Tony Blair Now Urging the Introduction of Biometric ID Cards

Mark Pattie, one of the many great commenters on this blog, posted this comment on my piece about Open Britain launching a campaign to get people to get photographic ID so they can vote:

‘Apparently Tony Blair has crawled out of whatever stone he’s been hiding these past 15 years to demand “digital ID”! I’m not voting Labour if Starmer goes along with this- haven’t Bunter Johnson et al crushed our civil liberties enough?’

Yes, Blair has, and sent the paranoid conspiracy fringe into a further frenzy of disgust and anxiety. But they’ve got a point. When Blair and New Labour were in government, they were considering the possibility of introducing biometric identity cards, which would hold all your personal details. The new electronic ID cards Blair is now urging to be introduced would also contain all your personal details, including insurance. It looks like the same idea. And before Blair started considering them, I think John Major’s Tory government was also reviewing the same idea.

The conspiracy fringe has condemned it as a totalitarian policy and fear that it could lead to the rise over here as the social credit state surveillance and control programme of communist China. Years ago I read a book about biometric ID cards, the ‘electronic burse’ that was supposed to introduce a wonderful, cashless society and other similar ideas. The book criticised all of them as threats to civil liberties by the state and banks. They’re not for your convenience, but to allow the state to collect every bit of information about you, including your private financial transactions. And they are also horrendously fatally flawed. Similar IDs were introduced, according to the book, in that beacon of personal liberty, Indonesia. The cards were touted as being completely impervious to fraud and being hacked and duplicated by criminals. Famous last words. Within three weeks, Indonesia’s crims had worked out how to hack into them and produce fakes. As for the electronic burse, something similar was trialled in Australia, and abandoned. The reason was that if they were lost or stolen, people were left completely without any money whatsoever.

Not only did this book, whose title I’ve long since unfortunately forgotten, expose these ideas as totalitarian and unworkable, it also announced the existence of a watchdog organisation, Privacy International, that had been set up to guard against them and similar attacks by the state on personal liberty by demanding access to people’s private information. I don’t know if this is still going, but the political class is going to push this idea once more, we really do need it.

I wonder what Stalin Starmer will do it about it. Hopefully he’ll drop the idea, and Blair’s benighted waffling will be ignored. It is indeed true that Cameron and Johnson have both done their best to wreck our liberties through the introduction of secret courts and legislation designed to limit the right to protest, along with Sunak’s proposal to destroy the right to strike. But I’m afraid Starmer is far to enamoured of Blair and his wretched legacy. And I honestly don’t think this policy was Blair’s idea. The fact that Major was also considering it suggests that it was suggested to him, probably by the same people Blair took over along with Tory policies.

The conspiracy fringe are extreme right-wing clowns who believe stupid myths about the Rothschilds, the Bilderberg Group, Trilateral Commission, the Masons, Jewish bankers, the World Economic Forum and the ‘globalists’, if not indeed Uncle Tom Cobbley and all. But this time they’re right.

Personal liberty in the UK is under attack, and must be defended.

The Stupidity of Black Anti-Semitism

Last week, the American rapper Kanye ‘Ye’ West successfully managed to torpedo his career and popularity by making stupid and bigoted comments about Jews. Unfortunately he isn’t the only person to hold stupid and malign anti-Semitic beliefs. His comments, however, led to one YouTuber putting up a half-hour long video examining whether Michael Jackson was anti-Semitic. I don’t know whether Jackson was or wasn’t. He may have been, but at the end of his life one of his friends or associates was, I believe, a rabbi, Shmuely Boteach. This suggests he probably wasn’t, or if he was, that any anti-Semitic views he had may have been nuanced and riddled with exceptions. But I confess, I didn’t watch that part of the video because I’m not that interested in Michael Jackson. As far as I’m concerned, Jackson was an immensely talented musician and dancer, but a deeply flawed human being. He seemed to me to be a perpetual child, surrounding himself with toys and exotic animals, and his musical achievements are tarnished by the accusations of child abuse.

What I found interesting instead was the beginning of the video, which included clips of other rappers and Black musicians airing their prejudices and negative opinions about the Jews. Many of them were complaints that they were being exploited by the music industry, which they believed was run by the Jews. I dare say that there may be a higher proportion of Jews in the music business, as there supposedly is or has been with the film industry. But this doesn’t come from any kind of stupid conspiracy to control the media. It’s simply because the entertainment industry, by and large, was more tolerant of Jews than other sectors of society. As for exploitation, there are any number of White musicians as well who’ve fallen out with the record label and feel they’ve been cheated on issues of recording rights and royalties. Where this has occurred, it’s been because their managers or the recording companies are acting as exploitative individuals. Again, it’s got nothing at all to do with race, and everything to do with the fact that there are people in every industry who will try to exploit and cheat their clients.

The video began with Professor Griff, who was sacked from NWA because of his anti-Semitic views, and included a clip of Griff explaining them and the circumstances of his sudden exit from the band. And from what he said, Griff certainly appeared to have genuinely Nazi views. He claimed he carried a library of books on them around in a suitcase, in order to educated people, and he’d lay them out on a table. These included such classic anti-Semitic texts as Henry Ford’s The International Jew. Ford was certainly a member of the extreme right. He hated socialism and trade unions, as well as Jews and Lord knows who else. I think he was a favourite of Hitler and the Nazis, who also believed that Blacks were racially inferior. One nasty piece of Nazi doctrine, according to Orwell, was that Blacks could interbreed with gorillas. I really do wonder why any self-respecting person of colour would read anything by people who believed such vile rubbish.

He then came out with some of the class anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, like the Jews caused World War II. This is still being repeated by White fascists after Hitler and Oswald Mosley over here in the UK. No, the Jews had nothing to do with it. The War started because Hitler invaded Poland, thus provoking France and Britain who had made pledged themselves to defend the country.

He also talked about the Rothschild’s and other Jewish banks extending credit and loans to Nazi Germany. This is true. They did, along with a number of other big American companies like IBM. This has absolutely nothing to do with the owners of these banks being Jewish. It’s simply because they, and the other gentile-owned companies that did business with the Nazis, were run by utterly amoral people who cared only about profit. Their dealing with the Nazi was naturally deeply and bitterly resented by ordinary Jewish peeps. And it should be a problem for any daft conspiracy theories about a secret Jewish plot to gain global domination. I really don’t understand how that can be squared with Jewish banks, which are an integral part of this putative conspiracy, collaborating with a regime dedicated to destroying their people. There are attempts to do this, in which a distinction is drawn between the Jewish elite behind the conspiracy and normal, decent Jews, but it’s still an obvious, glaring inconsistency that should show that the conspiracy theory is utter nonsense.

I do wonder where this anti-Semitism in parts of Black popular culture comes from. The Nation of Islam and Louis Farrakhan are one source. Farrakhan blames the Jews for the slave trade and in the 1980s a ‘historical research institute’ connected with the sect published a book promoting this idea. Proper historians of the slave trade dismiss the idea. Very few of the merchants involved in the trade in America were Jewish. I think Hugh Thomas says there were just four in his excellent book The Slave Trade. There were Jewish financiers involved, but again I don’t think there were that many. And as has been pointed out by historians of transatlantic slavery and anti-racist activists, they were employed by Christian princes.

I do wonder if some of this Jew-hatred comes from racial politics in Harlem during the 1920s and ’30s. The book Colour Prejudice notes that there was considerable anti-Semitism among Harlem’s Black community. This might come from the fact that many of the stores were White-owned, and despite selling to a Black clientele they wouldn’t employ Black staff. This resulted in a concerted campaign by an alliance of Black labour organisations against the policy. They organised a boycott of these stores under the slogan ‘Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work’. One of the leaders of the boycott was Sufi Abdul Hamid, a colourful figure who dressed in exotic eastern robes. He was another native-born Black American, who had converted to a form of Islam. Hamid was particularly vehement against the Jewish owners of such stores, as well as Greeks and Italians, who he derided as ‘spaghetti-slingers’. The boycott was successful, but Hamid lost control of the movement because the other leaders were acutely embarrassed by his racism. See the chapter on Hamid and his literary followers, ‘”In Turban and Gorgeous Robe”: Claude McKay, Black Fascism and Labor’ in Mark Christian Thompson, Black Fascisms: African American Literature and Culture Between the Wars (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press 2007), 87-116.

And against ideas of a Jewish racial antipathy towards Blacks, there’s the long history of Jewish support for the Black Civil Rights movement. Many Jews worked as social workers, school teachers and other professionals within the Black community and so were deeply sympathetic to their cause. The awesome Black Jewish pro-Palestinian activist, Jackie Walker, is an example of this. Her mother was a Black civil rights activist from Georgia and her father was a Russian Jew. Her parents met at a rally by the Communist party. I’ve forgotten the fellow’s name, but one of the Jewish supporters and campaigners for the civil rights of Black Americans was a rabbi.

Griff’s endorsement of Ford’s wretched tome did confirm something that I’ve suspected: that Black anti-Semites were also reading and being influenced by White racists. The same thing appears to be the case in much Afrocentric literature about ancient Egypt being the source of both European and African civilisation. It’s based on long out-disproven theories by White colonial anthropologists, for whom the Egyptians were White Hamites, who spread southward and colonised the continent. The Black Afrocentrists who took over this view simply flipped the races, so that the Egyptians were Black. The result, however, was much the same in that the indigenous African peoples were denied the credit for their own cultural achievement made independently of Egypt, whatever skin colour the Egyptians had.

If the ultimate source of Black American anti-Semitism does come from the racial politics of pre-World War II Harlem, then it’s profoundly depressing that it should still cast a shadow over race relations nearly a century later. Quite apart from the fact that no-one, of any colour, should believe Nazi conspiratorial rubbish.

History Debunked Speculates about King Charles and the World Economic Forum

I put up a piece yesterday about how right-wing counterprotest group Correct, Not Political took the occasion of Her Maj’s death to push stupid, right-wing conspiracies inherited from Resistance GB and God knows who else. The Queen was posthumously accused of presiding over the British public being stripped of their ancient liberties as well as sneers about giving birth to paedophiles and being a cousin to her consort, Prince Philip. The nadir was reached when they put up a photograph of our new king wearing a skullcap in a pew during a service with Jewish men also wearing skullcaps. This was captioned ‘Close it down’. This strongly seems to suggest to me that, despite angrily denying that they believe in the Great Replacement, they do believe in some godawful conspiracy theory about Jewish power, the Zionist Occupation Government or some other utterly malign nonsense like that.

But they weren’t the only people to suffer from a sudden attack of conspiracy paranoia. Simon Webb of History Debunked put up a video asking whether Charles was going to institute the neo-feudalism of the Great Reset. Now this is a conspiracy theory I don’t know very much about. From what little I’ve come across of it, it seems to consider that the World Economic Forum led by Klaus Schwab will use the ecological crisis to push a form of ‘Green communism’. The global economy will be reconstructed to become a form of Communism in which people will own nothing and be happy. Motor transport is a particular concern to those holding this theory. They’re very worried about current moves to ban oil-driven cars in favour of electric, and so there are forms of the slogan which run ‘You will have no car and be happy’. I didn’t watch the video. I tried but got very bored after a couple of minutes. I think the logic here is that because Prince Philip and King Charles are very much into ecology – I think Philip was patron of the World-Wide Fund for Nature, formerly the World Wildlife Fund – they must be keen on closing down the modern industrial economy and establishing this green economic system. A system in which they would be the new, feudal, ruling class.

Webb isn’t an anti-Semite. To his credit he’s put up any number of videos debunking the stupid conspiracy theories about Jews. A recent video he put up attacked one of the arguments used by the Holocaust deniers. This was that Auschwitz had wooden doors. These wooden doors would have been permeable to gas, so if Auschwitz was used as gas oven, the gas would have escaped to kill the guards. Therefore, it wasn’t. Webb described how the Nazis had initially tried killing Jews by putting them in the back of vans fitted with hoses leading from their interiors to the exhaust pipe and then driving around until their victims will killed by the carbon monoxide. This didn’t kill enough of them, so they settled on Zyklon-B instead, a highly toxic pesticide. And if that had been used with wooden doors, it would have seeped through them to kill the guards. It was so toxic that the men handling the canisters had to wear gas masks. So, the Nazis didn’t use wooden doors in Auschwitz. They used metal. Regardless of the right-wing nature of the rest of his views, he has done something absolutely laudable in putting up this post against one of the arguments used to deny the Holocaust. Unfortunately, I doubt that the people who really needed to take it on board did so. The comments below the video were full of the usual anti-Semites and Nazis stating that they were right and lamenting that Webb hadn’t come round to their views.

Despite his opposition to anti-Semitism, it strikes me very much that the conspiracy theory about the Great Reset and the World Economic Forum, which Webb appears to have embraced, is just another form of all the conspiracy theories about the Rothschilds, the Bilderberg group and the Trilateral Commission and the globalists Alex Jones used to rant about. And Klaus Schwab seems to be taking over from George Soros as main international Bond villain in these peoples’ imaginations.

But it doesn’t matter who the villains are now, it’s still the same rubbish.

Another Step to Nazi Terror as Starmer and Lammy Mobbed Following Johnson Savile Slurs

Yesterday we had the unedifying spectacle of Labour leader Keir Starmer and MP David Lammy having to be protected by the rozzers, who bundled them hurriedly into their waiting cars. Stalin and Lammy were surrounded by a group of angry paranoiacs, who seemed to believe that the Labour leader was involved in some nasty conspiracies. Some shouted questions about Covid, suggesting they came from that part of the population that thinks that the lockdown is unnecessary, or, worse, that the pandemic is a ruse devised by the globalists to seize absolute totalitarian power through the imposition of the lockdown. I also heard someone shout at Starmer a question about him being a member of the New World Order. This is a conspiracy theory that’s been around for decades. It holds that there is some kind of Masonic/ Satanic plot to create a one-world totalitarian state. This has been going on for centuries and the American Revolution was one part of it. Washington DC is supposed to have been laid out in Masonic symbolism, and the occult, Masonic nature of the new American republic is shown in the design on the back of the dollar bill. This shows the eye in the pyramid as the slogan ‘Novo Ordo Saeculorum’ – ‘New World Order’. This theory became particularly widespread in the 1990s following George Bush senior’s comments during Gulf War I about creating a ‘new world order’. These were the same words Hitler used to describe the new international and political order he was going to build. And while some versions of the theory claim that the conspirators are just Freemasons and Satanists, I’ve got a feeling that others also blame the Jews, or at least the big Jewish banking families like the Rothschilds.

But the main accusation being thrown at Starmer was that he deliberately avoided prosecuting Jimmy Savile. But Starmer didn’t. He was unaware at the time that there were three witnesses willing to testify, and assumed there was only one. And I think she may have been unwilling to bring charges in the absence of other, supporting testimony. Hence he was advised that the prosecution would not succeed. It’s for that reason, I believe, that Starmer didn’t prosecute. And very definitely not because he had any ulterior motive or connection to Savile.

But that’s the allegation that’s been made by our utterly unprincipled liar of a Prime Minister. Members of his own party have condemned it, and cabinet officers have resigned. Yet Johnson refuses to retract or apologise.

Some particularly unscrupulous politicians have done this before. Lyndon Johnson, discussing what tactics they were going to use against a rival politician with his campaign team, is supposed to have said that they would accuse the man, a farmer, of f***ing his pigs. HIs team were shocked, and told LBJ that he couldn’t say that. To which Johnson is supposed to have replied ‘Let him prove it’.

But the tactic was used further back by another, totally malign politico and his supporters: Adolf Hitler. In addition to the usual lies and propaganda about Jews and the ‘November criminals’ who signed the Treaty of Versailles and formed the governing coalition of the doomed Weimar Republic, the Nazis also spread lies and vitriol about individual politicians and officials. This included declaring that one of the republic’s police chiefs was Jewish as part of his anti-Semitic smears, even though the man was a gentile. And the Nazis accompanied their lies and smears with grotesque violence, not just through coup attempts and the savagery of the ‘Night of the Long Knives’, but also in paramilitary street gangs attacking and fighting Jews and ‘Marxists’. One of them used to sing a repulsive little ditty about fighting ‘until the Jew lies bleeding at our feet’.

As far as I know, the paranoiacs who mobbed Starmer and Lammy aren’t members of the Tory party or any paramilitary organisation. Nor do I believe that they have any personal connection with Johnson. But they are clearly acting in his favour by believing his lies and seeking to intimidate Stalin and Lammy accordingly. It’s not quite the same as the Nazis’ tactics, but it’s not far off.

And it shows that Johnson is an active threat to this country’s democracy by following the Nazi tactic of lies and smears intended to provoke mob violence.

Jewish Board of Deputies Accuses Nigel Farage of Anti-Semitism

Zelo Street reported yesterday that the Board of Deputies of British Jews had taken a break from accusing the Labour party to turn their ire on another British politico. This was Nigel Farage, Fuhrer and CEO of the Brexit Party. According to the Graoniad, the Board had accused the man 2000AD’s Judge Dredd satirised as ‘Bilious Barrage’ because

“Farage’s airing of claims about plots to undermine national governments, and his references to Goldman Sachs and the financier George Soros, showed he was seeking to ‘trade in dog whistles’ … [he] was also condemned by the MPs who co-chair the all-party group against antisemitism”.

They then provide a series of examples from a recent tweet and interview with Newsweek magazine. In the tweet’s video message, the Fuhrage claimed that Britain was facing a wave of ‘cultural Marxism’. This is an idea that has its origins in Nazism, and their claim that Germany was being subverted by Jewish ‘Kulturbolschevismus’. Organisations funded by George Soros were also responsible for companies removing adverts for right-wing TV programmes. This was the trope of the ‘disloyal Jew’.

In the Newsweek article, Nige had ranted about ‘unelected globalists’ shaping the lives of the public based on recommendations from the big banks. ‘Globalists’ was a code word for ‘Jews’ or ‘Jewish bankers’. Goldman Sachs was the only bank he named, which followed another theme from the extreme right.

And Zelo Street also provided a few examples of his own to support the Board’s accusation. In another tweet, the Brexit Party’s Duce Faragissimo had praised Viktor Orban’s Hungary for standing up to the globalists, and wished we all did the same. He also talked about anti-Brexit plots backed by George Soros, including the campaign for a second referendum. Rants against the globalists featured regularly in his tweets. In one, he declared that we were all sick of threats from the globalists. This followed a statement that London was the world’s no. 1 financial centre, and Frankfurt only the 11th. We were, he also announced, heading toward a world where the democratic nation state had made a comeback against the globalists. Former US president Barack Obama, and Chancellor Merkel of Germany were ‘holding a losing party’ for the globalists. And then there was this series of comments about Goldman Sachs

“Goldman Sachs and big business lost the referendum … Congratulations to former EU Commission President [José Manuel Barroso], now over at Goldman Sachs. Global corporatism! … If Goldman Sachs are leaving London for the US, why aren’t they going to their beloved European Union? … Goldman Sachs Chairman thinks those who want border controls are ‘xenophobic’. Badly out of touch”.

The Street noted that these snippets showed the Fuhrage being promoted by the Beeb, Sky News and the Heil. By doing so, they were also promoting anti-Semitism. The Street concluded

Serious anti-Semitism always comes from the far right. Nigel Farage is living proof of that.

See: https://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2020/06/nigel-farage-theres-real-anti-semitism.html

Farage’s rants and denunciations of the globalists, Goldman Sachs and George Soros are the latest forms of the anti-Semitic fears about Jewish bankers that first appeared in the Tsarist forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. They also have their roots in some of the conspiracy theories that emerged in the 1970s about the Bilderberg group and the Trilateral Commission. Many leading bankers, like Bernard Baruch, had backed the formation of the United Nations, Trilateral Commission and the elite Bilderberg group, which meets annually to discuss global politics. Thus the UN and the other organisations were seen as devices by which Jewish bankers sought world domination, culminating in a one-world dictatorship, the enslavement of gentiles and the extermination of the White race. Not all versions of this theory are necessarily quite so anti-Semitic. Some of them distinguish between Jewish bankers and the rest of the Jewish people, noting that some of the former, like the Rothschilds, advanced credit and loans to Nazi Germany even when the Nazis were persecuting the Jews. Other forms of the theory are more bonkers still. In one of them, the Trilateral Commission takes its name from the Trilateral ensign, the flag of the Grey aliens from Zeta Reticuli, with whom the US has made a Faustian pact. The aliens are allowed to abduct and experiment on humans in return for providing extraterrestrial technology like velcro.

I wouldn’t like to say that Farage is definitely an anti-Semite, but his rhetoric and beliefs about evil globalists comprising banks like Goldman Sachs and the Jewish financier George Soros are certainly part of a series of conspiracy theories, some of which are viciously anti-Semitic.

The Board is right to denounce Farage for spouting these theories. However, this hasn’t changed my mind about the Board as a whole. Most of its accusations of anti-Semitism, along with those of the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, the Jewish Leadership Council, the Chief Rabbinate and their allies in the Labour Party, the Jewish Labour Movement and Labour Friends of Israel, have been directed against Labour, its former leaders Jeremy Corbyn and Ed Miliband, and Corbyn’s followers. They have done so not out of concern about real anti-Semitism, but from a determination to defend Israel and its barbarous ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians from criticism. At the same time the Board denounced the Fuhrage yesterday, it was also attacking Labour’s shadow foreign secretary, Lisa Nandy, for demanding the government impose a block on the import of goods manufactured in the Occupied Territories if Israel begins its planned annexation of a third of the West Bank tomorrow.

It looks to me that the Board’s accusation of Farage for anti-Semitism is intended to soothe its left-wing critics by showing them that it doesn’t just attack the Labour Party. It really does attack other parties for anti-Semitism, really. But this doesn’t change the fact that the Board seems packed with Tories and Tory supporters. And it doesn’t change the fact that Board’s chief motivation for its attacks on the Labour Party is simply an attempt to excuse the inexcusable and defend entirely reasonable and proper criticism of Israel.

The Board is right to accuse Farage. But its accusations against the Labour Party are still wrong and politically motivated.

 

 

Tony Greenstein on the Leaked Anti-Semitism Report, the Political Motivation behind the Smears, and Corbyn’s Capitulation

Tony Greenstein has just put up the second part of his critique of the leaked report on anti-Semitism in the Labour party. This is the report that has caused so much anger and outrage amongst ordinary, rank and file members, through its revelations that the party bureaucracy were doing everything they could to unseat Corbyn, including purging his supporters and actively campaigning against the Labour party in the 2017 election. The first part of Greenstein’s article examines this aspect of the report. The second part now explains how it shows that Corbyn and his office did not understand the political nature of the anti-Semitism allegations. Led by Jon Lansman, Corbyn and his team absolutely accepted that the accusations were made in good faith. They caved in utterly to the accusers, who were motivated purely by a desire to topple Corbyn and protect Israel from justifiable criticism of its brutal programme of slow-motion genocide against the Palestinians. Thus Corbyn, Lansman, Milne et al threw their supporters to the wolves in a massively mistaken policy of appeasement. The Israel lobby and its accomplices inside and outside the party, including the Conservative Jewish establishment, were not only not appeased, by emboldened by this capitulation. They continued with increasing fervour until Corbyn himself, a passionate lifelong anti-racist and opponent of anti-Semitism, was smeared.

Greenstein’s piece tackles a number of episodes in this sorry tale of retreat and capitulation. This includes how Corbyn should have responded to Andrew Neil’s demand that he apologise to the Jewish community by pointing out how Neil, as head of the board of the Spectator, was responsible for the continuing employment of real anti-Semites and Holocaust deniers by the magazine. Scumbags like David Irving and Taki. He describes how Corbyn’s office itself put on pressure for the expulsion of himself, Jackie Walker, Marc Wadsworth and Ken Livingstone.

His piece discusses real anti-Semitism in the Labour Party, such as the historical cases of the Webbs, Herbert Morrison, and the perversion of the definition of anti-Semitism to mean anti-Zionism. He also argues that some of the hostile rhetoric against the Rothschilds really isn’t anti-Semitic, as many of those using it don’t understand that the Rothschilds were Jewish. It just reflects a poor political understanding of Zionism, when used solely in this context. He makes the point that the British and American elites support Israel for its military and political significance in the Middle East.

He also shows how the far-right ultra-Zionist activist David Collier infiltrated the Labour Party, leading the party’s Governance and Legal Unit to suspend Glyn Secker of Jewish Voice for Labour. He also discusses Jackie Walker’s and other cases, where the claims of anti-Semitic were false or at best, extremely flimsy. He also describes how anti-Semites have supported Zionism ever since the days of Alfred Dreyfus, and shows how the Jewish Labour Movement always supported Netanyahu and never criticised Israel, despite their denials. He refutes the claim that Sir Stephen Sedley and Geoffrey Robertson, one a former appeal court judge, the other a QC, both supported the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism. In fact, they were both ardent critics. The report also boasts of how Jennie Formby increased the suspensions for anti-Semitism due to pressure from the Jewish establishment. He quotes Len McCluskey, who said of the Jewish establishment’s refusal to be satisfied that Labour was effectively tackling anti-Semitism, as them refusing to take ‘yes’ for an answer.

He also shows how the accusations that Labour was in denial about the extent of anti-Semitism in the party was simply a convenient slur to mask their real targets – Corbyn’s support for improved conditions for working people and proper funding of the NHS. He states that Corbyn was unable to formulate a competing worldview to counter that of the Tories, which is why he ultimately lost. He simply wanted an improvement in conditions, whereas the whole structure of society needs to be changed. And he states that this accusation shows absolute contempt for the 70 per cent of Labour members, who don’t believe anti-Semitism is a problem and understand that the vast majority of accusations are politically motivated.

He then moves on demolish other cases of bogus accusations of anti-Semitism against Margaret Tyson, Asa Winstanley, Chris Williamson, Brian Lovett-White – smeared because he said that Zionism was anti-Semitism, which was actually historically the attitude of most Jews; and Alan Bull, suspended for connecting Israel to ISIS, when there is evidence to support this as factually correct. He also describes cases where the witch-hunters dragged their feet or failed to act against genuine cases of anti-Semitism, such as Nasreen Khan, Christopher Crookes, and Fleur Dunbar. He contrasts their case with that Anne Mitchell of Hove, who was expelled simply for talking about the Israel lobby, despite the fact that Israel does have lobbying groups like AIPAC campaigning on its behalf.

His piece concludes

The expulsion of socialists who have dedicated their life to the labour movement and the Labour Party is having a serious detrimental effect on their health. Pauline Hammerton died of a brain haemorrhage a week after receiving her expulsion letter. Clearly the Labour Party’s treatment of her contributed to her death. However such matters are of no concern to the author(s) of this Report. Their only concern is factional, rebutting the suggestion that they were not equally as active in expelling socialists and anti-racists as McNicol and Matthews.

See: http://azvsas.blogspot.com/2020/04/pt-2-labours-leaked-report-sad-sorry.html

This is a thorough demolition of the witch-hunt, showing just how spurious and hypocritical the allegations and those behind them were. But it also shows that their false assumption were shared by the compilers of the report. Both Mike at Vox Political and Martin Odoni have also written extensively attacking the report’s blithe acceptance of these smears.

Unfortunately, while there is immense pressure to bring the political intriguers to justice, there is absolutely no commitment to refute assumptions by Starmer and the current leadership. This is probably because they, like Corbyn, uncritically accept them.

And so decent people remain grotesquely smeared, and the potential for fresh witch-hunt, whenever the Israel lobby find it convenient, remains.

 

 

 

 

George Soros and Genuine Neo-Nazi Conspiracy Theories

Left-wing and anti-racism bloggers, commenters and campaigners have pointed out again and again how right-wing conspiracy theories about the supposedly nefarious activities of the financier George Soros, such as those promoted by the far-right Fidesz government in Hungary, conform to the poisonous Nazi conspiracy theories about evil Jewish bankers. Mainstream Conservatives have also blamed Soros’s influence for opposition to their policies in Britain. For example, Jacob Rees-Mogg, apart from accusing John Bercow and another Jewish politico of being ‘Illuminati’ – which has its own anti-Semitic overtones – also claimed that George Soros was financing the Remain campaign.

But the conspiracy theories about George Soros don’t just resemble Nazi mythology. They are a part of it, at least in some of the material that arose from the neo-Nazi fringe in the 1990s. In his book on contemporary Nazi paganism, Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism and the Politics of Identity (New York: New York University Press 2002) Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke discusses the work of Jan van Helsing, real name Jan Udo Holey, and his 1993 Geheimgesellschaften und ihre macht im 20. Jahrhundert (Secret Societies and their Power in the 20th Century). Two years later, in 1995, Helsing published Geheimgesellschaften 2. This consisted of his extended responses to interview questions. As you can imagine, despite Helsing’s avowed denials, it is a deeply anti-Semitic book. Goodrick-Clarke writes

Here he denies the charge of anti-Semitism, claiming Jewish friends and colleagues, before making the disingenuous distinction between Semitic Hebrews and Ashkenazi Jews or Khazars, who are his real antagonists in the persons of Rothschilds, Warburgs, the English royal family (!), Marx, Lenin, Stalin, etc. This ploy recapitulates the progressive disqualification of Jews from their Israelite heritage in Christian Identity doctrine. He then reprints several pages of Dr. Johannes Pohl’s vicious translation of the Talmud that was published by the Nazi Party in 1943 as anti-Semitic propaganda. On the Protocols, Helsing simply denies that their authenticity is an important issue: they exist and they are being applied. To complete his anti-Jewish rotomontade, he reveals that former Chancellor Helmut Kohl was born Henoch Koch and shows how George Soros is ruining East European economies through his liberal economic writ. Helsing’s dubious sources, his constant repetition of Jewish names as members of private and public organisations, and above all his emphasis on the assets and powerbroking influence of the Rothschilds as the top Illuminati family leave no doubt that his conspiracy theories are aimed at Jewish targets. (P. 296, my emphasis).

In case any of this sounds remotely credible, it’s worth noting that the royal family aren’t Jewish and neither were Lenin or Stalin. Stalin definitely not – he was a bitter anti-Semite. Helmut Kohl, the former German chancellor, wasn’t Jewish either. Van Helsing also believed that there’s a secret Nazi underground base in Antarctica, as well as colonies of other Reich Germans in the Canaries, the San Carlos area of Argentina, the Bermuda Triangle and the Himalayas. They also have a standing army of 6 million soldiers, including immigrants from Aldebaran. Yes, van Helsing believes the Nazi saucer mythology, in which Adolf and his band of thugs were helped by aliens from the star Aldebaran, who told them how to build flying saucers. Of which the Reich Nazis have an armada of 22,000.

When Jacob Rees-Mogg or the other Tories rant about George Soros, they are repeating an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory and should be criticised for it. But Conservative anti-Semitism has received nowhere near the amount of attention as the anti-Semitic smears against Corbyn and the Labour party. This is despite anti-Semitism being far lower in Labour. John Mann, the Tories’ anti-Semitism tsar, has shown himself completely uninterested in investigating it in the Tories, and blocked and called the children’s poet, Holocaust educator and broadcaster Michael Rosen a troll when he tried to draws Mann’s attention to some examples.

This shows how fake the Tories’ concern about anti-Semitism really is, just as the inclusion of George Soros in van Helsing’s wretched, vile anti-Semitic conspiracy theories show the real Fascism in similar fears about the financier in Tories like Rees-Mogg.

Rees-Mogg Hurls Anti-Semitic Conspiracy Insult at Tory MPs, Press Silent

Zelo Street has just put up a cracking story credibly accusing Jacob Rees-Mogg’s anti-Semitism. It seems that during the heated Commons debate on Brexit on the 3rd of this month, September 2019, Rees-Mogg opened his patrician gob to hurl a very loaded insult at his fellow Tory MP, Oliver Letwin, and John Bercow. He called them ‘Illuminati’. John Mann, the Tory’s Anti-Semitism Tsar, and the press seem to have missed all this completely. They have uttered not a word about it. There has been no outraged article by Gabriel Pogrund and Jake Wallis Simons. But one person, who did notice it was Michael Berkowitz, a historian at University College London, who posted a piece about it, on which the Zelo Street article heavily draws.

Berkowitz states that he found it extremely unsettling, as an historian of anti-Semitism, to hear Rees-Mogg use it of two MPs of Jewish background. He states that the Illuminati were originally a late Eighteenth century fraternal organisation, and cites three sources that use the term. He then explains that common to these sources is the view that the Illuminati infiltrated the Jewish bankers during the late 19th century. They follow the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion in regarding the Illuminati/Jews/bankers as behind the Bolshevik Revolution, the creation of the Federal Reserve banking system in the US, the Council on Foreign Relations, and then what the Far Right calls the New World Order, which also includes the United Nations and the European Union.

Berkowitz ends his post with the comment

“There is no other, anodyne usage of this term in current political discourse … With his nod to ‘Illuminati’ – pointed at Letwin and Bercow – Rees-Mogg is knowingly trafficking in the portrayal of Jews as underhanded and sinister … while studiously avoiding the word ‘Jew’, he has exhumed, embellished, and rebroadcast one of the most poisonous antisemitic canards in all of history”.

The Sage of Crewe comments ‘Rees-Mogg bang to rights’, and concludes

‘As he’s entirely consistent, I expect John Mann to be down on Rees Mogg like the proverbial tonne of bricks, camera crew and all. Once someone has explained it to him.’

See: https://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2019/09/rees-mogg-anti-semitism-exposed.html

It’s not quite that straightforward, unfortunately. The Illuminati were a Bavarian secret society of freethinkers, founded by Adam Weisshaupt, which infiltrated the Freemasons. They were then stamped out by the authorities in Bavaria, Austria and other countries. There is no evidence that the order has survived to today. However, following the French Revolution a number of works were published blaming the Freemasons for the French Revolution and various other conspiracies and revolutionary movements, including the Russian Revolution of October 1917. These conspiracy theories gradually became increasingly anti-Semitic. At first it was claimed that the Freemasons recruited the Jews to help them in their work of overthrowing the traditional western social order. Then the theories changed so that it was the Jews, who were responsible for these conspiracies. The idea that the Illuminati were ultimately behind these movements was put forward in the 20th century by the extreme Right-wing John Birch Society in America. Following them, they are regarded as the force behind a global conspiracy to create an evil, Satanic world government with a single universal, anti-Christian religion. And yes, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Bilderberg Group, Trilateral Commission, Jewish bankers like the Rothschilds, the EU and the UN certainly are regarded as part of this conspiracy.

To be fair, not everyone who believes in the Illuminati conspiracy is an anti-Semite by any means. Some of the Evangelical Christians, who believe it, are genuinely philo-Semitic. When they talk about the Illuminati, they mean a giant conspiracy which includes the giant banking families, like the Rothschilds, but which is not driven by the Jews. And indeed, Jews may be the Illuminati’s victims, such as the Jews murdered by the Nazis, who were funded during the War by the Rothschilds even when their persecution was known. But there are other versions of the theory in which the Illuminati are viewed as Jewish. During the 1990s these bonkers conspiracy theories expanded to include the alien abduction phenomenon and the tales of secret government collusion with the aliens. Bill English in his book Behold a Pale Horse claimed that the government had made a pact with the aliens in which they were allowed to abduct and experiment on humans in exchange for giving us their technology. This was all part of a nefarious global conspiracy against humanity. To prove the existence of this conspiracy, English quoted passages from the notorious anti-Semitic forgery, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. However, he advised his readers that instead of ‘Jews’ they should insert the word ‘Illuminati’. This was fiercely attacked because it seemed to advance and sanitise the real murderous anti-Semitism of the Protocols. Due to English’s book’s malign influence, a branch of Waterstones in one of the northern cities actually stocked copies of the Protocols.

Even if Rees-Mogg was not deliberately being anti-Semitic, when he accused Letwin and Bercow of being ‘Illuminati who are taking the powers to themselves’, he was using a real, genuine anti-Semitic trope. He should have been robustly rebuked for it, and made to explain himself. However, he was not. The comments on this piece are well-worth reading, as they show the immense hypocrisy of the press and John Mann. Neither of them are really interested in questions of genuine racism and anti-Semitism, except as sticks with which to smear and beat Jeremy Corbyn. One commenter describes how he tried to inform Mann of real racism on the part of Stella Creasy after he appealed for people to send him information of such incidents. He didn’t receive any reply, and no action was taken.

Mann’s and the media’s silence is troubling for another reason. They show how the political and media establishment will cover up genuine anti-Semitism, or something very close to it, when it’s done by one of themselves. Left-wing bloggers like Buddy Hell, Zelo Street and Mike have pointed out how Mann and other Labour ‘moderates’, as well as the Tories, are free to attack Romanies and other Travellers in racist terms, despite the Nazi attempts to exterminate them as well as the Jews and the disabled. Despite calls from the Muslim community and genuine anti-racists, the Tory party will not launch an inquiry into the real islamophobia in its ranks. And the media and anti-Semitism witch-hunting organisations like the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, the Jewish Labour Movement and the Community Service Trust seem more interested in attacking and manufacturing accusations of anti-Semitism on the Left than on the Right. And the vast majority of anti-Semitism by far comes from the extreme Right.

Many of the people smeared as anti-Semites are left-wing Jews, who have very often been the victims of real anti-Semitic abuse and assault. But they suffer from anti-Semitism again following the accusations of the media and the witch-hunters against them because they support Jeremy Corbyn and a just deal for the Palestinians. They are the ‘wrong kind of Jews’, another anti-Semitic motif.

This raises the terrible question that if someone in the Tory party did start a genuine campaign of discrimination and terror against this country’s Jewish citizens, would it be reported? The silence surrounding Rees-Mogg’s comments says that it probably wouldn’t, at least not in the initial stages. And according to the media and the witch-hunters, it’s Corbyn who is an existential threat to the Jews!

 

The Rights’ Conflation of Anti-Semitism and Anti-Capitalism and the Erasure of Left-Wing Jewish History

Just as the Jewish Chronicle may have itself been guilty of anti-Semitism by denying that one of the signatories to the letter of support for Corbyn and the Labour party sent to the Sunday Times, so other members of the right may also be aiding anti-Semitism by their repeated use of the conspiracy theory that the Jews are the real force behind capitalism.

Three days ago, on 16th March 2019, David Rosenberg of the Jewish Socialist Group, an ardent campaigner himself against racism, anti-Semitism and thus Zionism, put up on his blog an article discussing this very point, which had been published that day in the Morning Star. He began by commenting on the statement by Blairite Labour MP Siobhain McDonagh to John Humphrys on Radio 4 that ‘anti-capitalist politics are at the root of anti-Semitism’. Rosenberg states that it’s an appalling slur against everyone fighting against the poverty and inequality of Tory Britain, but it also revealed that the Right, even those, who think they are pro-Jewish, still believe anti-Semitic stereotypes, as McDonagh obviously thinks that Jews are rich capitalists.

He goes on to discuss how this is at the heart of the anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that sees the Jews as using their wealth to control the banks and governments. A theory that was pushed by Henry Ford, an Episcopalian Christian and founder of the car manufacturer that bears his name, in his paper the Dearborn Independent. Ford believed that the Jews caused World War I, and published the infamous Tsarist forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. And someone else who believed this poisonous nonsense, and was Ford’s biggest fan in Europe, was one A. Hitler.

Rosenberg goes on to discuss how there are Jews, who identify the Jewish community with capitalism, banking and property and so accuse the anti-capitalist left as anti-Semites. He then cites Richard Mather, who claimed in an article in the Jerusalem Post that ‘the Labour party’s call for the seizure of property’ was part of ‘anti-Semitic class warfare’, and pieces written by the editor of the Jewish Chronicle, Stephen Pollard, and one of his journos, Alex Brummer, who both claimed that Corbyn was an anti-Semitic threat to Jewish capitalists, with Pollard harking back to Corbyn’s attack on the bankers that caused the financial crash ten years ago. Rosenberg tweeted in response to this nonsense that of Pollard and Corbyn, one of them thought all bankers were Jews. And it wasn’t Corbyn.

Rosenberg goes on to say that

In my 61 years I’ve never met a Jewish banker. I’ve met unemployed Jews, Jewish decorators, post-office workers, van drivers, taxi drivers, shopworkers, social workers, secretaries, teachers, pharmacists, and several comedians.

He reinforces this point by describing how Arnold Brown, a Jewish comedian, who came from a poor background in Glasgow, tore up the floorboards at his home one day after the other schoolkids told him that all Jews were rich. He also makes the point that the racist Right use the stereotype of the rich Jewish capitalist to divert popular anger away from capitalism to particular Jewish figures, who are supposed to be responsible for its ills, such as Rothschild and Goldman Sachs to George Soros today, demonised by Trump and a slew of extreme right-wing regimes because he funds agencies for migrants and refugees and anti-government demonstrations.

But he also makes the point that this stereotype also erases the strong history of Jewish left-wing anti-capitalist activism, writing

When McDonagh, Mather and Pollard repeat stereotypes of Jews as capitalists, they not only feed these conspiracy theories, but also erase an outstanding tradition of Jewish anti-capitalism. People know the famous Jewish revolutionaries, like Marx, Trotsky, Rosa Luxemberg, Emma Goldman, but it was in mass Jewish workers’ movements such as the Bund, and among the Jews so numerous in socialist and communist parties over the last 120 years, that anti-capitalism was ingrained. In 1902, a Russian Jewish bookbinder, Semyon Ansky, wrote a Yiddish song to honour the Bund’s struggles for social justice. The movement adopted it as its anthem. One powerful verse translates as:

“We swear to the heavens a bloody hatred against those who murder and rob the working class. The Tsar, the rulers, the capitalists – we swear that they will all be devastated and destroyed. An oath, an oath, of life and death.”

He goes on to say that he is going that day to march and speak with the Jewish Socialist Group on a national demonstration in London against racism and Fascism, including the anti-Semitism that is rising in central and eastern Europe and Trump’s America with the Pittsburgh shooting.  He concludes

At street level, far right organisations concentrate physical attacks more frequently on Muslims, Roma, migrants and refugees, but when they want to explain to their supporters who they believe holds power in the world they fall back on Jewish conspiracy theories as surely today as they did in the 1930s. The fight against antisemitism, Islamophobia and anti-migrant propaganda are absolutely linked and we must combat them together.

See: https://rebellion602.wordpress.com/2019/03/16/the-anti-antisemitism-that-actually-promotes-jew-hating/

Absolutely. Rosenberg’s blog is particularly fascinating for the pieces he publishes about the Bund, the socialist party of the eastern European masses in the Russian Empire. It’s a history that I doubt many non-Jews know about, as the Yiddish-speaking communities the Bund represented were murdered by the Nazis. If people outside the Jewish community know about it at all, it’s probably because of the movement’s connection to the Russian Socialist movement. The Bund were, with the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks, part of the Russian Social Democratic Party, the parent organisation of the Russian Communists. It was their withdrawal from the party conference in 1909, when Lenin demanded that there should be no separate organisation for Jewish socialists, that made the Bolsheviks the majority faction and gave them their name, from ‘Bolshe’, the Russian word for bigger.

But the articles by David Rosenberg and other left-wing Jewish bloggers and vloggers reveal a rich, lost history of Jewish anti-capitalist struggle. One of the remarkable consequences of the anti-Semitism smears is that this history is being rediscovered and brought to public attention as Jewish Marxists and socialists refute these smears. Jon Pullman’s film, The Witchhunt, attacking these smears and particularly the libelous hounding of Jackie Walker, includes a brief mention of the Bund, including black and white footage of their demonstrations and banners. If Channel 4 had kept to its original charter as an alternative BBC 2, the Bund and its legacy would be a very suitable subject for a documentary. It could also easily be screened on BBC 4. But I doubt that this will ever happen because the stereotype of the rich Jew is too important a weapon against the anti-capitalist left for it to be refuted by such a thing as actual history.

And if left-wing Jewish history, like that of the Bund, is being forgotten, some contemporary works on the Jewish community may inadvertently reinforce the stereotype of the rich Jew. Back in the 1990s an aunt gave me a book about the Jewish community in Britain, The Club. It was a mainstream book by a very respectable mainstream publisher, but from what I can remember about it, it was about the elite section of British Jewish society, the top 100. I think it was written from an entirely praiseworthy standpoint – to celebrate Jewish achievement, and to how how integrated and indeed integral Jews were to British society and culture. But books like it can give an unbalanced picture of Jewish society in Britain by concentrating on the immensely wealthy and successful, and ignoring the ordinary Jewish folk, who live, work and whose kids go to school and uni with the rest of us, and whose working people marched in solidarity with us.

It’s fascinating and necessary that the history of Jewish socialism is being rediscovered, and that activists in the Bund’s tradition, like Rosenberg, continue to write, demonstrate and blog against racism and anti-Semitism as part of the real struggle by working people.

 

 

‘I’ Newspaper Smears Corbyn’s Labour as Anti-Semitic Conspiracy Theorists: Part 1

One of the papers pushing the smear that Labour is infested with anti-Semites is the I. Their columnist, Simon Kelner, was accusing the Corbyn and the Labour party of being anti-Semitic way back last summer, because the party hadn’t adopted the I.H.R.C. definition of anti-Semitism. Or it had, but hadn’t adopted all the examples. There was a very good reason for that, which has not been repeated by the lying mainstream media: most of the examples are not about the real meaning of anti-Semitism, which is simply hatred of Jews simply as Jews, but attempts to define criticism of Israel, or at least some criticisms of Israel, as anti-Semitic. Kenneth Stern, a Zionist and one of the formulators of the definition, has spoken out against it in Congress for the way it is being used to prevent criticism of Israel.

In Friday’s issue, for 8th March 2019, the paper took the occasion of the EHRC’s statement that it might investigate Labour for anti-Semite to publish a piece by Richard Verber in its ‘My View’ column, entitled ‘How Anti-Semitism Poisons Labour’, subtitled ‘The party needs to tackle these conspiracy theories’. This claimed that ‘at the heart of the accusations against figures in the party are a series of conspiracy theories about Jews which are so ingrained that even good people (people who consider themselves to be anti-racism campaigners) can believe them.’ Verber goes on to say that in his article he explains the three most dominant.

Alarm bells about the bias and distortions in the article should go off with the statement at the end of the article that Verber was the communications director at the United Synagogue. As Israel-critical Jews have pointed out, this is the constituency of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, one of the organisations making the accusations of anti-Semitism against Corbyn and the Labour party. The Board explicitly defines itself as a Zionist organisation, which presumably reflects the bias of the United Synagogue. It does not represent Orthodox Jews, nor the third of the Jewish community that’s secular. And by definition, the Board doesn’t represent non- or anti-Zionist Jews. This is important, as several of the ‘examples’ of anti-Semitism Verber discusses are actually attempts to prohibit criticism of Israel, and discussion of possible Israeli interference in British politics as anti-Semitic.

Verber starts with the usual anti-Semitic conspiracy theory, which he defines as ‘there is a ‘new world order’, run by Jews, to control global finance and governments’. This conspiracy theory he traces from the publication of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. He stated that the ‘New World Order’ was originally a call for peace following the collapse of Communism. However, the conspiracy version was all about Jews infiltrating the American government from the late 1940s onwards. He states that at its heart was the belief that Jews and the Illuminati were plotting to have Communism take over the world. He then argues that this later morphed into the ‘globalists’ of modern far-right propaganda, international bankers is code for Jews, as is the name ‘Rothschilds’.

Now there is a considerable amount of truth in this article. The notion of a global Jewish conspiracy does indeed go all the way back to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and that Nazi and contemporary Fascist ideology does see the world as controlled by Jewish bankers. But it’s also a gross oversimplification. The Illuminati at the centre of modern conspiracy theories were a group of radical freethinkers, founded by Adam Weishaupt, who attempted to infiltrate the Freemasons in late 18th century Bavaria, resulting in their suppression by the Roman Catholic authorities. The Freemasons were subsequently blamed for the outbreak of the American and French Revolutions. The term ‘New World Order’ is taken from the motto of the American dollar bill, ‘Novo Ordo Secularum’, which also featured the Masonic symbol of the Eye in the Pyramid. It also gained notoriety in the 1990s after George Bush senior, the former head of the CIA, referred to a ‘new world order’ after the Collapse of Communism, at the same time as the first Gulf War. To many people, it seemed that there really was a secret conspiracy controlling the world. However some of those who believed this nonsense simply thought that the conspirators were the historical Illuminati, Freemasons and Satanists. They did not accuse the Jews. Of course the identification of the Illuminati with the Jews came shortly after the publication of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and was introduced into British Fascism by either Nesta Webster or Rotha Orne Linton. One of these ladies was an alcoholic and a spiritualist, who had been told by the Duc D’Orleans, communicating from the Other Side, that the Illuminati had been responsible for the French Revolution and all the others since. Michael Pipes, a Conservative American political theorist, traces the evolution of the conspiracy theory that the world is being run by a secret cabal from fears about the Freemasons to the Jews in his 1990s book, Conspiracy Theories.

The historical dimension to the development of this conspiracy theory needs to be taken into account, as there may still be versions that place the blame solely on Freemasons, the historical Illuminati and Satanists, rather than the Jews. And while Bush’s use of the term ‘New World Order’ might have been peaceful in intent, it came at a time when many people were rightly fearful of the massive growth of American power and the first war with Iraq. This was supposed to be about the liberation of Kuwait after its annexation by its northern neighbour. However, by its critics at the time it was seen as a ‘resource war’. Greg Palast discusses the invasion in his book, Armed Madhouse, and concludes that the war was fought for geopolitical reasons in which oil was a main factor. Another factor why the phrase ‘New World Order’ is also notorious is that it’s similar to Hitler’s pronouncement about the Nazis creating a New Order. One of the banned Nazi organisations in post-War Italy was L’Ordine Nuovo. Which means, well, guess what?

Verber gives as an example of this conspiracy theory in the Labour party Corbyn objecting to the removal of the mural by Mear One in 2012, This showed, according to Verber, ‘hooked-nosed Jewish bankers playing a board game on the backs of poor people. notes that Corbyn’s objection to the mural’s removal was revealed in 2018 by Luciana Berger, and quotes a spokesman for the Labour leader stating that he was simply responding to a freedom of speech issue, but that the mural was offensive, did include anti-Semitic imagery and should be removed’. And to prove it was anti-Semitic, Verber states that the artist admitted some of the figures were Jewish.

Some. The operative word here is ‘some’. In fact the mural depicts five bankers, three of whom are gentiles. While they look like anti-Semitic caricatures, they are portraits of real people. And if the mural was anti-Semitic, why did it take Berger till last year to accuse Corbyn of anti-Semitism for objecting to its removal? The mural does depict the bonkers conspiracy theory about bankers, but there is little overt in it which specifically targets the Jews as the main conspirators. The whole incident was another manufactured smear against Corbyn.