This is a very provocative video from Simon Webb’s History Debunked. In it he defends the man, who was jailed last week or so under the anti-terrorism legislation for wearing a T-shirt supporting one of the Hamas paramilitary brigades. Webb has put up several pieces attacking what he regards as the infringement of the right to free speech under the hate crime and anti-terrorism laws. A little while ago he put up another video objecting to the jailing of another man for terrorism. The man was a Nazi, and the crime for which he was jailed was simply that of looking at Neo-Nazi material. Webb states that his views are vile and was clearly not happy at defending him. But his point was that terrorism should actually mean trying to kill people for political purposes, not merely simply holding extremist views. I think his argument in that video was this man, and a number of other White males, were being jailed for terrorism to even up the statistics when it came to the racial composition of terrorism offenders so that the majority weren’t Muslims. And the only way to do that is to start jailing people for holding extremist views and reading extremist material and not just for shooting people, planting bombs and so on.
In this video he talks about how, since 2002, it has been illegal to possess a copy of The Anarchist Cookbook, a nasty little publication that shows the reader how to make various weapons. He points out that it’s been around since the 1970s, and at one time you could buy it perfectly legally in high street bookshops. He himself used to have a copy. I remember people talking about it in the 1990s without anyone actually wanting to try it out to harm anyone. There’s a similar book in America, written by someone rejoicing in the name Ragnar Redbeard. That book similarly tells the reader how to make various weapons, which is very definitely illegal even under American law and the constitutional right to bear arms. According to the online human magazine, Cracked, however, it’s publication is perfectly legal under the constitutional right to free speech, and defended on the grounds that if the wretched book were banned, it would show that this fundamental right was under threat.
He goes on to talk about the case of the man jailed for his Hamas T-shirt, and compares it to the one he wears in the video. This has a motto in Hebrew. It’s taken from the Hebrew Bible, and is the motto of the Israeli intelligence agency, Mossad. It was given to him by his wife as a bit of a joke as he spent several years living in Israel. Yes, the Hamas paramilitary brigade on the bloke’s T-shirt is a terrorist organisation. But then, so is Mossad. This is strong stuff, as I don’t doubt there are plenty of people who would claim the opposite, not least because Mossad is an official department of the Israeli state. I can imagine that the same people, who screamed ‘anti-Semitism!’ whenever Jeremy Corbyn, Jewish Voice for Labour or the Electronic Intifada criticised Israel for its atrocities against the Palestinians being equally outraged at this description of Mossad. But Mossad has behaved like a terrorist organisation. It has carried out kidnappings and assassinations, and so the description, while controversial, has a certain validity.
Actually, the real object of Webb’s polemic is at the end of the video, where he talks about the arrest of Piers Corbyn for supposed terrorism. Piers Corbyn is a notorious critic of the Coronavirus lockdown, which he feels is a terrible infringement on the British public’s personal liberty. He’d been asked what ordinary people should do. He replied by telling them they should go round an MP’s house or constituency office, and, well, he didn’t know what, but suggested burning it down. Which is what got him arrested.
In my opinion, Piers Corbyn is a dangerous crank. His entire scepticism towards the Coronavirus and the lockdown reminds me very strongly of the other sceptics, who all refused to take the vaccine because they didn’t believe it really existed or wasn’t that bad. And then showed how lethal the disease could be by catching it and dying. As for his comments about burning down MPs’ homes or offices, well, it may be that Simon Webb is right and that he didn’t mean it literally. I think the judge may also have agreed with this view, and released him. But it’s still monumentally stupid. Unfortunately, MPs have been assassinated – David Amess by an Islamist, Jo Cox years ago by a White Fascist. And there’s the Liverpool suicide bomber. I dare say that none of these were caused by an unguarded inflammatory comment, but there is a danger that some nutter will hear casual remarks like P.C.’s and act upon them.
As for the Hamas T-shirt, I don’t like paramilitary organisations and terrorists no matter who they are. But there is a problem of selective enforcement. For example, Tony Greenstein has remarked several times on his blog about a couple of fervent Zionists, who turn up at every Zionist rally or anti-Palestinian organisation wearing T-shirts with the Kach symbol on them. Kach is another terrorist organisation, designated so by the Israelis themselves. It was founded on the teachings of the extreme right-wing Israeli rabbi, Meir Kahane, who really did believe that the Palestinians should be expelled at gunpoint from Eretz Israel. If you’re going to jail someone for wearing the symbols of a Palestinian paramilitary organisation, then rightly those supporting Kach should also face time in the slammer. You can also go further, and ask why the members of Sasha Johnson’s wretched Black militia haven’t been arrested. Before she was shot in the head by a gang apparently aiming for her partner, Johnson had been trying to found this organisation. There was footage of her standing in front of ranks of black-attired people in stab vests, all of whom were themselves Black. This was supposedly to protect Black people from being killed by the cops, whom she decried as the KKK, which is a grotesque comparison. According to legislation passed in the 1930s with the express intention of banning paramilitary groups like the BUF or the Nazis, it is illegal for an organisation to have a paramilitary uniform. But this is, arguably, what Johnson’s Black militia had and were. Despite calls by the mad right-wing YouTuber Alex Belfield for the police to come and arrest them, as far as I know they were allowed to go free. I suspect the authorities believed that some of its members would be only too glad to get into a fracas with the police and were afraid of playing into their hands. As for the Kach supporters, I suspect that if someone did try to have them arrested, it would either be ignored or be denounced as another instance of anti-Semitism by Israel’s militant supporters.
I have to say that I have no problem with jailing Nazis and real political extremists. But there are issues of free speech involved and the correct, uniform enforcement of the legislation. Because what should be illegal for one set of extremists and supporters of terrorism, should be illegal for all.
Two people wearing Kach T-shirts at a pro-Israel rally.
That’s the only way I think Tzipi Hotovely can fairly be described. She’s the Israeli ambassador who was hurried off the campus at LSE by the cops and her security guards as protestors against the genocidal brutality of the Israeli state made their feelings extremely clear. Needless to say, the government and the Blairite Labour leadership have metaphorically clutched their pearl in horror at what a terrible deed has been done to her. The protests have been condemned by Priti Patel and Starmerite rentagob Lisa Nandy. Mike has put up a couple of pieces about the incident, pointing out that Hotovely was never in any danger because of the police protection she enjoyed. And today he’s posted another article quoting a number of well-informed Twitterers and commenters, including Asa Winstanley of the Electronic Intifada; the Groaniad journo Owen Jones, Natalie Strecker; Another Angry Voice and a Palestinian gent, Omar Ghraeib, which showed exactly how deeply unpleasant her extreme Israeli nationalist views are.
The Nakba, the forced expulsion of 800,000 Palestinians to create the nascent Israeli state in 1948 is well-documented. Historians have uncovered that it was achieved through massacres of thousands of Palestinians. People were gunned down hiding in mosques for sanctuary. A group of women tried to appease the Israeli troops through bringing them baskets of rice. They were shot in the stomach. All documented fact, covered in histories of the reality of the creation of Israeli on videos available on the internet. I think a few of them were put up by Abi Martin of The Empire Files on Tele-Sur. But Hotovely has declared this all ‘a lie’. This is, to me, as deplorable as the Nazis and anti-Semites peddling their lies that the Holocaust never happened, or the Turkish state covering up the Armenian genocide. But it’s also not just the Nadba she denies. She claims there’s no Palestinian people – a common trope of the Israeli state and its supporters over here. It started with Gold Meir and the Zionist pioneers claiming that the Palestinians were really recent settlers from Syria and other Arab nations because the landlords were absentees in those countries. It comes from the old Zionist slogan ‘A people without a land for a land without a people’ – except the land already had a people. Hence all the lies that the Palestinians don’t really exist, which I’ve seen repeated on extreme right-wing American and Canadian websites.
As an Israeli far-right nationalist, she wants Arab villages razed to be replaced by Jewish settlements. In May she was one of the main speakers at a Zionist demonstration in support of the Israeli embassy. During which the demonstrators showed just what kind of disgusting human beings they were by chanting in favour of burning down Palestinian villages and supporting Rabbi Mei Kahane, the founder of Kach. This is a group so extreme that even the Israelis call it a terrorist organisation. She so right-wing that she’s even called for Israel to invade Jordan and Syria. This is bonkers, but it would be supported by Ted Hagee’s Christians United for Israel, which would also like Israel to invade and annexe parts of Egypt and Iraq. Technically I think Syria is still at war with Israel due to the Israeli occupation of the Golan Heights. A madman or -woman calling for real, renewed armed war is obviously a threat to peace in the Middle East. Which, incidentally she’s never given her explanation of how it can be achieved. A war-hungry maniac like her should not be let anywhere near power or international relations.
But let’s be fair, it’s not just Palestinians she hates. She also despises Jews, who protest against the Israeli state’s atrocities. In one of her wretched tweets she sneered at German Jewish critics, claiming in very anti-Semitic language that they were only doing it for the money. ‘Oy vey my German Euros!’, she tweeted. The mad right-wing Zionists trying to shut down any criticism of Israel do so by screeching that any critical remark must be an anti-Semitic trope. But this is a real one: that of the money-grubbing Jew. And right-wing Zionists also accuse their critics of being ‘offensive’! Well, I can only imagine how offensive her remarks must be to Jewish Germans, because the myth that Jews are materialistic, greedy and exploitative was at the heart of Nazi Jew-hatred and persecution. I’m also at a loss to know quite where she thinks these ‘German Euros’ that she claims were somehow being paid to her country’s Jewish German critics come from. They aren’t going to come from the German state, which supports Israel, nor its people, who are generally very friendly and well-disposed towards Jews. Germany is so welcoming towards Jews that many Israelis go there for their holidays. Nazism is banned under the Basic Law and Mutti Merkel’s government tried over and over to show that Germany was now a pluralist, anti-racist society that welcomed ethnic minorities. I dare say that there are individual Nazis ensconced in parts of the German state. But the German state as a whole is very, very definitely not going to give any kind of support to real anti-Semites.
The German-Jewish critics of Israel seem to me to be determinedly anti-racist generally. There’s a video on the web somewhere of the awesome Jackie Walker speaking at one of their meetings, and being given a warm welcome. This was after she was expelled from the Labour party on a trumped-up charge of anti-Semitism. She’s been subject to a torrent of horrendous abuse ever since, some of it viciously racist. She’s Black, and so her racist attackers have claimed she can’t be Jewish. There’s a vicious anti-Black racism in Israel. Abi Martin made a documentary a few years ago about the abuse and physical assaults made against Black Israelis. This included a maniac stabbing a baby in the head. The German Jews, who welcomed Walker and gave her a platform are far better people than Israel’s White supremacist defenders.
And just to show us what the state Hotovely so enthusiastically represents is actually like, Omar Ghraeib have tweeted about the shooting of a 13-year old Palestinian boy by an Israeli soldier, and Agent Rachel Swindon has also tweeted about the Israeli army’s destruction of water pipes serving four Palestinian villages. This is quite common, and is a method of squeezing the Palestinians in an attempt to force them off their land. Israeli soldiers also throw chemicals into Palestinian wells to make the water undrinkable. And the tweeters also rightly point out that the UN has condemned Israel as practicing apartheid.
Nandy was yelling that the demonstration was terrible attack on free speech. Which also shows what a revolting hypocrite Nandy is. As Daniel Finn points out, Nandy will not breathe a word in defence of the Palestinians. Her commitment to anti-Palestinian racism is ‘quite extraordinary’.
Of course, Patel and Nandy have also screamed that the demonstration was ‘anti-Semitic’. No. Definitely no! Many of Israel’s most ardent critics are themselves decent, Torah-observant and secular Jews. They’re severely normal, self-respecting people, who aren’t ‘anti-Semitic’ or ‘self-hating’ or any of the other wretched, vile smears that have been thrown at them. Some of them are Haredi Jews, who believe they are to remain in galut – exile – until the coming of the Messiah, as commanded in the Hebrew Bible and Torah. Others do so because they believe Israel violates the fundamental principles of the liberal Judaism they were raised in. You know, the type of Judaism that takes as its watchword ‘Jews should always be for the oppressed, never the oppressor’. And many are socialists following the ideas of the pre-War Bund, the Jewish socialist party that wanted Jews to stay in their ancestral homelands, fighting to be accepted as equals and friends by their gentile compatriots. Over here the British Jewish community before the First World War held exactly the same attitude. They wanted to be seen as patriotic Brits and Englishmen and women, not foreigners. The British Jewish establishment actually condemned the Balfour Declaration because they were afraid it would make gentile Brits see them as foreigners. It would create anti-Semitism. Philip Gould has posted a tweet from a Jewish group over here critical of Israel, Na’amod: British Jews Against Occupation. Now I don’t claim to be any kind of expert of Judaism, but I think it’s clear from their Hebrew name that they aren’t self-haters and anti-Semites. Natalie Strecker has also posted a tweet showing that, in contrast to Israeli nationalist propaganda, it is far-rightists like Hotovely who are unrepresentative of the Jewish community: “Imagine being so racist that you think a white supremacist who believes Palestinians should be subject to genocide represents Jews!!!” This was in response to someone called Caolan, who claimed that the protests were all anti-Semitic.
Way back in the early part of this century, Blair got into terrible trouble when he arrested the Chilean Fascist dictator, General Pinochet. Pinochet was responsible for horrific torture and massacres, which included the murder of a Spanish lad. Spain had put out an extradition for his arrest. Pinochet had arrived in Britain and was visiting his old friend, Maggie Thatcher. Blair pounced and had him arrested for crimes against humanity pending extradition to Spain. Thatcher and the right screeched in protest because, well, Thatcher and a large section of the Tory party support right-wing Fascist thugs like Pinochet, and he had given us aid during the Falkland’s conflict. It was all horribly bungled, as Pinochet should have been officially told first that he was not welcome over here. Blair’s regime was also guilty of human rights violations because of its grubby illegal invasion of Iraq. But in this instance it was trying to act in accordance with international law and humanity.
Hotovely is not the head of her state, but Israel is still guilty of many of the crimes for which Pinochet’s regime is abominated and reviled. I think it can be fairly said that rather than being defended and protected, the British state should be demanding her withdrawal because her racism is so much opposed to genuine, liberal British values.
In my opinion, she’s a Fascist of the same stripe as Pinochet, who should be facing tough questions from the International Court of Human Rights. But the British establishment just loves foreign Fascists if they’re on our side. And so we could expect nothing but smears and condemnation of the LSE protestersby Patel and Nandy.
Mike put up a piece on Saturday reporting that Labour leader Keir Starmer had caved in to the Board of Deputies of British Jews, and reprimanded two leading and highly respected Black women MPs, Diane Abbott and Bell Ribeiro-Addy.
These two ladies offended the Board because they appeared in a conference on Zoom, whose audience included Jackie Walker and Tony Greenstein, who asked questions. The Board objected, as Jackie and Tony were two of the many people smeared as anti-Semites and expelled from the party. One of the noxious Ten Pledges that the Board persuaded Starmer and the other leadership contenders to sign was that no Labour member would share a platform with someone expelled for anti-Semitism. Hence Marie van der Zyl, the Board’s current president, sent in a complaint about the incident to Starmer calling for him to deal with them.
However, the Board’s complaint is wrong for a series of reasons. Firstly, Jackie and Tony weren’t actually expelled from the party for anti-Semitism. And as Mike says, saying that they’re anti-Semites simply because the Labour party said so has less weight than gossip.
Secondly, the two women weren’t sharing a platform with the two accused. They were merely in the audience. The fact that the van der Zyl and the Board chose to attack the two women anyway not only shows their determination to attack them, but also their failure to understand how Zoom works. Perhaps they’re like the American congressman, who was so ignorant about the internet when it first emerged in the ’90s that he asked if you needed a driver’s licence to go on the information superhighway as it then was.
Thirdly, while Starmer and the others are free to sign anything they wish, decisions affecting the party as a whole have to be ratified by conference. And the Ten Pledges weren’t. Starmer’s disciplining of the two women is therefore constitutional.
The Board’s complaint also looks more than a little racist itself. Zionism has a long history of collaborating with real anti-Semites and Fascists so long as its purposes are served. And these are frequently against the safety and wellbeing of the Jewish people as a whole. The Zionists in Nazi Germany supported the Nuremberg Laws, which defined Jews as racially distinct and incompatible with gentile Germans and signed the infamous Ha’avara Agreement in which the Nazis sent Jewish emigrants to Israel. During the War, the head of the Zionists in Hungary, Rudolf Kasztner, also made a pact with the Nazis to send tens of thousands of Jews to Auschwitz just so that a few could be sent to Israel. Israel has also supplied weapons and expertise to a string of Latin American dictatorships, including Guatemala when that nation’s government was exterminating the Mayans. When a neo-Nazi government took power in Argentina in the mid-70s and began persecuting Jews there, the Israeli government did not scruple to supply them with arms. Arms that were used against us during the Falklands War.
The Board defines itself as a Zionist organisation. It’s also politically right-wing, although perhaps not all its members are members and supporters of the Tories. And the Tories have hated Diane Abbott ever since she entered parliament in the 1980s. She was a left-wing firebrand, one of the first Black women MPs, who was determined to attack anti-Black racism. Over half of all the abusive messages sent to MPs go to her. She was one of those racially bullied by the Blairite plotters, according to the leaked anti-Semitism report. Not only did the scumbags reduce her to tears, but they told journalists where she was crying. This is in stark contrast to the treatment of Black anti-racist activist Marc Wadsworth, who was accused of anti-Semitism and reducing a Jewish woman to tears after he caught her passing information on to a Telegraph journo at a meeting at which he was speaking. Yet instead of suspending the plotters, Starmer instead has disciplined Abbott and Ribeiro-Addy.
The Board’s record when it comes to defending Britain’s Jews against Fascism is blotchy. In the 1930s when Mosley’s British Union of Fascists was marching through the East End of London in order to intimidate the Jewish inhabitants, instead of standing up to them the Board advised Jews to stay indoors out of the way. Fortunately many courageous people ignored it, and joined Irish people, trade unionists and Communists in blocking Mosley’s march and giving his storm troops a well-deserved hiding.
The Board also showed the same twisted mentality forty years later in the 1970s when the National Front was on the rise and trying the same tactics. Instead of attacking them, the Board turned its fire on their opponents, the Anti-Nazi League. Jews were forbidden to join the organisation or allow it to hold meetings in synagogues. This was ostensibly because its founder was an anti-Zionist, and they were afraid of Jews hearing anti-Zionist propaganda. But others suspect that it was because the Board itself had White supremacist views.
Tony Greenstein has written a piece on his blog taking the Board and Starmer to task for their treatment of Abbott and Ribeiro-Addy. He discusses the shameful behaviour of the Board towards British Fascism, and quotes Maurice Ludmer, the Jewish founder of the anti-Nazi magazine, Searchlight. Ludmer wrote in issue 41 of the magazine
“In the face of mounting attacks against the Jewish community both ideologically and physically, we have the amazing sight of the Jewish Board of Deputies launching an attack on the Anti Nazi League with all the fervour of Kamikaze pilots… It was as though they were watching a time capsule rerun of the 1930’s, in the form of a flickering old movie, with a grim determination to repeat every mistake of that era. “
The-then secretary of the Anti-Nazi League, Paul Holborrow, also wrote that they were under attack from the Board. Tony is annoyed that genuine anti-racists like himself are smeared as anti-Semites for opposing and criticising Israel, while genuine racists, like Katie Hopkins, were given an invitation by the Zionist Federation to attend their gala dinner and meet the Israeli ambassador, Mark Regev. As for the Board, its previous head, Jonathan Arkush, welcomed the election of Donald Trump. Trump’s a racist, and his cabinet included real anti-Semites. However, he got a pass because he supports Israel.
Abbott and Ribeiro-Addy issued an apology for their actions. They had no call to do so, being blameless and actually the real injured parties in this sordid case. Greenstein in his piece advises them to stand firm and act like two of the heroes of the civil rights struggle in America, Paul Robeson and Angela Davies.
Robeson was a member of the Communist Party, and was thus hauled before the House Inquiry on Un-American Activities. When McCarthy asked him if he was a Communist, Robeson refused to answer, challenging the senator instead to stand behind him the next time he voted and fish his voting paper out of the ballot box to see. Greenstein also doesn’t mention it, but it is a significant fact here that Robeson was also an opponent of anti-Semitism. He gave a concert in Moscow after the War at the end of which he sang a Yiddish song by the Jewish resistance fighters against Nazism. This was not just to celebrate the millions of Jews killed by the Nazis, but also the millions of Soviet citizens murdered by Stalin.
Angela Davies is a Black American civil rights activist, who last year, 2019, was given the Shuttlesworth Human Rights Award by the Civil Rights Institute of Birmingham, Alabama. However, the Alabama equivalent of the Board got mightily offended and complained, because Davies is a critic of Israel and its persecution of the Palestinians, which she compares to the police’s maltreatment of Black Americans. The Alabama Board complained, and then issued an embarrassed retraction and apology for their own racism when Davies stood her ground and called them out instead.
And the British Board deserves to be called out on its racism. It includes as deputies individuals like Robert Festenstein, an islamophobe who appeared in a Rebel Media video with Tommy Robinson, the founder of the English Defence League and Pegida UK. Arkush and van der Zyl have also appeared at meetings in which members of the audience sported Jewish Defence League T-shirts. The JDL is a Judaeo-Nazi organisation, whose predecessor, Kach, is banned as a terrorist group in Israel. Unlike the majority of modern Jews, who strongly reject any idea that their religion makes them superior to anyone else, Kach was founded by Meir Kahane, an extreme right-wing rabbi. He really did believe that Jews are superior to gentiles, and urged Jews to arm themselves. He also absolutely believed that the Holy Land belonged solely to the Jews, and demanded the ethnic cleansing of the indigenous people.
There’s a connection here to the militia movement that emerged in America during the ’90s. These were the successors to the Survivalists of the 1980s. They were arming themselves against the American government, which they believed had been corrupted by liberalism and was about to establish a murderous totalitarian dictatorship. According to their critics, such as the Southern Poverty Law Centre, the militias were White Supremacists with close connections to American Nazism and the Klan. However, according to Adam Palfrey’s Cult Rapture, an examination of American fringe culture in the aftermath of the Oklahoma bombing, there was also Jewish militia. This group also based their ideology on that of Kahane’s. Palfrey sees them, as well as the fact that the leader of one of the other militias was Black, that the movement as a whole wasn’t White Supremacist. I think he’s wrong, and it’s just that some parts of the movement were less strict in their racism than others, and were prepared to include Jews as fellow White Supremacists.
Now Arkush and Zyl did not meet the American Kahanists. But by speaking at meetings attended by their British cousins they have shown a culpable willingness to tolerate real Islamophobes with paramilitary sympathies. They deserve to be called out on this, as should the Zionist Federation for its endorsement of Hatey Katie.
Starmer should not be kowtowing to the Board and punishing real anti-racists like Abbott and Ribeiro-Addy. He should be backing them instead and holding the Board to account for their racism. As Angela Davies’ case shows, it can be done.
Here’s a turn-up for the books. Katie Hopkins, the racist motormouth with a particular hatred of Islam, has found herself and her film, Homelands, panned by the Jewish Chronicle. Which was also shocked and disturbed by the growth of Fascism in the Jewish community, as shown by the far right sympathies of the mostly, but not exclusively Jewish audience.
Hopkins has been hawking her film around for a little time now. It’s about how decent Jewish and Christian Brits are being forced out of Britain by Muslims. It celebrates Israel as a sanctuary to which Jews can flee, while lamenting that no similar place exists for Christians. Obviously, it’s an immensely controversial flick. As Zelo Street described in an article a few days ago, she had a bit of difficulty finding a venue that would screen it in Israel: three venues turned her down, and the Board of Deputies of British Jews also severely criticised it. But she and her fellow islamophobe, the former kipper MEP Janice Atkinson, succeeded in getting it shown last night at the Pillar Hotel in Hendon. Hopkins was there, along with Ambrosine Shitrit and Sharon Klaff, two members of the ultra-Zionist Jewish right mentioned very frequently by Tony Greenstein in his articles. Also in attendance were Ros Pine and Anne-Marie Waters. Ros Pine is a member of the Board of Deputies, who was suspended last year for six years for describing Muslims as ‘the vilest of animals’. Anne-Marie Water is the founder of the islamophobic party, For Britain. And the JC’s correspondence, Ben Weich, was also there. And not remotely impressed.
According to Weich, the film opened with sepia-toned footage of wartime Britain, described as the ‘Britain our grandparents used to know’. This had a ‘shared sense of British pride’, to which people from across our colonies ‘flooded to partake’. Then Hopkins was shown visiting Savile Town, a suburb of Dewsbury which is 90 per cent Muslim. The film finally moved to Israel, with the woman nicknamed Hatey Katie expressing her envy for Jews, because ‘Brits don’t have an Israel to flee Europe to.’
Weich stated that the film was laughable propaganda, but the atmosphere during the Q&A session that followed was febrile and no joke. He said that for about an hour, members of the 100-strong audience, which was mostly but not exclusively Jewish, announced in turn that they were ‘devout islamophobes’ and followers of Meir Kahane, an ultra-right wing convicted terrorist, whose Kach organisation was banned by the Israeli authorities. After the film was over, the Jewish attendees denied that the film was islamophobic. All of them insisted that there was a difference between ‘racism and the truth’. But none of them wanted to give their names.
Weich ended his article with the words
“Jewish flirtation with the far right and extreme nationalism – less than a century removed from the Holocaust – is nauseating and ironic in equal measure”.
And the Zelo Street article itself concludes
Katie Hopkins is playing to extremists. wherever she goes. Well called out by the JC.
While the Jewish Chronicle is to be congratulated for attacking Hopkins, her wretched film, and the islamophobia and Fascism of its mostly Jewish audience, the rag is still responsible for vilely smearing Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters, including Mike, simply because they’re critical of Israel’s barbarous treatment of the Palestinians, or dare to defend those who do. Stephen Pollard, its editor, is himself an islamophobe, who considers Muslims and socialists to be a threat to western civilisation. And the Board fully supports these smears and vilifications in defence of the apartheid state. The former Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sachs, also shares extreme Israeli nationalist sympathies. He took a party of British Jews to participate in the March of the Flags, in which ultra-nationalist Israelis march through the Muslim quarter of Jerusalem vandalising property and intimidating the residents. This was despite British Jewish organisations appealing to Sachs not to go. And at all the pro-Israel, anti-Corbyn demonstrations there have been a young couple wearing T-shirts with the Kach symbol, expressing their sympathies for the Israeli Fascist right.
And I also wonder how many of the audience for Hatey Katie’s wretched flick were members of the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, which itself is viciously islamophobic, as well as smearing decent people as anti-Semites simply because they want the Israeli state to stop persecuting the Palestinians.
Weich is right to be disturbed about islamophobia and Fascism in the Jewish community. But the Jewish Chronicle, Board of Deputies and Chief Rabbis are also responsible for its growth due to their uncritical support for Israel and zealous smearing of its critics.
A little while ago I wrote a piece about how the Raelians’ original design for their embassy in Jerusalem was becoming increasingly accurate as a symbol of the increasingly fascistic nature of the Israeli state and its persecution of the Palestinians. The Raelians are a new religious movement, a sect that believes its leader and founder, Rael, real name Claude Vorilhon, was contacted and given a message for humanity by space aliens. These extraterrestrials, according to Rael, are the Elohim, one of the names for the Lord in the book of Genesis in the Bible. According to Rael, these aliens are due to return to Earth, where they will bring about a new age of peace and prosperity. Under their guidance, only certified geniuses will be allowed to rule, and all the menial work will be done by a specially genetically engineered slave race. The Holy City was chosen as the site of their embassy because that’s where Rael and his followers expect the Elohim to land and establish their centre of power on Earth.The society’s belief in ‘geniocracy’ – rule by the intelligent – has left it open to accusations of fascism. An accusation that probably wasn’t helped when they chose this as the design for their embassy in Jerusalem.
Yes, you’re seeing this correctly: it is a swastika in a Magen Dawid, a Star of David. And no, I don’t know why they chose this design. I suspect it’s because Rael, like a number of other new religious movements and occult sects since the 19th century, may have been impressed and drawn on eastern spirituality. In Hinduism and Buddhism, the swastika is a symbol of good. It also used to be like that over here before the rise of the Nazis. I think there’s even a town of Swastika in Canada, or there was.
Obviously, this didn’t go down at all well with the Israelis, who were justifiably and understandably outraged. The Raelians were forced to change their design, which is now a nice swirly galaxy in the Star of David instead.
But the symbol nevertheless suits the Israeli state, as it becomes more racist and Fascistic. And that Fascism has become blatant with Netanyahu’s new choice of coalition partners. A few days ago, the dedicated Jewish anti-Fascist and anti-Zionist, Tony Greenstein, blogged about how Netanyahu had made the Otzma Yehudit merge with another far right party, Jewish Home, which represents the settlers, so that they could join his wretched Likud in a governing coalition. Otzma Yehudit’s name means ‘Jewish Power’ in Hebrew, and they are Jewish Nazi party. It’s led by Michael Ben Ari, who takes his ideology from Meir Kahane’s wretched Kach, which was outlawed as a terrorist group. Kahane and his followers demanded the following
– Revocation of non-Jewish citizenship.
– Expulsion of non-Jews from Jerusalem and eventually Israel.
– The eventual imposition of slavery on Arabs and other non-Jews.
– Prohibition of contact between Jews and Arabs, including sexual relations.
– Segregated beaches.
– Prohibition of non-Jews living in Jewish neighborhoods.
– Forced dissolution of all intermarriages.
In 1988 Kach was banned by the Israeli Supreme Court when it looked like gaining four to eight seats in the Knesset.
Greenstein notes that not only did this come straight out of the Nazis’ vile Nuremberg Laws, but it also did little more than codify existing Israeli legislation.
Since 1948 successive Israeli governments have tried to forbid intermarriage between Arabs and Israelis. Mixed marriages are not recognised by Orthodox Judaism, the religion of the Israeli state. Which is one of the factors contributing to the outrage a little while ago when a couple of Israeli celebrities, who were respectively Jewish and Palestinian, got married, with the Jewish partner converting to Islam. Greenstein has also revealed on his blog that a number of municipalities in Israel are so keen to stop relationships between Jews and Arabs, that they are running courses in conjunction with the local police and religious organisations to discourage Jewish women from going out with Palestinian men.
The Nazis were also concerned to prevent intermarriage between Germans and those of what they considered to be inferior races, such as Poles and other Slavs. They were most fervently against gentile and Jewish Germans intermarrying. And the Jews also weren’t alone in being forced to wear identifying marks, in their case the Star of David. The Nazis developed a system of badges for the prisoners in the concentration camp, which identified the offence for which they were incarcerated. Gay men notoriously wore a pink triangle. The Gypsies, I think, were forced to wear a brown one. Red triangles were worn by socialists, Communists, Anarchists, other political dissidents and Freemasons.
There were also identification badges for ‘Jewish race defilers’. Men had to wear this
While women were identified by this badge
Clearly this represents the Nazis’ criminalisation of racial intermixing and the shaming of those, whose only crime was that they were Jewish married or in a relationship with a non-Jewish German. I also wonder if it was also foisted on non-Germans, who were incarcerated because of their marriage to a Jew.
But the Israelis are also attempting to discourage intermarriage between Jewish and non-Jewish citizens, and if Otzma Yehudit get their way, such liaisons will be criminalised. In which case I wonder if those convicted of such crimes will also have to wear similar vile symbols.
On Friday, 22nd February 2019, the long-time enemy of Fascism and Zionism Tony Greenstein put up a very ominous piece about a particularly revolting development in Israeli politics. Benjamin Netanyahu, or, as I’ve heard one Jewish professor described him, ‘That bastard Netanyahu’, has invited the extremist party Otzma Yehudit to join his coalition by urging the far right party Jewish Homeland-National Union to merge with them. Netanyahu has made this cynical maneuvre in order to fend off defeat from the Resilience and Yesh Atid parties.
This has dismayed and disgusted liberal Zionists, as Otzma Yehudit, whose name means ‘Jewish Power’, is the descendant of Meir Kahane’s Kach. In 1984 Kahane entered the cabinet with a programme that Michael Aarenau, a journo for The Times of Israel, reported that some Likud members were comparing to the Nazis’ infamous Nuremberg race laws. Kahane demanded
– Revocation of non-Jewish citizenship.
– Expulsion of non-Jews from Jerusalem and eventually Israel.
– The eventual imposition of slavery on Arabs and other non-Jews.
– Prohibition of contact between Jews and Arabs, including sexual relations.
– Segregated beaches.
– Prohibition of non-Jews living in Jewish neighborhoods.
– Forced dissolution of all intermarriages.
Greenstein notes that this comes straight from the Nazi laws, but also codifies what was already common practice in Israel. Kahane was banned from sitting in 1988 when it looked like his wretched party would get somewhere between 4 to 8 seats. And before then, when Kahane entered the chamber, the other 119 Knesset members would walk out. Greenstein states that you can tell just how extreme the party is from the behaviour of its leader, Michael Ben Ari. Ben Ari was a member of the Knesset for the National Union from 2009 to 2013. In that time, he started a pogrom against Black African refugees in South Tel Aviv. He also tore up a copy of the New Testament a Christian missionary had sent him and threw it in the bin. Now imagine the outrage that would quite rightly occur if a Christian leader tore up a copy of the Talmud! Ben Ari’s also a bloodthirsty thug, who hold non-Jewish and left-wing Jewish life in absolute contempt. When he was told in 2010 that six Palestinians had died for every Israeli, he declared that 500 should be killed instead for every soldier. As for the Gazans, he said that there were no innocents in Gaza, and they all should be mown down. He also described human rights organizations and left-wing Jews as ‘germs’ to be eradicated.
Greenstein then shows that Ben Ari only stated openly what other Israeli leaders were saying in private. The article also discusses the dismay and horror expressed by liberal Zionist organisations, Like the Forward newspaper. He makes the case that Otzma Yehudit, which wants to abandon democracy in Israel for a theocratic state, is only bringing to the fore the conflict between democracy and the idea of a Jewish state. You can have one, but not the other. If Israel’s a Jewish state, then consequently it abandons democracy as non-Jews cannot have the same rights as Jewish Israelis.
It’s very clear that the term ‘judaeonazi’ – a term coined by an Israeli professor and philosopher – aptly describes these thugs. This is the type of party and racial-theocratic bigot Netanyahu and his coalition represents. And by extension, it’s the type of Israeli Nazis that the Board of Deputies of British Jews and Chief Rabbi represent when they attack Jeremy Corbyn as an anti-Semite, simply for supporting the right of the Palestinians to stay in their ancestral homes and live without fear as equal citizens.
It is these thugs that Joan Ryan, the chair of Labour Friends of Israel, John Mann and Tom Watson are defending when they make these accusation of anti-Semitism. But this is being ignored by the political-media establishment, who simply want to use it to force Corbyn out.
But it’ll be interesting to see how the Israel lobby, Labour Friends of Israel, the Jewish Labour Movement, formerly Paole Zion, the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism and the rest of the Israel lobby try to spin all this when the pogroms and lynchings start, and when non-Jews, including Christians, are expelled from Israel.
If this is reported at all. Remember, according to the media, any criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic.
Okay, I’ve published a number of articles about gentile, racist, White supremacist and anti-Semitic organisations. Now here’s a post about Israeli Fascists. I found this photo in an article by Tony Greenstein published a few weeks ago, accusing Jewish Voice for Labour of abandoning Marc Wadsworth. Wadsworth is the veteran Black activist and anti-racism campaigner, who were expelled from the Labour party because Ruth Smeeth accused him of anti-Semitism. This, as I’ve pointed out, is yet another anti-Semitism smear, as Wadsworth’s comment criticising her contained no reference to her Jewishness, and he has actually collaborated with the Board of Deputies of British Jews in reformulating the law of racial harassment as part of a campaign against the real racists of the BNP.
It’s a photo of the crowd being addressed by the president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, Jonathan Arkush, at the demonstration organised by the Board, the Jewish Leadership Council and the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism a few weeks ago, when they accused Jeremy Corbyn of allowing anti-Semitism to increase in the Labour party.
I’ve drawn a rough red circle around two of the crowd at the front, who are both wearing ‘Kach’ T-shirts. These are black, with a yellow star within which is a black raised fist. Kach was a far-right, racist organisation founded by the American-Israeli Orthodox rabbi Meir Kahane. It was banned in 1984 as a terrorist organisation. One of its supporters gunned down 29 Arabs in the Tomb of the Patriarchs. I’ve also seen articles linking it to the extreme right-wing paramilitary militias that emerged in America in the 1990s, which many people believed were a new Fascist threat to American society. Greenstein states that they’re members of the Jewish Defence League, a far-right islamophobic mob, who goose-step around with the English Defence League.
Greenstein has also described how members of a pro-Israeli crowd also wore Kach T-shirts, when that mob tried to disrupt a pro-Palestinian meeting and conference.
Arkush, the Board, the Jewish Leadership Council and the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism are lying when they accuse Corbyn of promoting anti-Semitism. He isn’t remotely anti-Semitic, and neither are the very many decent, anti-racist people that have been smeared as anti-Semites by the CAA and its fellows within the Labour party. These include Ken Livingstone, Jackie Walker, Marc Wadsworth, Greenstein himself, and Mike Sivier, my bro, over at Vox Political. And I’ve said, over and again, very many of those smeared are decent, self-respecting Jews.
Now if any other party or organisation had supporters turning up bearing the symbols of banned racist paramilitary organisations, like the young Nazis of National Action, or legal organisations connected with terrorism, such as Sinn Fein, there would be a massive scandal. Especially if the organisation was the Labour party. I can remember in the 1980 how Labour was vilified because some constituency parties supposedly were addressed by members of Sinn Fein, and the party was in favour of peace talks between the government and the IRA. This was at the same time Maggie Thatcher was in secret talks with the IRA herself. The Tories, as someone once said, are an organised hypocrisy.
The presence of those two should immediately have asked searching questions to be raised about Arkush and the demonstration he helped organise. It isn’t, because the Board of Deputies of British Jews is the official Jewish organisation, and so apparently exempt from criticism. And the Conservative media and the Blairites within the Labour party thoroughly approve of their attempts to smear and discredit Corbyn and his supporters.
I admit there is a chance that discussion of the presence of the two terrorist supporters at the demonstration could increase anti-Semitism by showing links between the Board and the Israeli far right. This could seem to corroborate all the stupid nonsense about Jews wanting to dominate the world and the Zionist Occupation Government. But not if it is done properly. Only 7 per cent of the British population have negative views of the Jews. If the reporting of Arkush’s toleration of supporters of Israeli terrorist organisations was handled properly, the story would discredit the Board and the other organisations, but not libel Jews generally.
There is no global Jewish conspiracy for world domination and the enslavement of gentiles. But there are extreme right-wing Israeli racist organisations, who support Arkush and the other pro-Israel organisations in their attacks and smears on the Labour party and genuine anti-racists and opponents of anti-Semitism. They are a disgrace, and Arkush and the other organisations behind the smears and demonstrations should similarly be discredited or the subject of very strong censure and inquiry for their association with them.
Back on the 9th December 2017, Tony Greenstein, the pro-Palestinian, anti-Zionist activist, listed on his blog 31 pro-Israel activists, who regularly protest and disrupt pro-Palestinian events in London. He also has photos of them, and puts names to faces, along with very brief remarks about them. He begins his piece with the following passage:
Below we name and shame the 31 fascists and Zionists who have been attempting to disrupt and prevent solidarity events on Palestine. Led by Jonathan Hoffman they contain people who are members of other fascist groups like Britain First and the new Pegida. We see their connection with the far-Right. Jewish bourgeois groups like the Board of Deputies deliberately turn a blind eye to these people and no questions have been asked about Hoffman’s open links with neo-Nazis, holocaust deniers and fascists.
These people need to be treated in exactly the same way by the Left as fascists have traditionally been treated and that is to be physically driven off. As the alliance between Zionist activists and fascists grows, the Left needs to wake up to what is happening and get organised.
They’re quite a sordid bunch. At least two of these charmers have spent time in prison, or jumped bail before they could be jailed. And among the organisations they represent are the Jewish Defence League, the EDL – Jewish Division, Pegida UK, and the storm troopers of Britain First. A number of them sport Kahane T-shirts, which Greenstein explains as ‘Jewish Neo-Nazi’. I know very little about Meir Kahane, except that he was an extreme right-wing gun nut, who believed that Jews should arm themselves against persecution. And that they had an absolute right to Palestine. According to Adam Parfrey in one of his books, Apocalypse Culture or Cult Rapture, Kahane was an influence on one of the groups in the militia movement of the 1990s. The militias were right-wing, survivalist private armies, set up to defend America against despotic left-wing government and the collapse of civilisation once the Blacks, Commies, feminists and leftists took over. A number were very definitely bitterly anti-Semitic, with all the vile fantasies about ZOG. No, not Ahmed Zogu, the former king of Albania, but the Zionist Occupation Government. In their weird fantasies, America is really secretly run by the Jews, who are intent on destroying the White race through racial intermixing. It’s the same bizarre and noxious conspiracy theory you can find on neo-Nazi sites like the Daily Stormer, or Stormfront. However, one of the militia groups apparently was Jewish. Which adds further evidence to the numerous examples cited by Greenstein himself, which show how the Jewish extreme right and Zionists will make alliances with real anti-Semites and Fascist when it suits them.
A number of them are also members of the various fake organisations set up to combat anti-Semitism and advocate for Israel. These include the Israel Advocacy Movement, Eyeonantisemitism, UNWatch, Campaign4Truth and Hippodrome GG. Also featured is Jayda Fransen of Britain First, and various members of Essex Friends of Israel and Sussex Friends of Israel.
I don’t advocate violence to anyone, and I find the idea of violence against Jews particularly repugnant because of the long history of persecution, violence and genocide against them. But these people are Fascists, pure and simple. They have allied with Fascists, in the shape of Britain First and the EDL. They support militant armed extreme right-wing organisations, or at least those wearing the Kahane T-shirts do. If they weren’t Jews and were members of gentile extreme nationalist and racist organisations, there’d be absolutely no question that they were Fascists. And so they deserve to be called and treated as such.
One of the points made by Jewish supporters of the Palestinians is that there at more Christian than Jewish Zionists in America. Indeed, Prof. Norman Finkelstein has pointed out that support for Israel amongst Jewish Americans was marginal until the late 1960s, when Conservative activists worked hard to engineer support for the country after its victories against the surrounding Arab nations. Mike made a similar point in his defence of himself and his commenter, Paul Mabbo, against the accusations of anti-Semitism flung by the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism. Not everyone making the accusations was necessarily Jewish.
In fact there has been an alliance between right-wing American Christian groups and militant Zionists since before the election of Ronald Reagan as president in 1980s. Reagan’s election was partly due to his support from these right-wing Christian groups, brought about by the fundraisers and PR men Richard Viguerie, Terry Dolan, Howard Phillips and Ed McAteer. These men founded, led or advised a slew of conservative Christian organisations such as Conservative Caucus, Religious Roundtable, National Conservative Political Action Committee, Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress, Christian Voice, Young Americans for Freedom and the Moral Majority. The term ‘Moral Majority’ was coined by either Weyrich or Phillips when McAteer arranged for them to meet Jerry Falwell. McAteer was then the head of the Christian Freedom Foundation, which was funded by money from the Pew and DeVos families, who owned Sunoco and AmWay respectively. It isn’t surprising that Betsy DeVos has now popped up as Trump’s Education Secretary, with a militant right-wing plan to privatise all American public schools into Charter Schools with an explicitly right-wing Christian curriculum. Weyrich was also a member of the right-wing Heritage Foundation, which was financed by money from the Coors and Richard Scaiffe. As well as being a member of Young Americans for Freedom, Phillips had also been a minor member of Nixon’s administration. They chose Falwell because he had helped Anita Bryant defeat the Dade County Gays Rights Bill in 1977.
Falwell was one of the most notorious of the right-wing televangelists of the 1980s. He was actually the least popular of them, became the most influential through his contacts with Ronald Reagan. He first came to public attention for his 1965 speech denouncing Martin Luther King. However, it was the series of rallies he conducted in 1976 and ’77 which brought him to the attention of the leaders of the American Christian right. In 1983 Reagan allowed Fallwell to attend National Security briefings on the possibility of nuclear war with Russia, and discussed theology and nuclear war with him in his presidential limousine. Fallwell was also active establishing links with the Israeli leadership to the point where he became the most influential gentile lobbyist for Israel and Israeli expansionism.
As part of this, Falwell began arranging tours to the Holy Land. One of these was attended by a journalist, Grace Halsell, in 1983. She noted the prominent role apocalypticism played in the tours, with many of her fellow tourists believing that Christ’s return, and the end of the world were imminent. These tours also had an explicit agenda in drumming up support for Israel. The Israeli guide referred to Palestinians as Arabs, following the official Israeli line set by Golda Meir that there were no Palestinians. He then went on to state that the ‘Arabs’ preferred to live in poverty, had repeatedly refused Israeli friendship and bluntly stated that ‘all Muslims were terrorists’. When the tour bus stopped at Nazareth, it was only to use the toilets there. Halsell suspected that they were being prevented from speaking to any Palestinians or Christians living in Israel. This is not unlikely. One of the ministers at our church said that if you go to Israel, you will be kept from meeting Palestinians, including Palestinian Christians. The tour finally met Falwell at a hotel in Jerusalem, where they were treated to a speech by the Israeli defence minister, Moshe Arens, boast about Israeli victories in the invasion of Lebanon.
Falwell was richly rewarded by the Israelis for his services to them. A forest was named after him, he was showered with free trips to the country, and was also given a private jet by the Israeli government. He became the only gentile to receive the Jabotinsky medal, named after the Zionist leader, who advocated waging a war of extermination against the Palestinians in order to set up an Israeli empire that straddled both sides of the Jordan. It was Falwell who turned Jesse Helms, another prominent Reaganite, from a militant anti-Zionist into an enthusiastic supporter of Israel.
Falwell also visited the West Bank, where he had his photo taken with a Jewish American family, who had recently immigrated there. He set up a convention in Annapolis in 1983 to organise support for the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. This was attended by James Watt and Richard Allen, two members of Reagan’s administration; Yehuda Hellman and other Jewish leaders; Viguerie, Phillips and Weyrich; and former presidential sleazebag Richard M. Nixon. Falwell also told a Texan newspaper that same year that Israel had a divine mandate, through the covenant between the Lord and the patriarch Abraham, to parts of Iraq, Syria, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Sudan, and that the whole of Lebanon, Jordan and Kuwait should also belong to Israel. This would have to be achieved through force. Falwell stated that ‘good intentions are acts of stupidity’.
Extremist American Christian groups have also given support to Jewish terrorists, such as Gush Emunim, who have attempted to blow up the Dome of the Rock mosque in Jerusalem in order to restore Solomon’s Temple, whose site they believe the mosque occupies. In 1984 18 members of the terrorist group were convicted of trying to blow up the mosque, with the covert support of the Shin Bet and other members of the Israeli army and police. The group also attacked three Palestinian mayor, wounding them.
The terrorists were received as popular heroes in Israel, including by the judge who sentenced them. There were pleas for mercy from Yitzhak Shamir, and American right-wing Christians and Jews began sending money to finance their defence. Wealth American Jews also fund Gush Emunim and Meir Kahane’s extreme right-wing Kach party. Gush Emunim is also funded by Marcus Katz, a Mexican arms salesman, who made immense profits from selling guns and other armaments to Iran and various South American countries. Ruben Mattus, the head of the ice cream firm Haagen-Dazs, is one of the major backers of Kahane’s Kach party in Israel and his Jewish Defence League in the US.
The foremost Christian supporter of Israeli terrorism, at least in the 1980s, was the Jerusalem Temple Foundation, headed by the self-declared new Nehemiah, Terry Reisenhoover. Reisenhoover’s an Oklahoma speculator in oil and land, and styles himself after the Biblical Nehemiah, who was the first governor of Jerusalem after the return of the Jewish exiles from Babylon. The land Reisenhoover has speculated on, along with his Israeli partner, Shony Braun, includes land taken from Palestinians on the West Bank. Reisenhoover appointed as secretary Stanley Goldfoot, once implicated in the Stern gang’s 1946 bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem.
The Jerusalem Temple Foundation aimed to raise $100 million annually to rebuild the Temple and establish a yeshiva to teach the future priests the correct way to sacrifice animals there. They also supplied funds to Gush Emunim’s defence lawyers after the 1983 attack.
Another right-wing Christian group funding Israeli terrorism is the International Christian Embassy, who lobbied their governments to move their embassies from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. This group were also financed by South Africa.
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