Remember all those months ago when the Jewish Labour Movement and the Blairites in the Labour party had a collective feeding frenzy and went howling after ‘Red’ Ken, accusing him of being a terrible anti-Semite? Livingstone had committed the unutterable crime of trying to defend other members of the Labour party, falsely accused of anti-Semitism, by stating quite truthfully that Hitler had supported the Zionist movement.
This is quite true. Before embarking on the horrific ‘Final Solution’ the Nazis had as a way of creating a Judenrein Germany. The gave aid and support to people smugglers sending Jews covertly to Palestine, then under the British Mandate. And the Zionists themselves preferred Nazi persecution of their people, to tolerance and the patriotic Jewish groups fighting to stay in their homelands, like the Jewish ex-servicemen’s league in Germany. The Zionist leaders made monstrous pronouncements about preferring all of the Jews in Germany to suffer at the hands of the Nazis rather than half of them being saved if they found sanctuary in England, so long as some went to Israel.
All this is a matter of historic fact. You can find it in the history books, including those written by very pro-Zionist Jews. Yet it didn’t stop the cries of anti-Semitism, or John Mann doorstepping Livingstone to scream the accusation at him. And many histories of Fascism have pointed out that anti-Semites elsewhere, including Britain, were also Zionists through their determination to cleanse their countries of their Jewish population.
Behind all this raving Zionist hysteria is the determination of the Jewish lobby to conflate anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism. Israel is the Jewish state, and so, according to the Likudniks and the Israel lobby, any hostility to Israel can only be motivated by anti-Semitism. Even if the person criticising Israel is Jewish. Then they’re accused of self-hatred. And Jews and Gentiles alike have been accused of Jew-hatred, even when they are decent individuals without a racist, anti-Semitic bone in their bodies.
This was the reason Jackie Walker, the deputy chair of Momentum, was accused of anti-Semitism for her comments made at a day workshop in preparation for Holocaust Memorial Day. Walker had questioned the organisers’ definition of anti-Semitism, which explicitly conflated it with anti-Zionism. She also criticised it for the way it exclusively concentrated on the Holocaust, giving little, if any, mention of other genocides and crimes against humanity, such as slavery. Walker is half-Jewish herself, and her partner is Jewish. Her daughter attends a Jewish school. Her mother was a Black woman, deported from America for joining the Black American civil rights struggle. Her comments about Israel and the slave trade are part of a general debate amongst historians, scholars and anti-racist activists, including Jews. But that didn’t stop the Israel lobby demanding her head as a terrible anti-Semite.
Now it seems that Netanyahu and the other members of his Likud-led coalition cannot, by their own actions, accuse others of being anti-Semitic if they don’t equate anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism, or even worse, remind the world that many anti-Semites were pro-Zionist. ‘Cause Netanyahu has now done the same himself. He has publicly embraced Trump’s cabinet, which includes two notorious anti-Semites, for the support Trump is going to give Israel.
Neve Gordon has written an excellent article about this in Friday’s Counterpunch.
It begins
In February, the Israeli prime minister praised the British government for introducing new guidelines prohibiting publicly funded bodies from boycotting Israeli products. ‘I want to commend the British government for refusing to discriminate against Israel and Israelis and I commend you for standing up for the one and only true democracy in the Middle East,’ Netanyahu said.
‘Modern anti-Semitism,’ he went on, ‘not only attacks individual Jews, but attacks them collectively, and the slanders that were hurled over centuries against the Jewish people are now hurled against the Jewish state.’
Progressive voices such as Jewish Voice for Peace have tried for years to counter the insidious conflation of criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism, but the identification may now be unravelling at last because of a forceful intervention from the right.
She then discusses Trump’s appointment of Steven Bannon and Jeff Sessions. Bannon was accused by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency of putting anti-Semitic material on Breitbart, while Jeff Sessions is another White supremacist with a reputation for anti-Semitism. Sessions made distasteful joke sometime ago about thinking the KKK were all right, before he found out they smoked dope.
But now Netanyahu as embraced Trump, the hero of the racist, anti-Semitic Alt-Right. Netanyahu’s education minister, Naftali Bennett, happily sat next to Bannon last Sunday at a dinner organised by the Zionist Association of America. Bernie Marcus, the founder of Home Depot and a member of the board of the Republican Jewish Coalition, praised Bannon, stating
‘I have known Steve to be a passionate Zionist and supporter of Israel who felt so strongly about this that he opened a Breitbart office in Israel to ensure that the true pro-Israel story would get out.’
Neve Gordon’s article rightly concludes
Israel’s leaders and their right-wing Jewish allies in the United States, in other words, have no problem stomaching anti-Semitism so long as the anti-Semite supports Zionism. But if an anti-Semite can be a Zionist then anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism are not the same.
This shows the amoral political utilitarianism and hypocrisy of the Israel lobby. With Netanyahu’s embrace of Trump and his foul cabinet, they no longer have any right whatsoever to accuse anyone of anti-Semitism simply because they criticise Israel and its decades of brutality towards the indigenous Palestinians. And they have just proved Livingstone to be right about Nazis supporting Zionism. They did during the Third Reich. And they’re doing so now, with the bland co-operation and blessing of the Likud.
Yesterday I put up clips of an Alt-Right meeting at the weekend at which the movement’s founder and self-declared ‘father’, Richard Spencer, delivered a speech. It’s very chilling footage, as Spencer talks in openly Nazi terms, beginning with the cry of ‘Hail Trump! Hail our race! Hail victory!’ He’s now issued a statement today that all this was supposedly ‘ironic’.
Yeah. Right.
The Young Turks have pointed out that it would be ironic if the Green Party did it, or some other left-wing group. As it is, it isn’t ironic at all. It’s just Nazi.
Spencer also went on to eulogise the White race, stating that we were a race of ‘strivers, explorers and conquerors, who went up and up’. Well, so did any number of other civilisations, from whom we learned, and adopted and adapted their achievements. Like the great civilisations of the Ancient Near East, Babylon, Phoenicia, India, Ancient China, the Arabs and so on.
But Spencer also described Whites in another manner, which has distinct Nazi connotations, which no-one else so far appears to have picked up. He described Whites as ‘the children of the sun’. It’s a bizarre comment, as for most people, Whites are the children of the temperate or cold climates. ‘Children of the sun’ seems a description more appropriate to the indigenous peoples of the tropics, like Black Africa, south and south-east Asia, South and Central America and Australia.
The phrase looks to me like it comes from Nazi pagan sun worship. The swastika is believed to be a representation of the sun’s movement across the sky during the day. The Germanic neo-pagan cults, which partly influenced the Nazi party, were themselves strongly influenced by late 19th century Monistic philosophy, which viewed the planets, and the life that subsequently developed on them, as created from the primordial sun. This produced in its turn a volkisch cult of the sun. In the late 19th century, for example, one of the Austrian neo-pagan groups buried a series of bottles laid out in the shape of the swastika as part of a ceremony designed to adore the sun as the visible body of the ancient Norse God, Baldur.
Donald Trump has today issued a statement renouncing the support of the Alt-Right, assuring people that he believes in racial equality and wishes to be a president for all Americans. Unfortunately, he still has Steven Bannon, a Breitbart executive known for his anti-Semitic and White supremacist ‘Alt-Right’ beliefs. If Trump wishes to reassure Americans that he is not a White supremacist or Nazi, he should sack him and anyone connected with the racist Right.
But this is also an issue that confronts the Christian religious right. Much of the polemics made by right-wing religious and political pundits, like Glen Beck, has involved denunciations of Nazism for its explicitly pagan, anti-Christian nature. I know that this view of Nazism is challenged and rejected by many atheists, who point to Hitler’s statement in Mein Kampf that he was doing God’s will, and the disgraceful and odious support given to Hitler’s regime by the churches. The support Hitler received from the churches is indeed an outrageous scandal. Hitler himself wasn’t a Christian, however. Academic historians instead believe that he was a pantheist, who believed in an impersonal God as the forces of nature. He wasn’t a Christian, but he wasn’t quite an atheist either. Rather, he had views similar to the Monists mentioned above. There were pagan cultists within Nazism, mostly in the SS, whose leader, Heinrich Himmler, invented pagan ceremonies for them, and in certain sections of the Reich, such as the borders with occupied Poland, the gauleiters embarked on a deliberate policy of anti-Christian persecution.
Glen Beck and the other leaders of the Republican religious right see Nazism as synonymous with ‘socialism’ and state interference. But Spencer and his stormtroopers claim to defend private industry – which, incidentally, Hitler also did. But they’ve also made their Nazi beliefs very evident, including a revealing reference to their paganism. If the Christian religious right does not denounce them for their Nazism and paganism, but continues to support them because they supposedly defend and protect laissez-faire capitalism and anti-welfare policies, then it shows that they are nothing but hypocrites, who have no compunction against supporting a murderous political ideology and the pagan cultists, who wish to implement it, purely because they like their economic views.
I realise that not all pagans by far are Nazis. The impression I’ve got from meeting them and reading about their beliefs is that many have absolutely normal political views, and a large number are left-wing, peaceful hippy types. I’m not try to demonise them, or pantheists. My point here is to expose the hypocrisy of the Christian religious right, who make much noise about standing up for Christianity and Jews against pagan and Nazi persecution, but look like doing absolutely nothing about it in practice at this very moment.
This is a clip from The Atlantic, and it’s one of the most chilling portraits of a political meeting in a democratic country. I’ve already blogged about how Richard Spencer, the leader and self-declared father of the Alt-Right, made a Nazi speech at their conference this weekend, which was greeted with cries of ‘Hail Trump’ and the Nazi salute. This is a three minute clip from Spencer’s speech, which was a half hour long. And it’s frightening and disgraceful.
Spencer opens with the shout of ‘Hail Trump! Hail our people!’ He then goes to complain about how White people are exploited and marginalised in America today. He attacks the liberal media, which he calls by the term the Nazis coined, Lugenpresse – lying press, and particularly the liberal political commentator, John Oliver. He then describes how to be White is to be an inventor, conqueror, and explorer, makes comments about how Whites are ‘children of the sun’, claims that Whites don’t exploit anyone, and that Blacks and other ethnic minorities benefit from White rule. He states that until a generation ago, America was an ‘all White country’, and makes it clear that America is for Whites, founded by Whites for Whites.
His speech ends to applause, and a few more Nazi salutes and cries.
Nearly all of Spencer’s speech is rubbish. Yes, America was founded by White people for White people, and until a generation ago Whites were in the majority. This is rapidly changing due to non-White immigration and the higher birthrate among certain non-White communities. Whites certainly have explored, invented and conquered. But so have many other civilisations. If you want a corrective to his views, all you need to his crack open a book on the history of inventions to see just how many basic devices we take for granted were invented either by the Chinese, the Arabs, Persians or came from India. There are also a number of excellent books on Black inventors. One I’ve read, which I found in my local library, is Black Pioneers of Science and Invention. Among other fascinating pieces of information is the explanation of who the ‘McCoy’, in the phrase ‘It’s the real McCoy!’, was. Yes, he was a Black engineer working in the American navy, whose success at producing machines became proverbial.
And we Whites have exploited and marginalised non-Whites. All you need to do to read about this is look at any book on the history of slavery and the slave trade, and the exploitation of Black Americans under segregation and Jim Crow. And the continuing poverty and marginalisation of Black communities. even now, forty years after the Civil Rights movements. Ditto with Native Americans. I know much less about this, but here the classic text on the genocide of the Amerindians is Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. And Whites still enjoy a privileged position in American society, although this is declining.
If this were any other Nazi gathering, it could be ignored. Whatever racism there is in American society, explicitly Nazi organisations are very definitely at the margins. They’re a menace, because they do attack and murder innocent people of colour and leftists and anti-racists. That shouldn’t be downplayed. But for many people they’re also so grotesque as to be also figures of ridicule. Think of all the jokes about the Klan and the way John Landis’ The Blues Brothers sent up the Nazi fringe as the American Socialist White People’s Party.
This is frightening, because through Steven Bannon, they’ve got in the White House and Donald Trump’s ear. Already the right-wing media and the blogosphere is out, trying to tell us that the attacks on Trump are all wrong, and that the liberal media are lying and that Trump and his supporters are merely the innocent victims of intolerant leftists. I admit, some of Trump supporters do seem to have been physically attacked simply for their views. That’s wrong, and I don’t condone it.
But this video shows how vile and dangerous the people Trump’s mixing with are. And they have to be stopped, before they don their jackboots are start hurting more innocents with their lies, violence and brutality.
just to take the taste of Spencer and his vile speech out of our metaphorical mouths, here’s the clip from the Blues Brothers where they drive the Nazis off the road.
This is a short segment, fifteen minutes or so, from the full length film, Defamation, by the Israeli film-maker Yoav Shamir. Shamir’s argument in the film is that Israeli society and Jewish organisations abroad, like the Anti-Defamation League, deliberately obsess about anti-Semitism as a way of indoctrinating their people with xenophobic fears about everyone else. This is done in order to whip up support for the brutalisation and ethnic cleansing of the indigenous Palestinians.
Shamir starts off by saying that he’s an Israeli, and has never encountered anti-Semitism. So he wants to investigate it. He talks to his grandmother about it, a woman who fled Russia. Her comments about anti-Semitism shock her grandson, as her remarks about those Jews, who remain in the native countries are exactly the same as the slurs anti-Semites make about the Jewish people in general. She states that she is the genuine Jew, the hardworking, decent Jew, while those who remain outside Israel are all crooks, exploiting the non-Jewish inhabitants through alcohol, gambling and so on.
He then goes to one of Israel’s leading newspapers, which has published many stories about anti-Semitism. He meets one of its leading journalists, an elderly man in his 80s and a veteran of Auschwitz, who still has the tattoos the Nazis placed on the arms of their Jewish victims. This man blandly tells him that anti-Semitism is rising in the world, and that Germany, France, Britain and America are all anti-Semitic. Britain, he declares, is anti-Semitic, as London has an anti-Semitic mayor. He also states that the newspaper is keen to play up anti-Semitic incidents, and downplay any decline in them. When Shamir asks why that is, he gets the bland answer that if there’s a rise in anti-Semitism, they sell more papers.
He then travels to America, where he meets Abe Foxman, the head of the Anti-Defamation League at their headquarters. Foxman and his colleagues inform him that there has been a rise in anti-Semitism, and they’re pursuing several incidents at the moment. Later on, Shamir asks Foxman if there are any cases his team can follow as they’re investigated by Foxman and his people. Foxman agrees. When Shamir asks his staff what cases they’re pursuing at the moment, he’s told that they’re quite serious cases. However, most of them seem to be about people not being given time off work for the Jewish holidays, and an incident where someone overheard a cop making derogatory comments about the Jews on his walkie-talkie.
He then talks to Jewish high school students at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Israel. The students are shown looking at a model of the gas ovens at Auschwitz, and being taught about the horrific system under which the corpses of the victims had their gold teeth extracted, before being cremated. He then films a school teacher giving her class a prep talk for their forthcoming visit to Auschwitz. She touches on how this will prepare some of them for their military service. She also states quite explicitly that everyone hates the Jews. The Polish people, she says, hate the Jews. But they are not to worry, as they won’t meet them, and there will be two secret service agents with them.
When asked about their reactions to this xenophobic teaching, the kids state that it makes them feel special, to know that everyone in the world hates them.
This is a disturbing movie, and the repeated assertions that all non-Jews are anti-Semitic, blandly made as if they were a simple statement of fact, are nothing short of outrageous. If the shoe was on the other foot, and a non-Jewish politician stated that all Jews, or all Israelis, despised the gentiles, it would almost certainly be met with anger and condemnation from spokespeople for the Jewish community. And rightly so, as such claims are at the heart of the stupid and vicious conspiracy theories that claim that Jews exploit gentiles, or are engaged on a centuries-long project of global conquest, as outlined in the forged Protocols of the Elders of Zion. But these statements are not challenged, despite the fact that they are for a very large part, manifestly untrue.
I’m not bothered about the comments from Shamir’s grandmother. She’s of a different generation, one that arose long before our modern sensibilities about race. She’s like the embarrassing older relatives many of us have, who go on about Blacks or Asians. Their attitudes are unpleasant, and dangerous in so far as the people who hold them tend to be the people voting for Nigel Farage and UKIP here in Britain. But it’s not at the same level as the official xenophobia and racism being spewed out by the newspapers and the Israeli school system.
I’m not complacent about anti-Semitism in the West. Racism is on the rise throughout Europe, partly as a reaction to the poverty inflicted on the mass of ordinary people across the continent through neoliberal economic policies, and a political class that seems intent only on its corporate enrichment. It’s also fed too from fears of Muslim terrorism and violence following 9/11, and the refugee crisis, which has seen hundreds of thousands of people flee north Africa and the Middle East for what they hope will be better lives in Europe. Racism was a powerful factor in getting Trump to the White House, where he’s appointed Steven Bannon, an anti-Semite, as his ‘head of strategy’. It’s a powerful force in elevating Marine Le Pen’s Front National to a position as a major political force in France, and the Alternative fuer Deutschland in Germany. And there is a very nasty tradition of anti-Semitism in eastern Europe, which is getting stronger, with attacks on Gypsies and now Muslim immigrants.
But to claim that all non-Jews are anti-Semites is, quite simply, a ridiculous, outrageous lie. Let’s take some of the countries the various Israeli speakers in the movie claimed were anti-Semitic, beginning with Germany.
Yes, Germany was murderously anti-Semitic during the Third Reich. But apparently today the situation is the exact reverse. There are still Nazi thugs and hooligans, like the National Democrats and Schonhuber’s German Republican Party. But, probably in reaction to their anti-Semitic past, according to the BBC modern Germany is very pro-Jewish. So much so that Radio 4 a few months ago broadcast a documentary on how the country attracts many young Israelis to spend time there after they’ve done their national service. And a few weeks ago, the papers on this side of the North Sea reported that a sizable chunk of the British Jewish community had taken out German citizenship in opposition to Brexit. I’m not sure if the people, who did this will actually be moving to the Fatherland their grandparents and parents left. I think it’s like the various Brits, who took out Irish citizenship on the grounds that they had an Irish grandparent. They want the benefits of a connection to the EU through their ancestral homelands without actually moving there. But nevertheless, if Germany was the terrible, anti-Semitic monster that the Israeli bigots claim, somehow I don’t think the Jewish Brits now taking out German citizenship would want to do so.
Ditto with the Jews in France. Despite Marine Le Pen and her storm troopers, a poll of French people conducted after 9/11 found that 95 per cent of the population consider Jews French. Of course, this means that 5 per cent don’t, which is a problem. But the message there is that the overwhelming majority of French people aren’t anti-Semitic, at least in as much as they regard Jewish French people as their compatriots.
My guess is that the same is probably true of this country. I’m very much aware of the Nazi antics of the various NF/BNP splinter groups, such as the explicitly anti-Semitic and neo-Nazi National Action, whose leaders do believe in the obscene lies of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. They’re a pain and a menace. But they’re also miniscule, a mere handful of violent thugs. As for the mayor of London being anti-Semitic, excuse me, but ‘eh?’ If the film was made when Boris was mayor, this statement is wrong. Boris is, in my opinion, a vile individual, with racism one of his many unpleasant traits. But I’ve never heard him utter an anti-Semitic comment. All the racist remarks he’s made, or alleged to have made, seem to be about Blacks and Asians. If the remark is about Saddiq Khan, then again, I’ve never seen anything to indicate that he’s anti-Semitic. Unless, of course, this comes from the smear that somehow he supports Islamic terrorism. Which he doesn’t. He has associated himself, so I gather, with very conservative Muslim preachers, some of whom may hold anti-Semitic views. But this is speculation, and I’ve never heard or seen evidence that Khan himself is an anti-Semite.
As for America, the country is a staunch supporter of Israel, and very many of its favourite entertainers and celebrities are Jewish. Again, the Nazis, the Klan and the Alt-Right are out there, but the impression I’ve got is that, as a country, America has been very pro-Jewish. In fact amongst the American Conservatives, I’ve noticed that there is the perception that they believe that Europeans are all anti-Semites, and so view the rest of us on the other side of the Atlantic with suspicion.
The anti-Semitic incidents Shamir shows in this clip being discussed by the ADL are clearly in the movie because they are trivial. I don’t doubt that they’re annoying and distressing, to those to whom they occurred. I’m sympathetic to the frustrations and annoyance of the people, who couldn’t get time off to celebrate their religious holidays. With the rise of aggressive secularisation in Britain, it’s also happening to Christians over here. And I don’t like to hear people talking disparagingly about minorities. But these aren’t the same as assaults, and threats of physical violence. I am aware, though, that since Trump’s election Jewish businesses have been vandalised with Nazi slogans, including references to Kristallnacht, the infamous vandalism of Jewish shops and businesses by the Nazis.
But what is really chilling and outrageous is the way the Israeli education seems deliberately designed to reinforce these fears. It’s entire understandable and right that Israeli young people should visit Auschwitz, as an example of the massive campaign of extermination the Nazis initiated during the Holocaust. However, it is a chilling and vile smear that all of the Polish people are anti-Semites, and that these kids are to be kept away from them for their own protection. I’m very much aware that there is widespread anti-Semitism Poland, as there is in many other parts of eastern Europe. But I also know that the part of the Yad Vashem memorial to the Holocaust also contains a list of the many righteous Polish gentiles, who risked life and limb to rescue and shelter their Jewish countrymen during the Nazi occupation of their country.
Part of the joy of travelling is that you meet the native peoples of the countries you visit. Not only does meeting and talking to them broaden your mind by exposing you to their culture and their frequently very different perspectives on events and issues, but they’ve also been an integral part in creating good international relations after the carnage of the Second World War. When I was studying German for my ‘A’ levels, one of the foreign excursions we were offered as an adjunct to the course, was to the Sonnenberg Conference in Hannover. This is an annual meeting of school students in Germany from across Europe. And I think it was set up, at least in part, to heal the divisions between Germany and the other peoples of Europe after the War. I didn’t go, but those who did really enjoyed it.
My old college, where I took my first degree, also offered an exchange with a Polish college. The students, who went on this also visited Auschwitz, naturally. But they also met and enjoyed the hospitality of their Polish friends and exchange partners. Those I talked to about this were really impressed at how hard Polish students worked, and the way they were able to achieve good grades and a thorough understanding of their subjects, despite serious shortages in the kind of equipment we take for granted over here, like stationary and pens.
I’ve no doubt whatsoever that meeting other people from all over the world broadens your outlook, and creates genuine international understanding. But these Israeli kids were denied that. They were to be kept separate, guarded, told to fear the Polish people around them. As for the two secret service agents with them, you wonder why they were there, and who they were protecting. It seemed to me that they were there not to safeguard the children from gentile attack or vilification, but to make sure they didn’t become too close to the Poles. The real danger there, according to the Israeli military and educational authorities, seemed to be that Israelis could become too friendly with the people they were intent to demonise as the terrible ‘Other’.
And this has created the fear that makes some Israelis see themselves as special. And this feeling that the world is against them has led to the Israeli authorities angrily denouncing any criticism of the barbarous treatment they mete out to the Palestinians as ‘anti-Semitic’. Because they’re taught by their school teachers and army instructors that everyone else is anti-Semitic, and so any criticism they make of Israel must come from this deep anti-Jewish racism, not because of a decent outrage against the persecution of one people by another.
Shamir’s film is also important for the perspective it gives on the anti-Semitism allegations in the Labour party. I’m sorry for bringing this up once again, now that so many of the people accused of anti-Semitism have been cleared, but Luke Akehurst and the Jewish Labour Movement are still around, and still likely to cause trouble. The people slandered as anti-Semites, in the vast majority of cases, were decent, non-racist and even actively anti-racist people, with proud personal histories of fighting against anti-Semitism. They were accused of anti-Semitism because they made the unforgiveable crime of speaking out against the persecution of the Palestinians, or trying to put the Holocaust into perspective of one of the very many genocides that have sullied human history.
The Israelis, and Zionists like Akehurst, need to demonise and vilify such people, in order to ward off the entirely justified criticisms of Israel and its own maltreatment of its indigenous people. They need to demonise the peoples of other countries, Jews as well as gentiles, as ‘anti-Semitic’, or, if they’re Jewish, ‘self-hating’, in order to create that sense of election that allows the butchers in the Israeli armed forces to kill and massacre without compunction.
This is a monstrous disgrace. There are very many Jews and Jewish organisations abroad and in Israel itself, which are committed to defending the Palestinians and trying to create a better, more just Israel and a free Palestine. They include not just secular Jews, but also deeply religious people versed in the Bible and the Torah. Those in Israel may be subject to horrendous persecution, simply for speaking out. I’ve mentioned before how Ilan Pappe, the Israeli historian, who writes extensively on the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians, was forced out of his teaching post and then his homeland by the authorities.
This xenophobia needs to be challenged. It needs to be taken into account whenever the odious Mark Regev, the Israeli ambassador, starts ranting about anti-Semitism and lying about his political masters’ abuse of the indigenous Arab population. It needs to be brought up whenever the Israel lobby in the Labour party start lying and smearing decent people as anti-Semites. Racism everywhere needs to be fought. This includes not just the disgusting xenophobia of the Nazis, the Holocaust deniers, and racial populists like Trump and Farage. It also means the Israeli system, that fills its young people with unreasoning terror of other nations, in order to deform their personalities to get them to perpetuate the same horrors Jews have suffered on the Palestinians.
I found this 1948 speech by Hubert Humphrey, the Democratic mayor of Minneapolis, who was then a candidate for the senate and later became vice-president under Lyndon Johnson, defending Black Civil rights in The Penguin Book of Twentieth-Century Protest, ed. by Brian MacArthur (London: Penguin 1998).
We are here as Democrats. But more important, as Americans – and I firmly believe that as men concerned with our country’s future, we must specify in our platform the guarantees which I have mentioned.
Yes, this is far more than a party matter. Every citizen has a stake in the emergence of the United States as the leader of the free world. That world is being challenged by the world of slavery. For us to play our part effectively, we must be in a morally sound position.
We cannot use a double standard for measuring our own and other people’s policies. Our demands for democratic practices in other lands will be no more effective than the guarantees of those practiced in our own country.
We are God-fearing men and women. We place our faith in the brotherhood of man under the fatherhood of God.
I do not believe that there can be any compromise of the guarantees of civil rights which I have mentioned.
In spite of my desire for unanimous agreement on the platform, there are some matters which I think must be stated without qualification. There can be no hedging – no watering down.
There are those who say to you we are rushing this issue of civil rights. I say we are 172 years late.
There are those who say this issue of civil rights is an infringement on states’ rights. The time has arrived for the Democratic Party to get out of the shadow of states’ rights and walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights.
People – human beings – this is the issue of the twentieth century. People – all kinds and all sorts of people – look to America for leadership, for help, for guidance.
My friends, my fellow Democrats, I ask you for a calm consideration of our historic opportunity. Let us forget the evil passions, the blindness of the past. In these times of world economic, political and spiritual, above all, spiritual-crisis, we cannot, we must not, turn from the path so plainly before us.
That path has already led us through many valleys of the shadow of death. Now is the time to recall those who were left on that path of American freedom.
For all of us her, for the millions who have sent us, for the whole 2 billion members of the human family, our land is now, more than ever, the last best hope on earth. I know that we can – I now that we shall – begin here the fuller and richer realization of that hope, that promise of a land where all men are free and equal, and each man uses his freedom and equality wisely and well. (pp. 205-6).
I thought Humphrey’s speech need restating after Donald Trump’s election victory and the very real danger he now poses to freedom and equality in America. Trump’s surrounded and supported by Fascists. He’s promoted a racist and anti-Semite, Steven Bannon, as his chief strategist in the White House and is now preparing to initiate legislation require Muslims to be registered, as if they were enemy aliens. All of them, even if they are innocent of anything even remotely anti- or un-American.
And where Trump leads, I fear Europe will follow. He has an ally in Nigel Farage, many members of whose party, UKIP, are venomously xenophobic and bitterly anti-Muslim. Then there’s the threat of Marine Le Pen and the Front National in France, and the Alternative fuer Deutschland in Germany. Not to mention the waves of Fascist intolerance now spreading throughout eastern Europe, most notably in Hungary with Viktor Orban’s Fidesz Party.
The civil rights struggle in America was a profound inspiration and influence on Black people’s struggle for civil rights here in the UK. There is, or was, even a civil rights museum in Birmingham. That’s the Birmingham over here, not Birmingham, Alabama. Decent Europeans and Americans need to stand together against this new Fascist threat against freedom, equality, toleration, human dignity and everything liberals have campaigned for since the French Revolution.
The world was shocked last week by the election of Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton as the next president of the United States. The news showed footage of Clinton and her supporters weeping at the result. Yet as this documentary from Reichwing Watch shows, Clinton herself was no liberal. They describe her as a Republican Democrat. The description is accurate. As this documentary shows and concludes, she is like her Republican opponents a corporatist militarist, backing powerful companies, the military and the armaments industry against ordinary Americans, the environment, and the smaller nations of Latin America and Iraq, which have had the misfortune to feel the boot of American imperialism. And far from a supporter of women and ethnic minorities, the documentary also shows how she cynically sponsored the punitive legislation that has seen the mass incarceration and denial of federal welfare support to Blacks, defend truly horrific rapists and cover up Bill’s affairs and sexual assaults. All while claiming to be a feminist. The documentary also shows how Hillary was also extremely cynical about gay marriage, opposing it until the very last minute when it was politically expedient.
The documentary is divided into several chapters, dealing respectively with imperialism, Black rights, the gun lobby, the war on women, LGBT rights and corruption. It begins with a quote from Christopher Hitchens urging people not to vote for Hillary, as it is a mistake to support candidates, who are seeking election for therapeutic reasons. He then cites her husband, Bill, as an example.
Chapter 1: Building an Empire
This chapter begins with Killary’s support for the Iraq invasion, despite admissions from other members of the US Congress that the full scale industrial equipment needed to produce weapons of mass destruction was not found, and opposition to her and the invasion from Congressmen Kucinich, Bernie Sanders, Gravett, and the liberal news host, Jon Stewart. It also shows clips of Obama and Christopher Hitchens stating that she had the support of the Republicans for her stance on the Iraq invasion, including Henry Kissinger. Kissinger is rightly described by one of the speakers in this documentary as ‘the greatest unindicted war criminal in the world today’. It discusses how the US supported coup in Ecuador recalls the Kissinger sponsored coup in Chile that overthrew Salvador Allende in favour of the Fascist dictator, General Pinochet. It also mentions Killary’s sponsorship of the military coup in Honduras and the assassination of the indigenous rights leader, Berta Carceres. After the coup, Killary ensured that the regime received American aid, including military, in return for which American corporations also received lucrative contracts, especially in the construction of the dams. This section of the documentary also shows how Killary is absolutely ruthless and single-minded when it comes to pursuing her own projects, even at the possible expense of her husband’s interests. When Bill Clinton was finally considering intervening in Bosnia in the 1990s, Killary refused to support him until the very last minute as she was also afraid that this would affect her own healthcare reforms. She was also a firm supporter of No Fly Zones in Syria, despite the view of many others that these would lead directly to war with Russia.
Chapter II: Black Lives Matter
The title of this section of the documentary is highly ironic, considering that for much of her career, Shrillary hasn’t been remotely interested in Black rights, and indeed began her political involvement actively opposing them. She herself freely admits that when she was in college, she was a Goldwater Girl, supporting the segregationist Republican candidate Barry Goldwater. When Bill Clinton was governor of Arkansas, he and Hillary continued to celebrate Confederate Flag Day along with the rest of the reactionaries. There’s also a clip of her describing the threat of urban ‘super predators’ connected to the drug gangs. This was a term that at the time was used almost exclusively to describe Black men. There’s a clip of Michelle Alexander, the author of The New Jim Crow, about contemporary legislation designed to marginalise and impoverish Black America, denouncing the extremely punitive legislation Killary and Bill introduced as part of the war on drugs. These deny federal welfare aid to those convicted of drug offences for going to college, access to public housing and even food stamps. This was part of the Clinton’s strategy to win back swing voters, who had voted for Reagan and the Republicans. Clinton herself continued her strategy of appealing to White voters at the expense of Blacks. In 2008 she credited White voters for supporting her against Barack Obama. She also at one point discussed the assassination of Bobby Kennedy when answering a question about how long she planned to continue her campaign against Obama. She was viciously attacked for this by Stewart, who was outraged that she should mention this at a time when Obama was receiving death threats because of he was a Black man aiming at the presidency. Hillary was also herself extremely cynical in mentioning Obama’s Muslim background and upbringing. Without ever quite saying that he was a Muslim, and therefore shouldn’t be president, she nevertheless reminded people that he had been, thus reinforcing their prejudices.
Chapter III: The Gun Lobby
This begins with Hillary denouncing the armaments industry. However, once in power, she approved $122 million in sales for the gun firms, many of which produced the weapons used by Adam Lanza to shoot his mother and the other children at Sandy Hook school. She also managed to raise American armament sales abroad by 80 per cent over her predecessor, Condoleeza Rice, approving $165 billion of armaments sales in four years. These companies then invested part of their profits in the NRA, which sent lobbyists to Washington, several of whom, including representatives of Goldman Sachs, then went and attended a fundraising dinner for the Clintons.
Chapter IV: The War on Women
This concludes with a clip of Madeleine Albright urging women to vote for Clinton as ‘there is a special place in Hell for women, who do not help other women’. Yet Clinton’s own feminism and support for women is extremely patchy. This part of the documentary begins with her making a speech about how women’s rights are human rights, and vice versa. Which is clearly true. However, it then goes on to play a recording of her talking in 1975 about how she successfully defended a monstrous rapist, who had attacked a 12 year old girl. The girl was left in a coma for several months, needed considerable therapy to help her back on her feet afterwards. She has been on drugs, never married or had children. Her life has been ruined because of this monstrous assault, by a man Clinton knew was guilty, but successfully defended. Due to plea bargaining, he only served a derisory two months in prison.
This part of the documentary also shows how Hillary covered up for Bill’s affairs, and his sexual assault of Juanita Broderick. Broderick, then married, was a nurse at a nursing home, who had done some campaigning for the Clintons. They visited the home, during which Clinton sexually assaulted her in one of the bedrooms. Afterwards Killary approached her, caught her by the hand, and said that they appreciated how much she meant to her husband. Broderick clearly, and not unreasonably, considers this to be a veiled threat, and states that Killary frightened her. The section concludes with a piece about her support for another Democrat, Cuomo, and how this candidate was really another Republican in the guise of a Democrat, who believed in trickle-down Reaganite economics.
Chapter V: LGBT Rights
This begins with a clip from an interview with a gay serviceman, stating how it was very difficult initially in the navy when his sexuality was first known about. This section of the documentary shows how she actively opposed gay marriage until she thought there was votes in supporting it. She is seen supporting her husband’s ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy towards gays in the military as a progressive position, despite the fact that Bill himself said it was only a compromise. It then shows her making speeches declaring that she believed marriage should only be between a man and a woman, and that New York State should not recognise gay marriage.
Chapter VI: Corruption
This part begins by discussing how the Clinton’s took money from Tyson’s, one of the major poultry producers in Arkansas, and one of the agri-businesses credited with polluting 3,700 miles of the states’ waterways. Clinton passed laws setting up a task force to looking into the problem, while ensuring that about a third of the seats on this quango went to Tyson’s. Tyson’s were an important contributor to the Clintons’ campaign funds, in return for which Bill passed laws favouring the firm, and allowing them to grow into the state’s biggest poultry firm.
And the corruption didn’t stop there. It goes on to show how Killary did absolutely nothing to challenge Walmart’s ban on trade unions when she was on their board, and the company still lags behind others in promoting women to important positions. She was also hypocritical in her ‘Buy American’ campaign to persuade Americans to buy domestically produced goods. While she was at Walmart, the company continued to sale imported goods, some of which were even misleadingly labelled as ‘made in America’. This included clothing made in factories in Bangladesh which employed 12 year old girls.
Elsewhere, Killary also campaigned against a bankruptcy bill promoted by the credit card companies in their favour, in a reversal of her previous policy. The also made $675,000 from three speeches to Goldman Sachs, speeches which she refused to release.
She has also been duplicitous in her support of the NAFTA and TPP free trade agreements. She accused Obama during his election campaign of supporting NAFTA, while secretly reassuring the Canadians that she really backed it herself. There is also a clip of Elizabeth Warren, another Democrat politician, attacking the TPP. Warren states that this free trade deal isn’t about developing commerce, but in giving more power to multinational companies at the expense of national governments and hard-working ordinary Americans. America already had free trade deals with very many of the countries included in the treaty. And about half of the TPP’s 30 chapters are devoted to giving more power to the companies.
This section of the documentary also includes a clip of Mika Brzezinski, the daughter of Carter’s foreign policy advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, talking about how Killary has no personal convictions of her own, and will say anything to get herself elected. This is followed by the veteran radical, Noam Chomsky, stating that Clinton’s Democrat party is really that of moderate Republicans. President Truman, who warned about the threat of the military-industrial complex, is by their standards now far to the Left. It also has a clip from an interview with one of the multibillionaire Koch brothers describing how they liked Bill Clinton over many Republicans. This one is, admittedly, rather more hesitant when it comes to whether he’d support Killary. There’s then footage from a speech by Bill Clinton promoting small government and how there isn’t a programme for every problem. This is followed by footage of Hillary herself stating that she isn’t dogmatically Republican or Democrat. The documentary ends with the description of her as the worst of the two defects of the American political system. She is both a militarist, and a promoter of corporate power.
Donald Trump is a monster, and his election has brought fear to many millions of ordinary Americans, particularly those from ethnic minorities. The Beeb yesterday reported that 300 racially motivated incidents had been recorded since he was elected last week. Non-white children have been bullied at school, racist slogans sprayed on Black and ethnic minority people’s property and vehicles, and the Nazis from Alt-Right have crawled out from their pits to spew hatred against the Jews. Trump’s even appointed Steven Bannon, a racist and anti-Semite executive from the right-wing news organisation, Breitbart, his ‘chief strategist’. America and the world are facing the prospect of a Nazi in the White House.
But Hillary herself is no angel. She’s a corporate, militarist monster, who supports the very big businesses that are bringing poverty to working people in America by lowering wages, denying union rights, polluting America’s great natural environment, and shipping jobs overseas.
And abroad, her pursuit of American imperial power, as expressed in the American military complex’s own jargon of ‘full spectrum dominance’ – in other words, absolute military power over the rest of us – has threatened to plunge the world once again into a Cold War and the prospect of nuclear annihilation. And her embrace of Henry Kissinger should be a mark of shame to any decent human being. This is the man, whose firm support of dictators in Latin America and Asia, and whose conduct of the Vietnam War, brought death and torture to tens, if not hundreds of millions of innocents.
And Killary herself has blood on her hands through her support of the Iraq invasion, and the coups in Ecuador and Honduras.
Quite frankly, considering the millions she’s threatened with torture, assassination, disappearance and the Fascist jackboot, I really honestly don’t have any sympathy with her weeping over her election defeat. She’s lucky. She didn’t get to be president, but no-one will be rounding her or her husband up to be raped or tortured by the secret police, before being murdered in a concentration camp. She doesn’t have to worry about Chelsea being murdered by a death squad. She gets to live, and enjoy her very privileged life as a major politico and businesswoman. The people she and the rest of the administrations she served and supported, who’ve had their lands invaded and governments overthrown, haven’t been so lucky.
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