Open Letter to Nadhim Zahawi – Secretary of State for Hypocrisy & Education – on why he equates support for the Palestinians with ‘anti-Semitism’

 ‘Why is Ukraine’s Resistance to Occupation a Fight for Freedom whereas Palestinian Resistance to Occupation is ‘Terrorism’?

    

Israeli Soldiers Beat Palestinian Journalist – to Zahawi this video is more ‘anti-Semitism’

It is remarkable that some of the most virulent racists in the government are its Black members. The same is true of Starmer’s Shadow Cabinet. David Lammy, a Christian Evangelist and Labour Friends of Israel patron supports beating children.

The one exception to this in the Tory Party is Baroness Warsi who resigned from the Cameron government over their support for Israel’s Operation Protective Edge attack on Gaza in 2014.

Defending Free Speech on Israel/Palestine

Priti Patel is a byword for racism, with her ‘pushback’ scheme for ‘refugees in the Channel. Patel was previously sacked by Theresa May for lying about her holiday in Israel where she proposed diverting overseas aid money to fund the Israeli military.

Nadhim Zahawi, the second richest man in the Commons (2017), like his predecessor, has spared no effort, to support the Israeli state and its lobby, including the Union of Jewish Students.

Zionism is an integral part of British foreign policy today and Zahawi is its Black face. Zahawi recently distinguished himself by suggesting that anyone chanting Palestine should be free ‘from the river to the sea’ should be arrested! This is rich coming from a party that proclaims it supports free speech on campus and which has complained about the ‘cancel’ culture. It seems that the Right only support freedom of speech when they agree with it!

I therefore thought that in the interests of open government I should write to Zahawi asking for an explanaton. Not that I expect an answer but in order to demonstrate the lies behind Tory rhetoric:

Demonstrators Prevent Priti Patel’s Snatch Squads Seizing Asylum Seekers

Dear Nadhim,

Please forgive me for my naivety but until the advent of the current government I laboured under the impression that one of the qualifications for being Education Secretary was the possession of a modicum of intellectual, if not emotional, intelligence.

After the appointment of your predecessor, Gavin Williamson, whose credentials were that he was once an overpaid fireplace salesman, before being sacked for allowing his hands to wander in the direction of a more junior employee, I thought that just about anyone would be better than the man who was willing to take on the Chinese singlehandedly whilst wiping his bottom with an image of Putin’s face.

I realise that in a government led by a crook, standards are not high but you have taken them to a new low. In the Jewish Chronicle (where else?), in an article ‘River to Sea’ chanting is a police matter, says Zahawi you are quoted as saying:

That is the kind of, in my view, antisemitic, intolerant, murderous attitude of the organisation that’s proscribed (Hamas)”

Forgive me for my ignorance, but why is it ‘anti-Semitic’ to say that Palestine should be free? Are you really saying that opposing a repressive military tyranny is anti-Jewish? Isn’t that a teeny, weeny bit anti-Semitic?

Apparently your reasoning, if that is the right word, is that this is a Hamas slogan, Hamas is deemed a terrorist organisation and therefore the slogan is a form of terrorism. Adopting your ‘logic’, presumably if Hamas were to say that the Sun goes round the Earth then that too would be a criminal offence? In which case Galileo was also a terrorist?!

The decision to proscribe Hamas’s political wing was a political not an evidenced based decision. There was a time when Sinn Fein was called the political wing of the IRA, Although the IRA was proscribed as a terrorist group Sinn Fein was not, despite calls from Unionists.

Today Sinn Fein is the most popular party in Ireland. Even the most wooden headed Loyalist no longer calls for them to be banned.

Hamas, like the IRA, has a political wing and it was this that was made illegal under anti-terrorism legislation. A complete abuse of legislation which is supposedly about terrorism not banning those whose politics you don’t like. It would seem that in order to defend the world’s only Apartheid state, anything goes.

Hamas is the most popular party amongst the Palestinians because, unlike Fateh, which is now a footstool for the Israeli state, Hamas resists Israel’s military occupation. What you and your party are doing, supported by your echo chamber Starmer, is banning democracy amongst the Palestinians.

Since Hamas has never conducted military operations outside Palestine/Israel it is no more a ‘terrorist’ organisation than the Ukrainian resistance fighters who you are arming.

I don’t know whether or not your doctorate is one of those degrees that you can buy off the shelf from an on-line university but it is difficult to believe that you earned it. Perhaps you emulated Saif Gadaffi, who bought his Ph D for a mere £1.5 million from the LSE.

However I will give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that it was malevolence rather than stupidity that caused you to describe the Palestinian chant ‘From the River to the Sea’ as a police matter.

As you are well aware, Palestine is anything but free. Palestinians, who now constitute the majority population, live for the most part under permanent military occupation without any civil or political rights. Even those who are Israeli citizens possess fewer rights than Jews.

I will let you into a secret. I help raise funds for the Al Tafawk Children’s Centre in Jenin. Last May the ‘most moral army in the world’ wrecked it on the pretext of searching for arms.

Two weeks ago Mohammed a 15 year old boy was shot with a rubber bullet fired by an Israeli soldier. Today I received this message:

I am so sorry to share this terrible news ! Another child from the center has been shot at while he was going to take his treatment in Jerusalem today. Ali is 6 years old has cancer. He goes to Jerusalem every month. Please share his story he is a poor kid without father .. We rely on you to save our children.

 

He was going in the early morning to Jerusalem to have his treatment as he is sick with cancer and the Israel military shot at the car he was inside... his condition is ok now ! But he is so scared..

These actions are increasing these days.. I wish the news could share this as they share what is going on in the other side !

It takes a particularly sick and twisted mind to describe opposition to war crimes such as these as anti-Semitic. That is what ‘From the River to the Sea, Palestine Must Be Free’ means. Palestine is anything but free.

Your concern about anti-Semitism might be slightly more convincing if the British government weren’t supplying neo-Nazi militias in Ukraine, such as the Azov Battalion, with advanced weaponry.  I can only assume that you subscribe to the belief that there are ‘good’ as well as ‘bad’ neo-Nazis.

We were chanting ‘From the River to the Sea’ back in 1982 when Israel invaded Lebanon, i.e. at least 6 years before Israel helped create Hamas. Clearly your ability to engage in even the simplest research is not one of your strengths. Which is why I can only assume that you bought or bribed your way into obtaining a PhD.

In your talk to vice-chancellors you told them that the adoption of the IHRA misdefinition of antisemitism was “essential not optional”. Why is it that you are so concerned about ‘anti-Semitism’ when you have nothing to say about the deportation of Black British citizens to the West Indies in the Windrush Scandal or the attempt to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda?

The reason why people oppose the IHRA is not because it has anything to do with anti-Semitism but because it conflates opposition to Israel’s war crimes with ‘anti-Semitism’.

Why do you need a definition of anti-Semitism? My dad took part in the Battle of Cable Street in 1936. He didn’t need a definition of anti-Semitism to know who and what he was fighting. The Tory Home Secretary of the day, Sir John Simon, had agreed to Oswald Moseley’s fascist thugs marching through London’s Jewish East End. At that time Tory MPs were still engaged in a love-in with Hitler.

The Jewish Chronicle asked you whether Boycott Divestment and Sanctions had a place on campus and your response was “Absolutely not.” Four human rights groups – B’Tselem, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and now the Harvard Law Clinic, have declared that Israel is an apartheid state. How else can you describe a state which bars its Arab citizens from 93% of the land?

Perhaps you can explain why sanctions against Russia are fine, the more the merrier, but sanctions against Israel’s are anti-Semitic?

40 years ago Thatcher was hostile to Sanctions against Apartheid because she supported a system of White racial supremacy.  Support for Jewish supremacy is the reason for your opposition to BDS.

You have threatened the National Union of Students with derecognition, not for anything it has done but because it has elected a Black President, Shaima Dallali, who ten years ago tweeted ‘Khaybar Khaybar O Jews … Muhammad’s army will return Gaza,”. Hardly the gravest crime given your support of neo-Nazis in Ukraine.

On the basis of one tweet you have accused NUS of ‘systemic antisemitism’. If one teenage tweet means NUS is anti-Semitic then how would you describe a party that elected a leader who said that Africans have ‘water melon smiles’ and described people like you as ‘picanninies’?

If Shaima is guilty of anti-Semitism how would you describe someone who spoke of a ‘Jewish cabal who run the American media complex’ and Russian Jewish oligarchs who fix elections? To say nothing of a ‘a middle aged (Jewish) man with a proud nose and curly hair’. If you don’t know who I mean you might care to read Boris Johnson’s 72 Virgins!

But you already know this. If hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue, then dishonesty is the price you are willing to pay for staying in a Cabinet dominated by an all-purpose racist.

Your outburst followed ‘concerns raised by the Union of Jewish Students.’ Even by your standards this is pathetically thin gruel. The UJS was revealed by Al Jazeera’s The Lobby to be funded by the Israeli Embassy.

UJS has a constitution (which has disappeared off the Internet) which commits it to ‘inspiring Jewish students to make an enduring commitment’ to Israel. In other words UJS has support for Israeli apartheid at its heart.

UJS has a history of trying to suppress views it disagrees with.  Last year it did its best to ban Ken Loach, the world famous filmmaker from St Peters College because he once directed a play Perdition based on a real life Israeli trial which involved Zionist-Nazi collaboration. Apparently an 84 year old man was a ‘threat’ to the ‘safety’ of these Zionist snowflakes. See Outrage as Oxford college holds event with controversial filmmaker Ken Loach

As someone whose party is opposed to the ‘cancel’ culture it would seem that you are only opposed to the cancellation of racists. 

It is perfectly understandable Nadhim that you should have found a home in Boris Johnson’s government. In 1994 Geoffrey Archer, later jailed for perjury, helped you campaign for a seat on Wandsworth council. And by way of thanks you were put in charge of Archer's corrupt campaign for Mayor of London in 1998.

In January 2016 Labour proposed an amendment that would have required private landlords to make their homes "fit for human habitation". According to the Parliamentary register of interests, you were 1 of 72 Tory MPs who voted against the amendment. You just happen to be a large private landlord.

In November The Sunday Mirror caught you out after you had claimed £5,822 expenses from the public purse for electricity for your riding school stables and a yard manager's mobile home.  It’s an easy enough mistake to make. I do it all the time. If you had been claiming social security you would have had the book thrown at you but dishonest MPs are granted immunity by the Met.

I am even more surprised that your concern over ‘anti-Semitism’ does not extend to sexism against women. In January 2018 you attended a men-only Presidents Club dinner at the Dorchester Hotel in London. You will probably recall media reports of female hostesses being subjected to sexual harassment, groping and sexist abuse. The mere fact that you went to a men-only event such as this speaks volumes.

It is no surprise, given that a Prime Minister who doesn’t even know how many children he has and who has been accused of serial sexual harassment by Sunday Times journalist Charlotte Edwards, that you should have found yourself so at ease in his Cabinet.

Boris Johnson Lies About Groping Women

I have just one thing to ask of you.  Do you think you could put a stop to this fake concern over ‘anti-Semitism’? You are no more concerned about Jews than Johnson or Starmer are concerned about the truth. 

Yours,

Tony Greenstein

The Labour Right’s Anti-Semitism Heresy Hunt

Learning from Galileo and the Inquisition

In 1633 Galileo was convicted for Heresy by the Inquisition for arguing in support of the Copernican belief that the Earth revolved around the Sun.  This was despite the fact that most of the scientists and philosophers at the time were convinced that the Aristotelian concept of a stationery Earth, around which the Sun and planets moved, was false.

Galileo faced the Inquisition for daring to challenge accepted orthodoxies

Galileo’s problem was that scientific evidence, logic and observation conflicted with the ideological needs of the system he lived under.  A reordering of the heavens challenged the very basis of the theological precepts by which Papal rule was maintained.

The Political Equivalent of the Copernican Theory is now a Heresy in Labour

Galileo wrote to the German mathematician Johannes Kepler ‘"what would you say of the learned here, who, replete with the pertinacity of the asp, have steadfastly refused to cast a glance through the telescope?  What shall we make of this?  Shall we laugh, or shall we cry?"

I am reminded of Galileo’s travails since the heresy hunt in the Labour Party makes it an expulsion offence to even hint that Zionism is racist or to compare Israel in any way with the Nazis.  Indeed even to pretend that Israel is anything other than a fine, democratic example to the rest of the world, a beacon of freedom, is not only reason enough for suspension but prima facie evidence of ‘anti-Semitism’. 

Like Aristotle's Theory, the idea that Zionism is a wonderful movement opposed to all forms of racism is the New Labour orthodoxy

In the Labour Party today there is a similar refusal to look through the telescope or perhaps it is the turning of a Nelsonian blind eye to the Israeli state as it actually exists.  Israel is a state which permanently rules over four and a half million Palestinians, who cannot be granted the vote or any measure of civil rights, because that is incompatible with a ‘Jewish State’.  It is a situation whereby there are two different systems of law– one for Palestinians and another for Jewish settlers.  Even within the non-existent Green Line, Israel’s own Arab citizens are there on sufferance, with a plurality of Jewish voters wanting them expelled.  Apartheid may not be officially declared, but it is practical politics. 

Torquemada's agent Harry Gregson, Labour's SE Regional Organiser

The Labour Party now exists in a parallel universe whereby black is white and truth is false.  The laws of logic have been suspended.  How else can one describe a situation whereby those who support the world’s only apartheid state are the ones defining what is and is not racism?

In recent weeks, Ken Livingstone has been suspended for mentioning the relationship of the Nazis to the Zionists, David Watson has been suspended for claiming that Zionism is racist and I have been suspended for, among other things, claiming that Zionism is a Jewish form of anti-Semitism. 

When Peter Kyle MP won a seat in Hove against the Conservatives it was said that the most right-wing candidate had won!  Calling for the deselection of this arch-privatiser is now a disciplinary offence

The latter is a question of fact.  Although Zionist supporters today claim to oppose anti-Semitism, no historian of Zionism can be unaware that both anti-Semites and Zionists shared the same prejudices against diaspora Jewry.  As Jacques Doron notes in Classic Zionism and Modern Anti-semitism: Parallels and influences (1883-1914) (Journal of Israeli History, no. 8, 1.9.83., p.171)

‘It cannot be denied that the Jewish self-criticism so widespread among the German Zionist intelligentsia often seemed dangerously similar to the plaints of the German anti-Semites.’

Tomás de Torquemada -  Hero of Labour's Blairite civil service

There is a universal consensus in the media, that extends from the Guardian to the Daily Mail, that anyone who criticises Zionism is anti-Semitic.  The mere suggestion however that Israel is anything other than the purest form of Athenian democracy is like to result in Labour’s Inquisition bearing down on them, presided over by Torquemada in the form of John Mann MP. Events however have a habit of defying even the most prosaic of ideologues.

John Stolliday - the hatchetman in charge of the leaky Compliance Unit

In the past week alone Israel’s Deputy Chief of Staff, General Yair Golan has compared developments in Europe, particularly Germany in the 1930’s to Israel today. [IDF general in bombshell speech: Israeltoday shows signs of 1930s Germany, Jerusalem Post, 4.5.16.]  Yair’s speech at a ceremony remembering the Holocaust led to a series of events which culminated in the removal of Moshe Yalon as Israel’s Defence Minister.  

Yalon was no slouch when it came to killing Palestinians but his replacement, Avigdor Lieberman is the Israeli equivalent of Isis.  Lieberman has previously called for the beheading of ‘disloyal’ Israeli Arabs.  [Lieberman: Disloyal Israeli Arabs Should Be Beheaded and the drowning of thousands of Palestinian prisoners in the Dead Sea, Lieberman Blasted for Suggesting Drowning Palestinian Prisoners]

Lieberman agreed to join Netanyahu’s Likud coalition on the basis that he could introduce the death penalty.  Naturally the death penalty will only apply to Palestinians since only Military Courts, which have a conviction rate of some 99.7%, will have the power to impose it.  Jewish settler terrorists are tried in civil courts.

Having the Jewish Labour Movement presiding over 'anti-racism' training is like having Britain's biggest mass murderer, Dr Harold Shipman, in charge of developing a policy on medical ethics

We have an Alice in Wonderland situation in the Labour Party whereby the Jewish Labour Movement, which supports the Israeli state and its founding ideology, Zionism, is to be put in charge of anti-racism training by Baroness Royall, who investigated ‘anti-Semitism’ at Oxford University Labour Club.  Its akin to having the late Dr Shipman given responsibility for developing a course in medical ethics.  The JLM is affiliated to the World Zionist Organisation, which is responsible for the funding and development of settlements in the West Bank.  Its institutions are key to the maintenance of Israeli Apartheid, both in Israel itself and the Occupied Territories.  Since the JLM excludes from membership anyone who is not a Zionist or supporter of the Israeli state, it would be more honest to call it the Zionist Labour Movement.

It is part of the new political gospel that the Labour Party is being submerged in a tsunami of anti-Semitism.  What we are witnessing is the manufacturing of consent that flies in the face of all the evidence.  It is the perfect example of Marx’s dictum that the ruling ideas in any society are the ideas of the ruling class.  The existence of ‘anti-Semitism’ is assumed as a given.  It is above and beyond challenge in the mainstream press and media, despite the lack of any evidence for it.  How Israel lobby manufactured UK Labour Party’santi-Semitism crisis

Almost everyday people who criticises Zionism, the movement which founded the Israeli state, are being suspended for ‘anti-Semitism’.  Although it is anti-Semitic to equate Jews and Zionism, anyone who criticises the latter is deemed anti-Semitic!

Jackie Walker, the Vice-Chair of Momentum, has been suspended for mentioning the involvement of Jews in financing the slave trade.  She is herself both Black and Jewish. [Jackie has since been reinstated] It is one of Zionism’s myths that anti-Semitism is a seamless continuum of Jewish oppression for two thousand years.  Jews were always victims never perpetrators. It was this, the ‘lachrymose version of Jewish history’ that Salo Baron, perhaps the greatest Jewish historian of the 20^th century railed against.

I was myself suspended on March 18^th for having made comments, the details of which Labour’s Compliance Unit initially refused to give me, despite leaking them to The Telegraph which printed them on 2nd April. [Activist who derides critics as 'Zionist scum' admitted to Labour in latest anti-Semitism scandal to hit Party]

I will shortly be appearing before an investigation meeting.  It would appear that the Acting Regional Organiser for the South-East Harry Gregson, has gone into overdrive trying to find some incriminating evidence against me.  It is a strange process whereby you first suspend someone and then begin trying to find the evidence to justify the suspension.

One of the charges against me is that I wrote a blog post entitled ‘Israeli Policy is to wait for the remaining Holocaust survivors to die’  This was deemed such a terrible accusation by Gregson that it must be anti-Semitic.

It is of course a terrible accusation but exactly the same charge is made in an article in Israel’s Ha’aretz newspaper! Israel Is Waiting for Its Holocaust Survivors to Die 

It is beyond dispute that Israel is parsimonious in the extreme in withholding benefits from holocaust survivors.  Thousands of holocaust survivors in Israel live in dire poverty, forced to choose between heat and food.

Israel has received billions of shekels in reparations from the German state.  It has preferred to spend them on holocaust memorials and holocaust ‘education’, to say nothing of weaponry rather than on the holocaust survivors themselves. 

The true reason for my suspension though may lie in one other charge that I am facing, namely that I have called for the deselection of Peter Kyle, the New Labour MP for Hove.  Kyle is someone who believes fervently in private involvement in the NHS.  He voted for bombing Syria and is a darling of the Progress wing of Labour. 

The anti-Semitism witch-hunt in the Labour Party has one overriding purpose.  It is not just about sanitising Israel.  Its primary purpose is the removal of the Jeremy Corbyn leadership of the Party.  Co’s appeasement of the Right in the Labour Party is a recipe for defeat.  Its only effect is to whet the appetite of Labour’s McCarthyists.

Tony Greenstein