Norman Finkelstein Lays into Zionist Student for Using the Holocaust to Defend Israel

Okay, I’ve been put on probation by the Labour party for posting nasty things that are historically and philosophically true and correct, but which upset the delicate sensibilities of Zionists that are all for silencing any supporters of the Palestinians. Well, here’s something that will annoy them. It’s a longer version of a clip I found on YouTube of the veteran Jewish critic of Israel, Professor Norman Finkelstein, tearing into a young female student for the way she hides behind the Holocaust to defend Israel.

Finkelstein was a speaking at an event at Waterloo University. The girl complains that during his speech Finkelstein had described certain people as Nazis, and through tears says it’s very hurtful to Germans and to people who suffered under the Holocaust. This is too much for Finkelstein, whose parents were also Holocaust survivors. He tells her to shut her crocodile tears and that he doesn’t like using the Holocaust, but his father was in Auschwitz and his late mother in Majdanek. His father’s family were also involved in the Warsaw ghetto and were murdered by the Nazis. And he protests against Israel because of what his parents taught him. And if she had any real feeling, she’d be crying for the Palestinians, for the brutality they suffer, and the house clearances and other atrocities.

The girl really was going to lose when she tried to use the Holocaust to silence Finkelstein. Not only had his parents and relatives also suffered, as so many Jewish people have had parents and relatives suffer in the camps, but he also wrote a book awhile ago on the political uses of the Holocaust and the nasty, exploitative policies pursued by lawyers and firms claiming to be trying to get compensation for its victims, The Holocaust Industry. Quite often this has seen the compensation due to the Holocaust survivors swallowed up in lawyers fees. Israel has invited Holocaust survivors to settle, but really only wants their money through various schemes, and there are instances of the victims of Nazi brutality living in poverty or on the streets. The Zionist movement originally played down the Holocaust because they were afraid it made Jews look weak and unable to manage their own state. It was only after the Six Day War that the Holocaust was played up as a propaganda tool by Israel. It’s a horrible, cynically politically utilitarian attitude to one of the most horrific atrocities in human history and its victims.

The result of this is that the crowd goes nuts. Some cheer, others boo. But Finkelstein simply grins into the camera and says ‘I’ve never been in a crowd like this. They’re insane.’

Labour Anti-Semitism: Blairite MP Neil Coyle Demands Expulsion of Jewish Voice for Labour

I put up a post yesterday about Keir Starmer’s plans to purge four left-wing groups from the Labour party – Resist, Labour Against the Witch-Hunt, the Labour in Exile Network and Socialist Appeal. He and his fellow Blairites despise Labour Against the Witch-Hunt and the Labour in Exile Network because they challenge the lie that the people purged from the party were anti-Semites. They weren’t. Many of them were Jewish, like Jackie Walker and Tony Greenstein, and were very firmly anti-racist with a firm commitment to combating real anti-Semites and Fascists, such as Marc Wadsworth, a Black anti-racism activist who worked with the Board of Deputies of British Jews to fight BNP anti-Jewish attacks in the Isle of Dogs. The real reason they were purged was that they were socialists, who wanted a return to the mixed economy of the post-War consensus, a nationalised NHS and a welfare state that genuinely supported the poor, the unemployed, the disabled and elderly. They were targeted because they supported Jeremy Corbyn’s superb programme and, like him, they were opposed to Israel’s brutal dispossession and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians, or defended those who did. Mike was smeared as an anti-Semite and Holocaust denier because he wrote a document showing that Ken Livingstone was perfectly correct when he stated that Hitler initially supported Zionism.

The left-wing members of Labour’s NEC are determined to stand against the proposed purge. They fear it is an attack on Labour democracy and will lead to further purges and the erasure of the left-wing and Bennite traditions in the party. I believe very strongly that they are correct. As news of the proposed purge broke, various noxious MPs came out howling for the expulsion of other Labour party groups. One of them was Neil Coyle, who demanded that Jewish Voice for Labour should also be expelled along with other groups because they were ‘Communists’.

Not far enough. JVL should be gone too. And other outright Communists who have their own political party/ies they can ruin.

Mike in his great article about this latest piece of factionalism from Starmer points out that this anti-Semitic.

“There’s no reason to suggest that Jewish Voice for Labour (JVL) are Communists. Or that any of the organisations Starmer will purge are “poisonous”, “toxic” or “warped”.

But it is easier to persuade doubters with emotive language than it is to actually provide a reasoned argument for the unreasonable thing Starmer is about to do.

Coyle’s tweet is anti-Semitic. JVL argues that the purge of Labour Party members on grounds of anti-Semitism is false – from a Jewish standpoint. Coyle is therefore prejudiced against these Jews because they are Jews, which is the classic definition of anti-Semitism. And Starmer is perfectly happy with that, meaning that he is also an anti-Semite, notwithstanding his familial connections to Judaism.“

Absolutely. The malignant and intolerant ultra-Zionist right of the party despise Jewish Voice for Labour because they stood up for Corbyn, and denounced the attacks on the Palestinians. The Israel lobby is particularly harsh on Jewish critics of Israel, because they visibly contradict the lie put into Israeli law by Netanyahu that Jewry and Israel are synonymous and the Jewish state has the support and affection of the world’s Jews. Hence, Jewish critics of Israel are smeared as self-hating, anti-Semites and reviled as ‘traitors’ and ‘kapos’ – the last a reference to the officials in the Warsaw ghetto to whom the Nazis delegated the responsibility of selecting the victims destined for Auschwitz and the other murder factories.

Coyle’s own comment, however, is extremely close to real Nazi anti-Semitism.

The Nazis railed against ‘Jewish Bolshevism’, considering that Communism and ‘Marxist’ socialism, along with capitalism, liberalism, democracy and trade unions were all part of the overarching Jewish conspiracy to enslave White gentiles. They also claimed that Jews were disproportionately represented in the Social Democrats, the German equivalent of the British Labour party, and these socialist Jews were working to reduce the number of ‘Aryan’ members of the Reichstag as part of their insidious conspiracy. While Coyle isn’t a Nazi, his comment contains many Nazi tropes. If it came from a Corbynite group, they would be accused of anti-Semitism and expelled. But Coyle is safe because of the partisan bias of the NEC and because his noxious comment is directed against socialist, genuinely anti-racist Jews.

But it is a form of anti-Semitism, and racism in the party against Blacks and Muslims has risen under Starmer, whose followers in the NEC were responsible for the racist bullying of Black MPs and activists such as Diane Abbott.

The four groups Starmer wants to purge are not a threat to the Labour party. Starmer and his supporters in the NEC are, and it is they who should be purged and expelled as Thatcherites and racists opposed to genuine Labour values and policies.

More Selective Anti-Semitism as Blairites Persecute Left-Wing Jews

Starmer’s attempts to purge the Labour party of its left-wing members, who support Jeremy Corbyn, continues. All under the false pretext of fighting anti-Semitism, of course. This time the two victims are Moshe Machover and Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi, and the very notion that either of these two are any kind of real anti-Semites is a grotesque joke. Machover is a highly respected Israeli mathematician and philosopher, as well as a Marxist philosopher. Which I would imagine already really winds up his Blairite enemies, as it shows he’s almost certainly more intelligent than they are. Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi is the leader, or one of the leaders, of Jewish Voice for Labour. You know, that terrible Jewish group that supported Jeremy Corbyn, which only admitted Jews as full members and actually had a membership in hundreds. As opposed to their opponents in the Jewish Labour Movement, who had a membership that was just barely over a hundred, and most of them were gentiles. And while you also had to be a member of the Labour Party to be part of Jewish Voice for Labour, you don’t in the Jewish Labour Movement. Everything about the Jewish Labour Movement is fake or a half-truth, but the British political and media establishment decided that they really represent the Jews in the Labour Party.

Machover and Wimborne-Idrissi have been targeted because they’re anti-Zionist activists. They’ve been gunning for Machover for several years now. They tried suspending him a few years ago for a piece he wrote in the magazine of the Labour Marxists group. However, the outcry from Labour members was such that they had to reinstate him. Clearly they were just biding their time until they could try it again. This time the reason is that he appeared on Resistance TV with Chris Williamson and Tony Greenstein. Greenstein’s another Jewish critic of Zionism, who was thrown of the Labour party after a kangaroo court trial. Like Machover and Wimborne-Idrissi, he’s no kind of anti-Semite. He’s a passionate opponent of all kinds of racism and Fascism, and while he’s a secular Jew, he is very definitely not ‘self-hating’. Apart from very detailed, and minutely historically-informed criticisms of Zionism and Israeli policy towards the Palestinians, he’s also attacked domestic Fascists like Oswald Mosley and the BUF. He’s published a book on the struggle against Fascism on the south coast, as well as several articles on his blog about how the good, left-wing peeps of his home town of Brighton gave Mosley and his storm troopers a dam’ good hiding when they tried recruiting there. Which is clearly a source of pride to him, as it should.

Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi was, I feel, targeted this time because she dared to put her head above the barricades and made a video for Double Down News about how she and others like her, were ‘the wrong kind of Jew’. She was first called this when she was 19 at an exclusively Jewish meeting when she presented the case for the Palestinians. The Jewish Telegraph was there, and stuck her and that insult on their front page. Which shows just what a despicable rag it is. In the video for DDN, she talks about the other insults that are flung at Jewish critics of Israel – that they’re self-hating, or are ‘kapos’. The last is especially obnoxious, as the kapos were the collaborators with the Nazis in the extermination camps. It’s very clear from the DDN video that she is anything but self-hating. She says at one point that her people’s history contains much that is ‘wonderful and magical’ as well as horrendous persecution. Those, who hate themselves and their people generally don’t describe their people’s history in such positive terms, nor lament their persecution.

There are anti-Semites and self-hating Jews, though I’ve only read about the latter. From what I’ve seen, they’re deeply messed up individuals. One of them was the leader of a group of American Nazis, who shot himself when he was outed to his fellow storm troopers. He might be an extreme case, but he’s clearly poles apart from Machover, Greenstein, Wimborne-Idrissi and the many other Jews, who’ve been smeared as self-hating and purged by the Blairites. None of the above have ever tried to hide their Jewish identity, they’re not ashamed of it, and rather than join any kind of racist outfit, they’ve been active campaigners against racism.

They are only self-hating because, like so many other Jews, they dare to defy the demands of the self-proclaimed British Jewish establishment that Jews give their unqualified support to Israel. It’s ridiculous. Jews have been saying ‘Next year in Jerusalem’ as part of the Passover meal probably since the destruction of the Temple in AD 72 and then their forcible removal from the city by the Romans. But political Zionism was, as David Rosenberg and Tony Greenstein have both amply shown on their blogs, and Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi clearly shows in her video, a minority movement amongst modern Jews. The Jewish socialist party, the Bund, campaigned for Jews to be equal citizens of the countries in which they currently lived. American Jews were very comfortable with their lives over the other side of the Pond, though they had to work extremely hard to make their new lives there. As late as 1969 American Jewish Zionist magazines were lamenting the fact that there was no interest amongst them for returning to Israel. Wimborne-Idrissi’s video shows footage and photos from huge Jewish political meetings rejecting Zionism. But if adherence to Zionism is taken as the defining feature of Jewish identity, then according to the Board of Deputies, Chief Rabbinate and the rest, historically there have been an awful lot of self-hating Jews. Some of whom were obviously so self-hating that they actually fought against the Nazis, like Marek Edelman, one of the heroes of the Warsaw Ghetto. Which clearly makes the accusation utter twaddle.

This is selective anti-Semitism. Left-wing Jews are being targeted for abuse and purging from the party because they’re Jews, and their idea of Jewish identity conflicts with the British establishment’s. I’ve said very many times that the British establishment supports Israel because its a locus of western imperial influence in the Middle East. Hence it ain’t just the Jewish establishment that is determined to smear as anti-Semitic Jewish critics of Israel. Which means that we’re now treated to the grotesque spectacle of gentiles smearing decent, self-respecting Jews as anti-Semites. When Corbyn was leader, there was much hoo-ha in the press about the supposed ‘hurt’ and ‘pain’ suffered by Zionist Jews in the party, and by its supposed anti-Semitism. Well, the level of anti-Semitism has been shown by the E.H.R.C. report and previous studies to be grossly over exaggerated. But what is never discussed is the immense pain and hurt suffered by left-wing Jews. Mira Bar Hillel, a Jewish journalist, has said that there are many Jews afraid to speak out because they’re afraid of the terrible vilification they’ll suffer. And you can see how vile that abuse is when you think of the abuse and threats another self-respecting Jew, Jackie Walker, has received. She’s received messages telling her that she should be lynched, her body burnt and dumped in bin bags, and that she can’t be a proper Jews because she’s a woman of colour. Tony Greenstein has had irate Zionist Jews telling him that they wish he and his family had died in the Holocaust. But the media ignores the suffering of Jewish critics of Israel. They don’t exist, according to the establishment.

They’re the wrong kind of Jews.

Mike in his article about these latest suspensions has tweets from members of the public naturally condemning them. The peeps making them including Jews, people of Jewish heritage and Jewish organisations like Just Jews, Glenn Greenwald, Shlomo and Tom London, as well as left-wing, anti-racist gentile allies like Chris Williamson, Rachel Swindon, Kerry-Ann Mendoza, James Foster, and Cornish Damo. These are the peeps the Blairites and the ultra-Zionists despise and wish to purge and silence, because they actively demonstrate what a politically motivated lie the fake accusations of anti-Semitism are.

And the fake accusations against decent, anti-racist, Israel-critical Jews are actively harming the fight against real anti-Semitism. Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi states this clearly in her video as others have said before her. These accusations cheapen the charge of anti-Semitism by reducing it to a piece of cynical rhetoric. But at the same time real anti-Semitism and racism is on the rise. But the organisations that pose as Jews protectors, like the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, are largely uninterested. They were set up to attack Labour and left-wing criticism of Israel, not the real storm troopers like National Action, who scream anti-Semitic abuse and mouth stupid conspiracy theories about Jews plotting to destroy the White race. Nazis and anti-Semites, who hate Jews simply for being Jews, and mean them real harm.

These purges are an utter disgrace. They’re the product of sectarian anti-Semitism against left-wing Jews and their supporters. All of those smeared as anti-Semites, both gentile and Jewish, should be immediately reinstated with copious apologies.

And it should be their accusers instead who should be suspended and investigated for anti-Semitism and bringing Labour into disrepute. Even if that means suspending the General Secretary, David Evans, and the party leader himself, Keir Starmer.

See: Starmer’s purge of so-called Labour antisemites is now persecuting left-wing Jews | Vox Political (voxpoliticalonline.com)

No, HIGNFY, That’s Not What We Object to in Your Treatment of Corbyn

Last night’s edition of the Beeb’s satirical panel game, Have I Got Not For You, decided to reply to certain criticism regarding their treatment of the Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn. This week’s guest host, Jo Brand, stated that the programme had been widely attacked by supporters of the Labour leader because the programme continued referring to him by his surname, while the Prime Minister was more informally called by his first name, Boris. This, it was claimed, showed a bias towards the Tory leader, which the programme disputed.

Ummm, no. This is not why many of us object to the programme’s bias against Labour. We object to it because it pushes, like the rest of the media, the flagrant lie that he and his supporters are anti-Semites. Last Friday I put up on this blog immediately after the programme an article expressing my dismay at seeing this pushed once against by Victoria Coren-Mitchell, a broadcaster for whom I have otherwise immense respect. She made a joke about Corbyn believing in the anti-Semitic Jewish bankers conspiracy. He doesn’t. Never has done, and never will. He has a proud record of supporting Jews and Jewish issues in the UK as part of a general commitment to combating racism. But he frightens the British, American and Israeli political establishments by supporting Palestinian rights. And more alarming, horror of horrors!, he has the support of self-respecting Torah-observant and secular Jews. The meeting he attended, which so sent the British Jewish establishment into panicked hysteria because it compared the Israeli treatment of the Palestinians to that of the Jews under the Nazis, was addressed by Hajo Meyer, a Holocaust survivor. It certainly was not a Nazi meeting by any stretch of the imagination. And Mr Meyer wasn’t alone in his support for Palestinian rights. They were also championed by Marek Edelman, another Holocaust survivor, who had fought in the heroic Warsaw Uprising. Edelman even compared the Palestinians fighting for their land, freedom and dignity with the Uprising against Nazi genocide. But this is very much how it is not presented by the British press and media.

I wasn’t alone in my disgust at the programme pushing the idea that Corbyn was an anti-Semite and a conspiracy theorist in the worst sense of the term. Many others were too. Mike put up a piece reporting their criticisms and concerns. To be fair to Victoria Coren, she tried to reply to them, and seemed to leave thinking the issue over.

And it seems that the outrage on social media with the programme and its treatment of Corbyn has got to the point that its producers realise they have to do something to tackle it. But they can’t defend their linking of Corbyn with anti-Semitism and bogus, murderous conspiracy theories, it seems. Nor can they acknowledge, it appears, that there is a serious issue here. Because all decent people know that Corbyn is an anti-Semite, and they cannot damage this myth by showing that there are decent people, who don’t.

And so they tried to head off criticism by rebutting a different issue entirely.

This is not good enough, not by a long way. Some people might object to the programme for the above reason, but that’s not why an increasing number do. But it does seem to show that the programme’s producers are worried about criticism they are getting about their contemptuous and contemptible treatment of the Labour leader.

Perhaps if we continue to voice our real objections, the Beeb might just have to come clean on the real issue. I hope so, but I’m not holding my breath.

Polish Right-Wing Paper’s Anti-Gay Stickers

Last Saturday’s edition of the I also carried a story reporting that a Polish paper was planning to print stickers attacking gay rights. The article, ‘Paper prints anti-LGBT stickers’, by Samuel Osborne, on page 31, ran

A Polish newspaper plans to hand out “LGBT-free zone” stickers in its next issue. Gazeta Polska tweeted a preview of the stickers, which show a rainbow flag with a black cross over it.

The weekly publication, which has a circulation of about 11,000, openly supports the conservative governing Law and Justice Party (PiS). The stickers are due to be distributed on Wednesday with next week’s issue.

Georgette Mosbacher, the US ambassador to Poland, criticised the move.

She tweeted: “I am disappointed and concerned that some groups use stickers to promote hatred and intolerance.

“We respect freedom of speech, but we must stand together on the side of values such as diversity and tolerance.”

Earlier this year, another right-wing newspaper in Poland published an article on its front page on “how to recognise a Jew.”

This is chilling stuff, showing how quickly the Law and Justice Party, and similar governments in the rest of eastern Europe, are quickly dragging their nations into very real Fascism and anti-Semitism. This is the same government, remember, which against the express wishes of the mayor of Warsaw, allowed far right, Fascist organisations to march alongside ordinary, patriotic Poles on their national holiday celebrating Poland’s liberation from German, Austrian and Russian imperialism. The Law and Justice Party is strongly anti-gay, nationalistic and with a strong current of anti-Semitism. There was an international outcry a few years ago when they introduced a law criminalising the mention or discussion of Polish collaboration in the Holocaust. I gather, however, from a Polish commenter to this blog that the law doesn’t, however, prevent all discussion of Polish collaboration in this most horrendous of war crimes.

However, as with Viktor Orban’s similarly intolerant and Fascistic Fidesz government in Hungary, there’s been precious little denunciation of the Polish government’s increasing turn to Fascism from the official Jewish bodies in this country, like the Board of Deputies, or papers like the Jewish Chronicle. Why? Poland, Hungary and other eastern European countries are purchasing arms from the Israelis. And so readers of the Groaniad a few years ago were treated to a nauseating piece by Stephen Pollard, the Jewish Chronicle’s non-Jewish editor, informing them that Poland’s government wasn’t anti-Semitic. They were ‘good friends of Israel’.

Yes, they are ‘good friends of Israel’. And that’s a major cause of offence to many Israelis. Jewish bloggers and commenters like Tony Greenstein and David Rosenberg over here have reblogged stories from Israeli papers about Israeli human rights activists, who are outraged by the way any number of very real Fascists from right across the globe have been welcomed by the Israeli state. All they have had to do is pay an official visit to the Holocaust monument at Yad Vashem, and their own mass murders, assassinations, torture and mass imprisonments are discreetly overlooked.

Let’s also make it very clear that while anti-Semitism and racism is rising in eastern Europe, just as it is over here, not all Poles or eastern Europeans are racists or sympathetic to the far right. Way back in April, David Rosenberg put up an article describing a ceremony the previous day held at the Ghetto Fighters’ monument in Warsaw, celebrating the heroic uprising against the Nazis during World War II. The folks assembled for the event flew the red flags of the Jewish Bund, the Jewish socialist group, along with one for the International Brigade from the Spanish Civil War. This celebrated the Poles who left their country, to fight against Franco and the Fascists. One side of this flag was in Yiddish, commemorating the Jews, who fought in the Naftali Botwin company in the Dombrowski battalion. There was also a choir from one of the Warsaw schools, which has a multicultural curriculum. These were mostly, if not almost all non-Jewish, but they proudly sang the Yiddish songs of the Jewish resistance, like “We will Outlive Them!’

https://rebellion602.wordpress.com/2019/04/20/hope-for-a-different-future-on-warsaws-streets/

There were Poles, who courageously defied the Nazis and aided and rescued Jews, and are commemorated with their own memorial in Poland. And the Polish nation itself, along with the other Slav peoples, suffered their own horrific persecution under the Nazis. Hitler considered the Slavs, like the Jews and Gypsies, to be subhuman. An area of land extending deep into Ukraine was to be cleared of its traditional inhabitants and colonised by Germans. If the Nazis had won, the Slavs would have been reduced to an agricultural peasantry, whose only function was to provide food for their Nazi masters. Non-Jewish Poles were massacred, pressed into force labour, and had their villages destroyed. And Hitler had worse planned. He said that the war against the Poles would be a war of extermination.

But the re-emergence of real, vicious racism and intolerance in eastern Europe, which extends not just to gays and Jews, but also to Muslims and other non-Whites, is being ignored by the British Jewish establishment and the Israeli state. David Rosenberg has blogged about his concern for these nations’ Jewish minorities, as have other Jewish commenters, including senior academics. But the very real threat these communities face is ignored, because the Israeli state and the British Jewish establishment that supports it, is more determined to destroy genuinely anti-racist critics of Israel through false charges of anti-Semitism.

Which shows just how hypocritical organisations like Jewish Chronicle, the Board of Deputies and the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism really are.

The Nazis and American Gun Culture

Before I go on and give May and her wretched ‘No’ confidence vote a metaphorical pummeling, I thought I’d take a break from the Tories and Brexit and blog about the very strong similarity between the military training the Nazis put at the heart of the Hitler Youth and modern American gun culture.

I found this piece, ‘4. Training the Youth to Become Soldiers’ in the Chapter ‘Youth to Become Soldiers of Labour’ Brady’s The Spirit and Structure of German Fascism (London: Victor Gollancz 1937). I’ve blogged extensively about this book over the past few weeks, putting up passages from it, because although it was published 81 years ago, it still remains acutely relevant to the authoritarian structure of modern capitalism, and the links between Conservative ideology and that of the Nazis themselves.

In this passage, Brady discusses how the Hitler Youth began training boys with ordinary competitive sports before moving on to overtly military training. Brady writes

Under the banner of “Sword and Plough for Freedom and Honour,” Hitler’s own personal journal, the Nationalsozialistische Monatshefte, sounds the tocsin of duty for the young: “The National Socialist people’s youth affirms battle, and submits to the carrying of arms as the obvious foundations of all people’s labour. They hope for the day in which the weapons will be placed in their hands which are associated with the full consciousness of manhood.”

The National Youth Administration has prepared a manual, Hitler Youth in Service, for guidance of instructors and leaders throughout all divisions of the Hitler Youth. The first half of the book is taken up with physical exercises, games, and calisthenics. These are outlined in great detail, illustrated with charts and drawings, and full instructions for proper performance, including standard performance for different age groupings. The second half of the book is devoted entirely to military activities.

Transition from the first to the second half is provided by conclusion of sports activities in competition. The German word is Wettkampt. Kampf means struggle, fight6, battle, combat. All sport ends up in Wettkampt; the military training division begins with the first instruments of Kampf, or guns and shooting. The bodily development and discipline of ordinary sport is, thus, the necessary background for the more strenuous demands of warlike activity. “Shooting sport,” the manual asserts, “demands the greatest concentration and control of all physical and spiritual powers.”

Such shooting promotes virtues commendable to the Nazis. “It develops inner and outer calm and cold-bloodedness (Kaltblutigkeit), awakes and promotes decision and self-confidence in the shooters. Through the necessary arrangement and subordination at the shooting stand, shooting sport promotes discipline and the spirit of comradeship.” Arms supplied to promote amongst the Hitler Youth “joy in shooting service” consist of air rifles for boys under sixteen and small caliber rifles for boys over sixteen years of age. Manual instruction is given in assembly and cleaning of all rifle parts, arranging sights and finding range, and various postures and techniques of firing. (pp. 177-8).

Now I’m not attacking here competitive sport, though I was always bad at it at school. Nor am I attacking the various cadet services of the armed forces. I’ve worked with people, who were members of them, and while they enjoyed military training, they were very far from the insane militarists that I want to criticize. The same with most of the people I’ve met, who joined the TA. I’m also not criticizing the sports shooters, who go clay pigeon shooting or blaze away at targets.

But the right-wing American gun culture seems to me to be very different. It is aggressively nationalistic, and doesn’t just protect gun ownership. It actively promotes the possession and use of high caliber weapons that should only be in the possession of serving members of the armed forces and kept in a secure armoury. The head of the NRA, Dwayne Lapierre, has appeared several times promoting the ownership of these powerful and highly dangerous weapons, especially for young people. The NRA also produced an unintentionally hilarious add a year or so ago, in which various blue collar Americans warned the ‘ayatollahs’ that they had better beware armed working class folks like themselves if they tried any terrorist attacks on American soil. Well, the Islamic regime in Tehran hates America, and demonstrations in Iran have frequently chanted ‘Margh bar Amrika’ – ‘Death to America’ and verbally attacked the country as ‘Shaitan-e bozorg’ – ‘the Great Satan’. But most of the Islamic terrorism in the world now seems to come from radical Sunni groups, like al-Qaeda and ISIS, which heartily despise the Shi’a and Iran as heretics, who they want to exterminate.

One of the great myths going round ultraconservative, pro-gun right is that the Nazis triumphed in Germany because the population had been disarmed. The German anti-Nazi vlogger, Three Arrows, has demolished that argument in one of his videos. He stated that, yes, Germany had banned gun ownership, but this was by the democratic Weimar coalition government after the radical left revolution of 1919. By contrast, the Nazis were enthusiastically pro-gun, and passed legislation promoting gun ownership amongst the German population. But only, of course, if they were ‘Aryan’. Jews were forbidden to own them. Even so, I think another blogger put up the stats showing that Jews right the way across Germany did try to put up armed resistance to the Nazis in heroic but ultimately futile acts of resistance. All of them failed, including the uprising of the Warsaw Ghetto, because small groups of civilians, no matter how determined, stood no chance of winning against the overwhelming power of the armed forces. If the American government also became a monstrous Fascist tyranny like Nazi Germany, its civilian gun owners would similarly stand absolutely no chance of defending themselves.

I’ve also found a very interesting documentary, which I will have to put up sometime from one of the American left-wing news shows, which went into the history of gun ownership in America. Gun ownership has been a fervent part of American culture since the first colonies passed legislation demanding that men possess guns. However, the NRA when it began was a largely benign society of shooting enthusiasts. When the American government first began introducing legislation to outlaw certain types of firearm, the NRA was perfectly willing to comply and cooperate. It was only later, in the 1960s and ’70s, when the Association had been heavily infiltrated by extreme right-wing groups like the John Birch Society, that it became so extreme in its demands for the almost unqualified right of ordinary Americans to own extremely dangerous military combat guns. And just as the Nazis demanded that Aryan Germans should own guns, so the BNP here in Britain at the election a few years ago also put in their manifesto that they wanted every British home also to have a gun ready for the race’s defence.

The passage from Brady’s book does, however, show the very strong similarity between the ideology of gun ownership in the Third Reich and contemporary America. And it’s no accident that so many on the racist right in America actively promote and defend gun ownership and the type of paramilitary activity that is illegal in Europe. As we’ve seen from the recent shootings in America, ordinary private citizens have no business owning military firearms. These have been used by racist maniacs to kill innocent people. And the people promoting these firearms themselves have views dangerously close to the Nazis.

The racist right in the gun lobby won’t defend America from a Fascist regime. They would actively collaborate and defend it.

Protests in Edinburgh against Steve Bannon Speaking to the European Broadcasting Union

This is a report from RT, broadcast last Thursday, 15th November 2018, about the protests in Edinburgh against Steve Bannon’s address to the European Broadcasting Union.

Bannon, you will remember, was another Far Right activist and member of Trump’s cabinet, before the Orange Generalissimo gave him the heave-ho. He was interviewed in Edinburgh by journos from the Beeb. The video has a clip of Bannon’s speech, in which he states that present media coverage at the White House is at the level of playground gossip. There is no real coverage of the issues, partly because of economics but also because of a lack of investigative journalism.

The report states that he was met with protests from anti-racism demonstrators, which include United for Grenfell. The protesters chant ‘Stop Trump’, hold placards with the slogan, ‘Ban Bannon: Racists Never Welcome’ and ‘No To Racism, No To Trump’. Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland’s First Minister, withdrew from the even in protest, and the anti-racism group, Stand Up To Racism, has asked those involved in the interview to complain to the BBC.

There’s a clip of the joint head of Stand Up To Racism, Sabby Dahlu, explaining that they don’t agree with him being given a platform and treated as a normal journalist. He isn’t. He may have had links with Far-Right websites like Breitbart, but he was also Donald Trump’s chief of staff, and chief political strategist. He was sacked, but is now building a Far Right political movement across Europe, including Britain. Bannon has met Michael Gove, Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg, the Tory right, and funding the Fascist Free Tommy Robinson campaign. She therefore questions why the Beeb is presenting him as a respectable journalist when he isn’t. And the real danger is that if people like Stand Up To Racism don’t speak out, organisations and individuals like them will be treated as normal. And that is how Nazism started.

The European Broadcasting Union said it had a duty to present all views and give him a platform. They said that he was a key influencer in the rise of populism, one of the dominant political trends of our time. He was invited to News Xchange this year because his views are relevant to today’s society at large and therefore to the media industry. They also said it was their journalistic responsibility to scrutinize and share a variety of relevant viewpoints in the framework of balanced debate.

The Beeb defended their decision to be part of this with a statement that

Good journalism in a world of fake news and disinformation is more vital than ever. Journalism is about asking tough questions and understanding what is happening in the world and why. A conference designed to analyse the big issues impacting that world isn’t an endorsement of anyone or anything – it is a function of what journalism is.

In fact, this isn’t the first time that the Beeb and the British media has chosen to interview a Fascist, not by a very long chalk. Some of us can still remember the controversy the Beeb caused when they invited Nick Griffin, the-then head of the BNP, to appear on Question Time. And Buddy Hell has made the point over at Guy Debord’s Cat that the media is always soft when it comes to interviewing the Far Right, illustrating this with an interview with John Tyndale, the head of the National Front, in the ’70s.

And Sabby Dahlu’s right: there are real dangers to this approach. The number of people voting for the Nazis in Weimar Germany was derisory, comparable to the number of people voting in Britain for the BNP and the other bizarre Fascist grouplets today. One of the factors which aided their rise to power until they became a mass movement with a membership in the millions was that influential members of German society took them up and promoted them.

And there are real questions too about the impartiality of Edinburgh council. One protester was arrested on a charge of breach of the peace for holding a placard saying ‘Nae Nazis in Edinburgh’. Tony Greenstein pointed out that under Scots law, this isn’t a minor offence. It can carry an unlimited sentence. He also wondered what was so offensive or dangerous about the placard that the man holding it was arrested.

Bannon is a White supremacist and a real menace to civilized European society, and to its ethnic minority citizens. A week ago, on the 12th, Hope Not Hate put up a report about a mass march in Warsaw organized by the Fascist National Radical Camp or ONR, named after a viciously anti-Semitic organization in the 1930s, and All-Polish Youth, another Far Right outfit that is also militantsly homophobic as part of the celebrations commemorating the centenary of Poland finally gaining its independence in 1918. The march also included foreign fascists like the Italian Forza Nueva, a group of British skinheads, the Canadian Alt-Right YouTube personality Stefan Molyneaux, and Tommy Robinson and a group of his stormtroopers. 200,000 people attended the march.

See: https://www.hopenothate.org.uk/2018/11/12/fascism-march-warsaw/

Jewish anti-racist activist David Rosenberg has also described this procession in a moving article about a tour of Auschwitz and a tour of Kazimierz, the Jewish quarter of Krakow, which he was involved in organizing. He notes that as well as the Nazis, anti-Fascists also made their presence felt. He writes

But the spirit of anti-Fascist resistance was also present in Warsaw as progressives held an alternative march and anti-fascist rave. This march was led by two banners in Yiddish and Polish held side by side, translating to “For your and our freedom”. This slogan was first used in a Polish rising against the Tsarist Empire in 1831, then revived in the Spanish Civil War by the Botwin Company of the Dombrowski Battalion, and later by Bundists in the Warsaw Ghetto resistance.

https://rebellion602.wordpress.com/2018/11/16/sadness-and-rage-auschwitz-2018/

Fascism is on the march again, and Bannon is a part of it. And if you want to see what real Fascism does, contrary to all the nonsense Richard Spencer has spouted about a ‘peaceful ethnic cleansing’, all you need to do is look at Auschwitz. Or simply read the rest of Rosenberg’s article above.

Fascism and Nazism aren’t simply just another political movement. They are a direct threat to democracy and the lives and dignity of millions of people. Their leaders should never be given a platform from which to spread their vile doctrines.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Israel Lobbyists Smear Mike Again, Run Away When Refuted

Mike on Monday put up another piece, describing how he was smeared once again as an anti-Semite in an article, ‘Labour’s Anti-Semitism Problem’, by a couple of hacks called Kieron Monks and Gary Spedding. This was over what Mike had written about the belief that Blair had been unduly influenced by a group of Jewish advisers. Mike went on the attack to defend his reputation, and pointed out that he had not written what Monks’ claimed he had, and that he had in any case taken his words out of context. Monks tried arguing back, but when the force of Mike’s argument proved too much for him, retreated and went silent. He ran away, leaving his mate Spedding to try and defend his libel. Spedding didn’t fare any better either, and this resulted in Spedding not only abandoning the argument, but blocking Mike on Twitter.

You can read about the incident at: https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2018/03/05/another-article-alleges-anti-semitism-about-me-author-refuses-to-acknowledge-his-mistake/

Mike makes several very good points in his article about it, not least that all the relevant information about these claims and accusations is up on his blog, if the writers of such articles would actually care to read what he has to say.

But they don’t, because they’ve already decided that Mike’s an anti-Semite. And it’s not because of any genuine concern for anti-Semitism. Monks’ real motivation in writing the article is clearly shown in the title, and in one of the people he hashtags at the bottom of his tweet about it, Dave Rich.

The title of Monks’ piece is the same as a book written by Dave Rich, and published last year by Biteback. This claimed that there was a rising tide of anti-Semitism on the Left, ever since the Liberal party had got involved in an anti-Israeli politics in the 1970s. I can’t remember where I found it, but I read a review somewhere that pointed out that Rich was another prominent member of the Israel lobby, and that what really concerned him was that the Left were taking the side of the Palestinians against Israel. In short, he’s another Zionist upset that people are criticising and protesting about the Israeli state’s ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians, and trying to shut them down by libelling them as anti-Semites. Ditto for Monks and Spedding, who obviously share his views.

As for the accusation that Blair was unduly influenced by a group of Jewish advisers, it is true that Blair received much funding during the run-up to the Iraq invasion from businessmen connected to the Israel lobby, though a campaign run by Lord levy and Peter Mandelson. John Booth describes this in his ‘Labour, Corbyn and Anti-Semitism’ in Lobster 74. He writes

In contrast, this is Jon (now Lord) Mendelsohn speaking to Jewsweek.com on 8 September 2002: ‘[Tony] Blair has attacked the anti-Israelism that had existed in the Labour Party . . .Labour was cowboys-and-Indians politics, picking underdogs. The milieu has changed. Zionism is pervasive in New Labour. It is automatic that Blair will come to Friends of Israel meetings.’ Mendelsohn was speaking during the build-up to the Iraq war. At the time Corbyn was indulging in what the New Labour fundraiser would probably style ‘cowboy-and Indian politics’ by helping create the Stop the War Coalition. 7 Mendelsohn was a close associate of Michael (now Lord) Levy in drawing down funds from Israel supporters, a programme also well described in Robert Peston’s Who Runs Britain?. The ITN political editor in his informative 8 chapter ‘Democracy for Sale’ makes clear that a good deal of that funding was not from Labour supporters, but from those, including previous Conservative backers, who identified with Blair and his support for Israel and the Iraq war.

He also goes on to discuss the connections between the Israeli embassy and the various Friends of Israel organisations, which have been making the accusations of anti-Semitism against Corbyn and his supporters.

Mendelsohn is a former chairman of Labour Friends of Israel (LFI), membership of which, as he says, attracted many of the New Labour intake in 1997 and which resembled a passport to promotion for many of them. Not all have stayed in party politics since Labour’s 2010 defeat. Former Cabinet minister and chairman of LFI James Purnell is now a senior BBC executive and is talked of as a possible future director-general. LFI supporter Lorna 9 Fitzsimons, formerly Parliamentary Private Secretary to Foreign Secretary Robin Cook, became chief executive of the Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre (BICOM) after losing her parliamentary seat in 2005. Most of the LFI supporters still in Parliament or subsequently elected to it were opposed to Corbyn’s 2015 election as leader and tried to unseat him the following year. From their ranks – some of them here supporting LFI chair Joan Ryan – have come many of the well-publicised claims of anti-semitic 10 abuse that has attended Corbyn’s rise. 11 As the Al Jazeera documentary series, The Lobby, exposed earlier this year, there is a very close working relationship between the Israel embassy in London and the Friends of Israel groups in Parliament, including the one chaired by Enfield North MP Ryan. 12 There is also a strong link between the embassy and the Jewish Labour Movement (JLM) that has led criticism of Corbyn and was very active on the ‘anti-semitism’ issue at the Brighton conference. Two JLM officials, Jeremy 13 Newmark and Mike Katz, were backed by Yvette Cooper, a Corbyn rival for the leadership in 2015, when they unsuccessfully stood as Labour candidates in the general election.

And no, before anyone asks, Booth’s article is not remotely anti-Semitic. It begins by describing the warm welcome given to Jewish speakers at Labour’s Brighton Conference last year, including Naomi Klein, Naomi Wimbourne-Idrissi, who declared that the party did not have a problem with Jews, and, of course, Ed Miliband. Wimbourne-Idrissi later that day went on to launch Jewish Voice for Labour, along with a number of other, very prominent Jewish activists, including a former member of the Israeli Defence Force.

The article also discusses the close relationship between the Blairites and the Israel lobby, and how the rise of Corbyn and the leftward turn of the party threaten the Thatcherite entryists, and their backers in the media, such as the Groaniad. It challenges their views on the neoliberal consensus, as well as their political careers. Hence they have resorted to smearing their opponents as anti-Semites. And before Booth talks about Mandelson, he writes about how Marek Edelman, a hero of the Warsaw Ghetto, was persona non grata in Israel because he supported the Palestinians. He stated that to be a Jew means that you always side with the oppressed.

Edelman’s a true hero, and Rich, Monks and Spedding are definitely siding with the oppressors. Hence their participation in the smearing of Labour members and supporters, who criticise Israel’s maltreatment of the Palestinians, or who, like Mike, simply defend those, who do, on grounds of historical accuracy.

Lobster 74 is at https://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/issue74.php

Go and read the whole article to find out what these mendacious accusations are really about, and the noxious politics behind them.

Rabbi Yaakov Shapiro Explains Why Zionists Do Not Speak for World Jewry

And the good rabbi does not mince his words, as you’ll see later.

I found this on a YouTube channel entitled ‘Jewish Bund’. I don’t know who they are, but my guess is they’re probably politically left-wing. The Jewish Bund was the Jewish Socialist organisation in the countries of the Russian Empire. Along with the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, it was one of the constituent organisations of the Russian Social Democratic Party, before it fragmented completely into competing factions, which were then overtaken and suppressed during the Bolshevik coup of 1917.

It’s a video from an organisation, True Torah Jews against Zionism. I don’t know anything about the organisation, but it is obvious that they are another organisation of Torah-observant Jews, who reject Zionism as incompatible with the principles of Judaism.

The video was posted in 2015, and was prompted by Netanyahu’s visit to America. Netanyahu, with his usual lack of any kind of modesty or self-effacement, declared that he was not only Israel’s emissary, but also that of world Jewry. The rabbi and his interviewer, who is also clearly an observant Jew, soon set about demolishing that claim.

The rabbi points out, again and again in this video, that Netanyahu’s claim is ridiculous. He makes the point that Jews are and have been resident in very many countries. It’s a religion that comprises people of different nationalities. The rabbi’s own ancestors lived in Poland for 500 hundred years. Netanyahu doesn’t speak for him. He also rejects Netanyahu’s claim to represent him on religious principles, as well as simple nationality. Netanyahu is secular. He doesn’t observe the Torah, the Mosaic code. So he clearly doesn’t speak for the rabbi and other, Torah-observant Jewish people like him. The rabbi states that it’s as if the King of Bulgaria turned up in America, claiming that he represented and spoke for the Jewish people. Not only would the claim be demonstrably wrong, but people would laugh and ask, jokingly, what right the Balkan monarch had to claim that they do. Netanyahu doesn’t represent world Jewry, just Israel.

He and his interviewer state that the majority of rabbis have condemned Zionism down the ages. How then can Netanyahu make this claim? Rabbi Shapiro states that they’ve been doing it since the foundation of Zionism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He states that one of the great pioneers of the Zionist movement used an obscure point of Roman law, which allows someone to deputise for another as their proxy, to argue that he and the Zionist movement therefore represented the world’s Jews. The rabbi then goes on to argue that they had to adopt this tactic, as otherwise, without a country of their own, no-one would listen to them.

He then attacks this piece of rhetoric not only for its obvious falsehood, but because of the danger it presents to diaspora Jews. Rabbi Shapiro states that there is a threat implicit in it. It’s to show foreign politicians that there are people in their countries, who have outside loyalties that can be mobilised against them, if Israel’s desires are not complied with. This the rabbi understandably considers a vile slur against diaspora Jews living in their countries outside Israel. The ideals of the Torah determinate that Jews should live and work for the benefit of the nations in which they are resident. But this claim, and its hidden threat, are actively harmful to Jews by making it appear that they are quite ready to work against the best interests of their home countries and their fellow citizens for the good of Israel, a foreign power.

He is also scathing about another piece of rhetoric that is used along with the claim: that of the Holocaust. He is understandably offended with the cynical way Zionists use the horrific suffering of Jews during the Shoah in order to gain sympathy.

The video also puts up that notorious statement from one of the founders of Zionism, that anti-Semites will be more useful as allies to Zionists than decent people, with no prejudices, because they share the Zionists’ goals of getting Jews to emigrate.

The interviewer then asks the rabbi what can be done about this situation, when the media seems determined to marginalise and ignore voices like theirs. The rabbi is not downhearted. He states ‘We’re Jews. We have God on our side!’ He states that the Lord, who protected Mordechai and Esther during the Persian Empire, will protect them, just as He protected Jews from extinction over the last two thousand years. He advises his viewers that they can help combat Netanyahu’s pernicious claim by talking to their gentile fellows, and telling them that the Torah does not support what Netanyahu says, and that Jews are loyal fellow Americans.

I’ve no doubt that the rabbi is correct. Historians and critics of Israel have described over and over again how Zionism was a minority viewpoint amongst the world’s Jews. For many Torah-observant Jews, the state of Israel was a blasphemy, as they believed that Israel could only be restored by the Messiah. Tony Greenstein a few weeks ago put up a piece about a book and interview by a Canadian rabbi on Jewish opposition to Zionism. He also described in a piece about one of the non-Zionist leaders of the Warsaw Ghetto, Marek Edelman, how the majority of the Yiddish-speaking Jews of Poland voted solidly for the Bund and its campaign for Jews to take their place as fellow, equal citizens of their home countries.

And the rabbi’s fear that Netanyahu’s claim to represent Jews the world over casts suspicion on diaspora Jews by implication as agents of a foreign power was shared by the majority of British Jews at the time of the Balfour Declaration. The leaders of Britain’s Jewish community were very highly integrated into British culture and society. When Balfour was devising the Declaration, they – and the only Jewish member of his cabinet – objected for the same reason the rabbi above did. They wanted to be seen as loyal fellow Englishmen and women. You can see it in the oath of the Jewish equivalent of the Boys’ Brigade, in which boys swore ‘to be a good Englishman and good Jew’. And no doubt in very many other ways, in which they expressed their pride in being British and their loyalty as equal fellow Brits.

This is the video that Netanyahu very definitely would not want anyone to see, and neither would the Neocons, who have been guiding American imperial policy in the Middle East since Bush’s invasion of Iraq, or the Christian religious right, who are more fervent in their Zionism than America’s Jews. These are the people the media is determined to exclude. I’ve put up videos from YouTube from other Jewish organisations showing vast demonstrations in New York, with a crowd of about ten thousand or more, which the makers have claimed have not been covered by the American media.

And it’s clear why they don’t want videos like this to be seen: it destroys the right-wing claim that Israel is synonymous with Jewry, and that those, who don’t back Israel are anti-Semites. Even if, like these guys, they are religious observant men and women guided by the Torah, the Tanakh (Hebrew Bible) and the Talmud.