The Only Decent Journalist on the Guardian is their Cartoonist – Steve Bell

When you scratch a Liberal you find a Reactionary – The Guardian’s reaction to a Socialist leader of Labour was Predictable

Forget the Chakrbartys, the Gary Younge’s and George Monbiots, the only genuine anti-racist and anti-imperialist journalist with the Guardian these days is their brilliant cartoonist, Steve Bell.

Yesterday the Guardian, once again, censured a cartoon in which Israel's racist Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu featured. One wonders just what the problem of Kath Viner, the Guardian's cowardly editor is.

Netanyahu has literally allied himself with a party, Otzma Yehudit, which is a neo-Nazi party in order to slide into government once again. He is a man who complained that too many Arabs were voting and who contradicts an actress, Rotem Sala, 'explaining' to her that no Arabs are not equal citizens in Israel.  Israel is a Jewish not a democratic state.

Yet the Guardian's cowardly editor and its equally cowardly journalists maintain their silence as the only socialist on the staff is censured by this bastion of free speech.

Email to Kath Viner and the Guardian's gutless staff by Steve Bell

The rest of them are washed up liberals. Not only did 60 of Labour’s finest racist peers launch an attack on Corbyn yesterday via the Guardian but the paper’s former Jewish Chronicle pundit and her colleagues, Jessica Elgot (who has blocked me on Twitter!) wrote a story based around the treachery of these unelected aristocrats.

He may be a racist but that doesn't stop John Reid protesting about 'antisemitism'

I couldn’t help but notice the name of John Reid.  Ex-Stalinist he has a good claim to have been the most racist Home Secretary in living memory.  It would certainly be a hard fought contest with David Blunkett who tried to stop the children of asylum seekers going to school because then they would become integrated in the local community and harder to remove.

As the Guardian wrote in its more liberal days, i.e. when the capitalist system wasn’t threatened with having a socialist as Prime Minister, ‘Controversial proposals to deny asylum seekers rights to educate their children in British schools are facing a legal challenge because they breach human rights legislation.’ Blunkett wanted separate schools for asylum seekers in detention centres because that would make deportation easier.

Nick Blake QC wrote that:

‘'Blunkett's obnoxious language of "swamping" is unnecessary, inappropriate and offensive. How can a separate educational regime for asylum seeking children be other than discrimination?'

 Another New Labour racist who signed the letter from the peers was Beverley Hughes, a former Immigration Minister.  An article ‘Tough new asylum laws 'too draconian' in the Telegraph of all places described how ‘New rules to strip asylum seekers of benefits were condemned as "draconian and appalling" by refugee campaigners.’ New Labour’s Beverley Hughes was quoted as saying that

‘It is a reasonable expectation that desperate people fleeing for their lives will claim asylum as soon as they can. It is not acceptable for people to claim asylum after being in Britain for weeks or months working illegally, simply as a way of staying on at the taxpayers' expense."

Labour peers advert in the Guardian

Here you see their racist logic in action.  Asylum seekers are condemned for working illegally, having had their benefits removed and yet they are also condemned for staying on at the tax payer’s expense. In all the furore over the fake anti-Semitism people forget just how deeply racist these people were. ‘Anti-Semitism’ has brought people like Norman Tebbit even out of the woodwork and that is the best proof there is that if Tebbit and Trump condemn it, then it’s not anti-Semitism.

When people like Reid, Blunkett or Hughes condemn anti-Semitism, we should treat it in the same way as when Donald Trump tells 4 Black Congresswomen to go back to the home they never came from and then adds, for good measure, a condemnation of their ‘anti-Semitism’.

Anti-Semitism today is being weaponised by the Right and it is only fools and knaves like Momentum’s racist fuhrer Jon Lansman who refuses to see it.

That is why I support moves to break away from Momentum since the urgent need today as the vultures of the Right hover is for a fightback against those who weaponise anti-Semitism.  Following the AGM of Brighton and Hove Momentum last night members of the Labour Party have decided to form the Left Alliance in Brighton and Hove since Momentum is incapable of fighting the witchhunt.

Tom Watson lost sleep over 'poor Phil Woolas' Labour's racist MP

Our enemies include, according to the Guardian, Labour Party staff who voted by 124-4 in favour of a motion condemning the Labour press office’s response to the BBC programme.

These are the same people who quite happily expelled and suspended thousands of people suspected of voting for Jeremy Corbyn. When the left gained a majority on the National Executive Committee there should have been a wholesale clearout of existing New Labour staff, both locally and in the HQ.  It is still not too late.

It is not for the Labour Party’s civil service to dictate the politics of the Labour Party and the GMB should be told in no uncertain terms that any staff attempting to dictate the party’s response to the BBC’s Panorama programme, which contained the false and distorted ‘whistleblowing’ of Sam Matthews and company will be dismissed.

Below is an excellent article on the hypocrisy of Labour’s racist peers and their record of racism, by Aaron Bastani

The Labour Right WouldPrefer a Johnson Government to a Corbyn One. It’s Time to Replace Them

by Aaron Bastani

This was the week when the British establishment, from right to centre, effectively conceded they would prefer a Boris Johnson premiership to a Jeremy Corbyn one. This includes the Labour establishment, of course, the highlight being an advert in the Guardian taken out by 64 Labour Lords criticising the party’s leadership. 

It must be a new low for the Guardian when, in a manner resembling that of the Evening Standard, its commercial arm is indistinguishable from its editorial line. Rather than irritation or anger, the advert left me with a sense of befuddlement: why did Labour Lords pay £18K for negative coverage in a paper so willing to perform the service for free? Unelected legislators paying for newspaper inches in a ‘progressive’ outlet to attack a socialist leader of the opposition – just when you thought you’d seen it all, something else comes along.

The political hue of the signatories was predictable. One was Margaret McDonagh, the party’s general secretary from 1998 to 2001. It was during her tenure that Labour accepted a donation of £100K from Richard Desmond, then proprietor of the Daily Express and Daily Star. Not long after that contribution, which was known of only by McDonagh and the person who banked the cheque, the former general secretary joined Desmond’s operation as general manager of Express newspapers. Such largesse by the media lothario – whose Daily Star would champion the English Defence League in 2011 – would be significantly outdone, however, when he later donated more than £1m to Ukip.
Another signatory was John Reid, home secretary during the New Labour years and arguably the most authoritarian figure to hold an office tailor-made for such a disposition. While the advert claims the Corbyn leadership has failed “to defend our party’s anti-racist values”, it was Reid who once announced he would target “foreigners [who] come to this country illegitimately and steal our benefits”. He also once boasted he was “throwing out more asylum seekers – failed asylum seekers – than ever before.” As ‘anti-racist’ rhetoric goes, it’s certainly original.

Indeed Reid’s ‘woke’ credentials go so far that he even once took a holiday with Radovan Karadzic – the man responsible for Europe’s most recent mass genocide at Srebrenica. Perhaps unsurprisingly for someone who wanted special prisons for refugees run by G4S, he proceeded to join the company after leaving government. Like McDonagh, Reid’s trajectory is that of the classic Blairite: unscrupulous bureaucrat to unsavoury lobbyist. 

Then there is Baroness Morgan of Huyton – Sally Morgan to you and I. Morgan was once a trusted advisor to Tony Blair himself. So much so that – along with her then boss – she allegedly blocked the attorney-general from explaining to cabinet the small matter of the legality of the Iraq war. After leaving Downing Street in 2005, she became a non-executive director at Southern Cross Healthcare, leaving a year before the company went bust in 2012. She proceeded to become a senior non-executive director at Carillion, the outsourcing company, which also went into liquidation in early 2018 and is subject to an ongoing investigation by the Financial Reporting Council.

In short, many of the Lords associated with the Guardian advert represent the very worst elements of the Blair era. They are cronies who enabled a racist agenda on immigration; bag-carriers who misled a nation into an illegal war. Their reward is plum peerages with no scrutiny and plenty of perks.
Only days before the advert was published, five members of Labour’s national executive committee, including deputy leader Tom Watson, submitted a motion calling for rule changes to be enacted within the party. This included the demand that racism, sexism, misogyny, homophobia and transphobia are dealt with by “automatic exclusion” from Labour where there is “irrefutable evidence”. In an opportunistic ploy, typically bereft of considering actual implementation, it’s unclear what “irrefutable evidence” is on Planet Watson. Would Watson himself, for instance, have faced such a measure after running a racist campaign in the 2004 Hodge Hill by-election? After all, one of the leaflets in that very campaign claimed the Lib Dems “want to keep giving welfare benefits to failed asylum seekers. They voted for this in parliament on 1 March 2004. They want your money, and mine, to go to failed asylum seekers.”

What wasn’t mentioned in this campaign was that the policy in question was Labour’s plan to take asylum seekers’ children away from them and forcibly place them in care. For defending such a brutal, racist policy – and deploying the most audible of dog whistles while doing so – what does Mr Watson think should be his comeuppance?

And what would Watson suggest for his various colleagues, both past and present? Take David Blunkett, who was home secretary from 2001 to 2004. He once claimed asylum seekers’ children were “swamping” British schools. And then there’s Jack Straw – should he have been automatically expelled for overseeing the introduction of discriminatory visa policies for Roma people of Slovakian and Czech heritage in 2001? Or perhaps he could offer input regarding Phil Woolas? Ahead of the 2010 general election, the former MP’s team spoke internally of needing to get “the white vote angry”. Such an impulse was the basis for a campaign so ridden with racially inflammatory lies that shortly after winning, two high court judges determined Woolas had acted unlawfully and called for a fresh election. His punishment in the intervening period? A promotion. Watson’s response, rather than to decry his colleague’s lack of a moral compass, was to declare that the judges’ decision was one “we will all regret” and that he had “lost sleep thinking about poor old Phil Woolas”.

Remarkably Woolas’s son, Josh Woolas, was one of the 200 “current and former Labour staff and supporters” who condemned Labour’s handling of last week’s Panorama documentary in a recent letter. Did he pen anything when his own father’s campaign explicitly aimed at getting the ‘white vote’ angry? I suspect you know the answer to that. Interestingly, he participated in his own smear campaign in 2016. Like father, like son.

But even more absurd than the Guardian advert and Watson’s motion is the fact we now know it was former general secretary Iain McNicol who made the former party staffers on Panorama sign their non-disclosure agreements. This means the ‘whistle-blowers’ appeared on the same programme, saying the same thing, as the man who had allegedly curtailed their ability to speak the truth. Of course John Ware, who produced the programme, didn’t deem that detail important enough to mention.

Confronted with an increasingly deranged Labour right and their allies in parts of the media, it’s important to grasp what all of this represents: a last ditch effort to stifle any chance of a Corbyn-led Labour government. This now has an added urgency given that a general election looks increasingly imminent. The default approach of the Labour leadership so far, not unwisely, has been to ride such provocations while getting on with the slow business of transforming the party. But the reality is without mandatory re-selection it’s difficult to see how the leadership can maintain a semblance of party cohesion, especially in government.

Every single Labour MP now needs to face a trigger ballot as soon as the opportunity arises. Why? Because there is absolutely no chance of a successful political programme aiming to deal with Britain’s biggest problems – from rising racism to falling wages – with many of these people as Labour MPs. The last ten days have proven that beyond all reasonable doubt.

Published 18th July 2019.

Yad Vashem – Israel’s Holocaust Propaganda Museum Refuses to Speak Out Against Deportation Threat to Refugees

Yad Vashem’s Loud Silence Amid Israel's Deportations of Asylum Seekers

Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust museum was established by law in 1953. From the start it was intended to be integral to Israel’s propagandistic use of the Holocaust in its war against the Palestinians and as justification for the State’s existence. Even the title ‘Martyrs' and Heroes Remembrance (Yad Vashem) Law’ is evidence of a determination to rewrite the history of the Holocaust from a Zionist perspective. The Holocaust became Israel’s foundational myth.

John Vorster, Prime Minister of Apartheid South Africa, who was interned for Nazi sympathies in war, lays wreath to the Holocaust dead in Yad Vashem

Those who died were victims of fascism and genocidal racism. They were neither heroes nor martyrs and they would not have seen themselves as such. They were innocents who were murdered as a consequence of an ideology that became a material force of its own, a state that was based on racial supremacy and a murderous eugenics.  To portray those who died as martyrs and heroes in the battle for the Israeli state, which is what this law says, is to co-opt the Holocaust dead posthumously into the Zionist movement.  Given that Zionism was a minority movement in every Jewish community in Europe, this is to show contempt and disdain for those whose memories are being harnessed to a state which is based on the very same principles that led to their murder.

If anyone is doubtful as to the above then they need only look at section 1.8 of the law which stipulates that Yad Vashem should commemorate ‘the unceasing efforts of the besieged to reach Eretz Israel in spite of all obstacles, and the devotion and heroism of their brothers who went forth to liberate and rescue the survivors.’  This is called rewriting Holocaust history and it is no different from those who deny the Holocaust outright. It is Zionism's foundational Holocaust myth.  It uses the Holocaust as a weapon in the Zionist armoury.

Michael Kaminski of Poland's Law & Justice Party is in Yad Vashem's Hall of Names - Kaminski was also a founder of the Committee to Establish the Good Name of Jedwabne, a village in Eastern Poland where 1600 Jews were herded into a barn by fellow Poles, which was then set alight

Those who tried to escape from the Nazis tried to escape to any destination which would have them.  Palestine was neither the first nor the only destination.  Some 60,000 Jews out of a total of 446,000 Jews who escaped from the Reich territories between May 1933 and December 31 1939 went to Palestine, i.e. less than one in seven. [American Jewish Yearbook 1940-1] What the YV Law doesn’t say is that the Zionist movement did all in its power, including lobbying the Gestapo, in order to ensure that Jewish refugees only went to Palestine. [see for example Francis Nicosia, Zionism and Anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany, p. 168]

In the words of Israeli historian and journalist Tom Segev, Yad Vashem is a ‘bizarre cult of memory, death and kitsch’. [Segev, The Seventh Million, p.11] a ‘macabre worship of death.’ [Amos Elon, The Israelis – Founders and Sons, p. 208]

As Professor Idith Zertal of the Hebrew and Bael Universities wrote in Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood (p.100):

‘The transference of the Holocaust situation on to the Middle East reality… not only created a false sense of the imminent danger of mass destruction. It also immensely distorted the image of the Holocaust, dwarfed the magnitude of the atrocities committed by the Nazis, trivializing the unique agony of the victims and the survivors, and utterly demonizing the Arabs and their leaders.’

You might therefore think that the first organisation in Israel to speak out against Netanyahu’s attempt to deport 40,000 Black Africa refugees to death and torture would be Yad Vashem.  After all what is the point of Holocaust memorial museum unless it seeks to draw conclusions about what happened during the Holocaust for humanity's behaviour today? Perhaps the most obvious of all lessons of the Holocaust was that if the Western countries, in particular the United States, had open their doors, far fewer Jews would have died.

The Kindertransport - 10,000 Jewish children from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia arrive in London - the Zionists opposed their entry

Even as devoted an Israel apologist like Alan Dershowitz in comments to ILTV Daily agreed that “The whiff of racism can’t be avoided when you have a situation where 40,000 people of color are the ones who are being deported en masse, without being individualized and every single case considered on its merits,”

Yet Yad Vashem has remained silent.  It has refused to openly oppose Netanyahu’s racist plans.  It has issued a few meal mouthed platitudes whilst reminding people that the Holocaust must not be compared with anything, in other words it has no lessons to draw from the genocide of the Jews.

Yad Vashem is on the itinerary of all foreign dignitaries to Israel, including fascists and neo-Nazis. In April 1976 Yad Vashem welcomed John Vorster, Prime Minister of South Africa, who was interned during the war for Nazi sympathies. It has played host to a variety of far-Right and anti-Semitic politicians, from Heinz Strache of Austria to Michal Kaminsky of Poland’s Law & Justice Party and Robert Ziles of Latvia’s LNNK. Israel Shahak, a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto and Belsen-Bergen concentration camp wrote, 

Of the Yad Vashem… theatre, I do not wish to speak, at all. It, and its vile exploiting, such as honouring South Africa collaborators with the Nazis are truly beneath contempt.[Kol Hair, 19 May 1998, Jerusalem].

The real purpose of Holocaust awareness ‘is not at an understanding of the past, but a manipulation of the future’. [Boaz Evron, (1983) “Holocaust: The Uses of Disaster’, Radical America 17, No. 4]. No other group is allowed to claim a share of the “credit”. At the centre of this manipulation stands Yad Vashem.

Holocaust awareness and ‘the culture of victimization’ allowed a Jewish victim identity to become dominant at the same time as anti-Semitism was disappearing. [The Holocaust in American Life, Peter Novick, Houghton Mifflin, 1999, New York, p.190. See Review: Deconstructing Holocaust Consciousness, Joseph Massad, JPS, Vol. 32 No. 1 p.82].  In its place the ‘new anti-Semitism’ i.e. anti-Zionism emerged as a substitute.

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Yad Vashem’s Loud Silence Amid Israel's Deportations of Asylum Seekers

Even though Yad Vashem has rejected any comparison between the distress of the refugees in Israel and persecuted Jews in Europe during the Holocaust, they also found it appropriate to make a limp statement about asylum seekers here

Alon Harel, Uriel Procaccia Mar 08, 2018, Ha’aretz

FILE PHOTO: Asylum seekers protest against deportation in Tel Aviv, Israel, February 24, 2018.Meged Gozani

On June 26, 1941, the German army entered Vilnius, accompanied by Reinhard Heydrich’s Einsatzkommando killing squads, elite units of sorts that were in charge of exterminating Jews, Roma Gypsies, homosexuals and Communists.

The broad range of those destined for extermination symbolized the Nazis’ commitment to Aryan racial purity, in their readiness to rid themselves not only of the lower strata of the human race but also of leftists and of those whose sexual orientation didn’t find favor among high-ranking officials of the regime.

Miron Abeliovich, the grandfather of one of this piece’s two authors, Uriel, was among those murdered, eliminated along with all of the other members of his household in Vilnius, Lithuania.

Many members of Alon’s family lived in the Free City of Danzig, whose conquest by the Nazis served as a springboard for the Hitler regime’s goal of cleansing the city of Catholic believers and more generally to subjugate the Slavic peoples to the superior race. The murder of Alon’s family following the occupation of Danzig, with the outbreak of World War II, was no more than a footnote in the larger Nazi plan for the city.

Between 1939 and 1945, the United States gave asylum on its territory to only about 250,000 Jewish refugees, roughly a thousandth of the American population at the time. Other Western countries were not more forthcoming. So, for example, when the details regarding the anti-Semitic wave of destruction on Kristallnacht in November 1938 became known, a plan was developed to allow for the settlement of 15,000 persecuted Jews in Australia over the course of three years, but the gates of the country remained closed to any additional Jewish refugees. Those refused admission to all of those countries remained in or returned to the European inferno, and many of them were killed in the Holocaust.

The above paragraphs describe episodes of Holocaust history that are seemingly unrelated to each other, but there is a common thread that runs through them. The first few paragraphs demonstrate the obvious, that human evil can be directed not only against our own people but against anyone whom the regime wishes to deprive of their rights. The fifth paragraph, regarding restrictions on immigration at the time, show that the evil and cruelty of passive actors sometimes are no better than those of active players.

Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem, the central institution entrusted with the sacred memory of the Holocaust and the lessons that should be forever drawn from it, acknowledges some of these lessons on its website.

In its section on the Righteous Among the Nations, non-Jews who saved Jews during the Holocaust, Yad Vashem quotes the moving remarks of Elie Wiesel, who wrote, “Let us remember: What hurts the victim most is not the cruelty of the oppressor but the silence of the bystander. Let us not forget, after all, there is always a moment when moral choice is made. And so we must remember these good people who helped Jews during the Holocaust.”

And yet, when we face a similar reality of asylum seekers in Israel who are begging for their lives and, who, based on most accounts, can expect torture, theft, rape and even death in the countries where they are due to be sent, Yad Vashem issued a statement declaring that it is inappropriate and dangerous to compare the situation of the Jews during the Holocaust with Israel’s policy regarding those seeking residency status in the country now.

Indeed, how can they be compared? During the Holocaust, those being persecuted were our own people, whereas at the present time, they are only those of African background “seeking residency.”

FILE PHOTO: World leaders gather in the Hall of Names in Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, March 16, 2005.AP

During the Holocaust, the gates of Switzerland, Britain and other countries were shut, while now it is the gates of our own country. But despite the fact that the leaders of Yad Vashem have rejected any comparison between the distress of the refugees in Israel and persecuted Jews in Europe during the Holocaust, they also found it appropriate to make a limp statement about asylum seekers here, saying that their situation involves a “national and international challenge that requires empathy, compassion and mercy.”

“The experience of the Jewish people over generations heightens this obligation,” the statement continued. “The authorities in Israel must make every effort so that there is no person who arrived in Israel with a sword over his neck that did not receive refugee status.”

More than a month ago, while the controversy was seething, we approached the administration of Yad Vashem and asked for an interpretation and clarification regarding the call for “compassion.”

We asked what the leaders of the institution believed was or was not possible to do in the concrete case of asylum seekers at the present time.

We also asked what Yad Vashem’s position was regarding the masses of asylum seekers, which is nearly all of them, who have not received refugee status.

Does Yad Vashem believe that they should be given such status? Is it prepared not to be “a bystander” in the face of the government’s policy not to grant refugee status to almost any of these large numbers of persecuted people?

We have implored Yad Vashem to fulfill its moral and historic mission and to raise a hue and cry that the honorable interior minister would have difficulty ignoring. It is in fact easy for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government to ignore demands for justice from those whom it deems “Jew haters,” and it probably even derives sweet pleasure from that as well.

On the other hand, ignoring a strong demand by an institution that is a symbol of the catastrophe that befell our people and that also has, it must be admitted, material value in our relations with the nations of the world, is much more difficult.

We have warned the good people at Yad Vashem, who drag every dignitary to visit the institution, who rub shoulders with them and curry their sympathies. And we have explained that if Yad Vashem refrains from dealing with this urgent issue, it could, in one fell swoop, lose its legitimacy as a universal moral beacon and instead be perceived in the eyes of the world as an ethnocentric faction whose only interest is the Jewish people and its ability to engender feelings of guilt among non-Jews.

To date, we have not managed to obtain a response to our inquiry.

Alon Harel is a professor of law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and Uriel Procaccia a professor of law at Tel Aviv University.

Eritrean refugees protest in front of ministry of defense, Tel aviv

Israel – the ‘Light unto the Nations’ Treats Refugees as ‘Infiltrators’ and Terrorists

 Date: 18 October 2012 20:50:29 BST

Eritrean refugees living in Israel take part in a protest outside Ministry of Defense on October 18, 2012 in Tel Aviv,

The protesters were calling for the ousting of the dictatorship regime in Eritrea, and the release of all political prisoners. they wore demanding as well recognition as refuges and stooping the jailing policy of the Israeli government


Israel's government and its racist Minister Eli Yishai of Shas, refuses to recognise refugees as legitimate.  Zionism, with its demand for a pure Jewish state means that non-Jews shouldn't be admitted (unless they are rich and American/European)