Two schools have been in the news this past week or two, one because of threats made to staff over the prohibition of ‘free Palestine’ badges and the other because of attempts by Muslims pupils to overturn its secular culture and allow Muslim prayer. These events have been particularly reported and commented on by GB News, the channel that has two political biases: right and far right. This piece is a response in particular to the channel’s Patrick Christie, who has had a few things in particular to say about it.
One of these schools is Berkeley school, which has been the subject of a mass protesters outside its gates denouncing it. This is because the school stopped a pupil from wearing a ‘free Palestine’ badge. Rumours then spread, which have been denied by the school, that the lad was then bullied. The school states that it has a rule banning political badges. However, the badge’s prohibition has provoked angry protests. Free Palestine stickers and posters have appeared all over the surrounding area, including on private individual’s houses. One resident said that it happened on her house, and that there had been people driving around the area staring at her and other residents in an intimidating manner. This particularly upset her, because previously the area had been well-integrated and harmonious. Staff at the school itself had received death threat. It has been closed, and may never reopen, because it received a bomb threat along with a racially abusive phone call. In the meantime the school has resorted to distance learning for its pupils.
The other school is Michaela school, run by ‘Britain’s strictest headmistress’ Katherine Birbalsingh. This has very high academic scores, although listening to the discipline imposed on its pupils it sounds like a soul-crushing nightmare to me. Among other rules, pupils have to be silent in the corridor. Before I fell ill with the myeloma, I used to help out doing voluntary work with one of the local junior schools in my area. My job was simply to sit there and listen to the kids with reading difficulties read. The school at the time was run by the local authority, and was full of the stuff you’d expect and want on the walls of primary school. It had the children’s art and craft on display, as well as the rules commanding respect, tolerance and firmly banning bullying on the entrance lobby. It seemed the kind of happy school I remember when I was an ickle sprog. Then it was taken over by an academy chain against the wishes of the headmaster and staff. The head resigned, as did many of the ordinary teachers, and the ethos of the school changed. The art came off the walls, leaving them bare except for the school rules and safety regulations. Pupil behaviour was also clamped down upon. Like Birbalsingh’s school, talking in the corridors was banned. It changed from a cheerful learning environment to a grim, repressive place. I don’t know if the school’s scores improved, but it seemed to me that its joylessness was more likely to stop children wanting to come and learn than encourage them. Especially if work they and their teachers were proud of no longer appeared on its walls.
Birbalsingh is a secularist. She believes that for multiculturalism to work, religious differences, at least in her school, have to be minimised and removed. Hence she does not permit prayer. Some Muslims therefore started praying outside in the school playground using their jackets as prayer mats. This was duly forbidden as well. One pupil therefore took the school to court stating that the ban was unfair as it particularly affected Muslims. Muslims are required by their religion to pray five times a day. However, this seems to have been part of general attempt to enforce Muslim religious observance on the other pupils. Muslim girls wearing their hair free faced pressure to wear the hijab, for example. I think the court ruled in favour of the pupil. Birbalsingh as now announced that she is going to launch an appeal to ban prayer in school generally.
There are a number of aspects to these events and the reporting by GB News. The channel is especially keen on ‘culture war’ issues, such as the trans debate. It also gives due coverage to the news about the Pakistani Muslim grooming gangs. Christie compared the intimidating behaviour and the death threats made against Berkeley School with the mass protests against the teacher at the school in Batley, who was hounded out and is now in hiding because he showed his pupils the cartoons of Mohammed as part of a debate on freedom of speech. As obnoxious as Christie is, I think he’s right here. The same venomously intolerant forces are at work and need to be clamped down on. This is not about denying the protesters their rights to protest. It is about stopping threats and intimidation from an intolerant section of the Muslim community, especially when it involves death threats and reports of masked men hanging around the premises.
But I’m also aware that this is part of a wider campaign from the right-wing news channel to smear the left and the pro-Palestine campaign. The right-wing media have been running the line that the demonstrators against the genocide in Gaza are anti-Semites and Muslim supremacists, and this is an attempt to cow non-Muslim Britain with a series of shows of strength. As when they turned up to pray outside 10 Downing Street or Whitehall. For decades a section of the Conservative right has been spreading the idea that the left and militant Islam will combine to suppress traditional European freedoms and establish an Islamic state governed by sharia law. Anthony Burgess, the writer of A Clockwork Orange and author of the first Proto-Indo-European dictionary, wrote a book in the 1980s as a response to Orwell’s classic 1984. This book, with the rather obvious and unoriginal title 1985, was set in a Britain where the trade unions united with militant Muslims to start a revolution. This showed me exactly where the political sympathies of the man dubbed ‘Britain’s most pretentious writer’ lay. Then in the first years of this century the Spectator reviewed an SF book, set round about now in France, where the remains of French socialism had united with the Muslims to establish an Islamic state and had started a new Holocaust against the Jews. Because to the person who wrote this piece of literary trash, Socialists and Muslims are all anti-Semites. This line is being pushed now because of the attitude among the militant Zionist right that any criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic. Even if it comes from proud, principled Jews deeply involved with their community and their gentile friends.
Birbalsingh’s case is slightly different. As it is developing, it appears to be becoming a contest between the forcible observance of Islam in the school environment, and a forcible secularism. I am not a secularist. I am very much a person of faith. This blog was initially set up for Christian apologetics, to defend religion in general and Christianity in particular against the attacks by the New Atheists in the first decade or so of this century. Mike and I went to an Anglican church school. I have Roman Catholic cousins who went to the Roman Catholic schools in Bristol. I also have Methodist and Baptist friends. I have not noticed any sectarian prejudice and hatred among the peeps in my part of Bristol, although I am aware of the situation in Northern Ireland and in Glasgow. The teachers at my old school included Methodists, Roman Catholics and Presbyterians and they all had a horror of religious bigotry and violence. I support parents’ right to bring their children up in their religion and to send them to a faith school if they so wish. Provided, of course, that the teaching in that school conforms to British values of democracy, freedom of belief and conscience, religious tolerance and genuine racial equality.
Here I differ from Talk Radio Tory mouthpiece, Julia Hartley-Brewer, who also took it upon herself to weigh in on this subject. She wanted religion to be kept out of schools altogether and didn’t want children to be divided according to their parents’ religion. I dare say that if this came from a woman or man of the left, the Daily Mail would have heart attack and condemn it as an attack on traditional British belief and culture. But as it comes from her, the Mail and other right-wing organs and personages will remain silent.
But I think this part of a strategy by some militant Muslims to impose Muslim belief and observance on non-Muslim schools and organisations. And I think it probably has its ultimate origin in Pakistan. A few years ago I heard from a Christian Pakistani lady about the immense pressure Christians in Pakistan are under to convert to Islam. Her father had been the headmaster of a Christian school. The leading schools in Pakistan are Christian and Muslims are desperate to get their children into them. But they also put pressure on the headmasters to convert.
A few years ago there was a case in this country where a Muslim had been desperate to get his son into the local Christian school. When he succeeded, he then sued the school demanding that all the Christian iconography and ethos be removed, because it went against his Muslim beliefs and sensibilities. And I’ve heard of other cases like it in the charity sector.
I honestly don’t want prayer or religion removed from schools or the public sector. A presumably Muslim commenter to one of these videos noted that Roman Catholic schools provided prayer rooms for Muslim pupils, claimed that praying only took five minutes and ‘had many benefits’. That may be so, but I gather that Birbalsingh’s school is in a very ethnically and religious mixed area and that she felt that secularism was necessary for multiculturalism to work. My sympathies here are with her school. If the school rules ban prayer and this applies to everyone, then pupils coming to the school voluntarily should obey it. If they cannot, then they should perhaps choose another school.
And those choosing to practise their religion should not force it on those that don’t.
Jewish Comics Artist Eli Valley Attacks the ‘Kapo’ Insult Hurled by Zionists
November 8, 2018It must be the week for comics and the Israel lobby. This time last week the bug-eyed Zionists of JVLWatch tried again to smear Mike as an anti-Semite using his ‘Hardboiled Hitler’ strip from Violent. Violent is Mike’s small-press homage to the 1970s comic, Action, which caused outraged and ended up being banned because of its violent content. In ‘Hardboiled Hitler’, Mike satirizes the Fuehrer, presenting him as a superhero, who is nevertheless a grotesque, posturing, inept, flatulent clown. The flatulence is entirely historically accurate. Hitler suffered from meteorism – chronic flatulence. Apparently it got very loud and nasty when he was in full rant. JVLWatch, whoever they are, tried to present the strip as a glorification of the Nazi regime and that the poisonous clouds surrounding Hitler represented the gas chambers used to murder the Jews. They weren’t. The noxious fumes surrounding Hitler all came from the Fuehrer’s bottom, and very definitely didn’t make him look at all heroic or glamorous. Various newspapers have also tried to make the same claim that Mike’s anti-Semitic using the strip. And as Mike says, when he complained to the press-regulator IPSO about them, the regulator dismissed their claims out of hand.
On Tuesday Tony Greenstein put up on his blog a page of art by the American left-wing Jewish comic artist and writer, Eli Valley, published in Jewish Currents, attacking the ‘Kapo’ insult. The Kapos were the heads of the Warsaw ghetto under the Third Reich. The Nazis cruelly delegated to them the responsibility of choosing which of their community should be sent to the extermination camps, which they did under duress. If the leaders refused, the SS would have attacked and killed everyone there.
Since then it’s become an insult the Israel lobby hurls at those Jews, who criticize Israel and Zionism for its crimes against the Palestinians. In the page reproduced by Greenstein, Valley turns the insult around and hurls it back at them, showing how the Zionists deserve the epithet far more than the people they slander. He explains how he was once attacked in this way by the editor of the Jewish magazine, Commentary, because he published a story about a Jew’s crisis of conscience after Israeli settlers burned alive a Palestinian child. The current Israeli ambassador to Israel also used it against the centre-left Jews of J-Street. He goes on to make the point that the Israeli right believe that the lessons of the Holocaust are that gentiles will always hate Jews, who must survive by any means necessary. That means attacking as treason even objection to the most Fascistic forms of Israeli nationalism. Hence Netanyahu joined demonstration attacking Yitzhak Rabin as a Nazi.
But to Valley, the real Kapos are the supporters of Trump and Netanyahu, the people who support Trump’s separation of immigrant children from their parents in his own concentration camps on the Mexican border. He shows the similarity between recent American immigrants, who have committed suicide fearing deportation, and those Jews who did the same in Franco’s Spain fearing that they would be sent back to the Third Reich. He also attacks the Orthodox Union for its award to Trump’s politico, Jeff Sessions. American Jews, he argues, have forgotten the other lesson of the Holocaust, that atrocities like this should never again happen to anyone, anywhere, ever again.At the heart of this problem is the way the Jewish community has allowed Jewish identity to be defined by a mainly Zionist, Orthodox right-wing minority. The result is that the Jewish community has internalized this view, and sees themselves through its lens. Hence when Jews declared that they felt ashamed to be Jewish after Israeli snipers killed over a hundred Gazans, this showed that they had accepted the belief that only Israel embodied authentic Jewish values. The strip concludes by that Jews need to take control of the vernacular to express the values they share, and use it to excommunicate people like arch-Zionist Trump supporter, Sheldon Adelson. Valley concludes by comparing them to the real Kapos, who had no choice about their collaboration with the Nazis. He states of the Zionists and other Jews supporting Trump ‘Kapo doesn’t begin to plumb the depths of their betrayal.’
It’s strong stuff which makes an excellent point, particularly because of Trump’s own connections to and support for the genuine anti-Semites of the extreme right. Greenstein also provides a link in his article to the webpages for Valley and his work. Valley’s published a collection of his strips from over the years, Diaspora Boy, in which he attacks right-wing abuse and corruption in the Jewish community and wider American society. The webpages also have samples of his work. And along with the critical praise is a quotation from a very offended person, who felt that it shouldn’t have been published anywhere. Valley’s been compared to Robert Crumb, but that’s not quite right. His view of society and humanity is as bleak and vicious as Crumb’s, but his style is more like that of Charles Burns in his 1990s alternative comic, Skin Deep.
Greenstein also adds more awkward facts to support Valley’s view of Zionists as the real Kapos. Like the Ha’avara agreement between the Nazis and Israel in 1933 that broke the international Jewish boycott of Nazi Germany and the suppression of the Auschwitz Protocols by Hungarian Zionist Erich Kasztner in order to preserve a treaty between them and the Nazis. He describes how the founder of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, came to believe that anti-Semitism was inevitable and couldn’t be fought when he was in France during the Dreyfus scandal. Hence the head of the Israeli Labor Party, Avi Gabbay, told American Jews that the real place was in Israel after the Pittsburgh massacre on Saturday. And how Berl Katznelson, the founder of the Israeli party Mapai, declared the Nazi seizure of power in 1933 was an opportunity for the Jews to build and flourish as never before, at a time when the rest of German Jewry were preparing to protest. This is also the reason why Ben Gurion opposed the Kindertransport evacuating Jewish children from Nazi Germany to Britain, because they wouldn’t be taking them to Israel. As for the real Kapos, Greenstein writes
The kapos were themselves prisoners who were destined for extermination. They had no control over their situation and their collaboration, if that is what it was, was forced. Who knows what any of us would do in such a situation? The Jewish Agency was under no such compulsion yet it willingly collaborated lobbying the Gestapo not to allow Jewish emigration to countries other than Palestine.
He then goes on to discuss the way members of the Fascist right, like Britain First, are accusing genuine anti-racists of racism, and how the National Front and BNP try to present themselves as protecting British Whites from Black racism. He also mentions how Zionists frequently tell their Jewish opponents that they wish they and their families had died in the Holocaust. One of the victims of this vile abuse was Aurora Levins Morales, a Black Jewish New Yorker.
He also attacks James Dyer, a Christian Zionist and member of the Sussex Friends of Israel – a group that’s also close to the EDL – who called him a ‘Kapo’. He goes on to connect him to Christian millennialist support for Zionism, which believes that the foundation of Israel is part of the End Times. Before Christ returns, however, the world will suffer a great tribulation. And in the Book of Revelation this will result in the destruction of the vast majority of Jews, except a small number who convert to Christianity. One of the most prominent Right-wing American Christian leaders is Jack Hagee, the head of Christians United for Israel, who also believes that Hitler did God’s work. He’s one of the two pastors Trump has appointed as ambassadors to Israel. He goes on to connect this with Christian anti-Semitism during the Third Reich, such as the German Lutheran church’s installation of the pro-Nazi bishop, Ludwig Muller as Reich Bishop, and Monsignor Tiso, the Roman Catholic prelate in Slovakia who presided over the deportations to the death camps there. He concludes
It is therefore no surprise that today the successors of Muller and Tiso are to be found supporting the Zionists and decrying any notion of Palestinian rights. It is even less of a surprise that they assuage their consciences with the taunt of ‘Kapo’.
http://azvsas.blogspot.com/2018/11/kapo-anti-semitic-insult-that-zionists.html
To be fair to Hagee, he’s not the only person, who believed that Hitler did God’s work. Apart from Hitler himself, I think Holocaust survivor and acclaimed author Elie Wiesel also stated that Hitler was God’s servant, based on the way God in the Old Testament uses foreign invaders like the Assyrians and Babylonians to punish Israel before punishing them in turn. Wiesel, incidentally, was certainly no self-hating Jew. He was a staunch supporter of Israel, who never criticized its brutal maltreatment of the Palestinians.
And Christian Zionism has been attacked for its racism and distorted theology by the Christians of the American Presbyterian Church in several books, which have been reviewed by the Electronic Intifada, and which I’ve blogged about.
But Greenstein’s article and Valley’s cartoons show very graphically how the real Kapos and collaborators with Fascism are the Zionists, both Jewish and Christian.
Tags:'Action', 'Commentary', 'Diaspora Boy', 'Skin Deep', 'Violent', Adolf Hitler, Ambassdors, anti-semitism, Anti-Semitism Smears, Assyrians, Aurora Levins Morales, Auschwitz Protocols, Avi Gabbay, Babylonians, Benjamin Netanyahu, Berl Katznelson, Blacks, BNP, Book of Revelations, Britain First, Charles Burns, Children, Christianity, Christians United for Israel, Concentration Camps, Deportation, Donald Trump, Dreyfus Affair, EDL, Electronic Intifada, Eli Valley, Elie Wiesel, General Franco, Haavara Agreement, Holocaust, Immigration, IPSO, Israeli Labor Party, Israeli Settlers, Jack Hagee, Jeff Sessions, Jewish Agency, Jews, JVLWatch, Ludwig Muller, Lutheran Church, MAPAI, Mike Sivier, Millennialism, Monsignor Tiso, Murder, National Front, New York, Orthodox Judaism, Palestinians, Pittsburgh Shooting, Presbyterians, Robert Crumb, Rudolf Kasztner, Sheldon Adelson, Slovakia, Sussex Friends of Israel, Theodor Herzl, Tony Greenstein, Warsaw Ghetto, Whites, Yitzhak Rabin, Zionism
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