Mark Pattie, one of the many great commenters on this blog, left a remark earlier today noting that Benjamin Netanyahu has appointed Ben Gvir as ‘kingmaker’. Netanyahu is the new Israeli president, and Itamar Be Gvir is a raging anti-Palestinian racist. He’s so extreme that in a recent piece about the Israeli elections the Beeb described him as ‘far right’. He is, as one of his demands is for the expulsion of ‘disloyal Arabs’. ‘Far right’ is strong language, especially as the I.H.R.A. definition of anti-Semitism says that it may be anti-Semitic to compare Jews to Nazis. But the comparison is certainly there, and valid, as the mighty Tony Greenstein has been showing for a very long time. Israeli policy towards the Palestinians is comparable to the Nazi persecution of the Jews before the initiation of the ‘Final Solution’ in 1942. You can also compare it to the Nazi occupation of Poland, in which a tract of land extending into Ukraine and Russia was cleared of its Slavic inhabitants ready for German colonisation.
But let’s stay with the ‘kingmaker’ epithet, shall we? If we’re talking about kings, I supposed the English king most like the demented Ben Gvir would be Edward I, the kind who expelled the Jews from England and who was the centre of a British Fascist cult, English Mystery, in the 1920s and 30s.
And it seems the Israel lobby is getting ready to make insinuations of anti-Semitism yet again against left-wing politicians. Ben Shapiro, one of the leaders of the right-wing American organisation, Turning Point, has posted a video this evening complaining that while the outgoing Israeli president, Yair Lapid, has congratulated Netanyahu on his election victory, Biden hasn’t done so. Well, if I was a politico, I wouldn’t want to congratulate the leader of an administration that had a monstrous bigot like Ben Gvir in it. But the attitude also reminds me of various incidents where the Israelis flung accusations of anti-Semitism against Barack Obama. Obama gave them the Iron Dome missile defence system. He also gave them aid, but because they didn’t get the amount they demanded, the Israeli government through a fit and screamed ‘anti-Semitism’.
This did not impress the very Jewish Sam Seder, head honcho of the left-wing ‘Majority Report’ news and commentary YouTube channel. Seder stated very clearly that if he was the president and they did that to him, he’d cut the aid by a third and ask them if they still wanted to complain about anti-Semitism. Unfortunately, no western leader would dare to do this because of the power of the accusation. Which is unfortunate, as now the Middle East is confronted by a real racist maniac in power with Netanyahu.
Double Down News are another left-wing, alternative news site and agency. In this video, Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi of Jewish Voice for Labour, talks about the abuse and attempts to silence her she and the other left-wing, pro-Palestinian Jews have faced. She describes what a breath of fresh air Jeremy Corbyn was and the hope he gave people like herself, that there would be real change at last after 30 years in the Labour party. She talks about the eminent Jewish academics, who have criticised the establishment’s exclusive concentration on support for Israel as the defining factor in Jewish identity, and the powerful role left-wing Jews like herself have played in combating racism and prejudice all over the world, from the battle against Mosley’s BUF to the American Civil Rights movement and apartheid South Africa.
Anti-Semitic Abuse for Being Pro-Palestine
She begins by describing the abuse she personally got when she was 19 and presented a pro-Palestinian talk at Uni. she was called ‘safe-hating’, ‘the wrong kind of Jew’, ‘anti-Semitic’ and a ‘kapo’. This is especially despicable, as they were the Jewish collaborators with the Nazis in the concentration camps. She is bitterly critical of this type of abuse, not just because it’s especially offensive for people who have really suffered under Nazis and other vicious anti-Semites – she equates it with being called a ‘paedophile’ – but because it also delegitimises the struggle against real Fascists. Here the video shows footage from the notorious Charlottesville Nazi gathering, with the storm troopers of the Alt Right marching along chanting ‘The Jews will not replace us.’ Wimborn-Idrissi’s talk and the abuse she received was covered by the Jewish Telegraph, who put it all on the front page. Which shows you what a despicable, right-wing establishment rag it is.
Heijo Meyer and Israel’s Nazi-like Persecution of the Palestinians
She also gives the real truth about Corbyn’s infamous attendance at the speech given by Heijo Meyer, which was used to pillory Corbyn as an anti-Semite. Of course he’s no such thing, and the video shows images of the greatest prime minister Britain rejected demonstrating against racism, including his arrest for protesting against apartheid. Meyer was a Dutch Holocaust survivor – and the video shows this with Meyer rolling up his sleeve to show the tattoo on his forearm which the Nazis used to mark the inmates of the death camps. Meyer’s was speaking at a Holocaust Memorial Day event. He was describing how the techniques used by the Nazis to dehumanize people like him – Jews – in the camps to enable them to murder them are also being used by Israel against the Palestinians. And what Wimborne-Idrissi says is horrifying is that the parallels are there.
This section of the footage is grim, as it show the Palestinian victims of Israeli aggression – homes in rubble, a disabled person tipped over in their wheelchair by Israeli squaddies, a little girl with horrifically blackened, swollen eyes.
The talk was part of a series of events that also showed other communities had suffered oppression, like the Travellers. But they were shouted down by a very obnoxious, very vociferous group of Zionists. She found it deeply disgusting that these people were trying to shout down and intimidate an eighty year old man, and urged Corbyn to call the rozzers to have them removed. And in fact the fuzz were prevailed upon to do their duty. But unfortunately by that time they’d been successful in drowning out the Travellers, so that people hardly heard a word from them.
The Media Silencing of Left-Wing Jews
Naomi points out that the media refuses give Jews like her a voice. Instead they give space to organisations like the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism as if they were long established and authoritative. There the video show a group waving placards, ‘Labour – For the Many Not the Jew’. This is the mendacious slogan dreamed up by novelist Howard Jacobson when he was in New York. Which is a good and sufficient reason for no-one to buy his books or listen to anything he has to say ever again. It also shows the Beeb’s Kirsty Wark and other journos as an example of this media bias. But Jews have opposed Zionism and Israel for a long time. This is accompanied by images of prominent Jewish critics of Zionism like the awesome Norman Finkelstein and various anti-Zionist Jewish conventions. Some of these are in Black and White, and are of packed, mass meetings. One looks like the Bund. This was the mass socialist party of eastern European Jews. Its slogan was ‘Wherever We Are, That’s Our Homeland’, and they were fiercely anti-Zionist.
She talks about Marek Edelman, one of the heroes of the Warsaw Uprising, who said that ‘to be a Jew is always to side with the oppressed, never the oppressor’. And that was why Jews like her aligned with the oppressed and fought against racism, and why it was just so revolting that their opponents wished to associate Jewry with the type of people they’d always fought against. She tells how the Jewish journalist, Anthony Lerman, has published articles attacking the anti-Semitism smears in the Labour party, and also Kenneth Stern’s criticism of the abuse of the I.H.R.A. definition of anti-Semitism. Stern is the Jewish academic, who formulated it. He meant it to be used in compiling statistics about anti-Semitic abuse. But he is concerned about the way it is being used to silence critics of Israel. He testified on this to Congress, and the video has a clip of his speech. He says he’s worried about the way its being used against Jewish non-Zionist college students and the way organisations are compiling dossiers and passing round opponents on critics of Israel. The anti-Zionist college students should also be heard. This is significant, because I think Stern is himself a Zionist. He’s just a decent man and not a racial fanatic like some of the organisations abusing his definition of anti-Semitism. But unfortunately all you hear are the pro-Israel fanatics. You don’t hear or see anything broadcast or printed by Lerman or Stern, except a few learned articles if you look online.
Fleeing Real Anti-Semitism, and Hope for the Future
She also talks about some of her and her families experiences as refugees from the pogroms and persecutions in eastern Europe, of not fitting because you’re weird with a funny accent. But there has to be hope. Jeremy Corbyn brought 300,000 new people into the party. And an increasing number of a new generation of young Jews, especially in America, are turning away and against Israel.
She concludes by praising Double Down News for giving left-wing Jews like herself a voice, and urges people to support it.
Naomi makes excellent points, and people should hear not just her voice, but the many other Jews like her. She is right to point out, early in the video, that the political and media establishment are anti-Semitic in their attempts to create the impression that Jews constitute a single, monolithic block. That’s what their oppressors have always done.
Unfortunately the media has shown that they have absolutely no intention of giving any space to good peeps like Jewish Voice for Labour, Jewdas and the Jewish Socialist Group. The Beeb, a company which increasingly looks like it has a proud future behind it, has been one of the leaders in pushing the anti-Semitism smears. And it wonders why it comes fifth ranked as trustworthy by the British public, lower even than Channel 5.
The Beeb is reviled as left-wing and ‘woke’ by the Tories and their poodle media because of its anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-homophobic stance, and ’cause they see it as anti-Brexit. But in domestic politics and economics, it’s solidly pro-Tory and pro-Israel. Hence its steadfast refusal to let any other voice be heard, Jewish or gentile, to contradict the anti-Semitism.
But left-wing, sincerely anti-racist folks of all religions and ethnicities have and are waking up to the Beeb’s disgusting bias. Which is why they’re joining the right in switching it off.
If we are going to hear the real truth, it has to come from news sites like Double Down News, Sam Seder’s Majority Report and the David Pakman Show in America, Amy Goodson of Democracy Now! and Abby Martin of Tele Sur, Ash Sarkar of Novara Media and Kerry-Ann Mendoza of The Canary. She’s another anti-racist gentile, who’s been accused of anti-Semitism, despite having a Jewish partner. Seder and Pakman are both Jewish. Seder has described himself as the most Jewish guy you know, and has no time whatsoever for Israel screaming anti-Semitism ever time America cuts its aid budget.
When we hear the truth, more often than not it comes from these broadcasters. Because it surely is not coming from the establishment media.
Michael Brooks is the titular presenter of an American left-wing internet news and comment show. He’s also a co-presenter with Sam Seder on the latter’s Majority Report. In this video, Brooks looks at and gives his approval to Labour’s election video.
Before going into the video, Brooks says that he thinks the election video is fantastic, that the initial polls look good and that Labour’s Brexit strategy is pretty smart. It’s smart from a tactical perspective of dealing with the competing demands from within their own party. He says of the Liberal Democrats that they are ‘utterly exposed’. They had an opportunity to form a government purely on the basis of making sure there wasn’t a no-deal Brexit. They rejected it because they care infinitely more about corporations and austerity and right-wing economic policies than stopping Brexit. Brooks then attacks the Tories, stating that Boris Johnson is the UK’s own contribution to the global embarrassment list – Trump, Netanyahu, Duterte and so on. Of Labour’s video, he says that he watched a conversation earlier that day between Alistair Campbell and John McDonnell, Corbyn’s no. 2. Brooks says that they’re really good politicians, because they’re putting so much on the table from the perspective of healthcare, workers’ cooperatives for a 21st century democracy, ‘that it’s not an opportunity to pass up.’ The video also shows they’re taking the campaign seriously, strategically and ‘presentationally’. They then show the video.
Labour’s election video begins with Corbyn’s election as head of the Labour party in 2015. It then moves through his career, and shows how he has forced the Tories to backtrack on some of their horrendous policies, while seeing off Prime Ministers David Cameron and Tweezer. In front of the relevant scenes are the following captions, beginning with Corbyn’s election. Corbyn’s shown saying ‘Poverty isn’t inevitable, things can and they will change. And they already have, says another caption. Tweezer is shown walking on, and then walking off backwards with the caption ‘Tories forced to backtrack on’ – dementia tax, winter fuel cuts, fox hunting ban, – ‘and many more’. A list of other policies blocked rolls up the screen too fast to catch, but they include grammar schools, police funding cuts, diesel tax, solar panel tax, tampon tax, Brexit deal vote, National Insurance, Brexit impact reports, Saudi prison contracts, Sunday trading hours, and triple lock on pensions.
There’s then footage of a reporter stating that polls show the Tories on 48 per cent, and Labour half that. Which is followed by John Snow saying ‘We, the media, the pundits, know nothing’. The captions then states that Labour had the biggest campaign growth since polling began. And that Corbyn bid farewell to two prime ministers, showing Tweezer and Cameron. It says he defeated May’s Brexit deal once, twice and then three times. He blocked Johnson’s disastrous no-deal Brexit. It then shows footage from the Labour conference of Corbyn saying that the party ‘will commit to unleash the biggest people-powered campaign we’ve ever seen in this country and in this movement.’ A caption then appears and says ‘To totally transform our society from grass roots upwards. To radically change our rigged economy so that it works for everyone.’ At this point there’s an image of Johnson meeting various people and Rees Mogg lounging on a Commons’ bench. The caption goes on ‘To urgently respond to the climate crisis with our green industrial revolution. To get Brexit sorted by giving the people the final say.’ It goes back to Corbyn against, who says, ‘We achieve all of these things by being a party and a movement totally and absolutely united to our common cause and purpose.’
The captions then appearing, saying ‘This is our chance, once in a generation to rebuilt Britain and put wealth and power in the hands of the many not the few. It’s time for real change’. And there it finishes with the Labour Party logo.
Brooks remarks, ‘That’s a good ad. They’re on point. I would really recommend if you’re in the UK you do absolutely everything you can for Labour. I’m incredibly excited to see what they put forward.’ He and the crew then discuss which date the election is on, before concluding that it’s the twelfth December. Brooks ends that section of the video by saying that he thinks it’s fantastic they have such a short election cycle.
The reason why the election cycle is so short, is because all the Tory governments have collapsed ever since Cameron’s wretched decision to call the Brexit referendum.
I think it’s brilliant that Michael Brooks thinks the video is so great, and gives his unqualified support for Labour. Brooks and Seder are both supporters of Bernie Sanders and his campaign to bring about the radical change America needs to empower its ordinary working people, and give them jobs and prosperity instead of more neoliberal lies, poverty and despair from the Republicans and corporatist Democrats. And what America most desperately needs is medicare for all. It’s a disgrace that a massive economic and geopolitical giant like America does not provide properly funded medicine to all of its people. The claims by the Republicans and right-wing Democrats like Hillary Clinton that the country can’t afford to is a flat-out lie. Bernie’s serious about correcting this glaring injustice in American healthcare, just as Corbyn’s determined to revive and regenerate our National Health Service.
We need and deserve Corbyn to win over here, and Bernie to win in America. And then we can make a better world by destroying four decades of Thatcherism and Reaganomics.
Very interesting article in next week’s Radio Times for 16th-22nd November 2019. John Sweeney, a former journo with the Corporation’s Panorama, has written a piece attacking the parliamentary lobby system, ‘Time to name your sources’, on page 9. The subtitle states very clearly why he objects to it ‘Why are political reporters feeding us fake news?’
The article runs
As the country gears up for a general election, TV viewers and newspaper readers are being lied to from within a secretive system that reduces political journalists and Westminster correspondents to underbutlers, protects power and poisons our democracy. It’s called the lobby and its two most powerful players are a career psychopath (Conservative) and a neo-Stalinist (Labour).
The lobby was created after an Irish terrorist bomb in 1885 caused MPs to lock out the journalists who used to mingle freely inside Westminster. Reporters complained and a permitted few were allowed back, so long as they followed rule number one: when a source says a story is on lobby terms, you don’t identify that source.
The lobby’s most elegant defender, Andrew Marr, wrote in his book, My Trade: A Short History of British Journalism, “Sophisticated social animals are necessarily hypocrites… who really wants to know less?”
But Marr wrote that before King Brexit turned everything it touched to Novichok. So where do those political stories based on anonymous oft-quoted “sources close to…” come from?
The PMS (the Prime Minister’s Official Spokesman) is a many-headed beast, but one set of jaws is snapped by James Slack, who, as Nick Cohen pointed out in the The Spectator, in a previous life wrote the words underneath the infamous 2016 Daily Mail headline “Enemies of the People”, attacking three judges. Another set of jaws are those of Rob Oxley, Boris Johnson’s press secretary, but the sharpest teeth belong to “career psychopath” Dominic Cummings. David called him that five years ago. It was an understatement.
Cummings, Slack and Oxley jointly and separately use reporters in the lobby system to tell unattributable whoppers while the system as a whole is given coverage by BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Sky and the papers. Veteran political reporter Peter Oborne nailed a series of lies about Brexit on “lobby terms” recently. Perhaps the most poisonous was the “lobby terms” claim, reported in the Mail on Sunday in October, that Remainers Dominic Grieve, Oliver Letwin and Hilary Benn were being investigated by the government because of their involvement with foreign powers. The story was a lie. The BBC, etc, didn’t tell that lie. But they prop up the system in which the lie could be told.
That system also encourages acquiescence among political hacks. If you don’t toe the line and ask awkward questions instead you are excluded from the regular drip-feed of anonymous briefings. It was reported that Boris Johnson when Foreign Secretary was considered a security risk by MI6 because of his dodgy private life. But has the lobby asked if Boris will launch an inquiry into himself? Nyet.
Another potential security risk is Jeremy Corbyn’s spin commissar, Seumas Milne. He oversees Labaour’s lobby operation but the system shields his shenanigans behind the arras. In 2014 Milne appeared on a panel at a summit in Sochi alongside Vladimir Putin. Milne, a former Guardian journalist, has in the past bigged up both Stalin and East Germany. Creepy.
Has the lobby asked Putin’s pal Milne if he is a security risk? Again, nyet.
In these toxic times, the lobby has become a lie factory. We need to scrappy “lobby terms”. If power speaks with a forked tongue, we need to know whose tongue it is that’s lying.
Okay, Sweeney’s correct to call out the lobby system. I’m irritated myself by stories that begin ‘sources close to the Prime Minister’ or ‘Ministers are considering’, as quite often this means that the source is sounding out a policy. And that policy is quite often something monstrous. I remember a story in the Sunday Express back in the early 1980s, when AIDS first appeared and everyone really was afraid it would decimate the global population like a new Black Death. It was so strongly associated with gays that a Beeb science documentary on it had the title ‘AIDS: The Gay Plague’. In this climate of fear, the Sunday Depress announced that ‘ministers’ – who were never named – were considering a radical solution to the problem. This was the construction of an ‘AIDS island’ following the Swedes’ example, where AIDS victims could be isolated and treated. It harkens back to the location of lazarettos – leper hospitals – on islands. But it was also frightening coming as it did from a government that had very far right tendencies and a reputation for aggressive homophobia. Maggie had just tried to introduce her law banning the positive teaching of homosexuality in schools. To many people, this seemed like the beginning of a campaign against homosexuals and the left which would end up with internment camps. The nightmare Fascist Britain of Alan Moore’s and Dave Lloyd’s V for Vendetta, running in the comic Warrior, seemed all too possible.
Others have also challenged the very close relationship between the press and the political class. When David Cameron was PM, it was pointed out that many leading journos, including editorial staff at the Guardian, I believe, also lived in Cameron’s village of Chipping Norton. Over on the other side of the Pond, some of the left-wing news shows on the Net, like The Young Turks, Sam Seder’s Majority Report and the David Pakman Show, have also commented on the way the press is content to parrot stories and claims by right-wing politicians, because they’re afraid that if they start challenging them, those politicians will simply stop talking to them and they’ll lose their stories. The result has been a decline in journalistic standards, as papers no longer attempt to hold politicos to account, but simply repeat their lines and lies. I’ve no doubt that this also partly accounts for the utter complicity of the press in repeating the claims and assumptions of the neoliberal right over here.
But this also doesn’t exonerate the Beeb. Despite the protestations of its political editor, the Beeb does platform right-wing figures over the left. Mike put up a graphic from Tory Fibs a few days ago, which showed very clearly how massively biased the Beeb was in its inclusion of figures and spokesmen for the right on its news shows and panels. Its newsroom is stacked full of Conservatives, like Nick Robinson, and Fiona Bruce and her producers on Question Time scarcely hide their right-wing bias. And the Beeb is still under investigation for the massive bias in its Panorama documentary on anti-Semitism in the Labour party.
The lobby system is a major part of the problem, but not the whole. The whole journalistic system and its cosy relationship with right-wing politicians is rotten, and needs to be overturned. And the Beeb is very much part of it.
Michael Brooks is a co-presenter and has his own show with Sam Seder on Sam Seder’s Majority Report. In this video, he adds his comments to the criticism Ellen Degeneres has earned about her friendship with George ‘Dubya’ Bush and her hypocritical treatment of her writing team. Degeneres, who considers herself politically liberal, and who came out as a lesbian on her own show a few years ago, provoked outrage when she was filmed sitting next George Dubya and his wife at a football game, chatting affably.
Left-wing Americans and others, who simply believe that America’s invasion of Iraq was morally wrong and support gay rights, were understandably upset that Degeneres was sitting with the man responsible for the illegal invasion and for trying to have it written into the Constitution that people of the same sex could not marry.
In response, Degeneres tried to explain herself on her own show. She said that her friendship with the wretched former president was no different than the other friendships she had we people, whose political views she didn’t share. She then said that we all should be kinder to each other.
Sam Seder made a video himself about her attempts to excuse herself. He made the point that Bush was responsible for the deaths, multilation and displacement of millions of people in Iraq and the Middle East. He also rebutted her call for people to be kind to each other on the grounds that you can believe in it, but does it mean you should be kind to a serial killer, who hasn’t stopped killing, believes there’s nothing he’s done wrong and will take that kindness as an indication that you’re fine with him killing.
In this video, Brooks also weighs in against Degeneres. He points out that she’s also a union-buster. Despite claiming that her writing team were all family to her, when they took part in the Writers’ Guild strike she sacked them all and replaced them with blacklegs.
But the main piece of his video is another, posted on Twitter by Rafael Shimunov. This shows the terrible reality behind Degeneres self-justification by placing behind her images of Iraq and its war-torn people. He also points out we shouldn’t be surprised by Degeneres’s friendship with Bush. They’re both part of the rich 1 per cent, supporting each other against the majority.
I realise that this is an American matter, and that Degeneres is hardly known over here, although I have seen her show broadcast on one of the cable/satellite channels. But there are issues of integrity here, which also affect journalists and broadcasters generally. Alistair Campbell and Tony Blair are still putting their oar in about current events, with Blair commenting on Corbyn’s leadership of the party and Campbell interviewing McDonnell in GQ. Both Blair and Campbell share the responsibility of the Iraq invasion with Bush, and could fairly be described as war criminals. They have no moral right whatsoever to give political judgments or recommendations to anyone on the left. At the same time, there is a new film ready to be released about the civil servant, who leaked the papers about the Iraq invasion in order to prevent it. This woman has far more integrity, and the film about her, is in my view, of far more moral worth, than Degeneres’ pleadings for kindness towards a man, who destroyed an entire country simply as a display of imperial dominance and corporate profit.
One of the female Labour politicos – I’ve forgotten who – has sparked controversy because she refuses to be friends with Conservatives. As these videos show, she has a point.
This is a very interesting and no doubt controversial video from Sam Seder’s Majority Report, in which he shows the link between Shapiro’s rhetoric about ‘good’ and ‘bad’ Jews and an attack on a synagogue in Indiana. Shapiro is a Republican mouthpiece, a very aggressive Zionist and Jewish. Seder’s also Jewish, describing himself as ‘the most Jewish guy you know’. But Seder’s also left-wing and a determined critic of Israel. He takes Shapiro to task for his sharp distinction between good and bad Jews, based on ethnicity versus religious practice, as distinction which is also made by neo-Nazis. And ‘bad Jews’ are Jews, who vote Democrat and specifically for Barack Obama.
Seder wondered what would happen if a public figure said something that inspired someone to commit a horrible act. And not only did they inspire the perp, they also made an equation that the perp cited as the cause for his committing the horrible act. Shapiro tried this with the Nazi, who shot up the synagogue in Pittsburgh, claiming that the Nazi was following an ideology similar to Ilhan Omar, the Muslim Congresswoman and critic of Israel. This is untrue. The Nazi didn’t, and he didn’t cite Omar as an explanation for his murder of the Synagogue’s congregation. But it has happened in the case of Shapiro and two Nazis, who vandalised a synagogue in Indiana.
The Nazis were Nolan and Kiyomi Brewer, and their crime was painting a Nazi swastika and Iron Crosses on a wall of a synagogue in Carmel. Nolan, the husband, was apparently law abiding, docile and passive. He was drawn into it by his wife, Kiyomi. She stated in her defence that she was led into the dark world of Nazism through mainstream right-wing news sites and organisations like Ben Shapirok Breitbart and Fox News. She then moved onto Stormfront, and then a Nazi site on the Discord Server. She and her husband also stated in the court papers that they deliberately selected that particular synagogue because it was full of ethnic Jews. This follows the neo-Nazi claim that Hitler wasn’t against religious Jews, but only against ethnic Jews.
Seder then shows with a series of tweets from 2011, 2016 and this year, that Shapiro himself makes the distinction. In one, he claimed that the Jewish community had always been undermined by bad Jews, and that these bad Jews voted Democrat. In the 2016 tweet, he said that there was a distinction between ethnically and religious Jews. Bernie Sanders was ethnically Jewish, and so passed the first standard, but not a Jew at all by the second standard.
Seder also shows a clip from the interview Shapiro gave with Andrew Neil, which was so embarrassing for Shapiro that he claimed that Neil was some kind of Leftist. Neil isn’t. He’s a Tory. Neil asked him about his claim that bad Jews voted for Barack Obama. Shapiro then tried to get around it by saying that American Jews were largely secular, and so his claim about nonreligious Jews was correct. Neil wasn’t going to be diverted, and stated that he hadn’t said that. He had said that bad Jews voted for Barack Obama.
Shapiro apparently has a list of stupid things he’s said on his website, and this comment is now one of them. But as Seder shows, Shapiro was still defending his comment on Neil’s show just weeks before in 2019. This is disgusting, and he wonders how many times Shapiro can say stupid things like it, which go down on his list, before newspapers like the New York Times stop giving him fawning headlines like ‘The Philosopher for the Cool Kids’. Seder cites her a tweet by Almanaqa refuting another tweet by Shapiro denying that he planned the synagogue attack. He didn’t, and nobody is saying that he did. But his rhetoric did inspire the attackers. Seder also makes the point that this is what the Intellectual Dark Web, so beloved of extreme right-wing ideologues, is actually about – Nazi sites like Gab. He concludes by attacking Shapiro once again for his comments and demanding that he be held responsible for them.
I’m blogging about this because this isn’t just an American problem. In this country the lamestream media, the Conservatives and the Blairites in the Labour party are using the same Nazi distinction between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ Jews to smear the Jewish supporters of Jeremy Corbyn, as Jewish and gentile left-wing bloggers like Tony Greenstein, Martin Odoni, David Rosenberg, Jewish Voice for Labour, Mike Sivier, Tim Fenton of Zelo Street and Tom of Another Angry Voice have pointed out.
It isn’t quite a distinction between ethnic and religious Jews, as the racism has included very religious, ultra-Orthodox Jews like Shraga Stern. But there is a particular venom within the Zionist right at Israel-critical Jews, like Greenstein and Jackie Walker, who are subjected to the vilest abuse. Abuse which would be considered anti-Semitic if it came from gentiles.
And right-wing Zionists do ally themselves with the Islamophobic and Nazi right. They have links to Tommy Robinson and the EDL, as well as Paul Besser and Britain First. Tony Greenstein’s put up long articles identifying the organisations and individuals involved. These include Jewish Fascist organisations, like Herut. When the Board of Deputies and Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis organised their farcical rally against the Labour party last year, two of the Zionists attending sported T-shirts bearing the Kach logo. Kach was a Judaeo-Nazi terrorist organisation banned in Israel. And then there’s the antics of the former Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, who led a British contingent to the March of the Flags day in Israel. This is when Jewish Nazi thugs march round the Muslim quarter of Jerusalem, vandalising homes and businesses and intimidating the locals. The same Jonathan Sacks, who declared Reform Jews were ‘enemies of the faith’. Which is the rhetoric of persecution.
Those smeared as an anti-Semites by the witch-hunters – the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, the Board of Deputies and so on – have received death threats. Jackie Walker has been horrendously vilified. She has been told that she’s not Jewish, because she’s Black, and that she should be lynched and her body burnt or put in bin bags. Chris Williamson, the Labour MP, who rightly said that Labour had given too much ground to those making false accusations of anti-Semitism, has also received death threats.
So I wonder how long it’s going to be before someone attacks a Jewish supporter of Jeremy Corbyn, and then states in court that they were doing it because he or she was ‘the wrong type of Jew’, and they were radicalised by Sacks, Mirvis, Gideon Falter and Marie van der Zyle.
Mike’s just put up a post this evening urging his readers look at an article on the Open Democracy website about the burning down of the Amazon rainforest by Brazil’s Fascist president, Jair Bolsonaro. Bolsonaro is a right-wing extremist, who defends Brazil’s military dictatorship. He also backs the campaign of the logging companies and the ranchers to open up the Amazon to exploitation and cultivation.
Except that, as Mike’s article points out, the soil is so poor that it only lasts for two harvests after the trees have been cut down. I can remember studying the problems of the Amazon, and similar parts of the planet, in the ‘A’ level geography class at school. Part of the course involved the Third World. The Amazon is a precious global resource, because its vegetation soaks up something like 20 per cent of the world’s carbon dioxide. That’s why it’s been called the ‘lungs of the world’. It’s also the home to countless precious and endangered species of animals and plants. And biologists are also interested in it because some of the plant species may possess medicinal properties, and so be immensely valuable in the creation of new drugs and treatments for disease.
The indigenous peoples of the Amazon do practise a form of agriculture, ‘slash and burn’. They cut down an area of forest to cultivate, but only do so for a fixed length of time before moving on to another area and leaving that part of the jungle to regenerate. It’s sustainable as it doesn’t exhaust the soil, as Western-style agriculture does.
It’s also an outright attack on the Amazon’s indigenous peoples themselves. The ranchers and loggers are very jealous of the extensive lands allotted to the Amerindian tribes as their reservations. These peoples have suffered a long, miserable history of European persecution. Following the European invasion of the New World, they were enslaved by the Portuguese settlers. Those that survived the devastation brought about by European diseases, that is. Conquistador accounts of journeys through the Amazon describe cities and communities that were wiped off the map. These accounts were thought to be just legends until archaeologists began discovering the house platforms and other remains belonging to these now vanished communities. These civilisations were vast, and it seems that the Amazon may have had a population of several millions before the catastrophe of European contact.
These sites are also of interest to ecologists, as the ‘black soil’ there has the power to regenerate, and restore its fertility.
Despite being protected under Brazilian law, the persecution and maltreatment of Amerindians continued into the 20th century. Encroaching farmers shot them as troublesome pests on their land. A few years ago, attacks by a group of loggers left one tribe virtually extinct. Although there were survivors, they are too few to form a viable breeding group. When they pass, so does their ancient people.
This is what is threatened by the actions of Bolsonaro and his backers in big business by the mass destruction of the rainforest. And if it goes, it may mean that the rest of the world goes with it as climate change becomes even more massive.
I realise that the subject of the Amazon is immensely touchy with patriotic Brazilians, who feel that it’s a resource they should be allowed to exploit. And I’m very aware that if the world declared that Britain should not be allowed to cultivate, or should be forced to rewild some of its forests, our people would similarly be indignant.
But this goes beyond the rights of individual nations. This is a catastrophe that threatens the world. The international community must join forces and aid the left-wing activists and ecological opposition in Brazil, if we are to preserve the rainforest and ourselves.
Sam Seder of Majority Report fame has also put up a video on YouTube in which Michael Brooks and his team identify Bolsonaro as the Human species’ greatest threat to survival. Here it is.
Here’s one to make the islamophobes’ heads explode, as well as really irritate the Islamist preachers of hate. Ilhan Omar, a Muslim congresswoman released footage of herself dancing along with the marchers at Pride Day in America on Twitter, with an accompanying message saying what a great time she’d had. It’s in this clip from Sam Seder’s Majority Report.
Seder and his team, including fellow presenter Michael Brooks (off camera) look at the Tweet and make a few appropriate ironic comments skewering the prejudices of the Right. The Republicans and Fascists fear Muslims, because they believe that they’re coming to America in order to undermine American democracy and replace it with Islamic, sharia law. Which bans homosexuality.
And this Tweet clearly poses a problem for the raving islamophobes, who believe Omar’s a part of this conspiracy, because she’s a Muslim woman enjoying herself at an event they believe that she should be railing against.
And so Seder, Brooks and co. make comments about how she’s clearly doing it to implement strict sharia law there, and deliberately presenting herself so that her Saudi masters can target the crowd more accurately.
The video’s entitled ‘Ilhan Omar Implements Shakira Law at Gay Pride’ probably because her attendance at the march and dancing is more like that of pop star Shakira than sharia.
In fact, as Yasmin Alibhai-Brown said in her column in the I a few weeks ago, Islam was until very recently far more tolerant of gays, and far less puritanical in many ways than the Christian West. It’s only been in recent decades that the situation’s been reversed, and Islam has become more puritanical and intolerant, while the West has become more tolerant and hedonistic.
Now I’m sure Omar’s very public participation in the Pride events will have upset the hardliners, just as very many Christian political Conservatives are bitterly opposed to gay rights the associated events. But Omar’s just demonstrated that being a Muslim doesn’t prevent someone from being a liberal American or citizen of any other western country. And it may well upset the Israel lobby and its ‘pinkwashing’ of the Israeli state, which tries to present Israel as the only state in the Middle East, where gay people are tolerated, against a hostile and intolerant Islam. And the islamophobes and racist fear-mongers are going to have hard time trying to explain away Congresswoman Omar’s very public show of liberal support for the gay community, and by extension the values of pluralism and tolerance .
In this video posted on the 12th March 2019, Sam Seder and his friends at the Majority Report lay into the Jexodus movement, launched by Elizabeth Pipko, to encourage Jews to leave the Democrat Party because of ‘anti-Semitism’. It’s the Jewish counterpart to Brandon Strauka’s ‘Walkaway’ movement.
They play a clip from Fox and Friends in which Pipko appears to explain why they’re launching the movement. This begins with Trump hypocritically pontificating that the Democrats have been the anti- Israel, anti-Semitic party after the comments by Minnesota congresswoman Ilham Omar about dual loyalty to Israel. Jexodus, as the Fox presenters gleefully tell their audience, are a group of Jewish millennials. They stated that
We reject the hypocrisy, anti-Americanism, and anti-Semitism of the rising far-left. Progressives, Democrats, and far too many old-school Jewish organisations take our support for granted.
Seder remarks that the fact they’re using Strauka’s walkaway movement without crediting him is really offensive.
Pipko herself then appears. She’s not only the movements spokesperson, but she’s also a former Trump staffer. Seder and his friends thus point out the contradiction. She can’t talk about Jews leaving the Democrat party as if she’s one of those giving up their membership, because she was never in it in the first place. Pipko explains that the movement’s called Jexodus after the Jewish people’s departure from Egypt. As Seder explains, Exodus is the book in the Torah – the first five books of the Bible – which describes how the Jews, then the Hebrews or Israelites, left Egypt. Exodus is already a term which refers to Jews. Calling their movement ‘Jexodus’ is therefore somewhat redundant. The Jewish Seder explains that it would be like saying that ‘this year at our house, we’re having a Jassover – a Jewish Passover’. He and his team then go on to make up other words combining ‘J’ and another element of Jewish faith or identity to show how ridiculous this is. Like ‘Jagels’ – bagels for Jews. Or ‘Jom Kippur’ – Yom Kippur’, but for Jews. ‘It’s like Jisrael – Israel, but for Jews!’ is another joke.
She then talks about how the anti-Semitism started under the Obama administration, and then got worse. But the Democrats have tried to hide it, refused to condemn it, and now its time for Jews to leave. The Fox presenters then talk about how there was going to be a resolution by the Democrats condemning anti-Semitism and specifically Omar’s comments, but due to pressure from the party’s left, this was changed to a more general resolution.
Pipko then moans that what was frightening wasn’t Omar’s original comment, but the lack of leadership by the Democrat party. As Seder jokes, they should have ‘jendemned ‘ – condemned it, but for Jews! They then go on with the ‘J’ jokes, as well as saying how they remembered Obama telling AIPAC that he was going to cut off their funding, ‘you goddamn load of shop-owners!’ Michael Brooks, who is also part Jewish, then spoofs Pipko’s attack on Obama as anti-Semitic by impersonating Obama calling them a load of Christ-killers while claiming to be politically correct. More of these jokes about Jews being ‘Christ-killers’ follow.
They then go to the Jexodus website, and its logo. This has the Star of David with the stars and stripes of the American flag, with ‘Jexodus’ underneath in mock Hebrew letters. They observe that it’s disturbing as it sort of resembles a White supremacist website, but one which believes the Jews really have taken over America, and this is what they’ll be doing soon – ‘Jamerica!’, Seder exclaims.
I’ve put this video up, as it shows how the Republicans and Israel lobby in America are using the same tactics to smear the Democrats and Israel’s critics as anti-Semites, just as Corbyn’s opponents within and outside the Labour party are doing over here. And it’s just as false. The accusations of anti-Semitism did start against Obama, it’s true, but it’s not because he was anywhere near anti-Semitic. It was Obama that gave Israel its Iron Dome missile defence system, for example. What enraged the Israel lobby in America was that Obama didn’t give the country all of the funding it wanted, though what Obama did give it was considerable. Hence there was the unedifying spectacle of pro-Israel groups whining about how anti-Semitic he was and claiming that America itself was somehow massively full of Jew-haters.
And obviously it’s colossally hypocritical for Trump to claim that the Democrats are anti-Semitic, when a large bloc of his supporters and cabinet were members of the Alt-Right and avowed anti-Semites and White supremacists.
Now there’s the question of the way Jexodus has conflated criticism of Israel not just with anti-Semitism but also anti-Americanism. There’s an interesting piece on the web – I think it might have been posted by the Electronic Intifada – which details the history of Zionism, and the way Jewish Zionists promoted their cause in the early 20th century in America by making deliberate parallels between themselves wishing to found a new land, and America’s own pioneers. This explains how it is that after Israel’s victories in the 1967 war the American Right could move over so easily to supporting Israel, with right-wing Christian fundamentalists proclaiming that ‘its values are our values’. In fact, as Tony Greenstein has explained on a post he has put up on his blog this morning, the question of dual loyalty and support for a foreign state – in this case Israel – which Ilhan Omar raised is a very good point. And it’s one that Israel itself has cause by declaring that Jews everywhere are citizens of Israel, even though half of the world’s Jews live outside it. It was a declaration that would have appalled the early Jewish opponents of Zionism, who were afraid that the founding of a Jewish state would lead them to be suspected of having greater loyalty to that nation than to their own native countries. This is why the British Jewish community by and large strongly opposed the Balfour Declaration pledging British support for a Jewish state in Palestine.
In Britain, America and other countries the Israel lobby and Conservatives, including those within the opposition parties, are using the charge of anti-Semitism as a weapon against the left and to shut down justified criticism of Israel and its persecution of the Palestinians. Ultimately this tactic will harm the Jewish community, as it gives the impression that it is full of dictatorial, domineering personalities who demand absolute, uncritical support for a foreign nation from gentiles and Jews alike. And it will demean the charge of anti-Semitism by using it so gratuitously to smear decent, anti-racist people.
In this clip from Sam Seder’s Majority Report posted yesterday, 4th March 2019, the very Jewish Seder and his team tackle two issues relating to Israel and its activities within the US. This is first about an Israeli private espionage agency operating in the US. The second is a Republican senator trying to argue that opposition to the Israeli state – anti-Zionism – equals anti-Semitism.
The story about the private Israeli espionage company comes from an article in the New Yorker. Apparently the company is allowed to operate in the US, providing that they don’t beat anyone up. But they have been sending intimidating emails and flyers trying to silence critics of Israel. They broke up when the Lemarr(?) investigation started, because they were involved peripherally with the Trump campaign. Seder’s co-host, Michael Brooks, says that the conduit was Newt Gingrich.
This is centred around a bill criminalising any kind of support for the BDS movement. Many states have already passed such legislation – New York, Texas – and the point to the terrifying story of the Texan speech pathologist, who lost her job. Seder states that the idea that the woman involved had spoken out of turn was very much belied by the facts. ‘But fortunately,’ says Seder ironically, ‘for those of us worried about anti-Semitism, Scott Perry, a Republican senator from Pennsylvania’s 10th district, basically sets those of us who may be critical of Israel straight.’
They then show a clip of Perry telling an official audience that they need to be careful about the parsing where you can see that you’re not for the government of Israel, but you’re for the Jewish people. ‘The Jewish people form the government of Israel. The state of Israel is formed by the Jewish people. And if you’re maligning the government and the state of Israel at the same time, they’re congruent. They are one and the same. They are the Jewish people. And I think that’s the biggest thing we can do.’
Brooks interjects that it’s a pretty anti-Semitic comment. Seder agrees, saying that not only is it anti-Semitic, it also seems to indicate accidentally that he doesn’t think there’s a democracy there. Seder explains that ‘we as Jews do not get together and vote on the state of Israel. I am Jewish. I have not been able to vote in any of the Jewish elections since the mid-60’s. ‘ He says of Perry that he’s incredibly ignorant about what he’s talking about. ‘He’s Jewsplaining to people’. Brooks says that this is who the modern alliance with Israel is built with. This is who modern Israel is friends with, all of the far right racist parties with the Likud on the left. Yair Lapide’s Yash Atid and Labor are centre right parties. Moretz is liberal and they’re totally marginalised. And there’s the Joint List, which fell apart, which were a couple of Arab and socialist parties. The Israeli government and foreign policy has really cultivated aligning with these people. When people like Olmert and Martin Barak said that they couldn’t have an apartheid state, and this is their words, although Brooks also uses it, they would say that it’s untenable in the long term because because, specifically, American Jews care about things like civil rights. And Netanyahu would agree, but say that there is also a whole set of people they can strike alliances with.
Seder agrees, and says that they wouldn’t need American Jewry if they had American Evangelicals. ‘Or’, says Brooks, ‘European neo-Fascists. Or, frankly, other countries like China or Russia that aren’t into human dignity questions.’
Seder has described himself as ‘the most Jewish person you know’ and his colleague, Brooks, is of party German Jewish descent. And like other critics of Israel, they’ve also been accused of anti-Semitism despite their Jewish heritage. But they’re right about this change in direction of Israeli politics.
Perry made his stupid equation between the Israeli state and government and the Jewish people because that’s what Netanyahu has done. He passed a law defining Israel as the state of the Jewish people, which automatically made Jews everywhere Israeli citizens, whether they wanted it or not. It would have horrified the Jewish opponents of Israel over a hundred years ago, who formed the majority of the Jewish community. They were afraid that the establishment of the Jewish state would mean that Jews would be looked upon as disloyal, and that their real allegiances were with the new, foreign, Jewish state. It’s the reason why the British Jewish establishment opposed the Balfour Declaration, pledging British support to the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine.
And Perry’s comments are anti-Semitic for another reason. Under the official definitions of anti-Semitism, you may not equate the actions of some Jews with the whole Jewish people. But this is what Perry has done, so by stating that Israel and the Jews are the same thing, he has made the entire Jewish community responsible for Israel’s crimes against humanity. Which is clearly false and anti-Semitic.
It’s also been reported elsewhere that the alliance between Israel and American Jews is breaking, because Jewish Americans do support civil rights. Young Jewish Americans are critical of Israel’s maltreatment of the Palestinians, including those who have suffered anti-Semitism personally. They’re turning away from Israel, with the result that the uptake of the Israeli heritage tours offered to young American Jews to take them to Israel and endow them with pride in the Israeli state is down by 50 per cent. Hence Netanyahu and his servants are turning instead to American Evangelicals, like Ted Hagee’s wretched Christians United for Israel.
And Israel is also forging alliances with Fascist and far right states and movements in Poland, Hungary and Ukraine, selling them arms. Which is why Stephen Pollard, the non-Jewish editor of the Jewish Chronicle, Jewsplained in the Guardian that the current government of Poland, which has banned any mention of Polish collaboration in the Holocaust, is not anti-Semitic
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