Expelled for Supporting the Palestinians on the 7th February (‘anti-Semitism’ in Labour Newspeak) Found Dead One Week Later

Pauline was Killed by Lansman, the Jewish Labour Movement and all those who supported the IHRA, a Charter for making false charges of ‘anti-Semitism’ against anti-racists

UPDATE

Out of respect for the feelings of Pauline's family I have removed her surname from the title of this blog and the main graphic. It is also important  to say that Pauline died of a brain haemorrhage not suicide. No one will know for sure what part the shock of being summarily expelled without any notice however  this was an always present possibility yet Laura Murray's witchhunters were oblivious to this when they proceeded to expel good socialist activists for daring to criticise the world's most racist state, Apartheid Israel.  Murray's only concern was for the feelings of her 'hard working' McCarthyite witchhunters.

The Labour Party believes a few token words absolves it from its duty of care. Their actions led to the death of Pauline 

This is a post I wish I didn’t have to write but I have long feared I would have to write. Repeatedly I have been told by good socialists, suspended and expelled by the Labour Party, how depressed they felt at being falsely accused of anti-Semitism by those whose only purpose in life is to defame supporters of the Palestinians, anti-Zionists and anti-racists.

It is outrageous that good socialists and anti-racists have been defamed and smeared for opposing the world's most racist state, Israel.

The Lynch mob accompanying Ruth Smeeth to Marc Wadsworth's Kangaroo Court

We have had 4 long years of fake and false allegations of ‘anti-Semitism’ by hypocrites, liars and defamers such as Luciana Berger and Ruth Smeeth.  Racists whose only mission was to defame anti-racist activists. We all remember how Smeeth falsely accused Marc Wadsworth of ‘anti-Semitism’ at the Chakrabarti press conference, despite him not even knowing that she was Jewish. To criticise these Zionist drama queens is anti-Semitic.

This was Pauline's last Facebook post

When the Labour Party adopted the IHRA misdefinition of anti-Semitism in September 2018 and when at last year’s conference, with the support of the pathetic Corbyn, ‘fast track’ expulsions were agreed, i.e expulsions without even a hearing, it was inevitable that sooner or later, that it might have fatal consequences and cause great shock. Fast-track expulsions, of which there were 25 in just one day this month, were obviously a ticking time bomb.

To Jon Lansman, Pauline's death is a price worth paying to rid the Labour Party of anti-Zionists

If any one person had the ability to stop the adoption of these proposals and the IHRA in its track it was Jon Lansman. More than any one person it is Lansman who bears the blame for Pauline's death. Owen Jones, who has acted as a cheerleader to the expulsion of anti-racists should also look to what’s left of his conscience.

Mike Katz, Chair of the JLM, has played a key role in defaming anti-racist activists on behalf of the world's most racist state

A cursory look at Pauline's Facebook page shows that she was anything but a racist.  She was a decent, kind, concerned person who hated all kinds of oppression. Pauline was Chair of Manchester Socialist Health Association. That was why she supported the Palestinians. Pauline was the kind of person who should be welcomed and respected. Instead she was expelled at the instigation of Mike Katz and his fellow war-criminals in the Jewish Labour Movement , the overseas wing of the Israeli Labour Party.

Carl Sergeant - found dead after allegations made against him

Pauline, who died a week after learning that she had been expelled under these murderous fast-track procedures, was not the first to die. In November 2017, Welsh Assembly Member Carl Sergeant, who had been suspended without being given any details, was found dead at his home. He had committed suicide. Sam Matthews, Head of Disputes had previously hung up on a call from him.

The self-pitying Head of Disputes who saw it as his mission to lie, deceive and expel socialists

Matthews was later to claim in the BBC Panorama programme Is Labour Anti-Semitic  that he had been suicidal at not being able to expel at will!

In the wake of Carl Sergeant’s suicide and the criticism of their behaviour, letters of suspension contained details of how to contact the Samaritans or the CAB.  There were also details of the Labour Party’s ‘Safeguarding Unit’ and a phone number, 0207 783 1134.  I have just phoned this number and been answered with a voice mail before the 4.30 cut off time. This is how the Labour Party fulfils its duty of care.

Owen Jones, this vacuous airhead, has acted as a cheer leader to Labour's killers

The Shadow NEC site said concerning Sergeant’s death:

‘What we do know from well researched evidence is the impact that public suspension, media pressure, isolation and not knowing what you have been accused of does to people’s mental well being.

There is much documented evidence that our party has been told repeatedly of the impact this treatment has had on individuals, irrespective of the nature of the allegations.

It eats into you, you cannot find an area to concentrate your defence on.

You believe yourself to be a decent person that cares about the world and society but a person/persons you believe in, see as a decent friend and fellow politician tells you that you have behaved in a way that you failed to recognise.

Your identity fragments, your hope dissipates, you fear you are a monster, you no longer know yourself.

What is so outrageous about all of this is that good socialists, kind and caring people, are being expelled because they object to the world’s only Apartheid State. A state that was best friends with Apartheid South Africa, armed and trained the Guatemalan Junta which killed 200,000 Indians and which today arms the Burmese Junta. It's description of itself as a 'Jewish state' is the greatest single reason for antisemitism today. It associates Jews everywhere with its war crimes.

Israel's Prime Minister Netanyahu has no problems greeting genuine anti-Semites like Hungary's Viktor Orban, a man who believes that the pro-Nazi war leader, Admiral Horthy was an 'exceptional statesman'

Israel is a state that is best friends with anti-Semites such as Viktor Orban of Hungary and Duterte, an open Hitler admirer, President of the Philippines.  To say nothing of  Trump’s anti-Semitism which manifests itself in the belief that Israel is the state of American Jews.

From Balfour to Trump, Bolsinaro to Orban, Vorster to Tommy Robinson, the best friends of the Zionists have always been anti-Semites.

The irony of all this is that it is anti-Semites who historically have been the best friends of Zionism.

Tommy Robinson, another supporter of Zionism, stands on an Israeli tank

When Russian Jews came to Britain to escape the Czarist pogroms at the end of the 19^th and beginning of the 20^th century, the anti-Semitic British Brothers League was formed.  Its President William Stanley Shaw, a Christian Zionist wrote in the Jewish Chronicle (8.11.1901) that:

I am a firm believer in the Zionist movement, which the British Brothers League will do much incidentally to foster. The return of the Jews to Palestine is one of the most striking signs of the times…. All students of prophecy are watching the manifold signs of the times with almost breathless interest

Arthur Balfour, hero of the Zionist movement for his Balfour Declaration in 1917 introduced as Prime Minister in 1905 the Aliens Act designed to keep Jews out of Britain.  Anti-Semitism and Zionism are Siamese twins, joined together at the hip.

Pauline RIP

 If you don’t want Jews to live in your country what better solution than to send them to Palestine.

We should not rest until those who were responsible for Pauline’s death, who murdered her by expulsion, are themselves expelled. Jeremy Corbyn by his silence is complicit in Pauline’s death. He could have spoken out at any time but he took the coward’s way out.

Jennie Formby  bears a heavy responsibility for Pauline's death

If Jon Lansman has any integrity, the fixer and manipulator who has long shown that power is his only principle, will resign from the Labour Party.  Jennie Formby and all those who were responsible for this tragedy should also consider their positions.

RIP Pauline – we will not forget you.

Tony Greenstein

The Witch Hunt may now have taken its heaviest possible price

Martin Odoni

Rest in peace, Pauline 

by Martin Odoni

Pauline, a long-term Labour activist from Hulme in Manchester, was fast-track-expelled from the party on the 4th of February for supposed ‘anti-Semitism’ – in reality, just for her support for the Palestinian people, who are being slowly crushed by Zionist occupation.

Pauline was found dead just seven days later. She had been left distraught by her expulsion, and although the cause-of-death has not yet been confirmed, the suspicion is that she suffered a haemorrhage brought on by the shock.

I had met Pauline a few times at demos and other meetings, and so, although I did not know her well, her death has come as a shock, to me personally, and to other activists across the north-west. Her dedication to justice was tremendous, and the callous mistreatment she received from a party that she had given so much to must have been the bitterest blow imaginable.

The deceitfulness and irresponsibility of the witch-hunt against scarcely-existent anti-Semitism in the Labour Party, carried out by Anglo-Zionist fanatics both outside and within that party, have badly damaged the lives of many innocent people. But now they appear to have taken the heaviest possible toll of all – an innocent life.

I do not expect the consciences of smear merchants like Margaret Hodge, Luciana Berger, Wes Streeting, David Collier, Zvi Solomons, Jonathan Hoffman, Ian Austin, and others of their ilk, to be tweaked in the slightest by this. Like all fanatics, they do not have consciences, no interest in right or wrong, only a blind hunger for power for the movement into which they have buried their individuality. They will probably relish the knowledge of their ability to destroy lives. At best, they will say, “Well, we’re very sorry to hear that this has happened, but…” before offering a nauseatingly dishonest list of reasons why this proves that people should not condemn Israel.

The Zionist lobby in the UK has always been amoral, indifferent to human lives, and only interested in ethics when they can be used as a weapon against opponents. But this marks the point at which the smear campaign has crossed the line. Their irresponsible aggression against innocent people to advance their failed ideology has now become a life-and-death matter in Britain, as it has long been in Palestine.

The question is, how do the rest of us respond?

Pauline Hammerton, rest in peace.

Correction: This article had previously indicated that Pauline was expelled on the 7th February. In fact, her letter of expulsion was sent on the 4th of February, and the 7th was apparently the date she opened it.

Shop Steward Expelled for ‘anti-Semitism’ by a Racist and Corrupt Trade Union

The GMB Expels Pete Gregson using the IHRA Definition of ‘Anti-Semitism’ which even its author, Kenneth Stern, has Disavowed

When Labour’s National Executive decided on September 4^th 2018, to adopt the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism, which conflates anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, Peter Gregson launched his own petition:

The IHRA has been savaged by a host of academic and legal scholars. It is incoherent, open ended, uncertain, illogical and barely literate.

The petition which attracted the ire of the GMB and Rhea Wolfson

According to Geoffrey Robertson QC, the renowned human rights barrister, the IHRA definition is, ‘not fit for purpose’.  Sir Stephen Sedley, the Jewish former Court of Appeal Judge wrote that the IHRA ‘fails the first test of any definition: it is indefinite.’ Hugh Tomlinson QC declared that the IHRA had

a potential chilling effect on public bodies which, in the absence of definitional clarity, may seek to sanction or prohibit any conduct which has been labelled by third parties as antisemitic without applying any clear criterion of assessment

The GMB under Gary Smith has acted as a scab union effectively inviting Peter's employer to dismiss him

The actual IHRA definition itself is 38 words, the salient part of which states that ‘Anti-Semitism is a certain perception of Jews which may be defined as hatred of Jews.’ What is a ‘certain perception’? Who knows. If anti-Semitism may be defined as hatred of Jews what else might it be defined as? And if anti-Semitism is to be defined in terms of hatred what about someone who simply dislikes Jews but doesn’t hate them. In short the definition is useless as an analytical tool. It is no wonder that David Feldman, who was Vice-Chair of the Chakrabarti Inquiry and Director of the Pears Institute for the Study of Anti-Semitism described the IHRA as ‘bewilderingly imprecise.’

The IHRA definition provides 11 illustrations of ‘anti-Semitism’ such as ‘Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.’

In order to make their case stick, the GMB has to lie about Peter's beliefs accusing him of being  a holocaust denier - this accords with Zionist attempts to invent holocaust denial where it doesn't exist

This is the section that Peter Gregson defied with his petition. This illustration is a good example of the incoherence of the definition. There is no connection between the first and second halves of the example. It is a non-sequitur. It is quite possible to support a Jewish right to self-determination and still believe that Israel is a racist state. The language is a good example of bad fourth form English. How can the existence of anything be an endeavour?

Criticism of a union official is impermissible for a cossetted bureaucracy

There is a simple definition of anti-Semitism in the Oxford English Dictionary which, unlike the 500+ words of the IHRA is only 6 words long: ‘Hostility to or prejudice against Jews’ which also catches attitudes that fall short of hatred. As Tony Lerman, a distinguished expert on anti-Semitism and former Director of the Institute of Jewish Policy Research wrote:

‘The more the definition is held up to the light and subject to public scrutiny, the more we see holes and cracks in its flimsy fabric. Not only is there now overwhelming evidence that it’s not fit for purpose, but it also has the effect of making Jews more vulnerable to antisemitism, not less...’

The drawback of the OED definition for the Zionists is that it doesn’t mention Israel. As the inauguration today of Yair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s new President shows, most fascists, racists and bigots are also ardent supporters of the Israeli state.

Even the person who drew up the IHRA, Kenneth Stern, has become disillusioned at the misuse of his definition, which was never intended to brand people as anti-Semites. In written testimony to the US House of Representatives Judiciary Committee he wrote that:

The definition was not drafted, and was never intended, as a tool to target or chill speech on a college campus. In fact, at a conference in 2010 about the impact of the definition, I highlighted this misuse, and the damage it could do.

Labour’s NEC adopted the IHRA as a way of buying off its Zionist critics. What it has done is to create a whole new set of problems around the rights of free speech. It is no accident that the GMB, which has traditionally been pro-Zionist has been the first to try and implement the IHRA. Traditionally the GMB has been corrupt, racist and politically backward.

Rhea Wolfson

Peter Gregson was suspended because of his petition when former Labour NEC member and the Glasgow GMB Organiser, Rhea Wolfson put in a complaint about ‘anti-Semitism’. He was accused of ‘anti-Semitic’ harassment of Ms Wolfson.  It is very clear from his statement that all he ever did was engage in political polemic. Nothing that he said was remotely anti-Semitic or indeed abusive.

Gary Smith - represents all that is wrong in  British Trade Unionism - the idea of a fair hearing is alien to someone who acted as judge and jury in his own cause, having organised the kangaroo court too

I wrote on the 28^th November to the GMB’s Scottish Regional Secretary, Gary Smith, who was handling the case offering to be a witness in the case.  I happened to know Gary some years ago in Brighton when, as Secretary of the Unemployed Centre, we had organised support for the workers at the Hollingdean Refuse Depot who had occupied the site as part of the campaign to get rid of SITA, a French company which the Labour council had brought in to run the refuse collection. The dispute was successful. At that time Gary was a radical young organiser.  Clearly as he has climbed the GMB’s greasy ladder he has abandoned his radicalism which included support for breaking the law.  Now he is just another apparatchik.

I pointed out to Smith that he could not be both the Prosecutor, the person organising the hearing and deciding who could be called and what would be allowed by way of a defence. I received no reply to this or another email.  Smith had clearly decided that Peter was guilty and he was not going to allow ‘grandstanding’ i.e. any attempt to mount a defence. On the day of the hearing a Rabbi who had travelled up from Manchester at his own expense was barred from the hearing.

The whole procedure that Peter faced has been wholly unfair as the letter from his solicitor Daniel Donaldson explains. Donaldson explicitly calls the GMB disciplinary  tribunal a ‘kangaroo court.’ In his letter of 17^th December to Smith he states, reiterating my own correspondence that:

You are a member of the GMB regional committee, you have conducted the investigation, you have determined the procedure and you are also prosecuting my client before the same committee. This approach to a disciplinary is inherently unfair and therefore unlawful.

This is the kind of justice that they are used to in Rhea Wolfson’s racial paradise in Israel , but it is contrary to British notions of natural justice and due process.

As I said to Smith, this hearing would make a kangaroo hang its head in shame. Gary Smith has become just another right-wing official in the GMB, a union which is a byword for corruption. Peter Gregson is the only shop steward for 24,000 members in the whole of the Lothian NHS. If Gary Smith was actually doing his job instead of harassing the only shop steward that does exist he would ensure that the GMB had some measure of shop floor organisation in peoples’ workplaces. Smith seems completely unconcerned about the effect of expelling Peter on the GMB’s own (lack of) organisation.

In reality GMB officials have never been particularly concerned about the effectiveness of representation for their members. Their main concern has been such mundane matters as how best to claim and inflate their expenses. Living on a far higher salary than their members they are cut off from life on the shop floor.

What is particularly reprehensible is that a member of the union has been expelled for calling out a state which is clearly racist.  I gave as examples to Smith the fact that in Israel Palestinian (but not Jewish) children as young as 12 are routinely detained, usually in night time raids on their homes.

We have recently had the obscene case of the lynch-mob murderer of an asylum seeker sentenced to 4 months imprisonment whereas a 16 year old girl, Ahed Tamimi, was sentenced to 8 months for daring to slap a heavily armed soldier.

As the National’s Martin Hannan reported Pete Gregson was suspended for describing Israel’s actions in ethnically cleansing Palestine of some 700,000 refugees as racist. To the corrupt and racist barons of the GMB ethnic cleansing by a settler colonial state is perfectly acceptable whereas criticism of it is racist. 

This is the upside down world of Gary Smith and the GMB’s General Secretary Tim Roache who on the basis of a fraudulent ‘election’ in 2016 backed Owen Smith in his challenge to Jeremy Corbyn.

Peter Gregson’s petition has now secured over 1,200 signatures from members of the Labour Party. Given that Israel’s Knesset earlier in the year passed the Jewish Nation State Law which explicitly grants national rights to one section of the population, Jews and denies them to non-Jews, it is difficult to know how else to describe the GMB’s decision to expel Peter Gregson other than racist. In the words of Ha’aretz’s Mordechai Kremnitzer, the ‘Jewish Nation-state Law Makes Discrimination in Israel Constitutional’.  What is it that Gary Smith or Tim Roache don’t understand about that? How else do you describe opening fire on unarmed demonstrators in Gaza, killing over 200 and wounding 20,000 with the use of high velocity ammunition?

Although Labour Against the Witchhunt didn’t support Peter’s petition because of problems with its wording we recognise that it represents a significant opposition in the Labour Party to the attempt to curtail if not abolish freedom of speech.

Of course the corrupt and racist GMB has never had freedom of speech. The regional barons ruled without opposition. The union exists primarily for the benefit of its highly paid officials not its membership. However even Roache and co. will have difficulty defending this particularly iniquitous decision. If Peter’s expulsion is not revoked then GMB members should join another, genuine trade union.

To see Pete’s website and his page on the IHRA and his Petition please click here

The letter of expulsion is here.  It is fundamentally dishonest. It alleges that Peter is guilty of ‘accusing Israel of inventing or exaggerating the holocaust’ and goes on to say that ‘For our Union holocaust denial or claiming the holocaust was exaggerated is simply unacceptable.’ The only problem is that this is a lie. Nowhere has Pete denied that the Holocaust occurred or that it was exaggerated. Peter specifically refers to the 6 million who died (though the actual figure will never be known). What he has said, which is true, is that Israel uses the Holocaust for political purposes and that it is used to counter Palestinian claims to justice. Which is what Jewish academic Norman Finkelstein, amongst others, wrote in The Holocaust Industry.

Tony Greenstein

Peter's press release on his expulsion

My third email to Gary Smith

Brighton & Hove Palestine Solidarity Campaign Bids Farewell to a Brave Fighter After a Lifetime of Struggle

Expelled from the Labour Party for having opposed a criminal war  Riad never stopped fighting

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2&v=BzHNnxmgyEY 

Yesterday we gathered at Clayton Woods Burial Ground near Hassocks to pay our respects to a longstanding Iraqi comrade, Riad El-Taher. It was a cold, rainy and windy November day and the weather reflected how we felt as the departure of our much loved comrade and friend.

Riad was unjustly expelled from the Labour Party in 2017 as a result of being fingered by Ivor Caplin, a right-wing Zionist and former MP for Hove and Labour Defence Minister at the time of Blair’s invasion of Iraq in 2003.  Riad was not given any form of hearing but was arbitrarily expelled under the ancien regime of Iain McNicoll. It is to be hoped that now the Left controls the NEC that Riad will be posthumously reinstated to the Labour Party.

It is an irony that someone who fought to his last breath against the criminal invasion of Iraq was expelled as a result of the petty vengeful and spiteful acts of a war criminal who bore responsibility for the invasion of Iraq. If there was any justice, it should have been Caplin who was gaoled for the death of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis as a result of the War for Oil in 2003.

When Riad was elected to the Hove Labour Party Executive Caplin, the current Chair of the Jewish Labour Movement, the overseas wing of the racist Israeli Labour Party, moved to have him expelled summarily because his sentence, of 10 months, was held to be a ‘serious offence’ although it had long been spent. Under the reign of the Right and McNicol any sense of fairness or justice went out the window.

Riad’s gaoling in 2011 for having breached the UN sanctions on Iraq which had been responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi people was in itself an outrage. Even The Times recognised the injustice involved in Riad’s gaoling.

Riad was an active participant in the activities of Brighton and Hove Palestine Solidarity Campaign and it was a cruel act of fate that he succumbed to cancer. Riad was until this year a member of the local Momentum Steering Committee and fully participated with others in building the Left in the local Labour Party. You can find Riad’s Facebook page here.

Clayton Woods Burial Ground, Hassocks, East Sussex

Riad recognised the role of Israel and Zionism, together with western imperialism in trying to subdivide the Arab world in order to make it that much weaker. For all his faults Saddam Hussein unlike the present leadership of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States wasn’t prepared to be a puppet in the West’s hands despite the enormity of his crimes against his own people.

You can go to Riad’s video on U tube on why was Iraq singled out? and read  his newly issued book O Daughter of Babylon: Journey of an Iraqi Patriot and What Chilcot Didn't Say (Paperback).

I feel I am very fortunate to have known Riad and to have said my goodbyes to him at the Martlett hospice just over a week ago. Riad wanted people to make donations to the Martlett’s in memory of him and you can do so here. Below is an obituary by a close friend of Riad’s and fellow PSC member, Michael Foulkes.

Tony Greenstein

Obituary of Riad El-Taher 1939-2018

Riad El-Taher, engineer and businessman, who died in Hove on 9^th November, came to prominence with his anti-Iraq-sanctions campaign between 1991 and 2003. In 1993 he took the late Tam Dalyell, George Galloway and the ex-BBC correspondent Tim Llewellyn, to his homeland to see for themselves the disastrous effect of the UN sanctions on the Iraqi people, particularly children.

On their return Dalyell encouraged Riad to set up Friendship Across Frontiers (FAF) with the aim of raising the campaign’s profile, and as a result gained considerable support in parliament. Further fact-finding delegations included Albert Reynolds, ex-Taoiseach, Canon Andrew White, Sue Lloyd Roberts and the bishops of Coventry, Kingston, and Cyprus and the Gulf.

The US and UK used their veto on the Security Council to overrule measures designed to ameliorate the suffering of the Iraqi people and in response the Iraqi government introduced a sanctions-busting surcharge on oil exports which Riad agreed to pay.

He did so to help the Iraqi people, reasoning that as the US & UK were doing nothing to prevent oil smuggling they were not in earnest in outlawing the surcharge. His reasoning was miscalculated, as out of all those who acted similarly there were only ever two prosecutions Riad and his co-defendent.  In 2011 he was convicted and imprisoned for this offence; his co-defendant was given a suspended sentence. The common factor was their contact with Saddam, and in Riad’s case, his outspoken criticism of the Blair government.  

Dalyell described Riad’s imprisonment as ‘a process of nasty, political vengeance.’ It is difficult not to see his expulsion from the Labour Party in 2017, shortly after he was elected onto its Hove Constituency Executive Committee, in the same light. The sole reason given was his conviction six years earlier.

Riad wound up FAF shortly after his release from prison sold his house in Surrey and bought a flat in Hove. Here he enjoyed his retirement spending time with his family, engaging in politics, going to concerts, practising yoga and writing his life story. He was a committed member of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign. His activism and commitment to fighting injustice wherever it exists will be greatly missed. 

Riad’s book, O Daughter of Babylon is now out

Michael Foulkes