Open Letter to Jeremy Corbyn - Don't Play with an Apartheid Organisation - Labour Friends of Israel

Cut your links with Labour Friends of Settlements, Apartheid & Ethnic Cleansing

Jeremy Corbyn at the LFI fringe meeting - they wouldn't have dreamt have inviting him b4 being elected

The Jewish Labour Movement and LFI play up their false anti-Semitism narrative for all its worth

I am posting this to ask that if you are a member of the Labour Party or Momentum supporter please sign this letter stating which Constituency and Labour Party you are in.  With the recent Al Jazeera revelations, there can be no doubt that both LFI and the Jewish Labour Movement are emanations of the Israeli state inside the Labour Party.

Please send your details to me either via the comments or to azvsas@gmail.com

tony greenstein

Jeremy Corbyn MP

Leader of the Labour Party

House of Commons

London SW1 1AA

Dear Jeremy,

We write as Jewish and non-Jewish members/ supporters of the Labour Party.

We welcome the fact that you have called for a Government  inquiry into the revelations in the recent four-part series of programmes by Al Jazeera TV.  However the programmes also raise very serious questions for the Labour Party, not least its relationship to Labour Friends of Israel and the Jewish Labour Movement.  We understand Free Speech on Israel has already called for a Labour Party Inquiry into the implications for the Labour Party.  We endorse that call.

The Jewish Labour Movement does its best to talk up the idea that the Labour Party is swamped with anti-Semitism

In the second programme (7m 50s), Joan Ryan MP, the LFI Chairperson asks Shai Masot, the Israeli Embassy’s Political Officer, who was caught trying to ‘take down’ Government Ministers:

‘What happened with the names that we put into the Embassy Shai?  To which Masot replies ‘Just now we’ve got the money.  It’s more than £1m, it’s a lot of money...  it’s not physical, it’s an approval’ to which Ryan jocularly responds ‘ I didn’t think you had it in your bag!’.

Michael Rubin, Parliamentary Officer of LFI and the Fabians explaining how close are LFI and the Israeli Embassy's ties

The LFI’s Parliamentary Officer, Michael Rubin, who was filmed boasting that he was trying to take-down the democratically elected President of the National Union of Students, Malia Bouattia, claimed to work “with the ambassador and embassy quite a lot”.

Joan Ryan in the third Al Jazeera programme was seen to concoct a wholly false allegation of anti-Semitism against a Labour Party conference delegate, Jean Fitzpatrick, who had come to ask Ms Ryan what LFI’s support for a 2 State Solution meant in practice and what they were doing to achieve it.  Getting no answer, Jean said that LFI had a lot of money, which is clearly true, a lot of prestige and that a friend of hers had got a good job at Oxford University on the basis of having worked for LFI. 

Joan Ryan asks what has happened to her request for cash for LFI's slush fund.  Joan just loves easy money.  In 2005-6 she claimed the second highest amount of parliamentary expenses.  In 2006-7, garnering over £173K, our Joan won the competition for the highest expenses of any MP.  Now she has collared over £1m.  When the MPs expenses scandal broke, she had to pay £6K back.

Shai Masot, the 'junior' Embassy official announces Joan Ryan's bid for slush fund money has been successful - 'more than £1m has been obtained'

A happy Joan Ryan is informed that the money for LFI's slush fund is not yet here

A delighted Joan Ryan MP jokes about a corrupt payment of £1m

None of this was remotely anti-Semitic yet Joan Ryan had no hesitation in transforming this into getting a ‘big job in banking and the City’ and an ‘anti-Semitic attack’.  On the basis of this Jean was suspended from the Labour Party.  Because the conversation was recorded, the charge was dropped but this is how false charges of ‘anti-Semitism’ have recently been concocted.

The reason for making false accusations of anti-Semitism, such as that against Ms Fitzpatrick, is to deter criticism of Zionism and the Israeli state.  Those who make these false claims of anti-Semitism are deliberately jeopardising Labour’s chances of electoral victory. 

Although the LFI purports to support a 2 State Solution it is clear, as Jean Fitzpatrick demonstrated, that this is a smokescreen for its uncritical support for Israel’s military occupation and settlement of the West Bank and Gaza.  At no time has LFI ever condemned or criticised the Occupation or the Settlements.  LFI supports the 2SS  knowing that it will never happen but also knowing that it will make them appear as reasonable and even-handed rather than a sycophantic and uncritical supporter of Israeli expansion and racism.

Prior to your election as Leader of the Labour Party you had never addressed a meeting of the LFI.  At the 2016 Conference you addressed the LFI fringe meeting for the second time.  It is clear from the Al Jazeera revelations that LFI operates as an emanation of the Israeli state within the Labour Party.  We saw this clearly when Shai Masot introduced Al Jazeera’s undercover reporter, ‘Robbin Harrow’ to people as the Chair of Young LFI, a non-existent organisation.

If you continue to speak at LFI meetings you will be taken to be endorsing a group which favours continued settlement expansion and which opposes their dismantlement.  You will also be interpreted as  lending support to those who wage war on Palestinians living inside Israel.  Only last week a Bedouin village in the Negev, Umm al-Hiran, which had been there for 60 years, its inhabitants having been displaced from their original village further south,  was demolished by bulldozers from the Jewish National Fund.  One resident was killed by police gunfire. 

Despite Palestinians occupying only 2% of the Negev, the Israeli government and the Jewish National Fund sought, as part of the programme of Judaisation, to demolish an Arab village in order to make way for the Jewish town of Hiran.  This is comparable to, if not worse than, the demolition in the 1970’s of Black ‘squatter’ camps in Soweto.

Neither LFI nor the JLM, which are always eager to accuse supporters of the Palestinians and opponents of Zionism of ‘anti-Semitism’ have anything to say about apartheid in Israel, both within the 1948 borders and within the Occupied Territories.  Ha’aretz newspaper recently warned, in an editorial ,that with the proposed annexation of Ma’aleh Adumim, that’Israel will cease to exist as a Jewish and democratic state, and officially become an apartheid one’.

Ha’aretz also referred, in the same editorial, to the Israeli Labour Party ‘opposition’, of which the Jewish Labour Movement is the British wing.  Ha’aretz said that ‘It is pointless mentioning the opposition at this stage, since the dead cannot speak’.

We would urge you to cease giving any support to either the Labour Friends of Israel or the Jewish Labour Movement and not to speak at any further fringe meetings of theirs.  Both the late Tony Benn and Eric Heffer resigned from LFI in 1982 as a result of its support for the invasion of Lebanon.  Over the past quarter of a century they have not changed.

Yours sincerely,

The  Tropes of Joan  Ryan MP

Jean Fitzpatrick states an obvious truth - LFI is very rich and has lots of prestige

Joan Ryan nearly passed out at the thought that LFI was anything other than a poverty stricken, much put upon Jewish organisation stricken by anti-Semitism

Jean makes a statement that working for LFI is good for your career - what is anti-Semitic about that?

Now it is impossible to know whether it is true or anecdotal but why getting a good job at Oxford University as a result of working for LFI, which is quite possible i.e. factually true, is anti-Semitic is bewildering

Joan is genuinely shocked.  LFI is almost broke, barely a million quid in the kitty

Despite not being Jewish, our Joan Ryan is an expert in anti-Semitic 'tropes' and dopes – saying that you can get a good job by working with LFI is the new definition of anti-Semitism 

Zionists love this word 'trope' it has a beauty all of its own.  The Mirriam-Webster dictionary defines it as:

1.   a common or overused theme or device - and this certainly applies to Ryan 

2.   a phrase or verse added as an embellishment or interpolation to the sung parts of the Mass in the Middle Ages- well it's certainly an embellishment!

Joan is convinced that we have an anti-Semitic trope here, therefore it is necessary to insert a few crucial words like banking - Joan never mentioned banking but if the trope is to be anti-Semitic we have to have banking 

Although we have an anti-Semitic trope here, without a doubt, unfortunately Jean didn't mention 'the City' - fortunately Joan is happy to insert a few crucial words here and there

Tropes to the left of us and tropes to the right - and if you were to accuse Joan Ryan of using anti-Semitism as a shield to cover her backside then that too would be anti-Semitic - and the fact that she's not Jewish has no relevance 

Jean never said anything about banks but we're sure that's what she meant - after all the woman was clearly anti-Semitic - she supported the Palestinians - what are a few words here and there?