The Campaign Against Anti-Semitism Smears Veteran Israeli Anti-Zionist Professor Moshe Machover

Why is CAA a Registered Charity – What Public Benefit does this McCarthyite Organisation Confer?

Senator Joe McCarthy
One of the heroes of CAA Chair Gideon Falter

It is clear that the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism is not a charity but a Zionist propaganda organisation masquerading as a charity.  I have set up a petition on change.org calling for the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism to be deregistered – please sign

Some of the 70 entries for Jeremy Corbyn - notice how this politically neutral 'charity' uses the term 'racist Labour'

The so-called CampaignAgainst Anti-Semitism is a Zionistpropaganda organisation out of control.  Ever since its formation during Operation Protective Edge in the summer of 2014, it has sought to tarnish supporters of the Palestinians and anti-Zionists with the smear of ‘anti-Semitism’.  The fact that it is an officially registered charity is an outrage which we should turn our attention to as a matter of some urgency.  The Tories may use it to burnish their credentials but it has nothing to do with either the fight against anti-Semitism nor does it provide any Public Benefit.  Its activities have nothing to do with any Charitable Purposes.

Fresh from its attack on Hove Labour Party and Momentum supporter Rebecca Massey the misnamed Campaign Against Anti-Semitism has gone onto smear veteran Israeli anti-Zionist Emeritus Professor Moshe Machover as ‘anti-Semitic’.  With its attack on Machover, the CAA has reached a new low. 

The CAA's vicious libellous attack on Moshe Machover

It accuses Professor Machover of ‘voicing support for Hamas, a genocidal antisemitic terrorist organisation.’  Even this is a lie.  As a Marxist Machover is unlikely to support a politically backward Islamic organisation.  In their quote, which I assume is accurate, Moshe says:

‘I’m not opposing their [Hamas’] armed struggle — they have a perfect right to resist with arms. I don’t condemn them. Who is responsible for the rise of Hamas in the Gaza strip? Israel.’  

That is my position too.  I support Hamas’s right to conduct an armed struggle.  That is the right of any oppressed people living under occupation.  That has nothing to do with supporting the organisation politically.  If Hamas is indeed a ‘genocidal antisemitic terrorist organisation’ [they try to pack as many pejorative adjectives as possible into one phrase!] then one has to ask why Israel helped create Hamas? 

The CAA's McCarthyite Chair - Gideon Falter

Rather than being a genocidal etc. organisation, Hamas are a politically backward and conservative Islamist organisation.  They condemned the Charlie Hebdo killings and in practice make a distinction between Jews and Zionists.  But when people come to your home and kill your relatives and attack your children in the name of the ‘Jews’ then it’s not surprising that they may not have a progressive attitude to Jews ideologically.

Hamas have a charter which is anti-Semitic but which plays no part in their political struggle today.  It is a part of their history just like Theodor Herzl’s Jewish State, which was certainly anti-Semitic and racist, is part of the Zionist tradition.  The difference is that Zionism is still anti-Semitic and racist.  The 'racism' of Hamas is minute compared to the everyday racism of Israel, where a plurality, 48% of the population according to the most recent Pew Information Survey  Israel's Religiously Divided Society, supports the physical expulsion of the Palestinians from Israel.

Hamas is on record as condemning the extermination of the Jews in the Holocaust.  Something that a 'genocidal anti-Semitic' etc. etc.  group is hardly likely to do.  Bassem Naeem, a spokesman for Hamas, in an article in the Guardian entitled Hamas condemns the Holocaust stated that

‘it should be made clear that neither Hamas nor the Palestinian government in Gaza denies the Nazi Holocaust. The Holocaust was not only a crime against humanity but one of the most abhorrent crimes in modern history. We condemn it as we condemn every abuse of humanity and all forms of discrimination on the basis of religion, race, gender or nationality.’

Why did Israel Create Hamas?

The truth that Zionists hate to hear - THEY created Hamas and now use it to demonise the Palestinians

But if Hamas are all the things that the CAA say they are then the obvious question to ask is why Israel was responsible for creating Hamas?  In an article in the Wall Street Journal, an official in Israel’s Military Administration in Gaza, Avner Cohen, told how "Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel's creation."

The article describes how Cohen, a Tunisian-born Jew worked in Gaza for more than two decades. Responsible for religious affairs in the region until 1994, ‘Mr. Cohen watched the Islamist movement take shape, muscle aside secular Palestinian rivals and then morph into what is today Hamas, a militant group that is sworn to Israel's destruction.’

Washington Post article - wikileaks have produced extensive evidence that Israel wanted Hamas to succeed 

‘Instead of trying to curb Gaza's Islamists from the outset, says Mr. Cohen, Israel for years tolerated and, in some cases, encouraged them as a counterweight to the secular nationalists of the Palestine Liberation Organization and its dominant faction, Yasser Arafat's Fatah. Israel cooperated with a crippled, half-blind cleric named Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, even as he was laying the foundations for what would become Hamas.’ Another official David Hacham, who worked in Gaza in the late 1980s and early '90s as an Arab-affairs expert in the Israeli military told how "When I look back at the chain of events I think we made a mistake, but at the time nobody thought about the possible results."  [How Israel Helped to Spawn Hamas, ANDREW HIGGINS, Jan. 24, 2009]

In an article How Israel helped create Hamas in the Washington Post we are told of Hamas's ‘curious history’. ‘To a certain degree, the Islamist organization... has the Jewish state to thank for its existence. Hamas launched in 1988 in Gaza at the time of the first intifada, ... for more than a decade prior, Israeli authorities actively enabled its rise.’

‘At the time, Israel's main enemy was the late Yasser Arafat's Fatah party, which formed the heart of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO). Fatah was secular and cast in the mold of other revolutionary, leftist guerrilla movements waging insurgencies elsewhere in the world during the Cold War. …’

 ‘Meanwhile, the activities of Islamists affiliated with Egypt's banned Muslim Brotherhood were allowed in the open in Gaza — a radical departure from when the Strip was administered by the secular-nationalist Egyptian government of Gamal Abdel Nasser. Egypt lost control of Gaza to Israel after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, which saw Israel also seize the West Bank. In 1966, Nasser had executed Sayyid Qutb, one of the Brotherhood's leading intellectuals. The Israelis saw Qutb's adherents in the Palestinian territories, including the wheelchair-bound Sheik Ahmed Yassin, as a useful counterweight to Arafat's PLO.’

Which of course was the story of the Americans and how they helped create the Taliban, Al Qaeda and ISIS.  Hamas is the democratically elected organisation of the Palestinians in Gaza.  But none of this complexity is of any interest to a McCarthyite organisation like the CAA.  Their only interest is in shutting down free speech on Palestine and Israel.  The activities of the CAA have nothing to do with anti-Semitism.  Monitoring and smearing anti-Zionists as anti-Semitic is their only goal. 

The CAA has 8 entries for Theresa May -  Britain's racist anti-refugee Prime Minister - all of them complementary

What they are doing is using what they call ‘the International Definition of Antisemitism recently adopted by the British government’ (what they mean is the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition which has no legal validity) to define all anti-Zionism as ‘anti-Semitic’.  Opposition to what is called Israel’s ‘right to exist’ is now anti-Semitic.  The new definition of ‘anti-Semitism’ which in fact has nothing at all to do with anti-Semitism, is nothing more than a thinly disguised means of attacking freedom of speech.  That is why it has to be fought and that is why Jeremy Corbyn was wrong to stupidly and meekly go along with Theresa May’s cynical adoption of it. 

Most people think of violent attacks on people who are Jewish as anti-Semitism.  Now there is a concerted attempt by Zionist groups to label any opposition to Israel as a Jewish supremacist state as ‘anti-Semitic’.  This has to be resisted.  Denying ‘Israel’s right to exist’ as if a state is a human being and accusing Jews of being part of a conspiracy is apparently antisemitic.  Well we know from the recent Al Jazeera programme The Lobby that some Jews who are Zionists are very much involved in conspiracies against democratic political organisations.

Of course the CAA and Israel’s apologists in Britain have nothing to say about the outrageous racism that is quite normal in Israel because they are too concerned with digging out traces of ‘anti-Semitism’.  Anti-racism is the last thing they are concerned with.

For example Israel’s Deputy Defence Minister Eli Dahan was reported by Israel’s Ha’aretz newspaper as saying that:

‘Homosexual Jews have "higher souls" than gentiles, gay or straight, the deputy minister for religious services told the Israeli daily Maariv.

As Reuven Hammer, a former president of the International Rabbinical Assembly commented in the Jerusalem Post:

‘Imagine for a moment that the religious affairs minister in some democratic country – England or Switzerland for example – were to make a public statement that “the souls of all Christians are superior to the souls of Jews.” Would Israel not make a fuss? Would not the ADL and the Weisenthal Center cry out in protest? Would not Jews in that country demand the immediate resignation of such an official? But in Israel, the man who fills such a slot – Deputy Religious Services Minister Rabbi Eli Ben-Dahan – recently said just that about Christians. He is quoted as saying in an interview which he knew would be published that the souls of all Jews are higher than those of Christians or Muslims or anybody else, yet his job is secure.

The Times of Israel, in an article New deputy defense minister called Palestinians ‘animals’ reported that ‘While discussing the resumption of peace talks in a radio interview in 2013, Ben Dahan said that “To me, they are like animals, they aren’t human.”  Dahan is not the only member of the Israeli government to talk about Palestinians as animals.  Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu is on record as describing Arabs surrounding Israel as being ‘wild beasts’.  Netanyahu plans fence around Israel to protect it from 'wild beasts'  As far as I’m aware lions, tigers and such creatures aren’t known to roam the deserts of the Middle East!

There are 70 entries for Jeremy Corbyn - none of them complimentary

The CAA has a long record of attacking people on the Left and in the Labour Party.  It has been allowed to get away with it for far too long.  For example It attacked Labour MP Gerald Kaufmann over his use of the term ‘Jewish money’ even though it’s a phrase widely used in the Jewish community.  I googled the Jewish Chronicle archive and got nearly 600 occurrences.  When I searched the CAA’s website I got up 21 result for Kaufman.  I got 70 results for ‘Corbyn’ – nice little charitable articles such as ‘Corbyn’s hypocrisy exposed yet again by Labour’s latest stealthy readmission of suspended antisemite’

The CAA has 29 search results on Gerald Kaufman - a Jewish Labour MP who supports the Palestinians - all of them attack him

When I searched under ‘British National Party’ I got 19 results.  Good I thought, at least they are covering the far Right which even the Home Affairs Select Committee’s flawed report on anti-Semitism conceded was responsible for the majority of anti-Semitic attacks.  But no, all of them were concerned with other parties and the BNP were mentioned tangentially.  The Liberal Democrats were also attacked by the CAA.

There are 29 entries for that well-known anti-Semite Shami Chakrabarti - the Shadow Attorney General

Shami Chakrabarti, who conducted an Inquiry into anti-Semitism in the Labour Party, has been a particular focus of the CAA’s ire.  There are no less than 29 articles concerning her, all of them hostile.  In CAA response to Jewish Labour Movement’s decision to invite Shami Chakrabarti to address antisemitism rally they write that:

‘The Labour Party has become a political home of antisemitism and the Jewish Labour Movement has fought hard to save their Party from its grasp. Nothing has undermined that effort more than Shami Chakrabarti’s whitewash of a report which cleared the Party of antisemitism, a feat for which she was rewarded by ennoblement by Jeremy Corbyn to the very institution that he promised never to promote anyone to.

As a matter of policy we do not comment on the work of other organisations engaged in the fight against antisemitism, but in this case we must make an exception. The Jewish Labour Movement’s decision to invite Shami Chakrabarti to address a rally against antisemitism is misjudged to the point of surrealism. Indeed, the very idea that it is possible to hold a rally in a pub to heal antisemitism in the Labour Party is absurd because the Labour Party, under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn, continues to deny that its antisemitism problem even exists. That is perhaps why the Jewish Labour Movement’s own poll of its members found that only 4% of them back Jeremy Corbyn in the current leadership election.

When antisemitism reaches the levels it now has within the Labour Party, the only effective strategy is to stand up and defy it with dignity.

I have previously covered the CAA and its antics, notably in a blog post 9 months ago EXCLUSIVE - Lifting the Lid on the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism - The Bogus Charity that Campaigns Against Corbyn, Muslims and Palestinians.