How the Right are Redefining Antisemitism to Mean Anything Socialist or Left-Wing

According to Zionist Logic, the Victims of the Holocaust Were Also Anti-Semitic

In an excellent article on how the Right is making the term ‘anti-Semitism’ synonymous with anything left-wing, Jonathan Cook makes extensive reference to my libel case. I reprint an extract from his essay below.

Jonathan is right.  What he could of course have gone on to say is that according to the ‘logic’ of fools like Rachel Riley and politicians such as Lord Pickles and Tom Watson, most of the Jews who died in the Holocaust were in fact ‘anti-Semites’!

This is in particular true of the 3 million Polish Jews, who constituted half of all the Jews who were exterminated in the Holocaust. Poland's Jews voted overwhelmingly for the left-wing Bund, the General Jewish Workers Union, who were anti-Zionist.

In the last free elections in Poland in 1938 for local authorities, in Warsaw the Bund won 61.7% of the Jewish vote and gained 17 out of 20 Jewish Council seats.  In the city with the second largest number of Jews, Lodz, they won 57.4% and 11 out of 17 Jewish seats.

The problem was explained by Isaac Deutscher in his essay 'The Non-Jewish Jew and Other Essays':

‘to the Jewish workers anti-Semitism seemed to triumph in Zionism, which recognised the legitimacy and the validity of the old cry ‘Jews get out!' The Zionists were agreeing to get out.’

So now we have it. In fact when Hitler murdered European Jewry because, in his view they were the germ seeds of Bolshevism, he got it right.  Most of Hitler’s victims were anti-Semites! Netanyahu explained at the 2015 World Zionist Congress that Hitler only got the idea of the Final Solution from the Palestinian Mufti! See Rewriting the Holocaust and Netanyahu: Hitler Didn't Want to Exterminate the Jews

 It’s little wonder that notorious racist and former Sephardi Chief Rabbi of Israel, Ovadia Yosef, blamed the victims of the Holocaust for their own deaths.  According to this wretch

“The six million Holocaust victims were reincarnations of the souls of sinners, people who transgressed and did all sorts of things which should not be done. They had been reincarnated in order to atone.”

The time will come when Zionists will begin to ‘understand’ why the Holocaust was perpetrated.  This is not so far fetched as it might seem.

When Robert Bowers murdered 11 Jews in Pittsburgh recently, sections of the Israeli Right and Likud blamed the victims and ‘understood’ the murderer.

Yoav Eliasi, aka The Shadow, a prominent Israeli hate rapper and Likud Party member in good standing with hundreds of thousands of followers social media followers,  portrayed the massacre as a legitimate response to the Jews of Pittsburgh’s support for refugees:

According to Eliasi, Bowers “was a man fed up with subversive progressive Jewish leftists injecting their sick agendas” into his country. Explicitly echoing the neo-Nazi’s manifesto, Eliasi added that “HIAS brings in infiltrators that destroy every country. The murderer was fed up with people like you. Jews like you brought the holocaust and now you’re causing antisemitism. Stop bringing in hate money from Soros.”Israel’s Far Right Blame “Leftist” Victims of Pittsburgh Synagogue Massacre

Max Blumenthall wrote about how

‘Hours after the massacre in Pittsburgh, a Likud Party email listserv pumped out talking points addressed to “ambassadors of the Likud” that claimed the anti-Jewish shooter “drew inspiration from a left-wing Jewish group that promoted immigration to the U.S. & worked against Trump.”

Within moments, Likud party activists like @guyshapira took to Twitter to repeat the talking points word for word.

This is where the Zionist libel that it is the Left not the Right is anti-Semitic ends up.  Zionism has always justified the anti-Semitism of the Right as being the fault of the Jews for not having emigrated to Israel. By continuing to live in ‘other peoples’ countries’ and opposing racism there, Jews are held to have brought on themselves their own misfortunes. Zionism itself has only ever existed with the support of the most reactionary and racist sections of society.

What a tangled web we weave.

Tony Greenstein

Weaponising anti-semitism – Jonathan Cook

In fact, these anti-semitism “watchdogs” no longer even bother to conceal the fact that their accusations of anti-semitism are intended as smears rather than as serious assessments of a rising tide of bigotry.

Tony Greenstein, an anti-Zionist Jew expelled by Labour party bureaucrats after a concerted campaign to character-assassinate him as an anti-semite, took one of his accusers to court, the grossly misnamed “charity” the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, in a libel action.

The CAA had claimed that Greenstein was a “notorious anti-semite”. “Notorious”, let us remember, means “famous or well-known”. So it should have proved a doddle for a well-funded charity that deals in little else but tackling anti-semitism to support its claim.

Strangely, however, when given a chance to produce the evidence before the UK High Court, the CAA declined to do so. In fact, rather than use the standard defence against libel, claiming their remarks were a “statement of fact” – or what used to be termed “justification” – the CAA resorted to the much weaker defence of “honest opinion”.

Traditionally in libel cases against media outlets, reporters have had to show they had a factual basis for their reporting, while opinion-writers could duck out under claims of “fair comment”, which allowed for muckraking and provocative viewpoints.

“Honest opinion” allows you to state falsehoods, and puts responsibility on your victim to prove the near-impossible: that you did so maliciously.  In short, you can defame as long as you can claim you did so in good faith.

What the CAA has indicated is that when it describes someone as an anti-semite, it does not need to base its accusation on evidence (such as a clear statement of prejudice against Jews) but rather root it in hearsay or its own hunches. In other words, the CAA is consciously playing fast and loose with the definition at the heart of its mandate. It is hollowing out the meaning of anti-semitism to politicise it.

The CAA’s legal manoeuvres confirm that the charge of anti-semitism has indeed been weaponised to silence political dissidents – just as critics, myself included, have long been claiming.

Right kind of Jew

Of course, the CAA is far from alone in pursuing this strategy. It is precisely the reason all those anti-semitism claims are being thrown around recklessly to silence anyone who wishes to disrupt the status quo – the constant warmongering, the neoliberal rape of the planet, and the entrenchment of a carbon-based economy that threatens imminent collapse of a climate conducive to most life.

Lots of rightwingers would like to use the anti-semitism smear to win political arguments in the more unruly, less predictable political environment we currently inhabit. But sadly for them, it only sounds credible when status-quo-loving centrist and rightwing Jews use it. Which is why we hear them using it so much.

It was why TV gameshow assistant Rachel Riley was taken seriously rather than ridiculed as she suggested to her hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers that Owen Jones, a diehard soft Zionist and fairweather Corbyn supporter, and Noam Chomsky (or Chomski, as Riley misspelt his name), a dissident Jewish intellectual, were anti-semites.

Both were characterised by her as “far left”, which is now treated as synonymous with “anti-semitic” in the rightwingers’ playbook.

Astoundingly, Riley was liberally spraying around the anti-semitism smear even as she made a series of anti-semitic statements during a TV interview that unusually failed to register on the radar of the usually vigilant anti-semitism “watchdogs”.

She observed that she didn’t look like a “typical Jew” (no hooked nose, Rachel?) and argued that her previous use of the expression “Bloody Jews again” wasn’t anti-semitic. She also implied that criticism of Israel shouldn’t be allowed because it was offensive to Jews (thereby conflating Jewish people with Israel, as well as denying anti-Zionist Jews a voice).

But then again, Rachel Riley can’t be anti-semitic because she, unlike Tony Greenstein, is the “right kind of Jew”. She’s on the right.