How David Feldman
of Birkbeck and the Pears Institute Changed His Views to Accommodate Zionist McCarthyism
Viktor Klemperer
I was recently reading Richard Evans trilogy on the
Holocaust. He, like David Cesarani’s Final Solution, relied heavily on the 3
Volume Diaries of Victor
Klemperer who had converted in 1912 to Christianity and married a non-Jew.
Klemperer was Professor of
Romance Languages at the Technical University of Dresden. The first piece of
anti-Semitic legislation that the Nazis brought in was in April 1933, the Law
for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service. Academics were considered
civil servants. This led to the dismissal of Jewish academics.
 |
| House Where Klemperer Hid His Diaries |
In the
academic year of 1934—35 1,145 professors were dismissed or pensioned off early.
These constituted 14.3% of the previous year’s faculty at all German
universities. By 1938 this figure had risen to 33% and by 1939 to 45%. Many but
not all of these were Jewish.
 |
| Victor_Klemperer receiving GDR prize |
Klemperer
was ‘lucky’. He was not immediately dismissed because he was a decorated veteran
of the 1914-1918 War and President Hindenburg had insisted that Jewish veterans
be excluded from the provisions of the Act.
However Hindenburg died in
August 1934. In March 1935 the local Nazi Gauleiter Martin Mutschmann
was appointed as Minister of Education for Saxony. At the end of April 1935
Klemperer was dismissed. Again he was ‘lucky’ in that he was made redundant,
which allowed a pension to be paid.
 | |
|
Richard Evans describes how, when Klemperer was dismissed ‘none of his colleagues did anything to help him; the only sympathy came from a secretary.’ [The Third Reich in Power p.568] This acceptance of Nazi anti-Semitism was true of most of German intellectuals, most of whom rushed to swear their fealty to the Nazis. Martin Heidegger, whom the Nazis appointed Rector of Freiburg University
‘was indecently silent when his Freiburg colleague, the great phenomenological philosopher Edmund Husserl, was dismissed as Jewish and pushed to suicide.’
 |
| Feldman has mastered the art of self-censorship |
There
were very few Karl Reinhardts, Professor of the Faculty of Law at the University of
Frankfurt-am-main, who wrote on May 5,
1933 to the Nazi Minister for Science that he was unable to continue teaching
because ‘the tradition of German Humanism’ had now been abandoned.’ Reinhardts
was an exception. Gary Dorrien wrote
of how ‘most of Frankfurt’s ostensibly humanist professors swiftly made
their peace with fascism.’ [Social Democracy in the Making, p. 300]
Dr.
Gerhard Falk wrote in The Expulsion of the Professors from the
Universities in Nazi Germany, 1933-1941 that ‘the number of
letters supporting the Nazi policy of “Gleichschaltung” [Nazification]
 |
| Professor Kurt Huber - conservative philosophy lecturer who became part of the White Rose group - executed by the Nazis |
far
exceeded the stand taken in the above example. In fact, the evidence indicates
that most of the former “Humanists” became “Nazis” almost overnight and
hastened to swear allegiance to their new masters.’
Philosophy Professor Kurt Huber, who was executed in July 1943 for
his membership of the White Rose group, was very much the exception. Huber concluded
his defence by quoting Johann Gottlieb
Fichte:
And thou shalt act as if
On thee and on thy deed
Depended the fate of all Germany,
And thou alone must answer for it.
On thee and on thy deed
Depended the fate of all Germany,
And thou alone must answer for it.
Jewish and Israeli Academics Who Fought Racism and
Zionism
Today the majority of the Jewish community
supports, to a greater or lesser extent, the Israeli state, the apartheid
nature of which is ever clearer. For those with doubts I recommend Jonathan
Cook’s article on the history
of the Jewish National Fund, which was the engine of ethnic cleansing and
segregation in Israel. This is reflected in the large numbers of Jewish and
Israeli academics who lend their talents to providing academic rationale for
Zionism and the Israeli state just as their counterparts did in Germany. There
are of course exceptions.
Perhaps the most famous exception today is
Noam Chomsky. Norman Finkelstein is another who was denied
tenure at DePaul
University because Alan Dershowitz lobbied the University.
A more recent victim
of the Zionist lobby is Bristol University Professor Steve Miller, who has been
forced to resign from the Labour Party after the usual allegations of
‘anti-Semitism’. Miller’s primary offence was co-authoring Bad
News for Labour which questioned the lack of evidence behind Labour’s
fake ‘anti-Semitism’ crisis. Waterstones was forced into calling
off the book launch after a series of intimidatory calls and threats by
Zionists. Fortunately we were able to put
the book launch on at very short notice.
 |
| Tony Lerman |
Tony Lerman is Jewish another academic who has
been witchhunted.
Lerman was the founding Director of the Institute for Jewish Policy Research. Lerman
was witchhunted out of his post by Zionist trustees led by former Tory
Treasurer and Islamaphobe, Stanley Kalms. The
Jewish Chronicle, ever the defender of academic freedom, termed this Divisive
Lerman leaves JPR. Having a non-Zionist leading British Jewry’s think tank
and research unit was unacceptable.
There are also a host of Israeli academics who
have spoken out against Zionism and Israeli colonisation. Most of them have
been forced to emigrate from Israel. They include Professors Ilan Pappe, Moshe Machover, Haim Bresheeth, Nira Yuval Davies, Avi Shlaim, Neveh
Gordon and there are a few still in Israel - Edith Zirtal, Nurit Peled-Elhanana, Shlomo Sand and Rachel Gior.
There is also Professor
Ze’ev Sternhell of the Hebrew University who has just died. Although a
Zionist, he spoke out against what was happening in Israel, comparing
it to the early period of Nazi Germany. Likewise former professors Israel Shahak, Yeshayahu
Leibowitz and Yehuda Elkana, the latter was Rector
of the Central European University in Budapest and a Holocaust survivor (before
Netanyahu’s favourite anti-Semite, Viktor Orban forced
it out.
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| Feldman mixing with the great and good of the Jewish Establishment - Rabbi Jonathan Sacks |
David Feldman – Following in the Tradition of Heidegger not Reinhardts
or Huber
Unfortunately David Feldman is not one of
those who have stood out against the Zionist settler colonialism which Chomsky described
as ‘the most brutal form of imperialism
in some of its most vicious forms.!
Having ethnically cleansed 85% of the
indigenous population, Israel has spent the whole of its existence pursuing
policies of marginalising the Palestinians, both those living in 1948 Israel
and after 1967 those living in Greater Israel/Palestine. The land discrimination,
relegating 20% of the population to 2% of the land and the refusal to build
even a single extra Arab town or community at a time when hundreds of
Jewish-only communities have been built, coupled with the ‘derecognition’ of
half the Arab villages, should make the nature of the Israeli state clear to
all of the most obtuse.
 |
| Martin Heidegger |
I sometimes wonder whether David Feldman and
his fellow authors of Labour
and Antisemitism: a Crisis Misunderstood have ever once considered that
their academic sophistry and word play has real consequences in the ability of
the Israeli state to blindfold, beat and abuse Palestinian children whom they
arrest in the middle of the night because ‘anti-Semitism’ has become Zionism’
main method of defending.
Both the Jewish diaspora and Israel itself
seem to have produced a remarkable number of dissident academics who have
retained their honesty and integrity. Unfortunately the same cannot be said for
David Feldman of the Pears Institute for the Study of Anti-Semitism.
There was a time when Feldman came in for
criticism by the Zionist Establishment for having signed the statement Not in Our
Name by Independent Jewish Voices. Instead of defending his signature he
removed it! When Feldman was appointed Vice-Chair of the Chakrabarti Inquiry he
came in for similar criticism
from the Jewish Chronicle who feared he might be too independent. They need not
have worried.
Feldman was appointed as an advisor to the 2015-16
All Party Parliamentary Inquiry into Antisemitism and he produced a sub-report
on anti-Semitism. In
October 2016 the Committee published a Report ‘Anti-Semitism
in the UK’. The link to the sub-report is now broken.
I have to declare an interest. Between
1992-1995 I did an MA at Birkbeck on the History of British Imperialism.
In
his sub-report
Feldman quoted
approvingly Brian Klug definition of
anti-Semitism as
‘a form of hostility towards Jews as Jews, in
which Jews are perceived as something other than what they are.’
There
was nothing about Israel in the definition. Feldman’s sub-report was largely
uncontroversial. He gave as an example of an anti-Semitic stereotype the notion
that Jews constitute a cohesive community, dedicated to the pursuit of its own
selfish ends. Unfortunately the Board of Deputies with its demands that the
Labour Party distance itself from ‘fringe Jews’ with its 10
Pledges has proved, once again, that Zionism and Anti-Semitism are 2 sides
of the same racist coin.
Feldman
claimed that the EUMC definition of anti-Semitism had fallen out of favour due
to continued controversy regarding its application to the State of Israel and
its policies.
In
dealing with the Zionist meme that criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic unless
you criticise every other country (they call it ‘double standards’), Feldman
noted that one of the reasons why people single Israel out is ‘Israel’s claim to be a liberal and
democratic state.’
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| Viktor Klemperer |
Feldman
also dealt effectively with the Zionist distortion of the ‘MacPherson
principle’ that the definition of an anti-Semitic incident should be anything
that is perceived by the ‘victim’ as racist. Feldman wrote that:
It
is sometimes suggested that when Jews perceive an utterance or action to be
antisemitic that this is how it should be described. In the UK this claim looks
for support to the 1999 Stephen Lawrence Inquiry... Macpherson wrote
that ‘a racist incident’ is ‘any incident which is perceived to be
racist by the victim or any other person.’ If we look at the context ... it
is unambiguously clear that Macpherson intended to propose that such racist
incidents require investigation. He did not mean to imply that such incidents
are necessarily racist. However, Macpherson’s report has been misinterpreted
and misapplied in precisely this way. Its authority has been thrown behind the
view that such incidents should, by definition, be regarded as racist. In
short, a definition of antisemitism which takes Jews’ feelings and perceptions
as its starting point and which looks to the Macpherson report for authority is
built on weak foundations.
Feldman
was equally clear about the problems of concusing identity politics and racism,
warning of the danger of ‘conceptual and political chaos.’
For
if the identification of racism becomes a matter of subjective judgment only
then we have no authority other than the perception of a minority or victim
group with which to counter the contrary subjective opinions of perpetrators
who deny that they are racists. Without an anti-racist principle which can be
applied generally we are left in a chaotic situation in which one subjective
point of view faces another. An equally damaging objection is that Jews in the
UK have diverse and, in some respects, contradictory perceptions of antisemitism.
Feldman
noted that the EUMC working definition of anti-Semitism, the precursor of the IHRA,
which the European Union’s Fundamental Rights Agency dropped
‘have not been adopted’.
Regarding the EUMC (now IHRA)
example of antiSemitism:
‘Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy
to that of the Nazis’.
Feldman’s recommendations fell
on the right side of the line:
Yet the fact
that these uses of the Holocaust are wrong and hurtful does not render them
antisemitic. Misleading analyses and hurt feelings are significant. They should
be named for what they are.
When
Michael Gove compared
BDS to the Nazi siege of Jewish shops, Feldman had no hesitation in criticising
him and the equally obnoxious Campaign
Against Anti-Semitism.
Despite
Mr Gove’s aim of criticising those who ‘trivialise’ and ‘pervert’ the
Holocaust, he appeared guilty of these same errors. We find a similar muddle
when the ‘Campaign Against Antisemitism’ likened the boycott movement as well
as the Tricycle Theatre’s refusal of sponsorship money from the Israeli embassy
to the ‘Nazi boycott of Jewish enterprise after Hitler’s election.’
Unlike
the dishonest
Jonathan Freedland Feldman was clear:
As
we have stressed elsewhere in this sub-report, the fact that something offends
Jews does not render it antisemitic. Moreover, for reasons set out earlier, we
cannot assume that the double standards which many of Israel’s supporters find
in the BDS movement amount to evidence that the movement is antisemitic.
Feldman
suggest that a Boycott of Israel might nonetheless be unlawful under the
Equalities Act 2000 because discriminated against a nationality. I disagree
with him because the Boycott isn’t against individual Israelis but the State of
Israel. Otherwise all international solidarity would be outlawed. The Boycott
of Chile under Pinochet would have been illegal despite it being in support of
Chileans who were dying under torture. In
the round Feldman’s sub-Report was pretty fair. In his conclusions Feldman wrote
that
‘The
movement to boycott Israel dismays Jews for understandable reasons. This does not
mean it is antisemitic. Boycott movements become antisemitic when they discriminate
against Jews.
Dealing
with the Zionist accusation that opposition to Operation
Protective Edge when Israel murdered 2,200 people, including 551 children, Feldman
was equally blunt.
the
concern expressed by many spokespeople for the Jewish community often lacked
perspective and, in this way, contributed to a climate of insecurity. We should
recognise that the antisemitic portion of the opposition to Operation
Protective Edge amounted to only a small part of a large body of opinion.
Moreover, there was a want of perspective in assessing the current situation in
comparison to the past. For example, the assertion from a leading communal
figure that we are living through the most insecure time since the Jews’
restoration in the seventeenth century has no basis in fact and encourages Jews
to imagine their situation as far less secure than it really is.
How
to Perpetrate An Intellectual Hoax
In the current issue
of Political Quarterly there is an article by three Birkbeck academics,
including Feldman, Labour
and Antisemitism: a Crisis Misunderstood. Not once do they ask where this
‘crisis’ came from or indeed any questions about it. They simply take its
existence for granted. Nor do they ask why it was that the mainstream media
from the Sun to the Guardian and the BBC ran with the narrative of ‘Labour
anti-Semitism’ and whether it might have something to do with the election of
Jeremy Corbyn in September 2015.
Feldman et al. want to reframe anti-Semitism
as a ‘reservoir’ of images rather than a ‘virus’. Even by the criteria of post-modernism,
where everything is relative, this article is shoddy.
Feldman’s article reminds me of when Alan Sokal, a professor of physics at
New York University, sent
a nonsense article to Social Text, an academic journal
that at the time was a leading intellectual forum. It was published. See What an Audacious Hoax
Reveals About Academia and Fashionable Nonsense
In 2013 John Bohannon, who was a journalist, not a doctor, submitted
an academic study to 304 peer-reviewed scientific journals concerning a
molecule that appeared to show promise as a treatment for cancer. It was
accepted for publication by 157 of the journals. He completely made up
the study. See It's
Surprisingly Easy to Get a Fake Study Published in an Academic Journal
In 2018 three more academics, James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose, and
Peter Boghossian wrote
20 fake papers arguing for ridiculous conclusions and submitted them to
high-profile journals in fields such as gender studies. Seven of their articles
were accepted for publication by peer-reviewed journals. Seven more were still
going through various stages of the review process. Only six had been rejected.
The
article
by Feldman, Gidley
and McGeever
comes under the category of a hoax. Not once do they say what the
‘anti-Semitism’ is that they are writing about. Is it the definition that most
people accept, the OED
definition: ‘hostility to Jews or
prejudice against Jews’? or is it the IHRA
definition? The article rests on 3
legs:
i.
There has been a widespread focus on individual
‘antisemites’, rather than on the broader problem of antisemitism. Antisemitism
is not a virus or poison but a reservoir of readily available images and ideas
that subsist in our political culture.
ii.
They offer five ways forward.
iii.
The authors talk of
a historical parting of the ways
between anti‐racism and
opposition to antisemitism. An anti‐racism defined solely by conceptions of whiteness
and power, we argue, has proven unable to fully acknowledge and account for
anti‐Jewish
racism.
This is just
so abysmally ignorant. Anti-racism isn’t defined by ‘whiteness’ (which is why I’m
critical of ‘White Privilege) but by relations of power and exploitation. Hence
why anti-Irish racism was just as severe as anti-Black racism. A leader of the
National Front, Steve Brady, once told me that they considered the Catholics of
Northern Ireland to be their Blacks!
In 2016
Feldman, before he became one of the Zionist establishment’s tame academics,
had been a free soul. In December of that year he wrote
asking‘Will Britain’s new definition of antisemitism help Jewish people? I’m
sceptical’. The sub head of which was:
‘While some consensus is needed in this debate, I
fear this definition is imprecise, and isolates antisemitism from other forms
of bigotry’
Clearly
there has been a change of tune! Now Feldman wants to separate the fight
against state racism against Black people from the fight against anti-Semitism.
Feldman casts scorn on the idea that
Labour ‘antisemitism’ was ‘‘a malign
confection’ created by the opponents and enemies of Corbyn, even though two-thirds
of the party held that opinion in autumn 2019. Feldman dismisses the idea that
Labour ‘anti-Semitism’ were
falsehoods disseminated to discredit the party by
Tories, Blairites and Zionists, factions which fear its radicalism in general
and its support for the Palestinians in particular.
Feldman and
co. have a simple answer.
‘The one thing we know about reported hate crime
figures in general is that they represent the tip of an iceberg. It is special
pleading to think that Labour’s data are in some way different.’
 |
| David Feldman made a gratuitous attack on Jackie Walker, implying that a Black woman could be Jewish |
Who were the three people who were
first expelled from the Labour Party?
Tony Greenstein, Jackie Walker and Marc Wadsworth. All of them anti-racist activists. Jackie and
I were Jewish and Jackie and Marc were Black. What kind of ‘hate crime figures’ were we? We were expelled as part of the
‘anti-Semitism smear campaign’ but none
of us were expelled for anti-Semitism despite the fact that we were
suspended as part of the anti-Semitism witchhunt.
The facts are clear that it was a
political stitch up. Marc was accused of abusing a Jewish MP Ruth Smeeth
despite not knowing she was Jewish. She was alleged to have left the
Chakrabarti Inquiry in tears but videos show no tears, just synthetic anger.
Marc was integrally involved in the Stephen Lawrence campaign and was
responsible for introducing Nelson Mandela to them. Jackie was alleged to have
said that Jews financed the slave trade. An outright lie based on the omission
of one word in a private conversation. This is the stuff on which Feldman and
his miserable associates based their allegations.
Cast back to
Feldman’s article
in the Guardian which recognised the:
discrimination and occupation,
annexation and expropriation. Those who make Israel the target of criticism for
these actions are now denounced as antisemitic by Israel’s leaders and by their
supporters around the world.
In December 2016 Feldman accepted that
antisemitism is a term that does
service both as a defence of minority rights, and in the context of support for
a discriminatory and illiberal state power. Little wonder the word provokes so
much disagreement.
Today Feldman pours scorn on Labour
members whose ‘complaint (is) that antisemitism is being used as a stick
with which to beat the Labour Party is unworldly.’ They don’t explain why.
Perhaps it’s unworldly for the Daily Mail, a racist paper which employed
Katie Hopkins to have initiated
the fake anti-Semitism campaign. Why is
it that 2 anti-Gypsy bigots, Eric
Pickles and John
Mann, were at the centre of the ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign? There is no mention of context in Feldman’s
recent article.
In his 2016 article
Feldman wrote of a
‘racism when it
is directed against a group that is relatively affluent, coded as “white”, and
most of whose members feel attached to the strongest power in the Middle East.’
In other words criticising the
identity of Zionist Jews could be a form of racism. It is clear that identity
politics was even then leading Feldman down the wrong road. Feldman also
commented that the IHRA
was ‘bewilderingly imprecise’ and it carried the danger that ‘the overall effect will place the onus on
Israel’s critics to demonstrate they are not antisemitic.’ Feldman accepted,
like the IHRA’s author Kenneth Stern, that it ‘chilled’
free speech.
Anti-Semitism as a virus
This is a
favourite Zionist metaphor. It was used by Hitler about Jews (‘bacillus’) and
Katie Hopkins (‘cockroches) about refugees. It means that racism, instead of
being a product of society is a pathology. It bears no relation to
scapegoatism, class or colonialism. Zionism favours it because it means it is
futile fighting anti-Semitism.
Corbyn was repeatedly attacked as anti-Semitic
because of his support of the Palestinians. Yet John Bercow, who had known him
for 22 years , stated
that hadn’t detected a ‘whiff’ of anti-Semitism about Corbyn though he recalled
anti-Semitism in the Tory Party. In one incident a fellow MP said: ‘If I had my way, Berkoff, people like you
wouldn’t be allowed in this place.’ To which Bercow replied ‘Sorry, when you say people like me, do you
mean lower-class or Jewish?’ To which he replied, ‘Both.’”
However Tory anti-Semitism and
racism did not feature in the Establishment’s hegemonic narrative and Feldman
and co. were not about to upset the apple cart and ask why.
For
academics Feldman, Gidley and McGeever are incredibly dishonest. They say that
according to the 2019 Yougov survey
‘fully one quarter of Labour voters agreed
that ‘Israel can get away with anything because its supporters control the
media’.
What is their conclusion?
‘when Israel became the topic of conversation these
respondents drew on the store of antisemitic stereotypes—in this case on the
hoary idea, at least 150 years old, that Jews control the media.’
There’s just one problem with this. It
didn’t mention Jews. It said Israel’s supporters control the media. If you
believe that all supporters of Israel are Jews, which is patently untrue, then you
are being anti-Semitic for assuming all Jews think the same. Supporters of
Israel like born again Christian Rupert Murdoch clearly do run the media.
Feldman’s suggestion that
anti-Semitism is
‘a deep reservoir of
stereotypes and narratives, one which is replenished over time and from which
people can draw with ease’
is essentialist. It posits
anti-Semitism as unchanging. Historically anti-Semitism has changed as the Jews
have changed. To think that three Birkbeck academics have come up with this
rubbish suggests that the college needs to think about the quality of its
teaching staff.
Unsurprisingly given the paucity of their analysis, their proposals
to remedy the ‘problem’ of anti-Semitism aren’t worth the paper they are
written on.
Anti-Semitism
is not form of racism
Feldman argues that
‘the reason Labour has not
responded more adequately to antisemitism is a continued difficulty in
recognising antisemitism as a form of racism.’
Clearly it never occurred to these 3 whizz kids that if you
define ‘anti-Semitism’ as opposition to Israeli racism then it is obviously
going to be difficult to recognise this as a form of racism.
Unsurprisingly there have been no Jewish victims of Labour’s
fake anti-Semitism crisis. This in itself proves that it is confected. Anti-Semitism
is a form of racism, but it mainly expresses itself as prejudice in Britain.
There are no Jewish victims of Windrush or Jewish victims of Police racism and
violence. Jews are not
disproportionately imprisoned. It wasn’t
Maurine Lipman but Bianca Williams and her partner who were stopped
and handcuffed by the Metropolitan’s racist pigs.
If what Feldman is saying is that anti-Semitism is no longer
a form of racism then what they are talking about is not anti-Semitism.
Unfortunately this thought never occurred to these 3 geniuses.
The 3 academics refer to the wider anti-racist movement where
divisions were growing
between campaigns against antisemitism and those organised around opposition to
other forms of racism, especially when articulated with the politics of Zionism
and anti‐Zionism.
They refer to the split between the Campaign Against Racism
and Fascism and Searchlight magazine in the early 1990s over the
question of Israel and Palestine and the
‘100 Black, Asian and
minority ethnic organisations signed an open letter expressing dismay at
Labour’s decision to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance
(IHRA) working definition.’
What Feldman doesn’t ask is why Labour ignored the collective
voice of Black and Asian groups and prioritised Zionist Jewish groups. That
would seem to be a good example of racism. The obvious answer was that the IHRA
was not about anti-Semitism but painting support for the Palestinians and
anti-Zionism as anti-Semitic.
In their search for ‘Labour anti-Semitism’ the 3 academics
plumb the depths. For example Corbyn’s review of John Hobson’s classic book Imperialism
because he did not mention a few anti-Semitic lines out of 400 pages. One of
Zionism’s few honest academics and the historian of the Jewish community,
Professor Geoffrey Alderman explained in the Spectator Is
Jeremy Corbyn really anti-Semitic?
Context is paramount.... We all know what Hobson
thought of Jews and capitalism. But to conclude – as Finkelstein does – that in
writing the foreword Corbyn had praised a 'deeply anti-Semitic book' is to give
a totally false impression of what this influential study is actually about. In
a text running to almost 400 pages there are merely a dozen or so lines which
we would call anti-Semitic. There was absolutely no need for Corbyn to have
drawn attention to them in his foreword.
Alderman concluded that ‘the grounds for labelling him an anti-Semite
simply do not exist.’ I disagree with Alderman on most things but this was
a brave and honest assessment. He noted that Corbyn had always put himself out
for Jewish causes.
This is why
Alderman, a columnist for 14 years, has been banned
from the Jewish Chronicle’s pages by editor Stephen Pollard. Clearly Feldman
and his fellow poodles will suffer no such penalty.
Feldman wrote
about how ‘Daniel Finkelstein ... characterised Imperialism as a
“deeply antisemitic book” which Mr
Corbyn, to his discredit, had commended as “correct
and prescient”.
Freedland never missed an opportunity to attack Corbyn for 'antisemitism'
If Feldman had
an ounce of honesty he wouldn’t touch Finkelstein with a barge pole. As I pointed
out Finkelstein was a member of the Board of the far-Right racist Gatestone
Institute. The Gatestone Institute is funded by Rebekah Mercer who
also funds Breitbart, the paper of the
alt-Right and White Supremacy in the United States. Breitbart used to be edited
by the anti-Semitic
Stephen Bannon. Also associated with Gatestone is Douglas Murray of the
far-Right Henry Jackson Society (of which Stephen Pollard is a founding
member). Murray’s writings are advertised
on Gatestone’s website.
Naturally Jonathan Freedland got
into the act accusing Corbyn of being ‘blind
to anti-Semitism’ over the Hobson book. Freedland should examine
‘anti-Semitism’ at the Guardian, because they advertised the book and carried a
review
which stated that
‘Hobson's
Imperialism belongs to the small group of books in the years from 1900
to the outbreak of war that have definitely changed the contours of social
thought.’
Another example was the ‘notorious mural’ in Tower Hamlets. They tell us that
this was ‘a powerful illustration of
antisemitism’ That ‘the mural depicted six men at a table
dictating the ‘New World Order’. Yes it was conspiratorial but it wasn’t
anti-Semitic. 2 of the 6 bankers were
Jewish.
What is amazing is that this article
took 3 academics to write it!
Feldman’s willingness to act as Pollard’s poodle was
exemplified by his article The
historical left really was ‘for the many, not the Jew’. in reaction to
Corbyn’s review of Hobson’s book.
Feldman argued in the Jewish
Chronicle that Hobson’s book was lauded in the labour press and that in these
circles, the idea that imperial expansion was driven by Jewish financial
interests was commonplace. This is rubbish.
It wasn’t the Right who joined Jews in the fight against
Oswald Moseley in October 1936 at the Battle of Cable Street or who fought
Franco in Spain. Wherever fascism or anti-Semitism reared its ugly head it was
the Left who fought it alongside the social causes of anti-Semitism. Zionism’s
allies today were then part of the problem which is why the Jews of Mile End voted in 1945 to send
England’s first elected Communist, Phil Piratin to parliament.
It is true that there was sometimes a conflation between Jews
and capitalism by early socialists and anarchists like Proudhon. However
despite criticism of his On the
Jewish Question Marx came out firmly in favour of Jewish Emancipation
in his debate with Bruno Bauer.
With the transition, especially in Eastern Europe, from feudalism
to capitalism, Jews were still seen in their feudal roles as agents of money.
However this changed as the Jews became proletarianised.
What is true is that it was
the supporters of Zionism in the Labour Party who were
anti-Semitic. Labour in 1921 had admitted Poale Zion as an affiliated society
because Labour saw Empire and Colonisation as good things bringing
‘civilisation’ to the natives. When the
future Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald visited Palestine in 1922 he told his
hosts that
‘the rich plutocratic Jew,
who is the true economic materialist. He is the person whose views upon life
make one anti-Semitic. He has no country, no kindred... he is an exploiter of
everything he can squeeze. He is behind every evil that Governments do... He
detests Zionism because it revives the idealism of his race.’ [David Cesarani,
Anti-Zionism in Britain, p.141].
Sidney
Webb, founder of the Fabians and the New Statesman made similar
comments about European social democratic parties being ‘Jew ridden’ whereas the Labour Party
didn’t have this problem as there was no money in it!
MacDonald’s anti-Semitism was
little different from the anti-Semitism of the Zionists. Fellow MP Watson
Rutherford described Winston Churchill, an ardent Zionist, as having decided in
the 1914 Shell Debate that ‘the best
course of action to get them to support it (his proposal) was … to do a little Jew-baiting.’
Churchill was ‘too much of a demagogue to
forego the applause to be had from attacking someone who was… a Jew, and an
unpopular one at that. [Michael Cohen, Churchill and and the Jews, pp.
28-29]
Arthur Balfour, another Zionist
favourite, was also an anti-Semite. Chaim Weizmann described a conversation he
had had with Balfour on the 12th December 1914. Balfour told him of a
conversation with Cosima Wagner, the notoriously anti-Semitic widow of Richard
Wagner. Balfour explained that ‘he shared
many of her anti-Semitic postulates.’ Instead of protesting Weizmann
‘pointed out that we, too… had
drawn attention to the fact that Germans of the Mosaic persuasion were an
undesirable and demoralizing phenomenon…’
[Leonard Stein, The Balfour Declaration p.154]
What was particularly
disgusting about Feldman’s Jewish Chronicle article,
apart from its jumping on the anti-Corbyn bandwagon alongside racists like
Pollard and Finkelstein was its dishonesty. Historically the left has fought
anti-Semitism uncompromisingly.
Even the late Robert
Wistrich, Professor of History at Tel Aviv University in his ‘Socialism
and the Jews’ wrote of the German Social Democratic Party that:
Opposition to anti-Semitism
had become a badge of honour for the workers’ movement: it now expressed their
total contempt for a political system that had excluded them as pariahs. Anti-Semitic
demonstrations were broken up in Berlin, Dresden and other German cities with
increasing frequency between 1881 and 1884.
Wistrich described ‘a typical incident’ in Hanover in April
1881 when workers jeered Adolf
Stocker, founder of the Christian Social Party.
He then passed over to the
Jewish question, which was greeted by the Social Democrats with cries of Aha!
and ironical applause. The Jew-bait was evidently to be the appetising sauce
with which all this rubbish was to be made palatable to the workers.
Nevertheless the latter showed not the slightest desire to swallow the bait..’
[p. 94]
The one section of German
society that held out to the last against Hitler was the left, the SPD and KPD.
The parties of the Right in particular the DNVP of Hugenburg cooperated with
the Nazis and supported Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor. In November 1932,
the last free elections in Germany, the Nazi vote fell to 11.7 million (33.09%).
The combined vote for the parties of the working class, the SPD and KPD, of 13.2
million (37.3%) was one and a half million more than the Nazis.
If Feldman wanted to find
anti-Semitism then he need look no further than the Zionist movement whose
leading members in 1933 welcomed Hitler
to power. That was one of the reasons
why they opposed the Boycott of Nazi Germany so strongly.
Lewis Namier, former Political Secretary of the Zionist Organisation in
London and the personal secretary of Weizmann during the 1930’s wrote the
preface to Arthur Ruppin’s Jews
in the Modern World. Etan Bloom
in his 2008 Ph. D Thesis (Tel Aviv University) wrote
that
‘Knowledgeable Zionists, including Nahum
Goldmann, saw in Namier an intense Jewish anti-Semite’.
Namier wrote that:
not
everyone who feels uncomfortable with regard to us must be called an
anti-Semite, nor is there anything necessarily and inherently wicked in
anti-Semitism.
Bloom
wrote how
‘the original draft was ‘even stronger. Weizmann –
who worked closely with Ruppin - read it and had to warn Namier not to be so
open in expressing their common toleration of Nazism’ because ‘the louts will say, the Jews themselves
think that it will be all for the good, etc’.
If
Feldman, once he’s finished his academic whoring wants to return to the real
world he could do better than read America’s Jewish Forward and articles such
as How
Steve Bannon and Breitbart News Can Be Pro-Israel — and Anti-Semitic at the Same
Time, in which Naomi Zeveloff
declared that:
‘though it
would seem impossible to hate Jews but love the Jewish state, these two
viewpoints are not as contradictory as they appear.
It only seems impossible because academics like
Feldman have consistently tried to hide the truth that it is Zionism which
shares most in common with anti-Semitism.
Both believe that Jews belong, not in the countries where they live but
in their ‘real
homeland’ Israel.
When nearly all the far-Right see Israel as a
bulwark against the Muslim hordes who are trying to replace them in Europe,
academic prostitutes who write to please the Board of Deputies deserve our
contempt.
I haven’t mentioned Feldman’s co-authors.
Ben Gidley is mentioned by some as Bob from Brockley. The other contributor
Brendan
McGeever has penned an anti-communist tract Antisemitism
and the Russian Revolution which argues that the Bolsheviks were
responsible for the massive increase in pogroms that accompanied the Revolution.
I can only recommend Clara Weiss’s excellent Brendan McGeever’s Antisemitism and the Russian Revolution:
Distorting history in the service of identity politics, parts one and two.
Or I can only quote the
Black artist and intellectual of the Harlem Renaissance, Claude MacKay:
“Every Negro… should make a
study of Bolshevism and explain its meaning to the coloured masses. It is the
greatest and most scientific idea afloat in the world today… Bolshevism has
made Russia safe for the Jew. It has liberated the Slav peasant from priest and
bureaucrat who can no longer egg him on to murder Jews to bolster up their rotten
institutions. It might make these United States safe for the Negro… If the
Russian idea should take hold of the white masses of the western world… then
the black toilers would automatically be free.”
Black fighters like Paul
Robeson looked to the Soviet Union, even under Stalin, as an example of a
society where racism was not inevitable. What McGeever is doing with his book
is no different from the attempts of David Irving and others to deny the Holocaust.
That there were some pogroms
committed by the Red Army in the civil war is undeniable. However they were under 10% of those
perpetrated and the Bolsheviks did their best to prevent them including
shooting pogromists. The vast majority
were carried out by the White Russians. Nowhere does McGreever mention, because
it would spoil his narrative that a member of the Zionist Organisation and the
leader of what became Revisionist Zionism, Vladimir Jabotinsky, formed an alliance with the Ukrainian
nationalist leader Petliyura, who was responsible for up to 200,000 Jewish deaths.
The Red Army consisted mainly
of peasants amongst whom anti-Semitism had been rife. The Czarist monarchy,
with whom the Zionists were so infatuated, had consciously used anti-Semitism
to divide the workers and peasants. The Bolsheviks consciously sought to attack
anti-Semitism from the beginning.
Weiss writes
that:
In the Red Army, leaflets
were distributed against anti-Semitism. Perpetrators of pogroms were severely
punished. For instance, units involved in the pogroms of Budyonny’s First
Cavalry in Poland in 1920 were dissolved and up to 400 cavalrymen were executed
The alliance with Petliura heralded the later Zionist collaboration with
the Nazis when they decided to oppose the world Jewry’s boycott of Germany by
forming a pact, Ha'avara with them. The needs of Palestine came before the
needs of the Jews. It is a great pity that David Feldman has lent his undoubted
talents to whitewashing Zionism and in the process getting into bed with two
anti-communists to peddle his nonsense article on Labour anti-Semitism. Such are the depths that Zionist
‘intellectuals’ sink to.
Tony Greenstein
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