Letter to Shami Chakrabarti – Anger is not a substitute for ignorance

Helping the Noble Baroness understand the Connection between Labour Friends of Israel’s support for War Crimes in Gaza and its advocacy of Livingstone’s expulsion  

A few days ago I did a post The Mask of Deceit Slips from the Face of Chakrabarti as She Supports Livingstone’s Expulsion. Naturally I sent a copy to the noble Baroness.  Unfortunately it would seem that good manners amongst noble members of the Upper House are not what they were as I haven’t yet received a reply. Or perhaps these life peers simply don't have the breeding of their hereditary colleagues.

Alternatively Shami Chakrabarti may have felt she had nothing to say . This too would not be too surprising since in her vacuous and fake angry interview (after all she had nothing to be angry about) what she did have to say was completely wrong.

Labour's lightweight Shadow Attorney General attacks the very civil liberties she once defended

This new member of Labour's legal establishment travels with very little ideological baggage, still less any commitment to socialism.  It is noticeable that she has not been able to generate any similar emotions when it came to the cold and calculated gunning down of unarmed civilians, including children, medics and journalists in Gaza by Israeli snipers positioned behind earthworks for the task.  

Despite Chakrabarti's previous record on civil liberties it would seem that they don't extend beyond the borders of Britain.  International solidarity is not a concept with which the noble Baroness is familiar.  Clearly the 'antisemitism' of words is more important than live bullets and pulverised bones.

I thought I should share my letter with you my dear reader as Shami Chakrabarti is one more addition to the travelling Right show who use ‘anti-Semitism’ in order to disguise not only their direction of travel politically but their own political shallowness.

Tony Greenstein

Dear Ms Chakrabarti,

You may recall that, as a Jewish member of the Labour Party who was suspended, because of the false anti-semitism campaign, I gave evidence to you as part of your Inquiry into racism and anti-semitism.

I am extremely disappointed that on BBC’s Sunday Politics show you saw fit to make an unwarranted attack on Ken Livingstone.  You described his opinion on Nazi support for the Zionist movement as 'incendiary'.  Perhaps but it was also true. Maybe you found it incendiary because you didn't understand it?

Your assertion that Ken's opinions were an attack on German Jews simply demonstrates your own ignorance. The German Zionist movement represented less than 5% of German Jews.  It was a political movement which openly sought to collaborate with the Nazis and to suggest that people should keep quiet about that now is to advocate political censorship. It is but a short step from that to book burning.

Ken Livingstone’s expulsion has been a high priority for both Labour Friends of Israel and the Jewish Labour Movement, both of whom assert that Ken was being anti-Semitic.  This is the same LFI who, only this week, justified the murder of over 60 unarmed Palestinians in Gaza including an 8 month old baby who exercised the right to demonstrate.

I do not remember you generating any synthetic anger over this on television.  Perhaps, as Aneurin Bevan once said, it's all a question of political priorities.

It is clear that you know nothing about Zionism and its sordid, bloody history.  Could I suggest that when you have nothing to say it is a good idea to say nothing? Verbal flatulence is not attractive.

Zionism is a movement which relegates the non-Jew and Palestinians in particular to the status of the untermenschen or in Zionism's racial hierarchy the lower races.  It finds its expression in the Apartheid structure of today’s Israeli state.

If you care to obtain a copy of Lucy Dawidowicz's Holocaust Reader (pp. 150-153) from Parliament's library (which I understand is very good) you will read a letter to Hitler from the German Zionist Federation of 21 June 1933.  It reads:

… an answer to the Jewish question truly satisfying to the national state can be brought about only with the collaboration of the Jewish movement that aims at a social, cultural and moral renewal of Jewry…On the foundation of the new state, which has established the principle of race... fruitful activity for the fatherland is possible.... Our acknowledgement of Jewish nationality provides for a clear and sincere relationship to the German people and its national and racial realities. Precisely because we don’t wish to falsify these fundamentals, because we too are against mixed marriages and are for maintaining the purity of the Jewish group… The realisation of Zionism could only be hurt by resentment of Jews abroad against the German development. (my emphasis)

The late Lucy Dawidowicz was a Zionist Holocaust historian. The letter above was the basis for collaboration between Zionism and Nazism. 

The suggestion that Ken Livingstone's remarks were an attack on all Jews presupposes that Jews and Zionists are both the same.  If you believe that then you are no different from those anti-semites who also maintain that there is no difference.

There is a history of former Directors and senior officers of Liberty (NCCL) veering to the illiberal right when they have left office. Patricia Hewitt and Harriet Harman are but two examples. In supporting the expulsion of Ken Livingstone for having expressed his opinions about Zionism you would appear to be following in their footsteps.

It is noticeable that you have had nothing to say about the real racism scandal in recent months, that of Windrush.  Unlike you Ken Livingstone has a proud and active record in fighting racism.  Your suggestion that the truth can be anti-Semitic is absurd.

It is your support of Zionism, the ideology of Israeli Apartheid which is, if anything, incompatible with a party that calls itself socialist.  The real question though is whether you even consider yourself a socialist?

Tony Greenstein