Apparently Calling for Freedom from the ‘River to the Sea’ is also ‘Anti-Semitic’!!

Freedom of Speech on Palestine and Zionism is Under Attack from the Zionists and ‘Education’ Minister Nadhim Zahawi

Later today there will be a Zoom meeting with Shahd Abusalama, who was suspended on 20 January from teaching at Sheffield Hallam University after complaints from unnamed Zionist groups. After a massive campaign in her support including from her own UCU branch (97% of whom voted in her favour) she was reinstated.

Also speaking will be Professor David Miller who was dismissed by Bristol University after having been targeted by the same Zionists. In addition Pete Jones, Shahd’s PhD supervisor and also myself will be speaking.

In the past week there has been a renewed frenzy by the racist Jewish Chronicle on the subject of ‘anti-Semitism’ at British universities. Especially after the successful picket of the Cambridge Union where Israel’s far-Right Ambassador Tzipi Hotoveli was speaking.

There is a chant at Palestine demonstrations: ‘From the River to the Sea Palestine Shall Be Free’. Apparently this is not only anti-Semitic but it is criminal too! It must be the first time in history that calling for freedom from Apartheid is a criminal offence.

At least it is according to the idiot who is the Education Minister. Nadhim Zahawi, who proclaimed in The Telegraph that those who chant this slogan should be referred to the Police. (Ministers vow action after Hamas chant at Cambridge).

As the media get het up about Starmer being accused of having colluded in letting Jimmy Saville go free, we are marching ever onwards to a police state.

Someone should remind Zahawi and the other Zionist liars that B’Tselem, Israel’s largest human rights organisation, produced a report in January 2021 titled ‘A regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: This is apartheid’. Presumably B’Tselem are ‘anti-Semitic’ too!

Hotoveli is the same person who invited the fascist Lehava Group into the Knesset Committee for the Advancement of Women to give advice on how to stop Jews and Arabs having relationships. Because just as in Nazi Germany, marriage between Jews and non-Jews is verboten (forbidden). That comparison by the way is also ‘anti-Semitic’ under the IHRA.Any form of relationship between Arabs and Jews in Israel is a social taboo.

On the web site of Lehava is the following piece of racist poison. Jewish women are not merely pure, unlike Arabs, they are daughters of kings! In a piece that could have been written by Julius Streicher, we have the following letter addressed to Jewish girls:

"To my dear Jewish sister, I wanted to ask of you, my sister, not to make my mistake, don't let some minority member bring you down and cause you to be impure. You're a king's daughter! The King of Kings! You have the privilege of being holy and pure, you're a Jewish woman! He wants you and the moment he gets his way you'll see what Hell is." (Letter on the Lehava website).

Hotoveli described the Nakba as "a very strong and very popular Arab lie." She clings to the Zionist fable that in 1948 the Palestinians left Israel of their own accord.  

Someone should tell her what her fellow right-winger, Bezalel Smotrich said recently to Israeli Palestine members of the Knesset that they "are here by mistake– because Ben-Gurion didn't finish the job and throw you out in 1948,"

The Jewish Chronicle has nothing to say about this racism because it’s target is non-Jews. In fact Smotrich, disgusting racist and ‘proud homophobe’ as he is, was at least being honest.

The Jewish Chronicle worked itself into a frenzy about the picket of Cambridge Union last week. Ministers vow action after Hamas chant at Cambridge their headline screamed.

Masked demonstrators at Cambridge University burned flares and screamed Hamas slogans during the Israeli ambassador’s visit on Tuesday – prompting outraged government ministers to demand action.

The masks were worn because of COVID, but to the JC anything to do with Palestinians is sinister. ‘From the river to the sea’ has become a Hamas slogan, despite being around long before Hamas was formed. This is nothing less than McCarthyist guilt-by-association.

Apparently it is genocidal to want the ‘Jewish’ state to be replaced by a democratic, secular state that doesn’t distinguish between Jew and non-Jew in terms of their civil and political rights.

The Jewish Chronicle’s editor Stephen Pollard is a founder member of the Islamaphobic Henry Jackson Society. Despite all the fulminating against anti-Semitism Pollard has no problem supporting genuine anti-Semites.  His one qualification is that they are also supporters of Zionism.

In 2009 Pollard went out of his way to defend a Polish fascist MEP Michal Kaminski who represent the town of Jedwabne in Poland. In July 1941 there was a pogrom in Jedwabne when Polish fascists herded up to 1500 Jews into a barn which they then set alight.

After a book by Jan Gross Neighbours revealed what had happened in Jedwabne there was a far-reaching debate in Poland. Most of the population of Jedwabne opposed a national apology but President Kwaśniewski disagreed and a memorial to those who had been murdered was erected in Jedwabne.

Kaminski was instrumental in urging residents to oppose the apology and to boycott the ceremonial event on 10 July 2001. The campaign against an apology had ‘strongly anti-Semitic overtones,’ according to Dr Rafal Pankowski, author of The Populist Radical Right in Poland. The Chief Rabbi of Poland, Michael Schudrich observed that

Mr Kaminski was a member of NOP, a group that is openly far-right and neo-Nazi. Anyone who would want to align himself with the Committee to Defend the Good Name of Jedwabne… needs to understand with what and by whom he is being represented.

Far from denouncing Kaminski and the support he received from Conservative members of the European Parliament (they were members of the same ECR Group, Pollard went out of his way to defend him!

Pollard wrote ‘Poland's Kaminski is not an antisemite: he's a friend to Jews’. When Jonathan Freedland, who is no slouch when it comes to making false accusations of anti-Semitism wrote Once no self-respecting politician would have gone near people such as Kaminski Pollard felt impelled to defend him:

“Jonathan Freedland attacked Michal Kaminski, the Polish MEP; Roberts Zile, the Latvian MEP; and me (Once no self-respecting politician would have gone near such people, 7 October). Freedland seems to have decided that Kaminski is an antisemite; but, far from this, Kaminski is – as his record in Brussels shows clearly – one of the greatest friends to the Jews in a town where antisemitism and a visceral loathing of Israel are rife.”

Pollard also wrote, in The Telegraph that Kaminski, "Far from being an anti-Semite is about as pro-Israeli an MEP as exists."

Kaminski, in an interview with Nasza Polska in March 2001, had argued that ‘Poles should not apologise for what they did until Jews apologised to them for their actions which included “murdering Poles”.’ The only problem was that over 90% of Polish Jews could not apologise, since they had been sent to Treblinka and Auschwitz.

There is a long history of anti-Semites combining hatred of Jews with love of Zionism. Adolf Eichmann in an interview after the war said that if he had been Jewish ‘I would have been a fanatical Zionist. I could not imagine anything else.’

Pollard has been particularly eager to defend genuine anti-Semites. One such was Roberts Zile, a Latvian MEP, who each March marched with the veterans of the Latvian Waffen SS.

Nonetheless Pollard was perturbed about ‘anti-Semitism’ at Sheffield Hallam University where we are told that

‘Jewish students branded the institution a “hostile environment” after it employed Palestinian activist Shahd Abusalama to teach a course on “post-colonial media culture”, despite her praise for terrorists and provocative statements about “Zionists”.

You would have to be brain dead not to understand that it is not anti-Semitism but anti-Zionism that people like Pollard object to. Genuine neo-Nazis like Tommy Robinson, who was given a hero’s welcome at last May’s pro-Israel demonstration (at which Hotoveli spoke) are kosher but Palestinian demonstrators are ‘anti-Semitic’.

Protesters at the Cambridge Union event holding signs saying 'Zionist scum not welcome here' (John Nguyen)

We are told that a

‘100-strong mob gathered outside Cambridge Student Union on Tuesday, chanting “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”.

Yet despite Nadhim Zahawi’s strictures, ‘Cambridge, officers looked on.’  One can only wonder why! Perhaps they don’t realise that we live in a police state yet!

Police at the Cambridge protest (John Nguyen)

Universities Minister Michelle Donelan joined in telling the JC that ‘Universities should have a zero tolerance attitude to anti-Jewish racism on campus.’  Support for the Palestinians and opposition to Zionism has been transformed into the new anti-Semitism. It recalls what George Orwell described as political speech.

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers.

I should also recall one particular incident that demonstrates just what a loathsome creature Pollard is. I wrote to him in 2010 about an American Jewish student, Emily Honochowicz, who went to demonstrate at the Qalandia checkpoint just outside Jerusalem. The Israeli military began attacking the demonstrators and Emily lost an eye. It was the same day as the Mavi Marmara. A tear gas canister was shot directly at her. I covered the story here. What could be more relevant than a Jewish student, whose only offence was to participate in a demonstration losing an eye (her family was later billed for her medical treatment!). But news like this is no news for a propaganda sheet like the Jewish Chronicle. Pollard wrote back

Dear Mr Greenstein,

Thank you for your email, which will make a fine addition to my 'delete' folder.

Stephen Pollard

From that day on I have had nothing but contempt for this vile lump of lard. 

Tony Greenstein