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.
I found this brief description of the Israeli intelligence agencies and their exploits in an old copy of Focus, dating from September 1993. It’s nearly 30 years out of date, but nevertheless gives an indication of what they’re like which I think is still relevant. It runs
The Shin Bet is responsible for security at home. Mossad, a highly notorious secret service, conducts clandestine operations abroad. Agents infiltrated the PLO and killed some of its leaders. In 1986 in London, a female Mossad agent abducted Mordechai Vanunu, who had blown the whistle on Israel’s secret nuclear weapons programme. He was flown secretly to Israel and sentenced to 18 years. Questions remain about Britain’s prior knowledge of the operation. Mossad agents have also taken torpedo boats from a French port, stolen the design of the Mirage jet fighter and hijacked cargoes of uranium at sea. In 1988 a Palestinian student living in Britain was found with a cache of explosives. He was a Mossad agent, a discovery which briefly soured MI6 and Mossad relations.
They’ve also been caught spying over here. Once was under Maggie Thatcher, who threatened to throw them out of the country. They did it again a few years ago, and nothing was done. They were allowed to get away with it. And I very well remember the scandal over Vanunu’s revelation that Israel had broken the anti-nuclear proliferation treaty and his subsequent abduction. It’s all very murky indeed. What comes across from this is that the Israeli intelligence agencies have scant regard for their supposed allies and pretty much do whatever they like.
And now Starmer has got one of these clowns in the Labour party, searching for anything he thinks is anti-Semitic which he can use to purge the left.
The Community Security Trust, which sounds to me to be a name taken from Monopoly’s ‘Community Trust’, are a volunteer police force originally set up to defend Jewish buildings and monuments, like synagogues and cemeteries, from attack. If that was what they only did, I’d have absolutely no problem with them. Every now and then real anti-Semites and Nazis do attack and vandalise Jewish areas. There have been incidents in the past few years where the stormtroopers have painted swastikas on Jewish homes and desecrated graves. However, there’s also a problem of precedent. If Jews are allowed to have their own police force, than other religious or ethnic groups should be allowed to have them too. But imagine the outrage if Muslims got their own! There’d soon be loud cries about the islamisation of Britain. I’m also critical of them because they joined in the anti-Semitism smears against Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters.
The problem comes when they’ve been used as stewards for pro-Israel demonstrations. They’re rumoured to have been trained in self-defence by Mossad. If that’s so, then either Mossad haven’t done a good job at teaching them about restraint and necessary force, or else they’ve trained them to treat counterdemonstrators over here the same way they would in Israel. Although possibly not as brutally, considering the real thuggery that gets meted out to the Palestinians. There have been reports of assaults on counterdemonstrators. In one incident, an elderly rabbi was punched in the face, and Jews and Muslims forcibly separated. Because God forbid that Jews and Muslims should mix and find friendship and common ground against a persecutory state.
I’ve shown the CST as skinhead thugs punching the rabbi, and calling him a traitor. This is a bit of artistic license, as I don’t think they did this. However, anti-Zionist Jews like Tony Greenstein have been assaulted and called traitors by militantly pro-Israel Jews. I’ve shown the CST thugs throwing away placards carried by a Jewish and Muslim women saying ‘Jews 4 Palestine’ and ‘End Israeli Occupation’, because women have also been attacked by them. It all seems to me less like the behaviour of any kind of responsible, respectable outfit and more like that of the violence carried out by the British Union of Fascists’ stewards at the notorious Olympia rally in the 1930s. The violence there was started by the Communists, but the BUF’s reaction was so brutal that it woke many people up to the reality of the BUF and helped to destroy their rising popularity. Perhaps if more people knew about the thuggery of the CST that would similarly help to discredit this ultra-Zionist organisation.
Despite styling himself ‘Reverend’, I very much doubt that Simon Sideways is a man of the cloth. He’s a right-wing youtuber, who vlogs about immigration, feminism, Islam and the coronavirus lockdown, all of which he opposes. I don’t share his views about these subjects. But in this short video below, he makes some very disturbing points about Israel. The video’s just over five minutes long, and it’s his thoughts about the assassination yesterday of the Iranian nuclear scientist, Mohsin Fakhrizadeh. Sideways believes that it’s the work of the Israeli secret service, Mossad, and goes on to discuss their probably responsibility for a virus that attacked the Iranian nuclear programme a decade or so ago.
The virus was originally developed by the Americans, and was intended to disrupt the computer systems controlling the operation of the centrifuges used in nuclear research. The Israelis, however, decided that the virus wasn’t sufficiently destructive, so they took it over and altered it before unleashing it on the Iranians. It didn’t just affect Iran, however. It spread around the world causing havoc in all the computer systems it infected, including our NHS. When the Americans then confronted the Israelis with the chaos they caused, the Israelis just shrugged it off.
Sideways states very clearly that the Israelis do exactly what they want, to whom they want, with a complete disregard for the consequences because they will always defend themselves by accusing their critics of anti-Semitism. America can break one international law in a year, and there’s a global outcry. Israel, however, will break fifty, and there’s no criticism, because everyone’s afraid of being called anti-Semitic.
This cavalier disregard for the immense harm done by them also extends to the country’s nuclear policy. This is the ‘Samson Option’, named after the Old Testament hero. This policy states that in the event of a nuclear attack by another country, Israel will launch its nuclear weapons indiscriminately at the other countries around the world, including Europe. The point of the strategy is to turn Israel into a ‘mad dog’ so that no other nation dares attack it. There is an article about the strategy on Wikipedia, which provides a number of quotes from journalists, military historians and senior Israeli officers about the strategy. It was to be used in the event of a second holocaust, with nuclear missiles targeting Europe, Russia and Islam’s holy places.
I remember the virus attack on Iran’s nuclear programme. If I recall correctly, it disabled an underground nuclear testing centre and killed 22 scientists. I also remember the crisis a few years ago caused by a virus infecting the NHS computers. I don’t know whether this was the same virus, but I really wouldn’t like to rule it out. He isn’t quite right about Israel escaping without criticism from the global community for its actions. The UN has issued any number of condemnations of Israel for its treatment of the Palestinians, which are very definitely in violation of international law. It’s just that Israel takes zero notice of them, and they aren’t enforced with sanctions. And they almost certainly won’t be, so long as Israel has the support of America, Britain and the European Community.
Sideways is right when he says that Israel responds to criticism by calling its accuser an anti-Semite. We’ve seen that in the Israel lobby’s smears against Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters in the Labour party, very many of whom were self-respecting Jews. Israel has been caught several times spying against friendly countries, another violation of international law. When Thatcher caught them doing so, she threatened to throw the Israeli spies out of the country. The Israelis duly issued an apology and amended their behaviour. They were caught doing the same under Blair and then under Cameron or Tweezer. I can’t remember which. Zero action was taken, and the Israelis got away with it.
They’ve also killed innocent people when they’ve tried assassinating Palestinian terrorists. And when I was growing up I remember how the rozzers in either Switzerland or Sweden nabbed a party of these clowns. The Israeli spies were trying to snatch a Palestinian terrorist, who was living in a block of flats. They decided the grab needed to be done in darkness, so turned off the block’s fuse box. Which plunged the entire block into darkness. Then Sweden’s or Switzerland’s finest turned up and grabbed them in turn.
This all shows that the Israeli security services are a bunch of out of control, murderous clowns. And the Samson Option shows that the Arabs and Muslims are right: it isn’t Iran that’s a rogue state. It’s the US and Israel. In his book America’s Deadliest Export: Democracy, Blum cites a Zogby poll of global, or at least Middle Eastern opinion, about whether Iran would be a threat if it had nuclear weapons. Most of those polled believed that Iran wouldn’t, and that it had a right to nuclear weapons.
The prospect of a nuclear armed Iran was worrying a few years ago, when Ahmedinejad was president. Ahmedinejad was extremely religious and belonged to a group of Twelver Shia – the country’s major branch of Islam – who believed that the return of the 12th Imam was imminent. The Shi’a believe that leadership of the Islamic community after Mohammed rightly belonged with a line of divinely inspired rulers – the Imams – beginning with Mohammed’s son-in-law, Ali. There are different sects, and Twelver Shia are so-called because, unlike some others, they believe that there were 12 Imams, the last of whom vanished after he went to a well in the 9th century AD. They believe he will return in the last days, when there will be a battle between Islam and the forces of evil. Ahmedinejad’s presidency was frightening because there was a fear that he would launch some kind of war in order to fulfil this prophecy.
But the Iranian president wasn’t the only leader whose apocalyptic beliefs were a possible threat to the world. Ronald Reagan and various members of his cabinet and military advisers also believed that the End was near as right-wing fundamentalist Christians. There was thus also concern that he would launch a nuclear war against Russia, here representing the forces of the Antichrist, to bring about the end.
Well, Ahmedinijad and Reagan have been and gone. I don’t believe that the Iranians have a nuclear weapons programme, as I explained in a post I put up about the assassination of the Iranian nuclear scientist yesterday. I also think that the Iranians were genuine when they said they were willing to negotiate and reach a deal with America. The refusal to cooperate, in my opinion, comes from the Americans, who really want regime change.
Not that the Iranians are angels in their turn. The regime is a brutal, repressive theocracy and they have been responsible for terrorist attacks against opposition groups. There’s a report on one such attack by the Iranian security services on an Iranian opposition group in Europe in today’s I. It’s just that it now looks to me that Iran isn’t, and has never been, a nuclear threat.
It looks to me like the real nuclear threat and rogue state is Israel. And the Iranians have more to fear from an invasion from America and Israel, than America and Israel have from Iran.
Keir Starmer has shown himself determined to purge the party of any and all critics of Israel on the utterly specious grounds that they are automatically anti-Semites. They must be, despite the fact that very many of them are self-respecting Jews and equally self-respecting non-Jewish anti-racists. This is because the Israel lobby and the British establishment and media have declared that anybody who supports Jeremy Corbyn and/ or shares his conviction that Palestinians should be allowed to live in peace in their traditional homeland has to be a horrible Jew-hater and a Nazi. Even if, like Corbyn, Tony Greenstein, Marc Wadsworth, Jackie Walker, Mike, Martin Odoni and any number of others, they are determined anti-racists. So let’s remind people just what the Palestinians are facing, and why criticising Israel is entirely legitimate and is based on what the Israeli state and its armed forces do, not because they’re Jewish.
I found this ‘Letter from Israel’ in Private Eye’s edition for 30th November – 13th December 2001. This was a time when the Eye didn’t flinch at criticising Israel, even when outraged Zionists complained that it was being anti-Semitic by doing so. The Eye has said that the ‘Letter From…’ pieces are written by journalists from countries described, so that this piece, although anonymous and possibly reworked by someone else in the Eye to cover up the author’s identity, comes from an Israeli journo. And it’s a long list of Israel’s attacks, not just on the Palestinians and their leaders, but also the Americans and Lebanon. It runs
Terrorism is the topic of the year, and whatever the current focus, history shows that we in Israel have a certain historical experience.
Take the bombing of American targets. Our chaps bombed the US cultural centres in Cairo and Alexandria as early as 1954, planning to let Abdul Nasser’s new Egyptian government take the blame. Unfortunately the scam went wrong and our defence minister Pinhas Lavon had to resign, though the director-general of his ministry, Shimon Peres, managed to hang on. Today he is Ariel Sharon’s foreign minister.
Or take political assassinations. If you ever wondered why Yasser Arafat’s lieutenants are hard to understand, the answer it simple: we shot most of his organisation’s top foreign language speakers. In fact in one glorious year, 1972, our Mossad secret service managed to kill both the PLO’s political representative in Rome, Wael Zouetar, and his counterpart in Paris, Mahmoud Hamdan.
Admittedly we make the odd mistake. There was the embarrassing 1974 incident in Lilienhammer, when a Mossad hit squad shot dead Moroccan waiter Ahmed Bouchiki in front of his heavily pregnant Norwegian wife, having mistaken him for a PLO man.
Still, we maintain a sense of proportion and have never believed in simply takinig an eye for an eye. In 1982 when an assassin from the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon wounded (but not killed) our London rep, Shlomo Argov, we invaded Lebanon and more than 20,000 people there died, mostly civilians.
Then there is the bombing of local public buildings, one of our specialities. In recent months we have shelled not just West Bank police stations, but hotels, an orphanage and the Bethlehem maternity hospital. (Not that many Palestinian women reach the hospital. Our boys at the checkpoints surrounding their townships are particularly mistrustful of women claiming to be in labour and so refuse to let them through).
None of this would have happened, of course, if the Palestinians would agree to live happily while surrounded by our soldiers and settlers. But they won’t and we must protect ourselves. Not for us any lily-livered effort to apprehend the actual perpetrators. We prefer hostage taking. This is certainly what we did when some Palestinians recently shot that nice man, ex-general Rehavam Zeevi, the founder of a party whose sole platform is the expulsion of all Arabs. Such a view had resulted in his being invited into Mr Sharon’s government as a tourism minister.
Anyway, whenever that sort of thing happens we just hold the entire population of the West Bank and Gaza Strip at gunpoint and station tanks in their streets. Then we smash the place up (just look at Manger Square after we finished with it!) and kill a few dozen locals of mixed age and sex.
And, oh yes, we also use helicopter gunships to blow to smithereens any Palestinian we suspect of planning any attacks on us, though not usually the actual perpetrators. Those we expect Yasser Arafat to hand over, in exchange for the goodwill we have shown in our peace talks with him, which have been dragging on for a mere eight years. Why are those Palestinians in such a rush?
That we have spent those years building thousands of new settler homes in the West Bank is a mere accident, not a lack of sincerity. True, this may have involved confiscating Palestinian land, arresting its owners and shooting demonstrators, which slows down agreement; but it makes sense: we just like holding peace talks so much we never want them to end.
Of course, we cannot negotiate with just anyone, and so we are currently helping improve Arafat’s administration by picking off any unsuitable figures. And we don’t just mean military men: one of those killed by us was Dr. Tahbed Thabed, the director-general of the Palestinian health authority.
In the 19 years since then, we’ve had the blockade of Gaza and now Netanyahu has declared his intention of seizing 1/3 of Palestinian land on the West Bank. But organisations like the Chief Rabbinate, Board of Deputies of British Jews, Jewish Leadership Council, the entirely wrongly named Jewish Labour Movement, whose members don’t have to be Jews or members of the Labour Party, and the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, founded to bolster British support for Israel after the bombardment of Gaza, will denounce anything more than the mildest, token criticism of Israel’s actions.
The Israeli state has been engaged on a decades-long campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Palestinians, and many of its own citizens have protested against it. Israel is a country. It is not, and never have been, synonymous with the Jewish people, no matter what law Netanyahu passes to claim that it is. Criticising Israel and its leaders is not anti-Semitic, no matter how much the Board and the Chief Rabbis howl that it is.
And Starmer has no business kicking genuine anti-racists and opponents of anti-Semitism out of Labour, simply for supporting the Palestinians. And especially not when he is tolerating real, anti-Black racists and islamophobes.
John Newsinger, whose book The Blood Never Dried: A People’s History of the British Empire I blogged about yesterday, is one of the many anti-Zionist and Israel-critical Jews, whose voices the Tory and Jewish establishments are both keen to marginalise and silence. Decent, self-regarding Jewish anti-racists, who also oppose Zionism, like Tony Greenstein and Jackie Walker, have been smeared as ‘self-hating’ and anti-Semitic because they expose the racism, apartheid and ethnic cleansing at the heart of the Israeli state. They have been purged from the Labour Party along with committed non-Jewish anti-racists like Ken Livingstone and the supporters of Jeremy Corbyn, who have also criticised and denounced Israel. ‘Red’ Ken was particularly smeared, partly because he stated quite correctly that Hitler initially supported Zionism. This is factually correct, however unpalatable it is to modern supporters of Israel. Before the Nazis decided on their horrific ‘Final Solution’, they weren’t particularly concerned what happened to the Jews as long as they were cleansed from Germany. They therefore made a short-lived pact, the Ha’avah Agreement, with the Zionists to smuggle German Jews into Palestine, then under the British mandate. Tony Greenstein blogged about the Ha’avah agreement in support of Leninspart, showing that it is established, respectable documented history, and even posting photos of the extremely rare medal the Nazis struck to celebrate the visit of one of their storm troopers to the Jewish community in Palestine. He also quoted extensively from the memoirs of Theodor Herzl, Zionism’s founder, to show how he regarded the anti-Semites as the Zionists’ most valuable allies.
Newsinger is a long-time contributor to the conspiracies/parapolitics journal Lobster. He is the senior lecturer in History and Cultural Studies at Bath Spa University College. Although he also has his differences with the Trotskyite newt-fancier, he published a piece in that magazine showing very clearly, again with copious documentation, that Livingstone was right. He also describes Herzl’s positive attitude towards European anti-Semites as a source of support for the Zionists, and the Zionists’ initial collaboration with the Nazis in the Jewish settlement of Palestine in The Blood Never Dried. He writes
While the settlers on the ground inevitably looked to the Turkish government for support and protection, the international Zionist movement was concerned to persuade European governments to pressure the Turks into being more sympathetic. This involved developing a relationship not only with the rival European empires, but also with openly anti-Semitic governments and politicians. Indeed, according to one historian, Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism
regarded the anti-Semites as his most dependable friends and allies. Rather than attack and denounce anti-Semitism, Herzl declared that ‘the anti-Semites will be our most dependable friends, the anti-Semitic countries our allies.’
The Zionists, at this time, argued that there was no place for Jews in countries like Russia, Germany, France, Britain or the United States, and this sentiment was reciprocated by anti-Semites in those countries. They could cooperate on the basis of this shared understanding. (p. 123).
Of the collaboration between the Zionists and the Nazis, Newsinger writes, pp. 129-30,
One other point worth making here is the extent to which the Zionist movement actually collaborate with the Nazis in the 1930s, in particular with the SS. To be blunt, they found they had a shared interest in the eviction of Jews from Germany. Reinhard heydrich no less, later to be the architect of the Holocaust, in September 1935 protclaimed his solidarity with Zionism in the SS newspaper, Das Schwarze Korps. The Nazis, he made clear, were “in complete agreement with the great spiritual movement within Jewry itself, the so-called Zionism, with its recognition of the solidarity of Jewry throughout the world, and the rejection of all assimilationist ideas”. Adolf Eichmann, a key figure in the destruction of Europe’s Jews, actually visited Palestine in 1937 at the invitation of the Zionists. The Gestapo worked closely with Mossad, the Zionist agency handling illegal immigration. In 1939 Heydrich was demanding that Mossad should be sending off “400 Jews per week … from Berlin alone”. This cooperation extended to the SS providing the Haganah with smuggled arms.” The moral bankruptcy of the Zionist movement is nowhere better demonstrated than in Ben Gurion’s response to the possibility of thousands of Jewish children being admitted into Britain after the Kristallnacht progrom in Germany. On 7 December 1938 he told a meeting of Zionist leaders
If I knew that it would be possible to save all the children in Germany by bringing them over to England, and only half of them by transporting them to Eretz Yisrael, then I would opt for the second alternative. For we must weigh not only the life of those children, but also the history of the people of Israel.
With the Nazis, of course, there was to be no such choice.
Mike was also suspended, expelled from the Party and then smeared as an anti-Semite and Holocaust denier – things that he is most definitely not – because he wrote a pamphlet, The Livingstone Delusion, defending Leninspart and showing that he was not an anti-Semite, and also actually right about the initial relationship between the Zionists and the Nazis.
But Newsinger’s book, well-documented and written by a proper, academic Jewish historian, shows that Mike, Tony Greenstein, Livingstone, and all the others were factually correct. It is the Zionists who are peddling anti-Semitic lies in order to cover up Zionism’s shameful record.
Mike’s expulsion, along with those of the other victims of the witch hunt, like Tony, Jackie, Livingstone, Marc Wadsworth, Martin Odoni, Cyril Chilson and so many, many other decent, innocent people, is a glaring injustice that needs to be reversed. Now.
How stupid and malign is Countdown numbers person Rachel Riley? This isn’t an academic question. As a fervent supporter of Israel, she has joined the rest of that lobby in Britain in libeling and smearing entirely innocent and decent people as anti-Semites, simply because they have made the mildest criticisms of Israel and its brutal and murderous policies towards the indigenous Palestinians. Now it seems she has surpassed herself. She has libeled the children’s Poet Laureate and Holocaust educator Michael Rosen as an anti-Semite and Holocaust denier just two months after he published a book about the relatives he lost in the Shoah.
Riley was following other stalwart defenders of Israel’s to impose apartheid and ethnic cleansing, who were angered at Mr Rosen and the left-wing film-maker, Ken Loach, joining the anti-racism movement, Show Racism the Red Card, as judges for a schools competition this year. The two are due to select the most inspiring and creative designs created by young people on the subject of anti-racism. SRTRC’s chief executive, Ged Gebby, said they were both valued supporters of the organisation, and they were delighted to have them. They couldn’t think of two better people to have choosing the winners.
This was too much for the Zionist fanatics and smear merchants. One supposedly genuine hack, Sarah Ebner, responded on Twitter with
“Wow. Interesting choices to say the least.I can’t understand why you would pick people who have had such problematic relationships with many in the Jewish community. There must be other possible judges out there. Racism AND Antisemitism both need to be ‘shown the red card’”
Rosen responded with a series of sharp tweets putting Ebner right:
“Can you tell me why I’m not suitable to judge a poetry competition about racism in football? Are you aware of what this looks like? Dubbing me as someone who has ‘a problematic relationship with many in the Jewish community’? What is ‘problematic’? Who are the ‘many’? What ‘relationship’? Who decides? Do you think your innuendo has any legal implications?”
“Along with HistoryWorks Cambridge I worked with 5000 school students and teachers on Holocaust Education last month. ‘Problematic’? Does it make me not suitable to judge a children’s poetry competition on racism and football?”
Another Tweeter, Roger Jarman, queried Ebner’s division of Britain’s Jewish community into ‘good’ and ‘bad’:
“And what is the ‘Jewish community’? Do all those who self identify as Jewish or are of Jewish heritage share common interests, views and ambitions? Or perhaps there is a smaller group of ‘good Jews’ with whom the ‘not so good Jews’ relate? And who decides who is ‘good’?”
Other Tweeters joined in, but unfortunately Ebner carried on sneering despite some of them telling her to stop digging.
Meanwhile, the head of policy at the Community Security Trust, Dave Rich, attacked Ken Loach. Loach, he claimed, had said
antisemitism is an “understandable” reaction to Israel’s actions; whether the Holocaust happened “is there for us all to discuss”; antisemitism in Labour is “exaggerated or false”; & complained about “the generalised sense of guilt that everyone has about the Jews”.
Um, no. This was more of what the Israel lobby does. They take quotes out of context and twist them in order to misrepresent staunch anti-racists and opponents of anti-Semitism. Magpie Ranger on Twitter by linking to a piece in the Graoniad by Loach responding to attacks on him by Jonathan Freedland and other Zionist hacks in that paper. This was titled ‘Ken Loach: I give no legitimacy to Holocaust denial’ and began
‘The Holocaust is as real a historical event as the second world war itself, and it is contemptible to imply that I have anything in common with people like David Irving, writes Ken Loach.’
And then Rachel Riley decided to put her oar in, and tweeted.
‘The supposed anti-racism football charity #ShowRacismTheRedCard yet again unashamedly promotes deniers/proponents of anti-Jewish racism.
I hope schools don’t touch this.’
This got a very swift response from the left-wing Jewish group, Jewdas and other Tweeters. One of the Jewish group’s Tweets was
‘Personally its not something we’d do but if you were planning on accusing a beloved childrens’ poet of Holocaust Denial, best not to do it DAYS after he releases a book about losing family in the Shoah.’
Quite. Because on 12th December, Mr Rosen published a book, The Missing, about his relatives who murdered in the Holocaust. He was particularly moved to write it by the fate of his grand-uncles, Oscar and Martin, who existed before the Second World War, but vanished during it. Rosen was interviewed by the Torygraph about his book, and said that he ‘was face to face with one of the most virulent forms of anti-Semitism’. Mr Rosen has also appeared before parliament to give information on the Holocaust as well not so long ago. It was while doing so that he managed to upset former Labour MP, Ian Austin, by putting him right about British involvement during the War. Austin thought that Britain stood alone. Rosen corrected him, stating quite rightly that we had the support of the Empire – Canada, India, the Caribbean, our African colonies, Australia and New Zealand. This was too much for Austin, who got shirty with him. But Rosen was quite right, and if we hadn’t had these nations’ support, we would have fallen to the Nazis in very short order like the other European nations.
Riley has since deleted her tweet, possibly realising, as Mike pointed out, that she had gone too far and that Mr Rosen, unlike most of her victims, actually has the money to spend on taking Riley to court. But the damage has been done. Unfortunately some people have been taken in by Riley, and really do believe that Mr Rosen is an anti-Semite, who denies the Holocaust.
Mike, however, has pointed out that there is a court case that could stop her making this false and libelous claims. These are the case he is fighting against her. She is suing him for libel because Mike dared on his blog to stand up for a girl Riley was bullying and had accused of anti-Semitism. Mike is fighting this false and malign accusation, but that requires money, and so Mike is once again asking for his supporters to dig into their pockets.
He writes
So allow me to repeat my appeal: if you want to see an end to this nonsense from a so-called TV celebrity who should know better, please support the CrowdJustice appeal for the funds I need to bring the case against me to court and to defeat her claims.
Such a loss would be a serious financial – and personal – setback for her. It is unlikely that Ms Riley would be able to present such questionable views to the public afterwards and expect a sympathetic reception.
And concludes
This is a witch-hunt. It will continue as long as privileged people like Ms Riley are allowed to go unchallenged when they attack people, simply for having views that she doesn’t like.
Riley and the rest of the Israel lobby despise Rosen and Loach because they are determined anti-racists, who have supported Jeremy Corbyn and criticised the witch hunt against him and his supporters. Loach also directed a play or a film some time again, which attacked Israel’s murderous oppression of the Palestinians.
As for the Community Security Trust, this is a volunteer police force that was set up to protect Jewish sites, like synagogues and cemeteries. They are supposed to be trained by Mossad members, and act as stewards for Zionist rallies. They have acted violently towards peaceful demonstrators, breaking apart and separating Jewish and Muslim demonstrators and assaulting them. In one instance, one of their thugs punched an elderly rabbi. But for some reason the government still thinks this bunch of paramilitary squadristi are an acceptable partner for the police force in defending the Jewish community.
Even when they are the people attacking Jews and their friends and supporters.
Last week, Boris Johnson appointed Priti Patel to be the new Home Secretary. This is deeply ironic, as the thoroughly objectionable Patel was thrown out of the cabinet by Tweezer in 2017 after she was caught holding unscheduled meetings with Israeli ministers and supporting their objectives in the UK, purely on her own initiative. The woman, who is now in charge of British national security, is actually a threat to it.
This is not hyperbole. Israel is a foreign power, no matter how many Zionist fanatics claim criticism of it is offensive because it’s important to their sense of Jewish identity. It’s supposed to be a friendly country, but all too frequently doesn’t behave like one. Allied, friendly nations aren’t supposed to spy on each other. But Israel does. They were caught spying on British citizens back in the days of Thatcher. She, however, certainly didn’t tolerate it. Not only did she thoroughly reprimand the Israelis, she also threatened to have their spy base over here closed down and thrown out of the country. The Israelis duly apologised and stopped.
This was in complete contrast to what happened when they did the same under Blair. Instead of threatening to close them down, the war criminal gave them a mild reprimand, essentially a slap on the wrist. Possibly he was prevented from going further because the money that funded his office, and which allowed him to be independent of the trade unions he despised, was raised through Lord Levy, whom he had a met at a gathering of the Israeli embassy, and came from pro-Israeli businessmen.
And we’ve seen over here how the Israelis have absolutely no qualms in meddling in our politics with al-Jazeera’s revelations in their documentary, ‘The Lobby’. This caught Shai Masot, an official at the Israeli embassy, conspiring – and that is the right word – with a member of the civil service – to have Alan Duncan dropped from Tweezer’s cabinet because he was a supporter of the Palestinians. He was to be replaced with someone more supportive of the Israelis. Like Boris Johnson, whose name was most definitely mentioned. And then there’s the still murky links between Joan Ryan and Labour Friends of Israel and the Israeli embassy. Ryan was caught on camera stating that she’d been given a million pounds by the Israeli government, but didn’t say what the money was for. So what was it for? It’s an obvious deduction that the money was given to make the Labour party, or at least certain individuals within it, more pro-Israel. But, alas, we didn’t learn how, and asking questions of that sort gets you tarred as an anti-Semite. Even if it’s a fair question to ask of money coming into any political party, from any foreign government.
The Israelis are also known for carrying out assassinations and other intelligence operations abroad. A few years ago it was reported by the mainstream media that an Arab militant had apparently been shot by the Israeli intelligence services in one of the other Arab nations. The Beeb report made it clear that this was not an isolated incident. But the Israelis also aren’t afraid of carrying out such operations in friendly countries in Europe. Back in the 1990s the cops in one European country caught Israeli spies trying to snatch a Arab militant from a block of flats. I think it might have been in Switzerland, but a friend of mine tells me it was Sweden. Whatever. These idiots, who were less James Bond as Johnny English, decided that their operation should best be done under cover of darkness. So they cut the electricity to the entire building at the junction box. Sweden’s – or Switzerland’s – finest were alerted, and hurried round to throw the clowns into the party van. There was much anguished comment in the paper afterwards over how the Israeli security services, who once smuggled Khrushchev’s secret speech denouncing Stalin to the West three days after it was made by the Russian president, could have fallen so low. How was it that such an efficient, highly professional organisation could now have become a bunch of bungling morons?
And I’ve also heard friend of friend stories from people in this country, which claim that they were spied upon by Mossad for their contacts with other Israelis. How much truth there is in these rumours I honestly don’t know. I’ve never asked the people concerned themselves, and it could just be paranoid rumour and nothing more. Like some of the stories about people being spied on by MI5, the CIA, the KGB or the Red Chinese or whoever. On the other hand, as the Israelis have been caught interfering in our politics and spying on us and other friendly nations, it could well be true.
By making these highly unofficial meetings with senior Israeli figures, Patel showed she was quite prepared to work with them outside the knowledge and permission of her own government. She was prepared to collaborate with them against her own government. And in appointing her to his cabinet, Boris Johnson has shown that he has absolutely no objection to his ministers operating in this way and that he will docilely accept Israeli interference in British domestic affairs, even when they undermine the normal processes of democracy.
Priti Patel is a threat to British national security and the personal safety of British citizens. Just as Boris is also ready either to look the other way, or willing comply with Israeli conduct that would be roundly condemned and prosecuted by other leaders and nations.
There are very many issues I’d like to blog about, but I have to cover this one. It’s an absolute travesty. Jackie Walker, the Black Jews anti-racist historian, activist and educator, has been expelled from the Labour party after she walked out of what was another kangaroo. Walker has suffered years of vilification and foul abuse because she is what the Israel lobby inside and outside the Labour party can’t stand: a Jewish opponent of Israel and its ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. If you watch Jon Pullman’s film, Witchhunt, which is about her persecution and those of other critics of Israel, she tells how she came into anti-Israeli apartheid activism. It was in the 70’s when she was part of the campaign against apartheid in Namibia. And through her activism against apartheid in southern Africa, she moved on to questioning it and campaigning against it in Israel.
It’s glaringly clear that Walker is no anti-Semite nor any kind of racist. But because of her activism and the fact that she was an ally and supporter of Jeremy Corbyn, the Israel lobby and the Conservatives, including the Thatcherite ‘moderates’ moved to smear her. They did so first by delving back into her Facebook posts and finding an old discussion with two colleagues in which she said that her people – the Jews – were the chief financiers of the slave trade. She should have said ‘among the chief financiers of the slave trade’. Walker is fully able to support the latter statement using established historical fact by conventional scholars, some of whom are Jewish. However, the sloppy wording of her statement allowed her to be presented by the CAA as anti-Semitic. That’s when she was suspended the first time. She was suspended again when she was secretly recorded at a training day on Holocaust Memorial Day run by the Jewish Labour Movement questioning their use of International Holocaust Remembrance Definition of anti-Semitism. This is a perfectly fair question, as the definition has been criticised by one of its authors, Kenneth Stern, for suppressing free criticism of Israel, and the Scots appeal court Judge, Sir Stephen Sidney, who is Jewish, amongst others. When Marc Wadsworth, the Black anti-racist activist, asked for a definition of anti-Semitism when he was hauled up before a similar kangaroo court, the wretched tribunal had to adjourn. When they returned, it was in the company of four lawyers, all arguing. In fact, the proper definition of anti-Semitism is straightforward. Following the definition of Wilhelm Marr, the 19th century German, who coined the term, it’s simply hatred of Jews as Jews. But the I.H.R.A. definition includes references to Israel, including describing it as a racist endeavour. Hence the insistence on its adoption by the Israel lobby, determined to suppress criticism of Israel for its racist oppression of the Palestinians.
In fact, Jackie walked out of her hearing after they refused to allow her to make an opening statement. She published a detailed account of her experience at the Jewish Voice for Labour website. And Mike in his piece about it, put up on Wednesday, describes how close it was to the treatment they gave him. Both Jackie and Mike were suddenly presented with new information against them at the very last minute. The charge against them was not a normal definition of anti-Semitism. In Jackie’s case, the definition used was whether an ordinary person reading or hearing her comment would consider them anti-Semitic. She remarks that it is an extraordinary dilution of the real definition of anti-Semitism as hatred of Jews. Similarly, the charge against Mike was that an anonymous individual, who thus legally didn’t exist, had been offended by what he wrote on his blog. She also states that she was not informed in advance of the identities of the panel, so she could check whether they would give her a fair trial. Neither was Mike, who remarked that if had been able to do this he would have refused to participate unless a new panel was selected.
Jackie has also complained about prejudicial comments made about her by Labour MPs. Mike has also said that he suffered the attention of Labour MPs, who wanted simply to find anyone accused guilty and that there was a directive in the charge sheet against him by the NEC to do so. Jackie also said that the Party was guilty of breaches of confidentiality in giving out private data, just as Mike is pursuing the Labour party for doing so. And while Mike was allowed to speak in his case, he was constantly interrupted by a panel that simply wasn’t interested in whether he was guilty or not.
Mike states in his article about Jackie Walker leaving the kangaroo court that
Put it all together and we see that Labour’s failure to follow its own rules, and its determination to smear party members who speak out about injustice, is not only habitual – it appears to be party policy.
He states that those responsible should feel a deep and abiding shame, and that they should resign. If they won’t, then they should be identified and pursued. But that will be difficult as they’re trying to purge everyone who might be a threat to them. Nevertheless, the identification of clear breaches of procedure in these cases should be enough to begin a dialogue.
Shortly after the hearing, Jackie was formally told she had been expelled from the party. Not for anti-Semitism, but for ‘prejudicial and grossly detrimental behaviour against the party’. This is a catch-all charge that actually means nothing. Her real crime, as Mike and the very many others he quotes in his article about this foul affair, was that she said something that offended a right-wing, Zionist/ pro-Israeli-government Jew. And by expelling her, the Labour party has shown that it is determined to persecute left-wing Jews, who want a peaceful solution to the Israel/Palestine problem. Walker’s expulsion was the subject of biased articles in the Guardian and Labour List, and rants by the Jewish Labour Movement, which claimed that she was able to carry on making a mockery of the party’s procedures because she had support of members of the party leadership, the NEC and MPs. Thus ignoring awkward facts like she was attacked in a letter signed by 38 Labour MPs and her expulsion was welcomed by poisonous egomaniac Margaret Hodge. The JLM then continued with its lies by saying that despite warm words, little had been done to tackle the scale and impact of anti-Semitism within the Labour party. Which is a bold statement to make after secretly and unethically recording her comments at the Holocaust Memorial training day. The Board of Deputies of British Jews, the Jewish Leadership Council and the Community Security Trust then made a statement that nobody wins in this latest ugly case of disreputable behaviour. To which Mike responds that this statement clearly contradicts the facts, as it doesn’t identify the disreputable behaviour as the secret recording of Jackie’s comments.
Mike’s article on Jackie’s expulsion states that it is mortifying for everyone in the Labour party, who believe the members deserve better from their leaders, and then proceeds down the list of breaches of basic justice they committed against her. The charge against her, of detrimental behaviour against the party, can mean anything and everything, as Martin Odoni has pointed out. It’s as unjust as the way the party threw out the I.H.R.A. definition of anti-Semitism in Jackie’s previous trial, and used instead the definition that something was anti-Semitic if an ordinary person thought it was. Which Mike states is claptrap. And then there’s the breach of the party’s own disciplinary procedures by giving her new evidence days before the trial.
Mike states plainly that
We are left to contemplate – not a disgraced anti-Semite who has finally been made to face justice, but an honourable campaigner, falsely-accused, falsely-expelled, and wrongly vilified by a disgraced, debased and corrupted political machine.
He goes on to say that if Jeremy Corbyn himself is reading this, it is to be hoped that he burns with shame at this travesty committed by his subordinates in an underhanded campaign to remove him from the leadership. Corbyn has been able to beat the accusations against him so his opponents have turned instead to attacking his allies. And he has let it happen. He can’t stop the persecution on his own. He needs the help of the NEC, but they haven’t lifted a finger to stop it but have cheered on the persecution carried out by the compliance unit and the NCC.
Mike concludes
Labour needs root-and-branch reform of all three organisations. And it needs it yesterday.
Everything Mike’s written about this shabby affair is absolutely right. Tony Greenstein, another principle Jewish campaigner against all forms of Fascism, who was also expelled on trumped up charges of anti-Semitism because of his opposition to Israel, has made the point time and again that Corbyn and his advisors have consistently given in to the witchhunters in the hope of appeasing them. But this hasn’t worked. It has just encouraged and emboldened them, and they will only stop when they have removed him as head of the Labour party.
As for the organisations involved in smearing Walker and the other victims of the witchhunt, despite their pretensions to honesty and virtue they are deeply immoral and deceitful. The Jewish Labour Movement claims to speak for all Jews in the Labour party. It doesn’t. It is, as its founder, embezzler Jeremy Newmark has said, set up to use the same methods to attack Israel’s critics and opponents elsewhere within the Labour party. It’s members don’t have to be Jewish – and it’s been claimed that the majority are gentiles. And they don’t even have to be members of the party. They’re a Zionist entry group, but position themselves as the true voice of Jews within the party to the exclusion of other Jewish groups like Jewdas, Jewish Voice for Labour and so on, who do support Corbyn and whose members are actually Jewish. The Board of Deputies of British Jews is another Zionist organisation that really only represents the United Synagogue. It doesn’t represent the Orthodox, many members of whom have published letters in support of Corbyn. Nor do they represent secular Jews. The Jewish Leadership Council was set up as a rival to the Board by much the same affluent, Tory-voting establishment types that serve on the Board. The Community Security Trust are a private vigilante group, trained by Mossad, who for some reason have been given considerable powers to patrol Jewish communities to protect them from harm. No other ethnic or religious groups have this privilege, despite the fact that Muslims and mosques are more at risk of attack and vandalism than Jews and synagogues. Also, the CST grossly inflates the incidence of anti-Semitism and has a history of unprovoked, vicious assaults on anti-Zionism campaigners. Tony Greenstein described some of this in a post he put up back in January. And it’s a long, ugly list. Those assaulted by the CST thugs include women, Muslims and Jews. One victim was an elderly rabbi, who was punched in the face! This is the deplorable behaviour of Fascists, like the viciously anti-Semitic banned terror group, National Action. But somehow the CST and its thugs have state approval. And the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism is really only interested in attacking left-wing critics of Israel, and has little to say about real, genuine anti-Semites and Fascists.
Walker, Marc Wadsworth, Ken Livingstone, Tony Greenstein, Mike and so many others have been expelled and smeared to satisfy a politically biased, grossly unrepresentative Zionist establishment. An establishment that has shown itself repeatedly to be manifestly unjust and deeply mendacious. It is this establishment and their right-wing allies, both in the Labour party and without, which needs to be held up to examination, and should have their lies and machinations exposed. And those responsible for the witchhunt should be called out and utterly disgraced for their vilification and demonisation of decent, anti-racist women and men.
Tuesday’s I, for 12th March 2019, featured a review by Etan Smallman of a new exhibition on anti-Semitism at the Jewish Museum in London. This included comments from the Museum’s director, Abigail Morris, and Deborah Lipstadt, the professor of Jewish history at Emory University in America and the author of Anti-Semitism: Here and Now. Lipstadt is best known as the American academic, who exposed David Irving as a holocaust denier and falsifier of history in court in the 1990s. This was portrayed in the 2016 film, Denial, in which she was played by Rachel Weisz.
Most of the exhibition seems uncontroversial, as it looks at the anti-Semitic depictions of Jews as money-grubbing, and the history of medieval anti-Semitism. The exhibition shows board games depicting Jews as grasping, including one which the song-writer Steven Sondheim said taught people to be anti-Semitic. It covers notorious events in English history, such as the York pogrom of 1190, stating that England was the first country to expel Jews. It also covers how the Roman Catholic church only renounced the idea that the Jews killed Christ in 1965, and notes how, in depictions of Judas Iscariot, he is given stereotypically Jewish features while Christ and the other disciples, who were also Jews, were not. It also discusses Fagin in Dickens’ Oliver Twist, and shows Yugoslav Nazi poster depicting Jews as the forces behind both capitalism and communism.
However, the Museum also seems to be promoting the lie that the Labour party under Corbyn is acutely anti-Semitic. It also tries to rule out inquiring about Israeli funding for particular political groups by claiming that this is also anti-Semitic. And it hails liar and internet bully Rachel Riley as some kind of heroine in the fight against anti-Semitism.
The article states
More recently, Labour has been mired in cases of anti-Semitism, culminating in Luciana Berger resigning from the party last month. Six people, including two from the left, have been convicted of race hate against the Jewish MP for Liverpool Wavertree.
Lipstadt describes the situation as “unprecedented”. “We’ve never seen anything as institutionalised in a Western democracy as we’re now seeing in the Labour party.”
A party spokesman said it “takes all complaints of anti-Semitism extremely seriously and we are committed to challenging and campaigning against it in all its forms”.
Before we go any further, let’s critique this little piece. First of all, of those convicted of race hate against Berger, only two were from the left. And what does ‘from the Left’ actually mean? Were they members of the Labour party? The article doesn’t say, so I would think they actually weren’t. And the incidence of anti-Semitism in the Labour party is belied by the stats. Looking at the statistics, only 0.O8 per cent of Labour party members have been suspended or expelled for anti-Semitism. And even there, the stats are unreliable because many of those charges, such as against Jackie Walker, Marc Wadsworth, Tony Greenstein and Mike Sivier, were utterly false. In fact anti-Semitism has actually gone down under Corbyn, and is less than in the rest of British society.
But the article continues
In the vanguard of the online battle against the anti-Semites is the unlikely figure of Countdown’s numbers expert Rachel Riley, who has responded to a wave of abuse by coining the hashtag #BeLouder.
Yes, this is the same Rachel Riley, who accused a sixteen year old school girl with anxiety problems and her father of being anti-Semites, got her followers to dogpile on to them, and threatens anyone who points out how false and libelous her accusations are with litigation.
The article then continues to quote a spox for the pro-Israel paramilitary vigilante group, the Community Security Trust.
The “dilemma”, however, according to Mark Gardner, of the Community Security Trust, a charity that monitors anti-Semitism, is that increased media coverage of anti-Semitism results in a spike in reports of hate crimes against Jews.
Except that the stats collected by the CST and its companion race hate organisation, the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, can’t be trusted. They exist to spread fear that anti-Semitism is spreading, and so inflate the statistics. To the extent that one of the two organisations declared that anti-Semitism had risen by 1,697 per cent in Wiltshire! Tony Greenstein has published many pieces destroying these organisations’ highly manipulated statistics. As for the CST itself, it’s a vigilante force supposedly formed to protect Jews from assault. It’s trained by former members of Mossad, and is not averse to thuggery itself. Greenstein in one piece described some of the assaults its members had carried out stewarding Zionist rallies. And it’s a long, ugly list, which includes women, the elderly and even non-Zionist rabbis. And, of course, at one such rally they separated Muslims from Jews by force. All this was done while the police stood and watched, but did not intervene. See Greenstein’s article at
Lipstadt is resolute that it needs to be condemned wherever it is found, “not just because of Jews”, but because “anti-Semitism is a classic conspiracy theory. If you have increasing numbers who believe, ‘Aha! The Jews are being paid to do this’, ‘The Jews are doing this all because of Israel’, they’re going to believe conspiracies about everything else.”
This isn’t entirely wrong, as along with the classic anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about the Jews there is a tendency to try to fit other daft conspiracies into the pattern, like reptoid aliens. But it is absolutely not anti-Semitic to point out that Israel is the force behind some actions. Shai Masot, an official at the Israeli embassy, was filmed conspiring to have Alan Duncan removed from the Tory cabinet. And the Israeli government does have a special department, the Ministry for Strategic Affairs, headed by Gilad Elon, to spread smears that Israel’s critics and opponents are anti-Semitic.
The article then goes to say that there is a problem tackling anti-Semitism because Jews are perceived as rich, and because they’re White. It then quotes Gardner as saying that being careful to use the word “Zionist” rather than “Jew” is no defence if you are still indulging in age-old anti-Jewish imagery, nor does being Jewish yourself inoculate you from perpetuating anti-Semitism.
But as we’ve seen, the concept of what counts as an anti-Semitic trope is so wide, that it’s used to silence people, who aren’t actually talking about the Jews as a whole, and who are factually correct. As Mike was when he talked about Masot’s conspiracy at the Israeli embassy. As for Jews also being guilty of anti-Semitism, we’ve seen how that accusation has been used against decent, self-respecting secular and Torah observant Jews like Walker, Greenstein, Martin Odoni and countless others.
And while some genuine anti-Semites hide their Jew-hatred behind rhetoric about Zionism, those criticising Zionism mean exactly that when they talk about it. They aren’t talking about the Jews.
The article concludes with Morris saying that she hopes the exhibition will get non-Jews to understand why Jews are so worried, and will contradict the perception that they’re overreacting. She says
I hope we can explain why it’s so serious – because we know where this kind of thing can lead.
So what is Morris claiming? That Corbyn and his supporters are going to hold torch-light processions and start pogroms, ending in the establishment of new concentration and death camps? They aren’t. Corbyn and his supporters are actually the least racist, and are determined opponents of anti-Semitism. But the Israel lobby fears and despises him and them because he also stands up for the Palestinians. Hence the panic. And as Norman Finkelstein, another Jewish American professor has observed, Israel and its lobby have always responded to their critics by smearing them as anti-Semites.
And this seems to be the real purpose of the exhibition, and to make the smear seem all the more compelling by putting it in the context of genuine anti-Semitism and Jew-hatred. I am very disappointed that the Jewish Museum has done this, and that Professor Lipstadt has been involved in it. I’ve never been in the Museum, but I can remember watching with great interest one of the antiques programmes on TV, which had a brief piece about it. They showed some of the priceless artifacts of Jewish history, including a Bible published in 17th century Italy, and the tokens Orthodox Jews used to pay their donations to the synagogue, as their religion forbids them from handling money on the Sabbath. This exhibition and the involvement of a respected academic like Lipstadt will reinforce the lie that criticism of Israel, and questioning Israel’s involvement in British politics, is anti-Semitic. A large section of the Jewish community strongly disagrees.
But the Museum and Lipstadt clearly represent the Zionist establishment, who are doing everything they can to stoke fear amongst the Jewish community by smearing any and all criticism of Israel, however, reasonable, as anti-Semitism, and then associating those smeared with real Nazis. Morris and Lipstadt should be ashamed they are complicit in this.
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