Rachel Cooke: Never Underestimate the Stupidity of a Guardian Journalist – Jewish Chronicle Letter of the Week

Open Letter to a Racist - Jon Lansman – Bahrain Picket – Tommy Robinson Video

 

Sometimes you wonder if there is a Stupidity Test that Guardian journalists have to pass before they are admitted into Kath Viner’s paradise. I mention this because in her interview with Ken Livingstone in last week’s Observer, Rachel Cooke asked ‘if some Labour activists don’t wilfully and perniciously conflate Judaism and Zionism’.  

The Guardian's Hapless Rachel Cooke

It’s the kind of remark that makes you want to tear your hair out. Where has this fool been? There has been a 3 year campaign by supporters of Israel to conflate anti-Zionism, the Israeli state and anti-Semitism. The summer of 2018 was taken up with the effort by Zionists and their media claque to impose the bogus IHRA misdefinition on the Labour Party, a ‘definition’ which conflates criticism of Israel and anti-Semitism, such that 7 of its 11 examples relate to Israel not Jews. Don't words have any meaning for these people?

In an article Labour's new guidelines show it is institutionally antisemitic the Jewish Chronicle’s tabloid editor Stephen Pollard, Dirty Desmond’s old mate, complained that Labour had refused to adopt the IHRA in toto.

 ‘instead of adopting the definition as agreed by all these bodies, Labour has excised the parts which relate to Israel and how criticism of Israel can be antisemitic.’

Leave aside that all the best anti-Semites, from Christian Zionist Steve Bannon to Viktor Orban admire Israel because Zionist ethno-nationalism is precisely what they would like to emulate, it is should be obvious that the strategy of Israel’s supporters is to perpetuate the lie that anti-Zionism = anti-Semitism. This is the accepted media narrative. 

Journalist fools like Rachel Cooke seem oblivious to the increasingly overt racism in Israel - what was submerged before is now coming into the open

What is it about this that idiots like Rachel Cooke do not understand?   Rachel Cooke is however only one example of the degeneration of the Guardian/Observer (there was a time when the two papers were separate).

I sent a letter to The Observer, but unsurprisingly it was not printed, as is the case with nearly all anti-Zionist correspondence these days. I copy it below.  Please distribute because this is an example of how the Letters page of the Guardian, the last area which was free of Jonathan Freedland’s baleful influence has now fallen victim to Zionism’s gatekeepers.

Sunday, 23 June 2019

Letters Editor

The Observer

Kings Place,

90 York Way

London N1 9GU 

In an otherwise interesting interview with Ken Livingstone, Rachel Cooke asks ‘if some Labour activists don’t wilfully and perniciously conflate Judaism and Zionism.’

Ms Cooke’s question is indicative of the confusion caused by the false anti-Semitism campaign by Zionists and supporters of Israel. It is truly Orwellian.

It is not Labour activists who conflate Judaism and Zionism but the Zionist movement and its supporters.  Where has Ms Cooke been these past 3 years?

There was a concerted campaign by the Zionist lobby to get the Labour Party to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance misdefinition of anti-Semitism, which equated criticism of the State of Israel with ‘anti-Semitism’.

No less than the Chief Rabbi stated in an interview with the Telegraph (3 May 2016) that ‘One can no more separate it [Zionism]from Judaism than separate the City of London from Great Britain.’

This conflation of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism is the basis of the false equation between Judaism and Zionism.

I just hope that in future the Observer’s interviewers are better briefed.

Yours faithfully,

Tony Greenstein 

The Jewish Chronicle’s Letter of the Week from Maurice Herson

Perhaps the Jewish Chronicle’s tabloid editor, Stephen Pollard, has been laid low with a bug.  This week there was the first decent letter for some time in the JC from a Maurice Herson from Oxford who spoke of the ‘JC's relentless hate campaign against Jeremy Corbyn.’

 I can’t imagine where he got that one!  Certainly not from Jon Lansman!

Lansman at the Palestine session of the Arise conference yesterday - looking bored and full of contempt for those there

Open Letter to Momentum’s Racist Leader

Lansman was spotted at the Palestine session at Arise yesterday – looking bored

I blogged a few days ago about the treacherous role that Jon Lansman has played inside the Labour Party in giving aid and comfort to the false allegations of anti-Semitism against supporters of Palestine. 

His latest attack, on Jewish Voice for Labour, which is reported in this week’s Jewish Chronicle boils down to the assertion that ‘that neither the vast majority of individual members of JVL nor the organisation itself can really be said to be part of the Jewish community."

You probably didn't hear of the letter from 34 Haredi Rabbis defending Corbyn last year - that's because the mainstream media didn't cover it

Leaving aside the fact that there is no single Jewish community - the Board of Deputies represents a minority of British Jews – neither the Ultra Orthodox nor secular Jews come under their wing – the question is so what?

Lansman in the pink shirt

The organised, synagogue going, mainly Zionist Jewish community is a thoroughly reactionary one that has voted Tory for 50+ years. In so far as they support the State of Israel that is or should be a matter of shame.

This is an Israel which only last week saw dozens of residents in Afula, including the Mayor and Deputy Mayor, demonstrating against the sale of a house to an Arab. This is the state which has supplied weaponry to virtually every racist and genocidal regime in the world, from South Africa to Burma to Guatemala.

It is not for nothing that Israel’s best friends include leaders such as Brazil’s Bolsonaro, Hungary’s Viktor Orban, Philippines Duterte – fascist and anti-Semites all.

What the JLM call their 'sister party' the Israeli Labour Party supports Netanyahu's attempt to deport Israel's 40,000 Black African refugees

Lansman played a particularly iniquitous role in the witchhunting of Jackie Walker, deposing her, with the support of the Alliance for Workers Liberty, as Vice-Chair of Momentum. Lansman has helped the Jewish Labour Movement witch-hunt of anti-Zionists and supporters of the Palestinians despite them passing a motion of no confidence in Corbyn at their last conference.  

Signs in Nazi Germany saying 'Jews not wanted' have a familiar ring in Afula

It is difficult to know how anyone who calls themselves a socialist today can find anything progressive in the State of Israel. There was a time when I was growing up when people hadn’t heard of the Naqba.  We believed that the Arabs really had left voluntarily in order that the Arab armies could enter Israel. We believed that Kibbutzim were islands of socialism in the Middle East where equality ruled, not realising that they employed cheap Arab and Misrahi/Oriental Jewish labour and were racially exclusive Jewish only institutions.

It was only later that we learnt that the best friend of Israel was Apartheid South Africa whom it transferred nuclear technology to and invested heavily in.  That this was the position not just of the Israeli Labour Party but of Mapam, to its left, too.

During the 1980’s we learnt that even as Argentina was murdering Jews because they were Jews as part of its wider massacre of leftists Israel was Argentina’s main arms supplier.  Even worse it became clear that the refuge against anti-Semitism that Israel proudly claims to be didn’t apply to leftist Argentina Jews who were the ‘wrong sort of Jews.’

We also learnt that from El Salvador to Guatemala Israel was involved in training the death squads and active in training those in Guatemala who perpetrated the genocide of the Mayan Indians.  Just as Israel today is the arms supplier of last resort to the Burmese regime in its genocide of the Rohinga people.

This is to completely omit Israel’s repression of the Palestinians and its permanent military occupation of Palestinian land and its creation of an ethno-nationalist Jewish state which is the envy of every fascist and neo-Nazi from Steve Bannon to Viktor Orban and Tommy Robinson.  Indeed the neo-Nazi founder of the alt-Right, Richard Spencer, describes himself as a White Zionist.

The only justification that Lansman has for his demonization of Jewish anti-Zionists and JVL in particular is that the majority of the Jewish community in this country supports Israel.

If this were true that most Jews in this country supported what Israel is doing and understands what a Jewish State really means then this would be a matter of shame. It would mean that Jews in this country were now on the side of the racists and imperialists.  To some extent this is obviously true.  Most Jews vote Tory and have voted Tory for over half a century.

However there are a considerable number of Jews who reject Zionism and what Israel does.  According to the most recent and authoritative survey in 2015 The Attitudes of British Jews Towards Israel the number of Jews who identify as Zionists today is 59%, a drop of 13% in 5 years.

The fact is that Lansman identifies with the reactionary majority of British Jews because they are Jews. Such a position is clearly a racist. If the left in the Labour Party has any self-respect then Lansman will be removed from his position in Momentum.  Those who give him legitimacy are giving legitimacy to the movement to overthrow Corbyn.

Anyone one who has doubts about the sincerity of the ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign should ask themselves one question – if the campaign was genuine and anti-Semitism was a real problem in the Labour Party why would all the Tory press, from the Sun to the Telegraph, support it?  Why should newspapers who have employed Katie Hopkins and who now back Boris Johnson, be so concerned with anti-Semitism?

Open Letter to Lansman

Dear Mr Lansman,

I read with interest your attack on Jewish Voice for Labour in the Jewish Chronicle. Let me the first to congratulate you on your choice of target as well as your exquisite sense of timing. 

After all it makes sense for Momentum's fuhrer (or is it caudillo?) to attack a pro-Corbyn Jewish group in the Labour Party. Just as it makes sense for you to give your support to the Jewish Labour Movement which recently passed, almost unanimously, a vote of no confidence in Corbyn.

All of this as part of the 'fight against anti-Semitism' as defined by the IHRA definition of antisemitism which says that all except the most anodyne criticism of Israel is antisemitic.

If you read my blog below you will see how the residents of Afula in Israel define Zionism and a Jewish state, by demonstrating against the sale of a house to an Arab.  Some people might compare this to what happened in Germany in 1938 but we both know that such a comparison is antisemitic.

Of course the majority Jewish community in this country supports a Jewish state and therefore they support this and all the other more covert measures of segregation in Israel and it is with those that you identify.

Some people would call this racism but racists call it 'Jewish identity'.  It's all part of what is now called Generation Identity. 

Your attack on Jews who oppose Zionism and the Israeli state is akin to the attacks that used to be made on Whites who opposed Apartheid in South Africa. Presumably if you had been in South Africa you would accused them of not being part of the majority White community?

Not only are you unaccountable to anyone, having launched a coup 3 years ago to destroy democracy in Momentum but it is clear you have no shame either.

Regards

Tony Greenstein

Previous picket of Bahraini picket calling for the freeing of a gaoled academic

ALERT 25 JUNE 2019 - PROTEST BAHRAIN 'DEAL OF THE CENTURY' CONFERENCE - PALESTINE IS NOT FOR SALE!

The first phase of the plan, hatched by Israel and Trump, to end any future Palestinian freedom will be tabled this week in Bahrain, hosted by the Khalifa dictatorship and supported by fellow servile Arab dictatorships like Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.

Inminds chair Abbas Ali said 

"The plan is to, on the one hand, try to squeeze the Palestinian people into submission, with the ongoing slow genocide in Gaza and enforced hardships in the West Bank; with the cutting of all funding to UNRWA; denying the Palestinians the right to their capital Al Quds; legitimizing the theft of the Syrian Golan Heights and giving the green light to similarly annexing the West Bank to Israel with the threat of ethnically cleaning its Palestinian population first.  And then on the other hand, to offer bribes, paid for by MBS and MBZ, to the corrupt PA leadership to accept the deal, selling Jerusalem to the Zionists, and denying the Palestinian people their homeland. The deal stinks so bad that even the normally purchasable PA has rejected it. So without even a token Palestinian presence, the conference aims to determine the future of Palestine. Please join us to condemn this farce, and those participating, and hosting it. Our message is simple - Palestine is not for sale!"

When:
3pm Tuesday 25th June 2019
Where:
Bahrain Embassy in London
30 Belgrave Square
London SW1X 8QB.
Nearest Tube: Hyde Park Corner, Victoria