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Category: anti-Semitism

  • 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.

    The post Innocence of Mahmoud Abbas first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • 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.

    The post Zionism and the Dark Side of Germany first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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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.

    The post Where’s the outrage about antisemitism at pro-Israel rally?  first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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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.

    The post Liberal budget funds apologists for Israeli crimes first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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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.

  • Over 500 scholars launch fightback against Israel lobby

    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.

    They called it “extraordinary” that Glasgow had recently apologised and labeled as “hate speech” a peer-reviewed article on the Israel lobby in the university’s postgraduate magazine. The scholars warned that Glasgow’s actions could have “potentially very damaging” consequences for research on Israel.

    They pointed out that the university’s stance “implies that other groups, states and corporations can all be the subject of critical academic analysis, but commentary on pro-Israel advocacy must be limited”.

    Separately, the main body representing Middle East academics in Britain wrote to the Scottish university last week after its politics department took the unprecedented step of demanding the right to vet a talk on Israeli and Palestinian politics.

    The university had invited a Danish professor to speak about his latest book but then insisted on new conditions – apparently after caving in to pressure from a Jewish student body.

    Concerns have also been raised that the university appears to have intended to seek the Jewish students’ approval before agreeing to the talk going ahead.

    Antisemitism redefined

    Both incidents follow Glasgow’s adoption last November of a controversial new definition of antisemitism that has been aggressively promoted by pro-Israel lobbyists.

    Most UK universities have now adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition following threats from the rightwing government of Boris Johnson last year to inflict financial penalties on any that demurred.

    There were early warnings, including from the main author of the IHRA definition, that it would be weaponised and critical research on Israel curtailed. The IHRA’s definition turns the focus away from hatred or fear of Jews. Instead most of its 11 illustrative examples of antisemitism relate to Israel.

    The severe threat to academic freedom posed by pro-Israel lobbyists and the IHRA definition were highlighted earlier this month when an expert scholar on propaganda and Islamophobia, David Miller, was sacked by Bristol university.

    The lobby had accused him of antisemitic “harassment” after he highlighted its role as one of “five pillars” supporting the promotion of Islamophobia – or hatred towards Muslims, Arabs and Palestinians.

    Bristol university dismissed Miller, even though documents leaked last week showed that the senior lawyer it appointed to investigate the case found there was no misconduct by Miller and that there was “no basis for any disciplinary action”.

    Twists and turns

    Glasgow university has become a key battleground in the fight to protect academic freedom after its public twists and turns over an academic paper published in its peer-reviewed online journal, eSharp, in 2017.

    Jane Jackman, who was then a scholar at Exeter University, published the paper, titled Advocating Occupation, examining the evolution and role of Israel lobby groups in the UK, in the immediate wake of a 2017 documentary aired by Al-Jazeera on the lobby’s interference in British politics.

    Footage filmed by an undercover reporter showed an Israeli embassy official, Shai Masot, covertly colluding with Zionist groups to undermine senior UK politicians – especially the then head of the opposition Labour party, Jeremy Corbyn – who were seen as too critical of Israel’s oppression of Palestinians.

    To pre-empt a diplomatic incident, Israel hurriedly recalled Masot.

    The hundreds of scholars supporting Jackman’s research have described it as an “account of public relations, lobbying, advocacy and information management” in what “is a well-established area of academic study”.

    Nonetheless, in an observation that would become all too prescient for Jackman herself, she concluded in her paper that “critics of Israeli policy expose themselves to the possibility, indeed the probability, of being smeared as anti-Semites”.

    However, the university dismissed initial complaints against Jackman’s paper shortly after it was published.

    ‘Moot’ point

    But last December, a month after the university formally adopted the IHRA definition, a prominent pro-Israel blogger revived the pressure campaign. David Collier marshalled fellow activists to write to Sir Anton Muscatelli, Glasgow’s principal, complaining that Jackman’s paper was “laden with conspiracy, antisemitism and errors”.

    He accused Glasgow staff of demonstrating “heavy antisemitism” in clearing it for publication.

    Jackman’s paper, he claimed, was a “poison spreading through our universities. With malignant cells in place such as Exeter, [London’s] SOAS and Warwick – it acts as a cancer – with new academics, freshly dosed with antisemitic ideology, leaving the nests to spread the sickness elsewhere.”

    Paradoxically, Collier had been identified by Jackman as particularly adept at characterising critics of Israel as “haters” and antisemites. Collier, she had noted, was a favourite of the Israeli embassy. Officials there had invited him the previous year to help train more than 100 representatives from British pro-Israel groups on advocacy tactics to burnish Israel’s image.

    But this time, the university reversed course, apparently fearing that it might fall foul of the illustrative examples after it had signed up to the main IHRA definition.

    The journal’s editors subverted their own peer review processes – four years after the fact – and issued an apology in May in a lengthy online preface to the article.

    They claimed the paper failed to meet academic standards and caused “considerable offense”, concluding that it promoted “an unfounded antisemitic theory regarding the State of Israel and its activity in the United Kingdom”.

    In a response to inquiries from the Jewish Chronicle weekly newspaper, Glasgow university suggested that action had been taken against Jackman’s paper in accordance with the IHRA definition of antisemitism. It also implied that her research was an example of “hate speech”.

    The Chronicle was at the forefront of a years-long, evidence-free campaign to tar the British Labour party under its previous leader, Jeremy Corbyn, as beset by antisemitism. Corbyn was a well-known champion of Palestinian rights.

    Astonishingly, when Jackman demanded to know what “antisemitic theory” she had promoted, the university backed off. In an email sent to her last month and seen by MintPress, the university’s complaints resolution office called her paper “thought-provoking” and added that whether her argument could be “described as antisemitic is also a moot point”.

    According to the dictionary, “moot” means either “subject to debate, dispute or uncertainty”, or of “little or no practical relevance”.

    In other words, the university appears to have conceded that casually and without evidence it defamed the work of an academic, with potentially catastrophic consequences for her personal and professional life.

    Jackman told MintPress: “It’s not so much the personal offence these allegations caused me, bad as that was, it’s the chilling effect this will have on early career academics, and the consequent silencing of debate.”

    Ideological zeal

    Jackman’s case neatly illustrates the use to which the lobby has been able to put the IHRA definition, both as a way to stifle criticism of Israel and, more recently, as a way to cover its own tracks as it does so.

    There have been very obvious problems with many of the IHRA’s 11 examples.

    Two of them, in particular, have been regularly cited by the lobby. They claim it is antisemitic to describe Israel as “a racist endeavor” or require of it “behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation”.

    But even Israeli scholars have long defined Israel as a non-democracy, terming it instead an “ethnocracy”. They note that Israel mimics a democratic state while actually according rights and privileges to one ethnic group, Jews, that it denies to another, Palestinians.

    And the New York-based Human Rights Watch and B’Tselem, Israel’s most respected human rights organisation, have both recently issued reports characterising Israel as an apartheid state.

    Nonetheless, Israel’s lobbyists have doubled down on another IHRA example, which suggests it may in certain contexts be antisemitic to accuse “Jewish citizens of being more loyal to Israel, or to the alleged priorities of Jews worldwide, than to the interests of their own nations”.

    Indeed it would be antisemitic if such an accusation were made collectively about Jews or solely because activists were Jewish.

    As Jackman and others have pointed out, many non-Jews are also Zionists and actively lobby to shield Israel from criticism.

    But ardent pro-Israel activists appear to have found in this IHRA example the perfect cover for concealing their own activism on behalf of Israel – activism that is determined not by their Jewishness but by their ideological zeal in promoting Israel and Zionism as political causes.

    Apartheid Week

    Jewish activists in the Israel lobby, in particular, are not shy to say that Israel is at the core of their identity – and that they view a self-declared Jewish state as a vital safe haven for them in the face of a supposedly rising tide of antisemitism on the left. Tangible antisemitism on the right, which is much less critical of Israel, appears to be of much less concern.

    These activists also belong to groups that declare themselves committed to lobbying for Israel.

    In her paper, Jackman documents parts of the network of pro-Israel groups in the UK that advertise their commitment to Israel and their collaboration with it in organising advocacy, such as the British Israel Communications and Research Centre (Bicom).

    And she sets out Israel’s own efforts to mobilise these groups to better serve its interests, such as against the international boycott (BDS) movement. At major Israeli establishment forums, such as the annual Herzliya Conference on Israel’s security priorities, discussions centre on ways to recruit Jewish and Christian supporters abroad to “win the battle of the narrative”.

    Jackman further highlights that Bicom has established a satellite organization, We Believe in Israel, “with the explicit purpose of mobilizing and resourcing an army of loyalists to challenge detractors, promote Israel and defend its actions”.

    Its director, Luke Akehurst, is also a senior figure in Labour First, a right-wing section of the Labour party that worked to undermine Corbyn for supposedly indulging antisemitism in the party.

    We Believe has subsequently made private a Youtube video in which, according to Jackman, Akehurst says many thousands of supporters, nearly half of them non-Jews, have been recruited to serve as “allies in the battle for Israel’s reputation”.

    Replicating the situation in the US, Jackman notes, British Christian fundamentalists – who view Israel as part of divine prophecy to bring nearer a supposed end times – have become a particularly vocal part of the lobby.

    ‘Hate crimes’

    Well before universities had adopted the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism focusing on Israel, campuses were being targeted by the lobby, as Jackman’s article notes, in a bid to silence activism there in support of Palestinian rights.

    A popular public figure, comedienne Maureen Lipman, became the face of claims that British universities were failing in a duty of care to Jewish students by allowing other students to mark Israel Apartheid Week.

    The argument glossed over the question of what duty of care the universities owed to Palestinian and Muslim students who wished to draw attention to Israeli policies that oppress Palestinians.

    Friends of Israel groups picked up Lipman’s theme in letter-writing campaigns to universities, calling Israel Apartheid Week “hate crimes” and evidence of antisemitism.

    As a result, a number of universities hurriedly closed down Palestinian solidarity activism, including the University of Central Lancashire, Exeter, and Central London.

    Immune to criticism

    And yet, despite all these highly visible pressure campaigns to stop criticism of Israel, the lobby groups behind them have decried as antisemitism any effort, such as Jackman’s, to analyse or record how such lobbying works in practice.

    With the assistance of the IHRA definition, they are not only making it even harder to criticise Israel but also ever harder to criticise themselves for making it so difficult to criticise Israel.

    As occurred in the Labour party under Corbyn, any attempt to analyse how antisemitism is being weaponised by the lobby is itself ascribed to antisemitism. The lobby has thereby made itself immune to all criticism.

    As Jackman noted in her paper, the lobby used precisely these tactics to avert the normal fallout from the revelations of Israeli interference in UK politics made by the Al-Jazeera documentary. That, she pointed out, would have been unavoidable “had Russia, Iran or indeed any other state been caught behaving in a like manner”.

    In backing Collier’s description of Jackman’s paper as “hate speech”, Glasgow University has sent a chilling message to academics: examine Israel and its lobbyists at your peril.

    In response, the petition – signed so far by more than 500 academics from 28 countries – was sent to Prof Muscatelli and made public on Monday. One of the organisers, Noam Chomsky, the world-renowned linguist, stated: “The capitulation by the University of Glasgow is a serious blow to academic freedom that should not be allowed to stand.”

    The signatories warn:

    Others [states, corporations or groups] may be described as organising, planning or seeking influence, and even disseminating propaganda or misleading accounts. But it is falsely asserted that description of such behaviour by Israel or its advocates cannot be neutral observation or analysis; a racist meaning and intent is imputed and assumed without evidence.

    The petition organisers also point out that “it is unusual for a case to attract so much international attention from academics across such a wide range of disciplines.”

    They include a Nobel laureate, George Smith, two fellows of the Royal Society – physicist Malcolm Levitt and the mathematician David Epstein – and the acclaimed historian Sheila Rowbotham.

    Two former presidents of the British Sociological Association, and the current president of the International Sociological Association, have also signed, as well as the president of the Latin American Studies Association. There are 20 signatories from major universities in Israel, as well as Salman Abu Sitta, President of the Palestine Land Society.

    The petition notes that making false claims of antisemitism “weakens the struggle against actual racism”.

    Self-censorship

    Where this is likely to lead is highlighted by another incident at Glasgow that has similarly disturbed leading academics.

    Last week, the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies (Brismes) wrote to Glasgow university expressing concern that its politics department had sought to vet a talk by Somdeep Sen, a professor at Roskilde University in Denmark. The department had invited Sen to speak on his new book, Decolonising Palestine, published by Cornell University Press.

    Brismes is the largest national academic association in Europe focused on the study of the Middle East and North Africa.

    According to the letter, Sen was contacted by the department to say it had received “a message of concern from the University’s Jewish Society” about his forthcoming talk and that he would need to “provide information” on the main points and any slides he intended to use.

    According to Brismes, it was also intimated that the information would be shared with the Jewish Society to assess whether it would have “negative repercussions” for Jewish students.

    The letter – sent by Brismes’s president, Baroness Afshar – warned that Glasgow’s treatment of Sen was illustrative of “the pernicious effect of the IHRA definition of antisemitism” and “its conflation of criticisms of Israel and Zionism with antisemitism”.

    Additionally citing the university’s apology over Jackman’s paper, Brismes warned that Glasgow’s decisions were having “a chilling effect when it comes to public debate and research on Israeli government policies, pro-Israel advocacy and Palestinian groups” and would lead to “self-censorship on the part of individual scholars and students”.

    A spokesman for the university told MintPress that Glasgow had “not prohibited any academic from speaking at the University… nor do we intend to prevent Dr Sen from doing so”.

    He added that the university was separately “considering [the petition] fully” and would “respond to the signatories in due course”.

    #MeToo moment

    Self-censorship by academics appears to be very much the goal of the lobby. The Community Security Trust – yet another pro-Israel lobby group –published a report into what it claimed was “widespread antisemitism at British universities” last December – just as Collier and the Jewish Chronicle began their campaign to pressure Glasgow university to disown Jackman’s scholarship.

    The Trust was also central to the pressure campaign to get Bristol university to sack David Miller, a sociologist and expert on Islamophobia. Leaked documents revealed by Electronic Intifada last week show not only that Bristol university’s investigation concluded that there was no misconduct from Miller but that its findings suggest that the Community Security Trust and two unnamed Jewish students colluded to smear Miller.

    The pair described Jewish students as “terrified” of Miller, but the investigation showed neither had attended his classes and they had not spoken to students who had.

    The only complaint about his teaching related to an optional essay question set by Miller on lobbying that made no mention of Israel, Zionism or Jews. One of the two students, however, claimed that answers to it might lead to “antisemitic tropes”.

    Nonetheless, despite the findings of its own investigation, Bristol dismissed Miller – apparently to avoid the increasingly loud noise the lobby had whipped up over the case, including a letter harshly criticising the university for “inaction” from more than 100 British parliamentarians.

    The Community Security Trust’s report highlights as an example of “widespread antisemitism” at British universities an incident in which a lecturer at Warwick university made a complaint against a Jewish student who accused her of making an antisemitic comment.

    Exploiting the #MeToo moment, both the Trust and the Union of Jewish Students have pushed for Jewish students “to be believed” – whatever allegations they make.

    James Harris, until recently the president of the Union of Jewish students, observed at the time of the Trust’s survey:

    It is evident that certain universities have woefully disregarded their duty of care to Jewish students. … When antisemitism does arise, Jewish students rightly expect that it will be taken seriously and dealt with effectively.

    Lord Mann, the government’s antisemitism czar, stated of the Trust’s report:

    All students should have the right to be who they want to be on campus. That is as true for Jewish students as anyone else. Those rights must not be dictated by fellow students, academic staff, students’ union officials.

    But, of course, Jewish students and organisations that want criticism of Israel off-limits, or their own pro-Israel activism immune from scrutiny, are denying “the right to be who they want to be on campus” to many Arab, Muslim, Palestinian and left wing students.

    The question, raised by the petition and letter of complaint, is whether universities like Glasgow will continue to submit to such attacks on academic life under the cover of false or evidence-free claims of antisemitism.

    The signs so far are not promising.

    • First published in Mint Press

    The post Over 500 scholars launch fightback against Israel lobby first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Academic David Miller Speaks Out Following Firing & Israel Lobby Smear Campaign

    Today, Lowkey speaks to one of the latest victims of that smear campaign, Professor David Miller. A prominent critic of the state of Israel’s policies, Miller was recently sacked from his position as Professor of Sociology at the University of Bristol, after a pressure campaign involving Zionist student groups and even members of parliament, who accused him of “inciting hatred against Jewish students.”

    The post Academic David Miller Speaks Out Following Firing & Israel Lobby Smear Campaign appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Jewish Chronicle’s libel payouts were a small price to pay for smearing Corbyn and the left

    The Jewish Chronicle, a weekly newspaper that was saved from liquidation last year by a consortium led by a former senior adviser to Theresa May, has been exposed as having a quite astonishing record of journalistic failings.

    Over the past three years, the Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO), the misnamed and feeble “press regulator” created by the billionaire-owned corporate media, has found the paper to have breached its code of practice on at least 28 occasions. The weekly has also lost, or been forced to settle, at least four libel cases over the same period.

    According to Brian Cathcart, a professor of journalism at Kingston University in London, that means one in every four or five editions of the Chronicle has broken either the law or the IPSO code. He describes that, rather generously, as a “collapse of journalistic standards” at the paper.

    IPSO, led by Lord Edward Faulks, a former Conservative minister, has repeatedly failed to launch any kind of formal investigation into this long-term pattern of rule and law-breaking by the Jewish Chronicle. He has also dragged his feet in responding to calls from a group of nine individuals maligned by the paper that IPSO urgently needs to carry out an inquiry into the paper’s editorial standards.

    Consequently, IPSO has left itself in no position to take action against the paper, even assuming it wished to. The “press regulator” has not fined the Chronicle – one of its powers – or imposed any other kind of sanction. It has not insisted on special training to end the Chronicle’s systematic editorial failings. And the paper’s editor, Stephen Pollard, has remained in place.

    And here one needs to ask why.

    Holding the line

    Cathcart’s main explanation is that IPSO, as the creature of the billionaire press, is there to “handle” complaints – in the sense of making them go away – rather than seriously hold the media to account or punish its transgressions.

    IPSO has never fined or sanctioned any of its member publications since it was created seven years ago by the owners of the corporate media to avoid the establishment of a proper regulatory body in the wake of the Levenson public inquiry into media abuses such as the phone hacking scandal.

    The bar for launching an investigation by IPSO was intentionally set so high – failings must be shown to be “serious and systematic” – that the “press regulator” and its corporate media backers assumed they would plausibly be able to argue that no paper ever reached it.

    The Chronicle has put even this sham form of regulation to the severest test.

    Cathcart argues that IPSO’s job has been to hold the line. If it tackled the Jewish Chronicle for its serial deceptions and character assassinations, it would risk paving the way to similar sanctions being imposed on Rupert Murdoch’s titles.

    Attack dog

    But there is an additional reason why IPSO is so loath to crack down on the Chronicle’s systematic editorial failings. And that is because, from the point of view of the British establishment, those failings were necessary and encouraged.

    It is important to highlight the context for the Chronicle’s egregious transgressions of the editors’ code of practice and libel laws. Those fabrications and deceptions were needed because they lay at the heart of the establishment’s campaign to be rid of former Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn.

    The Jewish Chronicle served as the chief attack dog on Corbyn and the Labour left, in service of an establishment represented by the Conservative party and the long-dominant right wing of the Labour party.

    Whereas the rest of the corporate media tried to discredit Corbyn and the Labour left with a range of early, lamentable claims – that he was scruffy, unpatriotic, sexist, a national security threat, a former Soviet spy – the Jewish Chronicle’s task was more complicated but far more effective.

    The paper’s role was to breathe life into the claim that Corbyn and his supporters were anti-semites, and the paper managed it by maliciously conflating antisemitism and the left’s criticisms of Israel as a racist, apartheid state that oppresses Palestinians.

    Confess or you’re guilty

    The Chronicle’s job was to initiate the antisemitism libels and lies against Corbyn and his followers that served to feed and rationalise the fears of prominent sections of the Jewish community. Those fears could then be cited by the rest of the corporate media as evidence that Labour was riding roughshod over the Jewish community’s “sensitivities”. And in turn the Labour left’s supposed indifference to Jewish sensitivities could be attributed to its rampant antisemitism.

    It culminated in the McCarthyite claim – now being enforced by Corbyn’s successor as Labour leader, Keir Starmer – that to deny Labour has some especial antisemitism problem, separate from that found more generally in British society, is itself proof of antisemitism. Once accused of antisemitism, as the Labour left endlessly is, one is guilty by definition – the choice is either to confess to antisemitism or be proven an antisemite by denying the accusation.

    Like a victim caught in quicksand, the more vigorously the Labour left has rejected claims that the party is riddled with antisemitism the more it has sunk into the mire created by the Jewish Chronicle and others.

    It is therefore hardly surprising that so many victims of the Chronicle’s libels and code violations are Corbyn supporters targeted in the antisemitism witch-hunt. Without these deceptions, the antisemitism claims against the Labour party would have looked even more preposterous than they did to anyone familiar with the evidence.

    False accusations

    For those interested, here are those four recent libel cases that went against the Chronicle:

    September 2019: “The Jewish Chronicle has paid out £50,000 in libel damages to a UK charity [Interpal] that provides aid to Palestinians after wrongly linking it to terrorism.”

    February 2020: “The libel settlement comes after a UK press regulator in December ruled that the paper’s four articles about [Labour activist Audrey] White had been ‘significantly misleading’ and that the paper had engaged in ‘unacceptable’ obstruction of their investigation.”

    October 2020: “Nada al Sanjari, a school teacher and Labour councillor, was the subject of a number of articles published by the newspaper in 2019 that claimed she was one of several Momentum activists responsible for inviting another activist who the Jewish Chronicle characterised as anti-Semitic to a Labour Party event.”

    July 2021: “The publication falsely accused [Marc] Wadsworth, in an article on its website in March, of being part of a group of current and ex-Labour members targeting Jewish activists in the party.”

    It is not hard to spot the theme of all these smears, and many others, which suggest that those in solidarity with Palestinians under Israeli oppression, including Jews, are antisemites or guilty of supporting terrorism.

    Saved from liquidation

    Remember, the 28 IPSO code violations – media euphemism for fabrications and deceptions – are only the tip of the iceberg. It is almost certain that many of those maligned by the Chronicle did not have the time, energy or resources to pursue the weekly paper either through the pointless IPSO “regulation” process or through extremely costly law courts.

    And remember too that IPSO found against the Chronicle for breaching its code at least 28 times, even though that code was designed to give IPSO’s member publications every possible benefit of the doubt. IPSO has no incentive to highlight its members’ failings, especially when it was set up to provide the government with a pretext for not creating a truly independent regulatory body.

    The reality is that the 180-year-old Jewish Chronicle, or JC as it has remodelled itself, would have gone out of business some time ago had it not been twice saved from liquidation by powerful, establishment figures.

    It avoided closure in 2019 after it was bailed out by “community-minded individuals, families and charitable trusts” following massive losses. The identities of those donors were not disclosed.

    At the time Stephen Pollard highlighted his paper’s crucial role: “There’s certainly been a huge need for the journalism that the JC does in especially looking at the anti-Semitism in the Labour party and elsewhere.”

    Consortium of investors

    Then only a year later the Chronicle had to be rescued again, this time by a shadowy consortium of investors who promised to pump in millions to keep the paper afloat and reimburse those who had donated the previous year.

    Why these financiers appear so committed to a paper with proven systematic editorial failings, and which continues to be headed by the same editor who has overseen those serious failings for years, was underscored at the time by Alan Jacobs, the paper’s departing chairman.

    He observed that the donors who bailed out the paper in 2019 “can be proud that their combined generosity allowed the JC to survive long enough to help to see off Jeremy Corbyn and friends, one of the greatest threats to face British Jewry in the JC’s existence.”

    Corbyn had lost the general election to a Conservative party led by Boris Johnson later that same year.

    The public face of last year’s consortium was Sir Robbie Gibb, a former BBC executive and a longtime ally of figures on the Conservative right. He served as Theresa May’s spin doctor when she was prime minister. He was also an early adviser to GB News, a recent attempt to replicate the overtly right wing Fox News channel in the UK.

    Other visible consortium members are associated with the antisemitism campaign against Corbyn. They include former right wing Labour MP John Woodcock, who cited antisemitism as his reason for quitting the party after it had begun investigating him for sending inappropriate messages to a female staff member.

    Another is Jonathan Sacerdoti, a regular “analyst” on the BBC, ITV and Ch4 who previously served as a spokesperson for the Campaign Against Antisemitism, a lobby group set up back in 2014 specifically to discredit critics of Israel as antisemites.

    And then there is John Ware, a former Sun journalist turned BBC reporter who fronted probably the single most damaging programme on Corbyn. An hour-long Panorama “special” accusing Labour of antisemitism was deeply flawed, misleading and failed to acknowledge that several unnamed figures it interviewed were also pro-Israel lobbyists.

    It would probably be unwise for me to say more about Ware or his publicly stated views on Muslims, shared by the Jewish Chronicle, because he has recently become litigious. He apparently has deep pockets, helping to fund both the rescue of the Chronicle and law suits against critics.

    Exceptional indulgence

    But the exceptional indulgence of the Jewish Chronicle, both by IPSO and prominent figures in broadcasting, and the paper’s continuing credibility as a source of news for the wider corporate media, indicates how the antisemitism narrative about Labour served, and continues to serve, the British establishment.

    Represented politically by the Conservative party and the Labour right, that establishment was able to reassert its cosy parliamentary duopoly by ousting any meaningful challenge from the Labour left. With Corbyn gone, the threat of real politics has disappeared. We are back to one-party, corporate rule under the guise of two parties.

    Which is why IPSO cannot take any meaningful action against the Jewish Chronicle. To do so would pull the rug from under the antisemitism narrative that destroyed Corbyn and is now being used by his successor, Starmer, to purge Labour of the remnants of the left and to distance the party as far as possible from any lingering signs of Palestinian solidarity.

    Exposure of the Jewish Chronicle as an editorial wrecking ball aimed at the left would show just how much the paper and the antisemitism narrative it bolstered were key to the Conservative party’s successful smearing of Corbyn that helped to keep him out of Number 10. It would highlight the enduring collusion between the corporate media and the political elite.

    And it would indicate that corporate media is not really an exercise in capitalist, free-market economics, where profitable outlets drive out those that are unpopular. Rather loss-making corporate media such as the Jewish Chronicle are a price the establishment is only too happy to bear as long as those publications fulfil a more important purpose: ensuring that the political and economic climate remains favourable to the ruling class.

    The Jewish Chronicle has played its part in destroying Corbyn and the left. Now it will continue that role by policing the public discourse and ensuring that no one like Corbyn ever gets near power again. Those libel payouts were a small price to pay.

    The post Jewish Chronicle’s libel payouts were a small price to pay for smearing Corbyn and the left first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Jonathan Cook.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Jewish groups that aid Israel’s war crimes can’t deny all responsibility for those crimes

    Here is something that can be said with great confidence. It is racist – antisemitic, if you prefer – to hold Jews, individually or collectively, accountable for Israel’s crimes. Jews are not responsible for Israel’s war crimes, even if the Israeli state presumes to implicate Jews in its crimes by falsely declaring it represents all Jews in the world.

    Very obviously, it is not the fault of Jews that Israel commits war crimes, or that Israel uses Jews collectively as a political shield, exploiting sensitivities about the historical suffering of Jews at the hands of non-Jews to immunise itself from international opprobrium.

    But here is something that can be said with equal certainty. Israel’s apologists – whether Jews or non-Jews – cannot deny all responsibility for Israel’s war crimes when they actively aid and abet Israel in committing those crimes, or when they seek to demonise and silence Israel’s critics so that those war crimes can be pursued in a more favourable political climate.

    Such apologists – which sadly seems to include many of the community organisations in Britain claiming to represent Jews – want to have their cake and eat it.

    They cannot defend Israel uncritically as it commits war crimes or seek legislative changes to assist Israel in committing those war crimes – whether it be Israel’s latest pummelling of civilians in Gaza, or its executions of unarmed Palestinians protesting 15 years of Israel’s blockade of the coastal enclave – and accuse anyone who criticises them for doing so of being an antisemite.

    But this is exactly what has been going on. And it is only getting worse.

    Upsurge in antisemitism?

    As a ceasefire was implemented yesterday, bringing a temporary let-up in the bombing of Gaza by Israel, pro-Israel Jewish groups in the UK were once again warning of an upsurge of antisemitism they related to a rapid growth in the number of protests against Israel.

    These groups have the usual powerful allies echoing their claims. British prime minister Boris Johnson met community leaders in Downing Street on Thursday pledging, as Jewish News reported, “to continue to support the community in the face of rising antisemitism attacks”.

    Those Jewish leaders included Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis, a supporter of Johnson who played a part in helping him win the 2019 election by renewing the evidence-free antisemitism smears against the Labour party days before voting. It also included the Campaign Against Antisemitism, which was founded specifically to whitewash Israel’s crimes during its 2014 bombardment of Gaza and has ever since been vilifying all Palestinian solidarity activism as antisemitism.

    In attendance too was the Jewish Leadership Council, an umbrella organisation for Britain’s main Jewish community groups. In an article in Israel’s Haaretz newspaper on this supposed rise in antisemitism in the UK, the JLC’s vice-president, Daniel Korski, set out the ridiculous, self-serving narrative these community groups are trying to peddle, with seemingly ever greater success among the political and media elite.

    Popular outrage over Gaza

    Korski expressed grave concern about the proliferation of demonstrations in the UK designed to halt Israel’s bombardment of Gaza. During 11 days of attacks, more than 230 Palestinians were killed, including 65 children. Israel’s precision air strikes targeted more than a dozen hospitals, including the only Covid clinic in Gaza, dozens of schools, several media centres, and left tens of thousands of Palestinians homeless.

    The sense of popular outrage at the Israeli onslaught was only heightened by the fact that Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, had clearly engineered a confrontation with Hamas at the outset to serve his immediate personal interests: preventing Israeli opposition parties from uniting to oust him from power.

    In his naked personal calculations, Palestinian civilians were sacrificed to help Netanyahu hold on to power and improve his chances of evading jail as he stands trial on corruption charges.

    But for Korski and the other community leaders attending the meeting with Johnson, the passionate demonstrations in solidarity with Palestinians are their main evidence for a rise in antisemitism.

    ‘Free Palestine’ chants

    These community organisations cite a few incidents that undoubtedly qualify as antisemitism – some serious, some less so. They include shouting “Free Palestine” at individuals because they are identifiable as Jews, something presumably happening mostly to the religious ultra-Orthodox.

    But these Jewish leaders’ chief concern, they make clear, is the growing public support for Palestinians in the face of intensifying Israeli aggression.

    Quoting David Rich, of the Community Security Trust, another Jewish organisation hosted by Johnson, the Haaretz newspaper reports that “what has really shaken the Jewish community … ‘is that demos are being held all over the country every day about this issue’ [Israel’s bombardment of Gaza].”

    Revealingly, it seems that when Jewish community leaders watch TV screens showing demonstrators chant “Free Palestine”, they feel it as a personal attack – as though they themselves are being accosted in the street.

    One doesn’t need to be a Freudian analyst to wonder whether this reveals something troubling about their inner emotional life: they identify so completely with Israel that even when someone calls for Palestinians to have equal rights with Israelis they perceive as a collective attack on Jews, as antisemitism.

    Exception for Israel

    Then Korski gets to the crux of the argument: “As Jews we are proud of our heritage and at the same time in no way responsible for the actions of a government thousands of miles away, no matter our feelings or connection to it.”

    But the logic of that position is simply untenable. You cannot tie your identity intimately to a state that systematically commits war crimes, you cannot classify demonstrations against those war crimes as antisemitism, you cannot use your position as a “Jewish community leader” to make such allegations more credible, and you cannot exploit your influence with world leaders to try to silence protests against Israel and then say you are “in no way responsible” for the actions of that government.

    If you use your position to prevent Israel from being subjected to scrutiny over allegations of war crimes, if you seek to manipulate the public discourse with claims of antisemitism to create a more favourable environment in which those war crimes can be committed, then some of the blame for those war crimes rubs off on you.

    That is how responsibility works in every other sphere of life. What Israel’s apologists are demanding is an exception for Israel and for themselves.

    Lobby with the UK’s ear

    In another revealing observation seeking to justify claims of an upsurge in antisemitism, Korski adds: “We don’t see the same kind of outpouring of emotion when it comes to the Rohingya or the Uighurs or Syria, and it makes a lot of Jews feel this is about them [as Jews].”

    But there are many reasons why there aren’t equally large demonstrations in the UK against the suffering of the Rohingya and the Uighurs – reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with antisemitism.

    The oppressors of the Rohingya and the Uighurs, unlike Israel, are not being generously armed by the British government or given diplomatic cover by Britain or being given preferential trade agreements by Britain.

    But equally importantly, the states oppressing the Rohingya and Uighurs – unlike Israel – don’t have active, well-funded lobbies in the UK, with the ear of the prime minister. China and Myanmar – unlike Israel – don’t have UK lobbies successfully labelling criticism of them as racism. Unlike Israel, they don’t have lobbies that openly seek to influence elections to protect them from criticism. Unlike Israel, they don’t have lobbies that work with Britain to introduce measures to assist them in carrying out their oppression.

    The president of the Board of Deputies, Marie van der Zyl, for example, pressed Johnson at the meeting this week to classify all branches of Hamas, not just its military wing, as a terrorist organisation. That is Israel’s wet dream. Such a decision would make it even less likely that Britain would be in a position to officially distance itself from Israel’s war crimes in Gaza, where Hamas runs the government, and even more likely it would join Israel in declaring Gaza’s schools, hospitals and government departments all legitimate targets for Israeli air strikes.

    Pure projection

    If you are lobbying to get special favours for Israel, particularly favours to help it commit war crimes, you don’t also get to wash your hands of those war crimes. You are directly implicated in them.

    David Hirsch, an academic at the University of London who has been closely connected to efforts to weaponise antisemitism against critics of Israel, especially in the Labour party under its previous leader Jeremy Corbyn, also tries to play this trick.

    He tells Haaretz that antisemitism is supposedly “getting worse” because Palestinian solidarity activists have been giving up on a two-state solution. “There used to be a struggle in Palestine solidarity between a politics of peace – two states living side by side – and a politics of denouncing one side as essentially evil and hoping for its total defeat.”

    But what Hirsch is doing is pure projection: he is suggesting Palestinian solidarity activists are “antisemites” – his idea of evil – because they have been forced by Israel to abandon their long-favoured cause of a two-state solution. That is only because successive Israeli governments have refused to negotiate any kind of peace deal with the most moderate Palestinian leadership imaginable under Mahmoud Abbas – one that has eagerly telegraphed its desire to collaborate with Israel, even calling “security coordination” with the Israeli army “sacred”.

    A two-state solution is dead because Israel made it dead not because Palestinian solidarity activists are more extreme or more antisemitic.

    In calling to “Free Palestine”, activists are not demanding Israel’s “total defeat” – unless Hirsch and Jewish community organisations themselves believe that Palestinians can never be free from Israeli oppression and occupation until Israel suffers such a “total defeat”. Hirsch’s claim tells us nothing about Palestinian solidarity activists, but it does tell us a lot about what is really motivating these Jewish community organisations.

    It is these pro-Israel lobbyists, it seems, more than Palestinian solidarity activists, who cannot imagine Palestinians living in dignity under Israeli rule. Is that because they understand only too well what Israel and its political ideology of Zionism truly represent, and that what is required of Palestinians for “peace” is absolute and permanent submission?

    Better informed

    Similarly, Rich, of the Community Security Trust, says of Palestinian solidarity activists: “Even the moderates have become extremists.” What does this extremism – again presented by Jewish groups as antisemitism – consist of? “Now the movement [in solidarity with Palestinians] is dominated by the view that Israel is an apartheid, genocidal, settler-colonialist state.”

    Or in other words, these pro-Israel Jewish groups claim there has been a surge in antisemitism because Palestinian solidarity activists are being influenced and educated by human rights organisations, like Human Rights Watch and Israel’s B’Tselem. Both recently wrote reports classifying Israel as an apartheid state, in the occupied territories and inside Israel’s recognised borders. Activists are not becoming more extreme, they are becoming better informed.

    And in making the case for a supposed surge in antisemitism, Rich offers another inadvertently revealing insight. He says Jewish children are suffering from online “abuse” – antisemitism – because they find it increasingly hard to participate on social media.

    “Teenagers are much quicker to join social movements; we’ve just had Black Lives Matter, Extinction Rebellion, #MeToo – now Jewish kids find all their friends are joining this [Palestinian solidarity] movement where they don’t feel welcome or they are singled out because they’re Jewish.”

    Fancifully, Rich is arguing that Jewish children raised in Zionist families and communities that have taught them either explicitly or implicitly that Jews in Israel have superior rights to Palestinians are being discriminated against because their unexamined ideas of Jewish supremacy do not fit with a pro-Palestinian movement predicated on equality.

    This is as preposterous as it would have been, during the Jim Crow era, for white supremacist Americans to have complained of racism because their children were being made to feel out of place in civil rights forums.

    Such assertions would be laughable were they not so dangerous.

    Demonised as antisemites

    Zionist supporters of Israel are trying to turn logic and the world upside down. They are inverting reality. They are projecting their own racist, zero-sum assumptions about Israel on to Palestinian solidarity activists, those who support equal rights for Jews and Palestinians in the Middle East.

    As they did with the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition, these Jewish groups are twisting the meaning of antisemitism, skewing it from a fear or hatred of Jews to any criticism of Israel that makes pro-Israel Jews feel uncomfortable.

    As we watch these arguments being amplified uncritically by leading politicians and journalists, remember too that it was the only major politician to demurred from this nonsensical narrative, Jeremy Corbyn, who became the main target – and victim – of these antisemitism smears.

    Now these pro-Israel Jewish groups want to treat us all like Corbyn, demonising us as antisemites unless we fall silent even as Israel once again brutalises Palestinians.

    The post Jewish groups that aid Israel’s war crimes can’t deny all responsibility for those crimes first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Massachusetts House Rejects Distorted Definition Of Antisemitism

    Cambridge, MA – The Massachusetts House of Representatives on Wednesday rejected an amendment to the state budget which would have Massachusetts adopt the IHRA definition of antisemitism, a definition that equates criticism of Israel with antisemitism, within its law on religious discrimination

    The problem amendment, called “Condemnation of Antisemitism and Adoption of IHRA Definition”, was submitted by Rep. Howitt (R. Seekonk) as amendment #300 to the state budget bill, H.4000.

    With only two days to respond before the amendment was considered, Jewish Voice for Peace- Boston, Massachusetts Peace Action, the Alliance for Water Justice in Palestine, and the Unitarian-Universalists for Justice in the Middle East mobilized quickly and contacted representatives and Palestinian rights supporters. 

    The post Massachusetts House Rejects Distorted Definition Of Antisemitism appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Labour disclosure “shows antisemitism was weaponised against Corbyn”, activists say

    Former leader’s disciplinary code, which was criticised by pro-Israel groups, is still being used under Starmer, party officials admit after court hearing

    A group of Labour activists fighting through the courts to discover why they and others were investigated or expelled from the UK’s Labour Party for antisemitism say they have flushed out proof of bad faith from their accusers.

    The group, who call themselves Labour Activists for Justice (LA4J), say the new disclosure confirms their claim that leading Jewish organisations intentionally politicised the meaning of antisemitism to entrap left-wing critics of Israel and undermine Labour’s former leader, Jeremy Corbyn.

    As a result, the number of cases of antisemitism in Labour was inflated, falsely feeding the public impression that the political party under Corbyn had attracted Jew haters, say the Labour activists.

    The suggestion that groups like the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the Jewish Labour Movement “weaponised” antisemitism against Corbyn is currently seen as grounds by Labour to suspend or expel members.

    But according to LA4J, evidence revealed in their legal case has now vindicated that claim.

    The activists note that Jewish groups that waged a campaign of attacks on Corbyn over an antisemitism code of conduct drafted by the party in 2018 are now “deafeningly silent” on discovering that Keir Starmer, Labour’s new leader, has been secretly using exactly the same code.

    When it was first published, the Board of Deputies and other Jewish organisations erupted in outrage, alleging that the 16-point code was proof of “institutional antisemitism” in the Labour party – and even that Corbyn posed a threat to Jewish life in Britain.

    But the admission by Starmer’s officials that they are using the same code of conduct to investigate members has gone entirely unremarked three years later.

    That is despite a submission to the courts from Labour’s own lawyers that the code had been kept secret because its publication might prove “politically incendiary”.

    LA4J points out that back in 2018 the Board of Deputies, the Jewish Labour Movement and other groups insisted that Corbyn replace the code with an alternative, controversial definition of antisemitism produced by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA).

    According to the activists, the current silence of these Jewish groups, after Starmer’s officials have conceded that they are using Corbyn’s code rather than the IHRA definition, further indicates bad faith.

    Despite public statements to the contrary, the organisations knew that the IHRA definition was unworkable for Labour’s disciplinary procedures back in 2018, LA4J say.

    “If Labour believes that the code issued by Corbyn was ‘incendiary’, the question is where is the bushfire now, when Starmer’s team admit they are using the very same code,” Chris Wallis, a spokesman for LA4J, told Middle East Eye.

    “One of the things this case suggests is that groups like the Board of Deputies hoped to weaponise antisemitism as a way to attack Corbyn.”

    Disciplinary process ‘back to front’

    The group’s legal action is due to reach the High Court in June. It will be the first wide-ranging legal examination of Labour’s disciplinary procedures relating to antisemitism. In October 2019, the High Court ruled that the suspension of then-Labour MP Chris Williamson for “bringing the party into disrepute” over antisemitism allegations was illegal, though the judge did not overturn a second suspension that ousted him from the party.

    Eight party members, including three Jews, are pursuing the case after they were investigated for alleged antisemitism. LA4J estimates that at least 30 Jewish members of the party have been accused of antisemitism, some repeatedly.

    Late last year the Equalities and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), the UK’s equalities watchdog, issued a report critical of Labour’s handling of antisemitism cases, especially over what it termed “political interference” by Corbyn’s office, which it said had resulted in “a lack of transparency and consistency in the complaints process”.

    However, the EHRC found that in practice such interference chiefly harmed the interests of those accused of antisemitism rather than their accusers. Corbyn’s officials often tried to speed up investigations in the hope of ending the barrage of criticism from Jewish organisations.

    LA4J argue that hundreds of members have been drummed out of the party in a process that has lacked the transparency and fairness demanded by the EHRC. The procedure, they say, has failed to provide those under investigation with an opportunity to challenge the allegations.

    Most members receive a “notice of investigation” that typically cites social media posts as evidence of antisemitism. In some cases, members have been accused of sharing articles from prominent websites, such as Electronic Intifada and Mondoweiss, known to be harshly critical of Israel for its repeated violations of Palestinian rights.

    No explanation is made in the notice of why party officials believe the posts to be antisemitic. Instead, it is required of those under investigation to demonstrate why their posts should not be considered antisemitic.

    The notices also demand that members under investigation not publicise their case or the information that is being used against them. It is unclear whether they are even allowed to seek legal advice. Instead, they are encouraged to get help from a GP or the Samaritans to aid their “wellbeing”.

    Wallis, a former BBC radio drama producer who has been under investigation since last year, is one of the eight members taking the party to court.

    “The disciplinary process has been entirely back to front,” he said. “We were never told about the secret code being used to judge our cases and it was never explained how what we did was antisemitic. The assumption was that we were guilty unless we could prove otherwise, and we were expected to incriminate ourselves.”

    ‘Sickness’ in Labour

    At a preliminary hearing in February, the Labour Party argued that the courts had no place adjudicating on its handling of antisemitism cases. However, the judge approved the High Court hearing for June and awarded costs against Labour.

    In what appears to be an attempt to avoid a second adverse ruling, Labour officials made the disciplinary process more transparent last month by divulging how it assessed antisemitism cases.

    Starmer’s officials published on the party’s website the same antisemitism code of conduct that had been drafted during Corbyn’s time as leader. They did so despite a submission from one of Labour’s senior lawyers during February’s court hearing that such an admission could prove “politically incendiary”.

    That was because a wide range of Jewish leadership groups rounded on Corbyn and Labour over the code when it was first published in July 2018.

    Dave Rich, head of policy at the Community Security Trust, set up to protect Jewish communities from antisemitic attacks, lambasted Corbyn in an article in the Guardian headlined “Labour’s antisemitism code exposes a sickness in Jeremy Corbyn’s party”.

    A blog on the Trust’s website added that the code “brazenly contravenes basic anti-racist principles”.

    The Board of Deputies and the Jewish Leadership Council, both claiming to represent Britain’s Jewish community, stated that the adoption by Corbyn’s officials of the code would “further erode the existing lack of confidence that British Jews have in their sincerity to tackle antisemitism within the Labour movement”.

    The Jewish Labour Movement, a Labour party affiliate connected to the Israeli Labor party, argued that the code was “a get out of jail free card” for antisemites, and claimed it breached equalities legislation.

    Ephraim Mirvis, the UK’s chief rabbi, called the code “a watershed moment” for Labour and warned that it sent “an unprecedented message of contempt to the Jewish community”.

    Dozens of rabbis backed him, accusing the Labour leadership of having “chosen to ignore the Jewish community”.

    And the Campaign Against Antisemitism, a pro-Israel lobby group, argued that “the code seems to be designed to give free rein to certain forms of antisemitic discourse”.

    ‘It was about who was in charge’

    But despite the outpouring of concern back in 2018, note LA4J, Jewish organisations have remained silent since Labour revealed that the same antisemitism code of conduct introduced under Corbyn is being used by Starmer’s officials in disciplinary cases.

    “This was never about what was going on inside Labour, as was claimed,” said Wallis. “It was about who was in charge. The aim was to remove Corbyn at all costs.”

    Labour’s stated goal in drafting the code in 2018 was to assist with ironing out problems in the IHRA definition, which was being aggressively lobbied for by leading Jewish groups.

    In particular, Corbyn’s code provided additional context to help judge aspects of the IHRA’s 11 potential examples of antisemitism, seven of which relate to Israel.

    The code warns that the IHRA text “is not a legal definition, and on its own does not provide clear guidance about the circumstances in which particular conduct should or should not be regarded as antisemitic”.

    The Labour antisemitism code also emphasises a need for “respectful debate” between party members when talking about contentious political matters around Israel and warns that the party “will not tolerate name-calling and abuse”.

    The concern among Corbyn’s team was that the definition would shift the focus of antisemitism away from hatred of Jews to criticism of Israel, and expose activists supportive of Palestinian rights to investigation.

    The imprecision of the IHRA definition, and its politicisation of antisemitism, had already been widely criticised, including by a former Court of Appeal judge and the British parliament’s home affairs select committee.

    Kenneth Stern, the chief architect of the IHRA definition, had also weighed in to note that it was unsuitable for use in disciplinary procedures and was being “weaponised” by elements of the Jewish community to stifle criticism of Israel.

    Jewish organisations, on the other hand, argued that Corbyn was using the Labour code to avoid adopting the IHRA definition in full with all its examples, and implied that his motivation was to make Labour hostile to British Jews.

    Facing the backlash, and concerted criticism in the media, Corbyn’s officials appeared to discard the code and instead adopted the IHRA definition in full a few weeks later, in September 2018.

    Definition ‘not fit for purpose’

    It is unclear whether Corbyn’s officials ever used the 2018 code to adjudicate in disciplinary cases. But LA4J say its adoption by Starmer’s officials – and their efforts to hide the fact that they were using the code – confirm that the IHRA’s definition was indeed unworkable.

    Jenny Manson, a co-chair of Jewish Voice for Labour, which was set up in 2017 to show support for Corbyn among Jewish party members and is now supporting LA4J, said that the weaknesses of the IHRA definition must have been clear to organisations like the Jewish Labour Movement and Board of Deputies.

    “Their current silence shows that they must have known the IHRA definition wasn’t fit for purpose as it was,” she said. “The additional code of conduct was needed. They opposed it in 2018, it seems clear, only because they were looking to damage Jeremy [Corbyn].”

    Although LA4J argue that the code is fairer than the IHRA definition, they also say it has been widely misused against members as officials have sought to placate Jewish groups accusing Labour of being institutionally antisemitic.

    Diana Neslen, an 82-year-old Orthodox Jew who has been investigated for antisemitism and sanctioned by the party, said: “Even a quick look at [the code] suggests that all of us have been wrongfully accused. Indeed, we should never have been investigated in the first place.”

    LA4J hopes that, with the code no longer secret, Labour members will have a better chance to challenge current and future investigations conducted against them by party officials.

    Neslen warned, however, that existing injustices needed to be addressed too: “What are they going to do about the hundreds of people already judged under the secret code, including me?”

    She and LA4J have called for those suspended or expelled to have their cases reopened and the evidence reassessed in a transparent manner.

    The Board of Deputies, the Jewish Labour Movement, the Community Security Trust and the Jewish Leadership Council were all approached by Middle East Eye for comment. None had responded by the time of publication.

    According to LA4J, their court case highlights how little evidence there was for the claim that antisemitism within the Labour party had been an especial problem under Corbyn’s leadership.

    Levels of antisemitism in Labour appear to be lower than in the wider British public, within which about five percent of people could “justifiably be described as antisemites”, according to research published by the Community Security Trust in 2017.

    Corbyn’s general secretary, Jennie Formby, issued figures in April 2019 that showed disciplinary action had been taken against just 0.08 percent of Labour’s 540,000 members, even after the strict application of the antisemitism code and “political interference” by Corbyn’s officials in speeding up disciplinary proceedings.

    During the latest legal proceedings, Labour has revealed equivalent figures for Starmer, relating to the period between May last year and last month. Although details about the investigations are not precise, in the worst-case scenario an even smaller percentage of Labour members were found to be antisemitic.

    These figures, the LA4J argue, suggest that Labour has not had an “antisemitism problem” under either Corbyn or Starmer.

    That impression is shared by most Labour members. According to a YouGov poll commissioned last month by the Jewish Chronicle newspaper, a significant majority – 70 percent – believe that Labour does not have a serious problem with antisemitism.

    Most appear to agree with Corbyn’s reaction to the Equalities Commission report that the claims against Labour were “dramatically overstated for political reasons”. That statement led to Starmer expelling Corbyn from the Labour parliamentary party.

    • First published in Middle East Eye

    This article was posted on Friday, April 16th, 2021 at 9:12pm and is filed under Anti-semitism, Character Assassination, Jeremy Corbyn, UK Hypocrisy, UK Israeli Lobby, UK Labour Party, UK Media, UK Politics, United Kingdom.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Labour disclosure “shows antisemitism was weaponised against Corbyn”, activists say

    A group of Labour activists fighting through the courts to discover why they and others were investigated or expelled from the UK’s Labour Party for antisemitism say they have flushed out proof of bad faith from their accusers.

    The group, who call themselves Labour Activists for Justice (LA4J), say the new disclosure confirms their claim that leading Jewish organisations intentionally politicised the meaning of antisemitism to entrap left-wing critics of Israel and undermine Labour’s former leader, Jeremy Corbyn.

    As a result, the number of cases of antisemitism in Labour was inflated, falsely feeding the public impression that the political party under Corbyn had attracted Jew haters, say the Labour activists.

    The suggestion that groups like the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the Jewish Labour Movement “weaponised” antisemitism against Corbyn is currently seen as grounds by Labour to suspend or expel members.

    But according to LA4J, evidence revealed in their legal case has now vindicated that claim.

    The activists note that Jewish groups that waged a campaign of attacks on Corbyn over an antisemitism code of conduct drafted by the party in 2018 are now “deafeningly silent” on discovering that Keir Starmer, Labour’s new leader, has been secretly using exactly the same code.

    When it was first published, the Board of Deputies and other Jewish organisations erupted in outrage, alleging that the 16-point code was proof of “institutional antisemitism” in the Labour party – and even that Corbyn posed a threat to Jewish life in Britain.

    But the admission by Starmer’s officials that they are using the same code of conduct to investigate members has gone entirely unremarked three years later.

    That is despite a submission to the courts from Labour’s own lawyers that the code had been kept secret because its publication might prove “politically incendiary”.

    LA4J points out that back in 2018 the Board of Deputies, the Jewish Labour Movement and other groups insisted that Corbyn replace the code with an alternative, controversial definition of antisemitism produced by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA).

    According to the activists, the current silence of these Jewish groups, after Starmer’s officials have conceded that they are using Corbyn’s code rather than the IHRA definition, further indicates bad faith.

    Despite public statements to the contrary, the organisations knew that the IHRA definition was unworkable for Labour’s disciplinary procedures back in 2018, LA4J say.

    “If Labour believes that the code issued by Corbyn was ‘incendiary’, the question is where is the bushfire now, when Starmer’s team admit they are using the very same code,” Chris Wallis, a spokesman for LA4J, told Middle East Eye.

    “One of the things this case suggests is that groups like the Board of Deputies hoped to weaponise antisemitism as a way to attack Corbyn.”

    Disciplinary process ‘back to front’

    The group’s legal action is due to reach the High Court in June. It will be the first wide-ranging legal examination of Labour’s disciplinary procedures relating to antisemitism. In October 2019, the High Court ruled that the suspension of then-Labour MP Chris Williamson for “bringing the party into disrepute” over antisemitism allegations was illegal, though the judge did not overturn a second suspension that ousted him from the party.

    Eight party members, including three Jews, are pursuing the case after they were investigated for alleged antisemitism. LA4J estimates that at least 30 Jewish members of the party have been accused of antisemitism, some repeatedly.

    Late last year the Equalities and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), the UK’s equalities watchdog, issued a report critical of Labour’s handling of antisemitism cases, especially over what it termed “political interference” by Corbyn’s office, which it said had resulted in “a lack of transparency and consistency in the complaints process”.

    However, the EHRC found that in practice such interference chiefly harmed the interests of those accused of antisemitism rather than their accusers. Corbyn’s officials often tried to speed up investigations in the hope of ending the barrage of criticism from Jewish organisations.

    LA4J argue that hundreds of members have been drummed out of the party in a process that has lacked the transparency and fairness demanded by the EHRC. The procedure, they say, has failed to provide those under investigation with an opportunity to challenge the allegations.

    Most members receive a “notice of investigation” that typically cites social media posts as evidence of antisemitism. In some cases, members have been accused of sharing articles from prominent websites, such as Electronic Intifada and Mondoweiss, known to be harshly critical of Israel for its repeated violations of Palestinian rights.

    No explanation is made in the notice of why party officials believe the posts to be antisemitic. Instead, it is required of those under investigation to demonstrate why their posts should not be considered antisemitic.

    The notices also demand that members under investigation not publicise their case or the information that is being used against them. It is unclear whether they are even allowed to seek legal advice. Instead, they are encouraged to get help from a GP or the Samaritans to aid their “wellbeing”.

    Wallis, a former BBC radio drama producer who has been under investigation since last year, is one of the eight members taking the party to court.

    “The disciplinary process has been entirely back to front,” he said. “We were never told about the secret code being used to judge our cases and it was never explained how what we did was antisemitic. The assumption was that we were guilty unless we could prove otherwise, and we were expected to incriminate ourselves.”

    ‘Sickness’ in Labour

    At a preliminary hearing in February, the Labour Party argued that the courts had no place adjudicating on its handling of antisemitism cases. However, the judge approved the High Court hearing for June and awarded costs against Labour.

    In what appears to be an attempt to avoid a second adverse ruling, Labour officials made the disciplinary process more transparent last month by divulging how it assessed antisemitism cases.

    Starmer’s officials published on the party’s website the same antisemitism code of conduct that had been drafted during Corbyn’s time as leader. They did so despite a submission from one of Labour’s senior lawyers during February’s court hearing that such an admission could prove “politically incendiary”.

    That was because a wide range of Jewish leadership groups rounded on Corbyn and Labour over the code when it was first published in July 2018.

    Dave Rich, head of policy at the Community Security Trust, set up to protect Jewish communities from antisemitic attacks, lambasted Corbyn in an article in the Guardian headlined “Labour’s antisemitism code exposes a sickness in Jeremy Corbyn’s party”.

    A blog on the Trust’s website added that the code “brazenly contravenes basic anti-racist principles”.

    The Board of Deputies and the Jewish Leadership Council, both claiming to represent Britain’s Jewish community, stated that the adoption by Corbyn’s officials of the code would “further erode the existing lack of confidence that British Jews have in their sincerity to tackle antisemitism within the Labour movement”.

    The Jewish Labour Movement, a Labour party affiliate connected to the Israeli Labor party, argued that the code was “a get out of jail free card” for antisemites, and claimed it breached equalities legislation.

    Ephraim Mirvis, the UK’s chief rabbi, called the code “a watershed moment” for Labour and warned that it sent “an unprecedented message of contempt to the Jewish community”.

    Dozens of rabbis backed him, accusing the Labour leadership of having “chosen to ignore the Jewish community”.

    And the Campaign Against Antisemitism, a pro-Israel lobby group, argued that “the code seems to be designed to give free rein to certain forms of antisemitic discourse”.

    ‘It was about who was in charge’

    But despite the outpouring of concern back in 2018, note LA4J, Jewish organisations have remained silent since Labour revealed that the same antisemitism code of conduct introduced under Corbyn is being used by Starmer’s officials in disciplinary cases.

    “This was never about what was going on inside Labour, as was claimed,” said Wallis. “It was about who was in charge. The aim was to remove Corbyn at all costs.”

    Labour’s stated goal in drafting the code in 2018 was to assist with ironing out problems in the IHRA definition, which was being aggressively lobbied for by leading Jewish groups.

    In particular, Corbyn’s code provided additional context to help judge aspects of the IHRA’s 11 potential examples of antisemitism, seven of which relate to Israel.

    The code warns that the IHRA text “is not a legal definition, and on its own does not provide clear guidance about the circumstances in which particular conduct should or should not be regarded as antisemitic”.

    The Labour antisemitism code also emphasises a need for “respectful debate” between party members when talking about contentious political matters around Israel and warns that the party “will not tolerate name-calling and abuse”.

    The concern among Corbyn’s team was that the definition would shift the focus of antisemitism away from hatred of Jews to criticism of Israel, and expose activists supportive of Palestinian rights to investigation.

    The imprecision of the IHRA definition, and its politicisation of antisemitism, had already been widely criticised, including by a former Court of Appeal judge and the British parliament’s home affairs select committee.

    Kenneth Stern, the chief architect of the IHRA definition, had also weighed in to note that it was unsuitable for use in disciplinary procedures and was being “weaponised” by elements of the Jewish community to stifle criticism of Israel.

    Jewish organisations, on the other hand, argued that Corbyn was using the Labour code to avoid adopting the IHRA definition in full with all its examples, and implied that his motivation was to make Labour hostile to British Jews.

    Facing the backlash, and concerted criticism in the media, Corbyn’s officials appeared to discard the code and instead adopted the IHRA definition in full a few weeks later, in September 2018.

    Definition ‘not fit for purpose’

    It is unclear whether Corbyn’s officials ever used the 2018 code to adjudicate in disciplinary cases. But LA4J say its adoption by Starmer’s officials – and their efforts to hide the fact that they were using the code – confirm that the IHRA’s definition was indeed unworkable.

    Jenny Manson, a co-chair of Jewish Voice for Labour, which was set up in 2017 to show support for Corbyn among Jewish party members and is now supporting LA4J, said that the weaknesses of the IHRA definition must have been clear to organisations like the Jewish Labour Movement and Board of Deputies.

    “Their current silence shows that they must have known the IHRA definition wasn’t fit for purpose as it was,” she said. “The additional code of conduct was needed. They opposed it in 2018, it seems clear, only because they were looking to damage Jeremy [Corbyn].”

    Although LA4J argue that the code is fairer than the IHRA definition, they also say it has been widely misused against members as officials have sought to placate Jewish groups accusing Labour of being institutionally antisemitic.

    Diana Neslen, an 82-year-old Orthodox Jew who has been investigated for antisemitism and sanctioned by the party, said: “Even a quick look at [the code] suggests that all of us have been wrongfully accused. Indeed, we should never have been investigated in the first place.”

    LA4J hopes that, with the code no longer secret, Labour members will have a better chance to challenge current and future investigations conducted against them by party officials.

    Neslen warned, however, that existing injustices needed to be addressed too: “What are they going to do about the hundreds of people already judged under the secret code, including me?”

    She and LA4J have called for those suspended or expelled to have their cases reopened and the evidence reassessed in a transparent manner.

    The Board of Deputies, the Jewish Labour Movement, the Community Security Trust and the Jewish Leadership Council were all approached by Middle East Eye for comment. None had responded by the time of publication.

    According to LA4J, their court case highlights how little evidence there was for the claim that antisemitism within the Labour party had been an especial problem under Corbyn’s leadership.

    Levels of antisemitism in Labour appear to be lower than in the wider British public, within which about five percent of people could “justifiably be described as antisemites”, according to research published by the Community Security Trust in 2017.

    Corbyn’s general secretary, Jennie Formby, issued figures in April 2019 that showed disciplinary action had been taken against just 0.08 percent of Labour’s 540,000 members, even after the strict application of the antisemitism code and “political interference” by Corbyn’s officials in speeding up disciplinary proceedings.

    During the latest legal proceedings, Labour has revealed equivalent figures for Starmer, relating to the period between May last year and last month. Although details about the investigations are not precise, in the worst-case scenario an even smaller percentage of Labour members were found to be antisemitic.

    These figures, the LA4J argue, suggest that Labour has not had an “antisemitism problem” under either Corbyn or Starmer.

    That impression is shared by most Labour members. According to a YouGov poll commissioned last month by the Jewish Chronicle newspaper, a significant majority – 70 percent – believe that Labour does not have a serious problem with antisemitism.

    Most appear to agree with Corbyn’s reaction to the Equalities Commission report that the claims against Labour were “dramatically overstated for political reasons”. That statement led to Starmer expelling Corbyn from the Labour parliamentary party.

    • First published in Middle East Eye

    The post Labour disclosure “shows antisemitism was weaponised against Corbyn”, activists say first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Starmer isn’t “too cautious”: he is ruthlessly tearing Labour apart

    The completion of Keir Starmer’s first year as Labour leader might have passed without note, had it not been the occasion for senior party figures to express mounting concern at Labour’s dismal performance in opposition to Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s government.

    At a time when Labour ought to be landing regular punches on the ruling party over its gross incompetence in handling the Covid-19 pandemic, and cronyism in its awarding of multimillion-pound coronavirus-related contracts, Starmer has preferred to avoid confrontation. Critics have accused him of being “too cautious” and showing a “lack of direction”.

    Dissatisfaction with Starmer among Labour voters has quadrupled over the past 10 months, from 10 percent last May to 39 percent in March. His approach does not even appear to be winning over the wider public: a recent poll on who would make a better prime minister gave incumbent Johnson a 12 percentage-point lead.

    Increasingly anxious senior Labour MPs called late last month for a “big figure” to help Starmer set aside his supposed political diffidence and offer voters a clearer idea of “what Keir is for”.

    That followed a move in February by Starmer’s team to reach out to Peter Mandelson, who helped Tony Blair rebrand the party as “New Labour” in the 1990s and move it sharply away from any association with
    socialism.

    ‘Cynically’ evasive

    But there is a twofold problem with this assessment of Starmer’s first year.

    It assumes Labour’s dire polling is evidence that voters might warm to Starmer if they knew more about what he stands for. That conclusion seems unwarranted. A Labour internal review leaked in February showed that the British public viewed Starmer’s party as “deliberate and cynical” in its evasiveness on policy matters.

    In other words, British voters’ aversion to Starmer is not that he is “too cautious” or lacklustre. Rather, they suspect that Starmer and his team are politically not being honest. Either he is covering up the fact that Labour under his leadership is an ideological empty vessel, or his party has clear policies but conceals them because it believes they would be unpopular.

    In response, and indeed underscoring the increasingly cynical approach from Starmer’s camp, the review proposed reinventing Labour as a patriotic, Tory-lite party, emphasising “the flag, veterans [and] dressing smartly”.

    However, the deeper flaw in this assessment of Starmer’s first 12 months is that it assumes his caution in taking on the Tory government is evidence of some natural restraint or reticence on his part. This was the view promoted by a recent commentator in the Guardian, who observed: “‘Starmerism’ has not defined itself in any sense beyond sitting on the fence.”

    But Starmer has proved to be remarkably unrestrained and intemperate when he chooses to be. If he is reticent, it appears to be only when it serves his larger political purposes.

    All-out war

    If there is one consistent thread in his first year, it has been a determined purging from the party of any trace of the leftwing politics of his predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn, as well as a concerted effort to drive out many tens of thousands of new members who joined because of Corbynism.

    The paradox is that when Starmer stood in the leadership election last spring, he promised to unify a party deeply divided between a largely leftwing membership committed to Corbyn’s programme, on the one hand, and a largely rightwing parliamentary faction and party bureaucracy, on the other.

    As an internal review leaked last April revealed, party officials were determined to destroy Corbyn even while he was leader, using highly undemocratic means.

    Even if Starmer had chosen to be cautious or diffident, there looked to be no realistic way to square that circle. But far from sitting on the fence, he has been busy waging an all-out war on one side only: those sympathetic to Corbyn. And that campaign has involved smashing apart the party’s already fragile democratic procedures.

    The prelude was the sacking last June of Rebecca Long-Bailey as shadow education secretary – and the most visible ally of Corbyn in Starmer’s shadow cabinet – on the flimsiest of pretexts. She had retweeted an article in the Independent newspaper that included a brief mention of Israel’s involvement in training western police forces in brutal restraint techniques.

    Real target

    A few months later, Starmer got his chance to go after his real target, when the Equalities and Human Rights Commission published its highly flawed report into the claims of an antisemitism problem in Labour under Corbyn’s leadership.

    This provided the grounds Starmer needed to take the unprecedented step of excluding Corbyn from the parliamentary party he had been leader of only months earlier. It was a remarkably provocative and incautious move that infuriated large sections of the membership, some of whom abandoned the party as a result.

    Having dispatched Corbyn and issued a stark ultimatum to any MP who might still harbour sympathies for the former leader, Starmer turned his attention to the party membership. David Evans, his new general secretary and a retread from the Blair years, issued directives banning constituency parties from protesting Corbyn’s exclusion or advocating for Corbynism.

    Corbyn was overnight turned into a political “unperson”, in an echo of the authoritarian purges of the Soviet-era Communist party. No mention was to be made of him or his policies, on pain of suspension from the party.

    Even this did not suffice. To help bolster the hostile environment towards left wing members, Starmer made Labour hostage to special interest groups that had openly waged war – from inside and outside the party – against his predecessor.

    During the leadership campaign, Starmer signed on to a “10 Pledges” document from the deeply conservative and pro-Israel Board of Deputies of British Jews. The board was one of the cheerleaders for the evidence-free antisemitism allegations that had beset Labour during Corbyn’s time as leader – even though all metrics suggested the party had less of an antisemitism problem than the Conservatives, and less of a problem under Corbyn than previous leaders.

    Alienating the left

    The Pledges required Starmer to effectively hand over control to the Board of Deputies and another pro-Israel group, the Jewish Labour Movement, on what kind of criticisms Labour members were allowed to make of Israel.

    Opposition to a century of British-sponsored oppression of the Palestinian people had long been a rallying point for the UK’s left, as opposition to the treatment of black South Africans under the apartheid regime once was. Israel’s centrality to continuing western colonialism in the Middle East and its key role in a global military-industrial complex made it a natural target for leftwing activism.

    But according to the Pledges – in a barely concealed effort to hound, alienate and silence the party’s left – it was for pro-Israel lobby groups to decide who should be be declared an antisemite, while “fringe” Jewish groups, or those supportive of Corbyn and critical of Israel, should be ignored.

    Starmer readily agreed both to adopt the board’s conflation of criticism of Israel with antisemitism, and to disregard prominent Jews within his own party opposed to pro-Israel lobbying. His office was soon picking off prominent Jewish supporters of Corbyn, including leaders of Jewish Voice for Labour.

    One of the most troubling cases was Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi, who was suspended shortly after she appeared in a moving video in which she explained how antisemitism had been weaponised by the pro-Israel lobby against left wing Jews like herself.

    She noted the pain caused when Jews were smeared as “traitors” and “kapos” – an incendiary term of abuse, as Wimborne-Idrissi pointed out, that refers to “a Jewish inmate of a concentration camp who collaborated with the [Nazi] authorities, people who collaborated in the annihilation of their own people”.

    In suspending her, Starmer’s Labour effectively endorsed that type of ugly demonisation campaign.

    Israeli spy recruited

    But the war on the Labour left did not end there. In his first days as leader, Starmer was reluctantly forced to set up an inquiry into the leaked internal report that had exposed the party bureaucracy as profoundly hostile to Corbyn personally, and more generally to his socialist policies. Senior staff had even been shown trying to sabotage Labour’s 2017 general election campaign.

    But once the Forde Inquiry had been appointed, Starmer worked strenuously to kick it into the long grass, even bringing back into the party Emilie Oldknow, a central figure in the Corbyn-era bureaucracy who had been cast in a damning light by the leaked report’s revelations.

    A separate chance to lay bare what had happened inside Labour head office during Corbyn’s term was similarly spurned by Starmer. He decided not to  defend a defamation case against Labour brought by John Ware, a BBC reporter, and seven former staff in Labour’s disciplinary unit. They had worked together on a Panorama special on the antisemitism claims against Corbyn that did much to damage him in the public eye.

    These former officials had sued the party, arguing that Labour’s response to the BBC programme suggested they had acted in bad faith and sought to undermine Corbyn.

    In fact, a similar conclusion had been reached in the damning internal leaked report on the behaviour of head office staff. It quoted extensively from emails and WhatsApp chats that showed a deep-seated antipathy to Corbyn in the party bureaucracy.

    Nonetheless, Starmer’s office abandoned its legal defence last July, apologising “unreservedly” to the former staff members and paying “substantial damages”. Labour did so despite “clear advice” from lawyers, a former senior official said, that it would have won in court.

    When Martin Forde, chair of the Forde inquiry, announced in February that his report had been delayed “indefinitely”, it seemed that the truth about the efforts of Labour staff to undermine Corbyn as leader were being permanently buried.

    The final straw for many on the party’s left, however, was the revelation in January that Starmer had recruited to his team a former Israeli military spy, Assaf Kaplan, to monitor the use of social media by members.

    Much of the supposed “antisemitism problem” under Corbyn had depended on the Israel lobby’s efforts to scour through old social media posts of left wing members, looking for criticism of Israel and then presenting it as evidence of antisemitism. As leader, Corbyn was pushed by these same lobby groups to adopt a new, highly controversial definition of antisemitism produced by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. It shifted attention away from hatred of Jews to criticism of Israel.

    A former Israeli spy trained in the dark arts of surveilling Palestinians would be overseeing the monitoring of party members’ online activity.

    Tory party of old

    Far from sitting on the fence, as his critics claim, Starmer has been ruthless in purging socialism from the Labour party – under cover of claims that he is rooting out an “antisemitism problem” he supposedly inherited from Corbyn.

    In a speech last month, Mandelson – the former Blair strategist who Starmer’s team has been consulting – called on the Labour leader to show “courage and determination” in tackling the supposedly “corrupt far left”. He suggested “large numbers” of members would still need to be expunged from the party in the supposed fight against antisemitism.

    Starmer is investing huge energy and political capital in ridding the party of its leftwing members, while exhibiting little appetite for taking on Johnson’s right wing government.

    These are not necessarily separate projects. There is a discernible theme here. Starmer is recrafting Labour not as a real opposition to the Conservative party’s increasingly extreme, crony capitalism, but as a responsible, more moderate alternative to it. He is offering voters a Labour party that feels more like the Tory party of old, which prioritised tradition, patriotism and family values.

    None of this should surprise. Despite his campaign claims, Starmer’s history – predating his rapid rise through the Labour party – never suggested he was likely to clash with the establishment. After all, few public servants have been knighted by the Queen at the relatively tender age of 51 for their radicalism.

    In safe hands

    While head of the Crown Prosecution Service, Starmer rejected indicting the police officers who killed Jean Charles de Menezes and Ian Tomlinson, and his department effectively cleared MI5 and MI6 officers of torture related to the “War on Terror”.

    His team not only sought to fast-track the extradition to Sweden of Julian Assange, the Wikileaks founder who exposed western war crimes, but it also put strong pressure on its Swedish counterpart not to waver in pursuing Assange. One lawyer told the Swedes in 2012: “Don’t you dare get cold feet!”

    Starmer’s actions since becoming Labour leader are very much in line with his earlier career. He wants to prove he is a safe pair of hands to the British establishment, in hopes that he can avert the kind of relentless vilification Corbyn endured. Then, Starmer can bide his time until the British public tires of Johnson.

    Starmer seems to believe that playing softball with the right wing government and hardball with the left in his own party will prove a winning formula. So far, voters beg to differ.

    • First published in Middle East Eye

    The post Starmer isn’t “too cautious”: he is ruthlessly tearing Labour apart first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Starmer isn’t “too cautious”: he is ruthlessly tearing Labour apart

    A year in, the British Labour leader is giving the Tories an easy ride while investing his energy in an all-out war on the party’s left

    The completion of Keir Starmer’s first year as Labour leader might have passed without note, had it not been the occasion for senior party figures to express mounting concern at Labour’s dismal performance in opposition to Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s government.

    At a time when Labour ought to be landing regular punches on the ruling party over its gross incompetence in handling the Covid-19 pandemic, and cronyism in its awarding of multimillion-pound coronavirus-related contracts, Starmer has preferred to avoid confrontation. Critics have accused him of being “too cautious” and showing a “lack of direction”.

    Dissatisfaction with Starmer among Labour voters has quadrupled over the past 10 months, from 10 percent last May to 39 percent in March. His approach does not even appear to be winning over the wider public: a recent poll on who would make a better prime minister gave incumbent Johnson a 12 percentage-point lead.

    Increasingly anxious senior Labour MPs called late last month for a “big figure” to help Starmer set aside his supposed political diffidence and offer voters a clearer idea of “what Keir is for”.

    That followed a move in February by Starmer’s team to reach out to Peter Mandelson, who helped Tony Blair rebrand the party as “New Labour” in the 1990s and move it sharply away from any association with
    socialism.

    ‘Cynically’ evasive

    But there is a twofold problem with this assessment of Starmer’s first year.

    It assumes Labour’s dire polling is evidence that voters might warm to Starmer if they knew more about what he stands for. That conclusion seems unwarranted. A Labour internal review leaked in February showed that the British public viewed Starmer’s party as “deliberate and cynical” in its evasiveness on policy matters.

    In other words, British voters’ aversion to Starmer is not that he is “too cautious” or lacklustre. Rather, they suspect that Starmer and his team are politically not being honest. Either he is covering up the fact that Labour under his leadership is an ideological empty vessel, or his party has clear policies but conceals them because it believes they would be unpopular.

    In response, and indeed underscoring the increasingly cynical approach from Starmer’s camp, the review proposed reinventing Labour as a patriotic, Tory-lite party, emphasising “the flag, veterans [and] dressing smartly”.

    However, the deeper flaw in this assessment of Starmer’s first 12 months is that it assumes his caution in taking on the Tory government is evidence of some natural restraint or reticence on his part. This was the view promoted by a recent commentator in the Guardian, who observed: “‘Starmerism’ has not defined itself in any sense beyond sitting on the fence.”

    But Starmer has proved to be remarkably unrestrained and intemperate when he chooses to be. If he is reticent, it appears to be only when it serves his larger political purposes.

    All-out war

    If there is one consistent thread in his first year, it has been a determined purging from the party of any trace of the leftwing politics of his predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn, as well as a concerted effort to drive out many tens of thousands of new members who joined because of Corbynism.

    The paradox is that when Starmer stood in the leadership election last spring, he promised to unify a party deeply divided between a largely leftwing membership committed to Corbyn’s programme, on the one hand, and a largely rightwing parliamentary faction and party bureaucracy, on the other.

    As an internal review leaked last April revealed, party officials were determined to destroy Corbyn even while he was leader, using highly undemocratic means.

    Even if Starmer had chosen to be cautious or diffident, there looked to be no realistic way to square that circle. But far from sitting on the fence, he has been busy waging an all-out war on one side only: those sympathetic to Corbyn. And that campaign has involved smashing apart the party’s already fragile democratic procedures.

    The prelude was the sacking last June of Rebecca Long-Bailey as shadow education secretary – and the most visible ally of Corbyn in Starmer’s shadow cabinet – on the flimsiest of pretexts. She had retweeted an article in the Independent newspaper that included a brief mention of Israel’s involvement in training western police forces in brutal restraint techniques.

    Real target

    A few months later, Starmer got his chance to go after his real target, when the Equalities and Human Rights Commission published its highly flawed report into the claims of an antisemitism problem in Labour under Corbyn’s leadership.

    This provided the grounds Starmer needed to take the unprecedented step of excluding Corbyn from the parliamentary party he had been leader of only months earlier. It was a remarkably provocative and incautious move that infuriated large sections of the membership, some of whom abandoned the party as a result.

    Having dispatched Corbyn and issued a stark ultimatum to any MP who might still harbour sympathies for the former leader, Starmer turned his attention to the party membership. David Evans, his new general secretary and a retread from the Blair years, issued directives banning constituency parties from protesting Corbyn’s exclusion or advocating for Corbynism.

    Corbyn was overnight turned into a political “unperson”, in an echo of the authoritarian purges of the Soviet-era Communist party. No mention was to be made of him or his policies, on pain of suspension from the party.

    Even this did not suffice. To help bolster the hostile environment towards left wing members, Starmer made Labour hostage to special interest groups that had openly waged war – from inside and outside the party – against his predecessor.

    During the leadership campaign, Starmer signed on to a “10 Pledges” document from the deeply conservative and pro-Israel Board of Deputies of British Jews. The board was one of the cheerleaders for the evidence-free antisemitism allegations that had beset Labour during Corbyn’s time as leader – even though all metrics suggested the party had less of an antisemitism problem than the Conservatives, and less of a problem under Corbyn than previous leaders.

    Alienating the left

    The Pledges required Starmer to effectively hand over control to the Board of Deputies and another pro-Israel group, the Jewish Labour Movement, on what kind of criticisms Labour members were allowed to make of Israel.

    Opposition to a century of British-sponsored oppression of the Palestinian people had long been a rallying point for the UK’s left, as opposition to the treatment of black South Africans under the apartheid regime once was. Israel’s centrality to continuing western colonialism in the Middle East and its key role in a global military-industrial complex made it a natural target for leftwing activism.

    But according to the Pledges – in a barely concealed effort to hound, alienate and silence the party’s left – it was for pro-Israel lobby groups to decide who should be be declared an antisemite, while “fringe” Jewish groups, or those supportive of Corbyn and critical of Israel, should be ignored.

    Starmer readily agreed both to adopt the board’s conflation of criticism of Israel with antisemitism, and to disregard prominent Jews within his own party opposed to pro-Israel lobbying. His office was soon picking off prominent Jewish supporters of Corbyn, including leaders of Jewish Voice for Labour.

    One of the most troubling cases was Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi, who was suspended shortly after she appeared in a moving video in which she explained how antisemitism had been weaponised by the pro-Israel lobby against left wing Jews like herself.

    She noted the pain caused when Jews were smeared as “traitors” and “kapos” – an incendiary term of abuse, as Wimborne-Idrissi pointed out, that refers to “a Jewish inmate of a concentration camp who collaborated with the [Nazi] authorities, people who collaborated in the annihilation of their own people”.

    In suspending her, Starmer’s Labour effectively endorsed that type of ugly demonisation campaign.

    Israeli spy recruited

    But the war on the Labour left did not end there. In his first days as leader, Starmer was reluctantly forced to set up an inquiry into the leaked internal report that had exposed the party bureaucracy as profoundly hostile to Corbyn personally, and more generally to his socialist policies. Senior staff had even been shown trying to sabotage Labour’s 2017 general election campaign.

    But once the Forde Inquiry had been appointed, Starmer worked strenuously to kick it into the long grass, even bringing back into the party Emilie Oldknow, a central figure in the Corbyn-era bureaucracy who had been cast in a damning light by the leaked report’s revelations.

    A separate chance to lay bare what had happened inside Labour head office during Corbyn’s term was similarly spurned by Starmer. He decided not to  defend a defamation case against Labour brought by John Ware, a BBC reporter, and seven former staff in Labour’s disciplinary unit. They had worked together on a Panorama special on the antisemitism claims against Corbyn that did much to damage him in the public eye.

    These former officials had sued the party, arguing that Labour’s response to the BBC programme suggested they had acted in bad faith and sought to undermine Corbyn.

    In fact, a similar conclusion had been reached in the damning internal leaked report on the behaviour of head office staff. It quoted extensively from emails and WhatsApp chats that showed a deep-seated antipathy to Corbyn in the party bureaucracy.

    Nonetheless, Starmer’s office abandoned its legal defence last July, apologising “unreservedly” to the former staff members and paying “substantial damages”. Labour did so despite “clear advice” from lawyers, a former senior official said, that it would have won in court.

    When Martin Forde, chair of the Forde inquiry, announced in February that his report had been delayed “indefinitely”, it seemed that the truth about the efforts of Labour staff to undermine Corbyn as leader were being permanently buried.

    The final straw for many on the party’s left, however, was the revelation in January that Starmer had recruited to his team a former Israeli military spy, Assaf Kaplan, to monitor the use of social media by members.

    Much of the supposed “antisemitism problem” under Corbyn had depended on the Israel lobby’s efforts to scour through old social media posts of left wing members, looking for criticism of Israel and then presenting it as evidence of antisemitism. As leader, Corbyn was pushed by these same lobby groups to adopt a new, highly controversial definition of antisemitism produced by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. It shifted attention away from hatred of Jews to criticism of Israel.

    A former Israeli spy trained in the dark arts of surveilling Palestinians would be overseeing the monitoring of party members’ online activity.

    Tory party of old

    Far from sitting on the fence, as his critics claim, Starmer has been ruthless in purging socialism from the Labour party – under cover of claims that he is rooting out an “antisemitism problem” he supposedly inherited from Corbyn.

    In a speech last month, Mandelson – the former Blair strategist who Starmer’s team has been consulting – called on the Labour leader to show “courage and determination” in tackling the supposedly “corrupt far left”. He suggested “large numbers” of members would still need to be expunged from the party in the supposed fight against antisemitism.

    Starmer is investing huge energy and political capital in ridding the party of its leftwing members, while exhibiting little appetite for taking on Johnson’s right wing government.

    These are not necessarily separate projects. There is a discernible theme here. Starmer is recrafting Labour not as a real opposition to the Conservative party’s increasingly extreme, crony capitalism, but as a responsible, more moderate alternative to it. He is offering voters a Labour party that feels more like the Tory party of old, which prioritised tradition, patriotism and family values.

    None of this should surprise. Despite his campaign claims, Starmer’s history – predating his rapid rise through the Labour party – never suggested he was likely to clash with the establishment. After all, few public servants have been knighted by the Queen at the relatively tender age of 51 for their radicalism.

    In safe hands

    While head of the Crown Prosecution Service, Starmer rejected indicting the police officers who killed Jean Charles de Menezes and Ian Tomlinson, and his department effectively cleared MI5 and MI6 officers of torture related to the “War on Terror”.

    His team not only sought to fast-track the extradition to Sweden of Julian Assange, the Wikileaks founder who exposed western war crimes, but it also put strong pressure on its Swedish counterpart not to waver in pursuing Assange. One lawyer told the Swedes in 2012: “Don’t you dare get cold feet!”

    Starmer’s actions since becoming Labour leader are very much in line with his earlier career. He wants to prove he is a safe pair of hands to the British establishment, in hopes that he can avert the kind of relentless vilification Corbyn endured. Then, Starmer can bide his time until the British public tires of Johnson.

    Starmer seems to believe that playing softball with the right wing government and hardball with the left in his own party will prove a winning formula. So far, voters beg to differ.

    • First published in Middle East Eye

    This article was posted on Monday, April 5th, 2021 at 10:37pm and is filed under Anti-semitism, Capitalism, Character Assassination, Cybersecurity, Israel, Jeremy Corbyn, Media Bias, Social media, The “Left”, The “Right”, Transparency/Secrecy, UK Israeli Lobby, UK Labour Party, UK Media, UK Politics, United Kingdom, Zionism.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Academics At UK University Reject IHRA Anti-Semitism Definition

    Academics at a major British university last week voted to reverse their institution’s adoption of the misleading anti-Semitism definition promoted by Israel and its lobby.

    A report by University College London’s academic board states that the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s “working definition” of anti-Semitism “is not fit for purpose within a university setting and has no legal basis for enforcement.”

    The board voted to endorse the report last week. It will now be up to university management to decide whether the vote will be implemented.

    The university’s branch of the University and College Union is campaigning against the definition.

    The report was more than a year in the making.

    The post Academics At UK University Reject IHRA Anti-Semitism Definition appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • The Empire Attacks BDS For The Same Reason Nixon Started The Drug War

    The Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that Arkansas’ anti-BDS law violates the First Amendment of the US Constitution, because it plainly does.

    “The Arkansas Times has successfully challenged a law that prohibits the state from doing business with companies that boycott Israel,” Mondoweiss reports. “The Little Rock-based weekly filed the lawsuit in 2018 and was represented by the ACLU. The paper takes no official position on BDS, but it launched the legal challenge after the University of Arkansas Pulaski Technical College refused to sign an advertising contract with The Arkansas Times, unless it signed the pledge. A U.S. district court judge dismissed the case in 2019, but last week the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals found the law unconstitutional in a 2-1 decision.” 

    “One of the greatest threats to free speech are laws banning state contracts with any company or citizen advocating a boycott of Israel,” tweeted journalist Glenn Greenwald of the ruling. “Every court to review them, except one, declared them unconstitutional. That sole court just got overruled: good news. These laws, which proliferated in numerous states, haven’t received the attention they deserve given what a grave threat to free speech they pose.”

    This is an important victory for civil rights defenders and for Palestinian rights activists, but it’s just one battle in a much larger war.

    In a recent article titled “Biden officials pledge to fight BDS“, Electronic Intifada‘s Josh Ruebner documents the “vitriolic opposition” which various members of the current administration have voiced against the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions protest movement against the Israeli government’s flagrant violations of international law and its apartheid abuses of the Palestinian people, and the administration’s support for the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of anti-Semitism which civil rights advocates criticize as “a pretext to smear and censor supporters of Palestinian rights.”

    Ruebner writes:

    The Biden administration “embraces and champions” the so-called IHRA definition of anti-Semitism, a State Department official said on Monday.

     

    Kara McDonald, deputy assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labor, praised the definition “with its real-world examples” as “an invaluable tool” to “call hate by its proper name and take effective action,” according to the JTA news agency.

     

    McDonald is serving temporarily as the Biden administration’s point person on the issue until it names a special envoy on anti-Semitism.

     

    The IHRA definition has been promoted by Israel and its lobby groups.

     

    It has been strongly opposed by civil libertarians and Palestinian and Jewish organizations which see it as a pretext to smear and censor supporters of Palestinian rights.

     

    Its use as a tool of censorship has even been criticized by the definition’s original author.

     

    This is because some of the definition’s accompanying examples equate legitimate criticisms of Israeli government policies and actions with anti-Jewish bigotry.

    So we can definitely expect the attacks on BDS and other Palestinian rights activism to continue with extreme aggression. Anti-imperialists often attribute this forceful campaign to Israel’s central role in the western empire’s geostrategic agendas in the Middle East, and that’s certainly a big part of it; if Palestinians are able to obtain equal rights in Israel the nation’s government and behavior will look drastically different from the way it looks today.

    But another major motive behind these attacks which doesn’t get enough attention is to sabotage and undermine the left in the western world, in much the same way as the “war on drugs” was originally intended to do.

    In 2016 the late journalist and author Dan Baum revealed something that he’d been told in 1994 by former top Nixon advisor and Watergate co-conspirator John Ehrlichman (emphasis added):

    At the time, I was writing a book about the politics of drug prohibition. I started to ask Ehrlichman a series of earnest, wonky questions that he impatiently waved away. “You want to know what this was really all about?” he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

    In much the same way, those in charge of the capitalist empire could never get away with outlawing support for socialism and opposition to imperialism, but they can target things that socialists and anti-imperialists happen to support in order to disrupt the left.

    Last month the prominent Israeli civil rights organization B’Tselem published an analysis titled “A regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: This is apartheid”, finding that “the bar for labeling the Israeli regime as apartheid has been met.”

    Anyone who moves a sufficient distance to the left of the mainstream so-called “center” will necessarily find themselves in opposition to a right-wing government with institutionalized apartheid. The true left’s inherent opposition to injustice, racism and imperialism necessarily means a leftist will inevitably find their way into that position once they learn enough and move far enough outside of imperialist mainstream indoctrination.

    By taking this natural aspect of leftism and labeling it “anti-Semitism”, as the aforementioned IHRA definition of anti-Semitism effectively does, the imperial propaganda engine has given itself a bludgeon with which to attack every part of the ideological spectrum which opposes capitalism and imperialism.

    Whether or not Ehrlichman’s account of the origins of the drug war is accurate (some dispute it), it cannot be denied that minorities and political dissidents have been affected far more adversely by the drug war than the white right-wingers who comprised Nixon’s base. Their leaders absolutely were arrested. Their homes absolutely were raided. Their meetings absolutely have been broken up. They absolutely were vilified night after night on the evening news.

    In the same way, it hasn’t been neo-Nazis and other right wing extremists who’ve wound up targeted by the dishonest conflation of anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism, it’s been peace activists and the left, whether that be on college campuses or in politics.

    The strongest example of the latter is of course the UK’s Jeremy Corbyn, who through a series of odd accidents found himself within spitting distance of leading a major western power as an anti-imperialist socialist. This could not be tolerated, so an entirely bogus narrative about an epidemic of anti-Semitism in Corbyn’s Labour Party, largely aided by Corbyn’s history of support for Palestinian rights, was hammered day after day by the mass media with unbelievable force until his party lost and his faction was subverted.

    Anyone of sufficient influence who is far enough outside the capitalist, imperialist consensus worldview will necessarily find themselves similarly targeted for their inevitable opposition to Israeli apartheid, with the shrieking narratives of the political/media class as shrill, urgent and hysterical as they need to be to undermine their subject into impotence.

    This weapon will continue to be used against the left, not only to support Israel but to prevent the rise of any political movements in powerful western nations which would threaten the capitalist, imperialist world order.

    _________________________________

    Thanks for reading! The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at  or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My work is , so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on , following my antics on , or throwing some money into my tip jar on  or . If you want to read more you can buy my new book Poems For Rebels (you can also download a PDF for five bucks) or my old book . For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, . Everyone, racist platforms excluded,  to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge.

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust

    More must be done to thwart neo-Nazis and white supremacists who are using the COVID-19 pandemic to target minorities, increase their ranks and re-write history, the UN Secretary-General has said.  António Guterres made the appeal in a video message for the International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust, observed on Wednesday 27 January, which honours the six million Jews and millions of others murdered by the Nazis during the Second World War.  

    As this year’s anniversary is taking place under the shadow of the pandemic, he noted that the crisis has exposed longstanding injustices and contributed to a renewed rise in antisemitism and xenophobia.  

    “Today, white supremacists and neo-Nazis are resurgent, organizing and recruiting across borders, intensifying their efforts to deny, distort and rewrite history including the Holocaust”, the UN chief said.    

    The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet, has also voiced concern over the “frightening” increase in hate crimes, and “sharp rise” in antisemitism online, over the past year. 

     “With renewed vigour, conspiracy theorists increasingly link extreme political ideologies and antisemitic delusions – weaving elaborate lies and falsehoods that lay responsibility for every kind of government failing on individual Jews or the Jewish community as a whole”, she said.  “We need to push back against lies. We need to ensure that public discourse is based on facts, which objectively reflect truth – including the fundamental truth of our equal rights and dignity as human beings”, she said.  

    Global church leaders such as Pope Francis and the head of the World Council of Churches have joined international leaders on World Holocaust Remembrance Day, calling for decisive action against antisemitism and warning of its danger to morph into other hate. “Remembering is an expression of humanity. Remembering is a sign of civilization,” said Francis. “Remembering is a condition for a better future of peace and fraternity.”

    On this 27th January (and beyond!), please join us in commemorating the Holocaust and committing to combatting antisemitism says Elizabeth Arif-Fear in https://voiceofsalam.com/2021/01/28/this-holocaust-memorial-day-we-need-to-stand-together-against-antisemitism/:

    • Join us and light a candle: Share a message of solidarity with the Jewish community by tweeting a photo of your candle with the hashtags #LightTheDarkness #WeRemember and #MuslimsAgainstAntisemitism
    • Learn more: Find out more about the Holocaust and educate others around you
    • Stand up: Speak out when you hear/see antisemitic tropes and conspiracy theories
    • Join us: Get involved with MAAS and volunteer to help us in the fight against antisemitism!

    Let’s all light a candle this Holocaust Memorial Day – let’s all stand up against antisemitism. Note that this blog was first published by Muslims Against Antisemitism (27/01/2021).

    https://www.ecumenicalnews.com/article/dont-repeat-what-world-holocaust-remembrance-day-remembers-world-urged/60824.htm

    https://news.un.org/en/story/2021/01/1083052

    This post was originally published on Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders.

  • The Right to Boycott

    “It is wrong to boycott Israel” is a bipartisan message. But is banning the boycott a violation of First Amendment rights? Also, the story of a man who is trying to boycott Israel while living under Israeli occupation.

    Don’t miss out on the next big story. Get the Weekly Reveal newsletter today.

    This post was originally published on Reveal.