Help! David Evans Wants to Indoctrinate Me to Believe Anti-Zionism = Anti-Semitism

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.

Evening Standard Publishes Anti-Semitic Cartoon – Board of Deputies and Official Jews Silent

Wednesday’s edition of the I also carried the news that the various organs of the Jewish establishment, which took it upon themselves to smear Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters as anti-Semites, issued a joint statement celebrating their meeting with the new leader of the Labour Party, Keir Starmer. They were Marie van der Zyl of the Board of Deputies, Jonathan Goldstein of the Jewish Leadership Council, Gerald Ronson, the chairman of the Community Security Trust, and Mike Katz, the head of the Jewish Labour Movement, formerly Paole Zion. They declared that Starmer had done more to tackle anti-Semitism in Labour that Corbyn did in four years of leadership.

This is a flat-out lie. Corbyn and his supporters were never anti-Semitic. Quite the opposite. Corbyn did much for the Jewish community, as various other Jewish groups recognised. Real anti-Semitism was at the lowest it had been for years during his leadership. But he was a critic of Israel, and so the official Jews declared that he had to be an anti-Semite. It’s the only way they can defend Israel against criticism of its indefensible ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians.

Starmer’s meeting with these knaves and clowns was a capitulation. He, along with the rest of the leadership hopefuls, had signed up to the Board’s 10 pledges for dealing with anti-Semitism. These can be summarised as the immediately expulsion without defence of anyone they decide is an anti-Semite. And that definition is very elastic, and applies only to pro-Palestinian activists, critics of Israel, and those, who try to defend them. The Board of Deputies, Jewish Leadership Council, Community Security Trust and the Jewish Labour Movement are all Zionist organisations, though you may be accused of anti-Semitism for pointing this out. Fact means nothing to these scoundrels. They are also Conservative to the core, which is why they also had a very party political motive for wanting Corbyn removed. It was very noticeable that Starmer’s meeting with them didn’t include left-wing Jewish groups, like Jewish Voice for Labour and the Jewish Socialist Group. Because they were the wrong kind of Jews.

And this contemptible lack of interest in defending the Jewish community as a whole, and in particular left-wing Jews, was shown very clearly in the Jewish establishment’s culpable silence on Tuesday over the publication of a cartoon in the London Evening Standard. Drawn by their cartoonist, Christian Adams, this portrayed Keir Starmer welcoming Ed Miliband back into the party. It was supposed to be a comment on Starmer’s own leadership that he was welcoming a former leader, who had been a failure. But it was a comment on George Osborne’s editorship of the Standard, that Adams showed Miliband with a hooked nose, buck teeth and clutching a bacon sandwich. Dripping a reddish substance. Miliband is Jewish, and the attacks on him when he was Labour leader definitely had an anti-Semitic tinge. Miliband’s father was the Marxist intellectual, Ralph Miliband. Miliband pere was a refugee from Belgium. He was a fierce critic of this country’s class system and the public schools that maintain it. But there is no question of his loyalty. He fought bravely for Britain in World War II to overthrow Nazism. But the Heil decided to run a feature calling him ‘The Man Who Hated Britain’ as an attack on his son. Yes, we’re back to the British establishment’s fears and vilification of Jewish intellectual, ‘rootless cosmopolitans’ and the idea that Jews have no loyalty to the country in which they reside.

But Miliband’s true patriotism and bravery during the War contrasts strongly with the Mail’s. This was the newspaper that hailed Oswald Mosley’s vile BUF with the headline ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts!’. Even when it dropped him, it still carried on supporting Hitler and publishing anti-Semitic headlines about Jewish refugees and so on. And the father of former editor, Paul Dacre, rather than serving in the army to defend our great nation, was instead far behind the lines covering the glamorous world of showbiz and celebrities.

As for the physical depiction of Miliband, who doesn’t have a hooked nose or buck teeth, they’re common to the racist depiction of a number of different ethnicities. But that does include the Jews. As does the bacon sandwich. The right-wing press ridiculed Miliband for eating a bacon sandwich ‘weirdly’. But many on the left also saw there another anti-Semitic trope. It was too similar to the medieval forms of ritual humiliation, in which Jews were forced to eat pork. As for the red substance, that was probably tomato sauce. But it also looked a bit like blood, which brings back the blood libel – that Jews ritually murder Christians in order to use their blood to make the matzo bread eaten at Passover. This vile smear has been at the centre of horrific pogroms and massacres down the centuries.

I realise these are just tropes, but that is how the official Jews of the Israel lobby judge whether something is anti-Semitic. It is, if it can be shown to conform to a literary trope or historical parallel. Even if what is being reported, such as the Israeli massacre of Palestinian civilians, is true.

By their own standards, Adams’ cartoon is anti-Semitic.

But the London Evening Standard is edited by former Tory chancellor George Osborne. and as the Jewish establishment is Tory to a core, Miliband is ‘the wrong kind of Jew’. The Board and the rest of them were culpably silent.

Both Mike and Zelo Street put up articles attacking the cartoon, the Standard and the hypocrisy of the Jewish establishment. As did Martin Odoni, another Jewish victim of the anti-Semitism witch hunt in the Labour Party. Martin commented

“Come on, BoD, come on, David Collier, come on, Jonathan Hoffman, and all you other self-righteous Zionist squealers cheaply using Jewish identity as a cover story for Israeli political gain. We know that the Evening Standard is a Tory newspaper, and therefore an ally of yours. But if you ever want to retain the slightest remnant of credibility, you need to protest this more loudly than any deed by anyone you have attacked in the Labour Party over the last five years.

“Because unlike almost all of the deeds you have attacked, this is absolutely explicit. It is an outrageous racial caricature, by the very standards you have insisted on imposing. You cannot apply them selectively.”

And both Mike and Zelo Street show Tweets from a variety of people showing that Martin’s definitely not alone. The silence of the Board and its fellows has been noted by very many people, who are disgusted.

Mike concludes his article with the comment

‘We’ll be waiting a long time for the Bod, JLC, JLM, CST and all the named champions of the fight against (Labour)(alleged) anti-Semitism to say anything, I reckon!

But what do you think?’

Well, it’s Friday as I write this, and all those august bodies have said not a dicky-bird.

Which shows you they aren’t interested in tackling real anti-Semitism, but only criticism of Israel and the socialist left.

See: https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2020/04/07/while-starmer-bends-backwards-for-right-wing-jewish-groups-the-tories-are-making-anti-semitic-jokes/

https://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2020/04/tory-ex-chancellor-promotes-anti.html

https://thegreatcritique.wordpress.com/2020/04/07/george-osborne-publishes-and-promotes-anti-semitic-cartoon-deathly-silence-from-bod-and-the-media/

The Israel Lobby’s Racist Persecution of Jackie Walker

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Absolutely.

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

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

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

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

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

2. LP relies on racist statements to prosecute me

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

The LP relies on anonymous witnesses who have written:

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

“Walker- who claims to be part Jewish”

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

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

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

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

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

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

That is unfair.

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

That is unfair.

3. Other racist and threatening remarks 

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

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

“Jackie Walker and her defenders can go hang”

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

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

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

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

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

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

That is unfair.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Israel Lobbyists Smear Mike Again, Run Away When Refuted

Mike on Monday put up another piece, describing how he was smeared once again as an anti-Semite in an article, ‘Labour’s Anti-Semitism Problem’, by a couple of hacks called Kieron Monks and Gary Spedding. This was over what Mike had written about the belief that Blair had been unduly influenced by a group of Jewish advisers. Mike went on the attack to defend his reputation, and pointed out that he had not written what Monks’ claimed he had, and that he had in any case taken his words out of context. Monks tried arguing back, but when the force of Mike’s argument proved too much for him, retreated and went silent. He ran away, leaving his mate Spedding to try and defend his libel. Spedding didn’t fare any better either, and this resulted in Spedding not only abandoning the argument, but blocking Mike on Twitter.

You can read about the incident at: https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2018/03/05/another-article-alleges-anti-semitism-about-me-author-refuses-to-acknowledge-his-mistake/

Mike makes several very good points in his article about it, not least that all the relevant information about these claims and accusations is up on his blog, if the writers of such articles would actually care to read what he has to say.

But they don’t, because they’ve already decided that Mike’s an anti-Semite. And it’s not because of any genuine concern for anti-Semitism. Monks’ real motivation in writing the article is clearly shown in the title, and in one of the people he hashtags at the bottom of his tweet about it, Dave Rich.

The title of Monks’ piece is the same as a book written by Dave Rich, and published last year by Biteback. This claimed that there was a rising tide of anti-Semitism on the Left, ever since the Liberal party had got involved in an anti-Israeli politics in the 1970s. I can’t remember where I found it, but I read a review somewhere that pointed out that Rich was another prominent member of the Israel lobby, and that what really concerned him was that the Left were taking the side of the Palestinians against Israel. In short, he’s another Zionist upset that people are criticising and protesting about the Israeli state’s ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians, and trying to shut them down by libelling them as anti-Semites. Ditto for Monks and Spedding, who obviously share his views.

As for the accusation that Blair was unduly influenced by a group of Jewish advisers, it is true that Blair received much funding during the run-up to the Iraq invasion from businessmen connected to the Israel lobby, though a campaign run by Lord levy and Peter Mandelson. John Booth describes this in his ‘Labour, Corbyn and Anti-Semitism’ in Lobster 74. He writes

In contrast, this is Jon (now Lord) Mendelsohn speaking to Jewsweek.com on 8 September 2002: ‘[Tony] Blair has attacked the anti-Israelism that had existed in the Labour Party . . .Labour was cowboys-and-Indians politics, picking underdogs. The milieu has changed. Zionism is pervasive in New Labour. It is automatic that Blair will come to Friends of Israel meetings.’ Mendelsohn was speaking during the build-up to the Iraq war. At the time Corbyn was indulging in what the New Labour fundraiser would probably style ‘cowboy-and Indian politics’ by helping create the Stop the War Coalition. 7 Mendelsohn was a close associate of Michael (now Lord) Levy in drawing down funds from Israel supporters, a programme also well described in Robert Peston’s Who Runs Britain?. The ITN political editor in his informative 8 chapter ‘Democracy for Sale’ makes clear that a good deal of that funding was not from Labour supporters, but from those, including previous Conservative backers, who identified with Blair and his support for Israel and the Iraq war.

He also goes on to discuss the connections between the Israeli embassy and the various Friends of Israel organisations, which have been making the accusations of anti-Semitism against Corbyn and his supporters.

Mendelsohn is a former chairman of Labour Friends of Israel (LFI), membership of which, as he says, attracted many of the New Labour intake in 1997 and which resembled a passport to promotion for many of them. Not all have stayed in party politics since Labour’s 2010 defeat. Former Cabinet minister and chairman of LFI James Purnell is now a senior BBC executive and is talked of as a possible future director-general. LFI supporter Lorna 9 Fitzsimons, formerly Parliamentary Private Secretary to Foreign Secretary Robin Cook, became chief executive of the Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre (BICOM) after losing her parliamentary seat in 2005. Most of the LFI supporters still in Parliament or subsequently elected to it were opposed to Corbyn’s 2015 election as leader and tried to unseat him the following year. From their ranks – some of them here supporting LFI chair Joan Ryan – have come many of the well-publicised claims of anti-semitic 10 abuse that has attended Corbyn’s rise. 11 As the Al Jazeera documentary series, The Lobby, exposed earlier this year, there is a very close working relationship between the Israel embassy in London and the Friends of Israel groups in Parliament, including the one chaired by Enfield North MP Ryan. 12 There is also a strong link between the embassy and the Jewish Labour Movement (JLM) that has led criticism of Corbyn and was very active on the ‘anti-semitism’ issue at the Brighton conference. Two JLM officials, Jeremy 13 Newmark and Mike Katz, were backed by Yvette Cooper, a Corbyn rival for the leadership in 2015, when they unsuccessfully stood as Labour candidates in the general election.

And no, before anyone asks, Booth’s article is not remotely anti-Semitic. It begins by describing the warm welcome given to Jewish speakers at Labour’s Brighton Conference last year, including Naomi Klein, Naomi Wimbourne-Idrissi, who declared that the party did not have a problem with Jews, and, of course, Ed Miliband. Wimbourne-Idrissi later that day went on to launch Jewish Voice for Labour, along with a number of other, very prominent Jewish activists, including a former member of the Israeli Defence Force.

The article also discusses the close relationship between the Blairites and the Israel lobby, and how the rise of Corbyn and the leftward turn of the party threaten the Thatcherite entryists, and their backers in the media, such as the Groaniad. It challenges their views on the neoliberal consensus, as well as their political careers. Hence they have resorted to smearing their opponents as anti-Semites. And before Booth talks about Mandelson, he writes about how Marek Edelman, a hero of the Warsaw Ghetto, was persona non grata in Israel because he supported the Palestinians. He stated that to be a Jew means that you always side with the oppressed.

Edelman’s a true hero, and Rich, Monks and Spedding are definitely siding with the oppressors. Hence their participation in the smearing of Labour members and supporters, who criticise Israel’s maltreatment of the Palestinians, or who, like Mike, simply defend those, who do, on grounds of historical accuracy.

Lobster 74 is at https://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/issue74.php

Go and read the whole article to find out what these mendacious accusations are really about, and the noxious politics behind them.