Let Noone Be Under Any Doubt
That It is ‘Perverse’ Acquittals Such
as This That Are Responsible for Starmer & Lammy’s Attempts to Abolish
Juries
Press
Conference & Speeches at the Acquittal of Six of the Filton 24 4.2.26.
It says something about the fake
democracy in which we live that the Filton 6, whose trial has just ended, faced
life sentences for trying to prevent genocide, whereas the legal system,
represented by Judge Jeremy Johnson, did its best to convict them. Because in trials today of Palestine
solidarity protesters we face two prosecutors – one in the well of the court
and one on the bench.
It was a long 10 weeks trial at
Woolwich Crown Court for the six defendants. They were charged with aggravated
burglary, criminal damage and violent disorder. Samuel Corner was also charged
with grievous bodily harm.
On the most serious charge, of
aggravated burglary, all 6 defendants were acquitted. Since all of the Filton
24 were charged with this, it logically follows that since the first 6 have
been acquitted that this charge should be dropped against the other 18. It is
after all a ‘joint enterprise’ charge.
Even Lammy, the Injustice
Secretary, should be able to understand that if all 24 enter a factory and 6
are not guilty of burglary that it makes no sense to try the other 18.
On the next most serious charge, violent disorder, which
carries a 5 year sentence, 3 of the defendants, Fatema Zainab Rajwani, Zoe Rogers and Jordan
Devlin were acquitted and the jury failed to reach a verdict on
the other 3.
On the question of whether they
were guilty of criminal damage the jury could not agree. They also could not
agree whether or not Samuel Corner was guilty of grievous bodily harm.
One thousand new recruits as Palestine Action ban tabled, with Asa
Winstanley
In other words, after 8 days of
deliberation the jury didn’t return a single guilty verdict. From the
perspective of the Crown Prosecution Service, it throws into doubt their whole
strategy of criminalising Palestine Actionists as terrorists and seeking to
lock them up for years.
Judge Jeremy Johnson - represented MI6, ruled Assange's Deportation Could Proceed - Reactionary to the Tip of his Toes
Judge Jeremy Johnson did his best
to obtain a conviction. When a juror asked whether they were allowed to acquit
because the defendants genuinely believed that they were destroying weapons to
prevent their use in genocide, Johnson replied ‘no’.
It also explains why, given the
doubts that must have existed as to whether these charges would stick, the CPS,
which is de facto a government
department, sought to deny the defendants bail.
They did this knowing that the
Judiciary, despite its much proclaimed
independence, is in reality about as independent of the government as a
dog on a leash. Judges have historically been in the forefront of government
repression and today they are behaving no differently.
Yvette Cooper and Starmer had, in
complete defiance of legal norms, pronounced that members of Palestine Action
had attacked the police with a sledge hammer as justification for the
proscription of Palestine Action even before this fact was or was not established
in a court of law.
Elbit
security guard attacking Palestine Action defendants with sledgehammer
This was widely publicised by the
prostitute press as fact when it was hotly disputed. As it turned out Samuel
Corner had been blinded by Pava, synthetic
pepper spray and was responding to what were called ‘blood curdling screams’ by Zoe Rogers who had been tasered twice
and then dragged around by a police officer with his foot on her stomach.
The violence of the security thugs
that Elbit employed to defend their factory of death were not been mentioned by
Starmer or Cooper. Nor was the violence against the protesters who had come to
dismantle the quadcopters and other systems that Elbit produces in order that
Israel can murder civilians and children.
When it comes to Andrew-Mountbatten then the Police are remarkably unconcerned about the Royal Rapist
We also know from the Epstein Affair
that Starmer and his friends are remarkably unconcerned about child abuse,
including the mass slaughter of Palestinian children. Israeli religious figures
like Rabbis Mali and Dov Lior have
explicitly endorsed the murder of Palestinian children to prevent a new
generation of resistance fighters being born.
Those who support Israel’s genocide
in Gaza and its mass murder of children cannot expect us to take seriously
their proclamations of horror at Epstein’s friend, Peter Mandelson, being
appointed as Ambassador to the United States. What is remarkable though is the
lengths to which the mass media are determined to sensationalise the Epstein
saga and keep Israel out of it when we know that Epstein was running a honey
trap for Mossad.
There
has also been a concerted attempt in recent years by politicians and judges to
withdraw defences for protesters. In particular key
defences such as "justification" and "lawful excuse".
The most significant shift occurred through Attorney General’s Reference (No. 1 of 2023), March 2024 in the wake of the Colston 4 trial in January 2022. The Attorney General, Suella Braverman, made the
reference to the Court of Appeal who gave her what she wanted.
This ruling dramatically curtailed the "belief
in consent" defence. The Court of Appeal ruled that a defendant’s political or philosophical beliefs
(such as opposing the arms trade or genocide) are not "circumstances"
of the damage that can be put to a jury. Juries are supposed to believe that
groups of people, for some unknown reason, have taken such a dislike to a
factory that they get together to smash it up.
This prevents protesters from explaining the reasons
for their actions (e.g., stopping war crimes) as a legal justification for
damaging property. Trial judges now have greater authority to withdraw these
defences from the jury before they even deliberate if the judge decides the
legal threshold for "circumstances" hasn't been met.
Following the "Stansted
15" and subsequent cases, the Court of Appeal reaffirmed that
the defence of "necessity" (acting to prevent a greater harm) is
generally unavailable to protesters who choose "maximally disruptive"
tactics.
Attorney General's
Reference No. 1 of 2022 also ruled that the right to protest under Articles 10 and 11 of the ECHR cannot be
used as a "lawful excuse" for "significant" criminal
damage.
Nonetheless
juries, such as that in the Filton 6 trial have often ignored the rulings of
judges because in their eyes the purpose of a trial is to see that justice is
done. If that means disregarding the bigoted views of reactionary judges then
that is what they are prepared to do.
This
is called a ‘perverse verdict’ or ‘jury equity’. The key case is that of Edward Bushell’s in 1670 when two Quakers, William Mead and
William Penn were charged with preaching to an unlawful assembly. Despite being
instructed by the judge to return a verdict of guilty, the jury refused to do
so, even after having been imprisoned in the Tower for two days without food,
fire, tobacco or water.
Perverse
verdicts occur when a jury acquits a defendant despite believing they broke the
law, often because they find the law unjust, its application unfair, or the
punishment too harsh, effectively "nullifying" or invalidating the
law in that specific case. Examples include that of Clive
Ponting, the Trident Ploughshares and Randle and Potter cases. The same happened in the United States
in cases involving the Fugitive Slave Act and Prohibition laws.
Jurors
have the power to deliver a "not guilty" verdict, which cannot be
overturned, though courts discourage openly encouraging nullification, viewing
it as a controversial feature of common law rooted in the jury's right to
decide a case as they see fit, even if contrary to the evidence.
It
was perhaps best expressed by Thomas Bingham, former Lord Chief Justice and Senior Law
Lord, described by fellow judge Lord Hope as the greatest jurist of his day.
Bingham
addressed the issue of acquittals contrary to the evidence by reference to a
number of high-profile acquittals:
“... the acquittals of such high-profile defendants as Ponting, Randle and Pottle
have been quite as much welcomed as resented by the public, which over many
centuries has adhered tenaciously to its historic choice that decisions on the
guilt of defendants charged with serious crime should rest with a jury of lay
people, randomly selected, and not with professional judges. That the last word
should rest with the jury remains, as Sir Patrick Devlin, writing in 1956, said
(Hamlyn Lectures, pp 160, 162): ‘an
insurance that the criminal law will conform to the ordinary man’s idea of what
is fair and just. If it does not, the jury will not be a party to its
enforcement… The executiveknows that
in dealing with the liberty of the subject it must not do anything which would
seriously disturb the conscience of the average Member of Parliament or of the
average juryman. I know of no other real checks that exist today upon the power
of the executive.’”
There
is therefore a tension between Jury Equity and the instructions that judges
give to juries.
There
is no doubt that Lammy’s attempt to restrict jury trials to offences carrying
over a 3 year prison sentence has nothing to do with delays in the hearings of trials, for
which there is no evidence. His real concern is ‘perverse’ verdicts. Lammy
knows that judges can be relied on to convict in political and direct action cases
when a jury would refuse to do so.
Starmer’s
regime is proving itself in every sense anti-democratic at home and genocidal
abroad. It is riddled with corruption and none is more corrupt than Starmer
himself who came top
of the league when it came to getting ‘freebies’ from rich individuals and
corporations. Fortunately it would appear that the days of Starmer, in the wake
of the Mandelson Affair, are numbered.
The
result of the trial is that once again a jury has defied expectations. In the
case of the charges of criminal damage Judge Johnson said that this was :
unlikely to cause you difficulty, given there
was no dispute that the defendants who had given evidence at least
intentionally damaged property in Elbit’s premises”.
How
wrong this reactionary judge was. When the verdicts were read out it would
appear that the charge of criminal damage caused great difficulty. So much so
that the jury could not agree on a verdict!
However
you will not be surprised to learn that the Board of Deputies found
the verdict ‘troubling’ if not anti-Semitic. It urged the government to
provide
clear direction in tackling hate crime and extremist violence. This incident
underlines the urgency of the Home Office’s current review into public order
and hate crime legislation.
This
was because Palestine Action was a group ‘whose
activities have included targeting businesses linked to the Jewish community in
London and Manchester.’ In other words because Elbit is owned by Israelis British
Jews are complicit in their genocidal activities.
If Jews Are Concerned About Anti-Semitism Then They Should Stop Acting As
a Moral Alibi for Extermination, Torture and Famine
There can be no greater
obscenity than using the Nazi Holocaust to justify Gaza’s Holocaust
Joint statement with the @JLC_uk: “We are concerned that the cumulative effect of these announcements, in quick succession, signal a significant shift in policy, away from Israel being a key UK ally. This would not only be a strategic error but a moral one.” pic.twitter.com/pu8tRin5Gd
— Board of Deputies of British Jews (@BoardofDeputies) July 26, 2024
One
of the most embarrassing things when speaking at a Palestinian demonstration is
when people applaud simply because you are Jewish. People take it for granted
that most Jewish people support Israel’s war crimes.Unfortunately this is true.
It’s
not that Jewish anti-Zionists deserve praise so much as Jews who support genocide
carried out in their name deserve condemnation.
That
was why I objected to a contest on
Twitter to find the top 10 Jews ‘who
don’t hate themselves’, the Nazi-style accusation that Zionists deploy
against anti-Zionist Jews. It should not be remarkable that Jews should condemn
a state which has turned Gaza into a death camp.
It
is a symptom of the amorality of most British Jews that they don’t protest when
their self-proclaimed leaders protest in their name against Britain resuming
its funding of UNWRA, the UN Agency charged with preventing famine in Gaza. These
wretches even complained that Britain was withdrawing its objection at the
International Criminal Court to the issuing of arrest warrants for Israel’s war
criminal Prime Minister, Netanyahu and Defence Minister Gallant.
Rosenberg
warned
that prosecuting war criminals would pose a threat to British national security
and that feeding Palestinian children by funding UNWRA would cause irreparable
harm to the Zionist cause. ‘Most
worryingly of all’ Rosenberg said, ‘is
the speculation that Britain may impose an arms embargo on Israel this
week.’
Imagine
what might happen. Israel wants to bomb one of the few remaining schools left
in Gaza and all of a sudden Israel’s Chief of Staff discovers that they’ve run
out of bombs. Palestinian children are likely to run amok unless you can
smother them with White Phosphorous. God forbid Israel might not be able to
massacre women and children at the drop of a hat. It would be an ‘astonishing decision to take against a key
UK ally and security partner’ Rosenberg proclaimed.Yet the sound of British Jews dissociating
themselves from these scoundrels is deafening in its silence.
For
all their memorials most Jews have learnt nothing from the Holocaust. This is Zionism.
Drawing universal lessons such as anti-racism might interfere with their
settler colonial project. If non-Jews in Europe had behaved in the same way as
Jews do today, then not 6 but 7 or 8 million Jews would have perished in the
Holocaust.
Labour Friends of Israel, funded by the Israeli Embassy, leapt into action at the prospect of Netanyahu facing the International Criminal Court for War Crimes
Support
for Israel, right or wrong, is a reflex action of most Jews. By their silence
British Jews are complicit in the genocide in Gaza. Unlike Germans under
Hitler, British Jews do not have the excuse of living in a state based on
police terror.
When
Britain’s Suella Braverman and Rishi Sunak claimed that marches against
genocide were anti-Semitic and that Jews were fearful
of entering inner London where were the protests? Most British Jews went along
with this nonsense and in the process what they did was to cement the
identification in the public mind between Israel’s atrocities and ordinary
Jews.
Jewish Bloc on Palestinian Demonstrations
That
these claims were evidence free, all the demonstrations had a Jewish bloc,
didn’t deter them in the slightest.Anti-racist
Jews are invisible to the British Establishment and their Zionist monkeys.
The
time has long gone when Jews could sit on the fence and proclaim their
indifference to what is done in their name. To be an onlooker when a Holocaust
is being perpetrated in your name is to take sides. As Archbishop Desmond Tutu said,
‘If you are neutral in situations of
injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.’
Most
British Jews know little about the holocaust. They rely on Simon Schama’s
coffee table books. They know even less about the Zionist record, not only
collaboration with the Nazis but their blocking of escape routes for Jews who tried
to get out of Europe.
As
in Gaza, the Warsaw Ghetto was subject to a siege. Some 92,000 Jews died as a
result of hunger even before the deportations. In Lodz, the second largest
ghetto, about 45,000 Jews died. In all some half a million Jews died of
hunger or starvation. This was deliberate Nazi policy. ‘Death by Hunger’ as
Hans Frank, the Nazi Governor General of Poland said. This is Israel’s template
today in Gaza.
In
July 1941 Zionist activists picketed
the offices of Agudat Israel in the USA in protest at them sending food parcels
to starving Jews in the Polish ghettos. Joseph Tenenbaum, a former
Vice-President of the American Jewish Committee, wrote that Jews must not
interfere with Britain’s war needs, ‘even
if this comes at the expense of victims in Poland or elsewhere.’ Zionists have
form in this sort of thing.
I
can remember debating with those on the Left who argued that it was
anti-Semitic to expect someone, just because they were Jewish, to take a
position on Zionism. Today when the so-called leaders of British and French
Jews openly
support what Israel is doing in Gaza, it is incumbent on Jews to speak out.
Silence is complicity.
The
Catholic Church was bitterly criticised for not having openly opposed the Nazi
Holocaust despite having been aware of it from an early stage. This was crystallised
in The
Deputy, the 1963 play by Rolf Hochhuth which portrayed Pope Pius XII as
having been indifferent to the extermination of the Jews.
What
then is one to make of Jews who remain silent when the Zionist puppet Ephraim
Mirvis openly supports the extermination of the Palestinians of Gaza and
protests against funding UNWRA?
The
situation today is that Palestinians are not only dying from bombs and bullets
but from Israel’s deliberate encouraging of the spread of disease.The Blocking of aid convoys means that Israel
is deliberately creating a famine and the conditions for disease to spread. Medical
researchers in the Lancet estimated that not 50,000 but 187,000
people – a tenth of Gaza’s population – have died. Jonathan Cook has suggested
that unless immediate action is taken then 600,000 will die. 600,000 is the figure
that Israel’s Ambassador in London, Tzipi Hotoveli, looked
forward to in an interview with Piers Morgan.
Despite
the Zionist outrage when I described Israel in 2019 as ‘Hitler’s Bastard Offspring’, my words have been proved correct. When
Israel’s war against the Palestinians began last October, ‘Defence’ Minister
Yoav Gallant called
the Palestinians ‘human animals.’
There were no protests at this by Mirvis or the Board despite it being first coined
by Heinrich Himmler, to describe Jews in in a speech to senior SS Officers in Poznań
on October 4 1943.
"The People of Israel Live, Finish Them" is a bumper sticker prominently seen on Israeli cars across occupied Palestine, which has recently exploded in popularity, explicitly calling for the genocide of the Palestinian people. #ICJ#southafrica#crimes#israel#gazapic.twitter.com/vkYaoUgAWL
Nor
was Gallant alone in identifying with the Nazis. ‘Finish them’ is the most popular car bumper sticker in Israel
today. When the war began Tel Aviv was flooded with stickers ‘exterminate now’. Former Likud MK
Moshe Feiglin compared
Hitler’s desire to annihilate every last Jew with Israel’s need to eliminate
every last Palestinian.
Israel
has based its claim to reparations from Germany on the fiction that it inherits
the memory of the Jews who died in the holocaust. The reality is that it
inherits the memory of those who killed the 6 million.
How
many Jews have walked out of a synagogue sermon when the rabbi defends what
Israel is doing? How many have openly criticised the Board of Deputies when
they justify Israel’s policy of starvation and its repeated massacres of a
civilian population?
Of
course there are many thousands of Jews who have refused to remain silent such
as those who participate in the Jewish bloc on the
demonstrations in London. But it has to be faced that the few thousand British
Jews who have participated in solidarity actions with the Palestinians are
still a small percentage of Britain’s Jews.
Zionism
and its interpretation of the holocaust have become, for most Jews a substitute
religion. From not wanting to know about the holocaust immediately after the
war, American Jews embraced holocaust theology at the same time as the United
States openly backed Israel post-67. During the McCarthy era mention of the
holocaust was seen as evidence of communist leanings.
How
is it that worship of god has been transformed into worship of real estate, the
preposterous claim that god gave the land of Palestine to the Jews? The
Prophets would have called this idolatry, a Golden Calf?
How
is it that Jews, who were once synonymous with the Left and subversion of the
established order - trade unionist, anarchists, socialists and communists – have
become the dupes and pawns of the Islamophobic far-Right?
The
unspoken assumption is that Jews today have nothing in common, apart from
religious rituals, with their counterparts in Eastern Europe a century ago. British
Jews today are completely dissimilar to Jews in the East End of the 1930s. When
anti-Semitism was a problem in Britain Jews naturally turned to the left – the Communist
Party and Independent Labour Party and assorted groups. The Labour Party dissociated
itself from the anti-fascist struggle.
In 1945 the only Communist
MP ever to have been elected in England, Phil Piratin, was elected for Mile End in the East End.Over half his votes were estimated to come from
Jews. When Geoffrey Alderman surveyed Jewish voters in Hackney for the 1979
general election, some 1.8% of Jews said they were voting for the neo-Nazi
National Front but none said they were voting for the CommunistParty.In other words not only have Jews become more
prosperous but they have moved to the right politically.
Anti-Semitism
– the False Anti-Racism of the Right
As
traditional anti-Semitism has disappeared so, in the minds of many Jews, anti-Zionism
is seen as opposition to their identity as Jews and anti-Semitism. But
opposition to identity is not racism. There are many groups in which female
genital mutilation [FGM] is seen as part of their culture. By this reasoning
opposition to FGM is also racism.
When
my father took part in the Battle
of Cable Street he didn’t need a definition of anti-Semitism. He knew what anti-Semitism
meant from daily life. The mere fact that the British and US governments have
pushed the definition so hard upon universities and other public bodies
testifies to its fraudulent and phony nature.
From
2015 onwards the CAA produced
an ‘Anti-Semitism Barometer’ which was criticised
even by other Zionists for its sloppy methodology.
Writing about this survey Anshel Pfeffer
accused
the CAA of an ‘eagerness
to see the anti-Semitism in Britain, which inarguably exists, as much more
widespread than it really is’. Pfeffer is a mainstream Zionist. About the finding that 56% of Jews
agree that “the recent rise in anti-Semitism in Britain has some echoes of
the 1930s.” Pfeffer remarked that:
If
the majority of British Jews and the authors of the CAA report actually believe
that, then it’s hard to take anything they say about contemporary anti-Semitism
in their home country seriously.... To compare today’s Britain, for all its
faults, with the Jews’ situation in 1930s exhibits a disconnect from reality
which borders on hysteria.
Since
the CAA, CST and the Metropolitan Police all use the IHRA
misdefinition of anti-Semitism then any statistics they produce can be
discarded as not merely unreliable but meaningless.
Last weekend an intimidating mob marched through London chanting “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” - a slogan that is widely understood as a demand for the destruction of Israel. Attempts to pretend otherwise are disingenuous. 1/3
Concern
about ‘anti-Semitism’ by racists like Suella Braverman has been used to both
flatter and frighten British Jews with the express purpose of claiming that
opposition to a key plan of British foreign policy, support for Israel, derives
from anti-Semitism.
Why
else would Sunak rush out of Downing Street when George Galloway was elected MP
to profess his concern
that ‘Jewish students were fearful to
wear their school uniforms’?The man
who made support for the Rwandan scheme for refugees his flagship policy.
What
is it about Jews that touches the depths of Braverman’s black heart when she
expressed no such concerns about the attacks on mosques and Muslims following
the murder of 3 girls in Southport?
Or
put it another way? Would Braverman, Jenrick and the rest of the Tory slime
have extended their support for Jewish refugees fleeing the pogroms at the end
of the 19th century?
According
to Matthew Hendley [Anti-alienism and the Primrose League, 250]
the late nineteenth
century critics of sweating "indulged in blatant racism, blaming foreign
immigrants (mainly East European Jews who settled in the principal industrial
areas) for causing sweating through their competition and low living standards.
In
the debate
on the Immigration of Destitute Aliens on 29 January 1902, William Evans-Gordon
MP had this to say:
"The main
cause of the present unpopularity of aliens in East London remains to be
stated. The inflow of the foreign Jew has brought with it an immense amount of
overcrowding, the direct and indirect effects of which have been alike
injurious. The number of families occupying one-roomed tenements is very great,
too many lodgers are received and illegally occupied basements are far too
common."
Mr
Forde Ridley followed up:
All they [British workers] know
is that they are being turned out of their homes and the neighbourhoods in
which they are obliged to live, in order to carry on their work, and that their
places are being taken by Russian and Polish Jews, and you cannot persuade them
that it is not a racial question. They naturally take a hatred to the Jewish
people.... It is argued by some that if a foreigner can live on so much less
than an Englishman, then it is high time that the British working man went to
the wall.
William Evans-Gordon,
the Tory MP for Stepney, formed the British
Brothers League in 1901 in order to keep Jewish immigrants out. In 1903,
Evans-Gordon wroteThe Alien Immigrant, in which he asserted that "the settlement of large aggregations of
Hebrews in a Christian land has never been successful", and that the
"Hebrew
colony ... unlike any other alien colony in [Great Britain], forms a solid and
permanently distinct block – a race apart, as it were, in an enduring island of
extraneous thought and custom", to the extent that "east of Aldgate one walks into a foreign
town".
Sound
familiar? This is what is said today about Muslims. The target may have changed
but the argument about different ‘races’ not mixing remains the same. In his
autobiography Chaim Weizmann, the future President of Israel wrote favourably
of Evans-Gordon:
our people
were rather hard on him. The Aliens Bill in England and the movement which grew
around it were natural phenomenon which might have been foreseen... Sir William
Evans-Gordon had no particular anti-Jewish prejudices... He acted as he
thought, according to his best lights and in the most kindly way, in the
interests of his country… he was sincerely ready to encourage any settlement of
Jews almost anywhere in the British Empire, but he failed to see why the
ghettos of London or Leeds or Whitechapel should be made into a branch of the
ghettos of Warsaw and Pinsk [Trial and
Error, pp. 90-91)
Stuart
Samuel, the Liberal MP for Whitechapel was opposed in 1900 by a Conservative,
David Hope-Kydd, who had the support of the English Zionist Federation.
Geoffrey Alderman described how Kydd
cleverly
coupled his desire for an aliens’ immigration bill with heart-rending support
for the infant Zionist movement.’Hope-Kydd referred to Jewish immigrants (aliens) as‘the
very scum of the unhealthiest of the Continental nations.’[The Jewish Community in British Politics,
pp. 68, 75]
The
BBL was instrumental in securing the passage in 1905 of the Aliens Act which aimed
to stop the entry of Jewish refugees from Czarist Russia.. Richard Thurlow wrotethat
If
Braverman and Sunak had been living at the beginning of the 20thcentury then the hostility they display to
refugees today would have been directed with equal venom against Jewish
refugees.
Today
British Jews are the most prosperous segment of the White population and also
the most reactionary and racist. If a survey was conducted of attitudes of Jews
to Moslems it would show that Islamaphobia and anti-Arab racism was off the
scale.
Even
without a scientific survey there are intimations of this. In January 2022 the
Senior Vice-President of the Board of Deputies, Gary Mond, was forced
to resign. Mond had written
on Facebook and tweeted
that ‘all
civilization’ is ‘at war with Islam.’
Mond is also a trustee of the Jewish National Fund-UK, as is Gideon Falter, its
Vice Chair and CEO of the Campaign
Against Anti-Semitism.
In July
2018 the BOD suspended
Roslyn Pine for describing Arabs as “the
vilest of animals.” Three years previously Pine had said that it was a pity
that the pro-Palestinian Swedish foreign minister was “too old to be raped.” She has also called fellow deputies “kapos.”
Jewish
News reported
that ‘the Board’s executive ruled that
she could return early if she apologised, showed contrition and expressed
remorse’. Contrast that with the life-time expulsions that the BOD demanded
for Labour members expelled for ‘anti-Semitism’.
What was
the reaction of Finchley United Synagogue? Did it change its representative? It
was reported
that
Finchley Synagogue will look into the
plight of its suspended deputy Roslyn Pine as a matter of “urgency”.
Note that
word ‘plight’.
There
are many reasons for the changing political allegiances of British and European
Jews. One of the most important is socio-economic. Jews have almost entirely
emigrated from the East End of London to the north London suburbs such as
Golders Green.
According
to Alderman by 1961, over 40% of Anglo-Jewry was to be found in the upper two
social classes compared to less than 20% of the general population.’ William
Rubinstein, a past President of the Jewish Historical Society, wrote
that:
The rise of
Western Jewry to unparalleled affluence and high status has led to the
near-disappearance of a Jewish proletariat of any size; indeed, the Jews may
become the first ethnic group in history without a working class of any size. [The Left, the Right and the Jews. p.51]
It has long been the
practice to accuse supporters of the Palestinians and opponents of Zionism,
including Jewish anti-Zionists of 'anti-Semitism'.... Today the
New Right claim to be opponents of anti-Semitism. ... Reagan's Republican Party... voted at its 1984
Party Convention to condemn anti-Semitism unanimously. Even neo-fascist groups,
eg. the French cultural and academic racist group, GRECE, opposes
'anti-Semitism'.’
Anti-Semitism was the new and false anti-Semitism
of the Right and one reason for this is because it barely exists.
Anti-Semitism is an extremely useful weapon with which to attack the Left and
the Palestine Solidarity Movement and that is what we are experiencing
today.
Many
on the left, were slow to understand this. It became clearer when
‘anti-Semitism’ became the main weapon used against Jeremy Corbyn as leader of
the Labour Party.
How
was this possible? Quite simply as Jews changed so did anti-Semitism. Racism changes
its contours. It doesn’t stand still. Yesterday’s victims of racism may be
today’s racists.
We
can see that clearly with people like Priti Patel and Braverman, both of whose
parents were immigrants. When the Jews of the East End faced the violent
anti-Semitism of Moseley and the British Union of Fascists, their allies were
the left and ordinary workers. In
October 1936 at the Battle
of Cable Street an estimated 200,000 demonstrators successfully defied the
attempts of the Metropolitan Police to force a path through the East End for
the fascists. The march had been approved by the Tory Home Secretary Sir John
Simon.
Today
the Met purport to oppose anti-Semitism but at that time their ranks were full
to the brim with BUF sympathisers. Racism towards Jews has been replaced by
hostility to Muslims in police ranks.
The
same is true of the Tory Party. Until recently the Tory Party was infested by
anti-Semitism.Zionism’s hero, Arthur James
Balfour was a dedicated racist and anti-Semite. As Prime Minister he introduced
the Aliens Act 1905.
During
a conversation with Weizmann, Balfour recalled an exchange with Cosima Wagner,
the widow of Richard Wagner. Balfour explained that ‘he shared many of her anti-Semitic postulates.’ Instead of
protesting Weizmann
‘pointed out
that we, too… had drawn attention to the fact that Germans of the Mosaic
persuasion were an undesirable and demoralizing phenomenon…’ [Leonard Stein, The Balfour Declaration p. 154].
During
the 1930s the Tory Party was riddled with anti-Semitism. The pro-Nazi Anglo-German
Fellowship claimed
among its members, fifty members of both Houses of Parliament and ‘many
generals, admirals, bishops and bankers.’
This
was why The Times (along with most of
the British press including the pro-Hitler Daily
Mail) and the BBC refused to allow criticism of Hitler’s anti-Semitism to
interfere with their coverage of German affairs. When anti-Semitism was a
genuine form of state racism, the mainstream press weren’t interested. Today
when ‘anti-Semitism’ means criticism of Israel then the media are all over it.
One
of the most ardent pro-Zionist politicians was Winston Churchill.Apart from warm words of sympathy he did
nothing to help alleviate the plight of Jews under Nazi occupation, still less
to admit to British territories Jewish refugees who had escaped the Nazis.
In
a speech in Sunderland in January 1920 Churchill spoke
of ‘the international Soviet of the
Russian and Polish Jew’. Churchill
was espousing a version of the international Jewish conspiracy theory.
Churchill followed this up in 1920 with Bolshevism v
Zionism in the Illustrated Sunday
Herald where he stressed how important it was
that the
national Jews in every country who are loyal to the land of their adoption
should come forward on every occasion, as many of them in England have already
done, and take a prominent part in every measure for combating the Bolshevik
conspiracy.
Churchill’s
answer to the support among Jewish people for socialism was Zionism. The Nazis
too saw Zionism, in Hitler’s words, as ‘a
great movement’. (Mein Kampf, p.41).Zionism has always been a racist and counter-revolutionary movement.
Long
before Zionism took hold amongst British Jews it had become the adopted policy
of the British Establishment. The only
member of the Lloyd George War Cabinet to oppose the Balfour Declaration
was Sir Edwin Montagu, its only Jewish member.
The organisation that is charged with monitoring and
collating statistics of anti-Semitism is the Mossad Project, the Community
Security Trust. As Tony Lerman documented in his essay Antisemitism Redefined in the 1990’s the Israeli state moved to
take over the monitoring of statistics on anti-Semitism. Lerman wrote
I had
close personal experience of the role the Mossad played in establishing Israeli
hegemony over the monitoring and combating of antisemitism. While I was
director of the Institute of Jewish Affairs (IJA)... in the 1990s, I founded
and was principal editor of the annual Antisemitism World Report, the
first objective, independent , country-by-country survey of anti semitism
worldwide. The London Mossad representative dealing with antisemitism made it
clear to me that they were very unhappy about our independent operation and
then tried to pressure us into either ceasing publication or merging our report
with one that the then new Project for the Study of Antisemitism at Tel Aviv
University, headed by Professor Dina Porat and part-financed by the Mossad, was
beginning to produce. [On Anti-Semitism,
p.12].
Every
year the CST produces Anti-Semitism
Incident Reports and every year it documents a continuing increase in anti-Semitism.
This fits in well with Zionist ideology that holds that Jews will never be safe
living outside Israel which is their ‘real home’.
Sure
enough their report
for 2023 found that ‘anti-Jewish hate
recorded across the UK in 2023... is the highest annual total ever reported to
CST.’ What even the CST could not avoid is the conclusion that it is
Israel’s attacks on Palestinians which is responsible for this increase. In
other words the ‘Jewish’ State is the main cause of anti-Semitism today. They
wrote that:
These spikes
(in anti-Semitism) also reflected the surge in anti-Jewish reactions to the
escalation of conflicts involving Israel. In 2023, the increase in antisemitism
following 7 October occurred on a larger scale. Between 1 January and 6
October, CST had recorded an average of five antisemitic incidents per day;
from 7 October to 31 December, this rose to an average of 31 antisemitic
incidents per day.
Note
how the reaction of people to Israel’s genocide is termed ‘anti-Jewish’. I
shall leave a detailed analysis of their figures to Alan Maddison’s article
for JVL ‘Will the latest CST report do more to protect British Jews or Israel?’ I have just one observation.
The CST report recorded
266 incidents of Assault in 2023, a rise of 96% from the 136 incidents reported
in 2022. They tell us that this was ‘the
most ever recorded in a year.’So if
the CST are right then two Jewish people will be attacked every three days.
This figure is, in itself, quite strange because the CST tells us that there
were 4,103 incidents of anti-Semitic hate in 2023.
Normally,
for other examples of racism, assault forms about a third of total incidents
which suggests that the CST are vastly over inflating the number of
anti-Semitic incidents and padding them out with social media posts which are
unquantifiable.What is even stranger is
that not one ‘of these incidents was
severe enough to be classed as Extreme Violence, compared to one incident in
2022.’ Extreme violence is where there is a case of actual or grievous
bodily harm. In other words not one Jewish person was actually hurt in 2023 and
just one was hurt in 2022.Compare these
figures to attacks on Muslims.
The CST's Opposition to 'anti-Semitism' didn't stop it inviting Britain's racist Home Secretary as its Guest of Honour
The CST’s decision to invite
Braverman as the guest speaker at its 2023 Annual Dinner, gives the lie to CST’s
claim to oppose racism.
In
a parliamentary
debate on Tackling Islamaphobia we learn that almost half of religiously
motivated attacks last year were against Muslims, a trend that has stayed
consistent for the last six years. 42% of mosques have experienced some form of
attack over the last three years (Andy Slaughter MP). I doubt if even 1% of
synagogues have been attacked. The scenes outside Southport, Hartlepool and
other mosques have never occurred outside synagogues yet the Home Office channels
£15m into the coffers of the CST, consistently greater than that to tackle
Islamaphobia. Why? Because the British State has an interest in promoting the
idea that ‘anti-Semitism’ is on the increase as a way of buttressing support
for Israel. Jews are the moral alibi for a central plank of British foreign
policy.
Although the BOD is very concerned about
‘anti-Semitism’ today it wasn’t always like that. In 1942 when news about the deportation
of Jews from Slovakia to Auschwitz emerged, the Federation of Czechoslovakian
Jews published a protest against what was happening. It asked the BOD to join
with them. The Board refused.
It
would seem that Brodetsky and his colleagues wished to maintain a distance
between themselves and the organisations of recent arrivals, whose demands went
against the grain of the BD policy which was to work ‘decently’ and refrain
from making noise.
In June 1942 the Federation held a
public rally. ‘Invitations were sent to
Brodestsky and Brotman but they declined to attend.’ Selig Brodetsky was
elected as the first Zionist President of the Board in December 1939 and Brotman
was its Secretary. Meier Sompolinsky wrote about how
‘the
shrewd action of the World Federation of Czechoslovakian Jews made a strong
impression and led to a conflict between the advocates of the quiet and the
public approaches....
At
the demonstration Rabbi Hertz, as chairman, expressed disappointment at
Brodetsky’s absence. Even (Anthony) Eden (Britain’s Foreign Secretary) and
Cardinal Hinsley, the Catholic primate had sent statements to be read in
public, but all the president of British Jewry did was to send an indirect
letter.
Sompolinsky comments that
The
way the Slovakian issue was handled was characteristic of the hesistant
approach of the JFC [Joint Foreign Committee of the Board of Deputies] in the
period before the Final Solution became public knowledge. [Meier Sompolinsky, The British Government and the Holocaust - The
failure of Anglo-Jewish Leadership, pp. 68-9, 1999]
When it came to opposing genuine anti-Semites the Board of Deputies has always run away from opposing them
This
has been the reaction of the BOD throughout its history. In 1936 it opposed Jews
taking part in the Battle of Cable Street. The BOD opposed the 43 Group of Jewish
ex-servicemen who physically put Moseley and his Union Movement to flight after
the war. During the 1960s and 1970s, when the NF was active, the BOD told Jews
to keep silent. The only form of ‘anti-Semitism’ that the BOD has ever been
prepared to be vocal about is opposition to Zionism and Israel.
The
first time the Board held a demonstration against ‘anti-Semitism’ was in 2018
when Corbyn was leader! Last year they also held a demonstration against
‘anti-Semitism’ – this time in support of genocide in Gaza. This is
the reality of the ‘anti-Semitism’ scare. It is about keeping British Jews as
their docile political pets.
It
means British Jews like Heidi Bachram, a Jewish Chronicle correspondent in
Brighton and Hove, acting as a spy for the British police against Palestinian
solidarity activists. This is a continuation of a long and inglorious Jewish tradition
which began when Haganah agent Feivel Polkes acted as a Gestapo agent informing
on the left. Thousands of Jews living under cover were betrayed to the Nazis by
Jewish informers, such as Icek
Glogowski (Fat Jacques). Jewish informers were far more effective than
their non-Jewish counterparts because many Jews in hiding trusted them. Zionism
informers today carry on the tradition.
French
Jews support for Le Pen
One
example of how Jews in Western Europe have moved to the right is the recent
elections in France. Contrary to all expectations the Left came out on top and
Marie Le Pen’s National Renewal came third. You might expect that French Jews
were overjoyed that a party founded by a holocaust denier and containing many
anti-Semites had been defeated. Not a bit of it. Many
French Jews voted for them and according to the Israeli press they were
most disappointed that the ‘anti-Semitic’ left came out on top.
Zionism
has managed to transform the far-right enemies of Jews into their friends and
the left, who hid Jews from the Nazis in France, into their enemies. Not only
are Western Jews the most racist, right-wing section of the White population,
they are also the most stupid.
