Open Letter to Seamus Milne: If Labour Fails at the Polls Today Then You Will Bear a Heavy Responsibility for What Has Happened

Your strategy of apologising for ‘anti-Semitism’ neutrality on Brexit and Appeasement of the Right has led to Disaster

Dear Seamus,

Short of a miracle, Jeremy Corbyn is not going to become the next Prime Minister. Yet after 9 years in opposition Labour should have had little difficult in winning the General Election, despite the ferocity of attacks on it.  Austerity has provided the ideal opportunity to be rid of Johnson and his acolytes.

Because of Jeremy Corbyn’s disastrous handling of the fake ‘anti-Semitism’ attacks, coupled with the absurd policy of neutrality on Brexit whilst accepting that we should be part of the NATO alliance fir war, I fear that we are going to fall short of what was achieved in 2017. As I blogged recently  and in the Weekly Worker, I expect the worst whilst hoping for the best.

Has Seamus Milne Sunk Corbyn's Hope of Becoming Prime Minister?

You were Corbyn’s Strategic Advisor and that meant drawing up a strategy not making fire fighting into a fine art.

It should have been clear from the outset that Corbyn, who more than anyone was identified with the anti-war, anti-NATO wing of the Labour Party, would come under fierce attack when elected as leader in September 2015. With your experience you above all should have understood what covert destabilisation was. Because that is what we have been witnessing for the past 4 and a half years.

American imperialism isn’t just for third world countries.  It has interfered repeatedly in Europe when it felt necessary as with Operation Gladio, in Italy. Imperialism isn’t just a jargon word but a description of how western capitalism maintains itself politically and economically.

You above all should have known that the United States and its allies here and in Israel would stop at nothing to destabilise Corbyn’s leadership in alliance with the Zionist movement.  The United States doesn’t give the Israeli state $4+ billion a year because of its love for Jews.

Trump is a good example of an anti-Semite who loves Israel and Zionism. When referring to American Jews tendency to criticise Israel he remarked that ‘some Jews don’t love Israel enough.’

Indeed if you are or should be aware that Zionism has no interest in combating anti-Semitism.  Zionism from the beginning accepted anti-Semitism as a natural phenomenon that could not be fought and should therefore be accepted.  Why?  As the editor of the Zionist paper Die Welt, Jacob Klatzkin explained:

‘If we do not admit the rightfulness of anti-Semitism we deny the rightfulness of our own nationalism... Instead of establishing societies for defence against the anti-Semites who want to reduce our rights, we should establish societies for defence against our friends, who desire to defend our rights.’

Did it never occur to you that there was something strange about the Board of Deputies of British Jews or the Jewish Chronicle’s apparent enthusiasm for fighting anti-Semitism? This is the same Board of Deputies and Jewish Chronicle that urged Jews to stay at home when Oswald Moseley tried to march the British Union of Fascists through the East End of London in October 1936.

The same Jewish Chronicle which has conducted a ceaseless war against Corbyn warned ‘Jews are urgently warned to keep away from the route of the Blackshirt march and from their meetings.’

I realise that being a scion of the British Establishment - Winchester and Oxford - your dad having been Director of the BBC, your parents would have run a mile from confrontation with the fascists. However Jeremy’s mother was there and so was my father.

I’ll let you into a secret. My dad didn’t need a 500+ word IHRA definition of anti-Semitism in order to know what anti-Semitism was.  All he had to do was go down the wrong road and get his head kicked in or worse. It is unbelievable that with the Zionists bellowing for the adoption of the IHRA, with no caveats or get out clauses, you were unable to perceive that anti-Semitism was being weaponised in support of the world’s most racist state, Israel.

Fascism and anti-Semitism has never been fought with a definition. The IHRA had an altogether different purpose which was to conflate anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism. It would seem that all your previous writings and political involvement counted for naught when you smelt power.

You were after all closely connected with the Communist Party, including being the business manager of Straight Left, the pro-Soviet faction in the CP.

Having written The Enemy Within: The Secret War Against the Miners, about the Great miners' strike which focused on the role of the Intelligence Services you cannot but have been aware of what the Deep State in Britain would do to undermine a perceived opponent of the United States and the NATO Alliance.  After all Corbyn had been elected as leader of the second major political party in the US’s closest European ally.  All this is or should be bread and butter to you.

Your inability to put into practice the insights gained from years of activism and journalism suggests that you never really believed half of what you wrote. Or that theory and practice had difficulty in reconciling with each other.

So how can we account for your hamfisted, counter-productive advice in respect of the accusations of ‘anti-Semitism’?  They didn’t begin with the infamous mural but in the summer of 2015 before Jeremy was even elected when the Daily Mail, followed swiftly by the Jewish Chronicle, alleged that Corbyn was an associate of Paul Eisen a holocaust denier.

It should have been obvious even then that anti-Semitism was being weaponised by those whose purpose was to defend the most racist state in the world, Israel and the ideology of that state, Zionism.

The Eisen allegations were followed by attacks on the late Sir Gerald Kaufman, a Jewish MP, Father of  the House and supporter of the Palestinians and then the affair of Oxford University Labour Club where allegations of anti-Semitism were made on the basis of the club supporting the university’s Israel Apartheid Week.

The Oxford allegations were comprehensively debunked by Asa Winstanley in two articles Electronic Intifada when Asa demonstrated that Alex Chalmers, the Chair of the Labour Club who was behind the allegations of ‘anti-Semitism’ turned out to have been an intern for BICOM, the main Israeli propaganda group in Britain.

Ken Livingstone - thrown under the bus by Corbyn and Milne

There then followed a whole series of manufactured incidents.  Ken Livingstone was accused of anti-Semitism for having mentioned that the Nazis had had a close relationship with the Zionist movement, which is a demonstrable fact.

The lynch mob that accompanied Ruth Smeeth to Marc Wadsworth's Expulsion Hearing

Marc Wadsworth was then accused of anti-Semitism for criticising CIA asset Ruth Smeeth MP at the Chakrabarti press conference for her buddy relationship with Telegraph reporters.

What an absolute disgrace that someone who was integrally involved in the Stephen Lawrence campaign, who introduced Nelson Mandela to Stephen’s parents, a pivotal moment in the campaign, should be expelled for criticising racist Labour MP and hoax ‘victim’, Ruth Smeeth?

Marc didn’t even know Smeeth was Jewish yet her tantrum and fake after event tears, because no-one saw them at the time, were allowed to dominate the narrative. Corbyn, no doubt on your advice, refused to defend Marc when challenged during the current campaign. Indeed when Labour Against the Witchhunt held a picket of his expulsion hearing members of Corbyn’s office had the gall to ask Marc to call off the demonstration.

What I find most puzzling is why it was not obvious early on that there was something strange about all these accusations of anti-Semitism coming from the right-wing press, who are not normally concerned about racism?  When I was suspended in March 2016 it was immediately clear what was going on.  The idea that with Jeremy’s election there had been a sudden upsurge in ‘anti-Semitism’ is about as likely to be true as sightings of the Yeti.  It was clearly part of a developing narrative and it was your job, as Strategic Director to get on top of it.

When Jeremy was accused of ‘anti-Semitism’ he responded painfully insisting that he wasn’t.  It was painful watching because it was clear he didn’t get it. The ‘anti-Semitism’ he was being accused of was not hatred of Jews but hatred of what Israel does.  He may not have worked it out but that’s what you are paid to do.

There isn’t a Palestine Solidarity activist in Britain who hasn’t been accused of ‘anti-Semitism’. It goes with the territory.  When we engaged with the National Front and fascist activists we were accused of being ‘anti-White’ hating the white race etc. Racists always project their own view onto others. What was there about these fake accusations of anti-Semitism that you didn’t understand?

Maybe the most ugly aspect of all of was the way you advised Jeremy to abandon old comrades and friends in the hope that throwing them overboard would somehow help you reach land sooner. It turned out, of course, that the more concessions you made the greater the attacks.

I thought that one lesson we learnt from the 1930’s was that you don’t appease an aggressor. You appeased the Jewish Labour Movement and the Board of Deputies.  Did they thank you?  No, in the words of Len McLuskey ‘Jewish Community Leaders Are Refusing To Take 'Yes' For An Answer’.  And why do you think that might be?  Why is it that every concession that you’ve made was never enough?

The answer is really very simple but it seems that it didn’t penetrate your consciousness or the thick head of John McDonnell whose pathetic pleadings on how Labour should have got on top of the ‘anti-Semitism’ allegations sooner suggest he will be easy meat for the banks and speculators if he should ever become Chancellor.

The goal of the JLM and the Zionists was simple.  It was to secure the head of Jeremy Corbyn. Nothing else would do. When a full  frontal challenge by Owen Smith failed in 2016 then the covert ‘anti-Semitism’ war was stepped up, though strangely enough I’ve never come across someone Jewish who has ever experienced this Labour ‘anti-Semitism’.

However as we know, BBC Panorama found 7 ‘victims’.  Strangely enough, despite not informing its viewers, all 7 happened to be officers of the Jewish Labour Movement.

And something else that hasn’t penetrated either Corbyn’s or McDonnell’s skulls is that the JLM isn’t the Jewish section of the Labour Party. Leaving aside that a majority of its members are right-wing non-Jews, it is, by its own admission, the ‘sister party’ of the Israeli Labour Party, a party that is all but extinct in Israel today. 

The JLM is also a member of the World Zionist Organisation, which specialises in the theft of land of Palestinians on the West Bank. According to Ha’aretz, the WZO has a special Settlement ‘Land Theft’ Division. Yet the JLM is not only affiliated to this racist colonising organisation it is affiliated to the Labour Party.  Despite this it is not supporting the Labour Party in the general election.

As I revealed, in the early 1980’s Jeremy sponsored a Labour Movement Campaign on Palestine conference, one of whose demands was to disaffiliate Poale Zion which was renamed JLM. He understood all the arguments then.

It seems you allowed him to forget that it was the Israeli Labour Party that was responsible for the Nakba, the expulsion of the Palestinian refugees. The JLM not only is the direct inheritor of  this tradition but it was effectively refounded in 2015 with just one purpose in mind – the removal of Jeremy Corbyn.

You will understand then that when the JLM threatened to disaffiliate from the Labour Party, which of course was nothing more than grandstanding, Corbyn sent them a message pleading for them to stay! Never in history has a man on death row pleaded with his executioner to stay a while longer in order that he can finish the job. Even Jesus Christ didn’t beg the Roman soldiers to torment him a little longer.

Yet the journalist who revealed all of this, Asa Winstanley of Electronic Intifada, has been suspended from the Labour Party for the ‘crime’ of journalism, that is telling the truth.  Of course the official pretext is ‘anti-Semitism’ but that just proves how ‘anti-Semitism’ has become debased.

It is an outrage that you and Jeremy haven’t spoken up about Asa’s suspension and told the execrable Jennie Formby, a worthy successor to Iain McNicol, to reverse this injustice.

There was a time in the 1990’s when I and others were suspended during the Kinnock witchhunts over the poll tax. At that time a certain Jeremy Corbyn was Secretary of Labour Against the Witchhunt.  I can only imagine his reaction if the then Labour Party had adopted ‘fast track’ expulsions without even a hearing.

I helped refound LAW two years ago.  Who would have thought that our main antagonist would be Jeremy Corbyn?

The job of a Strategic Advisor, if words are to have any meaning, is to devise a strategy.  Yet it would appear that you had no strategy apart from running so fast that you hoped your opponents wouldn’t catch up with you.

All this should have been clear to you when the Zionists put pressure on the Labour Party to adopt the IHRA misdefinition of anti-Semitism in September 2018.

Whose idiotic idea was it to adopt the IHRA in December 2016 following Theresa May’s embrace of it?  Did it not occur to you that if May, the person who introduced the ‘hostile ‘ and sent Home Office vans into areas with immigrant communities telling them to ‘go home, was concerned about anti-Semitism that something wasn’t right?

Israel is a state that armed and equipped the Guatemalan Junta when it butchered up to 200,000 Mayan Indians and which today arms and trains the Burmese Junta in its genocidal war on the Rohinga.

The Israeli state has about as much to do with the traditional Jewish values of justice and the fight against oppression as a ham sandwich has to do with keeping a kosher diet.

Today in the Labour Party criticism of Israel is tantamount to ‘anti-Semitism’. Historically it was always the anti-Semites who supported Zionism in the hope that it would rid them of their Jews.  Arthur Balfour, Edouard Drumont and Adolf Eichmann were just 3 of the many anti-Semitic supporters of Zionism.

According to Mark Gardener of the Community Security Trust your only objection to the IHRA was to one half of one bulletin  point which described Israel as a racist state (endeavour).  Really?  Did you have no objection to the example which said that ‘double standards’ in criticising the world’s only apartheid state is anti-Semitic? Wasn’t ‘double standards’ the same defence that supporters of Apartheid in South Africa used?

Why is the IHRA example which says comparisons between Israel and Nazi Germany are anti-Semitic? People compare states such as Iran to the Nazis? Why should Israel be a special case? Would you say that a child survivor of a Nazi ghetto, Ze’ev Sternhell should also be accused of anti-Semitism for writing an article in Ha’aretz ‘In Israel, Growing Fascism and a Racism Akin to Early Nazism.’

Two years ago Israel’s Deputy Chief of Staff Yair Golan in a speech at Holocaust Memorial Day reflected 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.”

If Yair Golan had been a member of the Labour Party he would have been suspended or expelled as an anti-Semite.  The Zionist ‘anti-Semitism witchhunt has meant that even honest Zionists are susceptible to an allegation that has nothing to do with actual anti-Semitism.

What I’ve been describing is how far free speech has been under attack and demoted in the Labour Party.  In order to assuage the racist defenders of the Israeli state, a state where dozens of Jewish rabbis issue edicts forbidding the renting of homes by Jews to Arabs, it is forbidden to say that Israel is a racist state. 

That is the tragedy of Corbyn’s leadership. He has presided over a regime that is more intolerant of free speech and debate than even Blair or Kinnock.  And you Seamus Milne have been Strategic Advisor to this pitiful regime of intolerance. 

What I find difficult to understand is why someone who was considered an expert on the Middle East and Palestine should find anything attractive in the IHRA ‘definition’ of anti-Semitism.  The only reason that the IHRA, formerly the EUMC Working Definition of Anti-Semitism was created was in order to ensnare criticism of Israel within the web of ‘anti-Semitism’.

If you don’t understand this I suggest that you read The Working Definition of Antisemitism – A Reappraisal by the main author of the IHRA, American academic Kenneth Stern. The IHRA was the brainchild of Dina Porat, Chief Historian at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Propaganda Museum in Jerusalem which regularly entertains all manner of racist, fascist and anti-Semitic guests in the name of fighting ‘anti-Semitism’.  I refer to creatures such as Duterte, Hungary’s Orban and Brazil’s Bolsinaro, all of whom have paid their homage at Yad Vashem in the past year.

It is little wonder that Daniel Blatman, a Holocaust Studies researcher at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem called Yad Vashem a

hard-working laundromat, striving to bleach out the sins of every anti-Semitic, fascist, racist or simply murderously thuggish leader or politician like Hungary’s Viktor Orban, the Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte and Italy’s Matteo Salvini.

Possibly your main failure was to question the claim of the Board of Deputies of British Jews to represent British Jewry. The Board of Deputies represents at best one-third of British Jews. It represents neither secular Jewry nor the Ultra Orthodox. 

When 34 Orthodox Rabbis from the Union of Orthodox Hebrew Congregations wrote to defend and support Jeremy why the silence? Of course it didn’t make the headlines, since only Skwawkbox and the Jewish Chronicle reported it, the latter to discredit it.  When Rabbi Mayer Weinberger wrote supporting Jeremy on behalf of the Executive Board of the United European Jews organisation why did you say nothing? 

What is it that makes you spurn those within the Jewish community that try to support you. As the Canary observed, it was the letter from a rabbi that won’t make the front pages of most of the mainstream media. However that is no reason for your paralysis.

Instead of openly meeting with Jewish Voices for Labour you have reinforced the most reactionary section of the Jewish community.

It is no accident that during the election campaign the Jewish Chronicle has devoted every issue to attacking Corbyn.  In his letter to readers last week, its far-Right editor Stephen Pollard wrote that ‘there is just one fundamental issue for the vast majority of our community – doing what we can to stop Jeremy Corbyn becoming PM.’

All your appeasement has come to nought.  The nadir was Corbyn’s pathetic response to Andrew Neil.  But it wasn’t just Corbyn’s fault.  What is the job of a Strategic Advisor and Media specialist if not to brief Corbyn in advance?  When Neil asked whether he was going to apologise to the Jewish community Corbyn should have responded that there was nothing to apologise for.

And when Neil persisted Jeremy could have responded that he wasn’t going to take lessons from someone who employed a holocaust denier, David Irving, when he was editor of the Sunday Times, to examine the Goebbels diaries. To say nothing over his presiding over a diet of racism as Chairman of the Board of The Spectator.  Just what do you do in your job?

Was it beyond your ability to brief Jeremy on the racist background of Tom Watson, the hypocrite who pretended to be concerned about ‘anti-Semitism’? This was the same Tom Watson who backed racist Labour MP Phil Woolas who had a run an election campaign in 2010 to ‘make the white folk angry’.  When the High Court removed Woolas for lying about his Lib Dem opponent Watson wrote he had ‘lost sleep over poor Phil.’

In 2004 Watson ran a racist campaign in the Birmingham Hodge Hill by election As Campaign Manager Watson oversaw the distribution of  leaflets which said “Labour is on your side; the Lib Dems are on the side of failed asylum-seekers.”

All but 6 Labour MPs abstained on the vote on the 2013 Immigration Act, which introduced the ‘hostile environment’ policy of Theresa May yet these self-same people are apparently concerned about ‘anti-Semitism’.  John Mann, the anti-Semitism ‘czar’ was interviewed by Police over the hate pamphlet he wrote labelling Gypsies and Travellers as a problem of anti-social behaviour.

Why was a full frontal attack on the Tories over the Windrush Scandal and the deportation of Black British  citizens not highlighted.  This would have shown up the hypocrisy of those concerned about ‘anti-Semitism’.  As far as I’m aware British  Jews have not been deported back to wherever they may once have come from.

Instead of fighting back Corbyn, with your ‘advice’ has become little more than a political punchbag. It is difficult to know just what your role is. In the words of Ali Abunimah, in an email to me,

It has been so incredibly frustrating to watch Corbyn refuse to fight back and even worse continue pandering to the smears. It is hard to believe that a politician who has been at it so long can be so absolutely naive about how the Israel lobby works. They cannot be appeased. They have to be fought, and when you do fight in a clear and principled way, people rally to you. He could have defeated them, but instead he let them run the show. Appalling!

And if the fake anti-Semitism campaign has not been your finest hour then how to explain the position on Brexit?  Clearly you find it difficult to let go of the days when the Soviet Union opposed the Common Market because it preferred to see Europe divided, which was the original reason for the Communist  Party’s opposition to the EEC.

Today it is, or should be obvious that Brexist means coming under the domination of the United States. There is no third way. Labour could have campaigned on a position of Remain and Reform and cleaned up the Remain vote.  In addition it could have put a socialist argument in the North that Brexit would simply continue the deindustrialisation that began under Thatcher.  That it wasn’t Europe but the Tories pursuit of monetarism that closed the mines, shipyards and steel mills.  But enchanted as you are with the Communist  Party’s British Road to Socialism you were unwilling to stand out for such basic socialist ideas such as the free movement of workers.

How else to explain the absurd position where Corbyn will apparently negotiate a new deal on Brexit and then take no position on it in the Referendum?  Whilst writing this letter I have increasingly wondered just what you did to earn your £100,000+ salary? Because whatever else you did Seamus Milne, the one thing you didn’t do was help provide Jeremy Corbyn with any sense of strategy or direction. 

Unless of course loving your enemies, including Margaret Hodge, counts as a strategy.  The problem though is that whilst loving his enemies Corbyn has presided over the most dictatorial and authoritarian regime for socialists and anti-racists.

The very idea of ‘monitoring’ social media posts and trying to get inside peoples’ heads is or should have been anathema.  Racism exists in society and is obviously reflected in the Labour Party. The way to tackle racist ideas, such as the belief that immigrants ‘steal’ peoples’ jobs or lower the price of labour is by education.

If Labour lose on Thursday then it will in part be because you failed so comprehensively. Indeed if you had been a fully paid up agent of MI5 you could not have been more successful. And given their expertise in running people like Harry Newton, who was trusted by so many for so long in CND, I don’t think we can ever be quite sure who you were really working for.

Yours sincerely,

Tony Greenstein          

Zionist Community Security Trust in Dilemma over Islamaphobic Conference

When I criticised those Zionists who associated Jews with Israel's attack on Gaza (2008-9) Gardener of the CST was one of those who objected!

Gardener of the CST - Happy to associate with bigots like Richard Littlejohn

Should We Walk or Should We Stay?  Neither it would appear!!

As I have documented time and again, the primary agenda of the self-appointed, private charity headed by ultra-Zionist rightwinger, Gerald Ronson, is to paint anti-Zionist and support for the Palestinians as ‘anti-Semitic’. 

Unsurprisingly the CST, which styles itself as the defence wing of the Jewish community and is honoured as such by the Metropolitan Police and people like Michael Gove MP, is no stranger to working with Islamaphobes and anti-Muslim racists.

In particular, over the summer, it devoted its time to supplying false and misleading information to the Home Office concerning Sheikh Raed Salah, leader of the Northern Islamic League in Israel.  Sheikh Salah, whom the Israelis tried to murder on board the Gaza Freedom Flotilla, has been a thorn in the side of Israel’s leaders.  The CST’s misinformation led to the arrest and attempted deportation of Sheikh Salah before the Senior Immigration Appeal Tribunal, noting the false nature of the charges against him, ordered his release.

Community Security Trust Supplies False Information to Deport Sheikh Raed Salah
Immigration Appeal Tribunal's Racist Order to Deport Raed Salah
How the Zionist Community Security Trust and Theresa May Colluded at the Behest of Racists to Deport Raed Salah & Prevent Free Speech

Indeed it is impossible today to be a pro-Israel advocate and a Zionist without also being an Islamaphobe.  Support for Israel and anti-Arab racism are inseparable.  

It was only last week that I picked up on a tweet from Dave Rich, second-in command at the CST, who accused Professor Baruch Brent, a child refugee of nazism, of 'Antisemitism!' for daring to compare the Nazi bombing of Guernica with that of Gaza. 

What attracted Rich's attention was that I happened to mention that the CST had paid no regard to the fact that a demonstration that they had stewarded, in support of the killing of 9 activists on the Mavi Marmara, had also been supported by the EDL and some of their members.  Dave Rich wrote back furiously stating that

‘I personally (and my colleagues), have made our position on the EDL and similar Islamophobic groups very clear on the CST Blog, for example:…..
We have also done so to the wider Jewish community via the Jewish Chronicle:…..
Regarding CST's policies regarding securing demonstrations , we have stated publicly that we will not provide security for demonstrations where the EDL are present: http://blog.thecst.org.uk/?p=2556
Your allegation that CST was content for the EDL to join a pro-Israel demonstration in June 2010 is not true and is contradicted by the media reporting at the time:
http://jc-thn-ws3.thejc.com/news/uk-news/32425/hundreds-demonstrate-israel-london
…. CST has provided security advice to mosques that faced Islamophobic demonstrations and I personally act as an advisor to the Tell MAMA campaign that monitors anti-Muslim hate crime.
Regards
Dave Rich
CST

Mr Rich said it was untrue to say that they were not content for the EDL to join the pro-Israeli demonstration and that they don’t steward events where the EDL is present was contradicted at the time.  Even the overtly pro-Zionist Bob from Brockley in an article ‘The English Defence League and the Gaza Flotilla’ accepted that ‘A tiny number of English Defence League members turned up at a pro-Israel demonstration, some possibly from the semi-fictitious "Jewish Division" of the EDL (it also has a "LGBT Division" and of course prominent Sikh members).’

Dave Rich may indeed be an adviser to Tell Mama but by all accounts, this Government funded initiative is ‘Not Off to a Good Start!’  Since the government has been one of the main sources of the demonisation of Arabs and Muslims these are not particularly spectacular credentials.

But the CST demonstrated its real concerns with its campaign to deport Sheikh Salah.  It was a thoroughly racist campaign (or perhaps I have failed to notice the CST campaign to have Avigdor Liebermann deported – from memory I seem to recall that they helped guard his meetings!).

To get Raed Salah deported, the CST quoted uncritically from racist Hebrew University Professor Raphael Israeli (see e.g. The Community Security Trust cites the racist Hebrew University Professor Raphael Israeli to denounce the ‘anti-Semitism’ of Sheikh Raed Salah.

Professor Raphael Israeli makes the British National Party and National Front seem mild by comparison.  For example ‘When the Muslim population gets to a critical mass you have problems. That is a general rule, so if it applies everywhere it applies in Australia." and ‘Australia should cap Muslim immigration or risk being swamped by Indonesians.’

Sydney Morning Herald, 16.2.07. ‘Limit Muslim migration, Australia warned.  The CST's Professor Israeli was also quoted as saying that ‘Muslim immigrants had a reputation for manipulating the values of Western countries, taking advantage of their hospitality and tolerance.’ ‘"French people say they are strangers in their own country. This is a point of no return.’

It wasn’t no long ago that you could have substituted ‘Jewish’ for ‘Muslim’ to receive the approval of the owner of the Daily Express (today's owner Richard Desmond is a funder/supporter of the CST and his papers are equally defamatory and racist to Muslims as they once were to Jewish immigrants).  Yet when I phoned Mark Gardener about Professor Israeli, his only response was ‘no comment.’
The primary purpose of the CST has not been to defend the Jewish community against anti-Semitism in the normally accepted and understood sense of the term, but to categorise opposition to Israel’s actions as ‘anti-Semitic’.  There is no doubt that some people, taking Israel’s rhetoric at face value, do react to its behaviour in an anti-Semitic way.  Indeed it is an undoubted fact that the source of most anti-Semitism in the West today originates from the actions of Israel – the ‘Jewish’ state apparently set up to make them feel secure!  But irony is lost on the CST.  What matters is the anti-Semitism, not its causes.

Even worse, despite supporting the Zionist inspired European Union Monitoring Committee definition of ‘anti-Semitism’, which states that ‘Holding Jews collectively responsible for the actions of the State of Israel’ is anti-Semitic, there is no recorded occasion when the CST has upbraided or even commented when leading Zionists and Jewish religious leaders expressed unanimous ‘Jewish’ support recently for the attack on Gaza. Unanimous UK Jewish communal organisations support for Israel over Gaza fighting

Symposium on ‘anti-Semitism’

It was therefore with some surprise that I read on Jewsansfrontieres that the CST had walked out of a symposia on ‘anti-Semitism’ at which some of the most dedicated anti-Arab and anti-Muslim bigots you could hope to find were speaking.  Proud to be ashamed to be associated with islamophobes or ashamed to be proud?

By chance I had recently done a post on this exact conference, cross-posting from Tony Lerman’s Another faulty, pseudo-academic antisemitism initiative  Lerman wrote about how

‘The Journal for the Study of Antisemitism: a home for the ‘new antisemitism’ notion.  The JSA is a privately funded periodical founded four years ago. It has no institutional base and is privately published. … Even a cursory glance at the journal’s list of Board Members reveals a great preponderance of neoconservatives, Islamophobes, advocates of the notion of the ‘new antisemitism’, pedlars of the ‘self-hating Jew’ accusation against Jewish critics of Israeli policies and out-and-out political propagandists.  The individuals funding the event are Daniel Pipes, Mitch Knisbacher and Jeff and Evy Diamond.
The three panellists will find much to agree on. For decades Bat Ye’or has been banging the drum about the ‘Muslim hordes’ who were about to take over Europe. Rather generously referred to as a ‘self-taught Jewish intellectual’, she now believes that Europe is dead, and in its stead ‘Eurabia’ has risen. Richard Landes, director and co-founder of the Center for Millennial Studies at Boston University, told the Herzliya IDC conference in 2007:
European democratic civilization can fall before the Islamic challenge. Do not say that this will never happen in Europe and that Islam will not be able to take control of Europe. If Europe continues its current path, the fall will be sooner.
Winston Pickett was the director of the now non-functioning EISCA. He lavishes unreserved praise on Professor Robert Wistrich for his huge tome, Antisemitism From Antiquity to the Global Jihad, a book that, as its title suggests, sets out to justify the notion of the ‘new antisemitism’.
In panel 2, Mark Gardner of the CST and Robert Wistrich, who heads the Sassoon International Centre for the Study of Antisemitism (SICSA), should feel comfortable with each other’s role in justifying and promoting the notion of the ‘new antisemitism’, though it would be only fair to acknowledge that Wistrich’s influence in this regard far outstrips that of Gardner’s. Wistrich restated the classic definition of the ‘new antisemitism’ in a talk at the Hebrew University Jerusalem in June 2011 entitled ‘From blood libel to boycott: changing faces of British antisemitism’. … Gardner’s use of the ‘new antisemitism’ argument is clearly apparent in his and Dave Rich’s analysis of Caryl Churchill’s short playlet Seven Jewish Children. … http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/may/04/caryl-churchill-antisemitism-play

So the Jewish Chronicle article ‘Walk-outs over ‘Islamophobia’ at antisemitism symposium’ came as something of a surprise, especially as these 'walk-outs' were headed by the CST.  Maybe I had been unfair on Dave Rich after all.   According to the JC,

‘A seminar meant to highlight problems in dealing with antisemitism ran into trouble when audience members walked out — alleging Islamophobia on the part of some speakers. 
 

At the forefront were leaders of the Community Security Trust, who challenged remarks made by the Egyptian writer Bat Ye’or, and Dr Manfred Gerstenfeld, a founding member of the Journal for the Study of Antisemitism, which sponsored the seminar, held at London’s Wiener Library.
Bat Ye’or told the audience: “The source of antisemitism is the organisation of the Islamic corporation.”

But when Dave Rich, the CST’s deputy communications director, expressed concern that such a comment could be construed as Islamophobic, she responded: “Islam is denying the root of Judaism and Christianity with a profound belief in Jihad.”

David Hirsh, editor of anti-racist website Engage, left the room during Dr Gerstenfeld’s lecture.
He explained: “I was appalled by Gerstenfeld’s characterisation of Muslim culture as inferior. Nearly all the speakers on the day, including me, stressed that antisemitism must be understood and opposed within an anti-racist framework.

“I am as appalled by the Islamophobia which creeps into some opposition to antisemitism as I am by the way antisemitism also creeps into ostensibly anti-racist spaces.” 
But Dr Gerstenfeld said later: “I am touching upon the taboos that have to be broken, because a totally false narrative has been created in Europe.”
 
“The idea that all cultures are the same is absurd. If there is no hierarchy in culture, then Nazi culture is equivalent to democratic Western culture. There are Islamic groups which are equivalent in their language and ideology to Nazis. And I have no problem in saying that, because it is true.”
 
Mark Gardner, director of communications for CST, said after the seminar: “A minority of speakers said things about Britain, Europe and Muslims that we found to be incorrect, unacceptable and self-defeating. We made our concerns clear with a number of interventions and were correct to do so.”
 
David Feldman, director of the Pears Institute, and Philip Spencer, director of research in politics at Kingston University, also walked out in protest.
 
Mr Feldman said: “Unfortunately, the unfounded arguments of some speakers and expressions of religious prejudice from others did a disservice to Jews and others seeking to combat antisemitism.”
It was therefore appropriate that ‘At the end of the event, the former Labour MP, Denis MacShane, was given an award for his work in fighting antisemitism.’  Who better to reward this fallen pillar of Zionist hypocrisy than a bunch of anti-Arab and anti-Islamic racists?

But just consider some of these arguments. According to Dr Gerstenfeld there is a ‘hierarchy’ of cultures.  An interesting concept, one wonders how one can measure cultures?  He cites the ‘western democratic’ as opposed to the ‘Nazi’ culture.  But Nazism had no culture, unless the gentle art of book burning constitutes such – in which case Michael Ben Ari MK’s ripping up of the New Testament recently is a good example of Zionist culture.  Nazism hated culture and stood in opposition to it.  It was 'anti-cultural'.  But racism today is not primarily biological.  The campaign to repatriate Black people in Britain is recognised, even by most fascists, as a lost cause.

Racism in the biological sense has transmuted into a ‘battle of cultures’ in which Arabs and Third World refugees are seen as the bearers of ‘backward’ cultures.   That is why fascists who, 20 years ago, were engaging in 'gay bashing' now contrast the hostility of Islamic Orthodoxy to the 'backwardness' of Arabs/Muslims rather than seeing such hostility as an integral part of all orthodox religions.

When Dr Gerstenfeld says that ‘I am touching upon the taboos that have to be broken’ then he is doing no more than repeating the refrain of white racism through the ages – that there are ‘taboos’ that need to be broken, it needs to be ‘cool’ to be racist again.  It is a long-standing theme from the Daily Mail and its most virulent racist commentator, arch-Zionist Melanie Phillips.  Gert Wilders and a host of racist and chauvinistic European politicians dedicate their lives to breaking these ‘taboos’.  The hierarchy of ‘race; has been replaced by the hierarchy of ‘culture’.  Yet there is no ‘culture’ such as they speak of.

Lerman also notes that the funding sources for the symposia includes ‘Daniel Pipes, Mitch Knisbacher and Jeff and Evy Diamond. Pipes, the president of the right-wing Middle East Forum (MEF), is widely described as an ‘Islamophobe’. In 2009 his MEF established a legal defence fund for the far-right, populist, Islamophobic Dutch politician Geert Wilders. Pipes reportedly claimed that President Obama is a former Muslim who ‘practised Islam’. Knisbach, who is the founder and owner of 800response (America’s leading provider of shared-use 800-number services), is active in the right-wing Israel lobby AIPAC and funds Tazpit News Agency, a service set up primarily to popularize a positive view of settlement activity in the West Bank. Jeff Diamond, who heads the Jeff Diamond Law Firm, which has six offices in New Mexico and Texas, was installed in January as chair of the New Mexico Anti-Defamation League (ADL) Board of Directors.’

As Mark Elf wrote on Jewssansfrontieres ‘And here's the bit I just don't get.  Mark Gardner, David Hirsh and Dave Rich must have known about the other speakers because they were listed in the information blurb for the event.  How offended can they really have been when they only heard what they must have expected to hear? Are they proud to be ashamed to be associated with a ragbag of zionist islamophobes?  Or they are ashamed to be proud of the association?’

Actually it’s far worse, because despite the bigotry and racism of the platform speakers, as Tony Lerman points out ‘the CST officials didn’t walk out. They stayed. ‘We challenged the speeches we objected to’, they tweeted in a response to me. I then put this to them: ‘Surely u wouldn’t participate in a symposium with white racists. Why attend one with Jewish racists?’ Their response: ‘we behaved honourably and have nothing to answer to you for’.  I’m not so sure that’s such an easily defensible position.

Rich and Gardener are janus faced .  If someone had said that “The source of anti-German hatred is the organisation of the Jewish corporation.” as of course Nazis used to, then one would clearly recognise this as a staple part of the anti-Semitic diet.  The world Jewish conspiracy theory no less.  Yet when Bat Yeor says that “The source of antisemitism is the organisation of the Islamic corporation.” there is apparently a walk-out, or was it just a polite disagreement, from the session in question.  Would the CST walk out of a session at which David Duke elaborated on Jewish ‘crimes’ yet remained content to participate and even be guest speakers at other sessions of the Conference on Jewry?

According to the Jewish Chronicle David Hirsh, editor of anti-racist website Engage, left the room during Dr Gerstenfeld’s lecture.  What a noble gesture!  And what was he doing there in the first place is what those he has accused of anti-Semitism in UCU might like to know.

But if one looks at Rich and Gardener’s comments above, concerning Dr Gerstenfeld and Bat Yeor, then one notices just how lukewarm their criticism really was.

Dave Rich suggested that Bat Ye’or’s comment concerning the ‘Islamic Corporation’ ‘could be construed as Islamophobic’.  That is a strange way of putting it.  How about if someone started speaking of the ‘Jewish Corporation’ and how Jews control the world through it?  I suspect, given Rich and Gardener’s record in detecting the signs of ‘anti-Semitism’ in even pro-Jewish places like Carol Churchill’s play, that he would have been somewhat more forthright in his views.  It says a lot for the government's ‘Tell Mama’ that Dave Rich is an advisor.

Mark Gardner, director of CST communications was equally forthright:
“A minority of speakers said things about Britain, Europe and Muslims that we found to be incorrect, unacceptable and self-defeating.  We made our concerns clear with a number of interventions and were correct to do so.”

Clearly there was no walk-out, just a ‘number of interventions’.  And the virulently racist nonsense espoused?  Well this was ‘incorrect’.  So when anti-Semites (and Zionists) such as Glenn Beck go on about the Rothschilds being the source of the world’s economic crisis [see Is Glenn Beck an anti-Semite? Fox host slammed by Anti-Defmation League for attack on George Soros] he is presumably ‘incorrect’ or mistaken.

Self-Defeating

What is more telling is Gardener’s use of the term ‘self-defeating’.  What it demonstrates is that Gardener and the CST see themselves as part of one big tent, a Zionist tent, which inevitably includes the most virulent anti-Arab and Islamaphobic racists.  What they are doing is offering friendly criticism to those who share the same outlook but choose to express it differently.  It is a minor tactical difference of opinion amongst comrades.  The real game is defaming the opponents of Zionism through the use of wild allegations of ‘anti-Semitism’.

Community Security Trust's Dave Rich Accuses Child Refugee of Nazism of 'Antisemitism!'

Mark Gardener, main spokesman of the CST, with fellow believer in tolerance, Richard Littlejohn

Robert Wistrich, Tel Aviv Professor and Ideologue for the Belief that Islam and a 'new anti-Semitism' are partners

 Weaponising the holocaust and anti-Semitism in the cause of Israel

In an excellent post by Tony Lerman 'Another faulty, pseudo-academic antisemitism initiative' Tony Lerman,  one of the key academics in Jewish and Zionist life in Britain, who broke from Zionism (see his book 'The Making & Unmaking of a Zionist' (which I've just reviewed!), he shows how unscrupulous 'academics', whose main concern is the wielding of 'anti-Semitism' at Israel's critics, are doing their best to shut down debate.  In a comment I posted, in response to various comments, I add the following - full article underneath:

Sharon Klaff asks, all innocent and wide-eyed 'what your gripe is. Take a breath and ask yourself why you are so angry that there are people who recognize the rise again of a call for genocide of the Jews.' 

Sharon has therefore answered her own question.  When people take the term 'anti-Semitisim' and 'genocide' against the Jews and use it to falsely lable those who are anti-Zionist, , then that is the concern, which Antony Lerman has expressed very well in his excellent post above.

Richard Kuper has dealt neatly with Harvey Garfield's absurd suggestion that the slogan 'from the river to the sea' is in any way anti-Semitic.  The call for a unitary, secular state is the  most democratic and anti-racist solution to the conflict between a settler state and the indigenous people there is.  And as Richard says, the Israeli state does not recognise the Green Line so why the Palestinians should is a mystery!

And since Dennis MacShane, who was quite content to siphon off thousands of pounds of public money whilst berating 'benefit thieves' if they should earn an extra fiver to feed the kids, is being honoured with an Award of Merit, the cover of which is headed by Jabotinsky, leader of the Revisionists, then Harvey needs to learn some Zionist history.  Because:
i.  The slogan of the Revisionists was the West Bank is ours and so is the East Bank too!!  (Apparently the tribe of Benjamin and one other resided there at one time)

ii.  Jabotinsky, although not a fascist himself, led a movement whose paper Daor Hayom in Palestine was edited by Abba Achimeir, who ran a column 'Diary of a Fascist'.  Achimeir wrote of how 'Yes, we Revisionists have a great admiration for Hitler. Hitler has saved Germany.  Otherwise it would have perished within four years. And if he had given up his
anti-Semitism we would go with him.'  This was expressed in the trial of Arlossoroff, the head of the Political Dept. of the Jewish Agency by the Revisionists who are widely considered to have assassinated him (for good anti-fascist reasons ironically)

In 1933 Jabotinsky wrote to Achimeir urging an end to this nonsense:  

'The articles and notices on Hitler and the Hitlerite movement appearing in Hazit Ha am are to me, and to all of us, like a knife thrust in our backs. I demand an unconditional stop to this outrage. To find in Hitlerism some feature of a  national liberation  movement is sheer ignorance. Moreover, under present circumstances, all this babbling is discrediting and paralysing my work ... I demand that the paper join, unconditionally and absolutely, not merely our campaign against Hitler Germany, but also our hunting down of Hitlerism, in the fullest sense of the term.'  Joseph Schectman, Fighter & Prophet, p.216.

Or there is the training of Jabotinsky's Beitar naval squadron at Civitavecchia in November 1934 when Mussolini was the darling of, not just the Revisionist Zionists.

It is no surprise that Mark Gardener and Dave Rich of the Community Security  Trust should throw their weight behind false accusations of 'anti-Semitism', since that is the real purpose of their organisation.  To create an image of anti-Semitism that doesn't exist and at the same time to use the 'old' anti-Semitism to frighten Jews into emigration.   One thing the CST has never done is to participate in any joint activity against anti-Semitic and racist groups like the NF/BNP/EDL.

Indeed they were quite content, as was Dave Rich, at the time of Cast Lead, for EDL members to participate in the glorification of the murders on the Mavi Marmara outside the Israeli Embassy.  Despite Rich's protestations at the time, no attempt was made to prevent EDL members attending that demonstration.  Indeed a mirror image of what occurred then happened at the pickets outside Ahava, with Zionist Federation and EDL members standing and chatting side by side.  The CST had nothing whatsoever to say.

The agenda is quite clear, as Prof. Klaff states.  Anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism, therefore it should be banned to protect Jewish students.  Ironically the Union of Jewish Students, which would quite like to do the same, OPPOSED no platform for fascists and racists when I was a student, in case it might be applied to them!

Brian Klug's definition, that anti-Semitism is a form of hatred and discrimination against Jews is pretty clear.  It is those who always saw anti-Semitism as a 'normal' reaction to the presence of Jewish strangers in their midst who can be considered as buying into anti-Semitism.  Yet that was the meaning of the Negation of the Diaspora.  Zionism accepted anti-Semitism as 'normal' with people like Israel's first Justice Minister Pinhas Rosenbluth going as far as to describe Palestine as an 'institute for the fumigation of Jewish vermin' (Journal of Israel Studies 4, Autumn 1983).  But this is not the type of anti-Semitism Gardener and Rich are concerned about because theirs is a political campaign.

And if they ally with vehement anti-Islamic racists and fundamentalists who cares.  Manfred Gerstenfeld's article about 'anti-Semitism' in Norway is a good example.  Perhaps he would care to peruse the views of Andreis Breivich as to his attitudes to Muslims and Israel (though like the CST and the above symposia participants, he too detested Jewish 'traitors').
 
The problem for Wistrich, Klaff and the other Zionist McCarthyites, who brook no challenge to their theses or debates, is that all their efforts fall on stony ground.  Most people are quite capable of working out what anti-Semitism is and the question they ask is quite simple.  How come the Jews of all people, given their experience of racism, can indulge in the same.  It is our job to point out that Jews and Zionists are not one and the same and that in any event any group of people, given the right set of circumstances, can be victim or victimiser.
 
It says a lot about the CST's lack of anything resembling a considered thought pattern that Dave Rich can seize on the letter from Emeritus Professor Leslie Baruch Brent, which compared Israel's actions in Gaza to those of the Nazis in the bombing of Guernica.  Is Rich seriously suggesting that the Nazis were unique?  If it is right to compare US bombing in Vietnam with Nazi bombing of civilians, or that of the British in Iraq in 1920, why should Israel be given a free pass?  No one is suggesting that Israel is alone in this war crime.
 
It is somewhat ironic that Professor Brent, with whose letter I didn't totally agree, is himself a childhood survivor of the Nazis, a member of the Kindertransport.  I think he knows a little more about what it was like to flee the Nazi terror than a paid propagandist.

Tony Greenstein

Another faulty, pseudo-academic antisemitism initiative

Tony Lerman - dissident former Zionist

It was inevitable. Another Gaza offensive by Israel begins, ostensibly to stop Hamas from firing rockets into southern Israel, and within a couple of days accusations of antisemitism were flying around.
 
Two particularly caught my attention. The first was the claim that Steve Bell, in his Guardian cartoon of 15 November, was ‘getting] away with using antisemitic imagery and tropes‘ because it showed Tony Blair and William Hague as puppets of Bibi Netanyahu.
 
The second was in a tweet about a letter to the Guardian from emeritus professor Leslie Baruch Brent who condemned the ‘disporportionate response of the Israeli government to the Hamas rocket attacks’ and concluded ‘Has the world learned nothing since Guernica?’  The text of the tweet read: ‘Hard to take @guardian opposition to #antisemitism seriously when they publish letter comparing #Israel to Nazis.’ 
I was especially interested in these accusations because the first was by Mark Gardner, the communications director of the Community Security Trust (CST), the private charity that acts as the defence organization of the UK Jewish community, and the second by Dave Rich, his deputy.
One of the things that is most worrying about what I believe were these false imputations of antisemitism (and I will explain my reasoning for this conclusion in my next blogpost) is that they come not simply from individuals expressing their own views, but from officials of a very influential, major registered charity, and in the case of the cartoon, writing in their capacity as officials of that organization. The view of the Community Security Trust is seen as, and is intended to be seen as, the view of the organized UK Jewish community. And yet that wider community has no means of calling the CST to account and therefore has to suffer the consequences of its officials’ doubtful and often damaging politically-motivated interventions in public debate.
 
The politicization of antisemitism research
 
The institutionalized politicization of antisemitism by bodies claiming to be non-political or academic is not new. And with regard to a charity like the CST, it is very troubling.

We saw this politicization in the now defunct Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Antisemitism (YIISA), which was closed by the university authorities after it became clear that it was primarily an advocacy body and not a serious research institute. And it was also apparent in the now almost defunct European Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism (EISCA), established, it seems, with a mandate to grossly exaggerate the problem of antisemitism (the inaugural lecture given by the then Labour Europe minister Jim Murphy was entitled ‘Antisemitism: a hate that outlives all others’). There has been no activity on its website since June 2011, and that was an article by the now disgraced former Labour Party junior minister Denis MacShane, first published in the Jewish Chronicle and cross-posted on the EISCA blog.
 
While still thinking about the manipulation of antisemitism for political purposes, I received information about a symposium on antisemitism taking place on 2 December at the Wiener Library in London. Though clearly planned long before the latest Israeli offensive against Gaza, the holding of the symposium at this time is an extraordinary coincidence. And it was immediately obvious from the programme that it fell squarely into the category of an event dressed up in pseudo-academic clothes but which is, in reality, an exercise in political advocacy.
 
Although the symposium is taking place at the Wiener Library, a highly respected documentation, research and educational resource on the Holocaust and the Nazi era, it’s not mentioned anywhere on Wiener’s website. This is no doubt because the event itself is being organized exclusively under the auspices of the Journal for the Study of Antisemitism (JSA), with the library’s prestigious central London premises simply hired for the occasion. Wiener’s director, Ben Barkow, is not speaking at the symposium.
 
The Journal for the Study of Antisemitism: a home for the ‘new antisemitism’ notion
 
The JSA is a privately funded periodical founded four years ago. It has no institutional base and is privately published. It describes itself as ‘ the peer-reviewed work of a select group of independent scholars’. Even a cursory glance at the journal’s list of Board Members reveals a great preponderance of neoconservatives, Islamophobes, advocates of the notion of the ‘new antisemitism’, pedlars of the ‘self-hating Jew’ accusation against Jewish critics of Israeli policies and out-and-out political propagandists.
 
The individuals funding the event are Daniel Pipes, Mitch Knisbacher and Jeff and Evy Diamond. Pipes, the president of the right-wing Middle East Forum (MEF), is widely described as an ‘Islamophobe’. In 2009 his MEF established a legal defence fund for the far-right, populist, Islamophobic Dutch politician Geert Wilders. Pipes reportedly claimed that President Obama is a former Muslim who ‘practised Islam’. Knisbach, who is the founder and owner of 800response (America’s leading provider of shared-use 800-number services), is active in the right-wing Israel lobby AIPAC and funds Tazpit News Agency, a service set up primarily to popularize a positive view of settlement activity in the West Bank. Jeff Diamond, who heads the Jeff Diamond Law Firm, which has six offices in New Mexico and Texas, was installed in January as chair of the New Mexico Anti-Defamation League (ADL) Board of Directors.
 
The journal’s editors — Neal E. Rosenberg, a criminal lawyer, and Stephen K. Baum, a clinical psychologist — and the journal itself were mired in controversy early in 2010 when they sacked Dr Clemens Heni, a Berlin-based academic, from the editorial board for criticizing the Berlin Technical University’s centre for research on antisemitism for what he regarded as its ‘neglect of Islamic anti-Semitism and Israel’s security’ — and this was in an article Heni wrote for the journal. Various members of the board resigned in protest. The editors say they were pressured by the Berlin centre, which, a Jerusalem Post article claims, threatened to engineer the resignation of seven German members of the Board and the withdrawal of cooperation with the journal by three German antisemitism research centres. The editors soon relented, reinstated Heni and asked some of the resigning Board members to return. Some did and some didn’t.
 
Heni vigorously attacked the decision to close YIISA. In the wake of its demise, and no doubt after his experience being sacked and then reinstated to the JSA editorial board, in 2011 he set up a new German antisemitism research body, the Berlin International Center for the Study of Antisemitism (BICSA), the main focus of which is ‘anti-Semitism in the 21st century, particularly hatred of Israel.’
 
The symposium: a one-sided affair
 
The curious thing about this incident is that it’s quite clear that the journal’s posture is very close to the line Heni took in his attack on the Berlin centre. The programme and speakers at the forthcoming symposium demonstrate this. (A note of caution: the programme sent to me looks like the last word on who is attending and speaking, but may not be. It differs from the version of the programme on the JSA website.) Titled ‘Contemporary antisemitism in the UK’, the symposium kicks off with a panel on ‘Defining the new antisemitism’, chaired by Kenneth Marcus. The panellists are Bat Ye’or, Richard Landes and Winston Pickett.

Marcus heads the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, which was founded in late 2011 and took over where YIISA left off when it was closed down. YIISA’s director, Charles Small is on the advisory board, the honorary chairman of which is Professor Irwin Cotler, former Canadian justice minister, who has probably done more than anyone else to promote the idea of the ‘new antisemitism’. Other like-minded board members, who were also YIISA supporters, include Professor Dina Porat, Professor Ruth Wisse and Professor Alvin H. Rosenfeld.
 
The three panellists will find much to agree on. For decades Bat Ye’or has been banging the drum about the ‘Muslim hordes’ who were about to take over Europe. Rather generously referred to as a ‘self-taught Jewish intellectual’, she now believes that Europe is dead, and in its stead ‘Eurabia’ has risen. Richard Landes, director and co-founder of the Center for Millennial Studies at Boston University, told the Herzliya IDC conference in 2007:
European democratic civilization can fall before the Islamic challenge. Do not say that this will never happen in Europe and that Islam will not be able to take control of Europe.
If Europe continues its current path, the fall will be sooner.
 
Winston Pickett was the director of the now non-functioning EISCA. He lavishes unreserved praise on Professor Robert Wistrich for his huge tome, Antisemitism From Antiquity to the Global Jihad, a book that, as its title suggests, sets out to justify the notion of the ‘new antisemitism’.
 
Panel sessions 2 and 3 — ‘Mapping the rise of contemporary antisemitism’ and ‘Antisemitism on campus’ — present much the same picture. Both chairpersons, Manfred Gerstenfeld and Kenneth Lasson, see no real distinction between anti-Zionism and antisemitism. Gerstenfeld’s crude and wild assertions about antisemitism are legion. A recent online article about antisemitism in Norway is a good example of his continuing attempt to portray European countries as riddled with antisemitism, no matter what the data say. Lasson’s views are clearly laid out in an 80-page paper, ‘Antisemitism in the academic voice’, in which he writes that ‘Anti-Zionism . . . has evolved into antisemitism’ and reveals how ill-equipped he is to comment on this subject when he says: ‘The misnamed “occupation” allegedly began after Israel’s 1967 victory . . .’
 
In panel 2, Mark Gardner of the CST and Robert Wistrich, who heads the Sassoon International Centre for the Study of Antisemitism (SICSA), should feel comfortable with each other’s role in justifying and promoting the notion of the ‘new antisemitism’, though it would be only fair to acknowledge that Wistrich’s influence in this regard far outstrips that of Gardner’s. Wistrich restated the classic definition of the ‘new antisemitism’ in a talk at the Hebrew University Jerusalem in June 2011 entitled ‘From blood libel to boycott: changing faces of British antisemitism’. A Cif Watch post summarised his remarks: ‘efforts to boycott and delegitimize Israel (the Jewish collective) as a form of exclusion from the community of nations [are] not dissimilar from historical efforts to exclude the individual Jew from the communities where they resided.’ Gardner’s use of the ‘new antisemitism’ argument is clearly apparent in his and Dave Rich’s analysis of Caryl Churchill’s short playlet Seven Jewish Children. (My refutation of their analysis is here.) It is also unlikely that there will be much disagreement in panel 3 between Clemens Heni, Ronnie Fraser (fresh from the tribunal hearing his claim of ‘institutional antisemitism’ against the University and College Union), who runs the 
Academic Friends of Israel, and Dave Rich.
 
Some dissent at last?
 
Some serious diversity of views then appears possible when Lesley Klaff chairs a panel discussing ‘Addressing current approaches’. This would be unlikely, however, were Professor Klaff to proffer her own views. Linked to BICSA and the Brandeis Center, she has made her opinions on the connection between anti-Zionism and antisemitism perfectly clear. As she writes in the journal of the Jerusalem Centre for Public Affairs:

University codes of conduct and UK law recognize that an important university goal is the promotion of equality of opportunity for minority students and their protection from discrimination, including harassment. Given the growing consensus that anti-Zionism is in fact anti-Semitism in a new guise, this goal is flouted with respect to Jewish students every time that anti-Zionist expression takes place on a university campus.

 So, no anti-Zionist views allowed on campus then. Period. While Günther Jikeli, co-founder of the International Institute for Education and Research on Anti-Semitism in London and Berlin, is under the false impression that the Fundamental Rights Agency of the EU endorses its predecessor’s ‘Working Definition’ of antisemitism, he, the PhD student Hagai van der Horst from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) and Professor David Feldman, director of the Pears Institute for the Study of Antisemitism at Birkbeck University of London will hopefully be able to offer a stark contrast with what will have gone before. Feldman’s approach at the Pears Institute is a model of inclusiveness and variety; he creates a safe space for the expression of sharply different opinions.

Worrying about the left and boycott, and promoting the EUMC ‘Working Definition’
 
The speakers on the final panel, ‘Strategic interventions: what can be done?’, are not on record, as far as I could ascertain, as specifically subscribing to the JSA‘s line on the relationship between anti-Zionism and antisemitism. The barrister Julian Hunt is described in the programme as ‘having experience defending pro-Israel activists’, which, from his July 2012 post on the Commentator blog, seems to refer to Jewish students on campus. With a title like ‘Criminalising the boycott bullies’, it seems fair to assume that he has an uncompromising attitude to anti-Zionism. Philip Spencer, an expert on the Holocaust and genocide, is director of politics and international Relations at the Helen Bamber Centre for the Study of Rights, Kingston University, and has a special interest in what he sees as the left’s less than glorious history of standing up to antisemitism. Francisco Garrett, a lawyer from Portugal, appears to have no significant track record as an antisemitism expert.
 
But there is little ambiguity in the position of the chair of this panel, L. Ruth Klein. In her 2009 report on antisemitism in Canada presented to the Canadian Parliamentary Coalition to Combat Antisemitism (CPCCA), the national director of the League for Human Rights of B’nai Brith Canada refers to anti-Zionism as ‘that unholy hybrid of age-old and new-age bigotry’, calls for the criminalization of boycotts ‘against the Jewish state’ and for the adoption of the EUMC ‘Working Definition’ of antisemitism.
 
Giving the political game away
 
A spirit of free inquiry does not seems to govern these proceedings. And this view is strengthened further by the sessions of the symposium that are not panel discussions. The former chairman of EISCA, Denis MacShane MP, is given the platform to himself to speak on ‘The politics of fighting antisemitism’. I and others have drawn attention to his woeful lack of understanding of antisemitism, his propensity to exaggerate what it represents – ‘there is no greater intolerance today than neoantisemitism’ – and his readiness to vilify Muslims and pro-Palestinian activists. For a man fêted as such a friend of the Jews, his ignorance about Jews and Israel, as displayed in his book Globalising Hatred: The New Antisemitism, is deeply disturbing.

But having written a book with that title he will certainly be at home among the JSA‘s ’select group of independent scholars’ at Sunday’s symposium. So much so that he is being presented with ‘The Award of Merit: Righteous Persons Who Fight Antisemitism’. (Whether the organizers still think he is quite so righteous after being found guilty of fiddling his parliamentary expenses, we do not know.) At the head of the page in the programme detailing this award, and two others, is a photograph of Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the right-wing, revisionist Zionist ideologue, whose ideas have inspired much of today’s ruling political elite in Israel and, so it clearly appears, the organizers of this symposium. Manfred Gerstenfeld receives the ‘Lifetime Achievement Award’ and Shimon T. Samuels scoops the jackpot with the ‘Jabotinsky Award’.
 
Samuels is the director for international relations at the Simon Wiesenthal Centre Paris and a long-standing promoter of the notion of the ‘new antisemitism’. In July 2011, after attending a UN meeting in Brussels titled ‘The role of Europe in advancing Palestinian statehood and achieving peace between Israelis and Palestinians’, he wrote to the UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon saying that the experience was akin to a ‘gangbang’. On 2 August 2012 he told the Jerusalem Post that the action of the Swiss Migros supermarket chain to label Israeli products from the West Bank was a boycott measure and must be viewed as ‘a continuation of Nazism’.
 
It shows just how far the academic study of contemporary antisemitism has become corrupted in some circles that the organizers of this symposium did not seem to feel a moment’s shame in so blatantly politicizing it by identifying so completely with the political ideology of Jabotinsky. As if this wasn’t enough to damn as bogus what’s billed as an academic event, the screening of Gloria Greenfield’s ‘documentary’, Unmasked Judeophobia, can leave no one in any doubt. The New York Times‘ reviewer Nicole Herrington wrote:

the film loses ground toward the middle, when it calls out individuals (often just by showing their images) and organizations for their passiveness or criticism of Israeli policies without giving a full account of the facts. The roster is long: the United Nations, feminists, the European news media, Alice Walker, human rights groups and American academics.

In the end the issues of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism are conflated, weakening the filmmaker’s argument.

Less restrained, but equally reasonable, was this from James van Maanen’s film review blog:

I suspect there is some very good information in Gloria Greenfield’s new documentary, Unmasked Judeophobia: The Threat to Civilization (that sub-title alone should raise a red flag), but the repetitive, ham-handed manner in which it is presented is enough to make aware and thinking people — anyone, that is, who might find and be willing to admit as reprehensible some of the state of Israel’s current behavior toward its Palestinian residents — run for the exit.

This comment could equally be applied to the entire JSA symposium.
 
Anyone who disagrees with the notion of the ‘new antisemitism’ should always be prepared to discuss it with its promoters. And its promoters should always be willing to debate the notion with its critics. This is the only way that sense on antisemitism can be arrived at. By the nature and format of this symposium, the JSA has clearly shown that it has no interest whatsoever in such a dialogue, even if one or two brave souls may try to speak up for the values that underpin true academic exchange.
 
(Thanks to Ben White for drawing my attention to this symposium and for sharing information and sources.)
 
Even one of Zionism’s more vacant intellects, Deborah Lipstadt, primus inter pares among American holocaust historians, bemoaned in How To Study Anti-Semitism how Yale University’s Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Antisemitism had been shut down because, in her words: ‘Too many students who take these classes find that they have entered a zone in which advocacy masquerades as scholarship.’  In other words, it’s not easy to marry propaganda and serious historical research and vigorous academic debate.  

See the Powerbase Article on the Community Security Trust


Needless to say this essay has set the cat amongst those who think of themselves as the more 'intellectual' Zionists e.g. Richard Millett, who questioned the fact that Dennis McShane was Islamaphobic as well of course as being a more general run of the mill reactionary!  See this      exchange:

1. I’m still waiting for proof from Tony Lerman that MacShane “vilifies Muslims”. Can you give a direct quote please?
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  Antony Lerman
  02/12/2012 at 10:08 pm | #21

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  MacShane’s book Globalising Hatred:The New Antisemitism (Weidenfeld & Nicolson 2008) is a very confused book in which MacShane tries to portray himself as on the side of Muslims experiencing racism just as he is on the side of Jews experiencing antisemitism. Sadly, this is overwhelmed by the Islamophobia that suffuses the whole book. For quotes, read the book and take your pick. If you need help, try p. vii, the first page of the preface, lines 10 to 17. Or p. 163 where he writes: ‘An end to antisemitism is the beginning of a rebirth of the Arab peoples and their nations’ — tantamount to an accusation of collective guilt of all Arabs, which of course includes a very great part of the world’s Muslim population. Or read chapter 7, ‘Antisemitism or Antizionism’, which is an extended attack on one person, Tariq Ramadan, done in such a way as to vilify Muslims generally. Enough for you Richard?