Obituary - The Death of an Establishment Bigot – Rabbi Dr Jonathan Sacks (8 March 1948-7 November 2020)

For all his pretentious and affected learning Sacks was a racist, a homophobe and a supporter of Judeo-Nazi Settlers

Of one thing you can be certain. When the press sings in unison you can be sure that they are wrong. And sure enough they fell over themselves to sing the praises of Saint Sacks. It is most unfortunate that the Jewish religion doesn’t have saints, though it does have tzadiks. (righteous persons). 

Sacks was described by NPR as a ‘Towering Intellect Of Judaism’  which probably says more about the state of modern Judaism than it does about Sacks.

The Times spoke of the ‘

Charismatic Chief Rabbi who was an eloquent, powerful advocate for the importance of all faiths and ‘made his listeners feel clever’

The New York Times explained how

In writings and media appearances, he took a universalist view of religion in a multicultural world — a stance that could get him in hot water with conservatives.

Sacks good friend was a fellow religious bigot

The Church Times described how Sacks was

prodigiously talented in two areas that only rarely come together. He had a trained and sharply honed philosophical mind, and he combined this with superb powers of storytelling and popular communication

There was a particular bond with George Carey, because of their shared support for Arsenal….

Carey it should be remembered covered up child abuse in the Church of England leading to him being banned from officiating at services. He was also a fellow Islamaphobe.

The Independent recalled how Sacks visited the United States to visit his family and how he visited the Brooklyn-based leader of the racist Lubavitch hasidic movement, Menachem Schneerson

We can get a flavour of Sack’s political orientation from the fact that in 2018 Sacks helped Mike Pence, the US Vice President, write a speech to be delivered in the Knesset in which he announced the date of Trump’s decision to move the American Embassy to Jerusalem. Sacks thus demonstrated that when it comes to the Occupied Territories, of which Jerusalem is a part, that he was signed up to a Greater Israel. Pence saw Sack’s contribution as a “hugely critical element in crafting the speech”.

Pence is an evangelical Christian and a reactionary on all social issues from gay rights and abortion to demanding that public funds for HIV/Aids be redirected to “conversion therapy” for LGBT people. Sacks had no problem in working with such a vile creature.

However Sacks was anything but righteous. He was a pretentious windbag who wrote over 20 books without saying anything worthwhile. Sacks flattered to deceive and created an aura of profundity.  He was also apparently a philosopher.  

I must confess that I treat philosophy as a way of saying the same thing in different ways but maybe I’m being unfair. The greatest philosopher of the past century is acknowledged to be Martin Heidegger, the author of Being and Time which gave rise to existentialism and Sartre, phenomenology and Derrida’s notion of deconstruction.

Although I don’t believe that you can simply write off art because it is produced by the politically obnoxious or backward, an obvious example being Salvador Dalli, when it comes to Philosophy we are dealing with political thought and ideas. Philosophy is a study of life itself, our understanding of reality and the meaning of one’s existence. If the greatest philosophical work in the last century was produced by someone who went on to become a Nazi, what does it say about his work? Or are we to accept that his personal political choices were separate from the ideas that he sponsored? Even when given the chance, after the war Heidegger refused to renounce his previous support for the Nazis.

The same is true of Sacks. You can best judge his verbal and written output by the stance he took on the various questions that confronted him and the choices he made. The Vatican and Catholic theologians produced millions of words yet that didn’t prevent the Vatican threatening to torture Galileo if he didn’t recant his bizarre ideas about the planets revolving round the Sun! 

It was Marx who put his finger on the dilemma of  philosophy in his Theses on Feurbach, which was the  precursor of The German Ideology in which he said that “Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.”

It is therefore worthwhile pointing out the contrast between the erudite and learned Sacks from the common and garden bigot he was in practice.

Sacks wasn't the only Chief Rabbi who was a reactionary

Jonathan Sacks as Homophobe

Jonathan Sacks was a homophobe, an anti-gay bigot. When the Home Office put out for consultation its proposals on gay marriage the Beth Din, (a Jewish religious court) which Sacks presided over, urged the government to reject any proposals to legalise gay marriage. See Once, the chief rabbi represented all British Jewry. No longer, by dissident Zionist Professor Geoffrey Alderman (13.7.13). The Beth Din declared that

"Our understanding of marriage from time immemorial has been that of a union between a man and a woman. Any attempt to redefine this sacred institution would be to undermine the concept of marriage."

Marriage has in fact not been an institution ‘from time immemorial’. Marriage as we know it now is of recent origin and has changed fundamentally over time as has the family itself. It is a common fault to read back from today into ‘time immemorial’.

The Guardian, before it was Freedlandised, was somewhat more critical of Sacks than before the ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign was underway. In Lord Sacks: the two sides of the chief rabbi (25.8.13.) it wrote that ‘

Lord Sacks's mellifluous voice may have charmed millions. But he was unable convincingly to explain why the dignity of difference does not also mean the dignity of diversity.

In 1992 Sacks excluded the Jewish Lesbian and Gay Helpline from a communal charity walkabout in Hyde Park which he had organised. According to a spokesman for his office the helpline

“presented an alternative lifestyle which we don’t accept. We know that some people feel that they are inclined that way but we draw the line at institutionalising it.”

'Words mean what I want them to mean'

Jonathan Sacks and Universalism

In his Wiki entry Sacks is described as ‘paradoxically one of the most universalizing voices within contemporary Judaism.’ I sometimes feel like Humpty Dumpty who remarked that words mean what you want them to mean. The only question being who is the master. To Sacks words lost any independent existence. They were merely weapons of war.

Universalism means that ideas, ethics and behaviour towards others have universal application. Sacks Zionism stood for the complete opposite. What is good for the Jews is its first question. Zionism is dedicated to creating and sustaining a Jewish state that is as ethnically pure as is possible

Sacks was a vehement Zionist and opposed to anything remotely approaching a universalist outlook. He used his academic background in philosophy in order to legitimise Jewish chauvinism and particularism. His academic learning was employed to defend Jewish exceptionalism, muddying it with a commitment to interfaith ‘dialogue’.

When it comes to bourgeois philosophy, terms such as ‘universalism’ mean anything you want them to mean. What his flatterers meant was that he spoke the language of ‘interfaith’ whilst subscribing to the idea that only the Jewish religion enables an acquaintanceship with god. The getting together of Christians and Jewish religious leaders to pat each other on the back, what is called interfaith ‘dialogue’, in practice meant Christian clerics giving unstinting support to Israeli ethnic cleansing and its barbaric occupation.

It says a lot about the intellectual poverty of the organised, synagogue going British Jewish community around the United Synagogue, that someone like Sacks was treated with veneration. Sacks was an intellectual fraud posing as someone with deep insight into the human condition.

When it came to the victims of Zionism, the Palestinians, Sacks was anything but a universalist. He held his arms out to the most murderous and racist settlers of all. Sacks was a bigot who dressed up his prejudices in flowery language, sophistry and semantics. What mattered was not how many philosophy books he wrote but how he interpreted them.

When in his 2002 book The Dignity of Difference, Sacks wrote

“God has spoken to mankind in many languages: through Judaism to the Jews, Christianity to Christians, Islam to Muslims. ... God is the god of all humanity, but no single faith is or should be the faith of all humanity.”

he sparked a backlash amongst the ultra-Orthodox. What was Sack’s reaction? Did he stand his ground? No, he amended his book so that it read

"As Jews, we believe that God has made a covenant with a singular people, but that does not exclude the possibility of other peoples, cultures, and faiths finding their own relationship with God."

Corbyn and the British irony meeting

Sacks, Corbyn and Hypocrisy

Sacks’ hypocrisy was on full display when he took advantage of the media chorus, fawning tabloid headlines and vacuous pundits, to launch a vicious personal attack on Jeremy Corbyn. In a New Statesman interview, if you can call it that, Sacks accusing Corbyn of having made the most racist speech since Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech. Here was the ‘deep thinker’ Sacks playing to a gallery of sycophants and reactionary press clowns, offering a cheap quote in return for even cheaper applause. Sacks demonstrated not only his own hypocrisy but his willingness to indulge in cheap demagogy.

That well known anti-racist paper the Daily Mail, which in 1968 gushed over Powell's 'rivers of blood' speech

Corbyn you will remember accused two Zionist thugs, Jonathan Hoffman and Richard Millett, who have a history of disrupting meetings that they disagree with, of failing to understand British irony. Corbyn’s comparison was with the Palestinian Ambassador Manuel Hassassian whose meeting they had tried to disrupt. Corbyn’s accusation was made against 2 particularly obnoxious Zionists, not Jews, although the media tripe treated ‘Zionist’ as equalling ‘Jew’. The contrast was between 2 individuals who were born in Britain but who lacked any sense of irony with the Palestinian Ambassador who wasn’t born in Britain. It was the exact opposite of Powellism. See You were never my Chief Rabbi, bruv

If Sacks had possessed any integrity, still less irony, he might have kept his rabbinical trap firmly shut. However people like Sacks tend to verbal incontinence. When asked to name his favourite book for 2017, Sacks volunteered Douglas Murray’s ‘Strange Death of Europe’! It is a book that not only praises Enoch Powell but it is the bible of the far-Right identitarian movement with its replacement theory which argues that mass Muslim immigration is part of a conspiracy to replace and eradicate White European identity.

Below is one of Murray’s tributes to his hero, Enoch Powell:

“among the things most striking when reading his [Powell’s] speech – and the reactions to it – today are the portions for which he was lambasted that now seem almost understated… if anyone had suggested to Powell in 1968 that he should use his Birmingham speech to predict that within the lifespan of most people listening those who identified as ‘white British’ would be in a minority in their capital city, he would have dismissed such an advisor as a maniac …even the most famous prophet of immigration doom in fact underestimated and understated the case.'….”

Enoch Powell - praised by Douglas Murray who was in turn praised by Sacks

To criticise Corbyn, the opponent of White Supremacy and Apartheid, for being a latter-day Enoch Powell when his own views dovetailed with racists like Douglas Murray was the height of hypocrisy

Indeed the full blown version of identitarianism has Jews as the masterminds of this immigration, financed of course by the ubiquitous George Soros. So not only was Sacks signing up to a racist far-Right ideology but he was giving sustenance to the very anti-Semitism that he accused Corbyn of!

What is also clear is that Sacks himself didn’t understand British (or any other) form of irony. On learning of Sacks death Murray paid him a heart felt tribute: ‘We have lost one of our kindest, deepest, most thoughtful minds. A terrible loss.’

Heidegger was a far greater philosopher than Sacks whose legacy consists of a few pious homilies. Nonetheless, for all his erudition Heidegger joined the Nazi Party in 1933 becoming Rector of Freiburg University. He distanced himself from fellow Jewish academics including his mentor Edmond Husserl, a ‘Christian’ Jew. Heidegger signed the dismissal letters of Jewish faculty, including Husserl. Even his lover Hannah Arendt accused him of effectively killing Husserl. Some might suggest that there is a dichotomy between a philosophy that critiques society and our place in it and a philosophy which ends up in Nazi dictatorship and biological racism. The same is equally true with Sacks. For all his fine, measured words, he lent his weight to the sanitizing of bigotry and racism.

Jonathan Sacks, with his affected profundity and learning, was an Establishment courier, flattering those with privilege and power but with nothing to say to the dispossessed. He was a man with little in the way of original thought. He simply repackaged the mundane.

Sacks, Israel and Zionism

Jonathan Sacks in a speech at a Solidarity Rally for Israel on 23^rd July 2006, during Israel’s attack on Lebanon, including its slaughter of its civilian population, said that

“Today we stand in solidarity with Israel, and rarely have I felt so proud of Anglo-Jewry as I have done these past few days. Especially of our young people. Last week 1300 of them, from youth groups right across the religious spectrum, went out to Israel. Every one of them, or their families, might have said, ‘No, not now. It is too dangerous.’ Yet almost none of them did. I want to say to every one of those young people: Kol hakavod. You make us proud … And today I want a message to go forth from us to Israel to say: Israel, you make us proud …” 

Israel’s bombing of Lebanon’s civilian population, including Western Beirut made Sacks proud. To compound just how deceitful and treacherous he was. he proclaimed how he ‘wept’ for the people of Lebanon even as the Israel he supported was bombing them! He was ‘proud’ of the murderers yet expressed sympathy with the murdered.

This is the Israel which committed the Qana massacre in Lebanon 10 years earlier, killing over 100 of the 800 refugees who had gathered there. Sacks said:

Does any of us, God forbid, take satisfaction at the devastation of Lebanon? Is that who we are? Let me be clear and unambiguous. We weep not just for Israel but for the people of Lebanon also …”

But of course all this ‘devastation’ was justified:

“And if we, if Israel, if Europe, if America do not take a stand against terror, if we ignore it as the world ignored it for so long, then it will leave a stain on the human future that no tears, no regrets, will ever remove.

Presumably it didn’t occur to this great philosopher and scholar that the terror the world was ignoring was that committed by Israel. However Hezbollah ensured that Israel was driven out of Lebanon in 2006. Its first defeat at the hands of an Arab army since 1948. Israel has since, together with the United States, branded Hezbollah a ‘terrorist’ group rather than a national liberation movement.

In 2012 during Israel’s Operation Pillar of Defense in Gaza in November 2012, in which 174 Palestinians were killed and many hundreds wounded by Israeli bombing, Sacks was asked by presenter Evan Davis, after giving his usual homilies on Thought for the Day, if he had ‘any thoughts on what’s going on over in Israel and Gaza at the moment?’ Sacks sighed and said ‘I think it’s got to do with Iran actually.’ Co‑presenter Sarah Montague quickly whispered ‘we’re live.’ Sacks immediately reverted to his normal pious tone offering a ‘continued prayer for peace, not only in Gaza but the whole region.’” Sacks was brought up in the tradition of the ‘left’ Zionists of ‘shooting and crying’. You weep, not for your victims but because they forced you to kill them.

Israel's annual pogrom that Sacks supported

Supporting Israel’s Judeo-Nazi Settlers’ Pogrom

Every June Israeli Jews celebrate Jerusalem Day, marking the 1967 War when the city was captured. As part of the celebrations, thousands of settlers take part in the “March of the Flags”.

This march includes a walk through Arab East Jerusalem by young settlers who chant slogans such as ‘Death to the Arabs’ whilst banging on the shuttered Arab shops. All under the gaze of the Israeli Police.

In 2017 Sacks extended a “personal invitation” to Diaspora Jews to join him on a trip to Israel which included “leading” the March of the Flags and “dancing with our brave IDF soldiers” in the far-Right settler enclave inside Hebron.

Ha’aretz’s correspondent Bradley Burston asked ‘Rabbi Sacks, Why Are You Cheerleading for anti-Palestinian Provocateurs?’ Burston never received a reply. Burston described it as

“an annual, gender-segregated extreme-right, pro-occupation religious carnival of hatred, marking the anniversary of Israel’s capture of Jerusalem by humiliating the city’s Palestinian Muslims”, in which marchers have “vandalized shops in Jerusalem’s Muslim Quarter, chanted ‘Death to Arabs’ and ‘The (Jewish) Temple Will Be Built, the (Al Aqsa) Mosque will be Burned Down,’ shattered windows and door locks, and poured glue into the locks of shops forced to close for fear of further damage.”

Ha’aretz’s Anna Roiser pleaded with Sacks not to attend, saying,

“one of the world’s most respected rabbis sends a message of normalization and acceptance of the occupation by the mainstream Jewish community. Many Jews in the Diaspora work hard to emphasize that being Jewish is not synonymous with supporting the Israeli government, and that supporting Israel’s right to exist is not synonymous with supporting the occupation. Rabbi Sacks’ actions risk undermining these messages.”

Not only did Sacks ignore all such requests but he marched together with Ephraim Mirvis, another anti-Corbyn bigot. Like Sacks, Mirvis found it difficult to oppose any other form of racism bar ‘anti-Semitism’. See Chief Rabbi and Lord Sacks should not back this march

Now if Jeremy Corbyn or members of the Labour Party were to shout ‘Death to the Jews’ as they did in pre-war Poland and Germany, then Mirvis might have something to complain about. I sent an unpublished letter to the Guardian in the wake of Mirvis’s outburst in The Times.

Dear Sir/Madam,

If there is one thing guaranteed to increase anti-Semitism in this country it is the sight of Jewish leaders attacking a Labour Party that represents the only hope for millions of British people. Britain’s Chief Rabbis have a habit of supporting the Conservative Party dating back to Immanuel Jakobovitz’s support for Margaret Thatcher but none have been this blatant.

Ephraim Mirvis’s attack on Corbyn has absolutely nothing to do with racism or anti-Semitism. This is the same person who was singing the praise of Norman Tebbit’s cricket test not so long ago.

Nor is Mirvis’s instruction to Jews not to vote Labour about despair. ['It reflects the despair': chief rabbi's criticism of Labour strikes a chord] It is part of a well co-ordinated campaign to use ‘anti-Semitism’ as a means to damage and destroy Labour’s electoral prospects.

This is the same Ephraim Mirvis who joined his predecessor Rabbi Jonathan Sacks and thousands of far-Right settlers on the 2017 Jerusalem Day ‘March of Flags’. The favourite chant of the settlers on these marches is ‘Death to the Arabs.’ Mirvis had no hesitation in joining those who desire nothing more than the expulsion of the Palestinians.

It is because Jeremy Corbyn bought into the myth that anti-Semitism was a problem in the Labour Party that he is now facing such problems. It is however curious that in the thousands of stories on Labour ‘anti-Semitism’ there is a marked absence of evidence.

Yours faithfully,

Tony Greenstein

Sacks ignored all entreaties. Together with Ephraim Mirvis, who was trained in the West Bank yeshivah Har Etzion in the settlement of Alon Shvut, Sacks helped lead the March of the Flags.

In a video taken of the march several youths spoke to Electronic Intifada’s Charlotte Silver. One said that they had come to celebrate the “liberation of Jerusalem from the Palestinians,” others chimed in with “may their memory be erased.”

“May they all die today, all together,” another interjected. A child asserted repeatedly that Jerusalem was “liberated” from “the donkeys.”

The curse calling for someone’s name or memory to be erased was traditionally used for enemies of the Jews as hated as Adolf Hitler or Haman. Its use by Jewish youths against Palestinians indicates the level of genocidal hatred with which they are brought up.

Members of the fascist anti-miscengenation group Lehava shouted “Arab beware – my sister is not abandoned goods” They also chanted, “Girls of Israel, for the Nation of Israel [Jews].” Israeli women are seen as the exclusive property of Israeli Jewish men. As in Nazi Germany, where Rassenchande (racial pollution) meant Jewish men having sexual relations with German women, not the other way around, there were no equivalent slogans telling Arab women to beware of mixing with Jewish men. See Israeli mobs celebrate “Jerusalem Day” with anti-Palestinian rampage in Old City

None of this prevented the Guardian’s Jenni Frazer describing Sacks as

a much admired figure in both the Jewish and non-Jewish world…. Sacks won high praise and was generally acknowledged as one of the most brilliant intellects of his generation. He was particularly lauded for his ability to explain Jewish philosophy to the wider community, which he did with great frequency on BBC Radio 4’s Thought for the Day lecturing in moral philosophy at Middlesex Polytechnic, or as a visiting professor at Essex University.

Rabbi Hugo Gryn

Sacks and the Funeral of Auschwitz Survivor Hugo Gryn

As Chief Rabbi of the United Synagogue Sacks refused to attend the funeral of Hugo Gryn in 1996. Gryn was a rabbi for 32 years at the West London synagogue – one of the largest Reform congregations in Europe. Gryn was a fellow panellist on The Moral Maze.

Gryn was also an Auschwitz survivor from Berehevo, which was then in Czechoslovakia, today in Ukraine. His family arrived in Auschwitz in 1944 when he was 14-year-old. His 10-year-old brother was gassed on arrival. He and his mother survived. His father died a few days after liberation.

A massive row erupted after the Jewish Chronicle published a leaked letter which Sacks had written which described Gryn as part of a “false grouping” which was “among those who destroy the faith”. Sacks’ subsequent decision to attend a memorial service for Gryn did not appease communal anger.

I know it’s not the done thing to speak ill of the dead but that is no reason to lie about them either.

Tony Greenstein

See John Spencer’s An existential threat?

You Can’t Unite With A Rattlesnake - the Left Will Never Defeat Starmer as long as it accepts his ‘Anti-Semitism’ Narrative

Starmer Promised to ‘tear the poison of anti-Semitism out of Labour’ – what he meant was expelling supporters of the Palestinians from the Labour Party

Important Update

This article should be read in conjunction with Asa Winstanley's recent article in Electronic Intifada which proves conclusively that Starmer’s witch-hunt is being driven by the Israel Lobby and the Board of Deputies

Revealed: the Israel lobby’s Labour hit list

When Starmer suspended Jeremy Corbyn 2 weeks ago I predicted that his expulsion was inevitable. Starmer’s reaction when an NEC panel voted to reinstate him demonstrates that expulsion was his original intention.  Starmer then did the next best thing. He expelled Corbyn from the Parliamentary Labour Party.

Add caption

When Starmer was elected in April I wrote that ‘Mogadon Man Assumes the Leadership of the Labour Party… The Fight against the Right begins.’ Craig Murray wrote

‘Sadly, Sir Keir Starmer has all the captivating exuberance of a stagnant pond, with the murky secrets of his dubious past polluting the fetid waters.

In the circumstances that was rather mild! I followed this up, on May 13, warning that

‘If Labour Wants to Win the Next Election then it needs to Dump Starmer fast - COVID-19 Demonstrates why Sir Keir is so useless – He has Nothing to Say’.

The Campaign Group - A complete failure to understand the 'antisemitism' campaign

Unfortunately Momentum and the Campaign Group ignored my advice. Many people are inclined to call them the ‘soft left’. I prefer the term STUPID LEFT. As Einstein is said to have remarked, the definition of insanity is repeating something over and over again and expecting a different result. For the past 5 years, Momentum and Corbyn have repeatedly tried appeasing the Labour Right and the Zionist Jewish Labour Movement. The more they gave them the more they demanded. The more they apologised, the more ground they conceded.

Jon Lansman, Who Singlehandedly Did More to Damage Corbyn than anyone else, Believed that the Election of Sturmer was a Victory for the Left 

These fools even got it into their heads that Starmer was going to preserve Corbyn’s manifesto pledges and that he was a ‘unity’ candidate. Anyone acquainted with Starmer’s record would have known that that was a lie. Starmer is and always has been from Labour’s hard right.

https://youtu.be/M4hW2X37z8g

As Director of Public ProsecutionsStarmer prosecuted Julian Assange and to this day refuses to speak out about his incarceration for being an investigative journalist. Starmer prosecuted women for making false allegations of rape whilst trying to cover for the Police who murdered Ian Tomlinson. Starmer is the only MP who is a member of the international ruling class body, the Trilateral Commission.

Not the least of Starmer’s crimes was the fact that he was first person to welcome my expulsion. This always struck me as curious.  Why, if someone is sincere in their opposition to anti-Semitism should they welcome the expulsion of a Jewish anti-racist?

Starmer however, unlike Corbyn and the Campaign Group/ Momentum is not stupid. Cunning, deceitful, dishonest but not stupid. From the beginning of his leadership he has repeated his promise to ‘tear the poison of anti-Semitism out of Labour by the roots’. That was what justified the sacking of Rebecca Long-Bailey and Lloyd Russell-Moyle and the dressing down of Stephen Kinnock. Not once has any member of the stupid left challenged his narrative.

Starmer went out of his way, from the start, to ensure that the EHRC Report was as damning as possible. That was why he paid off the racist liars and frauds among Labour’s senior staff who had campaigned against the Labour Party in 2017. This despite being told that Labour had a winning case. That way their version of events, that they had been prevented by Corbyn in tackling ‘anti-Semitism’ could not be contradicted without legal consequences.

The Cowardice of Lloyd Russell-Moyle Prevented Him Signing a Petition in Support of Corbyn

Starmer wanted the EHRC Report to be as bad as possible in order that he could wield it as a weapon. As it turned out the EHRC Report was insubstantial and evasive. Despite ignoring the evidence of Jewish Voices for Labour and my own offer, as the first Jewish person to be expelled, to give testimony its Report was a botched political stitch up. The suggestion that Ken Livingstone and Pam Bromley had been guilty of harassment is not worth the paper it is written on. Political speech and denying that there is an anti-Semitism problem is not harassment. It would be laughed out court. That is why Starmer and his glove puppet, David Evans, have been so concerned to prevent local Labour parties discussing the Report.

Hence Starmer’s reaction to Labour’s Leaked Report was to attack those who leaked the Report whilst rewarding Labour’s racist and misogynist former staff. The last thing Starmer could afford was any undermining of McNicol’s lies.

John McDonnell with his slavish support for Starmer hauls up the White Flag of surrender

It is or should be obvious that Starmer isn’t the least concerned about racism. ‘Anti-Semitism’ to him is what ‘Communism’ was to Joe McCarthy. It is a means of denouncing his critics and smearing the Left. Back in April I wrote that

If anyone had any doubts about who and what (Sir) Keir Starmer represents, his Shadow Cabinet appointments today should lay them to rest.  Starmer represents a return of the Blairite Right. Even Barry Gardiner, a supporter of Labour Friends of Israel and easily the most articulate member of Corbyn’s shadow cabinet has been sacked, as has Ian Lavery, former President of the NUM and one of the few working class members in the PLP as well as Jon Trickett.

It is not as if Starmer didn’t give a clear warning of his intentions. It is the cowardice and pathetic reformism of the Labour Left (if one can even call it such) that meant they didn’t heed the warnings. The signs of what Starmer’s real intentions were many:

i.              Starmer’s ‘constructive opposition’ in the ‘national interest’ to Boris Johnson’s disastrous COVID-19 strategy as the government presided over the highest death rate in Europe. The official death toll is 50,000 but the real death toll is far higher. The failure of the Tories is directly linked to the privatization of the NHS and the outsourcing of PPE and Test and Trace. Far from being ‘efficient’ the private sector is only efficient at maximizing its own profits. Channel 4 Dispatches has just shown how a private lab (they used to be in-house) treated test results cavalierly, allowing cross infection and leaking test tubes. Starmer’s failure to call out the health dangers of privatisation should have been taken seriously.

ii.           Starmer reversed Labour’s policy to support Kashmiri independence. Why?  Because Hindu chauvinists, supporters of the far-Right BJP government, accused supporters of Kashmiri independence and opponents of discrimination against the Untouchables of ‘Hinduphobia’.  The ‘Anti-Semitism’ scam is winning widespread admiration amongst racists.

The new leaders of Momentum (right) are no different from Lansman (left)

Just as opponents of Israeli Apartheid and Zionism are called ‘anti-Semites’ so Hindu bigots are calling opponents of caste discrimination ‘Hinduphobes’.  And who turned up at a House of Commons meeting to pledge his support for their campaign to keep caste discrimination legal?  Gideon Falter of the CAA! Starmer is very sensitive to the feelings of racists and chauvinists.

iii.        Starmer followed this up by sacking the weak and insipid Rebecca Long-Bailey, the Momentum candidate in the leadership elections. She had retweeted Maxine Peak’s statement that US Police learnt the neck hold from Israeli Police. Given that hundreds of thousands of US cops have been trained by the Israeli Police, it was a reasonable assumption, yet Starmer called this an ‘anti-Semitic conspiracy theory’.

iv.        Starmer may be concerned with ‘anti-Semitism’ and the feelings of fellow Zionists but when it came to Black Lives Matter he had no hesitation in declaring that it was a ‘moment’ that had passed. Concern about genuine racism against Black people, the Windrush scandal and ‘hostile environment’ hasn’t even left his lips.

Yet what was the response of Momentum to the suspension of Corbyn? Was it to call for Starmer to go? Was there a call for defiance of David Evans declaration that discussion of the suspension was not ‘competent business’ for Labour parties? Andrew Scattergood, Momentum’s Co-Chair issued a statement that ‘This suspension risks politicising Labour's response to antisemitism.’ Where have they been? The ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign has been political from the start. It has been the means by which the Right has progressively undermined Corbyn.

Even Scatterbrain realised that this statement was hopelessly inadequate and Momentum therefore issued another statement, which was even worse.  It read:

‘The suspension of Jeremy Corbyn by the Labour Party leadership is a factional attack on the left that inevitably undermines the fight against anti-semitism and makes a mockery of Keir Starmer’s pledge to unite the Party. Tonight our Party is more divided than ever.’ 

There was a similar statement on Youtube and in an interview with LBC.

False Allegations of ‘Anti-Semitism’ Are Destroying the Labour Left

It is the inability of the Labour Left to come to grips with the Zionists’ anti-semitism hoax which sealed Corbyn’s fate and is now consigning the Labour Left to oblivion. It is a consequence of their acceptance of pro-imperialist politics in combination with identity politics.

Jews may be a minority in Britain but they are not an oppressed minority. Today Jews are a privileged white group which has voted Tory for the past 50 years (except for the initial Blair years). Only 14% voted for Ed Miliband, Labour’s first Jewish leader, in 2015. Jewish support for the Tories has nothing to do with Labour anti-Semitism and everything to do with their class position in society.

The Tory Party has historically been a racist party, including an anti-Semitic one. It wasn’t in the Labour Party that an MP was told ‘

''If I had my way people like you wouldn't be allowed in this place.''

'And I said: ''Sorry, when you say people like me, do you mean lower-class or Jewish?'' 

'To which he replied: ''Both.'''

It was the Tory Party and the MP was former Speaker, John Bercow. In the same interview Bercow, when asked about Corbyn and anti-Semitism said about Corbyn that ‘I've never detected so much as a whiff of anti-Semitism’.

When anti-Semitism was a form of state racism in Britain, when the Metropolitan Police supported the British Union of Fascists and attacked Jewish workers was the time when Jews voted overwhelmingly for the Left.  Not just the Labour Party. In 1945 Phil Piratin, was elected for Mile End as a Communist with an estimated 50% of his vote coming from Jews in London’s East End.

This was the meme that was part of the evidence that got Simon Hindmarsh expelled - and Corbyn just nodded this through

Jews today no longer live in the East End. They have migrated to London’s middle class suburbs of Golders Green, Edgware and Redbridge. Britain’s Jews have changed as society has changed. Jews aren’t victims of racist murders, police harassment or Stop and Search. There is no Jewish Windrush or ‘hostile environment’. Jews aren’t deported because they are Jews. Yet the identity politics of much of the Left prevents them from relating racism to class.

Racism isn’t the same as prejudice. It is a form of class oppression but only more so. It is an attack on the most exploited and vulnerable sections of society. Jews are no longer in that position. They are no longer society’s scapegoats.

Even the Sun can see what Scatterbrain and McDonnell can't

When Momentum’s Scatterbrain declared that Corbyn’s suspension ‘undermines the fight against anti-Semitism’ he is demonstrating that there are no limits to the stupidity of Momentum which, under Lansman, did more than Boris Johnson to lose the 2019 election.

Why does Scatterbrain imagine that the Daily Mail and the Tory press are so concerned about ‘anti-Semitism’ when no other form of racism disturb them in the slightest? It should be clear that the ‘anti-Semitism campaign had, but one target, and that was Jeremy Corbyn.

Since March 2016 when I was suspended I have repeatedly emphasised that Jackie Walker, Marc Wadsworth, Ken Livingstone, Tony Greenstein, Peter Willsman and finally Chris Williamson were not the real targets. We were just collateral damage. The real target was always Corbyn even if he didn’t realise it.

Corbyn was a victim of what has come to be known as the Stockholm Syndrome. The more the Zionists attacked him the more he understood them and apologised. I’ve lost count of the number of friends that Corbyn threw under the bus in the vain hope that he would satisfy his enemies. Len McLuskey put his finger on it when he said that

‘Corbyn Has Answered Concerns On Anti-Semitism, But Jewish Community Leaders Are Refusing To Take 'Yes' For An Answer’.

Unfortunately McLuskey refused to face up to the logic of his own statement. He was correct. Whatever Corbyn did not satisfy the Zionist leaders of the Board of Deputies. McLuskey admitted

‘I am at a loss to understand the motives of the leadership of the Jewish community – the Board of Deputies, the Jewish Leadership Council and the Jewish Labour Movement.’

The answer was, as Bob Dylan once wrote, ‘blowing in the wind’. The reason why the ‘Jewish leaders’ i.e. Zionists at the Board of Deputies refused to take yes for an answer was that there was nothing that Corbyn could have done to satisfy them. The Zionists weren’t genuinely interested in anti-Semitism. They had but one goal – the removal of Corbyn. That was why the JLM was refounded in 2015.

It was clear to me from the very start that what was happening was an orchestrated campaign which had been tested in Latin America, in particular Nicaragua and Venezuela, where ‘anti-Semitism’ allegations had been leveled by Zionist groups and US Administrations at radical regimes. ‘Anti-Semitism’ has been patented and used as a weapon of the Right for over 30 years.

Contrast this with Argentina under a neo-Nazi Junta between 1976-1983. They tortured to death up to 3,000 Jews as part of their slaughter of 30,000 Argentinians.  Yet the Zionists and Israel remained silent.  Genuine anti-Semitism has never bothered Israel or the Zionist movement. From the Czarist regime at the turn of the 20^th century to Hitler the Zionists have remained indifferent to genuine anti-Semitism.

We see this today. Who are Israel’s best friends in the world? The anti-Semitic Hungarian regime, the far-Right anti-Semitic Polish government and the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion in Ukraine to whom Israel supplies weapons. Not forgetting of course Trump who has repeatedly told American Jews that Israel is their ‘real home’. Which is what the Zionists also believe. When a White Supremacist gunman murdered 11 Jews in a Pittsburgh synagogue, Israeli Labor Party leader Avi Gabbay told them that they should emigrate and come to their ‘real home’.  Which is what the anti-Semites also say.

Clues for the Stupid Left – Scatterbrain and the Campaign Group – that the ‘Anti-Semitism’ Campaign was about Zionism/Israel not Jew hatred

On a personal level I have no sympathy for Corbyn. I consider him a disloyal, treacherous fool who had it within his power to become Prime Minister and he threw it all away by throwing his own supporters to the wolves. Corbyn knew, more than most, that the ritual accusation of ‘anti-Semitism’ is levelled at all Palestine solidarity supporters.

There are many reasons why the anti-Semitism campaign was a confected hoax, orchestrated by the Israeli, British and US governments. Here are some of those reasons:

1.           It is curious that despite being told repeatedly that Labour is overrun with anti-Semitism, which according to Sturmer, is a ‘stain’ on the Labour Party no one has actually produced any Jewish victims of this ‘anti-Semitism’. All they can point to are opinion polls that say British Jews were living in fear. If true this is testimony to the ability of Zionist leaders, coupled with the British press, to instil fear in some British Jews by false and lying propaganda. I’ll wager a bet that if researchers had asked these idiots why they feared the Labour Party they would either have no answer or they would reply ‘Israel’.

2.           Accusations of Anti-Semitism were seen as far more likely to divide the Left than say hostility to Corbyn because of his opposition to Austerity. That is a product of the infatuation of much of the left with identity politics.

According to the Guardian the BNP congratulated Margaret Hodge on her racist housing policies - this creature is now Chair of the JLM's Parliamentary Group

3.           If concern over ‘anti-Semitism’ was serious why was it that the Labour Right – Tom Watson, Margaret Hodge etc. – didn’t display any concern over other forms of racism? Hodge had even been sent a bunch of flowers by the BNP because they approved of her Whites Only housing policy for Barking.

Tom Watson demonised asylum seekers in the Hodge Hill by-election in 2004 with the slogan ‘Labour is on your side, the Lib Dems are on the side of failed asylum seekers.’ Watson also supported the racist Labour MP Phil Woolas in 2010 when the High Court removed him from Parliament, for a campaign which involved trying to ‘make the white folks angry’.

4.           The Board of Deputies has never opposed anti-Semitism in its history. In 1936 it told Jews not to oppose the British Union of Fascists and Oswald Moseley. In the 1970s it repeated that with the National Front.

5.           If the Zionist Board of Deputies was so concerned about anti-Semitism why did it have nothing to say about the Tory alliance with fascists and anti-Semites in the European Parliament from 2009-2020?

6.           Why did the Board of Deputies say nothing about the Tories alliance with anti-Semites in the European Council? Boris Johnson even sacked Lord Richard Balfe, a former Tory MEP, for objecting to sitting down with parties like the Swedish Democrats whose members parade with swastikas.

7.           Why is it that the only ‘anti-racist’ demonstration that the Board has ever held was in March 2018 against Labour just before the local elections?  How is it that racists like Ian Paisley Jnr and Norman Tebbit attended an ‘anti-racist’ demonstration. The Board has never called demonstrations against the National Front or British Union of Fascists.

When Israel began using snipers to murder unarmed demonstrators in Gaza, the Board of Deputies blamed the Palestinians for their death

8.           The Board of Deputies is hardwired by its constitution into supporting Israel right or wrong. When Israel began using snipers to shoot unarmed demonstrators in Gaza the Board of Deputies supported them.

9.           Why, if the concern over anti-Semitism was genuine, was the same concern not extended to other forms of racism?  Luke Akehurst, who has just been elected to Labour’s NEC openly supports Israel’s snipers. Are the lives of Palestinians worth less than Jewish lives? Over 70 Palestinian children have been shot dead by these snipers yet Formby and Corbyn, despite my complaining to them, did absolutely nothing. Even The Telegraph carried a UN Report that said that Israel deliberately targeted children. Naturally Starmer or his Blairite choice as General Secretary aren’t going to expel Akehurst but it was Corbyn and Formby who did nothing.

10.      Why if the concern about anti-Semitism is genuine are anti-Zionist and non-Zionist Jews being suspended and expelled? Its a funny type of campaign which targets anti-racist Jews whilst ignoring Zionists.

11.      If the concern was really about anti-Semitism why did the Zionists clamour for Labour to adopt, in September 2018, the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism. A definition which has been panned by former Jewish Court of Appeal Judge Stephen Sedley (Defining Anti-Semitism), Hugh Tomlinson QC, Geoffrey Robinson QC, Sir Geoffrey Bindman and even David Feldman of the Pears Institute.  The IHRA is a definition of ‘anti-Semitism’ which conflates anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism. Its a definition of ‘anti-Semitism’ that anti-Semites are quite happy with!

12.      If the campaign was really about anti-Semitism, then why has the newly elected NEC member, Gemma Bolton, been made the subject of an investigation for saying that Israel was an Apartheid State. [See Labour probes new NEC member following 'Israel apartheid state' posts]

13.      Why is it that all those who are now targeted for expulsion under the fast track procedures that Formby and Corbyn introduced questioned about their attitudes to Israel not Jews?

On any objective analysis the campaign against ‘anti-Semitism’ was always about Israel and Zionism. In December of 2016 Corbyn voluntarily proposed the adoption of the IHRA’s 38 word definition of anti-Semitism? The idiocy of Corbyn beggars belief.

If you call Israel what it is, a racist apartheid state that is now 'antisemitic' according to Herr Sturmer

Not only did Corbyn make a rod for his own back by introducing the concept of ‘denialism’ whereby if you argue that the Labour Party doesn’t have an ‘anti-Semitism’ problem then you are ‘part of the problem’. This is the same kind of ‘logic’ that led to women and men in the Salem Witchhunt being hanged. As Elizabeth Purdy wrote:

Those who publicly questioned the guilt of a defendant were likely to be accused of witchcraft themselves.

To compound his idiocy and cowardice Corbyn opposed Open Selection at the 2018 Labour Conference. Once again he appeased his enemies. They have repaid him handsomely by threatening to resign from the Labour Party if Corbyn resumes the Labour Whip.

And if this was not enough at the 2019 Conference Corbyn and Formby lied by arguing that the proposed ‘fast track’ expulsion procedures, whereby you have no hearing and the NCC is bypassed, would only be used for ‘egregious’ cases. This has been used to expel hundreds of socialists and anti-racists.

Corbyn was the author of his own misfortune but he wasn’t the only one. McDonnell, who had previously traded on his far-left credentials was even worse than Corbyn.  He intervened when even Corbyn and his office wanted to discipline Margaret Hodge. McDonnell played the role of a scab throughout telling us to listen to the Tory Board. He said that he was ‘tearing his hair out’ about ‘anti-Semitism’. McDonnell constantly was the appeaser-in-chief.

What can we do now?

I have reluctantly come to the conclusion that the fight against the Right in the Labour Party is becoming hopeless, not least because of the capitulation of most of the formerly Corbyn left. A campaign of Open Defiance of David Evans is needed, a refusal by local parties to accept Evan’s dictats. Suspensions and expulsions without a fair hearing should not be recognised.

Campaign Group MPs would, if they even knew what the word solidarity meant, resign the whip in sympathy with Corbyn. As it is these cowards and opportunists rush like gadarene swine to distance themselves from Corbyn. When a petition in support of Corbyn was circulated only 22 Campaign Group MPs signed it. Careerists like Russell Lloyd-Moyle refused to sign it because it was ‘political’ as if the suspension of Corbyn was a humanitarian venture.

The latest letter from 28 Campaign Group MPs has not been signed by Momentum front benchers like Sam Tarry. This is disgraceful.  So-called ‘left’ MPs and Tarry is a full-on Lansmanite, are prioritising their own personal careers over the fate of Corbyn and the left.

Corbyn himself should declare that he is sitting as an independent socialist MP and will stand again at the next election. Indeed it would be a good idea if he resigned and stood for re-election in a by-election. Starmer’s decision to suspend him would blow up in his face if, as is likely, Corbyn won the re-election. At that point Corbyn and those socialists left in the Campaign Group should announce that they are leaving Labour to set up a Socialist Party.

Victory can still be salvaged from defeat but unfortunately the Campaign Group and Corbyn himself is so lacking in any Marxist or class politics that they are blown hither and thither in the gusts of capitalist reaction. Of one thing we should be clear. The Labour Party has been captured by Zionist and imperialist supporters who are as dedicated supporters of neo-liberal capitalism as Boris Johnson.

Tony Greenstein