Mike put up a piece on Saturday reporting that Labour leader Keir Starmer had caved in to the Board of Deputies of British Jews, and reprimanded two leading and highly respected Black women MPs, Diane Abbott and Bell Ribeiro-Addy.
These two ladies offended the Board because they appeared in a conference on Zoom, whose audience included Jackie Walker and Tony Greenstein, who asked questions. The Board objected, as Jackie and Tony were two of the many people smeared as anti-Semites and expelled from the party. One of the noxious Ten Pledges that the Board persuaded Starmer and the other leadership contenders to sign was that no Labour member would share a platform with someone expelled for anti-Semitism. Hence Marie van der Zyl, the Board’s current president, sent in a complaint about the incident to Starmer calling for him to deal with them.
However, the Board’s complaint is wrong for a series of reasons. Firstly, Jackie and Tony weren’t actually expelled from the party for anti-Semitism. And as Mike says, saying that they’re anti-Semites simply because the Labour party said so has less weight than gossip.
Secondly, the two women weren’t sharing a platform with the two accused. They were merely in the audience. The fact that the van der Zyl and the Board chose to attack the two women anyway not only shows their determination to attack them, but also their failure to understand how Zoom works. Perhaps they’re like the American congressman, who was so ignorant about the internet when it first emerged in the ’90s that he asked if you needed a driver’s licence to go on the information superhighway as it then was.
Thirdly, while Starmer and the others are free to sign anything they wish, decisions affecting the party as a whole have to be ratified by conference. And the Ten Pledges weren’t. Starmer’s disciplining of the two women is therefore constitutional.
The Board’s complaint also looks more than a little racist itself. Zionism has a long history of collaborating with real anti-Semites and Fascists so long as its purposes are served. And these are frequently against the safety and wellbeing of the Jewish people as a whole. The Zionists in Nazi Germany supported the Nuremberg Laws, which defined Jews as racially distinct and incompatible with gentile Germans and signed the infamous Ha’avara Agreement in which the Nazis sent Jewish emigrants to Israel. During the War, the head of the Zionists in Hungary, Rudolf Kasztner, also made a pact with the Nazis to send tens of thousands of Jews to Auschwitz just so that a few could be sent to Israel. Israel has also supplied weapons and expertise to a string of Latin American dictatorships, including Guatemala when that nation’s government was exterminating the Mayans. When a neo-Nazi government took power in Argentina in the mid-70s and began persecuting Jews there, the Israeli government did not scruple to supply them with arms. Arms that were used against us during the Falklands War.
The Board defines itself as a Zionist organisation. It’s also politically right-wing, although perhaps not all its members are members and supporters of the Tories. And the Tories have hated Diane Abbott ever since she entered parliament in the 1980s. She was a left-wing firebrand, one of the first Black women MPs, who was determined to attack anti-Black racism. Over half of all the abusive messages sent to MPs go to her. She was one of those racially bullied by the Blairite plotters, according to the leaked anti-Semitism report. Not only did the scumbags reduce her to tears, but they told journalists where she was crying. This is in stark contrast to the treatment of Black anti-racist activist Marc Wadsworth, who was accused of anti-Semitism and reducing a Jewish woman to tears after he caught her passing information on to a Telegraph journo at a meeting at which he was speaking. Yet instead of suspending the plotters, Starmer instead has disciplined Abbott and Ribeiro-Addy.
The Board’s record when it comes to defending Britain’s Jews against Fascism is blotchy. In the 1930s when Mosley’s British Union of Fascists was marching through the East End of London in order to intimidate the Jewish inhabitants, instead of standing up to them the Board advised Jews to stay indoors out of the way. Fortunately many courageous people ignored it, and joined Irish people, trade unionists and Communists in blocking Mosley’s march and giving his storm troops a well-deserved hiding.
The Board also showed the same twisted mentality forty years later in the 1970s when the National Front was on the rise and trying the same tactics. Instead of attacking them, the Board turned its fire on their opponents, the Anti-Nazi League. Jews were forbidden to join the organisation or allow it to hold meetings in synagogues. This was ostensibly because its founder was an anti-Zionist, and they were afraid of Jews hearing anti-Zionist propaganda. But others suspect that it was because the Board itself had White supremacist views.
Tony Greenstein has written a piece on his blog taking the Board and Starmer to task for their treatment of Abbott and Ribeiro-Addy. He discusses the shameful behaviour of the Board towards British Fascism, and quotes Maurice Ludmer, the Jewish founder of the anti-Nazi magazine, Searchlight. Ludmer wrote in issue 41 of the magazine
“In the face of mounting attacks against the Jewish community both ideologically and physically, we have the amazing sight of the Jewish Board of Deputies launching an attack on the Anti Nazi League with all the fervour of Kamikaze pilots… It was as though they were watching a time capsule rerun of the 1930’s, in the form of a flickering old movie, with a grim determination to repeat every mistake of that era. “
The-then secretary of the Anti-Nazi League, Paul Holborrow, also wrote that they were under attack from the Board. Tony is annoyed that genuine anti-racists like himself are smeared as anti-Semites for opposing and criticising Israel, while genuine racists, like Katie Hopkins, were given an invitation by the Zionist Federation to attend their gala dinner and meet the Israeli ambassador, Mark Regev. As for the Board, its previous head, Jonathan Arkush, welcomed the election of Donald Trump. Trump’s a racist, and his cabinet included real anti-Semites. However, he got a pass because he supports Israel.
Abbott and Ribeiro-Addy issued an apology for their actions. They had no call to do so, being blameless and actually the real injured parties in this sordid case. Greenstein in his piece advises them to stand firm and act like two of the heroes of the civil rights struggle in America, Paul Robeson and Angela Davies.
Robeson was a member of the Communist Party, and was thus hauled before the House Inquiry on Un-American Activities. When McCarthy asked him if he was a Communist, Robeson refused to answer, challenging the senator instead to stand behind him the next time he voted and fish his voting paper out of the ballot box to see. Greenstein also doesn’t mention it, but it is a significant fact here that Robeson was also an opponent of anti-Semitism. He gave a concert in Moscow after the War at the end of which he sang a Yiddish song by the Jewish resistance fighters against Nazism. This was not just to celebrate the millions of Jews killed by the Nazis, but also the millions of Soviet citizens murdered by Stalin.
Angela Davies is a Black American civil rights activist, who last year, 2019, was given the Shuttlesworth Human Rights Award by the Civil Rights Institute of Birmingham, Alabama. However, the Alabama equivalent of the Board got mightily offended and complained, because Davies is a critic of Israel and its persecution of the Palestinians, which she compares to the police’s maltreatment of Black Americans. The Alabama Board complained, and then issued an embarrassed retraction and apology for their own racism when Davies stood her ground and called them out instead.
And the British Board deserves to be called out on its racism. It includes as deputies individuals like Robert Festenstein, an islamophobe who appeared in a Rebel Media video with Tommy Robinson, the founder of the English Defence League and Pegida UK. Arkush and van der Zyl have also appeared at meetings in which members of the audience sported Jewish Defence League T-shirts. The JDL is a Judaeo-Nazi organisation, whose predecessor, Kach, is banned as a terrorist group in Israel. Unlike the majority of modern Jews, who strongly reject any idea that their religion makes them superior to anyone else, Kach was founded by Meir Kahane, an extreme right-wing rabbi. He really did believe that Jews are superior to gentiles, and urged Jews to arm themselves. He also absolutely believed that the Holy Land belonged solely to the Jews, and demanded the ethnic cleansing of the indigenous people.
There’s a connection here to the militia movement that emerged in America during the ’90s. These were the successors to the Survivalists of the 1980s. They were arming themselves against the American government, which they believed had been corrupted by liberalism and was about to establish a murderous totalitarian dictatorship. According to their critics, such as the Southern Poverty Law Centre, the militias were White Supremacists with close connections to American Nazism and the Klan. However, according to Adam Palfrey’s Cult Rapture, an examination of American fringe culture in the aftermath of the Oklahoma bombing, there was also Jewish militia. This group also based their ideology on that of Kahane’s. Palfrey sees them, as well as the fact that the leader of one of the other militias was Black, that the movement as a whole wasn’t White Supremacist. I think he’s wrong, and it’s just that some parts of the movement were less strict in their racism than others, and were prepared to include Jews as fellow White Supremacists.
Now Arkush and Zyl did not meet the American Kahanists. But by speaking at meetings attended by their British cousins they have shown a culpable willingness to tolerate real Islamophobes with paramilitary sympathies. They deserve to be called out on this, as should the Zionist Federation for its endorsement of Hatey Katie.
Starmer should not be kowtowing to the Board and punishing real anti-racists like Abbott and Ribeiro-Addy. He should be backing them instead and holding the Board to account for their racism. As Angela Davies’ case shows, it can be done.
Radio 3’s The Essay next week is doing a series of programmes on Paul Robeson. The show’s called ‘The Essay: Paul Robeson in Five Songs’, and is on from Monday to Friday at 10.45 pm. The short description of the series by David McGillivray on page 122 of the Radio Times runs
The turbulent life of Paul Robeson, the American performer whose career was shamefully curtailed by racism and anti-Communist hysteria, is reflected in five of his songs in a series of essays through the week. His was one of the most magnificent bass baritone voices of the 20th century, and the story behind his biggest hit, Ol’ Man River, is told by his granddaughter tomorrow [Tuesday]. Robeson’s most sustained success in films was in the UK but mostly the roles offered him were demeaning and he turned to political activism. The trade union ballad, Joe Hill (Friday) provides a melancholic epitaph.
Here are the blurbs for the individual episodes by day.
Monday.
No More Auction Block
The life and struggles of New Jersey-born bass-baritone singer, actor and civil rights activist Paul Robeson (1898-1976) are explored through five of his songs. Robeson’s signature performances include Show Boat and Othello, but spirituals defined his early career, and in 1925, Robeson and his accompanist Lawrence Brown turned them into “art music”. In this first installment, scholar and professor of black music Shana Redmond explores the ways in which Robeson’s performances of No More Auction Block map his own struggles.
Tuesday
Ol’ Man River
Susan Robeson explores the personal and political aspects of the song that is forever identified with her grandfather – Ol’ Man River, written by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein expressly for Robeson for their groundbreaking 1927 musical Show Boat. But the singer would not wrap his unique voice around it until the following year in the London production. He would have a lasting and complex relationship with the song, especially as a black superstar performing for white audiences. “My grandfather transformed Ol’ Man River from a song of submission and despair into a song of resistance.”
Wednesday
The Canoe Song
Paul Robeson and film should have been a perfect fit. The 20th Century’s first black superstar had presence, voice and fierce intelligence that projected from the screen. British audiences adored him, but for Robeson cinema was a constant betrayal of his political idealism. Matthew Sweet considers the confusing threads that make up Zoltan Korda’s 1935 Empire flag-waver Sanders of the River, which still hummed to the astonishing power of Robeson’s voice in the Canoe Song, prompting British audiences to declare him as “our Paul”.
Thursday
Zog Nit Keynmol
When Paul Robeson stood before a Moscow audience on the evening of 14th June 1949 in the Tchaikowski Hall, few expected to hear him perform the Yiddish Partisan song Zog Nit Keynmol (Never Say). His rendition of this fierce anthem of defiance, composed in the middle of Nazi slaughter, was thick with emotion, and at the end the crowd either fiercely applauded or booed. Robeson had sung for those he knew were already murdered, imprisoned or facing death as a new wave of Stalinist repression against Soviet Jews was underway. Nigerian-born actor and singer Tayo Aluko explores Robeson’s torment and contradictory emotions that make this performance so dramatic.
Friday
Joe Hill
London-based cultural historian Marybeth Hamilton summons up the ghosts of both Earl Robinson’s 1936 song Joe Hill – about the Swedish-American labour activist – and Paul Robeson as she explores the ways Robeson was so completely erased from culture and memory for many Americans. “If any one song in Robeson’s repertoire sums up those histories of denial silencing it is Joe Hill.“
Paul Robeson – one of the left-wing giants of the 20th century. I had a very left-wing aunt, who was a massive fan of Robeson. She would have loved this. I also wondered if all the Israel-critical Jews smeared and vilified by the Israel lobby shouldn’t sing Zog Nit Keynmol. From what I gather from reading David Rosenberg’s and Tony Greenbstein’s blog’s, the greatest resistance against the Nazis, including the Warsaw ghetto, came from the anti-Zionist Bund. The Zionists all too often made deals with the Nazis, as when the Zionist newspaper, the Judischer Rundschau, praised the Nazi Nuremberg Laws and urged its readers to ‘wear your yellow stars with pride.” Or when Rudolf Kasztner, the head of the Zionists in occupied Hungary, cut a deal with the Nazis whereby tens of thousands were deported to Auschwitz in return for a few being allowed to emigrate to Israel.
Tony Greenstein has frequently stated that Zionism is the Jewish form of anti-Semitism. This is so, because Zionism accepts and adopts the anti-Semitic assumption that Jews and gentiles are fundamentally, irreconcilably different and incompatible. Jews will never be accepted in non-Jewish society, and so must have their own country. He has also pointed out, over and over again, that in order to achieve this aim, Zionists have allied themselves with real anti-Semites, people and regimes who support Zionism purely for the racist goal of cleansing their countries of Jews. This is how it is that the Nazis made a pact, the Ha’avara Agreement, with the Zionist settlers in Palestine, to smuggle German Jews there during the British Mandate. It is why the Zionist Jewish newspaper in Germany, the Judischer Rundschau, enthusiastically welcomed Hitler’s vile Nuremberg laws, telling their readers that the Nazis shared their views that Jews and (gentile) Germans were racially different, and that they should wear their yellow stars with pride. It is why the Zionist leader in Hungary during the War, Rudolf Kasztner, made a deal with the Nazis that allowed hundreds of thousands of Jews to be deported to the death camps so that some might be sent to Israel. And after the War, Israel employed former Nazis, such as the SS officer Otto Skorzeny, who had committed horrific atrocities and massacres of Jews, as spies.
But Israel has very carefully manipulated history to present the opposite idea. Instead, Zionism poses as the protector and saviour of the world’s Jews. In the 1970s it rescued Jewish communities from persecution in Africa, particularly Ethiopia. Any mention of Zionism’s alliances with real, murderous anti-Semites is very carefully suppressed by the mainstream media and political establishment. Those who dare to speak out are smeared and vilified as anti-Semites themselves. This happened with Ken Livingstone, who dared to say, quite correctly, that Hitler initially supported Zionism. It happened with Mike of Vox Political, after he sent the Labour Party a text, The Livingstone Delusion, showing that the Trotskyite newt-fancier was historically correct. Both Leninspart and Mike were then publicly accused of anti-Semitism and expelled from the party.
But people are still speaking out and denouncing Israel and Zionism for their crimes against the Jewish people. Last Wednesday, 11th March 2020, the mighty Tony Greenstein reviewed a book by Stanley Heller, Zionist Betrayal of the Jews, from Herzl to Netanyahu. Tellingly, it’s self-published, but is available from the Middle East Crisis Committee of Woodbridge, Connecticut. It’s a long review, with Greenstein selecting only a few of the most notorious instances of this sordid history of collaboration and betrayal. And it begins with this meme.
The review first appeared in the Weekly Worker. It includes Ben Gurion’s indifference to the plight of Jews fleeing Nazi Germany for safety in Britain and America. He made it clear that he’d rather half of the Jewish emigrants were murdered, if a proportion would go to Palestine. Then there’s Zionism’s founder, Theodor Herzl, and his own acceptance of anti-Semitism. He notes that the smear campaign against those within the Labour Party, who are critics of Israel, like Ken Livingstone, has zero evidence supporting them. Which is the majority of victims are anti-Zionist Jews, like Greenstein himself. The papers that loudly supported Charlie Hebdo when it was the victim of a vicious islamist attack, loudly proclaiming freedom of speech and the right to offend, kept very quiet when it came to Leninspart and the other victims of the witch hunt. Leninspart lost his job with LBC, who had no qualms about employing Katie Hopkins, who mixes with and loudly supports real Fascists. Greenstein also states that it builds on Lenni Brenner’s 51 Documents – Zionism Collaboration with the Nazis and the same author’s Zionism in the Age of the Dictators, although it doesn’t share that author’s own views of the relationship between the two.
The book explodes the myth that Herzl was converted to Zionism by the Dreyfus affair. In fact, he secretly believed Captain Dreyfus was guilty, and was instead influenced by Karl Luegerer, the anti-Semitic mayor of Vienna, who also influenced Hitler. Greenstein’s review also covers Herzl’s meeting with the Tsarist minister, von Plehve, responsible for a pogrom in Kishinev. Jabotinsky met Petlyura, the White Russian leader, responsible for the murder of 50,000 Jews. Jabotinsky’s supporters later collaborated with the anti-Semitic regime in Poland which followed the death of Joszef Pilsudski, and the Italian Fascists. Instead of the Zionists, the only Jewish organisation that fought anti-Semitism in Poland was the Bund. The Stern Gang, the notorious Jewish terrorist group in Israel’s war of independence against Britain, was also quite content to see the Nazis imprison Jews in ghettos across Poland. He also discusses the indifference of American Jewry to what was being done against their coreligionists in Europe under the Nazis. The Zionist leaders of American Jewry did not want Jews to find safety anywhere except Palestine, and actively campaigned against those Jewish organisations that did. They even wrote to Roosevelt demanding the deportation of two Jewish leaders as ‘worse than Hitler’ for this reason.
The book also describes how Israel supported Latin American Fascist regimes. They recognised the Bolivian Fascist regime and the military junta that preceded it, supplying civilian and military aid, even though it was not recognised by American president Jimmy Carter and was sheltering the Nazi war criminal, Klaus Barbie – the infamous ‘Butcher of Lyons’. Israel also had good relations with Paraguay, whose dictator, Alfredo Stroessner, admired the Nazis and welcomed Mengele as a guest. The response of the Israeli ambassador to Paraguay, when asked about this, was that Israel wasn’t looking for the notorious Auschwitz human vivisectionist, even though the West German government was.
The book also a chapter on Israel’s current collaboration with contemporary anti-Semitic regimes, like that of Viktor Orban in Hungary, who looks back to Admiral Horthy’s dictatorship from the 1920s till late in World War II. It has also praised the Lithuanian leader Saulis Skvernelis, despite the fact that Lithuanian schools celebrate as heroes the Nazi-allied nationalists, who collaborated in the murder of 95% of the country’s Jewish population. Israel also had warm relations with Austria’s neo-Nazi Hans Christian Strache, Modi and his wretched Hindu nationalists and their supply of arms to the Ukrainian neo-Nazi Azov Battalion.
And not surprisingly, Israel also enjoys a very close relationship with Donald Trump, who said that the Nazis are Charlottesville had ‘good people’ on their side, and selected Pastor Ted Hagee of Christians United for Israel, to preside over the opening of the first American embassy to Israel in Jerusalem. This is despite Hagee believing that Hitler himself was a ‘half-breed Jew’. To be fair, I’ve known people, who also believe Hitler was half-Jewish, who definitely weren’t anti-Semites. There is evidence that Hitler may have been partly of Jewish descent through his grandmother, who had been a domestic servant in a Jewish home and who may have borne the son of her employers’ illegitimate child.
Greenstein concludes
In short, when Zionists talk about ‘anti-Semitism’, it is a camouflage to hide their own collaboration with genuine anti-Semites.
Heller has done us a great service in writing this all too short book. I can heartily recommend it as an hors d’oeuvres. However it is only a taster. The full story of Zionist collaboration with anti-Semites, the Nazis included, will take up a much larger volume.
This adds more evidence showing that it is the critics of Israel, who had history on their side during the Labour anti-Semitism witch hunt. The people like Leninspart, Mike and Greenstein himself, who dared to say that Israel collaborated with the Nazis. The real anti-Semites here are therefore Zionism and its supporters – the Board of Deputies, Chief Rabbinate and organisations like the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, which try to suppress real genuine history and smear entirely decent, non- and anti-racist people, including self-respecting Jews, as anti-Semites.
it can therefore reasonably be said that Israel and Zionism are an anti-Semitic endeavour.
That determined opponent of all forms of racism and Fascism, and their Jewish version, Zionism, Tony Greenstein, has written a passionate open letter to the mayor of the German city of Aachen, Marcel Philipp. His letter is a protest against Philipp’s decision to withdraw an artistic prize from Raad, a Lebanese-American artist, because Raad supports the Boycott, Divestment and Sanction movement against Israeli goods and businesses operating in the Occupied Territories. In his letter, Greenstein shows how the BDS campaign is actually an anti-racist movement, despite the official condemnation of it as anti-Semitic by the Bundestag, the German parliament. Boycotts are the weapon of the oppressed. He notes that it was used against slave-produced sugar from the West Indies, and takes his name from Colonel Boycott, an Irish landlord shunned by his tenants in County Mayo in 19th Ireland. He also points out that the anti-BDS legislation is supported by outright racists and genuine anti-Semites like the Alternative fur Deutschland in Germany and Trump in the US. They do so not because they are friends of Jews, but because they believe that Israel is their real home, and would like the Jewish people in their countries to move there.
Philipp is a member of the CDU, the Christian Democratic Union. This is the German equivalent of our Conservative party, and was formed after the war from the merger of the Catholic Centre Party and a few other parties. Greenstein accuses Philipp himself of racism, due to the presence of former Nazis in the party after the War. He points out that the closest adviser of Conrad Adenauer, Germany’s first post-War Chancellor, was Hans Josef Globke, the legal expert, who drew up the infamous Nuremberg Laws for the Nazis. This was the legislation that put the Nazi social policy of racism, anti-Semitism and vicious discrimination and persecution into official state action. After the War, 77 per cent of legal staff in the German department of justice were former Nazis. At the Eichmann trial, Adenauer was determined to stop any mention of Globke and his role in the Holocaust. And so he sent Israel military aid, including submarines, and assistance with David Ben Gurion’s nuclear programme.
Greenstein ends his letter
It is perfectly understandable that racists and white supremacists the world over should oppose the Boycott of Israel. Racists have always opposed the use of BDS. It is therefore no surprise that as a member of a racist German party should oppose Boycott.
My only message to you Mr Philipp is not to expiate your guilt over the Holocaust at the expense of the Palestinians. It was people like you who were responsible for Auschwitz and Treblinka, not the Arabs of Palestine.
The annihilation of the Jews in the Holocaust is no justification for the racial oppression and genocidal murder of the Palestinians today. Your party was once full of Nazis. It would seem that old habits die hard.
The letter’s interesting, not just for Tony’s protest about the withdrawal of the prize and efforts by German, American and European Fascists – he also mentions Italy’s Matteo Salvemini, amongst others – supporting and calling for a ban on the BDS movement, but also for the light it sheds on the Nazi past of many members of the CDU. The Baader-Meinhof gang in the 1970s arose because of scandals like this. They were furious that former Nazis like Globke were continuing their lives and careers, untroubled by proper punishment for their horrendous crimes. And as Ken Livingstone pointed out in his 1987 book, Livingstone’s Labour, NATO and the various western intelligence agencies actively recruited them during the Cold War as part of their campaign against Communism.
In fact, the party that consistently fought against the Nazis and their persecution was the SDP and later the KPD, the German Socialists and Communists. These formed resistance cells even after they were formerly banned. Not that German Conservatives were alone in possessing extreme right-wing sympathies. Our own Conservative party and its press, like the Daily Mail, also had Fascist sympathisers before the War, and a Fascist fringe afterwards.
Forget the lies about Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters in the British Labour Party, anti-Semitism is and has always been far more prevalent on the right. Which is why we need to have decent, left-wing parties presenting an alternative to poverty, austerity and neoliberalism in government all over Europe. And to fight all forms of Fascism, even when it tries to present itself as friendly towards Jews, like Zionist imperialism.
Just like the rest of the Conservative establishment, just when you think the Jewish Chronicle can’t go any lower, they do. This afternoon Mike put up a piece reporting and commenting on a story from the Skwawkbox about that rag’s attempts to discredit a letter published in the Sunday Times written by 12 Holocaust survivors in support of the Labour party and its leader, Jeremy Corbyn. As part of its attempt to rebut the letter, the JC has tried attack the credentials of one its signatories. This individual, it claimed, couldn’t be a proper Holocaust survivor because they left Germany in 1939 when they were two years old.
But as Steve Walker of the Skwawkbox and Mike in his article point out, this claim is nonsense as the definition of Holocaust survivor used by the Yad Vashem centre in Jerusalem is any Jew, who lived for any time under Nazi domination and survived. And that definition must therefore include those, who lived in Germany in the ’30s.
I suspect here that the Jewish Chronicle probable considers a Holocaust survivor as someone who survived the the system slaughter of the Jews carried out under the Final Solution from 1942 until the end of the War. However, the Nazis began their persecution of Jews and other ethnic, religious and political groups almost from the moment Hitler seized power in 1933. The Boxheim scandal of 1931 showed that the Nazis were intending to set up concentration camps, and the first at Esterwegen and Dachau were established in 1933. By August 1941, four months before the infamous Wannsee Conference of January 1942, there were 10 main camps with 25 satellites. In April 1933 there was a boycott of Jewish businesses and legislation was passed expelling Jews from the civil service and the universities. This was followed in October by the passage of the Reich Chamber of Culture and the Press Law, which prepared from the removal of the Jews from journalism. 1935 saw the passage of the infamous Nuremberg Laws and the Reich Citizenship Law, which restricted German citizenship only to full-blooded gentile Germans. Marriage and extra-marital sex between Jews and non-Jews were forbidden. This was followed by legislation in 1937 permitting Jewish businesses to be confiscated without any legal justification. All German anti-Semitic legislation was applied to Austria after that country was annexed in 1938. This was succeeded by further laws passed in April demanding the registration of Jewish wealth, the Munich synagogue was destroyed in June, and the Nuremberg in August. That same month Hitler issued a decree demanding that all male Jews should be called ‘Israel’ and all female ‘Sarah’. In October all Jewish passports had to be stamped with the letter ‘J’ for Jude, the German for Jew, and 17,000 Polish Jews were expelled from Germany. After the assassination of the German diplomat Ernst von Rath by Herschl Grynszpan in Paris came the horrific pogrom of Kristalnacht. 20,000 German Jews were imprisoned as businesse, homes and synagogues were attacked and looted. Further decrees expelled the Jews from the economy and demanded them to pay a collective fine of 12,500 million marks to pay for the destruction. At the same time, Jewish students were expelled from schools. In December, non-Jews were allowed to take over formerly Jewish companies. In April 1939 all Jewish valuables were confiscated and the law on tenancies passed, which supposed to force Jews to live together in ‘Jewish Houses’. In September the curfew was introduced forbidding Jews from being out after dark, and all their radios were confiscated in order to prevent ‘treachery’. The first deportations of Jews from Germany, mainly from Pomerania in what is now northern Poland, began the next year in February 1940.
See: D.G. Willliamson, The Third Reich (Harlow: Longman 1982) pp. 39-40.
James Taylor and Warren Shaw, A Dictionary of the Third Reich (London: Grafton Books 1988), ‘Anti-Semitism’, pp. 37-8; ‘Concentration Camps’, 88-91; ‘Crystal Night’, 92-3; ‘Jews in Nazi Germany’, pp. 190-2; ‘Nuremberg Laws’, 261.
It’s therefore very clear that even before the commencement of the Final Solution in 1941/2 Jews were under immense persecution in Germany and then Austria. A Times journalist reported that the situation in the latter was so desperate that some Jews were contemplating suicide. See The Faber Book of Protest. And the entry for ‘Final Solution’ in Taylor and Shaw, above, states that it is still uncertain whether the term ‘resettlement’ was also used as a euphemism for murder when it was used of the Jews in the late 1930s. (p. 126).
Mike also notes in his article the Ha’avara Agreement signed between Nazi Germany and the German Federation of Zionists to send Jews to Israel, making the point that the only reason the Federation signed the agreement was fear of Nazi persecution. It allowed the escape of 60,000 Jews to Palestine, then under the British Mandate, who are therefore also Holocaust survivors.
The short-lived collaboration between the Zionists and Nazis were what allowed the witch-hunters to smear and demand the suspension of Ken Livingstone. However, it is verifiable fact, documented by Zionist historians of the Holocaust like David Ceserani, the Yad Vashem Holocaust Centre, and mentioned in Taylor and Shaw, who write
At the outset the Nazis had tried to drive the Jews out of German living space, and were briefly in collaboration with the zionist movement. (p. 38).
Mike also believes that the Jewish Chronicle’s article may itself be anti-Semitic. He writes
In fact, the JC piece may itself be described as anti-Semitic. The IHRA working definition of anti-Semitism includes among its examples “denying the fact, scope, mechanisms… or intentionality of… the Holocaust”, and the accusation in this piece certainly does so.
He also states that the Jewish Chronicle has tried to suggest falsely that many of the signatories didn’t know what they signing. But they did, and some even suggested alterations. Mike concludes
What a weak response from people who have trumpeted their righteousness for years! And what will they try next?
I don’t know what the witch-hunters will try next, but it’s going to be foul. They’ve already shown they’re not averse to falsifying history, as John Mann did when he denied that Hitler signed any agreement with the Zionists. Just as they have shown they abuse and smear their Jewish opponents using rhetoric that would be unhesitatingly denounced as anti-Semitic if used by non-Jews. But they are given a free pass on this by a complicit British establishment and media.
One of the things that is very clear from Mike’s kangaroo court hearing is that Mike is no racist. He never was, and never will be. And growing up in the 1980s when the NF was once again seeking power, racism was attacked by a new generation of Black activists and Black politicians took their place as Labour MPs, we became very conscious of this issue and the need to combat it everywhere and every time it arose. One of the subjects Mike tackled in his attack on the false claims of anti-Semitism levelled against other Labour party members, was the racist abuse directed at Jackie Walker, the vice-chair of Momentum. Walker had attended a Holocaust Day training workshop organized by the Jewish Labour Movement, formerly Paole Zion, the British branch of the Israeli Labour party. She had then committed the unpardonable sin of objecting to the workshop’s exclusive focus on the suffering of the Jews to the exclusion of other groups, who have also suffered genocide. Her comments were secretly recorded, she was accused of anti-Semitism, and suspended from the party.
It is a farcical, shameful accusation from hypocrites and moral nullities. Walker is Jewish and a woman of colour. Her father was a Russian Jew, and her mother a Black American civil rights activist. They met during a civil rights march. Both sides of her family thus know only too well the reality of bigotry, racism and violent intolerance. After her comments were leaked, she suffered further racist abuse from those pretending to be the opponents of anti-Semitism. Mike discussed this in one of his posts, and the faceless Stalinists of the party bureaucracy accused him in turn of anti-Semitism. The NEC dismissed Mike’s concerns out of hand, and made a pompous statement that Mike’s very mention of the issue was
grossly offensive to those the Party seeks to represent particularly the Jewish community. Comments like these have had and continue to have a serious impact on the Party’s position as an inclusive organisation, which stands against antisemitism.
and ‘dismissive of anti-Semitism’.
Utter bilge!
Mike and some of the Jewish bloggers have shown the vile tweets directed at people like them on Twitter by Zionists, who very much claim that the focus should only be on the Jewish Holocaust. And the racist abuse suffered by Walker herself was appalling. Among the insults hurled at her was the charge that she couldn’t be Jewish, because she was Black. This is despite the fact that there are African Jews, of which the Falashas are probably the best known. Indeed, the Bible records that one of Moses’ wives came from Cush, which is now part of modern Ethiopia. There have been a number of documentaries and pieces by journalists exposing the violent racism in Israel against Black Africans, including Jews of Ethiopian heritage, who have come to Israel. Furthermore, the transatlantic Zionist right, or at least elements of it, also take the view that only Jewish suffering must be commemorated on Holocaust Memorial Day. Kathy Shaidle, an extreme right-wing Canadian Conservative/ Republican activist made that very clear on her blog, Five Feet of Fury. She took particular ire at Bernie Farber, the head of the main Canadian Jewish organization. Because Farber was a decent man, who felt Jews should sympathise and show solidarity with all other marginalized and persecuted groups. When Darfur in the Sudan was attacked and its people killed and rape by the Islamist Janjaweed militia, Farber organized a ‘Shabbat for Darfur’, a day of fasting and prayer in the Jewish tradition. Farber also had the temerity to take part in gay pride march to show his solidarity with Canada’s gay citizens. And Farber’s not alone in his views. As one left-wing, anti-racist Jewish activist said, to be a Jew is always to support the oppressed, never the oppressor.
There is no question that in making this accusation, the NEC were very much supporting racism. Mike makes that clear in his blog post about this issue, and condemns it as disgusting.
And when Mike argued against the accusation, posing awkward questions of his own, Cousins interrupted to prevent those presenting the accusations from answering. And when Mike succeeded in getting them to answer, it was clear why Cousins was so keen not to let the presenter answer the questions: she couldn’t. You can read Mike’s account of this over at his blog, at https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2018/11/15/labours-ruling-committee-is-racist-the-evidence-is-undeniable/
Nor is Mike alone in finding the NEC’s and Maggie Cousin’s persecution of decent members of the Labour party under the pretext of combating anti-Semitism racist.
Jackie Walker made the same accusation in an event in Islington in May this year, 2018, which was part of a tour of the country by Marc Wadsworth, supported by the comedian Alexei Sayle, and Jackie Walker and others, including a number of Black anti-racism activists. Marc Wadsworth was the Black anti-racism campaigner, who was himself smeared by Ruth Smeeth and a complicit Tory press as an anti-Semite because of a remark he made about her passing on information to a Torygraph hack at Labour party meeting. Wadsworth didn’t know she was Jewish and made no reference to Jews in his comments. But Smeeth, a Zionist and Blairite, smeared him as an anti-Semite anyway.
And as with Walker, it’s a charge that is utterly ridiculous. Wadsworth was a dedicated campaigner, one of his whose achievements was getting the parents of the murdered Black teenager, Stephen Lawrence, to meet Nelson Mandela. He had also worked closely with the Board of Deputies of British Jews in fighting the BNP in the ’80s and ’90s after a series of anti-Semitic assaults in parts of London. He is very, very far from being an anti-Semite. But he was a supporter of Jeremy Corbyn, and so the Blairite and Zionist right of the party chose to smear him in the campaign to topple the Labour leader.
And presiding over the kangaroo court that smeared him as an anti-Semite was – yes, you guessed it! – Maggie Cousins.
The three other Black speakers that evening were also concerned about the racist persecution of the Windrush generation, and anti-Black racism within the Labour party. They claimed that the report by Shami Chakrabarti on racism with in the Labour party, had been ignored when it came to other races. One of these speakers, Angela Lee, a presenter on the Genesis channel, was particularly concerned about low expectations of Black children and the higher rates of expulsion for them in schools, including those in Islington. See http://islingtontribune.com/article/the-muddle-around-a-conflict-within-labour
Cousins is a hard-right Zionist, but she isn’t a member of the Jewish Labour Movement or Jewish Voice for Labour on the other side, and so she masquerades as being impartial.
As for Zionism, non-Zionist Jews like Tony Greenstein and David Rosenberg have argued very strongly and convincingly that it is itself a deeply and perniciously racist ideology. It is anti-Semitic, in the sense that it is a capitulation to anti-Semitism. Its founder, Theodor Herzl, believed that anti-Semitism could not be overcome, and that Jews’ only hope lay in creating a state of their own, for which they should co-operate with anti-Semites. He thus praised Arthur Balfour, for passing the Aliens Act against eastern European Jewish immigration to Britain, as well as the British Brothers’ League, a racist organization campaigning against such immigration. The Zionist organization in Nazi Germany fully supported the racist Nuremberg Laws at the time other Jewish organization were campaigning against them. Its newspaper, the Judischer Rundschau, even told its readers that they should wear the yellow Star of David forced on them by Nazis with pride. Chaim Herzog opposed the kindertransport, which evacuated Jewish German children to Britain. He stated he’d prefer it if nearly all of the Jews in Germany were exterminated, if only a few went to the Jewish settlements in Palestine rather than the majority were saved by going to Britain. In Hungary, Rudolf kasztner made a deal with the Nazis to send some tens of thousands of Jews to the death camps, on the condition that some might be spared to go to Israel.
And Israel is still making alliance with real Nazis and anti-Semites, praising the far-right regimes in Poland and Hungary, and hosting British and American influential far right figures like Stephen Bannon, Richard Spencer and Tommy Robinson. And they have the same vile opportunism towards genuine anti-Semitic atrocities. After the Pittsburgh massacre last weekend, the Israeli ambassador to America claimed the rise in anti-Semitism in America was partly due to ‘left-wing activism on campus’. This was a coded attack on the BDS campaign, amongst other things. He also urged Jews to move to Israel.
The shooter had chosen the Tree of Life synagogue, because they were active helping asylum seekers come to America through a Jewish charity. An Israeli rapper notorious for his Fascistic lyrics odiously declared that you couldn’t blame the shooter and those like him, because they were fed up of liberal Jews interfering in their country’s politics.
Utterly, utterly repugnant.
There is also a very strong streak of what would be rightly seen as anti-Semitism if it came from gentiles in Zionist attacks on Israel-critical Jews. They are viciously attacked as ‘kapos’, with some wishing that their families had died in the Holocaust.
And David Rosenberg on his blog, Rebel Notes, has posted his account of how the Board of Deputies of British Jews in the 1980s was strongly opposed to Jews going on anti-racist marches when they were to protect and defend other racial groups. Thus meetings of Jewish anti-racists had to be held in venues like Quaker Meeting Houses because many synagogues closed their doors to them. The official reason was that the Board was afraid Jewish marchers would be exposed to anti-Zionist propaganda. But some left-wing campaigners believed the real reason was that the Conservative Jewish establishment wanted to keep them away from the Left.
And this is apart from Israel’s persecution of the Palestinians, its imprisonment of them in a system of apartheid and slow, ethnic cleansing. None of which can be defended, which is why Israel’s advocates smear those, who criticize it as anti-Semites.
This is what Cousins and Labour’s NEC are supporting: a vicious, hypocritical and persecutory ideology and state, which attacks real anti-racists and opponents of anti-Semitism. It is an ideology, who strongest advocates in Britain have never wanted British Jews to involve themselves in the struggles of other ethnic groups for equality and dignity. The Israel lobby in the Labour party wishes the genuine sufferings of Blacks in history to be ignored, rather than commemorated with that of the Jews. And for the marginalization of Labour’s Black members and those in Labour-run councils to continue in silence. Ken Livingstone was also concerned about Black representation in the Labour party. It’s in his book, Livingstone’s Labour. Which may well be another reason they smeared him as an anti-Semite.
So perhaps it’s about time we fought back, and named Cousins and the NEC for what they are, and tell them very firmly what we tell the BNP, National Action, the EDL and the rest of the thugs and bully-boys of the Far Right:
This is very short video of about a minute long, which I found on Tony Greenstein’s blog. It was in a piece he posted yesterday about the racist abuse of a disabled Black woman by another, White passenger, about a Ryanair flight. Greenstein was outraged that the abuser was not upbraided for his foul behaviour and escorted off the plane, but instead helped back into his seat and checked to see if he, rather than the disabled lady, was alright by the flight attendants. He has called for Ryanair to be boycotted in protest.
The video was one of two short anti-racist films. The other was from Momentum warning of the rise in Fascism. This video describes how Albania, a Muslim country, was the only nation in occupied Europe to save the Jews.
The video states that the one country that rescued Jews facing death – was Muslim. In Albania, Jews and Muslims lived in peace there for centuries. In 1943 Germany occupied Albania. Germany wanted a list of Jews to aid their slaughter. But Albania refused to hand over the list of Jews. Jews throughout Europe heard of this Muslim refuge. Hunted by Nazis, Jewish families headed to Albania for protection. Albanians follow a strict code of honour called ‘Besa’. This code compels Albanians to help people in need. By the end of the War Albania’s Jewish population had grown to 20 times its original size. Not a single Jew in Albania ended up in a Nazi camp. Ask an Albanian why they helped the Jews. They say, ‘This is what we had to do.’ It concludes ‘On international Holocaust Day the world thanks Albania.
Greenstein writes of it
The other is a film of one of the more unknown facts about the Holocaust. Despite the Islamaphobic rubbish one gets from Zionists and their apologists today, most people are unaware that Albania, which was first occupied by the Italians until September 1943 and then the Nazis, was the only Nazi occupied country in Europe where not only was no Jewish person deported but the Jewish population increased from 200 to approximately 2,000. Up till 1942 the Albanian embassy in Berlin issued visas to refugees and until the summer of 1943 refugees obtained protection in Albania.
Albania is about 70% Muslim. Of course given the way the Zionists rewrite history to make Muslims the Jews main enemy, you might be forgiven for thinking that the Holocaust happened in the Middle East.
That was why 3 years ago Netanyahu tried to rewrite history by pretending that the blame for the Holocaust was not that of Hitler, but the Palestinian Mufti. See Rewriting the Holocaust.
It’s clear that Greenstein put this up to rebut the accusations of the Israel lobby that all Muslims are anti-Semites, or that anti-Semites are most like to be Muslims, as propagated by the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism. I don’t think Albania was the only country that rescued Jews from murder and enslavement in the concentration camps. There were extremely courageous people throughout occupied Europe, who risked their lives saving Jews, and are rightly commemorated as ‘Righteous Gentiles’ at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Israel. 80% of Italian Jews survived, despite Mussolini being a close ally of Hitler and passing racist legislation in imitation of the Nuremberg laws. And I was told by a Danish friend that the Jewish community in his country escaped the Holocaust by being given passage to neutral Sweden. There was no, or minimal, anti-Semitism in Denmark and Hitler was keen not to antagonize the Danes for ideological reasons: they were the descendants of the Vikings, the Germanic warriors, who formed part of Hitler’s volkisch racism. The Danish public were opposed to the Holocaust, with the Danish king even wearing a Star of David in protest at it. And so the Nazis were forced to restrain themselves and let them go.
Albania also isn’t a totally Muslim country, as Greenstein pointed out. I also understand that Muslims and Christian Albanians together share the same code of honour, which dates from the 15th century before the Ottoman invasion.
But nevertheless, before the establishment of the state of Israel, there was much less anti-Semitism in the Islamic world than in Christian Europe. And evidently that spirit still survived in Albania to oppose the Holocaust. And their actions now resound to refute the lies told by the Israel lobby to justify their continuing demonization of Muslims.
This is another, very well-informed rant by Richard ‘the Dick’ Coughlan. Coughlan’s a stand-up comic in his other job, and his videos on YouTube presumably are in the same style as his comedy shows. As you can tell by his signature farewell at the end ‘May God be less’, he’s also quite a militant atheist. I don’t support his atheism, but I am reblogging this because, like many of his other videos on race, it has some very important things to say about prejudice, and how things are really different from the way they’re presented by the Right.
In this video, he’s mostly concerned with attacking Nigel Farage for confusing American Jews with Zionism and the Israel lobby. Farage has his own show on LBC. The other day he took a call from ‘Ahmed’, who said that it was peculiar that everyone was talking about the way Russia interfered in the American elections, but no-one was talking about AIPAC’s and the Israeli’s interference. The man parodied in the Judge Dredd strip as ‘Bilious Barrage’, agreed, and said it was down to the fact that there were 6 million Jews in America. He then went on to talk a little more about how powerful and influential the Jewish lobby in America is.
Coughlan points out that this isn’t very much as a piece of racial prejudice, but it is nevertheless dangerous, as Farage has confused American Jews and the Zionist lobby. He’s afraid this will act as a kind of dog-whistle to promote anti-Semitism further amongst those with racist and far right-wing views. So Coughlan goes on to show how profoundly mistaken Farage is. Most Jews in America are profoundly liberal politically, and many are deeply critical about Israel’s religious and political constitution, and the treatment of the Palestinians. Israel’s biggest supporters aren’t Jewish Americans, but American Christians.
But before he gets on to this issue, he talks about some of the other news about the far right he finds amusing or irritating. Such as the fact that the blogger, Peter Sweden, has a YouTube channel, in which he devotes a nine minute video to discussing a kebab he bought in Norway. He also talks about Milo Yiannopolis briefly getting a job with the Daily Caller, presumably another right-wing media outlet. But he didn’t last there long. He was sacked, and the person, who hired him was also sacked. The Caller, Coughlan goes on to say, has some truly horrendous people working for it. But Yiannopolis was too much even for them.
I can’t say that I’m surprised Yiannopolis got sacked. But it probably has nothing to do with Milo’s own, very right-wing political views, where he’s attacked Blacks and non-Whites, feminism and ‘SJW’ – Social Justice Warriors – in general. No, it’s far more likely they got rid of Milo because of his comments defending paedophilia, comments which he later retracted. Sort of. Before recognising that he was also a victim through being abused by a Roman Catholic priest when he was 14.
Coughlan points out that Israel mostly attracts the support of very hardline, racist, anti-Islamic individuals and organisations like the English Defence League, Jihad Watch, Gert Wilders, Pamela Geller, and the hardline American Conservatives. The biggest organisation lobbying for Israel in the Land of the Free is the CUFI – Christians United For Israel. This was presided over by the Roman Catholic bigot, John Hagee, before his death, and had Jerry Falwell, the extreme right-wing Christian evangelist on its board. It has 2.5 million members. AIPAC – the largely Jewish Israeli lobbying group, is more influential, as it has more powerful and influential members. Here he runs through a list of American politicos. But its actual membership is much smaller -100,000. American Conservatives love Israel, because Israel’s a profoundly Conservative nation. In the 2012 elections, 65 per cent of Israelis favoured Mitt Romney. But extremely politically Conservative Jews, such as Pamela Geller and Jonah Goldberg, the author of Liberal Fascism, aren’t representative of American Jewry as a whole.
Coughlan points out that about 22 per cent of Jewish Americans aren’t religious. This is so high a percentage, that the census has had to create another category specifically for them. There are now two entries for Jews – one for religious Jews, and another for non-religious. American Jews are also overwhelmingly liberal. 65 per cent of them vote Democrat. The majority also support a two-state solution to the Palestinian issue, and 66 per cent believe that Israel and an independent Palestine could co-exist peacefully. It’s just that their leaders don’t want to. 44 per cent of American Jews are opposed to Israel building further settlements in Palestinian territory. As for the theological view that Israel was given to the Jews by the Almighty, only 40 per cent of American Jews believe this. Which contrasts with the 82 per cent of American Christian Evangelicals, who think this is the case. And 77 per cent of American Jews have an unfavourable view of the orange simian creature, now skulking in the White House.
Regarding Israel’s religious constitution, 43 per cent of American Jews want synagogue and state to be separated. A further 20+ per cent want there to be more separation between synagogue and state, but not a total separation. He also notes the rise in Jewish concerns about anti-Semitism. Last year, in 2016, only 21 per cent of American Jews felt anti-Semitism to be a problem. This year, 2017, it has risen to 41 per cent.
And on social issues American Jews are very liberal. 90 per cent of American Jews, whether religious or not, support gay marriage and LGBT rights, as opposed to 50 per cent of Americans in general. They are also for gun control, against global warming, and do not support the war in Iraq nor the War on Terror.
Coughlan then discusses the size of the various Jewish denominations in America, and the political stance of the largest, the United Reform Judaism Union. 35 per cent of American Jews belong to Reform Judaism. The next largest Jewish denomination in America are the Conservatives, with 18 per cent, and then the Orthodox, with 10 per cent. The president of the URJU is Rabbi Robert Eric Yoffre. Yoffre ran unopposed as leader between 1996 and 2012. He’s very much in favour of equality, social justice and tolerance and religious dialogue, having spoken at Christian and Islamic religious conferences. But most people probably haven’t heard of him. And despite the size and numerical importance of this gentleman’s denomination, when he goes to Israel he is not treated as a rabbi. Because Israeli law does not recognise Reform Judaism as a denomination.
Coughlan states before he begins his discussion of real political and religious views of American Jews that he doesn’t intend to say anything about Israel, either for or against. This is simply about the facts about American Jewish opinion, as gleaned by polling groups like Pew Research.
He then continues his attack on Farage by stating that his conflation of ‘Jews’ with the Israel lobby will act as a dog-whistle to anti-Semites with stupid conspiracy theories about Jewish power and influence. And while he’s at it, he also wonders why Farage is no longer talking about Brexit. He should, because he spent 20 years campaigning for it, as well as being massively in favour of Trump. But now it’s a complete failure, supported only by bitter, racist Little Englanders.
As for stupid conspiracy theories, Farage’s conflation of the Jews with the Israel lobby may only be a small piece of prejudice, but he wonders what’s next: Farage raving about the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, perhaps? This is the notorious Tsarist forgery, which supposedly revealed that there was a massive Jewish conspiracy to enslave gentiles around the world. It was concocted by the Tsar’s secret police, the Okhrana, or Department 4, to convince the Tsar to increase the persecution of the Jews further. It’s a deeply malign document that has inspired racists and Nazis since its publication, such as Oswald Mosley in Britain and Adolf Hitler in Germany. Coughlan then concludes that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion are so important, that he’ll probably produce another video debunking them.
This is video is really good, as it gives the facts and figures to support some of the arguments I’ve put up before now, stating that Judaism and Zionism are entirely separate, and that many Jews are deeply critical of Israel. The veteran Jewish critique of Zionism and the Israeli lobby, Professor Norman Finkelstein, has made the point that historically support for Israel was very much a minority opinion amongst Jewish Americans. Many Jews in America and over here support the Palestinians and the campaign for their civil and political rights, joining groups like the Boycott, Divestment and Sanction campaign against Israel. And in Israel itself there are proud Jews, who also protest against the house seizures and demolitions, the construction of the illegal settlements, and the brutalisation and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians from their ancestral lands.
This probably explains the sheer venom of the Israel lobby, and its organs in the Labour party, in persecuting them, as well as gentile critics of Israel. I’ve pointed out time and again how the majority of people suspended and expelled from the Labour for anti-Semitism were nothing of the sort. They were very largely decent, anti-racist men and women, who hated anti-Semitism as another form of the racism they detested. They opposed Israel, or at least the brutalisation of the Palestinians, because they saw Israel as a White, European settler state, based on the same racist, imperialist and colonialist attitudes towards indigenous peoples, that has led to the brutalisation of other indigenous peoples and the theft of their land by Europeans across the globe.
However, the Israeli lobby both here and in America has libelled and vilified these people as anti-Semites, even when its obvious to everyone else that they aren’t. Those so maligned have included self-respecting Jews, who have themselves been the victims of real, anti-Semitic abuse or assault. This does not matter. Zionist and pro-Israel organisations, like the horribly misnamed Jewish Labour Movement and the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, have adopted a tortuous definition of anti-Semitism, which deliberately conflates it with opposition to Israel. And so it doesn’t matter how genuinely anti-racist a person is, whether they have a positive view of Jews, or simply have no strong opinion of them one way or another. Or if they’re Jewish, how observant they are, or otherwise self-respecting. Simply for denouncing Israel’s attack on Jews, they’re attacked as self-hating and anti-Semitic. And many people, including the British comedian Alexei Sayle, have noticed that the majority of the victims of the witch-hunt in the Labour party over this issue have been Jewish.
It looks very much like it’s because these organisations know how weak their position is, and how repugnant very many ordinary people, including Jews, find their persecution of the Palestinians. And so to keep up the image that Jew = Zionism/ Israel, as dictated by Likudnik doctrine, they have to try to marginalise and vilify those who deny it. And that means particularly persecuting Jews.
One of the books that was published a few years ago on the Israel Lobby noted that the lobby affected American elections through the funding of political candidates by organisations and Jewish businesses. AIPAC and similar groups give ample funds to pro-Israel candidates. And where an aspiring congressman or senator is critical of Israel, they will donate heavily to their opponent, thus ensuring that they will lose the election.
But as Coughlan has shown, not all American Jews support Israel, or at least not its maltreatment and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. Some American Jewish businessmen even donate to Palestinian charities and organisations, as well as Israeli. One of them is featured in the book Bushwhacked, published a few years ago, which exposes everything nasty and corrupt about George Dubya. This gentleman is included because he stands out against the bigotry and intolerance of the Bush administration.
Others have pointed out that Christian Zionism is much larger, and has a very theological agenda. It’s adherents believe that in order for Jesus to return to Earth in the Second Coming, the Jews must return to the Holy Land and Israel restored. This will culminate in a final battle between the forces of good and evil. Twenty years ago the forces of evil were the Communist bloc. Now it’s Islam. These people are a real, terrifying danger to world peace.
And the Israel lobby also has a profound connection to real anti-Semites going right back to the Nazis and the Ha’avara agreement. As anti-Zionists like Tony Greenstein and very many others have documented, the pioneers and leaders of the Zionist movement were all too willing to deal with anti-Semites, because they believed that increased anti-Semitism against diaspora Jews would benefit Zionism by encouraging more Jews to emigrate to Israel. Hence the Judischer Rundschau, the main Zionist newspaper in 1930s Germany, hailed the infamous Nuremberg laws, and urged its readers to wear their yellow star with pride. This was before the Holocaust, which the magazine did not foresee, but it’s still chilling nonetheless. And the head of the Zionist movement in Hungary during the War, Kasztner, allowed the Nazis to deport a greater number of Jews to the Death Camps than may otherwise have occurred, because he hoped that they would also spare some and send them to Israel instead.
But if you dare mention these historical facts, you’re an anti-Semite.
And more recently, the real Nazis and anti-Semites connected with Trump’s administration, like the Alt-Right ‘White Zionist’ Richard Spencer, have very strongly supported Israel. Spencer’s even been on Israeli TV. And Sebastian Gorka, a former member of Trump’s administration with extensive connections to the Hungarian Fascist right, has also been one of the guests at the Herzliya conference, the annual jamboree for the Israeli military. Many real Fascists and anti-Semites support Israel because they see it as another way of getting rid of their domestic Jews, by forcing them to emigrate there.
Judaism is certainly not synonymous with Zionism. And some Zionists and Zionist organisations will collaborate with Fascists and anti-Semites against diaspora Jews, in the hope of boosting their country’s population.
The Real News Network is another great alternative news service that’s on the net. Like RT, it’s actually doing proper journalism and showing just how corrupt and unjust contemporary politics is under neoliberalism in the West. In this video, Shir Hever from Heidelberg talks to Moshe Machower, an Israeli professor and anti-Zionist activist, about his expulsion from the Labour party. Hever states that the allegations of anti-Semitism in the Labour party started shortly after Jeremy Corbyn was elected leader, and that it has become clear that they don’t have any basis in reality. They are a device to smear critics of Israel. There’s a brief clip of Jackie Walker, the Black Jewish anti-racist campaigner, who was smeared and falsely suspended as an anti-Semite because of her views on Israel’s barbarous treatment of the Palestinians, and her refusal to kowtow to the fake definition of anti-Semitism which conflates it with opposition to Israel. Walker states that the anti-Semitism smears were an entirely constructed scandal in order to bring down Corbyn.
One of the most recent victims of this witch-hunt is Professor Moshe Machower, a long time critic of Israel. Machower’s not just Jewish, but an Israeli himself. He is also a prominent mathematician and very well respected. He was expelled under the pretext that he was an anti-Semite last week because he made a very well received speech and wrote an article in the Weekly Worker making the point that anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism. In the article he committed the heinous crime of pointing out that the Zionist organization in Nazi Germany actually welcomed the infamous Nuremberg Laws separating ‘Aryan’ and Jewish Germans in 1937.
Machower was then approached by Labour Party Marxists, who asked if they could reprint his article in their magazine. He agreed. And this is what precipitated his expulsion. The Blairites in the party used the article’s publication by the Marxists to have him ‘autoexcluded’ without any opportunity to defend himself as a Communist infiltrator. They then used the smear that he was an anti-Semite to expel the Marxist comrades, who published the article, as anti-Semites in their turn.
Machower states that this is not about anti-Semitism. It’s just a weapon in a campaign by the Blairites in the Labour party to try to cling on to power. Under Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour party has expanded to become the largest political party in Europe. Not only have new, younger members joined, but also the old ‘uns, who had previously left, disillusioned with the cynicism and Tory-lite policies of Blair and his cronies. And most of the Labour party, including Jeremy Corbyn and its top leadership, are left-wing. Hence, this isn’t a struggle in which the Labour party is trying to destroy itself, as Mr. Hever asks. It’s a struggle in which the Blairites are desperately trying to expel the Left.
I’d say here while the Blairites are trying to expel the Left from the Labour party, they have shown that they have absolutely no qualms about destroying the party in doing so. Several times there have been rumours about the Blairites wishing to split the party, and local Blairite Labour party officials have even gone so far as to ask Tories and Lib Dems to join the party to help them remove left-wing, pro-Corbyn members.
This shows how desperate they are, and how actively disloyal to the party. As well, of course, as their complete lack of morals in foully smearing decent, anti-racist, Jewish and non-Jewish men and women. And as Hever and Walker comment, their smears have been picked up by the other, competing parties and organizations outside the Labour party.
But their smear and expulsion of Prof. Machower has not been without consequences. Tony Greenstein, another long-term Jewish critic of Zionism, and stout anti-racist and anti-Fascist campaigner, has put up a very interesting piece on his blog, reporting the mass anger that has erupted against Machower’s expulsion. So great is this discontent, that MacNicholl and the other Blairites behind Machower’s exclusion have invited him to present his case defending himself. This is in stark contrast to their earlier, summary expulsion.
I hope this is just the tip of the iceberg, and that the expulsion of Prof. Machower becomes the straw that breaks the camel’s back. It should be a step too far, and should discredit not just the smears and lies against Professor Machower, but all the lying allegations of anti-Semitism against decent people in the Labour party.
There’s another article by John Booth over at the parapolitics magazine Lobster, which also makes very clear that the anti-Semitism smears are baseless lies, used by the Blairites and the Zionist lobby in the Labour party, the Labour Friends of Israel and Jewish Labour Movement, to hang on to power. And it makes very clear in its opening paragraphs just how much these allegations differ from reality by describing the Jews active in the Labour party, or who were speaking as guests as its conference last week. He writes (footnotes included)
Anyone reading and hearing about Labour’s annual conference in Brighton might have thought it riven by yet more acrimonious controversy over antisemitism. From The Guardian to the Daily Express and the broadcast journalists in between that was the big story for those critical of the party under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn. 1 But for those who were there or learned of it through the burgeoning alternative media, there were other impressions to be gained. The Jewish former party leader Ed Miliband appeared in relaxed mode at fringe events. 2 The keynote conference speaker was Naomi Klein, the Canadian author of Jewish descent who has done much to challenge the orthodoxies of neoliberalism and neo-conservatism. On the conference floor Jewish party 3 activist Naomi Wimbourne-Idrissi wowed delegates by her denunciation of Israeli policy on settlements and Gaza. She concluded: ‘This party does not have a problem with Jews.’ 4 Away from the formal party conference fringe, the events of the Momentum-led festival The World Transformed were routinely oversubscribed. Momentum is chaired by Jon Lansman, a former kibbutznik brought up in an Orthodox Jewish family. Later that day Wimbourne-Idrissi helped launch Jewish Voice for Labour
or 1 or <http://www.express.co.uk/news/politics/858647/labour-party-conference-2017-antisemitism-jew-brighton
or 2
3
4
(JVL) alongside international jurist Sir Stephen Sedley, Oxford emeritus 5 professor Avi Shlaim (a member of the Israel Defence Forces in 1967) and David Rosenberg of the Jewish Socialists’ Group. 6 A clue as to why the Corbyn-led Labour party has been dogged by antisemitism allegations can be found in comparing the words with which Rosenberg concluded his 2017 JVL address to a packed audience and one from a fundraiser for New Labour 15 years earlier. Here’s Rosenberg on Marek Edelman, the longest surviving member of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, who died in 2009: ‘This hero was persona non grata in Israel for remaining an anti-Zionist, and for saying about that incredible Uprising: “We fought for dignity and freedom. Not for a territory, nor for a national identity”. But the very most important thing he said was: “To be a Jew means always being with the oppressed, never with the oppressors.”’ In contrast, this is Jon (now Lord) Mendelsohn speaking to Jewsweek.com on 8 September 2002: ‘[Tony] Blair has attacked the anti-Israelism that had existed in the Labour Party . . .Labour was cowboys-and-Indians politics, picking underdogs. The milieu has changed. Zionism is pervasive in New Labour. It is automatic that Blair will come to Friends of Israel meetings.’
Another reason for the Blairites’ hatred of Corbyn is his own personal convictions. Not only has Corbyn been active in pro-Palestinian movements, but his second wife was a refugee from Pinochet’s Chile. As Blair was quite easy about providing support to every right-wing thug while trying to mask it under liberal platitudes, it’s not surprising that Mandelson and the others should be bitterly opposed to someone who takes standing up for human rights very seriously.
For more information, see:file:///C:/Users/User/lob74-labour-corbyn-anti-semitism.pdf
Mike has posted up yet another piece, which shows the disgusting attitude of the Blairites and their willingness to do anything to unseat and smear Jeremy Corbyn. It seems Sami Chakrabarti’s inquiry into anti-Semitism in the Labour party has generally given the party a clean bill of health. However, that hasn’t been good enough for Ruth Smeeth and Sam Stopp, two members, who seem absolutely convinced that the party is riddled with it and it’s all Corbyn’s fault. In the case of Smeeth, it seems to be because someone else in Labour called her a traitor because she was giving some assistance to the Torygraph in writing an article about it. And as she’s Jewish, she decided it must be because of her religion/ ethnicity, rather than in the fact that she was helping the notoriously anti-Socialist paper. In the case of Stopp, it’s because he looked at a speech in which Corbyn made it clear that Jews weren’t responsible for the actions of Israel, any more than Muslims were responsible for atrocities committed by ISIS, and came to the direct opposite of what was being meant. He perversely concluded that Corbyn was saying that Jews were responsible for the actions of Israel, and like Smeeth, promptly threw his toys out of the pram. See Mike’s article: http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2016/06/30/farcical-anti-semitism-accusations-fly-at-anti-semitism-inquiry-report/
These accusations about anti-Semitism in the Labour party are partly based on Ken Livingstone’s statement that Hitler too supported sending Jews to Israel. This was perfectly true, but was too much for the historically challenged Blairites, who in the person of John Mann, threw a fit and started accusing Red Ken of being a Nazi himself. Of course the old Leninist newt-fancier isn’t. When he was the head of the GLC, it was notorious for being right-on, anti-racist, anti-sexist and anti-homophobic. In his 1987 book, Livingstone’s Labour, Leninspart makes it very clear that he has no truck with racism, whether against Blacks, Jews or Irish, and provides deep and telling criticism of how the British and American governments recruited the real thing as part of their campaign against Communism. The Nazis they recruited as anti-Communist spies included heinous individuals, who had taken active part in the Holocaust and pogroms against the Jews during the invasion of the USSR. I’ve blogged about this before, many times, and quite simply I’m sick of having to explain it yet again.
John Newsinger, one of the long-time contributors to the parapolitics magazine, Lobster, has also put up a piece about the scandal, entitled in ‘Livingstone, Zionism and the Nazis in issue 71 of the magazine for Summer, 2016. Newsinger is, or was, a history prof at Bath Spa university. He makes it clear at the beginning of the article that’s he’s not impressed with Leninspart, because he played into the hands of the Blairites and their appalling allies in the Labour Friends of Israel and the Israeli ambassador to Britain, Mark Regev, an Israeli ‘hawk’. But he cites histories of the Holocaust written by Jewish historians, including David Cesarani, to show that Livingstone was historically correct. He also goes on to show, more specifically, the vile attitude of Israel’s founders to the plight of their fellows under the Nazis in Europe. The great Zionist pioneers had nothing but utter contempt for Jews, who wished to stay in their European homelands, and were more than content to see the Nazis persecute and butcher them, if it meant that some would go to Israel.
Cesarani himself was the son of Italian Communists, and a strong supporter of Zionism. He briefly became disillusioned while staying America, but when he came back to Britain, he returned not only to Liberal Judaism, but also was one of the first to equate anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism. Nevertheless, Cesarani’s book on the Final Solution provides abundant quotes showing the Livingstone was correct. Cesarani’s book states that the Zionists took very little interest in defending Jewish Germans, and were opposed to Jewish organisations, such as the Centralverein and the Reichsbund Judischer Frontsoldaten, a patriotic Jewish servicement’s league, that did. For the RjFS, leaving Germany was out of the question. It was a form of surrender. Cesarani describes how the Nazis actively promoted the Zionists as a way of getting the Jews out of Germany anyway they could, even providing quotes from those responsible. In 1935, Reynhard Heydrich wrote in the SS newspaper, Das Schwarze Korps, that the Nazi regime was ‘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.’
Cesarani also provides some chilling quotes showing the indifference of leading Zionists to their people’s suffering. He describes how (I)n January 1934, the
American, James McDonald, was appalled by the attitude of Chaim Weizmann when he ‘expressed his contempt for German Jews as a whole, his indifference to their fate, and for that matter, his indifference to the fate of millions of Jews elsewhere, just so long as a saving remnant could be preserved in Palestine’. pp. 132-133) This grotesque attitude was also shared by David Ben Gurion, who told a closed meeting of the Jewish Agency ‘If I knew that all the Jewish
children of Europe could be saved by settlement in Britain and only half could be saved by settlement in Palestine, I should choose the latter’. He also notes that Zionists and Orthodox Jews were quite satisfied with the ban on mixed marriages in the Nazis’ notorious 1935 Nuremberg Laws.
Cesarani’s book also describes how the Nazis supplied arms and support to the Haganah, the Jewish organisation in Palestine that helped the British crush the First Intifada, the Palestinian insurrection against the Mandate. Eichmann also gave his support to people smugglers, like Bernard Storfer, whom he put in charge of the illegal emigration of Jews to the embryonic Israeli colony. While Newsinger is clearly not a Zionist, he is deeply impressed with Cesarani’s scholarship, and urges Lobster’s readers to look at Cesarani’s first book, Justice Delayed: How Britain Became a Refuge for Nazi War Criminals. This describes how the post-War Labour government recruited immense numbers of Nazis as potential recruits for SIS, one of Britain’s intelligence agencies. Among those recruited were the 9,000 members of the SS’ Galician Division, Ukrainians responsible for horrific atrocities in that part of the USSR. He also rightly takes the British government to task for failing to take in Jewish refugees during the Third Reich. In his concluding paragraph, he states that a firm resistance to anti-Semitism must be a part of any determined anti-Zionist campaign, as it was only due to anti-Semitism in Europe that there was any real support for Zionism. He ends with this observation:
If the United States, Britain, and other countries had opened their doors to Jews fleeing the Nazis, these countries would almost certainly have been the destiny of choice for the overwhelming majority of European Jews. Instead, the doors were kept closed except for a comparative few. Once again, this was anti-Semitism at work. It was European anti-Semitism, culminating in mass murder and
attempted genocide, that made the Zionist project viable at the expense, we have to insist, of the Palestinian people. Consequently the fight against anti-Semitism is a vital part of the fight against Zionism.
This is very much the attitude of most liberal critics of Israel. The American radical left magazine, Counterpunch, has also run articles recently on how Winston Churchill and the British government bowed to the prejudice and xenophobia expressed by papers like the Daily Mail, and had German and Austrian Jews interned as ‘enemy aliens’ during the War in camps with the very Nazis that were persecuting them. And Newsinger also shows that, despite his obvious anger at Livingstone for giving the Israel lobby a weapon, the great newt fancier was very largely correct.
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