Yesterday Tony Greenstein put up a piece about an art exhibition on the plight of the Palestinians by an Arab/Israeli artist, Dr. Gil Mualem-Doron. Titled ‘Cry the Beloved Country’ after a 1953 article in the Israeli paper Maariv by its editor, Ezriel Karlebach. This compared the new legislation then passed against the Palestinians to the infamous Nuremberg laws the Nazis passed against the Jews. The article took its title in turn from the 1948 book by the South African artist Alan Paton on the rise of that country’s apartheid regime. The exhibition also features a conversation between the Palestinian historian Dr Salman Abu Sitta, Mualem-Doron, Eitan Bronstein Aparicio, the founder of the NGO Zochrot, somebody called Decolonizer and the exhibition’s curator, Ghazaleh Zogheib. It includes photographs of some of the ‘present refugees’ – Palestinians, who fled or were forced off their land during the Nakba of 1948, and who are officially regarded as foreigners in their own country among other photographic and artistic installations. There is also a screening of the film To Gaza and Back Home, by Aparicio and Decolonizer about the Arab village of Ma’in and its destruction. It was due to open on the 2nd April, but this was impossible due to the lockdown. It’s now showing online until sometime in September, probably the 27th, when it will open at the P21 Gallery in London.
Tony’s article quotes the exhibition, which says that
“Cry, the beloved country” is a nightmarish series of room installations and photography works dealing with the links between Great Britain, Israel and Palestine and depicting the catastrophic results of this unholy conundrum. Built as a journey into “the heart of darkness” the exhibition is intended to negate many Israelis and Zionists supporters’ view of Israel as a “villa in the jungle”.
The photographs include several of an actor dressed in KKK robes, a Jewish prayer shawl and waving an Israeli flag, saluting Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square. It was taken in 2017 during the centennial celebrations of the promulgation of the Balfour Doctrine, in which Britain backed the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. This was very much against the wishes of the British Jewish community, who did not want their Britishness questioned through the foundation of a state for which they had no loyalty and no desire to live in.
This is obviously an extremely provocative piece. I have no doubt that the very people and organizations, who scream ‘anti-Semitism’ at any criticism of Israel, no matter how reasonable and justified, would go berserk about this. It comes very close to one of the IHRA’s examples of anti-Semitism: the comparison of Jews to Nazis. But it is a reasonable comment on the Israeli state and its present government, composed of Likud and various parties from the Israeli religious right. Groups of settlers do launch attacks on Palestinian villages, like the Klan lynched Blacks in America. Those campaign for the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians similarly claim a religious basis for their crimes, just like the Klan claimed to be defending White, Protestant Christians from Jews, Blacks, Roman Catholics and Communists. And Tony himself has shown all too often how the present Israeli government and British Zionist activists have very strong links to the real far right groups. Jonathan Hoffman, who has frequently protested and demonstrated against pro-Palestinian exhibitions and meetings over here, shouting anti-Semitism, has done so in the company of Paul Besser, the former intelligence officer of Britain First, and members of the EDL. The event’s supported by Arts Council England and the Hub Collective. I think they should be commended for supporting such an important exhibition, despite the abuse and demands for cancellation the organizers of similar events receive.
The Israelis were due to begin their annexation of 1/3 of the West Bank today, in blatant contravention of international law. The Likud regime is zealously pursuing its persecution and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians with the active support of right-wing American Christian groups like Ted Hagee’s Christians United for Israel. It does so against the wishes and passionate efforts of very many Jews and Jewish organisations in America, Britain and Israel itself. The latter includes the veterans’ group, Breaking the Silence, which works to reveal the atrocities in which its members have personally participated, and the Zionist humanitarian group, B’Tsalem. The supporters of this ethnic cleansing, including the Board of Deputies of British Jews, the Chief Rabbinate, the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism and the various ‘Friends of Israel’ groups in the political parties, are doing their best to present Israel as synonymous with Judaism. This is in breach of the IHRA’s own guidelines, which state that it is anti-Semitic to claim that Jews are more loyal to another country, or hold them responsible as a whole for Israel’s actions. As these atrocities continue, more young Jewish people are becoming critical of Israel and the Zionist organisations themselves were frightened by the British public’s disgust at the Israeli bombardment of Gaza. Hence the foundation of the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism and the revival of Paole Zion, now renamed the Jewish Labour Movement, in the Labour Party. It was all to promote public support for Israel and quash reasoned, justified criticism.
It is why exhibitions like this continue to remain important and necessary, whatever the witch-hunters do to shout them down and silence them.
For more information on the exhibition and the individual pieces, go to:
This is absolutely atrocious behaviour from the Board of Deputies of British Jews, for which they should be roundly condemned by every genuinely anti-racist person in the country. Mike today has reported that the Board, led by its odious president, Marie van der Zyl, should expel two of its highly esteemed Black women MPs. The women they’re targeting are the Labour veteran, Diane Abbott and Bell Ribeiro-Addy. Why? Because they attended a conference on Zoom in which they took questions from the audience, which included two former Labour members, Tony Greenstein and Jackie Walker, whom the Israel lobby and Conservative – including Blairite – establishment had smeared as anti-Semites. And because Keir Starmer had stupidly tried to win their approval by signing their wretched ‘Ten Pledges’. One of these was that Labour Party members would not share a platform with those expelled from the party for anti-Semitism.
The Board is an unrepresentative body. Despite it claims to speak for all of Britain’s Jews, it really speaks for a tiny minority, the United Synagogue. It does not represent the Haredi Jews nor the Orthodox, who have their own bodies. Furthermore, it explicitly defines itself in its constitution as a Zionist organisation, which means that it does not represent non-Zionist Jews, of which there are many. The Board is, like the rest of the British establishment, by and large very Tory, though I would not care to say that all of its members are. Starmer, and the rest of the Labour leadership candidates, has given them, an organisation outside the Labour Party and hostile to it, dictatorial powers over whom it may accept as members, how they are to behave and with whom they may associate. Many of their demands, as Mike and others have pointed out to me, would not stand up if challenged in a court of law. Indeed, I have heard that they run directly counter to it. To many people, van der Zyl’s and the Board’s obnoxious demands look like both a domineering attempt to dictate to the Labour party and its members, and also a racist attack on two distinguished Black female MPs.
And not only is the Board morally wrong to demand their expulsion, it is also technically wrong according to the terms of its own wretched pledges. Jackie and Tony weren’t on the platform. They were members of the audience. And neither of them were expelled for anti-Semitism.
Mike reproduces a number of tweets from Labour members and supporters, who are very much aware of the gross injustice and sheer arrogance of the Board’s latest demand, and strongly condemn. They include Jackie Walker, the Alternative Daily News, ‘Saboteur Aesop’, ‘Stevewhiteraven’, Kerry-Ann Mendoza, Clare Curran, the Rt Rev’d Mojito and Simon Maginn.
Mike considers that this has put Starmer in quite a quandary, as if he gives into the Board there will be such a mass walkout that by Christmas it will only consist of him and Rayner.
As well as being racist, it also looks very politically motivated. The right has hated Abbott since she was a radical young firebrand in the 1980s. She was one of the first of the wave of Black and ethnic minority MPs that were then entering parliament, along with the late Bernie Grant. She was among the Labour MPs smeared by the Scum in the 1987 election. They claimed that she had said that all White people are racist. They hate her because she is very loud and outspoken in her attacks on anti-Black, anti-Asian racism. But she is also a close friend, and, so I have heard, a former lover of Jeremy Corbyn. This looks very much like the Conservative Board using this as an opportunity to attack a Labour MP they have always loathed.
Despite their claims, the Board and the Israel lobby have a very poor record when it comes to combating racism when it does not involve Jews. David Rosenberg of the Jewish Socialist Group, a veteran anti-racist campaigner, states in one of the pieces on his blog that when he was in the Anti-Nazi League, the Board forbade Jews from joining or holding their meetings in synagogues. This was ostensibly because the founder of the Anti-Nazi League was an anti-Zionist, and they wished to stop impressionable Jews hearing criticism of Israel. But other Jewish left-wingers suspected there was also another agenda, to stop Jews supporting Blacks and Asians.
The Board’s demands for the two women’s expulsion also resembles the racist undertones behind the Blairites’ and Israel lobby’s demand for the expulsion of Marc Wadsworth. Wadsworth is a genuine anti-racist activist. He worked for the parents of Stephen Lawrence to meet Nelson Mandela, and with the Board in the 1980s to stop anti-Semitic assaults by the BNP around the Isle of Thanet. But he was the man, who supposedly made a Jewish Blairite MP cry when he caught her passing information on to the Telegraph at a meeting, and called her out for it. An angry squad of Blairites, including, I believe, Luciana Berger, descended on his hearing to demand his expulsion. All of them were White, and critics said it looked very much like a White lynching party about to attack a Black.
Jackie Walker, a very respectable anti-racism educator and activist, has also been subject to viciously racist abuse since the Israel lobby smeared her as an anti-Semite. Apart from the grotesque hate messages she’s received demanding that she should be hanged, or burnt and her body dumped in bin bags, she’s also been racially abused by Jews. She’s Black, and so, according to their limited ideas, can’t be Jewish. I got news for them. There have been communities of Black Jews in Ethiopia for a very long time. There are also Black Jews in the West. There’s a professor of Afro-Jewish Studies at one of the American universities, an American synagogue has even made a Black woman its rabbi. And some of the older readers of this blog will remember a certain Sammy Davis jnr, a very popular singer, dancer and film star, who was a member of the famous ‘Rat Pack’ which included Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra.
But the Israel lobby also includes some individuals, who can certainly be fairly described as being Far Right. One of the ultra-Zionists, who turns up to protest pro-Palestinian meetings, was formerly a resident of apartheid South Africa and, it seems, very comfortable with its official racism. Others have links to the EDL and other islamophobic groups. Jonathan Hoffman, the former head of the Zionist Federation, has appeared at protests alongside Paul Besser of the extreme right-wing group, Britain First. There is also a couple who turn up to such protests, including those organised against Corbyn by the Campaign For Anti-Semitism and the Board of Deputies, wearing Kach T-shirts. Kach are an extreme right-wing Israeli terrorist group. There have also been Jews, who are extremely sympathetic to the British Nazi right. One Tory MP in Barnet, according to one anti-Zionist Jewish website I read, who used to complain that it was a pity the Conservatives and BNP were separate parties, as it divided the Nationalist vote. The great historian of the British Jewish community, Geoffrey Alderman, was also under pressure from the Board to remove the finding in one of his books in the 1970s that two per cent of the Jewish community support the National Front against Blacks and Asians. There were also some Fascists, who had no hatred of the Jews. Matthew Collins of the anti-racism, anti-religious extremism groups, Hope Not Hate, formerly a member of the BNP and other Nazi groups, recalls being told by another by another Fascist that he really couldn’t understand hatred of the Jews. This interesting snippet is in his book, Hate.
It is therefore completely possible and sensible to talk of Jewish White supremacism and anti-Black, anti-Asian racism.
Marie van der Zyl’s attacks on Diane Abbott and Bell Ribeiro-Addy is not only another partisan, Conservative, Zionist attempt to dictate to Labour under the spurious pretext of combating anti-Semitism, it also looks very much like anti-Black racism.
As one of the Tweeters quote by Mike says, get the Board out of the Labour party.
Jonathan Hoffman is a fanatical Zionist activist, who regularly protests against and tries to disrupt pro-Palestinian meetings and events because they are, to him, ‘anti-Semitic’. Even when the events are organised by Jewish and other organisations, who are very careful to exclude real anti-Semites and neo-Nazis. He and his bizarre antics have been all too frequently discussed and documented by Tony Greenstein, not least because of the extreme right-wing company he keeps. Tony has many times put up photographs showing Hoffman parading around in the company of extremist, islamophobic outfits like the EDL and Britain First. He was photographed outside demonstrating against one pro-Palestinian meeting next to Paul Besser, Britain First’s intelligence officer. Which must surely be a contradiction in terms, coming from that organisation. A few months ago Hoffman and one of his mates, to my recollection, lost a court case and were convicted of harassment. According to Tony’s article today, it was of a Palestinian woman. But Hoffman evidently hasn’t learnt his lesson, because he’s been out disrupting meetings again.
This time it was the turn of East London Humanists, who are affiliated to the National Secular Society, who felt his ire. They’d committed the heinous crime of inviting David Rosenberg, of the Jewish Socialist Group, to speak about anti-Semitism. Hoffman duly lost his fragile mind once again, and turned up with six other ‘vigilantes’ as he describes them, to disrupt the meeting. Tony has a photo on his blog of him with a couple of them standing next to two Israeli flags. Why the anger? Because David Rosenberg’s another Jewish critic of Israel’s barbarous treatment of the Palestinians. Thus, according to Hoffman, he’s an anti-Semite and a ‘renegade Jew’, and the East London Humanists are guilty of anti-Semitism for inviting him there, apparently. Hoffman complains that as the Humanists actively oppose religion, they are a pain to the Jews. As Tony himself points out in the article, the Humanists oppose all religions, not just Judaism. I certainly don’t support either Humanism or the National Secular Society, who, in my opinion, can be extremely intolerant in their attempts to force religion out of the public sphere. But I don’t think you can accuse them of racism. Nathan Johnstone’s book on New Atheist myths, which I reviewed a few days ago, attacked Dawkins and co. for their vitriolic rhetoric, which he believed could all too easily spark vicious persecution. But he acknowledged that Dawkins and the others, including Sam Harris, were actually humane people, who genuinely sympathised with the oppressed and marginalised. I also have the impression that there’s a split between the old-fashioned Humanists and the New Atheists about their rhetoric. Many Humanists and atheists are disgusted with the New Atheists because of their intolerance, which they associate with religion. So while I don’t doubt that Humanists object to Judaism as a religion, along with Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and the other faiths, I’m sure that they’re genuine supporters of the Jewish people’s right to live in peace, equality and safety, along with people of other races and ethnicities.
Also, David Rosenberg himself is very far from being any kind of ‘renegade Jew’ or anti-Semite. I’ve blogged about several articles from his excellent blog, Rebel Notes. Rosenberg is, like Tony, a very firm opponent of racism and anti-Semitism. He has spoken at meetings in Britain and abroad against racism and Fascism. He was in Warsaw a few months ago, attending a ceremony commemorating the heroes of the Jewish uprising against the Nazis. This included children from the local schools singing one of the rebels’ songs in Yiddish. He also posted another piece on his blog about the speech he gave at an anti-racism meeting in Manchester, in which he praised the local Jewish, Socialist, Communist and trade union activists in that great city for sticking it to Mosley and his stormtroopers when they tried to goosestep around it. He has also posted pieces about an exhibition at the London Jewish Museum on Marxism and Jewish identity, in which he viewed Marx as in the line of Jewish prophets and campaigners against oppression and exploitation. It’s glaringly obvious that Rosenberg wouldn’t do any of this, if he were a genuine anti-Semite.
But Hoffman and his fellows have decided Rosenberg is a Jew-hater, because his socialism is informed by the stance of the pre-War Jewish Bund. This was the Jewish socialist party in eastern Europe and the former Russian Empire. They saw the Jewish people’s homeland as whichever countries they lived in. They had no intention of supporting a separate Jewish state, and actively campaigned against Zionism. They demanded instead that Jews should live as equal fellow citizens with their gentile neighbours. This was by far the majority view of European Jewry at the time. But it runs counter to the right-Zionist message, which is that true Jews have always wanted their own state. And so Zionist extremists like Hoffman smear activists like Hoffman, Tony and Jackie Walker, as anti-Semites.
Hoffman is also upset ’cause he doesn’t like Tony mentioning how he keeps company with people, who could be described as Fascists. So Tony’s put up photos of him marching around with the EDL and their Jewish division, the JDL, as well as Paul Besser and a few other extreme right-wing Zionists.
Don’t be misled. It’s people like Hoffman and other extreme right-wing Zionists, both Jewish and gentile, who are behind the anti-Semitism smears against pro-Palestinian activists. Those they attack and smear are very frequently genuinely anti-racist opponents of anti-Semitism. Tony states that he has never seen Hoffman protest against genuine racists and Fascists. He has pointed out over and over again that the Zionist right will collaborate with real anti-Semites in order to advance their goals of getting more Jews to emigrate to Israel. Which is why the Conservative Jewish establishment in this country, like the Conservative establishment generally, has done everything it can to smear Corbyn and his supporters in the Labour party as anti-Semites, even when Corbyn and they have a proud record of combating racism and supporting the Jewish community. And they can be especially vicious in their attacks on genuinely left-wing Jews, who support the Palestinians.
The real fanatical bigotry here didn’t come from Rosenberg or the East London Humanists. It comes from Hoffman and those like him. They’re responsible for smearing decent people, and their lies are being used by a right-wing political establishment and media to prevent a Corbyn government getting into power. Because it would actually do something for British working people, who naturally include Jews.
This is a very interesting and no doubt controversial video from Sam Seder’s Majority Report, in which he shows the link between Shapiro’s rhetoric about ‘good’ and ‘bad’ Jews and an attack on a synagogue in Indiana. Shapiro is a Republican mouthpiece, a very aggressive Zionist and Jewish. Seder’s also Jewish, describing himself as ‘the most Jewish guy you know’. But Seder’s also left-wing and a determined critic of Israel. He takes Shapiro to task for his sharp distinction between good and bad Jews, based on ethnicity versus religious practice, as distinction which is also made by neo-Nazis. And ‘bad Jews’ are Jews, who vote Democrat and specifically for Barack Obama.
Seder wondered what would happen if a public figure said something that inspired someone to commit a horrible act. And not only did they inspire the perp, they also made an equation that the perp cited as the cause for his committing the horrible act. Shapiro tried this with the Nazi, who shot up the synagogue in Pittsburgh, claiming that the Nazi was following an ideology similar to Ilhan Omar, the Muslim Congresswoman and critic of Israel. This is untrue. The Nazi didn’t, and he didn’t cite Omar as an explanation for his murder of the Synagogue’s congregation. But it has happened in the case of Shapiro and two Nazis, who vandalised a synagogue in Indiana.
The Nazis were Nolan and Kiyomi Brewer, and their crime was painting a Nazi swastika and Iron Crosses on a wall of a synagogue in Carmel. Nolan, the husband, was apparently law abiding, docile and passive. He was drawn into it by his wife, Kiyomi. She stated in her defence that she was led into the dark world of Nazism through mainstream right-wing news sites and organisations like Ben Shapirok Breitbart and Fox News. She then moved onto Stormfront, and then a Nazi site on the Discord Server. She and her husband also stated in the court papers that they deliberately selected that particular synagogue because it was full of ethnic Jews. This follows the neo-Nazi claim that Hitler wasn’t against religious Jews, but only against ethnic Jews.
Seder then shows with a series of tweets from 2011, 2016 and this year, that Shapiro himself makes the distinction. In one, he claimed that the Jewish community had always been undermined by bad Jews, and that these bad Jews voted Democrat. In the 2016 tweet, he said that there was a distinction between ethnically and religious Jews. Bernie Sanders was ethnically Jewish, and so passed the first standard, but not a Jew at all by the second standard.
Seder also shows a clip from the interview Shapiro gave with Andrew Neil, which was so embarrassing for Shapiro that he claimed that Neil was some kind of Leftist. Neil isn’t. He’s a Tory. Neil asked him about his claim that bad Jews voted for Barack Obama. Shapiro then tried to get around it by saying that American Jews were largely secular, and so his claim about nonreligious Jews was correct. Neil wasn’t going to be diverted, and stated that he hadn’t said that. He had said that bad Jews voted for Barack Obama.
Shapiro apparently has a list of stupid things he’s said on his website, and this comment is now one of them. But as Seder shows, Shapiro was still defending his comment on Neil’s show just weeks before in 2019. This is disgusting, and he wonders how many times Shapiro can say stupid things like it, which go down on his list, before newspapers like the New York Times stop giving him fawning headlines like ‘The Philosopher for the Cool Kids’. Seder cites her a tweet by Almanaqa refuting another tweet by Shapiro denying that he planned the synagogue attack. He didn’t, and nobody is saying that he did. But his rhetoric did inspire the attackers. Seder also makes the point that this is what the Intellectual Dark Web, so beloved of extreme right-wing ideologues, is actually about – Nazi sites like Gab. He concludes by attacking Shapiro once again for his comments and demanding that he be held responsible for them.
I’m blogging about this because this isn’t just an American problem. In this country the lamestream media, the Conservatives and the Blairites in the Labour party are using the same Nazi distinction between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ Jews to smear the Jewish supporters of Jeremy Corbyn, as Jewish and gentile left-wing bloggers like Tony Greenstein, Martin Odoni, David Rosenberg, Jewish Voice for Labour, Mike Sivier, Tim Fenton of Zelo Street and Tom of Another Angry Voice have pointed out.
It isn’t quite a distinction between ethnic and religious Jews, as the racism has included very religious, ultra-Orthodox Jews like Shraga Stern. But there is a particular venom within the Zionist right at Israel-critical Jews, like Greenstein and Jackie Walker, who are subjected to the vilest abuse. Abuse which would be considered anti-Semitic if it came from gentiles.
And right-wing Zionists do ally themselves with the Islamophobic and Nazi right. They have links to Tommy Robinson and the EDL, as well as Paul Besser and Britain First. Tony Greenstein’s put up long articles identifying the organisations and individuals involved. These include Jewish Fascist organisations, like Herut. When the Board of Deputies and Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis organised their farcical rally against the Labour party last year, two of the Zionists attending sported T-shirts bearing the Kach logo. Kach was a Judaeo-Nazi terrorist organisation banned in Israel. And then there’s the antics of the former Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, who led a British contingent to the March of the Flags day in Israel. This is when Jewish Nazi thugs march round the Muslim quarter of Jerusalem, vandalising homes and businesses and intimidating the locals. The same Jonathan Sacks, who declared Reform Jews were ‘enemies of the faith’. Which is the rhetoric of persecution.
Those smeared as an anti-Semites by the witch-hunters – the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, the Board of Deputies and so on – have received death threats. Jackie Walker has been horrendously vilified. She has been told that she’s not Jewish, because she’s Black, and that she should be lynched and her body burnt or put in bin bags. Chris Williamson, the Labour MP, who rightly said that Labour had given too much ground to those making false accusations of anti-Semitism, has also received death threats.
So I wonder how long it’s going to be before someone attacks a Jewish supporter of Jeremy Corbyn, and then states in court that they were doing it because he or she was ‘the wrong type of Jew’, and they were radicalised by Sacks, Mirvis, Gideon Falter and Marie van der Zyle.
On Wednesday, Mike posted a story reporting that Jewish Voice had launched a campaign against Islamophobia, called appropriately enough, #JewsAgainstIslamophobia. They are not only campaigning against Tommy Robinson and the EDL, but also against right-wing Jews, who ally themselves with these Fascists.
Mike then went on to ponder whether they would take on the authors of a statement that British anti-Semites were mostly like to be Muslim, and that this country should not shy away from tackling the immense anti-Semitism in the Muslim community as well as the general population. This statement comes from the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, the extreme right-wing Zionist organisation that smeared Mike as an anti-Semite. The identification of Muslims as being more anti-Semitic than the rest of the population is itself racist, as Mike pointed out. He asked
If anybody had written, for example, that British Jews are Islamophobic and sympathise with terrorism, violence and extremism, how do you think that organisation would react?
Clearly the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism would have gone berserk with rage, which shows the hypocrisy and double standards of this organisation.
He then goes on to discuss the case of one of the Campaign’s individual members, the odious, repugnant and utterly mendacious Jonathan Hoffman. Mike states that when the CAA attacked Mike, which he believes was part of a plan to stop him being elected a Labour councillor for Powys, Hoffman and his fellow trolls turned up on the Labour Party campaign facebook page to make the same accusation of anti-Semitism.
He then links to three websites that provide information on this individual, including various incidents in which he has tried to close down free speech on Israel through screams, insults, smears and intimidation.
This first links to a story published in the Middle East Monitor in November last year, about how Hoffman and his mates in the Jewish Defence League turned up to disrupt a showing of the film, From Balfour to Banksy: Visions and Divisions in Palestine, shown at the Centre for Palestine Studies at SOAS. The film was intended to be part of an academic discussion of the history of Palestine, and the legacy of the Balfour declaration, which gave British support to a Jewish state.
This was too much for the precious snowflakes of the JDL to handle, and they began shouting and screaming, and waving Israeli flags around, in order to intimidate the organisers and drive people out of the film. Afterwards Hoffman issued a Tweet accusing the producer, Miranda Pinch, of anti-Semitism and trying to suppress free speech. When asked about this by the Middle East Monitor, Pinch stated that there was an attempt to suppress free speech, but it wasn’t by them. It was by the JDL. She said that she got the impression that they didn’t have any arguments, and so just wanted to shout them down. A student who was there described them as behaving like a bunch of football hooligans. Pinch also stated that she doesn’t have any issue with existence of the state of Israel, she just campaigns for justice for everyone there, Jewish, Christian and Muslim. She said
“I have ALWAYS made it clear that I stand for equality and human rights for all in that region and that includes Jews, Christians, Muslims and anyone else living there. I am a signatory of Jews for Justice and have many Jewish friends, both practising and non-practising. My view, as most of theirs, is that Israel does not represent the Jewish religion at all. The Old Testament exhorts the Jews again and again to care for the stranger in their midst and to love justice. Israeli policies bring Judaism into disrepute,” said Pinch.
The comparison with football hooligans is very apt. The Jewish Defence League are the Jewish division of the far-right, Islamophobic English Defence League, which does have links to various firms of football hooligans, allegedly. Quite apart from the fact that a Channel 4 documentary screened a little while ago when the organisation seemed to be gaining strength showed that, while Robinson and the leadership tried to project an image of being non-racist, the grassroots membership were the usual Nazis and Fascists from organisations like the BNP and so on.
The second link goes to a page, Hoffman Chronicled, which reveals that Hoffman is a member of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, and is a prolific contributor to the Jewish Chronicle website. It also shows him in the company of Kevin Carroll, the cousin of the EDL’s founder, Tommy Robinson, who’s also in the EDL. There’s also a photo of him in the company of Roberta Moore, the founder of the EDL’s Jewish Division, and one of the European organisers of Victor Vancier’s Jewish Task Force.
The third link goes to the website of David Cronin, the author of several books about Israel and its long campaign of violence and ethnic cleansing against the Palestinians. This describes how Hoffman repeatedly turns up at his talks and makes baseless accusations of factual inaccuracy. It also describes how he also insults and smears other activists against the Israeli oppression of Palestinians, like Jackie Walker, Thomas Suarez, the author of another book about Israel, and even Hajo Meyer, a survivor of Auschwitz. Hoffman described Meyer as ‘an amazing dancing bear’ because he had the temerity to state that Israel was dehumanising the Palestinians the way the Nazi dehumanised Jews.
But the Zionists love him. He has been consulted by the Reut Institute, a think-tank founded by a former adviser to the Israeli government. In 2011 he attended a conference, partly organised by them, on how to discredit criticism of Israel. The following year he failed to get re-elected as a vice-president of the Zionist Federation. And in 2016 he and his mate, Jonathan Newmark, who also makes spurious accusations of anti-Semitism against critics of Israel.
That isn’t the only company he keeps. He was also photographed with Paul Besser, the intelligence officer – if that isn’t an oxymoron – of the Far Right, islamophobic group, Britain First.
Cronin concludes
Hoffman is undoubtedly a bully but nobody should allow themselves to be intimidated by him or by similar lobbyists. Their belligerence illustrates that Israel feels discomfited by Palestine solidarity activists.
They don’t like the message, so they slander the messengers.
This is absolutely true. And clearly they feel very threatened by Mike, otherwise Hoffman and his fellow thugs and bullies wouldn’t have tried to smear Mike as an anti-Semite. They’re scared, and more people are becoming aware of how scared they are, and how their accusations of anti-Semitism are nothing but baseless smears and gross libel.
The anti-racist, anti-religious extremism organisation and site, Hope Not Hate, has put up on their site any number of stories showing how bonkers, ridiculous, and ultimately sad the Far Right are. These include details of their attempts to style themselves as the new Mussolinis, Hitlers and Mosleys, complete with cod Fascist uniforms. The megalomania of their leaders, as shown by the demand of one of these sawdust Caesars, that the assembled squadristi kiss his ring. One of them refused on the grounds that it was ‘homoerotic’. No! Really? This from a movement which has, historically, been fully of self-hating gays.
Then you have the sordid details about how these brave patriots, determined to save Britain from the menace posed by Jews, Muslims, Asians, Blacks, trade unions, gays, Gypsies, Socialists, Communists, and that bloke, who looked at them in a funny way once, have run away from the fights they’ve caused when they’re outnumbered. Or have beaten each other up because of disputes about money, stealing other people’s girl- and boyfriends. HNH has also mocked them because of their hypocrisy for engaging themselves in the type of sordid activities they blame on ‘Jewish big business wideboys’ and people of colour. Like drug peddling.
And they can hardly claim to be standing up for innocent, virginal White people and wholesome sexual morality against ‘Jewish pornographers’, when they themselves have, er, ‘private’ shops selling such magazines and other material. Which includes interracial porn. One female contributor to Counterpunch, looking at the marching morons in Charlottesville, stated that Fascists generally tend to be repressed self-hating gays, or, if not, be massively fixated on Black men pleasuring their wives with their enormous members. The Alt Right regularly uses the term ‘cuck’ as a form of abuse for their opponents. It’s short for ‘cuckold’, meaning a man, whose wife has been unfaithful to him. It also refers to a sexual perversion, where a man gets off on watching his wife have sex with other men. So in the case of the assembled Nazis, the term ‘cuck’ would seem to be self-referential.
The Far Right are a real menace and a growing threat. But they’re also so grotesque and incompetent that they’re also blackly funny. Hope Not Hate laughs at their stupidity, calling them ‘Nutzis’ and ‘Boneheads’. So did Private Eye. After running a series of stories about the bizarre antics of the BNP in Dagenham and Barking, and Tower Hamlets, the satirical magazine somehow got hold of an internal document showing that many of their stormtroopers had resigned. Among the various reasons was that the party had been made to look silly in the Eye.
Now the silliness continues in the form of the banned Nazi group, National Action, having sent a begging email to Tony Greenstein. I’ve blogged about and linked to several of Greenstein’s posts before, because he’s a bitter critic of Israeli racism and their ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. He’s also very anti-racist generally, and is a staunch opponent of Fascism. Quite apart from the fact that he is Jewish. His Zionist opponents have smeared him as anti-Semitic, but anyone reading his column will find plenty of evidence to refute that. He’s a secular atheist, like so many people, but that does not mean he hates his own ethnic group. Reading his posts, you find that he is very active within other Jewish Socialist organisations and those of Jews, who share his own fierce opposition to Israel and its ethnic cleansing of the country’s indigenous Arabs. In one article about a genuine Jewish anti-Semite, Gilad Atzmon, Greenstein has stated that the constitution of the pro-Palestinian group to which he belongs makes it clear that anti-Semites are very definitely denied membership.
All this, apparently, has been lost on the leadership of the Nazi outfit, National Action. Greenstein says he’s been receiving emails from them over the past few months asking him if he would like to make a donation. He tried to unsubscribe from their list, but they’ve come back.
They want his money because two of the Nazi organisation’s wretched leadership, Paul Golding and Jayda Fransen, have jumped bail and gone on the lam. They want the money to overturn the bail conditions that were imposed on them for demonstrating against the ‘Muslim child rapists’. Presumably this would be one of the groups of Asian men responsible for the serial assault and sexual enslavement of hundreds of young girls.
No decent person has any time for child abusers and people do have legitimate reasons for protesting against the Asian paedophile gangs. Not because the gangs were Asian, but because the council knew about it and allowed them to continue because of the perceived threat to racial harmony. Since the scandal broke, there have been Asian writers commenting in the papers that the authorities smeared their communities by assuming that Muslims and/or Asians generally would riot if these men were arrested and brought to justice.
They also point out that the majority of paedophiles in this country are White. And there certainly is an element of selective outrage amongst the British Far Right, as several of those claiming to be defending girls and young women from these predators have themselves been sentenced to prison for sexual abuse and assault.
Greenstein suspects that the reason the Nazis have come back to ask him for cash is the result of some dirty tricks between the Zionist organisations that have set out to smear him as an Anti-Semite. He writes
Why have I been resubscribed? I suspect it is dirty tricks from one Jonathan Hoffman whose best friend is Britain First’s ‘Intelligence’ Chief Paul Besser. Both like to picket Palestinian and other meetings on the grounds of ‘anti-Semitism’.
This is a reference to a Palestinian civil rights conference which the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism declared was ‘anti-Semitic’ even before it started. Hoffman, a leading member of one of these anti-Palestinian groups, was caught standing next to Besser at the demo. Which shows how selective and hypocritical the Zionist’s definition of anti-Semitism is. As for Besser and Britain First, the real anti-Semites always had a very flexible attitude to who was Jewish when it suited them. Karl von Luegerer,, then anti-Semitic mayor of Vienna, whom Hitler admired, had numerous Jewish friends. When asked about them by one of his fellow bigots, Luegerer replied ‘I say who’s a Jew and who isn’t’.
Greenstein concludes his comments by saying
I guess it’s kind of flattering to be told that they need me, even if they offer me the alternative of signing up or do nothing. At least, it would seem they take Jews!
Dig deep for these two neo-Nazi nuts. You know they’re worth it.
This is obviously very heavy irony. National Action have been banned as a terrorist group. They’re very openly Nazi. There’s footage of them at a demonstration in Liverpool screaming ‘Sieg Heil!’ and raising their right arms in the Fascist salute. Hope Not Hate also obtained a copy of a speech one of their leaders, Kevin Layzell, gave up north, which followed the usual Nazi conspiracy theory about the Jews using non-White immigration to destroy the White race.
They clearly don’t want Jews at all. On the other hand, someone might think that they could be useful for smearing a genuine anti-racist by association. Or it could be simply colossal, asinine stupidity. Which, given the massive lack of competence these thugs have shown over the years, is also a very plausible factor.
This is absolutely unbelievable. And to people, who have suffered genuine anti-Semitism, or who have stood up for those, who have, this must come as a very sick joke. Tony Greenstein, a Socialist, anti-Zionist and anti-racist blogger, who is himself Jewish, has run a series of articles pointing out that the Zionists have very frequently collaborated with Nazis and real anti-Semites. Both have had the same goals. The Nazis wanted to clear the Jews out of their countries, while the Zionists have as one of their core beliefs the conviction that anti-Semitism cannot be fought, and so the Jews must have a country of their own. And so you had the Ha’avara agreement between the Nazis and the Zionists, in which the Nazis smuggled some Jews out to what would become Israel. This was before the Nazis revoked the agreement and decided on their policy of mass extermination. Even after the Nazis were murdering the Jewish people in the death camps, some Zionists still held out the hope that some Nazis could be persuaded to spare some and send them to Israel. It’s why George Soros despises the Zionists. Soros is of Hungarian Jewish heritage, and the leader of the Zionists in Fascist Hungary, Kasztner, collaborated with the Nazi deportations from this disgusting view.
And the hatred is reciprocated. Soros won’t give any of his billions to Israel, and so the Israelis hate him in turn. Last week, Yair Netanyahu, the son of Benjamin Netanyahu, posted a cartoon about George Soros lifted from the Nazi website, the Daily Stormer. This shows Soros alongside one of David Icke’s reptoids and an anti-Semitic caricature of a Jew. Netanyahu junior took the offending cartoon down, but not before it had been praised by David Duke, the former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, and one of the most anti-Semitic figures in American politics, as well as the Daily Stormer itself. The Stormer takes its name from the Nazi propaganda rag, Der Sturmer, edited by Julius Streicher, that vilified and smeared the Jews during the Third Reich.
Now the editor of the website, Andrew Anglin, has appeared on Israeli TV, saying that he defends Yair Netanyahu because he’s against liberal Jews, making a clear distinction between Israelis and diaspora Jews. Greenstein comments that the two presenters, including a woman, Michelle Ghora, who’s supposed to be investigating him, appear sympathetic. Ghora even makes a comment about how you can’t really blame people for resenting their – in other words, Jewish – interference in their politics.
Anglin goes further, and says ‘I’ve just become informed that there is a Jewish-Israel alt-Right. I’m happy about this…. They are using some of our memes, it is based upon our movement, they are bothered, sick of the same people in the same way.’
Greenstein notes that
Anglin is making a clear distinction between Israeli Jews and Zionists, who are racially aware and Diaspora Jews who are up to their old tricks, controlling other nations. In this you see the coming together of Zionist ideology, which was always hostile to the diaspora and neo-Nazi anti-semitism.
Earlier in his piece he also comments on the sheer hypocrisy of the Zionist lobby in this country, like the Jewish Labour Movement, when anti-Zionists call Israel what it is – a racist state.
Anglin’s not the only American Fascist to appear on Israel TV arguing that American Fascism and the Israelis have something in common. So did Richard Spencer, the head of the Alt-Right, who told his interviewers that he admired the Israelis for creating their own ethnic state, and he wants to do the same for White America.
Not that Britain’s Zionists are necessarily any better. Tony Greenstein also put up a piece a week or so ago commenting on how Jonathan Hoffman, the leader of the Zionist Federation of England and Wales, organized a protest outside a pro-Palestinian conference. One of those who joined his picket was Paul Besser, who was the intelligence officer of Britain First, the banned Fascist outfit that Thomas McNair, the assassin of Jo Cox, belonged to.
Tony Greenstein’s photo showing Hoffman, left, together with Besser, right.
Way back in the 1990s, the Raelians, a UFO new religious movement run by Claude Vorilhon, now called Rael, wanted to open an embassy in Jerusalem, ready for when the aliens – the Elohim, according to them, return. This got into controversy because of the symbol chosen by the Raelians: a Star of David containing a swastika. Naturally, this wasn’t going to go down very well in the Jewish state, many of whose citizens either were, or were descended from, the victims of the Nazis. But having seen how Yair Netanyahu and his supporters are embracing real Nazis and Fascists, even to the point where one of their leaders claims that there is an Israeli Alt-Right, that symbol seems horribly appropriate.
And it also means that the Zionist lobby in the UK – the misnamed Campaign Against Anti-Semitism and the Jewish Labour Movement – have no business whatsoever smearing genuine anti-racists and opponents of anti-Semitism, like Ken Livingstone, Jackie Walker and Mr. Greenstein himself as anti-Semites.
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