Ken Livingstone Must Be Reinstated & Corbyn
Must Fight Back
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| Ken Livingstone - under suspension for speaking the truth |
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| The coin that the Nazis struck in commemoration of the head of the Jewish desk at the Gestapo visit to Palestine courtesy of the Zionist labour movement |
For the past few months the
Labour Party has been subject to a similar programme of destabilisation. A programme in which the Zionist movement
played and is still playing a major role.
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| Identity Politics have wrecked havoc with Jones' socialist politics - He supports the Palestinians and he supports their oppressors |
From July 2015 onwards,
when it became increasingly clear that Corbyn would win the leadership election, we had a campaign, initiated by the Daily
Mail EXCLUSIVE: Jeremy Corbyn's 'long-standing links' with notorious Holocaust denier and his 'anti-Semitic' organisation revealed and fronted by the Jewish
Chronicle under Stephen Pollard, its far-right editor and member of the Henry
Jackson Society, The key questions Jeremy Corbyn must answer The aim of the campaign was to paint Corbyn
as a ‘friend’ of ‘terrorists’ – Hamas and Hezbollah and an associate of
holocaust deniers.
When Corbyn became leader
of the Labour Party, the campaign shifted to an attack on Gerald Kaufmann for
having said at a meeting that it was ‘Jewish money’ that was responsible for
the pro-Israel policy of the Conservative government. Groups such as the misnamed Campaign Against
Anti-Semitism, an overtly Zionist political organisation masquerading as a
charity [see EXCLUSIVE - Lifting the Lid
on the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism The Bogus Charity that Campaigns Against Corbyn, Muslims and Palestinians waged a prolonged
campaign against Kaufman as if he was the most notorious anti-Semite since Adolf Eichmann.
When I searched the Jewish Chronicle’s
database for ‘Jewish money’ I turned up no less than 590 occurences of this
phrase! It is a phrase commonly used in
the Jewish community. As an example of Zionist hypocrisy, on May 1st
a former prominent Jewish funder of the Labour Party, Michael Foster, was given
nearly 10 minutes of airtime on BBC Radio 4’s World at One programme to
explain why Jewish people weren’t going to be funding the Labour Party whilst
Corbyn was leader. Of course ‘Jewish money’
is only anti-Semitic when used by opponents of the State of Israel.
Jewish Chronicle columnist Geoffrey Alderman called for Kaufman’s excommunication from
the Jewish community despite having used the very same term twice in the same
article. A man who deserves banning Jewish Chronicle Geoffrey Alderman and Gerald Kaufman –Jewish Chronicle Columnist’sExercise in Hypocrisy
Despite his outburst against Kaufman Alderman was remarkably tolerant in respect of David Whelan, the former owner of Wigan
Athletic football club, who stated that ‘there
is nothing like a Jew who sees money slipping through his fingers’ and when challenged by the Guardian responded that ‘I think they [Jews]
are very shrewd people…. I think Jewish people do chase money more than
everybody else. I don’t think that’s offensive at all.’ To most
people this would count as anti-Semitism.
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| Lansman holds talks with racist Zionist groups and supports Livingstone's expulsion whilst remaining Chair of Momentum |
Alderman’s take was
that ‘It was ‘a
sad and miserable tale of political correctness taken to new depths of
absurdity.’ This football fuss is a bit rich 5.12.14. Despite ‘shrewd’ being used in the sense of canny or
mean, i.e. a stereotypical comment about Jews and money, Alderman’s comment was
‘who reading this column could take umbrage at that?’ And as for
Jews chasing money, Alderman believed that ‘as far as I’m aware no serious
research has been done on this subject. But it’s certainly true that the
Jewish view of money differs considerably from that of Christianity.’
Pollard himself was more than willing to excuse
anti-Semites when they were pro-Israel. Michal
Kaminski, the Conservative’s new partner, in the European and Conservative
Reform group in the European Parliament, was ‘the best friend of the Jews’ despite being anti-Semitic. [see ‘Poland’s Kaminski isnot an anti-Semite: he’s a friend to Jews’:
and Weapon of Choice
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| Ben Gurion - 'it is in our interest to use Hitler' as they 'turn a disaster (the Holocaust) into a productive force |
The reason why Kaminski could not possibly be
anti-Semitic, despite being a member of a former neo-Nazi party and opposing a
Polish apology for Jedwabne, when up to 900 Jews were burnt alive in a barn, was that ‘Far from being an antisemite, Mr
Kaminski is about as pro-Israel an MEP as exists.' David Miliband's insult to Michal Kaminski is contemptible Jewish Chronicle
1.10.09.,
Other incidents of ‘anti-Semitism’
In February there began the
new phase in the ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign.
It centred on Oxford University Labour Club whose co-chairman Alex
Chalmers resigned claiming that his fellow Labour Club members were
anti-Semitic . The occasion of this
resignation was the decision of the Club to support Oxford’s Israel Apartheid
Week. Oxford University Labour Club co-chair, Alex Chalmers, resigns amid anti-Semitism row
Since then we have had the
case of Vicky Kirby, an
ex-Bradford Mayor who tweeted that 6 million Zionists died in the holocaust when
complaining that even greater acts of genocide didn’t receive the same
attention as the Jewish genocide and now of course Ken Livingstone’s reference
to Hitler’s support for the Zionist solution to German anti-Semitism.
In what is the first
comprehensive investigation of these allegations of anti-Semitism by Electronic
Intifada researcher and journalist Asa Winstanley it becomes clear that these
allegations are not what they seem. How Israel lobby manufactured UK Labour Party’santi-Semitism crisis
Alex Chalmers was an intern
with BICOM the Britain
Israel Communications & Research Centre, which despite describing itself as an ‘an independent research centre’ is an Israeli propaganda group.
The case of Vicky Kirby which was one of the
worst examples of ‘anti-Semitism’ presented turns out to be a case of someone quite innocent fitted
up. Her ‘big noses’ comment was nothing more than quoting from a play the 2010
comedy film The Infidel. The information had been taken from the
far-right Conservative web site Guido Fawkes which had cropped a screenshot of
a tweet to make it appear that these were her own words.’ In other words the usual Tory dirty tricks. The article
analyses the role of New Labour MP and ex-NUS
President Wes Streeting who attended a key anti-BDS Conference in Tel-Aviv. Streeting, who le arnt the tricks of the trade
in NUS, is almost certainly working with the Israeli embassy and no doubt has other intelligence links.
Ken
Livingstone
On April 28th in an
interview with BBC Radio London’s Vanessa Feltz Ken Livingstone, in the course
of defending suspended MP Naz Shah from accusations of ‘anti-Semitism’ remarked
that:
‘Let’s
remember when Hitler won his election in 1932, his policy then was that Jews
should be moved to Israel. He was supporting Zionism – this before he went mad
and ended up killing six million Jews.’ Labour antisemitismrow: Ken Livingstone interview transcipts in full
These remarks can be best understood in the
context of Hitler supporting the Zionist solution to German Jewry i.e.
expulsion, though even this is not strictly accurate. Ken Livingstone says Labour should reinstate himbecause everything he said about Jewish people "was true"
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| From the biography of David Ben Gurion, Israel's first Prime Minister and Chairman of the Jewish Agency, by Shabtai Teveth - this is BG's reaction to Britain's Kindertransport plan to save 10,000 Jewish childen by bringing them to Britain in 1939 - saving half Germany's children in Palestine was better than saving all of them in England |
There is no
doubt that Ken made a number of minor mistakes.
Israel didn’t exist in 1933, the area was called Palestine, it was a British
Mandate territory. Secondly Hitler
didn’t win any election in 1932, on the contrary his vote in the November election
compared to July dropped by 2 million to 11.74 million (33.09%) compared to
13.,23 million (37.3%) for the KPD and SPD.
Hitler was put into power on January 30 1933 by reactionary political
and military forces who sought the destruction of the German labour movement.
Thirdly the final solution was not a product of Hitler’s madness. Even without Hitler the final solution would have taken place. It was the product
of war imperialism and the fanatical anti-Semitism of a section of the Nazi
Party. The final solution had a logic
and momentum of its own. When the
expulsion of Jews was no longer an option after 1939 the countdown to the destruction
of European Jewry had begun. It began in June 1941 with Operation Barbarossa.
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| Ben Gurion's official biographer Teveth concludes that for Ben Gurion and implicitly the whole Jewish Agency Executive, there was a very thin line separating him from seeing the Holocaust as a 'beneficial disaster' |
Livingstone’s
comments weren’t the wisest thing to have made in the course of an
‘anti-Semitism’ witch hunt. However in essence they are correct. The Nazi movement singled out the Zionist
movement as their favourite Jews.
For
example on 28 January 1935 Heydrich, the ‘“real engineer of the final solution” [Gerald
Reitlinger, The
Final Solution, p.13.] issued a directive to the Bavarian Gestapo that ‘The activity of the Zionist-oriented youth
organisations…. lies in the interests of the National Socialist state’s
leadership…. (they) are not to be treated with that strictness that it is necessary
to apply to the members of the so-called German-Jewish (assimilationists).’
Lucy Dawidowicz, War Against the Jews, p.118, citing Hans Mommsen, ‘Der
nationalsozialistische Polizeistaat’ pp. 78-9.
The
Zionists were allowed to organise, hold meetings, fly flags, have a newspapers
whereas the ‘assimilationists’ were repressed.
The Zionists used their patronage by the Nazis to encroach on the position
of the majority of the Jewish community demanding parity in the Reichsvertretung,
the Jewish communal organisation in 1935.
Indeed they took over all the positions on the Reichsvereinigung, which
was established in 1939 after Krystalnacht.
The
Zionist policy was that Jews should flee to Palestine or nowhere. Their twisted logic was that if other
countries could solve the crisis of anti-Semitism in Germany and Europe then Palestine
would be made redundant. In any case anti-Semitism,
being a disease, would simply spread to other countries. Only Palestine could provide a long-term
solution to anti-Semitism. It was a
racial concept of humanity. The Zionists
therefore lobbied the Gestapo not to allow Jews to emigrate to countries other
than Palestine. It was a consistent
Zionist policy to oppose the emigration of Jewish refugees to countries other
than Palestine such as Santo Domingo which had offered to take 100,000 refugees
as a result of the Evian Conference.
In a memo to the Jewish
Agency Executive after Krystalnacht, Ben-Gurion wrote:
if the Jews are faced with a choice between the refugee problem and rescuing Jews from concentration camps on the one hand, and aid for the national museum in Palestine on the other, the Jewish sense of pity will prevail and our people's entire strength will be directed at aid for the refugees in the various countries. Zionism will vanish from the agenda and indeed not only world public opinion in England and America but also from Jewish public opinion. We are risking Zionism's very existence if we allow the refugee problem to be separated from the Palestine problem. [Y. Elam, Introduction to Zionist history, Tel Aviv 1972, pp.125-26. See also Ot, paper of youth cadre of Mapai, No.2, winter 1967 cited by Machover-Offenburg p. 58 and Brenner, p. 149. Memo of 17.12.38]
It is essential that socialists
defend Livingstone. The suspension of a National Executive member, a former
MP and London Mayor and a figurehead of the Labour Left for the last 30 years
marks a new stage in the witchhunt. According
to reports, Corbyn was extremely reluctant to suspend Ken but he was bullied
into it. After a staged confrontation with the boorish
bully John Mann MP, Livingstone was suspended.
Popular opinion holds that it is Mann, not Livingstone, who should have been
suspended. Mann is Chair of the
Parliamentary Committee on anti-Semitism which devotes its time to opposing BDS
and support for Palestinians.
Tweets
and comments made even before Naz Shah was an MP were dug up and she was
dismissed as John McDonnell’s PPS. Naz Shah suspended by Labour party amid antisemitism row
One
tweet, issued in the middle of Israel’s genocidal Operation Protective Edge in
the summer of 2014, when 2,200 people in Gaza were murdered by Israel,
including 551 children, was to joke that Israel should be relocated inside the
United States as this would save the US the trouble and expense of maintaining
the Israeli state and preserve Palestinian life. She displayed a map showing Israel as the 51st
state of the USA. It turns out that this
was produced by Norman Finkelstein, a Jewish American academic and anti-Zionist
who is the son of two holocaust survivors.
There was nothing anti-Semitic about this map. It was a twitter type fantasy solution to the
problem of Israel’s barbarism.
To
the humourless and vindictive squad of Progress MPs such as Mann and Streeting,
Naz Shah was the next worst thing to Eva Braun and she was forced to resign her
position. She was suspended from the
Labour Party and forced to make a humiliating apology like a prisoner in a
Stalinist re-education camp. When
Vanessa Feltz asked me why she would confess to anti-Semitism if she wasn’t guilty I explained that there have been many
false confessions in history, such as the defendants in Stalin’s purge
trials. It’s not difficult to persuade
someone that they are guilty if you apply enough psychological pressure and you
see your career disappearing before you.
The media, the Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland in particular have played a despicable role in the witch hunt. see for example Labour and the left have an antisemitism problem Freedland, a ‘liberal’ Zionist berates the left in particular for not accepting the Israeli state. My plea to the left: treat Jews the same way you’d treat any other minority
What if, he asked,
Israel were the only Black state in the world.
Would we oppose it then.
Professor Kamel Hawwesh of Birmingham University answered yes, Palestinians
would reject any coloniser, whatever their colour. A Palestinian view on the antisemitism row Freedland demonstrates both his ignorance and
his malevolence when he compares a Jewish Israel to a Christian Britain. In Britain Christianity is an adornment. It doesn’t entitle you to special
privileges. It doesn’t mean that your planning
application in the Jewish town of Afula will be rejected because you are
Palestinian. Israel's Virulent Housing Bias Runs Deep — and It's Not Only Aimed at Arabs
The BBC has also
lived up to its reputation. It has afforded
the Labour Right every opportunity to air their allegations whilst denying
anti-Zionists a platform. There has been
an almost one-sided media barrage. One
of the only exceptions was the BBC Big Questions programme on Sunday May 1st
at 10 am when there are relatively few viewers.
Moshe Machover, Daphne Baram and myself were widely considered, even by Zionists,
to have trounced those who alleged that anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism are one
and the same thing. I also did an
interview with Vanessa Feltz, BBC London’s Zionist interviewer where I refused
to be diverted from explaining why Israel is an apartheid society, but these
are very much the exception.
One of the most
egregious examples of BBC bias was that of Andrew Neil’s Sunday Politics show on
March 18th which gave MPs West Streeting and John Mann opportunity
to wax at length about Labour’s ‘anti-Semitism’ problem. Neil himself is a former Murdoch editor and
Conservative Party research assistant. James
Schneider, a supporter of Corbyn was given just 25 seconds whereas Streeting
had 45 seconds and Mann was allowed 6 minutes and 4 seconds.
Andrew Neil, rather
than subjecting his claims to cross-examination, urged Mann on to greater
excesses. Take for example this
penetrating question: ‘‘Why has it [anti-Semitism] come back?’ Note that Neil assumes the very thing he is
asking.
Corbyn has shown
not only spinelessness throughout this affair but a culpable failure to
understand what is at stake. He has
continuously rowed back from the positions he adopted in previous years. Alongside MPs such as the late Joan Maynard he
was a sponsor of the Labour Committee on Palestine and the Labour Movement
Campaign on Palestine, both of which I chaired.
These organisations supported a democratic, secular state solution in Palestine. We opposed a 2 state solution which at that
time was supported by George Galloway’s Middle East Council! George has now come round to our way of
thinking!
If Livingstone
is expelled from the Labour Party Corbyn will not last long as leader. John McDonnell has taken an even worse
position. He backed off last September from
his comments over Ireland. Now he has added
Palestine to his retreat from the Left. Rather than sacking Naz Shah he should have
backed her. Instead with his ‘out, out, out’ remarks about alleged anti-Semites
he has encouraged those making false allegations to greater efforts.
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| Jon Lansman welcomed Livingstone's suspension and has effectively backed his expulsion |
Momentum under
Jon Lansman has been equally abysmal.
Lansman has held secret talks with Labour Friends of Israel and the
so-called Jewish Labour Movement, the
British branch of the racist Israeli Labour Party in order to reach some
form of agreement. It’s like the chicken
negotiating for a safe pass from a fox. Lansman
openly criticised Livingstone and supported his suspension.
In Left Futures Why the Left must stop talking about ‘Zionism’ Lansman argues that we should drop all mention of Zionism. The movement that founded the racist settler
colonial state of Israel should not be mentioned even though the World Zionist
Organisation is alive and kicking, funding the settlement of the Palestinian
territories. Netanyahu proclaims that in
the name of Zionism he cannot admit refugees to Israel, because it would
undermine the national identity of the Jewish state. IsraelPM: illegal African immigrants threaten identity of Jewish state. Binyamin Netanyahu reignites row over fate of thousands of African migrants in Israel Harriet Sharwood, The Guardian,
20.5.12. Lansman argues that if we pretend
there is no such thing as Zionism then all the cries about anti-Semitism will
go away. Such is the craven attitude of
left social democrats when they come under any pressure.
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| The Sex Pistols wrote a song about Owen Jones - Pretty Vacant |
Owen Jones, the
Guardian’s token left commentator, has
demonstrated that he is both politically and intellectually a light
weight. For the last 3 years he has
written an annual article deprecating ‘anti-Semitism’. Two of them even begin with the same fatuous
phrase ‘anti-Semitism is a menace.’ He
is incapable of understanding that when Israel is killing Palestinians,
Zionists cry ‘anti-Semitism’.
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| Owen Jones scabs in the witchhunt against 'anti-Semites' and backs the Zionist 'concern' over 'anti-Semitism' |
It is not necessary to defend everything that
Ken Livingstone said in order to oppose his suspension. Defending Livingstone goes hand in hand with
opposing the new McCarthyist witch hunt.
Whereas Joe McCarthy was an anti-Semite, his disciples come in the guise
of opponents of anti-Semitism.
Tony Greenstein
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