Robin Simcox’s Racist and Anti-Semitic Links

Further respect to Zelo Street for adding a few more details about Robin Simcox and his membership of some very nasty right-wing organisations. Simcox is professional smirking slime-bucket Priti Patel’s choice for head of the Commission for Countering Extremism. I put up a piece about him yesterday, based on a piece about him in the latest issue of Private Eye noting that Simcox has some views himself that many might consider extreme. Like he’s a Neocon member of the Heritage Foundation, who backs sending terrorist suspect to countries where they can be tortured and further infringement on the rule of law. But that’s not all. According to Wikipedia, the Heritage Foundation denies the reality of climate change and is funded by the American oil giant, Exxon Mobil. It also promoted the false claims of voter fraud. This was done through Hans von Spakovsky, the head of the Heritage Foundation’s Electoral Law Reform Initiative, who made such fears mainstream in the Republican Party. Von Spakovsky’s work, you won’t be surprised to hear, has been completely discredited according to Wikipedia.

The Heritage Foundation, according to the Byline Times, have on their board Rebekah Mercer and her father, Robert Mercer, who funded Breitbart News, which in turn supported Cambridge Analytica. And it was Cambridge Analytica that introduced Donald Trump to Steve Bannon, who founded Parler. But it was Simcox’s links to the racist extreme right that was more worrying to that authors of the Byline Times’ article. In 2019 Simcox spoke at a meeting of the Centre for Immigration Studies. The CIS has been identified as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Centre. The CIS has for ten years circulated anti-Semitic and White nationalist materials, included articles written by supporters of eugenics and Holocaust deniers. According to Wikipedia, the CIS’ reports have been criticised as false or misleading and with poor methodology by experts on immigration. The Byline Times stated that in his work for the Heritage Foundation, Simcox promoted the work of several racist and anti-Muslim conspiracy theorists, including a supporter of the ‘Great Replacement’ theory, which has inspired many of the extreme right-wing terror attacks in recent years. He’s also been criticised for falsely equating British Islamic organisations with the Muslim brotherhood.

Simcox therefore has links to people, whose views could be described as genuinely Nazi. But as the Street notes, the self-appointed opponents of anti-Semitism are curiously silent about all this.

So who’s making their feelings known about this appointment? “Lord” Ian Austin? “Lord” John Mann? Wes Streeting? Stephen Pollard? John Woodcock? Margaret Hodge? Daniel Finkelstein? Crickets. If only Simcox had been pals with Jeremy Corbyn.

Zelo Street: Tory Anti-Semitism Link – No Problem! (zelo-street.blogspot.com)

Quite. But the above weren’t opponents of anti-Semitism per se. They were simply determined to destroy the Labour left and protect Israel and its persecution of the Palestinians. And as Tony Greenstein has shown ad nauseam, Israel has no problem collaborating with real Nazis if it will serve its interests.

Disgraceful! Starmer Caves in to Board’s Racist Demands over Black Women MPs

Mike put up a piece on Saturday reporting that Labour leader Keir Starmer had caved in to the Board of Deputies of British Jews, and reprimanded two leading and highly respected Black women MPs, Diane Abbott and Bell Ribeiro-Addy.

These two ladies offended the Board because they appeared in a conference on Zoom, whose audience included Jackie Walker and Tony Greenstein, who asked questions. The Board objected, as Jackie and Tony were two of the many people smeared as anti-Semites and expelled from the party. One of the noxious Ten Pledges that the Board persuaded Starmer and the other leadership contenders to sign was that no Labour member would share a platform with someone expelled for anti-Semitism. Hence Marie van der Zyl, the Board’s current president, sent in a complaint about the incident to Starmer calling for him to deal with them.

However, the Board’s complaint is wrong for a series of reasons. Firstly, Jackie and Tony weren’t actually expelled from the party for anti-Semitism. And as Mike says, saying that they’re anti-Semites simply because the Labour party said so has less weight than gossip.

Secondly, the two women weren’t sharing a platform with the two accused. They were merely in the audience. The fact that the van der Zyl and the Board chose to attack the two women anyway not only shows their determination to attack them, but also their failure to understand how Zoom works. Perhaps they’re like the American congressman, who was so ignorant about the internet when it first emerged in the ’90s that he asked if you needed a driver’s licence to go on the information superhighway as it then was.

Thirdly, while Starmer and the others are free to sign anything they wish, decisions affecting the party as a whole have to be ratified by conference. And the Ten Pledges weren’t. Starmer’s disciplining of the two women is therefore constitutional.

The Board’s complaint also looks more than a little racist itself. Zionism has a long history of collaborating with real anti-Semites and Fascists so long as its purposes are served. And these are frequently against the safety and wellbeing of the Jewish people as a whole. The Zionists in Nazi Germany supported the Nuremberg Laws, which defined Jews as racially distinct and incompatible with gentile Germans and signed the infamous Ha’avara Agreement in which the Nazis sent Jewish emigrants to Israel. During the War, the head of the Zionists in Hungary, Rudolf Kasztner, also made a pact with the Nazis to send tens of thousands of Jews to Auschwitz just so that a few could be sent to Israel. Israel has also supplied weapons and expertise to a string of Latin American dictatorships, including Guatemala when that nation’s government was exterminating the Mayans. When a neo-Nazi government took power in Argentina in the mid-70s and began persecuting Jews there, the Israeli government did not scruple to supply them with arms. Arms that were used against us during the Falklands War.

The Board defines itself as a Zionist organisation. It’s also politically right-wing, although perhaps not all its members are members and supporters of the Tories. And the Tories have hated Diane Abbott ever since she entered parliament in the 1980s. She was a left-wing firebrand, one of the first Black women MPs, who was determined to attack anti-Black racism. Over half of all the abusive messages sent to MPs go to her. She was one of those racially bullied by the Blairite plotters, according to the leaked anti-Semitism report. Not only did the scumbags reduce her to tears, but they told journalists where she was crying. This is in stark contrast to the treatment of Black anti-racist activist Marc Wadsworth, who was accused of anti-Semitism and reducing a Jewish woman to tears after he caught her passing information on to a Telegraph journo at a meeting at which he was speaking. Yet instead of suspending the plotters, Starmer instead has disciplined Abbott and Ribeiro-Addy.

The Board’s record when it comes to defending Britain’s Jews against Fascism is blotchy. In the 1930s when Mosley’s British Union of Fascists was marching through the East End of London in order to intimidate the Jewish inhabitants, instead of standing up to them the Board advised Jews to stay indoors out of the way. Fortunately many courageous people ignored it, and joined Irish people, trade unionists and Communists in blocking Mosley’s march and giving his storm troops a well-deserved hiding.

The Board also showed the same twisted mentality forty years later in the 1970s when the National Front was on the rise and trying the same tactics. Instead of attacking them, the Board turned its fire on their opponents, the Anti-Nazi League. Jews were forbidden to join the organisation or allow it to hold meetings in synagogues. This was ostensibly because its founder was an anti-Zionist, and they were afraid of Jews hearing anti-Zionist propaganda. But others suspect that it was because the Board itself had White supremacist views.

Tony Greenstein has written a piece on his blog taking the Board and Starmer to task for their treatment of Abbott and Ribeiro-Addy. He discusses the shameful behaviour of the Board towards British Fascism, and quotes Maurice Ludmer, the Jewish founder of the anti-Nazi magazine, Searchlight.  Ludmer wrote in issue 41 of the magazine

“In the face of mounting attacks against the Jewish community both ideologically and physically, we have the amazing sight of the Jewish Board of Deputies launching an attack on the Anti Nazi League with all the fervour of Kamikaze pilots… It was as though they were watching a time capsule rerun of the 1930’s, in the form of a flickering old movie, with a grim determination to repeat every mistake of that era. “

The-then secretary of the Anti-Nazi League, Paul Holborrow, also wrote that they were under attack from the Board. Tony is annoyed that genuine anti-racists like himself are smeared as anti-Semites for opposing and criticising Israel, while genuine racists, like Katie Hopkins, were given an invitation by the Zionist Federation to attend their gala dinner and meet the Israeli ambassador, Mark Regev. As for the Board, its previous head, Jonathan Arkush, welcomed the election of Donald Trump. Trump’s a racist, and his cabinet included real anti-Semites. However, he got a pass because he supports Israel.

Abbott and Ribeiro-Addy issued an apology for their actions. They had no call to do so, being blameless and actually the real injured parties in this sordid case. Greenstein in his piece advises them to stand firm and act like two of the heroes of the civil rights struggle in America, Paul Robeson and Angela Davies.

Robeson was a member of the Communist Party, and was thus hauled before the House Inquiry on Un-American Activities. When McCarthy asked him if he was a Communist, Robeson refused to answer, challenging the senator instead to stand behind him the next time he voted and fish his voting paper out of the ballot box to see. Greenstein also doesn’t mention it, but it is a significant fact here that Robeson was also an opponent of anti-Semitism. He gave a concert in Moscow after the War at the end of which he sang a Yiddish song by the Jewish resistance fighters against Nazism. This was not just to celebrate the millions of Jews killed by the Nazis, but also the millions of Soviet citizens murdered by Stalin.

Angela Davies is a Black American civil rights activist, who last year, 2019, was given the Shuttlesworth Human Rights Award by the Civil Rights Institute of Birmingham, Alabama. However, the Alabama equivalent of the Board got mightily offended and complained, because Davies is a critic of Israel and its persecution of the Palestinians, which she compares to the police’s maltreatment of Black Americans. The Alabama Board complained, and then issued an embarrassed retraction and apology for their own racism when Davies stood her ground and called them out instead.

And the British Board deserves to be called out on its racism. It includes as deputies individuals like Robert Festenstein, an islamophobe who appeared in a Rebel Media video with Tommy Robinson, the founder of the English Defence League and Pegida UK. Arkush and van der Zyl have also appeared at meetings in which members of the audience sported Jewish Defence League T-shirts. The JDL is a Judaeo-Nazi organisation, whose predecessor, Kach, is banned as a terrorist group in Israel. Unlike the majority of modern Jews, who strongly reject any idea that their religion makes them superior to anyone else, Kach was founded by Meir Kahane, an extreme right-wing rabbi. He really did believe that Jews are superior to gentiles, and urged Jews to arm themselves. He also absolutely believed that the Holy Land belonged solely to the Jews, and demanded the ethnic cleansing of the indigenous people.

There’s a connection here to the militia movement that emerged in America during the ’90s. These were the successors to the Survivalists of the 1980s. They were arming themselves against the American government, which they believed had been corrupted by liberalism and was about to establish a murderous totalitarian dictatorship. According to their critics, such as the Southern Poverty Law Centre, the militias were White Supremacists with close connections to American Nazism and the Klan. However, according to Adam Palfrey’s Cult Rapture, an examination of American fringe culture in the aftermath of the Oklahoma bombing, there was also Jewish militia. This group also based their ideology on that of Kahane’s. Palfrey sees them, as well as the fact that the leader of one of the other militias was Black, that the movement as a whole wasn’t White Supremacist. I think he’s wrong, and it’s just that some parts of the movement were less strict in their racism than others, and were prepared to include Jews as fellow White Supremacists.

Now Arkush and Zyl did not meet the American Kahanists. But by speaking at meetings attended by their British cousins they have shown a culpable willingness to tolerate real Islamophobes with paramilitary sympathies. They deserve to be called out on this, as should the Zionist Federation for its endorsement of Hatey Katie.

Starmer should not be kowtowing to the Board and punishing real anti-racists like Abbott and Ribeiro-Addy. He should be backing them instead and holding the Board to account for their racism. As Angela Davies’ case shows, it can be done.

See: https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2020/05/02/keir-starmer-has-turned-labour-into-the-party-of-hypocrisy-and-racism/

https://azvsas.blogspot.com/2020/05/the-new-mccarthyism-zionist-board-of.html

 

The Klan in 1981 Showing the Fascist Reality of Anti-Migrant Boats for the Med

I found the above picture in Morris Dees and James Corcoran’s book, Gathering Storm: America’s Militia Threat (New York: HarperCollins 1996). it shows an anti-immigrant vessel crewed by members of the Texas Emergency Reserve, a 2,500 man paramilitary army set up and headed by Louis Beam, The boat terrorised Vietnamese fishermen by running ‘gunboat’ near the docks and their fishing fleets. Dees is a member of the Southern Poverty Law Centre, an anti-racist groups which prosecutes Fascists and right-wing extremists. The book states that the SPLC brought a lawsuit against them, which forced Beam to disband his army of racist fanatics. As you can see, a couple of these Nazis are wearing Klan costumes.

I’m putting this up, because there have been demands for similar boats to deal with the migrant ships crossing the Mediterranean. Lauren Southern, a Canadian Alt-Right propagandist, was involved with a project by a group of European Fascists to set up an anti-migrant patrol boat, until it was scuppered by a campaign by Hope Not Hate. But other Fascists groups are making the same demands, like CasaPound, an insignificant Italian Fascist party, a video on which I put up about a week ago. And Katie Hopkins, the rightwing bigot and loudmouth, whose career on this side of the Pond spectacularly imploded a few weeks ago when she became too toxic for even the Scum and the Mail to employ, was responsible for a particularly odious tweet in which she recommended gunning down migrants and their boats without remorse. She then dared the TV presenter, Philip Schofield, to challenge her on these monstrous sentiments. This came a day or two before the bodies of the migrants aboard one such ship, which had sank, washed ashore, including the infant son of a man, who had stayed behind in Turkey.

Although this photo is from another time and place, it shows you exactly the kind of Fascist patrol boat the Fascists are demanding today. And it isn’t pretty.

Hope Not Hate Launches New Report on Breitbart’s Aims in Britain

The anti-racist, anti-religious extremism organisation Hope Not Hate has published a new report on their website into Breitbart and its political aims here in Britain. The report shows how Breitbart isn’t a news organisation so much as a media campaigning group for the Far Right, and wants to promote the brand of White nationalism that has propelled Trump to the White House here in Britain. Thus, the wretched company has been meeting and supporting Nigel Farage and UKIP. The front page of the report states

When former UKIP leader Nigel Farage was snapped having dinner with President Trump and his family by a fellow diner in late February, it caused a flurry of interest from the British media. What was not reported, but of far more significance, was the meeting Farage had earlier that afternoon.

Farage gatecrashed dinner with Donald Trump because he was in the area. In fact, he had just spent three hours at the White House with the President’s chief strategist, Steve Bannon.

The pair had a lot to catch up on. They had a lot to discuss and plan.

As this report shows, Bannon and Farage have got to know each other well over the last few years.

UKIP had been identified by Bannon’s Breitbart operation several years ago. Bannon launched Breitbart London to help UKIP ahead of the 2015 General Election. Breitbart’s key funder Robert Mercer supplied Farage’s anti-EU campaign, Leave.EU, with the data tools that helped secure the Brexit vote and the UK’s departure from the European Union.

In turn, Farage’s Brexit success provided Bannon, and his political master Donald Trump, with the inspirational story of the underdog defying the political establishment.

This report shows that Breitbart is not a news website or a media outlet in any ordinary sense and its staff are not mainstream journalists. Breitbart is a political project, with a specific political agenda, staffed by willing propagandists.

It distorts and fabricates news to deliberately incite anger in its supporters and fear in others. It pollutes the political space and demonises and vilifies its opponents.

Breitbart is just one part – albeit a vital part – of a wider political project that set Britain on a path to leave the European Union and got Donald Trump elected to the most powerful job in the world.

Unfinished business

But even with Trump in the White House the project is not yet complete. Steve Bannon and Robert Mercer have far bigger plans which they will seek to execute over the next few years. Bannon will use his clearly strong influence over the President to carry out his aggressive nationalism and strong anti-Muslim views at home and abroad. Mercer will use his financial muscle and data analytics to sway elections and shift opinion.

Breitbart intends to expand its operations into more countries in the hope of assisting more far right leaders gain power and laying the ground for what they consider is an inevitable conflict with Islam.

And in Britain, this operation will be at the heart of a new political venture, likely to be launched in a matter of months, to create a new far right party and run by multi-millionaire Arron Banks and Nigel Farage.

Based on the social movement model of Italy’s Five Star Movement but with the nationalist and populist politics of Trump, this new party will sweep aside UKIP and hope to capitalise on the uncertainty and compromise that will undoubtedly accompany Brexit.

While Banks and Farage will lead this new party, it will be Breitbart that provides the engine power.

It was this that Farage was discussing with Bannon at the White House.

The report also details the organisations links with the far right in this country, including some deeply unpleasant people and organisations. It gives a timeline of the company’s history from its foundation in 2005 to today, and a section on its right-wing stance against multiculturalism, feminism, immigration, gay and trans rights and its demonization of Muslims as predatory rapists intent on the domination of the West. It also explains that, according to an article in the Observer, Breitbart is merely one of a number of extreme right-wing organisation owned and founded by Richard Mercer, a hedge-fund manager. One of these is Cambridge Analytica, and small data analysis company that specialises in psyops – that is, producing propaganda designed to play on the recipients’ emotions, rather than convince them through rational argument. Cambridge Analytica also has links to Andy Wigmore, the director of the Leave campaign.

According to the report, Breitbart see themselves as fighting a war on two fronts, based in Texas and London respectively. In Britain, Breitbart has supported the anti-Muslim organisation, Pegida UK, led by Stephen Lennon, AKA Tommy Robinson, the founder of the English Defence League. They also plan to move into Europe to support Marine Le Pen’s Front National in France, the Alternative fuer Deutschland in Germany, Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, and Norbert Hofer of the Freedom Party in Austria. Wilders is also one of their columnists. They also want to start an edition in Italy. Another section takes apart their journalistic style, showing how it really is little more than ‘fake news’. This consists in running highly emotive and very misleading headlines, which aren’t really backed up or supported by the article beneath. This section in particular looks at articles by Anne-Marie Waters, Virginia Hale, Milo Yiannopolis, Donna Rachel Edmunds and Chris Tomlinson trying to drum up fear and hatred against Muslims through very biased and distorted reporting of rape and other attacks in Germany, Denmark and Sweden, which cite either unreferenced information, or official statistics while omitting other pieces of information from the same sources that disprove or severely qualify their arguments.

The article also argues that Raheem Kassam, one of Breitbart’s editors, had a major influence in making the Fuhrage much more Islamophobic and aggressive in his debating style. Kassam and another advisor were dropped from UKIP after Patrick O’Flynn complained that they had turned Farage into a ‘snarling, thin-skinned, aggressive man.’ It then goes on to examine the role Breitbart played in the civil war that erupted in the Kippers between Farage’s supporters and opponents. It also discusses Farage’s meetings and support for Trump, and warns that Kassam may be winding down his support of UKIP in order to launch a more extreme party. There are also individual sections on particular leading executives and writers at Breitbart, their careers and their very unpleasant connections to other parts of the far right. Raheem Kassam, for example, started out as a member of the Tory youth section, the Young Britons, before moving on to the Conservative Bow Group, setting up the short-lived British Tea Party, which was backed by the Libertarian thinktank, the Freedom Association. Hope Not Hate describes this last group as ‘anti-union’. They are, as well as extremely anti-Socialist and anti-working class in general. In the 1980s they earned notoriety when their links to Fascist Central American dictators and their death squads were revealed. He’s also been involved in the Neo-Con Henry Jackson Society, the Tax-Payer’s Alliance and Student Rights, a right-wing campus monitoring group which has no links to students or the trade unions, and which has been condemned by genuine students unions for its targeting of Muslims students and their events at London unis. He’s also worked for the neo-con The Commentator and is a fellow at Daniel Pipes’ Middle East Forum. Pipes is a rightwing American professor specialising in the Middle East. He’s also appeared on Ezra Levant’s wretched anti-Islamic TV show on Rebel Media in Canada. In his campaign for leadership of UKIP, he gave a prominent place to Anne-Marie Waters of Sharia Watch and also former members of the EDL and the BNP on what the report describes as ‘case by case basis’.

Other senior staff at UKIP include James Delingpole, Simon Kent, Donna Rachel Edmunds, Oliver J.J. Lane, Chris Tomlinson, Virginia Hale, Nick Hallett, Liam Deacon and Jack Montgomery. Delingpole is a former Telegraph and Spectator columnist, who predictably rants on about ‘cultural Marxism’. He has a bitter hatred of environmentalism, which he thinks aims at establishing a Green dictatorship worse than Hitler’s. But then, he also believes that the White, middle-aged, public school and Oxford educated White male is the section of the population most discriminated against.

Simon Kent is an Ozzie journo, who’s also worked for the Sunday Telegraph over here as well as a range of right-wing newspapers in Australia and Canada, including the Sun News Network in Canada.

Donna Rachel Edmunds was a Conservative councillor in Lewes and worked for Roger Helmer, before she left the party for UKIP. She founded the UKIPDaily.com blog, has written for The Commentator and the Freedom Association. She’s also another wretched fan of Von Hayek and Ayn Rand. She’s also given sympathetic coverage to Stephen Lennon, Geert Wilders and the extreme right-wing Sweden Democrats as well as Infowars’ Paul Joseph Watson.

Oliver JJ Lane is a former researcher for the military thinktank, the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a former Conservative candidate for Nuneaton and Bedworth, and is a former chairman of the British Monarchist League. The article also states that he has ‘liked’ a number of racist pages on the Net, including

the premier “alt-right”/new right publisher Arktos, the openly pro-fascist page “Rational Ethno-Nationalism” and the Nazi blood-and-soil page “Artaman: Hyperborean Garden”. Lane has also “liked” a page titled “European Traditional
Family” which posts Nazi propaganda of Aryan families, and the “strictly non muslim” group “The Beauty of European Girls and Women”, dedicated to white women of “pure european descent”.

The article also claims that he’s an associate of Gregory Lauder-Frost of the Traditional Britain group, which also has links to the Nazi right. I’ve also come across material from them which makes it clear that not only do they despise Islam, they also hate and would like to abolish the NHS.

Chris Tomlinson is a former mobile phone technician, who writes for the Canadian Conservative Party. He’s a fan of the French far-right Identitarian Movement, an activist in the Alt-Right, and a member of the Austrian Nationalist Party.

Virginia Hale is an east Asian studies graduate, who defines herself as a ‘palaeoconservative’. She’s also obsessed with White genocide, and has written a series of articles attack non-Whites and immigration, and corresponded with many of the leaders of the Nazi and Far-Right fringes.

Hallett’s another Tory, having been a member of the Young Britons’ Foundation, The Conservative Way Forward and has run the Margaret Thatcher Centre, a museum dedicated to the foul leaderene. His articles have also been promoted by CulturalMarxism.Net, Infowars and American Renaissance, which has been described by the Southern Poverty Law Centre as specialising in academic racism.

Liam Deacon is a former, moderately left-wing journo, whose articles became very anti-immigrant and right-wing in tone after he joined Breitbart. Jack Montgomery is an activist with the Leave.EU campaign.

The reports also lays out how Breitbart also provides a platform for extremists such as Geert Wilders, Katie Hopkins, Anne-Marie Waters and the anti-Islam campaigner, Robert Spencer, the founder of Jihad Watch, his colleague, Pamela Geller, Stephen Lennon, Ingrid Carlqvist, one of the writers at the infamous Gates of Vienna Blog, Frank Gaffney, a former director of nuclear forces and weapons under Ronald Reagan. Needless to say, he’s also anti-Islam and anti-immigration, and Daniel Pipes, another anti-Islam activist.

The article also discusses the way Breitbart in its comments section has given a platform to the members of the European Fascist right. This doesn’t just include the Front National, AfD and Wilders’ PVV, but also Jobbik in Hungary, the Golden Dawn in Greece, and the BNP. It also examines its highly distorted coverage of recent violence by Muslims and immigrants in Sweden.

A final section by the report’s author, Nick Lowles, considers Breitbart an important far-rightwing threat, and details the magazine’s intentions to monitor, rebut and combat it.

The report can be read at: http://www.hopenothate.org.uk/features/breitbart/breitbart-report-2017-03.pdf

Corporatist Democrats Smear Progressive Politician as Anti-Semite

I’ve posted up a number of pieces on this blog about the all-too many cases of decent, progressive politicians in Britain and America being smeared by the Israel lobby and the political establishment, because they’ve challenged Israel over its continued occupation of Palestine and its decades-long history of massacring and expelling them from their historic homeland, and/or they pose a threat to the Clintonian and Blairite corporatists in America’s Democrat and Britain’s Labour parties. We’ve had the anti-Semitism smears again Naz Shah, Jackie Walker and Ken Livingstone, and indeed, Momentum and the Labour left as anti-Semites in the Labour party. In America, Bernie Sanders’ Jewish Outreach officer was smeared and sacked from her post for alleged anti-Semitism, despite the fact that she was Jewish and active member of her community. Just like very many of those smeared in the British Labour party, such as Jackie Walker – whose father was a Russian Jew, whose partner is Jewish, and whose daughter attends a Jewish school.

Now the corporatist wing of the Democrats are trying to do the same to Keith Ellison, a progressive politico, who supported Bernie Sanders’ campaign for the presidential nomination. In this long piece from The Young Turks, their anchor Cenk Uygur discusses how he’s being smeared as an anti-Semite, because he is trying to become the party’s chair. This post is currently occupied by Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who rigged the primaries against Sanders so that Killary would get the nomination. See how well that turned out. But no matter. The corporatist wing of the Democrats, like their counterparts in the Labour party, haven’t woken up to the fact that the majority of people are sick and tired of neoliberal elites, who are only interested in doing favours for their paymasters in big business. And so the Clintonite Dems have started ranting and blaming anyone and everyone except themselves and their candidate.

Ellison has been smeared using a piece he wrote decades ago, defending Louis Farrakhan, the head of the Nation of Islam, against the charge of anti-Semitism. The establishment Democrats have also used part of a speech he also gave, in which he criticised Israel for expanding the illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank. That part of Ellison’s speech also said it was wrong for America to concentrate its Middle Eastern policy on aiding Israel, which only has a population of 7 million, against the 320 million people in the rest of the region. The Anti-Defamation League have also jumped in, stating that this speech shows that Ellison is deeply anti-Semitic.

In fact the opposite is true. Ellison is a Muslim, and the most prominent member of that religion in Congress. The piece defending Farrakhan was written when he was a college student. He recognises that Farrakhan is poisonously anti-Semitic, and years, if not decades ago, very publicly renounced what he’d written about him. I’ve also got a feeling that the information dug up about him and used to portray him as a Jew-hater comes from a militantly anti-Islamic group that has, according to The Turks, been itself identified by the Southern Poverty Law Centre as a hate group.

Cenk Uygur in this video is also very careful in his criticism of the Anti-Defamation League. This is one of the major Jewish organisations campaigning against anti-Semitism in the Land of Free. It is also pro-Israel. Uygur states that they are far to the right of him and The Turks there, and that it is wrong about Ellison’s supposed anti-Semitism. He does, however, recognise and praise the organisation not just for its work tackling anti-Semitism, but also for the way it works against hate crime as a whole. It has done sterling work in defending American Muslims against the rise in Islamophobia, and the attacks of the Alt-Right.

The passage used to claim that Ellison is an anti-Semite is a very carefully selected piece taken out of context. Ellison certainly is not anti-Israel. Far from it. He states that America should continue to defend Israel as its most important ally in the region. As for the illegal settlements, part of his argument against them is that they also harm Israel by provoking resentment around the world. This has been pointed out by another leading Jewish group, J-Street, which has come out to defend Ellison and point out that he has consistently been a friend to the Jewish community.

So once again, we have the corporatist wing of an ostensibly left-wing party – the Democrats – smearing a decent man with the charge of anti-Semitism, just to hang on to power. Like they’ve done to so many other decent women and men. This is disgusting and shameful, and the sooner the people, who make these false allegations are thrown out of positions of power, the better.

Sam Seder Takes Apart Conservative Rabbi Who Confuses Zionism with Judaism

Yesterday I published a long piece commenting on a post by Mike attacking the latest anti-Semitism smear against the vice-chair of Momentum, Jackie Walker. Mrs Walker was accused of being anti-Semitic again because she asked the organisers of a Holocaust Memorial training day why the commemoration of this most terrible crime couldn’t also include others, who have similarly suffered persecution and genocide. She also complained that the organisers did not give her a definition of anti-Semitism she could work with. Mike pointed out that we were not told what prompted her to make those comments, or what the definition of anti-Semitism to which she objected, was. Mike has now put up a post reporting the objections several other people, who attended the event, have to the allegations. These women and men, like Mrs Walker herself, are Jewish. They strongly object to this latest attack on Mrs Walker’s character by pointing out that the definition of anti-Semitism the event’s organisers used explicitly links anti-Semitism to anti-Zionism. This is a highly politicised definition of anti-Semitism, and is extremely controversial, not least because of Israel’s decade’s old policy of ethnically cleansing the indigenous Palestinians.

See: http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2016/09/30/anti-semitism-accusation-against-momentum-vice-chair-was-outrage-say-witnesses/

I’ll blog more about this latest post from Mike, and the issues it raises and refutes later. I am delighted that Mrs Walker, who is the daughter of a Black civil rights activist and a Russian Jew, and who has dedicated her life to attacking racism and anti-Semitism, has been given the support she deserves.

Unfortunately, the Jewish Labour Group, who organised the event, aren’t the only people, who confuse Judaism with Zionism. I pointed out in my piece that there are right-wing individuals and groups, who insist on an exclusively Jewish emphasis on the memorialisation of the Holocaust, and bitterly resent those Jews, who universalise their suffering into a commemoration of all, who have suffered genocide. In fairness, the Holocaust Memorial Day also does. However, what Mrs Walker objected to was that it did not commemorate the victims of ethnic cleansing and genocide that occurred before 1945. I also discussed in my piece the way Netanyahu a few weeks ago grotesquely invoked the Holocaust to justify his government’s refusal to end the occupation of the Palestinian territories of the West Bank. Mike also in his article noted that point of David Schneider’s definition of anti-Semitism, which states that Jews should not be automatically confused with the state of Israel and its crimes, would make many Zionists anti-Semites. This is also true. Netanyahu made a speech equating the Jewish people with the state of Israel, in order to render criticism of the state of Israel unacceptable as a form of anti-Semitism.

A few weeks ago, an American Conservative rabbi, Rabbi Jon Hausman, also declared that Judaism was identical to the state of Israel. He went further, and stated bluntly that those Jews, who did not share his views on the issue, were self-hating. They had not been brought up properly in the teachings of their faith, and so had replaced it with the op-ed pages of the New York Times.

Rabbi Hausman was speaking at an ACT for America event. ACT for America is an organisation dedicated to combating radical Islam, although in practice this seems to be just Islam. The Southern Poverty Law Centre has identified it in turn as a hate group. In this video below, Sam Seder, the presenter of the left-wing news show, the Minority Report, takes apart Rabbi Hausman’s views. He makes the point that Conservatives like Hausman, who have tried to impose their narrow definition of Judaism, have lost the debate for thousands of years. Judaism does not have a central religious official, like the Pope, who defines the faith. He goes further, and says that if you study the Jewish texts, you find that it is actually a sin to establish a state of Israel before the coming of the Messiah. That’s why, if you go to Jerusalem, you find graffiti scrawled on walls, which declare, ‘Zionism and Judaism are diametrically opposed’.

Mr Seder is also unimpressed with the rabbi’s attitude towards parenting. R. Hausman sneered at the members of his own family, and those of other Jews, who don’t make the equation of Judaism and Zionism. But he states that his daughter doesn’t make this theological mistake, but he told her that if she did, he wouldn’t pay for her college education. Mr Seder scathingly remarks about that attitude not being in the Torah.

Here’s the video. I should warn you, there is at one point an anti-Semitic slur, when one of the crew off-camera starts to parody the rabbi and those like him. Mr Seder himself laughs at the impression. I don’t condone the use of such derogatory terms. I think the reason it’s use is permissible on that part of the Majority Report is because Mr Seder and some of his production crew may be Jewish. They thus have ownership of the term, in the same way that Blacks can use the ‘N’ word, while others cannot.

From what I gather from my own, very limited reading and from talking to friends of mine, who have a background in helping to teach Religious Studies at college level, Sam Seder is entirely accurate. There is no single figure in Judaism, who has the power to make binding definitions of the faith. Individual rabbis have written responsa, which summarise the tenets of Judaism in their opinion. These may be respected, according to the status of the rabbi, but they are not authoritative statements like the Christian creeds.

I also understand that he is entirely correct about the traditional Jewish that the state of Israel could and should only be founded with the arrival of the Messiah. Many traditional Jews were shocked and horrified at the foundation of Israel, which they regarded as a secular blasphemy. For 20 or 30 years afterwards the establishment of the state Israel, its existence was the subject of fierce controversy within parts of the Jewish community. Even today, there are some Jews, who still find it unacceptable on religious grounds.

He is also right about the graffiti in Jerusalem. I’ve never been to the Holy Land, but I did read an article in the Observer way back in 1984/5, which had a story about the current situation in Israel as it was then. This had several photos, one of which showed that message scrawled on a wall, exactly as Mr Seder describes.

As for Sam Seder’s comments about the Torah not endorsing R. Hausman’s method of teaching his daughter, what he considers to be the correct attitude to Jewish doctrine and the state of Israel, while there are passages in the Bible, which do teach a very strict attitude towards bringing up children, several of the great rabbis I believe also had an appreciation of children’s need for play. There is a story that one of the rabbis bought pots, for his children to smash, so they could amuse themselves while he taught them the Law.

Judaism and Zionism are not automatically the same, and people are not anti-Semites, nor Jews self-hating, if they reject Zionism or criticise the ethnic policies of the Israeli government. This, however, is Mrs Walker’s real crime in the eyes of her accusers. As Mike and I have both written, I think they owe us an explanation and to be taken to task for their views, not Jackie Walker and the other decent men and women they’ve slandered.

Hatewatch on the Links between the American National Alliance and British Neo-Nazis

Thomas Mair, the suspect for the murder of the Labour politician Jo Cox, was a long-time members of the extreme Right, who had ordered about $600 worth of books on how to build home-made guns and ammunition from National Vanguard Books, the publishing arm of the National Alliance, the main American neo-Nazi organisation.

Michelle, one of the many great contributors to this blog, sent me this link to an article on Hatewatch, the magazine of the Southern Poverty Law Centre that documents the activities of right-wing extremists: https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2016/06/21/thomas-mair-brexit-and-us-uk-neo-nazi-connection. The Southern Poverty Law Centre has been around for decades. In the 1990s its leader, Maurice Dees, published a book on the threat of the Militias, independent, private armies of right-wing survivalists, bitterly alienated from the federal government, entitled Gathering Storm. The above article by Heidi Beirich, their intelligence director, describes the links to the National Alliance and other American Nazi organisations not just of Thomas Mair, but also Zack Davies, who carried out a brutal attack on a Sikh doctor in Mold in North Wales; Mark Cotterill, a former BNP member, who recruits for the National Alliance in Britain through his Heritage and Destiny website, Andrew Lovie, a former member of UKIP, and BNP stormtrooper, who has posted on the neo-Nazi website, Stormfront, in America. Among merchandising Lovie ordered from the National Alliance was a video game, ‘Ethnic Cleansing’, where the player goes around shooting Blacks and Jews. As grotesque and incredible as this sounds, it is all too plausible. When I was at College thirty years ago, the German Republican Party had got into the news and very hot water because of a computer game they launched, in which the player took the part of a the commandant of a concentration camp and had to prevent Jews, gays and leftists escaping. The article also describes the activities of two Brexit advocates, Andrew Tait and Matthew Tait, and Arthur Kemp. Andrew Tait ran a pro-Brexit website, ‘Vote Leave Take Control’, while Matthew Tait was a former BNP activist, who has spoken several times at conferences by American Renaissance, a racist outfit on the other side of the Pond. Tait also has his own website, Western Spring, in which he posted a pro-Brexit piece arguing that the EU was a Communist organisation to destroy the White race. Kemp’s a racist South African, who was a former officer of the BNP, and was at one time the media director of the National Alliance. Kemp also has a racist website, the New Observer Online, in which he calls immigrants ‘invaders’ and ‘rapefugees’.

Other Nazi assassins elsewhere in Europe also have contacts with American Nazi organisations. These include Anders Breivik, who was a member of Stormfront, Peter Mangs, another National Alliance member, who killed three people in Sweden, and Maxime Brunerie, a French Fascist, who tried to kill the-then president, Jacques Chirac. David Copeland, the infamous Nazi, who killed a number of people in a bombing campaign in London targeting gays, Blacks and Asians, was partly inspired by the Turner Diaries, a work of fiction describing a future extreme-right coup in America, sold by the National Alliance. And then there’s Frank S., a German skinhead, who stabbed Henriette Reker, a mayoral candidate for Cologne. He also was active online. The current Chairman of the National Alliance, Will Williams, is also living on welfare due to psychological problems, and has a history of victimising women. He celebrated the death of Jo Cox, stating that she had placed a target on her back.

Politically, the membership of extreme right-wing organisations in Britain is very low, but they are extremely violent, and as this article shows, several of the most vicious have transatlantic contacts. And there is a real danger that this violence will be spread and encouraged by Brexit. As one of my brother’s foreign friends has found, the amount of racism has increased and become very personal.

Hope Not Hate on Trump’s Links to the Counter-Jihad Movement

Hope Not Hate, the anti-racist, anti-religious extremism organisation, yesterday published a piece giving further details of Donald Trump’s links to the ‘Counter-Jihad’, anti-Islam movement. The article notes that several of Trump’s advisors, such as Walid Phares and Frank Gaffney, are members of the movement. Frank Gaffney was one of those responsible for the smear that Barack Obama was a secret Muslim intent on Islamicizing America. Other versions of the same basic paranoid nuttiness are available. He was also claimed to be a Nazi and Communist. As one internet graphic pointed out, ‘Come On, He Can’t Be all Three’.

Gaffney’s part of an anti-Muslim group called The Centre for Security Policy, which has been designated a hate group by Morris Dees’ Southern Poverty Law Centre. Trump also appears in a photo published by the Gates of Vienna blog from 2011 with Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff at the launch of The United West, another ‘counter-jihad organisation. Two years earlier, in 2009, under its former name, the Florida Security Council, it organised a Free Speech Summit, at which Geert Wilders, the notorious anti-Muslim Dutch politico, was not only invited, but was actually given an award to his services to free speech. Despite the fact that he wishes to ban the Qu’ran.

As for Sabadisch-Wolff, she’s the leader of the Osterreich Burgerbewegung Pax Europa, or Austria Citizens’ Movement Pax Europa, the Austrian branch of the Burgerbewegung Pax Europa, a German anti-Muslim organisation. She’s also a member of ACT! for America, an American anti-Muslim organisation. In 2011 she was sentenced by a court in Austria to pay a fine of 480 euros for comments she made about Mohammed and Muslims at a conference organised by the Freiheits Partei Osterreich, the extreme-Right anti-immigrant Austria party.

For further information, see the article at: http://www.hopenothate.org.uk/blog/nick/donald-trump-s-long-standing-links-with-counter-jihad-movement-revealed-4889

Trump’s notorious for his policy of banning Muslims from entering the US. This shows just how deep his connection to the anti-Muslim right actually goes. His stance is not isolated, but is part of a broader movement of which he is an active member.