40 years ago Bobby Sands MP died on hunger strike for the crime of taking up arms against Britain’s occupation in Ireland

The recent Loyalist riots should remind us that the Good Friday Agreement was a palliative not a solution – only the end of Partition will achieve that

Yesterday was the anniversary of the death of Bobby Sands, MP for Fermanagh and South Tyrone. Sands died on hunger strike 40 years ago. Despite being elected to parliament he was allowed to die because Thatcher was determined not to concede to demands for political status for the IRA prisoners.

 In the end the demands of the hunger strikers were conceded because even the stupidest member of the British ruling class came to understand that their intransigence had simply resulted in massively increased support for the IRA and Sinn Fein. In 1983 Gerry Adams was elected as MP for West Belfast displacing Gerry Fitt ‘the Brit’.

Of course Bobby Sands was deemed a ‘terrorist’ as have all those who took up arms against the British in the colonies.  And Ireland was our oldest colony. If you are a British racist then the British army could do no wrong wherever it ventured whereas those who took up arms against it were always in the wrong.

Israel has the same policy today. Anyone who opposes Israel’s occupation army is considered a terrorist whereas Israel, despite its atrocities against children even is never considered a terrorist state.

However the days of Unionism are numbered. Britain no longer has a strategic interest in maintaining the union. British investment today is in the South not the North.  The shipyards and engineering factories of Belfast are gone. That is why successive governments from Harold Wilson onwards have refused to resurrect the Protestant Supremacist police statelet that existed between 1921 and 1969.

Brexit has produced some uncomfortable truths for the Unionists. Large sections of the Protestant farming community look towards the South and the European Union today, not the mainland. That is why Boris Johnson, despite promises to the contrary, reneged on his promises to the DUP and placed a tariff border down the Irish sea in order that Northern Ireland could stay in the customs union.

The days of the Unionist veto are long since gone. The Protestant community itself was split during the 2016 referendum over Europe. The DUP, being a stupid party, never thought that Brexit would hasten the end of Unionism.

There is probably a majority for Irish unity today in the north of Ireland. I would expect that if such a referendum were held and Boris Johnson will resist one to the end, that a chunk of the Protestant community would also vote to unite.

History is against the Loyalists of Ulster. They are an anachronism of the Empire. The days of the Curragh Mutiny are long since gone. Of course the Protestant paramilitaries would promise civil war and violence should a referendum be held on the border.

When I visited Northern Ireland in the 1980s as part of a Labour Party delegation from Brighton we visited the headquarters of the UDA, a Protestant terrorist group who were legal at the time, because some forms of terrorism were acceptable to the British army.

Speaking to Andy Tyrie, the commander and John MacMichael, who was later assassinated by the IRA, was like being taken back in time. They looked to the golden days of Empire. They told us of the days in Liverpool when there was a sectarian Protestant party on the Council which allied with the Tories never asking themselves why working class people should vote Tory. In Liverpool that party disappeared but not in Northern Ireland.

The Protestant working class voted against its own interests and for Unionist parties allied to the Tories since 1922. That is the effect of settler colonialism. It creates an alliance between the settler working class and ruling class even if, as in the case of Northern Ireland the privileges that the Protestant working class gained over their Catholic neighbours were minimal.

The Good Friday agreement which ended the struggle of the IRA and led to a power sharing agreement in the Northern Ireland Assembly was in essence a palliative. The British ruling class was under immense pressure from the American ruling class  to resolve the crisis, which Blair did. However the situation in the North has not been resolved as the latest riots demonstrated.

Beneath the surface the old antagonisms remain. The Protestant working class is embittered that they have been ‘sold out’ as if the British ruling class every owed any loyalty to those who pledged fealty to them.

At the heart of the problem is the border, Partition. Of course today it is a notional border without customs posts. It is a border without any natural geographical features such as rivers.  Its basis for existing was the need to produce an artificial majority for the Protestants in the North.

As James Connolly, the revolutionary socialist who was executed for his part in the Easter Rising said, Partition would create ‘a carnival of reaction on both sides of the border’. He was of right in his prediction Not only in Ireland but India, Cyprus and Palestine. Partition and communalism were the favourite divide and rule tactics of the British in their efforts to maintain neo-colonial rule.

The British working class has never been distinguished by its support for the struggle of Irish people or the IRA but during the miners’ strike, when there were massive confrontations with the British state, the Police and reputedly the army in civilian uniforms, this began to break down,

I worked closely with miners from Kent coalfield and visited and stayed with strikers in Yorkshire. I heard repeatedly the same sentiment after the failed IRA attack on the Grand Hotel in Brighton in 1984: ‘Pity they didn’t get her.’ Indeed to my surprise, as I was volunteering in an old peoples’ home at the time (when Councils ran such things) one of the cooks in the kitchen expressed her disappointment that Thatcher had survived.

During the bitterest episode of class struggle in the last century, elements of the British working class began to see that the struggle of colonial peoples against the British ruling class was also their struggle.

Below is  the article I wrote last year and beneath that Peter Bolton’s article in the Canary.

Tony Greenstein

The Stupidity of Thatcher and the British Government in Refusing Political Status for Republican Prisoners led to the growth of Sinn Fein North and South

Bobby Sands wasn’t the first Irish hunger striker nor was he the last to die. Terence MacSwiney, the elected Sinn Fein Mayor of Cork, died in Brixton prison in October 1920 after 74 days on hunger strike. He had been arrested by the British government on a charge of sedition, a clearly political ‘crime’. 10 hunger strikers died in 1981.

Roy Mason, Labour's Northern Ireland Secretary, behaved like a typical British Colonial Secretary

Their demands were for the  return of political status which had been removed on March 1 1976 by Merlyn Rees, Labour’s Northern Ireland Minister. He was succeeded by the hated Roy Mason who was worse than any Tory imperialist ruler.

At first the reaction to the removal of political status was the blanket and dirty protest where faeces were spread on the walls.  Eventually that led to the hunger strikes. The behaviour of Roy Mason in provoking what became the hunger strikes led to the defeat of the Labour government when Frank MacGuire, the Independent Republican MP for Fermanagh and South Tyrone abstained in person.

Of course there are racists and imperialist dupes who chime up that the IRA were ‘men of violence’ and ‘terrorists’. The same people have no problem in supporting the ‘men of violence’ when it comes to the invasion of Iraq, the bombing of Libya, Israel’s war against the Palestinian people and any other imperial adventures. But when people fight back against colonialism and imperialism it is terrorism.  The same is true in Palestine.  The only ‘terrorists’ are the Palestinians, never the Israeli state.

The 10 Hunger Strikers Who Died

During the 16^th and 17^th centuries Ireland and in particular Ulster was subject to the Plantation, the colonisation of Ireland by thousands of settlers from Britain, Scotland in particular. This was enabled through the confiscation, i.e. theft of land from the indigenous population. This Protestant population was then used as a foil by the British state in order to undermine and subvert Irish unity.

The same happened in Palestine with the settlement of Jews from Europe and it is what the Indian government today is intending to do in Kashmir.

Bobby Sands funeral cortege accompanied by 6 IRA men

I was a member of the Troops Out Movement and I arrived on a fact finding/solidarity tour on 8^th August 1981 as the 9^th hunger striker, Thomas McElwee died.  I’ll never forget the scene on the Falls Road, the main road through the Catholic ghetto of West Belfast, with hundreds of women banging dustbin lids on the road to announce the death.

Here was a working class community basically in insurrection. I had never seen anything like this and wasn’t to see anything like it until I stayed during the miners’ strike in the South Yorkshire village of Armthorpe in December 1984.  Armthorpe had been subject to a siege by the corrupt and murderous South Yorkshire Police.

Although he died, it was Bobby Sands who won out against Thatcher

The British strategy in Northern Ireland was criminalisation. According to this fiction the IRA and INLA were merely common criminals like any bank robber. This has always been the reaction of the British to colonial uprisings. Whether it was the Indian Mutiny or the Mau Mau Uprising in Kenya the only reason that people rebelled against British rule was for base criminal reasons. There was nothing political about it. This was the self-deception that the British comforted themselves with. It was an illusion and a lie.

The 5 Demands

The fact is that the Catholic population of Northern Ireland had never accepted the constitutional set up.  In 1918 Sinn Fein won the all-Ireland general election winning 73 out of 105 seats. The Liberal government under Asquith had refused to implement the Home Rule Act of 1914 as a consequence of the Curragh Mutiny by army officers. After the Easter Rising in 1917 and Sinn Fein's election victory, which the British refused to accept, there began the war of independence.

There was a civil war in the Free State in Southern Ireland between 1922 and 1923. The British had threatened war and destruction unless the Irish accepted Partition. Partition, the favourite solution of imperialism to its divide and rule tactics in settler colonies, was imposed on the Irish people. The nationalist population of the north of Ireland had never accepted Partition and the IRA was the consequence.

Some of the thousands of mourners at Bobby Sands funeral

Partition has had disastrous consequences wherever it has been imposed in the world, be it Cyprus or India or indeed Palestine. As James Connolly predicted, Partition

would mean a carnival of reaction both North and South, would set back the wheels of progress, would destroy the oncoming unity of the Irish Labour movement and paralyse all advanced movements whilst it endured.

The Northern Ireland police statelet was created in 1921 and until 1972, when direct rule was imposed, there was what was called a Protestant state for a Protestant people with gerrymandering widespread. For example in Derry, there was a perpetual Unionist council even though Catholics formed the majority of the population by the simple device of making Catholic wards larger.

 

There grew up a civil rights movement in northern Ireland. In 1967 the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association was formed. It was a completely peaceful movement but it was met with state and unionist violence.

On 4 January 1969 a People's Democracy march from Belfast to Derry was violently attacked at Burntollet Bridge. This was the beginning of the Troubles in Northern Ireland.

 

The march had been called in defiance of an appeal by Northern Ireland Prime Minister Terence O'Neill for an end to protest. The Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association and some Derry nationalists had advised against it. Supporters of Ian Paisley, led by Major Ronald Bunting , denounced the march and mounted counter-demonstrations along the route.

At Burntollet an Ulster loyalist crowd numbering in the region of 300, including 100 off-duty members of the Ulster Special Constabulary (USC), attacked the civil rights marchers with stones as well as iron bars and sticks spiked with nails. Nearby members of the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) did nothing to prevent the violence.

In the Battle of the Bogside, from 12-14 August the B-Specials, an all-Protestant paramilitary force and Unionists tried to invade what became Free Derry. It was repelled by a civil insurrection and barricades were thrown up. It was a colonial rebellion by the Catholics of the north. It was euphemistically called ‘The Troubles’. 

At that time there was no IRA.  The IRA was reformed and split into the Officials ‘stickies’ and Provisionals.  The former claimed to be Marxist but ended up as the right-wing Workers Party in Southern Ireland. In 1969 the IRA stood for ‘I Ran Away’.

In 1981 the Hunger Strike began on March 1^st with Bobby Sands, the officer commanding the IRA in Long Kesh refusing his breakfast. On March 5^th the sitting nationalist MP Frank MacGuire died.  Bobby Sands was nominated in the by-election that followed and he defeated the sole Unionist candidate, Harry West by some 1,400 votes. Sands never took his seat.  He died 26 days later.

This was the context in which the hunger strikes took place and the sacrifice of Bobby Sands and the other 9 men.  Eventually the relatives of the hunger strikers insisted that the strike was called off but the demands were effectively won by then. In any event the British government had lost politically and northern Ireland would never be the same again. 

The hunger strike led to the rise of Sinn Fein and in 1983 Gerry Adams was elected as the MP for West Belfast defeating the sitting MP, Gerry ‘the Brit’ Fitt. The continual accusation by supporters of Britain’s occupation was that the IRA didn’t have the support of the Catholic population. The election of Bobby Sands by the voters of Fermanagh and South Tyrone and then the victory of Gerry Adams proved once and for all that the IRA had the passive, if not active, support of the working class Catholic population of Northern Ireland.

In the succeeding years the right-wing Social Democratic and Labour Party, the ‘moderate’ nationalist party, was eclipsed and Sinn Fein became the majority party of the Catholic population.

British colonialism has always been led by stupid and arrogant imperialists and none was more stupid than Thatcher who believed that her attempts to criminalise the Republican struggle would somehow stop the march of history.

With the Good Friday Agreement under Blair in 1998 the violence in Northern Ireland stopped, at least for the time being but as long as Ireland is partitioned, there will never be peace.

Below is an excellent article from Canary.

Tony Greenstein

We should never forget Bobby Sands, nor the brutality of the Thatcher government in Ireland

Today marks the 40^th anniversary of the death of Bobby Sands inside the H-blocks of Long Kesh internment camp. On 5 May 1981, Sands laid down his life for his and his comrades’ right for recognition as political prisoners. On this day, we should remember the sacrifice he made for the cause of Irish freedom. But his struggle does not just provide an example that all anti-imperialists should follow. It also serves as an important reminder of the ruthless brutality of the British government in Ireland under the leadership of then-prime minister Margaret Thatcher. And that is equally something that we should never forget.

‘Criminalisation’ leads to ‘blanket protest’

On 1 March, 1976, the British government announced an end to ‘Special Category’ status for members of paramilitary organisations imprisoned for offences related to the conflict in Ireland. This formed part of a multi-pronged propaganda strategy to falsely portray the republican insurrection against British rule as some kind of aggravated crime wave.

In response, republican prisoners began a series of protests to regain the lost privileges, as well as the symbolic importance of prisoner of war status. This included the right to wear one’s own clothes, free association and exemption from prison work. IRA volunteer Kieran Nugent began the ‘blanket protest’ when he refused to wear a prison uniform. Thrown into his cell naked, he draped himself in the only thing available – a grey, prison-issue blanket.

The ‘dirty protest’ and the 1980 hunger strike

After suffering beatings from prison officers on their way to the shower areas, republican prisoners began the ‘no wash protest’, in which they refused to bathe, cut their hair or shave. When prison officers refused to empty their chamber pots, republican prisoners were forced to smear their own excrement on the walls, which marked the beginning of the ‘dirty protest’.

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In 1979, their prospects became even bleaker with the election of the right-wing government of Margaret Thatcher in Britain. When it became clear that Thatcher wouldn’t grant even the most modest of concessions, republican prisoners began a hunger strike in 1980. It ended without any deaths when her government appeared to concede some of the strikers’ demands. But the document containing the terms of the agreement turned out to be vague and open to interpretation, and the prison regime was quickly returned to a situation little better than how it was before.

A second hunger strike, and this time to the death

Determined not to be double-crossed again, the new Officer Commanding (OC) of the republican prisoners, 27-year-old Bobby Sands, launched a second hunger strike with a crucial difference from the last. The strikers would stagger their joining of the fast one-by-one and two weeks apart so that each would near death one at a time. As OC, Sands volunteered to go first, making him the most likely to die. On 1 March, 1981, Sands refused his prison food, beginning the second hunger strike in Long Kesh just over two months after the end of the first.

On 5 March, less than a week into Sands’ fast, Frank Maguire, the independent nationalist member of parliament for Fermanagh and South Tyrone, died suddenly and unexpectedly, leaving his seat in Westminster vacant. The republican leadership on the outside hatched a plan. They were forever getting dismissed by political opponents for not having a mandate, but if they stood Sands as a candidate in the resultant by-election and won, they could demonstrate to the British government and the wider world that the hunger strikers’ demands had popular support in the community.

A bittersweet victory

On 9 April 1981, Bobby Sands won the election with over 30,000 votes – almost 10,000 more than Thatcher had won in her home constituency of Finchley in the 1979 UK general election. The victory provided the republican movement with a powerful morale boost and demolished the British government’s argument that they had no support.

But in spite of Sands’ victory, along with international pressure from the Irish diaspora abroad and others around the world, Thatcher refused to budge. On May 5, 1981, Bobby Sands died of starvation 66 days into his fast at 27 years of age. Over 100,000 mourners lined his cortege in one of the largest political funerals in Irish history.

International outcry

Sands’ death led to international outcry at the treatment of the prisoners and Thatcher’s intransigence in meeting their demands. Critics pointed out that as members of a guerrilla army operating in contested territory, republican prisoners were entitled under the Geneva Convention to be recognised as prisoners of war. One letter, sent from one Bernard Sanders (then-mayor of Burlington, Vermont in the US), stated:

We are deeply disturbed by your government’s unwillingness to stop the abuse, humiliation and degrading treatment of the Irish prisoners now on strike in Northern Ireland…

We ask you to end your intransigent policy towards the prisoners before the reputation of the English people for fair play and simple decency is further damaged in the eyes of the people of Vermont and the United States.

In October 1981, the British government eventually conceded most of the prisoners’ demands; but not before nine more republican hunger strikers had followed Sands to the grave.

This episode perhaps shows more than any other the utter depravity, brutality, ruthlessness and lack of humanity that lurked within the twisted soul of Margaret Thatcher. All but one of the men were under 30 years old and left behind grieving mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters and, in some cases, children – all for the ‘crime’ of fighting back against foreign oppression and discrimination in their own country.

The Community Security Trust’s Statistics on Antisemitic Incidents are Fake, False and Fraudulent

Reply to a Labour Zionist on the Pensive Quill

I was alerted to criticism on the Pensive Quill by Barry Gilheany, a member of the Jewish Labour Movement. Out of curiosity more than anything else, I discovered that the site was a Republican blog run by Anthony McIntyre, a former member of the Provisional IRA. It has on its masthead Dolours Price, one half of the  Price sisters who were gaoled for bombing the Old Bailey in 1973 and Brendan Hughes who initiated the hunger strikes in the 1980’s. Both had an involvement in The Blanket, a republican journal. 

Sir Ronald Storrs

I found it strange and still do that a Zionist should write for a Republican blog since Zionism and Unionism are siamese twins. Ronald Storrs, the first Military Governor of Jerusalem, wrote in his autobiography, Orientations, that the Zionist settlement in Palestine was ‘a little loyal Ulster in a sea of hostile pan-Arabism.’ The insertion of the Jewish settler colonial project into the Arab heartland was designed to ghfurther imperialist designs just as the creation of a Protestant Supremacist state in Ireland had done.

The Unionist parties, whose litmus test is support for a Protestant supremacist state in the north of Ireland, have always supported Zionism.
When the Zionists held a demonstration against ‘anti-Semitism’ in March 2018, DUP MP Ian Paisley jnr. and his fellow MPs joined the demonstration.  Paisley's father was a notorious supporter of Israel.

Conversely the Republicans have always been supporters of the Palestinians.  When I visited the nationalist ghettos in Belfast and Derry during The Troubles in the 1970’s and 1980’s they were festooned with murals supporting the Palestinians.  When, as part of a Brighton Labour Party delegation to Ireland we visited Andy Tyrie, the Commander of the Ulster Defence Association and John MacMichael (who was later assassinated) they told us of how they identified with the Israelis and saw the PLO as the equivalent of the ‘terrorists’ in the IRA whom they were fighting.

Gilheany based his article on anti-Semitism on the fake and fraudulent statistics of the Zionist Community Security Trust’s January-June 2019 Anti-Semitic Incidents Report. It is clear that this Report has been carefully scripted in order to provide a weapon to the Labour Party Witchhunt. It states:

There were 102 antisemitic incidents reported by CST that targeted Jewish organisations and events, rising by 59 per cent from the 64 such incidents reported between January and June 2018. This increase can largely be accounted for in the online response to Jewish leadership organisations issuing statements on social media regarding antisemitism in the Labour Party. Many of these antisemitic reactions were in the wider context of ‘smear’ accusations, spoke of conspiracy and attempted to delegitimise clear evidence of antisemitism; while others specifically targeted the social media accounts of Jewish organisations to respond to statements about antisemitism in the UK by holding these British Jewish organisations responsible for the actions of the Israeli government

The CST's founder and Chair Gerald Ronson,  who was gaoled for a year during the Guiness fraud trial - with friend

This is tendentious. Who were these ‘Jewish’ organisations?  The Board of Deputies presumably. What was the ‘clear evidence of anti-Semitism’ that was being delegitimized?  Criticism of Israel? Attacks by the Board on Chris Williamson?  We are not told but what we do know is that from their previous record the CST is closely linked to the Israeli state. The CST Report states that

In 100 cases - 11 per cent of all antisemitic incidents recorded by CST from January to June 2019 – the offender or offenders, and the abuse they expressed, were related to the Labour Party or the incidents occurred in the context of arguments about alleged Labour Party antisemitism.

This is guilt by association. The antisemitic incidents 'were related to the Labour Party.' In what way?  How? Were the persons concerned Labour Party members? Leaving aside just what constituted an antisemitic incideint . Without further details we have no way of knowing what it was that was being said, what the relationship (if any) was to the Labour Party and whether, like all Zionist organisations, CST is deliberately obfuscating and confusing the difference between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism.

Reply to Barry Gilheany of the Jewish Labour Movement

Anthony McIntyre, now a journalist runs the Pensive Quill blog

The fact that the ‘increase’ in incidents of ‘anti-Semitism’ are wholly related to social media and the Internet suggests that this Report has one purpose and one purpose only.  To add oil to the fire of false accusations of anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism used to be about discrimination, physical assaults, verbal abuse.  Now it appears to be a hostile tweet.

What would be interesting is if the CST or better still some independent organisation was to monitor and evaluate the degree of racism in the Jewish community against Muslims in particular.  My suspicion is that it would far outweigh any anti-Semitism, fake or actual, that is alleged in non-Jewish people.  However such a poll would not be politically convenient so it is doubtful anyone will be sponsoring it!
The Pensive Quill carried my rejoinder to Gilheany two days ago.

Tony Greenstein

My Response to Barry Gilheany of the JLM

Barry Gilheany in his article Labour Anti-Semitism & The IHRA Definition Of Antisemitism - Prevention Of Hate Crime Versus Freedom Of Speech reminds me of a fox entering a chicken coop to preach the virtues of vegetarianism. I would as soon take lessons on anti-racism from the British National Party as the Jewish Labour Movement.

I was brought up in a religious Zionist home with a father as a Rabbi. Despite this, by the age of 16, I realised that Marxism, which believes in the unity of the working class and universal principles of solidarity, was incompatible with Zionism which sees the unity of Jews as its guiding principle. To Zionism there is only one question: ‘is it good for the Jews’.

The Jewish Labour Movement is affiliated to the World Zionist Organisation whose Settlement Division has as its purpose the financing of settlements in the Occupied West Bank of Palestine. See ‘World Zionist Organization Settlement Division Finances Illegal West Bank Outposts’ There is nothing socialist about the JLM. It is akin to the now forgotten Liverpool Protestant Party.

The development of Unionism and Zionism followed very similar lines.  In 1921 Ireland was partitioned. In 1920 the Mandate of Palestine effectively began. The Colonial Secretary presiding over the birth of both Unionism and Zionism was Winston Churchill.

Zionism was the bastard cousin of Irish Unionism. As Sir Ronald Storrs, the first Military Governor of Jerusalem explained in his autobiography Orientations, ‘A Jewish State will be for England a little, loyal Ulster in a sea of potentially hostile Arabism’.  

But I forget. Gilheaney’s concern is not Israel or Zionism but anti-Semitism. The fact that he is a member of an overtly pro-Zionist organisation, the Jewish Labour Movement, is merely coincidental. He tells us that ‘the Jewish charity, the Community Security Trust’  has reported an increase in anti-Semitic incidents in the first 6 months of the year from 810 to 892, nearly all of which is due to Jeremy Corbyn becoming leader of the Labour Party.  Corbyn, ‘if not anti-Semitic himself, (he) has enabled anti-Semitism to grow on his watch just as Donald Trump has enabled and assisted in the growth of racism and race prejudice since becoming President of the USA.’ Apparently there is a veritable pogrom going on in Britain today, all of which is Corbyn’s fault.

It is difficult to know whether or not to laugh or cry at this nonsense. The reality is that there is probably less anti-Semitism today in Britain than there has ever been. The figures of the CST have little or no basis in fact. They are literally plucked out of thin air. You have more chance of accuracy if you spin the wheel in a game of roulette than relying on the CST.

In its Anti-Semitic Incidents Report for January-June 2019 the CST informed us that the 892 anti-Semitic incidents recorded were the highest ever for any six months period. It explained that this ‘can partly be attributed to increasing reports of online expressions of antisemitism.’ An online expression of anti-Semitism, such as a Tweet or Facebook post has now become an anti-Semitic incident. If only the victims of the Kishinev and Odessa pogroms in Russia had been so lucky. As far as I know no one has ever died  from a tweet!

One person can cause a Twitter storm. There is no possible way in which the level of racism in society can be measured by engaging in a social media lucky dip. Its completely impressionistic. Racism is about power, the power to discriminate, to oppress not a Tweet.

CST are being wholly disingenuous spinning their statistics in order to reach the desired conclusions. They explain that of the 892 incidents of anti-Semitism, no less than 323 of them consisted of online anti-Semitism, a full 36%. In 2018, for the same period, there were 221  such incidents, i.e. 27%. If you strip out on line anti-Semitism altogether then there has been a decrease in anti-Semitism over the past year from 589 to 569.

The CST records 85 assaults in the first six months of 2019 compared to 62 the previous year, an increase of 37%. The strange thing is that not one of these assaults were classified as ‘extreme’ i.e. causing injury or a threat to someone’s life. Yet when it comes to similar statistics for racial attacks, the number of serious incidents of violence compared to less serious or trivial assaults is about one-third.  Even more strange the number of assaults compared to racial incidents generally is also of the order of one-third, so if the 892 anti-Semitic incidents were genuine then one would expect something like 300 not 85 assaults.

Why is it that the CST’s statistics are out of kilter with all other measures of racial incidents?  Is it because they are being driven by a hidden political agenda or special interests or indeed that the CST is more assiduous in collecting statistics?  We don’t know because the CST, although in receipt of large amounts of public money is completely unaccountable.  There is no way of knowing whether what they call ‘anti-Semitism’ is driven by a Zionist/pro-Israel agenda. 

It would for example be interesting to know how many of these 85 assaults were recorded as crimes or subject to any form of prosecution? The answer is we don’t know, nor do we know what the criteria is for ‘abusive incidents’ and how they are distinguished from normal political argument. The CST is not a politically neutral organisation. It is openly Zionist. It sees as part of its remit collecting information on Jewish anti-Zionists and keeping anti-Zionists out of Zionist meetings. It compiles files on Jewish anti-Zionists (I obtained a massive file when I made a Subject Access Request a few years ago).

The CST finds it difficult to make a distinction between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism. It says that they do not ‘not consider criticism of Israel or Zionism inherently antisemitic’ which is a strange way to put it. In other words anti-Zionism is usually anti-Semitic! Whatever else you could accuse the CST of it’s not political neutrality.

The CST admits that ‘There were 203 allusions to Israel, the Middle East or Zionism, used in antisemitic incidents recorded by CST, of which 18 directly compared or equated Israel with the Nazis.’ Equating Israel or Zionism to the Nazis isn’t anti-Semitic. Israelis do it all the time, See Calling Your Political Rival a Nazi Is a Time-hallowed Tradition in Israel

The truth is that a decrease in anti-Semitism wouldn’t serve CST’s purposes. CST is not merely a Zionist organisation, it is effectively a para-state body. It has close links to both the British and Israeli states. The Home Office gave it £13.4 million in 2018. See para. s.6.2 of its own annual report ‘Working with the Government, Civil Servants and the Police’.

The Community Security Trust's Carol Laser with friends

When the CST’s Security Director Carol Laser retired ‘Scotland Yard presented her with a commendation usually reserved for officers shot in the line of duty.’ As Ms Laser admitted ‘"Nothing comes higher than the protection around the Israelis.’

Raed Saleh - who the CST tried to fit up - alongside rabbis from Neturei Karta

However when Raed Saleh, the leader of the Islamic Movement in Northern Israel came to visit Britain in 2011 he was greeted by an exclusion order and an attempt by Theresa May to deport him. The ‘evidence’ against him was provided by the CST. This evidence included a poem of his which had been doctored to include words relating to Jews. Channel 4 reported

‘The government’s main source of information was from the Jewish run Community Security Trust (CST). The CST has denied that it in any way misled the government. The group has also expressed disappointment that the exclusion order has been overturned.’

It is trite to say that Zionists use ‘anti-Semitism’ as a propaganda weapon against their opponents. This is why, according to Tony Lerman, the founder of the Institute for Jewish Policy Research, Mossad (MI6), with which the CST has close links, took over the monitoring and collation of anti-Semitism statistics.

Lerman was later forced to resign from his post because of his views. He documented what happened in Antisemitism Redefined [‘On Anti-Semitism’ Haymarket Books, 2017]

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) and its successor, the 'Institute for Jewish Policy Research OPR) in the 1990s, I founded and was principal editor of the annual Antisemitism World Report... 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.

What possible reason could there be for Mossad to take over responsibility for the monitoring of anti-Semitism in Jewish communities abroad?  Can you imagine MI6 getting involved in the race relations business in Britain?  There is only one explanation and it is that ‘anti-Semitism’ is a vital part of the political defence of Israel.

The statistics of anti-Semitism compiled by the CST are not worth the paper they are written on. They are part of Israel’s propaganda war against its adversaries. To paraphrase Mark Twain, there are lies, damn lies and CST statistics.

Gilheany says that ‘one of the kernels of the Labour anti-Semitism dispute relates to Israel and Zionism’ and that the document at the heart of it is the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance ‘definition’ of anti-Semitism.

Which is like saying that opposition to the British presence in Ireland makes you an anti-British racist or that support for a United Ireland means you are anti-Protestant.  Zionism like Unionism is a political not a racial project and opposition to them is political not racial.

The IHRA ‘definition’ of anti-Semitism is a racists' charter. Why does one even need a definition unless there is a hidden agenda? When my dad joined 100,000 Jews and non-Jews at the Battle of Cable Street in 1936 to stop Oswald Moseley’s British Union of Fascists marching through the Jewish East End of London he didn’t need a definition of anti-Semitism to know what anti-Semitism is! It’s a complete nonsense.

The IHRA isn’t even a definition. It’s 500+ words long. The Oxford English Dictionary definition of anti-Semitism, ‘hostility to or prejudice against Jews’ is just 6 words. The IHRA is so long because that’s how much it takes to conflate anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism.

The IHRA definition has been around, in one guise or another, since 2005. The definition has been criticised by academic researchers such as Brian Klug, David Feldman, and Antony Lerman; jurists including Hugh Tomlinson QC, Stephen Sedley, Geoffrey Bindman QC, and Geoffrey Robertson QC who described it as ‘not fit for purpose.. Even the original drafter of the IHRA, Kenneth S. Stern stated that:

‘“The definition was not drafted, and was never intended, as a tool to target or chill speech on a college campus.,”. “It was never supposed to curtail speech on campus.” 

The IHRA has 11 examples of ‘anti-Semitism’, seven of which refer to Israel.  For example ‘Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.’ In Nazi Germany mobs chanted Death to the Jews.  In Israel mobs chant Death to the Arabs.  Why is this anti-Semitic?  Is Ze’ev Sternhell, a childhood survivor of a Polish Ghetto an anti-Semite for writing about Israel’s ‘Growing Fascism and a Racism Akin to Early Nazism’

Another example of ‘anti-Semitism’ is ‘Applying double standards by requiring of it[Israel] a behaviour not demanded or expected of any other democratic nation.’ Which begs the question, is Israel a democratic state? Israel is an ethnocracy not a democracy. Its Jewish majority was created out of the forced expulsion of the native Palestinians.  If you don’t accept that Israel is democratic then you declared ‘anti-Semitic’. There was a time when anti-Semitism was about hating Jews, not criticising Israel or Zionism.

According to the IHRA ‘Denial of the right of the Jewish people to self-determination’ is anti-Semitic. Gilheany argues that if you oppose the right of every other national minority, from the Kurds to the Catalans, to an independent state then you ‘would not be seen as a priori anti-Semitic’.  This is not true but is in any case irrelevant.

It used to be the case that those who argued that Jews constituted a separate nation  were condemned as anti-Semites. Jews argued that they were British and Jewish by religion. The Zionist belief that Jews are strangers whose ‘real home’ is in Israel was seen as a form of Jewish anti-Semitism.  Indeed this is the real purpose of this false and confected ‘anti-Semitism’. To persuade Jews that they should ‘return’ to Israel.

Lucien Wolfe, who was Secretary of the Conjoint Foreign Committee of the Board of Deputies wrote, during the negotiations around the Balfour Declaration in 1917 that:

I have spent most of my life in combating these very doctrines, when presented to me in the form of anti-Semitism, and I can only regard them as the more dangerous when they come to me in the guise of Zionism. They constitute a capitulation to our enemies, which has absolutely no justification in history, ethnology or the facts of everyday life, and if they were admitted by the Jewish people as a whole, the result would only be that the terrible situation of our coreligionists in Russia and Romania would become the common lot of Jewry throughout the world.’

As Isaac Deutscher wrote in ‘The Non-Jewish Jew and Other Essays’:

‘the great majority of East European Jews were, up to the outbreak of the second World War_} opposed to Zionism... the most fanatical enemies of Zionism were precisely the workers, those who spoke Yiddish... they were the most determined opponents of the idea of an emigration from East Europe to Palestine... in the idea of an evacuation, of an exodus from the countries in which they, had their homes and in which their ancestors had lived for centuries_, the anti-Zionists saw an abdication of their rights, a surrender to anti-Semitism. To them anti-Semitism seemed to triumph in Zionism, which recognised the legitimacy and the validity of the old cry ‘Jews get out!' The Zionists were agreeing to get out’

As anti-Semitism increased in Poland so did support for Zionism wane.  In the last local elections in 1938, out of the 20 Jewish Council seats in Warsaw 17 were won by the anti-Zionist Bund and just one by the Zionists.  Everywhere in Poland it was the same story.  Zionism was seen as a capitulation to anti-Semitism.

Gilheany’s conspiracy theories about Stalinism and the Soviet Union lying behind the revelations of Nazi-Zionist collaboration are absurd. It wasn’t Stalin who was responsible for the fall of the second Sharrett government in Israel in 1955 but the verdict in the Kasztner libel trial, brought as a result of the accusations of Jewish survivors of the Holocaust against the leader of Hungarian Zionism that his collaboration had led to the deportation of thousands of Hungarian Jews.  It is a fact, amply documented by Zionist historians such as Francis Nicosia and Lucy Dawidowicz, that the Zionists were the favoured Jews of the Nazis, the ones who traded with them not campaigned against them.

It's one of these strange coincidences but antisemites and racists, the world over, like Hitler admirer and Philipenes ruler Duterte, love Israel and even pay homage to the dead of the Holocaust

Zionism is and always has been a reactionary movement and ideology.  Today that should be clear to all when the best friends of Israel are anti-Semitic leaders like Trump, Orban and Duterte. When even the neo-Nazi founder of the alt-Right in the United States, Richard Spencer openly boasts that he is a White Zionist and Netanyahu’s own son pens an anti-Semitic cartoon of George Soros that is immediately republished by David Duke of the KKK then it should be clear why Gilheany’s attempts to portray the Left as anti-Semitic are, to quote Neil Young, pissing in the wind.. Socialist Zionism was always an oxymoron, today it is simply a bad joke.

Tony Greenstein