Rachel Cooke: Never Underestimate the Stupidity of a Guardian Journalist – Jewish Chronicle Letter of the Week

Open Letter to a Racist - Jon Lansman – Bahrain Picket – Tommy Robinson Video

 

Sometimes you wonder if there is a Stupidity Test that Guardian journalists have to pass before they are admitted into Kath Viner’s paradise. I mention this because in her interview with Ken Livingstone in last week’s Observer, Rachel Cooke asked ‘if some Labour activists don’t wilfully and perniciously conflate Judaism and Zionism’.  

The Guardian's Hapless Rachel Cooke

It’s the kind of remark that makes you want to tear your hair out. Where has this fool been? There has been a 3 year campaign by supporters of Israel to conflate anti-Zionism, the Israeli state and anti-Semitism. The summer of 2018 was taken up with the effort by Zionists and their media claque to impose the bogus IHRA misdefinition on the Labour Party, a ‘definition’ which conflates criticism of Israel and anti-Semitism, such that 7 of its 11 examples relate to Israel not Jews. Don't words have any meaning for these people?

In an article Labour's new guidelines show it is institutionally antisemitic the Jewish Chronicle’s tabloid editor Stephen Pollard, Dirty Desmond’s old mate, complained that Labour had refused to adopt the IHRA in toto.

 ‘instead of adopting the definition as agreed by all these bodies, Labour has excised the parts which relate to Israel and how criticism of Israel can be antisemitic.’

Leave aside that all the best anti-Semites, from Christian Zionist Steve Bannon to Viktor Orban admire Israel because Zionist ethno-nationalism is precisely what they would like to emulate, it is should be obvious that the strategy of Israel’s supporters is to perpetuate the lie that anti-Zionism = anti-Semitism. This is the accepted media narrative. 

Journalist fools like Rachel Cooke seem oblivious to the increasingly overt racism in Israel - what was submerged before is now coming into the open

What is it about this that idiots like Rachel Cooke do not understand?   Rachel Cooke is however only one example of the degeneration of the Guardian/Observer (there was a time when the two papers were separate).

I sent a letter to The Observer, but unsurprisingly it was not printed, as is the case with nearly all anti-Zionist correspondence these days. I copy it below.  Please distribute because this is an example of how the Letters page of the Guardian, the last area which was free of Jonathan Freedland’s baleful influence has now fallen victim to Zionism’s gatekeepers.

Sunday, 23 June 2019

Letters Editor

The Observer

Kings Place,

90 York Way

London N1 9GU 

In an otherwise interesting interview with Ken Livingstone, Rachel Cooke asks ‘if some Labour activists don’t wilfully and perniciously conflate Judaism and Zionism.’

Ms Cooke’s question is indicative of the confusion caused by the false anti-Semitism campaign by Zionists and supporters of Israel. It is truly Orwellian.

It is not Labour activists who conflate Judaism and Zionism but the Zionist movement and its supporters.  Where has Ms Cooke been these past 3 years?

There was a concerted campaign by the Zionist lobby to get the Labour Party to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance misdefinition of anti-Semitism, which equated criticism of the State of Israel with ‘anti-Semitism’.

No less than the Chief Rabbi stated in an interview with the Telegraph (3 May 2016) that ‘One can no more separate it [Zionism]from Judaism than separate the City of London from Great Britain.’

This conflation of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism is the basis of the false equation between Judaism and Zionism.

I just hope that in future the Observer’s interviewers are better briefed.

Yours faithfully,

Tony Greenstein 

The Jewish Chronicle’s Letter of the Week from Maurice Herson

Perhaps the Jewish Chronicle’s tabloid editor, Stephen Pollard, has been laid low with a bug.  This week there was the first decent letter for some time in the JC from a Maurice Herson from Oxford who spoke of the ‘JC's relentless hate campaign against Jeremy Corbyn.’

 I can’t imagine where he got that one!  Certainly not from Jon Lansman!

Lansman at the Palestine session of the Arise conference yesterday - looking bored and full of contempt for those there

Open Letter to Momentum’s Racist Leader

Lansman was spotted at the Palestine session at Arise yesterday – looking bored

I blogged a few days ago about the treacherous role that Jon Lansman has played inside the Labour Party in giving aid and comfort to the false allegations of anti-Semitism against supporters of Palestine. 

His latest attack, on Jewish Voice for Labour, which is reported in this week’s Jewish Chronicle boils down to the assertion that ‘that neither the vast majority of individual members of JVL nor the organisation itself can really be said to be part of the Jewish community."

You probably didn't hear of the letter from 34 Haredi Rabbis defending Corbyn last year - that's because the mainstream media didn't cover it

Leaving aside the fact that there is no single Jewish community - the Board of Deputies represents a minority of British Jews – neither the Ultra Orthodox nor secular Jews come under their wing – the question is so what?

Lansman in the pink shirt

The organised, synagogue going, mainly Zionist Jewish community is a thoroughly reactionary one that has voted Tory for 50+ years. In so far as they support the State of Israel that is or should be a matter of shame.

This is an Israel which only last week saw dozens of residents in Afula, including the Mayor and Deputy Mayor, demonstrating against the sale of a house to an Arab. This is the state which has supplied weaponry to virtually every racist and genocidal regime in the world, from South Africa to Burma to Guatemala.

It is not for nothing that Israel’s best friends include leaders such as Brazil’s Bolsonaro, Hungary’s Viktor Orban, Philippines Duterte – fascist and anti-Semites all.

What the JLM call their 'sister party' the Israeli Labour Party supports Netanyahu's attempt to deport Israel's 40,000 Black African refugees

Lansman played a particularly iniquitous role in the witchhunting of Jackie Walker, deposing her, with the support of the Alliance for Workers Liberty, as Vice-Chair of Momentum. Lansman has helped the Jewish Labour Movement witch-hunt of anti-Zionists and supporters of the Palestinians despite them passing a motion of no confidence in Corbyn at their last conference.  

Signs in Nazi Germany saying 'Jews not wanted' have a familiar ring in Afula

It is difficult to know how anyone who calls themselves a socialist today can find anything progressive in the State of Israel. There was a time when I was growing up when people hadn’t heard of the Naqba.  We believed that the Arabs really had left voluntarily in order that the Arab armies could enter Israel. We believed that Kibbutzim were islands of socialism in the Middle East where equality ruled, not realising that they employed cheap Arab and Misrahi/Oriental Jewish labour and were racially exclusive Jewish only institutions.

It was only later that we learnt that the best friend of Israel was Apartheid South Africa whom it transferred nuclear technology to and invested heavily in.  That this was the position not just of the Israeli Labour Party but of Mapam, to its left, too.

During the 1980’s we learnt that even as Argentina was murdering Jews because they were Jews as part of its wider massacre of leftists Israel was Argentina’s main arms supplier.  Even worse it became clear that the refuge against anti-Semitism that Israel proudly claims to be didn’t apply to leftist Argentina Jews who were the ‘wrong sort of Jews.’

We also learnt that from El Salvador to Guatemala Israel was involved in training the death squads and active in training those in Guatemala who perpetrated the genocide of the Mayan Indians.  Just as Israel today is the arms supplier of last resort to the Burmese regime in its genocide of the Rohinga people.

This is to completely omit Israel’s repression of the Palestinians and its permanent military occupation of Palestinian land and its creation of an ethno-nationalist Jewish state which is the envy of every fascist and neo-Nazi from Steve Bannon to Viktor Orban and Tommy Robinson.  Indeed the neo-Nazi founder of the alt-Right, Richard Spencer, describes himself as a White Zionist.

The only justification that Lansman has for his demonization of Jewish anti-Zionists and JVL in particular is that the majority of the Jewish community in this country supports Israel.

If this were true that most Jews in this country supported what Israel is doing and understands what a Jewish State really means then this would be a matter of shame. It would mean that Jews in this country were now on the side of the racists and imperialists.  To some extent this is obviously true.  Most Jews vote Tory and have voted Tory for over half a century.

However there are a considerable number of Jews who reject Zionism and what Israel does.  According to the most recent and authoritative survey in 2015 The Attitudes of British Jews Towards Israel the number of Jews who identify as Zionists today is 59%, a drop of 13% in 5 years.

The fact is that Lansman identifies with the reactionary majority of British Jews because they are Jews. Such a position is clearly a racist. If the left in the Labour Party has any self-respect then Lansman will be removed from his position in Momentum.  Those who give him legitimacy are giving legitimacy to the movement to overthrow Corbyn.

Anyone one who has doubts about the sincerity of the ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign should ask themselves one question – if the campaign was genuine and anti-Semitism was a real problem in the Labour Party why would all the Tory press, from the Sun to the Telegraph, support it?  Why should newspapers who have employed Katie Hopkins and who now back Boris Johnson, be so concerned with anti-Semitism?

Open Letter to Lansman

Dear Mr Lansman,

I read with interest your attack on Jewish Voice for Labour in the Jewish Chronicle. Let me the first to congratulate you on your choice of target as well as your exquisite sense of timing. 

After all it makes sense for Momentum's fuhrer (or is it caudillo?) to attack a pro-Corbyn Jewish group in the Labour Party. Just as it makes sense for you to give your support to the Jewish Labour Movement which recently passed, almost unanimously, a vote of no confidence in Corbyn.

All of this as part of the 'fight against anti-Semitism' as defined by the IHRA definition of antisemitism which says that all except the most anodyne criticism of Israel is antisemitic.

If you read my blog below you will see how the residents of Afula in Israel define Zionism and a Jewish state, by demonstrating against the sale of a house to an Arab.  Some people might compare this to what happened in Germany in 1938 but we both know that such a comparison is antisemitic.

Of course the majority Jewish community in this country supports a Jewish state and therefore they support this and all the other more covert measures of segregation in Israel and it is with those that you identify.

Some people would call this racism but racists call it 'Jewish identity'.  It's all part of what is now called Generation Identity. 

Your attack on Jews who oppose Zionism and the Israeli state is akin to the attacks that used to be made on Whites who opposed Apartheid in South Africa. Presumably if you had been in South Africa you would accused them of not being part of the majority White community?

Not only are you unaccountable to anyone, having launched a coup 3 years ago to destroy democracy in Momentum but it is clear you have no shame either.

Regards

Tony Greenstein

Previous picket of Bahraini picket calling for the freeing of a gaoled academic

ALERT 25 JUNE 2019 - PROTEST BAHRAIN 'DEAL OF THE CENTURY' CONFERENCE - PALESTINE IS NOT FOR SALE!

The first phase of the plan, hatched by Israel and Trump, to end any future Palestinian freedom will be tabled this week in Bahrain, hosted by the Khalifa dictatorship and supported by fellow servile Arab dictatorships like Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.

Inminds chair Abbas Ali said 

"The plan is to, on the one hand, try to squeeze the Palestinian people into submission, with the ongoing slow genocide in Gaza and enforced hardships in the West Bank; with the cutting of all funding to UNRWA; denying the Palestinians the right to their capital Al Quds; legitimizing the theft of the Syrian Golan Heights and giving the green light to similarly annexing the West Bank to Israel with the threat of ethnically cleaning its Palestinian population first.  And then on the other hand, to offer bribes, paid for by MBS and MBZ, to the corrupt PA leadership to accept the deal, selling Jerusalem to the Zionists, and denying the Palestinian people their homeland. The deal stinks so bad that even the normally purchasable PA has rejected it. So without even a token Palestinian presence, the conference aims to determine the future of Palestine. Please join us to condemn this farce, and those participating, and hosting it. Our message is simple - Palestine is not for sale!"

When:
3pm Tuesday 25th June 2019
Where:
Bahrain Embassy in London
30 Belgrave Square
London SW1X 8QB.
Nearest Tube: Hyde Park Corner, Victoria

As Unarmed Egyptian demonstrators are massacred the Silence of Obama & Western leaders is Deafening

The Arab Spring Dies in Egypt

burned Rabaah al-Adawiya mosque

Update

You will no doubt be relieved to hear that I was that upset at the mental contortions Obama has to go through that I decided to write to the Independent to support him (in Lenin's phrase like the rope supports a hanging man!).  It was my first letter to a national since my recent illness so I was more chuffed than usual!!

When Obama was first elected as President I took a lot of flack from those with illusions in the potential of a Black President for my article ‘Obama – the Black Face of US imperialism’  I was even accused of racism.  White liberals often feel guilty at the use of the term 'Uncle Tom' which I used even though, as Joe pointed out, radical Black leaders like Malcolm X regularly assailed Black politicians and time servers as Uncle Toms.  The Socialist Workers Party, ever the opportunist, was fulsome in its coverage of Obama’s election.  Millions the world over breathed a sigh of relief that the era of George Bush jnr. was over and America’s first Black President had been elected.

Military show of force in Cairo

However since those early days and his much heralded speech in Egypt promising a new dawn   (courtesy of Egypt’s dictator Mubarak) Obama has shown himself to be as bad as Bush.  Drone wars and ‘smart power’ have become the hallmark of his Presidency.

Child holds up gas cannisters fired at demonstrators

Even US Presidents usually pay lip-service to democracy.  Obama, who is usually so verbose, has literally been struck dumb.  He can’t oppose the Egyptian military murderers yet he cannot openly support the machine-gunning of unarmed demonstrators.  What we see is a naked exposure of the hypocrisy of Western foreign policy.  Of course it would be difficult to say ‘we are bombing Pakistan and Afghanistan in order to provide a conduit for oil’ but as Clausewitz said, war is a continuation of politics by other means.

Yet even the most cynical observer of politics (the BBC excepted of course!) can see that the Western leaders have been exposed as hypocritical war mongers.  Apparently Obama has difficulty in deciding whether the removal of a democratically elected civilian President is a coup or not!  Black is white and peace means war, as Orwellian doublethink becomes the order of the day. 

injured member of MB carried by riot police

What is happening in Egypt is a demonstration of the fatal weakness of the Arab spring.  Unlike the 1848 revolutions in Europe that were unsuccessful at the time but which nonetheless achieved their objectives with time, the events in Egypt spell the death knell for the Arab spring.

Police storm al-Fath mosque

When demonstrators in Tunisia forced Ben Ali, its long-time dictator out of office in January 2011, it provided hope that Arab politics, frozen for so long with long-serving dictators such as Mubarak and Assad, would now herald in real change.  When Mubarak was forced out of office, its momentum seemed unstoppable, spreading even to Bahrain in the Gulf.  But whereas Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu publicly mourned the departure of Mubarak, western leaders were more astute.  For them the question arose as to how there could be change in the faces of its dictators whilst maintaining Western interests.  It was a dilemma that was solved, firstly in Libya, then Syria and now Egypt.  In the first two, the growth of mass movements who were calling for change, had to be pre-empted. 
What this meant was the militarisation of the struggle.  Instead of mass popular movements that might go on to challenge the existing economic order and in particular imperialist domination of Arab oil, the West decided to arm one or more factions of the opposition.  Instead of a mass movement to oust Assad and Ghadaffi, we saw a military conflict aided by Western air power.

Egypt proves, if proof were needed, that in the Arab and Gulf States, reformism has no possibility of succeeding.  The structure of politics and western interests mean that the struggle is all or nothing.  There can be no Egyptian Kerensky or Attlee.

Women mourns death of her daughter

Unfortunately it is a lesson that the Arab masses have to relearn.  The need for an all-Arab socialist movement, which is capable of planning and channeling the protests, is self-evident.  Western powers will simply pick off individual countries, turning them into sectarian cesspools and seeking to redivide the political entities that western imperialism itself first created (an obvious example is northern Iraq and the Kurdish semi-state there).

No one doubts that the government of Mohammed Morsi in Egypt was truly awful.  Morsi saw himself as the next pharaoh and devised a constitution that gave the President absolute power.  Sharia law and the encroachment of Islamic law, which is nothing but a façade for the legitimation of repression and the entrenchment of economic power in the hands of sections of the petit-bourgeois its clerical offshoot was something that Morsi and the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood proposed and intended. 

MB volunteer sleeps amongst shrouds

There is no doubt that Morsi wished to see an  ‘Islamic’ dictatorship in Egypt.  However Egypt is a largely secular society and the Muslim Brotherhood was and is a conservative political force that sought to co-opt imperialism in its plans.  Right to the end Morsi had illusions that Obama would prevent the military stepping in!

However those millions of Egyptians who hated Morsi, were wrong to support a military take-over in Egypt.  It is staggering that such a large section of society seems to have learnt nothing from the days of Mubarak.  The Egyptian army and police are the deadly enemies of any popular or democratic movement.  They who supported Mubarak and it is noteworthy that the charge against Morsi is that he and his followers used violence against their gaolers when they made their escape from prison.

General Sisi even compares himself to President Gamal Abdel Nasser, the leader of the Free Officers who ousted the pro-British King Farouk.  Those taken in by this comparison know nothing of their own history.  Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal in 1956 and was faced with a triple invasion by Israel, Britain and France.  All of this was plotted in Sevres near Paris.  Israel did the bidding of the two powers, though Ben-Gurion was openly skeptical about whether he would be betrayed, and attacked on cue and Britain and France imposed themselves as ‘peacekeepers’ bombing Port Said in the process!  The British Prime Minister Anthony Eden, who presided over the Suez disaster, will go down as the worst prime minister of the last century (except for Gordon Brown).

The United States under Eisenhower used the Suez invasion to oust the British from the Middle East.  When Britain and France began bombing the US took  both countries to the UN and only by use of   their veto did the Security Council not censor them.  But Eisenhower engineered a run on the pound, in the days when there was still a sterling area and both imperialist powers were forced to withdraw from Egypt.  When David ben-Gurion chafed at the idea of a withdrawal of Zionist forces, Eisenhower memorably said that it was not for those who are guilty of aggrandizement to set conditions on their own withdraw, something we should remember today.

Nasser was the most popular political leader Egypt ever had, even when defeated by Israel in 1967, because he stood up to imperialism.  When he resigned in 1967 popular demands led to his reinstatement.  Sisi on the other hand has only stood up to the Egyptian masses – the Muslim Brotherhood today but workers, socialists and women tomorrow.  Those who supported the military coup will not be able to complain when the military turns against them.

The massacre of Morsi’s supporters, maybe 2,000 have been killed, bodes ill for the future.  Army and police guns may be turned on Islamists today but they will target workers and socialists in the future.  Of course there are some in the Egyptian middle classes who supported Sisi’s actions, who also supported Mubarak.  But Sisi and SCAF (Supreme Council of the Armed Forces) still pretend that they are continuing the Arab spring whilst making it clear that violence against the armed forces is a deadly crime (though massacring unarmed demonstrators is quite acceptable).

The hypocrisy of western leaders should be obvious to anyone who is not blind.  Rhetoric about a ‘war for democracy’ is limited by their own greed and interests.  However the Arab masses have their own interests.

Imperialism seeks to divide people on confessional lines.  It is essential that any popular movement in Arabia has emblazoned on its banner opposition to confessionalism.  It is also crucial that the existing state forces are disarmed.  The mistake in Egypt was to limit the struggle to Mubarak.  But even then those seeking revolution and the overthrow of Zionism in the Middle East face an enormous problem.  The bastion of counter-revolution in the region resides in Saudi Arabia.  From the time of Nasser to today the Saudi ruling class has been active in opposing any popular movements and were unhappy at the removal of Mubarak.  Today, thanks to people like Edward Snowden, this fundamentalist government is exposed as having strong links with Israel, supporting and encouraging the bombing of Iran, just as it supported the Phalange in Lebanon's civil war.  It is now a major supporter of the military in Egypt and is funding them.  The Wahabi rulers of Saudi Arabia are, when not governing, to be found in the nightclubs and brothels of the West.  A poor man who steals a loaf of bread can have his hand and legs amputated whilst the real thieves in society are its rulers.

Western policy in the Arab East, from the earliest times, have been to separate the people from the oil.  This was one reason why whole western armies were transplanted to Saudi Arabia to fight the first Gulf War, as a result of Saddam Hussein’s annexation of Kuwait.  Overcoming this obstacle is crucial to the success of any revolution in the region.  Part of the same problem is the sectarian nature of much of Arab politics.

In Iraq, the US overcame the armed resistance through encouraging and perpetrating civilian massacres and car bombings.  It is one of the ironies of the ‘war against terror’ that whilst nominally fighting Al Queda, in Libya, Iraq and now Syria, they have used them to foster sectarian violence.  It demonstrates that the increased use of western forces in the region is legitimised by a bogus excuse.  Whilst Arab fought and killed Arab in Iraq, the US forces took stock and increased their own power.  In Faluja, the centre of the resistance, the US carried out a massacre as they sealed the city off.  Torture centres and prisons, of which Abu Ghraib was not the worst, were set up.

In the Gulf, the local population is not and will not become revolutionary.  Of course in places such as Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, the Shiite masses have that possibility, if they resist the temptations of sectarianism.  In Bahrain Saudi troops were sent at one point to the aid of King Hamad.  But the centre of any mass movement has to be the thousands of migrant workers in the Gulf.  Of course there are real problems with this strategy, not least that it is easy to deport workers from the Philippines or Thailand.

As the Egyptian Armed Forces prepare for further massacres, the burning need is for imperialism to be placed at the centre of the struggle.

Tony Greenstein