The Upper Immigration Tribunal overturned Theresa
May’s Deportation Order yet Freedland still accuses Raed Salah of
‘anti-Semitism’
I was wondering, when
writing this article, whether a new verb might be in order. To Freedland trans:
to deliberately distort or falsify an argument e.g. through concealment of evidence esp. by a journalist
When
writing a letter
to Jonathan Freedland regarding his latest attack
on Corbyn I asked myself – is this the most dishonest journalist in
Britain? Admittedly the competition is strong but given the Guardian’s
reputation as a left-liberal paper it would seem to me that Freedland is head
and shoulders above the competition.
 |
| John Bercow has failed to detect the anti-semitism in Corbyn that Freedland detects a plenty |
Freedland’s
attack on Corbyn as anti-Semitic is tawdry, even by his standards.
He cobbles together 3 examples of Corbyn's 'antisemitism' and ignores the testimony of the Jewish Speaker
of the House of Commons, John Bercow, that there is not a ‘whiff’ of anti-Semitism
about Corbyn.
He ignores Corbyn’s record as an MP and the defence of Corbyn by the foremost
historian of the Jewish community, Professor Geoffrey Alderman and instead attacks him for associating with a Palestinian cleric.
It is worth
examining this. In 2011 Raed Salah,
leader of Israel’s Northern Islamic Leagues came to Britain. He was the subject
of a banning order but Theresa May’s Home Office was incompetent enough not to
have told anyone. See Theresa May's haste to ban Raed Salah will be repented at leisure
 |
| Smugness and superciliousness is written all over this ex-public schoolboy's face |
Raed Salah
sailed through Britain's immigration controls and addressed a meeting at the House of
Commons. The next day he was arrested
and the First Immigration Tribunal upheld May’s decision. However in 2012
the Upper Immigration Tribunal overturned it, partly because the evidence relied on by the First Tribunal was a poem
of Salah’s which had been doctored by the Zionist Community Security Trust which had supplied the evidence against Salah to the Home Office. The Zionists
had included the phrase ‘we Jews’ in his poem.
How did
Freedland report this in his Guardian article?
when a Palestinian Islamist preacher was found by a British tribunal to have peddled the
medieval and lethal myth of Jews feasting on the blood of gentile children,
Corbyn declared that man a very “honoured citizen”, and invited him for tea in
the House of Commons.
What did
the Upper Tribunal find about this allegation of support for the allegation of
a blood libel? I quote:
First, and as pointed out by Professor Pappe, there is no reliable evidence of the appellant using words carrying a reference to the blood libel save in the single passage in a sermon delivered five years ago.
Similarly, the reliable evidence relating to
calls to martyrdom is confined to the
same occasion. The absence of other evidence
is striking, for at least two reasons.
The appellant is a prominent public figure
and a prolific speaker. The first indictment
shows that his speeches are of interest
to the authorities in Israel. In these
circumstances we think it can
fairly be said that the
evidence before us is not a
sample, or ‘the tip of the iceberg’: it is simply all the evidence that there is
In other
words there is no reference nor was there to Jews feasting on the blood of
gentile children. This phrase is entirely fictional, a creation of Freedland's fertile mind. In short it is a lie.
Indeed Salah didn’t even mention Jews.
He made an allegorical reference to the blood of children. Salah stated
“We have never allowed ourselves, and listen well, we have never allowed ourselves to knead the bread for the breaking of the fast during the blessed month of Ramadan with the blood of children. And if someone wants
a wider explanation, you should ask what used
to happen to some of the children of Europe, whose blood would be mixed in the dough of the holy bread. God Almighty, is
this religion? Is this what God wants? God will
confront you for what you are doing”.
You could
argue that the reference was ambiguous. Salah argued it was a reference to the
Spanish Inquisition. Possibly he got carried away by his rhetoric but this was a speech made in
2007, five years' previously. It was only in 2012, as a result
of the proceedings in the British courts that the Israeli authorities prosecuted
him. In fact the first court, the Jerusalem magistrates court acquitted him of
racial incitement in 2013 but the prosecution appealed and in November 2014 he was convicted and
sentenced to 9 months.
The fact that both these cases, relating to events in 2007, were only prosecuted after the events in Britain demonstrates the artificial political nature of the proceedings. Israel's courts are, for Palestinians, colonial courts.
No Israeli Jew, ever, has been prosecuted for
chanting ‘Death to the Arabs’. The authors of a book Torat Hamelech which
justified the murder of non-Jewish children and infants were not prosecuted.
 |
| Rabbi Dov Lior - his view is that one Jewish fingernail is worth a thousand non-Jewish lives |
According to the Jerusalem
Post the book, published in 2009 and written by Rabbis Yitzhak Shapira and
Yosef Elitzur of Od Yosef Hai Yeshiva in the West Bank settlement of Yitzhar,
was 'an analysis of the Jewish laws of the permissibility of killing
non-Jews during times of war and peace.' This wasn't some academic tome, it
relates to the rulings of military rabbis during the attacks on Gaza and
Lebanon who encourage the killing of civilians, including children in 'war'. Yet this kind of racism goes unremarked by
Jonathan Freedland. His writings are
effectively an accompaniment to Israel's targeting of Palestinian civilians.
In other
words Jonathan Freedland deliberately lied and distorted the facts about
someone that the Israelis tried to murder on the Mava Marmara but got the wrong
man. Raed Salah is a dignified man who
has been subject to the most horrendous persecution in Israel yet Freedland, in order to bolster his attacks on Corbyn, uses the victim of Zionist
racism as a tool in his armoury.
Disgusting or what?
In my
letter to him I quoted an old saying. It bears repeating:
You cannot hope to bribe or twist
(thank God!) the British journalist.
But, seeing what the man will do
unbribed, there’s no occasion to.
(thank God!) the British journalist.
But, seeing what the man will do
unbribed, there’s no occasion to.
I am sure
that Freedland is unbribed but I’m equally sure that what he does is in
conjunction with state actors both in Israel and Britain.
Tony
Greenstein
Dear Jonathan
Your latest anti-Corbyn
screed is possibly the most dishonest of all those you have penned since Corbyn
became leader of the Labour Party. It is, of course, timed to do most damage to
Labour’s election campaign. However your objective is so transparent that it is
unlikely to achieve its objective, other than confirming that the Guardian has
gone to rack and ruin.
As Gary Younge, one of the
few good journalists left departs for pastures anew what are you left
with? A bunch of ageing hacks without an
original thought between them – Rafael Behr, whose pomposity is his only attribute,
Suzanne Moore, whose acid pen is directed only at people like Julian Assange
and Polly Toynbee who is fading fast.
Where are people like
Jonathan Steele, Hugo Young, John Palmer, David Hirst, Michael Adams, Richard
Gott, Victor Zorza (who you won’t remember)? You would do well to recruit the
only decent Tory columnist on the market, now that the Mail has released him. I
refer to Peter Oborne but I suspect that even he is too radical for you.
I digress. Your connections
with the British state and Chatham House are a matter of record. I have no
doubt that your article was in accord with the consensus amongst your friends
that Corbyn, with his opposition to US imperialism would be harmful and
dangerous to Western interests. It is that and that only which explains your
concern with ‘anti-Semitism’.
If you were seriously
concerned about anti-Semitism then you would have written something about a
Tory party whose MEPs are members of the same political group in the European parliament,
the ECR,
as the representative of fascist and anti-Semitic parties.
10 years ago you wrote about
this very subject. Your article Once
no self-respecting politician would have gone near people such as Kaminski’
was immediately responded to by the leader of today’s ‘Corbyn is an anti-Semite
campaign’, Stephen Pollard, Editor of the Jewish Chronicle. Pollard wrote
that ‘Poland's Kaminski is not an antisemite:
he's a friend to Jews’. And historically he was right. Anti-Semites have
always been friends to Zionism.
In the scale of things, sitting down with Latvian
MEP Roberts Zile, who marches each year with the veterans of the Latvian Waffen
SS, is somewhat greater in the order of things than accusing someone of failing
to understand British irony. As Monica Lowenberg wrote
in an open letter to the Latvian government, her uncle Paul was murdered by
these same thugs, including the 15th SS Division, the most decorated
of all SS Divisions, in the Riga Ghetto.
Yet despite your obsession with Corbyn you
have not written for over a decade about the Tories’ links with Ziles or
Kaminski, the Polish MEP who told the remnants of Polish Jewry to apologise to
those who had burnt their fellows alive in Jedwabne.
Instead you construct a nest
of lies and half-truths in order to substantiate your accusations against Corbyn.
This despite the fact that the Jewish former Speaker John Bercow testified
that there is not a whiff of anti-Semitism in Corbyn, having known him for 22
years. Similarly the foremost historian of the Jewish community, Professor Geoffrey
Alderman, a right-wing Zionist like yourself, wrote
that Corbyn has devoted himself to supporting Jewish causes in Islington
including the preservation of the West London Jewish cemetery in the face of
plans by Margaret Hodge’s council to demolish it.
Instead you rely on 3 bogus and
dishonest examples of Corbyn’s ‘anti-Semitism’. A mural that Corbyn defended on
free speech grounds, which contained 2 (not 6 as you implied) Jewish bankers. Nor
were they hook nosed. The example of British irony not being appreciated by 2 Zionists
born in this country was a contrast with a Palestinian speaker who was not born
here. Nothing anti-Semitic about
that.
Not forgetting your demonization
of a Palestinian preacher, Raed Salah. You ‘forgot’ to mention that the Upper
Immigration Tribunal had overturned Theresa May’s deportation order because his
poem, upon which the prosecution relied, had been doctored. The Tribunal did not find that Salah was a believer in
the medieval Jewish blood libel myth and indeed Salah himself made that clear in
the pages of the Guardian.
We are left therefore with
the conclusion that your only concern was to defend the most racist state in
the world. Your concern with ‘anti-Semitism’ might be taken seriously if you
devoted the same time to protesting the racist actions of Israel, the ‘Jewish’
State.
Imagine that the Bishop of
Manchester decreed that non-Jews should not rent their homes to Jews? Yet that is exactly what the Chief Rabbi of
Safed did in 2011 when he ruled
that Jews should not let their homes to Arabs.
He was supported by dozens of Israeli rabbis yet he is a paid state employee.
Imagine that hundreds of British
Christians demonstrated against the sale of a house to a Jew? Yet in Afula, a
northern Israeli city, such demonstrations
have occurred in the past two years. Your silence on these and other
manifestations of the racism of Zionism is revealing.
If British Jews experienced
even a fraction of the discrimination that Palestinians citizens of Israel experience
then your charge of anti-Semitism would be justified. As it is you are a dishonest scribe, a paid
propagandist, with an agenda that has nothing to do with anti-Semitism. If as you claim 87% of British Jews believe that
Corbyn is an anti-Semite then it is because of dishonest journalists like you.
I have submitted a response
to the Comment pages but since you are the Editor I am sure it will not see the
light of day. It is such a pity that the
brainchild of the late Georgina Henry is now in the hands of Chatham House’s
servant. As the old saying goes:
You cannot hope to bribe or
twist
(thank God!) the British journalist.
But, seeing what the man will do
unbribed, there’s no occasion to.
(thank God!) the British journalist.
But, seeing what the man will do
unbribed, there’s no occasion to.
Yours
as ever,
Tony Greenstein
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