Is the Latest Anti-Labour Smear Motivated by Tory Fears of General Election?

Mike suggested in his first article on the Sunset Times’ latest anti-Semitism smear against the Labour party that it was motivated by the fear that a general election was in the offing. Mike wrote

This is a critical time for the people of the United Kingdom.

Hysteria over Brexit is at fever pitch, with Theresa May in negotiations with a Labour team on a way to save the process from the disaster she has made of it.

If the talks fall apart, it is possible that Mrs May will trigger a general election in the hope that a new Parliament may be able to support one of the options available.

And in this context, The Sunday Times publishes a piece smearing the leader of the Opposition.

See: https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2019/04/07/a-general-election-is-in-the-offing-time-for-another-anti-semitism-smear-against-jeremy-corbyn/

I don’t think there can be much doubt about it. The Skwawkbox has also pup up a very interesting little piece reporting that the Mail on Sunday has an eight-page feature telling its readers ‘How to protect your cash from Corbyn’. Which, as the Skwawkbox points out, is a frank admission that they think he’s going to win the next election, and that they think that one’s coming soon. The Skwawkbox also points out that it shows that the Tories are also all about the wealthy, drily commenting ‘Who knew, eh?’

https://skwawkbox.org/2019/04/07/mail-spends-eight-pages-telling-readers-corbyns-going-to-win-next-ge/

Who indeed? The Tories have always seen themselves as the party of business and industry. Or rather, they have since they stopped presenting themselves as just the party of the Anglican Church and aristocracy, and decided to broaden their constituency by taking the business vote from the right-wing of the Liberal party. As a result, they are very much the party of the Establishment, although it has to be said that the religious right have also become very worried that a large section of the Anglican church, along with many other British churches and religions, doesn’t support them. And it seems from the latest smears against the Labour party and this piece in the Heil on Sunday that the Establishment is very, very worried. And so they should. Polls last week showed Labour five points ahead of the Tories, and the Newport by-election even suggested that the lead could be as much as nine points. Or at least it was in Newport.

Hence the Sunset Times’ attack, which, as well as being a malign attempt to misrepresent and libel Corbyn and his party, is also an act of utter desperation. The Tories are desperately afraid they’ll lose the next election, and so they’re reverting to the anti-Semitism lies and smears. But they’ve used them so often before, it’s very likely that the British public, or at least a sizable part of them, realises that they’re lying and simply don’t believe them. I’ve blogged before about a piece I found elsewhere on the Net, which reported that a senior member of the Israel lobby, responsible for spreading the anti-Semitism smears against opponents of Israeli ethnic cleansing, lamented that it was no longer working as effectively as they’d like.

I hope this continues and the whole, wretched sham campaign of smears and lies is utterly discredited along with the soulless hacks and politicos that retail it. And that Labour wins the next election by a landslide.

Zelo Street on Neil Hamilton’s Nazi Antics

This morning, Zelo Street has put up a very interesting article about Neil Hamilton and his sordid history of extreme right-wing acts. The Street reports that Labour’s Ruth Jones has retained her seat at the Newport West by-election yesterday. This was despite the fact that she’s a Remainer, and it’s a constituency where a sizable part are ‘Leave’ supporters. The Labour majority was reduced, but that’s partly to be expected as the turn-out was much lower.

Unfortunately, the UKIP candidate, one Mostyn Neil Hamilton, also retained his deposit, even though he didn’t get in. Hamilton used to be a Tory politico until he ended up before the beak for taking bribes from one Mohammed al-Fayed, a grocer of Knightsbridge, in the ‘cash for questions’ scandal under John Major. Fayed, who was the-then owner of Harrod’s, had given money to Hamilton to ask questions in parliament, which is very much against the laws. Hamilton had taken the money and run, whereupon the man Private Eye dubbed ‘the Phoney Pharoah’ sued him for breach of contract. The result was a court case and mass hilarity. As someone said, it was the kind of case you wished both sides would lose.

The Street goes on to discuss the Kippers’ lurch to the far right, and its involvement with street protests. Why has Hamilton remained in the party when it has become notorious for intimidation and thuggery? The answer is that Hamilton himself has a history of intimidation and Fascist thuggery. He was one of those discussed in the Beeb Panorama documentary, ‘Maggie’s Militant Tendency’, which alleged that the Tories had been infiltrated by the Far Right. Hamilton was in it because he had made the Nazi salute in Germany, contrary to the country’s anti-Nazi legislation; worn blackface makeup to impersonate Idi Amin; gave a speech to a group of Italian neo-Fascists; was a member of the far-right Eldon group and an associate of the notorious George Kennedy Young, who had issued anti-Semitic slurs against Leon Brittan and Nigel Lawson. The documentary was never shown, because, despite all the evidence that the Tories were infested with Fascists, the Beeb surrendered when it could and should have humiliated Hamilton over Fascist links and behaviour. He also tried it with the Guardian, but the Groan stood up to him.

Zelo Street says that it was clear that several of the witnesses had suffered intimidation to change their stories, whether this was just a private word or a phone call. And it wasn’t personal intimidation, but legal threats from his wealthy supporters, like James Goldsmith and the Spectator columnist Taki Theodoracopulos,  who’s notorious for his anti-Semitism. This makes Hamilton perfectly at home in UKIP, which now boasts Tommy Robinson and associated thugs. Robinson was the former founder of the EDL, and has also been in Pegida UK and the BNP. His tactic of dealing with critics is to turn up mob-handed on their door step to intimidate them, as he has done with Mike Stuchbery. He also did this a few weeks ago to the parents of an unnamed young man, who had committed the heinous crime of posting footage showing Robinson contradicting himself or otherwise looking stupid or obnoxious on the web. The Street says

Plenty of intimidation, a little thuggery here and there, plenty of far-right links to keep him happy – Hamilton will be like the proverbial pig in shit.

And concludes

That’s why someone who served as a Conservative MP for 14 years fits right in with today’s UKIP. It’s also an indictment on that broad Tory church letting in the boot boys for so many years with no questions asked. 

See: https://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2019/04/still-liar-and-cheat.html

 

Hugh Thomas on Jewish Involvement in the Atlantic Slave Trade

In my last post I put up the descriptions on Amazon of a couple of books of orthodox, respected historical scholarship on Jewish participation in the slave trade to America and the Caribbean. These, by Saul Friedman and Eli Faber, were written to refute the anti-Semitic claims of the Nation of Islam and its leader, Louis Farrakhan, that Jews were chiefly responsible for the infamous trade. These books show that Jews formed a vanishingly small percentage of those involved in the slave trade.

Jewish involvement in the slave trade became part of the anti-Semitism smears against Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters in the Labour party when it was used to smear Jackie Walker, Momentum’s vice-chair. Walker herself is Jewish and a woman of colour, whose parents met on a Civil Rights demonstration in America. She is far from being an anti-Semite or, indeed, any kind of racist. But she was smeared as such after someone from the badly misnamed Campaign Against Anti-Semitism hacked into a Facebook conversation she had with two others about Jewish involvement in the slave trade. What she said was based very firmly on entirely orthodox, respectable historical research. But because she left out a single word, which she expected the other two in the conversation to understand, her comments were left open to deliberate misrepresentation. They were then leaked to the Jewish Chronicle, which then smeared her. Walker herself has made it clear that while there were some Jews active in the trade, as brokers, financiers and sugar merchants, they did so as junior partners. The real responsibility for the trade lay with the monarchs of Christian Europe. As for Walker herself, her father was a Russian Jew, her partner is Jewish and her daughter attends a Jewish school. There should be no question of her commitment to her faith, her community and to combating racism and prejudice, including anti-Semitism.

Hugh Thomas also discusses the Jewish involvement in the slave trade in his massive, and exhaustively researched The Slave Trade: The History of the Atlantic Slave Trade 1440-1870 (London: Picador 1997). He writes

For a time, in both Spain and Portugal, the slave trade was dominated by Jewish conversos: for example, Diego Caballero, of Sanlucar de Barrameda, benefactor of the Cathedral of Seville; the Jorge family, also in Seville, Fernao Noronha, a Lisbon monopolist in the early days in the delta of the Niger, and his descendants; and the numerous merchants of Lisbon, who held the asiento for sending slaves to the Spanish empire between 1580 and 1640. The most remarkable of these men was Antonio Fernandes Elvas, asentista from 1614 to 1622, connected by blood with nearly all the major slave dealers of the Spanish-Portuguese empire during the heady days when it was one polity.

Yet these men had formally become Christians. The Inquisition may have argued, and even believed, that many of them secretly practiced Judaism, tried some of them in consequence, and left a few of them to be punished by ‘the secular arm’. Some no doubt were indeed secret Jews, but it would be imprudent to accept the evidence of the Holy Office as to their ‘guilt’. That body, after all, was said to have ‘fabricated Jews as the Mint coined money’, as one inquisitor himself remarked.

Later, Jews of Portuguese origin played a minor part in the slave trade in Amsterdam (Diogo Dias Querido), in Curacao, in Newport (Lopez Rodrigues Laureno). In the late seventeenth century Jewish merchants, such as Moses Joshua Henriques, were prominent in the minor Danish slave trade of Gluckstadt. But more important there is no sign of Jewish merchants in the biggest European slave-trade capitals when the traffic was at its height, during the eighteenth century – that is, in Liverpool, Bristol, Nantes, and Middelburg – and examination of a list of 400 traders known to have sold slaves at one time or another in Charleston, South Carolina, North America’s biggest market, in the 1750s and 1760s suggests just one active Jewish merchant, the unimportant Philip Hart. In Jamaica, the latter’s equivalent ws Alexander Lindo, who later ruined himself providing for the French army in its effort to recapture Saint-Domingue. (p. 297). (My emphasis).

This seems to bear out Friedman’s and Faber’s research, that Jews played only a very small role in the slave trade, as well as Walker’s statement that the overall responsibility lay with the Christian monarchs who initiated and supported the infamous trade.

I really don’t have anywhere near the knowledge of Walker, Friedlander and Faber about this aspect of the slave trade. But I hope this helps people make sense of this issue, and refute the claims of genuine anti-Semites that the Jews were solely responsible, or the dominant force, behind the enslavement of Africans to the Caribbean and Americas. And it is utterly repugnant and disgusting that Walker herself has so vilely been libeled for her informed discussion of an entirely legitimate topic of historical research.

Miqdad Al-Nuaimi, Israel, ISIS and Anti-Semitism

In last post I discussed how Mike had put up news of the suspension of two more Labour politicians, Miqdad Al-Nuaimi, a councillor in Newport, and Terry Kelly, a councillor in Renfrewshire, following accusations of anti-Semitism. I’ve also discussed the particular allegations made against Kelly, and suggested that this may be a case of him clumsily making perfectly reasonable points, that, depending on context, may otherwise be completely unremarkable.

The same may well be true of Miqdad Al-Nuaimi. Al-Nuaimi is accused of making tweets comparing Israel to Nazi Germany, and making connections between Israel and ISIS. Now, it should be reasonable to compare Israel to Nazi Germany, no matter how offensive this comparison may seem, because there are similar attitudes to race in both countries. Israel was founded as ethno-religious state specifically for the Jewish people. There is therefore a certain similarity to Nazi Germany, which similarly granted ethnic Germans only full civil and political rights. There are a series of racist laws, which deliberately discriminate against the Palestinians. Furthermore, Netanyahu has stated that he will not allow the Arabs or their descendants, who fled Israel in 1947, to return to their ancestral homes, as this would dilute the ethnic composition of Israel as a Jewish state. And Israel is pursuing a policy designed to squeeze the few remaining Palestinians out of their homelands. So Israel is also similar to Nazi Germany and other racist regimes in seeking to purge itself of those it considers to be racially or ethnically undesirable.

Back in the 1920s, there was also an extreme nationalist group, the Maximalists, who wished to create a political-social system in Israel similar to that Fascist Italy. And a few years ago, the IDF had to do some apologising after it was caught giving its squaddies pamphlets telling them that Jews were genetically superior to everyone else. The idea of innate ethnic biological superiority is a classic racial nationalist doctrine. So it’s fair to point out that there is a Fascist element in the nation’s history, and in the ideology of parts of its armed forces.

Israel is also a democracy, whereas Nazi Germany most certainly was not. But that still doesn’t mean that it’s entirely illegitimate to compare the country to the Nazis. The systematic discrimination of the Palestinians has been compared to apartheid in South Africa. And the Broederbond, the Afrikaaner nationalist organisation that formed the core of the National Party, was influenced by the Nazis. So again, it should be possible to talk about a similarity to Nazi Germany, or at least to Nazi-influenced apartheid South Africa, in this respect as well. Just as it should also be possible to discuss the Fascist shadow in Hindu nationalism through the influence of Mussolini’s Fascists on the RSSS, the paramilitary arm of Modi’s BJP, the Hindu Nationalist Party in India, without being necessarily anti-Hindu or anti-Indian.

As for Israel and ISIS, this is the subject of a lot of conspiracy theorising on the Net. If you want to see this stuff, you can always Google it or find it on Youtube. I haven’t looked at it, because it seems completely bonkers. But that doesn’t mean that it may not be true. States do covertly fund seemingly opposing terrorist or militant organisation, in order to destroy a common enemy. For example, General Petraeus a few years ago recommended that America fund al-Qaeda in Syria to overthrow Assad. This is the same al-Qaeda that committed 9/11. The Americans also gave the nod to Saddam Hussein just before Gulf War I that he could invade Kuwait unopposed. And when he did, they counterattacked. Just because it’s unlikely, doesn’t mean that it didn’t happen, or make anyone prejudiced for suggesting that it has.

So here again, in the case of Miqdad Al-Nuaimi, I would suggest that his tweets and views are not necessarily anti-Semitic, and may even be quite reasonable, depending on what was said.

Alexander Cockburn and the Row Over the Israel Lobby

As I said in a previous piece I put up this evening, Mike has reported the suspension of two more Labour MPs for supposed anti-Semitism. They’re the Newport Councillor Miqdad Al-Nuaimi, and Terry Kelly, a councillor for Renfrewshire. Mr Kelly is supposed to have discussed the ‘Jewish lobby’ in the US, claiming that it influenced foreign policy and rigged the Oscars. See the article: http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2016/05/04/anti-semitism-row-labour-suspends-two-more/

In fact, as I’ve posted several pieces about the subject, it’s perfectly reasonable to talk about the Israel lobby and its very strong influence on American foreign policy without necessarily being either an anti-Semite or even anti-Israel. One of those, who does so is the veteran radical academic and scholar of linguistics, Noam Chomsky. Chomsky has said in an interview that one of the right-wing organisations in the America tried to uncover something with which they could smear him a decade or so ago. They were disappointed. After digging around, they found that personally, Chomsky was actually very boring, living in bourgeois American domesticity with his family, and mowing his lawn on Sundays. They therefore had to content themselves with making a sneering remark about his linguistic theories, like he hadn’t properly understood the role of such and such in his transformational grammar. Or some such asinine remark.

Ten years ago there was massive controversy over in the US when Mearsheimer and Walt published their study, The Israel Lobby, in 2006. Alan Dershowitz, a Harvard professor whom the radical journo Alexander Cockburn described as America’s most manic Zionist, went off on a rant and compared it to the anti-Semitic conspiracy text, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. He was joined by Eliot Cohen in the Washington Post. Cockburn discusses the furore in the chapter ‘The Row Over the Israel Lobby’, in his and Jeffrey St Clair’s End Times: The Death of the Fourth Estate. He points out that the book and its conclusions are entirely unremarkable and not remotely anti-Semitic. He begins the chapter thus:

This spring of 2006 a sometimes-comic debate has simmering [sic] in the American press, focused on the question of whether there is an Israeli Lobby, and if so, just how powerful is it?

I would have thought that to ask whether there’s an Israeli Lobby here is a bit like asking whether there’s a Statue of Liberty in New York Harbour and a White House located at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington D.C. For the past sixty years, the Lobby has been as fixed a part of the American scene as either of the other two monuments, and not infrequently exercising as much if not more influence on the onward march of history.

The late Steve Smith, brother-in-law of Teddy Kennedy and a powerful figure in the Democratic Party for several decades, liked to tell the story of how a group of four Jewish businessmen got together two million dollars in cash and gave it to Harry Truman when he was in desperate need of money amidst his presidential campaign in 1948. Truman went on to become president and to express his gratitude to his Zionist backers.

Since those days the Democratic Party has long been hospitable to and supported by rich Zionists. In 2002, for example, Haim Saban, the Israel-American who funds the Saban Center at the Brooking Institute and is a big contributor to AIPAC, gave $12.3 million to the Democratic Party. In 2001, the magazine Mother Jones listed on its website the 400 leading contributors to the 2000 national elections. Seven of the first 10 were Jewish, as were 12 of the top 20 and 125 of the top 250. Given this, all prudent candidates have gone to amazing lengths to satisfy their demands. There have been famous disputes, as between President Jimmy Carter and Menachem Begin, and famous vendettas, as when the Lobby destroyed the political careers of Representative Paul Findley and of Senator Charles Percy because they were deemed to be anti-Israel.

None of this history is particularly controversial, and there have been plenty of well-documented accounts of the activities of the Israel Lobby down the years, from Alfred Lilienthal’s 1978 study, The Zionist Connection, to former U.S. Rep. Paul Findley’s 1985 book They Dare To Speak Out to Dangerous Liaison: The Inside Story of the U.S. Israeli Covert relationship, written by my brother and sister-in-law, Andrew and Leslie Cockburn, and published in 1991. (pp.319-20)

Looking at Mearsheimer’s and Walt’s book, Cockburn stated that it’s actually unremarkable and really rather boring.

In fact, the paper by Mearsheimer and Walt is extremely dull. The long version runs to 81 pages, no less than 40 pages of which are footnotes. I settled down to read it with eager anticipation but soon found myself looking hopefully for the end. There’s nothing in the paper that any moderately well-read student of the topic wouldn’t have known long ago, but the paper has the merit of stating rather blandly some home truths which are somehow still regarded as too dangerous to state publicly in respectable circles in the United States. (P. 322.)

Of the denunciations of the book as anti-Semitic, Cockburn states that they’re actually funny, as the Lobby does exist, the authors weren’t ant-Semites, and even the Washington Post and New York Times have pointed out that the book had a point.

This method of assault at least has the advantage of being funny, because there obviously is a Lobby – as noted above and because Mearsheimer and Walt aren’t anti-Semites any more than 99.9 per cent of others identifying the Lobby and criticizing its role. Partly as a reaction to Dershowitz and Cohen, the Washington Post and New York Times have now run a few pieces politely pointing out that the Israel Lobby has indeed exercised a chilling effect on the rational discussion of U.S. foreign policy. The tide it turning slightly. (P. 323).

Except in 21st century Britain, apparently. It looks very much like another case where someone has confused the Israel Lobby with ‘Jews’. In the case of the accusations against the Oscars, unfortunately there have always been stupid conspiracies about the Jewish influence in show business. Jews have been very prominent in American cinema, as has been pointed out by historians of the American film industry. They’ve stated, however, that this isn’t due to some dodgy conspiracy, but the simple fact that there much less prejudice against them in the entertainment and film industries than there were elsewhere. At times, there have been anti-Semitic accusations levelled because of this, as during the 1930s when Father Coughlin accused the Jewish film moguls of trying to destroy American culture. At other times, the situation has been much more complicated. Private Eye a few years ago ran a story about how the career of US entertainment journalist had been torpedoed after they ran an article, which described the large number of Jews in the film industry as a ‘Jewish mafia’. However, a Jewish author in a later article also used the same words to describe the strong Jewish presence in American cinema, with no complaints.

I very much doubt that there is any kind of Jewish conspiracy to rig the Oscars. But that shouldn’t stop any reasonable discussion of the possible influence of Jewish organisations, or organisations claiming to represent Jews, in such areas. This should be for the same reason that talking about the role of Evangelical Christians in promoting the Satanism scare a few years ago, or describing how, horrifically, many Christians in the Fascist countries during the War were all too willing to collaborate with the Nazis should necessarily make you anti-Christian.

These are very emotive, very controversial topics. Let’s show a bit of common sense and calm rationality before throwing accusations like anti-Semitism around, shall we?

Winston Churchill in 1908 and 1909

Churchill is rightly regarded by Conservatives as one of their greatest political heroes. I’ve written several pieces about how Churchill’s own record as a statesman is extremely murky. He ordered the shooting of striking miners in Newport, and Stanley Baldwin was very careful to get him out of the way during the General Strike, as he wanted to call in the army to put it down by force. And his backing for the Beveridge Report, which set out the foundations for the modern welfare state, was at times very ambivalent.

So also was Winnie’s support for the Tories. I found this fine quotation from the Great Warleader in Gracchus’ Your MP, attacking the Tory party.

A party of great vested interests, banded together in a formidable confederation; corruption at home, aggression to cover it abroad; the trickery of tariff juggles; the tyranny of a well-fed party machine; sentiment by the bucketful; patriotism and imperialism by the imperial pint.

That was after he left the Tories for the first time on 8th May 1908.

And on the 30th January 1909, he described the Tories as

‘The party of the rich against the poor’.

Somehow, I don’t think that’s going to be mentioned very much the next time they get him out of the closet to whip up votes in an election. And it definitely puts the boot in the current Tory propaganda that they are the true party of the poor. After all, who is more trusted – Winston Churchill, or Ian Duncan Smith. Answers on a postcard, please.

Vox Political: Newport UKIP in Turmoil due to EDL and BNP Sympathisers

Mike Chaffin (left), Donald Grewar, (Right)

Mike over at Vox Political has posted another story about UKIP. This time it’s their Newport branch. According to the South Wales Argus, the party is in turmoil as the local chairman, Mike Chaffin, appealed for help to turf EDL sympathisers out of the party. He was particularly concerned about posts made to the EDL and BNP facebook pages by Donald Grewar, the party’s parliamentary candidate for Newport East.

Mike writes: Mr Grewar responded to an EDL post warning of ‘no surrender to militant Islam or political correctness’ with the comment: “Thus sais it all… the mood of the nation… well done EDL” [sic].

And he said in response to an article on the BNP website about gay marriage: “Well said Richtofen…. sadly this will all come to fruition in the very near future. We need to resist and stand our ground.”

The article’s Newport UKIP in turmoil as chairman tries to rid party of ‘EDL sympathisers’ – South Wales Argus
, and it’s at http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2015/01/27/newport-ukip-in-turmoil-as-chairman-tries-to-rid-party-of-edl-sympathisers-south-wales-argus/

UKIP and ‘Nationalist Entryism’

Now Mike is right in that Mr Chaffin should be applauded for taking seriously Farage’s words about theirs being a ‘non-sectarian and non-racist party’. Recent history has shown, however, that there are many far right sympathisers in UKIP’s ranks. The party also appears to be the target for the Nazis’ version of ‘revolutionary entryism’ so beloved of various Marxist factions like the Socialist Workers’ Party. This was the policy in which dedicated Communist or Trotksyite activists would infiltrate moderate, Social Democrat parties, like the Labour Party, or pressure groups campaigning for progressive issues, like anti-racism, and then try to take them over and radicalise them. In the 1980s it resulted in the campaign against the Militant Tendency in the Labour Party, while the Anti-Nazi League collapsed after it was infiltrated by the SWP. The Socialist Workers attempted to turn it into a satellite organisation, causing most of the membership to leave.

The parties of the Right have had similar problems with ‘nationalist entryism’. Here, the stormtroopers of the extreme Right infiltrate centre right, and even centre parties, in order to take them over. The BBC got into trouble with Thatcher’s government in the 1980s over the documentary ‘Maggie’s Militant Tendency’, which argued that this was happening to the Tories. There was a scandal at the same time in West Germany, when it was found that Neo-Nazis had infiltrated the Freie Demokraten, the German equivalent of the Liberals/ Lib Dems. A similar process seems to be occurring with UKIP.

The BNP, Grewar and Gay Rights

Grewar’s attack on gay marriage is somewhat peculiar. The Nazis carried out a vicious campaign against male homosexuals, as depicted in the stage play, Bent. Nevertheless, Fascist parties have also managed to attract gay members. Ernst Rohm, the leader of the SA, the ‘left-wing’ branch of the Nazi party, was gay, as were an estimated 3/4 of its membership. One of the leaders of the BNP was also gay, and had it written into the party’s constitution that the party respected the right for people to socialise with whomever they pleased. In short, the BNP, or factions within it, were more tolerant of homosexuality than sections of the Tories or mainstream British society at the time. Now that the BNP has more or less imploded, it seems that the old, bitter hatred of gays is being reasserted.