Israel Lobby Thugs Try to Close Down Book Launch with Threats and Intimidation

This can’t be left unchallenged. Yesterday a group of thugs from the Israel lobby, egged on by their fellows and supporters on social media, forced Waterstones in Brighton to abandon a book launch. When the event was moved to the Rialto, they tried the same tactics there, only for the management of that venue to stand firm.

The book in question was Bad News for Labour: Antisemitism, the Party and Public Belief by Greg Philo, Mike Berry, Justin Schlosberg, Antony Lerman and David Miller. This is a critical examination of the anti-Semitism crisis in the Labour party, particularly the denunciations of the party last summer that claimed it was institutionally racist and an existential threat to Britain’s Jews. The promotional material about the book, published by Pluto Press, however, states that

This book clears the confusion by drawing on deep and original research on public beliefs and media representation of antisemitism and the Labour Party, revealing shocking findings of misinformation spread by the press, including the supposedly impartial BBC, and the liberal Guardian.

Bringing in discussions around the IHRA definition, anti-Zionism and Israel/Palestine, as well as including a clear chronology of events, this book is a must for anyone wanting to find out the reality behind the headlines.

The authors are mainstream academics specialising in media studies, Jewish/Gentile relations and anti-Semitism. Mike, in his excellent article on the issue, gives their academic fields and qualifications. They are

Greg Philo is Professor of Communications and Social Change at the University of Glasgow, and Director of the Glasgow University Media Unit. Mike Berry is a lecturer in the Journalism School at Cardiff University. Justin Schlosberg is a media activist, researcher and lecturer in Journalism and Media at Birkbeck College, University of London. He is a former Chair of the Media Reform Coalition and Edmund J Safra Network Fellow at Harvard University. Antony Lerman is Senior Fellow at the Bruno Kreisky Forum for International Dialogue in Vienna and Honorary Fellow of the Parkes Institute for the Study of Jewish/non-Jewish Relations at Southampton University. He has written on multiculturalism, racism, antisemitism, and Israel/Palestine for the Guardian, Independent, New York Times, Haaretz, Prospect, Jewish Chronicle and London Review of Books. And David Miller is Professor of Political Sociology at the University of Bristol. He is a founder director of Public Interest Investigations and a director of the Organisation for Propaganda Studies. 

As Mike points out, they are academics, not anti-Semites. The two don’t go together, except in the pseudo-academia set up to provide a spurious intellectual veneer for the real hard right. Which these professors certainly don’t represent.

But this hasn’t stopped the Israel lobby and its supporters, both institutional and individual, going berserk and throwing around gross accusations of – what else! – anti-Semitism. The event was supposed to begin at 7.30, and would feature a panel discussion with the authors and Ken Loach. Two venues were forced to cancel it through intimidation and bullying that was so intense, an employee at one of the venues could not return to work.

The organisations supporting the bullying, and claiming the event was anti-Semitic were the Board of Deputies of British Jews and Sussex Jewish Representative Council. The individuals giving their support to it included one charmer giving his Twitter handle as #JC4 and then an icon of a toilet, Neil Barstow, Natalia Sloam, Nobody Norman Esq, Heidi Bachram, Ian Mackintosh, Jane Habib, Curry Fleur and Fiona Sharpe.

Mike states that he would like to see all the above interviewed by the rozzers about the threats suffered by the staff at Waterstone’s and the Rialto. He states it is especially abhorrent coming from those, who claim the moral high ground, and are using threats of violence to silence those they have smeared as anti-Semites and prevent them from exonerating themselves. He also points to a Tweet by one Gary Spedding, a venomous individual, who wrote an on-line article smearing Mike as an anti-Semite, which he refused to take down when Mike contacted him to show it was wrong. Spedding also added a few more ad homs against him on the way. It is to be hoped that Spedding also gets his collar felt about this.

Mike goes on to state that he does acknowledge that there is anti-Semitism in the Labour party. It just doesn’t exist in the book the Zionist fanatics were attacking, nor amongst the staff at Waterstones or the Rialto.

He concludes

These aren’t campaigners fighting prejudice against Jews.

They are vicious, hate-filled bigots.

And they need to be stopped before they seriously harm somebody.

One more thing – they did get an aspect of their campaign right: the slogan “Don’t host hate”. That’s a good slogan, and it can very clearly be applied to these bigots.

So I’m having it. If you see these people, or anyone else pushing their message, then flag it up with #DontHostHate

See: https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2019/09/24/bullying-bigots-tried-to-stop-book-launch-when-will-they-be-arrested/

Tony Greenstein, another victim of the anti-Semitism smear campaign, and a self-respecting Jew, who has always campaigned against racism and anti-Semitism as well as Zionism, has more information on this disgraceful thuggery on his blog at:

http://azvsas.blogspot.com/2019/09/book-burners-r-us-waterstones-shameful.html

Tony begins his article by describing the way the Israel lobby tried to prevent the performance of the play, Sedition, by the socialist playwright Jim Allen, 25 years ago. This drew the Israel lobby’s ire because it was about the 1944 trial in Jerusalem of the Zionist leader, Erich Kasztner, who had made a deal with Adolf Eichmann which sent half a million Hungarian Jews to death in Auschwitz. The play was due to be staged at the Royal Court. It was taken off, but so great was the public indignation against the attack on it, that it was performed instead at London’s Conway Hall and became the subject of a book, Dramas Played Off Stage.

Tony continues

That is what we need to see happen with Bad News for Labour. The Zionists know that their anti-Semitism smear campaign in the Labour Party is fraudulent and that they have cowed and coerced timid Corbyn into going along with the nonsense that the Labour Party is full of anti-Semites including himself. We must ensure that this book is publicised because it contains all the ammunition and evidence we need to demonstrate that the ‘anti-Semitism’ smear campaign has nothing to do with antisemitism and has no evidential basis. 

It is shocking enough that the supporters of Israeli Apartheid have been able to ‘persuade’ through threats and abuse, venues like the Holiday Inn, Jury’s Inn and Friends Meeting House into cancelling meetings with Chris Williamson. The cancellation on Monday night of a book by 5 academics of Bad News for Labour – Antisemitism, the Party and Public Belief takes this one step further. It is an attack on freedom of thought and inquiry and demonstrates the police state mentality of Zionism’s rabid supporters.

He goes on to quote the great German Jewish poet, Heinrich Heine, “Where books are burned, in the end, people will be burned” – which prophesied the mass book-burnings and murder of the Nazis. Justin Scholsberg, one of the authors, said last night that it was worse than McCarthyism and approached the book-burnings of the Nazis. Tony states

Cancelling a book launch and threatening to boycott Waterstones for holding the event is a Nazi tactic. It demonstrates just how far along the road to destroying our civil liberties and freedom of speech the Zionists have travelled. Literally Zionism is the enemy of a free society, not only in Israel/Palestine but in Britain, Europe and the United States.

He then goes on to discuss the culpable silence of the so-called liberal press about this incident, except for The Canary and the Skwawkbox, and calls upon his readers to imagine the outrage the Right would go into if the Left had done something similar against the genuinely racist books some of them have produced, like Douglas Murray’s racist Strange Death of Europe – Immigration, Identity and Islam.

And there’s much more in his very full article about the incident and the excuses made by Waterstone’s CEO for pulling the book launch from his store.

Tony and other Jewish anti-Zionists have long provided very detailed descriptions of just how violent and threatening the militant Zionists are, and their determination to shut down any criticism of their favourite apartheid state. They smear their opponents as anti-Semites – decent people like Mike, Martin Odoni, Tony Greenstein himself, Jackie Walker, Cyril Chilson, and Chris Williamson, so that they receive vile abuse. Some, like Walker and Williamson, have been sent death threats. Greenstein has also been assaulted by Jewish American Zionists. And a little while ago Tony also put up a piece describing how the CST – the paramilitary Community Security Trust – which is supposed to defend Jews, acts like Fascist stormtroopers when stewarding pro-Israel events. This includes beating up Muslims and anti-apartheid Jews. One rabbi was even hit in the face by these squadristi.

The people organising this campaign of abuse and intimidation should be called to account. And this includes the Board of Deputies. They are not above the law, and they are repeatedly demonstrating glaringly clearly that they do not represent the Jewish community of this country as a whole. They only represent the United Synagogue, and the pro-Israel branch of that. They are a viciously sectarian organisation, who actively support those who raise their fists at the people they consider the ‘wrong sort of Jew’. 

Giles Udy Tries Fomenting Red Scare against Corbyn and Labour

The Tories must really be in trouble. Not only are their supporters claiming they’re ahead in the polls, based simply on the evidence of one poll, and their fellow travelers in the Labour party are talking of quitting because of anti-Semitism, yet again, but the Tory press is now trying to run another Red Scare campaign.

This type of anti-Labour propaganda began with the Zinovieff letter in the 1920s. This purported to be a letter from the head of the Comintern in Communist Russia urging Labour to turn Britain into Communist state. It may have cost Labour the election that year, though some historians have suggested that Labour would have lost anyway and the letter itself didn’t make much difference. It certainly didn’t come from the Soviet Union, but was cooked up much closer to home by MI5.

In 1987 when Thatcher was up against Neil Kinnock, the Tory press ran it again. This time they claimed that there was a group of Labour MPs, who were secret Communists. If Labour was elected, they would oust Kinnock, seize power and turn Britain into a Communist state. The Scum also ran a double page spread of various left-wing Labour MPs, like Ken Livingstone and Diane Abbott, with quotes underneath them intended to scare the public into believing they were dealing with the ‘loony left’, as the Tories called them. The quote purporting to come from Red Ken had him saying that he didn’t believe in the British army, but in a worker’s army to guard the factories. And Diane Abbott was supposed to have said that ‘all White people are racist’. At the same time, the Tory press had been loudly telling everyone that Livingstone was a Marxist. Those who knew him made it clear that he wasn’t. He could sound like them on occasions, and was quite willing to use them. But he was never a Communist. So it’s a fair bet that Livingstone and Abbott may never have made the comments the Scum attributed to them, or if they did, they were ripped out of context. In any case there was no secret cabal of Commies within the Labour party plotting to seize power and turn us into the UKSSR.

Not that it stopped one of the Thatcher’s favourite novelists, Frederick Forsythe, writing another thriller based on this premise. This was about MI5 working to prevent Moscow turning Britain into a Soviet satellite through a group of infiltrators, who had worked their way into a Labour party headed by someone, who bore more than a little similarity to Michael Foot.

Now it seems the Tories are running the same scare tactics again. Zelo Street today has put up a very interesting piece about historian Giles Udy, who issued a series of Tweets promoting a forthcoming article in Tory political magazine Standpoint. Udy claims that Labour has a ‘shadow manifesto’ which states that capitalism has taken Britain to the abyss and only the seizure of power by the working class can save us. This document predicts that this revolution will be opposed by a Fascist dictatorship run by industrialists and newspaper editors, which will start a White Terror with death squads. This will only be avoided if the police, civil service, armed forces, security services and the judicial system are purged and replaced with supporters of the revolution. The lower ranks will be sent for re-education.

This is, of course, all twaddle. Zelo Street makes it clear that if you actually look at the article, you’ll find that the document in question doesn’t come from Labour. Not at all. It comes from the Communist Party of Britain’s 25,000 word piece, Britain’s Road to Socialism. This might actually cause a problem for a real journalist or historian, who would be well aware that this very obviously does not come from the Labour party. Udy tries to wave this objection away by saying that the words ‘socialist’, ‘democratic socialist’ and ‘communist’ are virtually interchangeable to describe followers of Marx. As Zelo Street remarks, they aren’t at all, and this is fraudulent in the extreme.

See: http://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2019/02/giles-udy-corbyn-red-scare-busted.html

In fact, Udy has previous in trying to smear Corbyn and other members of the Labour party as agents of Moscow. In February last year he issued a series of Tweets touting an article by him in the Torygraph. This was at the time the Tory press were claiming that Corbyn had passed information on to the Czech secret service, despite the fact that he didn’t. Udy claimed that Corby and Abbott must have met party officials when they went on holiday in the former DDR, and that the Stasi would have preserved records of these meetings. Except that Corbyn and Abbott didn’t meet anyone from Honecker’s ruling party, and the Stasi didn’t have any records of them doing so. Those facts did not deter Udy. He claimed that he didn’t believe Corbyn had taken money from the East Germans, but he was only one of various deluded members of the Labour party, who were admirers of socialist totalitarianism, and lamented the fact that Blair’s revolution hadn’t cleaned them all out. The other high-ranking Labour figure and trade unionist, who had taken Soviet money, he claimed, was Jack Jones, the former head of the Transport and General Workers Union, now Unite. He also claimed that Jones’ wife had been a Soviet agent since the 1930s. This was all bilge. He only had one source for this nonsense, and that was the Soviet defector and liar Oleg Gordievsky. But Jones and his wife were safely dead, and so couldn’t sue.

http://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2018/02/corbyn-smear-enter-useful-idiot.html

Udy was supposed to be a historian of the gulags, and was respected on the Right supposedly for his insight into the Labour party and Soviet Union. But Zelo Street said that after this article, he squandered whatever little credibility he had, and was just a paranoid fraud. ‘So no change there’.

None whatsoever. When things get tough for the Tories, run a scare story about them and Communism. This posed a problem when Blair was in power, as he was as right-wing as they were. They solved it then by published various fictions predicting that sometime in the next decade the remains of the European socialist parties would united with the Muslims to start a new Holocaust of European Jews. Frederick Raphael reviewed a book, which had this as its theme, set in France, around about 2004 in the Spectator as I recall. Now that they’ve got a real left-winger to fear and smear in the case of Corbyn, they’ve dropped all the stuff about Islam and are going back to Communism.

As for Standpoint itself, it’d be very interesting to know what connections it has, if any, with the British or American secret state. When the roughly left leaning political magazine, Prospect, first appeared about a decade or so ago, Lobster noted that it was more than a little like Encounter, another political mag from the ’60s – ’70s that was revealed to have been financed by the CIA. The right-wing press in this country has been running articles from the British secret state. It’s therefore quite possible that British intelligence or one of its nominally independent subsidiaries has been feeding it bilge about the Labour party as well. Like the smears against Corbyn and other British, American and European political figures claiming they were agents of Putin by the Integrity Initiative.

Which brings us right back to MI5 and the Zinoviev letter. And how old and shopworn the Tories’ smear tactics are.

Farage: Don’t Ring-Fence NHS Funding

UKIP’s purple Duce continues to present two faces on the NHS. The Independent today also has this article, Nigel Farage: ring-fencing the NHS is ‘nonsense’ reporting his remarks about the NHS in an interview he gave to Prospect magazine. In the interview, Farage said that he would make further cuts to the NHS’ budget, despite the fact that there is already a £2bn black hole in its finances. He also claimed that it was misleading for Labour and the Tories to claim they would ring-fence its funding, and said that the mainstream parties were too afraid to make negative comments about the Health Service.

The article quotes Fuhrage as saying of NHS funding “Even ring-fencing it is a waste of time—it’s moonshine to think we can.”

“We’ve reached a ridiculous point in the debate over health in Britain. Every time I’m on Question Time all the other politicians say is how wonderful the doctors and nurses are. Then everyone claps. Just because I’m not scared to criticise the NHS doesn’t mean I don’t think it’s important.”

The article mentions that in his memoirs, published last week, he blamed the NHS for misdiagnosing the testicular cancer that nearly killed him, and urged those who could to take out private health insurance.

In the Prospect interview, he praises the NHS for saving his life after he was hit by a car in 1985, and again when his light aircraft crashed five years ago when he was campaigning in the elections.

Despite this, the Independent points out that his comments about ending the ring-fence around NHS funding mean that he has turned his back on his promise to increase funding by £3bn.

The Indie’s article is at http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/generalelection/nigel-farage-ringfencing-the-nhs-budget-is-nonsense-10123958.html.

Farage’s comments on the NHS are confused, and deliberately so. He has said repeatedly that he wishes to see it privatised and replaced with an insurance-based system, as in the US. So has his deputy leader, Oberleutnantsturmgangfuehrer Paul Nuttall, last seen this weekend ranting about ‘cultural Marxism’. Farage is also acutely aware that if he makes his intentions public, he will wipe out immediately any electoral gains he thinks he can make. So are his followers. The other Kippers even told him to shut up about it.

Hence he deliberate shows two faces – appearing both to support the NHS, while wanting everyone to denounce it and get private health insurance if they can.

Don’t be deceived. And as for his comments about breaking the taboo about saying only good things about the NHS, this is the line taken by the Repugs over the other side of the Atlantic. One Repug site was fuming about the inclusion of the NHS in the celebration of British history in the opening pageant at the London Olympics. This particular Republican site also loudly denounced the minimal state health provision in America, like Medicare and Medicaid, in which the state pays the medical bills of those too old or poor to have health insurance.

It is these people with whom Fuhrage was mixing when he turned up at CPAC the other week.

As for Prospect, the parapolitical magazine, Lobster, has pointed out that, despite its mildly left-wing appearance, it has more than a little similarity to the Encounter. This was another cultural magazine, that was revealed to be funded by the CIA as part of its cultural campaign against Russia and Communism.

Osborne’s Attack on National Insurance as Jobs Tax and the Privatisation of the NHS

Last Thursday, Gorgeous George delivered his ‘state of the economy’ address. This was muddled and contradictory. Osborne seemed to be trying to be optimistic, declaring that the economy was recovering, while at the same time saying it was still in a parlous state and more cuts needed to be made. Mike has provided an excellent critique of his speech over at Vox Political. It can be found at http://mikesivier.wordpress.com/2013/12/07/the-state-of-osborne-a-visitors-guide/. One of the most significant parts of his speech was where the Chancellor described National Insurance as a tax on jobs, and stated that he was repealing it for those age 18-21 to get them into work. This seems to have been lauded, at least on the BBC, as a positive move. Points West, the local news programme on BBC 1 for Bristol, Gloucestershire and Somerset, did a piece that evening commenting on George’s speech, with one of their journalists reporting from one of the region’s factories. He interviewed one of the firm’s managers, who concurred entirely with Gideon’s comments about NI. Yes, he said, they’d like to employ more young people, but they were prevented by the costs of National Insurance. He then repeated Gideon’s comments about it being a tax on jobs.

This criticism of National Insurance rang alarm bells in me. A little while ago I was talking to a friend of mine, who told me that he’d been arguing with a Conservative on the net. This Tory was repeatedly arguing that Britain could no longer afford the NHS. My friend had been arguing that contrary, and tried to show that the NHS was not only more competitive and efficient than the social insurance schemes or completely privatised systems the Lib-Dems and Conservatives favour, but it could be made entirely affordable through increased NI contributions. This had not impressed the Tory, who continued posting the nonsense about the necessity of privatising the NHS. ‘Of course’, said my friend about the arguments against privatisation ‘this isn’t going to make much difference. The City want to decouple National Insurance from the welfare state as they don’t want it NI contributions raised’. If that’s correct, and I don’t doubt for a moment it is, then Gorgeous George’s comments about National Insurance are part of his wider plan to privatise the NHS.

It’s also part of a wider plan to abolish welfare benefits. At the moment, state pensions are still provided through NI contributions. If Gideon abolished this for 18 to 21 year olds, as one of Mike’s commenters has pointed out, then it means that they either have to take out a private pension plan or take out a workplace pension. It also means that they will have to work for another three years longer than those a few years older, who were luck enough not to be caught out by Gideon’s reform.

None of this was really picked up on at the time, though the Beeb did cover some of Labour’s criticisms of the Chancellor’s speech. I wonder if more trenchant criticism of Osborne’s comments on the economy on the BBC may have been hindered by the Conservative bias of the Beeb’s news team themselves, and an attack on the BBC as a state industry in the Tory magazine press. This week’s edition of Standpoint, which was launched as a Right-wing rival to Prospect, carried an article by Toby Young declaring ‘Now is the Time to Privatise the BBC. In a recent interview with Andrew Marr, Greg Dyke shrugged off Tory allegations of left-wing BBC bias as something that you could expect them to do, when faced with something they disagreed with. Every government, whether Left or Right, has believed that the BBC was biased against them. Nevertheless, with the Tories explicitly demanding the cessation of the BBC as a state broadcaster, it’s to be expected that any further criticism of the Conservatives in the next few weeks may be somewhat more muted than usual.