Tony Greenstein's Blog: The 100,000+ Fascist Demonstration on Sept. 13 & the Rise of Reform Must Be a Wake Up Call to the Left

Corbyn’s Leadership of Labour was a Disaster - We Cannot Afford a Repeat Performance With Karie Murphy & James Schneider As Advisors

The Membership Must Control Your Party & Tell Corbyn to Work With NOT Isolate Zarah

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Zarah Sultana – Why I am an Anti-Zionist

It is no secret that there were tensions between Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana. Zarah bounced Corbyn into forming the Your Party when she resigned from the Labour Party. Corbyn did nothing to hide his dismay that she had had the gall to call for an end to his dithering and delay about whether or not to form a new party.

It is therefore doubly disturbing that Corbyn, along with the four Independent MPs – none of whom claims to be a socialist – launched an attack on Zarah for sending out details of a new membership portal for Your Party.

The threat to invoke legal action including a complaint to the Information Commissioner are disgraceful. Has Corbyn not had enough of State interference, such as the EHRC report on ‘anti-Semitism’, in the British political system? The dispute is a political not legal one.

The panicked reaction of the all-male Independent MPs

Instead of supporting his co-leader, Corbyn attacked Sultana. Zarah is totally correct in calling out this misogyny and terming it a ‘sexist boys club’. Corbyn should be ashamed of aligning with the group of male, Muslim MPs who were elected on opposition to the genocide in Gaza but who are not otherwise progressive or on the left.

Corbyn has aligned himself with sexists against a young, politically principled woman MP. Socialists should have no difficulty in deciding where their loyalties lie. Corbyn seems determined to repeat the mistakes which led to his defeat as Labour leader.

Corbyn really needs to get a grip and put the overwhelming desire of people to see an alternative to Starmer and Farage at the top of his priorities. Instead of excluding Zarah he must talk to her. The Independent MPs are welcome to join the party but they must not have special privileges.

Politically they are a mixed bunch. Adnan Hussein was elected in Blackburn with a communalist vote defeating Craig Murray. Shokat Adams opposes the idea of a left or socialist party because we might put off people on the right.

One year ago Jackie Walker, Chris Williamson, Asa Winstanley, Anne Mitchell and myself wrote a letter to Corbyn asking him to reassess the role that false accusations of anti-Semitism played in his downfall as Leader of the Labour Party and his reaction to them.

During Corbyn’s leadership hundreds of good socialists were expelled from the Labour Party for ‘anti-Semitism’, in reality criticising the State of Israel. This was at the behest of the genocide supporting Jewish Labour Movement who claimed that it was all about ‘anti-Semitism’ when anyone with a few brain cells could see that their sole concern was support of the apartheid state of genocide.

We did not receive a reply to our letter. It was obvious to me as soon as I was suspended, in March 2016, that neither myself nor Jackie Walker or later on, Ken Livingstone, Marc Wadsworth and Chris Williamson were the real targets.

We were just collateral damage. The real target was Corbyn. Despite Corbyn and Jennie Formby presiding over an increasing number of expulsions the Zionists were not satisfied. Corbyn and Formby were proud of the number of ‘anti-Semites’, i.e. socialists that they had expelled. Not once did it occur to the dim-witted two that the more people who were expelled, the more it confirmed the false allegations of the Zionists that anti-Semitism was indeed a real problem inside the Labour Party.

Corbyn’s efforts to appease the JLM and the Labour Right had no effect whatsoever except to give them confidence. No sooner had Corbyn satisfied one demand than they went on to make another demand. As Len McCluskey wrote in Huffington Post Zionist leaders refused to accept ‘yes’ as an answer.

The JLM passed a motion of no confidence in Corbyn, days after had begged them not to disaffiliate from the Labour Party. A bogus threat designed to win sympathy for these poor ‘victims’ of anti-Semitism.

Corbyn’s strategy, if one can call it that, was to retreat, apologise and promise to do better. However the JLM had no intention of letting up because they had been refounded in 2015 with the explicit aim of removing Corbyn.

Accusations of ‘anti-Semitism’ were seen as the ideal way to undermine Corbyn. It was designed to confuse an identity politics left that confuses racism with prejudice and fails to understand that ‘hate speech’ can often be a code for support for the oppressor. In 2015 people were not wise to the weaponisation of anti-Semitism as a means of undermining the Palestinian struggle. They are now.

Corbyn has learnt nothing from his years of leadership. Of course it is understandable that the whole period was traumatic for him but that is no excuse for refusing to learn the lessons of that period. Instead he takes pride in his anti-intellectual approach.

Of course there were a tiny handful of anti-Semites in the Labour Party. No doubt there were tiny numbers of paedophiles too. Every party has them but no one said that Labour was ‘overrun’ with paedophiles. In fact the Tory Party was led by an anti-Semite, Boris Johnson, who in his novel 72 Virgins portrayed a Jewish character, Sammy Katz, with a “proud nose and curly hair”, and ‘painted him as a malevolent, stingy, snake-like Jewish businessman who exploits immigrant workers for profit.’ Johnson also described Jewish oligarchs who run the media and fiddle the figures to fix elections.

Not only did Corbyn throw allies like Livingstone, Wadsworth and Williamson under the bus but according to the Labour Leaked Report, his office, in the form of the obnoxious Laura Murray, tried to get the right-wing staff, who detested Corbyn, to speed things up!

Corbyn's Private Office Was Asking the Labour Right to Expel More Socialists

Whenever the Right, usually in the shape of Tom Watson barked, Corbyn jumped. His only query was as to how high. He supported Jon Lansman, the millionaire property developer who has now joined the JLM, in destroying Momentum’s democracy.

When Chris Williamson was reinstated by an NEC disciplinary panel Tom Watson organised a round robin petition of the Labour Right to protest. Instead of standing up to Watson and defending Williamson Corbyn got Jennie Formby to resuspend him.

The last and final opportunity was over the Open Selection of MPs. Here was the chance to get rid of the right-wing detritus in the Parliamentary Labour Party. Corbyn had always supported mandatory reselection as a young MP. But when Labour MPs pressurised him to oppose it he persuaded Len McCluskey of Unite to break the union’s mandate and also oppose it. By opposing Open Selection Corbyn signed his own death warrant.

Six years later amidst the Genocide in Gaza one would have thought Corbyn would at last have learnt something. That ‘anti-Semitism’ was a smear to be employed against opponents of Israel’s genocide and ethnic cleansing. That Zionism, far from being a form of Jewish identity is a vicious, racist ideology that treats Palestinians as subhumans.

Instead Corbyn merely witters on that anti-Semitism is a terrible thing without any understanding of the fact that the ‘anti-Semitism’ that the Zionists talk about is anti-Zionism. It should be obvious to Corbyn that ‘anti-Semitism’ is the only defence that Israel’s genocidaires have left. Anyone who criticises them is an ‘anti-Semite’. Yet Corbyn gives no indication that he has learnt anything at all from his period as Leader of the Labour Party.

No-one doubts that Corbyn is a veteran supporter of the Palestinians. That is why the Zionists and their imperialist allies on the Labour Right targeted him. However, even now, he has no understanding of the reasons for the Palestinians plight. He does not see that ethnic cleansing is an integral part of the Zionist dream of a purely Jewish ethno-nationalist state.

Corbyn was a vigorous opponent of the Apartheid regime in South Africa. He was even arrested because of it. Corbyn would have been the first to say that opposing the South African regime’s human rights abuses was not enough if one did not oppose Apartheid itself. Yet when it comes to Israel Corbyn opposes the attacks on Palestinians without understanding that this derives from Zionism, the ideology behind Israeli apartheid.

Corbyn still supports the 2 State Solution even though it has been the main smokescreen which has enabled the expansion of the settlements on the West Bank and the growth of the messianic neo-Nazi Jewish Right in Israel. Two states means a ‘Jewish’ settler colonial state continuing.

Zarah Sultana, by way of contrast has understood that Corbyn’s adoption of the IHRA misdefintion of anti-Semitism was a fatal mistake. Zarah’s declaration that she is a proud anti-Zionist should therefore have been welcomed. Instead of huffing and puffing Corbyn should have joined her.

Instead Corbyn has instead reverted back to his failed advisors in Collective, James Schneider and Karie Murphy, the architects of Corbyn’s disastrous failings first time around. It is as if Corbyn is congenitally incapable of learning from his past mistakes.

Corbyn has learnt nothing from what happened between 2015 and 2019. He doesn’t get how ‘anti-Semitism’ was weaponised by the Zionists and the British Establishment. The same Establishment that is now actively supporting and participating in the Genocide in Gaza.

James Schneider's Pamphlet That Bolstered the Fake Anti-Semitism Campaign

I hope that despite the breaking out of open warfare that all those involved, in particular Corbyn, will realise that Your Party (despite the opposition of Shockat Adams to terming it a left party) will make its politics clear to all and adopt a name, such as The Left Party.

We face a neo-fascist racist party leading the polls. Starmer’s Labour is not only incapable of fighting racism it doesn’t want to. Racism and imperialism are deeply embedded in it. I hope Corbyn recognises that his petty squabbles with Zarah must not get in the way of the main task which is to defeat Nigel Farage’s racist Reform Party.

For my part I have no hesitation in supporting Zarah Sultana and all anti-racists and anti-imperialists and opponents of misogyny and sexism will do the same. I have therefore joined as a member paying £5 per month despite the dire warnings of Corbyn and the other independent MPs.

If Corbyn is serious about forming a new left party that can challenge Farage then he has to put his ego to one side and stop being precious. He also has to accept that after the Holocaust in Gaza politics around Palestine have changed and that there is no merit in clinging to outdated concepts and ideas. Becoming an open anti-Zionist himself is long overdue if opposition to apartheid and racism is a principle.

Tony Greenstein

These are the Blogs I Wrote Between the Years 2016-2019 - They Tell the Story of How, When the Ruling Class Media was Attacking Him, Corbyn sought to Appease Rather than Fight – This time it Must Be Different.

1. David Baddiel’s allegation of ‘anti-Semitism’ against Corbyn for pronouncing ‘Epshtein’ demonstrates why you can’t appease Zionists 28-Nov-19

2. The Hypocrisy of Ephraim Mirvis’s Attacks on Corbyn’s ‘Anti-Semitism’ November 2019

3. Why Anyone Who is Jewish and on the Left Should Have no Problem Voting for Jeremy Corbyn November 2019

4. The Hypocritical War by the Jewish Chronicle and the Jewish Establishment on Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party 09-Nov-19

5. Rabbi Jonathan Romain, A Senior Reform Rabbi, Urges Jews To Vote ABC – Anyone But Corbyn November 2019

6. Corbyn can win BUT it is unlikely without a clear position on Brexit and a clear rejection of the anti-Semitism narrative 02-Nov-19

7. Drifting Without Direction – Are these the Dying Days of Corbyn’s Leadership? 02-Oct-19

8. The BBC’s War on Corbyn – Panorama would have made Pravda Proud 15-Jul-19

9. Corbyn’s Latest Anti-Semitism Proposals Prove that He is a Victim of the Stockholm Syndrome 23-Jul-19

10. If You Can’t Defend Chris Williamson, You Can’t Defend Jeremy Corbyn 07-Jul-19

11. Jeremy Corbyn Must Defend Chris Williamson Instead of Appeasing Tom Watson July 2019

12. We welcome the reinstatement of Chris Williamson –but why are Dennis Skinner, Laura Pidcock and the Campaign Group of MPs Saying Nothing? June 2019