Ali Harbi Ali, the assassin responsible for the murder of Tory MP David Amess, was tried last week and duly found guilty. There really couldn’t be any doubt, as the thug didn’t try to run away or deny his crime. He was caught bang to rights. His sentencing elicited due comment from various politicos and members of the media class, one of whom was Mark Steyn. Steyn’s a right-winger with a strong hatred of Islam. He has been on various far right news media, giving viewers the benefit of his opinion on Islam. I don’t know if he was ever on Ezra Levant’s Rebel Media, a Canadian internet broadcaster with miniscule rating and a very anti-Islam attitude, but it wouldn’t surprise me. He was, however, out in New Hampshire sharing the airwaves with Reaganite blowhard Rush Limbaugh on his station. That was before Limbaugh finally gave up the ghost and left this Earth. Now he appears occasionally on GB News. As he did a few days ago, to criticise mainly Labour politicians for failing to mention the elephant in the room: that the motivation behind Amess’ murder was Islam and its hatred of the west.
The Labour politicos had put the blame on a number of factors. These included a generally increasingly confrontational and violent attitude towards politicians and intolerance towards anybody who doesn’t share the same points of view. The evidence for this is the abusive messages, including threats of death, rape and violence, sent to MPs. Others also tried to put it into some kind of context by placing it with the various other assassination and assassination attempts that have occurred. The most notable of these was Jo Cox’s murder by a White nationalist, but there was also the attempt on the life of Lib Dem MP a few years ago by a maniac with a samurai sword, which claimed the life of one of his staff. But Steyn considered that all this missed the point, and dishonoured Amess’ memory because the motive behind his killer was abundantly clear: he was a Muslim seeking to kill an infidel. He’d marched up and down looking for victims before finally deciding on Amess.
But Steyn’s analysis of his motives also misses the point. Harbi Ali wasn’t simply motivated by the bigot’s hatred of the unbeliever. No, he said that he was moved to do what he did in order to protect Muslims from being killed by the west. And this supports William Blum’s observations behind the animosity towards the West in the Dar al-Islam. Blum was a long-term, bitter critic of American imperialism and its many wars. He states in one of his books that the world’s Muslims don’t hate us because they envy our freedoms or any of the other explanations offered by the right. He states that the reason they hate us is simply because we keep invading their countries. And he supports this with polling stats and comments from various authorities and Muslim spokespeople.
I don’t doubt he’s right. Bush and Blair’s wars have devastated Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, all of which seem to have been waged partly for geopolitical purposes, as well as the benefit of the oil industry and western multinationals. Hundreds of thousands have been killed in the Middle East, and millions displaced. Such aggression is going to leave much hatred behind it amongst those on the receiving end.
But a left Labour party Zoom event against imperialism remarked about a year ago that the people and forces behind these imperialist wars seem to be trying to stage a comeback. And these invasions were all sold to the British and American public as a response to an imminent threat – true in the case of Afghanistan after 9/11, a complete lie in the case of Iraq and the imaginary Weapons of Mass Destruction – and as liberating these benighted nations from evil tyrants. We were going to give them freedom and democracy. But this hasn’t worked. In the case of Afghanistan, it created the massively corrupt government of Hamid Karzai, who was determined to screw as much as he could out of his countrymen before scarpering to America when it all came tumbling down.
There are real problems with Islam. I’ve recently blogged about the appearance of bigoted, reactionary mullahs appearing on Islamic networks preaching jihad and the enslavement of unbelievers, despite two centuries or so of abolitionist preaching and legislation by Muslim anti-slavery activists. Fanatical imams have preached intolerance towards non-Muslims and gays in British and western mosques to the serious concern of many bog-standard, ordinary British Muslims. Several times worshippers at these mosques tried to alert the authorities, only to find themselves ignored. But that obviously doesn’t mean that there is a problem with the religion as a whole. As we’ve been reminded, the actions of terrorists don’t represent Muslims as a whole.
But the motive behind Amess’ murder wasn’t simply ‘Islam’. It was outrage at the deaths in the Muslim world that resulted from the west’s wars and invasions. Amess didn’t deserve to be killed, and Ali Harbi Ali certainly deserves to be sent to prison and not get out. But it needs to be realised what his motives were. And by simply blaming Islam, Steyn very definitely misses the point. Some of this is almost certainly because of his own deep hostility to Islam. But another reason may be that if he mentions it and gives it the discussion it deserves, it would cast serious doubt on the wisdom and effectiveness of further such actions and wars in the future.
And we can’t have that. Not when the west’s ability to put fear and awe into the rest of the world, and the interests of the oil industry and multinationals like Haliburton are at stake.
As Asa Winstanley, another anti-racism activist falsely expelled from the Labour Party for anti-Semitism remarks, this is beyond thoughtcrime. It’s pre-crime. Mike in his article about Keir Starmer reprimanding the respected Black women MPs Diane Abbott and Bell Ribeiro-Addy also mentions that the witch-hunters are demanding he censure their next target, Salma Yaqoob. Yaqoob is a prospective Labour candidate for mayor of the West Midlands, and a patron of the Stop the War Coalition. She is also due to appear in an online discussion from the Coalition about the new Labour leadership’s position on anti-war issues and Palestine on the 8th of this month, May 2020, alongside Paul Kelemen, the author of The British Left and Zionism: A History of a Divorce, and Tony Greenstein, ‘Jewish socialist and anti-war campaigner’. And it is his appearance on the panel that has sent the witch-hunters into a fearful bate, as Molesworth would sa.
Greenstein is very definitely a Jewish socialist and anti-war campaigner. He a fierce, bitter opponent of Fascism and racism. This means that he also criticises Zionism for Israel’s ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians, and the movement’s own crimes against Jews. He has pointed out again and again that throughout their history Zionists and the Israeli state have supported Fascists against Jews and other ethnic minorities when it has served their purpose. Israel sought out an alliance with another White Supremacist state, apartheid South Africa. In the 1970s and ’80 they also allied with Fascist regimes in South and Central America, including Guatemala during its dictatorship’s genocidal civil war with the Mayan Indians, and the neo-Nazi regime in Argentina, which targeted Jews for torture, massacre and murder. At the same time, the Board of Deputies of British Jews attacked the Anti-Nazi League in this country, forbidding Jews from joining it or allowing it to hold meetings in synagogues, because the founder was an anti-Zionist. Some left-wing Jews, who defied the ban and joined it nonetheless, like David Rosenberg of the Jewish Socialist Group, say that there were rumours that the Board opposed it for different, racist reasons: they didn’t want Jews joining the Black and Asian fight against racism.
Yaqoob’s appearance was picked up by Ian Austin, the former Labour MP complaining of anti-Semitism while the real reason was that Jeremy Corbyn had returned it to its socialist ideals. He has complained to Starmer and demanded Yaqoob’s suspension. Hence Asa Winstanley tweeted
This racist fanatic wants a prominent Muslim woman expelled from Labour for a future event with the “wrong” kind of Jewish person.
This is beyond Thought Crime, it’s Pre-Crime.
Jackie Walker, another Jewish anti-racism activist smeared as an anti-Semite and expelled from the Party, also commented: It’s open season on black women.
Kerry-Ann Mendoza, the mighty head of The Canary said
During the smear campaign a few years ago, the Board, Campaign for Anti-Semitism, Jewish Leadership Council and the other pro-Israel groups and their supporters waved placards at their protests bearing the slogan ‘Labour Party – For the many, not the Jew’. It was a play on Corbyn’s slogan ‘Labour – for the many, not the few’. According to Tony Greenstein, it was made up by British literary author, Howard Jacobson, when he was living in New York. It was supposed to show how anti-Semitic the Labour Party is. But the witch-hunters themselves have particularly targeted Jewish critics of Israel and pro-Palestinian activists. These entirely decent, self-respecting men and women have been viciously smeared as ‘self-hating’. The Board and the other pro-Israel organisations have also misrepresented themselves as standing for Britain’s Jewish community as a whole. They don’t. Board doesn’t represent Orthodox, Haredi nor secular Jews. It really only represents the United Synagogue. I find it very significant that when the I ran an article from a Jewish journalist denouncing Labour as anti-Semitic apart from their own columnist, Simon Kelner, that journo was always described as a member of the United Synagogue. As a Zionist organisation, the Board also doesn’t represent anti-Zionist Jews. The Board and the other organisations attacking Labour and Corbyn were also incensed when the Labour leader attended a Passover Seder with Jewdas, a left-wing Jewish group. This was another anti-Semitic affront to the Jewish community. They were the wrong kind of Jew! Which is itself a noxious, anti-Semitic gesture.
In fact the Board and the other witch-hunters targeting of Jews means that you could reasonably invert their slogan so it reads ‘Board of Deputies – For Israel, not the Jew’.
It was Tony Blair’s administration that launched the invasion of Iraq, against which the Stop the War Coalition protested, and the Blairites shared the same goals as the Neocons. After George Dubya left office, and was replaced as President by Barack Obama, it was Blair and Sarkozy in France who really wanted an attack on Libya and the overthrow of Colonel Gaddafy. The result has been the destruction of one of Africa’s most prosperous states, which had a strong welfare system and was relatively secular. It has now been replaced in some areas by a hard-line Islamist theocracy, which has returned to slavery with Black migrants now being openly sold in markets. Before the appearance of Coronavirus plunged the world into lockdown, the American right seemed also to be preparing and agitating for a war with Iran. The Neocons also want that country’s regime overthrown because of its militant opposition to Israel, accompanied by frankly genocidal rhetoric, and its defiance of American hegemony in the Middle East. They and their Saudi allies also covet its oil reserves, which they also wish to seize, just like they did Iraq’s.
And there’s also a streak of islamophobia in the witch-hunters a mile wide. People have turned up at pro-Israel and anti-Palestine protests wearing Kach T-shirts. This is a far-right organisation banned in Israel for terrorism. They also wear T-shirts and wave placards for its successor, the Jewish Defence League, which is also banned. One of the witch-hunters turned up next to one anti-Palestinian demo two years or so ago next to Paul Besser, the intelligence officer of the infamous islamophobic group, Britain First. These pro-Israel demonstrators also include open supporters of Tommy Robinson, the founder of the English Defence League and Pegida UK. One of the Board’s members even appeared with him in a video for Rebel Media, a far-right Canadian internet broadcaster.
It therefore very much seems to me that Austin and the other witch-hunters, by making this complaint against Yaqoob, are desperately trying to keep debate and criticism in the Labour party of Israel and its genocide of the Palestinians very firmly closed. They are also seeking to keep Blair’s Neocon agenda alive in Labour. And they are terrified of Muslims and Muslim influence in the Labour Party. There have been polls showing that 85 per cent of British Muslims support Labour. Muslims are one of the largest ethnic minorities in contemporary Britain. The Radio Times a few years ago covered a radio programme about Jewish comedy and literary festivals that were being held up and down the country. These festivals were open to the wider British population. According to the Radio Times, they were partly being held in order to encourage the broader population to support the Jewish community at a time when that community felt its respect was slipping away and being replaced by concern for other ethnic groups.
Now I’ve got absolutely no objection to such festivals, whether by Jews or any other religious or ethnic group. And with the Far Right on the rise in Europe, Jews do need the support and solidarity of non-Jewish anti-racism activists. But Austin’s complaint about Yaqoob, a Muslim patron of the Stop the War Coalition, suggests that the general insecurity felt by part of the Jewish population is shared by the Israel lobby. And they’re scared of competition from Britain’s Muslims for our sympathies.
The witch-hunter’s targeting of Salma Yaqoob is therefore about preserving the Neocon project and protecting Israel from criticism by silencing genuine anti-racism activists, particularly Jews and Muslims. It’s yet another example of the racism of the Blairite Right.
One of Tommy Robinson’s grotty Fascist tactics is to try to intimidate his critics and opponents into silence by turning up at their doorstep unannounced, mob-handed, and demanding a word. The crusader against Islam has done it to Mike Stuchbery, a teacher and academic, and to an unnamed lad in Luton. This was a student, who had angered the self-professed defender of truth and free speech, by putting clips out on the web showing instances where Robinson contradicted himself or was otherwise made to look stupid. He also made the point that, whatever he claimed to the contrary, Robinson was no longer quite the working class hero he claimed to be. He was living in a very expensive house, thank you very much, paid for by his followers’ donations. The lad showed the type of house Robinson was living in, but did not show Robinson’s own. Nevertheless, the islamophobic thug and jailbird decided to drive 300 miles up to the lad’s parents’ house in Cumbria in the company of two of his storm troopers. One of these was an Australian-Israeli bruiser, who claims to have shot an unarmed Palestinian when he was in the IDF. They turned up on the couple’s doorstep in the middle of the night, where they demanded to see them and generally behaved in a threatening manner. They also did this to Tim Fenton, the Sage of Crewe, who runs the excellent Zelo Street blog. And now that Robinson is banged up on a charge of contempt of court, many people are starting to wonder where Robinson got his information. Including Tim, who has posted an article about it.
He notes that when Robinson began his ‘Troll Watch’ programme for the Canadian far-right outfit, Rebel Media, he was usually assisted by Caolan Robertson and George Llewellyn John. In one edition, he turned up at the address of a paper, which had run a story about him. As Tim says, it wouldn’t have been difficult for him to get the address of the paper. But he then turned up at Tim’s own because of a piece Tim had put on Zelo Street about the Spectator endorsing Robinson. And it would have been difficult for Robinson to get Tim’s address. Zelo Street doesn’t give out phone contact details, doesn’t appear on the electoral roll and doesn’t have a landline phone number look up. Someone would have had to have given Robinson Tim’s address. Tim believes that the prime suspect at the moment is Robertson, who might like to tell all about how Robinson selected his target now that he’s parted ways with the infamous bigot. Other suspects include Fraser Nelson, the Speccie’s editor, and the author of the article Tim blogged about, James Delingpole. Tim asks
So now that Caolan Robertson has split from Lennon, perhaps he would care to let everyone know how his former boss got hold of peoples’ addresses? Did Lennon, as I concluded at the time, get mine from a discredited former tabloid journalist who had managed to gain access to my NHS records? Or did the information come via those nice and highly principled people at the Spectator magazine?
He goes on to state that Robinson is right in one regard when he claims to be a journalist – he does use the same Dark Arts they do. It’s just a pity that his connection with our free and fearless press is an illegal one.
If the Spectator, or someone associated with it, did give Tim’s details to Tommy Robinson, it shows how even more of a low rag it has become. And perhaps it wouldn’t be surprising if it did give Robinson Tim’s address. It does, after all, have a very strong racist, Alt Right slant, as shown by its continuing publication of articles by the horrendous anti-Semite, Taki.
This is a piece put up by Rebel HQ on YouTube. Rebel HQ are, I think, a Progressive Democrat news organisation, unlike Rebel Media, who are a bunch of highly reactionary racists and White Supremacists led by Canadian lawyer, Ezra Levant. In this video, presenter Emma Vigeland reports on the decision by a stream of Democrat politicos to stay away from the big AIPAC conference this weekend. AIPAC are the big Jewish fundraising and lobbying organisation in America for Israel.
But she begins with Trump’s noxious decision to recognise Israel’s possession of the Golan Heights. This is Syrian territory that was illegally seized by Israel during the 1967 war, which has been condemned by the United Nations, as she shows with a quote from the New York Times. This was described by CNN as ‘disputed territory’, when under international law it is anything but. Vigeland makes the point that if America had a president, who was actually concerned with international law, knew anything about history and wasn’t biased towards the very right-wing government of Israel while pretending to want peace, this wouldn’t have happened. Instead he handed a great victory to Benjamin Netanyahu, or ‘That Bastard’ Netanyahu as I’ve heard one British Jewish professor describe him. This is comes just as the Israeli premier is under pressure from corruption charges just ahead of the Israeli elections on April 9th. She says that Trump is glad to help out anyone, who says nice things about him, and hey, Netanyahu slept in Jared Kushner’s bedroom as a child.
Vigeland points to Netanyahu’s gleeful praise of Trump for his decision, declaring that the Orange Generalissimo had made history. As Trump handed Netanyahu this victory, the UN Human Rights Council was condemning Israel for its ‘unlawful, lethal and excessive force’ against civilians in Gaza. This is one of the reasons why the Democrat hopefuls for the 2020 elections did not attend AIPAC this weekend. This is a significant achievement for progressive activists, who have been trying to get the Democrats to do it for years. So far, those refusing to attend include Senators Kamala Harris, Bernie Sanders, Kirsten Gillibrand, former Representative Beto O’Rourke, Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, Jay Inslee, the governor of Washington, and Julian Castro, the former Housing and Urban Development Secretary. This is significant, as O’Rourke and Castro have supported AIPAC in the past.
She then shows Trump predictably attacking the Democrats as ‘the anti-Semitic party’, following the weaponisation of the accusation of anti-Semitism against the critics of the Israel lobby, who, she says, are largely weapons contractors and evangelical Christians, who support Israel in the hope that it’ll hasten Armageddon. This is followed by a clip of Trump declaring that the Democrats have once again shown themselves to be anti-Israel, commenting that it’s a disgrace. He states that he doesn’t know what happened to them, but they’re anti-Israel, and he thinks they’re anti-Jewish. Vigeland remarks with heavy irony that yes, Bernie Sanders, who is Jewish, is definitely anti-Jewish. She goes in the same way to thank Nancy Pelosi and other for giving this talking point life by smearing Ilhan Omar as anti-Semitic for saying the very thing that these candidates are now saying. Omar is, you’ll recall, the Muslim congresswoman, who said that American politics had been bought by Netanyahu and the Israel lobby, for which she was pilloried as, you guessed it, an anti-Semite. And Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer are also speaking at AIPAC.
She states that the point is that America’s support for Israel has now become the hot-button issue that it should all along. She states that America pretends to be neutral arbiters of peace in the region, but it consistently sides with and gives money to the country that breaks international law, emboldening them as they commit war crimes. The conversation is changing and its becoming more and more clear what the right side is to the American people.
I have no doubt that this development has shaken the Israel lobby, which in America, as in this country, demands absolute, unconditional support for Israel. Those, who don’t toe the line are smeared as anti-Semites and every care taken to destroy their political careers. They did this a little while ago to one of Sanders’ aides. Like him, she was Jewish, and very involved with her community. But nevertheless, she was critical of Israel, and so was smeared as an anti-Semite and removed from her position with Sanders’ staff.
I have the greatest respect for those Democrat politicos not attending AIPAC, and particularly Bernie Sanders. As I’ve said many times before, I’d love it if we had him in the White House and Corbyn in No. 10. And I wish our politicians would stand their ground against the fake accusations of anti-Semitism by the Conservative establishment, including the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the Chief Rabbi, neither of whom speak for the whole of British Jewry, as numerous left-wing Jewish organisations and bloggers have made very clear. Instead of politicians standing against Israel’s brutality being smeared and destroyed, it should be the Israel lobby itself that should face stern questioning and rebuke for its repeated interference in British politics, its legitimisation of an increasingly Fascistic Israeli regime, and the lies and smears against genuinely decent, anti-racist men and women.
This is a rather long video of a livestream held by male feminist and left-wing, anti-Fascist YouTuber, Kevin Logan, and Mike Stuchberry on Kevin Logan’s channel. It’s part of a series entitled ‘Let Them Eat Kek’, which as it’s title suggests, is about attacking the Alt-Right, and is a special devoted mainly to Tommy Robinson. It’s just under 3/4 of an hour long, and about half of it is the two discussing Robinson and his fans intimidating one of his internet critics and their family. The rest deals with a rather underwhelming UKIP rally with Tommy Robinson, which illustrates the depths of the Kippers’ decline, and the British imitators of the Yellow Vest protesters across the Channel. I’m putting it up because the conversations describes one instance of thuggish behaviour from Robinson, and shows why people like him should not be allowed anywhere near any political movement aspiring to respectability. And this in turn shows why UKIP’s present leader, Gerard Batten, is a disgrace for taking him and the rest of the far right YouTubers on.
The video was posted on the 16th December 2018, and the events they discuss occurred earlier that Monday. Robinson was annoyed at a piece posted on the Net by a long-time critic, Luke, a university student. Luke had amassed a sizable collection of videos posted on the web by Robinson, and used to put these up to show how Robinson contradicted himself or otherwise managed to make himself look stupid. What particular angered Robinson was a piece by Luke, in which he argued very persuasively that Robinson was not quite the working class hero he claims to be. Logan and Stuchberry believe that Robinson, real name Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, has an income in millions of pounds coming from crowd-funded donations, as well as funding by right-wing American think tanks like the Middle East Forum. Robinson lives somewhere on the outskirts of Luton in Bedfordshire. Luke found a house similar to Robinson’s – but which wasn’t the well-known Islamophobes – and from their similarity suggested that Robinson’s was worthy 950,000 pounds.
Robinson decided to show how outraged he was at this by driving up to Luke’s parents in Cumbria that evening in the company of his cousin and former bodyguard Kevin Carroll and Avi Yemeni. Yemeni’s a really repulsive individual, an Israeli-Australian, who claims to have shot civilians simply for throwing stones when he was a member of the IDF. The video contains a clip from one of the video’s Robinson’s band of thugs made of Yemeni boasting to Ali Dawah, another Islamophobe, about this. The trio then turned up outside Luke’s parents’ home at 2.30 in the morning and began filming. They were, in turn, filmed by one of the parents’ neighbours. This film of Robinson and co. is also in the video. For some reason Robinson didn’t take kindly to being filmed in turn. Luke was told of Robinson’s arrival at his parents by others on the Net. He went up there to arrive the next day. He then made some kind of agreement with Tommy Robinson which resulted in Luke taking his videos down. All of them. Robinson then drove back home to Bedfordshire, and posted at four O’clock or so that day a piece on the Net telling his followers not to harass Luke. Logan and Stuchberry aren’t impressed by this, as by that time the damage had been done. Robinson’s followers – the Tommunists, as they call themselves – had already bombarded Luke with threats and put up information about him and his family.
Logan and Stuchberry state that Robinson and his friends behaved like gangsters intimidating their opponents. They also discuss a Zelo Street article about the incident, which also states very firmly that Robinson and his gang were trying to threaten Luke and his parents. They also state that it’s rather hypocritical of Robinson, as he very frequently doorstepped people himself when he was working for Rebel Media. As a result of Robinson’s tactics, Luke was forced to lock down his Facebook and change his phone number. The two also ask how it is that Robinson remains free and not in prison when he pulls stunts like that. Robinson has served time for various offences, but it seems that he has just enough knowledge of the law to allow him to avoid being sent to jail for a very long time. They also think that the vast amount of money Robinson receives from his fans allow him to afford some very good legal advice. They also refute some of the allegations about the affair in the mainstream media, by stating that Luke did not actually reveal Robinson’s address or show his house.
The two then move on to the ‘Brexit Betrayed’ protest rally by UKIP, which was also addressed by Robinson. Logan and Stuchberry state that this also shows how far UKIP has imploded. The organisers expected about 20-30,000 to attend, and instead the crowd only number 4-5,000, who were outnumber by the anti-racism protesters. The party’s decline has also been shown in the similar reduction in the number of its MEPs. At its height after 2014 election, the party had 24 MEPs. This number has been drastically cut to nine, mostly by MEPs having to resign in disgrace. They were, the pair argue, never really interested in attending except when it concerned their own expenses. Farage himself was an example of this. they also accuse the former Kipperfuhrer of hypocrisy, as while the rest of us will have trouble travelling to the continent after Brexit, his children will find it considerably easier as they have German nationality. As for Robinson, he wasn’t noticeably interested in Europe. It’s simply a bandwagon he’s jumped on. But he’s added his own particularly twist on it. He told the crowd that in order to resist the islamization of Britain the EU would also have to be tackled.
They also tackle the despicable views expressed by two of the marchers. One was a man, who turned up with a model gallows, complete with a noose, who declared that Tweezer should be executed. Logan states that he’s not particularly fond of May himself, but this is disgusting as it’s stating that Tweezer should be killed. He wonders how this man wasn’t arrested. He’s also not impressed with another man, who holds up a placard saying ‘Jo Cox False Flag’. This fellow obviously believes in the conspiracy theory that the assassination of the anti-racist Labour MP Jo Cox by the Nazi Thomas Mair was a ‘false flag’ incident staged by the authorities to discredit the ‘Leave’ campaign, because it occurred at the same time as the referendum on the EU. Logan concludes that the intolerance of these two men bears out what Richard Spencer, the leader of the Alt Right, had already said about the far right: they don’t really care about freedom of speech.
The video ends with Logan and Stuchberry talking about the attempts by a group of British protesters to copy the Yellow Vest protests in France. These succeeded in closing Westminster Bridge, Tower Bridge and London Bridge. This bunch were fellow travelers of Robinson’s, led by James Goddard and Tracey Blackwell, a pair who turn up at every far right-wing demonstration. They are very much unimpressed at these protest, which blocked the road, because one of the vehicles they obstructed was an ambulance. And they’re also not impressed with the way the mainstream media appears to have been fascinated with the protests.
In addition to the two talking, there are odd interruptions by people breaking into the livestream to heckle them. Such as by telling Logan to get a job.
Robinson’s deliberate intimidation of his opponent, Luke, is worrying. Logan and Stuchberry are right when they compare it to that of the mob. But it’s also the type of tactics used by the far right, which has always used violence and the threat of violence to silence their opponents ever since the days of the Nazis and Italian Fascists. And both those movements carried that lawlessness into power with them. This is a very strong argument for not voting for UKIP, quite apart from the racism and islamophobia that the party appears to be courting and encouraging through the recruitment of Robinson and various far right YouTube personalities, like Count Dankula and Sargon of Akkad. If Batten expected them to boost the party’s membership, he’s gravely disappointed. People are leaving instead because of them. I’ve already put up a video by one Kipper bitterly denouncing the party for recruiting the far right activists. One of the people, who has left because of them is Farage himself.
Robinson and those like him are an active menace to democracy, and UKIP is dying because it’s recruited him.
Mike put up this morning a piece about Tommy Robinson’s arrest and sentencing for contempt of court. Robinson is the former leader of the EDL, and was arrested last week for filming outside a courtroom, where a group of Muslims were being tried on charges of paedophilia. This is illegal, and Robinson has just been given a 13 month sentence for contempt.
In this video, male feminist and scourge of Fascists and manospherian misogynists Kevin Logan, explains the circumstances behind Robinson’s arrest, and why it’s important that he is jailed. Robinson was videoing and commenting on a trial in a court in York, where a group of Muslims were being tried for paedophilia. Logan states that it’s quite likely that the accused men are actually guilty, and he certainly isn’t defending them. But they have a right to a fair trial. However, there are cases where, because of the biased reporting or comments about a trial, the accused have been released despite their probably guilt, because they were unable to get a fair trial. Logan states that something similar happened to Jayda Fransen and one of the other far right storm troopers, who were jailed on charges of racially aggravated harassment, although he then admits that this was a slightly different issue.
Robinson’s supporters claim that this is a free speech issue, and that he’s a journalist. But Robinson isn’t a journalist. He wasn’t reporting any of the facts of the case, and is actually so incompetent that even the far right Canadian outfit, Rebel Media, won’t have him. Logan points out that he used to be the head of the English Defence League, and before then was a member of the BNP, so he’s simply a Fascist. And he just wants to spread Islamophobia and fear of Brown people. He also states that Robinson has already got a suspended sentence for doing the same thing outside a court in Canterbury last year, down the other end of the country. He describes him as an ambulance-chaser, running around behind court cases of Muslims. So when Robinson got himself arrested for breach of the peace, it was his own fault.
This is a long piece posted on YouTube from Dick Coughlan’s ‘Left-Wing Propaganda’ podcast, where the comedian and vlogger against racism, sexism and anti-gay prejudice comments on Katie Hopkin’s final departure from mainstream British media.
Hopkins was the loser on British version of The Apprentice, who then went on to make a career out of being a right-wing, racist, corporate loudmouth. This is the woman who said she wanted helicopter gunships to shoot down the immigrants crossing the Med in boats, and who sneered at the father of the little boy, whose body was washed ashore in Turkey after one of them went down. She’s a prize, nasty piece of work. But one no longer welcome in British media. She lost her job with the Daily Mail the other day, and has now gone off to join Rebel Media. They’re another far right outfit with a nice line in racist, anti-immigrant politics. They’re Canadian, and if she moves to that country, it’ll be highly ironic, as she’ll be an immigrant. And way back in the 19th or early 20th century, the descendants of the original European settlers in Canada were campaigning against the influx of large numbers of new immigrants from Britain. But all this will be forgotten, as the new breed of extreme nationalists in Europe and America simply hate non-Whites.
Coughlan goes through the various newspapers and organisations that I have picked her up and then sacked her, or released her, because her views were just too toxic even for them. The Heil is simply the latest. She’s also been given the heave-ho by LBC and the Scum amongst others. He also talks about some of the monstrous comments she’s made, and her foot-in-mouth appearance on Philip Schofield’s show on ITV. This was in a piece about children’s names. Hopkins stated that she wouldn’t want her child going to school with children named after places, because it gave the messages that the parents were low-class and uneducated. Or words to that effect. Schofield then pointed out that she’d called her daughter India. To which Hopkins replied that ‘India is not a place.’ Really? That must surprised the nearly 1 1/4 billion people, who live there, as well as all the people of Indian descent over here!
As for being sacked from the Scum and the Heil, how right-wing do you have to be? The Heil is the newspaper, which ran the headline ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts’ praising Mosley and the BUF to the skies, when they were goose-stepping around in the 1930s, and in whose pages the father of the current editor, Paul Dacre, ranted about how wonderful Adolf Hitler was. The Mail has been consistently anti-immigrant, with a vicious hatred of the unemployed, the poor and disabled people on benefit, as well as unmarried mothers and anybody else they think is a threat to Tory values.
As for the Scum, that paper’s notorious for its racism. Always has been. Way back in the first years of this century, Private Eye published a piece stating that the Scum had been judged guilty of racism on 19 occasions by the Press Complaints Commission, as was. It comes to something indeed when Hopkins is far too toxic even for them.
Anyway, she out of British media. At least for the time being.
Tony Greenstein, a veteran Jewish socialist, anti-racist and anti-Zionist, has put up a very important piece on his blog reporting that the Jewish Labour Movement is attempting to insert an amendment into the membership clause of the Labour party’s constitution, which would make criticism of Israel illegal. Greenstein is a proud, secular Jew, and opposes Zionism precisely because it is racist, and venomously genocidal in its treatment of the Palestinians and Arab Jews. He has paid the price for his commitment to anti-racism and human dignity. Like other anti-Zionists and critics of Israel, Jewish and gentile, he has been smeared as an anti-Semite. Many Jews, who are critical of Israel, believe that they actually receive worse vilification for their stance than their gentile comrades. In Greenstein’s case, he’s been suspended from the Labour party, like hundreds of others, received hate mail and been physically assaulted.
The hate messages he has received are hardly distinguishable from the vile screeds of gentile Nazis and anti-Semites. A few weeks ago he posted one such message he got from an outraged Jewish Zionist, which called him a ‘traitorous Jew’ and mocked him for his entirely accurate statement that the majority of European Jews wanted to stay in the land of their birth, the countries that were their homelands, as equal citizens, rather than emigrate to Israel. He was told he should try living in a shtetl – the segregated Jewish village in eastern Europe with the gentiles ruling over him. The writer concluded his message with the statement that he didn’t really like saying this to another Jew, but he wished the angel of death had taken him and his family during the Holocaust.
It’s deeply unpleasant, racist stuff. Greenstein put it up on his blog as an example of Zionist anti-Semitism, to make the point that instead of Jewish critics of Israel being anti-Semitic, it was the Zionists. It’s a good point. The Zionist’s message is racist and anti-Semitic. It abused Greenstein because he was Jewish. As for being a ‘traitorous Jew’ – that’s the language the Nazi and Fascist anti-Semites employ when they claim that Jews and people of Jewish heritage are really foreigners, outside the nation, and secretly plotting its downfall. Like the stupid and murderous ‘stab in the back theories’ that circulated in Germany after the First World War, which claimed that Germany had been defeated because of Jewish treachery. These were monstrous lies. Jewish Germans had been extremely patriotic in their response to the war, serving their country with pride and honour. The captain of Hitler’s unit during the War, who had put the future Nazi leader up for an Iron Cross, was Jewish. And the Jewish ex-servicemen’s league was a real problem for the Third Reich, as these old soldiers couldn’t easily be accused of treachery.
This is the same type of language we heard from the Nazis marching at Charlottesville, chanting ‘the Jews will not replace us.’ One component of contemporary Nazi and White supremacist ideology in the states is the sick notion that the Jews under the Zionist Occupation Government are engaged in a vast conspiracy to destroy the White race through racial intermixing and the promotion of Black civil rights.
As for physical assault, Mr. Greenstein in his blog has also described how he was assaulted on the street by an irate Israeli. But because Greenstein fought back, he – not his attacker – was charged with assault, although this was later dropped. It’s a clear, manifest injustice.
Now he reports the Jewish Labour Movement are attempting to define racism, anti-Semitism or islamophobia as whatever is perceived as such by a member of the affected groups. He points out that it’s based on a skewed reading of Shami Chakrabarti’s citation of the McPherson report into the death of Stephen Lawrence.
If implemented, this would outlaw criticism of Israel on the grounds that a Jewish Zionist could simply say that it was anti-Semitic.
I’ve no doubt that this will happen. Mike said that after the sorely misnamed Campaign Against Anti-Semitism libeled him as an anti-Semite, he had Zionists turning up on his Facebook page complaining that his comments about Ken Livingstone were anti-Semitic, because they felt they were. And that was sufficient.
I’ve also seen debates between Zionists and anti-Zionists in which the latter included Jewish and Israel anti-racism activists – where the Zionist has accused his opponents of anti-Semitism, simply because they did not share his belief that Israel has a divinely given right to the Occupied Territories.
This is a deeply hypocritical, and very dangerous game. When New Labour under Blair and Brown wanted to introduce tougher legislation against hate speech, the Tories went berserk and accused them of introducing the same assumption into its definition. That something constituted a racist offence, if the victim thought it was, including racial abuse.
This adds a dangerous element of subjectivity into the argument. Of course, in the case of the JLM, it’s intended to rule out of bounds any criticism of Israel or Zionism, because as soon as anyone raises the subject they’ll scream ‘anti-Semitism’. Even though this may consist of nothing more than the truth: that Israel is an apartheid state, that it is engaged on a decades-long campaign to cleanse its territory of Arabs, and that Arabs in the Occupied Territories can be killed, attacked, have their drinking water fouled, and their homes and other property seized with impunity. They may also be jailed for no other reason than publishing a poem urging their brothers and sisters to resist, as occurred to Dareen Tatour.
Ezra Levant, one of the brains behind the Far Right Canadian media group, Rebel Media, once argued in one of his videos against legislation outlawing hate speech. Levant’s Jewish, and he argued that Jews had long learned from experience that the weapons you give the state to protect you, can also be turned on you. So if you give the state the power to censor or ban certain types of speech, they can use those same powers to silence you. He argued that this was the case with Nazi Germany.
Levant’s part of the Islamophobic ‘counter-jihad’ movement, and what he was really worried about was western countries – Europe, Canada and America – passing legislation to ban speech or writing inciting the hatred of Muslims. But he does have a point regarding the treatment of Jews.
One of the elements in anti-Semitism has been the belief that Jews believe themselves to be superior to and despise and sneer at gentiles. Since the Haskala, the Jewish Enlightenment, western Jews have taken great care to show that they don’t have this attitude. Indeed, in 1920s Germany I believe one traditional prayer was dropped from the synagogue service, in case it gave gentiles this idea. Jewish theologians and writers have also made the point that God gave the Torah to Israel and made them a people for His own possession, not because they were superior or stronger than the neighbouring peoples, but because they were weaker. Israel was to be a servant nation, acting as moral exemplars, and therefore ‘a light to lighten the gentiles’. Mr. Greenstein has also put up another piece on his blog about a Canadian rabbi, whose book on Jewish resistance to Zionism makes precisely this point against Zionism.
But if you introduce the idea of subjectivity into the definition of hate speech, it means that Jews are also vulnerable to unfair accusations of racism. A chance comment or remark, which may only just be a case of bad phrasing, may become a case for prosecution, simply because the person hearing it thinks they are being insulted, whether they are or not.
The insistence of the subjective perception of anti-Semitism also shows how close the Zionist lobby is coming to outright Fascism. Irrationalism was one of the formative components of Fascist psychology and ideology. Rational belief didn’t matter. They were just rationalisations used to justify a pre-existing belief or act. What mattered was how something felt, and this meant primarily one’s passionate commitment to the ethnic group and its character according to nationalist and racist theories. The JLM and the Zionists can’t argue against facts, and so their attempting to use the subjective perception of whether something is anti-Semitic to justify their attempts to close down discussion of Israeli racism and human rights abuse instead.
As for the Jewish Labour Movement, Greenstein makes the point that this is a sister organization to the Israeli Labour party, which is racist to the core. Recently, one of their MKs expressed his disgust that 61 other members of the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, were Arabs, and made it very clear that he despised Arabs and wanted them expelled from Israel.
He also discusses the example of the far right Israeli leader, Gopstein, a member of a racist nationalist group, Lehava, who made a speech encouraging Israelis to burn down churches and mosques. Despite calls from the Vatican that he should be arrested, Gopstein’s still free.
And Jewish Arabs have also been subject to discrimination and monstrous human rights abuse. Greenstein and Counterpunch have published several articles describing how the Zionist pioneers, as European colonialists, believed they were inferior, and wanted to destroy their Arab character. This even included forcibly taking the babies born to Yemeni Jews away from their mothers and giving them to rich, childless European Israelis or American Jews.
This is not only a crime against humanity in itself. It is also included in the UN definition of genocide, which includes the forcible removal of one part of an ethnic group to another. This also occurred during the Third Reich, where the Nazis sought Aryan bloodlines amongst the conquered Poles. Polish babies with blonde hair and blue eyes were declared to be of German stock, and were taken from their parents to be brought up as Germans.
The JLM are apologists for a viciously racist, genocidal state and political order that is ruthlessly intolerant of its critics, vilifying anti-racist gentiles as anti-Semites, and making the same, or even anti-Semitic insults at decent, self-respecting Jews. If Labour is serious about tackling racism and inequality, this amendment should be thrown out. At the very least, by introducing the element of subjectivity, as the Ezra Levant has pointed out, they have given a potential weapon to the real anti-Semites. And they won’t hesitate to turn it on them.
Here’s a piece of good news. Hope Not Hate today reported that Norwegian Cruise Line were cancelling a Caribbean cruise organized by Rebel Media, which would take Far Right sympathisers and activists to Honduras, Belize and Mexico. Rebel Media’s a Canadian far right organization, founded by Ezra Levant and Brian Lilley. Among their stars is the former head of the EDL, Tommy Robinson. The headline speaker for the cruise was going to be Gavin McInnes, the founder of the ‘Western Chauvinist’ Proud Boys. Proud Boys is a White supremacist, anti-feminist group. To be initiated into its ‘fourth degree’, a member has ‘to beat the crap’ out of an Antifa. They also have a militantly violent wing, the Fraternal Order of Alt-Knights, or FOAK.
As for McInnes, he has claimed not to be racist and to want to have nothing to do with the Alt-Right. But this rings more than a bit hollow after he’s made a video entitled, 10 Things I Hate about the Jews, and written pieces about White genocide and defending ‘transphobia’.
Hope Not Hate reported that they received the following message from Norwegian Cruise Line:
“We recently became aware that one of several affinity groups that booked space on an upcoming sailing was associated with and espoused views that are inconsistent with Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings core values.
The company has therefore exercised its right to cancel this group’s reservation and provide a full refund. As a matter of policy, the company neither discusses nor discloses the identities of our individual guests or groups.”
The anti-racism, anti-religious extremism group states
Norwegian Cruise Line’s decision is most welcome and they are to be congratulated for taking this stand against racism, sexism, homophobia and hatred of all kind.
In the current climate, this is a valuable example that companies have the choice to act responsibly and to refuse to allow their platforms to be vehicles for the normalization and mainstreaming of bigotry.
HOPE not hate will continue its fight against Rebel Media and anyone who shares their politics of prejudice.
Rebel Media’s association with real, violent neo-Nazis and anti-Semites also discredits some of the claims made by its founder, Ezra Levant. As have the recent events in Charlottesville. Levant is Jewish, and one of the main figures in the ‘Counter-Jihad’ movement. He has promoted his brand of islamophobia by demanding that the public attention be moved away from White supremacist groups in Canada to Islamism, which he has argued presents a bigger threat to Jews.
In his writings and broadcasts, Levant has stated that after the War, life was good for Jews in tolerant Canada. Most severely normal Canadians weren’t anti-Semites, and the membership of the Canadian Nazi party was minute. It was about thirty people. They were led by a sad individual skulking in a basement, who used to write grandiose, violent screeds against the Jews and other races he didn’t like with the assistance of his landlord. At demonstrations, the goose-steppers were massively outnumbered by Jews, left-wing counterdemonstrators, and the police who were there to keep order.
He is, along with his fellow bigot, Kathy Shaidle, who authors the blog Five Feet of Fury, bitterly critical of the ‘official’ Jews of the mainstream Canadian Jewish organization and its leader, Bernie Farber. This is because Farber and his organization link the Jewish experience of persecution and genocide, with those of other, persecuted peoples around the world. Way back in the early part of this century, when the Janjaweed Militia were wreaking havoc in Darfur, Farber and his organization held a ‘Shabat’, or Sabbath, for the African town’s people. The ‘Shabat’ here meant a day of fasting and religious contemplation. Christian Americans have also held formal fasts against wars. In the early 19th century, when America was in yet another war with its former colonial overlord, Britain, the Christian ministers of one of the statesBill organized a fast to end this strife between themselves and their British cousins.
As for Levant’s own programmes, they are glaringly, overtly biased, even when he invites a guest on from the other side of the debate. He introduces his guest with a tirade about how they’re wrong. From the clips I’ve seen, he does seem to be personally polite, which hasn’t been the case with Bill O’Reilly, the former main anchor at Fox News, before they sacked him sexual harassment.
I’ve no doubt that the membership of the Canadian Nazi party was a low as Levant says. So is the formal membership of all the various Nazi organisations in Britain and America. Way back in the 1990s one of the contributors to Lobster estimated that the BNP’s core membership was only about 200 or so people. If you read Hope Not Hate, that membership has declined even further, and the British Fascist right is divided between a number of small grouplets, all of which hate each other as much as the hate ethnic minorities, trade unionists and ‘Reds’.
I also read a few years ago that in America, the total membership of the Klan was 100,000, split amongst 100 different groups. I don’t know about the membership of the various Militias and Nazi groups, but I would imagine that they were similarly small compared to America’s vast population.
This does not mean that these organization don’t pose a violent threat. They clearly do. In the 1960s the NF was caught organizing paramilitary training weekends, which supposedly included lessons on bomb-making. One of the pieces of evidence for this was a can of weed killer found in a shed, which had the ‘weed’ scratched out and replaced with ‘Jew’. Yup, ‘Jew-Killer’. The NF and BNP deliberately recruited violent football hooligans, who embarked on a campaign of violence. Matthew Collins, one of the founders of Hope Not Hate, has described just how violent they are in his book about his time inside them, Hate.
As for Canada, the America Nazi party weren’t the only far right party in the country. One of the parties in the western province of Vancouver was the Social Credit party, which was anti-immigration, and pro-big business.
Despite his own Jewish heritage, Levant is clearly associating himself with anti-Semites by hiring McInnes as his main speaker for the cruise. And the Nazi violence in Charlottesville, which included surrounded the local synagogue and shouting ‘Sieg Heil!’, as well as the stats from a report from the FBI and Department of Homeland Security, show only too clearly that, in stark contrast to Levant’s claims, the White racists are far more of a threat than Islamism in America, at least in America.
This isn’t to downplay the threat posed by Islamist terrorism, merely to keep it in perspective, and stop the persistent denials of Trump, Levant and their ilk that White racist terrorism either doesn’t exist, or isn’t a comparable threat.
It is. And Trump has done everything he could to aid and abet it, short of actually giving them guns and money. But organisations like Hope Not Hate, Life After Hate, Tell Mama, which encourages Muslims to come forward to report racist attacks, are doing an excellent job of combating White supremacist terrorism.
There’s a grim piece by Simon Murdoch on Hope Not Hate’s site today, reporting that DePaul University in Chicago has cancelled an event by Gavin McInnes because of a speech McInnes gave at one of the unis in New York urging his supporters to use violence against left-wing protestors. The article also discusses the formation of a militant ‘Alt-Knight’ organisation by another member of the same far-right grouping, which also shows how the Alt-Right and its ‘soft’ counterpart, the Alt-Lite, are becoming just another form of the Klan.
McInnes is the co-founder of Vice and a host on Rebel Media, a far right platform. In his speech at New York University, McInnes told his audience
“We’re the only ones fighting these [protesters] and I want you to fight them, too […] When they go low, go lower. Mace them back, throw bricks at their head. Let’s destroy them.”
Last year, 2016, he also founded Proud Boys, a fraternal order for men, ‘who are unapologetic about creating the modern world.’ Initiation into the organisation consists of four stages, the last of which is a physically violence confrontation with the Left. McInnes told Metro that this means involvement in ‘a major fight for the cause’, saying “You get beat up, kinck [sic] the crap out of antifa”.
He also told Metro that “not only would [he] love to speak” with those who protest in disagreement of his views, but that he will also “get violent and beat the f–k out of everybody”.
Members of the Proud Boys were involved in the violence at Berkeley, which erupted when Anne Coulter was due to speak there. The order also has a more ‘militant’ wing, founded by Kyle Chapman, who goes by the name of ‘Based Stick Man’, with McInnes’ approval. This calls itself the ‘Fraternal Order of Alt-Knights’. Chapman himself was arrested after fighting a member of the public at a rally in Berkeley. Before that, he had also been arrested on suspicion of assault with a deadly weapon at a Trump rally.
It probably won’t surprise anyone to hear members of the far-right advocate violence against their opponents on the Left. It’s always been there, ever since Hitler founded the SA and then SS as the official paramilitary wings of the Nazi party, the squadristi of Fascist Italy, and the ‘Biff Boys’ of Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists. Quite apart from the skinhead boot boys, who form the thuggish hard core of post-War Fascism in Britain, North America and Europe.
As for the Alt-Knights, the Hope Not Hate article states that it refers back to the ‘Alt-Lite’ movement of which McInnes and Chapman are members. Well, perhaps. But it also seems to be a nod to a much older, violently racist organisation: the KKK. The Klan’s full title, or at least one of them, was ‘The Invisible Empire of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan’.
The Alt-Right has been described as the Klan with keyboards. Now it seems that the similarities with the KKK are becoming ever stronger and more blatant every day. The other day The Young Turks commented on a torchlight vigil organised by supporters of the Confederacy to protest the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee by the town council of Charlottesville, Virginia. Among those protesting was Richard Spencer, the White nationalist, anti-Semitic founder of the Alt-Right. The protestors chanted ‘You will not replace us’, ‘Russia is our friend’, and ‘Blood and Soil’.
The presenters of the video, Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian, state that the comments by the protestors that it wasn’t a racist issue, is contradicted by Spencer’s presence. They also demolish attempts by the supporters of Confederacy, who have tried arguing instead that the American Civil War wasn’t about slavery. They point out that instead of northern liberals not understanding history, it’s really southern Conservatives, as if you look at everything the leaders and defenders of the Confederacy wrote, they made it clear that it was about defending slavery.
This is a sharp refutation of some of the propaganda coming out of organisations like the Von Mises Institute, named after another Austrian free trade economist, who scarpered to America to escape the Nazis, while sharing their hostility to socialism and the organised working class. This outfit has also tried to argue that the Civil War was really about trade tariffs between the South and the rest of the US.
What they don’t comment on, but which makes the racist overtones of the protest very clear, is one of the slogans the crowd chanted. ‘Blood and soil’, or ‘Blut und Boden’ in German, was one of the watchwords of the Nazi party. It was based on the pseudoscientific doctrine that national characteristics were determined by the environment and landscape of a people’s racial homeland.
Observers of Trump’s rise last year remarked on the Fascistic violence that broke out against people of colour and left-wing protestors at the Orange Generalissimo’s rallies. Trump himself in one speech actually urged his supporters to beat his opponents, promising to pay their legal bills if they did.
This development shows just how deeply rooted is violence in the far-right organisations that back him. And they also show how close these organisations are to the older traditions of violent racism in Nazi and Fascist paramilitary organisations and the weird regalia and ritual of the KKK.
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