Jackie Walker is pilloried for saying that the Holocaust is the property of all humanity
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| Jackie Walker speaking at an LRC meeting in Brighton. Also on the platform was John McDonnell |
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| Another JLM supporter is quite certain that Jackie is not Jewish - why? because she is Black |
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| Just one of many abusive and racist tweets Jackie has received, courtesy of the JLM's campaign - notice how she is a 'pro-Islamist' - like the fascists Zionists are the most extreme Islamaphobes |
At the LP conference the JLM had deliberately invited as 'fraternal delegates' a delegation from the Israeli Labour Party. You can gain some measure of the racism of the ILP from an article Herzog slammed for remark about ‘Arab lovers’ in the right-wing Jerusalem Post:
'Zionist Union head Isaac Herzog has been trying to move his party to the center, but he appeared to have gone too far late Tuesday, when he told an audience in Ashkelon that his faction’s MKs needed to correct an impression that they are always “Arab lovers.”
“A false impression exists that we take the needs of Palestinians into account before the needs of the State of Israel,” he said at a toast for Labor activists ahead of the Passover holiday.'
What kind of Party is it whose leader talks about the need to avoid being seen as 'Arab lovers'? Imagine that Jeremy Corbyn said that the Labour Party needed to avoid being seen as 'Jew lovers'? I can remember when fighting the National Front and BNP being accused of being 'nigger lovers'. Herzog, who not so long ago was trying to give Corbyn lessons on 'anti-Semitism' is the racist leader of a deeply racist party, yet the JLM invited a delegation from the ILP to Party conference.
At the 'training seminar' of the JLM, which was really a propaganda session, participants like Jackie Walker were covertly filmed in order that anyone questioning the racist agenda could then be reported to Iain McNicol and Tom Watson and then subject to disciplinary procedures. The entrapment of people who attended is a disgrace and the JLM should have no further part in any form of anti-racist training. Indeed the whole concept of 'training' for anti-racism is itself a reactionary concept. Racism is eliminated by joint work and shared experiences not by lectures from on high.
Last week I wrote two blog posts - an Open Letter to John McDonnell – Don’t Condone the Race Baiters of the Jewish Labour Movement and The Jewish Labour Movement and its Political Lynching of Jackie Walker describing how Jackie Walker, Momentum’s Vice Chair, has come under sustained attack by the supporters of the Israeli state. What Zionists cannot bear most of all is that Jackie Walker is both Black and Jewish. Numerous abusive tweets (we only hear about abusive tweets directed at MPs) by people who could not possibly know her have confidently declared that she is not Jewish. Why? Because it is an article of faith amongst most Zionists that Black people are not Jewish.
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| William Fishman, a Jewish historian, tells how the Zionists played no part in Jewish socialism and trade union struggles in the East End - Zionism was a petit bourgeois delusion |
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| In the early 20th century when there was a Jewish labour movement, Zionists were excluded as scabs |
These
racists are being led by Jeremy Newmark and Mike Katz of the inappropriately
named Jewish Labour Movement (until 2004 it was known as Poalei Zion). I say inappropriate because when there was a Jewish
labour movement in this country, it wanted nothing to do with the Zionist movement,
which was rightly seen as a scab movement.
The Zionists were, as the enclosed scan from William Fishman’s highly
acclaimed East End Radicals shows, held in contempt by a very real Jewish labour
movement which, at its peak, consisted of over 30 Jewish unions. A labour movement which helped destroy Sir
Oswald Moseley’s British Union of Fascists at the Battle of Cable Street, a struggle
which the Zionists desperately opposed at the time along with their bourgeois
cousins in the Board of Deputies of British Jews.
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| crocodile tears come easy to these Blairite Zionists |
The Zionists and the race baiters of the Jewish
Labour Movement have never got over the fact that at her investigation Jackie
was cleared of anti-Semitism. This was
not surprising given that this indefatiguable fighter against racism and
fascism in Thanet, helped lead the Kent anti-racist network in their fight
against the National Front in Dover. You
will never see Zionist groups at an anti-fascist mobilisation or doing work
with asylum seekers or against state racism.
Jackie made the ‘mistake’ of privately discussing, in a Facebook post
with friends, the involvement of Jews in financing the slave trade. It is a historical fact that at certain times
Jews did indeed play a major part in financing the slave trade. That does not mean and contrary to their allegations,
Jackie has never said that it meant, that Jews therefore were the primary
financiers of the slave trade.
It is because of these libellous attacks on
Jackie that we asked John McDonnell to pull out of the JLM rally against ‘anti-Semitism’
last Sunday, which he did.
Zionist ‘anti-racism’ is purely an establishment
affair. It is a right-wing form of ‘anti-racism’
which pillories the victims of racism and presents the racists in an
anti-racist garb. It is an inversion of
reality. Zionism manages to turn the
victims of settler colonialism, the Palestinians, into the racists whereas the
settlers are seen as the victims of those whose land they colonise. In the Zionist fantasy world, the Palestinians
attack them, not because the colonists steal their land, water and resources –
it is because they are Jewish!
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| Jeremy Newmark - Chair of the JLM and accused of lying by an employment tribunal in Fraser v UCU where Newmark tried to argue that supporting a boycott of Israel was anti-Semitic |
What is most obscene is the Zionist use of the Holocaust
to justify their settler colonial project.
Zionism predated the holocaust, which began in 1941, by some 60
years. There was no connection between Palestine
and the holocaust other than the fact that the Zionist movement sought to use
the oppression and desperate situation of the Jews in Germany between 1933 and
1941 for their own advantage. What was
despicable was that even during the Holocaust the Zionists preferred to look
the other way. At no time during the
years 1941 to 1945 was there a concerted Zionist campaign to save even a
fragment of the Jews in Europe. The only
interest of the Zionist movement was in emigration, selective emigration to Palestine.
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| the Zionists have been waging a concerted campaign to expel Jackie Walker |
It is a matter of historical record that the Zionist
movement agreed a trade deal with Nazi Germany in August 1933, just when the Jewish
boycott of Hitler was taking off world wide.
It was agreed to by the Hitler regime precisely because it would destroy
the Boycott of Nazi Germany. The Boycott
had had a devastating effect on Germany’s economy. As Edwin
Black wrote in the ‘Transfer Agreement’
’For the entire first half of 1933 exports
were down 51%. ‘That six month loss
would have been greater except that the anti-Nazi boycott had not really
commenced until late March.’ [p.223]
The Zionists preferred to break the Boycott because they
wished to lay their hands on the wealth of German Jewry regardless of the fact
that only the Boycott had restrained the hands of the Nazis. Between 1933 and 1939 60% of capital investment
in Jewish Palestine was from Nazi Germany.
The behaviour of the Zionists in Hungary and elsewhere has been well
documented by more honest Zionists such as Ben Hecht in Perfidy. Suffice to say, the
allegations of collaboration brought by the survivors of the Hungarian holocaust
in Israel resulted in the Kasztner Trial in Israel between 1953 and 1958. The verdict confirming collaboration by the Zionist
leaders in Hungary caused the fall of
the second Labour Zionist government led by Moshe Sharrett in 1955.
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| faced with the choice between rescuing half of Germany's children in Palestine and all of them in Britain, Ben Gurion openly said that he preferred the former |
It is a matter of historical record that the Zionist movement
was disinterested in the Holocaust whilst it happened. I post here 4 pages from ‘The Burning Ground’
the official biography of Ben-Gurion by Shabtai Teveth.
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| Ben Gurion openly stated that the Holocaust would be used towards the 'building of our country' that was the Zionists main imperative |
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| Ben Gurion and the Jewish Agency Executive (the govt. in waiting) did not put rescuing Jews from the Nazis above Zionist work to build their state in Palestine |
Jackie Walker raised the JLM's hackles by questioning the
uniqueness of the holocaust. To the Zionists
it is a cardinal principle that the Holocaust is the property of the Jewish people
alone.
Lucy Dawidowicz, a right-wing Zionist historian, in the Holocaust and the Historians argued that
subsuming Jewish losses under a universal or ecumenical classification is to
effectively justify anti-Semitism. To Elie Wiesel it was a “betrayal of Jewish history”.
[Norman Finkelstein, Holocaust Industry, p.45] As Israeli
journalist and historian Boaz Evron wrote, the real purpose of Zionist Holocaust
awareness ‘is not at an understanding of
the past, but a manipulation of the future’.
For daring to raise the idea that mass genocide
or holocausts might be the property of all humanity, that Africans, Cambodians,
Jews and others have suffered at one time or another equivalent acts of
genocide, Jackie Walker has been vilified. First into the fray was that well-known
anti-racist newspaper, the Daily Telegraph.
In a bizarre article Revealed: Jeremy Corbyn ally says
Holocaust Memorial Day should not just be about genocide of Jews Jackie
was attacked for being ‘insensitive and
provocative’ i.e. debating the questions surrounding the holocaust and the
lessons it imparts. Particularly galling
was her statement that it would be "wonderful"
if Holocaust Memorial Day was not just about the genocide of Jews.
Although in theory HMD is open to all, in practice it
centres around the holocaust of the Jews.
Every other mass act of genocide is left on the periphery. On this Jackie is absolutely correct. In Israel school children are taken on trips
to Auschwitz, not to learn about the lessons of racism but to reinforce their
racism. Racism has become ‘a basic element in the everyday life of
Israeli youth’ according to an article in Ha’aretz. Israeli Teenagers: Racist and Proud of
It. This racism is as much
part of the Labour Zionist tradition as that of Likud.
Again according to Ha’aretz, which is Israel’s sole
liberal daily: ‘Nearly half of Israel's high school students do not believe that
Israeli-Arabs are entitled to the same rights as Jews in Israel’. The same
poll revealed that more than half the students would deny Arabs the right to be
elected to the Knesset. Poll: Half of Israeli High Schoolers
Oppose Equal Rights for Arabs
This is the racism that the JLM should be focussing
on. Instead they invite Israeli racists
to the Labour Party conference.
The Independent reports Momentum vice chair Jackie Walker
apologises over 'appalling' Holocaust comments quotes Jackie
as saying that if she had caused offence she apologises. Jackie is and has been under an immense
amount of pressure by those whose agenda is defending the United State’s guard
dog in the Middle East. A state which has
acted as the sponsor and supporter of every death squad regime in Central and
South America. A regime which was the closest friend of Apartheid South
Africa. In reality Jackie has nothing to
apologise for. The Zionists of course
take offence when anyone questions their bogus assertions of ‘anti-Semitism’
precisely because they and we know that there is no anti-Semitism crisis in
Labour. It is a great pity that Jeremy
Corbyn has bowed to the prevailing wind.
However it won’t do him any good because, as Kipling observed, paying
Danegeld merely increases the appetite of the blackmailer and that is what Jeremy
Newmark, Katz and the JLM are in the business of - blackmail.
The other ‘crime’
of Jackie Walker was to say that ‘I was
looking for information and I still haven’t heard a definition of anti-Semitism
that I can work with’ Possibly this is because the Zionist movement have
been busy peddling for years the discredited
European Union Monitoring Committee’s Working Definition of Anti-Semitism. It was a working definition which the Fundamental
Rights Agency deleted from their website.
This definition of ‘anti-Semitism’
tried to marry opposition to Israel and comparisons between Nazism and Zionism with
anti-Semitism. The University College
Union and the National Union of Students rejected it and even the Zionists
finally admitted that the EU had ditched the agreement [Israel lobbyists finally concede that
EU has ditched anti-Semitism “definition”]. The JLM however, led by Jeremy Newmark, who
was openly accused by an employment tribunal of lying on oath, pretended at its
‘training session’ that the EUMC definition was the standard definition. That is a lie and he knows it.
According to
the Independent ‘Senior members of
Momentum are "fuming" at her remarks’. If this is true then they should take a long
and hard look at their own behaviour.
Cowardice rarely pays. Any sign
of weakness from Momentum’s leadership will be capitalised on by the Zionists
and the Tom Watsons of this world. Momentum
needs to stand firm and reject the attacks on Jackie Walker. If Lansman backs down now, we will remove him
from the leadership of Momentum when eventually a conference is called.
According to
the Independent, The Holocaust Education Trust, founded by the paedophile Blairite
Greville Janner, accused Jackie Walker of undermining and belittling “the distinct nature of the tragedy itself”. This is utter rubbish. Placing the Holocaust in an anti-racist
context rather than exceptionalising and essentialising it, is exactly the
opposite of undermining and belittling it.
Exceptionalising
it by suggesting that it could only happen to the Jews when holocausts and mass
genocide have been the lot of many people is to take the holocaust out of
history. Essentialising it is to divorce
the holocaust from the reasons it occurred, in other words it wasn’t fascism,
the destruction of the German labour movement, the medieval myths fashioned
into modern racism, it was something about the Jews themselves. The Zionist idea of understanding the Jewish Holocaust
is not to understand it.
The HET stated
that ‘The deliberate use of term
Holocausts – plural – undermines and belittle the distinct nature of the
tragedy itself, ignores that genocides are the result of diverse and unique
factors, and also deprives the Jewish community of their collective memory.” This is nonsense. It is precisely by placing the Jewish holocaust
in a relative and historical context
that one can make sense of it. There are
also other questions to ask such as why the holocaust has taken on this importance
over 70 years after it occurred when it was barely mentioned in the first 20
years after it occurred. The answer
seems obvious. As Israel moves further
and further to the racist Right, as mobs chanting ‘Death to the Arabs’ become a regular feature of Israel’s political
scene (it used to be ‘Death to the Jews’ in Europe) so the Holocaust is the
shield to deflect criticism of Zionist racism.
What is obscene is the use of the holocaust in order to justify today’s
racism.
Tony
Greenstein
