Kim Leadbeater – A Vapid Candidate for a Vacuous, Manipulative Leadership

Okay, the Batley and Spen by-election has happened, and the results are. The good news is that the extreme right-wing parties, who went there hoping to clean up, have all done spectacularly badly. I saw something that said they only got two per cent of the vote, and lost their deposits. So well done to the good voters of that constituency. More problematic is the fact that the Labour candidate, Kim Leadbeater, won, scraping through with a majority of 360 odd votes. As Mike’s pointed out in his piece about the election, this has effectively turned a Labour safe seat into a marginal. But Starmer has hailed it as a great victory, and according to one of the papers has told everyone that Leadbeater is the ‘future of Labour’.

I profoundly hope he’s wrong, but I fear that under is persecutory, opportunistic and factional leadership, he might be right.

Leadbeater was apparently parachuted into the constituency on a shortlist of precisely one. She was not even a Labour member until four months ago. She’s another Blairite Tory – I won’t say Tory lite’, as these scumbags may be more extreme in their views than the true Tories. Also according to Mike, in 2017 she was telling disabled people that there was no magic money tree for them. Despite the fact that the Tories raid the magic money tree whenever its convenient for them or their patrons, the superrich. Then there’s a whole orchard of the plants. As for her policies in this campaign, the Preston Journalist posted the video below analysing her electoral video. In it she talks about fighting local problems like litter and dog mess. This is all well and good, but as the Preston Journalist points out, it’s local authority stuff. MPs deal with bigger issues like attracting investment to the area. He also argued she made a mistake, in that, as the local council was Labour and so should have been tackling these issues, she’s attacking her own side.

I think there’s a simple reason behind her failure to articulate a set of policies: under Starmer, Labour doesn’t have any. There’s a policy review going on at the moment, but Starmer was elected promising to continue the great manifesto polices set by Jeremy Corbyn. Which he then promptly broke, ditching the policies, suspending the Labour leader and going on yet another witch hunt against his supporters. Like Blair, Starmer doesn’t really have any different policies. He’s a Tory, as are his supporters and the Blairite party bureaucracy. They have nothing to offer working people except more privatisation and the destruction of the welfare state and NHS for corporate profit. Like Blair, his whole election strategy seems to be to appeal once again to the middle class, swing voters and corporate donors, with the promise that somehow his administration will be more efficient at carrying out Tory policies than the Conservatives themselves. But as he has no real policies himself, he’s constantly flailing around trying to find an issue that he can jump on. The last one was trans rights. Before then he opportunistically took the knee to support BLM, even though he dismissed it when it broke out last year. Worse, he has shown himself entirely complacent and unwilling to confront real racism, and particularly the bullying of Black MPs and activists like Diane Abbott, in the party. Hence Black people are deserting the party in droves. So apparently, are Muslims.

One of the issues at the election was Kashmir. Simon Webb, the man behind the History Debunked Channel, produced a video discussing this in which he sneered at the Labour party. I’ve said many times before that Webb is a Torygraph reading Conservative, although he also said he didn’t have much time for Boris’ crew either. He’s a staunch critic of multiculturalism, and so said that it was a peculiar situation when an election in an English town could be decided by the situation in a country thousands of miles away. He also talked about pro-Palestinian demonstrations by Labour supporters in a neighbouring area, and then repeated the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism’s line that most Muslims are anti-Semitic. Webb is very pro-Israel, and he says he spent some time in Israel when he was younger working on a kibbutz, as many idealistic young people did way back in the 80s or so. He claimed that Muslim antagonism to Starmer’s leadership was anti-Semitic. They hate the Labour leader because his wife’s Jewish and his children are being raised in that faith. This is the first I’ve heard of it, and quite honestly I don’t care about the personal religious beliefs of himself or his family either. What matters far more is that Starmer has declared himself a firm Zionist, and continued the witch hunt against decent, anti-racist folk, including Jews and gentiles, who have fought real anti-Semitism, who have dared to make even the mildest criticism of Israel. As for Kashmir, Modi is a Hindu supremacist, whose party persecutes not just Muslims, but also Sikhs and Christians, as well as liberal Hindus concerned about his assault on democracy, plurality and interfaith tolerance. There are good reasons why people of all three of those faiths, and not just Muslims, should be sceptical about Starmer’s apparent backing of Modi. Muslims have an especially good reason to despise Starmer, because of the brutality of the Indian occupation. A month or so ago, Private Eye did a ‘Letter From Kashmir’ about it. Among other atrocities, this mentioned how Indian troopers were rounding up Muslim youths and then raping them. It’s a very good reason why people, who care about human rights, should be concerned about Starmer and his support for the Indian prime minister. But I doubt you’ll hear a word about this from Starmer.

Webb’s comments about Muslims, Kashmir and Palestine also shows the double standard behind the IHRA’s definition of anti-Semitism. According to this, which the Board of Deputy and its allied Zionist organisation were so keen to foist on the Labour party, it is anti-Semitic to claim that Jews are more loyal to another country. In all too many cases, this is true. Central to the real, anti-Semitic conspiracy theories is the belief that Jews have no love or loyalty to their host nations, and are really more loyal to rival nations. At the time of the First World War, Jewish German businessmen like Mond were suspected by the xenophobic right of being more loyal to Germany, while in later years it’s been Israel. When the fear hasn’t been that the Jews are just more loyal to each other, of course, and are actively plotting to enslave their non-Jewish compatriots.

But that example of anti-Semitism also raises problems, as there are Jewish Zionists, who made no secret that their primarily loyalty was to Israel. One of the most notorious of these was the casino magnate, Sheldon Adelson, who made no secret that his first loyalty was not to his home, America, but to Israel. There’s a double standard in Webb’s attitude in that I assume he would find it anti-Semitic for Jews to be accused of such conflicting loyalties, but not British Muslims.

Back to Leadbeater, it seems to me that she was selected primarily because she’s the sister of the late Jo Cox, assassinated years ago by a Nazi. She’s also a lesbian, and while this shouldn’t make any difference to whether someone’s suitable for a political career, I think support for gay rights and anti-racism are also a part of the Blairite political ideology and one of the few areas that mark the Labour party as a party of the left. It’s been pointed out that Blair was a liberal, not a socialist. He ditched the party’s Clause IV, pledging it to nationalisation, but retained the concern for tackling prejudice against minorities, which is a liberal policy. But Starmer’s complete lack of interest in retaining Black and Muslim voters shows that he’s not really interested in anti-racism either. And as the Tories also claim to support gay rights since David Cameron’s leadership, and Johnson has marked Pride week or month by decorating the front of No.10 in Pride colours, I don’t know how far support for that issue differentiates the two parties.

The mad right-winger, Alex Belfield, also couldn’t resist the opportunity to take another swipe at Diane Abbott. Abbott, apparently, congratulated Jeremy Corbyn for Leadbeater’s victory. To Belfield, this is yet another demonstration of how stupid she is. Well, I can’t say Abbott is my favourite MP, but I think she’s right. Under Corbyn, Labour’s majority in the constituency was 8,000. I think Leadbeater’s election was helped by the scandal about Hancock’s affair and subsequent resignation, but I’m sure that it was also helped by some of those, who had voted Labour under Corbyn, continuing to support the party.

Before the election, people were predicting that Labour would lose and it would spell the end of Starmer’s leadership of the party. That hasn’t happened, and it looks like he’s still going to hang on. But it’s not a stunning victory, and the Tories know it. Sargon of Gasbag and his fellow Lotus Eaters put up a video afterwards laughing at how terrible the result was. While it’s good that Labour was able to hang on to the seat after the humiliation of the previous elections, it’s still doesn’t dispel the fears of further electoral disaster.

Together, Leadbeater and Starmer decimated the Labour majority in Batley and Spen, showing how much of a busted flush Blairism is and why Starmer still needs to go as party leader. But he’s determined to hang on, and so we can expect further and worse results in the future.

Novara Media on the Sacking of Jewish Journalist for Calling Out Media Bias for Israel and against Palestinians

I haven’t seen all of this video, but I wanted to repost it here because it shows exactly the disgusting right-wing, and general media bias in support of Israel. And because it also shows the particular venom Israel’s supporters have towards Jews who oppose their ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. The victim of the Zionist right’s Ire this time was Emily Wilder, a Jewish journalist with AP press. The video was posted a month ago, on 28th May, when the Israeli cleansing of an Arab district in east Jerusalem for Jewish settlers and the conflict this had provoked with the Palestinians was still very much a live issue. The video briefly describes the circumstances of Wilder’s sacking before moving to a discussion between Michael Walker and Novara’s main woman, Ash Sarkar.

Walker begins by stating that the media is largely silent about crimes committed by Israel, presenting shootings and atrocities carried out by the IDF in the passive voice. It should have been a game changer, then, when the IDF bombed AP’s offices in Gaza. But it wasn’t. Instead the press agency sacked Wilder, who had only been with the company for 16 days after joining on 3rd of May, for supposedly anti-Israel bias in on social media. Her crime was posting three tweets clearly and intelligently demonstrating the media’s bias, including a retweet from Leila al-Arian, a producer with al-Jazeera. Al-Arian said that simply reporting the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians like the back and forth between players in a ping-pong match without giving any context and background information was bad journalism and doing their viewers a disservice. The video puts up these tweets, quoted in the report in the Washington Post about this shameful affair, from which they draw for the video’s contents. Walker says that they look all very harmless. And they are – perfectly anodyne, and fair comment. Except to the fanatical pro-Israeli Republicans.

Wilder was targeted by a number of right-wing organisations because when she was a student at Stanford College, she was a member of Jewish Voice for Peace and another organisation campaigning for justice for the Palestinians. Stanford College Republicans dug out and posted an old tweet in which she called the late Las Vegas businessman and staunch supporter of Israel an ‘naked mole-rat looking old billionaire’. Which I have to say, he did. Adelson was vile piece of work. He made his money from casinos, which are responsible for spreading gambling addiction throughout American and British society. He was also the kind of Jew, which it is anti-Semitic to talk about according to the IHRA. Unlike the millions of Jewish Americans, who see themselves primarily and happily as Jewish Americans, or Brits, French, Germans, Poles and other nations, for example, Adelson explicitly stated that his first loyalty was to Israel. Joining the attack on Wilder was The Federalist, Washington Free Beacon and, inevitably, the website of Faux News.

This story bears out what the Jewish British journo, Miri Bar Hillel, has said: that there is a particular campaign against Jews and Jewish journos over this issue, and that many Jews are living in fear. I’m surprised they didn’t go all the way and accuse Wilder of being self-hating and anti-Semitic. And by Republican standards, she’s also ‘unamerican’ because ‘Israel’s values are our values’ as one Neocon put it.

And it also demonstrates once again the correctness of Tony Greenstein’s diagnosis of Zionism as Jewish anti-Semitism. Because it is based on the anti-Semitic premise that Jews and non-Jews can never live together in peace, friendship and harmony. I’m very much aware that anti-Semitism is still around, but as Tony’s also shown, the vast majority of severely normal Brits either have a positive view of their Jewish compatriots, or simply think they’re no better nor no worse than anyone else. Only 7 per cent of the British public have negative views about Jews.

The sacking of Wilder for making entirely fair and justified comments about media bias for Israel is despicable. I hope she gets a better job elsewhere.

Because her treatment has shown just how biased, cowardly and complicit the western media are in their covering up of Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians.

Chief Rabbi Tells AIPAC Why He Told People Not to Vote for Corbyn

Unfortunately, Melanie Phillips wasn’t the only person this week violating the provisions of the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism in Israel’s favour. So was Ephraim Mirvis, the world’s worst Chief Rabbi. Mirv appeared in the page of the wretched right-wing libel sheet, the Jewish Chronicle, talking about his speech to AIPAC explaining why he told the British Jewish public not to vote for Labour because of Jeremy Corbyn. AIPAC is one of the very largest pro-Israel lobbying organisation in America. The largest is Ted Hagee’s equally vile Christians United for Israel, but AIPAC is extremely influential. Leading American politicos, including presidential candidates like Hillary Clinton, have appeared before it, pledging their undying support for Israel and seeking the organisation’s endorsement. And its leaders include such charmless nerks as Sheldon Adelson. Adelson’s a casino billionaire, who has apparently made it public that his first loyalty is to Israel. The IHRA definition of anti-Semitism says it is anti-Semitic to accuse Jews of being more loyal to a foreign country. For the vast majority of Jews, this is undoubtedly the case – they’re loyal citizens and accusing them of such disloyalty would be anti-Semitic. But in Adelson’s case, apparently, it’s true.

Mirv’s Violation of IHRA Anti-Semitism Definition

Mirv declared that Prime Ministers of Israel and key Jewish leaders have been graciously and warmly welcomed at No. 10 under the Conservatives. As Mike points out in his article, they’ve also been welcomed by Labour leaders. One of these was Tony Blair, who received considerable backing from the Israel lobby, which is probably one of the reasons why the Blairites were able to make such an alliance with the Israel lobby in the Labour Party to attack Corbyn. He then went on to ask rhetorically “What would happen if the next incumbent was Jeremy Corbyn? What would the consequences be for Jews and Judaism and the State of Israel?” As Mike also points out, that also violates another stipulation of the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism – that Jews should not be identified with Israel.

Unfortunately, Zionists do it all the time. Netanyahu passed a law nearly a decade ago making all Jews everywhere automatically citizens of Israel. Many Jews weren’t impressed. There are very many Israel critical and anti-Zionist Jews. These include ultra-Orthodox Haredi Jews, who believe it is their God-given duty to remain in exile and work for the good of the countries in which they live, until the Messiah comes to restore Israel. This cannot be the work of a secular state, which is an abomination. They’re a growing section of the British Israeli population. In a few years they will account for a third of it, and will have overtaken the United Synagogue as the largest section of British Jewry. Other Jews are critical of Israel from a belief in traditional liberal Jewish values, and despise the country for its barbarous ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. And these are also a growing part of the American Jewish population. An increasing number of American Jewish young people have no interest in Israel, or actively oppose it because of its treatment of the Palestinians. Enrollment in the heritage tours, which the Israeli state gives American school leavers so that they can visit Israel, is falling. One Jewish American, commenting on Netanyahu’s wretched citizenship law, said it was ludicrous that he, who had been born in Anchorage in Alaska, was a member of country he’d never been to, while his friend, a Palestinian, had no right to return to the country of his birth. And this opposition to Israel is shared by Jews, who have experienced genuine anti-Semitism.

Chief Rabbinate and Board of Deputies Not Representative of British Jewry

And then there’s the claim of the Zionist Jewish establishment to represent all of Britain’s Jews. Er, no, they really don’t. The Jews have never been a monolithic community. That’s a fantasy of anti-Semites. They’re as disparate and varied in their attitudes, opinions and values as every other ethnic or religious group. As Jewish bloggers like Tony Greenstein and David Rosenberg have pointed out, the Board of Deputies really only represents the United Synagogue. And its questionable how many of them it represents. Some synagogues don’t allow women to vote, others have sitting deputies whom they haven’t changed for years. And the Board’s constitution explicitly defines itself as a Zionist organisation, so non-Zionists need not apply. And needless to say, as they’re based on the synagogues, they don’t represent that third of British Jewry that is secular. But never mind. Once upon a time ’twas said that the Anglican Church was the Tory party at prayer. That was true at one time, as the Tory party stood for the monarchy, the established church and the landed aristocracy. But since Thatcher the Anglican Church has also criticised Tory policy on poverty, leading to disputes between the Tories and the Archbishop of Canterbury. It now seems that the Anglican Church is no longer such a staunch upholder of Conservatism. That role now seems to have been taken over by the United Synagogue, who can always be relied on to produce another anti-Semitism smear against Labour when the Tories are in trouble.

As for the Chief Rabbinate, as Mike has said on his blog, traditional Jewish theology and law stipulates that no rabbi’s opinion is any better than any other rabbi’s. And so when Mirvis speaks, it could be said that he speaks for himself alone, or rather, just himself and those who choose to share his opinions. The old retort Winston Churchill once gave a member of the House Lords therefore seems to apply to him: ‘The honourable member represents only himself, and I don’t like his constituency’.

Mirvis himself is a true-blue Tory, and welcomed the ascension of Tweezer as Prime Minister. He is also very much a Zionist thug. He and his predecessor, the noxious ‘Reform Jews are enemies of the faith’ Jonathan Sacks, both led British contingents to the annual March of the Flags in Jerusalem. That’s the unedifying occasion when ultra-patriotic Israeli boot-boys go marching through the Muslim quarter of Jerusalem, waving the Israeli flag around, vandalising Palestinian property and terrorising the locals. Sacks was requested by a liberal Jewish organisation not to go. He ignored them.

Jews Safe and Respected Under Corbyn

Not every Tory was happy about Mirvis’ decision to attack Corbyn. Simon Kelner wrote a piece in the I attacking it, stating that if Corbyn did win the election, nothing would happen to Britain’s Jews. There would be no riots, no pogroms. Now Kelner promoted the anti-Semitism smears as enthusiastically as all the other Fleet Street hacks. And in writing his piece he may well have been afraid that Corbyn would get in, and Mirv’s predictions of rampant Jew-hatred would have been exposed as the fearmongering it was. And as a consequence, the reputation of Chief Rabbinate would have been very badly damaged.

But Kelner would have been right. Nothing would have happened to Britain’s Jews under a Corbyn administration, because neither Corbyn nor his supporters are anti-Semites. Quite the opposite – Corbyn has always worked for the Jewish community. And he would have continued to do so. What would have happened is that Israel would have come under pressure to obey UN resolutions regarding the treatment of the Palestinians. And the ability of the Israel lobby to smear critics of Israel as anti-Semites would be severely damaged.

Jews Historically Indifferent or Opposed to Israel and Zionism

As for the relationship between British Jews and Israel, my guess is that the situation would have gone back to that pre-1969 and the launch of the Neo-Con project. William Kristol announced it in an American Jewish magazine as a method for encouraging Americans, and that included American Jews, to support Israel. Norman Finkelstein, that redoubtable Jewish American critic of Zionism, has pointed out that Kristol launched Neo-Conservatism because American Jews weren’t interested in Israel. They had no interest going to an unknown country, when they could make comfortable lives for themselves in America. David Rosenberg has said that until World War II, Zionism was a tiny minority in European Jewish opinion. Most Jews wished to remain in the nations of their birth, as equal citizens. The slogan of the Jewish socialist party, the Bund, was ‘Wherever we live, that’s our homeland!’. My guess is that British Jews have the same attitude. The Balfour Declaration was opposed by the British Jewish establishment, as they wanted Jews to be, and to be seen as, patriotic fellow Brits. They did not want to be accused of being foreign or having divided loyalties, and felt very strongly that the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine would lead to such anti-Semitic accusations. If British Jews migrated, my guess is that most of them would have gone to the same destinations as their gentile counterparts – America, or one of the White majority Commonwealth countries – Canada, Australia or New Zealand. Jews have been dinkum  Ozzies since the 19th century. In the 1870s Rabbi Davis of the Sydney Synagogue took part in a rally against the enslavement of the indigenous Polynesians along with his Christian compatriots in the Anglican, Methodist and Presbyterian churches. According to Patridge’s Dictionary of Historical Slang, the Australian term ‘Cobber’ comes from the Hebrew ‘Cobar’, which means ‘comrade’. If Corbyn had got in, it’s possible that all that would have resulted is that more Jews would have become indifferent to Israel. An attitude that’s probably growing anyway.

Conclusion

Mike in his piece on Mirv’s wretched speech asks if the Chief Rabbi is more concerned about representing Israeli racism than Britain’s Jews. I don’t think Mirvis is able to distinguish between Judaism and Israel, so taken is he with the Zionist lie that the two are one and the same. And at present, the absolute, uncritical support he and the Board demand for Israel does mean supporting racism, apartheid and ethnic cleansing.

An increasing number of British Jews, including those who consider themselves Zionist, oppose this. But it seems that Mirvis really doesn’t represent them.

Is the UK’s Chief Rabbi more concerned with supporting Israeli racism than Jewish people?

 

 

 

Jewish Comics Artist Eli Valley Attacks the ‘Kapo’ Insult Hurled by Zionists

It must be the week for comics and the Israel lobby. This time last week the bug-eyed Zionists of JVLWatch tried again to smear Mike as an anti-Semite using his ‘Hardboiled Hitler’ strip from Violent. Violent is Mike’s small-press homage to the 1970s comic, Action, which caused outraged and ended up being banned because of its violent content. In ‘Hardboiled Hitler’, Mike satirizes the Fuehrer, presenting him as a superhero, who is nevertheless a grotesque, posturing, inept, flatulent clown. The flatulence is entirely historically accurate. Hitler suffered from meteorism – chronic flatulence. Apparently it got very loud and nasty when he was in full rant. JVLWatch, whoever they are, tried to present the strip as a glorification of the Nazi regime and that the poisonous clouds surrounding Hitler represented the gas chambers used to murder the Jews. They weren’t. The noxious fumes surrounding Hitler all came from the Fuehrer’s bottom, and very definitely didn’t make him look at all heroic or glamorous. Various newspapers have also tried to make the same claim that Mike’s anti-Semitic using the strip. And as Mike says, when he complained to the press-regulator IPSO about them, the regulator dismissed their claims out of hand.

On Tuesday Tony Greenstein put up on his blog a page of art by the American left-wing Jewish comic artist and writer, Eli Valley, published in Jewish Currents, attacking the ‘Kapo’ insult. The Kapos were the heads of the Warsaw ghetto under the Third Reich. The Nazis cruelly delegated to them the responsibility of choosing which of their community should be sent to the extermination camps, which they did under duress. If the leaders refused, the SS would have attacked and killed everyone there.

Since then it’s become an insult the Israel lobby hurls at those Jews, who criticize Israel and Zionism for its crimes against the Palestinians. In the page reproduced by Greenstein, Valley turns the insult around and hurls it back at them, showing how the Zionists deserve the epithet far more than the people they slander. He explains how he was once attacked in this way by the editor of the Jewish magazine, Commentary, because he published a story about a Jew’s crisis of conscience after Israeli settlers burned alive a Palestinian child. The current Israeli ambassador to Israel also used it against the centre-left Jews of J-Street. He goes on to make the point that the Israeli right believe that the lessons of the Holocaust are that gentiles will always hate Jews, who must survive by any means necessary. That means attacking as treason even objection to the most Fascistic forms of Israeli nationalism. Hence Netanyahu joined demonstration attacking Yitzhak Rabin as a Nazi.

But to Valley, the real Kapos are the supporters of Trump and Netanyahu, the people who support Trump’s separation of immigrant children from their parents in his own concentration camps on the Mexican border. He shows the similarity between recent American immigrants, who have committed suicide fearing deportation, and those Jews who did the same in Franco’s Spain fearing that they would be sent back to the Third Reich. He also attacks the Orthodox Union for its award to Trump’s politico, Jeff Sessions. American Jews, he argues, have forgotten the other lesson of the Holocaust, that atrocities like this should never again happen to anyone, anywhere, ever again.At the heart of this problem is the way the Jewish community has allowed Jewish identity to be defined by a mainly Zionist, Orthodox right-wing minority. The result is that the Jewish community has internalized this view, and sees themselves through its lens. Hence when Jews declared that they felt ashamed to be Jewish after Israeli snipers killed over a hundred Gazans, this showed that they had accepted the belief that only Israel embodied authentic Jewish values. The strip concludes by that Jews need to take control of the vernacular to express the values they share, and use it to excommunicate people like arch-Zionist Trump supporter, Sheldon Adelson. Valley concludes by comparing them to the real Kapos, who had no choice about their collaboration with the Nazis. He states of the Zionists and other Jews supporting Trump ‘Kapo doesn’t begin to plumb the depths of their betrayal.’

It’s strong stuff which makes an excellent point, particularly because of Trump’s own connections to and support for the genuine anti-Semites of the extreme right. Greenstein also provides a link in his article to the webpages for Valley and his work. Valley’s published a collection of his strips from over the years, Diaspora Boy, in which he attacks right-wing abuse and corruption in the Jewish community and wider American society. The webpages also have samples of his work. And along with the critical praise is a quotation from a very offended person, who felt that it shouldn’t have been published anywhere. Valley’s been compared to Robert Crumb, but that’s not quite right. His view of society and humanity is as bleak and vicious as Crumb’s, but his style is more like that of Charles Burns in his 1990s alternative comic, Skin Deep.

Greenstein also adds more awkward facts to support Valley’s view of Zionists as the real Kapos. Like the Ha’avara agreement between the Nazis and Israel in 1933 that broke the international Jewish boycott of Nazi Germany and the suppression of the Auschwitz Protocols by Hungarian Zionist Erich Kasztner in order to preserve a treaty between them and the Nazis. He describes how the founder of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, came to believe that anti-Semitism was inevitable and couldn’t be fought when he was in France during the Dreyfus scandal. Hence the head of the Israeli Labor Party, Avi Gabbay, told American Jews that the real place was in Israel after the Pittsburgh massacre on Saturday. And how Berl Katznelson, the founder of the Israeli party Mapai, declared the Nazi seizure of power in 1933 was an opportunity for the Jews to build and flourish as never before, at a time when the rest of German Jewry were preparing to protest. This is also the reason why Ben Gurion opposed the Kindertransport evacuating Jewish children from Nazi Germany to Britain, because they wouldn’t be taking them to Israel. As for the real Kapos, Greenstein writes

The kapos were themselves prisoners who were destined for extermination. They had no control over their situation and their collaboration, if that is what it was, was forced. Who knows what any of us would do in such a situation? The Jewish Agency was under no such compulsion yet it willingly collaborated lobbying the Gestapo not to allow Jewish emigration to countries other than Palestine.

He then goes on to discuss the way members of the Fascist right, like Britain First, are accusing genuine anti-racists of racism, and how the National Front and BNP try to present themselves as protecting British Whites from Black racism. He also mentions how Zionists frequently tell their Jewish opponents that they wish they and their families had died in the Holocaust. One of the victims of this vile abuse was Aurora Levins Morales, a Black Jewish New Yorker.

He also attacks James Dyer, a Christian Zionist and member of the Sussex Friends of Israel – a group that’s also close to the EDL – who called him a ‘Kapo’. He goes on to connect him to Christian millennialist support for Zionism, which believes that the foundation of Israel is part of the End Times. Before Christ returns, however, the world will suffer a great tribulation. And in the Book of Revelation this will result in the destruction of the vast majority of Jews, except a small number who convert to Christianity. One of the most prominent Right-wing American Christian leaders is Jack Hagee, the head of Christians United for Israel, who also believes that Hitler did God’s work. He’s one of the two pastors Trump has appointed as ambassadors to Israel. He goes on to connect this with Christian anti-Semitism during the Third Reich, such as the German Lutheran church’s installation of the pro-Nazi bishop, Ludwig Muller as Reich Bishop, and Monsignor Tiso, the Roman Catholic prelate in Slovakia who presided over the deportations to the death camps there. He concludes

It is therefore no surprise that today the successors of Muller and Tiso are to be found supporting the Zionists and decrying any notion of Palestinian rights. It is even less of a surprise that they assuage their consciences with the taunt of ‘Kapo’.

http://azvsas.blogspot.com/2018/11/kapo-anti-semitic-insult-that-zionists.html

To be fair to Hagee, he’s not the only person, who believed that Hitler did God’s work. Apart from Hitler himself, I think Holocaust survivor and acclaimed author Elie Wiesel also stated that Hitler was God’s servant, based on the way God in the Old Testament uses foreign invaders like the Assyrians and Babylonians to punish Israel before punishing them in turn. Wiesel, incidentally, was certainly no self-hating Jew. He was a staunch supporter of Israel, who never criticized its brutal maltreatment of the Palestinians.

And Christian Zionism has been attacked for its racism and distorted theology by the Christians of the American Presbyterian Church in several books, which have been reviewed by the Electronic Intifada, and which I’ve blogged about.

But Greenstein’s article and Valley’s cartoons show very graphically how the real Kapos and collaborators with Fascism are the Zionists, both Jewish and Christian.

Max Blumenthal on How Israel Destroys the Careers of Its Critics

In this video from RT America of just over eight minutes in length, posted in 2015, Priya Reddy, one of the broadcaster’s own producers, talks to the news anchor about Max Blumenthal and his book, Ruin and Resistance in Gaza: The 21 Day War. Blumenthal had been speaking about the book at an event the previous evening, which Reddy had attended and interviewed him.

Reddy begins by describing how well attended the event was, and how many Jewish people were there, talking and being very critical of Israel. Blumenthal made it very clear that Judaism and Zionism are not the same thing, not every Jew identifies as a Zionist, and that there’s a whole new generation of young Jewish people, who are very critical of Israel.

The news anchor asks her how she would compare Blumenthal’s approach to that of the general US media. Reddy states that what she respects about Blumenthal’s work is that, rather than doing Israel’s PR, he went to Gaza, interviewed the victims and extensively documented some of the most horrific war crimes in modern history. Which is what a real journalist does. Blumenthal stated that the standard US media coverage of Gaza was simply to take talking points from Netanyahu’s right-wing government and repeating them.

This is followed by a clip of Blumenthal saying that he wanted to honour the resistance of the Gaza strip by telling their own stories and presenting their testimonies in their own words. And most importantly he wanted to identify and expose the criminals, who devastated Gaza, who killed over 2,200 people, including 550 children.

Blumenthal described the incident when the Israeli navy fired on small Palestinian boys playing soccer, the kids were aged 9 to 11 years old. Israel routinely targets children, but what was different this time is that it occurred right in front of an hotel where foreign journalists were staying, and so they couldn’t ignore it, and it was reported with more accuracy than the rest of the war.

There’s then another clip of Blumenthal, in which he says that there’s still a fear here in DC among the media and political elites, among the influential people in Washington of taking on Israel as it is, as an apartheid state that doesn’t want peace, which intends to occupy permanently Palestinian land and hold Gaza under siege. To do that is just a bridge to far, not because people don’t realise that here. They realise it. You could see at his talk people knew something was wrong and it was resonating. But there is a pressure machine, there is a lobby that can still destroy your political career. For Blumenthal personally, he was able to do it because he’s an independent journalist, and he really has nothing to lose by telling the truth.

Reddy goes on to state that Blumenthal’s book exposes some of these extremely horrific war crimes. There’s a long-standing pattern in the US media of downplaying these crimes, which has been extensively documented by groups like Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting and many others. She also states that it was interesting to learn from Blumenthal that Sheldon Adelson and Haim Habad – who supports Hillary Clinton – actually discussed buying the New York Times and LA Times outright. Controlling the narrative is a top priority for the Israel lobby. Israel has not only banned journalists from covering Gaza, but has actually bombed media buildings and shot and fatally killed a number of journalists.

The news anchor continues, saying that Sheldon Adelson is a big heavyweight when it comes to buying, or as they would put it, contributing or donating to campaigns, typically to the Republicans. Reddy then interrupts, saying the buy both Republicans and Democrats.

The news anchor then goes on to describe a recent incident where Israeli settlers set fire to a Palestinian home, burning the family alive, killing an 18-month old baby. Reddy had asked Blumenthal, who he thought was responsible for inciting that kind of violence. Reddy replies that it is not unusual for settlers to target Palestinians, and there is almost never any legal penalties, which sends the message that it’s no big deal if you murder a Palestinian. Reddy says she asked Blumenthal specifically about inflammatory statements made by top level officials, like Netanyahu, Eilet Shaked that not only sanction but encourage this type of barbaric behaviour.

This is followed by a clip of Blumenthal stating that incitement to genocide and incitement to killing children is legitimate when it’s inciting the citizens of Israel to do it in army uniform, and that’s what Eilet Shaked did when she called for the killing of mothers in the Gaza strip, their extermination in order to prevent them giving birth, in her words, to ‘little snakes’. This was the Justice Minister, the person in charge of the court system. Moshe Alon, the Defence Minister, recently pledged to hurt children in airstrikes in Lebanon, in April 2015. That was considered legitimate. What is not considered legitimate is a fanatical settler like Moshe Orbach, who wrote a manual, which isn’t even in wide-publication, for burning Palestinians alive in their homes. He wasn’t calling for that in army uniform, he called for it in vigilante fashion and so was pulled in for interrogation. So the state, which has killed 550 children, many of whom were burned alive, uses the settlers as moral cover for its own crimes.

The news anchor says that this is a difficult situation, and many people will be asking what they can do to change it. Reddy says that there is international law, but there is a massive failure of international institutions to hold Israel accountable, such as the UN or the ICC, that’s why grassroots movements are so important and individual actions are so important. Blumenthal talked about the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. Reddy therefore asked him why the BDS movement, which is explicitly anti-racist and pro-human rights, is so aggressively attacked by well-funded Israel lobbyists as anti-Semitic.

There’s then a clip of Blumenthal saying that it’s the same thing people hear from White supremacists here in the US: that when African-Americans talk about racism, they’re being racist, or when they talk about White violence against African-Americans, racially inspired violence, they’re being racist. It’s the language we hear from Zionists when they complain that the BDS movement is a movement of hatred, when all they’re doing is supporting international law.

Jim Lobe on Who Funds AIPAC

This is a short, five minute clip from The Real News, based in Boston, put on YouTube ten years ago in 2008. It’s an extract from a longer interview with Jim Lobe, the bureau chief of the Inter press Service in Washington, about the Neocons, the Israel lobby and their power in the US. In this clip, they ask Lobe who’s funding AIPAC, one of the main organisations in the Israel lobby in America.

Lobe replies that one of them is Sheldon Adelson, the casino magnate. Adelson owns the Las Vegas Sands in Las Vegas, has opened casinos in Macao, and is the third wealthiest America with a fortune worth between $12 and $30 billion. He offered to be the major donor for AIPAC’s new building. He’s very close to Benjamin Netanyahu and Natan Sharansky, who is part of the Shalem Centre, a Natanyahu/Likud front thinktank in Israel. Adelson founded his own institute, the Adelson institute in Israel, which is headed by Sharansky. He’s also the biggest contributor to the Republican Jewish Coalition, a very Neoconservative, pro-Likudist group, and was also a founder and by far the biggest contributor to another lobby group, Freedomswatch, which was aiming to influence the Congressional races in November 2009.

Lobe says that there are also other, very wealthy contributors, and recommends that the interviewer talks to Michael Massing, who has written quite a bit on the Israel lobby as a kind of corrective to the Walt Mearsheimer thesis first published in the London Review of Books. Asked about Mearsheimer’s views, Lobe replies that they’re putting the issue of the influence of the Israel lobby – that is the confluence of American presidents, AIPAC, the really big organisations, on US policy into the debate – is absolutely critical, particularly under this Bush administration. What we’ve seen is things go seriously, seriously bad in the Middle East, and that a lot of that is due to the policies that these large, very influential American Jewish organisations have first endorsed, then pushed.

Their ( Mearsheimer’s) idea of Israel is something along the two-state solution and getting it done. And they see Israel without such a solution still holding onto Arab lands and so on, as a serious drag on US foreign policy success, as a detriment in the region. They took a realist position, but not one Lobe feels compromises or would compromise Israel’s security so long as it defines its borders more modestly than it does at the present time. Lobe thinks that they were saying that support for Israel should not be unconditional, that there should be clear conditions put on that support, which Israel can either accept or reject. But their main point was that the influence of the Israel lobby, particularly organisations such as this, on Congress, was distorting American interests because the support for Israel in Congress is essentially unconditional, and that’s not getting the US anywhere. It’s also undermining Israel’s security in the long-term. Lobe says that there isn’t much to disagree with in that assessment, or at least Lobe himself says he doesn’t disagree with it much.

Of course, the Israel lobby isn’t confined to American Jews. It also includes Christians, like Ted Hagee’s Christians United For Israel, while many American Jews are becoming increasingly alienated and critical of Israel and its treatment of the Palestinians.

Al-Jazeera Report into Israel Lobby in America and Qatar

‘Michelle’, another of the great commenters on this blog, sent me the link below to a report by Asa Winstanley in the Electronic Intifada on a forthcoming Al-Jazeera documentary exposing the activities of the Israel lobby in spying on anti-Israel activists in America, and their attempts to bring the United Arab Emirates into line with Israeli and American foreign policy. And, of course, suppress Al-Jazeera.

This is being done through the Neocon organisation, the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, which is gathering the data of pro-Palestinian activists and the BDS movement in the US. The top civil servant at the Israeli Ministry of Strategy Affairs is Sima Vaknin-Gil, an Israeli army officer, whose boss is an ally of Netanyahu. The Ministry is in charge of propaganda against the BDS movement. Vaknin-Gil has said that she wants to create an army of pro-Israeli trolls to flood the internet, while being formally separate from the Israeli state.

The Foundation also receives funding from Sheldon Adelson, the American casion magnate, who makes it very clear that he stands for ‘Israel first’.

The documentary also shows pro-Israel lobbyist Max Adelstein, who works for AIPAC, the big pro-Israel lobby group in the US, boasting of how he is also working to bring the UAE into closer alignment with America and Israel.

The film also shows Jonathan Schanzer, the Senior Vice-President at the Foundation, telling his minions how they are to smear pro-Palestinian activists. And he reveals how the smears increasingly aren’t work. This part of the report says

According to the source, Schanzer admits to the undercover reporter that “BDS has taken everybody by surprise.”

He calls the response by Israel lobby groups “a complete mess,” adding, “I don’t think that anybody’s doing a good job. We’re not even doing a good job.”

According to the source, Schanzer laments that attempts to smear Students for Justice in Palestine and American Muslims for Palestine as linked to extremist Islamic terrorism have failed to gain traction.

He is also said to regret that the Israel lobby’s habitual tactic of falsely alleging Palestine solidarity activists are motivated by anti-Jewish hatred is losing its impact.

“Personally I think anti-Semitism as a smear is not what it used to be,” he is said to tell the undercover reporter.

Schanzer’s views echo a secret report endorsed by the Israeli government and distributed to Israel lobby leaders last year. That report, a leaked copy of which was published by The Electronic Intifada, concludes that Israel’s efforts to stem the growth of the Palestine solidarity movement have largely failed.

And the Emirates’ links to the Trump administration are also being investigate by Robert Mueller, who is moving away from the supposed Russian influence to include them through their connections to Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner.

It also discusses Al-Jazeera documentary, The Lobby, which showed Shai Masot conspiring with members of the Conservative and Labour parties. This new documentary was supposed to be shown five months ago, but has not yet come out.

The Israel lobby has also been active travelling to Qatar to get the film suppressed, and supposedly received assurances that it won’t, though the Qataris deny this. Al-Jazeera’s investigation has been decried by Noah Pollak, another Neocon, as a foreign espionage investigation on American soil. The Israel lobby is pressuring the US government to force Al-Jazeera to register as an arm of the Qatari government.

https://electronicintifada.net/content/whats-al-jazeeras-undercover-film-us-israel-lobby/23496

I am frankly completely unsurprised that the Neocons were up to their neck in this. The Neocon project always was a Zionist outfit. It all started with an article in the late ’60s by their chief ideologue, William Kristol, about ways to get the American public to back Israel. Which included the vast majority of Jewish Americans at the time, who were completely indifferent in Israel, a foreign country they had never seen and had no desire to emigrate to.

As for AIPAC, there’s more than a whiff of double standards here. One of the left-wing American news channels pointed out that FARA, the piece of American legislation dating from World War II, which demands that foreign lobbyists register with the US authorities, should cover them. But it doesn’t. Because of their very powerful influence since the 1950s.

What is encouraging, however, is Schanzer’s admission that the lies and smears he and his scummy friends have been directing against pro-Palestinian activists, that they’re all connected to Islamist terror groups, or anti-Semites, increasingly aren’t working.

And when they fail completely, how is this going to make McNichol and the kangaroo courts persecuting decent, anti-racists and campaigners against anti-Semitism, who’ve been libelled by the Israel lobby because of their anti-Israel activism, going to look?

Lies, Libels, Criminal and Political Manipulation Catch Up with the Israel Lobby

Oh dear, the various crimes and misdeeds of prominent members of the Israel lobby are starting to come to home to roost. Mike yesterday put up a series of article discussing the various shady figures in the Jewish Labour movement, their criminal activities, and the connections of the organisation’s leading members to the Israeli embassy at the time when Shai Masot, an official at that embassy, was taking it upon himself to decide what Conservative politicians should be in our cabinet.

First of all, Jonathan ‘No Morals’ Newmark, as I have decided to dub him, the former chair of the JLM, is now being investigated by the fuzz at the request of the organisation he once headed. No Morals has been credibly accused of stealing funds from Jewish charities when he was one of the head honchos of the Jewish Leadership Council. They released him, but decided not to start a police investigation in order to avoid a scandal. No Morals denied this, of course, and claims that he resigned instead due to health reasons. Well, we shall see.

The JLM is the morally corrupt organisation, which the Labour party wanted Mike to go to for a ‘training day’. They’re the outfit that smeared Jackie Walker as an anti-Semite for questioning the exclusive concentration on the Jewish Holocaust during the Second World War at their workshop on Holocaust Remembrance Day. She wanted other groups, who had also suffered genocide, like Blacks, to be included. It was meant to be a ‘safe space’ where anyone could speak freely without repercussions, but they taped her comments and then released them. She also committed the unforgivable sin in their eyes of rejecting their tortured attempts to expand the definition of anti-Semitism to include criticism of Israel. As Israel is a racist apartheid state, she was right to do so. The anti-Semites themselves defined anti-Semitism, a word coined by their leader and founder, Wilhelm Marr, as hatred of Jews based on their biology and race. But this is forgotten by the Israel lobby, who are more concerned with defending Israel than really battling genuine anti-Semitism. Mike refused to attend their wretched training day, because he believes that this would be an admission of guilt on his part. And he’s absolutely right.

https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2018/03/03/newmark-to-be-focus-of-jewish-labour-movement-police-investigation-the-jewish-chronicle/

Then Mike posted up this 2016 article from the Electronic Intifada, pointing out that the JLM’s new director, Ella Rose, was an official at the Israeli Embassy during Shai Masot’s interference with our politics at the highest level. She did not declare this connection on her CV, stating only that she was head of the Union of Jewish Students. No Morals Newmark has declared her appointment a good career move, which seems to Mike to be highly suspicious.

https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2018/03/03/jewish-labour-movement-director-was-israeli-embassy-officer-the-electronic-intifada/

And he’s also put up a piece showing that Labour Against Anti-Semitism have also been libelling Jennie Formby, the new left-wing candidate for the post of General Secretary of the Labour Party. They claim that in 2016 she was forced to leave her post as Political Director of Unite the Union, because she questioned the impartiality of Baroness Royall to head an investigation into allegations of anti-Semitism amongst Labour students at Oxford University. This is supposedly because Baroness Royall had made several trips to Israel. Mike makes clear that this is based on the tortured definition of anti-Semitism adopted by the Zionist organisations, which states

“it is antisemitic to accuse ‘Jewish citizens of being more loyal to Israel, or to the alleged priorities of Jews worldwide, than to the interests of their own nations’.”

This isn’t actually part of the definition, but just a guide to deciding what is or isn’t anti-Semitic.

There’s only problem with the LAA’s accusation against Ms. Formby. T’ain’t true. The union has issued a statement refuting the LAA’s accusation, pointing out that her departure had nothing to do with such allegations, and that she was a valued and respected part of their team. They state that rather than opposing Royall’s appointment, she actually supported her and wanted her investigation to be properly resourced. And also, nobody actually knows if Royall herself is anti-Semitic or not. And if she isn’t, this alone blows their accusation away. You cannot be anti-Semitic against someone who isn’t Jewish.

Mike’s article ends with this statement

LAAS is fronted by Euan Philipps, chair of Tonbridge and Malling Constituency Labour Party. He wrote a libellous blog article about This Writer on the Huffington Post website, so it is clear that he enjoys a questionable relationship with factual accuracy. The HuffPost‘s lawyers reckon his comments were “honest opinion” but that has to be based on accurate facts, so they are both in a highly actionable situation.

And a promise that he’ll let his readers know how this strand will develop.

https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2018/03/03/another-organisation-that-claims-to-fight-anti-semitism-is-accused-of-lies/

Mike states that he is actually fully in agreement with the IHRC’s guideline that it is anti-Semitic to accuse Jews of being more loyal to the Israel, or the interest of Jews worldwide, than to the nations of their birth. As a generally principle, so do I. But I make an exception to certain members of the Israel lobby, who clearly do make it clear that their priorities are elsewhere.

Like Sheldon Adelson, the casino magnate, who is one of the most vocal supporters of Israel in America and a lavish political donor. Adelson states very clearly that he is ‘Israel first’. So by his own admission, he is more loyal to Israel than to the America in which he lives and made his money.

As for Ella Rose and her connections to the Israeli embassy while Shai Masot was trying to manipulate the Tories’ selection of cabinet ministers, if she was involved in this, then she too has dangerously divided loyalties. People who genuinely love their country don’t conspire with officials of a foreign power to manipulate their nation’s politics. They may try to alter the policies or appointment of personnel through negotiation at official levels, which is natural. But they do not do so at private, secret meetings, carefully hidden from scrutiny.

I am not saying that the Israelis are unique in this. America has plenty of form in manipulating the politics of other nations, either trying to stop the election of parties they don’t like, or then overthrowing them when they do get in. And it’s a long list of countries, about 54 or more. The latest was the Orange Revolution in the Ukraine, overseen by Obama’s woman Victoria Nuland, and Hillary ‘Queen of Chaos’ Clinton. And Killary herself has gone on recorded saying that she regretted not interfering in the Palestinian elections.

But just because the Americans are doing it, doesn’t make it any better for the Israeli lobby over here to do so too.

There are series questions to be asked of all the pro-Israel organisations in the Labour party because of their smears, libels and political manipulation. And this isn’t anti-Semitic, because amongst the decent people they’ve vilified are decent, self-respecting, anti-racist Jews, many of whom have suffered anti-Semitic abuse and violence.

It’s time to end the charade that the JLM and similar bodies care anything about anti-Semitism. They’re just right-wingers terrified of the Left, and afraid that Israel’s Fascist character is being increasingly exposed.

Netanyahu Rejects Liberal American Jews for Christian Zionists

Yesterday, 7th December 2017, Jonathan Cook published a very revealing piece about Netanyahu’s attitude to towards liberal American Jews in Counterpunch. The Israeli butcher is basically turning his back on them. Cook begins his piece by noting that most American Jews are politically liberal domestically. But they support Israel, and have been prepared to overlook or support the atrocities it has committed as they believed they had the right to a strong state themselves following the Holocaust. But he goes on to argue that Netanyahu’s increasing intolerance towards liberal Judaism makes this position increasingly difficult, and that they will have to confront their hypocrisy.

Much of this centres around the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, the remains of Solomon’s Temple. At the moment it’s controlled by Orthodox rabbis, who do not want Reform Jews and women praying there. There was an attempt to set up a special space for them, but the Orthodox was resolutely against it and Netanyahu caved in. As a result there has been outrage amongst Jewish Americans. Avraham Infield, a liaison to the American Jewish community, told Haaretz that many Jewish Americans now believe that Israel doesn’t give a dam’ about them.

Matters have been made worse by Tzipi Hotovely, the deputy foreign minister. She criticised American Jews for not fighting in either the US or Israeli militaries. They were leading ‘convenient lives’. Cook notes that this echoes the views of Orthodox rabbis, who argue that Reform Jews aren’t real Jews, and may even be enemies of Judaism.

This has been accompanied by an increased intolerance of Israeli critics of the regime. Netanyahu’s government has for a long time denounced the Palestinian human rights group B’Tsalem and the veterans’ organisation Breaking the Silence as traitors. But now they have targeted the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, which is the Israeli equivalent of the American Civil Liberties Union. According to Netanyahu, the group supports ‘terrorists’. Recent decisions by the government allow pupils to give racist answers in exams, and expand gender segregation at the universities. The government is also trying criminalise boycotting the Israeli state. There are two bills to make advocating this illegal, punishable with seven years in jail or $150,000 fine. The Defence Minister, Avigdor Lieberman, wants stronger power to clamp down on protesters and critics, including the ability to detain without charge.

And Cook notes that for the first time, Jews are being asked at their airports what their political views are.

He also cites an article in the far-right Israeli newspaper, Makor Rishon, owned by the American casino magnate Sheldon Adelson. This apparently gave Netanyahu’s reasons for turning his back on liberal American Jews. Netanyahu is convinced that the low birth rate and high rate of intermarriage amongst American Reform Jews mean that they will die out within a couple of generations. So he’s abandoned them in favour of cultivating closer ties to Orthodox Jews and Christian evangelicals.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/12/07/netanyahu-ditches-us-jews-for-alliance-with-christian-evangelicals-and-the-alt-right/

I am not surprised at Netanyahu’s attitude towards Reform Jews. Orthodox Judaism very much is the religion of the Israeli state. And the pronouncements of leading Jews in this country have shown their intolerance towards Reform Jews. A few years ago, the Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, caused outrage when he declared that Reform Jews were ‘enemies of the faith’. There is indeed a very high rate of intermarriage amongst male secular and Reform Jews in the Diaspora. I think it’s about 80 per cent, though against that the rate of intermarriage for women is much lower. As a result, many Jews are worried that they’re people are disappearing. As for Christian Zionists, as Richard Coughlan pointed out in his video on this issue, they’re the largest Zionist group in America.

It is thus all too credible that Netanyahu is turning his back liberal, American Jews.

I don’t know whether it will force them to reconsider their support for Israel. It may well do so, as an increasing number of young Jewish Americans are coming to despise the country and the way it treats the Palestinians, even when they have been on the heritage tours organised by the Israeli authorities. This includes Jews, who have been victims of anti-Semitism. Other critics of Israel, like Norman Finkelstein, have pointed out that Israel was traditionally very peripheral to mainstream Judaism, and that by far the majority of American Jews wanted to live as equal citizens in America. They definitely did not want to go to Israel, and did not see Israel as having any potential to revive interest in their religion or community.

This all changed in the late 1960s, when Israel defeated the Arabs in the Six Day War. The American Right also seized on these victories as psychological compensation for American defeats in Vietnam. And the Neocon movement was launched by American Jewish Zionists as part of a campaign to drum up support for Israel. American support for Israel is therefore a relatively recent phenomenon.

Whatever happens, I think we can expect more screaming and shouts of anti-Semitism at Israel’s critics, including Jews, as Netanyahu’s government becomes increasingly intolerant. And this may, in turn, cause more people to turn away from supporting Israel, as they find themselves tarred as anti-Semites and supporters of terrorism simply for not being quite so enthusiastic in their support as Netanyahu demands.

Consortium News: Why No Probe of ‘Israel-Gate’?

‘Michelle’, one of the great commenters to this blog, sent me a link to this article by Robert Parry last week. I hadn’t really had time to read it and post it up until now. But the question it raises is acutely relevant. Since Killary lost the election to Trump, the Western media and political-industrial class has been baying that it’s all the Russians’ fault. That Vladimir Putin and RT are spreading ‘fake news’ all over America and the rest of the western media. They’re interfering in our politics. Just this morning the British press reported that Theresa May had joined the attack, claiming that Russia was the biggest threat to western democracy. Or some similar rubbish that sounds like something from the Cold War.

There’s no evidence that the Russians have been trying to interfere in American politics any more than usual. And May has very good, personal reasons for trying to deflect attention away from her on to a perceived Russian threat. Her government is in meltdown, with 40 of her MPs having signed a ‘no confidence’ letter against her. If they find eight more Tories to add their signatures, then May has to give herself up for re-election as the head of her party.

Hence the fear, and the determination to seize on a spurious Russian threat to western democracy in order to distract people from how precarious her ‘strong and stable’ government is. Quite apart from its horrific policies that are privatising the NHS, education, destroying the welfare state and killing the unemployed and disabled through benefit sanctions.

In fact, it isn’t the Russians who have repeatedly and blatantly interfered in American politics. It’s the Israelis, as Robert Parry shows. Parry was the reporter, who revealed many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s. This was Reagan’s dirty little secret about how he was allowing the Contras in Nicaragua to support their war against the Sandinistas by exporting drugs to America’s ghettoes. And how, in order to secure the release of US squaddies taken hostage in Lebanon, he sent a shipment of armaments to Iran.

Parry’s article discusses the way that both the Democrats and the Republicans prostrate themselves before AIPAC, the big Israeli lobbying group in America, and solicits donations from millionaires and billionaires like Sheldon Adelson. Adelson is the proprietor of a chain of casinos, and makes no secret of the fact that he is ‘Israel first’. And congress has repeatedly issued invitations for Netanyahu, whom I’ve heard described by at least one Jewish academic as ‘that b***ard Netanyahu’ to address them. They’ve invited him over three times, the same number as Winston Churchill.

Anyone who steps out of line and does not kowtow to the Israel lobby is duly punished. They’ll be vilified as ‘anti-Semites’, even if they are decent people, who are disgusted by anti-Semitism. Parry gives an example of two Republican politicos, Paul Findley and Charles Percy, both from Illinois, when they tried to open negotiations with the PLO in the early 1980s. The Israel lobby responded by donating handsomely to their opponents, so that both were defeated, Findley in 1982, Percy two years later. Findley later published a book about his experiences in 1985, entitled They Dare to Speak Out: People and Institutions Confront Israel’s Lobby. It was then comprehensively trashed in the pages of the New York Times by Adam Clymer, who denounced it as ‘one-sided’.

After that, American politicians were much less likely to confront the Israel lobby. Parry notes how Barack Obama and Mitt Romney both visited Israel, Obama in 2008, Romney in 2012, in order to secure Netanyahu’s blessing.

Israel was also involved in the October Surprise. This was the deal Ronald Reagan made with the Iranians to stop Jimmy Carter being re-elected. At the time, the new Islamic revolutionary regime had Americans in Iran captive as hostages. Carter was negotiating for their release, but Reagan arranged for arms to be sent to the Ayatollahs to keep the hostages captive for longer. This was to present Carter as ineffectual and incompetent, and allow Reagan to win the election.

And it worked.

The Israelis were also in on Reagan’s dirty little deal. The Israeli president, Menachem Begin, and many other leading Israeli politicos and officials hated Carter, because he had brokered the Camp David peace accords between Israel and Egypt. As part of the deal, Israel had been forced to hand back the Sinai to Egypt. Begin was afraid Carter would push for Israel to retreat back to its 1967 border, and would recognise a Palestinian state. So he connived with Reagan to scupper Carter’s chances at re-election.

Israel’s part in these manoeuvring was later revealed by Ari Ben-Menashe, an Israeli intelligence official, who had been part of the negotiations. So the Israelis then did their level best to discredit him in turn. And in the same decade, the Israelis also mounted internal spying missions in America. One of these involved Jonathan Pollard, who fed the Israeli spooks highly sensitive American documents.

Parry’s article also describes how the Americans themselves manipulate and interfere in other countries’ politics, often for regime change, using the National Endowment for Democracy and USAID – the US Agency for International Development. It was these agencies which were responsible for the ‘Maidan Revolution’ in the Ukraine, which ousted the pro-Russian Ukrainian president, Victor Yanukhovych.

He also describes how the Neocons collaborated with the Likudniks in 1996 to secure Netanyahu’s re-election in Israel, and how the same politicos and apparatchiks turned instead to the policy of regime change. Instead of negotiating with Arab governments, they were to be overthrown. By 1998 the Project for the New American Century, led by the neocons William Kristol and Robert Kagan, were putting pressure on Bill Clinton to invade Iraq. Five years later, they got their wish, and a new president, George Dubya Bush, launched the invasion. He also states that it was due to Israel that Barack Obama decided to ally with the Sunni forces in the region, including those fighting Assad in Syria. Which makes America ally with al-Qaeda. Parry then brings the story up to last year’s election, when Clinton and Trump both presented themselves as pro-Israel. Both Clinton and Trump attacked Iran as the prime supporter of terrorism in the world, even though it’s actually the Sunni kingdoms of Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states.

He then goes on to discuss the lies spread by US intelligence and the Clintonite wing of the Democrats that it was the Russians, who hacked into the computers at the Democratic National Convention to leak the incriminating documents. In fact, WikiLeaks have repeatedly denied that they received the documents from the Russians.

The article concludes

The U.S. intelligence community also has accused the Russian government of raising doubts in the minds of Americans about their political system by having RT, the Russian-sponsored news network, hold debates for third-party candidates (who were excluded from the two-party Republican-Democratic debates) and by having RT report on protests such as Occupy Wall Street and issues such as “fracking.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu making opening remarks at a joint White House press conference with President Donald Trump on Feb. 15, 2017. (Screenshot from White House video)

The major U.S. news media and Congress seem to agree that the only remaining question is whether evidence can be adduced showing that the Trump campaign colluded in this Russian operation. For that purpose, a number of people associated with the Trump campaign are to be hauled before Congress and made to testify on whether or not they are Russian agents.

Meanwhile, The Washington Post, The New York Times and other establishment-approved outlets are working with major technology companies on how to marginalize independent news sources and to purge “Russian propaganda” (often conflated with “fake news”) from the Internet.

It seems that no extreme is too extreme to protect the American people from the insidious Russians and their Russia-gate schemes to sow doubt about the U.S. political process. But God forbid if anyone were to suggest an investigation of Israel-gate.

See: https://consortiumnews.com/2017/04/20/why-not-a-probe-of-israel-gate/

All of this is demonstrably true. And there’s probably more, if you want to look for it. The other year the Israel lobby brought down a Black, Green party politico by presenting her as an anti-Semite and funnelling money into her opponents when she dared to criticise the Israel lobby.

We’ve also seen it in this country, where Al-Jazeera caught various members of the Tory party conspiring with officials at the Israeli embassy to remove awkward members of the Tory party. And there is the continuing witch hunt and vilification as anti-Semites people in the Labour party, like Ken Livingstone, Jackie Walker, Tony Greenstein and Mike from Vox Political, because they dared to criticise Israel for its barbarous treatment of the Palestinians.

These smears have nothing whatsoever to do with anti-Semitism. Those smeared in the Labour party have, by and large, been decent, anti-racist, men and women. Very many of them, like Walker and Greenstein, are self-respecting Jews. Those smeared included the secular as well as the Torah-observant and even devoutly Orthodox. Many of them have been victims themselves of anti-Semitic violence and abuse.

I’ve blogged before about how the British comedian, Alexei Sayle, who’s the son of Jewish Communists from Liverpool, has remarked on how most of those accused of anti-Semitism by the Israel lobby are Jewish. Well, you can expect that. The last thing Israel and its cheerleaders want is for ordinary Brits and Americans, whether Jewish or not, to realise that Judaism does not equal Zionism, and that to many Jews Zionism is an abhorrent blasphemy.

So decent anti-racists are vilified in Britain and America, and Russia misrepresented as the new threat to democracy, by a corrupt and desperate corporate political class trying to find a scapegoat for its increasing popularity. While a complicit media looks the other way, preferring to join in the creation of a new Cold War, rather than reveal Israel’s very real interference in American and western politics.