Brighton and Hove’s Green Councillors Betray the Cause of Anti-Racism as they get into bed with the Tories and New Labour

Brighton’s Labour Group Proposes IHRA Motion as part of its war on the Left and Corbyn and the Greens join in

In an interview with The Times of Israel it was reported that Israel’s Education Minister, Naftali Bennett, had stated that ‘he would instruct the IDF to shoot and kill any Palestinians who cross into the country from Gaza’. When questioned as to whether or not that would also apply to children Bennett responded ‘“They are not children — they are terrorists. We are fooling ourselves. I see the photos.” Bennett says IDF should shoot to kill Gazans who cross border [8.10.18]

The statement of Bennett, who is the leader of HaBayit HaYehudi (Jewish Home), a religious settlers’ party, is that of a Nazi. It is reminiscent of Himmler’s speech to Nazi leaders in the Polish city of Posnan on October 6^th 1943 when he explained why the killings had to include Jewish children: “I did not assume to have the right to exterminate the men… and have the avengers personified in the children to become adults for our children and grandchildren.”[Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, p.259]

Palestinian children to Bennett are no different from Jewish children to Himmler. To both they represent the devil in child form. That was why Israeli polymath and orthodox religious scholar, Professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz described the settlers as Judeo-Nazis. Naftali Bennett is a prime example of a Judeo-Nazi. He subscribes to a racial philosophy of Jewish supremacism no different from Nazi ideology.

But under the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism ‘Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis’ can be anti-Semitic even though Israelis regularly make such comparisons themselves. For example even Deputy Chief of Staff General Yair Golan at a Holocaust Remembrance Day commemoration two years ago caused a storm when he stated that

‘If there's something that frightens me about Holocaust remembrance it's the recognition of the revolting processes that occurred in Europe in general, and particularly in Germany, back then – 70, 80 and 90 years ago – and finding signs of them here among us today in 2016. IDF Deputy Chief Likens 'Revolting Trends' in Israeli Society to pre-Holocaust Germany

Education Minister Naftali Benneftt, a Judeo-Nazi

Another member of Netanyahu’s Cabinet, Defence Minister Avigdor Liberman remarked that he would like nothing more than to see the drowning of thousands of Palestinian prisoners in the Dead Sea. Again the label Judeo Nazi would be apt. His Deputy as Defence Minister, Rabbi Eli Dahan is also no slouch. In a radio interview he explained that to him Palestinians ‘“are like animals, they aren’t human.” and that “A Jew always has a much higher soul than a gentile [non-Jew] , even if he is a homosexual,”

Anti--Gypsy Signs in Barns Green, West Sussex

To understand the full import of the above it is important to recognize that for Orthodox Jews being gay is an abomination which merits the death penalty, but even a gay Jew has a ‘much higher soul’ than a non-Jew. These are just some of the people who inhabit the present Israeli cabinet. Yet to call them what they are, Judeo-Nazis is anti-Semitic under the shabby, incoherent and contradictory collection of words that goes under the title of the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism.

Yet amazingly enough, the IHRA ‘definition of anti-Semitism’ is what Phelim McCafferty and the Green Group on Brighton & Hove Council has signed up to.  A defence of Israel which renders criticism of racists like Naftali Bennett antisemitic.         

The Latvian Waffen SS are lauded by the LNNK Party which the Tories are allied to in the European Parliament

Next Thursday Brighton and Hove Council is set to be the latest right-wing Council to adopt the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism.  It is a definition whose main purpose is not to combat anti-Semitism but to demonise support for the Palestinians.

The arguments against the IHRA have been well rehearsed for example in my most recent Open Letter to Caroline Lucas, Green MP for Brighton Pavilion. Simply put there is a very simple definition of anti-Semitism.  It is the OED: ‘hostility to or prejudice against Jews.’ The IHRA is 500+ words because that is how much it needs in order to conflate anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism.

Tony Janio - leader of the Tories  professes opposition to antisemitism but has never criticised the link-up of the Tories in the European Parliament with antisemitic parties

The actions of the Labour Group, which consists overwhelmingly of supporters of Progress and the Labour Right, in moving the IHRA have more to do with their opposition to Jeremy Corbyn than any concern about anti-Semitism.  Likewise the Tories are supporting the motion, not because they are worried about anti-Semitism but for similar reasons to Labour.  They too want to see an end to Jeremy Corbyn.  What is surprising is that the Green Party Councillors are playing #me2.

What kind of political degeneracy and stupidity leads anyone on the Left to sign a motion against racism with the Tory Party? Phelim McCafferty comes from Southern Ireland. He knows full well the bloody record of the Tories in Ireland. The Tory Party is the party of the British Empire and racism is its bread and butter. Racism was the justification for Empire through the belief that those we conquered were less civilised than ourselves. Racism isn’t an illness you catch or some moral deficiency, it is the oil that makes the wheels of imperialism turn - from the Atlantic slave trade to the Amritsar massacre and the starvation of Bengal. What kind of moral turpitude and political opportunism is it that leads the Greens of Brighton to get into bed with a party for whom racism is second nature? 

For sure the Tory party now has some Black and Asian MPs just as it now has some Jewish MPs. The British in India also relied on native collaborators to maintain the Raj but their rule was no less racist or bloody because of this. Today Sajid David presides over the Windrush scandal and the Tories ‘hostile environment policy’ towards migrants.

Most people think of the Green Party as some kind of anti-establishment party on the left of British politics but Brighton Greens when in power have shown a remarkable ability to adapt to the prevailing political ambience.

Up to 2015 the Green Party ran a minority administration in Brighton.  Because that administration was widely seen as a disaster, their representation fell from 21 to 11in 2015 and the Council is now run by Labour. The Greens during their time in power came into conflict with the refuse workers and together with the Tories imposed the hideous Eyesore (I-360) on Brighton.

We were led to believe that with the replacement of the previous leader, Jason Kitcat by Phelim McCafferty, that the Deep Greens had been put to bed.  By seconding the IHRA resolution to Council with the Tories the Greens have demonstrated their political shallowness.

Anyone serious about anti-racism would ask why it is that ‘anti-Semitism’ is being singled out.  Jews may be a minority but they are not racially oppressed. According to the Pew Research Centre 7% of British people have unfavourable attitudes to Jews, compared to 26% and 50% with respect to Muslims and Roma respectively.

Daniel Yates - right-wing leader of Brighton Labour Group

There are no Windrush-style deportations of Jews.  Jews are not stopped and searched on the street or likely to die in police custody nor do they suffer from racial attacks or economic discrimination.  Jews are not overrepresented in prisons and under-represented in Parliament. Jews are a privileged part of the White population.  The idea that passing the IHRA resolution has something to do with opposing racism against Jews is fanciful.  It is about a political narrative concerned with Israel, Zionism and Jeremy Corbyn. 

The mere fact that ‘anti-Semitism’ is being privileged above any other form of racism is itself racist.  It is a slap in the face of those groups who really do suffer from racism.  

The Tories are the traditional party of anti-Semitism. At the beginning of the 20^th century they opposed the immigration of Jewish refugees from Czarist Russia and in 1905 under the ardent Zionist Arthur Balfour they introduced the Aliens Act to keep Jews out.  In the 1930’s they opposed the immigration of Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany, supported by the Times, Telegraph, Mail and Express. The war-time government of Churchill adamantly refused to admit Jewish refugees who were able to escape Nazi occupied Europe because they were considered enemy aliens!

An email from Jewish Green Party member Les Levidow to Phelim McCafferty

Message to Phelim McCafferty from Debbie Fink, a Jewish member of the Green Party

Of course as the Jewish community has moved upward socially and politically to the Right the Tories have shed their overt anti-Semitism which resulted in someone like Michael Howard having to face over 40 selection contests before becoming an MP.

But although the Tories are ardently pro-Zionist and anti-Palestinian they have not shed all their attitudes.  They are allied with the European Conservative and Reform Group in the European Parliament.  This is a group consisting of a number of anti-Semitic parties such as the Swedish Democrats, Poland’s Law and Justice Party and Latvia’s LNNK/For Fatherland and Freedom. The LNNK for example has one MEP, Robert Zile, who on one Saturday every March demonstrates alongside veterans of Latvia’s Waffen SS.

Over 95% of Latvia’s Jews perished in the Holocaust, the second highest of any European country.  Part of the reason was the hostility of the native population many of whom joined the Waffen SS, the section of the SS responsible for running the concentration camps. Yet the Tories, including ex-Conservative Friends of Israel Chair Eric Pickles ardently defend their tie up with overtly anti-Semitic parties.

See Monica Lowenberg’s Riga, Capital of European Culture: Waffen SS, Stags and Silence? for a description of the Tories friends in Latvia. If Tony Janio, the Tory leader in Brighton Council were sincere in his opposition to anti-Semitism then he would challenge his party’s membership of the ECHR group in the European parliament.  Otherwise he is just being the normal Tory hypocrite.

For the Green Party to ally itself with right-wing Labour and the Tories use of ‘anti-Semitism’ as a stick to beat supporters of the Palestinians demonstrates how shallow their support for the Palestinians really is. Whenever the Greens gets their hands on the levers of power, they behave no different to their Labour/Tory counterparts.

It remains to be seen whether all 11 of the Green Party councillors follow the lead of Phelim McCafferty into the lobby with Warren Morgan and the Tories.

Let us be clear what this is about.  The IHRA states that

"Manifestations [of antisemitism] might include the targeting of the state of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity. However, criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic. "  

In other words if you criticise Israel because it is fundamentally different from a normal state, from an anti-Zionist perspective, because it is a state based on ethnic supremacy, then you are antisemitic.  This is what the Green group and the Labour group have signed up for. This is anti-Palestinian racism, pure and simple. Tony Greenstein

Open Letter to Phelim McCafferty – Leader of Green Group on Brighton and Hove City Council

Dear Phelim,

I wrote to you earlier today regarding the fact that you had jointly seconded, with Tony Janio of the Tories, the IHRA resolution that is going to the next meeting of Brighton and Hove Council. You have chosen not to respond.

I sent you and the Green Councillors over the weekend a letter explaining why the IHRA has nothing to with opposing anti-Semitism and everything to do with undermining support for the Palestinians. No one has yet explained why a ‘definition’ of anti-Semitism of 500+ words is required when the Oxford English Dictionary definition ‘hostility to or prejudice against Jews’ consists of just 6. The fact that the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism is based on ‘hatred’ rather than ‘hostility’ demonstrates it has nothing to do with anti-Semitism.

 Even the IHRA’s principal author Kenneth Stern has criticised its use to chill free speech on campuses. The IHRA has been the subject of withering criticism by a variety of legal and academic figures, such as former Court of Appeal Judge Sir Stephen Sedley, Hugh Tomlinson QC and Geoffrey Robertson QC who has described it as ‘not fit for purpose.’

The reason why the Labour Group is proposing this pernicious statement owes more to their hostility to Jeremy Corbyn than any concern with racism against Jews or others. Hostility to Corbyn is also the prime motive of the Tory group.  It is stretching credibility to believe that a Tory Party which has deported possibly hundreds of Black British Windrush Citizens under their ‘hostile environment policy’ is seriously concerned about racism against Jews.

A Tory Party which, when Jewish refugees were fleeing from the pogroms in Czarist Russia, introduced the 1905 Aliens Act and which also opposed the admission of Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany is now apparently concerned about anti-Semitism. This is the same Tory Party which is in alliance with anti-Semitic parties in the European Parliament and whose MEP’s have just supported the racist Viktor Orban, Prime Minister of Hungary.

What makes this even more sordid is that you led people to believe that the Green group in the Council would not be supporting this wretched motion.

The only effect of adopting the IHRA will be to threaten the free speech of Council employees and others.  For the Green Group to support such an anti-democratic resolution is shameful. The IHRA has been used to close down Israel Apartheid week on university campuses. A staff member of Hammersmith & Fulham Council was dismissed for contravening the IHRA.  Clearly your support for civil liberties is skin deep.

This resolution is also racist. You have ignored the letter written to the Council by some 18 Black and migrant groups in this city opposing the IHRA. By what right do you privilege opposition to anti-Semitism, which is a marginal prejudice, compared to racism against Black people, Muslims and Gypsies?  There is no state anti-Semitism in Britain and where it does exist, in Poland and Eastern Europe, the Zionist movement has nothing to say because these regimes are also the most ardently pro-Israel.

Racist attitudes to Roma in this country are over 7 times higher than that against Jews and anti-Muslim racism is over 3 times as high.  It is clear that it wasn’t anti-racism which motivated this resolution.

Some people have fondly imagined that the Green Party and its councillors represent a break from the traditional two parties and their mode of operation. In supporting this racist resolution, not least in the way you led people to believe that you would be opposing the IHRA, it is clear that your real goal is for a greater share of the spoils rather than a desire for fundamental change in society.  Some of us had hoped that the Green councillors had broken from the Jason Kitcat era.  Clearly we were wrong.

Yours sincerely,

Tony Greenstein

Picket of the BBC– End the Bias Against Jeremy Corbyn – If You’re Concerned About ‘Anti-Semitism’ Stop Giving a Platform to Tommy Robinson’s Fascist Supporters

A Simple Message to Jeremy Corbyn – Stop Apologising for non-existent anti-Semitism You have nothing to apologise for

Picket of the BBC by JVL and LAW

Called at short notice by Jewish Voice for Labour and supported by Labour Against the Witchhunt, Brent Momentum and at least two union branches, we had an excellent picket of the Biased Broadcasting Corporation today otherwise known as the Voice of Israel.

Tony Greenstein speaking at the BBC picket

The BBC has been one of the main proponents of the fake anti-Semitism campaign, picking up on every neo-con allegation it can find against Corbyn. It has portrayed the execrable Margaret Hodge as a latter day saint, despite her despicable role as Council leader in Islington in covering up child abuse (not a word of which passes the BBC’s corporate lips).

I spoke almost as soon as I arrived on behalf of LAW and my message was that if the BBC wanted to focus on genuine anti-Semitism then why has it refused to cover the alliance between the Conservative Party and anti-Semitic parties in the European Parliament?  Since 2009 the Tories have been part of the European Conservative and Reform group which contains the anti-Semitic Polish Law & Justice Party, which has just passed a Holocaust law making it an offence to refer to Polish complicity in the Holocaust. 

Events such as the burning alive of up to 1600 Jews in Jedwabne in 1941 by nationalist Poles were made a criminal offence, despite the fact that in 2001 Poland’s President Aleksander Kwasniewski  apologised on behalf of the Polish nation for this massacre. A statue erected in Jedwabne in memory of those who died has been repeatedly daubed with swastikas and anti-Semitic slogans.

Today's picket of the BBC

None of this prevented the far-Right Editor of the Jewish Chronicle, Stephen Pollard from defending Michal Kaminski, MEP for the L&J party and member of the Polish Sejm for Jedwabne, who defended and exonerated those who committed this crime. Poland's Kaminski is not an antisemite: he's a friend to Jews As Pollard noted Kaminski was ‘one of the greatest friends to the Jews in a town where antisemitism and a visceral loathing of Israel are rife.’ Support for Israel and Zionism meant he couldn’t be an anti-Semite. Which exonerates nearly all the world’s anti-Semites! More recently Pollard has been accused by David Rosenberg of the Jewish Socialist Group of endangering his family under threat from fascists.  This is the level of hypocrisy we are dealing with.

Also members of the ECR Group are the Latvian National Alliance (LNNK/Freedom and Fatherland) party with one MEP Robert Zile.  Zile spends a Saturday every March demonstrating in Riga with veterans of the Latvian Waffen SS.  Not a word of any of this passes the lying lips of the BBC and their tame reporters. For more details of Tory Party tolerance of anti-Semitism in Latvia and Eastern Europe see Monkia Lowenberg’s Riga, Capital of European Culture: Waffen SS, Stags and Silence? None of this, genuine anti-Semitism, has ever been reported by the BBC or our yellow press.  They are far more interested in fake anti-Semitism in the Labour Party.  Thus we are in an Orwellian situation where Black = White and anti-racism = anti-Semitism. I also had a message to Jeremy Corbyn.

For f*** sake stop apologising for your past.  Do you really think that apologising will stop the attacks on you?  The more you apologise the more they will step up the bogus allegations.  Is Seamus Milne’s head filled with sawdust these days?

Your enemies are going to dig up all sorts of stuff.  Stand your ground.  If they attack you for speaking with Hamas/Hezbollah say what you used to say. They are not terrorists, they are representatives of the oppressed.  Hamas and Hezbollah were both elected and you had the right to speak alongside them.  Indeed but for Israel neither organisation would even exist.

Yes their military wings are designated as terrorists but so is the Kurdish PKK.  That is an outrageous political decision which has no regard to their actual activities.  It is the Israeli army who are the real terrorists. Israel helped create Hamas and if they hadn’t murdered 20,000 people and injured about 100,000 in their invasion of Lebanon in 1982 there would have been no Hezbollah.  Hezbollah’s main offence was being the only Arab army to stand up to Israel and win in 2006.

Thatcher shakes hands with the man she called a terrorist

Hamas and Hezbollah don’t drop bombs on or shoot guided missiles at peoples’ homes, schools or hospitals.  The ANC too were designated terrorists by Reagan and Thatcher and until recently the US had them on a terrorist watch list.

Stop apologising for the fact that a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust. Hajo Mayer, at a meeting you chaired, compared Israel to the Nazis.  It was the Deputy Chief of Staff of the Israeli Army, General Yair Golan, who said three years ago that:

“If there is something that frightens me about the memories of the Holocaust, it is the knowledge of the awful processes which happened in Europe in general, and in Germany in particular, 70, 80, 90 years ago, and finding traces of them here in our midst, today, in 2016

This is what veteran peacenick, Uri Avnery, himself a Zionist wrote:

‘The discrimination against the Palestinians in practically all spheres of life can be compared to the treatment of the Jews in the first phase of Nazi Germany. (The oppression of the Palestinians in the occupied territories resembles more the treatment of the Czechs in the “protectorate” after the Munich betrayal.)

The rain of racist Bills in the Knesset, those already adopted and those in the works, strongly resembles the laws adopted by the Reichstag in the early days of the Nazi regime. Some rabbis call for a boycott of Arab shops. Like then. The call “Death to the Arabs” (“Judah verrecke”?) is regularly heard at soccer matches.

A member of parliament has called for the separation between Jewish and Arab newborns in hospital. A chief rabbi has declared that Goyim (non-Jews) were created by God to serve the Jews.

Our ministers for education and culture are busy subduing the schools, theatre and arts to the extreme rightist line, something known in German as Gleichschaltung. The supreme court, the pride of Israel, is being relentlessly attacked by the minister of justice. The Gaza Strip is a huge ghetto.

Of course, no one in their right mind would even remotely compare Netanyahu to Hitler, but there are political parties here which do emit a strong fascist smell. The political riffraff peopling the present Netanyahu government could easily have found their place in the first Nazi government.

One of the main slogans of our present government is to replace the “old elite”, considered too liberal, with a new one. One of the main Nazi slogans was to replace “das System”.

Army rule

By the way, when the Nazis came to power, almost all high-ranking officers of the German army were staunch anti-Nazis. They were even considering a putsch against Hitler. Their political leader was summarily executed a year later, when Hitler liquidated his opponents in his own party.

We are told that Golan is now protected by a personal bodyguard, something that has never happened to a general in the annals of Israel.  I strongly recommend people read the whole article. Uri Avnery: Israeli politics bears comparison with end of Weimar Germany and rise of fascism, Irish Times, 25.5.16.

This relates to one of the ‘illustrations’ in the IHRA ‘definition’ of anti-Semitism.  Corbyn made yet another rod for his own back by following meekly in the footsteps of Theresa May and adopting this dishonest and disingenuous script whose only purpose is to equate supporters of the Palestinians and opponents of Zionism with the Nazis. Corbyn is an ‘anti-Semite’ to those the BBC regularly interviews because he is reluctant to adopt the whole of the IHRA.

Today we had a lively demonstration and made our views clear to the BBC, which John Pilger described as the most effective propaganda organisation in the world.

We live in times which are Orwellian.  Anti-racists are racists and anti-Semites whereas Tories, whose party was founded on racism and Empire are now anti-racists!  A party which fought against the admission of Jewish refugees to Britain and under Lord Balfour introduced the anti-Semitic 1905 Aliens Bill is now apparently opposed to anti-Semitism. 

There is no more eloquent opponent of ‘anti-Semitism’ than Boris Johnson.  The same man who described Black people as ‘picanninies’ with ‘watermelon smiles’ and who only yesterday described Muslim women as looking like letter boxes.  This piece of filth is also a sincere opponent of ‘anti-Semitism’.

The reality is that ‘anti-Semitism’ is the false anti-racism of the Right.  It is a cover for real racism Islamaphobia.  It is no wonder that one of the main proponents of the false anti-Semitism campaign, John Mann MP, is a bigoted racist when it comes to the Roma who he considers a social pest, much as the Nazis did.

We need to turn the heat up on the BBC and all the other liars in the mainstream press.  When we can have the racist press, the Sun and Mail, being in the forefront of the campaign against ‘anti-Semitism’ we can be sure that the ‘problem’ in the Labour Party is utterly contrived.  That is why Corbyn has to be saved from his own stupidity. If he doesn’t start fighting back he is doomed.  And the person who bears most responsibility is the scab leader of Momentum, Jon Lansman, a Zionist for whom defence of Israel is more important than a socialist Labour Party.  Already there are reports of secret meetings of his MPs.  CORBYN'S CURTAIN CALL: Furious MPs vow to 'COLLAPSE’ leadership at SECRET MEETINGS

We know who these MPs are and in the event Corbyn manages to win a working majority at the next election we can expect these scabs to refuse to support him as Prime Minister. 

We have to deselect Labour’s Tory MPs now.  If their bluff isn’t called then they will, when the time is ripe, act as a Tory/Liberal 5^th column.

MPs such as Joan Ryan, Chris Leslie, Hilary Benn, John Mann, Wes Streeting, Louise Ellman, Luciana Berger, Ruth Smeeth, Ian Austin, Margaret Hodge et al should be ‘encouraged’ to join a more suitable party. 

Today’s picket should be the first of many such actions and well done to Jewish Voice for Labour for calling it.

Tony Greenstein 

See Tariq Ali's  NEW ATTEMPT TO UNSEAT JEREMY CORBYN

Inminds Demonstration Last Friday Outside the BBC

Inminds Demonstration Last Friday Outside the BBC

Inminds Demonstration Last Friday Outside the BBC

Poland's New anti-Semitic Government - Israel Keeps Silent

Although Poland’s Michal Kaminski has now deserted Law & Justice for the right-wing Civic Platform party, the differences between the two parties are marginal.  Both oppose abortion and the right of women to control their own bodies, both are homophobic and anti-gay rights, both oppose same sex marriages, euthenasia and the decriminalisation of soft drugs.  Both are free-market parties that support privatisation and liberal economics and of course both are virulently nationalist.

Kaminski led the campaign against a national Polish apology for the burning alive of up to 900 Jews in Jedwabne by Poles in 1941 (see )  Kaminski was formerly a member of the fascist National Revival of Poland Party. 

Kaminski paying the ritual visit to Yad Vashem - an obligatory stop for racist visitors to Israel

Kaminski was also the Zionists’ favourite anti-Semite, being a guest of honour in Israel at the Global Counter-Terrorism Conference in Herzliya, Israel, September 2009.  He also paid his respects to the dead of the holocaust at the Yad Vashem propaganda museum, following in the wake of former Nazi John Vorster and others.

However, according to the far-right Zionist editor of the Jewish Chronicle Stephen Pollard, "Far from being an anti-Semite, Mr Kaminski is about as pro-Israeli an MEP as exists."  ‘Poland's Kaminski is not an antisemite: he's a friend to Jews’.    Indeed Kaminski is ‘one of the greatest friends to the Jews in a town [Brussels] where antisemitism and a visceral loathing of Israel are rife.’ 

 In other words his Zionism shielded his anti-Semitism.  And Pollard wasn’t the only one.   Rabbi Schochet, member of the virulently racist Lubavitch sect, of Mill Hill synagogue, invited Kaminski to his synagogue explaining that:  “We are intending to host Michal Kaminski at an evening open to the entire community once his itinerary is confirmed. It is hoped to hold this event in liaison with Conservative Friends of Israel and I personally hope to host him in a private capacity on a Friday night.’

“I decided to extend the invitation precisely because of the ambiguity surrounding him. Mr Kaminski is known to have a colourful past but is presently a strong supporter of Israel and is leading a lobby against the anti-shechitah parties.”   JC 3.11.10.

A ‘colourful past’ is certainly one way of describing being a member of an openly anti-Semitic and fascist organisation, wearing fascist insignia and being a homophobe (among other sins). 

The following article in the liberal Jewish magazine Forward describes the anti-Semitic tendencies of Poland’s new Law & Justice Party.  It describes how in Wroclaw, a demonstration against Muslim refugees ended up burning an effigy of a Hasidic Jew, demonstrating if any proof were needed, that racism against Muslims will inevitably cross over into anti-Jewish racism.  Of course Israel has not criticised Poland’s new government.  Why should it?  They are both Islamaphobic and racist and in any case, anti-Semitism in Poland can only result in emigration to Israel, which is something that Netanyahu always welcomes.

Tony Greenstein

Poland Turns Hard to Right — and Jews Wind Up in Crosshairs

When some 50,000 people turned out in Warsaw recently to protest a plan by Poland’s ruling party to pack the nation’s constitutional court, the hard right-wing political faction responded quickly with a counter-demonstration of its own. Its counter-protest featured, among other things, a placard that mocked those claiming to defend democracy as “the committee to defend Jewish-Communist wealth.”

At around the same time in Wroclaw, Poland’s fourth largest city, crowds at a parallel demonstration to support the recently elected Law and Justice party shouted, “Wroclaw is being de-Polanized as the Jews are buying up homes in the city.”

At another Wroclaw demonstration, held November 18 to protest a European Union plan that would see Poland admit some 7,000 Syrian refugees, demonstrators denounced the proposed immigrants as Islamists — and to somehow add to this point, they set fire to a previously prepared effigy of a Hasidic Jew holding the E.U. flag.

Image: Reuters:  Rage and a Non Sequitur? To protest against the immigration of Muslims and Syrian refugees, demonstrators in Wroclaw on November 18 burn an Orthodox Jew in effigy.

“God, Honor and Fatherland,” the crowd then chanted.

Since the October 25 elections that gave the strongly nationalist Law and Justice Party an absolute majority in parliament, Poland has been a nation in crisis. Like several other countries in Europe, the right-wing party’s rise back to power after eight years in opposition was fuelled in part by anti-immigrant furor, but also anger with the corruption of the government led by the incumbent Civic Platform party. A backlash from rural Poles who feel left behind by the country’s free-market reforms also played a big role. But critics charge that Law and Justice is now using its absolute majority to implement anti-democratic measures they denounce as “Putinist.”

And amid all this, somehow, Jews have become a focus of ire among the party’s defenders in the country whose huge Jewish population was decimated in the Nazi Holocaust.

“This government harbors anti-Judaic sentiment which can easily become anti-Semitism,” said the Rev. John Pawlikowski, professor of social ethics and director of the Catholic-Jewish studies program at the Catholic Theological Union, in Chicago.

Among other things, Law and Justice, known also by its Polish acronym, PiS, has failed to denounce the effigy burning in Wroclaw. The party also has appointed a defense minister who’s made anti-Semitic comments and has, via its culture minister, Piotr Glinski, threatened to sue those it believes guilty of “defamation against Poland.”

Image: Getty Images:  See You in Court: Piotr Glinski (center), Poland’s minister of culture, has threatened to sue those he believes guilty of defaming his country.

“It reminds me of the Communist takeover in the 1940s,” said Andrzej Zoll, a former ombudsman for the constitutional court.

David Harris, executive director of the American Jewish Committee, will soon visit Warsaw to discuss the current situation with members of the new government. In a telephone interview December 1, Harris told the Forward that any move away from the full throttle of democracy that Poland has experienced since 1989 would be a very disturbing development.

Harris cited AJC’s partnership with the Forum for Dialogue, the largest Polish nongovernmental organization dealing with Polish-Jewish relations, which has sponsored wide-ranging Polish-Jewish dialogue since 1996.

“If the forum continues to flourish, it will be a good and welcome sign,” Harris said. “If this is not the case, everyone should be concerned, and it will be a good litmus test.”

AJC has been involved in Poland for 26 years. “We will continue to remain involved with democratic forces there,” Harris said.

Many see the new government’s drumbeat for Polish patriotism as cause for concern.

Barbara Engelking, director of the Polish Center for Holocaust Research at Warsaw University, said she saw the form of national identity that PiS promotes as an immature and simplistic model that constitutes a setback in Polish thinking about the past.

Citing historical research in recent years that deals with Polish crimes against Jews, such as the 1941 massacre at Jedwabne and the murder of Jews elsewhere during the German occupation, Engelking said she had hoped this research would give the national discussion a deeper dimension that would force serious reflection and help build a mature, complex national identity with an awareness not just of Polish victimhood, but also of the crimes that Poles have committed against Jews.

Jan Zaryn, a PiS senator, disagrees. During a phone interview, he denied that nationalists were rewriting history. “We do not have to lie about our history, because it’s beautiful,” he said, citing the valor of the Polish underground during the German occupation and the loss of 3 million non-Jewish Polish lives under the Nazis, the same as the number of Polish Jews. Zaryn also denied that there is deeply rooted anti-Semitism in Poland.

Polish prosecutors are considering a libel suit against Jan Gross, a Polish-born Princeton University professor who recently wrote an opinion piece that appeared in the German newspaper Die Welt, in which he claimed Poles killed more Jews than they killed Germans during the German occupation. Gross is the author of several books about Polish atrocities during World War II, including “Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne,” about the 1941 Polish massacre of Jews.

The Polish American Congress, representing 9.5 million Polish Americans, doubts that its countrymen murdered between 350 and 1,000 Jews, as generally estimated by historians, in Jedwabne then. Frank Milewski, who is in charge of documenting Holocaust information for the organization, said German bullet casings were found in the barn where the Jews were burned to death. He said no conclusions could be reached unless the bodies were exhumed. Frank Spula, president of PAC, declined comment.

In America, the Anti-Defamation League has expressed concerns about the government not taking the opportunity to distance itself from expressions of anti-Semitism and anti-Semitic acts. Foreign Minister Witold Waszczykowski responded to a call by the ADL on the government to condemn the burning in effigy of a Hasidic Jew at the November 18 Wroclaw protest by invoking “the Jewish lobby” and calling for Poland to create its own lobby and narratives.

At a November 17 conference in the Presidential Palace, called by President Andrzej Duda, representatives from Polish museums and other cultural institutions were told to galvanize Polish nationalism and to discard narratives that brought Poland shame. Glinski told the gathering that building a national identity was an important component in the PiS philosophy of government.

Notably, there was no E.U. flag in the conference room. According to Marcin Zyla, an editor at the Krakow-based liberal Catholic weekly Tygodnik Powszechny, the absence of the E.U. flag was a symbolic rebuke to the secular Western European community, which PiS sees as an existential threat to Catholic Poland.

“The push to create a bright image abroad is not new, but this government is promoting PiS policy much more brazenly and aggressively,” said Jan Grabowski, a Polish-born professor of history at the University of Ottawa, in Canada.

Polish xenophobia was very much evident during the November 18 demonstration in Wroclaw, when demonstrators demonized Muslim refugees, warning that the refugees were not welcome in Poland.

“Raped, beaten and murdered by the Islamic savages,” the crowd shouted. “Do you want it on our streets?” But what was the connection there between that and the burning in effigy of the Hasidic-looking Jew holding an E.U. flag, an action that Poland’s B’nai B’rith was quick to denounce?

“The Jew has always been portrayed in Polish folk culture as an eternal threat and a stranger,” said Piotr Pazinski, editor in chief of Midrasz, a Jewish cultural magazine in Warsaw. “Holding an E.U. flag fortifies their racist belief that Jews are orchestrating an E.U. plot to destroy white Catholic Poland.”

Image: Getty Images:  Powerful Pair: Poland’s new defense minister, Antoni Macierwicz (left) has suggested that the anti-Semitic Protocols of the Elders of Zion may be valid. Prime Minister Beata Szydio (right) has rebuffed demands to revoke his appointment.

So far there has been no official government denunciation of the Wroclaw incident.

“The silence of the government is deafening,” said Michael Schudrich, chief rabbi of Poland, although he believes the Wroclaw demonstration consisted of a small group of marginal people.

But some Jews outside Poland with years of philanthropic investment in the country are reluctant to stigmatize the new government. Sigmund Rolat, a Holocaust survivor and funder of Warsaw’s new Museum of the History of Polish Jews, which also receives government support, urged caution.

“Remember, everything is relative,” he said. “We know about the threat to Jews in Western Europe. By comparison, Poland is a safe haven for Jews. The mayor of Wroclaw has ordered an investigation of the incident, and they know who set the fire.”

Rolat has played a major role in the success of the annual Jewish Culture Festival in Krakow and is an honorary citizen of his hometown, Czestochowa, for his contributions to cultural life.

The museum’s director, Dariusz Stola, a history professor, stressed that he does not expect any pressure from the government to change the museum’s portrayal of Polish behavior during World War II. “The museum is a huge success,” Stola said.

Repeated efforts to reach philanthropist Tad Taube, whose foundation is a major supporter of Jewish life in Poland, were unsuccessful.

But the xenophobia and bigotry evident in the comments of government officials and in public behavior at pro-government rallies has left many observers pessimistic about the prospects for civil liberties and democratic values in Poland.

In an article in Foreign Affairs magazine, Mitchell Orenstein, a University of Pennsylvania history professor of Slavic studies, wrote “goodbye to gay rights, in-vitro fertilization, abortion in the case of potential harm to the mother, and other liberal policies.”

As for the future of the 10,000 members of Poland’s organized Jewish community (estimates of the total number of Jews in Poland beyond that core range up to 20,000), Konstanty Gebert, a columnist and veteran of the underground fight against communism, said: “If this democracy is curtailed, Jewish life will shrivel. We are too few to hunker down and weather the storm. Our future may well be on the line.”