The Palestinian Resistance factions announced on Saturday launching a national campaign and a popular conference in face of the UK decision to label Hamas Movement as a terrorist group.
After holding a meeting in Gaza Strip, the Palestinian factions considered that the UK decision targets all the Palestinians and represents an extension of Britain’s colonial policy.
The Palestinian factions called on the UK authorities to undo their decision, urging the Arab League to reject it.
Member of Islamic Jihad politburo, Mohammad al-Hindi, described the UK decision as unjust and adding that it reflects grudge against all the Palestinians and their resistance.
Meanwhile, Yemen’s Ansarullah movement firmly denounced the UK decision decision against Hamas, voicing support to all the Palestinians and their resistance factions.
Ironically, Miller’s book, “Bad News for Labour: Anti-Semitism, the Party and Public Belief,” detailed how bogus charges of anti-Semitism were weaponized against Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn in order to defame and destroy him.
Instead of simply stopping its human rights abuses, the Israeli government has built an extensive and sophisticated public relations network across the West in order to protect itself from criticism.
Today, Lowkey speaks to one of the latest victims of that smear campaign, Professor David Miller. A prominent critic of the state of Israel’s policies, Miller was recently sacked from his position as Professor of Sociology at the University of Bristol, after a pressure campaign involving Zionist student groups and even members of parliament, who accused him of “inciting hatred against Jewish students.”
Miller, a graduate of the University of Glasgow Media Group, was appointed to his position at Bristol University in 2018. He also held positions at the University of Strathclyde from 2004 until 2011 and the University of Bath from 2011 until 2018.
Miller is the creator of the websites SpinWatch and Powerbase, both of which are dedicated to revealing networks of influence and power in Western society. Much of his academic work revolved around Islamophobia in the post-9/11 era. Miller maintained that Zionist organizations were one source of anti-Muslim bigotry, an accusation that put him on a collision course with those groups.
The final blow came late last month, as the university, under enormous external pressure, sacked Miller, citing his comments that certain Jewish students were being used as “pawns of Israel.”
Miller’s case has drawn considerable attention from those who see it as a harbinger of things to come. An open letter to Bristol University defending him as an “eminent scholar” was signed by hundreds of academics and public intellectuals — including prominent Jewish public intellectuals such as Noam Chomsky, Judith Butler, Norman Finkelstein and Illan Pappe, who described him as a trailblazer “exposing the role that powerful actors and well-resourced, co-ordinated networks play in manipulating and stage-managing public debates, including on racism.”
Miller described the disciplinary procedure as “a shambolic process that seems to have been vetted by external actors,” adding that, “Israel’s assets in the U.K. have been emboldened by the university collaborating with them to shut down teaching about Islamophobia. The University of Bristol is no longer safe for Muslim, Arab or Palestinian students.”
Miller is far from the first academic to be targeted in such a manner, and it is unlikely that he will be the last. Ironically, Miller’s book, “Bad News for Labour: Anti-Semitism, the Party and Public Belief,” detailed how bogus charges of anti-Semitism were weaponized against Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn in order to defame and destroy him. Just such an occurrence appears to have happened in his case as well.
For all the talk of cancel culture, it is highly unlikely that Miller’s case will be taken up by the usual suspects who pontificate about the increasingly stifling atmosphere on university campuses.
Join us as Lowkey and Miller discuss his work, his dismissal, and the network of power Israel has built in the West.
The Israeli newspaper Haaretz has run a fascinating long report this week offering a disturbing snapshot of the political climate rapidly emerging across Europe on the issue of antisemitism. The article documents a kind of cultural, political and intellectual reign of terror in Germany since the parliament passed a resolution last year equating support for non-violent boycotts of Israel – in solidarity with Palestinians oppressed by Israel – with antisemitism.
The article concerns Germany but anyone reading it will see very strong parallels with what is happening in other European countries, especially the UK and France.
The same European leaders who a few years ago marched in Paris shouting “Je suis Charlie” – upholding the inalienable free speech rights of white Europeans to offend Muslims by insulting and ridiculing their Prophet – are now queuing up to outlaw free speech when it is directed against Israel, a state that refuses to end its belligerent occupation of Palestinian land. European leaders have repeatedly shown they are all too ready to crush the free speech of Palestinians, and those in solidarity with them, to avoid offending sections of the Jewish community.
The situation reduces to this: European Muslims have no right to take offense at insults about a religion they identify with, but European Jews have every right to take offense at criticism of an aggressive Middle Eastern state they identify with. Seen another way, the perverse secular priorities of European mainstream culture now place the sanctity of a militarized state, Israel, above the sanctity of a religion with a billion followers.
Guilt by Association
This isn’t even a double standard. I can’t find a word in the dictionary that conveys the scale and degree of hypocrisy and bad faith involved.
If the American Jewish scholar Norman Finkelstein wrote a follow-up to his impassioned book The Holocaust Industry – on the cynical use of the Holocaust to enrich and empower a Jewish organizational establishment at the expense of the Holocaust’s actual survivors – he might be tempted to title it The Antisemitism Industry.
In the current climate in Europe, one that rejects any critical thinking in relation to broad areas of public life, that observation alone would enough to have one denounced as an antisemite. Which is why the Haaretz article – far braver than anything you will read in a UK or US newspaper – makes no bones about what is happening in Germany. It calls it a “witch-hunt”. That is Haaretz’s way of saying that antisemitism has been politicized and weaponized – a self-evident conclusion that will currently get you expelled from the British Labour party, even if you are Jewish.
The Haaretz story highlights two important developments in the way antisemitism has been, in the words of intellectuals and cultural leaders cited by the newspaper, “instrumentalized” in Germany.
Jewish organizations and their allies in Germany, as Haaretz reports, are openly weaponizing antisemitism not only to damage the reputation of Israel’s harsher critics but also to force out of the public and cultural domain – through a kind of “antisemitism guilt by association” – anyone who dares to entertain criticism of Israel.
Cultural associations, festivals, universities, Jewish research centers, political think-tanks, museums, and libraries are being forced to scrutinize the past of those they wish to invite in case some minor transgression against Israel can be exploited by local Jewish organizations. That has created a toxic, politically paranoid atmosphere that inevitably kills trust and creativity.
But the psychosis runs deeper still. Israel, and anything related to it, has become such a combustible subject – one that can ruin careers in an instant – that most political, academic and cultural figures in Germany now choose to avoid it entirely. Israel, as its supporters intended, is rapidly becoming untouchable.
A case study noted by Haaretz is Peter Schäfer, a respected professor of ancient Judaism and Christianity studies who was forced to resign as director of Berlin’s Jewish Museum last year. Schäfer’s crime, in the eyes of Germany’s Jewish establishment, was that he staged an exhibition on Jerusalem that recognized the city’s three religious traditions, including a Muslim one.
He was immediately accused of promoting “historical distortions” and denounced as “anti-Israel”. A reporter for Israel’s right-wing Jerusalem Post, which has been actively colluding with the Israeli government to smear critics of Israel, contacted Schäfer with a series of inciteful emails. The questions included “Did you learn the wrong lesson from the Holocaust?” and “Israeli experts told me you disseminate antisemitism – is that true?”
Schäfer observes:
“The accusation of antisemitism is a club that allows one to deal a death blow, and political elements who have an interest in this are using it, without a doubt… The museum staff gradually entered a state of panic. Then of course we also started to do background checks. Increasingly it poisoned the atmosphere and our work.”
Another prominent victim of these Jewish organizations tells Haaretz:
“Sometimes one thinks, ‘To go to that conference?’ ‘To invite this colleague?’ Afterward, it means that for three weeks, I’ll have to cope with a shitstorm, whereas I need the time for other things that I get paid for as a lecturer. There is a type of ‘anticipatory obedience’ or ‘prior self-censorship.’”
Ringing off the Hook
There is nothing unusual about what is happening in Germany. Jewish organizations are stirring up these “shitstorms” – designed to paralyze political and cultural life for anyone who engages in even the mildest criticism of Israel – at the highest levels of government. Don’t believe me? Here is Barack Obama explaining in his recent autobiography his efforts as US president to curb Israel’s expansion of its illegal settlements. Early on, he was warned to back off or face the wrath of the Israel lobby:
“Members of both parties worried about crossing the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Those who criticized Israeli policy too loudly risked being tagged as ‘anti-Israel’ (and possibly anti-Semitic) and confronted with a well-funded opponent in the next election.”
Corbyn, it seems, has found an unlikely ally in former US President Obama. In his new autobiography, he writes of the Israel lobby's power: 'Those who criticized Israeli policy too loudly risked being tagged as "anti-Israel" (and possibly anti-Semitic)' https://t.co/tKmy8q3Cws
When Obama went ahead anyway in 2009 and proposed a modest freeze on Israel’s illegal settlements:
“The White House phones started ringing off the hook, as members of my national security team fielded calls from reporters, leaders of American Jewish organizations, prominent supporters, and members of Congress, all wondering why we were picking on Israel … this sort of pressure continued for much of 2009.”
He observes further:
“The noise orchestrated by Netanyahu had the intended effect of gobbling up our time, putting us on the defensive, and reminding me that normal policy differences with an Israeli prime minister – even one who presided over a fragile coalition government – exacted a political cost that didn’t exist when I dealt with the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Japan, Canada, or any of our other closest allies.”
Doubtless, Obama dare not put down in writing his full thoughts about Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu or the US lobbyists who worked on his behalf. But Obama’s remarks do show that, even a US president, supposedly the single most powerful person on the planet, ended up blanching in the face of this kind of relentless assault. For lesser mortals, the price is likely to be far graver.
No Free Speech on Israel
It was this same mobilization of Jewish organizational pressure – orchestrated, as Obama notes, by Israel and its partisans in the US and Europe – that ended up dominating Jeremy Corbyn’s five years as the leader of Britain’s leftwing Labour party, recasting a well-known anti-racism activist almost overnight as an antisemite.
It is the reason why his successor, Sir Keir Starmer, has outsourced part of Labour’s organizational oversight on Jewish and Israel-related matters to the very conservative Board of Deputies of British Jews, as given expression in Starmer’s signing up to the Board’s “10 Pledges”.
It is part of the reason why Starmer recently suspended Corbyn from the party, and then defied the membership’s demands that he be properly reinstated, after Corbyn expressed concerns about the way antisemitism allegations had been “overstated for political reasons” to damage him and Labour. (The rightwing Starmer, it should be noted, was also happy to use antisemitism as a pretext to eradicate the socialist agenda Corbyn had tried to revive in Labour.) It is why Starmer has imposed a blanket ban on constituency parties discussing Corbyn’s suspension. And it is why Labour’s shadow education secretary has joined the ruling Conservative party in threatening to strip universities of their funding if they allow free speech about Israel on campus.
Disturbing to learn from this article that Labour backs threatening funding to universities to bully them into adopting the IHRA re-definition of antisemitism – a definition that protects Israel from criticism and would ban most forms of solidarity with Palestinians on campus
But the Haaretz article raises another issue critical to understanding how Israel and the Jewish establishment in Europe are politicizing antisemitism to protect Israel from criticism. The potential Achilles’ heel of their campaign are Jewish dissidents, those who break with the supposed “Jewish community” line and create a space for others – whether Palestinians or other non-Jews – to criticize Israel. These Jewish dissenters risk serving as a reminder that trenchant criticism of Israel should not result in one being tarred an antisemite.
Leading Palestinians warn: 'The fight against antisemitism has been increasingly instrumentalised by the Israeli government and its supporters in an effort to delegitimise the Palestinian cause and silence defenders of Palestinian rights' https://t.co/Shu1Z7XYM1
Israel and Jewish organizations, however, have made it their task to erode that idea by promoting a distinction – an antisemitic one, at that – between two types of Jews: good Jews (loyal to Israel), and bad Jews (disloyal to Israel).
Haaretz reports that officials in Germany, such as Felix Klein, the country’s antisemitism commissioner, and Josef Schuster, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, are being allowed to define not only who is an antisemite, typically using support for Israel as the yardstick, but are also determining who are good Jews – those politically like them – and who are bad Jews – those who disagree with them.
Despite Germany’s horrific recent history of Jew-hatred, the German government, local authorities, the media, universities and cultural institutions have been encouraged by figures like Klein and Schuster to hound German Jews, even Israeli Jews living and working in Germany, from the country’s public and cultural space.
When, for example, a group of Israeli Jewish academics in Berlin held a series of online discussions about Zionism last year on the website of their art school, an Israeli reporter soon broke the story of a “scandal” involving boycott supporters receiving funding from the German government. Hours later the art school had pulled down the site, while the German education ministry issued a statement clarifying that it had provided no funding. The Israeli embassy officially declared the discussions held by these Israelis as “antisemitic”, and a German foundation that documents antisemitism added the group to the list of antisemitic incidents it records.
Described as ‘Kapos’
So repressive has the cultural and political atmosphere grown in Germany that there has been a small backlash among cultural leaders. Some have dared to publish a letter protesting against the role of Klein, the antisemitism commissioner. Haaretz reports:
“The antisemitism czar, the letter charged, is working ‘in synergy with the Israeli government’ in an effort ‘to discredit and silence opponents of Israel’s policies’ and is abetting the ‘instrumentalization’ that undermines the true struggle against antisemitism.
Figures like Klein have been so focused on tackling criticism of Israel from the left, including the Jewish left, that they have barely noted the “acute danger Jews in Germany face due to the surge in far-right antisemitism”, the letter argues.
Again, the same picture can be seen across Europe. In the UK, the opposition Labour party, which should be a safe space for those leading the anti-racism struggle, is purging itself of Jews critical of Israel and using antisemitism smears against prominent anti-racists, especially from other oppressed minorities.
Extraordinarily, Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi, one of the founders of Jewish Voice for Labour, which supports Corbyn, recently found herself suspended by Starmer’s Labour. She had just appeared in a moving video in which she explained the ways antisemitism was being used by Jewish organizations to smear Jewish left-wingers like herself as “traitors” and “kapos” – an incendiary term of abuse, as Wimborne-Idrissi points out, that refers to “a Jewish inmate of a concentration camp who collaborated with the [Nazi] authorities, people who collaborated in the annihilation of their own people”.
In suspending her, Starmer effectively endorsed this campaign by the UK’s Jewish establishment of incitement against, and vilification of, left-wing Jews.
The aggressive purge of Jews from the Labour Party under the repressive rule of @Keir_Starmer marches on.
I haven't seen a sustained campaign of overt anti-Semitism quite like the effort of Labour centrists to create lists of Good Jews & Bad Jews and purge the latter. https://t.co/wVwnu47QJP
Earlier, Marc Wadsworth, a distinguished black anti-racism campaigner, found himself similarly suspended by Labour when he exposed the efforts of Ruth Smeeth, then a Labour MP and a former Jewish official in the Israel lobby group BICOM, to recruit the media to her campaign smearing political opponents on the left as antisemites.
In keeping with the rapid erosion of critical thinking in civil society organizations designed to uphold basic freedoms, Smeeth was recently appointed director of the prestigious free speech organization Index on Censorship. There she can now work on suppressing criticism of Israel – and attack “bad Jews” – under cover of fighting censorship. In the new, inverted reality, censorship refers not to the smearing and silencing of a “bad Jew” like Wimborne-Idrissi, but to criticism of Israel over its human rights abuses, which supposedly “censors” the identification of “good Jews” with Israel – now often seen as the crime of “causing offense”.
Ok, we've now officially moved from Alice Through the Looking Glass into the Twilight Zone.
Ruth Smeeth, ex-Israel lobbyist for Bicom and a key player in outlawing solidarity for Palestinians in the Labour party, is the new CEO of free speech group Index on Censorship! https://t.co/UmHXbTQETS
The Haaretz article helps to contextualize Europe’s current antisemitism “witch-hunt”, which targets anyone who criticizes Israel or stands in solidarity with oppressed Palestinians, or associates with such people. It is an expansion of the earlier campaign by the Jewish establishment against “the wrong kind of Jew”, as identified by Finkelstein in The Holocaust Industry. But this time Jewish organizations are playing a much higher-stakes, and more dangerous, political game.
Haaretz rightly fears that the Jewish leadership in Europe is not only silencing ordinary Jews but degrading the meaning – the shock value – of antisemitism through the very act of politicizing it. Jewish organizations risk alienating the European left, which has historically stood with them against Jew-hatred from the right. European anti-racists suddenly find themselves equated with, and smeared as, fledgling neo-Nazis.
If those who support human rights and demand an end to the oppression of Palestinians find themselves labeled antisemitic, it will become ever harder to distinguish between bogus (weaponized) “antisemitism” on the left and real Jew-hatred from the right. The antisemitism smearers – and their fellow travelers like Keir Starmer – are likely to end up suffering their very own “boy who cried wolf” syndrome.
Or as Haaretz notes:
“The issue that is bothering the critics of the Bundestag [German parliament] resolution is whether the extension of the concept of antisemitism to encompass criticism of Israel is not actually adversely affecting the battle against antisemitism. The argument is that the ease with which the accusation is leveled could have the effect of eroding the concept itself.”
The Antisemitism Industry
It is worth noting the shared features of the new Antisemitism Industry and Finkelstein’s earlier discussions of the Holocaust Industry.
In his book, Finkelstein identifies the “wrong Jews” as people like his mother, who survived a Nazi death camp as the rest of her family perished. These surviving Jews, Finkelstein argues, were valued by the Holocaust Industry only in so far as they served as a promotional tool for the Jewish establishment to accumulate more wealth and cultural and political status. Otherwise, the victims were ignored because the actual Holocaust’s message – in contrast to the Jewish leadership’s representation of it – was universal: that we must oppose and fight all forms of racism because they lead to persecution and genocide.
Instead, the Holocaust Industry promoted a particularist, self-interested lesson that the Holocaust proves Jews are uniquely oppressed and that they, therefore, deserve a unique solution: a state, Israel, that must be given unique leeway by western states to commit crimes in violation of international law. The Holocaust Industry – very much to be distinguished from the real events of the Holocaust – is deeply entwined in, and rationalized by, the perpetuation of the racialist, colonial project of Israel.
In the case of the Antisemitism Industry, the “wrong Jew” surfaces again. This time the witch-hunt targets Jewish left-wingers, Jews critical of Israel, Jews opposed to the occupation, and Jews who support a boycott of the illegal settlements or of Israel itself. Again, the problem with these “bad Jews” is that they allude to a universal lesson, one that says Palestinians have at least as much right to self-determination, to dignity and security, in their historic homeland as Jewish immigrants who fled European persecution.
Keir Starmer needs to listen to the 'proudly pro-Israel' Americans for Peace Now. They reject the IHRA definition for 'weaponising' antisemitism and allowing 'McCarthyite witch hunts' of Israel critics. Only those living in a 'black hole' could support it https://t.co/mNCj0LqCky
In contrast to the “bad Jews”, the Antisemitism Industry demands that a particularist conclusion be drawn about Israel – just as a particularist conclusion was earlier drawn by the Holocaust Industry. It says that to deny Jews a state is to leave them defenceless against the eternal virus of antisemitism. In this conception, the Holocaust may be uniquely abhorrent but it is far from unique. Non-Jews, given the right circumstances, are only too capable of carrying out another Holocaust. Jews must therefore always be protected, always on guard, always have their weapons (or in Israel’s case, its nuclear bombs) to hand.
‘Get out of Jail’ Card
This view, of course, seeks to ignore, or marginalize, other victims of the Holocaust – Romanies, communists, gays – and other kinds of racism. It needs to create a hierarchy of racisms, a competition between them, in which hatred of Jews is at the pinnacle. This is how we arrived at an absurdity: that anti-Zionism – misrepresented as the rejection of a refuge for Jews, rather than the reality that it rejects an ethnic, colonial state oppressing Palestinians – is the same as antisemitism.
Extraordinarily, as the Haaretz article clarifies, German officials are oppressing “bad Jews”, at the instigation of Jewish organizations, to prevent, as they see it, the re-emergence of the far-right and neo-Nazis. The criticisms of Israel made by the “bad Jew” are thereby not just dismissed as ideologically unsound or delusions but become proof that these Jews are colluding with, or at least nourishing, the Jew-haters.
In this way, Germany, the UK and much of Europe have come to justify the exclusion of the “wrong Jew” – those who uphold universal principles for the benefit of all – from the public space. Which, of course, is exactly what Israel wants, because, rooted as it is in an ideology of ethnic exclusivity as a “Jewish state”, it necessarily rejects universal ethics.
What we see here is an illustration of a principle at the heart of Israel’s state ideology of Zionism: Israel needs antisemitism. Israel would quite literally have to invent antisemitism if it did not exist.
This is not hyperbole. The idea that the “virus of antisemitism” lies semi-dormant in every non-Jew waiting for a chance to overwhelm its host is the essential rationale for Israel. If the Holocaust was an exceptional historical event, if antisemitism was an ancient racism that in its modern incarnation followed the patterns of prejudice and hatred familiar in all racisms, from anti-black bigotry to Islamophobia, Israel would be not only redundant but an abomination – because it has been set up to dispossess and abuse another group, the Palestinians.
Antisemitism is Israel’s “get out of jail” card. Antisemitism serves to absolve Israel of the racism it structurally embodies and that would be impossible to overlook were Israel deprived of the misdirection weaponized antisemitism provides.
An Empty Space
The Haaretz article provides a genuine service by not only reminding us that “bad Jews” exist but in coming to their defense – something that European media is no longer willing to do. To defend “bad Jews” like Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi is to be contaminated with the same taint of antisemitism that justified the ejection of these Jews from the public space.
Haaretz records the effort of a few brave cultural institutions in Germany to protest, to hold the line, against this new McCarthyism. Their stand may fail. If it does, you may never become aware of it.
The fraudulent 'Labour antisemitism' controversy has empowered the most thuggish elements in the organised British Jewish community.
Case in point: the Campaign Against Antisemitism effectively calls for Professor David Feldman to keep quiet or be sacked. https://t.co/QWvNg84c2E
Once, the “bad Jews” have been smeared into silence, as Palestinians and those who stand in solidarity with them largely have been already; when social media has de-platformed critics of Israel as Jew-haters; when the media and political parties enforce this silence so absolutely they no longer need to smear anyone as an antisemite because these “antisemites” have been disappeared; when the Jewish “community” speaks with one voice because its other voices have been eliminated; when the censorship is complete, you will not know it.
There will be no record of what was lost. There will be simply an empty space, a blank slate, where discussions of Israel’s crimes against Palestinians once existed. What you will hear instead is only what Israel and its partisans want you to hear. Your ignorance will be blissfully complete.
– Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His books include “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). Visit his website www.jonathan-cook.net. He contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle.
The ongoing process of political degeneration which has been happening in the UK Labour Party is basically part of a deep-going movement which has been taking place in all left-of-centre parties in Europe. In political/ideological terms, they have been swept away by the rampaging neo-liberal globalist forces – circa 1980 onwards and have, like good little boys and girls, trimmed their sails to the globalist agenda. This, straight betrayal has been justified by the usual TINA cliche. The roll-call of the sell-outs has included the SPD (Germany) the PS (France) Pasok/Syriza (Greece) the old ex-communist party of Italy, (now rebranded as the Democratic Party) PSOE (Spain) not forgetting the Democratic Party in the US. This historical betrayal has given the militant right a chance to attack the very real sell-out of the centre-left parties and publications which includes the Guardian, New York Times, Economist,Washington Post, . L’Express, La Figaro, Der Spiegel – the list is extensive.
THE BRITISH LABOUR PARTY
The Guardian newspaper had long been a supporter of the Labour Party but more recently has been the trend-setter in this ‘liberal turn’ if we may call it such. There has taken place an unseemly metamorphosis from centre-left to the Blairite right. Going back to earlier days the Manchester Guardian, as it was then called, steered an honest social-democratic course under the leadership of C.P.Scott famous for his catchphrase, ‘’Comment is free but facts are sacred.’’ was the ultimate statement of values for a free press and continued to under-pin the traditions of good newspapers throughout the western world, (but sadly of course this is no longer the case, not by a long shot). Looking back, Scott and the then Manchester Guardian resolutely opposed the British war against the Dutch settlers (Boers) in South Africa (1899-1902). For his pains Scott’s home was physically attacked by jingoistic mobs and he required police protection, as did the property of the Manchester Guardian which was also attacked.
That was then, this is now.
The rot in the current Guardian newspaper began with the conversion of what was once a campaigning left-of-centre political publication into a straightforward business journal with a centre-right political orientation; this happened earlier in this century when the Scott Trust was rebranded as the Scott Trust Limited, along with the Guardian Media Group – GMG – both of whom became registered as a commercial company by decamping to the tax haven of the Cayman Islands British Overseas Territory, for tax reasons – i.e. tax avoidance.
THE CORBYN AFFAIR
As for the whole ‘anti-semitic’ brouhaha surrounding ex-leader of the Party, Jeremy Corbyn, and the Labour Party itself, this was engineered from both internal and external sources. It should be understood that anyone who is anyone in the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) and who entertains political and occupational preferment in the PLP is a member of the ‘Labour Friends of Israel’ – this is mandatory. The same is true of the Conservative Party and the Liberal Democrats. So we have here a situation where an ostensibly sovereign state, the UK, has been penetrated by another sovereign state, Israel which in effect is selecting who and who shall not be members of the Labour Party’s policy and decision-making processes. This blatant process was caught by a mole planted by the Kuwaiti TV Station Al Jazeera and televised under the name of ‘The Lobby’ where the mole in question interviewed a member of the London Israeli embassy – Shai Masot – about the ‘taking down’ of pro-Palestinian politicians and spreading Zionist influence inside independent political groups active in the UK. This TV interview showed Mr Masot – who was blissfully unaware of being televised – discussing with his interlocutor how to cause embarrassment to pro-Palestinian politicians deemed to be detrimental to Israeli interests.
Students and campaigners told a reporter posing as a pro-Israel activist they had been given funding and support from Israel’s embassy in London to counter the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. When asked whether he had ever “built a group”, Mr Masot replied: “Yeah, I did several things like that, yeah…in Israel and here. Nothing I can share but yeah.’’
“It’s good to leave those organisations independent, but we help them actually.”
The UK National Union of Students said it was investigating alleged attempts to influence last year’s leadership election, which saw its first black, Muslim, female president Malia Bouattia voted in.
Following claims that opposing NUS members held “secret meetings” with activists supported by the Israeli embassy, a spokesperson for the union said: “The NUS takes these allegations seriously. We are looking into them and, when we have all the information available, the behaviour of NUS officers will be reviewed, and appropriate action taken.” (1)
This seemed outrageous, but such is the influence of extra-national political configurations in British politics. This was instanced in the manner in which the now ex-leader of the Labour party – Jeremy Corbyn – was subject to a relentless but bogus assault internally from the Blairites, the media and also Britain’s Jewish opponents on the basis of his ongoing support for Palestinian rights. Of course anyone who in Zionist terms is a supporter of Palestinian rights is ipso facto an anti-Semite. On absolutely no evidence Corbyn was suspended from the leadership of the party which was now under the leadership of one (Sir) Keir Starmer QC, who doesn’t seem to have any political views at all, apart from his unconditional support of Israel, which of course befits yet another political carpet bagger on the make. ‘What are my politics?’ What would you like them to be?’
Of course the same scenario also applies to the United States – a fortiori. This latter case of organized Jewish influence both internal and from outside (Israel) is so open, widespread and obvious that it barely needs mentioning. (2) Moreover, socialism in the United States, or even social-democracy, has, never, since the days of Eugene Debs been anything other than a minor curiosity and led by a leadership so venal that it collapses at the first serious challenge. Such was the fate of Bernie Sanders, who managed to capitulate to the DNC powers-that-be not once but twice.
But to return to the Labour Party, this political hollowing-out of what was once a mass and proud reformist party has by now been pretty much neutered and in keeping with centre-left conditions just about everywhere. The list does not make pretty reading. Currently there is no centre-left party, in western Europe at least, worthy of the name, the capitulation seems complete. As follows:
GREECE. THE RISE AND FALL OF SYRIZA
On its accession to power Syriza laid great emphasis on trying to convince their opponents that their proposals were financially sound and of benefit to all in the long-run. This is one of the characteristics of social-democracy. It is an approach based upon ‘the truth’, as they understood it, and rationality of their approach and compared favourably to the mistaken beliefs of their political opponents. What Syriza did not understand, however, was that the social virtues and heritage of social democratic reform was now history, buried deep under the refuse pile of new neoliberal values.
The political imperatives of SYRIZA’s position consisted of an adamantly committed policy to stay in the eurozone and the euro regime; but this was a regime of structural flaws which only benefitted the elites rather than ordinary folk. Concurrent with this the Greek people were consistently indicating in various polls taken that they did not want to leave the eurozone either. Like Syriza they wanted to end austerity and stay in Europe and keep the euro. Neither thus understood that the root of austerity lay in the neoliberal euro regime that they wanted to keep. One would have thought that following the crowd in this instance was a dereliction of duty on the part of the Syriza leadership who should have known better, but it is so much easier to take the easy way out than actually lead.
Syriza wanted a European version of the US 1930’s New Deal, but there was no FDR on the horizon, and, moreover, this was 70 years later, and history was not about to repeat itself.
The upshot of this sad historical nemesis was when Syriza took the road of least resistance. The European base of neoliberalism required the arrangement of goods and services and free movement of labour and capital which had indebted Greece (and other peripheral economies) and ensured some form of perpetual austerity. But this was precisely how the system was designed to work.
‘’Over the course of the third debt restructuring negotiations in 2015, Syriza would at first deny and then resist this reality, then concede in steps as it retreated from its positions and its Thessaloniki programme. In August 2015, it capitulated. Like its political predecessors, New Democracy in 2012, and PASOK in 2010, Syriza would also eventually settle into the ‘caretaker’ role for the neoliberal Troika.’’ (3)
FRANCE – LE PARTI SOCIALISTE – ABJECT FAILURE.
In late 2016, French President Francois Hollande became the first leader of the 5th Republic to announce that he would not seek re-election leaving his Parti Socialiste to find another candidate for the April 2017 presidential election. The five years of Hollande’s presidency had not been kind to the ruling party. Terrorist attacks, a shift to the right on domestic matters, persistent unemployment, internal party divisions, and even an illicit love affair, eroded confidence in Hollande’s government and left the Socialists with little in their playbook that remained popular with voters.
Hollande’s choice for economy minister, Emmanuel Macron, created new problems for the president right from the start. Just 36 when he was appointed in 2014, Macron was a former investment banker at a firm owned by the Rothschild family – an unusual choice for a president who once declared that the world of finance was his “enemy”.
Macron soon angered the Socialist’s left wing with his criticism of the 35-hour work-week and by calling for the deregulation of the French economy. Socialist deputy Yann Galut spoke for many in his party when he accused Macron of “disowning all the values of the left”. But then what else from an investment banker did the party expect?
The pro-business reforms, known as the “Macron laws”, included allowing stores to remain open on Sundays and late in the evenings. A more wide-ranging labour code 5, made it easier for firms to hire or fire and to extend employee working hours, soon followed suit. The proposed reforms prompted months of sometimes violent protests over the summer from students and unions who were angry over diminished labour protections. Yes it was all straight from the neoliberal policy manual. Hollande’s government controversially pushed the bill through parliament in June 2016 without holding a vote, igniting a new burst of outrage.
Macron was not the only member of Hollande’s cabinet to anger the party’s leftist base. Manuel Valls, 54 – the French Tony Blair – who served as interior minister and then prime minister before resigning to announce his own presidential run, has proved that even a Socialist Party can have a right wing.
As protests against labour reforms spread across France last summer, Valls once again took a hard line, moving to ban further demonstrations in Paris after sporadic outbreaks of violence. It was the first time since the 1960s that union demonstrations had been banned in France and it sparked outrage across the political spectrum, including within the already divided Socialist Party. After a weeklong stand-off, the unions were eventually allowed to hold a protest march via a different route.
Valls has said he wanted to ‘modernise’ the Socialist Party, even suggesting that it rename itself because the term “Socialist” is too “old-fashioned”. He says that a revitalised party could unite all of the country’s “progressive forces” into one movement. Valls’ brand of ‘right-wing Socialism’ (i.e., a neoliberal party) highlighted the quandary the party faced. If Hollande is seen as representing the traditional yet ineffectual left, its more dynamic members now look like the centre-right.
As unemployment continued to hit record highs, Valls infuriated many by saying more needed to be done to encourage the unemployed to get back to work. Macron, for his part, had said that the costly system of unemployment benefits needed to be revised, blaming the unions for deadlocking negotiations.
Statements such as these, coming as record numbers of French citizens struggled with a lack of job opportunities, have heightened resentment among much of the public and divided those within the Socialist party. And they seem more like admonishments that would come from the right-wing Les Républicains party than from the fresh new faces of France’s left. But after the erratic Hollande years, the party now faced the task of reinventing itself as a movement that combines traditional leftist values with a fresh dynamism that is ready to meet the challenges of the future. In short, the PS had to change into a neoliberal outfit. After all – TINA!
Humiliated, unloved, and threatened to be plundered by Macron’s movement, the French socialists stood shivering at a crossroad. Hardly unexpected of course. France was, after all, being corralled into the neoliberal sheep-pen.
France has predictably followed the universal neoliberal economic prescriptions and rewarded with the wholly expected failed outcomes. After growing at an estimated rate of 1.7% in 2018, GDP grew by an abysmal estimated 1.3% in 2019. Minimal growth rates needed to overcome this economic standstill needed to be at least 2% to make any impact on what has become a secular stagnation. This has had political ramifications.
The European elections of May 2019 saw the victory of the National Rally of Marine Le Pen (far right), gathering 23% of the vote, compared to 22% for the Republic in March of Emmanuel Macron. On the international scene, the president intends to strengthen the integration of the euro zone by revitalizing the Franco-German partnership. But Macron’s delusions of grandeur are simply swimming against the stream here with unemployment at 10%, trade figures all negative, private debt to GDP at 227% and Sovereign debt at 98%. Unquestionably France is in a deep structural political/economic crisis.
From Gaullism in 1945 consisting of independence and distrust of the Anglo-Saxon bloc, to the current force feeding of neoliberalism and an unquestioning loyalty to NATO. Mission accomplished? Not quite. And then comes the emergence of the Gilet Jaunes. What next for France?
GERMANY: THE SPD
The oldest, Social Democratic Party in Europe, the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, can be traced back to the 1860s, and for much of the 20th and 21st centuries it has represented the centre-left in German politics, although not the far left politics of the pre-war KPD (Communists) and SAP (Socialist Workers’ Party’ where Willie Brandt was once a member). Nevertheless from 1891 to 1959 the Party at least theoretically espoused Marxism. Of course this all changed in the main due to Cold War but more importantly for the need for political deals and coalition governments which were made the sine qua non for the formation of governments in Germany. At the present time, the SPD is in a fragile coalition government together with the conservative CDU/CSU and the SPD, the Grand Coalition as it is called.
THE EUROPEAN POWER-HOUSE:
In economic terms Germany had always been the economic powerhouse of Europe and possibly even the world. It’s dynamism came from a globally competitive industrial base, pivoting on automobiles, chemicals, and machine tools. Its exports enabled it to command vast surpluses on current account thus providing the wherewithal to lend globally.
Whether this Teutonic pre-eminence was a conscious policy choice on the part of Germany, or merely a policy-drift due to the internal structure of Germany’s post-war policy configuration seems debatable. Germany had certainly bucked the Anglo-American trend of de-industrialisation and financialization which had become de rigueur internationally as a result of the putative ‘efficiency’ of the Anglo-American model. Germany had not deindustrialised, had a smallish stock market compared with other developed states, eschewed as far as possible a system of equity funding and maintained a traditional reliance on bank funding for industry since long term relations were easier to develop among corporations and banks and the internal structure of corporations is not driven by the desire to placate stock markets. Moreover, the German banking system had a multitiered and competitively structured organization which included a raft of smaller and medium sized banks, the Sparkassen, which operated with a local focus. This stood in stark opposition to the oligopolistic banking monoliths of the Atlantic world.
Additionally, there were further reasons why Germany emerged as the EU hegemon. Primarily, Germany did not sacrifice its world class industrial-export sector on the altar of deindustrialisation. But instead adopted and adapted its own variant of financialization while at the same time protected its industrial sector by manipulating its exchange rate to protect exports. The German manufacturing sector is highly productive, export-oriented and has maintained relatively strong union representation in the wage formation process compared to the rest of the private (domestic) sector which has modest productivity and relatively weak unions in comparison with other EU countries.
In the domestic economy, however, Germany was able to restructure (i.e., lower) wage costs and working conditions with the imposition of the Hartz reforms – a set of policies arrayed against German labour which pushed down costs through the implementation of ‘flexible’ labour markets. This gave Germany a competitive first-mover, edge in intra-European trade resulting in an ongoing surplus on its current account. And when one state achieves a (recurring) surplus on current account other states must record a deficit on current account. In this instance this was the southern periphery. If this smacked of neoliberalism –that’s because it was.
In sharp contrast to the southern periphery the eastern periphery of central Europe was not part of the eurozone which means that they were not ensnared in the Iron Cage of EMU and enabled to keep their own currencies. But heavy German investment in this area produced a core-periphery relationship where low-wage, semi-skilled assembly work was farmed out to Slovakia, Slovenia, Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland. That is the usual pattern of FDI supply chains. High-end production, including R&D was kept at Home Base.
Additionally, Central European peripheries have come to depend heavily on Germany for technology and markets. If Germany faced a severe recession so would probably be the whole of Central Europe.
Thus, Germany was to become the overseer of an increasingly neo-liberal order precisely at the time when the 2008 blow-out was to cross the Atlantic and usher in a quasi-permanent period of instability for the whole EU project. The main actors in the future development of the EU were the ECB the EC and the IMF, the infamous Troika. The ECB in particular was the paragon of Banking, monetary and fiscal rectitude. This was underlined insofar as it was domiciled in Frankfurt as was the Bundesbank and was heavily influenced in policy terms by this particular institution.
Then came the 2020 derailment. Prior to this, however, growth rates had been zero to miniscule at less than 1% per quarter since 2018. Then came the yo-yo bounce in 2020. Ten Year Bunds Yields were at -0.53 (that’s a minus sign BTW), unemployment was beginning to rise, inflation was at -0.2% which means that it was actually deflation, interest rates were at zero, consumer confidence was at -3.1, retail sales at -2.2%, Sovereign Debt-to-GDP 68%, Private Debt-to-GDP at 154% (but these latter private figures were based upon 2018 statistics).
THE SPD VANISHING TRICK:
And where was the SPD during all this time? It was following the trend of course. The then party leader and Chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, defended his counter-reformist ‘Agenda 2010’ and praised Tony Blair’s ‘New Labour’ as a successful example of ‘modern’ social democracy. At the same time, up and down the country, some 90,000 workers responded to a call by the Trade Union Federation, the DGB, and demonstrated against attempts to dismantle the welfare state. In East Germany, 84% of all steel workers organised in the IG Metall voted in favour of industrial action for the 35-hour week which had been introduced in the West back in the 1990s.
Horrified by high unemployment (4) and fear of recession and even depression, Schroder and his think tanks were doing what they had always accused the previous Helmut Kohl government of doing: they were attacking the unemployed and not unemployment. They claimed that dismantling the welfare state and massive tax reductions were to the benefit of the employers and the rich but in general would open the path towards economic growth and a new jobs miracle. In doing this, they could count on the applause of the bourgeois media and politicians who kept pushing them further and further down that road.
But later developments in 2019 have led to a new inward turn of the SPD which will give the already rapidly changing party system a further push. Both the CDU and SPD have lost dramatically during recent European and regional elections. The winners have been the ‘woke’ Green party and the far-right Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD). The Green party, also led by a new team since January 2018, has been a clear beneficiary of the rise of the urban middle-class and the weakness of the two governing parties. The Green party is now solidly number two in the party system and highly likely to join the next government, either with the CDU or the two parties on the ‘left’, the SPD left centrist and Der Linke the old East German Communist Party.
CONCLUSION
Throughout Europe the Social-Democratic tradition has been in crisis since the 1980s onwards and is heading rapidly toward marginalization and oblivion. Having prostrated itself before the deities of neo-liberalism and globalization, and swallowed the holy dogmas whole there seems no way back. And if anything the situation in the southern and eastern peripheries are even more dire than those in Western Europe. The political structures in Europe now range from outright fascist, right and centre right, and an allegedly centre-left that acts like a centre-right, a Guardian-style liberal woke party. That’s it folks. Europe seems to be heading to a turbulent and ugly future
NOTES
(1) The Lobby – Al Jazeera – The Independent newspaper – London 12-January-2017
(2) The Israel Lobby – John J Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt – passim.
(3) Looting Greece: A New Financial Imperialism Emerges – Jack Rasmus – passim.
(4) The story of the German jobs miracle is misleading. It is true that the number of people in employment increased by more than 10 percent between 2003 and the end of 2016 from 39 to 43 million. But this was achieved mainly by replacing full-time jobs by part-time and mini jobs. In fact, actual working time did not increase at all up to 2010; the work was just spread over more people.” And also since the economic climate improved in 2011, the volume of work has been growing much more slowly than employment and is still below the levels of the early 1990s. And that is why in 2016, 4.8 million people in Germany were living entirely from mini jobs. A further 1.5 million are working against their will in part-time jobs. And then there are around 1 million contract workers and more than 2 million self-employed without employees, and most of them do not have enough work.
The “industrial reserve army“ of the unemployed, as Karl Marx once called them, “was reduced in size at the price of a growth in the reserve army of the under-employed in part-time work and the over-employed who have to do several jobs to get by.”
Liberal film maker Michael Moore, who in 2016 predicted Donald Trump’s electoral victory, is again interfering with the premature celebration over Biden’s victory.
Yesterday, just five days before the election, Moore sounded the alarm, strongly suggesting that the polls showing Biden with a comfortable lead over Trump are not accurate.
In a TV interview Moore said: “The Trump vote is always being undercounted. Pollsters- when they actually call the Trump voter, the Trump voter is very suspicious of the ‘Deep State’ calling them and asking them who they’re voting for.”
Moore is devastated by the thought that Trump may continue residing at the same address for another four years, but that does not affect the acuity of his observation. In this peculiar world, a large proportion of Americans are reluctant to admit their support for the elected president. This is not just an American phenomenon. Many Brits won’t admit that they voted Brexit and would probably vote Brexit again. Many Brits wouldn’t admit that they supported the Tories but when they voted, they served up the Labour party its biggest blow in its electoral history. The same happened in Israel’s recent elections. Netanyahu performed far better on election day than in the pollsters’ predictions. The explanation given in Israel was that his voters do not tell the truth to pollsters.
History provides us with a manifold of occasions in which the masses pretended to support the regime, the ruling party or a tyrant. What we see in the West currently is the opposite. A large segment of the public is actually fearful of the opposition, of those who are committed to ‘liberate’ them from their ‘crypto fascist’ rulers in the name of ‘liberal values’ and ‘freedom.’
Americans aren’t fearful of Trump, his party, the intelligence services, the NSA, the FBI or the CIA. They are actually afraid of the ‘progressive’ social media giants and their ‘community standards’. In the USA much of the mainstream media isn’t shy of being one sided and blatantly conceals news that may present the presidential challenger in a negative light. It is even more disturbing that many Americans appear to be fearful of the opposition and its powers over them. This suggests that America isn’t even remotely a free place. In America, as in Britain, the opposition has evolved into a dark, authoritarian force.
What is at the core of this authoritarian shift? The so-called Left; ‘liberals’ and ‘progressives’ are totally removed from the cultural and political core values that made the Left into a meaningful argument. The level of detachment is so severe that most Leftists, progressives and liberals don’t even remember what those values are. The so-called Left has failed to adapt to the new reality. They, evidently, seek political power, but they fail to provide a plan that would make the world a slightly better place. It doesn’t take a genius to point at Trump’s dysfunctional operation as much as it is easy to point at Boris Johnson’s comical cabinet but what is it that the opposition offers instead? I would have liked to say ‘not a lot,’ but the answer is actually ‘nothing at all.’
The humiliating crash of Jeremy Corbyn is probably the most useful window into the evaporation of Left and progressive politics on both sides of the Atlantic. When Corbyn was elected to lead the Labour Party in September 2015, he was regarded as a principled Left ideological icon, a man who had supported the oppressed throughout his entire political career: even those who did not support him agreed that Corbyn was Britain’s leading anti racist. Within days of Corbyn’s nomination as the Labour PM candidate, Corbyn displayed all the traits of a rock star. Millions of young Brits and others around the world saw him as a hero of justice and offered themselves as his avant-garde in his battle for justice and against austerity.
Yesterday, the same Corbyn was subject to the final humiliating blow. He was suspended from the party he led until a few months ago. What happened between 2015 and 2020?
As soon as Corbyn assumed the lead of Labour both he and his party were subject to relentless attacks by the Israel Lobby and British Jewish Institutions. One after another, Corbyn’s closest allies were targeted. Corbyn didn’t stand up for any of them, or if he did, he made sure to conceal his intervention. Thousands of Labour members were suspended and expelled from the Party for criticising Israel, its lobby, or noting any exceptionalist aspects of Jewish political culture. But throughout the witch hunt, Corbyn remained silent. And when it came to politics, Corbyn couldn’t take a firm position on Brexit or any other matter. It took Corbyn only four years to waste the huge support he had initially and to reduce his party into a tragic act. In those four years, the British Labour Party explored every authoritarian method. It harassed and collected private information about its members, it even spied on its members’ social media accounts. It operated in concert with the police and the Israel lobby against its own precious members. During all that time while Corbyn was the leader of the party, not once did he act as a leader and stand up and call for a stop to the madness.
Corbyn was suspended yesterday following his reaction to the Equalities and Human Rights Commission’s (EHRC) verdict that Labour had broken the law in its handling of antisemitism complaints during the period when Mr Corbyn was in charge.
No one in the treacherous British press dared mention it, but the meaning of this suspension is that even the ex-leader of the Labour party, a person who was a PM candidate last December, is not allowed to express his personal views. All he is allowed to do is to follow the script. Clearly it isn’t just the masses who are terrorised by tyranny of correctness, even the Labour Party and its leadership are subject to the most authoritarian proscriptions. They are commanded to follow a script. The only question that remains open is who writes the script and who translates it into English?
But the absurdity is even greater. The EHRC was formed by the Labour government back in 2007. Its non-official task was to tackle right wing racism in an attempt to interfere with the British National Front. From its inception, the EHRC was designed to police thought and speech. Looking at Corbyn and the damage the Labour party inflicted on itself, the chickens have come home to roost. Labour has been beaten by the dictatorial machine it invented to police its political enemies.
We do not yet know who is going to win the USA presidential election. But even if Biden wins, it is impossible to deny the fact that pretty much every second American voter believes that Trump is the better man to lead the country. The same applies in Britain, even if Labour had won the last election, every second Brit believes that Brexit is the right way forward.
I believe that if there is anything left out of the Athenian spirit and Christian ethos that made the West into a precious civilization that inspired others, it is that we must ‘love our neighbour.’ In 2020 loving your neighbour means to agree to disagree, to see a human and humanity in each other. To love your neighbour is to search for that which unites us and to stand firm against those who break us into biological identitarian segments separated by gender, skin colour, sexual orientation etc. To love your neighbour in 2020 is to seek harmony.
The Left in its current authoritarian form cannot lead us towards this goal. It is an occupied zone. The Left needs a reset, it needs to delve into its metaphysical origin: into that unifying instinct that is also universal. Corbyn was a star when people believed that he really cared for ‘the many’ and not ‘the few.’ He evaporated as a political power when the many understood that he and his party were puppeteered by the very few.
If Britain were a healthy society the #Wiley saga would have triggered an open discussion about race and privilege. Wiley would be invited to BBC Newsnight, he would be challenged by one of BBC’s anchors, he would be confronted by one or two representatives of the Jewish community, he would have a chance to explain where he comes from. We would be better able to understand the emerging clash between Jews and Blacks.
But Britain is not very healthy at the moment and none of the above has happened.
What happened instead was George Floyd all over again, but with a few major and significant differences. In the case of George Floyd a few policemen engaged in a deadly brutal and insidious act. In the case of Wiley, the entire Zionist league and its allies used a collective public knee to attempt the annihilation of the Black music icon. Another difference reflects on all of us. Following the Floyd murder thousands of Brits went to the streets to loudly proclaim that Black Lives Matter. They confronted the British police, they destroyed statues of slave traders. Who took to the streets to support Wiley? Do Black Lives Matter only so long as Blacks do not open their mouths?
Watch Wiley in action:
Wiley’s comments didn’t trigger the desirable, if heated, debate because Jewish power, as I define it, is the power to silence criticism of Jewish power. Every means that serves this cause is considered legitimate. Interestingly, the disabling of speech is so extreme that one can’t find out what it was that Wiley said that was so offensive. His tweets were initially removed by Twitter and as his twitter account is suspended.
Every news outlet in Britain and beyond has told us that Wiley’s tweets were horrid and anti-Semitic but no one dares to provide an example. It seems we are not even allowed to know what it is that we shouldn’t say. Possibly the censorship is even more sinister, they don’t want Wiley quoted only to find out that a large number of Brits, possibly including prominent Jewish voices, actually agree with the gist of Wiley’s statement.
Wiley is accused of promoting “Conspiracy Theories” about Jews and their power. This is slightly confusing because Jews often brag about their power and success. According to the Jewish site Israelunwired, Alan Dershowitz’s message to the Jews reflects a celebration of the power of Jews: “Why is it that Jews feel they need to apologize? Why do they feel that because they are strong and have contributed so much to the world, that deserves an apology? On the contrary! Jews should feel proud that God has given them such strength. And they have used it to help others. It is crazy that the world still has such negative beliefs about the Jewish people!”
On its face, it seems as if today’s Number One ‘Amalek,’ Wiley, a Black celebrity rapper and our prime Zionist mouthpiece, Dershowitz, agree on the significance of Jews in different domains. However, Dershowitz is entitled to brag about Jewish achievements, the Black voice Wiley is reduced to dust and declared public enemy number one.
Back in 2018 Dershowitz admitted in an Washington Examiner article that “it is true that Jews are represented in large numbers in various professionals such as the academy, finance, and the media.” Dershowitz also believes that Jewish prominence “is not because they are given preferential treatment. It is because they have proved to be successful at these enterprises. Should they be blamed for that?”
Like Dershowitz I believe that some Jews are gifted in certain areas, I also believe that people who work hard deserve acknowledgment. I am pretty sure that Wiley also agrees with that. So where is the dispute?
In both my writing and talks I keep insisting that there are no “Jewish conspiracies,” all is done in the open, whether it is AIPAC domination of USA foreign policy or Epstein flying world leaders on his Lolita Express, but you can’t talk about it. Dershowitz can brag about Jewish achievements: the rest of us can’t. Maybe we are tapping here into the true meaning of Jewish privilege.
In the last two days I searched the net to find out what words Wiley said. I found no trace, but the BBC, the failure news outlet, was proud to provide us with an extended monologue delivered by Emma Barnett.
Emma Barnett told her BBC listeners that she went through Wiley’s tweets and they where “straight out of the Hitler playbook of 1930s Nazi Germany.”
According to Barnett, Wiley tweeted that “Jewish people are cowards do something to me, I am waiting.” This doesn’t sound like Hitler to me. It is crude, it is a challenge, it involves an essentialist generalization but contains nothing that echoes Hitler or Nazi Germany. However, they still came at Wiley as hard as they could. Maybe Wiley should be recognized as the last prophet. They may want to consider integrating his tweets into the Hebrew Bible.
“They act rough,” she quotes Wiley as writing, “but they hide behind the police” – in fact, this sounds to me like a tweet by a Jewish pressure group bragging about its intimate “partnership” with UK police (also look here and here).
Barnett quotes Wiley, “who writes the laws, who changes the law, who implements the laws?” 80% of our conservative MPs are members of the Conservative Friends of Israel so the priorities of our ‘lawmakers’ are obvious. Maybe Barnett should use this opportunity and tell us how many Conservatives are friends of Hartlepool, Liverpool or any other Pool in the Kingdom.
“Who runs the world?” Wiley asks. I guess that when Epstein, Maxwell, Wexner and Weinstein are constantly in the headlines, this question may be rhetorical. Does Mrs. Barnett need me to introduce her to the work of Jared Kushner and his role in the Trump administration? Maybe the name Rahm Israel Emanuel rings a bell? Do I have to tell Barnett about AIPAC, CFI, LFI or the Crif?
“Who runs banking?” Barnett quotes from Wiley’s tweet. Maybe Dershowitz could help defend Wiley as he calls upon Jews to be proud of their achievements in this domain. Barnett can also look at George Soros and Black Wednesday. She can look at Goldman Sachs, Greenspan, Yellen… the list is pretty endless and growing by the day.
I guess that Barnett is sincere when she complains that “these words play of a very deep Jewish hidden fear that anti-Semitism rises up.” Yet, is “hidden” the right term? I ask because we are blitzed day and night by repetitions of this very specific Jewish fear. If there is anything that isn’t ‘hidden’ in Britain it must be the ‘Jewish fear of anti-Semitism.’
Emma Barnett doesn’t want us to talk about #Jewishprivilege. I am afraid that pushing all of social media to blacklist a Black cultural hero just a month after George Floyd, with No 10 and Priti Patel also pushing on behalf of Zion, is a privilege no other ethnic minority enjoys, certainly not the bronze community of former world leaders that were toppled one after another in recent weeks.
I do partially agree with Emma Barnet when she says “Jews don’t run the law.” Absolutely correct Emma, Jews don’t run the law, but Jewish pressure groups do and they boast about it 24/7.
Barnett declares, “Jews do not run the banks,” True again Emma, but Jews are vastly over represented in every banking and investment sector as Dershowitz boasted above.
“Jews do not run the world!” Absolutely true but AIPAC dominates American foreign policy and is proud of it.
“Where did it get his anti-Semitic memo from?” Barnett asks. I find this question slightly perplexing since statistics confirm that a large segment of Europeans may agree with Wiley. A recent major survey of public attitudes for CNN found more than a fifth of the 7,000 people polled in seven countries believed Jewish people have too much influence in finance and politics. The ADL is telling us in its latest survey that 1.09 billion “People in the world harbour anti-Semitic attitudes” out of 4 billion surveyed. Once again we are talking about 25%. To answer Barnett’s question, If Wiley was really looking for an educational source he had more than a billion people to choose from. It seems as if according to the ADL, one out of four people admit to their feelings about Jews as long as they stay anonymous. This may reveal what Wiley’s ‘crime’ was. He uttered that which most people are trained to keep to themselves.
Wiley gave us an opportunity to meet our demons, to understand what we are for real. The picture that is unfolding from that saga is grim and points to a darker future. We are terrified of our rulers and we are tormented by our own thoughts which we are scared to admit to ourselves. We are living in a world where maintaining a social media account is way more important than our own truth. This is how far we are removed from our Athenian cultural, spiritual and intellectual ethos that made the west into a distinct civilization.
For those who are confused by the Jewish institutional reaction to Wiley, the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan offers an explanation. “The unconscious is the discourse of the Other,” was, I believe, Lacan’s most important insight. The unconscious is the fear that everybody out there sees you as you are and even worse, discusses you with others behind your back. The unconscious is the fear that if you fail in bed tonight; tomorrow your neighbours will refer to you as ‘the impotent.’ In Lacanian perspectives, for self identified Jews, it seems the unconscious is the discourse of the Goyim, it is the fear that those one billion identified by the ADL as ‘anti-Semites’ will start to explore their views in the open. It is the unbearable fear that the ‘Goyim Know.’
Lacan’s insight helps us grasp the hysteria around Wiley and anti-Semitism. Self-identified Jews are very happy to brag about their successes but the idea that the same success is scrutinized by others devastates their entire existence.
If Britain were an open space, we could openly discuss all of this and move our society forward towards harmony and reconciliation. Both Jews and gentiles would benefit from such a discourse. But Britain is an occupied zone and for more than a while. It is invaded by fear and dominated by the politics of fear. This type of politics, when it appears in other countries, is called ‘terror,’ ‘fascism,’ ‘authoritarianism,’ ‘totalitarianism,’ and ‘tyrannical conditions.’ Maybe time is overdue for Jews and Goyim alike to decide if these are the conditions they want to live in.
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Introduction by Gilad Atzmon: I found this morning that British Jewish pressure groups once again defame British anti racists. Today it is, Rosie Smith, a Black Lives Matter activist and Jim Curran, an old truth seeker. Curran is guilty of attending Keep Talking meetings, a discussion group that discusses the undiscussable (9/11, the Holocaust, Rothschild etc.).
According to the Jerusalem Post, Keep Talking is also guilty of inviting yours truly to discuss the Balfour Declaration. I am once again falsely accused of spreading ‘conspiracies’ and ‘holocaust denial’ no less no more.
Here is my Balfour declaration talk. You won’t find tere ‘Holocaust denial’ or ‘conspiracies,’ just properly sourced materials referenced to Jewish and zionist publications. I can only be thankful to the Zionist alliance for referring to my work on the Balfour as I am proud of this lecture in particular.
In this talk Atzmon elaborates on that which the historicity of Balfour is set to conceal — a century of Jewish political hegemony in Britain and beyond.
Keep Talking, London 7.11.2017
Text
The Balfour Declaration – One Hundred Years of (Goyim) Solitude
A talk given at Keep Talking gathering in London, 7 November 2017
By Gilad Atzmon
In Heidegger and the Jews, the French philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard points out that history claims to narrate the past but, in practice, what it does is conceal our collective shame. The Americans conceal slavery and imperial genocidal aggression, the Brits conceal their colonial blunders, the Jews turn their eyes away from anything that may have contributed to turning Jewish history into an extended shoah. The real historian, claims Lyotard, is there to unveil the shame. This week marks 100 years since the Balfour declaration and today I will try to touch upon your shame, my shame, our shame. We will try to figure out what the history of the so-called Balfour ‘Declaration’ is there to conceal.
Let’s first examine the document. Most noticeably the so-called ‘declaration’ is not printed on official British government letterhead. It is not signed by the British cabinet either. It is, instead, a letter from a sleazy British politician (Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour) to a very rich Jew (Lord Walter Rothschild). As such, the Balfour ‘declaration’ is actually a statement with somewhat limited significance. What it does is “declare[s] sympathy with Zionist aspirations.”
Yet, we must admit that the Jewish world has managed to squeeze quite a few drops of juice out of this watery statement. The Jewish world interprets this ‘sympathetic declaration’ as a commitment to their Zionist, racist and expansionist project namely the ‘Jewish State’. They claim to regard the vague statement as a license to ethnically cleanse the entire indigenous people of the land, i.e., the Palestinians. And, as if this is not enough, the British PM Theresa May has evidently bought into the most radical Zionist interpretation of the declaration.
May announced last week that she was “proud of our pioneering role in the creation of the state of Israel.”
Let me share some of the awkward history of the Balfour Declaration with you. The ‘declaration,’ as we now understand, was actually drafted and approved by British Jews before it was sent to Lord Rothschild.
The National Library of Israel reveals the flowing:
“Before the declaration was officially presented to Lord Rothschild by Lord Balfour, the draft was presented to Jewish leaders of every political stripe, both Zionist and non-Zionist. One of these leaders was Sir Philip Magnus, a Reform rabbi and British politician whose opinion on the declaration was sought.” (http://web.nli.org.il/sites/NLI/English/library/reading_corner/Pages/balfour.aspx)
Herbert Samuel, the British first High Commissioner of Palestine who served between 1920 and 1925 was an avid Zionist Jew and a close acquaintance of Chaim Weizmann, the leading pragmatic Zionist, the spirit behind the ‘declaration’ and later the first Israeli president. How did the Zionists managed to plant a Zionist Jew in such a crucial and sensitive position? The answer is devastatingly simple. They were running the show. We are talking here about Jewish domination of the relevant British foreign affairs as early as the beginning of the 20th century.
But was it really ‘The Jews,’ Moshe, Yaakov, Sarah who dominated British Middle East affairs? Unlikely. It is more reasonable to assume that the fate of the empire and its decisions were in the hands of just a very few powerful Jews, people like Lord Rothschild to whom Balfour actually addressed the declaration.
This tale of Jewish political domination extends well beyond the borders of Britain. In his invaluable book, The Pity of it All, Israeli historian Amos Elon suggests that the 1917 Balfour Declaration was at least partially motivated by the British government’s desire to win the support of pro-German Jewish- American bankers so that they would help push the USA into the war.
Elon argues that at the beginning of the war, German- American Jewish financiers sided with the Germans and rejected possible alliances between the USA and England. “Jacob H. Schiff, head of Kuhn, Loeb—at the time the largest private bank in the United States after J. P. Morgan—declared that he could no more disavow his loyalty to Germany than he could renounce his own parents. Schiff prayed for Germany’s victory. In a statement to the New York Times on November 22, 1914, he charged the British and the French with attempting to destroy Germany for reasons of trade.” (The Pity Of It All, pg. 455)
According to Elon, the Brits had encountered a Jewish problem with American Jews. “The British government took these developments very seriously. In a fit of paranoia, the British ambassador in Washington even suspected the existence of a veritable German Jewish conspiracy in the United States directed at Britain.” (Ibid)
Thanks to the Balfour declaration German Jewish bankers in the US flipped sides. Seems that they betrayed their fatherland, no more were they German patriots. Elon’s conclusion is that: “The 1917 Balfour Declaration, calling for the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine, was at least partly motivated by the British government’s desire to win support among pro-German American Jews.” (ibid)
The take home message is rather devastating. For some time our universe has been dominated by tribal interests that are foreign to most of us. And for some reason we cannot really explore the conditions that shape our reality and dictate our doomed future.
This is, in fact, the precise meaning of Jewish power. Jewish power is the power that suppresses criticism of Jewish power. Some of the less sophisticated critics of Israel accuse Zionism and Israel of various conspiratorial doings. I, on the other hand, have said repeatedly that there are no Jewish conspiracies. All is done in the open. The Balfour ‘declaration’ that was written to a Jewish financier was quickly made public. America was openly pushed into WWI for the sake of Zion. The appointment of a Zionist Jew, Herbert Samuel, as the high commissioner of Palestine wasn’t a secret either. It was actually controversial at the time.
These events were as clear at the time as are contemporary Jewish lobby groups such as AIPAC, CRIF, CFI and LFI who push, in broad daylight, for Zio-driven immoral interventionist wars against Iraq, Syria, Iran and Libya. A century of constant abuse has left us speechless. We do not know how to deal with this menace. And this is the core of our shame. This is what our history is there to conceal. This applies to you and me, but it also applies to Theresa May. To tell the truth about the Balfour Declaration is to publicly admit to 100 hundred years of Goyim solitude.
In the last few weeks, Palestinian solidarity enthusiasts have been creative in producing numerous proactive slogans. The one that grabbed my attention this week was “Balfour Declaration -100 years of ethnic cleansing.” This week actually marks a century of Zionist domination of the Western civilisation. But let me tell you, the real authentic Palestinians, those who live in Gaza and the West Bank may be slightly better off than the rest of us. While we are often overwhelmed by the sophistication of our masters in Tel Aviv, the Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza and Lebanon know exactly who their enemies are; they meet them in roadblocks, they recognise the sounds of their drones. Our enemy here, in the USA, in France and in Britain, is somehow elusive: is it Zionism, is it Israel, or maybe just the Lobby? Is it really ‘the Jews,’ or even Judaism? Where exactly does Judaism end and Jewishness start? Let me try to open your eyes. It is none of the above, and yet it might as well be all of the above and beyond. Zionism is a sophisticated matrix and it shifts rapidly. Zionism like Jewish anti Zionism strives for your intellectual castration. It somehow defies your opposition even before you can utter it yourself. How is this done? It obliterates your ability to act ethically and rationally. It targets your survival skills. How? It eradicates your Athenian roots and replaces them with a rigid Jerusalemite regulatory system.
In my recent book Being in Time – a post Political Manifesto I delve into the Straussian dichotomy between Athens and Jerusalem. Athens is where we think things through, Athens is where philosophy and essentialism are celebrated. Jerusalem is the city of revelation, where Torah, Mitzvoth and commandments are accepted blindly. Athens is where ethics is explored by means of judgment. Jerusalem, on the other hand, is where ethics is replaced by laws.
Zionism, my friends, can only operate within a Jerusalemite dominated universe. A world governed by a tyranny of correctness. Was it Herzl, Ben Gurion or Netanyahu who imposed such tyrannical conditions on us? Not at all, this is the role of the New Left, the Identitarians, the cultural Marxists, the ‘progressives’ the people who adhere to ideological collectivism. The people who in the name of diversity silence the majority. Those who instead of uniting us around that which we all share, actually seek to divide us into infinitesimal particles of biological symptoms (skin colour, sex orientation, etc.).
I started this talk with a reference to Leyotard and his Heidegger and the Jews, I conclude with a reference to the teaching of the 20th century’s greatest Athenian: Martin Heidegger.
In opposition to the Jerusalemites of the world who in the name of ‘correctness’ tell us what to say and what to think, Martin Heidegger, the Athenian, taught us that to educate is to teach others to think for themselves and how to refine the questions (as opposed to recycling answers).
Time is overdue for us to liberate ourselves from our shame. Time is ripe to call a spade a spade. Now is the time for Alethea ( truth – Ancient Greek) and Logos to prevail. We must emancipate ourselves and find our true voice once again. Emancipation is opposition to the Jerusalemite oppressive condition. It is the fight for the disclosure of human unity once again.
We learned today that Israel’s UN ambassador Danny Dannon told AIPAC that Bernie Sanders is an ‘ignorant fool, a liar or both. “We don’t want Sanders at AIPAC. We don’t want him in Israel…Whoever calls the prime minister of Israel a ‘racist’ is either a liar, an ignorant fool, or both,” Ambassador Dannon announced.
The evidence of Israel’s racism and Netanyahu’s government’s racialist policies is, unfortunately, conclusive. One can look at Netanyahu’s government’s approach to Black migrants. Or examine the racist Israeli national bill. This leads one to wonder what motivated Ambassador Dannon to act so ‘undiplomatically,’ by attacking the Democratic Party frontrunner for expressing a reasoned criticism of Israel and its PM?
But even before we can get to that question, we have to consider what the same Israeli media outlets have informed us. In a leaked recording, Netanyahu senior adviser Natan Eshel, revealed that “hate is what unites” the Israeli right-wing and it “works well on non-Ashkenazi voters.”
Eshel, a former Netanyahu chief of staff who resigned amid allegations of sexual misconduct, continues to work with the Israeli PM, and last year led the two coalition negotiations.
In the recording, Eshel explains that Likud minister (and former IDF Spokeswoman) Miri Regev is “excellent” at “stirring up” Likud supporters. Eshel refers to Regev as “an animal,” but notes her tactics work very well in “drumming up the crowd.”
It is reasonable to think that Ambassador Dannon’s description of Sen. Sanders served a similar purpose: to drum up the AIPAC crowd. And, of course, the British Jewish media together with Jewish pressure groups and the Israeli Lobby have, since 2017, also used this technique to ignite their crowd’s hatred of the Labour party and its leader Jeremy Corbyn. Some people, so it seems, are united by hate.
Netanyahu’s senior adviser’s leaked recording shines a light on the ever- growing Jewish fear of antisemitism. Those who are so easily ‘united by hate’ tend to believe that others are also similarly hateful. The Jewish fear of antisemitism can be seen as projection. Those who are ‘united by hate,’ may well attribute their own hatefulness to their neighbours whether they are Palestinians, Labour voters, or even the Democratic frontrunner.
What we see is a lethal snowball of loathing and fear: the more hateful one happens to be, the more one is tormented by imagining that the Other is afflicted by the same hatefulness.
Jesus Christ diagnosed this very dangerous trait amongst his brethren. His solution was shocking, if simple. Instead of stockpiling weapons, he preached that his followers turn the other cheek: take a step forward, love your neighbour, break away from the vicious circle, seek peace and harmony.
The fate of Jesus is known to us all. The fate of those who try to preach peace to Israelis and Zionists isn’t exactly a secret either.
On Thursday night, the Jewish charity, Campaign Against Antisemitsm (CAA) declared that it would “be selecting a number of future dates on which to picket the 606 [jazz] club over its decision” to present a jazz performance by yours truly. With this threat, CAA crossed the line. This time it wasn’t just going after me or my band, this time its threat encompassed an entire community of musicians and music lovers for whom the 606 club is a preeminent venue, and none of whom have anything to do with me or my ideas.
Such threats are anathema to the values of British and western culture: the way to counter ideas with which they don’t agree is to present their own position. The tactic of gross intimidation, of menacing an entire community over the legal speech of one member are more characteristic of organised crime than of a British charity.
Yesterday I reported the CAA’s actions to the police. They took my complaint very seriously and I was interviewed for two hours. I had the strong impression that the matter was already known to the police.
During the time the police interviewed me, I received a message that the CAA is under investigation by the Charities Commission.
I was advised that every musician, music venue, promoter or audience member who is or has been subject to any intimidation or harassment by the CAA should contact the police immediately.
No one should be harassed, especially by a charity, and I want to believe that the threats to British politicians, artists, intellectuals, journalists, venues and ordinary people are about to come to an end. Such a development will make life safer and more comfortable for Jews and Gentiles alike.
Why I have withdrawn from my commitment to play at the Great 606 Jazz Club this Saturday night.
By Gilad Atzmon
They destroyed the Labour Party, now they have launched a campaign against the British arts scene. Will they successfully abuse the moniker of anti-Semitism to destroy any place, person or organization where they sense opposition?
The 606 Jazz Club and its owner, Steve Rubie, have been subjected to a constant barrage of pressure and threats for hosting my concert. In a familiar first act, a Jewish “member of the public” asked the 606 to explain why the club gives a [music] platform to me, whom he duplicitously calls ‘an anti-Semite and a Holocaust denier.’ The UK Jewish press avidly repeated the lies about me. Ludicrous accusations were made. The club was told that I advocate the ‘burning of synagogues.’ I was accused of suggesting that “Hitler was right after all.” The accusations are false and, of course, unsourced as they cannot be found anywhere in my work. If I were a Hitler supporter who urged burning synagogues, certainly these campaigners would have used Britain’s strict hate speech laws to have me spend some time behind bars..
I have played in the 606 club for many years and Steve and I have spent many hours discussing Israel and its politics. Steve has no doubts that the accusations against me are unfounded. Yesterday he wrote a moving statement explaining why I am invited to play at his club on a regular basis despite the constant pressure he endures. Amazingly, Steve had to point out that The 606 is “a music venue first and foremost. We are here to promote the best in UK music and Gilad falls in that category…” This is without regard to Steve’s disagreement with most of my political views.
Steve’s explained the basic core western value that political disagreement is no reason to stop the music. Are we to live in a land where Tories and Labour block each other’s arts events? Ridiculous. But apparently kosher in the case of supporters of Israel and its critics. The Campaign Against Antisemitism (CAA) were not persuaded by the simple truth of Steve’s letter. Last night, the CAA launched its new strategy, to threaten and then harass the Jazz community, the club, that artists and the jazz audience whenever it so decides. A few hours ago the CAA posted the this Tweet:
“Campaign Against Antisemitism will be selecting a number of future dates on which to picket the
Campaign Against Antisemitism will be selecting a number of future dates on which to picket the @606Club over its decision to provide notorious antisemite Gilad Atzmon with a platform.
This should horrify every Brit, Jew and Gentile, as it horrifies me. In 2017 a similar CAA campaign ended in a vicious attack on an audience member who suffered a serious eye injury.
This morning I decided that in the light of the CAA’s threats, I am withdrawing from the gig. I do not want to see the art scene obliterated by an insane Zionist pressure group. I certainly don’t want British artists and audiences subjected to violence. I did this despite my concerns about the consequences of bowing to anti-cultural bullies and my obligation to the British artists who have played with me for decades and whose livelihoods depends on such gigs.
Of far larger concern is that a pressure group that tweets its call for volunteers to destroy our art scene enjoys such impunity in Britain. How is it that British tax benefits granted charitable status to the benefit of the CAA that openly threatens to harass the Jazz community, its audience, venues and artists?
I deeply believe that Britain must reinstate its liberal and universal values of tolerance and diversity, and as a first step, I intend to file a complaint against the CAA with the Charity Commission. I ask you to examine their rules and decide if you want to do the same.
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.
The UK Labour Party is saying goodbye to Jeremy Corbyn as leader after its disastrous general election performance and has begun choosing someone else.
Wasting no time, the Board of Deputies of British Jews last week published Ten Pledges they wanted Labour leadership hopefuls to sign up to if the Party’s relationship with the Jewish community was to be healed.
The BoD claim anti-Semitism in the party became a matter of great anxiety for the UK’s Jews during Corbyn’s four years in office and it will take at least 10 years to repair the damage. Their president Marie van der Zyl says: “We expect that those seeking to move the party forward will openly and unequivocally endorse these Ten Pledges in full, making it clear that if elected as leader, or deputy leader, they will commit themselves to ensuring the adoption of all these points.
“Tackling antisemitism must be a central priority of Labour’s next leader,” she insists. “We will certainly be holding to account whoever ultimately wins the contest.”
But is there really an anti-Semitism crisis other than the one caused by the Jewish State itself and mischievously drummed up within Labour? As former Israeli Director of Military Intelligence, Yehoshafat Harkabi wrote: “It would be a tragic irony if the Jewish state, which was intended to solve the problem of anti-Semitism, was to become a factor in the rise of anti-Semitism. Israelis must be aware that the price of their misconduct is paid not only by them but also Jews throughout the world.” It has been suggested before that so-called anti-Semitism is a matter best resolved by the Jewish ‘family’ itself.
Obedience required
The BoD claim that all the leadership contenders – Sir Keir Starmer, Rebecca Long-Bailey, Lisa Nandy, Jess Phillips and Emily Thornberry – have signed the Ten Pledges, and three of the five deputy-leader candidates have done so. What are these crisis-busting Ten Pledges they’ve committed the Party to?
(1) Resolve outstanding cases – All outstanding and future cases should be brought to a swift conclusion under a fixed timescale.
Absolutely.
(2) Make the Party’s disciplinary process independent – An independent provider should be used to process all complaints, to eradicate any risk of partisanship and factionalism.
Of course.
(3) Ensure transparency – Key affected parties to complaints, including Jewish representative bodies, should be given the right to regular, detailed case updates, on the understanding of confidentiality.
Except that complainers, including the BoD, have a poor record of keeping even their wildest allegations confidential.
(4) Prevent readmittance of prominent offenders – It should be made clear that prominent offenders who have left or been expelled from the party, such as Ken Livingstone and Jackie Walker, will never be readmitted to membership.
It is not clear from the evidence that Livingstone or Jackie Walker committed an offence. They were hounded out and not, I think, by any independent arbitrator.
(5) Communicate with resolve – Bland, generic statements should give way to condemnation of specific harmful behaviours – and, where appropriate, condemnation of specific individuals.
This should apply also to false accusers and to the BoD themselves if failing to condemn the “harmful behaviours” of their brethren in the Israeli regime towards our sisters and brothers in Palestine.
(6) Provide no platform for bigotry – Any MPs, Peers, councillors, members or CLPs [local parties] who support, campaign or provide a platform for people who have been suspended or expelled in the wake of antisemitic incidents should themselves be suspended from membership.
Unacceptable. Many have been suspended for no good reason. And suspension does not mean guilt.
(7) Adopt the international definition of antisemitism without qualification – The IHRA definition of antisemitism, with all its examples and clauses, and without any caveats, will be fully adopted by the party and used as the basis for considering antisemitism disciplinary cases.
How many times must you be told that the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism is a minefield? Top legal opinion (for example Hugh Tomlinson QC, Sir Stephen Sedley and Geoffrey Robertson QC) warn that it is “most unsatisfactory”, has no legal force, and using it to punish could be unlawful. Furthermore it cuts across the right of free expression enshrined in UK domestic law and underpinned by Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which bestows on everyone “the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers”. This applies not only to information or ideas that are regarded as inoffensive, but also to those that “offend, shock or disturb the State or any sector of the population”. Labour Party members should know all this. The prohibitive IHRA definition is not something a sane organisation would incorporate into its Code of Conduct.
(8) Deliver an anti-racism education programme that has the buy-in of the Jewish community – The Jewish Labour Movement should be reengaged by the Party to lead on training about antisemitism.
The BoD and JLM would do better teaching anti-racism to the Israeli regime and its supporters. Besides, MPs and councillors don’t ‘belong’ to the Labour Party or any other party; they belong to the public who elected them as their representative. No outside body should expect to influence their freedom of thought, expression or action (see the Seven Principles of Public Life).
(9) Engagement with the Jewish community to be made via its main representative groups – Labour must engage with the Jewish community via its main representative groups, and not through fringe organisations and individuals.
Labour should engage with the Jewish community though any representative organisation or individual it pleases.
(10) Show leadership and take responsibility – The leader must personally take on the responsibility of ending Labour’s antisemitism crisis.
There’s no agreement that anything approaching a crisis exists within the Party.
Leadership front-runner Starmer is a former human rights lawyer and ought to know better. Long-Bailey is another lawyer who should hang her head in shame. Thornberry is a former barrister specialising in human rights law – words fail. Jess Phillips, a member of Labour Friends of Israel, wrote Truth to Power: 7 Ways to Call Time on B.S., described as “the little book we all need to help us call time on the seemingly unstoppable tide of bullshit in our lives”. The irony of it seems lost on her. Lisa Nandy is a puzzle as she’s chair of Labour Friends of Palestine.
If this bunch won’t robustly uphold freedom of expression guaranteed by law and international convention what have they let their hapless party in for? Those standing for deputy-leader also have little excuse. Angela Rayner was shadow education secretary, Ian Murray read Social Policy and Law, and Rosena Allin-Khan is a Muslim and former humanitarian aid doctor. They obediently signed the Ten Pledges. Dawn Butler and Richard Burgon declined.
When, a year ago, the French Republic presented its Human Rights Award to B’Tselem (the Israeli human rights group) its Executive Director Hagai El-Ad, thanking the National Consultative Commission on Human Rights, said of Israel’s behaviour towards the Palestinians: “The occupation…. is organized, prolonged state violence which brings about dispossession, killings, and oppression. All branches of the state are part of it: ministers and judges, officers and planners, parliamentarians and bureaucrats.”
On another occasion B’Tselem said: “If the international community does not come to its senses and force Israel to abide by the rules that are binding to every state in the world, it will pull the rug out from under the global effort to protect human rights in the post-WWII era.”
When a respected Israeli organisation speaks truth in such stark terms it cannot be ignored. And recent UN reports confirm that the Israelis abuse and torture child prisoners. So why would anyone – especially those competing to be Labour Party leader and one day prime minister – agree to dance to the tune of those who pimp and lobby on Israel’s behalf?
Who will punish the false accusers?
The BoD nevertheless make some valid points. The Labour Party takes a ridiculously long time to deal with allegations of anti-Semitism, many of which are false or vexatious and could be dismissed in five minutes. Let me tell you about two Scottish Labour politicians wrongly accused of anti-Semitic remarks and suspended. Let’s call them ‘A’ and ‘B’. Both are regional councillors.
Constituency party officials declared ‘A’ guilty immediately and issued a press statement to that effect without waiting for him to be heard, hugely prejudicing any investigation. This stupidity was compounded by his Council leader publicly calling on him to resign as a councillor and saying his thinking belonged to the Dark Ages: “To smear an entire community both past and present, to say he has lost ‘all empathy’ for them is utterly deplorable,” he was quoted in the press.
What was ‘A’s crime? He had tweeted: “For almost all my adult life I have had the utmost respect and empathy for the Jewish community and their historic suffering. No longer, due to what they and their Blairite plotters are doing to my party and the long suffering people of Britain…” Was nobody in the local party aware that the Jewish Leadership Council and the Board of Deputies were then leading an obnoxious campaign to discredit Labour and Jeremy Corbyn?
‘B’, a respected lady councillor, was accused of anti-Semitism by a former Labour MP who was already on record as wanting to impose limits on freedom of expression. A Tory MP immediately put the boot in, telling the media it was clear to the vast majority of people that ‘B’ was no longer fit to hold office and suspension didn’t go far enough.
And what was ‘B’s crime? She had voiced suspicion on social media that Israeli spies might be plotting to get rid of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader after three Jewish newspapers ganged up to publish a joint front page warning that a Corbyn-led government would pose an “existential threat to Jewish life in this country”.
She added that if it was a Mossad assisted campaign to prevent the election of a Labour Government (which pledged to recognise Palestinian statehood) it amounted to an unwarranted interference in our democracy. For good measure she said Israel was a racist State and, since the Palestinians are also Semites, an anti-Semitic one.
‘B’ was eventually interviewed by party investigators. They surely knew that in January 2017 a senior political officer at the Israeli embassy in London, Shai Masot, had plotted with stooges among British MPs and other activists to “take down” senior government figures including Boris Johnson’s deputy at the Foreign Office, Sir Alan Duncan. And that Mark Regev, Netanyahu’s former chief spokesman and mastermind behind Israel’s propaganda programme of disinformation, had recently arrived in London as the new ambassador.
Masot was almost certainly a Mossad tool. His hostile scheming was revealed not by Britain’s own security services and media, as one would have hoped, but by an Al Jazeera undercover team. Our Government dismissed the matter saying: “The UK has a strong relationship with Israel and we consider the matter closed.” But at a Labour Party conference fringe meeting Israel insider Miko Peled warned that “they are going to pull all the stops, they are going to smear, they are going to try anything they can to stop Corbyn…. the reason anti-Semitism is used is because they [the Israelis] have no argument….”
Given such a blatant attempt by an Israeli asset to undermine British democracy, with Regev in the background and (quite probably) Mossad pulling the strings, ‘B’s suspicions were reasonable enough and she had a right to voice them.
As for Israel being a racist State, its ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians and other brutal policies over 70 years make it obvious. And the discriminatory Nation State laws recently adopted by Israel put the question beyond doubt. Her point about anti-Semitism was also well made. DNA research (see for example the Johns Hopkins University study published by Oxford University Press) shows that while very few Jews are Semitic most indigenous Arabs in the Holy Land, especially Palestinians, are Semites. The term ‘anti-Semitism’, long used to describe hatred of Jews, is a misnomer that hides an inconvenient truth.
And it couldn’t have been difficult to establish that the opportunistic Tory MP calling her unfit to hold office was the chairman of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on British Jews, which is funded, supported and administered by The Board of Deputies. The case against ‘B’ should have been dropped instantly and action taken against the troublemakers. Instead, weeks later, ‘B’ was posting on her Facebook page that she was still suspended: “I can’t make any decisions about my personal, political, or professional future whilst this hangs over me. I am constantly tired and anxious, and feel I am making mistakes. I have lost paid work because of what has happened.”
Her suspension was finally lifted but she was “advised” not to post about it or she’d risk losing professional work on which her livelihood depended. That’s how nasty the Labour Party disciplinary machine is. Surely, if the Party lifts a suspension it should issue a public statement saying so. Must the wrongly accused, after being needlessly humiliated, be left to pick up the pieces and struggle to re-establish their good name? In total ‘B’ had to wait 16 weeks under sentence. And all because of a trumped-up allegation that ought to have been immediately squashed.
As for ‘A’, he stopped answering emails and there has been nothing in the press. Was his suspension lifted? Was he similarly threatened if he said anything? I simply don’t know although I phoned and wrote to the Leader and the General Secretary for an explanation. The latter eventually replied that “the Labour Party cannot, and does not, share personal details about individual party members” and placing a member in administrative suspension “allows a process of investigation to be carried out whilst protecting the reputation of the Labour Party”. Bollox. How did the media get news of these suspensions in the first place? And never mind the damage done to the cowardly Party, what about the reputations of the two councillors and their months of anguish while working for their constituents? I wasn’t asking for case details. All I wanted was the answer to three simple questions:
# Had the suspensions been lifted?
# If so, had the Party issued a public statement to that effect?
# And had the false accusers been disciplined?
Silence… spineless, don’t-give-a-damn silence.
Are these two cases typical of the so-called anti-Semitism crisis? I have no way of knowing. But they show how the Party is run by enough crackpots on the inside without inviting impertinent interference from the outside.
Jews’ Ten Pledges vs Palestinians’ Eleven Red Lines
Anyone signing up to the BoD’s Ten Pledges should consider at the same time subscribing to the ‘Eleven Red Lines’ of anti-Palestinianism. Examples in public life, the media, schools, the workplace, and in the religious sphere could, taking into account the overall context, include, but are not limited to:
(1) Denying the Palestinian people their right to self-determination and nationhood, or actively conspiring to prevent the exercise of this right.
(2) Denial that Israel is in breach of international law in its continued occupation of Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
(3) Denial that Israel is an apartheid state according to the definition of the International Convention on Apartheid.
(4) Denial of the expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians during the 1948 Nakba and of their right, and the right of their descendants, to return to their homeland.
(5) Denial that Palestinians have lived for hundreds of years in land now occupied by Israelis and have their own distinctive national identity and culture.
(6) Denial that the laws and policies which discriminate against Palestinian citizens of Israel (such as the recently passed Nation State Law) are inherently racist.
(7) Denial that there is widespread discrimination against Palestinians in Israel and the Occupied Territories in matters of employment, housing, justice, education, water supply, etc, etc.
(8) Tolerating the killing or harming of Palestinians by violent settlers in the name of an extremist view of religion.
(9) Making mendacious, dehumanizing, demonizing, or stereotypical allegations about Palestinians — such as, especially but not exclusively, the myth of a Palestinian conspiracy to wipe Israel off the map.
(10) Justifying the collective punishment of Palestinians (prohibited under the Geneva Convention) in response to the acts of individuals or groups.
(11) Accusing the Palestinians as a people, of encouraging the Holocaust.
This working definition of anti-Palestinian racism, described as “hatred towards or prejudice against Palestinians as Palestinians”, holds up a mirror to the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism and was drafted by Jewish Voice For Labour, one of those fringe representative organisations the BoD insist Labour mustn’t engage with.
So here’s a simple test for the BoD: if they demand the Labour Party signs up to their Ten Pledges will they themselves embrace the Eleven Red Lines on anti-Palestinianism?
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.
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.
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 LabourParty 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.
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.
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.
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 TheGrayzone 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.
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.
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.
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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.
Once every day, a Labour official offers a grovelling apology to the Jewish community, but for some peculiar reason its leaders seem unforgiving. They don’t take Corbyn‘s expressions of remorse seriously. Today’s attempt to appease his party’s detractors was made by Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell on Andrew Marr’s show, it was: “we’ve done everything, I think, we can possibly do. We’ve apologised to the Jewish community.”
BBC Politics
✔@BBCPolitics
“We’ve done everything, I think, we can possibly do. We’ve apologised to the Jewish community”#Marr asks Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell about anti-Semitism in the Labour Partyhttp://bbc.in/2RxpsQ2
So far, nothing seems to have worked. If the Labour party is to be forgiven by the ‘Jewish community,’ it must perform an authentic act of total humiliation and the sooner it occurs, the better, as electionday is just a few days away.
Therefore, I suggest that Corbyn, his shadow chancellor and any other person who contemplates becoming involved in British politics learn some basic Jewish history and in particular. the horrendous and tragic story of Jewish philosopher Uriel Da Costa .
Uriel Da Costa, (born in 1585-1590), was a Jewish rationalist who became a symbol among Jews and others of one martyred by the intolerance of rabbinical zeal.
Da Costa was the scion of an aristocratic family of Marranos (Spanish and Portuguese Jews forcibly converted to Roman Catholicism). Initially, he studied canon law and became the treasurer of a collegiate church. Da Costa questioned the salvation depicted by the Roman Catholic church. In his search for authentic meaning and spirit, he turned to the Old Testament. He then converted to Judaism and convinced his close family to adopt his new/old religion. At the age of 22, Da Costa fled with his family from Porto, Portugal to Amsterdam.
Da Costa soon found that the form of Judaism that prevailed in Amsterdam had little to do with the Bible or with rational or analytical thinking and had much to do with an elaborate structure based on rabbinic legislation (Talmud). Being philosophically inclined, he formulated 11 theses (1616) attacking Rabbinic Judaism as non-biblical, for which he was excommunicated by the Rabbinical institutions.
Uriel Da Costa
Da Costa next composed a larger work condemning rabbinic Judaism and denying the immortality of the soul (1623–24). In a path that may remind some of life in contemporary Orwellian Britain, the Amsterdam magistracy arrested Da Costa, fined him and deprived him of his books.
In 1640, after years of ostracism which he could hardly bear, Da Costa made a public recantation. In response, the community’s leaders choreographed an exceptionally cruel and humiliating rite. As described by the Israeli Museum of the Jewish People:
“In a ceremony in the Great Synagogue of Amsterdam, da Costa was first forced to confess his sins, then endure 39 lashes, and finally to lie on the (synagogue) threshold and let the entire crowd step over his body.”
Da Costa never recovered from the barbarian ritual. A few months later he shot himself in the head in the middle of the street.
If Corbyn, his shadow cabinet or anyone else within the Labour party is interested in forgiveness, the road is open for them to undergo Urial Da Costa’s experience.
However, some major categorical differences between Da Costa and Labour politicians must be examined before such a development matures into a televised spectacle. While Da Costa was an exquisite free thinker who served as an inspiration to the great Baruch Spinoza (who was subjected to similar Rabbinical malevolence just a few years later), Labour’s leadership isn’t exactly an intellectual collective. Their contribution to authentic thinking and freedom of thought is currently in the red. Unlike the sensitive Da Costa who couldn’t bear the humiliation and ended his life under tragic circumstances, Corbyn and the Labour elite are more than likely to survive such a humiliating scenario, they may even enjoy it. Like most British politicians, they long ago lost contact with the concepts of dignity and pride.
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.’
‘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.’
‘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.’
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.’
‘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.’
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.
‘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.
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For the last 15 years I have been warning both Brits and Jews of the possibility of serious consequences that might result from the intensive activities of the Jewish Lobby in Britain and beyond. I have written thousands of commentaries about the topic, given endless talks and interviews and published the best selling books on Jewish Identity politics in return for which I have received relentless abuse. However, I survive and with just a bit of luck Britain may also survive the present chaos inflicted on it by the Lobby and by its own compromised political establishment.
For the last three years we have witnessed an orchestrated smear campaign conducted by many Jewish institutions against British political parties, politicians, intellectuals, artists, and various other members of the public. The Labour Party has been subjected to a uniquely vile smear campaign: its leadership accused of being ‘anti-Semitic.’ The Labour Party, not, perhaps, a collective of distinctly sharp minds, was clumsy in its attempts to counter these empty accusations. The Party foolishly responded by surrendering to the Lobby’s every demand: suspending and expelling some of its best members for telling the truth about Palestine and accepting the primacy of Jewish suffering by adopting the IHRA definition of antisemitism. The Party and its leader repeatedly apologized to the Jewish community for acts it hadn’t committed although this failed to assuage the Lobby’s unquenchable appetite.
In July 2018, the three British Jewish newspapers united in an attempt to finish Corbyn’s political career by simultaneously issuing a joint editorial that declared: “Today, Britain’s three leading Jewish newspapers – Jewish Chronicle, Jewish News and Jewish Telegraph – take the unprecedented step of speaking as one by publishing the same front page. We do so because of the existential threat to Jewish life in this country that would be posed by a Jeremy Corbyn-led government.”
Since then Corbyn has been accused by Labour MP Margaret Hodge and other Jewish celebrities of being “racist” and “an anti-Semite”. In a uniquely foolish move that conveys a severe inability to read his neighbours’ mood, British Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis has launched an explosive and unprecedented attack on Jeremy Corbyn calling on the Brits not to vote Labour.
When Rabbi Mirvis published his article the Tories were leading in the polls by 12-14 percent. Then came a remarkable shift. Corbyn was confronted by the BBC’s Andrew Neil who no doubt expected him to offer his customary words of appeasement but for some reason, this time the Labour leader refused to provide the goods. Four times Neil used the BBC to demand Corbyn’s apology and each time the Labour leader demurred. Corbyn stood firm and in the next poll, not surprisingly, the Labour Party bounced back. The Tories and their leader, or so I read in the press, are in a panic and for good reason. A hung parliament may well result in Corbyn being the next British prime minister. Leading polling expert Sir John Curtice has warned that the recent election headlines predicting a Tory landslide were premature. The Brits have had enough of foreign Lobby interference with their politics. They are tired of a hostile pressure groups weaponizing anti-Semitism, vandalising their culture and politics and openly defying the Athenian roots at the core of the British value system and its ethos.
The outlandish conduct of British Jewish institutions is perplexing. The Jewish press, the Chief Rabbi, the unelected BOD that claims to represent British Jewry have all apparently focused their energies on smearing Britain’s opposition leader. But here is an interesting riddle. Jewish institutions and celebrities have repeatedly described Corbyn as an “existential threat to British Jews.” They practically equate the life long anti racist campaigner with Hitler. I assume that British Jews know that in 1933 Hitler won the German election with the support of just 33% of the German population. As of yesterday’s polls, Corbyn and the Labour party enjoy the same level of support from the British public. I reckon that if these Jewish institutions really believed that Corbyn is a Hitler figure as he is so often outrageously described by their leaders and press, the fact that a third of the Brits support him would mean that Britain is the new Nazi Germany and a Shoah is just around the corner. If British Jews really believed in such a ludicrous scenario there would be a mass exodus of Jews out of Britain and real estate prices in North West London would plummet. As of now, this is not the case. The cost of a three bedroom house in Golders Green is still way above the British average.
Not many scholars in the West tackle issues to do with Jewish politics, they don’t dare criticise Jewish power since Jewish power is the power to silence every person who dares to criticise Jewish power. I first realised in the early 2000s that Jewish power is very dangerous for Jews and gentiles alike. Jewish power is a sophisticated apparatus. In fact it wasn’t the British politicians or establishment that defied that treacherous spirit that has haunted British politics for too long. It is actually the British people who have stood up and said, essentially, ‘enough is enough.’
A video popped out this weekend showing health secretary Matt Hancock being humiliated, booed and heckled at a general election meeting. In response to the Tory MP attempt to recycle the ‘antisemitism’ spin, the entire gathering protested and ousted him within seconds.
The sudden unpredicted rise of Corbyn and Labour’s popularity is a fascinating phenomenon in light of the failure of the dysfunctional British institutions to defend elementary freedoms in the kingdom. The transition of the Guardian, once a respected outlet, into a ‘Guardian of Judea’ is almost as compelling as the transformation of the BBC into BiBiC. Yet, in Britain, only a few brave souls have dared to look into these topics. David Icke has been doing an incredible job of this for which he has been subjected to relentless abuse. Stuart Littlewood has produced a substantial body of work on Zionist and Jewish pressure groups. Craig Murray has written a number of commanding articles about the Israeli grip on British politics. Jonathan Cook watches his homeland crumbling from the vantage point of Nazareth, Palestine. Each of them are intellectuals. They are not political nor activists yet are subjected to unrelenting abuse from the Lobby and its stooges within the British establishment.
I have immersed myself in the study of the J-word. I realised a long time ago that as Israel defines itself as the Jewish State and enjoys the almost absolute support of world Jewry and its institutions, we need to ask what the J-word stands for. Instead of asking who or what are the Jews, I decided to examine what those who self-identify ‘as Jews’ mean by that term. In my books The Wandering Who and its sequel, Being in Time, I produced a study of the metaphysics of Jewishness. I examined different perspectives of Judeo-centrism. I attempted to untangle the concept of choseness. I have tried to understand what it is in Jewish culture that provokes animosity and causes Jewish history to be a tragic continuum.
In The Wandering Who I delved into the notion of Pre-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PRE TSD). In PRE TSD, stress results from a phantasmic event, an imaginary episode set in the future; an event that has never taken place. Unlike PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) in which stress comes as a direct reaction to an event that (may) have taken place in the past, with PRE-TSD, the trauma is caused by an imaginary scenario of destruction. The fear of Corbyn is clearly an example of such a phantasy. The illusion is self- perpetuating as neither Corbyn nor his party did anything to contribute to its escalation. No one within the British Jewish community managed to stop this snowball of collective stress. And now the results of this are devastatingly clear. A crack of mistrust has opened in British society between the Jews and their host nation. I would think that Jews who find this upsetting can easily identify the Jewish pressure groups, leaders and media outlets that led to this unnecessary development.
My guess is that reading my work rather than burning my books could have helped the Jewish community to introspect and prevent this development. Engaging with me rather than attempting to cancel my talks might have saved the Jewish institutions from repeating their most obvious historic mistakes. I accept that blowing the whistle is a challenge. I understand that for most people, living in a state of denial is convenient, but I also know that truth unveils itself to us, often, unexpectedly. In the real world it is not us, the people, who seek the truth, instead it is actually the truth that haunts us wherever we are and against all odds.
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.
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.
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.
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.
UPROOTED PALESTINIANS: SALAM ALQUDS ALAYKUM 
