A Simple Message to Jeremy Corbyn – Stop Apologising for non-existent anti-Semitism You have nothing to apologise for
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| Picket of the BBC by JVL and LAW |
Called at
short notice by Jewish Voice for Labour
and supported by Labour Against the
Witchhunt, Brent Momentum and at
least two union branches, we had an excellent picket of the Biased Broadcasting
Corporation today otherwise known as the Voice of Israel.
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| Tony Greenstein speaking at the BBC picket |
The BBC has been one of the main proponents of the fake anti-Semitism campaign, picking up on every neo-con allegation it can find against Corbyn. It has portrayed the execrable Margaret Hodge as a latter day saint, despite her despicable role as Council leader in Islington in covering up child abuse (not a word of which passes the BBC’s corporate lips).
I spoke
almost as soon as I arrived on behalf of LAW and my message was that if the BBC
wanted to focus on genuine anti-Semitism then why has it refused to cover the alliance
between the Conservative Party and anti-Semitic parties in the European Parliament? Since 2009 the Tories have been part of the European
Conservative and Reform group which contains the anti-Semitic Polish
Law & Justice Party, which has just passed a Holocaust law making it an
offence to refer to Polish complicity in the Holocaust.
Events
such as the burning alive of up to 1600 Jews in Jedwabne in 1941 by nationalist
Poles were made a criminal offence, despite the fact that in 2001 Poland’s
President Aleksander Kwasniewski apologised
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| Today's picket of the BBC |
None
of this prevented the far-Right Editor of the Jewish Chronicle, Stephen Pollard
from defending Michal Kaminski, MEP for the L&J party and member of the Polish
Sejm for Jedwabne, who defended and exonerated those who committed this crime. Poland's Kaminski is not an antisemite: he's a
friend to Jews As Pollard noted Kaminski was ‘one of the greatest friends to the Jews in a town where
antisemitism and a visceral loathing of Israel are rife.’ Support for Israel
and Zionism meant he couldn’t be an anti-Semite. Which exonerates nearly all
the world’s anti-Semites! More recently Pollard has been accused
by David Rosenberg of the Jewish Socialist Group of endangering his family
under threat from fascists. This is the
level of hypocrisy we are dealing with.
Also
members of the ECR Group are the Latvian National
Alliance (LNNK/Freedom and Fatherland) party with one MEP Robert Zile. Zile spends a Saturday every March
demonstrating in Riga with veterans of the Latvian Waffen SS. Not a word of any of this passes the lying
lips of the BBC and their tame reporters. For more details of Tory Party
tolerance of anti-Semitism in Latvia and Eastern Europe see Monkia Lowenberg’s Riga, Capital of European
Culture: Waffen SS, Stags and Silence? None of this, genuine anti-Semitism,
has ever been reported by the BBC or our yellow press. They are far more interested in fake anti-Semitism
in the Labour Party. Thus we are in an
Orwellian situation where Black = White and anti-racism = anti-Semitism. I also
had a message to Jeremy Corbyn.
For
f*** sake stop apologising for your past.
Do you really think that apologising will stop the attacks on you? The more you apologise the more they will
step up the bogus allegations. Is Seamus
Milne’s head filled with sawdust these days?
Your
enemies are going to dig up all sorts of stuff.
Stand your ground. If they attack
you for speaking with Hamas/Hezbollah say what you used to say. They are not
terrorists, they are representatives of the oppressed. Hamas and Hezbollah were both elected and you
had the right to speak alongside them. Indeed
but for Israel neither organisation would even exist.
Yes their
military wings are designated as terrorists but so is the Kurdish PKK. That is an outrageous political decision
which has no regard to their actual activities.
It is the Israeli army who are the real terrorists. Israel helped create
Hamas and if they hadn’t murdered 20,000 people and injured about 100,000 in
their invasion of Lebanon in 1982 there would have been no Hezbollah. Hezbollah’s main offence was being the only
Arab army to stand up to Israel and win in 2006.
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| Thatcher shakes hands with the man she called a terrorist |
Hamas and
Hezbollah don’t drop bombs on or shoot guided missiles at peoples’ homes,
schools or hospitals. The ANC too were designated
terrorists by Reagan and Thatcher and until recently the US had them on a
terrorist watch list.
Stop
apologising for the fact that a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust. Hajo Mayer,
at a meeting you chaired, compared Israel to the Nazis. It was the Deputy Chief of Staff of the Israeli
Army, General Yair Golan, who said
three years ago that:
“If
there is something that frightens me about the memories of the Holocaust, it is
the knowledge of the awful processes which happened in Europe in general, and in Germany in particular, 70, 80, 90 years ago, and finding traces of
them here in our midst, today, in 2016
This is what veteran
peacenick, Uri Avnery, himself a Zionist wrote:
‘The discrimination against the
Palestinians in practically all spheres of life can be compared to the
treatment of the Jews in the first phase of Nazi Germany. (The oppression of
the Palestinians in the occupied territories resembles more the treatment of
the Czechs in the “protectorate” after the Munich betrayal.)
The
rain of racist Bills in the Knesset, those already adopted and those in the
works, strongly resembles the laws adopted by the Reichstag in the early days
of the Nazi regime. Some rabbis call for a boycott of Arab shops. Like then.
The call “Death to the Arabs” (“Judah verrecke”?) is regularly heard at
soccer matches.
A
member of parliament has called for the separation between Jewish and Arab
newborns in hospital. A chief rabbi has declared that Goyim (non-Jews) were
created by God to serve the Jews.
Our
ministers for education and culture are busy subduing the schools, theatre and
arts to the extreme rightist line, something known in German as Gleichschaltung.
The supreme court, the pride of Israel, is being relentlessly attacked by the
minister of justice. The Gaza Strip is a huge
ghetto.
Of
course, no one in their right mind would even remotely compare Netanyahu to
Hitler, but there are political parties here which do emit a strong fascist
smell. The political riffraff peopling the present Netanyahu government could
easily have found their place in the first Nazi government.
One
of the main slogans of our present government is to replace the “old elite”,
considered too liberal, with a new one. One of the main Nazi slogans was to
replace “das System”.
Army rule
By the way, when the
Nazis came to power, almost all high-ranking officers of the German army were
staunch anti-Nazis. They were even considering a putsch against Hitler. Their
political leader was summarily executed a year later, when Hitler liquidated his
opponents in his own party.
We are told that Golan is now
protected by a personal bodyguard, something that has never happened to a
general in the annals of Israel. I
strongly recommend people read the whole article. Uri Avnery: Israeli politics bears comparison with
end of Weimar Germany and rise of fascism, Irish Times, 25.5.16.
This
relates to one of the ‘illustrations’ in the IHRA ‘definition’ of anti-Semitism. Corbyn made yet another rod for his own back
by following meekly in the footsteps of Theresa May and adopting this dishonest
and disingenuous script whose only purpose is to equate supporters of the Palestinians
and opponents of Zionism with the Nazis. Corbyn is an ‘anti-Semite’ to those
the BBC regularly interviews because he is reluctant to adopt the whole of the
IHRA.
Today we
had a lively demonstration and made our views clear to the BBC, which John
Pilger described
as the most effective propaganda organisation in the world.
We live in
times which are Orwellian. Anti-racists
are racists and anti-Semites whereas Tories, whose party was founded on racism
and Empire are now anti-racists! A party
which fought against the admission of Jewish refugees to Britain and under Lord
Balfour introduced the anti-Semitic 1905 Aliens Bill is now apparently
opposed to anti-Semitism.
There is no
more eloquent opponent of ‘anti-Semitism’ than Boris Johnson. The same man who described
Black people as ‘picanninies’ with ‘watermelon smiles’ and who only
yesterday described Muslim women as looking like letter
boxes. This piece of filth is also a
sincere opponent of ‘anti-Semitism’.
The reality
is that ‘anti-Semitism’ is the false anti-racism of the Right. It is a cover for real racism
Islamaphobia. It is no wonder that one
of the main proponents of the false anti-Semitism campaign, John Mann MP, is a bigoted
racist when it comes to the Roma who he considers a social pest, much as
the Nazis did.
We
need to turn the heat up on the BBC and all the other liars in the mainstream
press. When we can have the racist
press, the
Sun and Mail,
being in the forefront of the campaign against ‘anti-Semitism’ we can be sure
that the ‘problem’ in the Labour Party is utterly contrived. That is why Corbyn has to be saved from his
own stupidity. If he doesn’t start fighting back he is doomed. And the person who bears most responsibility is
the scab leader of Momentum, Jon Lansman, a
Zionist for whom defence of Israel is more important than a socialist Labour
Party. Already there are reports of
secret meetings of his MPs. CORBYN'S
CURTAIN CALL: Furious MPs vow to 'COLLAPSE’ leadership at SECRET MEETINGS
We know who
these MPs are and in the event Corbyn manages to win a working majority at the
next election we can expect these scabs to refuse to support him as Prime
Minister.
We have to deselect Labour’s Tory MPs now. If their bluff isn’t called then they will,
when the time is ripe, act as a Tory/Liberal 5th column.
MPs such as Joan Ryan, Chris Leslie, Hilary Benn, John
Mann, Wes Streeting, Louise Ellman, Luciana Berger, Ruth Smeeth, Ian Austin,
Margaret Hodge et al should be ‘encouraged’ to join a more suitable party.
Today’s
picket should be the first of many such actions and well done to Jewish Voice
for Labour for calling it.
Tony
Greenstein
See Tariq Ali's NEW ATTEMPT TO UNSEAT JEREMY CORBYN
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| Inminds Demonstration Last Friday Outside the BBC |
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| Inminds Demonstration Last Friday Outside the BBC |
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| Inminds Demonstration Last Friday Outside the BBC |
