Starmer Declares that Labour Has Passed the EHRC’s Stipulations on Cleansing the Party of Anti-Semitism

Or does he mean the Wrong Kind of Jews and others accused of anti-Semitism ’cause their evil socialists and critics of Israel?

I got this round-robin message from the leader of the Labour party this afternoon.

‘Dear David,

In October 2020, the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) published a damning report into antisemitism in the Labour Party.

At that time, I was clear the Party accepted the EHRC’s report in full and would implement all of its recommendations. We agreed an Action Plan with the EHRC in December 2020, and since then, we have worked tirelessly to right the wrongs of the past and to tear out antisemitism from our Party by its roots.

Today, it was announced that the EHRC have been satisfied with our progress and the significant changes we have made. Accordingly, the Action Plan has formally concluded.

You can watch the speech I gave today about this here.

While this is an important moment, it is not one for celebration. Rather, it is one for reflection. As to how a Party that has always prided itself on its anti-racism and its commitment to equality could have fallen so far.

This announcement demonstrates we have turned the corner. However, the job of restoring Labour is not complete. It shows we are heading in the right direction, and I assure you that there is not a hint of complacency in that confidence. I know there is still much to do.

We will not rest for a moment until not only have we changed the Labour Party for the better, but our country, too.

Thank you,

Keir Starmer
Leader of the Labour Party’

The storm of allegations of anti-Semitism against the Labour party and individual members, often men and women of deep integrity and humanity, and which cost Corbyn the election and the party’s leadership, were whipped up by a corrupt political and media establishment appalled at the prospect of a return to power of a man committed to genuinely empowering working people. They baulked at the renationalisation of the utilities, despite the fact that every day shows this is urgently needed. They hated the idea of reversing the privatisation of the NHS and most of all they feared and loathed the return of strong trade unions, workers’ rights and proper welfare state that actually supports its citizens. There was also a foreign policy element too. They also hated Corbyn because he was an idealist who shared Robin Cook’s dream of an ethical foreign policy and specifically his support for the Palestinians.

This fear and loathing was shared by the right-wing, Zionist section of the Jewish community that considers itself that communities official ‘establishment’. This included the Board of Deputies of British Jews, which in reality speaks for the United Synagogue and no-one else, two Chief Rabbis, who both led contingents of Jewish Brits on the ‘March of the Flags’ in which Israeli bovver boys terrorise the Arabs of East Jerusalem, the Jewish Leadership Council, which split with the board because they weren’t right-wing and pro-business enough for them, and various other organisations that were set up in the wake of the bombardment of Gaza to promote Israel and drive away support for the Palestinians. These included the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism and the woefully misnamed Jewish Labour Movement, whose members don’t have to be Jewish or even members of the Labour party. Their accusations were taken up by the British mainstream, who’d found that smearing Corbyn as a Commie and Trotskyite hadn’t worked. But the charge of anti-Semitism stuck. Corbyn backed down when he should have fought, and sacrificed his allies in the belief that this would placate his enemies. It didn’t, and people like the mighty Tony Greenstein knew it wouldn’t and tried to tell him so. But he didn’t listen.

And then there were the vipers within the Labour party, who collaborated with all this. The right-wing faction that conspired against Corbyn at every opportunity, whose members were on Conservative websites and forums, who misdirected election funding from where they were needed, organised coups and bullied Black and Muslim members. They also did their best to conceal instances of real anti-Semitism from the leadership in order to keep the smear going.

When are these malign enablers of real anti-Semitism going to be thrown out of the party?

Well, I reckon they won’t, because they supported Starmer. And Starmer was also personally keen to keep the smears going as a tool for his purges of the left. Hence, even though he was told by his lawyers that he would win a court case against one set of allegations, he folded and gave them the money they demanded.

Israel’s Far Right government this week has declared they’re going to recognise a slew of illegal Jewish settlements in Palestine as punishment for the disturbances at Christmas. This is in contravention of international law. Where’s a statement condemning this from Starmer? Oh, wait, he’s ‘100 per cent Zionist’, so there won’t be one. This is despite the fact that numerous Zionist human rights organisations like B’Tselem have condemned the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. And suffered for it from militantly nationalist regimes that have declared them, like the Jews in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, to be the enemy within.

And what does this statement mean?

It looks like, although the EHRC is satisfied, Starmer still intends to continue his witch hunt because there is still much work to do and we have to reflect on how an anti-racist party became steeped in anti-Semitism. Well, when you realise that the majority of those accused of anti-Semitism were Jews, who had often experienced real abuse and assault because of their religion or ethnicity, and that one of the gentiles smeared and purged was a Black anti-racist activist who had worked with the Board of Deputies to combat real anti-Semitic violence by the BNP in the 1980s, it’s clear that this is all bogus.

The anti-Semitism smears and witch hunt were a tissue of lies from beginning to end. And Starmer knows it, and supported it. And it looks like he means to keep the pressure up even after it is all supposed to have ended.

Number of Tory Party Members Resigning Crashes Their Website

This ought to cheer a few of us up following the imposition of yet another unelected Tory prime minister. Mad right-wing Brexiteer Mahyar Tousi reported on one of his videos today that so many grass roots members of the Tory party are fed up with not being allowed to have their say in the selection of the new PM, that they’re resigning en masse. And so many of them were going on the Tory website looking for ways they could resign their memberships, that they crashed it. Apparently, they have nothing against Sunak himself, just that the party prevented them from the process of selecting who they wanted as prime minister. Richard Tice, fuehrer of Reform UK, formerly the Brexit party, is making the most of this crisis in the Tory ranks. He’s emailing former Tory members to join his wretched crew and says that Reform is planning to stand 500 candidates at the next election. As for Tousi himself, he reckons that this means trouble for the Tories, although they could just win the next election as Sunak prints money to give as handouts. That comment shows you how right-wing and out of touch Tousi is.

I’m not surprised the Tory grassroots are angry. Tousi admits that there aren’t many advantages to being a party member. You do get to go to the Tory party conference, though that costs extra, and there are one or two other perks. But there were grumblings from ordinary Tory members a little while ago about how they felt sidelined by the leadership in favour of the big donors. Now it seems that anger has come to head with the selection of Sunak by the parliamentary party in a process that excluded regular Tory members. Let’s hope a few other party leaders learn a few lessons here about the folly of ignoring the grassroots party, eh Starmer?

Ken Livingstone Talks about his Resignation from the Labour Party due to Anti-Semitism Smears

On Monday, Ken Livingstone resigned from the Labour party. He had been suspended from the party following the smears that he was an anti-Semite and had claimed that Hitler was a Zionist. This was completely untrue. As Red Ken goes on to say in the interview with RT, he never claimed that Hitler was a Zionist, only that he briefly supported Zionism. It is abundantly clear if you read Livingstone’s 1987 book, Livingstone’s Labour, that a racist of any stripe is the very last thing the former head of the GLC is. He makes it very clear that he is firmly opposed to anti-Semitism as well as anti-Black and anti-Irish racism, and details with the disgust and outrage the way the British state recruited Nazis, including those responsible for pogroms against the Jews and the Holocaust, as agents in the Cold War struggle against Communism. The claim that Livingstone said Hitler was a Zionist is an invention of John Mann, the Blairites and the Israel lobby, and repeated ad nauseam, ad infinitum, by the Conservative press and media in order to smear and discredit him. And they are still doing it. Deborah Orr, one of the wretched columnists in the I newspaper, claimed that he had said the Hitler was a Zionist, which shows how much she, and her editor, care about factual reporting. Mike has also covered on his blog how the Israel lobby continue to point to an interview Red Ken gave on Sky as showing that he was anti-Semitic. Which also shows they haven’t bothered to watch it, as in the interview Ken thoroughly refutes the allegations and shoots down those making them.

In this interview, Livingstone answers the question why it has taken him so long to resign. He replies that his instinct has always been to fight on to the end, whether it was against Thatcher or Tony Blair. But he chose to resign now because the controversy and lies surrounding him were becoming too much of a distraction. He was suspended two years ago in 2016. After a year, there was another three day hearing, which couldn’t refute the charges against him, and so extended the suspension for another year. He wanted to take his accusers to court, but was told by his lawyer that it would take at least two years to get there. He considered that it was too much of a distraction from Labour’s real programme under Corbyn, which he makes very clear has a real chance of winning.

When asked about whether the allegations have damaged Labour’s chances, for example, in Barnet, which has a high Jewish population, Red Ken said that of course people would be shocked when they hear that he said that Hitler was a Zionist, that it’s not anti-Semitic to hate Jews in Israel, or that Jews are Nazis, but he was struck by the number of Jews, who came up to him on the street to tell him that they knew what he said was true. This was that in 1933 Hitler and the Zionists made a deal to send some Jews to Israel. They didn’t like each other, but as a result, 60,000 Jews emigrated to Palestine. If they had stayed in Germany, they would have been murdered in the Holocaust. So it’s the lesser of two evils, according to Livingstone.

When the interviewer asks him if these allegations haven’t put a dent in Labour’s electoral chances, such as in Barnet, Livingstone tells him that half a dozen Jews have asked him on the street why he claimed that Hitler was a Zionist. And he’s told them that he never said that. Unfortunately, Livingstone never completes that reply due to a technical fault.

The interviewer then moves on to ask him if he really believes that Labour has a chance under Corbyn. Livingstone says clearly that everyone said that Labour would be wiped out during the next election. But in fact, Corbyn delivered the greatest increase in the Labour vote since the 1945 election, and they came within two per cent of the Tories. They could have gotten more, if the party had been united and MPs hadn’t been trying to unseat their leader. He states that Corbyn has excellent plans for massive public investment, improved service, creating new jobs and investing in high tech industries. That connected with people, and will connect with people at the next election.

The interview ends with the question of what Livingstone will do now that he’s retired from politics and whether he will return. Livingstone states that he retired from politics after he lost the election to Boris Johnson in 2012. Now he’s an old age pensioner and a house-husband, walking the kids and feeding the dog.

It’s a very, very good interview with Livingstone making it very clear that he definitely did not say what the liars in the Blairites, the Israel lobby and the press have accused him of. As for Jews telling Livingstone that they know he didn’t say those things, I can well believe this. Mike has put up innumerable pieces on his blog showing the support of many Jews and Jewish groups for Corbyn and the victims of the anti-Semitism smears, pointing out that there is absolutely no truth in them. Especially as so many of those libelled as anti-Semites are self-respecting Jews. The alliance between the Nazis and the Zionists is solid historical fact, and included in respected historical studies of the Holocaust, such as that of the Zionist historian, David Cesarani. It was called the Ha’avara agreement, and there’s a page on it on the site of the International Holocaust Museum in Israel. All you have to do is google it to find out that what Livingstone said was the truth.

Mike is disappointed with Ken’s decision to resign, as this also affects the legal chances of those, like him, who have been smeared trying to defend Livingstone. He writes

The shame of it is that certain people will take Mr Livingstone’s decision as an admission of guilt – and that he will not have the opportunity to put the record straight.

That means he is letting down others who have been put in the same situation (like This Writer).

I’m not backing down – and if Labour’s disciplinary panel find against me, I’ll happily sue the party because my good name is not a negotiable commodity.

https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2018/05/21/ken-livingstone-quits-labour-not-due-to-any-guilt-but-because-of-the-row-kicked-up-by-right-whingers/

It goes without saying that I’m backing Mike, and everybody else who has been foully smeared by these contemptible knaves, 100 per cent. While I understand why Livingstone has raised, I am afraid this will just serve to encourage the Blairites and the Israel lobby in their campaign against Corbyn and the true Labour moderates. They will not be placated by just taking down a few, sacrificial supporters, like Livingstone. Now that they’ve seen their campaign is effective, they will keep on and on. The best defence is attack, and the only way to tackle them is to meet them head on, and refute every one of their dam’ lies. They are not as secure as they think they are. The Blairites live in holy terror of the constituency parties deselecting them. The Israel lobby itself is becoming painfully aware that smears of anti-Semitism aren’t having the affect they used to have. And Jonathan Arkush’s own position as president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews is looking very rocky after his disgusting comments trying to cast the blame on the victims of the Gaza massacre, rather than the Israelis.

The Blairites and the Israel lobby are bullies. They are in a far weaker position than they wish to appear, and are responding by smears, lies and throwing their weight around. But you can stand up to bullies, and bring them down.

RT Video on Justice For Grenfell Rally

This is another great little video from RT of the rally outside parliament demanding justice for the victims of the Grenfell Tower fire.

The speakers included Diane Abbott, who said ‘You can talk about the cladding, you can talk about regulations, but there is also an attitude to communities that needs to be exposed.’

Another speaker was Clary, a Black lady from Grenfell United. She said, ‘We are here until we get justice. This is not an overnight thing. This is not a road for the swift. But guess what? We’ve asked for something and as humans we’ve demanded something. It’s our right. It’s our basic human right, and the fight goes on till we get it.’

Richard Burgon, the MP for Leeds East, praised the people of Grenfell, saying that they’ve inspired people across this country and across the world, ‘because when they see your struggle for justice, a struggle you shouldn’t have to be waging, by the way, they feel inspired in their own struggles as well.’

Natasha Elcock said ‘Grenfell should never have happened, and it never, never, never, never, never, never should have to happen to anybody. No-one should go through what Grenfell United, the community of North Kensington, and those communities living out there, with cladding on their tower blocks, should never have gone through this. And I urge every single MP, Grenfell United (did) a big parliamentary event last week here, over a hundred MPs promised their support, and we hope today they deliver that. Grenfell must never be forgotten. 72 people died as a result of that fire. And if one thing’s for certain, we will continue to add pressure.’

The video also shows a display of small, black circles, each bearing the name of one of the fire’s victims.

It’s disgraceful that after so long, the fire’s victims are still waiting for justice. Remember how the government, just after the fire, promised them that they’d all be rehoused within three weeks? That promise was very soon broken. Even the number of people who died may be inaccurate, as it’s based only on the number of bodies that were recovered. Some of the victims may not have left anything in the way of remains, because the fire would have incinerated them so completely. And instead of ensuring that horrors like this don’t happen again, the Tories have just passed legislation making safety regulations on tower blocks and the materials used in their construction even lower.

Much of the abuse Diane Abbott gets probably comes from the perception, aided by the Scum, that she’s an anti-White racist. But when she says that the government’s response to the fire’s victims also shows an attitude to communities that needs to be tackled, I’m sure she’s absolutely right. The people in Grenfell Tower were poor, and very many of them were non-Whites and immigrants. And we’ve seen just how the Tories really view BAME people in the racist comments posted on Tory affiliated websites, as reported last week by one blogger, as well as EvolvePolitic’s piece on the 18 Tory candidates at the council elections last week, who were suspended for alleged racist, homophobic, misogynist and bigoted remarks. Both these stories were covered by Mike on his blog. And then there’s the way Tweezer herself, when she was Cameron’s Foreign Secretary, removed the legislation permitting the Windrush Generation to stay in this country as British Citizens. The result has been the shameful deportations.

And Mike today has put up a piece commenting on May’s expression when she was given a painting of the burned out building by Damel Carayol, whose sister, Khadije Saye, was one of those, who died in the fire. She called it ‘powerful’, but her face suggests instead that she really doesn’t want to have anything to do with it.

Mike’s article goes on to discuss how a group of Grenfell residents came away feeling let down last week, when they went to the Prime Minister to discuss setting up a more diverse panel with the powers to make decisions as part of the inquiry process. One of them, Nabil Choucair, who lost his mother, sister, brother-in-law and three children, told her had no confidence in her. May responded by saying she’d ‘reflect on it’. Choucair went on to say that it was like it went in one ear and out the other. He complained it was bad enough having to go through the experience all over again, without having to ask for the panel, which May should have understood immediately. He concluded that she had caused a lot of unnecessary pain and suffering.

https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2018/05/14/grenfell-tower-theresa-mays-face-tells-us-all-what-her-mouth-wont/

Of course she has, because, as a Tory, her sympathies are with the rich and with Kensington Council cutting costs on construction materials, in order to save money for the rich at the expense of the safety of the poor.

It’s long past time the government honoured their promises, and gave the people of Grenfell Tower homes and justice.

Lobster on Real Conspiracies Versus Conspiracy Theories: Part Two

Bale then goes to contrast the non-existent groups of the bogus conspiracy theories, with real conspiratorial groups, which have exerted a genuine influence, such as the Afrikaner Broederbond, the extremist Afrikaner nationalist group that was ultimately responsible for the adoption of apartheid. He writes

No Monolithic Conspiracy
There has never been, to be sure, a single, monolithic Communist Conspiracy of the sort postulated by the American John Birch Society in the 1950s and 1960s. Nor has there ever been an all-encompassing International Capitalist Conspiracy, a Jewish World Conspiracy, a Masonic Conspiracy, or a Universal Vatican Conspiracy. And nowadays, contrary to the apparent belief of millions, neither a vast Underground Satanist Conspiracy nor an Alien Abduction Conspiracy exists. This reassuring knowledge should not, however, prompt anyone to throw out the baby with the bath water, as many academics have been wont to do. For just as surely as none of the above mentioned Grand Conspiracies has ever existed, diverse groups of Communists, capitalists, Zionists, masons and Catholics have in fact secretly plotted, often against one another, to accomplish various specific but limited political objectives.

No sensible person would claim, for example, that the Soviet secret police has not been involved in a vast array of covert operations since the establishment of the Soviet Union, or that international front groups controlled by the Russian Communist Party have not systematically engage in worldwide penetration and propaganda campaigns. it is nonetheless true that scholars have often hastened to deny the existence of genuine conspiratorial plots, without making any effort to investigate them, simply because such schemes fall outside their own realm of knowledge and experience or – even worse – directly challenge their sometimes naïve conceptions about how the world functions.

They Do Exist
If someone were to say, for example, that a secret masonic lodge in Italy had infiltrated all of the state’s security agencies and was involved in promoting or exploiting acts of neo-fascist terrorism in order to condition the political system and strengthen its own hold over the levers of government, most newspaper readers would probably assume that they were joking or accuse them of having taken leave of their senses. Ten years ago I might have had the same reaction myself. Nevertheless, although the above statement oversimplifies a far more complex pattern of interaction between the public and private spheres, such a lodge in fact existed. It was known as Loggia Massonica Propaganda Due (P2), was affiliated with the Grand Orient branch of Italian masonry, and was headed by a former fascist militiaman named Licio Gelli. In all probability something like P2 still exists today in an altered form, even though the lodge was officially outlawed in 1982. Likewise, with the claim that an Afrikaner secret society, founded in the second decade of this century [the 20th], had played a key role in establishing the system of apartheid in South Africa, and in the process helped to ensure the preservation of ultra-conservative Afrikaner cultural values and Afrikaner political dominance until 199. (sic). Yet this organisation also existed. It was known as the Afrikaner Broederbond (AB), and it formed a powerful ‘state within a state’ in that country by virtue, among other things, of its unchallenged control over the security services. There is no doubt that specialists on contemporary Italian politics who fail to take account of the activities of P2, like experts on South Africa who ignore the AB, are missing an important dimension of political life there. Nevertheless, neither of these to important organisations has been thoroughly investigated by academics. In these instances, as is so often the case, investigative journalists have done most of the truly groundbreaking preliminary research. (pp. 21-2).

He then goes on criticise the attitude of historians like David Hackett Fischer, who have identified those theories that attribute too much power to secret organisations as part of the ‘furtive fallacy’, but then go too far the other way in insisting that the only significant influences are those that are above board and public, and that nothing of any significance has ever been by clandestine groups. He writes

To accept these unstated proposition uncritically could induce a person, among other things, to overlook the bitter nineteenth century struggle between political secret societies for, at least, between revolutionaries using non-political secret societies as a ‘cover’ and the political police of powerful states like Austria and Russia, to minimise the role played by revolutionary vanguard parties in the Russian and communist Chinese revolutions, or to deny that powerful intelligence services like the CIA and the KGB have fomented coups and intervened massively in the internal affairs of other sovereign states since the end of World War II. In short, it might well lead to the misinterpretation or falsification of history on a grand scale.

It is easier to recognise such dangers when relatively well-known historical development like these are used as illustrative examples, but problems often arise when the possible role played by conspiratorial groups in more obscure event is brought up. It is above all in these cases, as well as in high-profile cases where a comforting ‘official’ version of events has been widely diffused, that commonplace academic prejudices against taking covert politics seriously come into play and can exert a potentially detrimental effect on historical judgements. (p. 21-2, my emphasis).

He concludes

There is probably no way to prevent this sort of unconscious reaction in the current intellectual climate, but the least that can be expected of serious scholars is that they carefully examine the available evidence before dismissing matters out of hand.

The proposals by YouTube, the Beeb and the Tory Party to set up monitoring groups to rebut ‘fake news’ go far beyond normal academic prejudice against taking real secret politics seriously. They are an attempt to present a very comforting official version of politics, which in the case of the Tory party means suppressing and falsifying the horrific assault their policies have had on British institutions, industry, and people since Maggie Thatcher. They are trying to shore up the decaying economic edifice of neoliberalism by presenting its opponents as wild-eyed radicals in the grip of loony conspiracies, producing ‘fake news’.

And the same is true of Israel lobby, which tries to hide its attempts to pervert British and American politics through lobbying and the sponsorship of leading politicians. It also uses the existence of malign, anti-Semitic conspiracies as a weapon to smear genuine historians and activists, who support the Palestinians in their struggle for dignity and equality, or simply want to correct their lies, as anti-Semites. People like Mike, Tony Greenstein, Jackie Walker, Ken Livingstone and so many, many others. They need to be stopped. Now.

The article is available at the magazine’s website. However, early issues, like 29 are behind a paywall. The editor, Robin Ramsay, has also written a book on conspiracies, where he makes the same distinction.

Counterpunch Article Urging Peace with Iran

Counterpunch published a very interesting article by Jonathan Power on the first day of this month, November 2017, on their website. He argued that it was high time the West stopped trying to bully Iran and overthrow their government. He made the point that if you asked most Iranians privately how they felt about America, they would quietly state that they were favourably disposed towards them.

Now America risks this goodwill through Trump throwing out the peace deal that Obama had brokered with the Mullahs. Power notes that the experience of the Iran-Iraq war and its horrors has left deep scars on everyone in the country over forty. Saddam Hussein was used as a proxy for America to avenge its deep humiliation felt by the overthrow of Shah and the hostage crisis during the Islamic Revolution. But Power goes onto make the point that the Iranian regime is very dubious about the morality of nuclear weapons and other, equally immoral forms of warfare. For example, one of the first things the Ayatollah Khomeini did was to stop the Shah’s nuclear programme. They only took it up recently because of the threat of American/ Saudi invasion. And the current ‘Supreme Leader’, Ayatollah Khameini, has said that nuclear weapons are immoral and un-Islamic.

He also states that while Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons, the Iranians themselves never did. He acknowledges that the Iranians’ foreign policy is destabilising, and in many cases destructive, but it essentially one of self-defence. They are also keen to protect the Shi’a minority in Iraq, who were oppressed by the Sunnis to which the secular Saddam Hussein nominally belonged.

He writes

Trump knows no Iranian history. When the Iranian revolution happened in 1979, the Shah was overthrown and the fundamentalist Islamic Shi’a regime of Ayatollah Khomeini came to power, one of the first things the new regime did was to close down the Shah’s nuclear weapons’ research program. (Ironically, it had had technical help from the US.) It was only after Iraq attacked Iran that the program was resuscitated.

Underneath the Iranian skin of anyone over 40 lies the memory of the Iran-Iraq war.

Whatever warm feelings the Iranian man and woman in the street might have for the West today can easily be undercut by any suggestion that the US and UK, in particular, might be reverting to those confrontational days when they covertly aided with sophisticated weapons President Saddam Hussein’s eight-year war with Iran. (It lasted from 1980 until 1988.)

The Reagan Administration escorted Kuwaiti oil tankers through the Persian Gulf to Iraq. It also initiated an arms embargo against Iran.

It was a terrible war, more akin to the trench warfare of World War 1 than any other, with opposing troops bogged down for years on end, fighting over a few hundred metres of ground. Iraq used chemical weapons on a large scale. The death toll was horrendous – estimates range from 170,000 to 750,000.

For its part, Iran refused to use chemical weapons in retaliation.

Its present-day Supreme Ruler, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has made a point of reminding us of this, explaining that using such a weapon of mass destruction would have gone against Islamic teaching. At the same time, he has long pointed out that this is the key reason for Iran not building nuclear weapons.

It is this war that has determined the larger part if not most of Iran’s foreign policy. “What Gulf Arab officials term ‘Iran meddling in Arab affairs’ is to Iran an essential part of an ‘aggressive defence’ of its national security”, write professors Ariane Tabatabai of Georgetown University and Annie Samuel of the University Tennessee in a recent article in Harvard’s quarterly, “International Security”.

He concludes that if the hostility with Iran continues to increase, we will lose any goodwill the Iranian may have towards us. It’s time to make peace with them.

The whole article is worth reading, and is at:
https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/11/01/time-to-make-up-with-iran/

America and Israel want another war with Iran. This won’t be about protecting the West, curbing ruthless dictators and freeing their people. This is just going to be ‘Iraq II’ – Western capitalist looting and pillage redux. It’s going to be because Israel wants to destroy a hostile nation, and the Neocons and American and Saudi oil interests want to seize their oil fields, privatise their state industries, and sell them off to American multinationals.

And the result will be more carnage, homelessness, refugees and ethnic and sectarian warfare.

Brought to you by Trump. And aided, no doubt, by that giggling warmonger, Hillary Clinton, who never met a war she didn’t like.

‘Florence’ Suggests I should Compile a Book about British & American Support for Fascist Dictators

Yesterday I put up a piece commenting on a video from the Aussie left-wing blogger, Democratic Socialist. This showed the Tory media’s double standard in reviling Jeremy Corbyn as a supporter of terrorism, Iran, and an anti-Semite, when he is none of those things. But the hacks of the Telegraph definitely did not make those accusations against their Tory molten idol, Maggie Thatcher, when she by association supported all of the above through her friendship with General Pinochet.

Corbyn’s support for Iran was based on an interview he made to an Iranian group, the Mossadeq Project. Mohammed Mossadeq was the last, democratically elected prime minister of that ancient and extremely cultured nation. He was no theocrat, but a secular liberal. He was also a Baha’i, a post-Islamic, syncretistic faith which embraces human equality, including that of men and women. The Shi’a Muslim establishment have hated them since the faith first emerged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and there have been terrible pogroms against them. This hatred is not shared by all Iranian Muslims, and I have personally known Iranian Muslims, who are heartily sick of the way their Baha’i friends are treated.

Mossadeq’s crime was that he dared nationalise the Iranian oil industry, then dominated by the British-owned Anglo-Persian Oil, which became BP. This resulted in us and the Americans organising a coup, which toppled Mossadeq, and began the long process by which the Shah gradually assumed absolute power, ruling through terror and a secret police force, SAVAK.

‘Florence’, one of the many great commenters on this blog, commented

In the early 70s I volunteered to help type up translation transcriptions of reports from torture victims of the “Shit” of Iran, as Private eye called him. (It was as evidence for Amnesty.) Its not something you can ever forget. When the revolution happened, it was simply new bosses at the same slaughter houses. This is another lesson learned; the violence required by a state to terrorise its own people seeps into the culture, and remains for generations (maybe longer, its too early to tell in most of the cases you cover in this interesting and evocative piece). The violence of the state becomes symmetrical in the revolution in many countries, Iran, Iraq, etc. that follows such repression.

(For this reason I also worry that, for example, the almost visceral hatred of the disabled (and other poor) in the UK bred by the eugenics of neoliberalism for decades will not be so easily dislodged with a change in government. )

I see that the experience of having lived through those times is no longer part of the wider political education of the younger members of the left. In Labour the excesses of the neoliberals all but wiped out that generation and the links. I talk sometimes to our younger members in the Labour party and they are fascinated – but totally clueless. I do try to point them at this blog for this very reason. They are oblivious to who Pinochet was, why it mattered to us then and now, the refuge given to that butcher by Thatcher, the entire history of the Chicago school etc. The traditional passing in of this history, personal history too, through social groups in the Labour party has all but broken down.

As a suggestion, perhaps you could edit your blogs into a book we could use in discussion groups? You would help us be that collective memory board for the newer (not just younger) activists. It would help tease out the older members stories of their personal part in the struggles at home and abroad, but more than that your pieces on the collision of religious and political also show the rich complexities of life.

I am really honoured that my blog is so highly regarded and useful. While talking to Mike earlier today, I mentioned the idea to him. He was enthusiastic and supportive, making a few suggestions on how I should go about it. I told him I have had problems finding a mainstream publisher for some of my other books I have written. He suggested I should try Lulu again, and have the cover done by a professional artist. This would be a great help to actually selling the book, and he could put me in touch with some of the great comics artists he’s worked with.

I am therefore definitely going to look into this.

Now for the other points ‘Florence’ has raised in her comment.

As for the point about how a whole generation in the Left and the Labour party having an awareness and opposition to the various Fascist leaders run riot around the world thanks to British and American support as part of their political education, I think that’s how very many people got involved in politics. Private Eye covered these issues, as it still does, and there was the series of comedy reviews put on in support of Amnesty in the 1980s called The Secret Policeman’s Ball. These featured some of the greatest comedy talents of the day, such as the Pythons and the languid, caustic wit of Peter Cook. I don’t think you had to be particularly left-wing to be a fan, only a supporter of democracy and civil liberties. Very many of the other kids in my Sixth Form were into it, including those, who could be described as working-class Tories.

But come to think about it, we haven’t seen anything like that on our screens for many, many years. The series was becoming long and drawn out towards the end, but nevertheless there’s no reason something else like it, which could be launched. And I don’t doubt that there are young, angry, talented comedians out there, who are perfectly capable of stepping up to the mike and doing it.

And some of the absence of comment and criticism of the monsters, who ran amok across the globe thanks to British and American support does come from the victory of neoliberalism. Including its adoption by New Labour. Blair was an Atlanticist, and an alumni of the Reagan-founded British-American Project for the Successor Generation, or BAP for short. This was a group that trained up future British political leaders, sending them on free jaunts to the US, so that on return to Britain they would be enthusiastic supporters of the ‘Special Relationship’. And they did a superb job on Blair. Before he went on one jaunt, he was a supporter of unilateral disarmament. When he returned, after meeting the American nuclear lobby, he was fully on board with us supporting America’s siting of nukes in Britain, as well as our own, independent nuclear deterrent.

Much of the activism against these thugs came out, it seems to me, of the campaigns against the Vietnam War. This inspired the radical young people of the time to look more closely at what America and the West were doing in the Cold War, and the people we supported as the bulwark of ‘freedom’ – which really meant ‘capitalism’ and western big business – against the Soviets. And the brutal realities of Pinochet’s regime, and that of the Shah of Iran, and very many others, were extensively reported. Clive James in one of his TV reviews written for the Observer, acidly commented on an interview on British TV with some high level thug from the Shah’s Iran. This torturer was asked about the brutal methods of interrogation employed by SAVAK, the Shah’s secret police. There was no problem, said the thug. They were improving all the time. Oh yes, commented James, or something similar.

Incidentally, an Iranian friend of mine told me had some experience of the activities of the Shah’s secret police himself. Back in Iran, he’d been a footie fan. But he noticed that several of his mates kept disappearing. He then found out that one of his friends was a snitch for the secret police, and had been informing on them. It’s when you hear these experiences from the people, who observed what was happening, that really begin to understand why so much of the world is less than enthusiastic about western imperialism. And why so many Iranians were taken in by that other thug, Khomeini. When he returned to Iran, he promised freedom to all Iranians. That didn’t last long, as it was back to normal with the rapists and torturers in Evin prison under his regime.

I was also part of a British medieval re-enactment group. One of the great peeps I met in that was an American chap, whose ancestry was South American. He was proud of his Incan heritage, and in America he’d been part of a similar group, that recreated the warrior traditions of this Andean people. He’d also been a translator for one of the human rights organisations, translating documents on abuses from Spanish.

There is indeed a whole generation out there, with personal experience of the dictatorship supported by the West, people whose wealth of knowledge and experience should be passed on.

But part of the problem is the supposed break with dictatorship and the entry of neoliberalism into the Labour party. The Fall of Communism was meant to be the End of History, as heralded by Francis Fukuyama. From now on, Western liberal democracy and capitalism would reign unchallenged. And with the threat of Communism gone, the Americans decided to cut their losses and move against the Fascist dictators they’d been propping up. Hence their ouster of General Noriega.

This gave the impression that the world was going to be nicely democratic, with the unspoken assumption that western, Euro-American culture would remain dominant and unchallenged.

But the old culture of lies, coups and regime change when the dominated countries in the developing world get too uppity is still there. As are the Cold Warriors. We didn’t invade Saddam Hussein’s Iraq to free its peoples. We invaded because the Neocons wanted their state industries for American multinationals, and the Saudi-American oil industry wanted their oil fields. And Israel wanted to stop Hussein from aiding the Palestinians. Human rights was just a convenient pretext. And it’s been like this for the last 14 years.

Just like we’re also being told lies about the situation in Ukraine. The Maidan Revolution was not spontaneous. It was staged by the CIA, National Endowment for Democracy, George Soros, and Victoria Nuland in Obama’s state department. It was to stop Ukraine becoming too close to Putin’s Russia. Ukraine has always had strong links to its eastern neighbour. Indeed, Kiev was one of the earliest and most powerful of the Russian states to emerge in the Middle Ages. Trying to sever the links between the two is similar, as someone put it, to Canada moving away from America to side with the Communist bloc.

But we aren’t being told any of that. Nor are we told that real, unreconstructed Nazis from the Pravy Sektor are in the ruling coalition, and that there is credible evidence that human rights abuses have been visited on the Russian minority and Russian speaking Ukrainians.

We are just being told that Putin is a thug – which is true – and that he’s ready to invade the former Soviet satellites. Which probably isn’t.

There is also a further problem, in that some of the countries, whose Fascist leaders Britain and America supported, are very remote. I’d guess that many people really wouldn’t be able to find them on a map, let alone know much about their history. And so we face the same problem the Czechs faced, when Chamberlain sacrificed their country to Hitler at Munich. They are faraway countries, of which we know nothing.

And this is a problem with British imperial history generally. Salman Rushdie once said that the British don’t know their own history, because so much of it happened abroad. This is true. British capitalism was stimulated through the colonisation of the West Indies, the slave trade and the sugar industry. How much is a matter of debate. Black and West Indian scholars have suggested that it was the prime stimulus behind the emergence of capitalism and the industrial revolution in Britain. Others have argued instead that it added only 5 per cent to the economy. But that it did have an effect is undeniable, especially on its colonised peoples. In the West Indies, this meant the virtual extermination of the indigenous Amerindian peoples and their replacement with enslaved Africans.

Well, the Empire has gone, and been replaced by the Commonwealth. But western domination of these countries’ economies still remains through the various tariff barriers that the Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal called Neocolonialism. As well as the domination of their industries by western multinationals.

There are book available on the British Empire, some of them critical. Like John Newsinger’s The Blood Never Dried, and a recent book about the internment, torture and mutilation of the indigenous Kenyans during the Mao Mao crisis, Africa’s Secret Gulags. But the people, who appear on TV to talk about imperialism tend to be those on the right, like Niall Ferguson, who will admit that the British Empire was seriously flawed, but on balance did more good. Which might be true, but still glosses over some of the horrors we perpetrated.

And many of these are still kept from us. The public documents supporting the allegations of the victims of British torture in Kenya only came to light because they fought a long and hard battle in the British courts to get them released. I honestly don’t know what other nasty little secrets are being kept from us, in case it embarrasses senior ministers or industrialists.

So if you want to see the brutal reality behinds the West’s foreign policy, you have to read specialist magazines, many of them small press. Like Robin Ramsay’s Lobster, which has been going since the 1980s, and which is now online, and Counterpunch, an American radical magazine and website, which has been digging the sordid truth up about the American Empire and the rapacity of capitalism and the global elite. I also recommend William Blum’s The Anti-Empire Report, and his books, as well as Greg Palast’s dissection of the real reasons we invaded Iraq, Armed Madhouse.

More material on the rapacity of western imperialism is coming to light through the internet, and especially the emergence of alternative news sites. And there is a growing audience for it, as young and older people from across the world are brought together through international links. This isn’t just business, but also through the foreign students coming to Britain, as well as Brits living, working and studying elsewhere in the world.

The problem is getting it out there, and moving it from the sidelines so that it becomes a major topic that can be used to challenge our leaders and hold them to account, without being written off as ‘loony radical lefties’ spouting about things no-one else wants to know about or even hear. About other ‘faraway places, of which we know nothing’.

Alt Right Leader Richard Spencer Follows Manosphere, Says Women Shouldn’t Be Allowed to Vote

Richard Spencer, the founder and leader of the Alt Right, has shown that not only is his outfit racially bigoted, it’s also profoundly misogynist. He has declared that women shouldn’t have the right to vote.

This shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. The Far Right has always had a very traditional view of women’s role. This was summed up in the Nazi slogan of ‘Kinder, Kirche, Kueche’ – ‘Children, Church and Kitchen’. Mussolini and the Italian Fascists also didn’t believe that women should have the right to vote, and should confine themselves to their traditional domestic role.

In this video, the male feminist Kevin Logan points out that the arch-reactionaries of the manosphere – the Men’s Rights Movements’ – got there before him, and shows excerpts from a range of their websites, such as Return of Kings, where they state that women should be stripped of the right to vote. Those demanding this disenfranchisement of the entire female population include Anne Coulter, the notorious extreme right-wing Republican activist. She’s been saying this rubbish for years. When somebody raised the issue of just how she could believe in this, while writing a series of books attacking liberalism and promoting her form of Republicanism, she simply replied that you could be denied the vote, but still write books. Well yes, you could, but you’d still be politically active, which is what the ban on women voting is designed to curtail.

If you look carefully, you’ll see that in one of the excerpts in the video the writer states that women have to be denied the vote, if you want to have both democracy and real Conservative politics. I’d say that preventing just over one half of the human race – women make up 51 per cent of the population – from possessing the suffrage was profoundly undemocratic. From the Right’s view, it might also be counterproductive. I can remember being taught at College that politically, women tended to be more Conservative than men. Certainly the Tory party over here has tried to appeal to women with promoting Maggie Thatcher and Theresa May to the country’s leadership, and with Dave Cameron trying to claim the Tories were doing more for women, when they were actually making their jobs more uncertain and their wages lower.

But there isn’t anything new about this stance either. I can remember reading Vox Day on his blog making the same argument – that to preserve Conservativism, you have to stop women voting – about a decade or so ago.

Which is Logan’s point. He concludes that the manosphere is more of a danger than the Alt Right, because it has been saying this for years. It has prepared the political ground so that Spencer can make this stupid, misogynist pronouncement.

Warning: Logan is a sweary fellow himself, and so there is some, er, ‘colourful metaphors’ as Spock says about cussing in Star Trek 4. And it ends with someone saying very clear ‘F*** you’, which is how Kev clearly feels about the manosphere and its appalling, reactionary inhabitants.

Joe Rogan on Conspiracy Theories and Alex Jones’ Comments on Charlottesville

It seems that Alex Jones just keeps going lower and lower in his statements and mouthings about stupid and poisonous conspiracy theories.

In this clip, Joe Rogan, the host of an internet radio show in the US, and his co-presenter talk about conspiracies and conspiracy theories. They discuss the problem of credibility and the refusal of people to accept when they genuinely don’t know anything. They also contrast real conspiracies with the wild, bogus theories spouted by Alex Jones.

Rogan gives as an example of a real conspiracy the plan by the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the 1960s to shoot down an American passenger aircraft and blame it on Cuba. There were also other strategies to arm Cuban friendlies to attack Guantanamo Bay, thus allowing them to blame it on Castro and start a war. These are genuine conspiracies, which have been revealed by documents released under the Freedom of Information Act.

He contrasts these with the bizarre, deep conspiracies, such as Kennedy being assassinated by his driver, and the rubbish pushed by Alex Jones.

Alex Jones is the main man behind Infowars, and I’ve blogged many times about his insane and dangerous theories. Jones is a 9/11 truther, but has gone on to claim that the ‘globalists’ who run the world really are demonic entities, either literally so, or are extra-dimensional aliens. The global elite sacrifice children to Satan, and perform black magic orgies. Barak Obama was possessed by demons. So is Hillary Clinton, though she may also be a robot or cyborg. The Clintons were also involved in a paedophile ring running out of a Boston pizza parlour. Gay rights activists are a ‘transhumanist space cult intent on producing genderless humans’.

And the global elite, including Obama, are just waiting to incarcerate true, freedom-loving Americans in concentration camps. They also manufacture emergencies, including gun crime and mass shootings, in order to pass legislation to deprive Americans further of the rights and liberties. Of which, the most important is the right to carry guns.

Hence he declared that the Sandy Hook school shooting was entirely fake, and that the victims were all ‘crisis actors’. Apart from being massively wrong and offensive, this has led to the nutters, who believe this nonsense approaching the bereaved parents to challenge them about the deaths of their children.

And now it appears Jones has done something similar following the events at Charlottesville. He has claimed that the violence there was staged by ‘Jewish actors’, at least according to Rogan. If this is true, then it’s a new low. The mob marching to defend the statue definitely included real Klan members and Nazis. These stormtroopers really did try to beat up and kill the counterdemonstrators, and the anti-racists inside a meeting hall, attended an inter-racial, interfaith meeting, in which the participants included Dr. Cornell West and Rev. Traci Blackmon, two Christian ministers committed to social justice. West and Blackmon have stated that it was the anarchists and the Antifa, who rescued them when it looked like the Nazis were going to beat them to death.

And the Nazis also marched on a local synagogue, surrounded it, and chanted ‘Sieg heil’, terrorizing those gathered for the evening service. The rabbi and staff were so frightened, that they smuggled the Torah scroll out of the backdoor in case the Nazis should try to damage it.

Rogan and his fellow presenter also state that these daft conspiracy theories are a distraction from what the authorities really are covertly doing.

This is all absolutely correct. Parapolitical writers, like Robin Ramsay, the editor of Lobster, draw a distinction between real conspiracies, such as those discussed by Rogan and his fellow host, which they sometimes term ‘parapolitics’ or ‘Deep Politics’, and the bogus conspiracy theories, such as Jones’ rants about the coming one world Satanic state, the various anti-Semitic theories about the Jewish bankers, and contact with shape-changing alien lizards.

As for Jones and his nonsense about ‘Jewish actors’, this is stuff of which the Nazis would have been proud. The Nazis and fellow Fascist parties in the rest of Europe, like Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists, blamed just about every misfortune on the Jews, including their own negative image. Mosley devotes an entire chapter in his autobiography, My Life, to what he calls ‘Jewish opposition’, claiming that he was unfairly maligned by his Jewish opponents. Needless to say, he wasn’t. His biographer, Skidelsky, claimed that Mosley wasn’t originally anti-Semitic, but only became so after he was attacked as such by the Jews. He supposedly ordered one of his lieutenants, who came from the Britons or another of the anti-Semitic societies, to look into it. And this officer then duly came up with the daft conspiracy theories and libels blaming everything on them. More recent studies, such as by Stephen Dorrill and his biography of Mosley, Blackshirt, have shown Mosley was anti-Semitic from the start.

Jones, and those figures on the right like him, are going down a very dangerous path when they repeat the same type of lies that the Nazis used to try and fool people into believing that they weren’t a collection of violent thugs intent on mass murder.

It’s questionable how much of this bilge Jones really believes. Jones has tried to defend himself in the court case involving custody of his children by having his lawyer release a statement that he doesn’t believe any of it, and that he just a ‘performance artist’, like a ‘rodeo clown’. If true, it means he’s consciously lying, which makes him even more similar to Goebbels in this matter.

I admit, I’ve got a lot of pleasure before now from watching Jones’ insane rants and antics. But this is rapidly coming to an end. When he starts lying about real Nazis, who act like Nazis attacking Blacks, Jews, gays and anti-racist Whites, he’s crossed a line.

Even looking at him to get a laugh out of his ravings is dangerous. Karl Dietrich Bracher, a German historian of Nazism, describes in one of his books how some Germans turned up at Hitler’s rallies and his denunciation of the Jews and others simply as a bit of fun, without taking it seriously.

After Charlottesville, a number of internet servers are refusing to host Nazi and White supremacist sites. After Jones’ comments about the violence in Charlottesville being the fault of ‘Jewish actors’, his show should be treated the same way as well.

American Politico Rick Santorum Calls People with Medical Conditions ‘Scammers’ Trying to Steal Health Insurance

In this video from The Ring of Fire, presenter Farron Cousins rips into Republican politician Rick Santorum for his mean-spirited, bigoted comments about people with pre-existing medical conditions. Santorum appeared on CNN this week, where he described people with these conditions as ‘scammers’ who were trying to steal others’ medical care. Farron points out that he didn’t describe how this was being done, when a scam is a deceit that is carefully planned and executed. He points out that people with medical conditions like diabetes or heart conditions aren’t scammers, trying to cheat others out of their healthcare. They are often people, who haven’t even spent a day doing anything wrong, who would otherwise find it extremely difficult to get medical care without Obama’s Affordable Care Act. How dare they take medical care away from those Americans, who don’t really need it! He makes the point that this is the common Republican strategy of trying to get people to turn on each other, as they’ve done with immigration.

This time, however, it won’t work. Ill health affects everyone, regardless of their political affiliation, Republicans and Libertarians just as much as Democrats, Green Partiers or whoever. By sneering at people with these medical problems, Santorum also shows how much he despises that segment of the Republican party who have them.

Cousins then lays into Santorum’s own massive political incompetence. He’s repeatedly tried and failed to get the presidential nomination. Cousins makes the point that he’s a stupid man, who says whatever comes into his head, who has so far been fundamentally lucky, but thinks it’s due to his own cleverness. With heavy sarcasm Cousins ends the clip ‘Good luck with your political career, Mr Santorum. You’re going to need it.’

Santorum is indeed no stranger to controversy. A few years ago his vocal opposition to gay marriage resulting in outrage gays and their supporters taking their own bizarre revenge against him. The submitted his name to the Urban Dictionary as the name for a substance too crudely biological to be decently mentioned in a family website.

It would be easy to dismiss Santorum’s comments as another product of the weird mentality of the American Right, which has no relevance to us Brits. But his mindset isn’t confined to him by any means.

It’s also very much the attitude of the Tories and the Blairites in the Labour party.

Mike and the other left-wing bloggers have pointed out that welfare fraud only accounts for 0.7 per cent of benefit claims. But thanks to the Tories and their media collaborators, like the Daily Heil and the Scum, the general public believes that it’s far more than that, and that roughly a quarter of all claims are fraudulent. This is how the Tories get their support for cutting down ESA, PIP and continuing with the wretched health assessments by ATOS and now Maximus.

And speaking of the work capability assessment, let’s not let Blair and his coterie in the Labour party off the hook for introducing it. Blair introduced it based on advice from insurance fraudster Unum and its head, John Lo Cascio, based on a piece of scientifically invalid nonsense, that considers poor health to be largely determined by mental attitude. Critics of the conference in which New Labour formulated its introduction of the tests and took the advice of Unum and other private health insurance companies on its implementation have repeatedly pointed out that the policy assumes that a large number of benefit claims are simply malingering. Blair and his minions even stated this at the conference in so many words.

The result of this is that there has been a massive rise in hate crime against the disabled. Mike last week reported the case of a young man with learning difficulties, who was beaten to death by a couple of young thugs. They seem to have thought their victim was a paedophile, but Mike also points out how much of their hate was inspired by the constant demonization of the ill and disabled by the Tories and their media.

And then there’s the role of the tests in creating massive poverty in this country. Mike, Stilloaks, Johnny Void, the Angry Yorkshireman, Kitty S. Jones and many, many other left-wing bloggers have posted up the names of some of the hundreds of victims of the Work Capability Assessment, who have died of starvation, misery or despair after being thrown off benefit. There’s even a whole website devoted to criticising it and the harm it’s doing to the sick and disabled: Atos Miracles. As Mike reported, another poor woman ended her life this week, thanks to the same malignant policy.

Mike, and Jeff3, one of the commenters on this blog, have repeatedly asked the rhetorical question whether behind all this there is a deliberate eugenics programme to cleanse Britain of its disabled by stealth, just as the Nazis started murdering the congenitally ill in the infamous Aktion T4 during the Third Reich. It’s a good question. Thatcher’s mentor, Sir Keith Joseph, stirred up controversy in the 1970s when he claimed that single mothers were a threat to British genetic stock. If it wasn’t for the fact that he was Jewish, he would have fitted right in with the Nazi party.

Santorum’s stupid, bigoted comments about the long-term sick and disabled being ‘scammers’ aren’t the exception. They aren’t the peculiarly twisted view of some nutty American right-winger. They’re bog-standard across the transatlantic Right. You find them in the Tories, their Lib Dem enablers, the Blairites in the Labour Party, and screaming at you every day in the page of the Murdoch Press, the Heil, Express and other tabloids. And this is having an effect. They’re encouraging a government determined to deny people support even if, or especially if, it kills them.

If you accept Santorum’s comments, if you support the Republicans in their repeal of the Affordable Care Act, or support the Tories and Lib Dems over here, or hanker for the return of Blair or one of his cabinet of horrors to return to lead the Labour party, you are supporting this policy of bigotry, murder and death.