Winstanley, Moshe Machover and far too many others, it’s almost a badge of honour to be included with them.
None of them are or have been in any way racist or anti-Semitic. And neither was the blog post that so offended someone that they felt they just had to complain about me. The post criticised Israel for its treatment of the Palestinians. This is the state of Israel, not Jews and not Israelis either. Through reading material by Jews critical of Israel, like Tony Greenstein’s and David Rosenberg’s blogs, as well as Ilan Pappe’s 12 Myths About Israel, as well as online presentations by the Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem, it’s massively apparent that there are very many Jews and Israelis who despise the Israeli state’s decades long ethnic cleansing of the indigenous Arabs. The Jewish people have never been a homogenous, monolithic group. The Talmud, Judaism’s second holy book, contains the records of disputes over the Law by the sages and great rabbis of antiquity. Quite often these disputes ended with ‘and so they differed’. It’s no different today. There is a wide diversity in Jewish belief, observance and political and social attitudes, just as there is in every community. However, former president Netanyahu and the Israel lobby would like us all to believe that all Jews everywhere are citizens of Israel and passionately support it, to the extent that any criticism of the country is a terrible assault on their identity. Which isn’t necessarily the case. American Jewish young people are becoming increasingly less interested, even opposed, to Israel. One American Jewish vlogger put up a video stating that he found it ridiculous that he somehow had a right to settle in a country he’d never visited – he came from Anchorage, Alaska, while his Palestinian friend, who was born there, was forbidden to return. In fact, far from speaking for the majority of British Jews, organisations like the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the Chief Rabbinate don’t speak for anyone except the United Synagogue, which is only one of a variety of Jewish denominations. But the Board and the Chief Rabbis were very vocal in the anti-Semitism smear campaign against the Labour party and specifically against Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters. Despite the sectarian nature of their support, they did their level best to present themselves falsely as the true voice of British Jews, speaking for the majority.
As for the specific charges against me, I was accused of anti-Semitism because I said that before the Second World War Zionism was a minority position among European Jews. It was. Pappe’s book, and Tony Greenstein’s and David Rosenberg’s blogs have made it very clear that it was, quoting chapter and verse from scholarly studies of Jewish history. The majority of European Jews wished to remain proud citizens of the countries in which they were born, with equal rights and respect as their gentile fellow countrymen. Ditto for Jewish Americans. As late as 1969 one of the Jewish Zionist magazines lamented that there was little interested in Israel among Jewish Americans.
My anonymous accusers also disliked me stating that all ideologies should be open to examination and criticism. Well, they should. There is nothing anti-Semitic in that. It’s one of the cornerstones of real political freedom. Presumably this alarmed them because it means that Zionism should also be examined and criticised. Which is true. Zionism, as I’ve also pointed out, is a political ideology. It is not synonymous with Jews or Judaism. In fact for many years it was just the opposite. The return of the Jews to Israel was first proposed by Christians wishing to hasten Christ’s return, long before Theodor Herzl and Jewish Zionism. Even now the largest Zionist group in America is Pastor Ted Hagee’s Christians United for Israel. It was also supported by real anti-Semites, like Richard Wagner and the various European Fascist parties before the Second World War as a way of removing them from their countries.
I also blotted my copybook defending awkward historical facts, which had resulted in the witch-hunters accusing other Labour party members of anti-Semitism. Ken Livingstone was smeared and then thrown out as an anti-Semite, because the Commie newt-fancier dared to state that Hitler supported Zionism. This is factually correct. It was the short-lived Ha’avara Agreement, in which the Nazis covertly supported the smuggling of Jewish Germans to Palestine. It’s in mainstream histories of Nazism and the Jews, and is mentioned on the website of the Holocaust Museum at Yad Vashem. But it does not support the myth the Zionists have constructed to present themselves as devoid of any collaboration with the Nazis.
Now let’s dismantle the Labour party’s statement that, because of my blog post criticising Zionism, I am harming the party’s efforts to fight racism. The simple answer is ‘No’, to the point where recent events in the Labour party make this sound like a sick, unfunny joke. The majority of the witch-hunt’s victims have been self-respecting Jews like Jackie Walker and Tony Greenstein, to the point that they comprise 4/5 of those purged. From this angle, it very much looks like it’s the witch hunters who are motivated by a sectarian anti-Jewish prejudice. Because peeps like Jackie and Tony ain’t the right kind of Jews. Marc Wadsworth, another victim, is Black and has campaigned tirelessly against racism. He got Stephen Lawrence’s family to meet Nelson Mandela, and in the ’80s worked with the Board to put in place legislation against real anti-Semitic attacks by the BNP in the East End. But they accused him of anti-Semitism and so had him purged.
At the moment, the Labour party is losing many of its Black and Asian members. Some of this is undoubtedly for the same reasons the party’s losing members generally: the party no longer represents the genuinely popular polices put forward by Jeremy Corbyn, policies that inspired so many to join the party that under Corbyn’s leadership it became the largest socialist party in Europe. But there’s also been a rise in anti-Black and anti-Asian racism in the Labour party as well as islamophobia under Starmer. Black and Asian MPs and activists like Diane Abbott were bullied and racially abused. One third of Muslim members say they have encountered islamophobia. But Starmer has done absolutely nothing about this. And the reason is simple:
He doesn’t care.
Starmer describes himself as ‘100 per cent Zionist’. The people he wishes to appease is the Israel lobby, and so avoid the same charges of anti-Semitism that brought down Corbyn. He does not seem to care about racism against Blacks or Asians or hostility and prejudice against Muslims. And the party’s attitude to what it considers to be anti-Semitic is highly partisan.
Starmer has been using fake charges of anti-Semitism to purge the Labour left, and so make the Blairite grip on it permanent and unchallengeable. Blair did something similar when he was in power. He ignored the left and traditional Labour voters in favour of middle class, Thatcherite swing voters. He assumed that traditional Labour voters and supporters would continue supporting the party because they had nowhere else to go. As a result, many Labour supporters stopped voting, so that even when he won elections, the percentage of people voting Labour actually declined. Some of the party’s working class supporters may have gone over to UKIP, whose supporters were largely older working class Whites who felt left behind and ignored by the existing parties.
And today there are a number of competing parties. A poll a few months ago found that there would be massive support for a new party led by Jeremy Corbyn. A number of left-wing organisations are considering allying to form a competing party, not to mention the Trades Union and Socialist Alliance, which has been around for years. And the Green Party is also growing in popularity. At the moment it’s only just behind Labour in the number of seats it holds on Bristol city council. I’m sure it’s similar in other cities up and down the country.
Starmer’s playing a very dangerous game with his purges, because rather than people keeping on voting and joining Labour because there’s nowhere else, they may very well join or set up rival parties.
This could destroy the Labour party, but I really doubt Starmer and his allies care, just as long as they retain control of the party. And it doesn’t matter how many decent people they purge and smear as anti-Semites, Communists, Trotskyites or whatever.
Last month the noxious Blairite MP Neil Coyle put up a tweet calling for the expulsion of Jewish Voice for Labour, an organisation of left-wing Jews, which supported Jeremy Corbyn and his socialist policies. Unlike the Jewish Labour Movement, the right-wing ultra-Zionist outfit, formerly called Paole Zion, JVL members had to be both Jewish and members of the Labour party, although non-Jews could be associate members. JLM members don’t have to be either, and at one point it seems that 60 per cent of their members weren’t actually Jewish. But Jewish Voice for Labour have terrified the Labour leadership and the Conservative political and media establishment by supporting a return to the Labour policies that would have empowered this country’s great working people and criticising Israel and its murderous persecution of the Palestinians. As a result, the woefully misnamed Jewish Labour Movement is somehow hailed as the true voice of the party’s Jews and given the responsibility for providing anti-Semitism training to prospective party workers and politicians. Jewish Voice for Labour, on the other hand, are continually being denounced by the Blairite witch-hunters like Coyle as ‘Communists’ and anti-Semites. This is despite the fact that they are decent, self-respecting Jews, many of whom have suffered real anti-Semitic abuse and assault.
In response to Coyle’s tweet, JVL have put up a couple of pieces on their website by David Rosenberg and Rob Ferguson respectively, noting that anti-Semitism has historically taken the form of a specific fear of left-wing Jews. In his piece, Ferguson notes that even the British publisher of the infamous Tsarist forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, distinguished between good, loyal British Jews and the Jewish Communist, anarchist and socialist radicals he was convinced were working to destroy Britain. It was a view also shared by Winston Churchill. Ferguson’s piece is well-worth reading, and so I’m including it here, as edited by JVL for publication on their site.
“The Labour Party and Jews: the return of antisemitic animosity
A couple of days ago, David Rosenberg posted a comment on the call by Neil Coyle MP that Jewish Voice for Labour (JVL) be added to the list of proscribed organisations (just agreed by the NEC as I write). David observed that Coyle was effectively calling for the expulsion of hundreds of Jews from the party and called out Coyle’s antisemitism.
David incurred responses on Facebook and Twitter from some on the left, insisting he was mistaken – that JVL was only being targeted because they were left wing, not because they were Jews. They are wrong. In demanding the expulsion of specifically left-wing Jews, Coyle is manifesting a form of antisemitism with a long pedigree, including within the Labour Party itself.
The half-decade long weaponisation of the charge of antisemitism against the left in particular and the promotion of the “new antisemitism” narrative in general, has dangerously degraded how antisemitism is understood. (And I do mean dangerously).
David’s critics misunderstand, or choose to ignore, a core dynamic of historic and contemporary antisemitism. Hatred of left-wing Jews has always acted as a key driver of antisemitic ideology. This is not simply one other element of antisemitic prejudice. Working-class movements constitute the primary foe of fascists, and far right reactionary movements. This bestows an instrumental significance to the hatred and demonisation of the left-wing Jew.
This prejudice does not arise in isolation. It is not, as is commonly conveyed, simply a bizarre manifestation of Nazi ideology. [Paul Hanebrink has written usefully on this]. The Nazis and others built on a commonly held prejudice against Jewish revolutionaries and socialists that encompassed wide layers of Europe’s ruling classes, including in Britain.
It is true that Nazi ideology explicitly cast “Judeo-Bolshevism” as in essence a racial characteristic; the dominant antisemitism of the western European establishment however tended to make an important distinction between “loyal”, “patriotic”, “national” Jews and socialists, anarchists and revolutionaries. David points to the example of Churchill’s vicious antisemitic tract of 1921 Zionism versus Bolshevism which precisely draws this distinction.
However, Churchill was expressing a very common view. Even the virulent antisemite, HA Gwynne, editor of the “Morning Post” and publisher of the Tsarist forgery, “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion”, made this distinction, writing: “A certain section of the Jews in the world are engaged in a mighty attempt to destroy the established rule in many countries and, to bring this world into communistic brotherhood”. Gwynne then continued, “But it would be downright wicked to ascribe to Jewry as a whole this mad and dangerous policy” arguing this would be “hideous antisemitism” and that fault lay not with “honest, patriotic Jews” but with “the revolutionaries of their race.”
These prejudices were reflected in some sections of the Labour movement including on the right of the Labour Party and even some elements of the trade unions, particularly during the first world war. This resurfaced on the Labour right in east London in the wake of Communist Phil Piratin’s victory in 1945 in Mile End; Stepney’s Labour leader, JC Lawder, declared that the Communists had won “in that part of the borough where people of alien origin predominate and where regard for the hoary institutions of British traditionalism is weak”.
A vile undercurrent of animosity towards left-wing, internationalist Jews is now re-emerging on the Labour right. Coyle’s call to expel Jewish members who criticise or oppose Israel is simply an explicit reflection of a deeper phenomenon. The right’s support for Jews is not unconditional. It rests on “loyalty” to the British state and imperialist interests. It is not a defence of Jews as Jews. Behind it stirs an old antisemitic animosity to left-wing Jews.
It is an animosity facilitated by the witch hunt, the conflation of Jewish identity with Zionism, and an IHRA definition that has hollowed out the meaning of antisemitism. It is in this context that Labour right-wingers like Coyle, are left free to express their vehement loathing of the Jewish left. I for one have been shocked at the virulence with which this has been expressed, not just by right wing “commentators” outside Labour, but inside the party.
In the early decades of the twentieth century liberal Jewry across Europe insisted that “Bolshevik” Jews were not real Jews. Right-wing Zionists have today picked up the baton.
Then as now, far from shielding Jews from antisemitism, this can only fuel it. It offers the far right antisemite legitimacy … and a sheild; if the Labour Party casts radical, left-wing Jews as antisemites … who are they to argue? And contempt for left-wing Jews never ends there…”
A few days ago Mike published an extract from the Morning Star reporting that, according to Jewish Voice for Labour, Starmer’s purge of alleged anti-Semites has resulted in the expulsion of hundreds of left-wing Jews from the party. Jews are being disproportionately affected, demonstrating that this is in itself an anti-Semitic attack on left-wing Jews in the party. As David Rosenberg has argued, and Rob Ferguson’s article shows particularly clearly, this is absolutely correct.
Jewish Voice for Labour and left-wing Jews in the party, people like Tony Greenstein, Jackie Walker, Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi, Martin Odoni and so many others, are decent people. They are not anti-Semites. The real anti-Semites are those on the right, using the age-old fear of Communist Jews to terrify the public with stupid, vicious conspiracy theories to justify their own anti-Jewish persecution.
Yesterday I put up a piece attacking Neil Coyle, a Blairite Labour MP, for demanding the expulsion of Jewish Voice for Labour from the Labour party along with other ‘Commies’. I pointed out that it was very much like the anti-Semitic rants of the Nazis, who rejected democracy as a Jewish plot to enslave ‘Aryan’ Germans. For example, in 1922 Hitler gave a speech which explicitly stated it.
And the Right has further completely forgotten that democracy is fundamentally not German: it is Jewish. It has completely forgotten that this Jewish democracy with its majority decisions has always been without exception only a means towards the destruction of any existing Aryan leadership. The Right does not understand that directly every small question of profit or loss is regularly put before so-called ‘public opinion’ he who knows how most skilfully to make this ‘public opinion’ serve his own interests becomes forthwith master in the State. And that can be achieved by the man who can lie most artfully, most infamously: and in the last resort he is not the German, he is, in Schopenhauer’s words, ‘the great master of the art of lying’ – the Jew….
(O)ne day it will turn to those who have most consistently foretold the coming ruin and have sought to disassociate themselves from it. And party is either the Left: and then God help us! for it will lead to us to complete destruction – to Bolshevism.
From: J.W. Hiden, The Weimar Republic (Harlow: Longman 1974).
Coyle’s demand for the expulsion of Jewish Voice for Labour comes from the same vicious factionalism that has resulted in the NEC voting to expel other left-wing groups within the Labour party – Resist, Socialist Appeal, Labour Against the Witch-Hunt and Labour in Exile. It’s the partisan hatred of Blairite neoliberals for real socialists, the kind of people that actually build the Labour party with the trade unions, founded the welfare state and NHS, and gave us the mixed economy. For all its faults, the mixed economy in which the utilities were owned and managed for the state actually provided these vital industries with the investment they needed and gave better service than under privatisation. This is why Blair Stalin, I mean, Kier Starmer, is running scared from these policies which were promoted by Corbyn and supported by a majority of the British public. It’s why the railways are failing spectacularly and the Tories are desperately fighting off having to renationalise them.
But Jewish Voice for Labour, Labour Against the Witch-Hunt and Labour in Exile are also being attacked and smeared because they state and argue unequivocally that the expulsions of Labour party members for supposed anti-Semitism are politically motivated. It’s not just just a hatred of socialists, but also a fanatical desire to protect Israel from reasonable criticism for its barbaric treatment of the Palestinians through conflating anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism. Many of Israel’s most trenchant critics are decent, self-respecting, God-fearing or secular Jews. People like Jackie Walker, Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi, Tony Greenstein, Ilan Pappe and Martin Odoni. These people are subject to particular abuse, vilification and sometimes even physical assault because they show that the Jewish community is not and has never been uniformly behind Israel, no matter how many laws Netanyahu passed to say that Jewry and the state of Israel were one and the same.
Coyle was undoubtedly motivated by a fear of Marxism and pro-Israel fanaticism when he made his noxious attack on JVL, rather than anti-Semitism per se. But he repeats very closely the real anti-Semitic, anti-democratic and anti-parliamentary denunciations of the Nazis.
Despite the attacks on Corbyn for anti-Semitic tropes, the realNazi rhetoric is coming from the ultra-Zionists and Blairites.
The terrible events in Israel last week when Palestinians and Israelis rioted and fought following the state’s attempts to ethnically cleanse Arabs from their homes in east Jerusalem ready for Jewish settlers clearly has had the anti-Semitism witch-hunters in the Labour party rattled. Because far-right Zionist nationalists and their supporters in the British political and lamestream media establishment have decided that even the mildest criticism of Israel and its barbaric policies towards the indigenous Arabs is anti-Semitic. Those who make them are to be ruthlessly smeared as Jew-haters and Nazis. The Labour party’s grotesque party bureaucracy has fully signed up to this attitude with the Jewish Labour Movement as one of the main organisations within the party demanding the automatic trial and purging of Israel’s critics. Even when those critics are entirely decent men and women, like Tony Greenstein, Jackie Walker, Mike, Martin Odoni, Marc Wadsworth and so many, many others, who utterly despise and attack all forms of racism, including anti-Semitism.
As a Labour party member, I got this merry little email in my inbox yesterday from David Evans inviting me to a session of online anti-Semitism training the Monday after next.
When I first became General Secretary of the Labour Party, I made my priorities clear.
I want to ensure that our Party is a welcoming environment for all our members.
In order to tackle antisemitism, it is vital to understand it.
That’s why I’m inviting you to an awareness raising training session for Labour Party members on understanding antisemitism, covering what antisemitic incidents look like in the UK and the world today, identifying different elements of antisemitism and how members of the Labour Party can create a welcoming environment for Jewish members.
The training will take place online, Monday 14 June from 6:00 – 7:00pm.
Help tackle the issue – sign up for the session today.
…..
The session will be introduced by Mike Katz, National Chair of the Jewish Labour Movement, and delivered by Rebecca Filer, National Organiser for the JLM, which has been the Labour Party’s Jewish affiliate for over 100 years.
The Labour Party is built on the values of solidarity, equality and respect. Our movement thrives when it is together. That’s why I am very grateful for all the invaluable work that has gone into this training session, and would like to stress its importance. I have undertaken the training myself and found it thought provoking and useful.
Once more, I would like to urge all members who are able to attend the session to do so.
Best,
David Evans General Secretary
The short answer to this invitation is ‘definitely not’. I know a fair amount about anti-Semitism. I know some great Jewish peeps and studied the rise of Fascism and Nazism as part of my history degree at College. And I’m very aware that what Evans, Katz and Filer want to tell me is anti-Semitism isn’t.
The Jewish Labour Movement is utterly incapable of giving an objective, non-ideological and impartial discussion of anti-Semitism. It used to be Paole Zion, ‘Workers of Zion’, a pro-Zionist Jewish socialist organisation and until very recently it was absolutely moribund. Then it was taken over by somebody, given a massive cash injection and renamed the Jewish Labour Movement. This was after the bombing of Gaza nine years ago, which also prompted the foundation of the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism because its ultra-Zionist founders were shocked to find that the British public did not view with pleasure the spectacle of the Israeli military machine killing Arab civilians. Even its name is a lie. It’s affiliated to the Labour party, but you don’t have to be a member of the Labour party or even Jewish to be a member. And in fact, the organisation has been embarrassed several times when one of its gobby mouthpieces has been revealed as such.
This is profoundly different from Jewish Voice for Labour, whose members must be Jewish and members of the Labour party, although gentiles may have associate membership. But then JVL are left-wingers, who supported Corbyn and criticised Israel, so they’re the wrong kind of Jews.
The ideological weapon the witch-hunters have used against Israel’s critics is the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism, which has been criticised by legal experts as dangerous imprecise. It conflates anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism, and so, in the view of one of its inventors, Kenneth Stern, has been used to chill criticism of Israel.
In fact, a far better definition of anti-Semitism is the simple one devised by Wilhelm Marr, the founder of the German League of Anti-Semites in the 19th century and the man who first coined the term. Anti-Semitism is simply hatred of Jews, as Jews. Now this can take terrible forms, the most notorious being the murderous and absurd conspiracy theories about the Jews controlling capitalism, Communism and the trade unions and encouraging race mixing and non-White immigration to destroy the White race, or that the Jewish people are engaged in a similar conspiracy to destroy Islam.
The anti-Semitism witch-hunters, however, have abused real history and politics through the use of a form of grotesque literary criticism. Israel very definitely has been engaged in plots against other governments, such as when a member of staff at the Israeli embassy was caught by al-Jazeera plotting with a senior British civil servant over who should be a member of Tweezer’s cabinet. But because this was a plot, even though it was real, and allegations of plotting and conspiracies have long been a staple of anti-Semitic attitudes, criticism of such actions are silenced by the accusation that anyone talking about them must somehow be anti-Semitic, even when the plots are perfectly real. If you criticise Israel for doing so, or use the wrong language when describing the country’s actions and policies, you will be attacked and vilified for using ‘anti-Semitic tropes’. Even when you are factually correct, and not remotely anti-Semitic.
Especially if you are factually correct, and not anti-Semitic.
This is the view that Evans, the Jewish Labour Movement and other wretched organisations like the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism and the Board of Deputies of British Jews wish to foist on the Labour party and its members. It’s a disgusting distortion what real anti-Semitism is, and has been used to vilify, persecute and purge genuine opponents of anti-Semitism. These have included Jews, and their friends and supporters, who have genuinely suffered anti-Semitic abuse and assault. The Labour party has definitely not been a welcoming place for critics of Israel.
I shall very definitely not be attending if such training is to be given by such odious, deceitful and mendacious organisations.
Last week the right-wing British press and the Zionist Jewish establishment launched another smear campaign against someone for criticising Israel. This was Dr David Miller, an academic at Bristol University, who had been one of the speakers at an event about defending free speech in the Labour party. Dr Miller committed the heinous crime of saying that Zionism needed to be ended. The Daily Heil, Board of Deputies of British Jews, the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism and the Community Security Trust, as well as the university’s Jewish Society, all went bug-eyed with rage and accused him of anti-Semitism. The issue has been on the local BBC news programme here in Bristol, Points West. Various members of the Jewish establishment have appeared on the programme ranting about how this is somehow preparatory to demanding full scale anti-Semitic persecution, hinting at the holocaust. One very angry gent on Sunday morning’s edition said of it that ‘we all know where that goes’ – clearly implying that Miller’s comments about Zionism, not about Jews, were tantamount to a call for pogroms and another Holocaust. They also claimed that Jewish students no longer felt safe and comfortable at the university thanks to Dr Miller’s comments. Which is peculiar coming from the right, which likes to rant about left-wing snowflakes. Well, there’s more than a bit of snowflakery going on here.
I’ve discussed this latest controversy in a previous article. As usual with these witch hunts, it’s nothing to do with real, vicious Jew hatred, but simply the right-wing British press and the Zionists of the British Jewish establishment seeking to defend Israel and its horrendous persecution of the Palestinians. They do this by smearing any and all critics or simply respectable journalists, who accurately report atrocities committed by the Israelis and their allies, as anti-Semites. They did it to Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters, including such principled, self-respecting Jews as Jackie Walker and Tony Greenstein. They did it to Marc Wadsworth, a Black anti-racist activist, who had worked with the Board to combat real anti-Semitic attacks on Jews by the scumbags of the NF/BNP in the 1980s. They did and are doing it to more ordinary members of the Labour party like Mike Sivier and Martin Odoni. All the above are genuinely anti-racist with no sympathy whatsoever for Fascism, and Martin’s also Jewish. But this means nothing to these moral frauds, who are determined to vilify and demonise decent people in their zeal for defending the indefensible.
Other speakers at the conference including Dr Norman Finkelstein, a respected American academic and passionate opponent of the Israeli state, and Ronnie Kasrils, a former minister in Nelson Mandela’s cabinet in South Africa. Both of them are Jewish, which clearly demonstrates that whatever the British Jewish establishment claims, they do not speak for all of Britain’s diverse Jewish community. This is also a repeat of a campaign these organisations launched against another academic at Bristol Uni, Dr Rachel Gould. Dr Gould was also guilty of making anti-Israel comments, despite being Jewish herself.
I am heartily, heartily sick of this witch-hunt and demonisation of decent people. I therefore wrote to BBC Points West to express my outrage as a way to make my feelings about this whole sorry affair public. Normally I would have written to the paper, but as all of the papers are solidly behind the witch hunters and against their victims, BBC Points West looked like the best and only option available. Here’s the text of the letter:
Dear Sir,
Thank you for coverage over the current controversy about Dr David Miller of Bristol University and the accusations of anti-Semitism that have been levelled against him. I am writing to you to express my utter disgust at what I see as a campaign of vilification against him for making a legitimate criticism not of Jews or Judaism, but of a political ideology. I am an historian and archaeologist, who was educated at school and as an undergraduate at College by Christian teachers and professors, who had a profound respect and warm sympathy for the Jewish people. They were acutely aware of the horrors Jews have suffered down the centuries, and taught their students about the Holocaust long before it became government educational policy. I myself have had the good fortune to enjoy the friendship of many people of Jewish descent and heritage. I have also studied the history of Fascism and its loathsome doctrines, and its racism and violence towards Jews and people of colour.
Dr Miller has been accused of anti-Semitism because he called for the end of Zionism at a recent conference on free speech in the Labour Party. This has provoked a campaign against him by the Daily Mail, the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism. This is profoundly and utterly wrong. Zionism is a political doctrine and is certainly not synonymous with the Jewish people or their faith. From what I understand, the Jewish people have never been the monolithic community claimed by anti-Semites. They have always held a variety of views on religious and political issues, including Zionism. Indeed, many Jews have strongly rejected Zionism because they viewed it as an internalisation of gentile anti-Semitism. Non-Jewish anti-Semites have claimed that a special state should be created for Jews, not out of sympathy for them, but simply in order to remove them their own countries. One example of this was the Fascist scheme to settle Jews in Madagascar. Jewish opposition to Zionism was famously expressed on the graffiti on a Jerusalem wall which stated ‘Zionism and Judaism are diametrically opposed.’ Several of the other speakers at the conference where Dr Miller made his comments were themselves Jewish, and also opponents of Zionism or critics of Israel. They included the noted American scholar, Dr Norman Finkelstein, and Ronnie Kasrils, a former minister in Nelson Mandela’s government.
I find it a matter of deep concern that the Daily Mail, the Board of Deputies and the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, as well as Bristol University’s Jewish Society, are accusing Dr Miller of anti-Semitism through confusing Jew-hatred with anti-Zionism, just as was done four years ago to another academic at Bristol University, Dr Rachel Gould. Dr Gould was also accused of anti-Semitism because of comments she had made about Israel, despite she herself being Jewish. But the real existential threat to Jews in my opinion comes not from decent people criticising Israel, but from real Nazis like the utterly repellent and extremely violent National Action.
I am also astonished by the claim that Jewish students do not feel they are welcome at Bristol University because of Dr Miller’s comments. These were, as I said, about Zionism, not about Jews. One of the most important aspects of a university education – what makes it education rather than mere instruction – is the exposure to different views, opinions and perspectives. This should be able to include criticism of Zionism as a political doctrine while excluding the real political doctrines that threaten Jews and other minorities, like Fascism. Yet not only is it claimed that criticism of Zionism is supposedly anti-Semitic, but that Jewish students are too sensitive and delicate to be allowed to hear arguments against it for fear of offending them. This belittles these students’ resilience and ability to engage in robust debate.
I am also utterly disgusted at the way the organisations leading the campaign against Dr Miller are invoking the spectre of real, vicious anti-Semitic persecution and the Holocaust. Dr Miller has certainly said nothing to support such persecution. I am acutely aware that very many British Jews lost family and friends to the Nazis’ appalling persecution, and that their descendants and relatives are still traumatised and haunted by its horrors. I therefore find the invocation of such persecution by the Mail, CAA, and the Board of Deputies to be nothing less than grossly repulsive scaremongering in order to turn decent people away from a person who is, as far as I can see, completely innocent of real Jew-hatred.
I feel very strongly that Dr Miller is innocent of the anti-Semitism of which he is accused, and that it is his accusers, who are behaving in a vile and disgraceful fashion. I have no issue with his opponents defending Israel and challenging his views on Zionism, but feel it is utterly contemptible to do this by confusing it with real anti-Semitism. At the very least, abusing the accusation of anti-Semitism in this way robs it of its power to shock and identify real Nazis and anti-Semites.
Yours faithfully,
I don’t know if this will do any good or even be read. After I sent it I got an automatic message back from the programme telling me that it had been received, but they were receiving so many messages that it was impossible for them to reply individually. But I felt it had to be done, and will let you know if I get a reply from the programme.
I really don’t want to labour the point about the witch hunt and victimisation of decent, anti-racist members and supporters of the Labour Party under the pretext of purging it of anti-Semitism. But I wanted to show graphically how utterly pathetic and grotesque it was. Images that showed how far from reality the Blairites’ and British establishment’s idea of who anti-Semites are.
This photo below is of John Tyndall and Martin Webster, two of the fuhrers of the National Front at a demonstration. It’s from Richard Thurlow’s Fascism in Britain: A History, 1918-1985 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1987).
They were the face of British Fascism when I was growing up in the 1980s. The caption for the photo reads:
John Tyndall and Martin Webster at an NF demonstration. Tyndall’s imitation of Mosely’s style with the use of flags, megaphone and inter-war economic and political programmes is combined with a thinly disguised and cleaned-up version of Arnold Leese’s obsession with The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and gutter racism. It is presented in the more acceptable language of the conservative fascist tradition with due homage to the influence of A.K. Chesterton.
And This Is What They Don’t!
This is Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi, one of the two left-wing Jews recently suspended from the Labour Party. She’s the vice-chair of Chingford CLP and one of the leaders of Jewish Voice for Labour, and has been vocal in her support for Jeremy Corbyn. She is absolutely no kind of racist, anti-Semite or Fascist. Quite the opposite. I found this photo of her on the web. It’s from the Socialist Workers’ YouTube channel, SWP TV. And while I don’t agree with the Socialist Workers, the image does show her commitment to combating racism. The image is blurred, but behind her there are posters urging people to fight Fascism and racism, as well as the attacks on benefits and climate change.
She’s been targeted because, like Moshe Machover, Jackie Walker, Tony Greenstein, Martin Odoni and many others, she’s the ‘wrong kind of Jew’. The British establishment wants the Jewish community to conform to an unswerving support for Israel. Any Jew that steps out of line, like the peeps above, is immediately accused and reviled as ‘self-hating’ and anti-Semitic. They suffer truly horrific abuse and death threats. Mira Bar Hillel, another Jewish journalist, has said that many Jews are afraid of speaking out about Israel because of this. But as these images show, there are very many Jews like Naomi and the others, who aren’t afraid to criticise Israel and attack its apartheid and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians.
This appears to be Naomi at another pro-Palestinian event, and as you can see from the slogans and the name of the organisation on the banner, it’s a Jewish event. The slogan reads ‘It’s Kosher to Boycott Israeli Goods’. And underneath the organisation’s monicker is Jews for Boycotting Israeli Goods.
This is why Naomi and the others are being accused of anti-Semitism and self-hatred. Despite the fact that they are not ashamed of their Jewish identity. If they were, they’d try to hide it, and if they really were Nazis, you’d see them with real Nazis. They wouldn’t stand on the barricades fighting them, as the above do.
Here’s another, related pic showing a banner for the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network.
I don’t know who this organisation is, but I would imagine they were another group of Jews outraged at Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. So, more of the ‘wrong kind of Jews’, the kind of Jews the establishment don’t want you see or even know exist.
I hope these images show very clearly the difference between the real and falsely accused anti-Semites. The real anti-Semites are Fascists thugs like Tyndall, Webster, and their successors, Nick Griffin, National Action and the rest. They aren’t respectable Jewish ladies or eminent Israeli mathematicians and philosophers, like Moshe Machover, or ordinary, Labour supporting Jews like Martin Odoni or Tony Greenstein. Real Nazis and anti-Semites tend not to speak to Marxist gatherings about anti-racism and the fight against fascism.
It’s a travesty that left-wing Jews like Naomi and the others are being smeared and purged simply for being left-wing and critical of Israel. Just as it is that decent, anti-racist non-Jews like Mike, Ken Livingstone, Marc Wadsworth and Jeremy Corbyn himself are being smeared.
This shameful farrago has to stop. Now. They should all be reinstated and their accusers instead suspended and tried for their sectarian anti-Semitism. It is they who are really bringing the Labour Party in disrepute!
Keir Starmer has shown himself determined to purge the party of any and all critics of Israel on the utterly specious grounds that they are automatically anti-Semites. They must be, despite the fact that very many of them are self-respecting Jews and equally self-respecting non-Jewish anti-racists. This is because the Israel lobby and the British establishment and media have declared that anybody who supports Jeremy Corbyn and/ or shares his conviction that Palestinians should be allowed to live in peace in their traditional homeland has to be a horrible Jew-hater and a Nazi. Even if, like Corbyn, Tony Greenstein, Marc Wadsworth, Jackie Walker, Mike, Martin Odoni and any number of others, they are determined anti-racists. So let’s remind people just what the Palestinians are facing, and why criticising Israel is entirely legitimate and is based on what the Israeli state and its armed forces do, not because they’re Jewish.
I found this ‘Letter from Israel’ in Private Eye’s edition for 30th November – 13th December 2001. This was a time when the Eye didn’t flinch at criticising Israel, even when outraged Zionists complained that it was being anti-Semitic by doing so. The Eye has said that the ‘Letter From…’ pieces are written by journalists from countries described, so that this piece, although anonymous and possibly reworked by someone else in the Eye to cover up the author’s identity, comes from an Israeli journo. And it’s a long list of Israel’s attacks, not just on the Palestinians and their leaders, but also the Americans and Lebanon. It runs
Terrorism is the topic of the year, and whatever the current focus, history shows that we in Israel have a certain historical experience.
Take the bombing of American targets. Our chaps bombed the US cultural centres in Cairo and Alexandria as early as 1954, planning to let Abdul Nasser’s new Egyptian government take the blame. Unfortunately the scam went wrong and our defence minister Pinhas Lavon had to resign, though the director-general of his ministry, Shimon Peres, managed to hang on. Today he is Ariel Sharon’s foreign minister.
Or take political assassinations. If you ever wondered why Yasser Arafat’s lieutenants are hard to understand, the answer it simple: we shot most of his organisation’s top foreign language speakers. In fact in one glorious year, 1972, our Mossad secret service managed to kill both the PLO’s political representative in Rome, Wael Zouetar, and his counterpart in Paris, Mahmoud Hamdan.
Admittedly we make the odd mistake. There was the embarrassing 1974 incident in Lilienhammer, when a Mossad hit squad shot dead Moroccan waiter Ahmed Bouchiki in front of his heavily pregnant Norwegian wife, having mistaken him for a PLO man.
Still, we maintain a sense of proportion and have never believed in simply takinig an eye for an eye. In 1982 when an assassin from the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon wounded (but not killed) our London rep, Shlomo Argov, we invaded Lebanon and more than 20,000 people there died, mostly civilians.
Then there is the bombing of local public buildings, one of our specialities. In recent months we have shelled not just West Bank police stations, but hotels, an orphanage and the Bethlehem maternity hospital. (Not that many Palestinian women reach the hospital. Our boys at the checkpoints surrounding their townships are particularly mistrustful of women claiming to be in labour and so refuse to let them through).
None of this would have happened, of course, if the Palestinians would agree to live happily while surrounded by our soldiers and settlers. But they won’t and we must protect ourselves. Not for us any lily-livered effort to apprehend the actual perpetrators. We prefer hostage taking. This is certainly what we did when some Palestinians recently shot that nice man, ex-general Rehavam Zeevi, the founder of a party whose sole platform is the expulsion of all Arabs. Such a view had resulted in his being invited into Mr Sharon’s government as a tourism minister.
Anyway, whenever that sort of thing happens we just hold the entire population of the West Bank and Gaza Strip at gunpoint and station tanks in their streets. Then we smash the place up (just look at Manger Square after we finished with it!) and kill a few dozen locals of mixed age and sex.
And, oh yes, we also use helicopter gunships to blow to smithereens any Palestinian we suspect of planning any attacks on us, though not usually the actual perpetrators. Those we expect Yasser Arafat to hand over, in exchange for the goodwill we have shown in our peace talks with him, which have been dragging on for a mere eight years. Why are those Palestinians in such a rush?
That we have spent those years building thousands of new settler homes in the West Bank is a mere accident, not a lack of sincerity. True, this may have involved confiscating Palestinian land, arresting its owners and shooting demonstrators, which slows down agreement; but it makes sense: we just like holding peace talks so much we never want them to end.
Of course, we cannot negotiate with just anyone, and so we are currently helping improve Arafat’s administration by picking off any unsuitable figures. And we don’t just mean military men: one of those killed by us was Dr. Tahbed Thabed, the director-general of the Palestinian health authority.
In the 19 years since then, we’ve had the blockade of Gaza and now Netanyahu has declared his intention of seizing 1/3 of Palestinian land on the West Bank. But organisations like the Chief Rabbinate, Board of Deputies of British Jews, Jewish Leadership Council, the entirely wrongly named Jewish Labour Movement, whose members don’t have to be Jews or members of the Labour Party, and the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, founded to bolster British support for Israel after the bombardment of Gaza, will denounce anything more than the mildest, token criticism of Israel’s actions.
The Israeli state has been engaged on a decades-long campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Palestinians, and many of its own citizens have protested against it. Israel is a country. It is not, and never have been, synonymous with the Jewish people, no matter what law Netanyahu passes to claim that it is. Criticising Israel and its leaders is not anti-Semitic, no matter how much the Board and the Chief Rabbis howl that it is.
And Starmer has no business kicking genuine anti-racists and opponents of anti-Semitism out of Labour, simply for supporting the Palestinians. And especially not when he is tolerating real, anti-Black racists and islamophobes.
In his piece today demolishing the anti-Semitism witch-hunt against the Labour Party, and Jeremy Corbyn’s absolute capitulation to the liars and smear merchants behind it, Tony Greenstein suggests how Corbyn should have handled Andrew Neil in an interview he gave with the broadcaster on his politics show back in November.
Neil challenged Corbyn to apologise to the Jewish community for the anti-Semitism that was rampant in the Labour party and his failure to deal with it. Anti-Semitism was not rampant in the Labour party, and Corbyn had dealt very effectively with real anti-Semitism. Greenstein therefore rightly says that Corbyn should have refused, saying he had nothing to apologise for. And then he should gone on the attack pointing out Neil’s hypocrisy in asking the question. When Neil was editor of the Sunday Times, he hired David Irving to write a piece about the supposed Goebbel’s diaries. That’s the David Irving, who really was an anti-Semite and Holocaust denier and was proven in the court case he lost against Deborah Lipstadt. And then he could have raised the issue of Taki’s continuing employment with the Spectator. Taki really is an anti-Semite, who recently praised the Greek neo-Nazi Golden Dawn in the magazine’s pages. This would have been extremely uncomfortable for Neil, whose chairman of the board government the wretched rag. When Owen Jones raised this very issue when he was on one of Neil’s wretched programmes, Neil was visibly frightened and asked if he was trying to get him sacked. Greenstein writes
‘That Andrew Neil Interview and David Irving
Not once did Schneider, Milne and Carrie Murphy ask themselves why, if the ‘anti-Semitism’ offensive was genuine, that it was the Right who were its most ardent advocates? One of its most fervent supporters was BBC broadcaster Andrew Neil. Neil crucified Corbyn in an election interview in November 2019 when he asked whether Corbyn would apologise to the Jewish community for Labour anti-Semitism.
It was a predictable question and there was a simple response. ‘I have nothing to apologise for’. Corbyn could then have gone on to condemn Labour’s genuine racism, against Black people:
‘I do however wish to apologise to Britain’s Black community for Labour’s previous support for the ‘hostile environment’ policy and the Windrush scandal. Our decision not to oppose the 2014 Immigration Act was scandalous.’
When Neil responded, listing examples of Labour ‘anti-Semitism’, such as the attempts to deselect Louise Ellman and Zionist diva Luciana Berger, there was a very simple response.
Corbyn could have told Neil that he had no intention of taking lessons on anti-Semitism from someone who, as Editor of the Sunday Times had hired a holocaust denier, David Irving, to examine the Goebbels Diaries which had just been discovered in a Moscow archive! As Jewish historian David Cesarani commented: ‘David Irving denies the gas chambers. Anyone who deals with him is tainted with that.’
And whilst Neil was spluttering Corbyn could have mentioned the fact that when Boris Johnson was Editor of The Spectator he hired Taki, the owner of Takis magazine for whom David Duke of the KKK wrote. Taki himself was no slouch when it came to anti-Semitism. As his biography records:
‘He (Boris) could have dispensed with Taki… but consistently chose not to, despite entreaties from many critics, including his own father-in-law Charles Wheeler. It is down to Boris that Taki was able to run columns on ‘bongo bongo land’, West Indians ‘multiplying like flies’ and one on the world Jewish conspiracy, in which he described himself as a ‘soi-disant anti-Semite’.
Even the right-wing owner of the Spectator Conrad Black, asked Boris to dismiss Taki after he had criticised Black for marrying a Jewish woman. Boris refused. Taki wrote for the Spectator for as long as Boris was editor. And who was Chairman of the Board of Press Holdings Media Group which owns The Spectator? Andrew Neil!
Of course, having accepted the ‘anti-Semitism’ narrative, Corbyn had no response. Not once did he point out the hypocrisy of Britain’s racist tabloids and the BBC for having ignored the Windrush Scandal, in which Black British citizens were deported to their death, instead concentrating on Labour ‘anti-Semitism’ which didn’t hurt a single Jewish person.’
This is all absolutely correct. Anti-Black racism is far more prevalent than anti-Semitism, and far more respectable. There would have rightly been a storm had May’s government similarly rounded up Jews of foreign parentage on the same grounds. But Cameron and May felt able to deport the Windrush migrants, who had every right to remain in this country, because of anti-Black racism.
Unfortunately Corbyn caved in to Neil and the other smear merchants in the media and Conservative political establishment. And in doing so he not only allowed himself to be ousted, but also decent anti-racists and his own supporters, people like Livingstone, Mike, Jackie Walker, Martin Odoni, Marc Wadsworth, Cyril Chilson, and Greenstein himself, to be smeared and expelled.
Tony Greenstein has just put up the second part of his critique of the leaked report on anti-Semitism in the Labour party. This is the report that has caused so much anger and outrage amongst ordinary, rank and file members, through its revelations that the party bureaucracy were doing everything they could to unseat Corbyn, including purging his supporters and actively campaigning against the Labour party in the 2017 election. The first part of Greenstein’s article examines this aspect of the report. The second part now explains how it shows that Corbyn and his office did not understand the political nature of the anti-Semitism allegations. Led by Jon Lansman, Corbyn and his team absolutely accepted that the accusations were made in good faith. They caved in utterly to the accusers, who were motivated purely by a desire to topple Corbyn and protect Israel from justifiable criticism of its brutal programme of slow-motion genocide against the Palestinians. Thus Corbyn, Lansman, Milne et al threw their supporters to the wolves in a massively mistaken policy of appeasement. The Israel lobby and its accomplices inside and outside the party, including the Conservative Jewish establishment, were not only not appeased, by emboldened by this capitulation. They continued with increasing fervour until Corbyn himself, a passionate lifelong anti-racist and opponent of anti-Semitism, was smeared.
Greenstein’s piece tackles a number of episodes in this sorry tale of retreat and capitulation. This includes how Corbyn should have responded to Andrew Neil’s demand that he apologise to the Jewish community by pointing out how Neil, as head of the board of the Spectator, was responsible for the continuing employment of real anti-Semites and Holocaust deniers by the magazine. Scumbags like David Irving and Taki. He describes how Corbyn’s office itself put on pressure for the expulsion of himself, Jackie Walker, Marc Wadsworth and Ken Livingstone.
His piece discusses real anti-Semitism in the Labour Party, such as the historical cases of the Webbs, Herbert Morrison, and the perversion of the definition of anti-Semitism to mean anti-Zionism. He also argues that some of the hostile rhetoric against the Rothschilds really isn’t anti-Semitic, as many of those using it don’t understand that the Rothschilds were Jewish. It just reflects a poor political understanding of Zionism, when used solely in this context. He makes the point that the British and American elites support Israel for its military and political significance in the Middle East.
He also shows how the far-right ultra-Zionist activist David Collier infiltrated the Labour Party, leading the party’s Governance and Legal Unit to suspend Glyn Secker of Jewish Voice for Labour. He also discusses Jackie Walker’s and other cases, where the claims of anti-Semitic were false or at best, extremely flimsy. He also describes how anti-Semites have supported Zionism ever since the days of Alfred Dreyfus, and shows how the Jewish Labour Movement always supported Netanyahu and never criticised Israel, despite their denials. He refutes the claim that Sir Stephen Sedley and Geoffrey Robertson, one a former appeal court judge, the other a QC, both supported the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism. In fact, they were both ardent critics. The report also boasts of how Jennie Formby increased the suspensions for anti-Semitism due to pressure from the Jewish establishment. He quotes Len McCluskey, who said of the Jewish establishment’s refusal to be satisfied that Labour was effectively tackling anti-Semitism, as them refusing to take ‘yes’ for an answer.
He also shows how the accusations that Labour was in denial about the extent of anti-Semitism in the party was simply a convenient slur to mask their real targets – Corbyn’s support for improved conditions for working people and proper funding of the NHS. He states that Corbyn was unable to formulate a competing worldview to counter that of the Tories, which is why he ultimately lost. He simply wanted an improvement in conditions, whereas the whole structure of society needs to be changed. And he states that this accusation shows absolute contempt for the 70 per cent of Labour members, who don’t believe anti-Semitism is a problem and understand that the vast majority of accusations are politically motivated.
He then moves on demolish other cases of bogus accusations of anti-Semitism against Margaret Tyson, Asa Winstanley, Chris Williamson, Brian Lovett-White – smeared because he said that Zionism was anti-Semitism, which was actually historically the attitude of most Jews; and Alan Bull, suspended for connecting Israel to ISIS, when there is evidence to support this as factually correct. He also describes cases where the witch-hunters dragged their feet or failed to act against genuine cases of anti-Semitism, such as Nasreen Khan, Christopher Crookes, and Fleur Dunbar. He contrasts their case with that Anne Mitchell of Hove, who was expelled simply for talking about the Israel lobby, despite the fact that Israel does have lobbying groups like AIPAC campaigning on its behalf.
His piece concludes
The expulsion of socialists who have dedicated their life to the labour movement and the Labour Party is having a serious detrimental effect on their health. Pauline Hammerton died of a brain haemorrhage a week after receiving her expulsion letter. Clearly the Labour Party’s treatment of her contributed to her death. However such matters are of no concern to the author(s) of this Report. Their only concern is factional, rebutting the suggestion that they were not equally as active in expelling socialists and anti-racists as McNicol and Matthews.
This is a thorough demolition of the witch-hunt, showing just how spurious and hypocritical the allegations and those behind them were. But it also shows that their false assumption were shared by the compilers of the report. Both Mike at Vox Political and Martin Odoni have also written extensively attacking the report’s blithe acceptance of these smears.
Unfortunately, while there is immense pressure to bring the political intriguers to justice, there is absolutely no commitment to refute assumptions by Starmer and the current leadership. This is probably because they, like Corbyn, uncritically accept them.
And so decent people remain grotesquely smeared, and the potential for fresh witch-hunt, whenever the Israel lobby find it convenient, remains.
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