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Category: anti-Semitism

  • The Antisemitism Industry doesn’t speak for Jews: It speaks for western elites

    Many years ago, the Jewish US scholar Norman Finkelstein wrote a best seller that caused uproar among a group he exposed as the “Holocaust Industry”: people who invariably had not been direct victims of the Holocaust, but nonetheless chose to exploit and profit from Jewish suffering.

    Though treated as leaders of the Jewish community, they were not primarily interested in helping survivors of the Holocaust, or in stopping another Holocaust – the two things one might have assumed would be the highest priorities for anyone making the Holocaust central to their life. In fact, hardly any of the many millions the Holocaust Industry demanded from countries like Germany in reparations ever made it to Holocaust survivors, as Finkelstein documented in his book.

    Instead, this small group instrumentalised the Holocaust for their own benefit: to gain money and influence by embedding themselves in an industry they had created. They became untouchables, beyond criticism because they were associated with an industry that they had made as sacred as the Holocaust itself.

    A follow-up book called the Antisemitism Industry, an investigation into much the same group of people, is now overdue. These ghouls don’t care about antisemitism – in fact, they rub shoulders with the West’s most prominent antisemites, from Donald Trump to Viktor Orban.

    Rather, they care about Israel – and the weaponisation of antisemitism to protect their emotional and financial investment. They profit from Israel’s central place in US political, diplomatic and military life:

    • as a giant real-estate laundering exercise, based on the theft of native Palestinian land;
    • as a laboratory for the production of new weapons and surveillance systems tested on Palestinians;
    • as a heavily militarised colonial state, a spearpoint for the West, useful in destabilising and disrupting any threat of a unifying Arab nationalism in the oil-rich Middle East;
    • and as the frontier state for eroding legal and ethical principles developed after the Second World War to stop a repeat of those atrocities.

    Anyone who challenges the Antisemitism Industry’s – and therefore Israel’s – stranglehold on Jewish representation in public life is hounded as an antisemite or self-hating Jew, as is currently happening most prominently to Jewish film-maker Jonathan Glazer. He is the Oscar-winning director of The Zone of Interest, about the family of a Nazi commandant of Auschwitz who lived blind to the horrors unfolding just out of view, beyond their walled garden.

    I wrote an earlier piece about the manufactured furore provoked by Glazer’s comments at the Oscars. In his acceptance speech, he denounced the hijacking of Jewishness and the Holocaust that has sustained Israel’s occupation over many decades and generated constant new victims, including the latest: those who suffered at the hands of Hamas when it attacked on October 7, and the many, many tens of thousand of Palestinians killed, maimed and orphaned by Israel over the past five months.

    Israel’s walled garden

    Though it is unclear whether any analogy was intended by the film-makers when they were making The Zone of Interest, the film undoubtedly has especial significance and ironic resonance right now, as Israel commits what the World Court has called a plausible genocide in Gaza.

    For the past 17 years, Israelis have lived in their own walled garden, right next to an open-air concentration camp for Palestinians that has been blockaded by the Israeli military from every direction: by land, sea and air.

    The Palestinian inmates were not allowed out of their cage. Their fishing boats were confined to only a mile or two from the coast. And Gaza’s skies were filled with the constant buzzing of drones watching over the population, when those same drones weren’t unleashing deadly missile strikes quite literally from out of the blue.

    The concentration camp was gradually becoming a death camp. Palestinians were being left to die very slowly in their cage, too slowly for the world to notice.

    For a decade, the United Nations had been warning that Gaza was becoming uninhabitable, with more than 2 million Palestinians crowded into the tiny enclave.

    Most had no work, and no prospect of ever finding work. There was no meaningful trade because Israel refused to allow it, which meant there was no economy. Gaza was almost completely dependent on handouts. And Gaza’s population was fast running out of clean water, slowly poisoning themselves with water mostly drawn from overstretched and contaminated aquifers.

    Israelis had no reason to care about what was happening on the other side of their walled garden – much of it land stolen in 1948 from Palestinian families like those confined to Gaza.

    If Palestinian groups tried to make a noise by firing home-made rockets out of their prison, Israel had an Iron Dome system that intercepted the projectiles. Quiet – or “calm” as the western media calls it – largely reigned for Israelis. Or it did until October 7.

    Were Glazer ever to make a modern retelling of The Zone of Interest, the Nova music festival, filled with young people dancing through the night on the doorstep of the Gaza concentration camp, might provide good material. Except this updated tale would have an unexpected twist: the youngsters living the dream right next to 2 million people living a nightmare suddenly found themselves caught up in the nightmare too, when Hamas broke out of the Gaza prison on October 7.

    “Wrong kind of Jews”

    Glazer’s crime at the Oscars was to threaten the Antisemitism Industry’s stranglehold on the West’s narrative about Israel.

    In Britain, the Antisemitism Industry calls them the “wrong kind of Jews” – Jews who care about all human suffering, not just Jewish suffering. Jews who refuse to let Israel commit crimes against the Palestinian people in their name. Jews who rightly described as a witch-hunt the smearing of former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters, including his Jewish supporters, as antisemites.

    Glazer seized the rare opportunity provided by the awards ceremony this week to grab the microphone from the Antisemitism Industry and represent a Jewish voice that westerners are not supposed to hear. He used the Oscars as a platform to highlight Palestinian suffering – and to suggest that it is normal to care about Palestinian suffering as much as it is Israeli and Jewish suffering.

    In doing so, he threatened, like Finkelstein before him, to expose the fact that these antisemitism witchfinder generals are dangerous charlatans, conmen in the true sense.

    Unlike the Antisemitism Industry, Glazer has profound, universal things to say about the Holocaust and the human condition. He makes his living from tapping deeply into his humanity, insight and creativity, not wielding his power like a bludgeon to terrorise everyone else into submission.

    Which is the context for understanding the comments, widely cited in the media, of David Schaecter, the figurehead of the Holocaust Survivors’ Foundation USA.

    Schaecter, who denies that Israel is occupying the Palestinian people – and therefore rejects the the very basis of international humanitarian law established to stop a repeat of the Holocaust – says it is “disgraceful for you [Glazer] to presume to speak for the six million Jews, including one and a half million children, who were murdered solely because of their Jewish identity”.

    Schaecter is, of course, projecting. It is he, not Glazer, who presumes to speak for those millions of Jews.

    There are plenty of Holocaust survivors who have spoken out against Israel and its treatment of the Palestinian people, including Finkelstein’s own mother and the late Hajo Meyer, the distinguished physicist who became one of Israel’s harshest critics. Meyer regularly made comparisons between what Israel did to the Palestinians and what the Nazis did to Jews like himself.

    But unlike Schaecter, Meyer got no help or funding to set up a foundation in the name of Holocaust survivors. He was not feted by the western media. He was not treated as a spokesman for the Jewish community and given a bullhorn.

    In fact, quite the opposite. Meyer found himself silenced, and vilified as an antisemite. He even became the pretext in 2018, four years after his death, for a new round of accusations against Corbyn for supposedly fostering antisemitism in the Labour party. The Labour leader had shared a platform with Meyer at a Holocaust Memorial Day event in 2010, five years before he became Labour leader.

    Such was the onslaught that Corbyn denounced Meyer for his views and apologised for the “concerns and anxiety caused” by his appearance with the Holocaust survivor.

    Today, Meyer might be astonished to find that he would be banned from being a member of the British Labour party, and that the grounds on which he would be disqualified are antisemitism. Like most other major western political parties and organisations, Labour adopted a new definition of antisemitism that equates Jew hatred with trenchant of criticism of Israel.

    Meyer, the Holocaust survivor and believer in a universal ethics, would find himself unwelcome in every major British political party. Glazer, the humanitarian Jewish film-maker who cares about Palestinians as much as he does other Jews, is currently being cast out of respectable society in precisely the same way.

    It can happen only because we let western establishments foist on us these Antisemitism Industry charlatans and conmen. It is time to listen to the people who care about humanity, not the people who care about their status and their wallets.

    The post The Antisemitism Industry doesn’t speak for Jews: It speaks for western elites first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Awesome Reality-Denial by Israel and Its Supporters

    Holocaust-deniers say that the Holocaust didn’t exist even though, according to historian Hans Müller, Hitler proudly told the Pope’s representative, Archbishop Berning, on 26 April 1933, “I am doing what the Church has done for 1,500 years. I am simply finishing the job.” Furthermore, Hitler, in the privacy of his bunker (as transcribed there by the lawyer Heinrich Heim during Hitler’s Table-Talk), concluded, on 21 October 1941, a lengthy tirade against Jews, with: “By exterminating this pest, we shall do humanity a service of which our soldiers can have no idea.”

    So, too, and just as clearly, today’s Israelis and their supporters are in reality-denial by denying that Israel today perpetrates at least ethnic cleansing, if not outright genocide, to clear the Gazans from Gaza. South Africa’s legal case against Israel actually quotes many of Israel’s top leaders, including Benjamin Netanyahu, saying that the Gazans don’t belong in Gaza and won’t be allowed to stay there — that their being there is itself a crime against Israel. Netanyahu actually said, citing the Torah, that God Himself authorized this to be done; and, so, it must be done.

    The talk-show host and Washington Post columnist Hugh Hewitt headlined in that newspaper on 31 October 2023, “Does Israel have a right to exist?” and started by saying that he automatically excludes as guests on his show anyone who rejects the official account of 9/11 or else rejects the Republican position on the Cold War, and that he now will add to that list anyone who denies that Israel has a right to exist. He said:

    I’ve never even considered that I would ask someone, “Did the Holocaust happen?” I’ve never knowingly had a Holocaust denier on the air, just as I’ve never had on a proponent of white supremacy. It’s pretty easy to build walls against such pollutants entering the airwaves under my jurisdiction. But now I will have to add the basic question about Israel’s nationhood.

    He added that only anti-Semites — Jew-haters — deny Israel’s “right to exist”:

    In the past three weeks, it has become painfully clear that hundreds of thousands of Americans and Europeans marching in demonstrations across campuses and in the streets of major cities do not accept the state of Israel’s legitimacy. That view is radical and dangerous. And it can no longer be considered so marginal that it need not be discussed in polite society. Instead, the view is one that must be exposed and its believers obliged to explain themselves.

    And at that point he changed his tune to becoming: Now I want to expose those people, instead of to exclude them from speaking on my show: He went on to emphasize that to question Israel’s “right to exist” is unacceptable because Hamas denies Israel’s right to exist, and Hewitt assumed that whatever Hamas believes, has to be labelled as false, and that Israel is targeting for killing ONLY Hamas, and NOT the Gazans, but that any Gazans who die in this war are okay to be killed, because of Israel’s necessity to exterminate Hamas, which necessity justifies anything that Israel does in order to eliminate Hamas. In other words: the end justifies the means — ANY means.

    He closed by saying:

    We in the media should not silence the Israel deniers, but we would perform a public service if we invited them to reveal themselves. As with those who presume to address 9/11 without a basic grounding in the facts, or who deny the reach of Soviet espionage, when Israel deniers begin to spew, the audience deserves fair warning.

    So: he closed his defense of Israel’s right to exist, by saying that “the audience deserves fair warning” that a kook is a kook. And throughout his article he was aiming to make his appeal to Republicans, against Democrats.

    Throughout, Hewitt’s focus isn’t on verifying what is true and what is false, but instead on who is ‘us’ and who is ‘them’. And he was equating Holocaust deniers with everyone who supports Palestinians against Israelis; and equating anti-Israel with anti-Jew — he was implying that only anti-Semites are against Israel: that to be against Israel is to be against Jews (as-if ALL Jews support or endorse Israel against the Palestinians).

    The way to reality-denial is to personalize — argue ad-hominem — INSTEAD of to present evidence — argue ad-rem. And that was Hewitt’s entire case for answering Yes to his titled question, “Does Israel have a right to exist?”

    I wrote on March 9 “Should Israel Exist?” as a logical analysis of this question, given the clear fact that Israel is either ethnically cleansing or else genociding the Gazans. As regards the broader HISTORICAL argument concerning that question, the case is open-and-shut that Israel should never have been created in 1948. So: to Hewitt’s question, of whether Israel has a right to exist, I would answer “No.” The historical record is clear and unequivocal that Israel had no such right, any more than that any thief has a right to the property that he or she has stolen.

    Historically speaking, the war between the Israelis and the Palestinians was started by that enormous theft of not only land but a hidden number of lives from the Palestinians. This war did not begin on 7 October of 2023 when Israelis say that their war against ‘Hamas’ (but really all Gazans) started, but instead back in 1948. However, like all thieves do, Israelis lie in order to ‘justify’ themselves. As regards the October 7 attack by Hamas, I have headlined on 11 March 2024 “What You Didn’t Know About Hamas’s October 7th Attack”, which introduces and links to a highly informed discussion about that attack. Apparently, Israel lies massively about that event, too, so as to ‘justify’ whatever they do to the Gazans. However, in any case, this war certainly didn’t start on 7 October 2023 like Israel alleges it did.

    The post The Awesome Reality-Denial by Israel and Its Supporters first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • “It’s Our Duty to Talk About All Struggles”

    An interview with Collectif Golem, a left-wing Jewish group in France fighting antisemitism and the far right.

    This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.

  • When “Leftists” use “Antisemitism” Smears to weaken Palestinian Solidarity 

    While it’s near impossible to sidestep nationalist, imperialist and supremacist ideas, “leftists” should at least not promote prevailing anti-Palestinian ideological strictures. Despite the horrors Israel’s unleashed in Gaza, some who ‘stand with Palestine’ still prioritize Jewish sensitivities over opposing Canadian support for genocide.

    In a hundred days 30,000 Palestinians have been killed, 60,000 seriously injured and 2 million displaced in Gaza. Half a million in Gaza are facing famine conditions and basically everyone is hungry. If Israeli-imposed hunger, disease and lack of medical care persists hundreds of thousands may end up dying. And the state perpetrating this genocide has long encaged, occupied and ethnically cleansed those it is slaughtering.

    Amidst the genocide that Canada has enabled, some self-declared leftists still devote significant energy to smearing anti-genocide activists or trying to have their speaking events cancelled for purported “antisemitism”. Two months ago, some individuals associated with Independent Jewish Voices pushed to cancel my participation in a Palestinian Youth Movement and International League of People’s Struggles event in Ottawa. More recently, the anonymous X account Jane Austen Marxist posted, “In case there’s any doubt about Yves Engler’s antisemitism at this point (there isn’t)” atop a screenshot highlighting a passage from one of my articles. It noted, “With outsized influence in Hollywood and other domains, Jewish cultural influence is significant.” (Anyone interested in the broader context can read my full article here.) A hodgepodge of rightists and leftists liked or retweeted the statement.

    There was no attempt to show how my statement was incorrect or even to explain how it was anti-Jewish. For them, stating that Jews have outsized influence in Hollywood can only be a “trope” or “dog whistle” and thus unmentionable. But my statement is factual, as this 2014 Globe and Mail article demonstrates. In a stunning 2008 Los Angeles Times article headlined “Who runs Hollywood? C’mon” Joel Stein writes:

    How deeply Jewish is Hollywood? When the studio chiefs took out a full-page ad in the Los Angeles Times a few weeks ago to demand that the Screen Actors Guild settle its contract, the open letter was signed by: News Corp. President Peter Chernin (Jewish), Paramount Pictures Chairman Brad Grey (Jewish), Walt Disney Co. Chief Executive Robert Iger (Jewish), Sony Pictures Chairman Michael Lynton (surprise, Dutch Jew), Warner Bros. Chairman Barry Meyer (Jewish), CBS Corp. Chief Executive Leslie Moonves (so Jewish his great uncle was the first prime minister of Israel), MGM Chairman Harry Sloan (Jewish) and NBC Universal Chief Executive Jeff Zucker (mega-Jewish). If either of the Weinstein brothers had signed, this group would have not only the power to shut down all film production but to form a minyan with enough Fiji water on hand to fill a mikvah. The person they were yelling at in that ad was SAG President Alan Rosenberg (take a guess). The scathing rebuttal to the ad was written by entertainment super-agent Ari Emanuel (Jew with Israeli parents)… The Jews are so dominant, I had to scour the trades to come up with six Gentiles in high positions at entertainment companies. When I called them to talk about their incredible advancement, five of them refused to talk to me, apparently out of fear of insulting Jews. The sixth, AMC President Charlie Collier, turned out to be Jewish.

    The demographic make-up at the top of the US entertainment/media industry would have had to shift dramatically for my innocuous “outsized influence” statement to be incorrect. Do those smearing me have alternative data or any coherent rebuttal? No. In fact, they would likely respond to my quoting Stein’s story about Jewish influence in Hollywood by doubling down on their smear. For them presenting any data that demonstrates “outsized Jewish influence” anywhere is another act of antisemitism. The effect is to be unable to describe how widespread and effective anti-Palestinianism is and why, which, of course, are necessary steps in combatting this form of racism.

    A near universal, if undeclared, rule when discussing antisemitism in Canada is that one can only cite a single sociological indicator for status/oppression. Of the twenty most commonly employed categories in discussions of racism — income levels, incarceration rates, educational attainment, life expectancy, home ownership, positions on corporate boards, etc. — hate crime data is the only indicator one can mention. It’s no coincidence that hate crimes is the only widely used indicator of discrimination in which the Jewish community fairs poorly. While the genocide lobby exaggerates the scope of the problem, Canadian Jews are substantially over represented as victims of hate crimes. But they fare better (often significantly so) than other groups on the other indicators commonly employed to identify status/oppression.

    A broader discussion of the community’s standing doesn’t excuse acts of hate or prejudice against Jews, but it does relativize the impact of antisemitism in Canada. This is important when the genocide lobby explicitly counterposes antisemitism with Palestine solidarity. In a stark example, the Trudeau government recently criticized South Africa’s case to the International Court of Justice against Israel for purportedly impacting Canadian Jews. The government statement noted, “We must ensure that the procedural steps in this case are not used to foster Antisemitism and targeting of Jewish neighbourhoods, businesses, and individuals.” So, an international legal case to end a genocide is objectionable because it may impact Canadian Jews!

    When lobbyists, politicians and the media are explicitly counterposing antisemitism with stopping a genocide, internationalist and anti-racist minded individuals must avoid fueling the antisemitism panic and reinforcing the nationalist, imperialist and supremacist bias towards Canadian Jewish sensitivities. Even if one believed all the apartheid lobby’s most outlandish claims about the anti-genocide movement’s contribution to antisemitism, they barely register compared to the horrors Canada has enabled in Gaza. Let’s say Ottawa seriously pushing back against Israel’s atrocities — by calling it genocide, suspending arms permits and seeking to staunch the flow of subsidized charitable donations — restrained Israel’s barbarity by 1%. This would have saved 300 lives and led to 20,000 fewer Palestinians displaced and 5,000 fewer facing famine conditions. Anyone professing internationalist, humanist and anti-racist values would easily accept all (and some) of the apartheid lobby’s bigotry claims in exchange. But our political culture is highly nationalistic, imperialistic and supremacist. (In reality the Palestine solidarity movement is responsible for little antisemitism and there’s no reason why Canada couldn’t end its genocidal complicity with little spillover.)

    Those implying that antisemitism is a major problem in Canada and that one must be hyper sensitive about “tropes” when discussing the Jewish community’s relations to Palestine are requiring those opposed to colonialism to fight with a hand tied behind their backs. They are saying we must be hyper sensitive to a form of discrimination, but can’t investigate the socioeconomic status of the community purportedly under threat. They are saying it’s illegitimate to cite “outsized Jewish influence” at the upper echelons of Hollywood even when it helps explain the cultural weight of antisemitism accusations and why few in the generally liberal movie industry have publicly denounced the genocide. They are saying mentioning Jewish wealth and power is antisemitic despite it contributing to the effectiveness of the apartheid lobby.

    How many Palestinians have to be slaughtered before we stop prioritizing the sensitivities of a generally well-off Canadian group over a colonized people facing genocide?

    …
    The post When “Leftists” use “Antisemitism” Smears to weaken Palestinian Solidarity  first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • University Presidents Carelessly Resign

    From their inception, the Zionists learned how to turn a loss into a gain, how to use debt as collateral, and enrich their interests. Twisting incidents so that their victim becomes the assailant and their assault makes them the victim has been their trademark. Taking a valid reproach to their damaging tactics and converting it into anti-Semitism, a one hundred percent offering, has shielded Zionist distasteful maneuvers from public animosity.

    This was apparent in their plan of combating the well-received campus protests that highlighted the ignominious support the United States government gives to Israel’s ongoing extermination of the Palestinian people; what better than turn the campus protest issue into having the public perceive the campus protests as giving support to those who proposed extermination of the Jewish people? The insensible congressional hearing, titled Holding Campus Leaders Accountable and Confronting Antisemitism, before the US House Committee on Education and the Workforce accomplished the task.

    Representative Elise Stefanik, Republican of New York, claimed students had “chanted support for intifada and many Jews hear that as a call for violence against them.” What a stretch. Support for Intifada is support for Palestinian actions against Israel, much as support for the Maidan uprising supported the Ukrainian people. Can Congresswoman Stefanik tell us how many, if any, Jews hear that as a call against them and not just Israelis? Ms. Stefanik and her committee proved themselves a complete failure; they did not recite one incident of anti-Semitism. How about that?

    Without having introduced anything meaningful into the hearing, Representative Stefanik took a giant leap and asked the president of the University of Pennsylvania, Ms. Magill, “Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Penn’s rules or code of conduct, yes or no?” Nowhere and at no time has a “calling for the genocide of Jews” been uttered in the campus demonstrations. Like all Zionists, Ms. Stefanik knew that just reciting the “trapping question” was enough to have the thought imprinted on people’s minds, comparable to Trump saying, “Our election was stolen.”

    Confronted with a hypothetical, the confused university presidents, people of integrity and dedication, took the high road and felt they could not give an honest answer. Their lapses proved fatal; the initial scratches became clawed wounds and the unfortunate presidents ran for cover and resigned. They erred terribly.

    It may be excusable that they did not give appropriate answers to the “trapping question.” Any of the presidents could have responded, “We have not heard of anyone calling for the genocide of Jews during the campus protests, and calling for genocide of any ethnicity, not just Jews, violates acceptable rules of conduct.” Their subsequent behavior did not mollify their initial lapses.

    Afterward, when finally arriving in a sensible atmosphere, they could have rationally explained themselves, offered something that soothed the public, and raised doubt of the sincerity of Congresswoman Stefanik who had asked the question. Their inability to respond adequately and rapid resignations betrayed the campus demonstrations, subdued its positive appearance, and gave support to the pro-Israel deception.

    An immediate, well-conceived, and authoritative response to the Committee’s false rhetoric, a further elaboration on the University presidents not wanting their problems to become divisive and contentious issues that affect the universities, and a more in-depth explanation for their abrupt actions from others allied to the universities, counters the usual Zionist twisting of incidents in which their victim becomes the assailant and their assault makes them the victim. Otherwise, this is a bad moment in the struggle to inform the American public of the genocide facing the Palestinian people.

    The post University Presidents Carelessly Resign first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • No to Antisemitism, No to Weaponizing it to Support Israel’s Crimes 

    MPs Anthony Housefather and Michael Levitt are more devoted to apartheid Israel than to their own prime minister and colleagues in the Liberal caucus.

    — Dimitri Lascaris, 2018

    The above tweet was criticized by all the major federal party leaders even though few could argue with it today. After the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA) denounced the post as antisemitic, the prime minister, Conservative leader and a cascade of others followed suit.

    In a betrayal worth reflecting on, many leftists and self-proclaimed solidarity activists echoed the anti-Palestinian lobby’s criticism. Rather than focusing on Canada’s complicity in apartheid, they prioritized Jewish sensitivities. In so doing they reinforced a political climate that’s enabled the killing of over 20,000 Palestinian while agonizing about a generally privileged Canadian Jewish community.

    While it was obvious at the time, today no serious person could argue that Levitt and Housefather weren’t “more devoted to apartheid Israel than to their own prime minister and colleagues in the Liberal caucus.”  Levitt left the party two years later to campaign full-time in favor of apartheid as CEO of Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Centre. Among a slew of examples, Levitt recently suggested Trudeau was antisemitic for expressing opposition to the killing of babies. He tweeted that the PM’s comments “fan the flames of Jew-hatred” and told CBC they “further fuel antisemitism and lashing out at Jews in Canada.”

    After Canada recently voted with the vast majority of the world for a ceasefire at the United Nations, Housefather repeatedly condemned his own government to the media. A month ago, the Montréal MP also criticized Trudeau for his statement opposing the killing of babies. At the time CBC’s At Issue panel reported that Liberal MPs (presumably Housefather) had privately threatened to quit the party if Trudeau called for a ceasefire. He subsequently went on a solidarity trip to Israel. Alex Boykowich aptly dubbed Housefather “objectively Netanyahu’s man in the Canadian government/parliament.”

    Levitt and Housefather care far more about Israel than Trudeau or the Liberal party. As I detailed, there was already a bevy of evidence at the time of Lascaris’ statement that Housefather and Levitt were obsessed with Israel and prioritized defending its crimes over their own party. But the immediate background to the 2018 tweet uproar made the condemnation completely outrageous.

    After a demonstration opposing B’nai B’rith’s smears against the Canadian Union of Postal Workers, Lascaris called on Housefather and Levitt, CIJA, and others who had defended B’nai B’rith on the eve of the protest, to publicly repudiate two of that group’s supporters who called for a number of Muslim and brown politicians to be killed in a video detailing their participation in a counter protest to the rally against B’nai B’rith. Lascaris tweeted about the two B’nai B’rith supporters who “called for the death penalty to be imposed on Justin Trudeau & Liberal MPs Iqra Khalid, Omar Alghabra & Maryam Monsef” and asked Levitt and Housefather “to denounce” the threats “but shamefully, they’ve said nothing.” Then Lascaris tweeted: “ MPs Anthony Housefather and Michael Levitt are more devoted to apartheid Israel than to their own prime minister and colleagues in the Liberal caucus.”

    In response CIJA tweeted: “Yesterday, CJPME [Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East] Chair Dimitri Lascaris accused Jewish MPs Anthony Housefather and Michael Levitt of being disloyal to Canada. This is the literal definition of antisemitism under the IHRA [International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance] definition. Will CJPME publicly retract & apologize for this antisemitic smear?” Soon thereafter a slew of MPs, Conservative leader Andrew Scheer, Justin Trudeau, NDP leader Jagmeet Singh and others jumped to Housefather and Levitt’s defense or directly smeared Lascaris.

    Despite all this being immediately detailed, a number of leftist voices followed the Israel lobby, focusing on “tropes” rather than Canada’s role in enabling an apartheid state waging unrelenting violence in (according to a recent Wall Street Journal article, Israel has attempted more – over 2,700 – international assassination missions then any country since World War II).

    In a post-mortem on Lascaris’ narrow defeat in the 2020 Green Party leadership race The Breach founder Dru Oja Jay wrote “it should also be said that in 2018, Lascaris questioned the loyalty of two extremist pro-Israel Jewish MPs in a tweet. Questioning the loyalty of Jewish politicians is an anti-semitic trope with a long history. While he has condemned anti-semitism broadly and while there’s no doubt that charges of anti-semitism are used to silence advocates for Palestinian human rights (which Lascaris is), his refusal to back away from his remarks gave that line of attack levels of legitimacy that they would have otherwise lacked.”

    The next year another Breach editor, Martin Lukacs, reiterated the point in an email claiming my defence of Lascaris was antisemitic. He wrote, “your defence of Dimitri Lascaris’ obtuse and offensive dual loyalty charge a few years ago against Canadian Liberal politicians followed a similar dynamic. In your writing, you seemed to either be ignorant of this classic trope of anti-Semitism, or you simply choose to ignore the connotations of what he wrote about.” (In response to the remarkable onslaught I immediately published “Canadian Zionists’ Unprecedented Smear Campaign against Dimitri Lascaris” and followed up with “CIJA, B’nai B’rith smear Palestine activist instead of racists, antisemite”. These articles emboldened Independent Jewish Voices and Toronto Star columnist Linda McQuaig to defend Lascaris and paved the way for the public letter backing Lascaris headlined “Prime minister owes human rights activist an apology”, which was signed by Noam Chomksy, Roger Waters, Chris Hedges and others.)

    I rehash this history because many leftists, even those who call themselves anti-Zionist, have directly contributed to Canada’s deeply anti-Palestinian political climate. By prioritizing Jewish sensitivities about ‘tropes’, they’ve emboldened the Housefathers and Levitts of the world and further tilted the political terrain against those opposing Canada’s vast complicity in Israel’s horrors.

    It also demonstrates how anti-Palestinian lobby groups set the agenda. If CIJA hadn’t created a brouhaha over Lascaris’ post, few would have seen the tweet, let alone complained about it years later. On principle leftists should be allergic to allowing an apartheid lobby that seeks to destroy left-wing movements set the tone on anything Palestine related.

    Canadian political culture fixates on the sensitivities of Jews here rather than how Canada enables Israeli barbarism. Part of this reflects the dominance of nationalism. What happens here – or to Canadians abroad – is prioritized by the political and media establishment. You see this with the recent discussion of the uptick in hate crimes against Muslims and Arabs or Jews. While all acts of bigotry should be condemned, nothing that has transpired in Canada over the past 10 weeks remotely compares to the horrors in Gaza.

    There’s also a specifically Jewish element to the fixation. With outsized influence in Hollywood and other domains, Jewish cultural influence is significant. Additionally, the Nazi Holocaust is a definitive historical reference point, which has intertwined anti-Jewishness with the ultimate evil.

    It’s true that in Canada Jews are significantly over-represented as victims of hate crimes and there is a history of legalistic antisemitism, including McGill’s quotas on Jewish students between the 1920s-40s, “none is too many” WWII immigration policies and prejudicial land covenants targeting Jews and others into the 1950s. But there’s nothing in Canadian history approaching the antisemitism of Eastern Europe, let alone Nazi Germany. Additionally, today Jews are over-represented in positions of wealth and influence in Canada.

    None of this is to say antisemitism does not exist. It does and when people express hatred for Jews simply being Jews we should condemn it. But being Jewish should not protect someone from criticism for supporting crimes against humanity such as apartheid, ethnic cleansing or genocide. Being Jewish should not protect someone for their anti-Palestinian racism. The self-proclaimed “Jewish state” can and should be criticized for its actions. If that offends some Jewish Canadians that is their problem.

    Hypersensitivity regarding antisemitism is unwarranted when it is being so aggressively mobilized to enable horrors against Palestinians. Conscientious individuals must question how they uphold a political climate that enables Canadian complicity in the slaughter in Gaza.

    The post No to Antisemitism, No to Weaponizing it to Support Israel’s Crimes  first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Campus Free Speech

    Some violent expressions against Jews occurred during the campus demonstrations that criticized U.S. policy of fortifying Israel’s post-October 7 attacks in Gaza. These expressions came from obvious identification of Jews with Israel’s violent attacks; after all, Israel claims to be a Jewish state and a great number of Jews in the United States support what credible observers consider genocide of the Palestinian people. Compared to the numbers protesting U.S. policy, the few people who originated violent messages against Jews did not determine the nature of the protests and their activities were not related to the protests.

    The impact of the protests ─ increased sympathy with the Palestinian cause ─ propelled pro-Israel groups to solicit the U.S. Congress to skew the debate from the reality of U.S. support of genocide of the Palestinian people to specious campus activity of anti-Semitism ─ diminish the importance that several hundred innocent Palestinians are murdered each day by Israeli forces; more important is that reckless persons voiced severely hostile opinions of Jewish students.

    Posters that appeared on a Cornell University message board with a prompt to the school’s president to alert the FBI. “If you see a Jewish ‘person’ on campus follow them home and slit their throats,” and another that threatened to “bring an assault rifle to campus and shoot all you pig Jews,” exhibited hatred that needs investigation. More to it. Flying under the radar are other serious charges that also need investigation.

    Demanding an end to U.S. foreign policy that militarily and morally aids Israel in its destruction of the Palestinian people was the issue of the campus protest. The protests of U.S. foreign policy proceeded from a logical view that the U.S. has no reason to be involved in the battle between Israel and Hamas and gains no benefit from aiding and abetting an Israeli response that many certify as an excuse for genocide. Just the opposite is requested — a democratic U.S. that claims to be the protector of human rights should be prominent in obtaining a cease-fire and protecting Gazan civilians.

    The counter-protestors, who wrapped themselves in Israeli flags and walked around colleges while tagging posts with #standwithIsrael, exhibited a serious lack of citizenship and a convoluted attitude toward genocide. They did not contend the protestors’ arguments with U.S. foreign policy, which defies contention; they supported a foreign nation before the interests of their nation and defended genocide. They were not attacked because they were Jews; they were attacked as dubious Americans who had an uncalled-for presence in the campus protests. This is not different than if the U.S. aided and abetted the Myanmar government in its genocide of the Rohingya people and a group of Americans walked around with the Myanmar flag and placed posters that say #standwithMyanmmar as a counter to those who protested against a U.S. policy of helping Myanmar in its genocide.

    The campus protestors had one mission ─ change a U.S. foreign policy that credible commentators observe as aiding and abetting Israel in its destruction of the Palestinian people. The counter-protestors, who acted more by formula than thought, created an intra-campus debate between those who want to prevent genocide and those who support it. Israel’s supporters steered the debate to have the protests become an example of anti-Semitism and, for that reason, should be stifled. This led to wealthy alumni, who recognized they owed much to their university education and made huge donations to the universities, showing they learned that when you have financial power, use it for your personal interests, even if it harms those who helped you gain it. As one example, a Penn University donor threatened to rescind a $100 million gift if the university did not discharge the current president whose testimony before a congressional committee he did not approve.

    The congressional inquiry into campus anti-Semitism, which never depicted any instances of anti-Semitism (Oh yes, Congresswoman, Elise Stefanik, mentioned that conspirators were urging another Intifada, implying that Intifada meant extermination of all Jews), got what it wanted with one loaded question, “Would calls on campus for the genocide of Jews violate the school’s conduct policy?”

    Indeed, the university presidents did not answer the question properly. However, it is not believable they would condone the words and not seek action. Never having faced the violation, each was unaware of the procedures. Perfectly logical. Why torment them for an acceptable confusion? All those watching and participating should have been asking, “Why is there a congressional committee investigating a hypothetical; why aren’t there congressional committees investigating the actual?

    From my knowledge, and I invite correction, the actual is that no serious physical violence against Jews in America has occurred after October 7. There may have been unplanned altercations between demonstrators but no Jewish person has suffered a planned physical violence. In contrast, several Muslims have been deliberately attacked and two have been killed. Why is there no congressional committee investigating the severe attacks on the Muslim community?

    As mentioned previously, the campus protests highlighted the appearance of a group favoring genocide, not genocide of Jews but genocide of the Palestinians. Why didn’t the congressional committee ask the university presidents if they were taking action against that group?

    Conclusions

    The campus protests have been a good example of university education put into action. Israel’s supporters tie every attack on Israel to being an attack on Jews. Why are they complaining when others equate Israel with Jews and use the word Jew instead of Israel in the same manner that Zionists normally do? The few examples of anti-Jewish sentiment that occurred during the protests were superfluous to the protests and should be investigated. They should not lead to curbs on the protests, which arose from purposeful misinformation and are unwarranted.

    Those against the protests did not exhibit valid reasons for their attitude. They placed themselves in the category of supporting genocide of the Palestinian people, a position that has no place in normal discourse and deserves investigation. That investigation should not be influenced by wealthy donors who use their wealth to dictate university policy. Universities should listen to alumni and trustees and reject threats that tie donations to steering policies.

    The post Campus Free Speech first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • For Crazed Pro-Israel Crowd even Trudeau is an Antisemite

    “Justin Trudeau is and always has been an antisemite”, according to Canada’s former ambassador to Israel. While Vivian Bercovici has staked out an extreme position, other commentators have expressed some variation of this perspective since the PM expressed opposition to killing of babies.

    In a statement in which he repeatedly condemned Hamas and failed to explicitly call for a ceasefire, Trudeau told the press “we’re hearing the testimonies of doctors, family members, survivors, kids who’ve lost their parents. The world is witnessing this — the killing of women and children, of babies. This has to stop.”

    In response to the prime minister’s comment former Liberal MP and current CEO of Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center Michael Levitt posted to X, “The scathing remarks also landed here at home, where Jews like me, reeling from weeks of surging antisemitism, got the message loud and clear, and will worry that they have the potential to further fan the flames of Jew-hatred that we are facing.” In an interview with CBC Levitt reiterated the point, claiming the prime minister’s comments “further fuel antisemitism and lashing out at Jews in Canada.”

    In an article headlined “Trudeau’s Israel tirade hands Canada’s anti-Semites a propaganda victory” Toronto Sun columnist Laurie Goldstein echoed this line of reasoning. He argued that “Trudeau handed anti-Semites in Canada a new club to beat Jews over the head with by blaming Israel alone for the conduct of the war in Gaza — with theatrical pauses for effect — before he even mentioned Hamas.”

    Former Conservative senator, United Jewish Appeal (UJA) Toronto Board Chair and now head of UJA’s Committee to combat Antisemitism, Linda Frum blamed Trudeau for a purported bomb threat at a private Jewish school (which holds “IDF days”). Above a statement noting “Toronto’s largest Jewish school TanenbaumCHAT was evacuated today due to threats made against the school”, Frum posted, “A few days ago PM Trudeau falsely accused Israel of deliberately killing babies. You can draw a straight line from there to here ….”

    (In the real world, Trudeau has enabled Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Alongside dispatching Canadian special forces there and flying 30 Israeli reservists to the country, Trudeau’s government has called for “eliminating” Hamas, supported Israel’s “right to defend itself” and visited to encourage Israeli violence. At the same time Ottawa has refused to halt arms exports, prevent illegal recruitment for the IDF or stop Canadian charities from unlawfully assisting Israel’s military, as detailed in a recent notice of intention to prosecute the PM for aiding and abetting Israel’s war crimes.)

    The argument that criticizing Israel for killing babies equates to attacking Canadian Jews is enabled by Zionist groups linking Canadian Jewry to Israel. Claiming to represent Montreal’s 90,000 Jews, Federation CJA recently launched a campaign to send cards to “our” Israeli soldiers. “Make cards for our brave IDF soldiers”, explains a section on their site that includes a financial appeal for Israel. Card writers are told to drop their messages of support for the IDF off at Beth Tikvah Synagogue and Federation CJA’s office. The Jewish federations in Toronto, Vancouver and elsewhere are also fundraising for Israel and promoting the IDF.

    If told Israeli soldiers are “ours” then criticism of the IDF can easily appear like an attack on Montréal Jews. But the Israeli military is slaughtering children.

    The advocacy agent of Canada’s Jewish Federations, the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA), was set up partly to further conflate Jews with Israel. A decade ago, the Tanenbaums, Schwartz/Reisman and other wealthy hard-line apartheid promoters created CIJA to replace the Canadian Jewish Congress and Canada Israel Committee. They removed Canada from the name but left Israel in it partly to further blur the distinction between Canadian Jewry and Israel.

    If your principal concern is promoting Israel, perhaps it is politically sensible to minimize the distinction between Israel and Judaism. By doing so you increase the pressure on Canadian Jews to back Israel. Simultaneously, it frames opposition to Israeli violence and apartheid as anti-Jewish.

    But destroying the meaning of “antisemitism” cannot possibly be good for the average Canadian Jew. When a former Canadian ambassador openly calls the prime minister an “antisemite” for opposing the killing of babies the pro-Israel-no-matter-what crowd really have lost their minds.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Israel Is Now the Greatest Source of Anti-Semitism

    On October 28, Craig Mokhiber, the Director of the New York Office of the U.N.’s High Commissioner for Human Rights, wrote to the U.N.’s High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHCHR) in Geneva (and I here, in boldface, add a few links for documentation of some of his assertions):

    This will be my last official communication to you. …

    The current wholesale slaughter of the Palestinian people, rooted in an ethno-nationalist settler colonial ideology, in continuation of decades of their systematic persecution and purging, based entirely upon their status as Arabs, and coupled with explicit statements of intent by leaders in the Israeli government and military, leaves no room for doubt or debate. In Gaza, civilian homes, schools, churches, mosques, and medical institutions, are wantonly attacked as thousands of civilians are massacred. In the West Bank, including occupied Jerusalem, homes are seized and reassigned based entirely on race, and violent settler pogroms [against Arabs] are accompanied by Israeli military units.

    Across the land, Apartheid rules.

    This is a text-book case of genocide. The European, ethno-nationalist, [Jewish] settler colonial project in Palestine has entered its final phase, toward the expedited destruction of the last remnants of indigenous Palestinian life in Palestine. What’s more, the governments of the United States, the United Kingdom, and much of Europe, are wholly complicit in the horrific assault. Not only are these governments refusing to meet their treaty obligations “to ensure respect” for the Geneva Conventions, but they are in fact actively arming the assault, providing economic and intelligence support, and giving political and diplomatic cover for Israel’s atrocities. …

    We must begin now or surrender to unspeakable horror. I see ten essential points: 1. Legitimate action: First, we in the UN must abandon the failed (and largely disingenuous) Oslo paradigm, its illusory two-state solution, its impotent and complicit Quartet, and its subjugation of international law to the dictates of presumed political expediency. Our positions must be unapologetically based on international human rights and international law. 2. Clarity of Vision: We must stop the pretense that this is simply a conflict over land or religion between two warring parties and admit the reality of the situation in which a disproportionately powerful state is colonizing, persecuting, and dispossessing an indigenous population on the basis of their ethnicity. 3. One State based on human rights: We must support the establishment of a single, democratic, secular state in all of historic Palestine, with equal rights for Christians, Muslims, and Jews, and, therefore, the dismantling of the deeply racist, settler-colonial project and an end to apartheid across the land. …

    Israelis learned well from Hitler: they elected governments that did (or else condoned doing) to the non-Jewish natives in their land (who before 1948 were 61% Muslim, 30% Jewish, and 8% Christian), what Hitler had done to Jews in Christian Europe — and now they are being supported by the U.S. and its allies to deliver Israel’s final solution to the Palestinian problem: extermination.

    The self-defense by Israel and its apologists, for this reality that drove Mokhiber to quit and to condemn them, is for them to ignore all of that reality, and to focus instead upon the responses to it by the Palestinians. The self-defense, in other words, is to condemn not the side that started this war (themselves) beginning in 1948, but the side that then, and even earlier (in the late 1930s), were trying to prevent or avoid it (the Palestinians). The evil in this deception by the perpetrators — by the Israelis and their apologists — is obvious, and here is how it is driving a surge in anti-Semitism:

    Israel and its apologists say that anti-Israelism is the same thing as anti-Semitism (so that to condemn Israel is to condemn all Jews), but here they lie yet again because outside of Israel are many Jews who loathe what Israel has been doing in their names. The very idea that all Jews are Israelis, or even support the Israelis and oppose the Palestinians in this war between the aggressor (Israelis) and the defender (the Palestinians), is stupid. That idea simply is not the case; but yet many Jews are being targeted by AUTHENTIC anti-Semites as-if it WERE the case.

    Comments by many readers and viewers online are rife with such anti-Semitism, and the global community of that authentic anti-Semitism grows ever-larger, the closer that Israel and the U.S. get to delivering their final solution to the Palestinian problem. A great many of these anti-Semitic comments are coming from individuals who condemn all Jews on the basis of anti-Semitic lines from the New Testament (such as John 8:44, Matthew 23:31-38, and the earliest-written one of them all, 1 Thessalonians 2:14-16 — all of which lines I have discussed here). However, many come instead from the Old Testament, which historians consider to be mythical but theologians and preachers believe instead to be “the Word of God”; and, so, scholars cannot agree with one-another on what is history and what in the Old Testament is instead merely myth (religious propaganda, for spreading the Jewish faith).

    According to Wikipedia’s article on the “Kingdom of Judah“:

    Centered in the highlands of Judea, the kingdom’s capital was Jerusalem.[3] Jews are named after Judah and are primarily descended from it.[4][5] The Hebrew Bible depicts the Kingdom of Judah as a successor to the United Kingdom of Israel, a term denoting the united monarchy under biblical kings Saul, David and Solomon and covering the territory of Judah and Israel. However, during the 1980s, some biblical scholars began to argue that the archaeological evidence for an extensive kingdom before the late-8th century BCE is too weak, and that the methodology used to obtain the evidence is flawed.[6][7] In the 10th and early 9th centuries BCE, the territory of Judah appears to have been sparsely populated, limited to small rural settlements, most of them unfortified.[8]

    and Wikipedia’s “Davidic line” says that,

    as for David and his immediate descendants themselves, the position of some scholars, as described by Israel Finkelstein and Neil Silberman, authors of The Bible Unearthed, espouses that David and Solomon may well be based on “certain historical kernels”, and probably did exist in their own right, but their historical counterparts simply could not have ruled over a wealthy lavish empire as described in the Bible, and were more likely chieftains of a comparatively modest Israelite society in Judah and not regents over a kingdom proper.[27]

    If the actual historical nation of Israel was ONLY what is shown on the map as constituting the Kingdom of Judah, then neither Gaza nor the northern two-thirds of the West Bank had ever been in any ancient Israel; and, so, anyone who says that the Jews in 1948 were ‘coming home’ to ‘Israel’ is historically wrong. However, those Jews were ethnically cleansing the land. It’s well-documented, such as here, here, here, and here. And even if ancient Israel had included all of the land that now is Israel, it wasn’t so at all in recent centuries, when virtually all of the residents there were Muslims and Christians — though Jews were demanding to control it while being only a tiny percentage of the population there. Their supremacism was clearly not only fascist but racist; it was Jewish Nazism. Furthermore, during the 1930s, Zionists considered themselves to be fascists; and fascists in both Germany and Italy considered Zionists to be Jewish fascists, ideological brothers of both Italy’s and Germany’s fascists (Christianity’s fascists). And Albert Einstein and other prominent progressive Jews in the U.S. after World War II described as “fascists” Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, both of whom subsequently became elected by Israel’s Jews to lead Israel. And yet the U.S. Government backed them, not only when Begin and Shamir were leading massacres of Arab villages in the 1940s, but when both men became Israel’s leaders in the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s — and afterward, under their political follower Benjamin Netanyahu: clearly, a racist-supremacist apartheid regime ever since its founding, a regime which defines the supreme group, “Jew,” not only by religion, but by descent; that is, racially. Under U.S. President Harry S. Truman, the America and the world that his predecessor Franklin Delano Roosevelt (who was against the formation of a Jewish state and even resisted his aides who backed Churchill’s strong support for the creation of Israel, and who also was opposed to Winston Churchill’s and Dwight Eisenhower’s urgings for a war against the Soviet Union) had sought and carefully planned — the world that FDR had been intensively working to build — abruptly ended. And, more than anything else, this is the reason why, on 28 October 2023, the Director of the New York Office of the U.N.’s High Commissioner for Human Rights, wrote to the U.N.’s High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHCHR) in Geneva, to resign his post. He resigned his post because now the final solution to the Palestinian problem — the problem that Truman and his successors enabled fascist Jews to create — is about to come to a head. And decent Jews everywhere will be experiencing the backlash from what the indecent ones — who are the majority in Israel — are doing. The decent Jews will be getting the backlash for what the indecent ones are doing, but the blame really should go ONLY to the Israelis, and to the UK and U.S. billionaires (and their politicians and ‘news’-media) who have been constantly propagandizing for them.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Israel Is Now the Greatest Source of Anti-Semitism

    On October 28, Craig Mokhiber, the Director of the New York Office of the U.N.’s High Commissioner for Human Rights, wrote to the U.N.’s High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHCHR) in Geneva (and I here, in boldface, add a few links for documentation of some of his assertions):

    This will be my last official communication to you. …

    The current wholesale slaughter of the Palestinian people, rooted in an ethno-nationalist settler colonial ideology, in continuation of decades of their systematic persecution and purging, based entirely upon their status as Arabs, and coupled with explicit statements of intent by leaders in the Israeli government and military, leaves no room for doubt or debate. In Gaza, civilian homes, schools, churches, mosques, and medical institutions, are wantonly attacked as thousands of civilians are massacred. In the West Bank, including occupied Jerusalem, homes are seized and reassigned based entirely on race, and violent settler pogroms [against Arabs] are accompanied by Israeli military units.

    Across the land, Apartheid rules.

    This is a text-book case of genocide. The European, ethno-nationalist, [Jewish] settler colonial project in Palestine has entered its final phase, toward the expedited destruction of the last remnants of indigenous Palestinian life in Palestine. What’s more, the governments of the United States, the United Kingdom, and much of Europe, are wholly complicit in the horrific assault. Not only are these governments refusing to meet their treaty obligations “to ensure respect” for the Geneva Conventions, but they are in fact actively arming the assault, providing economic and intelligence support, and giving political and diplomatic cover for Israel’s atrocities. …

    We must begin now or surrender to unspeakable horror. I see ten essential points: 1. Legitimate action: First, we in the UN must abandon the failed (and largely disingenuous) Oslo paradigm, its illusory two-state solution, its impotent and complicit Quartet, and its subjugation of international law to the dictates of presumed political expediency. Our positions must be unapologetically based on international human rights and international law. 2. Clarity of Vision: We must stop the pretense that this is simply a conflict over land or religion between two warring parties and admit the reality of the situation in which a disproportionately powerful state is colonizing, persecuting, and dispossessing an indigenous population on the basis of their ethnicity. 3. One State based on human rights: We must support the establishment of a single, democratic, secular state in all of historic Palestine, with equal rights for Christians, Muslims, and Jews, and, therefore, the dismantling of the deeply racist, settler-colonial project and an end to apartheid across the land. …

    Israelis learned well from Hitler: they elected governments that did (or else condoned doing) to the non-Jewish natives in their land (who before 1948 were 61% Muslim, 30% Jewish, and 8% Christian), what Hitler had done to Jews in Christian Europe — and now they are being supported by the U.S. and its allies to deliver Israel’s final solution to the Palestinian problem: extermination.

    The self-defense by Israel and its apologists, for this reality that drove Mokhiber to quit and to condemn them, is for them to ignore all of that reality, and to focus instead upon the responses to it by the Palestinians. The self-defense, in other words, is to condemn not the side that started this war (themselves) beginning in 1948, but the side that then, and even earlier (in the late 1930s), were trying to prevent or avoid it (the Palestinians). The evil in this deception by the perpetrators — by the Israelis and their apologists — is obvious, and here is how it is driving a surge in anti-Semitism:

    Israel and its apologists say that anti-Israelism is the same thing as anti-Semitism (so that to condemn Israel is to condemn all Jews), but here they lie yet again because outside of Israel are many Jews who loathe what Israel has been doing in their names. The very idea that all Jews are Israelis, or even support the Israelis and oppose the Palestinians in this war between the aggressor (Israelis) and the defender (the Palestinians), is stupid. That idea simply is not the case; but yet many Jews are being targeted by AUTHENTIC anti-Semites as-if it WERE the case.

    Comments by many readers and viewers online are rife with such anti-Semitism, and the global community of that authentic anti-Semitism grows ever-larger, the closer that Israel and the U.S. get to delivering their final solution to the Palestinian problem. A great many of these anti-Semitic comments are coming from individuals who condemn all Jews on the basis of anti-Semitic lines from the New Testament (such as John 8:44, Matthew 23:31-38, and the earliest-written one of them all, 1 Thessalonians 2:14-16 — all of which lines I have discussed here). However, many come instead from the Old Testament, which historians consider to be mythical but theologians and preachers believe instead to be “the Word of God”; and, so, scholars cannot agree with one-another on what is history and what in the Old Testament is instead merely myth (religious propaganda, for spreading the Jewish faith).

    According to Wikipedia’s article on the “Kingdom of Judah“:

    Centered in the highlands of Judea, the kingdom’s capital was Jerusalem.[3] Jews are named after Judah and are primarily descended from it.[4][5] The Hebrew Bible depicts the Kingdom of Judah as a successor to the United Kingdom of Israel, a term denoting the united monarchy under biblical kings Saul, David and Solomon and covering the territory of Judah and Israel. However, during the 1980s, some biblical scholars began to argue that the archaeological evidence for an extensive kingdom before the late-8th century BCE is too weak, and that the methodology used to obtain the evidence is flawed.[6][7] In the 10th and early 9th centuries BCE, the territory of Judah appears to have been sparsely populated, limited to small rural settlements, most of them unfortified.[8]

    and Wikipedia’s “Davidic line” says that,

    as for David and his immediate descendants themselves, the position of some scholars, as described by Israel Finkelstein and Neil Silberman, authors of The Bible Unearthed, espouses that David and Solomon may well be based on “certain historical kernels”, and probably did exist in their own right, but their historical counterparts simply could not have ruled over a wealthy lavish empire as described in the Bible, and were more likely chieftains of a comparatively modest Israelite society in Judah and not regents over a kingdom proper.[27]

    If the actual historical nation of Israel was ONLY what is shown on the map as constituting the Kingdom of Judah, then neither Gaza nor the northern two-thirds of the West Bank had ever been in any ancient Israel; and, so, anyone who says that the Jews in 1948 were ‘coming home’ to ‘Israel’ is historically wrong. However, those Jews were ethnically cleansing the land. It’s well-documented, such as here, here, here, and here. And even if ancient Israel had included all of the land that now is Israel, it wasn’t so at all in recent centuries, when virtually all of the residents there were Muslims and Christians — though Jews were demanding to control it while being only a tiny percentage of the population there. Their supremacism was clearly not only fascist but racist; it was Jewish Nazism. Furthermore, during the 1930s, Zionists considered themselves to be fascists; and fascists in both Germany and Italy considered Zionists to be Jewish fascists, ideological brothers of both Italy’s and Germany’s fascists (Christianity’s fascists). And Albert Einstein and other prominent progressive Jews in the U.S. after World War II described as “fascists” Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, both of whom subsequently became elected by Israel’s Jews to lead Israel. And yet the U.S. Government backed them, not only when Begin and Shamir were leading massacres of Arab villages in the 1940s, but when both men became Israel’s leaders in the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s — and afterward, under their political follower Benjamin Netanyahu: clearly, a racist-supremacist apartheid regime ever since its founding, a regime which defines the supreme group, “Jew,” not only by religion, but by descent; that is, racially. Under U.S. President Harry S. Truman, the America and the world that his predecessor Franklin Delano Roosevelt (who was against the formation of a Jewish state and even resisted his aides who backed Churchill’s strong support for the creation of Israel, and who also was opposed to Winston Churchill’s and Dwight Eisenhower’s urgings for a war against the Soviet Union) had sought and carefully planned — the world that FDR had been intensively working to build — abruptly ended. And, more than anything else, this is the reason why, on 28 October 2023, the Director of the New York Office of the U.N.’s High Commissioner for Human Rights, wrote to the U.N.’s High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHCHR) in Geneva, to resign his post. He resigned his post because now the final solution to the Palestinian problem — the problem that Truman and his successors enabled fascist Jews to create — is about to come to a head. And decent Jews everywhere will be experiencing the backlash from what the indecent ones — who are the majority in Israel — are doing. The decent Jews will be getting the backlash for what the indecent ones are doing, but the blame really should go ONLY to the Israelis, and to the UK and U.S. billionaires (and their politicians and ‘news’-media) who have been constantly propagandizing for them.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Know Your Enemy: In Search of Anti-Semitism, with John Ganz

    John Ganz returns to discuss William F. Buckley Jr.’s 1992 book In Search of Anti-Semitism.

    This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.

  • Know Your Enemy: Elon Musk, the Jews, and the ADL, with Mari Cohen, Alex Kane, and Peter Beinart

    Editors and writers from Jewish Currents stop by for a discussion on the contradictory history of the Anti-Defamation League—and how to make sense of its recent showdown with Elon Musk.

    This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.

  • A Conversation with Miko Peled on the State of Israel and the Palestinians

    [This is a partial transcript of an interview aired on 11 April 2023 on Berks Community Television.]

    Faramarz Farbod: Can you explain what you mean by Zionism?

    Miko Peled: To put it as simply and succinctly as possible, Zionism is an ideology that says the Jewish people all over the world have a right to Palestine at the expense of Palestinians. It created a theory that because all Jewish people around the world are descendants of ancient Hebrews a few thousand years ago, they have a right to return. And that the Jews are not a nation united by religion, but a nation united as all other nations by a land, a country, a history, and so on, which, of course, is completely antithetical to Judaism. According to Judaism and Jewish law, what unites Jews is their faith, the laws, the Jewish laws, not language or a country. Anyway, the Zionists were secular people. They said we are a nation like all nations, our country is Palestine, and our history is the Old Testament. They believed in the religious part of the Old Testament, but they said we can throw out God and all that nonsense. But the history there, that’s our history. I grew up and learned that history, the stories of the Old Testament; we learned them as history.

    That’s Zionism, and it says that I and every Jew around the world, well, I certainly, because I was born there, but any Jew around the world, has the right to come to Palestine, and they call it Israel, the land of Israel.

    FF: That is the so-called Right of Return, which is extended to the Jews but not to the Palestinian inhabitants who were displaced.

    MP: Yes, of course. The Palestinians were considered, and are considered, invaders, foreign invaders. It’s our land, we may have been gone for two thousand years but we are back. You know, the use of ‘we were there and now we are back’ and so this is us. The reason I think this is absurd is that if you ask any Israeli Jew “Where are you from?” they’ll say Ukraine, Poland, Russia, Iraq, Yemen, Kurdistan, Maghreb, Iran, and every other place in the world; but you ask any Palestinian outside of Palestine “Where are you from?’ — ask any child, you know that I go to conferences and there are always a lot of children — they say: Yafa, Haifa, Jerusalem, and so on. They know the name of the villages up and down the country. These people are all from there. But take Bezalel Smotrich, the far-right Israeli Minister of Finance, who is the most rabid, racist Zionist, perhaps in the history of Zionism. His name is the name of a town in Ukraine. He has this rant that goes on telling Palestinians that they are Arabs and that there is no such thing as Palestinians. They’re just Arabs and they need to go back to Arabia. If their name is Messrie (Egyptian in Arabic) then they need to go to Egypt, and so on. But his name is Smotrich, and he hasn’t even changed it. It shows the absurdity of this whole idea of the right of Jewish people to return to a place they never came from.

    That is what Zionism is. It’s the ideology that created an apartheid regime in Palestine that gives privileges to Jews at the expense of the Palestinians. That’s what it is. It’s a racist ideology. It’s a violent ideology. And what we see today is that ideology being manifested.

    FF: We could say Zionism is a violent ideology not because it is theoretically a violent ideology. If there was a place without a people where this in-gathering of Jews from around the world could take place, then it would not require any violence. But because Palestine was inhabited by the Palestinians, Zionism in practice necessarily became very violent. It also required sponsorship by global powers, earlier Great Britain, and later the United States. Otherwise, there would be no state of Israel the way we are experiencing it as a settler-colonial, apartheid state.

    MP: It also required this new notion, a new creation of a secular Jew — historically a new thing. For Jews, the yearning to go to Jerusalem was always for prayer and worship. It had nothing to do with sovereignty. Jews never sought and according to Jewish law are prohibited from sovereignty in the Holy Land. There is a famous line by a Rabbi, an Egyptian who lived in Baghdad, Iraq, in the 12th century, that every practicing Orthodox Jew knows. He wrote it in Arabic using Hebrew letters, discussing religious issues as part of a famous treatise. He wrote that the Jews are a nation united by their sharia, their religious laws. That’s it. Zionists came up and said, no. You don’t have to be religious. It has nothing to do with religion; we are a nation, and on and on.

    So, that’s what Zionism is, and as you said, there is no way it could go without violence. This is why they created this mantra: “A land without a people for a people without a land.” First, this was a Christian mantra before it became a Jewish Zionist one; the Christian Zionists preceded the Jewish Zionists in the early 19th century. But it is not that they didn’t know there were people living in Palestine, but these were people who didn’t matter because they are brown. They are not European. This is a Eurocentric settler-colonial ideology that made perfect sense at the time. It’s like people say, Balfour promised Palestine to the Jewish people by giving a note to a Jewish millionaire by the name of Rothschild. Who the hell is Balfour and who the hell is Rothschild and what have they got to do with giving and taking Palestine and promising it to anybody? But they are two white racist Europeans talking about the land that belongs to brown people. They could do that, and it was perfectly acceptable at the time.

    FF: You are referring to the Balfour Declaration in 1917. I agree. Even Theodore Herzl (the founder of modern Zionism) who argued for the immigration of Jews to Palestine to form a Jewish state in response to European anti-Semitism, wrote in his 1896 book, The State of the Jews, that a Jewish state in Palestine would be “an outpost of civilization against barbarism,” betraying the European colonial and racist mentality of the times.

    MP: Herzl also talked about how disgusting Jews are and how the Zionist is a new Jew who is good-looking and looks more like the Greek ideal of what a human should look like. He wrote some terrible things about Jews that no one would dare say today. If you look at his writings, it’s quite horrifying the way he and some other early Zionists describe Jews.

    FF: I wonder why? Is that because he was looking down on the condition of Jews who had lived in ghettos? Is that what he was associating that image with?

    MP: He was disgusted by Jews. He hated Jews. He couldn’t help the fact that he was a Jew. You must read his writings. He had this idea that you must break away from this ugly, filthy, thieving Jew, and create this new image of the Zionist Jew who is good-looking, tanned, brave, fights for their rights, cultivates the land, is enlightened, speaks an enlightened language, and so on. Many early Zionists, the whole generation of my father, what’s called the 1948 Zionists who were born in Palestine, hated the Jews, hated the image of the European Jew, which was somebody who is subservient to God, follows what they perceive as God’s laws, lives in a secluded way in a way that they can worship and not be interrupted, and refuses to carry guns. To this day, the Orthodox community in Palestine refuses to serve in the military, and they get hate, they get arrested, they get beaten, and they get persecuted terribly by the Israeli authorities for their stance which is a very honorable moral stance of refusing to carry arms and participating in this military thing. But the Zionists look down on these people. Even at one point, they said, we are creating the state but not for these people. We are creating the state for this enlightened Jew, not for this backward Jew. So there are a lot of very strong antisemitic overtones in early Zionism.

    FF: It’s ironic that by now the enterprise of Zionism in a way has led to this turnaround in Israeli politics towards the rise of nationalistic religious Zionism at the expense of let’s say a more pragmatic, Ashkenazi, Labor party-type Zionism that dominated in the first several decades of the establishment of the Jewish State. I wonder what Herzl and other early Zionists might have said if they were alive to witness this turn of events moving from this secular Jew to now this rising dominance of Zionist type or character of nationalistic and religious Jews, a settler from the West Bank.

    MP: Who knows what people like Herzl would have said? When you look at it historically, what we see today does not represent a shift or change. I think it’s a very natural succession of Zionism up to this point. People talk about how, as you said, they used to be kind of secular and socialist-oriented. But we can’t forget that this secular, socialist-oriented ideology was established over a massive campaign of ethnic cleansing and genocide, a genocidal campaign against another nation. And then when they established the state, the few Palestinians who remained in Palestine were put in ghettoes. They were not second-class citizens but people with no rights. In the West, people thought it was this wonderful thing; it was a miracle. In the 70s and the 60s, young Americans and young Europeans would go and volunteer on the Kibbutz. And the Kibbutz was this idealistic creation. But, of course, the land and the water were stolen, and labor was cheap. The Palestinian farmers who were thrown out of their land were now hired at starvation wages to cultivate the land for these Ashkenazi settlers. So, yes, there was this sense that it was idealistic, and they presented it that way in the West. But the truth was very different. Look at the current Israeli cabinet and government. They are the true representation of Zionism.

    FF: You could say they are the case of Zionist chickens who have come home to roost.

    MP: Yes. You know, you got the hundreds of thousands of Israelis protesting. Why are they protesting? This is the 40 or 45 percent of Israelis who did not vote for the people who are in government power right now. They were quite happy and satisfied when these settlers terrorized Palestinians in the West Bank. They belong in the West Bank. They don’t belong on the national scene. They don’t belong as ministers in our lives. They belong to these rowdy, ugly people that we don’t like and don’t want to associate ourselves with. These 40 or 45 percent in the streets do not see themselves as settlers; they do not see themselves as people who committed war crimes going on for 75 years. The other Israelis have. Now these other Israelis are back like you say they are turning to roost. Now they are in the government. They hold nationally important positions. They create policies that touch on everybody. That’s why Israelis are so angry now and protesting in the streets because they don’t like the face of these people. It’s like looking in the mirror and discovering that you are terribly ugly.

    FF: So, it’s like the tension between let’s say liberal Zionism and religious, ultra-nationalistic Zionism of settler kind. Is this essentially what we are seeing?

    MP: Yes, although I would use the word ‘liberal’ cautiously because all they care for is their own privilege within the apartheid regime. This does not extend to anybody other than Israeli Jews.

    FF: Right. That’s why when people say ‘Israel is the only democracy’ in the Middle East, they are really talking about at best a closed utopia, for the Jews only. We cannot call Israel a democratic state when you have the ongoing occupation of Palestinians and the apartheid practices as acknowledged by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Harvard Law School, B’Tselem, not to mention Palestinian sources.

    MP: Of course not.

    FF: In a September 2022 U.N. Report by Ms. Francesca Albanese, the current Special Rapporteur about human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, she argued that the denial of the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination constitutes the very heart of the injustice in Palestine. This denial is the key reason why we have this terrible situation in Palestine today.

    MP: Yes. A couple of years ago, the new Rapporteur that you mentioned co-authored an excellent paper called “Palestinian Refugees in International Law” and she asked me to write a review that I published. It talks about claims of Palestinian refugees. Not only have they not become weaker over the years; they have become stronger over the years. It shows exactly what was taken from Palestinians in 1948 beyond just their homes and their land. We are talking about public spaces, cities, produce that was on the fields and trees, and you know billions were stolen and what the value of that is today and what Israel owes Palestinians to this day. Because there is an attempt to delegitimize the Palestinian claims to return and to reparations, saying only the Palestinians who were alive in 1948 and were displaced have any rights of refugees. She shows that is legally untrue and that people don’t realize just how much the Zionists stole. People had money in the banks. People had cars. Farmers had agricultural equipment. There was produce in the fields. There were fruits on the trees. There were entire cities, public spaces, theaters, schools, and hospitals, and all of this was taken and stolen to create houses and apartments. These were big cities. The Zionists came and said that there is nothing here and that we made the desert bloom. You know the Negev, which is a fertile desert, if you look at aerial photos the British took in the 1920s you see enormous plots of land that were cultivated. Israel did not make anything bloom. They went on a rampage and stole and destroyed. They have continued the destruction to this day. I am glad that you mentioned her because she coauthored this important paper.

    FF: That’s why the Palestinians say that the land was furnished when the Zionists came and took it. Palestine was not empty neither of people nor riches.

    MP: That’s right.

    FF: Let’s get to the current protests and the new government in Israel. There have been months of protests in Israel against the judicial reforms that Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel, has been pushing for. Currently, it has been delayed. But part of the news of the delaying of the push for the overhaul of the judicial reforms by Netanyahu was that he gave Itamar Ben-Gvir, the Minister of National Security of Israel, who had opposed the delay, his own so-called private militia, or a new national guard. People like Ben-Gvir and the settlers who follow him have been going around saying to the Palestinians they terrorize that they are going to give them a second Nakba. That’s a word that Palestinians use to describe the catastrophe that befell them in 1948 when they lost their land, homes, and their history. This poses a tremendous problem for the security of all Palestinians in the coming months.

    MK: Yeah, I mean there is a discussion about guaranteeing the safety and security of the Palestinians. They are the ones that are being killed regularly for over 75 years. They are the ones who are endangered. But the narrative and the discourse are always about the safety of the Jews and the Israelis. And that’s kind of what justifies the $3.8 billion going from the US to Israel and they milk that to the bone. It’s the Palestinians who need some kind of guarantee for their lives and safety. Again, it was always the case. Now, it is even worse. Netanyahu supposedly made a promise that he was going to put a hold on these judicial reforms, which most people call a coup, not judicial reform. But nobody believes him. I don’t believe him. He says one thing and does another quietly. This is how they operate. The protests are not stopping. But you do hear voices from people who work in the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Education that their budgets have been sliced and slashed to provide funding for Ben- Gvir’s new Army which is some kind of new militia. The lives of the Palestinians have always been in danger since Israel was established. Now it’s much more severe. The lives of every Palestinian are in danger all the time. They were saying that this militia would only deal with terrorists and political issues. In other words, every Palestinian child with a rock is a terrorist. Anyone who rejects Zionism, the state of Israel, or what it does is a supporter of terrorism. You and I would be in that category. Every other Palestinian would be in that category.

    The Palestinian citizens of Israel are probably the most cooperative, quiet, educated, and as a community contributing to society and the well-being of others. They are all going to be terrorists now. We are talking about Palestinian Bedouins in the Negev, some 300,000 people, the Palestinian citizens of Israel in general, about 2 million, any activists within that community, and any politician who runs against the settlers. The settlers control the municipalities, and city councils, and are now getting more control of the military and the police. Palestinians are on the edge of a precipice without any question, and nobody is speaking for them. Nobody is talking about how to guarantee their safety and security. It’s never part of the conversation. It’s a very serious problem. There is always this expectation, expression, and discourse that ‘the Palestinians need to…,’ ‘the Palestinians should…,’ and ‘if only Palestinians could…’ Well, the Palestinians are in a maximum-security prison. They are doing everything they possibly can. There is not going to be another Salaheddin, Messiah, or God knows who is going to come and save them.

    If we allow our representatives to send the money to Israel, they will continue to do so. If we allow our representatives to identify with Zionism, which is a racist, brutal ideology, then they will continue to do so. If we tell them to stop and demand they stop, then there is a chance they will stop. But we hold the keys. The other thing is we always hear that Israelis are people of conscience. But we saw liberal Israelis in the hundreds of thousands in the streets and never heard one voice calling to end the blockade of Gaza or allow the allocation of the same amount of water to Palestinians who are not allocated water. That is not part of the conversation at all. Two hundred fighter pilots refused to show up for duty as reservists. When did they ever refuse to bomb Gaza? So, we cannot look up to Israeli society; help is not going to come from them. These are the most liberal people that we are seeing in the streets now, and this is not a part of their agenda. So, it’s up to us. People on the outside must help the Palestinians.

    FF: Yes, that’s why the Palestinian Israelis are not part of these protests. After all, what if you secure the independence of the courts in Israel? They have not been nice to the Palestinians with home demolitions and all sorts of other issues. Nobody is talking about their issues; Palestine is the elephant in the room here.

    Let’s talk about the US-Israel relationship. Why does the US support Israel when all human rights organizations say Israel subjects the Palestinians to a brutal system of oppression and apartheid? We still have Biden saying that he is a Zionist and a friend of Israel. The US goes on to support Israel with the $3.8 billion that you mentioned in terms of money but also with all the other layers of US support: diplomatic, political, using the US veto in the UN, strategic, economic, integrating some of the US high-tech industry with that of Israel, intelligence-wise, ideological, and so on. Why do you think that is? Is it due to a very effective PR machine at work, the Israeli lobby, or is it an imperative of the American Empire, maybe Israel is a watchdog for the US in the region, or a combination of all these?

    MP: It is all the above. People imagine the Israeli lobby as a bunch of people in suits at the Capitol. That’s how Israel operates. The Zionists learned very early on, a hundred years ago, that in America all politics is local. That is why anybody who runs for city council, school board, or any mayor, police chief, or deputy-police chief, regardless of how small the town is, immediately gets a trip to Israel, which includes a helicopter ride with some famous General over the Golan Heights, and visits here and trips there in jeeps and so on. They have been investing in cultivating politicians, making sure that schoolbooks, textbooks, and social studies portray the issue of Israel-Palestine the way they want it done. They got watchdog organizations through- out the entire country looking at and reading social studies textbooks. They are in the black and Latino churches. They are taking delegations of young black leaders again to Israel. They have got these organizations where Zionist Jews sit with black Americans talking about their mutual suffering. You know, one of the most privileged groups in America sharing suffering with probably one of the most disenfranchised groups in America and the world. They have been doing this for a hundred years. They have pockets without limits. They are very good at it. On top of that, about half of the foreign aid bill comes back to purchase weapons, and the whole issue of shared values of two countries that are built on racism and genocide. So, it is a combination of all the things that you mentioned.

    FF: I am glad you mentioned the ‘shared values’ because, when people here in the US mention it, they mean that we are both democracies, that we both respect human rights and the rule of law, and so on. But, as you said, it is the values of racism and settler colonialism that both countries share.

    Lastly, do you see any difference between the Democratic Party and the Republican Party when it comes to relations with Israel and the US support for it?

    MP: No. Not at all. This is a bi-partisan issue and will always be one because it has nothing to do with politics. It is above politics.

    FF: Some poll data suggest the rank-and-file of the Democratic Party has shifted its perspective on this issue but not the establishment of the party. Bernie Sanders pointed to the Israeli violence against the Palestinians and refused to attend the AIPAC gathering when he was invited. These developments point to an opening of sorts at least among the rank-and-file of the party. But like you, I don’t see any shifts in the establishment of the party.

    MP: Yes, I think it is marginal. There is some shift in the margins. But in the larger scheme of things, I don’t think there is any difference here. I think the problem is that nobody is speaking for the other side at any level. There is no Palestinian presence in Washington, D.C. Nothing, not one, zero. There are a couple of little NGOs located in basements in Virginia and other places but there is no presence at all. Nobody is speaking seriously for Palestine anywhere in this country. So, it does not matter. I mean, if there was a presence and they were speaking and doing a good job of it, then the whole bi-partisan support could shift.

    FF: Thanks, Miko for joining me. And thank you for your honesty, defiance, and empathy, and for seeing the Palestinian other as human. These are qualities that we need if we are to bring about positive changes in Palestine. We need to see your example replicated.

    MK: Thank you very much for inviting me to your program.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Weaponised Antisemitism Crushed the Political Left:  Now it’s the Cultural Left’s Turn

    What does it mean to be antisemitic in modern Britain? The answer seems ever more confusing.

    We have reached the seemingly absurd point that a political leader famed for his anti-racism, a rock star whose most celebrated work focuses on the dangers of racism and fascism, and a renowned film maker committed to socially progressive causes are all now characterised as antisemites.

    And in a further irony, those behind the accusations do not appear to have made a priority of anti-racism themselves – not, at least, until it proved an effective means of defeating their political enemies.

    And yet, the list of those supposedly exposed as antisemites – often only by association – keeps widening to include ever more unlikely targets.

    That is especially true in the Labour Party, where even the vaguest ties with any of the three iconic left-wing figures noted above – Jeremy Corbyn, Roger Waters and Ken Loach – can be grounds for disciplinary action.

    One of the Labour Party’s most successful politicians, Jamie Driscoll, North of Tyne mayor, was barred last month from standing for re-election after he shared a platform with Loach to talk about the North’s place in the director’s films.

    Not coincidentally, Driscoll has been described as “the UK’s most powerful Corbynista” – or supporter of Corbyn’s left-wing policies. The nadir in this process may have been reached at the Glastonbury Festival.

    Back in 2017, Corbyn, then-Labour leader, was given top billing as he set out a new, inspirational vision for Britain. Six years on and organisers cancelled the screening of a film, Oh Jeremy Corbyn: The Big Lie, highlighting the sustained campaign to smear Corbyn as an antisemite and snuff out his left-wing agenda.

    The decision was taken after pro-Israel pressure groups launched a campaign to smear the film as antisemitic. The festival decided showing it would cause “division”.

    So what is going on?

    To understand how we arrived at this dark moment, one in which seemingly anyone or anything can be cancelled as antisemitic, it is necessary to grapple with the term’s constantly mutating meaning – and the political uses this confusion is being put to.

    A huge irony

    A few decades ago, an answer to the question of what constituted antisemitism would have been straightforward. It was prejudice, hatred or violence towards a specific ethnic group. It was a form of racism directed against Jews because they were Jews.

    Antisemitism came in different guises: from brazen, intentional hostility, on the one hand, to informal, unthinking bias, on the other. Its expressions varied in seriousness too: from neo-Nazi marches down the high street to an assumption that Jews are more interested in money than other people.

    But that certainty gradually eroded. Some 20 years or so ago, antisemitism began to encompass not just hostility to an ethnic group, Jews, but opposition to a political movement, Zionism.

    There was a huge irony.

    Zionism is an ideology, one championed by Jews and non-Jews, that demands either exclusive or superior territorial and political rights for mostly Jewish immigrants to a region of the Middle East inhabited by a native population, the Palestinians.

    The key premise of Zionism, though rarely stated explicitly, is that non-Jews are inherently susceptible to antisemitism. According to Zionist ideology, Jews therefore need to live apart to ensure their own safety, even if that comes at the cost of oppressing non-Jewish groups.

    Zionism’s progeny is the self-declared “Jewish state” of Israel, created in 1948 with bountiful assistance from the imperial powers of the time, especially Britain.

    Israel’s establishment as a Jewish state required the ethnic cleansing of some 750,000 Palestinians from their homeland. The small number who managed to stay inside the new state were herded or caged into reservations, much as happened to Native Americans.

    Racial hierarchies

    None of this should be surprising. Zionism emerged more than a century ago in a colonialist Europe very much imbued with ideas of racial hierarchies.

    Simply put, Israel’s founders aspired to mirror those ideas and apply them in ways that benefitted Jews.

    Just as European nations viewed Jews as inferior and a threat to racial purity, Zionists regarded Palestinians and Arabs as inferior and endangering their own racial purity.

    It is only once one understands Zionism’s inbuilt and systematic racism that it becomes clear why Israel has shown itself not just unwilling but incapable of making peace with the Palestinians. Which, in turn, helps to explain the recent evolution in antisemitism’s meaning.

    After Israel collapsed the Oslo peace talks in 2000 to prevent a state for Palestinians being established on a sliver of their former homeland, the Palestinians launched an uprising, or intifada, that Israel brutally subdued.

    Israel’s crushing of the Palestinians’ fight for self-determination coincided with the arrival of new, digital kinds of media that made concealing the cruelty of Israel’s repression much harder than before.

    For the first time, western publics were exposed to the idea that Israel and the ideology that underpinned it, Zionism, might be more problematic than they had been encouraged to believe.

    The romantic illusions about Israel as a simple refuge for Jews started to unravel.

    That culminated in a series of reports by leading human rights groups in recent years characterising Israel as an apartheid state. Israel’s supporters, however, whether Jews or non-Jews, have struggled to acknowledge the ugly, anachronistic ideas of race, apartheid and colonialism at the heart of a project they were raised to support since childhood.

    Instead they preferred to expand the meaning of antisemitism to excuse Israel’s abuse of the Palestinians.

    So in parallel to Israel’s crushing of the Palestinian uprising, its apologists intensified the blurring of the distinction between hostility towards Jews and opposition to Israel and Zionism.

    They began a campaign to redefine antisemitism so that it treated Israel as a kind of “collective Jew”.

    In this new, perverse way of thinking, anyone who opposed Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians was as antisemitic as someone who marched down the high street shouting anti-Jewish slogans.

    Antagonism to Israel was denied the right to present itself as evidence of anti-racism, or support for Palestinian rights.

    Colonial meddling

    This evolution culminated in the adoption by a growing number of governments and official bodies of an entirely new, and extraordinary, definition of antisemitism that prioritised opposition to Israel over hatred towards Jews.

    Seven of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s 11 examples of antisemitism focus on Israel. The most problematic is the claim that it is antisemitic to argue Israel is “a racist endeavour”.

    That view has been a staple of anti-racist, socialist thought for decades, as well as serving for 16 years as the basis of a United Nations resolution.

    Perhaps not surprisingly, Israel took a pivotal role behind the scenes in formulating the IHRA definition.

    The new definition might have gained little traction, but for two key factors.

    One was that it was not just Zionists who had an interest in protecting Israel from scrutiny or serious criticism. For the West, Israel was the lynch pin for projecting its military power into the oil-rich Middle East.

    The benefits the West received from that power projection – continuing colonial meddling in the region – could be disguised, too, by directing attention at Israel and away from the West’s guiding hand.

    Better still, the backlash against Israel’s role inflaming the Middle East could be stifled by labelling any critic as antisemitic. It was the West’s perfect cover story and the ideal silencing tool all wrapped up in one smear.

    The second factor was Corbyn’s explosion onto the political scene in 2015, and his near-miss two years later in a general election, when he won the biggest increase in votes for Labour since 1945. He was 2,000 votes shy of winning.

    Corbyn’s unexpected success – against all odds – sharply underscored the urgent, shared interests of the British establishment and the Zionist movement.

    A Corbyn government would curb the privileges of a ruling elite; it would threaten the West’s colonial war machine, Nato; and it would seek to end the UK’s military and diplomatic support for Israel, the West’s key ally in the Middle East.

    After the 2017 election, no effort was spared by the political establishment – by the government, by the media, by Labour’s right wing, and by pro-Israel groups – to constantly suggest that Corbyn and the hundreds of thousands of new left-wing Labour party members he attracted were antisemitic.

    Under mounting media pressure, the IHRA definition was foisted on the party in autumn 2018, creating a trap into which the left was bound to fall every time it took a principled stance on Israel and human rights.

    Even the chief author of the IHRA definition, Kenneth Stern, warned it was being “weaponised” to silence critics of Israel.

    The antisemitism campaign sapped Corbyn’s campaign of energy and momentum for the 2019 general election. The once-inspiring left-wing leader was forced into a permanent  posture of defensiveness and evasiveness.

    Purge of members

    Corbyn was ousted from the Labour benches in 2020 by his successor, Keir Starmer, who had been elected leader on the promise of bringing unity.

    He did the opposite.

    He waged a war on the party’s left wing. Corbyn’s few allies in the shadow cabinet were driven out.  Then, Starmer’s team began a relentless, high-profile purge of the party’s Corbyn-supporting members, including anti-Zionist Jews, under the claim they were antisemitic.

    Debate about the purges was banned in local constituencies, on the grounds that it might make “Jewish members” – really meaning Israel’s apologists – feel unsafe.

    This process reached a new level of surrealism with the barring last month of the popular figure of Jamie Driscoll, the first mayor of North of Tyne, from standing for re-election on a socialist platform.

    Driscoll had embarrassed Starmer’s officials by proving that running society for the benefit of all could be a vote-winner. He needed to be neutered. The question was how that could be achieved without making it clear that Starmer was really waging a war not on antisemitism but on the left.

    So a set of tendentious associations with antisemitism were manufactured to justify the decision.

    Driscoll was punished not for saying or doing anything antisemitic – even under the new, expanded IHRA definition – but for sharing a platform to discuss director Ken Loach’s films. Loach, it should be noted, had not been expelled from the party for antisemitism.

    Loach’s expulsion in 2021 had been justified on the grounds he had accused Starmer’s officials of carrying out a witch hunt against the party’s left. Loach’s treatment thereby proved the very allegation he was expelled for making.

    But to bolster the feeble pretext for targeting Driscoll, which even in the official version was entirely unconnected to antisemitism, media organisations ignored the stated grounds of Loach’s expulsion. They emphasised instead fanciful claims that the director had been caught denying the Holocaust.

    Not only was Driscoll barred from running again as mayor, but, according to reports, any mention of his name can lead to disciplinary action. He has become, in a terrifying phrase from George Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, an “Unperson”.

    In parallel, Starmer has overseen the rush by the party back into the arms of the establishment. He has ostentatiously embraced patriotism and the flag. He demands lockstep support for Nato. Labour policy is once again in thrall to big business, and against strikes by workers. And, since the death of the Queen, Starmer has sought to bow as low as possible before the new king without toppling over.

    His whole approach seems designed to foster an atmosphere of despair on the left. At the weekend, in a sign of how quickly the purges are expanding, it emerged that the Starmer police had been knocking at the door of a figure close to the party establishment, Gordon Brown’s former speechwriter Neal Lawson.

    Cultural dissent

    None of this is surprising. Labour, under Corbyn, was the one holdout against the complete takeover of British politics by neoliberal, predatory capitalist orthodoxy. His socialism-lite was an all-too-obvious aberration.

    Now, under Starmer, that political threat has been swept away.

    There is a bipartisan – meaning establishment – consensus. The UK government voted last night to ban all public bodies, including local governments, from approving a boycott of one country over its record of human rights abuses: Israel.

    The legislation will effectively protect Israel from boycotts even of products from Jewish settlements, built illegally in the West Bank and East Jerusalem to drive Palestinians off their historic homeland.

    Michael Gove, the communities secretary, argued in the Commons debate that such practical expressions of solidarity with Palestinians would “harm community cohesion and fuel antisemitism” in Britain.

    The government appears to believe that only the sensitivities of the more extreme Zionist elements within the UK’s Jewish community need protecting, not those of British Palestinians, British Arabs or Britons who care about international law.

    Starmer’s party, which shares the government’s hostility to boycotts of Israel, whipped Labour MPs to abstain on the bill, allowing it to pass. It was left to a handful of Tory MPs to highlight the fact that the bill undermines the two-state solution that the government and Labour party pay lip service to.

    Alicia Kearns, chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee, said the bill “essentially gives exceptional impunity to Israel”.

    Speaking for Labour,  Lisa Nandy referred to boycotts of Israel as a “problem” that needed to be “tackled”, and instead urged amendments to the legislation to soften the bill’s draconian powers to fine public bodies.

    Starmer’s Labour eased the bill’s passage even as Israel launched yesterday the largest assault on the West Bank in 20 years. At least 10 Palestinians were killed in the initial attack on Jenin and more than 100 injured, while thousands fled their city.

    On Tuesday, the United Nations said it was “alarmed” by the scale of Israel’s assault on Jenin.

    The World Health Organisation, meanwhile, reported that the Israeli army was preventing first responders from reaching and treating the wounded.

    With all political dissent on Israel crushed, what is left now are small islands of cultural dissent, represented most visibly by a handful of ageing giants of the arts scene.

    Figures like Loach and Roger Waters are leftovers from a different era, one in which being a socialist was not equated with being antisemitic.

    Loach was a thorn in Starmer’s side because he made waves from within Labour.

    But the scope of Starmer’s ambition to eviscerate the UK’s cultural left too was highlighted last month when he wrote to the Jewish body, the Board of Deputies, to accuse Waters – in entirely gratuitous fashion – of “spreading deeply troubling antisemitism”.

    The last fires

    In a further sign of his authoritarian instincts, Starmer called for the musician’s concerts to be banned.

    Evidence for Waters’ supposed antisemitism is as non-existent as the earlier claim that Jew hatred had become a “cancer” under Corbyn. And it is the same establishment groups defaming Waters who smeared Corbyn: the government, the corporate media, Starmer’s wing of Labour, and the Israel lobby.

    Waters has been widely denounced for briefly dressing up in a Nazi-style uniform during his shows, as he has been doing for 40 years, in a clear satire on the attraction and dangers of fascist leaders.

    No one took an interest in his shows’ political messaging until it became necessary to weaponise antisemitism against the cultural left, having already eliminated the political left.

    Like Corbyn, Waters is an outspoken and high-profile supporter of Palestinian rights. Like Corbyn, Waters is noisily and unfashionably anti-war, including critical of Nato’s efforts to use Ukraine as a battlefield on which to “weaken” Russia rather than engage in talks.

    Like Corbyn, Waters is a critic of capitalist excess and a proponent of a fairer, kinder society of the kind expunged from most people’s memories.

    And like Corbyn, and very much unlike our current breed of charisma-free, technocratic politicians, Waters can draw huge crowds and inspire them with a political message.

    In Britain’s current, twisted political climate, anyone with a conscience, anyone with compassion, anyone with a sense of injustice – and anyone capable of grasping the hypocrisy of our current leaders – risks being smeared as an antisemite.

    That campaign is far from complete yet. It will continue until the very last fires of political dissent have been extinguished.

    • First published in Middle East Eye

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • If You Ever Start Trusting U.S. Businessmen, Remember Henry Ford

    (The name Henry Ford came up in a comment thread recently so I thought it’d be helpful to offer some lost context.)

    Henry Ford, the autocratic magnate who despised unions, tyrannized workers, and fired any employee caught driving a competitor’s model, was also an outspoken anti-Semite.

    In 1918, he bought and ran a newspaper, The Dearborn Independent, that became an anti-Jewish forum. The May 22, 1920 headline blared, “The International Jew: The World’s Problem,” and thus began a series of ninety-two articles, including “The Jewish Associates of Benedict Arnold” and “The Gentle Art of Changing Jewish Names.”

    By 1923, the Independent’s national circulation reached 500,000. Reprints of the articles were soon published in a four-volume set called The International Jew, which was translated into sixteen different languages.

    “The New York Times reported in 1922 that there was a widespread rumor circulating in Berlin claiming that Henry Ford was financing Adolf Hitler’s nationalist and anti-Semitic movement in Munich,” write James and Suzanne Pool in their book Who Financed Hitler. They add:

    “Novelist Upton Sinclair wrote in The Flivver King, a book about Ford, that the Nazis got forty-thousand dollars from Ford to reprint anti-Jewish pamphlets in German translations, and that an additional $300,000 was later sent to Hitler through an intermediary.”

    Ford’s plants in Germany adopted an Aryan-only hiring policy in 1935 before Nazi law required it. A year later, Ford fired Erich Diestel, manager of the automobile company’s German plants, simply because he had a Jewish ancestor.

    An appreciative Adolf Hitler kept a large picture of the automobile pioneer beside his desk, explaining, “We look to Heinrich Ford as the leader of the growing Fascist movement in America.”

    Hitler hoped to support such a movement by offering to import some shock troops to the U.S. to help Ford run for president.

    In 1938, on Henry Ford’s 75th birthday, he was awarded the Grand Cross of the Supreme Order of the German Eagle from the Führer himself.

    He was the first American (General Motors’ James Mooney would be second) and only the fourth person in the world to receive the highest decoration that could be given to any non-German citizen. An earlier honoree was none other than a kindred spirit named Benito Mussolini.

    When appraising history and today’s Titans of Capitalism™, keep your guard up…


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Mickey Z..

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Harriet Tubman Exposed as Vicious Anti-Semite

    Plans to put Underground Railroad hero Harriet Tubman on the U.S. $20 bill have been permanently shelved due to her recently uncovered lifelong anti-Semitism, announced Fox Abramson of the Anti-Defamation League.

    “It’s incredibly bad judgment that she was ever even considered as a candidate,” Abramson complained. “They called her ‘Moses’ but she didn’t lift a finger to help the victims of the 1859 Odessa pogrom in Russia, ignoring their plight and continuing to focus laser-like on black people out of pure spite,” he added.

    “A more vicious hate crime could hardly be imagined.”

    Psychologists are probing Tubman’s history of Jew-hatred to determine where it came from and why it manifested itself in such an ugly manner. Early hints suggest she was angry that Jesus failed to attend his own Bar Mitzvah and took it out on the entire self-chosen master race. Other possibilities include resentment that Mose’s wife saved her son from angel attacks by circumcising him, an option that was denied the childless Tubman.

    “It’s easy to see how she might have had a – ‘What am I – chopped liver?’ – relationship with God, says Minister Fairy Jalwell of the Very Reformed Protestant Church.

    In the wake of the anti-Semitism charge the U.S. Treasury Department has been bombarded with alternate suggestions for currency changes, including Representative Ilhan – “It’s All About The Benjamins” –  Omar for the $100 bill, Joe Biden for the $1 bill (nearly worthless), and, at his own suggestion, Donald Trump for the upcoming trillion dollar bill because, “no one has a bigger bill than me.”

    The post Harriet Tubman Exposed as Vicious Anti-Semite first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • We All Must Speak Out Against Any Rise in Anti-semitism

    Jewish communities across the country have been targeted with violence or harassment as anti-semitic hate crimes reach record levels.

    In late January, a man tossed a Molotov cocktail — a firebomb — into the entrance of a New Jersey synagogue in the middle of the night.

    In early February, a man walked into a San Francisco synagogue firing blank shots from a gun during a religious gathering. And in the suburbs of Atlanta that same week, Jewish families found flyers with antisemitic images and messages littering their driveways.

    These terrifying incidents are only a fraction of a disturbing trend in American culture. That trend is especially visible on the far right, whose anti-semitism is now louder, bolder, and more aggressive than it’s been in most of our lifetimes .

    At times like these, all of us need to be better neighbors to each other. This got me thinking about an experience I had 15 years ago as a city council member in Ithaca, New York.

    A local rabbi approached me then and explained that in traditional Jewish communities, certain types of work and activities — like carrying objects outside the home — are prohibited on the Sabbath.

    Tradition accommodates this restriction by creating a larger area called an eruv: a space that defines home as several houses and streets within a community. The boundaries of the eruv are designated by markers around the neighborhood, often attached to utility poles and wires.

    The eruv symbolically enlarges the home, so the necessities of faith and of daily life can coexist.

    For years, the rabbi said, the Jewish community had asked to put up eruv markers in parts of Ithaca, but the city council hadn’t responded. I was happy to help and even happier that we got it done. But there was some pushback from some of my colleagues, who opposed what they called “catering” to a religious community.

    That deeply saddened me then and now. Here’s why.

    Whether your views align with the right or the left, many of us are clear that antisemitism among white supremacists, militant extremists, Christian nationalists, and other bigots poses a deadly threat to all of us.

    That has been true for a long time — it’s one reason Black, Jewish, and progressive communities were such strong allies to each other during the civil rights era. But for a variety of cultural and political reasons, I now worry these alliances are fraying. When good people are not aligned in opposition, tolerance for division and evil becomes commonplace.

    Think of Nick Fuentes, the far-right activist who grabbed headlines for his dinner with Donald Trump and Ye (formerly known as Kanye West). Fuentes and Ye have openly praised Adolf Hitler. Not long ago, this would have been unthinkable in public life.

    The way to combat the rising tide of hate and fragmented solidarity is with a strong, progressive, multiracial coalition. All of us must come together to dismantle the forces behind the divide-and-conquer agendas intended to harm Jewish and Black people, along with immigrants, women, LGBTQ people, and indeed most communities in one way or another.

    In other words, like the eruv, our communities need to symbolically enlarge our home.

    I’m reminded of a quote by Rabbi Leonard Beerman: “We need those who have the courage to be ashamed, who have the muscle to care. And more than caring, we need those who will preserve and cultivate an enduring vision of the good, who will maintain a vision of the future as a permanent possibility in the present.”

    Our real and symbolic home should be with each other, where we are united by our shared humanity and where hate by any name is excluded. Let’s make that space, and welcome each other in.

  • Zionists Attack Palestinian Writers and Australian Free Speech

    The acclaimed Palestinian writers Susan Abulhawa and Mohammed El-Kurd were invited to the Adelaide Writers’ Festival, South Australia, but have encountered a storm of false defamation from Zionists, pro-Zionist Mainstream media  and pro-Zionist politicians. Susan Abulhawa has also been falsely defamed for her humane, pro-peace views on the appalling Ukraine War. The eminent anti-racist Jewish Australian Festival Director, publisher  Louise Adler, is standing firm against this ferocious Zionist attack on free speech in Australia.

    Palestinian writers Susan Abulhawa and Mohammed El-Kurd have been falsely defamed for alleged “anti-Semitism” and “hate speech” for criticising the century-long genocidal abuse of indigenous Palestinians by Zionists. However anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism because a large body of anti-racist Jewish scholars condemn racist Zionism, Israeli Apartheid, Apartheid Israel, and the century-long and  ongoing Palestinian Genocide (2.2 million Palestinians killed by violence, 0.1 million, and imposed deprivation, 2.1 million).

    Thus anti-racist Jewish American scholar Professor Bertell Ollman (New York University): “The Zionists are the worst anti-Semites in the world today, oppressing a Semitic people as no nation has done since the Nazis”. Likewise anti-racist Jewish Canadian writer Naomi Klein: “There is a debate among Jews – I’m a Jew by the way. The debate boils down to the question: “Never again to everyone, or never again to us?”… [Some Jews] even think we get one get-away-with-genocide-free card…There is another strain in the Jewish tradition that say[s], “Never again to anyone.”

    Famed  anti-racist Jewish and non-Jewish writers and scholars Tariq Ali, Russell Banks, John Berger, Noam Chomsky, Richard Falk, Eduardo Galeano, Charles Glass, Naomi Klein, W.J.T. Mitchell, Harold Pinter, Arundhati Roy, Jose Saramago, Giuliana Sgrena, Gore Vidal, and Howard Zinn have condemned “[Israel’s] long-term military, economic and geographic practice whose political aim is nothing less than the liquidation of the Palestinian nation” (Google “Jews against racist Zionism” and “Non-Jews against racist Zionism”). Indeed 25% of US Jews and 38% of those under 40 say that Israel is an apartheid state.

    Despite a century-long Palestinian Genocide and successive mass population expulsions (800,000 in the 1948 Nakba or Catastrophe, and 400,000 in the 1967 Naksa or Setback), today 7.5 million Indigenous Palestinians represent 50% of the 15.0 million Subjects of Apartheid Israel (while 7.0 million Jewish Israelis represent only 47%), but 5.5 million Occupied Palestinians (73% of the Indigenous Palestinian Subjects of Apartheid Israel) cannot vote for the government ruling them i.e. they are subject to egregious Apartheid as recognized by major world and Israeli human rights organizations.

    Each year Israel violently kills about 500 Palestinians and a further 4,000 die avoidably from imposed deprivation. Since 2000 about 10,000 Palestinians have been killed violently and about 90,000 have died from imposed deprivation. 4,000 Zionists have been killed since 1920, 40 by Gaza rockets since 2000. However about 4,500 Israelis have been murdered by fellow Israelis since 2000.

    Apartheid Israel is committing Genocide, defined by Article 2 of the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”. The “GDP (nominal) per capita” is a deadly $3,500 for Occupied Palestinians and $54,400 for Occupier Israelis. Serial war criminal Apartheid Israel is grossly violating Articles 55 and 56 of the Fourth Geneva Convention that demand that an Occupier is obliged to provide life-sustaining food and medical requisites to its Occupied Subjects “to the fullest extent of the means available to it”.

    Of 15.5 million mostly impoverished Indigenous Palestinians: 8 million Exiled Palestinians are excluded from their homeland inhabited continuously by their forebears for over 3,000 years; 5.5 million Occupied Palestinians exist without human rights under Israeli guns in the West Bank (3.3 million) and the blockaded and bombed Gaza Concentration Camp (2.2 million); and 2.0 million Israeli Palestinians can vote but exist as Third Class citizens under 60 Nazi-style, race-based laws.

    The false defamation and attempted censorship of the acclaimed Palestinian writers Susan Abulhawa and Mohammed El-Kurd is repugnant and symptomatic of a wider malaise in Zionist-subverted, Zionist-perverted, and “look-the-other-way”  Australia that is a craven lackey of an endlessly warmongering  and Zionist-subverted America. US lackey Australia is second only to the US as a supporter of nuclear terrorist, genocidally racist and neo-Nazi Apartheid Israel.

    Presently 3 out of 8 Australian State and Territory Governments (the Victorian, New South Wales,  and South Australian State Governments), 2 out of 43 Australian universities (Melbourne University and Wollongong University), the Federal Labor Government, and the Coalition Federal Opposition endorse the anti-Jewish anti-Semitic, anti-Arab anti-Semitic, pro-Apartheid,  genocide-ignoring and holocaust-ignoring International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) Definition of anti-Semitism that has been rejected by scholars  and over 40 anti-racist Jewish organizations around the world.

    The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) Definition of anti-Semitism is anti-Jewish anti-Semitic (by falsely defaming anti-racist Jewish critics of Israeli Apartheid as anti-Semites), anti-Arab anti-Semitic (by falsely defaming anti-racist Palestinian, Arab and Muslim critics of Israeli Apartheid as anti-Semites), and near-comprehensively genocide-ignoring and holocaust-ignoring (by falsely ignoring all WW2 holocausts and genocides other than the WW2 Jewish Holocaust, and indeed ignoring some 70 genocides and holocausts).

    Australia is one of 35 members of the all-European and mostly NATO and EU IHRA. All but 4 IHRA members shockingly voted No with Australia, the US and Ukraine  to the annual UN General Assembly Anti-Nazi Resolution in 2022 that condemns Nazism, neo-Nazism and related racist obscenities. Even neo-Nazi Apartheid Israel voted Yes for the UNGA Anti-Nazi Resolution.

    What can decent people do? People supporting Apartheid Israel and hence the vile crime of Apartheid must be exposed as utterly unfit for public life in one-person-one-vote democracies like Australia. The world must apply Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Apartheid Israel and all its racist supporters. Decent anti-racist and anti-Apartheid Australians simply cannot vote 1 for  either Labor or the Coalition in Australia’s compulsory and preferential voting system. Abolition of any foreign ownership of Australian media would stop the present mendacious subversion of Murdochracy Australia by the dominant and fervently Zionist US Murdoch media empire.

    Free speech and truth are core values of decent universities, and academic staff and students around Australia are protesting this worsening threat to Australian democracy and academic free speech. No decent overseas students will study at Zionist-subverted Australian institutions committed to Racism and Lies instead of the academic and humanitarian ethos of Kindness and Truth. Please inform everyone you can. For detailed analysis and documentation see Gideon Polya, “Abulhawa, El-Kurd, Palestine & Ukraine: Zionists Attack Australian Free Speech,” Countercurrents.

    The post Zionists Attack Palestinian Writers and Australian Free Speech first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Melbourne University Backs Racist and Anti-Semitic IHRA


    In 2022 Melbourne University (MU), formerly Australia’s top university, succumbed to racist Zionist subversion by falsely defaming anti-racist Jewish and non-Jewish staff and students as anti-Semitic for criticism of Israeli Apartheid. MU has now adopted the false, racist and defamatory International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) Definition of anti-Semitism that is anti-Jewish anti-Semitic, anti-Arab anti-Semitic, and near-comprehensively  genocide-ignoring and holocaust-ignoring.

    Not content with merely falsely defaming anti-racist  students and staff as “anti-Semites” for criticizing Israeli Apartheid, the Melbourne University Management (MUM) administers a Code of Conduct that now implicitly includes the false, racist, defamatory, anti-Semitic and holocaust-ignoring IHRA Definition of anti-Semitism. The MUM thus threatens the free speech of staff and students at MU.

    The IHRA Definition of anti-Semitism is:

    (a). anti-Jewish anti-Semitic by falsely defaming anti-racist Jewish humanitarians opposed to genocidally  racist Zionism, Zionist  ethnic cleansing,  Israeli Apartheid and the ongoing Palestinian Genocide that has been associated with 2.2 million Palestinian deaths from violence (0.1 million) and imposed deprivation (2.1 million) since the British invasion of the long-lived Ottoman Caliphate (1517-1924) in 1914 for oil and imperial hegemony;

    (b). anti-Arab anti-Semitic by falsely defaming anti-racist Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims opposed to Israeli Apartheid and the ongoing Palestinian Genocide; and

    (c). near-comprehensively holocaust ignoring by referring to “The Holocaust” and ignoring all WW2 holocausts other than the WW2 Jewish Holocaust (5-6 million Jews killed by Nazi Germany and its allies through  violence and deprivation), namely (people killed by violence and deprivation in brackets) the WW2  European Holocaust (30 million Slavs, Jews and Roma killed by the Nazis), the WW2 Chinese Holocaust (35-40 million Chinese killed under the Japanese, 1937-1945), the WW2 Bengali Holocaust (WW2 Indian Holocaust, WW2 Bengal Famine; 6-7 million Indians deliberately starved to death for strategic reasons by the British with food-denying Australian complicity), and the Polish Holocaust (6 million Poles killed by Nazi Germany). Indeed the IHRA Definition ignores about  70 other genocide and holocaust atrocities including 30 involving Australia),  this making the IHRA the most egregious holocaust-ignoring organization in the world.

    The IHRA Definition of “antisemitism” lists 11 false examples of assertions that could be regarded as anti-Jewish anti-Semitic. Space does not permit detailed exposition here, but all 11 examples can be shown to be utterly false assertions  designed to damage and defame anti-racist Jewish and non-Jewish critics of genocidally racist Zionism and of nuclear terrorist, racist Zionist-run, genocidally racist, serial war criminal, grossly human rights-abusing,  child-abusing, mother -abusing, women-abusing, democracy-by-genocide Apartheid Israel and its ongoing Palestinian Genocide.

    Racism and bigotry in general are still serious and persistent problems in the 21st century, but  the Zionist IHRA Definition makes false and malicious assertions about just one example of racism, namely anti-Jewish anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism exits in 2 equally repugnant forms, anti-Jewish anti-Semitism against 18 million mostly culturally Semitic Jews, and anti-Arab anti-Semitism against 300 million ethnically Semitic Arabs and 2,000 million mostly culturally Semitic Muslims.

    However, in the 21st century, anti-Jewish anti-Semitism  is largely expressed only verbally by fringe neo-Nazi groups who are not unlike the Zionists in their fanatical and racist hatreds. However anti-Arab anti-Semitism has been associated with an estimated 32 million  Muslim deaths from violence (5 million) and deprivation  (27 million and mostly children) in 20 countries invaded by the US Alliance since the 9/11 atrocity that killed 3,000 innocent people.

    Genocidally racist Zionism is based on utterly false premises. Thus, there is no non-Biblical evidence for the Hebrew Exodus from Egypt, the Kingdom of David and Solomon, or the Exile of Jews from Palestine under the Romans. Indeed, the cultural and ethnic descendants of the Palestinian Jews at the time of Jesus are today’s sorely oppressed Palestinians whose genocidally racist Jewish Israeli oppressors largely descend from Berber, Yemeni and Khazar converts to Judaism in the first millennium CE.

    The Ashkenazi (Eastern European) Jews, that politically dominate Zionism and Apartheid Israel, descend from Turkic Khazar converts to Judaism (indeed DNA analysis shows that I am largely Ashkenazi Jewish with zero Middle Eastern Semitic contribution, this being confirmed by several centuries of recorded family history).

    True Orthodox Jews reject Zionism for theological and humanitarian reasons, and a huge body of anti-racist Jewish and non-Jewish leaders, scholars, writers and humanitarian activists (notably Nobel Laureates and South African heroes in the fight against South African Apartheid) condemn Zionism and the crimes of Israeli Apartheid. Indeed anti-racist Jewish American scholar Professor Bertell Ollman (NYU): “Zionists are the worst anti-Semites in the world today, oppressing a Semitic people as no nation has done since the Nazis”.

    Of the 35 countries that are members of the IHRA: (1) all are European; (2) the 5 located outside Europe (Argentina, Australia, Canada, Apartheid Israel, and the US) were all created based on the genocide of the Indigenous People; (3) 9 members were part of the genocidal WW2 Nazi Germany Alliance; (4) 4 (the US, UK, France and Apartheid Israel) are nuclear terrorist states; (5) 28 belong to the 30-member nuclear-armed NATO that accepts  mass incineration of billions of men, women and children as an acceptable military strategy; (6) 14 were notably involved in the brutal conquest and genocide of Indigenous non-European people over 5 centuries; (7) only 2 (Austria and Ireland) have had the moral decency to sign and ratify the Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW); and (8) all but 3 shockingly voted No to the annual UNGA Anti-Nazi Resolution in 2022 that condemns Nazism, neo-Nazism and related racist obscenities.

    Not surprisingly, the racist and mendacious IHRA Definition has been condemned by scholars around the world and by over 40 anti-racist Jewish organizations.

    Because MU has been regarded as the top Australian university this attack by MU Management on the core academic ethos of Kindness, Truth, and Free Speech also constitutes a grave attack on the reputation of all 43 Australian universities and indeed of Australia. Unfortunately, US lackey Australia is second only to the US as a supporter of Apartheid Israel and hence of utterly repugnant Apartheid. The Australian  Coalition Opposition, and the Labor Government have disgracefully adopted the anti-Semitic IHRA Definition. Politicians who support Apartheid Israel and hence Apartheid are utterly unfit for public life in a one-person-one-vote democracy like Australia. Accordingly, decent anti-racist Australians simply cannot vote 1 for either the Coalition or Labor in Australia’s preferential voting system.

    Two decades ago I concluded a detailed analysis entitled  “Current academic censorship and self-censorship in Australian universities” with 8 concrete suggestions, the last of which stated: “viii. Finally, we should publicly insist that universities that constrain free speech are not fit for our children.” Friends, graduates, staff and students of Melbourne University, of all Australian universities, and indeed of all universities in the world, must take action to save this formerly great institution of learning from this egregious, genocidally racist Zionist attack on the core human and academic ethos of Kindness and Truth.

    *****

    For a detailed and highly documented account including detailed demolitions of the IHRA’s false and malicious 11 examples of asserted “antisemitism” see Gideon Polya, “Melbourne University Adopts Anti-Semitic & Holocaust-Ignoring IHRA Definition Of Anti-Semitism,” Countercurrents, 5 February 2023. For numerous anti-racist Jewish and non-Jewish opinions Google “Jews Against Racist Zionism” and “Non-Jews Against Racist Zionism”.

    The post Melbourne University Backs Racist and Anti-Semitic IHRA first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • I Am Muslim. I Am an Immigrant. I Am From Africa. Is Anyone Surprised I Am a GOP Target?



    The following are the remarks, as prepared for delivery on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives, of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) in opposition to a Republican resolution barring her appointment to the House Foreign Affairs Committee on February 2, 2023.

    Who gets to be an American? What opinions do you have to have to be counted as American? That is what this debate is about, Mr./Madame Speaker. There is this idea that you are suspect if you are an immigrant. Or if you are from a certain part of the world, of a certain skin tone, or a Muslim.

    It is no accident that Members of the Republican Party accused the first Black President, Barack Obama, of being a secret Muslim. It is no accident that former President Donald Trump led a birther movement that falsely claimed he was born in Kenya. Because to them, falsely labeling the first and only Black President of the United States a Muslim and an African immigrant somehow made him less American.

    There is nothing objective about policymaking.

    Well, I am a Muslim. I am an immigrant. And, interestingly, from Africa. Is anyone surprised that I am a target? Is anyone surprised I am somehow deemed unworthy to speak about American foreign policy? Or that they see me as a powerful voice that needs to be silenced? Frankly that is expected. Because when you push power pushes back.

    Representation matters. Continuing to expand our ideas of who is American and who can partake in the American experiment is a good thing. I am an American. An American who was sent by her constituents to represent them in Congress. A refugee who survived the horrors of a civil war, As someone who spent her childhood in a refugee camp, and as someone who knows what it means to have a shot at a better life in the United States. Someone who believes in the American dream, in the American promise, and the ability to voice that in a democratic process.

    That is what this debate is about. There is this idea out there that I do not have objective decision-making because of who I am or where I came from and my perspective. But we reject that and we say there is nothing objective about policymaking. We all inject our perspective, point of views, our lived experience, and the voices of our constituents. That is what democracy is about.

    So what is the work of the Foreign Affairs Committee? It’s not to cosign the stated foreign policy of whatever administration is in power. It’s oversight, it’s to critique, and to advocate for a better path forward. But most importantly, it’s to make the myth that American foreign policy is intrinsically moral a reality.

    The work of the Foreign Affairs Committee… is to make the myth that American foreign policy is intrinsically moral a reality.

    So I will continue to speak up because representation matters. I will continue to speak up for the sake of little kids who wonder who is speaking up for them. I will continue to speak for the families who are seeking justice around the world—Whether they are displaced in refugee camps looking to find a home somewhere, or whether they are hiding under their bed somewhere like I was, waiting for the bullets to stop.

    Because that’s what this child survivor of war would have wanted. The 9-year-old me would be disappointed if I didn’t talk about the victims of conflict.

    Those that are experiencing unjust wars, atrocities, ethnic cleansing, occupation—or displacement like I did—are looking to the international community, including the United States. Asking us for help. They look to us because the international community and the United States profess the value of protecting human rights and upholding international law. And we owe it to them not to make this a myth, but a reality.

    I didn’t come to Congress to be silent. I came to Congress to be their voice. And my leadership and voice will not diminish if I am not on this committee for one term. Thank you and I yield back.

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams.

  • Overstep of Israel’s Supporters

    In community devastation, destruction of the Palestinian people ranks with the most severe. A group of foreign people invaded a land, seized property and resources from native people, expelled a mass of the population, and oppressed and controlled the remaining inhabitants. After decades of suffering under extreme oppression, with no end in sight, with oppressors who could live as well in other places, the destruction of the Palestinian people has unique qualities that defy rational thought. Only those who are inattentive to the situation, are genocide deniers, or have agendas that preclude recognition, cannot realize that the willful destruction of the Palestinian people requires magnitudes more attention than it is receiving.

    Compounding the defiance of rational thought, those responsible for the covert method of the genocide, which is the denial of ontological security to the Palestinian people, continually promote attention to a previous genocide and highlight, by exaggeration, attacks on their community. Inordinate attention to the World War II genocide has not halted other genocides and cannot resurrect those killed. Proper attention can halt the ongoing Palestinian genocide and save the lives of a population of millions.

    Highlighting of mostly verbal attacks on the Jewish community has been counterproductive and failed to halt anti-Jewish sentiment. The latter feelings partially arise from those who oppose the role that a great part of world Jewry plays in the destruction of the Palestinians and from those who are chagrined by the continuous attempts of Israel’s supporters to play victim. Excessive attentions to the World War II genocide and exaggerations of anti-Jewish expressions enhance ontological genocide of the Palestinian people:

    • Zionists have been successful in using the World War II genocide and exaggerated claims of anti-Jewish sentiments to convince the U.S. public and its legislators that groups want to destroy the Jewish people and Israel. For that reason, Jewish people and Israel need special consideration and more adequate defense.
    • Palestinian supporters have been unable to coordinate methods that counter pro-Israel strategies that are destroying the Palestinian community.
    • The world is observing an ongoing ontological genocide and nobody has been taken to task for committing the egregious acts. In addition to the Israeli population and their leaders, there are multitudes of Israel supporters who actively support the genocide, who are accessories to abominable crimes, and are not countered and subdued.

    Overstep of Israel’s Supporters

    Proper attention to the three previous statements, grasping their substance, and reacting to their meanings provides a lifeline to the struggling Palestinians. If supporters of the Palestinian cause recognize that the Zionists have overreached their use of the Holocaust and spurious charges of anti-Semitism and take advantage of the collapse of the Zionist thrust, the Palestinian fate can change; they can take command of the narratives. The following discussion leads to the reason for the assertion.

    Exaggerated claims of anti-Jewish bias.
    In 2021, the anti-Defamation League (ADL) tabulated 2,717 anti-Semitic incidents throughout the United States, a 34% increase from the 2,026 incidents tabulated in 2020. ADL inflates the figures and its thrust is insensible.

    As an example, the Goyim Defense League distributed 91 flyers stating, “Jews own the media and a Jewish mafia has hijacked our country.” The ADL counts each of the 91 flyers as a separate incident. Similar duplication occurs when juvenile delinquents topple several gravestones, although no proof exists that the juveniles intentionally targeted a Jewish cemetery. When a person called one hundred Jewish organizations with the same bomb threat, even when the person was an adolescent Israeli Jew, the ADL listed each of the hundred threats as a separate anti-Semitic occurrence.

    By Jewish Telegraph Agency
    April 23, 2017

    JERUSALEM (JTA) — Israel’s Justice Ministry reportedly has denied a U.S. Justice Department request to extradite the Israeli-American teen charged with making threats against Jewish community centers throughout the United States. The teen from Ashkelon in southern Israel, who was arrested in Israel last month for making over 100 threats against Jewish sites in the U.S., has been named in the United States, but cannot be named in reports originating from Israel. Channel 2 News reported Saturday night that the teen said during interrogations in Israel that he had offered his “threat services” for payment.

    Other spurious statistics include inclusion of swastikas markings, which could be for any reason, and hate expressions by adolescents, pranksters, and juvenile delinquents in schools. Having teenagers behave in rebellious and contradictory manners is not unusual. Inclusion of their behavior in statistics is unwarranted.

    An example of an exaggerated anti-Jewish incident. The headline reads:
    Antisemitic vandalism discovered along Bethesda Trolley Trail
    Ivy Lyons | moc.potwnull@snoyli, August 8, 2022


    Why is this expression of white power considered anti-Semitic? It does not mention Jews and is obviously directed against African Americans. The commentator usurps an attack on the African American community, as if that community does not exist, which is racist by itself.

    The 2021 ADL reports eight violent crimes that involved a weapon. Some of these occurred at violent demonstrations, after Israel’s war with Gaza, and none developed into a serious injury. Carrying the ADL report to an extreme, if one person printed and distributed 3000 anti-Jewish flyers, and that is all that happened, the ADL would publish, “anti-Semitism has reached greatest heights.”

    For what reason does the ADL seek to continually inflate hate crimes? Possible reasons are due to the ADL being in the business of selling hate statistics, owing its livelihood to the existence of hate crimes, and feeding its audience what they want to hear. The more prominent reason is convincing others that rising hate can spill into mass violence and result in another Holocaust for the Jewish people.

    Every hate crime directed toward a particular group or ethnicity has to be reasoned, examined, caused, and studied as a guide for providing solutions to hate crimes. The ADL does not engage in finding solutions; it engages in finding statistics, inflating the severity, advertising the data, and inflaming the communities. Instead of berating law enforcement for not reducing hate crimes, the ADL berates law enforcement for supplying incomplete data. The spurious and loaded ADL reports are widely circulated and appear in public institutions, government conversations, newspaper articles, newspaper editorials, and across the Internet.

    President Biden added unwarranted solemnity to a festive holiday by saying, “This year’s Hanukkah arrives in the midst of rising and emboldened antisemitism at home — and quite frankly, around the world. I recognize your fear, your hurt, your worry that this vile and venom is becoming too normal.” The president added: “I will not be silent. America will not be silent.”

    The Washington Post repeats the script, with almost the same words, and adds to the warnings.
    Antisemitism casts darkness amid Hanukkah lights, by Laura Meckler, Michael Brice-Saddler and Allison Klein, December 18, 2022

    As the first night of Hanukkah, known as the Festival of Lights, arrived Sunday, Jews across the region were also contending with darkness — a surge of antisemitic incidents that have left many feeling vulnerable and even frightened.

    In recent days, the words “Jews Not Welcome” defaced an entrance sign at Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda.  On Saturday, xxx and three other Jewish students from Walt Whitman received a schoolwide email about the vandalism at their school. On the spot, they formed a group called Jews4Change and began planning a walkout of classes on Thursday. xxx, whose grandfather is a Holocaust survivor, said one of their goals is to push Montgomery County schools to include more Holocaust education in the curriculum.

    Local Television station WUSA9 received a communication from the same student.

    Ninth-grade student xxx at Walt Whitman reached out to WUSA9 after receiving an email from her principal regarding the incident.  She claims the graffiti comes directly after a school lesson on the Holocaust. xxx said a petition for the Holocaust lesson was started after Jewish students at the school began noticing their other classmates genuinely did not know what it was. “People are forgetting and it’s scary because if you don’t remember what happened, history repeats itself,” said xxx.

    Inspect the reports and narratives and see how hate incidents that are ingrained in racist and violent America, not unique to a particular community, and a subset of crimes that occur in all communities — Black, Oriental, Catholic, Hindu, Sikh, Muslim, Arabic, Jewish and others — are exaggerated in intensity (emboldened anti-Semitism, surge of incidents), develop spurious recitations (“I recognize your fear, your hurt, your worry that this vile and venom is becoming too normal,” “left many feeling vulnerable and even frightened”), become sidetracked into special attention for one community, and evolve into “push Montgomery County schools to include more Holocaust education in the curriculum.”

    No inquiries as to why someone wrote the words, “Jews Not Welcome” on an entrance sign at Walt Whitman High School. Because the incident occurred soon after a school lesson on the Holocaust and “a petition for the Holocaust lesson was started after Jewish students at the school began noticing their other classmates genuinely did not know what it was,” maybe a person became emotionally distressed at the constant attention to a decades old Holocaust that did not involve Americans and received special consideration apart from the history curriculum? Wouldn’t Native Americans, African Americans, Armenian Americans, Palestinian Americans, and a host of other American minorities who previously suffered or now suffer from mass destruction react unfavorably to one genocide receiving special attention, especially when constant and bludgeoning recitations have served no purpose except to gain support for Israel?

    Placing the words, “Jews Not Welcome” on an entrance sign is extreme, but I witnessed equally extreme events at public schools — intentional scatterings of the Diary of Anne Frank on school desks and gathering students in the library to choose general biographies and then presenting biographies in which seven out of the ten biographies discussed personalities from the World War II Holocaust. One librarian showed her ignorance of the topic by referring to Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg as a Nazi officer who helped the Jews.

    The Free Darfur movement, accused of allied with Israeli interests due to Sudan’s enmity toward Israel, organized public school demonstrations against Sudan for purported genocide. Local synagogues advertised the action. Demonstrations that regarded the genocides in Rwanda, Myanmar, Southern Sudan, and Palestine have not occurred. Is it a coincidence that Sudan, not a well-known country to most students, was uniquely selected because of its aggressive attitude towards Israel?

    In the scope of world problems, these incidents seem trivial. Not so; the reporting of these incidents provide an avenue for those favoring peace and justice in the Levant to usurp control of the narrative from the supporters of apartheid Israel.

    Palestinian Supporters Can Gain Control of the Narrative

    Isn’t it time and isn’t it valid for public school parents, students, teachers, and administrators to question and challenge the World War II Holocaust  being taught as a separate part of the history curriculum? Doesn’t special emphasis on a genocide that occurred in a foreign nation lessen the effects of the teachings of the genocide of the Native Americans and slavery of the African-Americans, for which Americans had responsibility? Should not Parent Teacher Associations (PTA) and school administrations consider this contradiction in lesson plans?

    Remarks reveal the lack of substance and disorientation attached to Holocaust teaching. Zionist related organizations, such as the Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC), provide trips for history teachers and students to visit the Holocaust memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. Teachers return home with these comments:

    If we don’t remember what happened, all of those people died in vain,” said a social studies teacher from Fergus Falls, who toured the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington with students last week. “If we remember them, we’re honoring their lives and families and the suffering they endured.”

    “I’ve seen kids listen to a survivor relate their story and explode out of the desk at the end and want to give them a hug. I’ve seen kids openly cry in a high school classroom. It’s just amazing what you see.”

    Are these the lessons of a holocaust that we want teachers and students to have — emotional upheavals, and traumas from observing traumas? Don’t we want them to have clear-minded thoughts for preventing other genocides? Are people who died in a particular tragedy worth more attention than those who died in other tragedies during World War II (consider American soldiers and their families) and in other conflagrations?

    More interesting and valuable to students is gaining knowledge of contemporary events. If total destruction of a community is an essential topic, why approach it with second and third hand lectures on a community destruction that has already occurred, is vague because it is not related to present life, and cannot be undone? Why not approach it with first hand discussions by people involved in a real live genocide, which is not vague, where Americans have a stake, and can be prevented?

    The World War II and ongoing Palestinian genocides have similar roots and patterns. Both proceed from virulent nationalism, from a desire to establish a nation of pure and unique folk, and from annexation of territories administered by another state or group on the grounds of common ethnicity or prior historical possession. Nazis initially ethnically cleansed by making lives of German Jews difficult, which forced the German Jews to sell property and leave; Zionists have been less subtle; they threw out the Palestinians and seized their properties. In both cases, ghetto conditions and laws restricted movements and livelihoods of the oppressed peoples. The subdued ethnicity is considered an enemy that must be forcibly restrained. German Jews had Kristallnacht. Every night is Kristallnacht in Palestine.

    Specific roots and patterns allied to a fanatical government, and not hate slogans scribbled on a wall and perpetrated by a few fanatics, signal a potential genocide. Americans do not need study of a decades old and wartime Holocaust that talks of deceased Jewish people; today’s  Americans, including Jews, need lessons in the genocide that Zionists are committing against the living Palestinian people, in the plight of the Rohingya, in the desperation of the Yemenis.

    Regardless of the outcome in modifying public school curriculum to address the issue of genocide, massively bringing the issue to public awareness will greatly strengthen the Palestinian cause. The issue will be heard throughout the United States — in public schools, colleges, institutions, and state legislatures. It will be a game changer, those who have blindly accepted the Zionist narrative will feel betrayed and change their attitudes, and those passively allied with the Palestinian narrative will become more active.

    Reaction by ADL and the myriad of pro-Israel associations will be the usual world – anti-Semite. Preparation for countering the remark, making its misuse distasteful, and moving it to a rightful place of obscurity by replacing it with the correct term, anti-Jewish, can be a by-product of the offensive that enables Palestinian supporters to gain control of the narrative.

    Countering Charges of anti-Semitism

    Statistics, derived from reports that contain mostly verbal, passive, and non-violent abuses are a subdued presentation of the serious problem of hate in America. The presentation points to problems with a few embittered people, but does not address the problems generated by mass audiences, which result from denial of basic rights. The mechanisms and manifestations of serious hate have economic, social, and political roots and proceed with one objective – deny power to others and gain power for your group. Acquiring economic power, protecting it with political clout, and using the latter to legislate social domination move chauvinist groups to physically and orally attack competitors, real and imagined,

    Discussion of hate in America is too complex and laborious to be part of this article. Challenging false and exaggerated charges of anti-Semitism encourages a more complete study of hate crimes, invigorates extensive research into its origins and causes, and leads to proposals for reduction. The challenge demands adequate replies to questions and accusations, with more than the word anti-Semitism, often coupled with words, such as canard, trope, slur, hurtful, and stereotype. Evangelist, Catholic, Mormon, Muslim, and other religious groups are attacked, big style, for real or imagined practices and, they either keep quiet, or, when they can answer, defend themselves with documented evidence.

    Setting in motion a strategy for Palestinian supporters to gain control of the narrative and successfully countering charges of anti-Semitism enables the moral and legal systems to bring the oppressors’ supporters to justice.

    Bringing the Oppressors to Justice

    How is it possible that those who commit and assist in an obvious ontological genocide are not brought to justice? The ontological genocide is well documented, not controversial, and beyond discussion. Efforts are being made to criminalize the BDS movement, a movement that attempts to limit criminal actions, while those committing the criminal actions wander free and unimpeded in their criminal actions.

    It may be difficult for the International Criminal Court (ICC) to indict and bring to justice criminals in Israel and the United States who directly and indirectly participate in the genocide, but legal and moral actions can be taken against these groups and individuals. The actions need a huge following and a loud voice, which make the previous recommendations more significant — obtaining control of the narrative and successfully countering charges of anti-Semitism create the numbers and loud voices that enable the actions to be widely heard. The U.S. has unregistered agents for Israel, who do not operate for Israel’s commercial interests, but aid and abet Israel’s death machine and they escape the U.S. legal system. Remind Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken of this fact, the next time he utters, “Perpetrators must face equal justice under the law.”

    Conclusion

    Start at the grassroots of the American system, with students, parents, and educators intimately involved in challenging activities that hinder understanding the calamities facing others, evolve into exposing the use of racial hatred statistics to favor a particular ethnicity, and finally force the legal system to address the illegal activities that enable Zionist crimes, and a path to Palestinian liberation is provided. Hopefully, this call to action will be widely circulated, widely heeded, and widely addressed.

    Hopefully, it will not repeat a previous shocking failure, the inaction in rallying historians and sensible and patriotic institutions to challenge the spurious and shameful PBS documentary: America and the Holocaust. This documentary, previously discussed in “PBS Spurious Narrative of America and the Holocaust,” revealed the PBS attempt to give Americans a “guilt trip,” and rally support for the Zionist cause. Another failure to expose the Zionist subterfuge will be catastrophic, showing that the rightful pro-Palestinian cause has limited strength to counter the Zionist aggression. If effective action is not taken, it can be assumed that the destruction of the Palestinian community, which has engulfed several generations and proceeded uninterrupted for more than seventy years, will continue and prove fatal. The lack of response to proposals in this article will, unfortunately, provide an answer to a previous question, “Are the Palestinians Doomed?”

    The post Overstep of Israel’s Supporters first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Whenever it Truly Matters, from Assange to Corbyn, George Monbiot cripples the Left

    Guardian columnist George Monbiot is, by his own admission, a very busy man. Dedicated as he is to issues such as soil loss, he has yet to find the time to throw his weight behind the campaign to free Julian Assange.

    When thousands of supporters poured into London from all over the world at the weekend to besiege the British Parliament, creating a human chain around it, Monbiot, like his newspaper the Guardian, ignored the event.

    Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, has been rotting in a UK high-security prison for years, as the United States works through a series of lawfare strategies to extradite him and lock him up indefinitely in a maximum-security jail on the other side of the Atlantic.

    Assange’s crime is doing real journalism: he published incontrovertible evidence of US and British war crimes in places like Afghanistan and Iraq. That kind of journalism has now been reclassified by Washington as espionage and treason, even though Assange is not a US citizen and did none of the work in the US. Plots by the CIA to murder and kidnap Assange have also come to light.

    Should his oppressors succeed, a very clear message will be sent to other journalists around the globe that the US is ready to come after them too if they disclose its crimes. The chilling effect on investigative journalism is already palpable.

    So, you might imagine, even a journalist like Monbiot – one primarily concerned about soil loss and other environmental concerns – should be worried by Assange’s fate. In the circumstances he might consider it worth publicising this threat to the most fundamental of our freedoms: the ability to know what our governments are up to and hold them to account.

    After all, Monbiot’s columns exposing the threats to our soil will be all the poorer if investigative journalism of the kind Assange excelled in before his silencing continues to be snuffed out by the US and UK’s joint terror campaign on whistleblowers and those who offer them a secure platform. How will we ever know what is being done behind our backs by governments and major corporations, or how they are keeping us in the dark about their political and environmental crimes and misdeeds, if fighters for transparency like Assange can simply be disappeared?

    But Monbiot is apparently not persuaded. He is yet to find the space or time for a column on this, the biggest threat to media freedom in our lifetime.

    When the Guardian columnist did take a week off from writing about soil loss and related topics, Assange’s plight, sadly, was still considered of insufficient import. As I have noted before, Monbiot decided it was more important to fill his empty slot in the paper’s commentary pages with denunciations of journalists like John Pilger for failing to be vocal enough in condemning Russia for invading Ukraine.

    Monbiot, it seems, felt he had to prioritise defending journalism from the menace posed by independent journalists on the left over any threat posed by the combined force of the US and British national-security states.

    But maybe the issue for Monbiot really is, as he has openly worried before, that he does not have anything sufficiently interesting to add to the topic because Assange’s persecution is already being detailed so fully by … a handful of independent journalists – those like John Pilger he wishes to bully into silence.

    Monbiot apparently does not need to dedicate a column to Assange, one that might alert millions of Guardian readers to the continuing persecution of a western journalist and the related assault on journalism, because independent left-wing writers – ones being algorithmed into oblivion by social media platforms – are covering the issue already.

    Breaking the rule book

    Those unsure whether Monbiot is arguing in good faith – and whether, aside from matters that touch directly on his environmental brief, he actually represents anything that can be seriously called “the left” – might consider his latest astounding tweet. He issued this one at the weekend, presumably adding so much to the burden of work that he could not find time to express his support for the human chain trying desperately to draw attention to the endless procedural and legal abuses at the heart the Assange case.

    Nonetheless, we should celebrate the fact that Monbiot took time from his busy environmental schedule to watch the first of The Labour Files, Al Jazeera’s explosive four-part documentary. The programmes draw on a huge cache of leaked internal Labour party files that show how the party’s right-wing bureaucracy broke Labour’s own rule book – as well as the law – to surveil, smear, bully and expel members that were seen as left-wing or supporters of Corbyn. Current leader Sir Keir Starmer appears to be colluding with, if not directing, this horror show.

    These Labour officials – who have been regularly termed “whistleblowers” by Monbiot’s employer, the Guardian – worked secretly to sabotage the 2017 election, including by helping to weaponise antisemitism to ensure Corbyn was unelectable, while at the same time demonstrating what looks suspiciously like a deep-seated racism in the treatment of black and Muslim party members, often because the BAME community were seen as stalwart allies of Corbyn, given his long-time activism against racism.

    So how did Monbiot respond to his belated exposure to The Labour Files? He tweeted:

    I’ve just watched Al Jazeera’s The Labour Files: The Crisis, about the handling of anti-semitism allegations. I found it deeply shocking. But I’m very unsure of myself on this issue. Have there been any rebuttals? Is there substantive evidence countering its claims? Thank you.

    Very unsure of himself? What surprising modesty and reticence from a journalist more usually ready with an opinion on a diverse range of topics – many concerning issues where he appears not to have read further than the headlines of his paper, the Guardian. Maybe it is too churlish to remember this 2011 Monbiot tweet on Assange, one that has fared badly with the passing of time:

    Why does Assange still have so much uncritical support? Seems to me he’s acting like a tinpot dictator

    Or how about his sudden and unexpected expertise in tripartite extradition law, between the US, Britain and Sweden? In 2012, he confidently observed:

    Harder to extrad[ite] him [Assange] from Sweden than UK, as US wld then have to go through 2 jurisdictions, not one.

    In fact, as people who know a lot more than Monbiot about such matters pointed out at the time, this was nonsense. Nils Melzer, an international law professor and the former United Nations expert on torture, recently wrote a book that set out good reasons why his lawyers would have assessed he was likely to be in far greater jeopardy in Sweden, where the extradition process was even more politicised than in the UK.

    Similarly, Monbiot has regularly chosen to offer his uninformed opinions on events taking place in far-off lands, from Syria to Ukraine. Why then the sudden loss of confidence when it comes to a matter happening on his doorstep, one that played out over seven years on the front pages of the establishment media, including his own newspaper, and whose evidentiary basis had been aired well before The Labour Files, in a leaked Labour internal report and the Forde inquiry’s report into that leak.

    Al Jazeera’s The Labour Files doesn’t cover much new ground. It deepens and enriches the evidence for abuses that were already in the public domain, including the collusion of newspapers like the Guardian with the Labour party bureaucracy in smearing as antisemites Corbyn and his supporters in the party, including many Jewish members.

    There has long been masses of information for Monbiot to get his teeth into, had he chosen to break with the enforced Guardian and media consensus and look into the matter. But like his colleagues, from the Daily Mail to the Guardian, he remained silent or amplified the lies rather than risk the career damage of challenging them as those independent journalists he so excoriates dared to do.

    Following the herd

    In fact, Monbiot’s seeming good-faith request for more evidence to assess the Al Jazeera documentary is treachery of the worst kind. Had he really wished to be better informed, he could have spoken long ago to Jewish Labour party members like Naomi Wimborne Idrissi who have been vilified and purged from Labour because they disputed the confected political and media narrative that Corbyn was an antisemite.

    Rather than show solidarity with them, or question what was happening, Monbiot once again followed the corporate herd; once again he ensured there was no one defending, let alone representing the views of, the British left as it was being defamed in the establishment media; and once again he helped to provide the veneer a supposed bipartisan consensus that Corbyn and his supporters were beyond the pale.

    In 2018, at the height of the antisemitism witch-hunt, Monbiot tweeted:

    It dismays me to say it, as someone who has invested so much hope in the current Labour Party, but I think @shattenstone is right: Jeremy Corbyn’s 2013 comments about “Zionists” were antisemitic and unacceptable.

    There is a reason that Monbiot suddenly professes to be interested in questioning whether the rampant, evidence-free antisemitism claims against Corbyn and large swaths of the Labour party were valid. Because, with the broadcasting of the Al-Jazeera documentary, he finds himself increasingly cornered. He looks ever more the charlatan, a journalist who withdrew from the struggle, standing silently by while the only chance to stop Britain’s endless political drift rightwards was eviscerated with lies promoted by the corporate media that pays his salary.

    And he did so, of course, in tandem with the campaign cheer-led by his own newspaper, the Guardian, to demonise the Labour left, as Al Jazeera documents.

    Rather than take a stand against the McCarthyism occurring right under his nose, witch-hunts that destroyed the British left’s chances of making the Labour party a meaningful alternative to the Conservatives’ “free market” zealotry, he focused his guns on left-wing journalists. He misrepresented as apologism for Putin their critiques of western hypocrisy and of Nato’s pursuit of a proxy war in Ukraine.

    Monbiot is a bad-faith actor for a further reason. Here is a reminder of his faux-naïve questions about The Labour Files:

    Have there been any rebuttals? Is there substantive evidence countering its claims?

    These hollow concerns should stick in his craw. Monbiot is a journalist. He knows as well as I do that Al Jazeera lawyered its programmes over and over again until it was certain that every part of them could be stood up, knowing that otherwise they would attract law suits like flies to a carcass. The feeding frenzy would have crippled the station.

    Monbiot knows, as I do, that if Al Jazeera had made a single solitary slip-up, the BBC, the Guardian and everyone else would be using it to discredit all the other claims in the four programmes. The noise would drown out every other issue raised in the programme.

    Monbiot knows, as I do, that the blanket silence from a corporate media deeply implicated in the fabrication of the Labour antisemitism narrative is proof alone that Al Jazeera’s claims are true – as are the deceitful responses from senior Labour politicians who, when challenged, profess not to have watched, or in some cases even heard of, the documentary. One doesn’t need to be a veteran poker player to spot the tell in that conspiracy of silence.

    Monbiot knows all of this. He is playing dumb, in the hope that his followers will fall for his act. In asking his questions, he is not trying to shed light on the Al Jazeera revelations. He is trying to keep those revelations obscured, in deep shadow, for a little longer.

    CIA talking points

    There is a pattern with Monbiot, one that he has been repeating for years. His position on every major issue, aside from his genuine passion for the environment, chimes precisely with that of his employer, the Guardian. He goes only as far as he is given licence to. He is not on the left, he is not a dissident, he is not even his own man. He is owned. He is a salary man. He is a corporate stooge.

    Even his environmentalism, invaluable as it invariably is, has been cynically weaponised by the Guardian. It provides a hook to draw in leftists who might stray elsewhere – and thereby help fund genuinely independent outlets – were they not offered a sop to keep them loyal to the Guardian corporate brand. Monbiot is the media equivalent of a promotional line to keep a supermarket’s shoppers satisfied.

    On foreign affairs, he promotes CIA talking points, advancing Washington’s ever expanding, ever more lucrative war on terror – wars that ravage the environment he supposedly cares about and constantly deflect our energies and attention from doing anything to tackle the ever more urgent climate crisis.

    He readily castigates anyone who tries to point this out as a Putin apologist, choking off the ability of the left – the one group equipped to challenge establishment propaganda – to air meaningful foreign policy debates.

    At home, he has equivocated on the biggest, most vital issues of our times.

    He indulged the Corbyn smears, even when it meant ushering in a fanatical right-wing government that is driving the destruction of the environment at break-neck speed. Even now, he professes doubts about the latest weighty evidence from Al Jazeera that confirms the earlier, equally weighty evidence that those smears were never rooted in any kind of reality.

    He has whispered his support for Assange, while doing nothing to galvanise the left into fighting not only for Assange’s personal freedom but for the freedoms of other journalists and the whistleblowers they depend on. In doing so, he has stifled efforts to shine a light into the very darkest corners of the machinery of the security state so that the public can know what is being done in its name. And further, in abandoning Assange he has abandoned the only journalist who had built a counter-weight, in Wikileaks, to take on that machinery.

    Far more is at stake here than simply griping about Monbiot’s failings. Just as Monbiot follows the company line set by the Guardian, never daring to stray far from the path laid down for him, so much of the left all too readily follows Monbiot, taking their cues from his take on events even though all too often he is simply regurgitating the consensus of the liberal wing of the establishment in which the Guardian is embedded.

    Monbiot is treated by much of the left as a figurehead, one whose environmentalism earns him credibility and credit with the left on foreign policy issues, from Syria to Ukraine, in which he echoes the same talking points one hears from Keir Starmer to Liz Truss. While on matters at home, like Assange and Corbyn, he sucks the wind out of the left’s sails.

    As the saying goes, if Monbiot did not exist, the establishment would have had to invent him. Their dirty work looks so much cleaner with him onboard.

    The post Whenever it Truly Matters, from Assange to Corbyn, George Monbiot cripples the Left first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • We can’t combat Islamophobia without dismantling white supremacy

    The recent Forde report found widespread Islamophobia, antisemitism, and anti-Blackness in the political sphere. Is anything going to be done about it? Probably not.

    It’s simply not politically expedient to meaningfully oppose racism. White supremacy makes racism an opportune tool for those who are looking to maintain the whiteness of the status quo. That’s why it’s so important to look at race and ethnicity alongside religion.

    It’s broadly the case that one of the central functions of white supremacy is to ensure that racism is routinely disbelieved and questioned, if the person experiencing the abuse is racialised as a “minority”. The Forde report alleged that a “hierarchy of racism” exists, and this is difficult to deny.

    As Shereen Fernandez writes for Middle East Eye:

    We thus cannot talk about dismantling racism without addressing how political parties and media outlets have perpetuated policies and myths that securitise racialised communities. We cannot allow ourselves to be assuaged by the optics of diversity if we are to truly challenge racism in the workplace and beyond.

    The Forde Report confirms many suspicions and experiences that racialised groups already had, but which had been dismissed. It’s time now to listen to those on the margins.

    Muslims in Britain have been made to feel, through political messaging and policy decisions, as though we are the enemies within. We’re seen as targets worthy of suspicion, who are not fully British do not fully belong. All this is wrapped up in decades-long Orientalism and xenophobia that carry white supremacy at their core. 

    Another thing the Forde report showed, however inadvertently, was that institutions like the Labour Party, and the political sphere at large, are not interested in meaningfully tacking antisemitism, Islamophobia, or anti-Blackness. There’s no need to state this politely – the Labour party no longer stands for the working classes. And it has shown time and time again that it has embraced white supremacy through refusing to meaningfully tackle Islamophobia.

    White supremacy

    We are far past the point where Britain can, in any serious way, be considered a progressive society.  Modern British politics has become about optics – it’s about appearing to tackle racism whilst merrily churning out policies that further disenfranchise communities of colour. There’s been a long and complex discussion about how major political parties are not meaningfully tackling Islamophobia and antisemitism. The thing is, though, white supremacy has been missing from this equation.

    In Charles Mills’ Racial Contract, he writes:

    White supremacy is the unnamed political system that has made the modern world what it is today.

    You wouldn’t know it if you were to look at the state of the British media today. Mills goes on to say about white supremacy:

    Though it covers more than two thousand years of Western political thought and runs the ostensible gamut of political systems, there will be no mention of the basic political system that has shaped the world for the past several hundred years.

    We can’t understand racism in Britain without understanding white supremacy. Islamophobia is racialised in a particular way. Antisemitism is also racialised – but mainstream politics and media have made the dominant discourse centre around white Jewish people at the cost of Jewish people of colour. It’s no accident that the combination of whiteness with being Jewish has been seized upon by people who don’t care about Jewish communities. Whiteness is seen as neutral. 

    Racialised religion

    In many political and media circles, racial literacy is woeful. Muslim writers have spent far too fucking long explaining patiently and at great cost how Islamophobia actually functions in this country. One of the most useful in understanding this is Salman Sayyid’s work on how we define Islamophobia:

    More than an expression of hatred or fear, Islamophobia needs to be understood as an undermining of the ability of Muslims as Muslims, to project themselves into the future. The manners in which Islamophobia is expressed and made manifest are diverse. This makes it difficult to say that Islamophobia has one specific feature that is hidden behind all its various occurrences. There is no essence to Islamophobia; instead there is a series of overlapping elements that constitute a coherence based around a notion of what Wittgenstein described as a family resemblance. It is possible to see how a gesture, a speech, and a police action can all be aspects of Islamophobia reflecting not an underlying unity, but a series of overlapping similarities.

    Sayyid demonstrates that the definition of Islamophobia does not hinge upon an understanding of who makes up a Muslim as a singular entity. Rather, we can track Islamophobia as a series of encounters which together form a map of belonging. In arguing that “there is no essence to Islamophobia”, Sayyid is able to express how complex Islamophobia is.

    Just as white supremacy is not only white people running around in hoods, Islamophobia is not one single aggression. Instead, it’s a heavily surveilled community, it’s the monitoring of children in the name of Prevent, it’s police harassment, and more. It’s broader policy decisions which punish Muslims abroad. It’s the overarching narrative that Muslims are not to be trusted. To put it simply, it’s a world-building narrative.  

    The ability to see oneself, intact, in the future has long underwritten the work of anti­racist work. Sayyid neatly articulates that for Muslims to imagine ourselves in the future, to be alive, speaks to resisting the work of death that constitutes white supremacy, racism, and Islamophobia. The costs of Islamophobia to Muslims are serious and steep. It’s not something which can be escaped. It must be confronted. 

    This is exactly why the fundamental function of white supremacy is death. It orders our societies and controls the lives and deaths of groups of people. Political systems don’t care about Islamophobia, but we must care as individuals. 

    Media coverage

    As the mess described in the Forde report shows, expecting political systems to change, expecting mainstream media to provide better coverage of racism, is a fool’s errand. It’s on those of us who are actually antiracists to commit to dismantling Islamophobic systems. This includes supporting independent media which challenges harmful narratives. 

    The uncritical treatment of knowledge production, and the types of communities this protects and sustains, is central to the reproduction of stereotypes and restrictive thinking. Edward Said’s work in Covering Islam examines the role of the media in reporting about Muslims. Said writes that:

    Far from challenging the vulgar stereotypes circulated in the media, the academic experts on Islam are as a body neutralized in their isolated, immediately functional role as status symbols of relevant authority on Islam, and also dependent on the whole system constituting and legitimating their function within it: and it is this system which the media, in their reliance upon stereotypes based on fear and ignorance, reflect. (1981, p. 148)

    A lack of critical thinking has become the hallmark of many works produced on understanding Islam. Said’s analysis, as ever, is a pertinent and astute reminder of the role of the media.

    State of the media

    The media has a duty to challenge the discourse coming out of Parliament. As we all know, that duty is met with a series of perpetual failures from mainstream media. Hierarchies of racism mean that Islamophobia is often forgotten about or not deemed worthy of opposition. It’s crucial that we can name white supremacy as the root of various forms of racism. 

    It’s an absolute disgrace that two prominent investigations which upended mainstream discourse on Islamophobia and antisemitism in Britain came from outside of the country. The Trojan Horse affair was investigated by the American podcast Serial, while Al-Jazeera have been rolling out their coverage on a data leak which they claim “attempted to undermine members supportive of Jeremy Corbyn.”

    As the Canary’s own Afroze Fatima Zaidi wrote:

    Journalism in the UK is full of anomalies. The press is supposed to be free, balanced and impartial, but this emphasis on impartiality requires being neutral on everything, including glaring injustice.

    Hierarchies of racism are not politically neutral, nor is resisting an increasingly Islamophobic state and media. To resist Islamophobia is to resist white supremacy.

    A version of this article was presented at Jewish Voice for Labour’s Fringe meeting at the Labour Party Conference – you can watch a livestream of the event here.

    Featured image via Unsplash/Jon Tyson

    By Maryam Jameela

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • Innocence of Mahmoud Abbas

    Palestinian President, Mahmoud Abbas, demonstrated political naiveté when replying to an intimidating question, “As a Palestinian leader, did he plan to apologize to Israel and Germany for the 1972 Munich Olympics 1972 attack by Black September ahead of its 50th anniversary next month?” Something chilling in memorializing a terrorist attack, making it unique among the thousands of terrorist attacks committed on helpless people, many of them done by the Zionists and the Israeli government.

    Not knowing the question was being used to provoke and use him to publicize apartheid Israel as a constant victim, President Abbas responded, “From 1947 to the present day, Israel has committed 50 massacres in Palestinian villages and cities, in Deir Yassin, Tantura, Kafr Qasim and many others, 50 massacres, 50 Holocausts.” Nothing incorrect in what he was saying and in using holocaust as a metaphor, stressing that, to those who have been massacred, a holocaust has no limits in size. Nor did his words diminish the Word war II holocaust.

    President Abbas failed to realize he was faced by a provocateur, who wanted to be provoked so he could raise the stakes, and that he was surrounded by racists who are determined to have the word holocaust reserved for their own use — Zionists, who daily convince the world that the World War II atrocities have a unique presence among all other atrocities and the German Federal Republic that subordinates other atrocities committed by Nazi Germany. The contrived uniqueness gives Zionists the right to cripple anyone who bothers them and enables Germany to claim superior morality by atoning for the sins of vanquished antecedents.

    A more astute political leader would have responded to this “Why do you beat your wife?” type of question by stating the question had no relevance to the present meeting and neither he nor the Palestinian government condoned or had any role in the event.

    German Chancellor, Olaf Schulz, the real culprit in this situation, demonstrated the continuous German obsequious attitude to the Zionist cause with inflammatory remarks. He wrote on Twitter, “The (Palestinian) leader would have gained sympathy if he had apologized for the terrorist attack on Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics 1972. Accusing Israel of ‘50 Holocausts’ instead is the most disgusting speech ever heard in the German Chancellery.”

    By not immediately intervening to prevent further ugly conversation and not shielding his guest from insults, the German Chancellor permitted the Zionists to twist everything to their advantage while he heightened the attack with careless remarks. Olaf Schulz’s remarks may be among the most disgusting ever uttered by a world leader. Demonstrations before German embassies should demand his immediate replacement. Off to a nursing home for this crippled politician.

    The calculated controversy demonstrates the clever strategy that Israel has used to perpetrate its genocide on the Palestinians, distinguishing harm to Jewish people, no matter how insignificant, from all other harms and, by use of the unique words anti-Semitism and holocaust, giving that harm more significance. Constant repetition of these words provokes a Pavlovian response in a significant number of numbed people, whose “knee-jerk” reaction is. “We must protect the defenseless Israeli Jews from these vile attacks.”

    Combatting the weaponiziation of these words — anti-Semitism and holocaust — is a necessary challenge for combatting apartheid Israel’s horrific oppression of the Palestinian people. Due to the lightning rod attributes of the words, the approach has been unduly careful and, by this manner, has achieved nothing. Time to shout out the truths: “Anti-Semitism is a manufactured word that has no context; anti-Judaism is the preferred word. Until the World War II atrocities, Jews suffered much less discrimination than other minorities, many of whom, such as the Cathars, Carthaginians, Hereros, Aborigines, and hundreds of tribes in the Americas, Africa and Asia have been almost completely wiped out and are not available to testify to the discrimination. Much of what is labelled as “anti-Semitism “ is the frequent discrimination against a minority (Jews in this case) provoked by economic, cultural, and social rivalries, religious intolerance, suspicions, or just being caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. The recently contrived and infantile labeling of discrimination of Jews as “the world’s oldest and ongoing discrimination,” as if that is a contest and is important, is contradicted by the continuous prejudice against women, homosexuals, Armenians, Assyrians, Samaritans, Nubians, and others, only a few of mass brutalities, from ancient times until today. Jews suffered minimal discrimination in the United States, magnitudes less than other groups, and today, much, much less than Arabs, Muslims, and Asians. Three quarters of the Anti-Defamation League statistics on anti-Semitism are vandalism —tumbling of graveyard monuments, telephone calls of intended bombings, and depictions of Swastikas by teen-aged juvenile delinquents, who are not expressing anything against others and are only expressing frustration with their lives. Serious crimes against Jews cannot be underestimated and need attention but are infinitesimal compared to the wanton destruction of Palestinian life and property by Israel’s Jewish settlers and magnitudes less than the Islamophobic hate crimes committed annually against Arabs and Muslims in the United States.

    Are the three years of the World War II holocaust more horrific and unique than the centuries of slaughter of the native tribes in the western hemisphere and the unendurable slavery of the African peoples, and not just in the United States, but throughout the world? The excessive attention to discrimination of Jews and to the World War II holocaust is due to one word ─ racism. The irony of the constant attention to the holocaust is that it is a racist expression, singling out one ethnicity in deference to others, while posing as anti-racist.

    Israel cannot be defeated on the battlefield and its ultimate success in stealing all Palestinian lands and reducing the Palestinians to vassalage depends on convincing the world that it is a protector of the Jews, who are in constant danger, continually subjected to anti-Semitism and another possible holocaust. After each serious Israeli transgression on Palestinian life, Zionist followers bring to life the departed of the holocaust and resurrect age-old anti-Semitism charges, which are reinforced by new charges of antipathy to Jewish progress and endangerment of their lives. This manipulation shifts the talk from the Israeli destructive action against the Palestinians to a construct of spurious actions by a hostile world against Zionism. Capturing each generation to sympathize with the Zionist apartheid and oppressive causes is a constant objective of the Zionist agenda. Centuries-old harms, irrelevant to today, are presented as happenings of a close yesterday.

    Oppression of the Palestinians will not be halted before the public relations stunts, which disgustingly use the dead from the holocaust and the sufferings of those subjected to criminal anti-Jewish criminal actions to cloak the oppression, are exposed and have no effect. Bringing Israel to task for its crimes demands revealing the nefarious use of the holocaust and spurious charges of anti-Semitism that attempt (and succeed) to shield Israel from criticism. Before the exposure is accomplished, nothing else will succeed in liberating the Palestinians from Israel’s genocidal actions.

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  • Zionism and the Dark Side of Germany

    Post World War II Germany has exhibited commendable characteristics — publicly atoning for its Nazi past, working assiduously to create a thriving nation, designing a truly democratic country, integrating its European compatriots into a common market, leading others in opening borders to refugees, and modifying its previous ultra-nationalism to form the European union. Behind these praiseworthy attributes lurks another Germany and with a deadly appearance. Germany, which committed the World War II genocide, actively aids and abets another genocide ─ the genocide of the Palestinian people.

    Conferences, reports, articles, and discussions have described the programs and assistance by which Germany has politically, financially, and militarily supported Israel and enabled the Zionists to violate international norms, illegally seize control of Palestinian lands, and suppress Palestinian aspirations for freedom and self-rule. Slipping under the radar is how Zionists exploit German benevolence and subvert German institutions in foreign lands to serve Israel. After a brief summary of how Germany contributed to Israel’s destruction of the Palestinian people, an example of the deliberate subversion will be discussed

    Starting in 1952, West Germany agreed to pay three billion Deutschmarks (DM) to the newly formed Israel and an additional 4.5 million DM to Jewish organizations for assistance to Holocaust survivors worldwide. Estimates have the total reparations paid to Israel accruing to between $25 and $30 billion. The United States State Department estimates that, by 2018, payments from various programs to all survivors were $86.8 billion. The final amount may reach $100 billion.

    The Federal Republic of Germany’s reparations enabled apartheid Israel to develop infrastructure—roads, railways, and shipping. Israel used the funds to buy patrol boats, tanks, weapons, and Germany’s Dolphin-class submarines, which can be fitted with nuclear warheads. German reparations have contributed to the destruction of the Palestinian people and to the possible destruction of Iran.

    Enhancing Israel’s military efforts is only one facet of Germany’s allegiance to the apartheid state. The Bundestag, Germany’s federal parliament, voted to declare Israel’s existence to be part of Germany’s national interest and passed a non-binding resolution that designated the BDS movement as anti-Semitic.

    A peculiar coda to Germany’s guilt trip appears in a recent news report from Times of Israel, by David Rising, 14 October 2020.

    Germany has agreed to provide more than a half billion euros to aid Holocaust survivors struggling under the burdens of the coronavirus pandemic, the organization that negotiates compensation with the German government said Wednesday. The payments will be going to approximately 240,000 survivors around the world, primarily in Israel, North America, the former Soviet Union and Western Europe, over the next two years, according to the New York-based Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, also referred to as the Claims Conference.

    This “claim” embarrasses countries and Jews around the world. The Claims Conference continues to nickel and dime present day Germans, who can use the money themselves or, at least help the more unfortunates, especially recent immigrants in Germany. How many displaced people have little access to vaccination?

    I have known and still know many Holocaust survivors, including my own relatives, and none of them have required financial care. Decades ago, all survivors were already established citizens in their nations and supported by their adopted countries. Wouldn’t the funds be better used for the one million plus refugees that Germany has absorbed or the tens of millions of widows and children of those killed by Nazi bullets, Nazi bombs, and Nazi vengeance? Don’t they deserve protection? Why does Germany feel its present citizens, who have no responsibility for the Nazi atrocities, must be financially and morally culpable? Do the United States, Great Britain, France, Belgium, and Italy still shoulder responsibility for the atrocities they have committed and the victims they created? Maybe, former German chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, supplied the answer.

    Le Monde diplomatique relates that Adenauer, in a 1966 television appearance, was asked about his reparations policy. The former Chancellor replied that “the German crimes against the Jews had to be expiated or repaired, if we were at all to regain our international standing”. He then added, “the power of the Jews even today, especially in America, should not be underestimated.”

    Germany’s reparations position has set the tone for Remembrance curricula that have little basis to exist in foreign nations and especially in those nations that do not offer Remembrance curricula for the atrocities they have committed upon other peoples. The American Institute for Contemporary German Studies (AICGS) at Johns Hoping University in Washington DC is a prime example of how the Remembrance curricula in German institutions, in a quiet and not aggressive manner, influences the public in other countries.

    AICGS defines itself as “a center for policy research and scholarship dedicated to the most important political, economic, and security issues confronting Germany and the United States in the global arena. AICGS anticipates challenges, proposes solutions, and bolsters the German-American partnership.”

    In 2007, the Federal Republic of Germany established an independent charitable association called the Förderkreis des American Institute for Contemporary German Studies (AICGS). The charitable association allowed German residents to make tax deductible donations to support the mission of the AICGS and circulate one of its principle issues ─ Memory Politics.

    AICGS explains its Memory Politics as:

    Germany’s approach to acknowledging and providing redress for past crimes has offered other nations around the world a guide to reconciliation. While Germany’s efforts resulted from a unique situation and are not considered a blueprint for other nations to emulate, they have nevertheless informed and impacted other countries dealing with the difficult processes of memory, commemoration, and rebuilding bilateral relationships.

    How does Memory Politics fit with AICGS thrust, which is “a center for policy research and scholarship dedicated to the most important political, economic, and security issues confronting Germany and the United States in the global arena.”

    An AICGS discussion, Thursday, July 7, 2022, on “Documenta 15 and the Controversy over Anti-Semitism” displayed the dubious nature of this fit.

    Even before the June opening of the fifteenth iteration of the prestigious Documenta contemporary art exhibition in the city of Kassel, several controversies, including alleged anti-Semitism on the part of the Indonesian organizers and some artists, had been swirling. Then, a banner was unveiled on the first day in which several Jewish figures were depicted in offensive, anti-Semitic ways. These took the form of a clearly labeled Mossad agent with the head of a pig (Mossad is Israel’s secret service), and a caricature of an Orthodox Jewish man wearing a black derby hat bearing the insignia of the SS, the Nazi unit responsible for the mass extermination of Jews. This has unleashed a torrent of critical commentary. AICGS has brought together three leading experts to help us to understand the controversies and the debates surrounding them in Germany.

    In any discussion, the moderator is obliged to take a neutral position and serve to lead the discussion so that all sides are properly presented. At this discussion, if anybody represented Documenta 15 and its defense against accusations of anti-Semitism, I did not hear it. I did hear its moderator, Dr. Eric Langenbacher, behave as a Zionist representative.

    Shown following are the banner drawings that received condemnation.

    Critics charged the above drawing is an anti-Semitic presentation of an Orthodox Jewish person, with SS credentials on his hat.

    The drawing to the right seems to depict a uniformed person as a pig. Why this drawing is considered to be of a Mossad agent is not clear.

    Interpret the drawings from a deliberately biased perspective, and one can quickly jump to charging offensive characterizations. Perceive them as emotionally charged expressions from those disturbed by Mossad actions and Orthodox Jewish settlers who daily harass and even kill innocent Palestinians, and the drawings become protest street art, which is supported by hundreds of millions non-racist people throughout the world.

    The photo on left is Baruch Goldstein, an Orthodox Jewish settler who murdered 29 and wounded 125 Palestinian Muslim worshipers at the 1994 Cave of the Patriarchs massacre in Hebron.

    The photo below depicts Orthodox Jewish settlers who are harassing Palestinian farmers.

    A foreign observer from Indonesia who wanted to draw murderous settlers in a gruesome manner would naturally draw what he/she knew from newspaper reports and images accompanying them, including images of Orthodox Jews praying at the Western Wall. Seems perfectly rational and without derogatory motives. Maybe this report from Basil Adra, a +972 reporter, agitated the artist.

    Last September, I ran up a mountain, panting, while being chased by dozens of masked Israeli settlers near my home in the South Hebron Hills. I was filming them descending with clubs upon a small village, Mufagara, located in Masafer Yatta in the occupied West Bank, where over 1,000 Palestinians are facing imminent expulsion from their homes.

    The settlers smashed the windows of homes, vandalized cars, and beat up families, stoning them with rocks and wounding several residents. They fractured the skull of a three-year-old child, one of my neighbors, as his mother tried to hide him and the other children in a small room.

    The one-sided discussion revealed its total bias when the moderator, Dr. Langenbacher, asked the commentators to express opinions on the “dark side” of anti-Semitism, audaciously citing a comparison of Islamists with Nazis, and characterizing Hezbollah and Hamas as anti-Semitic.

    The dictionary defines an Islamist as “someone who believes strongly in Islamic ideas and laws.” Dr. Langebacher, savior of the Jews from anti-Semitism, blithely commits a bigoted statement that compares Islamists with Nazis.

    What do Hezbollah and Hamas have to do with the questions posed by the Documenta 15 exhibition? By what right does Dr. Langenbacher, living in the United States, impugn the motives of those who fight against Israel’s theft of Palestinian lands and destruction of the Palestinian people?

    Documenta 15 committed no offense against any peace loving ethnicity. It only portrayed the racist and murderous elements of Israeli society in a metaphoric manner. German authorities were incorrect in removing a banner, which should preferably circulate throughout the world.

    The Federal Republic of Germany and the United States share responsibility for empowering Israel in its destruction of the Palestinian people, soothing their guilt by donating money and supplies to the Palestinians and their unwanted government, and enabling the Palestinians to survive another day before the next onslaught. A preferred argument against Documenta 15 is that it erred by not including drawings of these two “angels of death” in its popular and informative exhibition.

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  • Where’s the outrage about antisemitism at pro-Israel rally? 

    Flagrant antisemitism at a rally attended by leading politicians has been ignored because the targets of the racist attack stood with the oppressed.

    At United Jewish Appeal Toronto’s May 29 Walk with Israel a group of Israel flag-waving individuals crossed the street to berate a half dozen Hasidic Jews holding a Palestinian flag. One woman waves a small Israeli flag at them yelling “shame on you” and “you’re a shame on Jewish people”. Another Zionist says, “Hitler made a big mistake, you should have been in the gas chambers. Too bad. We’re here and you’re gonna go to hell.” She states repeatedly, “Hitler made a big mistake, you should have been in the gas chambers.”

    The non-Zionists remain calm in the face of the harassment and eventually the police push the Israel supporters away.

    Imagine the uproar if video emerged of identifiably Jewish individuals harassed in a similar way at a Palestine solidarity rally. Making the silence more noteworthy, the rally was attended by Liberal cabinet minister Marco Mendicino, Conservative party leadership front runner Pierre Poilievre, Toronto Mayor John Tory and other politicians.

    If NDP or Green MPs tweeted about attending a pro-Palestinian rally in which video subsequently emerged of Jews being repeatedly told “Hitler made a big mistake, you should have been in the gas chambers” the MP, party leader and others would be pressed to condemn the remarks.

    I emailed Mendicino, Poilievre and Tory’s offices to ask for a comment on the incident. I also contacted B’nai B’rith, Canadian Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center and the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA) about the incident and emailed B’nai B’rith’s anti hate hotline. None of them responded or publicly mentioned the harassment.

    Soon after the Walk With Israel, Toronto activist Paul Salvatori tagged his MP, Ya’ara Saks, with video of the harassment at the rally. Saks, who attended the Walk With Israel, ignored Salvatori. While she was indifferent to the abuse hurled at the Hasidim, Saks posted a thread to Twitter two weeks later claiming she was the victim of “hate” when young people yelled “stop supporting killing of Palestinians”. A self-described “unapologetic Zionist”, Saks’ claim that she and other identifiably Jewish individuals were yelled at was re-tweeted by all the main Israel lobby groups and many prominent figures in the anti-Palestinian movement. It was also reported on by a number of Jewish media outlets. Even pro-Palestinian voices such as former Ontario MPP Rima Berns‑McGown and NDP MPs Matthew Green and Heather McPherson expressed their solidarity with Saks by quote tweeting her thinly veiled attack on Palestine solidarity. As I detailed here, Saks has repeatedly linked Canadian Jewry to Israel yet when a pro-Palestinian teenager crassly applies the same logic it becomes “hate”.

    This is a common Zionist double standard. Conflate Canadian Jewry with Israel when it serves your purposes but complain bitterly if others do the same in a way you don’t like.

    Contrasting the wide circulation of Saks’ (evidence free) claim with the general indifference to the harassment faced by non-Zionist Hasidim (caught on video) highlights the Israel lobby’s grip over popular outrage regarding antisemitism. When CIJA, B’nai B’rith and associates ignore incidents of antisemitism few become aware of them.

    This is troubling since those the Israel lobby considers unworthy victims deserve solidarity. But there’s a broader question at play as well. The harassment transpired at an event organized by a group the Palestine solidarity movement should be actively seeking to discredit. Irrespective of the harassment targeting the Hasidic activists, the Walk With Israel was a racist affair organized by the leading funder of anti-Palestinian activism in the country. The woman who declared “you should have been in the gas chambers” offered a great opportunity to discredit United Jewish Appeal on their own (anti-Palestinian) terms.

    Anyone who supports Palestinian rights should be working to undermine UJA Toronto. They raise significant funds for Israel, are CIJA’s patron and have promoted recruitment for the Israeli military. A month ago UJA chair Linda Frum claimed those who blamed Israel for the killing of Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh engaged in a “blood libel” and “antisemitic double standard”. (The New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, Associated Press, Bellingcat, Al Haq, B’Tselem, Palestinian Authority and UN Human Rights Office have all conducted investigations concluding the IDF was responsible for Abu Akleh’s killing.)

    Jewish progressives should lead the charge to discredit UJA. But with the notable exception of Rabbi David Mivisair, left-wing Jewish activists largely failed to raise the harassment at the Walk With Israel. Independent Jewish Voices, Winchevsky Centre, New Israel Fund of Canada, Canadians for Peace Now, JSpace (not to mention the Bernie Farber chaired Canadian Anti-Hate Network) have yet to mention the antisemitic incident on their twitter. Overwhelmingly those who retweeted and boosted the video of the harassment were Arab-Canadians.

    The lack of reaction to the harassment faced by non-Zionist Hasidim highlights the extent to which the Israel lobby determines outrage at antisemitism. It also demonstrates how little interest there is in standing up to the Israel lobby.

    While the Israel lobby is often ruthless, the Palestinian side is generally tepid. Israel lobby groups regularly attack Palestine solidarity for people saying far less than “you should have been in the gas chambers”.

    When an individual at an Israel lobby event is caught on video telling pro-Palestinian Jews that Hitler should have killed them, we must denounce those responsible and embarrass the politicians who refuse to condemn the despicable act.

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  • Liberal budget funds apologists for Israeli crimes

    As more and more Canadians, including university students across the country, oppose Israel’s apartheid policies. the Liberals devoted millions of dollars in the recent federal budget to strengthen anti-Palestinian forces.

    They put up $5.6 million over five years for Canada’s Special Envoy on Preserving Holocaust Remembrance and Combatting Antisemitism. The position was created a year and a half ago for one of Canada’s chief apartheid apologists, Irwin Cotler. A staunch proponent of Israeli colonialism, Cotler has a home in Israel and his daughter was recently a member of the Knesset. In response to a recent speech Cotler delivered at the University of Toronto’s Temerty Faculty of Medicine, 45 faculty members sent the Dean a letter saying the event “reinforced anti-Palestinian racism in a way that is consistent with a broader pattern of silencing and erasure of Palestinian voices.”

    Cotler has been bemoaning the “new anti-Semitism” of those who support Palestinian rights for decades. After Canada’s largest ever Palestinian solidarity demonstrations — largely by racialized Canadians — in May 2021 Cotler led an antisemitism summit and began decrying the worst antisemitism in Canada since World War II. (As Cotler knows, it wasn’t until the 1950s that it became illegal to block Jews and other groups from purchasing property in some neighborhoods. Some social clubs also restricted Jewish membership into the 1960s.)

    Mimicking Canada, the Israeli government recently created its own Special Envoy for Combating Antisemitism and Delegitimization. In appointing Noa Tishby to the position Foreign Affairs Minister Yair Lapid talked about those accusing Israel of “apartheid”, making it clear the aim of the position is to combat groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch that have detailed Israeli apartheid. Cotler immediately applauded the Israeli government’s move to set up an envoy and announced he was planning to work with Tishby.

    The Liberals budget also funneled $20 million into a new Montréal Holocaust Museum, which is scheduled to move to the centre of the city in 2025. That institution lists Federation Combined Jewish Appeal (CJA) of Montréal as its “Beneficiary” and its largest donor was the Azrieli Foundation. The Azrieli Foundation has financed projects that benefit the Israeli military and the Azrielis made a controversial donation to Im Tirtzu, which was deemed a “fascist” group by an Israeli court. CJA has promoted Canadians joining the IDF. Its website also proclaims that its Community Recovery & Resilience Campaign co-chair Mitch Garber’s “eldest son Dylan just completed his service as a lone soldier serving in an elite Cyber Defense intelligence Unit of the IDF in Israel.”

    The museum has co-sponsored initiatives with CJA, B’nai Brith, Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs and other anti-Palestinian lobby groups. A former museum fundraiser, Mikhael Goldshtein, boasts that he fought in the IDF for eight years.

    In 2020 it released a statement titled “The Montreal Holocaust Museum regretfully notes the Montreal Mayor’s refusal to support the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) definition of antisemitism.” The IHRA definition seeks to label criticisms of Israeli policy as antisemitic. Seven of the definition’s 11 illustrative examples refer to Israel.

    In addition to the Montreal Holocaust Museum’s overt anti-Palestinian alignment, Hitler’s destruction of European Jewry has long been weaponized against Palestinians. In his 2000 book The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering, Norman Finkelstein, whose grandparents perished in Nazi death camps, argues that the American Jewish establishment exploited the memory of the Nazi Holocaust for economic and political gain and to further the interests of Israel. Since the book was written, Israel lobbyists’ reliance on antisemitism/Nazi Holocaust claims to undermine Palestine solidarity has grown substantially.

    If the Montréal Holocaust Museum refuses to distance itself — by declaring its support for Palestinian rights — from those using the Nazis’ extermination of European Jewry to justify subjugating Palestinians it should be opposed. Canada’s Special Envoy on Preserving Holocaust Remembrance and Combatting Antisemitism should be categorically rejected. Cotler is a liberal imperialist who has spent his life working to subjugate Palestinians.

    With their recent budget the Liberals have reaffirmed their anti-Palestinian policy. People who support human rights for all and oppose Israel’s apartheid policies take note.

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  • Palestine is a Loud Echo of Britain’s Colonial Past and a Warning of the Future

    [This is the transcript of a talk I gave to Bath Friends of Palestine on 25 February 2022.]

    Since I arrived with my family in the UK last summer, I have been repeatedly asked: “Why choose Bristol as your new home?”

    Well, it certainly wasn’t for the weather. Now more than ever I miss Nazareth’s warmth and sunshine.

    It wasn’t for the food either.

    My family do have a minor connection to Bristol. My great-grandparents on my mother’s side (one from Cornwall, the other from South Wales) apparently met in Bristol – a coincidental stopping point on their separate journeys to London. They married and started a family whose line led to me.

    But that distant link wasn’t the reason for coming to Bristol either.

    In fact, it was only in Nazareth that Bristol began occupying a more prominent place in my family’s life.

    When I was not doing journalism, I spent many years leading political tours of the Galilee, while my wife, Sally, hosted and fed many of the participants in her cultural café in Nazareth, called Liwan.

    It was soon clear that a disproportionate number of our guests hailed from Bristol and the south-west. Some of you here tonight may have been among them.

    But my world – like everyone else’s – started to shrink as the pandemic took hold in early 2020. As we lost visitors and the chance to directly engage with them about Palestine, Bristol began to reach out to me.

    Toppled statue

    It did so just as Sally and I were beginning discussions about whether it was time to leave Nazareth – 20 years after I had arrived – and head to the UK.

    Even from thousands of miles away, a momentous event – the sound of Edward Colston’s statue being toppled – reverberated loudly with me.

    Ordinary people had decided they were no longer willing to be forced to venerate a slave trader, one of the most conspicious criminals of Britain’s colonial past. Even if briefly, the people of Bristol took back control of their city’s public space for themselves, and for humanity.

    In doing so, they firmly thrust Britain’s sordid past – the unexamined background to most of our lives – into the light of day. It is because of their defiance that buildings and institutions that for centuries bore Colston’s name as a badge of honour are finally being forced to confront that past and make amends.

    Bath, of course, was built no less on the profits of the slave trade. When visitors come to Bath simply to admire its grand Georgian architecture, its Royal Crescent, we assent – if only through ignorance – to the crimes that paid for all that splendour.

    Weeks after the Colston statue was toppled, Bristol made headlines again. Crowds protested efforts to transfer yet more powers to the police to curb our already savagely diminished right to protest – the most fundamental of all democratic rights. Bristol made more noise against that bill than possibly anywhere else in the UK.

    I ended up writing about both events from Nazareth.

    Blind to history

    Since my arrival, old and new friends alike have started to educate me about Bristol. Early on I attended a slavery tour in the city centre – one that connected those historic crimes with the current troubles faced by asylum seekers in Bristol, even as Bristol lays claim to the title of “city of sanctuary”.

    For once I was being guided rather than the guide, the pupil rather than the teacher – so long my role on those tours in and around Nazareth. And I could not but help notice, as we wandered through Bristol’s streets, echoes of my own tours.

    Over the years I have taken many hundreds of groups around the ruins of Saffuriya, one of the largest of the Palestinian villages destroyed by Israel in its ethnic cleansing campaign of 1948, the Nakba or Catastrophe.

    What disturbed me most in Saffuriya was how blind its new inhabitants were to the very recent history of the place they call home.

    New Jewish immigrants were moved on to the lands of Saffuriya weeks after the Israeli army destroyed the village and chased out the native Palestinian population at gunpoint. A new community built in its place was given a similar Hebrew name, Tzipori. These events were repeated across historic Palestine. Hundreds of villages were razed, and 80 per cent of the Palestinian population were expelled from what became the new state of Israel.

    Troubling clues

    Even today, evidence of the crimes committed in the name of these newcomers is visible everywhere. The hillsides are littered with the rubble of the hundreds of Palestinian homes that were levelled by the new Israeli army to stop their residents from returning. And there are neglected grave-stones all around – pointers to the community that was disappeared.

    And yet almost no one in Jewish Tzipori asks questions about the remnants of Palestinian Saffuriya, about these clues to a troubling past. Brainwashed by reassuring state narratives, they have averted their gaze for fear of what might become visible if they looked any closer.

    Tzipori’s residents never ask why there are only Jews like themselves allowed in their community, when half of the population in the surrounding area of the Galilee are Palestinian by heritage.

    Instead, the people of Tzipori misleadingly refer to their Palestinian neighbours – forced to live apart from them as second and third-class citizens of a self-declared Jewish state – as “Israeli Arabs”. The purpose is to obscure, both to themselves and the outside world, the connection of these so-called Arabs to the Palestinian people.

    To acknowledge the crimes Tzipori has inflicted on Saffuriya would also be to acknowledge a bigger story: of the crimes inflicted by Israel on the Palestinian people as a whole.

    Shroud of silence

    Most of us in Britain do something very similar.

    In young Israel, Jews still venerate the criminals of their recent past because they and their loved ones are so intimately and freshly implicated in the crimes.

    In Britain, with its much longer colonial past, the same result is often achieved not, as in Israel, through open cheerleading and glorification – though there is some of that too – but chiefly through a complicit silence. Colston surveyed his city from up on his plinth. He stood above us, superior, paternal, authoritative. His crimes did not need denying because they had been effectively shrouded in silence.

    Until Colston was toppled, slavery for most Britons was entirely absent from the narrative of Britain’s past – it was something to do with racist plantation owners in the United States’ Deep South more than a century ago. It was an issue we thought about only when Hollywood raised it.

    After the Colston statue came down, he became an exhibit – flat on his back – in Bristol’s harbourside museum, the M Shed. His black robes had been smeared with red paint, and scuffed and grazed from being dragged through the streets. He became a relic of the past, and one denied his grandeur. We were able to observe him variously with curiousity, contempt or amusement.

    Those are far better responses than reverence or silence. But they are not enough. Because Colston isn’t just a relic. He is a living, breathing reminder that we are still complicit in colonial crimes, even if now they are invariably better disguised.

    Nowadays, we usually interfere in the name of fiscal responsibility or humanitarianism, rather than the white man’s burden.

    We return to the countries we formerly colonised and asset-stripped, and drive them back into permanent debt slavery through western-controlled monetary agencies like the IMF.

    Or in the case of those that refuse to submit, we more often than not invade or subvert them – countries like Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Iran – tearing apart the colonial fabric we imposed on them, wrecking their societies in ways that invariably lead to mass death and the dispersion of the population.

    We have supplied the bombs and planes to Saudi Arabia that are killing untold numbers of civilians in Yemen. We funded and trained the Islamic extremists who terrorise and behead civilians in Syria. The list is too long for me to recount here.

    Right now, we see the consequences of the west’s neo-colonialism – and a predictable countervailing reaction, in the resurgence of a Russian nationalism that President Putin has harnessed to his own ends – in NATO’s relentless, decades-long expansion towards Russia’s borders.

    And of course, we are still deeply invested in the settler colonial project of Israel, and the crimes it systematically inflicts on the Palestinian people.

    Divine plan

    Through the 1917 Balfour Declaration, Britain gave licence for the creation of a militarised ethnic, Jewish state in the Middle East. Later, we helped supply it with atomic material in the full knowledge that Israel would build nuclear bombs. We gave Israel diplomatic cover so that it could evade its obligations under the international treaty to stop nuclear proliferation and become the only nuclear power in the region. We have had Israel’s back through more than five decades of occupation and illegal settlement building.

    And significantly, we have endlessly indulged Zionism as it has evolved from its sordid origins nearly two centuries ago, as an antisemitic movement among fundamentalist Christians. Those Christian Zonists – who at the time served as the power brokers in European governments like Britain’s – viewed Jews as mere instruments in a divine plan.

    According to this plan, Jews were to be denied the chance to properly integrate into the countries to which they assumed they belonged.

    Instead the Christian Zionists wanted to herd Jews into an imagined ancient, Biblical land of Israel, to speed up the arrival of the end times, when mankind would be judged and only good Christians would rise up to be with God.

    Until Hitler took this western antisemitism to another level, few Jews subscribed to the idea that they were doomed forever to be a people apart, that their fate was inextricably tied to a small piece of territory in a far-off region they had never visited, and that their political allies should be millenarian racists.

    But after the Holocaust, things changed. Christian Zionists looked like much kinder antisemites than the exterminationist Nazis. Christian Zionism won by default and was reborn as Jewish Zionism, claiming to be a national liberation movement rather than the dregs of a white European nationalism Hitler had intensified.

    Today, we are presented with polls showing that most British Jews subscribe to the ugly ideas of Zionism – ideas their great-great-grandparents abhorred. Jews who dissent, who believe that we are all the same, that we all share a common fate as humans not as tribes, are ignored or dismissed as self-haters. In an inversion of reality these humanist Jews, rather than Jewish Zionists, are seen as the pawns of the antisemites.

    Perverse ideology

    Zionism as a political movement is so pampered, so embedded within European and American political establishments that those Jews who rally behind this ethnic nationalism no longer consider their beliefs to be abnormal or abhorrent – as their views would have been judged by most Jews only a few generations ago.

    No, today Jewish Zionists think of their views as so self-evident, so vitally important to Jewish self-preservation that anyone who opposes them must be either a self-hating Jew or an antisemite.

    And because non-Jews so little understand their own culpability in fomenting this perverse ideology of Jewish Zionism, we join in the ritual defaming of those brave Jews who point out how far we have stepped through the looking glass.

    As a result, we unthinkingly give our backing to the Zionists as they weaponise antisemitism against those – Jews and non-Jews alike – who stand in solidarity with the native Palestinian people so long oppressed by western colonialism.

    Thoughtlessly, too many of us have drifted once again into a sympathy for the oppressor – this time, Zonism’s barely veiled anti-Palestinian racism.

    Nonetheless, our attitudes towards modern Israel, given British history, can be complex. On the one hand, there are good reasons to avert our gaze. Israel’s crimes today are an echo and reminder of our own crimes yesterday. Western governments subsidise Israel’s crimes through trade agreements, they provide the weapons for Israel to commit those crimes, and they profit from the new arms and cyber-weapons Israel has developed by testing them out on Palestinians. Like the now-defunct apartheid South Africa, Israel is a central ally in the west’s neo-colonialism.

    So, yes, Israel is tied to us by an umbilical cord. We are its parent. But at the same time it is also not exactly like us either – more a bastard progeny. And that difference, that distance can help us gain a little perspective on ourselves. It can make Israel a teaching aid. An eye-opener. A place that can bring clarity, elucidate not only what Israel is doing but what countries like Britain have done and are still doing to this day.

    Trade in bodies

    The difference between Britain and Israel is to be found in the distinction between a colonial and a settler-colonial state.

    Britain is a classic example of the former. It sent the entitled sons of its elite private schools, men like Colston, to parts of the globe rich in resources in order to steal those resources and bring the wealth back to the motherland to further enrich the establishment. That was the purpose of the tea and sugar plantations.

    But it was not just a trade in inanimate objects. Britain also traded in bodies – mostly black bodies. Labour and muscle were a resource as vital to the British empire as silk and saffron.

    The trafficking in goods and people lasted more than four centuries until liberation movements among the native populations began to throw off – at least partially – the yoke of British and European colonialism. The story since the Second World War has been one of Europe and the United States’ efforts to reinvent colonialism, conducting their rape and pillage at a distance, through the hands of others.

    This is the dissembling, modern brand of colonialism: a “humanitarian” neocolonialism we should by now be familiar with. Global corporations, monetary
    agencies like the IMF and the military alliance of NATO have each played a key role in the reinvention of colonialism – as has Israel.

    Elimination strategies

    Israel inherited Britain’s colonial tradition, and permanently adopted many of its emergency orders for use against the Palestinians. Like traditional colonialism, settler colonialism is determined to appropriate the resources of the natives. But it does so in an even more conspicuous, uncompromising way. It does not just exploit the natives. It seeks to replace or eliminate them. That way, they can never be in a position to liberate themselves and their homeland.

    There is nothing new about this approach. It was adopted by European colonists across much of the globe: in North America, Africa, Australia and New Zealand, as well as belatedly in the Middle East.

    There are advantages and disadvantages to the settler colonial strategy, as Israel illustrates only too clearly. In their struggle to replace the natives, Israel’s settlers had to craft a narrative – a rationalisation – that they were the victims rather than the victimisers. They were, of course, fleeing persecution in Europe, but only to become persecutors themselves outside Europe. They were supposedly in a battle for survival against those they came to replace, the Palestinians. The natives were cast as irredeemably, and irrationally, hostile. God was invoked, more or less explicitly.

    In the Zionist story, the ethnic cleansing of the native Palestinians – the Nakba – becomes a War of Independence, celebrated to this day. The Zionist colonisers thereby transformed themselves into another national liberation movement, like the ones in Africa that were fighting after the Second World War for independence. Israel claimed to be fighting oppressive British rule, as Africans were, rather than inheriting the colonisers’ mantle.

    But there is a disadvantage for settler colonial projects too, especially in an era of better communications. In a time of more democratic media, as we are currently enjoying – even if briefly – the colonisers’ elimination strategies are much harder to veil or airbrush. The ugliness is on show. The reality of the oppression is more visceral, more obviously offensive.

    Apartheid named

    The settlers’ elimination strategies are limited in number, and difficult to conceal whichever is adopted. In the United States, elimination took the form of genocide – the simplest and neatest of settler-colonialism’s solutions.

    In the post-war era of human rights, however, Israel was denied that route. It adopted settler colonialism’s fall-back position: mass expulsion, or ethnic cleansing. Some 750,000 Palestinians were driven from their homes and outside the new borders of Israel in 1948.

    But genocide and ethnic cleansing are invariably projects that cannot be completed. Some 90 per cent of Native Americans died from the violence and diseases brought by European incomers, but a small proportion survived. In South Africa, the white immigrants lacked the numbers and capacity either to eradicate the native population or to exploit such a vast territory.

    Israel managed to expel only 80 per cent of the Palestinians living inside its new borders before the international community called time. And then Israel sabotaged its initial success in 1948 by seizing yet more Palestinian territory – and more Palestinians – in 1967.

    When settler populations cannot eradicate the native population completely, they must impose harsh, visible segregation policies against those that remain.

    Resources and rights are differentiated on the basis of race or ethnicity. Such regimes institute apartheid – or as Israel calls its version “hafrada” – to maintain the privileges of their own, superior or chosen population.

    Colonial mentality

    Many decades on, human rights groups have finally named Israel’s apartheid. Amnesty International got round to it only this month – 74 years after the Nakba and 55 years after the occupation began.

    It has taken so long because even our understanding of human rights continues to be shaped by a European colonial mentality. Human rights groups have documented Israel’s mistreatment of Palestinians – the “what” of their oppression – but refused to understand the “why” of that oppression. These watchdogs did not truly listen to Palestinians. They listened to, they excused, Israel even as they were criticising it. They indulged its endless security rationales for its crimes against Palestinians.

    The reluctance to name Israeli apartheid derives in large part from a reluctance to face our part in its creation. To identify Israel’s apartheid is to recognise both our role in sustaining it, and Israel’s crucial place in the west’s reinvented neocolonialism.

    Being ‘offensive’

    The difficulty of facing up to what Israel is and what it represents is, of course, particularly stark for many Jews – not only in Israel but in countries like Britain. Through no choice of their own, Jews are more deeply implicated in Israel’s crimes because those crimes are carried out in the name of all Jews. As a result, for Zionist Jews, protecting the settler colonial project of Israel is identical to protecting their own sense of virtue.

    In the zero-sum imaginings of the Zionist movement, the stakes are too high to doubt or to equivocate. As Zionists, their duty is to support, dissemble and propagandise on Israel’s behalf at all costs.

    Nowadays Zionism has become such a normalised part of our western culture that those who call themselves Zionists are appalled at the idea anyone could dare to point out that their ideology is rooted in an ugly ethnic nationalism and in apartheid. Those who make them feel uncomfortable by highlighting the reality of Israel’s oppression of Palestinians – and their blindness to it – are accused of being “offensive”.

    That supposed offensiveness is now conflated with antisemitism, as the treatment of Ken Loach, the respected film-maker of this parish, attests. Disgust at Israel’s racism towards Palestinians is malevolently confused with racism towards Jews. The truth is inverted.

    This confusion has also become the basis for a new definition of antisemitism – one aggressively advanced by Israel and its apologists – designed to mislead casual onlookers. The more we, as anti-racists and opponents of colonialism, try to focus attention and opprobrium on Israel’s crimes, the more we are accused of covertly attacking Jews.

    Into the fire

    Arriving in the UK from Nazareth at this very moment is like stepping out of the frying pan and into the fire.

    Here the battle over Zionism – defining it, understanding it, confronting it, refusing to be silenced by it – is in full flood. The Labour party, under Jeremy Corbyn, was politically eviscerated by a redefined antisemitism. Now the party’s ranks are being purged by his successor, Sir Keir Starmer, on the same phony grounds.

    Professors are being threatened and losing their jobs, as happened to David Miller at Bristol university, with the goal of intensifying pressure on the academy to keep silent about Israel and its lobbyists. Exhibitions are taken down, speakers cancelled.

    And all the while, the current western obsession with redefining antisemitism – the latest cover story for apartheid Israel – moves us ever further from sensitivity to real racism, whether it be genuine prejudice against Jews or rampant Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian racism.

    The fight for justice for Palestinians resonates with so many of us precisely because it is not simply a struggle to help Palestinians. It is a fight to end colonialism in all its forms, to end our inhumanity towards those we live alongside, to remember that we are all equally human and all equally entitled to respect and dignity.

    The story of Palestine is a loud echo from our past. Maybe the loudest. If we cannot hear it, then we cannot learn – and we cannot take the first steps on the path towards real change.

    The post Palestine is a Loud Echo of Britain’s Colonial Past and a Warning of the Future first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Lies, Secret Recording And Parakeets: The Israel Lobby’s Dirty War Against Lowkey

    Hip hop artist, campaigner and host of the MintPress podcast “The Watchdog,” Lowkey is at the center of a storm of controversy that has reached as high as Prime Minister Boris Johnson himself. On Wednesday, the prime minister was asked about it in parliament and said that British universities have “for far too long been tolerant of casual or indeed systematic antisemitism,” adding that he “hope[s] that everybody understands the need for rapid, and indeed irreversible change,” before announcing that the United Kingdom needed a new antisemitism task force “devoted to rooting out” the problem at all levels of the education system – comments that suggest that the entire pro-Palestine student movement is under threat.

    The post Lies, Secret Recording And Parakeets: The Israel Lobby’s Dirty War Against Lowkey appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Fightback Against Israel Lobby’s Antisemitism Smear Of UK Academics

    Glasgow, Scotland – Hundreds of international scholars have begun a fightback against pro-Israel lobbyists who have been scoring increasingly high-profile victories on UK campuses as they seek to curb academic freedoms under the guise of stamping out antisemitism. 

    Glasgow university officials have found themselves in the eye of a storm this week, accused of “capitulating” in two separate cases that have undermined academic research into the activities of Israel and its supporters.

    More than 500 scholars from around the world, including a Nobel prize winner, Royal Society fellows, and former and current presidents of major academic bodies, signed a petition delivered to the university this week in protest. 

    The post Fightback Against Israel Lobby’s Antisemitism Smear Of UK Academics appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.