Banned by Amnesty International for Harassment - How the BBC turned Zionist Thug Richard Millett from a Zero into a Hero

Without a trace of shame - The Times, which refused to criticise Hitler, calls for Corbyn's Resignation for 'anti-Semitism'!

A Summary of  Corbyn's Anti-semitic Attack on Zionist Thug Richard Millett

“-- Did you hear that Jeremy Corbyn, in a speech in 2013, said that British Jews weren't really British even if they were born there?

 -- Really? He said that?

-- Well, he intimated that British Jews couldn't grasp British irony and didn't understand history."

-- Really? He was referring to Jews?

-- Well, he didn't SAY Jews, but he said that about UK Zionists, which is a leftwing code term for British Jews.

-- Hang on, he made a reference to UK Zionists as a group?

-- Well, not exactly. Actually, he was referring to some pro-Israel members of the audience who came up and started arguing with the Palestinian ambassador who had presented the history of Palestine and used irony, which Corbyn thought these guys didn't get. He specifically referred to "the Zionists in the audience."

-- So, you mean to say he did not refer to British Zionists as a whole, but he was saying that the Palestinian ambassador, who is Armenian Palestinian, had a greater grasp of British irony, than these Brits who had lived their all their lives?

-- Yes, that's about it.

-- So, in effect, he accused pro-Israeli members of the audience, whom he referred to as "Zionists", which they are, and who argued with the Palestinian ambassador, with being humorless and misunderstanding history, compared with the Palestinian ambassador.

-- 

 Yep.

-- Well, that makes the man clearly an anti-Semite, doesn't it?”

Last week Richard Millet became the hero of the BBC and the media ratpack in their war against Jeremy Corbyn.  Millett appeared on the BBC’s 6 O’Clock News last Friday as a victim of ‘anti-Semitism’. Millett was even the cause of a splutteringly dishonest Leader in The Times last Saturday ‘Labour’s Moral Vacuum’.

What was the cause of this rise to media prominence? At a Palestine meeting in Parliament in 2013, which he tried to disrupt, Millett was told by Jeremy Corbyn that he should study some history and for good measure get a grip on English irony. For these mild comments, The Times attacked Corbyn as ‘straightforwardly antisemitic’. '

Satire is almost redundant when The Times begins to give Jeremy Corbyn lectures on antisemitism 

According to The Times Corbyn ‘used the word “Zionists” as a synonym for “Jews” and as a term of casual abuse.’ which is a good example of how the sins of the British press are visited on their victims. It is The Times and the rest of the yellow press which can’t distinguish between ‘Jew’ and ‘Zionist’. The Jewish Chronicle’s far-Right editor, Stephen Pollard also asserted that ‘the Labour leader 'used the word "Zionist" obviously to mean "Jews". There is nothing obvious about this at all of course.  Corbyn was careful to distinguish between Jews and Zionists, unlike the Jewish Chronicle.

Corbyn's innocent remarks made five years ago make Luciana Berger feel unwelcome in the Labour Party - what makes her feel unwelcome is a socialist leader!

Richard Millett is one of the best known Zionist thugs and bully boys amongst a group of Zionists whose sole purpose is to disrupt Palestinian and anti-Zionist meetings in London. In December 2017 I did a feature on 31 of these Zionist fascists, misfits and assorted thugs.

Richard Millett was number 13 on the list and the piece on him was accompanied by a picture of him with Paul Besser, former Intelligence Officer for the neo-Nazi Britain First group. So much for his opposition to anti-Semitism! Absurdly the Times article quotes Millett as claiming that he was frightened of recriminations if Corbyn was toppled as a result of the row. “I don’t know what will happen,” he said. “I am scared on a physical level and the Jewish community is upset about what they see is happening. I think we are all scared.”  Likewise the Mail claimed that Millett and the Jewish community was 'scared on a physical level' because of the false accusations of Labour anti-Semitism.

Millett and  fellow Zionist thugs and fascists demonstrated with Tommy Robinson’s Football Lads Alliance at the Al Quds demonstration last June yet they have the chutzpah to claim they are physically frightened of their opponents! It is a sign of the degeneration of the British press and the BBC that they take these claims at face value without even doing a cursory investigation into their background.

On Millett’s blog there is a piece about him being evicted from the Commons in April last year. Both Millett and the Daily Mail’s reporter Jake Wallis-Simons lied, stating that Millett was evicted by "armed police". This is untrue.  According to a witness I have spoken to the following was actually what happened:

The incident happened just a few weeks after a policeman was murdered at the House of Commons. There was an increased armed police presence.Mark Hendricks MP called the police (he did not ask for "armed police" as Millet implies. Because of the increase security immediately after the murder an armed police detail was closest and first to arrive. However, and this is what is important, the armed police explained that they would not remove the disrupters and called for regular police to deal with the situation. I was there and clearly heard all this as Millet also did.

In the original Mail on-line story by Jake Wallis Simons last Thursday Corbyn is quoted as saying that

'[British Zionists] clearly have two problems. One is they don't want to study history, and secondly, having lived in this country for a very long time, probably all their lives, they don't understand English irony either.'

This apparently is anti-Semitic according to the paper which supported Hitler before the war!  Clearly Zionists don’t want to study so much as rewrite history and their appreciation of any form of irony is close to zero.

Blumenthall and solicitor Mark Lewis were recently on the BBC's Victoria Derbyshire programme explaining how 'antisemitism' was forcing them to emigrate to Israel. Even a cursory investigation would show that she is a leading Zionist,  a member of Herut .  The whole basis of Zionism is that Jews don't belong in this country and should emigrate to Israel.

Although the Mail does not mention Millett the video link is from Millets blog where he is seen and heard shouting throughout. The DM journalist, Jake Wallis Simons, is a virulent Zionist who is close to Mandy Blumenthal, organiser for the far-Right semi-fascist Herut group who featured at Number 28 on my list of Zionist fascists. Wallis-Simons is the go-to guy for Blumenthal whenever she or the misnamed Campaign Against Anti-Semitism want publicity about emigrating to Israel, anti-Semitism etc.

Millett harassing visitors to Amnesty events

What the BBC, the Mail and The Times didn’t tell their readers was that Millett has been banned, along with Jonathan Hoffman, for harassing people at Amnesty International events as the 3 videos I am putting up show. Millett is clearly no shy and fearful Jew in these videos, rather a loud mouthed bully.

Although Millett claims his concern is with anti-Semitism he has demonstrated, like most Zionists, that he has no objection whatsoever to anti-Semites who are pro-Israel and pro-Zionist. Millett is like Jewish Chronicle Editor Stephen Pollard, who once wrote that Polish anti-semite Michal Kaminski MEP was 'one of the greatest friends to the Jews ' 

Eight years ago there was a campaign in London against a shop Ahava in Covent Garden.  It sold stolen products from the West Bank.  We picketed it every other week and eventually they were evicted from the premises because fellow shop owners were fed up with the constant pickets.

here is Millett excusing overtly anti-semitic comments about Jews being Christ Killers yet he objects to references to English irony - you couldn't make it up except that that is exactly what the BBC and Britain's venomous press does every day

Israeli shop assistant accuses demonstrators of Killing Jesus to Millett's approval

Millett was active, with Jonathan Hoffman in supporting the shop. In the course of a demonstration one day, a staff member at the shop accused Jewish protestors against the shop of being ‘Christ killers’ and when asked to explain this remark she said that it was 'because you are Jewish’. What was the reaction of Richard Millett to this vile anti-Semitic trope, an accusation that has led to thousands of Jewish dead in Easter pogroms? An accusation which was at the heart of Christian anti-Semitism for centuries?

Did Millett demand that the woman be sacked for antisemitism from what is after all an Israeli shop?  We are always told that Israel and Jews are one and the same! Not a bit of it.  In a blog Ahava’s female staff suffer continued bullying Millett’s concern was about the ‘bullying’ of the anti-Semitic shop assistant. In fact this like much else that Millett says was a lie.  The staff were never targeted. It was the shop which was the object of the demonstrations not the staff who worked there.  Millett told his readers that:

As you can see at the beginning of the video the woman is angry that the activists are now specifically targeting her!

Her apparent remark about Jews killing Jesus (although, no where in the footage do we actually hear her say that) is a remark to a male, Jewish activist who spends large proportions of his sad life hanging around outside the Ahava shop.

This is disingenuous as we can clearly hear in the video a Jewish demonstrator asking why she had called them 'Christ killers'. She didn’t deny it.  Her response was ‘Because you are Jewish’ thereby accepting that this was what she said. There was therefore nothing ‘apparent’ about the remark.  Millett clearly has no problem with anti-semitism when it is directed at the 'wrong sort of Jew'.

I don’t blame her for an off-the-cuff remark when confronted by a group of bullies.

It was an 'off the cuff remark' as was Jeremy Corbyn's suggestion that he brush up on his history and English irony.  However Corbyn is the worst anti-Semite since Adolf himself according to Millett and the Zionist chorus in the press. 

Thus we see that the only concern of Millett is to protect an Israeli shop, trading in the stolen minerals of Palestine, from being closed down.  Anti-Semitism is only a useful propaganda tool for this racist thug.

In my post of this incident Zionists Defend Ahava Staff Who Accuses Jews of Being ‘Christ Killers’ I noted that the accusation of being a Christ Killer was at the heart of some of the most bloody pogroms and violence against Jews.  Norman Cohn in Pursuit of the Millenium wrote that:

‘For generations the laity had been accustomed to hear the Jews bitterly condemned from the pulpit - as perverse, stubborn and ungrateful, as bearers also of a monstrous hereditary guilt for the murder of Christ.’ p.77 (my emphasis) 

Abe Foxman as ardent a Zionist as anyone was quite clear about the implications of accusing Jews of being Christ Killers. In his talk, ‘Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ:" Could It Trigger Anti-Semitism?’ Foxman, speaking as the National Director of the ADL on February 6, 2004 at Palm Beach, Florida stated that:

‘For almost 2,000 years in Western civilization, four words legitimized, rationalized, and fueled anti-Semitism: "The Jews killed Christ….

For hundreds of years those four words - acted out, spoken out, sermonized out - inspired and legitimized pogroms, inquisitions and expulsions.

Hitler, in 1934, visited the Oberammergau Passion Play, and when he left, he proclaimed (and I paraphrase): "The whole world needs to see this Passion Play, for then they will understand why I despise the Jewish people."

Many during the Holocaust who killed Jews from Monday to Friday went to church on Sunday and there was no disconnect for them, because, after all, all they were doing was killing "Christ killers."

So when the press report that Millett was upset by Corbyn's 'antisemitism' we should take this with a very large dose of salt.

The concern of the Daily Mail and The Times about anti-Semitism contrasts with their indifference to racist violence against Muslims, Gypsies and other minorities in this country.  The same Daily Mail which employed Katie Hopkins who described migrants as “cockroaches” is apparently concerned with ‘anti-Semitism.  

The Mail's concern didn’t extend to anti-Semitic attacks on Ed Miliband, Labour’s Jewish leader, because of his Marxist father, Ralph Miliband or his inability to eat a bacon sandwich, stands in contrast to their record in the Hitler era.  The Daily Mail’s support for the British Union of Fascists, Hitler and its opposition to the immigration of Jews from Nazi Germany is well known.  See for example When the Daily 'Hate' Mail Supported Hitler

What is less well known is that The Times, throughout the period from 1933-39 was not only an advocate of appeasement of the Hitler regime but that its editor Geoffrey Dawson adamantly refused to cover the growing persecution of Jews in Germany. Dawson was a member of the pro-Hitler Anglo-German Fellowship which was a Tory pressure group formed by influential personalities in British society, among them the banker and industrialist Ernest Tennant, a ‘personal friend of Joachim von Ribbentrop, then ambassador of the Third Reich in the United Kingdom.’ In 1946 Ribbentrop was hanged at Nuremburg having been found guilty of war crimes.  Amongst other things The Times supported Himmler’s annexation of the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia as part of the appeasement of Hitler.

Will Wainewright, in his book Reporting on Hitler: Rothay Reynolds and the British Press in Nazi Germany described how Times  reporter Norman Ebbutt struggled with his editor, Geoffrey Dawson, ‘who agreed with his chums in clubland that Britain had to be at peace with Hitler’. Martin Gilbert, the official biographer of Churchill wrote in Prophet of Truth: Winston S. Churchill, 1922–1939 (London: Minerva, 1990), p. 850  how Dawson explained to Lord Lothian on 23 May 1937:

"I should like to get going with the Germans. I simply cannot understand why they should apparently be so much annoyed with The Times at this moment. I spend my nights in taking out anything which I think will hurt their susceptibilities and in dropping little things which are intended to soothe them

So when we hear The Times or the Mail today telling us how aghast they are the ‘anti-Semitism’ of Jeremy Corbyn, when we know that their attitude to the Roma, Muslims and refugees has not changed one iota, it is fair to draw the conclusion that what they are concerned with is not racism against Jews but opposition to Zionism and the State of Israel. 

See also Skwawkbox's article Two ‘zionists’ criticised by Corbyn called ‘rude yobs’ – by RIGHT-wing, pro-Israel Streeting on the time when right-wing MP Wes Streeting called Millett and Hoffman 'rude yobs' for trying to disrupt a meeting he was chairing on Palestinian human rights.

See below the full review of Will Wainewright’s book on Hitler and the British press.

Reporting on Hitler: Rothay Reynolds and the British Press in Nazi Germany by Will Wainewright

Reviewed by Roger Boyes, February 18 2017 The Times

Norman Ebbutt, The Times’s well-respected correspondentJAY WILLIAMS

Put foreign correspondents together, beer in hand, and chatter will soon shift from the news of the day towards the casual brutality of editors; their failure to spot the significance of a story, their talent for inserting precisely the wrong word in a crafted text. Editors, eh, don’t you just love them.

In the 1930s a remarkable bunch of aggrieved reporters met at a Berlin Stammtisch — a pub table reserved for regulars. The men from the Daily Express and Daily Mail were saddled with intrusive proprietors who thought Adolf Hitler was exactly what Germany needed. The reporter from The Times

struggled with an editor, the Yorkshireman Geoffrey Dawson, who agreed with his chums in clubland that Britain had to be at peace with Hitler. The Manchester Guardian correspondent had no problems persuading his boss to publish accounts of Nazi persecution, but try as he might could not talk him into an editorial policy in favour of arming up for a war against the Third Reich.

The reporters saw what was going on around them in Germany — the Jews humiliated and beaten on the street, the persecuted churchmen and communists, the opening of the first concentration camps, the histrionic rallies — and choked back their frustration.

It did not help that Gestapo snitches sat next to their Stammtisch. Or when the Nazi foreign ministry sent a smooth official to their table to give a positive spin on new restrictions on Jews. “There are, I think, times when a correspondent should be a diplomat,” the official told them.

Soon enough there wasn’t any need for these ghoulish visits. The Nazis could count on the likes of Lord Rothermere. By the time Hitler came to power, the Daily Mail proprietor had been running the paper for more than a decade. One new sub-editor taken on in the late 1920s noted: “The day-to-day production of the paper was carried on under the system of bullying and insult.”

The Daily Mail owner Lord Rothermere's paen of praise to Hitler and the Nazis

Rothermere travelled to Germany in July 1933 and was entranced, writing an editorial headlined “Youth Triumphant”. There was an unfettered national spirit, soon Germany would rival Mussolini’s Italy as the best-governed country in Europe. He struck up what he considered a friendship with Hitler.

Imagine then how the Mail’s Berlin correspondent, Rothay Reynolds, must have squirmed. Will Wainewright tells his story in this fascinating book, a short study in conscience denied. Reynolds is a distant relative and Wainewright stumbled on a letter written by him after the outbreak of the Second World War, by which time he was both safely out of Nazi Germany and the Mail.

The story that emerges after a bit of digging is of a devout man, an Anglo-Catholic who took Holy Orders, was sent as a young assistant chaplain to the British community in St Petersburg, and after a while chose to become a Roman Catholic. That meant leaving his job and since he was 33, good at languages and Russia in 1905 was in ferment, he decided to become a stringer for the Daily News. While there he befriended Hector Hugh Munro, the writer Saki.

By the time he landed the job of Daily Mail reporter in Germany in the 1920s, Reynolds had done some war work, writing propaganda fake news for MI7, the disinformation wing of the Secret Service. The full scope of Wainewright’s problem as a biographer becomes clear by this stage: Reynolds arrived in Germany as a middle-aged man having, it appears, chosen to be a foreign correspondent because it suited his solitary nature. We find out almost nothing about him. There is a girl called Jane whose hand he touches, but nothing comes of it. He may or may not have had dealings with the Secret Service in Berlin. Faced with some of the most dramatic unfurling events in 20th-century history, he fails to find a journalistic voice.

And while, in hindsight, he can blame his lame texts on the bias of Rothermere, it is also clear that he was a pretty duff reporter. When Hitler launched a bloody purge of his brown-shirted colleagues in 1934, the Night of the Long Knives, he swallowed the official version. “We were told for instance, that General von Schleicher, revolver in hand, had tried to resist arrest and had therefore been shot down,” Reynolds said years later after leaving the Mail. “In fact, the former chancellor and his wife had been murdered in cold blood.” His piece in the Mail did not so much pull its punches as give an ovation: “Swiftly and with inexorable severity Hitler has delivered Germany from men who had become a danger to the unity of the German people and to order in the state.”

Rothermere’s Führer-love bought access to Hitler, but he did neither his newspaper nor his country any good. Had Reynolds been more gifted he might have been able to find himself a niche between an overbearing proprietor and an evil regime. Instead, he made some token acts of solidarity, publicly reciting the rosary in the street, for example, but he did not distinguish himself.

Almost everyone seems to stand out more strongly than Reynolds By contrast Sefton Delmer, of the appeasement-supporting Daily Express, demonstrated some rat-like cunning. Delmer arrives at the Reichstag after it has been set ablaze before Reynolds, but after a reporter for The Times, Douglas Reed, who has just been kicked out of the building by Hermann Goering. Delmer sees Hitler’s Mercedes approach and enters parliament in the Führer’s slipstream, landing a suspiciously long and coherent quote from him about setting the whole continent ablaze.

Around the Stammtisch, almost everyone seems to stand out more strongly than Reynolds. Eric Gedye of the Daily Telegraph, visiting from Vienna, had few illusions about the Nazis. After his expulsion from Austria he started work on a fiercely anti-appeasement book, promising the unvarnished truth. The Telegraph, upset that he was going to criticise the paper (though it rar ely interfered with his copy), sacked him. The paper said he had left by mutual consent. “That is correct,” said Gedye. “It is equally correct that Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia by ‘mutual arrangement’.”

Reynolds’s real admiration was for The Times’s correspondent Norman Ebbutt. The wrestling between correspondents, Dawson and some of the leader writers about appeasement has already been well chronicled. Yet the author has dug deep in The Times’s archives and come up with some blistering reports.

Here’s Ebbutt on the 1936 “election” held just after Hitler had sent his troops into the Rhineland, in breach of the Versailles Treaty. The work of the Hitler regime, he said, had “been done at the expense of freedom, truth and justice as these are conceived in the western world, and some who feel bound to support the Führer tomorrow on the patriotic issue will do so in fear and trembling that they are delivering Germany over to a new wave of National Socialist fanaticism”.

That’s telling it as it was, even if that day’s leader struck a rather more emollient note. Ebbutt was thrown out in the summer of 1937 (“By far the best correspondent here left this evening,” wrote the American reporter William Shirer) and he was seen off at the station by 50 correspondents who knew that their days were also numbered. Wainewright doesn’t know if Reynolds was there. The Nazis had warned the reporters not to give Ebbutt a send-off so perhaps Reynolds decided that discretion was the better part of valour. That seems to have been his watchword.

As the Guardian's 'anti-Semitism' campaign against Corbyn continues its time to BOYCOTT the Guardian

Howard Jacobson’s blindness to Zionist racism in the cause of fake anti-Semitism

Howard Jacobson - blind to the Palestinians

Zionist lobby group boasts of its success in neutering Guardian coverage of Zionism & Palestine

There was a time when the Guardian had the best Middle East correspondent of any paper, David Hirst, who wrote an excellent book, The Gun and the Olive Branch.  Now they have Jonathan Freedland, a thriller writer, who cannot see beyond his Jewish identity to understand that Zionism is a murderous,  racist settler colonial movement.

The Guardian carries Jacobson's junk article which speaks about support for Israel and omits to mention the Palestinians

Where once the Guardian and its Comment is Free column was an arena of lively debate, today anti-Zionists are effectively barred.   A decade ago I contribute a number of articles such as an article on the Royal Family's reception for the Jewish National Fund [Israel's Royal Welcome]  Such is the state of affairs at the Guardian, that the Zionists openly boast about how they have cleansed CIF of anything remotely opposed to Zionism and the Israeli state.

French fascist leader Marine Le Pen, combines anti-Semitism with a devotion to Israel

UK Media Watch, formerly CIF Watch, which is devoted to suppressing favourable coverage of the Palestinians or unfavourable coverage of Israel and Zionism in the media, boasts of its success with the Guardian.

'partly due to our efforts, the Guardian’s malign obsession with Israel had somewhat abated, and their legitimization of antisemitic tropes (above and below the line) had at least diminished.

The latter improvement in editorial decisions... occurred both as the result of our relentless naming and shaming of Guardian contributors who expressed such Judeophobic views, and at least two important decisions by the paper’s readers’ editor which had the effect of institutionally delegitimizing these narratives.  The readers’ editor we’re referring to is Chris Elliott ."

Geert Wilders - leader of the Dutch Freedom Party, virulently anti-Islamic and sees Israel as a bastion of the West

The one newspaper which could be relied on for objective coverage of Palestine and Zionism has now gone over to the dark side.  It is time that socialists and supporters of the Palestinians boycotted the Guardian.  In many ways its coverage is worse than paper such as The Daily Mail precisely because people expect The Guardian to be more balanced and fairer.

In its latest propaganda article, The Guardian has commissioned an article, Let’s be clear – antisemitism is a hate apart, from Howard Jacobson.  In his attempt to show that anti-Zionism is really a modern form of an ancient plaint, anti-Semitism, Jacobson’s literary talents seem to desert him.  His arguments are wooden and stilted as his hackneyed phrases betray a poverty of imagination. 

Heinz Christian Strache - leads the Austrian Freedom Party, which was formed to rehabilitate Austrian Nazis - a welcome guest of Likud to Israel recently

How can one write about Israel without once mentioning the Palestinians?  Israel is a state that receives the largest amount of aid of any country, despite its small population, from the United States.  It is a state armed to the teeth, with nuclear weaponry, whose military has ruled over 4.5 million people for 50 years.  Palestinians live in the same territory as 600,000 settlers yet unlike them they are subject to a different legal system of Military Law.  By any definition this is Apartheid.  At the hundreds of checkpoints that cover the West Bank there are separate entrances for Jewish settlers and Palestinians,  yet Jacobson has convinced himself that our reasons for opposing Israeli Apartheid is because of anti-Semitism!

Jacobson may be a distinguished novelist but there is nothing original in what he writes about anti-Semitism and Zionism.  Jacobson offers us no special insights that cannot be gained from Israeli hasbara (propaganda).  For Jacobson criticism of the Israeli state can be explained by the fact that ‘in the matter of the existence of the State of Israel... all the ancient superstitions about Jews find a point of confluence.’  Apparently criticism of Israel and Zionism has nothing to do with land discrimination and theft, the underfunding of the Arab education sector, the Judaisation of areas of Israel where there are not enough Jews, extra-judicial executions, torture of children or house demolitions.  It’s all because we are anti-Semitic!

Jacobson though is but the latest Guardian sock puppet.  In the past year it has run a series of articles about ‘anti-Semitism’ with the aim of portraying Labour under Jeremy Corbyn as a party in the grip of a tsunami of anti-Semitism.  Articles it has printed include The Left’s Jewish Problem: Jeremy Corbyn, Israel and Anti‑Semitism and Why I’m becoming a Jew and why you should, too which is a rewrite of an earlier article in the Jewish Chronicle  Hatred is turning me into a Jew by Nick Cohen, Why Jews in Labour place little trust in Jeremy Corbyn by Joshua Simons,  Labour and the left have an antisemitism problem and My plea to the left: treat Jews the same way you’d treat any other minority by Jonathan Freedland Antisemitism is a poison – the left must take leadership against it by Owen Jones, which he rewrites annually.  The Guardian has refused to print articles rejecting the idea in the above articles that anti-Zionism is a modern form of anti-Semitism.

Howard Jacobson made his name as a comic novelist.  It is a genre that he should have stuck to because there is little that is amusing or revealing in his discursions into anti-Semitism.  Jacobson pronounces that the Chakrabarti Report into racism and anti-Semitism in the Labour Party was ‘a soft inquiry’ and ‘was stillborn’.  Instead of explaining what it is he disagreed with in the Report he insinuates that the elevation of Shami Chakrabarti to the House of Lords was the payment of a bribe .  The Chakrabarti Report was a serious attempt to investigate the spurious anti-Semitism allegations of the Labour Right, the Tory press, and the Zionist movement.  Chakrabarti found that the Labour Party was not overrun by anti-Semitism. 

Indeed it is one of the curious aspects of the anti-Semitism allegations that no hard evidence has ever been produced.  The one serious attempt to investigate these allegations by Asa Winstanley How Israel lobby manufactured UK Labour Party’s anti-Semitism crisis showed that the evidence for the allegations was spurious, fabricated and in the specific case of Oxford University Labour Club, set in motion by a former intern, Alex Chalmers, for BICOM, Britain’s main Israeli propaganda organisation.

Howard Jacobson’s theme is anything but novel.  It is that anti-Semitism is ‘unlike other racisms’.  It ‘exists outside time and place and doesn’t even require the presence of Jews.’  In response to the Russian pogroms of 1881, Leo Pinsker, the founder of the Lovers of Zion, likewise wrote that ‘Judaephobia is then a mental disease, and as a mental disease it is hereditary, and having been inherited for 2,000 years, it is incurable. [Pinsker, Autoemancipation,  Berlin 1882 p.5.]

The logical conclusion is that if anti-Semitism cannot be explained then it cannot be fought.  It doesn’t even require Jews.  It exists in the realm of the metaphysical like all those other racial myths.  After all ‘when Marlowe and Shakespeare responded to an appetite for anti-Jewish feeling in Elizabethan England, there had been no Jews in the country for 300 years.’  Jacobson is wrong, there were Jews in England but the memory of the Jews and the roles they performed in society had not disappeared.  It is all too easy to characterise Marlowe and Shakespeare’s productions as anti-Semitic when they simply reflected not only popular perceptions but the actual role that Jews played in medieval society.

As Abram Leon, the Trotskyist leader who died in Auschwitz observed:

‘Zionism transposes modern anti-Semitism to all of history and saves itself the trouble of studying the various forms of anti-Semitism and their evolution.’..[Abram Leon, The Jewish Question - A Marxist Interpretation, p. 245. Pathfinder, New York, 1970]

Anti-Semitism was seen by Zionism as a permanent feature of Jewish relations with non-Jews, an immutable fact beyond history and time itself.  In June 1895, barely six months after the framing of the French Jewish Captain Alfred Dreyfuss for treason, Theodor Herzl, the founder of Political Zionism wrote in his Diaries (p.6) that ‘In Paris ...I achieved a freer attitude towards anti-Semitism, which I now began to understand historically and to pardon. Above all I recognise the emptiness and futility of trying to ‘combat’ anti-Semitism.   Since anti-Semitism was a natural phenomenon, it could not be fought.  You might as well fight the tides.

Jacobson’s claim that anti-Semitism is a unique form of racism is a truism.  All forms of racism have unique characteristics but anti-Semitism is not a unique form of racism.  There has always been racism against groups who were seen as better off and prosperous, be it the Huguenots, the Biafrans, the East African Asians or Koreans in the United States.  The Chinese of South-East Asia were known as the ‘Jews of the East’.  Racism against the Roma is just as persistent and deadly as anti-Semitism if not more so. 

Jacobson tells us apropos of anti-Zionism that ‘The presence of a Jew in any movement no more guarantees it to be innocent of antisemitism than guilty.’  The same can be said, with somewhat more justification of Zionism.  Anti-Zionism was a product of Jews not non-Jews.  It is noticeable that far-Right and fascist groups are some of the most ardent supporters of Zionism.  As Ruth Smeed, a spokeswoman for the Board of Deputies of British Jews admitted ‘‘The BNP website is now one of the most Zionist on the web – it goes further than any of the mainstream parties in its support of Israel.  Members of the English Defence League combine the Hitler salute with flying the Israeli flag at its demonstrations.[2] 

Far-Right European parties such as Geert Wilder’s Dutch Freedom Party, Heinz-Christian Strache’s Austrian Freedom Party and Marine Le Pen’s Front Nationale all combine virulent Islamaphobia and anti-Semitism with support for Zionism, without a murmur of concern from Jacobson and the witch finder generals of Zionism.   Was it not Pastor John Hagee, President of Christians United for Israel who informed us that Hitler was a hunter sent by God to drive the Jews to Israel?  Although John McCain was forced to disavow Hagee when he ran against Barak Obama in the 2008 Presidential election this did not stop Abe Foxman, of the Anti-Defamation League praising Hagee. ‘We are grateful’ Foxman said, ‘that you have devoted your life to combating anti-Semitism and supporting the State of Israel,” 

Nor was Foxman alone.  One of the leaders of the ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign is the neo-con editor of the Jewish Chronicle, Stephen Pollard.  Pollard sees no contradiction between attacking Corbyn for ‘anti-Semitism’ and defending Michal Kaminski, former MEP for Poland’s far-Right Law and Justice Party.  Kaminski opposed, in 2001, a national Polish apology for the burning alive of up to 900 Jews by fellow Poles in the village of Jedwabne in 1941.  Kaminski suggested it was the Jews who owed the Poles an apology.  Pollard however insisted that Kaminski was ‘one of the greatest friends to the Jews’ because ‘Far from being an antisemite, Mr Kaminski is about as pro-Israel an MEP as exists.’

Far from anti-Zionism being a disguise for anti-Semitism it is Zionism which has most in common with anti-Semites. From Edouard Drumont, the leader of the anti-Dreyfussards to Alfred Rosenburg to the BNP’s Nick Griffin, anti-Semites saw no contradiction in supporting Zionism.

Jacobson and the Guardian have great difficulty in accepting that criticism of the State of Israel is not on account of some ancient hatred of Jews but because it is a state that has racism woven into its DNA.  A ‘Jewish’ state in the context of settler colonialism means a Jewish supremacist state.  Whereas Britain being a Christian state is a constitutional adornment, in Israel Jews have real privileges over non-Jews.  Israel is a state where the ‘demographic question’ is the engine of Israeli policy towards the Palestinians. [see When will Israel stop seeing Palestinians as a 'demographic threat?']

Jacobson is not above deploying his literary skills in order to misrepresent his adversaries.  He says that according to anti-Zionists ‘Jews have only one motive in labelling anti-Zionism antisemitic and that is to stifle legitimate criticism of Israel. This assertion defames Jews’.  Well it would if it were true but it ignores that foremost amongst these defamers are Jews themselves!  It is the Zionist movement, Jewish and non-Jewish, who use ‘anti-Semitism’ as a weapon to deflect criticism of Israel.  Just as anti-Semites use the term ‘Zionist’ and ‘Jew’ interchangeably so too do Zionists.

Jacobson says that ‘Zionism originated as a liberation movement’.  Perhaps he could enlighten us as to when Zionists first described themselves so?  When Herzl founded the Zionist movement he wrote to Cecil Rhodes, the British imperialist after whom Rhodesia was named asking ‘‘how then do I happen to turn to you since this is an out of the way matter for you.  How indeed.  Because it is something colonial.’ [Diaries of Theodor Herzl, p.1,194].  In ‘Rebirth and Destiny’ [New York 1954] David Ben Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister, refers throughout to colonization and colonies.  This was because, in the first half of the last century, colonialism was seen as a good thing.  Today’s zeitgeist demands that colonialism is transformed into national liberation. 

Jacobson says we need to talk of Zion.  I disagree.  We need to talk about Zionism and what it has done to the Palestinians.  The Holocaust is no excuse for the dispossession of the Palestinians.

Tony Greenstein