Foreign Interference in Elections: Is it Real or Just Political Noise?

Philip Giraldi

July 30, 2020

A recently concluded British Parliamentary inquiry has determined that Russia may have interfered in the 2016 Brexit referendum, which resulted in the departure of the United Kingdom from the European Union. But, ironically, it also concluded that Russia might not have interfered given the fact that the British government never bothered to try to find out if there had been any attempt made by the Kremlin to manipulate the voting.

The Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee is reportedly perplexed by the lack of official interest in what might have been a foreign intelligence operation that had major impact, all too plausible given that it is assumed that Moscow would have welcomed Brexit as a first step that will eventually put an end to European political and economic unity.

So, no one knows if Russia or anyone else interfered in Britain, which is perhaps just as well as inquiries into voting in the U.S. also in 2016 have likewise created nothing but confusion and no smoking pistol. And, of course there is a question of definitions of interference. Millions of pounds were spent on advertising by those pro- and con-Brexit, just as billions were spent in political adverts in the United States. Much of the “information” provided in that fashion was deliberately misleading, often fearmongering, both in the U.K. and the U.S., suggesting that the problem is much bigger than one country’s possible attempt to influence the vote, if that even took place.

There were similar claims about Russian generated fake news and “a massive hacking attack” in the French presidential election in 2017, while Germany’s Federal Election was notable for a lack of any identifiable Kremlin interference in spite of warnings from some observers that Berlin would be targeted.

So, while claims of Russian interference in elections are fairly common, they are difficult to prove in any serious way. And one should recognize that the “victimized” governments and political parties have strong motives to conjure up a foreign enemy to explain to the public why things are going wrong, be it for coronavirus fumbling or for general political ineptitude. To be sure, as the allure of blaming Russia has faded China is increasingly being targeted by American politicians as a scapegoat, indicating that there must always be a foreigner available to blame for one’s problems.

The most recent nugget to come out of the U.S. Congress on foreign interference in elections originates with Adam Schiff, the sly head of the House Intelligence Committee. In an interview with MSNBC, Schiff revealed that U.S. intelligence has obtained information suggesting multiple nations could be trying to meddle in the 2020 U.S. elections, to include feeding or “laundering” possible disinformation through Congress.

Schiff explained how various nations us different tactics to get “fake news” messages through to the American voters. Some governments openly support a particular candidate or policy, while others like the Chinese provide misinformation during their trade negotiations with Washington. He observed that “The Russians may get involved in hacking and dumping operations or social media campaigns. The Iranians may have their own tactics and techniques like the North Koreans may have theirs.”

A letter signed by Schiff, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and Senate Intelligence Committee ranking member Mark Warner, D-Va has asked for a counterintelligence briefing for Congress regarding foreign efforts to interfere in the upcoming election. It includes “We are gravely concerned, in particular, that Congress appears to be the target of a concerted foreign interference campaign, which seeks to launder and amplify disinformation in order to influence congressional activity, public debate, and the presidential election in November.”

Democratic Party presidential candidate presumptive Joe Biden also has confirmed that he has received briefings about Russian alleged plans to interfere in November saying “The Russians are still engaged in trying to delegitimize our electoral process. China and others are engaged as well in activities that are designed for us to lose confidence in the outcome.”

Of course, there are a number of things to say about the claims that other nations are possibly planning to meddle in the voting. First, the list of possible players being presented by Schiff and others is all too convenient, kind of like a Congressional dream list of bad boys. Russia pops up because of longstanding claims about it, but China is a new entry in the game because it all ties up into a neat package, including the “Wuhan virus” and its challenges both to American economic supremacy and to U.S. naval power in the South China Sea. And of course, there are Iran and also North Korea.

One should ask what exactly China, Iran and North Korea stand to gain by attempting to “interfere” in the election? What message could they possibly be sending and what would be the mechanisms they would use to get their points of view across to a skeptical American public? In a campaign that will undoubtedly cost hundreds of billions of dollars in advertising and other “messaging,” what exactly is the possible place of Iran and North Korea?

There is also a lack of “realism” in the Schiff comments. By far the country that interferes the most in U.S. politics is Israel. Israel and its domestic Lobby initiate legislation relating to the Middle East and Israeli diplomats, lobbyists and soldiers all have free access both to Capitol Hill and to the Pentagon. If a Congressman dares to speak up against the Jewish state’s crimes he or she is smeared in the media and eventually forced out of office by a well-funded pro-Israel opponent. No other country gets away with all that. As it is highly likely that Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will be pulling out all the stops to reelect Donald Trump in November, why isn’t the Jewish state included on Schiff’s list?

And then there is the tantalizing bit about concerns over disinformation being “laundered” through Congress. It is difficult to imagine what exactly Schiff is referring to as the corrupt gasbags in Congress already constitute one of the world’s biggest sources of false information, second only to the fully coopted U.S. mainstream media.

In any event, if some countries that are accustomed to being regularly targeted by the United States are taking advantage of an opportunity to somehow diminish America’s ability to meddle globally, no one should be surprised, but it is a politically driven fantasy to make the hysterical claim that the United States has now become the victim of some kind of vast multi-national conspiracy to interfere in its upcoming election.

Dershowitz on the Promotion of Jewish Values (precious)

FEBRUARY 08, 2020 BY GILAD ATZMON

In his desperate attempt to defame Bernie Sanders, the Harvard professor has identified the enemy within: “the worst people in terms of not promoting Jewish values.” Dershowitz was referring to Norman Finkelstein, Karl Marx, Noam Chomsky and Gilad Atzmon. I guess that most people would regard the company above as guardians of justice and humanism. Not exactly a quality that can be attributed to Dershowitz and his arch pedo-pal Jeffrey Epstein.

Sooner or later, the American people will have to figure out how did lame characters such as Dershowitz have managed to invade their Ivy League institutions…

Donate

British Election Heralds Collapse of United Kingdom

Finian Cunningham

December 16, 2019

Boris Johnson is entitled to crack open a few bottles of champagne after being re-elected prime minister, with his Conservative party winning a landslide majority. But when the celebrations are over, Britain is facing a thumping hangover – from the inescapable fact that half of the United Kingdom is now on an irrevocable path of separatism and independence.

Johnson has won a decisive mandate to “get Brexit done”, at least from London’s perspective. His party now has a substantial parliamentary majority of 80 seats in the House of Commons which will ensure delivery on his promise to execute Britain’s departure from the European Union on January 31. The actual final severance will take another year or two to complete because of negotiations between London and Brussels to definitively hammer out divorce terms. But at least Johnson can claim that he has consummated the final journey to leave the EU on January 31, a journey which began over three years ago when Britons had originally voted for Brexit in the 2016 referendum.

However, crucially, the Conservative government’s mandate for Brexit only applies to England and Wales. It was in these two countries that saw the significant swing of voters from the opposition Labour party to Johnson’s Tories. Thus, in effect, his parliamentary majority stems from voters in England and Wales.

By total contrast, in Scotland and Northern Ireland, the other two regions which make up the United Kingdom, the voters resoundingly rejected Johnson’s Brexit plans and voted for parties wanting to remain in the European Union. The outcome is consistent with the 2016 referendum results when Scotland and Northern Ireland both voted against Brexit.

Moreover, the latest election results have reinforced the call for independence in both Scotland and Northern Ireland.

The Scottish Nationalists swept the election to enhance their already existing majority. They now control nearly 90 per cent of all seats in Scotland. Party leader Nicola Sturgeon says there is an unquestionable mandate to hold a second referendum for Scottish independence. The previous independence referendum held in 2014 was defeated. But Scottish nationalists claim that popular support for their cause has surged since the Brexit referendum in 2016. The Scots, by and large, do not want to leave the EU. To remain in the EU therefore necessarily means separating from the United Kingdom and its central government in London.

Boris Johnson has so far rejected calls for holding a second Scottish independence referendum. But his position is untenable. Given the parliamentary numbers for separation stacking up in Scotland, he will have to relent. Nationalists there are demanding the holding of another plebiscite as early as next year.

In Northern Ireland, the election outcome is perhaps even more momentous. For the first time ever, nationalist parties have a majority over pro-British unionist parties. Mary Lou MacDonald, the leader of Sinn Fein, the main nationalist party, says that there is now a clear mandate for holding a referendum on the question of Northern Ireland leaving the United Kingdom. Given the breakthrough nationalist majority in the latest election, that would inevitably lead to a United Ireland, from the northern state joining with the existing southern state, the Republic of Ireland.

Nationalists in Northern Ireland have long-aspired for independence from Britain. Northern Ireland was created in 1921 from an audacious act of gerrymandering by the British government when it partitioned the island of Ireland into an independent southern state (which became the Republic of Ireland) and a small northern state (which became Northern Ireland). The latter remained under Britain’s jurisdiction. The arbitrary, imperialist act of partitioning Ireland was done in order to give the British authorities in London a mandate to rule over a portion of Irish territory because in newly created Northern Ireland the pro-British unionists were in a majority over nationalists. It was British establishment cynicism par excellence.

The present political structure of the United Kingdom of England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland is only a century old. (Before that, the UK included all of Irish territory, but London was forced to grant partial Irish independence due to an armed insurrection.)

In any case, nearly a century after the setting up of Northern Ireland the natural demographic changes in its population have now created a majority for nationalists. The outcome of the election on December 12 is an undeniably huge historic event. For the first time ever, the nationalist mandate has overcome the unionist vote. The historic violation by British gerrymandering against Irish nationalist rights to independence and self-determination has finally been reversed in terms of electoral ballot.

When the Northern Ireland peace deal known as the Good Friday Agreement was signed in 1998 to bring an end to nearly 30 years of armed conflict, enshrined in that treaty is the “principle of consent”. The British government is treaty-bound to abide by the electoral mandate of a majority in Northern Ireland wanting a United Ireland.

The threshold for triggering a referendum on Northern Ireland leaving British jurisdiction has now been reached. And nationalist parties are openly demanding that the legislative process to achieve that separation is now implemented.

Jonathan Powell, a seasoned British diplomat who oversaw the negotiations of the Good Friday Agreement, is not one for hyperbole. But in an interview with Matt Frei for Britain’s LBC Radio on December 14, Powell said he expected to see the “collapse of the United Kingdom” within the next decade, if not sooner. He was referring specifically to the electoral results in Scotland and Northern Ireland.

Boris Johnson’s seeming victory in the British election is a double-edged sword. He may claim to have a mandate to cut off ties with the European Union. But the results also mean Scotland and Northern Ireland are empowered to now cut off their ties with the rest of Britain. The separation of those two states, leaving behind England and Wales, spells the end of the so-called United Kingdom.

Johnson’s election success is not “unleashing great potential” as he claims. Rather, it is unleashing an existential constitutional crisis for the British establishment.

Finian CUNNINGHAM

Former editor and writer for major news media organizations. He has written extensively on international affairs, with articles published in several languages

Also by this Author

• Ukraine Peace Hostage to Washington’s Russophobia
• US Weaponizing Space in Bid to Launch Arms Race
• Netanyahu-Pompeo Meeting Solidifies War Plan on Iran
• Bolivian Coup and Indian Wars on Thanksgiving
• American Exceptionalism Driving World to War – John Pilger

See also

• Epstein’s Latest Victim: A British Royal in a Midlife Crisis Who Couldn’t Control His Urges
• Living Under the Spectre of Hyperinflation: 1923 Weimar and Today
• Carney’s Green Crypto Currency: Precursor to a Financial Meltdown
• No World for Statesmen
• Brexit Is a Symptom, Not the Problem
• The Tabloid Curse That Gave Britain Two World Wars, Boris Johnson and Brexit
• The Passion of Second Stringer Donald Tusk

The Most Dangerous Political Party in Europe

DECEMBER 16, 2019 BY GILAD ATZMON

By Gilad Atzmon

 The Brits cast their votes. They had a choice between Nationalist – hard capitalism and a socialist manifesto that promised a four day workweek, free broadband, free higher education, saving the NHS and equality ahead. The election results couldn’t be more definitive:

 When people are asked to choose between hard capitalism and socialism, capitalism wins.

 A lot can be said about the collapse of Labour and its leader. How is it possible that Corbyn, clearly a well meaning man, managed to get squashed by the pompous, not so nice, Boris Johnson?  How is it possible that the unruly Bojo crushed Britain’s socialist elder, the man who just three years ago appeared to be a rock star and the only hope for change? How is it possible that the British working class turned their backs on the man who promised to save their NHS, raise minimum wages and push for an equal and fairer society?

 The working class in Britain, as in most Western societies, is divided into three segments: The Working Working Class – they tend to vote Tory;  The Workless Class – they would have voted for the Brexit party but ended up voting Conservative and, finally; The Don’t Want to Work Class which happens to be what is left of Labour’s now illusory constituency. As it seems, even they failed to buy into Corbyn’s lengthy list of ‘free’ gifts.

 Brits may come to regret their electoral choice, possibly within the near future. Some already claim that the worst result of the election was that the Tories won, however, the best consequence of the vote is that the Labour Party has been shredded into infinitesimal particles of political dust. The Party, as we know it, may well be finished.  Yet, what many Brits, and Labour voters in particular, may not fully understand is that the election result saved them from the menace of the most insanely tyrannical political party in Europe.

 For the past three years the Labour Party has turned against its best and most valuable members: it suspended and expelled its own members for telling the truth. In some cases Labour even targeted private citizens, all in the hope that these acts would appease its detractors within the Jewish community’s leadership. I have kept relatively quiet about all this, I didn’t want to be the person who revealed the full extent of the authoritarian tactics undertaken by Corbyn’s Labour nor did I want any responsibility for Labour’s political demise: this job was left to Britain’s Jewish institutions, the Jewish Chronicle, the JLM, the Chief Rabbi, the BOD and the CAA  who have all viciously smeared Corbyn and on a daily basis since the day he was elected to lead the Party.

However, now that Labour has been humiliated and is allegedly ‘seeking reflection,’ this is the right time for me to expose the tyrannical horrors this sycophantic party inflicted on its members and supporters. And, as you may imagine, I have a personal story to tell.

 My readers will remember that last year, just before Christmas, the impoverished Islington Labour Council spent  £136.000 of its taxpayers’ money on Likud Party godfather Sheldon Adelson’s lawyer in its efforts to prevent me from playing in a Rock & Roll concert at one of their venues. Two weeks before Christmas, Labour politician and Islington Council leader Richard Watts shamelessly complied with a ‘request’ from the Herut/Likud UK chairman to bar my performance. This means that  a compromised Labour politician willingly acceded to a request made by a foreign political party, one described by prominent Jewish intellectuals such as Albert Einstein and Hanna Arendt as “akin to Nazi and Fascist parties.”

 It didn’t go very well for Islington’s Labour council. A Christmas miracle occurred at its venue last December when a saxophone playing Santa Claus took care of my musical duties with near perfection execution. News of the Islington scandal spread rapidly. Thousands of people wrote to the Labour council. Many others resigned from the party in protest. One would have expected that after this fiasco, the Labour party would get off my back, But instead, this collective of uniquely ungifted characters failed to draw the most obvious and necessary lessons.

Compromised Labour politicians continued with their desperate campaign to appease the Israel Lobby by repeatedly trying to damage my reputation and music career. In January another caricature of a Labour councillor stepped in. Labour’s parliamentary candidate, Rachel Eden who is listed on the Zionist We Believe in Israel, was desperate to cancel my concert at Reading Jazz Club. Eden met with a wall of resistance. She failed to cancel my concert although she was quite successful in exposing her own true loathsome face. I am delighted to report that Eden didn’t make it into the parliament this week.

 By the end of January I realised that I was facing a campaign orchestrated by Labour to destroy me and my work. A few days after the sold out Reading concert I received the following letter from a British promoter.

“Hi Gilad,

 Hope all is well with you despite the absurdities they keep throwing at you.

I have a choice of dates for you in January next year at the XXX,. I’ve been told that if we want to book you again it has to be discussed at (Labour) council level. I’m hoping the process will be smooth…but who knows with the Labour party these days?

 See you soon,

XXXXX”

 More evidence appeared that the Labour party was deliberately attempting to destroy my artistic career and harm my reputation with the goal of seriously damaging my ability to make a living.

 Things continued to escalate. Labour Party leaders may have been foolish enough to think that ‘destroying’ Atzmon would somehow vindicate Corbyn from the crimes he didn’t commit. By March Labour was waging an all out war against my music.  As the Nazi party did, so Labour launched open warfare against a jazz venue. This time the links led directly to Corbyn’s closest ring within the Labour party. Momentum together with Jewdas, the racially exclusive Jewish Voice for Labour (JVL) and Guardian Journalist Owen Jones joined forces in an attempt to mount pressure on the Vortex Jazz Club. When the club didn’t surrender, Labour’s local council, acting like the mob,  sent the police to bully the club. But even this desperate measure backfired. In its reasonable response, something unfamiliar to Labour politicians, the club requested that the police do their homework and find out who I was and what I stood for. The cops called the club a few hours later and apologised, admitting that there was nothing wrong with Atzmon.  They confirmed that there has never been a single unlawful activity attached to my name in Britain or anywhere else.

The fact that promoters and music lovers did not bow to Labour tyranny and continued booking me and coming to hear me play in every jazz venue and festival in the country should have delivered a message to the Labour leaders who pushed the anti-Atzmon war. Seemingly, the authoritarian collective, who aren’t even gifted at being authoritarian, decided upon a different  form of malevolence. They began to expel and suspend members for reading Atzmon. In some cases, they even reported their own members to the police for doing just that.

A few months ago a FB friend was suspended from the Labour Party in part because he shared articles by me and had even dared to communicate with me in the open. The Labour ‘dispute team’ accused my friend of sharing an article by me titled The Primacy of Jewish Genes. The article delved into Jewish scholarship and actually ridiculed the idea of ‘a Jewish gene,’ ‘Jewish biologism’ or a  ‘Jewish race.’

A few months after he was notified by the Labour dispute team of his suspension, the police were knocking on my FB friend’s door. The evidence the police presented of possible ‘hateful communication’ was literally identical to the Labour document. It is not clear whether the Labour party filed the police complaint against my friend or if documents were stolen from Labour and somehow triggered the police investigation. What is clear beyond doubt is that Corbyn’s Labour Party was compiling ‘incriminating’ evidence against its own members. The party has engaged in intensive surveillance of its own members, searching personal and intimate communications and digging into personal social media.

It doesn’t take a genius to understand why a party that displays such blatant disregard for elementary freedoms is not just unfit to govern. Corbyn’s Labour has been a horrendous, tyrannical Orwellian operation. Luckily, the Brits, and amongst them many Labour veterans, realised that Labour in its current authoritarian state presents an imminent threat to freedom. On election day, the Brits gave the party a fatal knockout.

I learned from my friend that the Police interrogation lasted for an entire afternoon and led to nothing, my friend is a genuine anti racist and there was nothing in his communications that even resembled hatred or any form of bigotry. At one point during the questioning, the policeman asked my friend about my article and my friend said he wondered what was wrong with it. The policeman’s answer was shocking albeit amusing. “We are also puzzled by it. We looked into it and found nothing wrong in this Atzmon guy, we thought maybe you could tell us.”

On 11 December, just one day before the general election, the press informed us that the police were probing anti Semitism within the Labour Party and had submitted an evidential file against five Labour members to the Crown Prosecution Service. It is unclear how these bundles of ‘evidence’ made it to the police in the first place, did the party report its members?  Some people believe that the files were stolen from the party by members who were even more morally compromised than their party. Either way it is clear that in compiling such files the party was acting against its members. And if this is how Labour treats its core members, try to imagine what this party could have done to its dissenters if it had been given the chance to form the government.

Three days before the election I learned about another former party member who had been permanently expelled from the party. Amongst her ‘thought crimes,’ she was accused of sharing my thoughts.

Item number one on her ‘draft charge’ from Labour was “posting an article by Gilad Atzmon that Israel runs the British Press.”

The article titled This is how Israel Runs the British Press was not an opinion piece, it was actually a leaked document that revealed the extent of Hasbara’s/Mossad’s/Sayanim’s operation in the UK. It explained how Israel and its agents manage to dominate news coverage in Britain and beyond. The leaked email revealed how BICOM (British Israel Communication & research Centre) runs the News desk for the BBC, Sky and the FT.

Corbyn’s Labour has been targeting its best members for most of the last three years and has used the most disgusting authoritarian tactics. It has intimidated activists, suspended and expelled people for truthful statements and pressured artists and venues. When some of these stories came out, a few ardent Labour supporters insisted that it was the Blairites and the Zionists in the Party who were behind this mess. They were either misled or are lying to themselves, the Corbynites were at least as bad as the others, they might well have been worse.  Foolishly, naively and wickedly, Momentum, the racially exclusive JVL and other compromised elements associated with Corbyn, thought that by targeting their comrades and yours attempting to destroy my career they could appease the Lobby and their detractors within the Jewish community. Obviously, they failed in their goal. What they achieved was the opposite. They exposed themselves for what they are: a bunch of tyrannical, compromised caricatures unfit to govern.

As of today, Corbyn is finished. The prospect of equality in the near future in Britain is gone. Corbyn, who didn’t miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity, can only blame himself for the disaster his presence in British politics inflicted on all of us and on the Left in particular. But Corbyn did not create this disaster alone, he surrounded himself with advisers who were at least as gullible and dysfunctional has he.

 We learned this week that Chris Williamson, the Labour MP who supported, for a few minutes, my right to make a living and then found himself back peddling in an attempt to survive the Lobby onslaught, garnered just 695 votes last Thursday.  Williamson’s political career is probably finished. Rachel Eden, the Labour MP candidate who tried to stop me from performing in Reading failed to make it into the parliament. I guess that fighting a jazz artist and an arts centre earned her some enemies within her own constituency. I, however, am still alive and kicking. My music and literary career is untouched. Despite the desperate attempts by Corbyn’s Labour to eradicate me on behalf of the Lobby, I publish my commentaries on a daily basis and I play music every night.  On election day, I played at the Oxford Jazz club, The room was sold out well in advance. At 22.10 as I started my second set, I played a requiem for Labour and Corbyn, I made the political dirge as respectful as I could.

What we saw in Britain last Thursday could be described as a populist coup against the Labour party except Labour wasn’t even in power. One may wonder how the socialist opposition party managed to make itself so reviled. It was not Corbyn’s zigzag over Brexit that made him hated, it is not the free gifts he vowed to spread if elected, it is not the nonsense labels of anti-Semitism stuck on him, these actually made him popular. It was his party’s tyrannical and authoritarian inclinations that made Labour’s core support run away.

To locate a Labour’s enclave use a magnifying glass,

Last Thursday Labour was practically wiped out and throughout the entire country. If you want to locate Labour ghettos on the map, you may need to use a magnifying glass. The Brits managed to save themselves from a dangerous bunch of ‘well meaning’  vindictive Orwellian characters. Labour has been severely punished by the Brits. From this point on, any authoritarian attempt by Labour to interfere with elementary human rights should be met with fierce resistance: exposed and denounced. I tend to believe that in order to save the Labour Party from its current rotten state, it had better be killed off first.

---

My battle for truth and freedom involves  some expensive legal services. I hope that you will consider committing to a monthly donation in whatever amount you can give. Regular contributions will enable me to avoid being pushed against a wall and to stay on top of the endless harassment by Zionist operators attempting to silence me.

Donate

Big Labour Brother

DECEMBER 15, 2019 BY GILAD ATZMON

By Eve Mykytyn*

During the run up to the recent election in Great Britain, Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party were accused, with almost unprecedented hysteria, of anti Semitism.  Mr. Corbyn is not anti Semitic, he has been a lifelong anti-racist advocate. Perhaps the histrionics in the press and pulpits were a reaction to the tepid support Corbyn has offered the Palestinians or were based on the likelihood of large tax increases under Corbyn’s socialist manifesto under which the taxpayers would fund, among other items, free universal education, free broadband and the investment of billions of pounds in hazily defined transportation and green energy funds.

Labour’s response to the unrelenting smear campaign  was not to defend itself as a body that protects the rights of all races and religions (as its own manifesto claims), but instead to viciously turn on its own members, ousting anyone whose views, however historically verifiable, political or simply observational, were denounced as anti Semitic by someone. Essentially, Labour treated an accusation of anti Semitism as its own a priori truth.

In April, a Labour Party member (here called “Ted”) received a letter from Jane Shaw, secretary of Labour’s Constitutional Committee, stating that the committee “has received a charge from the National Executive Committee…that you have breached Labour Party Rules.”

The alleged breach was conduct “prejudicial or grossly detrimental to the Labour Party,” which, it claims, must be inferred from what it labels “demonstrating hostility to the Jewish people” and “published comments on line which deny or question aspects of the Holocaust.”  In my opinion, the writings cited by Labour, although they touch on so-called Jewish issues, fail to substantiate Labour’s own accusations, nor have they run afoul of Britain’s strict hate speech laws. I wonder what might happen had Ted written that Africans as well as others participated in the slave trade? Would this be treated as a racist statement about Africans?  I ask, because I read of no such expulsions for racism from the Labour Party.

The Party’s letter dictates its Draconian rules for contesting its accusation. The committee will hold a hearing for which Ted is given the choice of three bad options:1.Ted can appear alone; 2. Ted may bring a “silent friend” who is a “current compliant member [of the Party],” and whose name he provides in advance. Ted may consult with his friend but the friend may not speak aloud to the Committee. (what is the possible rationale for this?) or; 3. Ted may request  “to be allowed be (sic) represented by either a lay or trade union representative, [who is also] a member of the Party or a [lawyer], who does not have to be a Labour Party member.

The only way Ted can use non-Labour aligned representation or support is for Ted to incur the expenses of hiring a lawyer. Of course, not every ‘accused’ member is articulate enough to represent himself before the committee nor rich enough to afford a lawyer. The Party’s letter emphatically states that its rules never allow reimbursement for expenses under any circumstances including if Ted is found innocent of all charges or even if the charges are found to have been based on fraudulent or malicious accusations.

The brief letter contains more outrageousness. It warns Ted that “It is vital to ensure fairness to you and other individuals, and to protect the rights of all concerned under the Data Protection Act 2018 that these proceedings are undertaken confidentially.”  But the Data Protection Act sets standards to protect individuals, such as Ted, from organizations that collect data, such as the Labour Party. See: Ted is entitled to do as he wishes with his own file, it is the Labour Party that has a duty of confidentiality.

What is the credibility of an organization that sends an accusatory letter demanding confidentiality based on a law intended to protect individuals from organizations such as itself? Is its ‘rule’ intended to protect Labour from the consequences of its own conduct?

Labour further asserts that it retains control over data Ted receives in the process of reviewing the serious and in my opinion, unfounded charges made against him. “[such data] remains under the control of the Labour Party and … should not be .. disseminated without prior permission from a Labour Party Officer.”  By what authority does Labour deny Ted the right to name his accusers? Without Ted’s knowledge or consent, the Labour Party examined his personal facebook and twitter chats to play “find the anti Semitism,” and has published their ‘findings’ to two separate Orwellian-titled “committees.” It is no surprise that the letter does not inform Ted of his reciprocal rights should a committee member publicly release information about him. There are good reasons why governments protect open trials, one of which is to discourage kangaroo courts like the one outlined in Labour’s letter.

The salient questions this letter raises are why any sane person would want to be a member of such a Party and why the Brits would choose (as they emphatically did not) to be under the leadership of a party whose standards for tolerance and justice are set by its own big brother. 

* source: https://www.evemykytyn.com/writing/2019/12/15/big-labour-brother

My battle for truth and freedom involves  some expensive legal and security services. I hope that you will consider committing to a monthly donation in whatever amount you can give. Regular contributions will enable me to avoid being pushed against a wall and to stay on top of the endless harassment by Zionist operators attempting to silence me.

Donate

 

Election Result Signals a Possible End of the United Kingdom

By Alan MacLeod

Source

On the face of it, Thursday’s election result could hardly have been better for Boris Johnson and his ruling Conservative Party. Campaigning on a simple slogan of “get Brexit done,” the Tories romped to victory, winning 365 of a total of 650 seats, easily enough for a comfortable majority government. In his victory speech, the Prime Minister claimed that he was humbled that the British public had put their trust in him, and promised to make it is mission to work night and day, flat out, to get Brexit done by January 31^st, “no ifs, no buts, no maybes.”

Even better, his rivals suffered huge defeats; after what he called a “very disappointing night for the Labour Party,” Jeremy Corbyn announced he was standing down after four years in charge. Meanwhile, Liberal Democrat leader Jo Swinson suffered the embarrassment of losing her East Dunbartonshire seat.

The results will be interpreted as a very clear mandate for Johnson to push forward in his plans for a quick departure from the European Union. And yet the irony is that it is precisely this insistence from many in the Conservative and Unionist Party, to give it its full name, that could lead to the breakup of the union, ending the United Kingdom forever. An October poll found that the majority of English Conservative voters would accept the fragmentation of the UK as a price for leaving the EU. Those voters may get their wish– and sooner than expected.

Scotland, who overwhelmingly voted to stay in the EU, gave the Scottish National Party (SNP) an enormous majority as the party won 47 of the country’s 59 seats on 45% of the total vote share, 12 more seats than it got in 2017. This is added to the 69 out of a possible 129 representatives in occupies in the local Scottish government, a remarkable achievement in a multi-party, proportional representation system.

The result is an undeniable mandate for a second independence referendum, the last on coming in 2014, where 45% of Scots voted to leave the union. Polls suggest that the majority will vote for independence this time. A key talking point from the anti-independence side was that the country could not be certain of staying in the EU if it left the UK, a trump card that has now turned to dust. Johnson has talked of blocking a second referendum, but SNP leader and First Minister of Scotland Nicola Sturgeon has suggested they might organize one anyway, without the backing of London, and as imminently as in a few months.

In England, the two unionist, pro-EU parties, Labour and the Liberal Democrats felt the ire of voters, leaving the political center rather vacant. Meanwhile, in Northern Ireland the strongly right-wing Protestant Democratic Unionist Party leader Nigel Dodds spectacularly lost his seat to Sinn Fein’s John Finucane. Finucane’s father was the victim of an infamous murder by loyalist paramilitaries. But Sinn Fein, a leftist party that stands for a united Ireland, has its own deep connections to the IRA. Since September, surveys have shown that a majority of Northern Irish also favor leaving the UK and unifying with the Republic of Ireland, which wrested its own independence from the UK in 1922 after a bitter armed struggle. The fact that Johnson is charging ahead with Brexit, which has much more profound consequences for Northern Ireland due to its land border with and deep connections to the EU member state to its south, will do nothing to reverse this trend.

For the first time in history, the north has elected a majority of Irish nationalist and republican politicians to the Westminster parliament, with Sinn Fein receiving 47% of the vote itself. Its leader Mary Lou McDonald claimed that the calls for a referendum on Irish unification were now “impossible to ignore.”

The underlying reason for the growing nationalist and separatist sentiment is the decades of neoliberal policies that have brought with it economic dislocation, austerity and a generalized discontent. Both real wages and living standards have been on a long, slow decline since the 1970s. This has been most apparent in the post-industrial north of England, not coincidentally the area with the strongest pro-Brexit sentiment. On the other hand, the populations of the ravaged cities of Glasgow and Belfast have had their energies channeled into a more progressive vision of independence.

It is precisely the Conservative Party who are most responsible for implementing the economic changes that have led to this situation. Ironic then, that they have been granted the dubious honor of pushing through a Brexit that will likely only make the problem worse. In his victory speech outside 10 Downing Street, Johnson described himself as a “one nation Conservative.” He may be ruling over a much smaller one very soon.

Someone Interfered in the UK Election, and It Wasn’t Russia

By Caitlin Johnstone

Global Research, December 14, 2019

CaitlinJohnstone.com 13 December 2019

Ladies and gentlemen I have here at my fingertips indisputable proof that egregious election meddling took place in the United Kingdom on Thursday.

Before you get all excited, no, it wasn’t the Russians. It wasn’t the Chinese, the Iranians, Cobra Command or the Legion of Doom. I’m not going to get any Rachel Maddow-sized paychecks for revealing this evidence to you, nor am I going to draw in millions of credulous viewers waiting with bated breath for a bombshell revelation of an international conspiracy that will invalidate the results of the election.

In fact, hardly anyone will even care.

Hardly anyone will care because this election interference has been happening right out in the open, and was perfectly legal. And nobody will suffer any consequences for it.

Rania Khalek

✔@RaniaKhalek

The centrists and mainstream media outlets are responsible for the right wing win in the UK. They spent all their time bashing and smearing Jeremy Corbyn bc they will always prioritize smashing the left, even if it means allying with the far right. Shameful.

5,339

4:18 AM – Dec 13, 2019

Twitter Ads info and privacy

1,734 people are talking about this

Nobody will suffer any consequences for interfering in the UK election because the ones doing the interfering were extremely powerful, and that’s who the system is built to serve.

As of this writing British exit polls are indicating a landslide victory for the Tories. Numerous other factors went into this result, including most notably a Labour Party ambivalently straddling an irreconcilable divide on the issue of Brexit, but it is also undeniable that the election was affected by a political smear campaign that was entirely unprecedented in scale and vitriol in the history of western democracy. This smear campaign was driven by billionaire-controlled media outlets, along with intelligence and military agencies, as well as state media like the BBC.

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has been described as the most smeared politician in history, and this is a fair description. Journalist Matt Kennard recently compiled documentation of dozens of incidentsin which former and current spooks and military officials collaborated with plutocratic media institutions to portray Corbyn as a threat to national security. Journalistic accountability advocates like Media Lens and Jonathan Cook have been working for years to compile evidence of the mass media’s attempts to paint Corbyn as everything from a terrorist sympathizer to a Communist to a Russian asset to an IRA supporter to a closet antisemite. Just the other day The Grayzone documented how establishment narrative manager Ben Nimmo was enlisted to unilaterally target Corbyn with a fact-free Russiagate-style conspiracy theory in the lead-up to the election, a psyop that was uncritically circulated by both right-wing outlets like The Telegraph as well as ostensibly “left”-wing outlets like The Guardian.

US and UK Military-Intelligence Apparatus Campaigns to Destroy Jeremy Corbyn

Just as Corbyn’s advocacy for the many over the plutocratic few saw him targeted by billionaire media outlets, his view of Palestinians as human beings saw him targeted by the imperialist Israel lobby as exposed in the Al Jazeera documentary The Lobby. For a mountain of links refuting the bogus antisemitism smear directed at Corbyn, a lifelong opponent of antisemitism, check out the deluge of responses to this query I made on Twitter the other day.

This interference continued right up into the day before the election, with the BBC’s political editor Laura Kuenssberg flagrantly violating election rules by reporting that early postal votes had been illegally tallied and results were “looking very grim for Labour”.

Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz

There was extreme election interference in the #UKElection. It didn’t come from the Russians. It didn’t come from the Chinese. It came from the billionaire class and its political/media lackeys. And it was perfectly legal.

3,804

2:23 AM – Dec 13, 2019

Twitter Ads info and privacy

1,462 people are talking about this

The historically unprecedented smear campaign that was directed at Corbyn from the right, the far-right, and from within his own party had an effect. Of course it did. If you say this today on social media you’ll get a ton of comments telling you you’re wrong, telling you every vote against Labour was exclusively due to the British people not wanting to live in a Marxist dystopia, telling you it was exclusively because of Brexit, totally denying any possibility that the years of deceitful mass media narrative management that British consciousness was pummelled with day in and day out prior to the election had any impact whatsoever upon its results.

Right. Sure guys. Persistent campaigns to deliberately manipulate people’s minds using mass media have no effect on their decisions at all. I guess that’s why that whole “advertising” fad never made any money.

I am not claiming here that the billions of dollars worth of free mass media reporting that was devoted to smearing Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party had a greater effect on the election results than Brexit and other strategic stumbles in the party. I’m just saying that it definitely had a much greater effect than the few thousand dollars Russian nationals spent on social media memes in the US, which the American political/media class has been relentlessly shrieking about for three years. To deny that a media smear campaign the size and scope of that directed at Corbyn had an effect is the same as denying that advertising, a trillion-dollar industry, has an effect.

Which means that plutocrats and government agencies indisputably interfered in the British election, to an exponentially greater extent than anything the Russians are even alleged to have done. Yet according to British law it was perfectly legal, and according to British society it was perfectly acceptable. It’s perfectly legal and acceptable for powerful individuals to have a vastly greater influence on a purportedly democratic election than any of the ordinary individuals voting in it.

A free and healthy society would not work this way. A free and healthy society would view all forms of manipulation as taboo and unacceptable. A free and healthy society would not allow the will of members of one small elite class to carry more weight than the will of anyone else. A free and healthy society would give everyone an equal voice at the table, and look after everyone’s concerns. It certainly wouldn’t tolerate a few individuals who already have far too much abusing their power and wealth to obtain even more.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Featured image is from the author

The original source of this article is CaitlinJohnstone.com

Copyright © Caitlin Johnstone, CaitlinJohnstone.com, 2019

Why the ‘Left’ is Dead in the Water (revisited)

Source

Introduction: Following his party’s catastrophic defeat, humiliated Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn announced this morning that he would discuss with the party its need for a ‘process of reflection’ and promised that he himself “will lead the party during this period to ensure this discussion takes place.”

I will not hold my breath waiting for Labour to overcome its most acute problems. As a first step toward a recovery I would advise Corbyn and his caricature party that instead of suspending and expelling party members for reading yours truly, instead of expelling MPs for supporting my right to make a living as musician, or spending hundreds of thousands of taxpayers money trying to appease a foreign ardent right wing Lobby., the Labour partly/hardly should instead make my work compulsory reading for its members and leadership.

In this commentary from February 2019 I explain why the Left is dead in the water and why Corbyn’s Labour is a symptom of the total disaster that is the contemporary Left.

Why the ‘Left’ is Dead in the Water

By Gilad Atzmon

28.2.19

It seems that there is not much left of the Left and what remains has nothing to do with ‘Left.’

 Contemporary  ‘Left’ politics is detached from its natural constituency, working people. The so called ‘Left’ is basically a symbolic identifier for ‘Guardian readers’  a critical expression attributed to middle class people who, for some reason, claim to know what is good for the working class. How did this happen to the Left? Why was it derailed and by whom?

 Hierarchy is one answer. The capitalist and the corporate worlds operate on an intensely hierarchical basis. The path to leadership within a bank, management of a globally trading company or even high command in the military is of an evolutionary nature. Such power is acquired by a challenging climb within an increasingly  demanding system. It is all about the survival of the fittest. Every step entails new challenges. Failure at any step could easily result in a setback or even a career end. In the old good days, the Left also operated on a hierarchical system. There was a long challenging path from the local workers’ union to the national party. But the Left is hierarchical no more.

 Left ideology, like working class politics, was initially the byproduct of the industrial revolution. It was born to address the needs and demands of a new emerging class; those who were working day and night to make other people richer.  In the old days, when Left was a meaningful adventure, Left politicians grew out of workers’ unions. Those who were distinguished in representing and improving the conditions of their fellow workers made it to the trade unions and eventually into the national parties. None of that exists anymore.

 In a world without manufacturing, the working class have been removed from the consumption chain and demoted into an ‘under class.’ The contemporary Left politician has nothing to do with the workless people let alone the workless class.  The unions are largely defunct.  You won’t find many Labour politicians who have actually worked in factories and mixed with working people for real. No contemporary Left politician including Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders is the product of a struggle through a highly demanding hierarchical system as such a system hasn’t really existed within the Left  for at least four decades.

In most cases, the contemporary Left politician is a middle class university activist groomed through party politics activity. Instead of fighting for manufacturing and jobs, the Left has embraced the highly divisive identitarian battle.  While the old Left tended to unite us by leading the fight against the horrid capitalists rather than worrying about  whether you were a man or a woman, black or white, Jew or Muslim, gay or hetero, our present-day ‘Left’ actually promotes racial differences and divisions as it pushes people to identify with their biology (skin colour, gender, sexual orientation, Jewish maternal gene etc.) If the old Left united us against the capitalists, the contemporary ‘Left’ divides us and uses the funds it collects from capitalist foundations such as George Soros’ Open Society Institute.

 The British Labour party is a prime example of this. It is deaf to the cry of the lower classes. It claims to care ‘for the many’ but in practice is only attentive to a few voices within the intrusive Israeli Lobby. As Britain is struggling with the crucial debate over Brexit, British Labour has been focused instead on spurious  allegations of ‘antisemitsm.’  It is hard to see how any Left political body in the West even plans to bring more work to the people. The Left offers nothing in the way of a vision of a better society for all.  It is impossible to find the Left within the contemporary ‘Left.’

 Why has this happened to the Left, why has it become irrelevant?  Because by now the Left is a non-hierarchical system. It is an amalgam of uniquely ungifted people who made politics into their ‘career.’ Most Left politicians have never worked at a proper job where money is exchanged for merit, achievements or results. The vast majority of Left politicians have never faced the economic  challenges associated with the experience of being adults. Tragically such people can’t lead a country, a city, a borough or even a village.

The Left had a mostly positive run for about 150 years. But its role has come to an end as the condition of being in the world has been radically transformed. The Left failed to adapt. It removed itself from the universal ethos.

The shift in our human landscape has created a desperate need for a new ethos: a fresh stand point that will reinstate the Western Athenian ethical and universal roots and produce a new canon that aspires for truth and truthfulness as opposed to the current cancerous tyranny of correctness.

---

My battle for truth and freedom involves  some expensive legal services. I hope that you will consider committing to a monthly donation in whatever amount you can give. Regular contributions will enable me to avoid being pushed against a wall and to stay on top of the endless harassment by Zionist operators attempting to silence me.

Donate

Why the UK Establishment Hates Jeremy Corbyn

By Johanna Ross

Global Research, December 08, 2019

He’s been termed a ‘national security risk’ and an ‘enemy of the state’ by the mainstream media. On Sky News recently former Conservative and Times columnist Matthew Parris referred to his ‘mad’ conspiracy theories as he discussed with other journalists the danger of him being elected to power. One might think they were discussing a terrorist or criminal, but instead it was none other than Jeremy Corbyn, leader of the opposition, whose only crime has been to speak out against the harmful aspects of Britain’s foreign policy in recent years. Against regime change wars, against arms sales to Saudi Arabia and a supporter of Palestine – Corbyn has openly contradicted the establishment position for decades. Why? Because, like most conscious individuals, he deemed it to be immoral.

You see the problem with Jeremy Corbyn is that he tells the truth. Lord Finkelstein, writing in The Times on Wednesday, wrote a piece designed to send shivers down the spine of Britain’s most ardent capitalists. ‘How Lenin inspired Corbyn’s world view’ it was entitled, as he tried to persuade the public that the Labour leader threatens everything the UK establishment stands for. He quotes from a 2011 foreword written by Corbyn to the book Imperialism, in which he wrote,

“Since World War Two, the big imperial force has been the United States on behalf of global capitalism and the biggest, mostly US-based corporations. The propaganda for this has presented itself as a voice for ‘freedom’ and carefully and consciously conflated it with market economics.”

He goes further to suggest that Soviet expansionism was different from that of the US:

“The influence of the Soviet Union around the world was huge, but tempered by an inadequate industrial base in comparison to the United States and the ruinously expensive arms race that hastened its decline, and eventual collapse in 1990. But the Soviet influence was always different, and its allies often acted quite independently.”

These ‘dangerous’ opinions are of course opposed by the establishment, whose very existence depends on a flourishing capitalist order.

The reason this subject has resurfaced of late is, of course, because of the 70th anniversary of NATO. This military alliance, consistently portrayed in the West as a force only for good in the world, has been criticised by Corbyn in the past for its ‘obsession with Cold War politics’ and for provoking Russia through its expansion into Eastern Europe.  Describing it as a ‘US tool’ for shaping policy in Europe, in his 2014 Corbyn article entitled ‘NATO belligerence endangers us all’ has dared to venture into territory that no other UK politician would dare go into. Suggesting that there were ‘huge questions surrounding the West’s intentions in Ukraine’, that NATO has been wrongly allowed ‘to act outside its own area since the Afghan war’ and that ‘it’s time we talked with Russia’ are statements strong enough to raise more than a few eyebrows in Westminster. Dismissed as crackpot conspiracy theories, there are very few mainstream journalists and commentators willing to tolerate such views for a second, let alone work out what they might mean.

The Plot to Keep Jeremy Corbyn Out of Power

Thankfully there are some who have been able to see past the propaganda that Corbyn is some kind of ‘Soviet sleeper’ and terrorist sympathiser intent on undermining national security and destroying Britain’s ‘special relationship’ with the US, and as such he has got to the position he is in.  For the reality is that Corbyn’s mantra is essentially based on one basic principle: promote peace not war. And that is something which unfortunately is a huge threat to weapons manufacturers, from which the UK made £14bn last year, making it the world’s second largest arms exporter.

Therefore the ‘deep state’, will do everything it can to persuade the British public that Jeremy Corbyn is our enemy. Former MI6 head, Sir Richard Dearlove, writing in the Mail on Sunday last month warned ‘do not even think about taking the risk of  handing this politician the keys of No.10’ as he boasted that neither Corbyn nor many of his close allies would have passed security vetting in order to join the agency. He asserted that Corbyn and his strategist, Seamus Milne, were ‘compromised by their past’ as they had ‘embraced the interests’ of Britain’s enemies. Dearlove, whose resilience has survived the criticism he faced over his role in the Iraq war, is still be listened to it seems. Indeed, his anti-Corbyn articles have featured regular in the mainstream press in recent years, along with several television interviews. And he is not the only former intelligence officer to have spoken out against Corbyn, despite the fact that the security services are supposed to remain neutral.

A recent article by Mark Kennard illustrates the extent to which this principle is being flouted. He writes “The stories — which quote former or current members of the army, navy and special forces, as well as MI5, MI6 and an ex-senior civil servant — have averaged one every six weeks since Jeremy Corbyn was elected leader of the Labour Party in September 2015. There have, however, been significant spikes in frequency during the 2017 and 2019 general election campaigns.” Kennard goes on suggest that intelligence officers have in fact provided journalists in the mainstream media with secret documents as part of what he terms a ‘campaign’. It’s not hard to agree that this is a strong possibility. In 2018 the government’s Integrity Initiative scheme – an intelligence operation involving journalists and academics, designed to counter ‘Russian propaganda’ – was exposed, and it was found to be openly tweeting against Corbyn. This was one of the first indications that the media campaign against Corbyn could be orchestrated. In a previous interview with Professor David Miller at the University of Bristol, he also told me of the ‘unconstitional animus’ towards the Labour leader which he said was operating in the same way as the Zinoviev case in 1924.

So the threat Corbyn poses is, in fact nothing new – we’ve been here before with previous potential socialist governments. With baited breath one awaits the result of next week’s election; for if indeed Jeremy Corbyn does gain the keys to No.10 Downing Street we can only imagine what turmoil the establishment will be in…

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

Johanna Ross is a journalist based in Edinburgh, Scotland.

The original source of this article is Global Research

Copyright © Johanna Ross, Global Research, 2019

Why the UK Establishment Hates Jeremy Corbyn

By Johann Ross

Source

He’s been termed a ‘national security risk’ and an ‘enemy of the state’ by the mainstream media. On Sky News recently former Conservative and Times columnist Matthew Parris referred to his ‘mad’ conspiracy theories as he discussed with other journalists the danger of him being elected to power. One might think they were discussing a terrorist or criminal, but instead it was none other than Jeremy Corbyn, leader of the opposition, whose only crime has been to speak out against the harmful aspects of Britain’s foreign policy in recent years. Against regime change wars, against arms sales to Saudi Arabia and a supporter of Palestine – Corbyn has openly contradicted the establishment position for decades. Why? Because, like most conscious individuals, he deemed it to be immoral.

You see the problem with Jeremy Corbyn is that he tells the truth. Lord Finkelstein, writing in The Times on Wednesday, wrote a piece designed to send shivers down the spine of Britain’s most ardent capitalists. ‘How Lenin inspired Corbyn’s world view’ it was entitled, as he tried to persuade the public that the Labour leader threatens everything the UK establishment stands for. He quotes from a 2011 foreword written by Corbyn to the book Imperialism, in which he wrote,

“Since World War Two, the big imperial force has been the United States on behalf of global capitalism and the biggest, mostly US-based corporations. The propaganda for this has presented itself as a voice for ‘freedom’ and carefully and consciously conflated it with market economics.” He goes further to suggest that Soviet expansionism was different from that of the US:

“The influence of the Soviet Union around the world was huge, but tempered by an inadequate industrial base in comparison to the United States and the ruinously expensive arms race that hastened its decline, and eventual collapse in 1990. But the Soviet influence was always different, and its allies often acted quite independently.”

These ‘dangerous’ opinions are of course opposed by the establishment, whose very existence depends on a flourishing capitalist order.

The reason this subject has resurfaced of late is, of course, because of the 70th anniversary of NATO. This military alliance, consistently portrayed in the West as a force only for good in the world, has been criticized by Corbyn in the past for its ‘obsession with Cold War politics’ and for provoking Russia through its expansion into Eastern Europe.  Describing it as a ‘US tool’ for shaping policy in Europe, in his 2014 Corbyn article entitled ‘NATO belligerence endangers us all’ has dared to venture into territory that no other UK politician would dare go into. Suggesting that there were ‘huge questions surrounding the West’s intentions in Ukraine’, that NATO has been wrongly allowed ‘to act outside its own area since the Afghan war’ and that ‘it’s time we talked with Russia’ are statements strong enough to raise more than a few eyebrows in Westminster. Dismissed as crackpot conspiracy theories, there are very few mainstream journalists and commentators willing to tolerate such views for a second, let alone work out what they might mean.

Thankfully there are some who have been able to see past the propaganda that Corbyn is some kind of ‘Soviet sleeper’ and terrorist sympathizer intent on undermining national security and destroying Britain’s ‘special relationship’ with the US, and as such he has got to the position he is in.  For the reality is that Corbyn’s mantra is essentially based on one basic principle: promote peace not war. And that is something which unfortunately is a huge threat to weapons manufacturers, from which the UK made £14bn last year, making it the world’s second largest arms exporter.

Therefore the ‘deep state’, will do everything it can to persuade the British public that Jeremy Corbyn is our enemy. Former MI6 head, Sir Richard Dearlove, writing in the Mail on Sunday last month warned ‘do not even think about taking the risk of handing this politician the keys of No.10’ as he boasted that neither Corbyn nor many of his close allies would have passed security vetting in order to join the agency. He asserted that Corbyn and his strategist, Seamus Milne, were ‘compromised by their past’ as they had ‘embraced the interests’ of Britain’s enemies. Dearlove, whose resilience has survived the criticism he faced over his role in the Iraq war, is still be listened to it seems. Indeed, his anti-Corbyn articles have featured regular in the mainstream press in recent years, along with several television interviews. And he is not the only former intelligence officer to have spoken out against Corbyn, despite the fact that the security services are supposed to remain neutral.

A recent article by Mark Kennard illustrates the extent to which this principle is being flouted. He writes “The stories — which quote former or current members of the army, navy and special forces, as well as MI5, MI6 and an ex-senior civil servant — have averaged one every six weeks since Jeremy Corbyn was elected leader of the Labour Party in September 2015. There have, however, been significant spikes in frequency during the 2017 and 2019 general election campaigns.” Kennard goes on suggest that intelligence officers have in fact provided journalists in the mainstream media with secret documents as part of what he terms a ‘campaign’. It’s not hard to agree that this is a strong possibility. In 2018 the government’s Integrity Initiative scheme – an intelligence operation involving journalists and academics, designed to counter ‘Russian propaganda’ – was exposed, and it was found to be openly tweeting against Corbyn. This was one of the first indications that the media campaign against Corbyn could be orchestrated. In a previous interview with Professor David Miller at the University of Bristol, he also told me of the ‘unconstitutional animus’ towards the Labour leader which he said was operating in the same way as the Zinoviev case in 1924.

So the threat Corbyn poses is, in fact, nothing new – we’ve been here before with previous potential socialist governments. With baited breath one awaits the result of next week’s election; for if indeed Jeremy Corbyn does gain the keys to No.10 Downing Street we can only imagine what turmoil the establishment will be in…

The London Bridge Attack and Other British False Flags

By Gavin O’ Reilly

Source

Following last Friday’s Salafist-inspired knife attack in the British capital which left two bystanders dead, onlookers were no doubt reminded of a similar attack which had occurred two years previously in June 2017; this one also taking place on London Bridge, where three Wahhabi terrorists rammed pedestrians on the bridge with a van – killing two bystanders – before exiting the vehicle and going on to murder a further six civilians in an ensuing knife rampage, only ending when the trio were shot dead by armed police.

Less than two weeks prior to this initial London Bridge attack, the Manchester Arena bombing also occurred; where Salman Abedi, a terrorist previously trained by MI6 to depose Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi during the 2011 US-Anglo-backed regime change project in the North African country, detonated a suicide vest at an Ariana Grande concert mainly attended by young children, resulting in the deaths of 22 people.

Although differing in scale, each of these three attacks bore certain hallmarks – in all three incidents the attackers were previously known to British intelligence, each attack would subsequently be claimed by ISIS via the organization’s Amaq News Agency, and most tellingly of all, all three attacks occurred less than two weeks prior to a British General election.

This timing, which cannot be described as anything less than suspicious, would suggest to those among us with a knowledge of the previous actions of British intelligence that these attacks were allowed to occur in a bid to give strength to Conservative supporters’ favored ‘Corbyn is soft on terrorism’ criticism of the Labour Party – an ironic position considering that although previous Labour governments have engaged in equally Imperialist endeavors as their Tory counterparts, it has been under Conservative governments in which the British state has most strengthened its ties with Wahhabi terrorist groups, from Margaret Thatcher arming and training the Afghan Mujahideen during the 1980s, to the contemporary governments of David Cameron and Theresa May carrying out the same actions in Libya and Syria over the past decade.

In 1998, following more than a decade and a half of infiltration by British agents at its highest level, the once-revolutionary Provisional IRA had signed a surrender agreement with Westminster and put an end to perhaps the most effective guerrilla campaign of the 20^th century – the 30-year long conflict to end British occupation in the North of Ireland.

Though many of the Irish Republican grassroots base had been taken in by the lie that the Good Friday Agreement would lead to a British withdrawal from Ireland – something that has not yet come to fruition more than twenty years after its signing – a sizeable amount had long since seen the direction that the Provisional leadership was taking, leaving the Provisional movement to continue the original Republican goal of a 32-county Socialist Republic.

In August 1998, a number of these Republicans planned to bomb a British courthouse in the town of Omagh, occupied Ireland; intended purely as symbolic act to remove an icon of British imperialism, three telephoned warnings were called in prior to the attack to ensure no human life would be lost during the explosion.

In what can only be described as a tragic turn of events, however, 31 civilians would lose their lives in this attack, leading to the Real IRA issuing an immediate apology and temporarily halting military operations in the occupied six counties.

Rather than this tragic loss of life being purely down to miscommunications between the Real IRA and emergency services during the telephoned warnings, however, it would later emerge that British intelligence alongside their counterparts in the southern Irish state had advance knowledge of the Omagh bomb months in advance.

However, rather than trying to halt the attack, or merely allowing an evacuated courthouse to be destroyed instead, the British state instead used the tragic loss of civilian life as a propaganda coup to portray Irish Republicans as ‘terrorists’ and the copper-fastening of British rule in occupied Ireland, under the guise of a ‘peace’ process, as a progressive move – another perfect example of a British false flag.

Reopening Auschwitz – The Conspiracy to Stop Corbyn

By Media Lens

Global Research, December 06, 2019

Media Lens 3 December 2019

Thoreau got it right: ‘Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.’ (Thoreau, ‘Walden’, Penguin, 1983, p.68)

The same is certainly true of propaganda. We can laugh now at McCarthyite paranoia warning of Soviet tentacles threatening every aspect of Western life during the Cold War. In the 1940s and 1950s, Hollywood produced dozens of anti-communist films with titles like ‘I Married A Communist’ and ‘I Was A Communist For The FBI’. Large-circulation magazines were titled, ‘Communists Are After Your Child.’ Even children’s comics declared:

‘Beware, commies, spies, traitors, and foreign agents! Captain America, with all loyal, free men behind him, is looking for you.’ (Quoted, Howard Zinn, ‘A People’s History of the United States,’ Harper Colophon, 1990, p.428)

We can guess how future generations will view the current propaganda blitz depicting Jeremy Corbyn as a threat to Britain’s Jews. Not since 2002-2003, when sanctions-stricken Iraq, willing to allow months of no-notice UN weapons inspections, was said to be a ‘clear and present danger’ to the nuclear-packing US-UK, has the truth been so completely and shamefully distorted.

The level of madness is breathtaking, even by ‘mainstream’ standards. In July, the Sunday Telegraph columnist Simon Heffer claimed on LBC radio that Corbyn ‘wants to reopen Auschwitz’. When the interviewer responded that it was completely unacceptable to suggest that Corbyn was capable of such a thing, Heffer replied:

‘I’m sure, in 1933, they had similar conversations in Germany: “the Fuehrer’s never going to do that”.’

Jeremy Hunt, then Foreign Secretary, commented in July:

‘When I went to Auschwitz I rather complacently said to myself, “thank goodness we don’t have to worry about that kind of thing happening in the UK” and now I find myself faced with the leader of the Labour Party who has opened the door to antisemitism in a way that is truly frightening.’

Noam Chomsky summed up the shameful nature of these remarks:

‘The way charges of anti-Semitism are being used in Britain to undermine the Corbyn-led Labour Party is not only a disgrace, but also – to put it simply – an insult to the memory of the victims of the Holocaust…’.

In the i newspaper, former Independent editor Simon Kelner focused on the way Corbyn had ‘mispronounced’ the name of the sexual criminal Jeffrey Epstein, Prince Andrew’s former friend, in a TV debate: ‘He called him “Ep–Schtine”,’ Kelner noted.

Along with ITV political editor Robert Peston (see below), Kelner did not only dispense with the usual affectation of journalistic impartiality, he emphasised his subjectivity in lending weight to an attack on Corbyn:

‘My reaction was a visceral one: it’s not something I can explain easily, or even rationally, but a Jewish person does know when there is something that sounds wrong, or perjorative [sic], or even threatening. It was as if he was saying: “Are you aware this man is Jewish?”’

The idea, then, is that Corbyn – who has been subjected to relentless, highly damaging attacks on this issue for years, and who has done everything he can to distance himself from anti-semitism, taking a very tough line on the suspension of allies like Ken Livingstone and Chris Williamson from the Labour Party – was emphasising Epstein’s Jewishness in a deliberate – or, worse – unconscious effort to smear Jews. Of course, only a truly crazed racist would be unable to resist such a patently self-destructive impulse on national TV. And yet, the outgoing Speaker of the House of Commons, former Conservative MP, John Bercow, who is Jewish, said during an interview with British GQ magazine last month:

‘I myself have never experienced anti-semitism from a member of the Labour Party, point one. And point two, though there is a big issue and it has to be addressed, I do not myself believe Jeremy Corbyn is anti-semitic.

‘I’ve known him for the 22 years I’ve been in Parliament. Even, actually, when I was a right-winger we got on pretty well… I’ve never detected so much as a whiff of anti-semitism [from him].’

Our search of the ProQuest media database found no mention of Bercow’s comment in any UK national newspaper.

Remarkably, in July 2018, The Jewish Chronicle, Jewish News and Jewish Telegraph produced similar front pages and a joint editorial warning against ‘the existential threat to Jewish life in this country that would be posed by a Jeremy Corbyn-led government’.

Gideon Levy, an Israeli journalist and author who writes a weekly column for Israel’s Haaretz newspaper, commented on the smears last week:

‘The Jewish establishment in Britain and the Israeli propaganda machine have taken out a contract on the leader of the British Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn. The contract was taken out a long time ago, and it was clear that the closer Corbyn came to being elected prime minister, the harsher the conflict would get.’

This echoed the view of Professor Norman Finkelstein, whose mother survived the Warsaw Ghetto and the Majdanek concentration camp, and whose father was a survivor of both the Warsaw Ghetto and the Auschwitz concentration camp. Finkelstein said:

‘If Corbyn loses, a lot of people in the Labour Party are going to blame it on those Jews who fabricated this whole anti-semitism witch-hunt hysteria. And that will be a problem, which… you know what the bigger problem there is? It’s true! Jews were the spearhead of this campaign to stop Corbyn. And so, there’s going to be a lot of anger within the Labour Party – that’s not anti-semitism, that’s factually based.’

Finkelstein added:

‘The British elites could not have gotten away with calling Corbyn an anti-semite unless they had the support, the visible support, of all the leading Jewish organisations. You have to remember that during the summer, all three major British publications, for the first time in British Jewish history, they all took out a common editorial denouncing Corbyn as an anti-semite and saying that we’re now standing on the verge of another Holocaust. They are the enablers of this concerted conspiracy by the whole of British elite society to destroy Jeremy Corbyn.’

As Levy observed, the campaign reached its climax in an article last week in The Times by Britain’s chief rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis. Mirvis suggested that Corbyn should be ‘considered unfit for office’, adding:

‘I ask every person to vote with their conscience. Be in no doubt, the very soul of our nation is at stake.’

ITV’s political editor Robert Peston tweeted:

‘The Chief Rabbi’s intervention in the general election is without precedent. I find it heartbreaking, as a Jew, that the rabbi who by convention is seen as the figurehead of the Jewish community, feels compelled to write this about Labour and its leader. I am not… making any kind of political statement here.’

We responded:

‘What kind of journalistic neutrality is it for ITV’s political editor to use the fact that he is Jewish to support as sincere and even “heartbreaking” a bitterly disputed claim attacking the Labour Party in this way? In what universe is this impartial, objective journalism?’

The BBC’s political editor Laura Kuenssberg tweeted on the chief rabbi’s criticism an astonishing 23 times in 24 hours. Kuenssberg retweeted the following comment (screenshot here) from chat show host Piers Morgan in response to Labour shadow international development secretary Barry Gardiner’s refusal to field further questions on anti-semitism:

‘Wow. The breathtaking arrogance of this chump telling journalists what questions to ask. They should all ignore him & pummel Corbyn about anti-Semitism.’

Kuenssberg later apparently deleted this retweet.

Small glimpses of sanity were occasionally visible on social media. Glen Oglaza, former senior reporter at ITN and ex-political correspondent for Sky News, commented:

‘Don’t want to get involved in the #Labour #anti-semitism row, but worth pointing out that the #ChiefRabbi is a lifelong Conservative supporter and, in his own words, a “lifelong friend of Boris Johnson” Nuff said’

It was indeed ‘nuff said’. But, in fact, it was almost never said by corporate journalists.

Glenn Greenwald of The Intercept was typically forthright in responding to Mirvis:

‘This is utter bullshit.

‘The British Conservative Party is rife with anti-semitism, while there’s no evidence Corbyn is.

‘If you want the Tories to win, just say so. It’s incredibly dangerous to keep exploiting anti-semitism for naked political and ideological ends like this’

In 2014, during ‘Operation Protective Edge’ – the Israeli attack on Gaza in which 2,251 Palestinians were killed, including 299 women and 551 children – Mirvis wrote:

‘There is no “cycle of violence” in Gaza. There is Hamas trying to annihilate Israel, and Israel trying to defend itself…’

With hundreds of civilians lying dead, he added:

‘Israel has no desire to kill or injure civilians in Gaza. They are potential partners in peace whose death only serves the interests of Hamas’s PR war.’

And:

‘To measure the morality of war by the military might of each party, the number of deaths or the amount of suffering on each side is not merely misguided; it plays into the hands of a ruthless and calculating aggressor.’

Levy commented on Mirvis’s smear:

‘As opposed to the horrid Corbyn, Mirvis sees nothing wrong with the continued occupation; he does not identify with the struggle for Palestinian freedom, and he doesn’t sense the similarity between the South Africa of his childhood, Har Etzion of his youth and Israel of 2019. That is the real reason that he rejects Corbyn. The Jews of Britain also want a prime minister who supports Israel – that is, supports the occupation. A prime minister who is critical of Israel is to them an exemplar of the new anti-Semitism.’

In contrast to the blanket coverage of the chief rabbi’s comments – it was the lead story on the BBC News website for half a day – there was only token notice given to the Muslim Council of Britain’s warning of ‘denial, dismissal and deceit’ of ‘endemic, institutional’ Islamophobia within the Conservative Party.

There was also virtual BBC silence in response to the blistering attack on Boris Johnson’s racial slurs by Stormzy, the British rap artist who was a huge success at this year’s Glastonbury Festival. In an Instagram post that has been ‘liked’ almost 300,000 times, Stormzy noted:

‘I think Boris Johnson is a sinister man with a long record of lying and policies that have absolutely no regard for the people that our government should be committed to helping and empowering. I also believe it is criminally dangerous to give the most powerful role in the country to a man who has said that the sight of a “bunch of black kids” makes him “turn a hair”, compared women in burqas to letterboxes and referred to blacks [sic] people as “picaninnies” with “watermelon smiles”. I think it’s extremely dangerous to have a man with those views as the sole leader of our country.’

He added:

‘I will be voting for Jeremy Corbyn… for me, he is the first man in a position of power who is committed to giving the power back to the people and helping those who need a helping hand from the government the most.’

A commenter said (forwarded to us via email, 27 November 2019):

‘I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but the BBC are seriously compromised in this election.

‘Yesterday, arguably *the* most influential black person in the UK, Stormzy, launched a blistering attack on Johnson, calling him “sinister” and deploring his history of racism. This has been shared tens of thousands of times on social media. In the same post, he applauded Jeremy Corbyn as a figure of trust.

‘The BBC have not covered this at all.’

In a letter to the Guardian, Professor Des Freedman of Goldsmiths, University of London, commented:

‘Rigorous academic research shows that, in the first three weeks of the election campaign, coverage of Labour in the press has been overwhelmingly negative, with the Conservatives receiving consistently positive coverage… The most powerful sections of the UK media are simply not prepared to let citizens freely make up their own minds on Labour policies, nor to scrutinise Conservative claims systematically.’

The Plot to Keep Jeremy Corbyn Out of Power

The Evidence – The Real Threat To Human Life

Our ProQuest database search of newspaper articles for ‘Corbyn’ and ‘anti-semitism’ shows how intensively the issue has been used to attack Corbyn prior to the looming election on December 12:

September = 337 hits

October = 222 hits

November  = 1,620 hits

While opinions in effect declaring Corbyn a Nazi are widely reported, opinions defending Corbyn by the likes of John Bercow, Gideon Levy, Norman Finkelstein, Glenn Greenwald, Noam Chomsky, Jonathan Cook, Michael Rosen and others reach a comparatively small audience on social media but are simply ignored by the establishment press reaching millions.

Exactly mirroring the fake claims justifying the 2003 Iraq war – also universally presented as serious and fact-based – it turns out that claims of an epidemic of anti-semitism within the Labour Party are completely bogus. Israel-based former Guardian journalist Jonathan Cook summarised a recent survey published in The Economist:

‘It showed that those identifying as “very left-wing” – the section of the public that supports Corbyn – were among the least likely to express antisemitic attitudes. Those identifying as “very right-wing”, on the other hand – those likely to support Boris “piccaninnies” Johnson – were three and a half times more likely to express hostile attitudes towards Jews. Other surveys show even worse racism among Conservatives towards more obviously non-white minorities, such as Muslims and black people. That, after all, is the very reason Boris “letterbox-looking Muslim women” Johnson now heads the Tory party.’

Other surveys have strongly supported these conclusions, including an October 2016 reportby the Commons home affairs committee and a September 2017 report by the Institute for Jewish Policy Research and a Labour Party report discussed here in February 2019.

In 2002-2003, credible evidence from former UN weapons inspectors arguing that Iraq had been ‘fundamentally disarmed’ of 90-95% of its weapons of mass destruction by December 1998 was almost completely ignored by the corporate press – it just didn’t fit the establishment narrative. The same is true of the above highly credible and consistent reports – they are simply not part of the discussion.

If we are serious about offering a moral calculus, then we should, of course, include the fact that Johnson would certainly support Trump in any future racist wars against Iran, Venezuela, or North Korea, whereas Corbyn would not. Does it matter to journalists, to the public, that we might elect a leader who would make it more difficult for the US to kill, injure and displace hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of people? How does that concern rank alongside Brexit, the fact that Johnson is a jovial fellow, or the fake claims of anti-semitism? We need only glance at Johnson’s track-record for evidence of the threat.

Since November 1, ProQuest finds 24 newspaper mentions containing the words ‘Boris Johnson’ and ‘Yemen’. Only one of them, in the Independent, focused on Johnson’s destructive role in the conflict:

‘The government has signed off nearly £2bn worth of arms sales to repressive regimes in the two years since the 2017 election, official figures show.’

These regimes include Saudi Arabia, ‘which has been widely condemned by the international community for its offensive in Yemen’ and ‘benefited from £719m in UK licences for bombs, missiles, fighter jets, sniper rifles, ammunition’.

Andrew Smith of Campaign Against Arms Trade said:

‘As foreign secretary, Boris Johnson played a central role in supporting the terrible Saudi-led bombardment of Yemen, which has created the worst humanitarian crisis in the world. Tens of thousands of people have been killed, but the arms companies only see it as a business opportunity.’

In 2017, defending the US-UK destruction of Libya in 2011, Johnson crassly commented that the Libyan city Sirte could be the new Dubai, adding, ‘all they have to do is clear the dead bodies away’. Johnson also voted for the devastating 2003 Iraq war.

By contrast, The Times reported:

‘Labour is pledging to put human rights and international law at the heart of foreign policy, in keeping with one of Jeremy Corbyn’s longest held passions. As well as attacking “failed military interventions”, the manifesto promises a War Powers Act to give parliament a legal veto on military action.’

And:

‘Arms sales to Saudi Arabia would be suspended immediately after criticism of the country’s role in the civil war in Yemen.’

But even these horrors are trivial – we don’t use the word lightly – compared to Johnson’s Trump-like stance on climate collapse. Johnson, a notorious climate denier, has ‘Almost always voted against measures to prevent climate change.’ In 2015, Johnson wrote an article in the Telegraph titled: ‘I can’t stand this December heat, but it has nothing to do with global warming’. Johnson endorsed the completely discredited view that ‘it is all about sun spots’.

The reality is very different. Professor Tim Lenton at the University of Exeter, lead author of a recent article in Nature warning of ‘existential threat to civilisation’, said last week:

‘We might already have crossed the threshold for a cascade of interrelated tipping points. The simple version is the schoolkids [striking for climate action] are right: we are seeing potentially irreversible changes in the climate system under way, or very close.’

Phil Williamson at the University of East Anglia, concurred:

‘The prognosis by Tim Lenton and colleagues is, unfortunately, fully plausible: that we might have already lost control of the Earth’s climate.’

Most recently, Johnson refused even to participate in a Channel 4 leaders’ debate on climate change, instead sending his father and MP Michael Gove, who were turned away. BBC political editor Laura Kuenssberg tweeted a defence and a humorous discussion on this no-show, but no criticism. We can only wonder at her response, and that of the rest of the establishment press, if Corbyn had refused to participate in a debate on a key area of vulnerability, instead sending his dad.

If we can see beyond the propaganda, it is quite obvious that it is Johnson who offers, and who has already offered, a very serious threat to human life, not Corbyn. Voting for Johnson will likely have deadly consequences, not just for the traditional victims of US-UK firepower, but for all of us as the last hopes of averting climate collapse rapidly slip away.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

The original source of this article is Media Lens

Copyright © Media Lens, Media Lens, 2019

Britain’s Chief Rabbi Mirvis Is Helping to Stoke Antisemitism against Corbyn

By Jonathan Cook

Source

Chief rabbi Ephraim Mirvis has not only misrepresented the known facts about Labour and its supposed antisemitism crisis. He has not only interfered in an overtly, politically partisan manner in the December 12 election campaign by suggesting that Jeremy Corbyn – against all evidence – is an antisemite.

By speaking out as the voice of British Jews – a false claim he has allowed the UK media to promote – his unprecedented meddling in the election of Britain’s next leader has actually made the wider Jewish community in the UK much less safe. Mirvis is contributing to the very antisemitism he says he wants to eradicate.

Mirvis’ intervention in the election campaign makes sense only if he believes in one of two highly improbable scenarios.

The first requires several demonstrably untrue things to be true. It needs for Corbyn to be a proven antisemite – and not just of the variety that occasionally or accidentally lets slip an antisemitic trope or is susceptible to the unthinking prejudice most of us occasionally display, including (as we shall see) Rabbi Mirvis.

No, for Mirvis to have interfered in the election campaign he would need to believe that Corbyn intends actively as prime minister to inflame a wider antisemitism in British society or implement policies designed to harm the Jewish community. And in addition, the chief rabbi would have to believe that Corbyn presides over a Labour party that will willingly indulge race-hate speeches or stand by impassively as Corbyn carries out racist policies.

If Mirvis really believes any of that, I have a bridge to sell him. Corbyn has spent his entire political career as an anti-racism campaigner, and his anti-racism activism as a backbencher was especially prominent inside a party that itself has traditionally taken the political lead in tackling racism.

Rising tide of nationalism

The second possibility is that Mirvis doesn’t really believe that Corbyn is a Goebbels in the making. But if that is so, then his decision to intercede in the election campaign to influence British voters must be based on an equally fanciful notion: that there is no significant threat posed by antisemitism from the right or the rapidly emerging far right.

Because if antisemitism is not an issue on the right – the same nationalistic right that has persecuted Jews throughout modern history, culminating in the Nazi atrocities – then Mirvis may feel he can risk playing politics in the name of the Jewish community without serious consequence.

If there is no perceptible populist tide of white nationalism sweeping Europe and the globe, one that hates immigrants and minorities, then making a fuss about Corbyn might seem to make sense for a prominent Jewish community leader. In those circumstances, it might appear to be worth disrupting the national conversation to highlight the fact that Corbyn once sat with Hamas politicians – just as Tony Blair once sat with Sinn Fein leaders – and that Corbyn’s party has promised in the latest manifesto to stop selling weapons to Israel (and Saudi Arabia) of the kind that have been used to butcher children in Gaza. Mirvis might believe that by wounding Corbyn he can help into power a supposedly benevolent, or at least inoffensive, Tory party.

Chief Rabbi Mirvis

✔@chiefrabbi

CR: “I am delighted to congratulate Boris Johnson on becoming the next leader of the Conservative Party & our next PM. May he be blessed with the wisdom to successfully navigate the political uncertainties we face & bring healing & prosperity to our great country.”

But if he is wrong about the re-emergence of a white nationalism and its growing entry into the mainstream – and all the evidence suggests he would be deeply wrong, if this is what he thinks – then undermining Corbyn and the Labour party is self-destructiveness of the first order.

It would amount to self-harm not only because attacking Corbyn inevitably strengthens the electoral chances of Boris “watermelon smiles” Johnson. It plays with fire because Mirvis’ flagrant intervention in the election campaign actually bolsters a key part of the antisemitic discourse of the far right that is rapidly making inroads into the Conservative party.

Succour to white nationalists

White nationalists are all over social media warning of supposed Jewish global conspiracies, of supposed Jewish control of the media, of supposed Jewish subversion of “white rights”. It was precisely this kind of thinking that drove European politics a century ago. It was arch-antisemite Arthur Balfour who signed off the Balfour Declaration of 1917 that sought to end Britain’s “Jewish problem” by encouraging European Jews to move far away, to a part of the Middle East then known as Palestine.

That is, of course, why today’s white supremacists love Israel, why they see it as a model, why they call themselves “white Zionists“. In creating a tribal democracy, and one heavily fortified, land hungry, belligerent and nuclear-armed, Israel has done for Jews exactly what white nationalists hope to do again for their white compatriots. The white supremacists’ love of Israel is intimately bound up with their hatred and fear of Jews.

Mirvis has given succour to white nationalist discourse both because he has spoken out against Corbyn without offering evidence for his claims and because those entirely unsubstantiated claims have been echoed across the media.

There is good reason why the billionaire-owned print media and the Establishment-dominated BBC are happy to exploit the antisemitism smears – and it has nothing to do with concern for the safety of Jews. The corporate media don’t want a Labour leader in power who is going to roll back the corporate free-for-all unleashed by Margaret Thatcher 40 years ago that nearly bankrupted the rest of us in 2008.

But that is not what those flirting with or embracing white nationalism will take away from the relentless media chorus over evidence-free antisemitism claims.

Mirvis’ intervention in the democratic process will drive them more quickly and more deeply into the arms of the far-right. It will persuade them once again that “the Jews” are a “problem”. They will conclude that – though the Jews are now helping the right by destroying Corbyn – once the left has been dealt with, those same Jews will then subvert their white state. Like Balfour before them, they will start thinking of how to rid Britain and Europe of these supposed interlopers.

This is why Mirvis was irresponsible in the extreme for meddling. Because the standard of proof required before making such an intervention – proof either that Cobyn is an outright Jew hater, or that white nationalism is no threat to the UK – is not even close to being met.

The left’s anti-imperialism

In fact much worse, all the evidence shows the exact reverse. That was neatly summed up in a survey this month published by The Economist, a weekly magazine that is no friend to Corbyn or the Labour party.

It showed that those identifying as “very left-wing” – the section of the public that supports Corbyn – were among the least likely to express antisemitic attitudes. Those identifying as “very right-wing”, on the other hand – those likely to support Boris “piccaninnies” Johnson – were three and a half times more likely to express hostile attitudes towards Jews. Other surveys show even worse racism among Conservatives towards more obviously non-white minorities, such as Muslims and black people. That, after all, is the very reason Boris “letterbox-looking Muslim women” Johnson now heads the Tory party.

The Economist findings reveal something else of relevance in assessing Mirvis’ meddling. Not only is the real left (as distinguished from the phoney, centrist left represented by Labour’s Blairites) much less antisemitic than the right, it is also much more critical of Israel than any other section of the British public.

That is easily explained. The real left has always been anti-imperialist. Israel is a particularly problematic part of Britain’s colonial legacy.

Elsewhere, the peoples who gained independence from Britain found themselves inside ruined, impoverished states, often with borders imposed out of naked imperial interest that left them divided and feuding. Internal struggles over the crumbs Britain and other imperial powers left behind were the norm.

But in a very real sense, Britain – or at least the west – never really left Israel. In line with the Balfour Declaration, Britain helped to establish the institutions of a “Jewish home” on the Palestinians’ homeland. British troops may have departed in 1948, but waves of European Jewish immigrants were either encouraged or compelled to come to the newly created state of Israel by racist immigration quotas designed to prevent them fleeing elsewhere, most especially to the United States.

The west helped engineer both the ethnic cleansing of Palestine and Israel’s creation to solve Europe’s “Jewish problem”. It provided the components necessary for Israel to build a nuclear bomb that won it a place at the international top table and ensured the Palestinians were made Israel’s serfs in perpetuity. Ever since, the west has provided Israel with diplomatic cover, military aid and special trading status, even as Israel has worked relentlessly to disappear the Palestinian people from their homeland.

Even now, our most prized rights, such as free speech, are being eroded and subverted to protect Israel from criticism. In the US, the only infringements on the American public’s First Amendment rights have been legislated to silence those seeking to pressure Israel over its crimes against the Palestinians with a boycott – similar to the campaign against apartheid South Africa. In the UK, the Conservative manifesto similarly promises to bar local councils from upholding international law and boycotting products from Israel’s illegal settlements.

Rewarding war crimes

The real left focuses on this continuing colonial crime against the Palestinians not because it is antisemitic (a claim the Economist survey amply refutes), but because the left treats Israel as emblematic of British and western bad faith and hypocrisy. Israel is the imperial west’s Achilles’ heel, the proof that war crimes, massacres and ethnic cleansing are not only not punished but actively rewarded if these crimes accord with western imperial interests.

But ardent friends of Israel such as Mirvis are blind to these arguments. For them, one western antisemitic crime – the Holocaust – entirely obscures another western antisemitic crime: seeking to rid Europe of Jews by forcing them into the Middle East, serving as pawns on an imperial chessboard that paid no regard to the Palestinians whose homeland was being sacrificed.

In his state of historical and political myopia, Mirvis cannot begin to understand that there might be political activists who, in defending the Palestinian people, are also defending Jews. That they, unlike him, understand that Israel was created not out of western benevolence towards Jews, but out of western malevolence towards “lesser peoples”. The real left in Britain speaks out against Israel not because it hates Jews but because it holds dear a commitment to justice and a compassion for all.

Mirvis, on the other hand, is the Zionist equivalent of a little Englander. He prefers particularist, short-term interests over universalist, long-term ones.

It was he, remember, who threw his full support behind Israel in 2014 as it indiscriminately bombed Gaza, killing some 550 children – a bombing campaign that came after years of an Israeli blockade on the Palestinian population there. That siege has led the United Nations to warn that the enclave will be uninhabitable by next year.

It was Mirvis, along with his predecessor Jonathan Sacks, who in 2017 endorsed the fanatical Jewish settlers – Israel’s equivalent of white supremacists – on their annual march through the occupied Old City of Jerusalem. This is the march where the majority of the participants are recorded every year waving masses of Israeli flags at Palestinians and chanting “Death to the Arabs”. One Israeli newspaper columnist has described the Jerusalem Day march as a “religious carnival of hatred”.

It was Mirvis and Sacks that encouraged British Jews to join them on this tub-thumping trip to Israel, which they suggested would provide an opportunity to spend time “dancing with our brave soldiers”. Those soldiers – Israeli, not British – occupy West Bank cities like Hebron where they have locked down life for some 200,000 Palestinians so that a handful of crazed religious Jewish bigots can live undisturbed in their midst.

What is so appalling is that Mirvis is blind to the very obvious parallels between the fearful Palestinians who hastily have to board up their shops as a Jewish mob parades through their neighbourhood and today’s white supremacists and neo-Nazis in the west who seek to march provocatively through ethnic minority communities, including Jewish neighbourhoods, in places like Charlottesville.

Mirvis has no lessons to teach Corbyn or the Labour party about racism. In fact, it is his own, small-minded prejudice that blinds him to the anti-racist politics of the left. His ugly message is now being loudly amplified by a corporate media keen to use any weapon it can, antisemitism included, to keep Corbyn and the left out of power – and preserve a status quo that benefits the few at the expense of the many.

The UK Chief Rabbi and the Rest of the Nation – Gilad Atzmon on Richie Allen Show

NOVEMBER 28, 2019 BY GILAD ATZMON

The UK’s chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis has claimed “a new poison – sanctioned from the very top – has taken root” in the Labour party. In an astonishing personal attack in the Times, the Rabbi said that Jeremy Corbyn was unfit to lead the country. Jazz artist, author and geopolitical analyst Gilad Atzmon joins Richie Allen to discuss the above (21 min, 18 sec).

My battle for truth and freedom involves some expensive legal and security services. I hope that you will consider committing to a monthly donation in whatever amount you can give. Regular contributions will enable me to avoid being pushed against a wall and to stay on top of the endless harassment by Zionist operators attempting to silence me and others.

Donate

 

The Antisemitic Card

by Finian Cunningham

27.11.2019

It is a ludicrous situation when anyone criticizing Israeli state violations against Palestinians or neighbouring countries is then instantly discredited as being “antisemitic”.

We see this in Britain and the United States all the time. Congresswomen like Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib have been denounced for being “anti-Jewish”, including by President Trump, simply because they protested Israeli policy of occupying Palestinian lands or for having a malign influence on US foreign policy.

In Britain, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and his party have once again this week been vilified as “antisemitic” in prominent news media.

The reality is that Corbyn is neither racist or anti-Jewish. The specious allegation stems from him and sections of Labour being vehemently critical of Israel and its conduct towards Palestinians.

If elected in the general election next month, Labour says it will cut military trade with Israel and move to officially recognize a Palestinian state.

This conflation of valid criticism of the Israeli state with being “anti-Jew” is a cynical distortion which is wielded to give Israel impunity from international law. It plays on moral blackmail of critics by equating the historical persecution of Jews and in particular the Nazi holocaust with the sanctity of the modern Israeli state.

That distortion is exposed by many Jews themselves who have spoken out in the US and in Britain to defend the right of people to criticize Israeli policies. They understand the vital distinction between the Israeli state and the much wider existence of Jewishness. They understand that to be opposed to Israeli state practices is in no way to mean animus towards Jews in general.

Only in the past week, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has declared his government intends to expand annexation of Palestinian territory in the West Bank. The land occupied by Israeli forces since the 1967 Six Day War is illegally occupied, according to multiple UN resolutions under international law. Now Netanyahu wants to increase the violations. And with the support of the Trump administration which also announced it was no longer viewing Israeli settlements on Palestinian land as illegitimate.

Over the past month, the Israeli military has stepped up airstrikes on the Gaza Strip where nearly two million Palestinians subsist in abject poverty largely because of an Israeli blockade. One family of nine, including children, was killed by an airstrike on their home on November 14. As always the death toll among Palestinian civilians is grotesquely disproportionate to Israeli victims of rockets fired from Gaza.

Israeli forces have also been carrying out hundreds of airstrikes in Syria, including the capital Damascus, over the past year. Russia, among others, has condemned those attacks as “unlawful aggression”. Arguably, war crimes.

When Jeremy Corbyn and Britain’s Labour Party and a handful of American politicians speak out to denounce Israeli violations they are doing so to uphold international law and voice support for victims of state violence. That is a principled and honourable position.

Shamefully, the US and British governments and much of the corporate news media never do speak out. They shield Israeli leaders from international accountability by vetoing UN resolutions or by turning a blind eye. Pro-Israeli lobbies funnel massive donations to politicians in Washington on both sides of the aisle, and to the British Conservative Party. Their silence is bought. Not only silence but outright distortion, such as when people criticize Israeli malfeasance – and there is much of that – then they are absurdly character-assassinated as “antisemites”.

Admittedly, many British Jews phoned into radio stations this week to complain that they feel unwelcome in Britain due to what they perceive as growth in antisemitism under the Labour Party. To be fair though, their claims were not backed up by hard evidence of specifically anti-Jewish behaviour. They were eliding their Jewishness with Labour’s criticism of Israel.

The claims made against Corbyn this week by the British Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirviz of being “unfit for office” because of an alleged complacent attitude towards antisemitism in his party should be put in context.

Corbyn has apologized several times for a tiny fraction (less than 0.1 per cent) of party members accused of antisemitism. Why should he be obliged to keep on apologizing, as BBC interviewer Andrew Neil imperiously demanded again this week?

Chief Rabbi Mirviz is a self-declared friend of Conservative leader Boris Johnson and an ardent, uncritical supporter of the Israeli state.

Mirviz does not represent all British Jews, as many other Jewish groups came out voicing their support for Corbyn and his valid right of free speech to criticize Israel.

Mirviz got prominent media coverage for his views this week in the London Times and Daily Mail, among others. Britain’s rightwing media are owned by billionaire oligarchs who despise Labour’s manifesto for progressive wealth redistribution.

© REUTERS / JEFF OVERS/BBC

‘Corbyn Refuses to Apologise’: UK Papers on Labour Leader’s Response to Alleged Party Anti-Semitism

Official race-hate figures for Britain show that physical attacks against British Muslims are preponderantly more than attacks against any other religious minority, including Jews. Boris Johnson’s Conservatives have evident problems of fomenting Islamophobia. Yet we don’t see British media providing proportionate criticism on that to balance their focus on Corbyn and his alleged views.The antisemitic card is played to shield Israel from important criticism; and by Britain’s plutocrats and their media who would rather see the public squabbling over spurious claims about antisemitism so they can keep on plundering wealth from the majority of British people.

The views and opinions expressed in the article do not necessarily reflect those of Sputnik.

…

Anti-Corbyn Propaganda on Full Blast as UK Election Nears

By Johanna Ross

Source

With less than a month to go before the UK general election, all efforts are being made by political parties to further their agendas. Naturally each side is launching attacks on the other, but perhaps the most virulent campaign is that of the Conservatives towards Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party. Their malicious accusations, particularly regarding allegations of widespread anti-semitism in the Labour party, which are without any proper foundation, have been propagated more or less since Corbyn came to power.

The anti-Corbyn propaganda reached its peak last week with an article in The Guardian entitled: “Concerns about anti-semitism mean we cannot vote Labour”. Signed by 24 ‘celebrities’, the piece stated that Jeremy Corbyn was

‘steeped in association with anti-semitism’ and that the opposition leader had ‘a long history of embracing antisemites as colleagues’.

And yet a Home Affairs Select Committee inquiry into antisemitism in the UK in 2016 found

“no reliable, empirical evidence to support the notion that there is a higher prevalence of antisemitic attitudes within the Labour Party than any other political party”.

Furthermore, Labour’s own investigation the same year ruled that the party was not “overrun by anti-Semitism or other forms of racism”. Some party members did resign over matter – but this equated to as little as 0.08% of the membership – hardly a widespread issue it seems.

We therefore have to ask ourselves, why is it that we, the British people, are constantly being bombarded with information that the Labour party, and leader Jeremy Corbyn himself is anti-semitic? One can only deduce that it is pure propaganda being promoted by the Conservative party, because the fact is, there is very little to attack the Labour leader on. His policies genuinely have the potential to become extremely popular with the electorate, some of which are truly revolutionary and would nourish what is a nation starved of welfare provision after years of Tory austerity. Free broadband internet for all, raising the minimum wage to £10 an hour, nationalising public services – including rail, bus and Royal Mail – and creating a state-run pharmaceutical organisation: what is not to like? Britain is now a society steeped in injustice, with record levels of poverty and homelessness and despite Johnson’s attempt to compete with Corbyn on welfare with talk of also raising the minimum wage, he simply can’t undo the years of Tory austerity and the damage it has done to the lives of millions of ordinary working Brits.

Anti-semitism Is Cover for a Much Deeper Divide in Britain’s Labour Party

Yet the Tory propaganda machine is on full blast. On Wednesday, after the ITV leaders’ debate where Corbyn and Johnson went head to head, it emerged that the Conservative press office twitter account was changed to the title ‘factcheckUK’ during the course of their exchange. The fact that it was temporarily changed during the one-hour programme was clearly an attempt to mislead the public into thinking that this was an unbiased, impartial media outlet offering commentary on the Labour leader’s performance. It’s video entitled: ‘factcheckUK verdict: Boris Johnson is winner of the leader’s debate’ demonstrates a clear aim to deceive the public.

But we should not be surprised that a Johnson government is prepared to go to such lengths to mislead and dupe the electorate. Under the current Prime Minister’s leadership, such deception is an everyday occurrence it seems, to the extent that one of the questions put to Johnson at the debate on Tuesday night was about ‘trust’ and whether indeed he could be trusted. The PM has been caught out lying, whether consciously or not, on so many occasions, and was engaged in this even before he took office. In the run up to the EU referendum he was one of many claiming that the UK would save around £350 million a year by leaving the EU.

It is easy to lose count of the number of times he has lied since becoming PM. He said the Conservatives were building 40 new hospitals – this has been shown to be untrue. He keeps repeating that there will be 20,000 new police officers to tackle crime; misleading considering his party have taken 21,000 police officers off the streets in recent years. His propensity to be untruthful does not go unnoticed, and frequently makes headlines: ‘For nine extraordinary minutes, Boris Johnson stood next to his bus and lied and lied and lied without stopping’ and ‘PM Makes String of False Claims in BBC Interview’. And it’s a sad state of affairs when you almost except the Prime Minister not to tell the truth: ‘Johnson’s Brexit would devastate business; the CBI must be hoping he is lying’, Simon Jenkins writes in The Guardian.

And yet propaganda, it seems, works. For despite the woes of ordinary working Brits, they are still prepared to vote Conservative, for one reason or another at the ballot box. Personally, I find it difficult to work out why. One candidate is offering real solutions to the everyday strife facing working people, and another is promoting further uncertainty under Brexit  and a continuation of the status quo when it comes to social provision. And yet people seem to be taken in by the glossy, slick packaging of the Conservative manifesto and Johnson’s buffoonish, amiable personality. ‘He’s one of the boys, isn’t he?’ one Leave voter told Sky News recently. I shuddered in disbelief. One of the boys? How many average blokes in Britain have attended Eton and the Bullingdon Club? And yet people speak about him as if he joins the locals for a pint after work at the pub.

It’s time for people to waken up and smell the coffee come December 12th. For people’s livelihoods are at stake.