This week on CounterSpin: Ten human beings were killed and three wounded in Buffalo, New York. By the killer’s own admission, he sought to kill Black people because they are Black, and he is a white supremacist who believes there’s a plot to “replace” white people with Black and brown people, a plot run by the Jews. If you’re news media, you could go all in on media outlets and pundits and political figures whose repeated invocations to this white replacement theory are the obvious spurs for this horrendous crime. Or you could be the Washington Post, and tweet that Joe Biden “ran for president pledging to ‘restore the soul of America.’ A racist massacre raises questions about that promise.”
A press corps that wanted to go down in history as doing better than pretending to raise questions about the “soul of America” would be busy interrogating the structural, economic, political relationships that promote and platform white supremacy. They’d be using their immense and specific influence to interrupt business as usual, to demand—not just today, but tomorrow and the next day—meaningful response from powerful people. They would not be accepting that mass murder in the name of white supremacy and antisemitism is just another news story to report in 2022 America, film at 11.
We’ll talk about what we ought to be talking about with Matt Gertz, senior fellow at Media Matters for America, who has been tracking Fox News and Tucker Carlson, and their impact on US politics, for years now.
The the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition blurs the distinction between anti-Jewish racism and criticism of Israel, argues Jake Lynch.
Keen observers have long noted that the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) is essentially a xenophobic Israel-advocacy organization masquerading as a Jewish civil rights organization. If there was ever any doubt, this became abundantly clear at the ADL’s National Leadership Summit on May 1, when CEO Jonathan Greenblatt delivered a prerecorded speech, ostensibly to discuss the mission of the organization in light of its just-released 2021 Audit of Antisemitic Incidents. Instead, Greenblatt spent the majority of his time denouncing anti-Zionism (i.e., legitimate opposition to an ideology that promotes an exclusively Jewish state in historic Palestine) as antisemitism. In his speech, he specifically vilified three Palestine solidarity groups — Students for Justice in Palestine, the Council on American-Islamic Relations and Jewish Voice for Peace — terming them “hateful” and “extremist.”
Greenblatt’s doubling down was particularly notable because his message represented a change from the ADL’s official statement that “anti-Zionism isn’t always antisemitic.” Indeed, it was difficult to not be struck by the sheer amount of time he spent on the subject — and the vehemence with which he pressed his talking points:
To those who still cling to the idea that anti-Zionism is not antisemitism — let me clarify this for you as clearly as I can — anti-Zionism is antisemitism.
Anti-Zionism as an ideology is rooted in rage. It is predicated on one concept: the negation of another people, a concept as alien to the modern discourse as white supremacy. It requires a willful denial of even a superficial history of Judaism and the vast history of the Jewish people. And, when an idea is born out of such shocking intolerance, it leads to, well, shocking acts.
Greenblatt’s claims were particularly cynical because they actually flew directly in the face of the ADL’s own 2021 Audit of Antisemitic Incidents, which found that of the 2,717 incidents it recorded last year, 345 (just over 12 percent) involved “references to Israel or Zionism” (and of these, “68 took the form of propaganda efforts by white supremacist groups.”) Though he actually opened his speech by invoking his report, Greenblatt actively misrepresented its findings, choosing instead to vilify three organizations that actively protest against Israel’s human rights abuse of Palestinians. Most outrageously, he actually equated anti-Zionists with “white supremacists and alt-right ilk who murder Jews,” as if the rhetoric of Palestine solidarity activists could in any way be comparable to the mass murder of Jews in a Pittsburgh synagogue.
By singling out these Palestine solidarity groups, Greenblatt was clearly employing a familiar strategy utilized by the Israeli government and its supporters: blaming the current rise in antisemitism on Muslims, Palestinians, and those who dare to stand in solidarity with them. The “anti-Zionism is antisemitism trope” has also been the favored political tactic of liberal and conservative politicians alike. It is most typically invoked to attack supporters of the Palestinian call for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions. Pro-Palestinian activists well know there is no better way to silence and vilify their activism than to raise the specter of antisemitism.
As journalist Peter Beinart has put it, “It is a bewildering and alarming time to be a Jew, both because antisemitism is rising and because so many politicians are responding to it not by protecting Jews but by victimizing Palestinians.” Of course, the rise in antisemitism is alarming, but as ever, the greatest threat to Jews comes from far-right nationalists and white supremacists — not Palestinians and those who stand with them. It is particularly sobering to contemplate that this definition essentially defines all Palestinians as antisemitic if they dare to oppose Zionism. But what else can Palestinians be expected to do, given that Zionism resulted in their collective dispossession, forcing them from their homes and lands and subjecting them to a crushing military occupation?
The growing crackdown on anti-Zionism can also be understood as a conscious effort to stem the growing number of Jews in the U.S. — particularly young Jews — who do not identify with the state of Israel and openly identify as anti-Zionist. The backlash against this phenomenon has been fierce — at times perversely so. In a widely discussed 2021 essay, Natan Sharansky and Gil Troy lamented the growth of anti-Zionist Jews, by labeling them as “un-Jews.” Last May, immediately following Israel’s military onslaught on Gaza, a Chicago-area Reform rabbi gave a sermon in which she called anti-Zionist Jews “Jews in name only” who must be “kept out of the Jewish tent.”
Beyond these extreme protestations, it bears noting that there has always been principled Jewish opposition to Zionism. While there are certainly individual anti-Zionists who are anti-Semites, it is disingenuous to claim that opposition to Zionism is fundamentally antisemitic. Judaism (a centuries-old religious peoplehood) is not synonymous with Zionism (a modern nationalist ideology that is not exclusively Jewish).
My congregation, Tzedek Chicago, recently amended our core values statement to say that we are “anti-Zionist, openly acknowledging that the creation of an ethnic Jewish nation state in historic Palestine resulted in an injustice against the Palestinian people — an injustice that continues to this day.” Our decision to articulate anti-Zionism as a value came after months of congregational deliberation, followed by a membership vote. As the Tzedek Chicago board explained our decision:
Zionism, the movement to establish a sovereign Jewish nation state in historic Palestine, is dependent upon the maintenance of a demographic Jewish majority in the land. Since its establishment, Israel has sought to maintain this majority by systematically dispossessing Palestinians from their homes through a variety of means, including military expulsion, home demolition, land expropriation and revocation of residency rights, among others.
It is becoming increasingly difficult to deny the fundamental injustice at the core of Zionism. In a 2021 report, the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem concluded that Israel is an “apartheid state,” describing it as “a regime of Jewish supremacy from the river to the sea.” In the same year, Human Rights Watch released a similar report, stating Israel’s “deprivations are so severe that they amount to the crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution.”
Given the reality of this historic and ongoing injustice, we have concluded that it is not enough to describe ourselves as “non-Zionist.” We believe this neutral term fails to honor the central anti-racist premise that structures of oppression cannot be simply ignored — on the contrary, they must be transformed. As political activist Angela Davis has famously written, “In a racist society, it is not enough to be non-racist, we must be anti-racist.”
While we are the first progressive synagogue to openly embrace anti-Zionism, there is every reason to believe we will not be the only one. At the very least, we hope our decision will widen the boundaries of what is considered acceptable discourse on the subject in the Jewish community. As Shaul Magid recently — and astutely — wrote:
[Israel is] a country stuck with an ideology that impedes equality, justice, and fairness. Maybe the true messianic move is not to defend Zionism, but to let it go. Maybe the anti-Zionists are on to something, if we only allow ourselves to listen.
Whether or not organizations such as the ADL succeed in their efforts to falsely conflate anti-Zionism with antisemitism depends largely on the response of the liberal and centrist quarters of the Jewish community. Indeed, Greenblatt’s doubling down on anti-Zionism may well reflect a political strategy seeking to drive a wedge in the Jewish community between liberal Zionist and anti-Zionist Jews. Jewish establishment organizations, such as the ADL and American Jewish Committee view this moment as an opportunity to broaden their political influence, with the support of right-wing Democrats and Christian Zionists. The end game of this growing political coalition: an impenetrable firewall of unceasing political/financial/diplomatic support for Israel in Washington, D.C.
In the end, of course, the success or failure of this destructive tactic will ultimately depend on the readiness of Jews and non-Jews alike to publicly stand down Israeli apartheid and ethnonationalism — and to advocate a vision of justice for all who live between the river and the sea.
Palestinian societies (PalSoc) at universities nationwide have issued an open letter condemning the “smear campaign” against incoming National Union of Students (NUS) president Shaima Dallali. They are also urging the NUS to call off its investigation into allegations of antisemitism against Dallali.
A ‘smear campaign’
On 13 April, the NUS announced plans to open an investigation into allegations of antisemitism against the union and Dallali, who is due to take up her post in July. This was in response to an onslaught of complaints by the Union of Jewish Students (UJS), some former NUS presidents and political figures following Dallali’s election.
The issues raised included a comment Dallali made as a teenager, which she apologised for. She also welcomed the NUS investigation, and reaffirmed her commitment to working in solidarity with Jewish students.
However, the coalition of Palestinian societies argues that the backlash against Dallali’s election is due to her condemnation of Israeli apartheid and settler-colonialism, which human rights body Amnesty International has called “a crime against humanity”.
A coalition of PalSocs from universities across the UK have issued an open letter in solidarity with the union’s incoming elected president, saying:
We reject the smear campaign and harassment of Shaima Dallali and wish to make it clear that Shaima, as a dedicated and committed anti-racist organiser, has our full confidence to fulfil her duties as NUS President.
Underlining the danger and inaccuracy of conflating anti-Zionism with antisemitism, the coalition states:
the liberation of Palestine is not at odds with the safety of Jewish students in the UK.
Fears for her safety
In April, Dallali – a young Black Muslim woman – spoke out about being subjected to racist and Islamophobic abuse online as a result of the pile-on. Violent threats resulted in the young activist fearing for her safety, and harmed her mental and physical wellbeing.
Dallali told the Guardian:
Unfortunately, as a black Muslim woman, it is something that I expected because I’ve seen it happen to other black Muslim women when they take up positions in the student union or the NUS, where they are attacked based on their political beliefs or their pro-Palestinian stance.
Indeed, Malia Bouattia faced similar backlash in 2016. Bouattia was the first Black Muslim woman to become NUS president, and was vocal about her pro-Palestinian stance
Denouncing the NUS’ decision to investigate Dallali, the PalSoc coalition says:
To continue with this investigation into a President who has continuously been outspoken on Israeli Apartheid is a direct decision to exclude those who stand for justice in Palestine and to ignore the grave concerns that Shaima Dallali has over her own personal safety and wellbeing.
Hypocrisy
Questioning the veracity of the UJS’ statement against Dallali, the PalSoc coalition highlights claims that a number of its signatories didn’t actually sign the letter, and don’t endorse its message. It also points to an open letter written by Jewish students denouncing the UJS’ response to Dallali’s election, stating that its views don’t represent the UK’s entire Jewish student body.
The letter in support ofDallali states that launching an investigation based on an unreliable source such as this “sets a deeply troubling precedent”.
Furthermore, the Palestine solidarity coalition calls out the “hypocrisy” of the UJS’ “call for inclusion” while openly endorsing and defending Israeli settler-colonialism, and promoting inflammatory, Islamophobic views.
It states:
Quite simply, the UJS’ position to promote Zionism and claim to oppose racism is an untenable stance.
Investigations launched across UK universities against students and academics have intensifieda culture of surveillance, which combined with the expansive presence of the Prevent agenda within education, seeks to silence our voices against global injustices.
Indeed, the University of Bristol sacked former sociology professor David Miller following a smear campaign in 2021. Sheffield Hallam academic Shahd Abusalama was subject to a similar campaign in January.
When London School of Economics (LSE) students protested their university hosting Israeli ambassador and Islamophobe Tzipi Hotovely, home secretary Priti Patel backed calls to criminalise those involved.
Meanwhile, the UK government is trying to make boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) – a tactic once used against South African apartheid – illegal.
In April, former prime minister David Cameron praised an Islamophobic report targeting Muslim activists who oppose Prevent – the UK’s discriminatory counterterrorism policy. The policing bill – which is now law – will usher in further securitisation of university campuses. This will no doubt disproportionately harm marginalised students, particularly those who take a stand against injustices.
A united front
Denouncing the union’s failure to support victimised students, the PalSoc coalition states:
the NUS has been routinely silent when students have most needed support from institutions that claim to stand for equality, freedom of speech and anti-racism.
It adds:
An NUS that cannot protect its own President from the external pressures of groups who openly side with Apartheid is an NUS that has failed those who it seeks to represent.
The coalition invites student societies to sign the open letter in support of its statement urging the NUS to call off the investigation, saying:
We believe firmly in tackling all forms of discrimination and racism through a united front and call all student societies to support us in challenging an increased dependence on a culture of investigations and surveillance.
If the NUS seeks to live its anti-racist values, it must take a stand against Islamophobia, white supremacy, settler-colonialism, and apartheid, and also must support students who vocally defend Palestinians’ right to live free from Israeli occupation.
People are standing in solidarity with rapper Lowkey after he became the latest target for a pro-Israeli group. We Believe in Israel is trying to get the performer banned from Spotify.
But it isn’t going well for the pro-Zionist group, because people are showing they will not be silenced in their support for Lowkey and the Palestinian struggle.
Lowkey is a passionate and eloquent defender of Palestinian rights, and is well versed in the history of the region. This video shows him speaking at the Oxford Union in 2019:
“Let’s take a second to stop and rewind”
Spoken word artist Potent Whisper released a video about what’s happening with Lowkey. He sums up the situation:
This group of people are British based lobbyists. They use their influence to support Israel. Lowkey is a rapper who talks about the wrongs they do. He isn’t scared to speak about the things they won’t put on the news. Now they want to get revenge because he gets a lot of views. They want to lobby Spotify to try and get his songs removed.
He continues:
Israel drops bombs on streets but wants to call his songs extreme. I mean, I guess in a way you can kind of see why. Like if you were them, you’d be extremely worried. The people were exposing your killing of civilians – that’s why you spend so much on the MPs you lobby, so you can try legitimising killing Palestinians.
And as he asserts:
But ultimately what it comes down to is this: if they’re alleging that his music is violent, that defending Palestine is hateful incitement, they should have to prove it facts before they can remove his tracks. If they can’t, then it proves they just want him silenced.
Solidarity
Across Twitter, people have expressed their solidarity with Lowkey. Declassified’s Matt Kennard tweeted:
The apartheid regime’s counter-measures are increasingly desperate. They know the game is up.
Some folks are trying to have him removed because his art talks powerfully and frankly about the occupation of the Palestinian territories. https://t.co/ds7m4ShMgF
Ex-Labour MP Laura Pidcock also expressed her solidarity. It’s just a pity that solidarity didn’t come from current Labour MPs:
#Solidarity with @Lowkey0nline. His music continues to inspire thousands and thousands of people every day, awakening us to the system we live in – with his powerful lyrics and incredible talent.
Meanwhile Palestinian academic Shahd Abusalama, who recently won a massive victory after she was targeted by antisemitism smears at Sheffield Hallam University, tweeted her support:
And direct action campaign group Palestine Action highlighted the “time & dedication” Lowkey devotes to the “fight for an end to injustice”:
Lowkey rapped outside the now closed Israeli arms factory in Oldham, whilst we scaled the building. No other rapper puts in the time & dedication to fight for an end to injustice. Now it's time to reject the Israel lobby & stand with @Lowkey0nline! pic.twitter.com/Y47G1QQsOQ
Responding in Middle East Eyeto threats to ban his music, Lowkey stated:
This coordinated campaign is an extension of the brutalisation of the Palestinians. Palestinians are routinely arrested by Israel for posts on social media, even children. Dareen Tatour spent almost a year in occupation jail for posting a poem to her Facebook.
He continued:
Artists and musicians should never have to fear threats to their livelihood or person for the music they make. We will not be silenced on Palestine, not now, not ever.
The response on social media has shown that Lowkey is right. We will not be silenced. We will continue speaking out against the apartheid Israeli state. And we will unapologetically continue to defend the lives of Palestinian people.
A Fox News story (1/27/22) that used anti-Asian hate crimes to swipe at a favorite Fox target—a progressive DA—was accompanied by a video that put Fox‘s typical anti-China spin on a space story.
In crafting a landscape rife with danger and lawlessness, Rupert Murdoch–owned outlets drew upon a spike in hate crimes—specifically anti-Asian and antisemitic hate crimes—without taking responsibility for the xenophobia they’ve consistently peddled when it benefited their political agendas.
Fox News (1/27/22) in January reported that the Asian-American victim of a 2019 attack was suing San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin for mishandling his case, just one day before the San Francisco police department announced that hate crimes against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPI) were up 567% in the city in 2021 compared to the previous year. The story also mentioned a 60% increase in anti-Jewish hate crimes from 2020.
Early last month, Fox (2/2/22) reported on the arrest of a man suspected of spray painting swastikas on several Jewish schools and synagogues throughout Chicago. “The incidents came days after Holocaust Remembrance Day and as antisemitism is on the rise across the country,” the piece says. Another Fox headline (2/7/22) declared, “NYC Antisemitic Crimes Up Nearly 300% in January”; the story noted that “there were 15 hate crimes committed against Jewish people in January—a 275% increase compared to the four hate crimes recorded in January 2021.”
Meanwhile, Murdoch’s New York Post (1/21/22) published “NYC Hate-Crime Complaints Skyrocket, With Anti-Asian Attacks Up 343%.” Citing NYPD data, the article also noted that the largest portion of hate-crime complaints in the city in 2021 was for anti-Jewish incidents.
The Wall Street Journal (1/26/22), another Murdoch property, reported on an incident at a virtual meeting of National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum when a “Zoom bomber” hacked the group and projected anti-Asian images and audio onto the screen. “Major cities have reported an increase in hate crimes directed at Asian-Americans,” the article said, also citing the San Francisco and New York police department numbers.
Murdoch’s own outlets, however, often spread anti-Asian and antisemitic tropes, while taking no responsibility for the xenophobia that fuels these hate crimes in the first place.
Scapegoating China
The O’Reilly Factor‘s Jesse Watters (10/3/16) pretends to perform martial arts as part of a race-baiting report from New York’s Chinatown.
The rise in anti-AAPI violence is connected to both the rise of a new cold war with Beijing and the scapegoating of China for the Covid-19 pandemic (FAIR.org, 4/8/21, 7/29/21, 8/25/21), playing upon xenophobic stereotypes of Asians as disease-carriers (Salon, 2/6/20) and as robots brainwashed by their government.
Even in the years prior to the Covid outbreak, Fox News was spreading anti-Asian—particularly anti-Chinese—sentiment. In 2016, the Fox News segment Watters’ World (10/3/16) featured Fox personality Jesse Watters conducting on-the-street “interviews” with New York City Chinatown residents, ostensibly to mock them for their lack of knowledge regarding US/China relations as discussed in the 2016 presidential debates. From the “Kung Fu Fighting” background music, to Watters asking his sources if they knew karate (a Japanese martial art) and questioning whether their watches were stolen, the piece was five straight minutes of blatant racist stereotyping thinly veiled as cheap humor.
Like bullies in the lunchroom deriding another child’s food, Murdoch’s outlets employed the stereotype of Asian cuisine being unclean as a common—and juvenile—trope to scapegoat the Chinese for Covid. Watters’ anti-Chinese racism predictably ramped up at the start of the outbreak in 2020, when on Fox’s The Five (3/2/20), Watters asked for a “formal apology” from “the Chinese,” insisting Covid originated in China “because they have these markets where they are eating raw bats and snakes.” He linked the disgust such stories evoke to a red-baiting agenda:
They are a very hungry people. The Chinese Communist government cannot feed the people, and they are desperate. This food is uncooked. It’s unsafe, and that is why scientists believe that’s where it originated.
The New York Post (1/23/20) misidentifies a gross-out video as being taken “amid [the] coronavirus outbreak.”
“Revolting Video Shows Woman Devouring Bat Amid Coronavirus Outbreak,” read a January 2020 New York Post headline (1/23/20), linking a viral image of a woman eating a bat to the Covid outbreak. The article describes the clip as “gag-inducing,” explaining that “the deadly disease reportedly originated at Wuhan’s Huanan seafood market, which sold civets, snakes and other illegal exotic animals that had been infected by bats.” It didn’t matter that according to the woman in the video, it was filmed the summer prior to the outbreak, or that a second bat-soup video referenced in the Post article was apparently taken in Indonesia’s Palau, not China (France 24, 3/2/20).
The Wall Street Journal that condemned the rise in anti-AAPI hate crimes is the same paper that on multiple occasions has itself conflated Covid with China. In 2020, the Journal called China “the real sick man of Asia” (2/3/20), used what it called “the Communist coronavirus” to criticize China’s government (1/29/20), referred to the virus as the “Wuhan Coronavirus” (1/29/20) and falsely accused the Chinese government of stalling investigations into the evidence-free Wuhan lab leak theory (2/12/21, 5/23/21).
Normalizing anti-Jewish rhetoric
Murdoch’s outlets have also played a significant role in normalizing anti-Jewish rhetoric, despite their eager conflation of any criticism of the Israeli government with antisemitism. In 2012, Murdoch himself tweeted about purported irony of the “Jewish-owned press” being (in his mind) anti-Israel, evoking the antisemitic conspiracy theory that an elite Jewish cabal controls media (Extra!, 9–10/96).
Fox News blames the left and Palestinian solidarity for a spike in anti-Jewish hate crimes. “US Seeing Wave of ‘Textbook Antisemitism’ Amid Israel/Gaza Tensions,” warned one Fox headline (5/21/21). “The incidents fly in the face of those trying to distinguish between anti-Israel and antisemitic bromides,” the piece said.
Right-wing talkshow host Dennis Prager told Fox News (5/21/21) that the “Middle East dispute” is because “a big chunk of the Muslim world that would like to exterminate the Jewish state.”
Conservative radio host Dennis Prager joined Fox News Primetime (5/21/21) to discuss the rise in attacks:
This is not what the left wants you to believe. They want you to believe it’s over land. No, it’s not. There is a big chunk of the Muslim world that would like to exterminate the Jewish state beginning with, of course, Iran. That is why if you look at the rhetoric, it’s always “F the Jews,” “F the Jews” in all of these attacks. It’s never “F the Israelis.” It’s always “F the Jews.”
But attributing a rise in antisemitic hate crimes mainly to left-wing anti-Zionism is more politically useful than substantiated. Data from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) suggests the majority of antisemitic attacks come from white supremacist groups.
ADL’s most recent numbers are from 2019, during which there were 2,107 recorded attacks. There were 171 incidents in which attackers mentioned Israel or Zionism, and 68 of those were propaganda efforts by white supremacist groups (ADL, 2019). Out of 270 incidents carried out by known extremist groups, two-thirds of those groups were white supremacist.
Certainly, antisemitism does appear on the left as well as the right, and there are activists who shout “Free Palestine” and “Death to Jews” in the same breath, and use the word “Zionism” not as the name of an ideology but as a codeword for Jewishness. But Murdoch outlets consistently blur the line between criticizing Israel, or supporting Palestinian rights, and antisemitism. When Palestinian-American model Bella Hadid wore a necklace with the word “Palestine” on it, Fox (1/16/22) reported the model was accused of “perpetuating antisemitic tropes”—referring to a tweet Hadid had posted condemning “Israeli colonization, ethnic cleansing, military occupation and apartheid over the Palestinian people.”
‘A complicated web’
Fox News (12/14/21) took down a cartoon depicting George Soros as “the puppet master” behind progressive DAs and attorneys general after complaints that such imagery “contributes to the normalization of antisemitism.”
Murdoch outlets stop short of condemning antisemitism when it benefits their anti–police reform agendas. Blaming Jewish billionaire and philanthropist George Soros for the election of progressive “soft on crime” district attorneys throughout the country, they evoked images of a wealthy Jewish cabal pulling strings behind the scenes (FAIR.org, 1/14/22). “Soros Funnels Cash Through a Complicated Web,” explained a New York Post piece (12/16/21).
In late 2021, Fox removed a Soros “puppet master” cartoon from its social media after being called out for evoking antisemitic imagery (Ha’aretz, 12/16/21; FAIR.org1/14/22).
Fox star Tucker Carlson has also accused Soros of “waging a kind of war—political, social and demographic war—on the West,” in his recent documentary, Hungary vs. Soros: The Fight for Civilization (Fox News, 1/26/22).
In an interview with Watters about the documentary, Carlson said Soros is seeking to create a society that is “more dangerous, dirtier, less democratic, more disorganized, more at war with themselves, less cohesive” (Fox News, 1/25/22).
This anti-Soros rhetoric sounds eerily similar to that of Robert Bower, the Pittsburgh Tree of Life Synagogue shooting suspect who allegedly killed 11 people during Shabbat services in 2018. Bower (Washington Post, 10/28/18) once tweeted:
Jews are waging a propaganda war against Western civilization and it is so effective that we are headed towards certain extinction within the next 200 years and we’re not even aware of it.
Also a target of the “puppet master” trope: Michael Bloomberg. In 2020, Fox News anchor Raymond Arroyo described the billionaire and former New York City mayor, who is Jewish, as a “Biden puppet master” (Fox News, 3/5/20). The comments sparked backlash from the ADL, which contended that the use of the trope, even unintentionally, played a role in mainstreaming antisemitism.
‘Jews will not replace us’
Tucker Carlson (Fox News, 9/21/21) said Democrats want “to change the racial mix of the country”: “This policy is called ‘the great replacement,’ the replacement of legacy Americans with more obedient people from far-away countries” (Media Matters, 9/23/21).
In October, Jewish groups condemned Carlson’s defense of “Replacement Theory” (Daily Beast, 4/9/21)—the idea that immigrants and people of color are entering the US to reduce the political power of white Americans (Media Matters for America, 4/8/21; FAIR.org, 10/20/21). The theory is linked to antisemitism because it’s often claimed an elite Jewish cabal is leading the replacement. A popular conspiracy theory in 2018 claimed Soros himself was organizing the caravan of Central American migrants to the US border (Washington Post, 10/28/18).
Among Carlson’s fan-base are a group of neo-Nazis and white supremacists who attended the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, where “Jews will not replace us” was a prominent chant. Facing a lawsuit for taking part in the deadly demonstration while serving time in prison for an unrelated crime, neo-Nazi Christopher Cantwell reportedly watched Carlson with other white supremacists to prepare for the trial, according to a former inmate (BuzzFeed News, 10/28/21). Cantwell also mentioned Carlson in court documents, saying his trial was intended to silence white supremacists and those who agree with them, “even on peripheral issues.” He went on:
This is evidenced by the president of the United States, and the second most popular show in cable news (Tucker Carlson) being branded as “white nationalists” on account of sharing a small number of our views on the pressing issues of our time.
Neither Carlson nor Fox has commented on the neo-Nazi endorsement of the show.
Carlson has also downplayed the January 6 insurrection, whose participants included Holocaust deniers and neo-Nazis, asserting that it was not an act of terrorism (Fox News, 1/7/22). On hand for what Carlson (7/7/21) described as a “fake” insurrection “where elderly people showed up with signs on the Capitol” were Tim Gionet, a livestreamer known as Baked Alaska who has promoted antisemitic conspiracy theories online; the Nationalist Social Club neo-Nazi group; a man wearing a “Camp Auschwitz” sweatshirt; and another wearing a shirt reading “6MWE,” which stands for “6 million wasn’t enough.”
In 2021, Fox News commentator Lara Logan faced condemnation from Jewish advocacy groups for comparing Dr. Anthony Fauci to Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, who performed deadly pseudoscientific experiments on Auschwitz prisoners (Fox News, 11/30/21). “It is disrespectful to victims & a sad symptom of moral and intellectual decline,” tweeted the Auschwitz Museum in response. Neither Fox nor Logan apologized; in fact, Logan retweeted a defense of her comments.
The answer? More police
As FAIR (FAIR.org, 6/24/21; CounterSpin, 10/7/21) has reported in the past, using an uptick in certain crime categories to stoke fear of street crime allows corporate outlets to push a pro-police agenda, while blaming social justice, anti-police violence movements for crime.
In early February, Fox News (2/3/22) reported on President Joe Biden’s visit to New York City and rejection of calls to defund the police, citing the city’s rise in crimes, including hate crimes:
Hate crimes also surged 72% in New York City last month, driven mostly by a 275% increase in crimes against Jewish people.
It’s a trend that started last year, as hate crimes rose 96% in 2021 .
Framing the primary problem as crime and not hate allows hiring more police to be presented as the solution. And hate-mongering outlets like Fox News, the New York Post and Wall Street Journal don’t have to address their own antisemitism and anti-Asian racism.
Greek Orthodox Bishop Seraphim of Piraeus. Two activists were found to have falsely accused him of hate speech by a Greek court on Tuesday. Credit: Ewiki/Wikimedia Commons/ CC BY-SA 3.0
Several newspapers (here Anna Wichmann for GreekReporter of 16 February 2022) commented on the rather surprising ruling by a Greek court that two human rights activists falsely accused a Greek Orthodox bishop of hate speech and sentenced them to year-long prison sentences that were suspended for three years.
Bishop Seraphim, who is the Metropolitan of Piraeus, was acquitted on charges of hate speech. The bishop has made what many believe are both coded and explicit references to antisemitic tropes many times. For example when Greece introduced new legislation to expand rights for gay and lesbian couples in 2015, he claimed that an “international Zionist monster” was behind the bill.
He also claimed that Jews themselves funded and planned the Holocaust and charged that they were the reason for Greece’s financial troubles on Greek television five years ago. After his statement about the Holocaust began to garner controversy, the Greek Orthodox Bishop clarified that it was his own opinion and not that of the Greek Orthodox Church.
These comments were seen as extremely troubling in a country whose once vibrant Jewish community was nearly wiped out during the Holocaust, and antisemitic rhetoric and attacks, usually in the form of vandalism, are still a major problem.
The accused brought a formal complaint against the Bishop in 2017 in which they claimed he fueled hatred and incited violence against Greece’ Jewish minority with his inflammatory statements about Jews and the Holocaust. They also claimed that he had abused his office.
The prosecutor dismissed the activists’ complaint in 2019, but the Bishop decided to file his own motion against the activists for falsely accusing him of hate speech, and the prosecutor subsequently formally charged the accused in November.
Greece passed Law No. 4285/2014 in 2014, which criminalized hate speech — particularly speech which incites violence — and genocide denial. The law reads “Anyone, who publicly incites, provokes, or stirs, either orally or through the press, the Internet, or any other means, acts of violence or hatred against a person or group of persons or a member of such a group defined by reference to race, color, religion, descent or national or ethnic origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability, in a manner that endangers the public order and exposes the life, physical integrity, and freedom of persons defined above to danger, will be punished by imprisonment of from three months to three years and a fine of €5,000 to €20,000.”
Human rights groups around the world paid careful attention to the case; many believed that bringing the activists to trial alone was a sign of an alarming shift of the judicial system’s role in the country as a force against activists.
Amnesty International stated on social media that “The ruling poses a direct threat to the right to freedom of expression and has a chilling effect on human rights defenders advocating against racism and hate speech.”
Andrea Gilbert, one of the accused, who works for the Greek Helsinki Monitor rights group, expressed her outrage at the verdict to The Guardian: “Today’s outrageous verdict is representative of the institutionalized antisemitism that exists in Greece…We have immediately appealed and will fight it all the way.”
Activists and people who work for NGOs argue that the trial epitomizes how difficult it is for them to work in Greece.
“Human rights defenders (in Greece) are consistently targeted for their legitimate work…(They) face different types of attacks, including surveillance, judicial harassment, arbitrary arrests, detentions, ill-treatment, entry bans and expulsions,” the international secretariat of the World Organization Against Torture stated to The Guardian.
Although not included in the activists’ initial complaint of hate speech against Greek Orthodox Bishop Seraphim, he is also known to express what many believe are homophobic sentiments.
He has claimed that homosexuality brings about disease and can be “carcinogenic.” He has also called homosexuality an issue of “psychopathology” rather than sexuality.
In 2021, when Greece was hit with catastrophic wildfires that destroyed vast swaths of land and thousands of houses, Seraphim released a statement in which he hinted that the fires were a punishment for Greece adopting legislation that expanded the rights of gay people, writing:
“With love I would say to our leaders that when they show off the subversion of human ontology and human nature and institutionalize it as a “human right,” despite the fact that it doesn’t have any relationship with human nature, and they view it as a plus on their CV for advancement in their position of authority, they don’t understand that this is hubris, and each instance of hubris requires purification and ‘just repayment.’”
Human rights groups said the verdict was part of a troubling trend in Greece’s criminal justice system
An Athens court has handed two prominent human rights defenders prison sentences, suspended for three years, after finding the pair guilty of “falsely accusing” a Greek Orthodox bishop of racist hate speech.
The three-member tribunal sentenced the activists to 12-month jail terms after acquitting the bishop, Seraphim, the Metropolitan of Piraeus, of antisemitic rhetoric.
Palestinian academic Shahd Abusalama, a PhD student and associate lecturer at Sheffield Hallam University (SHU), was suspended from her role following accusations of antisemitism. However, Abusalama completely rejects these accusations and says they’re “malicious and motivated in bad faith”.
On 27 January, Abusalama said she’d been reinstated to her teaching – although she still hadn’t seen the allegations against her. She said:
I am accused of antisemitism. Because I dare to speak up against power, and I dare to demand freedom, justice, and equality for my people
She added that SHU announced an investigation without her knowledge. Moreover, she told The Canary she’s completely in the dark about the content and timeframe of this investigation.
So even if her reinstatement is welcome news, it’s certainly not the last we’ll hear of this. Because Abusalama demands people take action against censorship of Palestinian voices and against the university’s handling of this matter.
Censoring Palestinian “pro-justice” voices
Abusalama told The Canary she first became aware just before the 2021 Christmas break that something like this might happen. She said someone at the Jewish News contacted her for a statement claiming SHU was about to investigate her tweets for antisemitic content. The outlet published an article on it on 24 December 2021.
I was going to meet my students for a second time on Friday for my scheduled seminars… I received this sudden email from my university saying that I cannot resume teaching and that I’m under investigation following a complaint. Everything was vague. Nothing was mentioned of the nature of the complaint or why I was suspended. They also notified me that they would tell the students that my classes were cancelled until further notice.
Her suspension was compared to that of University of Bristol professor David Miller who was fired from his position in 2021. The case against him was also based on allegations of antisemitism in response to his academic work linking Zionism to Islamophobia. Miller said he was speaking out against anti-Muslim racism in the UK. While Miller was cleared of “anti-Jewish bigotry”, the university didn’t reinstate him.
Abusalama now wants people to write to the university to demand it drops its investigation. She also wants it to issue a public apology and ensure Palestinian justice activists are not subject to “malicious censorship” again:
I am reinstated, which shows how powerful our voices are when they are joined together. Yet, it's not over.
She additionally wants the university to drop its adoption of the IHRA definition of antisemitism. Because while this definition does apply to antisemitism and other forms of racism, it also conflates antisemitism with criticism of Israel.
Ignoring Israel’s crimes
Her suspension comes at a time when Israel continues to expel Palestinians from the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood in East Jerusalem. This is a move which a spokesperson for the UN high commissioner for Human Rights had previously said was “prohibited under international humanitarian law and may amount to a war crime”. It also comes at a time when Palestinians hold “Global Days of Action for Palestine”. On these days of action, Palestinians intensified:
protests against Israel’s dramatic escalation of violence and ethnic cleansing across Historic Palestine.
Abusalama spoke to The Canary at a protest in Sheffield in May 2021. She called on the world to act as Israel besieged Gaza. Israel bombed Gaza from land, sea, and air and killed over 130 Palestinians on that occasion, the majority of whom were civilians. She told The Canary:
Reporting from the ground what is happening, the repression of Israeli military and settler extremist groups is beyond description, and no one is safe in their homes. It is indiscriminate repression. …
The inherent recent racist character of the supremacist ideology of Zionism, that that is basically dictating the policies and practices of dehumanisation against the Palestinians.
We are counting one massacre after the other, one victim after the other. And it’s just non stop. And we don’t want more condemnation or declarations. We don’t want to hear calls for de-escalation. We want Israel to be held accountable. And it’s long overdue, that justice is served for the Palestinians. It is long overdue that Palestinian refugees like me, return to their home. It’s wrong; it’s morally disturbing that Jews anywhere in the world, in the US, can go and claim a right to return to Palestine when I, the indigenous people of Palestine, cannot return.
They allegedly targeted her
Abusalama believesJewish News, which she described as “Zionist press”, protested her appointment as associate lecturer at the university and could have targeted her. She also said:
that people who lead the campaign against antisemitism are also people who are chairs of the Jewish National Fund, who has been leading Zionist settler colonial expansion on our lands since early 20th century. And until now, they are contributing to the dispossession of the Palestinians in Jerusalem, in Hebron, in Beita… everywhere
She believes her case is part of a coordinated attempt by Zionist organisations to take down pro-Palestinian academics. She provided examples of this to The Canary.
These include an allegation that a criminal attorney in Vienna accused her of writing an antisemitic article in Al Jazeera. This was an attempt to damage her reputation and position at the University.
Then in August 2019, David Collier published a report called The Labour Party, obsession and radicalisation. The report included a case study on Sheffield. In that report, he accused Abusalama of spreading “hard-core antisemitism”. She also claims the Jewish Chronicle smeared her because of her 2019 Boycott Eurovision Campaign. That was the year the competition took place in Israel.
Additionally, she believes this campaign is part of a “historical pattern” where people prioritise the colonial narrative over the narrative of the colonised people. Moreover, she says the university has done nothing to protect her well-being, her rights, or her academic freedom. She says the university continues to:
engage with the Zionist press, confirming to them that they have adopted the political tool of the IHRA definition of antisemitism, while continuing to be dismissive of their own students’ education, my story and my life
The Canary contacted SHU for comment but received no response.
Solidarity with Shahd Abusalama
This is why, according to Abusalama, resistance against such attacks is crucial. There was an outpouring of support for Abusalama across social media and in public which she believes helped her in this struggle:
Palestinian academic at Sheffield Hallam University @ShahdAbusalama, who was suspended following a smear campaign by supporters of 'Israel', has been reinstated in her role, following protests over her suspension. (1/2)#InSupportOfShahdpic.twitter.com/n85Up00BGX
Abusalama said she’s very grateful for the support she has received so far. She says it’s “keeping me grounded and what is keeping me carrying on”. The “overwhelming” support has come from students, others at the university, her trade union, and people all over the world.
She also thanked “alternative press” for its support and for “shifting the narrative and [equalising] the gap in this power imbalance”. This latest alleged attempt by the Zionist lobby to silence criticism of Israel’s crimes is not going unanswered.
Prominent Jewish Labour members say their complaints about a centrist Labour MP’s antisemitic tweet is being stonewalled by the Labour Party. In July 2021, Neil Coyle MP approvingly quote-tweeted an article about four left-wing groups being purged by the party’s National Executive Council at the direction of Keir Starmer. Coyle said this didn’t go far enough, adding that 350 Jewish members of the Labour Party who are members of Jewish Voice for Labour are “Communists” and should also be expelled en masse from the Party.
Not far enough. JVL should be gone too. And other outright Communists who have their own political party/ies they can ruin. https://t.co/sLRk33dv17
The groups named in the article were Resist, Labour Against the Witchhunt, Labour In Exile and the Socialist Appeal. The Daily Mirrorarticle reported that members of these groups would be expelled from Labour if they were also members of the party.
Sir Geoffrey Bindman QC, Professor Avi Shlaim and Harold Immanuel lodged complaints with Labour in September 2021 about what they argue is a clearly antisemitic comment from Coyle. But the trio said that four months later nothing has come of their complaints despite the Labour Party’s obligations to complainants.
Bindman is a British solicitor specialising in human rights law. He founded the human rights law firm Bindmans LLP and served as Chair of the British Institute of Human Rights. Additionally, he is a visiting professor of law at University College London and London South Bank University.
Shlaim is an Oxford professor of history and author of several books on Israel and Palestine.
Judeo-Bolshevism
In his complaint, Harold Immanuel detailed Coyle’s tweet before stating:
I am a Jewish member of the Labour Party. His call for the mass expulsion of Jewish members of the Labour Party who are also part of JVL (Jewish Voice for Labour) is an antisemitic slur on Jewish members of the Party.
Immanuel highlighted the particular rule he claims Coyle broke:
It breaches Labour Party rule 2.1.8 which requires the NEC to regard any incident which in their view might reasonably be seen to demonstrate hostility or prejudice based on race religion or belief as conduct prejudicial to the Party. In my submission no other view is credible.
“Antisemitic lexicon”
Immanuel said that Coyle’s tweet drew on a long-standing antisemitic conspiracy theory that conflates communism, Judaism and other anti-Jewish tropes.
The antisemitic character of Mr Coyle’s tweet is reinforced by its identification of JVL members as “outright Communists”. As you know, this is a well authenticated antisemitic trope or slur rehearsing the myth of “Judaeo-Bolshevism” (Judaeo-Communism for the uninitiated) which dates at least from the Russian revolution of 1917 and has been a central part of the antisemitic lexicon ever since.
Oppression
Immanuel said this form of conspiracy theory went beyond simply framing Jews as part of a plutocratic (wealthy) plot by combining different anti-Jewish tropes. And that these became fundamental to the oppression suffered by Jews in the 20th Century:
It is not simply on a par with accusing Jews of being manipulative financiers and plutocrats but forms an equal part of the same conspiracy theory which is that Jews are both communists and plutocrats at the same time, two ways by which they seek a single objective of world domination. The trope played a fundamental role in the justification of the most murderous atrocities committed against Jews in the 20th century. In short, Mr Coyle’s tweet comes directly out of the world Jewish conspiracy playbook.
He did not find it credible that Coyle was unaware of the meaning and history of such language:
It is simply not credible that Mr Coyle didn’t know that calling for the mass expulsion of Jews is antisemitic; or that he didn’t know that calling for the mass expulsion of Jews by alleging that a whole group of them are communists is antisemitic; or that he didn’t know that calling for the mass expulsion of Jews because they are allegedly communists is a classic antisemitic trope.
Open and shut?
Professor Avi Shlaim’s complaint said this was a “crystal-clear” case of “racism”. He felt Coyle’s expulsion should follow as a result of the tweet. He said Coyle’s “diatribe against Jewish members” was “outrageous hate speech by any standards”:
This is surely an open and shut case of racism which calls for the severest censure. If this is not a crystal-clear case of racist antisemitism, I don’t know what is. Just compare what Mr Coyle said with the comments that led to Jeremy Corbyn’s suspension from the Labour Party. There is no comparison.
The only appropriate censure in my view is expulsion from the Labour Party.
Shlaim said that he was entitled to updates about the progress of his complaint:
Finally, as a victim of this complaint, I assert my right to updates on the progress of your investigation. Please note that data protection and confidentiality do not cancel this right.
He added that the comments were “disgustingly anti-semitic” and were the kind of thing said about Jews in Nazi Germany:
Mr Coyle’s call for the mass expulsion of all JVL members from the Labour Party is unmistakably, crudely, and disgustingly anti-semitic. By calling me and my JVL colleagues “outright Communist”, Mr Coyle adds insult to injury. This is the kind of thing that was said about Jews in Nazi Germany. It is shocking to hear it in this day and age and in the Labour Party of all places.
Procedural failures
The complainants say they have heard nothing back since they submitted. Harold Immanuel detailed what he felt were Labour’s failings in terms of their own complaints procedure. And he said that the Party claims it will keep complainants updated if they are the victims. And that matters will be dealt with “in a prompt, transparent and fair manner”.
Immanuel told The Canary:
Since none of us have heard anything in over four months, it follows that they have been neither prompt nor transparent. Nor, by any reasonable measure, have they been fair to the complainants.
The hope is that the Labour party will now take disciplinary action against Coyle. Then, maybe, this would be a step towards Labour becoming the safe, respectful place for Jewish members that the party claims it wants to be.
However, JVL Co-Chair Jenny Manson highlights a recent article by Rachel Reeves MP, Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer. In that article, according to Manson:
Reeves applauds the reduction in membership, including the many who have left horrified by the unjust investigation of false allegations of antisemitism; these investigations have involved at least 44 Jews. At the same time, a sitting Labour MP who has called for the expulsion of a Jewish organisation and has aligned Jews with communists, a long-standing and very threatening form of antisemitic abuse, has faced no action by the Party.
Neil Coyle MP and the Labour Party were contacted for comment but did not respond.
Prominent Jewish Labour members say their complaints about a centrist Labour MP’s antisemitic tweet is being stonewalled by the Labour Party. In July 2021, Neil Coyle MP approvingly quote-tweeted an article about four left-wing groups being purged by the party’s National Executive Council at the direction of Keir Starmer. Coyle said this didn’t go far enough, adding that 350 Jewish members of the Labour Party who are members of Jewish Voice for Labour are “Communists” and should also be expelled en masse from the Party.
Not far enough. JVL should be gone too. And other outright Communists who have their own political party/ies they can ruin. https://t.co/sLRk33dv17
The groups named in the article were Resist, Labour Against the Witchhunt, Labour In Exile and the Socialist Appeal. The Daily Mirrorarticle reported that members of these groups would be expelled from Labour if they were also members of the party.
Sir Geoffrey Bindman QC, Professor Avi Shlaim and Harold Immanuel lodged complaints with Labour in September 2021 about what they argue is a clearly antisemitic comment from Coyle. But the trio said that four months later nothing has come of their complaints despite the Labour Party’s obligations to complainants.
Bindman is a British solicitor specialising in human rights law. He founded the human rights law firm Bindmans LLP and served as Chair of the British Institute of Human Rights. Additionally, he is a visiting professor of law at University College London and London South Bank University.
Shlaim is an Oxford professor of history and author of several books on Israel and Palestine.
Judeo-Bolshevism
In his complaint, Harold Immanuel detailed Coyle’s tweet before stating:
I am a Jewish member of the Labour Party. His call for the mass expulsion of Jewish members of the Labour Party who are also part of JVL (Jewish Voice for Labour) is an antisemitic slur on Jewish members of the Party.
Immanuel highlighted the particular rule he claims Coyle broke:
It breaches Labour Party rule 2.1.8 which requires the NEC to regard any incident which in their view might reasonably be seen to demonstrate hostility or prejudice based on race religion or belief as conduct prejudicial to the Party. In my submission no other view is credible.
“Antisemitic lexicon”
Immanuel said that Coyle’s tweet drew on a long-standing antisemitic conspiracy theory that conflates communism, Judaism and other anti-Jewish tropes.
The antisemitic character of Mr Coyle’s tweet is reinforced by its identification of JVL members as “outright Communists”. As you know, this is a well authenticated antisemitic trope or slur rehearsing the myth of “Judaeo-Bolshevism” (Judaeo-Communism for the uninitiated) which dates at least from the Russian revolution of 1917 and has been a central part of the antisemitic lexicon ever since.
Oppression
Immanuel said this form of conspiracy theory went beyond simply framing Jews as part of a plutocratic (wealthy) plot by combining different anti-Jewish tropes. And that these became fundamental to the oppression suffered by Jews in the 20th Century:
It is not simply on a par with accusing Jews of being manipulative financiers and plutocrats but forms an equal part of the same conspiracy theory which is that Jews are both communists and plutocrats at the same time, two ways by which they seek a single objective of world domination. The trope played a fundamental role in the justification of the most murderous atrocities committed against Jews in the 20th century. In short, Mr Coyle’s tweet comes directly out of the world Jewish conspiracy playbook.
He did not find it credible that Coyle was unaware of the meaning and history of such language:
It is simply not credible that Mr Coyle didn’t know that calling for the mass expulsion of Jews is antisemitic; or that he didn’t know that calling for the mass expulsion of Jews by alleging that a whole group of them are communists is antisemitic; or that he didn’t know that calling for the mass expulsion of Jews because they are allegedly communists is a classic antisemitic trope.
Open and shut?
Professor Avi Shlaim’s complaint said this was a “crystal-clear” case of “racism”. He felt Coyle’s expulsion should follow as a result of the tweet. He said Coyle’s “diatribe against Jewish members” was “outrageous hate speech by any standards”:
This is surely an open and shut case of racism which calls for the severest censure. If this is not a crystal-clear case of racist antisemitism, I don’t know what is. Just compare what Mr Coyle said with the comments that led to Jeremy Corbyn’s suspension from the Labour Party. There is no comparison.
The only appropriate censure in my view is expulsion from the Labour Party.
Shlaim said that he was entitled to updates about the progress of his complaint:
Finally, as a victim of this complaint, I assert my right to updates on the progress of your investigation. Please note that data protection and confidentiality do not cancel this right.
He added that the comments were “disgustingly anti-semitic” and were the kind of thing said about Jews in Nazi Germany:
Mr Coyle’s call for the mass expulsion of all JVL members from the Labour Party is unmistakably, crudely, and disgustingly anti-semitic. By calling me and my JVL colleagues “outright Communist”, Mr Coyle adds insult to injury. This is the kind of thing that was said about Jews in Nazi Germany. It is shocking to hear it in this day and age and in the Labour Party of all places.
Procedural failures
The complainants say they have heard nothing back since they submitted. Harold Immanuel detailed what he felt were Labour’s failings in terms of their own complaints procedure. And he said that the Party claims it will keep complainants updated if they are the victims. And that matters will be dealt with “in a prompt, transparent and fair manner”.
Immanuel told The Canary:
Since none of us have heard anything in over four months, it follows that they have been neither prompt nor transparent. Nor, by any reasonable measure, have they been fair to the complainants.
The hope is that the Labour party will now take disciplinary action against Coyle. Then, maybe, this would be a step towards Labour becoming the safe, respectful place for Jewish members that the party claims it wants to be.
However, JVL Co-Chair Jenny Manson highlights a recent article by Rachel Reeves MP, Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer. In that article, according to Manson:
Reeves applauds the reduction in membership, including the many who have left horrified by the unjust investigation of false allegations of antisemitism; these investigations have involved at least 44 Jews. At the same time, a sitting Labour MP who has called for the expulsion of a Jewish organisation and has aligned Jews with communists, a long-standing and very threatening form of antisemitic abuse, has faced no action by the Party.
Neil Coyle MP and the Labour Party were contacted for comment but did not respond.
The centrists are at it again! Right-wing Labour MPs love twisting the findings of a key report on antisemitism in the Labour Party. This time it was Rachel Reeves, during an interview on the BBC. The main discussion was the arrival in Labour of Tory defector Christian Wakeford MP.
For some, a Tory joining your party might cause concern. Not Reeves though – she was “pleased” that Conservatives were joining Labour. She was then challenged on why an actual Tory was allowed in to Labour when former leader Jeremy Corbyn wasn’t.
A flustered Reeves said:
It’s very clear what Jeremy Corbyn needs to do. He needs to apologise for his response to the [EHRC] on the Labour Party, which found institutional antisemitism and mistakes made under his leadership.
The facts
Corbyn is not currently allowed to serve as a Labour MP. His suspension followed a statement he made after a major report on antisemitism in Labour was published:
One antisemite is one too many, but the scale of the problem was also dramatically overstated for political reasons by our opponents inside and outside the party, as well as by much of the media. That combination hurt Jewish people and must never be repeated.
To many people this is stating the obvious. But Keir Starmer quickly suspended Corbyn. Many feel this move was less about antisemitism and more about purging the Labour left’s figurehead.
“Flat-out lying”
One twitter user tweeted the exchange. They accused Reeves of “flat-out lying” to distract from letting a literal Tory into the party:
Nothing says 'I take antisemitism seriously' like flat-out lying about the EHRC report to get around awkward questions about why Labour is welcoming a racist Tory, huh @RachelReevesMP ? pic.twitter.com/COsIq2lpzR
The findings of the Equalities and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) report are hotly debated. And Reeves’ claim drew immediate criticism on social media.
Incorrect
Some people accused Reeves of vastly exaggerating “the scale of antisemitism for political purposes”:
By falsely claiming the EHRC found Labour guilty of "institutional antisemitism" and implying 200,000 former Labour Party members are "antisemitic", Rachel Reeves has proved Jeremy Corbyn 100% correct.
She's massively exaggerated the scale of antisemitism for political reasons.
— Frank Owen's Legendary Paintbrush (@WarmongerHodges) January 20, 2022
As someone pointed out, Reeves once highlighted the first woman MP Mary Astor’s political successes without once mentioning her rabid antisemitism In fact, as The Canaryreported previously, many centrist figures lauded Astor despite her well-documented far-right political views:
Rachel Reeves who gave a glowing endorsement of known antisemite Nancy Astor lied this morning on R4 and claimed that EHRC found Labour institutionally antisemitic under Corbyn’s leadership. They did not. LIE. Meanwhile Starmer has suspended more Jews than any leader in history
But despite its 17-month investigation, the EHRC failed to find Labour guilty of “institutional anti-Semitism,” despite being asked to do so by two pro-Israel groups – the “Campaign Against Antisemitism” and the Jewish Labour Movement.
But the bigger issue in Reeves weaponising the report in this way is the serious shortcomings with the report in its methods and motivations.
As The Canary’s Emily Apple wrote in October 2020,
Any and all allegations of antisemitism must be taken seriously. And if the Labour Party is responsible for “harassment and discrimination” then this must be addressed. But here’s where there’s a fatal flaw. Because the report includes, quite rightly, “using antisemitic tropes” as an issue. But it then adds “suggesting that complaints of antisemitism were fake or smears” as an issue in its own right.
And she added:
This is hugely problematic and a massive Catch-22
Accepted uncritically
She explains many of the other key issues with the report. And she argues that with Corbyn’s suspension:
any whiff of this critical evaluation has been drowned out. The report’s headline findings are accepted uncritically and broadcast as fact, without nuance and closer examination. It’s marred by interference from the very lobby that the report says is antisemitic to accuse of involvement. This argument wouldn’t stand if the report had evidenced other examples of antisemitic behaviour. But it doesn’t.
And this is the key point. There seems to be no space, or effort, to evaluate the EHRC report or its outcomes. The truth is this lack of critical thought does nothing to fight the very real threat of antisemitism. And it’s high time Labour MPs stopped weaponising the EHRC report for their own goals.
As The Canaryextensivelyreported during Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party, figures from the Conservative Party, the Labour right, and the establishment media orchestrated a transparently politically-motivated smear campaign against him. Their weapon of choice was employing a litany of bogus accusations of antisemitism to paint the lifelong anti-racism campaigner as some kind of bigot.
The purpose of the campaign was straightforward – they sought to derail his chances of becoming prime minister and distract attention from his (widely popular) policy proposals. Their motive was equally straightforward – they rightly feared the threat that a Corbyn-led government would pose to the status quo and their own political and economic interests. Now, one of the major players in this campaign has admitted that its whole underlying premise was false all along.
From name-calling to contorted attempts to tar by association
Canary readers will hardly need reminding that Corbyn’s time as leader as of the Labour Party saw him and his supporters come under a relentless attack from all the usual suspects. This included all the predictable childish name-calling about Corbyn belonging to the so-called ‘loony left’, taking part in ‘student union‘ politics, and acting like an ‘armchair revolutionary‘. It also involved desperate attempts to tie him to controversial organisations such as Hamas and the Irish Republican Army (IRA).
All of these smears were transparently preposterous and easy to debunk. But they nonetheless pail in comparison to the prime weapon used to besmirch him. Namely, political opponents latched on to a tried and trusted tactic for attacking friends of the Palestinian people – the risible notion that those who criticize Israel’s human rights abuses are usually motivated by hatred of Jews.
As would be expected, the right-wing gutter tabloid press played a leading role in utilizing this false premise to smear Corbyn. Again, these attempts, from the wreath laying controversy to the ‘muralgate‘ scandal (which even the nominally progressive Guardianjoined in on), have been roundlydebunked by journalists and scholars. But nonetheless, the antisemitism smear campaign has continued apace and, indeed, morphed into an all-encompassing attempt to attack anyone on the left more broadly.
A stunning admission
But now, in early 2022, over two years since the peddlers of the campaign succeeded in derailing Corbyn’s chances of becoming prime minister, one of the most flagrantoffenders of all has now essentially admitted that the whole thing was a farce all along. Astonishingly, during a radio broadcast of BBC 5 Live, presenter Rachel Burden said matter-of-factly:
there is absolutely no evidence that the leader of the Labour Party at that time [in 2019], Jeremy Corbyn, was or is antisemitic.
Burden made the comments to clarify some of the comments made during an interview early in the show with the Conservative Party donor and ‘Phones4U’ billionaire John Caudwell. She acknowledged that Cauldwell had described Corbyn “as being an antisemite and a Marxist.” She added:
I redirected him back on to the conversation, which was all about Boris Johnson. That’s what I wanted him to talk about. But I should have challenged him on the particular allegation of antisemite [sic].
She reiterated:
I apologize for not challenging that more directly, should have done, and I want to emphasize there is no evidence for that at all.
An allegation that’s absurd to its core
Burden’s apology should be welcomed (though it’s all rather a case of ‘too little, too late’). But the bigger point is that this admission exposes how the central underlying premise behind the smear campaign as a whole is, and always has been, completely false. As The Canary has argued on many occasions, the idea that most or even many critics of Israel are antisemitic is patently absurd. Indeed, many of Israel’s fiercest critics are themselves Jewish. This includes political scientist and expert on the conflict in Palestine Norman Finkelstein, who is himself not only Jewish but the son of Holocaust survivors, and Israeli historian Ilan Pappé, whose father fled from Nazi occupied Europe to Palestine.
Finkelstein explained to The Canary during an exclusive interview how the British ruling establishment cynically and enthusiastically went along with, and indeed actively participated in, the antisemitism smear campaign because they had a common enemy in the form of Jeremy Corbyn. He said:
The British elites suddenly discovered ‘we can use the antisemitism card in order to try to stifle genuine… leftist insurgencies among the population’. And so what used to be a kind of sectarian issue waged by Jewish organisations faithful to the party line emanating from Israel vs critics of Israel, now it’s no longer sectarian because the whole British elite has decided they’re going to use this antisemitism card to stop Jeremy Corbyn and the political insurgency he represents.
Finkelstein went on to liken the smear campaign against Corbyn to the Salem Witch Hunts. He said:
Except when you take the classic examples, the anti-communist hysteria, the Salem Witch Hunt hysteria, you really can’t come up with parallels.
Another shot at Number 10?
Such an admission from the BBC demonstrates perhaps better than anything else just how cynical the smear campaign was all along. It also raises some serious questions about the legitimacy of the outcome of the 2019 general election, and, indeed, the legitimacy of British democracy more broadly. After all, if one party leader was getting constantly attacked with false allegations then he can hardly be characterized as having had a fair shake at striving for the UK’s top job.
This raises the question of whether Corbyn should be given another shot. And it seems that many in the public now think so. According to one poll, reported in the Express of all places, “Jeremy Corbyn is the preferred choice of Red Wall voters for Labour leader if Sir Keir Starmer was to step down.” Though Starmer’s position seems to have been saved for the time being by improved polling for Labour (likely due mostly to increasing dissatisfaction with the Tories), this might not even end up mattering.
There are rumors swirling around social media that Corbyn might be on the brink of establishing a new party. This, of course, would free him from the ossified internal structures of the Labour Party, not to mention the constant backstabbing from the Labour right he experienced as leader. Perhaps there will soon be an opportunity to challenge the status quo and bring about radical change once more.
Alexander Vindman (New York Times, 12/10/21): “A prosperous Ukraine buttressed by American support” could persuade Russians “to eventually demand their own framework for democratic transition”—i.e., regime change.
With the United States and Russia in a standoff over NATO expansion and Russian troop deployments along the Ukrainian border, US corporate media outlets are demanding that Washington escalate the risk of a broader war while misleading their audiences about important aspects of the conflict.
Many in the commentariat called on the US to take steps that would increase the likelihood of war. In the New York Times (12/10/21), retired US Army Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman wrote that “the United States must support Ukraine by providing more extensive military assistance.” He argued that “the United States should consider an out-of-cycle, division-level military deployment to Eastern Europe to reassure allies and bolster the defenses of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization,” even while calling for a strategy that “avoids crossing into military adventurism.” He went on to say that “the United States has to be more assertive in the region.”
Yet the US has been plenty “assertive in the region,” where, incidentally, America is not located. In 2014, the US supported anti-government protests in Ukraine that led to the ouster of democratically elected, Russia-aligned Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych (Foreign Policy, 3/4/14). Russia sent its armed forces into the Crimea, annexed the territory, and backed armed groups in eastern Ukraine.
Since then, the US has given Ukraine $2.5 billion in military aid, including Javelin anti-tank missiles (Politico, 6/18/21). The US government has applied sanctions to Russia that, according to an International Monetary Fund estimate, cost Russia about 0.2 percentage points of GDP every year between 2014 and 2018 (Reuters, 4/16/21).
Furthermore, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)—a US-led military alliance hostile to Russia—has grown by 14 countries since the end of the Cold War. NATO expanded right up to Russia’s border in 2004, in violation of the promises made by the elder George Bush and Bill Clinton to Russian leaders Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin (Jacobin, 7/16/18).
“Russia has shown its intent to violate its international commitments by demanding NATO cease expanding,” Rob Portman and Jeanne Shaheen argue in the Washington Post (12/24/21)—ignoring the US’s violated commitment to not expand NATO eastward.
In the Washington Post (12/24/21), Republican Sen. Rob Portman and Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen jointly contended in Orwellian fashion that the Biden administration should take “military measures that would strengthen a diplomatic approach and give it greater credibility.” They wrote that “the United States must speed up the pace of assistance and provide antiaircraft, antitank and anti-ship systems, along with electronic warfare capabilities.” The authors claimed that these actions “will help ensure a free and stable Europe,” though it’s easy to imagine how such steps could instead lead to a war-ravaged Europe, or at least a tension-plagued one.
Indeed, US “military measures” have tended to increase, rather than decrease, the temperature. Last summer, the US and Ukraine led multinational naval maneuvers held in the Black Sea, an annual undertaking called Sea Breeze. The US-financed exercises were the largest in decades, involving 32 ships, 40 aircraft and helicopters, and 5,000 soldiers from 24 countries (Deutsche Welle, 6/29/21). These steps didn’t create a “stable Europe”: Russia conducted a series of parallel drills in the Black Sea and southwestern Russia (AP, 7/10/21), and would go on to amass troops along the Ukrainian border.
Afghan precedent
Max Boot (Washington Post, 12/15/21) suggests the US should point out to Russia “that Ukraine shares a lengthy border—nearly 900 miles in total—with NATO members Romania, Slovakia, Hungary and Poland.” Pretty sure they’re aware of that, Max.
Preventing Russia from attacking will require a more credible military deterrent. President Biden has ruled out unilaterally sending US combat troops to Ukraine, which would be the strongest deterrent. But he can still do more to help the Ukrainians defend themselves.
The United States has already delivered more than $2.5 billion in security assistance to Ukraine since 2014, with $450 million of that coming this year. There are also roughly 150 US troops in Ukraine training its armed forces.
But Ukraine is asking for more military aid, and we should deliver it. NBC News reports that “Ukraine has asked for air defense systems, anti-ship missiles, more Javelin antitank missiles, electronic jamming gear, radar systems, ammunition, upgraded artillery munitions and medical supplies.” The Defense Department could begin airlifting these defensive systems and supplies to Kyiv tomorrow.
Later in the article, Boot contended that the US should help prepare Ukraine to carry out an armed insurgency in case Russia intensifies its involvement in Ukraine. He said that “outside support” is “usually the key determinant of the success or failure of an insurgency”: Because of aid from the US and its allies, he noted, the mujahedeen in Afghanistan “were able to drive out the Red Army with heavy casualties.” Amazingly, Boot said nothing about the many alumni of the mujahedeen in Afghanistan who joined the Taliban and al-Qaeda (Jacobin, 9/11/21).
That it might be possible to reach an agreement in which Ukraine remains neutral between NATO and Russia (Responsible Statecraft, 1/3/22) is not the sort of possibility that Boot thinks is worth exploring. He apparently would prefer to dramatically increase the danger of armed conflict between two nuclear powers.
Whitewashing Nazis
The Nation (5/6/21): “Glorification of Nazi collaborators and Holocaust perpetrators isn’t a glitch but a feature of today’s Ukraine.”
US media should present Americans with a complete picture of Ukraine/Russia so that Americans can assess how much and what kind of support, if any, they want their government to continue providing to Ukraine’s. Such a comprehensive view would undoubtedly include an account of the Ukrainian state’s political orientation. Lev Golinkin in The Nation (5/6/21) outlined one of the Ukrainian government’s noteworthy tendencies:
Shortly after the Maidan uprising of 2013 to 2014 brought in a new government, Ukraine began whitewashing Nazi collaborators on a statewide level. In 2015, Kyiv passed legislation declaring two WWII-era paramilitaries—the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA)—heroes and freedom fighters, and threatening legal action against anyone denying their status. The OUN was allied with the Nazis and participated in the Holocaust; the UPA murdered thousands of Jews and 70,000–100,000 Poles on their own accord.
Every January 1, Kyiv hosts a torchlight march in which thousands honor Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera, who headed an OUN faction; in 2017, chants of “Jews Out!” rang out during the march. Such processions (often redolent withantisemitism) are a staple in Ukraine….
Ukraine’s total number of monuments to Third Reich collaborators who served in auxiliary police battalions and other units responsible for the Holocaust number in the several hundred. The whitewashing also extends to official book bans and citywide veneration of collaborators.
The typical reaction to this in the West is that Ukraine can’t be celebrating Nazi collaborators because it elected [Volodymyr] Zelensky, a Jewish president. Zelensky, however, has alternated between appeasing and ignoring the whitewashing: In 2018, he stated, “To some Ukrainians, [Nazi collaborator] Bandera is a hero, and that’s cool!”
Furthermore, according to a George Washington University study, members of the far-right group Centuria are in the Ukrainian military, and Centuria’s social media accounts show these soldiers giving Nazi salutes, encouraging white nationalism and praising members of Nazi SS units (Ottawa Citizen, 10/19/21). Centuria leaders have ties to the Azov movement, which “has attacked anti-fascist demonstrations, city council meetings, media outlets, art exhibitions, foreign students, the LGBTQ2S+ community and Roma people”: the Azov movement’s militia has been incorporated in the Ukrainian National Guard (CTV News, 10/20/21). Azov, the UN has documented, has carried out torture and rape.
Absent information
The fact that that Ukraine’s government and armed forces include a Nazi-sympathizing current surely would have an impact on US public opinion—if the public knew about it. However, this information has been entirely absent in recent editions of the New York Times and Washington Post.
From December 6, 2021, to January 6, 2022, the Times published 228 articles that refer to Ukraine, nine of which contain some variation on the word “Nazi.” Zero percent of these note Ukrainian government apologia for Nazis or the presence of pro-Nazi elements in Ukraine’s armed forces. One report (12/21/21) said:
On Russian state television, the narrative of a Ukraine controlled by neo-Nazis and used as a staging ground for Western aggression has been a common trope since the pro-Western revolution in Kyiv in 2014.
Nothing in the article indicates that while “controlled” may be a stretch, the Ukrainian government officially honors Nazi collaborators. That doesn’t mean Russia has the right attack Ukraine, but US media should inform Americans about whom their tax dollars are arming.
In the same period, the Post ran 201 pieces that mention the word “Ukraine.” Of these, six mention the word “Nazi,” none of them to point out that the Ukrainian state has venerated Holocaust participants, or that there are Nazis in the Ukrainian military. Max Boot (1/5/22) and Robyn Dixon (12/11/21), in fact, dismissed this fact as mere Russian propaganda. In Boot’s earlier Ukraine piece (12/15/21), he acknowledged that the UPA collaborated with the Nazis and killed thousands of Polish people, but his article nevertheless suggested that the UPA offer a useful model for how Ukrainians could resist a Russian invasion, asserting that “all is not lost” in case of a Russian invasion, because “Ukrainian patriots could fight as guerrillas against Russian occupiers”:
They have done it before. The Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) was formed in 1942 to fight for that country’s independence. Initially, it cooperated with Nazi invaders but later fought against them. When the Red Army marched back into Ukraine in 1943, the UPA resisted. The guerrillas carried out thousands of attacks and inflicted thousands of casualties on Soviet forces while also massacring and ethnically cleansing the Polish population in western Ukraine. The UPA continued fighting until the 1950s, forcing Moscow to mobilize tens of thousands of troops and secret policemen to restore control.
“All is not lost,” for Boot, though the lives of thousands of Poles and Jews were, the latter of whom he didn’t bother to mention. Calling the perpetrators of such atrocities “Ukrainian patriots” is a grotesque euphemism that, first and foremost, spits on the victims, and also insults non-racist Ukrainians. After a two-paragraph interval, Boot wrote that
the Ukrainian government needs to start distributing weapons now and, with the help of US and other Western military advisers, training personnel to carry out guerrilla warfare. Volodymyr Zelensky’s government should even prepare supply depots, tunnels and bunkers in wooded areas, and in particular in the Carpathian Mountains, a UPA stronghold in the 1940s.
Evidently neither the UPA’s precedent of fascist massacres, nor the presence of similarly oriented groups in contemporary Ukraine’s armed forces and society, give Boot pause. He’d rather the US continue flooding the country with weapons; the consequences aren’t a concern of Boot’s.
Readers seeking riotous calls to violence in Eastern Europe should turn to the Times and the Post, but those who are interested in a thoroughgoing portrait will be disappointed.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who took office January 1, wasted no time getting in the headlines, telling his prosecutors (New York Times, 1/6/22) that they should seek “jail or prison time only for the most serious offenses—including murder, sexual assault and economic crimes involving vast sums of money.” He also told them to “avoid seeking jail time for…certain robberies and assaults, as well as gun possession” if “no other crimes are involved.”
Criminal justice reform advocates see this move as a victory. Calling it a “balanced approach,” Allen Roskoff, president of a progressive New York City LGBTQ Democratic club, said in a statement that the “LGBTQ community, especially Black and brown queer people, have suffered much of the brunt of over-policing for minor crimes,” as well as “under-protection from serious offenses.”
Bragg and his directives are part of a national movement of progressive DAs—including San Francisco’s Chesa Boudin and Philadelphia’s Larry Kushner—who seek alternatives to incarceration, a less-radical sister movement to prison abolitionism, reducing the carceral state’s role in the criminal justice system through electoral reformism. That’s why Rupert Murdoch’s biggest outlets, whose bread and butter is scaremongering reports on crime, have spent the beginning of 2022 on a full-scale attack against Bragg’s directives.
‘Decade of the criminal’
Joseph Giacalone (New York Post, 1/9/22) on Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg: “What he has done is invite all sorts of criminals from the outer boroughs to join in on the mayhem.”
Murdoch’s New York Post (1/9/22) said the move, along with bail reform and limiting the prosecution of children as adults, welcomed in “the decade of the criminal.” The Post highlighted negative comments about Bragg from big business (1/10/22), the twice-ousted former NYPD commissioner Bill Bratton (who blamed Bragg’s election on Jewish billionaire George Soros—1/9/22), Republican gubernatorial wannabes (1/10/22) and the city’s sergeants union (1/8/22), which has a long history of corruption (ProPublica, 12/14/21) and racism (Daily News, 6/4/21). The paper (1/9/22) blasted Bragg for even responding to the criticism against him, stressing that the city’s four other DAs aren’t following Bragg’s path.
The Post’s most comical display of this theme was a major news story (1/12/22) about GOP gubernatorial candidate Andrew Giuliani and Guardian Angels founder (and recent Republican mayoral candidate) Curtis Sliwa’s petition to recall Bragg. The Post admits that “New York does not have a recall provision for voters to remove an elected official before their scheduled re-election,” and that the online petition had less than 2,000 signatures, giving the effort’s success a snowball’s chance in Hell. But the Post’s insistence on giving such a non-news story prime coverage is a testament to how big a priority Bragg is to the editors.
The Wall Street Journal (1/6/22), also Murdoch-owned, said Bragg was getting in the way of the tough-on-crime agenda of new NYC Mayor Eric Adams, a former NYPD captain, by “instructing prosecutors not to do their jobs.” Murdoch’s cable news outlet, Fox News, said he was “bringing disorder to the halls of justice” (1/5/22) and, like the Post, featured criticism from the police and business (1/6/22), and had former congressmember and federal prosecutor Trey Gowdy calling Bragg’s reform “dangerously stupid” (1/10/22).
Other targets of scorn
Michael Shellenberger (Wall Street Journal, 11/26/21 )claims that San Francisco has seen “an increase in crime so sharp that San Francisco’s liberal residents are now paying for private security guards.”
The firestorm from Murdoch-owned outlets might seem overblown for one memo from one of a city’s five chief prosecutors. But the Manhattan DA is seen as a national trendsetter, and his policy directive falls in line with both Boudin and Krasner, two DAs the Murdoch empire has also piled scorn upon.
The Journal (11/12/19) mocked “revolutionary San Francisco” for choosing Boudin, whom the editorial board saw as an advocate for urban decay. The paper (11/26/21) promoted the current recall campaign against him, a movement being bankrolled largely by a single Silicon Valley capitalist (San Francisco Chronicle, 3/25/21). The Journal (12/22/21) cited the December robbery of a man’s watch as summing up the holiday season in Krasner’s Philadelphia, and Fox News (12/7/21) sought out former Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter, a conservative Democrat who accused the “Soros-funded DA” of “white wokeness” and “white privilege.”
The right and its chief corporate media partner, Murdoch, have reason to be worried about public opinion these days, because Bragg, Boudin and Krasner are not alone. While democratic socialist Tiffany Cabán did not win the Democratic primary for Queens DA, she did come close (New York Times, 7/29/19), and thus has continued to be a so-called pro-crime punching bag for the New York Post (9/1/21, 10/23/21) now that she is a member of the city council.
And polling shows that while the “defund the police” movement is still in the minority (USA Today, 3/7/21), ideas about gradual reforms of the prison and criminal justice system are gaining popularity (Pew, 10/21/16; Gallup, 11/16/20). Last year, the Austin, Texas DA made waves for his tough policies—not against petty criminals, but against cops, as his office has “obtained indictments of five Austin police officers, two county deputies, an assistant county attorney and a sheriff, on charges including tampering with evidence and murder” (Washington Post, 12/17/21).
Familiar themes
The Murdoch propaganda against reformist DAs these days usually draws on some familiar themes. One theme is the one-sided commentary from police brass, police unions and opposing political forces who are obligated to be critical of a serving Democrat, while the groups that brought these DAs to power and criminal justice reform advocates are absent. Another is the idea that Manhattan and San Francisco, some of the most expensive housing markets in the country and home to a vast concentration of wealth, have become dystopian crime dens.
But this doesn’t match the data. New York City’s own reporting shows that felony rates in every category have steadily decreased since 2000. In San Francisco, the felony rate for most categories has remained on a steady flat trajectory since 2010, the exception being larceny theft, which increased during the pandemic, but is still far below its 2017 peak.
Since Chesa Boudin became San Francisco’s DA in January 2020, violent crime in the city has actually dropped sharply.
Another troubling feature is the obsession with Soros; Nutter in the Fox piece and Bratton in the Post piece both invoke Soros as a funder, and thus responsible for DAs like Krasner and Bragg. Fox recently “deleted its social-media posts portraying [Soros] as a ‘puppet master’—a common antisemitic trope” (Daily Beast, 12/15/21). Even the pro-business Forbes (9/12/20) said, “There is a troubling and undeniable truth about the constant attacks on George Soros: antisemitism.” In short, Soros has become a modern day symbol of the Jewish cabal, like the Rothschild family once did.
New York Post (12/16/21): George Soros ” funnels cash through a complicated web.”
In context, these comments add to the shopworn narrative that a shadow Jewish banking cabal is conspiring to unravel white Christian society from the inside. During the Black Lives Matter uprising of the summer of 2020, some right-wing pro-police partisans went so far as saying Soros was monetarily fueling the unrest (Reuters, 9/29/20). Tying Soros to progressive prosecution is the logical next step in that narrative.
This isn’t a dog whistle, either; the Post (12/16/21) has been an air horn for the idea that this one Jewish industrialist is masterminding the revolution against American order through DA reform. This is a feature of the rest of the intellectual right, too. The Heritage Foundation’s Daily Signal (8/11/21) said of San Francisco: “much of the blame for the burgeoning crime problems lies at Boudin’s doorstep and his Soros-backed marching orders.” The Washington Examiner (9/1/21) lays it on thick, saying “Soros-backed DAs” and their policies “are destroying cities.”
Given that this is a midterm election year, and beyond that Donald Trump is signaling his attempt to win back the White House in 2024 (New York Times, 1/4/22), you can expect this hysteria to continue.
The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) has asked Jewsh Voice for Labour (JVL) to submit evidence of the Labour leadership’s antisemitic discrimination against leftwing Jews in the party. A number of JVL members have been suspended or expelled from Labour, including two who have since passed away. In many cases, they were singled out for comments on Israeli policy in occupied Palestine.
JVL has submitted twice to the EHRC before. But this is the first time it’s been asked to contribute. In the new submission, JVL aims to raise:
the continued unfair targeting of Jewish members of the Party and in particular Jewish members with particular beliefs set out in further detail below, which appears to be entirely contrary to the findings of the EHRC Report and the purpose of the Action Plan
And:
the unfair procedures the Party is continuing to follow in respect of disciplinary proceedings
against individual members, in breach of principles of fairness, natural justice and
recommendations made by both the EHRC, and by Baroness Shami Chakrabarti in her report
published on 30 June 2016, following her inquiry into antisemitism in the Party (the
“Chakrabarti Report”). [Original emphasis]
Unresolved
The submission also highlights how two members of the organisation have died without being able to clear their names:
Two JVL members, Riva Joffe under investigation, Mike Howard having received a punitive suspension for antisemitism, have recently died, tragically with these offensive and unfounded charges against them unresolved. In the case of Mike Howard, his appeal against his suspension remains unresolved since 12 April 2021
JVL says the Labour Party has failed to even understand antisemitism, with devastating effects for some:
As a preliminary point, JVL considers that the failure of the Party to introduce a fair process to tackle antisemitism has resulted from its failure to properly understand antisemitism.
Definitions
JVL’s submission sets out what it means by antisemitism according to the key definitions:
The understanding of antisemitism on which this analysis is based reaffirms the traditional meaning of the term. This is important in the light of attempts to extend its meaning to apply to criticisms often made of the state of Israel, or to non-violent campaigns such as BDS. A charge of antisemitism carries exceptional moral force because of the negative connotations rightly attaching to the term. It is illegitimate to make such claims to discredit or deter criticism, or to achieve sectional advantage. To do so is to devalue the term. To be clear: conduct is antisemitic only if it manifests ‘prejudice, hostility or hatred against Jews as Jews.
JVL also charges the Labour Party with using a confused framework for accusations. This, they write, has hindered those accused from responding to allegations:
In the majority of investigations into alleged antisemitism, the Party asserts that the member is guilty of conduct that “undermines the Party’s ability to campaign against antisemitism”. This is a vague accusation that does not provide the member with sufficient information to understand, or defend themselves against, the charge. It also gives the Party an effective carte-blanche to investigate members in relation to complaints that have no basis and to stifle any questioning of the Party by its members.
Case studies
The submission also argues that Jewish Labour members have been accused of antisemitism at disproportionate rates. They point to Annex 11 of their submission:
which contains statistics on the number of investigations by the Party brought against Jewish members and in particular, anti-Zionist Jewish members. Annex 11 sets out that, as a population share, over five times more Jewish than non-Jewish Party members have been investigated in relation to allegations of antisemitism.
While Annex 17 looks at how the work of Jewish writers has been used as evidence of anti-Jewish racism without the author’s knowledge:
No attempt has been made by the Party to discuss the work with the respective authors; instead the Party proceeds on a misrepresentation that its interpretation is based on firm, legal evidence
Lifelong anti-racists
The submission refers to Mike Howard, an accused JVL member. He passed away in 2021 having never had the chance to clear his name. The submission document tells part of his story:
JVL draws attention in particular to the case of the late Mike Howard, whose appeal against his unjust punitive suspension is set out in Annex 15. Prior to investigation, Mr Howard had an unblemished record as a Jewish Labour, trade union and anti-racist activist. He was therefore incredibly angered and distressed to find himself subject to investigation.
The submission continues:
His appeal was filed in March 2021, with further submissions made on 13 April 2021. Following that date, Mr Howard received neither any update on progress nor any substantive response from the Party. Tragically, Mr Howard died in November 2021, without even an acknowledgement of his appeal by the Party.
A video of Mike Howard’s full story is available on YouTube:
Failed
JVL’s Jenny Manson and Richard Kuper spoke to The Canary. Manson said said she was disappointed with the EHRC:
It’s disappointing that the EHRC have not agreed to open an investigation into the targeting of so many Jews by the Labour Party. They seem to consider that their Report in January 2021 had dealt with issues relating to antisemitism in the Party. We by contrast considered they got off on the wrong premises, made questionable findings and failed to expose both the politicisation of the Party’s procedures and the Party’ misinterpretation of antisemitism.
She said the EHRC had originally referred them to Labour’s antisemitism Action Plan. But reminded them that JVL’s nominees had originally been excluded from involvement:
So, after the EHRC referred us to the Action Plan we wrote back again and reminded them that JVL nominees and eg those put forward by John McDonnell including a Rabbi and two Jewish experts on the interpretation of antisemitism, were excluded from consultation or any involvement in the new Plans.
Targeting
JVL felt that the evidence of harsh treatment of Jewish members was finally being considered by the EHRC:
It now appears that evidence we have been providing of the increasing harsh treatment and targeting of our Jewish members has been of concern to the EHRC. It’s hard to believe it wouldn’t be. Looking at Annex 11, you will see that 41 Jewish individuals have faced investigations for antisemitism. Of the current eleven JVL exec committee, ten have been or are presently facing disciplinary action or investigations related to allegations of antisemitism.
They added that the group was pleased their concerns were finally being noted:
We are very pleased that the EHRC have now taken account of our specific concerns about this Plan by asking for us to make further submissions to assist the EHRC’s monitoring exercise.
Unjust
Manson said that the whole process had been “unjust” to members:
Incidentally, the EHRC did not endorse the IHRA definition of antisemitism and noticed as we did the Party’s use without publication till this year of the ‘NEC Code of Conduct; Antisemitism’ to try to explain the IHRA. This was unjust to members and hugely ironic given this NEC plan in 2018 was considered yet another sign of the scandalous. antisemitism of the Party’s leadership.
Asked what they hoped would be achieved from the submission, JVL’s Richard Kuper told The Canary:
We believe that the evidence we have supplied and the arguments we have made will reinforce realisation the EHRC that these issues need to be taken into account in their monitoring of Labour’s actions. Doing so would be an important step in breaking the mainstream media’s radio silence on the harassment of Jews in the Party which is taking place under the aegis of the current leadership..
It can only be hoped that JVL members finally get a chance to be heard. And that the names of those who have passed away will now be cleared.
Earlier, we shared the results of an investigation into allegations of antisemitism at The Canary and Skwawkbox. This confirmed that we have always upheld the IMPRESS Standards Code and have neither discriminated against Jewish people, nor incited hatred against this group, of which I am personally a part. The government report that sparked the investigation was just another tactic employed in a clumsy attempt to harm our reputation, destroy our business, and silence the socialist Left. It failed.
Many of you, our readers, have been with us from the start. We are so grateful to you for that support, which we continue to appreciate as we all deal with the emotional and financial impact of this sustained campaign of five and a half years and counting. For others, this might not be an issue you’re familiar with. Either way, I felt it important to lay out a brief history (there is actually way too much to include in a single article, but you can read our many articles on antisemitism, if you wish) and also acknowledge the impact that this has had on our business and the wellbeing of individual members of our team.
Where did all this start?
The Canary launched in October 2015 and already by February 2016, the Telegraph was calling us “the maddest Left-wing website in the world”. This was a beautiful example of the old trope of ‘no such thing as bad publicity’. Our traffic immediately spiked and we continued to grow our audience at a rapid rate. We were proud of our achievement and took this as an indication that our intention to be a disruptive force in the media landscape was being realised, and quickly. But we were about to enter the Twilight Zone.
Many will never believe that the coincidence of our launch and Corbyn’s election as leader of the Labour Party was purely that – a coincidence. Either way, The Canary and Corbyn’s leadership were striving for many of the same socialist, environmentalist, and humanitarian goals for the UK and beyond: Then, and now, peace and justice for all. And that meant that if there were elements gunning for Corbyn, they were gunning for us too.
It was never Telegraph readers who wanted to silence us (though Eric Pickles and Conservative Friends of Israel were somewhat complicit in what unfolded), it was the centrists whose interest was in maintaining a status quo that is beneficial to them, regardless of the impact on those who aren’t part of their in-crowd.
Our co-founder, former editor, and my wife, Kerry-Anne Mendoza, wrote in April 2016:
It appears that enemies of Jeremy Corbyn’s progressive plans for the Labour party have discovered some common ground. Blairites within the party and the media, along with their conservative peers and the pro-Israel lobby, all lose out if Corbyn succeeds. So, in short, they are seeking to take him out of play by hitting him where it is mutually beneficial – his long-standing criticism of Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine.
Conflating criticism of Israel with antisemitism
And so it began. Early efforts in this campaign deliberately confused opposition to the actions of successive Israeli governments, which have systematically oppressed Palestinians, with antisemitic hatred of Jewish people. This has been a theme throughout, and, as I see it, the only way anyone could possibly say that The Canary is antisemitic; we have always been willing to criticise the Israeli government and military in their treatment of Palestinians and Jews of colour.
Because the creation of Israel in 1948 was the culmination of a Zionist project that began at the turn of the last century, but had been framed as reparation for the Shoah (the Hebrew name for the Holocaust), it was relatively easy to create and capitalise on confusion about whether criticising Israel is an example of antisemitism. Despite this, there was eventually, in 2018, a doubling down on this tactic, via the British Board of Deputies and the IHRA definition of antisemitism. This effort is ongoing, despite the fact that the author of the IHRA definition has warned that it is open to abuse.
The witch hunt’s first victims: Naz Shah and Ken Livingstone
Naz Shah’s social media comments, made prior to her election as an MP, were undoubtably offensive to many in the global Jewish community but her apology was thorough and effective and her resignation as Parliamentary Private Secretary for John McDonnell appropriate. Corbyn accepted both, and Shah was not suspended from the Labour Party.
The fact that these historic comments made front page news in April 2016 was, on the face of it, totally absurd. But the mainstream media had already joined the anti-socialist, anti-Corbyn campaign and was happy to oblige. Meanwhile they were ignoring what was actually going on in Israel and Palestine at the time, as well as endemic racism and Islamophobia in the Conservative Party.
Shortly after Shah’s vilification, came the suspension of Ken Livingstone for antisemitism. Say what you like about ‘Red Ken’ Livingstone – I don’t necessarily agree with the guy on everything – but he was the second victim of what was already, clearly, a McCarthy style witch hunt.
Livingstone had made a statement that gave a historical fact about Hitler’s early plans for European Jews and was immediately set upon. He may have shown poor judgement in raising this in the context of a media interview, but he was giving an accurate historical fact that ended in him being the witch hunt’s first really high profile victim.
Chakrabati inquiry
In June of 2016, human rights activist, Shami Chakrabati published a report following her inquiry into racism in the party. The findings should have been good news for Corbyn, demonstrating that aside from a very small handful of repugnant individuals, there was no evidence of systemic racism – including antisemitism – in the party. Unfortunately the mainstream media managed to spin the report’s content into oblivion and continued to bash Corbyn with gay abandon.
In April 2017 a group of 145 predominantly Jewish Labour members wrote to Corbyn, warning of the dangers of silencing them as critics of Israel. This followed the expulsion of Jewish Labour member and former co-chair of Momentum, Jackie Walker, for supposed antisemitism.
This was the time that Corbyn should have stepped up to support Jews on the left of the party. After all, we had been supporting him from the moment he announced his leadership bid and had been fighting hard to counter all the misinformation, spin, and outright lies being put out by mainstream media, including our state-funded broadcaster, the BBC. In my mind, this was actually his single biggest mistake. Instead of joining with, and backing up those dedicated to getting him elected as prime minister, he attempted to appease the centrists who were hell bent on getting rid of him and apparently had no interest in the facts of the matter.
Since Keir Starmer took over the Labour Party leadership in 2020, the witch hunt has focused in on the left of the party again. Now it is clear that left wing Jews are no longer welcome in the party and that is probably the worst antisemitism we’ve ever seen from Labour. In today’s Labour Party there are the right kind of Jews – Zionists who support the Israeli government – and the wrong kind of Jews – people like Jackie Walker and Graham Bash, as well as me and The Canary‘s Senior Editor, Emily Apple, who are willing to speak out against the actions of Israel.
The extent of corruption and underhanded tactics employed from within the Labour Party and by supporters of Israel is astonishing. It’s so unbelievable that we are accused of being cranks and conspiracy theorists. But the thing is, the receipts are all there, whether it is the fake social media accounts set up to discredit Corbyn or the Israeli diplomat and UK civil servant working together to bring down anti-Israel politcians in the UK, and build up those who are supportive, there is evidence and it is solid.
Stop Funding Fake News and Rachel Riley
Never in a million years did I think that the numbers woman from Countdown (Channel 4) would be trying to get my business shut down! But Rachel Riley was one of the most vocal supporters of a shady campaign calling themselves ‘Stop Funding Fake News’.
Stop Funding Fake News aimed to discredit The Canary and other left wing, pro-Palestinian outlets through bad faith claims that we had published so-called fake news. They also directly lobbied our advertisers to withdraw. To a degree they succeeded but continued to hide their funding and which individuals were actually running the campaign.
It took a lot of work but regular contributor and good friend of The Canary, John McEvoy, got to the bottom of Stop Funding Fake News, uncovering the campaign’s links to the right wing of the Labour Party. You can read the report of his investigation here.
The impact
There is the impact on our reputation. The smear campaign against us has succeeded in making The Canary synonymous with antisemitism in the minds of some. This is unjust and undeserved but also tells us that we have continued to punch vastly above our weight, as we have done since the word go. But it has really taken something for us to stand firm in the face of these attacks.
We run on a shoestring budget so there is no room for big PR campaigns or expensive legal battles. Our opponents have access to millions of pounds and some of the most effective spin doctors out there. They have mainstream media firmly on their side as well. Some might say it’s a bit of a David and Goliath situation.
Some of our advertisers decided we were too much of a risk for them and withdrew their adverts from our website. Thankfully, our readership responded by stepping up to fund the gap through a monthly membership scheme. Though, sadly, with the impact of Coronavirus and rising cost of living, we have lost a lot of those supporters in the past year and we find ourselves needing to make up a shortfall again (this is me shamelessly begging for your support if you can possibly afford to help us with as little as £3 per month).
The cost to our mental health
Here at The Canary we are a team of people dedicated to fighting racism and fascism wherever it occurs. Most of us have literally put our bodies on the line to protect vulnerable and oppressed people at one time or another. So being accused of antisemitism is a big deal and it hits right at the core of our identities. That hurts us.
For those of us who are Jewish there is another layer to this, which is that we know what genuine antisemitism looks and feels like. I wrote about some of my experiences and how the witch hunt has only succeeded in diluting the impact of calling something out as antisemitic. Our senior editor, Emily Apple, has also written from her perspective as a Jewish person and called out the right-wing press for hijacking our lived experience for political gain.
Like Graham Bash – a Labour activist and 50+ year veteran member of the party who was recently expelled for antisemitism – who speaks about his early experiences in the following video, my early experiences of antisemitism are part of why I grew up to be an activist.
Listening to Graham’s account reminded me that my grandfather was beaten so badly by antisemitic bullies at school that he lost a testicle. To me, that hardly compares to calling out human rights abuses against Palestinians.
I know that our opponents want to break us down and make us back off because staying in the fight is intolerably painful, so I’m hesitant to admit that they have come close to succeeding with me. I live with Complex PTSD and I am autistic, both of which contribute to making me an extremely sensitive person. I’ve had a lifetime of bullying so all of this is massively triggering to me and I’ve been in a pretty much constant state of fight or flight throughout. This has exacerbated my chronic physical health conditions and to be honest my whole nervous system has basically been in meltdown.
I asked our Senior Editor, Emily Apple, to tell me about her experience throughout the witch hunt and this is what she said: “There’s always a price when you successfully take on the establishment. Previously in my life this has manifested itself in police violence and repression – threats of serious charges and prison.
“But in the case of The Canary and pro-Palestinian elements of the radical left more generally, in recent years, it has been the accusation of antisemitism.
“The first protest I went to that turned into a riot was the Anti-Nazi league demo in Welling against a BNP bookshop when I was a teenager; I’ve spent years on the streets opposing the far-right and was proudly Antifa many years before it became a household name.
“I’m not saying this to impress with my anti-racist credentials. I’m saying it because militant anti-fascism is deeply ingrained in me. Like many people on the left, it is a core part of who I am.
“And it’s why this attack has had a massive impact on my mental health and on the mental health of many others who’ve been targeted by this witch hunt. It is an attack on what fundamentally defines us.
“It’s also why I cried when I read the IMPRESS report. I know I’m not publishing and writing hate speech. But having that backed up by our regulator is a massive step in countering the absurd accusations made by John Mann in his blatant vendetta against us.
“Like many people targeted by the witchhunt, I’m Jewish. I have family members who are Zionists. And it’s one of the reasons why I’ve always felt a real need to campaign on behalf of the Palestinian struggle – I feel a duty to say ‘not in my name’.
“I also find it particularly frightening that these attacks have happened at a time when we’ve seen the biggest shift to the far right in generations. Both in the UK, US and across Europe, genuine fascism is on the rise. In the UK, a combination of bills, including the policing bill, are taking away our fundamental rights. Now more than ever we need to fight the threat of fascism before it’s too late. Smearing those who are at the forefront of this battle is disgraceful and utterly unforgivable.”
Many of you will already know that my wife, Kerry-Anne, who was, until recently, our Editor-in-Chief, had to resign to tend to her mental health. The disgusting campaign against her invitation to give the NUJ’s annual Claudia Jones Memorial Lecture was what eventually pushed her into a breakdown, in 2018, which she is still recovering from. When it comes to PTSD, in Kerry-Anne’s case there are numerous other factors, but having to go to battle virtually every time she set foot in the office has not helped.
Moving on
It really has been good for us to see that IMPRESS have only confirmed what we already know – The Canary does not, and never will discriminate against or incite hatred of Jewish people. As human beings, we sometimes need that kind of validation.
I hope that for any readers who have had doubts about our credibility as an anti-racist and anti-fascist outlet, you can now feel more sure that we are who we say we are.
We know the witch hunt is not going away, at least not any time soon, and we will continue to stand in solidarity with those who have been unfairly treated and accused of antisemitism because they are willing to criticise Israel.
This little yellow bird continues to be a thorn in the side of the establishment. We will stand strong against these bad faith, politically driven misinformation campaigns for as long as our readership needs us to stand for them.
Solidarity to you all, and a thousand thanks for sticking with us.
Earlier this year, our regulator IMPRESS launched an investigation into concerns about antisemitism at The Canary and Skwawkbox. IMPRESS is the only independent press regulator in the UK and the only regulator to be recognised by the UK government’s Press Recognition Panel.
Their investigation was launched in response to a report by Kings College London, commissioned by Lord Mann, the government’s antisemitism tzar. The IMPRESS investigation is now available. It concluded that there was no evidence of discrimination against Jewish people, that further investigation would not be justified and dismissed the matter.
Drew Rose, Editor-in-Chief, The Canary said: “We are pleased to have confirmation of what we have known all along – that we have adhered to the high journalistic standards set out in the IMPRESS Standards Code. In particular, we have upheld the code with respect to discrimination against Jewish people. As ever, we are grateful to our regulator, IMPRESS, for ensuring that our readership has opportunities to hold us to account.
“Earlier this year, allegations against The Canary were made in a government-funded report by Kings College London, figure-headed by Lord Mann as the government’s antisemitism tzar. It was right that IMPRESS conducted a preliminary investigation, even though the authors of the report had declined to make any formal complaint against us. IMPRESS examined the evidence cited by the report and found no breach of the relevant clause. This demonstrates the importance of truly independent press regulation.
”We hope that the findings of this investigation draw a line, once and for all, under the cynical campaign of disinformation waged against The Canary. We are, have always been, and will continue to be, an avowedly antiracist and antifascist news organisation.”
Nancy Mendoza, Chief Operations Officer, The Canary added: “This is welcome news following the impacts of a sustained witch hunt against socialists, which has been disingenuously framed as an effort to tackle antisemitism. As a Jewish person who has experienced genuine antisemitism, this has been a very upsetting and difficult experience. We have experienced a smear campaign that sought to harm our reputation and destroy our business. Beyond that, seeing so many socialist Jews being expelled from the Labour Party has been heartbreaking. The irony is that the harm the witch hunt has done to individual Jews likely far outweighs any success it may have had in tackling antisemitism.
“Throughout the witch hunt, there are numerous examples where we have been misrepresented; Lord Mann himself is certainly guilty of this. In an interview with the Jewish Chronicle, published 27 January, he implied that our readers do not have ‘a clear right of recourse to defend themselves’. Of course, as an independently and voluntarily regulated news outlet, this right existed long before Lord Mann’s report on antisemitism in alternative media was conceived. At best this suggests he is ignorant of the facts and at worst he has engaged in cynically misleading audiences – we may never know which it is.
“I, and I can speak for colleagues too, hope that this will reassure our readership that we remain committed to tackling racism and discrimination against any oppressed group.”
Emily Apple, Senior Editor, The Canary said: “The witch hunt has had a massive impact on my mental health and on the mental health of many others who’ve been targeted. It is an attack on what fundamentally defines us. It’s also why I cried when I read the IMPRESS report. I know I’m not publishing and writing hate speech. But having that backed up by our regulator is a massive step in countering the absurd accusations made by John Mann in his blatant vendetta against us. Like many people targeted by the witchhunt, I’m Jewish. I have family members who are Zionists. And it’s one of the reasons why I’ve always felt a real need to campaign on behalf of the Palestinian struggle – I feel a duty to say ‘not in my name’.”
We hope that our readers will join us in welcoming the IMPRESS report.
On 9 November, students from the London School of Economics (LSE) protested a debate hosting Israeli Ambassador to the United Kingdom Tzipi Hotovely on campus. As British Jews Against Occupation have set out, Hotovely has an “appalling record of racist and inflammatory behaviour”. In spite of this, the university – as well as Tory and Labour politicians – rushed to denounce the peaceful protest. Police have launched an investigation.
People took to Twitter to highlight the hypocrisy of those defending Hotovely’s right to free speech while denouncing the actions of peaceful pro-Palestinian protestors.
Platforming a vocal fascist
Ahead of an LSE Students’ Union Debate Society event hosting Hotovely, LSE for Palestine shared plans to protest the platforming of the reported anti-Palestinian racist and Islamophobe. The student group planned a peaceful protest to take place outside the event in a display of solidarity with Palestine, and an attempt to disrupt and discredit the Israeli ambassador’s fascist ideology.
Hotovely is an ambassador of the apartheid Israeli state. She has a track record of spreading Israeli settler colonialism propaganda, Islamophobic rhetoric, and anti-Palestinian racist hate. She has described the Nakba – the forced displacement and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians by the Israeli state – as an “Arab lie”. Hotovely also called for further Israeli occupation of Palestine through annexation. And she has denied the very existence of Palestinian people. Protesters also highlighted that she has espoused Islamophobic rhetoric, and is openly against relationships between Jewish and Arab people.
Ahead of the debate, the LSE Students’ Union Palestine Society shared a statement reading:
There is no room for such bigoted and racist rhetoric on our LSE campus. There is no room for the denial of Palestinian existence on our LSE campus. There is no room for colonial apologism on our LSE campus.
A peaceful student protest
While protesters chanted outside the building in which the debate was taking place, Hotovely retained her platform for the duration of the event. During that time, she denied the Nakba again. The only disruption inside the building was a group of students walking out in protest.
Student protestors booed as Hotovely left the building. In video footage, one protester can be heard asking “aren’t you ashamed” while security bundles the ambassador into a car. It appears that the protest was disruptive, raucous and passionate, but never violent. However, police allegedly assaulted students on their own university campus.
Maintaining that “Palestinian human rights are not up for debate”, LSE for Palestine posted:
We must keep this momentum going &make sure events like these never happen again. Palestinian human rights are not up for debate and we will never stop resisting & agitating for a free Palestine and the liberation of Palestinians from the settler-colonial israeli apartheid regime
Speaking out in support of student protestors, Palestine Solidarity Campaign director Ben Jamal tweeted:
Tzipi Hotovely is the Ambassador of a state rightly defined as practising apartheid. She is also a virulent racist with a confirmed record of anti Psalestinian discourse.⁸She should be met with protest in any arena she visits.
However, LSE published a statement insinuating protestors engaged in “intimidation and threats of violence”. The university stated that it is prepared to take action against student protesters.
One Twitter user responded with:
For all the talk of “SU democracy” students will be harassed, surveilled & repressed by uni managemrnt for opposing racism, colonialism, Apartheid & their universities complicity in them.
The only option for resistance & liberation i ongoing demonstrations & direct action.
In the wake of the protest, Hotovely soon garnered the support of right wing UK government officials. Home secretary Priti Patel posted a tweet saying that she was “disgusted” by the peaceful protest. And Middle East minister James Cleverly characterised protesters as “aggressive and threatening“.
Netpol responded to the home secretary’s support for the police investigation into the peaceful protest with:
Home Secretary Priti Patel again showing her contempt for freedom to protest https://t.co/45TR7ok6T5
Reminding us where Patel stands on Palestinians’ right to live free from Israeli settler-colonialism, rapper Lowkey tweeted:
When Priti Patel seeks to criminalise pro-Palestinian protest by students, remember that she had 13 secret meetings with Israeli gov figures (inc Netanyahu) without the knowledge of the gov she represents, in which they discussed sending DFID funds to the Israeli Occupation Army.
Soon, even Labour MPs spoke out against the peaceful student protest. Leader of the opposition Keir Starmer and shadow foreign secretary Lisa Nandy called the protest “unacceptable“. People were quick to call out the absurdity of members of the opposition vehemently supporting an out and proud fascist.
Responding to Starmer’s denouncement of student protesters, writer, journalist and broadcaster Aaron Bastani tweeted:
They were booing someone who represents a country credibly accused of war crimes after she had spoken for 90 minutes.
God help civil liberties in this country if Keir Starmer becomes PM. https://t.co/kieGcbpp44
I’m so so angry today. The most basic principles of not just solidarity but fairness seem totally violated at the moment. Those kids did nothing wrong.
— GRTSocialists #SaveSheikhJarrah (@GRTSocialists) November 11, 2021
Solidarity with student protesters
In spite of backlash from LSE, the government and the mainstream media, many have spoken out in defence of the student protesters. Pro-Palestinian student societies from the School of African and Oriental Studies (SOAS) and King’s College London (KCL) spoke out in solidarity with LSE protesters, setting out that proponents of apartheid are not welcome on their campuses either.
Moved by this display of inter-institution solidarity, City, University of London Students’ Union president Shaima Dallali tweeted:
Journalist Robert Carter, who reported from the protest, shared:
Unlike all the shameless Labour and Conservative MPs rushing to board the "every student's an anti-Semite" bandwagon, I was actually there reporting at LSE the night of the protest.
The only racist I saw that day was Israel's Ambassador Tzipi Hotovely.
Says a lot about this British government crying wolf and jumping to defend a racist Islamophobe like far-right Tzipi Hotovely, who has consistently denied the existence of Palestinians and is a strong supporter of illegal settlements.
Speaking to the suppression of marginalised voices in the name of ‘free speech’, Ana Oppenheim shared:
Both major parties calling for a *police investigation* because some students organised a pro-Palestine protest on their campus is really, really chilling.
Why is it always about protecting the free speech of the famous and powerful but denying it to everyone else?
Urging people to speak up in defence of Palestine, assistant professor at LSE Sara Salem tweeted:
Solidarity with @LSEforPalestine. In light of disturbing media and government responses to the right of students to protest on campus, it's so important we defend spaces of solidarity with Palestine https://t.co/OECzft4pnJ
And co-director of LSE’s centre for human rights Ayça Çubukçu said:
Solidarity with @LSEforPalestine students now. Beyond the prospects of democratic protest on LSE's campus, this is an affair that concerns the future of Palestine solidarity activism in the UK, even beyond. Time to speak up. #DecoloniseLSE
Bringing attention back to the violent reality of Israeli occupation, one Twitter user shared:
mohammed daadas, a 13 year old child, was recently shot and killed by israeli occupation forces during demonstrations against their apartheid. meanwhile you've got people like nandy talking about 'freedom of speech' wrt demonstratrstions against tzipi hotovely
Arguments denouncing the peaceful student protest while crying wolf about the Israeli ambassador’s right to free speech beg the questions: ‘free from what?’ and ‘free for whom?’. Palestinians’ right to live free from Israeli occupation, apartheid and ethnic cleansing should certainly never be up for debate. The state and its institutions may be coming after student protesters, but the protesters stand firmly on the right side of history.
Jackie Walker and Graham Bash are Jewish anti-racist activists who spent years in the Labour Party yet were accused of antisemitism for standing up for the rights of Palestinians and People of Colour. Now, Bash has been expelled from the party, after Walker was too in 2019. In this interview with Canary co-founder Kerry-Anne Mendoza they speak candidly about how devastating this has been and what we all need to do to stand up against bullying and racism. .
As The Canaryextensivelyreported, throughout Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party, the corporate-owned press, Tories, and the Labour right alike targeted him with a vicious and protracted smear campaign. This campaign employed bogus accusations of antisemitism to try to derail his radical political project. This was one of the factors that led to Labour’s defeat in the 2019 UK general election, which in turn led to Corbyn’s resignation as party leader. But even now that he’s stepped down, the antisemitism smear campaign shows no signs of abating. Indeed, it has now morphed into a wider movement to attack the left more broadly. This includes, in particular, critics of Israel’s crimes against Palestinians.
The latest instalment in this sorry saga is a column in a right-wing US newspaper penned by a British comedian. It both represents a new low and highlights how the left will be the continual target of false accusations of antisemitism for the foreseeable future. We must continue to stand up to these pathetic and spurious attacks if we have any chance of rebuilding a movement for radical change.
The US equivalent of the Sun
On 18 September, the New York Postpublished a column about the left’s purported antisemitism problem by David Baddiel. Baddiel is a US-bornBritish-Jewish comedian who is perhaps best known for his stand-up comedy and television work alongside TV personalities such as Frank Skinner. The article is preposterously titled, The progressive left now sees antisemitism as an ‘acceptable’ racism.
This should come as no surprise given that the New York Post is a right-wing tabloidowned by media tycoon Rupert Murdoch. Naturally, it has an editorial style and political orientation similar to Murdoch’s major paper in the UK, the Sun. Like its British counterpart, it has frequently courted controversy with incendiary headlines and sensationalist reporting.
A good start, then all downhill…
The article actually starts off well enough, stating:
some… think that Jews and Israel are basically the same thing. They aren’t, and to assume so is racist.
This is certainly true. And as The Canary has argued previously, assuming that all Jews support Israel is not just racist but factually false and even defamatory. In fact, some of Israel’s major critics are themselves Jewish. They include academic experts on the Israel-Palestine conflict Ilan Pappé and NormanFinkelstein.
Sadly, however, after making this worthwhile point, the article takes a sharp turn for the worse. Baddiel claims that: “The conversation around the Middle East and antisemitism has changed of late, and disturbingly so”. And to support this argument, he employs a steady string of emotive anecdotes such as cases of pro-Palestinian protesters holding antisemitic signs or shouting antisemitic slogans.
…only to get worse
Certainly, antisemitism should always be condemned. But as The Canary has argued before, taking the actions of a small fringe of protesters and then falsely presenting them as representative of Palestinian solidarity activists as whole is a highly dishonest tactic. It slanders the vast majority of pro-Palestinian activists who are not motivated by antisemitism but rather by outrage at Israel’s actions.
And as The Canary has also argued, the fact that participants in the antisemitism smear campaign feel the need to engage in this deceitful tactic is itself revealing. Because it shines a light onto how desperate they are to defend Israel and/or smear friends of the Palestinian people like Jeremy Corbyn. It also demonstrates how little they have in substantive criticism of pro-Palestinian campaigners’ actual arguments.
Relying on anecdote and generalisation, with good reason
Baddiel then continues:
As I describe in my new book, “Jews Don’t Count,” antisemitism is elusive: It often unfolds in unconscious codes and tropes and assumptions. One of my readers on Twitter said he was surprised by how much he had fallen into some of the traps my book outlines, commenting, “It’s the racism that sneaks past you.” But that placard doesn’t sneak past you.
There are two important things to note with this paragraph. First, the title of his book makes an outrageous generalisation. He’s essentially saying that the left as a whole doesn’t see antisemitism as real racism. This is obviously absurd given the many Jewish supporters of Corbyn’s leadership. In February 2019, the BBCreported: “A network of Jewish Labour members has backed Jeremy Corbyn over claims the party has become “institutionally anti-Semitic” under his leadership”. And second, he relies solely on an anecdote about a (conveniently unnamed and therefore unverifiable) Twitter user to support his argument.
Turning reality on its head
But moreover, the reality is that research has shown that antisemitism is in fact much moreprevalent on the political right than the left. This reality is also evidenced by the fact that the vast majority of antisemitic crimes in the US have been committed by far-right extremists. In parts of Europe, meanwhile, it has overwhelmingly been far-right populist/nationalist figures like Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban who have made antisemitism mainstream again.
Speaking of Orban, in May he met with British prime minister Boris Johnson. And as The Canaryargued at the time, whereas Corbyn would surely have been pilloried by the corporate-owned media had he done so, Johnson largely got a free pass when he welcomed Orban into 10 Downing Street. And this reality fits within a much larger pattern within British media.
Double standards, Islamophobia
During the 2019 UK general election campaign, for example, Johnson again largely got a free pass on this issue just as the antisemitism smear campaign against Corbyn went into overdrive. This is despite Johnson having written a novel with some suspiciously antisemitic-seeming tropes. The media also largely ignored the fact that Tory figures, including Johnson and then-prime minister Theresa May, took part in the unveiling of a statue of Nancy Astor, who was openly antisemitic. (Needless to say, had Corbyn done any of these things we surely would have never heard the end of it from the major British media outlets.)
And as if this weren’t enough, some of these very same Tory figures have made flagrantly Islamophobic remarks with practically zero consequence. Johnson for example, described Islamophobia as a “natural reaction” and said that “Islam is the problem”. He also once quipped that Muslim women who wear burkas “look like letter boxes”. In November 2019, meanwhile, the Guardianreported:
Twenty-five sitting and former Conservative councillors have been exposed for posting Islamophobic and racist material on social media, according to a dossier obtained by the Guardian that intensifies the row over anti-Muslim sentiment in the party.
In short, whereas the left gets pelted with often spurious accusations of antisemitism, Islamophobia appears to take place in the Conservative Party in an atmosphere of near total impunity. And this in turn highlights the incredible hypocrisy and venality of those who orchestrated the antisemitism smear campaign against Corbyn.
Manipulative rhetoric
Toward the end of the piece, Baddiel concluded the following about his motley assortment of unverifiable anecdotes:
Thus, huge increases in hate crimes against Jews during the period of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict — a 600 percent rise in incidents in the UK alone — have been met with a shrugging sense that there’s something appropriate about that. Attacks on Jews during these conflicts are seen not just as understandable, but excusable.
Somewhere in the hive mind, certainly as you can hear it buzzing on Twitter, is the sense that Jews who experiencing violent pushback, wherever they are, whatever their views, is fitting.
Notice the vague language such as “met with a shrugging sense” and “somewhere in the hive mind… is the sense”. He talks a lot, in other words, about what he ‘senses’. And I believe this is deliberate. It serves to manipulate his readers by smearing a deliberately loosely-defined left without naming anyone specifically. Notice also the use of the passive voice: “Attacks on Jews during these conflicts are seen not just as understandable, but excusable”. (Seen by who, exactly?)
Together, these duplicitous and cowardly rhetorical sleights of hand have a double benefit. First, they allow him to subtly communicate the notion that large sections of the left are antisemitic without saying it quite so directly. And second, they provide him with a degree of plausible deniability should any specific individual complain at having been characterized this way.
We shouldn’t be surprised, though. This kind of intellectual dishonesty is neither new nor clever. It’s just another garden variety version of an underhanded smear to attack the left and provide cover for Israel’s ongoing crimes. With such tactics evidently not going away, we must redouble our efforts to fight back against this shameless, politically-motivated smear campaign.
The Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) has confirmed it will be attending the Labour Party conference. The announcement came after some confusion. It’s a situation that shows the hostility towards the group in some parts of the party, as well as the effects of showing solidarity with the Palestinian people.
Young Labour: shut out?
On 31 August, it emerged that Labour had tried to ban the PSC from speaking at an event with Young Labour. The rumours came from Young Labour chair Jessica Barnard. She posted on Twitter that the group had experienced problems with the party over its own event at the Labour conference. She also noted that Young Labour had had no communication from Keir Starmer or his team. Barnard also said that:
The most concrete information I have been given is that anyone from Palestine Solidarity Campaign will be refused as a speaker, as will Jeremy Corbyn. I’ve requested this in writing with reasoning. Appalled that PSC who have had a space at conference for years would be silenced.
Barnard’s tweet set off a chain reaction of events.
Confusion
On Wednesday 1 September, The World Transformed (TWT) festival – which is running at the same time as the Labour Party Conference – made moves. It quickly put out that it was hosting Young Labour and the PSC together for an event calledYouth rising for Palestine.
Then, the PSC itself confirmed Barnard’s claim. It tweeted that while it would still be at the conference:
it is also correct that an official within the Party has told Young Labour not to have a PSC speaker at a proposed event.
So it seemed that Labour was trying to block the PSC. But then, clearly something happened behind the scenes in Labour.
Back on
On Thursday 2 September, PSC put out a statement. It confirmed that someone in the party had told Young Labour that it couldn’t sit on a panel with PSC. But, as its statement noted, this “message” was a “mistake” and “was quickly reversed after interventions”. Other parts of the PSC statement were revealing about what potentially had gone on.
It said that the alleged issue from a “high ranking official” in the Labour machinery was because its:
support for the Palestinian call for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) might violate the IHRA definition of antisemitism.
And the PSC went further.
Delegitimising Palestinian solidarity?
While PSC noted that it didn’t want to “exaggerate” the situation, it questioned why someone wanted it banned in the first place. The PSC’s conclusion was that:
The answer of course lies in the significant efforts made over a long period of time by the Israeli state and its allies to delegitimise the global campaign for Palestinian rights, most particularly by conflating that campaign with antisemitism. This programme of delegitimisation has sought to prevent the description of the oppression experienced by Palestinians as a form of apartheid, to avoid discussion of the history of ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their lands, and to block support for the Palestinian call for a programme of BDS which would continue until Israel ceases its violations of Palestinian rights.
It also said that at the heart of this was the controversial International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism.
The IHRA definition of antisemitism
As professor Mark Muhannad Ayyash wrote for Al Jazeera, one of the issues with the IHRA definition is that it conflates antisemitism:
with critiques of Israel. Even though the IHRA insists that it does not wish to censor criticism of Israel, the effect of adopting this definition and its examples is certainly to police and censor the Palestinian critique of Israel.
The PSC said it warned Labour about this in 2018. Specifically, it noted that:
The effect [of the IHRA definition] is to create a cloud of suspicion around raising the cause of Palestine, which leads to a chilling effect. It leads directly to a climate within which a senior official in the Labour Party can conclude that it is ‘safer’ not to invite PSC lest the charge of antisemitism arise.
But Labour didn’t listen, and adopted the IHRA definition anyway – albeit with some caveats at the time.
Labour: not budging
The PSC noted that it was not the only group warning of the problems with the IHRA definition. As it noted, over 200 Jewish academics produced an alternative description of antisemitism. The Jerusalem Declaration:
includes a preamble, definition, and a set of 15 guidelines that provide detailed guidance for those seeking to recognize antisemitism in order to craft responses. It was developed by a group of scholars in the fields of Holocaust history, Jewish studies, and Middle East studies to meet what has become a growing challenge: providing clear guidance to identify and fight antisemitism while protecting free expression.
Yet so far, little in the Labour Party has changed. The PSC noted that it and other groups have:
made numerous attempts to meet with Keir Starmer and with David Evans to discuss these concerns. We are now pushing again for this meeting to take place in the aftermath of this latest incident. The key item we wish to discuss is the action the leadership will be taking to ensure that the space to discuss the oppression faced by Palestinians and the necessary action to address it is fully protected in the Labour Party.
The struggle continues
So will the party listen to the PSC’s concerns? That remains to be seen. But what we already know is that hostility exists towards support for the Palestinian people.
The PSC is asking Constituency Labour Parties (CLPs) to debate a new motion and then take it to conference. It’s in support of the Palestinian people. You can read the full text here. But in a climate where the party is purging left-wing members and groups – and where Israel, Palestine and Gaza are still contentious issues – Labour as a whole will likely continue to regress further from progressive policy positions.
The Daily Beast (8/3/21) reported that “Carlson has publicly praised Orban’s government on Fox News…laud[ing] the prime minister’s anti-immigration policies.”
The Daily Beast’s report (8/3/21) that Fox News host Tucker Carlson would speak at “MCC Feszt, a far-right conference in Budapest that is backed by Hungary’s authoritarian prime minister Viktor Orbán,” may just be one item on the host’s long list of potentially racist and fascist-friendly acts. But it stands out as an international incident, casting his range beyond American politics.
The report said that “news of Carlson’s appearance” came after an “apparent meeting between [Carlson] and Orbán,” and a “friendly photo posted to the leader’s Facebook page revealed on Monday that Carlson had hosted Orbán on his online show for Fox Nation.”
Carlson, the top-rated host on the Murdoch-owned network, has been heavily criticized by civil rights groups for years. He came under fire for endorsing the white nationalist “great replacement” theory (New York, 4/9/21), and lost advertisers when he lambasted the Black Lives Matter movement (LA Times, 6/11/20), telling his viewers, “They [will] come for you.” Such views have earned Carlson the support of white supremacists like David Duke (Newsweek, 7/9/20) and the group Identity Evrope (Forward, 3/14/19).
Orbán’s declaration against the modern European ideal of multiculturalism (Reuters, 6/3/15) helped usher in a new era for the global right that sees hardline anti-immigration policies as necessary to preserve national homogeneity, a rejection of 21st century transnationalism that fits neatly into the rise of the Brexit movement in Britain and former President Donald Trump’s slogan “America First.”
Unsurprisingly, Orbán is a big Trump fan (AP, 9/11/20). Orbán fights the claim that he and his party are antisemitic, often doing so by posing as a friend of Israel, as his anti-liberalism and opposition to the rise of Islam in Europe gained the favor of then–Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (AP, 7/19/18). Still, Jewish groups have documented antisemitism in Hungary under his reign (London Times, 3/30/19; Guardian, 2/13/19; Deutsche Welle, 12/17/20), in addition to showing how the regime has downplayed the Holocaust in Hungarian history. Politico (5/13/19) said Orbán featured antisemitic “imagery of powerful Jewish financiers scheming to control the world,” with “posters of a grinning Soros with the slogan ‘Let’s not allow Soros to have the last laugh!’” Orbán has long been an idol for the white supremacist right throughout the West (Think Progress, 11/29/17).
William Echikson of the Holocaust Remembrance Project (Politico, 5/13/19) wrote that Orbán “peddles in unpunished antisemitism.”
Carlson’s endorsement of the Orbán administration is not just a mainstreaming of Orbán’s politics, but a signal of what kind of society Carlson, along with other Trump supporters and the January 6 rioters, would like to see in the United States. Unlike other European far-right parties like the French National Rally or the Alternative for Germany, Orbán enjoys relatively unchecked power. The coalition between Orbán’s ruling Fidesz party and the Christian Democrats holds 133 out of 199 seats in the National Assembly, making the opposition effectively powerless (Reuters, 4/7/18; Guardian, 4/8/18). And some of the opposition isn’t friendly to democracy either, as the largest minority faction is Jobbik, which many see as an outright Nazi party (Independent, 4/8/14).
Hungary has stood out in Europe as a nation that has regressed, not just in terms of immigration and multiculturalism, but on academic freedom, freedom of the press and the right to dissent. An EU court ruled that the Orbán government illegally forced Central European University to move most of its operations outside the country (BBC, 10/6/20).
As far as the press is concerned, in 2010, the government introduced a law where “journalists can face huge fines if their coverage is deemed unbalanced” (VOA, 12/30/10), after one of the last independent radio stations was taken off the air. “Critics say the EU has been slow to punish Hungary for repeatedly violating democratic principles,” NPR (3/4/21) reported, and Reporters Without Borders recently included Orbán on a list of “enemies of press freedom” that includes “North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad” (RFE/RL, 4/5/21).
Imagine the right’s reaction if Rachel Maddow, MSNBC’s top host, echoed talking points from the Workers World Party and ended up broadcasting from Myanmar in support of the recent coup. It’s a wild thought, but far from reality. Meanwhile, Carlson currently has an average of more than 3 million viewers (Deadline, 4/27/21).
Ben Lorber, a research analyst at Political Research Associates, told FAIR:
Carlson’s affinity for Orbán borders on self-caricature. The two leaders have perfected an illiberal and anti-democratic style of demagoguery centered around the scapegoating and demonization of immigrants, refugees and other maligned “others” in pursuit of their ultranationalist agenda.
Whether from a Fox newsroom in the USA or from the halls of power in Hungary, Carlson and Orbán inflame the race and gender-based grievances of millions of followers, offering a world in which conspiracy theory is substituted for reality, democratic norms and institutions are delegitimized, and vulnerable minorities are stripped of human rights and singled out for acts of bigotry, political persecution and worse.
Growing transnational alliances between far-right leaders such as these further threaten the already tenuous fabric of multiracial democracy around the world.
William Galston (Wall Street Journal, 5/14/19): “Mr. Trump’s Oval Office meeting with Viktor Orbán was a disgrace that no amount of White House realpolitik can justify.”
Orbán’s model of consolidating government power in order to destroy the “liberal democracy” of the post–World War II and post–Cold War eras (Deutsche Welle, 5/10/18), and his record attacking institutions of free discourse and the press, should be frightening to mainstream American conservatism. Even the Wall Street Journal is worried by Orbán’s extremism, with columnist William Galston (5/14/19) writing that his government has “undermined the independence of the judiciary,” and the editorial board (3/21/19) pointing out that he shares the US right’s vilification of “Hungarian-born financier George Soros, whom the government has attacked with antisemitic tropes.”
Carlson and Fox News are giving Orbán and his government legitimacy to millions of cable television viewers. This makes him part of the agenda of the dominant wing of US conservatism that is still loyal to Trump. As extreme as it may seem, Hungarian fascism has been endorsed by one of the most powerful microphones in US media.
Featured image: Fox News‘ Tucker Carlson interviewing Hungarian fascist leader Viktor Orban for Tucker Carlson Tonight (8/2/21).
Throughout his time as Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn was subjected to a vicious, politically motivated smear campaign. This was based in large part on the claim that Labour had seen a dramatic increase in antisemitism amongst its membership during Corbyn’s leadership.
However, as The Canary has previously argued, of the respective leaders of the UK’s two major political parties during the 2019 general election, it was in fact Boris Johnson that had far more to answer for in terms of antisemitism. Now, that reality has been confirmed by Johnson’s latest guest at Downing Street. And this, in turn, raises the question of whether Jeremy Corbyn should be given another chance to face Johnson at the next general election.
A member of the new Eurofascist movement
On 28 May, Viktor Orbán arrived in London to meet with the British prime minister. The visit was ostensibly to discuss UK-Hungary relations following the UK’s exit from the European Union. Government ministers have defended the meeting as a legitimate exercise in relationship-building following Brexit. Business secretary Kwasi Kwarteng, for example, described it as “completely reasonable”.
But others have been quick to point out that hosting Orbán lends credibility to his far-right agenda and controversial stances. In particular, his characterization of migrants as “a poison” and comments about so-called “Muslim invaders” have drawn criticism. Orbán has been widelycharacterized as far-right. And along with other Eastern European leaders such as Poland’s Mateusz Morawiecki, he’s part of an emerging ultra-nationalist political trend. One that that arguably borders on fascism.
Establishment double standards on antisemitism
But from a UK perspective, Orbán’s most salient characteristic is his well-documented antisemitism. According to Politico, during Hungary’s 2017 parliamentary elections Orbán “promoted anti-Semitic imagery of powerful Jewish financiers scheming to control the world”. It added that his government’s “anti-migrant rhetoric endangers all minorities, including Jews, and its comparisons with the 1930s are unmistakable”. Orbán has also been accused of attempting to minimize Hungary’s role in the Nazi Holocaust.
The fact that the Conservatives are presumably willing to overlook all of this reveals how their and their backers’ charge of antisemitism against Corbyn was a cynical ploy all along. After all, if Corbyn had met with an actual antisemite, we would have never heard the end of it. But because of the UK media’s well-documented right-wing slant, Johnson largely gets a free pass.
Part of a long history
And it’s far form the first time he has either. As The Canary has previously reported, before becoming prime minister Johnson wrote a novel with some suspiciously antisemitic tropes. He was also part of a group of MPs who were present at the unveiling of a statue of Nancy Astor. Astor was an MP who openly held antisemitic beliefs.
Clearly, this is another flagrant example of the double standards the UK media and establishment apply to political figures according to their ideological orientation. As academic Norman Finkelstein explained to The Canary in an exclusive interview in 2019:
British elites suddenly discovered ‘we can use the antisemitism card in order to try to stifle genuine… leftist insurgencies among the population’. And so what used to be a kind of sectarian issue waged by Jewish organisations faithful to the party line emanating from Israel vs critics of Israel, now it’s no longer sectarian because the whole British elite has decided they’re going to use this antisemitism card to stop Jeremy Corbyn and the political insurgency he represents.
Perhaps it’s time the Labour membership came to terms with the fact that the 2019 election wasn’t a clean fight. And that Corbyn should be reinstated as Labour leader.
Over the past several weeks, the world has witnessed Palestinians continuing to resist forced displacement, apartheid and brutal military occupation. There have been outcries around the world calling for solidarity and to hold the Israeli government accountable. Missing in a lot of the circulating narratives, however, is the indisputable role that the powerful Christian Zionist movement plays, both now and in the long and bloody history of the colonization of Palestine.
Christian Zionists are leading the call for the U.S. to unconditionally support Israel’s expulsion of Palestinians in Jerusalem and Israel’s bombing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza. Christian Zionist leaders regularly caricature Palestinian resistance to their displacement as “Jew hatred,” appropriating antisemitism to hinder Palestinian rights. Recently, John Hagee, the chairman and founder of Christians United for Israel (CUFI), the largest pro-Israel lobby group in the U.S., tweeted that Jerusalem and Israel belong to the Jewish people, and encouraged Christians to “take a stand against evil” and show “unconditional love and support for Israel.”
What Is Christian Zionism?
Christian Zionism is by far the largest movement supporting authoritarian policies in the Israeli government outside of Israel, and an essential bloc within the larger U.S. Christian Right. The most politically active Christian Zionist movements aremotivated primarily by the belief that Jews taking control over the biblical land of Israel will bring about Jesus’ second coming and the end of the world, when Christians will reach salvation and non-Christians — including Muslims and Jews — will be annihilated.
These End Times theologies have roots in 16th-century Protestantism in Europe, and reflect the colonial context in which they were formed. Christian Zionism as a political movement gained traction as part of the 19th century “Fundamentalist Movement” in Britain and the U.S. when figures, such as Lord Shaftesbury, John Nelson Darby and William Blackstone, began proselytizing the End Times prophecy and conjuring up ideas of a Jewish homeland in Palestine decades before prominent Jewish Zionists called for the same. Britain’s Arthur Balfour, whose Balfour Declaration promised a Jewish homeland in Palestine, was himself a noted Christian Zionist, as was President Woodrow Wilson, who co-signed the Declaration at the encouragement of Jewish Zionist Supreme Court Judge Louis Brandeis.
Jewish Zionism is a newer development than Christian Zionism, but alliances were formed between the majority Ashkenazi Jewish Zionists in Europe seeking a Jewish state and the Christian Zionists who were located in the highest offices in the U.S. and British governments. Indeed, it was Christian Zionists who had the imperial and military power necessary to occupy and colonize Palestine at the fall of the Ottoman Empire, and it was the League of Nations, led by Western Christian-majority powers, who ultimately partitioned Palestine and Israel. No doubt, Christian Zionist leaders viewed the displacement of Jews out of Europe into Palestine as a convenient solution to the “Jewish question,” whereby the Jewish State would serve as a proxy for Western imperial interests in a geopolitically strategic region, and Jewish bodies used as a sword and shield against a centuries-old Muslim enemy. The colonization of Palestine is rooted in, and largely continues to serve, Western Christian imperialist interests at the expense of Palestinians, Muslims and Jews.
Many Christian Zionists today view the 1948 establishment of the State of Israel, which created the Nakba — or expulsion of about 750,000 Palestinians — as a fulfilment of biblical End Times prophecy. The Israeli occupation of the West Bank, Gaza and the Golan Heights beginning in 1967 similarly is interpreted as a sign that God is blessing Israel and paving the way for Jesus’ return. Subsequent wars, invasions and offensives have been seen as escalating measures that foreshadow the End Times that will bring Christians into salvation and annihilate non-Christians. In other words, Christian Zionism responds positively to conflict, in particular Israeli State aggression toward Palestinians. Regard for Palestinian land and life — including Palestinian Christians — is absent from Christian Zionism since Jewish rule over Palestine is key to unlocking the End Times.
What Is the Ongoing Impact of Christian Zionism?
Today, Christian Zionists are estimated to number at least in the tens of millions, far greater than the population of world Jewry. In the U.S., Christian Zionists are the most numerous and most right-wing voting bloc for Israel. The largest Christian Zionist organization, CUFI, boasts 10 million members, far eclipsing the 100,000 members belonging to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee or AIPAC, the much more famous pro-Israel lobbying organization. One out of every four adults in the United States identifies as Evangelical Christian, and 80 percent of Evangelical Christians, or 20 percent of the U.S. population, reportedly believe the gathering of millions of Jews by the State of Israel signifies the nearing of Jesus’ second coming. The power of Christian Zionism in the U.S. is summed up in a recent interview with Ron Dermer, a close ally of Israeli right-wing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and a former Israeli ambassador to the United States:
The backbone of Israel’s support in the United States is the evangelical Christians. It’s true because of numbers, and also because of their passionate and unequivocal support for Israel…. About 25% of Americans — some people think more — are Evangelical Christians. Less than 2% of Americans are Jews…. If you look just at numbers, you should be spending a lot more time doing outreach to Evangelical Christians than you would to Jews. But also look at the passionate support. For most Evangelicals in the United States, certainly for many of them, Israel is one of the most important issues to them. For some it’s number one. For others, it may be number two or number three…. It’s very rare to hear Evangelicals criticize Israel.
Many of the most egregious and anti-Palestinian policies by the United States are led by Christian Zionists. Former President Donald Trump’s foreign policy on Israel was largely appeasing his Evangelical Christian base who voted for him at a margin of 4:1 (on the other hand, a much smaller number of American Jews — somewhere between 21 percent and 30 percent –voted for Trump). Christian Zionists occupied the highest offices of the Trump administration, including former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and former Vice President Mike Pence, and Trump’s four years in office saw dramatic right-wing shifts in U.S. policy on Israel, including the cutting of U.S. funding to the UNRWA — the agency responsible for supporting Palestinian refugees — recognizing Israel’s illegitimate claims to the Golan Heights, moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem and withdrawing from the Iran nuclear deal. Netanyahu’s right-wing government had wanted to institute some of these changes for years, but it was only because of the Trump administration and its Christian Zionist base that Netanyahu was finally able to do so. While most Christian Zionist money flows through churches and is therefore difficult to track, Christian Zionist funding sends millions of dollars annually to Israel, including to support Jewish immigration to Israel and right-wing Israeli organizations and settlements in service of their goals of “regathering” the Jews, Palestinian displacement, and greater Israeli control.
While CUFI does not constitute President Biden’s base of support, Christian Zionism is shifting the U.S. conversation on Palestine as the movement continues to grow. The Biden administration restored funding to the UNRWA, but will not reverse many of Trump’s other Christian-Zionist influenced policies, including the U.S. embassy move to Jerusalem, despite having been major departures from decades of U.S. foreign policy. CUFI has grown to 10 million members from just 2 million in 2015, and Christian Evangelicalism is believed to be one of the fastest-growing religions in the world, forming an ever larger base of U.S. and global political and financial support for Israel’s right wing. Current Israeli aggression toward Palestinians is an outgrowth of long-held Israeli policies that privilege Jews, especially wealthy Ashkenazim, over Palestinians, but tens of millions of Christian Zionists constitute the global movement supporting, instigating and pushing the expansion of Israeli State control over the “holy land” at whatever cost.
Implications of Christian Zionism for U.S. Progressive Movements
While Christian Zionist movements largely outpace Jewish Zionist movements in their numbers as well as in their extremist, authoritarian views, the two movements continue to use one another for their own gain. As many Jewish Zionists hail Balfour, an avid antisemite, as a hero, they are very happy to overlook the antisemitism of Christian Zionists to bolster the shared vision of an apartheid Jewish supremacist state in historic Palestine. For example, even when U.S. politicians distanced themselves from John Hagee for his overtly antisemitic views, the Anti-Defamation League remained silent. The alignment of establishment Jewish organizations with right-wing antisemitic Christian organizations for the benefit of the Israeli right wing is dangerous for progressive movements in Palestine, the United States and around the world.
Indeed, Christian Zionism must be challenged as a powerful threat to a larger progressive agenda. Because Christian Zionism is predicated on Christian salvation coinciding with the end of the world and annihilation of non-Christians, Christian Zionism is at its core anti-Muslim and antisemitic. The anti-Muslim sentiments of many Christian Zionist leaders are often overt and indisputable: prominent figures such as John Hagee, Chuck Pierce and Pat Robertson have referred to Islam as satanic and the devil, and are key actors in the U.S. anti-Muslim industry. On the other hand, Christian Zionists use their unwavering support of the State of Israel rooted in philosemitism — the fetishization and objectification of Jews — to make it seem that they care for Jews while using Jews as pawns in their End Times drama and believing Jews are ultimately “damned to hell.” More broadly, many Christian Zionist communities adhere to a larger Christian Right agenda fighting against abortion and LGBTQ rights, contradicting any claims that they care for peace and freedom.
To overlook the impact of Christian Zionism on the ongoing colonization of Palestine is to overlook the original and largest worldwide movement seeking full Jewish control in Palestine — and one of the largest and most consequential anti-Muslim, antisemitic and antidemocratic movements of our time. Christian Zionism has informed Western policy on Palestine since at least the Balfour Declaration in 1917, and continues to be the backbone of global support for ongoing occupation, apartheid and displacement. Progressives committed to Palestinian rights and liberation — as well as Muslim and Jewish safety — will be limited as long as they fail to directly challenge this behemoth of a movement.
God works in mysterious ways — and so do Jewish voters. To see a perfect illustration of this, look no further than the Jewish community’s complex relationship with Harry S. Truman, the antisemitic president who helped Israel come into existence.
If you know anything about Israel, you almost certainly know that the Jewish nation relies on the United States for economic and military support. This is in no small part because the U.S. has the largest Jewish population of any nation outside Israel and because American politicians of both parties hope to win over Jewish voters (and Jewish political donors) by taking Israel’s side. When Israel is accused of humanrightsviolations, it can usually rely on American presidents and other major political leaders to have its back. (In that respect, even Donald Trump and Joe Biden are united.) This reality has long frustrated advocates for the Palestinian cause, especially at a moment like this, when the Israeli government is effectively waging war against Palestinians in Gaza.
Let’s consider Truman, the first president to have Israel’s back. Growing up as an American Jew in the 1990s, I was taught to view Truman as an icon, a hero for the Jewish people, the brave president who opposed his own State Department and became the first world leader to recognize Israel after it declared itself to be a new nation. In religious school I was regaled with the story of how the Chief Rabbi of Israel later told the president, “God put you in your mother’s womb so you would be the instrument to bring the rebirth of Israel.” Truman was said to have wept with joy.
Maybe that’s how Truman is viewed by Jews in retrospect. When he ran for president in 1948, however, he had the worst showing among Jewish voters of any Democratic candidate in 20 years.
Jews have voted predominantly Democratic in national elections since the 1920s, but even by that standard Franklin D. Roosevelt was beloved by Jewish voters. FDR never got less than 82% of the Jewish vote, and topped 90% in his last two campaigns, in 1940 and 1944 (elections that happened while Adolf Hitler was actively trying to wipe out the Jewish population of Europe). But in 1948, Jewish support for Truman fell by one-sixth, to 75% — although it wasn’t Republican nominee Thomas Dewey who benefited.
Truman’s Jewish support, in fact, was siphoned off by former Vice President Henry Wallace, running on the left as the Progressive Party candidate. Wallace only received 3% of the national popular vote, but won 15% of the Jewish vote — running in the year Israel was created and against the president given credit for helping to make that happen. Despite the antisemitic stereotype that Jewish voters only care about Israel, quite a few of them were so dissatisfied with Truman that they went for an actual left-wing alternative. You could almost hear the Wallace voters saying, “Israel Shmisrael!”
That was no anomaly. Jews have tended to support leftist and progressive causes throughout their history, whether that meant the labor movement, the civil rights movement, anti-war movements, feminism, LGBTQ rights and many more. It is difficult to state decisively why this is true, but the large number of prominent Jewish people involved with left-wing movements and American Jews’ century-long voting patterns make it undeniable.
And despite what antisemites may believe, relatively few Jews are “Israel first” voters. Polls old and new alike consistently find that the percentage of Jewish voters who consider Israel a paramount issue is usually in the single digits. A number of polls find that a majority of American Jews are critical of Israel’s policies, with only one-third in a recent survey saying they believe Israel sincerely wants peace with the Palestinians. And that’s true in spite of the fact that a growing number of Jewish Americans are increasingly concerned about antisemitism, a strong indication that they view the two issues independent of each other.
In other words, ever since the first time an American president stuck his neck out for Israel, American Jews have repeatedly proved that they are not a monolith. They do not have dual loyalties, as Donald Trump implied during his presidency, and they cannot be won over by bribing them with support for Israel.
There is another lesson in Harry Truman’s story, namely that people who do good things for Israel are not necessarily true friends of Jews. Indeed, if American Jews in 1948 had known more about how President Truman perceived them, he might have received an even lower share of the Jewish vote.
“Truman had an uglier side to his personality and sometimes that side that was prejudiced,” Randy Sowell, an archivist at the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library & Museum, told Salon. “I don’t deny that at all.”
As Sowell recounted, Truman private bigotry was complicated, as is so often true at the individual level. He used familiar ethnic slurs to refer to Jews in general, even though one of his closest friends, Eddie Jacobson, was Jewish. (Truman apparently believed that Jacobson’s success in business stemmed from his ethnic background.) Reportedly at his wife’s request, Truman didn’t allow Jewish people in his home. He described Jews as “very, very selfish” and claimed that “neither Hitler nor Stalin has anything on them for cruelty or mistreatment to the underdog.” (Truman also made racist or bigoted comments about other marginalized groups, including Black people and Asians.)
At the same time, as Sowell explained, Truman’s public actions are difficult to square with his prejudices. As a senator from Missouri, he wrote letters to his wife that brimmed with contempt for Jews, while also using his platform to advocate helping save Jewish people from Hitler and the Nazis. Even before the Holocaust was over, Truman became persuaded that the Jews’ Biblical homeland would be a fitting place for the survivors to build a new nation. When Secretary of State George C. Marshall, whom Truman deeply admired, urged the president not to recognize Israel because he feared the political tension blowback from Arab nations, Truman did so anyway.
Yet even in this story of humanitarian impulses overcoming antisemitic prejudice, there are some sour notes. Truman helped legitimized the new Jewish state by being the first world leader to recognize it, but did very little to help the native Palestinians who were being persecuted or driven into exile. When Truman at one point refused to meet with a Zionist activist to discuss Israel, his longtime friend Eddie Jacobson stunned him as he burst into tears, ultimately changing his mind. During this conversation, Jacobson compared the Zionist activist to one of Truman’s personal heroes, Andrew Jackson. Neither man, it seems, realized the cruel irony in linking the issue of Israel’s existence to a president widely reviled today for his racist and genocidal policies.
The moral here is that just as Jewish voters work in mysterious ways, so do the politicians they depend upon to protect their interests. Harry Truman was a bigot who wouldn’t let Jews enter his home yet felt compassion for the millions terrorized and murdered by a fascist dictator. We’ve seen a more recent president, Donald Trump, tell Israel it may do whatever it wants while still indulging his supporters’ overt antisemitism. Politicians on the Christian right may support Israel, but largely because of a half-baked prophecy holding that once Israel is a Jewish nation again, the messiah will return and Jews will either convert or go to hell.
Similarly, while leftist or progressive politicians may make some Jews uncomfortable when they criticize Israel, it is important to listen closely to what they say. Of course it’s contemptible to traffic in stereotypes about Jews being greedy or secretly controlling the world — the kinds of stereotypes Harry Truman quite likely believed — and anyone who exploits those beliefs in criticizing Israel deserves to be condemned. But criticism of Israel, or any other nation, that is rooted in facts and evidence is quite another matter. The lesson we can draw from the antisemitic president who helped create Israel is perhaps a lesson about challenging our assumptions and looking past them, and about learning to live with complexity and contradiction.
1. Be clear about what you mean when using labels:
Jewish or Muslim refers to people all over the world who are part of a religious group
Palestinian or Israeli are national identities
Zionism is the belief in the right of the Jewish people to self-determination (and not all people who call themselves Zionist share the same opinion about the exact territory, principles, etc. of the state of Israel). ‘Zionist’ or ‘Zio’ should not be used as a term of abuse
Arab is a grouping of people whose mother tongue is Arabic and there is great diversity across the Arab World (i.e. Jordan can’t simply become Palestine just because they are Arabs)
Islamism is an academic term with French origins that refers to a broad spectrum of political ideologies. Islamism is not a synonym for terrorism and should not be used as such
2. Do not hold Jews responsible for the decisions of the Israeli leaders, or Muslims responsible for the decisions of the Palestinian leaders
3. Do not demand that Jews or Muslims must take a certain political position on the issue
4. Do not assume that all Palestinians or Israelis support the actions of their governments
5. Anti-Zionism is not always antisemitic (for example if someone is generally anti-nationalism and believes in abolishing nation-states)
However, it can be, for example if criticism of Israel goes beyond that of its government policies and uses antisemitic tropes
Tonight outside the US embassy in London; "Khaybar Khaybar, ya yahud, Jaish Muhammad, sa yahud" or "Jews, remember Khaybar the army of Muhammad is returning". They mean Zionists tho…@PSCupdates are they your banners they're holding? @mishtalpic.twitter.com/PuMaZEomEk
Pro-Palestinian protestors shouting antisemitic rhetoric: “Khaybar Khaybar, ya yahud, Jaish Muhammad, sa yahud” (“Jews, remember Khaybar the army of Muhammad is returning”), London (May, 2021).
6. Do not state that Muslims should leave Palestine because they have the whole of the rest of the Middle East or that Israeli Jews should ‘go back to where they came from’
7. Israel is not a conspiracy to take over the Middle East or the World, and Palestine is not a conspiracy to enforce a Caliphate on Israel/Europe/the World
These are two national identities who both want to exist on the same piece of land
8. Israel is not Nazi Germany. Palestine is not Daesh
9. Israelis and Palestinians are human beings, celebrating their suffering and death is not acceptable
10. Be sensitive towards people who are pro-Israel or pro-Palestine at this time
They may have friends/family involved in the situation, or Israel/Palestine may represent something important to them such as their own sense of struggle or a place of safety in times of persecution
Solidarity with one side or the other is not a crime, they can be pro-Israel/pro-Palestine and still be pro-solution
If you want any advice, contact us at Solutions Not Sides. If you’re a teacher or school leader and want to know more about discussing this issue with your students, you can find out more here.
Credits:
This blog was written and first published by Solutions Not Sides (May 2021). Tweet was later added by Voice of Salam (May 2021).
Solutions Not Sides is an education programme that exists to provide humanising encounters, diverse narratives and critical-thinking tools in order to empower young people with the knowledge, empathy and skills to promote dialogue and conflict resolution, and to challenge prejudice in the UK.
Disclaimer:
The views expressed in this blog are solely the author’s and do not necessarily reflect those of Voice of Salam.
Anti-refugee and anti-migrant narratives and misconceptions around the numbers and location of refugees and asylum seekers continue to enter conversations, television screens and newspaper spreads. This sadly spreads fear, misinformation and distrust of those who’ve been forced from their homes in search of safety and security.
A campaign is growing to defend professor David Miller against attempts to have him suspended from his role at the University of Bristol. Campaigners have planned an act of solidarity in Bristol city centre. And on the evening of 13 March, Labour Campaign for Free Speech (LCFS) is holding a public online meeting in support of Miller. A number of public figures will be speaking out in Miller’s defence at this meeting.
Attempts to censor Miller
The Community Security Trust (CST) launched a campaign to censor Miller two years ago. This was based on allegations of antisemitism in response to his academic work linking Zionism to Islamophobia. In response to the latest allegations – led by Bristol’s JSoc and the Union of Jewish Students – a CST spokesperson said:
CST first complained to Bristol University about Professor David Miller’s promotion of what we consider to be antisemitic conspiracy theories two years ago, following concerns raised with us by Jewish students attending his lectures.
They added:
Despite repeated complaints Bristol University took no significant action and their negligence has led to this latest outrage, in which Miller explicitly targeted Bristol University’s Jewish Society by associating them with an “enemy” – Zionism – that he slanders as Islamophobic and racist and says must be defeated.
They concluded by saying:
This is unconscionable language for any academic to use about students at his own university. It has nothing to do with academic freedom and brings into question whether any students, Jewish or not, should remain under Professor Miller’s duty of care.
Those being anti-Zionist, however, argue that it is not the same as antisemitism, i.e. anti-Jewish prejudice. On the misleading conflation of anti-Zionism and antisemitism, The Canary‘s senior editor Emily Apple, who identifies as Jewish, has said:
Being anti-Zionist is not being antisemitic. Questioning Israel’s aggressive policies, Palestinian deaths, and illegal land occupations does not make anyone antisemitic. Protesting Israeli interests and supporting the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign does not make someone antisemitic. Being Jewish is not being Israeli, and we need to stop conflating the two.
The campaign for academic freedom
Miller’s supporters have launched a campaign to defend him. They’re calling on activists to send letters in defence of free speech to the university’s vice chancellor.
LCFS has organised a public online meeting at 5pm on 13 March to defend Miller, academic freedom, and free speech. Public figures including rapper Lowkey, Palestine-based investigative journalist Jonathan Cook and author Matt Kennard will join the discussion.
Campaigners established LCFS in 2021 to support freedom of speech and publication. A spokesperson for the group said:
Those who seek to get Professor Miller fired from his job won’t stop there. Other academics who are critical of Israel will be targeted and possibly fired. And it won’t take much of this to persuade other academics to stop speaking out against Israel’s policies for fear of losing their careers.
They added:
The campaign against Professor Miller is specifically designed to conflate criticism of Zionism with hatred of Jews. It is also designed to shut down teaching about Islamophobia and the harms posed by Zionism. Professor Miller is a test case – Israel’s lobby in Britain wants to use the widely criticised International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance Working Definition of Antisemitism to ban all criticism of the State of Israel, its policies and its ideology. It’s essential that we prevent this.
Growing support
A number of public figures have spoken out in support of Miller.
Film director Ken Loach said:
Universities depend on the freedom within the law to challenge all ideologies and political movements. Professor Miller is renowned and respected for his rigorous analysis and considered judgements. His voice is important. All are free to challenge his opinions but none should advocate their suppression. Everyone who cherishes free speech should stand with David Miller.
Political comedian Alexei Sayle expressed solidarity, saying:
A healthy society is one where people can speak the truth even about uncomfortable subjects. No-one should lose their job for telling the truth. I want to express my support for and solidarity with David Miller.
Moreover, former Labour MP Chris Williamson celebrated Miller’s academic achievements, saying:
David Miller is an esteemed academic who has made an invaluable contribution in highlighting Islamophobia, critiquing Zionist ideology and explaining the interrelationship between state and corporate power.
And Matzpen founder professor Moshe Machover said:
David Miller has been targeted by the British establishment and the Zionist lobby, as part of the ongoing campaign designed to stifle all opposition to the Zionist colonisation project and Israeli settler state. He should be defended by all those who value freedom of speech, and in particular academic freedom.
Campaigners have planned an act of solidarity to take place in Bristol city centre, and the LCFS has invited members of the public to the online meeting in support of Miller.
Two months have now passed since mobs of mostly white people descended on the Capitol in an attempt to overthrow the results of November’s election, but I am still haunted by images of the mob’s racist violence such as the noose that they put on display and the shirt of a white man in the crowd that read, “Camp Auschwitz.”
These details were more than symbolic — they point to historically materialized forms of horrific anti-Black and antisemitic racism that continue to be stoked by white supremacist strains of Christianity.
As we struggle against this violence, we can draw from the deep wellsprings of African American and Jewish prophetic traditions that speak truth to power and counter oppression.
In moments like these I often turn to the work of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, who was one of the leading Jewish theologians and prophetic figures of the 20th century. He was also a close friend of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and joined King to march from Selma to Montgomery in March 1965.
Rabbi Heschel’s writings produce a profound love for those who suffer and a profound sense of outrage against those who perpetuate that suffering. At this moment in U.S. history, as we witness the rise of unabashed white supremacy and the proliferation of lies and mistrust, we desperately need to channel the prophetic urgency and clarity of voices like his.
Where are the courageous voices who will call out all forms of religious idolatry that are entwined with profane understandings of Christianity? Is racism anti-theological? In what ways might we continue to hope while in the claws of despair? And where are we headed — into chaos or into community, given such pervasive violence and indifference in the world?
In this engaging interview, Rabbi Heschel’s daughter, Susannah Heschel, speaks in her own powerful voice, and weaves her father’s prophetic courage and wisdom into our conversation. Susannah Heschel is the Eli M. Black Distinguished Professor and chair of the Jewish Studies Program at Dartmouth College. She is the author of Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus, The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany, and Jüdischer Islam: Islam und jüdisch-deutsche Selbstbestimmung. A Guggenheim Fellow, she is currently writing a book with Sarah Imhoff, entitled, Jewish Studies and the Woman Question.
George Yancy:One of my favorite quotes from Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel is “The prophet’s word is a scream in the night.” For me, it points to his own deep sense of pain felt when others suffer, and the sense of outrage that he felt when it came to our inhumanity toward each other. I wanted to scream as I watched with sorrow and outrage the events unfold at the Capitol. How would you characterize the meaning and importance of your father’s use of “scream” within the context of what we witnessed collectively at the Capitol? There is something sonically visceral expressed in his use of that term.
Susannah Heschel: What does it mean to be a prophet? We conventionally think of prophets as people who foretell the future, but my father’s understanding of the Hebrew prophets of the Bible is entirely different. “What manner of man is the prophet?” he asks. A person of agony, whose “life and soul are at stake in what he says.” Who hears our despair? As you note, my father writes that the prophet’s word is “a scream in the night,” a scream to shatter our indifference. The prophet screams out the horror of human suffering, giving voice to the “silent sigh of human anguish.”
When we watched the horrific video of police murdering George Floyd, we saw his desperation and agony, and we watched a murderer kill him. We saw police bystanders who stood there, utterly indifferent, doing nothing to save this man’s life. We wanted to scream.
White Americans shoulder grave responsibility for that moment. My father writes, “Some are guilty, but all are responsible.” We are not guilty of murder, but we have to assess our responsibility: Are we not bystanders, responsible for the racism that led to the murder of so many Black men, women and children? George Floyd was murdered by the racism that has gone unchecked for centuries, the systemic racism that organizes this country according to principles of white supremacy.
The soil of this country is soaked with the blood of Native Americans we slaughtered and Black Africans we brought to this country to enslave. Slavery left us with a heritage of its sadism in our culture and with the screams of slaves still ringing in our ears. Remember, my father said that, “the blood of the innocent cries forever. Should that blood stop to cry, humanity will cease to exist.” Have we all become indifferent bystanders, unable to hear the scream in the night? Do we not hear the cries of the tortured and murdered? If we are to preserve our own humanity, we must become prophetic witnesses.
As you have shared when you were at Dartmouth College as our Montgomery Fellow, some white Christians in this country left Sunday church services to hunt a Black man, woman or child to torture and then hang in full view of a throng of white onlookers, taking photographs before going home for their Sunday dinner. During World War II, Nazi death camp guards tortured and murdered Jews and then went to church services. How is that even possible? What should we do once we conclude our prayers? Do we leave our houses of worship only to engage in brutality? What kind of worship is it, then?
Our worship services require revision to make clear to congregants why they gather to pray, and that God demands, first and foremost, justice before we even gain the right to stand before God and pray. A life of cruelty cannot be combined with a life of pretended piety: “I hate, I despise your feasts,” God tells us through the prophet Amos, “let justice roll down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”
Dr. King and my father used similar language and spoke of God not as the “unmoved mover” of Aristotle, but as the “most moved mover” of the Bible, a God of pathos who responds to us. Central to my father’s theology is his assertion that God has passion and is involved in human history, affected by human deeds. This means that God suffers when human beings are hurt, so that when I hurt another person, I injure God. How can a self-proclaimed “religious” person pray on Sunday morning and then torture and murder on Sunday afternoon? This is not prayer; this is not living as a witness to God.
What does it mean to be a witness? My father writes that while the Ten Commandments prohibit images of God, God created human beings in the divine image. We are the only permitted images of God, but what does it mean to be an image of God? To be an image, my father writes, is to be a witness: “God is raging in the prophet’s words.” The prophets are witnesses to God’s passion for justice. Indeed, citing an old Jewish tradition, my father writes, “I am God and you are my witnesses; if you are not my witnesses, then I am not God.”
Your father also wrote that, “The history of interracial relations is a nightmare.” He understood how racism defiles the human soul and disgraces our common humanity. The ugly, dreadful and deadly reality of racism in this country haunts U.S. history and lurks within the fragile struts that maintain our democratic experiment. At the Capitol, I recall seeing a sign or flag that read, “JESUS SAVES.” Deploying that message within the context of the racist and violent attack at the Capitol recalls other moments of vile contradiction within white Christianity, such as times when many white Christians gathered to watch Black bodies being castrated, brutalized and burned. And while this form of racism is not intrinsic to Christianity, many white Europeans committed gruesome crimes in the name of Christianity. Your father’s words characterize racial and religious bigotry in terms of evil, the sheer absence of reverence. How would your father characterize our contemporary nightmare, and what advice would he have for religious leaders as we live through this 21st-century nightmare?
Those self-proclaimed religious leaders who grant sanction to racists, spread lies and intolerance, claim they speak in the name of God, faith and morals; I say my Bible has been taken captive by a fascistic movement masquerading as apocalyptic Christianity. All around this country, we see truth and justice covered with chains, enslaved by selfishness and the lust for power and empire. These are indeed a people who hear and do not understand, see and do not perceive.
To these people, I quote Jeremiah:
They know no bounds in deeds of wickedness; they judge not with justice the cause of the fatherless, the rights of the needy. Shall I not punish them for these things, says the Lord, and shall I not avenge myself on a nation such as this? An appalling and horrible thing has happened in the land: the prophets prophesy falsely and the priests rule at their direction; my people love to have it so, but what will you do when the end comes? (Jeremiah 5:28-31)
How do we find hope in a time of despair? How do we keep the optimism of Isaiah at a time when the words of Jeremiah express our mood of desolation? But we must also ask: How can we abandon poor God to those who reject truth and trample on justice?
Let us remember that in the Bible, the words of God come to us from the prophets, not the priests, and not the kings. We are desperate for prophets in our time, those who will speak clearly to remind us, as my father did, that racism is “unmitigated evil.” My father stated clearly and sharply that we “forfeit the right to worship God” if we continue to uphold a racist society. He called upon all houses of worship to repent and recognize their sins, including their sins of perverting the fundamental teaching of all religious traditions: that God is either the creator of all life or of no life.
Prayer is the home for the soul, my father wrote, but worship must not be reassuring. My father’s friend, Rev. William Sloane Coffin, used to say that prayer must comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. My father wrote that prayer must be subversive, disturb our self-righteousness and complacency. The experience of prayer should be like the experience of hearing the prophets: a rousing call to conscience. The prophets have been mocked for their passionate outrage about injustice, and my father asks, if we mock the prophets as “hysterics,” then “what name should be given to the abysmal indifference to evil which the prophet bewails?” Who are we, the complacent, the bystanders?
I am also deeply intrigued by your father’s integration of God-talk vis-à-vis the ways in which we mistreat, oppress and marginalize others. Your father’s eyes were always focused on human beings, on our past and present mistreatment of other human beings. I see this as his horizontal vision, one that is unafraid to name and call out the social evils that we as human beings create and perpetuate. Yet, what I would call his vertical vision is always operative as well. God is always there, especially manifested in our fellow human beings. Your father writes, “To act in the spirit of religion is to unite what lies apart, to remember that humanity as a whole is God’s beloved child.” What is important to note here is that the term “religion” comes from the Latin religare, which suggests a community bond between human beings and God. Speak to the need for a form of God-talk in our moment, especially given so much religious hypocrisy, where religiosity appears to be tethered to forms of political idolization, where Donald Trump, apparently, can commit no wrong, no harm, no acts of injustice, where he has, for some, become “infallible.”
Perhaps what we need is not talk about God, but greater awareness of the presence of God. The problem my father poses in his books is how we can cultivate in ourselves the ability to sense God’s presence, whether in nature, Torah, other people — and in justice itself. First, we have to realize what we are capable of — a sense of awe and amazement, heightened sensitivity to others, awareness of our own vulnerability.
A Hasidic thinker of the 19th century made a distinction between having a sense of the absence of God’s presence — moments when we lose our ability to recognize that the whole earth is filled with God’s glory — and a sense of the presence of God’s absence, meaning moments when we fall into a pit of despair and sense that there is, perhaps, a place in our world that is vacant, without God.
In these days, some of us feel we are in an abyss of despair, terribly worried about the overwhelming problems we face as a society and a country, unsure of how we can emerge.
We also see people who were driven by a lying president, inciting them to riot, to rage against all norms of proper behavior and thereby fall into an abyss as well, though not of despair but of rebellion, the vacant abyss in which God is absent.
Together we need to raise ourselves from despair and rebellion. In Hasidic tradition, we need help to lift ourselves out of the abyss, to leave behind fear and resentment, and accompany our return to conscience and commandments.
What we must remember, my father always emphasized, is that evil is never the climax of history. Justice will rise up and prevail. Out of despair, let us find hope and inspiration in Dr. King and my father, in their teachings and in their relationship.
For my father, the prophets always held out a vision and a hope: “There is bound to come a renewal of our sense of wonder and radical amazement, a revival of reverence, an emergence of a sense of ultimate embarrassment, and ultimate indebtedness.”
Your father and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. were friends, but also close in terms of theological vision and sociopolitical praxis. Both rejected the evils of racism and economic injustice. Both were concerned about the poor, the orphaned, the despised, the “disposable.” Many want to know where we go from here. So, will it be chaos or community? And how might the voices of these two figures, who stand within the tradition of a theology of social justice, help us in this moment of deep divisiveness, help us to find a way out of so many anti-democratic forces?
Yes, will it be chaos or community? Apocalypse or prophecy?
The political religion of the Nazis was not about religion but fascism masquerading as Christianity. My great concern is that fascistic movements have until now never been halted by political arguments — not by Democrats, Communists, Socialists or Christians. The challenge before us is great, and the temptation to despair is enormous.
Throughout the course of history, political movements have used religion to gain power and have sought to undermine the prophetic tradition. They are movements characterized by terror and a desire for social control and constriction, warning of death and destruction rather than offering hope and redemption. Today we have a Christian Right that swaggers with a promise of salvation for the elect and ignores the here and now of our lives, our desperate need for justice and a beloved community. Rather than care for the Earth and its bounty, they care for money even at the price of utter destruction of the land, poison of our bodies, contempt for our fellow animal creatures.
Such movements are bolstered by a death-glorifying theology. What we see is a white supremacist movement reviving an insidious politics of race. In the Nazi period, some Germans used Christianity to promote racism and antisemitism. When I wrote a book about them, The Aryan Jesus, I learned how frighteningly easy it can be to pervert religion and destroy its moral credibility. Some German bishops and pastors were so enthusiastic about Hitler they called him a “savior.” Shockingly, I have heard American Christians say the same about Trump. In Germany, Hitler’s Christian supporters threw the Old Testament out of the Bible and proclaimed Jesus an Aryan, not a Jew.
Trump has had a similar effect in this country, with rallies that arouse emotional excitement. Some religious leaders — Catholic, Protestant and Jewish — have viewed him as a “savior” figure. In both contexts, Germany and America, the desecration of basic moral decency did not dissuade religious leaders, but brought a thrill of naughty violation of the fundamental propriety and doctrinal discipline of religion and society.
Why are some Jews in America and in Israel Christianizing Zionism and their own moral values with white supremacy? Is Trump more appealing than Judaism? Let me warn them: Smearing themselves with white supremacy will result in the suicidal destruction of Judaism.
Have my fellow Jews forgotten that the central teaching of Judaism is compassion and justice? The ultimate expression of God for the prophets is not wisdom, magnificence, land, glory, nor even love, but rather justice. Zion, Isaiah declares, shall be redeemed by justice, and those who repent, by righteousness. Justice is the tool of God, the manifestation of God, the means of our redemption and the redemption of God from human mendacity.
What has happened to our conscience, to our judgment, to our duty as citizens to say “no” to the subversiveness of our government, which is ruining the values we cherish by carrying out deadly policies? Is America, is democracy, the great rock of ages, to become a temporary moment in history?
How do we emerge from the abyss of despair and lift fellow human beings out of their abyss of rage? How do we become God’s beloved disciple when we feel like God’s suffering servant?
I wish to share a few poignant verses from the Bible:
Who will speak for me, asks God, who will remember the covenant of peace and compassion? Can we abandon despair and find the inner resources to respond like Isaiah, who said, Here I am, send me. (Isaiah 6:8)
And yet in anger, Habakkuk reminds us, we must remember mercy. (3:2)
To live a life of moral grandeur and spiritual audacity is a profound challenge; we must all begin by practicing small acts of courage and truth. David, on his deathbed, tells Solomon: Be strong and of good courage; Fear not, be not dismayed; for the Lord God is with you. God will not fail you nor forsake you until all the work for the service of the Lord is finished. (1 Chronicles 28:20)
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
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